Timeline of British Literature
Old English - Renaissance Literature
680- 1660
Old English Literature: c. 680- 1066
658-680
Caedmon’s “Hymn”—earliest poem in English
recorded in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English
People (completed in 731). The first vernacular poem in
English. Alliterative verse. Uses compound words or
kennings.
Nu sculon herigean
heofonrices Weard
(Now we shall praise Heaven-Kingdon’s Guardian,)
Meotodes Meahte
and his modgethanc
(The Measurer’s Might and his mindthoughts,)
Weorc Wuldor-Faeder swa he wundra gewhaes
(The work of the Glory-Father when he of wonders had,)
Ece Drihten
(eternal Lord,
or onstealde.
established the beginning.)
He aerest sceop
(He first created
Heofon to hrofe
(Heaven as a roof,
Tha middangeard
(Then middle-earth
Ece Drihten
(The eternal Lord,
Firum foldan
(The earth for men,
eorthan bearnum
for the sons of earth)
halig Scyppend
the holy Maker,
moncynnes Weard
mankind’s Guardian,
aefter teode
afterwards made,)
Frea Aelmihtig
the Master almighty.)
Old English Elegies
“The Wanderer” (c. 975) —an elegy or lament for the
loss of one’s lord and companions; loneliness, exile, and
utter desolation. Heavy with the thought of mortality and
the end of all being. Speaker is in exile from his kin,
his lord is dead; his companions lost in war.
Other elegies: The Seafarer,The Husband’s Lament, the
Wife’s Lament
Beowulf (c. 1000)
Written in alliterative verse and uses kennings, as does
Caedmon’s Hymn. An epic poem in the elegiac mode.
Deals with the Danish King, Hrothgar, whose court is
attacked by the monster Grendel and his mother, who kill
Many of the kings men.
Beowulf , a young Geat, comes boasting to Hrothgar’s
court, and avenges these deaths by fighting
Grendel and his mother, receiving rich rewards from
Hrothgar—his ring-bearer—for these deeds.
He then fights a dragon to save his own people, but dies in
slaying it. The poem ends in a lament for Beowulf.
Middle English Literature (1350-1485)
William Langland (c. 1330-1387)
The Vision of William Concerning Piers the
Plowman (1362, A text) An allegorical dream vision
poem divided into three parts, each with a different
vision. The poem is written in unrhymed, alliterative
verse with four stressed beats to each line and alliteration
between the initial consonants in the first and second parts
of the line. It is both a social satire, a satire upon the
Catholic church, and a call to live a pious and humble
life. The dreamer, William, beholds a “field full of folk” all
before him as he begins his first vision. He encounters
Lady Meed, who tries to seduce him, and Holy Church,
who also vies for his attention.
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)
The Canterbury Tales (1380s)
24 tales and a framing prologue that sets up the
fiction of pilgrims meeting at a tavern as they begin
their pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket
in Canterbury. Each agrees to tell a tale. The tales are
linked by prologues. The narrator begins the prologue by
describing the fine April day and each of the pilgrims in his
entourage. Some characters: Knight, Miller, Wife of Bath,
Prioress, Nun’s Priest, Squire, Reeve, Pardoner, Summoner,
Cook, Man of Law, Oxford Scholar, etc.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1375-1500)
Written by the unknown “Pearl poet,” who also wrote
the allegorical dream-vision poem, “Pearl.”
Arthurian Romance in Alliterative Verse
Involves Sir Gawain’s quest to confront the Green Knight,
who has disrupted Arthur’s court. The Green Knight may
represent fertility. Gawain’s chastity is tested by his host’s
wife, who tries to seduce him. Gawain fails his test of trust
by taking the girdle the woman offers him; it has protective
power. The host turns out to be the shape-shifting Green
Knight, who spares Gawain’s life in a beheading game. He
Gives Gawain a green girdle as a token of G’s weakness and
need for forgiveness.
