The Elizabethan World

 In a letter written to Walter Ralegh, Spenser had written his idea of what a poet should be and the role he was to play in contemporary society. He wrote to Ralegh that “The general end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline”. Spenser believed good literature fashions a gentleman and makes him virtuous. Spenser wanted to be recognized as a modern poet who belonged to the changing time capable of expressing new developments in his society. That experimentation led to The Spenserian Sonnet which later augmented a new canon of English poetry. The sonnet was new to English writing and it required careful handling. Lyricism and folk culture gained freshness of spirit and appeal in Spenser’s hands. It moved nearer to the English idiom and widened the scope of poetic expression. It dwelt neither on narrative nor moralizing, but focused on the mental state of an emotional person taken up with the urge to live and express. He was the first English poet after Chaucer to have become a representative voice of Elizabethan England. He is the forerunner of Shakespeare and Milton. He is also known as the national poet of England writing poems that presented the grandeur of the English kingdom and the rule of the queen.

According to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Spenser’s writings have the brightest and purest form of nationality which was common in elder poets. There is nothing unamiable and nothing contemptuous of others. To glorify their country, to elevate England into a queen, an empress of the heart, this was their passion and object.

The nation needed at the time and Spenser filled that gap in English poetry. In Spenser, the spirit of chivalry is entirely predominant, although with a much greater infusion of the poet’s own individual self into it than is found in any other writer. He has the wit of the southern with the deeper inwardness of the northern genius.

Italian and Latin comedies were source for Elizabethan comedies. These comedies used to be often romances in praise of patron or monarch. Love and suffering were the main theme of Elizabethan comedies. During this period,history plays and chronicles were common. As far as tragedy was concerned, they used Seneca as a model. Being melodramatic, these tragedies used to be full of emotional speeches and scenes. A great deal of stage views were used by playwriters skillfully.

Tragedies were concerned with the darker side of human characters such as immorality, greed and cruelty. Most of the time they also touched the melancholic aspects of human life. Almost all the playwrights of this age took interest in contemporary politics and history….

Christopher Marlowe’s privileged and strange two-part tragedy Tamburlaine (1587- 1589) Thomas Kyd’s popular revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy (1589), William Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy Romeo and Juliet (1595), and Thomas Heywood’s domestic tragedy A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603) are the most influential tragedies. These models for tragic drama were developed by writers like George Chapman, John Webster, John Ford, Philip Massinger, and James Shirley. A related line of historical drama can be traced from John Bale’s moral history King John (1539) through Marlowe’s Edward II (1592), Shakespeare’s first (Henry VI, Part One;

Henry VI, Part Two; Henry VI, Part Three; and Richard III) and second 15 (Richard II; Henry IV, Part One: Henry IV, Part Two; and Henry V). Other historicals trace Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII (1613), and Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (1634). In Elizabethan England, travelling companies staged performances in barns and yards and they were at the mercy of guilds. By the end of the 16th century, two public playhouses had come up outside of London where the people enjoyed drama.

These playhouses were the Theatre (1576) and the Curtain (1577). They were followed by Rose (1587), Swan (1595), Globe (1599), Red Bull (1605) and Hope (1614). All were built outside of the city limits to avoid problems with the city government. Some theatres were built inside the city limits but were the private playhouses, allowing for a smaller and wealthier audience. Dramas presented through these playhouses manifest the contemporary society to the audience. The patronage of the court of the kingdom made the dramatic companies

The courts and counselors used to visit the theatres to enjoy drama and share audience entertainment. Tragedy does not get success without audience’s interest in serious matters of tragedy. At the theatres like the Red Bull especially during the holidays the common men used to stand under the stage to evaluate the incidents of the play. But at the Globe, there were courtiers, university men, gentlemen and their wives and merchants for evaluation.

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