By 1476 when William Caxton issued the first book from his press at Westminster, England had already experienced considerable exposure to imported print. Caxton himself had printed some Latin during his time at Bruges, as well as a pioneering English text, the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Already, we may surmise, printed copies had replaced manuscripts of the same work in progressive libraries. But on the whole, as would remain the case for many decades, most ‘publication’ of texts was still carried out through writing and voice. The pen of the scribe scratched on regardless of the first creakings of the wooden press. Increasing literacy, the outcome of a modernising business and administrative order, fuelled an expansion of both systems of production: it was not a matter of the new one expanding at the expense of the old. Instead, each came to meet particular needs. While the press dealt best with longer texts and those required in large numbers, shorter ones directed at specialised readerships remained the preserve of the pen. The loss in the late 1530s of the scriptoria in which monks had toiled as an act of communal devotion was compensated for by the Protestant recognition of writing as an exercise of personal virtue and by an expansion of both private and public record-keeping.

When The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published in 1933 by Harcourt, Brace and Co. of New York, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) became instantly famous. At that time, her house in Paris was packed with some of the most innovative of her manuscripts that no publisher wanted to touch. However, Stein's first published book, Three Lives (1909), was generally well received, if only by a limited audience. The book impressed readers for its original handling of language, narrative form, and character, as well as for the mesmerizing effect of its repetitive style. Its first reviewers praised it as “a very masterpiece of realism” with “extraordinary vitality” and “sense of urgent life.” Written, according to Stein's own account, under the influence of Flaubert's Trois contes, which she had been translating, and inspired by Cézanne's portrait of his wife then hanging in Stein's sitting room, Three Lives gathers together three long stories focusing on three working-class women: “The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and “The Gentle Lena.” Stein's power of character observation and her ability to capture the speech of common people get the highest praise from Richard Wright, who was later to recount how delighted he was when he first read the story about the black woman, Melanctha. Troubled by “one left-wing literary critic”'s denunciation of Stein as a “decadent” writer, Wright says that he had even read “Melanctha” to “a group of semi-literate Negro stockyard workers” who “understood every word:” “Enthralled,” concludes Wright, “they slapped their thighs, howled, laughed, stomped, and interrupted [him] constantly to comment upon the characters.”

The literature of early modern England was shaped by the manifold developments that made London, with a population of perhaps 50,000 in 1500 and 250,000 in 1600, the second largest metropolis in Europe by the later seventeenth century. With this growth came an increasing variety of communities and cultures. A well-established citizenry of craftsmen, retailers and wholesale traders enjoyed the traditional freedoms of London by virtue of membership in the guilds or ‘livery’ companies that organised the City’s trades. The expansion of international markets and the establishment of trading outposts around the globe transformed large portions of this citizenry into a wealthy, mobile and literate merchant class. At the same time, the permanent residence of the royal court in Westminster brought increasingly large numbers of the nobility to London, while the legal proceedings of Parliament, the chief courts of the realm and the Inns of Court drew officials, petitioners and litigants from throughout the counties. As the main conduit for the exchange of landed wealth, London became home to the aristocratic marriage market; its social season and developing luxury and leisure industries were attractive to urbanising gentry disposed to conspicuous consumption. The City harboured a large ‘youth culture’ of apprentices and domestic servants, male and female, recruited from the often distant countryside. Substantial portions of the greater London population were ‘strangers’ – continental traders, immigrants and communities of Flemish and French religious refugees – and ‘foreigners’ or non-free English migrants: the artisans, casual labourers, criminals, homeless and unemployed who frequented the rapidly growing suburbs outside the City walls.

Contexts and conditions

As Chapter 21 in this volume demonstrates, the civil crisis of the mid-century was one that embraced three kingdoms and a principality. It drew England into several armed conflicts with other west European states: most significantly, that other maritime and Protestant power, the United Provinces. Additionally, the literary consequences of the war of the three kingdoms, and the First Dutch War (1652–4), were felt in the English language used in the provinces, in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, in the Celtic language cultures of these places, and in Dutch literature.

London, however, was at the heart of the Civil War, and understanding its unique role is one of the keys to understanding the nature of the English Revolution and the literary innovations of these years. London was important not merely because it was the capital city of the nation, the major centre of population and of commerce. It was also near the places where government occurred and where the theatre of state played itself out. London’s peculiar urban culture gave the capital a life of its own. We might more accurately say, a set of lives, since in the twenty years of Civil War, revolution and experimentation with non-monarchical forms of government, various forces would emerge from London culture and have a decisive effect on the turn of events in the nation at large.

