The Stuart Dynasty, Civil War, and Commonwealth (PDF)

**The Stuart dynasty, the Civil War and the Commonwealth** **The first Stuart king** When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603 without leaving a direct heir, the throne of England went to James VI of Scotland. He became the first of the Stuart kings of England, ruling both countries as James VI of Scotlan...

**The Stuart dynasty, the Civil War and the Commonwealth** **The first Stuart king** When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603 without leaving a direct heir, the throne of England went to James VI of Scotland. He became the first of the Stuart kings of England, ruling both countries as James VI of Scotland and James I (1603-25) of England. From the beginning, James showed a belief in the divine right of kings to rule and in the subjection of Parliament to the king\'s will: he also insisted on strict conformity to the rites of the Anglican Church. This excluded both Catholics and Puritans from government, since conformity to the Anglican Church was required to hold public office. **Catholic and Puritan dissent** The king\'s policy of strict conformity to the Anglican Church, however, did not go unquestioned. English Catholics organized the Gunpowder Plot (November 5, 1605), so-called because they tried to blow up the king and Parliament in session. The plot was denounced and many Catholics were executed. Meanwhile, persecuted Puritans were leaving the country. In 1620, a group of Puritans called the \'Pilgrim Fathers\' sailed to America on The Mayflower, where they founded New Plymouth in Massachusetts. This was was the first English settlement in North America and the beginning of the future United States (→ p. 93). **Stuart absolutism: Charles 1** King James I\'s son and successor, Charles 1 (1625-49), pursued his father\'s policy of open disregard for Parliament and opposition to all forms of religious dissent. He dissolved Parliament and ruled the country alone as an absolute monarch, like Louis XIV of France (the roi soleil). Foreign and domestic difficulties (a rebellion in Scotland) obliged Charles I to call a Parliament in April 1640. It lasted only three weeks, because opposition to the king was very strong: for this reason it is remembered as the Short Parliament. In 1641 the Long Parliament, as it is called, asked Charles I to accept radical proposals for reform. The king\'s refusal meant the beginning of the English Civil War. **The Civil War (1642-49)** Open war broke out in 1642: the Royalists, or Cavaliers, supported the Crown and the Anglican Church; the supporters of Parliament, or Roundheads (so-called because they wore their hair short), stood for the supremacy of Parliament and for a Puritan reformation of the Church of England. Victory went to the Roundheads, whose army was better organized and which could also rely on an excellent commander: Oliver Cromwell. Defeated in battle, Charles I was tried for treason by a Puritan jury and beheaded in 1649. **Cromwell\'s Commonwealth (1649-58)** From 1649 to 1658 England was a Parliamentary republic, called the Commonwealth, under the rule of the House of Commons. After 1653, even that one-house Parliament was dissolved and the country fell under Cromwell\'s direct rule. Officially he was given the title of Lord Protector. Cromwell\'s victorious military campaigns against Scotland, Ireland and his naval campaign against Holland pleased the nation, but the same could not be said of certain restrictions on everyday life he introduced. In particular, the closing of the theatres in 1642, for their supposed immorality, was resented by a nation that clearly enjoyed and was proud of its great drama. **The first settlements** **The colonial period** In American history, the period stretching from the beginning of the 17th to the last decades of the 18th century is best known as the \'colonial period\'. It was in this span of time that the English settlements, which were later to become the United States, were founded and began to construct their independence from the mother-land. The first attempts to establish English settlements on the American coasts go back to the Elizabethan Age, with a number of unsuccessful expeditions, the most famous of which were carried out by Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Richard Granville. The reports written about them, such as Thomas Harriot\'s A Briefe and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia (1588), constitute the first examples of \'colonial literature: Written by English authors for an English public, they share with the later American literary output of the same kind, both a \'promotional\' character (the wonders of the New World were often magnified to improve migration), and a \'practical\' one, containing useful technical, economic and geographical information. It was not until the reign of James I (1603- 25), however, that the first permanent settlements were founded as peace with Spain (1604) and the need for an expanded market for English goods lay