Chapter III: Elizabethan Times (1)

_General Influences, and Prologue to 1579._--The history of letters in England from More's _Utopia_ (1516), the first Platonic vision, to Milton's _Samson Agonistes_ (1671), the latest classic tragedy, is one and continuous. That is the period of the English Renaissance, in the wider sense, and it covers all and more of the literature loosely called "Elizabethan." With all its complexity and subdivisions, it has as real a unity as the age of Pericles, or that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, or the period in Germany that includes both Lessing and Heine. It is peculiar in length of span, in variety of power, and in wealth of production, though its master-works on the greater scale are relatively few. It is distinct, while never quite cut off, from the middle age preceding, and also from the classical or "Augustan" age that followed. The coming of Dryden denoted a new phase; but it was still a phase of the Renaissance; and the break that declared itself about 1660 counts as nothing beside the break with the middle ages; for this implied the whole change in art, thought and temper, which re-created the European mind. It is true that many filaments unite Renaissance and middle ages, not only in the religious and purely intellectual region, but in that of art. The matter of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the tales of Arthur and of Troilus, the old fairy folklore of the South, the topic of the _Falls of Princes_, lived on; and so did the characteristic medieval form, allegory and many of the old metres of the 14th century. But then these things were transformed, often out of knowledge. Shakespeare's use of the histories of Macbeth, Lear and Troilus, and Spenser's of the allegoric romance, are examples. And when the gifts of the middle ages are not transformed, as in the _Mirror for Magistrates_, they strike us as survivals from a lost world.

So vital a change took long in the working. The English Renaissance of letters only came into full flower during the last twenty years of the 16th century, later than in any Southern land; but it was all the richer for delay, and would have missed many a life-giving element could it have been driven forward sooner. If the actual process of genius is beyond analysis, we can still notice the subjects which genius receives, or chooses, to work upon, and also the vesture which it chooses for them; and we can watch some of the forces that long retard but in the end fertilize these workings of genius.

General forces.

What, then, in England, were these forces? Two of them lie outside letters, namely, the political settlement, culminating in the later reign of Elizabeth, and the religious settlement, whereby the Anglican Church grew out of the English Reformation. A third force lay within the sphere of the Renaissance itself, in the narrower meaning of the term. It was culture--the prefatory work of culture and education, which at once prepared and put off the flowering of pure genius. "Elizabethan" literature took its complexion from the circumstance that all these three forces were in operation at once. The Church began to be fully articulate, just when the national feeling was at its highest, and the tides of classical and immigrant culture were strongest. Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ and Shakespeare's _Henry V._ came in the same decade (1590-1600). But these three forces, political, religious and educational, were of very different duration and value. The enthusiasm of 1590-1600 was already dying down in the years 1600-1610, when the great tragedies were written; and soon a wholly new set of political forces began to tell on art. The religious inspiration was mainly confined to certain important channels; and literature as a whole, from first to last, was far more secular than religious. But Renaissance culture, in its ramifications and consequences, tells all the time and over the whole field, from 1500 to 1660. It is this culture which really binds together the long and varied chronicle. Before passing to narrative, a short review of each of these elements is required.

Politics.

Down to 1579 the Tudor rule was hardly a direct inspiration to authors. The reign of Henry VII. was first duly told by Bacon, and that of Henry VIII. staged by Shakespeare and Fletcher, in the time of James I. Sir Thomas More found in Roper, and Wolsey in Cavendish, sound biographers, who are nearly the earliest in the language. The later years of Henry VIII. were full of episodes too tragically picturesque for safe handling in the lifetime of his children. The next two reigns were engrossed with the religious war; and the first twenty years of Elizabeth, if they laid the bases of an age of peace, well-being, and national self-confidence that was to prove a teeming soil for letters, were themselves poor in themes for patriotic art. The abortive treason of the northern earls was echoed only in a ringing ballad. But the voyagers, freebooters, and explorers reported their experiences, as a duty, not for fame; and these, though not till the golden age, were edited by Hakluyt, and fledged the poetic fancies that took wing from the "Indian Peru" to the "still-vext Bermoothes." Yet, in default of any true historian, the queen's wise delays and diplomacies that upheld the English power, and her refusal to launch on a Protestant or a national war until occasion compelled and the country was ready, were subjects as uninspiring to poets as the burning questions of the royal marriage or the royal title. But by 1580 the nation was filled with the sense of Elizabeth's success and greatness and of its own prosperity. No shorter struggle and no less achievement could have nursed the insolent, jubilant patriotism of the years that followed; a feeling that for good reasons was peculiar to England among the nations, and created the peculiar forms of the chronicle play and poem. These were borrowed neither from antiquity nor from abroad, and were never afterwards revived. The same exultation found its way into the current forms of ode and pastoral, of masque and allegory, and into many a dedication and interlude of prose. It was so strong as to outlive the age that gave it warrant. The passion for England, the passion of England for herself, animates the bulk of Drayton's _Poly-Olbion_, which was finished so late as 1622. But the public issues were then changing, the temper was darker; and the civil struggle was to speak less in poetry than in the prose of political theory and ecclesiastical argument, until its after-explosion came in the verse of Milton.

Religious change.

