FORMS OF THE LITTLE AND LATE ELIZABETHAN CULTURE

Late Elizabethan literary culture is un-whole-some. It exacerbates and parades its potential for shame, but it is also un-whole-some in a very literal sense, as well, in that its structures are disjunctive. The generation of shame is preoccupied with the fragmentable nature of culture. After the iconoclasm of the dissolution of the monasteries, not only the classical past, but also the more recent medieval past, came down to the English Renaissance as fragments. Late Elizabethan culture is constituted from fragments, from the remains of other cultures which Spenser, for example, commemorates in The Ruines of Rome (1591). In the Renaissance, knowledge was disseminated and preserved through anthologies, manuscript miscellanies and common-place books which assembled the monuments and structures of knowledge from aphorisms, quotations, facts and diverse parts of varied texts. These could then be worked into any text or situation. Paradoxically, these fragments, or commonplaces, assert the continuity of a community of knowledge. The processes of revisiting, recording, resynthesizing and remembering are central to late sixteenth-century culture.

Of course, humanism itself requires the precise attention to textual detail that can produce a disintegrative reading. While the generation of shame defined itself in opposition to certain aspects of humanist ideology, these writers were themselves the products of humanist hermeneutical reforms that were propagated by sixteenth-century schools and universities.