(5) Tudor Literature

John Skelton (c. 1460 - 1529)

- a rhetorician, translator, Latin teacher to young Henry VIII, political pamphleteer, satirist, and ordained priest

- his poetry draws on the long tradition of medieval anticlerical satire

- uses traditional medieval modes, but typically gives these modes an unorthodox twist

- mixes high and low styles, plays bawdy verbal games with the Catholic liturgy

- rejects the ornate rhetorical devices of his period, writes in the so-called "Skeltonic metre": short lines with two of three accents and simple doggerel rhymes, strikingly resembling a kind of proto-rap

> The Bowge of Court (c. 1490s): a satire expressing the anxiety of living in the competitive world of the court (note: the title is the name of the ship in the poem)

> Agaynst the Scottes (1513): a satire abusing Scotland for its challenge to the authority of Henry VIII

> The Tunnying of Elynour Rummynge (c. 1520): a playfully disordered portrait of an alewife, the irregularity of the metre evokes the atmosphere of an untidy inn, the effects of beer, and the quarrelling of the customers (note: the tunnying of the title refers to Elynour's brewing practices)

> Speke Parrott (c. 1521), Collyn Clout (c. 1522), Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? (1522): a series of biting attacks on Henry VIII's powerful minister-clergyman Cardinal Wolsey

> The Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell (1523): the poet's vision of himself being praised as the Homer of his country and crowned with a laurel wreath

Sir Thomas More (c. 1477 - 1535)

- born in a prominent family, received university education, but initially torn between secular and religious career

- decided to serve to Got in public life, politically remained loyal to King Henry VIII, but considered God superior

- refused to take the oath required to affirm the king as the head of the church in England, was beheaded for treason

- for his martyrdom and incessant struggle against Lutheranism canonized by the Catholic church as a saint (1935)

- during his life befriended with Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466 - 1536), who wrote his essay "The Praise of Folly" (1509) as a guest in More's house and dedicated it to him

- shared with Erasmus the classical learning of the Humanist movement, Catholic Christian piety, and delight in rhetoric, satire, and experimental unsettling wit

> Utopia (1516 in Latin, 1551 in English translation):

- a prose writing influenced by Plato's Republic with its radically communalistic reimagining of society, and also by Amerigo Vespuccio's published accounts of his voyages to the newly discovered land across the Atlantic Ocean

- Book II describes the utopian society in which private property is abolished, labour is required by everyone, education is free and universal, but also there is no privacy, no variety in dress or housing, no individual freedom

- Book I, which was chronologically composed as second, portrays the harsh everyday reality of England

- takes the form of a dialogue between the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus (the surname means "learned in nonsense") who argues for the ideal society he describes and the fictional Thomas More (the surname rendered into Greek as "moros" means "fool") whose attitude toward Utopia remains deeply ambiguous

> The History of King Richard III (published posthumously in 1557):

- composed parallelly in English and Latin, but the work remains unfinished

- describes the last Yorkist king as a tyrant corrupted both physically and mentally, hypocritical, and murderous

- his portrayal of Richard III as a monster heavily influenced the prejudices of Shakespeare's play

Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (1503 - 1542)

- born in a prominent family, received university education, entered the service of King Henry VIII as a diplomat

- imprisoned in the Tower with several others accused of adulterous affairs with the disgraced queen Anne Boleyn

> "Who list his wealth and ease retain" and "In mourning wise": pays tribute to his five fellow prisoners who were beheaded while he was spared, vividly captures the arbitrary shifts in fate and in the exercise of royal power

- many of his poems express an intense longing for steadiness and an escape from the corruption of the court life

- cultivates plain words and plain English style, uses deliberately rough, vigorous, and expressive metrical style

- translated and freely adapted into English verses by Petrarch himself and by several of his disciples

- introduced into English the Italian strambotto, an epigrammatical poem of eight or six lines in hendecasyllables

