Part 34 (1/2)

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 n.o.ble poetry had the writer lived longer. As it is, his life and death form the n.o.blest 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Those sonnets also remained unpublished till some years later.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 t.i.tles 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages of buffoonery. These did not const.i.tute 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 n.o.bleman'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 cla.s.sics 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 a.s.sumed 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 banis.h.i.+ng them from the City precincts caused the first regularly constructed theatres to be established outside the City bounds in Sh.o.r.editch: 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 ent.i.tled 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 l.u.s.tre 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 t.i.tle is applied--Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Ford, Ma.s.singer--belong in effect wholly to the later reign.

Broadly speaking therefore it is worth noting that state-craft, soldiering, seamans.h.i.+p, 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 a.n.a.lysis 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, a.s.suming all knowledge to be his province, while affirming and formulating the principles of Inductive Reasoning in subst.i.tution 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sociated 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 att.i.tude 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.

CHAPTER XXVIII

ELIZABETH (xiii), 1558-1603--ASPECTS OF THE REIGN

[Sidenote: Features of the Reign]

The reign of Elizabeth may be said to have been distinguished primarily by three leading features. The first is the development and establishment of England as the greatest maritime power in the world, a process which has been traced with some fulness. The second is that sudden and amazing outburst of literary genius in the latter half, and mainly in the last quarter, of the reign, for which there is no historical parallel except in Athens, unless once again we find it in England two centuries later: whereof the last few pages have treated. The third is the Ecclesiastical settlement, on which it has. .h.i.therto been possible only to touch. This, with certain other aspects of the reign, remain for discussion in this concluding chapter.