A History of English Literature

O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded;

whom none hath dared, thou has done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou hast

cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched

greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these

two narrow words:Hic jacet! [Here lies ...]

The dramatic commonplace is near the heart of Elizabethan literature. Ralegh, who
embodied the extremes of his age’s ambition, fell, tried to recover, and then wrote
and rewrote its epitaph.

Elizabethan and Jacobean

After Sidney and Spenser, the harvest. Leaving Shakespeare aside, the 1590s are a
momentous decade in English poetic history. Suddenly ‘well over thirty poets of at
least some talent were known to be writing’ (Emrys Jones) – among them John
Donne, who wrote satires, elegies and some libertine verse before 1600.
The decade 1600–10 is almost as good, even without drama. The great periods of
new achievement in non-dramatic English poetry come in 1375–1400, in 1590–1610
and in 1798–1824. The Ricardian and Romantic constellations have stars as great as
those of the belated English Renaissance. The period in which the greatest number
ofaccomplished poets flourished would be the first three-quarters of the 17th
century.
In Hamlet (1601) the Prince wears an inky cloak; Jacobean tragedy is very black
indeed. The ‘golden’ phase of Elizabethan poetry passed in 1588 – before
Shakespeare wrote. After Gloriana’s zenith, writers addressed less ideal subjects.
Marlowe wrote of naked will and ambition’s fall; Donne mocked human folly;
Bacon’s essays reduced human pretension. A sceptical, analytical mood coincided
with a more Calvinist temper in the face of Catholic Europe, though many
Elizabethan poets and musical composers were Catholics, and the Catholic faith is
the theme of the remarkable poetry of Robert Southwell, executed for his beliefs in

1595. The Elizabethan plantation of Munster brought the harshness of empire
      nearer home.

Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe’s plays (see p. 114) tower over his poems. But his ‘Come live
with me and be my love’ was a favourite, answered in Ralegh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply
to the Shepherd’ and much parodied. It gracefully reworks Latin lyric themes, as do
Ralegh’s own ‘Serena’ and other lyrics of the time. Of Renaissance kinds, the lyric was
closest to its classical exemplars.

ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 103

Non-dramatic poets of the 1590s

Sir Walter Ralegh (c.1552–1618: executed) Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593: killed)
John Lyly (c.1554–1606) William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Fulke Greville (1554–1628) Thomas Nashe (1567–1601)
George Chapman (?1559–1634) Thomas Campion (1567–1620)
Robert Southwell SJ (1561–1595: executed) Sir John Davies (1569–1626)
Samuel Daniel (c.1563–1619) John Donne (1572–1631)
Michael Drayton (1563–1631) Ben Jonson (1572–1637)