The story of English literature begins with the Germanic tradition of the Anglo-Saxon

settlers. Beowulf stands at its head.

This epic poem of the 8th century is in Anglo-Saxon, now more usually described as Old
English. It is incomprehensible to a reader familiar only with modern English. Even so,
there is a continuous linguistic development between the two. The most significant
turning point, from about 1100, is the development of Middle English - differing from Old
English in the addition of a French vocabulary after the Norman conquest. French and
Germanic influences subsequently compete for the mainstream role in English
literature.

The French poetic tradition inclines to lines of a regular metrical length, usually linked by
rhyme into couplets or stanzas. German poetry depends more on rhythm and stress,
with repeated consonants (alliteration) to bind the phrases. Elegant or subtle rhymes
have a courtly flavour. The hammer blows of alliteration are a type of verbal athleticism
more likely to draw applause in a hall full of warriors.

Both traditions achieve a magnificent flowering in England in the late 14th century,
towards the end of the Middle English period. Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain are
masterpieces which look back to Old English. By contrast Chaucer, a poet of the court,
ushers in a new era of English literature.

Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain: 14th century

Of these two great English alliterative poems, the second is entirely anonymous and the
first virtually so. The narrator of Piers Plowman calls himself Will; occasional references
in the text suggest that his name may be Langland. Nothing else, apart from this poem,
is known of him.

Piers Plowman exists in three versions, the longest amounting to more than 7000 lines.
It is considered probable that all three are by the same author. If so he spends some
twenty years, from about 1367, adjusting and refining his epic creation.

Piers the ploughman is one of a group of characters searching for Christian truth in the
complex setting of a dream. Though mainly a spiritual quest, the work also has a
political element. It contains sharply observed details of a corrupt and materialistic age
(Wycliffe is among Langland's English contemporaries).

Where Piers Plowman is tough and gritty, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (dating from
the same period) is more polished in its manner and more courtly in its content. The
characters derive partly from Arthurian legend.
A mysterious green knight arrives one Christmas at the court of King Arthur. He invites
any knight to strike him with an axe and to receive the blow back a year later. Gawain
accepts the challenge. He cuts off the head of the green knight, who rides away with it.

The rest of the poem concerns Gawain, a year later, at the green knight's castle. In a
tale of love (for the green knight's wife) and subsequent deceit, Gawain emerges with
little honour. The green knight spares his life but sends him home to Arthur's court
wearing the wife's girdle as a badge of shame.

Geoffrey Chaucer at court: 1367-1400

In 1367 one of four new 'yeomen of the chamber' in the household of Edward III is
Geoffrey Chaucer, then aged about twenty-seven. The young man's wife, Philippa, is
already a lady-in-waiting to the queen.

A few years later Chaucer becomes one of the king's esquires, with duties which include
entertaining the court with stories and music. There can rarely have been a more
inspired appointment. Chaucer's poems are designed to be read aloud, in the first
instance by himself. Their range, from high romance to bawdy comedy, is well
calculated to hold the listeners spellbound. Courtly circles in England are his first
audience.

Chaucer's public career is one of almost unbroken success in two consecutive reigns.
He undertakes diplomatic missions abroad on behalf of the king; he is given
administrative posts, such as controlling the customs, which bring lodgings and
handsome stipends. Even occasional disasters (such as being robbed twice in four days
in 1390 and losing £20 of Richard II's money) do him no lasting harm.

A measure of Chaucer's skill as a courtier is that during the 1390s, when he is in the
employment of Richard II, he also receives gifts at Christmas from Richard's rival,
Bolingbroke.

When Bolingbroke unseats Richard II in 1399, taking his place on the throne as Henry
IV, Chaucer combines diplomacy and wit to secure his position. Having lost his royal
appointments, he reminds the new king of his predicament in a poem entitled 'The
Complaint of Chaucer to his Empty Purse'. The last line of each verse begs the purse to
'be heavy again, or else must I die'. Henry IV hears the message. The court poet is
given a new annuity.

Henry is certainly aware that he is keeping in his royal circle a poet of great distinction.
Chaucer's reputation is such that, when he dies in the following year, he is granted the
very unusual honour - for a commoner - of being buried in Westminster abbey.
Troilus and Criseyde: 1385

Chaucer's first masterpiece is his subtle account of the wooing of Criseyde by Troilus,
with the active encouragement of Criseyde's uncle Pandarus. The tender joys of their
love affair are followed by Criseyde's betrayal and Troilus's death in battle.

Chaucer adapts to his own purposes the more conventionally dramatic account of this
legendary affair written some fifty years earlier by Boccaccio(probably read by Chaucer
when on a mission to Florence in 1373). His own very long poem (8239 lines) is written
in the early 1380s and is complete by 1385.

Chaucer's tone is delicate, subtle, oblique - though this does not prevent him from
introducing and gently satirising many vivid details of life at court, as he guides the
reader through the long psychological intrigue by which Pandarus eventually delivers
Troilus into Criseyde's bed.

The charm and detail of the poem, giving an intimate glimpse of a courtly world, is akin
to the delightful miniatures which illustrate books of hours of this period in the style
known as International Gothic. Yet this delicacy is only one side of Chaucer's abundant
talent - as he soon proves in The Canterbury Tales.

The Canterbury Tales: 1387-1400

Collections of tales are a favourite literary convention of the 14th century.

Boccaccio's Decameron is the best-known example before Chaucer's time, but Chaucer
in The Canterbury Tales outshines his predecessors. He does so in the range and
vitality of the stories in his collection, from the courtly tone of 'The Knight's Tale' to the
rough and often obscene humour of those known technically as fabliaux.

He does so also in the detail and humour of the framework holding the stories together.
His account of the pilgrims as they ride from London to Canterbury, with their constant
bickering and rivalry, amounts to a comic masterpiece in its own right.

The pilgrims, thirty of them including Chaucer himself, gather one spring day at the
Tabard in Southwark. The host of the inn, Harry Bailly, is a real contemporary of
Chaucer's (his name features in historical records). He will act as their guide on the
route to Canterbury and he proposes that they pass the time on their journey by telling
stories. Each pilgrim is to tell two on the way out and two on the way back. Whoever is
judged to have told the best tale will have a free supper at the Tabard on their return.
Of this ambitious total of 120 stories, Chaucer completes only 24 by the time of his
death. Even so the collection amounts to some 17,000 lines - mainly of rhyming verse,
but with some passages of prose.

The pilgrims represent all sections of society from gentry to humble craftsmen (the only
absentees are the labouring poor, unable to afford a pilgrimage of this kind). There are
respectable people from the various classes - such as the knight, the parson and the
yeoman - but the emphasis falls mainly on characters who are pretentious, scurrilous,
mendacious, avaricious or lecherous.

The pilgrims are vividly described, one by one, in Chaucer's Prologue. The relationships
between them evolve in the linking passages between the tales, as Harry Bailly
arranges who shall speak next.

The pilgrims for the most part tell tales closely related to their station in life or to their
personal character. Sometimes the anecdotes even reflect mutual animosities. The
miller gives a scurrilously comic account of a carpenter being cuckolded. Everyone
laughs heartily except the reeve, who began his career as a carpenter. The reeve gets
his own back with an equally outrageous tale of the seduction of a miller's wife and
daughter.

