Jacobean and Caroline Literature (1603-1660)

On 24 March 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died at Richmond Palace. She had ruled England for forty-four years. She had never married, and she left no child to take her crown. For years the English had asked each other a nervous question: who would rule after her? The answer came from the north. James VI of Scotland, a distant cousin through the Tudor family, travelled south and became James I of England.

The new king brought a love of books, a firm belief in his own royal power, and a queen, Anne of Denmark, who enjoyed music and dance. Poets found a court that wanted to be entertained, and the theatre found a royal friend. But the king also brought quarrels that his son could not settle. The struggle between crown and Parliament grew until England went to war with itself. A king was tried and beheaded, the theatres were shut, and for eleven years there was no king at all. In 1660 the monarchy came back.

Literary history gives these fifty-seven years several names. Jacobean comes from Jacobus, the Latin form of James, and covers the reign of James I, from 1603 to 1625. Caroline comes from Carolus, the Latin form of Charles, and covers the reign of Charles I, from 1625 to 1649. The years from 1649 to 1660 are called the Commonwealth and Protectorate, or the Interregnum, which means the gap between kings. Many textbooks also call the years after 1625 the Puritan Age or the Age of Milton. This was the age of Shakespeare's late plays, the bitter tragedies of Webster, the poems of Donne and Herbert, and the early poems and fierce prose of John Milton.

The world of this age

Political life

James had been king of Scotland since he was thirteen months old, when his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to give up her throne in 1567. He grew up among quarrelling nobles and stern Scottish preachers, and he learned to trust his own cleverness. He also wrote books. In The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598) he argued that a king receives his power from God and answers to God alone. This belief is called the divine right of kings. In Scotland he had ruled with it for years. In England it met a Parliament that was far more used to speaking its mind.

English kings could not rule without Parliament for one plain reason: only Parliament could vote for taxes. Elizabeth had known this and had handled its members with care. She had also left debts behind, because of her long wars with Spain and in Ireland. James spent freely on gifts and favourites, and the debts grew. In 1610 he tried a bargain called the Great Contract, meant to give him a steady income, but it failed. In 1614 he called a Parliament that passed no laws at all and was sent home within weeks. It is remembered as the Addled Parliament. After that, James ruled without a Parliament until 1621.

Charles I became king in 1625. He was shy, serious and a fine judge of paintings. He shared his father's belief in royal power, but he lacked his father's skill at avoiding open quarrels. In the same year he married Henrietta Maria, a French Catholic princess, which made many Protestants uneasy. His favourite minister, the Duke of Buckingham, led military expeditions that failed, and Parliament hated him. In 1628 Buckingham was stabbed to death by a discontented officer, and in the same year Parliament forced Charles to accept the Petition of Right, which said that the king could not tax without consent or jail people without cause. A year later Charles sent Parliament home and ruled alone for eleven years. To find money he revived old taxes. The most hated was Ship Money, once paid only by port towns to keep the navy ready, which from 1635 he demanded from inland counties as well.

The crisis came from Scotland. In 1637 Charles and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, tried to force a new Prayer Book on the Scottish church. To Scottish Presbyterians it looked too close to Catholic worship. They signed the National Covenant in 1638 and raised an army. Charles needed money to answer them, so in 1640 he had to call Parliament again. The first, the Short Parliament, refused to help and was dismissed in three weeks. The second, the Long Parliament, met in November 1640 and attacked the king's advisers. His chief minister, the Earl of Strafford, was executed in 1641. In January 1642 Charles walked into the House of Commons with armed men to arrest five members, but they had already escaped. After that, neither side trusted the other. In August 1642 Charles raised his royal flag at Nottingham, and the Civil War began.

Supporters of the king were called Cavaliers, and supporters of Parliament were nicknamed Roundheads. Parliament built a disciplined force, the New Model Army, which crushed the royal army at Naseby in June 1645. Charles surrendered in 1646 but kept making secret deals, and a second war broke out in 1648. The army then removed the members of Parliament who wanted peace with him, and the rest set up a court. On 30 January 1649 Charles was beheaded outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall.

