English Social and Cultural History: An Introductory Guide and Glossary 9388028856, 9789388028851

Table of contents :
Contents
Contents-1
Contents-2
Contents-3
Contents-4
Contents-5
Contents-6
Contents-7
Chapter-01
Chapter-01-1
Chapter-01-2
Chapter-01-3
Chapter-01-4
Chapter-01-5
Chapter-01-6
Chapter-01-7
Chapter-01-8
Chapter-01-9
Chapter-01-10
Chapter-01-11
Chapter-02
Chapter-02-1
Chapter-02-2
Chapter-02-3
Chapter-02-4
Chapter-02-5
Chapter-02-6
Chapter-02-7
Chapter-02-8
Chapter-02-9
Chapter-02-10
Chapter-02-11
Chapter-02-12
Chapter-02-13
Chapter-02-14
Chapter-02-15
Chapter-02-16
Chapter-02-17
Chapter-02-18
Chapter-02-19
Chapter-02-20
Chapter-02-21
Chapter-03
Chapter-03-1
Chapter-03-2
Chapter-03-3
Chapter-03-4
Chapter-03-5
Chapter-03-6
Chapter-03-7
Chapter-03-8
Chapter-03-9
Chapter-03-10
Chapter-03-11
Chapter-03-12
Chapter-03-13
Chapter-03-14
Chapter-03-15
Chapter-03-16
Chapter-03-17
Chapter-03-18
Chapter-03-19
Chapter-03-20
Chapter-03-21
Chapter-03-22
Chapter-03-23
Chapter-03-24
Chapter-04
Chapter-04-1
Chapter-04-2
Chapter-04-3
Chapter-04-4
Chapter-04-5
Chapter-04-6
Chapter-04-7
Chapter-04-8
Chapter-04-9
Chapter-04-10
Chapter-04-11
Chapter-04-12
Chapter-04-13
Chapter-04-14
Chapter-04-15
Chapter-04-16
Chapter-04-17
Chapter-04-18
Chapter-04-19
Chapter-04-20
Bibliography

Citation preview

ENGLISH SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY An Introductory Guide and Glossary Bibhash Choudhury Associate Professor, Department of English Gauhati University Guwahati New Delhi-110001 2010

ENGLISH SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY: An Introductory Guide and Glossary Bibhash Choudhury © 2005 by PHI Learning Private Limited, New Delhi. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN-978-81-203-2849-5 The export rights of this book are vested solely with the publisher. Seventh Printing . . . . . . August, 2010 Published by Asoke K. Ghosh, PHI Learning Private Limited, M-97, Connaught Circus, New Delhi-110001 and Printed by Mudrak, 30-A, Patparganj, Delhi-110091.

To Harekrishna Deka and Ranjit Kumar Dev Goswami for showing me the way

Contents Preface

1. FROM THE MEDIEVAL TO THE RENAISSANCE Medieval Life and Religion The Church and Medieval Life Faith and Daily Life in Medieval England

Towns and Villages in Medieval England Towns in Medieval England Life in the Villages

Feudalism Definition and Scope Origin and Development The Conquest of 1066 and Feudalism in England The Social Impact of Feudalism

The English Manorial System and Medieval Agriculture The English Manorial System Manorialism and Agriculture in Medieval England

The Black Death and Its Aftermath The Black Death The Impact of Black Death Wycliffe and the Lollards The Peasants’ Revolt

Medieval Drama and Literature Medieval English Theatre Medieval Romance and the ‘Matters’ of Romance Fabliau, Lyric, Dream Allegory and Ballad Chaucer, Gower and Langland

Caxton and the Printing Revolution The Early History of Printing Caxton and Printing in England

The Impact of Printing

The Renaissance The Idea of the Renaissance Renaissance in Italy Painting and Sculpture in Renaissance Italy The Renaissance in the North Renaissance Humanism Capitalism and Trade Exploration and Discovery The Beginnings of Colonialism

The Reformation The Context of the Reformation The Bible and the Reformation Reformation in Europe Reformation in England

Elizabethan Theatre The Elizabethan Theatre and Stage Marlowe and the University Wits Shakespeare and Jonson Webster and Early Stuart Drama

Literature in Renaissance England Early Tudor Poetry and Wyatt and Surrey Spenser and Contemporary Elizabethan Poetry The Elizabethan Sonnet Tradition Elizabethan Prose The Metaphysical Poets

Glossary

2. IN TRANSITION: FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE AGE OF REASON The Restoration Period The Context of the Restoration Restoration Theatre Seventeenth Century Prose: Sprat, Clarendon, and Dryden Milton Women’s Writing in the Seventeenth Century Restoration Court Culture

Scientific Rationalism and the Enlightenment The Intellectual Context of the Scientific Revolution The Scientific Revolution in Europe Enlightenment Ideas and Philosophy British Enlightenment Major Themes of the Enlightenment Enlightenment Radicalism and the State of Women The Basic Features of the Enlightenment Enlightenment and Contemporary Culture Scientific Thought and Rationalism

Art and Literature in the Age of Reason Augustanism Poetry in the Neo-Classical Age: Dryden, Pope, Thomson, and Johnson Defoe and the Rise of the Novel Samuel Johnson’s Circle and Literary Culture

Glossary

3. ENGLISH SOCIETY AND CULTURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Romanticism The Context of Romanticism Romantic Poetry The Novel in the Romantic Period Romantic Prose

The Industrial Revolution The Context of the Industrial Revolution The Growth of Industry in England The Condition of the Working Class in Industrial England Urbanisation

Darwinism Darwin and the Theory of Evolution Social Darwinism Darwinism and English Literature

The Consolidation of the British Empire The First British Empire and Colonial Expansion The Second British Empire The Triumph of Imperialism Empire and Ideology

Democracy and Nationalism The Growth of Nationalism and Democracy Democracy and Victorian Society

Victorianism and Contemporary Society Victorianism Religion in Victorian Society Women’s Lives in the Victorian Age

Victorian Literature The Victorian Novel Poetry in the Victorian Age Victorian Prose

Glossary

4. FROM THE MODERN TO THE POSTMODERN: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND BEYOND The Crisis of Empire and Decolonisation Modernism The Context of Modernism Modern Fiction Modern Poetry Modern Art Modern Drama The Rise of English

Postcolonialism and Literatures in English Defining Postcolonialism Literature in a Postcolonial world

Urbanisation and Lifestyles Urbanisation Marriage, Divorce and Family Life

Literature and Culture in the Postmodern World The Context of Postmodernism Post-War English Fiction The Cultural Turn in Literary Studies Post-War English Poetry Theatre in Post-War England

Media and the Entertainment Industry British Cinema British Television Pop Music

Aspects of Contemporary Culture and Society Popular Culture Globalisation Terrorism and the New World Order Immigration 2 Feminism and Gender Issues

Glossary Bibliography 377–385

Preface Designed to introduce the rich social tapestry of England, this book provides a glimpse of various aspects of English life and culture. The book has four chapters, each with relevant sub-sections addressing the important issues and developments of the period. Chapter 1 covers the period from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and Chapter 2 deals with the Age of Reason. Chapter 3 covers the nineteenth century, and the final chapter traces the developments of the twentieth century. In each chapter, the commentary on the social and cultural developments is followed by a glossary of important terms, events, issues and problems. The major literary characteristics of each age have been briefly sketched to trace the development of the English literary tradition. The terms given in the Glossary explain those issues that require additional commentary and incorporate other aspects of English society which have not been specifically discussed in the chapters. The book is expected to shed light on certain key aspects of English society and culture. Some of the important issues discussed in the book include Feudalism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Postcolonialism, and Post-War British Society. Certain sections in the book provide information on important cultural and social developments, such as Manorialism, Victorianism, British Cinema and Television, Pop Music and Popular Culture. Interesting Glossary items include Church of England, Grammar Schools, Justice of the Peace, the Great Fire of London, the Royal Society, the Condition of English Novel, Trade Unions, Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Football, Screen, and Thatcherism. The book will give essential background information to students of English literature and to anyone interested in knowing about the key aspects of English social and cultural life. The Bibliography at the end will acquaint the readers with important literature on the topics discussed and enable them to delve deep into the subject. Representation of the past can never be comprehensive. This study on some of the important aspects of English society and culture is not only selective but also conditioned by another characteristic, that is, it moves beyond the territorial confines of England during discussions of issues that cannot be accommodated with specifically “English” limits. Especially in the readings

of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, globalisation, terrorism, postcolonialism and postmodern culture, the acknowledgment of crossfertilization of ideas across geographical boundaries necessitated a movement beyond English shores. This book is intended as an important reference for undergraduate honours and postgraduate students of English. I take this opportunity to thank my colleagues at the Department of English, Gauhati University; Mr. S.K. Singh and the entire editorial team of PHI Learning, and Imran and Imdad Hussain of Kitab Bhawan, Guwahati for guiding me in various ways during the writing of this book. I am also grateful to my wife Purabi and son Tuman for their patience and encouragement while I was preparing this study. Bibhash Choudhury Preface

1 From the Medieval to the Renaissance MEDIEVAL LIFE AND RELIGION The Church and Medieval Life Many institutions considered to be part of modern life trace their origins to the medieval period. Organised religion, linguistic systems, the art of dramatic performances, literary and creative art, and the processes related to governmental function are among some of the major features that were either engendered or anticipated in their modern avatars in the Middle Ages. Such a highlighting of the linear connection between modern institutions and their medieval roots does not, however, imply that the period’s ‘darkness’ is a nonexistent designation. The extremely intense and complicated power struggles of the medieval period coexisted with the attempts to structure social life within a more commonly apprehensible design. It is in this context that the Church acquires such importance for medieval man. In the midst of the surrounding chaos, the Church appeared to have offered him an inspiring alternative, one that came to occupy and impinge upon his daily life more and more as the times went by. For many men in the medieval period, the Church did not posit a choice but functioned as a taken-for-granted reality. Most of the codes of conduct drew from the Church’s doctrine and even the technically secular life did not completely veer away from the ideas derived from the scriptural sources. A significant aspect of the influence of the Church in the life of medieval man was that it imposed a sense of order through a belief-system that invited the participants to contribute to its development. So, instead of being a regimented form of governance, the Church conditioned medieval life in a way that provided a structure and a groove within which to function effectively. Obviously, there were resistant voices and alternate motions, but the major part of the medieval period found the organisational attributes of the Church advantageous for social and cultural progress. By the time

Geoffrey Chaucer came to write The Canterbury Tales, the Church was well consolidated. While Chaucer’s narrative satirically portrays the corruption that had steeped deep into the Church, there were external equivalents as well. John Wycliffe and the Lollards present the case for resistance in clear terms. Such examples suggest that the Church’s position in the Middle Ages, in England as well as mainstream Europe, was going through a process of consolidation, affirmation and decline. By the time the light of the Renaissance dispelled the ‘darkness’ of the Middle Ages, the Church had made a very interesting circle. In a way, the Church was one of the progenitors of the Renaissance pursuit; the Church was the only legitimate and accessible domain that nourished the young novitiates which gradually moved beyond the purely spiritual. One of the difficulties involved in isolating the religious from the secular in medieval society is the complexity of the Church’s penetration into the apparently non-religious domain. Various medieval agencies are indicators of this subtle engagement where secular activities were often perpetrated by the religious institutional apparatus, while people came to subscribe to the Church’s way without question. Even when there were resistances like those of the Lollards, the centrality of faith in man’s existence was not the question. If there were debates about the functioning of the Church, it also suggested how the house of faith had enlarged its range to encompass resistances about its conduct. Various craft guilds, for instance, did function in a secular capacity, but this was never in opposition to the medieval Church. It is important for us to recognise that religious faith and secularism in the medieval period was not a clearly posited either-or binary construction but a very enabling correspondence. The overwhelming influence exerted by the Church upon medieval man’s existence was not confined to his spiritual inclination alone. The Church was an institution of extremely rewarding privileges—its members enjoyed social, political, and spiritual clout that did not have its equal in any other profession. The professional benefits associated with the Church resulted in the exercise of power across its ranks, a condition that drew both reverence and fear from the lay people who looked up to it. The power and charisma of the Church were integrally connected with the needs and aspirations of the communities. Various agencies and modes of appropriation contributed to the wide-ranging influence of the Church. For example, preaching and scriptural

readings, group reading exercises in households and monasteries, storytelling and palm-reading activities during feast and festival days, enactment of chosen episodes from the Bible, permeation of saints’ lives etc. were some of the potent and lasting procedures that worked to engage the medieval mind. Earthly and heavenly considerations were drawn as stark states where the latter was privileged and hence, in most of the medieval literature, this conflict found ample narrative space. Usually, such narratives concerned the conflicting interests that pertained to the known material world and the aspired for celestial realm, as the Church posited a spiritual alternative and promise of a rewarding afterlife to medieval man, which appeared to determine his material interests greatly. One of the primary reasons for the growth of the Church was its wealth as it regularly received gifts, especially land and property, apart from the tithe (the tenth part of an individual’s income), which was mandatory for every member of the Church.

Faith and Daily Life in Medieval England One of the marked features of religious conduct affecting domestic life in England can be seen in the prevalence of ceremony in almost all social and cultural institutions. It was believed that ‘conduct’ was of great importance for proper living. The presence of such a ritualistic paradigm suggests the influence of not just the Church but also of the ideas associated with spirituality which were disseminated through other agencies such as the monasteries and nunneries and other forms of medieval literature. Conduct was, therefore, closely associated with some form of supernatural sanction and belief. The insistence of proper conduct in life and its relation to its spiritual after-effects is best illustrated by a play like Everyman where morality and the condition of a spiritual future are interrelated. Although the ceremonial aspect was extremely influential in directing conduct, it was a deterrent to the manifestations of violence and crime that prevailed in medieval English society. One way of dissuading a potential offender was to socially ostracise that person but it was usually overcome through means of corruption which involved bribing the relevant Church officials. The Church was the single most influential and powerful institution in medieval England. It worked to integrate belief, practice and daily conduct in a way that was socially sanctioned and settled. The association of the State and the Church,

however contentious, was nevertheless a coercive apparatus which also worked to direct and oversee conduct in social life. The Church used lively and vivid representations to impress the Biblical stories as well as the saints’ legends, doctrines of the Trinity, and other scriptural materials. Such endeavours were remarkably practical and dependent on the pattern of social structure and custom which was, perhaps, responsible for the variations that existed in, for example, East Anglia and London. More than the scriptural teachings, it was the sacraments that brought faith and daily conduct together. The body of beliefs, known as the holy sacraments, directed man in his domestic life as he seriously believed in their authenticity. For medieval man, the Church provided a systemic apparatus which not only facilitated smooth functioning but also offered a promise that could be availed through a disciplined following of its rules. Discipline was enforced by the Church through a very well worked out mechanism which was within the purview of the ecclesiastical courts. The pervasive influence of the system of faith in the Middle Ages was evident in various ways. Medieval man’s recognition of this influence was inextricably linked with the realities of the system of belief where the condition of afterlife was of great importance. The sacraments were part of a Christian’s life from birth to the grave. A birth was immediately ordained by a baptism ceremony and marriages were similarly blessed, while the sacrament of extreme unction functioned to facilitate the spiritual passage from a material life. The symbolism of the sacraments were, however, conditioned by their effectiveness in suggesting to the laity the need for such ordered conduct for a better life afterwards. The indoctrination, thus, had a practicality that encompassed the medieval people’s lives in an unalterable bind. It is remarkable that what was intended to be a more symbolic function than a literal one became a fetish. The rituals also developed into neat formulas to enable a superstition-prone public to adhere to practices ordained by the Church for material prosperity. The Church used its authority to discipline people who were likely to fall prey to the materialistic temptations. The medieval times witnessed a very powerful priest even though he was usually a commoner. Serfs and villeins however, were not permitted to join the priestly class as their manorial duties bound them to the land. The priest officiated at almost every religious activity concerning medieval man— births, weddings, deaths, and during sicknesses. The mode of his income was

determined by the fees received from parish lands, and tithe money. The manorial lord was technically responsible for the upkeep and protection of the parish priest. While tithe money was a source of income for the priest, it was an important revenue-raising mechanism of the Church. Under the tithing process every person was expected to give 1/10th of their income to the Church. The fund generated by this mode was traditionally divided between the parish priest, the Church, the bishop and the poor. Besides the Church, the religious functions of the medieval period in England, was conducted by the various orders as well as by the monasteries, nunneries, and the friars. The monasteries and the nunneries were quite independent institutions with remarkable reach and following. They were not only wealthy but also influential in guiding public opinion. The dissolution of the monasteries was done for both economic and political reasons, which indicate the power and control exercised by these institutions in medieval man’s life.

TOWNS AND VILLAGES IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND Towns in Medieval England The relationship of the town to medieval man’s daily life was a symbiotic one. Following the Norman Conquest, there was a spurt in the growth of towns as the new rulers encouraged a more sophisticated urbanised lifestyle. At the centre of the town lay the commercial hub, the market place, which was a major source of social, economic and political intercourse. Many of the medieval towns in England became specialised centres (a phenomenon common to almost all European towns) as trade interests determined the growth of commercial institutions like guilds, while merchants lobbied for better business opportunities, thereby, influencing the pattern of urban development. The best example of rapid expansion can be seen in the case of London. The Norman Conquest is an important milestone in the history of London, as William the Conqueror was crowned king on Christmas Day, in the year of the Conquest itself, at Westminster Abbey. The new king developed London’s condition by erecting new constructions, the most remarkable of which was the castle built in the southeast which was eventually transformed into the Tower of London by subsequent monarchs. The Tower of London became a very important strategic centre and served as the residence of the king. The use of the Tower for the purpose of imprisonment was not initiated until later. The importance of the Tower can also be gauged from the fact that it was a multi-purpose building housing the royal mint, treasury, and even a zoo in its early stages. By 1097 however, with the construction of the Westminster Hall, there was a slight shift in emphasis as the new Hall and the Abbey began to emerge as an important political centre. The influence of the merchants in medieval politics can be seen in the right granted by Henry I, the king after William, to them to elect a sheriff and impose taxes on its citizens. One feature of medieval London was the prevalence of monasteries which have bequeathed a legacy of place names such as Greyfriars, Whitefriars, and Blackfriars. With the building of the first stone London Bridge in 1176 (which remained the only one in London till 1739), there was the introduction of another passageway but its narrowness congested its traffic and many still preferred a row across the river than a movement by road. In 1192, the first Mayor of London, Henry

Fitzailwyn, was elected. Another construction which was a part of the medieval life was the Old St. Paul’s Cathedral which was completed in 1280. The association of London with the English Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 saw the stabbing of Wat Tyler to death, at Smithfield, by the Mayor William Walworth; the Revolt also served as a great opportunity for Londoners to air their civic grievances to Richard II and it was around this time that the city got a major uplift. The houses in medieval London were made of half-timber, or wattle and daub while a lime whitewash was common. Such houses were obviously susceptible to fire, but in spite of this threat, straw-roofing was not abandoned. A major fire in 1087 brought down many of London’s wooden houses and also the Old St. Paul’s Cathedral. While stone and tile houses appeared following the disaster, wooden houses still remained the primary type of dwelling for Londoners. The Lord Mayor and a council based on members elected from the merchant guilds formed the administrative body responsible for policy-making in London. The guilds were extremely powerful in that they dictated and determined both economic and administrative policies. The guilds were distinguished from one another by their own halls and coat of arms. There was, however, the Guildhall (141140) which functioned as the meeting-place for the representatives of the different guilds. The streets of medieval England had names which were derived from specific trade practices in those streets. For example, the Threadneedle Street (specialised for tailors), Bread Street (bakeries), and Milk Street (commerce based on milk produce). Another reality, stemming from lack of proper sanitation facilities, was the plague. There were sixteen plague attacks upon London, from the Black Death to the Great Plague of 1665. London’s posh locality in the medieval period was the Strand which housed the rich while the Temple and Fleet Street became the favourite place for lawyers. London was one of the major cities in medieval Europe and also a very significant trade centre. Its growth in the medieval period can be attributed to both the commercial and political conditions of that time. Cities other than London also had a prosperous run in the medieval period which obviously depended to a great extent upon the intensity and nature of the trade it specialised in. A town like Coventry was a thriving trade centre as it specialised in wool and cloth and became one of the wealthiest urban localities in medieval England. St Mary’s Hall in Coventry is one reminder of

the medieval communal life, a clue suggestive of the importance of business for urban growth. One peculiarity of Coventry was that although medieval business in cloth and wool contributed to the decline in its fortunes, unlike other towns, there was hardly any rebuilding process undertaken until the eighteenth century. Town life in medieval England was dominated by the merchant class and the emphasis on trade routes, conditions, and commercial intercourse is indisputable. The medieval merchant not only dominated the commercial activities of the town but also influenced popular and administrative opinion. Merchant guilds were in control of the town administration even though they had to compete with craft guilds. The prosperity of the town was necessary for mercantilist reasons and as such the tradesmen mobilised themselves behind the royalty for a controlled administration of the medieval urban centres. The king granted town charters which contributed to the coffers of the king. The growth of the medieval merchant eventually affected the manorial system which led to the collapse of the feudal order. If feudalism was the primary economic and social structure of the early Middle Ages, it was gradually overwhelmed by growing urbanisation of the later period, although it was never a direct swap. The merchant guilds were responsible for commerce and trade in the towns. The guilds determined the policies of trade and each merchant guild had its own specific style of functioning. The merchant guilds in the medieval town faced stiff competition from the craft guilds which had artisans and craftsmen as its members. Craft guilds had a three-tier structure with masters, journeymen, and apprentices. Generally, the townspeople were free individuals, a factor which was sufficient enough for the serfs to seek refuge in the towns. Medieval roads were narrow and congestion and encroachment were common features associated with them. The congestion of the streets of the medieval town was emblematic of another serious characteristic—that of sanitation. Often the open drains overflowed and filth came over to the streets. The problem was further aggravated by the tendency of the townsfolk to empty their garbage onto the streets. Such a lack of concern for cleanliness, undoubtedly, contributed to the consistency with which plague visited England even after the end of the medieval period. A significant feature of the medieval town was the constant intercourse that took place between the people representing a wide social spectrum. The

medieval town became the site of regular exchange between tradespeople and other members of the community. People would buy and sell products and engage in other trade relations which were not always of the same intensity. During plagues, for instance the regular spate was affected, or during social unrest as in the time of the Peasants’ Revolt. Each town had its own form and pattern of functioning depending on the population, demography, size, trade specialisation, and location. Town life throughout medieval Europe was characterised by incessant travelling by both tradesfolk and common people. People connected with the court—John of Gaunt and Geoffrey Chaucer are two famous examples—had regular access to urban cultures of different European towns. Travelling also facilitated a cross-fertilisation of social customs and modes. The bustle of a town in medieval Europe would not be same in say, places as diverse as Coventry or Venice. The high buildings and planned streets and lanes in some may not hold true for its next urban settlement. One way of tracing the development of the medieval town in England is to understand the features of boroughs. A borough was a site where burgage tenure determined the holding of land, which was indeed free insofar that it involved a fixed money rent, and tenants had the right to deal with it in the way that suited them best. Such a transactional framework provided by the burgage tenure system was conducive to the growth of trade and commerce. The governance of a town required funds for administrative and civic purposes and not all newly urbanised centres could flourish with their own resources, at least when it was still developing its trade relations with others. A town like Birmingham in the medieval period was hardly more elaborate than a village, and the fact that it was not granted a town charter suggested that official recognition was not there. Birmingham, however, was still one of the important marketplaces since it produced cloth (a major trade item in the medieval period), had inns that flourished, dealt with tanned leather, and carried out fish trade. Wool provided it a commercial platform to invite tradespeople from other centres. Thus, unlike the typical medieval village, Birmingham was diversifying in areas that were not related to an agriculturebased economy alone. The parish Church and the marketplace were busy centres of social intercourse and in spite of the fact that a charter was not granted, manorial lords here gave the tenants to control property through burgage tenure, a condition that provided Birmingham the structure of a

regular medieval town. It would also be misleading to assume that only towns were concerned with trade; rural England, especially following the agricultural revolution, had quite vibrant yet locally structured commercial interests. If a town was distinguished from a medieval village, the focus in an urban centre was more heightened and intense and given to interests that moved beyond purely localised concerns. Around seven hundred towns were flourishing in the fourteenth century although the growth pattern showed notable differences. Such a figure associated with urban development interestingly points toward a burgeoning economy, one that was gradually but inevitably transforming the social structure as well. Urbanisation in England can be traced to centuries prior to the medieval period, even though the emergence of the mercantilist class in Chaucer’s time was responsible for expediting the phenomenon. Towns became more noticeable and its prevalence became the natural fallout of the change in the economic condition of medieval England. By the late Middle Ages there emerged different types of towns based on the extent, population, trade, and cultural prominence—at the peak of the hierarchy stood London which was followed by important centres like Bristol, York, Norwich, Exeter, and Shrewsbury. The towns were also distinguished by an economic class stratification which determined the width of the gap between the rich and the poor depending on the nature of the town. The towns in medieval England underwent a very slow process of growth and that too was uneven and influenced by many local factors. The role of the king in determining the status of a borough or town was seen in the form of a royal sanction or recognition; royal sanction was associated with the protective function and the town’s resources could be used by the royal administration for the sake of the country’s integrity, defence and revenue. As in the case with feudalism and the manor, technically, a borough existed because the king willed it and granted it the royal privilege. Settlement in a borough thus provided the family certain benefits and advantages which were not available to a resident outside it. The walls of a town were peculiarly associated with the idea of freedom of the serfs i.e. any serf that managed to spend without being recognised within the limits of a town for at least a year and a day was recognised to be a free individual. This was because the dwellers of a town were supposed to have a dignified life without being bound to any other individual. As the boroughs in medieval England grew,

the pressures of the population started impacting its development which is best evidenced in the way the towns adjusted to the demands of expansion. At the centre of the medieval town lay the market which gradually changed site from the street to the square specially developed for the purpose of trade and transaction. Market day was an important social and commercial mechanism through which transactions were made. This was also the opportunity for many villagers to bring their produce to the market (or their manorial lords’). The markets did not expand suddenly but were influenced by both money-flow and the nature of mercantilism that affected a particular town. In other words, the markets were an important barometer to measure the economic pulse of a medieval English town. In the absence of a proper banking system, money and finances were regulated to a great extent by the Jews in medieval England. The major trading centres usually had a Jewish settlement which had the sanction of the king. The emergence of the Jews in medieval England as the controllers of economic resources was related to the fact that Christians desisted from usury since it was forbidden by the Church. As trade and commerce expanded, business interests grew and the requirements of infrastructure constantly demanded a regular flow of capital; with no other source than the Jews from which to meet the demand for finances (in spite of the high interest rates) these financers flourished as the market grew. The growth of trade and the demand for capital added a new dimension to the image of a Jew—a ruthless capitalist who was both hated and needed for his wealth. The Jews in England were an alienated class, neither fully accepted by the English nor accommodated within the framework of society. The prominence of the Jewish moneylenders diverted attention from the fact that many Jews had nothing to do with business and led humble lives, where scholarship and study of religion occupied their time. The presence of the Jewish moneylenders in the medieval English town suggests the disorganised pattern of financial transactions of those times, and while they were fleeced for their capital formation capacity by the royalty, it is also a reminder of the fact that a suitable economic structure did not exist in medieval England.

Life in the Villages The condition of rural life in medieval England was based on a feudal

economy. The life of the countryman was controlled by the necessities and customs associated with the manor. In the two centuries following the Norman Conquest, there was the growth of manorial life where a lord was the master with tenants under him. The relation between a lord and his tenants was determined by the factors of land and labour. The existence of a manor in a particular locality signified the presence of a man of nobility, often a feudal lord, who also arbitrated upon legal matters and the disputes relating to the community. A manor was the basic economic unit of rural life. All the tenants of a manor regularly gave attendance in the lord’s court and their duties were assigned in accordance with the manorial requirements and customs. The centrality of the manor was responsible for integrating the people in a village or villages into a cohesive communal unit. The unification of the manor and the village was not always a coincident fact, for a village had other agencies and institutions such as its own forest land, the village Church and organised streets or lanes. The stratification of the villagers into a complex class structure was a highlight of rural life in medieval England. The Domesday Book refers to the existence of slaves, a class of individuals inferior to the villeins, but by the beginning of the thirteenth century the presence of this class had disappeared. The many gradations of labourers and freemen suggest that the class-relations in the medieval villages were specifically worked out. The most prominent class in the medieval villages was that of the villeins. A villein was not a free individual but he held land from the manorial lord for both cultivation and pasturing purposes. A full villein usually held a virgate or yardland, an early English land measure. The villein was required to till the demesne with his own farm equipments for either two or three days (depending on the tradition prevalent in a particular manor) a week. Apart from owing his lord a land service, which was customary, a villein was required to carry out cartage or perform carrying duties; during harvest time he had to provide additional service, which was extended to periods of haymaking and sheep-rearing. The demand of the villein’s service during such occasions was immense as he had to attend to the needs of his immediate family as well. Another pressure on the villein was the duty of a seasonal tribute which he had to pay during special occasions, such as Easter, or on other specifically allotted functions. The villein was bound to the lord in another way that he had to grind his corn and bake his bread in the lord’s mill and oven respectively, for which he was

required to pay a fixed sum. There were other forms of payments as well which the villein was required to pay the lord: (a) Merchet: The sum a villein had to give to his lord—whenever his daughter was married outside the manor, during his son’s entry into school, and when he chose to have a transaction involving his beast. (b) Heriot: A payment made on the villein’s death by his kin, which was usually the best beast. (c) Relief: A payment made by the villein’s heir to get the holding from his predecessor, which otherwise went directly to the king, who technically held all land; relief sums were not fixed and involved bargaining. (d) Mortuary: The payment given to the Church on the death of the villein, often in the form of the second-best beast. The villein’s binding to the lord was a personal one and the only way he could obtain his freedom was by escaping the manor or by being admitted to holy orders. The regimentation of the villeinage slackened after the Black Death, and the growth of towns and agricultural reforms led to its transformation to a copyhold by the 16th century. The copyhold became standard form of land holding following the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt as the villein possessed a copy of his new position. The copyholders were still required to pay a rent to the manorial lord but the services associated with villeinage were gradually dispensed with. It was only in 1928 that the Parliament terminated the copyholding practice in England. Another version of the medieval villein could be seen in the class of bordars. A bordar was a villein who possessed a cottage and a small plot of land (granted by the lord) and he was subjected to a regimen of menial labour dictated by the lord. The possession was dependent upon the pleasure of the manorial lord and in actual terms there wasn’t much of a difference between a bordar and a cottar. The cottar, too, was an unfree man holding attached land for which he had to serve the lord by some form of labour. All tenants in the medieval village were not subject to the rules of the villeinage. There were rent-paying tenants who were not burdened by the load of weekly service; some of them could hire labour for their own needs. There also existed a system of villein transfer in medieval England. Some manorial lords ‘gifted’ villeins to another, which was usually in the form of a substitution. Technically, the villein was bound to his native manor and the adoption of any other form of livelihood than the

one prescribed was forbidden. A villein’s life was undoubtedly a harsh one and his future was uncertain. A consequence of the dismantling of the medieval villeinage can be seen in the emergence of the yeoman, whose plight, though not exceedingly better, showed that the changes in medieval England’s rural structure were being manifested in social stratification as well.

FEUDALISM Definition and Scope At its most elementary level a fee or fief (in Latin feudum) was a contract where two parties exchanged service for some form of material value. This value could be in different forms: land (which was most commonly accepted), revenue collected in various ways through tolls and taxation, or an annual amount given in return for service rendered. Such exchanges were often politically motivated and lopsided in terms of its transactional value. Any possessor of land in the Middle Ages was extremely revered and such a possession brought with it both power and other social privileges. As a term, ‘feudalism’ is fraught with complications. There is considerable debate among historians about the efficacy of the term, primarily because it has been seen to suggest a variety of social, political, cultural and economic structures, while views about its focal concern remains unsettled. In conventional usage, feudalism involved the functions of justice, taxation, defence, economic privileges, and social recognition in a system of power relations in medieval society. One of the political implications of the term is that in the Middle Ages feudalism consolidated into an elaborate system of governance and power where private lords exercised their authority. The impact of this authority extended beyond their own individual households or social groups. It is also suggestive of the growing decentralisation of political governance that determined the administrative systems of the Middle Ages. By the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries feudalism emerged as one of the dominant ideologies that shaped and structured medieval man’s social, economic and political life. One of the most potent effects of feudalism was that it served as a justification for the functioning of a hierarchical order. This order was based on a scale of subordination, the head of which was the king. The acceptance of land constituted an important aspect of the feudal relationship as it was associated with service and reward. In some cases, the individual who received such gifts was recognised as a ‘vassal’ (from Celtic meaning ‘boy’), who owed allegiance to his patron. More than the terms associated with feudalism, it was the relationships that hierarchically structured the medieval society and organised the social paradigm for the purposes of governance.

While many of these politically-guided relationships grew to involve personal loyalties, it also suggests that the absence of a proper centralising authority (as evident in the modern world) granted to these feudal ‘lords’ power that was unprecedented in European history. On the other hand this system did not evolve through a process that could handle systemic shocks adequately. It often resulted in the wielding of excessive authority by some of these lords while many of their peers exerted only marginal or local influence.

Origin and Development Feudalism emerged in medieval Europe during the eighth century where almost independent principalities fought amongst one another for political control. Ownership of land and property was closely associated with power and authority. Such developments in the eighth and ninth centuries did not take place suddenly; the process of rewarding a worthy subject for his services had been in existence much before the institutionalisation of feudalism in medieval Europe. The growing authority of the nobles in European monarchies is related to weakening of the central power-centres in the major European states. The possession of land was exploited to engineer groups of retainers who could be utilised for military services whenever the need arose. The king and the lords not only availed of their own lands but also distributed the lands under the Church in order to extend their range of command. Following divisions of the Carolingian Empire, after the death of Charlemagne in 814, there emerged various local power centres that posed a serious challenge to the Roman authority. The consolidation of power in the hands of lords and chieftains was primarily determined by the nature of their land-holdings. The system, however, was far from simple. It gradually developed into a hierarchical system where smaller landowners owed allegiance to ones more powerful than them, which eventually extended to the king. Technically, then, the feudal system in medieval Europe was still under monarchical control; but this system was not administratively enjoined to follow just one regimen. It was, therefore, subject to the local conditions where the lords’ exercise of power accommodated various specific factors that took account of individual situations in greater detail. Such a system was facilitated, amongst other things, by the weak administrations of medieval

towns and boroughs which came under the control of the nobles and lords. Sometimes such control was directly authorised by the king, who found this to be a very effective mechanism to quell revolt and also to dispense with a very expensive administrative budget. Paradoxically, medieval towns grew commercially and experienced unprecedented trade relations with other urban centres through the zeal of the feudal lords. It is perhaps the economic bulwark of the feudal order that contributed to the influence of the manorial system, which exercised significant political and social clout in medieval society. By the time Chaucer was composing The Canterbury Tales, the feudal structure had undergone significant changes. For instance, while the feudal engagement extended to the Church in the eleventh and the twelfth centuries, its slackening hold could also be attributed to the changing relations the knights had with the central governmental authority. By the fourteenth century, the salaried officials of the monarchy tried to circumvent the nobility’s overarching power paradigm by relying on a set of rules and processes that had the royal sanction. This was a significant development as the very genesis of feudalism in England was based on William the Conqueror’s strategy to derive the allegiance from his nobles (who were also potential political rivals) through which he sought to pacify them by granting them a very carefully orchestrated political control in the provinces and localities they operated in. All these nobles, following William’s political domination over the English, therefore, were important contributors to the consolidation of the Norman kingdom. However, this very process of consolidation that worked so well in the early years of the Norman Conquest, did not serve the same political purpose in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By 1485, when Richard III was vanquished by Henry Tudor in a decisive battle that settled the dynastic line of English monarchy, feudalism had moved beyond its best days. In terms of the English situation feudalism can be conveniently signposted within two remarkable historical battles— those of 1066 and 1485. We also need to recognise that the English version had its own practical and native conditions to account for, which contributed towards its peculiar demographical orientation. The secularisation of the social format in the Tudor period—especially in the opening up of the vocational opportunities—saw to the early collapse of the rigid feudal structure in England. Obviously, any historical straitjacketing involves the

ironing out of distinctively mannered characteristics, and the 1066–1485 division, therefore, should not be taken to suggest a distinct positional change in the social organisation, at least not literally. What is clearer, however, is that within a century of William the Conqueror’s settlement in English soil, the feudal structure had consolidated itself pretty well; on the other hand, by the time Black Death wrought its havoc on the English public, the demands of the changing political, economic, and social conditions saw to the modification of the feudal organisation. Thus, the feudal framework that William the Conqueror adopted for strategic purposes had exhausted its scope soon enough, and while it continued to serve as the foundation for the maintenance of the system, local pressures brought about inevitable changes —changes that were perhaps not envisaged by William in 1066.

The Conquest of 1066 and Feudalism in England William the Conqueror’s conquest of 1066 was a landmark event in many respects. The pressures of military control over a people ready to challenge the authority required immense tact and diplomatic acumen. William knew very well that he did not have the resources or adequate knowledge about local habits and customs; moreover, the first priority was settlement and control over the people who had offered resistance under the English King. The battle of Hastings went in William’s favour but the matter of managing the resources of his new dominion, and both his own men and the local resistances, proved to be engaging tasks that continued for quite some time. One of the ways in which William sought to dissipate the potential rivalries within his own fold was the adoption of the feudal structure. The feudal structure enabled him to negotiate strategic deals with his compatriots through a resource that he did not bring from Normandy, i.e., land, a resource that pacified the competitors and gave him the power to distribute. So, initially, the nature of feudalism in England was based on the power equations that existed between the nobles and their retainers. The feudal pyramid that was thus formed had the monarch at the top with each layer imposing the pressure it felt from above. The Norman lords functioned with considerable independence and as they experimented with the governmental machinery they contributed to the formation of the medieval social norms. Initially, the nobles’ feudal relation with the king was essentially based on

military function. It is also noteworthy that many of the nobles that came to England with William were conversant with the feudal codes and systemic requirements because feudalism was a thriving social and political apparatus in Normandy. In a way, then, the people who first brought the feudal system to England were not novices trying out a new experiment in governance. What was new, however, was the people and culture that the Normans sought to govern through a system that was thriving in Continental Europe. There was another significant difference between the system’s functioning in other European countries and England. When William decided to adopt the feudal structure for his English subjects, initially primarily for the purpose of governance, he devised it as a central mechanism where more and more administrative power was vested in the higher echelons of the political pyramid. In European practice, there was comparatively a greater degree of decentralisation. William drew on the existing English social structure which suited his scheme very well. The adaptations that followed eventually shaped the pattern of English society. The functioning of the feudal system in England was essentially military even though the subtle power relations that it gradually came to implicate involved serious lobbying within the elite pressure centres. One of the areas where the effect of such a situation was most discernible was the Church. The English bishops and abbots, most of who held considerable landed property, were assigned fixed knight-service allowance for their assets. This goes to show that although a bishop was not part of the real politick of the country, the system’s pervasive pressures came to implicate him also. The relation of land and feudalism was exploited by William in the way he insisted the allegiance of all landowners to the royalty. In another development, that suggested the fusion of the Carolingian process and the English one, William retained the sheriff’s office and service to monitor and administer his diktat, even though he was an essentially English functionary. William and his lineage, thus, showed great political acumen which they combined with a quickly assimilated knowledge of local conditions. Such a combined procedure contributed to the emergence of the English version of feudalism. Immediately following William, at least till the fifteenth century, the feudal structure consolidated in England. The monarchical system in these centuries, after the Norman Conquest, was based on the adoption of feudalism. An important aspect of the feudal structure of society in England, after 1066,

relates to the functionality of the structure, its political and strategic necessity, and the immediate need of William to quell any potential resistance that could have led to social fragmentation. It is important to recognise that the feudal stratification was initially both strategic and an economic requirement; it was a pay-off for services rendered and handing out of administrative tokens. Technically, therefore, the king was recognised as the arbiter and controller of assets (though in individual occupation), and the owners of these assets were eventually answerable to the king. By the time of Henry I (1100–1135), the feudal structure was fully in place and was acquiring a professionalism that was unprecedented in England.

The Social Impact of Feudalism The feudal system in England, even though it was initiated as a political strategy and necessity, came to impact the societal functions of the ordinary Englishman in a big way. The first significant effect of feudalism is related to the imposition of order on a chaotic society. The system was essentially one where the serfs, villeins, vassals and their lords were contracted to one another. The contract was based on the concept of returns for service rendered. It was not uncommon for the retainers of a particular lord to shift to another base where the situation was more lucrative. But the manner in which the system worked, there existed a bonding between the serf and his lord which was not dictated by monetary needs alone. Since a period of time was spent with a master, the serf found it convenient to stick to the same lord; moreover, any shift was unlikely to result in large scale transformation of the serf’s fortunes. In effect, there was a gelling purpose that feudalism, which though not part of the original design, was a major social development. Another effect of this process of bonding was that it helped preserve the idea of centralised kingship at a time when the administration was considerably controlled by independent lords. Many of the lords were extremely powerful but still they did not move out of the system of allegiance to the king. In that sense the authority of the king was represented by the members of society who had no direct business with the monarch. It was to this condition of the monarch’s consolidation, through a system of feudal allegiance, that Henry II referred to when he tried to go against Thomas Becket’s logic of the Church’s supremacy in the twelfth century. Although originally, William I used

feudalism in England to provide a sense of independence to his nobles, it worked out very well as a mechanism that facilitated the supreme authority of the monarch. The second major impact of feudalism could be seen in the functioning of the Church. William and his followers realised that the support of the English Church was extremely important for securing the confidence and allegiance of the people. That is why large tracts of land and other property were granted to the Church as gifts. Such largesse carried with it the responsibility that ordinarily bound a serf to his lord. While as an institution the Church was technically independent of monarchical control, the official of the clergy was related to the lord in the same way a vassal was if he held fief under him. There was, however, a significant difference between the holding of land by a Church official and a vassal in that the official held land in his capacity as clergyman while the vassal was individually responsible for the condition of the fief he had. In the event of the death of a vassal without heirs, for instance, the fief reverted to his lord; a similar consequence befalling a Church official did not alter the land’s relation to the Church which still exercised control over it. This was an extremely fruitful mechanism as it enabled the Church to grow and control property. While the Church initially had a relation of allegiance to its political authority, such a relation was not sustainable as the centuries went by because the Church by itself rapidly grew into a very dominant power-centre. The function and authority of the Church in medieval society made it impossible for the political centres to demand an allegiance similar to the ones it received from secular individuals. Interestingly, this development was socially sanctioned and recognised as important for the church’s resources.

THE ENGLISH MANORIAL SYSTEM AND MEDIEVAL AGRICULTURE The English Manorial System The manorial system in England and other parts of central and Western Europe involved the structure of medieval economy, the head of which was the landlord. Landholding was the primary source of the lord’s power and prestige on the basis of which he commanded and organised his tenants. The manorial lord was not just the economic arbiter of his tenant’s resources (including labour), but was also responsible for legal matters pertaining to his manor. The tenant, who was usually the landless labourer or peasant, could return his lord’s obligation in any of the following three forms: service (often termed corvée), produced matter, or money. The rendering of service was the most commonly adopted mode of transaction between the manorial lord and his peasant. The English form was adopted from the French version which was already in existence when the Normans came to England. Although there isn’t much variation between the English and the French variety, there existed considerable flexibility in the way the new landowners went about negotiating the land settlements with their new English subjects. One peculiarity of the English landholding system was that by 1087 at least 17% of the land was held by the king. This condition added another dimension to the entire landholding process, for it made the manorial supervisors who conducted the dealings on behalf of the king extremely powerful. The English manor was the central economic paradigm that had its impact on all aspects of medieval life. Methods of agricultural farming, peasant life and social formations, or the relationships between the various social classes, were all implicated by the manorial system. It is, however, important to recognise that the manor’s functions and systemic requirements transformed as the centuries progressed. Since the system was closely associated with landholding and asset management, the landowner occupied a position of power which was related to the farming potential of his agricultural property. Usually a large landowner supported and patronised several hundred manors —the size of which varied from 350 to 5000 acres each; a small landowner could, on the other hand, be in possession of just a single manor. It was a

network of relationships that implicated the social stratification and dictated the affairs among the lords and the vassals. The term ‘domain’ was used to signify the manor(s) used by the lord for his needs. Even though the manor served as the residential quarters of the lord and his family and relatives, it was also the controlling centre in terms of the economic and social activities of the people who lived there. The residents of the manor included, besides the lord’s immediate family members, a number of retainers and dependents who served there in different allotted capacities. This was both a professional and a personal arrangement that had significant social ramifications. At the same time, this was also a two-way process as the lord was equally dependent on his retainers and vassals for the successful working of the manor. While the feudal relations in medieval society were primarily organised along military lines, the central principle that governed the manorial system was economic and agricultural. The relation between the lord and his peasants was organised on the basis of the concept of self-sufficiency. Both parties felt that they were giving the other the best deal. One of the controlling strategies involving the peasant’s loyalty to his lord was associated with the way ideology functioned. Many of the peasants in medieval Europe sincerely believed that they were indeed privileged to be able to serve their lords. This was a process of indoctrination that worked for generations. The demesne, or the location of the master’s manor, housed besides the estate, barns, mill, bake-house, stables and a general cook-house. The organisation of a medieval manor was extremely systematic and the work and functions of its residents were clearly delineated. There was thus a process of networking which made the administration of the manor smoother. But an English manor was not just the immediate campus, it also included an elaborate cultural and social system that functioned to emphasise its effectiveness. The immediate household of the lord, which was actually a sprawling campus, with allotted space to all its inhabitants, was simply one constituent of the manorial system. The lord was also responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the local church, the tenants’ lodgings (usually huts), the priest’s house, and the vicinity that developed as a consequence of such settlements. The lord was the master who possessed lands and meadows, the common for pasture, and it was his sole discretion to disburse parts of these possessions as he considered appropriate. The people who owed allegiance to and derived their daily bread from a particular manor were controlled by the norms set by

the manorial lord. While these norms were not in opposition to the laws in existence throughout England, there was considerable scope for flexibility. The structure of each manor therefore differed, which was also affected by the demands of the location; the administrative functionaries of each manor, though predictable in their occupations, adapted to the requirements of the manor. This scope for customised attention to manorial needs suggests that there existed remarkable freedom within a manor regarding its conduct. Usually the land under a typical manor was structured under the following three heads: (i) Demesne: This was the term used to describe land under the direct occupation of the lord who used it primarily for his own personal needs, including farming; the farming was done by dependents who either stayed in the lord’s household or were hired specifically for the purpose. The demesne was also extremely privileged as a plot for its logistical reasons as well as agricultural ones. The quality and the extent of a demesne contributed to the lord’s standing in the highly competitive medieval society and were often seen as a measure of the manor’s strength. (ii) Dependent land: The land that the peasant farmed on but which was owned by the manorial lord. Usually, in lieu of the land made available for cultivation, the peasant had to give labour service to his lord. The terms and manner of this service were determined by the lord. The dependent land was usually part of the field system from which the lord granted the peasants a share. (iii) Free peasant land: This was the land that didn’t technically belong to the manorial lord but was subject to the manorial laws and customs. This situation in most cases was observed during the early years of manorialism. These peasants were not under allegiance to the lord like his fellow-serfs but any decision that applied for the lord’s serfs worked in these portions as well. Within a manorial system such free holdings weren’t much and this was only to be expected given its extent and reach in medieval England.

Manorialism and Agriculture in Medieval England

In most cases the lord preferred the best portion of the landed assets, whether it was farm land or the village common. The land was portioned in terms of strips which were then distributed. One of the ways of separating these land divisions was through the process of erecting sod ridges. An indication of the sense of community that the manorial members exhibited can be discerned from the sharing of plough animals when each individual did not possess his own. The most common process of dividing the land was to structure it as a two-field or three-field planting format that allowed the remaining land to be kept fallow as well as preventing the potentialities of the cultivated land from exhausting itself. This system, known as the open field system, evolved immensely since the Norman invasion. The open field system was a major change from the farming methods of the ninth century when there were many independent landowning farmers who cultivated individually. Such a method, though rewarding to the farmer, involved a cumbersome rent collection system for the manorial lord. By the tenth century, many of these independent land holdings were consolidated into larger common grounds which facilitated an easier distribution system. Inevitably, the consolidation of a wider land-plot gave the manorial lord greater power and control over his tenants. It is, however, not to be assumed that the lords alone were responsible for this changeover. Many peasants, who were erstwhile tillers of smaller units of land, found it difficult to sustain rising costs, security arrangements and the demands of the lord. Cultivating a plot or strip where there were other tillers farming alongside made things a lot easier. Sharing of resources, including oxen and plough, was only possible where there was community farming under a lord. Most villages bonded well for the purposes it served to the peasants under this system of community cultivation. Another advantage of this agricultural development was that it provided scope for experiment which would not have been possible for an individual tiller. New varieties and more suitable crop-rotation modes could now be tried out. Community farming also provided space for pastoral purposes where the village animals could graze. Manorial agriculture thus provided a great advantage to peasants who were otherwise without any social security assurance, for it offered them a platform to come together as a group. As the manorial system developed, the peasants socialised, took part in festivities, and established a closer, more assured relationship with the manorial lord. The parish Church was one of the common bonding factors that made the

peasants serving under a manorial lord feel like a close-knit family. Even though such generalisations are inadequate to iron over the subtle differences that existed within the system, there is no denying that manorial agriculture facilitated the successful working of a land-tenure system till the enclosures replaced these farming conditions. The condition of the peasants in medieval England, however, was far from satisfactory. The peasants had a lot of liability in terms of their familial responsibility and there was an immense gap between their resources and the demands they regularly faced. While community farming, did provide a sense of security that was unthought-of in individual farming, the manorial system also gave a lot of control to the lord. The manorial lord found in the distribution of assets a valid justification of his decisions, which could often be extremely hard on the individual farmer. A fallout of this process was that the lord could claim a much larger share of the agricultural produce than previously. For the land strips that the lord provided the peasant to farm, he had to give both a part of the produce and a rent back in return. Another advantage that the lord had was in the choice of the demesne, which was usually from a third to a half of the common fields, and the entire produce from this part belonged to him. The most technically damaging of manorialism’s effects, perhaps, was the relegation to serfdom for many of the peasants who were freer individuals before coming under this agricultural system. The imposition of a labour fee (or increase where it was already in existence) for manorial services converted the free peasants to serfs. This was an extremely significant social development, for it effectively linked agriculture, lifestyle, economy, and social structure in one integrated bind. It is, however, not to be assumed that serfdom was brought about by the advent of the manorial system; serfdom was what manorialism intensified and precipitated, even though it had been in existence in Europe for centuries and in situations where no manorial system was in place. The equation between the serf and the erstwhile free peasant was detrimental to individual freedom. While it was not possible for the manorial peasant to act without his lord’s permission, he was at the same time not at all certain about the time and terms of payment for the services rendered. One cause for this was related to the heavy taxation process that the lord justified as legitimate. The only court of appeal was the manorial one and it hardly favoured the peasant. One of the basic conditions in forming the manorial system was the sanction of custom

that made all of the lord’s decisions and the peasant’s obligations valid, which made it almost impossible for any departure to be anything but a transgression. The social format that evolved following manorialism’s entrenchment in English society was one that provided the peasant very little scope to move beyond it. There were, nevertheless, examples of peasants becoming town dwellers, but such numbers were quite low and definitely the exception to the rule.

THE BLACK DEATH AND ITS AFTERMATH The Black Death An attack of bubonic and pneumonic plague, the Black Death, affected major parts of Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century. The origins of the plague have been traced to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia from where it was transported to Europe through a combination of rodents and fleas, both of which are carriers of the plague. There is, however, no way of determining the process through which this transportation of the plague was done from Mongolia into China, north India and Crimea. The Tartars’ siege to the Caffa port on the Crimean coast is considered to be one of the routes through which the plague arrived in Europe. The Tartars were themselves severely affected by the plague and their strategy of hurling corpses into the town only helped in contaminating the local people. The merchants fleeing Genoa precipitated the matter when they unwittingly brought the plague to the European mainstream. It has been assumed that 1346 was a crucial year when the plague infiltrated into Black Sea and eventually it came by the next year to Sicily and North Italy. Once the plague reached Italy, its European entry was well underway. While death and attacks by different diseases was not uncommon in medieval England, the scale and impact of the plague was unprecedented. The plague’s first attack in English soil was recorded in June 1348, at Melcombe Regis, in Dorset. A general estimate about the number of deaths brought about by the plague suggests that one-third of the English population was decimated by it. About 20 per cent of the villages were either abandoned or completely depopulated in the fourteenth century with the chief wrecker being the plague. The places most affected by the plague were the cities, primarily because of overcrowding and lack of proper sanitation facilities. The first attack in London was recorded on November 1, 1348. It is estimated that almost 30,000 of the 70,000 contemporary Londoners perished in the attack. Apart from cities, prisons and monasteries were also greatly affected by the plague. One of the factors which made it impossible to stem the rot in the first burst of attack was the lack of proper medical facilities. The average medicine man in the medieval period was nothing more than a herbalist and he was not equipped to handle the calamitous plague at all. Since the medical

knowledge was not adequate and a rational explanation was not on offer for common consumption, various theories were in circulation regarding the advent and nature of the disease. To a medieval mind, preoccupied with faith, this was seen as an instance of God’s wrath, and the various processions to pacify the divine suggests the way this theory was subscribed to by many. Another explanation was that it was the result of a noxious or evil mist while a bout of anti-Semitism put the blame on the Jews who were accused of poisoning the wells. There was, however, an interesting development—the quarantine—following the havoc of the Black Death as ships coming from the East were isolated for 40 days and the members were not allowed to come to the shore. Although by 1350, the Black Death was declining, its shadow remained in England for the next three hundred years. Black Death produced different symptoms in its three variations. The most common form was bubonic which brought about swellings called buboes. These were seen usually at the places the fleas bit, most commonly the groin, armpits, or neck. Extremely painful, these swellings caused death to the victim within a week. The buboes eventually turned black following a red and purple tinge at the beginning. It was this black tinge that was responsible for the term ‘Black Death’. The second variation was called pneumonic plague. The infection in the lungs led to blood vomiting. Pneumonic plague was the most infectious as the disease disseminated through the air as the victims coughed or sneezed. The third variation was septicemic plague. In this form of attack, the bacteria infiltrated into the individual’s bloodstream and led to a very painful but quick death.

The Impact of Black Death The immediate consequence of the Black Death was depopulation. There was an overall change in the demographic pattern of England following the plague. The impact on the survivors was immense. Not only had they to take care of the situation following the deaths of near ones in the family but also to come to terms with a changed social spectrum because of the plague. Many of the survivors were compelled to desert their professions in fear of contagion, and as they sought isolation and safe havens there was an obvious dispersion of the population. Since the towns and the cities were the worst affected many of its inhabitants fled the urban areas. Agriculture was greatly

affected by the loss of labour. The market value of labour increased twofold. Some of the free labourers sought more wages while the villein tried to take advantage of labour scarcity to wrangle free of the feudal grip that bound him. Lands lay untilled as people fled and bushes dramatically filled up the plantation strips. The hovels of the farmers were deserted and whole villages became extinct. Trade suffered immensely and manufacturing units faced unprecedented disruptions. One consequence of the ‘deserted village’ was that now more land was available for pasture which transformed the interest of landowner; many of these uncultivated lands were given to sheeppasturing. There was thus an obvious increase in sheep-runs which aided the export of raw wool to Flanders and also contributed to the English cloth manufacturing industry. The boost to the cloth and woollen industries shaped the economy of fourteenth century England. The regimented manorial economy was gradually being dismantled as social structuring became more mobile, as peasants moved about in search of better job opportunities. The depopulation and economic changes wrought by the Black Death intensified in the two decades following the outbreak. By the time of Chaucer’s death there was a better regulation of prices which had risen during the plague. And if English sheep-rearing and cloth manufacturing industry grew rapidly during the fourteenth century the Black Death had an important hand in it. Another corollary of the Black Death was that it contributed to specialised farming instead of cereal cultivation which was the usual case prior to the plague. The situation in the towns was immediately apparent as the plague made a huge impact in the urban areas. Overcrowding, which was a major problem in many European cities in medieval times, including England, was negated to some extent by the plague. The urban centres became more developed and gained from the newer economic circumstances.

Wycliffe and the Lollards John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384), the eminent Oxford based religious reformer, was closely associated with the movement of the Lollards in the fourteenth century. He was a staunch adherent of Augustine’s views and he believed in the doctrine of predestination. The concept of predestination implied that some people were God’s chosen while others were not. In Wycliffe’s estimation many members of the clerical order violated the Christian norms

and were not fit for spiritual election. He sought to cleanse the Church of all the corruption that beset it since the early Middle Ages. He felt that there was a need for replacing the corrupt Church officials with secular personnel so that the whole clerical institution was tuned up to the doctrines of Christianity. The aristocratic classes of England were drawn to the ideas of Wycliffe for it was of great advantage to them. The undercurrent of the Church-State conflict thus found in Wycliffe’s position a new manifestation and it is not surprising that he was initially supported by the nobility in his attack on the Church. Things became difficult for Wycliffe when he started questioning some of the basic institutions of the Church and many of his patrons and aristocratic supporters began to move away. His death in 1384 perhaps saved him from the condemnation of the Church for heresy but his followers, known as the Lollards, continued to persist in their questioning even after Wycliffe passed away. One of Wycliffe’s contentions was that certain institutions of the Church, such as the sacrament of the Eucharist, instead of providing for man’s salvation, was just another means of enriching the coffers of the corrupt Church officials. Wycliffe’s views on the sacrament were considered radical enough to invite condemnation. In Oxford, his followers were soon taken care of by a regimented disciplinary mechanism but in the country his following increased. In the countryside, Wycliffe was seen as a pioneer of Church reform and a full scale attack on the religious institution was launched. The authority of the priest and the concept of Transubstantiation were singled out for attack by his followers. The Lollards insisted on the importance of frequent preaching by the priest and advocated the reading of the Bible as a mandatory obligation. During the final years of Wycliffe’s life his followers grew even though a majority of the people saw such an activity as reproachful. Lollard settlements extended across the breadth of England and loyalists continued to preach the ideals of Wycliffe even after the Parliament passed a Statute for heresy in 1382. The popularity of the Lollards hindered the Church authorities from taking extremely severe measures against them and also because many of their suggestions for reform seemed appropriate. Nevertheless, the rise of reformists was a major concern for the Church and the 1401 Statute De Haeretico Comburendo, which stipulated burning for heretics, was an important step towards the termination of the Lollard threat. As the years passed, the Lollard movement became more socially and

politically inclined and the original religious purpose became subservient. When Henry V came to the throne, there was a further Statute in 1414 strengthening the provisions of the 1401 enactment and by this time the religious fervour of the Lollards was hardly visible. The routing of John Oldcastle was perhaps the final stage where the Lollards lost the opportunity to transform themselves into a relevant political unit. Moreover, they had also lost most of the social appeal as the times changed considerably. The remaining Lollards were eventually integrated with the Protestant reformists of the Tudor period.

The Peasants’ Revolt Following the excessive depopulation after the Black Death, there was an evident scarcity of labour. The landowners, on the other hand, had a lot of land in their hands which required tilling. Many of these landowners now had to take recourse to hired labour whereas they relied on the manorial villeins before the plague. This was because in many of the manors there was no substantial tenantry to carry on the cultivation in the earlier way. Hired labourers were at this time not abundant which put them in a very commanding position. As a natural development, therefore, there was a great increase in wages and even then the problem was not immediately solved. The landlords not only found it difficult to cope with the situation but also regarded such a position of the labourers as unjustified. It is in this context that they appealed to Parliament to eradicate the problem through some form of legislation. The Statute of Labourers, passed by Parliament in 1351, was the most important legislative step brought into effect under the influence of the landowners in the fourteenth century. In actuality, however, this decree was only an extension or a revised version of a proclamation made by the king on 18 June, 1349, when the plague was at its peak. The Statute of Labourers sought to offer remedies in the event of the situation precipitated by the Black Death but in reality it was an indirect attempt to give the landowners control over labourers even in the changed conditions. The Statute provided that every free labourer, man or woman, would be bound to serve the employer who needed his/her services even though he/she was free to choose the landowner in the event of more than one vying for the services. It was also decreed that the wage-structure would be the one that existed in

1347, i.e., before the plague came to England. It was further said that if any reaper, mower, or any other worker left serving his/her employer it would lead to imprisonment. The Statute provided that no one should give anything, even alms, to sturdy beggars, the violation of which would land the giver in prison. The rules and regulations laid down by the Statute were highly impractical in the context of the situation that existed after the plague subsided. The Statute was futile in that it failed to realise the purpose substantially. The Parliament either failed to foresee that such an oppressive Statute would not succeed or it sided with the powerful landowners to go ahead with such a decree. In the course of the implementation of the Statute, there was a strong resentment as it forced the labourers to be tied to the land once again. Labourers who fled their employers were branded ‘F’ signifying falsity. Those labourers who found parochial landowners were facing a tough time; the Statute of Labourers was one of the instruments that provoked the peasants to revolt against the oppressive working standards. Such provocation reached its climax when another oppressive poll tax was imposed on the peasants. In 1377, the Parliament imposed a poll tax of a groat, or four-pence on all English people above 14 years, except beggars. Two years later, in 1379, there was an enhancement to the tax which was now increased to £ 6 13s. 4d. on the wealthier nobility, while a peasant was required to pay a groat as earlier. In 1380, however, matters became worse when a new tax of three groats was imposed on all persons above fifteen, irrespective of their condition. The peasantry was incensed by this tyrannical poll tax and within months there was a consolidation of the public against it. The first outbreak of the revolt took place in Kent when one Wat Tyler murdered a tax-collector and marched to Canterbury. He headed a large group of protestors who destroyed any manorial record that came their way. Simultaneous movement took place in Essex and Hertfordshire. Riots started all over England and the basic demands of the rioters were the abolition of the institution of villeinage, freedom to the peasants, and access to markets. One of the drawbacks that hindered the possibility of the revolt was the rioting that took place in the towns and this only enraged the townspeople whose sympathies soon shifted towards the authorities. The Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered, the Tower of London was looted and countless justices and manorial heads were assaulted or manhandled. Such large scale violence did not aid the peasants in their attempt to rid the villeinage system

and the slaying of Wat Tyler by London’s mayor caused the spark for the revolt to run out. Soon Richard II was able to quell the uprising within three weeks of Tyler’s death. Following the dispersal of the peasants, the king and the nobility did not keep the promises made and the abolition of villeinage was pushed further into the future. The failure of the uprising made it difficult for the peasants to get the advantage of the post-Black Death situation back. It is apparent that the uprising’s inability to win the sympathy of the king or the Parliament caused the peasants more hardship. The landlords became wary of the peasants and stricter controls were imposed in order to prevent further recurrence of the uprising. The revolt can be seen as the first major conflict between labour and capital in English history.

MEDIEVAL DRAMA AND LITERATURE Medieval English Theatre Theatrical practice in medieval England was closely related to the lifestyle and social conditions of the people. The primary form of medieval drama was religious. The three dominant forms of religious drama—the mysteries, miracles, and moralities—were preoccupied with different emphases even though they addressed the same audience and expected a response of faith in both the cases. The dramatic performance, called a mystery, was essentially based upon a biblical story; a miracle play, on the other hand, was a dramatised account of the life or episode(s) of a saint. The mystery seems to have been extremely popular as the extant miracles are somehow related to biblical narratives and even the saints’ lives that were dramatised for performance manifested the influence of the Bible. Harrowing of Hell, a mystery dramatised in the northeast Midlands around the middle of the thirteenth century is an exemplary model of the type. It is structured in the manner of a dispute, one which was common to the romance form. The themes of the mysteries were directed towards an indoctrination of the moral thesis and the severe consequences likely to accompany any violator were presented with great force and conviction. There was a very close connection between the festive spirit of medieval life and the performance of these mysteries. Usually prominent during festival days like Easter, these plays were soon transformed into popular agencies of entertainment as these performances were the most anticipated items in the medieval festival calendar from around the fourteenth century. They were presented in the form of cycles and were connected to the craft guilds. The four cycles whose plays are extant are those of Coventry, Chester, York and Wakefield. In the best of the cycle plays there was a potent realism, which was accompanied by an unmistakable humour (sometimes coarse) and sustained spiritual idealism. The cycle plays had a structural pattern that was similar and the religious content was indisputable. The Creation stories with which the cycles began moved through various episodes from the Bible. For example, the Fall of Man, the Great Flood, and Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac were common material for the performers. The variations in the cycles came from the pressures (of the guild performing it or the local conditions associated with it)

which influenced the final presentation. The Last Judgement and Christ’s life were extremely popular subjects for the guilds as they were easily appreciated and also because they afforded great dramatic possibilities. These cycle plays were closely associated with the occasion of Corpus Christi because they were usually performed on such occasions. The festive atmosphere of the pageants on these days of religious celebration was simultaneously an occasion for the community’s involvement as the preparation involved announcements made weeks in advance. During the performance days the crowd was constituted by people from the towns and the countryside that had access to that particular site, which was also a great opportunity to interact with people from different social classes. The atmosphere of abandon, sometimes seen as one of the features of medieval religious theatre, appears to be at variance with the process of spiritual indoctrination, which was the original intention in the first place. By a strange arrangement, the mixing of the carnivalesque and the spiritual in the religious dramatic practice of the Middle Ages, worked out to engage the medieval mind with a philosophy that addressed the Church’s purpose. The importance of the Church in the life of medieval man cannot be discounted in spite of the festive experience that accompanied the staging of the religious performances like the cycle plays. While the audience found in the nature of the performance something to revel in, the content impressed upon them its doctrinal value in all its seriousness. The elaborateness with which the mystery plays were produced was quite astonishing. The performers prepared laboriously in advance and what was missing in terms of thematic ingenuity was compensated by great attention to detail. These mysteries were normally performed on pageant vehicles, which had provisions for a scaffold stage. Unlike later Elizabethan dramatic practice these performances were not governed by the unities of time, place, and action, conditions which would have been out of place, given the nature of the content. The employment of technical gadgetry was in its infancy but nevertheless provided valuable support by arranging for the demonstration of angels, monsters, astonishing turnarounds, or scintillating deaths in colourful settings. The mode of processional performances was adopted in the fourteenth century when pageant wagons were used for the purpose. The mobility of this kind of theatre had a spectacular aspect to it as it invited audiences to respond to its display of both pageant and performance. The entertainment value of these

technically religious performances cannot be overlooked. The comic figure, Satan, was a great favourite, attested to the possibilities of theatricality, which was exploited to the full. The combination of seriousness and comic relief anticipated the same condition manifested in the theatre of Shakespeare that followed. The eventual failure of the mystery plays to sustain the popularity was related to the growing secularisation of the worldviews that were now available to the people. The lack of patronisation of the Church was another condition that led to the mysteries’ lack of institutional support—a factor which contributed to its decline. The religious potency of these plays were in serious doubt as the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance and almost all the major tendencies of secular drama came to be anticipated in the later mysteries. In terms of the loss of popular appeal the newly arrived secular theatre (with socially identifiable themes) offered a variation that people preferred to the monotony of the mysteries. The mysteries also suffered because growing mercantilism of the Renaissance brought about a change in the operations of the merchant guilds, which impacted the social function of these performances. The miracle plays, also called saints’ plays, dealt with a real or fictitious presentation of the miracles or any significant episode (including martyrdom) of a saint. The saint’s legend provided the material for the drama which was seen as an extension of religious doctrine presented in dramatic form. The earliest miracles grew out of religious necessity and were structured to augment the festivities in the Church’s calendar. It was assumed that the saints’ lives would provide the required spiritual fillip to the viewer and hence it was attached to the public domain. Like the mysteries, however, the infiltration of secular elements by the thirteenth century soon served to dissociate the miracles from their original purpose and intention. The play by which the convention of miracle drama is usually identified in the English tradition deals with St. Katherine (performed c.1110), but the Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene from the late fifteenth century is the text that has served as a model of the type. The morality play, the third type of drama which can be traced to a liturgical origin, was based on the dramatisations of abstract conditions. Concepts such as that of the Seven Deadly Sins or Death dominated the subjects of these moral discourses. Moralities were considerably short in length but had a remarkable degree of intensity. A play like Everyman (c. 1500) allegorically

sought to cultivate a fear of the spiritual future through a representation of the consequences of materialism. The allegorical dimension allowed the dramatist to exploit the resources provided by the concepts available in Christianity which he did in order to press home the religious thesis. The binarism at the centre of morality plays suggests the importance of portraying conflict between spirituality and corruption. It is also an indication of the fact that moralities had started to address the issues which came to dominate the Renaissance mind even though resistance to material temptation was elevated as a spiritual necessity. Seven Deadly Sins, Vice, Death, the Virtues, and other human attributes constituted some of the most popularly used abstractions in the medieval morality play. The character of Vice was often comically displayed—both as a physical spectacle and as a caricature in characterisation—a condition that perhaps anticipated the Fool in Shakespeare.

Medieval Romance and the ‘Matters’ of Romance Of the verse forms that were accorded popular reception in the Middle Ages, the romance was one of the most admired and circulated. The popular reception of the romance form in the medieval period also accounts for the highly developed and complex web of ritualistic codes that inform them. Technically, a medieval romance was an adventure story which had kings, knights, members of the nobility, and ladies who encountered and came to terms with numerous issues such as love, faith, honour or even the ordeal of the adventure itself. In the medieval period, the romance appeared in the twelfth century in French where it marginalised the existing epic form called chanson de geste. While the epic epitomised an inclination towards heroism, the romance suggests the dominance of the chivalric condition. Some of the other contrasts between the epic and the medieval romance can be organised as follows: Epic–weight, heaviness, tragic intensity, narrative unity, marginalisation of love, heightened sense of drama Romance–mystery, fantasy, light-hearted, loose structure, centrality of love, narratorial control. In Western European medieval literature, the dominance of the romance can only be equated with the novel in the modern period. Not only was it

ubiquitous in the medieval world, it was also wide-ranging in its impact. Although the initial examples of the romance form were in verse, the experiment with prose in the later ages suggest the structural flexibility of the form. The early romances drew its content from the Charlemagne related source or the chanson de geste—also known as the matter of France, ancient chronicles and literature (known as the matter of Rome), Arthurian sources (known as the matter of Britain) and Germanic sources (known as the matter of England). In England, the romance emerged as one of the dominant verse forms in the thirteenth century; it continued to find popular audiences well into the Renaissance period but when other literary forms provided it competition there was also a kind of degeneration in the seventieth century. A feature of the medieval romance that is applicable to all its variants is the presence of the theme of quest. The chivalric structure of rescue of a woman or the religious framing of the Holy Grail quest seem to be the two most common themes in the medieval romance, irrespective of the “matter” it deals with. When the medieval romance first made its appearance, it was shifting the focus from the condition of heroism to that of love; here the expansion of allegiance to incorporate love for the lady, in addition to the knight’s affection for the lord, was an interesting development as it centralised woman in a structure that was supposed to promote the ethics of chivalry. This was paradoxical because it celebrated and idealised sexual love on the one hand, granting a kind of legitimacy to the illicitly amorous relation between the knight and the lady, and on the other engaged the route of secrecy because the relation of a lady and a knight (who was not her husband) was not socially sanctioned. The secrecy of the relation was necessary in order to preserve the lady’s honour; the perpetuation of the clandestine involved a spirit of adventure as the love was both fulfilling and ennobling for the lady. The violation of norms, pursuit of adventure, and the glorification of ideal love outside marriage constituted a paradoxical yet conventional orientation of medieval motifs. Two of the most popular pairs of medieval lovers— Lancelot and Guinevere, and Tristan and Isolde—are thus represented as being conscious of the unsuspicious husbands’ presence which not only intensifies their love but also calls for added caution and secrecy. Early omances exhibited the features that indicate the possibility of oral transmission. These verse tales were perhaps circulated through the agency of

a professional and travelling entertainer or minstrel, a condition that could account for commonness of theme and narrative orientation present in the romances across the different cultures of Western Europe. However, as the romances came to be written down in prose, it too became a stylistic option for the composers. The fact that medieval romances were circulating in both the oral and the written versions makes it impossible to draw a full fledged catalogue accounting for its appearance in England. Another aspect of romance tradition in medieval Europe was the overt French influence, especially manifested in the indebtedness to the chansons de geste which emanated from the north of France. The transition to the romance was gradually achieved through transitional poems like the Chanson de Roland, which is the best known example of the type. Historical accounts of the development of the romance in medieval literature usually follow the convenient division of the romance subjects made by the twelfth century trouvère (a trouvère was a professional minstrel or troubadour), Jean Bodel, who categorised them into three groups: the ‘matter of France,’ ‘the matter of Britain’ and the ‘matter of Rome the Great.’ The matter of France was the major subject that dominated the romances of the early medieval period. Charlemagne and his knights form the primary source of these romances which had affinities with the preceding heroic tradition. The most famous illustration of this type of romance is the Chanson de Roland. The growth of the cycle of romances surrounding Charlemagne, however, went on to focus on the knights of the Carolingian circle, and their adventures too form a significant part of this cycle. One of the themes of this cycle concerns the fight of the defenders of Christianity against the Saracen attackers, which granted to the romances in this group a strong moral flavour. Such a strong moral emphasis has led to the conjecture that these poems were promoted and even produced by the monasteries in order to advertise the theme with the intention of getting patronage. All the romances in this group were not simply about the moral or religious conflict; while the tenor of heroism was retained in the individual’s resistance against the imperial despotism, such struggles were meant to highlight the adventuristic potential of the romances. The spirit of adventure was so strong during the early medieval period, when these romances were composed and circulated, that later on any adventure that had a Carolingian association came to form a part of this group. The romances that constitute the ‘matter of France’ were

indebted to the French literary tradition even though some of them were composed in England. It is also a sign of the consistent cultural intercourse that took place between the Continent and England. The romances belonging to this group follow a line that applies to the Arthurian romances as well—the engagement of a central figure that was of extreme importance to the community. Instead of Arthur’s Round Table, the radii lay at the centre of the ‘matter of France’ romances. As the tradition around Charlemagne developed there was a growing humanisation in the stories. Roland and Oliver are the two most important knights of the ‘matter of France’ cycle. The subsidiary characters like Ganelon and the Guy of Burgundy stand out for their involvement in the romances. The tradition of the family line is evident in the presence of the four sons of Aymoun, Renaud de Montaudon, Huon of Bordeaux, and Ogier the Dane; these characters are placed as retainers but they suggest amply the feudal structure of contemporary society. Christianity is one of the major driving principles in these romances and one notable illustration of this fact is seen in the conversion of the heroic Saracens like Ferumbras and Otuel. The English romances derived from the French source do not have as highlighted a chivalric tenor as those in the original language but the overpowering Christian emphasis here is unmistakable. The presence of such Christian fervour may be attributed to the context of the Crusades which served as sources for other medieval compositions too. The romances that form part of the ‘matter of France’ group are resplendent with descriptions of the fantastic, the grotesque and the improbable. But unlike the heroic tradition that the romances replaced, the adventurist focus was always engaged here to tailor its ends i.e., Christianity, the greatness of the French emperor, or emphasis on the elements of the courtly love tradition. Unlike the ‘matter of Britain’ poems, these romances dealing with the Carolingian cycle often emerged as mellifluent and exaggerated exercises. The Sowdone of Babylone (c.1400) has a heroine Floripas whose acts of betrayal (giving her father, the Sultan, to the Christians) and murder (killing her nurse) are glossed over to justify her love for Guy of Burgundy. An example of a typical ‘matter of France’ romance is the one titled Roland and Vernagu (c.1330). It is usually considered to be a fragment of a much elaborate and composite romance called Charlemagne and Roland, which no longer survives. The romance recounts the adventure of Charlemagne to Constantinople and his successful return with the relics of the Passion; it

further describes the conquest of Spain and ends with a long passage describing the duel between the Saracen giant and Roland ending with the latter’s victory. Roland instructs Vernagu in the rudiments of Christian charity and the benevolent character of Christian faith. The relics, symbols and their associated significances take up a lot the narrative space, suggesting the importance of such elaborations for the contemporary audience. Another fragment that continues this narrative is the romance titled Otuel and Roland (c. 1330). The poem is about the Saracen messenger Otuel’s challenge to Charlemagne and his subsequent adoption of Christianity. Otuel’s ultimatum to the French emperor is challenged by Roland and as the duel proceeds, the landing of a dove on Otuel’s helmet activates his submission to Roland and to Christianity. Otuel’s inclusion as a knight in the Carolingian cycle is portrayed through his participation in Charlemagne’s invasion of Lombardy. Otuel’s antics are further highlighted in his saving of Roland, Oliver and Ogier from the hostile Saracens. Besides Roland, other Carolingian knights too found narrative space in the Middle English romances dealing with the ‘matter of France.’ The Taill of Rauf Coilyear (1475–1500) is an interesting story that showcases an encounter between Charlemagne and the Scottish peasant Ralph and as the latter plays host to the French monarch, he gives his royal guest a lesson in courtesy. The ‘matter of Britain’, the second category made by Bodel, took for its subject the adventures of King Arthur and his knights. A lineage of this ‘matter’ being the subject of medieval literature can be seen in the interest shown by Geoffrey of Monmouth and Layamon, who both dealt with the Arthurian theme, but then they were considering it as history. The exact source of these romances is not known although the stories about Arthur were familiar to audiences well before they became a part of medieval romances. The historical presentation of Geoffrey of Monmouth thus constitutes only one of the attempts to reconstruct a narrative based on existing source material. Perhaps the stories came to Brittany with the Welshmen who emigrated there and then from there by a circuitous route back to England when Arthur had become legendary. Three romances from the ‘matter of Britain’ group stand out: Le Morte Arthure, Morte Arthure, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The centrality of the Arthur story in all of the romances can be seen in the way they are organised to suggest various aspects of the hero’s life or those associated with his followers. Even in the

romances that deal with a knight’s adventure rather than specifically with Arthur, there is an unmistakable ambience that marks it as Arthurian. Some poems like Morte Arthure represent the whole of Arthur’s life while there are others that are specifically focused such as Arthur and Merlin, which showcase his relationship with his mentor. The poems dealing with the lives and adventures of his knights, especially Gawain, Lancelot, Percival and Tristran, on the other hand, have had varying degrees of response at the hands of the English romancers. Gawain is the most celebrated hero in Middle English romance and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is usually cited as the example of a medieval classic. The verse romance was composed in the West Midlands dialect during the last part of the fourteenth century. The fact that it has survived in a manuscript that includes three other religious poems—Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness, has contributed to the contention that all these poems were written by the same author. Whatever the case may be regarding authorship, it is clear that the poem is a clear illustration of the potential of the medieval romance. Composed in 2500 alliterative lines, Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight is organised through a division into four fitts (sections) and each stanza of the poem ends with a bob and the wheel. The plot of the poem is placed during the early part of Arthur’s reign. A Christmas celebration at the court is suddenly disrupted when a green knight enters the hall and throws a challenge to the king. He challenges the court to give him a blow with his axe with the condition that he too would hand down a similar fate to the accepter a year later at his own home, the Green Chapel. The challenge surprises the Arthurian court and for a long time no knight comes forward. Eventually Arthur himself takes up the challenge but then Gawain steps in to give a blow to the Green knight. The knight picks up his head and promptly walks off after reminding Gawain of the promise to be kept the next year. The second fitt covers the preparation of Gawain for the encounter with the Green knight and describes his journey from Camelot to northern England as he moves on to honour his word. The descriptions in this section deal with the pentangle on Gawain’s shield and its significance and also elaborate upon different aspects of the journey. Gawain arrives at a castle where he decides to stay on as he is informed that the Green Chapel (where the encounter is to take place) is close by. The third fitt shows the last three days before the encounter and during this time an interesting game takes place between the host and

Gawain. The host, who goes hunting, and Gawain agree to share the spoils of the day with each other; the host comes with a deer, a boar, and a fox respectively while Gawain gives back kisses in return. This was because the host’s wife had attempted to seduce him and though she was not successful, he faithfully reproduces the kisses. On the third day the lady seeks a gift from him which he refuses, and then she gives him a ring and her green girdle. The green girdle, the wife tells him, would save him from violent death—it is a temptation he cannot refuse and accepts these gifts. When the lord returns, Gawain only reproduces the kisses, and information about the gift is not revealed. In the fourth fitt Gawain and the green knight meet at the Green Chapel. The green knight stops before the final blow to Gawain the first two times and nicks the skin in the third; this activates Gawain and he gets ready to fight when it is revealed that the lord of the castle is the Green Knight, Sir Bertilak de Hautdesert. Gawain refuses the lord’s invitation to grace the castle once more and moves back to Arthur’s court. He wears the green girdle as a mark of shame but in the court his actions are celebrated by everybody and the girdle is transformed into a symbol of honour. The poem is remarkable for many factors, of which the deft handling of language, projection of Gawain’s inner conflict, and pointed descriptions are the most pronounced. The folkloric base of the poem cannot be missed even though no known source of the poem can be traced exactly. Many of the motifs presented in this poem were part of medieval folklore and owed to the courtly love tradition. Many of the medieval ideals of the romance tradition find reflection in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, chivalry, modesty, commitment, valour, duty and honour, and the sense of community. The ambiguity of certain issues in the poem has dogged critics—the Green Knight’s identity and the significance of the entire adventure have drawn various interpretations from critics, but none have been conclusive. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight remains the most accomplished and sophisticated of the Middle English romances and its combination of the themes of the marvellous and the idealistic, the nuanced grace of the verse and the quiet conviction of the plot, is unparalleled in contemporary romance. Eleven romances dealing with Gawain survive and he is most represented of the Arthurian knights in the medieval romance tradition. Golagrus and Gawain, Ywain and Gawain and Sir Gawain and the Castle of Carlisle are some of the other poems that deal with the figure of Gawain. Lancelot, the

most celebrated of the Arthurian knights, however, wasn’t very popular among the Middle English romancers. Two romances—Lancelot of the Laik and Le Morte Arthure are the primary representations of this Arthurian knight. Lancelot of the Laik, composed towards the end of the fifteenth century, is a dream vision poem where the poet is inspired by the God of Love to compose for his Lady; the resulting work is a translation of parts of the French Lancelot story, with the Vulgate Lancelot serving as the source. The idealistic representation of issues like loyalty, duty, and chivalry are digressive and are not successfully fused to the primary story. Le Morte Arthure, the second of the Lancelot based romances retells the story of the famed Lancelot-Guinevere romance, the subsequent duel with a reluctant Arthur. The poem ends by describing the death of Arthur and his ascent into heaven. Percival, another famous worthy of the Arthurian cycle, is represented in Sir Percyvelle of Galles (c.1375), the only major English poem about the Grail hero. The poem chronicles the various adventures of Percival, including the killing of the Red knight challenging Arthur and the rescue of Lady Lufamour. Another component of the ‘matter of Britain’ cycle relates to the romances that deal with the Grail legend. How and when the Grail legend originated is shrouded in mystery. The best Middle English representation of the Grail legend can be seen in Joseph of Arimathea (c.1400). This poem shows the endeavours of Joseph who was consoled in prison by Christ and who gets the Holy blood shed by Jesus on the Cross. Joseph eventually comes to England and founds the Abbey of Glastonbury after his heroic deeds in the East involving other members of his family also. Tristran, another of Arthur’s knights, forms the subject of a Middle English romance called Sir Tristran (c.1300). The story deals with the familiar Tristran-Isoude love saga which is much older than the LancelotGuinvere romance. The difficulties encountered by the pair are chronicled with a finesse that is rare in depictions of romantic relationships in the medieval period. In interweaving politics, love, and elements of the courtly love tradition, Sir Tristran engages many of the issues that occupied prominent place in medieval romance literature. Jean Bodel’s classification of the ‘matters’ of romance was based on combining the subjects of Britain and England together, which has been further separated on the basis of the sources. One view regarding this issue is that Bodel “makes no distinction between the Celtic and the Germanic in his

term ‘de Bretagne’; and while the Celtic elements, through the complicated tapestry of the Arthurian romances, are far more glamorous and influential upon the fiction of posterity, the ruder Germanic elements cannot be disregarded” (Anderson 1962: 105). The non-Arthurian English romances, which come from a Germanic source, are thus part of the cycle recognised as the ‘matter of England.’ The ‘matter of England’ romances deal with, among other things, the tradition and legacy associated with the Viking marauders. The earliest romance that belongs to this group is King Horn (c.1225). The poem deals with the life and adventures of Horn, the son of the king of England, who has been killed by pirates. Horn, set adrift by the pirates, falls in love with Rymenhild, the daughter of King Aylmer of Westnesse, who had rescued and brought up the abandoned child. The romance between Horn and Rymenhild continues without the knowledge of the king and the subsequent betrayal leads to Horn’s exile. During his stay away from Rymenhild for seven years Horn avenges the death of his father and he comes back to attend the forced marriage of his beloved to King Mody. Horn is disguised as a beggar and ultimately he not only wins his love but also kills King Mody, reclaims his royal position and clears his name. The popularity of this romance can be seen in that two more elaborations based on this story—Horn Child and Ballad of Hind Horn—form a tradition, which however, is not very successful. The economy of the verse along with intense psychological portraiture is the distinguishing marks of this early Middle English romance. Havelock the Dane (c.1280–1300), another Middle English romance belonging to the ‘matter of England’ group presents the story of Havelock, the son of the Danish king, who is handed over to the fisherman called Grim to be slaughtered. Havelock not only survives but also grows to be the strongest man in the land and eventually becomes the king of both Denmark and England. Magic and a fascination for the spectacular characterise this Middle English romance. Guy of Warwick (c.1232–42) has an eponymous hero from the lower strata of society who is rejected by his love, Felice, for his social position. Guy’s exploits in various tournaments sees a more experienced lover return to England after seven years to marry Felice, but soon afterwards he again departs on a pilgrimage to do penance for his earlier adventures. Guy comes back as a hermit and lets his identity be known only just before his death. His wife too dies soon afterwards. The poem is full of

incidental detail and has other episodes including the one describing the fortunes of Guy’s son Reinbrun. Bevis of Hampton (c.1300) deals with a hero whose father is killed by his mother’s lover and he finds himself in the custody of the Saracen king. Bevis’s exemplary conduct and his subsequent relation with the king’s daughter Josian, however, doesn’t allow him respite. He is discovered and Josian is forcibly married off although she manages to preserve her virginity. Eventually, Bevis marries Josian and defeats his rivals. The troubles, however, do not end for Bevis as the killing of King Edgar’s son by his horse compels him to flee the scene. His wife gives birth to twins in his absence and is abducted by Ascopart. The family is finally united after many years of separation. Other notable romances belonging to this group include Athelston, The Tale of Gamelyn (once considered to be the work of Chaucer), and William of Palerne. The ‘matter of Rome’ is constituted by two major cycles—those dealing with Alexander, and Troy—with a third one dealing with Thebes, completing the category. The figure of Alexander had acquired mythical status much before the Middle English period in the Continent and various stories relating his adventures were in circulation. The extensive French poem titled Roman d’Alexandre, a work that shows several authors’ involvement in the last part of the twelfth century, was a major influence in terms of the prosodic legacy it has bequeathed, the iambic hexameter which was consequently known as the Alexandrine. The English attempts that sought to recapture the French model had two special characteristics: first, they were more inclined towards the epical, though in constitution they exhibited the features of the romance, and these poems hardly suggest the importance of the courtly love tradition as there isn’t any highlighting of love or etiquette; second, the didactic emphasis on conduct, as epitomised by the model warrior, is showcased at the expense of the image of a chivalric lover. Perhaps such a presentation had to do with the received image of Alexander whose prowess was better situated to be visualised in epic terms. The best example of this group is The Lyfe of Alisaunder (c.1325). The poem records the various stages of Alexander—from his mysterious birth, his youthful days, the conquest of Carthage, the battles with Darius, his journey to India, and finally his poisoning by Candace—a chronicle that can be termed as a general appropriation of the French model Roman d’Alexandre. The poem is characterised by the adoption of the epic mode in terms of style and plot

enumeration. The detailing that provides the ornamental element to the poem considerably brings it closer to the romance form, but otherwise the pattern shows qualities that are found in epics. Another poem titled Alexander, which has survived only in fragments, is an alliterative recreation of the hero’s early days and experiences with his father and his education. The didactic feature of the fragment that survives makes it monotonous. Alexander Buik (1438), a Scottish variant of the same theme, shows similar tendencies while at the same time indicating the spread of the Alexander cycle through the British Isles. The case of Troy, the second major subject of the ‘matter of Rome’ cycle, can be traced to sources which were extremely diverse—Virgil’s Aeneid, a prose account of Troy by Thebanus, the French romance titled Roman de Troie by Benoit de St. Maure (1184), and two Latin representations of the story by Dicyts of Crete and Dares of Phrygia. In spite of the classical sources providing information, it was Benoit’s rendering that was the most influential in the medieval period. The story of Troilus and Cressida and the depiction of the Trojan War—two of the most represented subjects of the Troy cycle, were derived from Benoit. In fact, Benoit was responsible for the lionisation of Troilus to a major hero from a marginal character in the classical sources. The most famous as well as a typical example of this cycle is The Gest Historiale of the Destrcution of Troy (c.1425), which encompasses the genesis of the fight between the Greeks and the Romans, the story of the Golden Fleece, the Helen saga, the Ten Years’ War, Aeneas’s escape, and Ulysses’ wanderings and eventual death. This is the most elaborate of the surviving romances in this cycle. Another retelling of the same legend, although in prose, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye (translated by Caxton), is of historical importance for another reason—it was the first English book to be printed. The Seege of Troye (c.1425) was another popular poem that was drawn from the same source. The third constituent of the ‘matter of Rome’ cycle, the subject of Thebes, was represented by Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. Why the Theban legend failed to fire the imagination of the Middle English versifiers is not exactly known; however, its lack of representation is suggestive of the fact that the other stories appealed more to them. Besides the romances constituting the ‘matters’ of France, Britain, England, and Rome, there were also some miscellaneous poems that enhanced the Middle English romance convention. The poems usually clubbed under the

heading of Breton lays are part of the medieval romance tradition. The origin of the Breton lays is shrouded in mystery; it was perhaps a musical form that had a narrative line accompanying it. Marie de France, the attributed writer of a collection called Lais (c.1189), wrote twelve lays in octosyllabic couplets that dealt with a variety of themes, including love and adventure. Many of the Middle English lays were written in the fourteenth century, two of which —Sir Launfal and Lai le Freine—were translations from Marie’s collection. Sir Orfeo, the best known Breton lay, is based on the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orfeo loses his wife Herodis to the faery king whose realm denies access to him. Orfeo wanders in the forest for years and eventually his harpplaying makes it possible to get back his wife as a reward. The tragic ending of the original legend is omitted and Orfeo and Herodis regain their kingdom. Sir Torrent of Portyngale, Sir Triamour, Sir Gowther, The Earl of Toulus, Ipomadon, and Floris and Balncheflour are some of the other unclassifiable romances of the Middle English period. The common themes of love, separation, betrayal, reunion, and eventual happiness after the rout of evil by good are characteristically present in one form or another in these poems.

Fabliau, Lyric, Dream Allegory and Ballad Apart from the romances Middle English literature was characterised by the presence of other verse forms which had some interesting variations within the genres. The fabliau (pl. fabliaux) was a popular verse form in the medieval world. It was the form that usually had a humorous flavour and its conventional pattern involved the eight syllable couplet. The form was extremely popular in France in the Middle Ages. There was no restriction to the stories of the fabliaux but it was characterised by the presence of the humorous and the satirical, which was a defining trait in all the stories. Since the fabliaux were based on ridicule and satire, many contemporary institutions, practices, and even cultural groups were included within its purview. Moreover, the importance given to wit in these tales diluted the moral emphasis which was an integral part of the fable. Some of the common targets in the fabliaux included the clergy and the women, examples that shed light on the ideological and socio-cultural structures in forming medieval society. In his The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer makes use of the form in stories of the Miller, Reeve, Merchant, and the Shipman. The Miller’s tale

deals with the theme of double trickery. A carpenter called John is fooled into believing his lodger’s prediction that a second flood is imminent and he unsuspectingly accepts the proposal to play Noah. Seizing the opportunity of the husband’s absence, his lodger Nicholas works out a strategy to spend time with John’s wife Alison. Alison, however, uses the chance to play a trick on Absolon, another of her admirers. The bawdy and the humorous elements combine to suggest the validity of horseplay in the tale. The Reeve’s tale is a response to the Miller’s tale and it is structured in the same fabliau form. A cuckolded Miller is duped by two clerks who seduce his wife and daughter to take revenge for the theft of their corn. The fabliau presents the Miller on the losing side but the clerks too do not emerge in a very good light. The sources for this tale can be traced to many preceding tales in French and Italian literature. ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales is another fabliau of trickery involving the duping of an old husband called January by his wife May and her lover Damian respectively. The intermixing of various generic conventions is one of the highlights of this story. The dialogue of the first part recounting the virtues of married life is oriented to present a Christian view of the issue while the lovers’ relationship is organised according to the conventions of the medieval courtly love. The final restoration of sight to the blind husband and his discovery of the lovers is narrativised in terms of the epic conventions. The fourth example of the fabliau from Chaucer, ‘The Shipman’s Tale,’ is significant for the mercantilist context that informs the duping of a merchant by his wife in conjunction with a monk. The tales of Boccaccio in his Decameron suggest the influence of the fabliaux. The Harley manuscript (c.1340) suggests that the entry of fabliaux into the literary culture of England pre-dated Chaucer. Unlike a fable, the fabliau was too realistically inclined to suggest the serious moral concern of the former, in spite of the fact that the attachment of such tags was not uncommon. Although fabliaux were common in France in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, it appeared in English only after 1400. Several variations of this genre emerged in medieval England, for example, indecent stories of urban existence, humorous and satirical accounts of contemporary life, stories dealing with animal life like the Renart cycle, and moralistically inclined exempla. The major English fabliau to survive as an individual poem is Dame Sirith (c.1272–83). Margery, a merchant’s wife, is pursued by a clerk Wilekin, who tries to seduce her in the absence of her

husband. As his overtures are not complied with, he appeals to Dame Sirith for help; Dame Sirith feeds her dog with mustard and pepper and takes it to Margery to show the transformation of her daughter who was audacious enough to reject Wilekin’s advances. Shocked by the development, Margery submits to the amorous desires of Wilekin. The dialogue form of the poem is indicative of its dramatic potential which may have been part of a design to present it on stage. The fable, so much a part of the Continental literary tradition, were almost unattended by the medieval English poets. Only three ‘beast tales’ have survived—The Fox and the Wolf, Fox and Geese, and Chaucer’s Nun Priest’s Tale. The Fox and the Wolf (c.1250–75) is a retelling of one of the stories from the Renart cycle. A fox finds himself at the bottom of a well as he tries to quench his thirst after an abortive attempt in a poultry farm. The fox, however, takes advantage of a wolf’s innocence and entices him to come to the well following which he escapes and the wolf is left there to be beaten by the monks who possess the well. Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale is an elaboration of the conventional cock and fox story where the former escapes from the latter’s clutches after being caught, by exploiting the fox’s sense of pride. The tale is an interesting example of the dream visions serving as agencies of meaning. The two major characters in the fable, Chauntecleer, the cock and his wife Pertelote, who is affected by the dream of being attacked by a large red animal, are engaged to present the allegory through a combination of the comic and the serious through a moral frame. The medieval lyric is characterised by a toning down of the elegiac note which distinguished the Anglo-Saxon experiments in the genre. A form of lyric poetry that developed in the twelfth century is the carole and it is through this mode that many of the medieval lyrics found its potential audience. The carole, a song with a refrain, may go back to pre-Christian times in terms of its conception but there is no denying that it was related to the festive spirit of the early Middle Ages. As it developed the carole grew from its rudimentary structure to become a sophisticated verse form appropriating the nuances of the lyric’s necessity. As in the case of the romances, medieval English lyrical poetry too looked to the French for example and inspiration. In the chanson d’adventure, the aube, or the chanson de carole, genres devoted to lyric exposition in the French language, varieties of themes found its space—from a woman’s complaint to the separation of lovers. In English the best known of the early lyrics is a carole

beginning ‘Summer is icumen in’, which celebrates the spring. The celebration of spring was part of a convention and also a device of invocation and it was one of the most common themes of medieval poetry. All lyrics, however, were not concerned with natural themes. The ‘Cuckoo song’ with its emphasis on the musical attributes of the song-bird stands out as a striking example of the medieval lyric. Politics had its share of thematic orientation in the medieval literary culture and the lyric form gave it a platform. ‘Song of Lewes’ is the primary example of this theme finding exposition in a lyric. A notable feature of the medieval lyric was its focus on the musicality of verse and the very effect of simplicity was the result of a carefully worked out design. The structure of these musical lyrics also suggest that they were designed to facilitate the dance form—a condition that presents the importance of the lyrics for the community they emanated from, for they were closely associated with festivities such as the May Day rites. A strict division of the medieval lyric on the basis of its religious affiliation, or rather a lack of it, cannot be achieved because these songs were part of the medieval folk tradition, and even the Christian lyrics were not marshalled to serve the Church as the sermon was designed to do. The rootedness of the lyrics in the community’s calendar was a basic condition which showed how they were imbibed as cultural metaphors. Of the Christian lyrics, the most celebrated were the ones dedicated to Mary, and in many of these Christian songs there was an intermingling of the secular and the liturgical which made it a heady mix, better understood in the context of medieval folk life than as mere representations of Christianity. The medieval mind’s inclination towards the allegorical mode was evidently not confined to the poems ostensibly framed thus, but worked through diverse poetical forms such as the fabliau, the fable, the miracle, mystery and the morality plays. Medieval man was accustomed to see things allegorically —a condition that was accentuated by the importance of the scriptural in his daily life. Apart from the use of the allegorical mode in various literary structures, there was also a specific verse form that exploited the allegory to further its theme. One example of such a verse exposition can be seen in the dream allegory genre. Even here the French influence is unmistakable. The most potent and visible medieval example of the dream allegory is the Roman de la Rose, the first part of which was composed by Guillaume de Lorris (1227) and the second by Jean de Meun (1268-77). The poem, originally left

incomplete by de Lorris is finished by de Meun, and the marks of the different hands are quite evident in structure and treatment of the subject. The poem serves as a structure that exploits the potential of the dream through which the theme is presented. The influence of the Roman de la Rose was tremendous all over the Continent. It catered to the taste of the niche upper class audience and its subtle yet sophisticated representation shows its position as a genre of sensibility. All dream allegories were not designed to treat courtly love alone; the elegiac Pearl (c.1357) was used for an altogether different purpose. The poem is organised through the structure of twenty sets of five stanzas. It seems to have an autobiographical emphasis but it is not authenticated by the poem itself. The poem is an elegy where the narrator mourns for the dead daughter with the dream-vision facilitating the narrative enunciation. The narrator falls asleep and finds himself in a land where the pearl-maiden (the dead girl visualised as a young woman) meets him. The Biblical theme of the poem is presented with the maiden explaining to him the various intricacies of divine inspiration but the stubborn narrator fails to realise the purport of it all. The poem is replete with descriptions of the procession of the 144,000 virgin brides of Jesus and the Heavenly City. The narrator’s inability to grasp the significance of the spiritual theme shows how the conflictual potential between the secular and the religious is exploited fully. The pearl works as a multi-layered symbol in the poem and involves issues like grace, spiritual perfection and salvation. The Pearl is undoubtedly one of the most important medieval poems, and perhaps the most succinct example of the dream-vision allegory along with Langland’s Piers Plowman. The ballad was another flourishing poetic genre in the Middle Ages. It is the form that suggests the importance of the mode of oral transmission for the sustenance of folk narratives in society. It is undeniable that orality was integrally bound up with the ballad form and the tradition that has served to orient it cannot simply be measured in terms of written accounts. Given the nature of balladry, the lack of a prolific output corresponding to its circulation and usage in medieval society is not surprising. Many of the medieval ballads were rooted in actual historical situations, or at least were derived from sources that had some relation to actuality in the late medieval society. The Robin Hood ballads were extremely popular and the legendary exploits of this forest hero and his band of merry men have endeared themselves to people well beyond the time of their original emergence. The

fact that the tales associated with Robin Hood were modified and altered shows that its appeal was continuous and remained a part of English folk culture well into the Renaissance. The stories of Robin Hood are set in the Sherwood Forest and he has an archenemy in the sheriff of Nottingham. One of the most appealing aspects of the myth of Robin Hood has been his strategy of robbing the rich to aid the poor. The earliest reference to Robin Hood is from the fourteenth century when he was visualised as a helper of the downtrodden while characters like Maid Marian were only added in the sixteenth century. One problem regarding the ballads is related to their time of origin. The position of the ballad in a community, the transfer of theme across cultures and its mode of oral transmission make exact dating of ballads almost impossible. Among the late medieval ballads The Ballad of Chevy Chase was popular for its topicality as it dealt with the border wars between England and Scotland that started in the fourteenth century. In fact, many of the ballads of this time have a Scottish origin. In Chevy Chase the conflict between two lords, Percy and Douglas, is chronicled where both of them die in battle. The ballad genre may be divided into two categories: (a) the folk ballad, and (b) the minstrel ballad. The folk ballad presented an emotional situation in short stanzas with a refrain and repetition being consistently used; the minstrel ballad, which included those involving Robin Hood, was more elaborate with quatrains having alternate rhyme scheme constituting the extended narrative. As a communal poetic form the ballad was of the most popular medieval genres.

Chaucer, Gower and Langland Geoffrey Chaucer is the most recognisable and arguably the most representative English writer of the medieval period. The career of Chaucer exhibits some of the general tendencies of the age, the most significant of them being the fact that English was not the only medieval language in which the writers exercised their creative resources. It was also an age where the writing was not always done by male clerics and not all literature was religious. Chaucer’s own literary output is made of a combination of these tendencies. The poetry of Chaucer suggests many of the highlights of medieval literature. His poetry makes use of the chivalric ideal but not at the expense of a down-to-earth realism which foregrounds worldly wisdom. His

The Canterbury Tales adopts the storyteller’s framework exploited by the Decameron of Boccaccio. The poem is remarkable for the way in which a wide spectrum of fourteenth century life is represented and for the fact that most of the pilgrims going on the journey to Canterbury come from the ecclesiastical world. In the fourteenth century and even earlier, faith played a major role in determining the direction of human life. The poem is also an example of the use of irony and satire to undercut most of the pretensions and preoccupations that are associated with the characters. The people coming from the non-religious professions are also well represented in the poem. An Oxford scholar, a manciple, the Wife of Bath, the merchant, the sailor, the cook, the miller and the reeve are among those that find a place in Chaucer’s platform. Chaucer’s work also introduced for the first time a note of the dramatic in medieval poetry but then his poetry exemplifies many medieval poetic codes: romance, legend saga, fabliaux, allegory, sermon, and courtly love. Before coming to The Canterbury Tales and also during the composition of this poem, Chaucer had tried his hand at other kinds of verse. His contribution is remarkable for the fusion of the Continental elements along with the emerging English tradition—a credit he is deservedly given. Poems like the Legend of Good Women, the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowles, and Troilus and Criseyde exemplify his versatility and showcase his evolution as a poet. Chaucer’s career ran almost parallel to the emergence of English as the language of the nation, a condition that was determined to some extent by his choice of privileging English over other Continental varieties like French. Chaucer’s contribution to English poetry cannot be judged by a literary analysis of his poetic oeuvre alone. His art was socially conditioned and reflected the complexities of the age with remarkable vivacity. The first quality of Chaucer as a versifier is his versatility; his adeptness in handling multiple poetic forms is testified by his excellence in different genres. He was also a very bold experimenter who did not flinch from trying the unconventional and from introducing elements that not only show his sense of poetic acumen but also exemplify his deft handling of contemporary themes. Chaucer was undoubtedly the man of his time and his poetry is one of the most potent and engaged sources for the study of contemporary life. That choice of language was an important factor for the medieval writer is seen in the works of Chaucer’s contemporary, John Gower. Gower used a

different language for each of his three major poems: French for Speculum Meditantis, Latin for Vox Clamatis, and English for Confessio Amantis (1390). The French poem is an allegory dealing with the attack of Seven Deadly Sins upon man. The moral vigour of the poem is remarkable in that it undercuts the descriptions of corruption with great alacrity. His Vox Clamantis, based on the experience of the Peasants’ Revolt, was written in Latin unlike Confessio Amantis, his most popular work. Vox Clamantis shows the position of the landowner who faced the wrath of the peasants following the administration of such dictatorial decrees as the Statute of Labourers. The poem is interesting because it presents the aristocratic position, and the censure of Edward II shows that Gower tried to represent his argument in critical terms. The topical significance of the former poem is removed from the didactic nature of Confessio which is again structured around the concept of the Seven Deadly Sins. The use of the confessional mode for such a lengthy work shows the attention granted to a process that medieval man was familiar with. The main attraction of the poem is in the tales drawn from various sources that form part of the narrative. Unlike The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, however, the moral import in Gower’s poem is more intense and concentrated. The inclusion of the episode of Aristotle’s teaching of Alexander in the seventh book is one of the highlights of the poem. The most vibrant of dream allegories comes from the pen of William Langland who wrote Piers Plowman. The dream vision mode, in fact, facilitated unrestricted movement (without being hindered by the space-time structure) for Langland as he drew upon the ideas of Christian theology to organise a thesis to discuss human conduct. The use of the dream-vision format, however, is not consistent as Langland moves in and out of reality to suit his argument. The picture presented in the poem is organised through a complex mix of allegory, exemplum, and exegesis. Social responsibility, faith, and individual salvation constitute the primary themes in this poem. The quiet assuredness of the poem is one of its most remarkable characteristics and it is undoubtedly placed among the marvels of medieval literature. Medieval literature is a good resource for examining the contemporary circumstances. The overwhelming influence of religion, the institution of the Church, the Peasants’ Revolt, English’s initial struggle and eventual

ascendancy as the language of the land, the engendering of the nationalistic spirit—all of these find some form of expression and representation in the literature of the time. Texts like The Canterbury Tales and Vox Clamantis highlight important tendencies. Like all ages the text-context dialogue in the English Middle Ages was also a mutual two-way movement.

CAXTON AND THE PRINTING REVOLUTION The Early History of Printing The early attempts at printing were manifested in the form of single-sheet prints, saints’ portraits, and playing cards; this was followed by, at a considerable evolved state of evolution, a series of prints bound in book form which were known as block-books. In such early experiments, woodengraving was the primary mode of making both the text and the illustrations. ‘Biblia Pauperum’ is the most famous of this species of printing as essentially religious and scriptural themes dominated the texts. Every page of the book was filled with impressive pictures and images relating to well-known Biblical episodes which were often accompanied by a note, commentary, or textual notation in letterpress. The variety of these experiments was evidenced in the decorative element which differed from book to book. It is through the introduction of the movable types that the real revolution in printing was initiated, which were flexible and could be used in multiple texts with a variety of combinations. Two cities—Mentz (associated with John Gutenberg) and Haarlem (associated with Lawrence Coster) are usually considered to be the contestants claiming to the place responsible for the origin of printing. While Gutenberg’s claim is connected to the availability of evidence, Coster has been held as having a hand in the origin of printing, a claim which is based on circumstantial proof. Gutenberg’s name is first seen in a lawsuit at Strassburg, in 1439, where his involvement in the experiments in printing is recorded. In 1455, there was another lawsuit against him where too he was identified as a printer, and in 1468 his printing materials were granted to his creditor, a condition that is associated with his demise. More than Gutenberg’s life, however, it is the books which are of interest. The Indulgence of Nicholas V, the earliest extant edition of which is dated 15 November 1454, is the text connected to the first evidence of printing in Europe. The 1450s saw numerous books, mostly religious, appear in printed form from Germany. The Mazarine Bible (1455–6), and the Psalters (1457– 9) were extremely popular and well-decorated productions of this early period. Before the end of the decade, printing had travelled beyond Mentz and examples of beautifully produced books from Bamberg and Strassburg

suggest that it was slowly spreading across Germany. An important development was the dispersal of the Mentz’ printers following the capture of the town by Adolf von Nassau, and resetting of these men in different parts of Germany. Arnold ther Hoernen, from this early group of printers initially based in Mentz, introduced the practice of giving title pages and numbering the book pages. The claim of Haarlem as the place of origin of printing is not as substantial. The earliest reference to a book published in the Low Countries dates back to 1473, a year when Utrecht and Alost too printed books. The fact that there were already many presses in different places of the Netherlands by the early 1470s is used as strong evidence of printing being practised in Haarlem at least decades earlier. The lack of reasonable evidence in Haarlem’s claim makes the Mentz position stronger and credible. Moreover, the name of Lawrence Coster is not traced to a historical individual, in spite of the fact that the Haarlem advocates link him to the printing in the Netherlands. From Germany, the spread of printing to other parts of the Continent was swift and impressive—it arrived in Italy through Swenheym and Pannartz (1465), in Sorbonne, France, in 1470, and in Valencia, Spain, in 1474. In all these cases, religion provided the primary subjects for the books.

