Writing the Elizabethan Way

Mention Elizabethan writers and most people think instantly of Shakespeare. A lucky few might think of Ben Jonson or Spencer. However, the Elizabethan era was far from a staid bastion of "thee's" and thou's"--it was a time of ferment, with a number of writers competing both for audiences and the future direction of English prose writing.

So what do the Elizabethans have to do with being a writer today? Well, they not only wrote some of the most beautiful, moving prose in the entire English language, they also established several fundamental tools of writing used to this day. While the vocabulary of English has changed in the past four hundred years, the process of writing in it has not. Your twenty-first century writing can be improved by understanding how some of the most famous and enduring writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century crafted their prose.

Let's start with the purpose of writing. The Elizabethans wrote mainly to persuade. Formal letters, like speeches frozen, were written to request, urge, support, or oppose policies and actions of both the Queen and Parliament. Public pamphlets and broadsides discussed the pros and cons of current events. Speeches and sermons were a common way of influencing both the powerful and the common man. Even plays had a moral or a theme. Before they sat down to write, the Elizabethans always clearly understood what they were going to say. Modern writers could--and should, in my opinion--do the same. Knowing what you intend to say is easy to do with a non-fiction piece, much harder with a poem, novel, or short story. However, having a theme in your fiction gives additional structure and direction to your prose. Rather than cramping your story, it can give it a scaffold around which you can build.

Once they knew what they were going to say, Elizabethan writers turned to the matter of how to say it. Gentlemen of the day received an education that included grammar, logic, and rhetoric. As part of their rhetorical training, the Elizabethans studied two great Roman orators, Cicero and Quintillian. Both men taught that a speech should be divided up into five parts. The Romans considered these five parts essential; the bones on which a speech was fleshed out. Subjects were divided and sub-divided, then placed in such order as would give the maximum effect. Elizabethan writing was often built according to the same rhetorical framework as a speech. A plan or outline was a necessary part of any composition, no matter how short. While many modern writers consider an outline superfluous, especially in this age of computerized cut-and-paste, having a road-map to your goal will ensure you get there by the straightest, fastest, and most powerful route.

A great debate raged among the Elizabethan writers when it came to the question of writing style. Once again, two great Romans were involved, but this time they were Cicero and Seneca. The Elizabethans had great reverence for the ancients, and so attempted to transfer Latin writing styles into English. Some considered the long, convoluted sentences--full of clauses that built upon each other, turning this way and that--which Cicero wrote, to be the proper model to be copied. Others preferred the simpler, more direct sentences of Seneca. Both camps believed that their particular style was best. Ciceronians accused Senecans of being blunt and inelegant. Senecans claimed the Ciceronians were more enamored of wordplay than clarity of thought. However, no matter which school they followed, Elizabethan writers were meticulous sentence-smiths. They worked hard at honing and polishing their sentences. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his book "The Art of Writing" said that words come to the reader as soldiers across a narrow bridge--one at at time. The Elizabethans took great pains to ensure that each individual word or phrase was the most powerful, and placed exactly where it needed to be. In these days of fuzzy words used in imprecise sentences, modern writers could do much worse than become sentence-smiths themselves.

The followers of Senecan prose used direct sentence structures, so the power of their writing depended more on words and images. Following the advice of Aristotle in his Rhetoric, Senecan writers often used striking imagery and metaphors. Metaphors were the scalpels the Elizabethans used to cut through confusion; the gunpowder that charged their writings with emotion. A metaphor can be used both for its emotional energy and to describe a new concept in terms of the familiar. The Elizabethans often constructed their metaphors to do both at the same time.

The Elizabethans, because they revered the Ancients, considered the writers of Greece and Rome to be the highest authority on any subject. Some men, such as Bacon, had begun to doubt their omnipotence. But these writers were in the minority, and even Bacon resorted to Classical quotes in his writing. Elizabethan writers turned to the Ancients for two reasons: to substantiate their contemporary opinions by borrowing the authority of the Greek and Roman sources; and to show the fact that they were well-educated men--something which also added authority to their opinions. "Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world," Samuel Johnson said a century later.

Modern writers can still use metaphors and quotations to introduce new subjects and add emotional power. The modern writer's maxim of "show, don't tell" encourages writers to engage the reader's senses. Metaphors do just that.

So if you want to improve your writing, it's worth your time to read the writings of the Elizabethans. Far from being long-dead, long-forgotten writers, they are living teachers of powerful techniques of English prose.