5AAEB007 History, Politics and the Elizabethan Imagination
Level/Semester taught
Convenor/Teacher
Credit Value
Teaching Arrangements
Assessment
2nd Year Module Band 1
Rivkah Zim
15 credits
1 hour lecture & 1 hour seminar weekly
1 x 3 hour exam
MODULE OUTLINE:
General aims
This module builds on the foundations established by the first-year introductory module ‘Early Modern Literary
Culture’. Its purpose is to investigate how some sixteenth-century readers, writers and legislators perceived the
functions of literature in society, with reference to humanist traditions of the value of history and epic narrative in
the drama, poetry and visual arts of Elizabethan England (ca 1550-1603). It examines sixteenth-century concepts
of human individuality and the literary forms which were designed to represent men and women within an historic
European and English national culture.
In Part One we shall look at how stories drawn from biblical and classical traditions provided different
contexts for humanist discussions of personal motivation and moral choices: in particular, actions which, because
of the status of the personalities involved, had consequences in early modern readings of English history. By the
second half of the sixteenth century, poets had learned how to select and organize their historic literary materials,
and their readers had begun to recognize anachronism; nevertheless, it remained problematic to use the past to
comment on the present. This was especially so in the wider arena of performance and publication in print
In Part Two we shall focus on examples of how selected readings of English chronicles became
paradigms for statements on contemporary politics relating to such sensitive issues as the succession to the
throne.
By the end of the module students should know about some of the leading institutions and personalities of
Elizabethan government and the nature of their interactions in education and the creative arts, and be able to
assess the role of the poet in politics and to interpret the politics in poetry, with detailed reference to specific texts
and historic situations (ca 1550-1603).
This module offers copious opportunities to discover the subtleties of a range of relationships between
representations in words and in pictures (including printed and manuscript book illustrations).
Lecture/Seminar programme (indicating texts studied)
1. Humanism, literature and politics in the reign of Elizabeth I: An Introduction
Part One – Beginnings: personal stories and national history
2. The sins of the fathers in a lyric dimension: *Wyatt’s King David (printed 1549) and *Peele’s David and
Bethsabe 1599)
3. Queenly lovers and the heroic dimension: *Surrey’s Queen Dido (in Aeneid, IV, pr. 1557) and Marlowe and
Nashe’s Tragedie of Dido queen of Carthage (pr. 1594)
4. Dying for love: Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (pr. 1598) with their offspring (e.g. extracts from Nashe’s Lenten
Stuffe, 1599) and renditions of Venus and Adonis in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Bk III (1590) and Shakespeare’s
poem dedicated to Southampton (1593)
5. Tarquin’s treachery and the betrayal of Rome: the inside story of Shakespeare’s Lucrece (1594)
6. Tragic Tudor tales of treachery and betrayal: the down side of Richard III by *Sackville (‘Complaint of
Buckingham’, 1563) and Shakespeare (Richard III, 1597)
7. Reading week
Part Two – The poet in politics and the politics in poetry
8. The poet’s career in *Sacvyles olde age’, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Sidney’s youthful toys
(Defense of Poesie)
9. Sackville & Norton, Gorboduc, the monarchical republic and *parliamentary petitions to the Queen (1562)
10. Sidney’s Old Arcadia and ‘Letter’, ‘a true Englishman’s hand’ and a French marriage proposal for the Queen
(1579-81)
11.’Know ye not that I am Richard II?’ (Queen Elizabeth to William Lambarde): the drama of the earl of Essex’s
revolt (1601), also starring Sackville, Francis Bacon (‘Of Faction’) and Shakespeare
A coursepack containing non-Shakespearean texts, facsimiles or pictures will be available.
Supplementary bibliography
(more specific reading will be recommended at the beginning of the module)
C. Barber, Early Modern English (A. Deutsch, 1979) description of the language
P. Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (Routledge, 1989)
M. G. Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance (London, 1988)
Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance, ed. A. Hadfield (Cambridge, 1994)
M. Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (London, 1982)
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. M. Hattaway (Cambridge, 2002)
T. Healy, New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature (London, 1992)
J. E. Howard & P. Rackin, Engendering a Nation: a feminist account of Shakespeare’s histories (Routledge, 1997)
J. N. King, English Reformation Literature: the Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982)
The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600, ed. A. Kinney (2000)
The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. J. Kraye (1996)
P. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002)
R. S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Tragedy: the influence of Seneca (Oxford, 1997)
D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford, 2002) pioneering study 1st edn 1984
E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1939 & later edns)
classic study much cited
P. Saccio, Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle and Drama (Oxford, 1977)
R. Sowerby, The Classical Legacy in Renaissance Poetry (London, 1994)
D. R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2001)
B. Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (Yale, 1996)
L. B. Wright, Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill, NC, 1964)
R. Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer 1535-1601 (Cambridge, 1987)