England now became a republic, called the Commonwealth. Its strongest man was Oliver Cromwell, a country gentleman who had become a great general. After he put down resistance in Ireland and Scotland, he took the title Lord Protector in 1653. He died in 1658. His son Richard could not control the army, and the country drifted. In early 1660 General George Monck marched from Scotland to London, a new Parliament was chosen, and it invited Charles's son to return. Charles II entered London on 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday.

Social life

London was by far the largest city in England, and it was growing fast as people left their villages to look for work. Streets were crowded, and disease spread easily. When James came to the throne, plague was killing thousands of Londoners, his coronation was held with little ceremony, and the theatres stayed closed for many months. Plague returned in 1625 and again in the 1630s, and each time the playhouses shut their doors.

Society was divided into clear ranks. At the top stood the king and the great lords. Below them came the gentry, who owned land and ran the counties, then merchants, craftsmen and farmers, and a large body of labourers and servants. Rank decided a person's clothes, schooling and manners. Girls were mostly taught at home to run a household, few learned Latin, and a married woman had very few rights under the law. Even so, a small number of women found ways to write and publish.

A young gentleman's education followed a clear path. First came grammar school, then Oxford or Cambridge, and then the Inns of Court in London, where law was studied. The Inns were also clubs for young wits. Students went there to learn manners, make friends, watch plays and write verse. John Donne, Francis Beaumont and John Ford all spent time at them.

The wider world was opening too. In 1607 English settlers founded Jamestown in Virginia, the first lasting English colony in America. In 1620 a group of Separatists, now remembered as the Pilgrims, sailed in the Mayflower to found Plymouth in New England, because they wanted to worship in their own way, free from the English Church.

Economic life

Cloth made from English wool was the country's chief export, and London merchants grew rich by selling it abroad. Long sea voyages were costly and risky, so merchants joined together in companies, where many investors shared the cost and the profit. The East India Company had been set up in 1600, and the Virginia Company followed in 1606. In 1615 James sent Sir Thomas Roe as his ambassador to the Mughal emperor Jahangir, hoping to win trading rights for the East India Company. Roe landed at Surat in September 1615, was received by Jahangir at Ajmer in January 1616, and stayed until 1619 without winning the full agreement he wanted.

At home, prices rose faster than wages, and the poor suffered. The crown needed money too, so it sold favours. James sold monopolies, which gave one person the sole right to trade in an item, and in 1611 he created a new rank, the baronet, which could be bought. Writers felt the same pinch. Few could live on the sale of books. They depended on rich patrons, court posts, the Church, or a share in a theatre company. Ben Jonson wrote for nobles and the court, John Donne spent years seeking patrons before the Church gave him a career, and Shakespeare earned his living as a sharer in the King's Men.

Religion

England was a Protestant country, but its Church was a compromise left by Elizabeth. Puritans wanted to purify it further by removing robes and ceremonies that seemed Catholic. Catholics, who refused to attend Church of England services, paid heavy fines. When James came south, both groups hoped for relief. In January 1604, at Hampton Court Palace, he met leading churchmen to hear the Puritan requests. He refused to touch the system of bishops, warning that without bishops there would soon be no king. But one Puritan, John Rainolds, suggested a new translation of the Bible, and James agreed. That decision led to the King James Bible of 1611.

The Catholics were bitterly disappointed. A small group of them, led by Robert Catesby, planned to blow up Parliament on 5 November 1605, when the king would be present. Guy Fawkes, a soldier, was to guard the barrels of gunpowder hidden in a cellar under the House of Lords. A secret letter warned a Catholic lord, who passed it to the government, and Fawkes was caught in the cellar. The plotters were hunted down and executed, new laws against Catholics followed, and bonfires are still lit in Britain every 5 November.

Belief in the unseen was strong. James had studied witchcraft and had written a book, Daemonologie, in 1597, after witches in Scotland were accused of raising storms against the ship that brought him home with his bride. In 1604 England made its law against witches harsher. In 1612 a group of people from Pendle in Lancashire were tried, and most of them were hanged. This fear gave writers rich material, and Macbeth was written in such a world.

