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20 - Literature and the household

from 4 - The earlier Stuart era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Barbara Lewalski
Edited by
David Loewenstein  and
Janel Mueller
David Loewenstein
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Janel Mueller
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

No doubt authors in every age have written poems and plays, stories and tracts in their studies or bedchambers. But in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, households of various kinds – from noble estates headed by literary patrons to the private dwellings of the ‘middling sort’–emerged as a prominent site of literary production for male as well as female authors, offering an alternative to the court or the church. In these years also, the activities, inhabitants and ideological underpinnings of such households form the subject matter of many kinds of literary and rhetorical texts, addressed to various audiences and serving both private and public purposes.

Ben Jonson’s ode ‘To Penshurst’ was published in his folio of 1616 but written before Prince Henry’s death on 6 November 1612. It celebrates the estate of Sir Robert Sidney, Viscount Lisle and later Earl of Leicester, younger brother of the deceased Sir Philip Sidney and of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and himself author of a sonnet sequence, Rosis and Lysa. Jonson’s poem, in heroic couplets, presents Penshurst as an idealised noble household, a counterweight to the Jacobean court and to more recent ‘prodigy’ houses like Knole or Longleat, built for ostentatious display and to entertain the court in progress. Penshurst is a locus amoenus or delightful place with nature and human society in harmony and with pastoral otium happily associated with georgic cultivation. The woods are inhabited by nature gods and family memorials intimating permanence and stability, and on this quasi-Edenic estate fruit is ready to hand, fish leap willingly into nets, and game gladly offers itself to the lord’s table.

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The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature , pp. 603 - 630
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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