Literature: 1684 to 1828

The Rise of Neoclassicism and the Flourishing of the Baroque Arts (17th–18th Century)

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European arts, literature, theater, music, and architecture were heavily influenced by Greco-Roman models, marking the emergence of Neoclassicism. However, in architecture and the visual arts, the period was still dominated by the Baroque style, characterized by grandeur, drama, and elaborate decoration.

In music, the Baroque period saw the development of complex polyphonic and contrapuntal techniques, as well as the birth of opera, oratorio, and cantata, laying the groundwork for later classical and Romantic music traditions.

Neoclassicism and the Baroque in Visual Arts and Architecture

• Neoclassicism emerged as a revival of Greco-Roman ideals, emphasizing harmony, symmetry, and simplicity.
• Despite this trend, architecture remained largely Baroque, featuring:
  • Elaborate ornamentation and curvaceous forms.
  • Dramatic contrasts of light and shadow.
  • Monumental scale and theatrical effects.
• In painting and sculpture, artists such as Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini brought Baroque dynamism and emotion to religious and mythological subjects.

The Evolution of Baroque Music

The Baroque period (c. 1600–1750) was marked by the rise of:

• Opera – A dramatic, fully staged musical form combining singing, instrumental music, and theatrical performance.
• Oratorio – A large-scale musical work for choir, soloists, and orchestra, often based on biblical stories (e.g., Handel's Messiah).
• Cantata – A shorter vocal work, typically performed in churches or courts, featuring recitative and arias.

Instrumental music flourished, leading to:

• The development of fugue, concerto, sonata, and suite.
• Innovations by Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, who explored contrapuntal (interweaving) techniques and harmonic progressions.

New Musical Instruments of the Era

The 17th and 18th centuries also saw the invention and refinement of several musical instruments, including:

• Clarinet (early 18th century) – A woodwind instrument with a rich, expressive tone.
• Pedal harp – An advancement that allowed greater versatility in key changes.
• Harmonica – A free-reed wind instrument, later popularized in folk and blues music.
• Accordion – A portable, bellows-driven instrument with both melody and harmony capabilities.

Conclusion: A Dynamic Era of Art and Music

The 17th and 18th centuries were a period of artistic evolution, where Baroque exuberance coexisted with Neoclassical ideals. While Neoclassicism would eventually dominate literature and architecture, the Baroque period revolutionized music, theater, and visual arts, leading to the creation of some of the most enduring works in European cultural history.

John Bunyan writes the second part of The Pilgrim's Progress, published in 1684 in London.

In contrast to the heroic journey of Christian recounted in Part 1, Bunyan relates the pilgrimage of Christian's wife, Christiana; their sons; and the maiden, Mercy, to better allegorize the journey of the Christian life.

By using women, children, and physically and mentally challenged individuals, the Christian preacher and Bedford native illustrates the idea that almost anyone can be can be a brave pilgrim.

Aphra Behn had published Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister in 1684 as the first part of a three-volume roman à clef playing with events of the Monmouth Rebellion and exploring the genre of the epistolary novel.

Love Letters From a Noble Man to his Sister, Part Two, was published in 1685; the third installment was published in 1687 as The Amours of Philander and Silvia.

Behn in 1688 published Oroonoko, a short novel concerning the tragic love of its hero, an enslaved African in Surinam in the 1660s, and the author's own experiences in the new South American colony.

It is generally claimed (most famously by Virginia Woolf) that Aphra Behn was the first professional female author in English, living entirely by her own earnings.

While this is not entirely true, Behn was the first professional female dramatist, as well as one of the first English novelists, male or female.

Although she had written at least one novel previously, Behn's Oroonoko is both one of the earliest English novels and one of the earliest by a woman.

She dies at forty-eight on April 16, 1689, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Below the inscription on her tombstone read the words: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be / Defence enough against Mortality."

William Congreve achieves sudden fame in March 1693 with the production at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, of The Old Bachelour, written, he said, in 1690 to amuse himself during convalescence.

Warmly heralded by John Dryden, who declares that he has never read so brilliant a first play, though it needs to be given “the fashionable Cutt of the Town,” it is an enormous success, running for the then unprecedented length of a fortnight.

His next play, The Double-Dealer, plays in November or December at Drury Lane but does not meet with the same applause (it will later become the more critically admired work, however).

Its published form contains a panegyrical introduction by Dryden.

Entered in 1691 as a law student at the Middle Temple but never a serious reader in law, Congreve had published in 1692 under the pseudonym Cleophil a light but delightfully skillful near-parody of fashionable romance, possibly drafted when he was seventeen, Incognita: or, Love and Duty reconcil'd.

He had quickly become known among men of letters, had some verses printed in a miscellany of the same year, and became a protégé of John Dryden, the greatest English poet of the later seventeenth century.

In that year, Dryden had published his translation of the satires of Juvenal and Persius (dated 1693), in which Congreve collaborated, contributing the complimentary poem “To Mr. Dryden".