Caxton and Printing in England The name of William Caxton is synonymous with the history of printing in England. Caxton (1422–91) went to the Low Countries in the early 1440s. He was based in Bruges and he must have prospered there as he was made the governor of the merchant adventurers (1463–5). Until entering the service of the Duchess of Burgundy in 1470, Caxton was based in Bruges. From 1470, till his departure to England, Caxton was involved in translating books into English and acquiring proficiency in foreign languages. The loss suffered by the Duke of Burgundy at the hands of the Swiss in 1477 necessitated his loss of position with the Duchess, a change that brought an end to his identity as a merchant and compelled him to return to England. During a visit to Cologne in 1471, Caxton had a first hand experience of the technology of printing, which was thriving at Cologne by then. He met many printers during this visit and learnt a lot from them. In Cologne itself, in the same year, he also printed a Latin edition of Bartholomeus de Proprietatibus Rerum which is

credited to be his first example of printing. When he came back to Bruges he joined hands with Colard Mansion, a former calligrapher, to print three books: The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye (first English book to be printed), The Game and Playe of the Chess, and Les Quatre Derrennieres Choses. On his return to England in 1477, Caxton settled in Westminster and began printing straightaway with Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophers, the first book to be printed in his own country, which came out in November. Although the book was a translation from the French language (it was translated by Earl Rivers), Caxton’s involvement can be gauged from the fact that he supervised the whole process, including the translation, and contributed a chapter to it. Ordinale Sarum, Caxton’s next book, has not survived in full and its existence is derived from the references to it in advertisements. The writings of Lydgate were among the first books of an important writer to be printed in these initial years. From 1477 to his death in 1491 Caxton had issued close to a hundred publications, many of them translations from the French. Caxton’s contribution to the history of printing England must be evaluated in conjunction with his role as a translator, especially because he was, to some extent, responsible for determining the direction of English prose as Chaucer had done for poetry. In fact Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales was one of the most ambitious productions to emanate from Caxton’s press in the early years, which was a considerably huge folio of seven hundred and forty eight pages. Some of the other books to be printed in his press in this initial period were the following: The History of Jason, The Chronicles of England, The Cordyal, and Chaucer’s Boethius. At many times Caxton also served as the editor and corrector in addition to being the printer of the books. In 1480, however, there was competition for Caxton when John Lettou established his printing press at London. Lettou’s process was much more advanced than Caxton’s, a condition that led the latter to adopt all of them in his productions too. The printing of an ‘Indulgence’ by John Kendale in 1480 shows the difference between the two presses—while Caxton used the large ragged type, Lettou’s production was in smaller print with neat letters. Caxton reacted by having another edition of the same book printed with newly-cut smaller letters. Following the practice introduced by Lettou, Caxton too started using signatures in his books; another development resulting from the Caxton-Lettou competition was the even spacing of the

letters. Caxton himself was responsible for introducing illustrations in his books, the first of which was The Mirror of the World (1481). This was also the first book to contain a lot of diagrams. The quality of the art printed, however, wasn’t very good, an indication perhaps of the lack of demand for illustrations at this time. Within the period of 1480–6 Caxton brought out about thirty-five books which included Reynard the Fox, The Polycronicon, Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Soul, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Æsop’s Fables, The Golden Legend, The Morte d’Arthur, and The Life of Charles the Great. The edition of Æsop’s Fables was interesting in that almost all the fables had their corresponding illustrations in it. The period 1487–91 saw the printing of about thirty books from the press of Caxton. The major books of this stage included The Four Sons of Aymon and The Doctrinal of Sapience. After Caxton’s death in 1491, he was succeeded by one of his apprentices, Wynkyn de Worde of Lorraine, who began looking after the Westminster press. De Worde was equally prolific in printing like his predecessor and after a slow start (only four books in the first two years) he printed nearly a hundred books by 1500. Many of de Worde’s publications were reprints of his master such as The Golden Legend, The Morte d’Arthur, and The Canterbury Tales. De Worde was the most active of all the early English printers as he had printed nearly five hundred books by the time of his death in 1534. Caxton’s example in England was followed by other printing presses with one at Oxford functioning as early as 1478, a year after Caxton began his work. The Oxford press, however, did not last very long and closed down in 1486. Theodoric Rood of Cologne and an Englishman named Thomas Hunte were involved in it and most of their books were scholarly in character. Cicero pro Milone (England’s first ‘classic’ in print), The Letters of Phalaris, and Liber Festivals were among the fifteen books to emanate from the press at Oxford. St. Albans was another site which saw the functioning of a printing press in 1480 by an unknown schoolmaster. His type, in the resemblance it has to Caxton’s, suggests the influence of the pioneer. While the first books to be printed in the St. Albans press were in Latin, the following couple—The Chronicles of England and The Boke of St. Albans— were in English and they dealt with popular themes. The Boke of St. Albans was extremely popular as well as informative. Hunting, hawking, and heraldry were some of the subjects of this book. The popularity of this book

led Wynkyn de Wolde to reprint it with an additional chapter on fishing. John Lettou’s press, which began in London in 1480 and provided Caxton the pressure of competition, was an extremely slow starter. In the first two years he had printed only two books; he was joined by William de Machilinia and while the output marginally increased to five by 1484, Lettou soon left and the press was continued by Machilinia alone. The press functioned under the latter’s supervision till 1490 with Richard Pynson taking up the resources. Pynson’s output were comparatively lesser than Wynkyn de Wolde’s but his books were more learned; Pynson is credited with the initiation of the roman type in England for the first time. Within half a century of Caxton’s press starting in Westminster numerous printing presses started functioning in England, a sign not only of the necessity of the technology but also of the distributive properties associated with it.

The Impact of Printing The initiation of printing in England did not bring about a revolution in a day. The assumption that it led to an immediate democratisation and helped in the secularisation of English society does not evidence itself in terms of contemporary developments. Any generalisation regarding the impact of printing cannot iron out the subtle local factors in the functioning of the presses. In the century following Caxton’s venture there was an inevitable opening of numerous other such enterprises all over England, with a more dominant concentration in the urban areas, especially those that had a better percentage of potential readers or patrons. Secondly, the initial output of the presses weren’t much and although some works like The Canterbury Tales or The Boke of St. Albans ran into many editions, other books were not printed again. The early history of printing in England, thus, is not related to the economics of supply and demand, as the English people were only just learning to acclimatise themselves to this new development. The third feature of these early years relates to the quality of the books. Caxton’s initial work was not exemplary and over the next century English printing evolved. The woodcuts were neither professionally presented nor was there any attempt to address the required nuances through the illustrations. Such a qualitative inadequacy, however, was soon addressed as the readers’ demand for better work compelled the printers to indulge in a greater degree of sophistication.

The drawbacks enumerated here were overwhelmed by the advantages brought about by the printing enterprise. Firstly, printing with movable type saved a lot of labour; this made books remarkably inexpensive and by the end of the sixteenth century book culture became an integral part of English life. The second feature associated with the introduction of printing in England is related to the improvement in literacy, a factor that influenced the educational pattern in Renaissance England. Since books were cheap and affordable they were more readily accessible than ever before. This was the third major advantage of printing and it contributed to the fourth, i.e., the dissemination of information and knowledge among different classes of people. As books were easily available knowledge no longer remained the province of the elect few but contributed to the democratisation of a society that was just emerging from the influence of a faith-dominated medieval world. This condition, however, cannot be taken to be all-encompassing in its impact, and based on location and circumstances there still remained a group of people for whom books were out of reach. This condition was closely related with nature of educational reform and situation in England. The next feature associated with printing was that a host of non-religious productions were now available to the public which included conduct books, manuals of instruction, and books of light entertainment. The opening up of a non-religious worldview— facilitated by the availability of secular reading material—contributed to the dismantling of constrictive religious hold, a legacy of the medieval world that was now well left behind. Printing also introduced a different side to the professional Elizabethan world, and now there emerged a host of pamphlet books, ritualistic manuals, ballads, and songbooks which functioned as a highly busy industry. The benefits of printing were used by both the Renaissance thinkers and religious reformists to further their agendas. In Europe, for instance, Martin Luther capitalised on the printing revolution to proliferate his pamphlets. Renaissance writers used the platform provided by printing to disseminate a plethora of material to entice the Elizabethan mind. Books functioned as one of the primary agencies in consolidating the spirit of nationalism in Renaissance England. This was achieved through the spread of books which worked to standardise the English language in the sixteenth century. The King’s English was the one that was printed in London and its impact was felt in heavily dialect-ridden places like Yorkshire and Wales. Printing improved administration as communications became easier and a

common linguistic terminology was available for common use. The sum of the benefits of the printing revolution is usually taken to contribute to the democratisation and secularisation of English society in the sixteenth century. Certainly, the impact of printing on English society and culture was immense but there remain doubts about the extent of its influence. Also there were other factors such as the introduction of an elaborate educational policy, land reform measures, collapse of feudalism, growth of the nationalistic spirit in Tudor England, and other political initiatives which contributed to the effects of social and cultural change that are usually bundled under the head of the printing revolution. The introduction of printing was thus one of the many factors that led to the Renaissance upheaval and interest in learning in the years that followed Caxton’s initiative in 1477 at Westminster.

THE RENAISSANCE The Idea of the Renaissance One way of viewing the Renaissance is to place it in its historical context. Such a placement is usually associated with the series of cultural changes that affected Italy in the fourteenth century and other parts of Europe a century later. The Renaissance brought about changes in the way certain institutions were perceived till then. Perceived literally, the term ‘Renaissance’ signifies ‘rebirth’, and it refers to that period in the history of Europe which was postmedieval; it was distinguished by a renewed focus on classical studies. Apart from the renewal of classical scholarship the post-medieval period saw the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution and an unprecedented emphasis on exploration and discovery. Important developments of the Renaissance period were the invention of printing, modern navigation, spurt in industrial and commercial activities, and the restructuring of social classes following the slackening of the feudal setup. The period also saw a new approach to the study of history and the human sciences. It has been rightly suggested that the term ‘Renaissance’ was both current and independent in what it signified: ‘As a synoptic abstraction both for cultural change and for an epoch the word is unlike similar expressions in being both autonomous and contemporary.’ (Hay 1973: 121). The contemporaneity of the Renaissance lay in the fact that it was a response to many of the after-effects of the medieval times—it was thus the culmination of a process that originated the questionings pre-dating it. It was, on the other hand, an independent development because the Renaissance saw a unique emphasis on learning, scholarship, and the pursuit of knowledge. The classical elements which were in circulation in some specific quarters in the late Middle Ages gradually came to occupy centre-stage as the horizon widened. In Italy, where the flowering of scholarship was the most pronounced, there was an interest in Greek and Roman writers even in the pre-Renaissance period, even though it was muted and present primarily in the clerical orbit. Writers like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio argued, in their own distinctive ways, for a need for renewal in scholarship modelled on the classical writers. The Greeks and the Romans provided these Italian writers with an apparatus

with which to engage their love of wisdom. The focus for Petrarch shifted from the dry study of syllogism in schools to a more serious and intense pursuit of wisdom. The disregard for the previous mode of enquiry which was prevalent in the Middle Ages was more prominently organised in Giovanni Boccaccio. Boccaccio regarded Dante as the model of proper scholarship and aesthetic value while Giotto was seen as the architect of the norms of painting. By the end of the fourteenth century, Italian thought was seen to constitute a radical departure from the groove that characterised medieval thought. Florence was a major site of such interest in learning; the position of Florence (Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were Florentines) was such that it offered the climate for the situation of the humanist enquiries. It was, however, a Tuscan called Giorgio Vasari who invented the term ‘Renaissance’ in his book Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors from the Cimabue to Our Own Times (1550). It is interesting that the idea of the Renaissance spread rapidly across many of the Italian towns where new learning, literature, painting, and architecture became the subjects of choice. The extent of the proliferation of the Italian ideas can be seen in the growing accommodation of the new in other European cultures in the sixteenth century. The identification with Rome as the epitome of cultural values, however, was not the same in the case of the non-Italian Renaissance enthusiasts. In the north, where the Renaissance gave forth a different colour, the emphasis was still on the cultivation of literature and the arts, but there was a distinct pattern to it which did not follow the Italian example in its entirety.

Renaissance in Italy Why did the Renaissance originate in Italy? There are various reasons for such a flowering in Italy. In the first place, it was the most advanced and sophisticated of the European urban centres in medieval Europe. The Italian aristocrats, unlike their counterparts in other parts of Europe, did not leave the urban centres. This was an important condition as it facilitated their involvement in both business and administrative matters. The Italian aristocrats’ participation in business and industry alongside the merchant class made the separation of the two peoples almost impossible. Such an intercourse between the nobility and the merchants worked well to create the

cosmopolitan climate which was so important a feature of the Renaissance. The famous Medicis of Florence, for instance, made their wealth in banking and trade and ascended the ranks of the nobility. This was an important development because it made education the most sought after object; the aristocrat and the merchant alike looked for the best educational opportunities for their children—this was because education served the businessman and the man of social importance well provided the art of public performance was mastered. This pursuit of knowledge was initially born out of the competitive structure of the Italian towns; the majority of educators sought to offer their best wares to the students—feature which is reflected in the emergence of the many treatises of ethics and literature emanating from this early Renaissance period. The sophistication associated with the Italian upper class in the late Middle Ages in Europe was the most reputed. This new generation was further blessed by the patronage of the wealthy who saw to it that the development became a continuous process. The second reason behind Italy serving as the site of Renaissance activity was its proximity to the classical heritage, in a way that did not apply to other Western European centres. The educators looked to the models provided by the ancient Greek and Latin resources for inspiration and consultation. For the Italians, the classical example was not only the most relevant but also the most easily accessible. This was not true of the other centres in Western Europe as they could not connect to the classical heritage in the way the Italians did. If Italy looked to its own classical past it was also conditioned by their desire to reconstruct their identity through such a legacy and in opposition to the scholastic model of the French. The Roman models thus served the Italians in a very suitable way—it became a reinvention of their own heritage and was tailored to accentuate the Roman way. The third reason why Renaissance began in Italy is related to its enormous wealth. The prosperity of the Italian towns made it easier for artists and scholars to remain at home and pursue their interests. In Italy, public support for the artists was a major development as the competition between the cities contributed to the patronage of the artists and scholars. The renewal of learning in post-medieval Italy is evidenced in Renaissance literature and thought which had many faces. The first of the Renaissance writers in Italy was Petrarch (Francesco Petrarcha, 1304–1374). A Catholic to the core, Petrarch advocated the cultivation of literary fluency for the

perpetration of the proper intellectual climate. The classical writers were the exemplars of eloquent expression and their writings were at the same time the repository of perennial wisdom. Petrarch imitated the Latin models and developed a humanist programme of which his moral treatises serve as examples. His Latin verse compositions, however, have not been accorded the kind of value given to his Italian vernacular compositions by later readers and scholars. These Italian sonnets—more popularly known as the Petrarchan sonnets—were disseminated throughout Renaissance Europe and served as models for similar compositions. Petrarch’s Christian idealism was the governing principle behind the organisation of his pursuits, and his eventual goal was the achievement of the ideal of a contemplative and contented life. Such goals, however, were not pursued by all the Renaissance humanists. The necessity of being useful to the state—a condition known as civic humanism—was advocated by the Florentine humanists Leonardo Bruni (c.1370–1444) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472). Ambition and the quest for knowledge were elevated by Bruni and Alberti as virtues to be cultivated and while this can be seen as a fondness for the material world, it was associated by these humanists with the very idea of progress. The most representative of the civic humanists’ work in this period was Alberti’s On the Family (1443) where his thesis suggesting the importance of the nuclear family was presented. One characteristic of Renaissance thought was the consistent denigration of women, which was part of the Alberti thesis, and it was not uncommon in the writings of other thinkers too. The emphasis on scholarship in the Renaissance led to the discovery of ancient texts which were marshalled to develop the argument for a mode of learning that went beyond medieval scholasticism. Important Latin texts were discovered while many of the Greek writers were now read for their contribution to human thought. The re-emergence of the Greek thinkers was facilitated by the participation of many Byzantine scholars who came to Italy as Greek instructors at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The intellectual intercourse between the Italian and the Eastern peoples was mutual as the former too went to Constantinople in search of Greek texts. Giovanni Aurispa, for instance, came back with 238 manuscripts of writings of the ancient times that included works by Sophocles, Euripides and Thucydides. The Italians were also involved in translating many of these texts which provided access to the Greek minds for the first time in Western Europe.

Another important break from the medieval scholarship was introduced and activated by the Renaissance thinker Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457). He was a rhetorician, grammarian, and a scholar of language who was deeply interested in the linguistic study of texts. His analyses of texts showed the discrepancies and also highlighted how propaganda was the basis of many medieval assertions which had been passed of as authentic. The best example of Valla’s incisive scholarship is evident in his exposure of the supposed ‘Donation of Constantine.’ This ‘Donation,’ supposedly a charter granted by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century to uphold the papal authority, stood exposed as a forged work, one that contained numerous linguistic inconsistencies. Valla’s critical work went a long way in demonstrating the use of anachronistic language in medieval texts, the influence of which was to be seen in subsequent historical research. His challenges to the established positions were by no means meant to subvert the traditional ideas for the sake of criticism, and his interest in scholarship can be gauged in his readings of Christian texts in the light of his rhetorical and linguistic knowledge. The kind of work Valla did in trying to fuse the traditional Christian with the contemporary was not peculiar; from around the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth a group of Italians, more famously known as the Neoplatonists, were engaged in bringing together strands of mystic thought and Christianity along with an emphasis on Platonic ideas. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) were the primary figures of the Platonic Academy, which had been started by Cosimo de Medici. The members of the Academy usually met to discuss the ideas of Plato and participated in readings and lectures relating to their Greek hero. Ficino’s translation of Plato’s works into Latin made it accessible to a wide European public, even though he considered his mystical collection called Hermetic Corpus to be his signature work. Both Ficino and Pico were not civic humanists as they laid greater emphasis on the afterlife than the civic humanists who insisted on defending material pursuits. Pico was at the same time also characteristically of the Renaissance temper as he insisted on the importance of human dignity in his Oration on the Dignity of Man. The writings of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), the most important political philosopher of the time, constituted an influential political discourse of the Renaissance. He lived at a time when turbulence was consistently

characterising contemporary Italian politics. Machiavelli’s views have courted controversy ever since they appeared. Some saw him as the architect of realpolitik, disdainful of moral concerns, while others visualised him as a true Italian representative, one who knew the pulse of the contemporary world. His support for the statesman who would go to unprecedented lengths to ensure proper governance was justified for the sake of the ends which made the means subservient to it. Machiavelli wrote two major political works—Discourses on Livy and The Prince—of which the former seems to be a contradiction of the latter. Far from it, Discourses on Livy celebrates the ancient Roman style of governance and functioning where republican values are given the greatest importance. The Prince, on the other hand, was reviled by his detractors as a discourse on tyranny. Machiavelli’s admiration for Cesare Borgia as the epitome of appropriate governance must be seen in the contemporary political context—the Italian political scene in Machiavelli’s time was extremely chaotic and semblance of order, which Borgia enforced in both Rome and Florence through means that weren’t actually ideal, inspired Machiavelli to build his thesis. If he presents a picture of chaos and disorder, of immorality and despotism, they are then informed by the conditions of contemporary politics. While a criticism of Borgia’s methods may be justified on the grounds of morality, the Machiavellian thesis that privileges the consequences over the mode also has its basis in terms of the deteriorating political scene in contemporary Italy. A more pleasing picture of contemporary society and manners was given by Baldassare Castiglione in his Book of the Courtier (1528). Castiglione’s manual served as a model for many generations of noblemen who were tutored in the rudiments of etiquette and conduct. The idea of the ‘Renaissance Man’ comes from the discourse of Castiglione. Grace, presentation, all-round appearance, and accomplishments in terms of cultivating wit, chivalry, honour, and above all learning, constituted his ideal of the Renaissance individual. The ‘courtier’ was also required to be conversant with the major trends in contemporary literature. A typical course of such literature would have works by writers like Machiavelli, who, for instance, wrote fiction and drama. The Italian literary scene during this time was extremely well furnished with the sonnets of Michelangelo and the Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) illustrating its range.

Painting and Sculpture in Renaissance Italy The Italian Renaissance is most recognised by the accomplishments in painting, sculpture, and architecture. The discovery of the laws of linear perspective in the fifteenth century was a major factor influencing the threedimensional effect in Renaissance painting. The study of chiaroscuro and anatomy provided artists with enhanced knowledge, the use of which can be seen in the paintings of the time. Among other factors contributing to the Italian Renaissance in the arts, the presence of the wealthy patronising class and the interest in Biblical as well as secular subjects were prominent. Advancements in painting techniques, such as the adoption of oil, showed previously unexplored facets of artistry and aesthetics. Florence was a major centre of painting in Renaissance Italy. Masaccio (1401–1428) was the first artist to exploit the rules of perspective, which is most evident in his Trinity fresco. In spite of his early demise, Masaccio was a great influence on later painters who drew inspiration from his use of perspective. Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was the most representative follower of the tradition established by Masaccio. He is renowned for Allegory of Spring and Birth of Venus which were characterised by a robust sensuousness and attention to detail. Botticelli’s interest in secular nonChristian subjects was considered to be an example of ‘Renaissance paganism,’ but it also suggests the celebratory potential of the Renaissance where Christian and other themes occupied the mind as well as the canvas of the artist. The most versatile and multi-faceted genius of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was also a Florentine. His genius flowered in many forms: painting, architecture, sculpture, music, mathematics, and engineering. This extremely gifted Florentine won the patronage of Lorenzo, the Medici governor of the city but as the patron’s demand for quicker productions was not met by Leonardo, he left the city to work in Milan. Milan continued to serve as Leonardo’s workplace and home until the French invasion of 1499 when he left the town, and after exploring the country finally came to France where he lived for the rest of his life. In a sense, Leonardo was the most severe of naturalists as he insisted on exactitude in whatever he painted. His dissection of the human corpses provided him with the knowledge of the body which is reflected in his paintings. Paintings like Virgin of the Rocks, The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, and Ginevra da Benci have

established his reputation as one of the foremost painters of the Renaissance. Virgin of the Rocks is remarkable in its use of science as Leonardo exploits the benefits of symmetry to its fullest potential. The painting symbolises order and exemplifies his technical dexterity beautifully. The Last Supper, on the other hand is a portrait of psychological realism. Christ’s information about the betrayal and the consequent shock, horror, and dismay are now part of art history. In capturing the mixed reactions the followers as well as a calm Christ Leonardo painting is a study of human emotions. Mona Lisa has been celebrated as a portrait where exemplary control and exhibition of colour combine to present its effect. Ginevra da Benci, likewise, is a picture of assured poise reflecting Leonardo’s versatility. Like Florence, Venice was also a centre where artists flourished during the peak of the Italian Renaissance. Giovanni Bellini (c.1430–1516), Giorgione (1478–1510) and Titian (c.1490–1576) were the leading Venetian artists who represented the life of ease in their city and showcased a yearning for the spectacle and sophistication. Other Italians who excelled in painting include Raphael (1483–1520) and Michelangelo (1475–1564). Raphael was one of those Renaissance artists who captured the dignified image of man, a characteristic Renaissance motif, in his paintings. His School of Athens combines a subtle depiction of intellectual stature in Plato (modelled on Leonardo da Vinci) and a quiet conviction in the figure of Aristotle. Raphael is also famous for his many Madonnas. Michelangelo was, like Leonardo, a very versatile artist who excelled in different fields such as painting, sculpture, architecture, and poetry with consummate ease and skill. He was interested in the portrayal of truths that endured and the Sistine Chapel in Rome, where he painted his most famous paintings, epitomise that interest in all its eloquence. The Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes which portray the Genesis stories are famous for the consummate control and quiet assertiveness. Some of the panels—The Creation of Adam, God Dividing Light from Darkness, and The Flood—are recognised as excellent examples of Renaissance, both for their thematic orientation as well as their sense of aesthetic harmony. Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel occupied two phases of his career—the ceiling frescoes are related to the first (1508–12), while his giant fresco called The Last Judgement on the altar wall (1536) belongs to the later period. The quiet harmony of the first phase is replaced by a tinge of pessimism in The Last Judgement.

Renaissance sculpture is characterised by the creation of subjects that stood in the round, which separated sculpture from the ambit of architecture. Donatello (c.1386–1466) was the first major Italian sculptor who marked a departure from tradition by suggesting the personalised aspect emphatically, and this nowhere better seen than in his bronze David, standing over the head of Goliath, which brought the sculpting of the nude human subject into vogue. His depiction of Gattamelata was another landmark in being the first equestrian sculpture since the Roman times. The greatest sculptor of Renaissance Italy, however, was Michelangelo. He is best known for works like David, which was an expression of contemporary Florentine idealism and for his conviction that the creative impulse found its most effective ground in a medium like marble. Moses is depiction of emotion at its most powerful while his incomplete Descent from the Cross shows the function of distortion effects to create an image of moving intensity.

The Renaissance in the North The influx of students from northern Europe to Italian universities like Bologna and Padua in the fifteenth century went a long way in disseminating the Renaissance ideas across the Continent. The involvement of the Spanish and the French in Italian battles contributed to the spreading of contemporary ideas while the movement of leading Renaissance figures like Leonardo illustrated its possibilities to people of northern Europe. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Renaissance ceased to be the monopoly of the Italians alone and developed into an international phenomenon. This process was interesting in that the Renaissance in the north happened at a time when its decline in Italy was unmistakably visible. Unlike the Italian version, the Renaissance in the north was overtly characterised by a marked Christian orientation. The variation was brought about by the difference in the cultural conditions of the two locations: (a) the mercantilist emphasis of Italy was not part of the northern tradition, and (b) it was more close to medieval scholasticism which facilitated the growth of Christian humanism. The antiquity referred to by the northern Renaissance thinkers was basically that of Christianity and not simply of the ancients, a condition that impacted the direction of thought and philosophy in these areas. The most recognisable figure of the northern Renaissance was Desiderius Erasmus (c.1469–1536).

He was an exemplary scholar who was famous for his deft control over language. Erasmus’ urbanity is reflected in a work like Colloquies which combined wit and irony to stand its ground as a purely literary text. All of his writings were directed towards the propagation of Christian philosophy; Erasmus’ most famous work, In Praise of Folly (1509), is a satirical attack on the ills of ignorance and superstition while irony undercuts his study of contemporary faith in Colloquies (1518). It was, however, Erasmus’ textual scholarship that epitomised the Renaissance. His research was reflected in his edition of the Greek New Testament (1516) which was accompanied by explanatory notes and a fresh Latin translation by him. Other notable figures of the northern Renaissance included Thomas More (1478–1535) and Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523). More’s Utopia, in depicting a supposedly ideal society, sought to attack the abuses prevalent in the major institutions of the time. Ulrich von Hutten, on the other hand, co-authored Letters of Obscure Men with a fellow German, Crotus Rubianus, to argue against the ill-effects of medieval scholasticism. The Renaissance of the north, however, was not just confined to the cultivation of humanist ideals but found a fertile ground in literature, art, and music too. While figures like Pierre de Ronsard (c.1524–1585), Joachim du Bellay (c.1522–1560), Philip Sidney (1554–1586), and Edmund Spenser (c.1552–1599) adorned the literary firmament, there were able expositors of painting as well as music in the north. Perhaps the most fascinating literary product of the Renaissance was the five-volume Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (c.1494–1553). Rabelais inaugurated the humorous study of contemporary institutions with an exuberance that was unprecedented. At the same time he was a master of critical satire; his presentation of crudities not only attracted the common reader but also served to veil his sarcasm through the employment of wit. In painting, the German Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) combined his knowledge of Italian perspective with a thematic orientation inspired by the ideals of Christian humanism. This is evident in his most famous work The Four Apostles. The work of Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), another German who captured the spirit of individuality in his paintings, is best known for his naturalistic focus and his portraits of the two Renaissance giants, Erasmus and More, epitomise this tendency. The field of music saw an exploration of varying modes of expression which was accentuated by the development of new instruments

and forms. It was during the Renaissance that music grew in stature to become an art form by itself. The development of the Italian opera by the end of the sixteenth century, and the intricate compositions of Roland de Lassus and Giovanni Pierluigi characterised a fascination for musical exploration that encompassed almost the whole of Renaissance Europe.

Renaissance Humanism The term Renaissance humanism is applied to refer to the intellectual development which originated in Italy in the fourteenth century and continued till the culmination of the fifteenth. The interesting aspect of Renaissance humanism was the involvement of moralists, historians, men of letters, and statesmen. The philosophical fraternity during the Renaissance was primarily concerned with logic which was used to read physical and material problems, and the early humanists’ ire was in fact directed towards the contemporary philosophers. In his collection of letters called Familaires (1351–53), Petrarch began by questioning the significance of the philosophy that was governed by the logical impulse. For the humanists the actual terms of existence, human conduct, and the contemplation of beauty and truth offered a better ground for investigation than mere argumentation. Other humanists like Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Lorenzo Valla emphasised the need for an education system that attended to the demands of human conduct. As such poetry, history, philosophy, ethics, rhetoric, politics, and economics emerged as the primary study areas. In this sense, humanism facilitated an opening up of the disciplines and made possible a kind of investigation that was not part of medieval scholasticism. A major contribution of the humanists was in the inauguration of serious investigation which broke the illusions of many medieval myths. This is best exemplified in the work of Lorenzo Valla whose painstaking study of the ‘Donation of Constantine’ exposed the inadequacies of medieval study. The humanists thus sought to find out the classical sources by their own research and did not rely on the ideas of classicism that were handed down. This cultivation of the critical method was manifested in the humanists’ reading of history. The humanists considered the age of ‘ancients’ to be more aligned to them than the medieval period which preceded them. The restoration of the classical authors upon a pedestal was orchestrated by the humanists at the expense of a

degraded medieval scholastic tradition. The names of the individuals involved in the humanist programme reads like a veritable roll call of great Renaissance thinkers: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pico della Mirandola, and Lorenzo Valla (Italy); John Colet and Thomas More (England); Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, and Guillaume Budé (France); Conrad Celtis and Johann Reuchlin (Germany); and Desiderius Erasmus (Rotterdam). The three themes of historical research, rediscovery of the classics, and the dignity of man were central to humanist thought and philosophy. Many of these humanists were part of the northern Renaissance and it was, in many senses, a pan-European affair, even though it had its springs in Italy. Although the term ‘humanism’ was used only in the nineteenth century to designate the intellectual revival of the Renaissance, it aptly captures the emphasis on the ideal of the Latin humanitas, a programme designed to condition man both culturally and intellectually. Humanitas was an engagement that sought to elevate man to a stature that would do justice to his potential. The man trained in the humanist programme would be a complete individual with both practical and cultural realisation. The focus for the humanist was on a reconciliation of participation and thought which aimed to develop the individuality of man in a way that lived up to the ideal of Renaissance man. The nature of the humanist engagement was such that it sought to accommodate people who weren’t part of the education system: adults thus constituted one of the targets that the humanist was trying to engage. For this, apart from aiming to cater to practical demands there was a simultaneous attempt to construct a utopian model, one that would constantly inspire the man of the Renaissance. Humanism was thus a wide-ranging cultural and intellectual programme. It placed man at the centre but not in opposition to society and culture. This combination of the individual and society is reflected in the literature of the age as well as in writings that propagated that ideal of which More’s Utopia and Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier are the most recognisable examples. While contemporary Renaissance literature and drama captured the humanist inclination, its source lay in classical literature. The writings of Plato, Cicero, or Livy appeared to the humanists to be the most potent and viable resources for contemporary living. These writings gained a more impressive gloss because it was placed beside the predictable medieval productions that were either dated or too regimented to offer the humanists the inspiration they needed. The classical

model was derived from literature, rhetoric, poetics, and even descriptions of war. In its apparent clarity of vision, the classical examples provided the Renaissance humanists a resource that was not to be found in medieval scholasticism. The classical model influenced language, style, and criticism also. Aristotle and Horace were esteemed for their critical ideas and their influence is evident in texts such as An Apology for Poetry (also known as Defence of Poesie) by Philip Sidney. Humanistic criticism contributed to the cultivation of the classical attitude (Ben Jonson’s works are examples of this influence) and also to the adoption of grace and dignity as necessary virtues in creative composition (epitomised by Edmund Spenser). It is worth noting, however, that the recovery of classical scholarship was not the sole end of humanist engagement. The humanists were cognisant of the rapid changes taking place in contemporary society and their worldview was thus a response to this process of transformation. The political changes in Italy and other European states as well as the exploratory expeditions that gave information of the new world contributed to the placement of man at the centre of this expanding world. The new world did not completely replace the old but there was an accommodation of conditions that led to the discovery of man. The existing conflict between free will and determinism was reinvigorated by the humanists and the optimism with which human dignity was seen became one of the hallmarks of Renaissance humanism. The humanists did not elevate man simply as a counterpoint to the existing theological framework; in fact the energies of the humanists were directed towards the negotiation of man’s centrality with the idea of God’s ordered universe. The Italian Neoplatonists were the pioneers in this regard. Thinkers like Pico, Ficino and Manetti built upon their readings of Plato to structure a return to origins which was evident in the reconciliation of religion and the humanist worldview. Another humanist trait was the cultivation of the naturalistic impulse which was illustrated by the new techniques employed by the architects and artists. A ‘return to nature’ constituted the ideal strategy in aesthetics as against the handed down medieval stereotypes. It is also worth acknowledging that the manifestation of this tendency was extremely diverse and it found alternative platforms in different cultural centres. Perhaps the most significant characteristic of humanism was the placement of man at the centre and a glorification as well as a celebration of his abilities. In the writings of humanist thinkers like Valla, the focus was on the

construction of a curriculum that would make it possible for man to develop in the best possible way. The emphasis on learning for the sake of enhancing and nurturing the potentialities of man was organised by the proponents of civic humanism to meet the needs of the state. It was necessary for men to be civil for the sake of society—a condition that was recognised not only by the humanist thinkers but also by the merchants and bankers of the Renaissance world. The cultivation of the humanist ideal can be seen in curriculum devised for the students. Latin composition and exercises, grammar, poetics, rhetoric, ethics, and the study of the classics were common to the educational programmes in various Renaissance cultures, including England. The development of the mental and intellectual aspects was placed beside the practical orientation which sought to attend to the moral and behavioural conditions of life and conduct. It was towards the thesis of ‘dignity of man’ that the humanists chose to direct their attention, the most cogently argued of which remains Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration (1486). Pico sought to place man’s attempt to attain fulfilment in various fields of religion, magic, and intellectualism by marking it as a universal phenomenon. Pico’s incorporation of Neoplatonic attributes in his discussion grants to his argument a formalism characteristic of the humanists. Other thinkers like Egidio da Viterbo or Aurelio Brandolini furthered this thesis of human dignity in their writings. Renaissance humanism was neither an absolute reversal of the medieval tradition nor a sudden burst of novelty—it was an attempt that can be seen as a response to the changing times where an authentic recovery of the classical heritage served the needs of Renaissance man better. A major contribution of the humanists was the investigation of phenomenon for its own sake rather than a mere adherence to authority. In fact, the humanists’ questioning of the authority of medieval scholasticism went a long way in creating the appropriate ground for the Scientific Revolution. Moreover, the humanist legacy was manifested in the organisation of a body of knowledge that attempted to address the immediate demands of man’s life in the context of contemporary developments and it was devised in such a way that it tried to accommodate both the material and spiritual spheres.

Capitalism and Trade

The Renaissance was the period of capitalistic growth. At the centre of the newly structured post-medieval economy lay the merchant who played a major role in directing the financial pattern across different states. This was the time when the economy moved beyond the conditions of insular production to engage the highly complex web of trade practices that brought about the advent of the modern period. Industrial prosperity became a given condition that contributed to the burgeoning trading structures of the time. Many new avenues opened up for the Renaissance entrepreneur. As business interests spread across nations and economies became interdependent trade was no longer consigned to operations at the community level; the growth of business houses and institutions gradually became a regular phenomenon as the sixteenth century progressed. The most vibrant and productive industry was that of textile which involved tremendous transactions in places like Flanders. The export of products contributed not merely to the country’s economy but also excited the navigators—the businessmen encouraged the explorers and they were in turn benefited by the voyages. It is also quite reasonable to assume that the early mercantilist tendency contributed to the consolidation of the empire. In this context, the mercantilist emphasis provided a ground that facilitated colonialism. At the centre of this economic transformation lay the merchant who determined the structure of such modern aspects as urbanisation and banking. The medieval trader was most commonly an itinerant traveller who displayed his wares; the sophistication of the Renaissance merchant, on the other hand, was evident in their enterprise and their dynamism spilled over to embrace other social conditions as well. With the opening up of the professions the entrepreneur was now able to try out newer ventures like printing, banking, and mining—a process that played a role in the secularisation of Renaissance society. In fact, the merchant of the sixteenth century was also responsible for introducing the culture of competition which provided great fillip to the rapid process of urban growth in the Renaissance. The Renaissance merchant was not just a seller of commodities; he was involved in many areas which were distinctly modern—insurance, real estate, transportation, and other industrial activities formed for him the keys to economic prosperity. It has been rightly argued that the ‘sixteenth century merchant was the resident motor of a complex economic machine.’ (Rice & Grafton: 2004, 50) An important development in this regard was the demonopolisation of the

medieval craft guilds. The craft guilds were extremely important economic centres in the Middle Ages. They were structured to provide both employment and sustenance to a substantial group of people. Its hierarchised structure, along with the changes in the market conditions brought about a change in its role in the Renaissance period. By the beginning of the Renaissance the craft guilds were structured along hereditary lines and the scope for professional betterment was considerably lessened. At the same time other inviting trade options lured potential apprentices from the guilds. While the movement from an insular economy to an international one did not happen overnight, there were interesting pointers that mark out the development of modern capitalism. In terms of the remarkable changes evident during the Industrial Revolution centuries later, the flow of capital during the Renaissance was neither immense nor well spread out. Certain centres like Florence and Venice were quite well-placed while others like Yorkshire—very much a part of the Renaissance industrial process—charted a different route for industrial expansion. In places like Yorkshire, East Anglia, and the Cotswolds, for instance, the cloth entrepreneur was known as a clothier; the clothier was primarily rural based and he determined the terms of his business (units produced, pricing, labour, and mechanisation) in accordance with the demands of the market and interestingly, he was not hindered by municipal restrictions for which he had a free hand in hiring labour and determining the terms of production. This was quite unlike the potentially volatile relationship that existed during the height of the Industrial Revolution. The nature of the clothier’s business was such that it was not solely dependent on the flow of capital and the matter was eased to a great extent that in the sixteenth century the clothier could afford to remain in the rural context and still do business internationally. One of the primary business areas of the tradesman in Renaissance England was cloth trade. The formation of the Fellowship of the Merchant Adventurers of London, in 1486, was an important step in England’s overseas trade because it had the royal sanction. This is borne out by the active role played by Henry VII in settling the conflictual terms between the Adventurers and other merchants doing business in the Netherlands (essentially Antwerp) which granted the Parliament the authority to extract a commission, but at the same time this was also the initiation of the consolidation of company-based business in England. The London-Antwerp trade axis was a major economic

development in Renaissance England as it greatly enhanced cloth production, regularised distribution, and legitimised foreign trade. The system was organised in such a manner that it was possible for the rural merchant entrepreneur to engage in international trade without involving himself in the complications of urban commerce. The picture, however, wasn’t rosy for the merchant throughout the Renaissance period. The fluctuations of international trade are best illustrated by the drastic fall in cloth production in 1551–52 which saw the introduction of a spate of bills to systematise production. The capitalist inclination began in England only after the collapse of feudalism. The changes in land tenure, the dispersion of population across a wider social and economic spectrum, the failure of the craft guilds to withstand the onslaught of the newly emerging merchant, the rapid urbanisation, and the opening up of the international market to English entrepreneurs are some of the significant factors that aided capitalism. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the bounds of feudal structure began to slacken considerably. With the landlords themselves opting for revenue generation processes that were not in agreement with the one employed during the feudal days, it was only inevitable that the economic structure would change. However, the change was both economic and social. It affected various aspects of contemporary life such as education, professional engagement, and culture. Another corollary to this development in the economic sphere was the exploratory attitude of Renaissance man which is evident in both the literal and the literary dimensions.

Exploration and Discovery The opening up of the new world was an important development in Renaissance Europe. The spurt in exploration was activated by two factors, (a) the search for new trade routes, and (b) improvements that aided travel. When trade and commerce increased by the end of the Middle Ages, the Italian merchants made a considerable profit from the business of others as they were the chief traders between the eastern part of the Mediterranean and the remaining portions of Europe. Many hands were engaged in the transportation, shipment, and delivery of products which affected the prices of imports like spices, silk, and other materials from the East. The high

charges of the Italians compelled the tradesmen of other countries to think of alternative routes through which they could make the demanded wares available at a more affordable rate. The merchants belonging to states like Spain, Portugal, England, France and the Low Countries were eager to unshackle the monopolistic hold of the Italians and were looking to other routes that would circumvent the Italian control. The second factor influencing exploration was the improvements made in travel conditions; the invention of the compass and the astrolabe made life easier for mariners. The astrolabe determined the latitude and even though it was believed to have been invented by the Alexandrian Greeks its usage was not prevalent in Europe before the fifteenth century. The compass may have been invented in China in the twelfth century but its use in Europe was not evident until the post-medieval period. Another important aspect of Renaissance exploration was the use of sophisticated maps. The maps of the post-medieval era were remarkably accurate which were further supplemented by new knowledge gained from regular exploration. The Danish geographer Claudius Claussön Swart is credited with making the first map of northern Europe in 1427 while Nicholas Krebs’s 1491 map of Germany was another instance of modern cartography. The first nation to be involved in the discovery of new lands was Portugal. The Portuguese Prince Henry was greatly interested in navigation and he started sending ships every year from 1415 to sail along the coast of Africa with the intention of gathering information about unknown lands. These early voyages saw the discovery of the Gold Coast of Ghana and the Cape Verde Islands and also brought Henry considerable profit. Although Prince Henry died in 1460, his initiative provided inspiration to navigators, one of which, Bartholomeu Dias went from Portugal in 1487 to reach Africa’s southern tip the following year. His expedition showed that there was a sea passage through the south of Africa. The success of the Portuguese expeditions led other nations to employ their explorers and Christopher Columbus, an Italian who went in search of India under Spain’s banner, found the Bahama Islands by sailing west on October 12, 1492. Columbus made three subsequent trips by the same route and while he reached the South American mainland once, he had a hand in the discovery of many other islands. The Portuguese expeditions to the east meanwhile bore fruit in Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the route to India when he arrived at Calicut in May, 1498. Gama’s discovery

of the all water route to India was responsible for breaking the Italian monopoly in European trade. These rewarding voyages of Dias, Columbus, and Gama inspired other explorers as well as the European imagination. Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian who navigated first under the patronage of the Medicis and then for Portugal claimed on the basis of that his four voyages to the New World between 1497 and 1503, that he was the first among the Europeans to arrive at the mainland. His name is associated with the New World, now known as the Americas, even as the dispute among historians regarding his claim remains unsettled. Another fruitful voyage was made by the Portuguese Pedro Cabral who came to what is now Brazil in 1500. Vasco da Balboa’s discovery of the Isthmus of Panama (1513) remains one of the major achievements of Renaissance exploration. Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition (begun 1523) to the New World, on the other hand, was the first to complete a journey around the world. It took Magellan around three years to arrive at Spain with only eighteen men even though he had started with two hundred and forty three mariners. Magellan’s Portuguese nationality notwithstanding, it was the Spaniards in the sixteenth century who led the journeys to the New World. Hernando Cortes’s conquest of the Aztecs and Pizarro’s invasion of Peru were motivated by the desire for gold. This tendency for riches contributed to the dissemination of stories about their ruthlessness, which weren’t without reason but they were at the same time sufficiently glamorised. The success of the Spaniards and the Portuguese in this race for territory led to a competition among many of the European nations; subsequently this transformed into colonial rivalries between the countries that sought to occupy land for both power and profit. The English explorations started when Henry VII issued a patent to an Italian navigator called John Cabot on March 5, 1496, for exploring unknown territories. Stories of Columbus’ adventurous voyages were circulating throughout Europe and it activated the English too. Cabot’s voyage led him to the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, which he claimed for the English king. The identity of the place where Cabot landed has not been definitely settled: southern Labrador, Newfoundland, and Cape Breton Island are the major claimants. The search for the Northeast Passage was intensified by the English explorers. The 1553 expedition led by Sir Hugh Willoughby did not succeed but Richard Chancellor claimed to have gone further than his predecessor. Another English explorer Anthony Jenkinson went from the

White Sea to Moscow, from which he arrived at Bukhara, which led to the discovery of the old east-west trade routes through a new path. There was another group of explorers waiting to know more about the Northwest Passage. Sir Martin Frobisher found the bay, now named after him, in 1576. Among the unsuccessful voyagers who tried to find the Northwest Passage John Davis, Henry Hudson, Robert Bylot, Sir Thomas Button, and William Baffin were the persistent ones in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although the Passage as such was not discovered, it led to the discovery of many regions and islands which were exploited for their resources. Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, was the first to go through the passage, but that was almost four centuries later (1903–05). Other Englishmen who made an impact in exploration were Sir Francis Drake, Sir Richard Hawkins, Sir Richard Grenville, Thomas Cavendish, and Richard Hakluyt. Many of them like Drake and Grenville are associated with the beginnings of colonialism or known for their involvement in imperial struggles. Hakluyt, on the other hand, was a major geographer of his time and his book The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) is an important historical document. Drake’s mayoralty of Plymouth (1581) is an example of how political the entire process of exploration was becoming in sixteenth century England. Other explorers like Frobisher and Grenville hated Drake for his enterprise but the individualistic mode of functioning was a characteristic feature of Renaissance navigation. Frobisher himself was a very able explorer but his arrests on the charges of piracy and his inability to establish a colony has somewhat shadowed his otherwise remarkable navigational career. Grenville went to Roanoke Island in 1585 and his legendary fight with the Spanish was commemorated by Tennyson in the poem ‘The Revenge.’ Cavendish emulated Drake in the routes taken by the latter and he went on the third circumnavigation of the world.

The Beginnings of Colonialism The Renaissance period saw the initiation of the great expansionist plans of the new colonisers who began exploring unseen territories. Initially, many of these expeditions did not have the condition of colonialism informing all of them, for the motives of gathering resources and discovering routes for trade

occupied the explorers’ minds. But as more and more territories of the New World came under the possession of the Europeans it was felt that political and administrative control over those domains served the purposes of the explorers and the respective governments better. With time occupation of a colony came to be associated with national pride and glory that resulted in the competition among many of the European nations, especially England, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Wealth was an important driving force behind the investment and energy put into these expeditions. Merchants and tradesmen sought to utilise the routes and the resources of the colonies to their maximum advantage, while the spread of Christianity to these new lands was supported by the clerical institutions of the mother countries. The English pursuit of new territory that began with explorers like Drake and Frobisher saw them embroiled in serious political and military struggle with other competing nations. The conquest of the Spanish Armada provided a great fillip to the expansionist plans of the British. In 1607, the English founded the settlement in Jamestown and Virginia while Plymouth and Massachusetts was established in 1620. A major chunk in the Americas came under English control, including parts of Hudson Bay in Canada, islands in the West Indies, and the Bermudas. The major rival of the English in this area were the Spaniards who occupied the other side of America. The competition sometimes reached a flashpoint as in the case of the seizure of Jamaica by the English from the Spaniards in 1655. The colonisation process saw considerable degree of emigration of people from England to the New World which reached sixty thousand by the middle of the seventeenth century. English colonialism was not confined to the Americas alone. The establishment of the East India Company in 1600 saw the subsequent spread on the English to parts of Asia, especially India. The East India Company was only one of the many such bodies established for the purpose of doing business in the colonies. Three considerations—political, mercenary, and religious—were involved in the process of colonialism. And while initial Renaissance motive of discovery and trade convenience guided many of the early explorations, the inevitable entanglement of the colonisers and the natives contributed to the political relationships that characterised the colonial structures. Another binary, i.e., the civilised/savage construction, served as a very powerful ideological tool for the expansionist plans of the colonisers. Edward W. Said has pointed out

that the power structures working towards the establishment of the imperialist agenda were guided by motives and concerns that went far beyond the mercenary ones. In Culture and Imperialism, Said writes: “Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination” (Said 1994: 8). The political interests of the colonising nations, which soon followed their trade interests, wasn’t actually consolidated into full fledged empires during the Renaissance itself; many of the English expeditions did not start out with merely political domination in mind. It was only by the nineteenth century that the colonialist enterprises, begun in the Renaissance period, consolidated into its imperialist avatars. Another significant aspect of colonial growth in the Renaissance could be seen in the way it affected daily life in England. Many of the products used by English people in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries were new imports from the colonial territories. Of these, coffee, tea, and sugar among food items, mahogany as a fashionable timber, and the introduction of tobacco were some of the early influences of the colonial experience.

THE REFORMATION The Context of the Reformation The Reformation of the Church was a major 16th-century religious restructuring that resulted in dilution of supremacy of the pope in Western Europe. One immediate consequence of the Reformation was the founding of Protestant institutions that both rivalled Catholicism and presented a spiritual alternative to contemporary man. The Reformation changed the format that was working so well in the Middle Ages. Even though the challenge to the Catholic Church is said to have begun with Martin Luther, the conditions of a revolt and reaction had been there within the clerical institution for centuries before him. Many historical factors contributed to the disillusionment leading up to the Reformation. The ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of the Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the lack of any mechanism to activate reform saw the emergence of an attitude of questioning regarding many of the Church’s positions and functions. One important mover activating the Reformation was the Black Death which brought about a radical reorientation of the economy in many European societies. The collapse of the feudal structure and the growth of commercialism, especially in the urban areas, provided a great fillip to the movement, for the unshackling of the Church’s tight grip upon people’s lives. The disbanding of manorial economy and the prosperity following the changed economic condition of many European countries, including England, can be seen as conditions that enhanced the secular impulse; this was a process that was greatly aided by the humanist move for a better cultural orientation. Greed, corruption, and a rigid hierarchical structure contributed to engender dissatisfaction among people within the Church and outside. John Wycliffe had voiced concern and even organised a form of resistance to the highly corrupt practices of the churchmen in the fourteenth century. The lack of accountability of the Church, the suspicion surrounding its financial condition, and the interest of many rulers in its wealth created the atmosphere where any form of protest was bound to find support, both political and religious. Within the Church the number of people seeking a complete reorganisation of the clerical institution was growing all the time. The religious-minded saw in the activities of humanists like Erasmus the

possibilities of addressing the problems of the Church through a new mechanism. The crisis in the Church, before the actual reformist movement, was thus a crisis of ideology. The belief that religious principles could seek the aid of philosophy to augment its theses and further its cause, as Thomas Aquinas had done, was now brought under the scanner. This led to the collapse of the scholastics which was substituted by the ideology that a simple correspondence between reason and faith could not account for the inconsistencies within the Church. The scholastic emphasis of people like Duns Scotus and Aquinas which argued through the frame of a presupposed faith was seriously challenged by the newly emerging humanist focus in sixteenth century philosophy. At its core, Humanism wasn’t a direct attempt at Church reform. It was, however, the humanists who drew attention to the need for change in the Church through their emphasis on education. Humanist thinkers like Erasmus believed that a true religiosity was a matter of individual response and not institutionally programmed. The corruption in the Church was a major deterrent in both man’s religious practices and educational possibilities. The humanists’ emphasis on devotionalism as a better alternative to the rituals prescribed by the Church appeared to attract the reformists. There was thus a favouring of the moral conditions within which to situate man and marginalisation of ritualistic practice. Humanism was a great intellectual stimulator for the Reformation in that it provided a sound basis to place the argument for the criticism of the institutional trappings of the Church. What the Reformation emphasised was not a dismantling of the Church as an institution but its reconstruction to address the individual’s religious concerns. The focus of Humanist individualism appealed to those who were not as religiously occupied as the clerics themselves. These included the newly emerging merchant class who found clerical regimentation a deterrent to their interests. For many people the Church’s views regarding trade, pricing, and usury were outmoded and not viable. There was also a gradual distancing between the priest and his parishioners with the former becoming more and more inaccessible and patronising. On the other hand, many priests appointed to the parish churches were not learned, especially in the rural areas. The lack of theological research which had suffered because of a sizeable number of priests had not exhibited that knack or they were not required to further religious studies became another cause that activated the call for reform.

Most importantly, the clerics, including bishops were seen more as administrative managers rather than serious theological scholars. This was because the medieval Church had grown enormously to have its elaborate institutional setup with a lot of assets and property to look after. In such a situation the bishops could not afford to be unfamiliar with the required legal and financial regulations. The call for religious orientation by the priests, in such a context, appeared to be hollow as the cleric and the image of a man of faith didn’t seem to agree with one another. Luther exploited this situation by arguing that every man could function as his own priest; this reworking of the humanist motif of individualism saw the emergence of the Bible as the primary instrument of faith. The growth of Renaissance and Humanism also saw the cleric lose his monopoly as the professional knowledge man; common people read the classics and were forming opinions themselves.

The Bible and the Reformation Religious doctrine for many people in the medieval period was epitomised by the Bible. However, the Bible in the Middle Ages was not accessible to the common people and was available only through transference through mechanisms organised by the Church, the most prominent of which were the priests who came into contact with the people regularly. The Humanist emphasis on the individuality of man was an illustration of how man could access God through the Bible itself. The printing revolution was a major aid in this process when the call for the supremacy of the holy book was given by the Reformists. It is not that the Church had deferred scholarship; on the contrary the Church had actually facilitated research in theology and hermeneutics for ages. But then the pursuit of knowledge within the Church’s banner was limited in that it was called to serve the needs of religion and any appropriation of other findings (Aquinas is an example of this reworking of philosophy to fit the theological frame) was bound to be placed within a theological ambit. So the cultivation and pursuit of knowledge was aimed to consolidate Church dogma. In a sense, the emphasis on the Bible as the sole religious authority by Reformists, was a violation of the humanist pursuits which the Church itself had orchestrated. Martin Luther had been involved in Bible scholarship for a long time and it is to the holy book that he later attributed the call for reform. The Bible’s centrality to the Reformist

programme inaugurates interesting aspects like education and the cultivation of individuality. The focus on the Bible suggested the spreading of education as it was a call to people to access the contents directly, which would not be possible without some form of basic literacy. The fact that the Bible combined the response of the individual to his faith can also be seen as another factor which aimed to release religion from the grasp of the clerical institution. Other factors such as the spreading of books following the print revolution, better educational programmes and facilities for the common people, growth of nationalism and call to cleanse the Church, commercial development, and individualism were also responsible for the Reformist movement but the Bible’s reach and its re-presentation as the source of faith worked to mount it as the movement with a following.

Reformation in Europe One of the major centres of the Reformation movement in Europe was Germany which was led by Martin Luther. Luther’s study of the scriptures convinced him that salvation was an issue involving man and God and did not necessarily require the sacraments, the Church rituals, or even the priests to intervene. More radical and challenging was Luther’s recognition of just two sacraments—the Holy Eucharist and baptism. He believed that faith is the only way of achieving salvation from which sprung the doctrine called justification by faith. His views were in direct opposition to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and the crisis came over the issue of granting indulgences. While the indulgence as a spiritual instrument was extremely personal the Church gradually came to use it as a means of amassing wealth. The sinner who confessed and repented was granted an indulgence following which he said special prayers and gave a petty donation to the clerical authorities. However, when Pope Leo X announced the sale of indulgences during 1515–17 for the purpose of raising funds he vitalised Church agents like Johann Tetzel who sold indulgences in Wittenberg without even explaining the importance of repentance. Such promotion of indulgences was severely criticised by Luther who challenged the Church’s functioning in his 95 theses posted on the door of the Wittenberg Church in October 1517. In a debate with a clergyman named Johann Eck, Luther was more radical as he questioned the rights of the papacy in administering faith to individuals.

Luther’s radical views led to his excommunication by the Church in 1521 when he did not act according to the Diet of Worms which sought his recantation. His refusal to accede to the papal demand for withdrawal of his views was instrumental in him being branded a heretic, and supporters of the Pope were up in arms against him. The printing presses that started functioning in the late fifteenth century provided a great fillip to Luther’s attempt to disseminate his position regarding faith. In 1520, Luther published three important documents that expressed his radical views against the Church. In these texts—An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On Christian Liberty—he exposed the inconsistencies of the foundations of the Roman Catholic Church. His translation of the Bible from Latin to German was an important step in propagating the principles of Lutheranism. Like other Renaissance ideas the Lutheran emphasis on the individual placed man in direct relation to God. The cessation of corruption, which was the driving force behind Luther’s agitation, yielded a reappraisal of the individual’s response to God. On the other hand, Luther was also very serious and particular about interpreting the import of the scriptures, a tendency that did not go too well with the humanists who tried to inculcate a flexible approach to knowledge. Apart from the print revolution playing a part in the Lutheran emphasis on reform, there was still another factor which influenced the spread of his ideas —the growth of universities in Germany. The fact that the universities in medieval Europe provided many aspiring and enthusiastic young men a platform proved to be conducive for Lutheranism. In the universities it was easy to press for reform through a questioning of doctrine because the intellectual climate in the higher educational institutions made such a situation easier. The universities in Europe grew rapidly during the Renaissance and some started quite late (Wittenberg University, where Luther studied, became operational in 1502). Lutheranism caused a great divide among the people, the princes, and the clergy alike. The ones who supported the status quo—the emperor and the higher clergy being in this group—did not give any justification in favour of the Lutheran protest. In the north of Germany, however, Lutheranism won favour with the lower clergy, the peasantry, and the commercial class. These two groups soon indulged in direct conflict which is known as the Peasants’ War (1524). Although aligned

with the Lutheran impulse the peasants had their own axe to grind as they took the opportunity, accorded by the religious upheaval, to seek better conditions for themselves. Luther was not supportive of the economic agenda that the peasants were trying to push through but he considered their case in terms of the conflict’s implications and urged the landlords to settle the matter. Luther’s position was soon directed towards the peasants that sought to argue against their violent methods in his pamphlet titled Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of Peasants (1525). The defeat of the peasants that very year, however, did not ease the conflict. The Diet of Speyer (1526) was an important step towards the recognition of the conflict when German princes desiring to accept Lutheranism were granted the freedom to make that choice. The second Diet of Speyer (1529), however, saw the revocation of the first which led to the protest by the Lutheran minority. These protestors came to be known as the Protestants. The Reformation, however, was not confined to Germany alone. The Swiss pastor Huldreich Zwingli was one of the driving forces in initiating protest against the sale of indulgences in his country. Zwingli’s method of articulating his protest was more publicoriented than Luther as he used the town council, the marketplace, and the pulpit equally as platforms. Zwingli agreed with Luther that the Bible was the only source of spiritual authority. For two years from 1523, Zwingli and his supporters in Zurich went about de-institutionalising the Church by burning relics, calling for the abolition of adoration of saints, and by adopting communion service in lieu of the much elaborate mass. The Reform movement in Switzerland served as a very fruitful forum to declare their independence from the Roman Church and the German Empire. Not all cantons were equally forthcoming and while Basel and Bern adopted similar reforms some others still favoured Roman Catholicism. Like the Peasants’ War in Germany, civil unrest too affected the Swiss Reformation. The Catholic and the Protestant cantons faced each other in 1529 and 1531 and the second conflict saw Zwingli’s death. The conflict ended in each canton being granted the right to choose its own religion. The Lutheran and Zwinglian drives for the reformation of the Church found a worthy successor in the figure of the French Protestant thinker John Calvin who represented the next generation. Although French by origin, Calvin was compelled to abandon his land and come to the independent republic of Geneva. Calvin argued for a much more systematic organisation of reforms

and sought to introduce the ideas of democracy in his Church. The Calvinist doctrines were remarkably rigid and were worked out to the smallest detail. The rigidity of the Calvinist position was manifested in the theocratisation of Geneva. The Calvinists were in control of religious as well as secular matters; education, politics, entertainment, daily conduct, dress—all these things came under the purview of Calvinist doctrine. The emphasis on education saw the unification of the Calvinist Church as knowledgeable Protestants were invited to Geneva to share their experiences. The idea of divine election, one of the basic tenets of Calvinism, went well with the merchants, peasants, and the common men, for ambition, thrift and hard work were seen as true Christian attributes. The appeal of Calvinism can be seen in the adoption of its doctrines by many European churches, and the Reformed Church in the Netherlands and the Scottish Church led by John Knox are two of the most visible examples of this phenomenon.

Reformation in England The character of the Reformation in England was not only different from its Continental versions but also mounted through a process that was politically situated. Unlike the Reformist movements in other European countries, the challenge to the Church in England was propelled by an already existing anticlerical condition of which John Wycliffe and the Lollards were the most aggressive and visible. In fact, the Lollard movement in England had served to encourage the Hussites in Bohemia to orchestrate a similar uprising. The Lollards had been a potent force, however, only in the late fourteenth century and the Reformist impulse can never be seen as the legacy of the declining Lollards. The Lollards had only suggested the possibilities of resistance to the existing Church structure in the fourteenth century and a reference to Lollardism is at best engaged as a historical antecedent of the Reformation. The more immediate factor responsible for the move to disengage from the papal authority was part of the political exigency of Henry VIII. Henry was originally a devout Catholic and actually had no intention of segregating himself from such an allegiance. The refusal of the papacy to grant him a divorce led to his activating the Parliament to organise the cessation from the Roman Catholic Church of Rome. During Henry Tudor’s reign the Church of England acquired a new character.

In 1534, the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy which made Henry the authority of the Church of England too. One of the activities initiated by Henry VIII was the ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’ which was completed by 1540. The separation from the Roman Church also brought about a halt to holy pilgrimages and attacks on pilgrim shrines were not uncommon. The wealth of the monasteries now became state property, a move that consolidated the Crown’s power over the Church. The aristocracy and the gentry had a say in the way these matters were organised and hence the dissolution was not simply a matter of stalling corruption. This process of Reformation, initiated by Henry VIII in England, was not accepted by all. Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, who were executed for resisting it, show that the Reformation in England was welcomed by everybody, at least not in the way it was carried out by Henry. Along with the people who were against the Reformist challenge in England there were also some who believed in the necessity of the movement. Many of Henry’s supporters were Protestants and they felt that a severance was required even though they may not have been willing to submit to the personal equation of Henry when he activated the resistance to papacy in England. By the time Henry’s son Edward VI began his reign in 1547, Protestantism was strongly placed in England. Edward’s sympathies emboldened the Reformists and they abolished the mass, ruined images, and had a hand in the closure of the chantries. The Reformist designs initiated by Henry and followed up by Edward, however, were overturned for a brief period when Mary (1553– 1558), who became the monarch after Edward, reverted to Catholicism. This development was short-lived and a settlement of the English Church was made during the reign of Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s balancing act was a compromise no doubt, but it was nevertheless successful and worked to douse the aggression in both camps. While England chose to become Protestant, the condition in the other European states wasn’t taking such a simple trajectory; this was because the Counter Revolution was affecting many of the changes that the Reformists originally desired. The Elizabethan experiment was thus peculiar to England and such a settlement was not to be seen in other countries after the Reformation. The Civil War in the seventeenth century and the conflict between the Puritans and the state was the next major religious strife in England but as a whole the aftermath of the Reformation had been reasonably quiet in England. Reformation in England

differed from other such calls for change to the clerical institution in two ways: first, the call for a move towards Protestantism in England was not evidenced in a power struggle within the country; second, the strength of the monarchy and its relation to the Parliament enabled it to weather the religious conflict better than any other European nation. Reformation in England, thus, was a national effort and an official protest against the functioning of the Roman authority. This was a strange combination given the state of politics and religion in Europe at that time. But it worked. It was effective in structuring a consensual politics in spite of the fact that Henry’s reasons for the severance weren’t in anyway lofty. The pattern of the religious struggle, also, wasn’t following the European example in England. While the call for religious reform brought about a political re-appraisal of relations with the papacy; in England, it was a political initiative from the very beginning.

ELIZABETHAN THEATRE The Elizabethan Theatre and Stage The playhouses in Elizabethan England were varied in terms of the audiences it catered to, the plays it staged and produced, and the sites it occupied. The nature of the production, too, differed with some having a stylised and rhetorical presentation on a bare stage while others relying on a glossy, ornamental look where elaborate costume, celebrity actors, and carefully designed scenic effects sought to attract its audience. The emergence of theatres in England was very much an Elizabethan development; when the early English play Gorboduc was staged, it was organised for a private audience. Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, on the other hand was written for an audience that responded to stage performances and was accustomed to the certain theatrical conventions. Within this period, stretching from Gorboduc to the plays of Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan theatre was a part of contemporary cultural and social life. The Mysteries, the Moralities, and the Interludes were responsible for creating an atmosphere of theatre in the early Tudor period. While the Mysteries and the Moralities weren’t devised to accommodate lengthier stage performances, the Interlude was perhaps the first step in the formation of ‘characters.’ The Mysteries were performed in cycles (they are also known as Cycle Plays) and stories from the Creation to the Last Judgement formed its subject matter. The religious orientation of the Mysteries was also seen in the Moralities which were, however, based on the presentation of abstractions through personifications. The Moralities were remarkable engagements in psychological discourse, even though such plays were also popular for the entertainment they provided to the audience. Both, the Mysteries and the Moralities along with the Miracles, were meant to educate the public in religiosity and were performed either in the open or in wagons. The Interludes were not, unlike the Mysteries or the Moralities, performances designed for the stage or for the viewing of the general public, but were organised in the halls of great men, universities, or schools. The young Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Thomas Kyd must have been familiar with such presentations and the influence of the preceding theatrical tradition on the Elizabethan dramatists is undeniable. Many of the theatres during the early years of English stage history were

located outside the city walls of London. This had to do with the clout of the authorities who considered theatrical activity to be against the standards of the age. In fact, the attitude towards the Elizabethan theatre was mixed and the growth of Tudor London can also be chronicled through its response to the stage. The London theatres in the Elizabethan age occupied two areas— the south bank of the River Thames and the northeast part through Finsbury Fields. Blackfriars, the theatre house where many of Shakespeare’s plays were staged, was placed within the walls of London. Although ‘The Theatre’ is usually credited with the honour of being the first playhouse (it was opened in 1576), it was preceded by other theatrical structures that fulfilled the requirements of contemporary stage performance adequately. The Red Lion (1567), perhaps the first theatrical structure in Elizabethan London, was begun by John Brayne in Stepney, even though it was soon superseded by The Theatre, in which Brayne and his brother-in-law James Burbage had a hand. Located in the Liberty of Halliwell, Shoreditch, The Theatre was placed outside the city’s jurisdiction. The Theatre had a remarkable history that spanned twenty years. During this time many companies availed of its facilities: Leicester’s (1576–8), the Queen’s (1583–9), the Admiral’s Men (1590–1), and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (1594–6). The Theatre did not have a roof and was characterised by its circular structure, which accommodated three galleries surrounding a yard. Besides having stage performances, The Theatre functioned as the arena for fencing and athletic competitions also. James Burbage’s death in 1597 led to its closure and his sons, Cuthbert and Richard, used its resources to initiate the building of the Globe theatre. In the new Globe theatre, the Burbages controlled half of the shares while the rest was distributed between the members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. From its inception in 1599 to its closure in 1644, the Globe stood witness to many memorable performances. It was burnt in 1613 when its thatch was inadvertently set afire by cannon during a staging of Henry VIII. The destruction of the Globe, however, did not prevent its reconstruction the next year. In course of the reconstruction, its original cylindrical shape was replaced by a circular one and a tiled gallery roof. This reconstructed Globe was pulled down in 1644, a couple of years after the Puritans closed all theatrical activity in 1642. Another theatre, The Rose (1587–1605), was built by Philip Henslowe and John Cholmley. The octagonal shape of the Rose gave it a distinct identity and it was partly

thatched and constructed upon a brick foundation. Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta were some of the plays staged in The Rose. Henslowe opened another playhouse, The Fortune, in 1600. It opened to a performance by the Admiral’s Men and continued to stage plays illegally even during the Puritan reign. It was dismantled in 1661. One of the theatres that courted controversy for the nature of the performances and the crowd that attended it was the Red Bull. It was started by Aaron Holland at the beginning of the seventeenth century (1600–05) and was characterised by the presence of a rowdy crowd; it soon became famous as a site of vulgarity. Queen Anne’s Men was one of the main groups to occupy the Red Bull (c.1600–17). It survived the Puritan regime and reopened when theatrical activity was restored in 1660. By 1665, however, it was no longer in use. Blackfriars Theatre, located at the erstwhile Dominican (the Black Friars) priory, was a major playhouse in Elizabethan England. Richard Burbage played at the Blackfriars following his inheritance in 1597. This was also one of the early Elizabethan companies to pioneer boys’ acting by patronising Children’s Companies in its first version (1576–80). The late plays of Shakespeare were performed at the Blackfriars. It was closed down in 1642.

Marlowe and the University Wits The dramatic convention inherited by Shakespeare was not only rich in orientation but also a very flexible platform that made it possible for his genius to exploit it fully. In terms of staging and theatricality, preShakespearean drama is characterised by a slow and gradual movement from the religion-based theatre of the Moralities and the Mysteries to a wellendowed and developed secular structure in the late sixteenth century. It is interesting to note that at the advent of the sixteenth century, the Mysteries, the Miracles, and the Moralities were drawing great audiences. The Interludes, a form of interval-presentation during a banquet or some other entertainment, was slightly different from the religious temper of the other three dramatic forms. The Interlude was characterised by the fact that it did not have ‘action’ in the way later Elizabethan plays depicted it, and nor did it require much stage-props. The Interludes suggest the Renaissance emphasis on intellectual inquisitiveness while at the same time borrowing from some of

the features of the religious drama of the time. Another kind of play, known as the mummers’ play, was part of the English folk tradition, and performances of wooing plays, mummings, Robin Hood plays, and other folk performances were common at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The fact that there were many folk festivals in the Elizabethan countryside provided a great platform for these performances. The development of pre-Shakespearean drama was subject to major influences that were not native in origin. The secular performances in the early sixteenth century (of which schoolmasters initiated some) were influenced by the classical models provided by Plautus and Terence. Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (c.1541), loosely based on Terence’s Eunuchus and Miles Gloriosus, is usually considered to be the first major English comedy. Its racy dialogue and swift turns of plot make it a milestone in English theatrical history. Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c.1553), the next significant English comedy, is attributed to an unidentified Mr. S, and is noted for its Englishness, as its rhymed doggerel and apparent lack of the classical influence shows the creative resources of the native dramatist. The classical influence in terms of tragedy came from Seneca. The Senecan model was quite unlike the dramatic practice in England till the middle of the sixteenth century but the external features of his plays—grand speeches, gory elements, supernatural aspects—caught the fancy of the early Elizabethan playwrights. Gorboduc (1561), the first major example of an English tragedy, was presented by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, two students from the Inns of Court. Its adoption of the generic devices of the Senecan model was evident in the lack of action, but at the same time it was a move away from the abstractions of the Morality tradition. Among the many contributors to the rich heritage of pre-Shakespearean drama, the University Wits were the most versatile. John Lyly (1554–1606), who caused a stir with his Euphues (1578), and Euphues and His England (1580), was also a successful playwright. Lyly’s dramatic career is closely connected with the boys’ companies, which performed all his plays except The Woman in the Moon. Some of his major plays are Campaspe, Sappho and Phao, Gallathea, Endymion: The Man on the Moon, Love’s Metamorphosis, and Mother Bombie. Apart from the first two, which were performed in the early 1580s, the rest are usually dated in the second part of the same decade. His comedies were artificial and used the setting of Italian

pastoral idyll and his was an unmistakable influence on later playwrights of the age. Thomas Kyd, another of the University Wits, is famous for one play that is associated with the tradition of Elizabethan revenge tragedy—The Spanish Tragedy. It was published anonymously in 1592 and continued to be the favourite of the theatre companies, with Ben Jonson augmenting it with additions for the Lord Admiral’s Men. The plot of The Spanish Tragedy is set against the backdrop of the Spanish victory over the Portuguese in 1580 and a story of intrigue; it is thematically organised to present a father’s revenge of his son’s murder. Heironymo, the father is the Marshal of Spain while his son Horatio, the lover of Belimperia, has made Balthazar, the son of the Portuguese Viceroy, a captive. Balthazar’s falling in love with Belimperia complicates the plot. The captive’s love interest is supported by the brother of the girl, who also happens to be the nephew of the Spanish king. Lorenzo and Balthazar conspire against Horatio to eliminate him. Meanwhile, Heironymo finds out the murderers and plans a play before the court and he manages to persuade the conspirators to take part in it. During the staging of this play Heironymo stabs Lorenzo with Belimperia doing the same to Balthazar. While Belimperia stabs herself, Heironymo’s end comes after he selfdestructs following his capture. As a ‘tragedy of blood’, Kyd’s play anticipates many of the features of Shakespearean and Jabobean tragedies, although without the polish of the more illustrious playwrights that followed him. Kyd is also associated with the adaptation of two more plays—Soliman and Perseda and Garnier’s Cornéille—which did not have the same impact as The Spanish Tragedy. Robert Greene’s stage practice saw the return of folk comedy which was accompanied by romantic adventure, magic, and country jests. His The Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Aragon (c.1587) is elaborate in its stage directions and is the first instance of such detailing in this respect in an Elizabethan play. Greene’s most famous play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c.1589) is a hotchpotch but significant for the way it combines elements of popular folk drama with a mocking representation of the clergy. Greene’s success in this play lies in his ability to carry the multiple plots together. The Scottish History of James the Fourth (c.1591), Greene’s last play brings in royalty and the fairy world within the same frame, but such a juxtaposition wasn’t very successful on the contemporary stage. George Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale (c.1590) was another combination of farce and romantic folk tale. Peele was a prolific playwright

and experimented with various genres: Edward I (c.1593) is historical, The Battle of Alcazar (c.1589) deals with foreign history, The Love of King David and Fair Bathseba (c.1594) is based on a Biblical theme, and The Arraignment of Paris (c.1584) combines classical pastoral and contemporary topicality to add novelty to a familiar subject. Thomas Lodge (1557–1625), another University Wit, wrote two plays—The Wounds of Civil War (c.1586) and A Looking Glass for London and England (with Robert Greene, c.1594) —which both drew on classical themes. While the first derived from Appian’s Roman History, the second adopted the morality frame to suggest the relevance of Ninevah’s fate to the contemporary audience. Christopher Marlowe, the greatest of the University Wits, and also a major Elizabethan dramatist, had a very short career in the theatre. His first play Tamburlaine (1587) was performed by the Lord Admiral’s Men. Marlowe’s use of blank verse is a major Elizabethan feature, and although Norton and Sackville had experimented with it in Gorboduc, it was Marlowe who suggested the potential of this form to his contemporaries. Marlowe is consistent in his use of dignified themes and the serious drama that has been characterised as Marlovian is founded on the union of matter and form which was unprecedented in the English theatre. The majesty of Tamburlaine is carried forth by a powerfully etched character who overwhelms all before him. The play is in two parts, the first of which is generically a history play. In Marlowe’s conception, the hero is a Scythian shepherd who exploits the passers-by travelling through the territory of Mycestes, the Persian king. It isn’t long before Tamburlaine becomes the king of Persia and he successfully defends the attack of the Turkish monarch Bajazeth. Bajazeth and his wife Zabina are captured and put behind bars. Zenocrate, the beautiful Egyptian princess is Tamburlaine’s next victim, who is caught on the way to marry the Arabian king. In the subsequent contest between the Egyptian sultan/Arabian king and the Marlovian hero, the latter wins with the sultan accorded the welcome as the father of the bride to be, while the king is killed. In spite of the brutal acts of Tamburlaine, he is portrayed as a strong, resolute man who conquers weak opponents with conviction. His unscrupulousness is contextualised by his love for Zenocrate, one of the driving forces of the play. The second part of Tamburlaine is puzzling as it is a more intense catalogue of villainous acts perpetrated by the protagonist. The appeal of the play lies in its grandiloquence and its magnificent design and execution exemplifies

Marlowe’s dramatic potential. The Jew of Malta (c.1590) has had problems of both dating and generic categorisation. Styled as a tragedy, it has been seen as a farce, black comedy and a satire. The protagonist of the play is the Jew Barabas, who loses his wealth following the diktat of the Maltese Governor directing the seizure, and to complicate matters further, his house is transformed into a nunnery. His daughter Abigail joins a nunnery. The complications of the plot lead to the death of Barabas and the poisoning of Abigail with the villainy of the Jew established beyond doubt. The world of moral anarchy in the play is replete with acts that do not qualify as just for any of the characters except Abigail. Perhaps the underside of the society is represented by Ithamore, who remains on the margins. Edward II (c.1592) is poorly constructed but is striking in its strong finish. This is a remarkable experiment in the play of power which was perfected by Shakespeare. Dido, Queen of Carthage (c.1585), reputed to be Marlowe’s first play, was perhaps a collaboration with Thomas Nashe. Doctor Faustus (c.1592), Marlowe’s most famous play combines features of the morality tradition with the theme of the Renaissance to present a secular individual within a religious frame. Based on the German legend of Faust, Marlowe’s play deals with the themes of individualism, intellectual propriety, and Renaissance curiosity; it places Faustus within the frame of the typical Renaissance pursuer of knowledge whose exhaustion of the traditional disciplines suggests the overwhelming of authority which was characteristically associated with the Renaissance humanists. In his pursuance of knowledge Faustus pledges his soul to Lucifer, and while he whiles his time away in insignificant nothings, the time of reckoning sees him hasten to seek the help of Providence, but by then it is too late. Doctor Faustus is one of the major achievements of the Elizabethan theatre in spite of the fact that there are serious inconsistencies in the plot (most likely because of interpolation by another hand) and the comic scenes hardly gel with the primary thematic movement. Some passages as the Helen episode are often quoted for the characteristic Marlovian brilliance that his verse carried with such élan.

Shakespeare and Jonson William Shakespeare (1564–1616) towers as a colossus over the English literary and cultural scene. Apart from his creative genius which flowered in

all its magnificence in the theatrical arena, his poems, sonnets, and histrionics have become a part of English lore. External facts about his life are scanty and much of the connections between the dates associated with his life and career are based on conjecture and detective work. Exactly when he began writing plays for the theatre has not been settled. Perhaps he began work as a collaborator like many of his contemporaries (the hand of others has been seen in Henry VI, c.1590) and by the time he graduated to write for the theatre on his own he had become part of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Such a professional arrangement must have been mutually beneficial to both the parties as his output in the early 1590s suggests. His early comedies—The Comedy of Errors (c.1593), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c.1593), and The Taming of the Shrew (c.1594)—though lacking in the maturity evident in his later comedies are qualified by the presence of great comic timing and the repeat value of the plays; especially the first of the three, testify to their appeal. Shakespeare at this time was dealing with material that was highly derivative (as in the case of most of his later plays) but his deft handling provided the drama a texture that enriched the lot like no other. This comic experiment was complemented by his attempt at tragedy and history plays. Titus Andronicus (c.1590) and Richard III (c.1594), with a lot of bloodletting in them, shows the road he travelled as he came to compose his great tragedies, and his three Henry VI plays are suggestive of the direction he was interested in, in these early years at the theatre. The 1590s also concerns the middle comedies like Love’s Labour Lost (c.1594), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1596), and The Merchant of Venice (c.1596); in the same decade Shakespeare’s interest in the tragic (Romeo and Juliet, c.1595) as well as the historical themes (Richard II, c.1595, Henry IV 1&2, c.1597–8 and Henry V, c.1599) found manifestation. Shakespeare’s involvement with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men resulted in the production of many of his mature plays. While his problem plays have dwelt with issues that engage conflicts where resolutions do not offer themselves readily, it is in his tragedies that Shakespeare’s genius is displayed in multi-dimensional splendour. The four great tragedies—Hamlet (c.1601), Othello (c.1604), King Lear (c.1605), and Macbeth (c.1606)—set unprecedented standards of theatre. The tragic dimension in a Shakespearean play is not unique for its choice of material (all the sources of Shakespeare’s tragedies were stories that had been in circulation previously) but for the way he organises and treats it. Other

Shakespearean tragedies are Julius Caesar (c.1599), Antony and Cleopatra (c.1607), Coriolanus (c.1608), and Timon of Athens (c.1607). Shakespeare’s last plays show a much mellow orientation but nevertheless they are in keeping with the evolving character of the playwright. Pericles (c.1608), probably written in collaboration with George Wilkins, introduced the quiet temper of his last plays discernible in Cymbeline (c.1610), The Winter’s Tale (c.1611), and The Tempest (c.1611). Two plays by Shakespeare in collaboration with John Fletcher—Henry VIII (c.1613) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (pub. 1634)—have been considered patchy although sparks of his characteristic style are visible here also. Shakespeare’s plays are usually placed in terms of phases though his development as a dramatist is traced. Such an organisation for critical purposes does not, however, really address the issues of individual features of each play specifically. Shakespeare is closely associated with the romantic comic tradition for the finesse with which he portrayed his subject. The creation of the imaginative realm in Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, has a telling counterpoint in the assuredness of The Merchant of Venice, where key political issues of the day found manifestation. It is, however, in his tragedies that Shakespeare exhibited the intensity of passion, deceit, and destruction in a manner that was unparalleled in contemporary drama. More than anything else, generations of theatregoers as well as readers of his plays have wondered at the exquisite beauty of his language and the incredible control that has come to be recognised as Shakespearean. His tragedies have been examined in a variety of ways—from being sites of memorable character to being wonderful exhibitions of the politics and the structures of power. It is impossible to convey through an outline or impoverished summary the grand design and exuberance of his comic and tragic dimensions. It has also been a commonplace to situate Shakespeare as a product of his time, while the granting of the label of greatness has had avowed advocates through the ages. Ben Jonson (1572–1637) is one the greats of the Elizabethan theatrical scene. He is associated with a particular kind of comedy known as the comedy of humours. Based on the concept of personality being governed by the presence of the four humours, his two plays dealing with its representation —Every Man in his Humour (1598) and Every Man out of His Humour (1599)—established his reputation as a playwright of note. Every Man in his Humour deals with the exposure of the follies of the foolish by showing an

overabundance of the ‘humours’ in the characters. The Knowell family, represented by father and son, are at the centre of the complex plot where disguise and intrigue are involved. The most important character, however, is Old Knowell’s servant Brainworm, whose manipulative tactics outsmart the others and also determine the play’s direction. Every Man out of his Humour is less attractive but has the same comic concern and is an important contribution to the tradition of satiric comedies. The convention of satiric comedy is furthered by other Jonsonian plays such as Cynthia’s Revels (1600) and The Poetaster (1601). Jonson also tried his hand at drama drawn from classical themes in Sejanus, His Fall (1603), and Catiline His Conspiracy (1611). The first Roman play deals with the career of Lucius Aelius Sejanus whose ambitious designs are eventually thwarted by the mob. The second Roman play, Catiline His Conspiracy, too follows the protagonist’s fall but it does not have the sustaining power of his comedies. Jonson’s reputation is based on his comedies especially Volpone (1605), Epicoene, or, The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist, (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614). Jonson shows consummate control over the subject and he is recognised as having the best plot arrangements in his plays among his contemporaries. Another notable feature of his comedies is his incisive language which is pointed and focused, showing his skill in the portrayal of character. Volpone, for instance, has a protagonist who marvels in deceit and he is ably supported by his lieutenant Mosca, who eventually outwits. Filled with mountebanks, frauds, dupes, and fools, Jonson’s dramas represent the contemporary London underbelly in all its horror, which is intensified by the sharpness of the comic orientation. His plays show his knowledge of contemporary manners and London life is nowhere as elaborately represented in contemporary theatre as in Jonson’s comedies. All his plays, however, were not successful on the stage. The Devil is an Ass (1616), another Jonson experiment in knavery, was a failure. The New Inn (1629) and A Tale of a Tub (1633) are his last plays. Jonson is closely associated with the trend of classicism that emerged as a counterpoint to the Romantic mode epitomised by Shakespeare. He was the major Elizabethan playwright to adhere to the idea of the ‘unities’ and abhorred the extravagant excesses of his contemporaries. Apart from being a playwright Jonson was also a very successful writer of masques, and his collaboration with the noted architect Inigo Jones was a celebrated one.

Webster and Early Stuart Drama John Webster (c.1580–1634) wrote plays at a time when collaborations were common and it is not surprising, therefore, to find him partnering other contemporary dramatists. Four of his productions—Westward Ho (c.1606), Northward Ho (c.1605), The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1607), and Appius and Virginia (c.1608)—were collaborations, the first three with Dekker and the last with Heywood. The reputation of Webster, however, rests on plays that are considered to be his alone. The Devil’s Law Case (c.1610) is steeped in sensationalism and does not have the tautness of his better plays. The White Devil (c.1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (c.1613) are Webster’s best known plays. The play revolves around the character of the lead female protagonist Vittoria Corombona, whose love relationship with the already married Brachiano leads to a series of murders. Eventually, both the lovers die and leave a sorry reminder of the consequences of adultery in a society that isn’t placed morally any better than them. The Duchess of Malfi is memorable for Webster’s characterisation of the title figure and her husband Antonio. The character of Bosola, the slave sent to spy upon the Duchess is the pivot around whom the plot of the play revolves. This play exemplifies the combination of betrayal, intrigue, and power, themes that served many of the Jacobean dramatists as well. As tragedies of revenge, these plays exhibit a relentless parade of bloodletting vendetta, which is to a great extent controlled by Webster’s careful use of language. The picture of chaos in both these tragedies is organised through a structured development. Webster has been accused of lacking in humour, but then the genre he dealt with would perhaps have lost its intensity if the grossly comic infiltrated its frame. Webster and his contemporaries dealt with a moral-less universe where the Christian values like compassion and kindness, humanity and goodness were overwhelmed by a pursuit of self-interest. Towards the end of his career, Webster was involved in further collaborations—Anything for a Quiet Life (c.1621) with Middleton and A Cure for a Cuckold (c.1624) with Rowley. John Marston (1576–1634) began his career by writing for a boys’ company —two plays—Antonio and Mellida (1599) and its sequel Antonio’s Revenge (1599). Two of the plays, The Dutch Courtesan (c.1604), and The Malcontent

(1604), are his most characteristic as they deal with the themes of disguise, fraud, and duplicity. Like many of his contemporaries, Thomas Dekker (c.1570–1632) was a versatile artist, who was also a pamphleteer and a writer of masques, besides being a successful dramatist. His first play, Old Fortunatus (1599), is a moral story showing the fortunes of a beggar’s family. His second play, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, is considered to be his masterpiece. It portrays a very vivid picture of London and is successful in capturing a variety of characters involved in their own professions. The central character of Simon Eyre is one of the most memorable figures in Renaissance drama. The other plays that Dekker wrote on his own are not as sustained. They include Satiromastix (1601), The Whore of Babylon (c.1606), and If it be not Good the Devil is in it (c.1610). Dekker was a prolific collaborator and he partnered many of the contemporary dramatists including Webster, Middleton, Massinger, and Chettle and Haughton. Thomas Middleton (c.1580–1625) is known for his city comedies primarily written for the boys’ companies, of which A Mad World, My Masters (c.1605), A Trick to Catch the Old One (c.1605), and Michaelmas Term (c.1606) are well-known. Two of his collaborations with Dekker—The Honest Whore (1604) and The Roaring Girl (pub. 1611)—involve characteristically complicated plots with several twists and turns. His own plays written for adult companies include the well-received A Game of Chess (1624) and Women Beware Women (c.1625). Another of Middleton’s collaborators, William Rowley (c.1685–1626) did write individually—All’s Lost by Lust (c.1620), A New Wonder: A Woman Never Vexed (pub. 1632), and A Match at Midnight (pub.1633)—but he is more known for his success in partnership. Especially notable is his collaboration with Middleton in the production of The Changeling (1622). Thomas Heywood (1573–1641) claimed to have had a hand in about two hundred and twenty plays, of which only thirty are still extant. He is now known as the playwright of the domestic tragedy A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) while his versatility is seen in the variety of dramatic fare that he dished out, both in collaboration and singly, including The Fair Maid of the West (pub. 1631) and If you Know not Me, You Know Nobody (1605). He defended the theatrical establishment against Puritan views in his An Apology for Actors (1612). Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher constituted a very successful playwriting team in the Jacobean period. Their success saw them replacing Shakespeare (about 1609) as the

primary dramatists of the King’s Men. Their notable plays for the King’s Men include Philaster (c.1609), The Maid’s Tragedy (c.1610), and A King and No King (1611). The blurring of moral values constitute one of the features of plays like The Maid’s Tragedy, where sensationalism is seen bordering the pornographic, but it is perhaps also an indication of the changing taste of the times. The theme of The Maid’s Tragedy was a familiar one i.e. human emotion versus the call of duty. Although the play has some weak scenes it is characterised by the presence of extremely powerful situations, which grant it its distinctness. Philaster had almost all the staple ingredients of Jacobean drama—intrigue, suspense, disguise, twists of plot, incredible revelations, an extraordinarily heroic central character, and two heroines. In conjunction with a distinctly undercutting humour, the play succeeds because of the careful integration of all the aforesaid elements. The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), in which Beaumont was alone involved, is the first complete parody in English and in many respects in outshines the original, Heywood’s The Four Prentices. Henry Chettle (c.1560–c.1607) was another prolific dramatist of the time but most of his plays have not survived. Only Hoffman or A Revenge for a Father (c.1603) is believed to be by Chettle. Like other playwrights of the time, Chettle too was a successful collaborator and he joined hands with William Haughton, Webster, Anthony Munday, and John Day. John Day (1574–1640) is known for the satiric comedies that he wrote for the boys’ companies which include Law Tricks (1604) and The Isle of Gulls (1606). Anthony Munday (1560–1633) was a translator and a playwright. His hand is seen by many critics in the play called Sir Thomas More (c.1596) while most of his dramas have not survived. He was also the official poet of London. John Ford (c.1586–1640) was another Jacobean dramatist who is known for his tragedies. However, Ford began his playwright career as a collaborator with Rowley and Dekker in The Witch of Edmonton (1621) and followed it with another partnership with Dekker in The Welsh Ambassador (1623). His comedies weren’t as successful as his tragic drama; nevertheless, two of his comedies, The Fancies, Chaste and Noble (c.1636) and The Lady’s Trial (1638), show his control over dialogue and scene execution. Another comedy, The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), suggests his tragic inclinations. His tragedies are justifiably famous, of which The Broken Heart (c.1629) and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (c.1631) were the most successful. Set in Laconia, The Broken Heart

concerns familiar Jacobean tragic themes of adultery and deceit, while ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is one of the best examples exhibiting the dramatisation of psychological conflict. Ford also wrote a chronicle play Perkin Warbeck (pub. 1634). Philip Massinger (1583–1640) was involved primarily in collaborative work of which quite a lot has not survived. His major collaborations include The Fatal Dowry (c.1618) with Nathan Field, The Virgin Martyr (1620) with Thomas Dekker, and more than twenty plays with John Fletcher which include Sir John van Olden Barnavelt (1619), The Beggar’s Bush (1622), and The Spanish Curate (c.1622). Of the plays where Massinger did not have a partner, The Roman Actor (1626), A New Way to Pay Old Debts (c.1622), and The City Madam (c.1623) are the notable ones. Massinger is best remembered today for the creation of distinctive characters like Sir Giles Overreach (in A New Way to Pay Old Debts) which combined striking realism with witty satire. The Maid of Honour (c.1621), The Bondman (c.1623), and The Renegado (1624) are some of Massinger’s other plays. James Shirley (1596–1666) was greatly influenced by Beaumont and Fletcher, whose style of multiple plotting is evident in his work. His plays show the direction of Caroline drama and his control over the subject is visible in his social comedies. He is also considered to be a forerunner of the Restoration Comedy of Manners. Dealing with a degree of sophistication not common in the romantic comic tradition of the Elizabethan period, Shirley’s plays appealed to a much narrower audience. His major comedies include The School of Compliment (1625), Hyde Park (1632), The Gamester (1633), The Young Admiral (1633), and The Sisters (1642). In The Gamester, Shirley deals with an errant gambler named Wilding whose addiction affects his family life as does his fondness for his wife’s ward Penelope. It was an interesting experiment that combined the social and the personal in an involved plot. His tragedies include The Traitor (1631), Love’s Cruelty (1631), and The Cardinal (1641). Shirley also wrote some very successful masques including The Triumph of Peace (1634) and Cupid and Death (1653).

LITERATURE IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND Early Tudor Poetry and Wyatt and Surrey The poetry of Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547) are consonant with the newly emerging poetic trends in the Tudor age. Chaucer’s poetry was followed by a series of imitators, the most remarkable of them being John Skelton (1460–1529). Skelton is known for developing a particular verse form—the ‘skeltonic’—lines having 2/3 accented syllables and connected either in couplets or longer rhymes. His major poetic works have a dramatic quality that shows his control over the medium (he also wrote a morality play called Magnificence, c.1515–6), and his Philip Sparrow (c.1505), The Garland of Laurel, and The Tunning of Eleanor Rumming (c.1517) provided a contrast to the imported variety of verse that was introduced into Tudor England by Wyatt’s and Surrey. Thomas Wyatt’s first published work was titled Certain Psalms…Drawn into English Metre (1549), but they do not exhibit the Continental influence evident in the poems that appeared in a collection of poems having the contributions of both Wyatt and Surrey i.e., Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). Other compositions by Wyatt did not appear in print before the nineteenth century. Wyatt and Surrey are credited with introducing the sonnet form into English and also of nativising it by structuring it through the rhyming couplet at the end. Wyatt’s contribution to the development of the sonnet form in England is not just confined to the initiation of the genre but also involves his adaptation of a difficult foreign frame in terms of his native language. He was a competent translator and was responsible for bringing Petrarch to England through his translations and adoptions. Wyatt occupies a distinct place in the evolution of English poetry for another reason—he brought forth a Continental flavour into the English literary realm which reemphasised the Renaissance spirit. Wyatt introduced metrically nuanced effects through carefully worked out combinations of verse rhythms; more than anything else they suggest the intricate craftsmanship of this pioneer of sonnet in England. Interestingly, Wyatt’s success lies in his capacity to merge the elements of the inherited English tradition with the imported constituents of the verse forms that he adopted. Wyatt was also conversant with the rondeau and the terza rima, two verse forms that soon grew popular with the creative

Elizabethans that followed him. Surrey, his partner in rhyme, too, was involved in translation. His translation of Virgil’s Aeneid was commended for its accuracy, while his sonnets that drew from the Petrarchan originals were able to retain the classical temper as well as demands of the English language. Like Wyatt, Surrey was instrumental in bringing the sonnet form to the English shores. On the other hand, he did not have the grave aspect discernible in some of the sonnets by Wyatt. Perhaps the best recognised of Surrey’s contributions involve his introduction of blank verse into English literature, a variation he did not invent but helped immensely to popularise. Wyatt and Surrey activated the English language by channelising it to meet the exigencies of the sonnet form. More being simple versifiers, Wyatt and Surrey were also responsible for setting in vogue the pattern of circulating the new verse form through anthologies. Tottel’s Miscellany paved the way for further anthologies of verse to find their way into the midst of the contemporary reading public. Such a proliferation of anthologies was an important factor in creating a climate where the presence of the sonnet form soon legitimised it into becoming a part of the English poetic tradition. Besides Wyatt and Surrey there were many other poets writing in the sixteenth century. The poems of Thomas Churchyard (c.1520–1604) were collected in Churchyard’s Chips (1575). He was a versatile writer and wrote pageant verses, epitaphs, broadsides, and tracts. George Gascoigne (c.1525– 77) was a dramatist and a poet whose play of mistaken identity, Supposes (c.1566), anticipated Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. His amatory poem Dan Bartholomew of Bath has some sparkling passages, while his blank verse satire The Steel Glass (1576) is one of the firsts in the genre. The poem is an attack on materialistic concerns and is supportive of the clerical institution. Gascoigne also imitated Petrarch in his The Grief of Joy (1576) and exploited the potential of the Ovidian form in The Complaint of Philomene (1576). George Whetstone (c.1544–87) wrote a eulogy in verse (1577) praising his contemporary George Gascoigne but he is known more for his unacted play Promos and Cassandra (1578). He was also an author of a biography of Philip Sidney. George Turberville (1540–1610) was the author of Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (1567) which contained both translations from the works of Ovid and Mantuan and original compositions. Barnaby Googe (1505–94) was another translator whose anti-Catholic stance is evident in his collection—Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets (1563). He was

one of first poets to have composed eclogues in English. The eclogue was tried by another of Googe’s contemporaries, Alexander Barclay (1475–1552).

Spenser and Contemporary Elizabethan Poetry Edmund Spenser (1552–99) brought into vogue a kind of poetry that was derived from the classical tradition but which, in his hands, acquired a definite English character. This kind of poetry was called pastoral and Spenser was a master of it. His first major pastoral was The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579). It was published under the pseudonym of Immerito and it ran into many editions. Spenser’s classical sources for the poem were Theocritus’s Idylls and the Eclogues by Virgil. In line with the tradition of the pastoral, The Shepherd’s Calendar deals with the sense of loss and concerns the theme of the golden ages of the past. The contrast between the grossness of the contemporary world and the idealistic vision of earlier days informs the poem. Some of the dominant issues in the poem concern recurrent topics like love, ethics, morality, and God. The poem is structured around the twelve months of the year and it begins as well as ends in the winter season. While January and December carry Colin Clout’s complaints, love, religion, and aesthetic issues dominate the other months. The Shepherd’s Calendar was a prologue to the much more expansive The Faerie Queene. The Shepherd’s Calendar is remarkable for the variety of metrical use it exhibits, and also for being one of the few Elizabethan texts experimenting with the potential of English diction. Pastoralism was one of the themes to dominate English Renaissance literature and The Shepherd’s Calendar intensified a condition that was already in the process of consolidation. It is, however, Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1589–96) that remains his masterpiece. The original plan for the book involved the writing of twelve books, but he did not complete much beyond six. The title figure of the ‘Queene’ is organised both as a reference to Queen Elizabeth and as a representation of ‘Glory.’ The twelve knights in the poem stand for different virtues, while Arthur is the symbol of gentlemanliness. More than the storyline or the purported philosophy, it is in the creation of the enchanting realm and the orchestration of the ambience of the magical that the poem’s primary merit resides. The cadence of the verse and which facilitates the

evocation of the poem’s feeling is one of the major achievements of Elizabethan poetry. The Faerie Queene first appeared with Spenser’s epistle to his friend Walter Raleigh where the main plot of the poem is described as Arthur’s quest for Gloriana, one of the aspects in which Queen Elizabeth is represented in the poem. Belphoebe is another incarnation that stands for the figure of queen. The first book of the poem shows Redcross, the holy knight, who is involved in the protection of Una. The first book, however, is also an allegorical attack on the Catholic institution and the Protestant prejudice against Rome is palpable. The second book concerns the knight of temperance, Guyon. In this section, the major influences are Aristotelian virtue, and Guyon’s journey to the Bower of Bliss is informed by the adventure of Odysseus. The third book chronicles the female knight Britomart’s quest for her future husband Arthegall. Other pairs of lovers emerge in this intricate story whose fates are associated with the figure of Britomart. This Britomat-Arthegall love story continues in the next book and only achieves fruition in Book V. While the fourth book concerned friendship, the focus in the fifth is on Arthegall’s pursuit of the giant Grantorto. The sixth book of The Faerie Queene deals with the adventure of Calidore who is involved in capturing the Blatant Beast. Towards the conclusion of the section, however, the Beast escapes the frame of the text to threaten the poet. Spenser drew from many sources, classical and Continental, and achieved a remarkable synthesis of the Renaissance humanist and Protestant ideals in the poem. Some of Spenser’s other verse compositions include the sonnet collection Amoretti and Epithalamion, both of which appeared in 1595, the autobiographical pastoral Colin Clout’s Come Home Again (1595), Four Hymns (1596), and Prothalamion (1596). Amoretti, in line with other Elizabethan sonnet sequences, was a major contribution to the Elizabethan sonnet tradition in that Spenser devised his own format for it. Epithalamion, as the name suggests, was a marriage song and it concerns the bride’s movement towards marriage; its beauty lies in Spenser’s language and also in his contextualisation of the classical elements within a Christian frame. The term Prothalamion owes its origin to Spenser himself, who used it to commemorate the double betrothal of the daughters of the Earl of Worcester in 1596. The stanzas of poem were based on the model of the Italian canzoni and its evocation of softness is due to the Spenser’s balanced diction. Two

figures to whom Spenser addressed his The Shepherd’s Calendar and The Faerie Queene i.e., Philip Sidney and Walter Raleigh respectively, were very much part of the Elizabethan poetic scene. Philip Sidney (1554–86) was the ideal Renaissance man—poet, soldier, critic, diplomat and courtier. Sidney’s writings, however, were not published in his lifetime. Philip Sidney’s literary output covered various genres. He was a poet, writer of a romance, a dramatist, and a literary critic. In each of these genres Sidney’s contribution was historically significant. His sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella (1591), was one of the better examples of the practice that had many exponents in Elizabethan England. An Apology for Poetry (pub. 1595) is remarkable for the synthetic achievement of classical influence and contemporary aesthetics, and also for being the first major text of English criticism. In Arcadia (pub. 1926), Sidney wrote a romance that explored the possibilities of an evolving medium to its potential. The Lady of May (1578), Sidney’s minor play shows his engagement with the dramatic form. Sidney’s poems are sites of poetic experimentations and explorations that bear testimony to both the spirit of the age and the man. Walter Raleigh (1554– 1618), like Sidney, showed his versatility in many fields. He was a navigator, chemist, soldier, courtier, poet, historian, and politician. The poetry of Raleigh was not organised to resemble a consolidated body of work but appeared either in contemporary miscellanies or remained in fragments, to be printed much later. His Cynthia (incomplete and surviving only in a fragmentary draft) concerns Queen Elizabeth who stands for the title figure. The poem is characterised by a cultivated ruggedness that informs its movement. Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554–1628), another of Sidney’s close friends, wrote a series of songs titled Caelica (pub. 1633); the collection was eclectic in that it had verses of various forms and dealt with many themes, including the philosophic and the religious. The poetry of two Elizabethan greats, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, is of importance not only for the fact that they excelled as dramatists but also for the merit of the verses themselves. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander reflects a tradition that found many illustrious exponents in the Elizabethan period. It was the genre of the long poem which took for its content a mythical or classical subject. Marlowe left his poem incomplete at the time of his death in 1593 and it was George Chapman who provided it the sense of an ending. While the influence of Ovid’s Metamorphosis is

discernible in the poem, Marlowe weaving of the erotic experience of the lead pair shows his firm control in a medium that demands consummate attention. Shakespeare’s poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), exhibit great drama in sustained verse. Like Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis is characterised by the temper of eroticism and draws from an Ovidian source. Shakespeare presents the wooing of Adonis by Venus through a deliberate exhibition of rhetoric that acquires dimensions of the grandiose by relying on a witty playfulness. The Rape of Lucrece concerns the rape of Collatinus’s wife Lucretia by Tarquinius, the son of the Roman king. Unlike the mythical realm of his other long poem, the adoption of a subject from Roman history perhaps owes to the attention given to the issue of Lucretia’s fate in the Elizabethan period. Sidney, for instance, considered her to be a paragon of virtue in An Apology for Poetry. Shakespeare’s fondness for verbal playfulness has been seen as a condition marring the poem as it tends to overweigh the tragic sense through an emphasis on language. The average Elizabethan was familiar with long poems as many appeared, either individually or in collections. Thomas Lodge wrote Glaucus and Scylla, a poem which was earlier christened Scillae’s Metamorphosis (1589). He also wrote a sonnet sequence titled Phillis (1593) and a satirical collection called A Fig for Momus (1595). Endimion and Phoebe (1595) by Michael Drayton (1563–1613) and Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598) by John Marston (1576–1634) are two other long poems to emerge from this period.

The Elizabethan Sonnet Tradition The sonnet form was brought to England by Wyatt and Surrey and it was one of the major poetic genres to preoccupy the literary landscape of the sixteenth century. While Wyatt and Surrey introduced the form in the English language, it was soon taken up by many other practitioners who either followed the already traversed path or sought to innovate by playing around with whatever flexibility the tight formal structure of the sonnet allowed. As a literary form, the sonnet’s origin is traced back to the practice of poetic compositions that began in the Sicilian court of Frederick II around the years 1220–30. Many of the individuals who dabbled with the form were notaries

in the court of Frederick II and out of the fifty-eight sonnets, one of them, Jacopo da Lentini (1188–1240) that survive, is often seen by sonnet historians as the first major evidence of its practice. The structure of the sonnet, however, owes something to another Sicilian form called the strambotto, the pattern of which was similar to the octave of a conventional sonnet. The Italian form of the sonnet that was brought to England by Wyatt and Surrey was the one that was made popular in the Continent by Francesco Petrarch. The two-part scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet with an octave and a sestet was slightly modified by some of the English practitioners, most notably William Shakespeare. The Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains and a couplet and it is believed that the credit for the innovation goes to Surrey, who was also responsible for suggesting the potentialities of blank verse in English poetry. Apart from the Petrarchan and Shakespearean variants in the Renaissance period, there was another modification attempted by Edmund Spenser who wrote in a complex rhyme scheme —ababbcbccdcdee. Spenser’s model, however, was not as popular as the other two formats, which found a more fertile ground in Elizabethan England. In later ages, the sonnet form has been played around with much more, with examples such as George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862) sequence consisting of sixteen line sonnets and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (1922), a combination of the Shakespearean and the Petrarchan elements, being evidences of the liberties poets have taken with the form. The Tudor period was characterised by a remarkable outpouring of sonnets, both as independent poems, and also as part of sequences. The sonnet sequence was a major draw for many of the poets of the time, with Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Drayton, and Daniel being its most famous exponents. The logic behind the assembly of the sonnets into the form of a sequence was often loosely organised and in many cases they were brought together to suggest a line of commonality, even though they could very well be read independently. Then there were poems written in the same period, which in spite of having the term ‘sonnet’ associated with them, weren’t strictly examples of the form; the most evident illustration of this being John Donne’s Songs and Sonets. Donne, however, did write a series of sonnets that dealt with the theme of spirituality titled Holy Sonnets. Shakespeare’s sonnets were first published in 1609, even though some of them had been written much earlier. The 1609 order of the sonnets is

controversial in that authorial sanction of the same has not been detected there. Even then, however, the sequence can be divided into two parts: 1–126 (concerned with the speaker’s male friend) and 127–54 (dealing with the speaker’s mistress). The sonnets of Shakespeare have taxed the minds of the readers and critics alike for the elusiveness that characterises them; while critics have managed to draw out some thematic features in these sonnets like time, love, fidelity, death, immortality, art and the artist, and friendship, the mystery surrounding the man behind the compositions have thrown up many interesting theories. The characteristic Shakespearean brilliance evident in his other writings, such as quibbling, wordplay, consummate control and poetic finesse are part of the sonnets also and they stand as literary marvels of the age in their own right. The sonnets of Philip Sidney which are included in his sequence called Astrophil and Stella, were perhaps composed in the early 1580s, and as such exemplify one of the earliest attempts of the sonnet sequence in English. The sequence was printed with a preface by Thomas Nashe in 1591 and it had 108 sonnets. This was a sequence that foregrounded the idea of an unsuccessful courtship through the figures of Astrophil and Stella. The collection can also be read as a critique as well as an account of the conventions of love poetry circulating in the Renaissance. Spenser’s sequence, on the other hand, titled Amoretti, exhibits a different kind of courtship. The sequence is characterised by its chronological narrative scheme and its affinity to Epithalamion (with which it was published in 1595) is evident in the celebratory nature in some of the sonnets. Samuel Daniel (1562/3–1619) wrote a collection of sonnets titled Delia, which underwent a series of revisions and modifications in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Michael Drayton (1563–1631), another of Daniel’s contemporaries, contributed to the sonnet tradition through his sequence called Idea, which initially appeared in 1594 under the title of Idea’s Mirror. Apart from the sonnets which appeared as part of the sequences, there were also examples of the form in many of the miscellanies that circulated in the world of letters.

Elizabethan Prose The Elizabethan age was also remarkable for the kinds of prose work it produced. Different prose genres were not only experimented with but even

developed through continuous engagement. In general terms, the prose of the period may be divided into two categories—fictional and non-fictional. The fictions of the Elizabethan period covered a diverse terrain in that variety of prose writings, from the picaresque narrative to the pamphlet, occupied the writer’s mind. Many of the University Wits were prolific prose writers and wrote both fiction and non-fiction. John Lyly introduced the ‘euphuistic’ style through his Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit (c.1578) and Euphues and his England (1580). Lyly’s narratives were not original (the sources included a famed Continental influence like Boccaccio) but his treatment and rendering won over many contemporary readers. The first book was extremely well received and by 1581, it had run into five editions. The sequel Euphues and his England celebrated English culture and life, but could not emulate the original’s popularity to the same extent. Lyly’s method and narrative design were extended by Robert Greene who wrote a further sequel to the Euphues legend by presenting his Euphues, his Censure of Philautus (1587). Greene, however, wrote other prose romances that served some of his contemporaries, including Shakespeare, as sources for their writings. Greene’s Pandosto (1588) was used by Shakespeare for his The Winter’s Tale, while the other prose romance, Menaphon (1589), is now more famous for being the book that has the lyric “Weep not, my wanton.” Of Greene’s pamphlets, the most famous is Groatsworth of Wit, Brought with a Million of Repentance (1592), not as much for its content as for his comment in it that his now more famous contemporary, Shakespeare was “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.” Another of his pamphlets, The Art of ConnyCathcing (1591) is a wonderful document that depicted the low life of London in detail, especially the practice of trickery, which he treated with special attention. Pamphleteering was a common Elizabethan vocation, and apart from Greene, there were many other writers who engaged in it. Thomas Dekker was a prolific writer of pamphlets, the majority of which were written in the first decade of the seventeenth century. The Wonderful Year (1603) starts of with a description of the queen’s death but soon goes on to engage other typical issues of the time such as death, plague, and other morbid aspects of London life. Dekker’s pamphlets are interesting for the insights they provide about contemporary social and cultural life and also for giving information about the practices that occupied his contemporaries. The Gull’s Horn-Book (1609) shows Dekker at his satiric best as he parodies the

contemporary courtesy books through his humorous commentary. Some of Dekker’s other pamphlets include The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606), The Bellman of London (1608), and Lantern and Candlelight (1608). Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) was another prolific prose writer of the Elizabethan period. He started with a preface to Greene’s Menaphon and followed it with The Anatomy of Absurdity (1589), where he came down heavily on the superficiality of contemporary romances. He is said to have written many pamphlets during the Marprelate Controversy, but it is difficult to trace his authorship in many of those attributed to him. Nashe is today remembered for his fictional work The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), which many claim to be the first picaresque novel in English. The narrative deals with the adventures of Jack Wilton and chronicles the situation which the protagonist finds himself in—most of which are strenuous and taxing. Some of Nashe’s other prose writings are associated with a book called Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil (1592), which started of a series of letters being written to Gabriel and Richard Harvey, who attacked Nashe for his views in it. Gabriel Harvey attacked Nashe in Four Letters (1592) and subsequently a series of pamphlets ensued from both sides. Nashe also wrote two other interesting pieces titled Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592) and Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599). Topical prose writings abound in the Elizabethan period. Religion, voyage and discovery, and London life were some of the major subjects that interested Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Philip Sidney, for instance, reacted to the abuse against poetry by defending it in his An Apology for Poetry (1595). This is one of the first critical works in English and presented many of the aesthetic principles that held centre stage during the Renaissance. It shows Sidney’s use of argumentative resources, many of which are Aristotelian, and his handling of many issues such as history, philosophy, and aesthetics with consummate control. Sidney, however, also wrote Arcadia, a prose romance that has survived in two versions. The first rendering, more popularly known as Old Arcadia, was originally written for his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, perhaps around 1580. In 1590, the second version was published posthumously with substantial additions and modifications. Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616) was one of the first English writers to indulge in travel writing. He was extremely industrious in his research and his collection of writings titled Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of

America (1582) saw the New World open up to the English audience through a deft narrative. His A Discourse Concerning the Western Planting (1584) was another addition to the information that he provided in his first account of America. The most famous of his works, however, is the book titled The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589). A trendsetter, this work set the tone for subsequent narratives of the type and introduced a remarkably comprehensive historical account of English exploration and discovery. The account is immensely readable for the stories it presents and the descriptions of the New World are interesting, especially for the peculiarities and little details. The prose writings of Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) also follow a somewhat similar thematic trail, which was evident in his A Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Isles of the Azores (1591) and A Discovery of the Empire of Guyana (1596). Although these accounts showed his skill as a prose-writer, it was his The History of the World (1614) that showed how ambitious he was as a writer, even though certain circumstances compelled him to leave it unfinished and it won approval without even proceeding beyond the 2nd century BC. A different subject occupied the interest of another accomplished prose writer of the period, Richard Hooker. Richard Hooker (1554–1600) was one of the greatest theologians of the Elizabethan period. His scholarship was well admired by his contemporaries and it culminated in his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in which he argued the case for the Elizabethan Settlement. The book was divided into volumes, of which I–IV came out in 1594 and the fifth one three years later. Three further volumes of the same book (published in the middle of the seventeenth century) are sometimes attributed to him, but the issue of authorship in the case of these remains controversial. Hooker defended the Anglican tradition for the fact that the Bible served as the foundation of faith and this was amply supplemented by a sound reliance on reason. The contractual relation that existed between the Church and the Crown was one of the focal interests of Ecclesiastical Polity. Hooker is generally acknowledged to be one of the masters of English prose style. The essay found its greatest Elizabethan exponent in the achievement of Francis Bacon. Bacon was one of the major figures of Humanism in England and his scientific and visionary writings suggested possibilities that were typical of the Renaissance endeavour. His Essays, first published with only

ten of them in 1597, and followed by an enhanced edition with 58 pieces, appeared in 1625. Bacon called his essays ‘dispersed meditations’ that dealt with different subjects with remarkable ease. His aphoristic style and quiet yet confident assertions set the tone for most of the essays. While Bacon was at his conceptual best in works like The New Atlantis (1626) and The Advancement of Learning (1605), his essays demonstrate his skill as a rhetorician. He eschewed all ornament and used extremely apt illustrations to further his arguments. Whatever the focus of the argument, Bacon’s essays never fail to stimulate and engage the attention of the reader.

