Tudor Monarchs
Stuart Monarchs
The Interregnum
Stuart redux
Some Authors we will encounter
Some Verse Forms we will encounter
Some Genres we will encounter
Metrical feet
Line lengths
Stanza lengths

A. TUDOR MONARCHS
 

• 1. Henry VII (Henry Tudor, of the house of Lancaster) defeated King Richard III of York in the battle of Bosworth Field, 1485. We call this the beginning of the Tudor period in English history and it is often called the beginning of the English Renaissance or Early Modern period (and the end of the Middle Ages). Henry VII ruled England from 1485-1509.
• 2. Henry VIII ruled England from 1509-1547. He had six wives and orchestrated the split or schism between the Catholic Church (the Holy Roman Empire) and the Church of England (the Anglican Church). Ironically, only a few years before the schism, Henry had been granted the title Defender of the Faith by the Pope for his services in fighting radical Protestants and Lutherans in Europe. (It was during this time that Protestants like Anne Askew, whose ballad weâre reading, were executed). He divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, the mother of his eldest daughter Mary, on the grounds that his marriage to her was illegal because she had been previously married to his elder brother Arthur, who died while still a young man. Catherine countered Henryâs claim by arguing that her marriage to Arthur had been annulled because it had never been consummated, because of Arthurâs ill-health. The Pope supported Catherine, but Henry decided to establish a new church, which he called the church of England. Instrumental in effecting this conversion was Cardinal Wolsey. Sir Thomas More, on the other hand, felt himself to be unable to take the oath of fealty to the King (to pronounce the Act of Succession, which declared Princess Mary illegitimate and legitimized the kingâs second marriage, to Anne Boleyn). More died a martyr and in the twentieth century was made a saint by the Catholic church.
• Here are Henry VIIIâs six wives :
• 1. Catherine of Aragon   divorced  Mary
• 2. Anne Boleyn    beheaded  Elizabeth
• 3. Jane Seymour    died   Edward
• 4. Anne of Cleves    divorced
• 5. Catherine Howard   beheaded
• 6. Catherine Parr    survived!

• 3. King Edward VI ruled England from 1547-1553. He was a devout Protestant who sponsored the translation of the Bible into English and encouraged Catholics to convert to the Church of England. There were many Catholic martyrs during this period, as Edward had been raised to consider Catholic believers damned and believed it was his duty to convert them to Protestantism. He was a sickly child and died young.
• 4. Lady Jane Grey ("the nine daysâ queen") was placed briefly on the throne by her powerful Protestant relatives, who were worried about what would happen if Princess Mary, who was a devout Catholic like her mother, inherited the throne. Her claim to the throne was weak in comparison to Maryâs, however, and Maryâs supporters ousted and executed Jane after only nine days.
• 5. Queen Mary (Mary Tudor or "Bloody" Mary), ruled England between 1553-1558. At first she ruled on her own, but in 1554 she married and became co-ruler of England with her husband, Philip II of Spain. They were both devout Catholics. She earned the soubriquet "Bloody" because of her religious fervour and her enthusiasm to execute Protestants; she believed that God had chosen her to re-convert England back to Catholicism. Mary had several miscarriages but no children survived.
• 6. Queen Elizabeth I ("Gloriana," "Cynthia," "Good Queen Bess," "The Virgin Queen"), ruled England from 1558-1603. She had been raised a Protestant. Under Queen Elizabeth, the English church came up with a compromise: the Elizabethan Settlement. Under the terms of the settlement, citizens were compelled to attend Anglican church services, and to swear an oath of loyalty to the queen, but were free to believe whatever they wished in their hearts. As long as they participated in the service, the queen was not concerned with their true beliefs: she is said to have claimed, "I do not wish to make windows into menâs souls." Despite her commitment to religious freedom, Elizabeth nonetheless executed Catholics and Puritans (extreme Protestants) who were found guilty of treason, for trying to remove her from power. Elizabeth never married.

