The English Renaissance began with the importation of Italian art and philosophy, Humanism, during the reign of Henry VIII.  Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, imported and translated classical writings, such as Virgil's Aeneid, the first English work to use Blank Verse. Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt in their sonnets also imitated classical writers such as Petrarch, and are credited as "Fathers of the English Sonnet."

While the "Great Chain of Being" (an idea suggested from antiquity; all that exists is in a created order, from the lowest possible grade to perfection, God Himself) was still asserted, the opposite, the reality of disorder, was just as prevalent. Not surprisingly, a favorite metaphor in Shakespeare's works is the world upside down, much as Hamlet presents.

The analogical mode was the prevailing intellectual concept for the era, which was inherited from the Middle Ages: the analogical habit of mind, with its correspondences, hierarchies, and microcosmic-macrocosmic relationships, survived from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Levels of existence, including human and cosmic, were habitually correlated, and correspondences and resemblances were perceived everywhere. Man was a mediator between himself and the universe. An "analogy of being" likened man to God; however, the Reformation sought to change this view, emphasizing man's fallen nature and darkness of reason. The analogy can be seen in the London theatre, correlating the disparate planes of earth (the stage), hell (the cellarage), and heaven (the "heavens," projecting above the top of the stage). Degree, priority, and place were afforded all elements, depending on their distance from perfection, God.

Because he possessed both soul and body, man had a unique place in the chain—the extremes of human potential are everywhere evident in the drama of the English Renaissance. Natural degeneration, in contrast to our optimistic idea of progress, was everywhere in evidence too—the primitive Edenic "golden age" was irrecoverable, and the predicted end of the world was imminent. With changes in the ways that man looked at his universe, disturbing discoveries suggested mutability and corruption: the terrifying effect of new stars, comets, etc., added to a pessimism that anticipated signs of decay as apocalyptic portents of approaching universal dissolution.

Hierarchically, the human soul was threefold: the highest, or rational soul, which man on earth possessed uniquely; the sensual, or appetitive soul, which man shared with lower animals; and the lowest, or vegetative (vegetable; nutritive) soul, concerned mainly with reproduction and growth. The soul was facilitated in its work by the body's three main organs, liver, heart, and brain: the liver served the soul's vegetal, the heart its vital, and the brain its animal faculties—motive, principal virtues, etc.

Man himself was formed by a natural combination of the four elements: the dull elements of earth and water—both tending to fall to the center of the universe—and air and fire—both tending to rise. When the elements mixed they shaped man's temperament. Each element possessed two of the four primary qualities which combined into a "humour" or human temperament: earth (cold and dry: melancholy), water (cold and moist: phlegmatic); air (hot and moist: sanguine); fire (hot and dry: choleric).

Like his soul and his humours, man's body possessed cosmic affinities: the brain with the Moon; the liver with the planet Jupiter; the spleen with the planet Saturn. Assigned to each of the stars and the sphere of fixed stars was a hierarchy of incorporeal spirits, angels or daemons. On earth, the fallen angels and Satan, along with such occult forces as witches, continued to tempt man and lead him on to sin.

Familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries were the Aristotelian four causes: the final cause, or purpose or end for which a change is made; the efficient cause, or that by which some change is made; the material cause, or that in which a change is made; and formal cause, or that into which something is changed. Renaissance concern with causation may be seen in Polonius' laboring of the efficient "cause" of Hamlet's madness, "For this effect defective comes by cause" (2.2.101-03).

In the Aristotelian view, change involves a unity between potential matter and actualized form. Change is thus a process of becoming, affected by a cause which acts determinately towards a goal to produce a result. Implicit in the Elizabethan worldview was the Aristotelian idea of causation as encompassing potentiality and act, matter and mind. The London dramatist's pre-Cartesian universe, indeed, tended to retain a sense of the purposefulness of natural objects and their place in the divine scheme.

Towards the mid-seventeenth century a major cleft between the medieval-Renaissance world-view and the modern world view took place, effected by Renee Descartes (1596-1650). Cartesian dualism separated off mind from matter, and soul from body—not a new idea, but reformulated so that the theologians' doctrines became the philosophers'; the problems of Predestination were suddenly the problems of Determinism.

For Descartes, all nature was to be explained as either thought or extension; hence, the mind became a purely thinking substance, the body a soulless mechanical system. Descartes' philosophy held that one can know only one's own clear and distinct ideas. Objects are important only insofar as man brings his own judgments to bear upon them. Cartesian skepticism and subjectivism led to the rejection of the previous centuries' Aristotelian perspectives, as meaningless or obscure. According to Aristotle, to know the cause of things was to know their nature.

For the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, objects influenced each other through mutual affinities and antipathies. Elizabethans accepted the correspondences of sympathies and antipathies in nature, including a homeopathic notion that "like cures like." Well into the seventeenth century, alchemical, hermetical, astrological, and other pre-scientific beliefs continued to exert, even on the minds of distinguished scientists, a discernible influence.

Concerned with the need to believe, in an age of incipient doubt, theatre audiences often witnessed in tragedies such struggles to sustain belief: Hamlet has a need to trust the Ghost; Lear has a wracked concern for heavenly powers; and Othello feels a desperate necessity to preserve his belief in Desdemona—"when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again" (3.3.92-3). For Othello and Lear, belief is sanity.

Theologically, in the later sixteenth century, divine providence seemed increasingly to be questioned, or at least to be regarded as more bafflingly inscrutable. The medieval sense of security was in a process of transformation. Those changes coincided with such circumstances as the Renaissance revival of Epicureanism, which stressed the indifference of the powers above to man's concerns. In its place was a special personal power, which was emphasized in the works of Machiavelli (1469-1527) and other Renaissance writers.

Such changes in the relations of man and his deity inevitably provided a climate for tragedy, wherein both divine justice (as in King Lear) and meaningful action (as in Hamlet) seemed equally unattainable. Lear appears to question the forces above man's life, and Hamlet the powers beyond his death. Hamlet's task is further complicated, for example, by his meaningless quest for action—from a Reformation standpoint—of works toward salvation. The path to salvation, of great concern to most Elizabethans, was not through works or merit but by inscrutable divine election.

The post-Reformation man, alienated from the objective structure of the traditional Church, as well as from the release of the confessional, with a burdened and isolated conscience, turned his guilt inward.

The Renaissance epistemological crisis emphasized the notion of the relativity of perception, present in the appearance-versus-reality motif recurrent through Renaissance drama. The Renaissance dramatists' works mark a transition between absolute natural law bestowed by God, and relativistic natural law, recognized by man.

 
To cite this article:

Narey, Wayne. "Elizabethan Worldview." Luminarium.
       2 Aug 2006. [Date you accessed this article].
       <http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/dramaworld.htm>

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