The Elizabethan world picture

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 and 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: Angles; the Stars and Fortune; 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 all of men of the Renaissance. -- Cover.

First sentence: Those (and they are at present the majority) who take their notion of the Elizabethan age principally from the drama will find it difficult to agree that its world picture was ruled by a general conception of order, for at first sight that drama is anything but orderly.

Year

1940

Language

English

Publisher

Vintage

Editions

8

Pages

128

ISBN

9780394701622

Data source: Wikidata