The sixteenth century - Letteratura inglese, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica The sixteenth century - Letteratura inglese e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Thomas More's Utopia was not written in English at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but in Latin. The English language had almost no prestige abroad, and there were those at home who doubted that it could serve as a medium for serious discourse. How did it come that by 1600 so many remarkable poems, plays, and prose works came from English? Part of the answer lies in part in the brilliant creativity of a succession of brilliant writers in the English language. The court and the city The development of the English language in the sixteenth century is linked at least indirectly to the consolidation and strengthening of the English state. The Tudor dynasty ruled England from 1485 to 1603, ending the Wars of the Roses, a decades-long struggle for royal power between the houses of York and Lancaster. The family name derives from Owen Tudor, an ambitious Welshman who married Catherine of Valois, widow of the Lancastrian king Henry V. Tudor England's royal court was a center of culture as well as power. Culture and power were not, in any case, easily separable in Tudor England. Henry VII was able to counter the multiple and competing power structures characteristic of feudal society. Court entertainments such as theater and masque shaped the taste and the imagination of the country as a whole. Many of the best poets in Tudor England were courtiers, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, and others. London's boom was one factor among many contributing to the sense of a culture moving at increasing velocity away from its historical roots. It is estimated that one in eight English people lived in London at some point in their lives. About a decade before Henry VII won his throne, the art of printing from movable metal type (German invention) had been introduced into England by William Caxton. Literacy seems to have increased during the fifteenth century, and more during the sixteenth, when Protestantism encouraged a direct encounter with the Bible. Printing made books cheaper, providing more opportunity to read and more incentive to learn. Greater availability of books silent reading: communal experience turns into a more intimate encounter with the text. These changes were not as sudden and dramatic. As often in an age of spectacular novelty, many people looked back to an idealized past. Great innovations of the Tudor era were often seen as attempts to restore lost links with ancient traditions. Renaissance Humanism In the fifteenth century a few English clerics and government officials had journeyed to Italy. That movement, generally known as the Renaissance, involved a rebirth of letters and arts stimulated by the recovery of texts and artifacts from classical antiquity. In England it was not until Henry VII's reign that the Renaissance began to flower. This flowering, when it occurred, came not, as in Italy, in the visual arts and architecture. It came rather in the spiritual and intellectual orientation known as humanism. More's Utopia (1516), with its dream of human existence entirely transformed by a radical change in institutional arrangements, is an instance of a general humanist interest in education: in England and elsewhere, humanism was bound up with struggles over the purposes of education and curriculum reform. English humanists wrote treatises on education to promote the learning they regarded as most suitable for public service. Education grammar, logic, and rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music; but its focus shifted from training for the Church to the general acquisition of "literature," in the sense both of literacy and of cultural knowledge. Elizabethan boys of the nobility and gentry were taught to speak and write good Latin, their sisters learned modern languages, religion, music, and needlework, but they received the grounding in ancient languages and classical literature so central to Renaissance culture. Elizabethan schoolmasters sought to impart facility and rhetorical elegance, but the books their students pored over were not considered mere exhibitions of literary style: the classics were also studied for the moral, political, and philosophical truths they contained. Humanists committed to classical learning were faced with the question of whether to write their own works in Latin or in English. The two impulses—humanist reverence for the classics and English pride in the vernacular language—gave rise to many distinguished translations throughout the century. The reformation England early sixteenth century Catholicism. For its faithful adherents, the Roman Catholic Church was the central institution in their lives. In 1517 Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, began a bloody revolt that forever ruptured the unity of Western Christianity. Luther’s topics: the pope and his hierarchy were the servants of Satan and that the Church had degenerated into a corrupt conspiracy designed to bilk the credulous and subvert secular authority. Salvation by regaining direct access to the word of God, by translating the BibleMost of the theological discussions were in Latin, which few lay people could