Sam Jones
Literary History of London
The literary history of London until the 19th century is a very vast topic, and covers a huge genre of books as well as plays, poems, and sonnets. It begins in a published form with the Canterbury tales, and continues up to the origins of the modern day novel with writers such as Henri Fielding and Jonathan Swift, with Shakespear and others in the middle. Yet what all of this writing and literature does is set the tone for the classics of literature that came out in the 19th century from writers such as Dickens, Wilde, and Austin.
The first of the landmark literary works to come out of the city of London is the Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer and published between 1392 and 1396. The Canterbury Tales represented and landmark in the literary field due to its bawdy, low style of English that played to the common man, not the well educated noble. The Tales were very much influenced by the Italian story tellers, as well as Boccaccio’s Decameron, which told the story of 10 nobles from Florence who go to a villa in the country to escape the plague and pass the time by telling tales to each other. The Canterbury tales was written in what we now know as middle English. The Tales are one of the few outstanding pieces of literary art that came out of the Middle Ages and is still in print.
The next large jump in literary development came in the late Fourteenth Century in the origins of the play. Original plays were popular, crude, dirty vernacular tales of comedic spins on classic religious tales. Workers in a town would put on a play, normally in conjunction with a religious celebration. The plays were either Miracle plays or Mystery plays, Miracle being tales of scenes or events in the lives of miracle working saints or martyrs. Mystery plays were depictions based on or around episodes of the life of Christ. Plays like the Second Shepard’s Play represent this genre of comedy mixed with religion. The play depicts a sheep stealer who ends up going to the birth of Christ as a Shepard. Like the Canterbury Tales, these productions were put on for the commoner, spoken in language that was familiar to all, yet they were all in rhyme. These plays set the stage for the Renaissance theater productions and play writes such as Shakespear, which made up the bulk of English literature.
The Renaissance represented a blast of developments through the theater, and the play. The time represented a desire for education, as well as a quest for words, and their power and uses. It also represented a time of looking back, and appreciating the works of ancient Rome and Greece. By this time the theater had developed into a professional art form, with theaters, professional actors, and most importantly professional play writes. Almost all of the plays were set in Italy, and were less crude than that of the Miracle and Mystery plays. These new plays focused on language and its uses, and made uses of the evolvement of the English language, in many situations generating that very evolvement.
What came out of that is what we now know as the Elizabethan drama. The Elizabethan Drama represented once again a richness and love of language. The plays used what is known as Blanc Verse, which allows for some rhyming, but creates a different scheme in the text. This rhyming scheme is what Shakespear used in all of his plays. The defining character of this time was without a doubt William Shakespear, who is probably the most famous writer in the world. The brilliance of Shakespear came from many thing, one of them was his ability to blend aristocratic topics and language with popular crude humor. This blending brought together every type of drama and comedy, as well as use every different language tool there is. He was able to mix dramatic storytelling with philosophical ideas into real people along with the use of comedy. Every one of Shakespear’s plays represented a new idea, and new way to represent things, and a new device for later play writes and writers of all kind to use.
The last important piece of literature of this time was the King James version of the Bible. This was the first bible to be published in a language that many of the people could read, and was published on a scale that many could own it. If any book had the largest influence on the people of the time, it was the King James Bible. The dramatic power, and biblical storytelling left a mark on all literature, and that version of the bible is still very prevalent today.

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