The Faerie Queene (Oxford Companion)

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

The Faerie Queene, the greatest work of *Spenser, of which the first three books were published 1590, and the second three 1596.

The general scheme of the work is proposed in the author's introductory letter addressed to *Ralegh. By the Faerie Queene the poet signifies Glory in the abstract and *Elizabeth I in particular (who also figures under the names of *Britomart, *Belphoebe, *Mercilla, and *Gloriana). Twelve of her knights, the 'patrons' or examples of 12 different virtues, each undertake an adventure, on the 12 successive days of the queen's annual festival, and an account of their origins was to have been given in the last of 12 books. Prince Arthur symbolizes 'magnificence', in the Aristotelian sense (says the author) of the perfection of all the other virtues (he must have meant not 'magnificence' but 'magnanimity', or 'gentlemanliness'). Arthur has a  vision of the Faerie Queene and, determining to seek her out, is brought into the adventures of the several knights and carries them to a successful issue. This explanation, given in the introduction,does not appear from the poem itself, for the authors starts at once with the adventures of the knights; as we have it the poem does not conform to his scheme. Of the six books Spenser published, the subjects are:

I, the adventures of the *Redcrosse Knight of Holiness (the Anglican Church), the protector of the virgin *Una (truth, or the true religion), and the wiles of *Archimago and *Duessa.

the Redcrosse Knight, in Bk I of Spenser's *Faerie Queene, St. George, the patron saint of England. He is separated from *Una (the true religion) by the wiles of *Archimago (hypocrisy) and is led away by *Duessa (the Roman Catholic religion) to the House of Pride. He drinks of an enchanted stream, loses his strength, and is made captive by the giant *Orgoglio (pride). Orgoglio is slain by Prince *Arthur, and Una leads her knight to the House of Holiness, to learn repentance and be healed. The Knight and Una are finally betrothed, after he has killed the dragon which besieged her parents' castle.

Una, in Bk. I of Spenser's *Faerie Queene, typifies singleness of the true religion. She is separated from the *Redcrosse Knight of Holiness (the Anglican Church) by the wiles of *Archimago, but meets and is protected by a lion, until the latter is killed by *Sansloy, who carries Una off to a forest. She is rescued by fauns and satyrs, and is finally united to the Redcrosse Knight.

Archimago, or Archimage, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, is the great enchanter, symbolizing Hypocrisy, who deceives *Una by assuming the appearance of the *Redcrosse Knight (I.i). His deceits are exposed and Archimago is 'layd full low in dungeon deepe' (I.xii.36). From this he emerges in Bk II to seek vengeance on Sir *Guyon for what he has suffered at the hands of the Redcrosse Knight, and employs *Braggadochio for the purpose. 

Duessa, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, the daughter of Deceit and Shame, Falsehood in general, in Bk I signifies in particular the Roman Catholic Church, and in V.ix, Mary Queen of Scots.

Orgoglio (Italian, signifying haughtiness), in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (I. vii, viii) captures the *Redcrosse Knight, and is slain by Prince *Arthur.

Arthur, Prince, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene. He symbolizes 'Magnificence' (Magnanimity), in the Aristotelian sense of the perfection of all the virtues. He enters into the adventures of the several knights and brings them to a fortunate conclusion. His chief adventures are the slaying of the three-bodied monster *Geryoneo and the rescue from him of Belge (the Netherland) V. x, xi); and, jointly with *Artegall, the slaying of the *soldan (Philip II) in his 'charret hye' (the Armada) (V. viii).

Sansfoy, Sansjoy, and Sansloy, three brothers in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (I. ii. 25 et seq.). Sansfoy ('faithless') is slain by the *Redcrosse Knight, who also defeats Sansjoy ('joyless') but the latter is saved from death by *Duessa. Sansloy ('lawless') carries off *Una and kills her lion (I. iii). This incident is supposed to refer to the suppression of the Protestant religion in the reign of Queen Mary.

II, the adventures of Sir *Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, his encounters with *Pyrochles and *Cymochles, his visit to the Cave of *Mammon and the House of Temperance, and his destruction of *Acrasia and her *Bower of Bliss. Canto x of this Book contains a chronicle of British rulers from *Brut to Elizabeth;

Guyon, Sir, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, the knight of Temperance. His various exploits, the conquest of *Pyrochles, the visit to the cave of *Mammon, the capture of *Acrasia, and the destruction of her *Bower of Bliss, are related in II. v-xii.

Braggadochio, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, the typical braggart. His adventures and final exposure and humiliation occur in II. iii; III. viii, x; IV iv, v, ix; V. iii. Cf. *Trompart.

Trompart, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (II. iii),

wylie witted, and growne old

In cunning sleights and practick knavery.

attends *Braggadochio as his squire, and with him is finally exposed and beaten out of court.

Pyrochles, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, symbolizes rage. He is the brother of *Cymochles, the son of 'old Acrates and Despight' (II. iv. 41). On his shield is a flaming fire, with the words 'Burnt do I burne'. He is overcome by Sir *Guyon (II. v), and tries to drown himself in a lake to quench his flames. He is rescued and healed by *Archimago (II. vi. 42-51), and finally killed by Prince *Arthur (II. viii).

Cymochles, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (II. v, vi, and viii), 'a man of rare redoubted might', given all to lust and loose living, the husband of *Acrasia and brother of *Pyrochles. He sets out to avenge on Sir *Guyon the supposed death of his brother, but *Phaedria intervenes. He is finally slain by Prince *Arthur

Phaedria, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (II. vi), the Lady of the Idle Lake, symbolizing immodest mirth.

Mammon, theCave of, described in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (II. vii). It is the treasure-house of the god of wealth, visited by Sir Guyon. Milton in his *Areopagitica uses the example of Spenser making Guyon visit the cave of Mammon, 'that he might see and know, and yet abstain'.

Acrasia, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, II. xii, typifies Intemperance. She is captured and bound by Sir *Guyon, and her *Bower of Bliss destroyed.

Bower of Bliss, the, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (II. xii), the home of *Acrasia, demolished by Sir *Guyon.

 

III, the legend of Chastity, exemplified by *Britomart and *Belphoebe;

Britomart, the heroine of Book III of Spenser's *Faerie Queene, the daughter of King Ryunce of Britain and the female knight of chastity. She has fallen in love with *Artegall, whose image she has seen in a magic mirror, and the poet recounts her adventures in her quest for him. She is the most powerful of several types of Queen Elizabeth in the poem. 

Belphoebe, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, the chaste huntress, daughter of the nymph Chrysogone and twin sister of *Amoret; she partly symbolizes Queen Elizabeth. Belphoebe puts *Braggadochio to flight (II. iii), finds herbs to heal the wounded *Timias ('whether it divine Tobacco were, / Or Panachae, or Polygony', III. v), and rescues Amoret from *Corflambo (IV. vii).

Artegall, Sir, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, V, the champion of Justice. *Britomart, to whom his image has been revealed by a magic mirror, is in love with him, and her quest of him ends in their union. Representing Lord Grey de Wilton, he undertakes the rescue of Irena (Ireland) from the tyrant Grantorto. Jointly with Prince *Arthur he slays the *soldan (Philip II of Spain). His name perhaps signifies 'equal to Arthur'.

Timias, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, Prince *Arthur's squire, may represent *Ralegh. When wounded (III. v), he is healed by *Belphoebe. The incident of Timias and *Amoret, in IV vii. 35 and 36, may allude to Ralegh's relations with Elizabeth Throckmorton.

Amoret, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, III. vi, xii and IV. vii, daughter of the nymph Chrisogone and twin sister of *Belphoebe. She is 'Of grace and beautie noble Paragone', and has been married to Sir *Scudamour, but carried off immediately after by the enchanter *Busirane and imprisoned by him until released by *Britomart. *Timias loves her, but being reproved by Belphoebe leaves her. This incident refgers to the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth at the relations of  *Ralegh with Elizabeth Throckmorton.

Busirane, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (III. xi and xii) the 'vile Enchaunter' symbolizing unlawful love. He is struck down by *Britomart in his castle and forced to release *Amoret. On the door of one of the rooms of the castle was written:

Be bold, be bold, and every where Be bold.

But on another iron door,

Be not too bold.

 

IV, the legend of *Triamond and *Cambell, exemplifying Friendship; together with the story of *Scudamour and *Amoret.

Triamond, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (IV. iii, iv), the Knight of Friendship. After an inconclusive fight with *Cambello  in the contest to decide which of her suitors *Canacee (Cambello's sister) is to be awarded, Triamond and Cambello swear eternal friendship. IN the tournament arranged by *Satyrane, Triamond, though wounded, returns to rescue Cambello. He marries Canacee.

Cambell, or Cambello, the name given by Spenser in The Faerie Queene, IV. iii, to *Cambalo, whose tale he borrows from 'Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled', and completes. Cambell is brother of *Canacee, for whom there are many suitors. It is arranged that the stronges of these, three brothers, shall fight with Cambell and the lady be awarded to the victor. Two of the brothers are defeated: the contest between the third, *Triamond, and Cambell is undecided, each wounding the other.They are reconciled by Cambina, Triamond's sister; Canacee is awarded to Triamond and Cambell marries Cambina. The magic ring of Canacee in the 'Squire's Tale' reappears in the Faerie Queene, with the power of healing wounds.

