| |
CHAPTER 11
THE ELIZABETHAN AGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.
THE literary temper of Elizabethan England was distinguished by a
splendid vitality and vivacity, a rare catholicity of taste and width of
outlook. Prose and poetry alike rang with a fervid enthusiasm for life in its
most varied aspects. The nation's intellect was permeated by a wealth of ideas
and aspirations which were new. The powerful individuality of Elizabethan
literature is unmistakable, and in the work of Shakespeare it scaled heights
unsurpassed in the literature of the world. But Elizabethan literature is
misunderstood when it is studied in isolation. Very many of its ideas and
aspirations were the common property of civilized Europe, however much they were colored by the
national idiosyncrasy. The enthusiasm for the Greek and Latin classics, the
passion for extending the limits of human knowledge, the resolve to make the
best and not the worst of life upon earth, the ambition to cultivate the idea
of beauty, the faith in man's physical, moral, and intellectual perfectibility,
the conviction that man's reason was given him to use without restraint, all
these sentiments, which went to the making of Elizabethan literature, were the
foundation also of the Renaissance literature of Italy, France, and Spain.
Elizabethan literature cannot be rightly appreciated unless it be viewed as one
of the latest fruits of the great movement of the European Renaissance. The
Elizabethan was gifted with an exceptional power of assimilation. He studied
and imitated foreign authors with amazing energy. At times the freedom with
which the Elizabethans adapted, often without acknowledgment, contemporary
poetry of France and Italy seems inconsistent with the dictates of literary
honesty. Yet in spite of the eager welcome which was
extended to foreign literary forms and topics, in spite of the easy tolerance of
plagiarism, the national spirit was strong enough in Elizabethan England to
maintain the individuality of its literature in all the broad currents. The fervor of his temperament was peculiar to the Elizabethan,
and in most of his utterances his passionate idiosyncrasy fused itself with the
varied fruits of his study. Dependence on foreign example, so far from checking
the fervid workings of native sentiment, invigorated, fertilised and chastened it. The matter and manner of Elizabethan literature owed an
enormous debt to foreign influence, but Elizabethan individuality survived the
foreign invasion. English literature in the sixteenth century was slow in
proving its true capacity, though in its infancy the finest flower of the
Renaissance literature of Italy and France lay at its disposal. In Italy, where
of all the countries of western Europe the intellectual movement of the
Renaissance matured earliest and flourished longest, the highest levels of
literary achievement were reached long before sixteenth century England won any
conspicuous literary repute. The Renaissance literature of France was junior to
that of Italy, and its career was briefer and less distinguished. But the
French Renaissance yielded a rich literary harvest while English Renaissance literature
still lacked coherent form or aim. It is in the story of the Renaissance
literature of Spain that the course of the Renaissance literature of England
finds its closest parallel. The active career of Cervantes (1547-1616) was
almost precisely conterminous with that of Shakespeare. In both Spain and
England, too, the literary energy of the era devoted itself most earnestly to
the same branch of literary effort; the finest literary genius alike of
Englishmen and of Spaniards at the close of the sixteenth and the beginning of
the seventeenth century was absorbed in the production of drama. In Spain and
in England, alone among civilized nations, the
literary Renaissance of the sixteenth century ran its course contemporaneously.
As in Spain, so in England Renaissance literature made some notable reconnoitring skirmishes before it gained the roads which
led to decisive victory. Under Italian or French influence Henry VIII's
courtiers sought to inaugurate a literary era in England in the first half of the
sixteenth century. Blank verse and the sonnet, which were to play a large part
in the Elizabethan epoch, were then first introduced from Italy. But the first
harbingers of a literary revival in Tudor England proved disappointing heralds.
Their utterances were for the most part halting. There was a want of
individuality or definiteness in expression. The early Tudor experiments in
poetry lacked harmony or complexity of tone. The prose was marked by a simple
directness, which was often vigorous, but tended to monotony and tameness. It
is even more worthy of remark that the work done by Surrey, Wyatt, Lord Berners, and their contemporaries practically ceased with
their deaths. No one for the time being carried it further. The generation that
followed the close of Henry VIII's reign was almost destitute of genuine
literary effort.
The work of Thomas Sackville
Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) |
|
 |
Nor did the Elizabethan period of English literature begin with the
accession of Queen Elizabeth to the English throne. Twenty-one years of her
reign passed away before any literary works of indisputable eminence came to
birth. There were occasional glimmerings of light in the course of the first
two decades. Much was attempted which offered invaluable suggestion to later endeavors, but the stream of great literature did not flow
continuously or with sustained force until after Edmund Spenser (1552?-99)
gave certain proof of his poetic power in his Shepheards Calender in 1579, and Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86)
invited his fellow-countrymen in his Apologie for Poetrie to acknowledge the solemn significance of great
literature. In the opening years of Queen Elizabeth's reign the most notable
literary work came from the pen of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608), at the time a
young barrister of three-and-twenty, who in later life devoted himself
exclusively to politics. He came to hold the highest offices in the State,
obtained the title of Earl of Dorset, and outlived Queen Elizabeth's long reign
by five years. Sackville made two interesting contributions to English
literature, which bore testimony to a craving for a finer workmanship and wider
scope than existed already; but his work stands practically alone. In the
first place, he designed a long poem on the vicissitudes of great personages in
English history who had reached violent ends. Sackville owed the main
suggestion of his plan to Boccaccio, who had worked out a like scheme in Latin
prose, while he drew from Dante and Virgil the machinery of a poet's imaginary
visit to the regions which the souls of dead heroes inhabited. A Myroure for Magistrates showed, as far as Sackville's
contributions to it went, a marked advance in poetic temper on any English
poetry that had been produced since Chaucer's death. Sackville wrote only two
sections of the long poem, the Induction and the story of Henry Stafford, Duke
of Buckingham, a victim of Richard III's tyranny. Sackville's poetic aims are
perhaps more remarkable than his powers of
execution. Some of the stiffness which is inevitable in new methods of poetic
exposition is apparent in his phraseology and versification. But his sense of
stately rhythm, and his fertile command of poetic imagery, went far beyond the
range of any preceding sixteenth century poet in England.