The English Reformation, so long political rather than doctrinal or imaginative, cost much writing on all sides; but no book like Calvin's _Institution_ is its trophy, at once defining the religious change for millions of later men and marking a term of departure in the national prose. Still, the debating weapons, the axes and billhooks, of vernacular English were sharpened--somewhat jaggedly--in the pamphlet battles that dwarfed the original energies of Sir Thomas More and evoked those of Tyndale and his friends. The powers of the same style were proved for descriptive economy by Starkey's Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, and for religious appeal by the blunt sound rhetoric and forthright jests in the sermons of Latimer (died 1555). Foxe's reports of the martyrs are the type of early Protestant English (1563); but the reforming divines seldom became real men of letters even when their Puritanism, or discontent with the final Anglican settlement and its temper, began to announce itself. Their spirit, however, comes out in many a corner of poetry, in Gascoigne's _Steel Glass_ as in Spenser's _Shepherd's Calendar_; and the English Reformation lived partly on its pre-natal memories of Langland as well as of Wycliffe. The fruit of the struggle, though retarded, was ample. Carrying on the work of Fisher and Cranmer, the new church became the nursing mother of English prose, and trained it more than any single influence,--trained it so well, for the purposes of sacred learning, translation and oratory, and also as a medium of poetic feeling, that in these activities England came to rival France. How late any religious writer of true rank arose may be seen by the lapse of over half a century between Henry VIII.'s Act of Supremacy and Hooker's treatise. But after Hooker the chain of eloquent divines was unbroken for a hundred years.

Classical culture.

Renaissance culture had many stages and was fed from many streams. At the outset of the century, in the wake of Erasmus, under the teaching of Colet and his friends, there spread a sounder knowledge of the Greek and Latin tongues, of the classic texts, and so of the ancient life and mind. This period of humanism in the stricter sense was far less brilliant than in Italy and France. No very great scholar or savant arose in Britain for a long time; but neo-Latin literature, the satellite of scholarship, shone brightly in George Buchanan. But scholarship was created and secured; and in at least one, rather solitary, work of power, the _Utopia_ (which remained in Latin till 1551), the fundamental process was begun which appropriates the Greek mind, not only for purposes of schooling, but as a source of new and independent thinking. In and after the middle of the century the classics were again put forward by Cheke, by Wilson in his _Art of Rhetoric_ (1553), and by Ascham in his letters and in his _Schoolmaster_ (1570), as the true staple of humane education, and the pattern for a simple yet lettered English. The literature of translations from the classics, in prose and verse, increased; and these works, at first plain, business-like, and uninspired, slowly rose in style and power, and at last, like the translations from modern tongues, were written by a series of masters of English, who thus introduced Plutarch and Tacitus to poets and historians. This labour of mediation was encouraged by the rapid expansion and reform of the two universities, of which almost every great master except Shakespeare was a member; and even Shakespeare had ample Latin for his purpose.

Italy and France.

The direct impact of the classics on "Elizabethan" literature, whether through such translations or the originals, would take long to describe. But their indirect impact is far stronger, though in result the two are hard to discern. This is another point that distinguishes the English Renaissance from the Italian or the French, and makes it more complex. The knowledge of the thought, art and enthusiasms of Rome and Athens constantly came round through Italy or France, tinted and charged in the passage with something characteristic of those countries. The early playwrights read Seneca in Latin and English, but also the foreign Senecan tragedies. Spenser, when starting on his pastorals, studied the Sicilians, but also Sannazaro and Marot. Shakespeare saw heroic antiquity through Plutarch, but also, surely, through Montaigne's reading of antiquity. Few of the poets can have distinguished the original fountain of Plato from the canalized supply of the Italian Neoplatonists. The influence, however, of Cicero on the Anglican pulpit was immediate as well as constant; and so was that of the conciser Roman masters, Sallust and Tacitus, on Ben Jonson and on Bacon. Such scattered examples only intimate the existence of two great chapters of English literary history,--the effects of the classics and the effects of Italy. The bibliography of 16th-century translations from the Italian in the fields of political and moral speculation, poetry, fiction and the drama, is so large as itself to tell part of the story. The genius of Italy served the genius of England in three distinctive ways. It inspired the recovery, with new modulations, of a lost music and a lost prosody. It modelled many of the chief poetic forms, which soon were developed out of recognition; such were tragedy, allegory, song, pastoral and sonnet. Thirdly, it disclosed some of the master-thoughts upon government and conduct formed both by the old and the new Mediterranean world. Machiavelli, the student of ancient Rome and modern Italy, riveted the creed of Bacon. It might be said that never has any modern people so influenced another in an equal space of time--and letters, here as ever, are only the voice, the symbol, of a whole life and culture--if we forgot the sway of French in the later 17th and 18th centuries. And the power of French was alive also in the 16th. The track of Marot, of Ronsard and the Pleiad and Desportes, of Rabelais and Calvin and Montaigne, is found in England. Journeymen like Boisteau and Belleforest handed on immortal tales. The influence is noteworthy of Spanish mannerists, above all of Guevara upon sententious prose, and of the novelists and humorists, headed by Cervantes, upon the drama. German legend is found not only in Marlowe's _Faustus_, but in the by-ways of play and story. It will be long before the rich and coloured tangle of these threads has been completely unravelled with due tact and science. The presence of one strand may here be mentioned, which appears in unexpected spots.

Philosophy.