Canacee, the daughter of King Cambuscan in Chaucer's 'Squire's Tale' (see CANTERBURY TALES, 11) and in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, Bk IV. 

Cambalo, one of the two sons of King Cambuscan, in Chaucer's 'Squire's Tale': see CANTERBURY TALES, 11; see also *Cambell for the continuation of his story in Spenser's *Faerie Queene.

V, the adventures of *Artegall, the Knight of Justice, in which allegorical reference is made to various historical events of the reign of Queen Elizabeth: the defeat of the Spaniards in the Netherlands, the recantation of Henry IV of France, the execution of *Mary Queen of Scots, and the administration of Ireland by Lord Grey de Wilton;

soldan (from the Arabic sultan). The soldan or souldan, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (V. viii) represents Philip II of Spain. He is encountered by Prince *Arthur and Sir *Artegall with a bold defiance from Queen *Mercilla (Elizabeth), and the combat is undecided until the prince unveils his shield and terrifies the soldan's horses, so that they overturn his chariot and the soldan is torn 'all to rags'. The unveiling of the Shield signifies divine interposition.

Geryoneo, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (V. x and xi), a three-bodied giant who represent's Philip II's power which controlled Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries.

Mercilla, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (V., viii), 'a mayden Queene of high renowne' (Queen *Elizabeth I), whose crown the *soldan seeks to subvert.

VI, the adventures of Sir *Calidore, exemplifying Courtesy. 

Calidore, Sir, the Knight of Courtesy, the hero of Bk VI of Spenser's *Faerie Queene. He pursues and chains the *Blatant Beast. One of Keats's earliest poems, the fragment 'Young Calidore is paddling o'er the lake' (1816) was inspired by him.

Blatant Beast, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, Bk VI, a monster, the personification of the calumnious voice of the world, begotten of Envy and Detraction. Sir *Calidore pursues it, finds it despoiling monasteries and defiling the church, overcomes it, and chains it up. But finally it breaks the chain, 'So now he raungeth through the world againe.' Cf. *Questing Beast. (Glatysaunt Beast, the creature in Malory's *Morte D'Arthur which is the original of *Spenser's 'blatant beast'. The word is from an Old French term meaning 'baying', 'barking'. In Malory it is pursued by Palomydes the Saracen).

There is also a fragment on *Mutabilitie, being the sixth and seventh cantos of the legend of Constancie, which was to have formed the seventh Book. This fragment contains a charming description of the seasons and the months.

'Mutabilitie Cantos', name given to the fragmentary 'Book VII' of Spenser's *Faerie Queene: two cantos only, first published with the folio edition of The Faerie Queene in 1609. They describe the challenge of the Titaness Mutabilitie to the cosmic government of Jove. (The first canto includes the charming topographical fable of Faunus and Molanna, which reflects Spenser's affection for his Irish home.) The goddess Nautre vindicates Jove's rule, displaying its orderly beauty in a procession of Seasons and Months, asserting finally that natural things 'are not changed from their first estate / but by their change their being doe dilate'. The cantos can be seen as an epilogue to The Faerie Queene, ending with the poet's prayer. 

The work as a whole, modelled to some extent on the *Orlando furioso of Ariosto, suffers from a certain monotony, and its chief beauties lie in the particular episodes with which the allegory is varied and in descriptions, such as those of the Cave of Mammon and the temptation of Sir Guyon by the Lady of the Idle Lake, in Bk. II. The meaning of many of the allusions, which must have added to the interest of the work for contemporaries, is now lost. The poem is written in the stanza invented by Spenser (and since utilized by James *Thomson, *Keats, *Shelley, and *Byron), in which a ninth line of twelve syllables is added to eight lines of ten syllables, rhyming  a b a b b c b c c.

Edmund Spenser

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William Wycherley

WYCHERLEY, William (1641-1715), of a Shorpshire family. He was educated first in France, then at the Queen's College, Oxford, but he never matriculated, afterwards enrolling as a student in the Inner Temple. His first play, Love in a Wood, or, St James's Park, a comedy of intrigue set in St. James's Park, was probably acted in 1671, and published in 1672, and brought him the favour of the duchess of Cleveland, the king's mistress. In 1679 he secretly married the widowed countess of Drogheda, daugher of the first earl of Radnor, and incurred thereby the displeasure of Charles II, who had offered him the tutorship of his son, the duke of Richmond. His second play, *The Gentleman Dancing Master, was probably acted 1671, published 1673, *The Country Wife was published and probably first acted 1675; his last play, *The Plain-Dealer, was probably acted 1676, published 1677. His Miscellany Poems (1704) led to a friendship with *Pope, who revised many of his writings. His Posthumous Works appeared in 1728.

Wycherley's plays, admired by *Lamb but condemned by *Macaulay as licentious and indecent, are highly regarded for their acute social criticism, particularly of sexual morality and the marriage conventions; his characterization and thematic organization are also strong, and his last two plays have been successfully revived many times. The standard edition is by A. Friedman (1969). (See also RESTORATION). 




The Country Wife, a comedy by *Wycherley, published and probably first performed 1675. It is now considered by many to be his finest play, a sharp satiric attack on social and sexual hypocrisy and greed and on the corruption of town manners, but even in the author's time (see his own jokes on the subject in *The Plain Dealer) was attacked for its alleged obscenity. *Garrick's version, The Country Girl (1766), aimed to remove the original's 'immorality' and 'obscenity', and with them cut the character of Horner, a central figure of the plot, a witty libertine who spreads a false report that he is impotent as a result of an operation for the pox, and thus gains access to the favours of various women, each of whom believes he has sacrificed reputation for her sake. 

The main plot concerns Mr Pinchwife, who comes to London for the marriage of his sister Alithea, bringing with him his artless young wife Margery; his excessive warnings against wrongdoing put ideas into her head, and she is eventually seduced by Horner, innocently protesting the while that she is merely behaving as town ladies do. Alithea's suitor Sparkish loses her to a new lover, Harcourt, through the opposite fault of excessive credulity. Pinchwife's conclusion, as he apparently accepts the excuse of Horner's impotence, is 'Cuckolds like Lovers shou'd themselves deceive.'



 The Plain-Dealer, a comedy by *Wycherley, probably performed 1676, published 1677. It was highly praised by *Dryden and *Dennis, though from the start it was criticized for obscenity, and in the 18th cent. was performed in a version bowdlerized by *Bickerstaffe.

 It is loosely based on *Molière's Le Misanthrope; Wycherley's hero Manly, an honest misanthropic sea-captain (from whom the playwright took the nickname 'Manly' Wycherley), corresponds to Molière's Alceste, and his treacherous, worldly beloved Olivia to Célimène. Manly, returned from the Dutch wars, has lost faith in all but Olivia, to whom he has confided his money, and his friend Vernish; he finds Olivia married to Vernish, and faithless even to him. Manly is beloved by Fidelia, a young woman who has followed him to sea in man's clothes; she intercedes with Olivia on his behalf, in a scene reminiscent of the Olivia-Viola scene in *Twelfth Night, is discovered by Vernish, who attempts to rape her, and is finally wounded in an attempt to defend Manly from Vernish. Manly forswears Olivia and pledges himself to Fidelia. There is a sub-plot in which the litigious widow Blackacre, who has a passion for legal jargon, trains up her son Jerry (a literary ancestor of Tony Lumpkin in *She Stoops to Conquer) in her footsteps, and thereby overreaches herself. 

The Plain Dealer is also the name of a periodical established by A. *Hill.

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Holcroft

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

HOLCROFT, Thomas (1745-1809), successively stable boy, shoemaker, actor and author. He was largely self-educated, a militant atheist, and believed fervently in man's capacity for self-improvement. His varied and energetic life is described in his Memoirs (edited and completed by his friend *Hazlitt), which contain early reminiscences of *Foote and the aged *Macklin, and later accounts of radical associates such as *Godwin and *Tooke. He was acquitted for high treason in 1794, and spent eight weeks in Newgate before being discharged. He wrote a number of sentimental plays, of which the best known was The Road to Ruin (1792); also several novels, including  Anna St Ives (1792) and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794), both of them influenced by Godwin's radical philosophy, but less successful as literature than [Godwin's] *Caleb Williams. After the hostile reception of his play Knave or Not? in 1798, Holcroft, plagued by debt, moved to Hamburg, then Paris, returning to England in 1802; he died in London after a long illness, during which he dictated a large part of his Memoirs. Anna St Ives (ed. P. Faulkner) and Hugh Trevor (ed. S. Deane) were reissued in 1970 and 1973 respectively.

