The Early Stuarts and the Commonwealth

Overview: Early 17th-Century England

Periods

• Elizabethan period → Jacobean period (James I) → Caroline period (Charles I) → Commonwealth / Puritan Age

• Jacobean period continues many Elizabethan ideas but begins major change.

• Major divide: Monarchy (James I & Charles I) vs Commonwealth (Cromwell)

✅ Key Historical Developments

Political Changes

The 17th century = Age of Transitions

• Absolute monarchy under James I & Charles I

• Growing Parliament power → Civil War

• Rule by Puritan Parliament & Cromwell (Commonwealth)

• Restoration of monarchy (Stuarts)

• Beginning of constitutional monarchy

Science & Economy

• Shift from medieval / scholastic worldview to rationalism & science

• Religion & science start to separate

• Colonisation fuels economic change

✅ From Elizabethan to Jacobean Spirit

• Elizabethan spirit: optimistic, unified, humanist, festive

• Jacobean spirit: critical, satirical, questioning, rebellious

✅ Problems Under James I & Charles I

James I (1603–1625)

• Scottish king succeeding Elizabeth (distant relative)

• Lacked political skill compared to Tudors (the ruling house Elizabeth was from)

• Tried peace with Catholic Spain → unpopular

Charles I (1625–1649)

Growing national discontent because he:

1. Dissolved Parliament (1629) → acted like an absolute monarch

2. Raised taxes without consent of Parliament

3. Censored the press

4. Upset Puritans

   • Supported High Church Anglicanism (close to Catholicism)

   • Tolerated Catholics (married a Catholic queen)

✅ English Civil War (1642–1649)

Sides

Parliament wins (1649)

• Charles I executed

• Son Charles escapes to France

✅ Commonwealth / Puritan Age (1649–1658)

• Leader: Oliver Cromwell (Lord Protector, 1653)

• Strict Puritan control

• No fun: theatres, festivals, dancing banned → end of “Merry England”

✅ Key Themes

• Transition from absolute monarchy → parliamentary power

• Shift from medieval worldview → scientific rationalism

• Conflict between Anglican monarchy vs Puritan Parliament

• Cultural movement from joy & celebration → austerity & moral strictness

✨ In One Sentence

The early 17th century in England saw a shift from Elizabethan optimism to Jacobean criticism, leading to conflict between monarchy and Parliament, the Civil War, the Puritan Commonwealth under Cromwell, and major cultural, political, and scientific transitions that paved the way for constitutional monarchy.

✅ Jacobean Drama (Early 17th Century)

Jacobean = reign of James I. Drama remained creative and prolific, but themes became darker, cynical, and more critical than in the Elizabethan period.

✅ Key Features of Jacobean Drama

✅ Major Playwrights

🟦 Shakespeare (1564–1616)

In this period wrote:

• Dark comedies

• Great tragedies

• Late romances

🟦 Thomas Dekker (1570–c.1640)

• Comedies (e.g., The Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Honest Whore)

• Influenced by Greene & Shakespeare

• Known for keen social observation despite sometimes clumsy plots

🟦 John Webster (1580–1625)

Tragedies of intense passion & dense language

• The White Devil — Woman kills husband for love → punished

• The Duchess of Malfi — Duchess secretly remarries; brothers seek revenge → imprisonment & murder — Evil seems to win, but duchess’s nobility morally condemns villains

Theme: violence, corruption, psychological darkness

✅ The Satiric School

🟨 Ben Jonson (1572–1637) — Leader

• Classical, learned, realist

• Contrast to Shakespeare (sharper, more critical, less sympathetic)

• Aim: correct vice through satire

• Portrayed real contemporary London

• Attacked moral weaknesses and rising merchant wealth

• Characters driven by one dominant passion = "humour characters" (based on four bodily humours)

Key plays:

• Every Man in His Humour (1598)

• Volpone (1605–06)

• The Alchemist (1610)

• Bartholomew Fair (1614)

Tone: bitter, moralizing, satirical

🟨 Other satiric playwrights

✅ Jacobean Romantic Dramatists

🟩 Beaumont & Fletcher

• Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) + John Fletcher

• Romantic tragedies & comedies

• World-weariness → escapism

• Exotic settings

• Themes: love, honour, friendship in conflict with vulgar society

• Characters often weak, overwhelmed, sometimes choosing suicide

✅ Caroline Drama (under Charles I, from 1625)

Changes in Audience & Theatre

• Shift to wealthy, elite audience

• Blackfriars Theatre (1609) → higher ticket prices, indoor theatre

• Under Charles I & Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria (not Catherine of Aragon — note: this text is mistaken!) → preference for conservative, courtly, elaborate plays

Consequences

• Theatre becomes expensive, artificial, detached from real life

• Decline in independent theatres

• Puritans opposed this extravagance → theatres closed in 1642

Aftermath

• When reopened in 1660 (Restoration) drama remained upper-class entertainment

• Lost Elizabethan vitality and realism

✅ 17th-Century English Prose — Overview

From Elizabethan prose to “prose of utility”

• Elizabethan prose (16th century) = imaginative, ornate, elaborate, sophisticated in style.