Following the suppression of the monasteries and the turmoil in the church in the 1530s, the patronage of writers became almost exclusively secular, with the monarch and the nobility broadly accepting that the encouragement of learning was one of the functions of power and authority. In a complementary way, authors and printers knew that a book could not come abroad without the name of a patron affixed in order to signal that a powerful figure stood behind the exposed and vulnerable author. Patronage in the early Tudor period was neither systematic nor sustained, and its recipients had limited expectations. In general, a writer would be satisfied with the presence of a protective name at the head of his work; reward was not a significant factor in dedications, for most authors (themselves not a numerous group) already had a post in life, and an affiliation with some great household. Their dedications were mostly expressions of loyalty or gratitude rather than anglings for future favours. Hope of reward in the form of office, advancement or money is a feature of later Elizabethan times, when writers proliferated and aspired to earn a living or advance their careers by publication. In the earlier Tudor period, however, when the number of printed books was relatively modest, and readership limited to the educated, a book needed a guarantee of its worth. The importance of a titled dedicatee has to be recognised: in an aristocratic age a noble name offered assurance that the contents had merit, and reassurance that there was no harm, political or religious, in the work.

‘Religious literature’ is a category which cannot be measured with statistical precision. What we in a more secular age call ‘religion’, a discrete phenomenon, permeated many areas of early modern life and much of its book production. Broadsheet ballads and pamphlets, precursors of both newspapers and novels, may have entertained, even titillated, but they professed to teach moral lessons. Preachers and journalistic hacks, writers of murder pamphlets and the like, invaded each others’ generic spaces. Popular songs were instantly ‘moralised’, with improving lyrics set to the same tunes. Historians and poets disputed which of their disciplines was in the better position to encourage ‘virtue’. Sir Philip Sidney thought poetry more ‘doctrinable’. ‘Truth’ was at a premium. The Bible was the ultimate in truth, but chronicles, too, were said to ‘carry credit’.

But religious books, by a more exclusive and conventional criterion, will be found to have been the single most important staple of the publishing industry, making up roughly half of its output. This suggests considerable public interest in the subject, although two factors other than piety must be taken into account in explaining the volume of religious publication. On the one hand there were the commercial motives of printers and booksellers (presumably responsive to demand); on the other, the interest of state and church and of organised bodies of religious opinion, often critical, even dissident. These were factors of ‘push’ rather than ‘pull’. Even supposedly ‘popular’ literary forms may have been popular only in the sense that they were products intended by their social and intellectual betters for the improvement of the semi-literate, a process of downward cultural mediation.

The advent of printing in England

In Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, the rebel Jack Cade orders Lord Saye to be beheaded on the anachronistic grounds that he had ‘caused printing to be used’ and had ‘built a paper mill’ (4.7.30–3). William Caxton would not in fact set up the first printing press in England until 1476, some twenty-six years after the encounter the play represents, and still another twenty years would pass before John Tate would establish the first paper mill on English soil. Yet if Cade is an unreliable historian as he seeks a justification for his reflexive opposition to authority and order, he correctly intuits that print would have a profound effect upon the social life of England.

Certainly it could be claimed that print was one of those inventions that, in Bacon’s famous phrase, ‘changed the fate and the state of things in all the world’, although it did not work quite as bluntly as Jack Cade feared to secure aristocratic power and privilege. Its effects were unpredictable and slow to be felt at first, and few in the first decades of printing could have sensed its eventual impact. Initially it was little more than an improved means of textual reproduction, a technique of ‘artificial writing’ that served as a faster, cheaper way of producing multiple copies of the texts that had previously circulated in manuscript. Indeed early printed books tried very hard to reproduce the form and feel of manuscripts (typefaces, for example, mimicking the popular forms of script), though, of course, their ability to do so did not bring the age of manuscript production to an end.

My subject is the consumption and production of vernacular literature in early modern England – of epic and romance, of history and pamphlet, of song and sonnet, ode and epistle, satire and epigram – and more especially the ways in which habits of reading created a field of expectations in which literature was imagined and into which texts were issued. I want to begin, however, with a personal letter, and not a canonical literary text, because the letter touches on both the production and consumption of literature, and at a number of points. In December of 1614, shortly before he took orders, John Donne wrote to Sir Henry Goodyer for help in retrieving his scattered verse, not exactly, it turns out, because Donne was ashamed of his literary vocation – though there is a sense of valediction in the letter that covers Donne’s secular writing – but rather to secure scattered manuscript copy with a view to print publication. Donne had been contemptuous of print and was aware that others knew of that contempt, but necessity pressed him, and the appeal to Goodyer points not only to the dilemmas and desires of a poet, c. 1600, but also to the merits of script and print, the status and uses of verse, and the ways in which poems and letters might be read and remembered:

