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In early modern England, epic narratives, stage plays, and satire in all forms were genres designed for audiences and readers the writer did not know, a general public with varied tastes and background. Lyric poetry, prose romances, and tales were more often written for a closed circle of friends. Circulated in manuscript, works in these genres allowed a writer's wit to play on personal or coterie matters. Here writers could speak of the pain of love or the thrill of ambition, and both reveal and, in a sense, create their own identities in and through language. By imitating and at the same time changing the conventions of lyric, particularly as they were illustrated by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch, English poets were able to represent a persona or fictive self that became, in turn, a model for others. Unlike Petrarch, who saw his lady as imbued with numinous power before which he could only submit, such poets as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Andrew Marvell imagined love in social and very human terms; in the struggle to gain affection and power, their subjectivity took strength from their conquests as well as their resistance to defeat. Women poets, such as Mary Herbert, Amelia Lanyer, Lady Mary Wroth, and Katherine Philips reworked the conventions of love lyric to encompass a feminine perspective on passion and, equally important, on friendship. Sonnet sequences were popular and, reflecting a taste for narrative romance, often dramatized a conflict between lovers. Shakespeare wrote the best-known sonnets of the period; his cast of characters, including the poet as principal speaker, his beloved male friend, a rival poet, and a fickle lady, appear as protagonists in a drama of love, betrayal, devotion, and despair. Some poets embedded their love poetry in prose narratives that told a story, as the Italian poet Dante Alighieri had in his sequence of songs and sonnets to the lady Beatrice, entitled The New Life. A brilliant tale of seduction frames George Gascoigne's lyrics in his Adventures of Master F.J., and Sidney's eclogues or pastoral poems punctuate the long and complicated narrative of his romance Arcadia. Prose romances also provided images of new kinds of identity. Stories of marvels surrounded the lives of the powerful and exotic—such as Robert Greene's Pandosto (the source for Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale) and Thomas Lodge's Rosalind—while the tales of lower-class artisan-adventurers illustrate the enthusiasm with which early modern writers and readers embraced a freedom to reinvent themselves. The romantic notion of the "marvelous" gained a new meaning in the tales of tricksters as well as of sturdy entrepreneurs who survived against all odds—they illustrated the creative energies possessed by plain folk. The short fiction of Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney, and the hilarious (and anonymous) Life and Pranks of Long Meg of Westminster conclusively broke with the delicate sentimentality of pure romance and, appealing to a taste for the ordinarily wonderful, pointed the way for such later novelists as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Charles Dickens. Finally, the spirit of romance infused narratives of travel, many of which made little distinction between fact and fantasy. Sir John Mandeville's fifteenth-century Travels, in print throughout the sixteenth century, responded to Europeans' growing curiosity about the wonders of nature in distant lands, which harbored whole peoples who were pictured as utterly different from anything known at home. The wonders reported in popular collections of travel narratives—such as Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589) and Samuel Purchas's Purchas his Pilgrimage, or Relations of the World and the Religions observed in all Ages (1613)—were designed to attract not repel readers, but a horror of "the other" was nevertheless implied in many of these accounts. Shakespeare's Othello both embodies foreignness himself and shares the European love of the exotic: confusing fact with fantasy, he tells the Venetian senate that parts of the globe are inhabited by "Cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi," as well as "men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders." But the lure of distant lands could also attract the social critic who sought to devise images of an ideal world in order to better the real world. Sir Thomas More's Utopia projects a fantasy of a communal state that does double duty by pointing to both the inequities of English society and the absurdities of reforms that assume men and women can be consistently reasonable. Literally describing a utopia, or a "nowhere," More's treatise is effectively also a "dystopia," or a work describing a "bad place." Neither Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627) nor James Harrington's Commonwealth of Oceana (1656)—true utopias suggesting a radical reform of political and intellectual life—emulates More's embrace of both utopian and dystopian perspectives. But the dystopias of later writers, such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Samuel Butler's Erewhon, an anagram for "nowhere" (1872), and George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949) impressively illustrate the hazards of idealistic and visionary social thought. The situation for women was somewhat different. Ancient philosophy and medieval theology had insisted that womankind was essentially and naturally different from mankind, distinguished by physical weakness, intellectual passivity, and an aptitude for housework, childcare, and the minor decorative arts. The fact that women had distinguished themselves in occupations traditionally reserved for men was understood to signal an exception, and in general social doctrine imposed rigid codes of behavior on men and women. But early modern life was changing in this respect, too. Contemporary treatises devoted to pro-woman argument or the defense of womankind drew on evidence that supported a revolution in ideas of sex and gender. The Bible, they pointed out, stated that woman, like man, was made in the image of God and therefore had the same degree of reason as man; history, they insisted, revealed that women had undertaken all kinds of activity and therefore had same range of talents as man. In short, they maintained that the absolute difference between man and woman was not naturally part of things, but rather was conventional and subject to modification. Social practice reflected and substantiated some of this argument. Early modern women who were classified as legally independent or femes soles (literally, women alone) could own and manage property and businesses as men did; educated women, such as Mary Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and Katherine Philips, contributed to all the literary genres and got their work published; and during the Civil War, sectarian women registered political protest in public places, including the House of Commons. These novel ways of understanding women found corresponding changes in attitudes toward men. Departing from medieval social norms, humanists had stressed that men should be educated in the arts as well as arms, and writers such as Sir Philip Sidney, illustrating the sensitivity of men to emotional life, devised characters whose masculinity was amplified by attributes that were conventionally associated with women: passion, sympathy, and an aptitude for creative deception. The central figure in Sidney's Arcadia is the prince Pyrocles who appears as an Amazonian warrior through most of the narrative; as the androgynous Cleophila, he is always referred to as "she." Flexibility with respect to categories of gender is also a feature of much lyric poetry; the male poet's beloved is sometimes another man. Shakespeare's sonnets include striking examples of homoerotic verse in this period, and homoerotic innuendo, often suggested as a feature of a love triangle, is common in all genres of writing. In Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander the youth Leander loves the girl Hero, and Leander attracts the sexual attentions of the sea-god Neptune. Ideas as well as social forms and practices were also changing. The repeated shifts in religious practice, from medieval Catholicism to Henrician Protestantism back to the Catholicism dictated by Queen Mary I and then on to the Anglican Church of Queen Elizabeth I, revealed that divine worship could alter its form without bringing on the apocalypse. More subtly, the emerging capitalist economy produced a conceptual model for cultural exchange. Just as material goods flowed through regional and national markets, entering a particular locale to move elsewhere, sometimes great distances, so might ideas, styles, and artistic sensibilities. Drama especially conveyed how fluid were the customs, codes, and practices that gave society its sense of identity. The enthusiasm for stage plays was motivated, in part, by an interest in role-playing: If an actor who in real life might have been born a servant could perform the part of a king in a play, then might he not also perform the part of a king indeed? Was there more to being than performing? This mutability was both liberating and dangerous, as Shakespeare showed by dramatizing the protean powers of Othello's false friend, Iago, who chillingly boasts: "I am not what I am."
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