Queen Anne (1665 – 1714) was the last of the Stuart’s the second daughter of James II and his first wife Ann Hyde. Queen Anne ruled England from 1702 to 1714. It was a golden age in the history of England because it was a period of great prosperity. Industry, agriculture, and commerce all continued to prosper. Only during the last three years of her reign were their sign of distress and discontent, and that was chiefly due to the unavoidable war conditions in which the people had to live. English agriculture had improved so far that more wheat was grown than in medieval times. Wheat was the most important article of food. In the reign of Anne, there was a great exchange of agricultural products between one district and another. England’s agriculture improvement during this regime was so much that she was able to send corn abroad on a large scale.

Queen Anne’s reign was not yet time to appreciate the value of good education. There were only a few public schools like Eton, Winchester, and Westminster which were patronized chiefly by the aristocracy. The sons of the squires, yeomen and shopkeepers went to the nearest grammar schools. In wealthy families, private chaplains were employed to teach the young gentlemen. In schools, the punishment was of a rather severe type. Flogging was restored as a means of imparting knowledge and maintaining discipline. Writers like Locke and Steele were highly critical of this method. Women’s education was almost neglected and there was no good school for them. Most girls learned from their mothers to read, write, sew, and manage the household.

In the early part of the eighteenth century, most of the marriages were arranged by the parents. However, runaway marriages were common. There were also numerous love marriages. Divorce was almost unknown. During the twelve years of Queen Anne, in the whole country, there were only six divorces.

There were certain sports and pastimes which provided relaxation to the people. In Anne’s reign, a primitive kind of cricket was just beginning to take its place among the village sports. Football also was played by many. Cockfighting was watched with excitement by all classes of people. Horseracing attracted hundreds of people to the places where it was conducted. The most usual sports that people could easily resort to, were angling, shooting, and snaring birds of all kinds.

The most important industries of the period were coal mining and cloth-making. The coal mines were treated as the property of the owner of the land. Explosions were common in these mines and many workers lost their lives. In Anne’s time, the coal-mining industry was midway between the domestic and the factory system. The industry next in importance was cloth-making. Spinning was done chiefly in country cottages by women and children, and weaving chiefly in towns and villages by men.

The religious activities of the period consisted of the establishment of many religious societies and charity schools. life in individuals and families, to encourage church- The first object of these societies was to promote Christian attendance, family prayers, and Bible study. During the reign of Anne hundreds of charities, schools were founded all over England to educate the children of the poor in reading, writing, moral discipline, and the principles of the Church of England. Another characteristic activity of the period was the working of the Society for the Reformation of Manners.

In the last couple of years of her life, Anne became very ill. She was often bedridden and attended to by doctors. These doctors used many techniques to try to cure Anne including bleeding her and applying hot irons. These crude medicinal techniques probably did more harm than good, and Anne died on July 31st, 1714.

Daniel Defoe was an English writer, trader, journalist, pamphleteer, and spy. He was born in London, became a soldier, and then took to journalism. He is one of the earliest, and in some ways, the greatest, of the Grub Street hacks. He worked for both the Whigs and the Tories, by whom he was frequently employed in obscure and questionable work. His parents were Presbyterian dissenters, and he was educated in a Dissenting Academy at Stoke Newington run by Charles Morton. After leaving school and deciding not to become a dissenting minister, Defoe entered the world of business as a general merchant, dealing at different times in hosiery, general woolen goods, and wine. In 1684 he married Mary Tuffley; six of their eight children lived into adulthood. After expanding into the import-export business for goods such as tobacco and alcohol, Defoe made some unwise investments and in 1692 declared bankruptcy. He was twice briefly imprisoned for his debts, negotiating his freedom with the aid of recognisance (guarantors) and becoming an accountant and investment advisor to the government and private business owners.

His Poetry

Defoe wrote some form of poetry all his life, but his great period of poetic composition was from 1699 to 1707. Here and there, especially in the Review, he left distichs, lampoons, pasquinades, fragments of songs, and ballads; he also included verses in his novels. One can track the development of his thought in the poems, his attachment to certain ideas, such as reform or morality, his theoretical interests in the language and style of poetry, his habit of casting poems into irony, and his skill in creating large poetic “fictions” that permit him to draw together numerous “characters” in recognizable patterns. Within his lifetime a few poems had considerable popularity, in, for example, the 1703 Poems on Affairs of State. The poems are taken up chronologically, with a few exceptions; and some efforts are made to create larger groupings of the poems, such as parliament poems, moral satires, and Scottish poems. The best texts of the poems, with annotations and headnotes, are to be found in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714, volumes 6 and 7 (1970, 1975).

