therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’ Despite its last
gesture, this famous passage is communal. Donne’s sermons rehearse his ‘sin of fear’
in order to make the hearers identify with his guilt, fear, repentance and rapture. The
preacher was their representative in the pulpit, as the priest had been at the altar.
If Donne’s poems read dramatically, his sermons were drama both audible and
visible. Conspicuous in his raised pulpit, his chief stage-prop was the preacher’s
hourglass: ‘we are now in the work of an houre, and no more. If there be a minute
of sand left, (There is not) If there be a minute of patience left, heare me say, This
minute that is left is that eternitie which we speak of; upon this minute dependeth
that eternity.’ In days when kings could be rebuked from the pulpit, the public were
not spared. At Donne’s sermons, women fainted and men wept: ‘like guilty creatures
sitting at a play’, to apply the words of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Donne often imagined his own death. He did not die in the pulpit, but he
managed to preach his last sermon dressed in his shroud, as shown in the fron-
tispiece of the sermon printed as Death’s Duell, 1632. His biographer Izaak Walton
(1593–1683) wrote that ‘Dr Donne had preach’t his own Funeral Sermon.’ His ashes
were buried in an urn, his statue showing him in his shroud, vertical, ready for take-
off at the General Resurrection. This tomb survived the Fire of London and Old St
Paul’s, and stands in Wren’s new St Paul’s. Donne’s final piece of one-upmanship
exhibits a medieval ‘good death’ in the Renaissance guise of world-as-theatre. This
was not a philosophical ‘virtuous man’ passing ‘mildly away’, but a sinner dying in
exemplary hope. Marvell describes Charles I as ‘the royal actor’ on the ‘tragic scaf-
fold’: Charles’s end on ‘that memorable scene’ was the last instance of the
Renaissance understanding of life as exemplary display, one which gives this phase
of English life and literature a special resonance.Prose to 1642
The cool eve nhandedness of Marvell contrasts with Donne’s histrionic urgency.
During the 17th century prose became plainer, less elaborate. Its stylistic model was
not the artful Cicero but the shorter Seneca; and there were English exemplars of
this.The first major writers to choose succinctness were Ben Jonson, and Sir Francis
Bacon (1561–1626) in his Essays of 1597.
In his Advancement of Learning (1605),Bacon advocated that the truths about
natural phenomena should be established by experiment. This empiricism gained
ground in philosophy as well as science. The founders of the Royal Society (1662)
ac knowledged Bacon as their master, and its Secretary wanted to reduce style to ‘a
mathematical plainness’. Then the cadences ofLancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), of
the antiquarian Robert Burton (1577–1640), and the physician Thomas Browne
(1605–1682) gave way to a style whose business was to state its business: not only in
the politics ofThomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and the epistemology ofJohn Locke
(1632–1704), but in fields outside philosophy. The two styles are worlds apart, and
the difference is connected with the move from first causes to second causes, from
Donne’s angels and the metaphysical doctrine of analogy to Newton’s apple and the
physical law of gravity.Sir Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon rose under James I to become Lord Chancellor. Dismissed in 1621 for
corruption, he spelled out his plans for systematizing the pursuit of knowledge,146 5 · STUART LITERATURE: TO 1700