Medieval Lyrics: Both Secular and Religious
13th – 15th Centuries. Lyric poems, some of which were
set to music. Themes: love, the beauty of the beloved, the
seasons, the pain of unrequited love, Religious themes,
Biblical and liturgical themes, devotion to the virgin Mary,
other devotional themes.
Cuckoo Song: “Sumer is ycomen in,
Loude sing cuckou!” (Ezra Pound parodies)
Western Wind: “Western wind, when will thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.”
Mystery Plays or Cycle Drama: Late 14th–15th Centuries
Cycles of religious plays based on Biblical stories.
A cycle started with a creation play and ended with a
Second Coming and Judgment play. They were acted
by the crafts guilds of towns once a year. Each play
moved through the streets on a wagon from one
stopping place to the next. Four complete cycles have
survived from the guilds of four towns:
Wakefield, Coventry, York, and Chester.
The Chester Noah’s Flood play has a shrewish Noah’s
wife, who boozes it up with her girlfriends and cuffs
Noah on the ear.
Wakefield Second Shepherd’s Play: Mak, Gil, sheep
Sir Thomas Malory (1405-1471)
Le Morte Darthur (1485)
Prose Arthurian Romance
Contains much of the Arthurian material used by later
English writers.
Inspired Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King
Inspired Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court
Some call it a precursor to the novel
Renaissance Literature (1485-1660)
“Renaissance” means “Rebirth”--Rebirth of interest
in the Greek and Latin classics
Emphasis on humanistic education for statesmanship
Focus on the individual and a concern with the fullest
possible cultivation of human potential through proper
education; focus on individual consciousness and the
Interior mind
Concern with the refinement of the language and the
development of a national, vernacular literature
Tudor England (1500-1557)
Henry VII (acceded to throne in 1485)
Henry VIII (acceded to throne in 1509)
Edward VI (acceded to the throne in 1547)
Mary I (acceded to the throne in 1553 and ruled until
1557)
Queen Elizabeth I 1558-1603. Elizabethan literature is
full of references to Cynthia, Diana, Gloriana that symbolize
or allegorize the queen.
Thomas More (1478-1553)
Utopia (1516) A satiric prose fictional traveler’s report
back from a supposedly ideal commonwealth where there
is no private property, pre-marital sex is punished by
forbidding the offenders from ever marrying, and courtship
takes place in the nude! More was satirizing his own society
by suggesting that this non-Christian commonwealth had
attained a greater degree of peace and order than had his own
England. The fictional traveler, Ralph Hythloday, reports
about his visit to a fictional “Thomas More,” who is the
narrator of the piece.
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
Lyric poet who introduced the sonnet form into English
Translated some of Petrarch’s sonnets into English
(“Whoso list to hunt, / I know where is an hind …”)
Unlike Petrarch, who idealizes love as transforming,
Wyatt stresses the anguish and disillusionment of love.
The speaker in some of the poems is bitter, cynical,
Angry, longing and pained. “They flee from me”
In “Mine Own John Poins,” a Verse Epistle, he says he
Will flee the corruption of the royal court and retreat home
Roger Ascham (1515-1568) Educator
Toxophilus (1545) A treatise on the art of shooting
a bow. He advocates skill, balance, and concentration—
which he calls “Comeliness”—in all things, not just in
learning to shoot a bow.
The Schoolmaster (1570) A treatise on education
and the proper teaching of Latin, etc. He attacks the
vanity of Englishmen who travel to Italy and come back
all corrupted in manners and dress.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)
Like Wyatt, Surrey was a courtier in the court of Henry
VIII.Unlike Wyatt, he was beheaded.
Wrote sonnets in imitation of Petrarch and developed the
English sonnet form that Shakespeare later used, with
14 lines, divided into 3 quatrains and a couplet.
Wrote a verse translation of Vergil’s Aeneid in which
he devised a new verse form in English– Blank Verse.