As in Greece, and as in the day of Coleridge and Shelley, the fabric of poetry and prose is shot through with philosophical ideas; a further distinction from other literatures like the Spanish of the golden age or the French of 1830. But these were not so much the ideas of the new physical science and of Bacon as of the ethical and metaphysical ferment. The wave of free talk in the circles of Marlowe, Greville and Raleigh ripples through their writings. Though the direct influence of Giordano Bruno on English writers is probably limited to a reminiscence in the _Faerie Queene_ (Book vii.), he was well acquainted with Sidney and Greville, argued for the Copernican theory at Greville's house, lectured on the soul at Oxford, and published his epoch-marking Italian dialogues during his two years' stay (1583-1585) in London. The debates in the earlier schools of Italy on the nature and tenure of the soul are heard in the _Nosce Teipsum_ (1599) of Sir John Davies; a stoicism, "of the schools" as well as "of the blood," animates Cassius and also the French heroes of Chapman; and if the earlier drama is sown with Seneca's old maxims on sin and destiny, the later drama, at least in Shakespeare, is penetrated with the freer reading of life and conduct suggested by Montaigne. Platonism--with its _vox angelica_ sometimes a little hoarse--is present from the youthful _Hymns_ of Spenser to the last followers of Donne; sometimes drawn from Plato, it is oftener the Christianized doctrine codified by Ficino or Pico. It must be noted that this play of philosophic thought only becomes marked after 1580, when the preparatory tunings of English literature are over.

We may now quickly review the period down to 1580, in the departments of prose, verse and drama. It was a time which left few memorials of form.

Prose to 1580.

Early modern English prose, as a medium of art, was of slow growth. For long there was alternate strife and union (ending in marriage) between the Latin, or more rhetorical, and the ancestral elements of the language, and this was true both of diction and of construction. We need to begin with the talk of actual life, as we find it in the hands of the more naif writers, in its idiom and gusto and unshapen power, to see how style gradually declared itself. In state letters and reports, in the recorded words of Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland and public men, in travels and memoirs, in Latimer, in the rude early versions of Cicero and Boethius, in the more unstudied speech of Ascham or Leland, the material lies. At the other extreme there are the English liturgy (1549, 1552, 1559, with the final fusion of Anglican and Puritan eloquence), and the sermons of Fisher and Cranmer,--nearly the first examples of a sinuous, musical and Ciceronian cadence. A noble pattern for saga-narrative and lyrical prose was achieved in the successive versions (1526-1540-1568) of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, where a native simple diction of short and melodious clauses are prescribed by the matter itself. Prose, in fact, down to Shakespeare's time, was largely the work of the churchmen and translators, aided by the chroniclers. About the mid-century the stories, as well as the books of conduct and maxim, drawn from Italy and France, begin to thicken. Perverted symmetry of style is found in euphuistic hacks like Pettie. Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_ (1566) provided the plots of Bandello and others for the dramatists. Hoby's version (1561) of Castiglione's _Courtier_, with its command of elate and subtle English, is the most notable imported book between Berners's _Froissart_ (1523-1525) and North's _Plutarch_ (1579). Ascham's _Schoolmaster_ is the most typical English book of Renaissance culture, in its narrower sense, since _Utopia_. Holinshed's _Chronicle_ (1577-1587) and the work of Halle, if pre-critical, were all the fitter to minister to Shakespeare.

Verse to 1580.

The lyric impulse was fledged anew at the court of Henry VIII. The short lines and harping burdens of Sir Thomas Wyatt's songs show the revival, not only of a love-poetry more plangent than anything in English since Chaucer, but also of the long-deadened sense of metre. In Wyatt's sonnets, octaves, terzines and other Italian measures, we can watch the painful triumphant struggles of this noble old master out of the slough of formlessness in which verse had been left by Skelton. Wyatt's primary deed was his gradual rediscovery of the iambic decasyllabic line duly accented--the line that had been first discovered by Chaucer for England; and next came its building into sonnet and stanza. Wyatt (d. 1542) ended with perfect formal accuracy; he has the honours of victory; and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (d. 1547), a younger-hearted and more gracious but a lighter poet, carried on his labour, and caught some of Chaucer's as well as the Italian tunes. The blank verse of his two translated _Aeneids_, like all that written previous to Peele, gave little inkling of the latencies of the measure which was to become the cardinal one of English poetry. It was already the vogue in Italy for translations from the classics; and we may think of Surrey importing it like an uncut jewel and barely conscious of its value. His original poems, like those of Wyatt, waited for print till the eve of Elizabeth's reign, when they appeared, with those of followers like Grimoald, in Tottel's _Miscellany_ (1557), the first of many such garlands, and the outward proof of the poetical revival dating twenty years earlier. But this was a false dawn. Only one poem of authentic power, Sackville's _Induction_ (1563) to that dreary patriotic venture, _A Mirror for Magistrates_, was published for twenty years. In spirit medieval, this picture of the gates of hell and of the kings in bale achieves a new melody and a new intensity, and makes the coming of Spenser far less incredible. But poetry was long starved by the very ideal that nursed it--that of the all-sided, all-accomplished "courtier" or cavalier, to whom verse-making was but one of all the accomplishments that he must perfect, like fencing, or courting, or equestrian skill. Wyatt and Surrey, Sackville and Sidney (and we may add Hamlet, a true Elizabethan) are of this type. One of the first competent professional writers was George Gascoigne, whose remarks on metric, and whose blank verse satire, _The Steel Glass_ (1576), save the years between Sackville and Spenser. Otherwise the gap is filled by painful rhymesters with rare flashes, such as Googe, Churchyard and Turberville.

Drama to 1580.

The English Renaissance drama, both comic and tragic, illustrates on the largest scale the characteristic power of the antique at this period--at first to reproduce itself in imitation, and then to generate something utterly different from itself, something that throws the antique to the winds. Out of the Morality, a sermon upon the certainty of death or the temptations of the soul, acted by personified qualities and supernatural creatures, had grown up, in the reign of Henry VII., the Interlude, a dialogue spoken by representative types or trades, who faintly recalled those in Chaucer's _Prologue_. These forms, which may be termed medieval, continued long and blended; sometimes heated, as in _Respublica_, with doctrine, and usually lightened by the comic play of a "Vice" or incarnation of sinister roguery. John Heywood was the chief maker of the pure interludes, and Bishop Bale of the Protestant medleys; his _King Johan_, a reformer's partisan tract in verse, contains the germs of the chronicle play. In the drama down to 1580 the native talent is sparse enough, but the historical interest is high. Out of a seeming welter of forms, the structure, the metres and the species that Kyd and Marlowe found slowly emerged. Comedy was first delivered from the interlude, and fashioned in essence as we know it, by the schoolmasters. Drawing on Plautus, they constructed duly-knitted plots, divided into acts and scenes and full of homely native fun, for their pupils to present. In _Thersites_ (written 1537), the oldest of these pieces, and in Udall's _Ralph Roister Doister_ (1552 at latest), the best known of them, the characters are lively, and indeed are almost individuals. In others, like _Misogonus_ (written 1560), the abstract element and improving purpose remain, and the source is partly neo-Latin comedy, native or foreign. Romance crept in: serious comedy, with its brilliant future, the comedy of high sentiment and averted dangers mingled still with farce, was shadowed forth in _Damon and Pithias_ and in the curious play _Common Conditions_; while the domestic comedy of intrigue dawned in Gascoigne's _Supposes_, adapted from Ariosto. Thus were displaced the ranker rustic fun of _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ (written c. 1559) and other labours of "rhyming mother-wits." But there was no style, no talk, no satisfactory metre. The verse of comedy waited for Greene, and its prose for Lyly. Structure, without style, was also the main achievement of the early tragedies. The Latin plays of Buchanan, sometimes biblical in topic, rest, as to their form, upon Euripides. But early English tragedy was shapen after the Senecan plays of Italy and after Seneca himself, all of whose dramas were translated by 1581. _Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex_, acted about 1561, and written by Sackville and Norton, and Hughes' _Misfortunes of Arthur_ (acted 1588), are not so much plays as wraiths of plays, with their chain of slaughters and revenges, their two-dimensional personages, and their lifeless maxims which fail to sweeten the bloodshot atmosphere. The Senecan form was not barren in itself, as its sequel in France was to show: it was only barren for England. After Marlowe it was driven to the study, and was still written (possibly under the impulse of Mary countess of Pembroke), by Daniel and Greville, with much reminiscence of the French Senecans. But it left its trail on the real drama. It set the pattern of a high tragical action, often motived by revenge, swayed by large ideas of fate and retribution, and told in blank metre; and it bequeathed, besides many moral sentences, such minor points of mechanism as the Ghost, the Chorus and the inserted play. There were many hybrid forms like _Gismond of Salern_, based on foreign story, alloyed with the mere personifications of the Morality, and yet contriving, as in the case of _Promos and Cassandra_ (the foundation of _Measure for Measure_), to interest Shakespeare. Thus the drama by 1580 had some of its carpentry, though not yet a true style or versification. These were only to be won by escape from the classic tutelage. The ruder chronicle play also began, and the reigns of John and Henry V. amongst others were put upon the stage.

Spenser.

_Verse from Spenser to Donne_.--Sir Philip Sidney almost shares with Edmund Spenser the honours of announcing the new verse, for part of his _Astrophel and Stella_ was written, if not known in unpublished form, about 1580-1581, and contains ten times the passion and poetry of _The Shepherd's Calendar_ (1579). This work, of which only a few passages have the seal of Spenser's coming power, was justly acclaimed for its novelty of experiment in many styles, pastoral, satiric and triumphal, and in many measures: though it was criticized for its "rustic" and archaic diction--a "no language" that was to have more influence upon poetry than any of the real dialects of England. Spenser's desire to write high tragedy, avowed in his _October_, was not to be granted; his nine comedies are lost; and he became the chief non-dramatic poet of his time and country. Both the plaintive pessimism of Petrarch and du Bellay, with their favourite method of emblem, and the Platonic theory of the spiritual love and its heavenly begetting sank into him; and the _Hymns To Love_ and _To Beauty_ are possibly his earliest verses of sustained perfection and exaltation. These two strains of feeling Spenser never lost and never harmonized; the first of them recurs in his _Complaints_ of 1591, above all in _The Ruins of Time_, the second in his _Amoretti_ (1595) and _Colin Clout_ and _Epithalamion_, which are autobiographical. These and a hundred other threads are woven into _The Faerie Queene_, an unfinished allegorical epic in honour of moral goodness, of which three books came out in 1590 and three more in 1596, while the fragment _Of Constancy_ (so-called) is first found in the posthumous folio of 1609. This poem is the fullest reflex, outside the drama, of the soul and aspirations of the time. For its scenery and mechanism the _Orlando Furioso_ of Ariosto furnishes the framework. In both poems tales of knightly adventure intertwine unconfused; in both the slaying of monsters, the capture of strong places, and the release of the innocent, hindered by wizard and sorcerer, or aided by magic sword and horn and mirror, constitute the quest; and in both warriors, ladies, dwarfs, dragons and figures from old mythology jostle dreamily together. To all this pomp Spenser strove to give a moral and often also a political meaning. Ariosto was not a _vates sacer_; and so Spenser took Tasso's theme of the holy war waged for the Sepulchre, and expanded it into a war between good and evil, as he saw them in the world; between chastity and lust, loyalty and detraction, England and Spain, England and Rome, Elizabeth and usurpers, Irish governor and Irish rebel, right and wrong. The title-virtues of his six extant books he affects to take from Aristotle; but Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Justice, Friendship and Courtesy form a medley of medieval, puritanical and Greek ideals.