• 1. King James I was King James VI of Scotland when he inherited the English throne at Elizabethâs death. He ruled from 1603-1625. His mother, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabethâs cousin, had been deposed from the Scottish throne for sexual irregularity when James was a baby; she took refuge in England, where her presence posed a difficult political problem for Elizabethâs court, because Mary was continually the center of Catholic intrigues to depose Elizabeth. Eventually Mary compromised herself to such an extent that she was arraigned and found guilty of treason, and executed. Meanwhile, the infant James was ruling Scotland, aided by an adult Regent. James himself was raised a staunch Protestant by the Scottish Peers and appears to have borne Elizabeth no ill-will for the death of his mother. James married the Protestant Anne of Denmark, who commissioned Jonsonâs Masque of Blackness.
• 2. King Charles I was the second son of James I. His elder brother, Henry, should have been the next in line to the throne but for his untimely death in 1613. Charles ruled from 1625-1649, his reign cut short by his execution after the victory of the Parliament party (the "Roundheads") in the Civil War. Too many factors contributed to the Civil War to allow for more than a very brief list here: Charlesâ arrogant dismissal of Parliament; his demands for greater and greater taxes on the poor; his failure in the Irish wars; the rise of a new middle class who wanted more rights and freedoms than the feudal system would allow them; the increasing power of the Puritans (many of whom belonged to this new middle class), who believed that England should be a low-church, evangelical state; the unpopularity of Charlesâ queen, Henrietta Maria, who was a Catholic (and whose open religiosity led to rumors that Charles, too, was a Catholic); the personal magnetism and integrity of Oliver Cromwell, the republican leader. The Roundheads were so called because many of them were Puritans, low-church Protestants who believed in simplicity of dress, hair and behavior, both men and women cropping their hair short for modesty. The kingâs supporters were called "Cavaliers," for their interest in courtly pastimes such as hunting and horse-riding. In opposition to the Roundheads, Cavaliers prided themselves on their long, curled hair and elaborate costume. Most authorities believe that the Commonwealth party, led by Oliver Cromwell, succeeded because it used modern military methods (Cromwellâs New Model Army), and because the soldiers in its ranks were trained, paid men who believed in the cause for which they were fighting. The Cavaliers, on the other hand, relied upon untrained and sometimes "pressed" men, and upon feudal loyalty.

C. The Interregnum and Commonwealth
 

• 1. Between 1649-1653 England was ruled by the Council of State. After the Civil War many prominent English aristocrats were forced to flee England for the Continent, and their lands were seized (like those of the Duke of Newcastle, the husband of Margaret Cavendish, who wrote Blazing World). Other aspects of English life were altered: in 1642 the Puritans closed the theaters, because they believed theatrical representation was sinful (think of this period as Malvolioâs revenge!), and the theaters remained closed until the Restoration. They enacted strict dress codes ("sumptuary laws") prescribing simplicity of attire.
• 2. Oliver Cromwell governed as Lord Protector (the Commonwealth party were Republicans and did not support a monarchy) from 1653-1658. During this time he defeated the Irish, who had been stubbornly resisting English rule since the time of Elizabeth (see Marvellâs "Horatian Ode").
• 3. Cromwellâs son, Richard Cromwell, took over as Protector after his fatherâs death, but he was a weak and corrupt governor who was forced to resign at the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

D. The Stuarts (again)
 

• 1. The Restoration was marked by the accession of King Charles II ("Bonny Prince Charlie," "The Merry Monarch"); he ruled from 1660-1685. Exiled aristocrats returned to England; the theaters re-opened (with actresses, rather than boy-actors, playing womenâs parts, for the first time). Ironically enough, after the religious wars of the previous two centuries, Charles himself was a crypto-Catholic (he took last rites on his deathbed) and married a Catholic, Catherine of Braganza. This marriage was childless, and Charles neglected his queen for his numerous mistresses, with whom he fathered many illegitimate children, including James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, who rebelled against him (events satirized by Dryden in Absalom and Achitophel).

