C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
G. R. Lomer, ed. The Student’s Course in Literature.
Lectures on the World’s Best Literature: English Literature: III. The Elizabethan Age (1564–1616)
By Gerhard Richard Lomer (1882–1970)
The centre about whom the courtiers and the writers of the day revolved was Queen Elizabeth. Spenser in the letter prefixed to his ‘Faerie Queene’ says: “In that ‘Faerie Queene’ I mean glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our souveraine the Queene, and her kingdom in Faerie Land.”
Elizabeth was in fact the ‘Gloriana’ of a glorious age, and it is not the lowest praise that we give her when we say that, finding a realm in which religious intolerance and political uncertainty were rampant, she so steered her course between the Scylla of reformation and the Charybdis of political revolution that her administration has become synonymous with tolerance and peace. She found her island kingdom in grave danger of European vassalage; she left it independent of all European powers and respected by the world at large. She found a Church poised uncertainly between reaction and reform; she left it upon a firm foundation which since her day has never been seriously shaken. She was, indeed, a great character in a great age. Possibly in her, as in her subjects, the necessities of the time brought out the heroic in character and encouraged the magnificent in action. Certain it is that at no other time has the Crown shone with the reflected light of an intenser loyalty or of a deeper national devotion. The words which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of John of Gaunt in ‘Richard II.’ are but the echo of the thought of every loyal Englishman of the day of Queen Bess as he looked with pride upon
It was, indeed, “the envy of less happier lands” which produced most of the political complications of Elizabeth’s day, and she needed the skillful help of far-seeing and astute courtiers to guide the ship of state with safety. In Burghley, Essex, and Leicester, among others, she found such men, able statesmen who shared the Tudor conception of monarchy and were willing to further its ideals and to foster its aims. Elizabeth’s diplomatic refusal of the proffered hand of Philip of Spain without forfeiting his support or alienating his sympathies; her re-establishment of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the sovereign within the realm; her authorization of the use of the English language in the Book of Common Prayer in church services; her enforcing of the Oath of Supremacy upon the clergy—all of these problematical situations fraught with the possibility of grave international complications or internal strife, she managed with a caution and a skill which maintained peace abroad and at home, which created in the minds of her subjects a nation-wide conviction of her interest in their welfare, and which called from their hearts a feeling of gratitude for her concern in the common weal.
In this age of strong personalities and of great figures, that of the Queen is perhaps the most striking. As Green says:
The court at this period was the centre of national life, and the courtier the most conspicuous figure of the day. Display and adulation were ideals of personal and public life that were daily realized, and were as necessary to the existence of the sovereign as her food. Triumphant progresses through her realm satisfied her almost insatiable desire for public display and encouraged in the populace that respectful attitude towards royalty which even a strong democratic tendency cannot entirely remove. The fulsome adulation, the exaggerated compliment, the thickly coated praise of her person and her power which Elizabeth demanded incessantly and which she received in full measure from courtier, poet, and playwright, is a commentary upon the gorgeous superficiality of an age which at the same time has made some of the finest and most permanent contributions to English letters and to English political life.
The age was a luxurious one in both diet and dress. One old chronicler of the day named Stubbes asserts that, “whereas in his father’s day, one or two dishes of good wholesome meat were thought sufficient for a man of worship to dine withal,” it was now the custom to see the table “covered from one end to the other, as thick as one dish can stand by the other,” and it was some time before the habit of eating and drinking between meals, “breakefasts in the forenoone, beverages, or nuntions after dinner,” disappeared. Nor were fashions in dress less extravagant than those of the dinner table. Shakespeare in his ‘Merchant of Venice’ describes a young baron who “bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany.” The fashions that prevailed at the English court were largely imported from the continent, and the young Englishman of fashion struttered about clad according to the latest whim of France or Spain, so that when European morals were added to the European custom, a censurer of the age described an “English man Italianate as a devil incarnate.” As might be expected, the women were even less conservative than the men in matters of custom, and supplemented nature to such a degree with the devices of the dressmaker’s art that a crabbed critic says that they were left “the smallest part of themselves.”
The stage, too, reflected the love of gorgeous costumes of the day and actors aped the fashion of their betters in costume as well as in freedom of manners. This extravagant love of decoration and fondness for richness is reflected in some of the English prose of the period, notably in John Lyly’s ‘Euphues,’ in which balance of phrase and alliteration are incessantly used, and in which erudite allusions to little known classics are generously mingled with reference to the inexact and fabulous natural history of an unscientific age. Referring to Queen Elizabeth, Lyly for example says:
This habit of making an intricate pattern out of prose is something that had a strong influence upon the writing of English. It became in Elizabeth’s day a fashionable fad, but the lure of the repeated sound, of the balance of phrase, of the apt antithesis, is to be found so late as the prose of Ruskin (e.g., ‘Modern Painters’) and the verse of Swinburne (e.g., ‘Atalanta in Calydon’).
