Syopsis of "The Elizabethan World" by Tillyard
Syopsis of "The Elizabethan World" by Tillyard
The book The Elizabethan World Picture by Tillyard is an account of the ideas and beliefs of people during the Elizabethan age. The great writers of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries included many of the same ideas and viewpoints discussed in The Elizabethan World Picture in their writings. Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton are just some of the many authors that incorporated Elizabethan ideas in their works. The play Richard II written by Shakespeare portrays many Elizabethan ideas.
The most characteristic idea of the Elizabethan era was cosmic order. “I also found that the order I was describing was much more than political order, or, if political, was always a part of a larger cosmic order. I found, further, that the Elizabethans saw this single order under three aspects: a chain, a set of correspondences, and a dance” (Tillyard vii). Simply put everything in the heavens and on earth has its own place. In heaven God had created order in the form of a hierarchy which consisted of God at the top followed by archangels and angels. This hierarchy was mirrored on earth where God had appointed kings, princes, and others under them.
In Shakespeare’s play Richard II King Richard was atop the hierarchy in England, he was followed by his nobility and peasants. However this hierarchy was not of pure form. Richard had disrupted the array on earth by ordering the killing of his brother Thomas of Woodstock who was the Duke of Gloucester. Richard ordered his killing in order to get control of the English throne. This disrupted the order of things in turn creating chaos on earth and in the heavens as well. “Take away order from all things, what should then remain? Certes nothing finals, except some man would imagine festoons chaos. Also where there is any lack of order needs must be perpetual conflict” (Tillyard 11).
King Richard’s blunders did not stop there however. Richard appointed several of his friends in high government places such as his advisors. In Richard II the Gardener presents an excellent speech about King Richard’s careless ways.
“Go bind thou up young dangling apricots, which, like unruly children, make their sire/ Stoop with oppressions of their prodigal weight. / Give some supportance to the bending twigs....