Shakespearean Soliloquy.

Shakespeare is known for his deep understanding of human nature with diverse feelings, emotions, and passions both positive and negative involved in it. Soliloquy is a device according to which a character brings out the inner complex feelings by speaking to himself / herself. The audience is supposed to hear it but not the other characters. Shakespeare gives soliloquies to complex character in order to bring out the secret feelings and plans which the character cannot share with other characters.
    Characters are individuals with their own complex thoughts and emotions. Not all these thoughts and emotions can be shared with others. Though drama is something public by its nature, soliloquies help to bring to light the private side of a character’s personality. It is the most appropriate formula for revealing the complex thoughts in the mind of characters. Shakespeare gives soliloquies either to villains or to protagonists with complex personality. In Othello, he gives more soliloquies to the antagonist Iago. Since Iago is a scheming villain his deceptions, treachery, conspiracies and pretensions can best be revealed through soliloquies. It helps to show that side of the character’s personality which is hidden from the other characters who are the victims of Iago’s villainy. In Hamlet, it is the character Hamlet who soliloquizes often thereby revealing his doubts, dilemmas, fears, anger and musings on questions of morality. Hamlet is not the acting type so the reflective or contemplative side of his personality is best brought out through his soliloquies. His ‘to be or not to be is the question’ is one of the most remarkable soliloquies that serves to highlight the state of indecision in which he finds himself.

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Hamlet as a Tragedy

Hamlet is a revenge tragedy written in the line of Roman senecan tragedy. It is the tragedy of reflection and moral sensitivity. The protagonist is very reflective and too sensitive thus unfit for taking revenge through action. He has to undo the past but the paradox of guilt and justice baffles him. The soliloquies of Hamlet help to bring out his complex mental state. When the play ends all the major characters are dead making the tragedy an absolute one.
    Hamlet’s father has been murdered by his uncle and his mother marries the criminal after her husband’s death. As suggested by the ghost Hamlet has to take revenge on his father’s murderer. As he is a person with a high degree of moral sensitivity and a philosophic bent of mind, he thinks about whether evil can undo evil and not remain evil. He wants to find out whether the ghost has told the truth or not. He thinks too much and cannot go into action without which revenge cannot be taken and the tragedy occurs. The soliloquies are given to him to help reveal his complex psychological state. It’s the tragedy of moral frustration. The tension between Hamlet’s need for revenge and the question of morality, guilt, justice as well as his uncle and mother’s position is vividly dramatized. In action is the major tragic flaw which hastens his tragic downfall. Had Hamlet been Othello the tragedy wouldn’t have occurred. His philosophical soliloquies make it a poetic play rather than a realistic one. Ophelia, her father and brother die primarily because of Claudius’s conspiracy and Hamlet’s impulsiveness. Though the conspirator is killed many other innocent people lose their lives. It is a great disintegration. Since all the characters die at the end of the play the throne has to be given to a foreigner. It is an absolute tragedy in a way. The horror, violence and bloodshed on the stage create a kind of unnerving scene. The readers cannot help feeling pity and fear for what has happened.

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T.S. Eliot calls Hamlet an artistic failure. Do you agree? Give reasons.

