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The Elizabethan World Picture

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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.

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.

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.

When I was a student some four decades ago this book was often regarded as having proved unequivocally that the simplistic hierarchical view of the world presented by Tillyard as Elizabethan was indeed that; that all Elizabethans, without question, fully held the beliefs he imputed to them.

What is clear is that a number of Elizabethans did hold such beliefs, and that Tillyard does prove as much. But anyone reading e.g. Shakespeare's *Richard II* with Tillyard's book in mind could see that it did not "work": that Shakepeare is divided in his response to events. Richard may see himself as protected by "divine right" - by God himself - but the play leaves one in doubt whether he actually is. Yet Bolingbroke's actions - although Richard gives him the throne too readily - can easily be seen to be those of a usurper. Such complexities cannot be resolved by an appeal to Tillyard's book, and shows its very severe limits: an intelligent Elizabethan like Shakespeare could obviously see beyond Tillyard's "model"!

However, the influence of Tillyard's book been enormous, and much modern (or should that be "post-modern"?) nonsense that would see Shakespeare as purely "subversive" or providing "Shakespearean texts" which serve as a "site" for "conflict" within his society can either be refuted by knowledge of Tillyard's model or be seen as nothing other than a modification of it, whereby the model remains structurally intact but has different values assigned to it (along the lines of "we all know that the Elizabethans thought hierarchically, but you - a right-winger - approve of such a view whereas I, as a left-winger, don't").

Readers interested in the Reniassance who don't own a copy should get one, as this remains a very important text to refer to, containing much valuable and unreplaced information. - Joost Daalder, Professor of English, Flinders University, South Australia

Shakespeare is the one writer in English who can claim without dispute universality: translated into every language on the face of the planet, performed year after year in countless theaters, spoken by lovers stealing his best lines in numberless trysts. But unless you read this book, you really have no hope of understanding Shakespeare. First published more than half a century ago, Tillyard to this day is utterly readable and dead-on correct about the way the Elizabethans viewed the world. What almost everybody misses about Shakespeare is that he was essentially a conservative, dedicated to supporting the government which allowed his plays to be performed; this book explains why all of Shakespeare's plays support the established order, and crush anyone who would defy that order -- even in the comedies, the order of the world is restored to where it belongs. Tillyard's book should be mandatory for anyone who thinks they understand Shakespeare -- or who wants to understand Shakespeare.

My high school principal told me to read this book. It was invaluable even in college. The most concise and readable book on the Elizabethian world view.

This work gives a picture of the Elizabethean (1580-1605) world- view which Tillyard underlies the work of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Milton and Donne. Tillyard believes that these ideas were widespread in the Age and not the invention of a few great individuals. The fundamental idea of an ordered Chain of Being transformed by Renaissance thought is at the heart of the work.

I do not know enough about Elizabethan history to say how accurate the picture Tillyard draws is. But he gives a fascinating picture of the underlying belief- system of one of the great literary ages of all times.

I must agree with the South Australian with the review entitled: "Onesided and simplistic but enduringly useful." This little volume, along with Lovejoy's more ambitious "The Chain of Being," did wonders in helping me crank out Shakespeare term papers as an undergraduate and graduate student. But now that I've left such training wheels behind, I'm perhaps in a better position to issue a few cautionaries. It's not just Richard III who represents a contradiction that violates Tillyard's blueprint but Henry V who, far from representing the exemplary Shakespearean king, becomes a ruthless imperialist invader and sadistic despot, sacrificing innocent women and children simply to make a point. Moreover, the very spokesperson for the stable Elizabethan world picture, Ulysses ("Troilus and Cressida"), proves a vulgar, hypocritical antithesis to his own rosy view.

Regard Tillyard's representation as, at best, a "freeze frame" of the action occurring in Shakespeare's actual language. Approach it as a useful template, or mere starter, for opening a discussion on Shakespeare's churning, rapidly changing meanings, but resist the temptation to interpret the text through the template (unless you don't mind having your head handed back to you). In fact, the scheme's usefulness may be that it served the poet as an organizing tool or convenient metaphor, an alloy to be disposed of once the text was in place, inviting the reader's participation in the life of the language. At that point, we need to jettison the framework, lest it obscure and even distort our view of a character as non-categorizable, life-like and inexhaustible as Falstaff.

A must-read book. Anyone who is starting or have been studying Shakespeare have to read this book, and then, come back to the plays.

Easy to read, small, but doesn't contain too many notes about the works that are used (what isn't good).

I had a very nice time reading it many times.

One last thing, if you want to read the history plays, this is the very stating point. No doubt about it!

This compilation of Renaissance historical tidbits ( dress, manners, etc) is just what is needed if one hopes to navigate the waters of the period.