William Shakespeare [1558-1603 A.D.] The age of Elizabeth may pre-eminently claim the distinction of having called up a great native literature. The national mind had already put forth many blossoms of poetry, and in the instance of Chaucer the early fruit was of the richest flavour. But in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign England had a true garden of the Hesperides. It has been most justly observed by Macaulay that "in the time of Henry VIII and Edward VI, a person who did not read French or Latin could read nothing or next to nothing." Hence the learned education of the ladies of that period. The same writer asks, "Over what tragedy could Lady Jane Grey have wept, over what comedy could she have smiled, if the ancient dramatists had not been in her library?" Lady Jane Grey meekly laid her head upon the block in 1554. Had she lived fifty years longer she would have had in her library all Shakespeare's historical plays, except King John and King Henry VIII; she would have had Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour's Lost, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet-for all these were printed before that period. She might have seen all these acted; and she might also have seen As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, and Othello. Her pure and truly religious nature would not have shrunk from the perusal of these works, which might worthily stand by the side of her Terence and her Sophocles in point of genius, and have a far higher claim upon her admiration. For they were imbued, not with the lifeless imitation of heathen antiquity, but with the real vitality of the Christian era in which they were produced; with all the intellectual freedom which especially distinguished that era from the past ages of Christianity. The deities of the old mythology might linger in the pageants of the court; but the inspiration of these creations of the popular dramatist was derived from the pure faith for which the lady Jane died. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616) From no other source of high thought could have originated the exquisite creations of female loveliness which Shakespeare and Spenser equally presented. Some portion of what was tender and graceful in the Catholic worship of "Our Lady" passed into the sober homage involuntarily paid to the perfectness of woman by the two great Protestant poets. In Shakespeare was especially present a more elevated spirit of charity than belonged to the government of his times, although his toleration must have abided to a great extent amongst a people that had many common ties of brotherhood whatever were their differences of creed. Hence the patriotism of Shakespeare-a considerate patriotism founded upon that nationality by which he is held "to have been most connected with ordinary men." But [1558-1603 A.D.] Shakespeare lived in an age when nationality was an exceeding great virtue, which alone enabled England, in a spirit of union, to stand up against the gigantic power which sought her conquest through her religious divisions. All around the dramatist, and reflected by him in a thousand hues of "manycoloured life," were those mixed elements of society, out of whose very differences results the unity of a prosperous nation. There was a great industrious class standing between the noble and the peasant, running over with individual originality of character, and infusing their spirit into the sovereign, the statesman, and the soldier. The gentlemen of Shakespeare are distinct from those of any other poet in their manly frankness; and the same quality of straightforward independence may be traced in his yeomen and his peasants. His clowns even are the representatives of the national humour which itself was a growth of the national freedom. There was a select lettered class, who, having shaken off the trammels of the scholastic philosophy, were exploring the depths of science and laying the foundations of accurate reasoning. Shakespeare stood between the new world of bold speculation that was opening upon him, and the world of submission to authority that was passing away. Thus, whilst he lingers amidst the simplicity and even the traditionary superstitions of the multitude with evident delight-calls up their elves and their witches and their ghosts, but in no vulgar shapes-he asserts his claim to take rank with the most elevated of the world's thinkers in the investigation of the hardest problems of man's nature. Such are a few of the relations in which the art of Shakespeare stood to the period in which he lived; and although it has been truly said, "he was not for an age, but for all time," we hold that he could not have been produced except in that age and in the country of which he has become the highest glory. There must have been a marvellous influence of the social state working upon the highest genius, to have called forth those dramas for the people, which, having their birth in a yeoman's house at Stratford, "show, sustain, and nourish all the world." Lyric Poets The lyrical poetry of the Elizabethan time was chiefly written to be married to music. As Shakespeare's drama was drama to be acted, so his songs were songs to be sung. Their grace, their simplicity, their variety of measure, were qualities which are found in the lyrical poems of Marlowe, Greene, Lodge, Raleigh, Breton, Drayton, and others less known to fame, who contributed to the delight of many a tranquil evening in the squire's pleasure garden and by the citizen's sea-coal fireside, where Morley's Airs, and other popular collections, were as familiarly known as Moore's Melodies in our own day. It was not that the musical taste of England was first developed in this period, but that it had spread from the court to the people. There was a greater diffusion of wealth, and therefore more leisure for the cultivation of the elegancies of life. Property was secure. The days of feudal tyranny were past. The whole aspect of the country was necessarily changed. If we open the county histories of this period we find an enumeration of "principal manor-houses," which shows how completely the English gentleman of moderate fortune had in every parish taken the place of the baron or the abbot, who were once the sole proprietors of vast districts. A poet of the period has noticed this change in his description of rural scenery. "Here on some mount a house of pleasure vanted [1558-1603 A.D.] These lines are from the Britannia's Pastorals of William Browne, whose poems, unequal as they are, contain many exquisite descriptions of country life. But nearly all the poetry of this age shows how thoroughly the realities of that life had become familiar to the imaginative mind. The second-hand images with which town poets make their rural descriptions wearisome are not found in the Elizabethan poets. The commonest objects of nature uniformly present their poetical aspects in Shakespeare, as they did in Chaucer. The perpetual freshness and variety of creation were seen by these great masters with that rapid power of observation which belongs to genius. But the minor poets of the end of the sixteenth century evidently studied rural scenery with that feeling of the picturesque which is always a late growth of individual or national cultivation. The country, to the educated proprietor of the soil, had become something more than the source of his revenue. His