• 17th-century prose shifts dramatically:

  • Writers move away from fiction and embellished language.

  • They adopt practical, direct, and useful writing — a “prose of utility.”

  • Focus is on political, religious, and social conflicts of the time.

  • Aim: clarity, precision, purpose.

  • They deliberately avoid the decorative style of Lyly and Sidney.

• However, even supposedly simple writers can sound ornate or indirect to modern readers.

✅ Letter-Writing & Parental Advice

James I’s advice to his son

• In letters to his son, King James I encourages:

  • Plain, natural language “not painted with artifice.”

  • Practical, straightforward communication.

• New prose principles:

  • Do not write unless you have something meaningful to say.

  • When you write, say it simply and clearly.

Represents the new ideal of clear, purposeful prose.

✅ Major Translations

The Authorised Version / King James Bible (1611)

• Commissioned by James I, at request of Puritan-leaning merchants.

• Produced by ~40 scholars.

• Based on earlier translations:

  • Tyndale, Coverdale, Geneva Bible, Bishops’ Bible

• Added deliberately archaic phrasing to give dignity.

• Qualities:

  • Poetic, balanced, majestic style.

  • One of the greatest prose works in English.

  • Profound influence on English literature and culture.

• Used in the Anglican Church up to mid-20th century

  • Modern versions = more accurate but less poetic.

Ben Jonson’s Discoveries

• Jonson = classical scholar.

• Discoveries = paraphrases + translations from Latin authors, plus his own judgements.

• Style: Roman clarity, compactness, economy of expression.

✅ Religious & Political Prose

Robert Burton (1577–1640)

• The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

• Essays exploring:

  • Human dissatisfaction and melancholy

  • Remedies for unhappiness

• Became hugely popular — reflects psychological & philosophical concerns of the age.

John Milton (1608–1674)

Primarily known as a poet, but also major prose figure.

Wrote 29 political & religious pamphlets (1641–1660)

• Early works defend Presbyterians against royal & episcopal power (Reason of Church-Government Urged Against Prelaty, 1641)

• Later opposed Presbyterians when they censored ideas → Areopagitica (1644) → eloquent defence of freedom of speech & against censorship

• Also wrote a treatise on education (1644), influenced by Comenius (Czech reformer)

Other religious prose writers

• Thomas Fuller — popular Anglican preacher

• Richard Baxter — mild Puritan; The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650)

✅ Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

Importance & role

• Most significant figure of the prose of utility.

• Introduces Montaigne-style essay into English literature:

  • But unlike Montaigne's personal reflections,

  • Bacon aims to instruct and form capable public men (young Jacobean gentlemen).

• His focus: efficiency, practical wisdom, success in public life — not personal happiness or morality.

Bacon as philosopher & scientist

• Major works:

Legacy

• Challenges medieval scholastic tradition & linguistic misuse.

• Establishes empiricism, rationalism, pragmatism.

• Father of the scientific method:

  • Induction (facts → conclusions), not medieval deduction (premises → conclusions)

• Style not always simple to modern readers, but marks shift from ornate prose to practical philosophy.

✅ Key Themes

✅ Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)

Background & intellectual formation

• Born to an almost illiterate vicar → rose to become one of the greatest scholars of his age.

• Attended Oxford at age 15, already fluent in Greek & Latin.

• Became a mathematician; believed motion explains nature, mind, and society.

• Travelled on the continent; exiled 10 years in Paris, where he met René Descartes.

Leviathan (1651)

• His most famous work, written during the English Civil War.

• Title refers to the Biblical sea monster → symbol of overwhelming power.

• In Hobbes’s theory, Leviathan = the State / Society

  • A strong central authority needed to restrain chaos.

View of human nature & politics

• Very pessimistic about human nature.

• Without government → “state of nature” = “war of all against all.”

• Only way to avoid violence: strong, unified state power.

• One of the first major social contract theorists.

Social contract principle:

• Individuals surrender some freedom to the State in exchange for protection & social order.

Hobbes = father of modern political theory of the State.

✅ Seventeenth-Century Prose Genres

Character books

• A distinctly 17th-century form, popular when fiction was out of fashion.

