The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton

by E.M.W. Tillyard

This brief & illuminating account of the ideas of world order prevalent in the Elizabethan age & later is an useful companion for readers of the great writers of the 16th & 17th centuries: Shakespeare, the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne, Milton etc. The basic medieval idea of an ordered Chain of Being is studied by Prof. Tillyard in the process of its various transformations by the dynamic spirit of the Renaissance. Among his topics are: Angels; the Stars & Fortunes; the Analogy between Macrocosm & Microcosm; the Four Elements; the Four Humours; Sympathies; Correspondences; & the Cosmic Dance--ideas & symbols which inspirited the minds & imaginations not only of the Elizabethans but of all of the Renaissance.
Preface
Introductory
Order
Sin
The Chain of Being
The Links in the Chain
The Corresponding Planes
The Correspondences
The Cosmic Dance
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Shakespeare, Philosophy, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Literature

116 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall (E. M. W.) Tillyard OBE was an English classical and literary scholar who was Master of Jesus College, Cambridge from 1945 to 1959.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are new to the study of Shakespeare and wish to acquire a comprehensive conception of the map of ideas the Bard of Avon carried in his head, you could do worse than rely on this old warhorse of Renaissance Studies, The Elizabethan World Picture (1942) by E.M.W. Tillyard.

Eustache Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard (no wonder he preferred his initials!) was—above all else—a Cambridge man. He was born there (his father was the mayor), went to day school there (the Perse School), university (at Jesus College), and when he returned from WW I (with an O.B.E.) he began to teach in Cambridge at the recently established English School. (Before the 20th century, English literature was considered a hobby, not a serious subject for scholarship; serious reading was done primarily in Latin and Greek.)

Tillyard was a loyal promoter of the new discipline of English Studies, and was a Fellow (later Master) of the English School at Jesus College from 1926 to 1959. He wrote much, particularly on Shakespeare and Milton, but The Elizabethan World Picture is the book he is known best for today.

Tillyard sees the Elizabethan intellectual world not as a flowering of secular humanism before the Puritan frost, but rather as an extension of what was a medieval Christian consensus:

. . . the Puritans and the courtiers were more united by a common theological bond than they were divided by ethical disagreements. They had in common a mass of basic assumptions about the world, which they never disputed . . . . Coming to the world picture itself, we can say that it was still solidly theocentric, and that it was a simplified version of a more complicated medieval picture. . . . Those who know the most about the Middle Ages now assure us that humanism and a belief in the present life were themselves powerful by the twelfth century and that exhortations to contemn the world were themselves powerful for that very reason.

And what was this world picture? It was “that of an ordered universe arranged in a fixed systems of hierarchies . . .”

Tillyard’s book can be dry at times, but it is a fun book too, and the real fun comes with his descriptions of the “fixed systems of hierarchies,” particularly the ranks in the “Great Chain of Being”: the choirs of angels (seraphim first rank, angels last rank) , the stars and their influence, the elements and their associated “humours,” man (the king or queen is paramount, of course), the other animals (king lion or elephant at the top, the lowly oyster at the bottom), and stones (the ruby and diamond rule, for their hardness and brilliance).

There is much here that is useful to Shakespeare studies. Tillyard’s treatment of astrology is all you need to evaluate astrology deniers like Cassius and Edmund (theirs is a minority, suspect position, although free will of course may override astrology). And the treatment of the Great Chain of Being itself, and its correspondence to the political state, casts doubt on any violently revolutionary interpretation of Shakespearean politics: earthly order reflects heavenly order, and must—with remarkable exceptions—be maintained.

Although Tillyard may overemphasize the conservative elements of Elizabethan thought, he is still a good place to start. It is useful for contemporary readers to know what past writers like Shakespeare grew up thinking—those thoughts as much a part of them as blood and breath, the thoughts they seldom bothered to write down.

