The story of early Stuart theatre is a narrative almost entirely confined to England and Wales. The austere Calvinism of Stuart Scotland did not encourage the development of secular theatre, and the kirk bitterly resented the English travelling companies that occasionally visited Edinburgh while James still resided there. Once the court went south in 1603, leaving the kingdom without a king, Scotland’s fragile drama withered away to nothing. The only significant plays written by a Scot during the entire period were Sir William Alexander’s Monarchic Tragedies (1607) – four closet dramas in intricately Senecan style that were not intended for performance, by a courtier who followed James to London and became completely anglicised. Ireland had a more developed native drama – at Kilkenny, ecclesiastical pageants survived into the 1630s – and English companies occasionally visited Dublin, but the only sustained attempt to establish a professional theatre was the Werburgh Street playhouse, opened by John Ogilby in 1637. These were the years when Lord Deputy Wentworth was living at Dublin in ostentatiously vice-regal style, and Ogilby, his children’s tutor, received a new office of Irish Master of the Revels. But since Werburgh Street performed an essentially English repertoire, with actors and a playwright (James Shirley) recruited from London, it inevitably exhibited the tensions of cultural colonialism. Shirley’s prologues express an outsider’s discomfort with the Dublin audience, and although he wrote one play on Irish history, St Patrick for Ireland (c. 1639), it represented the locals as sullen, barbaric and needing acculturation.

In between his time at Harvard (1897–1900), when he published frequently in undergraduate magazines, and his move to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1916, when he was beginning to appear with regularity in the newly emerging little magazines of avant-garde writing, Wallace Stevens led a double life in New York City, with the lion's share of his waking hours spent trying (and failing) to earn a wage good enough to enable him to resume the comfortable upper-middle-class style he had been accustomed to in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he grew up, and in Cambridge, where he was supported by his father's faithful checks. In the late hours of evening during his New York years he read and occasionally wrote verses. On weekends he became the part-time exemplar of Teddy Roosevelt's ideal of the “strenuous life,” taking marathon walks in the country of twenty to thirty miles.

While his son was still at Harvard, Garrett Stevens – successful lawyer, small businessman, and poet himself – had sent Wallace this letter, which haunted the younger Stevens for the rest of his life:

The first book of poetry by Langston Hughes (1902–67), entitled The Weary Blues, was published in 1926, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement. The 1920s were an exceptionally fertile decade for American poetry. The production of this period alone invites a reconsideration of the kind of picture that the designation “American modernist poetry” generally brings to mind: the international flow of American and European poets and artists crossing the Atlantic both ways; the “little magazines” sprouting everywhere, both in the United States and in Europe; the new and powerful articulations of poetry and life, poetry and the other arts; the intricate dialectics of tradition and modernization and of conservatism and reform or revolution; the radical innovation of form and conceptualization; the more or less overt challenges to the dominant (white) bourgeois culture; the cosmopolitanism of most American poets of the period and the materiality of their sound-, image- and language-centered texts; the ferment of new American ideas and forms rising in Paris, London, the Village, and Harlem; and many different kinds of books of poetry emerging all over the place, absorbing the newest developments in society and the culture in different ways, and changing current notions of poetry and poetics.

The middle decades of the seventeenth century in England were momentous in political, religious and material terms – with the country in the throes of political crises, religious sectarianism, and civil as well as foreign warfare – but they also represent a significant turning point in the history of English literary activity. The structures of patronage which had sustained and framed the literary output of previous generations (as discussed by Graham Parry in Chapter 4) were by now severely weakened and in some cases totally demolished. The court, the focal point of national culture (for good or ill) in the days of Elizabeth I and James I, had become the polarising, unfixed and shadowy entourage of Charles I at war, and after 1649 it moved into exile abroad. The English Church, instigator and inspiration of so much literary production since the Reformation, was divided, fragmented and ultimately disestablished until 1660. The public theatres, the material and financial context for a substantial amount of early modern writing, were closed between 1642 and 1660. Although some of the kinds of writing previously fostered by these three major institutions (for example, the lyric) continued to be produced, and although some of the issues that they had formerly expressed – love, religious devotion, power – continued to drive the texts of the mid-century, these new writings began to reveal the environment from which they predominantly came: the household.

This chapter aims to describe the complexities which characterise the relationship between the literary arts, especially those of an officially sanctioned kind, and political circumstances in the metropolis during the period 1603–40. At one level, this is a narrative of continuities. The principal forms in which the city of London constructed and celebrated its own image remained the same as in the Elizabethan period. Royal processions once more expressed the aspirations and the loyalism of the City towards the monarchy. Although there are significant silences, such as the cancelled celebration of the coronation of Charles I and the curtailed rites for the funeral of the Duke of Buckingham, the return of Charles I in 1641 from the Scottish crisis was commemorated as emphatically as the coronation entry of James I. The procession to commemorate the installation each year of a new Lord Mayor, a ritual established in its fullest form towards the end of the Elizabethan period, continued, arguably with increasing pomp, throughout our period. Paul’s Cross remained the most public and the most influential preaching platform in the City, and its careful control ensured a continuing loyalism in the majority of sermons preached there, many of which were subsequently printed.