• Short sketches of virtues & vices in everyday people.

• Offered natural, varied portrayals of human types.

• Helped prepare the way for the 18th-century novel.

• As numerous in this century as sonnet sequences in the Elizabethan era.

Autobiographies & Memoirs

• Turbulent times → people wrote to justify themselves.

Charles I — Eikon Basilike (1649)

• Title means “The King's Image”.

• Published at his execution.

• Purports to be his spiritual autobiography:

  • reflections on his reign, sufferings, prayers,

  • and advice for his son (future Charles II).

• Created a huge emotional impact upon publication.

The “Lives” (biographies)

Isaak Walton (1593–1683)

• A self-made London shopkeeper, friend of many leading figures.

• Wrote “lives” of admired people, including:

  • John Donne

  • George Herbert

• The Complete Angler (1653):

  • A hymn to peaceful country life and contemplation.

  • Reacts against Puritan cruelty and bloodshed.

  • Nostalgic for happier Elizabethan times.

✅ Baroque Prose

Reaction against plain prose: Some writers embraced intense imagery, striking metaphors, emotional excess.

John Donne (1572–1631)

• Known as a major poet, but also significant Anglican preacher.

• Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.

• Sermons = dramatic, emotional, spiritually intense.

• Depicts inner conflict of the Christian soul in vivid, frightening language.

• Style = baroque:

  • moral intensity

  • extreme contrasts (sin vs grace)

  • elaborate metaphors

  • balanced, musical sentences

• Famous quote from Meditation XVII:

  “No man is an island… any man's death diminishes me… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Mixes the sublime and the terrifying.

Thomas Browne (1605–1682)

• A physician and thoughtful Anglican writer.

• Religio Medici (1642):

  • Private, reflective spiritual journal.

  • Combines science & religion.

  • Calm, tolerant, personal tone — unlike Donne’s emotional agony.

  • Advocates charity, moderation, and peace in a divided age.

• Seen as a remedy against religious fanaticism.

• Work became well-known in Europe.

✅ Key Themes & Concepts

✅ Poetry in English, 1600–1660 — Overview

Key poets of the period:

• Walter Raleigh

• George Chapman

• Ben Jonson (influenced the Cavalier poets)

• John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell (Metaphysical poets)

• The towering, solitary figure of John Milton (transitional to later period)

This period bridges late Elizabethan poetic tradition and the newer, more questioning Jacobean/Caroline spirit.

✅ In the Wake of Elizabethan Poetry

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618)

• A true Elizabethan adventurer: soldier, sailor, explorer, colonial expeditions vs Spain and in the New World.

• Supported Elizabeth’s campaigns (including in Ireland).

• Under James I:

  • Imprisoned for 13 years in the Tower (wrote History of the World, unfinished)

  • Later released to lead an expedition to Guyana → failed

  • Executed to appease Spain

• Friend of Spenser and Marlowe

• Though mostly Elizabethan, Raleigh’s lyrics show questioning, scepticism typical of Jacobean mood

George Chapman (1559–1634)

• Famous for his translations of Homer (Iliad, Odyssey) → praised by John Keats (“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”)

• More serious, philosophical poet

• Subversive, questioning tone

• In The Shadow of Night:

  • Day = tyranny of daily life, shallow routine

  • Night = silence, study, contemplation, regeneration

  • Represents a shift toward introspection, intellectual depth

Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645)

• Moved in aristocratic circles

• One poetry volume: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611)

• Advocates female virtue; engages Biblical themes

• Attempts to redeem Eve’s reputation

• Uses conventional social and poetic forms of the time (Not to be overstated as a precursor to Milton, but notable as early female poetic voice)

✅ Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

• Classical-minded poet and dramatist

• Self-conscious heir of the Ancients

• Values control, balance, discipline, refined diction

• Rejects Elizabethan emotional excess and rhetorical ornament

• Master of the ode (inspired later Romantic odes by Keats and Shelley)

• Aesthetic:

  • Measured, polished style

  • Musical harmony, classical restraint

• Influenced a school of young poets → “Sons of Ben”

✅ The Cavalier Poets

Continuation of courtly lyric tradition, influenced by Jonson’s style.

Key features

• Elegant, light-hearted, witty

• Themes: love, loyalty, carpe diem, court life

• Tone ranges from idealizing love to playfully erotic

• Classical balance and polish

Major names

• John Suckling

• Thomas Carew

• Richard Lovelace

• Robert Herrick

Essentially royalist poets celebrating refinement and pleasure.