- introduced into English the sonnet, adapted the Italian form of an octave and a sestet into the English three quatrains and a couplet with the intertwining rhyme scheme abba cddc effe gg

- while Petrarch presents love as a transcendent experience, Wyatt assumes an embittered and self-pitying position

> "They flee from me" and "Who so list to hunt": sonnets blending his characteristic passion, anger, cynicism, longing, and pain

- little of his poetry appeared in print during his lifetime, after his death his poems were included in Songs and Sonnets (1557), also known as Tottel's Miscellany, an influential anthology by the printer Richard Tottel

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (?1517 - 1547)

- together with Wyatt the leader of an imported avant-garde and contributor to the development of lyric tradition

- like Wyatt's poetry, Surrey's own poems were effectively canonized only by inclusion in Tottel's Miscellany

- wrote sonnets in the Petrarchan tradition, but introduced the now petrified rhyming scheme abab cdcd efef gg

- his sonnets were much admired as pioneer expressions of neoclassical propriety by 16^th to 18^th century critics

- characteristic with metrical regularity, but writes to a formula rather than evolving a personal mode of expression

- his translation of two books from Virgil's Aeneid made a significant move to unrhymed verse and his choice of iambic pentameter had a lasting effect on English poetry

Sir Walter Ralegh (?1552 - 1618)

- a courtier, soldier, explorer and colonist, historian, philosopher, and poet

- born to a gentry of modest means, but came to amass great wealth due to his position at the court

- preoccupied with the idea of an English settlement in Guiana to which he led expeditions in hope to find gold, claiming to the Indian chieftains that he has come on a civilizing mission to liberate them from Spanish oppressors

- known for his hatred of Spain and challenges to the Spanish dominance in the New World

- devoted to Queen Elizabeth whom he pictures in his poetry as an inaccessible immortal ideal of beauty and virtue

- self-consciously played out the roles of the formal knightly lover, courtly poet, and bold actor in the drama of life

- imprisoned in the Tower for some fifteen years and finally executed on grounds of treason by James I

> The Ocean to Cynthia: a long poem devoted to Queen Elizabeth, remains in fragments of manuscript

> "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" (1600): a reply to Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"

> "The Lie": a bitter poem against the court he normally celebrated, the poem itself provoked many replies

> "What is our life?": a later meditation on impending death, making use of theatrical metaphors for life

> The History of the World (1614): an ambitious unfinished work written during his imprisonment

- begins with the Creation and breaks off at 168 BC, deals with the negatives of the rise and fall of ancient empires

- reflects in an elegiac mode on disappointment and defeat, emphasizes the providential punishment of evil princes

Sir Philip Sidney (1554 - 1586)

- born in a prominent family, became a well-connected knight, soldier, poet, and patron actively encouraging fellow writers, including Edmund Spenser who devoted him his Shepheards Calender (1579)

- killed in a battle for the Protestant cause against the Spanish, became an object of adoring cult in the years after his death as the image of a perfect courtier come to life

> The Lady of May (performed before the Queen in 1578 or 1579):

- a royal entertainment in the form of a dignified dispute between a shepherd and a forest for the hand of the Lady

> Arcadia (began in 1580):

- a long elaborate epic romance in prose with interspersed pastoral eclogues and songs

- builds on mistaken identities, melodramatic incidents, tangled love situations, princes disguised as shepherds, etc.