Under Charles, the Church changed again. Archbishop Laud wanted churches to be orderly and beautiful, with railed altars and rich ceremony. Puritans saw this as a step back toward Rome. Many left, and in 1630 a large group sailed to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Those who stayed won power in Parliament, and in the 1640s they set out to change the Church and everyday life.

Literature in this age

The language

The English of these years is called Early Modern English. It is the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. It is close enough to read today, but spelling had no fixed rules, and people still used "thou" and "thee" for close friends, for inferiors and for God. The language was also growing fast. It had borrowed words from Latin, Greek, French and Italian, and many readers felt lost among them. In 1604 a schoolmaster named Robert Cawdrey published A Table Alphabeticall, a small list of hard English words with plain meanings. It is regarded as the first English dictionary.

The Bible of 1611 had a far larger effect. After the Hampton Court meeting, James appointed scholars to prepare a new English Bible. They worked in teams at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, and they drew heavily on earlier translators, above all William Tyndale. The book slowly became the Bible read aloud in English churches. Its calm, rhythmic sentences trained the ears of generations of speakers and writers.

Writers chose their styles with care. Jonson and Bacon liked short, firm sentences. Donne wrote as if arguing aloud, with sudden starts. Thomas Browne preferred long, rolling sentences full of Latin words, and Milton shaped English as if it were Latin, with long, balanced sentences.

How the writing survived

In 1603 a play was not thought of as a book. It was written to be acted, and it belonged to the acting company, which often kept the script away from printers. Some plays still reached print, in small cheap books called quartos, often with errors. Authority also watched the press. The Master of the Revels licensed every play for the stage, and the Church and Crown licensed books, which sometimes meant cutting dangerous lines.

Poems were handled differently. Gentleman poets often thought it undignified to print their verse, so poems were copied by hand and passed among friends. Many of Donne's poems were read this way for years, and they were printed only in 1633, two years after his death.

Ben Jonson changed the attitude to plays. In 1616 he published his plays, masques and poems together as The Workes of Benjamin Jonson. The grand volume claimed that plays deserved the same respect as any other literature. Shakespeare died that same year. In 1623 two actor friends from the King's Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, gathered thirty-six of his plays into one large book, the First Folio. Eighteen of them had never been printed before, among them Macbeth and The Tempest, and without the book they might have been lost. It also carried a poem by Jonson, praising Shakespeare as a writer for all time, not for one age.

Drama

The theatre that James inherited was already famous. In London, acting companies, each protected by a noble patron, played to crowds who paid a penny to stand in the yard and more to sit. In May 1603, within weeks of arriving, James made Shakespeare's company his own, and the Lord Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men. Other companies took the names of Queen Anne and Prince Henry. The King's Men acted at the open-air Globe in summer, and after 1608 they also used the indoor Blackfriars theatre in winter.

Shakespeare had written Hamlet and his great comedies before James arrived. In the Jacobean years he turned to darker stories: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Macbeth, written around 1606, suited the new king. James believed in witches, and he was said to descend from Banquo, the Scottish lord whom the witches in the play promise will father a line of kings. Later came Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, plays in which families are broken by jealousy or storm and healed only after long years. Shakespeare spent his last years mostly in Stratford and died on 23 April 1616.

Ben Jonson wrote differently. He was a bricklayer's stepson who taught himself Latin and Greek, and he believed that plays should correct foolishness, as the old Roman writers had done. His temper was hot: in 1598 he killed an actor in a duel and escaped hanging only by proving that he could read Latin. His comedies were sharp and crowded. In Volpone (1606), a rich Venetian pretends to be dying so that greedy friends will bring him gifts in the hope of inheriting his gold. In The Alchemist (1610), three tricksters take over a London house, left empty because of the plague, and cheat the greedy visitors who come hoping to get rich. Jonson called his method the comedy of humours. In old medicine a "humour" was a body fluid thought to rule a person's mood, and Jonson built each character around one ruling obsession.