From Andrew Sanders's Short Oxford History of English Literature:

Independent-minded women figure prominently in the novels of two further members of the Godwin circle, Robert Bage (1728-1801) and Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809). In the work of both writers, however, it is men who assume the burden of the fictional argument. (...)
    Holcroft's Anna St Ives (1792) is a witty and various epistolary novel, one which shows its debts to Richardson in its scenes of confinement and in the threatened rape of its abducted title character. Anna is courted by two men, rivals contrasted by birth, station, and literary style. Frank Henley, the practically educated son of an upwardly-mobile gardener, expresses himself 'frankly'. Coke Clifton has a very different, rakish, inflated style which plays with Latin tags and affects a restless desperation. Clifton is, however, no Lovelace despite his emotional lurches between wrath and regret, convention and excess. Henley, of course, wins the battle for the intelligent Anna's hand. The novel's discursive development also allows for some pointed asides concerning the 'barbarity' of the Europe of the ancien régime. Holcroft's second revolutionary novel, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (1794), was published in the year in which its author spent some eight weeks in Newgate prison on an indictment for high treason (he was acquitted without any charge being preferred). Hugh Trevor is a Bildungsroman which traces the unsteady fortunes of its narrator and a destiny which is almost Hardyan in its unhappiness. All occasions seem to inform against him, and his splenetic denunciations of the corruption of the Church, the Law, and the State suggest a real bitterness founded on experience. Despite its occasional sensationalism (as when Hugh finds himself, by accident, in an anatomist's cadaver store), the novel provides a generally effective criticism of the body politic. Holcroft's plays, Duplicity (1781), Love's Frailties (1794), and the once popular The Road to Ruin (1792), are equally sprinkled with aspersions concerned with the injustice of a hierarchical society (appropriately enough, it was he who adapted Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro for the English stage in 1784). His posthumously published memoirs (1816), which describe his early struggles against poverty and rejection, later moved Charles Dickens to repress the hope that her own autobiography (had he ever finished it) might one day stand on the same shelf.

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Katherine Philips

(From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble).

PHILIPS, Katherine (1631-64), known as the 'Matchless Orinda', the daughter of Royalist John Fowler, a London merchant. She lived in London until the age of 15, attending Mrs Salmon's School, Hackney. Upon her father's death her mother married a Welsh baronet, whose castle in Pembrokeshire became Katherine's home. In 1648 she married Parliamentarian James Philips of Cardigan: he was 59, she 17. Her poems were widely circulated in manuscript, inspiring eulogies by Henry *Vaughan ('It was thy light showed me the way' in Olor Iscanus and Thalia Rediviva); a commendatory poem by 'Orinda' was prefixed to the latter volume. Her translation of *Corneille's Pompée was acted in Dublin with great success in 1663, and her version of Horace, completed by *Denham, in 1668. Her collected poems appeared unauthorized in 1664. She died of smallpox, and was mourned in elegies by *Cowley and Sir William *Temple; her collected poems were published in 1667. They memorialize a coterie, a Platonic Society of Friendship, whose members were known by poetic sobriquets, including Anne Owen (Lucasia), Mary Aubrey (Rosania), John *Berkenhead (Cratander), and Sir Charles Cotterell (Polliarchus), her correspondence with whom was published as Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus in 1705. These letters show Philips's careful construction of the persona of 'Orinda'. She was pre-eminently a poet of female friendship. Her lyrics, marrying Cavalier and Metaphysical influences, applied Petrarchan love conventions to present women's friendship as an ideal. Friendship is 'our passion . . . the strongest thing I know'. See P. W. Souers, The Matchless Orinda (1931); E. Hobby, The Virtue of Necessity (1988); Germaine *Greer, Kissing the Rod (1988).

___________________

"Katherine Philips." Poetry Foundation.*

         https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/katherine-philips

         2019

Katherine Philips. "To my Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship." Poetry Foundation.*

         https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50445/to-my-excellent-lucasia-on-our-friendship

         2019

Henry Vaughan (and Thomas Vaughan)

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John Donne

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

DONNE, John (1572-1631), related on his mother's side to Sir Thomas *More, born into a Catholic family, his uncle Jasper Heywood being the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. His father, a prominent member of the London Ironmongers' Company, died when Donne was 4, and six months later his mother married a Catholic physician, Dr John Syminges. Educated at home by Catholic tutors, Donne went at the age of 11 to Hart Hall, Oxford (not Hertgrod College), favoured by Catholics because it had no chapel, so that recusancy attracted less notice. He may have transferred to Cambridge, but his religion (which he appears to have renounced c. 1593) debarred him at this point from taking a degree in either university. In 1589-91 he may have travelled on the Continent, to Italy and Spain. He sailed as a gentleman volunteer with *Essex to sack Cadiz (1596) and with *Ralegh to hunt the Spanish treasure ships off the Azores (1597). His poems 'The Storm' and 'The Calm' commemorate these voyages. Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, lord keeper of the great seal, and in 1601 he was elected MP for Brackley, Northamptonshire, an Egerton seat. He forfeited his chance of a civil career when late in 1601 he secretly married Ann More, Lady Egerton's niece: he was dismissed from Egerton's service and briefly imprisoned. Donne's next 14 years were marked by fruitless attempts to live down his disgrace. At first he depended on the charity of friends and of his wife's relations, living with his ever growing family in a cottage at Mitcham. In 1612 he moved to a London house owned by his patron, Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk, whom he had accompanied on his continental travels. In honour of Sir Robert's dead child Elizabeth, whom Donne had never met, he wrote his extravagant Anniversaries. Other friends and patrons in these years were Sir Walter Chute, with whom Donne went to the continent in 1605-6, Sir Henry Goodyer, probably Donne's closest friend, Lucy, countess of Bedford, Magdalen Herbert (mother of George Herbert), and Sir Robert Ker, Viscount Rochester, to whom Donne offered his services in the Essex divorce case. Despite Ker's good offices, James I considered that Donne was unfit for confidential employment and urged him to enter the Church, which he did in 1615. James made him a chaplain-in-ordinary and forced Cambridge (which regarded him as a careerist) to grant him a DD. In the Church Donne held several livings and the divinity readership in Lincoln's Inn. His wife died in 1617 at the age of 33, after giving birth to their 12th child, and the following year Donne went as chaplain to the earl of Doncaster in his embassy to the German princes. His 'Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany', full of apprehension of death, was written before this journey. In 1621 Donne procured the deanery of St Paul's. One of the most celebrated preachers of his age, as well as its greatest non-dramatic poet, he died on 31 March 1631, having first, as his earliest biographer Izaak *Walton records, had his portrait drawn wearing his shroud and standing on a funeral urn.

Donne was celebrated by contemporaries for his abandoning of Elizabethan classicism's 'soft, melting Phrases' through an 'imperious Wit' (Thomas *Carew). His earliest poems, his 'Satires and Elegies', often lubricious, dazzlingly argued, and luridly self-dramatizing, belong to the 1590s. His unfinished satirical epic 'The Progress of the Soul' bears the date 1601, and some of his Holy Sonnets were probably written in 1610-11. His 'Songs and Sonnets' are, howerver, largely impossible to date. These love poems encompass the intimate and tender but intellectually strenuous 'Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', the dark turbulence of 'Twicknam Garden', the sombre majesty of 'A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day', and libertine lyrics founded on an emotionally complex misogynist casuistry.

Donne's prose works include Pseudo-Martyr (1610), an attack on Catholics who had died for their faith, and Ignatius His Conclave, an attack on the Jesuits (1611). Biathanatos, a defence of suicide, to which Donne confessed a 'sickely inclination', was probably written at this time, but its subject matter made it unpublishable until after his death. His Essays in Divinity (1651) were composed in preparation for his ordination and the Devotions (1624) were assembled in less than a month from notes made during a near-fatal fever. His sermons appeared after his death in three volumes, LXXX Sermons (1640), Fifty Sermons (1649), and XXVI Sermons (1660). These were edited by his son John and based on texts which Donne himself prepared from his rough preaching notes during two periods of rest in the country in 1625 and 1630: their memorable exhortations include the well-known 'No man is an Iland . . . never send to know for whom the bell tols, it tolls for thee'. His poems were collected by his son John and published in 1633 (second, enlarged, edn 1635). See also METAPHYSICAL POETS.

R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (1970); J. Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (1981); Elegies and Songs and Sonnets (ed. H. *Gardner, 1965); Divine Poems (ed. H. Gardner, 1952; 2nd edn, 1978); Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters (ed. W. Milgate, 1967); Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes (ed. W. Milgate, 1978); Paradoxes and Problems (ed. H. Peters, 1980); Ignatius His Conclave (ed. T.S. Healy, SJ, 1969); Essays in Divinity (ed. E. M. Simpson, 1952); Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (ed. J. Sparrow, 1923); Sermons (ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson, 10 vols, 1953-62). There is no collected edition of Donne's letters, the best available approach to one still being E. *Gosse, Life and Letters (2 vols, 1899).

This Is My Play's Last Scene

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The Oxford Companion to English Literature

A Couple of Bacons & Coke

(From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble).