Yes, I agree with T.S. Eliot that Hamlet is an artistic failure. There are two reasons for it. First a work of art should be read in the context of literary tradition on which an individual work is built and of which it is a part. Shakespeare drew the material for his Hamlet from the plays of Thomas Kyd but failed to make his play correspond to the original material. The second reason for calling Hamlet an artistic failure has to do with the lack of objective correlative. Shakespeare creates the character possessing emotion in excess because the emotion has no equivalence to the action of the character and the other facts and details in the play.
    We can only criticize a work of art according to certain standards by comparing it to other works of art. Hamlet by Shakespeare owes its content to plays by Thomas Kyd. In Kyd’s version of Hamlet the revenge motive is at the core of the play. Hamlet’s madness was mainly designed to avoid the people’s suspicion of his ability to murder a king surrounded by body guards and Hamlet did it successfully. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet the title character’s madness, on the contrary serves to arouse the king’s suspicion. This change is not complete enough. The delay in revenge goes unexplained. Moreover the Polonius-Laertes and Plonius-Reynaldo scenes are not explained satisfactorily. There is a little excuse for it. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt up on her son but Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the material of the old play. The variable versification shows that both workmanship and thought are in an unstable position. Thus the play can not do justice to the original play to which it is indebted for its material.
    Hamlet also fails as a work of art due to the obvious lack of objective correlative which is the only way of expressing emotion with the help of a set of objects, situations, and a chain of events which will be the formula of that particular emotion. The presentation of facts and external situation should be adequately used for the full realization of the pent up emotional energies. This is lacking in Hamlet. Hamlet is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. Hamlet suffers from bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings and emotions. Hamlet’s disgust is caused by his mother but his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it. His disgust exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand. He fails to objectify it. It poisons his life and works as a hindrance to action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it. His mother’s character is so negative and trivial that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is in capable of representing. In Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art. If Hamlet were an adolescent his inability to express the intense emotion would be understandable but he is a mature person. There is no excuse for him.
    Thus, I think my agreement with Eliot’s comment on Shakespeare’s Hamlet is justified as the play fails to do justice to the original material and it tacks objective equivalent for the externalization of the repressed emotions and feelings.

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“HAMLET”--AN ARTISTIC FAILURE:

T.S. Eliot In his essay entitled “Hamlet and his Problems” has written about Hamlet. So farfrom being Shakespeare’s mater-piece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure.” Hehas called the play the “Mona Lisa of Literature”, something puzzling and disquieting.According to him, there are many superfluous and inconsistent scenes in the play and assuch it lacks the unity of action. Then, he says, in this play, workmanship and thought arein an’ unstable condition which is an artistic defect.These objections are based on T.S; Eliot’s much controversial idea of “objectivecorrelative”. The defects in Hamlet arc the result of the absence of the objective correlative.He ‘believes that the only w of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding anobjective correlative, in other words a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events whichshall be the formula of that particular’ emotion, and which shall evoke the same emotionfrom the reader. In Eliot’s opinion, Hamlet is dominated by an emotion which isinexpressible because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.Eliot’s objections can be answered easily. He is in the habit of expressing starting opinionand sometimes does not follow them himself. His idea of subjective correlative is vague as itfalsifies the way a poet actually composes. No object or situation can in itself be a, formulafor any emotion. No doubt, the play is puzzling as the problems of delay madness andghosts have been subjects of much discussion. But it is also a fact that’ every poses of artposes a challenge and demands thinking. Eliot’s own poem “The Waste Land” has not beenless puzzling. The objection that there are many superfluous scenes relates to theconstruction of plot. No doubt, there are many such scenes but they are interwoventhematically and as such nothing remains superfluous.In fact, if we have a deep study of the play and keep in view the delineation of the complexcharacter of Hamlet, artistic construction of the play, consistent theme and the beautifullanguage used in the speeches, we are compelled to conclude that Hamlet is a master-pieceof dramatic art.

Plot:

As regards plot of the play, it has a definite form and obeys the laws of dramaticconstruction arid is regarded as a well constructed play. The action of the whole play fallsinto three movements, and has a beginning, middle and an end. The first movementexposes the crime and the culprit, the Polonius family is linked to the main action and itvoices the secondary theme: “Frailty thy name is woman”. The second movement shows thedevelopment in Hamlet’s character and the enacting of the play to confirm Claudius’sguilt, and his two tragic errors---not killing Claudius, and killing Polonius, Hamlet who hasto avenge his father’s death, becomes a victim of revenge by another son, for killing afather. The final movement brings the action to an end along with the death of Hamlet,Laertes, Claudius and Gertrude. So we see there is a gradual development in the progressof the plot Hamlet deteriorates in character as the progresses, but regains his lost balanceof mind with an added strength at the end of the play before he dies.