John Dryden had been received into the Roman Catholic church in 1685, after the newly acceded king James II seemed to be moving to Catholic toleration.

In his longest poem, the beast fable The Hind and the Panther (1687), he had argued the case for his adopted church against the Church of England and the sects.

His earlier Religio Laici (1682) had argued in eloquent couplets for the consolations of Anglicanism and against unbelievers, Protestant dissenters, and Roman Catholics.

The abdication of James II in 1688 had destroyed Dryden's political prospects, and he lost his laureateship to Shadwell.

He turned again to the theater.

The tragedy Don Sebastian failed in 1689, but Amphitryon was a success in the following year, helped by the music of Henry Purcell.

Dryden collaborated with Purcell in a dramatic opera, King Arthur (1691), which also succeeded.

His tragedy Cleomenes was long refused a license because of what was thought to be the politically dangerous material in it, and with the failure in 1694 of the tragicomedy Love Triumphant, Dryden stops writing for the stage.

Dryden has in the 1680s and '90s supervised poetical miscellanies and translated the works of Juvenal and Persius for the publisher Jacob Tonson with success.

He had in 1692 published Eleonora, a long memorial poem commissioned for a handsome fee by the husband of the Countess of Abingdon, but his great late work is his complete translation of Virgil, contracted in 1694 by Tonson.

Love for Love almost repeated the success of Congreve’s first play.

Performed in April 1695, it is the first production staged for the new theater in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which was opened after protracted crises in the old Theatre Royal, complicated by quarrels among the actors.

Congreve becomes one of the managers of the new theater, promising to provide a new play every year.

He begins in this year to write his more public occasional verse, such as his pastoral on the death of Queen Mary II and his Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer'd to the King on his taking Namure; and John Dennis, at this time a young, unsoured critic, collecting his Letters upon Several Occasions (published 1696), extracts from Congreve his Letter Concerning Humour in Comedy.

Congreve's position among men of letters is by this time so well established that he is considered worthy of one of those sinecure posts by which men of power in government reward literary merit: he is made one of the five commissioners for licensing hackney coaches, though at a reduced salary of one hundred pounds per annum.

Through his brilliant comic dialogue, his satirical portrayal of the war of the sexes, and his ironic scrutiny of the affectations of his age, Congreve shapes the English comedy of manners.

Mary Pix writes her first play, a comedy, The Lost Lover, or, The Jealous Husband (1696).

There is some indication that she may have been by then reconciled with her husband, for a time.

Mary was born in 1666, the daughter of a rector, musician and Headmaster of the Royal Latin School; her father Roger died when she was very young, but Mary and her mother had continued to live in the schoolhouse after his death.

She was courted by her father’s successor Thomas Dalby, but he left with the outbreak of smallpox in town, just one year after the mysterious fire that burned the schoolhouse.

Mary Griffiths (her maiden name) had married George Pix, a merchant, and moved to his country state in Kent.

Her first son, George, died very young, but the next year they moved to London and she gave birth to another son, William.

While living in London and when she is thirty, she becomes a professional writer, with her tragedy Ibrahim (1695-6).

At first she associates herself with two other playwrights of the time, Delariviere Manley and Catherine Trotter, reaching a great success that grants them some criticism in the form of an anonymous satirical play The Female Wits (1696).

Mary Pix appears as “Mrs. Wellfed one that represents a fat, female author. A good rather sociable, well-matured companion that would not suffer martyrdom rather than take off three bumpers in a hand” (From The Female Wits, Morgan, 1981: 392).

She is depicted as an ignorant woman, but amiable and unpretentious and she is summed up in the play as “foolish and openhearted” (From The Female Wits, Morgan, 1981: 392) Her first play had been put on stage at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1696, but when that same theatrical company performs The Female Wits she changes to Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Catharine Trotter Cockburn, born to Scottish parents living in London, had been raised Protestant but converted to Roman Catholicism at an early age.

After an illustrious career, her father, navy captain David Trotter, died of the plague in 1684, leaving his family in financial jeopardy.

Catharine, a precocious, physically attractive, and largely self-educated young woman, had had her first novel (The Adventures of a Young Lady, later retitled Olinda’s Adventures) published anonymously in 1693, when she was but fourteen years old.

Her first published play, Agnes de Castro (a verse dramatization of Aphra Behn's story of the same title), had been staged two years later.

She is in 1696 famously satirized alongside Delarivier Manley and Mary Pix in the anonymous play, The Female Wits.

In it, Trotter is lampooned in the figure of “Calista, a lady who pretends to the learned languages and assumes to herself the name of critic.” Delariviere Manley was probably born in Jersey, the third of six children of Sir Roger Manley, a royalist army officer and historian, and a woman from the Spanish Netherlands, who died when Delarivier was young.

It seems that she and her sister Cornelia moved with their father to his various army postings.

