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This thesis came about as a result of a search for a life of Donne to be used as background material for a study of the use of elisions in his poetry. It was with considerable surprise that I discovered the lack of any real biography of the poet since Sir Edmund Gosse's two volume attempt at the end of the last century. Since then there have been innumerable studies of one or another facet of Donne's life and work, but no one has attempted a serious work on the whole man. Hugh I'A. Fausset's Study in Discord, to which no references of any kind have been made in this was a poor restatement of Gosse's overly- romantic treatment of the poet without Gosse's fortunately firm framework of 17th Century Christian orthodoxy. Once determined on the subject, I had one great advantage that is often missing in modern scholarship, especially American scholarship. Much as I enjoyed and admired Donne's work, I had no special beliefs about either his life or work. There are many points made in this thesis which I did not at first believe but was forced to accept as I went along. Even while writing on such events as the Armada and Donne's reaction to it, I found my first thoughts to be incorrect. At no time did any prejudgements have so much force as to keep me from changing. Indeed there are some arguments which are still very fluid in my mind, but I have not put down any of these thoughts without finding sufficient proof. For example, I think it very likely that Donne wrote not only his Satyres between his two Essex voyages, but nearly all the Elegies as well, perhaps beginning with a translation of Ovid or Horace on the trip back from Cadiz. I have attempted to keep away from the romancing of Gosse, however, and have not recorded these thoughts unless there has been sufficient evidence. Whenever industry or interest flagged, there were always new articles or criticisms to awaken anger sufficient to carry on. The lack of full biographical treatment of Donne has led to a good deal of utter rot being printed about the man. Marius Bewley's last article in The Kenyon Review is a good example. His "psychological" criticisms seem to me to be ridiculous, but he is welcome to them. His completely wrong biographical data, however, merely angers me. If this thesis did nothing but show that Donne was not trained by Jesuits, it would be valuable. BBC broadcasts have shown a similar lack of knowledge about Donne. The Schools' broadcast for May 18, 1952, used material from Walton's biography of Donne which has been shown to be inaccurate. John Dowland's "Sweet, Stay awhile" has been announced as by Donne. And a program on the reading of Donne on the Third Programme has claimed that to read Donne correctly, one must be like him and feel with him - -this spoken by a voice which continued to mis-pronounce his name. It seems strange that after so much has been written on the subject and after Donne himself made the point so clear that the "official" pronunciation of his name should be so obviously wrong. Then there are the other problems of Donne scholarship which have led to so much error, particularly in the uncritical acceptance of the letters from the Burley MS. I have given as much attention to these problems as possible, but I have attempted to subordinate them to the main purpose of the thesis: to give as complete and as detailed a description of Donne's first thirty years as is possible from printed and manuscript material now available. As the Bibliography indicates, I have attempted to draw upon all sources for a study of Donne's entire life, for his later actions help to illuminate the young man.