At court the favourite entertainment was the masque, a show of music, dance, costume and painted scenery that ended when the masked players stepped down and danced with the audience. Queen Anne loved masques. Jonson wrote the words and the architect Inigo Jones designed the stage, and together they made The Masque of Blackness in 1605 and many others. The two men quarrelled over whether words or spectacle mattered more, and by 1631 Jonson had stopped writing for the court.

While Jonson laughed at fools, other playwrights stared at evil. Their tragedies are full of poison, spies, ghosts and cruel dukes, usually set in Italy or Spain, far from London, which let writers speak freely about wicked courts. This kind of play is called revenge tragedy, and it grew out of earlier plays such as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet. John Webster's The White Devil (about 1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (about 1613) are its best-known examples. In the second, a widowed duchess secretly marries her steward against the wishes of her two brothers, and they destroy her. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622) tells how a young woman hires a servant to kill a man she does not want to marry, and finds that he demands a terrible price.

Such stories were not far from real life. In 1613 Sir Thomas Overbury died in the Tower of London, and two years later it came out that he had been poisoned. Powerful people at court were put on trial.

Not all plays were dark. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher wrote tragicomedies, plays that bring the heroes close to death or disgrace and then end happily. Beaumont also wrote The Knight of the Burning Pestle (about 1607), which makes fun of a London grocer and his wife who interrupt a play to tell the actors what to do. After Beaumont died in 1616, Fletcher became the chief writer for the King's Men, and he even worked with Shakespeare on Henry VIII.

When Charles I became king, the stage grew more polished and more tied to the court. Charles and Henrietta Maria liked graceful plays about love and honour. Philip Massinger wrote A New Way to Pay Old Debts (about 1625), whose greedy villain, Sir Giles Overreach, became a favourite role. John Ford wrote tragedies of forbidden love, such as 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and James Shirley wrote comedies about fashionable London life. Meanwhile, Puritan dislike of the stage was growing. William Prynne's huge book Histriomastix (1633) attacked plays and actors. Since the queen herself liked to act in court shows, the book was taken as an insult to her, and Prynne was severely punished. Nine years later, Parliament ordered public plays to stop.

Poetry

Poetry changed along with the theatre. The sweet, smooth sonnets of the 1590s no longer satisfied younger readers, who wanted wit, argument and surprise. The poet who gave them that was John Donne.

Donne was born in 1572 into a Catholic family at a time when Catholics were persecuted. His younger brother Henry died in prison after being arrested for sheltering a priest. Donne later left the old faith, studied law at Lincoln's Inn, and wrote clever, bold love poems that circulated in manuscript among friends. In 1601 he secretly married Anne More, the daughter of a powerful man, Sir George More, without his consent. Donne lost his post as secretary to the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, spent a short time in jail, and lived in poverty for years. King James finally urged him to take holy orders. Donne was ordained in 1615 and became Dean of St Paul's in 1621, where his sermons drew crowds. His later poems, such as the Holy Sonnets, burn with fear and love of God, as when he begs God to "batter my heart". He died in 1631.

Donne's poetry sounds nothing like Elizabethan smoothness. A poem may open with a shout, as in "The Canonization": "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love." He argues like a lawyer, mixes body and soul, and compares lovers to the most unexpected things, such as the two legs of a pair of compasses in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning". Such a comparison, stretched far and worked out with logic, is called a conceit. The poets who wrote in this way are called the metaphysical poets.

George Herbert wrote with the same wit but a quieter voice. He came from a noble family, studied at Cambridge, and hoped for a career at court. When those hopes faded, he became a priest and served the small parish of Bemerton, near Salisbury, from 1630 until his death in 1633. His poems describe a private quarrel and friendship with God. Many are plain and tender, and some, such as "Easter Wings", are shaped on the page like the wings they describe. According to his friend Izaak Walton, Herbert sent his poems from his deathbed to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, saying that they could be published if they might help any poor soul, and otherwise burned. Ferrar published them as The Temple in 1633.

