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English 3I06 / The Age of Elizabeth I
6 May 2008
Introductory Lecture
Lecture Outline
*communication
*course outline overview
*whirlwind tour of the 16th century: Elizabeth’s inheritance and legacy
*400 years: a long time ago, or no time at all?
Communication
*email: as noted on the course outline – use smithmk2@gmail.com as a default, since McMaster email is not as reliable as one might like
*course website: link is available via WebCT, or go directly to:
http://elizabethrex.blogspot.com/
For a complete course outline including a print version, see the post before this one.
Course Outline Overview
Key points for future reference:
*If for any reason you can't reach me at the McMaster email address, don't hesitate to use the gmail account. Or, just use the gmail account anyway.
*Re: assignments: watch in the next few days for details on the workshop topics you'll be able to choose from. I'll post them online and bring a signup sheet to class. The details of the assignment will be configured in a way that's appropriate for our relatively small class size. If there are people in the class with which you definitely want to work, let me know now.
*I will also try to post term 1 essay topics ASAP.
Whirlwind Tour of the 16th Century: Elizabeth’s Inheritance and Legacy
Protestant Reformation
*A timeline can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_English_Reformation
Note I advise using wikipedia with caution. It can be cheesy and/or wrong at times, but it can also be a useful way to access more in-depth materials. The timeline I'm linking to here is okay.
*Major break between Henry VIII and the Catholic Church, 1533-35
*Made more plausible by the existence of an alternative to Catholicism with the European Protestant Reformation, begun by Marin Luther in 1517 with his protest document, the Ninety-Five Theses
*Edward VI becomes King after Henry VIII’s death, 1547 at age nine; rules 1547 until his death on 6 July 1553; under Edward, Protestantism becomes more confirmed with the establishment of the Book of Common Prayer (which we’ll read a bit about on May 15)
*Lady Jane Grey (the Nine Days Queen), daughter of the younger sister of Henry VIII, succeeds to the throne; is executed nine days later when support for her rule erodes
*Mary I (“Bloody Mary”) gains the throne; restores Catholicism and persecutes prominent Protestants
*17 November 1558, Mary dies at age 42; Elizabeth I, her younger sister, takes the throne, restores Protestantism with some modifications (lesser penalties for dissenters, maintenance of some elements of Catholic church hierarchy and ceremony – see Broadview intro pages XLIX-L)
*Elizabeth rules for the next 45 years, until 1603
Tenents of (English 16th Century) Protestantism
*a greater emphasis on the individual’s relationship with God and the Bible
*a de-emphasis of the role of clergy in mediating the relationship with God
*a focus on the trinity rather than on the Saints and auxiliary figures (especially Mary)
*the belief that most church decorations are “idols” and need to be removed in order to bring the focus back to God
*in the Eucharist ritual, a belief that the bread and wine are not literally transformed into the body and blood of Christ, but are signs or symbols or contain the spirit of Christ
*a strong emphasis on the fallen nature of humanity (i.e., original sin)
*the focus on original sin as the cause of most human problems, including illness
*in some versions (esp. Calvinism) a belief in predestination, meaning God decides whether you are going to go to hell or heaven
*therefore, the individual does not control his or her fate
*in this model, sinful behaviour or good works are a sign or symptom of the direction the person is going to go, but don’t cause the person to go to hell or heaven
Humanism
*Another thread within 16th century culture, strongly linked to the concept of the “Renaissance” *the rediscovery and close reading of classical texts (ancient Greek and Roman) placed an emphasis on the human capacity to rationally explore the world around us
*an emphasis on beauty, truth, the value of the liberal arts (poetry, painting, sculpture, music, grammar, rhetoric, history, oratory); the potential for good or evil as inherent in humanity; at its extreme in the classical period, humanism led at least one major philosopher to reject the notion of original sin (Pelagius, 354 AD-440-ish)
Economy
*a movement from the country to urban centres, especially London, driven by the practice of “enclosure”
*a dramatic increase in the urban poor
*the rise of the middle class, and a precursor to the modern concept of banking
Exterior Exploration/Colonization
*colonization begins at home: during the period we’ll study, England continued to try to dominate Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, with varying success
*foundation of colonies in North America (esp. Virginia, which we’ll read about in more detail in June)
*a question: given that Britain later became the most successful empire on the planet (i.e., “the sun never sets on the British empire), was this dominance determined by her early policies and attitudes toward her colonies, or could it have gone another way?
Gender
*all over the map
*cardinal rule number one when dealing with issues of gender and power in this period: class is often if not always a greater determinant of power than gender. While the period is incredibly misogynist, generally speaking much less power came along with being a lower-class woman or man than an upper-class woman
*with Protestantism, a greater emphasis on marriage over chastity
*simultaneously, the emphasis on the direct relationship between God and the individual enables some women to step forward to speak directly about their faith; some women become prophets – although traditionally there have always been women saints and martyrs
*Queen Elizabeth herself occupies a peculiar, perhaps completely unique space on the gender map
See especially the Clopton portrait, circa 1560, where she appears dressed more as a scholar than a feminine woman (contrast to the miniature portrait from approximately the same era, above)
For reference, a picture of Erasmus, a well-known Dutch humanist scholar, painted in 1523:
*during the 16th century, the seeds are sown for women to begin to speak back to their oppression in more direct ways, resulting in something called the “woman controversy” an early 17th-century pamphlet war
*forms of gender as always generated exceptional people, like Moll Cutpurse, a famous cross-dressing woman / drag king who emerged from the London underworld in the early 1600s
Her years were 1584-1659; she is the main character of a play about her called The Roaring Girl by Thomas Dekker, in which she unites a couple who is being prevented from marrying by the man’s father.
*a good practice is to try to see the gender landscape, like every other conceptual landscape of the period, as foreign to our own, and try to remap your ideas of what is “masculine” and “feminine” in the period. The answers may surprise you, especially in terms of the erotic content of a lot of what we’ll study
For your consideration, Christopher Marlowe, 1564-1593, swaggering intellectual, playwright, poet, possible spy, and lover of boys:
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604, excessively fertile and most often cited as the guy who “really” wrote Shakespeare’s plays:
Art and Entertainment
*books in print
Genres:
*prose fiction
*prose non-fiction
*poetry (lyrical and narrative)
*drama
*miscellaneous: music, puppet shows, ritualized entertainments (mummers, morris dances, maypole dances), various forms of public humiliation
400 years: a long time ago, or no time at all?
Now: a family portrait
And some others:
And then:
This portrait is in your Broadview anthology: The Saltonstall Family, 1636-7
The Tongue: a case study
Now(-ish):
Then: George Wither’s Emblem Book 1635. You can view the complete book as well as others at http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/home.htm (main page). Wither's book begins here: http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/withea01.htm. Flip forward to the emblem pages. A fullsize version of the flying tongue emblem is here: http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/withe042.htm
Further reading / information:
Some info on crime and punishment in the period:
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/punishment.htm
On mummers, including some cool pictures of mummers:
http://library.efdss.org/cgi-bin/textpage.cgi?file=aboutMummers&access=on
On maypoles, see a good version of the maypole dance from the original, far superior Wicker Man film:
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