The Metaphysical Poets As a term, the word ‘metaphysical’ refers to the concerns about the fundamental problems of the world, and to queries relating to the philosophical issues about man’s position and nature in the world and society. Such a label may be applied to all literature, but it is specifically used to designate a kind of poetry that was in vogue in the early seventeenth century. John Donne was the primary figure in this development that saw the initiation of an approach to the poetic form which was, in many senses, a departure from the practice of the Elizabethan period. This kind of poetry is characterised by its intellectual vigour, unconventional use of language, and a playfulness manifested in innovative use of the poetic medium itself. ‘The Metaphysical poets’ wrote both secular and religious poetry. Such a combined interest was a reflection of certain preoccupations of the age—the secular poems of Donne and his followers are alive to the experience of contemporary voyages and discoveries, theories of the humanists and the scientists, and the interests of the Renaissance man, while the religious verses of the group can be seen in the context of contemporary religious debate, questions of faith, and spiritual allegiance. The most striking feature of Metaphysical poetry is the combination of the intellectual element with a penchant for an emotional response to a chosen situation. The combination of the two—intellect and emotion—was manifested in diverse ways, while the more pronounced exhibitions of this process in the poetry of the metaphysicals were grounded upon an integrated engagement that provided a sense of wholeness. The balance was often fruitful in the major Metaphysical poets’ work in that it was a device that

appropriated familiar forms of experience and also considered through an innovative frame. T.S. Eliot’s essay on the Metaphysical poets (written almost four centuries later in the early twentieth century) was responsible to a great extent in redrawing the parameters for criticism of English literary history in that he projected the poetry of Donne and his followers as the exemplary model of the intellect-emotion combine. If Donne and his followers sought to foreground brainwork as a necessary condition inherent in the poetic process they were not doing it simply in terms of glorifying rationality over other forms of apprehension; ratiocination was, for these poets, a structural as well as an apprehending mechanism and it subsumed other perceptive modes such as those of the senses and emotional responses. The Metaphysical poets were also alive to the contemporary cultural engagements and were very much responsive to the practices of their times. This was evident in the appropriation of the poetic conventions of the period which was then used innovatively to condition their responses. Hackneyed ideas, ideas that had received regular attention at the hands of other Elizabethan poets, found in the Metaphysical poets a fresh ground that served as sites of poetic experiment. It is, therefore, confusing to find Donne often being clubbed as an early seventeenth century poet as they were both preoccupied with similar thematic interests even though there was a palpable difference in approach. The Elizabethan fascination for symbols was organised in the work of these poets in the development of such a tested device as a conceit, which was transformed in their hands as an extremely pronounced poetic arrangement. The conceit, which is a strategically contrived metaphor, was engaged to draw comparisons between elements that were not conventionally associated together. The Metaphysical conceit is more problematic than an ordinary one because it seeks to go beyond the accepted frames of reference; the conditions that engage the poet’s perceptions are used to highlight resemblances between things that aren’t otherwise conceivable in those terms. The appeal of the Metaphysical conceit lies in its ingenuity. In the major poems of the Metaphysical poets, the arguments are carefully devised and not confined to an empty playfulness. Consider the following conceit from John Donne in his ‘The Flea’: This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is; Though parents grudge, and you, we’ve met And cloistered in this living walls of jet. The Metaphysical poets used the simple-looking conceits to foreground serious philosophical issues as well as more common ones such as love and death. Other themes occupying the Metaphysical poets were time, faith, God, concerns of material existence, and spirituality. These poets relied on the use of devices, such as the paradox, more extensively than their contemporaries, a tendency that was perhaps directed towards the drawing of intellectually engaging issues, irrespective of their secular or religious contexts. The heightened sense of drama or the presence of the dramatic in Metaphysical poetry was part of the strategy to rework the poetic conventions anew. Donne, Vaughan, Herbert, Crashaw and Marvell used theatricality to great effect in their poems. This strategy was often aligned with another feature of Metaphysical poetry—humour. In the poems of Donne and his followers, humour was both parodic and sobering and combined the dramatic element with a great sense of wit. That is why the best Metaphysical poems, in spite of being intellectually engaging, are never dull. Another reason for such an achievement could be the very economic use of language which amounted to a carefully devised poetic vocabulary. The Metaphysical poets have invited interesting responses from critics from the time of their appearance. In the early seventeenth century, William Drummond of Hawthornden reported Ben Jonson as remarking: “That Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging” (Cited in Hunter 1965: 150). The more celebrated comment, an accusation rather, by Samuel Johnson in his Life of Cowley that the Metaphysical poets did violence to ideas that were similarly aligned has received prominence in the criticism of Metaphysical poetry and provided a paradigm through which to situate Donne and his followers. While the Romantic age did not pay much attention to the poetry of the Metaphysicals, the Victorian response was a mixed one. Browning’s reference to Donne in his letters suggest that their appeal was not just confined to the criticism of someone like T.S. Eliot, who did more than anybody else in the early twentieth century to popularise and bring back the Metaphysical strain in poetry. The interest in Metaphysical poetry was initially generated in the early twentieth century when Herbert Grierson

brought out Donne’s Poems in 1912. The edition was extremely popular and had a wide readership. Many modern poets like William Butler Yeats accessed Donne though Grierson’s 1912 edition. It was, however, Grierson’s seminal 1921 edition titled Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century that contributed to the focus it received in poetic and academic circles in the first half of the twentieth century. Grierson’s edition was reviewed by T.S. Eliot in the same year of its appearance. In this review essay Eliot referred to the unification of sensibility that was so characteristic of Metaphysical poetry. The work of Donne and his followers, in fact, facilitated the construction of a paradigm by Eliot through which he historicised the poetic development in England. While Donne exemplified the successful combination of intellect and emotion, later poets like Tennyson and Browning seemed to Eliot to suggest an imbalance that was in variance with his preferred form of poetic practice. Eliot saw in the work of the Metaphysical poets the cultivation of an intellectual apparatus that wasn’t dissimilar to his own formulation of poetic ideals. Eliot’s response to the Metaphysical poets was, thus, that of a practicing poet who sympathised and endorsed their poetic mode. Eliot highlighted the significance of the dramatic element in the Metaphysical poets and saw a close affinity between their practice and the techniques employed by the Jacobean dramatists. The cue provided by Eliot was soon taken up by other critics like Joan Bennet and F.R. Leavis. What this renewed interest in Metaphysical poetry in the early twentieth century did was to readdress the issues of intellect-emotion combine in the poetic process itself and also enabled to situate the practice of many of the modernists themselves.

GLOSSARY A Mirror for Magistrates: A Mirror for Magistrates is an anthology of poetry, organised in the form of verse monologues spoken by princes and other members of the nobility, which was published in the Renaissance period. It had a very complicated history of production. The first edition of the anthology appeared in 1599. This edition was commissioned by Jay Wayland and was originally planned as an extension of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (1494). The two writers who contributed to the volume (named in the title page as William Baldwin and George Ferrers) relied on various historical sources to organise nineteen stories of human decline. The poems in the volume had interlinking prose pieces connecting them. Many of the characters who form the subjects of these poems were subsequently made famous by their incorporation in the history plays of Elizabethan playwrights like Marlowe and Shakespeare. The second edition (1563) had additional poems by contributors such as Thomas Churchyard (the story of Jane Shore) and Thomas Sackville (Buckingham). By 1578, when the next edition appeared, there were further additions, most notably compositions on the characters of Humphrey and Elinor Cobham, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester respectively (both of them were represented in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II). The complicated production history of A Mirror for Magistrates was further intensified in 1574, when another anthology titled The First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates appeared under the authorship of John Higgins and not the original contributors to the 1559 edition. The 1574 Jack Higgins edition had sixteen stories drawn from early British historical sources. In 1578, The Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates appeared under the authorship of Richard Blennerhassett which provided accounts of twelve British legends. A somewhat collated version containing material from the Jack Higgins and the Baldwin-Ferrers editions appeared in enhanced form in 1587. In 1610, Richard Niccols reorganised the material by deleting the prose connections; Niccols added Michael Drayton’s account of Thomas Cromwell. The 1610 edition was effectively the final edition of The Mirror for Magistrates. Contemporary reception of the volume is best represented by Philip Sidney’s praise of it in his An Apology for Poetry. There were reissues

of the volume in 1619, 1620, and 1621. Bestiary: A bestiary is a story describing adventures and episodes relating to either imaginary or natural creatures. It was an immensely popular form of literature in the medieval period. Many of the bestiaries of the Middle Ages were reworkings of the stories found in the eleventh century collection titled Physiologus by the Latin writer Thetbaldus. The bestiary had a familiar pattern in that a brief description of the creature’s attributes was followed by elaborate explications of the significance of each account. The primary focus of the bestiary was moralistic. As a moral tale, the bestiary was organised to propagate the supreme will of God which could be appreciated through the symbolic significance in the manifest world. The bestiary was flexible as a literary form as it employed a variety of verse structures. The narrative scheme of the conventional bestiary was simple even though it involved a considerable philosophical tenor. T. H. White translated the twelfth century Latin collection of beast tales in 1964 which was titled A Book of Beasts. The Bestiary is a Middle English poem that presented accounts of imaginary or real animals to further its didactic theme and was composed either in the late twelfth or the early thirteenth century. Like other poems of the genre, the English version too followed the conventional trajectory by emphasising the importance of a morally realised situation. While there was an ample representation of natural animals, imaginary characters included the unicorn, the cocatrice, the phoenix, the manticora, and some combinations such as the lion’s body with a man’s head. The work is sustained by a series of recounted legends, some of them obvious misrepresentations of animal behaviour based on contemporary beliefs. Book of Common Prayer: The Book of Common Prayer is one of the major religious documents of the Church of England. It was brought into circulation under the supervision of Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and passed by the Parliament with the title of The booke of the common prayer and the administracion of the Sacramentes, and other rites and ceremonies of the Church after the use of the Churche of England. The ‘book’ actually combined three ancient texts of religion—the Breviary, the Missal, and the Ritual. Cranmer introduced significant changes in the organisation of the traditional material in keeping with the nature of the Reformist church’s principles. For instance, his Breviary saw the reduction of

the eight Catholic divisions of daily service to two, and the Missal was made the Book of Communion. The Ritual retained a significant portion of the established doctrines with changes directed at highlighting the new emphasis on the immediate access of faith. S.T. Bindoff comments on the Book of Common Prayer thus: “Taken as a whole, the Prayer Book was a skillful blend of the old and the new. It clung, wherever possible, to the ancient forms for the sake of the time-honoured beauty, but purged them of what was to Reformers their idolatrous character. Its keynote was compromise, and in that it faithfully reflected the personality of its chief author” (Bindoff 1983: 154), The Book of Common Prayer represented the moderate tenor of the Anglican Church and was very much in keeping with the compromising nature of the principles of the Elizabethan settlement. The prayer book also served as a model of English prose, with the Authorised Version of the Bible (1611) representing another aspect of the development of contemporary stylistics. Many of the phrases which are now part of the English language owe their origin to The Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer first appeared in 1549, although its draft was complete within 1548. It was further revised and published in 1552. The third edition of the book (1559) included substantial revisions with additional material being added to it. This edition was immensely popular and commonly referred to by the Elizabethans. The third edition is known for introducing the thirty-nine articles which exemplified the direction of Protestant faith in England. The fourth prayer book came into effect during James’s reign, while during the Commonwealth it was replaced by the Directory for Public Worship. Following the Restoration, the fifth edition of the Prayer Book appeared to an overwhelming reception in 1661, although its conflation with the Act of Uniformity (1662), has contributed to the belief that it agreed with the Act of Uniformity. The Book of Common Prayer was, when it appeared for the first time, not the only book of its kind. In fact, the influence of homiletic texts on the Continental audience was not a new phenomenon at all. Many of the ideas and teachings incorporated in the prayer book were derived from sources that suggested the Continental influence. The noteworthy thing about the English Prayer Book is that it was not just a simple rendering of the extant Latin sources into English; it was a work of synthesis that sought to combine established theological principles with practical conditions that went well with the Reformist character of the

English Church. Thomas Cranmer’s hand in the matters of making significant policy decisions relating to the philosophy behind the Prayer Book is clearly apparent in the way it was drafted. One of the primary focal points of the Reformation—the teaching and reading of the Bible—found a very willing and enthusiastic contemporary audience. The Book of Common Prayer prescribed that the Psalms were to be read every month thoroughly, the New Testament thrice annually, and the Old Testament once a year. The Book of Common Prayer has been an extremely influential source of faith for the members of the Anglican clergy till the modern period and its original character has not been substantially affected through the ages, even though attempts were made to revise it completely in the early decades of the twentieth century, which were not accepted by the House of Commons in 1928. Boy Bishop: A ceremonial office associated with the election of a boy in many medieval monasteries to execute the various functions of a bishop, which began on St. Nicholas’s Day (December 6) and continued till Holy Innocents’ Day (December 28). The elected boy and his colleagues carried out all the requisite functions except mass on the eve of Holy Innocents’ Day. Although popular, the ceremony was constantly criticised by the ecclesiastical establishment and it was banned by the Council of Basel in 1431. The practice in England continued till the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign when she prohibited it. One of the motivations behind the practice was the dramatisation of the idea of reverence for children expressed in the gospels although its degeneration into a comic form was seen as a devaluation of the actual office of the bishop. Boys’ Companies: The boys’ companies (also known as children’s companies) formed a part of the Elizabethan theatrical tradition. The term refers to the groups of boy actors that were engaged in performing both privately and on the public stage. Most of the boys involved in acting were drawn primarily from choir schools; these schools were either part of the chapels or cathedrals, and the boys who participated in the theatre were trained in music and made to learn the rudiments of performance in the cathedrals itself. During the reign of Henry VIII, companies such as the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul’s were involved in court pageants and religious ceremonies of which acting was an integral part. By

the time Elizabethan theatre flourished, these companies had developed into competent professional units. They usually had about 8–12 boys who were called upon to give public presentations. The roles of managers, directors, music composers, and designers were carried out by the choirmasters under whom these boys trained regularly. Their professionalism posed a threat to the other companies engaged in the theatre in the late Elizabethan period. Boys’ Companies were an integral part of the first Blackfriars Theatre (c.1576-80), and they also took part in the proceedings of the second Blackfriars (in 1600 the Children of the Chapel got a lease on it) where the plays of John Marston and Ben Jonson were performed in the early seventeenth century. For the major part of the 1590s, however, their involvement in the Marprelate Controversy contributed to their absence from the public theatres. The Children of the Chapel Royal was absorbed into an adult company in 1613, a sign of the diminishing relevance of the boys’ companies in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Church of England: The Church of England has been one of Britain’s longest running institutions. Although Christianity came to England in either the first or the second century, the Church of England operated independently and not under the Church of Rome. In the medieval period, the Church of England functioned as a constituent of the Roman Catholic Church. The break-up came in the reign of Henry VIII when there was a dispute regarding the superiority of the Church and the Crown. Such disputes were not uncommon in British history and had already claimed a martyr in Thomas Becket in his conflict with Henry II. A brief union with the papal authority during the reign of Mary I was, however, short-lived as Elizabeth I settled the matter on acquiring the reigns of power. Since then, in spite of various breakaways, the Church of England has remained the central institution of faith among the English people. Technically, the ‘Supreme Governor’ of the Church is the monarch but in the actual sense the Archbishop of Canterbury holds the position of authority. Historically, Augustine’s movement into Britain in 597 is considered to be the event that led to the consolidation of the faith as he began operating from Kent in Canterbury. The Church of England interestingly is a mix of both Protestant and Catholic features. Its break-up from the authority of the Pope, the Elizabethan settlement, and the incorporation of the ideals of the Reformation are circumstances that

associate it with the Protestants; its insistence on an unbroken spiritual heritage and the closeness to the practices of the Roman Catholics align it with the papal side. The Church of England’s most striking feature, however, has been its liberalism, a condition that distinguishes it from other orthodox churches. Doctrinal controversies have been a part of the Church of England’s history with women priests being allowed in 1992 (practice begun 1994), while the issue regarding homosexuality remains unresolved. Although the supreme legislative body of the Church is the General Synod any basic change must be moved through Parliament. The English Church in the medieval period was a part of the Western European Catholic Church. As such, the Pope was the supreme authority in ecclesiastical matters; this condition was, however, qualified by the fact that the English monarch had a say in issues relating to the Church and sometimes it resulted in conflicts—the most famous of these being the one involving Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Henry II. In medieval times the clergy, at the most elemental level, was responsible for the conduct of spiritual matters in the village or the parish. The parish Church was a thriving institution in the Middle Ages in that it directed the lifestyles on the parishioners to a great extent. Although the parish priest was in charge of the village, a parish was not always synonymous with the village and could sometimes include more than one within its purview. A cluster of parishes made up a ‘see’ and it was the responsibility of a bishop to look after the see entrusted to him. The sees (also called bishoprics) were marked under two heads, controlled by the Archbishop of York and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop of Canterbury was accorded the highest position of authority in matters relating to the Church of England. The bishops and the Archbishops were part of the Parliamentary structure, a tradition that has continued through the ages. The supreme authority of the medieval English Church was technically the Pope but such an arrangement was discontinued after the sixteenth century. King Henry VIII’s reign saw the first major conflict of the political authority with the papal one at Rome which forever altered the matter of religious allegiance altogether. The first breakaway took place when Henry VIII’s petition to Pope Clement VII seeking annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was refused. The petition was first made in 1527 but when a positive response was not forthcoming Henry drew up a case for the authority

of the monarch in ecclesiastical by quoting old records in 1529. The situation aggravated further in 1531 when the English king demanded a hundred thousand pounds from the clergy in order to grant pardon for the ‘illegal’ allegiance to papal authority. The recognition was given to him by the clergy in the same year but Henry still harboured hopes of reconciliation till the following year. Such a strategy, however, didn’t work out. By the May of 1932, the Church of England submitted to the monarch and recognised his authority as supreme. The Statute of Restraint of Appeals was another step consolidating the monarchical position as it took away the Church’s right to appeal to the Pope in important matters of matrimony, tithes, and oblations. The authority on these matters was vested upon the two Archbishops of England. The Statute enabled the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer to facilitate the annulment of Henry’s marriage, following which he got married to Anne Boleyn. The Act of Submission of the Clergy (1534) was the ultimate step initiated by the English authority when the right of all appeals to Rome were prohibited. In 1536, Henry VIII was officially recognised as the Supreme Head of the Church of England through the first Act of Supremacy. Henry’s power was utilised not just to disentangle his marital problems but also to reach out to the wealth of the monasteries, and following the suggestions of the Vicar General Thomas Cromwell, the Dissolution of the Monasteries was achieved. Henry’s decision to bring about the cessation with the Roman ecclesiastical authority, however, cannot be taken as the immediate start of the English Church’s Protestant character. In fact, Henry had a major hand in the framing of the Six Articles of 1539 which asserted the Catholic character of the English Church. The steps taken during his reign, which are aligned with a Protestant ethic, weren’t radical but included the prohibition of pilgrimages and pilgrimage shrines, and derecognition of many saints’ days. Without even seeking a radical upheaval, the schism of the English Church with the Roman authority was responsible for the Reformist upswing in England, which in any case, was affecting Europe around this time. The reign of Edward VI is more closely associated with important changes to the English Church. A Protestant bias was adopted in principle in the translations and in 1549, the Book of Common Prayer was issued. Edward’s short reign was succeeded by Mary’s, whose Roman Catholic allegiance brought about a complete U-turn, with the schism with Roman authority being reversed. There was a spate of executions in her reign

for which she was termed ‘Bloody Mary.’ The reversal initiated by Mary, however, did not last long. Her death in 1558 brought Elizabeth to the throne and along with it a return to the separatist position of her father. In 1559, the Parliament recognised the monarch as the ultimate governor of the English Church when a new Act of Supremacy was legislated. This balancing of the swift turns of preceding reigns is known as the ‘Elizabethan Settlement’, a process that sought to pacify the warring Protestants and the Catholics and unify them under the umbrella of the Church of England. The Settlement, however, wasn’t completely successful in satisfying either the Catholics or the Puritans, a newly emerging group of extreme Protestants who desired further reforms. The simmering discontent continued to grow and reached a crisis point when, in the seventeenth century, the Civil War saw the overthrow of English monarchy at the hands of the Puritans. Oliver Cromwell became the Lord Protector and England and Puritan doctrine determined the conduct of the Church but it ceased to function as a state institution. The exclusion of the Puritans took place again when monarchy was restored in 1660 and Charles II came to the throne. The excluded Puritans, who were denied political rights as well as entry into the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, soon set up their churches and they came to be called Dissenters. The newly emerging political parties of the Whigs and the Tories soon allied with the two factions with the former favouring the Catholics while the Puritans getting the latter’s support. The passivity of the Church in the early eighteenth century was shaken by the activities of John Wesley who broke away to form a new group that were known as the Methodist Church. Wesley’s attempt to make the religious doctrines more accessible to the poor brought about the Evangelical Movement within the English Church. The next challenge to the English Church came from John Henry Newman’s initiatives which soon consolidated into the Oxford Movement. Newman favoured independence of the Church from state control and argued for a return to the medieval format of clerical superiority in ecclesiastical matters. Newman Movement to the Roman Catholic fold ultimately contributed to the dissipation of the force of the Oxford Movement, but then, many of the issues raised by him have contributed to significant formations in the English Church that have remained. The High Church (Anglicans with a Catholic attitude who reject papal authority), the Broad Church (more interested in social reform and an outgrowth of the Evangelical Movement), and the Low

Church (with a Protestant bias) are the three divisions within the structure of the Anglican Church that originated in the nineteenth century. The Church of England in its present form is a state Church. Outside of England, all the institutions that come from the Church of England (in Wales, Scotland, the Commonwealth countries, and the United States) are identified as the Episcopalian Church. Courtly Love: One of the most important cultural traditions of the European Middle Ages, the courtly love tradition, served to situate poetic representations of the time to a great extent. The cult of courtly love emphasised the veneration of noble ladies and involved their transformation into objects of admiration. The courtly love tradition is an important indicator of another process of social stratification; it is suggestive of the ways in which certain conventions operated in medieval society, especially for the purpose of enhancing the already existing hierarchies. Refinement was one of the characteristics associated with courtly love, the idea of ‘courteous’ love appropriately serving the lofty character of a noble context or a royal court. The stark distinction between the ladies of the court who ‘deserved’ attention for their refined manners and social position and those women who came from the lesser classes show how hierarchically engaged this convention was. This was an established social construct that prescribed that women of nobility deserved courting while peasant women were to be taken by force if necessary. How far such ideas were actually manifest in medieval society isn’t exactly known; this has been a contentious issue. The first reason is that the idea of the courtly love tradition is essentially derived from literature, which cannot be taken as the only authentic source, and the second factor involves the restrictions imposed on even women of nobility, for their veneration in the courtly love tradition is another way of limiting their choices. One thing, however, is clear that women came to constitute a major subject of medieval literature once the courtly love tradition became more noticeable. The Song of Roland (c.1100), for instance, had hardly any women at all, or if medieval romances had women they were not venerated; the courtly literature of the medieval period, however, saw women occupy important narrative and thematic spaces in poetic compositions. The exact origins of the courtly love tradition cannot be ascertained. It was perhaps indebted to the convention established by the Provençal minstrels

where women occupied roles in the stories that they narrated; another factor was the central position held by Virgin Mary in medieval society, who served as a symbol of feminine dignity. In the original design, courtly love entailed the formulation of love where love was seen as the source of great emotional distress and frustration; the lover exhibits tendencies that result in introspection and questionings—a process that can only be alleviated by the beloved’s acceptance of his love. Once united with his beloved, the lover vows to achieve great heights and express faith in their love for one another in spite of the obstacles which hinder them. Andreas Capellanus is credited with the theorisation of the ‘rules’ of courtly love in the thirteenth century, but more than one individual’s prescription, it was a culture that followed the settled codes. Married life, in the strictest rule of the tradition of courtly love, goes against the notion of ‘love’ itself, one reason perhaps why the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere is one of the more celebrated ones. The courtly love tradition served as influences in texts such as those that constituted the Elizabethan sonnet sequences and an undercurrent of this condition operated even where it wasn’t that discernible. Ovid is considered to be one of the influences behind the emotional focus of the courtly love practice and his Ars amatoria showed the possibilities of a lover’s discourse directed towards his lady. The condition of respect, which was associated with courtly love, came to be gradually enhanced as the practice incorporated more variations of the same theme. How far the refinement characterised by the courtly love tradition was part of actual relations of men and women is difficult to locate. What is substantially discernible is the feudal motif in the structuring of the relationships in the tradition of courtly love. The lopsidedness of the equation, with the lady occupying the position of privilege, perhaps owed to the feudal practice where the nobility enjoyed special rights at the expense of the peasantry. The subservient male attending to the demands of the noble lady is patterned as a servant, engaged in the service of love. The culture that facilitated the convention was complex and was reliant upon many medieval sources. Whether it was a simple two-way relation or an important register of social behaviour, or a mere literary structure, courtly love has left behind a rich residue of cultural structures, primarily in literary form, that are indebted to it. Issues of etiquette, politeness, humility, cultural growth, patriarchy, and social hierarchy are some of the noticeable ones involved in the framework of

the courtly love tradition. The framework of courtly love perhaps was more inspiring for later writers as an available paradigm through which their themes could be organised. Although a medieval concept, courtly love contributed to one of the most remarkable romantic traditions which was influential even in ages beyond its original one. Craft Guilds: The Craft Guilds functioned as one of the important social and economic agencies in medieval England. Many towns were affected by the composition and operations of these guilds. Initially, during the formation of a town, there would be just a single guild to accommodate the townsfolk and a general body formed from the eminent members of the town would determine the principles regarding the conduct of the guilds. Such an arrangement, however, was not suitable in terms of distribution of duties as the members responsible for forming the decisions were unwilling to relinquish power, thereby, leading to a large unrepresented section of the community. With time the guild was unable to satisfy the different artisans (many of whom felt that they were hard done by the guild officials); this resulted in the formation of other guilds in the same town for accommodating the interests of different sections of the community. The situation was not the same in all towns as the break-up of the original guild was not achieved with the same speed as a lot of local factors were involved in it. The Oxford town guild remained the dominant guild and other guilds adhered to its rules even though they were separate bodies. Such an arrangement was not very common as most guilds within the same town were usually, independent in both decision-making and functioning. Usually, the original town guild was transformed into a merchant guild. Most of the craft guilds formed in medieval England evolved through this process. There were some common features in these craft guilds of the medieval period. The English craft guilds were constituted by individuals who were granted legislative authority within the particular guild but only a selected number of them were involved in the process of administration. Such officials of the craft guild were known as wardens. In addition, there existed a council which was primarily engaged in an advisory capacity. The craft guild was hierarchically organised with masters, journeymen, and apprentices forming the three most important categories. The relations within the craft guild between a master and the journeymen and the apprentices were

governed by concerns of power, which were based on both skill/competence and social position. The master was likely to privilege a socially better placed apprentice than a comparatively inferior one. The master was in control of the technical side of a particular guild and determined the course of action for the skilled personnel under him. Each craft guild had the aim of monopolising the trade resulting from the practice of the craft that that guild specialised in. For this purpose the craft guild sought to unify the technical and human resources relating to it, but there was hardly any guarantee of such methods succeeding completely. Without a proper price-control mechanism in place, the guilds were strained to streamline its economic structures. Two factors— first, the growing internationalism of late medieval trade which eventually led to the growth and spread of mercantilism, and second, the availability of the same produce through competing guilds, made it difficult to sustain the monopolistic structure all the time. Another aspect that diminished the power of the craft guilds was related to the growth of local administrative agencies (manifested in the consolidation of English nationalism) which brought the craft guilds under control of the state administration. At most times, the policies of the craft guilds were placed within the purview of the municipal bodies. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the craft guilds’ process of decline was becoming more and more visible. The Renaissance upsurge in the European markets perhaps contributed more than anything else to the dismantling of the medieval economic structure of which the craft guilds were an important constituent. Dissolution of Monasteries: The dissolution of monasteries in England began in 1536 and continued till 1540. One of the obvious reasons for this process was economic as the monastic houses owned property and assets that was beyond the reach of the Crown. The dissolution process was actually initiated in 1535 when the newly appointed Vicar-General for ecclesiastical matters, Thomas Cromwell, went to visit a number of monasteries (this is known as the ‘Visitation of the Monasteries’). He reported that many of the monastic houses weren’t in a satisfactory condition. Based on the report of Cromwell, the Parliament approved the dissolution of the monasteries which began in 1536. Henry VIII has been seen in history as being guided by his own need in deciding to dissolve the monasteries, but more than only the king, the wealth of the houses had become a major enticement for the nobility

and the wealthy in contemporary England. The reasons for the dissolution were both political and economic. At the same time, the action was also guided by the issue of power as it granted the king the upper hand in the ongoing attrition between religion and the state. It is noteworthy that the dissolution was not encouraged by the people before it started while the Protestant population supported it for religious factors. The dissolution was not well received in certain parts of England, especially Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, where the resistance took the form of Pilgrimage of Grace. Many monastic houses which were not ready to submit were eventually persuaded to surrender, the whole process covering the years 1537–9. By 1540, all the houses had surrendered to the Crown and the dissolution of the monasteries was complete. The monks (numbering about 5000), who were erstwhile members of the monasteries, received a pension along with the nuns (about 1600) whose nunneries were also dissolved. Some of the monks became clergymen and adopted a religious lifestyle that was not actually in conformity with the austerity that they had previously cultivated. The property of the monastic houses was disbursed by the Crown for significant economic returns which went to the state’s coffers. The reaction to the dissolution was not a quiet one as it antagonised both the monks and those who were dependent on them. The monasteries were major employers in medieval England and they were sustaining quite a number of the populace by employing people in various capacities. Moreover, many institutions suffered, and the educational contribution made by the monastic houses received a setback. Domesday Book: The Domesday Book is the name of the primary record of the survey conducted during William the Conqueror’s reign in England. The survey was begun and completed in 1086. At the time of its initiation, it provoked widespread discontent but even then the surveying process continued with seven panels of commissioners functioning in different counties. The aim of these commissioners was to gather information about the estates of the nobility and property which technically belonged to the king. The accounts were considerably detailed and were eventually compiled and submitted to the king. The summary of these accounts, compiled by the royal clerks, came to be known as The Domesday Book. The range covered by The Domesday Book was remarkable in that it covered

almost the whole of the country except for the north. It was a document that sought to provide the king with valuable information about the nature of land, tenancy, and wealth held by the gentry; it was further organised to facilitate an adequate taxation system. Technically, The Domesday Book consists of two books, the first having the complete summary of the records of counties (without the records of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex) and the second (also known as Little Domesday) containing the records of these three counties. The exact reason for such a process of bifurcation of the information is not known. Besides the main summary, many other documents associated with the investigation have survived. Exon Domesday, for instance, deals with the records of counties such as Somerset, Devon, Wiltshire, Dorset, and Cornwall. The details of Cambridge have been recorded in another source known as The Inquisition of the County of Cambridge. It is evident that different regions of England were examined in a way that accommodated local contexts adequately. The commissioners used the form of sworn inquest to gather information from the respondents. The sessions were designed to elicit as authentically as possible information relating to the land, property, and wealth of the nobility in the Norman period. Usually, the officials in a town were responsible for making arrangements for the sessions conducted in the county. Once collected from the counties (which was again subdivided into shires and villages) the information was processed on the basis of its relation to the king. This procedure was an acknowledgement of the essentially feudalised system of Norman society. The summaries of the counties are quite comprehensive and record significant details associated with tenancy and fiefdom. The organisation of material is accessible and shows a serious restructuring of the information. It is both a catalogue and a historical document. Even though it was authorised to present the position of the ruling power elite and further consolidate it, The Domesday Book remains a very important source for research of the Middle English period. Dream Vision Poetry: Dream vision literature was a very potent aesthetic framework in the medieval period. It was not just confined to England but extended to encompass the literatures of other European countries as well. The primary agency in this type of literature, which was mainly in the verse form, was the dream, which served to situate the theme of the poem in the realm of the imaginary. It was, thus, dependent upon the allegorical mode for

a successful execution. The context in which dream vision poetry was conceived and transmitted was one where the immediate audiences of these poems were very much accustomed to such modes of communication and were more familiar with the allegorical significance of a given text than say, in the modern age. The relevance of the dream vision poems can be gauged from the way they incorporated elements of contemporary social and cultural life in the realm of the fantastic—for dream vision poetry was another form of engagement with the unreal. William Langland’s Piers Plowman is a poem that uses the dream platform to present a wide panorama; besides human conflict and the quest for faith, Langland’s dream vision also critiques social practices and contemporary cultural modes. In the context of medieval literature, the framework of the dream vision was a conventional structure. In the typical dream allegory, the narrator/speaker falls asleep, a state that leads to the dream that he dreams; this condition facilitates the presentation of the actual story which has relevance beyond the dream’s frame. Many medieval poems in the Middle Ages exploited the dream frame’s convenient narrative scheme; The Romance of the Rose, The Divine Comedy by Dante, The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame by Chaucer, The Pearl, and Langland’s Piers Plowman, The Thissil and the Rois and The Goldyn Targe by William Dunbar, and The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan are later examples of the dream allegory. The variety of themes that came to be represented through the dream vision frame suggests the possibilities that the genre afforded. As a poetic form, dream vision served to situate interesting subjects within the ambit of a familiar structure, and in ways that were known to the immediate medieval audiences. Enclosures: The process of enclosing land under the open field system began in the sixteenth century. This was done primarily to enhance production of food and for the determination of specific land areas to distinguish the agricultural and pastoral needs. In the sixteenth century, wool trade was flourishing and as the demand for wool grew it became imperative that the needs of this industry be attended to. On the other hand, enclosures enabled the distinction of the arable from the non-arable land and facilitated better organisation of the entire agricultural process. In the sixteenth century, the highest number of enclosures was made in the Midlands, where at least 30% of the total arable land was brought under the enclosure system. Considering

that enclosing of land was still in its early stages in the sixteenth century (it was 3%–4% in the entire country), the Midlands situation was an exception. In a country accustomed to the open field system for so long, the enclosing of land did cause some unrest initially, but with the collapse of the feudal system, it was inevitable. Enclosing of land continued throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries and eventually it constituted an important aspect of the agrarian revolution. Enclosing, contrary to common assumptions, was done arbitrarily but under the supervision of commissioners, who were engaged by the landowners themselves. More than 60,00,000 acres of arable land were brought under enclosure by the middle of the nineteenth century. Enclosures indicate the move from community based farming to a more specialised and advanced form of agriculture. It is also associated with the change in the economy from the feudal to the capitalist order. Estates Satire: ‘Estates satire’ is a term applied to a medieval literary convention that was concerned with the attributes, responsibilities, and inadequacies of society. The specific term ‘estates’ refers to the social classes that served as the subject of these satirical expositions. Rank and function— two of the most potent social denominators—constituted the conditions engaged in the estates satires. For instance, Chaucer’s The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales exemplifies the structural dependence on existing social classification for the critique that informs the narrative. Chaucer uses both the features of rank and function to situate his social panorama. In estates satire, there is a reliance on a given normative structure where certain positions and the individuals associated with them were taken as necessary for the hierarchical organisation of society. The institutions of papacy, monasticism, knighthood and positions such as those occupied by king, prince, priest, nun, monk, knight, or even domestically situated positions as those of the wife, the retainer, and the page boy were considered to be necessary to the scheme of social structuring. The estates satires sought to satirically represent the subject, such as hierarchy, through frames that weren’t necessarily similar. For instance, Chaucer’s The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales and a text like Mum and Sothsegger do not agree in terms of their thematic orientations, but yet both are part of the generic category of estates satire. Mum and Sothsegger, an anonymous Middle

English poem (once attributed to William Langland) is structured in the form of a debate and its satirical focus is not similar to that of Chaucer’s in The General Prologue. Other Middle English texts like Piers Plowman are also representations of the same genre of estates satire. The Tudor play Satire of the Three Estates by David Lindsay shows the dramatic possibilities of the convention. Grammar Schools: Grammar schools in England were called so to emphasise the focus on the teaching of Latin grammar there. In 1387, the phrase ‘gramer schole’ was mentioned for the first time; the process of educating pupils, however, was part of the early medieval church, which concentrated on the education of boys, so as to train the prospective ones in Latin for entry into the religious profession. The growth and spread of Christianity in England is closely associated with the development of education in the medieval period. With time, education of boys who were specially trained for religious service, was taken by monasteries and the support of craft guilds was not uncommon. The establishment of grammar schools in England gained momentum after the Reformation, many of which were privately funded. As a consequence of the renewed interest in Classical studies during the Renaissance, the study of Greek and Latin literature was made mandatory along with Latin grammar. How intensely and to what extent the study of these subjects were carried out depended on a variety of factors, an important one of which was the financial position of the schools. By the middle of the seventeenth century, with the development of boarding grammar schools some modified concept developed what was known as public schools. The insistence on a syllabus of Classical studies was one of the causes for the gradual decline of the grammar schools in the Augustan age. Students opted to study in the less rigorous private schools and Dissenting Academies. Following the loss of pupils to other more inviting schools with contemporary academic structures, the whole pattern of education was reshaped in the Victorian period. When the Education Act of 1902 was passed, the restructuring of grammar schools was properly initiated. In the twentieth century, a typical grammar school provided education to children in the age group of 11–18. The pupil was admitted to the institution only after passing a selection test. Grammar schools served as the foundational platform for students, after which they could go on to pursue

higher studies at a college or university. By the 1960s and 70s, another type of school was introduced to address the problems unattended by the grammar school structure. This type of school was known as a comprehensive school. When Tony Blair’s Labour government assumed office in 1997, it sought to have a fresh look at the functioning of the grammar schools by initiating a referendum process in different localities of the country to arrive at a consensus about importance (or lack of it) of the schools. Even though very few areas have organised a public view regarding the matter by the end of 2004, it has given a clear indication that grammar schools should be part of a ‘comprehensive’ education system. Critics of the current grammar school system in England consider the selection of 11 year-olds as an unfair form of evaluation, a view that the National Grammar School Association argues against. Inns of Court: The Inns of Court are four legal institutions based in London. They were primarily concerned with the education of the legal professionals. The Inns of Court are constituted by the four institutions known by the following names: (a) the Inner Temple, (b) the Middle Temple, (c) Lincoln’s Inn, and (d) Gray’s Inn. These four institutions are close to the Royal Courts of Justice in London. The origins of the Inns of Court are not clearly known. Since the Inns of Court functioned as voluntary organisations, they were not under the royal patronage at the time of their origin. It is believed that these institutions were begun with the aim of providing legal education to those interested in law. The Inns also admitted individuals who sought to know the basics of the legal procedures for serving as stewards or to work as legal advisers to members of the nobility. Common law was intricate and not easily accessible to the uninitiated and as such the clerks who sought to benefit from a legal education found a suitable platform in the Inns of Court. These Inns of Court were initially, especially in the fourteenth century, confronted with a lot of would-be lawyers who sought to have a legal education. Such a situation was tackled by the complicated legal system which made great demands on the student’s intellectual resources and by a process of regulation that made entry into the Inns of Court difficult. During the English Renaissance, the Inns functioned as agencies of education for many general students who enrolled to gain knowledge but not to pursue a career in the legal profession. The system of attending readings and moots in the Inns of

Court, however, could not meet the challenges posed by developments in other media such as the press, which devalued the monopoly of the Inns. By the nineteenth century the Inns were seriously declining and required assistance from the common law court establishment for its revival. In 1974, the Senate of the Inns of Court and the Bar was established in order to manage its educational as well as financial matters. Interludes: The interlude was an important dramatic form in the Tudor period. However, the interludes were also part of the European theatrical tradition and the developments in the form showed its Continental practice. In Europe, the interlude was devised as a mini performance with small companies engaged in it. In many of the Western European countries it was in vogue in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Unlike a proper dramatic performance, the interlude was not wholesome theatre as it involved private stagings as well. At the same time, the interlude was also used to preface actual dramas in public stages; sometimes short skits or farces were structured as interludes. Unlike the morality tradition, from which it undoubtedly derived some dramatic elements, interludes did not primarily concern spiritual themes. They were essentially secular and not overtly philosophical. The comic strain was dominant in interludes and this applied equally to its various formats in the Continent: fastnachtsspiele (Germany), kluchtspelen (Netherlands), and sorties (France). When and how the interludes started in England has not been ascertained. In the words of J. L. Styan: “It is not known how the interlude came to be called by its awkward name, but most scholars believe that it implies a play performed in an interval or intermission during a social occasion like a banquet, so that it is virtually synonymous with an entertainment” (Styan 1996: 60). There are further problems with the term as almost all short entertainments in the Tudor age were labelled interludes even without being in agreement with the structural or thematic points. There seems to have been a composite gathering dramatic activity in the period within the umbrella term of the ‘interlude’ as various theatrical matters such as the farcical, the moral, the allegorical, the grotesque, and the comic constituted these performances. In fact, some of the elements of the secular Elizabethan theatre derived from the examples set by the interludes. In spite of this difficulty of isolating the attributes of the genre, certain general characteristics may be

pointed out: (a) it was a kind of intimate theatre, with the audience being close to the action and yet, at the same time, being part of the festivities of which the performance is one component; (b) it did not involve elaborate theatrical arrangements and had limited requirements for the staging of the scenes; (c) song, music, and dance were part of the entertainment package of the interlude (they are also important elements in the masque); (d) it used excessive display modes—a form of exaggeration that heightened the comic effect; (e) it had considerably flat characterisation which was easily accessible to the audience; and (f) it exhibited an abundant degree of horseplay and clowning. The most important figure in the history of the English interlude is John Heywood (c.1497–c.1580). Heywood’s dramatic compositions are usually taken to exemplify the Tudor interlude. His plays are, at the same time, a major step forward in the secularisation of English drama as his exposition of the comic mode suggests a departure from the spiritual demands of the morality tradition. His most well-known interludes are The Four P’s (c.1544), The Play of the Weather (1533), A Play of Love (1533), and A Dialogue Concerning Witty and Witless (pub. 1846). In The Four P’s there is a contest of occupations between the Palmer, Pardoner, and the Pothecary. They are joined by the Pedlar who declares that he will reward the one who can indulge in falsehood most convincingly and eventually the Palmer wins when he says that he has never come across an impatient woman. The play has also been seen as a satire against women. Other playwrights who composed interludes include John Rastell’s The Four Elements, The Field of the Cloth of Gold, and Gentilness and Nobility. Jews in England: The history of the Jews in England is a chequered one. There is no direct reference to Jewish settlement in England prior to the Norman Conquest. In this context Paul Johnson writes: “There had been few, if any, Jews in Anglo-Saxon England. They came, along with many other Flemish immigrants, in the wake of William the Conqueror’s invasion. Half of them settled in London, but Jewish communities sprang up in York, Winchester, Lincoln, Canterbury, Northampton and Oxford” (Johnson 1995: 208). The Jews spread out in different parts of England in the years that followed the Conquest. But controversy seemed to dog them from the time of their first settlement and certain stereotypical ideas formed part of the way

they were seen by the people of other communities. They were considered to be outsiders and their practices were seen with suspicion. Their association with finance and money-lending contributed to the image of greed that was so intensely portrayed in dramatic characters as Barabas and Shylock in the Elizabethan period. The history of Jewish persecution in England goes back to the twelfth century when after the coronation of Richard I on September 3, 1189, the Jews present in the ceremony were humiliated by some Christians. In fact, a rumour was generated that the king had ordered the slaughter of the Jews, which resulted in an attack on the community in Old Jewry. The royal office was agonised at this development but not tangible steps were taken to punish the miscreants. Following the movement of the king outside the country for the Crusade, the antagonism between the Jews and the local population intensified when riots started between them. The matter became worse during the fair at Stamford on March 11, 1190, when many Jews were killed. The riots spread to other places like Bury St. Edmunds and Lincoln and sporadic violence against the Jews became a consistent affair in English social life. The massacre at York on March 16–17 of the same year was the most horrific. The problem began when the Jews of York, led by a man called Josce, entered the king’s castle on the pretext of shelter and as they refused entry to the warden he assembled the court militia and the sheriff to get hold of the castle again. The campaign between the two forces flared up as the Jews were given the choice of getting slaughtered or accepting Christianity. Josce killed his wife and daughter in an act of self-destruction and he was subsequently annihilated by the religious leader of the community Rabbi Yom Tov of Joigny. Almost all the Jews were killed after the tower came back to the possession of the sheriff. When Richard I returned from the Crusade, he ordained that all transactions involving the Jews should be properly recorded. The record of debts and lendings of the Jews thus came under the purview of the ‘Ordinance of the Jews.’ In fact, this was the foundation of the Exchequer of the Jews which made taxation of Jewish property convenient and easy. The wealth of the Jews was an inviting resource for the king who demanded 10% of their profits. The Jewish moneylenders, at the end of the twelfth century, enjoyed rights quite similar to those of the other English people. During the reign of King John, they were looked upon with considerable favour. In the time of Henry

III, the papal ordinance that sought to impose the Badge upon the Jews was brought into effect by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, in 1218. Following this ordinance, it became mandatory for Jews to wear a small oblong white patch for the purpose of identifying themselves. It became virtually impossible for the Jews in Henry’s time to evade the heavy taxation imposed upon them because they could be easily detected. Even changes of residence were not permitted without a proper official sanction. During the thirteenth century itself, the significance of the Jews as financiers lessened considerably as the royal coffers were now not wholly reliant upon the money-lending prowess of the Jews alone. There also emerged other options (Italian traders who dealt in usury, for instance) that challenged the monopoly of the Jews in this field. The Jews, on the other hand, were heavily burdened with taxation and even their request to leave the country in 1254–5 was not granted by the king. The Jews sought permission from the king’s council in 1271 to have landholding rights, but it was rejected. The Jews’ possibility of expanding business was thus eliminated. Another step, which robbed the Jews’ right to practice usury, was the ordinance ‘The Statute of Judaism’ (1275), which prohibited all money-lending activities; the statute, in fact, allowed the Jews to engage in business and commerce and to take land on lease for a maximum period of ten years (without the feudal advantages associated with landholding). This statute made life extremely difficult for them. They were officially expelled from England by an order of King Edward on July 18, 1290. The deadline for their departure from the country was All Saints’ Day of the same year and while they were permitted to take away their movable property, barring a few exceptions, all their houses and other immovable property transferred to the king. The Jews were allowed to return to England in 1655 by Oliver Cromwell. Until the nineteenth century, the Jews were denied political rights, as was the case with any group that was not part of the Church of England. When Benjamin Disareli, a Jew, became the Prime Minister of England, the condition of the community was immeasurably better than ever previously. In literary representation, the Jews have suffered from the limitations of a stereotype that visualised them as a manifestation of evil, which was at its most intense in the case of characters like Shylock, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, or Fagin, in Dickens’ Oliver Twist. In the twentieth century, James Joyce’s Bloom has been seen as the epitome of the travelling Jew, while a writer like T. S. Eliot has been

attacked for the strains of anti-Semitism in his writing. Justice of the Peace: A Justice of the Peace, in medieval England, was an official responsible for both administration and maintenance of civil discipline. Commonly abbreviated as JP, a Justice of the Peace was appointed to maintain peace and provide decisions in cases of dispute. The jurisdiction of the office was confined to a given locality and while matters of local administration were placed under his purview, it was not mandatory for a JP to have a formal legal education. The choice of a JP was made from among the citizens to be administered, and usually he was the one who commanded respect in the society. Perhaps the first instance of the appointment of officials by King Richard in 1995, was that of the ‘Keepers of the Peace’ who were specially chosen knights designated to maintain peace in the problem areas of the land. These knights were directly accountable to the king. It was, however, in 1361 that the designation of ‘Justice of the Peace’ was formally announced when Edward III made the appointments of magistrates to look after the administration of given localities. Among the many responsibilities of a Justice of Peace, fixing of wages, looking after the condition of roads, drains, and bridges, carrying out the orders of the king for the maintenance of law, and implementing the Royal decisions issued from time to time, were the most prominent. Technically, the office was honorary and in most cases members of the gentry took up the position. In trying the criminal cases and dealing with misconduct, the Justice of the Peace used his wide experience and knowledge of the law. During the passage of centuries, from the Middle Ages to the modern, there has been some changes in the operational limits of the Justice of the Peace. Ceremonially, the position still remains, and constitutes one of the foundational features of the British judicial system, but one significant change from the earlier practice is that in the modern age, the JP is a lay person and a basic education in legal knowledge is imperative for the individual willing to serve in that position. London: The city of London has occupied an important place in the social and cultural life of England since the medieval period. One of the reasons for its significance has been its adoption as the seat of power. Another factor is that it was logistically better located and was also better conditioned in terms of wealth and security than the other towns of medieval England. From the

time of William the Conqueror, it has been the location of the royal residence and the fact that the Tower has served important functions had made it politically imperative for the governing class to fortify and work towards a secure London. During the late Middle Ages and the early part of the Renaissance, London emerged as the major political and economic centre of England. Westminster was the location for the royalty and it also housed the administrative offices. In the early fourteenth century, the population of London was about thirty-five thousand, and even though the number drastically fell during the Black Death, by the early years of the sixteenth century it had reached the forty thousand mark. London was cosmopolitan in the late Middle Ages as people from other European countries came and settled there due to its significant position in the international wool trade network. The local London market had two parts in the late medieval period —cheapside catered to the buying and selling of general products and commodities and Eastcheap specialised in fish and meat, while Billingsgate had the central fish market. There were specialised streets for specific products, with the names indicating the item i.e., Bread Street, Milk Street, Poultry Lane etc. From the Middle Ages, the economy of the town was controlled and regulated by merchant guilds and later by the craft guilds in the city. Guildhall was responsible for the civic administration of the city. Medieval London was an important religious centre also. St Paul’s Cathedral and the Westminster Abbey were its main attractions. Besides the churches, there were also many monasteries and nunneries in the city. One of the defining characteristics of medieval London was its narrow streets. The city was overpopulated and suffered from the ills brought about by congestion. The population of Tudor London grew at an unprecedented rate. Within a century—from the early sixteenth to the early seventeenth—the population grew to 2,00,000 which became 5,75,000 by 1700. The Tudor period also saw the establishment of the Royal Exchange, the centre that regulated state finances in the sixteenth century. This was an important development since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw rapid political expansion and commercial growth and also the establishment of the First British Empire. The Bank of England was established in 1694 and several companies such as the East India Company were formed—illustrations of the increasing commercial significance of the city. Culturally, London was the centre of the great English Renaissance and saw a boom in theatrical activity. London also

witnessed the widening gap of the rich-poor divide in the Tudor period, one source of the wealth being facilitated by the dissolution of the monasteries. Restoration London survived two major crises—the Great Fire of London and the Great Plague. The influence of the Restoration court culture was also discernible in the city comedies of the period that played upon the urban/rural opposition. In the eighteenth century, London’s reputation as the leading centre of culture and arts was further enhanced. Samuel Johnson considered it impossible for any intellectual to be tired of London life and the pleasures it offered. During the eighteenth century itself, the city also served as the primary administrative centre for the regulating of policies and finances in the colonies. The immense growth of population and the extension of the city’s limits made it the world’s largest in the Victorian period. In 1901, the population of the city crossed 6.5 million. The Great Exhibition was organised in 1851 at the newly built Crystal Palace as a symbol of national pride and imperial supremacy. The new London Bridge was a Victorian development as well as the Tower Bridge, which opened in 1894. But Victorian London was also characterised by its increasing squalor, growing slum population, and poverty which carried stark images of the city to the international arena. In the twentieth century, London’s claim as the world’s largest city was wrested by New York, in the 1920s, but the city continued to grow at a fast rate. In the middle of the twentieth century, the population touched the eight million mark. A major crisis of the twentieth century was the Blitz in 1940 and 1941 which saw the death of thirty thousand Londoners and severe damage to different parts of the city, especially the East End. After the 1950s, the problem of immigration emerged with many people from the Caribbean settling in the city. The ‘swinging sixties’ changed the cultural fabric of the city as youth culture, pop music, and the cinema entered the lives of the Londoners. In 1990, a great riot took place in the central part of the city after the Conservative government withdrew the property tax and brought in the community charge tax. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, London continues to grow and is characterised by changing demographic paradigms that has affected, among other things, the cultural matrices emanating from the city. Marprelate Controversy: The Marprelate controversy refers to an intense pamphlet contest that took place in Elizabethan England. It was brief (1588–

89) and was initiated by some Puritans who sought to defame the Episcopal authorities by launching an abusive attack on them. Perhaps the Star Chamber address by John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, against Puritan pamphlets was responsible for such an outburst. The pamphleteer(s) who carried out the campaign were not directly supported by the Puritan leaders. Although much more were in circulation, only seven of the pamphlets signed by ‘Martin Marprelate, gentleman’ and ‘Martin junior’ survive. The identity of the author has remained a mystery in spite of active detective work by historians. It has been conjectured that more than one author was involved in the writing of the pamphlets. The tracts ridiculed the bishops and attempted to expose the inconsistencies of the Episcopal authorities, but in effect, there was a reverse attack upon the Puritans. Many of the Presbyterian leaders were arrested in 1589 as the hunt for the author of the tracts did not yield anything. The reaction to the tracts started in 1589 and the voice of the episcopacy was represented by Richard Bancroft who sermonised against Marprelate in London. The reply to the Marprelate tracts was given by the bishops in the name of Thomas Cooper who was referred to in one of the pamphlets. Many prominent Elizabethan writers joined the camp of the bishops in the war against Marprelate. Thomas Nashe (An Almond for a Parrot and The First Part of Pasquil’s Apology, 1590) John Lyly (Pap with a Hatchet and Mar-Martin, 1589) and Richard Harvey (Plain Percival, 1589) were some of the significant names who contributed to the controversy. John Penry and John Udall were suspected of being responsible for the tracts—Penry was executed in 1593 and Udall died in captivity. Job Throckmorton, another suspect in the controversy, escaped conviction by denying the charges at Penry’s trial. Masques: The masque, as a form of performative art, perhaps owes its origin to dramatic practices that pre-date its prominent and more striking appearance in the Tudor and Stuart eras. The medieval mummings or occasional ceremonies—both festivals and scheduled games—addressed social structures in a way not wholly dissimilar to that done by the masques. The impulse that conditioned the masque was, thus, similar to that governing medieval religious drama. Other medieval influences upon this sophisticated theatrical form include civic pageants, socially organised spectacles and other entertainments. It is not certain when and how these influences combined to

manifest itself in the form of a masque, even though the Epiphany spectacle (1512), in which Henry VIII played an important part is cited as the first example of the type. Throughout the sixteenth century, various performances including interludes, moralities and secular drama vied for the attention of the contemporary audience. It is difficult to disentangle the evolution of the masque from this mass of theatrical activity that consolidated into distinct dramatic forms only towards the end of the sixteenth century. The most famous exponent of the masque was Ben Jonson. In partnership with Inigo Jones, a famous architect of the age, Jonson devised a series of masques for presentation in court circles. The masque is an interesting dramatic development in an age when theatrical production saw various experiments. It was a form that relied more on the ornamental aspects of the production than the exigencies of the plot, and the way machinery was utilised here suggests how stylised the whole process was. In terms of its appearance, there were two categories of masques—the ‘essential’ masque and the ‘literary masque.’ The literary masque was characterised by its avoidance of the detailed performance-related matters involved in the other variant of the form. Milton’s Comus (1634) exemplifies the literary masque adequately and perhaps it is the most famous of all contemporary masques. The essential masque, on the other hand, was more concerned with the spectacular, and its emphasis on the success of the audio-visual combination shows this inclination. Masques had great visual appeal with mythical figures appearing commonly in them. The need to enhance the audio-visual effect led to a rise in the costs of production. In the Jacobean age, masques came to have a wholly professional character with the performing troupe comprising dancers, artists, musicians, and stage organisers. In its early phases, the masque was peopled by individuals who were affiliated to the court but weren’t professionals; the Jonsonian anti-masque, however, led to both professionalism and a greater focus on important dramatic matters like plot and character. Jonson’s contention was that the masque ought to combine the elements of conventional drama and the spectacle in order to serve its purpose. Given the character of the masque and the occasions when it was staged, the visual element in it was of great significance. Usually, a masque was presented in some form of celebration, ceremonials, and even during weddings and coronations. It was presented as a form of entertainment that met the demands of specific audiences such as those associated with the Inns

of Court. Elements of the masque were present in various Elizabethan literary forms. Spenser benefited from the tradition of masque presentation as is evident in his use of the form’s elements in his Faerie Queene. Shakespeare used it to further his dramatic purpose in As You Like It and The Tempest. The masque was immensely popular in the late Elizabethan and the early Stuart era but with the prohibitions on theatrical activity coming into effect from 1642, the form did not survive. Merchant Guilds: Merchant guilds were an important part of medieval economy. These guilds were organised to further the monopolistic trade structure of a particular town or locality. Although supposedly concerned with the interest of merchant and governed by the principle of trade alone, most merchant guilds were town-centric and worked as tight-knit bodies that were loyal to the places where they were situated. These merchant guilds controlled the trade relations between the cities and determined the pattern of transaction and inflow of capital. As bodies of trade, these guilds were extremely protective about their interests and were quite regimented in matters of policy. As such, the merchant guilds did not survive the sixteenth century in the format that succeeded so well in the Middle Ages. These guilds, which were actually associations of various categories of traders, weren’t always confined to the same kinds of goods or commodities. The merchant guilds regulated the demand/supply cycle of products in the area of its operation. The prosperity of a guild was, in most cases, an index to the economic health of a town or city in the medieval period. As the medieval times came to a close, the merchant guilds were outnumbered by the emerging craft guilds. Miracle Plays: Miracle plays (also known as Saints’ plays) were an important part of the medieval theatre. According to J.M. Manly, a miracle play involved “the dramatisation of a legend setting forth the life or the martyrdom or the miracles of a saint” (Manly 1906–7: 585), Medieval miracle plays may be divided into the following categories: (a) plays that dramatise the life of a saint; (b) plays that dramatise the life of a saint on the basis of historical accounts; (c) plays dealing with just an episode or incident of a saint’s life, especially one with high symbolic significance; (d) plays that represent miracles relating to Saint Nicholas, Virgin Mary, or some other saint; (e) plays dealing with martyrdom; and (f) romantic plays using

elements from the miracle play convention. It is evident from the above schematisation that the focus of the miracle plays was more on the subject than on technical or dramatic excellence. In terms of the staging process of these miracle plays, there wasn’t much of a determined regulation; this was because the plays were focused on the achievement of the liturgical goal that overshadowed its theatrical structure. Like other hagiographical literature, the element of faith formed the basis of the theological argument that constituted the subject of the miracle plays. Not many plays from this medieval tradition has survived in spite of the fact the saint’s stories formed one of the most significant aspects of religious life in England till the Renaissance. Many of the saints’ legends in English were contained in the South English Legendary which was in existence from the thirteenth century. The four major English miracle plays that survive are The Conversion of Saint Paul, Mary Magdalen, St. Meriasek, and Play of the Sacrament. Like other religious medieval drama, the miracle plays also foregrounded the moral conditions adequately, but these plays also sought to highlight the historical context in which the saints or their miracles were placed so that the moral of the miracle was based on a historical understanding. The staging arrangements associated with the miracle plays are not exactly known; what is clear, however, is that these plays used the benefits of the scaffold structure and had similarities with the other forms of medieval religious theatre. Monasteries and Monasticism: The term ‘monastery,’ though initially applied to any religious order, system or group, came to imply a particular community of monks as its usage gained acceptance. The practice of a monastic life can be traced back to the early years of Christianity when some people used to think that an isolated approach would make the spiritual exercise easier. Originally, the monks were members of the laity who sought an isolated life and followed extreme forms of self-denial. Such individuals were more concerned about the possibilities of contemplation an isolated lifestyle afforded that the adherence to a rigid order. By the third century, monasticism was emerging as an option for the spiritually inclined but it was only in the fourth that there was a gradual spread of this tendency throughout Europe. The hermit-like asceticism was a mode of living that suggested to many as an appropriate way of conducting their spiritual concerns, while

another cause of the appeal of a monastic life was the growing secularisation of the priestly class. Saint Basil (c.330–379) is usually associated with the laying down of a set of guidelines for monks, and he is revered as one of the architects of Eastern monasticism. Basil’s principles may seem arduous by modern standards but he was responsible for streamlining the monastic order of the East. Monasticism’s entry into Western Europe, however, did not effectively take place until the sixth century. It was only when Saint Benedict (in the fifth century) laid down what is known as the Latin rule did monasticism settle in the West. The Benedictine rule suggested that the cultivation of poverty, sexual chastity, labour, obedience, and religious devotion should be the guiding traits for a monk’s life. The Benedictines contributed to the growth of Western culture and religious practice by their missionary zeal and inspiring work. The conversion of England and Germany is generally attributed to the missionary work of the Benedictine monks. It was Saint Augustine’s arrival in Kent in 597 A.D. that initiated the monastic orders in England. Monasticism has different orders with specific principles laid down for each one of them. In the British Isles, various orders were established following the arrival of Augustine. These orders had different rules as regards the particulars of spirituality. The Benedictines, Cistercians, Cluniacs, Augustinians, Premonstratensians, and the Carthusians were the major monastic orders established in Britain. The Rule of Saint Benedictine, which came to England with Saint Augustine, was established at Monte Cassino in Italy about 529 A.D. The Benedictine order was eventually separated into various other monastic sects on the principles of reform or modifications. Westminster, Canterbury, Bury St. Edmunds, Glastonbury, and Dunfermline in Scotland developed into major Benedictine houses. The Cistercian order was founded as a reformist move to offer a stricter regimen to Benedictine monks. This order was open to nuns as well. The Cistercian monks, however, were eventually divided into two groups—the original stricter adherents known as the Trappists and the more liberal ones adopting certain relaxations. The first settlement of the Cistercian order in England was in Waverley, Surrey, in 1129. Since the Cistercians emphasised on manual labour, their houses were usually associated with sheep farming in which they were quite adept. The Cluniacs (founded in 910 in France) formed another variation of the Benedictine Rule which gained a major following in

the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. Lewes, Sussex was the first major English settlement for this order in 1077. The Rule of Saint Augustine was based on the teachings of Augustine of Hippo. The order was further divided into two sects, known as the Augustinian Canons and the Augustinian Friars. The Premonstratensians were a religious order (founded 1120) which started in Prémontré, France. Saint Norbert of Xanten was its founder. The order united the Augustinian principles of monasticism with the austerity of the friars. In England, they were known as White Canons because of their striking habits of white wool. The Carthusian order (founded by Saint Bruno in 1084) prescribed an extremely strict regimen and even though it grew in the twelfth century it never attracted a wide following. First established in England in 1180, the Carthusian monasteries did not expand beyond 19 and its house in Aldersgate was the most prominent of all. The monks in England played a very important social role in the medieval period. The monks followed a strict routine in spite of variations based on the specific orders, and they devoted hard physical labour, scholarship, and contemplation. Usually, the monks utilised their time between the services and the work associated with community life. The monasteries had a selfsustaining mechanism with own buildings and resources. They raised sheep and had plantations which contributed to their wealth. It is believed that in the thirteenth century, the monasteries controlled at least ten per cent of England’s national income, employed a large corpus of workers, and thus regulated the country’s economy. One of the principal contributions of the monasteries was in the field of scholarship. Some of them even rivalled the universities, such as the Cathedral Prior at Canterbury, in terms of the learning opportunities they offered. Monasteries had enviable libraries and almost all monks were well versed in scriptures, and knowledgeable in matters of secular life as well. The monks also contributed to the preservation of manuscripts as they copied them separately. By the fourteenth century, monasteries were declining as there was a growing secularisation of society and also because their wealth was viewed as a threat which was eventually confronted by Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries (1536-40). Moralities: A form of allegorical drama, moralities constituted one of the most popular influential dramatic experiences in the English Middle Ages. Some critics trace the origin of morality plays to the mysteries and miracles

although its allegorical orientation can be traced to the homiletic tradition as exemplified by different forms of religious literature. Primarily revolving around the good/evil axis, a morality play was designed to present the internal conflict within man through a moralistic frame. There were various counters chosen to demonstrate the workings of the conflict of which Satan, Death, God, The Seven Deadly Sins, Flesh and the World were the most common. In Everyman, the classic and most representative of morality plays, the summoning of Everyman by God through the agency of Death and his subsequent realization that only Good Deeds will stand by him on his eternal journey, engages the conflictual potential of many contrasting conditions as materialism/spirituality, good/evil, or corruption/salvation. The play is a lesson in ethical conduct and its insistence on the necessity of Good Deeds was designed to remind the people of the early sixteenth century (when it was first performed) of the dangers in the pursuit of material happiness. Almost all moralities followed the same pattern of didactic enumeration of moral principles through the dramatization of potential spirit versus matter conflicts. While some form of goodness (God, angels) was pitted against the machinations of the evil forces (the Devil, the Seven Deadly Sins), all the morality plays weren’t structurally as well organized as Everyman. The language was not polished in all the passages and more significantly, the characterization wasn’t uniform. Morality plays were immensely influential and many of its elements were later incorporated into the theatrical structure of Elizabethan playwrights like Marlowe and Shakespeare. Major morality plays in English include The Castle of Perseverance (c.1425), Mankind (c.1475) and Magnificence, (1516) by Skelton. By the middle of the sixteenth century, moralities declined as secular drama arrived to the English theatre. Mysteries: Mystery plays grew out of the liturgical tradition of the English Church in the medieval period. These plays were also known as Cycle plays, because they were usually performed as dramatisations of the cycle from the Creation to the Day of Judgement. Many medieval English towns possessed cycles which were performed on a regular basis, even though the staging of independent plays was also done in between. The mysteries show the importance of religious drama as a communal activity, something in which the whole community participated. The playwrights who were responsible for writing the scripts of the performances were more driven by spiritual

enterprise than literary ones. Being part of the whole community, the mysteries involved a lot of manpower and money. Associated with guilds, the mysteries were sometimes reworked and revised to suggest a change in ownership. The first examples of liturgical drama are traced back to the end of the fourteenth century. The dramatisation of episodes from the Bible were closely associated with the calendar of the Church and during the early days, these performances were enacted inside the Church. The major difference between the liturgical drama of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and the mysteries was that the former remained a closed performance, while the latter went on to involve a wider audience and was comparatively more open. Another important aspect of the staging of the mysteries is the establishment of the Feast of Corpus Christi. The Corpus Christi Feast was established in 1311 at the Vienne Council and within the same decade it became a common phenomenon in most of Europe. The Feast took place on Thursday that followed Trinity Sunday and very soon it became a platform for many Craft Guilds to demonstrate their professional affiliations. As the completion of the sacrifice of Christ usually fell on Trinity Sunday, Christ was the central figure in the pageant that covered the creation story and with the cycle continuing till Judgement Day. The process through which the cycle of episodes were manoeuvred into the frame of the Corpus Christi procession in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries is not exactly known. At least the origins of the mode are in the realm of speculation. It has been observed that “what happened is a kind of group invention whereby a number of people associated with the procession arrived, by experiment, at a workable arrangement” (Happé 1985: 20), Although the association of the mystery plays with the Corpus Christi Feast is certain, the matter of the cycle’s authors is not adequately recorded. Most of the stories were well known and in circulation. The craft guilds were responsible for both the development of the cycles and the execution of the theatrical principles associated with it. The Corpus Christi processions provided the guilds an opportunity to display their conditions as well as giving them the platform through which they established the distinctiveness of their groups. With time, other performances, not necessarily related to the Corpus Christi Feast, were incorporated within the cycles, but this did not dilute the significance of the original occasion. It is worthwhile to remember,

however, that the cycles were in a constant state of evolution and change, and were subject to local conditions. The decline of the mysteries began with the beginning of Reformation in England. By the time of Queen Elizabeth, the craft guilds had lost their influence considerably and moreover, the tenor of the mysteries were not actually in line with the theological assumptions of the newly worked out Elizabethan Settlement. The mystery plays were mounted upon wagons and mobility was one of the features of the theatrical process. The use of mechanical devices for theatrical effect was common. In England, four Mystery cycles have survived but it is almost definite that other towns had their own cycles, which incidentally, are no longer extant. The four surviving Mystery cycles are those of York (48), Coventry (42), Wakefield (32), and Chester (25). The Wakefield cycle was also known as the Towneley cycle. Performances based on such religiouslyinspired material organised in the form of cycles were common all over Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the English experience representing one of the many possibilities of the tradition. Norman Conquest and the English Language: When William conquered England in 1066, he and his fellow invaders carried out a meticulous campaign to overwhelm the English forces. Territorial annexation and the wresting of land from English hands did not cause the Normans much of difficulty. However, along with political control and domination came responsibility. These new governors of England, both in the political and the spiritual spheres, were French speakers. Initially, during the first century of the Norman reign, the nobility moved across the Channel not just to revisit their country of origin but also to maintain cultural links to which they felt affiliated. This dual allegiance pushed back the matter of settling England’s language a century further. There are two reasons for this development. First, the early Norman rulers could not immediately connect to the cultural conditions of the country they just invaded and controlled. The idea of ‘home’ was related to the culture and habits that they had nurtured and practised thus far in Normandy. The second reason for English not emerging readily as the language of England, when the Norman invasion was underway and immediately afterwards, was that it was yet to have a clearly demarcated linguistic limits. English, in the tenth century, was not only in its early formative stages but it was also still assimilating formalistic features. As

such, English was yet to present itself to the Normans as a ‘developed’ language which they could consider as an alternative to the French and which they could immediately adopt for official purposes. By the time the Normans began to see themselves as part of the English culture and life, French was firmly entrenched as the language of official discourse. Law, government, administration, court literature, and even scriptural writing were conducted in French in these initial years of the Norman reign. It was almost two hundred years after the Norman Conquest that the English language came to occupy the place of prominence, in both the official and lay realms. In trying to appreciate the nature of the French influence on English life and letters in the first two centuries of Norman governance, it is important to acknowledge its two stages. The first stage of the French contact is associated with the Norman elite who preferred a Scandinavianised version of the French language. The condition of this linguistic usage, however, was not destined for a longer run. This was because of the parameters within which the Norman elite functioned. This version of the French was neither more developed nor prestigious than the ‘formed’ English with which it had to compete in the fourteenth century. Moreover, this version did not possess a rich literary heritage which could be an alternative to the burgeoning artistic resources that English was gradually acquiring. The advantage that Norman-French had in its early years of usage in the elite circles was that it was a language that offered the governors of this new land a system with which they were familiar and conversant. The influence of Norman-French on the spiritual realm of England was no doubt there, but it was quite limited. Latin was still the language in which religious discourse was transcribed, conducted and disseminated. The term ‘triglossic’ has been used to suggest the three-language use (Norman-French, Latin, and English) in England immediately after 1066 (Leith 1983: 27). Even though historians have worked out a three-way linguistic intercourse in Norman England in the post-1066 era, whether such interactivity was pervasive in all cultural pockets of England remains doubtful. For all practical purposes, it was more of a bilinguistic affair with Norman-French and English competing one another. While Latin remained one of the major discursive structures in the religious world there seems to be hardly any penetration of this language of scripture into the discourse of the English masses. The relation between Latin and the English people was peculiar in that while it served its purpose

in the pulpit, it was not considered as a viable medium of daily exchange. The vocabulary of the Latin language was thus restricted to its functions in the religious sphere where it developed a discourse that could not be replaced by any other. It was only when English came to be accepted as the mainstream linguistic discourse of the English people that Bible translations were initiated and transmitted. By the time The Book of Common Prayer was in circulation in the sixteenth century, Latin still had its adherents among the Church people but its influence was narrowing. Considerably then, Latin was primarily present in the medieval society as a language for a particular kind of discourse, which inevitably affected the religious conduct of the people but it was something they did not try to replicate in toto during daily exchange. In this sense, Latin in England has always remained a functional language devised, articulated, and structured, for, a special cultural mode, i.e., religion. Even then the language of the Church was not solely Latin. This aspect of Latin in medieval England is worth noting; for while the average Englishman encountered Latin phrases daily in his interaction with the Church people and also perhaps at home when he was engaged in scriptural contemplation, it was not part of a vocabulary that he took to work. The relation between Norman-French and English, however, is much more complicated. There are two opinions about the interpenetration of French in English society and culture. It has been argued that the French influence involved and incorporated a wide spectrum of the English populace, while the opposite position holds that its use outside the elite circles was extremely restricted. Whatever the nature of the acceptance or interaction, it is clear that French did not displace English as the language of the masses. It is also clear that there were many dialects in circulation and currency, and it was quite sometime before English emerged as a language that represented different sections of English society. Nevertheless, these different dialects did not really give in to the Norman-French option following the Conquest of 1066. One of the reasons why Norman-French did not succeed in becoming the language of the English is its apparent lack of linguistic unity. As a language, Norman-French was only a version of a Continental variety and in adopting the French language the Normans had tailored it to their immediate cultural and social needs. It did not seem to possess the prestige and regard associated with Latin which was known to the English people. Furthermore, there seems to have been very little attempt—either cultural, administrative, or coercive—

to present the Norman-French version as a potential alternative. With no mechanism in place to infiltrate into the different cultural pockets of England, Norman-French remained the court language, a language with its gloss of sophistication but without mass appeal. It was, however, likely that there were some social formations and communities which interacted in a manner that made the cultivation of the bilingualism between Norman-French and English inevitable. It is of course not very clear how this interaction was achieved in each individual case; it was not uniform to a degree that would let us generalise and construct a pattern of such bilingualism in medieval England. For each social group and community, the reasons for learning and nurturing a second tongue would have been different. Wherever the scope of linguistic transaction between two communities was more frequent, knowledge of the language of the addresser/addressee became necessary. In case of marginal groups or peoples that did not have direct access to the Anglo-Norman nobility, the motivation for learning French was much less and perhaps also less cultivated. One of the reasons for the bilingualism—at least in those areas where both English and Norman-French were current—was functional. It was impossible in such situations to have any meaningful social intercourse without a working knowledge of the other’s language. This condition also points towards another aspect of the English language, i.e. its adoption of French words and phrases. This is obviously not the whole story about the social conditions that went into the development of the English language during the medieval period. There is considerable debate among linguistic historians about the nature of the influence of the Norman invasion upon English language. Some positions, however, are less contested. One such position relates to the language of the English monarchs following the Conquest, which was expectedly French, the language they had carried with them when they entered English soil. What is surprising, however, is the continuance of French as the first language of English monarchy well into the fourteenth century. It has also been suggested that many members of the English nobility and royalty were perhaps primarily French speakers, well after the immediate years of the Conquest. While there is evidence to support the case of French usage in the English aristocracy in the years following the Norman invasion, it is also believed that the natives who now had new governors

carried on with the language they had been using thus far. The Norman kings, therefore, were reigning over subjects who, in spite of owing allegiance to their rulers politically, did not felt the necessity to bring about a radical change in their daily linguistic operations. The theory that there existed a bilingual transaction in medieval England, though not wholly discounted, was not pervasive in a way that altogether altered the language habits of the ordinary English residents immediately after 1066. It must also be acknowledged that some form of interactivity between some members of the English society and the new aristocracy was unavoidable and this was, in all likelihood, achieved without much difficulty. At this point it is necessary to qualify two terms we have been using freely so far: ‘Normans’ and ‘aristocracy.’ The nature of the invasion led by William was such that all his liegemen could not have been aristocrats of the first order. They belonged to various social strata and worked in different military and civil capacities. While the Norman feudal lords operated through personnel who served as a link between them and the land labourers, these mediatory officials were bound to be familiar with both tongues for the smooth functioning of the estate. This was a necessity in terms of daily interactions which could not have been possible with only ‘some’ knowledge of both languages. As the years after the Conquest passed, these mediators spread out into the English countryside, the towns, and even different parts of the British Isles, initially to meet the demands of their Norman masters and later on their own initiatives to fulfil their personal needs. One motivation for these people conversant in both languages to fan out to other parts of England was the benefits of settlement. While some of these people belonged to groups that accompanied William, there were other splinter factions that were of Norman origin but did not have the direct military connection. Craftsmen, artisans, merchants, and tradesmen found England a lucrative proposition and their professional compulsions necessitated familiarity with the native tongue. The nature of the bilingual activity in this case was more of the Normans acquiring working knowledge of English rather than vice versa. French never posed a major threat to the English language, even during those peak years of Norman occupation, and if the transactional yardstick is to function as a measure of the extent to which these relations were affected, it must be recognised that the number of people who came under the purview of such a condition did not encompass the whole of England. While French was used

for the major administrative functions following the Norman Conquest, it is doubtful whether it was ever able to dislodge English as the language of the financial world. More than English people being fluent in French, it was perhaps the other way round. The Normans who interacted regularly with the common people were compelled to learn English. In effect, what transpired between the average Englishmen and the Norman merchant, for instance, was worked out in a pidgin form, a variety that is often termed as Anglo-French. This process of interaction through a form of improvised language that adopted both English and French terms did not eventually persist in the same condition. It is perhaps an indication of the assimilative powers of the English language that enabled it to incorporate French terms and expressions without markedly altering the native language. That there were marital unions between the Normans and the English is undeniable and also that the immediate generations consequent upon such marriages adopted the mixture of both their parents’ tongues, but as the process of assimilation continued it eventually ironed out to become part of the developing English language. While the Norman Conquest influenced language usage among the nobility and the laity, there were other institutions that came to be affected by the linguistic demands of Norman governance. The languages of the Church, which were both Latin and English, did not face much of challenge from the French. There were two obvious reasons for not making the linguistic changeover following a transformation in the political sphere. The first was that English served its purpose very well for a laity that would have found it extremely difficult to move to a new religious idiom just because of a political change. The second was that a majority of the believers who attended the English Church conversed in English and the adoption of an alien language was practically not required. Even in monasteries established by the Normans, bilingualism was a more practical option than a complete imposition of the French. In the already existing churches, English (the west midland dialect was the most dominant form) was used extensively both for communicative and textualising purposes. The preservation of religious texts was carried out in both Latin and English while a sprinkling of Latin interspersing the native tongue in religious interaction was quite common. In terms of literary production, however, the currency of Norman-French in the higher echelons of society facilitated a considerable output, which, given the political positioning of the ruling class was hardly surprising. But then it is

also true that this circumstance did not engender a new literary tradition which owed a direct allegiance to the Norman-French creative experiments. The fact that French loan words began to make their presence felt around the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries show how the English language was finding in the tongue of the rulers a source ground from which to borrow and use. At the same time, we should also acknowledge the distinction between the French of Paris and the Norman variety. When Normandy became subject to French political control (in 1204), the French of Paris became the central language that people of both Normandy and their descendents in England looked up to—a condition that worked to situate the hitherto current NormanFrench in a position of inferiority. When French was in circulation among the elite in England in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, there was a subtle but engaged contest between these two French versions. The example of Chaucer suggests this tendency very well. While he looked to the Continent for influence and inspiration, his adoption of French themes, manners, and social practices indicate how the French of the English court was exerting its pressure upon a language that was trying to come to its own. For the Norman elite, English was still the language of the natives who lacked polish and sophistication. The lessening number of French speakers here was seen as one of the merits of the language—it was befitting only for the members of the ruling class to have access to a language which ordinarily had no truck with the average Englishman. While such politics did sway and control the linguistic affiliations of the elite and the masses, it is also evident that a straitjacketing of this type cannot account for the cross-fertilisation that took place when the various communities interacted. When Chaucer was at his creative peak, the position of English as the language of the land was considerably settled; the French language, however, had not lost its appeal even then but it had acquired the condition of distance which marked it as a language of prestige and privilege, the distance here being that of culture and inaccessibility. For the English people in Chaucer’s time, French was a glamorous option. In the legal profession and in the world of writers, the knowledge and usage of French was viewed as a privilege. The relation between English and French however, was also reason enough for antagonism among the people. The French people and their culture was seen by many in medieval England as a potential threat to the ethos of a developing English identity. However, such a view was obviously not the

dominant one, and by the beginning of the fifteenth century English’s fortune as the language of the land was assured beyond doubt. It is, however, equally important to recognise that the Norman Conquest and the import of the Norman-French option did speed up the matter of standardising English. Nunneries: The nunneries, along with the monasteries, served important religious, social, and economic purposes in medieval England. The nunneries constituted the only professional option for unmarried girls and widows in the Middle Ages. As an institution, a nunnery was headed by an elected prioress or abbess. Membership was usually from the upper classes till the time of Chaucer and entry into a nunnery was also a statement on the social position of the individual. Although some form of scholarship was part of the activities of a nunnery till the eleventh century, gradually academic work was discontinued and more importance was given to embroidery and spinning. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, daughters of the upwardly mobile merchants also became nuns. Most of the nunneries had an additional labour force for doing the physical work. There are instances of some nunneries being used for disciplining errant girls as it provided a form of closure and confinement. Nunneries were also known as convents. Open-field System: The open field system was a mode of farming in medieval England which had been in existence for more than 2000 years. In this system of cultivation, the two or three large open fields were divided from the manorial land, which were further separated into narrow strips. The three-field system was more economical than the two-field one. These strips were then handed over to the tenant farmers who worked in the manor for cultivation. Usually, the strips of the land were about ½ acres each. These strips were called selion which meant ‘furrow’ in French. The manoeuvrability of the eight-plough oxen was usually the determining factor in deciding the length and the breadth of each selion. The separators across these strips were called balks. A balk was the name given to unploughed ridge which served as a boundary between the strips. The phrase ‘ridge and furrow farming’ is sometimes used to describe the open-field system. Even though the number of holdings differed from the manorial lord to the cottar (a villein who possessed a cottage and held an attached land), the distribution was well spread out across the entire social spectrum. While one or more fields were sown with crops such as wheat, rye, barley, or oats, one was

deliberately kept fallow. Beyond these open-fields lay stretches of uncultivated lands which were used for a variety of purposes. The waste land was given for grazing but the uncultivated land also served as meadow and woodland. The open-field system suited the feudalised manorial structure well and the lord took advantage of the whole land being in his possession. The most fertile land strips belonged to the lord who availed of the best conditions in the uncultivated portions as well. It must be noted that all the parts of England were not adhering to the open-field system. Mountains, forests, and large wastelands were not conducive for this type of agriculture. Parish Church: The parish Church has been an integral part of English social life and culture. The parish churches which are considered to be the oldest in England go back to about 670 A.D. In the early Middle Ages, the parish Church was categorised into three classes: cathedral, collegiate and local or private chapels. The category of ‘cathedral’ churches in the early years of Christianity in England referred to those institutions that served as the base for the missionaries who went out to preach. These churches were also known as ‘mother churches.’ The ‘collegiate’ or the ‘old minster’ churches belonged to the next level of the institutions which were also involved in missionary activities. The private or local chapels were established by the different groups or powerful individuals as thegns or bishops. In England, local lords or thegns who occupied positions of power were responsible for the construction of the early parish churches. Besides fulfilling man’s religious needs, these early churches were also representative of the power of the lords who took the initiative in establishing them. The sites of these churches in the early Middle Ages were interestingly chosen as those places where some form of spiritual activity was practiced earlier. The continuation of spirituality now got a Christian garb and orientation. Usually, the churches have been constructed in such a way that the main altar symbolically faces Jerusalem, which is the east side. How and when these early institutions came to be designated as parish churches is unclear. The word ‘parish’ refers to an area or administrative district. When applied for the first time, word ‘parish’ referred to the domain of a bishop. One view regarding the territory of the parish is that they were old Saxon manors. It must also be remembered that a parish was not synonymous with a settlement. The Normans found the existing arrangement suitable and didn’t

alter the provision where the local lord’s domain and the parish church’s extent coincided. In Anglo-Saxon times, the thegn was extremely powerful and had the authority to change the priest. The gradual growth of the Church as an institution was responsible for the corresponding growth of parish in the high Middle Ages. A parish Church has a chancel, which is the priest’s domain while the nave was for the use of the parishioners. This two-fold structure accounted for the peculiar design of the early parish church. Usually, the chancel was better equipped and structurally stronger than the nave; this condition, which suggests the privilege position of the priest, however, wasn’t part of all churches in the Middle Ages. One consequence of this positioning can be seen in the development of rood screens, which separated the priest from his parishioners. Most of these rood screens were broken down during the Reformation. Early parish churches did not had the provision for seating and as sermons became part of the liturgical process the churches developed to adapt to the changing situation. In the Middle Ages, the parish churches were usually plastered with vivid paintings representing Biblical scenes for common consumption. Unfortunately, such plasters with paintings have not survived the medieval period. Wool churches were one of the most distinctive examples of the medieval parish church; a wool Church had many wealthy people, primarily merchants who gained from the wool trade, with Cotswolds and East Anglia having the majority of them. Another innovation was added during the Elizabethan period—the pulpit developed into an integral structure of the Church as long sermons became part of regular service. This was also the time when grand churches were constructed. Urbanisation from the seventeenth century onwards saw a rapid increase in parish churches and London had the maximum number. The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed many of the existing churches following which Christopher Wren rebuilt some in the classical style. Another development that has continued from the seventeenth century has been the entrusting of administrative responsibility for local matters to the parishes and its churchwardens. Such responsibility involved supervision of Poor Law and highways. The urban parishes, in their original structure as a local unit of government, have been abolished since 1933 even though limited administrative powers form part of the duties of the rural churches following

the reorganisation of local government in 1974. Pilgrimage of Grace: The Pilgrimage of Grace is associated with the reaction to the dissolution of monasteries in England in the sixteenth century. The Pilgrimage of Grace was an uprising that took place in the northern counties of England in 1536. The exercises of Thomas Cromwell, under the directive of the Crown, were the primary source for the opposition. When Cromwell sent commissioners to gather financial subsidy and directed the closure of the weaker monasteries, it affected the sentiments of the people in the north which was manifested in the form of an uprising. The first impact was felt in Lincolnshire when riots broke out on October 1, 1536 but this could not be sustained and it fell through by the 19th of the same month. The rebellion led by Robert Aske in York, however, was more wide-ranging in its impact and had the support of about thirty thousand people. By February 1537, the Pilgrimage of Grace was subdued by Henry VIII and its failure only quickened the dissolution of the monasteries. Spanish Armada: The Spanish Armada (1588) was an important landmark in the history of Queen Elizabeth’s reign and affected the course of contemporary politics, especially England’s position in the European context. The Armada was the Spanish king Philip II’s fleet, which in association with another one consisting of the Spanish forces in Flanders, was sent to occupy England. The Spanish Armada was an important naval battle for the English as it was the first time that heavy guns were used by England. The battle demonstrates how the intricacies of contemporary politics flared up to grow into a full-fledged war among two nations. Philip II was aiming to convert England into the Catholic fold and when the English side began to support the Dutch following the Treaty of Nonesuch (1585), the Spanish monarch got the opportunity to legitimise his attack. The English support for the Dutch considerably hurt Spanish interests and provided Philip II the right incentive to launch his fleet against England. Duke de Parma, the Spanish governor of the Netherlands, led the assault from one side with 30,000 troops. The Duke of Medina-Sidonia led the Spanish forces from another side with more than 27,000 troops, of which 19,000 were soldiers. With Charles Howard as the leader (Francis Drake was the second in command) the English forces organised an adequate reply to the Spanish forces. In terms of number, the English were inferior to the Spaniards and did not have the manpower of the

latter but certain factors aided the Elizabethan side. Unlike the Spaniards, the English were not burdened by the demands of transportation and they had faster ships. Owing to a strategic miscalculation Parma could not coordinate his forces with the other group and the Spanish ships were heavily exposed to the English firepower. On the midnight of August 7–8, the English forces compelled the Spanish to abandon the port by launching a severe fire-attack. When the actual confrontation began the next day, the Spaniards were not ready, and more importantly, their formation had collapsed. In the subsequent battle, the Spaniards were routed and about 15,000 troops died. The loss on the English side too was considerable, but the victory ensured that Elizabeth’s reign was now secure and an important political message was sent to other European countries about England’s military and naval capability. Tottel’s Miscellany: One of the prominent poetry anthologies of the English Renaissance, Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), was brought out by a printer and bookseller named Richard Tottel in collaboration with another scholar and translator named Nicholas Grimald. The collection was, however, not known as Tottel’s Miscellany from the beginning—it was originally titled as Songs and Sonnets Written by the Right Honourblae Lord Henry Howard, Late Earl of Surrey and Other. The collection had poems by Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey besides some verses by other poets. Tottel’s Miscellany was the only collection published in the period to have included Wyatt’s poems, for his other verse compositions remained in manuscript till the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wyatt’s poems served as a very interesting model for other contemporaries who followed the example set by him in Tottel’s Miscellany. Surrey, whose name formed part of the original title of the volume, contributed more than forty poems. Surrey was an accomplished versifier and his experimentation with the sonnet form was taken up by more illustrious exponents of the form like William Shakespeare later. Besides Wyatt and Surrey, some of the other poets represented in this volume included the publisher Nicholas Grimald himself, John Cheke, and Thomas Vaux. Grimald published forty of his own poems in the collection. It is also likely that Grimald edited the poems in the volume. Two of Vaux’s poems were included in the volume, of which one (The Aged Lover Renounceth Love) served as the source of the gravedigger’s distorted

recollection in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Before the advent of the journal format, of which Tottel’s Miscellany was one of the earliest examples in Tudor England, the poems were often circulated in manuscript but never brought together in one volume. In fact, soon after the publication of this anthology, numerous other collections appeared with poems by contemporary poets in them. Tottel’s Miscellany was extremely popular with the Elizabethan reading public which suggests the popularity of the short English poem, including the sonnet. The popularity of the volume can be gauged from the fact that its second edition appeared in the same year as the first and other editions followed throughout the sixteenth century with alterations and modifications. Town Charters: The town charters were issued by the king to a medieval town; it was a form of recognition and a process of licensing, the sole authority of which rested with the royalty. The practice of granting towns a royal charter became common in the twelfth century. The charter gave the town the framework for administration, as long as it was in line with the generally devised structure applicable to the whole country. The grant of the royal charter was both a matter of privilege and a recognition by the king. Most towns in medieval England had their own seals, which signified their distinct character.

2 In Transition: From the Restoration to the Age of Reason THE RESTORATION PERIOD The Context of the Restoration The restoration of monarchy in England in 1660 transformed the regimented and pent-up social energies and redirected them through the agency of the English court. When Charles II came back to England, he also brought a cultural matrix that wasn’t really part of the social experience—even in court circles—in the pre-Commonwealth era. The world in which Charles II entered benefited from the extreme restrictions of the Puritan regime—the prohibitions imposed by the Cromwellian administration went against the festive spirit that the new king reintroduced in English society. The Act of Uniformity (1662) was an important milestone in the marginalisation of the Puritans, and although it was both political expediency and a religious reaction, such a move showed the attitude of the new regime quite early. It is also noteworthy, however, that the Restoration didn’t result in the cultivation of an outright reactionary attitude, with the dominant mood being that of moderation. It was the climate of moderation that facilitated the publication of texts like Paradise Lost (1667) and The Pilgrim’s Progress (1684). The comic playfulness of Restoration comedy represented the other side of the spectrum in an age of social and political transition. In the political sphere, the Restoration enhanced the Parliament’s position and by the time the Glorious Revolution of 1688 took place, the wings of monarchy had been considerably clipped. The reign of Charles II was also characterised by different kinds of turmoil—the Popish Plot, the attempt of Monmouth to come to power, and the party conflicts between the Whigs and the Tories. It was the time that saw the beginnings of democracy; the first move towards the need for organising scientific discipline found its own agency in the Royal Society. In literature and drama, the Restoration saw the introduction of women actors on the English stage, a decline in the theatrical

extravagance of the Elizabethan variety and a superficial sophistication that catered to niche audiences and a preference for slander, libel and satire (something which continued till Romanticism). The period also saw rapid urban growth and colonial expansion overseas.

Restoration Theatre Although it is said that the restoration of Charles II to the English throne synonymously coincided with the restoration of the theatre, the process was not exactly done in the pre-Civil War sense. Charles II granted William Davenant and Thomas Killigrew the monopoly to run two theatre companies in August 1660. The situation was slightly different from the earlier arrangement when several companies offered their fares; now only the King’s Company (Killigrew) and the Duke’s Company (Davenant) had the license to be engaged in theatrical activity. The fact that the Restoration theatre was patronised by the Court affected its audience composition as the merchant classes and the common theatre-goers, which constituted a considerable segment of the audience during the Elizabethan age, were distanced from the stage. The theatre was city-based, and while the comedies made fun of the wealthy citizen and the country gentleman, commentators have disagreements about how far such ridicule was designed to offend. Another change was the introduction of women actors in the parts of the lady protagonists. This development was of historical importance but in terms of acting prowess better performers are associated with the theatre of the eighteenth century. When William Davenant staged The Siege of Rhodes in 1661, he relied on the romance tradition that was in vogue during the time of Beaumont and Fletcher. Davenant is also associated with the introduction of heroic plays into the Restoration theatre, but it was actually Dryden who brought in the innovations and enriched the genre. Dryden analyses the characteristics of the genre in his essay titled Of Heroic Plays, which was attached to his The Conquest of Granada (1672), where he comments on the use of resources derived from the Elizabethan as well as the French theatrical practice of Corneille. Other influences on the heroic drama included the heroic poem, and unlike Davenant, who skimmed the surface, it was Dryden who extended the possibilities by enhancing both plot and characters. Dryden produced The

Indian Queen in collaboration with his brother-in-law Robert Howard in 1664, and the encouraging response to it led him to present The Indian Emperor, its sequel in 1665. Both the plays have the conflicting counters of love vs malice, valour vs cowardice, and ideal vs real and it set the pattern for many of his later heroic plays. In 1669, Dryden introduced some changes in the type when he staged Tyrannick Love but his classic The Conquest of Granada (1670–71) was actually responsible for determining the structure and theatrical features of heroic drama. Dryden combines moral preaching in this play with great characterisation of which Almanzor is the most remarkable example. Dryden’s success in developing the heroic tragedy genre was not confined to his own compositions only, but also included his adaptations of stories from earlier plays, which he placed in dramatic frames that were designed to be contemporaneous in taste. His most well-known adaptation is the reworking of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, which he restructured as All for Love (1677). In spite of the play’s Neo-Classical orientation, All for Love remains one of the most well orchestrated theatrical experiences to emerge from the Restoration period. Unlike Nahum Tate, who took considerable liberties with King Lear in adapting it for the contemporary audience, Dryden did not play with the tragic form and his heroic verse was well suited to the theme of the play. Dryden’s other adaptations include the operatic recreation of Milton’s Paradise Lost in The State of Innocence (1677), but this was not unique in his dramatic career as he had already dealt with historical and mythical themes in his earlier plays. Aurang-Zebe (1675), his last heroic play, however, did have the stereotypical elements of political intrigue and suspense, with a love story interspersing the plot with its complications. Other dramatists of the period who wrote heroic plays include Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrey, Elkanah Settle, Thomas Otway, and Thomas Southerne. Two of Orrey’s tragedies—Henry V (1664) and The Black Prince (1667)— combined English subjects with elements derived from the French theatrical tradition—a process that considerably influenced later playwrights who tried their hand at the genre. From his Mustapha (1665), he moved on to an oriental theme but the conventions of the genre were comfortably accommodated within the scheme of the play. The historical importance of The Empress of Morocco (1673), by Elkanah Settle, is associated with the rivalry that developed between him and Dryden as Settle was propped up by

patrons who sought to mount a challenge to the more established Restoration playwright. The play does not deviate from the characteristic feature of the genre but effectively uses the plot to demonstrate a scheme of intrigue in a way that drew applause from the immediate London audience. Perhaps a greater competitor to Dryden in the field was Thomas Otway. Otway tasted success with his second play Don Carlos (1676), where the humanised aspects of otherwise ‘heroic’ characters brought an interesting dimension to the characterisation. Like Dryden Otway also derived from the French theatrical tradition and his short plays—Titus and Berenice and The Cheats of Scapin—follow Racine and Moliere respectively. But it is in his fusion of the classical tradition with the contemporary, best manifested in his The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1680), The Orphan (1680), and Venice Preserv’d (1682), that his accomplishment as a dramatist lies. Caius Marius contributes to the tradition of adaptation that gave the Restoration theatre Dryden’s All for Love, as it draws from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for its primary movement. The Orphan is a domestic tragedy, which in spite of the continuous suicides at the end, maintain a sense of dramatic decorum. It was one of the most popular plays of the period. Venice Preserv’d presents both the individual quest for happiness and the society that places restrictions on it. Southerne’s plays did not engage the politics of intrigue that characterised Otway’s tragedies in the same overt manner, but nevertheless presented pictures of society in terms that appealed to the contemporary audience. His Loyal Brother (1682), Fatal Marriage (1694), and Oroonoko (1695), the last an interesting adaptation from Aphra Behn’s fictional narrative, are his contributions to the Restoration stage. Although the traditions of Restoration drama are associated with developments in both tragedy and comedy, it is the latter that has left a more distinctive mark in the history of the English stage. When the theatres closed down in 1642, the Jacobean and Caroline theatrical conditions were working as continuations of the dramatic traditions that went back to the middle of the sixteenth century. But the restoration of the theatre in 1660 did not offer the dramatists a tradition of continuity and as such it is not surprising to find adaptations of previously staged plays and experimental comedies surfacing in the theatre. Dryden was one of these experimenters but his comic output was not equal to his ventures in the heroic mode and even though in plays like Wild Gallant (1663) and Sir Martin Mar-all (1667) he exploits the

benefits of the comic conventions of Ben Jonson and Moliere, the focus on intrigue does not allow them to develop into the typical ‘comedy of manners.’ It is only in his Marriage à la Mode that Dryden came close to capturing the comic ingenuities of his more worthy contemporaries who practiced the genre like Etherege and Congreve. In his dedication to the Earl of Rochester, Dryden makes some interesting observations about the contemporary social scene and comments on the importance of ‘manners’: “In my little experience of a court (which I confess I desire not to improve) I have found in it much of interest and more of detraction—few men there have that assurance of a friend as not to be ridiculed by him when they are absent. There are a middling sort of courtiers who become happy by their want of wit; but they supply that want by an excess of malice to those who have it. And there is no such persecution as that of fools; they can never be considerable enough to be talked of themselves, so that they are safe only in their obscurity and grow mischievous to witty men by the great diligence of their envy and by always being present to represent and aggravate their faults” (Dryden 1981: 4). Many common features of Restoration comedy are highlighted here. The satirical inclinations of the comic mode in Restoration comedy, however, were not best represented by Dryden’s plays, but manifested in the dramas of Etherge, Wycherley, and Congreve. George Etherge’s first success was Comical Revenge (1664), but it is in his She Wou’d if She Cou’d that the typical features of the Restoration comic tradition are best witnessed. The importance attached to the rational aspect of characterisation was perhaps done at the cost of imaginative recreation of the dramatic elements, and characters like the Cockwoods are ridiculed through an appeal to reason. One of the allegations levelled against Etherege is that he could not develop his plots convincingly enough, but then, the situational interests were more important in his comic vision. Etherge’s The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676) is one of the classics of the genre. Dorimant, a rake is at the centre of the comic interventions that question and critique the licence granted to sexual relationships in contemporary society. Extremely sophisticated in execution, this play, however, also suffered from the lack of compactness in terms of the plot. In the plays of William Wycherley the plot is one of the interesting areas of theatrics that combined emotion and reason to establish the comic effect. Love in a Wood (1671), his first play, uses the

frame of hypocrisy to subvert the pretensions of polite society. The digs at contemporary behavioural patterns were more convincingly portrayed in his next play, The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1672). Like other plays in the tradition, this play too uses farce to engage serious issues like morals and manners within the conditions of comic prescription. In his other plays—The Country Wife (1675) and The Plain Dealer (1676)—trickery and intrigue are given central importance. The greatest playwright of the Restoration period was William Congreve, and even though his plays were attacked by Jeremy Collier in A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, the artistic brilliance of Congreve moves beyond the topicalities of the immediate socio-political context. This is interesting because the merits of Congreve’s dramatic art are drawn from the resources of the contemporary world, and in presenting his critiques of the manners and morals he organised his theses through designs that could be misread as supportive of the degenerative culture he referred to. Congreve was a master technician and a formalist. His superb control over his plot, characters and situations is unparalleled in contemporary drama. More than the unity of action (which in Congreve is much better executed than in his contemporaries), it is in the orientations of the comic that his excellences are best manifested. His wit and irony are remarkably subtle and textured to offer multiple layers of signification. In The Way of the World (1700), his best play, these features are combined to engage the politics of relationships, and in achieving the balanced union of the central pair, Mirabell and Millamant, through a wonderfully worked out diplomatic conditioning of love, Congreve offered his perspective on the hypocritical cultural milieu of his times. Millamant is one of the most attractive characters to appear in an English comedy and the way she holds her own in the negotiation scene is indeed remarkable. Here she is arguing for her space in the relationship with Mirabell: Mirabell: Have you any more Conditions to offer? Hitherto your Demands are pretty reasonable. Millamant: Trifles, As Liberty to pay and receive Visits to and from whom I please; to write and receive Letters, without Interrogatories or wry Faces on your Part; to wear what I please; and chuse Conversation with regard only to my own Taste; to have no Obligation upon me to converse with Wits that I don’t like, because they are your Acquaintance; or to be intimate with Fools,

because they may be your Relations. Come to Dinner when I please, dine in my dressing Room when I’m out of Humour without giving a Reason. To have my Closet Inviolate; to be sole Empress of my Tea-Table, which you must never presume to approach without first taking leave. And lastly, where ever I am, you shall always knock at the Door before you come in. these Articles subscrib’d, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a Wife (Congreve 1977: 155). This kind of a position has been seen as being typical of the ‘Artificial Comedy’ of the Restoration but then artifice is what the major Restoration dramatists were endeavouring to expose. It is perhaps as a reaction to the excess of the satirical and the comic that Sentimental Comedy developed in the following age.

Seventeenth Century Prose: Sprat, Clarendon, and Dryden The prose writings of the Restoration period show the importance given to clarity of expression and preciseness of thought—conditions that not only reflect the temper of the Enlightenment but also highlight the rationalist foundation that was behind such a philosophy. One of the best examples of this attitude is reflected in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667). The Royal Society began functioning as an association of people who were united in cultivating the scientific temper, and following the recognition by royal charter in 1662, it functioned as a platform facilitating scientific understanding. Technically, the Royal Society dealt with science, but the involvement of men from different professions brought in aspects of humanist culture into the attitude it came to represent as a distinctive one. When Sprat presented his History of the Royal Society, as more than a mere chronicle presenting an account of the institution, it sought to situate the terms under which such an association came to be formed and drew attention to the significance of cultivating the scientific temper. The emphasis on the appropriate kind of view for the understanding of the world was associated with the functions of the English language and it is in this context that Sprat drew a map of intellectual orientation required for such a movement. Sprat argued for the cultivation of an intellectually alert mind that could reciprocate and respond to the demands of reason, for which a movement away from the

religious fervour associated with Puritan society was necessary. The History of the Royal Society offers one of the most cogent arguments favouring the function of reason in any intellectual enterprise. Besides being a ‘history’ of the institution of Royal Society, Sprat’s focus on the rationalistic temper has made the text one of the manifestos of Restoration prose. Consider the following outburst of Sprat criticising the use of ornamentation in language: “Who can behold without indignation how many mists and uncertainties these specious Tropes and Figures have brought on our knowledge? How many rewards which are due to more profitable and difficult Arts have been still snatch’d away by the easie vanity of fine speaking? For now I am warm’d with this just Anger, I cannot withhold myself from betraying the shallowness of all these seeming Mysteries upon which we Writers and Speakers look so big. And, in few words, I dare say that, of all the Studies of men, nothing may be sooner obtain’d than this vicious abundance of Phrase, this trick of Metaphors, this volubility of Tongue, which makes so great a noise in the World. But I spend words in vain, for the evil is now so inveterate that it is hard to know whom to blame, or wherefrom to begin to reform. We all value one another so much upon this beautiful deceit, and labour so long after it in the years of our education, that we cannot but everafter think kinder of it than it deserves. And indeed, in most other parts of Learning, I look on it to be a thing almost utterly desperate in its cure, and I think I may be plac’d amongst those general mischiefs, such as the dissention of Christian Princes, the want of practice in Religion, and the like, which have been so long spoken against that men are becoming insensible about them, every one shifting off the fault from himself to others, and so they are only made bare common places of complaint. It will suffice my present purpose to point out what has been done by the Royal Society towards the correcting of its excesses in Natural Philosophy, to which it is, of all others, a most profest enemy. They have, therefore, been most rigorous in putting in execution the only Remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been a constant Resolution to reject all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the Mathematical

plainness as they can, and preferring the language of Artisans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that of Wits and Scholars” (Sprat 1908: 117–18). Sprat’s argument that all forms of rhetorical devices and strategies should be dispensed with must be understood as a call for unbridled expressions, expressions that adequately address the content through a cultivation of conciseness and precision. Sprat mentioned that ‘all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style’ should be discarded so that reason is articulated not through the structures of artifice but in all its purity. The conditions laid down by Sprat are designed to draw attention to the corrupting tendencies of figurative language and any scientific representation cannot submit to the muddled rhetorical dazzle, for authenticity is fundamental to articulations carrying rationalistic content. There are two ways of approaching the Sprat position: first, his idea of reason being the sole guide is similar to the Platonic debunking of poetic language as essentially unreal, and second, language is only the carrier of thought and not an agency of enhancement. While a kind of idealism informs his views on poetry and the arts (trick of Metaphors) it is noteworthy that Sprat and other members of the Royal Society were hardly interested in promoting poetry as they were in popularising reason. After all, it was the age of Enlightenment. For the members of the Royal Society, English prose was the primary agency of articulation and a clear resolution of the manner of expression was required for the purpose of evolving a standard. In 1664–65, the Society established a committee to investigate the possibilities of providing a frame to English prose style that would be the representative yardstick; needless to say, such a view was not unique to the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon had already called for a plainer style and John Dryden showed in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) how ornament and intellectual content could be wonderfully organised into one whole. It is interesting that a similar resolution arrived at almost one and a half century later in Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads (1802) was a vehement reaction against the restrictive structures of ‘reason.’ And here Sprat is arguing for an unornamental, mathematically plain language in order to represent ‘reason’ as sincerely as possible. John Dryden’s prose writings are scattered through his oeuvre except for his dialogue on aspects of poetic drama, Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1668). The essay is interesting not simply for the issues it raises but also for the dramatic form it adopts—it is structured as a dialogue between people, one of which is

Dryden himself. All the characters are situated in contexts of opposition and Crites, one of the characters, sets the ball rolling by analysing the differences between the Ancients and the Moderns. Eugenius, the second character, takes the side of the Moderns, while Lisideus champions neo-classical French drama. Dryden, who emerges as Neander, takes up the cudgels for the English and offers a comparative evaluation of the French and English situations. The other critical prose writings of Dryden were presented as dedications and prefaces, but such writings nevertheless contain remarkable insights into the subjects. Dryden was the first professional writer in English to theorise about his practice. As a prose writer, Dryden’s style is conversational and witty. He discusses almost all the subjects associated with literary creation and covers different genres as comedy, tragedy, satire, and poetry. His comments are precise and coherent in conception. Take the following passage from his ‘Preface’ to Troilus and Cressida: To instruct delightfully is the general end of all poetry. Philosophy instructs, but it performs its work by precept; which is not delightful, or not so delightful as example. To purge the passions by example is therefore the particular instruction which belongs to Tragedy (Dryden, in Leitch et al 2001: 383). Dryden, however, was not consistently brilliant in all his writings; the spark evident in many of his commentaries is no doubt designed to provide a picture collectively, but still certain passages outshine the others. Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon’s writings, on the other hand, are historical. Although he originally did not support the king during the Civil War in England, he eventually went on to support the royalty. It is this proximity to the seat of power that enabled Clarendon to provide an ‘authentic’ picture of the conflict between the monarchy and the Puritans in his classic True Historical Narrative of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. Clarendon began writing this text in 1646. It is a monumental achievement in its elaborate detailing of facts, carefully worked out and planned narrative structure, and for the wonderful persuasiveness that characterises his style. It is not that the narrative is without faults, but in culling resources from an immediately occurring present, Clarendon is attentive to the possibilities of history-in-the-making and makes space for such manoeuvres. The sense of objectivity that we find in his account is not one commonly associated with modern critical standards, but is more guided

by a sense of honesty to the necessity of truth. After all, the ‘history’ is personalised and represents his view of the civil war. Clarendon does not dwell in petty incidents but makes broad yet convincing movements to accommodate the portraits. He is penetrating but not intrusive and in analytical reasoning he combines wit with argument to great effect. One of the features of Clarendon’s prose is its strong, pacy movement; his gift of organising material is evidenced by a resourceful use of rhetoric and skilful engagement of the ‘historical’ facts. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, as this book is also known, is perhaps the first historical narrative of its kind in the English language. Not only does it give the reader an insider’s view into the politics and intrigue behind the civil wars, it also facilitates a reading of the text as a sourcebook of the time described.