E. AUTHORS
 

• 1. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) wrote the Defence of Poesie (also known as the Apologie for Poetry ) in about 1580; it was published in 1595. We will also be reading his sonnet-sequence, Astrophel and Stella, written in 1582 and published in 1591.
• 2. George Puttenham (1529-1590/1) wrote The Arte of English Poesie which was published in 1589.
• 3. Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599) wrote The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and The Faerie Queene (Books I-III: 1590, Books IV-VI, 1596). He published his sonnet-sequence, Amoretti, and his marriage-poem or Epithalamion in 1595.
• 4. John Skelton (1460-1529) was the court poet under Henry VII. We are reading his "Replycacyon," published in 1528.
• 5. George Chapman (1559?-1634). We may read his "address to the Reader," from his translation of Homerâs Iliad. It was probably published in 1609.
• 6. Anne Askew (1521-46) was a Protestant martyr. The ballad by her that we are reading was published in 1547, a year after her death.
• 7. John Heywood (1497-1580) was a playwright and musician in the courts of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Queen Mary. A devout Catholic, he wrote the epigram "Of turning" in 1562.
• 8. Robert Southwell (1561?-1595) was a Jesuit priest. He was accused of treason and executed in 1595 after a long imprisonment and period of torture. "The Burning Babe" was first published in 1602.
• 9. Mary Sidney (1561-1621) was Sir Philip Sidneyâs sister. In 1577 she married William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, so she is sometimes called Mary Herbert or Mary Sidney Herbert or the Countess of Pembroke. She edited and augmented her brotherâs long prose romance, the Arcadia, but she specialized in translations of the Biblical Psalms and modern French literature; because it was considered inappropriate for a lady to publish her work, her translations of the Psalms existed only in manuscript until 1963, when they were published.
• 10. Michael Drayton (1563-1631) published poetry of all kinds: pastoral, sonnet, historical and Ovidian. He was also a playwright. He is best known for his long, epic history of Britain, the poem Poly-Olbion, which took him ten years to write. We may be reading one of his eclogues, published in 1606.
• 11. Richard Barnfield (1574-1620) attended Brasenose College, Oxford, where he studied the classics. He wrote one of only two surviving sonnet-sequences addressed to a young man (in Cynthia, published in 1595)÷the other one is Shakespeareâs. We will be reading his long pastoral poem The Affectionate Shepheard (1594).
• 12. Arthur Golding (1536?-1606) translated Ovidâs Metamorphoses in 1567.
• 13. Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) was a playwright and poet. We will be reading his erotic verse epyllion Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602).
• 14. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a well-known playwright, poet and actor. In this class we will be reading his Ovidian erotic poem Venus and Adonis (published in 1592) and his sonnets, composed between 1598 and 1604.
• 15. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) is best-known for his plays, but also for his unfinished (or is it?) epyllion Hero and Leander (1598). He was killed mysteriously in a fight in a tavern. During his lifetime he was accused of being an atheist, a homosexual and a spy. All three of these offences were felonies under Elizabethan law, but Marlowe denied the charges when he was summoned to trial. It appears from contemporary documents, however, that all three of these suggestions were true.
• 16. John Donne (1572-1631) was a poet and churchman. In this class we will be reading only one of his poems, Sappho to Philaenis, which was probably written during the 1590s. You can read more of his poems in UGA's "Seventeenth-century poetry" class.
• 17. Sir Walter Ralegh (1554-1618) was a courtier, explorer, poet and historian. He is credited with first bringing tobacco, potatoes and tomatoes to Europe from the Americas. He fell out of favour with Queen Elizabeth when his secret marriage to one of her ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton, became public when she gave birth to a son in 1592; Ralegh was then committed to the Tower until he secured the Queenâs pardon. He probably wrote the long poem we shall be reading, The Ocean to Cynthia, while he was in prison in 1592, although it was not printed during his lifetime; it exists in manuscript (autograph) form, at Hatfield House.
• 18. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) spoke, read and wrote several modern languages (French, Spanish, Italian) and Latin and Greek (in which she also wrote poetry, in addition to her English lyrics and translations). She was one of the most highly-educated women of the age. "Ah silly pugge," is addressed to Sir Walter Ralegh, and probably composed in the late 1580s; "The doubt of future foes" was probably composed in the 1560s, in response to the conspiracies surrounding the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, whom the Pope and English Catholics were attempting to set on the English throne instead of Elizabeth.
• 19. William Birch (?-?). All we know about this man is that he published a number of ballads. "Come over the born bessy" was published in 1564.
• 20. Sir Thomas Wyatt (c. 1503-1542) was a courtier and diplomat in the court of Henry VIII. In 1536 his career was blighted and he was banished, possibly because he had been involved with Anne Boleyn, whom the King now wished to marry. "They flee from me" and especially "Whoso list to hount" probably refer to this crisis. Wyatt is credited with bringing the sonnet form to England. There are three versions of "They flee from me," one published in Tottelâs Miscellany (1557), a very important collection÷the first collection of lyrics in English÷and two other versions that exist in manuscripts (the Egerton and Devonshire manuscripts. Which did he write first? Did he change one version, or did Tottel, the editor, or a scribe?
• 21. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517?-1547) was a soldier and nobleman who was executed for treason. He is well known for popularizing the sonnet-form in English, and in particular for translating and imitating the poetry of Petrarch. "The soote season" first appeared in Tottelâs Miscellany.
• 22. Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) was a Cambridge-educated professional writer, best known for his proto-novel The Unfortunate Traveler (1594). We will be reading his Choise of Valentines, which circulated in manuscript some time between 1593 and 1597.
• 23. King Henry VIII is thought to have composed the song "Greensleeves" for Anne Boleyn, his second wife and former lady-in-waiting of Catherine of Aragon. Anne Boleyn always wore long sleeves to hide her hands because of a congenital deformity÷she had six fingers on her left hand. She also had an extra nipple on her left side; these birth defects made many people accuse her of being a witch.

