Krantz
Outline of Jacobean and Dissolution England
Taken from the Norton Anthology of Literature, 7th ed.

Background Notes: Seventeenth Century England

History Part I: 1603-40
State and Church

1. Parliament
   
   1. Contention over taxes, religion, unpopular ministers, and parliamentary rights
      
   2. Royal absolutism
      
   3. Shaper of culture (published on poems, psalms, witchcraft, tobacco)
      
2. Court
   
   1. Licentious, disorderly, extravagant
      
   2. Selling peerages and noble titles
      
   3. Three separate courts, markedly different
      
      1. Queen Anne as patron of arts
         
      2. Prince Henry militant protestant and patron of arts
         
3. Erotic male friendships of James
   
4. Religion
   
   1. Gunpowder Plot unifies Protestants vs. Catholics
      
   2. Roman Catholics and Puritans resist Established Church
      
      1. Catholics fined or hanged but still in high places
         
      2. Puritans extreme re: Predestination; or iconoclasts; or Protestant work ethic
         
5. Ascent of Charles
   
   1. Prince Henry dies, dashing Puritan hopes
      
   2. Charles marries Catholic Henrietta Maria of France and not the Infanta of Spain
      
      1. Charles acts as absolutist and divine rightist (vs. compromises of James)
         
      2. Personal rule without parliament and with taxes
         
      3. Laud promotes high Anglicanism and doctrine of Free Will and Puritans were dispossessed
         
6. Resistance to Stuart Absolutism
   
   1. House of Commons wanted own rights and powers
      
   2. Ancient Peers disaffected through impoverishment
      
   3. Bourgeois gained power through loans, exploration and colonization
      
7. Charles' Big Mistakes
   
   1. Imposition of Book of Common Prayer and episcopal organization upon Scotland
      
   2. Failure of Scottish Wars (1639-40)
      
   3. Laud tries to impose oath of conformity
      
   4. Riots and Scots occupation force the calling of the Long Parliament

Literature and Culture (See text for specific examples)

1. Ideas in Transition
   
   1. Old Ideas and images not yet abandoned
      
      1. Ptolemaic universe
         
      2. four elements: Fire, Air, Water, Earth
         
      3. four humors: choler (black bile), phlegm, blood, and melancholy (yellow bile)
         
      4. macrocosm/microcosm
         
      5. chain of being
         
   2. New ideas challenging old
      
      1. Bacon's scientific method
         
      2. Harvey's circulation of the blood
         
      3. Galileo's telescope confirming Copernican astronomy.
         
2. Court happenings impact literature
   
   1. Masques portray James I as source of all power and splendor
      
   2. Queen Anne's and Prince Henry's enacting assert their interests and power: resistance
      
3. Noble houses retained status as powerful local patrons
   
   1. Sidneys, Herberts, Margaret Clifford, countess of Cumberland
      
   2. Coteries of friends also promoted and circulated literary works
      
4. Church
   
   1. Treatises of devotion, meditation, and instruction
      
   2. Controversial tracts
      
   3. Cases of conscience
      
   4. Sermons: elegant or plain
      
5. City of London
   
   1. Civic entertainment
      
   2. Bookselling and publishing
      
   3. Theaters
      
6. Changes in Poetic fashion
   
   1. Abandonment of long allegories, sonnet sequences, and pastoral poems
      
   2. Norm = short, very concentrated poems in colloquial and plain style.
      
   3. Other popular genres: love elegy and satire, epigram, verse epistle, dramatic monologue, meditative religious lyric, country-house poem
      
7. Three Important Poets
   
   1. ohn Donne: dialectical arguments, learned terms and inquiry, speech like, strikingly dramatic; witty play with paradoxes, ironies, and the conjunction of opposites ("metaphysical conceits"); interchanged vocabularies of love and religion in both love and religious poetry.
      
   2. Ben Jonson: celebrates the social world; classical values: simplicity, restraint, economy, decorum (fit of style to subject); good workmanship (strong and plain); art. Cavaliers
      
   3. George Herbert; complex religious sensibility and great artistic subtlety; new plain, devotional, and biblical mode; caught in paradox of need but impossibility for poet to praise God fitly.
      