But the pilgrim who has most delighted six centuries of readers is the five-times-married
Wife of Bath, taking a lusty pleasure in her own appetites and richly scorning the ideals
of celibacy.

Edmund Spenser: 1579-1596

Edmund Spenser, who has the greatest lyric gift of any English poet in the two centuries
since Chaucer, is a graduate of Cambridge and by inclination a humanist pedant. His
inspiration comes largely from a desire to rival his classical and Renaissance
predecessors.

His first important work, The Shepheardes Calendar(1579), consists of twelve eclogues
- a form deriving from Virgil but imitated by many subsequent writers. With one for each
month of the calendar, Spenser's eclogues cover a wide range of subjects in many
metres and styles of poetry. But they are skilfully held together to form a convincing
single poem within the pastoral framework.

Just as Virgil moved on from the pastoral themes of the Eclogues and Georgics to the
patriotic epic of the Aeneid, so Spenser progresses to The Faerie Queene. In
undertaking this ambitious project (he states in a letter to Walter Raleigh in 1590), his
models have been ancient and modern poets alike
- Homer and Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso.

The framework of the poem is an allegory in praise of the Faerie Queene or Gloriana
(Elizabeth I), in whose interests the Red Cross knight (the Anglican church) fights to
protect the virgin Una (the true religion) against the wiles of many hostile characters
including the deceitful Duessa (variously the Roman Catholic church or Mary Queen of
Scots).

It is evident from these details that the poem is deeply rooted in national politics of the
late 16th century, and many of its allusions must have been of far greater interest to
contemporary readers than to any generation since. Spenser himself is a close witness
of the struggles of the time. From 1580 he is employed in the English government of
Ireland. In 1588 he becomes an 'undertaker' in the first Elizabethan plantation, receiving
the forfeited Irish estate of Kilcolman Castle.

Here he is visited in 1589 by Walter Raleigh, who is so impressed by Spenser's

readings from The Faerie Queene that he persuades the poet to accompany him to
London in the hope of interesting the real queen in it.

Publication of the first three books in 1590 is followed by Elizabeth's awarding the poet,
in 1591, a pension of £50 a year. Spenser's original scheme is for twelve books, each
consisting of an adventure on behalf of Gloriana by one of her knights. In the event he
completes only six, the second group of three being published in 1596.

Spenser, spinning his elaborate allegory in rural Ireland, stands at the end of a long and
retrospective poetic tradition - though others will soon develop less archaic versions of
the epic (as in Paradise Lost). Meanwhile something much newer and more popular is
taking place in London. When Spenser is there in 1590, Christopher Marlowe is the new
excitement in the city's theatres.

London's theatres:1576-1599

The theatres built in London in the quarter century from 1576 are a notable example of
a contribution made by architecture to literature. In previous decades there have been
performances of primitive and rumbustious English plays in the courtyards of various
London inns, with the audience standing in the yard itself or on the open galleries
around the yard giving on to the upper rooms. These are ramshackle settings for what
are no doubt fairly ramshackle performances.

In 1576 an actor, James Burbage, builds a permanent playhouse in Shoreditch - just

outside the city of London to the north, so as not to require the permission of the
puritanical city magistrates.

Burbage gives his building the obvious name, so long as it is the only one of its kind. He
calls it the Theatre. It follows the architectural form of an inn yard, with galleries
enclosing a yard open to the sky. At one end a stage projects beneath a pavilion-like
roof.

In such a setting, custom-built, writers, actors and audience can begin to concentrate on
dramatic pleasures. A second playhouse, the Curtain, rises close to the Theatre in
1577. A third, the Rose, opens in 1587 on the south bank of the Thames in the area
known as Bankside. In that year one of these three theatres puts on a play which
reveals how far English playwrights have progressed in a very short while
- Tamburlaine, by Christopher Marlowe.

In about 1594 a fourth theatre, the Swan, is built close to the Hope. There are now two
theatres to the north of the city and two south of the river. But soon the balance shifts
decisively to Bankside.

James Burbage, builder of the original Theatre, dies in 1597. Two years later his two
sons dismantle the building and carry the timber over the river to Bankside, where they
use it as the basis for a theatre with a new name - the Globe. This name resounds in
English theatrical history for two good reasons. It is where Richard, one of the Burbage
brothers, develops into one of the first great actors of the English stage. And it is where
many of Shakespeare's plays are first presented.

The structure of the Globe and the other London theatres has a significant influence on
English drama at its greatest period, because of the audiences which these buildings
accomodate. Ordinary Londoners, the groundlings, stand in the open pit to watch plays
for a penny. Others pay a second penny to climb to a hard seat in the upper gallery. A
third penny gives access to the two lower galleries and a seat with a cushion. A few
places in the first gallery, to left and right of the stage, are reserved for gentlemen who
can afford a shilling, or twelve pennies.

This is a cross-section of nearly all the people of London, and the audience is vast - with
four theatres giving regular performances in a small city.

It has been calculated that during Shakespeare's time one Londoner in eight goes to the
theatre each week. A city of 160,000 people is providing a weekly audience of about
21,000. There is only one comparable example of such a high level of attendance at
places of entertainment - in cinemas in the 1930s.

The range of Shakespeare's audience is reflected in the plays, which can accomodate
vulgar comedy and the heights of tragic poetry. The occasional performances in
the Athenian drama festivals must have had something of this efffect, involving much of
the community in a shared artistic experience. In Elizabethan and Jacobean London it
happens almost every night.

Marlowe: 1587-1593
The year 1564 sees the birth of two poets, Marlowe and Shakespeare, who between
them launch the English theatre into the three decades of its greatest glory. Marlowe
makes his mark first, in a meteoric six years (from 1587) in which his life and his
writings are equally dramatic.

From his time as a student at Cambridge Marlowe seems to have been involved in the
Elizabethan secret service. This dangerous work, combined with a fiery disposition,
brings him into frequent clashes with the authorities. He is in prison in 1589 after a
street fight. He is deported from the Netherlands in 1592 for the possession of forged
gold coins. He is arrested for some unknown reason in London in 1593. And twelve
days later he is murdered.

Marlowe is killed in a Deptford tavern by one of a group of colleagues with whom he has
spent the day. The official explanation is a row over the tavern bill, but it is possible that
the event relates to his secret service activities. What is certain is that when he dies,
short of his thirtieth birthday, he is already an extremely popular playwright with the
London audience.

Marlowe's first play, acted with great success in 1587, is an event of profound
significance in the story of English theatre. Tamburlaine the Great introduces the supple
and swaggering strain of blank verse which becomes the medium for all the glories of
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

Marlowe's Tamburlaine is a character who revels in the power which his conquests
bring him, and the verse conveys brilliantly his sense of excitement. Rich words trip off
his tongue, relished for their own sakes, in a manner which becomes characteristic of
much English poetry. When Tamburlaine defeats the emperor of Persia, and imagines
his moment of triumph, even the strange names of his three colleagues are pressed into
service to add to the rich brew:

'Is it not passing brave to be a king, Techelles?

Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?'

Tamburlaine is so popular that Marlowe adds a second part, staged in 1588. In the
remaining five years of his life his plays include The Jew of Malta (a melodrama of
revenge, in which the Jew indulges in an orgy of killing after his money has been
confiscated), Doctor Faustus (inspired by a recent biography of Faust, and setting the
pattern for later treatments of the subject) and Edward II (the first play to dramatise
English history as a conflict between real characters, and the predecessor of
Shakespeare's great achievements in this genre).

In the first three of these plays the title role is taken by Edward Alleyn, Marlowe's
leading actor and the great rival of Shakespeare's Burbage.
The dates of the plays after Tamburlaine are uncertain, and the texts of Doctor
Faustus and The Jew of Malta have reached us in very corrupted versions because
they are first printed years after Marlowe's death.

What is certain is that when Shakespeare arrives in London, in about 1590, the London
stage belongs above all to Marlowe. By the time of Marlowe's death three years later
only one of Shakespeare's undeniable masterpieces, Richard III, has been produced
(with Burbage as the villainous hero). It would be hard to predict at this stage which of
the two talented 29-year-olds is the greater genius.

The life of Shakespeare: 1564-1616

The mysterious death of Marlowe, the Cambridge graduate, and the brilliant subsequent
career of Shakespeare, the grammar-school boy from Stratford, have caused some to
speculate that his secret service activities make it prudent for Marlowe to vanish from
the scene - and that he uses the name of a lesser man, Shakespeare, to continue his
stage career. Others, similarly inclined to conspiracy theories, have convinced
themselves that Shakespeare's plays are the work of the statesman and essayist
Francis Bacon.

Snobbery rather than scholarship seems to underpin such arguments. Their proponents
find it hard to accept that the unknown boy from Stratford should have created the
crowning achievement of English literature.

The truth is that William Shakespeare is not such an unknown figure, and the education
provided in England's grammar schools of the time is among the best available.
Shakespeare's baptism is recorded in Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564 (this is only
three days after St George's Day, making possible the tradition that England's national
poet is born, most fortunately, on England's national saint's day).

Shakespeare's father, John, is a leading citizen of the town and for a while a justice of
the peace. It is a safe assumption (though there is no evidence) that Shakespeare is
educated at Stratford's grammar school.

In 1582, at the age of eighteen, Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway. Their first child,
Susanna, is baptized in 1583, followed by twins, Hamnet and Judith, in 1585.

There is then a gap of several years in the documentary record of Shakespeare's life,
but he is involved in the London theatre - as an actor trying his hand also as a
playwright - by at least 1592, when he is attacked as an 'upstart crow' in a polemical
pamphlet by Robert Greeene. In 1593 he publishes a poem, Venus and Adonis,
following it in 1594 with The Rape of Lucrece. Meanwhile he has had performed the
three parts of Henry VI and, probably in the winter of 1592, Richard III.

The London theatres are closed for fear of the plague during 1592 and 1593 apart from
brief midwinter seasons, but in 1594 things return to normal and Shakespeare's career
accelerates. He is now a leading member of London's most successful company, run by
the Burbage family at the Theatre. Patronage at court gives them at first the title of the
Lord Chamberlain's Men. On the accession of James I in 1603 they are granted direct
royal favour, after which they are known as the King's Men.

Shakespeare's share in the profits of this company, operating from the Globe on
Bankside from 1599, makes him a wealthy man. Most of the subsequent documentary
references relate to purchases in his home town of Stratford.

In 1597 Shakespeare pays £60 for a large house and garden, New Place in Chapel
Street. By 1602 he has enough money to purchase an estate of 107 acres just outside
Stratford, and he continues over the next few years to make investments in and around
the town. In about 1610 he begins to spend less time in London and more in New Place,
where he dies in 1616. He is buried in the chancel of the Stratford parish church.

Shakespeare has shown little interest in publishing his plays, for like others of his time
he probably regards them as scripts for performance rather than literature. After his
death two of his colleagues, John Heminge and Henry Condell, gather the texts of thirty-
six plays which they publish in 1623 in the edition known now as the First Folio.

The plays before1601

By 1600 Shakespeare has conclusively demonstrated his genius in every kind of play
except tragedy. In dramatizing English history he has progressed from the fumbling
beginnings of the three parts of Henry VI (1590-92) to the magnificent melodrama
of Richard III (1592), the subtle character study of Richard II (1595), the jingoistic glories
of Henry V (1600) and, most successful of all, the superb pair of plays about Henry IV
and his wayward son Prince Hal.

Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 (1597-8) present a rich panorama of English life, from court and
battlefield to tavern and rustic retreat. They also introduce, in Falstaff, the most rounded
and unforgettable comic character in English literature.

Meanwhile Shakespeare has developed a sweet and delicate strain of romantic poetry,
seen first in the tragic romance of Romeo and Juliet (1595) and then in the comic
romances A Midsummer Night's Dream(1596) and As You Like It (1599). And he has
shown his skill in a more knock-about vein of comedy, with The Taming of the
Shrew (1593) and The Merry Wives of Windsor (1600).

All these dates are approximate, to within a year or two, because there is in most cases
no firm evidence of the date of first production.

After 1600 there is one more play which combines broad comedy (in the antics of Toby
Belch and Andrew Aguecheek) and enchantingly romantic poetry (as in the very first
line, 'If music be the food of love, play on'). This is Twelfth Night, and its first production
possibly occurs less than a week into 1601. There is evidence that Shakespeare
probably writes it as part of the festivities for Twelfth Night (or January 6) at Elizabeth's
court in this particular year.

In general, though, Shakespeare's palette darkens with the new century. The next few
years see some much less sunny comedies and his four great tragedies.

Tragedies and dark comedies: 1601-1608

Shakespeare's first attempt at full-scale tragedy, in 1601, brings to the stage a

character, Hamlet, whose nature and weaknesses have prompted more discussion than
any other Shakespearean creation. His prevailing characteristics of self-doubt and self-
dramatization hardly seem promising material for a tragic hero, but Shakespeare uses
them to create an intensely personal drama. Each opportunity for action prompts the
young prince to indulge in another soul-searching soliloquy, each missed opportunity
makes disaster more inevitable.

Othello is the next of the major tragedies, in about 1603, with the 'green-eyed monster'
jealousy now the driving force on the path to destruction.

King Lear, in about 1605, is the most elemental of the tragedies, with the old king's
sanity buffeted by storms upon an open heath as much as by his treatment at the hands
of his unfeeling daughters. Macbeth, a year or so later, makes guilt itself the stuff of
tragedy after ruthless ambition has set events upon their course.

These plays are tragic in that each has a central character whose actions drive the
events and whose flaws make the conclusion unavoidable. Others written during these
years may not be tragedies in this fullest sense, but they have a bitter flavour far
removed from comedy. An example is Troilus and Cressida (1602), with its caustic view
of the world enunciated by Thersites.

Even the plays of this period which are literally comedies, in the simple sense that they
end happily, are in mood closer to tragedy. Examples are All's Well that Ends
Well (1603) and Measure for Measure(1604).