BACON, Francis, first Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans (1561-1626), the fifth son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper to Queen Elizabeth 1558-79, by his second marriage to Lady Anne Cooke. Bacon's mother was the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to King Edward VI, and was an exceptionally gifted scholar and translator in her own right. One of her sisters married the queen's chief minister *Burleigh. Bacon was born in London, at York House in the Strand, and with his brother Antony went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1573 and 1575; they were tutored by the master, John Whitgift, subsequently archbishop of Canterbury. As part of his grooming for high public office he spent from 1576 to 1579 with the queen's ambassador to France, Sir Amias Paulet, studying statecraft and performing diplomatic duties. Bacon's public career suffered two serious setbacks. His father died suddenly, in Feb. 1579, having settled estates on his first four sons, and in the process of doing so for his youngest. Deprived of an inheritance, Bacon returned to England to become a lawyer, entering Gray's Inn in 1579, graduating in 1582. His abilities were soon recognized, and he was appointed a lecturer and invited to sit on government legal committees while still in his twenties. In 1581 he became an MP (for Bossiney, Cornwall) and served in every parliament until 1621, first in the Commons, then in the Lords. He achieved recognition as a parliamentary speaker, but his boldness in the 1593 session in opposing the unusally heavy taxes the queen wanted led to his being expelled from royal favour, promotion to higher legal office going to his rival, *Coke. The queen continued to employ Bacon in various legal offices, severely testing his loyalty to the Crown by appointing him one of the prosecutors of his former patron the earl of *Essex, whose increasingly headstrong behaviour led him eventually to the scaffold. Under King James, Bacon achieved the public office for which he had so long been preparing. Knighted in 1603, he became king's counsel in 1604, solicitor-general in 1607, attorney-general in 1623, a privy counsellor in 1616, lord keeper in 1617, and lord chancellor in 1618. Having more than emulated his father in public office, he excelled him in rank, being elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Verulam in 1613. and created Viscount St. Albans in 1621. Although remarkable, the promotion was well deserved, for Bacon impressed everybody with his forensic skills, intellectual penetration, and abilty to present complex issues clearly. But the higher reaches of state office carried their own dangers, and Bacon increasingly found that his carefully worked out advice and counsel were ignored both by James and by the court favourite, the first earl of *Buckingham. In the absence of a proper salary structure, government officials under James depended for their livelihood on gifts from suitors and on selling their office, leading to a high degree of corruption from which many (particularly Buckingham) profited. In 1621 a parliamentary group was bent on reform, led by Coke and Sir Lionel Cranfield, attacked the system of monopolies, where lucrative patents were allocated by nepotism (Buckingham's two brothers benefited richly) and enforced by illegal means. While attempting to censure Bacon, who as head of the court of Chancery had issued licenses to patentees at the king's request, they heard of two aggrieved suitors who had followed the custom of giving presents to Bacon as presiding judge, but had not won their case. The government's enemies succeeded in having him impeached in the House of Lords on charges of bribery, even though (unlike other venial judges) he had never allowed such presents to sway his judgement, and at this point both James and Buckingham abandoned him as scapegoat for their own unpopular policies. Bacon's career was ruined: he was given a huge fine, imprisoned in the Tower, and forbidden to come within 10 miles of the court. But the fine was never collected, the imprisonment lasted three days, the whole affair being cynically intended to placate the reform party, while the real abuses continued. Deprived of power, Bacon was vulnerable to Buckingham's greed, and was made to sell York House in the Strand. Out of office, he devoted himself fully to writing, producing in quick succession A History of the Life and Reign of King *Henry VIII (1622), the De Dignitate & Augmentis Scientiarum (1623, a Latin expansion of *The Advancement of Learning), the *Essays (1625), and the posthumously published New Atlantis (1627). Until his downfall, Bacon's writings were the product of the vacations or other leisure time in a busy public career. Simultaneously a Protestant or moderate Calvinist (as his Confession of Faith shows) and a humanist, sharing that movement's emphasis on the individual's duty to take part in a vita activa for the common good, all Bacon's intellectual activities were directed towards practical ends, from which the whole of society would benefit. He outlined many schemes for reforming the laws, making them easier to understand and more coherent; he wanted the universties to widen their curriculum from the three traditional professions (theology, law, medicine) to take in the 'arts and sciences at large'; and he was ahead of his time in realizing that a continous growth of knowledge was possible. Bacon's plan to reform the whole of natural philosophy (or science), outlined in the fragmentary Instauratio Magna (1620), of which the *Novum Organum was the only more or less complete part, aimed to effect a new union beween 'the mind and the universe', from which would spring a range of inventions to 'overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity' (See also BACONIAN THEORY).

Bacon's writings inpired the founding of the *Royal Society in 1662, and had a considerable influence on *Hobbes, *Boyle, *Locke, *Defoe, and many others. The fullest edition of his works was prepared by James Spedding (14 vols, 1857-74); see also Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers.

Advancement of Learning, The, a treatise by F. *Bacon, published 1605, systematizing his ideas for the reform and renewal of knowledge. Book I has a dual task: to defend knowledge in general from all its enemies, ecclesiastical and secular, and to argue for its dignity and value. Surveying the discredits that learning has brought upon itself, Bacon writes brilliantly satirical accounts of medieval Scholasticism, which restricted intellectual enquiry to the text of *Aristotle, and Renaissance Ciceronianism, with its slavish imitation of *Cicero's style. Thse, and other 'diseases' have deflected knowledgte from its true goal, 'the benefit and use of man'.

Book II then undertakes a 'general and faithful perambulation of learning', identifying 'what parts thereof lie fresh and waste', not properly developed. Bacon surveys the whole of knowledge, human and divine (that is, theology), under three headings, history, poetry, and philosophy, corresponding to the three faculties of memory, imagination, and reason. The result is a tour de force, showing a ramarkably wide grasp of many subjects and a penetrating insight into the kind of research needed to develop them, including original analyses of rhetoric, psychology, ethics, and politics. Bacon's 'small globe of the intellectual world', as he called it, has important links with his essays.

Essays, The, of F. *Bacon, first published in 1597, together with the 'Christian Meditations' and 'Of the Colours of Good and Evil', consisted of ten essays, in extremely bare style. The sentences are printed separately, marked with a paragraph sign, giving them the status of aphorisms, discrete observations drawn from experience, in the realm of public life. The second edition (1612) contained 38 essays, in a more varied style, and on a wider range of topics; a manuscript copy now in the British library describes them as his 'writings  . . . in Moralitie, Policie [politics] and Historie'. In this collection Bacon began to fill a lacuna he had noted in his *Advancement of Learning (1605), the lack of concrete knowledge of the different 'natures and dispositions' of human beings, and how they were affected by psychological and social factors (such as gender, health, social standing, physical appearance). The final version, now called Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1625), included 58 essays, filling in more of these gaps in treating both 'civil' or public life, and the mores or behaviour of private individuals. Bacon's approach varies greatly from essay to essay, approaching each topic from several different viewpoints, juxtaposing systematic analysis with brilliant aperçus. The styles used range from the detached and laconic to the passionately engaged, especially when expressing his moral beliefs. Dr. *Johnson said that the Essays were 'the observations of a strong mind operating upon life; and in consequence you find what you seldom find in other books'.

Novum Organum, a Latin treatise on scientific method, which F. *Bacon included in his Instauratio Magna (1620). This 'great renewal' of natural philosophy (which Bacon never completed) involved a systematic methodology, starting with fresh observation of natural phenomena. followed by carefully controlled experiments, to provide data from which scientific laws could be formulated. The 'new instrument' outlined here (the title alludes to the corpus of Aristotelian philosophy, known as the Organon) abandoned the main tool of logic, the syllogism, which Bacon criticized as a self-contained verbal procedure starting from an a priori premiss. Instead, he advocated an inductive method, generalizing upward from experimental results, tested by the use of 'negative instances' (if 100 white swans are observed, the discovery of a single black one is enough to falsify the thesis that all swans are white).

Book I of the Novum Organum restates in the form of detached aphorisms Bacon's fundamental criticisms of science and his plans for its renewal. Calling for the direct observation of nature (rather than recycling *Aristotle's texts) Bacon was nonetheless aware of the ossible distortions involved, brilliantly analysing the four 'Idols' (from the Greek eidola, illusions) to which human beings are prone. These are the Idols of the Tribe, Cave, Market Place, and Theatre: respectively, the distortions caused by sense perception, which are common to all; distortions caused by differences of temperament and education, arising from particular circumstances of each individual; distortions arising from the treacherous medium of language and the illusions of philosophic systems, these systems being in Bacon's view like so many stage plays, representing imaginary worlds of their own manufacture. In the more technical Book II Bacon gives a worked example of inductive method as applied to heat, using experimental data to construct tables of absence and presence, concluding that heat is a form of motion. Bacon's inductive method has often been misrepresented as a purely mechanical procedure, but recent research has shown that it includes hypothetico-deductive elements, representing a substantial contribution to natural science.