Spenser's moral sentiments, often ethereally noble, might well be contrasted, and that not always to their credit, with those more secular and naturalistic ones that rule in Shakespeare or in Bernardino Telesio and Giordano Bruno. But _The Faerie Queene_ lives by its poetry; and its poetry lives independently of its creed. The idealized figures of Elizabeth, who is the Faerie Queene, and of the "magnificent" Prince Arthur, fail to bind the adventures together, and after two books the poem breaks down in structure. And indeed all through it relies on episode and pageant, on its prevailing and insuppressible loveliness of scene and tint, of phrasing and of melody, beside which the inner meaning is often an interruption. Spenser is not to be tired; in and out of his tapestry, with its "glooming light much like a shade," pace his figures on horseback, or in durance, with their clear and pictorial allegoric trappings; and they go either singly, or in his favourite masques or pageants, suggested by emblematical painting or civic procession. He is often duly praised for his lingering and liquid melodies and his gracious images, or blamed for their langour; but his ground-tone is a sombre melancholy--unlike that of Jaques--and his deepest quality as a writer is perhaps his angry power. Few of his forty and more thousand lines are unpoetical; in certainty of style amongst English poets who have written profusely, he has no equals but Chaucer, Milton and Shelley. His "artificial" diction, drawn from middle English, from dialect or from false analogy, has always the intention and nearly always the effect of beauty; we soon feel that its absence would be unnatural, and it has taken its rank among the habitual and exquisite implements of English poetry. This equality of noble form is Spenser's strength, as dilution and diffusion of phrase, and a certain monotonous slowness of _tempo_, are beyond doubt his weaknesses. His chief technical invention, the nine-line stanza (_ababbcbcC_) was developed not from the Italian octave (_abababcc_), but by adding an alexandrine to the eight-line stave (_ababbcbc_) of Chaucer's _Monk's Tale_. It is naturally articulated twice--at the fifth line, where the turn of repeated rhyme inevitably charms, and at the ninth, which runs now to a crashing climax, now to a pensive and sighing close. In rhyming, Spenser, if not always accurate, is one of the most natural and resourceful of poets. His power over the heroic couplet or quatrain is shown in his fable, _Mother Hubbard's Tale_, and in his curious verse memoir, _Colin Clout_; both of which are medleys of satire and flattery. With formal tasks so various and so hard, it is wonderful how effortless the style of Spenser remains. His _Muiopotmos_ is the lightest-handed of mock-heroics. No writer of his day except Marlowe was so faithful to the law of beauty.

Spenserians.

The mantle of Spenser fell, somewhat in shreds, upon poets of many schools until the Restoration. As though in thanks to his master Tasso, he lent to Edward Fairfax, the best translator of the _Jerusalem Delivered_ (_Godfrey of Bulloigne_, 1600), some of his own ease and intricate melody. Harington, the witty translator of Ariosto (1591) and spoilt child of the court, owed less to Spenser. The allegorical colouring was nobly caught, if sometimes barbarized, in the _Christ's Victory and Triumph_ of the younger Giles Fletcher (1610), and Spenser's emblematic style was strained, even cracked, by Phineas Fletcher in _The Purple Island_ (1633), an aspiring fable, gorgeous in places, of the human body and faculties. Both of these brethren clipped and marred the stanza, but they form a link between Spenser and their student Milton. The allegoric form, long-winded and broken-backed, survived late in Henry More's and Joseph Beaumont's verse disquisitions on the soul. Spenser's pastoral and allusive manner was allowed by Drayton in his _Shepherd's Garland_ (1593), and differently by William Browne in _Britannia's Pastorals_ (1613-1616), and by William Basse; while his more honeyed descriptions took on a mawkish taste in the anonymous _Britain's Ida_ and similar poems. His golden Platonic style was buoyantly echoed in _Orchestra_ (1596), Sir John Davies' poem on the dancing spheres. He is continually traceable in 17th-century verse, blending with the alien currents of Ben Jonson and of Donne. He was edited and imitated in the age of Thomson, in the age of William Morris, and constantly between.

Drayton and Daniel.

The typical Elizabethan poet is Michael Drayton; who followed Spenser in pastoral, Daniel, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare in sonnet, Daniel again in chronicle and legend, and Marlowe in mythological story, and who yet remained himself. His _Endimion and Phoebe_ in passages stands near _Hero and Leander_; his _England's Heroical Epistles_ (1597) are in ringing rhetorical couplets; his _Odes_ (1606), like the _Ballad of Agincourt_ and the _Virginian Voyage_, forestall and equal Cowper's or Campbell's; his _Nymphidia_ (1627) was the most popular of burlesque fairy poems; and his pastorals are full of graces and felicities. The work of Drayton that is least read and most often mentioned is his _Poly-Olbion_ (1612-1622), a vast and pious effort, now and then nobly repaid, to versify the scenery, legend, customs and particularities of every English county. The more recluse and pensive habit of Samuel Daniel chills his long chronicle poems; but with Chapman he is the clearest voice of Stoicism in Elizabethan letters; and his harmonious nature is perfectly expressed in a style of happy, even excellence, free alike from "fine madness" and from strain. Sonnet and epistle are his favoured forms, and in his _Musophilus_ (1599) as well as in his admirable prose _Defence of Rhyme_ (1602), he truly prophesies the hopes and glories of that _illustre vulgare_, the literary speech of England. All this patriotic and historic verse, like the earlier and ruder _Albion's England_ (1586) of William Warner, or Fitzgeoffrey's poem upon Drake, or the outbursts of Spenser, was written during or inspired by the last twenty years of the queen's reign; and the same is true of Shakespeare's and most of the other history plays, which duly eclipsed the formal, rusty-gray chronicle poem of the type of the _Mirror for Magistrates_, though editions (1559-1610) of the latter were long repeated. Patriotic verse outside the theatre, however, full of zeal, started at a disadvantage compared with love-sonnet, song, or mythic narrative, because it had no models before it in other lands, and remained therefore the more shapeless.

