The Elizabethan World Picture [Hardcover]

E. M. W. Tillyard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1943

This brief and illuminating account of the ideas of world order prevalent in the Elizabethan age and later is an indispensable companion for readers of the great writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne and Milton, among many others. The basic medieval idea of an ordered Chain of Being is studied by Professor Tillyard in the process of its various transformations by the dynamic spirit of the Renaissance. Among his topics are: Angels; the Stars and Fortunes; the Analogy between Macrocosm and Microcosm; the Four Elements; the Four Humours; Sympathies; Correspondences; and the Cosmic Dance—ideas and symbols which inspirited the minds and imaginations not only of the Elizabethans but of all men of the Renaissance.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 116 pages
• Publisher: Chatto & Windus (December 1943)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0701111496
• ISBN-13: 978-0701111496
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,506,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ian Myles Slater on: A Standard Introduction, October 11, 2003

By 

Ian M. Slater "aylchanan" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Elizabethan World Picture (Paperback)

Shakespeare and his contemporaries not only wrote in a form of English which is no longer familiar (and may not mean the same thing when it looks familiar), and needs notes on words and grammar to be completely understandable. Like Dante, they lived in a mental world which is now remote and foreign. No matter how universal Shakespeare, or Ben Jonson, or Christopher Marlowe, may seem, it is easy to miss the points of their statements, take the commonplace for the original, the new for the ordinary, and generally impose our own thoughts on their words.

This was in fact the common practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (with some honorable exceptions), but some of the great scholars of the Victorian Age began to try to restore the intellectual context of an epoch that was no longer entirely medieval, but not really modern. Their approach gradually filtered down to students through articles and commentaries. Or, as in this case, an independent introduction to the subject.

For well over half of the twentieth century, E.M.W. Tillyard's handy summary of "The Elizabethan World Picture" gave countless undergraduates, and many curious readers, a short introduction to an often unfamiliar world. A world in which your health rested on a proper balance of humours, which were not your reaction to jokes, but substances flowing through your body. A world in which the Four Elements (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water) were part of a hierarchy beginning with God, and including all the ranks of human beings. A world which was beginning to crumble, as the Eternal Truths of Christianity became contingent on political events, and which needed reassurance, even in popular entertainment.

Tillyard was an interesting critic (he had a famous debate on critical theory with C.S. Lewis, published as "The Personal Heresy"). His major works include a full study of Shakespeare's History Plays, in which he worked out in detail their relation to Elizabethan political theory. It is a little ironic that he may be best known for this short textbook, in which he did not set out to say anything particularly new or original. There are longer, more comprehensive, and far better documented books on the subjects he covers in "The Elizabethan World Picture," but it would be hard to find so convenient and focussed an entrance into this particular lost world of the imagination.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating in the extreme., January 31, 2002

By 

Princess Artemis (Temecula, California, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Elizabethan World Picture (Paperback)

I don't know enough about the Elizabethan time to know what this book may have left out, but I found it utterly fascinating.

People today seem so proud of their own scientific views and look down on older ones as so obviously out of date, but they fail to recognize that given what the people of the time had access to, their worldview was just as consistent with the then known facts as 'ours' is today.

Some day the prevalent worldview may become blatantly wrong according to new facts, and maybe some day people will read about it and be as fascinated by 'our'worldview as I am by the Elizabethan.

This book does a wonderful job of describing the fantastically interconnected parts that make up the Elizabethan worldview, and I find it something worth using to understand and read things written at the time and to remember as metaphor for today.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book can help you appreciate Shakespeare., December 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Elizabethan World Picture (Paperback)

Although this book is short and readable, it contains a lot of general information about the Elizabethan world picture. The book doesn't get bogged down in scholarly details, and can be read and understood at the junior high level and above. You needn't be interested in Shakespeare to read this; however, any reading of him, or his contemporaries, will be a fuller reading after looking at this book.