From the historical point of view Sackville's second literary endeavor is perhaps more notable than his first. With
another lawyer, Thomas Norton (1532-84), he collaborated in the production of
the first regular tragedy in the English tongue, and was thus a herald of the
most characteristic feature of Elizabethan literature. A rudimentary form of
drama had long been current in England. The medieval miracle plays, which were
for the most part oral presentations of biblical stories, had yielded in course
of time to moralities, in which personifications of vices and virtues illustrated
in action the unending struggles of good and evil for the dominion of man's
soul. In the early sixteenth century the moralities had been largely supplanted
by interludes, in which homely anecdote or farcical character was scenically
portrayed. Of true dramatic art, with its subtlety of characterization and its poetic capabilities, practically nothing was known in England when
Elizabeth's reign opened. A crude endeavor by a
schoolmaster, in a piece called Ralph Roister Doister,
to adapt to English idiosyncrasies Plautus' comedy of Miles Gloriosus can only with many qualifications be allowed to have introduced comedy into
England. Later efforts to disseminate a knowledge of classical drama gave
Elizabethan drama its first true impetus. The tragedy of Gorboduc,
of which Norton wrote the first three acts and Sackville the last two, was the
earliest efficient attempt to familiarize the English
public with the significance of drama in any artistic sense. Norton and
Sackville took the late classical work of Seneca as their model. But they were
not slavish imitators. No effort was made to respect the classical unities of
time or place, although the action was for the most part narrated by chorus and
messenger. The plot is drawn from mythical annals of primeval British history
and points a moral of immediate application to contemporary politics, the perils
of a nation which is torn by internal dissension. The dramatic feeling is
throughout of an elementary type. Small capacity is betrayed of delineating
character or of developing plot. The speeches are of monotonous temper and
tedious length. But in spite of its manifest imperfections, the tragedy of Gorboduc has two supreme claims to honorable commemoration. It introduced Englishmen, who knew no language but their own, to
an artistic conception of tragedy, and it revealed to them the true mode of
tragic expression. Like Surrey's translation of the Aeneid, Gorboduc was written in blank verse, and first
indicated that this metre, which Sackville and Norton
borrowed, like Surrey, direct from its home in Italy, was alone consonant with
the dignity of tragedy in the English tongue.
Sackville's efforts stand
practically apart in the history of Elizabethan literature. His contributions
to A Myroure for Magistrates, were published in 1563. Gorboduc was written and acted in 1561, first printed
in 1565. Sackville's literary career went no further; no certain promise of
great poetry or prose characterised the work of such
authors as were active at the moment when he laid down his pen. The torch that
he had lighted found during many years few fitted to bear it after him. The
versifiers Barnaby Googe (1540-94) and George Turberville (1540?-1610?) studied the classics and
contemporary Italian literature with very small effect. Neither they nor Thomas
Churchyard (1520?-1604), who reached a patriarchal age, gained a footing
except on the lowest slopes of Parnassus.
Gascoigne's innovations
George Gascoigne (1525?-77) |
|
 |
The work of George Gascoigne (1525?-77), which belongs to the same
epoch, stands in a different category. The variety of endeavor lends his career historic interest. He sought new inspiration from Italy in
directions which no one before had followed. From his pen came both a comedy
and a tragedy which were directly adapted from the modern Italian drama. His
comedy, The Supposes, is drawn from Ariosto; his tragedy, Jocasta,
from Lodovico Dolce. Ariosto's play is in prose, and if Sackville and Norton's
tragedy first taught Englishmen the fitness of blank verse for the purposes of
tragedy, Gascoigne's English presentation of Ariosto's I Suppositi first taught his countrymen that prose was the fittest vehicle for the purposes
of comedy. Gascoigne's tragedy, the second that was written in England, was in
blank verse, like both its Italian original and its early English predecessor.
It follows the classical model more closely than Gorboduc,
for Gascoigne merely translates Dolce, who was himself slavishly adapting the Phoenissae of Euripides. At the same time Gascoigne showed
his appreciation of another development of Italian literature. The novel had
absorbed much efficient literary energy in Italy. Boccaccio, the earliest
master of Italian prose fiction, had in the sixteenth century many disciples,
among whom Bandello and Cinthio rivaled their chief in popularity. The vogue of both Bandello and Cinthio was great in England during the latter half of Elizabeth's reign; and
Gascoigne inaugurated this fashionable interest in the contemporary Italian
novel by translating one of Bandello's popular stories. Nor did this effort
exhaust Gascoigne's pioneer labors. He wrote a
satire in rhyming verse in emulation of Juvenal and Persius,
which was the forerunner of a long line of English poetic satires, and he
proved his serious interest in the general development of poetic art in his
native country by producing a first critical treatise on poetic workmanship and
technique. Gascoigne died in 1577, and two years later Elizabethan literature
definitely started on its great career. When the forward movement began, one
form of foreign influence seemed likely to obstruct its progress. This obstacle
had to be removed before the advancing army could command an open road. In
cultured circles the zeal for classical study combined with the want of
distinctive artistic quality in contemporary English verse to generate the
fallacious belief that English poetry could only improve its quality by servile
obedience to classical law or suggestion. The faith was universal that English
drama was bound to respect the lines which Athens and Rome had glorified and
which Italy and France had reinstated in authority.