The narratives of travel and exploration written by the English voyagers and merchant adventurers who visited India during 1579 -1630 are of great literary and historical value for many reasons. For the first time they brought the ordinary Englishman in contact with the peoples of the East and made it possible for tradesmen to see through the mind's eye new and unlooked -for splendours in the Indies, the glamour of the Mughal court, or the power of the Great Turk. The common man found in the narratives of travel not only a romantic literature more fascinating than fiction, but a call to personal adventure. These were the stories, not of King Arthur or of fabulous knights, but of men who had lived and had their being in Elizabethan England. To any apprentice might come adventures that would have dazzled even Guy of Warwick -, as Captain John Smith himself had witnessed. Nor was rhetorical decoration needed to adorn these tales. The plain narratives were sufficiently attractive without adornment. No one has yet appraised the influence on modern English prose of the matter-of-fact relations of the voyagers; but merely as evidence of the development towards verbal simplicity many of these accounts deserve the study of literary historians. Out of utilitarian works on geography and the homespun narratives of merchants and seamen grew a vast literature, perhaps more completely than any other inspired by and appealing to the middle class. For the modern reader, these narratives not only throw considerable light on one of the most crucial periods of Indian history, but also reveal the beginnings and gradual growth of English power in the East. Compiled by men to whom everything in India was new and strange, they form a valuable supplement to the records of the native chroniclers; for the latter took for granted many local institutions and customs unfamiliar to Europeans, and all too often sacrificed objectivity to eulogies of the reigning sovereign. The number of English visitors to India during this period was remarkably large, and for this reason, detailed examination of all of them is outside the scope of such a study as this. In order to avoid swelling the dimensions of this already lengthy work to unreasonable proportions, I have omitted all but a few absolutely important travellers and have employed the word 'traveller' to signify only those who left extensive records of their experiences in India. Amongst them, how - ever, I have included, at the very outset, a Jesuit who is hardly a traveller except in an extended sense of the word, since no account of the early British transactions in the East can be deemed complete unless some notice is taken of this pioneer of British `gravel to India. The importance of Fr. Stephens (for this was the name of the Jesuit in question), which has led me to devote one full chapter to him, will be sufficiently clear in the following pages, but the particular circumstance which has made his inclusion imperative is the fact that he is little known in this country, whereas he deserves to be much better known by his countrymen, perhaps as well known as some of the distinguished poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or the Orientalists of later ages. From what we have seen ..., it is clear that although there were notions current about Indian people, Indian traits, Indian climate, long before there was any regular contact between England and India, precise information about the latter began to find its way into Europe after the discovery of the Cape route, and into England after the return of the British pioneers, such as Ralph Fitch, Newberry, etc. The modern European knows much about India, and in this sense at least these early travel -accounts may appear to be outdated; but their importance lies in the fact that they throw considerable light on the India of the great Mughals and that their writers had a certain advantage over the chroniclers of the court. Having nothing to fear or to expect from the powers that were, they could fearlessly tell the unvarnished truth regardless of official frowns or favours. Having come from other lands, they recorded with meticulous care matters seemingly unimportant which a native of India would ordinarily have dismissed as commonplace. Moreover, their narratives and journals have been drawn upon by English poets and prose- writers, some of whom read them extensively and thus broadened and enriched both their knowledge of the world and their general outlook on life. Through these accounts accessions were made to the English language of many Hindi, Arabic and Persian words. It is these travellers, sailors and sea- captains who ask us Indians not to be led too far astray by complacent dreans of the days of glory that are no more, but to see and realize our most degrading varieties of superstition, our most grotesque forms of idolatry. They had no desire to hide things. They spoke more plainly than we do, and far more strongly, and they believed, as we do, that what we think of ourselves is not necessarily what the world thinks of us.

In <i>Mourning before Death</i>, I discuss the representation of maternal mourning in <i>King John, </i>the <i>Henry VI</i> trilogy, <i>Richard III</i>, <i>Titus Andronicus</i>, and <i>Coriolanus</i>. Primarily, I explore Shakespeare’s expansion of maternal roles from his source texts, especially their lamentations anticipating the death of sons in these plays. Shakespeare emphasises the grief experienced by mothers which is largely absent in the historical accounts on which the plays are based. My research address Phyllis Rackin’s definition of females as ‘anti-historians’ and examines how mothers in mourning intrude into historical events and confront masculine authority. This study focuses principally on Shakespeare’s representation of maternal authority in terms of mother-son relationships. The introduction identifies the importance of ‘women’s time’ and physical expressions of maternal distress and the dramatic conflicts these provoke. Chapter 2 examines how Constance’s grief affects the reaction of the audience to the power struggle in <i>King John</i>. Chapter 3 is concerned with how Margaret’s queenship in <i>Henry VI</i> disrupts the development of English kingship and endangers the existing Lancastrian rule. Chapter 4 discusses the psychological and physical meanings expressed through the use of the sitting posture, a gesture which embodies the mother’s pain. Chapter 5 discusses Shakespeare’s exploration of political wildness and barbarism through his representation of Tamora’s tragic passion. Chapter 6 discusses Volumnia’s maternity and her appropriation of the Roman concept of honour. The conclusion considers the strength of maternal authority and female power in Shakespeare’s representation of maternal mourning.