Can we read the literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth century as containing universal human truths and being as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare “not of an age, but for all time” or is it denying them a full understanding by reading them out of their original context?
To fully appreciate the literature of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries it is important to look at the works of that era in their historical contexts. ... We couldn’t possibly try to separate history and literature because they are one and the same: literature is history and history is literature. ... Taking Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the great and William Shakespeare’s Richard III as examples of Elizabethan literature, I will try to outline these.
Shakespeare wrote his history play based on Richard the Third around 1591, this being more than a century after Richard was defeated and died at the Battle of Bosworth and Henry VII ascended the throne. ...
Henry VII encouraged his historians, primarily Polydore Vergil, whose angle on events More later took, to take the view that the deposition of Richard II led inevitably to periods of civil unrest until it was resolved by Richard III, whereas all the guilty perished and the divinely ordered Henry VII ascended the throne. ... Richard the 3rd is a tragedy, it is a play and it has elements of both Elizabethan conventions and the literature that came before it. This is the same for all literature of its time though. ...
As Margaret Doody also said, we must also look at literature representing the “cultural life of the surrounding society”. In Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlane’ are many images that reading the text now we wouldn’t understand the significance of, but looking at it in it’s historical context we notice their importance. The grand rhetoric of ‘Tamburlaine’, which I discussed earlier, is deeply rooted in the street processions of the sixteenth century. ... His joining with two companions in a parody of the trinity parallels the iconography of the blessed virgin as do the quotes about her “heavenly” status as the “divine zenocrate”
Looking at Sixteenth and Seventeenth century literature in a historical context can give us a very useful insight into the context in which Shakespeare and Marlowe’s work was written and first received. ... ” There are many advantages and disadvantages to looking at past literature in the context they were written, but due to the evidence I think the former weighs out the latter.
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