Shakespeare and Marlowe wrote plays in blank verse.
Blank Verse = unrhymed iambic pentameter poetry.
Elizabethan England (1558-1603)
Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
The Shepheardes Calender (1579). Written in
Imitation of Vergil’s Ecologues, the Calender has an
ecologue for each month of the year.
Ecologue = a short pastoral poem written as a dialogue
or soliloquy. Conversations among shepherds and rustic folk.
Characters: Cuddy, Piers, Colin Clout (the poet figure),
Hobbinol, Gloriana (represents Queen Elizabeth), etc.
Spenser uses 13 different verse forms and clearly wants to
prove he is “our new poet.”
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596) A LONG narrative poem,
an allegorical epic in six books.
Each book contains twelve cantos, each of which contains
At least 40 stanza.
Each stanza is composed of nine lines. 1-8 are iambic
pentameter, and 9 is iambic hexameter (alexandrine);
each stanza is rhymed ababbcbcc. This form is called a
Spenserian stanza.
The Faerie Queene
Spenser planned to write 12 books of the Faerie Queene,
one for each of the "twelve private moral virtues" from
Aristotle (although there are no such virtues in Aristotle),
which Arthur represents. In each book, a different hero
represents one of these moral virtues.
Arthur is "magnificence," the sum of all the virtues.
Gloriana in the Faerie Queene represents Queen Elizabeth.
Throughout the whole poem, Arthur appears, disappears, and
reappears, looking for Gloriana, with whom he has fallen in
love. He longs to marry her. Spenser completed only six
books of his intended project (thank God for small favors).
Book I is devoted to the virtue of Holiness; Redcrosse
Knight is the hero
Book II –Temperance -Sir Guyon is hero
Book III – Chastity - Britomart, the virgin, female warrior
is hero. (Another allegorical figure for Elizabeth.)
Book IV – Friendship - Cambel and Triamond are heros
Book V – Justice – Artegal is hero
Book VI – Courtesy - Calidore
Edmund Spenser
Amoretti (1595) A sonnet sequence of 89 sonnets
that tell the story of a love relationship in which the
couple move toward marriage (unlike all other
sonnet sequences of the period).
Some Other English Sonnet Sequences:
Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella (1591)
Samuel Daniel, Delia (1592)
Michael Drayton, Idea's Mirror (1594)
Shakespeare, Sonnets (1609; written earlier)
Michael Drayton, Idea (1619)
Phillip Sidney (1554-1586)
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1578-83). A
prose pastoral romance dealing with shepherds and
courtly people disguised as shepherds. The plot
involves mistaken identities, disguises, amazon women,
crossdressed men, wild coincidences, melodramatic
incidents, and tangled love intrigues. Some characters:
Pyrocles, Philoclea (with whom he’s in love),
Musidorus, the Amazon Zelmane.
The Defense of Poesy (1579; published 1595). An
important prose defense of poetry in which Sidney
argues for the dignity, moral importance, and social
effectiveness of poetry, which teaches and delights so
that one will aspire toward virtue and shun vice.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). Poet & Playwright.
Dr. Faustus (1604) Play about a man of learning who
Strikes a bargain with Lucifer so that he can have forbidden
knowledge and the power that brings. He rejects his
former legitimate studies for Black magic. His fall is caused
by his pride and ambition.
Characters: Faustus, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Mephastophilis,
the Pope, Wagner, Valdes, Cornelius, the Seven Deadly
Sins, and more.
Marlowe writes his plays in Blank Verse. Critics admired
“Marlowe’s Mighty Line.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
See handout on Shakespeare’s dramatic canon.
Check out the web site that has synopses of all the
plays.
Sonnets
Venus and Adonis. Long narrative poem about the
love affair between these two characters. It is
highly erotic and sensuous in its verse.