the foundations of an English empire. In 1607 the Virginia Company of London established Jamestown, and founded the first English colony in America. The expedition was led by Captain John Smith, whose A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Incidents as Hath Happened at Virginia (1608) was the first book about America to be written on American soil. The book has an eminently practical character, which can be regarded as a common feature in the early literary output of the colonies in Southern North America. **The Southern and New England colonies** **The Southern colonies** Like Virginia, all the other Southern colonies founded in this period soon developed a predominantly rural economy, often based on a one-crop system and on the exploitation of black slaves. Also typical of southern colonization was the presence of great aristocratic families, the owners of the large tobacco, cotton and rice plantations, which held most of the political power. Among the Southern colonies Georgia was founded in 1703 with the intention of releasing debtors from prison and sending them there. Many colonists who could not afford the costs of the voyage to the New World bound themselves to work for a proprietor or a company for a limited time in exchange for passage and maintenance. Such a practice was known as indentured labour\', and the people who signed for it \'indentured servants. **The New England colonies** The most relevant feature which distinguished the Northern, or New England colonies, from the Southern ones was the religious character of the former. With the accession to the throne of James I (1603-25) life in England became difficult for Non-Conformists, that is those who refused strict conformity to the rites of the Anglican Church. Many persecuted Puritans fled to Holland seeking greater religious freedom and from there, in September 1620, a small group of people (the so-called \'Pilgrim Fathers\') sailed to America. Their ship, the Mayflower, was bound for Virginia, but as they reached the coasts of New England they decided to land there and founded the Plymouth Colony (December 1620). **The Puritans in America** English Puritans looked upon themselves as God\'s chosen people and found in the Bible their guiding book. It was a hard life, but just a year later the Pilgrims celebrated their first American harvest beginning the tradition of Thanksgiving. Like Plymouth, all the New England colonies were established by Puritan separatists. As a result, intolerance ruled the political life of New England, which was in fact subject to strict religious rule although State and Church were considered as separate. Those who dissented were often banished from the community. The obsession with dissent and moral deviations also led to witch- hunts and the notorious Salem trials (named after the town in Massachusetts where they were held) in which hundreds of women were accused of being witches and were tortured and burnt at the stake. **Renaissance poetry** **The sonnet and the cult of the lady** In literature, the new Renaissance the spirit pervaded lyric poetry and especially the sonnet. The sonnet was introduced to England by a group of Court poets during the reign of Henry VIII. They translated of England Petrarch, whose Canzoniere was the model for Renaissance poets. Most 16^th^-century sonnet collections are addressed to the mythical lady of the Petrarchan tradition: a woman who is both real and ideal, full of the highest physical and spiritual qualities. This tradition was particularly suited to the English cultural and political situation, because of the veneration of the \"Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. A great technical innovation by English Renaissance poets was to change the metrical structure of the sonnet from Petrarch\'s pattern (two quatrains and two tercets) to the so-called Elizabethan sonnet (three quatrains and a couplet). Thus they created the pattern which was later adopted by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries and is usually known as the Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet. **The English sonnet sequences** The first to write sonnets in English were Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) and the Earl of Surrey (1517-47). Their sonnets were published in a very popular collection called Tottel\'s Miscellany (1557) (→ European literatures, p. 101). The first important English sonnet sequence, however, was Astrophil and Stella (1581) by Sir Philip Sidney (c. 1554-86), which set a fashion for sonnet writing. Sidney\'s sonnets are both traditional and original: they lie within the accepted Petrarchan model, but they sometimes contrast love with social and ethical duties. Sometimes they also show a love of introspection which seems to anticipate Romantic feelings. After Sidney, sonnet writing became immensely popular. In 1595 another great poet, Edmund Spenser (1552-99) published his sonnet collection, Amoretti. In it he not only celebrates his lady, but also deals with the theme of the