understand, so religious doctrine and spirituality were mediated to people by the priests, church art and music, and by the liturgical ceremonies of daily life. In England, however, the Reformation began less with popular discontent and theological disputation than with dynastic politics and royal greed. Henry VIII, who wrote a diatribe against Luther, craved a legitimate son to succeed to the throne, and his queen Catherine of Aragon failed to give him one. After negotiations, the pope, under pressure from Catherine's powerful Spanish family, refused to grant the king the divorce he sought in order to marry Anne Boleyn. A series of momentous events followed, as England lurched away from the Church of Rome. 1533 Henry's marriage to Catherine was officially declared null and Anne Boleyn was crowned queen. The king was excommunicated by the pope (Clement VII). In the following year, a parliamentary Act of Succession required an oath from all adult male subjects confirming the new dynastic settlement. The Act of Supremacy passed, declaring the king "Supreme Head of the Church in England". Upon Henry's death in 1547, his son Edward came to the throne, and during his brief reign the archbishop of Canterbury formulated the forty-two articles of religion which became the core of Anglican orthodoxy and wrote the first Book of Common Prayer, adopted in 1549 as the basis of English services. The sickly Edward died in 1553, six years after his accession to the throne, and was succeeded by his half-sister Mary (Henry VIII's daughter by his first wife, Catherine), who immediately returned to Roman Catholicism. She initiated religious persecutions that earned her the name Bloody Mary. Mary died childless in 1558, and her younger half-sister Elizabeth became queen. Elizabeth's succession had been by no means assured. For if Protestants regarded Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine as invalid and hence deemed Mary illegitimate, so Catholics regarded his marriage to Anne Boleyn as invalid and hence deemed her daughter illegitimate. Henry VIII himself seemed to support both views, since only three years after divorcing Catherine, he beheaded Anne on charges of treason and adultery and urged Parliament to invalidate the marriage. During her coronation procession, when a girl in an allegorical pageant presented her with a Bible in English translation—banned under Mary's reign—Elizabeth kissed the book, held it up, and laid it to her breast. By this gesture, Elizabeth signaled England's return to the Reformation. Commissioners were sent throughout the land to confirm that religious services were following the officially approved liturgy. England had gone: Roman  CatholicismCatholicism under the supreme headship of the English king a guarded Protestantism a more radical Protestantisma renewed and aggressive Roman CatholicismProtestantism again. All these changes created danger, persecution, and death, and made people wary. A female monarch in a male world In the last year of Mary's reign, the Scottish Calvinist minister John Knox thundered against what he called "the monstrous regiment of women." After the Protestant Elizabeth came to the throne the following year, Knox and his religious brethren were less inclined to denounce all female rulers, but in England, as elsewhere in Europe, there remained a conviction that women were unsuited to wield power over men (bc women only led by passion). Like many Renaissance monarchs, Elizabeth was drawn to the idea of royal absolutism. But Elizabeth’s power was not absolute, the government lacked a standing army, a national police force, an efficient system of communication, and an extensive bureaucracy, and above all, the queen had limited financial resources and needed to turn to the Parliament. Members of the House of Commons were elected from their boroughs, and though the queen had influence over their decisions, she could not dictate policy. The court of Elizabeth I was a cult of love: queen's gender was transformed from a liability into an asset. The court: atmosphere of romance, with music, dancing, plays, and fancy-dress entertainments called masques. When she was disobeyed she showed an anger that "left no doubting whose daughter she was". The kingdom in danger The presence of a Catholic queen with a plausible claim to the English throne was the source of widespread anxiety. Fears of Catholic conspiracies intensified after Spanish imperial armies invaded the Netherlands in order to stamp out Protestant rebels. Suspicion swirled around Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been driven from her own kingdom in 1568 and had taken refuge in England. The queen's life seemed in even greater danger after Pope Gregory XIII's proclamation in 1580 that the assassination of the great heretic Elizabeth (who had been excommunicated a decade before) would not constitute a mortal sin. The immediate effect of the proclamation was to make life more difficult for English Catholics, most of whom were loyal to the queen but who fell under grave suspicion. When, after several botched conspiracies had been disclosed, Elizabeth's spymaster unearthed another assassination plot in the correspondence between the Queen of Scots and the Catholic Anthony Babington, Mary's fate was sealed. After a public display of vacillation and perhaps with