In the years after Macbeth Shakespeare tackles two Roman themes. In Antony and
Cleopatra (1607) the facts of history carry his two famous lovers to their tragic fates.
In Coriolanus (1608) it is the arrogance of the central character which creates the drama
- resolved only when his duty as a son, in response to the pleading of his aged mother,
results in his own death.

The last plays: 1608-1611

Shakespeare's last four plays, beginning with Pericles, Prince of Tyre in about 1608,
share a pattern of rupture, retirement, renewal and reconciliation. Rather like the natural
rhythm of winter, followed by hibernation and emergence into spring, the plots begin
with violently evil deeds. The good characters somehow escape to safety and a new
life, often with a new identity. Years pass and children grow up, until eventually all is
resolved.

In Pericles the events supposedly occur in ancient Tyre. In Cymbeline (1609) the
tormented family is that of the historic Cunobelin, king of a Celtic British tribe. The
Winter's Tale (1611), set in undefined classical times, takes place in the kingdoms of
Sicily and Bohemia.

The Tempest (also 1611) is set in a much more suitable context for any story of this
kind, half real and half magic: 'The scene, an uninhabited island'. For the past twelve
years the island has been home to a victim of political skulduggery - Prospero, duke of
Milan, accompanied by his young daughter Miranda. They share the place with a
subhuman inhabitant, Caliban, and a spirit who has been trapped here, Ariel.

Since this is an island, and Prospero has magic powers, shipwreck provides an easy
way of delivering the evil characters who were responsible for Prospero's exile.

With their arrival, the ingredients are in place for a fantasy playing on many of life's most
significant contrasts. The ways of the world, both good and bad, are seen in a fresh light
through the innocent eyes of Miranda, to whom everything is new. The benevolent
wisdom of Prospero outwits the scheming wiles of his opponents. Drunken crew
members have a natural affinity with the discontented Caliban. And the island, as a
magical place, can spring its own surprises.

At the end of the play, when Prospero has brought the main characters together in
reconciliation, he renounces his magic powers in a farewell epilogue.

Prospero's final speech has often been seen as Shakespeare's own farewell to his
theatrical career, relinquishing the magic with which he has conjured so many stories
and characters into life on the stage.

It may be so. But he is part author of one more play, Henry VIII (1613), and an event
during one of its performances certainly puts the seal on his retirement. A spark from a
stage cannon sets fire to the thatched roof of the Globe, which burns to the ground. The
theatre is rebuilt, reopening in 1614 with a tiled roof. But the event is likely to confirm
Shakespeare in his full-time withdrawal to his properties in Stratford, where he dies in
1616.

The sonnets: 1595-1598

If Shakespeare had written not a single play, he would still rank among England's
leading poets because of the 154 sonnets which he writes during the 1590s (they are
not published until 1609). The beauty of the individual sonnets, many of them among
the best loved poems in the English language, is enhanced by the mysterious personal
relationships of which they give tantalizing hints.

The volume of 1609 is dedicated 'to the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr W.H.'
Many of the sonnets are addressed to a young man, and the assumption that the loved
one is himself W.H. has prompted endless speculation as to who he might be. William
Herbert (earl of Pembroke) and Henry Wriothesley (earl of Southampton) have been
leading contenders.
In the early poems (1-17) the poet urges the young man to achieve immortality by
marrying and having children, but nos 18-25 suggest that he will be immortal anyway
through these sonnets addressed to him (as indeed, in his anonymous way, he has
proved). The poems up to 126 dwell on the relationship with the young man, sometimes
offering pained hints that he is being unfaithful with a woman.

If she is the woman to whom the final sequence of sonnets is addressed, then her
identify has stimulated as much fruitless research as that of W.H. Famous only as the
dark lady of the sonnets, she is dark physically, dark in the turmoil she creates for her
lover, and dark now in escaping the limelight.

Ben Jonson: 1606-1616

Ben Jonson, almost as prolific in his works for the stage as Shakespeare, achieves his
most distinctive voice in two satirical comedies based on an interplay of characters seen
as types. In the earlier of the two, Volpone (1606), the characters are even given the
Italian names of animals to point up their supposed natures.

Volpone (the fox) pretends to be dying so as to extract gifts from people expecting an
inheritance. Mosca (the fly) acts as his accomplice. A lawyer, Voltore (the vulture),
hovers around the supposed death bed. A feeble old man, Corbaccio (the crow), is
willing to disinherit his son for his own benefit. And a self-righteous Corvino (the raven)
offers his wife to satisfy Volpone's lust.

Tricks played on the gullible also provide the comedy in The Alchemist (1610). Subtle, a
confidence trickster pretending to be an alchemist, promises his victims whatever they
most desire.

A grossly self-indulgent hedonist, Sir Epicure Mammon, and two fanatical puritans,
Ananias and Tribulation Wholesome, turn out to share the same longing - to possess
the philosopher's stone, with which they will turn base metal into gold. By contrast a
simple tobacconist, Drugger, wants nothing more than a design for his shop that will
bring in customers. Kastril, an oaf up from the country, is mainly interested in
discovering the fashionable way of being quarrelsome.

These two plays succeed partly because of the farcical opportunities available as the
tricksters struggle to keep their various victims separate and happy. But they also
benefit from the vividly realistic detail which gives life to Jonson's verse.
His sharp eye for the everyday scene, and for the amusing quirks of people's behaviour,
even enables him to make a viable play out of Bartholomew Fair(1614). It has little to
hold it together except the context of the famous fair itself. The plot consists only of the
adventures and mishaps which befall different groups of visitors.

While writing his comedies for the public theatres, Jonson also provides masques for
amateur performance at the court of James I. His first, The Masque of Blackness in
1605, is specifically written to accomodate the longing of James's queen, Anne of
Denmark, to appear in the role of a black African.

A quarrelsome and touchy man, frequently in trouble with the authorities, Jonson is
unusual for his time in insisting on the dignity of the craft of playwright. Whereas
Shakespeare shows little interest in the survival of the text of his plays, Jonson arranges
for his own works to be published in a splendid folio edition of 1616. Three years later,
as if taking the point, Oxford university honours him with a degree as master of arts.

England's Metaphysical poets: 17th century

The term Metaphysical has been applied, with no very good reason, to a group of
English poets of the early 17th century who share a love of intellectual ingenuity, literary
allusion and paradox, and who use language, images and rhythms of a kind not
conventionally 'poetic' to startle the reader into thought.

In the 17th and 18th century the term usually implies hostility to what is perceived as
these poets' perverse complexity. In the 20th century, after their merits are championed
by T.S. Eliot and others, it becomes one of approval.

The earliest of the group (by a generation and more) is John Donne, whose wide range
of themes stretches from erotic delights (Love's Progress, or To his Mistress Going to
Bed) to the power of a holy sonnet such as the one on death (beginning 'Death be not
proud' and ending 'Death, thou shalt die').