✅ Metaphysical Poets

Term coined by John Dryden and Samuel Johnson (initially negative: “obscure”)

• Vindicated by T. S. Eliot in the 20th century

• Key traits:

  • Paradox, conceits (unexpected metaphors)

  • Intellectual intensity

  • Juxtaposition of opposites (“yoking together” contradictions)

  • Colloquial rhythm, argumentative tone

Major figures:

• John Donne

• George Herbert

• Andrew Marvell

John Donne (1572–1631) — Central Metaphysical Poet

Life

• Adventurous early career:

  • Naval expedition vs Spain

  • Secretary to government minister

  • Imprisoned for eloping with his employer’s niece

• Later became Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral

Style & Themes

• Life and mind full of restlessness, intensity, tension

• Combines:

  • Sensual passion + philosophical reasoning

  • Emotion fused with intellect

  • Vivid, often shocking imagery

• Anti-Petrarchan reaction:

  • Rejects sweet Elizabethan lyricism

  • Prefers bold realism, abrupt rhythms, colloquial tone

• Imagery drawn from:

  • Sensual experience

  • Science

  • Theology & medieval learning

Major works

• Songs and Sonnets (secular love poems)

  • Passion ranges from worshipful devotion to cynical detachment

• Holy Sonnets (religious poems)

  • Spiritual torment, sin, fear of judgement

  • Faith in grace, repentance as path to salvation

Donne’s poetry is a constant interplay of body & soul, doubt & faith, intellect & passion.

✅ Key contrasts of the period

✅ George Herbert (1593–1633)

Key Features

• Wrote exclusively religious poetry

• Unlike Donne:

  • Less intense, less extreme

  • More simple, homely, intimate

• Rejects pompous, “sonorous” style

• Uses everyday language & familiar images

• Seen as “God’s troubadour” → expresses love of God, not romantic love

Style & Themes

• Tone: devotional, humble, personal

• Focus on faith, inner conflict, obedience, love

• God is a loving presence who values sincere sacrifice

• Famous example: poem “Love” (gentle welcoming God figure)

✅ Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)

Position in poetry

• Hybrid poet — combines:

  • Metaphysical (Donne-like imagery, paradox, tension, intellect)

  • Cavalier (grace, clarity, smoothness, elegant style)

Style & Legacy

• Clever, intellectually playful, but also graceful and controlled

• Balance of wit + lyric simplicity

• Strong rhythm and clear style

• Anticipates neo-classical clarity of the next age

Marvell = bridge between metaphysical complexity and classical elegance.

✅ John Milton (1608–1674)

Early Life & Personality

• Austere, solitary temperament

• Educated at Puritan school → Cambridge University

• Deeply learned; classical training

• Early works written in retirement:

  • Comus (masque)

  • L’Allegro (“joyful mood,” Elizabethan spirit)

  • Il Penseroso (“melancholy mood,” Jacobean spirit)

Life Turning Point

• Planned a great epic from early on

• Went on a Grand Tour of Europe (especially Italy)

• Civil War begins → he returns to England

• Devotes himself to Puritan cause

  • Writes political pamphlets (also served Cromwell)

  • Never ignored Cromwell’s faults

• Under Charles II (Restoration, 1660) → lives in retirement, completely blind

Major Works (after blindness)

• Paradise Lost (1665) — masterpiece

• Paradise Regained (1671) — lighter & simpler

• Samson Agonistes (1671) — tragedy in Greek style (chorus, messengers, speeches)

• Famous sonnet: “On His Blindness”

Paradise Lost — Themes

Purpose: to “justify/vindicate the ways of God to Man.”

• Story of Satan’s Fall + Fall of Man

• Humans fall due to wrong choice and denial of God’s authority

• Salvation possible only through:

  • Right reason

  • Repentance

  • Christ’s mediation

Style

• Sonorous blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter)

• Blindness sharpened his musical ear

• Elevated, Latinate diction and sentence structure

• Far from everyday speech → majestic, solemn, monumental

• Result: one of the greatest achievements in English literature

✅ Toward Neoclassicism

After Milton, two poets prepare the way for Restoration & classical style:

Edmund Waller (1606–1687) & John Denham (1615–1669)

• Loyal to monarchy → exiled in France with Charles II’s court

• Reaction against metaphysical complexity and Donne’s obscurities

• Advocated:

  • Naturalness of language

  • Regular meter

  • Clarity

  • Simplicity in theme and diction

Denham’s Cooper’s Hill — Key Lines

“Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; Strong without rage; without overflowing, full.”

• Became aesthetic motto for neoclassical poets

• Ideal qualities:

  • Deep but clear

  • Gentle but strong

  • Controlled, balanced, harmonious

These values guide Restoration and 18th-century poetry (Pope, Dryden, etc.)