Sonnets.

The English love-sonnet, brought in by Wyatt and rifest between 1590 and 1600, was revived as a purely studious imitation by Watson in his _Hekatompathia_ (1582), a string of translations in one of the exceptional measures that were freely entitled "sonnets." But from the first, in the hands of Sidney, whose _Astrophel and Stella_ (1591) was written, as remarked above, about 1581, the sonnet was ever ready to pulse into feeling, and to flash into unborrowed beauty, embodying sometimes dramatic fancy and often living experience. These three fibres of imitation, imagination and confession are intertwisted beyond severance in many of the cycles, and now one, now another is uppermost. Incaution might read a personal diary into Thomas Lodge's _Phillis_ (1593), which is often a translation from Ronsard. Literal judges have announced that Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ are but his mode of taking exercise. But there is poetry in "God's plenty" almost everywhere; and few of the series fail of lovely lines or phrasing or even of perfect sonnets. This holds of Henry Constable's _Diana_ (1592), of the _Parthenophil and Parthenophe_ of Barnabe Barnes (1593), inebriate with poetry, and of the stray minor groups, _Alcilia, Licia, Caelia_; while the _Caelica_ of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, in irregular form, is full of metaphysical passion struggling to be delivered. _Astrophel and Stella_, Drayton's _Idea_ (1594-1619), Spenser's _Amoretti_ and Shakespeare's _Sonnets_ (printed 1609) are addressed to definite and probably to known persons, and are charged with true poetic rage, ecstatic or plaintive, desperate or solemn, if they are also intermingled with the mere word-play that mocks or beguiles the ebb of feeling, or with the purely plastic work that is done for solace. In most of these series, as in Daniel's paler but exquisitely-wrought _Delia_ (1591-1592), the form is that of the three separate quatrains with the closing couplet for emotional and melodic climax; a scheme slowly but defiantly evolved, through traceable gradations, from that stricter one of Italy, which Drummond and Milton revived, and where the crisis properly coincides with the change from octave to sestet.

Mythic poems.

The amorous mythologic tale in verse derives immediately from contemporary Italy, but in the beginning from Ovid, whose _Metamorphoses_, familiar in Golding's old version (1555-1557), furnished descriptions, decorations and many tales, while his _Heroides_ gave Chaucer and Boccaccio a model for the self-anatomy of tragic or plaintive sentiment. Within ten years, between 1588 and 1598, during the early sonnet-vogue, appeared Lodge's _Scillaes Metamorphosis_, Shakespeare's _Venus and Adonis_ and _Rape of Lucrece_, Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ and Drayton's _Endimion and Phoebe_. Shakespeare owed something to Lodge, and Drayton to Marlowe. All these points describe a love-situation at length, and save in one instance they describe it from without. The exception is Marlowe, who achieves a more than Sicilian perfection; he says everything, and is equal to everything that he has to say. In _Venus and Adonis_ the poet is enamoured less of love than of the tones and poses of lovers and of the beauty and gallant motion of animals, while in The _Rape of Lucrece_ he is intent on the gradations of lust, shame and indignation, in which he has a spectator's interest. Virtuosity, or the delight of the executant in his own brilliant cunning, is the mark of most of these pieces.

Lyric.