• 1. Skeltonics (named after John Skelton) have two or three stressed syllables in a line, making for a two-foot (dimeter) or three-foot (trimeter) iambic line, rhymed in couplets or in larger groups.
• 2. Alternate rhyme rhymes every other line.
• 3. Rhymed couplets or triplets rhyme the final syllable or syllables of every pair or triplet of lines.
• 4. Spenserian stanzas have nine lines, rhymed ababbcbcc. The first eight lines are in iambic pentameter (five feet), but the last line has an extra foot (i.e. itâs twelve syllables long). A six-foot iambic line is called an Alexandrine.
• 5. Ballad stanza or common measure can be easily set to music and sung like a hymn or song. It usually consists of alternately rhymed quatrains with alternating lines of 6 and 8 syllables, or 6 and 7 syllables.
• 6. Sonnets come in several versions. A sonnet is fourteen lines long. A Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave (the first 8 lines) and a sestet (the final 6 lines), distinguished by the rhyme scheme: abbaabbacdecde. A Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains, alternately rhymed, and a couplet; the rhyme scheme is ababcdcdefefgg. A Spenserian sonnet, like a Spenserian stanza, uses the rhyme to run like a chain throughout the poem to connect the octave and the sestet: ababbcbccdcdee. A Sonnet sequence is a series of sonnets that share a common theme, or that tell a story. NB: We have a very strict definition of what constitutes a sonnet, but the Elizabethans use the word "sonnet" (or, as they spell it, "sonet") to refer to any short lyric poem about love! We are reading only love-sonnets, but a sonnet doesnât have to be about love (John Donne, for example, wrote many great sonnets about religion, and the Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote sonnets about the natural world between 1709 and 1850. At the very end of the 19th century, Gerard Manley Hopkins even wrote a sonnet about electricity, and in the 1990s Vikram Seth wrote a novel entirely in sonnets, The Golden Gate, about a group of friends living in the San Francisco Bay Area).
• 7. Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. It's used most often in Elizabethan verse drama, like Shakespeare's or Marlowe's plays.
• 8. Prose is writing without a regular beat, without regular pauses and without rhyme scheme, although prose will sometimes use rhythm and rhyme irregularly for effect.
• 9. "Fourteeners" have, as you might guess, fourteen syllables or seven feet to an iambic line. The most famous example of fourteeners is Arthur Goldingâs translation of Ovidâs Metamorphoses, but George Chapman uses them in his translation of Homer, too.
• 10. A canzone is a long poem consisting of lyric stanzas with two piedi (feet) and a coda (tail or end-piece) and a valediction (farewell). Spenser's epithalamium is the best example of this.