Political Writing

Like most of the other writers of his time, Defoe turned out mass political tracts and pamphlets. Many of them appeared in his journal, The Review, which, issued in 1704, is in several ways the forerunner of The Tatler and The Spectator. His ‘The Shortest Way with the Dissenters’ (1702) brought upon him official wrath and caused him to be fined, imprisoned, and pilloried. He wrote one or two of his political tracts in rough verses which are more remarkable for their vigor than for their elegance. The best known of his class is The True-born Englishmen (1710). In all his propaganda, Defoe is vigorous and acute, and he has a fair command of irony and invective.

His Fiction

His works in fiction were all produced in the later part of his life, at almost incredible speed. First came Robinson Crusoe (1719); then Duncan Campbell, Memories of a Cavalier, and Captain Singleton, all three books in 1720; in 1722 appeared Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year, and Colonel Jacque; then Roxana (1724) and A New Voyage round the World (1725). This great body of fiction has grave defects, largely due to the immense speed with which it was produced. Before his death in April 1731, Defoe was plagued by debts and restlessly moved between several different lodgings. He is buried in Bunhill Fields, the cemetery for Nonconformists.

Benjamin Jonson was an English playwright and poet. Jonson’s artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He was born at Westminister and educated at Westminister school. His father died before Jonson’s birth, and the boy adopted the trade of his stepfather, who was a master bricklayer. From this, he turned to acting and writing plays, engaging himself, both as actor and playwright, with the Lord Admiral’s company (1597). In 1617, he has created a poet for the king, and the close of James’s reign saw Jonson the undisputed ruler of English literature. His favourite haunt was the Mermaid Tavern, where he reigned as dictator over a younger literary generation. He was buried in Westminister Abbey, and over him was placed the epitaph “o rare Ben Jonson!”

Jonson’s numerous works, comedies, tragedies, masques, and lyrics, are of widely varying merit, but all of them, as well as his Timber, a kind of commonplace-book, which is of considerable interest for its critical comment on literature. To him, the chief function of literature was to instruct. His play was divided conventionally into comedies and tragedies, for Jonson, true to his classical models, did not combine the two. In his comedies, he aimed to return to the controlled, satirical, realistic comedy of the classical dramatist, and the inductions of his plays make it clear that he hoped to reform the drama on these lines. His main concern was with the drawing of character, and his creations are important because they introduce the “comedy of humours“. Many of his characters arc, in consequence, types, but the best, like Bobadill in Every Man in his Humour, rise above the type and live as truly great comic characters.

His early comedies, Every Man in his Humour (1598), Every Man out of Humour (1599), Cynthia’s Revels (1600), and The Poetaster (1601), show his ingenuity of plot, his hearty humour, his wit, and they are full of vivacity and fun. Every Man in his Humouris, perhaps, his greatest work. The middle group of comedies, Volpone, or the Fox (1605), Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fayre (1614), represents, as a group, his best work. They are all satirical in tone, realistic and natural in dialogue, and ingenious in the plot. The characters are less angular and more convincing. His later comedies, The Devil is an Ass (1616) and The Staple of News (1625), show a distinct falling-off in dramatic power.

The two historical tragedies, Sejanus his Fall (1603) and Catiline his Conspiracy (1611), are composed of classical models. They are too laboured and mechanical to be reckoned as great tragedies. Jonson was also friends with many of the writers of his day, and many of his most well-known poems include tributes to friends such as Shakespeare, John Donne, and Francis Bacon. Ben Jonson died in Westminster on August 8, 1637. A tremendous crowd of mourners attended his burial at Westminster Abbey. He is regarded as one of the major dramatists and poets of the seventeenth century.

John Bunyan was an English writer and Puritan preacher. He was born in Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628, the son of Thomas Bunyan and Margaret Bentley. He followed his father into the tinker’s trade but rebelled against God and ‘had but few equals, both for cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God’. As a teenager, he joined Cromwell’s New Model Army but continued his rebellious ways. His life was saved on one occasion when a fellow soldier took his place at the siege of Leicester, and ‘as he stood sentinel he was shot in the head with a musket bullet and died’.

Bunyan married at age 21. Those books his wife brought to the marriage began a process of conversion. Gradually, he gave up recreations like dancing, bell ringing, and sports; he began attending church and fought off temptations. Later, he realised that he was lost and without Christ when he came into contact with a group of women whose ‘joyous conversation about the new birth and Christ deeply impressed him’. In 1651 the women introduced him to their pastor in Bedford, John Gifford, who was instrumental in leading Bunyan to repentance and faith.

