Elizabethans

Elizabeth assumed the throne of England in 1558 and for forty-five years reigned over what would later be known as the Golden Age. With the discovery of new continents and the creation of reliable merchant fleets, England was trading throughout the known world and gaining in both wealth and power. The times were favorable for literature as well. Traveling companies of players settled in London, built their own theaters, and presented plays full of action, humor, and poetry, appealing to all classes of society, high and low. In the summer, when plague prowled the city, the players went out into the countryside and traveled from town to town, presenting a bawdier and more violent version of their repertoire. The actors and poets of the theater were rowdy and popular, publicly scorned by polite society and adored by everyone else.

But the Elizabethan Age was also the age in which the written word exploded into use. Boys went to school at the age of six and studied ten hours a day until they were ready for an apprenticeship. By 1600 at least a third of the men in England could read and write, often in Latin as well as English. Wealthy girls were taught to read, write, keep household accounts, and manage the estate. Everyone learned to sing and dance.

Elaborate masques, full of song and recitation, became a popular form of entertainment, prying English culture further away from the power of Rome. Men at court wrote poetry to demonstrate their education and win the Queen’s attention. But while the style and form of those poems came from the classical Greeks, the language was English. The subject, even with Shakespeare, was the use of power and the beauty of the Queen, and in the history of literature there is no time like the last decade of the sixteenth century when there were so many poets of such surprising talent. An independent nationalist literature began to gain momentum, and printing presses capable of producing several thousand pages a day captured the best writing in broadsides that circulated into the countryside. The printed word became the hot new technology. And the best of it was verse.

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns