Puritan Writing and Genre

In the first class (9/7) we compared some very different texts: two poems by Anne Bradstreet ("To My Dear and Loving Husband" and "A Letter to her Husband") and the "character" of "A she precise Hypocrite" from John Earle's Micro-cosmographie. I want to comment further on the question of genre, which arose briefly toward the end of class. Lyric poetry was hardly invented by the Puritans, but the English religious lyric did flower in the seventeenth century in part because of the Protestant emphasis on the subjectivity of spiritual experience. (The Bradstreet poems we read seem to me to have an affinity with the poetry of Donne, who liked to combine images of erotic and spiritual love.) Later in the semester when we look at Robinson Crusoe we will consider how the inward mode of lyric (which is also the mode of Puritan spiritual autobiography) took another form in the early novel.

The Character, by contrast, has an obvious affinity with the stage, and some of Earle's portraits may have been based on Shakespearean types such as Falstaff. As we will see this week, Elizabethan plays were a venue for mocking Puritans. This was not just a form of revenge for Puritan antitheatricality. Stage characters are especially suitable for satirizing types based on external behavior and appearance. On the other hand, Shakespeare's plays, particularly Hamlet, are often seen as reflecting or even motivating the developing sense of inwardness in seventeenth-century England. In addition to the issue of Malvolio as a Puritan type, which you will read about this week, consider what Twelfth Night seems to suggest about the relationship between external appearance and inner life.