So soon as Elizabethan literature was emerging from darkness, a
strenuous effort was made to restrain its free development by forcing on it
classical fetters, from which there should be no release. Gabriel Harvey (1545
P-1630), a Cambridge tutor, who reckoned Spenser amongst his pupils and had a
wide acquaintance among the cultivated nobility, imperiously ordered English
poets to confine themselves to Latin metre as well as
to Latin ideas. There had recently been developed in France a vernacular
literature which deliberately fashioned itself on classical poetry. The
comparative success of that movement, whose leaders took the corporate title of La Pléiade, seemed, at a time when the English poetic
standard was low, to lend weight to Harvey's pedantic counsel. For a moment it
appeared as if Harvey's advice were to prevail. At his instance a literary club
was formed in London in 1579 to promote the naturalisation in English poetry of classical prosody.
The club, which was called "the Areopagus" and held its meetings at Leicester House, the home of the Earl of
Leicester, was formed of men of rank and literary promise who had travelled in
France and Italy and had acquired there their literary aspirations. Chief of
these was Sir Philip Sidney, a man of great social eminence, in whom were
concentrated all the aspirations of the Renaissance: the love of art and
letters, the philosophic curiosity, the yearning for novel experience. With
Sidney there was associated the more imposing figure of Edmund Spenser, who was
Harvey's old pupil and for a time served the Earl of Leicester as secretary.
Much energy was spent by these and other eager disciples of Harvey on
experiments in English hexameters, elegiacs, and sapphics.
For a time both Spenser and Sidney seemed to accept the pedantic argument that
accent and rhyme in English poetry were vulgar and ungainly, and that quantity
was the only fit characteristic of verse. The clumsiness of the poetic endeavours which illustrated these principles happily
proved their ineptitude and error. Spenser quickly acknowledged that poetry
could only flourish if it were left free to adapt itself to the idiosyncrasy of
a poet's mother-tongue. Sidney, too, as well as Spenser broke away from the
toils of the classicists. A breach was essential to the healthy literary
development of the country. It came as soon as Elizabethan poetry showed the
real capacity of accent and rhyme.
The classical champions were slow to accept defeat. Their own
incompetence brought about the ruin of their cause. The English hexameter which
they eulogised as the finest vehicle of poetic
expression readily lent itself to grotesqueness. Richard Stanyhurst's translation of the Aeneid (1582) into hexameters was
deservedly laughed out of court, and its ludicrous
clumsiness finally disposed of the claims of the classicists to regulate
English literature. Twenty years later Thomas Campion in his Observations on
English Poesie (1602) still persisted in denouncing
rhyme, but he sufficiently confuted his own argument by the splendid harmonies
of his own rhymed lyrics. George Chapman (1559?-1634), a fine classical
scholar, spoke the last word on the classical theory with admirable point in
one of his earliest poems:
Sweet Poesy
Will not be clad in her supremacy
With
those strange garments, Rome's hexameters,
As she is English: but in right
prefers
Our native robes, put on with skilful hands
English heroics, to those
antic garlands. (Shadow of Night, 11. 86-91.)
Spenser, whose muse rejected with some reluctance the trappings of Latin
prosody, did more than any other writer to give Elizabethan literature at the
outset its fitting cue. His Shepheards Calender, which was published in 1579, was the first great
Elizabethan poem which was to stand the test of time. In it the poet offered
ample evidence of foreign study. The twelve eclogues which it comprised were
framed on foreign models of acknowledged repute. The Greek pastoral poetry of
Theocritus and Bion was its foundation, modified by
the study of Virgil's Eclogues, and of many French and Italian examples of more
recent date. The debt to Marot's French Eclogues was notably large, Spenser was
at the same time alive to the literary achievements of his own country. Many
times in the course of his poetic career he avowed his discipleship to the
greatest of his English literary predecessors, Chaucer. But the value of The Shepheards Calender lies
ultimately not in the dexterity of its adaptations, but in the proof it offers
of the rich individuality of the poet's genius. The fruits of his reading were
fused together and transmuted by his individual force and original genius. The Shepheards Calender shows a rare
faculty for the musical modulation of words and the potency of the poet's
individual affinities with poetic aspects of nature and human life. It proved
how well the new aspirations of the age - the devotion to the Queen and the
enthusiasm for the Protestant religion - lent themselves to poetic treatment.
Contemporaries at once acknowledged that there had arisen in England one
qualified to rank above all preceding English poets, save only Chaucer, who had
died nearly two centuries before.
Influence of Euphues. Sidney's Arcadia
In the same year as Elizabethan poetry gave
sure promise of its great future in The Shepheards Calender, prose also made a notable advance. John Lyly
(1554-1606), who was about the same age as Spenser, published the first volume of his moral romance of Euphues soon after The Shepheards Calender; the second and concluding volume followed within a year. It was Lyly's endeavor to weave a moral or educational treatise into a work of fiction. The design showed originality and boldness, if absolute success were scarcely possible. The methods of fostering in "a gentleman or noble person" "virtuous and gentle discipline" barely lend themselves to romance. But the chief interest of Lyly's book lies, not in its subject-matter, but in its style. The author deliberately sought to invest English prose, for the first timein its history, with a distinctive mannerism. His sentences, which are evenly balanced, present an endless series of antitheses, with a slightly epigrammatic flavour. Alliteration is employed with some frequency, and there is a ceaseless flow of similes drawn from natural history. The quaint pedantry of Lyly's method owes a good deal to the affectations of earlier Spanish prose, especially the mannered prose of Guevara. But the English writer adheres to his self-imposed laws of composition with a persistent thoroughness that is unknown to his masters, and gives him substantial claim to the honors of original invention.
Euphues was received with enthusiasm, and stimulated a taste for a subtler
and a more characteristic prose style than already existed, as well as for
contemplative romance. Few writers achieved at a bound so high a reputation in
cultivated society. The ladies of the Court were soon described as Lyly's
scholars, and only those who could "parley Euphuism" gained repute
for refinement. Lyly's pedantic style lent itself readily to caricature and
exaggeration. Contemporary prose soon rang with strained antitheses and
grotesque allusions to precious stones, stars, fishes, and plants. But,
notwithstanding the absurd extravagance of Lyly and his disciples, he pointed
the way to that epigrammatic force of which Bacon in his Essays showed the
English language to be capable.