Among Charles II’s first political initiatives was an Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, but most recent scholars of the early Restoration have tried to undo both the ‘Oblivion’ and the ‘Uniformity’ mandated by the new regime. Literary history no longer separates Milton and Marvell from their context, nor does it confidently proclaim a new ‘Age of Dryden’ starting in 1660. Sympathetic historians stress the persistence of ‘revolutionary’ or ‘nonconformist’ culture under persecution and the continuities in those poets’ writing careers; revisionists stress the relative stability of social attitudes before and after the regicide. In this final chapter my task is to bring out connections and continuities with the literary-historical themes and institutions that have shaped the entire volume. Rather than minimising the effect of 1660 or replicating its polarised propaganda, however, I suggest that the epochal changes of the Restoration incorporated and preserved the defeated ‘English Revolution’ in its memory. My paradigm derives from the Vanity Fair episode in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, both a general allegory of the World, the Flesh and the Devil and a precise portrait of the drunken, jeering, conformist culture of the early Restoration, which taunts the austere and disdainful pilgrim for his black clothing and godly dialect, tries to force him into consumerism, and then installs him in a cage at the very centre of the Fairground. That cage preserves the marginalised ‘Puritan’ at the very centre of the victors’ culture, and guarantees some receptiveness, however hostile, to his resurgence.

Writing in self-willed exile to an ex-student from a cottage in Beaconsfield, England, which he called “The Bung-Hole”; still deep in literary obscurity – though not quite as deep as the obscurity he had experienced in America in the previous twenty years; writing in November 1913, with his first book out and warmly reviewed by the right sort of people, Ezra Pound among them, and with a second and maybe even a third book waiting in the wings, Robert Frost hatched the plot of his return to the United States as the first step in his cunning pursuit of the fame that would eventually become the means of supporting himself and his family. And more: he would court fame because it would provide the material base for the realization of a desire he publicly announced in the 1930s and to which critics on the Left might have responded sympathetically – but didn't. (Frost came up through some pretty joyless conditions.) That desire, at once induced by and mainly prohibited in Frost's American culture, Yeats called the desire for “unity of being.” Other high modernists would weigh in with other, equally romantic, phrases for a need that represented not only longing for another and better – because integrated – kind of life, but also criticism of the social ground on which they stood. With crafted American homeliness, Frost called it his “object in living” to unite “My avocation and my vocation / As my eyes make one in sight”: pleasure, play, doing whatever you want – in 1913, at thirty-nine years old, Frost had done little of the latter – fused with work, what you had to do if you were someone like Frost.

In his dedication of the 1616 folio version of Cynthia’s Revels, Ben Jonson addressed the early Stuart court as ‘A bountiful and brave spring’ that

Thus described, the court is inseparable from the nation at large: not only does it ‘water’, or offer economic and other sustenance, to the ‘noble plants’, the aristocracy and gentry, but it also ‘mirrors’, or provides through its own collective outward ‘grace’ and loveliness, and its inward sagacity and probity, a set of patterns against which other elements of the kingdom define themselves and each other and determine their relative worth.

It is doubtful whether the Stuart court was as central to all areas of the emerging nation as Jonson claimed it was: in defining it as he did, Jonson, whom James I appointed Poet Laureate and granted an annual pension in that very year of 1616, sought in part to establish the value and significance of his new position. But his definition also points towards an important historical truth: under James, significant elements of court culture were more visible to the nation at large than they had been at any previous time in British history if only because so much of the literature associated with the court was routinely brought into print.

This chapter examines a spectrum of civil war and Interregnum venues – literal and textual – in which authors either imagined alternatives to engagement or pursued intellectual projects at some remove from the era’s political, religious and military conflicts. Drawing on longstanding generic practices, foreign and native, as well as various philosophical and religious traditions, numerous writers, mainly Royalist, celebrated country life and rural retirement in order to evade or address Britain’s crisis. Royalist authors also expressed defiant insouciance, shared values and mutual support-in-adversity with innovative contributions to traditional genres, such as the drinking poem, and newer sorts of publications, such as the anthology of verse ‘drollery’. With differing degrees of involvement in current events, like-minded intellectuals, such as Samuel Hartlib’s circle, the Oxford scientific club and the Cambridge Platonists articulated new intellectual visions. Others, such as Thomas Browne and Thomas Urquhart, pursued more solitary intellectual and literary paths for a personal purchase on both their age and eternity, or participated in contemporaries’ group endeavours with self-conscious distinctiveness – as did John Milton, the Puritan convivial poet and Hartlib’s classicising colleague in educational reform.

