Similarities Between Jacobean And Elizabethan

In general, Elizabethan as well as Jacobean plays, not only those of Shakespeare, were more or less influenced by the tradition from which they had arisen, by the sources of information on which they were based, and also by the current political situation in which they were written. While scholars have disagreed about the direct influence of Seneca on Elizabethan drama. The Elizabethan era was a time of relative hope and confidence. In the early seventeenth century, however, the national mood seems to have become tense and anxious, partially because James was not as skillful a ruler as Elizabeth. This period, called Jacobean from the Latin form of James's name, also is known as the early Stuart era after James's family name. William Shakespeare
Patronage came not just from James, but from James' wife Anne of Denmark. Also during this period were powerful works by John Webster, Thomas Middleton, John Ford and Ben Jonson. Ben Jonson also contributed to some of the era's best poetry, together with the Cavalier poets and John Donne. Inprose, the most representative works are found in those of Francis Bacon and the King James Bible.In 1616 George Chapman completed his monumental translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English verse, which were the first ever complete translations of either poem, both central to the Western Canon, into the English language. The wildly popular tale of the Trojan War had until then been available to English readers only in Medieval epic retellings such as Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. Jonson was also an important innovator in the specialised literary subgenre of the masque, which went through an intense development in the Jacobean era. His name is linked with that of Inigo Jones as co-developers of the literary and visual/technical aspects of this hybrid art. (For Jonson's masques, see: The Masque of Blackness, The Masque of Queens, etc.) The high costs of these spectacles, however, positioned the Stuarts far from the relative frugality of Elizabeth's reign, and alienated the middle classes and the Puritans with a prospect of waste and self-indulgent