ELIZABETH (xii), 1558-1603--LITERATURE
The Elizabethan Literature demands from the general Historian something
more than the incidental references which may suffice in other periods. In
earlier days, he may draw upon Piers Plowman or Chaucer for evidence and
illustrations of the prevalent social conditions; in the century following
he may appeal to Milton and Bunyan to elucidate aspects of Puritanism. But
the Elizabethan literature is in a degree quite unique, the expression of
the whole spirit of the time, its many-sidedness, its vigour, its creative
force; helping us to realise how it was that Elizabeth's Englishmen made
Elizabeth's England. And this of course is beside the other fact that for
the historian of literature _per se_ there is no period quite so
interesting and instructive, none of such vital importance in the evolution
of English Letters.
[Sidenote: Birth of a National Literature]
In the five centuries since the Norman Conquest, ending in 1566, England
had produced but one single poet of the front rank or anything approaching
it, Geoffrey Chaucer. From the time when Edmund Spenser in 1579 delighted
his contemporaries by the publication of the _Shepherd's Calendar_,
she has never been without writers whose claim to eminence among poets can
be at least plausibly maintained. Before very much the same date, English
prose as a consciously artistic medium of utterance had hardly begun to be
recognised; even Thomas More wrote his _Utopia_ in Latin, and it was
not translated into English till many years after his death. The
possibility of an English Prose Style--written prose as distinguished from
spoken oratory--had hardly presented itself except to the translators of
Scripture and the Liturgy. Before the century closed, the world was
enriched by the compact and pregnant sentences of Francis Bacon's
_Essays_ and the dignified simplicity of Hooker's _Ecclesiastical
Polity_. As with the Poets, so also the chain of masters of English
Prose is unbroken from that day forward. But most sudden and startling of
all the various developments was that of the Drama. It may be doubted if
any critical observer in 1579 would have ventured even to suspect that the
crowning glory of Elizabeth's reign was to be the work of playwrights; yet
before she died the genius of Marlowe had blazed and been quenched,
_Hamlet_ had appeared on the boards, Jonson's "learned sock" had
achieved fame; the men whose names we are wont to associate with the
"Mermaid" had most of them already begun their career, even if they had not
yet passed the stage of merely adapting, doctoring, and "writing up" for
managers the stock-plays in their repertory. The Drama, proving itself the
form of literary expression most perfectly adapted to the spirit of the
age, absorbed the available literary talent as it has never done since.
Sudden as the outburst was however, it had been made possible by many years
of wide and miscellaneous experiment, though little of any permanent
intrinsic value had been actually achieved.
[Sidenote: Prose: before 1579]
Except for Ascham's _Toxophilus_, very few passages [Footnote: Such as
may be lighted on for instance in "Sir John Mandeville," Mallory, and
Hall's _Chronicle_.] of English prose notable as prose--that is,
consciously essaying what is connoted by the term _style_--had been
produced before Elizabeth's accession, apart from the liturgical,
rhetorical, or controversial work of the clergy or clerical disputants. The
_Acts and Monuments_ of Foxe, popularly known as, the "Book of
Martyrs," published in the first decade of the reign, showed the
development of a power of vigorously dramatic narrative which should not be
overlooked. The enormous popularity however which that work achieved was at
least in part the outcome of the general sterility. Men had not yet learned
to write, but they were ready to read even voraciously. Culture was in
vogue. As things stood culture, in practice, meant and could mean little
else than the study of Latin and Italian authors--Greek being still
reserved for the learned--of whose works translations, some of notable
merit, were very soon beginning to appear on the market. It was inevitably
to these two literatures--the Latin and the Italian--that men turned in the
first instance to find the models and formulate the canons of literary art;
with only occasional divagations in the direction of France or Spain,
countries which were scarcely a generation in advance of England. We remark
that the old idea that for prose which was intended to live the true medium
was still the one international literary language, Latin, died exceedingly
hard; Bacon himself, great master though he was of his mother-tongue,
maintaining it quite definitely. This pedantic attitude however was not
involved in the idea of culture, and men welcomed with avidity an author
who made his appeal to the non-academic public in vigorous English. The
conversion even of the academic mind was close at hand.