G. Some Genres
 

• 1. Epigrams are short, pithy poems, often satirical.
• 2. Epic was considered to be the highest form of poetry during the Renaissance, because it glorified bravery, the founding of a nation and the power of the sovereign.
• 3. Psalms are Hebrew hymns from the Bible. Translations of the Psalms vary in their verse form but are usually like ballads÷highly rhythmic, with alternate rhyme in quatrains, with lines 2 and 4 shorter than lines 1 and 3.
• 4. A Hexameral Poem is based on the book of Genesis in the Bible. It is a kind of Biblical narrative.
• 5. An Eclogue or Eglogue is a Pastoral poem that praises life in the countryside and simplicity over life in the city or the court. It often expresses a nostalgia for the past and casts its characters as nymphs, shepherds, milkmaids and other humble, rural types.
• 6. An epyllion or minor epic or Ovidian narrative is an erotic poem influenced and inspired by the Latin poetry of Ovid. It will usually feature some kind of metamorphosis or transformation, a detailed description of men and womenâs bodies, a rape or seduction, Greek gods and goddesses and other mythological characters.
• 7. An elegy has two meanings during the Early Modern period; it can mean a poem praising someone who is deceased (our modern understanding of the term), but it can also mean a sexually-explicit love-poem.
• 8. An epithalamium or epithalamion is a kind of ode: itâs a marriage-poem. The word "epithalamium" means in Greek "progression to the marriage chamber." The verse form of Spenserâs famous epithalamium is extremely complicated.
• 9. A comedy is a stage-play that traditionally ends in marriage or sexual union (cf. Shakespeareâs Twelfth Night or The Taming of the Shrew).
• 10. A tragedy is a stage-play, often but not necessarily in verse, that ends with the death of the protagonist and, usually, of many other supporting characters. Aristotle argues in The Poetics that a tragedy needs to enable "the purging of the passions through pity and terror," describing the fall of a great man through hamartia or a mistake; Hegel argues that a tragedy presents the meeting of two implacable forces (his example is The Antigone).
• 11. A closet-drama is a play that was never performed or, some say, intended to be performed (like Elizabeth Caryâs The Tragedy of Mariam).
• 12. A masque is an entertainment performed on a special occasion at court, featuring elaborate scenery, costumes, music, dancing and singing. Members of the court, including women, participated in the performance, although sometimes professional actors were called in to take the major roles.
• 13. Romance developed as a genre from the medieval romances, which were usually verse stories recounting the adventures of a knight to win his lady, to prose romances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which are characterized by fantastic events, improbable plot devices, heroism, and high-flown language. In later periods "romance" is often opposed to "realism," which is supposed to present events, relationships and characters in a manner more similar to real life. In the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, "romance" has come to mean a kind of genre-fiction dealing with love-relationships, usually from the point of view of a female narrator (cf. The "Harlequin" romances).

• 1. iamb: short long (*/)
• 2. trochee: long short (/*)
• 3. dactyl: long short short (/**)
• 4. anapest: short short long (**/)
• 5. spondee: long long (//)
• 6. pyrrhic: short short (**)
• 7. amphimacer: long short long (*/*)
• 8. amphibrach: short long short (*/*)

J. Line lengths
 

• 1. monometer: one foot
• 2. dimeter: two feet
• 3. trimeter: three feet
• 4. tetrameter: four feet
• 5. pentameter: five feet
• 6. hexameter: six feet
• 7. heptameter: seven feet

K. Stanza lengths
 

• 1. verse: a single line of poetry
• 2. couplet: pair of lines
• 3. tercet: three-line stanza
• 4. quatrain: four-line stanza
• 5. cinquain: five-line stanza
• 6. sixain: six-line stanza