PILGRIMS’ PROGRESS THROUGH REVOLUTION

AND RESTORATION (1616 – 1696)

7.1. Особенности социального развития Англии в начале XVII века. Английская поэзия после Шекспира. Творчество Джона Донна. Трактовка человека и мира, специфика образов, экспрессивность стиля.

Donne was born in London; at the age of 11 he entered the University of Oxford, where he studied for three years. According to some accounts, he spent the next three years at the University of Cambridge but took no degree at either university. He began the study of law at Lincoln's Inn, London, in 1592. About two years later, presumably, he relinquished the Roman Catholic faith, in which he had been brought up, and joined the Anglican Сhurch.

His first book of poems, Satires, written during this period of residence in London, is considered one of Donne's most important literary efforts.

Although not immediately published, the volume had a fairly wide readership through private circulation of the manuscript, as did his love poems, Songs and Sonnets, written at about the same time as the Satires.

In 1596, Donne joined a naval expedition. On his return to England, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal. Donne's secret marriage in 1601 to Egerton's niece, Anne More, resulted in his dismissal from this position and in a brief imprisonment. A cousin of his wife offered the couple refuge in Surrey. While there, Donne wrote his longest poem, The Progresse of the Soule (1601), which ironically depicts the transmigration of the soul of Eve's apple.

During the next few years Donne made a meager living as a lawyer. Donne's principal literary accomplishments during this period were Divine Poems(1607). In 1608 a reconciliation was effected between Donne and his father-in-law, and his wife received a much-needed dowry. Donne became a priest of the Anglican Church in 1615 and was appointed royal chaplain later that year. He attained eminence as a preacher, delivering sermonsthat are regarded as the most brilliant and eloquent of his time.

Donne continued to write poetry, notably his Holy Sonnets (1618), but most of it remained unpublished until 1633. In 1621 James I appointed him dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral; he held that post until his death. While convalescing from a severe illness, Donne wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623-1624), a prose work in which he treated the themes of death and human relationships; it contains these famous lines:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; ...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

It is almost certain that Donne would have become a bishop in 1630 but for his poor health. During his final years he delivered a number of his most notable sermons, including the so-called funeral sermon, Death's Duell (1631), delivered less than two months before his death in London.

The poetry of Donne is characterized by complex imagery and irregularity of form. He frequently employed the conceit, an elaborate metaphor making striking syntheses of apparently unrelated objects or ideas. His intellectuality, introspection, and use of colloquial diction, seemingly unpoetic but always uniquely precise in meaning and connotation, make his poetry boldly divergent from the smooth, elegant verse of his day. The content of his love poetry, often both cynical and sensuous, represents a reaction against the sentimental Elizabethan sonnet, and this work influenced the attitudes of many 17th-century religious poets sometimes referred to as the metaphysical poets.They drew much inspiration from the imagery and spirituality of Donne's religious poetry. Donne was almost forgotten during the 18th century, but interest in his work developed during the 19th century and reached its heights in the 20^th century.

7.2. Английская революция как переход к новой эпохе. Расцвет публицистических жанров, активное участие литературы в общественно-политической борьбе. Творчество Джона Мильтона. Поэма «Потерянный рай»: проблематика и дискуссионные аспекты ее трактовки.

The English Revolution, also called the Puritan Revolution, is a general designation for the period in English history from 1640 to 1660. It began with the calling of the Long Parliament by King Charles I and proceeded through two civil wars, the trial and execution of the king, the republican experiments of Oliver Cromwell, and, ultimately, the restoration of King Charles II. The causes of the conflict can be traced to social, economic, constitutional, and religious developments over a century or more. Closer at hand were questions of sovereignty in the English state and Puritanism in the church. The immediate cause, however, was Charles’s attempt (1637) to impose the Anglican liturgy in Scotland. The Presbyterian Scots rioted; then they signed the National Covenant and raised an army to defend their church. In 1640 their army occupied the northern counties of England. The English Revolution was the first of the so-called great revolutions. It began as a protest against an oppressive and uncompromising government. A moderate constitutional phase was followed by the use of military force, then the violent overthrow of the government, experiments with new institutions, the rule of a virtual dictator, and, finally, a restoration that embodied some new practices within the older tradition. The revolution was important because it generated new political and religious ideas and because it extended the English tradition that the government’s power.

