Rhetoric, Ideology and the Elizabethan World Picture

Abstract

The Elizabethan World Picture is frequently pronounced dead, yet it has remarkable powers of resurrection. Fifty years ago, E. M. W. Tillyard demonstrated how often defenders of the Elizabethan regime appealed to the analogy of the order of nature: monarchy and hierarchy were universal features of the cosmos, and any attempt to overthrow them was a perversion of a divine order.¹ Somewhat more recently, the belief that the early modern period was particularly susceptible to arguments from natural analogy was strongly reaffirmed by Michel Foucault in his highly influential book The Order of Things.² And some revisionist historians, concerned to demonstrate that the radical political ideas of the mid-seventeenth century were fundamentally alien to English culture, have recently been reiterating some of Tillyard’s arguments.³