The increasing luxury of private life and the display of public pomp which we have seen to be a characteristic of the age of Elizabeth were in large measure responsible for the encouragement given to adventurous seamen. Though the immediate impulse to these voyages was undoubtedly either that eternal wanderlust which stirs in the Anglo-Saxon breast a powerful curiosity to yield to the lure of the unknown, yet in the background there was a national restlessness, a desire for conquest, for wider freedom, and for vast dominions which would increase the area and wealth of a European power. There was also, in some hearts at least, an element of faint hope for the discovery of El Dorado, that fabled land of gold, the Mountains of Bright Stones, the Fountain of Youth, or some such will-o’-the-wisp that in days gone by had lured men past the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis, past the gates of the central sea, toward the Islands of the Blessed, toward Atlantis and the setting sun.
The English sailors who went roving up and down the coastwise paths of island commerce and who helped to defeat the Spanish Armada were the descendants of the old Anglo-Saxon storm kings and of the turbulent, restless fighters of the Norman régime. They were also the ancestors of a numerous and sturdy band of explorers and colonizers who fly the flag of England on every sea and who have made it her proud boast that the sun never sets on her dominions.
Richard Hakluyt (c. 1553–1616) has preserved for us contemporary accounts of ‘The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques, and Discoveries’ of the English nation in Shakespeare’s day. Actuated by the patriotic desire to record the adventurous exploits of his countrymen, and by a shrewd commercial insight into the sources of the wealth of nations, he collected and printed all the accounts he could find of voyages or exploring expeditions to Russia, Tartary, India, and the far East, and most important of all, to the New World. Among the interesting accounts thus preserved to us, we have ‘The Last Fight of the Revenge’ in which the death of Sir Richard Grenville is narrated, the loss of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, “devoured and swallowed up of the sea,” Raleigh’s discovery of Guiana, and the American adventures of Sir Francis Drake.
Before 1550, a medical school, including a chair of botany, had been founded at Padua; Vesalius (1514–1564), the first scientific anatomist, had carried on his researches; Luca Ghini (1490–1556) had founded the first botanical gardens at Pisa; Ambroise Paré (c. 1510–1590) had invented ligatures for arteries; Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), one of the greatest of astronomers, had discovered the variation of the moon; the microscope had been used as early as 1590; Galileo (1564–1642) had discovered the isochronism of the pendulum, constructed thermometers and telescopes, and discovered Jupiter’s satellites and the sun’s spots; Kepler (1571–1630) had formulated his first and second laws; and Harvey (1578–1657) had discovered the circulation of the blood.
So much of the progressive conquest of nature was well under way before Francis Bacon (1561–1626) died as the indirect result of an experiment in cold storage. With Bacon’s political career, with his gradual rise to the position of Lord Chancellor and with his spectacular fall, we are not here concerned. Bacon took all knowledge for his province and sought in his ‘Advancement of Learning’ to give a view of scientific method and achievement as it was then understood. In his ‘New Atlantis’ he makes his contribution to the literature of ideal societies, of which St. Augustine’s ‘City of God,’ and Campanella’s ‘City of the Sun’ are continental precursors; but in England, Bacon had a forerunner in Sir Thomas More, whose ‘Utopia’ sought to give a picture of an ideal commonwealth where economic conditions were simple and just. Bacon in his ‘New Atlantis’ sketches out a similar picture of an intellectual community devoted very largely to scientific investigation, and his ‘Solomon’s House’ is founded for the “interpreting of nature and the producing of great and marvelous works for the benefit of man.” It is in his ‘Essays,’ however, that Bacon still interests the modern reader, and it is through them that he has had an appreciable influence upon the development of English prose. These “dispersed meditations” of his are the unstudied product of his rare leisure hours, the expression in simple prose of the pith of his philosophy of life—a philosophy which is compounded of insight into the workings of men’s minds, of an ill-concealed selfishness, and a shrewd worldly wisdom. The epigrammatic terseness of his phrases has made his ‘Essays’ much quoted and has given him a reputation as an aphorist which is out of proportion to his value as a moralist.
