Unit II The Seventeenth Century I: Peacham, Drayton, Reynolds, Milton (Blamires, pp. 68-216)

M. Phil English, Bharathiar University--Blamiers— Approaches--Unit II,

Unit II 

The Seventeenth Century I: Peacham, Drayton, Reynolds, Milton (Blamires, pp. 68-216)

The Seventeenth Century II: Rymer to Dennis

The Eighteenth Century I: The Age of Addison and Pope

The Eighteenth Century II: Johnson and his Successors

Unit II The Seventeenth Century I: Peacham, Drayton Reynolds, Milton.

The seventeenth century was a turbulent period in the political as well as literary history of England. The Civil War of 1642-51, the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Commonwealth government and the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell created disorder and confusion in society so much so that quiet reflection on works of literature was nearly impossible.

The Restoration of 1660 restored peace, at least outwardly, in England. But literary taste has dramatically changed after the Elizabethan period. The essentially native tradition of English Literature was replaced by the French tradition. The king, his court, and the royalist sympathizers had spent many years in France. They had imbibed the culture and taste of the court of Louis XIV. The great French dramatist Pierre Corneille’s highly stylized form of drama influenced the English stage. Corneille’s grandiose and highly rhetorical tragedies were in sharp contrast to the boisterous Elizabethan drama.

Thus the Restoration period was dominated by French taste and no field of literary studies was exempt from that influence.

1. Henry Peacham ( 1578- 1642)

Peacham’ masterpiece was The Complete Gentleman. The book considers many activities like fishing, travel, and heraldry. Chapter 10 of the book is entitled Of Poetics. Peacham follows the ideas of Puttenham. After an attack on philistinism, Peacham analyses Virgil’s qualities in terms of Prudence, Efficacy, Sweetness, and Variety.

Prudence: - It is a combination of learning and good judgment. This creates proper placing and relationship of events and style.

Efficacy: - This is the power to describe things vividly and imaginatively.

Sweetness: - This is the smoothness of versification.

Variety:- This is the imaginative and verbal range which ‘makes every encounter in battle different from the others’.

Peacham deals with writers like George Buchanan and Thomas More who wrote in Latin.

In his survey of English poets Chaucer is given predominance. He praises Chaucer for sweet conceit and invention. Peacham had a poor opinion of Gower, though he appreciated the latter’s ‘good and grave morality’.

2. Michael Drayton (1563-1631)

Epistle to Henry Reynolds, Of Poets and Poesie, were his main works. In these works we can hear the voice of a professional critic. He acclaims Chaucer as the first to enrich English poetry. Chaucer made the language do as much as it was then capable of. Drayton praises Wyatt and Surrey for the ‘many dainty passages of wit’ in their songs and sonnets. Spenser is praised for the richness of his invention and excellence of his ‘high knowledge’. Drayton shows his wisdom in praising Sidney for showing that English could go hand in had with Greek and Latin in prose.

Perhaps the most sensitive of his judgments is on Marlowe. Marlowe is praised for his clear verse and the ‘fine madness’ of his poetic brain. Drayton also praises Shakespeare for his strong conception and Jonson for his learning.

3. Henry Reynolds (1627-33)

He was a friend of Drayton to whom Drayton addressed his epistle. His work, Mythomystes, is not concerned with what English poets may have done but rather almost exclusively with what they failed to do.

Reynold’s main argument is that the ancient poets were not simply poets but prophets and sons of Gods. The difference between the ancients and moderns is analyzed under three heads:-

a. Ancients contemplated the beauty of supernatural and intellectual things. They attained a rapture of spirit that made them blind to all trivial and inferior things. Modern poets, on the contrary, scorn disinterested study and flatter the wealthy.

b. Modern poets have nothing to hide or to veil. They have no understanding of the profound mysteries.

c. Modern poets are totally ignorant of the mysteries and hidden properties of Nature. Modern poets deal in trivial matters. Reynolds considers classical literature as a treasure-house of knowledge of the ancient nature of things.

4. John Milton (1608-74)

There are references to poets and poetry scattered over Milton’s prose writings. A technical question is raised in his Preface to Paradise Lost. Here he defends his use of blank verse. Milton is against the use of rhyme in poetry and notes that the best English dramas are written in blank verse.

The verse of Paradise Lost is built on principles totally against the use of rhyme. Milton’s technique exploits a system of key words, which are echoed and reechoed throughout the poem. It is this significant echoing of words and phrases which determines the poetic architecture.

Milton’s other significant preface is in connection with Samson Agonistes. He states in the preface that the poor reputation of tragedy is because of the mixing of the comic with the tragic and because of the absurdity of introducing trivial and vulgar persons. Milton makes it clear that in plot and design he is working in the tradition of the great Greek tragedians observing the unities.

II. Some Royalist Critics

1. William Davenant

Davenant wrote a substantial ‘Preface’ to his heroic poem Gondibert. He begins his preface with a brief survey of heroic poets from Homer to Spenser. Davenant then lists his own prerequisites for a successful epic poem.

·        Mere imitation forestalls originality.

·        The story will be placed in a former age than the present. It must be far removed from the present so that it can free the poet from the shackles of the historian.

·        The heroic poem must be in five books closely modeled on the five acts of a drama.

·        The essential material of the work is ‘wit’, not just luck and labor.

2. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Hobbes equates three kinds of poetry —— Heroic, Scommatique, and Pastorall —— with three kinds of regions, court, city, and country and three levels of humanity, the  lustrous nobility, the moody, unreliable city-dwellers, and the plain, dull rural population.  The three main divisions of poetry are again subdivided into six—— epic and tragedy, satire and comedy, pastoral and pastoral comedy.