The matter of Lyly's Euphues, despite its
confused aim, also exerted a prolific influence on subsequent Elizabethan
literature. Elizabethan romance was compounded of many simples, among which
were conspicuous the post-classical Greek novel (notably the Aethiopica of Heliodorus), the
chivalric stories of the Middle Ages, and the novel and pastoral of Italy.
Strongly marked features were derived from such foreign sources as these.
Nevertheless, Elizabethan prose fiction readily assimilated Lyly's didacticism
in addition.
It was after Lyly's popular work had won public favor that Sir
Philip Sidney, when in retirement from the Court, began his great fiction of Arcadia. Although Sidney was familiar with all foreign forms of romance, and
directly imitated many of them, the ethical disquisitions which he grafted on
his scheme were in Lyly's vein and proved his discipleship to Lyly. The Arcadia was not published till 1590, but it was freely circulated in manuscript seven
or eight years previously, and its variety of topic, its wealth of adventurous
episode, its poetic interludes, and its ludicrous
situations, quickly rendered it, despite its length and frequent incoherence, a
formidable rival to Lyly's earlier achievement. But Lyly's narrower scope more
easily lent itself to imitation. The short romance, which was a popular
literary feature of the decade following the publication of Euphues,
drew thence such homebred sustenance as went to its making. The fertile novelists
Robert Greene (1560?-92) and his disciple, Thomas Lodge (1558?-1625), were
content to announce to the public their chief efforts as sequels or
continuations of Lyly's romance. One of Greene's volumes was christened Euphues, his Censure to Philautus,
1587; another was called Menaphon : Camilla's
alarum to Slumbering Euphues. Lodge's familiar
romance of Rosalynde, on which Shakespeare founded
his play of As You Like It, bore the subsidiary title of Euphues'
Golden Legacy.
The Puritans and the drama. Sidney's Apologie
The year 1579, which witnessed the emergence of Elizabethan poetry in
Spenser's Shepheards Calender and of Elizabethan prose in Lyly's Euphues, gave one
other somewhat equivocal hint of the coming greatness. English drama had not
passed the limits set by the efforts of Sackville and Norton and Gascoigne. The
drama was making no artistic progress in England. Servile adaptations of
classical tragedy, which Sackville's and Gascoigne's experiments initiated,
seemed destined to encourage bombastic presentment of crime without poetic elevation.
Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister, commonly
called the earliest English comedy, had had a successor in 1560 in an even
cruder farce called Gammer Gurton's Needle, the work of a Cambridge graduate who is now identified as one William
Stevenson of Christ's College. Gascoigne had gone to Italy for a comedy of a
more regular and ambitious type, but it had not attracted popular taste. The
horse-play, rusticity, and burlesque of the native interlude could alone
command unquestioned popularity. But signs were apparent before 1579 that the
Elizabethan public was developing an interest in dramatic performances, which
gave some hope of improved taste in the future. The actor's profession was in
course of organization under the patronage of the
nobility and in 1576 a building in London was erected for the first time for
the purposes of theatrical representations. A second theatre was opened in the
following year. From a literary point of view this dramatic activity merited
small attention, but evidence of an increased popularity of the infant drama
could not be overlooked by any Londoner.
A section of the public saw in the
primary principles of the drama a menace to public morals. Puritans identified
theatres with paganism, and declared them to be intolerable in a Christian
community. A bitter attack from the religious and ethical point of view quickly
developed. In 1579 Stephen Gosson, one of the
fanatical foes of the budding drama, published a virulent denunciation of
plays, players, and dramatists; and he sought to give added weight to his
onslaught by dedicating his work without permission to Sir Philip Sidney, who
at the moment held a prominent place in fashionable and literary society.
Sidney resented Gosson's sour invective. His
knowledge of the classics taught him to regard the drama as an honoured branch of literature. By way of dissociating
himself from Gosson's opinions he penned a reply to
his jaundiced criticism, which gave a notable impetus to the liberal progress
of contemporary literature.
In his Apologie for Poetrie Sidney did far more than defend the drama from fanatical abuse. He surveyed the
whole range of poetic art and sought to prove that poetry is the noblest of all
the works of man. In detail his treatise is open to censure. Reverence for the
classical laws of dramatic composition shackled his judgment. He anathematised tragi-comedy and
defended the classical unities. Nor did he foresee the greatness of the coming
Elizabethan drama. On the other hand, he fully acknowledged the grandeur of
Spenser's youthful genius, and made a stirring appeal to his countrymen to
uplift themselves and look "into the sky of poetry". His work was
published in 1580, and his exalted enthusiasm seems to lend him the voice of a
herald summoning to the poetic lists the mighty combatants with whom the
Elizabethan era was yet to be identified.
The implied challenge met with a notable response. During the decade
1580-90 there were new outbursts of activity in every direction. Both comedy
and tragedy assumed for the first time in England a distinctive literary garb.
Prose acquired dignity and ease. The sonnet and other forms of lyric poetry
reached a new level of fervor, and the last year of
the decade was glorified by the publication of the first instalment of Spenser's Faerie Queene.
Spenser's great poem
would have rendered the epoch memorable, had it stood alone. It was admirably
representative of contemporary ideals in life and literature. The poet, while
frankly acknowledging indebtedness to Homer, Virgil, Ariosto and Tasso,
professes to present a gigantic panorama of the moral dangers and difficulties
that beset human existence. But the allegorical design was not carried out with rigor. The adventures in which Spenser's heroes
engage are often drawn from chivalric or epic romance, and are developed with a
freedom which ignores the allegorical intention. Spenser, too, was a close
observer of the leading events and personages of Elizabethan history, and he
wove into the web of his poetry personal impressions of contemporary personages
and movements. Hardly anywhere else in Elizabethan poetry does the fervid
loyalty of the Elizabethan to the Queen find more expansive utterance. But it
is by its poetic style and spirit that the Faerie Queene,
as a whole, must be judged. It is the fertility of the poet's imagination, the
luxuriance of the poetical imagery, and the exceptional command of the music of
words, which give the poem its true title to honour.
The poetic fervour of the age, with its metrical
dexterity and exuberant style of expression, reached its zenith in Spenser's
great work, which proved a potent stimulus not only to poets of his own day but
to a long array of their successors.
To Lyly, the author of Euphues, the marked
development of comedy which characterised the decade
after 1580 was chiefly due. Nearly all his nine comedies were written and
produced between 1581 and 1593. With one exception they are in prose, though
all are interspersed with simply worded songs which ring with easy harmonies.
The form that comedy assumed in Lyly's hand seems mainly of the author's
invention. Dramatic force is not a predominating feature. The_characters are mainly drawn from classical mythology : the plot is slender; there is little attempt at characterisation. Lyly's
comedies are remarkable for the literary temper of the dialogue. The fantastic
conceit, the clever word-play, the graceful similes, create an air of educated
refinement which was new to dramatic composition in England. His example had
far-reaching consequences. The witty encounters in verbal fence which
distinguish many of Shakespeare's comedies bear the impress of Lyly's manner;
and, although Lyly as a writer for the stage toys with life rather than
interprets it, he revolutionised the native conception
of comedy by investing its language with a literary charm.
While Lyly was creating an artistic tradition in realms of comedy, an
even more impressive service was rendered to tragedy by another writer of
greater poetic genius. Born only two months before Shakespeare, and dying
before he had completed his thirtieth year, Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), the
first English tragic poet, began and ended his literary work while Shakespeare
was still in his novitiate. His earliest tragedy, Tamburlaine, probably
produced in 1588, first indicated the possibilities of Elizabethan tragedy. It
was quickly followed by three other tragedies, Dr Faustus, The Jew of Malta,
and Edward II. Other dramatic work came from Marlowe's pen, but it is to these
four tragedies that he owes his commanding place in Elizabethan literature. In
the prologue to his first piece, Tamburlaine, he announced his resolve to
employ in tragedy "high astounding terms". He scornfully denounced
"the jigging veins of rhyming mother wits" whose pens had previously
been devoted to tragedy. Not that Marlowe wholly cut himself adrift from the
native dramatic tradition. He did not altogether reject even the machinery of
the miracle play. In his Faustus good and evil angels and the Seven Deadly Sins
are among the dramatis personae, and Hell is pictured on the stage with "damned souls tossing on burning forks". Many of his heroes bear, too, a
specious resemblance to the leading characters in the old moralities. They are
for the most part personified vices or ruling passions, and are far removed
from ordinary humanity. At the same time classical literature left a deep
impression on his work. Early in life he had rendered into fervid English verse
a part of Musaeus' Greek poem Hero and Leander, as
well as Ovid's elegies and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia.
His drama abounds in classical allusions; he assimilated much of the spirit of
classical literature; at times, as in Faustus' address to Helen, he seems to
emulate the beautiful simplicity of Greek poetry. But, in spite of his wide
literary studies and sympathies, Marlowe was essentially a rebel against
precedent. His conception of tragedy passed beyond the bounds of authority. His
central aim was to portray men in tragical pursuit of
unattainable ideals. Tamburlaine is ambitious of universal conquest. Barabas is avaricious of universal wealth. Faustus yearns
for omniscience. In developing such ambitions in drama Marlowe often wanders
into wild extravagances. But the Titanic force of his presentment of human
aspiration is inextinguishable. Many qualities which are requisite to perfect
drama were beyond the range of Marlowe's genius. There is practically no
feminine interest in his plays; he is destitute of humour; a strain of rant is audible in his flights of eloquence. Nevertheless, the
blank verse, which his example finally consecrated to tragic uses, has for the
most part a poetic dignity, even a suppleness, of which no earlier writer had
given any sign. Ben Jonson justly panegyrised his
"mighty line". His latest tragedy of Edward II is cast in a far more
artistic mould than its predecessors. The unqualified terror which Tamburlaine, Faustus, and The Jew of Malta excite is there conquered by a subtle pity. The
monumental labours of Holinshed, following the
earlier and slighter efforts of Hall, had lately made the political annals of
the country generally accessible, and the patriotic enthusiasm encouraged poets
and dramatists to seek material there. The practice of dramatising English history was not inaugurated by Marlowe, but he was the first to invest
with tragic sentiment historic episode. The increased mastery of his art which
is apparent in Edward II renders Marlowe's death before he reached his prime
one of the most regrettable incidents in literary history. But the work he
lived long enough to accomplish bore golden fruit. It was as Marlowe's disciple
that Shakespeare first gave proof of his unsurpassed genius for tragedy.
The tragedy of blood
On
lesser men than Shakespeare Marlowe's influence was conspicuous and immediate.
Writers like George Peele (1558?-97?) and Robert Greene (1560?-92), who had
already made some experiments in drama, seem to have hastily revised their
effort in the light of Marlowe's example. Greene's Friar Bungay and Friar Bacon reflects something of the motive of Dr Faustus, though the two
plays are worked out on different lines. Greene could not rise to Marlowe's sombre intensity, and the buffoonery of the old moralities
corrupted his notions of stagecraft. Peele, like Marlowe, went to English history
for a tragic plot. Peele's tragedy of Edward I, which was in all likelihood the
offspring of Marlowe's Edward II, is unrelieved by artistic subtlety and
defaced by political bias. The grandeur of Marlowe's style was difficult of
approach, and, save Shakespeare, almost all who sought to emulate it, merely
succeeded in echoing the bombast and crude rant with which Marlowe's work was
mingled. Elizabethan audiences saw no defect in the sanguinary extravagances of Tamburlaine or The Jew of Malta, and many writers deliberately set themselves
to better Marlowe's instruction in developing scenes of bloodshed and violence.
