Caroline literature

Literature in Britain during the reign of Charles I (1625-49). The title ‘Caroline’ derives from the Latin for Charles, Carolus. The period was marked by increasing religious and social tension, which eventually found expression in the English Civil War.

This short period marks the watershed between the culture of Elizabethan literature and Jacobean literature in England. To some extent, the Caroline period sees the death of many major authors and the birth of important authors of the period of Restoration literature, but there is not the same wealth of authors specifically associated with Caroline literature as with other literary periods.

Poetry English poet Michael Drayton continued to hark back to the past, with works like ‘Nymphidia’ (1627). The English Cavalier poets John Suckling and Richard Lovelace seem to attempt to resist the imminent social turmoil of the Civil War. Also falling in this period are the early poems of English poet John Milton (including Comus, 1634; L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, both 1645), but his major poems were not written until later (such as Paradise Lost, 1667 and Paradise Regained, 1671). The English poet and cleric Robert Herrick published in this period his religious and secular poems, which included the famous ‘Gather ye rosebuds while you may’ (c. 1648).

Drama The Caroline period saw the death of two major English dramatists, John Webster and Thomas Middleton, and English dramatist Ben Jonson continued to write sporadically until his death in 1637. English dramatists John Ford (works include 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, 1626) and Philip Massinger (works include A New Way to Pay Old Debts, c. 1625) wrote consistently but for an increasingly aristocratic audience. Popularity of theatre among all classes, which was a feature of Elizabethan drama, was short lived. At court, the masque was an increasingly popular form, with members of the royal household taking part in some of these wastefully expensive spectacles, making the Queen, Henrietta, the first woman to appear on stage in England (to considerable disapproval).

Prose English writer and physician Thomas Browne was a worthy successor to the philosophy and science of English writer Francis Bacon. His publications include Religio medici/The Religion of a Doctor (1643).