Likewise, outside the arenas of state control, the self-representation of the metropolis appeared remarkably stable. City comedy, apparently holding up a mirror to the lives of London’s citizens, continued to be an extremely popular dramatic form, and its assumptions and values changed only a little between the late Elizabethan paradigms, such as The Shoemakers Holiday (1599), and early Stuart examples within that tradition.

The questione della lingua: that is the question or, at least, the one that was posed by early modern Italians regarding the status of the vernacular in the sixteenth century. Renaissance Italian writers involved in the debate widely known as the ‘question of the language’ considered their options: they had to choose, first, between the native tongue and Latin, still the lingua franca of European culture; and second (if they chose Italian), they had to discriminate further among the several dialects of Italian then current. Early modern British authors, too, often faced such choices – whether to write in Latin or in the mother tongue and, if in the latter, what form of the vernacular to choose. Although the question of selecting among regional dialects had been more or less settled with regard to the written language, the British vernaculars were not yet standard languages; that is, they were neither uniform nor fixed by rule. The Renaissance in Britain has long been identified with a prodigious variety and plasticity in the forms and uses of native languages, a ‘linguistic exuberance’ characteristic of its greatest poets, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare and John Milton. The Renaissance was no linguistic free-for-all, however: sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers, across a range of disciplines, address the question of the language by discriminating among available forms and experimenting with new ones. The linguistic choices made by Renaissance British writers, and what was at stake in the choosing, will be the subject of this chapter.

No doubt authors in every age have written poems and plays, stories and tracts in their studies or bedchambers. But in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, households of various kinds – from noble estates headed by literary patrons to the private dwellings of the ‘middling sort’–emerged as a prominent site of literary production for male as well as female authors, offering an alternative to the court or the church. In these years also, the activities, inhabitants and ideological underpinnings of such households form the subject matter of many kinds of literary and rhetorical texts, addressed to various audiences and serving both private and public purposes.

Ben Jonson’s ode ‘To Penshurst’ was published in his folio of 1616 but written before Prince Henry’s death on 6 November 1612. It celebrates the estate of Sir Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle and later Earl of Leicester, younger brother of the deceased Sir Philip Sidney and of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and himself author of a sonnet sequence, Rosis and Lysa. Jonson’s poem, in heroic couplets, presents Penshurst as an idealised noble household, a counterweight to the Jacobean court and to more recent ‘prodigy’ houses like Knole or Longleat, built for ostentatious display and to entertain the court in progress. Penshurst is a locus amoenus or delightful place with nature and human society in harmony and with pastoral otium happily associated with georgic cultivation. The woods are inhabited by nature gods and family memorials intimating permanence and stability, and on this quasi-Edenic estate fruit is ready to hand, fish leap willingly into nets, and game gladly offers itself to the lord’s table.

The rudiments

In 1607, Christopher Meade, gentleman, and steward of the manor court of Little Gransden in Cambridgeshire, appeared in the Court of Exchequer to give evidence in a suit concerning the size and whereabouts of the demesne and the yardland in Gransden. The purchasers of this former episcopal manor could not, in a fashion not unknown elsewhere amongst this batch of episcopal sales, find their purchase, which had been farmed by the tenants since the fourteenth century. Christopher Meade was an antiquarian of considerable skill and resourcefulness, for he had searched the thirteenth-century episcopal surveys of Gransden, and the medieval reeves’ accounts, and then tied the documents to surviving earthworks to reconstruct the layout of the demesne. It is the first record known to us of a local historian ‘getting mud on his boots’ and doing some fieldwork. Meade, however, had a considerable advantage: he had been to school in the 1570s or 1580s in the chancel of Little Gransden church with a very mixed group of the other witnesses, who, as children, had been schoolfellows. These children had talked about the rumour that houses had once stood in the Bury Close, and played over the surviving tell-tale earth-works. So Meade’s gentry status did not prevent his learning the ‘rudiments’ along with other village children in the church chancel.

England

At one level national identity is little more than xenophobia: that gut reaction which provokes verbal and physical violence against strangers and outsiders. It had appeared in fifteenth-century riots against Flemings and Italians; and it appeared in the ‘Evil May Day’ riot of 1517 against foreigners. An anonymous Italian observer, writing of the English about 1500, declared ‘They have an antipathy to foreigners, and imagine that they never come into their island but to make themselves masters of it, and to usurp their goods.’ There was a positive side to such feelings, but it was equally unattractive. The same observer continued: ‘The English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England. And whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that “he looks like an Englishman”.’ Such sentiments do not appear in English writings of the period, which were seldom aimed at a popular readership, but they were widespread at all social levels. English nobles attending Henry VIII in the highly competitive atmosphere of the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520) declared that if any French blood ran in their veins, they would cut it out with a knife.