Of these the chief was Thomas Kyd (1557?-95?), whose popular tragedies of
horror, The Spanish Tragedy, and Jeronimo, emulated
Marlowe's least admirable characteristics. Kyd clothed revolting incident in
what a contemporary critic called "the swelling bombast of bragging blank
verse", and his strident notes for a moment dominated public taste. But
his triumph was short-lived. He was battling with the stream of progress, and
suffered the inevitable penalty of neglect even before he died. The new
artistic spirit of tragedy which Marlowe's best work inaugurated was not to be
repressed.
It was in the last thirteen years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, 1590-1603,
that Elizabethan literature shone in its full glory. In 1596 Spenser published
the last completed books of his Faerie Queene, and
his reputation was finally established. In all directions literary activity
redoubled.
Elizabethan lyrics and sonnets
Never before or since was the country so prolific in lyric and sonnet.
Foreign influences are here especially apparent. French and Italian poetry was
pillaged for ideas and phraseology. But there was a simplicity and sweetness of
melody in the best of the short Elizabethan poems, even where the ideas and
phraseology came from a foreign source, which must be assigned to native
genius. The poetic spirit was widely distributed.
Writers like Thomas Nash (1567-1601) or Thomas Dekker (1570P-1641?),
who applied most of their energy to prose, showed in rare outbursts of verse
genuine lyric intensity. The habit of writing lyrics spread high and low
through all ranks of society; and the success of the amateurs rivalled that of professional writers. Politicians and men
of action like the Earls of Essex and Oxford and Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618) could occasionally turn as harmonious a lyric stanza as any of
the young poets who devoted themselves to literature exclusively. The
subject-matter of the Elizabethan lyric is mainly limited to amorous emotion,
but there is an occasional tendency to reflexion on
sterner topics. Indeed one of the most voluble and honey-tongued of Elizabethan
poets, Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), developed a reflective faculty in verse which
gives him some claim to rank with Wordsworth. How widely extended was the taste
for lyrical utterance may be gauged by the ample miscellanies of brief poems
which repeatedly came from the printing-press at the end of the period. All
conditions of men figured among the contributors. At least two of these
collections, England's Helicon, 1600, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, 1602,
provide banquets of lyrical masterpieces.
The sonnet, the most difficult of all poetic forms in which to attain
excellence, proved a more perilous attraction to poetic aspirants than the
lyric. Sonnet-sequences of love, such as Sidney inaugurated in England in his Astrophel and Steall, and Thomas Watson developed in his
EKA-TOMATHIA (1582), and in his Tears of Fancie (1593), engaged an army of pens during the last decade of Elizabeth's reign.
Few of the great poets of the day escaped the sonneteering contagion. Daniel and Drayton, Lodge and
Constable, helped to swell the sonneteering chorus.
Spenser and Shakespeare were drawn into the current and paid ample homage to
the fashionable vogue. Like Sidney and Watson, the later Elizabethan sonneteers
followed with fidelity foreign models, and most of them treated the sonnet as a
literary exercise rather than a vehicle for the expression of personal feeling.
The work of Petrarch and Tasso among Italians, of Ronsard and Desportes among Frenchmen, was the begetter of fully
two-thirds of the quatorzains which saw the light in
Elizabethan England. Spenser's long sonnet-sequence which he called Amoretti owed much to French and Italian poetry, and very sparse fragments of it bear
adequate testimony to his great capacity. Among the Elizabethan examples only
Shakespeare's Sonnets maintain for any space exalted levels of lyric melody or
meditative energy. Like other Elizabethan sonnets, they owe a large debt to the
vast sonneteering literature of sixteenth century
Europe ; but their supreme poetic quality sets on that literature a glorious
crown.
The close of the Queen's reign also witnessed a wonderful expansion of
the scope of prose literature. The literary fervour which distinguished the poetry of the epoch infected Elizabethan prose.
Whatever the subject to which the writer applied himself, whether theology or
fiction, or social life or travel, an almost lyrical exuberance of expression
manifested itself. The Elizabethan translation of the Bible, The Bishops'
Bible, which had been published in 1568, was constantly reprinted until it was
superseded by the Authorised Version of 1611,
contributed to this effect, but the warmth of feeling reflected the
enthusiastic spirit of the age. The most dignified contribution of the era to
prose literature was made by the theologian Richard Hooker (1554-1600);
although his style is largely based on Latin models and is often stiff and
cumbrous, it rarely lacks an harmonious rhythm, and often reaches heights of
poetic eloquence.
|
 |
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was beginning his literary career
when Hooker was laying down his pen. His great philosophical work was done
largely in Latin prose, but whenever he essayed English prose he notably
illustrated the adaptability of the language to the highest purposes of
exposition. Bacon's English writing owes much to his facility in Latin
composition; but it is impregnated by a native gift of imaginative eloquence.
In his Advancement of Learning, his chief philosophical work in English, his
vocabulary is exceptionally large, and his sentences ring with melody.
Pithiness and terseness were rare characteristics of Elizabethan prose. But
Bacon in his Essays proved his versatility by making an experiment in
aphoristic style, which achieved triumphant success. His subtle reflexions on human nature are largely founded on
Machiavelli's practical interpretation of life, and owe something also to
Montaigne. But the place of Bacon's Essays in English literature is due to the
stimulating and pointed brevity of his language.
In the lower ranks of literary endeavor prose also filled a large space.
Pamphleteers abounded and supplied something of the place held by the modern
journalist. Thomas Nash (1567-1601) was the most original personality among
occasional writers in prose. He was a professional controversialist, and no
subject that could be turned to polemical uses was foreign to his pen. He satirised contemporary society and all whom he believed to
be impostors with effusive vigour and frankness.