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really well-written and interesting monograph. But (boredom alert here) it's a monograph on Elizabethan poetry and the prevailing philosophies and naturalistic theories of the average, educated Elizabethan. So if you are not into poetry, this book will probably bore you more than Martha Stewart on the many uses of Kleenex. If you are a poet, though, you might want to read this. Because it's sort of fascinating if you like Shakespeare, Milton and all the other sugar peeps of Elizalit. It's funny all the odd things they believed about the world back then, when physics was just a toddler. But then somebody's going to be typing the same thing about Stephen J. Hawking and Richard Feynman on Goodreads in 2699 C.E., no doubt. This is a small book written in the middle of the last century by a guy who spent his life studying these authors. And he gives you the benefit of all that digestion...drools knowledge into your mouth like some sort of mother bird with a chick. Good pea soup. Don't read it in public or people will run from you. Or mug you.

[Cindy Rollins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful book in understanding the Elizabethians and the even the medivals before them. Their view of the cosmos was comforting and mysterious. It almost seems absurd to think, after pondering this book, that Christians today do not dance :)

[Skallagrimsen]

The Elizabethans understood the cosmos as a series of terrestrial hierarchies that mirrored the hierarchies of heaven. In this system, inanimate stands above animate matter, beasts above plants, man above beasts, Christians above "heathens," men above women, nobles above commoners, kings above nobles, spirit above flesh, angels above seraphim, Archangels above angels, and God above all. It was a variation of a "world-picture" mostly inherited from scholastic philosophy with an infusion of Renaissance Neoplatonism (or as they called it, "Platonism").

The Elizabethan iteration of this ancient cosmology was its final phase, unknowingly teetering on the precipice of the scientific revolution. The provocations and discoveries of Copernicus, Bruno, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, Steno, Leeuwenhoek, Newton, and many others were about to come crashing down on it like a tsunami. It fascinates me to consider that in little more than a lifetime, a belief system that had reigned unchallenged over the intellectual life of the west and beyond for millennia could be effectively swept out of existence.

The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton by E.M.W. Tillyard describes a vital transitional chapter in the history of ideas. I didn't find it as exciting as it perhaps might have been, considering its weighty theme. But I thought it solid and readable enough. It also has the virtue of being short and, as far as I can tell, it's substantially accurate. I can recommend The Elizabethan World Picture to those interested in the subject.

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 1943 study of the ways in which the great writers of the late fifteenth century were shaped by their inheritance of medieval thought and understanding remains remarkably fresh and makes for illuminating reading.

Tillyard’s clarity of vision and persuasive tone, combined with plenty of contemporary references and quotations, portray the Elizabethan mindset and its agile passions with warmth, playfulness and scholarly attention.

And at just over a hundred pages, this is no mean feat.

[Christina Baehr]

I appreciated this introduction to the Elizabethan worldview, and it will definitely enrich my reading of Shakespeare and Donne. However, at times it felt too abbreviated. Tillyard avoids making obvious connections to ancient Biblical sources for some of the thought-patterns, like the idea of a community as having parallels with a human body (hello, Corinthians??). I can’t tell whether this is because it was taken for granted in a time with higher biblical literacy (1943), or because Tillyard just didn’t like talking about the Bible.

My favourite parts were where Tillyard takes a step back and says, “Hey, you think this is loopy? Reflect on how you perceive the cosmos yourself, o exalted Modern!”

I’d also have liked to read more about how, if the 1500s worldview was so utterly obsessed with rigid hierarchies and the chain of being and the divine right of kings, we got the tumultuous events and sects of the mid to late 1600s? Levellers, quakers, and a royal beheading??

Still, it’s an introduction and it’s packed with primary source quotations.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

An introduction to the 'Medieval Model' inherited by the Elizabethans. In a tradition stretching back to Pythagorus and Plato (in his Timaeus), and refined by his followers and the medieval Scholastics, the nature of the universe is explained in terms of hierarchies. Thus we have a hierarchy of the planets, from lowly earth to the blazing sun; a hierarchy of beings, from God, the Seraphim, the lesser angels, man, beast, plant, water and stone; even a hierarchy of the supposed elements: fire, air, water, earth etc. We on earth inhabit the sublunary region, subject to the flux and decay of time. Beyond the moon's orbit the planets, probably occupied by Souls spurred by the love of God, revolve in eternal and perfect motion.

