Transcript Early 17th Century - Coweta County Schools

Learning Goals
• To identify the major authors and literary
contributors of the early 17th century.
• To recognize the major literary characteristics
of the period.
• To understand how the politics of a time
period can influence its literature.
• To identify major vocabulary needed to
analyze the literature of the period.
Around the World
• 1605-1615 - Don Quixote – Miguel Cervantes
(Spain)
• 1608 – Telescope Invented
• 1641 - Sakoku begins in Japan (Japanese isolation)
• 1633 – Galileo and the Inquisition (Copernican
Theory)
• 1637-44 – Descartes’ major works published (I
think; therefore, I am.) Cartesian method.
• 1643-1717 – The reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV in
France
History and Monarchs
The Stuarts
James I (1603-1625)
The Interregnum (1653-1660)
“The Protectorate”
Charles I (1625-1649)
Oliver Cromwell
(1653-1658)
Richard Cromwell
(1658-1659)
James I (1603-1625)
• Divine Right of Kings
– The True Law of Free Monarchies
• Court Masques / Sun King / “Pagan”
rituals that annoyed the Puritans
• Puritans set out on Mayflower 1620 –
wanted to “Purify” the church of all
pagan/catholic rituals
• 1622 First English Newspaper
• Known for gluttonous feasting,
financial heedlessness, hunting and
sport, and hard drinking.
• Beginning of the East India Trading
Company
Charles I (1625-1649)
• Divine Right of Kings /
Absolute Monarchy
• Marries a Catholic
(Henrietta Maria of France)
• Wants money!
• 1635 Connecticut first
settled
• English Civil War breaks
out 1642
• 1649 - Gets beheaded
The English Civil War (1642-1648)
• Charles I hoped to unite the
kingdoms of England, Scotland and
Ireland into a new single kingdom
– Parliament afraid of losing control of
the monarchy
• Charles marries a Roman Catholic
– Parliament is staunchly Protestant
• Cromwell / Parliament want a
constitutional monarchy– then
decide they want a republic
instead. Roundheads vs. Cavaliers
• Charles I beheaded for treason
• Commonwealth & Protectorate
• Monty Python!
Oliver Cromwell
• General who came to lead the
victorious Puritan Roundheads against
Charles I in the English Civil War
• Ruled England as Lord Protector
from1649 to his death in 1658.
• The Protectorate barely outlived him;
his son Richard resigned his post in
1659, and the monarchy was restored
in 1660.
• (The years 1649-60 are known as the
"Interregnum," the period between
kings.)
Characteristics of the Literature
• A heightened focus on and analysis of the self and the
personal life.
• The true beginnings of political pamphleteering and
propaganda. (News Books – precursor to newspapers)
• Suppression of the theatre & anything Catholic/Pagan
during the Commonwealth and Cromwell’s reign.
• Art and Nature (Artifice that must look natural) – Think
Pastoral Poems…do they truly reflect nature as it is?
• A Dark Side – underlying many of the poetry and
literature of the time is a sense of impending decay and
death.
Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679)
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Leviathan (1651)
the right of the individual
the natural equality of all men
the artificial character of the
political order
• the view that all legitimate political
power must be "representative"
and based on the consent of the
people
• a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to
do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid
The Power Structure
• In Early Modern England, both gender
hierarchy, with the man at the top, and
the husband's patriarchal role as
governor of his family and household —
wife, children, wards, and servants —
were assumed to have been instituted by
God and nature.
• The family was seen as the secure
foundation of society and the patriarch's
role as analogous to that of God in the
universe and the king in the state.
• Unmarried virgins and wives were to
maintain silence in the public sphere and
give unstinting obedience to father and
husband, though widows had some
scope for making their own decisions and
managing their affairs. Children and
servants were bound to the strictest
obedience.
Tension in the Power Structure
• Inevitably, however, tension
developed when such norms
met with common
experience, as registered in
the records of actual
households and especially in
the complexities and
ambiguities represented in
literary treatments of love,
courtship, marriage, and
family relations, from
Shakespeare's King Lear, to
Webster's Duchess of Malfi,
to Milton's Paradise Lost,
and more.
Culture
• Greek mythology still
plays a leading role – King
James liked to liken
himself to the god Apollo
– a god that the people of
the Renaissance through
the Enlightenment viewed
as a god of the sun, the
arts, and civilized society.
Louis XIV will later call
himself the “Sun King.”
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
• Satirical Playwright – Volpone, The
Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair
• Wrote for the Lord Admiral’s Men
w/ Philip Henslowe
• Collaborated with Inigo Jones to
create court masques for James I’s
court.
• Poetry serves as a predecessor to
the Cavalier Poets who called
themselves the “Sons of Ben” or the
“Tribe of Ben”
• Playful use of wit, lyricism
Drama and Masques
• Highly elaborate
pagents/plays/
masquerades
• Held at court and
typically designed by
famous architects,
performed by famous
actors, with courtiers
filling in the background
parts.