8. New prose fashion: Bacon's familiar, pithy sententious essays
   
9. Women as Authors: rewriting discourses that repress or diminish women: poems, diaries, autobiographies, plays
   
10. Charles as King. 1625
    
    1. Rowdy court of James replaced by new sophistication, refinement, courtly code idealizing female beauty, heterosexual love, and harmony.
       
    2. Artistic and literary cult of platonic love
       
    3. Masques mystify and reinforce Charles' personal rule.
       
11. Culture Wars intensify
    
    1. Caroline court and Laudian (high Anglican) church vs. reformist Protestants and Puritans
       
    2. Puritans denounced court festivities and country celebrations, especially on Sunday and saw pastoralism, Neoplatonism, and representations of ritual in court masques as connected to Queen's Catholicism.
       
    3. William Prynne's book denouncing all this got him stripped of academic dgrees, ejected from the legal profession, etc. and life imprisonment. Seen as very dangerous.
       
    4. Milton's early poems show tensions of these years.
       
       1. He repudiates courtly and Laudian asthetics and also Prynne's prohibitions.
          
       2. Develops reformed versions of pastoral, masque, and hymns
          
       3. Denounces Cavaliers
          
       4. Denounces establishment clergy.
          

The Revolutionary Era 1640-60

1. Two theories of Causes
   
   1. Marxist: Long term changes in English society and economy
      
      1. conflict in modes of production
         
      2. rising power and ambition of the gentry and "middling" sort of people
         
   2. Revisionist: unlucky chance events, personal psychological factors, poor decisions by a few individuals, especially, Charles I.
      
2. Effects of revolution
   
   1. Development of capitalist production
      
   2. Development of bourgeois liberal thought:
      
      1. religious toleration
         
      2. separation of church and state
         
      3. social contract
         
      4. popular sovereignty
         
      5. representative government
         
      6. republicanism.
         
3. Historical Account
   
   1. Long Parliament
      
   2. Puritan opposition to the Established (Anglican) Church
      
   3. Civil War
      
      1. First CW (1642-46) seeks to limit king's control over army and church and establish Presbyterianism as church of England
         
      2. Puritans divided over question of Religious Tolerance
         
      3. Second CW: Charles tried and executed
         
   4. Rump Parliament: Remains of House of Commons
      
      1. Wanted Athenian and Roman type of democracy
         
      2. Too threatened by foreign countries
         
      3. Popular government never takes hold
         
      4. Puritan Sects attack the new government and each other
         
   5. Oliver Cromwell
      
      1. Victorious in Ireland and Scotland
         
      2. Dissolves Rump Parliament
         
      3. Barebones Parliament self-destructs
         
      4. Cromwell is named Protector for Life
         
   6. "Restoration"
      
      1. Cromwell dies 1658
         
      2. Army brings Charles' son, Charles II, back as king
         
      3. Court and church fully restored and Puritans repressed
         
      4. Parliament and merchants become powerful
         
1. Literature and Culture 1640-60
   
   1. Drama: Theaters destroyed; "Reformed" dramas emphasize colonial and imperial myths
      
   2. Cavalier poets write in exile: internal or external.. Most important are Herrick, Waller, and Lovelace
      
   3. Royalist poets write lyrics. Important: Vaughan, Phillips, Crashaw, Cavendish
      
   4. Important Prose Writers
      
      1. Hobbes: philosophy and political theory: validates all "successful" government so all parties distrust him.
         
      2. Walton "canonizes" Donne and writes The Complete Angler
         
      3. Browne ridicules Puritans and, like Walton, upholds Anglicanism
         
      4. Polemical tracts argue all aspects of religious, social, and political controversies
         
         1. Gauder writes on the royalist side
            
         2. Harrington for the republic and the revolutionaries
            
   5. Women's Writing is given impetus by the revolution and represents all sides
      
   6. Marvell and Milton
      
      1. Marvell supports both royalist ideas and Cromwell
         
      2. Milton is Puritan but heterodox
         
   7. Summary: Seventeenth Century poetry and prose fuses intellectual strength, emotional passion, and linguistic artfulness.