Donne becomes dean of St Paul's in 1621. An unscrupulous collector of pluralist church

appointments, he is nevertheless a most persuasive preacher. A passage written during
a serious illness uses a powerful and frequently quoted sequence of images to involve
all humanity: 'No man is an island, entire of itself; ... and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.'
George Herbert, an aristocrat whose mother is a friend and patron of Donne, chooses a
quieter life than his somewhat worldly predecessor and settles eventually for an
insignificant country parish. He writes only devotional poems. Published just after his
death in a single volume, The Temple (1633), they convey a mood of simple piety
transcending subtle torments of spiritual conflict.

Several other poets of the period write within a roughly similar idiom, which can be said
to share Metaphysical characteristics. One in particular stands out - Andrew Marvell, a
generation younger again than Herbert.

In his own lifetime Marvell is known as a minor public figure, linked with prominent
leaders during the Commonwealth. He acts as tutor in the families of
both Fairfax and Cromwell, and from 1657 serves with Milton in Cromwell's department
for foreign affairs.

Marvell's poems are published in 1681, three years after his death. Not until the 20th
century are they appreciated, for their subtle and often provocative blending of different
levels of perception. In To His Coy Mistress Marvell gives the conventional argument of
the seducer (to gather rosebuds while we may) a very much darker complexion: 'The
grave's a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace.'

Milton the young poet: 1632-1638

When the collected plays of Shakespeare are reissued in 1632, in the edition known as
the Second Folio, the volume contains an Epitaph on Shakespeare. It is not known how
the poem has been chosen for this honour, but it is the first published work of John
Milton - famous as yet only in the limited circle of Cambridge, where he is a brilliant
student.

Milton's other poems from his student days, not published until 1645, include On the
Morning of Christ's Nativity and a linked pair, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, contrasting the
active and the contemplative life.
Two years after his departure from Cambridge, Milton's masque Comus is performed, in
1634, at a grand ceremonial occasion in Ludlow castle. And in 1637 a personal tragedy,
linked with Cambridge, prompts the writing and publication of his first major poem.

A fellow student from his college days, Edward King, dies in a shipwreck in the Irish
Sea. A volume of elegies is planned in his memory and Milton is asked to contribute.
The result is Lycidas, published with the other elegies in 1638. Though written within a
formal pastoral convention, the poem is an intensely felt and very personal meditation
on mortality (Milton's perhaps as much as Edward King's, who was an acquaintance
rather than a close friend).

Milton the polemicist: 1641-1660

To an observer in the 1640s and 1650s these few but distinguished poems would seem
to comprise the full and completed career of Milton the poet, for during this period of
crisis in English history he devotes himself to issues of more immediate and practical
concern.

In the developing conflict between the Anglican monarchy and puritan parliament,
Milton's sympathies are on the side of parliament - in whose endeavours he sees the
best hope for his own central concern, that of liberty for the individual citizen. From
1641, the date of his first polemical tract, Milton consciously and with regret sets aside
poetry in order to 'embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes'.

He is by no means slavishly on parliament's side. Indeed the best known of his

pamphlets, Areopagitica(an impassioned plea for freedom of the press, published in
1644), is prompted by parliament's decision to continue censorship laws inherited from
the days of the Star Chamber.

Nevertheless Milton's political allegiance is clear, and when the Civil War has been won
by parliament he himself enters government. In March 1649 he is appointed Latin
secretary to Cromwell's council of state. Latin is the international language, so his post
means that he is responsible for the administration of foreign affairs.

Milton is also what would nowadays be called the government's spin doctor, a role in
which he is presented at once with a difficult task. The royalists publish, on the day of
the executed king's burial in 1649, a powerful propaganda volume called Eikon
Basilike ('image of a king'). It is a collection of meditations and prayers, supposedly
written by the martyred Charles I when held in captivity by parliament. Milton responds
with Eikonoklastes('image breaker'), but he can do little to dent the power and
immediacy of the opposing volume.
Milton keeps his job until the end of the Commonwealth, in 1660. He has been blind
since 1652, but talented assistants (including Marvell) are at his side.

Paradise Lost: 1667

Milton's lack of personal skill in politics is evident from the timing of his last polemical
pamphlet. In 1660, the year of the Restoration and just two months before the return of
Charles II to London, he publishes The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free
Commonwealth.

From his close association with the leading regicides, Milton is in real danger in the
early months of the restored monarchy. He goes into hiding when a warrant is posted
for his arrest. In the event he is allowed both his life and his liberty - perhaps because
his blindness makes him harmless. The change proves immensely beneficial, in the
fourteen years of life left to him. He now devotes himself fully to a task which is already
under way.

There is evidence that from early in his life Milton has had in mind a grand project on a
biblical theme. Since 1658 he has been dictating an epic poem which states in its
opening lines that its subject is 'man's first disobedience', and its purpose 'to justify the
ways of God to man'.

Paradise Lost (or, in its early draft title, Adam Unparadized) uses the first three chapters
of Genesisas the springboard on which Milton builds mighty edifices describing the fall
of Satan and his rebel angels, the struggle between them and the archangels, the
promise of redemption through Christ, the innocence and temptation of Adam and Eve,
and their expulsion from paradise.

The writing of this great work by the blind poet provides one of the most evocative
scenes of English literary history. Milton usually composes his soaring lines during the
night and keeps them in his head until the next day. When he is ready 'to be milked', he
dictates (often with a leg sprawled over the arm of his chair) to various scribes, including
two nephews and one of his daughters.

The poem is published in 1667 (earning its author £10), and is followed in 1671
by Paradise Regained (a briefer work, centred on Christ resisting Satan in the desert to
undo the harm of Adam and Eve succumbing to him) and Samson Agonistes (a poetic
drama, treating the final days of Samson with the intensity of Greek tragedy).

Pepys: 1660-1669
At some time during the last weeks of 1659 a 26-year-old Londoner buys himself a
handsome leather-bound volume with all its pages blank. He senses that the new
decade will be an interesting one in politics (and, he hopes, in his own career). He
intends to record it in a diary.

On 1 January 1660 he begins his first entry: 'Lords day. This morning (we lying lately in
the garret) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other
clothes but them.' He goes on to describe the sermon which he hears in church and his
midday meal at home: 'My wife dressed the remains of a turkey, and in the doing of it
she burned her hand.'

Samuel Pepys has launched into the great adventure of recording the minutiae of his
daily life. The experiment lasts nine years (until trouble with his eyes brings it to an end),
and it bequeaths to the world perhaps the greatest of all diaries.

The word 'diary', in the sense of a personal record, only comes into use in the 17th
century. Almost immediately there are two outstanding examples in the journals of
Pepys and of John Evelyn. They are very different. Evelyn keeps a spasmodic account
of events, mainly of a public kind, over a span of seven decades. Pepys, in a greater
number of words, records everything which takes his fancy during just nine years.

Pepys is fortunate that the 1660s in London are so eventful. In starting the diary he
anticipates interesting developments as the country adjusts to the ending of the
Commonwealth and, as it turns out, to the restoration of the monarchy. But no one can
anticipate two of the most newsworthy events in London's history, the Great Plague and
the Great Fire, which Pepys is able to record in fascinating detail (see Plague and Fire).

The description on 4 September 1666 of himself and Sir William Penn, together digging
a hole in the garden to preserve their wine and parmesan cheese from the advancing
flames, makes an extraordinarily vivid historical vignette. The fire stops short of their
treasure.

