Assignment about Francis Bacon

1. Paper-1
 Name: Jalandhara Ravji J
 Roll No: 35
 Enrollment No: 2069108420180024
 Topic: Prose writers of Elizabethan Age with special
reference to Francis Bacon
 M. A. Sem-1
 Paper:-1 The Renaissance Literature
 Batch: 2017-19
 Email Id: ravjijalandhra@gmail.com
 Submitted to: Department of English MKBU

2. Introduction
 The Elizabethan age is called The Golden Age of
English poetry and drama, it should also be regarded
as a glorious age of English prose, for English prose was
set on the track of glory by such great prose writers as
Bacon, Richard Hooker, sir Philip Sidney, sir Walter
Raleigh, John Fox, Camden, Knox and Thomas North
with Sir Philip Sidney on the forefront.

3. Prose writers of Elizabethan
 Richard Hooker:
 In strong contrast with Bacon
is Richard Hooker, one of the
greatest prose writers of the
Elizabethan Age.
 His one great work is “The
Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity”,
a theological and
argumentative book; but
entirely apart from its
subject, it will be read
whenever men desire to hear
the power and stateliness of
the English Language.

4. Sidney & Raleigh:
 Sir Philip Sidney, who has already been considered as a
poet, is quite as well known by his prose works, ‘Arcadia’, a
pastoral romance, and the ‘Defense of poetic’, one of the
earliest literary essay. Sidney represents whole romantic
tendency.
 While Sir Walter Raleigh represents its adventurous spirit
and activity. He was the poet, scholar and adventurer.
Raleigh prime works are the ‘ Discovery of Guiana’ and the
‘History of the world’ written to occupy his prison hours. It
is interesting chiefly for its style.

5. John Fox
Fox will be remembered
always for his famous ‘Book of
Martyrs’.
 Foxe had been driven out of
England by the Marian
persecution, and in a
wandering but diligent life on
the continent he conceived
the idea of writing a history of
the persecutions of the church
from earliest days to his own.

6. Hakluyt & Purchas:
 Two editors of this age have made for themselves and enviable
place in English literature. They are Richard Hakluyt and Samuel
Purchas. First Hakluyt translate ‘ De Soto’s travels in America’.
 His, ‘principal Navigations’, ‘Voyages’, and ‘Discoveries of the
English Nation’.
 Samuel Purchas first famous book, ‘Purchas’, ‘His Pilgrimage’,
Appeared in 1613. So, both in accuracy and literary finish, there is
still plenty to make one glad that the book was written and that
he can now comfortably follow Purchas on his “Pilgrimage’.

7. Thomas North:
 Among the translators of the
Elizabethan Age Sir Thomas
North is most deserving of
noticed because of his version
of ‘Plutarch Lives’ from which
Shakespeare took the
characters and many of the
incidents for three great
Roman plays.
• He remains the most
inspiring interpreter of the
biographer whom Emerson
calls “the historian of
heroism”.

8. Francis Bacon
 There was another great scholar who
contributed a great deal to the enrichment of
English prose. He was Francis Bacon (1561-
1626).
 He was the first to introduce in English the
literary genre, known as the Essay, innovated
by the French philosopher Montaigne. Bacon
was both a scholar and a creative genius with a
unique style of his own.
 Bacon was the first to introduce the
intellectual, impersonal, reflective essays in a
style which is inimitable. Brevity is the soul of
Bacon’s essay.
 The words chosen by him are crisp and pithy.
His sentences though small, speak volumes. It
may be said that the Elizabethan intellectual
prose finds its culmination in Bacon.
 “Fear of death is more dangerous than death”
~ Francis Bacon

9. To Conclude:
 To conclude, we can say that Francis Bacon was the
prominent prose writer of the Elizabethan Age, and
also considered as a father of essays in English
literature of the world. Although Bacon was for the
greater part of his life a busy man of affairs, one can’t
read his work without becoming conscious of two
things, a perennial freshness which the world insists
upon in all literature that is to endure and an
intellectual power which marks him as one of the great
minds of the world.

10. Resources:
<http://www.literaturewise.in/mdl/mod/page/view.ph
p?id=130>.
goggle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_by_Francis_Bac
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