Younger poets followed. Henry Vaughan, a Welsh doctor, wrote of nature as a glimpse of heaven in Silex Scintillans (1650) and openly admired Herbert. Richard Crashaw, who became a Catholic, wrote passionate, almost dazzling religious verse. Andrew Marvell wrote one of the most famous argument poems of all, "To His Coy Mistress", in which a lover reasons that if time were endless he could court slowly, but since time is short, they should love now. Marvell also wrote the "Horatian Ode" in 1650, which praises Cromwell's power yet speaks with respect of the king's calm courage on the scaffold. His lyric poems were printed only after his death, in 1681.

Another group of poets belonged to the court. The Cavalier poets, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace and Robert Herrick, were gentlemen who served or admired Charles I. They were followers of Ben Jonson, and were sometimes called the "sons of Ben". Their verse was short, polished and light, and its themes were love, wine, loyalty and the fast passing of time. Herrick's famous advice, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may", is an example of carpe diem, Latin for "seize the day". Suckling teased a pale lover with "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" When war came, their loyalty was tested. In 1642 Lovelace was jailed for presenting a petition to Parliament in favour of the king, and in prison he wrote "To Althea, from Prison", which says that stone walls cannot make a prison for a free and loving mind. Herrick's Hesperides was published in 1648, in the middle of the war.

John Milton belonged to neither group. He studied at Cambridge and spent years in quiet study, planning to become a great poet. He wrote "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" in 1629, a masque called Comus (1634) for the family of the Earl of Bridgewater at Ludlow Castle, and in 1637 "Lycidas", a poem of grief for a Cambridge friend, Edward King, who drowned in the Irish Sea. "Lycidas" is also an attack on corrupt clergy, a sign of the political storm to come. Then war came, and Milton put his great poem aside and wrote mostly prose for the Puritan cause. Paradise Lost (1667) belongs to the next age.

Women also wrote. Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) is regarded as the first significant book of original poetry published by an Englishwoman. Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) is one of the earliest plays in English by a woman. Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (1621) was an early prose romance by an Englishwoman. In 1650 Anne Bradstreet's poems were printed in London as The Tenth Muse, the first book of poetry by a writer in the American colonies.

Prose

The age was also one of argument and new thinking, and prose carried it. Its first great voice was Francis Bacon, a lawyer and statesman who believed that learning had been stuck for centuries on the words of old authorities such as Aristotle. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum (1620) he argued that knowledge must grow through careful observation and experiment. His Essays, first printed in 1597 and enlarged in 1612 and 1625, are short and packed. In "Of Studies" he says that some books are to be tasted, others swallowed, and a few chewed and digested. Bacon rose to be Lord Chancellor in 1618, but in 1621 he was charged with accepting bribes, confessed, and lost his office. He spent his last years writing and died in 1626.

Others wrote long, rich books of their own. Robert Burton, an Oxford scholar, wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), an enormous study of sadness gathered from a huge range of authors, which he said he wrote partly to cure his own gloom. In Norwich a doctor, Thomas Browne, wrote Religio Medici (1643), about his own faith, and Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial (1658), a meditation on death prompted by the discovery of old burial urns in Norfolk. His sentences move like music.

Church writers filled the pulpit and the study. Lancelot Andrewes, one of the Bible translators, preached splendid sermons at court, and Donne's sermons at St Paul's drew crowds. After the Civil War began, the Royalist clergyman Jeremy Taylor wrote Holy Living (1650) and Holy Dying (1651), guides to a good life and a good death. Izaak Walton, also a Royalist, wrote The Compleat Angler (1653), a gentle book about fishing and friendship that offers calm in a violent time.

Then the Civil War turned prose into a weapon. Thomas Hobbes, who feared disorder, had gone to live in Paris in 1640, and there he wrote Leviathan, published in 1651. He argued that people must give up some freedom to a strong ruler, or life will be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". John Milton argued in the opposite direction. In 1643 Parliament passed a law requiring books to be licensed before printing. Milton answered in 1644 with Areopagitica, a speech-like pamphlet saying that destroying a good book is like killing reason itself, and that truth grows stronger in a free contest with falsehood. After the king's execution he defended it in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) and answered the popular book Eikon Basilike, which pictured Charles as a holy martyr, with Eikonoklastes. The new Commonwealth employed him as Latin Secretary, to write its letters to foreign powers, and he was blind by 1652. Others wanted more than a change of rulers. Gerrard Winstanley and his Diggers set up a farming community on common land in Surrey in 1649, claiming that the earth should be shared. These were years of fierce pamphlets, thousands of them.