[Sidenote: 1579-89]
The year 1579 is in the strictest sense an epoch in the history of English
Literature; as witnessing the first appearance of a new and original force
in English verse, and the first deliberate and elaborate effort in the
direction of artistically constructed English Prose. In that year, John
Lyly published his _Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit_, and Edmund Spenser
his _Shepherd's Calendar_.
[Sidenote: Euphues]
_Euphues_, and its companion volume _Euphues and His England_
enjoyed a very remarkable if temporary vogue; running through numerous
editions in the course of the ensuing fifty years. After that, it dropped.
It is not surprising that it dropped. The work is tedious, prolix,
affected, abounding in pedantry and in intellectual foppery. But its whole
meaning and significance at the time when it was written are lost to us if
we pay attention only to the ridicule which very soon fell upon it, to the
mockery in Shakespeare's burlesques of Euphuism, or to Scott's later parody
of it in the character of Sir Piercie Shafton. The everlasting antitheses,
the perpetual playing with words, the alliterative trickery, the
accumulation of far-fetched similes, the endless and often most
inappropriate classical, mythological, and quasi-zoological allusions and
parallels, are indeed sufficiently absurd and wearisome; and when
"Euphuism" became a fashionable craze, its sillier disciples were a very
fit target for jesting and mirth, very much as in our own day the humorists
found abundant and legitimate food for laughter in the vagaries of what was
known as "aestheticism". In both cases, the extravagances were the
separable accidents, the superficial excrescences, of a real intellectual
movement with a quite healthy motive. _Euphues_ itself was a real and
serious if somewhat misdirected effort at making a moralised culture
fashionable, and at elevating; the English tongue into a medium of refined
and polished expression. If the Euphuists included Armados among them, they
numbered also their Birons and Rosalines. Though Lyly practised exuberances
of verbal jugglery, he was not their inventor; they were a vice of the
times, largely borrowed from foreign models; and Shakespeare himself, in
moments of aberrant ingenuity, produced--not for laughter--samples which
Lyly might have admired but could never have emulated.
[Sidenote: Sidney's prose works]
Lyly's work was a novel experiment in prose, without previous parallel;
critical judgments were no very long time in detecting and condemning his
extravagances. But the same intellectual motive was soon to find a more
chastened and artistic expression in the work of one who was still but a
literary experimentalist when he meet his death at Zutphen. When Sir Philip
Sidney, that "verray parfit gentil knight," scholar, soldier, and
statesman, if the unanimous appraisement of the best of his contemporaries
is worth anything, wrote his _Defence of Poesie_, he had not indeed
broken free from the trammels of academic theory; but it is a very often
acute and always charming piece of critical work in scholarly and graceful
language. More affected and generally inferior in style, but also still on
the whole scholarly and graceful in its language, is his _Arcadia_, an
example of the indefinitely constructed amorphous Romances out of which in
course of long time the novel was to be evolved. The dwellers in that
Arcady are as far removed from the nymphs and swains of Watteau's day as
from a primitive Greek population; they behave as no human beings ever did
or could behave; they belong in short to a particularly unconvincing kind
of fairy-land, of which the vogue happily died out at an early stage. The
_Arcadia_ is not intrinsically a great book, nor can it be read to-day
without a considerable effort; yet it must always be notable as not merely
an experiment but a positive achievement in English prose style. Neither of
these works was published till after 1590; but both must have been written
before 1583.
[Sidenote: Hooker 1594]
It was not till the last decade of the reign had begun that the first great
monument of English Prose appeared; nor is it surprising that, when it did
come, it was an example of the Ecclesiastical or politico-ecclesiastical
order. With the publication in 1594 of the first four books of Richard
Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_, the full claims of English as a
great literary language were decisively established by his rhythmical,
stately, and luminous periods. In their own field, Poets and Dramatists had
already secured those claims; with the works of Marlowe, the earliest plays
of Shakespeare, and the opening books of the _Faerie Queene_.