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BACON, Roger (1210-14 - after 1292), the 'Doctor Mirabilis', a phiosopher who studied at Oxford and Paris where he probably became Doctor before returning to England c. 1250, at which time, probably, he joined the Franciscan order. It is likely that he remained at Oxford until c. 1257 when he incurred the suspicion of the Franciscans and was sent under surveillance to Paris where he remained in confinement for ten years. He produced at the request of his friend Pope Clement IV (1265-8) Latin treatises on the sciences (grammar, logic, mathematics, physics, and modern philosophy); his grea work is the Opus Maius, and he also completed an Opus Minus and an Opus Tertium. He was again in confinement for his heretical propositions, c. 1278-92, and is said to have died and been buried at Oxford. He has been described as the founder of English philosophy. A conservative in theology, which he regarded as incomparably supreme among the arts, he advocated support for it from an appeal to experience, rather than from the Scholastic method of argument employed in the Summa of *Albertus Magnus and *Alexander of Hales. He begins by stating the chief causes of error to be ignorance of languages, especially Greek, bad Latin translations, and lack of knowledge of the natural sciences, especially mathematics. At the same time, his outlook remained partly mystical. His attack on the Scholastic method was taken up again and developed by William of *Ockham in the next century. He was a man of immense learning, with a wide knowledge of the sciences and of languages: Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. He was also a practical scientist; he invented spectacles and indicated the method by which a telescope might be constructed. He was vulgarly regarded as a necromancer in the Middle Ages because of his interest in the new sciences, especially chemistry and alchemy.

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COKE, Sir Edward (1552-1634), English jurist, called to the bar in 1578. by favour of *Burleigh, he became recorder of London in 1592 and attorney general in 1594, in which capacity he represented the Crown at the trials of *Essex and Southampton (1600-1). *Ralegh, and the Gunpowder Plot conspirators (1605). He became chief justice of the Common Pleas in 1606 and in that capacity came into conflict with King James about the jurisdiction of the common law courts. In 1613 he became chief justice of the King's Bench and a member of the Privy Council, but conflict with the king continued, and in 1616 he was dismissed by the Council. Coke's importance as a jurist rests on his Reports (1600-15), the first textbook of early modern law. The first book of the Institutes, known as 'Coke upon Littleton' (1628) is a legal encyclopaedia; the last three books (1641) form the basis of modern British constitutional law.

The Three B's: Bacon, Burton, Browne

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William Cowper

From the Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.


COWPER, William (1731-1800), elder son of the rector of Great Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, whose mother died when he was 6. He was educated at a private school (where he was bullied) and at Westminster, where he was a contemporary of Charles *Churchill and W. *Hastings. He was called to the bar in 1754. Sensitive and hypochondriac by nature as a child, he began to suffer from severe depression, and when called for examination for a disputed clerkship in the House of Lords he broke down completely and attempted suicide; his illness may have been aggravated by the failure of his hope of marrying his cousin Theodora Cowper. From this time he was subject to periods of acute melancholia which took a religious form; he felt himself cast out of God's mercy, and wrote later in his moving autobiographical Memoir (c. 1767, pub. 1816), 'conviction of sin and expectation of instant judgement never left me.' He spent some months in Dr Cotton's Collegium Insanorum at St Albans, and turned increasingly to evangelical Christianity for consolation. In 1765 he became a boarder (in his own words, 'a sort of adopted son') in the home of the Revd Morley Unwin at Huntingdon, and on Morley's death moved with Mary, his widow, to Olney.

There he came under the influence of J. *Newton, the evangelical curate, with whom he wrote Olney Hymns (1669); his contributions include 'God moves in a mysterious way' and 'Oh, for a closer walk with God'. He became engaged to Mrs Unwin, but suffered another period of severe depression and made another suicide attempt; he spent a year with the Newtons before returning to Mrs Unwin's home. A calmer period followed, during which at her suggestion he wrote his satires ('Table Talk', 'The Progress of Error', 'Truth', 'Expostulation', 'Hope', 'Charity', 'Conversation', and 'Retirement') which were published in 1782 with several shorter poems 8including 'Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk; see SELKIRK); in the same year he wrote 'John Gilpin' and in 1783-4 his best-known long poem The Task (1785), both subject suggested by his new friend and neighbour Lady Austen. The volume in which these appeared also contained 'Tirocinium', a vigorous attack on public schools. In 1786 he moved with Mrs Unwin to Weston Underwood, where he wrote various poems published after his death, including the unfinished 'Yardley-Oak' (admired by *Wordsworth), the verses 'On the Loss of the Royal George' ('Toll for the brave . . . '), 'To Mary', and 'The Poplar-Field'. His translation of *Homer, published in 1791, was not successful. From 1791 Mrs Unwin suffered a series of paralytic strokes; she died in1796, leaving Cowper in severe depression from which he never fully recovered.

He wrote 'The Castaway' shortly before his death; like many of his poems it deals with man's isolation and helplessness. Storms and shipwrecks recur in his work as images of the mysterious ways of God, and Cowper's search for a retired and quiet life of simple domestic and rural pleasures gave him little sense of permanent security. Yet his poems and his much admired letters (published posthumously) have been highly valued for their intimate portrait of tranquillity and for their playful and delicate wit. His sympathetic feelings for nature (expressed in the lines from The Task admired by Jane *Austen's Fanny Price, 'Ye fallen avenues! Once more I mourn, / Your fate unmerited') presage *Romanticism, and his use of blank verse links that of James *Thomson with that of *Wordsworth. He was also, like his evangelical friends, a champion of the oppressed, and wrote verses on *Wilberforce and the slave trade. Whether religion was cause or cure of his depression has been much disputed; the sense of guilt and paranoia displayed in his Memoir has much in common with that of Bunyan's *Grace Abounding. A life by his friend W. *Hayley was published 1803-4; see also The Stricken Deer (1929) by David *Cecil and a critical biography by M. Quinlan (1953). Cowper's *Letters and Prose Writings, ed. J. King and C. Ryskamp, appeared in 3 vols, 1979-82.





The Task, a poem in six books by Cowper, published 1785.

When Cowper's friend Lady Austen (whom he met in 1781) suggested to him the sofa in his room as the subject of a poem in blank verse, the poet set about 'the task'. Its six books are entitled 'The Sofa', 'The Time-Piece', 'The Garden', 'The Winter Evening', 'The Winter Morning Walk', and 'The Winter Walk at Noon'. Cowper opens with a mock-heroic account of the evolution of the sofa ('I sing the sofa') and thence digresses to description, reflection, and opinion. The poem stresses the delights of a retired life ('God made the country, and man made the town'), Bk I, 749); describes the poet's own search for peace ('I was a stricken deer, that left the herd', Bk III, 108), and evokes the pleasures of gardening, winter evenings by the fire, etc. The moral passages condemn blood sports, cards, and other diversions; the poet manifests tenderness not only for his pet hare but even for worms and snails.The poem was extremely popular: *Burns found it 'a glorious poem' that expressed 'the Religion of God and Nature', and it helped to create and supply the growing demand for natural description and tender emotion that found a fuller expression in Wordsworth's *Prelude, a poem which contains many echoes of Cowpar.





'The Castaway', a poem by Cowper, written 1799, published 1803. It is based on an incident from *Anson's Voyage Round the World. Cowper depicts with tragic power the suffering of a seaman swept overboard and awaiting death by drowning. Mr Ramsay in V. Woolf's *To the Lighthouse is given to declaiming its last lines: 'We perish'd, each alone: / But I beneath a rougher sea, / And whelm'd in deeper gulphs than he.'

Osborne

From the Oxford Companion to English Literature:

OSBORNE, John James (1929-94), playwright, born in Fulham, London, the son of a commercial artist who died in 1940; the first volume of his autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981), describes his childhood in suburbia, his brief spell as a journalist, and his years as an actor in provincial repertory, during which he began to write plays, the first of which was performed in 1950. He made his name with Look Back in Anger (1956, pub. 1957), which was followed by Epitaph for George Dillon (1957, pub. 1958; written in the mid-1950s in collaboration with Anthony Creighton).; The Entertainer (1957, which starred Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, a faded survivor of the great years of music hall), Luther (1961, based on the life of Martin *Luther, with much emphasis on his physical as well as his spiritual problems); Inadmissible Evidence (1965, the tragedy of a down-at-heel solicitor, Bill Maitland, plunging rhetorically towards self-destruction); and A Patriot for Me (1965, a highly theatrical piece set in Vienna, based on the rise and fall of Redl, a homosexual officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, ruined by blackmail). Iconoclastic, energetic, and impassioned, Osborne's works at their most positive praise the qualities of loyalty, tolerance, and friendship, but his later works (which include West of Suez, 1971; A Sense of Detachment, 1972; Watch It Come Down, 1976), became increasingly vituperative in tone, and the objects of his invective apparently more arbitrary. His outbursts of rage against contemporary society are frequently exhilarating, for the anger that made him known as an 'Angry Young Man' remained one of his strongest theatrical weapons, but he also expressed from time to time an ambivalent nostalgia for the past that his own work did so mucho to alter. His last play, Déjàvu (1991), is a sequel to Look Back in Anger, presenting the same characters in their regrouped, bad-tempered, but occasionally companionable middle age. Almost a Gentleman (1991) was a second volume of autobiography; Damn You, England (1994) a miscellany of reviews and letters to the press. (See also KITCHEN SINK DRAMA).



Look Back in Anger, a play by J. *Osborne, first produced by the *English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956, published 1957. It proved a landmark in the history of the theatre, a focus for reaction against a previous generation (see KITCHEN SINK DRAMA), and a decisive contributionto the corporate image of the *Angry Young Man.