ancestral trees had now for him a higher interest than to furnish logs for his hall-fire. His garden was no longer a mere place for growing kail and pot-herbs: it was to have choice flowers and shady seats; the stately terrace and the green walk; the fountain and the vase. The poets reflect the prevailing taste. They make their posies of the peony and the pink, the rose and the columbine. They go with the huntsman. to the field, and with the angler to the river. They are found nutting with the village boys, and they gather strawberries in the woods. They sit with the lady of the May in her bower, and quaff the brown ale at the harvesthome. The country has become the seat of pleasant thoughts; and the poets are there to aid their influences. The reign of Elizabeth, which witnessed such an outburst of native literature, had not neglected that cultivation of ancient learning upon which sound literature and correct taste must in a great degree be built. New colleges had been founded at Oxford and Cambridge. Elizabeth had also founded Trinity College, Dublin. James VI had erected the university of Edinburgh, in addition to the Scottish academical institutions, and Marischal College, Aberdeen, was built in his reign. To the London grammar schools of St. Paul's and Christ church had been added Westminster school by the queen, and Merchant Tailors' school by the great city company of that name. The grammar schools were essentially the schools of the people; and it is a sufficient praise of Elizabeth's new foundation of Westminster to say that Camden there taught and that Jonson there learned.f UNDER no other dynasty in the world have large national changes depended so completely on the personal ideas of monarchs as in England under the Tudors. But now the energetic Tudor line had vanished from the throne. By right of inheritance, another family ascended, whose origins and associations were in Scotland, the crown of which it now united to that of England.-VON RANKE.6 ENGLAND appeared as despotic a country at the death of Elizabeth as any in Europe, and it was only by the concurrence of two circumstances that it did not lose its liberties altogether. The first of these was that the wiliest and most ambitious of her kings had no standing army. When a monarch has the interest of a superstitious priesthood and the ignorance of the multitude in his favour, he needs only a military force to strike out the last spark of freedom. When Henry VII, therefore, had broken the nobility and gained the church, and quieted the people, there would have been no power able to oppose him if he had had a soldiery in his pay; as it was, he had to trust to the national force-the archers of the different parishes and men raised for a limited time. The English army was a militia, officered by the gentry of the land; so Henry VII and his imperious son had not the means of consolidating the tyrannic power which circumstances enabled them to exercise for a time. The other circumstance was the very strange one that the degradation of the house of commons tempted the first Tudors to use it as an ostensible instrument of their authority, till the people, who were not aware of the personal baseness and subserviency of their representatives, seeing every great event attributed to parliament, began to believe that it was mightier than the king. They saw a church overthrown, and another church established; a queen divorced, and another executed; Mary declared illegitimate, and the [1603 A.D.] kingdom left to the disposal of the sovereign, all by act of parliament; and there was no limit to their confidence in these magic words. The crawling sycophants who sat on the packed benches of the commons began to be invested with a part of the majesty which the policy of the kings had thrown over the assembly to cloak their own designs; and towards the end of Elizabeth's reign the belief in the dignity of parliament had seized even on some of the members, and they reasoned, remonstrated, accused, and finally made terms, as if they had in reality some of the influence which had belonged to them in the times of the Plantagenets. Nothing, however, would persuade the new race of kings that parliament was anything but a collection of their clerks and servants; and all through the next two reigns the point in dispute was the usurped, but constantly exerted, supremacy of the crown, and the theoretical, but long disused, supremacy of parliament. Fortunately for the parliament, the representative of absolute monarchy, who now presented himself in the person of James, was not rendered very dangerous by his vigour of mind or body. Even the country he came from detracted from his popularity; for the long wars between the realms had made Scotland a disagreeable sound in English ears. The people were considered barbarous, and their land a desert. A flight of locusts was looked upon as a similar infliction to an incursion of the hungry Scots, whether as friends or foes. The behaviour of James, since his accession to his native throne, had not raised his reputation for courage or plain dealing; and reports must have been already widely spread of his garrulity, selfishness, pedantry, and awkwardness, which made him a very unfit president of the most accomplished, learned, and high-spirited court in Christendom. A courtier like Sir Walter Raleigh, hearing an argument of Bacon in the morning and a play of Shakespeare in the afternoon, could have had little appetite for the laborious and jocular platitudes of the Solomon of the north. Yet with all the advantages of an undisputed right, and bearing with him the prospect not only of peace, but union, between the two peoples who inhabited the island, the great-grandson of Margaret of England took peaceable possession of the throne of the Plantagenets and Tudors. It was taking the people back to the olden time, of which every new generation entertains such a fond recollection, when they saw in the son of the beauteous Mary-representative in the third degree of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York-a blending once more of the white and red roses, and never were king and nation more pleased at the parts they were to play. His journey from the north was a perpetual triumph. Arches covered the streets, and orations exhausted the eloquence of mayors; and his speeches in reply transcended their understanding. He ate, and drank, and spouted Latin, and made poems in a manner never heard of before; he also made knights on all occasions. But the habits and temper of the new king came out in more disagreeable colours in the course of the same journey. Gentlemen, accustomed to the stately cavalcades of Elizabeth, and even her affected and grandiose style of walking, were at first astonished to see a little fat personage, with large and wandering eyes; a bonnet cast by chance upon his head, and sticking on as it best could; his legs too thin for his weight; his clothes so thickly padded out to resist a dagger-stroke, of which he was in continual dread, that he looked more like a vast seal than a man; a flabby, foolish mouth, widened for the freer extrusion of remarkably broad Scotch-and all these surmounting a horse saddled after the manner of an arm-chair, with appliances for the rider's support, in spite of which his majesty not unfrequently managed to tumble most ungracefully to the ground; and before the courtly nobles who had |