immortality bestowed upon the loved one (and, consequently, the poet) by poetry. Last but not least, William Shakespeare\'s sonnets (→ p. 179) came out in 1609, though they were mostly written between 1593 and 1599, They are by far the greatest of the English sonnet sequences. They are obviously indebted to the Italian and classical tradition, but they are also highly original. sonpy which they did and of firences **Metaphysical and Cavalier poets** Two influences stand out clear and distinct in English poetry at the beginning of the 17th century: John Donne (1572-1631, →p. 188), the first of the so-called Metaphysical poets and a master in the tradition of wit, and Ben Jonson (1572-1637), who was the model for the Cavalier poets. They were classicists in their literary production and royalists in their politics. The best of them were Robert Herrick (1591-1674) and Andrew Marvell (1621-78), who is still well-known for his poem To His Coy Mistress, one of the best expressions of the carpe diem motif in English literature. The Metaphysical poets differed from previous movements in their insistence on an elaborate style, the search for the unusual and the intellectualism of their works. To the Cavalier poets, poetry meant not so much metaphysical extravagance as classical elegance and clarity. **The chivalric poem** One of the genres favoured by Renaissance poets was the chivalric poem, which spread from France and Italy to the rest of Europe. In England. Edmund Spenser adapted Ludovico Ariosto\'s Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso\'s Gerusalemme liberata to the needs of Protestant and Tudor propaganda. His Faerie Queene (1591-96) uses fantastic tales of imaginary knights and ladies, fairies and deities, to celebrate Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers. The allegorical form of the poem allows Spenser to set Protestant England against her enemies - Catholic Rome in particular without having to write in explicitly political terms. **The Christian epic poem** On the Puritan side, the most important poet was John Milton (1608-74, p. 192). To devote himself fully to the Puritan cause, in the crucial years of the Commonwealth (the 1640s and 1650s), he set aside poetry to write prose pamphlets defending the Puritan regime. During that time, he only wrote a few sonnets. With the fall of the Puritan Commonwealth, Milton finally found time to write the great Christian epic poem he had always had in mind: Paradise Lost (1667). For his subject he chose the biblical story of the temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and man\'s subsequent loss of paradise. Paradise Lost is the last and the greatest Renaissance epic, full of the spirit of Greek and Roman literature as well as Christian Humanism. **A theatre for the English nation** **The Elizabethan theatre** The Elizabethan theatre was the most important cultural phenomenon in Renaissance England not just for its high artistic quality: it also celebrated England and her kings and queens, providing a common mythology to an entire nation. Such a theatre was also popular entertainment seen by great nobles, middle class citizens, craftsmen, labourers and peasants in the playhouse, each social class and individual spectator enjoying the play in their own way. **The structure of the theatres** The new plays were the result of changes in social and performing conditions. At first, the companies of actors performed in the courtyards of the London inns, but in 1574 public performances were banned by the City government: plays were considered a disturbance by the citizens of the City and highly immoral by the Puritans. In a few years, however, many new public outdoor playhouses were built, initially north of the City (the Theatre, the Curtain), and then south of the Thames, at Bankside: the Rose, the Swan and the Globe. The Globe was Shakespeare\'s company\'s playhouse. Prices varied according to the position occupied by the spectators. It cost one penny to enter the playhouse and stand in the arena that surrounded the stage: standing spectators were called \'groundlings\', i.e., people on the ground. For one more penny the spectators had access to the galleries that went around the playhouse, where there were seats. There were also a few seats on the stage; these cost more for people who wanted to watch the action close-up, while also being seen by the rest of the audience. **Performances** Plays were performed in the afternoon, and special effects were achieved by elementary stage tricks such as the carrying of torches to indicate that the scene was taking place at night. The actors were in close contact with the audience, who would move around, call to each other, quarrel, eat and drink. The continuous exchange between the actors and the spectators, and the mixed nature of the audience, account for the unique atmosphere of Elizabethan public theatres. **The companies of players** Plays were so popular that this led to a change in the actors\' conditions. They were classified by law as \'vagabonds\' and