What is most interesting in his work is his analysis of the creative process. He writes:-

·        Time and Education begets experience

·        Experience begets memory

·        Memory begets judgment and fancy

·        Judgment begets the strength and structure

·        Fancy begets the ornament.

Many years later Hobbes published his own translation of Homer’s Odyssey and prefaced it with an address to the reader concerning ‘the Virtues of an Heroique Poem’. Here he enumerates the qualities of an epic poem.

·        The vocabulary must avoid all foreign words.

·        The style must be natural and not distorted in the interests of metre or rhyme.

·        The mode of presentation must be appropriately contrived.

·        Speaking about the role of Fancy, Hobbes remarks that its role must not be above reason and judgment. Fantastic implausibilities like flying horses must be avoided.

·        Hobbes also speaks of truth to fact, originality and fitness in the use of imagery, and variety in presentation.

3. Abraham Cowley

Cowley wrote a ‘preface’ for his Poems. The preface contains his views on poetry. Cowley preferred Biblical subjects for poetry. He scorned the use of shallow fables. “He would bid poets prefer Noah to Deucalion, Jeptha’s daughter to Iphigenia, Samson to Hercules, the passage of Moses into the Holy Land to the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas”. However he cautions that Biblical materials had to be treated carefully, otherwise they would produce deformed results.

4. Thomas Sprat (1635-1713)

He was Cowley’s friend. He is credited with publishing the first literary biography in English, The Life and Writings of Cowley (1688). Sprat was involved with the Royal Society and with the movement to start an English Academy of Letters.

Sprat was critical of the superfluities in usage and expressed the need for a body to regulate the vocabulary of the language. Sprat wanted “ a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that of wits and scholars”.

Sprat initiates the style of mixing personal life with literary achievements and this style was later followed by Dr. Johnson in Lives of Poets.

Sprat praises the lack of affectation in Cowley’s poetry. Cowley’s metrical roughness was also defended by Sprat.

Sprat argues that Cowley’s swift flow of fancy is restrained by his balance of judgment. Cowley knows the secret of good writing——he knows where to stop.  The scope and variety of Cowley’s range is something to be appreciated.

Sprat is especially perceptive in dealing with Cowley’s use of the Pindaric ode. Cowley popularized the ode and it came to be known as ‘Cowleyan Ode’.

III. The Debate about Drama

The Restoration brought about the re-opening of theatres and the renewal of dramatic criticism.

1. Richard  Flecknoe

Flecknoe’s ‘A Short Discourse of the English Stage’ is a preface he wrote for his play Love’s Kingdom, a Pastoral Tragi-Comedy. He says that the main fault of Elizabethan dramatists is ‘huddling too much matter together” and the fabrication of excessive intrigue. He says that the audience should be led into a maze from which it is possible to find the way out, and not into an impenetrable mist. Flecknoe praises Shakespeare for his natural wit, Jonson for his gravity and ponderous style and Fletcher for his wit. He complains that Jonson mixed up too much erudition in his plays.

Flecknoe defines wit as the “spirit and quintessence of speech, extracted out of the substance of the thing we speak of”.

2. Sir Robert Howard (1626-98)

Preface to Four New Plays and a preface to The Great Favourite  are his works of criticism. In these works he touches on the controversies on the uses of rhyme and blank verse in drama. Joining issue with him is his brother-in-law Dryden.

Howard stoutly defended the English drama against those who wanted to follow the classical rules. The ancients relied more on indirect narration as they had to represent self-immolation, magical rejuvenation and similar such things on the stage. Howard quotes Horace to argue that ‘everything makes more impression presented than related’. Therefore, when selecting a subject the playwright should see to it that the subject is presentable on the stage. Howard did not like the English practice of mixing the comic with the tragic. He argued that the style of a play should be consistent to either the serious or the comic vein.

Howard’s arguments against the use of rhyme in drama are noteworthy. 

·        To treat rhyme as a check on bad writing is absurd

·        The bad writer will write badly, rhyme or no rhyme

·        Verse is a noble medium for great thoughts. But when ordinary things are expressed, verse becomes unsuitable. It is absurd to call a servant or ask a door to be shut in rhyme.

Howard attacks the attempts to lay down formal rules for drama. “To ridicule the practice of crowding two separate countries into one stage or the events of many years into two hours and a half is absurd”. To imagine that the unities restricting the use of time and place are nearer to what is natural is illogical. It is better not to formulate strict rules on all these matters.

3. Thomas Shadwell (1648-92)

Shadwell wrote two prefaces for his The Sullen Lovers and The Humorists. Shadwell claimed that he followed the three unities as closely as possible in his comedy, The Sullen Lovers. He professed himself as a disciple of Ben Jonson, developing the comedy of humors. He believed that humor comedy made a faithful representation of human life possible and preferable.

In his preface to The Humorists, Shadwell attacks the views of Dryden who said that delight is the chief end of poetry. Dryden gave instruction only the second place. Shadwell believed that the aim of poetry is primarily to instruct. Shadwell’s ideal dramatist was Ben Jonson. Shadwell argued that comedy was more suitable to laugh at the vices and follies of men.

IV. John Dryden (see the next posting)

The Seventeenth Century II: Rymer to Dennis

The Eighteenth Century I: The Age of Addison and Pope

The Eighteenth Century II: Johnson and his Successors 

 [ Please refer to the next posting]

Notes prepared for the MPhil students of Bharathiar University

Dr. S. Sreekumar