Donne critics & contexts

Donne critics & contexts

1. Contemporary critics

   • John Dryden
     • "perplexes the mind of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy ... when he should ... entertain them with the softness of love"
   • Ben Johnson
     • "for not being understood would perish"
   • Samuel Johnson
     • "heterogeneous ideas ... yoked by violence together"

2. 19th century critics

   • Henry Hallam
     • "the conceits have not even the merit of being intelligible"
   • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
     • "where the writer thinks, and expects the reader to do so"

3. 20th century critics

   • C S Lewis
     • "Its complexity is all on the surface"

4. Donne's religion

   • John Carey
     • "perpetual worry about fidelity and falseness"
       • Someone who has changed loyalties becomes nervous of the capacity of other people to change their minds.
   • Clergyman who attempted to strike a balance between his Catholic heritage and reformers
     • Catholic imagery in 'The Canonisation'
     • Endorsing a Catholic understanding of the world

5. Politics and kingship

   • 'Divine Right of Kings'
   • Chain of being and the natural order
     • Undermined by political thinkers such as Machiavelli in 'The Prince'
     • Threatened by emergence of Capitalism

6. Discovery of new worlds and maps

   • Elizabethan voyages of dicovery
     • Christopher Columbus

7. War

   • Spanish Armada 1588
   • Was a permanent background threat to everyday life

8. Petrarch

   • Italian love poet who established several conventions for Elizabethan love poetry whom Donne's poetry challenges
     • Non-romantic imagery in 'The Flea'
     • Removed from the remote, chaste heroine of courtly love

9. Death

   • Elizabethan age obsessed with death
     • Pervades much of Donne's work

10. Capitalism

    • Seen as first true Capitalist age
      • Cardinal Wolsey, son of a butcher who rose to an extremely influential position
      • Formation of the East India Company in 1600

11. Readership

    • Strong oral tradition in literature
    • Addressed to an exclusive private audience
      • Trusted readers
        • His lover
        • Other respected poets
        • Valued patrons
        • Close friends
        • Male wits
        • God
      • Plays and printed books were subject to censorship
        • Donne could only write openly about sex, morality, religion and politics by limiting exposure of his work