were forbidden to perform in public. For this reason, they put themselves under the protection of a nobleman or even of the king or queen. They wore their noble patrons\' liveries (designs or colours) and their companies took their patrons\' names. The companies to which Shakespeare belonged, for instance, were known as The Earl of Leicester\'s Men, The Lord Strange\'s Men, The Lord Chamberlain\'s Men and, under James I, The King\'s Men. Players often performed at Court or for noble households, especially in winter. An important thing to remember about Renaissance drama is that all female roles were acted by young boys dressed as girls or women, a tradition that to a certain extent lasted in England until the end of the 19th century and is sometimes revived even today. **The Jacobean theatre** The theatre also provides a powerful metaphor for the division of England in the early 17th century, after Elizabeth\'s death. Whereas previously playhouses had been attended by all classes, now there was a sharp division between public outdoor theatres and private indoor ones. Plays catering mainly for the nobility were only performed at noblemen\'s palaces or at Court. The lower and the higher classes were no longer part of the same audience. In between there was the Puritan middle class, which looked on the theatre as a place of perdition. **William Shakespeare** **What was Shakespeare\'s upbringing and early life?** The most important documents regarding William Shakespeare\'s life refer to Stratford: his baptism, his marriage and the birth of his three children. He was born on 23rd April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, in Warwickshire. In fact, he was christened on 26th April but tradition has dated his birth back to the 23rd, thus making it coincide with the feast of St George, England\'s patron saint. His father John was a glover and a wool dealer who rose to prominence in civic life: at one time he was Bailiff of Stratford (mayor). His mother, Mary Arden, came from a country family of some importance. Shakespeare was born in a plague year (1564 recorded some 200 deaths, an estimated sixth of the town\'s population), and outbreaks of the plague would follow him throughout his life, also heavily conditioning his work in the theatre when the playhouses were closed. In his youth Shakespeare almost certainly attended Stratford\'s grammar school. He would have started at 6 or 7, as was the custom, and have been taught rhetoric, poetry, Latin and some Greek: the knowledge of these subjects which emerges from his plays is in fact of the kind that was then part of a grammar school\'s curriculum. In November 1582, when he was 18, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years older than him. At the time of the marriage she was already pregnant, and their first daughter, Susanna, was born in May 1583. In February 1585 two other children, the twins Judith and Hamnet, were born. (Hamnet, who had the same name as Shakespeare\'s most famous character, Hamlet the two were variants, would die at the age of 11. in 1596.) It was probably at this time that he decided to go to London to work in the theatre. In fact, from the birth of the twins in 1585 until 1592, when he is mentioned in a book by a fellow playwright, we have no record of Shakespeare\'s whereabouts. These are the so-called \'lost years\', which have been imaginatively filled with many suggestions: school master, lawyer\'s clerk, butcher, poacher, soldier, or the follower of a great lord on his Grand Tour, especially to Italy. **What did Shakespeare do when he entered the world of London theatres?** By 1592 Shakespeare was already active in London as an actor and playwright, We know that because in that year another writer, Robert Greene, jealous of his success in the theatre called him a \'Shake-Scene\' (with an obvious pun on \'Shake-Speare\'). Greene specifically referred to Shakespeare\'s Henry VI, a great success at the box office (that is, it made a lot of money). It was in three parts, each a separate play, as in today\'s film series. In those early years Shakespeare experimented with two genres then popular: the light love comedy, with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and a Roman tragedy full of blood and atrocities, Titus Andronicus - what we would call pulp fiction today. He also tried his hand at a comedy of classical origin, The Comedy of Errors (c. 1592-93), imitated from the Latin playwright Plautus. Even in his apprentice days, though, Shakespeare was trying to outdo his models: the Latin original\'s comic plot turns on the mistaken identities of two identical twins; Shakespeare doubles it by giving the two twins a servant each who in their turn are also identical twins. A new outbreak of the plague in 1592 closed down the theatres for about two years. In those two years away from the playhouse Shakespeare quickly won himself a reputation as a poet by two long mythological poems: Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). They show his knowledge of classical themes and mythological figures and made him an acknowledged master of love poetry, especially among young readers. Venus and Adonis was a bestseller, running up to thirteen editions in the poet\'s lifetime. In 1594, however, the plague died down and the playhouses reopened: it was time for Will to go back to the theatre. Moreover, great changes among the companies of players were taking place, and Shakespeare would play his part in them. **How did Shakespeare become a sharer in an important company of players?