Milton John Milton (1608–74) is considered by many to be the most important poet to write in English after Shakespeare. He wrote at a time of great transition in English society and found himself in the middle of the major political and religious upheaval. Milton’s literary career may be seen in three phases: the first phase concerns his short poems, which was followed by his prose compositions; the third and final stage of his career saw the composition of three of his major poems. The early sonnets of Milton show his consummate control over his medium as well as a dexterous handling of the subject. One of his most famous sonnets is titled ‘On his Blindness’:

When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide ‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’ I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best: his state Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er land and ocean without rest; They also serve who only stand and wait.’

The theme of religious orientation occupied Milton and influenced most of his writings even in his later phases. In the first phase itself, he wrote Comus (1634) and Arcades (1633), two masques that showed his versatility. In the same decade Milton wrote Lycidas (1637), which combined the pastoral and the elegiac to great effect. During his early phase, Milton also wrote two companion pieces called L’Allegro and Il Penseroso which showcased his ability to organise sustained rhetoric without a dip in interest. The second phase of Milton’s career saw the production of an important prose work like Areopagitica (1644)—work that showed Milton at his polemical best where his quiet yet convincing reasoning placed his thesis in its context. Freedom of speech constitutes one of the major themes of the essay and it was one that saw him writing other prose pamphlets during this period as well. Some of his other prose works are Of Reformation (1641), Apology for Smectymnuus (1642), The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), A Treatise of Civil Power (1659), and A Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660). Milton’s blindness was not a deterrent in the composition of his greatest work, Paradise Lost (1667). Before embarking on his great poem, Milton had contemplated on various ‘grand’ subjects, including that of King Arthur, but eventually settled on the man’s fall and expulsion from paradise. Paradise Lost is a religious as well as a political poem and engages serious philosophical issues of the time. The fact that he was writing at a time of a significant political transition gave the poem an interesting contemporary colour. But the poem stands on its own, in spite, or may be because of the topical significance the theme carries. Paradise Lost is considered to be one of the greatest epics in the English language. It is known for its grand style and controlled poise. The poem consists of twelve books and primarily concerns the issues of transgression and rebellion, with both Satan and man going against God. The critical reception of the poem has encompassed diverse opinions, with some seeing Milton’s thesis being amply reflected in it, while others considering the representation of Satan to be more powerful than that of man. In this last phase, two other important works of Milton were published—Paradise Regained (1671) and Samson Agonistes (1671). The sequel to Paradise Lost i.e. Paradise Regained deals with the figure of Christ, who is envisaged as a ‘second Adam’ and the major source of the poem is Christ’s resistance to temptation, especially as depicted in the Gospel according to St. Luke. Samson Agonistes is a poetic drama that

records the loss of Samson’s strength through the guile of Delilah and the subsequent overthrow of the Philistines. As a poem of faith, Samson Agonistes is a poignant reworking of a familiar biblical tale.

Women’s Writing in the Seventeenth Century The condition of women in the seventeenth century was hardly different from that of the Elizabethan age with the patriarchal mode being the dominant operative social structure. In John Donne’s poetry, for instance, the rhetoric of love is also the language of male authority and his proclamation that “She’s all States/And all Princes I” in ‘The Sunne Rising’ extends the patriarchal hold through the metaphor of governance—and this was an attitude that was characteristically the primary one in the domestic sphere as well. The idea of women’s virginity being the basic condition of virtue— before it was registered in Richardson’s Pamela (1740) in the eighteenth century—was well in circulation in the literary discourses of the time. Ben Jonson’s ‘Come, My Celia’ (1606) or Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ articulated the necessity of submission for the woman, and even though it was designed as an exemplification of the carpe diem theme, the patriarchal strategy is undeniable. But there was one difference between the way the images of women were circulated in the Elizabethan age and the seventeenth century, and the difference was that at this point of time some women started working towards the development of poetics that could address the issues of women’s identity. Aphra Behn is the most striking figure in the realm of letters, but she was not the only one. Narratives and verses started appearing from the pen of women writers, and while in the dominant canonical structure allocated to male discourses the privileges of a patriarchal attitude were adequately represented, women writers interrogated and subsumed the ideological formations at work in contemporary society. It has been rightly suggested that “female poets both participated in and diverged from the literary conventions and genres established by their male contemporaries” (Gilbert and Gubar 1996: 79). Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was the most enterprising of the women writers of the seventeenth century. She was also perhaps England’s first woman writer to make writing her profession. Unlike other women writers of her time, Behn did not belong to the aristocratic class, and the fact that she was a

widow in need of money was an important factor influencing her literary career. She spent her early years in the West Indies and is said to have been involved in a slave rebellion but accounts of her early experience have not been adequately authenticated. She was, in many ways, a maverick figure. When Behn came back to England in 1664 she got married, but was widowed a year later and by 1666 she was already in the intelligence service of Charles II. The career as a ‘spy,’ for Aphra Behn, however, wasn’t a pleasant one as it hardly paid enough and hence was compelled by penury to take up the profession of writing. Her first play, The Forced Marriage (1670), saw the start of a successful career as a dramatist. Although The Rover (1677, 1681) was her most successful play, she wrote other dramas, fourteen in all, of considerable merit. Dealing with the adventures of a small party of English Cavaliers in Madrid and Naples during the years of Charles II’s eventual exile (during the Commonwealth period), The Rover was written in two parts. In her other plays, the contemporary tradition of comedy of manners is reflected quite well and in comic orientation they seem to be similar to the designs evident in Wycherley and Congreve. In her poems, which suggest an eroticism seemingly shocking for her age, she displays an honesty in articulating the politics of desire. Here’s a poem by Behn:

On her Loving Two Equally I How strong does his passion flow, Divided equally twixt two Damon had ne’er subdued my heart Had not Alexis took his part; Nor could Alexis powerful prove,

II When my Alexis present is, Then I for Damon sigh and mourn; But when Alexis I do miss, Damon gains nothing but my scorn. But if it chance they both are by, For both alike I languish, sigh, and die.

III Cure then, thou mighty wingéd god, This restless fever in my blood; One golden-pointed dart take back: But which, O Cupid, wilt thou take? If Damon’s, all my hopes are crossed; Or that of my Alexis, I am lost.

Behn’s career as a dramatist did not maintain an upwards trajectory all the time, and as she suffered at the theatre, she sought out the realm of fiction as the next creative platform for exploration. Her reputation today may rest primarily on her novel Oroonoko (1688), but her other fictions are now being recovered as part of the ecriture feminine that show interesting aspects of the politics influencing contemporary literary practice. Her other fictions include Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–86), The Fair Jilt (1688), and Agnes de Castro (1688). Oroonoko is a romance, a travel narrative, a semi-autobiography, and a partial biography. Aspects of the novel have been seen as indications of the condition of feminist experience, but the genre of the novel is not so easy to pin down. The novel is wonderfully textured as a response to the issues of race, cultural variation, and individuality. To see it merely as a narrative of femininity would not be fair, as its character extends beyond the limits of a feminist text. While the polemics located by critics today in the text may have been distant from the contemporary readers, it is indeed a reminder about the possibilities of the novel. Later feminist critics have celebrated Behn’s sense of wit and conscious appropriation of gender issues in writing, in spite of the fact that the debate about her place in the canon is still on. The practice of women engaged in creative writing in the seventeenth century, however, began before Aphra Behn started her career. Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Katherine Philips (1632–1664) preceded Behn. Cavendish was considered to be only a minor writer in her lifetime even though her literary output was considerable. Her verse is an interesting mix of Metaphysical tendencies and abstractions while critics have seen in her poetry something that articulates the ‘feminine’ experience, even though the configurations of such an experience are not strictly determined. Poems and Fancies (1653) and Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancie’s Pencil (1656) are two of her verse books while Female Orations is a commentary on issues relating to women’s identity. Cavendish was caricatured in her own time for her outlandish personality and for her sudden departures in her writing, and it was only in the twentieth century that the writer in her was accorded more respectability. In her extremely short life and literary career, Katherine Philips (1632–1664) etched a name for herself among her contemporaries. Her writings concern different subjects including love, marriage, and the difficulty of motherhood. Unlike Cavendish and Behn, Katherine Philips

wrote of other women—a suggestion that she was contemplating of the experience of friendship with women—and while it indicates the possibilities of unions other than the man-woman relationship, it also emerges as an important social marker. Her readership, however, extended beyond the immediate bounds of a female audience and the fact that admirers of her writing included John Dryden and Abraham Cowley is a guide to appreciating her stature in the contemporary world of letters. Katherine Philips was also an accomplished translator and she rendered into English from French plays by Corneille. Although not much of her poetry was published in her lifetime, appearance of the verses later in print won applause from her peers in the seventeenth century. The feelings of community, of oneness, and of unrestricted togetherness are themes of many of her poems, of which the following is a representative example:

To My Excellent Lucasia, On Our Friendship I did not live until this time Crowned my felicity, When I could say without a crime, I am not thine, but thee. This carcass breathed, and walked, and slept, So that the world believed There was a soul the motions kept; But they were all deceived. For as a watch by art is wound To motion, such was mine: But never had Orinda found A soul till she found thine; Which now inspires, cures, and supplies, And guides my darkened breast: For thou art all that I can prize, My joy, my life, my rest. No bridegroom’s nor crown-conqueror’s mirth To mine compared be: They have put pieces of the earth, I’ve all the world in thee. Then let our flames still light and shine, And no false fear control, As innocent as our design, Immortal as our soul.

A metaphysical suggestiveness informs the strategy through which Philips orients her relationship here. A more intense examination of gender relations constitutes the subject of the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731). In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), Astell sought to negotiate the possibilities for women outside marriage in the context of the contemporary situation. Pursuing her argument for a space for women’s lives, especially with regard to religious contemplation, she writes: “For since God has given women as well as men intelligent souls, why should they be forbidden to improve them? Since He has not denied us the faculty of thinking, why should we not (at least in gratitude to Him) employ our thoughts on Himself their noblest object, and not unworthily bestow them on trifles and gaieties and secular affairs? Believing the soul was created for the contemplation of truth as well as for the fruition of good, is it not as cruel and unjust to exclude women, from the knowledge of the one as from the enjoyment of the other?” (Astell, in Gilbert and Gubar 1996: 191) Astell’s argument was intellectually posited to counter the attributed sensuousness of Restoration women, and as she focused on the issue of space for women in the philosophical and religious spheres, it was remarkably novel in the context of the thrust of the mainstream Restoration comedy. The work of another Restoration woman writer, Anne Killigrew (1660–1685), was scanty but nevertheless full of promise. John Dryden composed his ‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew’ (1686) as a tribute to the potential of Killigrew, which is evident in the little verse that she wrote before her death (from small pox) at 25. The issue of authorship, for instance, is one that occupied her in most of her poems. In ‘Upon the Saying That My Verses Were Made by Another’ she writes: ‘The envious age, only to me alone,

Will not allow what I do write, my own; But let them rage, and ’gainst a maid conspire, So deathless numbers from my tuneful lyre Doth ever flow…”

The tradition established by the women writers in the seventeenth century was continued and consolidated by others like Anne Finch (1661–1720), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), Eliza Haywood (1693–1756), Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797).

Restoration Court Culture The Restoration of monarchy in 1660 was an important index to social and cultural change and of all the ‘periods’ in English history, the ‘Restoration’ is the only one where a change in the political administration marked the beginning of a distinctive transformation in other spheres of life as well. The difference between the Restoration age and a later one like the Romantic, for instance, is that while 1798 (because of the publication of the Lyrical Ballads) is taken as a starting point of a new attitude, tendencies that figured the spirit of the Romantic ideal were present in years pre-dating the so-called starting point. The year 1798, in the case of English Romanticism, is convenient for historical structuring, for the process of periodisation, but it is not a point of reference to which everyone is agreed upon. Some scholars consider poets like Thomas Gray and those belonging to the Graveyard School of Poetry to be Romantic in their orientation and some consider the French Revolution to be the major inspiration for the Romantic Movement in England. Such alternative views, however, are not associated with the Restoration period. The Restoration was thus not just a political change but also a signal of cultural and social transformations. With Charles II assuming the throne in 1660, there was a relaxation of many of the curtailments imposed during the Cromwellian regime. With Charles II regaining the seat of power, the old system of hierarchisation was re-imposed and in society too the relations were controlled by the conditions of authority and rank. A pleasure-loving monarch made it possible for those around him to pursue material interests more vigorously than in the previous reign. The manners of the court were thus determined by the example set by the king and by the attitude fostered through elitism. The aristocratic class directed matters in the court by working out a system of distributing both offices and favours where privileges were granted rather than being accorded on merit. The reestablishment of the monarchical order meant that the decision-making process reverted back to the court; in a way this was against the

democratising mechanism that the Commonwealth had sought to introduce. Even the Glorious Revolution was not very far off, but then it was hardly anticipated in the early years of the Restoration period. Another aspect of the centralising of power and privilege in the court meant that London became the focus of attention for all important matters in the political and the cultural spheres. Not only did the image of the English countryside suffer considerably in the hands of the Restoration dramatists but the fast pace of city life was just the opposite of the slow movement in the villages. The influence of the court impacted the attitudes of the men and women in the city. The urban lifestyle was the preferred one, with sophistication and refinement closely associated with the cultural life of the city which was seen as a contrast to provincial backwardness. Such a construct was pervasive but the image did not actually correspond to the hard facts of reality. The impression of sophistication was integrated to some kind of moral laxity, which was induced by two important factors—the emphasis on rationalism, and the reaction to Puritan regimentation. In fact, the invitation to Charles II was organised as a counter measure against the excessive control exercised by Puritanism. The writings of the period, especially the comedies and the satirical poems, are contextualised as responses to the new fashions suggested by Restoration court culture. At the same time, the people associated with the court and its cultural orientation constituted a minority both within the city and in terms of the national population.

SCIENTIFIC RATIONALISM AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT The Intellectual Context of the Scientific Revolution The interest in the functioning of nature and the world around man was not peculiar to the Renaissance. In the ancient world, the work and the ideas of the Greeks set an example of the interest in knowledge. The medieval European mind was similarly preoccupied with an attempt to understand, appreciate, and explain the world surrounding man. The difference between the medieval and the Renaissance minds lay in the fact that the curiousminded were relatively fewer during the Middle Ages when clerical doctrine and a faith-based lifestyle made intellectual movement beyond the structured pattern difficult. Even then, however, there were artists and sculptors in the medieval world who sought to appropriate the natural circumstances as faithfully as possible. Not only the human figure and the anatomy, but the plants and animals also received attention. During the Renaissance, the artists exploited light as a mode of engaging the linear perspective. Light became a major area of study and it moved beyond the preoccupations of the painter; the study of optics at this time contributed to the invention of the reading glasses. The fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries saw remarkable achievements in the scientific field. The preoccupation of the human mind regarding the exploration of the unknown was rooted in a strange combination of Christian Neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism. The organisation of the universe, argued Thomas Aquinas, was done in such a way that any reason-based investigation regarding its function and character would inevitably lead to the conclusion arrived at through faith—that in God lay the final answers to all human questions. The argument that reason could also substantiate faith was thus one of the spurs that egged on the scientific enterprise. One inevitable consequence of such an argument was that in a contest between the positions of enquiry and faith, the latter was granted precedence. The idea of reconciliation of theology and rational enquiry, however, couldn’t be sustained for long. Nominalist theologians began to articulate a position that went against the thesis of Aquinas which argued that the idea of God’s supremacy and the possibilities of reading nature to suit

that agenda were not credible. Argumentation within a more materialist framework was thus facilitated by the test provided by nominalism. While humanists were more concerned with the dissemination of knowledge, their insistence on the Neo-Platonist philosophy of perfection was one of the precursors of the scientific breakthroughs. The idealism of the Neo-Platonic position favoured the cultivation of perfection in all human enquiries—a feature that is reflected in the work of scientific thinkers like Copernicus and Kepler. The Greek thinker Archimedes’ works, which were published in 1543, provided a great thrust to the Renaissance thinkers and created a platform for scientific enquiry. The popularity of his ideas was among the major features that contributed to an interest in mechanism during the sixteenth century. The Renaissance integration of art and engineering, best epitomised in the works of Leonardo da Vinci, engendered tremendous possibilities for science. Da Vinci was not the only pursuer of knowledge through a combined apparatus of aesthetics and science, though the most remarkable exponent. Most importantly the spread of alchemy and astronomy among the laity contributed to an atmosphere of amateurish intellectualism, which eventually led to sustained efforts in these fields. The revolution in scientific thought and experiment that took place in Europe was not confined to the country of its origin alone. Neither did its impact manifest itself in terms of a radical upheaval. With the dissemination of knowledge beyond the frontiers of the Church hurried on by the invention of printing, the intellectual platform for scientific investigations that followed was created.

The Scientific Revolution in Europe The origins of the scientific revolution are usually traced to the Copernicus’ questioning of the Ptolemaic model of the universe. The model provided by Ptolemy, which was working pretty well till the late Middle Ages, raised some problems for an ecclesiastic like Copernicus who was one of the researchers employed by the Catholic Church to investigate the incompatibility of the saints’ days with the position of the stars. Copernicus’ studies in astronomy soon made him realise that the Ptolemaic model couldn’t be correct. The much simpler heliocentric system offered the explanation he was looking for; it is also worth remembering that this was the

time when the influence of Neo-Platonism was immense—the theory of ‘Ockham’s Razor’ (the view that when two ideas seem to fit the facts under observation, the one having the lesser assumptions is to be taken) being the best example of this position favouring simplicity. Copernicus believed that he was now in command over an explanation that justified the supremacy of God and such conservatism and allegiance to the Church made him delay the publication of his findings. His book On the Revolution of the Spheres was only published the day he died in 1543. The fillip given to astronomical studies was continued by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, two extremely gifted astronomers of the time. Tycho set up a laboratory on a small island and observed the sky for twenty painstaking years. He mapped the night sky with uncanny accuracy, considering the fact that he was working without a telescope. By the time of his death in 1601, Tycho had assimilated the best collection of astronomical data in Europe. Tycho, however, didn’t submit to the Copernican theory and offered his own, which is known as the Tychonic system. According to him, the planets revolved round the sun and the entire system then went round the stationary earth. This model was extremely popular during his time and proved conducive to the Church’s view about earth’s centrality. One of Tycho’s assistants, Johannes Kepler found in the Copernican model a greater degree of credibility and went on to provide the first physical explanation to justify the circumstance of the earth in revolution. Kepler was a firm believer in the perfection of mathematics and he used the enormously rich resource base left by Tycho to re-examine the Copernican model. He replaced the idea of a circular orbit with that of an elliptical one. His second revision of Copernicus’ position holds that there is an unalterable relation between the velocity of the planet and the distance from the sun. While his view regarding the magnetic attraction between the planets and the sun was not accepted by his contemporaries, it was important in anticipating the law of gravitation formulated by Newton. The base provided by Copernicus, Tycho, and Kepler found in Galileo, a successor, who built upon their contributions to astronomy. It has been rightly said that “Galileo transformed Copernicanism from a theory about astronomy into a larger debate about the role of natural philosophy in revealing the true nature of the world” (Coffin et al. 2002: 634). Galileo was the most famous natural philosopher of his time and perhaps also the most controversial. Unlike Kepler who had worked through the mathematical

paradigm, Galileo’s discoveries were brought by the telescope. He used the telescope for sighting the most extraordinary astronomical phenomena that changed his views about the celestial world. He recorded the existence of sunspots on the sun, the craters on the moon, and the orbiting satellites round Jupiter. These findings appeared in his The Starry Messenger (1610) and brought him instant fame and recognition. It also got him the patronage of the Medicis, the powerful Florentine rulers, and gave him the opportunity to pursue his investigations further. Galileo’s establishment of the heliocentric model’s truth through his telescopic findings, however, were a great threat to the Church’s position on the subject. It wasn’t surprising therefore that critics of the Copernican theory started mounting an attack on Galileo. In 1632, Galileo published A Dialogue Between the Two Great World Systems where he argued on behalf of Copernicanism through the dialogue form with a veiled character called ‘Simplicio’ representing the Pope against it. The book’s success shook the clerical establishment. An ageing Galileo was compelled to recant his views and prohibited from further discussion of the subject. Galileo, in spite of the prohibition, continued to work, the result of which was evident in The Two Sciences (1638)—a book smuggled out of Italy and brought out in Protestant Holland. The contribution of Galileo to the development of scientific thought can be seen in two significant respects: firstly, he brought together mathematics and experiment to engender a new physics. This combination was applied to the study of physical behaviour of objects. Secondly, Galileo too worked under the assumption that Copernicus began his intellectual engagement with the movement of the spheres, i.e., in order to arrive at the thesis that a mathematically explicable world, where heliocentrism was a fact, would fit into the orthodox view of the Church enhancing God’s supremacy. Galileo’s Inquisition made such a negotiation difficult to sustain. Galileo’s contribution was important, for he initiated the foundation of the modern scientific method that combined observation and experiment. His work on the nature of falling bodies was another major step forward in physical science as his challenge to the Aristotelian position helped sunder the classical legacy that had bound scientific exploration. The work of Newton, in England, was one of the major achievements in the scientific world. His law of gravitation (which presented the view that every planet possesses a gravitational force whose power is dependent upon its mass and position in the universe) along with his law of inertia (the view that

objects in movement keep moving in the same direction unless resisted by an external force) combined to explain the motions and positions of all celestial bodies. The applicability of the gravitational rule to domains outside the earth suggested the mathematical foundation of physics; Newton’s work in physics was published in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), a major landmark in scientific development. Isaac Newton had a great influence on scientific experiment and philosophy. His theories of universal gravitation and motion explain how objects move on Earth as well as extraterrestrially. Newton also established the discipline of optics. His invention of calculus, discovery of the binomial theorem, and the mathematical grounding of natural philosophy channelised contemporary scientific thought. His ideas are presented in many published texts of which Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), and Opticks (1704) are the most famous. Newton explained the functioning of the physical world in mathematical terms, a mode that was conducive to the rationalistic attitude. His laws of motion and gravitation were used to transform physics to a scientific discipline with a mathematical foundation. Newton’s work permanently altered the development of the physical sciences. Astronomy and physics, however, weren’t the only disciplines affected by a new upsurge of thought and discovery. Mathematics, which had served as the foundation for the scientific engagement of Kepler and Galileo, found in the work of John Napier, a Scottish mathematician, another frontier. Napier’s study of imaginary roots helped him to invent the logarithm principle, the results of which were published in 1614. Napier was also responsible for developing the modern decimal notation. Although Napier’s work was recognised as path-breaking, it was left to Henry Briggs, another English mathematician, to change the base of the logarithm principle to 10. Briggs, who also devised the method of long division, published his Logarithmic Arithmetic in 1624. René Descartes, Newton, and Gottfried Leibniz were all instrumental in doing pioneering work in the field of mathematics. Descartes developed analytical or coordinate geometry (also called Cartesian geometry). The Cartesian method is used for translating the geometric problems to algebraic form, thus enabling the application of the latter to solve it. Newton’s contribution to the field of mathematics can be seen in his discovery of the binomial theorem (1676) and calculus. He combined his mathematical discoveries with his work on physics and mechanics to give

scientific experiment a wholly new direction. Leibniz was a philosopher and a mathematician who showed great panache in first developing the calculating machine that could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and find square roots and then working towards the discovery of calculus. Although the origin of calculus has been a hugely debated issue with Newton and Leibniz both finding advocates, the fact of its invention was more important than finalising its inventor’s name. The study of magnetism and electricity saw new light when William Gilbert’s De magnete was published in 1600. Gilbert discovered magnetism and did interesting work on Earth’s magnetic field. His book is generally considered to be the first major scientific work in England. Along with the developments in astronomy, physics, and mathematics the sophistication in scientific investigation brought about by the invention of new instruments stimulated research. Newton developed the reflecting telescope in 1668 while Evangelista Torricelli invented the mercury barometer in 1645, which was followed by advancements made in an associated field by Gabriel Fahrenheit who found the mercury thermometer. Anders Celsius used a different scale to develop a variant of the thermometer. The year 1656 saw the first pendulum clock being made by Christian Hugyens, a development that owed to the pioneering work of Galileo in analysing the pendulum. It is indeed remarkable that almost all of these pathbreaking developments in physical sciences and instrumentation were achieved within the span of less than two centuries. The progress in the physical sciences was paralleled by pioneering work in chemistry and other sciences. Robert Boyle was the first major European scientist who gave chemistry its modern frame and lifted it from the ambit of alchemy. He attacked the alchemists’ view of the four elements by suggesting that air wasn’t a basic element as it was composed of many gases in his book The Sceptical Chemist (1661). He established Boyle’s law—the concept that for a fixed mass of gas at invariable temperature the volume and pressure are related in an inverse proportion—which is one of the fundamental principles of modern chemistry. Boyle brought about a change in the way people responded to chemical structures. Significantly, he was one of the founder members of the Royal Society. Robert Hooke, another founder of the Royal Society, did pioneering work in instrumentation. His Micrographia (1665) explained the complex structure of the membrane-bounded units of animal and plant life. Boyle’s work in chemistry was further developed by another

Briton, Joseph Priestley, who is considered to be the most remarkable English-speaking experimental chemist of the eighteenth century. He discovered many gases, including oxygen and his findings were described in his writings, the most notable of which was Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air and other Branches of Natural Philosophy (1790). Priestley’s experiments were supplemented by the incredible work of the Frenchman Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, who started the Chemical Revolution. His method of naming chemical compounds has been followed ever since; Elementary Treatise on Chemistry (1789) is his major work. The fascination for the human body became, during the Renaissance, a major interest area. The study of medicine in the sixteenth century, found a new direction with Swiss doctor Paracelsus. His views on medicine were not only popular but also effective. For instance, he was the pioneer of the research on occupational diseases and also among the very few to recognise mental health as a matter of medicine and not witchcraft. It was in the sixteenth century that Andreas Vesalius, the founder of modern anatomy, began his research on the human body. His work The Seven Books on the Structure of the Human Body (1543) had descriptions and woodcuts of unprecedented clarity and accuracy. Vesalius’s work was astonishingly superior to the previous research in the field. In the early seventeenth century, William Harvey founded modern physiology by discovering the blood circulation mechanism. The slim volume On the Motions of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1628) published the findings of Harvey that had been the result of his research over the last fifteen years. One of the great medical classics of all time, Harvey’s book showed that the heart valves, arteries, and veins are one-way, and recorded a host of other details that led him to conclude that blood circulation was inevitable. In the seventeenth century itself, the English physiologist Richard Lower made the first successful blood transfusion which was carried out as an experiment under the aegis of the Royal Society. The contribution of Thomas Syndenham, a master clinician who changed the methods of treating disease for the better, was another high point in the history of medicine in the seventeenth century. Syndenham was an epidemiologist who suggested the use of quinine in malaria, opium for relieving pain, and iron for treating anaemia. Another important area that aided medicine research was the discovery of bacteria in the seventeenth century by Antony van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch microscopist, who also discovered blood capillaries,

red blood cells, protozoa, and rotifers.

Enlightenment Ideas and Philosophy A mechanical ordering of social and political life is usually seen as one of the characteristic thrusts of the Neo-Classical period, a condition that owed a lot to the climate of intellectual opinion following the developments in science. This was the Age of Reason and it became both fashionable and logical to argue that the universe was a well-ordered machine. The ideas behind this new philosophy were drawn not only from the developments in the scientific world but also from those advocated by thinkers like Descartes and Francis Bacon. Bacon believed that a blind adherence to the inherited past was a major deterrent in the path of new knowledge. The reliance on ancient authorities, unless backed by reason, could only hamper proper enquiry. Bacon advocated a direct encounter with nature and not through the outdated manuals that professed the authority of the ancients. He suggested the use of the ‘inductive’ method which combined evidence from a large base of particular observations to arrive at general conclusions. He argued that people required practical knowledge of the natural world to understand it better. Bacon was the first philosopher to advocate the combined efforts of research workers working in different fields. His Novum Organum (1620) contains his views on scientific method. René Descartes found the Baconian ideas regarding the utilitarianism of knowledge and the discarding of the authority of the ancients on blind faith acceptable but his way to understanding was organised through a process of self-doubt and discovery. Rationality became the governing principle of the Cartesian method and knowledge was seen as the consequence of deduction. His view, which provided the logical basis to the mechanistic approach, was a great impetus to the Neo-Classical position. The Enlightenment was a European intellectual phenomenon that affected cultural and social life in the eighteenth century. One of the leading centres of Enlightenment thought was France where the climate of intellectual discourse, exchange, and engagement was the most pronounced. The French word philosophe is used as a label to describe the activities of those Frenchmen who favoured and articulated the ideas of the Enlightenment. The word philosophe, which means a free thinker, was consequently used to encompass any individual—Immanuel Kant and David Hume were the two

most famous non-French thinkers fitting into this concept of a philosopher— working towards the thesis of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. The French thinker who epitomised the Enlightenment ideals in the eighteenth century was François Marie Arouet, more famously known as Voltaire (1694–1778). He was a radical exponent of freedom and attacked all forms of domination. His enthusiasm led him to serve a term in Bastille, after which he was exiled to England. He spent three years in England and lapped up the ideals of British institutions and culture, and more significantly, he became a staunch Newtonian. He was responsible for taking Newton’s ideas to France and for providing more visibility to empiricism in Europe. The publication of his Philosophical Letters (1734) caused a furore in France as it seemed a rebuff of his own country’s philosophy and culture and an advocacy of the British. He commented on various matters relating to British social, cultural, and political life. He praised the state of British philosophy and empiricism, and Britain’s religious toleration and social harmony was one of its major advantages over the French according to Voltaire. Obviously, Voltaire’s views about British society and culture were exaggerated and too general to be the true reflection of the society at the time. But it was a major call for the revaluation of values that came to characterise Enlightenment ideals. His patronisation of the British way of life may have been a device to awaken the French from their intellectual stupor but it was impressive in that it activated the climate of serious thought in the Continent. Voltaire was an advocate of the right to intellectual opinion and a defender of freedom of speech. His attack upon religious bigotry suggests the strong rational basis that held together the ideals of Enlightenment philosophy. Voltaire was in favour of simplicity and decried the tendency to cloud matters in unnecessary jargons. He was some sort of an international celebrity and his plays and books were known outside his own country as well. Voltaire’s contribution to Enlightenment philosophy was remarkable in that he was able to fuse together many of the strands, that lay scattered across the Continent, through his writings. The work of another Enlightenment figure, Baron de Montesquieu (1689– 1755) showed the use of the empirical framework in political discourse. His Spirit of the Laws (1748) was both a sociological and a political text; it was a pathbreaking effort as it tried to assess the political institutions, traditions behind their formations, and the logic supporting such structures. He tried to

evaluate the reasons behind the variety of governments and the principles that informed them. He suggested that states could be classified in three respects: first, a republic, which was government by the people, often represented by an elite aristocracy; second, monarchy, which had a single ruler governing in accordance with a set of laws; and third, despotism, the government by a single authority without any checks and measures to correct ill-governance. According to Montesquieu, republic was the most favourable of governments whereas monarchy was honourable. Like Voltaire, Montesquieu too praised the British over the French for offering a more liberal form of government. He was also the first political theorist to propose a three-fold division of government—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial—which was incidentally a major influence upon the makers of United States constitution. The ideas of Voltaire and Montesquieu were remarkable for the climate they helped foster in eighteenth century France and also the Continent. The radical yet rationalist positions of these thinkers showed how clarity of vision and a proper conceptual apprehension of subjects could facilitate new ideas. Another French project which synonymised the idea of the Enlightenment was that of the Encyclopedia. It was the aim of the Encyclopedia to elaborate and analyse all the scientific, philosophical, technical, and cultural knowledge —undoubtedly a grand and ambitious project, but in keeping with the lofty ideals of the philosophes. The thinking behind the project lay in the possibilities envisaged for reason as the explicator of all conditions and it hoped to survey the traditions, institutions, and histories associated with the subjects reviewed. The main architect and mover of the project was Denis Diderot. The Encyclopedia ran into seventeen volumes and was published over a twenty-year period, from 1751 to 1772. Many articles were commissioned by Diderot for the Encyclopedia and the explication of the functioning of machines and scientific reasoning were emphasised. This focus on scientific reasoning was soon used to deal with other matters beyond the province of science, which included economics, slavery, government, taxation, and theology. The eighteenth century political climate in France, however, was not as liberal as the contemporary British and Diderot had to circumvent the supposedly anti-religious articles by the use of a euphemistic vocabulary. The articles of Encyclopedia caused a hue and cry during the initial years, and in 1759, permission to continue publication was denied by the French government. The popularity of the Encyclopedia however, could

not be curtailed by the prohibitions and it was consumed primarily by the elites for whom possession of the volumes symbolised a keenness for knowledge. The spreading of the ideas of Enlightenment through the mechanism of the Encyclopedia was a major cultural and intellectual development in eighteenth century Europe. It called for the cultivation of scientific rationalism and a dismantling of tradition, unless it was backed by reason. The importance given to intellectual autonomy in the Enlightenment period was perhaps most visible in the works of René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes is famous for having laid emphasis on the necessity of establishing beliefs through a rational engagement, for which he worked through the method of doubt. His work in mathematics had shown him the possibilities of analysis, something which tried to apply in his philosophic undertaking also. Descartes used the method of deduction to argue that reason required validation and any enquiry cannot rely on the edifice of uncertainty. Other philosophers who contributed to the foundations of modern philosophy include Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646– 1716), and Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Engaged in understanding the nature of the world, these philosophers arrived at different conclusions even though they all employed ‘reason’ for the purpose of enquiry.

British Enlightenment The Enlightenment wasn’t uniformly or consistently manifested in the Continent even though there were common features informing its appearance in different parts of Europe. Moreover, there is another aspect involved in considering such an inter-cultural phenomenon as the Enlightenment was in blocks or rather in terms of territorial tendencies. Nevertheless, the lack of uniformity granted to the whole phenomenon a condition that made its operations in different areas of Europe interesting and varied. In England, the Enlightenment was a major cultural and intellectual development, which was epitomised by Isaac Newton. John Locke, on the other hand, placed man’s intellectual capacities at the centre of a universe which was only beginning to be the part of scientific investigation. The combination of science and rational outlook contributed to the creation of an unprecedented belief in the importance of reason. With science providing the impetus for bold theories,

many conservative opinions were gradually being dispelled. During the Enlightenment period, the interest in reason was also manifested in the emergence of works that sought to present visions about the future, the most striking example of which was Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733), and the anonymously published The Reign of George VI, 1900–1925 (1763). Enlightenment in England was, thus, manifested through the preoccupation with the idea of progress, whether in theological studies, physics, mathematics, science fiction, or mainstream literature like poetry, drama, and prose. In the works of thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft and David Hartley, there was a renewed emphasis on the need to realise the set goals which was conditioned by an unprecedented optimism. Edward Gibbon’s thesis in his historical works, for instance, was designed to suggest the importance of Enlightenment philosophy in building an apparatus through which to approach the past. In economics, on the other hand, writers like David Hume insisted on the significance of proportion in trade, an attribute that is closely related to the ideals of the Enlightenment circulating in eighteenth century England. Hume’s Of the Balance of Trade (1741) is a classic case showing the influence of contemporary intellectual climate on economic thought. It was, however, Adam Smith who framed the economic impulse by associating man’s quest for wealth within the context of theoretical principles that relied on the logic of certainty. Man’s economic conduct was explained as a natural condition of human response, one that was seen more for its necessity than for the complexities that came to be associated with the phenomenon later. John Locke was instrumental in visualising the economic aspect of man’s life in the context of the ‘laws of nature.’ The Lockean emphasis on the naturalness in the economic sphere was further engaged, although not in exactly similar terms, by Adam Smith in his Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations (1776). The celebration of the pursuit of wealth in Smith’s formulation was an interesting reminder of the potential of Enlightenment philosophy and the ways in which it was appropriated in different fields. Not all thinkers of the time, however, subscribed to the Smithian ethic of economic organisation in the manner he presented it, and the best counter to it was evident in A New View of Society (1813) by Robert Owen. While Owen also agreed with the idea of rationalism being the ground upon which social progress could be conceived, he was more in favour of education’s contribution to the development of a social programme than mere

pursuit of wealth. The Royal Society was the first of the many ‘scientific’ institutions that sought to propagate and promote the Enlightenment spirit in England. The Lunar Society of Birmingham (1765), The Linnean Society of London (1788), and the Royal Institution (1799) in England were paralleled by The Royal Society of Edinburgh (1783) and The Royal Irish Academy (1785) in other parts of the British Isles. It is imperative to recognise the contribution of these agencies in furthering the scientific interest in a way that wasn’t within individual schemes. The idea of ‘British Enlightenment,’ however, cannot be seen in isolation. The Enlightenment was essentially a European phenomenon with the intellectual centres being spread across the Continent and also covering a very wide time-scale that began with the Scientific Revolution and continued till the growth of industries in the nineteenth century. To see its features, therefore, as a development that would be available for suspended and isolated delineation would be highly unfair to the influences, both direct and indirect, that shaped it. The Enlightenment was simultaneously a cultural, scientific, social, literary, and intellectual development. It embraced both high scientific theories and common life. In this regard, however, we need to acknowledge the complex nature of its working process, at least in the light of the fact that its manifestation and orientation wasn’t always uniformly processed.

Major Themes of the Enlightenment Although the Enlightenment ideas emanated from France, its impact went beyond its territory to different parts of Europe. Voltaire and Montesquieu were popular in Switzerland, Russia, and Germany and the advocacy of the British way as a model sought to suggest both the possibility and practicality of perfection. In Britain Edward Gibbon, David Hume, and Adam Smith argued for a rationalist response to reality. The writings of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin showed how Enlightenment ideas were moving beyond Europe to America. Thus, across different European cultures, there was an attempt to promote the themes of the Enlightenment—human dignity, freedom, equality, and religious forbearance. The Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) wrote a treatise called On Crimes and Punishment

(1764) which focused on some of the major Enlightenment themes such as the use of power, reason, and humanitarianism, His proposals for legal reform was a step forward in the history of jurisprudence. Beccaria advocated a sensitive handling of crime and criminals and his call for leniency was in line with the characteristic ideals of the Enlightenment such as respect for human dignity and individual rights. The horrific torture methods employed in disciplining criminals in eighteenth century Europe were commonplace and Beccaria’s work drew attention to the inhuman nature of such procedures; in fact his work was influential in radically transforming prisoners’ conditions for the better in many European states. Another theme of the Enlightenment was that of tolerance in religious matters. It was not that the Enlightenment thinkers were against the Church but they considered faith, abstinence from it, or agnosticism the issue of individual choice and reason, and they felt that it was improper to interfere in such matters. Many of them were followers of Deism. Enlightenment philosophy also addressed issues of freedom, taxation, economics, and state policy and sought to offer a humanitarian aspect to governance. The consolidation of mercantilism in the eighteenth century in the hands of the few was seen as being detrimental to fruitful production and economic growth. Adam Smith (1723–90), the proponent of laissez faire, (the call for minimum of governmental control in economic policy) worked towards the granting of complete economic freedom for national development. His Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations (1776) advocated the pursuance of individual interests in an economic environment where there would be no competition from state supported companies. Smith saw in the idea of individual liberty the perfect condition for the growth of capital, and his attack on state-run monopolies emphasised the need for a level-playing field that offered equal opportunity to all players. Apart from economics, the issues of colonialism and slavery formed two of the most volatile subjects where the Enlightenment thinkers held drastic views. The ‘new’ world of the colonies was seen by many as the pristine idealised state of human optimism as against the corrupt European states. The manner in which colonialism became a means of exploitation for the colonialists formed a major debating point for the Enlightenment intellectuals. Abbé Guillaume Thomas François Raynal (1713–96) was a cleric whose Philosophical and Political History of European Establishments

and Commerce in the Two Indies (1770) was a monumental text covering life, culture, and society in the colonised countries, and that interrogated the significance of the colonialist enterprise itself. While he believed in the importance of scientific and technical innovation, he also realised that the pre-technological colonial state offered the possibility for ‘natural’ development. Raynal and other Enlightenment thinkers criticised the brutal use of power by the colonisers for their own profit. Views about slavery among the Enlightenment weren’t unified in that while a metaphorical argument in support of individual freedom for everybody was agreed upon, open condemnation of slavery wasn’t as vociferously articulated.

Enlightenment Radicalism and the State of Women All Enlightenment discourse was not designed to suggest a complete unification of thought and philosophy, and it is this condition that facilitated the radicalism that characterises many of its thinkers. The French philosophes were radicals in proposing an upheaval in society through a complete reorientation of key ideas. The philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712– 78) is cited as an example of Enlightenment thought even though he had major disagreements with his fellow philosophes. Rousseau was the most idealistic of all Enlightenment thinkers. His famous political discourse, The Social Contract, studied the functions of government and dealt with the question of social positioning. Inequality in society was brought about by the lopsided holding of property by the rich which made governments favour only those who were privileged. Rousseau’s book was a call for the unshackling of the governmental chains that bound man and hampered growth. Authentic authority, Rousseau believed, was vested in the people alone. Rousseau’s idea of the social contract envisaged a society where citizens formed a body bound by obligations towards one another; this mutuality that brought people together appeared to many to be a brilliant model of integration, especially because it eschewed coercion and favoured equality. The development of such a community would theoretically represent the will of the people. There were two opposite responses to the ideas of Rousseau—his overwhelming of the private interests in favour of the social contract was seen by his critics as an example of authoritarianism; the other interpretation read his views as an evidence of idealism. The Social

Contract wasn’t properly appreciated by all its readers in his time; nevertheless the book’s ideas were inspirationally used during the French Revolution. Rousseau, however, was equally famous for his novels and other moralistic writings. His Emile (1762) argued for a complete freeing of the mind to the natural impulse. He believed that the natural path was the best way to approach life and reason wasn’t always the most appropriate guide for man (a view that went against the views of the other French philosophes). Rousseau was embroiled in controversy because he advocated different modes of education for men and women. He argued that the education of women ought to be related to men’s training as women had a greater social function as wives and mothers. He considered ‘dependence’ to be a natural attribute of women. Rousseau’s polemical views on gender suggest the different connotations that the idea of nature underwent as Enlightenment philosophy progressed in the eighteenth century. Another popular but extremely patriarchal novel by Rousseau was Julie which had a female protagonist who marries the man of her father’s choice even though she loved another. She is presented as the epitome of ‘feminine’ virtues and her sacrifice at the end only enhances her womanhood. It is apparent that Rousseau’s views on gender appear to be lopsided and the contradictory positions within the Enlightenment fraternity show how contentious an issue it was even then. One opinion was that education patterns could not be the same for all because it involved the condition of receptivity. This school believed that sexual difference necessitated different educational programmes for boys and girls. But there were also some others like Diderot and Condorcet who argued that proper progress was impossible without the active participation of women. The most celebrated view regarding gender in the Enlightenment period came from Mary Wollstonecraft who held that women were in no way inferior to men. She argued that women possessed the same capacity for work and reasoning as men and that there is no logic in the inequality between the sexes. Wollstonecraft was the first thinker of the eighteenth century to apply the ideas of the Enlightenment to explain the condition of women. What Montesquieu did to the government, Wollstonecraft did to the domestic sphere—she questioned the disparity of the marriage law and suggested that husbands were practitioners of despotism as married women that were not given property rights. Culture played a big role in conditioning women that

made their ‘weakness’ appear natural. The training of women was responsible for such a condition as marriage was seen as one of the primary objectives in life for a girl. This culture of domestication was a device that further weakened women. Education, for Wollstonecraft, meant the promotion of emancipation and independence. Like many of her contemporary Enlightenment intellectuals, Wollstonecraft too believed in the idea of a proper division of labour for the development of society. The imperatives of Enlightenment philosophy found in the views of Rousseau and Wollstonecraft two differing manifestations but nevertheless it suggests the fascination for nature and reason with a varied emphasis. Gender inequality was one issue where the radicalism of Mary Wollstonecraft seemed to inaugurate a new paradigm for future studies.

The Basic Features of the Enlightenment In its manifested form, the Enlightenment was an eighteenth century condition that spanned the entire century. The ideas of the Enlightenment were not accepted and followed by all the intellectuals of the time. Vico, for instance, did not support it while Jean Jacques Rousseau was a partial advocate of the phenomenon. The manner in which the Enlightenment emerged as an intellectual development and attitude was not uniform at all places. In some, such as France, it was apparent in a more direct form while it was a continuation of the Renaissance quest for understanding nature and a consequence of the Scientific Revolution at others. In spite of such variations in emphasis and orientation, the Enlightenment did have a set of features which were working in the intellectual circles in the eighteenth century. The following characteristics of the Enlightenment are the most representative of the phenomenon. First, there was a great sense of self assurance in the force of human reason. It was partly derived from and based upon the remarkable developments that led to the Scientific Revolution. Newton’s example became the model of Enlightenment possibilities even though the intricacies of his theories weren’t properly understood by the common people. Nature seemed to be explicable through the agency of human reason. Philosophers like Bacon and Kant argued for a severance from ancient or traditional concepts of knowledge; this sundering of faith in traditional knowledge was to be achieved by the

reposing of faith in reason. The Enlightenment was thus a call for intellectual liberation from the traditional structure within which knowledge had been previously enmeshed. The second feature of the Enlightenment is the condition that it was a form of extension of the intellectual work of the preceding years. For Voltaire, Newton, and Locke formed the triad who facilitated the freeing of knowledge from the shackles of tradition. The English thinker John Locke was a major inspiration to the Enlightenment intellectuals. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) set forward theories of education, and personal development, and placed human knowledge within the frame of perception. His idea of the mind being a blank slate was a major source of the belief that with proper training perfection was achievable. Locke’s focus on the possibilities of education gave a great thrust to the endeavours of eighteenth century educationists, and education was seen as the pathway to individual development and social progress. Although Locke’s theories had the potential to suggest the design of an egalitarian concept of society, it was not adequately addressed even by those who saw him as their inspiration. Nevertheless, Locke’s ideas suggested that human progress was part of human design, intention, and effort and hence it validated the supremacy of reason. The third feature can be seen in the high ambitions of the Enlightenment thinkers. They sought to unify and organise knowledge into one composite whole and felt that there was nothing in the world that could not be explained by reason. Even political and natural changes were encompassed within their view that understanding these transformations was only possible through the agency of reason. The Enlightenment thinkers aimed to construct a science of human nature and formulate ideas that would do justice to the complexities of human behaviour. Knowledge, mental condition, religion, government and administration, cultural conditions of different peoples, sex, race, and social structures—all of these were part of their intellectual engagement. The fourth characteristic stems from the vision of the Enlightenment thinkers who saw it as a cultural project with the aim of bringing about a change in the way people responded to life and society. It was thus a vision which believed in the orchestration of humanity through a paradigm based on reason. The idea that it was visualised as a ‘project’ did not mean that all the intellectuals of the Enlightenment worked within a set pattern. There were differences

between them as well as a variety in the way they went about disseminating their ideas. Thinkers like Hobbes and Locke were particularly adept in presenting their ideas through small treatises while Rousseau wrote novels and his Confessions was an autobiographical attempt at justifying his views. They addressed different kinds of audiences with an obvious variation in response and impact. David Hume, who was one of the architects of the Scottish Enlightenment, wrote histories for his readers. The manner in which the ideas of the Enlightenment reached different parts of Europe suggests that it was developing into a form that aimed to culturally reorient the people in the eighteenth century. The growth of elitist salons and discussion groups was another consequence of the Enlightenment climate. In this context, it is worth noting that the ideas of the Enlightenment were equally framed through a cultural makeover involving the growth of literacy and readership, expansion of the book market, and other engagements that facilitated intellectual intercourse. Many of the values of the Enlightenment encompassed diverse areas like politics, state, individual, economy, culture, equality, reason, and faith in the abilities of the human spirit. These values were part of Enlightenment thinking but not equally pronounced in all places. They may be listed as follows: (a) Politically, it was believed that the state is responsible for the upholding of an individual’s rights. (b) Democracy was considered to be the best possible form of government. (c) The Enlightenment thinkers valued individual dignity above everything else and advocated both personal freedom and liberation of the mind. (d) They were in favour of equality in all spheres of life, including matters of faith, individual behaviour, race, and politics. (e) They had great faith in the efficacy of human reason and considered the scientific method to be the best apparatus with which to address nature. (f) Reason was more valuable than religion or individual faith.

Enlightenment and Contemporary Culture The print revolution that began during the Renaissance soon became a major facilitator of cultural exchange in different European centres. In England,

book publishing had become a major industry by the eighteenth century, but a hefty percentage of the books produced were pirated and internationally circulated. The growth of the publishing industry meant that there was a corresponding increase in readership—a phenomenon illustrated by the elaborate distribution networks, growth in journals and periodicals, and the circulation of the daily newspapers. Newspapers in Britain first appeared in 1702, and by the end of the eighteenth century there were locally published newspapers in thirty-seven towns. The so-called communications revolution was a major Enlightenment feature. The growth of the communications industry in Britain was facilitated by government apathy which did not place any restrictions on its operations. The imposition of the stamp tax wasn’t much of a deterrent for the prospective buyers of newspapers and magazines. The freedom of the press in Britain was praised by the French philosophes and the contrast could be seen in the rigidity with which the government in France functioned in such matters. Censorship in the other European countries provided a great impetus to the pirates who did good business by dealing with subversive literature, especially those which radically sought to question any form of regimentation. Subversive and underground literature, however, also included pornography, prison accounts, and gossips of elites and celebrities. The fact that the expensive Encyclopedia volumes sold well suggests that readers were willing to pay for books if it appeared to them to be worthwhile. The book industry’s growth in Britain and elsewhere highlights another aspect of contemporary life—the growing socialisation and increased networks of cultural exchange. There was thus a new elite emerging that thrived on the transfer of knowledge, and many British literary and philosophical societies provided the platform to readers to share and discuss contemporary ideas. Societies of this type also made it possible for people not affiliated to educational institutions to cultivate the library culture. The Royal Society was the most famous of these platforms facilitating intellectual discourse. Apart from such ‘academic’ societies there were salons that catered to the intellectual, social, and cultural demands of women. Often these salons were sites of games and idle talk but it also provided interested men and women the opportunity to interact in an informal atmosphere. The development of secret societies, social organisations, and clubs pointed towards an increasingly active cultural life. The expanding network of eighteenth century sociability could be seen in another popular platform—the

coffee houses. The coffee houses were vibrant sites of social exchange and the topics of discussion were extremely varied; such locations where various groups of people met and interacted show that knowledge was now circulating in the public domain. Public opinion was thus a by-product of the eighteenth century culture of social interaction. The opinions expressed in these social platforms were influential in generating debates and drawing attention to matters of importance in the contemporary world. The kind of readers who read the books and newspapers published in the eighteenth century included people from different professions. Fiction, biography, travel literature, history, and geographical accounts—these were some of the subjects available for popular consumption in the eighteenth century. The growth of women readers is attested by the fact that there was a substantial increase in etiquette books. The most popular form of literature, however, was the novel and by far. Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), the author of Pamela and Clarissa, was extremely successful among women readers. The works of Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) and Henry Fielding (1707– 1754) were equally popular with the contemporary audience. Women writers like Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) and Jane Austen (1775–1817) showed how different experiments with the novel form found willing readers. The popularity of books and magazines in the eighteenth century, however, was not an adequate index to the cultural pattern in towns and villages at that time. For instance, the literacy rate in villages was drastically lower than the urban centres. Religious texts like the Bible, Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress or some book of catechism, or tales of saints were common to most households, irrespective of the economic condition. Non-religious fare included medical or home cure manuals, paperbacks (which was a seventeenth century development), and cheap books on animals. Entertainment for the poorer classes was available in the form of street theatre and popular songs and dance—forms which varied in manifestation and format from region to region.

Scientific Thought and Rationalism The developments in science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were providing man options of negotiating multiple cultural and social progresses with an attitude that was not based on religion alone. The opening up of

intellectual possibilities was activated by many of the conditions that went to constitute the Scientific Revolution. Galileo exploited the advantages of the telescope to substantiate the concept of heliocentrism; but man’s body was equally the site of discovery as were the changing views about the heavens. This change in response to natural phenomena was a great blow to the established positions of the ancient thinkers like Aristotle as many of their views were either overturned or questioned. So when Bacon argued for a fresh approach to the pursuit of knowledge, he was arguing for the cultivation of rationalism as a governing principle in all inquiries. The difficulty in accepting a single worldview was brought about by another factor, that of the knowledge that came from the exploration of new lands. While new ideologies were formed, the controvertibility of established positions appeared to be a great advance for the pursuit of knowledge. The investigations carried out for the purpose of unravelling the mysteries of the physical and natural world seemed initially to threaten the foundational structure and role of religion, but it was quite similar to the Puritans’ questioning of the norms prescribed for experiencing the spiritual. Newton’s laws further consolidated an already emerging rational worldview into a condition of truth. The marriage of mathematics and physics, which was so successfully achieved by Newton, functioned as the best example of rationalism; this Newtonian achievement served to illustrate many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century perceptions which were based on the cultivation of reason. One of the interesting developments of this Newtonian model can be seen in the success of Deism. The philosophy of the Deists was that the universe was a well-structured machine and only God was the master technician who controlled it. There may be many inexplicable things in the universe of the Deists but it was believed that the mechanism functioned according to the principles of rationalism. The scientific achievements were seen as affirmations of the fact that such a world only had God as its operator, for the explicability of nature through science was a clear manifestation of the workings of a structured universe. One of the important institutions to emerge from this context of a rationalist position was the Royal Society. It represented the movement towards the institutionalisation of scientific thought and exploration. By the early seventeenth century, the consolidation of reason as the principle guiding thought and cultural life was

apparent in various manifestations. Both the Cromwellian experiment at governing through the Commonwealth mechanism and the Parliamentary advancements, made after the Glorious Revolution, were significant political movements aiding the thrust towards rationalism. Subsequently, the growth of democracy in England saw the monolith of monarchy lose its significance; democracy as a form of government, technically at least, sought to encompass a much wider pluralistic and demographically varied population under its wing, through an invitation to participate in administration. The idea of a rationalist society was thus seen to be supported by the political and social movements, and the convenient pattern of thought and culture ascribed to the condition of England, from Restoration to Romanticism, finds a valid structure upon which to anchor itself. Like all generalisations, terms like ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Scientific Rationalism’ are only suggestive as a commentary on the primary trends of the age. The connection usually made to bridge the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, thus, is not an absolutely linear structure but one which shows the negotiability of the conditions of the former aiding the development of the latter. In contemporary aesthetics from the Restoration to Romanticism the illustration of the principles of reason can be seen in its most pronounced and assertive forms.

ART AND LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF REASON Augustanism As a term in English literary history, Augustanism refers to the dominant condition prevailing in the area of cultural production in the first half of the eighteenth century. Politically, Augustanism refers to the parallels drawn between the emerging structures of English society and those existing in the period of Emperor Augustus (27 BC–14 AD) in ancient Rome. These parallels were worked out in terms of the political similarities and the closeness evident in some kind of cultural conditioning in contemporary England. In fact, the process of finding similarities between the Augustan period in ancient Rome and English society began in the early seventeenth century, when writers like Ben Jonson alluded to the possibility. The immediate similarity was seen in the ‘restoration’ of political order by both Augustus and Charles II after periods of political turmoil. The restoration was also related to the upholding of constitutional decorum and propriety and both the rulers sought to justify their reigns by suggesting that theirs were legitimate while the ones they displaced were forms of usurpation. The concept of Pax Britannica was developed to encompass this process of new political and social order in line with the more famous idea of Pax Romana. The new political groups that emerged at the time—the Whigs and the Tories —supported the comparison as it seemed to validate the whole concept of ‘order’ that they were trying to engage democratically. The optimism of British society and politics, following the Restoration of monarchy in 1660, was carried forward in the early eighteenth century and was consolidated in the reign of Queen Anne. In the cultural sphere, the writers of the Restoration and the early eighteenth century sought to draw inspiration from the models established by the literary figures of the corresponding Roman era. Writers like Horace and Virgil were seen as the foundational figures who exemplified the stability of the age as well as contributed creatively to a culture of decorum and standardised art forms. In the age of Dryden and Pope, the poetics of the Classical age was engaged as a kind of norm-determining process and it was manifested in the choice of metre, genre, and literary form. Pope was visualised by his contemporaries, as a potential Virgil and his translations of Homer only

enhanced that reputation. In fact, the career of Pope was quite similar to Virgil’s, as the English poet followed the pattern of his classical predecessor in moving from pastoral to georgics to epic (in the case of Pope it was mockepic). Another similarity between the Roman age and the corresponding English one was evident in the choice of the ‘heroic’ mode in both drama and verse. The cultivation of a kind of Classicism was, then, a response to the preceding adventurism of the Elizabethan age, and since the postCommonwealth age was one where a kind of political stability was organised as the desired ideal, a similar orientation in letters and culture was albeit ‘natural.’ In terms of working out poetics for the age, Dryden led the way with his Prefaces and the Essay on Dramatic Poesie, and Pope’s Essay on Criticism built up the case for legitimising the parallel. At the same time, it is imperative to recognise that these similarities cannot be stretched very far, not at least literally. The regulations devised in the Augustan poetic world, for instance, were both functional and theoretical. The best example of this orientation is evident in Essay on the Different Stiles of Poetry (1713) by Thomas Parnell. The range of Augustanism is still the subject of dispute. While a consideration of the ‘Augustan’ age was often structured derogatorily in the early twentieth century, it has remained a descriptive term indicating poetics, judgement, and taste.

Poetry in the Neo-Classical Age: Dryden, Pope, Thomson, and Johnson Although the figure of Alexander Pope looms large over the poetic horizon of the Augustan age, it is in the path shown by John Dryden that many of the writers of the Neo-Classical period took their inspiration and example from. Dryden was a maverick figure and tried his hand at various forms of art— drama, poetry, and criticism—and remarkably succeeded in not only showing the possibilities of creative representation in each of these genres but also set standards, determined the line of literary taste, and experimented in ways nobody had done before. If Pope is the hero of the Augustan age, the NeoClassical temper that conditions much of it owes to the practice and precept of Dryden. Dryden adopted the satiric mode both in imitation of the Classical ancients and as strategy through which to situate the social polemics, and in many ways he set the temper by advocating a backward movement to the

Classical heritage—it was a programme that was well suited to address the politics of culture in an age of implicit backstabbing. Dryden was neither free from such an enterprise of critique nor was he excused by his contemporaries. This was then a culture of rhetorical questioning of social norms, often presented in terms of an othering that was negative in its orientation. In ‘MacFlecknoe’ Dryden embarks on such an enterprise of attack at his rival Thomas Shadwell—and this poem, perhaps more than anything else, inaugurated the culture of personalised attack through verse as Shadwell immediately gave back Dryden some of the same. In ‘MacFlecknoe’, Shadwell is made the heir to the minor poet Richard Flecknoe (which is schematised as a form of disparagement) and what in ordinary conditions would have been an honour (to have been left a legacy and pronounced the heir to a line) is overturned by the derogatory positioning of the image:

Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dullness from his tender years. Shadwell alone, of all my Sons, is he Who stands confirm’d in full stupidity. The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

This is brilliant as a strategy of underpinning the opponent within the norms of a chosen culture. Shadwell is just one among many of the time, so his criticism is also designed to represent a corruption of an entire generation. This method of critique and examination of cultural values is however, best achieved in his Absalom and Achitophel (1681), where Dryden not only successfully juggles through a politically volatile situation and historicises his own time as it happens, but equally emphatic is his rhetorical gymnastics through which he frames the entire issue of political succession of Charles II within the matrix of the David narrative in the Bible. The key strategist on the other side, Achitophel (standing for Shaftesbury), is the butt of the entire rhetoric and Dryden carefully avoids placing the potential heir Monmouth within the axis of evil entirely, even though he is repeatedly instigated by the forces of evil. Monmouth’s heroics after all are subjugated to the image of a wise Daniel, and in the game of politics, it is Achitophel and his group who stand trial. Dryden’s shifting political allegiances had an impact on his poetic output. When he became a Catholic in 1685, in keeping with the political current, it was imperative that he manifest such a religious affiliation through some verses, the result of which was the allegory ‘Hind and the Panther’ (1687). Among his later poems, ‘Alexander’s Feast’ (1697) and ‘The Secular Masque’ (1700) show his insistence on the heritage of the Classical past, which incidentally was the focus of many of his translations collected together in Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700). If the religious affiliation was a matter of political strategy for Dryden, for Pope it was a badge of identity and the fact that he was a Catholic in an essentially Protestant society considerably affected his poetry. Like Dryden, Pope was indebted to the Classical heritage and sought to reproduce the culture and philosophy of that past through his writings. Pope was also a very successful translator of Greek and Latin classics; it was his translation of Homer that gave him a fortune, and also an editor of Shakespeare. Even during his own time Pope was not free from critics who enthusiastically punctured the inconsistencies in his scholarship, but for Pope it hardly mattered, because he could not orient himself otherwise. In following and developing the line of satire, suggested by Dryden’s poetics of NeoClassicism, Pope both responded to his rivals and propagated a programme of social taste. In the early part of his career, Pope started with Pastorals (pub. 1709) which shows his consummate control and promises the technical

virtuosity that became so integral to his poetic craft. But it was with An Essay on Criticism (1711) that Pope announced his arrival on the Augustan literary scene. This is an accomplishment that exhibits a sophisticated urbanity and is well recognised as an exemplar of the Enlightenment vision. Many of the Neo-Classical precepts are formulated in this poem, which, considering the fact that it was written when he was only twenty-one, is a wonderful illustration of the sophisticated and the refined attitude in poetry. Here’s a representative section from the poem:

Nature to all things fix’d the Limits fit, And wisely curb’d proud Man’s pretending Wit: As on the Land while here the Ocean gains, In other Parts it leaves wide sandy Plains; Thus in the Soul while Memory prevails, The solid Pow’r of Understanding fails; Where Beams of warm Imagination play, The Memory’s soft Figures melt away. One Science only will one Genius fit; So vast is Art, so narrow Human Wit; Not only bounded to peculiar Arts, But oft in those, confin’d to single Parts. Like Kings we lose the Conquests gain’d before, By vain Ambition still to make them more: Each might his sev’ral Province well command, Wou’d all but stoop to what they understand. First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frame By her just Standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang’d and Universal Light, Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.

Pope’s technical excellence was exhibited in his other poems as well, and whether it was put to serve the demands of satire or the mock-heroic, the union of the craft and content was well achieved. The Rape of the Lock shows Pope exploiting the possibilities afforded by the mock-heroic genre and in making a trivial matter the centre of great concern he was also commenting on the social pragmatics that influenced such an orientation. It is, however, in his satirical poems that Pope is the most incisive and The Dunciad (1728) is a well-acknowledged masterpiece of Neo-Classical verse. The poem’s structure is devised to expose the foolishness of individuals, and by extension a culture, where ‘dunces’ are favoured and respected. The politics behind the philosophy informing the poem is complicated enough as it goes back to the criticism of Pope’s scholarship by Theobald (who is made the central figure of the poem) and reins in a host of other rivals. In placing Theobald as the favourite of the Goddess of Dullness, Pope unceremoniously castigated his rivals, but the language and extremely potent imagery makes it possible to appreciate the poem’s features even without being cognisant of the immediate topicalities. Pope continued to work within the paradigm of a carefully devised reading of political positions which were also designed to address important social and cultural issues. His Essay on Man (1733–34) is a commentary on the ordered nature of the universe and one of the most cogently argued testaments of eighteenth century reason. In his next ventures —the Moral Essays (1731–35) and the final version of The Dunciad (1743)– Pope analysed the perversions that dominated the contemporary society and ridiculed the reduction of idealism to political strategy. The poetry of James Thomson exhibits another direction of Augustan poetry, one where more than a social conditioning and political satire, it is the atmosphere of nature that occupies the centre-stage. Much before the Romantics arrived on the scene, Thomson suggested the poetic imperatives through which the themes of ‘nature’ poetry could be envisaged and represented. Thomson’s The Seasons is a classic of the eighteenth century. It was written in four phases, each covering the different seasons: Winter (1726), Summer (1727), Spring (1728), and Autumn (1730). In fact the entire poem was published together with the last section in 1730. Written in blank verse, The Seasons is the first major ‘nature’ poem in the English language. Unlike Pope and his contemporaries, Thomson achieved coherence not by developing a ‘plot’ but by engaging a different mechanism, that of structuring

the poem through a sense of thematic orientation. The Seasons is supportive of the philosophy of order but such a resolution is not arrived at through the frame of rationalism, but by an appeal to the senses. In the high age of NeoClassicism The Seasons seemed to depart from the cherished principles of poetic composition so emphatically prescribed by Pope and his contemporaries. Thomson, however, was not completely removed from the intellectual climate where the union of reason and God was deigned essential, and in his To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton (1727) he exemplified such a philosophy. Other poems by Thomson include Liberty (1735–36) and The Castle of Indolence (1748). Samuel Johnson neatly rounds up the Neo-Classical tendencies in the eighteenth century. London (1738) is his first major poem. It is based on Juvenal’s third satire and is designed to satirise the decaying culture of contemporary England. In the original poem of Juvenal, the dialogue of a friend departing from the city to a life of rusticity moves the narrative, while in adopting a similar scheme, Johnson launches an attack on the intellectual and moral poverty of the age. Courtiers and members of the elite class are specifically chosen as targets of satire. The poem provides an interesting account of contemporary London, especially its poverty and the chaos of urban life. The abstruseness of some passages of London is, however, polished to give an effect of sophisticated urbanity in The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). Like London, this poem too draws its inspiration from a Juvenal model, the tenth satire, and is organised as a survey of mankind in its initial phase after which it moves to scrutinise some of the contemporary figures in centres of power such as Bolingbroke and Clarendon. The poem is an interesting example of the Neo-Classical tradition because of the sweep through which the contemporary situation is evaluated by reference to chosen points in history. The sense of tragic irony which informs the final part of the poem is telling in its effect.

Defoe and the Rise of the Novel It may be customary and even convenient to place the beginnings of the novel form in English within the frame of the early eighteenth century, but there were other experiments in fictionalised narratives, especially in the form of travelogues. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe too borrows from the travel

narrative structure which was a common mode of organising stories. The process of presenting narratives through schemes of travel tales can be traced back to the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (1375) and other experiments in the genre in the sixteenth century such as The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) by Thomas Nashe. The growth of female readership in the seventeenth century and new norms of social behaviour significantly impacted the way literary taste was appreciated by the middle classes. While John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) emerged from the milieu of Puritanism, it still relied on a kind of narrative enunciation that was not much different from the programmes of fiction tried out by the seventeenth century writers. When Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress in a climate of Puritan faith, he wasn’t exactly certain about its success. In the ‘Apology’ to the first book of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan expostulates his experience of writing the narrative:

When at first I took Pen in hand, Thus for to write; I did not understand That I at all should make a little Book In such a mode; Nay, I had undertook To make another, which when almost done, Before I was aware, I this begun. And thus it was: I writing of the Way And Race of Saints in this our Gospel-Day, Fell suddenly into an Allegory About their Journey, and the way to Glory, In more than twenty things, which I set down; This done, I twenty more had in my Crown, And they again began to multiply, Like sparks that from the coals of Fire do fly. Nay then, thought I, if that you breed so fast, I’ll put you by your selves, lest you at last Should prove ad infinitum, and eat out The Book that I already am about. (Bunyan 1984:1)

Bunyan’s ‘allegorical’ narrative is not simply a landmark text in the context of the Puritan experience of the seventeenth century, but one of the important precursors of the English novel. ‘Precursor’ may not be the appropriate word here, for many of the characteristics associated with the English novel are contained within the narrative scheme of the Bunyan text. In recreating the journey from a material life to the realm of paradise, Bunyan relied on a rich tradition of homiletic conditioning and it is no wonder that after the King James Bible, The Pilgrim’s Progress was the most sold book of the seventeenth century. Bunyan gave allegory a new frame and provided for the Puritan experience a structured evocation of the faith/doubt binarism. The narrative deals with the journey of Christian as he labours towards the much sought-after paradise, but then he is wracked by doubt and it is only through a process of self-discovery in conjunction with God’s grace that he realises his goal. The text has many memorable moments, one of which concerns Christian’s experience at Vanity Fair. What Bunyan achieved for the English novel was further developed by later practitioners like Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe. (For a discussion of Aphra Behn’s work see the section on Women’s Writing in the Restoration period) Defoe was a journalist by profession and his entry into the realm of the novel was not originally designed. In novels like Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), Defoe worked out narratives that focused on the fortunes of the protagonist and in many ways the movement of the plot was determined by the movement of the protagonist. Both these novels by Defoe emerged from the phase of experimentation and thus follow different narrative trajectories. In Robinson Crusoe, which many critics consider to be the first instance of the novel proper in English, the moral and cultural specifics subtly undercut the apparently simple tale of a shipwrecked sailor. The whole novel can be read as a programme for a kind of cultural conditioning, one which is in line with a particular brand of faith. It is also a heavily loaded ideological structure as the indoctrination of Friday by Crusoe makes clear. The strategies through which a politics of culture is interwoven to suggest civilisational advancement are not easily separable from the text’s texture. This is what makes Robinson Crusoe such an interesting read. The text has also been seen as an example of the imperialist ideology informing the eighteenth century mind and the fact that the book was so well received highlights the presence of such conditions in it. By subsuming the colonial

interests of Crusoe to the designs of a civilising programme of faith, Defoe somewhat blurred the political engagement that Crusoe cannot wash his hands off. As a myth and a classic tale of survival, the narrative of Crusoe seems to acquire the quality of rightness, a quality which grants him the authority to tutor and structure Friday into a prescribed mould. The mercenary motive in the novel, on the other hand, can hardly be overwhelmed by the didactic and represents a culture that authenticated essential eighteenth century interests. In Moll Flanders, while the same mercenary imperative is involved, the protagonist’s fate is not determined by natural forces but it is suggested that she is naturally programmed to find herself in such situations that befall her. As a quest narrative, Robinson Crusoe focussed on important social structures where the desire for money was sanctioned as legitimate and this factor constitutes the basic condition upon which Moll Flanders is built. Moll searches for love, commitment, trust, identity, and social recognition. Historically, Moll Flanders is an important step in the development of the genre of the novel as it focuses on character rather than adventure, and while it is admissible that the plot is flawed, the attractiveness of the heroine is undeniable. Roxana (1724), Defoe’s next fictional experiment is more sophisticated than Moll Flanders, even though there is a similarity in plot movement. Roxana’s independence and adventurous nature did not really represent the ideal woman of the age, which came to fruition only in Richardson’s Pamela, sixteen years later. Samuel Richardson wrote Pamela (1740) by accident. Richardson had originally intended to write manual advising women on the art of letter writing, a feature that influenced the choice of an epistolary format for Pamela. Pamela Andrews, the heroine of Richardson’s book, is pursued by Mr. B, and it is only by faith and a persistence with chastity that enables her to save herself. The subtitle of the novel reads ‘Virtue Rewarded’ and for Pamela, the reward consists of an upgradation in the social scale through marriage to her pursuer. Male sensuality and female virtue are placed as stark opposites in the novel—a structure that drew flak and fictional responses from many of Richardson’s contemporaries such as Henry Fielding, who ridicules it in his Shamela and Joseph Andrews. In terms of reception Pamela was a tremendous success. It consolidated certain norms of the man/woman and facilitated the circulation of a social pattern that relied on stereotypical roles for men and women. In his next novel—which was also epistolary

—Clarissa (1747–48), Richardson widened the circle by engaging multiple perspectives as there are four different letter writers. Unlike Pamela’s fortune and rise in the social scale, Clarissa’s fate is tragic as she ends up being fooled by her lover and is made a victim of mercenary interests by her family. Lovelace, her suitor, is a villain and in playing around with the virtuous Clarissa, he seems to exhibit similarities with many Jacobean revenge tragedy schemers. Clarissa was not as successful as Pamela and evoked mixed reactions. When Richardson returned to the theme of morality once again for his third novel titled Sir Charles Grandison (1754), it did not work. Perhaps because his readers had come to see him as a writer who portrayed women more faithfully than he did men or may be it is because the protagonist is too good to be true. Richardson’s insistence on the moral design as the sole guiding principle for a just existence was countered by Henry Fielding in two of his books —Shamela and Joseph Andrews. Instead of focussing on female virtue, Fielding invites his readers to consider the male subjects and suggests that virtue is not only chastity but is extended to cover other behavioural aspects of man as well. As instances of parodic literature, these two fictions stand out, but in spite of the intertextual condition, Joseph Andrews inaugurated the social novel in English as opposed to the psychological example shown by Richardson. Fielding’s genius, however, flowered fully in his masterpiece, Tom Jones (1749). Presented in a picaresque mode, the fast, racy narrative of Tom Jones has been one of the all-time favourites. At the centre of the novel stands the title character Tom Jones, whose unabashed moral and sexual licences are not met with the disciplining rod, at least in a way that would seem appropriate in a culture of moral policing. But it must be remembered that the quest for discipline is never within Fielding’s fictional vision. As a journey towards self-knowledge, Tom Jones is flexible in terms of the plot arrangement. The novel is also remembered for creating some memorable characters such as Squire Western. The whole idea of respectability is revised in Fielding’s emphasis on the provisionality of human conduct. In spite of his escapades, Tom Jones is not a villain and it is his humaneness that endears him to the readers. In his next novel, however, Fielding chose to narrate the experience of a villain called Jonathan Wild the Great (1742) but the philosophy of criminality fell flat. Another instance of satirical writing is found in the works of Jonathan Swift,

most notably in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Often read as a children’s tale, the satirical imperatives of Gulliver’s Travels are wonderfully executed to represent the corruptibility of man, and by interweaving the immediate social and political issues into the fictional frame, Swift achieves many goals at once. Among the many objects of satire, the Royal Society is one. The whole idea of progress and man’s civilised march forward is ridiculed to expose his animality in all its bruteness. A similar strategy was not attempted until William Golding punctured the ‘innocence’ myth of children in his Lord of the Flies in the twentieth century. Swift’s criticism of English society and culture constitutes the theme of another book of his, Tale of a Tub (1704). The experiments in fiction in the eighteenth century, however, were no match for the ingenuity demonstrated in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The whole novel was published in eight volumes from 1759 to 1767. Sterne was unlike any of his contemporaries in that he deliberately subverted the expectations of the reader by defying the rational ordering of plot. In Tristram Shandy, the expectations associated with the linear perspective are challenged and Sterne not only digressed from the primary premise but also did not conform to any structured order. He has been seen as one of the precursors of the ‘stream of consciousness’ novel and also a postmodernist writer. Language and thought do not correspond in Tristram Shandy in the commonly understood way, which provides the narrative with a rambling effect. The apparently nonsensical representation thus seems to lack an ideological centre, and as fragmentation and scattering of experiences suggest, its orientation is not dissimilar from the postmodern. The other important novelist of the age was Tobias Smollett, whose most accomplished novel is Humphry Clinker (1771). The form chosen for this novel was epistolary, and the subject was presented as a form of examination of contemporary values. The novel has a controlled sense of humour, which is perhaps its most significant aspect. Smollett’s other novels include Peregrine Pickle, Roderick Random and Sir Launcelot Graves. Two other novels—The Man of Feeling (1771) by Henry Mackenzie and The Vicar of Wakefieled (1766) by Oliver Goldsmith—deserve mention here. Goldsmith used the advantages of the rural setting to revisit the fairy-tale narrative while The Man of Feeling is a sentimental novel.

Samuel Johnson’s Circle and Literary Culture Samuel Johnson was more important in eighteenth century culture for the influence he exerted as a man of letters and upon the cultivation of literary taste than as a creative writer. This does not suggest that his writings are without merit, but in many ways it was Johnson’s image and command over the literary horizon that have overwhelmed his identity as a writer. As a writer in the Neo-Classical tradition, Johnson came to stand last in a line of literary culture that thrived by reference to the antiquated past of the Greek and Roman times. The emphasis on the classical bent was initiated by Dryden in the Restoration period and continued till the advent of the Romantics. Given such a development, it is not surprising to find a bridge like ‘Dryden to Johnson’ being constructed in literary history for the purpose of situating the Neo-Classical experience in the eighteenth century. By the time Johnson, came to command a following, Neo-Classicism was already well settled in literary circles. Johnson’s credit thus, lies not in initiating a process but in enhancing it. In trying to appreciate the role played by Johnson it would not be out of place to consider him as the statesman of letters of his age. The reputation of Johnson was, to a considerable extent, though not entirely, influenced by James Boswell’s biography The Life of Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson had many facets as a writer: he was a critic (Lives of the Poets, Preface to Shakespeare), a novelist (Rasselas), a poet, and a lexicographer. Johnson initially worked as a journalist but had not tasted much success. The publication of his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), however, brought him immediate attention and fame. In fact, it made him a major literary figure of the time. The Dictionary had taken him nine years to complete and is a veritable treasure house of knowledge and information. The fact that all definitions carried the characteristic Johnsonian wit has enabled the book to transcend the topicalities of its time. Some of his definitions have become part of literary folklore such as:

Lexicographer–A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge. Oats–A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.

His commentaries on writers, past and contemporary, in Lives of the Poets have been referred to time and again by later writers for their insights. Johnson was writing at a transitional time and his career epitomises the changing status of the writer in the eighteenth century. He marshalled the artists, writers, and thinkers of his time to form a Club, which represented what is known as the Johnson Circle. In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the biographer talks about how great a conversationalist Johnson was, and it is to this characteristic that much of the success of the Club depended. The Club was constituted with members like Sir Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith in 1764. The members of the circle met at Turk’s Head, Gerrard-Street, Soho, every week. As the years went by, more and more members joined it and the names suggest that it was a veritable ‘who’s who’ of contemporary society. Later members included Bishop Percy, Garrick, Joseph Warton, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, and James Boswell. The life in the Club was one of cultural and intellectual intercourse, and Johnson increasingly spent more time there than at home. The Johnson Circle amply represented the culture of collective consensus that influenced the literary values of Neo-Classical practice.

GLOSSARY Act of Uniformity: There were a series of Acts of Uniformity passed in England, starting from the first in 1549, which was prepared by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. The Act was structured as a kind of balancing action which sought to negotiate the opposition between the old and new positions held by the conservative and the Reformist groups. The first Act of Uniformity was synonymous with the presentation of the First Book of Common Prayer. The new Act of Uniformity, 1662, was passed by the new Parliament under Charles II after the Restoration. It was designed to unconditionally support the theses of the Book of Common Prayer and also legitimise the removal of Puritan ministers from their offices. The Act of Uniformity, 1662, was a reactionary measure as it sought to slacken the hold of the Puritans over the Church of England. Other Acts of Uniformity were passed in 1552 and 1559 in connection with the revisions of the Book of Common Prayer. Bank of England: The Bank of England was started by William Paterson in 1694. It began functioning as the note-issuing bank in England. Sir John Houblon was the first governor of the bank. The Bank of England was granted the Royal Charter in 1694 itself and subsequent renewals of the Charter were made in 1742, 1764, and 1781. Although the bank was originally situated in Mithras at Walbrook but moved to Threadneedle Street in 1734. From its quiet beginning at the end of the seventeenth century, the Bank of England grew to become the primary financial institution of the country. In 1946, the bank was nationalised. Baptists: The Baptists constitute an important part of the Nonconformist Protestant group of Christians in England. The Baptists are of the view that baptism should be done by immersion and not by sprinkling/pouring of holy water and that it should be confined only to believers. Two divisions among the Baptists—Particular Baptists (who considered the sacrifice of Christ to be specifically for God’s elect) and the General Baptists (who considered Christ’s atonement as act for all people)—were prevalent in England. The Baptists trace their origin to John Smyth, an exile in Amsterdam. Smyth was responsible for holding the first Baptist convention among refugees there in 1609.

Brownists or Congregationalists: Congregationalism was a religious sect that began in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It was founded by Robert Browne in Norwich (c.1580). The Congregationalists favoured the right of each congregation to determine its own spiritual course without interference from any other authority. The Congregationalists were also known as Independents or Brownists. The Protestant stress on the idea of God’s sovereignty and the spirituality of believers characteristically became part of the Congregationalists’ belief-system. The refusal to submit to a higher lay authority contributed to the cultivation of an attitude of openness among the Congregationalists. Oliver Cromwell was an Independent and during the Commonwealth, the Congregationalists used their political clout to suppress other religious groups like the Presbyterians. Coffee Houses: The prevalence of coffee house culture in England followed the introduction of coffee and tea in England. Although coffee houses had been formed in the sixteenth century Persia, it arrived in Europe a century later. The first coffee house in England was started by a man called Jacobs, at Oxford, in 1650, while the first London coffee house, situated at St. Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, began functioning from 1652. It was owned by a Greek named Pasqua Rosee. The coffee houses gained immense popularity as places of social gathering in a very short time. Specific coffee houses had specific groups of people coming to it, the most famous of which was Lloyd’s, the leading commercial centre in eighteenth century, England. The coffee houses soon became the centres where news was circulated and exchanged; they were also important as places where many business transactions were carried out. In the middle of the eighteenth century there were more than five hundred coffee houses in London. These were quite accessible to the general public as the admission charge was just a penny and it provided the opportunity to people to have coffee, read newsletters, converse and gossip, and smoke. As communication centres, the coffee houses provided an important platform for the dissemination and gathering of news and was one of the primary agencies facilitating the journalistic exercise. Runners reported to chosen coffee houses about significant developments in contemporary politics and culture. Coffee house culture impacted literary production as well, especially the periodical essay; one example being The Tatler, which Steele mentioned, started functioning from

St. James Coffee house. Corresponding Societies: The Corresponding societies were groups formed by skilled workers for the initiation of reforms towards the very end of the eighteenth century. One of the major influences upon these societies was the immediate example of the French Revolution. In England, these Corresponding societies were functioning as one of the agencies demanding political change. The London Corresponding Society, formed in 1792 by a shoemaker called Thomas Hardy, was extremely active in voicing the need for both social and political reform. A major interest area of these societies was the granting of universal adult suffrage and a balanced distribution of Parliamentary constituencies. The holding of annual elections was another important demand made by the Corresponding societies. These societies had relations with one another and they ‘corresponded’ and had dialogues to arrive at conclusions that reflected a sense of uniformity; there was even a process of dialogue initiated between members of the societies in England and similar bodies in France. The position of the societies was not always uniform, one instance of it being the support given to the king during the war with France in the last part of the eighteenth century. The government’s worry over the societies’ gaining popularity was manifested in the passing of the ‘Gag’ Acts in 1795 and the suspending of the habeas corpus the preceding year. The 1795 Acts prohibited the assembly of more than fifty persons without the permission of a magistrate. Such repressive measures culminated in the banning of the major Corresponding societies in 1799 by which time their clout had considerably declined. Deism: The term ‘Deism’ refers to a particular religious philosophy which was part of seventeenth and eighteenth century culture in England. The concept was unorthodox in that it tried to combine the logic of rationalism with the principles of Christian faith. Deism was a kind of ‘natural religion’ which suggested that a religious propensity is either innate in every individual or may be cultivated through the employment of reason; on the other hand, it was contrary to the view that religious understanding could come through either the agency of revelation or an institution like the Church. One of the figures associated with this mode of thinking was Edward Herbert (later Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 1583–1648), the brother of the English metaphysical poet George Herbert. Edward Herbert opined that it was

possible to arrive at the truth through reason. He rejected revelation as a source of truth. His ideas are presented in On Truth (1624), On the Causes of Errors (1645), On the Religion of the Laity (1645), and On the Religion of the Gentiles (1663). The works of Herbert, however, weren’t part of popular discourse and it was only during the climate of religious freedom in postRestoration England that Deist philosophy came to find more takers. The Deist position regarding the role of the Church was also used by writers and thinkers of the time to suggest the significance of faith based on reason. Critics of orthodox Christianity used the framework of Deism to counter the ideas of revelation expressed in the Gospels. Deism went to Europe through the translations of the works of another English Deist, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713). Shaftesbury insisted that man had in him an inherent moral temper, which could not be countered by the theory of the fall. His arguments were attractively packaged in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). Deism had many detractors, with Joseph Butler (1692–1752), Immanuel Kant, and David Hume being the most prominent. Glorious Revolution: The Glorious Revolution (also known as the Bloodless Revolution) refers to the deposition of James II, the Catholic king of England in 1688, which was followed by the accession of his daughter and her husband, Mary II and William of Orange respectively. Although the monarchical change was brought about in 1688, the ferment regarding James’s faith was well underway the moment he became king in 1685. James was a Catholic in Protestant England and it was only inevitable that he would be distanced from a majority of the people who professed a different religious line. When James issued a Declaration of Indulgence (1687) decreeing the suspension of penal laws against Dissenters, followed by another that a Declaration of Indulgence (1688) be read from the pulpit on two consecutive Sundays, the archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, and other bishops decided to voice their protest, but they were only put on trial. In the month of June of the same year, the matter of succession came to a head when James’s Roman Catholic wife, Mary, of Modena gave birth to a male child. Seeing that the Protestant ethos of the nation was seriously under threat, a group of prominent Englishmen led by the bishop of London, Henry Compton, and the Earl of Danby petitioned William of Orange to come with an army to attend

to the matter. The acceptance of the English invitation was strategically significant for William as it provided him the opportunity to counter the emerging French prominence through the agency and arsenal of England. He arrived at Brixham on the 5th of November, 1688, and as the aides of James quit the scene quickly, the takeover was comfortably achieved without the shedding of a single drop of blood. James II fled to France. William was now given the authority to call a session of the Parliament (known as the Convention Parliament), where it was decided that the fleeing of James should be treated as an abdication. The Bill of Rights (1689) rendered many of the decisions of James II void. It gave the right to succession to Mary’s sister Anne, in case William and Mary remained issueless. The Bill of Rights also prohibited Roman Catholics from the throne. The Bill of Rights effectively gave the Parliament the upper hand and considerably diminished the powers of the Crown. Graveyard School of Poetry: The Graveyard School of Poetry is a loosely drawn group of poets of the eighteenth century who took death, loss, and mourning as the themes of their poems. ‘The Grave’ (1743) by Robert Blair and Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ (1742–45) are two representative illustrations of the group. It must be remembered that these poets never worked out a fully comprehensive philosophy for the expression and articulation of their views, and it is only retrospectively that they are seen as a body. In fact, the emergence of the Graveyard School is taken as both being a reaction to the regimentation of Neo-Classicism and as foreshadowing the Romantic spirit of the early nineteenth century. Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) is a classic representation of the ethos pursued by the Graveyard School poets. Great Fire of London: The Great Fire of London was one of the major calamities of the seventeenth century. It started in London on September 2nd and continued till the 5th and caused serious damage to property and infrastructure. Surprisingly, however, only about nine persons are said to have perished in the fire. More than thirteen thousand houses, eighty-seven parish churches, six chapels, forty-four Company Halls, the Custom House, the Royal Exchange, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Guildhall, the prisons of the city, the Sessions House, three gates of the city, and four bridges were affected by the flames. More than a hundred thousand Londoners were

rendered homeless by the fire. The source of the Great Fire of London has been traced to the house of Thomas Farrinor, a baker of the king, who, it is believed, did not turn off the oven on September 2, 1666, following which a fire started soon after midnight. While Farrinor escaped through the window, his housemaid failed to make it. The fire stretched rapidly through London and as most of the constructions were of combustible material the spread of the flames was inevitable. The Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, delayed in responding to the call for redress, which is supposed to have aggravated the situation. The narrow lanes and the congested localities made fire-dousing extremely difficult. More than five-sixth of the whole city was affected by the conflagration, with the St. Paul’s Cathedral being the most celebrated casualty. Great Plague of London: The Great Plague of London (1665) was one of the major natural calamities of the seventeenth century. It terminated more than sixty thousand people, which was about a fifth of the population of London at the time. The plague is taken to be bubonic in nature, with similarities between the medieval Black Death also being drawn. The Great Fire of London and the Great Plague were two of the major disasters in the 1660s. Margaret Porteous’s death was the first recorded human loss of the plague, although it is unlikely that she was the first real victim. The centre of the plague was London, but it affected other areas as well. After the Great Plague of 1665, no major outbreak has taken place in England. It is widely perceived that the Great Fire of London contributed to the elimination of rats and hence also prevented the recurrence of plague, but quarantine was also an important factor. Daniel Defoe presents a vivid picture of the Great Plague in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Methodism: Methodism was a religious development that began in eighteenth century England. The Methodists were led by John Wesley, a preacher who began his so-called ‘religious tours’ from 1738. Wesley was known for his strict insistence in the maintenance of discipline, a process that contributed to the use of the term ‘Methodist’ to describe his line of spiritual engagement. His mode of preaching, where he emphasised on the importance of a direct conversion to Christianity, was organised in a form known as ‘field preaching’ and very soon it caught the fancy of many of his contemporaries. The structure under which the Methodists were organised

was extremely disciplined and organised with local societies being further divided into ‘class meetings.’ Although Wesley did not want to move away from the Church of England, soon after his death in 1791, the Methodists formed into a separate different Nonconformist group. The actual break took place in 1795. This separation from the main body was inspired by Wesley’s act of ordaining his own ministers from 1784. The Methodists had a huge following in the nineteenth century, especially in the industrial areas. Periodical Essay: The beginning of the eighteenth century saw the prolific productions of a number of periodicals. Two figures stand out in the history of the periodical essay—Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. The trend had already started in the late seventeenth century when the Athenian Gazette was introduced in 1791 by Dunton. In Daniel Defoe’s A Weekly Review of Affairs in France lay the germ of the periodical concept popularised by Steele as he was inspired by Defoe’s section titled ‘Advice from the Scandalous Club.’ Steele developed the new essay format in his Tatler (1709–11) and in collaboration with Addison Steele launched The Spectator (1711–12). Addison also contributed to another Steele venture The Guardian in 1713. The Tatler began appearing three times a week from April 1709 and continued till the first month of 1711. Although the aim of the journal was to present stories of gallantry, entertainment, and news items from both the local and the international arenas, they were actually distributed from different coffee houses in London. For instance, the following coffee houses supplied the following sections: White’s (entertainment), St. James (politics and foreign news), and Will’s (poetry). As the issues started pouring in, The Tatler went on to suggest views about decorum and taste and sought to prescribe ideal positions for men and women. It set parameters for the determination of good sense and influenced people in forming opinions about topics of contemporary relevance. Certain aspects of contemporary society were critiqued; gambling, coquetry, rakish manners, and scandals were not approved. Steele used the name of Isaac Bickerstaff (which was borrowed from Swift) for the editor. While Steele wrote the content for 190 issues, Addison contributed to 42 and together they wrote 36 issues. Steele may have been responsible for the periodical’s development, but it was in Addison’s pen that much of the insights were contained. Addison’s entry as a contributor to The Tatler was considerably late, and before long the journal

ceased publication. The Tatler was followed by The Spectator. It began appearing from the first of March, 1711, and continued as a daily till the sixth of December, 1712. Addison revived the journal again in 1714 when it had a run of eighty issues. One of the features of The Spectator was the fictional presence of ‘The Spectator Club’ through which much of the narrative was designed and organised. The characters were placed in different situations so as to enable a discussion on a given topic. The imaginary members represented various sections of contemporary society as it included men from commerce (Sir Andrew Freeport), army (Captain Sentry), the town (Will Honeycomb), and the country (Sir Roger de Coverley). ‘The Spectator’ was apparently the author of all the reports presented in the journal. It has also been suggested that the process of characterisation associated with the members of the Spectator Club showed later fiction writers the possibilities of portraying personalities but even if some novelist did draw inspiration from the method of Steele and Addison, the model offered in the periodical was only a sketchy one. The periodical’s existing structure and orientation were flexible enough for the essayists to manoeuvre their views within already chosen formats. This was remarkable because the writers could express opinions without taking responsibility for their views. This mode of articulation is distanced from the personal essay of Lamb in the Romantic era. The Spectator essays also dealt with specific topics differently. Sometimes it appeared grave and solemn and otherwise witty and wellhumoured. Besides Addison and Steele, many other writers (Pope, Thomas Tickell, and Ambrose Phillips etc.) of the early eighteenth century made contributions to the journal. Through the journals Addison and Steele provided a platform for dealing with issues that found no other place for articulation. After the closure of The Spectator, Steele started another one, titled The Guardian, which ran from March to October, 1713. Although both Steele and Addison were the chief contributors, Tickell, Pope, Ambrose Phillips, Berkeley, and Gay also provided a helping hand. The Guardian was ostensibly impartial but could not avoid controversy and suddenly closed down. Steele’s fascination for the format, however, found another name, The Englishman, which he released the same year. Later ventures by Steele (Lover, The Reader, Chit Chat) and Addison (Freeholder) were neither as successful nor enduring. Many imitations of The Tatler and The Spectator followed—The Female Tatler and The Whisperer are the notable ones.

Popish Plot: The ‘Popish Plot’ refers to a completely fabricated story about an alleged plot by Jesuits, which came to light in 1678. It was widely believed that certain Jesuits had hatched a conspiracy to eliminate Charles II so that the Catholic heir to the throne, James, the brother of the king, could be made the monarch of England. The fabrication is attributed to Titus Oates, an Anglican reactionary who surreptitiously became part of the Catholic establishment. Oates was coaxed into circulating the theory of the plot by an anti-Catholic companion called Israel Tonge. When Oates was scrutinised regarding the veracity of the whole affair, his case fell flat and it became apparent that he was lying. The matter caught the imagination of the public when Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, the Justice of the Peace before whom Oates had made his deposition on September 28, 1678, was found murdered. The assassination of Sir Godfrey created panic among the people as the truth of the ‘plot’ was believed in many areas. Altogether, about thirty-five individuals were executed for their supposed involvement in the plot. The Popish Plot only hyped up the anti-Catholic sentiment in Restoration England further. Presbyterians: The Presbyterians were a group of Protestants who sought affinities in the doctrines of Calvinism. The Presbyterian institution is part of the Reformed Church tradition. The evolution of the Presbyterian Church in England can be traced back to the Puritan impulse in the sixteenth century. Although the Presbyterian pressure on a different form of church government was already there during the Elizabethan period, it was only during the Civil War (1642–51) that they gained momentum. When Charles I consented to the bill that argued for the removal of bishops from the temporal offices, he paved the way for the incorporation of Presbyterian principles in the Church of England. When Oliver Cromwell assumed the authority of both the Church and the administration, his Congregationalist allegiance made it difficult for the Presbyterians to make much headway among the masses. The Commonwealth Parliament had removed all the Presbyterian members by 1648 under Cromwell’s influence; the Presbyterians were systematically alienated by the Cromwellian regime which led to a considerable loss in terms of popular acceptance. Following the Restoration of monarchy, there was some respite for the Presbyterians as the Episcopal form of church government was restructured to accommodate them. In England,

Presbyterianism never became the religious force as in Scotland. It was only in the eighteenth century that Scots worked towards the revival of Presbyterianism in England with their own congregations, which led to the institution of the Presbyterian Church of England in 1876. In 1972, it became a part of the United Reformed Church of England and Wales. Puritanism: Puritanism in English was a seventeenth century development but its roots can be traced back to the questioning of spiritual slackness in the Church and to the call for a stricter adherence to the principles of the Bible during the Renaissance. The term ‘Puritan’ referred to those Protestants who were not satisfied with the Elizabethan settlement of the religious imbroglio following the break-up with the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. Many of these puritans sought to expel the elements of Catholicism that had been retained as part of the Church of English. They desired more cleansing of the Anglican Church by implementing a set of principles that would get rid of the unscriptural aspects and highlight the pure constituents of Christianity in English. The Puritans were initially interested in bringing about a change in the constitution of the Anglican Church by weeding out the ornaments, vestments, and organs that were deemed unnecessary. The attempt gained a political colour when some of the extreme Puritans mounted an attack on episcopacy with the aim of replacing the government by a group of elders from the Church. This move, to politically wrench power, gained momentum from around 1570. Originally, the term ‘Puritan’ was used as a metaphor for derision suggesting the position of inferiority and also as a term of abuse when it first came into currency in the Elizabethan age. The primary objection of the Puritans was directed towards certain aspects of Church practice which they believed were not in accordance with the principles laid down in the scriptures. For instance, they objected to the wearing of the surplice and to the prelates being involved in government while they sought to take part in the communion in the sitting posture. Of the many demands made by the Puritans in the Millenary Petition (1603), the ones most striking were: reform of the church courts, abolition of outmoded and superstitious customs, disowning the Apocryphal books of the Bible as being insignificant as religious documents, and a strict observance of the Sabbath. It is also remarkable that many of the beliefs associated with Puritanism are not justified. For instance, these Puritans did not behave in the

way they are usually considered to have done—they were neither, as a group, teetotallers, nor were completely fanatical against dance, art, or music. There were many scholars, common people, and reformists under their fold. Puritanism has been seen as the logical outgrowth of the Renaissance and of the Reformation where many of the corrupt practices of the Church were brought to the notice of the common people. The Reformists’ insistence on the centrality of the Bible was a call for an individual response to God at the expense of the prescribed format of the Catholics. In fact, originally, the term ‘Puritan’ was used to signify those Protestant reformers who did not accept the Elizabethan Settlement. The Protestants who were opposed to the middle path of the Settlement preferred to accept the Geneva position which was associated with the strict views of the Reformist John Calvin. The maintenance of Bishops in the Anglican Church appeared to these extreme Protestants to be against the spirit of reform; in fact any continuation of the Catholic institutional process (the wearing of vestments by priests or the maintaining of religious icons or images) went contrary to the idea of faith of the Puritans. The cultivation of simplicity and the advocacy of the antiCatholic position were two of the primary conditions of Puritanism in the sixteenth century. All Puritans, however, did not agree about the nature and style of reform or the cultivation of faith. As such, there emerged many divisions within the Puritans: Presbyterians Brownists or Congregationalists, Baptists, and the Quakers. After the Elizabethan Settlement, although the immediate crisis of conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants was negotiated, the puritans refused to submit to such a compromise. They continued to grow and gather forces and their impact could be seen in the towns where they were able to win both patronage and sympathy from all the classes. This was not surprising, given the belligerent attitude of some of the Reformists who sought to give the Puritans a bad name by degrading their love of simplicity. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Elizabeth’s reign had come to a close, the Puritans’ growth was gradually being manifested in different ways. Puritan aggressiveness, was in fact one of the reasons behind the Civil War (1642–46) being so swiftly over; the control over the political faith of the country was one of heights of Puritanism in English history. When Oliver Cromwell wrested power from Charles I, there was a change in the functioning of the government as politics and religion merged to produce a model of administration that did not have any scope for

the royalty. The happy days of the Commonwealth were overturned when the restoration of the monarchy took place in 1660. The re-entry of monarchy into the political arena of English, signalled a difficult time for the Puritans. They were not allowed to take part in the Church of English, and more tellingly, the right to free religious worship was also denied. It was not until the Toleration Act of 1689 that the Puritans were granted the right of free worship, but then, their world was affected by the monarchical restoration too severely to be the same as before. By the time the eighteenth century, was through, the attitude of the administration and the Church of English toned down quite a bit—a matter affected by the emergence of other options of faith such as Methodism, which carried many of the conditions that characterised Puritanism. With the passage of the nineteenth century, the Puritans, who were usually now seen as the Nonconformists, began to find some social recognition—they were permitted to fight elections to Parliament only in 1829, and by the time the universities of Cambridge and Oxford opened its doors to them, it was 1871. The significance of a puritan lifestyle, however, went beyond the strictures prescribed by the condition of faith that went along with the official label, and as such, all followers of that culture weren’t necessarily ‘Puritans.’ One of the characteristics commonly associated with the puritan attitude was the view that it cultivated a hostility to the arts and entertainment industry. This wasn’t always literally true—Spenser and his contemporaries were puritans in that they followed a moral path but not doctrinally—while the opposition to some of the liberties taken by the theatre of Elizabethan times was based on a moral structure sanctioned by the official Puritan position. It is also difficult to disentangle the nature of the literary status of a work (Milton’s writings are one example) from the contemporary cultural climate, which included Puritanism as one of its influences. Milton’s works are influenced by the condition of Puritanism and they emanate from the context imbued by that culture, but they are also works that extend beyond the bounds of such structures. Bunyan, another Puritan writer of Milton’s age, exhibited the conditions of Puritanism through the apparatus of prose, but in spite of the scriptural backing of a work like The Pilgrim’s Progress, it was criticised by many Puritans as being too fictional to be relevant as a religious discourse. In spite of the claims of the secular and the religious, to which texts like Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress have to submit to, it is their

multidimensional cultural conditioning that organises them as major examples of English literature. Quakers: The term ‘Quakers’ refers to the members of the religious sect called ‘Society of Friends’ which appeared in the middle of the seventeenth century. The members of the Society believed in conducting their lives by following the ‘inward light’ which was based on a direct correspondence with the experience of God. Quakerism highlighted the significance of the direct relation between God and the individual without the mediation of any other agency. George Fox (1624–91) was the most articulate proponent of the group. The fact that the Society refused to adhere to the ideology of the Church angered a lot of people but their reliance on a direct mode of apprehension was in line with the basic assumption of Puritanism. Along with Fox, James Nayler, Edward Burrough, William Dewsbury, and Richard Farnworth were the major members of the group. The activities of Quakers began in Swarthmoor, in Lancashire, around the 1650s, and within a few decades, the number of converts had increased to almost sixty thousand. The insistence on a direct correspondence was taken to the extreme limit by Fox and his followers, which was viewed with doubt even by the Puritans. From the very beginning, the Quakers were moving against the general tide of faith and the Quaker Act (1662) was only a recognition of their outcast status in contemporary England. Quakers spread to America in the 1650s. In the twentieth century, membership of the Society of Friends has extended to other European countries and Africa, but the number of adherents has always remained quite small. Royal Society: The Royal Society was founded in London, in 1660, after the restoration of Charles II to the English throne. The complete title of the Society was ‘The Royal Society of London for Promoting Natural Knowledge.’ The genesis of the Royal Society can be traced back to a discussion that took place in the mid-1640s on the issue of the ‘new’ philosophy. The foundation date of the Royal Society is 28 November 1660; this is the day when twelve members of the group gathered at Gresham College following a lecture by Christopher Wren, the distinguished Gresham Professor of Astronomy. The decision to start ‘a College for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’ was taken in the light of the developments in the world of science, many of which were indeed

revolutionary. Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Sir Robert Moray, William, and Viscount Brouncker were among those present when the Society’s formation process was initiated. It was decided that once a week the Society would go through and discuss the relevance of recent experiments and findings. While Robert Hooke was the first Curator of Experiments, Robert Moray was responsible for securing the permission and approval of the king. It is interesting to note that the group was initially without a definite name and the appearance of ‘The Royal Society’ in print in 1661 was followed by an announcement in the second Royal Charter (1663), where ‘The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge’ was the term used to describe it. The Royal Society was based at Gresham College, the place where it first germinated. The Royal Society was located for a time in Arundel House after the Great Fire of London (1666), and in 1710 it had its own premises in Crane Court. The Society was extremely ambitious in that it aimed to accommodate any form of knowledge under its purview. It was deigned that the Society would encourage the cultivation and nurturing of a lucid and sound intellectual attitude, the best reflection and example of which was Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667). Sprat’s example paved the way for a series of important intellectual and scientific engagements that shaped the course of serious English discourse for the next several years. The Royal Society emerged as a model for scientists and writers alike and the Neo-classical bent came to be closely associated with the kind of position the Society sought to espouse in its early years. Philosophical Transactions (started 1665) was published with the aim of making available to scientists and thinkers a forum to organise and present their intellectual positions for a healthy debate on certain issues. Initially, the Royal Society’s members followed a process of election, which being vague, made it possible for non-professional scientists to get membership. There was a change in the election procedure in 1731 when it was decided that candidates required to be proposed in writing which had to be backed by a certificate by the supporter. The drive for patronage gained momentum when Sir Joseph Banks took over charge as President of the Royal Society, as he initiated a series of measures to accommodate both working scientists and members who were willing to financially support it. These interesting developments took place when the Royal Society had moved to its new quarters at Somerset House. By 1847,

however, such laxity was done away with and it was decided that individuals would gain the privilege of membership only if they could show competent scientific work. The nineteenth century thus saw a remarkable degree of professionalism developing as a major feature of the Royal Society. The grant of £1000 by the government in 1850 was an economic security that enabled the Society to develop the organisation adequately. In spite of such close ties with the administration, the Royal Society has maintained its autonomy. The Royal Society now has about a hundred and twenty employees and is situated in Carlton House Terrace, England. South Sea Bubble: The crisis confronting the early eighteenth century economy of England was sparked off by the collapse of prices in 1720, a phenomenon that is closely associated with the speculation that caused the economic ‘bubble’ to burst in the South Sea Company begun by Robert Harley in 1711. Interestingly, the Company received exclusive rights to trade in Spanish South America, which was then one of the very exciting trade possibilities following the expansionist culture of colonialism. The actual benefits from exclusive rights, however, did not come to Harley and his Company until 1713, when the War of Spanish Succession ended. Moreover, the rights were not as wide-ranging as Harley had envisaged and his speculation based on proposed projection of profits in the entire enterprise did not materialise in exact financial terms. The £10 million of government bonds that Harley took to exchange them with bondholders appeared to be seriously off target as the 6 per cent interest on these shares turned out to be a liability. The fact that the Company did not embark on an actual expedition until 1717, was further affected by its inability to make much out of the enterprise. By 1718, the relations between Spain and Britain soured considerably and it affected the fortunes of the South Sea Company as well. With the gap between the promise and the realisation widening, the Company took another burden of £2 million of public debt. With matters not working out for the better, in 1719 the Company proposed the taking of the entire national debt of the country—estimated at £30,981,712—which was in turn equated with an offering of the Company’s stock at 5 per cent. The proposal was devised to earn profits and gain control over the country’s economic resources unlike any other private body. The fact that the Bank of England had also made a similar proposal and that the South Sea Company’s proposal was accepted with slight modification in April 1720 enhanced the impression

of the Company in the public eye. The government debt of £50 million in 1719 thus became the prerogative of the South Sea Company. The Company started creating an atmosphere of economic boom through the agency of ‘rumours’ which led to a ‘speculation frenzy.’ The valuation of shares increased from £128 in January 1720 to £550 by the month of May of the same year. The craze about enormous profits promised through foreign ventures was immediately caught up by other joint-stock companies, which led to the creation of ‘bubbles.’ The sudden flood of economic schemes or ‘bubbles’ led the government to introduce the Bubble Act in June 1720, which mandated that all companies required the grant of the Royal Charter. The shares of the South Sea Company shot up to an unprecedented £890 in June itself as it was granted the Royal Charter. The rise of prices led to a selling frenzy, and as the Company’s agents bought the shares the prices stabilised at £750. Even though the price reached £1000 in August, the selling trend had started and the fall in price was inevitable. In August, the company was due to pay the instalments which created enormous pressure on the generation of liquid funds. By September-end, the £150 share price created a crisis as the loss of credibility affected banks and individual investors. The Parliament sat in December (the share price had reached £124 in December) to address the matter by initiating an investigation. The enquiry revealed that many investors were destroyed by the ‘bubble,’ while at least three ministers were involved in speculation and corruption. Although the Company survived till 1853, most of its rights had been bought by the Spanish government in 1750. Whigs and Tories: The word ‘Whig’ came into circulation after the crisis of the Exclusion Bill (1678–81) in England. A supporter of the ‘exclusion’ of James II from the seats of power in England, Ireland, and Scotland was known as a Whig. The Tory, on the other hand, opposed the Whig position. The terms (Whig and Tory) were used as forms of abuse (whiggamor: a cattle driver or sometimes used to refer to horse thieves, and tory: outlaw in Irish). The implications of the terms, however, were considerably extended to accommodate wider political and cultural affiliations. The Whigs were identified with nobility and religious dissent while the Tories were seen as being sympathetic to the Church of England. In the context of early eighteenth century politics, the Whigs and the Tories did not really position themselves as political parties in the modern sense. During the period of

Hanoverian control, the Whigs were occupying the place of prominence but by the time of George III, there was a resurgence of the Tories. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Whigs remained out of political favour. Lord Grey, who came back to lead the Whig revival in 1830, initiated a series of reformist moves, beginning with the Reform Act of 1832. The influence of the Whig position could be seen in the view circulated by Thomas Babington Macaulay, which suggested that the essential line of English history was nothing but a process of progression from the Restoration to Lord Grey’s assumption of power in the early nineteenth century. By the nineteenth century, the Whig elements in the British political system were assimilated within the broader spectrum of the Liberal party. The Tories have been closely associated with the Conservative Party in modern British politics, and in spite of the original connotation of abuse, it is seen in contemporary Britain to refer to the policies, conduct, and character of the Conservative party. One of the important phases in the history of the Conservative party in the twentieth century is associated with Thatcherism, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the party is faced with the challenge of upstaging the ‘New’ Labour led by Tony Blair.

