Overview

The image of the husband beating his wife with a rod is from a French engraving by Abraham Bosse (ca. 1640). The wife kneels before the husband as a penitent, and her children do also, as if begging mercy for her.

From an early seventeenth-century collection of costumes at the time of James I. Here, as the gentleman and the lady of the household play cards with their guests, a servingman brings them dishes of food. The Folger Shakespeare Library.

 After more than four decades on the throne, Elizabeth I died in  James VI of Scotland succeeded her, becoming James I and establishing the Stuart dynasty. King’s theories: less “shared” government & more authoritarian “Divine right of kings”

 Political and religious tensions intensified under James’s son, Charles I, who succeeded to the throne in Attempted to rule without Parliament 1642 Civil War breaks out Charles defeated and beheaded!

 As ideas changed, so did the conditions of their dissemination. Recall the Monarch = God paradigm These structures begin to crumble in light of scientific discoveries

 In the early seventeenth century, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and George Herbert led the shift towards “new” poetic genres.

 Many leading poets were staunch royalists, or Cavaliers, who suffered heavily in the war years. Civil War disastrous for theater: closed down playhouses in 1642  Yet two of the best writers of the period, John Milton and Andrew Marvell, sided with the republic.

 The revolutionary era also gave new impetus to women’s writing on both sides of the political divide