The action takes place in a Midlands town, in the one-room flat of Jimmy and Alison Porter, and centres on their marital conflicts, which appear to arise largely from Jimmy's sense of their social incompatibility: he is a jazz-playing ex-student from a 'white tile' university, working in a market sweet satall, she is a colonel's daughter. He is by turns violent, sentimental, maudlin, self-pitying, and sadistic, and has a fine line in rhetoric. The first act opens as Alison stands ironing the clothes of Jimmy and thir lodger Cliff, as Jimmy reads the Sunday papers and abuses her and the 'Edwardian brigade' which her parents represent. In the sencond act the battle intensifies, as Alison's friend Helena attempts to rescue her from her disastrous marriage; Alison departs with her father, and Helena falls into Jimmy's arms. The third act opens with Helena at the ironing board; Alison returns, having lost the baby she was expecting, and she an Jimmy finda a manner of reconciliation through humiliation and games-playing fantasy. In its use of social milieu, its iconoclastic social attitudes, and its exploration of sadomasochistic relationships, the play was highly influential.



Angry Young Men, a journalistic catchphrase loosely applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid 1950s, including Kingsley *Amis, John *Osborne, *Sillitoe, and C. *Wilson, whose political views were radical or anarchic, and who described various forms of social alienation. It is sometimes said to derive from the title of a work by the Irish writer Leslie Paul, Angry Young Man (1951).

kitchen sink drama, a term applied in the late 1950s to the palys of writers such as *Wesker, S. *Delaney, and J. *Osborne, which portrayed working class or lower-middle class life, with an emphasis on domestic realism. These plays were written in part as a reaction against the drawing-room comedies and middle-class dramas of *Coward and *Rattigan, and also undermined the popularity of the verse drama of T. S. Eliot and C. *Fry. *Tynan was a principal advocate of this new group of writers.

The New Theatre

BLAKE, William

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

BLAKE, William (1757-1827), the third son of a London hosier. He did not go to school but was apprenticed to James Basire, engraver to the Society of *Antiquaries, and then became a student at the *Royal Academy. From 1779 he was employed as an engraver by the bookseller J. *Johnson, and in 1780 met *Fuseli and *Flaxman, the latter a follower of *Swedenborg, whose mysticism deeply influenced Blake. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market-gardener; their childless marriage was a lasting communion. Flaxman at this period introduced him to the progressive intellectual circle of the Revd A. S. Mathew and his wife (which included Mrs *Barbauld, H. *More, and Mrs. E. *Montagu), and Mathew and Flaxman financed the publication of Blake's first volume, Poetical Sketches (1783). In 1784, with help from Mrs Mathew, he set up a print shop at 27 Broad Street, and about the same period (although not for publication) wrote the satirical *An Island in the Moon. He engraved and published his *Songs of Innocence in 1789, and also The Book of Thel, both works which manifest the early phases of his highly distinctive mystic vision, and in which he embarks on the evolution of his personal mythology; years later (in *Jerusalem) he was to state, through the character Los, 'I must create a System, or be enslaved by another Man's', words which have been taken by some to apply to his own need to escape from the fetters of 18th-cent. versification, as well as from the materialist philosophy (as he conceived it) of the *Enlightenment, and a Puritanical or repressive interpretation of Christianity. The Book of Thel presents the maiden Thel lamenting transience and mutability by the banks of the river of Adona; she is answered by the lily, the cloud, the worm, and the clod who assure her that 'He, who loves the lowly' cherishes even the meanest; but this relatively conventional wisdom is challenged by a final vision in which Thel visits the house of Clay, sees the couches of the dead, and hears 'a voice of sorrow' breathe a characteristically Blakean protest against hypocrisy and restraint—'Why a tender curb upon the youthful, burning boy? Why a tender little curtain of flesh upon the bed of our desire?'—a message which sends Thel back 'with a shriek' to the vales of Har. The ambiguity of this much-interpreted poem heralds the increasing complexity of his other works which include Tiriel (written 1789, pub. 1874), introducing the theme of the blind tyrannic father, 'the king of rotten wood, and of the bones of death', which reappears in different forms in many poems; *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (engraved c. 1790-3), his principal prose work, a book of paradoxical aphorisms; and the revolutionary works The French Revolution (1791); America: A Prophecy (1793); and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), in which he develops his attitude of revolt against authority, combining political fervour (he had met *Paine at Johnson's) and visionary ecstasy; Urizen, the deviser of moral codes (described as 'the stony law' of the Decalogue) and *Orc, the Promethean arch-rebel, emerge as principal characters in a cosmology that some scholars have related to that of *Gnosticism. By this time Blake had already established his poetic range; the long, flowing lines and violent energy of the verse combine with phrases of terse and aphoristic clarity and moments of great lyric tenderness, and he was once more to demonstrate his command of the lyric in Songs of Experience (1794) which includes 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright', 'O Rose thou art sick', and other of his more accessible pieces.

Meanwhile the Blakes had moved to Lambeth in 1790; there he continued to engrave his own works and to write, evolving his mythology further in The Book of *Urizen (1794); *Europe: A Prophecy (1794); The Song of *Los (1795); The Book of Ahania (1795); The Book of Los (1795); and The Four Zoas (originally entitled Vala, written and revised 1797-1804), and also working for the booksellers. In 1800 he moved to Felpham, Sussex, where he lived for three years, working for his friend and patron *Hayley, and working on *Milton (1804-8); in 1803 he was charged at Chichester with high treason for having 'uttered seditious and treasonable expressions, such as "D—n the King, d—n all his subjects . . . "', but was acquitted. In the same year he returned to London, to work on Milton and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (written and etched, 1804-20). In 1805 he was commissioned by Cromek to produce a set of drawings for R. *Blair's poem The Grave, but Cromek defaulted on the contract, and Blake earned neither the money nor the public esteem he had hoped for, and found his designs engraved and weakened by another hand. This was symptomatic of the disappointment of his later years, when he appears to have relinquished expectations of being widely understood, and quarreled even with some of the circle of friends who supported him. Both his poetry and his art had failed to find a sympathetic audience, and a lifetime of hard work had not brought him riches or even much comfort. His last years were passed in obscurity, although he continued to attract the interest and admiration of younger artists, and a commission in 1821 from the painter John Linnell produced his well-known illustrations for the Book of Job, published in 1826. (It was Linnell who introduced Blake to Samuel *Palmer in 1824.) A later poem, 'The Everlasting Gospel', written about 1818, shows undiminished power and attack; it presents Blake's own version of Jesus, in a manner that recalls the paradoxes of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, attacking the conventional 'Creeping Jesus', gentle, humble, and chaste, and stressing his rebellious nature, his forgiveness of the woman taken in adultery, his reversing of the stony law of Moses, praising 'the Naked Human Form divine', and sexuality as the means whereby 'the Soul Expands its wing', and elevating forgiveness above the 'Moral Virtues'.

At Blake's death, general opinion held that he had been, if gifted, insane. *Wordsworth's verdict, according to C. *Robinson, was that 'The was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott', a view in some measure echoed by *Ruskin, who found his manner 'diseased and wild' but his mind 'great and wise'. It was not until A. *Gilchrist's biography of 1863 (significantly describing Blake as 'Pictor Ignotus') that interest began to grow. This was followed by an appreciation by *Swinburne (1868) and by W. M. *Rossetti's edition of 1874, which added new poems to the canon and established his reputation, at least as a lyric poet; his rediscovered engravings considerably influenced the development of *art nouveau. In 1893 *Yeats, a devoted admirer, produced with E. J. Ellis a three-volume edition, with a memoir and an interpretation of the mythology, and the 20th cent. saw an enormous increase in interest. The bibliographical studies and editions of G. *Keynes, culminating in The Complete Writings of William Blake (1966, 2nd edn), have added greatly to knowledge both of the man and his works, revealing him not only as an apocalyptic visionary but also as a writer of ribald and witty epigrams, a critic of spirit and originality, and an independent thinker who found his own way of resisting the orthodoxies of his age, and whose hostile response to the narrow vision and the materialism (as he conceived it) of his bêtes noires Joshua *Reynolds, *Locke, and Isaac *Newton was far from demented, but in part a prophetic warning of the dangers of a world perceived as mechanism, with man as a  mere cog in an industrial revolution. There have been many interpretative studies, relating his work to traditional Christianity, to the *Neoplatonic and Swedenborgian traditions, to Jungian *archetypes and to *Freudian and *Marxist theory; the Prophetic Books, once dismissed as incoherent, are now claimed by many as works of integrity as well as profundity. Recently, Blake has had a particularly marked influence on the *Beat Generation and the English poets of the *underground movement, hailed by both as a liberator; *Auden earlier acclaimed him ('New Year Letter', 1941) as 'Self-educated Blake . . .' who 'Spoke to Isaiah in the Strand / And heard inside each mortal thing / Its holy emanation sing'.