If we go to the lyrics, the versified mythic tales and the sonnets of Elizabethan times for the kind of feeling that Moliere's Alceste loved and that Burns and Shelley poured into song, we shall often come away disappointed, and think the old poetry heartless. But it is not heartless, any more than it is always impassioned or personal; it is decorative. The feeling is often that of the craftsman; it is not of the singer who spends his vital essence in song and commands an answering thrill so long as his native language is alive or understood. The arts that deal with ivories or enamelling or silver suggest themselves while we watch the delighted tinting and chasing, the sense for gesture and grouping (in _Venus and Adonis_), or the delicate beating out of rhyme in a madrigal, or the designing of a single motive, or two contrasted motives, within the panel of the sonnet. And soon it is evident how passion and emotion readily become plastic matter too, whether they be drawn from books or observation or self-scrutiny. This is above all the case in the sonnet; but it is found in the lyric as well. The result is a wonderful fertility of lyrical pattern, a wonderfully diffused power of lyrical execution, never to recur at any later time of English literature. Wyatt had to recover the very form of such verse from oblivion, and this he did in the school of translation and adaptation. Not only the decasyllabic, but the lyric, in short lines had almost died out of memory, and Wyatt brought it back. From his day to Spenser's there is not much lyric that is noteworthy, though in Gascoigne and others the impulse is seen. The introduction of Italian music, with its favourite metrical schemes, such as the madrigal, powerfully schooled and coloured lyric: in especial, the caressing double ending, regular in Italian but heavier in English, became common. The Italian poems were often translated in their own measure, line by line, and the musical setting retained. Their tunes, or other tunes, were then coupled with new and original poems; and both appeared together in the song-books of Dowland the lutanist, of Jones and Byrd (1588), and in chief (1601-1619) of Thomas Campion. The words of Campion's songs are not only supremely musical in the wider sense, but are chosen for their singing quality. Misled awhile by the heresy that rhyme was wrong, he was yet a master of lovely rhyming, as well as of a lyrical style of great range, gaily or gravely happy. But, as with most of his fellows, singing is rather his calling than his consolation. The lyrics that are sprinkled in plays and romances are the finest of this period, and perhaps, in their kind, of any period. Shakespeare is the greatest in this province also; but the power of infallible and unforgettable song is often granted to slighter, gentler playwrights like Greene and Dekker, while it is denied to men of weightier build and sterner purpose like Chapman and Jonson. The songs of Jonson are indeed at their best of absolute and antique finish; but the irrevocable dew of night or dawn seldom lies upon them as it lies on the songs of Webster or of Fletcher. The best lyrics in the plays are dramatic; they must be read in their own setting. While the action stops, they seize and dally with the dominant emotion of the scene, and yet relieve it. The songs of Lodge and Breton, of Drayton and Daniel, of Oxford and Raleigh, and the fervid brief flights of the Jesuit Southwell, show the omnipresence of the vital gift, whether among professional writers of the journalistic type, or among poets whose gift was not primarily song, or among men of action and quality or men of religion, who only wrote when they were stirred. Lullaby and valentine and compliment, and love-plaint ranging from gallantry to desperation, are all there: and the Fortunate Hour, which visits commonly only a few men in a generation, and those but now and then in their lives, is never far off. But the master of melody, Spenser, left no songs, apart from his two insuperable wedding odes. And religious lyric is rarer before the reign of James. Much of the best lyric is saved for us by the various Miscellanies, _A Handful of Pleasant Delights_ (1584), the _Phoenix Nest_ (1593) and Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody_ (1602); while other such collections, like _England's Helicon_ (1600), were chiefly garlands of verse that was already in print.

There is plenty of satiric anger and raillery in the spirit of the time, but the most genuine part of it is drawn off into drama. Except for stray passages in Spenser, Drayton and others, formal satire, though profuse, was a literary unreal thing, a pose in the manner of Persius or Juvenal, and tiresome in expression. In this kind only Donne triumphed. The attempts of Lodge and Hall and Marston and John Davies of Hereford and Guilpin and Wither are for the most part simply weariful in different ways, and satire waited for Dryden and his age. The attempt, however, persisted throughout. Wyatt was the first and last who succeeded in the genial, natural Horatian style.

Metaphysical or fantastic schools.

_Verse from Donne to Milton_.--As the age of Elizabeth receded, some changes came slowly over non-dramatic verse. In Jonson, as in John Donne (1573-1631), one of the greater poets of the nation, and in many writers after Donne, may be traced a kind of Counter-Renaissance, or revulsion against the natural man and his claims to pleasure--a revulsion from which regret for pleasure lost is seldom far. Poetry becomes more ascetic and mystical, and this feeling takes shelter alike in the Anglican and in the Roman faith. George Herbert (_The Temple_, 1633), the most popular, quaint and pious of the school, but the least poetical; Crashaw, with his one ecstatic vision (_The Flaming Heart_) and occasional golden stanzas; Henry Vaughan, who wrote from 1646 to 1678, with his mystical landscape and magical cadences; and Thomas Traherne, his fellow-dreamer, are the best known of the religious Fantastics. But, earlier than most of these are Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Habington with his _Castara_ (1634), who show the same temper, if a fitful power and felicity. Such writers form the devouter section of the famous "metaphysical" or "fantastic" school, which includes, besides Donne its founder, pure amorists like Carew (whose touch on certain rhythms has no fellow), young academic followers like Cartwright and Cleveland (in whom survives the vein of satire that also marks the school), and Abraham Cowley, who wrote from 1633 to 1678, and was perhaps the most acceptable living poet about the middle of the century. In his _Life of Cowley_ Johnson tramples on the "metaphysical" poets and their vices, and he is generally right in detail. The shock of cold quaintness, which every one of them continually administers, is fatal. Johnson only erred in ignoring all their virtues and all their historical importance.

In Donne poetry became deeply intellectualized, and in temper disquisitive and introspective. The poet's emotion is played with in a cat-and-mouse fashion, and he torments it subtly. Donne's passion is so real, if so unheard-of, and his brain so finely-dividing, that he can make almost any image, even the remotest, even the commonest, poetical. His satires, his _Valentine_, his _Litany_, and his lyric or odic pieces in general, have an insolent and sudden daring which is warranted by deep-seated power and is only equalled by a few of those tragedians who are his nearest of kin. The recurring contrast of "wit" or intelligence, and "will" or desire, their struggle, their mutual illumination, their fusion as into some third and undiscovered element of human nature, are but one idiosyncrasy of Donne's intricate soul, whose general progress, so far as his dateless poems permit of its discovery, seems to have been from a paganism that is unashamed but crossed with gusts of compunction, to a mystical and otherwordly temper alloyed with covetous regrets. The _Anatomy of the World_ and other ambitious pieces have the same quality amid their outrageous strangeness. In Donne and his successors the merely ingenious and ransacking intellect often came to overbalance truth and passion; and hence arose conceits and abstract verbiage, and the difficulty of finding a perfect poem, however brief, despite the omnipresence of the poetic gift. The "fantastic" school, if it contains some of the rarest sallies and passages in English, is one of the least satisfactory. Its faults only exaggerate those of Sidney, Greville and Shakespeare, who often misuse homely or technical metaphor; and English verse shared, by coincidence not by borrowing, and with variations of its own, in the general strain and torture of style that was besetting so many poets of the Latin countries. Yet these poets well earn the name of metaphysical, not for their philosophic phrasing, but for the shuttle-flight of their fancy to and fro between the things of earth and the realities of spirit that lie beyond the screen of the flesh.