[Sidenote: Verse; before 1579]
While the Eighth Henry was still ruling England, Surrey and Wyatt, heedful
of things Italian, had already discovered that verse-making was at any rate
a delectable pastime for a gentleman of wit, especially if he had a
love-affair on hand; a pastime certainly pleasing to himself and probably
agreeable to his mistress. They made metrical experiments, introducing both
the sonnet and blank verse. The example they set was followed by others,
and _Tottel's Miscellany_, published towards the end of Mary's reign,
shows that a considerable skill in this minor art had already been
acquired, and not only by the two principal contributors, though the
writers were still working within very narrow metrical limitations. In 1559
appeared the _Mirrour for Magistrates_, for the most part dull and
uninteresting but containing in the _Induction_ and the _Complaint
of Buckingham_ two contributions by Thomas Sackville (afterwards Lord
Buckhurst) which are a good deal more than clever verse-making. But after
one other experiment--the part-authorship of the first English Tragedy in
blank verse, _Gorboduc_--Sackville deserted the Muses, for public
affairs; in his later years becoming a leading member of Elizabeth's
Council. The little verse that he left is of a quality to make us wish that
he had written more: for there is in him at least a hint of some
possibilities which were actualised in Spenser. But twenty years passed
before the appearance of the _Shepherd's Calendar_, during which it is
probable enough that courtiers and lovers continued to practise, after the
school of Surrey and Wyatt; nothing however was published that has
survived, save the work of the universal experimentalist and pioneer George
Gascoigne, who tried his hand at most forms of literary production,
achieving distinction in none but a laudable respectability in all.
[Sidenote: 1579-90 Spenser and others ]
The _Shepherd's Calendar/_ by itself would give Spenser nothing more
than a high position among minor poets; but with him verse reappeared as
something more than an elegant exercise for courtiers, scholars or lovers.
Above all, the _Shepherd's Calendar_ gave unexpected proof of the
metrical capacities and verbal felicities of the English language, though
setting it forth to the accompaniment of an excessive use of archaic forms
and expressions. Even that excess had its value as a protest against the
pedantic precision of the Latinists, who were already indulging in a
grotesque attempt to displace natural English metres by Ovidian and
Horatian prosody. Spenser himself made some futile efforts in this
direction; so did Sidney--sundry more or less ingenious examples are
scattered about the _Arcadia_; but Sidney realised his error in time
to write the _Astrophel and Stella_ sonnets (about 1581-2), which
though still somewhat stiff and academic might well have been the
precursors of some noble poetry had the writer lived longer. As it is, his
life and death form the noblest poem he has bequeathed to us.
Those sonnets also remained unpublished till some years later. The first
three books of the _Faerie Queene_, which at once established Spenser
for all time as a true poet of the highest rank, did not appear till
1590. In the interval, the English Drama was finding itself, and some of
the dramatists were revealing that gift of song--in the restricted sense of
the word--which was bestowed in such unparalleled measure on the later
Elizabethans. To this decade belong songs by Lyly and Peele, Lodge and
Greene, which have already caught the delicate daintiness and the exquisite
lilt of Shakespeare's songs and a host of others found in the later
songbooks--qualities of which there is little more than a rare hint here
and there in the earlier Miscellanies, for all the bravery of such titles
as _A Paradise of Dainty Devises_ (1576): _A Gorgeous Gallery of
Gallant Inventions_ (1578): or _A Handefull of Pleasant
Delites_(1584).