Pepys's genius as a diarist is that he records everything which interests him. The diary
is for himself and about himself (it is not published, even in abbreviated form, until
1825). His concerns, to the delight of modern readers, frequently centre on his sexual
exploits. We even share with him the anticipation. He records on 19 December 1664
that he feels a little guilty, lying in bed with his wife, because his mind keeps running on
what he hopes to do tomorrow with the wife of a certain Bagwell. The next day we learn
that he has succeeded.
Pepys even lapses into foreign doggerel in case his wife reads the diary. 'Et ego did
baiser her bouche.' But can Mrs Pepys really not work out that her husband has kissed
someone on the mouth?

The Pilgrim's Progress: 1678

The persecution of Nonconformistscauses one of England's best loved works of

literature to be written. In many households in the 18th century there is only one book
other than the Bible. It is The Pilgrim's Progress, much of it probably written when its
author John Bunyan is in Bedford gaol.

His offence, in the harsh Anglican reaction of the 1660s, is merely to preach without a
licence - meaning outside the authorized confines of the Church of England. Bunyan is
a leading member of a community of Baptists in Bedford. Committed to the county gaol
in 1661, he remains there for eleven years until released in 1672 as a result of Charles
II's Declaration of Indulgence.

Bunyan's spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, is published

during his years in gaol (in 1666). It gives him an added literary reputation when he
returns to his preaching during the 1670s. This perhaps encourages him to undertake
(or maybe just to complete) a more popular work when he finds himself back in Bedford
gaol for another spell of six months in 1677.

The Pilgrim's Progress from this world, to that which is to come is published in 1678,
followed by a second part in 1684. In a sense it covers the same territory as his
autobiography, telling of a guilt-ridden quest for salvation. But the material is now given
fictional form.

The immediate popularity of The Pilgrim's Progress in solemn English households is

easy to understand. While unmistakably an improving religious work, it has the
excitement of a folk tale and the rich characters of a novel.

In Part 1 the pilgrim, Christian, sets off with his burden of sins upon his back to make his
way to the Celestial City. His path takes him through the Slough of Despond, past the
tempting delights of Vanity Fair, and into temporary imprisonment by Giant Despair in
Doubting Castle. In Part 2 Christian is followed on the journey by his wife, Christiana,
with their children. Every virtuous family in England can identify with these characters
and their adventures.
A new Augustan Age: 1702-1714

Literary life in England flourishes so impressively in the early years of the 18th century
that contemporaries draw parallels with the heyday of Virgil, Horace and Ovid at the
time of the emperor Augustus. The new Augustan Age becomes identified with the reign
of Queen Anne (1702-14), though the spirit of the age extends well beyond her death.

The oldest of the Augustan authors, Jonathan Swift, first makes his mark in 1704
with The Battle of the Books and A Tale of a Tub. These two tracts, respectively about
literary theory and religious discord, reveal that there is a new prose writer on the scene
with lethal satirical powers.

The tone of oblique irony which Swift makes his own is evident even in the title of his
1708 attack on fashionable trends in religious circles - An Argument to prove that the
Abolishing of Christianity in England, may as Things now stand, be attended with some
Inconveniences.

In the following year, 1709, a new periodical brings a gentler brand of humour and irony
hot off the presses, three times a week, straight into London's fashionable coffee
houses. The Tatler, founded by Richard Steele with frequent contributions from his
friend Joseph Addison, turns the relaxed and informal essay into a new journalistic art
form. In 1711 Steele and Addison replace the Tatler with the daily Spectator.

The same year sees the debut of the youngest and most brilliant of this set of writers.
Unlike the others, Alexander Pope devotes himself almost exclusively to poetry,
becoming a master in the use of rhymed heroic couplets for the purposes of wit. In 1711
he shows his paces with the brilliant Essay on Criticism (the source of many frequently
quoted phrases, such as 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread'). He follows this in
1712 with a miniature masterpiece of mock heroic, The Rape of the Lock.

In Windsor Forest (1713) Pope seals the Augustan theme, using the poem to praise
Queen Anne's reign just as Virgil celebrated that of Augustus.
Pope is so much in tune with the spirit of his age that he is able, in his mid-twenties, to
persuade the British aristocracy to subscribe in large numbers to his proposed
translation of Homer's Iliad into heroic couplets.

The work appears in six volumes between 1715 and 1720, to be followed by
the Odyssey (1725-6). The two projects bring Pope some £10,000, enabling him to
move into a grand riverside villa in Twickenham. This is just half a century
after Milton receives £10 for Paradise Lost.

The weapon of these authors is wit, waspish in tone - as is seen in The Dunciad (1728),
Pope's attack on his many literary enemies. The most savage in his use of wit is
undoubtedly Swift. His Modest Proposal, in 1729, highlights poverty in Ireland by
suggesting that it would be far better for everybody if, instead of being allowed to starve,
these unfortunate Irish babies were fattened up and eaten.

Yet, astonishingly, a book of 1726 by Swift, almost equally savage in its satirical
intentions, becomes one of the world's best loved stories - by virtue simply of its
imaginative brilliance. It tells the story of a ship's surgeon, Lemuel Gulliver.

Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels: 1719-1726

Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, has a genius for journalism in an age
before newspapers exist which can accomodate his kind of material. He travels widely
as a semi-secret political agent, gathering material of use to those who pay him. In 1712
he founds, and writes almost single-handed, a thrice-weekly periodical, the Review,
which lasts only a year. But it is his instinct for what would now be called feature articles
which mark him out as the archetypal journalist.

A good example is the blend of investigative and imaginative skills which lead him to
research surviving documents of the Great Plague and then to blend them in a
convincing fictional Journal of the Plague Year (1722).

Another work which could run week after week in a modern newspaper is his immensely
informative Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, published in three volumes
in 1724-7. But his instinctive nose for a good story is best seen in his response to the
predicament of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who survives for five years as a
castaway on a Pacific island before being discovered in 1709.
Just as the plague documents stimulated a fictional journal, this real-life drama now
prompts Defoe to undertake the imagined autobiography of another such
castaway, Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Defoe imagines in extraordinary detail the practical difficulties involved in building a

house and a boat, in domesticating the local animals, and in coping with unwelcome
neighbours. This is a cannibal island. The native whom Crusoe rescues from their
clutches on a Friday becomes his faithful servant, Man Friday.

Defoe's interests seem to lie mainly in the theme of man's creation of society from
primitive conditions, but meanwhile he almost unwittingly writes a gripping adventure
story of survival. Robinson Crusoe is avidly read as such by all succeeding generations
- and has a good claim to be considered the first English novel.

Seven years later another book appears which immediately becomes one of the world's
most popular stories, and again seems to do so for reasons not quite intended by its
author. Jonathan Swift, a man inspired by savage indignation at the ways of the world,
writes Gulliver's Travels (1726) as a satire in which human behaviour is viewed from
four revealing angles.

When Gulliver arrives in Liliput, he observes with patronising condescension the habits
of its tiny inhabitants. But in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, he is the midget. When he
proudly tells the king about European manners, he is surprised at the royal reaction.
The king says that humans sound like 'little odious Vermin'.

