| |
Literary
works in sixteenth-century England were rarely if ever created in
isolation from other currents in the social and cultural world. The
boundaries that divided the texts we now regard as aesthetic from other
texts that participated in the spectacles of power or the murderous
conflicts of rival religious factions or the rhetorical strategies of
erotic and political courtship were porous and constantly shifting. It
is perfectly acceptable, treating Renaissance texts as if they were
islands of the autonomous literary imagination. One of the greatest
writers of the period, Sir Philip Sidney, defended poetry in just such
terms; the poet, Sidney writes in The Defence of Poetry
(NAEL 1.933-54), is not constrained by nature or history but freely
ranges "only within the zodiac of his own
wit." Many sixteenth-century artists,
such as Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare,
brooded on the magical, transforming power of art. This power could be
associated with civility and virtue, as Sidney claims, but it could
also have the demonic qualities manifested by the "pleasing words" of
Spenser's enchanter, Archimago (NAEL 1.63), or by the incantations of
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (NAEL 1.990-1025). It is
significant that Marlowe's great play was written at a time in which
the possibility of sorcery was not merely a theatrical fantasy but a
widely shared fear, a fear upon which the state could act with
horrendous ferocity. Marlowe's tragedy emerges not only from
a culture in which bargains with the devil are imaginable as real
events but also from a world in which many of the most fundamental
assumptions about spiritual life were being called into question by the
movement known as the Reformation. Catholic and Protestant voices
struggled to articulate the precise beliefs and practices thought
necessary for the soul's salvation. One key site of conflict was the
Bible, with Catholic authorities trying unsuccessfully to stop the
circulation of the unauthorized Protestant translation of Scripture by
William Tyndale, a translation in which doctrines and institutional
structures central to the Roman Catholic church were directly
challenged. The Reformation is closely linked to many of the texts
printed in the sixteenth-century section of Spenser's Faerie
Queene (NAEL 1.628-772), for example, in which a staunchly
Protestant knight of Holiness struggles against the satanic forces of
Roman Catholicism.
Text: The Norton Anthology of English Literature
Vol. 1. 6th ed. (NAEL)
TOP
|