Rhythm.

Between Spenser and Milton many measures of lyrical and other poetry were modified. Donne's frequent use of roughly-accentual, almost tuneless lines is unexplained and was not often followed. Rhythm in general came to be studied more for its own sake, and the study was rewarded. The lovely cordial music of Carew's amorous iambics, or of Wither's trochees, or of Crashaw's odes, or of Marvell's octo-syllables, has never been regained. The formal ode set in, sometimes regularly "Pindaric" in strophe-grouping, sometimes irregularly "Pindaric" as in Cowley's experiments. Above all, the heroic couplet, of the isolated, balanced, rhetorical order, such as Spenser, Drayton, Fairfax and Sylvester, the translator (1590-1606) of Du Bartas, had often used, began to be a regular instrument of verse, and that for special purposes which soon became lastingly associated with it. The flatteries of Edmund Waller and the Ovidian translations of Sandys dispute the priority for smoothness and finish, though the fame was Waller's for two generations; but Denham's overestimated _Cooper's Hill_ (1642), Cowley's _Davideis_ (1656), and even Ogilby's _Aeneid_ made the path plainer for Dryden, the first sovereign of the rhetorical couplet which throve as blank verse declined. Sonnet and madrigal were the favoured measures of William Drummond of Hawthornden, a real and exquisite poet of the studio, who shows the general drift of verse towards sequestered and religious feeling. Drummond's _Poems_ of 1616 and _Flowers of Zion_ (1623) are full of Petrarch and Plato as well as of Christian resignation, and he kept alive the artistry of phrasing and versification in a time of indiscipline and conflicting forms. William Browne has been named as a Spenserian, but his _Britannia's_ Pastorals (1613-1616), with their slowly-rippling and overflowing couplets which influenced Keats, were a medley of a novel kind. George Wither may equally rank among the lighter followers of Spenser, the easy masters of lyrical narrative, and the devotional poets. But his _Shepherd's Hunting_ and other pieces in his volume of 1622 contain lovely landscapes, partly English and partly artificial, and stand far above his pious works, and still further above the dreary satires which he lived to continue after the Restoration.

Herrick.

The long poem.

Of poets yet unmentioned, Robert Herrick is the chief, with his two thousand lyrics and epigrams, gathered in _Hesperides_ and _Noble Numbers_ (1648). His power of song and sureness of cadence are not excelled within his range of topic, which includes flowers and maidens--whom he treats as creatures of the same race--and the swift decay of both their beauties, and secular regret over this decay and his own mortality and the transience of amorous pleasure, and the virtues of his friends, and country sports and lore, and religious compunction for his own paganism. The _Hesperides_ are pure Renaissance work, in natural sympathy with the Roman elegiac writings and with the Pseudo-Anacreon. Cowley is best where he is nearest Herrick, and his posy of short lyrics outlives his "epic and Pindaric art." There are many writers who last by virtue of one or two poems; Suckling by his adept playfulness, Lovelace and Montrose by a few gallant stanzas, and many a nameless poet by many a consummate cadence. It is the age of sudden flights and brief perfections. All the farther out of reach, yet never wholly despaired of or unattempted in England, was the "long poem," heroical and noble, the "phantom epic," that shadow of the ancient masterpieces, which had striven to life in Italy and France. Davenant's _Gondibert_ (1651), Cowley's _Davideis_ and Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_ (1659) attest the effort which Milton in 1658 resumed with triumph. These works have between them all the vices possible to epic verse, dulness and flatness, faintness and quaintness and incoherence. But there is some poetry in each of them, and in _Pharonnida_ there is far more than enough poetry to save it.

Milton.

Few writers have found a flawless style of their own so early in life as John Milton (1608-1674). His youthful pieces show some signs of Spenser and the Caroline fantastics; but soon his vast poetical reading ran clear and lay at the service of his talent. His vision and phrasing of natural things were already original in the _Nativity Ode_, written when he was twenty; and, there also, his versification was already that of a master, of a renovator. The pensive and figured beauty of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, two contrasted emblematic panels, the high innocent Platonism and golden blank verse of the _Comus_ (1634); the birth of long-sleeping power in the _Lycidas_ (1637), with its unapproached contrivance both in evolution and detail, where the precious essences of earlier myth and pastoral seem to be distilled for an offering in honour of the tombless friend;--the newness, the promise, the sureness of it all amid the current schools! The historian finds in these poems, with their echoes of Plato and Sannazzaro, of Geoffrey of Monmouth and St John, the richest and most perfect instance of the studious, decorative Renaissance style, and is not surprised to find Milton's scholars a century later in the age of Gray. The critic, while feeling that the strictly lyrical, spontaneous element is absent, is all the more baffled by the skill and enduring charm. The sonnets were written before or during Milton's long immersion (1637-1658) in prose and warfare, and show the same gifts. They are not cast in the traditional form of love-cycle, but are occasional poems; in metre they revert, not always strictly but once or twice in full perfection, to the Italian scheme; and they recall not Petrarch but the spiritual elegies or patriot exaltations of Dante or Guidiccioni.