Gulliver's next stop, the flying island of Laputa, is run by philosophers and scientists
(as Plato might have wished); predictably they make a mess of things. Finally Gulliver
visits a land ruled by intelligent horses (the Houyhnhnms, Swift's version of whinnying).
The hooligans here are brutal and oafish beasts in human shape, the Yahoos.

Once again the sheer vitality of the author's imagination transcends his immediate
purpose. Of the millions who enjoy Gulliver's fantastic adventures, few are primarily
aware of Swift's harshly satirical intentions.

The English novel: 1740-1749

During a quarter of a century, from 1740, the novel makes great advances in England,
with notable achievements in several different styles.

Defoe has laid a foundation with Robinson Crusoe, and has followed this up with The
Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders in 1722. Moll's story is more like
a conventional novel than that of Robinson Crusoe, being set in the real world of low-life
London and the plantations of Virginia. It is full of vitality and incident, but it is basically -
as the title states - a sequence of fortunes and misfortunes for the heroine. Crusoe had
his isolation to give focus to the story. Moll has only her vivacious character. Of plot, in
the normal sense, there is little.

This lack of focus is fully answered by Samuel Richardson, a novelist of much greater
influence in his own time than today. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) tells the story
of Pamela Andrews trying to ward off the sexual advances of the young man of the
house in which she is a maid. The narrative develops in the form of letters - most of
them written by Pamela herself.

The ability to unfold a plot through correspondence, spinning out the detail and viewing
events from several different angles, is the pioneering discovery of Richardson. He
takes it to much greater length in Clarissa (7 vols, 1747-8), a novel of more than a
million words and the longest in the English language.

Pamela has a somewhat unconvincing happy ending. Clarissa, an altogether darker

account of a relationship between two upper-class characters, ends in disaster for both.
This account of pyschological warfare between the sexes is much read throughout
Europe. The brilliantly savage erotic novel by Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782),
can be seen as a direct descendant.

A more cheerful offshoot of Richardson's efforts is the first novel by Henry Fielding, a
magistrate in London's Bow Street court with an intimate knowledge of the city's low life.
Offended by the sentimental unreality of Pamela, he writes Joseph Andrews (1742) -
the story of Pamela's brother, who is a minor character in Richardson's book.

Fielding finds virtue not in respectability (the ultimate yardstick in Pamela) but in the
warm-hearted honesty of a group of ordinary and often unfortunate characters, in
particular the absent-minded Parson Adams. His plot, loose and picaresque though it is
in many respects, has its own logic and consistency.

The ingredients pioneered in Joseph Andrews are deployed by Fielding with even
greater success in Tom Jones (1749). The adventures in a vividly wicked world of the
lusty but honest Tom, and the survival against all the odds of his love for Sophia
Western, provide a novel of romance and adventure which has kept its power ever
since - as is evident in its several incarnations on film.

The English novel: 1759-1766

The most original novel of the 18th century, and one of the most chaotically endearing
books of any age, is published from 1759 by a clergyman on the staff of the cathedral in
York. It is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

Told as Tristram's autogiography, the book begins - logically but unconventionally - with
the scene at his conception. Thereafter, in a series of looping digressions interrupted
with sudden surprises (such as a page of solid black in mourning for poor Yorick),
Sterne dwells upon a small number of quite ordinary characters who come vividly alive
thanks to their minor obsessions and eccentricities. We are well into Vol. 3 before the
author is born. Slightly before that event he at last has a moment to write his Preface.

Sterne's blend of fantasy and mock-learning owes much to Rabelais, but he adds an
easy playfulness, a friendly teasing of the reader, which his contemporaries find
immediately attractive. The success of the first two volumes in 1759 is so great that
Sterne is able to retire to a quiet curacy in north Yorkshire. Tristram Shandy could go on
for ever, but the story ends in the middle of nowhere after Vol. 7 (1767), merely because
that is where its author stops writing.

Tristram Shandy - with its amused interest in the relationship between writer and reader,
and in the nature of narrative - seems two centuries ahead of its time, resembling a
modern demolition of the very idea of the novel.

The next English novel to retain a devoted readership through the centuries is, by
contrast, firmly in the mainstream of fiction. Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of
Wakefield (1766) tells the story of a simple and good-hearted vicar who puts up stoically
with a series of disasters, mainly brought upon him by the vagaries of his children, until
he eventually emerges unscathed.

The events are more melodramatic than those which drive the plots of Jane Austen, but
Goldsmith's unaffected prose and gentle irony prefigure later advances in the English
novel. Between them, the experiments in English fiction in the mid-18th century make
almost anything possible.

Johnson and Boswell: 1755-1791

'Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing

the original, and detailing the signification of words.'

That definition appears in the Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson,
published in 1755. Its heavyweight solemnity, enlivened by the joke at its centre, is the
quality which has made Dr Johnson England's best-loved literary character. His cast of
mind is known now not from his own voluminous writings but from the devoted account
written by his young friend James Boswell and published in 1791 as The Life of Samuel
Johnson.

Boswell meets Johnson in London in 1763 and keeps in touch on his annual visit from
Edinburgh, where he is employed as a lawyer. Boswell is a man fascinated by
conversation (as is revealed in his own extremely vivid journals), and in Johnson he has
met the heavyweight champion of this particular art. From early in their friendship he
conceives the plan of writing the great man's life, and begins to note down his views and
remarks.

It is evident from Boswell's pages that Johnson, like Falstaff, is alarming as well as witty.
As Goldsmith observes in Boswell's pages: 'There is no arguing with Johnson; for when
his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.'

Boswell's literary efforts on behalf of his friend mean that more of Johnson's
curmudgeonly opinions are remembered and affectionately quoted than those of any
other Englishman.

A frequent butt is Boswell's own country. 'Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which
a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England'. As it happens this
prejudice is particularly inappropriate in Johnson's lifetime when Edinburgh, in
particular, is enjoying a period of creativity known subsequently as the Scottish
Enlightenment. But vigorous opinions of Johnson's kind transcend small local realities.

Johnson, the devoted Londoner, has little interest in travelling. Asked by Boswell
whether the famous Giant's Causeway would not be worth seeing, he replies: 'Worth
seeing? yes; but not worth going to see.'

Even so, Boswell does somehow persuade the reluctant tourist to accompany him on a
journey north in 1773 - recorded by Johnson in A Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland (1775), and by Boswell in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). This is a
region of particular topical interest, for the Celtic fringe of Britain has suddenly become
famous as the home of the poet Ossian. His newly discovered epic work excites all
Europe - except, almost alone on the issue, Samuel Johnson.

Everywhere in the islands there is talk of Fingal, a supposed poem by Ossian

discovered and translated by James Macpherson and published in 1762. Johnson tells
Boswell that he considers it 'as great an imposition as ever the world was troubled with'.
When Johnson's views become public, in his book of 1775, Macpherson demands a
retraction and gets the reply: 'What shall I retract? I thought your book an imposture
from the beginning, I think it upon yet surer reasons an imposture still.'

Johnson's critical sense makes his Lives of the Poets(1779-81) a valuable work even
today. And on the Ossian issue he is ahead of the best minds in Scotland. Even Hume
and Adam Smith are at first taken in by the poem.

