Название: Seventeenth-century English literature
Автор: King, Bruce
Издательство: Schocken Books
Год: 1983
Формат: pdf
Страниц: 314
Размер: 10.1 Мб
Язык: English

THE seventeenth century was probably the greatest century of English poetry and drama and, while the novel was still in its infancy, has left us such prose classics as Bacon’s Essays, Browne’s Religio Medici and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Although by the conventions of literary history Shakespeare belongs to the sixteenth century, his greatest tragedies, tragicomedies and romances are contemporary, and share characteristics, with the writings of Jonson, Donne, Marston and Fletcher. In an ideal world, not governed by the economics of book publishing, I would have written on how Shakespeare’s late plays are influenced by and yet dissimilar to the other Jacobean dramas. I would also have written at more length of George Herbert, Marvell and Crashaw — three poets with claims to greatness. But then there would also need to be fuller discussions of such interesting and now neglected authors as Oldham, Carew, Shirley, Ravenscroft and Behn. The good literature of the seventeenth century sometimes seems as endless as modem discussions of the Puritans, the causes of the Civil War, the influence of the new science on literary style and what is meant by the Baroque.