[Sidenote: The Drama before Elizabeth]
The definite triumph of Christianity over Paganism killed the Drama of the
old world, the Church deliberately setting its face against the
theatre. But primitive popular instincts, embodied in the continued
celebration, as holiday sports, of what had originally been pagan rites,
kept in existence crude and embryonic forms of dramatic representation at
the festival seasons; which after a time the ecclesiastics saw more
advantage in adapting to their own ends than in suppressing. Hence arose
the miracle plays or Mysteries (probably _ministerium_, not [Greek:
mystaerion]) of the middle ages--representations chiefly of episodes in the
Biblical narrative. These in turn suggested the Moralities, dialogues with
action in which the characters were personifications of virtues or vices
relieved, in consideration of the weakness of the flesh, by passages of
broad buffoonery. Lastly in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries came the representation of what were called "Interludes," for the
most part short farces of a very primitive order--probably the offspring of
the aforesaid passages of buffoonery. These did not constitute a literary
drama; but they kept the idea of dramatic representation in being, though
no such thing as a theatre or building constructed for the purpose existed
as yet. The performances were given either in Church, or, later, in a
nobleman's hall, or in the courtyard of an inn. The "masque" or pantomimic
pageant, without dialogue, was also a familiar spectacle of the later
times, and remained an occasional feature of the drama in its development.
The revival of interest in the classics caused some attention to be paid to
the Roman drama; and hence Italy led the way--as in all things literary--in
producing imitations of the plays then known. These however hardly got
beyond the stage of being mere imitations; though as models Terence and
Seneca were superior to the compilers of miracle plays, something more was
required than copying their works before a Drama worthy of the name could
be evolved. But from about the middle of the sixteenth century, the
dramatic instinct in England was struggling to find for itself new and
adequate expression.
[Sidenote: Early Elizabethan Drama]
With the Educational revival, it would appear that schoolmasters
occasionally caused their pupils to act scenes, in Latin or perhaps at
times in a translated version, from Terence: and it is not surprising to
find that what is recognised as the first English Comedy was written by a
schoolmaster for his boys to perform. _Ralph Roister Doister_ derived
from the Latin model, and is in doggerel couplets. It was the work of
Nicholas Udall who was Master of Eton and afterwards of Westminster; but
whether it was produced in the earlier or later period is not certainly
known. At any rate it preceded the accession of Queen Mary. _Gammer
Gurton's Needle_, dated 1553, holds the second place in point of time;
and _Gorboduc_ otherwise known as _Ferrex and Porrex_, the first
English blank-verse tragedy, the work of Sackville and Norton, was acted in
1561. From this time, we have notices of the production of a considerable
number of plays of which it may be assumed that they were exceedingly
crude, being either very formless experiments derived from the interludes
or else direct imitations or translations of Latin or Italian plays; to
which Gascoigne contributed his share. A nearer approach to the coming
Comedy is found in the plays of John Lyly preceding his _Euphues_. By
this time dramatic performances had achieved such popularity that the City
Fathers were scandalised--not indeed without reason--by their encroachments
on the more solid but less inviting attractions of Church Services; and by
banishing them from the City precincts caused the first regularly
constructed theatres to be established outside the City bounds in
Shoreditch: a departure which no doubt tended to the more definite
organisation of the Actor's profession. As the Eighties progressed, a
higher standard of dramatic production was attained by the group of
"University" play wrights---Peele, Greene, Nash, and others; wild Bohemian
spirits for the most part, careless of conventions whether moral or
literary, wayward, clever, audacious; culminating with Marlowe, whose first
extremely immature play _Tamburlaine_, was probably acted in 1587 when
he was only three and twenty; his career terminating in a tavern brawl some
six years later. By that time (1593) it is certain that Shakespeare, born
in the same year as Marlowe, was writing for the managers; though none of
his known work can with confidence be dated earlier than the year of
Marlowe's death. The great age of the Drama had begun.
[Sidenote: The younger generation]
It will have become apparent from this survey that, although we talk with
very good reason of the Elizabethan Age of English Literature, the Queen
had been reigning for thirty years, the great political crisis of her rule
had been reached, the Armada had perished, before any single work had been
written, or at any rate published, which on its merits--judged by the
criteria of an established literature with established canons--would have
entitled its author to a position of any distinction on the roll of fame.