** In 1594 Lord Hunsdon, Queen Elizabeth\'s Lord Chamberlain (one of the three main officers of the Royal House), assembled a new company of players: the Lord Chamberlain\'s Men. Shakespeare was one of them; other members included the great comic actor William Kempe and the tragic one Richard Burbage - the first theatrical star as well as the first Romeo, Hamlet and Othello in history. The Chamberlain\'s Men played at the Theatre in Shoreditch (→ p. 104), north of London\'s city walls, or at Court during the Christmas festivities. Across the Thames, in Bankside, was the competition: the Rose Theatre where the Lord Admiral\'s Men played, whose main actor was Ned Alleyn and whose main dramatist had been Christopher Marlowe (→p. 110). Shakespeare was a great asset to the company, bringing to them his old plays and the two new ones which he now wrote every year, on average. In their turn, they gave him a permanent home and financial independence especially after he became a \'sharer of the company (he would get a tenth of the theatre\'s profits). This allowed him to buy New Place, the second-best house in Stratford, as well as some land and a coat of arms for his family. Comparative wealth went hand in hand with success on the theatrical scene. Now that Marlowe was dead (he had died in 1593) Shakespeare was the most successful playwright of his time. He excelled in all the dramatic genres then in vogue: comedies, tragedies and historical plays. At the close of the century the Chamberlain\'s Men moved into a new playhouse, the one to which Shakespeare\'s name is linked to this day: the Globe. The story of their move to the Globe is typical of the adventurous days of the Elizabethan theatre. In 1599 the lease of the Theatre playhouse expired, and despite several attempts by the Chamberlain\'s Men to renew it, the owner refused. Shakespeare and his fellow players then decided to dismantle the Theatre and to transport its parts to a new site across the river where they would be reassembled. This was accomplished overnight in December 1598 and the result was London\'s largest playhouse - the Globe. Apparently, all this was legal - but three years later the old owner was still trying to sue the company. **How did Shakespeare fare in the reign of King James I?** As James I succeeded Elizabeth at her death in 1603, Shakespeare\'s company\'s fortunes rose still higher. The new king loved the theatre and wanted to take Shakespeare\'s company under his protection: accordingly, they changed their name to King\'s Men. Shakespeare paid homage to lames (who came from Scotland, where he still was King James VI) with a Scottish play, Macbeth, that celebrated one of James\' mythical ancestors, Banquo. In the years 1603- 1608 Shakespeare would write and stage many of his most tragic stories, the so-called \'great tragedies\': Othello ( p. 144), Macbeth (p. 150), King Lear (→ p. 156), Antony and Cleopatra. They are very powerful stories and present a dark vision of life. Even the comedies of this period, Troilus and Cressida and All\'s Well That Ends Well, have an uncertain and bitter tone they are often referred to as \'problem plays\': their happy ending is a dubious one. In this period the Globe, an open-air public theatre, was used in summer while in winter the company acted in the private, indoor Blackfriars Theatre. Though much smaller, the private theatres catered for more select audiences and brought in as much, if not more, money than the larger outdoor playhouses. At about this time, in 1609, Shakespeare finally published his collection of sonnets, probably during one of the many lockdowns of the playhouses because of the plague. **Did he end his days in London?** The last part of Shakespeare\'s career is in some ways surprising: he abandoned tragic subjects and only wrote comedies (apart from one more history play, Henry VIII, and one more Roman play, Coriolanus). They are different from those of his early and middle years. The most typical and most famous is The Tempest (1611, p. 173), a story set in a magic island ruled by Prospero, a magician and a savant. Prospero\'s farewell to his magic art in the play has been seen as Shakespeare\'s own farewell to the stage. In fact, he went on to write other comedies or romances as these of his last phase are called among which some that are still popular today such as The Winter\'s Tale. The Two Noble Kinsmen (written together with John Fletcher) was certainly Shakespeare\'s last play. It is dated 1613. In June of that year the Globe was burned down by a fire, brought about by a cannon shot that set the thatched roof ablaze during a performance of Henry VIII. It is tempting to think that soon after Shakespeare decided to retire: by that time he was fifty, nearly all his relatives had died, and thanks to his success as a playwright he had earned enough to be able to retire to Stratford and buy several properties there. He died in Stratford in 1616, on the 23rd of April, the same day on which he was born. He was buried in the Holy Trinity Church where he had been christened. **Are Shakespeare\'s sonnets a traditional Renaissance sonnet sequence?