Seventeenth-Century Prose: I. Bacon and the Prose of Utility

To suppose that all prose writers of the early seventeenth century wrote like Sir Thomas Browne and Milton would be an instance of pseudodoxia epidemica. 1 The writers considered in the present chapter were reacting against the mannered, ornamented style of Lyly and Sidney. They formed their prose into an instrument of greater utility and precision and achieved no special elegance, with the exception of some of the Bible-translators, Ben Jonson, and Bacon, all of whom were capable of turning austerity itself into a garment of beauty. One of the features of the change from the Tudor to the Stuart period is that prose advanced itself into a number of provinces of literature where verse had previously ruled. Thus the prose “character” succeeded to the poetical satire and epigram, the essay to the eclogue; and in the work of such long-lived and prolific writers as Nicholas Breton, Dekker, and Heywood it is roughly true that their Elizabethan output is predominantly verse and their Jacobean output mainly prose. Dekker’s Bellman of London (1608), Gull’s Hornbook (1609), and his series of plague pamphlets, Heywood’s Apology for Actors (1612) and Gunaikeion (1624) show the shift to realism and social analysis, though Dekker and Heywood remained at heart Elizabethan. 2 Letter Writers