Characterization:

As regards characterization, the character of. Hamlet is the chief attraction of the play. Hamlet’s personality is as complex as an undetected murder. He iscontrasted with obedient, prying Polonius, smiling but villainous Claudius, SheepishGertrude, poor, lovable Ophelia, faithful Horatio active Laertes and the strong mindedbrave Fortinbras The audience and the readers share his feelings. We laugh at Osric withhim at, reprove Gertrude with him, curse with him Claudius, and speak friendly to Horatiowith him. In him we have a speculative man “caught in ethical and metaphysicaluncertainties.” He assumes madness as a device to give vent to his feelings but at times heseems truly mad. These contradictions add to the beauty of artistic quality rather thanspoil it.

Thematic Coherence:

Hamlet is much praised for its thematic coherence and structuralunity. The main theme is revenge--- a son avenging the murder of his father. This themedepicts the character of the hero, the development or deterioration in his character, thesuccess or failure in carrying out the work, and the means he adopts to achieve his aimScenes like play within play, nunnery scene, Fortinbras incident, graveyard scene, whichappear to be superfluous, become relevant through the theme of the play.
 

 

Beautiful Speeches:

Then we have very beautiful speeches in this play Soliloquies of Hamlet, Claudius and Ophelia have been used as dramatic device to reveal the inner mindof a character. But they have a beauty of their own. The language used in them is terse,pithy and fluent. They are full of quotable lines and phrases like “to be or not to be”, “theundiscovered country”, “the unweeded garden”, “the native hue of resolution”, “bestialobliviousness”, “the glass of fashion and mold of form”To sum up, like other plays of Shakespeare, Hamlet may be criticized on some groundssuch as the artificial role of chance, puzzling relationship of Horatio to Denmark, Hamlet’sage and many other loose ends But taken as whole, far from being an artistic failure,Hamlet is a well-constructed play which appeals to the imagination and intellect of theaudience and reader alike.

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Is Hamlet an artistic failure?

THE hero of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is in a highly disturbed state of mind. The remarriage of his mother has come as a tremendous shock to him. She has married his uncle — the murderer of his father and usurper of his throne. Hamlet reflects how his father loved his mother and how she pretended to be equally sincere towards him. The tragic contrast between his father’s sincerity and his mother’s infidelity rends his heart. Had a religious notion not restrained him, he would have committed suicide. In a fit of disappointment, he soliloquises:
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
When he suddenly appears before Ophelia (his beloved) after the remarriage of his mother, she is startled to see him. To her, he seems like a man who has come out of hell.
Although the situation Hamlet faces is quite serious, T.S. Eliot, a renowned critic, holds that it does not adequately justify his emotional reaction. In successful Shakespearean tragedies, there is a complete adequacy of the external circumstances to emotional responses but, in Eliot’s opinion, "Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is...in excess of the facts as they appear". Eliot thinks that the guilt of Hamlet’s mother is not enough to account for his disappointment. "Hamlet’s disgust envelops and exceeds his mother," he says. He calls Hamlet ‘an artistic failure’.
There are critics who disagree with Eliot’s view. Patrick Cruttwell is one of them. Expressing disagreement with Eliot’s notion, he says, "As far disgust for life which Hamlet expresses, isn’t it very adequately accounted for by what happens to Hamlet: Eliot’s famous remark that Hamlet ... is dominated by an emotion which is ... in excess of the facts as they appear’, has always I must confess, filled me with stupefaction; for when I consider the ‘facts’ as they did appear to Hamlet — the sudden death of his much-loved father, followed immediately by an indecently hasty and incestuous remarriage of his mother to a man whom Hamlet hated and despised and who then proceeded to cheat him out of throne, this followed in turn by the supernatural reappearance of his late father with the information that Hamlet’s step-father was his father’s murderer and the peremptory command that he, Hamlet, should set to work at once on vengeance — When I consider all this, I find it hard to imagine any degree of emotion which ought to be censured as ‘excessive’.
Although Cruttwell’s argument carries weight, he loses sight of a vital fact which largely accounts for Hamlet’s mental disturbance. It is Hamlet’s love for Ophelia. The infidelity of his mother has engendered doubts in his mind and he looks upon women as unfaithful creatures. He now distrusts Ophelia’s fidelity as well and decides not to marry her. However, she continues to dominate his thoughts. His love for her makes him long to marry her. The unfulfilled longing gnaws at his heart. It is an unsound view that Hamlet is a patient of melancholia and that his melancholy, apart from making him behave like an insane person, also weakens his love for Ophelia. The fact is that his love for Ophelia never dies.
But the above words do not come from the core of his heart. What he himself says about his love for her is quite true. Standing in the pit of her grave, he says: "I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum".The death of his beloved unhinges his mind completely.
Freudians opine that Hamlet is disturbed to see his mother with his uncle because he is unconsciously in love with her without lusting for her. This view must be rejected. However, the fact cannot be denied that the remarriage of Hamlet’s mother has made a great difference to him. As his uncle claims most of her attention, Hamlet feels cut off from her.
Also, his consciousness that his mother has incestuous relations with his uncle weighs heavily on his mind. He knows that it is beyond his power to wash the stigma of incest off his mother.
Overwhelmed with this consciousness, he considers it to be futile to take revenge on his uncle for the murder of his father. He desists from killing his uncle because he thinks that such an act will send him (his uncle) to heaven. But such a notion is only an excuse by which he justifies his inaction. What prevents him from killing his uncle is the awareness that his mother has been besmirched for ever. The gravity of his mother’s sin is realised when it is viewed vis-a-vis the age in which Hamlet lives. During the Elizabethan age, incest was considered to be the greatest of all sins.
From the above facts it is clear that the situation Hamlet faces accounts for his mental disturbance. Beyond any shadow of doubt, Shakespeare has successfully dealt with the effect of a mother’s actions on the mind of her son in this play. Hence Eliot’s remark that Hamlet is ‘an artistic failure’ has no validity.

