routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

112 The Renaissance 1485–1660
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
The intention is deliberately lyrical, aiming at the delicacy of a miniature
rather than engaging in debate or polemic. But Herrick, like his
contemporary Richard Lovelace, was very much concerned with the
political upheavals of the time; and the refinement of the lyric forms
may often contain serious reflections, as in Lovelace’s impassioned
lines on freedom, To Althea, From Prison:
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage.
These lines were written as the somewhat authoritarian Puritan rule took
command under Oliver Cromwell, who remains one of the most ambiguous
of English heroes. John Milton hailed him in a sonnet as ‘our chief of men’,
and praised his defence of liberty and conscience. Cromwell seemed the
embodiment of Renaissance values: Marvell wrote, ‘If these the times, then
this must be the man’. Yet two years after his death the monarchy was
restored, and for many years the Commonwealth was seen as a black period
of Puritan extremism, austerity and restraint. Many writers such as Milton and
Dryden found themselves changing allegiance as they saw the Revolution
lose its impact and decline into a return to older forms and ways.
JACOBEAN DRAMA – TO THE CLOSURE OF
THE THEATRES, 1642
Come, violent death,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep!
(John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi)
BEN JONSON
Ben Jonson, who wrote an Ode (To the Memory of my Beloved, the
Author Mr William Shakespeare: And What He Hath Left Us) for the
First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected plays (1623), is the Bard’s greatest
contemporary. It is difficult to sum Jonson up briefly because, as a