The Elizabethans were last age to take any of this seriously. But there was already tension. As Tillyard says, 'in spite of Copernicus and a wide knowledge of his theories through popular handbooks, the ordinary educated Elizabethan thought of the universe as geocentric.' By the time the later Metaphysical Poets like Marvell were having their fun, references to the great Chain of Being have become prettified, have lost their solemnity. (Milton is arguably an exception).

Tillyard quotes abundantly from poetry and prose at the time to exemplify his point, giving meaning to passages in Shakespeare, Spenser and Donne which might otherwise be lost to modern audiences. How else to get the multilayered pun in Twelfth Night when Sir Toby Belch mistakenly identifies legs and thighs as the body-parts assigned to Taurus (wrong), which thus makes it the perfect sign to be festive under (right: actually it is the sign of neck and throat, and they will probably drink more than they will dance. Sir Toby has said more than he meant). Tillyard suggests that what might seem most strange in much of this poetry is actually what makes it common place for its age. Shakespeare et al were only drawing from those same materials inherited by every half-educated man in England.

I might have enjoyed this book more if I hadn't read it hot on the heels of another written on same topic: C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image. The two were contemporaries at Cambridge and actually co-authored a book together (albeit one in which they argued opposing viewpoints). Both were writing for the same general audience, but Lewis succeeds in making his subject come alive and feel exciting. I don't think this is purely because I read his first. I would recommend anyone interested in a better understanding of English renaissance literature read Lewis' book over this. His includes an entire chapter dedicated to fairies.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

For only being 100 pages, this book sure is meaty. The concepts are difficult to grasp, and Tillyard's scholarly writing style really forces you to focus if you want to understand what he's saying. I wish C.S. Lewis had written this book in his easy-to-understand, conversational style. However, when I did comprehend what was being said, it was well worth the effort, and those moments sustained me through the confusing parts. I feel like I learned a lot, and with this knowledge under my belt I'm ready to tackle a lot more Shakespeare.

[Jessica Snell · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book is an invaluable aid to understanding not only Elizabethan literature, but also its close follower: the work of the metaphysical poets.

Every page of Tillyard's book is an enlightenment. He lays open the world as the Elizabethans saw it, from the most minute of the elements to the great dance of the stars in the firmament above.

And he makes that world infinitely attractive. There is an appealing order in the world the way the Elizabethans saw it, in the way that the kingdom of plants was a real - and not an imaginary - parallel to the kingdom of the animals, which paralleled in turn the kingdom of men. To understand a truth about one part of the world was to understand something true about the rest of the world because there were real correspondences throughout all of creation, and all created things were part of one long "chain of being", rising from the elements to the plants to the animals to man to the angels to God himself, from whom it all came. One part of creation mirrored the others. If you knew something about lions, you knew something about kings.

And along with those macrocosms, you gained knowledge of the microcosm of man himself. To know about kings was to know something about the role that reason ought to play in your own self - reason being the proper monarch of the well-ordered self. Everything was connected.

The connections were not mistakes, and not happenstances. They of necessity existed in a world that was ordered by an intelligent creator. As it says in Proverbs, "It is the glory of God to hide a thing; it is the glory of kings to seek it out." The Elizabethans sought out that order to the full.

Fascinating book; I highly recommend it.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those old school scholarly pieces, clearly inflected by the Enlightenment/Modernist project of constructing master narratives. Tillyard's project is fundamentally descriptive, but in the course of describing he also delimits and calls into being the idea he has ostensibly found in Renaissance English culture. I mean by this that Tillyard's description applies itself retroactively to defining THE Elizabethan world, rather than identifying one component of the a complex and contradictory society in which multiple ideologies competed. He may be right that notions like the Great Chain of Being, the four elements, and planes of correspondence may have influenced Anglican, Catholic, Puritan, and Deist thought in the period, but it is now accepted (post-Althusser and other 20th century Marxists) that ideology is never as monolithic as it is sometimes pretended to be. And while Tillyard gestures toward other elements at play in the Elizabethan era, his work suggests a monolithic conception.