Criticism and scholarship

The name "metaphysical" began as a complaint. In 1693 John Dryden said that Donne showed off his learning and filled the minds of ladies with hard ideas when he should have been winning their hearts. In 1779, in his Life of Cowley, Samuel Johnson used the word metaphysical for a whole group of poets. He admired their learning but disliked their conceits, saying that in them "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together".

For about two centuries Donne was little read. Then in 1921 H. J. C. Grierson published an anthology, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, and T. S. Eliot reviewed it in an essay, "The Metaphysical Poets". Eliot argued that these poets could feel a thought as directly as the smell of a rose, and that this power was lost after the seventeenth century, a change he called a "dissociation of sensibility". He blamed Milton and Dryden in part. His essay made Donne a favourite of modern poets and readers.

Later critics deepened the study. William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) showed how many meanings a line of Donne or Herbert could hold. Cleanth Brooks, in The Well Wrought Urn (1947), read Donne's "The Canonization" as a lesson in paradox. Rosemond Tuve's A Reading of George Herbert (1952) placed Herbert's images within Christian tradition. Helen Gardner's Penguin anthology The Metaphysical Poets (1957) introduced many students to the group.

Drama had its own critics. A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) studied Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth through character. L. C. Knights's Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (1937) linked the comedies of the time to a society hungry for money and rank. Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy (1984) argued that Jacobean tragedies questioned royal power and fixed ideas of human nature. For the Civil War years, Christopher Hill's Milton and the English Revolution (1977) read Milton against the fights of his time.

How the age ends

After the king's death, the Puritans who now governed England tried to reshape national life. They had never liked the theatre. Parliament's order of 2 September 1642 had told actors to stop playing while the "sad causes" of the war lasted. Later orders in 1647 and 1648 went further. They treated actors as rogues, ordered playhouse seats and galleries to be pulled down, and punished spectators. The stage did not die completely. Actors performed in secret, and short comic scenes taken from old plays, called drolls, were acted in private. In 1647 the government also banned the celebration of Christmas.

Yet writing did not stop. Poets, scholars and preachers who had no stage turned to the study and the printing press. William Davenant found a way round the ban in 1656 by staging The Siege of Rhodes with music at a private house, as an entertainment rather than a play. It is often called the first English opera.

In 1658 Cromwell died, and the Puritan government began to break up. In January 1660, as the country waited to see who would rule, a young clerk named Samuel Pepys began a diary in which he wrote about everything around him. It continued for nearly ten years. In May the king returned. In the summer Charles II gave Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant the right to run theatre companies in London, and plays came back to the stage. Milton, who had defended the king's execution, hid for a time, was briefly arrested in 1660 and was then freed. Blind and far from rich, he went on to finish Paradise Lost, published in 1667. A new age with new fashions had begun.

Writers and works

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Sources

• Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed., Cengage Learning, 2015.
• Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy. Macmillan, 1904.
• Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn. Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947.
• Cawdrey, Robert. The First English Dictionary, 1604: Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall. Edited by John Simpson, Bodleian Library, 2007.
• Das, Nandini. Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire. Bloomsbury, 2023.
• Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy. Harvester Press, 1984.
• Drabble, Margaret, editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed., Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Eliot, T. S. "The Metaphysical Poets." Times Literary Supplement, 20 Oct. 1921.
• Firth, C. H., and R. S. Rait, editors. Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660. His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1911.
• Gardner, Helen, editor. The Metaphysical Poets. Penguin, 1957.
• Grierson, H. J. C., editor. Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. Clarendon Press, 1921.
• Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. Faber and Faber, 1977.
• Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. 1779-81.
• Knights, L. C. Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson. Chatto and Windus, 1937.
• Pearsall Smith, Logan. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton. Clarendon Press, 1907.
• Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2004.
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• Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Afsar Khan, Ph.D. English