Though he expressed unmeasured scorn of the current practice of imitating
foreign masters, the luxuriant bluster of Rabelais and Aretino strongly
appealed to him. He was addicted, as he confessed, to a swelling and boisterous
mode of speech, which at times descended to burlesque effects. But in spite of
his reckless gasconading the literary spirit was always strong in him; and in
his prose romance of Jack Wilton he produced a novel of adventure, the first of
its kind in English, which has lasting literary value. Dekker subsequently
carried on a part of Nash's work in quieter tones. His numerous tracts,
describing the darker side of London life, are clothed in an untamable volubility.
But his prose is thoroughly Elizabethan in the glow of humorous insight and
vivacity with which it is illumined.
Shakespeare's career
William
Shakespeare (1564-1616) |
 |
More impressive than any other feature of the literary history of the
closing years of Elizabeth's reign was the rise to fame and fortune of William
Shakespeare (1564-1616), and the final elevation of the drama to the first
place in the literature of the age. The general trend of Shakespeare's career
was not unlike those of many contemporaries who followed the dramatic
profession. The son of a village tradesman, he received the ordinary education
in Latin which was available to all boys of the lower and middle classes in the
grammar-school of Stratford-on-Avon, his native place. After vain endeavours to gain a livelihood in the country, he made his
way to London soon after he came of age, and opened in a very humble capacity a
life-long association with the theatre. There is little doubt that at the
outset he thought to win distinction as an actor. But his literary instinct
quickly diverted him to the writing of plays.
His period of probation was not short. He did not leap at a bound to
fame and fortune. It was probably not till 1591, when he was twenty-seven years
of age, and had already spent six years in London, that his earliest original
play, Love's Labour's Lost, was performed. It showed
the hand of a beginner; it abounded in trivial witticisms. But above all there
shone out the dramatic and poetic fire, the humorous outlook on life, the
insight into human feeling which were to inspire titanic achievements in the
future. Soon afterwards, he scaled the tragic heights of Romeo and Juliet, and
he was rightly hailed as the prophet of a new world of art. Thenceforth, he
marched onward in triumph.
Shakespeare's work was exceptionally progressive in quality, few authors
advanced in their art more steadily. His hand grew firmer, his thought grew
richer as his years increased; and, apart from external evidence as to the date
of production of his plays, the discerning critic can determine from the
versification, and from the general handling of the theme, to what period in
his life each composition belongs. The comedies of Shakespeare's younger days
often trench upon the domains of farce; those of his middle and later life
approach the domain of tragedy. Tragedy in his hands markedly grew, as his
years advanced, in subtlety and intensity. His tragic themes became more and
more complex, and betrayed deeper and deeper knowledge of the workings of human
passion. Finally, the storm and stress of tragedy yielded to the placid pathos
of romance. All the evidence shows that, when his years of probation ended, he
mastered in steady though rapid succession every degree and phase of excellence
in the sphere of drama, from the phantasy of A
Midsummer-Night's Dream to the unmatchable humour of
Falstaff, from the passionate tragedies of King Lear and Othello to the
romantic pathos of Cymbeline and The Tempest.
Shakespeare was no conscious innovator. The topics to which he applied
himself were rarely quite new. The chronicle play, which dramatised episodes of English history, had already engaged other pens.
He based his comedies on popular Italian novels, most of which had
furnished material for plays, not merely in England, but in Italy and France,
before he took up his pen. His Roman tragedies all dealt with well-tried
themes. But in the result his endeavours bore little
resemblance to those of his contemporaries. The magic of his genius transmuted
all he touched. His wealth of thought and his supreme command of language
invested all his efforts with an originality and freshness which no
contemporary approached.
The amount of work which Shakespeare accomplished in the twenty years of
his active professional career (1591-1611) amply proves his steadiness of
application and the regularity with which he pursued his vocation. His energy
brought him rich pecuniary rewards. Returning to his native place as soon as his
financial position was secure, he purchased there the chief house in the town,
New Place, and obtained other lands and houses. No mystery attaches to
Shakespeare's financial competency. It is easily traceable to his professional
earnings as author, actor, and theatrical shareholder, and to his shrewd
handling of his revenues. His ultimate financial position differs little from
that of his fellow theatrical managers and actors.
Shakespeare died at Stratford on Tuesday, April 23, 1616, probably on
his fifty-second birthday. The epitaph on his monument in the chancel of
Stratford-on-Avon Church bears convincing testimony to the reputation he
acquired in his own day. "With his death," it is there stated,
"quick Nature died." All contemporary art was declared to stand in
the relation of a page-boy or menial towards his masterly achievements. The
supremacy which was frankly allowed him in his own day has been amply
vindicated by modern criticism.
Many attempted to wield Shakespeare's bow after his death, but none
succeeded. The history of the post-Shakespearean drama of James I's and Charles
I's reigns is a tale of degeneracy and decadence. A bountiful endowment with
the poetic spirit of the age, an occasional flash of rare dramatic insight, an
improved trick of stagecraft, were poor substitutes for Shakespeare's magical
intuition, for his sustained command of dramatic expression, for what Coleridge
calls his "omnipresent creativeness." In his lifetime the ranks of
the dramatists were greatly widened, and numerous younger contemporaries of his
energetically pursued the profession of dramatist when he was laid in his
grave. But, compared with Shakespeare, even the most accomplished Elizabethan
dramatists are dwarfed saplings in the presence of a giant oak.