[Davis Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's absolutely impossible to even begin to understand Shakespeare (let alone his contemporaries in what is hands down my favorite hundred-year period of literature) without understanding the ideas discussed here. I had begun to develop a similar image of the Shakesperean worldview through my time with his plays, but how less frustrating and opaque would they seem if people knew about this ahead of time. The Elizabethans crafted astoundingly rich dramas of the soul dealing with what it means to live a full life in a broken, beautiful world. Tillyard just might convince you that this elfin, cosmic, earthy vision is worth reclaiming to heal our art and our times. This slim book belongs on the shelf of anyone who is even remotely interested in British literature. It resides on mine next to Lewis's "Discarded Image," a similarly illuminating interpretation of the assumptions that charged the Middle Ages.

[Karen· · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr Tillyard was writing at a time before deconstructionism, so this is a nicely unselfconscious, academic and eminently readable short work on the world view of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. Tillyard stakes out a position against those who tend to focus on the humanism and individuality of Renaissance thinking, placing Spenser, Shakespeare and Donne firmly in a tradition that continues directly from the Middle Ages rather than breaking with it. The dynamism of the conflicts between this world and the next, between free will and destiny, between nature and nurture are rendered clearly and succinctly in a well-structured, tight piece of writing.

[Timilyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Setting the imaginative backdrop for many many books

[S · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful introduction to a mode of thought that is so foreign to modernity that we view it as trite & often metaphorical. But Tillyard warns against any such dismissal. I think he is a man first & foremost concerned with the complete melting-into-air of all magic, mystery, wonder, & tradition caused by science’s primacy in modern life. I think the Elizabethan age is an escape for him.

The book goes over Elizabethan thought, which is mainly inherited from the Middle Ages, & in turn from Greece. But the 16th century was the very beginning of what we call “modernity” — Tillyard presents it as a turning point from a medieval, mysterious view of the wold & its wonders to our modern understanding of these wonders as mere metaphors. For example, towards the end of the book, he writes:

“Modern astronomers, hating the asteroids for being so many & so obstructive, have named them the vermin of the sky. To us this is no more than a metaphor with an emotional content. To the Middle Ages the observation would have been a highly significant fact, a new piece of evidence for the unity of creation: the asteroids would hold in the celestial scale of being the position of fleas & lice in the earthly. The Elizabethans could take the matter either or both ways.”

There are “overlapping planes” of existence: heavenly, celestial, earthly, societal, elemental, etc. What Tillyard is talking about in that passage is the *correspondences* between these planes. The universe was conceived with celestial music, to which the planets still dance to this day; therefore to dance is to partake in the underlying current of existence. This kind of fundamental *order* was all the rage at this time. To the Elizabethans, the state was like a body; take away the head, or the heads of government, & the body suffers. Equally, cut off the feet, or the mass of laborers & farmers, the body can no longer move. Since you can’t have a body of just legs or just lungs, a state must have a hierarchy. There is, of course, a heredity in this period bolstered by the divine right to rule, despite the social mobility also present. Although I do wish Tillyard spent a bit more time examining social mobility vs heredity & the ideas that went into not just the King’s right to rule, but the differences between classes.

This is echoed by the “chain of being” idea, inherited from the Middle Ages as well — the universal hierarchy from god, the angels, man, animals, etc. There is a certain immutability to this, but simultaneously a flexibility; the Elizabethan age was one of contradictions.

