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Early Modern British Literature, a la Shmoop. The next time you step into your time machine

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and are trying to decide when to set your coordinates…

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…we don’t recommend the Early Modern Period.

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Not unless you particularly enjoy plagues, fires, regicides and dubious personal hygiene.

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We’re talking about the period of time directly following the Middle Ages.

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Back then, if someone maced you…

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…you wouldn’t get back up for a while. Times were rough in Early Modern England…

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…but it doesn’t mean that nothing good came out of the era.

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There was plenty of great literature written in seventeenth-century England.

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Which was great, because then you had something to read while you were dying of smallpox.

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The King James Bible was a biggie.

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It contains symbols and genres that we still make use of today…

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…as well as such memorable phrases as… Ask and it shall be given… let there be

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light… and… fight the good fight.

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In its time, it was more quotable than Anchorman. A few decades later, John Milton wrote a blockbuster

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hit.

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Paradise Lost was the most epic… epic… since Homer’s Odyssey.

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Unfortunately, James Cameron wasn’t alive at the time to adapt it to film…

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…but it still did pretty well in bookstores. The book’s cast of characters included…

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…well, most of the same cast as the King James Bible.

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God, Jesus, Satan… the whole gang. But… are you ready to be really impressed?

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Milton was blind. He wrote the entire thing by dictation.

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So, for all we know, Milton wasn’t a good writer at all…

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…but the guy taking dictation was brilliant. Poetry became quite popular in the first part

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of the century…

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…even if it was pretty limited in its subject matter.

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These… metaphysical poets… basically only wrote about either sex or God.

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If you weren’t a big fan of either, poetry probably wasn’t going to be your thing.

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Neither was living in the Early Modern Period, though.

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Later on, a rival gang of Cavalier poets popped up.

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Oh, yeah. It was intense. Jets versus Sharks, Montague versus Capulet sort of thing.

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Once in a while someone would get limericked to death.

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Hey, we warned you they were dark times. One of the Cavalier poets, Robert Herrick…

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…made a name for himself with poems that urged his listeners to… seize the day. And

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the girl.

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He might have been the first Newsie. But enough with the rhymes. How about the

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guy named Samuel Pepys <<peeps>> who started recording his life…

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…just like any twenty-first century hipster…

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…but without the knit cap and handlebar moustache.

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Well, okay, he went through a phase. His nine-year long diary recorded everything

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from the Great Plague…

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…to fantasies he had while at church.

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And they were more elaborate than simply... fantasies about the pastor having a decent

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singing voice. Then James Boswell published a biography of

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eighteenth century celebrity Samuel Johnson.

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He was sort of like the TMZ or People Magazine of the Early Modern Period.

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Without him, no one would have known what all the stars were wearing to their premieres.

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Eventually, literature had a clear new direction.

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It was moving away from the super-complex, super-elite world of metaphysical poetry and

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Biblical epic…

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…and was starting to focus more on… everyday life.

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People were realizing that it was actually more interesting to read about themselves…

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…than about a bunch of gods, kings and monsters.

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Although… the stories that combined all of the above were generally the best of the bunch.

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