Civil war and criticism

As Marsden describes it, the growth of neoclassical literary sensibilities developed in part in reaction to the chaos and disorder of the English civil war – following in this regard the development of late 17th century political theory. Orderliness, definiteness, clarity became virtues, while ambiguity, double entendres, and inconclusiveness became literary vices.

“Writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries delighted in enigmas and conundrums; as such verbal games indicate, puzzling, mystifying, even tricking the reader was part of the pleasure. In the Renaissance, the assumption that ambiguity was a readily acceptable literary tool permeated writing on all levels . . . .

“In contrast to the adaptations, with their painstaking linguistic simplicity. Renaissance literature abounds with puns and sometimes elaborate conceits, literary figures which by their very nature promote ambiguity by adding an additional layer of meaning. By the time of the Restoration, these literary attitudes had changed as the radical instability of the recent civil war, coupled with political struggles and social upheavals, made permanence a desired virtue. Creating hierarchies helped establish a sense of order, and classifying literature and people, and thus controlling any incipient disorder or anarchy, became crucial. The social class system developed along with theories concerning hierarchies of genre which established qualities that should separate comedy from tragedy. The popularity of neoclassical theory, with its rigid definitions of genre and its focus on the psychological underpinnings of audience response, indicates a suspicion of social and literary uncertainty. Writers, and subsequently critics, questioned the audience’s ability to decipher ambiguity, fearing the possible confusion it might foster and the moral as well as political problems such confusion could create.”

Perhaps the dissociation of sensibility has a political source.