Other minor writers of the period are John Lyly (1555?–1606) whose ‘Euphues’ has already been referred to, and Roger Ascham (1515–1568) whose ‘Schoolmaster’ is one of the earliest professional books on education. The age of Elizabeth, however, is not a great prose age. It is a period of lyric poetry of a high order and of dramatic achievement which has been unsurpassed. Its prose is too complex, too florid, too unwieldy for simple uses. It will be only after this instrument of expression has been submitted to the discipline of reason by the eighteenth-century writers that we will find it emerging refined, simplified, and adaptable as an effective instrument for the expression of ideas; but we will have to go beyond the age of Queen Anne in order to find it transformed still further into a vehicle for the expression of emotion in addition to thought. That will be the accomplishment of the Victorian age.
The social conditions under which the drama was produced had a great deal to do with its history. Little more than quarter of a century before Elizabeth’s death there were no theatres in London and in 1642 the representation of such plays was forbidden by law. In this short interval, then, there arises in England a dramatic literature which is as brilliant in its own way and as permanent as the contribution which the age of Pericles made to the literature of Greece. It will be long in the history of English literature before we come upon a period where as much of merit and enduring worth is produced within so short a span of years.
The dramatists themselves were people of what we would call the middle class. They were in many cases actors before they were dramatists and belonged to a profession to which in that day a stigma was attached which perhaps was deserved only in the days of the Restoration Drama. Shakespeare himself served an apprenticeship in the theatre and, like his fellow-dramatists, knew both the craft of the stage and the psychology of his audience. In many cases the first work that these dramatists-in-training did was to revise old plays and to adapt them to the demands of a more modern audience. This practice, combined with the very general dependence upon “sources,” accounts for the apparent imitation by the Elizabethan dramatists of their own literature and that of the continent and the classic lands. But though Shakespeare drew freely from French and Italian works as well as from English books, his originality consists in the masterly way in which he transformed the bare suggestion or the crude outlines which he used as a basis, and his genius shows itself partly in knowing what to select and partly in knowing how to use what he had selected. Many of these Elizabethan dramatists collaborated in the writing of plays. Beaumont and Fletcher are the outstanding examples of a professional co-operation which had in itself much that was ideal.
In the Elizabethan drama we see reflected nearly all the characteristics of the age: there is the incredibly quick development from small and obscure beginnings; there is an attainment coming nigh perfection in a variety of ways; there is a richness of diction, of character, of incident, becoming at times opulent or even extravagant; and there is, lastly, that unmistakable sense of originality which makes the age of Shakespeare and its literature one of the most individual in the whole course of the history of English literature.
Spenser’s ‘Shepherds’ Calendar’ (1579), the best known of his minor poems, consists of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year. These he uses as a convenient poetic device to lament the death of friends, to satirize tendencies of the day, to flatter the Queen, or to discuss religious subjects.
Beautiful though his sonnets and his poetical hymns are, they pale before the ‘Faerie Queene.’ In this work, Spenser, like Chaucer in his ‘Canterbury Tales,’ planned more than he could achieve. His original intention was to write twenty-four books, portraying in a diffusive but picturesque allegory King Arthur and his knights in stories told at a twelve-day festival at the court of Queen Gloriana. Of the twenty-four books, Spenser completed only six, in which he celebrated the virtues of holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy. In addition to the moral allegory Spenser also attached a political significance to some of his characters, so that, for instance, the Faerie Queene represents Elizabeth, and Duessa thinly disguises Mary Queen of Scots. The poem, however, is most interesting when it is read merely as a story, and not as a political puzzle or a piece of theological propaganda sugar-coated with poetry.
The stanza form in which the ‘Faerie Queene’ is written is not only beautiful in itself but important in history of prosody. It closely resembles the “ottava rima” of Ariosto and the Chaucerian stanza of ‘The Monk’s Tale’ with an additional line. Spenser’s stanza consists of eight pentameter lines, followed by a single hexameter, with the lines rhyming abab bcbc c. It is admirably constructed to avoid monotony and is especially suited to the long narrative poem which Spenser contemplated writing.
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) is one of the most charming of Elizabethan personalities. He is the ideal knight, the perfect gentleman, whose reputation depends rather upon what he was than upon what he wrote. His short life was nevertheless long enough to show forth abundantly those qualities of personal greatness which would shine in any age. His long pastoral romance, the ‘Arcadia,’ is a rambling tale, discursive and lacking in definite purpose or compact structure, but it has all the charm of that unreal land of shepherd and shepherdess which we find also in Lodge’s ‘Rosalynde,’ in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It,’ or later in the pictures of Watteau or Fragonard. Sidney, like Spenser and Shakespeare, also wrote sonnets, but as everyone in Queen Elizabeth’s day indulged in this poetic exercise, his achievement is somewhat overshadowed by the multiplicity of “sugar’d conceits” which have been preserved from that time.