Up to 1589, the most remarkable productions had been: in prose, Foxe's
_Book of Martyrs_ and Lyly's _Euphues_; in verse, some lines of
Sackville, and the _Shepherd's Calendar_. Even when we have added to
these Sidney's _Sonnets_ and his _Arcadia_--written but not
published--the significant fact remains that he, as well as Spenser and
Lyly, was not born till the second half of the century had begun: and all
three were older than any of the group of dramatists who are named as
Shakespeare's precursors. Spenser was actually the eldest of all the men
whose writings shed lustre on the great Queen's reign: and Spenser himself
had not attained to the full maturity of his genius--had not, at least
given its fruits to the world--at the hour of England's triumph. Had he
died in the year of Zutphen, "Colin Clout" would have ranked little if at
all higher than "Astrophel." Further: save for Sidney and Marlowe, who were
both cut off prematurely, and Spenser himself who died at forty-six, the
work of all the greater Elizabethan writers--Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson,
Bacon, Hooker, Raleigh, Middleton, Drayton--lies as much in the time of
James as in that of Elizabeth; while a whole group of those to whom the
same general title is applied--Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Ford,
Massinger--belong in effect wholly to the later reign.
Broadly speaking therefore it is worth noting that state-craft, soldiering,
seamanship, affairs of a very practical character, absorbed the keen brains
and the abundant energies of the earlier generation; even for the men born
in the fifties, like Raleigh and Sidney, literature (except with Spenser)
held a quite secondary place. But no sooner is the National triumph ensured
than the younger generation displays in the literary field characteristics
essentially the same as those whereby their elders had raised England in
war and in politics to the first rank among the nations.
For years to come, for the first time certainly in English History,
literature in one form or another appropriates the best work of the best
brains. There are men of ability in politics, but no giants: or if one of
the giants, like Bacon, divides his attention between the two fields, the
best half of it goes to literature. Yet it is essentially the same spirit
which works in the great men of Elizabeth's closing years as in the great
men of her youth and of her maturity.
[Sidenote: Pervading Characteristics]
The quality which conditions the whole English character through the period
is an exuberant, often even a riotous energy, a vast imaginativeness, which
breeds in the first place an immense daring, saved from degenerating into
mere recklessness by a coolness of head in emergencies which is singularly
marked. Whether we look at Elizabeth, Cecil, and Walsingham, or at Hawkins
and Drake and Frobisher, or broadly at the actions of the rank and file,
these characteristics are apparent. They are no less patent in the poets.
[Sidenote: displayed in the Drama and other fields]
Thus if we consider the tragedies of the period, their tremendous audacity
is perhaps their most prominent feature. The stage reeks with blood and
reverberates thunder, to an extent which could not fail to become merely
grotesque but for the immense pervading vitality. These men could and did
venture upon extravagances and imbue them with a terrific quality, when in
weaker hands they would have become ridiculous. For anything less than the
vibrating energy of Marlowe, the final scene of his _Faustus_ would
have sunk to burlesque. A cold analysis of the plot of _Hamlet_ or
_Macbeth_ would suggest mere melodrama. A Shakespeare or a Marlowe had
no hesitation in facing tasks which offered no mean between great success
or great failure. Nor was the audacity in their choice of subjects more
remarkable than in their methods, their defiance of recognised canons. Just
as the seamen had ignored the convention of centuries, creating a new
system of naval tactics and a new type of navy, so the Tragedians brushed
aside the academic convention, creating new dramatic canons and a new type
of drama. The innovation in the structure of comedy was no less daring,
since it proceeded on parallel lines. And here again the same quality of
superabundant vitality is equally prominent. But it is to be noted that
while the Elizabethan vitality would have made the drama great in spite of
its audacity, the greatest productions are distinguished from the less
great precisely by that peculiar sanity which stamped the master-spirits of
the time. As it is with the dramatists, so is it with the rest. The same
fulness of life is apparent in the luxuriance of Spenser's imagination, and
in the spontaneity of half a hundred anonymous song-writers, the same
audacity in Raleigh, embarking on his History of the World, and in Bacon,
assuming all knowledge to be his province, while affirming and formulating
the principles of Inductive Reasoning in substitution for the Deductive
methods by which the Schools had lived for centuries. Wherever the critic
turns his glance, he can find no sign of the Decadent. In every field of
life, in politics, in war, in religion, in letters, the Elizabethan was
virile even in his vices. His offences against morals or against art were
essentially of the barbaric not the effete order; as the splendours of his
productions were the natural beauties of plants nurtured in the open, not
in the hothouse.