One of the greatest celebrants of country life and retired contentment, Robert Herrick mixes lyric grace and epigrammatic point in his 1648 volume consisting of the predominantly secular Hesperides and religious Noble Numbers. Hesperides documents ‘Times trans-shifting’ (‘The Argument of his Book’, line 9) – not only seasonal changes, ageing and death, but also English sociopolitical disruption. Yet the polysemous title Hesperides evokes England as a paradisal garden island.

T. S. Eliot grew up knowing he was privileged and obligated. One of his biographers, Peter Ackroyd, remarks that “the Eliots were the aristocrats of nineteenth-century America (family motto: Tace et fac), part of that rising mercantile class which offered moral leadership to those who came after them; their self-imposed mission was to administer and to educate”: to educate by leading and administering; most of all, to educate. The poet's grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, left the Harvard Divinity School in order to establish the Unitarian faith in the frontier town of St. Louis, Missouri, in 1834, where he founded a church and (as Ackroyd puts it) “three schools, a university, a poor fund, and a sanitary commission.” His father, Henry Ware Eliot, grew wealthy from the proceeds of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, of which he was president. His mother, Charlotte Stearns Eliot, was (one wants to say “of course”) a poet, some of whose verses were published in newspapers, most of which were pasted into her scrapbooks.

Social versus cultural responsibility, striking business prowess versus aesthetic sensibility: in America, these historically opposed domains were the heritage of the twentieth century's most famous and powerful taste-determining man of letters. Thomas Stearns, a chip off the old family block, became a poet, a literary critic, a stalwart at Lloyds Bank and Faber and Faber, a Nobel Prize winner, and, in the peak years of his fame, the author of a prose of heavy concern (the cultural equivalent of his grandfather's sanitary commission).

The major Southern New Critics are John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, but to refer to them as “critics” does them an injustice. It confines the scope of their achievements, just as the term “New Critic” itself names a movement that these writers launched but that their practice moved beyond. As Warren said, in an interview in 1957, the New Criticism is “a term without any referent, or with too many referents.”

Even to identify Warren (1905–89) as a literary critic is misleading, for he excelled in a number of fields. His early publications included a biography of the abolitionist John Brown (1929), a collection of poems (1935), and a novel, Night Rider (1939). These writings established the pattern of disciplined engagement with a variety of genres that he maintained. Before his involvement with the New Criticism in the late 1930s and 1940s, Warren had already taken part in two other important groups in Southern culture and American literature: the Fugitive poets, based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee; and the Agrarian reformers and polemicists who spoke out against industrialism in the controversial volume I'll Take My Stand (1930).

Warren did much to define and institutionalize New Critical methods, above all through the influential textbook, Understanding Poetry (1938), that he and Brooks wrote. But the scope of Warren's literary achievement, in All the King's Men (1946) and ten other novels, poetry (fifteen volumes in all), short stories, and historical meditations – Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956), The Legacy of the Civil War (1961), and Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965) – shows that his New Critical commitments coexisted with (and were informed by) evolving attitudes toward history, politics, regionalism, nationhood, and race relations.

Chapter 25 of The Autobiography (1951) of William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) begins with the following startling remarks about the first two decades of the twentieth century:

Later in the book Williams elaborates on this topic in more detail. According to him, during the first two decades of the century young American poets just starting their careers, Williams foremost among them, were experiencing an exhilarating excitement about reinventing art and poetry in America to which the publications of The Waste Land (1922) somehow put an end. Evidently, one gathers, after Eliot's classical, erudite, and cosmopolitan gesture, the other young American poets, whose conception of American poetry claimed to have everything to do with a primary understanding of the elemental locality of America as a new nation, did not know what to do about inaugurating a “new order.” Even Marianne Moore, one of the poets whom Williams believed to be in the right direction (we might call it the “nativist” or “vernacular” direction), was “no luckier” than all the others.