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History of Drama

History of Drama from its Medieval Origins to the Closing of the Theatres

The early history of English drama is important because
• it shows how the instinct for dramatic representation finds its outlets,
• it tells us a great deal about the workings of the popular imagination, and
• it throws some light on the themes and conventions of later drama.

The Origins of Drama
The origins of drama as we know it are more the concern of anthropologists because drama and religious ritual seem to have been bound up with one another in the earlier stages of all civilizations.
These things lie in the background of all drama:
• Folk celebrations,
• Ritual miming of such elemental themes as death and resurrection,
• Seasonal festivals with appropriate symbolic actions.
As far as we can trace the history of English drama, it begins with the elaboration of the ecclesiastical liturgy in mutually answering dialogues.
Of the other sources --pre-Christian seasonal festivals, St. George and Robin Hood plays, maypole dances, and similar folk activities-- we know little else except that they existed.
No substantial continuity can be established between the origins of European drama in the Middle Ages and the drama of Greece and Rome, which had already run its course by the time the Christian era began.
Strolling minstrels and other varieties of itinerant entertainments might have preserved some bit of Roman theater but they eventually became absorbed into the repertory of the profession long before it contributed anything to the acting of miracle or mystery and morality plays.
Tropes to Liturgical Dramas
With its two great festivals of Christmas and Easter, and its celebration of the significant points of Christ's life and career from birth to resurrection, the Christian Church itself was inherently dramatic.
The ceremonies designed to commemorate these special Christian events naturally lent themselves to dramatization, from
• simple chanting between priest and choir or two sections of the choir to
• more elaborate acting out of a scene between two characters or sets of characters.
These ceremonal dramatizations were known as tropes--simple but dramatic elaborations of parts of the liturgy--and they represent the beginnings of medieval drama.