- at the same time aspires to a great literary, political, and moral value with its elevated tone of heroic seriousness

- Old Arcadia: the original version by Sidney

- New Arcadia: a revised version which Sidney broke off and his sister further revised and published after his death

> The Defence of Poesie (also as An Apology for Poetry, published 1595):

- a long prose essay, the most influential Elizabethan work of literary criticism

- exalts the role of the poet, the freedom of the imagination, and the moral value of literature

> Astrophil and Stella (written c. 1582, published 1591):

- a sonnet sequence containing 108 sonnets and 11 songs concerned with the unrequited love of a star-lover (in Greek astrophil) for a distant star (in Latin stella)

- explores the lover's state of mind and soul, the contradictory impulses, intense desires, and haunting frustrations

- by means of a constantly changing viewpoint examines the conflict between private and public obligation, when the noble concerns of a soldier are frustrated by a woman who exercises a sometime whimsical authority over him

- while Petrarch's Laura remains coolly unresponsive, Sidney's Astrophil holds to hope that Stella might still favour him and ends his long campaign with a sense of failure, not with Petrarch's idea of love as a purifying experience

Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561 - 1621)

- the educated and sophisticated sister of Philip Sidney

- besides her revisions of Arcadia, she also revised and continued her brother's verse translation of the Psalms

- produced strikingly original verse of a great metrical, lexical, phrasal, and metaphorical variety

Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 1593)

- little is known about his life, but probably served as a spy or agent provocateur against the English Catholics who were conspiring to overthrow the Protestant regime

- killed at an inn in the London suburb of Deptford by a dagger thrust, his murderers having connections to the world of spies to which Marlowe himself was linked

- his tragedies portray characters passionately seeking power beyond the boundaries of conventional human beings, the power of rule in Tamburlaine, power of money in The Jew of Malta, and power of knowledge in Faustus

- his dramatic verse cultivates the English iambic pentameter

> "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (1590s):

- the most popular of Elizabethan lyrics, provoked many responses, both imitations and parodies

- quoted by Marlowe himself in The Jew of Malta, by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor, provoked W. Raleigh's response "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd", and J. Donne's parody "The Bait"

> Hero and Leander (published 1598):

- a mythological fanciful erotic poem, a free and original treatment of a classic tale about two ill-fated lovers

- inspired by the Greek poet Musaeus (5^th century BC) and by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC - 17 AD)

- Hero is a nun vowed to chastity and a devotee of the love goddess Venus, Leander is both a sophisticated seducer and an innocent novice in sex

- characteristic with its comic and playful tone, irony and hyperbole, cruelty and cynicism

- remained unfinished, later completed by George Chapman in a rather awkward moralizing and philosophical tone

> Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590):

- follows the exploits of a 14^th century Mongol warrior who rose from humble origins to conquer a huge territory

- the protagonist incorporates boundless energy, ambition, and impulse to strive ceaselessly for absolute power

- shows strife, restlessness, and unfettered ambition as embedded in the laws of nature and in human psychology

- though his aspirations are limitless, his ability to obtain fulfilment is restricted by forces beyond his control

> The Jew of Malta (performed c. 1592, published 1633):

- shows a protagonist obsessed with the idea of accumulating "infinite riches in a little room", who is eventually outwitted and sent to his death

> The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (performed in 1590s, published 1604):

- based on an old folklore motif of a man exchanging with devil the access to the forbidden knowledge of black magic for the eternal damnation of his soul

- contains some comic scenes of low practical joking contrasting with the passages of high ambition

> Edward II (published 1592):

- follows the fate of a homosexual king born into an inheritance of royal government, effectively throwing it away by preference of love to men, and finally being reduced by his enemies to the depths of human misery

- unlike his other tragedies does not celebrate the dangerous detachment of the protagonist from the limiting restraints of society, but explores the problem of moral conflict within an established society

Thomas Kyd (1558 - 1594)

- a close associate of C. Marlowe

- his theatrical style is characteristic with the fusion of violent action, exaggerated gesture, and boisterous rhetoric

> The Spanish Tragedy: or, Hieronimo is Mad Again (1592):

- follows the fate of Hieronimo, a father determined to revenge the murder of his son

- intermixes dense plotting, intense action, swift dialogue, and long rhetorically shaped soliloquies

- pioneers the highly influential subgenre of revenge tragedy

- introduces a new kind of protagonist: an obsessive, brooding, mistrustful, and alienated plotter