Milton was educated at St. Paul's School, London. The conventional date given for his admission is 1620, but it may have been as early as 1615. In addition to his regular schoolwork in Latin, Greek, and, later, Hebrew, the boy had instruction at home, perhaps partly in modern languages, from private tutors. Milton was a voracious student; he traced the initial cause of his later blindness to his having, from his 12th year, rarely quit his books before midnight.

Along with a couple of Latin exercises that have survived, his earliest attempts at verse, made when he was 15, were rhymed paraphrases of Psalms 114 and 136.

Milton entered Christ's College, Cambridge; he received his Bachelor of Arts degree and his Master of Arts. His experience at Cambridge can be partly gathered from his abundant Latin verse and his seven Latin public speeches that were expected to display the speaker's learning and rhetorical and argumentative powers.

Milton's nickname at the university, "the Lady," was apparently bestowed because of his handsome and delicate features and a purity of mind and behavior that disdained the diversions of his coarser fellows. During his seven years at Cambridge he seems to have moved from some unpopularity to general respect and, among dons and cultivated students, to high esteem. He did not love the scholastic logic that dominated the curriculum; then, as well as later, he denounced it as barren. By Milton's own account, his early enthusiasm for the sensual poetry of Ovid and other Roman writers gave way to an appreciation of the idealism of Dante, Petrarch, and Edmund Spenser. He then moved on to Platonic philosophy and finally came to hold the mysticism of the biblical Book of Revelation in the highest esteem. Meanwhile, Milton had been learning his craft and sometimes revealing his inner self in writing Latin verse. (Latin was then the standard language of the university world.)

In 1630 Milton wrote the lines "On Shakespeare," which were printed in the Shakespearean Second Folio, 1632.

* * *

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones

The labor of an age in piled stones?

Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid

Under a star-ypointing pyramid?

Dear son of memeory, great heir of fame,

What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Has built thyself a livelong monument.

For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,

Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart

Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book

Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,

Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,

Dost make us marble with too mauch conceiving,

And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie

That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

Milton's scholarly and literary gifts had from childhood marked him out in the minds of his family and teachers for the ministry; in his later prose he said he had refused to "subscribe slave" in a church governed by prelacy, but the date of his negative decision is not known. After taking his Master of Arts degree, Milton retired to his father's house and proceeded to give himself the liberal education Cambridge had not provided. It was in these years that he laid the foundation or set the direction of his liberal thinking. He sought to digest the mass of history, literature, and philosophy, to gain the "insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs" needed by the citizen-poet who would be a leader and teacher.

In 1638, Milton set off on a visit to Italy. Milton and some of his early Latin poems were cordially welcomed among men of letters and patrons and their academies. This experience warmed his heart and nourished his self-confidence. (It should be remembered that at home he had very little literary acquaintance and, outside a small circle, no poetic reputation.) In Florence he made a call on the aged astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was under house arrest because his views on the universe conflicted with the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church.

Milton returned to England in 1639, settled in a house in London, and prepared to take in pupils. Milton had returned to England with plans for an Arthurian epic; like other ambitious poets of the Renaissance, he hoped to write the great modern heroic poem.

But he was also deeply anxious about the Puritan cause. In his denunciation of clergy, Milton had virtually declared his Puritan allegiance, and the next dozen of years he gave almost wholly to pamphleteering in the cause of religious and civil liberty. Notoriety came with Milton's pamphlet Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which was followed by three more tracts on the same theme. His preoccupation with the subject of divorce was presumably hastened by his own marital disaster.

Several months before the outbreak of the Civil Wars, Milton had married Mary Powell, the daughter of a royalist squire of Oxfordshire who owed money to his father. Success could hardly be predicted for the marriage of a scholar and poet of 33 to an uneducated girl half his age from a large, easygoing household. The young wife, visiting her family a little later, declined – doubtless with their backing – to return to her new husband's household. The shock must have been especially severe for a man who had approached marriage with high hopes and earnest prayers, and there was no release from such a tragic mistake.

In the tracts Milton argued that adultery might be less valid for divorce than incompatibility and that the forced yoke of a loveless marriage was a crime against human dignity. For this he was attacked as a libertine by royalists and Presbyterians alike. Later friends brought about a reunion between Milton and his wife, and when the Powells had been ruined by the war, he took into his house, for nearly a year, the whole noisy family of 10. Three daughters, Anne, Mary, and Deborah, were born in 1646, 1648, and 1652. A son died in infancy. Mrs. Milton died a few days after Deborah's birth.

