Elizabethan Literature

ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON M. P. AUTHOR OF MONTAIGNE AND SHAKESPEARE, MODERN HUMANISTS, ETC. THORNTON BUTTERWORTH LIMITED 15 BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W. C. 2 First Impression 9 4 Second Impression October 193 A II Rights Reserved MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN Post Graduate Library College of Arts Commerce 0. U, CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGB i A BIRDS-EYE VIEW ... 7 II PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY ... 18 III POETRY BEFORE SPENSER . . 42 IV SPENSER .... 66 V THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA . 85 VI THE GREAT PROSE . ., 117 VII POETRY AFTER SPENSER . . 140 VIII SHAKESPEARE ..... 175 IX PROSE FICTION .... 200 X THE LATER DRAMATISTS . . 224 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE . . . 253 INDEX ...... 255 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE CHAPTER I A BIRDS-EYE VIEW IN following the growth of a literature, we find ourselves after a time driven to narrow the working definition of the subject-matter. For scientific purposes there is indeed no ultimate dividing line between what the French call belles letters what used to be known in English as polite letters and other kinds of writing. Even handbooks of 46 literature in the academic sense usually deal with the writers of history and philosophy and a history of nineteenth-century literature could hardly omit Darwin, though that great man is not remarkable for his style. But as books multiply and their makers specialize, the survey of them tends to divide between histories of thought and histories of the kinds of writing which have an aesthetic or artistic aim. Even here, the separation is an artificial one, a matter of convenience rather than of fundamental distinction. We cannot omit to consider the way of thought of the men who write plays, poems, and novels and even ifwe concern ourselves mainly with the art of verbal expression we cannot ignore the development given to that art in scientific or didactic treatises. But there emerges for us in such a survey a general conception of literature as one of the fine arts a matter of putting sincere thought or feeling in fine form and the term fine letters might fitly be used to describe it. It is to this aspect that any short survey of Elizabethan literature must necessarily be addressed. It is of an artistic aspect that we think, first and last, when we use the phrase. When there began to come over English literature the change which broadly marks off that of the nineteenth century from that of the eighteenth, an eager return to the age of Shakespeare was at once a symptom, an effect, and a cause of the alteration. The generation which in its youth fed upon Wordsworth and Keats and Coleridge and Scott found itself, as it were, spiritually detached from the age of Addison and Pope even from the nearer age of Gray, Goldsmith, and Johnson. It reached out spontaneously to the beautiful free way of writing which it saw in Spenser and Shakespeare, finding there a kind of delight that was not given by the prose and poetry of the eighteenth century, which in comparison is so straitened and constrained. Keats, who so rejoiced in Chapmans translation of Homer, sounded the note of revolt against a mode of poetry which he mistakenly regarded as having been imposed upon his race by the French influence of Boileau. And that revolution in taste has in the main been permanent, though we can now realize that what happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not so much a wilful adoption of French models as adevelopment of a kind of literary bent which is clearly present in the literature of Elizabeths age. In that literature there are two spirits. From the first, it runs, even in point of style, to a precise and pedestrian kind of verse and phrase, as well as to a free and be dftiful way of writing. The Popean couplet, fine prosaic and didactic way of viewing and describing life, the constrained way of singing, are all to be found in Tudor prose and verse down to the Jacobean period and they never disappear...