Part I, Paper 4 English Literature and Its Contexts, 1500-1700

Part I, Paper 4 English Literature and
its Contexts, 1500-1700

Introductory information
This period, usually referred to as the Renaissance or the early modern period, was a time of
boundless literary creativity and extraordinary cultural upheaval. This was the first age of print,
when presses spread across Europe and transformed the conditions of writing, creating
circumstances in which hack writers, flagrant self-publicists and the first newspaper journalists
would flourish. It was an era of travel, mercantile expansion, and empire-building, when writers
began to take the globe as their canvas and to translate numerous works from ancient and
modern languages. For many, the period is defined by educational transformation; thanks to
humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and Desiderius Erasmus, training in eloquent, persuasive speech
assumed a new dominance, creating an electric connection between art and life. The unfolding
Reformation made this a heyday for poignant spiritual writing and violent religious polemic, with
Protestants and Catholics coming to real and textual blows, and sometimes casting Jews and
Muslims as more enlightened than their Christian enemies. (Political meltdown often followed hard
on the heels of religious clashes). And this was also an age of inquiry, in which writers explored
new approaches to the created universe, the human body and the self, sculpting a new philosophy
that (as John Donne put it) ‘calls all in doubt’.
Where did writing come from in this period? The early Tudors moved to consolidate the power of
the monarch, and many writers (including Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey under Henry VIII
and Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser under Elizabeth I) were courtiers or would-be courtiers.
Such writers frequently circulated their works in handwritten copies, rather than seeking to see
them printed; manuscript was also a favoured medium for female poets such as Hester Pulter and
Katherine Philips, and for the transmission of lewd or politically subversive texts. The professional
theatres that opened in London in the second half of the sixteenth century soon swirled with a
galaxy of talented writers, including Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster and Thomas
Middleton before the civil war closures, and Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, George Etherege and
William Congreve when they reopened in 1660. (Shakespeare also falls within this paper’s range;
although in the examination you cannot devote an answer exclusively to him, it is well worth
making comparisons with his works as you read for this paper). The new world of urban print led
to the emergence of a new popular literature: the raucous proto-rap of John Skelton, the wild
experimentation of Thomas Nashe, the feminist pamphleteering of Jane Anger and Rachel Speght,
and the political treatises of Levellers, Diggers and Ranters. Some of the period’s bestsellers
emerged from the church, or (so they claimed) from divine inspiration: the poems of George
Herbert, the masterpiece that is John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the sermons and meditations of
celebrated divines. But you may also find yourself reading works of political or moral philosophy,
broadside ballads, treatises on cross-dressing or the criminal underworld, emblem books, travel
narratives and science fiction. The world lies all before you.
This paper takes into its purview all writing produced in Britain and Ireland, in whatever language
(including Latin and the Celtic languages), and Anglophone writing wherever in the world it was
produced. The poetry of William Dunbar in Scots and George Buchanan in Latin, or the American
poetry of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, fall within the scope of the paper, as do works in
translation (such as Mary Sidney’s Garnier, John Florio’s Montaigne, Thomas Shelton’s Cervantes,
Thomas Urquhart’s Rabelais, Lucy Hutchinson’s Lucretius) and works in other languages, when
used for comparative purposes. Literature that deals with questions of cultural difference and
empire ranges from Thomas More’s Utopia at the start of the period to Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko at
the end, via works such as Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and View of the Present State of
Ireland, Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, the travel narratives
collected by Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and
Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco. Texts that address questions of social exclusion and
disability include Copland’s Hye Way to the Spyttell Hous, Isabella Whitney’s Wyll and
Testament, the collaborative Witch of Edmonton, Abiezer Coppe’s Fiery Flying Roule and
Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Gender identity and sexuality is a concern of numerous texts, including
Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, Thomas Middleton and Thomas
Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, the anonymous Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women,
Mary Wroth’s Urania, the female autobiographical writings gathered in the anthology Her Own Life,
and the poetry of Katherine Philips. A rich body of material and visual evidence, and a vast
quantity of non-fictional writing, can be used to shed further light on the intersection between
textual representations and quotidian experience. The archive of searchable text in Early English
Books Online represents a wonderful resource for such explorations.
Recent critical writing on this period has been exceptionally lively, and has frequently turned on
the question of the relationship between texts and history. The ‘new historicism’ of the 1980s
made a powerful impact here, but other critical formations—deconstruction, feminism, queer
theory, psychoanalysis, materialism—have made prominent contributions. The introductory lecture
series will provide you with a broad overview of contexts and key critical interventions. You should
use the ‘General Literary History and Criticism’ section, below, which lists some of the most useful
books for those starting out in the period, and the ‘Anthologies’ section to widen your reading. The
following are among the most rewarding one-stop introductions:
Briggs, Julia, This Stage-Play World: English Literature and its Background 1580-1625 (Oxford:
OUP, 2nd edn., 1997)
Loewenstein, David, and Janel Mueller, eds, The Cambridge History of Early Modern English
Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 2003)
Scott-Warren, Jason, Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2005)
The Cambridge Companion series is also useful for this purpose (e.g. English Literature, 1500-
1600, ed. Arthur F. Kinney; English Poetry, Donne to Marvell, ed. Thomas Corns; English
Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller; Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, ed. Ton
Hoenselaars; English Renaissance Tragedy, ed. Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan; English
Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk; Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N.H. Keeble
and English Literature, 1650-1740, ed. Steven N. Zwicker). These are all freely accessible online.
The Blackwell and Oxford Handbooks series also have many helpful volumes covering this period
(e.g. The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, ed. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank; The Oxford
Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Religion, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox; The
Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers).
Helpful introductions to the history of the period include:
Brigden, Susan, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603 (London: Allen
Lane, 2000; Penguin, 2001)
Kishlansky, Mark A., A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603-1714 (London: Allen Lane, 1996;
Penguin, 1997)
Or for (much) briefer starting points:
John Morrill, Stuart Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
John Guy, The Tudors: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

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Part I, Paper 4 English Literature and

its Contexts, 1500-1700

Scott-Warren, Jason, Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2005)

Helpful introductions to the history of the period include:

Or for (much) briefer starting points:

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