III

LITERATURE AND THE THEATRE IN ENGLAND UNTIL 1587

[The best popular history of English Literature is still Stopford Brooke's Primer. The best popular work on Elizabethan Literature is Saintsbury's; the best on the early drama is Addington Symonds's Shakspere's Predecessors. More satisfactory than any of these, as far as it goes, is Frederick Ryland's Chronological Outlines of English Literature. For whoever wishes more thorough treatment of the English stage, Mr. A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature is useful; and Mr. Fleay's Chronicle History of the London Stage, and Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama are very valuable.]

FROM the facts we have just considered, it is clear that in 1587 Shakspere was still at Stratford; and that by 1592 he was already so established a dramatist as to be grouped by Robert Greene with Peele and Marlowe. In the next year, 1593, the publication of Venus and Adonis brings him finally before us as a man of letters. The fact that, in 1587, the Earl of Leicester's players, the company with which he was later associated, paid a professional visit to Stratford, has led some people to surmise that when they returned to London they took him along. Whatever the facts were, we cannot be far wrong in assuming that the state of English Literature in 1587 fairly represents what Shakspere found, just as the

state of things in 1612 fairly represents what Shakspere left.

His literary activity, then, his productive period, we may assume to be limited to twenty-five years, the last sixteen of the reign of Elizabeth and the first nine of the reign of James I. The state of our dramatic literature during this period, and to a great degree that of English poetry, may be adequately studied, for our purposes, in works generally assigned to him. To appreciate these, however, we must first glance at the state of English Literature which immediately precedes them.

Putting aside Chaucer, who was already as solitary a survival of a time long past as he is to-day, we may broadly say that during the first twenty-nine years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, English Literature contained and produced hardly anything permanent; a few lyrics, like Wyatt's Forget not Yet, or Lyly's Cupid and Campaspe, still to be found in any standard collection, may be said to comprise the whole literature of that period which has survived. In a traditional way, however, certain writers of the time remain familiar; without knowing quite what their work is like, people in general have a nebulous idea that the work exists, and at least formerly was of some importance. The earliest of these writers do not strictly belong to the time of Elizabeth at all. Both Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, who are commonly regarded as the pioneers of our modern literature, died in the reign of Henry VIII. Their

writings, however, remained chiefly in manuscript until 1557, the year before the accession of Elizabeth. In that year, together with a considerable number of lyrics by other and later men, their songs and sonnets were published in Tottel's Miscellany. With that publication, modern English Literature, we may say, first became accessible to the general public.

By that time, as a hasty glance at the Miscellany, will suffice to show, the movement begun fifteen or twenty years before by Wyatt and Surrey had already progressed considerably. Wyatt was a gentleman, an ambassador, a statesman; Surrey, eldest son of the Duke of Norfolk, was a man of the highest rank and fashion. Wyatt, the elder by fourteen years, was by far the more serious character. The fact that nowadays they are commonly grouped together is due not so much to any close personal relation, as to the accident that their works were first printed in the same volume. It is justified historically, however, by the relation which their work bears to what precedes and to what follows. These courtiers, these men whose lives were passed in the most distinguished society of their time, found not only the literature, but even the language, of their native England in a state which, compared with the contemporary French or Italian, may fairly be called barbarous. Each alike did his best to imitate or to reproduce in English the civilized literary forms already prevalent on the Continent. Each, for example, translated sonnets of Petrarch; each made original

sonnets after the manner of that master; and Surrey, among other things, was the first to use English blank verse, in a careful, and by no means ineffective, translation of two books of the Æneid. Each, in short, made a considerable number of linguistic and metrical experiments; and neither seems to have thought of publication. Manuscript copies of their verses were multiplied among their private friends. A fashion was started, until at last the ability to play gracefully with words became almost as essential to the equipment of an Elizabethan gentleman as the ability to ride or to fence. As a rule, however, these men of fashion followed the example of Wyatt and Surrey to the end. They improved the power and the flexibility of the language surprisingly; but they did not publish. In 1586, for example, Sir Philip Sidney died; the Arcadia, the first of his published works, did not appear till 1590. As late as 1598, too, we may remember that, according to Meres, the "sugred sonnets" of Shakespere, who was by no means a man of rank, followed the fashion in being reserved for his private friends. In 1587, then, one may safely say that for above thirty years a certain graceful poetic culture had been the fashion; that its chief conscious object so far as it had any was to civilize a barbarous language; that it delighted in oddity and novelty, and that it inclined to disdain publication.

There was no want of publication, however. The prose books of Roger Ascham, already rather anti

quated, proved that a scholarly man could write very charmingly in English prose. Ascham was tutor to both Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth. He published a book on archery, and another on education, which are still pleasant to read; and he intended to write one on cock-fighting, which might have been more amusing than either of the others. Again, Foxe's great Acts and Monuments, traditionally called the Book of Martyrs, was, from 1563, as generally accessible as was the early version of the English Bible. Both of these naturally concerned themselves little with literary form; Foxe was so grimly in earnest that his views still affect the opinion held by Englishspeaking people concerning the Roman Catholic Church. Incidentally, however, he proved with what tremendous effect the English language might be used for serious narrative. There were increasing numbers of translations from the classics, too, of which the most generally remembered now are probably Golding's Ovid and North's Plutarch. There were popular translations, as well, of less serious foreign literature, of which the most familiar in tradition is Paynter's Palace of Pleasure, a collection of tales largely from Boccaccio. These translations, from classic tongues or from foreign, were alike in their object of supplying to a people whose curiosity was awakened material that should for the moment have the charm of novelty. Novelty, too, was what gave a charm hardly yet exhausted to those records of exploration and discovery which are best typified by