Elizabethan worldview

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Elizabethan worldview is the worldview of English society during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). In the middle of the 20th century, EMW Tillyard developed this concept for the time of the Elizabethans, caught up in a traditional notion of the “great chain of beings”, which the literary scholar Arthur O. Lovejoy had a few years earlier had postulated for the entire pre-modern era. This idea has developed very effectively, but is now regarded as too closed a system of thought to be able to explain the world of thought of an entire, complex society, and is therefore outdated.

According to this concept, the decisive factor in the Elizabethans' imagination was the thought that the order of the universe - the macrocosm - is reflected in the small - in the microcosm. Every thing was in itself a microcosm in which the order of the cosmos was reflected. So the king ruled the state like God of creation , and the order of the state in turn reflected the order of creation. The individual person himself also carried the order of the whole within himself. This was shown, for example, in the ancient doctrine of the four humours, which was particularly important in medicine in Elizabethan times : the four elements of creation assumed at the time - air, fire, earth and water - were reflected in the four The juices that the Elizabethans believed made human beings: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm (blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm), each of the four humours representing a character trait.

According to Lovejoy, Elizabethans were obsessed with the perfection that could only be found above (i.e. not in the earth, in the lower classes or in the lower regions of the body), and they felt threatened by disorder and chaos, e.g. B. Civil war, insanity and irrational passions. Change was fundamentally frightening.

This idea holds together, for example, the complicated plot frameworks of William Shakespeare ( Elizabethan Theater ): If there is disorder in nature, there is also disorder in society and the psyche of the individual. The rebellion against God is repeated in the rebellion against the king and the father, namely among noble citizens and common people. For example, in Shakespeare's drama Macbeth, the iniquity of regicide, which upsets the state, is reflected in the chaos that reigns in nature.

While the theological-cosmological concept of hierarchical order primarily provided an explanation of the world, the political-social concept of order of a God-given hierarchy had a real meaning for the body politic , the state and society as a "political body", since the stability of the Elizabethan polity, for lack of a written constitution, largely depended on the citizens and subjects seeing themselves as part of a divine hierarchy.

In Shakespeare's plays there are explicit pleadings for adherence to the social hierarchy. In Troilus and Cressida, for example, when the ranking of the Greeks began to dissolve during the long siege of Troy, Odysseus gave a speech in which he eloquently reaffirmed the importance of maintaining the degree , hence the rank. If the traditional order is dissolved, "horror, plague and mutiny" break out; only through rank can "communities, schools, guilds, brotherhoods, peaceful trade between distant coasts, the rights of the firstborn and heirs, the primacy of age, crowns, scepter, orders ... authentically continue." If the rank is disregarded or shaken, every company is sick; there is a threat of controversy and the violence of arbitrariness, which lead to complete chaos and suffocation. (Act 1, scene 3, 74-137).

A similar plea for social hierarchy can be found in Shakespeare's Coriolanus , in which Menenius compares the Roman state with a body whose stomach is the nobility. In Henry V , the Archbishop of Canterbury, in an extensive speech, compares the state with a colony of bees, as Odysseus does.

What Shakespeare expresses with pathos in his plays in dramatic language can also be found in dry prose , often in similar formulations, in numerous writings of the 16th century, for example in Sir Thomas Elyot in The Boke named the Governour (1531) or in the treatises of Richard Hooker , who was one of the most important theologians of the English Reformation.

In spite of the knowledge of the educated layers of the upheaval of the cosmological worldview through the discoveries of Copernicus , the ideas of a large part of the Elizabethans were determined by the clinging to medieval ordo thinking and the fear of a dissolution of the social hierarchy. The medieval conception of the world, which largely shaped the basic feeling of the people of that time, offered them the stability and security that the English longed for after they had to change religion three times between 1534 and 1559 and they had to burn the pyre of martyrs remembered vividly.

More recently, however, the use of Shakespeare as evidence of the traditional-conservative way of thinking and the call for order (Tillyard wrote a book on Shakespeare's History Plays in 1944 , from which he developed his ideas for Elizabethan society) has been widely criticized.