That same year he moved to Bedford with his wife and four children, including Mary, his firstborn, who had been blind from birth. He was baptised by immersion in the River Ouse in 1653. Appointed a deacon of Gifford’s church, Bunyan’s testimony was used to lead several people to conversion. By 1655 Bunyan was himself preaching to various congregations in Bedford, and hundreds came to hear him. In the following years, Bunyan began publishing books and became established as a reputable Puritan writer, but around this time, his first wife died. He remarried in 1659, a young woman named Elizabeth, who was to be a staunch advocate for her husband during his imprisonments for in 1660 Bunyan was arrested for preaching without official permission from King Charles II; he was to spend the next 12½ years in Bedford County Gaol.

In January 1672, Charles II issued the Declaration of Religious Indulgence with to make Roman Catholicism legal. As a result, many religious prisoners were pardoned and released, including John Bunyan. That same month, he became pastor of the Bedford church. In March 1675, he was imprisoned for preaching again because Charles II withdrew the Declaration of Religious Indulgence. This time he was imprisoned in the Bedford town jail on the stone bridge over the Ouse.

Bunyan became a prolific author as well as a popular preacher, though most of his works consisted of expanded sermons. He wrote, The Pilgrim’s Progress, in two parts, the first of which was published in London in 1678, and the second in 1684. He had begun the work in his first period of imprisonment and probably finished it during the second. The earliest edition with the two parts combined in one volume was published in 1728. A third part, falsely attributed to Bunyan, appeared in 1693 and was reprinted as late as 1852. The Pilgrim’s Progress is arguably one of the most widely known allegories ever written. It has been extensively translated into other languages.

Two other successful works of Bunyan’s are less well-known: The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680), an imaginary biography, and The Holy War (1682), an allegory. A third book that reveals Bunyan’s inner life and his preparation for his appointed work are, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666). It is all about Bunyan’s spiritual path. Bunyan died in 1688 after catching a cold while riding through a rainstorm on a journey to reconcile a quarreling family. He was buried at the Nonconformist cemetery of Bunhill Fields in London.

Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe, was an English playwright, poet, and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. He was Shakespeare’s most important predecessor in English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse. He was born at Canterbury and educated there and at Cambridge. He adopted literature as a profession and became attached to the Lord Admiral’s players.

Marlowe’s plays, all tragedies, were written within five years (1587-92). He had no bent for comedy, and the comic parts found in some of his plays are always inferior and maybe by other writers. Only in Edward II does he show any sense of plot construction, while his characterization is of the simplest, and lacks the warm humanity of Shakespeare’s. All the plays, except Edward II, revolve around one figure drawn in bold outlines. This character shows no complexity or subtlety of development and is the embodiment of a single idea.

In Tamburlaine the Great, the shepherd seeks the “sweet fruition of an earthly crown,” in The Jew of Malta Barabbas seeks “infinite riches in a little room,” while the quest of Doctor Faustus is for more than human knowledge. Each of the plays has behind it the driving force of this vision, which gives it an artistic and poetic unity. It is, indeed, as a poet that Marlowe excels. Though not the first to use blank verse in English drama, he was the first to exploit its possibilities and make it supreme. His verse is notable for its burning energy, its splendour of diction, its sensuous richness, its variety of pace, and its responsiveness to the demands of varying emotions.

The Massacre at Paris is a short and luridly written work, the only surviving text of which was probably a reconstruction from memory of the original performance text, portraying the events of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, which English Protestants invoked as the blackest example of Catholic treachery. It features the silent “English Agent”, whom subsequent tradition has identified with Marlowe himself and his connections to the secret service. The Massacre at Paris is considered his most dangerous play, as agitators in London seized on its theme to advocate the murders of refugees from the low countries and, indeed, it warns Elizabeth I of this possibility in its last scene.

Doctor Faustus (or The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus), based on the German Faustbuch, was the first dramatised version of the Faust legend of a scholar’s dealing with the devil. While versions of “The Devil’s Pact” can be traced back to the 4th century, Marlowe deviates significantly by having his hero unable to “burn his books” or repent to a merciful God to have his contract annulled at the end of the play. Marlowe’s protagonist is instead carried off by demons, and in the 1616 quarto his mangled corpse is found by several scholars. Doctor Faustus is a textual problem for scholars as two versions of the play exist: the 1604 quarto, also known as the A text, and the 1616 quarto, or B text. Both were published after Marlowe’s death. On 30 May Marlowe was stabbed to death during a fight at a house in Deptford, apparently after an argument about a bill. He was about 29. The incident’s relation, if any, to Marlowe’s investigation by the Privy Council is unknown.