The Quem Quaeritis? Trope One of the earliest recorded tropes was one performed at Easter in the 10th century. It depicts a dialogue between the three Marys and the angel at Christ's tomb, and it is known as the "Quem Quaeritis? Trope" because it asks the question "Whom do ye seek?": - Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae? - Jesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicolae. - Non est hic; surrexit, sicut praedixerat. Ite, nuntiate quia surrexit de sepulchro - "Whom do you seek, O followers of Christ? - "Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified." - "He is not here. He is risen, just as he foretold. Go, announce that he is risen from the sepulcher." The "Quem Quaeritis? trope" is often identified as the earliest instance of medieval drama.

The simple trope eventually grew into liturgical drama, which was drama arising from or developed in connection with church rites or services. Liturgical drama was fully developed in the 12th century. At first these dramatic renderings were presented in Latin but as they increased in popularity, they were presented in the vernacular.
Liturgical dramas represented dimensions of the life of Christ. A play bringing the shepherd to the crib of the infant was introduced at Christmas. An Epiphany play introduced the three kings and even a mechanical star. The first Passion Play developed in the 13th century.

What is a Passion Play?
The passion play began in the Middle Ages and was originally a work depicting Christ's passion or crucifixion. It was performed from about the 13th century onward. In its later manifestations, it came to include both Passion and Resurrection. The form gradually died in popularity after the 16th and 17th centuries, but it remains locally popular.
At the same time the "plots" developed, the staging of the plays became more elaborate, which made it difficult to confine them to their traditional area: the choir portion of the church. As they grew more elaborate, the performances began to extend physically down the nave, using appropriate portions of the church as needed. At this point, however, they were still confined to the church, both physically and in subject matter.
Miracle Plays
Eventually, dramatic representations moved out of the church altogether--and this simple move brought massive changes to the face of drama. First, they were produced in the churchyard itself and then later they moved into an even larger space, traditionally the marketplace of the town or even a convenient meadow.
Once outside the church, the vernacular ousted Latin and the focus of the story moved away from just the liturgy to encompass the whole range of sacred history from the Creation to the Last Judgment. Drama began to present the entire range of religious history.
Presentation of the plays outdoors became dependent upon on the weather, so they could no longer be acted on all of the different chuch festivals. The establishment of the feast of Corpus Christi (May or June) in 1264 provided a suitable day for play presentation. Corpus Christi was a good choice because it was warm but also because it involved a professional observance with the Host carried about and displayed at various stations. Dramas were generally given on wagons or pageant carts, which were in effect moving stages. Each pageant cart presented a different scene of the cycle and the wagons followed each other, repeating their scenes at successive stations. Carts were often very elaborate, equipped with a changing room, a stage proper, and two areas which represented hell (usually a painted dragon's head) and heaven (a balcony). Stage machinery and sound effects became integral parts of the plotting.
When the plays moved outdoors, who controlled them also changed. Trade or craft guilds -- important in many ways to social and economic life in the Middle Ages-- took over sponsoring the plays, making them more secular. In fact, each pageant became the province of a particular guild. For example, at York The Fall of Man was presented by the coopers and The Last Supper by the bakers.
Liturgical drama, confined to the church and designed to embellish the ecclesiastical ritual, thus gave way to plays in English, performed in the open and separated from the liturgy though still religious in subject matter. Such early plays are known as miracle or mystery plays.

Miracle Plays vs. Mystery Plays Critics tend to distinguish between miracle and mystery plays: • Miracle plays had as their subject a story from the Scriptures or the life and martyrdom of a saint. • Mystery plays usually base their stories on the New Testament. For our purposes, the inclusive term miracle play can be used to identify works dealing with either Biblical history or saints' lives

It is at this stage that elements from minstrel performances and older folk festivals began to be incorporated into what was originally Christian drama. These new elements provided vitality for a drama whose primary function was fast beginning to be plain old entertainment.
The transition from simple liturgical drama to miracle and mystery play can't be accurately dated or documented. It is believed that miracle plays developed rapidly in the 13th century; there are records of cycles of miracle plays in many regions of England during the 14th-15th centuries, even into the 16th.

