In His paper “Writing Empire and Nation,” Richard Helgerson argues that England’s rise as an imperial power in the 16th and 17th centuries had significant cultural and literary ramifications. The efforts to establish England’s status as a great empire necessitated the development of a robust literary tradition on par with the achievements of ancient Rome, the archetypal empire after which early modern states modelled themselves. Helgerson contends that this “writing of empire” also produced “the sense…of a people, the sense of an English nation.” As England sought to project itself as an ascendant global force capable of rivalling historical superpowers, its writers and intellectuals felt compelled to forge a commensurate literary grandeur that could glorify the nation’s imperial glories and legitimize its political dominion over territories at home and abroad. Just as the Roman Empire was reflected in and reinforced by the immortal works of Virgil and other classical luminaries, an expansionist England required a native canon of literary monumentality to quintessentially encode its sovereignty, power and unique national character on the world stage (Lecture 5 slide 8). An examination of three seminal works from this period – Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Edmund Spenser’s October eclogue, and John Milton’s pastoral elegy Lycidas – reveals how these preeminent Renaissance writers grappled with and contributed to developing conceptions of English empire and nationhood through their artistic productions, confirming Helgerson’s thesis about the deeply intertwined literary and imperial projects unfolding in early modern England. However, thepaper explores “Doctor Faustus,” “October,” and “Lycidas” to explore the cultural and literary dimensions of England’s efforts to establish itself as an empire. It confirms Richard Helgerson’s argument that the “writing of empire” produced a sense of national identity and sovereign political order.
In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe investigates the figure of the overreacher, the aggressive person who resists traditional limits and pecking orders in the quest for power and information. The lead protagonist, Faustus, enters a settlement with Satan, exchanging his spirit for limitless information and supernatural capacities that permit him to rise above human restrictions. In any case, the play likewise tests Faustus’ appearing powerlessness to apologize for his offence, bringing up issues about whether he has any office over his cursed destiny or, on the other hand, assuming bigger profound powers are controlling his predetermination (Lecture 16 slide 5). The text can, in this manner, be perused as a rebellious critique on the Protestant philosophy of destiny that was getting forward movement in Marlowe’s Britain. By fixating on Faustus’ failure to apologize despite his expressed longings, the play disrupts presumptions about human independence that supported Calvinist thoughts of the choice fated for salvation and the delinquent bound for punishment. In this sense, Specialist Faustus disputes a strict precept that was turning out to be progressively cherished as a marker of English strict and public character in the last sixteenth 100 years as the country tried to characterize itself against Catholic powers. The play’s protection from Protestant universality adjusts it against a philosophical current key to articulating the forms of rising English nationhood, particularly from Mainland rivals like Spain.
Spenser’s October is all the more plainly drawn in with inquiries of domain, country, and the job of writing and the artist comparable to these general political ventures. The poem is a dialogue between two shepherds, Cuddie and Piers, who are semi-autobiographical representations of Spenser himself, debating the value and purpose of poetry. Cuddie laments what he perceives as the debasement and lack of worthy patrons and inspiring subjects in their era. His complaints capture anxieties about England’s ability to attain and sustain cultural glories on par with ancient civilizations like Rome, which were prerequisites for imperial grandeur (Lecture 3 slide 7). Cuddie grouses that the English court and political elite have “lost their virtue” and forsaken the duty of providing exemplary individuals of “heroic” stature and moral nobility – the ideal figures of myth and history whose deeds could be immortalized through the poet’s craft. Piers pushes back, asserting the intrinsic worth of poetry’s power to captivate audiences beyond any need for patronage. However, the dialogue encodes Spenser’s self-conscious ambition “to make himself into the leading English poet of his age,” embracing this literary vocation as part of staking England’s claim to being a preeminent imperial power whose political might was matched by its cultural magnificence.