** Shakespeare\'s sonnets, 154 sonnets in all, are by far the greatest of the English sonnet sequences. They are obviously indebted to the Italian and classical tradition but they are also highly original. It is probable that most of the sonnets were written between 1593 and 1598. possibly for the young Earl of Southampton, who was Shakespeare\'s friend and patron and who may have been the \'fair youth\' celebrated in so many of the poems. The sonnet sequence has no title, unlike other Renaissance sequences, and its characters are also not traditional (see below). Technically, Shakespeare\'s sonnets are made up of three quatrains closed by a final rhyming couplet (4+4+4+2). The rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. **Who are the main characters in the sonnets?** Shakespeare\'s sonnets do not revolve around a perfect lady in the Petrarchan fashion, seen by the poet as a leading star, a mystical guide to heaven. Shakespeare\'s lady, the so-called \'dark lady\', is a flesh-and-blood woman, openly sensual, at times unfaithful. The fair youth, on the other hand, is initially shown as a model of physical and moral perfection, though in the end he too becomes unfaithful and shows the defects and the shortcomings common to humanity. His role in the sequence, however, is fundamental: he is at the centre of it all, and most of the sonnets are centred around him. Whatever the fair youth might have meant for Shakespeare on a personal level, he is his main source of poetical inspiration. The rival poet, finally, is a disturbing factor in Shakespeare\'s affection for the fair youth, and his part only seems that of a dangerous rival (only a few sonnets centre on him). **What kind of love is at the centre of Shakespeare\'s sonnets?** Shakespeare\'s sonnet sequence has several themes besides love, and even when it deals with love it displays an unusual variety of feelings and depth of psychological insight. The way in which old motifs come to new life in Shakespeare can be seen in the first 17 sonnets. They are known as \'marriage sonnets\' because they urge a handsome young man (the fair youth) to marry and beget an heir: procreation will ensure that the fair youth\'s moral and physical gifts will not be lost. In Shakespeare\'s hands the invitation to marry gradually merges into a deep reflection on the passing of human life and the decay of all earthly things. This may be seen especially in When I Do Count the Clock That Tells the Time (p. 181) and Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer\'s Day? Shakespeare\'s sonnets are also revolutionary in their treatment of love, as compared to all other Renaissance sonnet collections, because in them love is seen in its two main aspects: spiritual and also physical. In Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds (p. 184) the poet celebrates Platonic or ideal love; a kind of love which is not \"Time\'s fool\' but lasts to the end of time. In My Mistress\' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun (p. 185), on the other hand, the Petrarchan ideal is reversed: Shakespeare\'s lady is depicted as no goddess and has the physical qualities (and imperfections) of an ordinary woman; and yet the poet believes her to be as rare a woman as any sung by other poets with excessive praise. **How is time a shaping influence in Shakespeare\'s sonnets?** As the sonnet sequence develops, it becomes clear that the questions involved concern much more than one man\'s love for another human being: what is personal acquires universal relevance. Time becomes the arch-enemy not only of the poet-lover but of all mankind, threatening all the beauty and goodness in the world with destruction. The worst enemy for the poet-lover, then, is not so much the dark lady\'s unfaithfulness or the rival poet, but time. Shakespeare\'s sonnets indicate two ways of opposing time. In When I Do Count the Clock That Tells the Time procreation is presented as the only \'defence\' against death and decay; in Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer\'s Day? the victory against time is achieved through poetry (\'eternal lines\'), which can immortalize both the loved one and the poet. This idea is further enhanced in Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments, where the poet\'s \'powerful rhyme\' (the sonnet) will outlast palaces and cities and keep the fair youth\'s virtues alive until Doomsday - that is until the end of the world.