Although the Reformation is often blamed for suppressing popular drama, and did indeed become a potent oppositional force to be reckoned with in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, that opposition was by no means evident at first. In Scotland, for example, surviving evidence from the mid sixteenth century shows that theatrical activity, carried out in open-air public venues, could serve the Protestant cause. In 1571 John Knox watched a play that dramatised the current siege of Edinburgh Castle ‘according to Mr Knox doctrin’. Although the texts for this and a number of other such plays do not survive, we do have a full text and records of performance of Sir David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits, staged first in 1540 before the King and Queen at Linlithgow, then at Cupar, Fife, in 1552, and finally at the public playfield in Edinburgh in 1554 in the presence of Marie de Lorraine, Queen Regent, along with ‘ane greit part of the Nobilitie’ and ‘ane exceding greit nowmer of pepill’. Its avowedly political allegory invites John the Common-Weill to take part in a thoroughgoing redistribution of political responsibility and thereby rescue the King (Rex Humanitas) and his three Parliamentary ‘estaits’ (Spiritualitie, Temporalitie and Merchand), from those whose loyalties are ‘speciallie vnto the Court of Rome’ (line 286). The King’s tempters are variously named Sensualitie, Flatterie, Falset and Dissait, until, as often happens in such morality drama, they adopt the disguise names of Devotioun, Sapience and Discretioun.

The dynamics of literature in the early Tudor court

In the summer of 1537 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was imprisoned by order of the King. This was the first of four such occasions (from the last, in the Tower, he would not return). ‘The most folish prowde boye that ys in Englande’, the 21-year-old heir to the greatest title outside the royal family, was boxed in. If his punishment was mild – confinement in Windsor Castle, silent without the court’s activity, where walls without tapestries returned ‘a hollow sound of plaint’ – Surrey’s dilemma was not. In his stanzaic poem beginning ‘So crewell prison’, the longer of two texts he wrote to dramatise his situation, Surrey’s speaker is losing his ‘freedom’, a pun ambiguously situated between ‘liberty’ and ‘blood-nobility’. In actual fact, Henry VIII had sequestered his cousin, and the personal humiliation for the stylish aristocrat was worse than the public. Accordingly, in conversation, the courtier George Constantyne answers the attack on Surrey as a ‘prowde’ show-off by responding: ‘What then? he ys wise for all that’ and ‘no mervell though a yonge man so noble a mans sonne and heyre apparante be prowde’. The courtier on the lower rung identifies the very public place Surrey held in the stratified space – physical and cultural – called the court in 1537.

This chapter addresses the advent of the English Reformation from its political inception in the ‘Great Matter’ of Henry VIII’s divorce suit to its formal reinstatement in the first year of Elizabeth’s reign. Here the phrase ‘English Reformation’ will have a dual reference, both institutional and textual – denoting, on the one hand, the emergent entity of an autonomous national church comprehending England, Wales and parts of Ireland, and, on the other, the literature in English that articulated, probed, contested and projected the religious claims and aspirations of this thirty-year period.

Prior to these tumultuous decades of the sixteenth century, the domain of religious adherence, faith and practices had been a Christendom imagined as universal through its obedience to the Pope, but in fact experienced much more locally, in the human associations and the sacred traditions of one’s own parish church. It has long been commonplace to observe that the national Church of England began as a top-down imposition by successive Tudor sovereigns, eventually acquiring an identity that a popular majority came to embrace as its own. While accurate enough regarding the beginning and end of a sometimes ruptural, sometimes gradual, always complex process, this commonplace sheds no light on intermediate phases. Across a spectrum of recent historical scholarship, however, the English Reformation has taken interpretive shape as a series of confrontations and negotiations that effected transformations in English culture in the 1530s, 1540s and 1550s as successive political agendas appropriated and forefronted certain religious issues.

The context

There was a war of words and images as well as a war of swords and muskets in mid seventeenth-century Britain, and it was a war fought with the same venom and the same determination. It was, to an even greater extent than the clash of arms, a war of religion or a series of wars of religion: the established Church of England was dismantled and the unity of the godly disintegrated. On the battlefield, the fighting followed existing good military practice, and the codes of honour were adhered to. There was no such restraint on the printed page: innovation, inventiveness, a spoliating invective was everywhere to be found. The heady cause of religious liberty was advanced with a freedom of form, syntax and vocabulary that startled, troubled and disturbed. This war of religion was waged across the period in a bewildering diversity of polemical strategies and forms in both prose and poetry.

On all sides, but perhaps especially on the Puritan side of the polemical exchanges, the religious writing in the period 1640–60 is a literary equivalent of the mid nineteenth-century opening up of the American West. It was frequently characterised by an exhilarating freedom, a high dependence on contingency, a rugged individualism, extraordinary improvisation and a central authority trying and largely failing to impose rules and inappropriate order. The most exhilarating (for us) and alarming (for many contemporaries) feature of this was the freedom that men and (more dramatically) women had to think unthinkable thoughts, to challenge those beliefs about the way the world was that previous generations had been incapable of thinking of questioning.