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 were porous
and constantly shifting. It is perfectly acceptable,
of course, for the purposes of reading to redraw
these boundaries more decisively, 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 8, 1.953–74), is not constrained
by nature or history but freely ranges "only
within the zodiac of his own wit." But
Sidney knew well, and from painful personal
experience, how much this vision of golden
autonomy was contracted by the pressures, perils,
and longings of the brazen world. And only
a few pages after he imagines the poet orbiting
entirely within the constellations of his own
intellect, he advances a very different vision,
one in which the poet's words not only
imitate reality but also actively change it.
We have no way of knowing to what extent,
if at all, this dream of literary power was
ever realized in the world. We do know that
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 8, 1.714–902), or by the
incantations of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus
(NAEL 8, 1.1022–1057). 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 — as the case
of Doctor Fian vividly shows — with horrendous
ferocity. Marlowe was himself the object of
suspicion and hostility, as indicated by the
strange report filed by a secret agent, Richard
Baines, professing to list Marlowe's wildly
heretical opinions, and by the gleeful (and
factually inaccurate) report by the Puritan
Thomas Beard of Marlowe's death.
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. Those doctrines and structures,
above all the interpretation of the central
ritual of the eucharist, or Lord's Supper,
were contested with murderous ferocity, as
the fates of the Protestant martyr Anne Askew
and the Catholic martyr Robert Aske make painfully
clear. The Reformation is closely linked to
many of the texts printed in the sixteenth-century
section of the Norton Anthology: Book 1 of
Spenser's Faerie Queene (NAEL 8, 1.719–856),
for example, in which a staunchly Protestant
knight of Holiness struggles against the satanic
forces of Roman Catholicism, or the Protestant
propagandist Foxe's account of Lady Jane
Grey's execution (NAEL 8, 1.674-75), or the
Catholic Robert Southwell's moving religious
lyric, "The Burning Babe" (NAEL 8, 1.640-41).
If these windows on the Reformation offer a
revealing glimpse of the inner lives of men
and women in Tudor England, the subsection entitled
"The Wider World" provides a glimpse
of the huge world that lay beyond the boundaries
of the kingdom, a world that the English were
feverishly attempting to explore and exploit.
Ruthless military expeditions and English settlers
(including the poet Edmund Spenser) struggled
to subdue and colonize nearby Ireland, but with
very limited success. Farther afield, merchants
from cities such as London and Bristol established
profitable trading links to markets in North
Africa, Turkey, and Russia. And
daring seamen such as Drake and Cavendish commanded
voyages to still more distant lands. The texts
collected here, which supplement the selections
from Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana
(NAEL 8, 1.923-26) and Hariot's
Brief and True Report (NAEL 1.938-43)
in the Norton Anthology, are fascinating, disturbing
records of intense human curiosity, greed, fear,
wonder, and intelligence. And lest we imagine
that the English were only the observers of
the world and never the observed, "The
Wider World" includes a sample of a foreign
tourist's description of London. The tourist,
Thomas Platter, had the good sense to go to
the theater and to see, as so many thousands
of visitors to England have done since, a play
by Shakespeare.
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