See also the Blake Books (19777) by G. E. Bentley Jnr, including annotated catalogues of his writings and scholarly books about him; The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D. V. Erdman (1965, 1988); Blake's Illuminated Books, 6 vols. (1991-5), gen. ed. D. Bindman; and J. Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993), an authoritative account of Blake's graphic process; The William Blake Archive: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/blake (ed. M. Eaves, R. Essick, J. Viscomi). There is a life by Peter *Ackroyd, (1995).

A World in a Grain of Sand —The Cosmic Dimension

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John Dryden

From the Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

DRYDEN, John (1631-1700), educated at Westminster School under *Busby and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He inherited a small estate, but supported himself mainly by his writing. His first major poem was the Heroique Stanza's (1658) on the death of Cromwell: he later celebrated the King's return with Astraea Redux and To His Sacred Majesty. Other poems were addressed to Sir Robert Howard, whose sister Lady Elizabeth Dryden married in 1663; the earl of *Clarendon, *Charleton, and Lady Castlemaine. He also published a long poem in quatrains, *Annus Mirabilis (1667), but most of his early writing was for the theatre and included several rhymed heroic plays, The Indian Queen (1664, in collaboration with Sir Robert Howard), The Indian Emperour (1665, which has the Mexican ruler Montezuma as subject), *Tyrannick Love (1669), and The Conquest of Granada in two parts (1670). He also wrote comedies, The Wild Gallant (1663), The Rival Ladies (1664), Sir Martin Mar-all (1667, in collaboration with the Duke of *Newcastle), *An Evening's Love (1668), and a radical adaptation of *The Tempest (1667, with *D'Avenant). He was most original, however, with his tragi-comedies, Secret Love (1667), *Marriage-à-la-mode (1672), The Assignation (1672), and a second Shakespeare adaptation, *Troilus and Cressida (1679). All these plays, together with the operatic adaptation of *Paradise Lost, under the title The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man (unperformed, pub 1667) and the immensely successful Oedipus (1678, with N. *Lee), reveal Dryden's considerable interest in philsoophical and political questions. He became *poet laureate in 1668, and historiographer royal in 1670.

Dryden constantly defended his own literary practice. His first major critical work was *Of Dramatick Poesie (1668). Subsequent essays include A Defence of an Essay (1668), preface to An Evening's Love (1671), Of Heroick Plays (1672), Heads of an Answer (to *Rymer, c. 1677, pub. 1711), and The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, prefixed to preface to Troilus and Cressida (1679). *Aureng-Zebe was his best rhymed heroic play. The prologue, however, denounces rhyme in serious drama, and his next tragedy, *All for Love (1678), was in blank verse. Much of Dryden's criticism was devoted to the assessment of his Elizabethan predecessors, Shakespeare, *Jonson, and *Fletcher. Despite his genuine respect for their achievement, Dryden was unsparing in his enumeration of what he perceived as their 'faults', although he frequently modified his critical views and his artistic practice. This flexibility as critic and dramatist left him vulnerable to attack. He was represented as Bayes in *The Rehearsal (1671) by *Buckingham, and physically assaulted in 1679, possibly at the instigation of *Rochester. His principal opponent was *Shadwell, whom Dryden ridiculed in *Mac Flecknoe (c. 1676, pub. 1682). Other poems in which he develops his critical principles include many witty and imaginative prologues and epilogues, and poems about, or addressed to, fellow writers and artists, notably Lee, *Roscommon, *Oldham, *Congreve, and *Kneller.

The constitutional crisis of the late 1670 and early 1680s saw Dryden's emergence as a formidable Tory polemicist. His contribution to the political debate included plays, especially *The Spanish Fryar (1680), The Duke of Guise (1682, written with Lee), and the operatic Albion and Albanius (1685); his celebrated satires *Absalom and Achitophel (1681), *The Medall (1682), and a number of lines for N. *Tate's The Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel (1682), as well as a host of partisan prologues and epilogues. His interest in religion was also heightened at this time. In *Religio Laici (1682) he offers a defence of the Anglican via media. However, following the accession of James II Dryden became a Catholic and wrote *The Hind and the Panther (1687) in support of his new co-religionists. At the death of Charles II he attempted a Pindaric *ode, Threnodia Augustalis (1685), the first of several poems in this form, notably To the Pious Memory . . . of Mrs Anne Killigrew (1686), A Song for Saint Cecilia's Day (1687), 'An Ode, on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell' (1696), and Alexander's Feast (1697), which was later incorporated into *Fables Ancient and Modern (1700). Dryden also wrote numerous witty elegant songs for his many plays.

In 1689 he lost both his court offices and returned to the theatre. Two of his late plays, *Don Sebastian (1689) and *Amphitryon (1690), are excellent; Cleomenes (1692) is intellectually impressive; and only Love Triumphant (1694) is a failure; but Dryden was tired of the theatre and turned to the politically less compromising work of translating. His immense and splendid achievements in this field include translations of small pieces from *Theocritus and *Horace, and more substantial passages from *Homer, *Lucretius, *Persius, *Juvenal, *Ovid, *Boccaccio, and *Chaucer, as well as the whole of *Virgil. His version of the Georgics is especially magnificent. In all these translations he made frequent but subtle allusions to his Jacobite principles. He also returned to criticism, notably in preface to the Sylvae (1685), *A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693), Dedication to Examen Poeticum (1693), and Dedication of the Aeneis (1697). His culminating and most impressive achievement both as critic and translator was Fables Ancient and Modern, which should be read as a whole, and to which 'The Secular Masque' (1700) is a wise and noble coda. He was buried in Westminster Abbey (see also RESTORATION).

Other works by Dryden include:

Plays: Amboyna (1673, a tragedy), *Mr Limberham (1679, a sexually explicit comedy), and a dramatic opera, King Arthur (1691). Poems: 'Upon the Death of Lord Hastings' (1649), Britannia Rediviva (1688), Eleonora (1696). Prose works: His Majesty's Declaration Defended (1681), Life of Plutarch (1683), Vindication of the Duke of Guise (1683), Character of St Evrémond (1692), Character of Polybius (1693), Life of Lucian (1711), translations of Maimbourg's The History of the League (1684), Bouhours' Life of St Francis Xavier (1686), Du Fresnoy's De Arte Graphica (1695).

The standard complete edition is The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker et al. (1956- ), 20 vols pub. as of 1997. Other editions include Sir W. *Scott's (18 vols, 1808, with life as vol. i, rev. edn. by *Saintsbury, 18 vols, 1882-93); Dramatic Works, ed. M. Summers (6 vols, 1931-2); Poems, ed. J. Kinsley (4 vols, 1948); The Poems of John Dryden,  ed. P. Hammond (4 vols , 1995- ); Of Dramatic Poesy, and Other Critical Essays, ed. G. Watson (2 vols, 1962); Letters, ed. C. E. Ward (1942). See also J. A. Winn, John Dryden and His World (1987); J. and K. Kinsley (eds.), Dryden: The Critical Heritage (1971); P. Harth, Contexts of Dryden's Thought (1968) and Pen for a Party (1993).

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Notes on some works by Dryden (from the Oxford Companion):

Annus Mirabilis, a poem in quatrains by *Dryden, published 1667. 

    Its subjects are the Dutch War (1665-6) and the Fire of London. Prefaced by 'Verses to her Highness and Dutchess' [of York], it indicates that even in the 1660s Dryden's optimism about the monarchy, mercantilism, and the *Royal Society (of which he was a fellow) did not preclude the expression of an ironic vision of history. Queen Elizabeth II, to the bewilderment of some journalists, drew on Dryden's poem in a speech (24 Nov. 1992) referring to the fire of Windsor in that year, using the words 'Annus Horribilis'.

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Tyrannick Love, or The Royal Martyr, a heroic play by *Dryden, produced and published 1669.

     Based on the legend of the martyrdom of St Catherine by the Roman emperor Maximin, it contains some of Dryden's most extravagant heroic verse. Possibly deliberately comic at times, it is also seriously concerned with contrasting Lucretian and Christian conceptions of God. It was ridiculed in *The Rehearsal, and by *Shadwell. Dryden himself satirizes its excesses in *Mac Flecknoe.

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An Evening's Love, or The Mock Astrologer, a comedy by Dryden, produced 1668, published 1671.  Combining elements of Spanish intrigue comedy and fast-moving farce with sexually explicit language, it proved a commercial though not an artistic success. The plot, borrowed from M. de *Scudéry, *Corneille, Quinault, *Molière, and others, shows the exploits of two English cavaliers, Wildblood and Bellamy, in Madrid at carnival time. In the course of the play Bellamy acts the part of the eponymous astrologer, and both men gain Spanish wives while also helping their host Don Lopez to one. Most memorable are the scenes featuring Wildblood's spirited mistress Jacinta testing her lover in the guise first of a Moor and then of a Mulatta. Despite Wildblood's spectacular failure to remain faithful to her on both occasions, Jacinta forgives him and agrees to marry him. The preface to this play is among the most stimulating of Dryden's critical essays. He defends drama as entertainment, and replies to charges of plagiarism, offering his most explicit statement on literary appropriation to this date. The preface represents his views when he was least sympathetic to *Jonson and is therefore of importance in the dispute with Jonson's champion *Shadwell which culminated in *Mac Flecknoe.