• VERY showy and expensive to put on.
• Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson were responsible for most of the court
masques during the early 17th century.
Metaphysical Poetry
• Investigate the world by
rational discussion of its
phenomena rather than by
intuition or mysticism.
• Not really a school or
movement, but these poets
share some common
characteristics:
• Wit
• Inventiveness
• A love of elaborate stylistic maneuvers
• Metaphysical Conceit: high stylized comparison between two VERY unlike
things.
• John Donne considered the main poet in this genre.
Metaphysical Poetry
• Reaction against the deliberately
smooth and sweet tones of
much 16th-century verse.
• Metaphysical poets’ style is
energetic, uneven, and rigorous.
• It has also been labeled the
'poetry of strong lines'. T. S. Eliot
argued that their work:
– fuses reason with passion
– shows a unification of thought and
feeling
• John Donne, George Herrick,
Andrew Marvell, Sir John
Suckling
John Donne (1572-1631)
• Chief producer of metaphysical
poetry
• Early life – broke most of the time /
married young, lived in poverty.
• Anglican priest in 1615 by the
suggestion of James I, later Dean of
St. Paul’s Cathedral.
• Early Poetry:
– Very witty, sexual
– Political commentary
• Later Poetry:
– Religious, somber, pious
– Challenges to Death
Cavalier Poetry
• Also called “Royalists,” for their
allegiance to the monarchy.
• Courtly, well-educated, genteel, the
Cavaliers are as likely to be talented
with the rapier as with rapier wit, and
honored skill with each.
• Characteristics of Poetry:
– Avoids discussion of religion
– No plumbing the depths of the soul
– A combination of Donne’s
intellectual conceits with Jonson’s
eloquence
– Direct, colloquial language
– Casual, amateur, light-hearted,
carefree, and affectionate
– Carpe Diem message
Cavalier Poetry
• For these poets, life is far too
enjoyable for much of it to be spent
sweating over texts in a study.
• The poems must be written in the
intervals of living, and are celebratory
of things that are much livelier than
mere philosophy or art.
• To put it in a nutshell, the Mistress in
no longer an impossibly chaste
Goddess to be wooed with sighs, but a
woman who may be spoken to in a
forthright fashion.
• Many of these poems have a much
different attitude toward love than
we've seen before, often more
carefree, even flippant, and often
more sexual, as well.
Puritan Poetry
• “The Descendants of Spenser”
• The period of the Interregnum discouraged
many aspiring Catholic and traditional
Anglican artists and writers, but Puritan
writers saw a time of encouragement.
– To set forth orthodox Calvinist
Christianity
– Rejection of the worldly
– Need for self-examination
– Idea of Original Sin / Search for salvation
• John Milton – Latin Secretary under
Cromwell
• Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor –
American Colonial Poets
Paradise Lost
• John Milton – published in 1667
• Purpose: “To justify the ways of God
to men”
• Conflict: God’s Eternal Foresight vs.
Free Will
• English Religious Tragic Epic Poem
– Muse is the Holy Spirit
– Written in blank verse
– Begins in medias res
– Two tragic heroes: Satan and
Adam
• Draws on different texts for
inspiration:
– The Book of Genesis
– Ovid’s Metaphorphoses
Paradise Lost
– Traditional Epic: Satan is portrayed as the
tragic hero (Fall of Lucifer)
• Wages war with Heaven / Defeated /
Wages war on humanity
• Satan is depicted as a strict
conservative who values old-fashioned
views of hierarchy – not the new system
of position and prominence based on
merit.
– Domestic Epic: Relationship of Adam and
Eve (Fall of Mankind)
• Eve is successfully tempted by Satan’s
RHETORIC (what could this mean?)
• Adam eats because he knows Eve is
doomed and doesn’t want to live
without her
• Sex is introduced into the world /
creates GUILT & SHAME
• Adam is given a vision of the
consequences of his sin in the future
(Flood / Christ)
Pilgrim’s Progress
• Written by John Bunyan (1678)
• Protestant allegory in which Christian,
an everyman character, journeys from
his hometown, the "City of Destruction"
("this world"), to the "Celestial City"
("that which is to come": Heaven) atop
Mt. Zion.
– “Now I saw in my Dream, that at the end of
this Valley lay blood, bones, ashes, and
mangled bodies of men, […] I espied a little
before me a Cave, where two Giants, Pope
and Pagan, dwelt in old times, by whose
Power and Tyranny the Men whose bones,
blood ashes, &c. lay there, were cruelly put
to death.”
In America
• Anne Bradstreet, Puritan Poet
– The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in
America (w/ apology)
• “Upon the Burning of Our House”
• “The Author to Her Book”
• “To My Dear and Loving
Husband”
• Characteristics
– A rejection of the worldly and
material
– Domestic and Religious Themes
– Justification of women’s education
– Plain style
Terms to Know
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Metaphysical Conceit
Oxymoron
Paradox
Carpe Diem
Baroque
Allegory
Sprezzatura
Epic