3 English Society and Culture in the Nineteenth Century ROMANTICISM The Context of Romanticism Romanticism, a term overused in literary and critical discourse, was a multidimensional movement of the early nineteenth century embracing a variety of art forms which evoked wide-ranging responses from both its practitioners and critics. In a well-anthologised essay ‘On the Discriminations of Romanticisms’ A.O. Lovejoy analyses the difficulties of situating the term definitively: What, then, can be done to clear up, or to diminish, this confusion of terminology and of thought, which has, for a century, been a scandal of literary history and criticism, and is still, as it would not be difficult to show, copiously productive of historical errors and of dangerously undiscriminating diagnoses of the moral and aesthetic maladies of our age? The one radical remedy—namely, that we should all cease talking about Romanticism—is, I fear, certain not to be adopted. It would probably be equally futile to attempt to prevail upon scholars and critics to restrict their use of the term to a single and reasonably well-defined sense (Lovejoy, in Abrams 1960: 7). The contestations over the meaning(s) of Romanticism are part of literary folklore. Nevertheless, certain characteristics of the development in the English literary history of the nineteenth century can be analysed. For instance, Romantic poetics favoured and privileged the function of the imagination in a way that was designed as a form of reaction to the principles of the preceding age. Commenting on this aspect of Romanticism, C.M. Bowra writes: “If we wish to distinguish a single characteristic which differentiates the English Romantics from the poets of the eighteenth century, it is to be found in the importance which they attached to the imagination and in the special view which they held of it” (Bowra 1961: 1). Almost all the Romantic writers and artists articulated their positions on the function of the

imagination in different ways, and contradictions between them regarding the nuances of the term highlight the intensity with which they approached it. The Coleridgean position regarding the imagination is perhaps the most well known as it was presented through a form of critical discourse in his Biographia Literaria (1817), but Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Lamb, and Hazlitt held interesting views on the significance of the ‘imagination’. In the history of the eighteenth century literary studies, imagination was already in circulation as a term designating the creative process and often synonymised with wit and fancy. Coleridge and the other Romantics re-visited the term to provide it a specific orientation that addressed their poetic concerns adequately. It is in this context that the term ‘imagination’ comes to acquire a special significance in the hands of the Romantic writers who considered it to be an integral part of the creative process. The focus on the imagination also meant that the self was prioritised above the social image that guided much of the eighteenth century literary studies. The centrality of the self, then, constitutes another feature of Romantic literature. It must be noted, however, that the sense of unity that seems to be a characteristic of English Romanticism, was not exactly there, even though the poets and thinkers arrived at similar conclusions through different routes. Neither did the writers agree on the usage nor the function of the term, and the variations within them in fact showcase the highly individualistic character of these writers, which is closely associated with the element of subjectivity in Romanticism. As a response to the intellectually engaged rationalistic phase in the eighteenth century thought and writing, Romanticism moved away from the Enlightenment focus on reason to cultivate and foster a poetics of subjectivity, freedom, and imagination. These writers also privileged the functions of feeling and sensation, which was most pronounced in Keats, and constituent features of Romantic aesthetics. While subjectivity and the focus on the freedom of the individual became important principles of Romanticism, the articulation and orchestration of the same was varied. The political developments of the American and French Revolutions were important matrices that seemed to many of the Romantics to embody in practice some of the principles that they sought to represent through their writings. Irrespective of the actual outcome of the given political exigencies they related to, the seer and the visionary in the Romantic overwhelmed the immediate physical condition to revel in the philosophic potential through

imaginative visualisation. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Romantics have been labelled as dreamers by later critics and poets, more so in the modern age, when it became increasingly difficult to sympathise with the possibilities of a visionary aesthetics. The Romantic ideal was often realised through the agency of dreamers, revolutionaries, reactionaries, or loners—a situation that was fairly removed from the socially programmed aesthetics of the NeoClassical tradition. Early Romantic poetry was devised to suggest a reactionary poetics with a deliberately worked out intensity and many of the poems of the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge are influenced, by this condition. The excess of individualism or the use of the imagination to present other socially relevant views was also responsible for the extremely sensationalised narratives of the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the most representative of the genre being Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In fact, the tendencies of the Romantic movement were foreshadowed in the poetry of the transitional poets like Thomas Gray, Thomas Chatterton, and William Cowper. Before the formal launch of the Romantic agenda through the publication of Lyrical Ballads, the search for an alternative poetics was well underway but it was only in the early years of the nineteenth century that the realisation was more elaborately announced. The Romantic impulse, then, was propelled by a desire to find out a new frame through which to engage the world, a process that found in the valorisation of the individual an adequate device for the fulfilment of such a design. Commenting on the philosophy behind the composition of the poems incorporated in Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge writes in Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria: “During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry—the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination (Coleridge 1997: 179). Novelty of expression was also adopted by the Romantic writers in other genres. Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, for instance, reoriented the essay form to exhibit their ‘personal’ inclinations, and the heady mix of autobiography and a well-devised imagination constituted essential features of the essay in the Romantic period. In the novel form, Jane Austen and

Walter Scott were trying out different formats to showcase their innovations; while Austen parodied the sensationalised fictional heritage that preceded her by inaugurating a particular brand of ‘romance’ narratives, Scott contextualised the historical sense through narratives that dealt with remarkable protagonists. Another important aspect of English Romanticism is that the writers associated with it came from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds and had very personalised themes, which weren’t devised to suggest the existence or even development of a ‘school.’ It is in this context that Romanticism’s character in England presented many faces. It may seem that the novel of manners practised by Jane Austen is distant from the thematic orientations of the poets, and while in adopting different paradigms for representing the romantic ideal, Austen and Wordsworth may have organised their motifs in individual ways—they were similarly informed by a poetics that was devised as a reaction against the Neo-Classical propensities of the preceding age. The idea of ‘Romantic taste,’ often engaged through a variety of mechanisms, from Charles Lamb to Mary Shelley, was behind the schematic formulations of the writers in the early nineteenth century as they sought to demonstrate the efficacy of an alternative to the prescriptions of eighteenth century rationalism. If the sophistication of the Romantics is seen as a design, it was not organised as part of a genteel programme, and such a differentiation of the aesthetic and intellectual character must be situated within the frame of the conditions of early nineteenth century culture. It is imperative to notice the significance of the French Revolution, not simply for what it demonstrated but also for the possibilities it suggested to the English Romantic writers. The appeal of the French Revolution lay in the fact that it brought about the collapse of the old regime and necessitated a system change. More than the change of the power situation, it was the symbolic appropriation of the Revolution that enticed the Romantics. The upheaval in France, however, could not sustain the pressures of the promises it made within the country and subsequently led to the disillusionment of the Romantics who believed in the potentiality of such promises. The Romantic period in the English literary history contained the germs of many ideological structures that have continued since: liberty/domination, individuality/social responsibility, past/present, tradition/change, innocence/experience, and man/nature. The perspectives offered by the situation of Romanticism, then,

presents interesting counters through which interrogations of many social structures were made possible.

Romantic Poetry The poetry of the early nineteenth century is primarily characterised by its emphasis on a poetics of subjectivity where the celebration of the self in a supposedly unornamental language was posited by the most well-known of the Romantics, William Wordsworth. The Romantic movement in English poetry is said to have made its appearance through a co-production, that of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, titled Lyrical Ballads, which was published in 1798. The fixing of a literary and cultural movement to such a date is not without its problems. According to some, the Romantic position was evident in the works of Thomas Gray and the Graveyard School, while William Blake’s poetic experiments not only pre-date the WordsworthColeridge effort but also show the possibilities of Romanticism in English for the first time. The usual consideration of the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, as the beginning of Romantic poetry in England, is thus provisional though extremely convenient in terms of historical arrangement. The poetry of Blake, noted for its visionary intensity, exhibits many of the Romantic concerns. His first verse collection, Poetical Sketches (1783), demonstrates his frustration with the existing Neo-classical tradition and he tried to work out a new idiom which could accommodate his themes. Blake, however, did not find any model to go by in the examples offered by the poets immediately before him, and it is not surprising that he sought inspiration from writers who deviated from the Augustan convention, such as Collins and Chatterton. Instead of following the demands of the heroic couplet, Blake worked out his ideas through new rhythms and unconventional rhyming patterns. Poetical Sketches, although representative of Blake’s early career, is a good example of poetic innovation. Consider the following poem from Blake’s first poetic collection:

To Spring O thou, with dewy locks, who lookest down Thro’ the clear windows of the morning; turn Thine angel eyes upon our western isle, Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring! The hills tell each other, and the list’ning Vallies hear; all our longing eyes are turned Up to thy bright pavillions: issue forth, And let thy holy feet visit our clime. Come o’er the eastern hills, and let our winds Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste Thy morn and evening breath; scatter they pearls Upon our love-sick land that mourns for thee. O deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put Thy golden crown upon her languish’d head, Whose modest tresses were bound up for thee! The poem’s erratic rhyme patterns evoke a sense of spontaneous response, which the Augustan poetics would not have been able to accommodate. Blake continued to experiment with verse forms and given the fact that he was also an artist, the combination of art and verse resulted in the production of relief etching, which he started in 1788 and which was responsible for most of his later productions having very few copies, as it was an extremely laborious process. This is another reason why Blake’s poetry cannot be read simply as any other text, for the accompanying painting or sketch is a necessary complement and constitutes the whole. The publication of Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) was remarkable not just for the contrasting positions taken up in the ‘innocence’ and ‘experience’ sections, but also for the departure it marked from the Neo-classical tradition. Accompanied by drawings to guide the reader (the drawings were loaded with symbolic significance), the poems of this collection show the effectiveness of symbolic compression. The poems from the first section (which was also published independently as a single volume as Songs of Innocence in 1789) are

designed to suggest a kind of naïveté that is spiritually sanctioned and not unsullied by corruption, one theme which appears in the Songs of Experience. Poems like ‘The Tyger’ are among the most anthologised of Blake’s poems, but at the same time these are also his most accessible verses. Blake went on to work out his vision of the world, which was manifested in a mythic design with extremely complex symbolism informing it. From about 1795 to 1820, Blake continued to develop this mythology. His prose aphorisms titled There is no Natural Religion, All Religions are One (c.1788) and commentary titled The French Revolution: A Poem in Seven Books exhibit his radical views on nature, society, and religion. In 1790, Blake engraved The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, another prose work that expressed his dissatisfaction with the contemporary tendencies. The characters of his personal mythology first appeared in The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Other books that built upon his mythic structure include The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Los and The Song of Los (1795). Interestingly, the structure of Blake inverts the frame adopted by Milton in Paradise Lost. The manner in which Blake wrote makes it difficult to arrange the poems in a chronological order. The fact that his visions constituted important motifs in his poetry, which were often textured with his personal symbolism, makes him one of the most inaccessible English poets. The poetry of William Wordsworth (1770–1850), on the other hand, was both popular and accessible to his contemporaries. Wordsworth inaugurated a new poetic idiom and sought to invigorate the world of poetry through a worldview that departed from and was settled against the poetics of the NeoClassical age. The publication of the Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, in 1798 was technically a collaborative effort in association with Coleridge, but the primary contributor was Wordsworth. The collection is a landmark in English literary history for the ‘break’ it initiated with the preceding Johnsonian tradition and also because it showed the possibilities of the English language for the new philosophy that informed Romantic poetry. One of the most remarkable poems of the collection was Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth’s meditative reworking of past experience in conjunction with the perspective of the present. The poem begins by announcing the passage of time and its impact on the poet’s vision:

Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur. Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. Like many other poetic evocations of Wordsworth, these lines also present the self as the central motif in an engagement that situates atmosphere, condition, and changes in situation through the agency of the poet’s perception. This engagement of the self for the purpose of prioritising the nature/man relation was one of the dominant characteristics of Wordsworth’s poetry. There has been, however, sometimes a reductionist position that sees him as a ‘nature’ poet, which though not incorrect, is inadequate to accommodate other important aspects of his craft. Lyrical Ballads contains some of the most representative Wordsworth poems. His celebration of rustic life (something he emphasised in the ‘Preface’ to the Second Edition of the collection) is evident in poems like ‘Simon Lee’ and ‘Lines Written in Early Spring.’ The ‘Preface’ was expanded in the Third Edition of 1802 and it contains some of his important views on the subject of poetry. Commenting on the project of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes: “The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and

consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” (Wordsworth, in Leitch et al 2001: 650). The ‘Preface’ is remarkable as a manifesto of English Romanticism, even though Coleridge and the other Romantics had reservations about some of the positions articulated in it. There has also been considerable debate regarding the practice of the poetic principles by Wordsworth himself in his poetry. The fact that the First Edition of the Lyrical Ballads was sold out is an important commentary on its reception and the evolution of romantic ‘taste.’ The period of 1798–99 was one of prolific output and major poems like The Prelude (which was expanded in 1805, and even revised later) were written during this time. It is interesting to note that though Wordsworth lived well into the Victorian age, most of his poems were produced by 1807, with only The Excursion (1814) and the collected poems of 1815 following it. Wordsworth was unable to produce the exuberance of his great period later but continued to revise some of his early works. The Prelude, one of the greatest poems in the English language, was designed as an autobiographical account, but it not only celebrates the self of the poet but also provides an interesting picture of the imagination at work. It also contains many of the themes that preoccupied Wordsworth throughout his career. In the twelfth book of The Prelude, for instance, he writes:

Oh Soul of Nature, excellent and fair! That didst rejoice with me, with whom I too Rejoiced, through early Youth, before the winds And roaring waters, and in lights and shades That marched and countermarched the hills

Wordsworth’s collaborator in the Lyrical Ballads, Samuel Taylor Coleridge who contributed the poem with the ‘supernatural’ element The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was more philosophically inclined than his partner. While some of Coleridge’s poems are justly famous, they were often conditioned by sudden spurts of the creative process and it is perhaps one of the reasons behind the fact that many of his productions remained incomplete. In Coleridge’s poems, unlike the central thesis of nature’s relation to man in Wordsworth, moral concerns and a fascination for the unknown is well represented. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner exhibits aspects of the Romantic temper that were carefully orchestrated with the matrices of spirituality, guilt and desire. The poem is also a “romance” tale in that it narrativises a journey from innocence to experience through the frame of an actual travel structure. The simplicity of the verses is designed to foreground the deeply philosophical import by engaging the conflict faced by the mariner. The poem has significant fluctuating moments of calm and tension with gripping lines that graphically evoke the conflict raging within the mariner. Consider the following lines from the poem:

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.

The evocation of mystery and suspense in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner had an element of magic and supernaturalism in it, and in other poems like ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’ the use of his imaginative resources showed his adeptness at handling similar poetic themes. Both ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel’ however, emerge from different narrative frames than The Rime of the Ancient Mariner but the orientation of the imagination is characteristically Coleridgean. The interruption that eventually led to the incompleteness of ‘Kubla Khan’ is one of the most well recorded episodes of literary folklore and the appeal of the verses is not just because of such a history but for the poetry as well. The opening lines of the poem have a magical element about it:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river ran, Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

A romantic figure in terms of the image he had among his contemporaries, George Gordon, Lord Byron was very much inspired by the Classicism of Pope and Johnson. In providing the age with the idea of the ‘Byronic hero’, this romantic poet contributed to the creation of a myth that found manifestations through a variety of agencies which included his personage as well as his poetry. It was not unusual for his contemporaries to see the characters he created through the image he had in public life, and a strand of authentic correspondence between the man and his works was sought to be constructed by the readers of Byron’s poetry. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) is one of those poems which have provided the ground for the association between the character and the creator. A restless wanderer, Childe Harold, undergoes a series of experiences that moves alternately from despair to promise. Although Childe Harold is often taken as the epitome of the Byronic hero, other aspects of the figure were represented in Manfred (1817), who is also an outcast and rebel and his attractiveness lies in his fascination for and indulgence in the forbidden. The influence of Pope and the satirical tradition, however, is best exemplified in his semi-autobiographical Don Juan. The poem is an adventure tale and a comic exploration of the ‘romance’ theme with Byron’s commentary on the state of contemporary society informing it. Unlike Pope, Byron’s satirical propensity is not corrective by design and lacks the incisiveness of his eighteenth century predecessor. Another Romantic poet who has been closely identified with the image of the rebel is Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s reactionary impulse, however, was directed towards the ideal configuration of a society where individual freedom would not be coerced by the politics of manipulation. In many of his poems, Shelley engaged this theme through different structures. ‘The Revolt of Islam’ (1818) deals with such a cry for liberty but its length has been a constraint for many readers. In poems like Ode to the West Wind, Shelley’s imaginative resources are best exhibited as he successfully combines the exotic with the familiar:

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened Earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Shelley wrote both long poems and shorter lyrics. He was one of the most gifted English poets and could combine a highly philosophic intent with the demands of the sense-experience. If his idealism has been seen as the most characteristic feature of his verse, it is not without justification; Shelley had great control over his resources and his classic Prometheus Unbound (1820) exemplifies that feature distinctly. Politics and social concern were never far from Shelley’s vision and his best poems represent the consistent movement between the ideal and the real. The ideal/real conflict occupied the youngest of the Romantic poets, John Keats as well. In his six major odes, Keats dealt with the conflict between the world of lived experience and eternity. Death, suffering, decay, and disease are opposed to the conditions of truth, beauty, and imagination. His longer poems weren’t as successful as the shorter ones, perhaps because he could not sustain that imaginative spirit over a longer narrative stretch, and while there are brilliant passages in Endymion, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Hyperion they do not have the cohesiveness of a longer Shelley narrative. The career of Keats was remarkably short and often characterised by frustrations resulting from the experience and foreboding of physical decay. The fact that his early poetic efforts were not well received by the critics further affected Keats. From the composition of ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ in 1816 to his death in 1821, Keats produced some of greatest verses in the English language. His sensuousness and fascination for the ‘truth’ of the imagination guided him in his visions of a realm that he envisaged as an alternative to reality. This conflict between the ideal and the real is beautifully worked out in his odes. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ Keats presents this situation thus:

Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain – To thy high requiem become a sod.

In many of his poems, Keats reworked Classical themes which shows his fascination for the heritage of the past. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ and Hyperion exemplify this Keatsian tendency well.

The Novel in the Romantic Period Although the novel form emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the popular literary genres, its two most accomplished practitioners in the Romantic period—Jane Austen and Walter Scott—chose to depart from the examples of Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett and devised their own models to engage their fictional enterprises. Jane Austen chose a method that concentrated upon the minute features of a segment of a given society, and this engagement of the specifics actually enabled her to orient her themes through structures that she could control with ease. In fact, one of the characteristics of the Austen novel is the sense of great control over the narrative—a condition that shows itself in the compactness of her plots. Jane Austen was also reacting against varieties of excess, including sentimentalism, which the preceding practitioners of the genre had bequeathed her. Without being overtly didactic or satirical, Austen used the ironic mode to create some of the most compelling stuff in English fiction. Critics have commented on the absence of the war experience in her novels at a time when the Napoleonic conflict was raging, but then Austen was focussing on areas of society that could be well engaged without reference to the war. The fact that Austen was neither comprehensive nor concerned with the macroscopic social frame does not take away her qualities as a fiction writer. If a limited number of characters and a selected social strain served her purpose, it was perhaps because she felt most comfortable with such a design. Although her novels were published in the early nineteenth century, they were mostly conceptualised and framed within chosen narrative structures in the 1790s itself. All of Austen’s novels deal with the womencentred themes that achieve the goal of marriage through the experience of love, even though the patterning of the process is not always similar. The Austen novels also fit the structure of the classic romantic fiction but the way the transformations of the heroines are organised shows the novelist’s use of subtle yet telling ironic modes. The achievement of the goal of marriage is not possible without the process of realisation, which is actually an index to

the growth of the character. In Pride and Prejudice, for instance, Elizabeth Bennet’s acknowledgment of self-growth is placed within the ambit of realised love: She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man, who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was a union that must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgement, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance (Austen 1996: 252). Austen strives to situate the balance between the sexes in terms of social order and while the politics of a gendered society runs as an undercurrent, the negotiation is presented in terms of mutual benefit. This pattern is present in almost all of her novels, but all the heroines (Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is one) are not as confident as Elizabeth. It has been rightly noted that the “attainment of self-knowledge on the part of the heroine is always part of Miss Austen’s theme” (Allen 1958: 115). Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion are her other novels. The novelistic universe of Jane Austen was peopled with characters that were realised to a great extent by the situations in which they were placed and though the range was limited by both design and orientation, the preoccupations engaged important ‘issues’ that addressed the exigencies of life itself. Jane Austen’s craft was characterised by her great sense of irony and wit, which was conditioned by a remarkable use of understatedness. One of the commonly held opinions about Austen is that she reworks the Cinderella theme in most of her novels, which though not untrue, is not the entire story. The gentry, which, for instance, occupies such an important role in the social scale of her novels, is not presented as a block but realised through the critical apparatus that Austen brings in to visualise all the aspects of her novels. The self-imposed limitations in the Jane Austen novel, however, do not concern the representative mode of her contemporary, Walter Scott. Scott uses the framework of the historical narrative to recreate the codes of chivalric society in the Waverley novels. The early Waverley fictions, from Waverley (1814) to The Bride of Lamermoor (1819), are engagements that

draw from the resources of an envisaged past and unlike Austen, where individual relations mattered, here the system’s structural necessities are organised as frames within which the heroes and the heroines are placed. The forces of history and the cultural mechanisms of the posited societies provide the novels the designs through which the fortunes of the characters are presented. It is not possible for a character of a Scott novel to shape the direction of his destiny without recognising the implications of social forces. The historical perspective, which can be limiting as a structural frame, is however, used by Scott to perpetuate a fictional process where situations and individual responses are combined to contribute to the final effect. In Ivanhoe (1819), for instance, the reign of Richard I is recreated but the lines of reference go back to the times of King Alfred. In setting the novel in the context of the Anglo-Norman period, Scott reworks the politics of the age which provides intrigue which continually influences the love story. Historians have viewed Scott’s rendering of the Norman-Saxon conflict with scepticism but an ‘authentic’ rendering of historical ‘facts’ is not the novel’s purpose. Like the other successful historical novels of Scott, Ivanhoe combines romance, myth, and history with the fantastic and the mysterious. Scott was a remarkable storyteller with a panache for the unusual, and by blending the fictions with the carefully chosen historical strands he achieves the compelling effect in many of his tales. Scott is also recognised as one who could wonderfully evoke the atmosphere of the past, and his romanticism lay in the vivid recapturing of a past that is revived through the agency of a vibrant imagination. Rob Roy (1817), the adventurous story set in the eighteenth century, is another of Scott’s narratives that successfully engages the political and the individual to reconstruct the figure of Rob Roy. Like Ivanhoe, Rob Roy too departs from the traditional account but revels in the imaginative recreation of the source material. Scott’s re-writing of history and the process through which he brought back historical figures to life were patterned through modes of fiction that weren’t as successfully engaged previously. The success of Scott marked the popularisation of the historical novel genre. In spite of the fact that Scott’s reputation declined after the nineteenth century, his influence on the Victorian novelists was undeniable.

Romantic Prose

The prose writers of the early nineteenth century, like their Romantic contemporaries who used the imagination in verse, sought to represent the self in all its possibilities. In a work like Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), the primary focus is on the elaboration of the process of creativity. Coleridge engages the creative faculty, which for him, like many of the English Romantics, resided in the imagination and a major part of the book is devoted to this aspect. Coleridge was greatly affected by the current of German thought and that influence is discernible in his prose writings. The book has acquired a canonical status as text of Romanticism, in spite of the fact that many of its assumptions are left half-way and some of the theories are alleged to have been heavily influenced by Continental philosophy. While Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria was a ‘biography’ of the aesthetic process, some of the prose works of other writers of the period were confessional in nature. Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater was published in The London Magazine in 1821. De Quincey combines his analysis of opium addiction with a commentary on aspects of his life before and after he got the habit. The work was immensely successful and influenced a lot of nineteenth century writers like Francis Thompson and the American Edgar Allan Poe. The subconscious world of the subject provides De Quincey ample scope to imaginatively recreate the experience. The Romantic fascination for the self found in the essays of Charles Lamb (1775–1834) a new aesthetic frame. Lamb is now known for the essays he contributed to The London Magazine under the pseudonym of Elia which ran from 1821 to 1823. Besides these ‘Elia’ essays, Lamb had also written prose pieces in other journals (‘On the Character and Genius of Hogarth’ in Reflector, 1811 and ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare’ in Quarterly Review, 1814). But more than the writings on various subjects that were scattered in different journals, it was the essays written as Elia that brought him fame. The essays were so popular that Lamb brought out a second series in 1833 titled Last Essays of Elia. Some of the pieces in these two books are anthologised as examples of Romantic celebration of the self. The ‘celebration’ as such in Lamb is tinged with the condition of pathos and it is this blend that makes his writings so appealing. In Lamb, the genre of the personal essay found a new standard, and the way he fictionalised the self indicates the different conditions to which the experience of Romanticism could be submitted. William Hazlitt (1778–1830) began his career as prose

writer by discussing philosophical topics and by reviewing Malthus’s Essay on Population in 1807. By the early part of the second decade of the nineteenth century, Hazlitt switched from philosophy to literature and started writing essays in various journals and periodicals such as The Examiner, The Edinburgh Review, and The Champion. Hazlitt was also a very perceptive literary critic and his Characters of Shakespeare (1817) and Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) contain interesting insights on aesthetics and literary history. He had a more critical vision than Lamb as he used the agency of the self sparingly; this is perhaps one of the reasons why, in comparisons between Hazlitt and Lamb, the latter scores over the former, and also because of his image of ‘pathos.’ But both Lamb and Hazlitt dealt with different subjects and sought to visualise their realities through different paradigms. Hazlitt’s sense of critical judgement is best exemplified by the essays collected in The Spirit of the Age (1825), where a distinct incisiveness is framed by an engaging intellectual orientation. The work is important as an example of early literary criticism in English and contains insightful essays on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Lamb, and Scott. Among other writers of prose in the English Romantic period, Thomas Love Peacock and Leigh Hunt dealt with subjects that concerned contemporary interest. Hunt was himself the editor of journals and not only wrote for them but also determined the standards of literary taste. Peacock wrote novels and poems, but is today more famous for his Four Ages of Poetry (1820). Along with his Essay on Fashionable Literature (1818), his Four Ages suggest the possibilities of English prose in terms of subjects that examine the relation between art and social necessity.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The Context of the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution that shaped modern life in the West initially began in England. It was, however, not merely a nineteenth century phenomenon in that the genesis of this changeover lay in the years that went back to a period much beyond the realm of the Victorian era. Certain factors were responsible for the fact that the Industrial Revolution began in England rather than any other European country. In terms of labour availability and working conditions, the English situation offered a better social structure, one that was conducive to the factors involved in changing the face of industry in the West. The market structure in England was comparatively better than those existing in the Continent and there was a surplus of goods there, which made the production/supply equation a much more compatible engagement. The fact that the British Parliament provided encouragement to this condition of capitalist growth was evident in the emphasis given to the sanctioning of enclosures. Fields, pastures, and wastelands were brought under a system of enclosures which suggested a prioritising of capitalist economy. By the middle of the eighteenth century, English capital had grown to encompass unprecedented economic territories. The flow of money to the English market as well as the entrepreneur was tremendous; it brought a sense of material prosperity that was not part of the previous social and economic structure in England. More than the presence and circulation of money, however, other factors came into play in bringing about the Industrial Revolution in England. The English people, for instance, were programmed to consider the pursuit of wealth as a more valid and legitimate option than the citizens of other European countries, and one influence of this was the rapid expansion of the British Empire. Money-making became a pursuit that won social sanction and found many advocates who sought to justify such activities within the frame of necessity. It would, however, be naïve to assume that such a desire to materially upgrade oneself was characteristic of the British alone. But then, in the other urban and rural European centres the changes, in commercialisation and agricultural pattern, weren’t as rapid. The changes in England, thus, involved the reorientation of the commercial interests of people who earlier didn’t have the opportunity to consider such social upgrading as facilitated by

the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution provided scope to many of those who, in spite of belonging to the lower strata, could now envisage a climb up the economic ladder. The aspirations of these new social climbers weren’t well received in all quarters; but that was to be expected in a society so markedly divided along class lines. One of the major inducements contributing to industrial growth in England in the eighteenth century was the nature of the market. The nation’s market, in spite of its smaller size, was suitably tailored to meet the demands of the consumers, and the lack of a well-structured system of tolls and taxes made way for mobile and flexible market conditions. Economic growth was supplemented by the advancements made in movement which made travel and transportation of goods much cheaper, more comfortable, and considerably more accessible. Better conditions favouring movement of capital and manpower was aided by a favourable political climate in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The British Parliament was alert enough during these crucial years to respond to the needs of a growing economy. The situations of English politics, industry, and economy were intertwined in such a way that there was a mutual aiding of one another. Political astuteness and necessity were fuelled by a burgeoning economy and ever-expanding foreign and domestic markets. Colonialism was thus simultaneously a condition of and also facilitated by the Industrial Revolution.

The Growth of Industry in England The Industrial Revolution, as can be well visualised, was far from a uniform process; nor was it a pattern that manifested itself immediately. In different areas of Britain and in different aspects of industry, the process of technological growth and upgradation was not equally distributed. The first noticeable impact was felt in the textile industries. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the cotton industry was growing steadily. There was a considerable demand for cotton goods and the high tariff policy made import of cotton from the East Indies unfeasible. The restrictions placed on the importation of cotton from the established markets outside, in fact, paved the way for the growth of the domestic cotton industry. Indian raw material and also those gathered from the southern part of America were used by the English entrepreneurs for production at home. The situation in the eighteenth

century thus was conducive to the growth of the cotton industry. The necessary spark came from concurrent technological advancements which speeded up production dramatically. John Kay invented the flying shuttle in 1733 which made rapid weaving possible. Other inventions followed. The spinning jenny, which was invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, was a compound spinning wheel and it could produce sixteen threads simultaneously. The drawback of this instrument was the weakness of the threads, which was attended to by Richard Arkwright’s invention of the water frame (1769), through the application of which substantial production of the warp and woof became feasible. When the water frame was used in conjunction with the spinning mule, it addressed a lot of problems related to the spinning wheel. By the end of the eighteenth century, the quality and quantity of the production of thread increased manifold. Once these machines were adopted, the changes in the industry were inevitable. Since cotton was sturdier than wool, the jenny and mule combination suited it. There was another important factor that contributed to the growth of the cotton industry in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries—the fact that cotton supply could be enhanced with a rapidity that wasn’t possible in the case of wool. The price of cotton came down drastically when Eli Whitney, an American, invented the cotton gin in 1793; the cotton gin mechanically separated seeds from the fibre and thus reduced the labour costs incurred for the purpose earlier. The initial benefits of the new machines were felt in the households of the farmers who used them individually; with more developments being made, such as the introduction of the steam-run instruments, the units were controlled by entrepreneurs who eventually established mills in England’s north. This movement to the north had farreaching implications for the industry; it also influenced demographic patterns and changed the way markets functioned in the nineteenth century. The focus shifted from the erstwhile commercial centre, i.e., the south of England, to the newly developed north. The mills of the north were the most tangible indicators of the Industrial Revolution with its mechanical engagement drawing criticism from the traditional southern quarters. The service of the women workers in these mills, for instance, or the uncomfortable working conditions drew flak from different groups. There was also the case of labour exploitation, and repeated cries for reform did not yield much as the employers continued to employ women and children in the

mills. The use of cheap labour somewhat blunted the benefits of production which was slowly turning the economy around. The production process in the mills was going on in addition to the weaving carried out in the farmers’ homes. This continued till the advent of the power loom which minimised production costs further. The impact of the cotton industry on the global market was immense. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, English cotton was made available in markets that had a great demand for it—India, Africa, and North America. Cotton was cheap, easy to wash, comfortable, and considerably durable. Such a combination was neither previously available nor affordable. In 1800, the cotton industry contributed 5 per cent to English national income which went up to a whopping 40 per cent of the value of domestic goods exports in 1815. The dramatic change in the fortunes of the cotton industry in England was exactly replicated by the developments in other spheres. Nevertheless, the developments in the industries of coal, iron, and other chemicals contributed to the overall growth of industry in the country. The demands of transportation required consistent supply of coal which, from the middle of the eighteenth century, did not remain a problem; in fact the production of coal, only met domestic demands but addressed overseas needs too. The iron production in England around this time was also remarkable. The demand for iron (which was onsiderable, given the rapid setting up of plants and the expansion of the railways) was adequately met; in fact by the middle of the nineteenth century, English iron exports stood at the double of the overall global production. Important inventions in the coal industry helped in speeding up the mining process. Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine pump (1711) was improved by James Watt in 1763 and patented six years later. A Birmingham manufacturer named Matthew Boulton joined hands with Watt in marketing the machine and by the turn of the century the quantity sold went up to 239. Although the steam engine was slow to replace water in the generation of power, it was a major contributor to the process of industrialisation in England. Advances made in textiles also saw other industries grow; the best example of such a development through association was in the chemical industry, which was required to provide better dyeing and bleaching possibilities. Improvements in the chemical industry also saw the betterment of other industries such as that of soap and glassmaking. Manufacturing industries were growing rapidly in the nineteenth century,

which also included the production of pottery and metalware. During the Industrial Revolution existing industries grew and newer ones emerged to cause an effect on the lives of the people. It spanned almost three generations and did not really happen either spontaneously or with the suddenness that the word ‘revolution’ usually implies. The pace of industrial growth and expansion was uneven and differently conditioned in different English regions; all industries were not situated in the same region even though the north of England gradually became the industrial hub of the country. Moreover, the emergence of an industrial life did not bring about the extinction of the home-based industries, and often they either worked in collaboration or independently for a considerable period that went well into the nineteenth century. The replacement of old methods and equipments was not achieved immediately; nor was the population pattern affected overnight by the setting up of mills and plants. The second characteristic of industrial progress in England was that it did not have much of a theoretical foundation (nor for that matter a technological one) to facilitate it. The results achieved through the invention of various machines weren’t, strictly speaking, due to scientific experimentation but more because of individual interest, and the inventions of Arkwright and his brethren were made possible primarily through their own efforts. This is astounding, since the benefits of their inventions were transferred to the people for actual use not through the mechanism of mass education but through the agency of the artisan, whose use and practical knowledge worked to filter it downwards. The Industrial Revolution in England was thus of a different kind in that it didn’t happen without notice; but when it did, like other upheavals, it changed the lives and standards of the English people as well as of those with whom they came in contact either directly or indirectly.

The Condition of the Working Class in Industrial England One of the major shifts in society in the nineteenth century was felt in the emergence of a labour force that was closely associated with industrial growth. Prior to England’s industrialisation, the concept of a employer/employee relation wasn’t very pronounced; in fact, much of the labour was not concentrated and the formation of trade unions was thus one

of the corollaries of the revolution. When industrialisation began in England, the workers weren’t adequately organised into any proper body which would attend to its rights. The second problem faced by the working class was that it was protected by political legislation so that recognition of the working population’s needs was slow in coming. The Combination Acts of 1799–1800 showed that the government was not quite appreciative of the problems faced by the labour class. One of the first efforts made towards alleviating some of the problems of the labour class in early industrial Britain was manifested in the functioning of the Speenhamland System which started in Berkshire in 1795. The Speenhamland System was initiated by the magistrates of Berkshire as a form of poor relief, to both employed and unemployed labourers, which was given in accordance with the size of the family. The system gained popularity in the south of England but did not, ironically, cover the industrial north. The laissez-faire economists like Malthus and Ricardo did not approve of the process as it went against the principle of free and fair competition. In spite of such criticism, the Speenhamland System was popular in the areas where it was introduced and by the time the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) was implemented, it was losing its appeal and relevance. But the Speenhamland System was a strong reminder of the needs of the labour class in early industrial England. Contrary to the criticism levelled against it, it showed the possibilities of welfare schemes in an age when competitive hostilities were challenging the type of life the worker had been long accustomed to. The Speenhamland System had its downside as well. The employers used the opportunity afforded by the presence of such welfare schemes to justify the low wages paid to the worker. During economic slumps, or in the years of inadequate production, the plight of the worker was miserable. It was not that the worker was better off in ‘normal’ conditions; the trade unions took a considerably long time to organise itself into a visible body, and until the middle of the nineteenth century, the worker’s condition was practically difficult—both in terms of economic possibilities and also in terms of the actual physical labour he had to do. The workers did try to develop some kind of a protest mechanism to voice their difficulties in the early phases of the nineteenth century; but as the Peterloo Massacre demonstrated, they were unable to further their cause even when many of them lost their lives in the process. The Peterloo Massacre took place on August 16, 1819, when the

radical leader Henry Hunt was about to address the gathering of 60,000 people at St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester. Although the meeting was organised to demand political reform, it capped a series of protests in a year of economic and industrial depression; in fact, the prices of food produce went up dramatically during the year and workers assembled there expressed their solidarity with Hunt whom they had come to listen to. Even before the lecture began, however, the nervous magistrates ordered the arrest of the speakers; the problem went beyond control when the local yeomanry failed to carry out the arrest peacefully and with the involvement of the 15th Hussars and Chesire Volunteers the meeting was cleared of people, but with heavy casualties. Eleven people died and over a four hundred were injured. Hunt and other leaders were arrested and convicted while the press seized the opportunity to castigate the government for such an inhuman act upon a peaceful assembly. The significance of the Peterloo Massacre lies in the way it came to signify the government/worker divide. Following the Massacre, trade unions started protest rallies while the Whigs took up the cudgels for Parliamentary reform once again. The site of the incident, Manchester, was, in many senses, the centre of industrial activity in the nineteenth century. The fact that such an incident took place at Manchester was responsible for the widespread reaction to it and many saw this as an example of the extreme possibilities of the repressive measures of the government. The working conditions did not get better after the Peterloo Massacre. The Six Acts of 1819 which were designed to thwart the activities of the radical organisations highlights the troubles that the working class continued to face even after the Peterloo Massacre. The early decades of the nineteenth century were troubled years for the workers in the newly industrialised England. The condition of the working class was closely associated with the lack of rights, both political and social, that characterised their position in society. These years also saw bad harvests being coupled with economic depression and unemployment; the problem became more acute because traditional domestic lifestyles were now disrupted by industrialisation, which wasn’t yet functioning to make living standards of the workers better. The improvement in the living conditions of the working class, which became a reality towards the end of the nineteenth century, was still a long way off. The idea of a working class was thus developed through the agency of conflict with the other privileged classes, which was more of an umbrella term than the label describing a

shared experience in the early years of industrial growth in England. Working-class culture was not well represented during this initial period and the inability of movements like Chartism to fulfil the aspirations of the people it sought to represent showed that the problem wasn’t easy to access. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the consolidation of the working class was becoming apparent in its manifestation through various agencies. As Asa Briggs writes: “It was only after 1870 that a new working-class culture with a distinct way of life took shape, as a product of segregation. The culture owed less to shared attitudes towards industrial work —these were often contradictory—than it did to attitudes towards life and leisure (although some leisure was directly related to the workplace itself)” (Briggs 1999: 223). There were other problems with the idea of the working class in Britain which persisted throughout the nineteenth century. The division between the skilled and unskilled personnel was sharp with the former being prioritised in the work environment and the latter often succumbing to the hire and fire policy of the employers. The so-called ‘casual’ workforce remained on the fringes of the working class itself and its graduation to the privileged position of the skilled workers was not a matter of normal progression. By the end of the century, the condition of the working class had been bettered considerably. Mid-Victorian Britain saw a series of developments—many of them political—which contributed not only to the consolidation of the working population into a ‘class’ but affected their living conditions. Among the major political initiatives, the recognition given to the trade unions was responsible for bringing the workforce within the ambit of bodies that sought to represent them. The history of trade unionism in Britain isn’t one of smooth sailing but a tortuous one; nevertheless, it did provide the working population with a platform to organise themselves and present their case before the government. The other important political developments were passing of the Ten Hours Act (1847) and the Factory Act of 1901. Within the half century of the passing of these two Acts, the English working class took shape and formed into a distinct social entity. Socially, the working class did not manifest itself as an amorphous body but engaged a complex web of conditions both within and without the category. The various Factory Acts, from 1802 to 1920, did not necessarily affect all of the working population, less so the women and children in industries such as textiles and manufacturing. Neither did the progress of industrialism signal radical

changes in the economic lives of the workers immediately. What is perceptible is that the Industrial Revolution affected Victorian life in an unprecedented way and one of the manifestations of this phenomenon was the emergence of a labour force that impacted contemporary social dynamics. It is important, therefore, to situate the idea of the working class within the context of the various paradigms at work in industrial Britain before arriving at blanket generalisations regarding its condition.

Urbanisation Urbanisation is one of the key features of modern industrial England. The growth of English towns and the changes in demographic pattern in the nineteenth century is closely associated with the process of industrialisation. The dismantling of the home-based industry saw a regular influx of the new workforce into established urban areas like London and also into newly developed areas like the north of England. Industrialisation compelled movement towards the city; the mobility associated with urban life was brought about by the industrial revolution in England. By the middle of the nineteenth century more than half the population was residing in towns and cities. Urbanisation brought a series of problems in its wake. Without adequate planning and infrastructure to cope with the consistent flow of people to the towns, there was a rapid growth of slums. The slums housed a majority of the labour force in industrial England. The condition in the slums was pathetic—drinking water was usually polluted (with outbreaks of cholera common), there was overcrowding, and disease seemed to be a part of existence itself. The slums were not organised under any banner but at the same time these places were also functioning as the underworld; it housed criminals, outcasts, and a teeming body of people that refused to follow any norms of standard living. Sanitation and sewerage were two more areas that needed immediate attention in the slums. In other words, life in the slums in industrial England was miserable and difficult for the dwellers. Outside the slums, life was organised in a different way. By the 1870s, the municipal bodies in the various English towns were trying to attend to the immediate needs of the dwellers. The Municipal Corporation Acts of 1835 and 1882 brought about considerable uniformity in the administration of the towns. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many of the industrial

areas had become bustling urban centres. Cities like Manchester and Liverpool were hubs of commerce, industry and urban culture. By the middle of the eighteenth century itself, Manchester had started showing, signs of urbanisation. The onset of the Industrial Revolution saw Manchester grow into a bustling city by the beginning of the Victorian period. The city housed numerous cotton-spinning mills and by the 1830s it numbered close to a hundred. The first modern railway line was constructed between Manchester and Liverpool. An interesting aspect of the city life of Manchester was its lack of modern governmental machinery as even at the start of the nineteenth century it was managed by a form of manorial administration. It was only in 1838 that an elected council was formed in the city and a local government established. By the middle of the century, the city had become a trade centre with diverse commercial structures in place; this was a remarkable graduation from its condition as a cotton-manufacturing town in the previous century. Important productions from the city included locomotives, steam engines, machine tools, armaments, and items related to electrical engineering. Manchester also led in providing a direction to English cultural and intellectual life. The Manchester Guardian was a very influential newspaper in spite of its provincial bias; the grammar school of the city was considered by many to be a model of education in the country. It had centres for music education, schools and parks, and fostered an intellectual and cultural climate that other English cities tried to emulate. For a brief period, in the early 1840s, the German philosopher Friedrich Engels resided in the city and his experience of life in Manchester is recorded in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Manchester was also the site of the Peterloo Massacre, an event that highlighted the problems as well as the benefits of industrialisation. As a city, Manchester however, hasn’t been able to keep pace with the rapid pace of urbanisation evident in other English cities in the twentieth century. This is ironic, given the fact that it was the leading urban centre in nineteenth century England. Liverpool likewise was another rapidly developing urban centre in Victorian England. Trade relations with America and the West Indies enabled the city’s economy to flourish in the eighteenth century itself. The Liverpool Triangle was a very effective business arrangement that made exchange of slaves in Africa in lieu of manufactured items feasible, which was again exchanged with products such as sugar, molasses and spices in the West Indies. The railway network made access to

and from the city cheap and easy. Cities like Manchester and Liverpool were great sites for immigrating populations in the nineteenth century. Life in the capital city London was already fast and even pre-industrial London was familiar with the exigencies of urbanisation. In the industrial age, the population of London exceeded one million and by the middle of the nineteenth century, it had crossed 2.3 million. Many of the problems faced by the new industrial cities (there were nine cities with population more than 1,00,000 and fifty others had populations exceeding 20,000 in the midVictorian period) were already part of London life. Industrialisation had considerably affected the demographic pattern in English cities with movement of people taking place with consistent regularity. The new industrial cities had numerous problems which weren’t part of life in the pre-industrial age. Housing, sanitation, water—the basic requirements of modern living—weren’t always available for all the urban dwellers. In addition, noise (in the market place and from horse-driven carriages, carts and other vehicles), filth, chimney smoke from factories, bad streets, and poor work conditions had become ‘natural’ attributes of town life in Victorian England. The cities were havens of crime and the quietness of the rural countryside became a thing of the past for the urban population. The picture Dickens portrays in many of his novels of highly potent criminality— the portrait of Jaggers as a lawyer in the midst of crime-infested urban life in Great Expectations is one example—exemplifies the experience of this phenomenon. Urban living had its benefits too. Products became cheaper and more easily accessible, the customer had a wider choice, markets opened up, the insularity of village life was replaced by a growing cosmopolitanism, and fast life became a part of modern man’s existence. Transportation and communication in industrial England—the railways and the telegraph were two very effective agencies—became easy like never before.

DARWINISM Darwin and the Theory of Evolution The quest for human origins goes back to research done by scientists before Charles Darwin (1809–82) at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It has been rightly noted by two historians of science thus: “Evolution, as an idea, was in the air at the beginning of the 19th century. Geologists were debating the issue of evolution of the Earth. And the discussion naturally went handin-hand with the question of biological evolution” (Spangenburg and Moser 1999: 75). The intellectual and scientific climate in the early part of the nineteenth century was such that Darwin’s theory of evolution seems to follow a trajectory that was precipitated by previous developments in geology and biology. John Ray had propounded the concept of ‘species’ as early as 1686, which was further clarified and elaborated by Comte de Buffon in 1749. It was, however, believed that changes in the formation and constitution of species had not occurred since the beginning of life. This idea of fixity relating to species was displaced by the theory of ‘epigenesist’, which was given by Caspar Wolff. Another major breakthrough in this regard came from the study of fossils which showed the bone and anatomical structures of species that were long gone. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, thinkers like Jean-Baptiste de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck opined that evolution is related to environment conditions. Darwin’s foray into biology was accidental. He went on the HMS Beagle’s scientific expedition with Robert FitzRoy as an unpaid volunteer naturalist. His voyage on the Beagle lasted five years and gave him insights that were to transform the course of biological thought. Darwin’s experience on the voyage made him realise that the current theories of evolution were not adequate. His studies in the Galápagos Islands showed that the evolutionary process was much more complex than was previously thought. Eventually Darwin conceived the idea commonly known as ‘the survival of the fittest’ (which has attained the notoriety beyond what its original context implied); in other words, this means that those species which successfully transfer their attributes to the coming generations are the most suited to survive (‘fittest’ here is not simply a synonym for ‘best’ or ‘strongest’). Darwin formed the idea of divergence to explain the differences

between varieties of the same species, which eventually led to the formation of new species. Darwin was determined to present his theory of evolution by writing it down in a book, which however, could not be completed. In 1858, when he was on the verge of completing his book on evolution, another researcher working independently in Malaysia, Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913), sent him an essay where he too arrived at the same findings as Darwin’s. This was a shock to Darwin and after consulting Wallace, the theory of evolution was published jointly—Wallace’s essay and Darwin’s summary of his own research—in the Journal of the Linnean Society in 1858. On November 24, 1859, Darwin published his findings in book form which came to be known as On the Origin of Species. Even though all the 1250 copies of the first print run of On the Origin of Species sold out on the first day itself, the adoption of Darwinian ideas wasn’t as fast or as easily accepted. The churchmen were among the first to react to his theory as it had no scope for divine intervention. The criticism of the theory was intense and continued for quite some years unabated. Cartoons satirising Darwin and snubs from the intellectual fraternity appeared regularly. Only a few came forward to accept Darwin’s ideas, the most prominent of them being T.H. Huxley. Charles Lyell (1797–1875) published his book called Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man in 1863 where he supported Darwin’s idea of evolution. Meanwhile, Darwin came up with another book titled The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) where he placed his ideas about man’s evolution from pre-human creatures. The reaction to his ideas continued to come from different quarters throughout the nineteenth century in spite of the fact that by the end of the century most of his views were regarded with favour by the people. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the number of people who were against Darwin did not constitute the majority. Darwin’s theories intensified the process of doubt that came to characterise the Victorian century. By positing a challenge to the theory of divine origin, Darwin laid one of the foundational blocks of modern science. His name is now used in conjunction with various theories of progress, including political and social, and a misappropriation of his ideas is not uncommon.

Social Darwinism

The ideas of Charles Darwin were influential in other fields besides biology, especially in those that sought to appropriate his theories of evolution for furthering theses of progress and development. One such area is that of social science research. The theory of social Darwinism, closely associated with the ideas of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), was one such manifestation. As a term, ‘social Darwinism’ refers to the attempt to use the ideas of evolutionary biology to explain social behaviour; it is the theory that tries to argue that conflicts between persons, classes, countries, communities, or groups are necessary for the sake of progress and social growth. It also suggests that competition is a natural phenomenon rather than a cultural development. One offshoot of this position is seen in the development of eugenics, the belief that genetic qualities of humans can be improved by selective breeding. Social Darwinists believed that stronger culture weeded out the weaker ones in a manner that wasn’t dissimilar to the theory of biological evolution propounded by Charles Darwin. Social life, in this view, was a continuous struggle and competition was not unjustified when seen in the context of social and cultural progress. Social Darwinists, like Spencer and Walter Bagehot, were of the opinion that natural selection could influence differences in population patterns if employed through the agencies of competition as societies were also built like organisms and hence followed the same evolutionary path. Laissez-faire capitalist competition found in social Darwinism a very able advocate; individual progress was associated with cut-throat competition, and the class differences were construed as legitimate. The social Darwinists did not believe in the intervention of the state and considered social inequality to be reflective of a process that was akin to that of biological evolution. The twin concepts of continuity and utility were part of the thesis of social Darwinism. The ideas of social Darwinism were used by imperialists to justify the unequal relations between the coloniser and the colonised at the height of empire.

Darwinism and English Literature The ideas of Darwin influenced aesthetics and creative literature also. Darwin’s own work showed that the appeal of the subject of evolution was immense. Before Darwin, Charles Lyell and Robert Chambers had gained popularity through their works, Principles of Geology (1830–33) and

Vestiges of Creation (1844) respectively. When Darwin’s work started circulating in Victorian circles, both scientific and otherwise, interest in the man and his theories was growing rapidly. This was heightened because Darwin courted controversy from the very beginning. As early as 1866, Elizabeth Gaskell attempted a portrait of Darwin in her novel Wives and Daughters. The theories of evolution—biological, geological, and social— were very much in the Victorian air and generated considerable heat; this was evident especially in the conflicts that arose because of the irresolvable incompatibility between the Darwinian position and the theological one. Philip Henry Gosse, a Christian and a natural philosopher, sought to reconcile both these opposing strains by suggesting that the creation story of Genesis was fundamentally true but it was manifested through the fossil patterns which were already there. His experience as a zoologist led him to propose a reconciliation of the conflicting ideas that the displayed fossil records are misleading and that the biblical idea of Adam’s creation was not refutable. Gosse presented his views in Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (1857), which however, did not find many takers. In fact, the conflict between the divine and the biological continued with Gosse’s son Edmund taking up the cudgels on the other side, something that he records in his autobiography Father and Son (1907). Gosse’s angst at not being able to come to terms with the new scientific development was one of the most characteristic Victorian issues; many people of his generation found it difficult to shake off the idea of divine creation while at the same time being unable to reject the powerful thesis of human evolution altogether. Although pre-dating Darwin’s formal announcement of the evolutionary theory by some years, Tennyson’s In Memoriam portrays the conflict between science and religion, between faith and doubt like no other Victorian poem. The circulation of the discourse of evolution, so much in the air in the 1830s when Tennyson started composing his poem, influences the its thesis of progress, even though it is primarily geological in orientation and not biological. In this context, Basil Willey notes: “From his earliest manhood, Tennyson breathed the atmosphere of scientific theory and discovery, and throughout his life his meditations were governed by the conceptions of law, process, development, and evolution—the characteristic and ruling ideas of his century” (Willey 1973: 155). In Section 55 of In Memoriam, Tennyson presents the Darwinian position of evolution well before the formal

announcement in the following terms:

Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life; That I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear. There are numerous passages in Tennyson’s poem which are available for such a discursive reading, but then In Memoriam is not simply about evolution. It is one of those nineteenth century poems that capture its ethos brilliantly. There is also a need to distinguish between the ways in which Darwinism came to function as a discourse in literature, especially that of the Victorian period. One approach to the entire matter could be situated in terms of investigating the correspondence between the text and the context opened up by the Darwinian ideas, but another more revealing and rewarding could be to see how discourses influenced by Darwin’s concepts come to penetrate literary works. The views of Michel Foucault may be used here to contextualise the functionality of discursive structures. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault writes: “At a certain scale of micro-history, one may consider that an affirmation like ‘species evolve’ forms the same statement in Darwin and Simpson; at a finer level, and considering more limited fields of use (‘neo-Darwinism’ as opposed to the Darwinian system itself) we are presented with different statements. The constancy of the statement, the preservation of its identity through the unique events of the enunciations, and its duplication through the identity of the forms is constituted by the functioning of the field of use in which it is placed” (Foucault 1972: 104). The reading of ‘field of use’ becomes important in any context that seeks to situate a discourse as Darwinism in terms of its literary manifestation. One reading could locate determinism as being a form of correspondence between Darwin’s ideas of evolution and literary representation. Various genres employ aspects of determinist philosophy in either thematic or philosophic formulations. In the case of the Victorian novel various examples can be cited —from George Eliot’s Middlemarch to Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. It has

been suggested that “George Eliot, with her massive, eloquent, and finely discriminate concern with intellectual issues, saw the question of origins in relation to evolutionary theory” (Beer 1989: 129). How far an ideology of determinist philosophy was at work in the novels of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy is still a contentious issue. But if Darwin’s emergence on the Victorian scene affected the views of his contemporaries, then it is in the discourses of the time that his impact must be located. The concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ has been notorious for its usage, most of which does not necessarily rely on Darwin’s theories for authentication. Nevertheless, the circulation of such discursive structures in society often finds outlets through literature’s accommodative agencies, and the novels of Eliot and Hardy are only two examples of such a possibility. Newer genres in the twentieth century such as science fiction or the futuristic movie (the Matrix movie series is one example) can offer interesting sites for readings that engage the discourse of Darwinism in various ways.

THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE The First British Empire and Colonial Expansion The explorations carried out in the Elizabethan period gradually concentrated into colonial settlements in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The initial discoveries of the new territories were not all carried out with the colonial agenda in mind, but then the situations in most of these places afforded the opportunity and in many cases settlement became a political necessity. Initially, the trade interest constituted the primary objective of the English people who came to these territories and the involvement of merchants in such enterprises was the normal condition. Depending on the situation the process of colonisation followed different patterns. In the West Indies it was induced by tobacco plantations, in North America it was religion, and in India it was trade through the agency of the East India Company. The settlements of the First British Empire became visible in the early years of the seventeenth century when parts of North America came under British occupation—Jamestown (1607), Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts Bay (1620), Maryland (1634), Rhode Island (1636), and Connecticut (1639). Almost all of these colonies in North America were driven by the religious interests of the colonisers. An important aspect of British colonialism in America was the lack of governmental control over the territories there, primarily because of the distance involved. The formation of local political bodies for the purpose of governance was thus a necessity in this part of the world from the very beginning. As the seventeenth century progressed, the British domination in America increased—they won New York (previously christened New Amsterdam) from the Dutch in 1664 and Pennsylvania was made an English colony in 1681. In 1732, Georgia became a part of the British imperial structure in America. The British imperial experience in America was unlike any other it had because the colonies here were governed primarily by local requirements and the allegiance to the British Crown wasn’t always governed by loyalty to it. It isn’t much of a wonder therefore that the British lost America within the eighteenth century itself. The American Revolution was a watershed in British politics of the eighteenth century. It was precipitated by the introduction of the Stamp Act of 1765, but

the reasons for a desire for severance of political ties with the mother country can be traced back to much earlier developments. For many people in America, the Stamp Act’s provisions were not justified and even though it was soon withdrawn, it sparked off widespread unrest throughout the country. The general feeling of unease over the British government’s unfair handling of American resources was so intense that it eventually led to the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. The actual fighting between the forces of the two countries was a manifestation of dissatisfaction of the colonial policies of England. While such an unease may have been the case with other English colonies in the Americas also, the nature of the various units of the American union and their solidarity contributed towards the successful overthrow of the imperial British, but it did not work out similarly elsewhere. The size of America, the economic and natural potential of the country, and its distance from England made its governance extremely difficult even in the early years of colonisation. The surrender of General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781, marked the culmination of the first British Empire. Incidentally, the loss of America did not bring about similar resistances in the other colonies; in fact, in spite of France aiding some of the resistance movements, the British Empire was only further consolidated in the Americas, including the regions of Canada and the West Indies. British occupation of the West Indies had begun way back in 1623 when Saint Christopher (St. Kitts) became a colony. The West Indies provided the British a very rich ground—both economically and in terms of manpower management. Within years the colonies were transformed into large sugar plantations, which served as the employment centres for the African slaves. This triangle was extremely effective and was used for a major part of the eighteenth century to sustain other British interests. The Treaty of Madrid (1670), between England and Spain, was the first formal recognition by another country of English political domination in the Caribbean region. The formation of the Royal Africa Company (1672) was further testimony to the expanding business network of the British, in which the supply and working of the slaves was placed within the bounds of legitimacy. By the end of the seventeenth century, the sugar industry in the Caribbean, sustained by the labour force of the slaves transferred from Africa, was providing great economic sustenance to the English colonial machine. The example of the

Bertram family’s fortune in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) shows how British colonial interests in the Caribbean were beginning to circulate in popular discourses of the time.

The Second British Empire The expansionist programme begun in the seventeenth century was furthered in the eighteenth century. The major loss in the eighteenth century was that of America and it necessitated a change in strategy and policy that directed British interests to other parts of the globe. The Industrial Revolution which began to make an impact by the end of the eighteenth century made it imperative to develop markets for British products. One of the factors influencing the expansion of the British Empire beyond the colonies of the seventeenth century was search for an adequate platform to enhance international trade. As the trade practices changed and a growing internationalism accompanied the Industrial Revolution, economic considerations played an important part in the consolidation of the British Empire. Instead of the Americas, Britain’s new colonial interests were located in Asia and Africa. It was not until the start of the decolonising process in the twentieth century that the British imperial interests in Asia and Africa subsided. The colonisation process, however, did not start from scratch in Asia and Africa in the eighteenth century. The East India Company was active in establishing trading centres in India—Surat (1612), Madras (1639), and Calcutta (1690)—in the seventeenth century itself. In the early years of the eighteenth century, the British interests in India were not confined to trade alone. After the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, there was a scramble for power which provided the British the platform to consolidate their hold over the political horizon of India. While they gained supremacy over the French in the Carnatic Wars in the 1740s–60s, the victory in the decisive Battle of Plassey (1757) made the Company the most powerful foreign power in India. Although the East India Company was outside the direct purview of the British government, it did not remain so for long. The Regulating Act (1773) brought the East India Company’s policies under the scrutinising authority of a Governor-General, and the India Act (1784) made political administration of the occupied territories a concern of the British government. In the early nineteenth century, Britain was in control of the

administration of India (the Mughal emperor was no more than a puppet). Matters weren’t smooth however; resentment to the policies of the British was growing in different quarters, and the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 manifested the angst most vociferously. Although the Mutiny was quelled, it brought to attention many problems—both cultural and political—to the fore. In order to prevent any more uprisings like that of 1857 from embarrassing the government again, administration of India was brought directly under the control of the British crown. Apart from India, British colonialism was spread across other parts of the globe. Australia, for instance, was one of the territories that served Britain many purposes—it provided the British with an important trade route and also became a dumping ground for convicts (Magwitch in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is one example). Canada, South Africa, and Ceylon were other important conquests of the British which made it the most powerful imperialist nation of the world in the nineteenth century.

The Triumph of Imperialism In the early eighteenth century, the British had gained substantial control over territories in India. This was significant as just a few decades back America had got independence and so India constituted a major colony for the British. Within a very short time, the British dominated Indian cultural and political life and started influencing the course of social life. The process intensified when the only competition for the British in India, the French, gave up Madras and with Robert Clive’s enterprising vision and tactics there was no looking back. The Battle of Plassey turned the tide in favour of the British and when the Seven Years’ War in Europe came to an end in 1763 it enabled them to consolidate their hold in India. The movement from colonisation to imperialism was achieved in a number of ways, one of which related to the reduced powers of the East India Company and the growing governmental influence in administrative matters. The appointment of the GovernorGeneral was an important step in this regard as it smoothly shifted the power structure to the British government. Although it was not until the Sepoy Mutiny that technically the control of India went to the British government, the process had started much earlier, with the India Act of 1784 being one milestone of this phenomenon. The British control over Indian territories in

the eighteenth century was achieved through a variety of ways, some of which were neither ‘noble’ nor organised to benefit the natives. The representatives of the East India Company brought provinces within their power by direct annexation or by forging alliances (subsidiary alliance) with rulers who appealed to (or accepted offers from) the Company for ‘protection.’ This process was going on well into the nineteenth century, but following the Sepoy Mutiny, the British government took over the administrative and political control from the Company in 1858. The demarcation of authority involved the setting up of a new administrative mechanism headed by a viceroy. The creation of legislative and executive councils in 1861 further streamlined the process. The British policy involved the appointment of officials in the councils, rather than the ‘election,’ a process of monopolisation that continued well into the final decades of the Raj. The British administration in India achieved an important goal—it brought about political unification to a country that was never previously functioning under a single political power. The imperialist process of administering such a vast country was aided by the introduction of English as the official language and promotion of English studies in the nineteenth century. Gauri Viswanathan makes an interesting observation about the way ‘English’ functioned as part of the imperialist process: “The nineteenth century Anglicist curriculum of British India is not reducible simply to an expression of cultural power; rather it served to confer power as well as to fortify British rule against real or imagined threats from a potentially rebellious subject population” (Viswanathan 1990: 167). Before the British gained control over India, there was no single language that was operating across the nation, no language which could be used by people from different regions in the country for communicative purposes. Along with the introduction and circulation of a common language, the social measures initiated by the British enhanced the imperialist design. The British brought crime under considerable control, made travel easier, and ensured protection of property to a great extent. This line of reviewing of British activities in nineteenth century colonial India, however, has been seriously questioned by postcolonial critics and recent historiographical trends suggest that such a view of the British ‘civilisational’ project can only be provisionally argued. A middle way through these extreme positions would, nevertheless, recognise the acts of ‘social reform’

as important in the context of nineteenth century British policy regarding the governance of India, even though questions about the strategies and structures behind such acts remain unsettled. Like the various social measures that affected life in many parts of colonial India—female infanticide and the abolition of sati are two of these—other aspects of British policy such as the introduction of the railways and telegraph lines, enhanced medical facilities, wide-ranging irrigation works, to name a few, also exerted influence on the life of both the British and the Indians considerably. Moreover, these measures functioned as a kind of justification for the imperialist hold of the British over Indian territories. However, the British rule in India in the nineteenth century left a lot of issues unsettled and in fact aggravated some that were already in existence. Poverty was a major problem in colonial India with extreme situations resulting in famines. The rural economy of India received a body blow because the products of the British industry easily outmanoeuvred the handicraft items that were made in the villages. With the loss suffered in the handloom and handicraft industries, Indian economy increasingly looked to agriculture to make up the deficit. In education, the problems multiplied when the British introduced the English model in 1833. Even though English was used as a medium of instruction, the infrastructure wasn’t there in most parts of India. As such, a majority of the Indian population remained illiterate. While such a situation served the British imperial interests well, it enhanced the divide between the haves and the have-nots. The nineteenth century constituted the age of imperialism. While the earlier stages of exploration, discovery, and colonisation were not unified into a particular format, but governed by individual conditions, the nineteenth century saw the consolidation of British power and authority in many of the colonies. The fact that the Colonial Office, begun in 1801 as a part of the Home Office, became an individual department by the 1850s showed the increasing significance of British colonial interests. Apart from India, other acquisitions of the British in the nineteenth century included New Zealand and other islands in the Pacific such as Tonga, Papua, and Fiji. The expansion of the British Empire also embraced parts of Africa where other European powers were vying for control as well. The Royal Niger Company widened the imperial net in Nigeria, and British occupation of the Gold Coast (later renamed Ghana) and Gambia provided competition for other imperial

European powers scrambling for colonies in Africa. Other companies that operated in Africa included the British South African Company which gained control in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. The possessions in Africa were acquired through a variety of methods. In the case of Egypt, for instance, the bankruptcy of the governor Ismail Pasha contributed to the entry of the British into the country. But expeditions were not smooth as the death of Charles George Gordon in 1885 in Khartoum proved. The African experience was often situated through discourses that submitted to the advanced/backward structure, the most pronounced illustration of which was the representations of the figure of David Livingstone. Livingstone made several expeditions to Africa in the two decades, from 1851 to 1873, and he was the first European to cross the Kalahari Desert. He favoured the opening up of the African landscape to both commerce and Christianity and he acquired larger-than-life status in Britain. Exotic images of the ‘dark continent’ only fuelled the interest in Africa. Henry M. Stanley, who had gone to Africa to find Livingstone in 1871, himself led several expeditions to Congo and made access to the continent easier. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a greater part of Africa was partitioned by the Western powers.

Empire and Ideology The ideological assumptions behind the imperial exercise are increasingly being recognised as important for the structures they created and the cultural formations they fostered. The filtering of the imperialist design was activated through different modes, sometimes even without ‘direct’ involvement of the British. In this context, Ania Loomba observes. “Millions of Indians never saw an English person throughout the term of the Raj, although that did not mean their lives had not been woven into the fabric of the empire. This kind of ‘shallow penetration’ can be seen as a prototype for modern imperialism, which functions by remote control” (Loomba 1998: 111). At the same time, it is not necessary to assume that a single ideological formation was behind the imperial enterprise of the British, for it was orchestrated differently, sometimes with a variety of articulatory mechanisms and sometimes without an immediately tangible operative logic behind it. It goes without saying that the several ideological assumptions at work during the long nineteenth

century of imperial expansion weren’t devised to function as a body or as a single discourse. One of the interesting processes involved in the strategic imbibing of ideology during the peak of the British Empire was the technology of ‘Othering’. This meant that the native, who was seen as an ‘Other’, came to subscribe to the thesis that situated him/her in a scale of inferiority. During the nineteenth century, various methods and ways were employed to suggest the legitimacy of the ideologies at work and it isn’t surprising that such machineries succeeded in permeating cultures with particular belief systems. Any reading of the ideological structures informing the British imperial experience, however, must be situated in terms of the acknowledgement that these formations were not unified by inherent design —at least the British never started the process of colonisation with one particular agenda. These two aspects of British imperialism—the function of ideological assumptions and the provisionality of those discourses—cannot be ignored. The process of othering, through which stereotypes were perpetrated, was an important exercise in the dissemination of ideology. Thomas R. Metcalf provides the following analysis of the way ideologies served the British in India: “As the British defined their own identity as a nation in opposition to the world outside, so too, more generally, did they as Europeans, under the influence of the ideals of the Enlightenment, announce their own pre-eminence as a ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’ people” (Metcalf 1998: 4). The process of othering that was engaged in the imperialist enterprise was achieved through a variety of cultural agencies. Literature was one of them. In the work of the major novelists, representations reflecting imperialist structures were integrated within the fabric of the narrative. In texts like Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and W.M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–8), for instance, the experience of imperialism was represented. Postcolonial critics have interrogated the strategies involved in such representations and at the same time, analysed the imperatives of ideology behind the circulation of such discourses. In many of the journals and periodicals of the time the well-structured binarism of civilised/savage was patterned as ‘natural’ and with the government suggesting the supremacy of the Empire in both cultural and social aspects through different formats, including the Great Exhibition, this process was deep-seated in the discourses of national identity and even in those operating

in the colonies. There was also a case for situating the religious argument as one of the reasons behind the imperial enterprise. It was part of the larger ‘civilisational’ scheme of the Empire but was structured specifically and not necessarily through the same modes that the government employed. One of the most pronounced features of Victorian social life was the idea of the Empire, and it, in fact, constituted one of the features of Victorianism itself. The imperialist process buoyed the feelings of nationalism and perpetrated a condition of superiority among the English. Like all positions, however, such an interpretation is provisional in that not all Englishmen agreed on the operative terms that were structured to posit such an image of supremacy. The ruptures against imperialism within Victorian society were, at the same time, not part of the dominant discourses and circulated through marginal fissures. The dominant discourses (especially those promoted through the agencies of the government) were often functioning as narratives of power. Commenting on this aspect of British imperialism, Denis Judd observes: “The British Empire was perceived as underwriting the nation’s future in a variety of ways. British politicians of all parties were quick to discern in the Empire a means of uniting the British people for a common cause, as a means of inspiring a sense of international mission, a device to blunt the edge of class warfare and egalitarian philosophies, and above all as a way of looking to the future with more confidence that the realities intrinsically merited. Rule over a host of indigenous peoples also provided untold numbers of British people with an easy psychological defence mechanism: a great and messy amount of personal and national rubbish could be dumped elsewhere —principally upon ‘inferior’ black and brown people throughout the imperial system, which thus became the repositories of much that was unwanted and disowned at home. As a consequence, the Empire helped to boost both the confidence of the individual and the nation, and to keep fears of inadequacy” (Judd 1997: 4–5). The mechanisms through which the various discourses operated within the imperial network depended also on immediate and local exigencies. The images of India in the Victorian imagination were not similar to those, for instance, of the Caribbean. This process was not confined to the nineteenth century. It was well embedded in the British imagination that the nation confronted the crisis of Empire and experienced decolonisation in the twentieth century.

DEMOCRACY AND NATIONALISM The Growth of Nationalism and Democracy Nineteenth century England was politically conditioned to facilitate imperialist and industrial growth. It was the time of great material development and this process was aided by political stability and social reform. Queen Victoria, who reigned over the English public for the major part of the century, became a symbol of prosperity and progress, in spite of the fact that the age’s contradictions undercut such an assumption. Politically, the Parliament had grown stronger and the two political parties shared power in a democratic experiment that was seen as a model by the other countries of the Continent. The erstwhile Whig and the Tory parties had been transformed into the Liberal and Conservative parties respectively by the middle of the nineteenth century itself and the leadership of both were in hands of formidable statesmen. William E. Gladstone (Liberal) and Benjamin Disareli (Conservative) dominated British politics and shaped the political fortunes of the country. The reform measures, especially in respect of granting voting rights to the people, were initiated within the nineteenth century when three reform bills were passed in 1832, 1867, and 1884. The 1832 Reform Act was one of the landmark in the history of electoral rights. The reasons pertaining to it, however, weren’t really in keeping with democratic motives but governed by political necessity. It was a time (1829–32) of economic and industrial depression and the Reform Act was used to curtail the revolutionary inclinations of the middle and the working class. Incidentally, even after the Reform Bill, the working class remained without voting rights and England was governed by the same people as before. However, the Reform Act of 1832 outlined one very important development—it showed the increasing clout of the House of Commons. The third Reform Act of 1884 granted almost all adults the right to vote. This was also the period when public education became state-sponsored, the practice of the secret ballot was initiated, and the trade unions became more active. The democratic experience in the political sphere was starting to affect other aspects of British life as well. By the time Queen Victoria’s reign came to an end, the English nation had become democratically the most visible of European

countries. The idea of nationalism was invoked by the French revolutionaries when they claimed that it was the nation and not the king which was the source of sovereign authority. The idea of nationhood and nationality was not new; during the Elizabethan age the spirit of nationalism contributed to the creation and sustenance of the Tudor myth and brought together the English forces in their fight against the Spanish Armada. But then the idea of nationalism was never fixed. It was developing through the period of English Renaissance and by the nineteenth century it was consolidating into a quite potent form. In fact, the kind of nationalism perpetrated by the political establishment was advertised as one of the best conditions of the democratic experience. Leaders like Gladstone and Disareli sought to suggest that the English nation was the best, a logic that was used to further the designs of imperialism also. For the political establishment, nationalism was a very effective ideological tool to harness the manpower of the country for the purpose of propagating the myth of progress and prosperity. It was founded on actually working social structures as holidays, festivals, school calendars, military rituals, granting of voting rights, and celebration of the democratic way of life through jingoistic modes such as the Great Exhibition of 1851. With education being part of the state policy, the culture of a just and orderly state was perpetrated through the agencies employed for the purpose. The nationalist position was reworked through other agencies also—poems like Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of Light Brigade’ and other like literature enhanced the popular perception associated with the English nation. A ‘national’ culture and a ‘national’ language were imbibed in the public and supposedly innocuous agencies such as the daily newspaper fostered the sense of a national community. Lord Palmerston proudly announced in 1850 that the British citizen was protected anywhere in the world as the nationalist urge was pressed into the service of the imperialist machinery. The belief of many of the young recruits into colonial territory, either as the state’s servants or as the personnel of private companies, that they were engaged in ‘noble’ service was due to the effectiveness of the nationalist position. Nationalism was also propounded through the cultivation of a sense of commonness which was brought about by both industrialism and the empire. In fact, the imperial machine and the industrial mechanism were used very effectively by the political establishment to suggest the success of democracy in England. Both

imperialism (take the instance of the Sepoy Mutiny in India, 1857) and the Industrial Revolution (the Peterloo Massacre) weren’t smooth experiences— they brought unforeseen problems, many of which even the political astuteness of the Victorian statesmen wasn’t able to tackle; yet these two developments also provided the British the opportunity to revisit the nationalist position (it was very successful in the Elizabethan age). In the Romantic period, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought to reintroduce the appropriate English way of life and language in the Lyrical Ballads while Walter Scott induced the nationalist experience in his reconstruction of Scottish history through fiction. It is generally agreed that the French Revolution was a landmark political and cultural event in that it brought about a new government, and more importantly showed a new way of looking at the world. The nineteenth century was the period of nationalist growth in most of Europe. Germany and Italy embraced the spirit of nationalism in an age when education spread and the conscription into the army was on the rise. This was also the time when there was an increase in readership and the dissemination of the ideology of patriotism was organised through various agencies, including the print media. The nationalist impulse was accompanied by a growth of the democratic process even though the two were neither synonymous nor always proceeding at the same pace.

Democracy and Victorian Society As the nineteenth century progressed, there was an increase in the reform measures initiated by the government. The Victorian age was also the period of political stability in Great Britain. By the 1850s, both the Whigs and the Tories developed into stable political formations with the transformation bringing about a change in identity as well, as they came to be known as the Liberal and Conservative parties respectively. Both the parties had great statesmen leading them—Benjamin Disareli, the Conservative and William E. Gladstone, the Liberal. Both these men served as Prime Ministers of Britain for a remarkably long time, for nearly three decades between them. The Liberal party, which was led by Gladstone, had for its members those who were motivated primarily by commercial and industrial interests. The other party, the Conservative, which was led by Disareli, preferred to favour the gentry and the aristocracy. Disareli was sympathetic towards the lower

class and sought to build a bridge between them and the aristocratic population of the country. The Conservative and the Liberal parties were equally responsible for initiating reform measures in Victorian England. They brought bills to widen the social spectrum for the extension of voting rights, of which the Second Reform Bill (1867) introduced by the Conservative Party and the Third Reform Bill (1884) initiated by the Liberals, were significant moves in the direction. The process of democratisation was not confined to the political granting of rights alone. Another socially significant move was the policy of state-supported education adopted by the governments in the Victorian age. The polytechnics and workmen’s institutes played a very important role in the spread of education to the masses in the nineteenth century. With educational opportunities being extended to the lower classes, the claim for political rights was mounted with greater vigour. The nineteenth century also saw the rise of trade unionism, which facilitated and made possible the articulation of protest at a time when the public agitation was not legitimised. The trade unions did not achieve any miracles for the people it was supposed to represent, but it provided space for an alternative discourse, often in the form of protest, which is one of taken-forgranted means of showing resentment in modern democratic systems. Major democratic measures introduced after 1850 include the adoption of secret ballot, recognition of trade unions, educational facilities for the working class, and moves to universalise adult franchise. Ironically, it was perhaps the long reign of Queen Victoria, often invoked as the great symbol of English power, stability, and democracy, which made the initiation of these many reforms a smoother process. Two other non-political conditions in the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism, aided the growth of democratic institutions. The growth of industry in England in the nineteenth century brought the needs and problems of the working class into sharp focus—the Condition of England novel is one of the various agencies working in that direction—and it became very difficult for the political establishment to ignore such concerns and still justify social responsibility. The emergence of the trade unions only intensified the need for political attention to matters relating to the working class. Darwinism, on the other hand, challenged parochialism, and though not immediately apparent, it invited an alternative response to the issue of man’s origins. Such developments worked to create an atmosphere where the circulation of a

variety of discourses became possible, which is one of the necessary discourses in a democratic society.

VICTORIANISM AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY Victorianism The long reign of Queen Victoria (1837—1901) saw numerous developments that shaped the culture and society of the time, many of which were patterned through contradictory structures. The word ‘Victorian,’ at least as one used to describe the developments of the major part of the nineteenth century, is not problem-free. But it is convenient, and to a great extent, accommodative of the cultural and social formations of the time of Queen Victoria’s reign. Although technically, the Victorian period starts with the ascension of the Queen to the throne in 1837, the cultural manifestations peculiar to the age, start manifesting themselves more directly from the 1850s. It is imperative, however, to acknowledge that such divisions are provisional in that the movement from one social condition (from pre-industrial to industrial, for instance) to another is a gradual process and the factors impinging upon them are quite diverse. Take the case of Darwinism. Although Darwin’s book was not published until 1859, the circulation of ideas relating to evolution created the platform for the articulation of the faith/doubt structure much earlier. The ideas of civilisational progress, programmed through the agency of imperialism, were working towards the establishment of order in an age when the ferments in the social and cultural spheres were challenging it. Two important developments characterise the condition of Victorianism: (a) the Industrial Revolution, and (b) Darwinism. The Industrial Revolution, may have started in an earlier epoch but its impact was most visibly felt and realised only in the Victorian age. Mechanisation and growing industrialism speeded up life considerably in the Victorian age. It affected human relations, the professions, and created new opportunities for the working classes while at the same time enhancing the north-south divide. Quite perceptibly, important social and cultural structures were introduced because the existing formats were rendered inadequate by the culture of industry. Take the case of English studies. In the nineteenth century, the idea of a national literature was reoriented and newly visioned to engage the cultural requirements of the working class. The polytechnics and the working men’s institutes started functioning with the agenda of elevating the working class people to a level of accepted cultural position. This process

engaged to enable the working classes is but one of many developments induced by the Industrial Revolution. As the Condition of England novels show, the rhetoric of mechanisation impacted necessary social spheres like education and religion. If one of the celebrated characteristics of the Victorian age has been the conflict between faith and doubt, industrial growth and Darwinism were equally potent factors in social and cultural life. Darwinism conditioned the Victorian public to respond to a culture of polemics and inaugurated one of the important dualities—that of science and religion—which persisted throughout the nineteenth century. Oppositions to both Darwinism and the cultures of various faiths were abundantly in circulation. One of the interesting ways of approaching the idea of Victorianism is that taken by John Fowles in his novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), where the whole age is scrutinised and subjected to parody and pastiche and is just a reminder of the fact that many of the belief systems and institutions associated with nineteenth century culture have been subject to a politics of representation. The very idea of an ism, characteristically distinguished in terms of the period to which it is associated, is not common in the history of English culture. While it is customary to posit features of a particular age in conjunction with the general tendencies prevalent at the time, ‘Victorianism’ has often been used as a term of abuse. It is not surprising to find situations in criticism where the ideas of cultural conflict of the age are understood in the context of givens, and one commonplace being that the Victorian age was one of contradictions. There is no denying the usefulness of such a given, for it conveniently serves the need of the historian, but at the same time it is imperative to see through the rhetorical structures that have facilitated the embedding of that structure. As a form of knowledge and as a discursive formation, the idea that the Victorian age was one of contradictions, is culturally conditioned and informed by a number of factors. More than anything else, the gap between the actual experience and the theorising of what it must have been like remains and any articulation claiming to do justice to the epoch must acknowledge the strategies involved in such readings. The acknowledgement of the structural polemics behind the formation of Victorianism is not to invalidate the commonly circulating discourse but to recognise their presence. The influence of industrialism or Darwinian theories in the social and cultural life of Britain in the nineteenth

century cannot be ignored. What a recognition of the discursive patterns based on givens culled from such understanding entails, is, that ideas like Victorianism cannot be taken uncritically.

Religion in Victorian Society The Church of England was the major religious institution in Victorian England but significant departures from the mainstream were manifested in the emergence of Methodism, the Oxford Movement, and Evangelicalism. Such a variety of religious responses to the changes in contemporary society had their origin in sources that preceded the nineteenth century. John Wesley’s Methodist influence was primarily of eighteenth century origin even though its impact on Victorian social life was enormous. The divisions within the Anglican Church were, in one sense, manifestations of the interrogatory tendencies that constituted much of Victorian society. In the circulation of Catholic ideology through carefully argued ‘tracts’, through the agency of the Oxford Movement, the fissures within the Church of England became apparent. The Church thus functioned, at one level, as the platform for the argumentation over matters of religion and their relevance in contemporary social life. That these departures could find aficionados within a very short time suggests that the space for theological debate was very much there in Victorian England. The climate for the engagement of a debate on religious issues was not blunted by either Darwinism or the Industrial Revolution. One summary of the situation runs thus: [In Victorian society there] were indeed intelligent agnostics and for that matter militant atheists of the artisan or small shopkeeper class, and they caused considerable alarm, but after all they were the exception. The bulk of the nation still seems to be at least nominally Christian; it was dangerous to attack religion in public except before a highly educated audience. Much public discussion was religious, or at least pietistic, in tone, and popular literature and drama had a rather obtrusive, if sentimental, Christian background (Clark 1965: 148). It is undeniable that church-going was an important aspect of life for a majority of Victorians. But then, the fact that the primary religious institution of the land i.e., the Church of England, was subjected to scrutiny indicates that some of its elements were now opened up for reappraisal. This was a

remarkable feature of the religious life of the Victorians as although they may have been Methodists or Evangelists, but they still subscribed to religious structures that were significant to them. New modes of life, thought, or culture (the railways, Darwinism, or mechanisation) were placed at extremes, while some form of religious orientation remained integral to the Victorian outlook. No doubt such orientations were contested and challenged (after all, late Victorian society also saw the emergence of agnosticism), but as a conditioning process, religion and a preoccupation with morals remained central to Victorianism. It was only towards the final stages of the age that the questioning of religious ideals reached a point where the Modernist thinkers found in such interrogations of religious stability a resourceful ally. Another way of looking at the whole issue is to situate it in terms of opposition to Darwinism—the faith/doubt structure is often invoked in such analyses—where the foundations of religion appear shaken. There are two levels at which these discourse operated: first, the already mentioned daily life of the average Victorian, which seemed unaffected by Darwin’s advent on the scientific scene; Thomas Hardy’s fringe characters in many of his novels represent a body of people who show the perpetuation of traditional belief systems wonderfully. The second level where the faith/doubt structure was more enhanced was the arena of intellectual engagement. Bishop Colenso’s The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862) is an example of the questioning of religious principles at a higher level. Matthew Arnold’s call to poetry to take on the role of religion was another manifestation of this tendency. It is also to be acknowledged that Darwinian theories did make an impact upon the currents of thought in the Victorian age, but it is equally true that faith was far from over. People who were aware of the implications of the Darwinian position also exhibited a remarkable degree of religiosity. It is in this context of the mutual existence of opposing tendencies—of science and religion—that the Victorian period is usually considered be one fraught with contradictions. Religion and science were thus two important counters in Victorian life, but they weren’t always programmed through the matrix of the either/or binarism.

Women’s Lives in the Victorian Age Even though the questioning of women’s position in a patriarchal society had

begun during the Enlightenment, it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a concerted movement for rights and votes found momentum. Mary Wollstonecraft had argued about the polemics involved in the situation of women in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) in the late eighteenth century, but she did not represent the general line of thinking on the matter. In fact, the dominant strand was related to the ‘angel in the house’ concept, which was deeply rooted in Victorian society. Many of the limitations imposed on women’s conduct came from the law, education’ and tradition. The public sphere was not as easily accessible to female as it was to their male counterparts. One example of such a tradition where male identity functioned as a more powerful agency than the female one is exemplified by the Brontë sisters’ adoption of names that did not give away their female identity when they first approached publishers with their works. George Eliot’s identity is another example. An average Victorian woman was considered to be best suited for a life of domestic activities and as the benefits of an industrial society accrued, the recruitment of domestic help may have lessened the burden of the woman but did nothing to unshackle the patriarchal structure. Men’s jobs, or those professions seen as being conducive to men such as employment in the factories and offices (including in different parts of the Empire), were not approached by women. This process of visualising women in a particular way, especially in relation to men, operated even in the early twentieth century. E. M Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) shows some of these structures at work. Aldela Quested comes to India to know the ‘real’ country, the country where her fiancé Ronny works. The man-at-work/woman-at-home binarism is evident here. The presence of the Victorian work ethic in a twentieth century text only suggests the pervasiveness of such cultural structures. There are many examples in Victorian literature that followed this programmatic positioning of woman in society. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Jos and Amelia Sedley represent the same structure. Certain professions were indeed available for women. Two of them—governessing and teaching—were seen as feminine and were used to identify the condition of femininity itself. The experience of the Brontës show the latter while Jane Eyre remains one of the most adorable governesses in English fiction. As Jane Eyre and the novels of Jane Austen show, the governess was not really placed in a scale that was considered to be socially elevated. The governess was usually seen as occupying the fringe of

society; they weren’t located specifically in the social hierarchy but were considered to be inferior to the position of her employers. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), which carries on the tradition of Jane Eyre, as far as the situating of governesses is concerned, the ordinariness of Doris Kilman, the governess, is highlighted. Another aspect of women workers in the Victorian age was that their work at home went unrecognised. Women who worked at factories were still working when they reached home. Along with the image of ‘angel in the house,’ the concept of the ‘fallen woman’ was also a part of the Victorian attitude towards women. In the work of many Victorian writers these images were circulated well. Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ and Hardy’s Tess are just two random examples suggesting the politics of representation involved in literary discourses about women. This is, however, not the whole picture. Views about the oppression of women were also expressed and irrespective of whether they were intellectually situated, as John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), or politically engaged, like the struggle for rights, they constituted a level of discourse that addressed the problems of women.

VICTORIAN LITERATURE The Victorian Novel In spite of the fact that it is a commonplace to associate the Victorian age with the dominance of the novel, the persistence of such a notion has important reasons behind it. Throughout the nineteenth century, from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy, different exponents experimented with the novel and produced a variety of narratives that enabled the English novel to be consolidated as the primary literary form. It is not that poetry or drama were not written or produced, but then, the consumers and producers of fiction outnumbered the other genres by far. This may appear exaggerated in the context of the great response poems like In Memoriam got or in view of the popular reception of Victorian melodrama, but the social mechanism through which the novel circulated was not the same as the other genres. Novel writing and reading were literally social engagements that constituted one of the more accessible forms of entertainment for the Victorian people. The novel was accessible and perhaps one of the reasons behind the Victorian novel’s wide-ranging popularity was its insistence on realism. The eighteenth century novel of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne had not consolidated into the ‘classic realist’ format that characterises most of Victorian fiction. The realistic narrative made the ‘stories’ appear closer to life and at one level the response of the public was related to this feature. The fact that Charles Dickens had to revise the ending of Great Expectations shows how deeply the sentiment of the readers was associated with the ‘life’ of the novel. The novelists responded to the changes taking place in contemporary society—the railways, the shifting of population because of the industrialisation, the influence of mechanisation on the lives of the people, the rise of educational opportunities, urbanisation etc. were all represented in the novels of the nineteenth century. Obviously, the representational modes weren’t similar—while Thackeray satirised, Dickens caricatured and Hardy presented his version of the ‘fallen woman.’ But these are random examples. The Victorian novel was much more varied than such a sampling suggests. In many ways, women in the Victorian age contributed to the development of the novel as both producers and consumers. While most of the readers were women in the nineteenth century, this was also the time when many women

novelists made their mark in the genre. From Jane Austen and Mary Shelley in the early nineteenth century to Marie Corelli in the final years of the era, women enriched the novel with their contribution. One influence of such a presence was that the themes of Victorian novel were concerned with women’s lives in different ways—from domestic and familial structures to intense engagements concerning love and marriage, women were never out of the frame of the Victorian novel. The presence of women as producers, consumers, or subjects of the novel in the nineteenth century, however, wasn’t taken uncritically. The persistence of stereotypes—the ‘angel in the house’ and the ‘fallen women’ represented two extremes—shows that the emergence of the woman reader or writer did not necessarily entail the granting of rights to them. Society was still governed by patriarchal modes and in almost all the novels the emphasis on closure found articulation through a rounding up of the loose ends in a manner where domestic happiness or rejection of the social nonconformist was common. Take the example of the women in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: Amelia and Becky both represent opposite extremes of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ natures and even though the design of the novelist is primarily satirical, the reliance upon commonly understood social structures cannot be ignored. The pairing of contrasting attributes of women in the same novel can be seen in other novels as well. Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) are two examples where dualities of femininities are projected. There is also the case of social elevation of women through marriage; by far, love and marriage were the most commonly engaged poles around which the narratives of the Victorian age revolved. Whether it is Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or eponymous Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë’s novel, the need to move up the social scale plays a significant part in their relations with men. The emphasis on women’s relations and identity also impacted the representations of sexuality in the Victorian novel. Sexuality and morality were often seen in associative terms, even though variations persisted. The modes of publication and circulation of the Victorian novel showed interesting developments in the respective fields. While early nineteenth century novels (most of them were ‘three decker’ ones) were considerably high-priced, as the century progressed the libraries made novel-reading more accessible. Apart from the libraries, the serialisation of the novels also

generated interest in the genre. Analysing the ubiquity of the Victorian novel, Anthony Trollope commented in 1870: “Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the lastappointed scullery maid. We have them in our library, our drawing rooms, our bed rooms, our kitchens, and in our nurseries” (Trollope 1938: 108). Many journals—All the Year Round and Household Words were two of them —published novels in serial form and some narratives suffered from the constraints of such a mode of publication. One of the dangers of assessing the development of the Victorian novel is to submit to the idea of a ‘great tradition’ or to convenient schemes like ‘Dickens to Hardy.’ It is undeniable that certain general characteristics can be assimilated to highlight the features of the novel but it is important at the same time to be attentive to the various narrative structures that existed at the time. All these narrative structures cannot be pigeonholed within the format of the Victorian novel, not at least by simply drawing a series of features to justify the peculiarities of each one of them. For instance, there was the Newgate novel, the silver fork novel, the detective novel, the Condition of England novel, the romance, the provincial novel, and the tragic novel—such a wide variety of sub-genres can hardly be accommodated within the purview of ‘the Victorian novel.’ As such, generalisations relating to the novel in the nineteenth century have failed to justify the singularities of each sub-genre, not because the assumptions have been proven invalid, but because each of the narrative structures mentioned above followed procedures that can hardly be addressed with emphasis on general surveys of the phenomenon. It is only possible here to provide a sketch of the commonly perceived tendencies of the novel in the Victorian age on the basis of some general comments on the work of some of the novelists. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley preceded the actual advent of the Victorian period and showed the possibilities of the genre but it is in the work of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray that the so-called ‘Victorian’ ethos is most visibly engaged. In Vanity Fair (1848), which he subtitled ‘A Novel Without a Hero’ Thackeray interweaves the stories of two women and presents a picture of contemporary social formations, especially the intense materialistic orientation that characterised the middle class. Thackeray’s satire engages many targets—from the mockery of the

Napoleonic War to the gross materialism of Becky Sharp and her cohorts. The anti-heroism of Vanity Fair is one of the most noticed features of the realist novel, which was however, engaged in a variety of other ways by later novelists. The genre of Victorian domestic fiction that Thackeray so masterfully presented in Vanity Fair, found articulation in the novels of Dickens as well, but of course, differently. The pursuit of crude materialism, which Thackeray critiqued, constitutes one of the targets of Charles Dickens’s satire also. In novels like Oliver Twist (1838) and Dombey and Son (1848), Dickens explored the corruptions rampant in the Victorian world. In fact, corruption is one of the major preoccupations of Dickens’s fiction. Unlike Thackeray, who programmed his satire through the representations of Becky Sharp and Lord Steyne, Dickens posits his case through the contrast of an Other, the child figure, who is ubiquitous in his fictional world. The child is sometimes the victim and sometimes the reminder of the innocence lost in a materialistic world. Dickens’s world was richly populated with a variety of characters drawn from different social structures and often his moral vision is engaged through the mechanism of caricature. At the same time, Dickens’s novels also show a remarkable awareness of contemporary social issues, which though not always articulated within frames of reformist critique, have an important place in his fiction. The criticism of workhouses in Oliver Twist, the suggestiveness about the prison system in Great Expectations, and the commentary on the ironies of industrialisation are contextualised by his conviction in the relevance of such issues. To read too much into the reformist strain in Dickens is obviously fraught with problems, but it is also to be admitted that his novels were the products of an age where the issues represented in his fiction occupied the minds of his contemporaries. Dickens is also recognised as one great creator of memorable characters—Micawber, Fagin, Little Nell, Gradgrind, Sissy Jupe, Uriah Heep are some of them—and many of them have occupied the imagination of readers since their appearance in the pages of his novels. The Victorian age was one where a lot of women novelists wrote fiction. Some of them, like the Brontës and George Eliot, rivalled Thackeray and Dickens both in terms of range and the exploration of the possibilities of narration. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) is one of the classics of English fiction but the reasons for its popularity have been explained differently through the age. The love story of Heathcliff and Catherine

Earnshaw has been seen to represent class concerns and individual passion, and the novel itself is subjected to a variety of interpretations. It has been seen as a story of revenge, and also as that unique love story that goes against the general paradigm of love and marriage characteristic of most Victorian novels. Another interesting aspect of Wuthering Heights, however, has more to do with how the story is told; Emily Brontë devised the frame narrative to engage her fictional needs in a way that combined aspects of both first person and third person narratorial modes. Emily Brontë’s innovative representation of passion wasn’t exactly duplicated by the other Brontë sisters, but both Charlotte and Anne Brontë concentrated on relationships of women in the contexts of social imperatives that suggested the difficulties involved in experiences of sexual difference. Jane Eyre by Charlotte and Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey dealt with different conditions of marital experience. Especially in Jane Eyre, the issues of femininity and gender polemics have been subjected to a variety of readings; the women and men in the Brontë novels can be seen as exemplars of the Romantic impulse, with Rochester and Heathcliff being the most celebrated (or victimised, depending on the position you adopt). If the Brontës exemplified a streak of Romanticism in their writings, the preoccupation with social realities of a different kind, including that brought about by industrialism, preoccupied two other women novelists of the time—Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Gaskell’s first novel Mary Barton (1848) was subtitled ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’, and in dealing with the experience of industrialism it also suggested the dangers of dehumanisation brought forth by increased mechanisation. A similar theme occupied North and South (1855), but in Ruth (1853), a moving tale of a woman’s search for identity in a harsh world, her creative powers were on full display. Gaskell’s style has similarities with her Romantic predecessor Jane Austen, but it is in the novels of George Eliot that the experience of provincial life, which too formed part of the Austen vision, was most intensely engaged. Middlemarch (1872), one of those texts most commonly cited as an example of the classic realist ones, concerns, like many other George Eliot’s novels, the theme of human action in the context of impending social change. This contextualisation of the individual and the social often lends an interesting dimension to the novels of George Eliot. In a brilliant essay titled ‘Circulatory Systems: Money, Gossip, and Blood in Middlemarch,’ Gillian Beer makes an interesting observation:

Middlemarch is concerned with bringing to the surface the implicit values by which people live their lives: within the plot the medium of evaluation is, over and over again, money. All the quarrels in the book have money as a trigger—whether these be between Lydgate and Rosamond, Mary Garth and Featerstone, Mr Brooke and his tenants, or even Dorothea and Casaubon (Beer 1989: 100). George Eliot’s preoccupation of the polemics arising out of the conflict between surface and depth, society and the individual, and money and values was engaged in her other novels as well. The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Daniel Deronda (1876)—three of her other novels also show the problems arising out of the struggle to orient personal choice in the face of harsh social realities. The novels of Thomas Hardy, too, dealt with a reality that was derived from contemporary experience, but was conditioned by the imaginative resourcefulness adumbrating a semi-fictional realm, that of Wessex. Hardy’s protagonists show peculiar traits that distinguish them from others, and in investing them with a tragic dimension not equalled in Victorian fiction he extended the possibilities of the fictional mode in ways that anticipated the Modernist tendencies of the twentieth century. Whether it is Gabriel Oak, Eustacia Vye, or Michael Henchard, the Hardy stamp of deterministic philosophy stamps them all. Hardy is also known for the evocation of atmosphere and there are many memorable passages in his novels—whether it is the unchanged harsh landscape of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native (1878) or the following description of the dilapidated Oxwell Hall in The Trumpet Major (1880): The rambling and neglected dwelling had all the romantic excellencies and practical drawbacks which such mildewed places share in common with caves, mountains, wilderenesses, glens, and other homes of poesy that people of taste wish to live in. Mustard and cress could have been raised on the inner plaster of the dewy walls at any height not exceeding three feet from the floor; and mushrooms of the most refined and thin-stemmed kinds grew up through the chinks of the larder paving. As for the outside, Nature, in the ample time that had been given to her, had so mingled her filings and effacements with the marks of human wear and tear upon the house, that it was often hard to say in which of the two or if in both, any particular

obliteration had its origin. The keenness was gone from the mouldings of the doorways, but whether worn out by the rubbing past of innumerable people’s shoulders, and the moving of their heavy furniture, or by Time in a grander or more abstract form, did not appear (Hardy 1987: 96). This technique of evoking atmosphere was also extended to the characterisation in his novels. The Stonehenge scene in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) or the opening wife-selling episode in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) illustrates the intensity of Hardy’s imaginative vision. Hardy was the last of the major Victorian novelists and even though he wrote no more fiction after Jude the Obscure (1895), he anticipated some of the characteristic features of the modern novel.

Poetry in the Victorian Age The Romantic enunciations that dominated the world of Wordsworth and Keats were replaced by a poetics of anxiety in the Victorian age, which became more pronounced as the century wore on. The demarcation of the Romantic and the Victorian is both a historical and an aesthetic one. The assuredness accompanying the poetics of Romantic imagination was greeted with an aesthetic of crisis, and with the undercutting of existing valuesystems by a variety of challenges, of which Darwinism was just one, it became extremely difficult for the Victorian poet to respond to the world around him/her in the same way as his Romantic predecessors did. The models of earlier times did provide frames for many of the Victorian poets, but they were provisionally engaged. Alfred Tennyson’s first verse composition (written 1823–24, published 1930), ‘The Devil and the Lady’ was Elizabethan in orientation while the publication, in 1830, of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical marked his entry into the English poetic scene. Tennyson had a publication prior to this, Poems by Two Brothers (1927), which included poems by his brothers Frederick and Charles. Tennyson’s early experience of poetic reception wasn’t very pleasant. His next publication, Poems (1832), was severely attacked by John Wilson in The Quarterly Review. From the early 1830s to the beginning of the next decade, Tennyson didn’t publish anything. A momentous experience was the tragic death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833, which changed the course of his poetic career. Feelings of loss, grief, anxiety, and insecurity gripped Tennyson as he sought

to recover from the trauma of Hallam’s death. It eventually resulted in the publication of In Memoriam, A.H.H. (1850). The poem is one of the most representative Victorian texts as many of the preoccupations of the age—faith and doubt or science and religion—were engaged in it. It is another matter, of course, that the manner in which such features of Victorian society were appropriated or seen as apprehended within the poem’s thematic range has provided critics a fertile ground for debate. The opening stanza, written last in 1849, incorporates the theme of belief, which provides an important counter to the experience of loss and sorrow articulated in the poem. Tennyson did not design the poem in the eventual order of its appearance as it was originally recorded as a series of reflections in a kind of poetic diary that continued from the time of his immediate response to Hallam’s death till the writing of the prologue just prior to the publication of the poem in 1850. The manner of composition had an effect on the structure of the poem. Consider the opening lines of the poem:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove; Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Life in man and brute, Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot Is on the skull which thouhast made.

In Memoriam brought Tennyson instant fame. It programmatically engaged the conflictual properties of the age most eloquently. In writing the experience of the self, Tennyson sought frames that weren’t similar to the ones adopted by the Romantics, but still it was his personal loss that provided him the source for his most famous work. It is widely believed that his later poetry lacks the incisiveness and the conviction that characterised In Memoriam. It is not difficult to read his post-In Memoriam verse otherwise, but the fact that he was driven by a particular experience in his major poem does suggest that he had to devise alternative strategies in his other poetic works. Melancholy and isolation continued to dominate his poetic vision, but the colour of personality was no longer advertised in the way it was done in In Memoriam. He wrote some memorable poems that offered the subtle ideological contestation present in In Memoriam through different engagements. In poems like ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ or ‘Ulysses,’ Tennyson explored the possibilities offered by pre-existing structures of history and myth. Tennyson’s use of myth for the purpose of poetry continued with Idylls of the King (1859), and the recognition of change that enabled him to reconcile with the experience of death in In Memoriam, emerged in this poem also. If a line like the following seems morally loaded, it extended beyond merely being ethical: The old order changeth, yielding place to new. In his long poetic career, Tennyson tried his hand at a variety of forms from the elegy to the dramatic monologue. In the Victorian age, the reputation for enhancing the potentialities of dramatic monologue rests on another poet, often considered Tennyson’s rival, Robert Browning. Poems like ‘My Last Duchess,’ one of his most anthologised compositions, show the engagement of the persona in a manner that eschews the author figure. Browning has been seen as an intellectual writer, and the dramatic monologue offered him the appropriate platform for the display of his skill. Browning was adept at creating ‘characters,’ and could remarkably evoke the atmosphere in a poem where the persona merged into the situation in a manner that appeared natural. He was also capable of subjecting his protagonists to artifices that undercut many of the presumptions that situated them in the first place. His poetry clearly anticipates the monologues of T.S. Eliot, most significantly The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. His innovations in linguistic rhythms

drew from the experiments of his predecessors which was supported by his sophisticated use of words. His most successful poem was the long narrative The Ring and the Book (1868–69). Set in the seventeenth century, it is an extremely complex poem with allusions operating at various levels. Even during his own time, Browning was considered ‘obscure,’ but this intellectual and culturally versatile Victorian poet, more than anyone else anticipated many of the characteristics of modern verse. The poetry of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, however, did not suffer from any such imputation of obscurity; in fact, she was one of the most popular poets of her time. She was a bold experimenter and did not follow tradition just for the sake of it. Her Aurora Leigh (1857) is now being read as one of the Victorian examples of ecriture feminine, for her questioning of the terms of femininity suggest a different orientation altogether.

The works of women are symbolical. We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, To put on when you’re weary – or a stool To stumble over and vex you … ‘curse that stool!’ Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean And sleep, and dream of something we are not But would be for your sake. Alas, alas! This hurts most, this – that, after all, we are paid The worth of our work, perhaps.

If such verse is polemical, it also engaged some of the dominant assumptions informing contemporary perceptions about women. The poetry of Matthew Arnold represented another aspect of Victorian life. In ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), he communicated a bleakness that is brought to the fore through a merging of the classical and the modern tendencies. Engaged with a moral consciousness that permeated even his non-poetic writings, ‘Dover Beach’ seems to qualify as the typical Victorian response to the inconsistencies of the age. The bleakness in the poem is not to be synonymised with the pessimism of Thomas Hardy, however, as the Arnoldian vision incorporated conditions of disillusionment through other parameters as well. The questioning of conviction in ‘Dover Beach’ is articulated differently in poems like ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ (1853) or ‘Balder Dead’ (1858). It has been suggested that Arnold’s moral vision so overwhelmed his poetry that the matter of poetry ended up being a slave to the philosophy. F.L. Lucas’s analysis of Arnold’s poetry represents such a perception: Arnold recognised two main elements in poetry—natural magic and moral profundity; but with his fetish about poetry being ‘criticism of life’ he too, often in practice, sacrificed the magic to the morals (Lucas, in Wright 1961: 59). The late Victorian poetic scene saw the emergence of the Pre-Raphaelites. Although accused by some as representing the ‘fleshly school of poetry,’ this group of poets led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti combined mysticism with a fascination for the symbolic representation of natural elements. In Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel, heaven is characterised by the experience of the flesh, a motif that runs through his sonnet sequence The House of Life (1870). Other Pre-Raphaelite poets included Algernon Swinburne, more famous for his verse drama Atalanta in Calydon (1865) than his two series of Poems and Ballads (1866, 1878), and William Morris, whose accomplishments lay in the field of painting rather than verse. Often seen as a poet of modern sensibility, not simply because of the time of publication of his verse, but also for the remarkable innovations he made, Gerard Manley Hopkins is perhaps better placed in English literary history as one who straddled both the Victorian and the Modern with an élan that was unprecedented. One among the few original writers of the nineteenth century,

Hopkins introduced a variety of poetic modes such as ‘instress of inscape,’ ‘sprung rhythm’ and toyed with established formats like the sonnet. His themes were religious in orientation but they had a metaphysical flavour that reminds one of the conflict-laden poetic structures of George Herbert and Richard Crashaw. Despair for Hopkins is much more than the experience of loss as it extends to appropriate the conditions of spiritual decline and the anguish that emanates from within. Hopkins’s poems anticipated the Modernist poet’s search for meaning in a difficult world.

Victorian Prose The term ‘Victorian Prose’ appears inadequate in the context of the variety of prose writings it is supposed to encompass—from the rhetoric dealing with the Condition of England question to the religious argumentation of Newman. There is also the genre of scientific writing epitomised by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and the philosophical and critical texts of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and Walter Pater. Thomas Carlyle’s early prose works titled ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829) and ‘Characteristics’ (1831) appeared before Sartor Resartus (1836), but it is the latter that has been more generously received. A combination of a variety of genres—autobiography, novel, and the essay—Sartor Resartus is presented through the experiences of a fictitious protagonist called Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (implying ‘God-given Devil’s Dung’), whose mode of presentation introduces the comic element into an otherwise serious discussion. The title is equally significant, meaning ‘The Tailor Retailored,’ and it provides the frame for the line of argument that has come to be known as the ‘Clothes Philosophy.’ In trying to demonstrate the distinction between appearance and reality, Carlyle analyses some of the preoccupations of his age through analogical representations. The implications of a highly rhetorical language are conditioned by constant references to the possibilities of the symbolism informing it. It is a complex text in that it interweaves numerous strands, including the use of devices that did not really follow the prose tradition established by Carlyle’s Romantic predecessors. The subject’s romanticism, on the other hand, is organised by the polarisation of chosen binary oppositions. The spiritual climax that is developed through the chapters (ambitiously named ‘Everlasting No,’ ‘Everlasting Yea,’ etc.) points

towards an aspired-for higher state. Consider this passage from the section titled ‘Centre of Indifference’: But at this point the Editor recalls his principle of caution, some time ago laid down, and must suppress much. Let not the sacredness of Laurelled, still more of Crowned Heads, be tampered with. Should we, at a future day, find circumstances altered, and the time come for Publication, then may these glimpses into the privacy of the Illustrious be concealed; which, for the present, were little better than treacherous, perhaps traitorous Eavesdroppings. Of Lord Byron, therefore, of Pope Pius, Emperor Tarakwang, and the ‘White Water-roses’ (Chinese Carbonari) with their mysteries, no notice here! Of Napoleon himself we shall say only, glancing from afar, remark that Teufelsdröckh’s relation to him seems to have been of a very varied character. At first, we find our poor Professor on the point of being shot as a spy; then taken into private conversation, even pinched on the ear, yet presented with no money; at last indignantly dismissed, almost thrown out of doors, as an ‘Ideologist.’ ‘He himself,’ says the Professor, was among the completest Ideologists, at least Ideopraxists: in the Idea (in der Idee) he lived, moved, and fought (Carlyle, in Abrams et al., Vol. II, 1993: 942). Carlyle’s emphasis on cultural reorientation stems from his understanding of the contemporary world as being in need of vitality, especially at a time when significant changes were taking place. He was a radical no doubt, but he was also alive to the problems confronting the middle class and his views about society and industry in the 1840s are better appreciated when placed in the context of impending transformations of the world around him. His reading of the concept of heroism, on the other hand, has also been seen as a form of conservatism, while the democratic ideal followed by many of his contemporaries did not appeal to him. Carlyle’s mode of analysis had an impact on the way he represented his subjects. He moved away from the prose style of Samuel Johnson and his contemporaries in that he cultivated a pace in his language that is simultaneously engaging and lively. The prose writings of John Henry Newman are tinged with the condition of philosophy, which was often engaged through the paradigm of the man/God relationship. In his autobiographical account in Apologia Pro Vita Sua and his controversial ‘tracts’ that contributed to the Oxford Movement, he addressed the problems associated with the spiritual position of the Anglican

Church. His gradual drift towards the High Church was seen by his contemporaries as constituting a defence of the Roman Catholic view. Eventually he became a Roman Catholic (at the age of forty-four); Newman consistently argued for the significance of personal faith, which he thought could not be adequately apprehended through the structure provided by the Anglican Church. Although Newman wrote some verse, his esteem rests on his prose output. Newman pursued the line of rigorous intellectual engagement and many features of classical oratory characterise a prose style where figure is closely aligned to the argument. Like his contemporaries, Newman was also concerned with the importance of education in moulding individual minds. In the seventh chapter of The Idea of a University, titled ‘Knowledge Viewed in Relation to Professional Skill,’ Newman writes: “Truth of whatever kind is the proper object of the intellect; its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth. Now the intellect in its present state, with exceptions which need not here be specified, does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of intellectual powers, such an enlargement and development, such a comprehensiveness, is necessarily a matter of training” (Newman, in Abrams et al., Vol. II, 1993: 978). Newman’s emphasis on the significance of an appropriately worked out nurturing process is not unique in the sense that many Victorians expressed a similar concern in their writings. Writers like Arnold and Ruskin too voiced concern about the cultural deterioration in their writings. It is another matter that each of these Victorian thinkers subscribed to notions that were neither completely similar nor oriented towards the same goal. One of the issues that acquire great importance in Victorian thought is the issue of morality. Newman addresses this issue in Apologia Pro Vita Sua by justifying his spiritual development. Newman sought to posit an alternative to the mainstream ecclesiastical view by drawing inspiration from the tradition of Catholic thought, but he also tried to situate such an exegesis within the frames of legitimacy. The autobiographical form provided him the best structure for such an enterprise.