The astronomical understanding of these people, inherited from the Greeks, remained largely the same for centuries. Even after Copernicus showed us that the Earth revolves around the sun, the Elizabethans went on stubbornly believing that the Earth was the center of the universe. It’s that stubbornness, an unwillingness to rob God’s creation of its mystery, that Tillyard loves. There are, at this time, inklings of science. But the Elizabethans still lived in a much larger, stranger world than we live in today.

Merry Christmas!

[Christy Whitsell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a hard read for me. I have a passing familiarity with some of the topics, but much was tough going because I don’t have much of the frame of reference. The poetry he quotes is also hard to understand. I fought through because I want to begin to build a framework of understanding. I had to laugh when I realized at one point I had spent 45 minutes trying to understand 5 pages. I bought the book a decade ago, so I am glad to have finally read it through. I’m sure I will reference it again as I delve more into literature of that era.

[Brian Koser]

Similar style to The Discarded Image. Shows that the Elizabethan idea of the cosmos was still very much a medieval one. Their belief in an ordered creation was balanced by a belief in sin's curse, preventing them from being as optimistic as the Victorians. In the Chain of Being, they had a place for everything in a cosmic hierarchy. The correspondences between, for example, the sun, the king of a country, the head of a body, and the lion as king of beasts, fueled their imaginations. I've already understood allusions in Donne poems that would have escaped me otherwise. Highly recommend for anyone reading Shakespeare or his contemporaries (which should be everyone!).

[Matthew Hudson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A perfectly servicable book on the normative worldview of the Elizabethan Era. It moves briskly, wastes no time, and covers all of the essential subjects in 109 small pages. You will gain a basic understanding of the ideas of the Elements, the humours, the hierarchy of the universe and the Great Chain of Being, among other things.

Its only faults are two. One, that it can be quite dry, but the shortness of the book alleviates that issue. Second, it is a bit too short, where I would have liked more examples and refrences. Yet if it had been any longer, I likely would have gotten tired of it. As such I think the author knew the precise amount of information needed and the precise length the book would be before it overstayed its welcome. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a better grasp of the authors of that era.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally finished this one after several months plodding. A very thought-provoking and illuminating read. Highly recommended if you’d like to better understand the way Elizabethans saw the world, which will also help you recognize deeper layers in authors like Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton.

[Jeannette · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book went over my head most of the time. But there were moments of brilliance.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

E.M.W. Tillyard's 'The Elizabethan World Picture' helped herald in a new era of a New Historicism movement around the world. In its pivotal study and interpretation of Elizabethan concepts and texts in their context, this brief book still remains today an indispensable companion to the student of English literature and scholar alike.

Tillyard elaborates on the book's intentions; "The province of this book is some of the notions about the world and man which were quite taken for granted by the ordinary educated Elizabethan, the utter commonplaces too familiar for the poets to make detailed use of except in explicitly didactic passages..."

Therefore, this study will influence the way one regards Elizabethan texts and some later poetical examples, such as Milton, as well. It will also illuminate the reader to some specific terms and concepts, such as the analogy between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm; the Four Elements and Humours; and so on. Moreover, it strives throughout to eradicate some of the more common misconceptions, especially in its treatment and description of the ordered Chain of Being.

Through its many interesting references to popular and neglected texts alike, its brief but charming commentary, this study will undoubtedly change the way you look at the majority of Elizabethan texts, including most of Shakespeare's poems.

[Tammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This scholarly book explains the complex beliefs and values of the Elizabethans. They inherited a rigid medieval cosmology and their longing for order caused them to simplify it so that they could cling to it, regardless of what the emergence of science had to say. Readers who finish this book are better equipped to understand what Shakespeare said in his plays and sonnets. Moderns who try to deconstruct and analyse his work destroy the beauty and truths he was trying to communicate.

As a non-scholar, I spent five years starting and stopping and restarting this book. This year was the year to start, plod, and plod some more. While it is not an easy book for me, it was a worthy book to read and, thankfully, short!

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic book, but I'm deducting one star due to Tillyard's apparent dislike of using listing commas (let alone an oxford comma). It was an occasional stumbling block as I was reading.