Comparable themes about poetry’s grand, nation-building vocation are taken up by Milton in the pastoral elegy Lycidas. Written to mourn the death of his Cambridge classmate Edward King, the poem articulates Milton’s complex anxieties about dying before achieving the incredible poetic feats he dreamed of – works that would enshrine English literary and cultural preeminence on par with Classical predecessors like Virgil (Shields 5) The epitaph’s nuanced wrestling with mortality, notoriety, brilliance and the heaviness of idyllic heritage summons Virgil’s job course from serene to epic as the gleaming way Milton needed to mimic in having a specific interest in preeminent grandiosity through influential academic works. At the same time, Milton unequivocally perceives his stupendous cravings from the “unseemly” concerns and “profane” minds of other contemporary journalists, whose senseless holds back deny the section’s sanctified explanation before God (Stephen 17). This adapting mission agreed with the Protestant way of thinking Marlowe’s Faustus appeared to undermine. For Milton, an exceptional stanza to help religion was indistinguishable from getting the magnificent solicitation – a philosophical work that Lycidas emerges as his temporary experience. The result of everlasting works like Heaven Lost is undoubtedly expected to deliver an English scholarly monumentality befitting a thriving domain.
However, Lycidas likewise works as a clerical scrutinizer, rebuffing the Congregation of Britain as inadequate and ill-suited to shepherd its Protestant rush appropriately, which is a disappointment with significant public ramifications. Similar to how Faustus opposed the philosophical principles of Calvinism that were forming an English Protestant ethno-strict character, Lycidas prosecutes the state Church that characterized the curious shapes of English strict patriotism in the early present-day period. Milton’s idyllic dispute reflects how the Reconstruction overturned and undermined the ancien régime, with heterodox doctrinal flows scattering the political, social and social requests. The epitaph forecasts the approaching tempest of the English Nationwide conflict, which Milton later became entangled in as a progressive essayist and Parliamentarian polemicist. His shrinking investigation of the Congregation bespeaks the separation points arising inside contending dreams of English nationhood, risking the power and magnificent assumptions the country’s social creations intended to reinforce. The three works investigated above bear witness to Helgerson’s cases about the abstract elements of realm working in early present-day Britain. Their changing commitment to verse’s relationship to control, administration, religion, and different markers of majestic culture highlight how England’s climb as a politically influential nation was inseparably bound up with innovative and philosophical builds explained through scholarly creation. As these journalists grappled with beginning ideas of English domain and its reasoning manufactured through humanist learning and the recovery of old-style customs, their texts added to moulding “the sense…of a group, the feeling of an English country” – either by injecting these incipient originations with hopeful reason, magnificence and dreams of civilizational significance fit for an eminent worldwide dynamo, or by rebelliously opposing the philosophical flows and orthodoxies mixing around royal English nationhood.
In any case, the abstract texts analyzed here do not just affirm but also entangle and qualify the compass and extent of Helgerson’s contention about the “composing of the realm” fashioning originations of public English personality. While these works, without a doubt, took part in uniting specific public legends, esteem frameworks and glorified self-discernments bound up with Britain’s magnificent rise, they likewise enrolled inside contradict and pluralistic viewpoints standing up against solid developments of domain, power or homogeneous dreams of English peoplehood (Lecture 6 slide 5). The strict and philosophical heterodoxy epitomized in works like Specialist Faustus and Lycidas reinscribed pluralistic aspects inside the social and artistic representation of the English country, disagreeing with conventional Protestant convictions and Anglican ministerial power. These texts demonstrate the veracity of crevices, pressures, and contestations intrinsic in manufacturing originations of Englishness imbricated with supreme desires as opposed to a durable program of philosophical teaching.
Also, none of the three messages straightforwardly address or answer Britain’s pioneer expansionism or territory over regional possessions abroad – seemingly the most unmistakable components of the realm verbalized through graphic artistic records, as per Helgerson’s unique plan. Their commitments to “composing domain and country” work at a more slanted, emblematic and figurative register that, just by implication, conjures the country’s frontier exploits and endeavours. They articulate England’s imperial aspiration and inchoate sense of nationhood more through abstract mythmaking, resonant motifs from humanist learning, and ideological coding than overt chronicles, cartographic literary mappings, or tangible inventories of colonial domains and spoils (Lecture 7 slide 6). Their engagement with empire privileged the inculcation of cultural and imaginative frameworks congenial to English preeminence over literal transcriptions of territorial aggrandizement. While broadly confirming Helgerson’s overarching thesis about the interplay of literary production and imperial formations, a close reading of these key Renaissance texts reveals a more vexed, multivalent relationship between poetic imagination and the cultivation of English empire and nationhood than his original argument might suggest. If the “writings of empire” manifested in these works did indeed coalesce into “the sense of an English nation,” it was framed as an unstable, constantly evolving and ruptured idea as much as an increasingly cohered and cemented ideological construct. Literary dissent, doctrinal fissures and ideological indeterminacy inflected representations of imperial Englishness as much as mythic-fueled aspirations toward sovereign glory and cultural preeminence.