Seventeenth Century
Jacobean Era—1603-1625-- the rule of King
James I
Caroline Era—1625-1640—the rule of Charles I, who
was deposed in 1640 and executed in 1649
1642: The Civil Wars Begin
1649-1653: England is a Commonwealth under the rule
of Parliament
1653-1658: England is a Protectorate under the rule
of Oliver Cromwell, the Protector (Right!)
1660: Charles II is recalled and monarchy restored
John Donne (1572-1631) & the Metaphysical Poets
Metaphysical poetry is characterized by:
--energetic, rough, or uneven movement, unlike the studied
elegance, sweetness, and smoothness of 16th century verse
--elaborate, strained, or far-fetched “conceits”;
--dazzling displays of wit
--a tendency toward logical argumentation or the structure
of an argument in a poem
--an interest in philosophical questions and speculation
Metaphysical Conceits:
Examples from Donne:
A woman’s naked body as an explorer’s map—”Oh, my
America!”
Two lover’s bodies as a compass with two legs and a
fulcrum point holding the two parts together
The action of God’s grace as a battering ram, a metal
worker melting and hammering a dented vessel, a rapist
A flea’s body that has just bitten both lovers as a sacred
altar or a marriage bed
How to Recognize a Donne Poem:
--dramatic, in medias res, opening
--a dramatic situation in which there is a speaker
and one spoken to, who is always silent
--fairly rough, irregular rhythm
--a conversational tone
--highly imaginative and unlikely drawing of
likenesses between things
--images drawn from all sorts of sources that seem more
worldly than the lovely images of 16th century poetry
Donne’s Works:
--Songs and Sonnets (not printed in his life time; begun in
1595 and probably written over the next 20 years)
“The Flea”
“The Good Morrow”
“Song”
“The Sun Rising” (an aubade or dawn poem)
“The Canonization”
--Holy Sonnets. Nineteen religious sonnets as part of his
Divine Poems.
Sermons. As an Anglican preacher, Donne preached
Volumes of sermons, including his last, Deaths Duell
Other Metaphysical Poets:
George Herbert (1593-1633) The Temple (1633)
“The Altar”
“Redemption”
“Easter Wings”
“Affliction I”
“Church Monuments” “The Windows”
“The Collar”
“Death”
“Love”
Henry Vaughan (1621-1695) Silex Scintillans
“Regeneration,” “The Retreat,” “The World”
“They Are All Gone into the World of Light,”
“Cock-Crowing”
Other Metaphysical Poets:
Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) Steps to the Temple (1646)
“To the Infant Martyrs”
“The Weeper” calls Mary Magdalene’s tears “portable
and compendious oceans” and a breakfast for cherubs
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) Poems (published after his
death)
“Damon the Mower” “The Mower’s Song”
“The Mower Against Gardens” “The Mower’s Song”
“To His Coy Mistress” “Upon Appleton House”
The Cavalier Poets, or Sons of Ben or Tribe of Ben
Ben Jonson (1572-1637) Poet, Playwright, Prose Writer
Plays: Every Man In His Humour (1598)
Every Man Out of His Humour (1599) Volpone
The Alchemist and Epicoene (1609)
Bartholomew Fair (1614) ETC.
Poetry: Epigrams: “On my First Son” “On my First
Daughter,” “To my Book,” “On Something that Walks
Somewhere”
The Forest: “To Penshurst” “Song: To Celia”
Sons of Ben OR Cavalier Poets:
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
Hesperides (1648) “Upon the Loss of His Mistress,”
“The Vine,” “Delight in Disorder,” “Upon Julia’s
Clothes,” “Upon the Nipple on Julia’s Breast,”
“To the Virgins to Make Much of Their Time”—a
carpe diem poem, one that urges the reader to seize
the day because time sweeps all into death.
Sir John Suckling (1609-1642) Song (“Why So Pale
and Wan, fond lover?/Prithee, why so pale?” Fragmenta
Aurea (1646)
Richard Lovelace (1618-1657) Lucasta (1649) “To
Lucasta, Going to War”