In 1644 Milton published what are for modern readers his best-known pamphlets, Of Education and Areopagitica.

Of Education is one of the last in a long line of European expositions of Renaissance humanism. His aim was to mold boys into enlightened, cultivated, responsible citizens and leaders on the basis of the study of the ancient classics, in due subordination to the Bible and Christian teaching. But he also gave notable emphasis to science. Areopagitica is on the freedom of the press and was specifically written to protest an order issued by Parliament the previous year requiring government approval and licensing of all published books. Milton argues that to mandate licensing is to follow the example of the detested papacy. He defends the free circulation of ideas as essential to moral and intellectual development and reasserts above all his belief in the power of truth to triumph over falsehood through free inquiry and discussion. Areopagitica is now regarded as a classic plea on behalf of civil liberties and democratic values, but the tract seems to have had very little effect in its own time.

On Februarty 13, 1649, two weeks after the execution of Charles I, Milton's first political tract appeared. In it he expounds the doctrine that power resides always in the people, who delegate it to a sovereign but may, if it is abused, resume it and depose or even execute the tyrant. A month later he was invited to become secretary for foreign languages to Cromwell's Council of State. Hitherto a detached observer, Milton, in spite of his private studies, was doubtless eager to have a hand in the workings of government. He was not on the policy-making level, but he had the easy command of Latin needed for foreign correspondence. Also, as a publicist of demonstrated sympathy with the revolution, he was expected to continue his defense of the cause against the multiplying attacks on the regicides.

He was inevitably and profoundly depressed by the loss of his eyesight; it had been failing for years, and blindness became complete in the winter of 1651-52. Milton was only 43, and the great poem was still unwritten. Blindness reduced his strictly secretarial duties, though he continued through as a translator of state letters. His last political pamphlet, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, was published in 1660. It was an act no less courageous than futile, since machinery was patently moving to bring back Charles II and install him as king (he made his triumphal entry on May 29). Milton's pamphlet is a cry of incredulity and despair from the last champion of "the good Old Cause." The glories of the Commonwealth, to which he himself had given 20 years and his eyesight, were being swept away by a nation of slaves "now choosing them a captain back for Egypt." The Restoration was the last and heaviest of Milton's many disillusionments.

The Restoration government executed the Commonwealth leader Sir Henry Vane the Younger and exhumed and hanged at Tyburn the bodies of Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw. Milton himself, as a noted defender of the regicides, was in real danger. In the summer of 1660 a warrant was out for his arrest; he was kept in hiding by friends. In August the Act of Oblivion, granting pardon to most Commonwealth supporters, was passed. Milton was safe within its terms but was nevertheless taken into custody (and released on December 15). His life was spared. It may have been decided that the blind writer was now harmless and that token proceedings against him would be enough.

It was about that time that Paradise Lost was actually begun. It was finished by 1665. Paradise Lost is an epic poem written in blank verse – unrhymed iambic pentameter verse. It tells the story of Satan's rebellion against God and his expulsion from heaven and the subsequent temptation and expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. By Milton's time the Fall of Man had already received innumerable literary treatments, narrative and dramatic, so that the simple tale in Genesis and the more shadowy role of Satan in heaven, earth, and hell had acquired a good deal of interpretative and concrete embellishment. So the main motives and events of Paradise Lost had abundant literary precedent, though they were handled with powerful originality; Milton, like a Greek dramatist, was reworking a story familiar in outline to his audience. His story, moreover, gave him the advantage of immemorial belief and association in the minds of his earlier readers.

Milton centres the magnificent first two books of his poem on the figure of Satan and his legions as they lie in hell. Milton's roll call of the leaders of the fallen angels, in making them individuals, also becomes a survey of the spread of heathen idolatry over the Eastern world. The realistic power of the debate of the fallen angels in hell dwarfs all other epic councils. Epic accounts of Hades are combined, in Milton's pictures of hell, with Christian lore, but the lurid and dismal scenes and the physical and mental diversions of the fallen angels symbolize their spiritual death and futile striving. The wars of gods and Titans and giants in classical literature supply details for the war in heaven in Paradise Lost, which is a large metaphor for the anarchy of sin.