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Marriage-à-la-Mode, a tragi-comedy by *Dryden produced 1672, published 1623.
    The main plot concerns a usurper's discovery that his daughter and his (lawful) predecessor's son have been secretly reared together in rural seclusion and have fallen idealistically in love. The comic plot is a double intrigue involving two friends and their pursuit respectively of the wife of the one and the betrothed of the other. The counterpointing of these contrasting plots is particularly striking, especially as each ends anticlimactically, the lawful heir being restored to his throne in an overtly stagy manner, and the adulterous lovers failing to consummate their affairs. The play contains some of Dryden's finest songs, and embodies the principles of comic writing outlined in his preface to *An Evening's Love.

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Of Dramatick Poesy: An Essay by *Dryden, published 1668.
    The essay is in the form of a dialogue between Eugenius (C. *Sackville), Crites (Sir Robert Howard), Lisideius (*Sedley), and Neander (Dryden himself), who take a boat on the Thames on the day of the battle between the English and Dutch navies in June 1665, and subsequently discuss the comparative merits of English and French drama, and of the old and new in English drama. The essay is largely concerned with justifying Dryden's current practice as a playwright. It also contains admirable appreciations of Shakespeare, J. *Fletcher, and *Jonson.

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Aureng-Zebe, a tragedy by *Dryden, produced 1675, published 1676.
    The plot is remotely based on the contemporary events by which the Mogul Aureng-Zebe wrested the empire of India from his father and his brothers. The hero is a figure of exemplary rationality, virtue, and patience, whose stepmother lusts after him and whose father pursues the woman with whom Aureng-Zebe is himself in love. Apparently highly schematic in its organization, this last of Dryden's rhymed heroic plays evinces a deeply disturbing awareness of the anarchy and impotence which threaten every aspect of human life, emotional, moral, and political.

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All for Love, or The World Well Lost, a tragedy by *Dryden produced and published 1678.
    Written in blank verse in acknowledged imitation of Shakespeare's *Antony and Cleopatra, it is Dryden's most performed and his best-known play. It concentrates on the last hours in the lives of its hero and heroine. In contrast to Shakespeare's play, it is an exemplary neo-classical tragedy, notable for its elaborately formal presentation of character, action, and theme. (See NEO-CLASSICISM.)

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Mac Flecknoe (c. 1676), or A Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T. S., a *mock-epic poem by *Dryden published 1682, and in a definitive edition, 1684.

    The outcome of a series of disagreements, personal, professional, and critical, between Dryden and *Shadwell, the poem represents the latter as heir to the kingdom of poetic dullness, currently governed by the minor writer *Flecknoe. It brilliantly exploits the crudity of Shadwell's farces (notably The Virtuoso) and critical writings; while the range of its allusions to 17th-cent. theatre demonstrates the complexity of Dryden's critical thought and, since he satirized his own work (notably *Tyrannick Love) as well as Shadwell's, his humility towards the tradition in which he was working. Mac Flecknoe was a vital inspiration for Pope's Dunciad.

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The Spanish Fryar, a tragi-comedy by *Dryden, produced and published 1681.
    The serious plot is characteristically about a usurpation. Torrismond, though he does not know it, is lawful heir to the throne, and secretly marries the reigning but unlawful queen, who has allowed Torrismond's father, the true king, to be murdered in prison. The sub-plot is dominated by Father Dominic, a monstrous corrupt friar, who uses the cant terms of Dissenters and who pimps for the libertine and whiggish Lorenzo. The latter is a highly dubious character, yet ironically it is through his agency that the lawful Torrismond is rescued. The woman Lorenzo is pursuing, however, turns out to be his sister. The play is like *Mr Limberham in breaching comic as well as tragic decorum and in its deeply sceptical treatment of religious and political orthodoxies.

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Absalom and Achitophel, an allegorical poem by *Dryden, published 1681.
    A *mock-biblical satire based on 2 Sam. 13-19, it deals with certain aspects of the Exclusion crisis, notably the intrigues of the Earl of Shaftesbury and the ambition of the Duke of Monmouth to replace James Duke of York as Charles II's heir. Various public figures are represented under biblical names, notably Monmouth (Absalom), *Shaftesbury (Achitophel), the duke of *Buckingham (Zimri), Charles II (David), *Oates (Corah), and Slingsby Bethel, sheriff of London (Shimei). The poem concludes with a long speech by David vigorously but paradoxically affirming Royalist principles, and asserting his determination to govern ruthlessly if he cannot do so mercifully.
    In 1682 a second part appeared, mainly written  by N. *Tate. However, it contains 200 lines by Dryden, in which he attacks two literary and political enemies, *Shadwell as Og an *Settle as Doeg.

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The Medall,  a poem by *Dryden, published 1682.
    The earl of *Shaftesbury, who is represented in *Absalom and Achitophel and possibly in *Mr Limberham, was acquitted of charges of high treason in 1681, and a medal was struck to commemorate the event. Dryden's response includes savage attacks on Shaftesbury himself, the City, and the Commons. It predicts with some accuracy the constituted instability which was to beset the country in the ensuing 30 years. *Shadwell and Samuel Pordage (1633-?91) both wrote replies.

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Religio Laici, a poem by *Dryden, published 1682.
    Written in defence of Anglicanism against Deist, Catholic, and Dissenting arguments, Religio Laici combines an exalted recognition of religious sublimity with a defence of a 'layman's' reasonable and straightforward religious attitudes. The poem's opening lines, beginning 'Dim as the borrow'd Beams of Moon and Stars', are among the finest Dryden wrote.

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The Hind and the Panther, a poem by *Dryden, published 1687.
    Dryden became a Catholic in 1685, and the poem represents an attempt to reconcile Anglican and Catholic political interests, while at the same time defending Catholic doctrine. The first part describes various religious sects under the guise of different beasts, and in particular the Catholic Church and the Church of England as the Hind and the Panther respectively. The second part is occupied with arguments about church authority and transubstantiation, issues full of political as well as ecclesiological implications. This leads into the third part, which constitutes half the poem, and is designed to recommend  a political alliance between both Churches and the Crown against Whigs and Dissenters. It contains two celebrated fables, that of the swallows and that of the doves. However the balance of the latter, and so of the whole poem, may have been upset by James II's Second Declaration of Indulgence, which appealed to dissenting protestant sects over the heads of the Anglican establishment.

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Fables, Ancient and Modern, by *Dryden, published 1700.
    Verse paraphrases of tales by *Ovid, *Boccaccio, and *Chaucer are interspersed with poems of Dryden's own, and together with the preface, in itself one of the most important examples of Dryden's criticism, they compose themselves into an Ovidian and Catholic meditation on the place of nature, sex, and violence in the flux of history.

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Don Sebastian, a tragi-comedy by *Dryden, produced 1689, published 1691.
    The play is based on the legend that King Sebastian of Portugal survived the battle of Alcazar. He and the princess Almeyda, with whom he is in love, are captured by Muley Moloch, who spares their lives until he discovers that they have secretly married. In love with Almeyda himself, he orders Dorax, a renegade Portuguese nobleman, to execute Sebastian, but Dorax, once Sebastian's favourite, refuses to do so. Muley Moloch is killed in a revolt, but Sebastian and Almeyda then discover that their marriage is incestuous, and they renounce each other and their thrones. However, they do not renounce the memory of their love, which is subsumed in ecstatic and total submission to the decrees of an inscrutable Providence. Counterpointing this main plot is a notably erotic and earthy sub-plot. The play is Dryden' most complex dramatic treatment of a number of important political, sexual, and religious themes.

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Amphytrion, a comedy by *Dryden, produced and published 1690.
    Adapted from the comedies of *Plautus and *Molière on the same subject, it represents the story of Jupiter's seduction of Alcmena in the guise of her husband Amphytrion. In this he is aided by Mercury, who is disguised as Amphytrion's slave Sosia. The cruel abuse of mortal love by the gods is in striking contrast to the play's uninhibited eroticism. The same story was adapted by *Giraudoux in his Amphytrion 38 (1929).

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A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, by *Dryden.
    The Discourse was published with The Satires (1693) of *Juvenal and *Persius, translated by various hands, among them Dryden's. Less impressive for its scholarship (which is not, however, negligible) than for its broad sense of the principles underlying literary and social history, it distinguishes between 'Varronian', 'Horatian', and 'Juvenalian' satire in a way that has considerably influenced criticism of Dryden's own satirical works and that of his Augustan successors.

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Mr Limberham, or The Kind Keeper, a comedy by *Dryden, produced 1679, published 1680.
    The play was banned by royal decree after three performances and has been execrated since, but Dryden nonetheless thought highly of it. The title role is possibly based on *Shaftesbury. Limberham is an impotent masochist, who is cuckolded by the oversexed hero Woodall, to whom every woman in the play succumbs. In this Woodall (who has been brought up abroad and is under an assumed name) is enthusiastically abetted by his unknowing father, Aldo. By implication the play attacks the patriarchism of a sexually corrupt court, the blind hedonism of the nobility, and the hypocrisy of Dissenters.

Cold Song

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