Get complete information on Jacobean and Puritan Periods

The reign of James I (in Latin, “Jacobus”), 1603-1625, followed the Elizabethan Age. This was the period in prose writings of Bacon, Donne’s sermons, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and the King James translation of the Bible.

It was the period also of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies and tragicomedies, and of major writings by other notable poets and playwrights, including Donne, Ben Jonson, Drayton, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Chapman, Middleton, and Massinger.

The first half of the 17th century is known as the Puritan Age, for Puritanism was the dominant force during this period. It is also called the Age of Milton, for Milton was the greatest poet of this period.

As first King James I and then Charles I ruled England during these years, it is also referred to as the Jacobean Age (adjective from ‘James’) or the Caroline Age (adjective from Charles).

It is an age of transition. By this time the Renaissance impulse has exhausted itself, the Elizabethan zest for life is gone, and the Elizabethan exuberance and optimism have been succeeded by a mood of apprehension, disillusionment and defeat.

Here the important point is to note that the Jacobean age ended with the end of James I while Puritan age remained up to mid-seventeenth century. In the broadest sense, Puritanism may be regarded as the renaissance of the moral sense of man.

The Greco-Roman Renaissance of 15th and 16th centuries was largely pagan and sensuous. It did not touch the moral nature of man, it did nothing for his religious, political and social emancipation.

The Puritan movement, on the other hand, was the greatest movement for moral and political reform. Its aims were: (1) religious liberty, I.e., that men should be free to worship according to their conscience, and (2) that they should enjoy full civil liberty. The Puritans wanted to make men honest and to make them free. They insisted on the purity of life.

During this period, criticism of the church and the court increasingly became more vocal and wide spread and resulted ultimately in the civil war and the beheading of Charles I. The critical temper of the age is reflected in its literature poetry, prose and drama.

It was an age of transition in which the old order collided with the new, and writer like Donne were virtually suspended between two worlds, the old world of Decay, and the New World of Progress.