My absolute favorite quote comes from the final paragraph:
"When we are confronted with the notions that God put the element of air, which is hot and moist, between fire, which is hot and dry, and water, which was cold and moist, to stop them fighting, and that while angels take their visible shapes from the ether devils take theirs from the sublunary air, we cannot assume, try as we may, an Elizabethan seriousness. Yet we shall err grievously if we do not take that seriousness into account..."

[Aaron Meyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short and interesting introduction to the Elizabethan way of thinking. Through poetry and other writings of the era Tillyard shows how commonplace and intertwined many of the following ideas were to the average intellectual; Sin, Order, The chain of being, Planes, Correspondences, and the Cosmic Dance. Definitely helps one to understand many of the political ideas of the era, at least for me it did. Worth having on the shelf for quick reference.

[Dominika · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often feel like I can't handle the greats like Shakespeare without being back in one of my undergraduate classes with some hand-holding from a wise and learned professor. This is hand-holding from a wise and learned professor in book form. Tillyard has a winsome way of writing about, what I find to be, the breathtaking Elizabethan conception of the world.

[Daniel Birtles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this book to learn of the world the elizabethans believed themselves to inhabit and, in turn, better understand the post-Elizabethan age in which I live. In that respect, it was a catastrophic failure. I suppose I now have some amorphous understanding of the ways of the ‘educated Elizabethan’ and the ideologies roaming the streets of pre-modern Britain, but I wanted to understand the everyday Elizabethan to freshen up my own worldview, a cosmological deodorant of sorts. This book presented, in my subjective opinion, a wholly unscientific analysis of the inner working of the aforementioned everyday Elizabethan.

Despite my apparent dissatisfactions, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, loved it perhaps. There were concepts introduced to me which I found eye-wateringly beautiful (e.g. chain of being, music of the spheres, correspondences, etc). So much so that any original intentions as a reader melted away.

In a room full of Elizabethan historians, I am certifiably stupid and ignorant and uninformed. If my morning commute can be illuminated by the nose-bleed-inducing writings of Mr Tillyard then I’m sure you can have a great time reading it too!

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book helped me understand I’m more medieval in my thinking than I realized! Everything about this was beautiful: they order, the purposefulness, the beauty and harmony.. The Elizabethan World Picture beautifully reveals the mindset of the time. It was a short little book, quite dense and a little dull at times, but Worth the effort.

[Miriam]

Interessant, maar wel taai.

[D'Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved every word! Brings Shakespeare and his buddies to life!

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me to help me read and understand Shakespeare better. It reminded me of C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image, which is about the Middle Ages but is still very relevant to The Elizabethan age. Tillyard is a good teacher. There is a lot of information in here, but at a brief 109 pages it is not intimidating. I learned a lot without ever feeling overwhelmed.

This is the general idea (quotes from the book):
“Coming to the world picture itself, one can say dogmatically that it was still solidly theocentric, and that it was a simplified version of a much more complicated medieval picture…
Though there were various new things in the Elizabethan age to make life exciting, the old struggle between the claims of two worlds persisted and that to look on this age as mainly secular is wrong.

The world picture which the Middle Ages inherited was that of an ordered universe arranged in a fixed system of hierarchies but modified by man’s sin and the hope of his redemption. The same energy that carried through their feats of architecture impelled them to elaborate this inherited picture. Everything had to be included and everything had to be made to fit and to connect…

Ultimately, the game grew over-complicated and too much for people. But it is a mistake to think that it was changed. Protestantism was largely a selection and a simplification of what was there all the time.

The greatness of the Elizabethan age was that it contained so much of the new without bursting the noble form of the old.”


The purpose of this book is to explain to modern readers how people of a different age perceived the world they lived in, and how this was communicated in their beautiful art, especially in literature, which is the focus here. Tillyard corrects our modern assumptions and helps us appreciate the intricacies and order of some of the greatest English writers who ever lived; details that are easily hidden from us because we simply don’t think like they did. We miss the metaphors.