Although the basic feeling of the Elizabethan world and the values ​​associated with it have found their way into Shakespeare's works, he also shows in his pieces the endangerment of this order, because the cosmic pyramid of values ​​in Shakespeare is broken in numerous places by a potential fault line, where not only the dramatic characters or people, but also the underlying divine order threatens to break apart.

In addition to the traditional notion of order, there was also a counter-movement that was becoming increasingly important and no longer saw the dissolution of the firmly established order as a threat, but as an opportunity. Especially for the rising middle class and above all the Puritans , the flattening of the social hierarchy was tantamount to an increase in their own social status. This egalitarian endeavor first found expression in non-fictional literature and did not make itself heard until the middle of the 17th century during the English civil war .

Even those poets and intellectuals who were shaped by Renaissance humanism called for a different form of emancipatory individualism and claimed what was understood in the Italian Renaissance as the concept of virtù (virtue). Christopher Marlowe showed himself to be one of the most outstanding Elizabethan exponents of this Machiavelli- influenced new worldview , who in his dramas shows characters who strive for the highest without scruples. In his Faust drama in particular, he radically expresses the transformation of the medieval order of values; however, the process of dissolving the old order is also reflected in numerous other writers. Even Shakespeare was well aware of this new attitude, as his haunting portrayal of the usurpers Richard III. or shows Macbeth unmistakably from within. The design of Falstaff as the ultimately likable embodiment of the anarchic par excellence shows that Shakespeare was by no means a one-sided or even reactionary supporter of the old system of values. In some of his comedies, for example, he places the restoration of the disturbed order in the hands of a woman or, in his great tragedies, after the fall of the hero, lets power pass into the hands of a pragmatist without tragic charisma. From his point of view, the only thing necessary seems to be the existence of a hierarchy, the concrete form of which he leaves open in some respects.

The culturalistic turn in history and the New Historicism in literary studies have pointed to the fractures, fluidities and the "countless Elizabethan worldviews" instead of the one monolithic. There could also be subversive power in superficially affirmative statements. It is important to take into account the context in which the Second World War threatened all order and Tillyard's idealistic , historicist way of thinking in order to understand his work. Because despite all the criticism, science is still concerned with his work today.

literature

supporting documents

  1. ^ Cf. Hans-Dieter Gelfert : The Elizabethan worldview. In: Hans-Dieter Gelfert: William Shakespeare in his time. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-65919-5 , pp. 123 ff. And 129.
  2. ^ Cf. Hans-Dieter Gelfert : The Elizabethan worldview. In: Hans-Dieter Gelfert: William Shakespeare in his time. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-65919-5 , p. 126.
  3. ^ Cf. Hans-Dieter Gelfert : The Elizabethan worldview. In: Hans-Dieter Gelfert: William Shakespeare in his time. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-65919-5 , pp. 126–129.
  4. ^ Cf. Hans-Dieter Gelfert : The Elizabethan worldview. In: Hans-Dieter Gelfert: William Shakespeare in his time. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-65919-5 , p. 122 f. and 129.
  5. ↑ Alexander Leggatt, for example, writes about the "customary ... ritual attack"; the subject has "established that to see Shakespeare as a propagandist for the Tudor Myth, the Great Chain of Being, and the Elizabethan World Picture will not do." Alexander Leggatt: Shakespeare's Political Drama. The History Plays and the Roman Plays. Routledge, London et al. 1988, ISBN 0-203-35904-6 , p. Vii.
  6. ^ Cf. Hans-Dieter Gelfert : The Elizabethan worldview. In: Hans-Dieter Gelfert: William Shakespeare in his time. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-65919-5 , pp. 130-132. See also in detail the various counter-movements to the medieval cosmological concept of order, as Tillyard describes it, the explanations in Bernhard Fabian (Ed.): The English literature. Volume 1: Epochs and Forms . Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 3rd edition Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-04494-2 , pp. 47–61.
  7. ↑ Neema Parvini: Shakespeare's History Plays. Rethinking Historicism. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2012, ISBN 978-0-7486-4613-5 , p. 85.