In addressing the idea of culture, Matthew Arnold did not seek to employ the autobiographical mode like Newman, but many of his beliefs and articulations on values were informed by the faith of personal conviction. Arnold was a multifaceted writer in the sense that he engaged a variety of genres, including poetry, religious writings, and social and literary criticisms. His views of culture are integrated to his vision of a civilised society, a position he held on to very dearly, and it is not surprising that it impacted his articulations in the other genre as well. His literary criticism, for instance, is not simply a ‘reading’ of texts, but is aligned to a purposefulness that wasn’t exactly similar to Benthamite Utilitarianism. For Arnold, the pursuit of literature was part of the study of the values that he esteemed most in life; for him culture was a matter of orientation and it was not plain wickedness that distinguished the ‘Philistines’ from the refined class, but ignorance. Education for Arnold, as it was for Leavis later on, was one of the potent methods through which such a cultivation could be facilitated. Arnold’s language was tailored towards the substantiation of his thesis and the presence of elements drawn from or referring to a variety of sources, including those from the Classical period, is thus part of a greater design. If he is, sometimes, satirical and sarcastic, that has more to do with his chosen mode of argumentation than a mere narrative strategy. In referring to Classical sources, Arnold chose to filter them through the agency of Continental thought; this was an interesting strategy because he was also providing a survey of the literary tradition in English and this Continental perspective enabled him to cross-check many of the critical principles that he held dear. For instance, the radical and revolutionary implications of the Continental thinkers are considerably sobered down in Arnold, as for him it was not a one-time arrangement but a culture. Consider these two passages from ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’: A Frenchman has, to a considerable degree, what one may call a conscience in intellectual matters; he has an active belief that there is a right and a wrong in them, that he is bound to honour and obey the right, that he is disgraced by cleaving to the wrong (Arnold 1970: 71). What are the essential characteristics of the spirit of our nation? Not certainly, an open and clear mind, not a quick and flexible intelligence….Openness of mind and the flexibility of intelligence were very

signal characteristics of the Athenian people in ancient times; everybody will feel that. Openness of mind and the flexibility of intelligence are remarkable characteristics of the French people in modern times; at any rate, they strikingly characterise them as compared to us; I think everybody, or almost everybody, will feel that. I will not ask what more the Athenian or the French spirit has than this, nor what shortcomings either of them may have as a setoff against this, all I want now to point out is that they have this; and that we have it in a much lesser degree (Arnold 1970: 71–72). The Arnoldian emphasis on the properly chosen mode of cultural orientation is evident in the way he offers the perspectives in reading the English poets. His discussions of the major English poets are tailored to converge upon the thesis of the touchstone method, a method that makes it possible for Arnold to situate the literary heritage of English literature within the ambit of his idea of culture. The moral strain in Arnold’s writings is hard to define. It extends beyond a good/evil axis and incorporates elements of cultural programming that do not accede to the superficial enunciations of action-based ethics. His enquiry into the relations between self and society is thus a carefully wrought programme—a coming together of influences that derive from both the Classical and the Continental traditions. The Arnoldian prophecy entails a responsibility that is not just confined within the limits of traditional textual criticism; his prose belongs to that tradition where content, form, and philosophy coalesce to suggest an evolutionary process and it is in this sense that the moral involvement serves to facilitate culturally informed readings of literature. Another of Arnold’s contemporaries, John Ruskin, veered towards a position where economic considerations offered him a better perspective for reading culture than mere literature or art. In the context of his earlier writings, the views on economic aspects of society, propounded by Ruskin in Unto This Last (1860), seem out of the current of mainstream Victorian cultural criticism. Towards the end of his career, he was being increasingly regarded as an eccentric, but then much of his mature thought comes from such a time when he was trying to negotiate the contradictions suggested by historical change and the imperatives of intellectual engagement. This movement across disciplines— from art criticism in Modern Painters (1843– 60) to the autobiographical Praeterita (1885–89)—shows him travelling through genres, but more importantly it enables him to engage in a series of

social and cultural issues. Ruskin’s prose is brilliant in phases, and while his mastery is evident in works like Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice (1851–53), and Munera Pulveris (1872), his ideas go beyond the order of aestheticism of the Pre-Raphaelites, with whom he was loosely associated.

GLOSSARY Chartism: Chartism was one of the significant nineteenth century political demand movements in England. The demand for better working conditions started in the late eighteenth century itself when Corresponding societies were formed by the skilled employees in the 1790s with the aim of initiating reform. By the early nineteenth century, the pressures of the unsympathetic Whig policies could be felt in a greater intensification of this demand for change. Three important laws of the early 1830s—the Reform Act (1832), the Factory Act (1833), and the Poor Law (1834)—agitated the workers further but none of these met the existing demands of the workers. The demands for a ten-hour work schedule or the grant of voting rights to men were thwarted and it was believed that a Parliament biased towards the aristocracy and capitalists would never address or understand the problems of the working classes. In 1838, a People’s Charter, which comprised six important demands of the government, was drawn up by William Lovett and Francis Place. The Charter demanded the following: (a) universal male suffrage, (b) no property privileges for the MPs, (c) holding of annual parliaments, (d) equally-sized constituencies, (e) payment of MPs, and (f) voting through secret ballot. The demands of the 1838 Charter had been aired earlier in the last decades of the preceding century too, but Lovett’s formulation caught the imagination of the people and inspired the workers to press for reform harder than ever before. A National Convention, organised with the backing of 1.3 million signatures, was held in London on February 4, 1839. However, the gathering was divided upon the way they would go about pressing for reform as some supported the use of violence if required, while others weren’t keen on abandoning the peaceful ways of protest. The conflict between the advocates of moral and physical force remained and the Convention did not end with a show of unity. Nevertheless, with the Parliament rejecting the demands and with the Convention failing to realise the potential of the Charter in terms of a consensus on the matter, there was an inevitable slump in the middle-class support that had done so much to prop up the Chartists in the first place. The continuation of the agitation in 1839 suggests that it did not lose steam easily, but the quick suppression of the armed protest in Newport showed that the powerful governmental machinery was beyond the Chartists. The disbanding

of the National Convention in September 1839 dissipated the concentrated call for reform and local protests replaced the national focus. The failure of the Newport rising (24 protestors were killed) alienated Chartists from the aristocracy or the middle classes. The inability to succeed in 1839, however, did not prevent another version of the Chartist protest from emerging the next year when the National Charter Association (NCA) was formed by Feargus O’Connor. O’Connor used his newspaper Northern Star as the great propaganda vehicle for the Chartist movement, and the swelling of the NCA membership to 50,000 suggests that the reformists were not deficient in number. The failure of the petition of the second National Convention (backed by 3.3 million signatures) compelled the movement to attend to social and cultural areas like developing Chartist schools, chapels, cooperative outlets, and burial clubs. When harvests failed in 1846 and 1847, interest in Chartism revived again, which was evident in the mass rally organised in London, in 1848. The government made elaborate arrangements to tackle the gathering by mobilising more than a hundred thousand police personnel (which incidentally outnumbered the petitioners) and eventually banned the procession. O’Connor lost both face and support as the movement petered beyond any further revival. As a political protest, Chartism didn’t really win over people from different classes, a failure that contributed to its inability to generate sympathy for the demands, and the lack of which indicates the extent to which the society of the high Victorian period was stratified, as the Reform Act of 1832 satisfied many Englishmen and those that weren’t did not have a political base to articulate their demand. Since the Parliament was not composed of representatives of the people who demanded reform, the movement was hardly recognised as a political threat. Interestingly, all the demands of the Chartists were fulfilled eventually, even though such realisations weren’t under any banner identifying the movement. Condition of England: The term ‘Condition of England’ was first used by Thomas Carlyle in his essay titled Chartism (1839) where he sought to draw attention to the problems associated with industrial growth and mechanisation. As a movement, Chartism marked the first deliberate demand for social reform in a society newly confronting industrial haphazardness. The phrase was used before Carlyle but he situated the term as a response to the experience of industrialism. The English genealogist and statistician,

Gregory King’s book Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England, 1696 (1801), contained the phrase, but it referred to seventeenth century English society and not the industrial world of the Victorian age. Carlyle’s use of the phrase, on the other hand, in Chartism was designed as a response to industrialisation and its impact on social mobility. Although his pamphlet was published in 1839, the ‘Condition of England’ issue remained in vogue and in the centre of the debate on industrialism for a considerably longer time. Apart from Carlyle, various other contemporary thinkers commented on the debasement of culture and the mechanisation of life in the so called ‘hungry forties,’ which also included Frederick Engels, who was living in Manchester at the time. Engles’ treatise on the experience of industrialism titled The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) analysed the development of industrialisation and it social implications. Condition of England Novel: The ‘Condition of England’ question constituted the theme of a spate of novels in the 1840s and 50s. These novels, which took for their subject the impact of industrialisation on man and society, are also known as ‘social problem novels’ or ‘industrial novels.’ Common to these novels is the concern about the condition of society and the effect of changes brought about by the growth of industry. It is not that these novels did not accommodate other aspects of society and culture, but the emphasis on the industrial impact was the dominating one. Elizabeth Gaskell’s first novel, Mary Barton (1848), is usually cited as a classic in this genre. The theme of Mary Barton concerns the lives of the Bartons, a working class family, and the crisis that results from the involvement of the father, John Barton, in a murder that is motivated by class difference. The fact that the main plot of the novel is situated in Manchester, a city that was becoming increasingly the site of dehumanisation, contributes to the stark harshness brought to human life by industrialisation. The novel recaptures the conditions of work in the textile mills and slums of Manchester. The difficulties faced by the workers are further propounded by their inability to get out of the rut in which they find themselves. The lives of the workers are subject to the commercial and industrial cycles and governed by predictability, they carry their angst inside them. Sometimes such despair and frustration finds manifestations in acts that do not have social sanction. The

act of John Barton is characterised by such a condition. In spite of the fact that Gaskell is sympathetic towards the working class, hers is primarily a middle class perspective, and it lacks the sense of immediacy that is evident in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), another novel of working class life written in the twentieth century. Elizabeth Gaskell offered another exposition of the same theme in her North and South (1855). The title of Gaskell’s novel referred to the contrast between the industrial north and the leisured south. The movement of the protagonist, Margaret Hale, in the experiential scale holds the key to the novel. The situation in the industrial England of 1840s and 50s served as the source for many writers, including non-fiction. Carlyle and Engels may be among the more celebrated writers who had written about the bleakness that confronted the English nation, but there were others who addressed the issue with great conviction. Take for instance, the case of Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population in Great Britain (1842) by Edwin Chadwick, a bestseller that was technically a dry document, but sold well because it addressed an issue that mattered to Victorians in the 1840s. Industrialisation, after all, wasn’t an isolated phenomenon but affected a wide spectrum of Victorian society across the classes. There were other industrial novels published before Gaskell’s Mary Barton, one of which was Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, The Factory Boy (1840). The novel is interesting as an example of the early Victorian response to the experience of industrialism. During the 1840s and 50s, other novelists tried to experiment with the genre by highlighting various aspects of industrial life. One of the most celebrated instances of this particular kind of writing is the opening passage of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, a passage that inaugurates the theme of utilitarianism, and caricatures the emphasis on a mechanical way of life: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children Stick to Facts, Sir!” (Dickens 1989: 1). Whether one agrees with the moralistic thesis of Dickens or not is another

matter, but there is no doubt that he writes from a conviction that grants the thought of the novels its sense of purpose. This may seem ironic, at least in the context of the structures of contrast that Dickens organises in the narrative, one of which is the idea of purpose. The character of Thomas Gradgrind, driven by ‘facts’ stands at one extreme, and as his children lose out on human affection and love, Dickens places the honest factory worker Stephen Blackpool at the other end of the social spectrum. The contrast is often informed by a complex intermingling of shades, as the difficulties faced by Blackpool signify. Another of Dickens’s novel Dombey and Son (1848) dealt with the theme of mercenary pursuit, even though it wasn’t strictly based upon the context of industrialism. In Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845), Benjamin Disareli uses the context of industrialism to engage the issue of leadership in a society fragmented by class divisions, and while his solution through the marriage of the aristocratic Harry Coningsby and the daughter of ‘millocracy’ Edith Millbank in the first text may not be the ideal one in the circumstances, the novels nevertheless attend to the political dimensions of the ‘Condition of England’ question. In Sybil, he comments on the experience of Chartism. In spite of the fact that Disareli is sympathetic towards the working class, his position is at times patronising. Two novels by Charles Kingsley—Yeast (1848) and Alton Locke (1850)—too dealt with the ‘Condition of England’ question. Both the narratives offer the views from a perspective of reformism, and the critiquing of Chartism is based on the reading of the political machinations of the leaders which further victimise the oppressed class. Felix Holt (1866) by George Eliot is an interesting example of the genre because it was written at a time when many of the central issues relating to the ‘Condition of England’ question had consolidated into settled formats. Eliot’s novel contrasts conditions of value (integrity, honesty, and sincerity) with opportunism. Other novels in this genre include Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and Dinah Mulock’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1857). Corn Laws: The Corn Laws collectively refer to the rules related to the import and export of grain in England. The first Corn Laws were imposed as early as the twelfth century but its impact on the society and economy was more pronounced when it was used to manipulate prices in the nineteenth century. In 1815, immediately following the Napoleonic Wars, the British

Parliament passed an Act that was designed to enhance and protect the interests of the country’s market as it prevented wheat import till domestic prices reached £4 a quarter. The argument that this measure was meant to ‘protect’ the farmers from overseas competition was seen by the average grain producer primarily as a disguised method of serving the landowners’ business interests. The Corn Laws that followed the 1815 enactment were moved by the same principle and the succeeding legislations in 1822, 1828, and 1842 weren’t able to lessen the dissatisfaction among the manufacturers. The protests against the Corn Laws were organised through the banner of the Anti-Corn Law League which was constituted in 1839. When the issue became too overtly political, the government repealed the Corn Laws in 1846. While the repeal of the Corn Laws brought smiles to the faces of the manufacturers, it did not affect domestic production as the price of corn remained stable for the first half of the nineteenth century. Evangelicalism: Evangelicalism refers to the movement within the Church of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where the members emphasised on what they called ‘vital Christianity.’ The Evangelicals insisted on the adherence to a strict moral code and the importance of good work. They were inspired by the doctrines of Calvinism and formed parish churches on the model of the Church of England. The Evangelicals were influential in the nineteenth century and had members primarily from the upper and the middle classes. Among the many things they insisted upon, the strict observance of Sunday is one of the more important ones. They were against the perpetuation of the slave trade and were responsible for the founding of missionary societies. Great Exhibition: In 1851, The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations was organised in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park London. The Great Exhibition was the first major exhibition of its kind in the world. Various objects, items and artefacts were collected from different parts of the world, including the colonies that had recently come under British control. One of the purposes behind the holding of the exhibition was the display of British industrial supremacy to the world. More than a half of the fourteen thousand exhibits were British. The exhibition ran for five months and drew millions of visitors. Most of the visitors (there were many from the European countries as well) were greatly impressed by the items of display, while some

like John Ruskin considered it vulgar. Prince Albert was behind the holding of the Great Exhibition and he believed it to symbolise the idea of peace and progress. Laissez-faire: The term laissez-faire refers to the philosophy or doctrine that considers free trade as a more preferred option to the one determined by the state. The source of the term is not exactly known but it is associated with the Physiocrats, a group of French economists, who believed that conditions influencing population growth were related to economic prosperity. The Physiocrats greatly influenced classical economists in England like Adam Smith. Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations (1776) is one of the classics expounding the theory and logic of laissez-faire as he held that the involvement of tax regime affected trade. The policy of free trade could ensure the growth of the economy as it ensures competition and enable the movement of capital. According to the doctrine of laissez-faire, free trade benefits both the producer and the consumer as it made products cheaper and qualitatively better. In spite of the fact that the producer is motivated by selfinterest, he ends up helping society by his enterprise as competition compelled the disciplining of prices. For free trade to thrive, governmental control must be minimal, for monopolies and protectiveness would make the prices of commodities go up. The popularity of the doctrine was somewhat aided by the writings of John Stuart Mill, whose Principles of Political Economy (1848) argued against the governmental control in economic matters. Politically, the concept of laissez-faire had an impact on nineteenth century state policy. It affected the formulation of the Poor Law Act of 1834, influenced the reduction of import duties, and contributed to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. In different formulations, the doctrine survived in British policy till 1932, when the Great Depression compelled the government to go in for protective measures in an organised way. Most European countries, however, had implemented some kind of protective mechanism by the 1870s except Britain. London Magazine: Although a periodical named London Magazine was published in the eighteenth century (1732–85), the name is more closely identified with the monthly that was in circulation from 1820 to 1829. John Scott was the editor of London Magazine. The Romantic period was one of the most successful ages in terms of magazine publication and London

Magazine capitalised on the trend. It was in competition with the popular Blackwood’s Magazine, another popular journal of the time. Among the many writers who contributed to the magazine included Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb. De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Lamb’s Essays of Elia were first introduced to contemporary readers through the pages of the London Magazine. The journal thrived on the rivalry with its competitors, especially Blackwood’s, and Scott worked towards the establishment of a specific image that would separate it from the other productions. Apart from essays and prose writings, London Magazine also published poems by John Keats and John Clare. There have been other productions titled London Magazine in the twentieth century, the most famous of which was John Lehmann’s journal of the same name which began appearing in 1954. Oxford Movement: The Oxford Movement was a nineteenth century development centred at Oxford, which questioned some of the foundational aspects of the religious programme represented by the Church of England. The Oxford Movement sought to re-emphasise the significance to the Roman Catholic position as an alternative to the Church of England position. The legislations initiated by the British government, relaxing some of the impositions on Roman Catholics, from 1828–32 inspired the believers of the Catholic faith to highlight the inconsistencies of the Protestant principles. The movement raised important theological and spiritual issues. The four most influential leaders of the development were John Henry Newman (1801–90), Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–36), John Keble (1792–1866), and Edward Pusey (1800–82). The Movement is also known as the Tractarian Movement because the tracts provided the medium of argument initiated by 90 Tracts for the Times (1833–41), which was edited by John Henry Newman. Arguing as critics of the Anglican Church, Newman and his group insisted on the doctrinal functions of the Catholic position. The Movement was able to reintroduce many ritualistic and doctrinal practices in religion in the nineteenth century and contributed to the development of the Anglo-Catholic Church in England. Palgrave and The Golden Treasury: Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897) was a Victorian poet and critic. He became a Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1885, prior to which he served in the Education Department. His own poetry

books—Visions of England (1880–81) and Amenophis (1892)—do not represent the main current of the Victorian poetic tradition. It is upon his critical writings and editorial proficiency, displayed especially in Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), that his reputation rests. International Exhibition (1862), a guide book on fine arts, Essays on Art (1862), and Landscape in Poetry (1897) are his critical books. Palgrave also edited a second updated volume of Golden Treasury (1897) and a Treasury of Sacred Song (1889), but none could equal the popularity of the 1861 volume. His other works include a selection of Robert Herrick’s poems titled Chrysomela (1877) and a biography of Arthur Hugh Clough (1862). In compiling the poems in the Golden Treasury, Palgrave was aided by Tennyson. The collection went a long way in popularising the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, and sidelined the Metaphysical poets. The collection was also instrumental in shaping the idea of an English literary canon. The compilation has been enhanced and modified in subsequent editions and it has been one of the most popular poetry collections even in the twentieth century. Commenting on Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, Matthew Arnold wrote in ‘The Literary Influence of Academies’: “The plan of arrangement which he devised for that work, the mode in which he followed his plan out, may, one might even say, merely the juxtaposition, in pursuance of it, of two such pieces as those of Wordsworth and Shelley which form the 285th and 286th in his collection, show a delicacy of feeling in these matters which is quite indisputable and very rare” (Arnold 1970: 86). Poor Laws: Poor Laws refer to a series of legislations implemented in England with the aim of providing relief to the poor. The process started in the sixteenth century and continued till the twentieth century. In the sixteenth century, the Poor Laws (known as Elizabethan Poor Laws, 1597–98) were implemented through the agencies of parish overseers and the primary beneficiaries were the aged, the sick, the infants, and the residents of workhouses. The Poor Law Act of 1601 decreed that the Justice of the Peace was responsible for the administration of the rules, which included the setting to work and punishing of ‘sturdy beggars.’ The Poor Law Act of 1723 enhanced the range of activities of the Overseers of the Poor by enabling them to begin workhouses and gave them the authority to deny benefits to those who refused to enter it. Most of the provisions of this Act were

terminated by Gilbert’s Act (1782), which paved the way for the adoption of the Speenhamland System later. The Speenhamland System made provisions for giving relief to individuals below a prescribed subsistence level and owing to its influence, the terms of poor relief were greatly modified by the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834). Instead of administering poor relief through parishes, the 1834 Amendment created 643 unions in the country, with each of these having a workhouse within it. The administration was run by an elected Board of Guardians and it was placed under the regimen of three government Poor Law Commissioners. The provisions were now limited to the workhouses, with only the aged and the sick paupers outside eligible for poor relief. The 1834 Act caused great resentment among the public as it prevented the able-bodied poor from getting relief. In 1929, the Board of Guardians was disbanded through the Local Government Act and it was replaced by the Public Assistance Committees. National Health Service, along with the National Assistance Act (1948), created an alternative mechanism of providing relief through a wider and more comprehensive welfare strategy than that covered by the Poor Laws. Ragged Schools: Ragged schools were one of the many agencies involved in providing education and other services to the poor children in the nineteenth century. The first ragged school was begun by Thomas Cranfield in 1810 in South London. These schools were run through charity and besides elementary education, they provided basic industrial training and religious education. The Ragged School Union was formed in 1844 in London (Lord Ashley, later Lord Shaftesbury, was its first President) which functioned as the general body of these institutions. The Union was renamed the Shaftesbury Society in 1898. Railways: The railways provided great fillip to industry in the nineteenth century and eased the pressures of transportation and communication. The first use of steam locomotive in the railways was done on September 27, 1825, when George Stephenson’s engine Active moved the train from Stockton to Darlington. On September 15, 1830, the engine Rocket designed by George and Robert Stephenson was used in the Liverpool-Manchester line. Prior to the steam locomotive’s arrival, however, railroads did exist in England, but its impact was limited. Around 1750 wooden rail lines had been laid in the north of England to make movement of horse drawn trucks for the

purpose of carrying coal from mine to the river quays. The so-called ‘railway mania’ sweeped England around the period 1843–49. This was the time when immense investments were made for the development of railways. An important development was the passing of the Railway Act of 1844 which made it mandatory for at least one train to run on a daily basis on every line that had been laid. Railroad transportation rapidly networked different locations all over the world in the second half of the nineteenth century. The railways had a great impact on the Industrial Revolution and contributed to the agrarian changes in England. The expansion of railroads facilitated the growth of the iron, coal, and steel industries; it made far-flung markets accessible to these rapidly growing industries. The railways also made progress in the fields of civil and mechanical engineering inevitable. The building of bridges, tunnels, and viaducts were remarkably expedited by the coming of the railways while innovations in the manufacturing of engines and other related equipments became possible because of the growth of the railways. The pace with which the railways impacted communications and consequently the whole of nineteenth century life is astounding. From its beginning in 1825 to the end of the Victorian reign, the expansion of the railways was such that it came to constitute a regular part of life. Asa Briggs comments on this aspect thus: “By the last decades of the nineteenth century, railways, no longer thought of as a novelty, had ceased to capture the imagination of the public. They were taken for granted, not just because what they carried was now deemed commonplace (they quickly revolutionised the distribution of consumer goods, perishable, bulky and fragile, from milk to mail), but because passengers no longer felt that great excitement in speed of movement which the first travellers had done” (Briggs 1999: 237). Many of the important developments in the railways were achieved in the nineteenth century: fixed signals (1830), semaphore and audible fog signals (1841), automatic brake (1872), sleeping cars (1873), dining cars (1879), and corridor coaches (1890). The railways speeded up Victorian life like never before. It made movement easier, transportation of various kinds of goods and commodities became routine, and distant markets came closer to the industries. Two major contributions of the railways to Victorian life were: (a) the cheapness of transportation which increased both social and economic mobility, and (b) the facilitation of the industrial growth. The pre-industrial state of English society was also that which predated the emergence of the

railways; in terms of historical significance the railways have become almost synonymous with the Industrial Revolution. Reform Act (1832): Seen as one of the important measures in the democratic evolution of England, the 1832 Reform Act was a major political development in the nineteenth century. The conditions that existed during the first two decades of the nineteenth century precipitated public unrest. It was a time of depression caused by the unsettlement of industrial wages, the employment scene was not encouraging, and agricultural production was at a low. The problems related to agriculture found some form of manifestation in the Swing riots. Collectively, the social scene was one of turmoil and the call for reform was growing all the time. The British Parliament at that time, however, was hardly a fully representative one: the fact that there were rotten boroughs sending representatives and other important towns (Manchester is one prime example) not having any, contributed to the increasing calls for addressing these social issues politically. When the Whigs assumed power in 1830, they were hardly inclined to initiate reform—ironically, they had come to power on the basis of such a promise—as, among other things, Earl Grey was against the idea of the secret ballot. Against such a backdrop, the proposals of the 1831 bill were extremely surprising as it suggested a radical overhauling of the seat distribution system, which would make it impossible for the ‘rotten’ boroughs to exert more pressure than ones with no seats at all. The issue of franchise was also addressed in the 1831 bill but when it was brought before the House of Commons it passed by a mere vote. Grey decided to call for elections. It led to a Parliament where the number of Reform supporters went up to 130. When a similar bill was introduced again, the House of Lords rejected it. The people were greatly agitated and demanded reform more vociferously. Grey resigned, but was soon back after the failure of Wellington and with the Tories refraining from voting, the bill was eventually passed. The Reform Bill, however, did not unshackle the aristocratic hold over franchise in spite of the fact that matters were considerably streamlined. The working class remained aloof from the voting process throughout the nineteenth century. But then the path to democracy became smoother as the social protest emerged as a mode of effective articulation—something the pre- and post-Reform situations exemplified. The House of Commons emerged stronger during the course of developments

that led to the Reform Act of 1832 and the decline of the influence of the House of Lords became more pronounced. Swing riots: The term ‘Swing riots’ refers to the agricultural conflicts that took place in England in 1830–31. Agricultural production came down considerably following the Napoleonic Wars, and even after the conflict ended in 1815, the matter was far from improving. Labour unrest complicated an already difficult situation as poor harvests and rising prices severely affected the British economy. Moreover, the number of people unemployed had risen and a collective dissatisfaction over these problems found manifestation in the agricultural disorders, the first of which began in Kent in 1830. The unrest quickly embraced other areas of England, especially the localities where the Speenhamland system operated. The name associated with the riots was derived from a mythical non-existent Captain Swing who apparently led the rioters by writing anonymous letters. The destruction of equipment and loss of property was common. About two thousand of the protestors were arrested and after the Special Commissions Court’s decision, nineteen were hanged. The protest was quickly curtailed but the Swing Riots, nevertheless brought issues relating to agricultural conditions and working conditions into sharp focus in the early 1830s, and was partly influential in bringing in the Reform Act of 1832. In spite of it being a specific response to inadequacies in agriculture in 1830–31, the Swing Riots highlighted other social discrepancies by involving the general population in the affected areas. Trade Unions: Trade unionism, or the formation of labour bodies, goes back to the medieval times when craft guilds were formed for both furthering and protecting the cause of its members. Such a genealogy, however, does not really follow a straight line to the past, for the unions in England that were formed in the nineteenth century were conditioned by a completely different impulse. Bodies of workmen, at least in the format in which they have come to exist in the modern world, were not there prior to the seventeenth century. Various bodies of workers— carpenters, tailors, and those of other artisans— were formed in different parts of England in the eighteenth century; this development shows the emergence of a capitalist economy, one that was gradually moving into the early phases of industrialisation. The early history of the organisations of labour shows a marked shift from the apprenticejourneyman-master arrangement to the employer/employee structure in the

eighteenth century. The existing bodies of master and journeymen were facing a sharp decline, and in any case they did not operate in the way modern labour unions function. The move from wage-based economy to a labour-market driven one is one of the registers through which the change in the economic structure of English society in the industrial age may be discerned. The growing importance of the trade unions in the industrial age can be seen in the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 which declared that unionism was illegal. The Acts were brought into effect as a response to the political unrest during the French revolutionary conflicts, but other factors were also at work; the combination of workers in the densely populated Lancashire and Yorkshire localities, for instance, was an immediate reason for the implementation of the Combination Acts. The original purpose of the Acts, i.e., prohibition of unionism, was not achieved, as many of these labour bodies survived and many actually thrived in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Some of these bodies were known as Friendly Societies. In 1824, when the Combination Acts were repealed, it signalled the first official recognition of the existence and the legitimacy of the trade unions. In the period that followed, there was a proliferation of labour unions. The trade unions of the early part of the nineteenth century were developed initially in a town with a single trade practice in mind. Thus, for a major part of the first half of the century, the unions grew with a focus on local issues and were governed by immediate concerns of the areas in which they operated. The major impetus in the process of the formation of the trade unions came from Robert Owen who conceived of a project called the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU) of 1833–34. This was aimed at bringing together all the labour force even though it was essentially London based and was peopled by the tailors and the shoemakers of the national capital. This body was the first union in England to have both skilled and unskilled labourers under its wing; within months, however, the body fell flat with six members of The Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers (which was part of Owen’s GNCTU) being deported to Australia. The federal character of the trade unions in England started appearing by the 1850s, with the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (1851) taking the lead. The Trade Union Congress was formed in 1868 as the federation of all unions in England, and it had about two million members by the end of the century. Interestingly, these unions were mainly for the skilled workforce and the

unskilled labour sector wasn’t well organised till the final decades of the century. The 1890s saw a major crisis in British industry with prolonged strikes being commonplace; the six-month long strike in the engineering sector (1897–98) was the first major lockout in England when the strikers agitated for the adoption of eight-hour workdays. The efforts of the trade unions to win support for their agitations weren’t always successful. Two significant failures in the early twentieth century showed that problems of labour weren’t always easily addressed: the first was ‘Black Friday’ (April 15, 1921) when the transport workers and railwaymen did not support the miners’ demand for reversal of the wage cuts imposed by their employers, and the second was the General Strike (May 4–12, 1926) that ended in complete surrender by the Trade Union Congress. In 1927, the government passed the Trade Union Act which further restricted the powers of the labour bodies. Utilitarianism: Utilitarianism refers to a particular tradition that came into prominence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The major proponents of the Utilitarian view were Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The basic assumption of Utilitarian philosophy is that actions should be judged according to the pleasure/happiness it gives; thus, in this view, an action will be considered to be ‘good’ if it provides happiness and ‘bad’ if vice versa. The range of ‘happiness’ is not confined to the individual alone but must accommodate the world around him/her. The antecedents of English Utilitarianism can be traced back to Richard Cumberland’s philosophy in the seventeenth century and Francis Hutcheon who developed a position to Utilitarianism in the eighteenth century. Bentham himself traced his orientation to the work of earlier thinkers like Joseph Priestley, ClaudeAdrien Helvétius, Cesare Beccaria, and David Hume. Other sources of Utilitarianism include the ethical position of the theological scholar John Gay, who considered the promotion of human happiness to be related to God’s will. Bentham believed in the idea of ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ and considered it to be the philosophy that would apply to the entire community. His An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) presents the programme for social uplift and relates it to the imperatives of legislation. Bentham’s emphasis on a transformation of social ideals constituted the basis of the philosophy that was later structured to

fashion everything in terms of ‘utility.’ Bentham’s followers included David Ricardo, the economist, the father-son duo of James Mill’ and John Stuart Mill and the legalist thinker, John Austin. John Stuart Mill was one of the most ardent spokesmen for the cultural orientation of Utilitarianism. His views on women’s suffrage, education for the masses, and individual liberty are considered to be important articulations on the subject. In fact, his essay titled ‘Utilitarianism’ (1861) still remains the basic introduction to the philosophic doctrine. In the late nineteenth century, Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (1874) presented a cogent analysis of Utilitarian principles in relation to individual ethics. The ethical ideals, fostered by thinkers like G. E. Moore in the early twentieth century, have furthered the dimensions of Utilitarian thought. Stephen Toulmin, Patrick Nowell-Smith, and J.O. Urmson are the major twentieth century thinkers whose philosophic orientations show the strains of the Utilitarian tradition. Workhouses: Workhouses in England had been in existence much before the nineteenth century. They started functioning as places of shelter and sustenance for the poor and the needy from the beginning of the seventeenth century. The 1601 Poor Law Act stipulated that the duty of looking after the requirements of the poor belonged to the respective parishes. In the early seventeenth century, it was usual for the ablebodied men to work in the workhouses but the original design of making them work for profits did not always materialise. During the eighteenth century, the workhouses deteriorated considerably. It was also the period when the workhouses served as the gathering place of different anti-social elements and in spite of the fact they were apparently paupers, their strategies exhibited other propensities. For the administration, the workhouses were useful dumping grounds as people unwanted in the society could be accommodated here. Not just poor people, the old, the weak, and the mentally unsound constituted the population of the workhouses. The 1834 Poor Law Act streamlined the principles of administration of the workhouses. The Act made it impossible for the able-bodied individuals to seek relief from the workhouses. Dickens’s Oliver Twist provides a picture of the atmosphere inside a workhouse in the nineteenth century. After the early decades of the twentieth century, the workhouse system was assimilated within more comprehensive schemes for social welfare.

4 From the Modern to the Postmodern: The Twentieth Century and Beyond THE CRISIS OF EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION By the early decades of the twentieth century, the erstwhile secure imperial structure began to manifest cracks and show slow but definite signs of collapse. The first indication of the crisis became apparent when the Boer resistance drew unprecedented dissension from both within England and other European countries. Even though the end of the Second World War is a convenient historical mark to place the decolonising process in perspective, the crisis of empire was brought about by many interlinking factors which pre-date the war. The collapse of the empire and decolonisation did not happen overnight. Nineteenth century imperialism was characterised by the exploitation of racial inequality, economic subjugation, and a tacit anti-native bias. For more than a century, the colonies had served as important sources for the generation and supply of raw materials, and then markets for the finished goods manufactured in England. The colonies also provided ample scope to the adventurous investors to further their business interests. The colonies were thus competing with the mother country for opportunities which were now available to many enterprising English people. Important businesses of the British entrepreneurs were situated in and controlled from the colonies, and these people also played very influential roles in the governance of the colonies. At the same time, the imperialist enterprise also brought about a significant change in the lifestyles of the natives. The benefits of industrialisation slowly filtered to the colonised—education, sanitation, medicine, transport, and communication being some of the major fields affected by this process. The population increase in the colonies, however, ran parallel to the growth in wealth and the number of educated among the

colonised increased considerably. Education and enlightenment brought with it an awareness of the ideals of liberty, equality, and the right to selfdetermination. The idea of self-determination was initially associated with the process of decolonisation but its germ lies in the upsurge of nationalism in many of the colonies, which intensified towards the end of the nineteenth century. The nationalistic spirit was manifested in, among other things, the recognition of one’s cultural identity which made it difficult to accept the foreign rule. On the other hand, it is important to acknowledge that the concept of self-determination in its current usage, as the designatory term to signify the struggles of some groups, was not the connotation that worked to inspire the colonised. The awareness of the educated classes was influential in inspiring the otherwise disorganised masses into forming a coherent resistance movement in most of the colonies. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Aurobindo are two striking examples of how the Western model of education and experience of European life contributed to the harnessing of the nationalistic spirit in colonies like India. If the leaders of the resistance movements in many of the colonies utilised their experiences in the West, it is a reflection upon the historical process that worked to circumvent the very mechanism of the empire through an agency that it facilitated and provided. Armed with the knowledge of the benefits of liberty, the nationalistic leaders in many of the colonies staked a serious claim for freedom, equality, and an end to foreign domination. The movements for freedom in different parts of the world were orchestrated through different mechanisms no doubt, but it also suggests that the gradual growth in awareness throughout the nineteenth century can be situated as a common factor contributing to the intensification of the resistances in the colonies. Again, the knowledge of successful revolutionary struggles, especially those in America and France and later Russia, inspired the freedom fighters in the colonies. The matter gained strength with the international scene changing during and after the two world wars, as the logic and ideology behind the Allies’ involvement was that these wars were fought for the sake of freedom and liberty of the oppressed peoples. As the nineteenth century wore on, the costs of managing the imperial administration started to make an impact on the colonisers’ attitude; what was initially a very beneficial enterprise and a mode of profit was now becoming burdensome. There was, therefore, a deliberate shift in policy where there

was a subtle movement away from the administrative side of the enterprise. The realisation of the shift was most discernible in the formation of the League of Nations in 1919 when the creation of the mandates system made the image changeover necessary. Following the Boer conflict in South Africa, the empire’s invincibility and validity came into serious question. The loss suffered by a 30,000 strong force, led by the Commander-in-Chief General Buller, at the hands of native Afrikaners on January 24, 1900, at the Battle of Spion Kop in South Africa, was a major embarrassment for the British. The more popularly know Afrikaner aggression against the British (1899–1902) eventually ended in the surrender of the Boers, but by that time enough was done to tarnish the image of the imperialists. Firstly, the British troops found it extremely difficult to manage the campaign and when the Boers did submit to the forces, there was a lot of international attention drawn to it to simply leave it behind. One of the views, which seemed to persist well beyond the conflict’s years, was that it “seemed to represent all that was reprehensible in British imperialism. Britain, the ‘mother of democracy’, had on this analysis brought about a war with two puny but independent states, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, for the sole purpose of laying its bloodstained hands upon the gold mines of the Rand, whose development since the 1886 had transformed the region’s economy” (Judd 1997: 155). More than anything else, the Boer conflict ‘exposed’ the British motives and the supposedly reformist measures initiated in the various colonies were opened to scrutiny. Three more developments before the end of the Second World War contributed to the intensified crisis and eventual collapse of the British Empire. It was not that the empire fell merely because of these developments but they added fuel to the call for decolonisation that began to emerge with greater vocal pressure every passing day. The first of these was the Easter Uprising in Ireland in 1916. The uprising was sudden and unexpected, at least for the British, when about twelve hundred protestors from different groups such as the Irish Volunteers, Sinn Féin, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood took control of the post office and other premises in Sackville Street. The rebellion was short and lasted for only four days. While sixteen of its leaders were captured and executed, 450 of the rebels died with the casualties numbering about 100 on the British side. The uprising was influential in determining the course of opinion in the United Kingdom, and the condemnation of the abrupt and violent response of the British only helped to

ignite the already tense relations between the two peoples. The Easter Uprising of 1916 showed how the imperialist British could go against its own ‘white’ brethren, a fact noted by other European countries during the middle of the First World War. The second development was that of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 which presented the British in an unprecedented brutal way to the world. The unprovoked firing upon peaceful demonstrators in Jallianwallabagh, Amritsar on April 13, 1919, left almost 400 dead and a thousand wounded. The outrage over the incident in India and elsewhere sparked off a serious rethinking of the attitude towards the British. It contributed to the consolidation of the Satyagraha Movement in India and is often taken as an example of the frustration with which the British administration was coping. The Easter Uprising of 1916 and the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 were strong indicators of the growing resistance in the colonial territories, a condition the British was finding extremely difficult to negotiate with. Matters were further complicated because Britain had also to attend to the exigencies of the First World War along with the tackling of these uprisings, a balance that was not required during Queen Victoria’s reign. The third development, closely associated with the gradual crisis of British imperialism in the twentieth century, was the loss of Singapore. In February 1942, the British forces surrendered meekly to the Japanese; this loss of Singapore along with the subsequent capture of the 130,000 imperial troops, including Australian and Kiwi troops, was seen as a serious blow to the idea of European invincibility. In the context of the Second World War, this development may be seen as one among many incidents related to the war (the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941 being another), but it went a long way to demonstrate that the imperialist monopoly of the European powers was now being challenged. The emergence of Japan broke through the Eurocentric bias of the imperialist enterprise and the position of the British as the major imperialist power of the world was no longer valid. India’s independence from the British in 1947 was the most obvious sign that the massive imperial structure, at the centre of which it stood, was irreversibly dismantling itself. By the middle of the twentieth century, the process of decolonisation was well underway. India’s right to selfgovernance in 1947, however, was not granted straight away. Almost a century earlier, in 1857, the now famous Sepoy Mutiny indicated clearly that

the imperialist enterprise would have to face its share of opposition. As the nineteenth century progressed, the intensity and range of resistance grew. Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent tactics started making its mark by the early decades of the twentieth century and the concentration and consolidation of nationalism under the banner of the Indian National Congress offered the British a face of unity that was impossible to wish away. When the Second World War ended in 1945, the Labour government in England submitted that India’s independence was now a political inevitability. The conflicts of partition and the creation of India and Pakistan notwithstanding, the British handover of power was not a very difficult affair. The Labour policy makers at the helm believed that while managing India had been both a costly and messy business, the other Southeast Asian and African colonies would continue to serve English interests well. Such a belief, however, was ill founded. Resistances in many West African countries were working towards a well-regulated pitch and the English government realised very soon that colonialism was no longer a coercive exercise. British tact and diplomacy in the 1950s failed to prevent the independence movements in the African states from realising their goals. The lack of approval for British governance in Ghana and Kenya contributed to the decline of empire, and events such as the Mau Mau rebellion in the latter country only added to the loss of face. ‘Atrocity’ was now a commonly associated qualification for the British style of governance as the experience of the Boers and the Mau Mau only served to enhance and magnify this image of hostility among the colonised. This loss of face was a serious matter for English diplomacy and foreign policy. Moreover, the maintenance of the empire was taking its toll on the English economy and the emergence of new political powers in Europe only added to the view that colonisation was not an idea to be persisted with much longer. The British control over dominions was fast facing newer political challenges after the Second World War. In spite of the unwillingness of the British to leave Egypt, the country’s nationalists forced the colonisers in 1951 to agree to a departure to be effected within three years. Well before the three-year term was over, however, the Egyptian king Farouk, considered close to the imperialists, was deposed by nationalist army officers in 1952, following which Egypt was declared a republic. Gamal Abdel Nasser became the first President (1956–70) of the country after the withdrawal of the British. Nasser’s political ascendancy constituted a major threat to the position of the

Western powers in the Middle East as he sought to foster and develop the anti-colonial ideology of West-baiting. One of the most embarrassing situations faced by the British government in modern history related to the attack on Egypt in 1956. The situation, now known as the ‘Suez Crisis’ precipitated when Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal Company. Nasser refused to compensate the British for the share they had in the company because Britain and the United States were unwilling to finance the construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile. Nasser’s logic was based on a heightening of nationalistic pride and the marshalling of financial resources. The Canal had been serving as an important route to British bases which now completely changed the situation. Israel, faced with the threat of a growing pan-Arab nationalism, suddenly joined the Suez affair when it attacked Egypt under a secret pact with Britain and France on October 29, 1956. The French considered the emergence of Egypt as a threat to their expansionist plans and when the Anglo-French mediation offer was turned down by Nasser, it provided a legitimate ground to the two European nations to attack Egypt. In spite of the destruction of the Egyptian air force and the landing of troops on the mouth of the Nile, along with the Israelite occupation of Sinai, Nasser could not be vanquished. Following the war, Nasser became a national hero and a cult figure. The British and the French forces were compelled to withdraw as international opinion was vehemently against the aggression. Suez heralded the end of British imperialism. The granting of political freedom to the colonies considerably weakened British hold over international opinion and the Egyptian fiasco constituted a major development that made a recall of the erstwhile imperialist enterprise impossible. The Suez crisis “is often seen as a major turning point in British history. More accurately, it marked the time when the majority of politicians realised that the world had already changed for ever, because of the Second World War” (Garnett and Weight 2004: 464). The Suez crisis pointed towards the fallibility of the imperial ideology and the consequent political effect of territorial domination became a major embarrassment for the English. If the Suez affair made the British aware of their decline, the difficulty of colonialist practice was manifested in the case of Rhodesia. Rhodesia’s location (in Africa) and the politics of population contributed to the problem of balancing local and colonial interests. In 1965, when the white Rhodesians were urged to negotiate a position where racial segregation

would not be the abiding principle, it was refused. The white settlers wanted complete control over the country and did not want to grant equal rights to the black population. Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, proclaimed on November 11, 1965, that they were no longer under British colonial rule. Britain had succeeded in smooth transfers in Black African colonies in the past but in the case of Rhodesia, the whites declared complete independence. The desire for a segregated race-based population worked very well for the white Rhodesians, a system which continued until 1977. The English immigrants in Rhodesia insisted on maintaining the partisan class structure based on skin colour and the Liberal English government saw such assertion as a challenge to its international standing. The combined pressure of the United States and the British, along with economic restrictions, were important devices aiding the guerrilla technique employed to crack the Rhodesian resistance. The support of South Africa was also withdrawn which put the Rhodesian government to offer negotiation, and Zimbabwe, a renamed Rhodesia, was created in 1980. However, the transition from the white-dominated rule to that of African nationalists’ was fraught with difficulties. Robert Mugabe, who took over as the head of the new state, started showing unexpected hues as the years progressed, and from being the popular choice in the early 1980s he is today at the centre of a major crisis as international opinion has come to view his dictatorial policies as a serious threat to the state. Mugabe’s usurpation of power and his attempt to legitimise his dictatorship is a very stark reminder of the fact that the mere quitting by the British did not necessarily ensure progress for the erstwhile colonies. While some former colonies such as Canada, Australia, and India have moved ahead from its colonial days to fashion out newer horizons, many other ex-colonies have collapsed into crises following the departure of the British. The Falklands, which had been a British colony since 1933, was at the centre of a major international crisis, involving Britain and Argentina, when war broke out between the two in 1982 over its occupation. By the early 1980s, Falklands had ceased to be an important colony either for the British or for its international competitors. In fact, it has been noted that the dispute came at the right time to enthuse an otherwise placid English economy. Even politically, the Falklands seemed to provide the Margaret Thatcher government with much-required ammunition to win over public opinion in its

favour. “In Britain the decision to reconquer the Falkland Islands proved extremely popular, apparently uniting people of different background, class, and political persuasion” (Judd 1997: 405). Argentina’s military ruler, General Galtieri, invaded the Falkland Islands on April 2, 1982. The British troops, however, took over the capital city of Port Stanley on 14 June of the same year. It is interesting to note that the Falklands did not, in any way, revive the colonialist urge but only brought to fore the difficulties of maintaining (or even continuing with) the imperial legacy that England possessed so far. This is best attested by the different handling of the invasion of another British colony, Grenada, by America the following year. The American intrusion was done in the name of quelling an insurrection, and ostensibly for the restoration of law and order. The Thatcher government justified its inaction in the Grenada case by the logic of the special arrangement it had with the United States. This was a long way from the early years of the twentieth century when British supremacy was beyond doubt and it is perhaps a statement upon the status of contemporary international relations where American interests and doctrine have come to influence global affairs. When Hong Kong became part of the Chinese republic of July 1, 1997, the last of major colonial occupations of the British slipped out of its hands. The agreement to hand over Hong Kong to China as a ‘special administrative region’ was finalised in 1984 between Britain and China after years of dialogue. Ever since the British occupied Hong Kong during the Opium Wars (1839–42), it had served as an important trade centre for them. Although China had originally agreed to respect Hong Kong’s autonomy for the first 50 years following its incorporation into the republic, it decreed in April 2004 that any electoral change in Hong Kong would have to be with China’s permission, which effectively suggests the latter’s insistent influence. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the vestiges of British imperialism which remain, only emphasise how decolonisation and the collapse of colonialism has irreversibly affected international relations and British life. The five most significant factors responsible for decolonisation are (a) enhanced financial and military liability in the post-war period, (b) the emergence of the United States as a major power in international politics, which consequently changed the relations between the Western nations, (c) organised resistance movements in the colonies and the increased demand for

self-determination, (d) opinion favouring the granting of independence to the colonies in Britain, and (e) the United Nations Declaration on Decolonisation (1960) and American endorsement of it. At the same time, five further characteristics of decolonisation could be listed to explain the phenomenon. Firstly, the growth of nationalism in many of the colonies could no longer be ignored. The second condition associated with decolonisation is the suddenness with which it happened; even a century prior to India’s independence, for example, the nationalist movement had failed to consolidate into a worthwhile body, while by the beginning of the twentieth century the resistance found its voice and fervour. The third aspect about decolonisation is its unpredictability and indeterminacy; it is impossible to suggest a formula to effectively explain the time-scale involved in decolonisation. Fourthly, not all colonies achieved independence through the same methods; it implies that different local factors along with the nature of the coloniser/colonised relation contributed to the variety of situations, which were not in imitation of each other, in the colonies. Finally, decolonisation has hardly been a smooth affair; in many colonies, the violent aftermath suggested that things weren’t easy even during the departure of the British. Thus, there have been various explanations regarding the decline of the British Empire. Eric Hobsbawm offers this theory regarding the British attitude towards decolonisation: “The British accepted, because ultimately they understood that there are limits on what can be achieved in the world. Equally, they never attempted to establish a form of supremacy within Europe” (Hobsbawm 2000: 52).

MODERNISM The Context of Modernism The Modern movement in the arts, although seen as being almost synonymous with the advent of the twentieth century, actually goes back to the last decades of the nineteenth century when the foundations of high Victorian culture were facing serious threats from various agencies. As a cultural phenomenon, Modernism saw the departure from pre-existing modes of aesthetic engagement for reasons that weren’t just confined to the sphere of art. The changes brought about by technology in the second half of the nineteenth century necessitated a response from people engaged in the arts; the responses were varied, often contradictory and confused. Technology contributed to the erosion of many ‘cherished’ values. It broke up the systems of social integration—the concepts of ‘the happy family,’ or ‘angel in the house’ for instance, were threatened—and fragmented the individual’s belief system. Not that simply one credo was replaced by another but there was a change in the pace in which life moved—it became faster, freer, and grossly materialistic. The twentieth century saw a host of material benefits available to man— luxury items, popular entertainments like cinema, and unprecedented comfort in basic living conditions. Materialism also enhanced the class divide, but that was not an unknown experience for the industrial West. Technological advancements made it possible for man to experience modernity, an experience that further contested the foundations of faith already battered by the onslaught of Darwinism. It has been suggested that “technology was, whether desirable or not, modern; so was the increasingly rapid supersession, especially in weaponry, of one model by another” (Kermode and Hollander 1973: 5). The technological developments brought about a rapidness to life, a condition that affected the programmes the artists set for themselves. With faith shaken, modern man was without the structure that had solaced him for so long in his journey in the civilised world. The challenge to faith is one of the key characteristics in modern literature. In the early poetry of T.S. Eliot, for instance, the anxiety of modern living and the experience of chaos capture this loss of centre—Eliot’s Prufrock and Joyce’s Dedalus are questers without direction. The modern writer was not just taking in the experience of

modernity rather reacting to it in extremely nuanced and powerful ways. The modern experience was not confined to England alone. The twentieth century saw the internationalisation of the literature—the literary horizons of English were inhabited by writers who used the language but not necessarily the territorial condition. Writers like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway found in the modern experience the resource through which they engaged their creative impulses, but this wasn’t simply the English experience. This is one critical aspect of modern literature in English; it is characterised by a process of cross-fertilisation of ideas, images, symbols, and experiences. When Joseph Conrad writes about Marlow he is a modern man, but not simply an Englishman. In the world of Charles Dickens in the nineteenth century, Micawber belongs to a tradition that traces its source to a robust English optimism; again, in the world of Squire Western in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), the cross-fertilisation evident in modern literature is not there. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Marlow’s nationality or experience of his country is not the focal issue; it is the inward movement of the self that occupies the modern writer more than a mere depiction of external details. Individuality and the narration of subjectivity constitute for the modern writer a major preoccupation. The modern condition also drew on the experiences of ideologies that were organised as responses to the changing times. The Symbolist attitude or the philosophic inclinations of Nietzsche, for instance, were new modes now available to the writers and poets. It is in such a context that the ‘modern’ acquired a tradition of its own—it was part of an ethos that owed to conventions and practices of the past, some of which were radicalised to conform to the innovative worldviews of the modern artists. Many of the nineteenth century texts such as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857), Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) are often seen as important antecedents of modern literature. Such a view of modernism has its conditions, for it is historically bound by the logic of a linear chronology, and it does not really move beyond the 1930s. The first two decades of the twentieth century were indeed great years for art —it produced an unprecedented array of creative work that sought to challenge the limits of expected visions, and resulted in the setting off of programmes (Imagism and Vorticism are two examples of such modernist adventures) that were designed to shock. The changes in the cultural matrices

formed an important part of the modern experience. The nature of scientific developments saw a related response in the changed conceptions of time and space; although they weren’t necessarily sparked off by the new sciences, they were at the same time part of the climate of modernism. The modern experience was thus a combined coming of responses to the ‘new’—in culture, society, science, and technology. James McFarlane analyses the situation of the period thus: “Appreciably, the dimensions of time and space had begun to alter. As communications improved, distances shrank. As the more hectic rhythms of urban living imposed themselves over wider areas of society, events moved faster and the whole tempo of life quickened. The chance of casual international encounter (like colliding atoms in conditions of rising temperature) was greatly increased, and with it the rapidity with which ideas and opinions were exchanged across national frontiers” (Bradbury and McFarlane 1991: 78). The advent of the new was not coincidental—in 1905, Einstein announced his Special Theory of Relativity, the pathbreaking Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1900, which was followed the next year by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In other fields, Edmund Husserl introduced “Phenomenology” to the world, Russell adventured in logic, and the field of language found a new proposition in the views of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The intellectual world was being redefined by the new theories in humanities, especially in philosophy, many of them finding in literature wonderful sites for orientation. William James’ ideas about the movement of time (enumerated in his Principles of Psychology, 1890) were adapted to reprogramme the format of fiction and the ‘stream of consciousness’ novel became a novelty that played with the structural possibilities of the genre, and it took the cue from the experience of epiphany that fixated moments in an otherwise rapidly moving modern world. Time, instead of being just a mode of thematic traffic in narratives, came to constitute a concern for the modern writer by itself. The modern writer’s experiments with the stable ideas of the nineteenth century continued with the toying around with the forms of creation they dabbled in—fragmentation and dissolution of the fixed entities became common. The fragmentation could be manifested in different ways; it could be the Cubist response to the routines of verisimilitude or the chaotic reorganisation of the material evident in Surrealism. Ideologies were announced and in fact there was a celebration in the departures that each movement made, whether it was the short-lived Imagism in poetry or the

reorientation of speed and modern technology in the manifesto of Futurism. Dadaism and Surrealism were denials of the conventional idea of civilisational progress and it was done with a blatant exhibitionism that didn’t harbour any apologetic potential. The experience of modernity wasn’t simply a matter of changing cultural and technological modes but also involved a transformation in the attitudes of the people. With new theories of human existence arriving one after another, it became very difficult for the modern individual to ignore stress and anxiety, which were defining features in the work of many modern writers. Since the influences from various quarters and agencies were confronting man with such rapidity, it was inevitable that the responses to such stimuli were not coordinated to present a unified face. The multiplicity of movements and the variety of individual responses testify this characteristic of modern literature. The avant-garde became one of the norms in a culture where it was impossible to accept the tradition of the past in its received forms. Within a very short period, the modern condition came to present a tradition of its own, which in spite of being eclectic and multifarious, seemed to celebrate such diversity as an inevitable necessity. The modern tradition of the early twentieth century was, thus, not universalised as some kind of a credo, but amalgamated to demonstrate the functioning of the complexities of the modern condition. The avant-garde is a search for a style, a mode of enquiry that seeks to engage alternative structures in lieu of the ones available; that is why the modern artist is always in search of a paradigm that would refer to the experience of modernity—the process of such an engagement, however, is not easily accessible as it is a process that reworks the resources without referring to an already existing framework. The innovative features of many of the modern movements thus owe this tendency to the acknowledgement that all experiences cannot conform to familiar structures. One way of approaching the innovations attempted in the modern age is to see the age as one of crisis, for the newness that is so often associated with the modern is also a sign of insecurity. The structures that propped up the pre-modern cultures were no longer applicable in the forms they worked previously. In fact, many of the value-systems were contested and they served as the positions that required contestation—faith and morality were the major casualties in the modern age. When T.S. Eliot or D.H. Lawrence exploited the resources afforded by the experience of sexuality in their writings, they

were reworking the parameters of morality within newly defined structures that seemed to accommodate their theses. Since the modern was continuously in shift, it required a great degree of intellectual engineering to accommodate the variety of cultural and technological changes that were affecting contemporary society. The sense of community that so evocatively defined the sense of the worlds of Thomas Hardy or Charles Dickens was no longer part of the modern writer’s catalogue of dominant themes. With the changes in living standards and the transformation of everyday life, there was also a corresponding change in the way the artists responded to them; in many cases the manifestation was structured in the manner of an angst, a violation of orderly conduct, and this was one feature of modern art that so offended the moral policing of the older generation of writers who continued to extend their Victorian fare into the new age. Instead being a reflection of a universal tendency or pattern, the modern artist’s exploration of the experience of modernity became an extremely individual and isolated exploration. This is perhaps the reason for the presence of so many loners in modern European literature. As an aesthetic response to the changes of modern life, the elements of modernism weren’t always designed to photocopy the technological advancements of the time. The cultural conditions of much modern literature weren’t the same in all the centres; this was because of the fact that modern literature was truly international in character. It was not confined to any single ideology or formation and defied the structural bounds of conformist frames. The commentary on modern literature’s lack of territorial affiliation has been succinctly put by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane: “No single nation ever owned Modernism, even though many of the multiform movements of which it was made did have national dimensions and origins in specific regions of European culture. Many if not most of its chief creators crossed frontiers, cultures, languages and ideologies in order to achieve it” (Bradbury and McFarlane 1991: 13). Given the international character of Modernism, it’s being involved in the cross-fertilisation process was inevitable. The changes that distinguish modern literature from the formats of the preceding ages were thus conditioned by the alterations in the modes of perception and in the way these responses were designed.

Modern Fiction The novel was the dominant literary form in the Victorian period and while its engagement with the reading public of the early twentieth century continued, there was a marked shift in the way the form was used to present the experience of modernity. The high Victorian fascination for social drama was somewhat pushed to the margins in the attempts of the modern novelists to accommodate new situations and attitudes. Thomas Hardy had already traversed contentious ground when he capitalised on the potential of the ‘fallen woman’ idea to explore the modes of fiction anew. It may be argued that the modern moment in English fiction was brought about by the writings of Joseph Conrad, especially his Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902). Conrad’s major contribution to English fiction has been his revision of the narrative modes of the conventional Victorian techniques. In employing the third person narrator who wasn’t completely in command of the narrative resources, Conrad engaged the reader in a much more participatory role than ever before. The uncertainties thus inaugurated, invited the reader to respond to the themes that weren’t familiar. The possibilities suggested by Conrad were taken further by other modern novelists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf readdressed the issue of the genre itself by suggesting that external structuring of events through the frame of the novel was not adequate to justify the complexities of modern experience. She found the Victorian narrative insufficient and moved to organise her own narrative and stylistic framework. Woolf was very closely associated with a group of intellectuals and aesthetes called the Bloomsbury group. Among other members, the novelist E.M. Forster was also associated with the Bloomsbury group for some time, even though his novels depict a quiet, liberal humanist position and not a radical departure like Woolf’s stream of consciousness technique. Forster’s best known work is A Passage to India (1924) where he wove through the thread of cultural differences with dexterity. His views regarding India have been controversial to say the least. The earlier novels of Forster, however, were true to his liberal humanist position and novels like Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), A Room with a View (1908), and Howards End (1910) seem more aligned to the novel of manners tradition than the innovative modern narratives of Joyce

and Woolf. The genius of James Joyce was one of the most potent features of the landscape of modern fiction and his arrival into the European scene emulated the feat of another literary traveller, Henry James. James had shown how the experience of cosmopolitanism could be utilised to suggest transcultural experiences which were manifested on a much larger scale but with very few characters in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Joyce’s novel has become a cult text of modern literature. In Ulysses, Joyce moves ahead with his quest figure, Stephen Dedalus (whom he had introduced in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1913), in a narrative that is designed to present the modern day Dublin as the archetype of the civilised city, and these characters as epitomes of modern man. Joyce’s use of epiphany, his wit and humour, his control over the linguistic resources at his disposal, his panoramic vision, and his movement across cultural frontiers in the novel make it one of the masterpieces of world literature. Joyce’s creative output was limited and while he took his penchant for linguistic ingenuity to its maximum potential in Finnegan’s Wake (1939), it is as the author of Ulysses that he is best known. All the writers of fiction in the modern age did not necessarily offer radical revisions of the narrative mode. D.H. Lawrence relied more on the thematic evocation of the modern experience than narrative jugglery to further his thesis of modernity. Lawrence has been seen as an autobiographical novelist for the close correspondence between his experience and fiction that depicted in some of his novels. While Lawrence did derive elements of creative resource from his working-class background, it was transmuted to refigure the same in a wholly fictional frame. The logic of autobiographical association was used initially to read his first novel Sons and Lovers (1913), but the work is remarkable enough to stand even without such correspondence. The other novels of Lawrence have had their share of controversy as he was considered vulgar for the focus on sex, but ironically this was something Lawrence did not want to impress upon his audience, or it could be argued that his visualisation of obscenity and vulgarity operated through a completely different matrix than the one that normally did. The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), Aaron’s Rod (1922), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928/1960) are some of Lawrence’s other novels. The modern world’s chaotic state formed the subject of many novels in the early years of the twentieth century. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) wrote a futuristic

novel about modern chaos in his Brave New World (1932). Exposure of corruption and a satirical presentation of contemporary society were evident in two of Huxley’s other novels, Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923). In Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Huxley uses the figure of Anthony Beavis to portray a pessimistic view of existence. The combination of tragedy and satire was successfully packaged in the novels of Evelyn Waugh (1902–66), especially A Handful of Dust (1934) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). Waugh’s novels are wonderful expositions of social satire in modern fiction. Graham Greene (1904–91) was a gifted storyteller who depicted dilemmas stemming from the collapse of faith, and a text like Brighton Rock (1938), which epitomises the moral downfall, is a study in hypocrisy and isolation. The plight of the personal occupied a very important place in Greene’s fiction which was portrayed in The Power and the Glory (1940) and The Heart of the Matter (1948).

Modern Poetry The advent of the twentieth century saw interesting explorations in the field of poetry, which were further quickened by developments in the contemporary world. The first major change came in the writing of the group known as the War poets, whose compositions reflect their responses to the experience of war. The First World War was a major political as well as a cultural event that demanded immediate responses from the poets. These War poets used the experience of battle to situate and depict conditions of reality that weren’t part of the Victorian literary scene. From a cultivation of jingoistic ideology to an evocation of the meaninglessness of the whole experience of conflict, these poets showed how the context of conflict could be made to serve genuine poetic purposes. The poetry of Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) is often seen in conjunction with his image of the ‘young patriot’ who died for the country, but it is also noteworthy that Brooke was one of the first writers of the twentieth century to show interest in and appreciate the work of the seventeenth century Metaphysical poets. Brooke has always had the glamour tag attached to both his personality and his verse ever since his early and glorified demise in the war. Brooke was celebrated for the way he presented his version of nationalism at a time when the British made use of such images of

glorification. Later criticism has not been as kind to Brooke and has seen more substance in the work of other War poets who chose other modes of response. ‘The Soldier,’ Brooke’s most famous poem, builds on the themes of nostalgia and romanticism, which he packaged to suggest the legitimacy of the British Empire. The contemporaries of Brooke who provided responses of protest and frustration included Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). Sassoon wrote anti-war poems with a quiet but very effective ironic thrust in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack (1918). Sassoon also wrote some spiritual verse towards the later part of his career, which appears in Vigils (1935) and Sequences (1956). Sassoon’s brand of realism is a sharp contrast to the poetics of Brooke in that he transformed the platform to further his reading of the war’s futility. Sassoon’s poetic oeuvre shows the transition from an understanding of the secular context of human conflict to the divine, but this was not the trajectory of development in some of the other war poets. Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), Ivor Gurney (1890–1937), Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), Edward Thomas (1878–1917), and Charles Sorley (1895–1915) were some of the other poets of the war period, who didn’t survive it. Although the War poets are usually clubbed together for the thematic commonness and chronological arrangement, these poets were all working towards the same philosophy or position. The case of Rupert Brooke is an interesting illustration of the possibilities that were engendered by the experience of the First World War as his poetry is conveniently placed by historians within the colonialist bracket, which however, isn’t the only structure that his verses suggest. The other extreme is represented by Wilfred Owen, whose brief poetic career was engaged in the propagation of another philosophy, that which is epitomised by his poem ‘Futility’.

Futility Move him into the sun— Gently its touch awoke him once At home, whispering of fields half-sown. Always it woke him, even in France, Until this morning and this snow. If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know. Think how it wakes the seeds— Woke once the clays of a cold star. Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall? —O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth’s sleep at all?

The nuanced play of the metaphors of ‘sun,’ ‘clay’ and ‘earth’ show how Owen undercuts the nationalist ideology by suggesting the futility of the whole exercise. Owen combined a quiet sensuality with a fascination for the tragic, and most of his mature poems benefit from this association. Ivor Gurney’s war experiences are collected in two books of poems—Severn and Somme (1917) and War’s Emblems (1919). Gurney was greatly influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins, especially evident in his poems of despair. In a poem like ‘The Silent One,’ he evokes the horrific experience of war with consummate control: “Kept flat, and watched the darkness, hearing bullets whizzing—/And thought of music—and swore deep heart’s deep oaths/(Polite to God) and retreated and came on again,/Again retreated—and a second time faced the screen.” Apart from Hopkins, Edward Thomas exerted considerable influence on Gurney. The poetry of Thomas does not always show a concern for the rhetoric of war and it is his rich and sensitive depiction of the natural world that situates his craft. Even in his ostensible war poems, patriotism is contextualised by the visualisation of the ‘enemy’ as England’s other, as the violator of the natural order of things. Isaac Rosenberg’s reputation has been considerably enhanced after his death and critics have paid attention to his use of unconventional imagery and use of dramatic effects in his poetry. Rosenberg presents the troubled context of war through a clearly worked out linguistic pattern, a feature that separates his poetic language from the other War poets. Charles Sorley occupies an interesting place in the annals of the literary history of the First World War period not only for his poetry but also for his letters (The Letters of Charles Sorley, 1919), which contain some of the most insightful commentaries on the war and the literature emanating from such experience. As a poet, Sorley exhibited a kind of anti-romanticism that was more elaborately handled by Sassoon and Owen in their poetry. Other poets who wrote about their war experiences include May Wedderburn Cannan (1893–1973) and David Jones (1895–1974). The First World War provides a very convenient marker to read the emergence of new trends in English poetry, and figures like William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), who in fact, had been writing from the last decades of the preceding century, and T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) moved to suggest interesting departures from the available poetic modes. Yeats’ first poems were published in The Dublin University Review in the 1880s and much of his

early poetry is characterised by a substantial presence of the romantic strain. The influence of Irish folklore, country themes, and a fascination for the natural world are the striking features of Yeats’ early verse. The conflict between the romantic idyll and the potentially corrupt urban world is beautifully evoked in his ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree.’ The poem is characterised by a simplicity that finds its appropriate representation in the controlled poise of Yeats’ language:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Yeats’ romanticism found another counter in the spirit of Irish nationalism that engaged so many of his contemporaries. In the 1890s, he was passionately involved in the Irish nationalist movement and very much concerned with Irish themes. The first decade of the twentieth century saw Yeats’ engagement in the rebuilding of the Irish theatre, which was represented by the opening of the Abbey Theatre in December 1904. The politics of Irish nationalism reached its crisis point during the Easter Rising of 1916, and Yeats was prompt enough to present his perspective on the loss of Irish ‘pride’ about which he writes in ‘Easter 1916.’ The poem is one of the most anthologised political poems of the twentieth century and captures the loss, regret, and even the inevitability of the entire uprising with great pathos. Yeats’ association with the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, was reflected in some of his poems, especially ‘No Second Troy.’ Another association, with Lady Gregory, proved fruitful for Yeats in his cultivation of a sophisticated cultural poetics. In the later phase of his career, Yeats moved to develop a complex form of impersonality where the rustic and the urban elements were combined in a concentrated focus of the poetic imagination. Yeats experimented in both the rhythm and the symbolism of poetry, which were further elaborated in his philosophic writings. In the two Byzantium poems, for instance, Yeats grappled with the problematics of form, time, language, culture, and perfection, and he was just not content to offer a picture of contemporary life but also sought to address issues that harped back to the generative powers of the inherited past. The modernist in Yeats was greatly appreciated by T.S. Eliot who considered the evolution of his predecessor from romanticism to modernism as being a part of the experience of modernity itself. It was, nevertheless, up to Yeats’ genius to respond to the changing cultural conditions of the time; Eliot, on the other hand, began his poetic career by reacting to the romantic assumptions of the nineteenth century brand practised by poets like William Wordsworth. One of his earliest poems, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ is today, seen as an example of trademark modernism for its constructed allusiveness and for subsisting in a parodic engagement that undercuts many of the Victorian certainties, including love. The patterns of verse that Eliot presents in the poem are designed to interrogate the notion of subjectivity celebrated by the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century. Consider the opening lines of this poem:

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question… Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.

Eliot developed the urbane culture, that forms such an integral part of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ further in his classic The Waste Land (1922), where he presents the angst, corruption, and materialism of modernist society within the frame of a quest that draws on various cultural structures. The poem is characterised by a robust cosmopolitanism and invites an intellectual engagement that was earlier associated with the Metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. Symbolic suggestiveness and a cultivated use of irony and pastiche are important features of Eliot’s early poetry. Till the 1920s, Eliot persisted with the mode of referentiality and conveyed landscapes through the carefully crafted machinations of wit, intellect, and allusion. By the 1930s, however, the spiritual element in his poetry came to figure more and affected a revival of the theme of the sacred, which was present even in his ‘secular’ poems. The collection of four poems called Four Quartets (1943) dealt with the complexities of religious experience in the modern world while his other briefer religious poems worked out episodes of conflict by referring to and reacting against the established parameters of faith. Eliot’s engagement with faith found a wonderful ground in his verse play Murder in the Cathedral (1935), where he capitalised on the conflictual potential of the martyrdom issue with great élan. Eliot was a major influence on the development of modern poetry and even though other modernists like James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence wrote verses, somehow it was Eliot’s model that found a following. The next generation of poets who derived a lot from the path Eliot suggested were both alike and different from him. Poets like W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis swerved towards the political ideologies and such alignments eventually compelled a confinement of some of their poems to purely topical contexts. Most of the poetry of these poets, all known as the Thirties’ Poets, however, exhibited remarkable control, and the added sensuousness in some of the poems granted them a sensitivity, sometimes missing from Eliot’s verse. The philosophically inclined poetry of W.H. Auden, for instance, interrogated some of the structures that modernity had placed man in, and the pursuit of liberal values (sometimes associated with his political position) is evident in his memorial verses to Yeats and Freud. Some of the collections having his poetry are Poems (1930), The Orators (1932), New Year Letter (1941), and City Walls and Other Poems (1969). Auden’s deft control over matter and language was part of his remarkable poetic oeuvre as is evident in passages like the

following from ‘In Praise of Limestone’:

…not to be left behind, please! to resemble the beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these Are our Common Prayer, whose greatest comfort is music Which can be made anywhere, is invisible And does not smell.

The poetry of Stephen Spender (1909–1995) is organised to manifest his concern for the contemporary scene, and from his first collection Poems (1930) to Dolphins (1994), he exudes a sober sophistication that distinguishes his work. In the early phase of his career, he was influenced by the polemics of a volatile political climate, but this affiliation, primarily with Communism, didn’t last for a long time. Like other modernists, Spender also engaged the quest motif with consistency, but all of his poetic excursions weren’t of the same calibre. Spender’s interests were not confined to poetry alone and he effortlessly moved across various genres that included literary criticism. Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) was another Thirties poet who built upon the legacy of modernism to probe the experience of the contemporary world with intensity. He was a maverick of sorts in that he continually swayed across various disciplines to engage his creative talents for different purposes. It is perhaps his alertness as a translator that enabled him to project a lyric sensuousness onto themes that concerned the chaos of modern life. His contemporary, Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972), demonstrated a different use of the lyric altogether. He was the only poet from the Auden circle to directly join the Communist Party, even though the circle as a whole did not consider such an association mandatory, in spite of their being supportive of the political cause. Day Lewis was also remarkably versatile and wrote a variety of books from novels to non-fictional prose to translated works. His gift of lyrical evocation lifts even the ‘political’ poems from their immediate topical context to suggest other possibilities as well. The Thirties Group is placed midway between the new voices of the post-War literary scene and the Eliotled brand of high Modernist poetics. The poetry of Dylan Thomas (1914– 1953) exhibits the marks of a genius that, according to many, wasn’t completely fulfilled. Thomas created a poetics that relied on the honest exposition of theme and the carefully devised manipulation of the resources of the English language granted his poetry a distinctive character. His early poems are collected in Song at the Year’s Turning: Poems 1942–54 (1955). Thomas’ rich and sensitive idiom was used to serve the often unromantic stance with which he addressed the themes of his poems. His sophistication is not mere gloss and it remains one of the most visible features of AngloWelsh poetry in the twentieth century. Dylan Thomas was one of the major English poets to demonstrate the possibilities of a combination of the traditional folk motifs and the characteristically modern traits of twentieth

century life.

Modern Art Like many other Modernist movements, the origins of art in the modern period can be traced back to the developments in the nineteenth century. The innovations carried out in the modern period have been one of the most striking in the history of art. Various styles, many of them blends of eclecticism, and others modified and adapted from pre-existing modes, have enriched the world of art in the twentieth century. There has also been an unprecedented introduction of new techniques, materials and more interestingly, the adoption of newer materials and conditions in the age of increased mechanisation. A holistic definition of modern art is difficult to situate in the context of the wide-ranging, often conflicting and reactionary developments in the early decades of the twentieth century. One feature associated with modern art is the insularity of the art form itself, in both painting and sculpture, and the marked dissociation from traditional institutions like the Church or the state. One consequence of this condition was a freeing of the artist from the restrictions that usually framed his vision in the earlier ages. At the same time, the thematic orientations of many modern artists were not necessarily devoid of religious or political intonations in spite of the lack of any overt association. The use of the term avant-garde is another commonly attributed characteristic of modern art. In this view, the radical newness associated with many of the modern movements is considered a sign of modernity. The desire to shock and even abuse the established guardians of culture was a strategic design for many artists of this time and Marcel Duchamp’s exhibition of the urinal and the bicycle wheel in 1917 as art objects illustrates this point effectively. Radicalism has thus been an integral feature of modern art, though the resistances to it have also been equally pronounced. Technology provided the modern artist newer media and the one attribute of the collage has been the use of the newspaper as a resource for such purposes. Other sources of non-Western culture were also used by many modern artists to programme and organise their artefacts—Picasso took advantage of African masks and Paul Klee studied paintings by children. The influence of popular culture on the art movements of the twentieth century is another notable

feature of modern art. Andy Warhol, for instance, used soup cans in his pictures. The origins of modern art can be traced back to some late nineteenth century movements. Impressionism was one such influence. The impressionists stayed away from the established modes of European painting and sought to represent scenes from daily life. The impressionists engaged many agencies of popular culture and introduced new techniques such as the application of broken brush strokes or the employment of intensely concentrated colours. The impressionists also elevated the sketch to a primary art form. The impressionist phase was followed by another interesting development in the final decades of the nineteenth century, Postimpressionism. The term Postimpressionism is a label applied to the departures from the principles that governed impressionist painting; Paul Gaugin favoured wider stretches of colour to the specific brushstrokes of the impressionist and Matisse moved away from the focus on ‘natural’ evocation to make an abundant use of colour. The reaction against the civilisational aspects of Western society was manifested in a fascination for the unfamiliar and the unconventional. Vincent Van Gogh sought to relay on his emotional pressures through the canvas and used symbolic structures in his paintings, including representations of the self. Edvard Munch, on the other hand, took recourse to exaggerated and colourful representations of modern man’s anguish in a mechanised society. Georges Seurat, who used the benefits of scientific knowledge by violating the norms of realism, took the exaggerations of Postimpressionism towards another direction. These departures from the available structures of art in fact pointed towards the developments that are now associated with expressionism. Paul Cézanne combined a solid conception of objects with a remarkable reorientation of perspective altering the overall effect of the paintings. Cézanne’s radical perspectives were more apparent in his still-life paintings. His use of the fragmentary technique was further adumbrated in the paintings of Cubists like Picasso. The late nineteenth century and early Modernist focus on a re-visualisation of art objects was also evident in developments that heralded a form of abstractionism. Henri Matisse’s use of disparate shapes in his apparently ‘simple’ drawings suggests a fascination for abstraction that was unprecedented. Instead of trying to create the impression of depth through the use of perspective, Matisse tried the reverse, i.e., to impress the illusion of

flatness through his paintings. Matisse and other painters (André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen and Georges Braque) who painted using the same principles of abstractionism are considered to represent the group who practised Fauvism, which was active during the first decade of the twentieth century. Cubism, another radical revisualisation of perception and technique in the early twentieth century, is associated with Modernism in art. Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907), a classic Cubist artefact, challenged the formal structure of conventional paintings by distorting and dislocating the idea of proportion and radically presenting an alternative view of space. Picasso is associated with analytical Cubism, a genre that violently exaggerated the traditional ideas of space and form and used the perspective of the cube by fragmenting and breaking up the structure of visuals. Many other artists like Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris followed Picasso in reinventing the idea of form and their experiments gave Cubism wide circulation in the art world. The attention given to cubes and/or cylinders militated against the very idea of proportion that characterised much pre-modern painting. In the paintings of the artists associated with Futurism, Modernist art saw the engagement of technology and rejection of tradition. Futurists like Umberto Boccioni used the idea of motion that came from the placement of sequential photographs, especially those by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Boccioni’s “Dynamism of a Soccer Player” (1913) is a trademark futurist painting. The Futurists (Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini were other practitioners) considered the mechanised view of man to be more relevant in the modern age than the ideal of the perfect human shape perpetrated in previous ages. An interesting development in Germany during this time was the formation of a group of artists known as Die Brücke (The Bridge) that considered the modern urban centre to be a place of isolation. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff were important members of this group. Die Brücke represented German expressionism which was followed by the formation of another group known as The Blue Rider in 1911. The Blue Rider or Der Blaue Reiter was extremely cosmopolitan with artists coming from different nationalities— Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei von Jawlensky (Russia), Franz Marc, August Macke, and Gabriele Münter (Germany) and Paul Klee (Switzerland). In

Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), Kandinsky tried to argue that abstraction in art was closely connected with spiritualism. The sense of incompleteness which characterises much of Kandinsky’s own abstract paintings suggest that his choice of the representational medium can have spiritual implications, and this is especially applicable in the way he constructs his thesis of spirituality in the biblical paintings. Another development in Russia around this time that privileged abstractionism in art was the formation of Suprematism and Constructivism. Suprematism was begun by a group of painters that included Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitzky and Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko, two sculptors, developed Constructivism. Suprematism favoured the evocation of the idea of ‘supremacy’ while the Constructivists, influenced by the Cubist experiments of Picasso, sought to engage the traditional ways of sculpting to emphasise the importance of the materiality of the finished object. In the hands of the Dutch group known as the De Stijl (The Style, formed 1917), which included Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck, Georges van Tongerloo and Gerrit Rietveld, abstractionism was accorded another dimension. The artists of this group believed that abstraction could be made purposeful and thus be relevant to the society. There are many similarities between the De Stijl artists’ technique and those used by the Cubist painters. The First World War brought about a change in the perceptions of the artists and the dominance of abstraction was being affected by the collapse of the traditional institutions. The development of the group Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in Germany after the War shows that felt experience was once again back in favour. Artists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix sought to relate art to social stratification, an emphasis that finds reflection in Dix’s Matchseller (1920), which is almost a direct rejection of all the existing modes including Cubism and the varieties of abstractionism current before the War. In Dadaism Modernist art saw the emergence of a radical position that was also a reaction against the sense of futility brought about by the First World War. The Dadaists mocked the traditional cultural and aesthetic principles by trying to portray meaninglessness through art. Many artists were part of the Dadaist movement: Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters (Germany), Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco (Romania), Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia (France) and Man Ray (America). They preferred the use of “junk” as the material of art and concentrated on collage.

The Dadaists revelled in transforming ordinary objects of daily life into “art” creations, a striking example of which was Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which was nothing but an ordinary urinal. The focus of these artists compelled a revision of the conventional aesthetic ideas and added a new dimension to Modernist art. Usually clubbed together with Dadaism, Surrealism wasn’t just another synonym for the former, even though they were closely aligned in many respects. The Surrealists wanted to communicate the functioning of the unconscious and the writings of Sigmund Freud were a major influence on their practice. Like Dadaism, Surrealism too had converts from many European centres: André Breton, André Masson, and Yves Tanguy (France), René Magritte (Belgium), Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí (Spain) and Max Ernst (Germany). Dali’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) brings together many supposedly incompatible elements to configure “time” in a new way. The Surrealists used a technique called automatism, which was designed to give the impression of the free-moving unconscious. The innovations in painting were paralleled by experimentation in sculpture. Constantin Bamcusi used abstractionism in his practice by combining a variety of materials together. The use of multiple sources was also evident in the work of Méret Oppenheim, who, however, did not follow abstract principles but highlighted the artistic potential of ordinary objects such as tea cups and spoons. Alberto Giacometti took the surrealistic tendency further by using the insights from the work of Liberian sculptures. Henry Moore’s combinations, on the other hand, derived from his unification of Aztec motifs with traditional ones, which is amply represented by The Recumbent Figure (1938).

Modern Drama Henrik Ibsen is often regarded as the first modernist in the history of European theatre, which is conflated with his placement as a pioneer in terms of the development of realist theatre also. Ibsen was remarkably alive to the possibilities of the theatre’s language and his reworking of stock conventions showed that drama could be refashioned to accommodate experiences in ways that weren’t tried earlier. Ibsen was also interested in presenting the conditions of his world within structures that represented the contemporary

with a sense of immediacy. This is perhaps one of the reasons for the evolution of the dramatist in Ibsen—an evolution that responded to national as well as theatrical demands of the time. Ibsen has been variously celebrated in the annals of modern drama with suggestions about his pioneering work being extended to both the man and the movements (Modernism being one of them) he generated or represented. Malcolm Bradbury is effusive in his praise of this remarkable Norwegian: “He was the greatest playwright of the day, the greatest individualist and over-reacher who was also an entire movement in itself” (Bradbury 1989: 55). The influence of Ibsen was one of the many currents in modern European drama that informed the English theatre. Whereas the Ibsenite framework facilitated newer conditions in European drama, its working was not overwhelming in all the centres that sought to appropriate the Norwegian master’s model. The practice in England, for instance, wasn’t really tailored to make a direct shift from the melodramatic mode of the Victorian stage to the realist theatre epitomised by Ibsen. It was George Bernard Shaw who flagbeared Ibsen into the English theatrical ambit through his non-dramatic writings and more emphatically in his own plays. Interestingly, Ibsen was never aped per se in the English theatre of the early modern period. Apart from the Shavian appropriation, the influence of Ibsenism was apparent in the way his work suggested the possibilities of departure from the existing theatrical modes and practices. The early experiments in twentieth century theatre were thus movements away from the tested paradigms of Victorian theatre, with a variety of dramatic structures looking for new audiences. This exploration spanned the first half of the century with variations such as poetic drama and absurd theatre providing interesting counterpoints. Even though the plays of Arthur Wing Pinero (1855–1934) and Henry Arthur Jones (1851–1929) preceded the innovative theatrics of modern drama, some of their plays do show the potential of a serious engagement with the problems of modernity. The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) by Pinero, for instance, combines the Ibsenite penchant for critical readings of contemporary malaises with a reliance on the conventions of nineteenth century realist theatre. The seriousness that characterises even the comic dimensions of an Ibsen play is not evident in Pinero’s drama; instead, there is a compromise between the two extremes of stock realism and the shock of

departure epitomised by Ibsen. A similar foray into the theatrics of Ibsen is seen in Henry Arthur Jones’ Mrs Dane’s Defence (1900) which enlarges the parameters of society drama to accommodate the sexual politics that also served as themes in novels of the period. Jones’ fascination for womencentred issues found expression in another of his plays, The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), which toyed with social implications of adultery. Plays dealing with contemporary problems, especially those of Jones and Pinero, did not offer radical alternatives to the conventions that engaged the characters and it is this reluctance to move away from the familiar formats of social behaviour that straitjackets the drama of the 1890s. The only comic reinvention of the time came from the writings of Oscar Wilde, whose plays deliberately undercut the familiar by exposing oppositional facets within those very structures that characterised contemporary conditions. Wilde was a maverick of sorts in that his reworking of the social conventions did not take on any radical dye but still managed to critique such expectations through and from within those familiar engagements. The so-called society drama of the last part of the nineteenth century found in Wilde an extension that rebuffed the stability upon which such theatre was situated. Guised as an experiment in aestheticism, the plays of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), however, offers a wholly different kind of orientation, something that was unprecedented in Victorian drama. Outwardly, the four major plays (Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892; A Woman of No Importance, 1893; The Ideal Husband, 1895 and The Importance of Being Ernest, 1895) of Wilde exhibit striking similarities with the theatre of social convention as epitomised by Jones and Pinero. They are consciously governed by class considerations and the façades of social hypocrisy are common features in Wilde’s plays. The melodramatic inclinations of the Victorian theatre are not dispensed with altogether and while his brilliance at employing epigrammatic wit is unparalleled, the theatrical innovations of the modern poetic or absurd adventures are not part of the Wildean scheme. The adventure in the Wildean sense resides in the playfulness and the witty, racy, and often sophisticated dialogue which stretches to encompass almost all of the social concerns within its comic grasp. The use of language and the context of performance thus functions to undermine the very conventions of social behaviour that frame the plays. This undermining of the normal was not part of the typical Victorian theatrical engagement. The plays of Oscar Wilde thus suggest a

wonderful case of a movement that draws from the resources of the existing theatrical structure and which, at the same time, projects the possibilities of departure. Wilde’s questioning of the orthodox and stratified conventions of high Victorian culture is not done from a point that is situated within the matrix of that culture itself. In terms of plot and action-orientation, the plays of Wilde exhibit remarkable similarities with high Victorian society drama; Wilde, however, manages to underscore many of these conventions’ operative principles by circumventing the certainties of such orthodoxies by combining the potential of wit with a panache for satire that is placed within the same theatrical mechanism. His most famous play, The Importance of Being Ernest (1895), achieves these objectives of playful critique by the successful amalgamation of wit, rhetoric and social convention. Wilde’s critiques are directed against the social, political and moral inconsistencies in the societies that the high society Victorian drama represented. Characters like Lady Bracknell or Gwendolen are affiliated to a class that assumes many of the structures of high Victorian society as natural, and while Wilde deconstructs the binaries informing them, he does not appear as the ideologue of the masses, or it is not even clear whether his critiques are organised to offer radical alternatives. The sophisticated gloss that characterises Wilde’s plays does not therefore run contrary to the critiquing mechanism that he integrates within. In the case of more vocal positions suggested by the drama of George Bernard Shaw or Harley Granville-Barker, the critiques are manifested either through garbs of professed ideologies or through articulations that accommodate problems of social behaviour. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) inherited, or rather consciously appropriated, the Ibsenite model and exploited the resources of such theatrical conditioning in his dramatic experiments. The absence of the moralised rhetoric in his early plays testifies the influence of Ibsen. Plays like Widowers’ Houses (1892) and Mrs Warren’s Profession (1902) does not blunt the polemics that enveloped the subjects dealt in these plays and Shaw’s iconoclastic treatment of themes in his other plays as well shows how effortlessly he could combine the commercial with the ideational interests. Of all the early modern dramatists, Shaw was the most commercially successful. The reruns of many of his plays demonstrated that the juxtaposition of the intellectual and commercial was achievable in a modern society that was becoming increasingly technologized. The discursive engagements in the

Shavian theatre were designed to draw attention to certain issues which were placed within plots that weren’t beyond established convention. Like Wilde before him, Shaw also was adept in exploiting the resources of the theatrical heritage that preceded him. The adoption of themes of familiar understanding in plays like Androcles and the Lion (1913), Pygmalion (1914) and Saint Joan (1924) suggests the potentialities of these stories that could be dramatically extended beyond the conventions that framed them. Such an understanding or even analytical engagement of the social conditions of these plays does not exactly find expression in his other dramatic experiments. In plays like Heartbreak House (1921), Shaw moved to present the theatrics of the contemporary through a different kind of programming; it was designed to invite the participation of the audience by a reference to the moral and social choices that it schematised. The tendency to read the socialist in him through the plays has been an influential one in Shavian criticism but there are other aspects to his theatre which have remained underattended. His association with the Fabian Society has often been taken to represent a direct ideological position but it isn’t as clearly reworked in his dramatic texts. Shaw has been one of the extremely colourful figures in the history of English theatre and his individual pyrotechnics notwithstanding, his oeuvre demonstrates enduring appeal of a theatre that extends beyond the age of its original production. The plays of Granville-Barker engaged the ‘problem play’ in a slightly different way. Granville-Barker belonged to the IbsenShaw tradition but there are noticeable dissimilarities in execution. As a playwright his plays, especially The Voysey Inheritance (1905), Waste (1907) and The Madras House (1910), are experiments in the tradition of the wellmade play genre. Granville-Barker’s role in the modern theatre is more famously seen for his involvement in making other playwrights like Shaw popular. He was a remarkable theatre organiser and the sophistication he brought to the production values of the modern theatre is well recognised. The Granville-Barker theatre initiative produced numerous classical and modern plays and played an important role in drawing audiences to the theatre in an age of other material enticements. The works of John Galsworthy, coming at around the same time, utilised the benefits of parallel plotting to show how engaged the chosen subjects were: Strife (1909) is Galsworthy’s best example of this condition. The success of The Silver Box (1906) was further emulated by some of his other plays like Justice (1910)

and The Skin Game (1920). Galsworthy was a prolific dramatist who wrote more than thirty plays. His penchant for social criticism—most scathing in Justice and Strife—led to some interesting commentaries on issues like class divide and social inequality. Each of these three early modern dramatists worked through paradigms that sought to foreground the contemporary social inconsistencies, but by adopting ways that weren’t exactly similar in either orientation or display. The experience of the working class, which constituted the subject of some of Galsworthy’s plays, was the basic theme of some plays of D. H. Lawrence. In plays such as A Collier’s Friday Night, The Daughterin-Law and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (collected in The Complete Plays, 1965 even though they were all written within the first two decades of the century), Lawrence provided a perspective from the inside, which was not really part of such drama in the 1920s. As commentaries on conditions of the working-class and as critiques of the cultural inadequacies governing relations between members of different social positions, these plays display an aggressive tenor that undercuts the assuredness of the typical drawing room drama of the Edwardian period. Modern British drama was characterised by the appearance of certain movements that attended to demands of specific cultural structures, the two most remarkable examples of such forays being the developments in the Irish theatre and in the revival of poetic drama. The Irish literary Renaissance was a major development in British modernism. It began with a manifesto that tried to address the theatrical needs and objectives of the Irish in a way that wasn’t previously attempted. Lady Gregory, in outlining the agenda for the Irish theatre, admitted that it was an extremely ambitious project, but quite interestingly the dramatic experiment in Dublin did manage to unshackle many of the existing straightjackets that had constrained its evolution. In “Our Irish Theatre” Lady Gregory writes: Our statement—it seems now a little pompous—began: “We propose to have performed in Dublin in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted and imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory, and believe that our desire to bring upon the stage deeper thoughts and emotions of

Ireland will ensure for us a tolerant welcome, and that freedom to experiment which is not found in theatres of England, and without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us” (Harrington 1991: 378). The attempt to prop up a regional theatre to explore the potential of the Irish condition reflected both the adventurist intentions of the modern theatre and the desire to situate the culture of Ireland within a distinctly non-English matrix. W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), one of the architects of modern Irish theatre, aimed to establish a national drama by reworking the material of folklore and myth. The Countess Cathleen (1899), The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and On Baile’s Strand (1904) are framed within the conflictual paradigms of the familiar and the unknown; the selling of the soul (reminiscent of the Faust legend) in The Countess Cathleen submits the Christian story of salvation to the context of famine while The Land of Heart’s Desire deals with the issue of responsibility. Although Yeats was dealing with clichés, his advent into the national theatre was significant for the possibilities it opened the modern theatrical scene to and also for suggesting that myth and folklore could serve the modern man’s interrogative inclinations well. On Baile’s Strand, Yeats’ first reworking of the Cuchulain myth, was further repeated in The Golden Helmet (1908), At the Hawk’s Well (1916), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1929) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939). Yeats’ attempt to work out a representational frame that wasn’t essentially realist was derived, to some extent, from the ideas of the Japanese theatre. The poetics of Yeats’ dramatic craft therefore requires an appreciation of the context of the modern Irish consciousness that found in both theatre and poetry ample avenues to manifest its designs. There are two criticisms of Yeats’ theatre: the first is that he is elitist and the second that he is unable to organise the visionary ideal of his drama through a popular framework. In both cases, however, one could argue that Yeats’ position was not similar in either design or theatrical orientation to that of the realist drama of the early modern period. Any attempt to blanket Yeats within the structure of the

modern experience in the English theatre would go against the assumptions upon which he grounded his theatrical poetics. Another Irishman who left a mark on the modern stage was John Millington Synge (1871–1909). In a brief but exciting career Synge exploited the resources of his culture to experiment and engage the potential of Irish theatre in a way that wasn’t attempted before him. Synge was involved, along with Lady Gregory and Yeats, in the launching of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and his In The Shadow of the Glen (1903) exudes the confident consciousness of a new Irish nationalism. The freedom issue that dominates the choice of Norah Burke is one of quiet assertiveness, a position that highlights Synge’s concern for the isolated individual, and this continued to occupy his drama in other plays as well. Riders to the Sea (1904), The Well of the Saints (1905) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907) are other Synge plays that move through terrains of heightened pessimism and given their placement within a culture of Irish indomitableness, they seem to reorient the comic in a wholly new way. Riders to the Sea is one of the masterpieces of the modern stage, and in spite of the brevity, it has managed to project a tragic resoluteness within a frame that manifests a distinct Irish identity. The Playboy of the Western World exploits the comic potential of a serious theme as parricide and even though it antagonised sections of the contemporary Irish audience, it has remained a modern classic. Priestly life and culture find a satirical counterpoint in his The Tinker’s Wedding (1909) while his only direct use of Irish mythology, Dierdre of the Sorrows (1910), completes Synge’s dramatic oeuvre. Sean O’Casey (1880–1964) occupies a position in the history of Irish theatre that shows the combined possibilities of both the Irish and the English theatrical tradition. O’Casey’s early adventure with Irish nationalism and contemporary life was manifested in three of his plays—The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1925). Each of these plays demanded a political response from the audience and in spite of the expressionist strain, they were extremely controversial, more for the attitude than for the technique he used in doing so. The turning point in his career came when he broke off with Yeats and staged his The Silver Tassie in London in 1929. The stylised evocations based on the German model of expressionist theatre were successfully carried off by O’Casey and this heralded a period of departure from the Irish model prescribed by Yeats and Lady Gregory. The expressionist experiment in Within the Gates (1943),

however, wasn’t able to replicate the success of his earlier drama. The later plays of O’Casey weren’t able to match the popularity of his Dublin pieces. The Star Turns Red (1940), Red Roses for Me (1943), Purple Dust (1943), The Bishop’s Bonfire (1955) and Behind the Green Curtains (1962) are some of his other plays. The plays of Tom Murphy (1935-) and Brian Friel continue the Irish theatrical tradition, especially the plays of the latter dramatist, who has invested his creative energies in the recapturing of Irish pastoralism. The revival of poetic drama in British theatre was marked by the appearance of two playwrights—Stephen Phillips (1864–1915) and James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915)—who relied on the tested conventions of the Elizabethan period. Phillips’ Paolo and Francesca (1902), Herod (1900) and Ulysses (1902) and Flecker’s Hassan (1922) were quite successful during their initial stagings. The fascination of the early modern theatre-going audience for the poetic mode was seen in the experiment of John Masefield (1878–1967), whose The Tragedy of Nan (1908) tasted considerable success. The presence of theatre companies such as Rupert Doone’s Group Theatre or Mercury Theatre of Ashley Dukes perhaps contributed to this vogue in the early twentieth century. Poetic drama, however, found other exponents like T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), W.H. Auden (1907–73) and Christopher Isherwood (1904–86) a little later and these playwrights did not actually succumb to the invitations of the Elizabethan model and sought to revisit the possibilities of verse theatre in their own distinctive ways. Auden was contemptuous of the convention of verse theatre that preceded him and his combination of social and verse drama is evident in his collaborations with Isherwood—The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936) and On the Frontier (1939). The Auden-Isherwood partnership combined the benefits of political engagement with the motif of the quest to present the case of social inadequacy. In the plays of T. S. Eliot, on the other hand, there was a different orientation of the poetic medium, which moved away from the stated political overtones to engage a serious restructuring of belief systems. In Murder in the Cathedral (1935), Eliot used the historical subject of Thomas à Becket’s death to deal with the issue of Christian martyrdom. The ritual recapitulation of familiar historical material is cleverly organised to elicit responses from the audience and within the Christian frame of reference such a condition is worked out well. The play remains the most successful of

Eliot’s dramatic experiments, and in spite of the topicality of the theme its thematic extensions encompass issues of moral choice and conduct. The early decades of the twentieth century saw prolific productions of plays that were governed by the principles of religious orientation and in that context it is indeed remarkable that Eliot’s play has endured so well where others of the genre have not. The Family Reunion (1939), his next play, didn’t fare as well commercially. The disjointedness perhaps may be attributed to the unhappy combination of poetry and the theme of contemporary social life. Verse was more suited to the spiritual theme of Murder in the Cathedral, while it could not carry off The Family Reunion with the same élan. Eliot’s problems as a dramatist concern his adoption of many of the formal features of classical plays, which weren’t effectively conjoined to the thematic schemes of his plays. In the other plays too—The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958)—Eliot wasn’t really able to achieve the perfection he desired. The presentation of a realism that was domestically situated wasn’t adequately patterned to emerge with equal conviction in verse. The 1920s and the 30s were fertile years for the English theatre. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) successfully demonstrated the possibilities of satire in his plays. They include Our Betters (1917), The Circle (1921), The Constant Wife (1927) and For Services Rendered (1932). Maugham’s plays are exercises in the genre of comedy of manners with a conviction and assuredness characterising them. The career of Noël Coward (1899–1973) may be seen as the sum of two different phases: the first involved plays like The Young Idea (1923), The Vortex (1924), Fallen Angels (1925) and Sirocco (1927), which were not only controversial but also lacked the polish and sophistication of his later drama; the second phase concerns plays like Fallen Angels (1925) and Present Laughter (1942) which show a confident use of the resources of the comic medium. Coward was extremely well organised as a playwright, a condition evident in his use of the technical attributes in his plays. J.B. Priestley was a remarkable experimenter who toyed with a variety of themes, subjects, and techniques. His exploitation of the racy narratives of the thriller is manifested in some of his plays like Time and the Conways (1937) and I Have Been Here Before (1937). Terence Rattigan (1911–1977) was one of the major commercial successes on the English stage in the first half of the twentieth century. His The Winslow Boy (1946) and The Deep

Blue Sea (1952) are two of his most successful plays. He was conscious of the pulse of the audience and as the years passed, he managed to rework his subjects to suit the contemporary stage. Christopher Fry (1907–) was another playwright who tasted considerable success in both the stage and on celluloid. A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946), The Lady’s Not for Burning (1948), A Boy with a Cart (1950), A Sleep of Prisoners (1951) and The Dark is Light Enough (1954) are some of Fry’s major plays.

The Rise of English The rise of English Studies is usually associated with the response of the Victorian elite to the growing mechanisations of industrial culture, even though other factors such as the enlargement of the middle class, increased literacy and the threat to religious assuredness also played a part in its emergence. The need to “Hellenize” the middle class—a call emphatically given by Matthew Arnold—was characteristic of the growing tendency to imbibe in the masses a sense of order and proportion that could only be brought about by a cultivated cultural orientation. The centrality of English as a language and the focus on the literature of England were thus constituent factors of this enterprise, which was simultaneously ideologically informed as well as culturally programmed. The advent of English as a formal discipline in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge was not achieved outright but the Victorian age was surely the time when institutionalisation of English was vigorously pursued. It is also noteworthy that the spread of English studies formed an interesting part of the imperial agenda and often flag-bore the ‘civilisational’ needs of the British. The 1921 Newbolt Report was the culmination of a series of developments in the nineteenth century that capped the formal institutionalisation of English studies. The most potent challenge to English was mounted by German philology, which was closely identified with language scholarship in Europe. As such, English was not only a new entrant in the field but also a ‘discipline’ without the heritage that German philology had. Thus, along with the imperial need to project the cultural significance of ‘English’ there was a renewed emphasis on the need to identify the national demand for furthering English studies. English became, in the age of Empire, a potent symbol of nationalism and the alignment of the patriotic impulse in the identification of English studies and

English character was not uncommon. It has been suggested that European nations used their own languages and literatures as ideological structures to reconstruct the histories of the colonies they possessed and dominated. Edward Said makes an interesting observation in this regard: When the local or native language was studied in the colonies it was always imprisoned within the perspective of a dead or classical language; what the untutored native spoke was a kitchen language, nothing more. Because of the educational system the bourgeoisie adopted English or French, with a good deal of self-conscious pride and also a sense of the distance that separated the class both from the colonial master and from the unfortunate peasant (Said 2002: 30). It is interesting that while English was fostered and developed in England as an agency of consolidation, it was used for an entirely different purpose in the colonies, i.e., political subjugation. Edward Said argues that English was effectively used to distance the colonised from the imperialists as well as “culture” them: “when you have English teachers teaching a lot of natives, one of the things they try to teach you is that you can acquire some of the knowledge of England and its poetry and language, but you can’t ever be English, which is quite different from the French system of imperialism, where they trained people to assimilate France.” (Said 2002: 263). The synonymity of a liberal humanism with English education was carefully crafted to posit the view that ‘universal’ education was only possible through the kind of scholarship that it programmed for the natives in the colonised territories. Take the case of the emergence of English studies in India. Gauri Viswanathan’s excellent study of the politics of British domination, The Masks of Conquest demonstrates the manner in which English studies was foisted upon the Indians, and of the many imperatives informing such an enterprise, one involved the ideological control over the colonised. As a time capsule for English culture, India provided an ideal setting. The structure of Indian society, its multiple languages and multiple religions, eliminated some of the chief difficulties encountered in England in the preservation of a pure national culture. For the differentiated education that the Indian social structure encouraged—vernaculars for the lower castes and the classical languages of Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian for the upper classes of Hindus and Muslims—minimised the possibilities of one language ever achieving the status of a common language for all the population. Linguistic

stratification of classes permitted English high culture to be maintained in all its purity without the erosion that was occurring to polite literature in England (Viswanathan 1990: 116). This strategy was essentially designed to further the imperialist structure, which was also informed by the developments in the field in Victorian England. The educational scene in Victorian England was not alone responsible for the rise of English in the nineteenth century. While ambitious educational programmes in the Victorian age were being undertaken, major changes in the social sphere were also impinging upon such projects. The programmes which were in circulation saw a rigorous insistence on the importance of studying history, especially the literary history of England. This was primarily done with two objectives: (a) to inculcate in the new literates a sense of pride in the culture and literature of their own country and (b) to imbibe the idea of an English tradition through literary studies. English studies thus has been intimately connected with the idea of cultural ‘growth.’ As a programme, English studies has always sought to foist a decided cultural heritage by the process of canon building, which incidentally reflected the concerns of the dominant cultural group at a given time. Since the processes associated with the different stages of English studies have not been uniform, the variety of agencies at work was often conditioned by immediate factors informing it. The service of English studies to imperialism, for instance, occasioned a different kind of marshalling of cultural resources than that which served the purpose in England. Within England and subsequently outside it, English studies has been a very effective and potent tool of indoctrination; this method was used pretty early in its history for engaging the issues of nationalism and cultural heritage of England. Isaiah Smithson makes the following observation to explain this feature of English studies: Consisting primarily of English language, literature, and history, English studies sought to engender national pride, maintain a particular definition of the English “character,” instil respect for a specific social order, and impose a particular set of values onto growing sectors of population whose literacy, income, political power, and importance to the economy and labour force were increasing (Smithson and Ruff 1994: 4). The development of English studies in nineteenth century England was conditioned by two important factors: the growth of literacy and the advent of adult education. In the sphere of adult education, the emergence of

Mechanics’ Institutes contributed to the consolidation of the concept of English literature. The Mechanics’ Institutes came into being as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution as the need was felt that the workmen required some degree of cultural education. The idea behind the formation of these institutes and that which Matthew Arnold called for in his essays on culture were propelled by a similar thesis, that of having an English cultural programme that would situate the people of the country within an accepted social framework. In these institutes evening classes were conducted (with science and necessary arts as the initial subjects) for the workmen who did not have any experience of formal education. The enrolment of other people, and later on, semi-literates and clerks, was also allowed. George Birbeck formed London Mechanics’ Institute (which subsequently became Birbeck College) in 1823. In fact, Birbeck had a hand in the formation of a similar institute in Glasgow earlier. By 1850, the number of Mechanics’ Institutes had risen to 622. This meteoric rise, however, could not be sustained. By the end of the nineteenth century, most of these institutes had either closed down or were transformed into clubs, libraries or reading spaces and some of them used the space of these institutes to organise lectures and meetings. It is important to recognise that the introduction of a curriculum comprising English language and literature in the Mechanics’ Institutes was organised to ‘educate’ the pupils both culturally and literally. Chris Baldick provides the following commentary in this context: The initial openings for English studies in secondary and higher education came as educationalists realised that sooner or later greater provision would have to be made for scientific and technical instruction, given the increasing complexity of industry and the need for British capital to compete on favourable terms with Germany and the United States, where technical training was further advanced. The relation of literature to science became an immediate problem for the curriculum. A movement towards modern or liberal studies tended to follow the growth of technical instruction like a shadow, providing the ‘human face’ to industrial growth in the form of a socially unifying national heritage, both historical and literary. In the Mechanics Institute in particular, English Literature and technical subjects developed alongside each other. Many educationalists agreed with Arnold that in all sectors of education the provision of practical knowledge had to be supplemented by a humane,

moralizing subject which could harmonise an otherwise anarchic profusion of ‘dry facts.’ English Literature was an ideal candidate for this position, since it could be offered as a substitute for Classics, acting as a liberal counterweight to technical learning without taking up so much time in basic linguistic drilling or in teaching resources (Baldick 1983: 61–62). The advantages of a national literature were, thus, quite apparent in the way they could be made to submit to the demands of a chosen cultural programme. The Mechanics’ Institutes were ideally suited for the purpose. Ideally, these institutes were supposed to have the basic facilities such as libraries, museums, and laboratories (actually, however, many of these institutes were fully equipped) and they also served as a kind of testing ground for the appropriateness of the cultural programme foisted upon the pupils. It was equally important that the Mechanics’ Institutes could be used to check out the viability of the supposed intellectual ‘contest’ between English and the Classics. The Classics had long served the cultural requirements of the English and the propagation of an alternative constituted by a kind of national language and literature was not that easily achievable. The movement towards the formation of an English studies programme, therefore, was consciously engineered to posit the significance of a nationalist need; various commissions and committees formed to look after the state of contemporary education in the middle of the Victorian period suggested that English be promoted as a necessary programme for the students in elementary and secondary education. By the early 1870s, a consensus was forming about the service an English studies programme could provide to the educational scene itself by drawing weaker students who were unable to adequately respond to Classical studies. The movement of such an educational programme was simultaneously organised to serve the cultural needs of the nation. While a kind of cultural policing was working towards the homogenisation of the educational programme in respect of the initiation of English studies in Victorian England, it is also noteworthy that such an endeavour was often bundled with the formation of many institutions that were professedly devoted to such a task alone. The philosophy of Christian Socialism, for instance, was behind the formation of F.D. Maurice’s Working Men’s College (1854) and this was a model for many other similar institutes which sought to engage the campaign of enculturation through education. In fact, F.D. Maurice also championed the formation of the

Queen’s College for Women in 1848 and interestingly English Literature was considered to be especially relevant for the education of women. It was Charles Kingsley who noted the necessity of English education for women in his introductory address as the Professor of English at Queen’s College. The combined structuring of an English studies programme with proper educational curricula and the idea of cultural elevation and advancement was thus organised through various agencies in the nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, English studies was being recognised as one of the constituents of the educational programme necessary for the English student. It is obvious that the manner in which the English studies programme was used to serve the needs of cultural growth in England was distinctively different from the way it was pressed into service in the colonies. The mission initiated by the English educationists in the nineteenth century was carefully orchestrated by writers like Matthew Arnold, in spite of the fact there were oppositions from the educational establishment to the idea of a ‘literature’ of the English against the conventional programme Classical studies. One result of such a conflict between the proponents of English studies in the nineteenth century and its opponents was evident in the growing literary bias that informed the arts programmes in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge by the beginning of the twentieth century. Arthur Quiller-Couch, who was appointed the Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge in 1912, made an interesting comment on the need to recognise the antecedents that inform the English literary heritage. ‘Literature,’ wrote Quiller-Couch in his Preface to On the Art of Writing, “is not a mere Science, to be studied; but an Art, to be practised. Great as is our own literature, we must consider it as a legacy to be improved. Any nation that potters with any glory of its past, as a thing dead and done for, is to that extent renegade. If that be granted, not all our pride in a Shakespeare can excuse the relaxation of an effort—however vain and hopeless—to better him, or some part of him. If, with all our native exemplars to give us courage, we persist in striving to write well, we can easily resign to other nations all the secondary fame to be picked up by commentators” (Cited in Baldick 1983: 82). Quiller-Couch’s idea of organising English studies as a kind of cultural movement for the enhanced civilisational purposes of the English people is in line with the Arnoldian dictum that sought to locate in literature a panacea for social ills. In many of his essays, which included “The Literary

Influence of Academies,” “The Study of Poetry,” “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Arnold sought to unveil a programme of cultural uplift through the inculcation of ideas derived from both the Hellenist heritage and the English greats. While the Arnoldian position contributed to the interest generated in English as a subject of study, it was actually left to the academicians to propel the literature and the language of England to the arena of intellectual debate and by the beginning of the twentieth century the ‘quarrel’ between the English and the Germans was well underway. QuillerCouch was among the many intellectuals who made severe attacks on the German philological tradition in order to clear the ground for English studies. By 1921 when the Newbolt Report on The Teaching of English in England was presented, the idea of a national literature was gaining ground. The Newbolt Report stressed on both the political and cultural motives behind the idea of English literary studies. The Great War (1914–1918) provided great fillip to the idea of a separate English studies programme as the combination of national pride and a native literary heritage was utilised to work up a frenzy during the war period. This process continued after the war too, as the Newbolt Report testifies. A consequence of these developments was seen in the fostering of the idea of ‘national education.’ Institutions like the English Association (formed in 1906) and figures such as George Gordon, Henry Newbolt, George Sampson (whose English for the English, 1921 was quite influential), played an important role in this enterprise. F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis were among the important advocates of the English studies programme in the first half of the twentieth century. The role of the Leavises, however, in the consolidation of English studies in the early twentieth century acquires greater significance in the context of the challenges literary studies faced in the wake of growing mechanisation. Assessments of their role have often centred upon the way English literary culture was programmed in the early twentieth century based on the approaches and reading structures they provided. In the words of David Macey, “The influence of Leavis and his wife on the development of English as an academic discipline has been so great that it might be claimed that anyone who has studied English literature in Britain is an unwitting Leavisite without necessarily reading a word of their works” (Macey 2000: 225). Closely associated with the journal Scrutiny, F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis inaugurated a cultural movement of sorts and organised a methodology for

the teachers of English with the view to promoting a particular brand of English above other circulating cultural challenges. The Leavises were responsible for the promotion of the view that education was closely related to cultural conditions and only a proper programme and method could serve the interests of the English people. The Leavises thus continued a line of thinking that emanated from the nineteenth century cultural politics in which the association of social uplift and English education was seen as inevitable. Often judgemental, F. R. Leavis aimed to show a path of critical inquiry that would uphold the ethical structures upon which society was supposed to stand, and while his idea of ‘tradition’ was not exactly the same as Eliot’s, there was nevertheless an insistence on the significance of ‘high seriousness’ that informed education, especially the study of English literature. Leavis appealed to “minority” to respond to the theory and the art of literature, for it was the minority which held the key to the subsuming of the best in the English tradition. The association of ‘minority culture’ with the need for the inculcation of a morally infused aesthetic order was behind Leavis’s vision of the academy as the site of cultural learning. Minority culture represented for Leavis a potent social force, one which required a proper programme and mechanism and one that English studies could help realise. Leavis reacted against the onslaught of certain agencies of popular culture like advertising and his vision thus included a kind of sociological poetics through which he suggested that the teaching of English in schools ought to be connected to the cultural milieu. Leavis was responding to the authority of the establishment but his programme was not a Marxist one, for he sought to dissociate the economics of social class conditions from the cultural imperatives that informed his vision of English education. In “Retrospect to Scrutiny”, F.R. Leavis commented: “I mean, we had no tendency to confine ourselves to questions of method or theory, and the ‘practicality’ of the ‘practical criticism’ we were indeed (taking ‘practical’ as the antithesis of ‘theoretical’) concerned to promote was not just a matter of analytic technique and brilliant exercises. What governed our thinking and engaged our sense of urgency was the inclusive, the underlying and overriding preoccupation: the preoccupation with the critical function as it was performed, or not performed, for our civilisation, our time, and us” (Leavis 1963: 4). The Leavisite position was thus an enhanced reworking of the Arnoldian model, even though the straight swap of poetry for religion that Arnold had argued about was not what Leavis

was actually looking for. The early twentieth century insistence on the formulation of a programme of English was in fact also visible in the work of critics like I.A. Richards. Richards’ association with Basic English was manifested in his insistence on the importance of meaning in English studies. In the section titled “The Teaching of English” in Practical Criticism, he writes: “Indeed, it is the oddest thing about language, whose history is full of odd things (and one of the oddest fact about human development) that so few people have ever sat down to reflect systematically about meaning” (Richards 1991: 334). Richards attended to the importance of mass education in a way that sought to maintain a chosen standard but his emphasis on the loss of meaning through an inevitable stereotyping implied that mass consumption also constituted a threat to culture. In the first half of the twentieth century, English studies became a major area of scholarship. Given the emergence of Cultural Studies in the post-War period, it is remarkable that such a concentration of intellectual energies was achieved for the purpose of one discipline before the Second World War. Writing in 1983, Geoffrey Strickland commented on the high phase of English studies in the 1930s thus: Despite the energy and conviction that went into the promotion of ‘English’, it was not an unqualified success—certainly not by the standards of its instigators. One has only to think what Matthew Arnold would say if treated to a few minutes of ‘Tom and Jerry’ or ‘Starsky and Hutch.’ It would also be difficult today to find among the thousands of English teachers any unanimity regarding the purpose of English studies comparable to that which seems to have existed half a century ago. There are also few who would regard the idea of promoting social harmony as anything other than a naïve or mischievous delusion; few also would not be embarrassed at the idea of being thought of as a ‘missionary’ (Strickland 1990: 177). Strickland’s idea of the ‘missionary’ aspect of English studies can be extended to the way English studies served the needs of the British Empire. It is interesting to note that English has served the needs of the writers in the erstwhile colonies, a situation that is as much ironic as it is political. The call for the abolition of the English department, for instance, highlights this dilemma faced by the people who have been accustomed to a particular kind of literary programming. In an essay titled ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’ Ngugi Wã Thiong’o, Taban Lo Liyong and Henry Owuor-

Anyumba made the following observation: “We have argued the case for the abolition of the present Department of English in the College, and the establishment of a Department of African Literature and Languages. This is not a change of names only. We want to establish the centrality of Africa in the department” (Ngugi, Liyong and Owuor-Anyumba in Leitch et al., 2001: 2096). The resistance to the study of English literature in the colonies, even after they ceased to be under British rule, was not always articulated so vociferously. That English studies was facing a crisis in both England and other parts of the world where a specific programme had been in place after the Second World War is undeniable. Ostensibly, the mode and nature of the call for revision of the English studies programme in the second half of the twentieth century have not been engaged with the same intensity throughout the English-speaking world.