The Scottish Enlightenment: 1748-1785

During the second half of the 18th century Scotland is in the forefront of intellectual and
scientific developments. The movement known now as the Scottish Enlightenment has
much in common with the broader Enlightenment, in its emphasis on rational processes
and the potential of scientific research. This Scottish version is mainly of interest for the
concentration of achievement within a small region. The people involved are in the
university departments and laboratories of Edinburgh and Glasgow.
The founding figure can be said to be the philosopher David Hume. He publishes his
most significant work, A Treatise on Human Nature, early in his life, in 1739-40, but it
receives little attention at the time.

Hume travels during much of the 1740s, becoming better known only after he settles in
Edinburgh in 1751. His treatise is now published again in three more accessible parts
(An Essay concerning Human Understanding 1748, An Enquiry concerning the
Principles of Morals 1751, A Dissertation on the Passions 1757). His Political
Discourses of 1752 give him a wider reputation, being translated into French.

At this time he becomes a close friend of Adam Smith, who as yet is a primarily a moral
philosopher - making his name in 1759 with The Theory of Moral Sentiments. His great
work of political economy, The Wealth of Nations, is still nearly two decades in the
future.

Hume and Smith are the intellectual leaders of this Scottish movement, but they have
distinguished colleagues in scientific research. In 1756 Joseph Black, a lecturer in
chemistry in Glasgow, publishes a paper which demonstrates the existence of carbon
dioxide. Five years later Black discovers the principle of latent heat. By that time he has
befriended a Glasgow laboratory technician, James Watt, who also has an enquiring
mind and an interest in heat.

Meanwhile in Edinburgh a 'Society of Gentleman in Scotland' has been formed to

emulate the great publishing achievement of the continental Enlightenment,
Diderot's Encyclopédie which has been appearing in parts since 1751.

The gentlemen in Scotland produce between 1768 and 1771 the first edition of a
dictionary of the arts and sciences under the title Encyclopaedia Britannica. Unlike its
French predecessor, it has been revised and reissued ever since.

While the Encyclopaedia Britannica is coming off the presses, a retired doctor in
Edinburgh has been studying the local rock strata. In 1785 James Huttonreads a paper
on this unusual topic to the newly founded Royal Society of Edinburgh. His approach
breaks new ground. Hutton is the pioneer of scientific geology, one of the main
contributions of the Scottish Enlightenment to the field of human enquiry.

Macpherson and Chatterton: 1760-1777

In the late 1750s James Macpherson, a Scottish schoolmaster, begins travelling in the
Highlands and islands to collect Gaelic manuscripts and oral accounts of traditional
Celtic literature. The result is a collection of supposed translations of ancient texts,
published in 1760 as Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of
Scotland and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language.

Macpherson follows this in 1762 with a much more ambitious publication, an entire epic
poem by the semi-legendary Irish poet Oisin, supposed son of the Celtic warrior hero
Finn McCool.

Transferred by Macpherson to Scotland, the pair become Ossian and Fingal - and the
poem itself is published as Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem composed by Ossian. This is
rapturously received as a romantic relic from the Middle Ages, with only a few
dissenting voices such as Dr Johnson's.

It is later proved to be almost entirely Macpherson's own book, with a few scraps of
ancient ballads inserted here and there, but its success has another significance. The
Celtic twilight imagined in Ossian's name chimes perfectly with a new longing for
something more mysterious than the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

This developing mood of romantic medievalism (less frivolous than Horace Walpole's
self-indulgence at Strawberry Hill) is given another boost in 1765 with the publication of
Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. This contains genuine medieval
ballads, mainly taken from a single surviving manuscript. In many cases they are
somewhat over-restored by Percy, as an editor, but this is a trivial detail in the
developing mood of the time.

Both Ossian and Percy are read with avid interest by a brilliant and lonely boy in Bristol,
now in his early teens. Thomas Chatterton lives his own imaginative life in the late
Middle Ages.

Chatterton invents a 15th-century poet, Thomas Rowley, and sets him among historical
Bristol characters of the period. He writes Rowley's poems for him, and forges
documents and correspondence relating to his life. These are sufficiently convincing to
deceive various local antiquaries. Horace Walpole at first accepts as authentic a treatise
by Rowley on painting which Chatterton sends him (The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn
Englande).

In March 1769 Chatterton has a supposed early medieval work (Ethelgar. A Saxon
poem) accepted by the Town and Country Magazine. Two months later the same
periodical publishes one of his Rowley poems.

In April 1770 Chatterton moves to London to seek his fortune. But no one in the capital
city pays much attention. In August, in a garret, the 17-year-old boy takes arsenic and
dies.

Seven years later a volume of the Rowley poems is published in London, assumed by
the publisher to be by the 16th-century author. For many years argument rages as to
whether these poems are by Rowley or Chatterton. Unlike Macpherson's forgeries,
those believing them to be Chatterton's see in them a fresh and original talent. Called by
Wordsworth 'the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride',
Chatterton becomes a powerful influence in early romanticism.

Decline and Fall: 1764-1788

The most famous work of history by an English author has a precisely pinpointed
moment of inspiration. Edward Gibbon later describes the day: 'It was at Rome, on the
15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot
friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline
and fall of the city first started to my mind.'

The eventual offspring of that moment is The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1778. The six volumes cover a vast
sweep of European history from the 2nd centuryto the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Decline and Fall is an act of enquiring nostalgia by a classicist of the rational 18th
century who looks back to the Roman world, a society which he finds in so many ways
admirable, and wonders why, where and when everything went wrong. He discovers, as
he must have suspected he would on that day in 1764, that the barefoot friars and their
superstitious colleagues during the medieval centuries are to blame for the long process
which he describes in a typically challenging phrase as 'the triumph of barbarism and
religion'.

Paradoxically, Gibbon writes a great work on the Middle Ages at the very time when the
period's merits are most undervalued by scholars such as himself.

His book is an immediate success when the first volume is published in 1776 - partly
because some of his comments on Christianity provoke controversy, but above all due
to the elegant irony of his prose and his ability to rise to the grand historic moment.

The full orchestra plays in long rolling cadences when Gibbon describes an event such
as the crusaders in 1204 sacking Constantinople. But a new character (in this
case Rienzo) may be introduced with a simple and challenging sentence; 'In a quarter of
the city which was inhabited only by mechanics and Jews, the marriage of an innkeeper
and a washerwoman produced the future deliverer of Rome.' Gibbon's readers have
found this blend irresistible.

At the end Gibbon brings his work full circle. His story ends with two events of the 15th
century, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks and the return of the papacy to
Rome. Renaissance Rome, with papal encouragement, rediscovers and takes pains to
restore the glories of classical Rome. By the time of Gibbon's visit the city is the
destination of every Grand Tourist.

Gibbon states with some satisfaction in his conclusion: 'The monuments of ancient
Rome have been elucidated by the diligence of the antiquarian; and the footsteps of
heroes, the relics not of superstition but of empire, are devoutly visited by a new race of
pilgrims from the remote, and once savage, countries of the north.'

This History is as yet incomplete.