Post-Shakespearean drama
|
 |
Of the younger generation of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Ben Jonson
(1573-1637) was the first to enter the dramatic arena, which he was one of
the last to quit. Of strongly conservative temper, Jonson deliberately sought
to stem the tide of the Shakespearean canons, which freely defied the old
dramatic unities and declined to recognise any
artificial restriction on the presentment of living experience on the stage. On
such principles Jonson declared open war. Comedy, as in the Greek and Latin
theatres, was in Jonson's hands a satiric weapon. Plot or story counted for
little; men's humours or foibles, which served the
purposes of satire, dominated Jonson's efforts in comic drama. Every Man in his Humour, which was probably his earliest extant piece,
as it was first acted in 1598, bore witness to his satiric force. His
masterpieces in comedy, Volpone and The Alchemist,
betrayed a fiery scorn of villainy and hypocrisy; the scenes and characters
abounded, too, in strokes of effective humour. But
Jonson's respect for the old comic tradition prevented him from abandoning
himself freely to the varied dramatic impulses of the epoch. His Roman
tragedies, Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611), despite the stateliness of the
verse, more conspicuously sacrifice life to learning. The dramatic movement
halts. With the versatility characteristic of the age Jonson at the same time
exercised lyric gifts of a quality that places him in the first rank of
Elizabethan poets. For intellectual vigor he may be
placed above all his contemporaries save Shakespeare; but the development of
English drama owed little or nothing to him. George Chapman (1559-1634), the
translator of Homer, worked as a playwright somewhat in Jonson's groove, but he
showed less vivacity or knowledge of life. Chapman's tragedies are obtrusively
the fruits of studious research. He is by natural affinity a gnomic poet or
philosopher who inclines to cryptic utterance. His plays often resemble a
series of dignified and weighty soliloquies, in which the dramatist personally
addresses himself to the audience in a succession of transparent disguises.
At least eight other able playwrights of Jonson's generation sought, on
the other hand, to continue the Shakespearean tradition, and they at times
echoed, albeit hesitatingly, their master's wondrous powers of speech. They
were all faithful followers of the common contemporary practice of
collaboration, and it is not always easy to disentangle one man's contribution
to a single play from another's.
John Marston (1575-1634), who began his career as a satirist, was in
comedy a shrewd and cynical observer of human life, while as a tragic writer he
could occasionally control the springs of pity and terror. Thomas Dekker (1570-1641?) for the most part brought on the stage the society of his own time.
He was far more realistic than most of his fellows, and a more truthful
portrayer of character. His sentiment was more sincere. But he had smaller
faculty of imagination. His language, if simpler, was less glowing or stimulating.
Thomas Heywood (d. 1650?) and Thomas Middleton (1570-1627) energetically
competed with Dekker and Marston for public favor. Each, in one work, at
least Heywood in his Woman Killed With Kindness, and Middleton notably in his Changeling, proved that he cherished a great conception of dramatic art. Heywood
excelled Dekker in dramatic handling of domestic episode. Middleton sought to
turn to dramatic account picturesque romance. But even the masterpieces of
these two writers are defaced by carelessness in construction, and the rest of
their work rarely rises above the level of fluent mediocrity. None of these
dramatists, save perhaps Heywood, achieved marked success in the theatre. Only
John Fletcher (1579-1625), and Philip Massinger (1583-1640), inherited in
permanence any substantial share of Shakespeare's popularity. Shakespeare's
place at the head of the dramatic profession was filled on his retirement by
Fletcher, who made his earliest reputation as a writer of plays in a
short-lived partnership with Francis Beaumont (1607-11). Beaumont's career
closed before that of Shakespeare, and Fletcher continued his work either alone
or with other collaborators, of whom the most constant was Massinger.
Fletcher's alliance with Beaumont produced rich fruit in The Maid's Tragedy,
and in the tragi-comedy of Philaster (c. 1611), to both of which Beaumont was the larger contributor. Fletcher was
better fitted to excel in comedy than in tragedy, and it is his brilliant
dialogue and sprightly repartee that mainly gave his dramatic work distinction.
His tragic endeavors revealed splendid powers of
declamation, but wanted sustained intensity of feeling. Massinger shared many
of Fletcher's characteristics, but excelled him in his appreciation of stage
requirements, and at times intensified the passing interest of his work by
making his plots or characters reflect episodes of current political history.
The merits of Fletcher's and Massinger's labours are,
however, those of a declining epoch. They show intellectual agility rather than
intellectual fertility. Their picturesque utterance inclines to
over-elaboration, and there is a steadily growing tendency to mannerism and
artifice. Moreover their moral tone is enfeebled. Although Shakespeare is
invariably frank and outspoken on moral questions, the moral atmosphere of his
work is throughout manly and bracing. Fletcher and Massinger play havoc with
the accepted laws of morality, and present vice in all manner of insidious
disguises.
Another contemporary dramatist of unquestioned eminence, John Webster
(1580-1625) gave similar proofs of decadence. Webster concentrated his
abundant energies on repulsive themes : his plots centre in fantastic crimes,
which lie out of the range of art and life. But Webster, of all Shakespeare's
successors, approached him nearest in tragic intensity.
The last flickers of light which can be traced to the Elizabethan
dramatic spirit are visible in the tragic genius of John Ford (d. 1639) and in
the miscellaneous ability of James Shirley (1596-1666). Ford's tragic romance
of the Broken Heart was produced in 1633. It more closely accords with the
classical canons of construction than with the Shakespearean, but the high
poetic strain echoes the deep harmonies of Shakespearean tragedy. The name of
James Shirley, who died in 1666 from fright and exposure during the Great Fire
of London, closes that chapter in the history of the English drama which opened
with Marlowe. Though much of Shirley's work is lost, a great mass of plays from
his pen survives. His comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies are shadows of the
drama that went before them. But, however faint is the reflexion,
Shirley kept the genuine tradition alive till the theatres were forcibly closed
at the opening of the civil wars. The Elizabethan age of English literature was
one of such exuberant energy that only by slow degrees could the impetus
exhaust itself. For a short space the highest intellectual and artistic
ambitions of the English people had consciously or unconsciously concentrated
themselves on literature. Before the second decade of the seventeenth century
closed other interests supervened; questions of supreme political moment
distracted and finally absorbed the nation's attention. But the spirit of the
Elizabethan era had then done its work. It had given birth to a mass of poetry
and prose which ranks in literary merit with the products of the greatest
literary epochs in the world's history. Above all, it produced Shakespeare,
whom the unanimous verdict of all civilised peoples
pronounces to be the greatest of dramatic poets.
|