POSTCOLONIALISM AND LITERATURES IN ENGLISH Defining Postcolonialism The recent spurt in critical activity from the 1960s has courted contemporary politics, culture and society in an unprecedented way. Theorists, however, are not fully agreed on the terminologies of the various terms and critical jargon that have now come to occupy important spaces in contemporary discourse. The case of ‘postcolonialism’ is not different. In terms of historical and chronological placement ‘postcolonialism’ is that state or condition which comes after the colonisation process has come to a close; from this perspective, it is only possible to formulate the idea of a ‘postcolonial state’ after the end of the empire, after the colonies under foreign occupation have been restored to the people who consider it their own. As a term, ‘postcolonial state’ is usually used to refer to those states which have got their independence following a period of subjugation; this political sense implicates ideas of ‘independence’ and ‘nation.’ It has been suggested that the post-colonial state’s “formation after independence is the clearest signal of the separation of the colonised from the imperial power. The independence of that newly formed state is the sine qua non of the claim to have left the power of the coloniser behind” (Ashcroft et al., 1998: 193). While the postcolonial state ostensibly refers to the freedom from colonial rule, it does not necessarily imply that better conditions will prevail. Many erstwhile colonies ran into unmanageable chaos following the granting of independence and the states of Nigeria and Ghana are striking examples. Nevertheless, the release from colonialism did render a state into political liberty, the condition which characterised many of the Asian and African states in the middle of the twentieth century. The granting of independence was usually preceded by a feeling and cultivation of the notion of nationhood in these colonies. After independence many of these states built upon that inspiration to forge ahead into an era that was envisaged to be better than it was under the colonisers. One of the implications of this renewed nationalism was the tendency to revisit and revise the history of the state’s past, and more so in a way that

sought to undo the damage wrought by long years of colonial possession. Postcolonialism, in this sense, involves the attempt to work out an image changeover; this process involves a re-reading of documents that go against the grain established during colonial rule, and if the ‘post-colonial’ interpretations of the nation’s past offer diversely different perspectives, it is the result of this tendency to reorganise the nation’s past resources. There are evident intellectual dangers in these endeavours which Franz Fanon has brought to the notice of the postcolonial aficionados. One implication of such revisits into a country’s past concerns the tendency to over-read and read positions that would not have been in focus otherwise. This can also be manifested in the valorising and celebration of a cultural and historical heritage which is more of a post-facto construction rather than an evident situation. Postcolonial critics, however, will argue that all situations relating to the colonial past of a country involve the politics of reading which they are only trying to unmask. Such an argument, no doubt, lies at the base of rereading process, but it is also a political act, and any rescue, restoration or revival of a nation’s past is, like the others that it seeks to replace, merely provisional. Nationalist writing of the colonial as well as early postcolonial period have drawn upon the theme of unity to work out the idea of oneness which, in a postcolonial condition, the people are in the process of recovering. This thesis is usually marketed through jingoistic portrayal of subjects who may have been lacklustre and the added gloss with every subsequent report tends to be magnified. The construction of a national culture has been one of the major preoccupations of postcolonial theorists. The process of organising a nation’s past in terms of the theme of unity was a general feature of the many newly independent states in the twentieth century. Politically, the freedom of a country after colonial rule required the rewriting of the nation’s history; this rewriting usually involved the celebration of factors that are associated with the country’s heritage and culture. It is worth noting, therefore, that the post-colonial condition both necessitated and facilitated the re-invention of a country’s history. The construction of a nationalist argument was done to re-vigorise the newly-born nation’s people. It is, however, debatable whether such enterprises were entirely successful. The cultivation of nationalism was also organised to offset the warring elements with a post-colonial society. The ‘unity’ slogan was therefore, for many of the ex-colonies, a very significant agency to draw

together the body of people who had their own individual interests, and which were often in obvious disagreement. The post-colonial state and the concept of the nation were, then, important aspects in the decolonised world. It is necessary to acknowledge the fact that a term like ‘postcolonialism’ invites a host of connotations that affect different spheres together, among which the political and the cultural are the most pronounced and recurrent. Politically, decolonisation initiated the condition of a hyphenated ‘post’colonialism; the rapidly changing world order in the twentieth century has been influenced by this condition. It may also be argued that the spate of independent states that emerged by the 1960s was responsible for the revisionist attitude that qualifies most postcolonial theories. It has been rightly said that the “wave of accessions to independence in the two decades 1945–65 was without precedent or parallel” (Howe 2002: 104). Such a drastic change in the global political climate not only affected the balance of power in Europe and America but also brought forward a body of thought that relied on the re-reading of the colonial past. This process of re-reading the colonial past of a nation or its heritage is done by the application of the critical and intellectual resources to ‘undo’ many of the ideological influences which were put to work to justify the condition of imperialism. In effect, this attempt to dismantle the implications of colonial ideology is done through a process of cultural orientation. The cultural aspect of postcolonialism has been directed towards the redrawing of the historical map. In this way texts are re-discovered and brought back to the mainstream of a nationalist discourse. Such an exercise involves the issues of identity and location. It is simultaneously a reading process where the Eurocentric attitude is questioned. While certain cultural traditions were valorised and presented as ideal in the colonial world, the post-colonial position made it necessary to challenge the validity of such claims. The cultural aspect of postcolonialism thus concerns the situation of the ‘other’ but now instead of the coloniser’s position being at the centre of a discourse, alternative structures are also articulated. ‘Othering’ has remained the major culturally realised process in both the colonialist and postcolonialist arguments. In the colonial world, Britain saw the colonised world as its other. The British position was advertised as the norm which determined the standard of evaluation. In a postcolonial world, however, such a view is not tenable. Based on the reading perspective, the othering is

directed towards a re-positioning of relationships. One major influence in this field has been Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) where he argued that the idea of the orient has been a very powerful construct but not a ‘fact.’ The non-west has been viewed, according to Said, as the other of the West. In the colonial world this construct functioned to inspire the colonialists and win over the natives. Postcolonialism tries to study the significance of the processes that went into the formation of such an other. It explores the identity issues which were both manipulated and exploited for the purposes of colonisation. Postcolonialism thus “refers to a way of reading, theorising, interpreting and investigating colonial oppression and its legacy that is informed by an oppositional ethical agenda” (Low and Wolfreys, in Wolfreys 2001: 201). Among the many goals that postcolonialism has set for itself, one is to investigate the nature of the ‘stereotype’ in colonial discourses. The following points emerge as the primary preoccupations of postcolonial studies: (a) postcolonialism is a mode of reading; it aims to re-read culturally and politically loaded texts that come with a particular ideological baggage; (b) it seeks to investigate the strategies and conditions that go into a particular text’s dominant interpretation; (c) it tries to study the power structures at work in arguments that are presented to justify colonial rule; (d) it aims to access the variety of historical and geographical conditions in different colonial discourses and positions; (e) it addresses issues of nationality and social configuration; (f) it studies the politics of the colonial process; (g) it incorporates within its purview discourses which engage a variety of colonial experiences; (h) it studies institutions and events that have acquired a set of values through ‘traditional’ usage and (i) it attends to marginal peoples and their discourses.

Literature in a Postcolonial World The experience of colonialism has had advocates and antagonists on both sides of the imperial divide. In the nineteenth century when the colonial enterprise was being consolidated, different arguments in its support often found aesthetic manifestations, the qualitative variations of which, however, were starkly distanced from one another. It is interesting that the idea of nationalism which motivated the resistance movements in many of the colonies worked in Britain also to inspire and encourage the people in their endeavour to sustain the imperialist idea. For instance, George Nathaniel’s

“The British Empire” (1906) is just one of a series of literary works which sought to justify the supremacy of England and English life. [T]he Empire is…first and foremost, a great historical and political and sociological fact, which is one of the guiding factors in the development of mankind. Secondly, it is part of the dispensation of a higher Power which for some purpose – it cannot possibly be for an evil one—has committed the fortunes of all these hundreds of millions of human beings to the custody of a single branch of the human family. And thirdly, it is a call to duty, to personal as well as national duty, more inspiring than has ever been sounded in the ears of a dominant people. The cynics may scoff at Empire. The doctrinaires may denounce it from the benches of the House of Commons or elsewhere, and the rhapsodists may sometimes conspire almost to render it ridiculous. But it is with us. It is part of us. It is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh (Nathaniel, in Boehmer 1998: 318). The sense of inevitability that characterises this attempt to justify imperialism (“a great historical and political and sociological fact”; “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh”) is one of the many embedded constructions that postcolonialism seeks to question through its rereadings. In this context Edward Said explains: “Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century imperial culture is plentiful with such words and concepts as ‘inferior’ or ‘subject races’, ‘subordinate peoples’, ‘dependency’, ‘expansion’, and ‘authority’” (Said 1994: 8). The language of literature in the colonial period was tailored to organise the ideology of imperialism as fact and it was a process that had a varying degrees of articulation. It has also been argued that apparently liberal novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) are augmentations of the imperialist thesis. The literature of the twentieth century may be divided into two categories in terms of their thematic focus, orientation and emphasis. Many texts, including those written after decolonisation was well underway, still subscribed to the basic assumptions of the imperialist project wherein the ‘supremacy’ of

colonialism was advertised and justified. Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939), set in colonial Nigeria, is one example of this type. Thus, there are literary works written in English in the twentieth century which submit to the ideologies of empire and apparently sustain that view within the matrices of those texts. On the other hand, there is another group of texts which question, critique and challenge the assumptions of colonialism. These works may be set within a colonial period in terms of its composition/publication but nevertheless address the issue of colonialism critically or offer a resistance model. Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) falls in this category. It is obvious, however, that such a blanket categorisation carries with it the dangers of oversimplification. While isolation of texts on the basis of fixed features may invite criticism which is usually directed against a structuralist position, the impact of decolonisation on the practice and theory of literature is undeniable. The anti-colonialist struggles were facilitated by the cultivation and propagation of a national identity that sought to challenge and question the colonial position. This was done through various modes and agencies. Yeats’ “Easter 1916” is an example of the politically volatile Irish uprising serving as the source and subject of poetry. What this condition suggests is that there was an irreversible widening of the author-base in the twentieth century who wrote in English but did not necessarily identify with or actually belonged to England or its culture. Decolonisation thus facilitated a postcolonial literature that moved beyond the shores of England which, however, remained ‘English’ because of the medium used. New writers emerged in the erstwhile colonies and they competed with British practitioners for attention of the English-reading public in the twentieth century. The term post-colonial in this context refers to the phase of writing that developed in both the colonies and England and which made it clear that English nationality was no longer the basic criterion for evaluating a writer’s credentials. R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, George Lamming, Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe are some of the non-British writers who have contributed to the field of literatures in English in a postcolonial world. The transformations in the world order following decolonisation and the unprecedented growth of the English language have brought forth this situation where postcoloniality as a political and cultural condition cannot be undone. As a language, English has been embraced by many aspiring writers in various non-European cultures for its reach and accessibility.

Interestingly, many of the writers writing in English today have chosen to locate themselves within the Anglo-American situation for better visibility and recognition. Such locational change, however, has not changed their identity altogether. Salman Rushdie or V.S. Naipaul’s residences in the West have not removed the ‘Indian-origin’ tag. If they are considered to be postcolonial, it is because their identities have refused to fully dissolve within the cosmopolitanism of the West, where they are still seen as being, maybe partly, affiliated to non-Western cultures. This has resulted in an interesting claim game where, based on the benefits that may accrue from such an effort, they are appropriated by rival cultures as one its own. The blurring of identities of writers has brought into focus the issues of individuality, cultural allegiance, origin, language, ideology, and social change to the cenre of contemporary literary discourse. It is by this token that contemporary writers like Hanif Kureishi, Patience Agbabi, or Monica Ali can be called postcolonial. One of the ideas working behind the establishment of writers who are of African or Asian ‘origin’ is that of diaspora identity. The term ‘diaspora’ refers to a group or community of people who, in spite of living in one country, trace and acknowledge some cultural, linguistic, or racial connection with another older territory, which serves as a source of some emotional affiliation. The group as such may not even see or know the other older territory in actual terms, but nevertheless would identify with some of the practices, cultures and conditions prevalent there. This association works to create what has been called diaspora identities. Many writers like Hanif Kureishi and Monica Ali, who were born and have been living in Britain, exemplify this condition. Their writings are responses to the issue of identity in a postcolonial world where experiences of nationality, community, and cultural affinity are blurred. Monica Ali’s first novel Brick Lane (2003) traces the experience of a Bangladeshi family as it tries to grapple with the different cultural life of Britain. Ali came to England when she was just three years old and has grown up seeing the Asians thriving in its cosmopolitanism. In exploring the experience of migration and the issue of identity, Ali is responding to a situation where location and culture combine to present conditions that would have been beyond conception in the nineteenth century colonial world order. Commenting on the contemporary situation in England for the diasporic population, Monica Ali says: “I do think though that there’s something more interesting going on in terms of British Asian or black

writing which is perhaps a reflection of a reality, that as the second or third generation, we’re getting into our stride… We’re gaining more confidence. We have a different perspective, we have stories to tell, personal stories about migration and displacement, sometimes with an immigrant narrative but which have enough wider resonance” (Ali, in Nashta 2004: 349). Hanif Kureishi’s first novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) has in Karim a protagonist who moves across a plethora of identity markers as he tries to organise his individuality in an ‘English’ society. Kureishi has been very influential in articulating the experience of the ‘other’ in an England, which, in spite of its multiculturalism, has remained a complex site for cultural negotiations. The poetry of Patience Agbabi, on the other hand, combines the experience of the contemporary multicultural British life with an exposition that draws on her Nigerian lineage through the adoption of the rap poem. Her first collection of poems, strikingly titled R.A.W., is a response to the pop culture of her times. In such forays as Agbabi’s or Kureishi’s, the literary world of the English moves beyond the frontiers of a Victorian or modern haven to accommodate conditions that exercise the flux of contemporary British life. The condition of postcoloniality here subsumes the process of representation by refusing to wish away the experience of a past that is rooted in the experience of colonialism. In contemporary literature, represented by the likes of Kureishi and Agbabi, there is an inevitable questioning of the identity issue through a cultural engagement that often emerges within a politically nuanced paradigm. The contribution of these second and third generation Britons to the world of English literature is thus a complex figuration of cultural positions and themes that reorient the paradigmatic frame of traditional aesthetics. Another writer of Nigerian origin, Diran Adebayo, has explored the problems of a young black British student’s attempt to come to terms with his experiences at the university, his Nigerian legacy, his experience of London life, drugs, and eventually the adventure of an activist’s life in a stunning first novel Some Kind of Black (1996). Adebayo’s complex weaving of the experiences of the ‘black’ view with the ‘traditions’ of British life has been widely recognised as an appraisal of the contemporary English world where the marks of identity are at best provisional. His second novel My Once Upon a Time (2000) took the ramifications of the themes enunciated in his work further. Such writers who trace some kind of affiliation to a colonial past

abound in contemporary Britain. Not all of them are second or third generation Britons, but retain a strong connection with a world which provides not just the sources of creative inspiration but also serves as a reminder of the legacy that cannot be forgotten. While early postcolonial literature often emerged in the form of overt critiques of colonial historiography and questioned the paradigms of such representations, contemporary literature is a much more inward-looking exercise where the national loyalties quietly sway between the British and the original structures of experience. Poet and playwright John Agard has used his experiences in British Guyana to incorporate his understanding of Caribbean culture and practices into frames that are directed towards, among others, children. Agard’s From Man to Pan (1982) draws on the tradition of calypso lifestyle to work out the elemental figures and even his British association has not dented his Caribbean imagination. He is intently satirical, while the romance of his language is appealing in its simple evocativeness. And in the way he has used the iconic modes of traditional Caribbean life, there is a suggestion of an imaginative legacy that provides him the inspirational springs, and his recent work—Weblines (2000) and Come Back to Me My Boomerang (2001)—has retained the same tendency. The transformations now directing the course of literature in English owe something to the experience of postcoloniality, the rumblings of which became apparent even before the end of colonialism began. In novels like Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938), the colonial position came under flak at a time when political postcolonialism, was not realised. The literatures that emanated from the colonies, however, were not always critical of the imperialist experience. So it is essential to distinguish between those literatures that subscribed to the advertised colonial view and those that sought to interrogate it. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) is a remarkable chronicle of the problems that came to Igbo society following colonialism, and one of the reasons why this text has acquired canonical status in the realm of postcolonial literature is because of the issues it tackles, the foremost among which addresses the question of identity and cultural practice in a society changed forever by the experience of colonial life. The typical postcolonial text moves within the matrices of social structures that recognise the inevitability of colonialism and the consequent changes wrought by such a condition. If the postcolonial text ends up critiquing the

ideas characteristically associated with colonial experience, it also serves to examine the notions that a post-colonial world confronts the writer and his/her subjects. Now considered a classic of postcolonial literature, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is remarkable for the range of disciplines and fictional territories it covers, for in it India—inscribed in the historicity of its independence, which gives the novel its title—is both represented and historicised and the journeys made within it are of a scale which does not adhere to the limits of realistic narratives. Rushdie’s organisation of the plot is directed by a propensity that celebrates fragmentation. Although the novel’s protagonist Saleem Sinai is one of the many children born on independent India’s first midnight, he is gifted with a memory that confounds conventional wisdom. The story of Midnight’s Children is not just Sinai’s; he is a storyteller and a chronicler who can revert to a memory fund which goes back beyond his birth. In creating a narrator whose command on ancestral historical resources is equally supplemented by a knack of appropriating contemporary truths, Rushdie creates a magical realm that is never fully detached from the conditions of everyday reality. Rushdie’s taut narrative is sustained by an intense working up of incidental detail that adds to the continually changing plot direction. Midnight’s Children has continued to draw attention for the way it involves issues about nationalism, loyalty, cultural and social identity, narrativity, community pressures, time, self and the other, historical representation, aesthetic freedom, and of course postcoloniality. Shame (1983), set in the fictional land of Peccavistan, is another of Rushdie’s engagements with the textuality of history, although the subtler and darker contours of the novel move with a focus that is not discernible in Midnight’s Children. Rushdie’s preoccupation with the conditioning of identity marked by an inherited consciousness about the past has been a revealing feature of his work. The angst sometimes moves to a negotiation within a plane of subjectivity where the grappling with the situations of life is personal and self-directed, as in Fury (2001). The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) is another example of Rushdie’s exploration of the Indian psyche through the personality of rock stars that suggests the inevitability of undoing the cultural cross-fertilisation in a postcolonial world. The mode of representation and thematic preoccupation that distinguishes Rushdie, however, does not find

similar engagements in other writers who trace a lineage to the experience of colonialism. Some representations are subtler, nuanced, though the rhetorical understatedness seems to be a deliberate tendency in many of them. Jamaicaborn Benjamin Zephaniah’s novels deal with the identity question but the explorations are personalised in a way that invokes the community only by association. Refugee Boy, (2001) and Face (1999) are youth-centred narratives that exemplify Zephaniah’s interest in the theme of the personal. Alem, the protagonist of Refugee Boy tackles the issue of immigration and cultural identity, following his movement from between Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is, however, Zephaniah’s poetry that has generated interest for the political connotations it has managed to suggest; the seemingly paradoxical combination of love of English life, especially London, and the critique of the English legal system have been widely acclaimed. City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black, Too Strong (2001) have, in spite their incisive political implications, shown that the themes of social isolation and cultural identity transcend topical boundaries. Ben Okri’s trilogy involving Azaro, a spirit child beginning with The Famished Road (1991) continues in Songs of Enchantment (1993) and Infinite Riches (1998) where the resourceful engagement of Nigerian cultural metaphors have made available to English-speaking audiences the textures of an ‘other’ that refuses to be ignored. Okri’s strength lies in his ability to combine a poetics of the tragic with an extremely nuanced vocabulary. Postcolonial writers like Okri and Rohinton Mistry have enhanced the English language by suggesting newer and potentially maverick ways to organise narratives that tell stories of different cultures. Mistry’s stories of Bombay life are recollections that engage the conditions of a world slipping away into the grip of an inevitable time-bind, whether they revolve round an old Parsi suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Nariman Vakeel’s quest for meaning in Family Matters (2002) or the Indian emergency of the 1970s as in A Fine Balance (1996). Like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Mistry’s A Fine Balance works through a rhetoric of power within which the Parsis in the novel find themselves enmeshed. It is both a questioning of the efficacy of the historical condition as well as a perspective with which to view that period. The novels of Nadine Gordimer move towards a mode of critiquing that offers positions of looking at institutions of colonial origin. July’s People (1981) situates a white family in the midst of a violent social condition where

the reversal of apartheid is examined. The tautness of the narrative is equally supplemented by a quiet movement across the cultural divides which determine the identities of the blacks and the whites in apartheid-ridden South Africa. Gordimer’s confident prose has been employed to serve the demands of extremely complex narratives such as the issues of migration politics, (The Pickup, 2001) murder and elite-subaltern conflict (The House Gun, 1988), exile, alienation, compromise and angst (The Conservationist, 1974 and Burger’s Daughter 1979) and the politics of love (Occasion for Loving, 1963). Gordimer’s moral conviction has been one of the features of her powerful narratives as they negotiate the contours of politics and culture in apartheid-driven South Africa. Many of the writers who have engaged with the condition of postcoloniality to critique and readdress the cultural positions following the collapse of empire have chosen distinctly individual ways to do so. Sometimes emerging as a rhetoric of the community, and otherwise as an individual response or query, these texts do not seek to posit an either/or structure. Neither do these narratives aim to ‘correct’ the political orientation that is often read into the paradigms of the imperial enterprise. Novelists like Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh and Shashi Deshpande have chosen much quieter and subtler representational modes to suggest the ‘other’ view. Deshpande’s Moving On (2004) and Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) are explorations which seek routes that do not tread the now familiar path of parody and wit epitomised by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. There is an obvious change in the way contemporary writers trace the English language’s potential to work out narratives and dramas that tell of cultures with a panache characterised by a quiet understatedness. On the other hand, there are also bold experiments that combine travel discourse, magic realism, science fiction and fantasy as in Ghosh’s novels. Politics, however, has remained a major theme in postcolonial literature. To say that the literatures in a postcolonial world have been diverse would be stating the obvious; in the choices that postcoloniality has opened up for its many practitioners there has been an unprecedented tapping of creative resources not done previously.

URBANISATION AND LIFESTYLES Urbanisation The process of urbanisation in England since the beginning of modernity has been acquiring newer dimensions in a rapidly changing world where capitalism, industrialisation and globalisation have become inherent structural positions. The years following the Second World War were important ones in English history as growing disillusionment over unrealised promises by the government gave rise to angst and protests of various kinds became more pronounced than they were before the War. Many of the problems related with urban life in early twentieth century remained and some became more intensified. Unemployment was a major concern throughout the century and even during the optimistic years when Thatcherism was at its peak, it was not away from public discourse. The idea of the welfare state that contributed to the expectations related to the promises made by the governments immediately after the Second World War, however, did not manifest itself in complete realisation of that ideal. In fact, when John Osborne and other artists of the 1950s reacted against the futility of the state machinery and commented on the establishment’s inability to respond to the demands for better opportunities, they were highlighting one of the common areas under public scrutiny. Unemployment problems started acquiring serious proportions in the 1920s when the wartime production boom dissipated. During the time of the Great Depression, it was estimated that unemployment in England reached the three million mark. While urban growth and unemployment continued to be closely associated in the two decades following the Second World War, the 1970s saw another crisis as high inflation as a consequence of the 1973–74 oil shock brought it back into sharp focus. In spite of consistent manipulation of statistics of unemployment figures by the government in the 1970s and 80s, the figure remained constantly above the three million mark. The ‘New’ Labour government of Tony Blair sought to redefine the parameters of economic growth by offering a radical restructuring of the system, but as the first five years of the new century have demonstrated, matters aren’t as simple as they were initially made out to be. One of the factors influencing the nature of unemployment at the beginning

of the twenty-first century has been the British involvement in the Iraq war. Apart from the political consequences of the Blair government’s decision to go ahead with American President George Bush’s “war on terror,” the effect on the country’s economic resources has been enormous. Throughout the twentieth century, unemployment has remained a crisis-point in British social and political life (the so-called golden years of the welfare regime of the postWar notwithstanding). It has been rightly commented that “there were some among the unemployed who accepted joblessness as a way of life—and others who abused the system. But in their different ways, both of these categories were an indictment of post-war politicians who had manipulated an affluent economy in their own interests. The remainder of the unemployed —those who desperately wanted to find a suitable job, but could not do so for one good reason or another—were no better off than their counterparts had been in the 1930s” (Garnett and Weight 2004: 497). The problems relating to unemployment were closely associated with the economic climate of the nation. In spite of the fact that British economy was thriving for a major part of the twentieth century, the export-import ration is not balanced. Since urbanisation, industrial growth and unemployment or labour problems are integrally related, it is imperative to realise that each of these was part of larger process and not independent of each other. The trade union movement in the twentieth century demonstrates the complications brought about by the inequality discernible in labour/industry relations. The 1971 Industrial Relations Act for instance offered a compromise in that it catered to the interests of both employees and the industrial magnates, but even legislation wasn’t enough to stem the feelings of discontent that manifested itself from time to time. In the late twentieth century, labour problems continued to dog the government and serious confrontations like the miners’ strike of 1984–85 only exemplified the persistence of the phenomenon. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Tony Blair government, in spite of having the sympathies of the trade unions (Blair’s is the “new” face of Labour after all) has not been able to solve the problems of unemployment. Unemployment, however, is just one of the characteristics of modern urban Britain. Population growth and immigration are two very serious issues in contemporary British life. The population of the cities and towns saw a rapid rise in the twentieth century, and even though globalisation and the growth of traffic across the urban West has somewhat affected the

pattern of contemporary life. Housing is another important aspect of British life in the twentieth century. During the peak years of industrial growth in the nineteenth century, there was a rapid process of urbanisation. This continued till the early decades of the twentieth century as the unplanned construction of houses gave rise to serious social and economic problems. Policymakers were slow to respond to the crisis as problems of sanitation, safe drinking water, overcrowding, and the spread of diseases started manifesting the ugly side of urban existence. When the Housing Act (1919) was passed in the early twentieth century, it was hoped that many of the problems relating to urban housing would be attended to, but this was not to be. As property ownership became a driving force (also responsible somewhat for enhancing the class divide) in the times of economic growth, it became evident that urban Britain remained unresponsive to the demands of better housing for the working and the lower classes. Slum populations, throughout the twentieth century, showed no signs of declining, giving rise to a host of related problems that have come to be seen as part of contemporary urban life. The political will wasn’t always missing—the Conservatives rode back to power in 1951 primarily on the basis of the promise that they would have at least 300,000 new houses annually, a target that the government met in 1953—but it was hardly the index through which to measure the issue generally. In the 1960s, flatconstruction reached a new high but even then problems of rent remained. In the next two decades housing figures showed a decline, primarily because subsidies were curtailed by the Thatcher government. In the context of the situation that existed in 1900, a century hence it had improved remarkably; but then urban problems associated with housing are far from over as immigration, and an increasing class divide enhance the demand for better living facilities at the beginning of the twentieth century. Another aspect of modern Britain was its growing consumerism. In the first half of the twentieth century, the culture of consumerism manifested itself most remarkably in the interwar years when many items were available for public consumption, not because they were necessities, but for their significance as luxuries. New devices such as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and electric fires were the craze of the nation in the 1930s as the prosperous families began acquiring them both as symbols of stature and items of necessary use. In the 1950s, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan

announced that times were never as better before; such a view, however, was not seen by everyone as representative of the general sentiment as some considered the growing insistence of materialism as a sign of decadence. Popular cultural products such as the radio and the television really caught the imagination of the urban British population in the 1950s and 60s even though they were available decades earlier. The culture of the remote has remained a constant feature of urban life in England even as newer fashions as the Internet and other items of techno-culture are being consumed in the computerised age. In a globalised world the consumerist culture is inevitably intertwined with marketing, advertising and production processes that actually undercut the very concept that ‘the consumer is king.’

Marriage, Divorce and Family Life Family life in the twentieth century saw the mounting of challenges to the ‘solidity’ of the traditional institution of marriage and as a consequence, a whole network of relationships was affected by it. It is worth noting that marriage is an impressive index through which to view the changes in contemporary social life in England. The change in lifestyle and pattern of existence was more pronounced in the urban areas as the pressures of the professional and personal routines seriously affected the people. In fact, this tendency was not peculiar to England, but was ubiquitous in the urban West in terms of the consistency with which it was manifested in twentieth century society. As Hobsbawm observes, “the classical Western nuclear family, the married couple with children, was in patent retreat” (Hobsbawm 1995: 322). By the end of the twentieth century, the number of single-parent families was on the rise. Given the rosy picture of a welfare society projected half a century earlier, this wasn’t a development that was welcomed by the traditional purists. The context of a globalised economy and the changing parameters of social change have had a considerable impact on family life in Britain. Many social commentators see the 1960s as the turning point in terms of the changing family relationships in contemporary British society. The 1960s were remarkable years in that it heralded a cultural revolution of sorts: it made available to the British public the pop music of the Beatles and other groups that led the ‘British Invasion,’ this was also the time when youth culture was emerging as a potent and vocal social group, the radio and

television viewership was on an unprecedented rise, drugs and crime were no longer news but becoming the part of the commonplace and more importantly a sexual permissiveness was in fashion. These were significant developments in that they also altered the conditions under which the traditional ideas of moral life were challenged and replaced by newer combinations of specific and immediate concerns. Moreover, the professional lives of the English people were considerably affected by the availability of different opportunities which put to test the experiences of the conventional family. The changing lifestyles and family life in twentieth century Britain, however, was not simply brought about by the ‘swinging sixties,’ as conservative social commentators would put it, but also influenced by conditions whose roots lay in earlier times. Divorce, for instance, was not alien to the English experience, for Henry VIII had challenged the papal authorities in the early sixteenth century on that very ground. In terms of general occurrence, however, divorce did not come to occupy the centrestage until the 1930s, when the Suffragette movement contributed to the issue of women’s freedom. The concept of divorce, thus, was closely allied to the reaction against political domination of women, which wasn’t simply orchestrated from the activists of the feminist movement, but equally articulated from within homes. Separations weren’t uncommon in the interwar years, but it took some time for the British middle class to come to terms with divorce as another aspect of social life; by the 1960s, the divorce rate had seen an unprecedented rise and apart from the 1937 Bill on Divorce introduced by A. P. Herbert, there were other factors that led to the phenomenon. And even though there was a doubling of the divorce rate following the 1937 Bill, there was an associated development that saw a revaluation of marriage terms which many couples did to reconsider their relationships. There is another reason why the 1960s is considered to be a watershed in the context of the destabilisation of the institution of marriage—it was the growing irreverence to married life as alternative options of maintaining mutually beneficial nonmarital relationships seemed lucrative enough to many Britons. From the 1960s to the 1980s—the Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Act (1984) is a major landmark—the divorce rate was on a consistent rise, but by then it had gained acceptance in middle class circle. Acceptance of divorce as a social reality, however, did not imply that marriage breakups weren’t resented; an instance of the British obsession with marriage was evident in

the celebrity event status granted to the union of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in the 1980s. Diana was engaged to Prince Charles on Feb. 24, 1981 and they were married on July 29 in the same year. The marriage, often described as the example of a modern “fairy-tale,” got global attention as the marital proceedings were telecast live to audiences who revelled in the unfolding of celebrity lives before their eyes. Lady Diana became a national icon and she used her celebrity status to highlight many issues of concern including the campaign against AIDS. Things weren’t as rosy, however, as the public made it out to be. Although Diana and Charles were seen as the ideal British couple, Diana was combating depression, postnatal complications and the paparazzi that pursued her ever since her marriage. After years of marital difficulties, the royal couple separated in 1992 and were finally divorced in August 1996. The “fairy-tale” marriage had come to a cruel conclusion. Even after her divorce, Diana continued to be a favourite of the British public and media until her death in 1997, a condition that reflected the British fascination for celebrity lives. This feature continues as the frenzied media attention to Prince Charles’s remarriage to Camilla Bowles in 2005 exemplifies. There were other celebrity marriages, divorces and remarriages that occupied media attention in the twentieth century. John Lennon’s marriage to Yoko Ono or Rod Stewart’s marriages provided spicy content to the British tabloids. Celebrity marriages in Britain seemed to perform a cyclic routine with great religiosity: announcement, lavish weddings (sometimes extremely privately organised to stay away from the glare of the media), wedding photographs (sometimes “exclusive” ones given to one tabloid only), children, more photographs, scandals, and eventually divorce. This is often followed by an authorised biography or an autobiographical account – often by both the sides – that claims to provide the “true” picture. Andrew Motion’s Diana: Her True Story (1992) is one of the many such celebrity productions in the genre of “true lives.” For the average English family, marriage in the late twentieth century was part of the many exigencies of social existence that required attention. One feature of marriages in the 1980s and 90s was that remarriages made up a huge number of unions among the British couples. Certain complications continue to remain unsettled as English people move into the twenty-first century: upbringing of children born out of wedlock (more than a third of live births are from unmarried mothers), single parenting and divorce. The matter

is not within the parameters of government attention, as the failure of the much-publicised Child Support Agency, set up in 1991 by the John Major administration, suggests.

LITERATURE AND CULTURE IN THE POSTMODERN WORLD The Context of Postmodernism The term ‘postmodernism’ has been highly contentious and in spite of its very common use in contemporary discourse, disagreement about its nature and scope persists. Thomas Docherty notes that “although the term ‘postmodern’ has become one of the insistently used terms in cultural debates in recent years, it is a term which has often been used with a great deal of imprecision” (Docherty 1993: xiii). Given the multiplicity of contexts to which it is subjected and the various agencies in which its presence is noted, it does not readily offer itself to a concretely locatable or definable structure. Thus, its use must be seen in terms of the contexts in which it has been used ever since it appeared in critical discourse. It was used by Arnold Toynbee in 1939 to refer to a kind of chronological order in his A Study of History, where he applied it to organise the historicity of the post modern period. Toynbee’s use was conditioned by the philosophic figuration of a future moment in history, which he chose to call the post-modern, and as such it was not accommodated to engage the theoretical polemics to which it refers to today. Intellectually, postmodernism has been associated with French critical theory of the twentieth century which in the 1960s sought to revise many of the assumptions that were commonly accepted and taken for granted. The first aspect in this intellectual interrogation relates to the challenging of the ‘foundational’ (assumptions based on solid foundations) nature of many belief-systems. These anti-foundational perspectives of viewing ‘reality’ destabilised the concrete ideas that had been unquestioningly accepted. The theoretical framework of the French intellectuals in the 1960s, however, was informed by the philosophical heritage of some thinkers like Nietzsche, who had commented on the impossibility of certainty in the nineteenth century. Thus, the early philosophic writings of French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault built upon the philosophic heritage they inherited and organised their questioning of the foundations of traditional beliefs in the context of such a legacy. The questioning of foundations also implied the adoption of new ways of

seeing the world and the unshackling of previously assumed constants was brought about by the engagement of various agencies. First, the idea of a ‘grand narrative’ (a narrative that totalised everything within its purview) was challenged and postmodernists claimed that the fragments are more important than the whole and also that it is never possible to view the whole as such. The focus on the fragments—in culture, in politics, in literature and the media —drew attention to the inability of language to be comprehensively accommodative in respect of providing the view of reality. The rejection of grand narratives also led to the view that ideas about reality can only be provisional. It is one of the commonplaces of postmodernism to valorise the variety of perspectives instead of privileging just the dominant. In this sense, postmodernism is a democratising process and is related to the deconstruction of the dominant central principle governing any structure. The movement away from a foundational or central thesis as the only organising principle of reality is closely associated with deconstruction. The term ‘deconstruction’ was used by Jacques Derrida to show that inconsistencies persist in any given structure, irrespective of whether they are immediately perceived or not. Technically, or rather within the given terms of the phenomenon, to offer a definition of deconstruction would be self-defeating, as it too would be subjected to the same principles it seeks to explain. Derrida proposes that the intellectual framework of Western philosophy has long been governed by the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and that the playful nature of language cannot be ignored. According to him, all ideas of the real are structured through the relations of signs which are not fixed but relative and provisional. The view that sign-systems are structures which do not permit a complete view of reality is related to another Derridean concept, that of deferral. Not only does meaning differ from one another, it is also in a constant state of deferral. The impossibility of arriving at a final meaning is one aspect of language that Derrida draws attention to and this aspect of relativism has been extended by many thinkers beyond the realm of the linguistic sign to explore the perspectives of contemporary cultural narratives. In the field of literature, this focus on the language of texts is closely aligned to the proposition, put forward by Roland Barthes, that the author does not exist. This is not to imply that the historical author is physically dead but it suggests that a text’s existence does not rely on any external authority and also that it is independent of authorial control. The idea that a text is “plural” has had

serious implications for the entire philosophic tradition of the West. The postmodern attention to the textuality of literature has been used to read history as representation and not fact. This means that like other texts, historical narratives too are structured and are informed by certain paradigms that control and determine them. The questioning of the facticity of history is another way of challenging the fixed idea of the “real.” This characteristic of viewing the real with scepticism has also led to questioning of the foundational assumptions of scientific knowledge and thus even apparently “solid” theoretical structures (the theory of evolution is one such example) are understood relatively. The implications of this relativism have been wide-ranging and enormous. For instance, thinkers like Foucault question the very idea of historical or civilisational progress (another ‘grand narrative’) and conditions like power and politics continually inform them. Instead of seeing political and historical structures as givens, postmodernists consider them as discourses and go on to study other competing structures as well. Postmodernism has opened up interesting debate sites in cultural theory and it has affected the perceptions about almost everything in contemporary life, from detergents to the ideas of God. Roland Barthes was one of the early philosophers to highlight the structural features of objects of consumption, thereby inaugurating the need to review the idea of culture itself. Postmodern thought has contributed to the debunking of the high culture/low culture myth by emphasising the relevance of popularly consumed material. The democratising aspect of postmodernism is thus manifested in the organisation of the perceptions relating everyday experience. On the other hand, a study of such structures has also led to an increased attention given to everyday experience and the politics and ideological implications of the agencies at work. Three features thus emerge in the context of postmodernist thought: (a) scepticism towards the rationalistic assumptions as being the only agency of knowledge; (b) loss of certainty and a foregrounding of relativism; and (c) a rejection of cultural elitism. In literature and the arts, postmodernism has been appropriated through a focus on the politics of representation. Jean-François Lyotard has argued against the idea of ‘truth’ and its representability in one of the key texts of postmodernism, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge: “The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which would make it possible to

share collectively the nostalgia for the attainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable” (Lyotard 1979: 81). Lyotard’s emphasis on the politics of representation suggests that postmodernism is not necessarily and always related to chronological positioning, but is also an approach, an attitude and a cultivation of scepticism towards all that are taken for granted. The importance given to representation has meant that there is in postmodern cultural structures—texts and artefacts that announce their postmodern character by a rejection of foundational beliefs—a tendency to interrogate the self, often manifested in the condition termed “self-reflexivity.” In literature such a character is reflected in novels like Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie or The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) by John Fowles. Rushdie and Fowles continuously draw attention to the fictive elements in the narratives of the novels and directly suggest the constructedness of the texts. In the way these texts are organised, there is a constant reference to the playfulness that informs each representation of ‘reality,’ which is neither a given nor an unalterable structure. Such a tendency—the relativism of texts as well as the condition of provisionality—is a general feature of much postmodern art and music. The impact of postmodernism in the fields of popular culture and visual arts has been immense. The focus has shifted from the concreteness of forms to the perpetration of images, of simulations that have come to dominate everyday living. In many spheres this relativism has led to an ‘overload’ or ‘excess’ and something like the Internet is one of the agencies that offer the free movement of images, an agency that does not follow the structured hierarchy of the past. The postmodern world is one where constantly produced cultural items are on display and available for consumption. Christopher Butler analyses this aspect of the postmodern condition thus: “Many of us are working in an incredibly driven, information-soaked world (and those of us who are not are often starving or illiterate or struggling at the bottom of the social heap or mentally ill). There is too much of everything. We are subject everywhere to a sensory overload of images, in magazines and advertisements, on the TV, in the cityscape etc.” (Butler 2002: 117) Butler’s focus on the fast-moving contemporary world also highlights the enhanced divide between cultures and even within them. The postmodern world has seen many developments that have brought cultures closer, but this has not

happened with an equitable distribution all over the world. Globalisation, one important feature of the postmodern condition, has not been equally relevant in terms of its impact upon different societies. Usually, this is one of the charges levelled against the postmodern tendency to relativise, to devalue the structures of tradition and to introduce elements into a culture, which would have otherwise been alien to it. Postmodernism is both a technological inevitability, especially in the advanced societies of the world and also a cultural response to and condition of the contemporary world. In literature and the arts, postmodernism is one of the many influences, but it is not the only way “reality” is viewed or seen by artists and writers. As a cultural and social condition, postmodernism has brought about important changes in the way perceptions are organised and, more than anything else, it has introduced a sense of scepticism regarding the status of institutions, systems, and beliefs.

Post-War English Fiction The world of fiction has seen interesting experiments and adventures in the post-war period. It is important to recognise, however, that reading fictional developments in terms of periods is not problem-free. As Philip Tew notes: “All periodizations are tenuous. Clearly, any such chronological demarcation may be argued to be fraught with conceptual and ideological difficulties, but no more so than any other commensurable definitional generic or movement boundaries” (Tew 2004: 58). Nevertheless, certain aspects of post-War English fiction may be outlined here. Stories of individual struggle and the contest for meaning constituted the major themes of the novels of the 1950s. The issues of national identity and the state of contemporary culture occupied the thematic orientations of a group of novelists usually described by the epithet ‘angry young men.’ The novelists who made up this group were Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), John Wain (1925–1994), John Braine (1922– 1986) and Alan Sillitoe (1928–). Braine’s Room at the Top (1957) captured the angst that was part of the intellectual frustration and which found quite vocal articulators in both fiction and drama. Kingsley Amis’ first novel Lucky Jim (1954) brought him immediate success. The novel’s protagonist Jim Dixon’s misadventures in situations that go beyond his control constitute the crux of the novel. The consistently boisterous and satirical incidents liven up the narrative. The novel belongs to a series of fictional writings that deal with

the pretentiousness of both intellectual and cultural institutions of the time. Amis’ other fictional forays haven’t been as well appreciated in later times in spite of the fact that they were popular during the time of appearance. Amis was interested in detective fiction as well and his imitation of the James Bond example in Colonel Sun (1968), which incidentally was published under the pseudonym of Robert Markham, shows that he carried it quite comfortably. His later novels have dwelt on topical issues, especially The Old Devils (1986) which was awarded the Booker Prize. The rise of popular culture and the fragmentation of the welfare structure of the state (announced with such bravado in the Beveridge Report), the dissatisfaction of the youth with the available conditions of social intercourse, the lack of employment opportunities and even the collapse of empire contributed to the picture of gloom in British society in the 1950s. John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) presents a theme that’s very similar to Amis’ Lucky Jim, as it also describes the university scene through the downward social movement of Charles Lumley, and the overwhelmingly satirical portrait of the unemployment situation in contemporary England preoccupied many writers of the time. In this context, Lucky Jim and Hurry on Down are generically similar because of the common positions they take and the concerns they narrate; the problem of social adjustment which constituted the themes of these novels found its dramatic platform in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956). Wain’s other novels have not been followed with the same fervour even though he has dabbled in a variety of fictional adventures in his The Contenders (1958), The Smaller Sky (1968), Young Shoulders (1982) and Where the Rivers Meet (1988). Wain was also a writer of short stories, which have been collected in Nuncle (1960) and Death of the Hind Legs (1966). John Braine’s Room at the Top featured a character called Joe Lampton whose grossly material pursuits brought the conflict between wealth and “love” into sharp focus. The sequel to the novel, titled Life at the Top (1962), could not emulate the success of the original. Braine’s other novels include The Vodi (1959), The Crying Game (1964) and The Two of Us (1984). Another member of the ‘angry young men’ group, Alan Sillitoe, revelled in portraying the outsider. His collection of stories The Loneliness of the LongDistance Runner (1959) dealt with the themes of loneliness, isolation and angst. His first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), captured the maverick inclinations of the anti-hero Arthur Seaton with great panache.

Provincial life and the oppositional structures of contemporary cultural sites have occupied the fictional thrust of Sillitoe’s later novels. The Death of William Posters (1965), The Flame of Life (1974) and The Widower’s Son (1977) carry forward his concern about the working-class environment in an age of high industrialisation. Sillitoe has also dealt with other possibilities in his later fiction as in The Lost Flying Boat (1983), which concerns the experience of flight. The vogue of the proletariat novel, so eloquently developed by Sillitoe, found another exponent in Stan Barstow (1928-) whose novels about provincial Yorkshire life represent the angst of the post-war years. His first novel A Kind of Loving (1960) is his best known work. The Watchers on the Shore (1966), A Raging Calm (1968), A Season with Eros (1971), The Right True End (1976), A Brother’s Tale (1980), and Just You Wait and See (1986) are his other novels. The condition of contemporary England has not been the province of the “angry young men” alone. Rose Macaulay (1881–1958) proposed a radical view of social reorganisation in her The World My Wilderness (1950). The collapse of the civilised order in the wake of post-War frustration constitutes the theme of this powerful indictment of contemporary British society. Macaulay’s satirical outspokenness found its ground in many of the novels that she wrote in the pre-War period: Told by an Idiot (1923), Orphan Island (1924) and I Would be Private (1937). Angst and dissatisfaction with the contemporary social scene formed the subjects of many other novelists who first made their presence felt in the 1950s. Muriel Spark (1918–) worked around with the themes of social delusion and individual failure/achievement in her novels. The Prime of Jean Brodie (1961) is her most popular work. She ironically visualised the rhetoric of cultural progress in novels like Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960). The black humour of Spark isn’t exactly engaged in a novel like Scenes from Provincial Life (1950) by William Cooper (1910–) whose protagonist Joe Lunn followed a narrative trajectory similar to the ones represented by the ‘angry young men.’ Angus Wilson (1913–1991), Anthony Powell (1905–2000) and Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) were three of the major novelists to write interesting fiction in the early decades after the Second World War. Wilson’s Hemlock and After (1952) is often considered to be a critique of liberal humanist ideals. It has been suggested that “the testing of liberal humanism in Hemlock and After remains a pertinent ethical topic fifty years on.” (Head 2002: 20). It is indeed

ironic that Wilson has been often set beside the tradition of Forster given that he tried primarily to interrogate its basic assumptions. Another interesting work by Wilson is his ambitious depiction of the Matthews family in the first half of the twentieth century, No Laughing Matter (1967). The novels of Anthony Powell, especially his 12-part series, published from 1951 to 1975 show his skilful control over narratives of sustained drama. The first novel in the series was titled A Question of Upbringing (1951) which concluded with Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975). The psychological grounding of Iris Murdoch’s novels may have something to do with her being engaged in the philosophising process itself, but even then her fiction stands independently. In novels like A Severed Head (1961), Murdoch’s use of self-analysis as an agency of understanding undercuts the theme of love, a process that is characteristic of her other works as well. Under the Net (1954), The Black Prince (1973), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), and The Good Apprentice (1986) are some of the other novels by Murdoch where the playful intercourse between ideas and the people that embody them is used for effectively engaging the themes. Five other women novelists of the post-War period have shown their fictional engagements through the cultivation of a rhetoric that is distinctively tailored to manifest their individual concerns. Margaret Drabble (1939–) has been writing novels that foreground the concerns of women in specific contexts of contemporary culture. Her exploration of the problems of aging and social reception shows an alert perception of complex gender issues. The Realms of Gold (1975), The Gates of Ivory (1991), and The Seven Sisters (2002) are her major novels. Drabble’s sister A. S. Byatt (1936–) writes novels that are dense in character and have intense and gripping plots. Possession (1990), for which she won the Booker Prize, deals with romance in the academy, a slight departure from her fictions of family drama represented by works like The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still-Life (1985) and more recently A Whistling Woman (2002). Jean Rhys (1894-1979) began her career in fiction as a short story writer in the pre-war period with the collection The Left Bank (1927). Her novels that precede the Second World War include Postures (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Her finest and most accomplished fictional work, however, was published in the post-war period, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a moving tale that reworks the position of the mad wife of Mr Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Rhys continued to

write short fiction till the end and her collection Sleep it Off, Lady (1976) has some of the most polished short fiction of the twentieth century. Doris Lessing (1919–) has been one of the most visible of the English women novelists in the twentieth century, which did have something to do with her engagement of social issues and her preoccupation with trans-cultural politics. The Grass is Singing (1950), her first publication, deals with the politics of colour in Rhodesia; other politically alert novels of Lessing involve the figure of Martha Quest, who appears in Children of Violence (1964–5), novel in two volumes. The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1975) are two of her popular novels. Lessing has also written a substantial body of science fiction, the five-part sequence titled Canopus in Argos: Archives illustrating her control over long narratives. The Good Terrorist (1985) concerns the culture of urban terrorism and is set in London. The women-oriented novels of Anita Brookner (1928–) are designed to expose the hypocrisies and cultural politics of the late twentieth century middle class society. The corruption of cultural maladjustment is the theme of The Misalliance (1986). Brookner’s concern about women finding appropriate cultural counters in a reckless society is also manifested in her Booker Prize winning novel, Hotel du Lac (1984). Other novelists of distinction writing in the post-war period include Anthony Burgess (1917–1993), William Golding (1911–1993), John Fowles (1926–), John Le Carré (1931–), Martin Amis (1949–) and Ian McEwan (1948–), among others. Burgess’ Clockwork Orange (1962) used a combination of American, Russian and English slang vocabulary to explore the gap between the younger and the older generations. The novel was extremely successful in presenting an inside view of the youth culture of the 1950s and 60s. The Eve of Saint Venus (1964), Enderby Outside (1968), Earthly Powers (1980), The End of the World News (1983), The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985), Any Old Iron (1989), and A Dead Man in Deptford (1993) are the other fictional works of Burgess. His exploitation of the linguistic possibilities in his fiction and unconventional storylines separate him from his contemporaries. William Golding’s novels provide pictures of social inadequacies and in dealing with issues of cultural corruption (best evidenced in his first and most famous work Lord of the Flies, 1954), he has explored the flexibility of the novelistic genre to the fullest. His last novel The Double Tongue (1995), while dealing with the same preoccupation with the politics of culture, takes the frame of

the Delphic oracle to present a contemporary reading of primitive society. The presence of the primitive in man was the subject in his The Inheritors (1955) and The Spire (1964), both dealing with pre-modern cultures. Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Pyramid (1967), Darkness Visible (1979), The Paper Men (1984), Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989) are the other works of Golding. Narrative playfulness characterises the most famous novel of John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Its resourceful exploitation of the conventional Victorian narrative has been well celebrated in the history of post-war English fiction. Fowles has remained a very adventurous novelist and has tried something new in each of his novels. A Maggot (1985) goes back to the eighteenth century, while the exciting Mantissa (1983) parodies the assumptions of structuralism. He also tried his hand at thrillers with The Collector (1963) and The Magus (1966). The thriller genre, however, found one of the major exponents of the twentieth century in the works of John le Carré. Of the many Le Carré’s novels, which have become classics of the spy-thriller, genre The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Russia House (1989), and The Constant Gardener (2001) are the more famous ones. The character of George Smiley, who appears in some of le Carré’s novels, has been one of the twentieth century fiction’s well-known fictional figures. Martin Amis’s satirical verve has been seen as a commentary on the irreverence that is associated with much of modern living and in novels like Money: A Suicide Note (1984) and The Information (1995), he demonstrates his quiet but assured response to the state of contemporary society. Martin Amis is one of Britain’s most important novelists writing today. In novels like London Fields (1989), where he engages his fascination for angst within the frames of metafictional narrative, Amis’s satire is both scathing and unrelenting. The many layers of narrative enunciation make London Fields a remarkable exercise depicting the experience of postmodernity. The novels of McEwan, especially the Booker Prize winning Amsterdam (1998) and Atonement (2002), have had a mixed reception, in spite of their being concerned with contemporary social and cultural structures. His earlier fiction showed the influence of Continental writers like Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. An interesting experiment in novel writing was the work titled A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) by Julian Barnes (1946–). Barnes had previously written Metroland

(1981) and Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), but his ‘history’ engages many of the motifs of postmodern fiction as it amalgamates fact and fiction, pastiche and parody, rhetoric and representation to reproduce the Noah’s Ark structure within completely revised parameters. Another interesting work by Barnes is England, England (1998) which exposes the certainties of English national identity and shows how complex the idea of meta-England is, which he incidentally uses to great effect. The cosmopolitanism of English society in the second half of twentieth century is reflected in the many-cultured and multivoiced fictional experiments that have drawn from the cultural resources of various nonEnglish centres. Writers like Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh (all of Indian descent) and Kazuo Ishiguro (Japanese) have contributed to the development of contemporary English fiction in ways that have not been replicated in the same terms in other non-English cultures. These writers are usually clubbed within the frame of postcolonial literature, but they are also aligned to the tradition of modern British culture in that many of their narratives derive either directly or indirectly from such a heritage. Their presence in the novelwriting scene has invigorated and enriched the genre of the English novel. (For a discussion of these writers and their works, refer to the section dealing with Postcolonial literature.)

The Cultural Turn in Literary Studies English studies, which was on the rise in the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century, was confronting a new challenge when cultural studies became a major area of interest for many scholars. This was a process that had, in fact, been foreshadowed by F.R. Leavis in many of his writings on education, literature and society. The preoccupation with a kind of cultural elitism was one of the distinguishing features of high Modernism. In England, the development of cultural studies has seen the re-framing of the terms of canon-formation that informed much of the literary studies programme in the early part of the twentieth century. The cultural turn in literary studies was evident in the works of the early years following the Second World War, and when the Birmingham University Centre for Cultural Studies started developing it as an area of

study in its own right, it became evident that popular cultural forms were worthy of serious critical attention. The various agencies of popular culture— newspapers, magazines, best-sellers, comic strips and tabloids, television, radio and cinema, popular and folk music—constituted the primary study area for a new group of scholars who sought to develop a particular kind of critical apparatus to understand and explore the workings of these agencies in the popular imagination. Typical of the cultural studies approach in its formative years, books like Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society: 1780– 1950 (1958) suggested that culture was not a given but a process that cannot be studied in isolation. The influence of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies was immense as it enabled the scholars like Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall to formulate and streamline an approach that aimed to move beyond the straitjacketing tendencies of literary criticism exemplified by the New Critical school. These early years also saw the great influence of the journal Screen as it engaged many of the contemporary forms of culture through a scholarly and critical lens. By the 1980s, the parameters of cultural studies were being redefined as many areas purportedly associated with other humanities disciplines were brought within its purview. Thus, two stages in British cultural studies are noticeable: the first emphasised cultural tendencies for their discursive potential and the second focused on the significance of cultural structures, often with a poststructuralist perspective. The study of film, music and theatre benefited immensely from these scholarly forays. What, then, is cultural studies? According to Simon During, “cultural studies is not an academic discipline quite like others. It possesses neither a welldefined methodology nor clearly demarcated fields for investigation. Cultural studies is, of course, the study of culture, or more particularly, the study of contemporary culture” (During 1993: 1). A cultural critic is engaged in the re-examination of the very idea of culture itself and this has a major implication for literary studies in that the whole idea of the canon (the list of ‘great books’) is looked at anew. This means that the existing list of ‘great’ texts is expanded (not necessarily replaced by new ones) to incorporate texts that emanate from specific cultural situations, such as films, television shows, and newspapers. In other words, a relational paradigm is foregrounded in cultural studies rather than the evaluative focus that characterised traditional literary criticism. Along with significant literary texts, Shakespeare’s drama,

for example, other texts from the same cultural context are studied—not simply as background material but for the purpose of understanding the discourses at work in a particular culture. Unlike traditional literary studies, cultural studies is more interactive and accommodates a variety of relations within cultures. The first casualty of such an emphasis on the relational aspects of cultural formation is the very idea of high culture, a position that is closely associated with Modernist thought. The reconciliation of the high and low cultural positions is not done by a process of levelling of differences that exist but by acknowledging the importance of each cultural condition. Interestingly, the cultural turn in literary studies has sought to challenge many of the principles governing the institutional structures as it not only contributed to the establishment of the high/low divide but also kept out ‘texts’ that weren’t strictly ‘literary.’ In the hands of the cultural critics, there is a blend of resources derived from a variety of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, history, linguistics, and communication theory. Such a method of using a wide range of scholarly resources has only ended up in jettisoning many of the established principles of literary studies. Cultural studies programmes across the world today have a variety of texts that concentrate on the politics of textuality of cultural items such as comic strips, advertisements and sitcoms. In other words, the cultural studies initiative began as a reaction to elitist views about culture and literature that were circulating in the pre-War period in the twentieth century. In the initial years of cultural studies, Marxism was a major influence. The thinkers associated with the development of cultural studies in England utilised some of the positions elaborated by Marx and as a review of cultural elitism, it found in the study of ideologies a reliable ally. Thinkers like Althusser or the Annales historians provided the cultural theorists a serviceable framework. Perhaps the greatest influence on the cultural theorists of the twentieth century has been Michel Foucault. Foucault’s theory of discourse and studies of power relations have been used to illuminate the machinations informing contemporary cultural positions. From the early take on Leavis in the 1950s to the poststructuralist emphasis on the structures of cultural formation, cultural studies has come a long way. The first characteristic of cultural studies is that it refused to admit the ‘orthodox’ idea of culture for scholarly purposes. Culture, in cultural studies, is not seen as an innocuous entity out there but as a complex phenomenon that was a

manifestation of multiple agencies at work. Increasingly, cultural theorists turned their attention towards the political nature of cultural institutions and sought to understand the strategies that informed their formations in different ages. The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’ was immensely helpful in explaining many of the cultural formations that were being reviewed in the 1960s and 70s. From being merely a structure of social classification, culture came to embody a complex stratification that required unravelling through a study of shifting relations of power within different groups. The cultural theorists working in the 1970s thus used the twin concepts of hegemony and ideology to great effect in studying a variety of cultural processes. In a remarkable essay titled ‘Encoding/Decoding’, Stuart Hall cogently analyses some of the strategies at work in the mass media and the insights of Foucault and Gramsci are evident in his discourse. Consider the following extract from Hall’s as an example of cultural studies: Any society/culture tends, with varying degrees of closure, to impose its classifications of the social and cultural and political world. These constitute a dominant cultural order, though it is neither univocal or uncontested. The question of the ‘structure of discourses in dominance’ is a crucial point. The different areas of social life appear to be mapped out into discursive domains, hierarchically organised into dominant or preferred meanings. New, problematic or troubling events, which breach our expectancies and run counter to our ‘common-sense constructs,’ to our ‘taken-for-granted’ knowledge of social structures, must be assigned to their discursive domains before they can be said to ‘make sense.’ The most common way of ‘mapping’ them is to assign the new to some domain or other of the existing ‘maps of problematic social reality.’ We say dominant, not ‘determined,’ because it is always possible to order, classify, assign and decode an event within more than one ‘mapping.’ But we say ‘dominant’ because there exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings’; and these both have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalised (Hall, in During 1993: 98). Poststructuralist perspectives have opened up the discipline of cultural studies to much more than a left against the right (represented by Thatcherism in the 1980s) re-visioning of cultural positions. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, for instance, show how the implications of cultural theory have come to constitute a rethinking of the text/context relation. In the early

twentieth century, critics like Dover Wilson (Life in Shakespeare’s England, 1911) and E.M.W. Tillyard (The Elizabethan World Picture, 1943) sought to frame Shakespeare studies by commenting on the significance of ‘background.’ The terms in which New Historicism reads the assumptions behind the texts of Shakespeare’s time—both ‘literary’ and otherwise—is based on the understanding that ‘history’ as such is only available in fragments, and that too through a process of textuality. The politics of representation, often camouflaged behind the stable notions of historical explanations of traditional critics like Tillyard, is foregrounded in New Historicism as it refuses to submit to the critical conditions implicated by a text unreservedly. Stephen Greenblatt, in works such as Renaissance SelfFashioning (1980), has explored the polemics of subjectivity by looking at as another mode of representation. Although aligned and similar in many respects, the development of Cultural Materialism in England shows an interesting departure from the principles of New Historicism. Cultural Materialism has built upon the structure provided by Raymond Williams and others to reorient ideas such as ‘otherness’ to understand the strategies behind a given cultural position. Gerald Graff puts the relevance of cultural studies in perspective when he makes a very pertinent observation: “the cultural studies project revives a nineteenth-century philological ideal that existed before it was trivialised by positivistic specialisation—that is, the idea of studying the history of civilisation as an organic whole. Yet, a precondition of the cultural studies project was the postmodern decentring of organic totalities and hierarchies, and the consequent blurring of distinctions between high and popular culture” (Graff et. al., in Smithson and Ruff 1994: 26). The dissolution of the traditional and orthodox limits of literary studies and the adoption of theoretical paradigms drawn from a variety of disciplines across the humanities spectrum for the study of different kinds of texts (both literary and non-literary) seems to offer cultural studies newer vistas for exploration. This process has not happened across the board (Oxford and Cambridge still do not have cultural studies programmes), but it is now being widely recognised that a study of cultural forms and practice can only benefit and aid the study of literature.

Post-War English Poetry

The Modernist tendencies that dominated the English poetic scene before the Second World War did not find much ground in the hands of even those poets, Dylan Thomas is one such example, whose works were being published in the 1950s. In terms of development, the emergence of the Movement (which included poets like Philip Larkin (1922-1985) and Kingsley Amis showed some of more possibilities of pre-War Modernism, but it was nevertheless not as radically organised to shock as the early poetry of Eliot and Pound. The filtering of the Modernist tendencies in Movement poetry was not done by a cultivation of difficulty but by an avoidance of it. The writing of poetry that could be easily understood was a deliberate strategy by the Movement poets; in fact, the impression of scholarship so closely associated with Modern poetry (T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) was soon discarded in favour of a simplicity that won responses from the contemporary readers as well as brickbats from some critical quarters still supportive of Modernist poetics. In the poetry of Philip Larkin, the impression of simplicity is both a design and an engagement that sought to inaugurate a new freshness that was distinctively English in temper. Larkin, went against the idea of an internationalised Modernist ethic and replaced it with the twin conditions of immediacy and intimacy. His first book, The North Ship (1945), seems to considerably under Yeatsian influence, but even in his supposedly provincial poems, there is a remarkable degree of sophistication and adventurism. The possibility of a variety of truth-claims and a quiet but assured interrogation of institutional orthodoxy in the context of commonplace experience is the highlight of poems like ‘Church Going.’ Along with simplicity, the impression of sincerity was part of Larkin’s poetic enterprise, something that remained a characteristic of even his later poems. It is interesting that the cultivation of a naïveté was also a reaction to the poetics of high Modernism and the conditioned Yeatsian temper in some of Larkin’s poems shows how subtly he negotiated the intellectual engagement with a wonderfully worked-out simplicity. Larkin has been criticised for being monotonous as well as for persisting with similar theme, but, then, to his credit goes the remarkable inventiveness that he brought to conventional English, which was well followed up by the other Movement poets. The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) are his other poetic works. Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) was also associated with Movement poetry.

Amis’s poetry is characterised by a subtle engagement of the protest motif through an evocation of simplicity. Amis’s early poetry was published in Robert Conquest’s anthology of contemporary poetry New Lines (1950) and his later volumes include Bright November (1947), A Frame of Mind (1953) and A Case of Samples (1956). John Wain’s poetry collections include Mixed Feelings (1951), A Word Carved on a Sill (1956), Weep Before God (1961), Wildtrack (1965), i (1969), and Feng (1975). Wain’s poetry presents an example of the careful yet clever use of wit and wry humour to undercut the assumptions of tradition, a feature for which he has faced criticism. Robert Conquest, in whose anthology many of the Movement poets published their works, was also writing poetry at the time. Conquest’s poems were published in Poems (1950), Between Mars and Venus (1966) and Arias from a Love Opera (1969). Thom Gunn (1929-) wrote poetry as a form of exploration of experience that employed protean images and symbols. His early collections include Fighting Terms (1954), The Sense of Movement (1957) and My Sad Captains (1961). The assured control of the poems like “Considering the Snail” exhibits the characteristic Gunn emphasis on simplicity and sincerity of movement:

The snail pushes through a green night, for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes, where rain has darkened the earth’s dark. He moves in a wood of desire …

His later poetry collections—Moly (1971), The Passages of Joy (1982)— demonstrate the poetic longevity of Gunn whose maturity beyond the exigencies of the Movement has found newer grounds for imaginative engagement. One criticism of Gunn, however, remains: that his nihilistic temper sometimes clouds the quiet determination of his verse. Donald Davie (1922-1995), another Movement poet, was perhaps the most intellectually alert of the group and in many ways, his work went against the grain of the Movement emphasis on simplicity. Davie’s poems are cultivated and sophisticated in a peculiar way, but this may have to do with his engagement as a critic who meticulously attended to the technicalities of verse composition of other practitioners. His poetry collections include Brides of Reason (1955), A Winter Talent (1957), Essex Poems, 1963-67 (1969), In the Stopping Train & Other Poems (1977), and To Scorch or Freeze (1988). Davie’s poetry has a distinctive Empsonian flavour but is sufficiently attuned to his resourceful use of the possibilities of poetic language. The first poetry collection of R.S. Thomas (1913–2000), Song at the Year’s Turning: Poems 1942–54 (1955) showed that unconventional images could be restructured through an idiom of simplicity. This characteristic remained a consistent feature of much of Thomas’s later poetry as well. By the 1970s, Thomas had added on to the combination of the simple and the unconventional the condition of fragmentation, which sometimes is oriented to present prophetic positions. This odd movement towards a kind of esoteric conditioning has in fact dissociated much of his early readership who favoured the simple yet evocative engagement that defined his poetry. Thomas was also a significant contributor to the internationalisation of Welsh life through his works and he used the idea of rootedness to great effect in much of his poetry, a feature for which he has been seen as a ‘country poet.’ Other poets whose work was represented in Robert Conquest’s anthology New Lines in 1956 included D.J. Enright, John Holloway and Elizabeth Jennings. D.J. Enright (1920–) was in fact one of the important movers in making the Movement a poetic phenomenon in the 1950s by editing the anthology Poets of the 1950s (1955). The Laughing Hyena (1953), Paradise Illustrated (1975) and A Faust Book (1979) are some of his collections of verse, and, significantly, the latter two are based on literary themes, which suggest his lifelong interest in literature as a teacher and critic. His poetry is characterised by a carefully cultivated strain of anti-sentimentalism and by the noticeable use of irony. Elizabeth

Jennings (1926–) published her first verse collection in 1953, under the titles Poems and her award-winning A Way of Looking (1955) established her as one of the significant voices of the period. She effectively used the mode of confession in her Song for a Birth or a Death and Other Poems (1961) which also addressed the theme of love in a hostile age. Jennings’ growth as a poet is chronicled in her poetry of the 1960s with themes of mental breakdown and isolation informing much of it. The works of this decade include Recoveries (1964), The Mind has Mountains (1966) and The Animals’ Arrival (1969). Lucidities (1970) and Relationships (1972) show her return to themes of love, friendship and cultural orientations, something that is intensified in much of the work that followed: Growing Points (1975), Consequently I Rejoice (1977), Moments of Grace (1977), Celebrations and Elegies (1982) and Extending the Territory (1985). The poetry of the 1950s wasn’t just part of the Movement and important poets like Charles Tomlinson (1927–) demonstrated, among other things, the relevance of an international experience that was out of favour with the ‘provinciality’ of the Movement poets. Tomlinson’s early poetry was included in Relations and Contraries (1951) and The Necklace (1955). He found in poets like Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound interesting motifs which he exploited to engender a new kind of impersonal poetics. The intellectual element in his verse provided a contrast to much of the Movement poetry and his landscape renderings have about them a philosophical tenor that rejuvenates the contexts in which they are placed. There is a strange combination of natural description and an urbanised sophistication informed by intellectual energy in Tomlinson’s poetry. Unlike other poets of the 1970s, he has refused to accede to the demand for the new just for the sake of it; the assured metaphysical conditioning provides impetus to Tomlinson’s later poetry as well. His poetry collections include Seeing is Believing (1960), American Scenes (1966), The Poem as Initiation (1968), America West Southwest (1969), The Shaft (1978), Selected Poems 1951–1974 (1978), The Flood (1981) and The Return (1987). Tomlinson has also collaborated with Octavio Paz in Air Born/Hijos del aire (1979), a bilingual English/Spanish work where each poet translated the poems by the other. The other reaction to the Movement was the development of minimalism and concrete poetry, with poets like Norman MacCaig (1910–1996) and Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–) experimenting with the traditional verse forms. MacCaig was both anti-

romantic and metaphysical and the affinities with Donne that have been noticed in his verse are not without reason. Far Cry (1943), The Inward Eye (1946), Riding Lights (1955), The Sinai Sort (1957), A Common Grace (1960), A Round of Applause (1962), Measures (1965), Rings on a Tree (1968), A Man in My Position (1969) and A World of Difference (1983) are his poetic works. Ian Hamilton Finlay is recognised as one of the influential practitioners of concrete poetry. In The Dancers Inherit the Party (1969), the focus on an eclectic configuration of images contributes to the overall effect of stark concreteness. His magazine P.O.T.H. (1962–67) also represented Finlay’s views, but it is in the compositions that have followed that there is a conscious engagement of contemporary contexts. Concretism in aesthetics has had its influence in fields other than poetry as well but two other poets— Bob Cobbing (1920–) and Edwin Morgan (1920–)—deserve mention for their attention to sound and sense as performance media in poetry. The poetry of Ted Hughes (1930–1998), which also emerged in the 1950s, enhanced the English poetic scene through an amalgamation of the traditional and the new in inventive schemes. Hawk in the Rain (1957), Hughes’ first collection of verse, exhibited the potential of traditional poetic forms, which he attuned to meet the demands of his subject. The ostensibly animal-based matter of much of Hughes’ poetry is beautifully grafted within parameters of his own choosing and the interest that such a poetic method generates is related to the way he projects the subjects. Hughes’ career has been often shadowed by his tortuous marriage with the American poet Sylvia Plath, whose mythical status was accentuated after her suicide in 1963. Hughes has been seen as the husband of Plath, and accusation of his hand in her miserable end is not uncommon among critics. While the fairness of the allegation relating to the early domestic disharmony remains a disputed matter, another kind of association—that of his poetry and Plath’s has also been in circulation for quite some time. Hughes has concentrated on an evocation of starkly drawn images that skilfully engage a poetics of anguish and desire and most of his verse after the first collection has relied on such a structuring process. Hughes, poetry collections include Lupercal (1960), Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Season Songs (1974), Gaudete (1977), Moortown (1979), The Remains of Elmet (1979) and River (1983). Tales from Ovid (1997) is his adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, while his retelling of his relationship with Sylvia Plath in Birthday Letters (1998) capped a

remarkable career in poetry. One of the dominant themes of Hughes’ poetry has been the emphasis on the conflictual potential of civilisational and ‘beastly’ elements through the reorientation of the beast fable. Poems like ‘Theology’ have been read for the way he uses a robust intellectual energy to serve the idea of human experience.

Theology No, the serpent did not Seduce Eve to the apple. All that’s simply Corruption of the facts. Adam ate the apple. Eve ate Adam. The serpent ate Eve. This is the dark intestine. The serpent, meanwhile, Sleeps his meal off in Paradise— Smiling to hear God’s querulous calling. The electric images of Hughes’ verse were complemented by the work of another contemporary, Basil Bunting (1900–1985). Bunting was well known even before the publication of his first major work, Briggflatts in 1966. The work used an elaborate structure and its celebration of community life in Northumbria is considered to be one of the achievements of the period. The work of Geoffrey Hill, on the other hand, (1932–) shows a different use of historical resources. Hill has used the elegiac mode to great effect in his recounting of figures and episodes of the past. In collections such as Unfallen (1959), King Log (1968), Mercian Hymns (1971), Tenebrae (1978) and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983), Hill provides a grim view of reality through the juxtaposition of wit and irony. Hill is one of the major poets of the post-War period and his experiments have been well acclaimed both for their adventurism and inventiveness. Seamus Heaney (1939–), the leading Irish poet of this generation, doesn’t agree to the epithet ‘British’ attached to his kind of poetry and he has continuously asserted the significance of his own cultural heritage. In first poetry collection Death of a Naturalist (1966), Heaney explored the exigencies of tradition in the context of newly arriving changes and this book also sets the tone for engagement of the rustic Irish lifestyle, which has remained a major motif even in his later works. While the context of Northern Ireland has been present in much of Heaney’s verse, the violent side

of life there found a new emphasis in volumes such as Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975). With a style characterised by the evocative use of images, Heaney has moved through the frontiers of sense and everyday experience with consummate ease. His recent works have demonstrated the importance of an affinity with felt life, which, in spite of being framed through the agencies of myth and mysticism, is invigoratingly fresh and emotional. The Spirit Level (1996) and even his translation of Beowulf in recent years have only enhanced his reputation as one of the foremost poets currently writing in the English language. Other works of Heaney include Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), and Seeing Things (1991). In Heaney, the political emphasis is beautifully interwoven within the matrix of the domestic and it is perhaps this condition that explains the note of immediacy present in his verse. English poetry in the final decades of the twentieth century and now well into the first decade of the twenty-first, has been preoccupied with a search for frames of reference. Craig Raine (1944–), often described as the progenitor the Martian school of poetry for his focus on perception through the frame of outsideness, has written some interesting verse in the last three decades. His second collection titled A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979) has been responsible for inaugurating a new poetic mode that emphasises the situational aspect of the subject. This way of seeing, in fact, has been part of Raine’s poetic design from his first verse collection The Onion, Memory (1978) to later works such as Clay: Whereabouts Unknown (1996). Raine’s verse has highlighted the importance of perspective in the structuring of the subject and this feature has been well adapted by other poets of his generation. Tony Harrison (1937–), sometimes called a ‘Gorgon’ poet for his The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992), is one of the leading theatre and film poets writing in England today. His first collection Loiners (1970) shows a fondness for classical mythology which has been one of his major poetic interests; From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems (1978), his next collection and his Selected Poems of 1984 suggest his penchant for experimentation. His movement to dramatic verse is best exemplified by V (1985), the long poem reminiscent of Gray’s Elegy, where he reconstructs the fall of traditional institutions and industries of England. His translation of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia (1981) and the adaptation of the Mystery Plays in 1985 have been acclaimed for being both contemporaneous and true to the traditions they come from. Wendy Cope (1945-) is another

poet writing today whose strength is her great sense of humour and wit. Cope’s verse collections include Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992) and If I Don’t Know (2001). The poetry of Simon Armitage (1963–) is a blend of sophistication and urbanity that is often camouflaged to reorient his Yorkshire roots. His poetry collection include Zoom! (1989), Kid (1992) and CloudCuckooLand (1997).

Theatre in Post-War England The English theatre functioned as one of the major platforms for both entertainment and articulation of angst in post-War England. While the disillusionment following the failure of the government in keeping its promises after the Second World War led to angst-ridden performances like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), it was also the time that saw a change in theatrical idiom. This was affected in two ways: firstly, the initial hoopla surrounding the promises of welfare activities was soon frustrated, which led to a re-examination of themes and ideals which characterised the plays preceding the War. Thus, the striking differences in both vocabulary and dramatic orientation in a Galsworthy and John Arden play can be attributed to, among other things, the responses to social developments. The second aspect that brought about a discernible change in theatrics in the postWar England is related to the emerging media alternatives of film and television. The search for a new idiom also found a willing and accepting audience ready for a changeover. Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and John Osborne belong to the first post-War generation playwrights who responded innovatively to a society that demanded a change in dramatic orientation. If Beckett’s absurdist forays opened up a previously uncharted dramatic realm, Osborne’s satirical incisiveness went well with its initial audiences. Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, now placed in its own iconic realm in the history of post-War English dramaturgy, has been marred by controversies. Almost half a century past, Osborne’s diatribe against the establishment through the figure of Jimmy Porter is now viewed by some as the framed rhetoric that has ceased to wonder. John Brannigan reasons that Jimmy Porter has lost his relevance now. Commenting on the failure of the Osborne rhetoric to capture the interest of the contemporary generation of theatregoers, Brannigan writes:

“There are many reasons to be sceptical about the pivotal, or revolutionary status attributed to Osborne’s play. Chief among these reasons is that Look Back in Anger, in hindsight, doesn’t stand up to much analysis as a socialist, or progressive, piece of theatre. Jimmy Porter’s violent outbursts tend to be directed against women, rather than the social or political order, and the criticisms he does make of the state, the empire and the church seem to be tinged with nostalgia for the securities these institutions were perceived to have offered in the past” (Brannigan 2003: 137). Such an extreme view obviously discounts the great interest Osborne’s play generated for its immediate audiences. It is not without reason that Jimmy Porter endeared himself to the first generation of post-War theatregoing public. While Look Back in Anger may be considered as merely topical today, it however, reflects just one interpretative position regarding its impact. It is a fact that Jimmy Porter’s rhetoric appealed to its first audiences for various reasons. One of these was that the people seemed to connect to the views of Jimmy in a way which suggested the inadequacy of the very institutions he criticised. Osborne’s play provided a voice to a generation that found nothing to cheer about the War or the promises of the government. More than being an effective agency responsible for social change, Look Back in Anger represented the angst that characterised the experience of the English middle class. It is important to place the theatrical developments of the 1950s in perspective. There is no denying the fact that Look Back in Anger caused a ripple in English society, even though, not surprisingly, the theatregoing audience merely represented 2 per cent of the English population. What is significant is that this minority audience also constituted an influential group whose voice mattered. It is also necessary to acknowledge that the change in the dramatic conventions was related to the transformation of the audiences’ pattern and their immediate interests. It has been suggested that there “was no revolution in post-War Britain, but there has been significant change” (Sinfield 1983: 173). How was this ‘significant change’ affected? Although the generation of playwrights following the war did not develop a school or agenda, they represented in their own ways a response to the social and political climate of the times. The growing political overtones of these theatrical experiments in the 1950s gradually formed into a major dramatic initiative that took on the challenges of television and film. The 1950s has

been called the period of English dramatic renaissance. And while Look Back in Anger is just one of the many experiments to have hit the English stage, the contribution of playwrights like Samuel Beckett and John Arden suggested interesting alternatives to the established dramatic conventions. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (Paris 1953, London 1955) suggested the existentialist case with an emphasis that was unprecedented in the English theatre. If Vladimir and Estragon’s histrionics captured the imagination of the English audience, it was also reflection of the changing priorities and themes, and, perhaps, an indication that it was just not possible to stay away from the intellectual climate even in a performance-oriented text. Look Back in Anger and Waiting for Godot represent the emergence of a new kind of theatre in England. Such a move showed that both political and absurdist experiments had an audience that responded with a view of its own. Look Back in Anger can be placed at the beginning of a series of politically nuanced dramatic productions. Osborne’s play prepared the theatre management to encourage productions that highlighted the middle and lowermiddle class perspectives. Orwell’s later plays remained consistently concerned with ‘the angry young man’ motif, even though its manifestations have sometimes overly bordered on the comic side. The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961) and Inadmissible Evidence (1965)—the plays of the decade following Look Back in Anger—tried to read the conditions of societies where the gap between the real and the ideal is seen in all its conflictual potential. A Patriot for Me (1965) engages the personality conflict within the matrix of a society where the avenues and agencies of expression are controlled by a hostile other. It was Osborne’s most radically open take on homosexuality. Osborne was successful in airing the angst of a generation that refused to succumb to the political gimmicks offered to the English middle class; at the same time it is also important to recognise that some of his dialogues go overboard in their rhetorical vigour. John Osborne made a case for English-bashing in a way that was unprecedented in the London theatre. All of his plays were not successful on the stage: A Subject of Scandal and Concern (1971) flopped at the National Theatre. The failure to win over the audiences’ interest, however, was not due to a decline in rhetorical energy, but reflected the fact that Osborne’s anger now had fewer sympathisers. Déjà Vu (1992), Osborne’s final dramatic presentation, returned to an ageing Jimmy Porter who had lost none of his vitriol, but, then,

the 1990s generation had grown weary of such raging machines. If such vocal orientations are seen in the context of the politically charged theatrical atmosphere of the 1950s and 60s, it seems to have a pattern that may be extended to other playwrights as well. The initial shock element generated by the plays of the 1950s and 60s was not simply caused by the articulation of angst but manifested in radical theatricality and a challenge to dramatic convention. One of the most striking of such radical experiments is associated with Edward Bond’s plays, especially his first, Saved (1965). The most shocking of modern English dramatic scenes, the sixth of Saved presents a horrific stoning to death of an infant in a pram in a London park, is perhaps better understood in the context of a generation that had grown accustomed to the grotesque. Nevertheless, the infant-stoning incident did cause a furore. Bond’s explanation offers a reading strategy that seeks to expand the matrix within which such a scene may be placed: “the stoning to death of a baby in a London park is a typical English understatement. Compared to the ‘strategic’ bombing of German towns it is a negligible atrocity, compared to the cultural and emotional deprivation of most of our children its consequences are insignificant” (Bond 1977: 310–11). The apparent similarity between the atmosphere of Bond’s plays and the Shavian context, however, is more directed by thematic affinities rather than the variations of dramatic form. The fascination for the visual, in all its spectacular impact, is perhaps Bond’s most attractive dramatic accessory. Unlike Bernard Shaw, Bond revels in engaging the audience’s attention in a way that draws out the unexpected to the centre. The Pope’s Wedding (1962), Early Morning (1968), Lear (1971), Bingo (1973), The Sea (1973), The Fool (1976), Restoration (1981), and Summer (1982) are some of his other plays. Early Morning did not escape the ban as it depicted Queen Victoria as a lesbian. While the mere suggestiveness caused a national outrage, Bond’s persistence with the debunking of iconoclasts continued with Lear. Lear’s attack on Cordelia’s morality is perhaps the classic example of Bond’s mode of exposure. It is interesting that even in such plays where the intertextual frame does not permit a foray beyond the limits prescribed by the original, Bond deliberately engages the political in his plays. Bond’s consistency has been questioned, for his dramatic experiments did not always translate into box office successes. And the comic frame did not suit the essentially political thrust that it was designed to encompass. Bingo is about

Shakespeare himself, especially about his later years. Caught in the local politics and under domestic pressure, Shakespeare eventually kills himself. Bingo explores the implications of fame within the matrix of the individual’s interests, where social and personal considerations emerge in a dialogue of conflict. Several playwrights of Osborne’s generation worked upon the thesis of angst within matrices that were either of their own making or devised as responses to the social condition from the perspectives that found a reasonable following. John Arden’s first play All Fall Down (1955), performed when he was just 25, was followed by The Life of Man (1956) which brought him to the notice of the London theatre as it won a B.B.C. drama award. Arden, however, established his reputation with the critics with Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance (1959) which looks into the ethics of the much-used terms like valour, patriotism and integrity. The play is also significant for the manner in which Arden exploits the dramatic frame for articulating a very intense social and political stance regarding the English attitude towards war. While the play reminds one of Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children, the extremely English orientation is meant to engage the politics of the military and its implications for the common people. Arden achieves the much acknowledged comic effect through a careful manipulation of dialogue and thematic focus. The dance, both dramatically presented and figuratively potent, is central to the architectonics of the central character, Sergeant Musgrave. The undercutting of the heroics of war is not just achieved through parody but also by a design that provokes the audience to review the subject again. Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, with its re-presentation of a hackneyed subject, brought immediate attention to Arden’s dramatic craft. Conflict between stated values and the incompatibility resulting from a different practice has been one of the dominant themes pursued by Arden throughout his career. Arnold Wesker’s Jewish heritage finds a stage in his trilogy Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots and I’m Talking about Jerusalem (all 1960). As a proponent of the so-called ‘New Wave British Theatre’, Wesker pioneered the culture/identity theme without taking recourse to mere rhetoric. Another of Wesker’s popular plays includes Shylock (1980), which presents the play from the Jew’s point of view. Reworking of themes has been one of the persistent features of post-war British theatre. Ann Jellicoe, who arrived on the English dramatic scene with The Sport of My Mad Mother (1958),

emerged as one of the leading architects of the theatre movement in England. Her association with Royal Court Writers’ Group has yielded fruitful results. Her stint as the Director of the Colway Theatre Trust did not dispense with the dramatist in her as she produced The Tide (1979) and The Reckoning (1980), both of which engaged the carnivalesque to reorient local themes on a large canvas. Nigel Dennis, who came to the theatrical scene after a successful career as a novelist, began by adapting one of his novels The Cards of Identity (1956) to highlight the gullibility of the masses in the face of a propagandist onslaught. The existentialist position of Jean Paul Sartre is perhaps one of the influences behind Dennis’ first play. The function of religion in modern life was the subject of his The Making of Moo (1957) which argued for a rationalist attitude. An example of political drama engaging the elements of popular tradition is Brendan Behan’s The Hostage (1958). Behan worked up a thesis regarding the political climate of the time in a manner that is quite removed from Osborne’s but equally effective in inviting attention. Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985), though not overtly political, seeks to give a taste of the decadent culture where sex, deceit, and manipulations are the required qualities. Hampton’s classical strain is evident in his eschewal of direct commentary in favour of a carefully orchestrated and balanced view of things. Total Eclipse (1967), The Philanthropist (1970) and Tales from Hollywood (1983) are some of his other plays. Shelagh Delaney’s most famous play A Taste of Honey (1958) dealt with a different social problem which involved the politics of personal relationships. The comments on homosexuality and individual identity perhaps testify the preoccupations of the contemporary world. The early plays of Trevor Griffiths deserve a mention here for the highly potent political content that they posited, especially in Occupations (1970) and The Party (1973). Both are concerned with the conflict that exists between the reformist and the reactionary, where, perhaps, the highlighting of the excesses of overzealous intentions calls for attention. The plays of Howard Brenton, in their obvious leftist stance, have frequently courted controversy on stage. Terrorism is the theme of Magnificence (1973), which Brenton essentially places within the urbanised context of the modern world, while a focussed application of power politics occupied The Churchill Party (1974) and Weapons of Happiness (1976). The influence of Brecht is

discernible in Brenton’s threatrics, a debt he acknowledged through a staging of Brecht’s Galileo (1980), which he translated for the National Theatre. Some of Brenton’s plays were written in collaboration with David Hare, of which Brassneck (1973) and Pravda (1985) are the most prominent. David Hare’s versatility as a playwright is best attested by the fact that he smoothly moved from political drama to social comedy and ensured box office success in most of his theatrical compositions. Teeth ‘n’ Smiles (1975) is a campus drama that deals with an episode which blows beyond anticipation, while Plenty (1978) is a gloomy statement suggesting the corruption across national boundaries in Europe. It is perhaps to the ambiguous manifestation of the dramatic design that the failure of Plenty must be attributed, even though Hare was focussing on the declining standards of the political climate in Europe. Hare has often received flak for his inability to provide an easy access to the complicated designs of his plays. Pravda, his collaborative effort with Brenton, was however successful on the stage. Hare’s first play Slag (1970) and Knuckle (1974) were interesting experiments but he came to his own with Plenty and Pravda. His recent plays include Skylight (1995), Amy’s View (1997), The Judas Kiss (1998), My Zinc Bed (2000), and The Breath of Life (2002). The Permanent Way (2003), Hare’s most recent play, explores the politics of privatisation of British Rail. Dealing essentially with post-war disillusionment. Hare has moved across various political terrains to re-present his angst through a comic orientation that strikes by its insistence on underplaying. Via Dolorosa (1998) shows Hare at his most poignant and intense state as he played around with his experiences in Israel to question the ethics of the value-systems that have brought the Palestinians and Israelis into conflict. There is an obvious toning down of the anger in Hare’s recent plays, which, however, still retain his tendency to seriously engage the politics that so consistently directs social conduct. David Edgar, another contemporary playwright, has moved towards socially engaging drama over a career spanning more than three decades. The National Interest (1971), Excuses Excuses (1972), Dick Deterred (1974), Saigon Rose (1976), Wreckers (1977) Mary Barnes (1978) and Entertaining Strangers (1986) are the plays that showcase his fascination for the socially conflicting paradigms which constituted the themes of these plays. Destiny (1976), the drama that sought to expose the English version and practice of fascism, aroused great interest when first staged. The Jail Diary of Albie

Sachs (1978), The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1980), Maydays (1983), The Shape of the Table (1990), and Pentecost (1994) are the plays that belonged to Edgar’s second phase. Albert Speer (2000) and The Prisoner’s Dilemma (2001), his recent plays, continue to exploit the conflictual potential of a society that has been unable to harmonise its warring elements. The reworking of historical and fictional material in both Nickleby and Albert Speer by Edgar is fast emerging as a common trend among the contemporary British playwrights. The character of Albert Speer presents the case of Hitler’s architect while Nicholas Nickelby brings Dickens to the stage. Like Bond’s re-conditioning of Shakespeare, Edgar’s import of the past is meant to carry all the connotations of a comparison with a past that is beyond revival. Edgar’s political dramas are potent examinations of contemporary English society and culture and his commitment to serious theatre (he was the founder of the MA course in Playwriting Studies in the University of Birmingham, 1989) is reflected in his dramatisations as well. Peter Shaffer’s outstanding record is characterised by a wide choice of subjects spanning a Spanish conquest (The Royal Hunt of the Sun, 1964) to the intrigue surrounding the figures of Salieri and Mozart (Amdeus, 1974). Equus (1973) is Shaffer’s experiment with the outward manifestation of the inner psyche of an individual who finds just treatment in a psychiatric clinic. At the beginning of the play, a boy blinds six horses with a metal spike and as the plot progresses, the remarkable tension between the psychiatrist Dysart and the patient enhances both the visual and the intellectual appeal of the play. The combination of theatrical experimentation and serious social engagement is the striking feature of another contemporary English playwright, Caryl Churchill. Churchill began playwriting with Downstairs (1958) when she was still a student. Early plays like The Ants (1962), Lovesick (1967) and Abortive (1971) expressed social concern in a way that suggested the emergence of a distinct pattern: the engagement of rhetoric for the process of undercutting existing structures. Churchill’s activities during the 1970s and 80s saw Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976), Cloud Nine (1979), Fen (1983) and A Mouthful of Birds (with David Lan) (1986). Top Girls (1982) employed a dramatic framework that clubbed five historical female characters at a dinner party in a London restaurant by the new managing director of ‘Top Girls’ employment agency. The play’s questioning of the ethics of workplaces,

especially where women were involved, dealt with the price employees had to pay for the competitive environment that accompanied industrialisation. The play is also interesting for the manner in which Churchill juxtaposes the historical contexts of different eras together within the framework of the dinner party. As an examination of the problematics of the feminist movement, the play also critically reads the implications of Thatcherism for the ‘new woman.’ Mad Forest (1990) and The Skriker (1994) are two of her most exciting theatrical forays of the last decade of the twentieth century. Far Away (2000) and A Number (2002) suggest interesting thematic departures which show Churchill inviting public opinion on important social matters. The figure and plays of Sarah Kane, complete with her sudden suicide, constitute one of the most striking developments in English drama of the final decade of the last century. Kane was just 24 when her first play Blasted (1995) was staged in London. Like Edward Bond’s Saved, Blasted created a major controversy in the British theatre for its unequivocal questioning of the values that the English people prided themselves in. Equally with the content, her stark and brutal handling of contemporary behaviour drew widely disparate views. The play was replete with rape, sexual abuse, depravity and even cannibalism of a dead infant—a plethora of scenes unprecedented in English theatre. Although initial reactions were of shock and dismay, Kane is today recognised as one of the major influences on the new generation of English playwrights. The series of grotesque, horrific and deliberately spectacular episodes in the play epitomise ‘in-yer-face-theatre’, a genre that has evolved through the cultivation of angst in a way that Osborne did not anticipate in the 1950s. Kane’s preoccupation with body violence and manic depression is perhaps reflected in her suicide in 1999. Her short career of four plays—Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, and Crave—have established her reputation as one of the pioneering forces of contemporary British theatre. Crave (staged 2000) was initially published under the pseudonym of Marie Kelvedon, a design that suggested that the play be viewed for its dramatic potential and not merely as an extension of Kane’s oeuvre. With four characters, having a letter for a name Crave engaged a highly intertextual and schematised pattern to probe deeper psychological states where the surfaces are as potent as what they seem to hide. Sarah Kane’s designed offensive tactics directed at the English theatregoer is not without peers. Mark Ravenhill also employs the tactics of shock to work through the ethical and

individual standards of the viewer, which he started with his very first fulllength play, Shopping and Fucking (1996). Even though the second and more provocative word of the title, advertised in posters as ‘F***ing’, invited audiences for the high expectations that it raised, Ravenhill smoothly wins the audience over to seriously review the hypocrisies involved in the apparently mundane, everyday activity of ‘shopping.’ A critique of contemporary consumerist habits, Ravenhill’s opposition is not directed against a known entity but it seems to be an exploration of tendencies that define modern lifestyles. Faust is Dead (1997) and Handbag (1998) are two of his most pronounced attacks on the failure of idealism and the overpenetration of materialism in today’s society. The thinly-veiled appearance of the French philosopher Michel Foucault as Alain in Faust is Dead is perhaps designed to critique the critic and the layman alike. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest (1895) is the primary source of Ravenhill’s Handbag, where Miss Prism’s perspective provides the ironic counterpoint. His next play, Some Explicit Polaroids (1999), is Ravenhill’s most politically overt dramatic statement. Crowded with criminals and psychotics, this is a drama that presents a virtual rogues’ gallery. His leftist inclination undercuts the conflict between the ideal and the actual in a pattern that does not romanticise alternatives. Totally Over You (2004) is Ravenhill’s examination of the celebrity cult, the portrayal of which is characterised by a carefully worked out pseudo-pictorial presentation of the reality of glamour. The second important trend which arrived dramatically on the English theatrical scene after the Second World War was the absurdist experiment initiated by Samuel Beckett. The existentialist thesis found in Beckett’s theatre a suitable agency: at least in dealing with the language on stage Beckett showed how the absurd negotiates the medium of communication for its lack and/or functionality. The absurd experiment was radically new for the possibilities it promised. Interrogating the very question of existence, the themes of the absurd plays seemed to go beyond the dramatic rhetoric of contemporary theatre; it offered a system that accommodated philosophy through, among other procedures, silence. Disjointedness was a condition that offered the playwright sufficient scope to manoeuvre the subject and if the fragmentariness of dialogue was a favourite, it was very much an inherent structural necessity. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954) drew on the resources of popular entertainments and most of its comic effects are worked

through the ironic and witty situations as well as dialogue. The short, crisp and supposedly inconsequential words celebrate play, a condition that uses the condition of the ludic to great purpose. The two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are remarkable for the way they are ‘absurd’ in their behaviour; it is also interesting to recognise that the apparent directionlessness that the play peters towards is deliberate and the movement away from the centrality of meaning is a choice the dramatist emphasises. The mode of the dramatic leaves little room for readings that do not follow the logic of the play itself. “Insofar as it is interpretable,” writes a critic, “it is so only within its own terms; here, there are no effects of causes, as in Ibsen’s drama, only effects in themselves” (Mudford, in Dodsworth 1994: 381). Beckett’s fascination for language that struck a chord with the English audience was one that has remained a consistent feature of his plays. The shock-effects in Beckett—the mouth in Not I (1973) or the half-buried Winnie in Happy Days (1961) for example—cannot be read as the mere elements of a greater whole, or at least of a tangible whole. Perhaps the play mode is directed towards the critique of a taken-for-granted existence; even so Beckett’s theatrical innovations do not dull the audience into stupor as the sheer manipulation of the comic condition grants to the drama a jouissance factor, the validity of which refuses to submit to either/or structures. Seemingly paradoxical, the joy associated with the play mode in absurd drama, points towards the irrationality of life itself, including any pleasure or pain the materiality of existence offers man. Harold Pinter’s plays move along a similar plane where the absurdity of life is a leitmotif. The wordplay in Pinter is astonishingly striking even though a given social matrix is assumed whenever a character seeks to articulate the self. Questioning, self-doubt and distrust of values constitute some of the major preoccupations of the characters in Pinter’s dramas. The Birthday Party (1957) exploits the persecution mania of Stanley to provide a glimpse of the private territory of man, where loneliness is under threat from social intercourse. Pinter’s beautiful use of social spaces to intensify the self’s inward chaos is without parallel in contemporary English drama. A room functions as the site for self-enquiry in The Caretaker (1960), while ‘home’ is the contested space in his The Homecoming (1964). The persistence with Beckett and Pinter which drove the absurdist experiment forward, however, did not have many takers. Playwrights like Tom Stoppard, John Mortimer and Alan Ayckbourn who emerged on the English post-war

dramatic scene in the 1960s did not revel in the type of possibilities the absurd seemed to offer them. These dramatists chose to follow the realistic or naturalistic route. Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967) is one such example. His innovation here lay in a very carefully worked out modern idiom that brought out the intertextual possibilities; the theme of marginality is treated anew and any pretension of this being a re-write of the Shakespearean version is quickly dispelled. Stoppard’s Jumpers (1972) and Travesties (1974) established him as a leading contemporary dramatist. In works such as Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth (1979) and Squaring the Circle (1984), Stoppard attacks the repressive political regimes of Eastern Europe. Overt political rhetoric, however, has not been his only thematic concern. Another sort of relation where the politics is more personal is evident in his The Invention of Love (1997), which offers a reading of the relationship between the poet A.E. Housman and Moses Jackson, a man whose love he yearned for without it being reciprocated. However, as screenplays like Shakespeare in Love (1998) show, his gradual move to the film industry has been a loss to the theatrical establishment. Stoppard’s wit has a polish that rubs the comic sense without any hint of crudity. Mortimer (who also wrote for television), on the other hand, in plays like A Voyage Round my Father (1982) reworked the personal to provide the world an access to his self. If Mortimer’s drama presented the world a naturalistic frame within which to place questions of morality and ignorance, Ayckbourn’s plays made of the middle class a type that required representation. Distinctly different from writers like Beckett, Ayckbourn’s drama disturbed the standard rhetoric of the English middle class by reorienting the language of protest. Of these three major trends—political, absurd and realist—the first has been the most recognised for its potential volatility. It is also matter of great interest that many of these dramatists who have excelled in the theatre have also moved to television and cinema. British cinema has benefited from this influx of talent, and if the crossing over has been beneficial to the electronic media, it is only a reflection of the changing times. The different theatre companies which deserve a mention here for their contribution to the growth and fostering of English drama are not necessarily all London-based. When Joan Littlewood founded the Theatre Union with her husband Ewan MacColl, it was based in Manchester, which had a new name

after the war—Theatre Workshop, and eventually moved to East London. Littlewood’s enthusiasm was one of the driving forces in the post-war English theatrical scene. She was accommodative enough to encourage the working classes to come to the theatre and her most famous production The Hostage by Brendan Behan was a celebration that did not apparently follow the commercial routine. As time went by, however, the growing commercialisation of the media made it difficult to maintain the Theatre Workshop’s insularity and lucrative transfers from the West End became inevitable. The Royal Court Theatre (founded 1871), ever since the production of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956, has been primarily concentrating on new drama; it has enabled playwrights like Osborne, Arden, Churchill, Bond and Hampton to establish and cement their reputations. The formation of the National Theatre Board in 1962 gave a fillip to the English theatre at a time when the threat from other media was becoming alarming. The staging of specimens from world drama as well as the encouragement provided to neglected plays has widened the horizons of the theatre immensely. Among other things, the National Theatre has given the audience a wide variety of choices.

MEDIA AND THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY British Cinema The popularity of Hollywood cinema in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century is usually cited as one of the major deterrents in constructing an objective historical lineage of British ‘national’ cinema. Most of the Hollywood films imported to Britain in that time were huge commercial successes and yet they epitomised a kind of life and manners that seemed to be at a fair remove from what constituted British ‘national’ sentiment. Such debates have clouded the historical studies of British cinema to integrate the issue of a national ideology with the evolution of the cinematic form in Britain. It has been rightly noted that “various commentators have constructed their preferred versions of British cinema. Inevitably, this has brought competing definitions of British cinema, its strengths, and its weaknesses into the market-place of ideas” (Higson, in Hill and Gibson 1998: 501). The British photographer William Friese-Greene, who built a camera for taking photographs on a perforated film roll, is sometimes credited with inventing cinematography. When the first public exhibition of a moving picture was organised in Britain in 1896, it was the beginning of a major cultural revolution as it was soon followed by making of films, which, though short, prepared the way for a mature cinema to follow. Stop Thief (1901) and Fire (1902) by James Williamson are the first multi-shot films, which though not really the example of full-scale ‘feature’ movies, showed that British film-makers were willing to join the cinematic revolution almost as soon as it began. Cecil Hepworth’s Rescued by Rover (1905) and William Haggar’s Salmon Poachers (1905) are two of the other forays to distinguish the British cinematic experiment in the first decade of the twentieth century. While Stop Thief was a ‘chase film’, the other two were interesting attempts at presenting narratives through moving pictures. The First World War is an important mark in terms of some of the developments that took place in European cinema. One of the areas where films affected the economic condition of the British industry was in terms of the trade potential they exhibited. After the First World War, there was a growing Americanisation in the film industry. While the early years of the twentieth century were starting to show promise for a nascent film industry,

the War saw a tremendous exodus of American films which were not only better produced but also had a more glamour and glitz and so necessarily appealed to the British audiences. By 1916, only 9% of the films exhibited were British and a huge portion of the rest (75%–90%) was made up by the American films which were imported (Forbes and Street 2000: 4). There was, however, another reason why London functioned as the commercial transit point for American films—the British Empire. London served as the hub through which the American films were sent to the colonies and it became a major trading centre of modern cinema. The domestic market of Britain required some protective measures by the 1920s, and in 1927 the quota system was introduced. It stipulated that 7.5% of the films handled by British distributors and 5% of those exhibited by the British exhibitors should be produced in the country. In 1936, this quota was increased in both the cases of distribution and exhibition to 20%. The formation of integrated companies dealing with production, distribution and exhibition was one of the ways in the industry sought to counter the Act’s restrictions. British International Pictures (The Associated British Picture Corporation from 1933) and the Gaumont British Picture Corporation were the two most powerful and recognised combines that aimed to add polish to the British film industry. Smaller companies like Associated Talking Pictures, London Films and the British and Dominions Film Corporation also did considerable work for the spread of British cinema in these early years. The fallout of the imposition of the quota was that there was a reasonable qualitative decline in British cinema with the ‘quota quickies’ satisfying the production demand but hardly meeting the aesthetic standards set by the Americans. Early British cinema saw the proliferation of adaptation of classic stories (Henry VIII, Oliver Twist, Lorna Doone, etc) which was primarily done to win over audiences with familiar subjects. The scene in the 1920s wasn’t promising for British cinema. Cecil Hepworth Michael Balcon and Victor Saville were producing films at a difficult time for the British film industry as American films dominated the theatre. Directors like as Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith worked to provide British cinema a standard that was not part of the common fare. Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (1922) by Hepworth was not as experimental and innovative as Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1926) and Asquith’s A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929). The quota system facilitated the evolution of a pattern in the British film industry in the 1930s,

with crime films, comedies and musicals forming the three major genres. In terms of subject and situation, many film-makers turned to the theatre for inspiration with Noel Coward and Ben Travers being the most popular playwrights. Gracie Fields was the most visible face of the time who began her career with Sally in our Alley (1931). The influence of the theatre saw many of the stage actors migrate to the screen with Jack Buchanan, Cicely Courtnedge, Sonny Hale and Bobby Howes being the major performers. The importance of music in the comic films of the 1930s saw the emergence of a major star Jessie Matthews, whose Evergreen (1934) was extremely popular. In another dominant genre of the period—the crime thriller—Alfred Hitchcock was the most influential film-maker. His The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) have now achieved cult status in British film history. The historical film with a rather lavish budget was not as common in the UK as in America, but there were still some attempts to experiment with large-scale productions by companies like Gaumont British. The brief closure of the theatres in 1939 because of the outbreak of war drew attention to a reality that soon became the subject of the movies. In Which We Serve (1942), One of our Aircraft is Missing (1942), Millions Like Us (1943), The Bells Go Down (1943), and Western Approaches (1944) were some of the war films that attracted viewership in Britain at the time. While people like Michael Powell, Frank Launder, Sidney Gilliat, Thorold Dickinson and Carol Reed built upon their pre-War reputations, David Lean and Basil Dearden led those who established it in the post-War period. One significant development of the 1940s was the emergence of the Rank Organisation which became a powerful player in the movie business by bringing together the Gaumont British company including the Gainsborough Studios, the Odeon cinema circuit and Pinewood and Denham studios. The growth of Rank Organisation was a cause for concern for the government as it signalled the monopolistic regime in the British film industry. But then this was also a signal that the British film circuit was now becoming professionalized and the economics of production and marketing came to have a significant say in the state of affairs. There was a change in the scene in the 1950s with the making of big-budget movies, which targeted an international audience as well as the British viewers. Mogambo (1953), Bhowani Junction (1956), Moby Dick (1956), and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) are the most recognisable of British films to run in the international circuit. Another

stream that got quite a considerable appeal was the comic tradition which started way back in the 1930s but never died down. The ‘Carry On’ series beginning with Carry On Sergeant (1958) saw a tendency that utilised the ribald to engage and draw the audiences’ attention. The 1950s also saw the success of what is now known as the British ‘Gothic’ cinema which started with the films like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). The James Bond series, beginning with Dr. No (1962) starring Sean Connery as Bond (Bond has since changed many faces with actors like Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan gaining popularity through the Bond name), is still doing good business. While sex, violence, and a consummate dose of techno-glitz provided a diet of racy, slick cinematic fare, the plot weaknesses of the Bond films were overlooked as ‘entertainment’ became the passage to box-office success. The challenge from television was sought to be countered in the 1960s by some landmark epic productions—Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) being the most famous. The British film industry’s inclination towards films that showcased an extravagance was underlined by the fact that some American film-makers came to contribute in a substantial manner to British cinema. Joseph Losey combined with dramatist Harold Pinter to produce The Servant (1963), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1971). Stanley Kubrick’s brilliance was another of British cinema in the 1960s as he made Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1966) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) in Britain. The European directors who made major films in Britain at this time are Roman Polanski (Repulsion, 1964 and Cul-de-Sac, 1966), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451, 1966), Michelangelo Antonioni (BlowUp, 1966), and Jean-Luc Godard (One Plus One, 1968). When The Associated British Picture Corporation became part of the music conglomerate EMI, there was an evident policy change in the way cinema in Britain came to be produced. There was hardly any cinematic trend in the seventies to compare with the adventure-streak of the preceding decade, but the great success of Chariots of Fire (1981) suggested the possibilities of a cinema that could challenge Hollywood’s extravagant offerings and yet retain an obvious British flavour. David Puttnam, the producer of Chariots of Fire, came up with two potential classics in Local Hero (1983) and The Killing Fields (1984). Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1983) provided the British industry a position in the global cinematic landscape that was unprecedented.