Much has been written about Milton's powerful characterization of Satan, who is one of the supreme figures in world literature. Satan has, on a superhuman scale, the strength, the courage, and the capacity for leadership that belong to the ancient epic hero, but these qualities are all perverted in being devoted to evil. In his first grand speech to his lieutenant Beelzebub, Satan's defiance of God manifests his egoistic pride, his false conception of freedom, and his alienation from all good. Against the background of hell, Satan maintains the false magnificence of his "heroic" stature, but outside of hell he loses even that. In his soliloquy addressed to the Sun, he reveals, like Dr. Faustus or Macbeth, his despairing consciousness of his own evil and damnation, a consciousness that gives him potentially tragic dimensions. Thus Satan and his fellows are enveloped in dramatic irony because – though the corruption of man is achieved – they fight and scheme in ignorance of the unshakable power of God and goodness.

Adam and Eve are enveloped in a parallel kind of irony. The picture of the Garden of Eden is a symbolic rendering of Milton's vision of perfection, but it is presented when the reader accompanies Satan into the garden, so that idyllic innocence and happiness are seen only under the shadow of evil. Though the pair have had warnings, Eve is beguiled by an appeal to her vanity and ambition, by the hubristic dream of attaining godlike knowledge and power; and Adam allows his love for Eve to oversway his love for God. Both, far from attaining godlike knowledge, succumb to animal lust; yet, when grace and penitence begin to work in them, they have a strength beyond the reach of Satan. On the other hand, though there is promised redemption for the faithful, and though the poem is, logically, a divine comedy with a happy ending, Milton's panorama of human history gives little ground for hope on earth. Irony, profoundly compassionate irony, pervades the moving last lines which describe Adam and Eve as they depart from Eden – not now the majestic lords of creation but two frail human beings beginning life anew in the world of sin and sorrow and death, though "with Providence their guide" and the hope of achieving a "paradise within."

The more one reads Paradise Lost the more one recognizes Milton's powers of imagination and organization. Everywhere, on the largest or the smallest scale, in abstract idea or concrete act, theme and material are closely knit through parallel and contrast. The central conflict and contrast between good and evil are reflected and intensified in the contrasts between heaven and hell, light and darkness, order and chaos, love and hate, humility and pride, reason and passion.

The poem is rich in its appeal to both the eye and the ear. Milton's preface stresses the novelty and rightness of blank verse for a heroic poem, and his manipulation of rhythm and sound is of course one of his supreme achievements. The continuous flow of his long sentences and paragraphs is naturally unlike the dramatic blank verse of Shakespearean dialogue, and it builds up a continuous onward pressure. While the iambic pentameter line remains the norm, there may be extra syllables, and there is endless variety in the number, weight, and position of stresses. At the same time there is a secondary and still more fluid system of rhythmic units, which flow from the caesura in one line to the caesura in the next, resulting in an infinity of permutations and combinations. Milton's blank verse is never monotonous, and the pattern of sound is so wedded to the pattern of sense that each is essential to the other.

Paradise Regained is a natural sequel to Paradise Lost: Christ, the second Adam, wins back for man what the first Adam had lost. But Milton did not, as might have been expected, deal with the Crucifixion; instead, he showed Christ in the wilderness overcoming Satan the tempter, thereby proving his fitness for his ultimate trial and, in his human role, showing what humankind might achieve through strong integrity and humble obedience to the divine will. Although the poem has been found cold by the mass of readers and critics, it nevertheless has all the fire of Milton's religious and moral passion and his reverence for true heroism.

For some readers, the drama of Samson is the most powerful and completely satisfying of Milton's major works. It is by far the greatest English drama on the Greek model and is known as a tragedy more suited for reading than performance. The play deals with the final phase of Samson's life and recounts the story as told in the Book of Judges of the Old Testament. The action, up to the reported catastrophe, is wholly psychological; it is the process by which Samson, "eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves," moves from preoccupation with his misery and disgrace to selfless humility and renewed spiritual strength, so that he can once more feel himself God's chosen champion. He is granted a return of his old strength and pulls down the pillars that support the temple of the Philistine god Dagon (also spelled Dagan), crushing himself along with his captors. The drama must owe a great deal of its power to Milton's sense of kinship with his hero; he has been eyeless in London among a nation of slaves.

7.3. Развитие политической философии в Англии в эпоху Реставрации: Джон Локк. Творчество Джона Беньяна. Аллегорический роман “Путь паломника” и его историко-культурное значение.

