England’s Time of Crisis

Abstract

The century of English history from the coronation of Elizabeth in 1559 to the end of the Commonwealth in 1660 was, for those who lived through it, a period fraught with fear, tension and anxiety. The world seemed such a desperately insecure and unstable place, beset by alterations and imminent possibilities of further change, that it became hard to adopt a balanced attitude towards it. Indeed, in an atmosphere of crisis such a response might seem altogether inadequate to the circumstances. This book is an attempt to pursue this shifting yet cumulative sense of crisis from Elizabethan to Civil War England as it is articulated in literature and other printed sources, in the belief that the characteristic energies of English writing of this time are better grasped as a response to the social and political tensions of the Reformation than through the aestheticised perspectives that a notion of ‘Renaissance’ has tended to impose. Although those who put pen to paper may well have been both more critical and more pessimistic than the majority of the population and although their sense of cultural crisis may not have always found an echo, they nevertheless shaped a climate of opinion which contributed to the Civil War. For cultural crises are as much a matter of attitude as of historical fact.