A Jacobean Age

Coriolanus represents this old, Elizabethan order, and Coriolanus, which was written in 1605-1608, reflects very strongly the move into the Jacobean Age, which was pragmatic without understanding the imaginative romanticism that had gone before....

If there has ever been another Jacobean age since, there is one now: it's Jacobean in the sense that the virtue of heroes, which is the virtue of serving something above and beyond, is no longer fashionable. We've become more and more secular and efficient, and we're not interested in that service at all.  There has been a loss of faith, and to a degree a loss of imagination. We live in a godless society. All our gods have failed us. The golden age of the Elizabethan time has passed, and we are now into the dark age of the Jacobean era. 

pages 216-7 of Living with Shakespeare, edited by Susannah Carson

More than pragmatic

Although we belong to a species which spends an alarming amount of its time blowing things up, every now and then we are moved to add gargoyles or garlands, stars or wreaths, to our buildings for no practical reason whatsoever. In the finest of these flourishes, we can read signs of goodness in a material register, a form of frozen benevolence. We see in them evidence of those sides of human nature which enable us to thrive rather than simply survive. These elegant touches remind us that we are not exclusively pragmatic or sensible: we are also creatures who, with no possibility of profit or power, occasionally carve friars out of stone and mould angels onto walls.

Alain de BottonThe Architecture of Happiness