Locke, John (1632-1704), English philosopher, who founded the school of empiricism. Locke was educated at the University of Oxford and lectured on Greek, rhetoric, and moral philosophy at Oxford from 1661 to 1664. In 1667 Locke began his association with the English statesman Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, to whom Locke was friend, adviser, and physician. Shaftesbury secured for Locke a series of minor government appointments. In 1669, in one of his official capacities, Locke wrote a constitution for the proprietors of the Carolina Colony in North America, but it was never put into effect. In 1675, after the liberal Shaftesbury had fallen from favor, Locke went to France. He lived in Holland, and following the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the restoration of Protestantism to favor, Locke returned once more to England. The new king, William III, appointed Locke to the Board of Trade. He died in Oates on October 28, 1704.

Locke's empiricism emphasizes the importance of the experience of the senses in pursuit of knowledge rather than intuitive speculation or deduction. The empiricist doctrine was first expounded by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon early in the 17th century, but Locke gave it systematic expression in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). He regarded the mind of a person at birth as a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which experience imprinted knowledge, and did not believe in intuition or theories of innate conceptions. Locke also held that all persons are born good, independent, and equal. Locke's views, in his Two Treatises of Government (1690), attacked the theory of divine right of kings and the nature of the state as conceived by the English philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes. In brief, Locke argued that sovereignty did not reside in the state but with the people, and that the state is supreme, but only if it is bound by civil and what he called “natural” law.

Many of Locke's political ideas, such as those relating to natural rights, property rights, the duty of the government to protect these rights, and the rule of the majority, were later embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Locke further held that revolution was not only a right but often an obligation, and he advocated a system of checks and balances in government. He also believed in religious freedom and in the separation of church and state. Locke's influence in modern philosophy has been profound and, with his application of empirical analysis to ethics, politics, and religion, he remains one of the most important and controversial philosophers of all time.

In 1655 Bunyan became one of the leaders of a congregation of Nonconformists in Bedford, giving sermons as a lay preacher. After his wife died, Bunyan remarried and became a popular preacher, speaking to large audiences. However, after the restoration of Charles II in 1660, Puritans lost the privilege of freedom of worship, and it was declared illegal to conduct divine service except in accordance with the forms of the Church of England. Bunyan, who persisted in his unlicensed preaching, was confined to Bedford county jail, although during a part of this time he was allowed a degree of freedom and was able to support his family by making shoelaces. While Bunyan was in prison his library consisted of the Bible and the Book of Martyrs by the theologian John Foxe. Studying the content and literary style of these works, Bunyan began to write religious tracts and pamphlets. Before his release he wrote the first of his major works, the spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). In 1675 Bunyan was imprisoned for six months, and during that time he probably wrote the major part of his masterpiece, The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, a prose allegory of the pilgrimage of a soul in search of salvation (1st part published 1678; 2nd part, 1684). Ten editions of this great work were printed during Bunyan's lifetime, and it eventually became the most widely read book in English after the Bible. It exerted great influence on later English writers. Noted for its simple, biblical style, The Pilgrim's Progress is now generally considered one of the finest allegories in English literature, and it has been translated into many languages.

7. 4. Поэзия и драматургия эпохи Реставрации: Джон Драйден и его творчество.

Dryden, John (1631-1700), English poet, dramatist, and critic, who was the leading literary figure of the Restoration. Dryden was educated at Westminster School and at the University of Cambridge. About 1657 he went to London as clerk to the chamberlain to the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Dryden's first important poem, Heroic Stanzas (1659), was written in memory of Cromwell. After the Restoration, however, Dryden became a Royalist and celebrated the return of King Charles II in two poems.

In 1662 Dryden began to write plays as a source of income. During the next 20 years, he became the most prominent dramatist in England. His comedies are broad and bawdy; one of them, The Kind Keeper; or, Mr. Limberham (1678), was banned as indecent, an unusual penalty during the morally permissive period of Restoration theater. His early heroic plays, written in rhymed couplets, are extravagant and full of pageantry. Among them are the semi-opera The Indian Queen (written with Sir Robert Howard in 1664); this work contains some of the most famous music of his contemporary, the English composer Henry Purcell. One of his later tragedies in blank verse, All for Love; or, the World Well Lost (1678), a version of the story of Antony and Cleopatra, is considered his greatest play and one of the masterpieces of Restoration tragedy. In his poem Annus Mirabilis (1667), Dryden wrote of the events in the “Wonderful Year”1666, chiefly of the English naval victory over the Dutch in July and of the Great Fire of London in September. His reputation is that of the father of English literary criticism.

ADDITIONAL READING

SELECTION ONE