The Elizabethan World Picture - Eustace M. Tillyard

This brief and illuminating account of the ideas of world order prevalent in the
Elizabethan age and later is an indispensable companion for readers of the great
writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-Shakespeare and the Elizabethan
dramatists, Donne and Milton, among many others.
The basic medieval idea of an ordered
Chain of Being is studied by Professor Tillyard in the process of its various transformations
by the dynamic spirit of the Renaissance. Among his topics are: Angels; the Stars
and Fortunes; the Analogy between Macrocosm and Microcosm; the Four Elements; the
Four Humours; Sympathies; Correspondences; and the Cosmic Dance-ideas and symbols
which inspirited the minds and imaginations not only of the Elizabethans but of all
men of the Renaissance.