The religious heterodoxy of Doctor Faustus challenged the very Protestant tenets that were being institutionalized as markers of the emerging English nation’s distinct ethno-religious character. Milton’s Lycidas excoriated the lapses of the established Church in scathing ways that portended the imminent fragmentation of England’s spiritual and political order in the Civil War era. Indeed, even Spenser’s October enrolled significant nerves about whether the country’s exclusive classes could give appropriate motivations to scholarly apotheosis befitting a royal power. Across these works, one witnesses the functional pressures between the artistic, creative mind catalyzing new ethno-public legends and the incendiary undermining capability of that equivalent excellent permit to agitate official orthodoxies and unbending solutions of English royal character. As opposed to social works smoothing out a solid vision of nationhood, these Renaissance texts emblematize an energetic on the off chance that an untidy cluster of points of view jarring to characterize the shapes of “domain” and “Englishness” as both conceptual beliefs and grounded fundamental factors (Lecture 6 slide 9). Scholarly dispute combined with philosophical indeterminacy arises as a constituent part, not a variation, of the abstract circle’s commitment to domain and country in this period. The “works of realm” manufactured a pluralistic, polyvocal discussion about the English public person and supreme job as much as any philosophical solid content. The texts analyzed here uncover the flexible, challenged and continually developing nature of scholarly creations reflecting and forming the changeable ideas of English domain and nationhood in the Renaissance.
In conclusion, examining Doctor Faustus, October, and Lycidas, one can see how these original artistic functions built up and undermined the originations of domains and countries that arose in early Britain. Their aggressive scholarly degree and phonetic magnificence aligned with Helgerson’s thought of manufacturing an English idyllic custom befitting an incredible supreme power. However, their petulant commitment to strict precepts, humanist goals, and cultured shows uncover the scholarly creative minds as a diffusive power too – continually pulling separated and questioning solid verbalizations of the English realm and personality even as it urged their development. These Renaissance texts embody how the “compositions of realm” unearthed public legends and philosophical establishments while also enlisting significant questions, interior discords, and drastically pluralistic points of view about Britain’s majestic assumptions. Magnum’s opuses of artistic origination manifested the domain’s hazards and gaps as much as its clinging talking points and master narratives. Lovely creative mind hatched and fed Englishness as a consistently developing, constantly challenged comprehension of aggregate sway and character instead of static philosophical content. Mirroring the intricacies and inconsistencies inside Britain’s climb, the scholarly creations of Marlowe, Spenser and Milton vouch for a pluralistic, vexed connection between creative composition and the creation of domain and country in the Renaissance. Their speciality typified a dynamic discussion moulding and continually redoing feelings of a public person and majestic business.
Work Cited
Lecture 3. Spenser, “October”: Contexts. 2024.
Lecture 16. Milton, “Lycidas”: Contexts. 2024.
Lecture 5. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: Contexts. 2024.
Lecture 6. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: Analysis. 2024.
Lecture 7. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus: Analysis. 2024.
Shields, John C. The American Aeneas: classical origins of the American self. Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2004.https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=2sh0_JKfLJsC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=Written+to+mourn+the+death+of+his+Cambridge+classmate+Edward+King,+the+poem+articulates+Milton%27s+complex+anxieties+about+dying+before+achieving+the+great+poetic+feats+he+dreamed+of+-+works+that+would+enshrine+English+literary+and+cultural+preeminence+on+par+with+Classical+predecessors+like+Virgil&ots=A6Rk2Rvn67&sig=CZfvaLX6pYZlnX38mbg-PNucxY0&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Stephen, Leslie. Shakespeare as a man. Vol. 4. Putnam, 1907.https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=cD1AAQAAMAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=,+Milton+unequivocally+perceives+his+stupendous+cravings+from+the+%22unseemly%22+concerns+and+%22profane%22+minds+of+other+contemporary+journalists,+&ots=iKnFYcFuUf&sig=6DL0QXLjqgrqbh9oVDCPxvgjX9E&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
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