After their father's death in 1687, the girls had become wards of their cousin, John Manley (1654–1713), a Tory MP.

John Manley had married a Cornish heiress and, later, bigamously, had married Delarivier.

They had a son in 1691, also named John.

Manley had left her husband in January 1694, and gone to live with Barbara Villiers, the 1st Duchess of Cleveland, at one time the mistress of Charles II.

She remained there only six months, at which time she was expelled by the duchess for allegedly flirting with her son.

Manley travels extensively in England, principally in the southwest, during the period of 1694–1696.

Charles Perrault, having lost his post as secretary to the influential minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1695, when he was sixty-seven, has decided to dedicate himself to his children.

At a time when the French court values embellishments and elaboration, Perrault modifies simple plots, embellishes the language, and writes for an audience of the nobility and aristocracy.

His stories were either original literary fairy tales, modified from commonly known stories or based on stories written by earlier writers such as Boccaccio.

Thematically, the stories support Perrault's belief that nobility is superior to the peasant class; moreover many of his stories show an adherence to Catholic beliefs, such as those in which a woman must undergo purification from sin and repentance before reintegration into society.

In 1694, Perrault had written in verse form three stories, "Griselidis", "The Ridiculous Wishes", and "Donkeyskin", published in a single volume and republished a year later in a volume to which he added a preface.

A further edition containing eight more stories, titled Histoires ou contes du temps passé (Stories of Times Past) with the subtitle Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose Stories), is published in 1697.

The eight new stories written for the 1697 edition are written in prose and combined with the three tales previously written in verse: "Sleeping Beauty", "Little Red Riding Hood", "Bluebeard", "The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots", "Diamonds and Toads", "Cinderella", "Riquet with the Tuft", and "Hop o' My Thumb", "Griselidis" (La Patience de Grisélidis), "The Ridiculous Wishes" (Les Souhaits ridicules), "Donkeyskin" (Peau d'Ane) and "Diamonds and Toads" (Les Fées).

Three of the stories were first published in the elegant literary magazine Mercure galant: "Griselidis" and "Suhait" in 1693, and "Sleeping Beauty" in 1696.

Its publication makes Perrault suddenly widely known beyond his own circles and marks the beginnings of a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with many of the most well-known tales, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood.

He has actually published it under the name of his last son (born in 1678), Pierre (Perrault) Darmancourt ("Armancourt" being the name of a property he bought for him), probably fearful of criticism from the "Ancients".

In the tales, he uses images from around him, such as the Chateau Ussé for The Sleeping Beauty and in Puss in Boots, the Marquis of the Château d'Oiron, and contrasts his folk tale subject matter with details and asides and subtext drawn from the world of fashion.

The world of London theatergoing in 1700 has changed significantly from the days of, for example, The Country Wife.

Charles II is no longer on the throne, and the jubilant court that revels in its licentiousness and opulence has been replaced by the far more dour and utilitarian Dutch-inspired court of William of Orange.

His wife, Mary II, is, long before her death, a retiring person who does not appear much in public.

William himself is a military king who is reported to be hostile to drama.

The political instabilities that had been beneath the surface of many Restoration comedies are still present, but with a different side seeming victorious.

William Congreve's comedy The Way of the World is first performed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London in early March.

Widely regarded as being one of the best Restoration comedies written, it is still performed sporadically to this day.

One of the features of a Restoration comedy is the opposition of the witty and courtly (and Cavalier) rake and the dull-witted man of business or the country bumpkin, who is understood to be not only unsophisticated but often (as, for instance, in the very popular plays of Aphra Behn in the 1670s) either Puritan or another form of dissenter.

The courtly and Cavalier side had been in power in 1685, and Restoration comedies had belittled the bland and foolish losers of the Restoration.

By 1700, however, the other side is ascendant.

Therefore, The Way of the World's recreation of the older Restoration comedy's patterns is only one of the things that make the play unusual.

The 1688 revolution concerning the overthrow of James II had created a new set of social codes primarily among the bourgeoisie.

This shift in social perspectives is perhaps best shown in the characters of Fainall and Mirabell, who represent respectively the old form and new form of marital relations: sexual power at first and then developing into material power.

The new capitalist system means an increasing emphasis on property and property law.

Thus, the play is packed with legal jargon and financial and marital contracts.

These new legal aspects allow characters like Mrs. Fainall to secure her freedom through an equitable trust and for Mirabell and Millamant's marriage to be equal though a prenuptial agreement.

Later in the month, on the 25th, France, England and the Dutch Republic sign the Treaty of London.

Sometimes known as the Second Partition Treaty, the agreement is an attempt to restore the Pragmatic Sanction following the death of Duke Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, which had undermined the First Partition Treaty (the Treaty of Den Haag).

Under the new Treaty, Archduke Charles (later Charles VI), the second son of the Emperor Leopold I, is to become King of Spain when Carlos II dies.