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

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.

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.

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.

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.