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Pastoral Poems and Sonnets
| Pastoral Poems and Sonnets • Pastorals portray shepherds and rustic life, usually in an idealized manner. • Elizabethans admired intricacy and artifice. • The sonnet is a 14-line verse form, often published in sequences. |
The glittering Elizabethan court was a focus of poetic creativity. Members of the court vied with one another to see who could create the most highly polished, technically perfect poems. The appreciative audience for these lyrics was the elite artistic and social circle that surrounded the queen. Elizabeth I herself wrote lyrics, and she patronized favorite poets and rewarded courtiers for eloquent poetic tributes. Among her protégés were Sir Philip Sidneyand Sir Walter Raleigh.Raleigh, in turn, encouraged Edmund Spenser,who wrote the epic The Faerie Queene (1590) in honor of Elizabeth. Sir Walter Raleigh and his contemporary Christopher Marlowewrote excellent examples of a type of poetry popular with Elizabeth’s court: the pastoral.A pastoral is a poem that portrays shepherds and rustic life, usually in an idealized manner. The poets did not attempt to write in the voice of a common shepherd, however. Their speakers used courtly language rather than the language of common speech. The pastoral’s form was artificial as well, with meters and rhyme schemes characteristic of formal poetry.
Improving NatureThe Elizabethans viewed nature as intricate, complex, and beautiful. To them, however, the natural world was a subject not for imitation but for improvement by creative minds. Nature provided raw material to be shaped into works of art. The greater the intricacy or “artificiality” of the result, the more admired the artistry of the poet. Elizabethan poets thus created ingenious metaphors, elaborate allegories, and complex analogies, often within the strictures of a popular verse form that came from Italy, the sonnet.
Earlier poets, such as Sir Thomas Wyattand Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,had introduced into England the 14-line verse form, modifying it to better suit the English language. During Elizabethan times, the sonnet became the most popular form of love lyric. Sonnets were often published in sequences, such as Edmund Spenser’sAmoretti, addressed to his future wife. William Shakespeare’ssonnets do not form a clear sequence, but several address a mysterious dark lady some scholars think may have been the poet Amelia Lanier.The English sonnet eventually became known as the Shakespearean sonnet,in tribute to Shakespeare’s mastery of the form.
Renaissance Drama
During the Middle Ages, English drama focused mainly on religious themes, teaching moral lessons or retelling Bible stories to a populace that by and large could not read. The mystery, miracle,and morality playsof medieval times—simple plays performed in churches, inns, and marketplaces as a way of spreading religious knowledge—provided the opportunity for actors and writers to develop their craft within biblical story outlines already familiar to audiences.
With the Renaissance, however, came a rebirth of interest in the dramas of ancient Greece and Rome. First at England’s universities and then among graduates of those universities, plays imitating classical models became increasingly popular. Certain noble families of the time maintained their own companies of actors who, when they weren’t doubling as household servants, amused their patrons with brief farcical interludesthat ridiculed the manners and customs of commoners. These interludes had little to do with the Bible, paving the way for later Elizabethan dramatists to write plays with secular themes. The third source, Latin and Greek dramasthat were revived during the Renaissance and studied at university centers such as Oxford and Cambridge, modeled for Elizabethan playwrights the characteristics of comedy and tragedy. These plays fell into two main categories: comedies and tragedies.
In Western civilization, both comedies and tragedies arose in ancient Greece, where they were performed as part of elaborate outdoor festivals. According to the famous ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, tragedy arouses pity and fear in the audience—pity for the hero and fear for all human beings, who are subject to character flaws and an unknown destiny. Seeing a tragedy unfold produces a catharsis,or cleansing, of these emotions in the audience.
In ancient Greek tragedies, the hero’s tragic flaw is often hubris—excessive pride that leads the tragic hero to challenge the gods. Angered by such hubris, the gods unleash their retribution, or nemesis, on the hero. Ancient Greek tragedies also make use of a chorus,a group of performers who stand outside the action and comment on the events and characters in the play, often hinting at the doom to come and stressing the fatalistic aspect of the hero’s downfall. By Shakespeare’s day, the chorus consisted of only one person—a kind of narrator—or was dispensed with entirely.
Renaissance dramatists borrowed devices from these earlier works but inserted their own elements consistent with the thinking of the age. As products of the Renaissance mindset, dramas dealt with the complexities of human life on earth rather than with the religious themes of earlier times. Plays were often staged at court, in the homes of wealthy nobles, and in inn yards where spectators could sit on the ground in front of the stage or in balconies overlooking it. A similar plan was used in England’s first theaters, such as the famous Globe Theatrein London.
In Renaissance England, comedywas broadly defined as a dramatic work with a happy ending; many comedies contained humor, but humor was not required. A tragedy,in contrast, was a work in which the main character, or tragic hero,came to an unhappy end. In addition to comedies and tragedies, Shakespeare wrote several plays classified as histories,which present stories about England’s earlier monarchs. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, however, his tragedies are the ones most often cited as his greatest.