Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on the texts and citation
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Struggling to emerge from barbarity: historiography and the idea of the classic
- 2 Learning's triumph: historicism and the spirit of the age
- 3 Call Britannia's glories back to view: Tudor history and Hanoverian historians
- 4 The rage of Reformation: religious controversy and political stability
- 5 The ground-work of stile: language and national identity
- 6 Studied barbarity: Jonson, Spenser, and the idea of progress
- 7 The last age: Renaissance lost
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Call Britannia's glories back to view: Tudor history and Hanoverian historians
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on the texts and citation
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Struggling to emerge from barbarity: historiography and the idea of the classic
- 2 Learning's triumph: historicism and the spirit of the age
- 3 Call Britannia's glories back to view: Tudor history and Hanoverian historians
- 4 The rage of Reformation: religious controversy and political stability
- 5 The ground-work of stile: language and national identity
- 6 Studied barbarity: Jonson, Spenser, and the idea of progress
- 7 The last age: Renaissance lost
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As a complement to and consequence of the European revival of learning came the reign of Elizabeth – in Johnson's words, “the favourite period of English greatness.” This greatness brims over in his first major poem, London (1738), one of the eighteenth century's most famous evocations of a Tudor monarch:
On Thames's banks, in silent thought we stood,
Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver flood:
Struck with the seat that gave Eliza birth,
We kneel, and kiss the consecrated earth;
In pleasing dreams the blissful age renew,
And call Britannia's glories back to view;
Behold her cross triumphant on the main,
The guard of commerce, and the dread of Spain.
Although this idolatrous admiration of the 1580s is enough to make us forget for a moment the poem's satirical function in the 1730s, Johnson's history lesson is anything but disinterested. By recalling Tudor glories and contrasting Walpole's Spanish policy with Elizabeth's, Johnson uses Tudor history as a standard by which to measure the present. Similar invocations of the Tudor dynasty abound in the eighteenth century. Elizabeth and her age were discussed and celebrated by writers of every political persuasion: in the hands of a political insider, the idealized past was a useful tool for propagandizing the reigning monarch; in the hands of the satirist, it was a cudgel with which to beat the debased present.
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- Information
- The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson , pp. 57 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002