The early promise of the eighties, however, has not been brought to fruition in the films that followed as big productions like Revolution (1985) failed to make an impact. Interestingly, Channel Four’s productions—My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). The Company of Wolves (1984), Dance with a Stranger (1985). Letter to Brezhnev (1985) being the most prominent—have pointed towards the possibility of small films attracting both niche and popular audiences. The Harry Potter series has attracted worldwide viewership at the beginning of the twenty-first century (with a promise of more to follow) while films like the Hugh Grant-Julia Roberts starrer Notting Hill (1999) showed that comedy was still the forte of the British film industry. The formation of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in 1912 is suggestive of the governmental involvement in the growth of the film industry, which was undercut by the fact that it didn’t have any statutory power. Nevertheless, the BBFC played the role of a watchdog and curtailed the exhibition of films that were not considered appropriate. By the 1930s, it became mandatory for film producers to send their scripts in order to prevent potentially dangerous films from being produced. This procedure was considerably strict and the banning of Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1926) till 1954 shows the rigidity of the censorship system. Potemkin was exhibited in private screenings in film clubs and societies but not released in theatres. While the appointment of the President of the BBFC had to be approved by the Home Secretary, there wasn’t much interference in the matters of censorship by the government. The situation in Britain after the First World War was thus a mixture of American imports, quota quickies, imperialist trade motives, and a strict censorship regime. During the Second World War, however, there was a greater exertion on the film industry by the governments, a tendency common to most European states affected by the War as films were seen as a powerful media in directing and influencing popular opinion. Films like In Which We Serve (1942), San Demetrio, London (1943), Millions Like Us (1943) and The Gentle Sex (1943) highlighted issues relating to the War, the last two focusing on conscription and work culture of women. Fascism became the villain in the cultivation of a nationalist propaganda and even comedy films with music hall routines did not fail to address the context of the War. The idea of a ‘national’ cinema was important in the major European states as the ubiquity of the Hollywood factor became a major threat to the film

cultures of these states. The Quota Act of 1927 was a step in this direction where British cinema was given a measure of protection and encouragement by the government. Hollywood’s appeal lay in the fact that it was extremely cosmopolitan in the manner of operation and function and included people who belonged to different nationalities and cultures. In this sense, Hollywood was not simply ‘American’ but a cultural melting pot that embraced, accommodated and addressed issues that seemed to appeal to its target audiences. Nevertheless, since the American government was extremely protective about its film industry, and since the America portrayed in the Hollywood movies was necessarily an inflated version of the real, European governments also sought to cultivate a similar agenda in terms of its own film industries. National pride became a pronounced affair when the talkies became part of the films in the late 1920s as opposed to the silent era when a nation’s identity was quite subdued or even not apparent at all. Sound thus seemed to play an important role in highlighting national sentiment in British cinema from the 1930s. National pride, however, could not prevent the influence of Hollywood in the way American idioms, expressions and even fashion infiltrated British life. This was not at all a smooth process with the American way being initially difficult to comprehend, but the sophisticated look and gloss of the Hollywood film’s appeal drew British audiences to theatres and it was but natural that these cultural transmissions soon became familiar. If the British audiences patronised the Hollywood films in the interwar years, it no doubt suggests that somehow the English films failed to match the American imports in terms of mass appeal. It is also notable that Americanisation was not part of all the English counties where dialect and cultural interests often came in the way of accepting such different representations. One way of countering the American threat was by building a sustained support system through the film studios. The Ealing Studios, especially under Michael Balcon from 1938, did some important work in fostering nationalist propaganda through a process that put films “to work in national interest” (Barr 1993: 7). In recent times, however, the idea of a national British film culture has lost its appeal; this is primarily because of the nature of the media in a highly globalised and multicultural world. The infiltration of popular Hindi cinema in the late 1990s and the early years of the first decade of the twenty first century suggests that the cultural relations between different centres have come to influence film reception in Britain in

an unprecedented way. A film like Bride and Prejudice (2004) by Gurinder Chaddha epitomises the cross-fertilisation of cultures in the arena of British films in the present age.

British Television The history of television in Britain is not coterminous with the growth of cinema, but since the 1980s it has come to constitute a major entertainment segment in the country. Since its inception, British television has been closely associated with public service even though it has prided itself in the fact that its independence from governmental influence is not to be doubted. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been at the centre of British television history since the very beginning and while its main rival ITV appears to be more popular with the average Briton preferring it over the state-controlled agency, the BBC still commands a position that has set remarkable standards in the global arena itself. The idea of a ‘public service’, however, is largely debated; one of the commonly accepted notions regarding ‘public service’ television has to do with its range and appeal which encompasses a wide population base and a general audience. Such a definition, of course, can only be provisional as the issues of reception, national identity, civic responsibility, impartial treatment of subjects, balance in dealing polemical contexts, and the avoidance of racial and discriminatory positions in programming are also involved in the allocation of such a label. The concentration of energies upon the idea of public service can be seen in the way news-based programmes and analysis have dominated the networks. This is perhaps indicative of the idea of public responsibility closely associated with public service television. The domination of the current affairs segment, however, has not dimmed the fact that serious drama, children’s programming (including animation), and soap operas and sitcoms are equally vying for the attention of the British viewer. The presence of a healthy and well-researched selection of documentaries suggests the strengths of British television in the non-fictional genre as well. This perhaps derives from the strength of the analytical programming base which serves the newsbased section well. British television has also shown a great degree of resourcefulness in making programmes of natural history and science, as well as in the educational packages made for specialised audience segments such

as children and the Open University system. The strength of another industry, that of filmmaking, today finds in television a major resource-base as movies are made through channels (the most prominent being Channel 4), many of which have achieved both box-office and critical successes. The institutional setup of British television is based on a three-way management system. The first involves the government represented by the Department of National Heritage. The department is responsible for the appointment of the members of all regulatory bodies and it is in control over policy matters relating to the regulation of laws concerning the television industry. The second structural arrangement relating to the British television industry involves the Board of 12 Governors which is responsible for the functioning of the BBC. As an organisation, the BBC is a huge body with approximately 25,000 employees; its annual income runs to about £2 billion. The revenue in this case is generated through a process of licensing levied on all families possessing a television set. The licence fee structure, interestingly, has run parallel to the retail price index with an appropriate fixation mechanism put in place by the BBC Board and the government for the purpose. Unlike the commercially funded television bodies, the BBC public responsibilities are clearly indicated in a Charter and Agreement (to run till 2006 when it will be reviewed again). This provision provides a great deal of transparency in the functioning of the BBC which balances the commercial needs with its obligations towards the policy of public service programming. In the case of the BBC, the Director-General is appointed by the Governors and the other members are then selected through a process of consultation. While the traditionally passive role of the Governors in the functioning of the BBC was only visible in the policy making measures till the 1970s, the following decades have seen a more active participation. The third tier involves the functioning of a commercially operating system that relies on advertisement for revenue generation. This tier is placed under the supervision of the Independent Television Commission, previously known as the Independent Broadcasting Authority and the Independent Television Authority. The ITC controls the operations of Independent Television, a grouping composed of 15 regionally-based companies, along with channels in news and breakfast television constituting the Channel 3 network. ITC also determines the policies governing Channel 4 which commissions and schedules but does not make in-house programmes and Channel 5, which was

launched in 1997. The ITC is, in fact, the regulatory body whose principles apply to cable and satellite services emanating in the UK. The Broadcasting Act of 1990 makes it clear that the 12 members of the Commission are to be selected by the government. The Commission regulates the licensing process through a mechanism of tendering and evaluation of commercial viability. The emphasis on quality control has brought about a strict admission procedure at the level of application itself. The system of reporting annually on the programme content has been a marked feature of the ITC that affects all television companies under its purview. The ITC’s codes also apply to advertising and programme content and presentation. British television has grown remarkably since the 1980s, with the last two decades spent in further consolidation. The multi-channel option before the British viewer, a reality following the advent of satellite television, however, is yet to encompass the whole of British homes. The reach of terrestrial television still remains undisputed in spite of the growth of cable television in England. BSkyB, the primary television network, in spite of its very attractive content and package does not have the reach of the BBC. The BBC started its radio operations on October 14, 1922 when it made its first broadcast. On November 2, 1936 the British Broadcasting Corporation broadcast pictures from London’s Alexandra Palace. The pre-Second World War condition of the BBC wasn’t very promising and with only about twenty thousand television sets in 1939 (that too primarily in London), it could cater only to a very limited viewership. When broadcast began again after the War (it had stopped operations during the War) in 1946, it faced an immediate fund crisis. In the early 1950s, there was considerable debate centring on the abolition of the monopoly of the BBC, which was eventually curtailed by the Television Act of 1954 and by the subsequent launch of commercial television in 1955 through the banner of the ITV. The challenge of commercial television was daunting as 76% of the population defected to the BBC’s rival and many of its producers and artists too joined the ITV. One of the reasons of the ITV’s popularity in the early years of its rivalry with the BBC was due to the broadcasting of programmes which were based on American formats, especially the situation comedies and quiz programmes (Double Your Money, 1955–68, was extremely popular with British audiences even though it was an imitation of an American original). The official line (reflected in the Pilkington Inquiry, 1962, which viewed ITV’s

programming as trivial and considered the BBC’s standard as exemplary) was supportive of the ‘tradition’ of British way with which BBC was associated. The situation comedies that made such an impact were part of BBC’s offering, the first of which (Hancock’s Half Hour, 1956–61) was responsible for establishing a pattern of constraints involved in urban living. In spite of the early successes of ITV’s sitcoms, BBC gained ground in the 1970s with some of the best programming in this field which were both popular and intellectually engaging. Hugh Greene’s time as Director-General from 1960 is usually associated with the BBC’s inclination towards popular culture. Crime shows (Z Cars, 1964–74), science fiction (Doctor Who, 1963– 89), and drama (The Wednesday Play, 1965–70) suggest the move towards mass-based programming and the relaxation of controls. A popular pop music show Top of the Pops, (1964–) not only indicated the change in the interests of the burgeoning youth segment but also showed how there was a discernible shift in the distribution of genres across the television’s broadening spectrum. When BBC2 was launched in 1964, there was an emphasis on the arts as one of its priority areas along with a thrust upon educational broadcasts. The latter was epitomised by the Open University broadcasts which began in 1972. The formation of the Broadcasting Complaints Commission in 1971 was a major step in submitting the television companies to public scrutiny, a step that was welcomed in television circles as well. It was, however, only in 1985 that the BBC started its own soap operas with Eastenders mainly to rival the ITV’s domination in that genre. An expansion programme, which began in 1994, saw the launch of many more BBC channels, including BBC World (for overseas viewers) and UK Gold (a repeats channel of selected archival material). DirectorGenerals like John Birt (1991–9), Greg Dyke (2000-4) and Mark Thompson (2004–) have built upon a reputation of high quality cultural programming as well as elaborate news broadcasts. The BBC has been one of the cultural icons of twentieth century British life and the beginning of the twenty-first shows that it is still maintaining the tradition. At the same time the critics of the BBC have been quick to point out that the moral rigour which distinguished it from the ITV is a thing of the past; whether this is an inevitable consequence of global as well as local cultural demands or a deliberate alteration of the BBC’s intrinsic character can only be decided by the historian of the future.

The ITV, BBC’s most potent rival of the 1950s and 60s, had a remarkable beginning. Within two years of commencement the ITV outstripped the BBC in terms of population share and had a major say in the way television culture evolved in Britain. Launched on September 22, 1955, the ITV was extremely attractive for British viewers, who had been accustomed to a more sedate programming from the BBC. Within the first decade of its inception, the ITV was earning advertising revenue that outstripped all previous records and set a new standard in television advertising. The initial emphasis of the ITV on regional programmes also contributed to its appeal in the provinces, primarily because it offered a more cosmopolitan bouquet to its audiences. The ITV transformed the culture of television viewing by introducing a variety of programmes that attended to the changing cultural modes, especially through its sitcoms and soap operas. The collapse of ITV, however, was as dramatic as its rise. By the 1980s, the emergence of Channel 4 (in 1982) provided another form of competition to the traditional BBC-ITV rivalry as it adopted a different advertisement and programming policy, one that started paying dividends before the end of the decade. The reliance on sources that were not tapped by ITV (a measure aided by the IBA’s assistance) made Channel 4 a viable proposition from its formative days itself. The commercial pressures of revenue generation began impacting the look and operational modes of British television in the 1980s. The advent of cable television and the entry of the digital version in 1996 (following the Broadcasting Act of 1996) showed that the competition was no longer between companies with sociallymotivated or culturally specific programming but between interest areas such as sports, movies and children subjects, especially animation. Another challenge faced by the television industry came from the video industry in the ’80s. A radical change in policy was made in the suggestions of the Peacock Committee on Financing the BBC when in its report (1986) it called for a rethink on the generation of revenues from sources other than the licence fee alone. This was also the time when the BBC’s entry into the world of multichannel television was decided upon. The changes in the world of British television have seen the BBC emerge stronger (and it is still the primary player). The emergence of competition from sources that offer a much wider and target-audience-based programming has changed the face of British television. Games like football demand huge investments, with great commercial stakes involved, and the growth of such niche audiences suggests

that the offerings of the BBC or the ITV cannot address such demands. Sports and cinema today constitute two of the major interest areas for the majority of the British population. If BBC is still the major player in a fragmented industry with many specialised rival companies, it is also because what the BBC offers is important for a particular viewership. Changes in the television industry have also brought about a restructuring in the ITV network with a split of the original into ITV1 and ITV plc. The BSkyB network, on the other hand, has consolidated itself in a very short time even though it has not been able to make a substantial dent in the BBC’s market share. The Sky network in the UK was bought by Rupert Murdoch and rechristened as Sky Television in 1989. The initial response to Sky wasn’t very encouraging as advertising revenues were not picking up. The launch of digital television by both ITV and Sky has taken technological sophistication in broadcasting to a wholly different level.

Pop Music Pop music has been a major cultural medium in the twentieth century. While America has been a frontrunner and also a trendsetter in contemporary popular music, England has had its fair share in the development of the ‘pop music’ scene in the West. Although both American and English musicians have been dealing with popular music, there are interesting differences in terms of cultural specifics. The commercial inclinations were more pronounced in the early years of the history of pop music in America and England followed a traditional line. In America, for instance, the number of radio stations in the early decades of the twentieth century heavily outnumbered the BBC, which incidentally took some time to accommodate the then radical sounding rock-and-roll within its wing. An interesting development in England in the early period was the presence of “pirate” stations that offered much more trendy and contemporary fare than the BBC did. The conditions in England, thus, were considerably removed from those existing in the United States in the 1950s and 60s. And even though the Beatles went on to become an international act with a reputation that went to America as well, the orientation of the British pop groups was not the same. The members of the Beatles were born in Liverpool and the idea of forming the group was occasioned by the meeting of John Lennon and Paul

McCartney in 1957 at Liverpool. By the early part of 1960, the duo were joined by George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best and in the same year they performed several gigs in clubs in Germany. Some of the characteristic features of their music were evident in these early formative years itself: the imbibing of the rock-and-roll character and the use of threepart harmonies were successfully received. By 1962, Sutcliffe and Best had left and the remaining three members of the band were joined by Ringo Starr as the drummer. Some of their classic numbers—“Love Me Do,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You”—were all recorded in the early years of the 1960s. When the group toured America in 1964, they were building on the reputation that had started consolidating in England itself. The success of the Beatles in the 1960s was part of the ‘British Invasion,’ and their participation in two feature films—A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help (1965)—not only brought them fame and commercial success but gave them the visibility that no British pop group had managed before. As the 1960s wore on, the Beatles experimented by bringing in other cultural structures to inform their compositions and their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a major landmark in the history of popular music in the West. George Harrison used Indian instruments and the whole album had an unmistakable psychedelic feel about it. While their White Album, formally known as The Beatles, was released in 1968, the pressures of ‘Beatlemania’ were beginning to tell on the members of the group. The members were now moving in different directions—both creatively and ideologically—and when the dissolution of the band was announced on April 10, 1970 it seemed to convey the inevitable. One of their more successful albums—Abbey Road (1969)—demonstrated the maturity the group had attained, but it was a little too late. In the early years of the 1970s, the members of the Beatles were experimenting their creativity individually and were enormously successful. The career of the Beatles is an interesting chronicle of the changing face of the English pop music scene: within a decade commercialisation and the cultivation of the celebrity cult had come to influence how music was done, produced and disseminated in England. At the height of their popularity in the 1960s, the Beatles were also associated with ‘youth culture’ and in many ways their work represented the changing climate and the mood of the period. The evolution and subsequent dissolution of the Beatles provides a perspective on the pop music scene as with their rise, numerous other groups

in England and America tried out the Beatles sound, while by the final years of the 1960s, the emerging rock groups demonstrated the changing tastes in popular music. The contemporary music scene from the 1990s onwards has seen the emergence of many talented singers and songwriters while some of the older performers have continued providing their own kind of music. Today musicians like Robbie Williams (a former Take That member) have shown how with talent it is possible to make the transition from being a crooner in a boy band to performing successfully as a solo artist. This example has been followed by many other members of groups that started out as teen bands but have subsequently embarked on solo careers—Geri Haliwell and Mel C from Spice Girls, Ronan Keating from Boyzone, Gary Barlow from Take That, Brian McFadden from Westlife are notable here. At the same time, many have failed to survive in an age when techno sounds have dominated the popular music scene. This characteristic of pursuing a solo career after being a member of a successful band is not new to British pop music. In the 1970s, the members of the Beatles went on to perform as extremely successful musicians (two of the surviving Beatles members, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are making music individually), and many other groups of that period like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Who, to name a few, have been responsible for providing its members a platform to try out their music as solo artists. Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin and Roger Waters from Pink Floyd have made some wonderful music as solo artists. In the eighties, some interesting music was done by groups like Dire Straits, which subsequently disbanded, but Mark Knopfler, its bandleader, continues to enthral by his music. In the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, groups and singers like Charlotte Church, Natasha Bedingfield, Coldplay, Dido, Geri Halliwell have been producing interesting music. Another aspect of the contemporary music scene has been the great successes of the “live” performances of these artists and bands. Sting (an ex-member of The Police), Elton John, Eric Clapton, David Bowie have shown the way to other younger performers. The British music scene today has also an important economic aspect as it accounts for almost 15% of the world music sales. The contemporary music scene in Britain is also the site for wide-ranging experimentation in a variety of genres. Bhangra, which traces its origin to the music emanating from Punjabi culture in India, has come a long way from its

conventional associations, as today it is highly commercialised and imbued with a distinct techno sound. Many talented musicians from the Asian community in Britain are using the potential of bhangra to fuse the traditional with the contemporary with remarkable élan. “Britpop,” a category incorporating alternative rock styles, is another emerging genre in contemporary pop music. Alternative or NU rock groups that have made an impact include Radiohead and Blur, while others like Oasis have been influential in making an impression in popular music charts as well. The sound of Alternative Rock in the UK is dominated by an emphasis on melody and harmonised vocals, features that distinguish it from the American experiments in the genre. An interesting variation of rock music in Britain today is seen in the success of Glamour Rock, with groups like Pink Floyd acquiring cult status for the melodious sounds made by an emphatic blend of the guitar sound and the synthesizer. The use of electronic sounds in contemporary music in fact became overtly apparent when Punk made an impression in the 1970s. Electronically enhanced sound in fact seemed to be the defining pattern in the English music scene in the 1980s. Of the music groups that sought to utilise the advantages of the platform afforded by the popularity of the profession, U2 and Queen made considerable impact by developing their own styles and by dealing with contentious issues in their musical compositions. The song “Sunday Bloody Sunday” from the album War (1983) by U2 was a deliberate jab at the political establishment and the commentary on the problems associated with individual freedom was designed to engage the politics of contemporary public life. U2, one of the leading rock groups in the world today, has produced some great music with their distinctiveness in their open engagement of many issues plaguing contemporary society. Without being patronising, U2 has managed to straddle both commercial and critical success with ease, and in an industry where bands don’t make it beyond a few years, it has done wonderful work for more than a quarter of a century. After The Joshua Tree (1987), an album that brought them into focus globally, the group has continued to make meaningful music even today, as the tremendous sales figures of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (2004) testify. Another group that got a cult following in the 1980s, (but which has not survived as a band) was Dire Straits. The gruffy voice of the group’s frontman Mark Knopfler, in combination with a specially developed Fender

guitar, established the reputation of Dire Straits in the 1980s. From the selftitled first album Dire Straits in 1978 to the final studio album On Every Street (1991), Dire Straits grew to become a band with a huge following in many countries across the world. Famous fans of the group included Bob Dylan, Lady Diana and Sachin Tendulkar. Even after the group’s break-up, Mark Knopfler has continued to pursue a solo career. Very different from Dire Straits in style and voice, Queen sought to portray a distinctly developed musical rhetoric to highlight important political and cultural issues. Freddie Mercury, the colourful Queen vocalist, was one of the early celebrity AIDS victims in England and the fact that he made no bones of his homosexuality drew attention towards an important issue in contemporary Britain. The courting of controversy by pop groups and musicians, however, is not new. While Cliff Richard and The Rolling Stones have overcome considerable hurdles in establishing their reputations globally, many groups formed in the 1960s have not survived beyond their immediate audiences. Groups like The Animals, Gerry and the Peacemakers, The Hollies etc. characteristically clung on to the sound made popular by the Beatles. Their inability to move beyond a programme of melodious music showed that tastes in music were changing fast. In the last three decades, musicians have experimented with the existing genres and at the same time tried out and designed new ones. An interesting aspect of the contemporary music scene has been the dependence on American examples, styles and variations. American musicians like Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Eminem (to name just three) have been influential in directing the sound of contemporary British music. A few words about the heavy metal genre in England. The classic act called Deep Purple, for instance, has had many avatars with the talented members forming other splinter groups such as The Whitesnake and Rainbow also presenting very good music. Like Rolling Stones, Deep Purple has survived many upheavals, a condition exemplified by their 2004 offering – Bananas. Hard rock as a genre in fact came into mainstream focus through the work of groups like the Rolling Stones, which incidentally is one of longest surviving rock acts in the world. Formed in 1962, the Rolling Stones attained acclaim in the late 1960s and 70s with albums such as Beggar’s Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971), and Exile On Main Street (1972). Band frontman Mick Jagger has been one of the most colourful figures of the English rock circuit and also one of the most controversial. The use of the

heavy amplified guitar sound inaugurated by the 60s bands like the Rolling Stones and the later Beatles gained a following in the 1970s and the early 80s as heavy metal and punk rock replaced the melodious music of the earlier groups. Important contributors in this field were the Police and Queen, groups that combined a flair for innovation with a deliberately cultivated commentary on the political establishment. The political intonations of much of the popular musical acts—Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut and Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” were extremely pronounced in their questioning of British policy—were often camouflaged within a melodic frame but the message was nevertheless apparent. Although British pop music technically refers to the productions of musicians based in Britain, a strictly territorial consideration cannot account for the enormous influence exerted by developments in other parts of the world. Popular music today is a highly interconnected activity with simultaneous releases occurring in several countries and pop artists have fans who are not confined to the country of origin at all. In the age of the Internet and a globalised culture, pop music is facing a crisis, in spite of the rise in sales as piracy and P2P file-swapping through the Internet continue to dog the music industry. The cross-fertilisation and internationalisation of pop music in the twentieth century has seen a continuous movement of artists and groups. It is impossible to fixate a particular artist in the global world as non-British performers like Enrique Iglesias, Avril lavigne, Christina Aguilera, Bjork, Bryan Adams, and Michael Learns to Rock (MLTR) have enjoyed popularity in different countries. British pop music today is one of the many currents in the contemporary scene, and even though a distinct cultural perspective is discernible in the work of many of the major artists, its appeal extends to audiences located in different cultural centres of the world.

ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE AND SOCIETY Popular Culture ‘Popular culture’ as a term refers to the variety of cultural forms in circulation in a society which are characterised by their being available for common consumption. The idea of popular culture is not new. In fact, in many ancient cultures of the world a distinction was made between the different kinds of cultural forms based on the classes that were involved in their consumption. From the very beginning, at least in many of the dominant discourses in the West, popular culture was seen in opposition to the elitist, sophisticated and selective conditions, more commonly designated as “high culture” that served to separate the classes. In many societies this hierarchization had to do with idea of “taste,” with the popular variety being placed on an inferior scale. Matthew Arnold’s classification of the classes, with the “Philistines” representing the uncivilised majority, represents this position. In fact, in Victorian society, the division between high and popular culture was starkly manifested in many agencies that sought to perpetrate it through ideological structures. Roy Wagner makes a very significant observation about this aspect and the relativity of gradation in cultural studies in his essay “The Idea of Culture”: The idea of culture, in other words, places the researcher in a position of equality with his subjects: each “belongs to a culture.” Because every culture can be understood as a specific manifestation, or example, of the phenomenon of man, and because no infallible method has ever been discovered for “grading” different cultures and sorting them into their natural types, we assume that every culture, as such, is equivalent to every other one. This assumption is called “cultural relativity” (Wagner, in Anderson 1996: 51). While popular culture was seen in its graded terms in the dominant critical discourses till the early part of the twentieth century, there has been a shift in emphasis in the way the dichotomy of popular/high is being re-situated. The items and properties that constitute popular culture are disseminated by a variety of agencies such as films, television, commercials, best-seller novels,

and the Internet. At the same time, not all that is accessible through these agencies constitute popular culture. What is popular at a given time may not be acceptable or may even go out of fashion at a later time. Take the case of the Beatles. In the 1960s, when Beatlemania gripped the youth population, its fall from popularity was unthinakable. In the first decade of the status of Beatles as one of the classic pop acts of all time is assured, but it does not command the youthful audience in the way it did in its prime. In other words, the Beatles have acquired a mythical status but it has also meant that it now has to vie for the audience’s attention along with other performers, who have joined the mainstream. While the Beatles was the dominant pop group in the 1960s and largely determined contemporary taste, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, fifty years later, it does not affect popular taste in the way it did then. This is not simply as case of replacement of one cultural icon by others, but a refashioning of the terms through which popular cultural items are circulated and disseminated. Thus, many social factors influence the conditions under which items of popular culture are consumed: in the case of the Beatles example, since youth represents a primary chunk of the population that responds to the changing pop music scene, it also shows how the idea of popular music itself has transformed in the decades that followed the days of the Beatles. Another aspect of popular culture is related to the availability of the products for mass consumption. Many ‘items’ of culture are popular because they are easily accessible and available; this easy-access has contributed to the notion that popular cultural items are superficial and lack the qualitative control associated with products that are difficult to access and high-priced. There are various sources of popular culture. The publishing industry, for instance, provides a lot of items from Valentine’s Day Cards to best-seller novels like the Harry Potter series. Books and other items related to the publishing industry are easily available and usually backed by aggressive publicity campaigns, they create and manipulate fashions and determine taste. It is for this reason that popular cultural items are said to circulate in a simulated reality, more commonly known as hyper-reality. The world of the hyper-real is one where images dominate, and subsequently determine the directions of consumer culture. The publishing industry, like many other agencies offering items for popular consumption in the contemporary world, relies on the successful dissemination of images to further the business. The

function of images in the circulation of images is immense. This mode of providing a ‘sneak peek’ at the products that people end up buying is used by the business houses that deal with films, music, video games, mobile handsets, computers and commonly used accessories like television sets and other appliances. One very popular method used by the music companies is the circulation of music videos, which make visible the audio content and provide gloss and glamour to the non-visible product. The repeated runs of film previews on television contribute to the hype created by publicity in the news media and generate interest in the film itself. Apart from these consumer-based sources of popular culture, there is another source of popular culture: that which is related to the folk elements of a particular culture. In anthropological terms, the folk items constitute important aspects of culture and which affect the lifestyles of the majority of the population. In this context, the study of folk items do not necessarily conform to the same territory as that which is closely associated with contemporary theories of popular culture. The significance of the ‘folk’ elements in most of the theoretical positions today is related to the rereading of such features; the term ‘popular culture’ thus, today, goes beyond the conventional anthropological usage of cultural positioning of folk elements and encompasses conditions that are associated with a highly complex network of consumption, display and circulation. What ‘popular culture’ means will depend on a large number of factors in a given context and while an umbrella definition such as a culture most comprehensible to the common people may indicate one condition of the term, it cannot accommodate its extensions and variations. Consider the following enumeration of the terms under which the concept of popular culture usually operates: [Popular culture] is frequently used either to identify a form of culture that is opposed to another form, or as a synonym or complement to that other form. The precise meaning of ‘popular culture’ will therefore vary, for example as it is related to folk culture, mass culture or high culture. In addition, popular culture may refer either to artefacts (often treated as texts) such as popular song or a television programme, or to a group’s lifestyle (and thus to the pattern of artefacts, practices and understandings that serve to establish the group’s distinctive identity) (Edgar and Sedgwick 2004: 285). Conditions of popular culture are today studied from a variety of

perspectives. One aspect of popular culture studies is related to the process of de-canonisation of the settled and dominant versions in literary studies. The whole idea of “greatness” is now being reviewed. Readers who love Shakespeare may also respond to “texts” such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2004) or the Harry Potter novels with excitement, and while this does not suggest some form of gradation of the texts, it does constitute an important index through which to situate the way reading processes are engaged in contemporary society. The opening up of the limits of literary criticism thus manifests the tendency to accommodate aspects of culture previously not entertained. In that context, the following observation seems appropriate: “If people who read Goethe and Manzoni and Pushkin with pleasure are also reading detective stories with pleasure, there is more in the detective story than its critics have recognized, perhaps more than even its writers and readers have recognized” (Roberts 1989: 5). Interestingly, popular culture studies have not sought to deny someone like Shakespeare the commonly attributed status, but an interrogation of the terms under which such a cult came to be constituted is surely one of the areas that scholars in this field study. A study of Shakespeare’s plays today may be carried out in conjunction with the production structures of films based on his theatre, which can lead to fruitful insights into the politics that the brand Shakespeare is submitted to through a popular medium as cinema. Graham Holderness comments thus on the politics of incorporating Shakespeare into the cinematic structure: The repute of cinema art and of the film industry can be enhanced by their capacity to incorporate Shakespeare; the institution of Shakespeare itself benefits from that transaction by a confirmation of its persistent universality. Shakespeare films exist on that important but peripheral fringe of cinematic production, where the values of high art can be held to justify or compensate for the lack of commercial success (they are probably screened more often and witnessed by more spectators) in the form of 16 mm prints hired by institutions of education than in the commercial cinemas), and they can scarcely be regarded as central to mainstream practice and development of the cinema (Holderness 1998: 71). The study of popular culture as a critical engagement is also associated with certain postmodern developments. The postmodern rejection of Modernist

elitism is one of the factors that have contributed to the interest in popular culture. The study of films, television soaps, and popular music in England intensely began with the efforts of scholars like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, who sought to engage the conditions and processes involved in the circulation of popular cultural forms. This emphasis on the study of popular cultural forms in England began with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and brought about the cultural turn in literary studies. Reading popular cultures can be done from a variety of perspectives. Sometimes, as in the following observation on rock music by Salman Rushdie, satire, innuendo and parody can be made to serve the ends of social commentary: Wit is not the quality most often associated with rock music and when one listens to the Cro-Magnon grunts of most rock stars one can readily appreciate why. In spite of the Spice Girls, however, rock’n’roll actually has a long history of verbal, musical off-the-cuff felicities and dexterities….In all this there is much for literary folk to study and admire. I don’t subscribe to the lyrics-are-poetry school aficionado overclaiming. But I know I’d have been ridiculously proud to have written anything as good as this (Rushdie 2003: 100–01). There are also the critical engagements of popular forms in contemporary culture such as the readings of cartoons like Pokemon or the Mills & Boon romance genre. Critics like Nancy Armstrong and Catherine Belsey have demonstrated the politics of the structures that condition such products.

Globalisation The changes in the world order brought about by various social, cultural, technological, economic and political developments in the twentieth century have led to a growing interdependence between societies and communities in an unprecedented way. This has led to the reworking of the relations between peoples and institutions in a manner that has come to impinge upon contemporary lifestyles and human conduct. The phenomenon of globalisation involves the propagation and promotion of a culture of interactivity where people from different locations and situations are engaged in various activities. In other words, globalisation has led to a remapping of priorities and structures; one of the primary aspects of globalisation has been

the growth of capitalism as the major economic structure determining relations among peoples in various parts of the world. Financial control and enhanced means of communication in a technology-driven age has rendered the conventional labour-capital equation redundant, which is leading to a growing deregulation of traditional economic structures. In terms of the economic aspect, globalisation circumvents the authority of the state by constructing alternative power centres and often determines the direction of politics. While the state has not disappeared because of globalisation, it has warranted a reorientation of traditional state-society relations. The dangers of globalisation are recognised even as its benefits are received by people in various parts of the world. One commentary on the threat of globalisation highlights the problems associated with it succinctly: “However unevenly, our world is interconnected through a vortex of globalisation. Polarisation could work as a sustainable system if the world were populated by rather dim economic men and women. But it is not; it is full of human beings with hopes and dreams and expectations. These will have to be accommodated across the world to prevent a politics of polarisation destroying all. An interconnected world is an easily sabotaged world. Terrorism, the politics of the weak, has followed an upward trend” (Johnston et al., 2002: 451). Although the threat of globalisation is now being recognised in some quarters, it has been a very fashionable phenomenon in an age where technology and interconnectivity are taken as inevitable givens. As a term, globalisation involves the recognition that developments in one part of the world will have implications for the people residing in other areas, in spite of wide distances separating them. The following definition accommodates many of the characteristics of globalisation: “Globalisation refers to a multidimensional set of social processes that create, multiply, stretch, and intensify worldwide social interdependencies and exchanges while at the same time fostering in people a growing awareness of deepening connections between the local and the distant” (Steger 2003: 13). The condition of a global society implicates the dissolution of territorial boundaries that are overcome developments in technology, communication and political conditions. Globalisation also involves the importance of the internationalisation of lifestyles; the idea of the ‘personal’ is affected by the conditions of social and cultural change that literally are quite removed from individual’s experience.

The growing accessibility facilitated by enhanced communication, however, goes beyond a mere physical attachment and the realm of the hyperspace acquires a reality previously unexperienced. Various institutions and agencies, some of them are often called ‘multinational,’ operate in different parts of the world today and the complex modes of production that characterise the operations of the markets demonstrate that the conditions of life in many places of the world have moved beyond the immediate concerns of particular territories. The negation of distance in many aspects of contemporary life is one of the features of globalisation. While the disadvantages of globalisation are being recognised (trafficking in illicit drugs, quick transfer of diseases, immigration and terrorism are some of the hazards of a networked existence), its merits are also celebrated and have brought about remarkable changes in different parts of the world. The most evident and recognisably positive aspect of globalisation has been the transfer of technology for a better and more secure life. Globalisation has led to increased sharing of various kinds of resources among peoples— technological, economic, information and cultural mores and customs. Of the many factors contributing to the globalised condition of the contemporary world, the fast developments in transport and communication are the most pronounced. Improved communication systems have made the gradual transition towards a cashless world, for instance, in the economic sphere, possible. Transactions across the economies of the world have become easier and the processes informing various systems have speeded up rapidly. This has led to an unprecedented speeding up of life itself and has resulted in remarkable transformations in social and cultural life as well. Various agencies of communication such as the Internet and the telephone have introduced a technology-based culture in many urban centres of the world. The proliferation of cheap commodities is another aspect of a globalised life. There are notable conditions behind the way globalisation has come to impact contemporary life. One is the role played by such “global” institutions as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund or the United Nations. While questions remain unsettled about the nature and even success of these institutions, it is recognised that such organisations have a remarkable stake in the way policies of states are determined and executed. The role of such multinational organisations—political, cultural and economic—in the lives of people in different parts of the world highlights the gradual diminishing of

local concerns. In fact, the global/local debate has been a major area in studies on globalisation. One view regarding this polarisation of the global/local has centred on the importance (often paradoxically) of regional issues in the context of globalisation. Another position holds that globalisation is a form of imperialism with certain dominant centres controlling the resources of other countries. The operating factors of globalisation have seen the emergence of interesting views. Cheap goods, better facilities, an enhanced lifestyle, individual-friendly technology are some of the positive aspects of the globalised life while an increase in the rich/poor divide, environmental hazards, cultural imperialism, social inequality, domination of the developing nations by the advanced ones and an unprecedented arms race are some of its worrying characteristics. ‘Speed’ is a keyword in today’s globalised life. Everything moves faster than it has ever done before. Things and technologies outdate very quickly. Life itself moves as a fast pace. Social relationships, including family life, are one of its calamities in many urban centres of the world. The equally rapid movement of disease (the enormous spread of AIDS is one example) is a major cause for concern. The growing class divide has also meant that all parts of the world have not been affected by the positive aspects of globalisation. In fact, while certain centres have drawn tremendous benefits from the culture of globalisation, others have found it difficult to withstand its pressure. Small industries, institutions, rural-based economies, traditional practices and customs are now under serious threat; again globalisation has been and essentially urban and industrial development and with capitalism as its foremost ally, the impact on weaker economies has been telling. In the cultural sphere, globalisation has changed the way media circulates in contemporary life. The publishing industry is now one of the major movers of the world economy. Best-sellers are globally consumed products. Writers who have managed to make a name for themselves through both aggressive marketing and quality have benefited from a global market. Globalisation is thus a post-modern development. It has introduced the high and low together as products of consumption and changed the way popular culture is received. The distinction between a ‘high’ modern text and a ‘popular’ book has almost disappeared. Writers like J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie have their aficionados among the scholars as well as the ‘masses.’ In England the significant development in the post-War years has been the infiltration of

culture and the physical immigration of peoples from non-British cultures. Many of the writers and artists in Britain trace their origin and allegiance to other cultures and it is not surprising that multiculturalism is one of the celebrated aspects (as well as a fashionable political slogan) of contemporary English life. One welcome fallout of the interest in other cultures has been the increase in translated works being circulated in different parts of the world. Texts are ‘recovered’ and newly translated and a challenge to canon is mounted on the basis of such works. The movement of new texts and rereading of canonical ones has been facilitated by easy-access modes now circulating in the globalised world.

Terrorism and the New World Order The post-War English society, especially in the last three decades, has seen an increasing recognition of terrorism as one of the primary threats to contemporary life. More than the actual terrorist act, it is the threatperception of terrorism that has dominated political, cultural and social life in many parts of the world in the recent decades. Following decolonisation and the emergence of the United States as the superpower in the post-War world, England has consistently allied with America in considering terrorism as one of the major concerns in the contemporary world. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on America, England declared that it was with the superpower in the fight against terror. ‘Terrorism’ thus has become highly politicised with contrary views about ideology and motive imputed against one another. Although the September 11 attacks took place on American soil, citizens of many countries died and businesses were affected in many nations. More than a hundred Britishers died in the attacks and Britain marshalled its diplomatic as well as military resources to organise an assault against the network believed to have been behind it, Al Qaeda. The British Prime Minister visited many countries, including many in the Middle East, to win support for the counter-terrorist exercises it planned to execute with America and other allies. The political aspect of terrorism, in fact, has been closely associated with definitions of terrorism from the beginning. Terrorist groups engage in subversive and violent activities with the purpose of ostensibly achieving political ends. Secondly, the terrorists organise their attacks against the state or against institutions representing governmental authority in a state.

Creating panic situations and spreading fear psychosis are the two objectives of terrorist groups. Intimidation is thus a primary goal in terrorist activities. Although often articulated through violence, terrorism does not follow the norms of traditional war. One of the justifications offered by terrorists is that theirs is a fight aimed at correcting the wrongs against them and the people they claim to represent. From the terrorists’ point of view, their violent activities are consequences of regulated victimisation by the oppressors against whom they revolt. One difference between terrorism and the war organised by the state is that the former is designated as crime, the latter is accepted as a just act. Various reasons are cited for the emergence of terrorism, some of them historically traceable to much earlier times. In a globalised world, political, social, religious, cultural and economic differences are usually taken to represent the sources of contemporary terrorism. While countries like Germany and Italy were threatened by terrorist violence in the 1970s, today almost all the Western countries perceive terrorism as a major source of concern. More liberal and open societies like those in the United States and the UK are also great draws for the terrorists who camouflage and infiltrate the civil structures to engineer their acts. The matter is complicated further by the tacit support given by certain governments to rival groups for political ends. Some states, on the other hand, are designated as supporters of organisations allied to the achievement of goals through violent methods, and the terror thus perpetrated is known as state-sponsored terrorism. The United States and the UK have considered such states threats to their interests and the attack on Iraq that led to the collapse of the Saddam Hussein regime is one such instance of counter-terrorism being manifested in the form of war. The face of terrorism in the early years of the twenty-first century has become extremely complicated with the acts of subversion carried out by the terrorist organisations becoming subtler and increasingly unpredictable. Suicide attacks (Israel is a major site of suicide attacks carried out by organisations like Hamas) are extremely effective both in terms of damage and its immunity to preventive measures. The September 11 attacks can be taken as a glaring example of a suicide attack for the purpose of inflicting both political and human casualties. The mode of attack and the sophistication of the terrorist operations have shown that this is one of the defining aspects of contemporary life. One aim of terrorism is to disrupt civil

life. The most common platforms of modern human existence such as shopping malls, transportation networks, cinema theatres, public gatherings are also susceptible to terrorist attacks. In the United Kingdom, the response to terrorism has been quite stringent from the time when threats were perceived in the twentieth century. In fact, the experience of Northern Ireland has been nothing short of terrorist interventions in the political and social life of the English people. The late 1960s saw the emergence of terrorist activities in Northern Ireland and the early years of the next decade saw a rapid rise in violence. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), which is the primary agency associated with the acts of violence in Northern Ireland, however, has changed its strategy by adopting the method of slow but steady attacks instead of massive destruction and their political goals are noticeably different from those motivating groups like Hamas and the Al Qaeda. When the peace agreement was signed on April 10, 1998, it was believed that a major thorn in the flesh had disappeared for good. While matters have settled down considerably, at least in terms of violent manifestations, incidents like the Omagh bombing on August 15, 1998 by the group called “Real IRA,” suggest that the volatility of the situation isn’t completely gone. Nevertheless, the experience of handling the IRA and going to war against terrorists who are neither easily recognised nor located are not the same. After the September 11 attacks, the British government has consistently allied itself with the Americans (some see this as another reminder of Americanisation). The British government has been fighting together as a part of the Coalition against the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and carrying out military exercises in Iraq after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime. The experience of fighting terror in the twenty-first century has not been a happy one for the Tony Blair government. The prison abuse scandals (which began with the involvement of US personnel) and the lack of conclusive evidence against the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq have contributed to the loss of both popularity at home and international support for the British government.

Immigration Beginning from the 1960s, immigration has been a great cause of concern for the British. It has been an important political issue and an interesting subject

among the common people, which incidentally is often whipped up from time to time by the tabloids with cartoons and imaginative recreations of a deluge of asylum-seekers adorning their pages. The rate of infiltration is surprising, given the stringent immigration laws of England. Interestingly, there is also a flip side to the whole affair with regular movement of people from the UK taking place from the 1970s. By the 1980s, the so-called brain drain was manifesting itself in different spheres, including the outflow of people related to culture and art. Many British actors and directors, for instance, tried out the more promising avenues in the United States and a movement to other EU states was also not uncommon. In the political debates that took place in England in the 1980s and the 90s, the issues of racial inequality and immigration came to occupy important space and while many of the positions taken in the debate were not as simple as they were promoted to be, the movement of non-British people into the country has had considerable impact on the social and cultural life of Britain. In terms of culture, for instance, the face of the entertainment industry has been affected by the contributions of the people who came from other centres. This pattern of movement and travel has been a common feature of many urban cultures in the West from the second half of the twentieth century. While the conditions of globalisation have been responsible for the deinsularisation of human resources, certain centres such as London have drawn comparatively more people because of its multicultural accommodativeness. On the other hand, people from the UK are now increasingly travelling to many places in the EU for both demands of profession and pleasure. Globalisation has opened up English society like never before. People today see English society as being a blend of multicultural permissiveness and traditional structures. Thus, the collapse of many institutions traditionally associated with British life has not seen the dissolution of the so-called English character but only a modification of it. This belief in the intrinsic Englishness of contemporary social and cultural life in Britain has also informed a much-promoted brand of nationalism. This spirit of nationalism (seemingly anachronistic in a highly globalised world) is extended to sports like football or cricket and marketed through extensive campaigns that are not always ostensibly designed as such. Immigration of people from essentially non-English centres is a remarkable instance of discourses of ‘liberalism’ influencing people to try out the English way of life. At the

beginning of the twenty-first century, the influx of people from different cultural centres is one of the most visibly mounted political and cultural issues. In spite of the fact that even representatives of the House of Commons have come from the Asian community in Britain, a strong undercurrent of racial tension persists. Culturally, there are various manifestations of this development: in popular music for instance, the introduction of elements drawn from non-British cultural conditions is today contributing to interesting trends in both the fields of popular and the so-called underground music scene. Sometimes immigration can lead to politically volatile situations, as in the case of the Jewish influx to Britain following the problems in Europe in the 1930s. In fact, race relations between the various communities in England have hardly been perfect and the killing of Stephen Lawrence, a black youth in 1993, only foregrounded what has been a critical matter in British multicultural society for a major part of the twentieth century. It has been aptly suggested that “at the beginning of the twenty-first century it was still over-optimistic to describe Britain as a healthy ‘multiracial’ society” (Garnett and Weight 2004: 256).

Feminism and Gender Issues Although the struggle for women’s rights can be traced back to the eighteenth century when the Enlightenment emphasis on equality foregrounded the depraved status of women, it was only in the twentieth century that the issues relating to gender positions came to occupy both the public sphere and the discourses of critical theory. There are two broad areas here: first, the struggle for political and civil rights and the second, the intellectual engagement known as feminism. In the early years of its history, the conflation of the struggle for political rights and an intellectual engagement involving the situation of woman in society was common. In the struggle for political rights, the Suffragette movement, which mobilised the women and generated support for the right to vote, was an important milestone. The achievement of the political and civil rights, however, was not easy. The Pankhursts’ enthusiasm notwithstanding, the Suffragette movement took some time to gather popular opinion and even then, it was never free from controversy. The intense mobilisation of opinion for a settlement of voting rights may have realised its goal in the early twentieth century, but some

form of ideological challenge to the patriarchal order was mounted way back in the eighteenth century. The early landmark in this context is Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which sought to re-situate the terms under which women were viewed and understood. In many ways, Wollstonecraft’s was a radical position. Here’s a passage exemplifying her views on the subject: For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same; yet the fanciful female character, so prettily drawn by poets and novelists, demanding the sacrifice of truth and sincerity, virtue becomes a relative idea, having no foundation than utility, and of that utility men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience (Wollstonecraft 1988: 51). Many of the central concerns of the women’s liberation movement are encapsulated in Wollstonecraft’s summary: the idea of equality, examining the patriarchal ordering of the world, and questioning of situation of women as objects of utility. Another important aspect of the above passage is the way ideology has served the purposes of patriarchy in the dominant discourses of the West. In England especially, from the time literature was disseminated in the popular imagination, ideological constructs have worked to establish a particular vision and function of women. When critics like Virginia Woolf in the early twentieth century highlighted this aspect of popular discourse, the same Wollstonecraft stain was being articulated. In seminal works like A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), Woolf highlighted the hypocrisy of the patriarchal system by deconstructing the strategies involved in the dominant configurations of women. The deconstruction of the ideological assumptions informing the canonical texts and which, incidentally, have been influential in determining the circulation of women’s images in popular discourse, has been a common rallying process for feminists throughout the twentieth century. In a very interesting essay titled “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure”, Kathleen McLuskie maps some of the concerns of contemporary feminist criticism and the way Shakespeare’s articulation of gender is being read. In the essay McLuskie comments changes taking place in feminist literary criticism in the following terms: “Within English departments critical activity has been divided among those who revived and privileged the work of women writers and those who have focused critical

attention on reinterpreting the literary texts from the traditional canon. In the case of Shakespeare, feminist critics have contested the apparent misogyny of the plays and the resistance of their feminist students by directing attention to the ‘world’ of the plays, using conventional tools of interpretation to assess Shakespeare’s attitude to the events within it” (McLuskie, in Dollimore and Sinfield 1995: 88). The directions in which contemporary feminist study has been moving, then, found in the politically informed structures of something traditionally revered as Shakespeare’s theatre the operation of strategies that undercut the taken-for-granted assumptions. In the context of the general developments in feminist theory, four assumptions may be situated for the significance attached to them: (a) language and reality are related, (b) the relation between language and reality is a political one, (c) the politics of language and reality impacts the identity of women and (d) the position, condition and status of women constitute the primary focus of feminist theory as it negotiates the politics of language and reality. The first assumption has been one of the most prominent as feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft to Toril Moi have questioned the belief that literature or any kind of discourse, for that matter, exists independently by itself. Feminist writers question the supposed transparency of literary texts, and by extension, of the discourses circulating particular cultures. This reassessment of the terms under which reality is construed and constructed in the dominant discourses of a culture, constitutes one of the major areas of feminist scholarship. Feminist theorists question the strategies involved in the representation of the “real,” and often this entails the setting up of a programme of alternative reading positions. The context of production, the factors influencing the culture from which a text emanates and the reading of the language/reality relation have been demonstratively engaged in feminist theory. Commenting on the gendered nature of language, especially that language which is used in creative literature, Sue Roe highlights the relational aspect of language and reality in her “Introduction” to Women Reading Women’s Writing: “That the process of creativity is gender linked is clear; the specificity of the process is, by definition, the individuating factor of the work of art” (Roe 1987: 5). In examining the relations between language and reality, feminists have often taken a historicist approach, where the specificities of a given cultural structure are placed under scrutiny. The second assumption, that the language/reality relation is a political one, has

also been important in the history of feminist scholarship. The politics in the relationship between the language and reality is organised through a variety of discursive structures. The structures that organise reality in particular ways are motivated by conditions of power. In negotiating the representational paradigms, the language structures are backed by certain ideological assumptions. Feminists argue that these assumptions work towards the perpetration of the system of patriarchy. How and in what manner the ideological structures of the patriarchal order works is determined by different factors, many of which are ingrained into the operating matrices of a culture in ways that appear to have the characteristic of “normalcy.” Feminists have concentrated on the way changes in perception can be used to re-address the cultural matrices in order to highlight the politics behind canonical texts. Commenting on this aspect of feminist practice in an essay titled “Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home,” Laura Mulvey writes: Feminist theory of popular culture has concentrated on the processes that produce the image of woman as ‘signifier of sexuality’ and has striven to create a sexual politics around representation that displaces and alters previous discourses. Significantly, feminism has also concentrated political attention on women’s place in the home and the family. Throughout, words, written and spoken, have been a political weapon for the Women’s Movement, from the days of consciousness-raising to recent feminist preoccupation with linguistic and psychoanalytic theory. The question of how and where women are positioned in relation to language and dominant cultural production has highlighted women’s marginality, near silence, and other, dispersed moves towards hesitant speech. This is not to say that women are, or at any point were, outside language (or the law) but that a given, limited vocabulary, characteristic of the oppressed, simply failed to provide the words needed to articulate the experience of oppression (Mulvey 1989: 75). One preoccupation of feminist theory, thus, has been the emphasis on the political aspect of the language/reality relation. In refusing to accept the terms of representation simply as givens, feminist theory rereads texts, not to deny the dominant motifs in circulation but to see the politics that constitutes the textuality that makes them so. The third assumption in feminist theory relates to the issue of women’s identity. Luce Irigaray points out the significance of identity in the

configurations of the “other” by suggesting that while the process of othering has been one of the modes of situating women, the subject/object relation is not an unproblematic one. In “The Question of the Other,” Irigaray writes: “Men and women … occupy different subjective configurations and different worlds. And it’s not just a question of sociohistorical determination or a certain alienation of the feminine which could be done away with by making it equal to the masculine. True, women’s does point to various kinds of alienation and passivity, but it also demonstrates an inherent richness which leaves nothing to be desired from men’s language, in particular, a taste for intersubjectivity, which it would be a shame to abandon in favour of men’s more inaccessible subject-object relations.’ (Irigaray 1995: 16–17). The reading of the ‘other’ in feminist theory has provided interesting insight into the question of women’s identity and more often than not, the positions within feminism have been dissimilar. Take, for instance, the case of Simone de Beauvoir, one of the early twentieth century feminist thinkers. Beauvoir’s position about the identity of women in her path-breaking study, The Second Sex (1949) is now a contested one within feminist discourse and critics like Irigarary favour a more ‘democratic’ understanding of sexual relations than accepting Beauvoir’s terms directly. Sexual identity and the configuration of gender constitute important areas in feminism. The fourth assumption mentioned above draws from the earlier three in that the negotiation of the language/reality relation concentrates on the issue of women, whose concerns are central to the entire approach. In trying to ‘situate’ women, feminist theories end up interrogating many related issues that have a bearing on the understanding of women’s identity through the language/reality structure. Like other discourses that highlight the politics of hierarchization, feminism too studies the strategies informing patriarchy, which situates women in particular ways in culture and society. Ruth Robbins sums up the issue succinctly when she argues that the “name given to this complex of oppressive structures is patriarchy—literally the rule of the father —and feminist theorists identify patriarchy at work in the home, the state, the church or other religious systems, the law, education, the workplace, in culture at large, and even in women themselves since women often internalise the values they are fed by powerful external institutions” (Robbins, in Wolfreys 2001: 51). Feminism thus entails, among other things, a reading position through which

both literature and cultural conditions are subjected to scrutiny. In early feminist work, this was related to the fight for political rights. In England, for instance, women got the right to vote only in 1928. While contemporary feminist discourse has moved ahead to accommodate much more than the mere concept of equality, in the case women’s position in English society, in the early twentieth century at least, the fight against discrimination constituted a major concern. The changes in the lives of women in England from 1900 to 2000 have been enormous; today, in the academic sphere, women are pressing ahead of men, even though it seems strange that women were not permitted to sit for a degree at the beginning of the twentieth century. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf describes a hypothetical situation where the presence of a woman in a university turf is a great cause for concern: It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding (Woolf 1992: 6–7). The situation has considerably altered by the beginning of the twenty-first century from the picture drawn by Virginia Woolf above. In the first decades of the last century, women did not constitute much of a presence in social and cultural life. Some of them did, no doubt, but even then the terms were set by men. It would not be wrong to say that during the years of the Great War, women were primarily seen for their potential as housewives. It was only after the Second World War that women came to enjoy rights that gave them the opportunity to think beyond the compulsions of domesticity. The process involving the ‘emancipation’ (a contested term in feminist theory) was slow

but gradual: the modifications in the Property Laws (1926, 1935), for instance, were important no doubt, but it was only in the 1980s that taxation procedures in Britain recognised the income potential of wives separately. During the Great War, women (almost 1.5 million) joined the professions left behind by the men who went to battle and although this was a temporary arrangement, it showed that women were capable of efficient service. By the 1950s, the number of women professionals had increased remarkably. There are three reasons for the increased involvement of the women in the professions. The first relates to the availability of opportunities that no longer distinguish between genders, the second to the development of a machinebased culture (items such as the refrigerator, vacuum cleaner or the washing machine lessened the domestic burden), and the third is the power of choice regarding conception, made possible by reliable methods of contraception. So when Second Wave Feminism began to engage critical space, the conditions were conducive for such an enterprise. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, women in Britain are ‘liberated,’ but problems remain. Pornography, sex abuse, rape and harassment at the workplace are serious issues confronting women in British society, in what many term the ‘post-feminist’ age. The reading of gender and women’s identity, however, is not just confined to a male/female binary structure. The politics of othering incorporates interesting surveys of various processes through which the idea of ‘gender’ itself is scrutinised in terms of its manifestation in culture. Queer theory, for instance, encompasses a broad spectrum of theoretical possibilities that mainstream feminism has not been able to accommodate. Sally O’Driscoll offers the following summary of queer theory: “The existence of queer theory would be unimaginable without the preceding work in lesbian and gay studies and politics; yet the goal of queer theory as defined by many critics is precisely to interrogate the identity positions from which that work is produced. Using the same word to refer to both fields has produced confusion and even some bitterness on the part of those who fear that queer theory’s critique of the subject undermines their visibility and political ground” (O’Driscoll 1996: 30). There are also a variety of feminisms based on theoretical positions as well as locations of culture. Anglo-American feminism, for instance, is seen as being different from French Feminism. Gender issues and concerns relating to identity, however, are also significant

for other theoretical positions (psychoanalysis and cultural studies, for example) which sometimes supplement or challenge the work done in feminist theory.

GLOSSARY Americanisation: American supremacy in global affairs in the twentieth century has compelled Britain to adopt the role of an ally in political policymaking. The process of decolonisation and the growth of America as an economic, industrial and political power simultaneously worked to situate Britain in a new way in international politics. While the consistent British policy has been to support the Americans in terms of political policy, it has sometimes led to embarrassment of the government. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s support to the American ‘war on terror’ has drawn considerable criticism at home. In many ways, the domination of America and the fact that Britain is now content to play second fiddle show a complete reversal of the political equation that existed when the former was the latter’s colony. Within the twentieth century, America has made rapid strides in different spheres. Economically vibrant, industrially advanced and politically stable, America is today the leading nation of the world. In the corporate sphere, American business houses control the economic policies in a variety of areas that involve oil production, the publishing industry and the media. This has led to the development of a culture which is determined by the way shown by American companies; this is seen as a new form of imperialism, often called ‘cultural imperialism.’ Take the instance of comic figures created by Walt Disney, the cartoon characters like Tom and Jerry, blockbuster Hollywood movies or the news programmes on CNN or NBC—they are all packaged as innocent images—but are actually highly potent ideological devices influencing the consumers in different parts of the world, and Britain is no exception. Martin Baker makes the following observation about the process of Americanisation: “American capitalism has to persuade the people it dominates that the ‘American way of life’ is what they want. American superiority is natural and in everyone’s best interest” (Baker 1989: 279). American standards today influence cinema, television programming, book production, academic discourse and other cultural modes in contemporary Britain. The resistance to such influences is organised by the conservative establishment in England, but, then, in the globalised world the cultivation of insularity is hardly feasible. Best-sellers: The concept of the best-seller is primarily a twentieth century

phenomenon, even though sales figures of novels and certain underground publications in the Victorian period demonstrated the popularity of those products. The idea of the best-seller, moreover, is not related to the reception of the book in the market alone; it is closely associated with the process of commodification of literature. Best-sellers are not confined to the fiction genre only. Even non-fiction such as biographies, travelogues, collection of essays and manuals of advice sell remarkably well. The idea of the best-seller originated in the nineteenth century when book promotion activities, including advertisement and readings, were orchestrated for the purpose of publicity. Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers (1836–37) was one of the earliest English novels to use publicity with the aim of enhancing sales. In the Victorian period, however, aggressive sales promotion campaigns were not organised. Another aspect of the contemporary best-seller is that publishers associate the concept with both the number of copies sold and the time in which this is done. There is no stipulated figure about the target of a bestseller but a variety of newspapers run weekly sections where information about new releases as well as lists of best-selling books are provided. There are two important characteristics of the best-seller book: first, best-sellers are seen as being of a particular type, i.e., racy, fast-paced thrillers constitute the most popular genre and second, following the development of cultural studies, increasingly, certain literary books acquire best-seller status because of different reasons. A Booker or a Nobel often transforms a literary text into a best-seller. There is a distinction between the writer of best-seller novels such as Jeffrey Archer and the ‘serious’ writer whose books become bestsellers. The latter category includes writers like Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul. The emergence of the best-seller is an important index to the changing reading habits of people. A typical best-seller, also known as ‘pulp fiction,’ is hardly reread, while a classic book may be read a number of times; again, a best-seller has, to a great degree, a predictable pattern. There are also certain books that address specific target audiences and the consistency in sales is related to such a process, one successful example of it being the Mills & Boon series. Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies: The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was formed in 1964 under the directorship of Richard Hoggart as a postgraduate research

wing of the University of Birmingham. The Centre has been responsible for providing a direction to the study and research of cultural studies in the UK and has been instrumental in giving an intellectual apparatus for critiquing and studying cultures. Much of the initial thrust of the Centre was influenced by Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) where he had espoused a rethinking about the way culture being a whole way of life and proposed the accommodation of alternative approaches to the subject. The Centre was, in a way, the guiding force in giving shape to what has now become the discipline of cultural studies. The CCCS was initially part of the Department of English of Birmingham University but became independent in 1972 when Stuart Hall was its Director. The Centre did have its problems when it began with the Department of Sociology, opposing it by suggesting it would only be an extension of that department. It was also initially not clear as to the syllabus or programme focus the Centre was going to have and certain books on the subject helped to streamline the new discipline. Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) and E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1964) thus became the key texts in shaping the direction of British Cultural Studies in the 1960s and the 70s. By the late 70s however, the influence of Continental thought was beginning to be felt with Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Lacan and Foucault constituting major influences. During the 1970s, over 60 Stencilled Papers and 10 issues of Working Papers in Cultural Studies (founded 1971) came out. For a large part of the 1970s, there were 5 faculty members in the Centre. The success of the CCCS was a great model for other universities in the UK, which set up similar centres by the 1980s. The CCCS example was followed by the following centres where Cultural Studies was part of the study programme: The Centre for Television Research (University of Leeds), the Centre for Mass Communication Research (University of Leicester), the Popular Culture Programme (Open University), the Glasgow Media Group (University of Glasgow), and the Media Studies Programme (Polytechnic of Central London). Apart from mainstream educational institutions, polytechnics served as bases for Cultural Studies programmes. The CCCS also created a climate in fostering the discipline of Cultural Studies and the formation of the Cultural Studies Association (1984). There was a concerted movement towards institutionalising the study of Cultural Theory. One of the

focal areas that CCCS concentrated on was the issue of the variant emerging media forms and certain other developments such as the Screen project facilitated the interrogation of contemporary cultural forms and practices. Hoggart and Hall worked towards the cultivation of an interdisciplinary attitude since English studies as a discipline was not broad enough to accommodate the many interesting cultural developments of the modern age. Hoggart was influential in dismantling the high/low binarism in terms of evaluating cultural practice. This position was responsible for widening the base of literary studies in England as ‘culture’ became a major study area following the CCCS initiative. Instead of straitjacketing ‘culture’ through the formula suggested by modernists like Pound and Eliot, the CCCS position tried to follow the ideas of thinkers like Raymond Williams who opened up the arena of Cultural Studies for a more wider and critical response. Stuart Hall’s leadership saw the Centre cultivate a pro-Marxist stance (Hall was the editor of New Left Review) where the thought of Adorno and Gransci formed major influences. The Centre aimed to redefine the mode of approaching the concept of culture by adopting a programme that was flexible enough to go beyond the stratified structures of conventional academic systems. Mass media, subcultures, race and gender, feminism, and other aspects of popular culture constituted some of its thrust areas. Of the many scholars (apart from Hoggart and Hall) who were at one time connected to the Centre, the following have done excellent work in the field of Cultural Studies either independently or collectively: Angela McRobbie, David Morley, Dick Hebdige, and Lawrence Grossberg. The Centre’s legacy is also testified by the wide scale acceptance of Cultural Studies as a major discipline in the major universities of the world. Interestingly, the CCCS was closed in 2002 (it had become the Department of Cultural Studies in 1988 and provided undergraduate courses) as part of the University of Birmingham’s restructuring plan which was received with great shock and dismay. This was done in spite of the fact the media and cultural studies programmes were oversubscribed and many aspiring students could not be accommodated because of seat shortage. The CCCS was incorporated within the Department of Sociology of Birmingham University. The contributions of the CCCS may be marked in the following terms: (a) making ‘culture’ an object of study in itself, with a critique and appreciation of various cultural forms and practices, (b) initiating media studies by

studying various media formats like film, music and other agencies of popular culture, (c) bringing ‘popular culture’ to the ambit of serious intellectual deliberations (soap operas, comic books, body art, music videos, advertising promotionals, best-seller novels, etc. constituted subject areas, (d) changing the idea of the ‘audience’ by dissecting the constituents of the response structures and by studying the complexities of the different targetgroups, (e) introduced the discipline of ‘cultural studies’ into the major study programmes in England, (f) used the structuralist and post-structuralist theories of Continental and British thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Antonio Gramsci to ‘deconstruct’ cultural forms and practices, (g) ‘semiotics of culture’ became a primary study area following the analysis ‘culture’ was subjected to as well as the domain of what is now known as the ‘language of culture’, (h) challenged the idea of ‘mass culture’ being a wholesome phenomenon. Booker Prize: The Booker Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in English language fiction. It is given to an author for his/her novel in the English language every year. The nominees are selected from novelists writing in English from the Commonwealth countries and the Republic of Ireland. The Booker Prize was established and started by Booker plc, a wholesaler, in 1968. The process of judgement is based on the recommendation of a jury formed with academics, writers and critics. The prize has been renamed Man Booker Prize from 2002 because an investment company called the Man Group plc sponsors it. The winners of the Booker Prize are as follows: 1969: Percy Howard Newby, Something to Answer For 1970: Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member 1971: V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State 1972: John Berger, G 1973: James Gordon Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur 1974: Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist, and Stanley Middleton, Holiday 1975: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust 1976: David Storey, Saville 1977: Paul Scott, Staying On 1978: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

1979: Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore 1980: William Golding, Rites of Passage 1981: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 1982: Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s Ark 1983: J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K 1984: Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac 1985: Keri Hulme, The Bone People 1986: Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils 1987: Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger 1988: Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda 1989: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day 1990: A.S. Byatt, Possession 1991: Ben Okri, The Famished Road 1992: Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, and Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger 1993: Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha 1994: James Kelman, How late it was, how late 1995: Pat Barker, The Ghost Road 1996: Graham Swift, Last Orders 1997: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things 1998: Ian McEwan, Amsterdam 1999: J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace 2000: Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin 2001: Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang 2002: Yann Martel, Life of Pi 2003: D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little 2004: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty Cricket: The first recorded reference to a game of cricket in England appears in a manuscript from the thirteenth century titled History of England, where an illustration shows a batsman holding a bat in his right hand with another individual being shown with his hands stretched to catch something. In another manuscript from the fourteenth century, an illustration shows a field with monks playing cricket. The game was not free from controversy even then (it was known as “Hand-in” or “Hand-out”), however, as it was seen as a form of competition to archery and was discouraged. It is conjectured that the

game of cricket evolved from another game known as stool-ball. In stool-ball a player stood in front of a stool and another threw a ball at him. The player standing in front of the stool had to hit the ball with his hand; in case he failed to hit it and the ball touched the stool or if the thrower caught the ball as the first player hit it back, the players exchanged one other’s positions. Stool-ball was often, though not exclusively, played by women. The game was granted legitimacy in the eighteenth century when the Laws of Cricket were framed in 1789. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, three stumps had replaced two and a great degree of formalisation had come into the game. For a long period, however, the administration of cricket was not bought under any organisation, as it continued to be played in fairs and public gatherings well into the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century itself, other norms were in place: eleven players per team and straight bats instead of curved ones have remained valid in the modern age as well. Some years before the framing of the laws in 1789, the London Artillery Club framed a series of codes in 1844. The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which was constituted in 1788, became the body regulating the rules of the game and one of the foundational aspects of modern cricket, round-arm bowling, was legitimised in 1835 by the MCC. From being played in fairs, the game was regulated through the organisation of the County Championship, which began in 1873. The playing of Test matches, however, had started in 1861-62 when the English cricket team toured Australia. During the nineteenth century itself, the game spread to other parts of the globe, especially those enclaves where the British colonial presence was strong. Apart from Australia and England, in the twentieth century, many other countries were given Test status: South Africa (1888), India, West Indies, and New Zealand (1926), Pakistan (1952), Sri Lanka (1981), Zimbabwe (1992) and Bangladesh (2000). The regulatory body of international cricket was formed in 1909, which was known as the Imperial Cricket Conference and its founding members were England, Australia and South Africa. It was renamed the International Cricket Conference in 1965 and further the International Cricket Council in 1989. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the game’s territories where the game is played are being expanded, a move that has not been free from controversy. There have been questions about the performance of some Test teams and the popularity of one-day cricket (also known as the limited overs version, which was

started by the MCC in the 1960s) has tended to overshadow the appeal of the longer version. The recent introduction of the 20-20 format (the first international between Australia and New Zealand was played in February 2005) has been seen as a further give-in to the commercial interests, which began in the late 1970s. By the end of the twentieth century, the use of coloured gear, dress and the white ball became ubiquitous in the one-day format. The fact that England has not been able to win a single World Cup Championship organised by the ICC among the major cricket playing countries since the event began in 1975 shows how the game has spread outside its shores and produced some of the great players in countries that were considered insignificant for a considerable part of the twentieth century. Cubism: Cubism refers to a particular development in modern art. It has been defined as “the parent of all modern abstract movements although [it is] itself an avowedly realist movement.” (Murray and Murray 1997: 126) The main movers of Cubism were Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963). Both Picasso and Braque sought to change the Impressionist emphasis on the surface of object representation by concentrating on an intellectually informed visualisation. The Cubists drew inspiration from the works of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and extended the idea of reality by emphasising the structures that constitute it. The Cubist focus on the structural imperatives of the visual form was used to suggest different views based on the viewing positions of the audience. One of the common features on Cubism was the use of the superimposed effect to suggest the structural properties of painting. In 1907, the first Cubist exhibition was organised in Paris. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—a painting that has women constituted by jagged shapes, forms and figures, and the source of which was the model of African masks—is considered by many to be the starting point of Cubist painting. Geometric shapes provided Braque and Picasso the structure in their paintings through which they represented a series of landscapes in 1908. Houses at L’Estaque (1908) by Braque and Houses on the Hill (1909) by Picasso are representatives of the movement and it is on the basis of such paintings that the French critic Louis Vauxelles coined the term Cubism. Braque and Picasso went on to challenge the illusion of space by dispensing with the idea of the three-dimensional effect. Light was used sparingly and the difference between background and subject was

manipulated to create the impression of a superimposed reality. There are two phases of Cubism, analytical and synthetic. Analytical Cubism is the name given to the paintings of the first phase, which continued till 1912. A characteristic painting of this phase is the Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910) by Picasso, which brought together both background and foreground into a common dimension. The refusal to accede to the commonly perceived idea of reality highlighted Analytical Cubism’s growing insistence of fragmentariness as a determining feature. The second phase of Cubism, commonly known as Synthetic Cubism, began with the development of a method called ‘collage’. Picasso devised this method to demonstrate the combined effect of multiple sources as in a typical collage a piece of paper or some other matter is pasted onto the surface of a painting. Before the use of collage by Braque and Picasso, painting did not involve the pasting of other materials and it suggested the immense visual possibilities of multiple media in painting. Braque and Picasso used oil cloth, newspaper strips, and wallpaper pieces in their collages and it made possible for later artists to experiment with other materials once synthesising became successful. Both Braque and Picasso went on to innovate stylistically in ways that moved away from the general features of Cubism in their later works. The techniques used by Picasso and Braque were followed by other artists in Europe. A Cubist Manifesto was drawn in 1912 by Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. The influence, however, was not confined to France as the Spanish artist Juan Gris devised his own type of Cubist technique, best exemplified in his Breakfast (1915). Dada: Dada, one of the most radical and avant-garde art movements in the twentieth century, is seen as a precursor of other developments such as Surrealism and Futurism. The word ‘Dada,’ in French means a child’s hobbyhorse, and “yes, yes” in Romanian, and there was no logic behind its choice as the designatory term for the movement, one indication that eccentricity and a defiance of conventional norms would be the important motifs in the work of the Dadaists. Most of the artists and writers associated with Dada came together as refugees of the First World War in Switzerland. The movement as such did not last long, but interestingly formed part of the Modernist trend to overwhelm traditionally accepted value systems, ideologies and norms. Within the 1916–22 period, Dada travelled across Europe and had advocates

and patrons in Zürich (where it originated), Cologne, New York, Berlin and Paris. It has been rightly noted that Dada was “deliberately anti-art and antisense (and, unlike Surrealism, anti-politics as well), intended to shock and outrage” (Murray and Murray 1997: 129). The Dadaists revelled in rejecting the conventions of polite society, art and morals. Designed to shock and cause dismay, most of the exhibits of the artists were an engagement with defamiliarisation, the most well-known of which was the reworked Mona Lisa with a beard and moustache. It carried the caption LHOOQ (standing for elle a chaud au cul) and was “by” Duchamp. This tendency to resituate classics of art was extended to represent eccentricity and a celebration of the absurd. Remarkably outlandish and extravagant exhibits of the Dadaists include the display of a commonly used urinal as an art object by Duchamp, which he signed R. Mutt. While the attempt to put it up was foiled in New York, Duchamp did succeed in making his statement that the standards of art are not fixed but arbitrary. Similar attempts at inviting the shock response from the audience included the display of a bicycle wheel as an art object and the disjointed collages assembled and fixated without adhering to any formal structure. The Dadaists made great use of the collage format introduced by Cubism, but were more radical than Picasso and Braque. The extensive use of collage by the Dada artists have led some commentators to associate Cubist painters like Picasso with the movement. Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball are usually considered to be the inspiration behind Dada. The beginnings of Dada in Zürich were designed as revelries and the common site for such performances was the Cabaret Voltaire. During these performances random musical notes were combined with ‘poetry reading sessions’ to create the impression of cacophony. The poems did not conform to the conventions of verse and were meant to shock by their apparent lack of meaning. The Dadaists also had a journal titled Dada, which ran from 1917 to 1921. Even in the journal, extreme liberties were taken with the format, and typesetting and layout patterns were not part of the existing journalistic standards. A neo-Dada movement flourished for some time in the 1950s and 60s when American artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were associated with a kind of Dada afterlife. Football: The game of football, which is one of the most popular and eagerly followed sports in the world today, originated in the Middle Ages. It was a

‘mob game,’ played with great aggressiveness on festival days like Candlemas. It was not played on a regular basis and its violent character was perhaps one of the reasons for its prohibition. The game revived in the nineteenth century as one of the major sports in the public schools and it came to be associated with entertainment and recreation. Interestingly, many of the popular football clubs of England trace their origin to parishes where the game got encouragement from the church and Everton, Aston Villa and Bolton Wanderers, to name a few, are among those that initially functioned as representatives of the local church. The Football Association (FA), the central authority in British football, was constituted in 1863. It framed the rules of the game but the fact that kicking at the shins was considered a foul led to a major controversy, with some clubs deciding to side with the format designed by the Rugby School, which eventually led to the formation in 1871 of the Rugby Football Union. The Victorian period was the formative period for English football as the structuring process had a variety of sources (the framing of a set of rules in 1848 at Cambridge University is one instance). The conflict between football associations continued as the Northern Union broke away from the Rugby Union in 1895 (known as the Rugby League after 1922) to introduce the system of payment to players and officials. For a major part of the nineteenth century, footballers affiliated to the Football Association were playing as professionals. The Football Association was responsible for taking the game to the masses, which included the organisation of the FA Challenge Cup (started 1871–82) and other tournaments. Another important step towards professionalisation of the sport was the formation of the Football League which had 44 clubs in its first year in 1888. The north-south divide was apparent in the way football administration was managed in the early part of the twentieth century. During the first two decades, for instance, the northern clubs (Arsenal was an exception) moved ahead of the southern ones, which played under its own league formed in 1894. The frenzy associated with English football today is a post-War development. After the Second World War, when the league competition resumed after a brief suspension during the war years, English football became associated with direct telecast of the matches. The showing of football matches on television (which gained momentum after 1955, when ITV entered the scene) considerably affected audience participation in the 1950s and the 60s. A major impact of the telecast of football matches was the

inevitable commercialisation of the game. With the lifting of restrictions regarding the transfer of professional from one club to another in 1961, the distinction between clubs widened considerably. The growing clout of the Professional Footballers’ Association meant that players received incredible sums and enjoyed cult status among fans. Both clubs and players from the 1960s have benefited commercially from the game. By the 1960s, the internationalisation of the game was taking place at a rapid pace and when England won the World Cup in 1966, football became the craze of the nation. Another aspect of the growth of the English League was the increasing movement of players to and from European clubs. The interest in the European circuit has often been taken as a deterrent to a spirited national performance as top players today negotiate between a choice of club and country depending on the given situation. Today, their clubs prize players like Michael Owen, David Beckham and Wayne Rooney, and every act of theirs—on-and off-the-field—is followed with great eagerness by the fans. Clubs like Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Newcastle and Chelsea have fans all over the world and there is a great demand for their merchandise as well. Fringe Theatre: The term ‘fringe theatre’ refers to those theatre festivals which are unjuried and not regulated by the conventional structures of mainstream theatre. In the twentieth century, there has been a great spurt in fringe theatre activities. Some of the places where fringe theatre festivals are organised are Edinburgh, Adelaide and Winnipeg. Fringe theatre also refers to the alternative theatre where orthodox dramatic conventions do not determine the criteria for performances. As fringe theatre provides great scope for innovation and experimentation, it has always catered to a particular segment of the theatre-going public and performances are held regularly in places like London outside the festival circuit. Edinburgh Fringe, which is the largest fringe theatre festival in the world, began in 1947. Fringe festivals do not follow a strict format and are usually organised as a rebuff to the main event (the Edinburgh Fringe began on the sidelines of the Edinburgh International Festival). Fringe theatre is open to all performers, whether amateur or professional and there are no limitations imposed on the character or design of the performances. One of the difficulties faced by the organisers of fringe theatre festivals relates to the excess of applicants, in which case

selection is done on the basis of a non-judgemental factor, such as the number of application or simply a random draw of lots. The organising group takes a fee for the management of the festival. As the fringe theatrical scene is subject to a prescribed set of rules, a typical fringe drama is not easy to define. The sharing of technical personnel, minimum of technicality, and smaller casts are some of the characteristics of fringe theatre. Solo performances are common at fringe festivals. The amateurish character of fringe theatre is connected to the shorter duration of the performances. Futurism: Futurism was an early twentieth century artistic movement that was centred in Italy, but it also had interesting German and Russian variants. It was characterised by an emphasis on speed, dynamism, power and restlessness and aimed to portray the experience of modernity in all its chaos. The movement was officially announced on February 20, 1909 with the publication of a manifesto by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. As a term, Futurism was supposed to address the dynamism of modern life as opposed to the static and boring structures that characterised previous art forms. Futurism sought to celebrate originality and innovation. One of the important symbols of the movement was the motor car as it reflected both speed and technology. Marinetti called for aggressiveness in the arts and the destruction of old values represented by the artefacts and books in museums and libraries. The rejection of tradition by Marinetti and his followers drew attention of the public in the early years of the twentieth century. Harry Potter: Harry Potter is the name of a popular book series, the first of which was published in 1997. The books in the series have been authored by J.K. Rowling (1965–), who said that there were seven books planned— each dealing with Harry Potter, the central figure’s adventures and experiences at Hogwarts School of Wizcraft and Wizardry covering his secondary school career. Combining elements of magic, fantasy, and the school story frame, the Harry Potter books have been extremely popular not only in the English speaking world but in other cultures as well, as the numerous translations of the books signify. Of the seven books originally planned, five were published by 2004. The following titles of the Harry Potter series have been published:

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)—also released as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the United States (1998) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005).

Warner Bros. has made films of the first three books and has plans for the other volumes as well. The Harry Potter series is one example of not just best-sellers capturing the popular imagination but also of it sustaining the initial euphoria. The success of the series has made its author J.K. Rowling one of the richest persons in England. Imagism: Imagism was a Modernist movement in poetry which had both English and American practitioners. The Imagists derived their name from the French title Des Imagistes, which was the name of the first collection of poems published by these poets in 1914. Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and F.S. Flint were the major figures of the movement. They believed in the concentration of thought and emotion in an ‘image.’ Imagism developed as a reaction to the Romanticism of some early twentieth century poets and the focus on intellectualism was designed to facilitate the removal of any form of excess in representation. When Pound found Vorticism to be more appealing in 1914, Amy Lowell took over the leadership of the group. Other followers included John Gould Fletcher and Harriet Monroe, while the verse of Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens showed the influence of the movement. Four Imagist anthologies were published (in 1914, 1915, 1916 and 1917) and individual poems were published in different magazines like Poetry. Little Magazines: Little magazines first made their entry in the 1880s and have been received by selected audiences ever since. Technically, a ‘little magazine’ refers to any of the periodical publications devoted to serious literary writings. Often avant-garde, these magazines are not driven by commercial motives. One of the principles behind the publication of little magazines involves the objective of providing a platform to writers and artists who are not otherwise granted the opportunity to have their compositions printed in the mainstream journals. Little magazines have provided great scope for experimentation and launched new styles and modes in twentieth century literature. Another characteristic of little magazines is that the production, editorial policy and financial management are not handled within the conventional paradigms of commercial structures that distinguish mainstream magazines. The scholarly and intellectual bent of these little magazines facilitated interesting departures from the conventional modes of literary practice. The little magazine culture was most active in the

early decades of the twentieth century. The first little magazine was Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1912), which was edited by Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound, who was the foreign editor. Many other magazines appeared during the First World War. These included Others (1915–19), edited by Alfred Kreymborg, The Little Review (1914–29), edited by Margaret Anderson, and The Egoist (1914–19), edited by Dora Mardson (1914) and Harriet Shaw Weaver (1914–19). Many writers of the twentieth century made their first appearance through little magazines: T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Edgar Lee Masters, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens and James Joyce published important work in some of the little magazines of the time. During the first decade itself other little magazines especially with a leftist stance, appeared, of which The Masses (1911–17) was the most influential. The literary journals that made their mark in the 1920s—Modern Review (1922–24), edited by Firwoode Tarleton, The Fugitive (1922–25), edited at different stages by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren, Voices (1921–65), edited by Harold Vinal, Secession (1922–24), edited by Gorham Munson, Broom (1921–24) edited by Harold Loeb and Alfred Kreymborg, This Quarter (1925–32), edited by Ernest J. Walsh and The Enemy (1927–29), edited by Wyndham Lewis—provided for an unprecedented intellectual climate in the early decades of the twentieth century. Some of the major publications that built upon the little magazine tradition in the 1930s include New Masses (1926– 48), Modern Quarterly (1923–40), The Anvil (1933–35), Blast (1933–34) and The Partisan Review (1933–). T.S. Eliot’s Criterion (1922–1939) and Eugene Jolas’s Transition were other influential journals of the 1920s and 30s. In its first phase, the French little magazines influenced opinion and were also responsible for the launching of literary movements. During this time the British and the American efforts were directed towards the circulation of Continental ideas and trends. American magazines started making an impact in the second phase (1915–30) by determining the possibilities of literary practice. The next phase saw the rise of those magazines that were ‘left’ inclined, of which the Partisan Review in America and The Left Review in Britain were the most important. Literary magazines from the 1940s have been increasingly concerned with the writings of academics and critics. The trend set by Scrutiny, and The Kenyon Review moved to more specialised terrains and in spite of publishers, and university presses facilitating the

publication of subject-based journals from the second part of the twentieth century, the little magazine culture continues in both Britain and America, but the influence is considerably muted. Manet and the Post-Impressionists: In November 1910, an exhibition titled “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” was organised by the British art critic Roger Fry in the Grafton Galleries, London. The success of the first exhibition encouraged Fry to hold another one (October 1912) two years later. Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh were among the artists whose works were on display in Fry’s first exhibition. Along with these three major artists representing Post-Impressionism, the work of Georges Seurat was also exhibited. Seurat is considered to be a representative of neo-Impressionism, a mode where the terms of Impressionism were extended to more rational formats. Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh, on the other hand, sought to make representations more colourful and moved away from the importance given to mere appearances by the Impressionists. Fry’s exhibitions were highly publicised and got large audiences. The exhibition brought the work of the Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh before English audiences for the first time. Reception of the paintings was mixed as conservatives considered Fry mad and the paintings degenerate, while many artists welcomed them. Midnight’s Children: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is recognised as one of the classics of post-colonial literature. It is an allegory that deals with certain events after India’s independence from the British rule in 1947. The central character and narrator of the novel, Saleem Sinai, is born exactly at the stroke of that midnight when India became independent. The developments in Saleem’s life run parallel to the unfolding of the new India, and the way the narrative is organised, it reads as a form of social representation. This use of the social representative mode is undercut by the regular ‘distortion’ of ‘facts,’ and the narrative constitutes one of the many possible representations of modern India. The text is a wonderful example of the politics of representation and a commentary on the relativity of viewing positions. Saleem Sinai makes this aspect clear in the chapter called “AllIndia radio”: “Reality is a matter of perspective” (Rushdie 1995: 165). In the same chapter, there is an interesting passage that challenges the ‘authentic’ version of Gandhi’s assassination:

Re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can’t judge. I’ll have to leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I’ve started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began… (Rushdie 1995: 166). Several Characteristics of the Novel Emerge in this Passage: the narrator talks about “my India,” and distinguishes it from “the actual sequence of events.” The “error in chronology” that the narrator refers to is the standard version, the version which has become settled as the most widely accepted one amongst the many representations that claim to authenticate the experience of India’s independence. Midnight’s Children brings to focus the issue of constructedness involved in every representation. What a text like Midnight’s Children does is to unravel the narratorial strategies that characterise fiction. In this sense, Rushdie’s novel departs from the classic realist mode, where a given assumption of reality is unquestioningly accepted and taken for granted. Rushdie’s novel offers many versions of the real in the course of the narrative, and instead of the reality with an upper case R, his narrative provides alternative structures of many realities. Midnight’s Children has also been viewed as an example of both magic realism and post-modernism. The almost surreal recapturing of India’s postindependent years is brilliantly interwoven through the visions of Saleem. Rushdie’s use of the conjunction of personal experience and external ‘history’ has had many imitators. The novel was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and the “Booker of Bookers” (the best among Booker winning novels in its first twenty-five years) in 1993. The Newbolt Report: The Newbolt Report (1921) on the status of education was a major landmark in the history of English studies. The Newbolt Committee was in fact preceded by four other committees which were set up between 1918–19 to address the issues involved in the study of science,

modern languages, classics and English. The Newbolt Committee, which was constituted under the Sir Henry Newbolt, had for its members educationists and thinkers like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, J.H. Fowler and Caroline Spurgeon. The primary objective of the Committee was indicated in the following way: “To inquire into the position occupied by English [Language and Literature] in the educational system of England, and to advise how its study may best be promoted in schools of all types, including Continuation Schools, and in Universities, and other Institutions of Higher Education, regard being had to: (1) the requirements of a liberal education; (2) the needs of business, the professions, and public services; and (3) the relation of English to other studies.” (Cited in Mathieson 1976: 72) The Committee in its Report highlighted the distinction that existed between the levels of English education delivered in different types of schools. Such discrimination, the Committee emphasised, went against the ideal of social equality and as such, it argued that education ought to serve the cause of social improvement. It was not simply possible to carry out reforms in education without effecting a change in the social configuration—a focus that was characteristically Arnoldian in the way it sought to integrate education, culture and social structure. The Committee also suggested that English literature was resourceful enough to culturally orient the students in a way similar to that done by the classics, but the teaching of classics was to be auxiliary and not primary in the newly envisaged educational programme. It was essential for the student to acquire competence in his own language (the emphasis was placed on the idea of a “national education”), which would also enhance his personality. The Committee thus proposed that English literature should be introduced in the elementary schools to invigorate them culturally and to imbibe in the students the spirit of nationalism. English education, in the vision of the Committee, was to be pursued almost with a missionary zeal, with teachers carrying out the function of preachers. Such a religiosity was evident in other educational texts of the time as well and was, in a sense, symptomatic of the intellectual climate prevailing at the time (George Sampson’s English for the English is another example). The Committee considered the introduction of English studies in the school curriculum to be one of the most potent ways of culturally elevating the generations in conditions of increasing mechanisation.

Screen: One of the major cultural landmarks in England in twentieth century was the success of Screen, a journal devoted to film studies which began in the 1950s. The history of the journal is traced to the formation of the Society of Film Teachers (SFT), which was founded in 1950. The Society was formed with the intention of promoting the teaching/learning of film studies in educational institutions and clubs. The body was voluntary but its attraction lay in the way it was devised to address an area of study that had been ignored or remained unaddressed. The year 1952 saw the SFT launching the journal titled The Film Teacher, which was edited by Derek J. Davies. Davies sought to attend to the necessity of cultivating the culture of proper film appreciation at a time when it was not part of mainstream cultural studies. In fact, the movement initiated by the SFT is a milestone in the history of British cultural studies. The Film Teacher however did not have smooth run in its initial phase as the high running costs of maintaining a journal made it difficult to sustain it on a regular basis. That is why the first couple of years saw it being irregularly published, a problem the Society sought to address by relying on other resources. The early years for the Society, therefore, were not easy as it was more a matter of survival than a sustained qualitative intellectual engagement. The irregular production of the journal saw a change in attitude and design as the Society decided to adopt a format change. From a print journal The Film Teacher became a mimeograph and the generic transformation to a newsletter allowed it a greater manoeuvrability. Such a change was brought about under the editorship of Jan B. Hoare. This arrangement of the newsletter continued till 1955 and the article was quietly dropped from the title (the journal now became Film Teacher) in 1956 when H.R. (Ray) Wills took over as the editor. 1959 was another significant year for the Society as the SFT became the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT). Screen Education, the print journal of the newly christened group, appeared in October 1956 and it was edited by Ray Wills. For ten years (1959–1968) Screen Education ran into 48 issues. In 1969, the journal was further renamed and it now became just Screen. Published in the tenth year of SEFT the first issue of Screen inaugurated the tenth volume. The patronage of SEFT by the British Film Institute with a grant-in-aid went a long way in providing it much needed fillip and contributed to its institutionalisation. Screen’s assumption of a definitive role in the cultural climate of the late twentieth century has been marked by the

fact that it has made available a platform for film studies when the area’s boundaries were not yet defined. It has thus been playing a pioneering role in providing a direction to British film and cultural studies; that many of Screen’s positions have been polemical is not to be counted as a disadvantage. In fact, such a polemicist orientation has drawn attention to hitherto unaddressed topics and subjects in the arena of film studies. Since 1989, the John Logie Baird Centre at the University of Glasgow has functioned as the centre for Screen as SEFT was dismantled that year. The editorship had also since moved to Glasgow based academics and intellectuals with the publication being handled by Oxford University Press. Currently, an international Editorial Advisory Board controls the operations of Screen with editorial responsibility borne by scholars from different parts of the UK. Scrutiny: Scrutiny was the name of a literary journal which came out from Cambridge from 1932 to 1953. Over a period of two decades, Scrutiny was closely associated with F.R. Leavis and it promoted a view of culture and education that has acquired the label “Leavisite.” In spite of the insistence on the preservation of high cultural standards and the propagation of the ideals of English studies based on a diet of ethical orientation, Scrutiny never became a large-circulation organ. This seems paradoxical in the context of the influence it has exerted in the fields of English teaching and literary criticism for a major part of the twentieth century in almost all the centres where English is studied. Along with the American New Criticism, the Scrutiny view of literary interpretation has dominated English studies for quite some time and it was only the advent of structuralist and poststructuralist reading options which challenged its hegemony in literary criticism. As a journal, Scrutiny was represented by the views of a select few —a group of critics that included F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Denys Thompson, among others. The writers who contributed to the journal sought to combine literary criticism with an emphasis on ‘good taste’ and a sophisticated view of culture. Criticism was viewed by the Leavisites as a technical art, which required a rigour that ordinary aesthetes were not equipped to follow. In an essay titled “Retrospect” published in 1963, F.R. Leavis looked back to the Scrutiny ideal in the following terms: “Our special business was literary criticism but we saw nothing arbitrary in taking the creative process of criticism—that interplay of personal

judgements in which values are established and a world created that is neither public in the sense congenial to science nor merely private—as representative and type of the process in which the human world is created and renewed and kept living…” (Leavis 1963: 5–6). In fact, one of the aims of the journal was to engineer the formation of an élite through guidance and instruction. This constitutes a difference from the similarly inclined critical position of the American New Criticism which wasn’t that emphatic about the cultural negotiations that Leavis and his followers were intent upon. Scrutiny was influential in shaping the direction of English studies and publications such as Boris Ford edited Pelican Guide to English Literature (later rechristened The New Pelican Guide) amply manifest this influence. Suffragette Movement: The Suffragette movement was related to the agitation programme for the securing of voting rights for women in Britain. The movement was active at the beginning of the twentieth century. The most important figure of the movement was Emmeline Pankhurst, whose ‘militant’ policies and aggressive leadership led the Daily Mail to give the title ‘suffragette’ to distinguish this group from other moderate feminists. Emmeline Panhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903, but its inability to draw the attention of the media as well as the public made her chose a more aggressive path. In order to assert their call for voting rights, the suffragettes started disrupting public meetings and throwing stones at shop windows. The Speaker blocked a move by the Liberal government to include female suffrage in the Franchise Bill of 1912, which led to further aggressiveness on part of the suffragettes, who broke windows and destroyed paintings. Emily Davison died in 1913 as she threw herself in front of the king’s horse during the Derby. In order to stop the suffragettes from going on hunger strike and thus get released from prisons earlier, the government brought in the Cat and Mouse Act (1913) which facilitated the release of the suffragettes for the purpose of recovery, following which they were arrested again. The use of aggressive methods to draw public attention was not received well and when the Great War began in 1914, the Suffragette movement became inactive. When voting rights for women above thirty were granted in the 1918 Representation of People Act, a major demand made by the suffragettes had been conceded, though it was achieved by the enterprising women and men who worked towards it without adopting any form of militancy. Complete voting rights for women were granted in 1928.

Surrealism: Surrealism is a Modernist movement in the arts. It emphasised the representation of the imagination in terms of dreams and dealt with the possibilities of its realisation. Surrealists supposedly avoided conscious control over their artefacts. It began in France with the works of André Breton. Breton published his Manifested u surréalisme in 1924. Often closely associated with Dada, Surrealism carried forward many of the principles of the previous movement. Breton and other surrealists sought to represent the ‘true’ process of thought and tried to suggest that only the depiction of the irrational could free artists from the paradigms of convention. The first movement of Surrealism was towards fantasy, where previously existing objects were reoriented either by a strange title or by a process of composition. The second movement—depicting the dream world—was often organised in both realistic and distorted formats and in juxtapositions of the unconventional, which were designed to suggest the reality of dreams. The Surrealists’ search for meaning was inspired by the psychoanalytical theories of Freud. Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Pierre Roy, Paul Delvaux, and Joan Miró were the major Surrealist painters. The works of these painters were highly individualistic and governed by self-determined structures. Of the new modes introduced by the Surrealists, frottage (which involved the rubbing of graphite over other substances, including wood), grattage (the scraping of the canvas), and automatic drawing are the most famous. In their attempt to portray the randomness of experience, the Surrealists also made immensely realistic representations, which, however, did not seem to mean much, as they were dissociated from their conventional settings. André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Pierre Reverdy were some of the important Surrealist poets. Thatcherism: The term ‘Thatcherism’ refers to the policies, philosophy and attitude of Margaret Thatcher and her followers in the Conservative Party in the 1980s when she was the Prime Minister of England. Privatisation, a liberal and free market economy, opposition to trade unionism and lower rates of taxation are some of the characteristics associated with Thatcherism. The term has been used in a derogatory sense by social commentators like Stuart Hall, who see the Thatcherite insistence on free capital outflow as being responsible for the economic slump in the late 1980s and early 90s. Thatcherism has been characterised by certain key principles, among which the control of inflation by monetarism, disciplining of trade unionism through

legal agencies, and the accumulation of wealth through entrepreneurs’ enterprise are significant. The early eighties were also significant for the frenzied spirit of nationalism, which reached a high pitch during the Falklands episode. Primarily, a distancing from the Socialist perspective constituted the Thatcherite ideal and it resulted in two corollaries: the increase in the rich/poor divide and a great sense of material prosperity. Other aspects of Thatcherism include important social developments such as the failure of marriages and the rise in personal debt. When John Major took over as the Prime Minister of Britain in 1990 (with the support of Margaret Thatcher) he continued the Thatcherite principles, but the fact that he took an initiative within three years of going “back to basics” suggests that the consequences of Thatcherism were beginning to tell—both politically and economically. In the 1980s, Thatcherism ensured a steady growth rate as the policy of privatisation yielded unprecedented results. Capitalist growth was accompanied by an alarming increase in unemployment, which was an important factor influencing the political change from the Conservative regime to the “New Labour” of Tony Blair. When the “New” Labour came to power, many of the positions held by the previous Conservative government were reversed; thus, in the 1990s and in the early years of the twenty-first, there has been a revival of industries relating to the services sector. Vorticism: Vorticism is often considered the first avant garde art movement in Britain. Numerous exhibitions, especially of European artists, held in the first decade of the twentieth century facilitated the emergence of Vorticism. The influence of preceding art movements like Cubism or Futurism can be discerned in the works of Vorticists. The adoption of geometrization in Vorticism is clearly a Cubist influence while the manifestation of urban, technological and sophisticated themes show Futurist tendencies. Although Vorticism formally appeared on the scene of Modern art in 1914, it belonged to the tradition of the avant-garde, which was already in place in the first decade of the twentieth century. The movement was led and orchestrated by the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis. Lewis formed the Rebel Art Centre with Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, and Edward Wadsworth, which laid the groundwork for the movement. The first issue of their journal Blast (“Review of the Great English Vortex”) was published in July 1914. Blast had many reviews written by Lewis, poems by Ezra Pound (who incidentally coined the term “Vorticism”), the opening section of The Good Soldier by

Ford Madox Ford and “Indissoluble Matrimony” by Rebecca West. It also carried reproductions of some Vorticist paintings. The “War Number” of Blast, which was also its second issue, came out in 1915. Two exhibitions of Vorticist paintings were organised during the First World War—in London (1915) and in New York (1917). The failure of the Group X exhibition (1920) signalled the movement’s loss of momentum, which had anyway suffered because of the disruption caused by the First World War.

Bibliography Abrams, M.H., Ed., English Romantic Poets, New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. ——— et al., Eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth edition, 2 Volumes, London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1993. Adams, Robert M., The Land and Literature of England: A Historical Account, London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1983. Allen, Walter, The English Novel: A Short Critical History, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958. Anderson, George K., Old and Middle English Literature from the Beginnings to 1485, New York: Collier Books, 1962. Anderson, Perry, English Questions, London: Verso, 1992. Anderson, Walter Truett, Ed., The Fontana Postmodernism Reader, London: Fontana, 1996. Appadurai, Arjun, Ed., Globalization, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Arnold, Matthew, Essays in Criticism, First and Second Series, Ed., S.P. Sengupta, Calcutta: World Press, 1970. Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helenm Key Concepts in PostColonial Studies, London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Ashworth, William, The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning: A Study in Economic and Social History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954. Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice, Ed., Vivien Jones, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. Baker, Martin, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. Baldick, Chris, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Barr, Charles, Ealing Studios, London: Studio Vista, 1993. Bland, A.E., Brown, P.A., and Tawney, R.H. Eds., English Economic History: Select Documents, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914. Bennett, H.S., Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions,

1150–1400, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937. Beer, Gillian, Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney, London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Biddiss, Michael D., The Age of the Masses: Ideas and Society in Europe Since 1870, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. Bindoff, S.T., Tudor England, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1983 rpt. Blamires, Harry, A Short History of English Literature, Second Edition, London and New York: Routledge, 1984. Boehmer, Elleke, Ed., Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature, 1870–1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Bond, Edward, Saved, in Bond Plays: One, London: Metheun, 1977. Bowra, C.M., The Romantic Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Bradbury, Malcolm, The Modern World: Ten Great Writers, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. ——— and McFarlane, James, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 rpt. ——— Ed., The Atlas of Literature, London: De Agostini Editions, 1996. Brannigan, John, Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945–2000, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Briggs, Asa, A Social History of England, Third edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999. Briggs, Katherine, British Folk-Tales and Legends: A Sampler, London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Ed., N.H. Keeble, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984. Butler, Christopher, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Caine, Barbara, English Feminism 1780-1980, Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1997. Cannon, John, Ed., The Oxford Companion to British History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Carter, Ronald and McRae, John., The Routledge History of Literature in English, London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Clark, G. Kitson, The Making of Victorian England, London: Methuen, 1965. Coffin, Judith, Stacey, Robert C., Lerner, Robert, E., and Meacham. Western Civilisations: Their History & Culture, Vols. 1 & 2, 14th edition, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2002. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria, Ed., Nigel Leask, London: Everyman, 1997. Collini, Stefan, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Coote, Stephen, The Penguin Short History of English Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. Cowie, L.W., The Wordsworth Dictionary of British Social History, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1996. Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the LifeCycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Cuddon, J.A., Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Fourth edition, London: Penguin, 1999. Daunton, M.J., Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Dickens, Charles, Hard Times, Ed., Paul Schlicke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Docherty, Thomas, Ed., Postmodernism: A Reader, Harlow: Pearson, 1993. Dodsworth, Martin, Ed., The Twentieth Century: The Penguin History of English Literature, Vol. 7, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994. Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan, Eds., Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, Second Edition, First Indian Reprint, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Drury, John, The Poetry Dictionary, Cincinnati: Story Press, 1995.

Dryden, John, Marriage à la Mode, Ed., Mark S. Auburn, London: Edward Arnold, 1981. During, Simon, Ed., The Cultural Studies Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Edgar, Andrew and Sedgwick, Peter, Ed., Key Concepts in Cultural Theory, First Indian Reprint, London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Erickson, Amy Louise, Women and Property in Early Modern England, London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Feuchtwanger, E.J., Democracy and Empire: Britain, 1865–1914, London: Arnold, 1985. Forbes, Jill and Street, Sarah Eds., European Cinema: An Introduction, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Tavistock, 1972. Fuery, Patrick and Mansfield, Nick, Cultural Studies and the New Humanities: Concepts and Controversies, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997. Garnett, Mark and Weight, Richard, Modern British History: The Essential A–Z Guide, London: Pimlico, 2004. Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, Eds., The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, Second edition, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1996. Gillie, Christopher, Longman Companion to English Literature, London: Longman, 1980. Given-Wilson, Chris, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth-Century Political Community, London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Grant, Alexander, and Stringer, Keith J., Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Happé, Peter, Ed., English Mystery Plays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Hardy, Thomas, The Trumpet Major, Ed., Roger Ebbatson, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Harrington, John P., Ed., Modern Irish Drama, A Norton Critical Edition,

New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1991. Hay, Denis, “Idea of Renaissance” in Philip P. Weiner Ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. 4, New York: Charles Scribners’ and Sons, 1973. Head, Dominic, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hesmondhalgh, David, The Cultural Industries, London, Thousand Oaks: New Delhi, Sage, 2002. Hibbert, Christopher, The English—A Social History 1066-1945, London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1987. Hicks, Michael, English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century, London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Hill, John and Gibson, Pamela Church, Eds., The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hilton, Rodney, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381, London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Hobsbawm, Eric, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991, London: Abacus, 1995. ———, The New Century, London: Abacus, 2000. Holderness, Graham, “Radical Potentiality and Institutional Closure” in Robert Shaughnessy, Ed., Shakespeare on Film: New Casebooks, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Holmes, George, The Later Middle Ages, 1272-1485, Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962. Hoodless, Pat, History and English in the Primary School: Exploiting the Links, London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Hopkins, David, Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hopkins, Eric, Industrialisation and Society: A Social History, 1830–1951, London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Howe, Stephen, Empire: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Hunter, Jim, The Metaphysical Poets, London: Evans Brothers, 1965. Irigaray, Luce, “The Question of the Other” Translated by Noah Guynn: Yale

French Studies, 87, 1995, 7–19. Johnson, Paul, A History of the Jews, London, Phoenix, 1995. Johnston, R.J., Taylor, Peter J., and Watts, Michael J., Eds. Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, Second edition, Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Judd, Denis, Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present, London: Fontana, 1997. Knight, Frances, The Nineteenth-Century Church and English Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kumar, Krishan, The Making of English National Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Lambdin, Laura Cooner, and Lambdin, Robert Thomas, Eds. A Companion to Old and Middle English Literature, Westport: CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Leavis, F.R., ‘Scrutiny’: A Retrospect,” Scrutiny, XX, 1963, 4. Leitch, Vincent B., et al., Eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001. Leith, Dick, A Social History of English, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Levin, Harry, Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Lipson, E., The Economic History of England, Twelfth Edition, London: A. & C. Black, 1959. Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979. Macey, David, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000. MacHan, Tim William and Scott, Charles T., English in Its Social Contexts: Essays in Historical Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Manly, J.M., “Literary Forms and the New Theory of the Origin of Species”,

Modern Philology 4, 1906–07, 577–95. Mathieson, Margaret, The Preachers of Culture, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1975. Metcalf, R. Thomas, Ideologies of the Raj, South Asian Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Metz, Christian, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. M. Taylor, New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Moody, William Vaughn and Lovett, Robert Morss, A History of English Literature, Revised by Fred B. Millett, Eighth Edition, Ludhiana: Kalyani Publishers, 1986. Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Murray, Peter and Murray, Linda, The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists, Seventh Edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997. Nasta, Susheila, Ed., Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk, London and New York: Routledge, 2004. O’Driscoll, Sally, “Outlaw Readings: Beyond Queer Theory,” Signs: A Journal of Women, Culture and Society, 22:1, 1996. Ousby, Ian Ed., The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1994. Outram, Dourinda, The Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Porter, Roy, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Second edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Prior, Mary, Women in English Society, 1500–1800, London and New York: Routledge, 1985. Protherough, Robert and King, Peter, The Challenge of English in the National Curriculum, London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Ragussis, Michael, Figures of Conversion: The Jewish Question & English National Identity, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Rice, Eugene F. and Grafton, Anthony. The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559, South Asian Edition, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004.

Richards, I.A., Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement, Indian Reprint, New Delhi: Universal Book Stall, 1991. Roberts, Thomas J., An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction, Georgia and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Roe, Sue Ed., Women Reading Women’s Writing, Brighton: Harvester, 1987. Rothblatt, Sheldon, Tradition and Change in English Liberal Education: An Essay in History and Culture, London: Faber and Faber, 1976. Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, London: Vintage, 1995. ———, Step Across the Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002, London: Vintage, 2003. Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage, 1994. ———, Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, Ed., Gauri Viswanathan, New York: Vintage, 2002. Sanders, Andrew, The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Third edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Selden, Raman, Ed., The Theory of Criticism: A Reader, London: Longman, 1990. Sinfield, Alan Ed., Society and Literature 1945–1970, London: Methuen, 1983. Smith, Roger, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences, London: Fontana, 1997. Smithson, Isaiah and Ruff, Nancy, English Studies/Culture Studies: Institutionalizing Dissent, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Spangenburg, Ray and Moser, Diane K., The History of Science in the Nineteenth Century, Hyderabad: Universities Press, 1999. Sprat, Thomas, History of the Royal Society, in J.E. Spingarn, Ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908. Stearns, Peter N., European Society in Upheaval: Social History since 1750, London: Macmillan, 1975. Steger, Manfred B., Globalisation: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Stenton, Doris May, English Society in the Early Middle Ages,

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952. Strickland, Geoffrey. “F.R. Leavis and ‘English’” in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 8: The Present, Ed. Boris Ford, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Styan, J.L., The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Tew, Philip, The Contemporary British Novel, London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Tomlinson, John, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Townson, Duncan, The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern History 1789– 1945, Second edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001. Trevelyan, G.M., English Social History, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Trollope, Anthony, Four Lectures, Ed. M.L. Parrish, London: Constable, 1938. Viswanathan, Gauri, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Whittaker, David J. Ed., The Terrorism Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780–1950, London: Chatto & Windus, 1958. ———, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, London: Fontana, 1974. Willey, Basil, “In Memoriam” in Robert H. Ross Ed., In Memoriam: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, A Norton Critical Edition, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1973. Waugh, Patricia, Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Background 1960–1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Wiener, Martin Joel, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, Second Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Widdowson, Peter, The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and its Contexts 1500–2000, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Wolfreys, Julian Ed., Introducing Literary Theories: A Guide and Glossary,

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1988. Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas, Ed., Morag Shiach, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Wright, Austin, Ed., Victorian Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Wright, Louis B., Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935. Wynne-Davis, Marion, Ed., Prentice Hall Guide to English Literature, New York: Prentice Hall, 1990. Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, London and New York: Routledge, 1990.