Cycles of Plays & The Wakefield Master The cycles were developed by extending the themes of liturgical drama both backward and forward, to include the Creation, the Fall, early Old Testament stories, and Doomsday. Almost complete cycles of miracle plays survive from Chester, York & Wakefield. Parts of other cycles also survive. Some of the plays seem to have been written by the same person, who has come to be known as the "Wakefield Master." They date from the 15th century, and the two most famous are Noah and The Second Shepherds' Play.

The development of the dialogue and the action in these early dramas is relatively naive, simple, as is the story presented. As time passed, however, touches of realistic comedy were introduced.
Morality Plays
While the miracle plays were still going strong, another medieval dramatic form emerged in the 14th century and flourished in the 15th-16th centuries, a form which has more direct links with Elizabethan drama. This is the morality play, which differs from the miracle play in that it does not deal with a biblical or pseudo-biblical story but with personified abstractions of virtues and vices who struggle for man's soul. Simply put, morality plays dealt with man's search for salvation
Morality plays were dramatized allegories of the life of man, his temptation and sinning, his quest for salvation, and his confrontation by death. The morality play, which developed most fully in the 1 5th century, handled the subjects that were most popular among medieval preachers and drew considerably on contemparary homiletic (sermon, preaching) technique.

Key Elements & Themes of Morality Plays Morality plays held several elements in common: • The hero represents Mankind or Everyman. • Among the other characters are personifications of virtues, vices and Death, as well as angels and demons who battle for the possession of the soul of man. • The psychomachia, the battle for the soul, was a common medieval theme and bound up with the whole idea of medieval allegory, and it found its way into medieval drama--and even into some Renaissance drama, as Dr. Faustus indicates. • A character known as the Vice often played the role of the tempter in a fashion both sinister and comic. Certain themes found a home in the morality plays: • The theme of the Seven Deadly Sins, which was a commonplace of medieval art and literature; • The theme of Mercy and Peace pleading before God for man's soul against Truth and Righteousness; and • The Dance of Death, which focuses on Death as God's messenger come to summon all, high and low. The Dance of Death is a dramatic rendition of the ubi sunt theme, which figures so largely in literature of the Middle Ages. The ubi sunt theme rhetorically asks "Where are all those who were before us?" (ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?).

The earliest complete extant morality play is The Castle of Perseverance, which was written circa 1425. This was an an elaborate play with 3650 lines and 34 characters, and its theme is the fight between Mankind's Good Angel and his supporters and his Bad Angel, who is supported by the Seven Deadly Sins. The action takes Man from his birth to the Day of Judgment. Everyman (ca. 1500) is perhaps the best known morality play. It depicts Everyman's journey in the face of Death. The hero is capably assisted to his end by Good Deeds.
The Interlude
Toward the end of the 15th century, there developed a type of morality play which dealt in the same allegorical way with general moral problems, although with more pronounced realistic and comic elements. This kind of play is known as the interlude.
The term might originally have denoted a short play or playlet actually performed between the courses of a banquet. It can be applied to a variety of short entertainments. including secular farces and witty dialogues with a religious or political point.
Although the transition can't be documented adequately because so many texts haven't survived, the term "interlude" is employed by literary historians to denote the plays which mark the transition from medieval religious drama to Tudor secular drama.
Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres --at the end of the 15th century-- is the earliest extant purely secular play in English. He had already written a morality play entitled Nature.
Medwall was one of a group of early Tudor playwrights that included John Rastell and John Heywood, who ended up being the most important dramatist of them all. Heywood's interludes were often written as part of the evening's entertainment at a nobleman's house and their emphasis is more on amusement than instruction. Heywood's art resembles the modern music-hall or vaudeville sketch. The plots are very basic.
Shifts in Theme: from Salvation to Education, Religion to Politics
The shift of thematic interest from salvation to education --which marks a distinction between medieval morality play and Tudor interlude-- was accompanied by a parallel shift from religion to politics. And when religion is treated, it is treated in the spirit of controversy produced by the Reformation and the great debate about the true form of Christianity.
Such controversial or propagandist morality plays abandoned the large universal moral and religious themes of the older moralities and were liable to portray the vices as Catholics.
Among those who wrote Protestant propaganda plays was John Bale (1495-1563), who wrote King Johan (part history play). The play is a mix of history, allegory, medieval vice and virtue representation, and some typical characters are Civil Order, Usurped Power and Sedition.

