Leading figure Ben Johnson Middle Age aesthetics Theory of humours Human behaviours result from 4 humours :

blood, phlegm ,black bile and yellow bile Humours correspond with air, water, fire and

earth Therefore, Johnson creates “types”. Stylish satires Volpone (1605 or 1606), The Epicoene (1609) The

Alchemist (1610)

Other important figures Beaumong and Flether – The Knight of the

Burning Pestle (comedy) Made people realize how feudalism and

chivalry turned into snobbery and deceit Other popular style revenge play (tragedy) Popularized by John Webster and Thomas

Kyd

The King James Bible – huge translation project (1604-1611)

Standard Bible of the Church of England Led by James I himself with 47 scholars

Major poets John Donne, George Herbert Subjects Christian mysticism and eroticism Extensive use of paradox and oximorons.

Metaphysical Poets: John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell

Cavalier Poets: Ben Jonson and his followers (Richard Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Edmund Waller, Sir John Denham). The Sons of Ben.

Puritans: Andrew Marvell, John Milton

Theatre: imitators of Shakespeare (Webster, Ford, Middleton, etc.)

Variety of comedies and masques by Ben Jonson

Theatres closed during the Puritan Revolution Sonnet: gradually goes out of fashion in the Jacobean period;

Donne used it for religious purposes, and Milton for political purposes

New forms and genres: Heroic couplets, verse satires, essays, biographies

‘The proportion of the world disfigured is.’

Radical break from Petrarchan tradition: ‘Donne has purged English poetry of pedantic weeds’, he has replaced ‘servile imitation’ with ‘fresh invention’’ (Carew)

Distorts traditional rhythmic and stanza patterns:

Not a ‘school’: no organised group but strong influence of Donne’s style on a generation of poets before 1660

Not ‘metaphysical’: ‘it is not philosophical poetry in any real sense, although it uses the concepts and vocabulary of philosophy’

Main features: colloquial language; the poem takes the form of a philosophical argument with another person; brings in a range of discordant images

Conceit (concetto): ‘a figure of speech that establishes an elaborate parallel between two seemingly dissimilar or remote objects or ideas’ Petrarchan: emotional; the subject is compared extensively to an

object (love is war)

Metaphysical: intellectual; striking analogies between two dissimilar things (a flea is a marriage bed)

Wit: ‘intellect’, ‘intelligence’, ‘creative intelligence’; describes Donne’s poetic style, which combines ideas in an ‘unexpected, paradoxical, and intellectually challenging and pleasing manner’

Sonnet: here: a synonym for ‘love lyric’ Addressed to flesh and bone women

19 religious sonnets, written in the last years of his life

English sonnet form Same combination of passion and intellectual

argument as in the love poems but the passion is more complex: hope and anguish, fear and repentance

The Temple: a collection of religious poems Contest between secular wit and religious devotion Spiritual struggle rather than auto-biographical

sincerity, as in Donne Symbolical objects: the human body is a church

building Remarkable variety of stanza forms, including

pattern poems: ‘Easter Wings’

Shakespeare’s friend, rival playwright and fellow actor

Poet, literary dictator; professional writer Classicist and Renaissance Humanist: ‘a

perfect playwright’

Comedies of humours: eccentricities of our ruling passions ridiculed; Every Man in His Humour (1598)

Classical tragedies: derived from Tacitus, Juvenal, Seneca; Sejanus (1610), Catiline (1611)

Satiric comedies: based on Terence and Plautus; Volpone(1606), The Alchemist (1610)

Poetry: occasional poems, elegies, compliments, dedications, songs, epigrams

24 sonnets between 1630-58: five in Italian, the rest in English

A variety of occasions: public and private, but no love sonnets; not a sequence