The Elizabethan World Picture: A Study of the Idea of Order in the Age of Shakespeare, Donne and Milton
by By Tillyard, Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall
Category: History , Europe , Great Britain , General

This brief and illuminating account of the ideas of world order prevalent in the  Elizabethan age and later is an indispensable companion for readers of the great  writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Shakespeare and the Elizabethan  dramatists, Donne and Milton, among many others.  The basic medieval idea of an ordered  Chain of Being is studied by Professor Tillyard in the process of its various transformations  by the dynamic spirit of the Renaissance. Among his topics are: Angels; the Stars  and Fortunes; the Analogy between Macrocosm and Microcosm; the Four Elements; the  Four Humours; Sympathies; Correspondences; and the Cosmic Dance—ideas and symbols  which inspirited the minds and imaginations not only of the Elizabethans but of all  men of the Renaissance.