The most important thing Tillyard wants us to know is that the Medievals and the Elizabethans believed in a created unity that was highly structured. They were fascinated by it and sought to harmonize everything by finding almost endless ways of connecting things. These connections are called “correspondences,” and there are many of them are listed here and explained in a very approachable way. Tillyard gives a lot of useful examples from a variety of writers and poets from that time.

It is hard (or impossible?) for a modern to enter into their mindset in order to appreciate it fully. The author addresses this:
“Much of the doctrine cannot but appear remote and ingenuous to the modern mind, which is quite unmoved by the numerical juggling and the fantastic equivalences that delighted earlier generations…
Indeed the amount of intellectual and emotional satisfaction these correspondences then afforded is difficult both to imagine and to overestimate. What to us is merely silly might for an Elizabethan be a solemn or joyful piece of evidence that he lived in an ordered universe, where there was no waste and where every detail was a part of nature’s plan.”

One way in which I can relate to the Elizabethans is that they lived through a period of great changes. They longed for order (as do I) but “the world they lived in was becoming ever more difficult to fit tidily into a rigid order.” (I can relate to this!) Their response to this conflict was creative: “they made the imagination use these details for its own ends: equivalences shaded off into resemblance… hovering between equivalence and metaphor.”

“It was through their retention of the main points and their flexibility in interpreting details that the Elizabethans were able to use these great correspondences in their attempt to tame a bursting and pullulating world. Even if they could not tame a new fact by fitting it into a rigid scheme, at least they could help by finding that it was like something already familiar.” (This sounds like Mission Impossible to me, today… but I think we all find our own ways of “making sense of things,” even today. It hurts my brain sometimes, but I keep trying! I think that’s just what we are wired to do, no matter what age we live in.)


I wonder what the Medievals or the Elizabethans would make of our current world that is constantly quaking and crashing with crisis after crisis of all sorts: economical, environmental, political, personal, global, national, international, even astronomical? They would probably be convinced that it is all a reflection of the disordered states of our own human hearts, and they’d probably have a LOT to say to us about that.
My first instinct is to laugh about that and dismiss it…
But then again… maybe they knew something about life that we’ve forgotten?

[Karen Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a gem of a book that basically explores the Elizabethan way of viewing the world by examining popular literature and philosophies of the period.
Quoting extensively from the likes of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and Sidney (among many others) and making reference to the Greek philosophers that influenced Elizabethan thought, particularly (pun intended) Plato, Tillyard explains the way people of the 15th and 16th centuries understood their relationship to the corporeal and spiritual world and how they established hierarchies of being from oysters through to lions; from paupers to kings. How these all existed in a complex and simple relationship, a chain of being within the cosmos. How this was all regarded as functioning within very ordered vertical and horizontal planes and within a deep religiosity, is also explored. While anyone familiar with Elizabethan literature and history will not be unfamiliar with Tillyard's ideas, it's the way they're explained and how literature and plays are used to both provide and support evidence that makes this book particularly delightful.

I think the most surprising thing to come out of the text for me was Tillyard's summation that for all we think of the Elizabethan poets and dramatists as having some special relationship to their muses, the world and imagination, what they produced was quite "ordinary". What he means by this including the music of the spheres in a poem, or likening the queen to the sun or moon and stars, linking the macrocosm and microcosm - was rather commonplace thinking for the time. He is not diminishing the accomplishments of the poets etc but rather asking us to understand that all Elizabethans read the world in that way, so the language of Shakespeare, Milton and Marlowe etc. was speaking to like-minded people who lived and breathed the allusions rather than grasping at powerful and beautiful metaphors that prove elusive to so many now. While an obvious point, I loved reading it and have subsequently tried to read Spenser with that view of the world in mind. It really does change things and make them easier to grasp. Not as easy as I'd like, but for that to happen, I'd have to step back in time awhile. Now, where's my Tardis....?