[Sidenote: Breadth of view]
Other aspects of the national character could be readily inferred from the
prevalent tone of this literature. Toleration as a political principle was
not yet recognised: tolerance as a private attitude of mind was very
prevalent. The Jesuit and the extreme Puritan, the doctrinal propagandists
who would endure no deviation from their own standard, were thoroughly
unpopular, and managed to put themselves outside the field of
consideration; the immense bulk of the nation was in sympathy with neither
the one nor the other, and it is only to the extremists that the men of
letters show a direct antipathy. Catholics can make a presentable case for
the theory that Shakespeare himself was a "crypto-Catholic," though the
case is not more than presentable. Rome is abhorrent to Spenser, yet it is
apparent that many of his ethical conceptions are infinitely nearer akin to
those of mediaeval Catholicism than of the current Puritanism. Hooker, most
earnest of Christians, was also the most liberal-minded of men. Jonson was
half a Catholic. All were manifestly men of deep religious feeling, but
none can be associated with any religious party. When England was pitted as
a Protestant Power against a Power aggressively determined on the
eradication of Protestantism, it was inevitable that the prevailing
sentiment should be increasingly Protestant; on the whole, it is surprising
that there should have been so little bigotry in it. The public inclination
was to be tolerant of all but the intolerant, and that attitude is
reflected in all the literature of the time, except the specifically
partisan writings of controversialists.
[Patriotism]
So also another note of the day was the general patriotism, national pride,
or insularity; the sentiment which made the Catholics themselves, even when
they were most under suspicion and had most cause to welcome an opportunity
for rebellion, ready and eager to fall into line and resist the invader who
was to liberate them. Again the poets gave voice to the national feeling,
none more emphatically or more admirably than Shakespeare himself.
Patriotic lines might of course be written for the sake of the gallery's
inevitable applause; but Shakespeare's panegyrics of England are absolutely
and unmistakably whole hearted, and it may be doubted if in all his plays
he presented any single character with a more thorough and convincing
sympathy and appreciation than his Henry V., the incarnation of English
aggressiveness.
[The Normal Types] Finally, what manner of men and women they were who
peopled the England that Shakespeare knew, we can see from the men and
women whom Shakespeare drew. The types manifest themselves; the normal and
the exceptional are readily distinguishable. The normal type is keen of
wit, impulsive; it is observable for instance that both men and women
habitually--almost invariably--fall in love unreservedly at first sight;
generous for the most part; in action prompt and more often than not
over-hasty, but resourceful--the women more resourceful than the men. It is
a commonplace of course to remark that his types are types for all time;
but different types are more prevalent at one time than another, and the
inference is that Shakespeare's prevalent types were the prevalent ones of
his own day. Hamlet, Brutus, Cleopatra, belonged to eternal but not to
normal types; Hotspur and Mercutio, Rosalind and Cordelia--even if the
latter were glorified examples--were obviously normal. For in play after
play, whether as leading or as minor characters, they recur again and
again; and more than that we find the same characteristics--presented no
doubt with less incisiveness and less brilliancy--reappearing in the
Dramatis Personae of the whole Elizabethan group. Such were the gentlemen
of England who fought the Spaniard and overthrew him; such were their
sisters and their wives.