The Importance of King Johan This play can in a sense be called the first English history play, but it is history treated in a very special way. It is not an example of the English chronicle play, which we know from Shakespeare.

The move from religious themes to etho-political ones can be seen in John Skelton’s Magnificence (1515), aimed at Cardinal Wolsey, which shows the rise, fall and final repentance of a worldly prince seduced and eventually redeemed by allegorical figures, such as Virtues and Vices.
The Classical Influence on English Comedy
At the same time, classical influences were being felt, providing for a developing national drama new themes and new structures, first in comedy and then later in tragedy.
Taking its theme from the Miles Gloriosus of Roman playwright Plautus, about 1553 Nicholas Udall wrote the comic Ralph Roister Doister. This play brings the braggart soldier for the first time into English drama. Udall's characters function both as traditional vices/virtues and as traditional characters in Latin comedy (for example, the Parasite, who also shows up in the plays of Ben Jonson). The plot is simple, but it does include a complication and a resolution, which shows a firmer grasp on structure.
Another comedy, Gammer Gurton's Needle, by "Mr. S.," probably William Stevenson of Christ's College, was written a few years later and produced at the college. Here, the themes and characters of Plautus combine with the comedy of English rural life. The plot is crude and comic: "Gammer" Gurton loses her needle and it is found sticking in the pants of her servant. However, the construction in five acts is effective.
It was not until George Gascoigne produced his comic play Supposes at Gray's Inn in 1566 that prose made its first appearance in English drama. Gascoigne's play is another comedy adapted from a foreign source, from the Italian of Ariosto. Gascoigne's play is far more sophisticated and subtle than Ralph Roister Doister or Gammer Gurton's Needle. In fact, it is the first of many witty Italianate comedies in English which includes Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing.
Although we rarely read any of these early works, they are important because they bring to English drama elements that would be further developed by its master playwrights. Moreover, Gascoigne's work indicates that the popular tradition of the English drama could be modified--enhanced--by classical influences and by the needs of a more sophisticated audience.
English Tragedy
At the same time these changes were occurring in English comedy, the Humanist interest in Latin and Greek classics helped produce a new kind of English tragedy.
There were no tragedies among the miracle or morality plays; in fact, there was nothing that could be called tragedy in English drama before the classical influence began.
The favourite classical writer of tragedies among English Humanists was not Sophocles or Euripides but Seneca, the Stoic Roman. Although they were never meant to be acted, Seneca's nine tragedies provided Renaissance playwrights with volatile materials: they adapted Greek myths to produce violent and sombre treatments of murder, cruelty, and lust. Seneca's works were translated into English by Jasper Heywood and others in the mid-16th century, and they greatly influenced the direction of drama on the English stage.

Senecan Tragedy Seneca's tragedies are bloody and bombastic, combining powerful rhetoric, Stoic moralizing and elements of sheer horror. In them, there are numerous emotional crises, and characters are not subtly drawn but are ruled by their passions, being mixtures of sophistication and crudeness. Seneca's plays were discovered in Italy in the mid-16th century and translated into English, where they greatly influenced the developing English tragedy.

Although Seneca's writing style did not provide a good model for developing English playwrights --it was polished yet monotonous-- his methodology did. Like the sonnet, the typical Senecan tragedy was ordered and concentrated. It was a good proving ground for would-be dramatists.
Before Senecan tragedy fully influenced the English dramatists, there were some other attempts at the genre. Richard Edwards' Damon and Pythias (1564) and John Pickering's New Interlude of Vice Containing the History of Horestes (1567) were two early tragedies that relied on classical themes. Thomas Preston's Cambises (1570), which billed itself as a "new tragical comedy," combined features of both genres. Gorboduc --also known as Ferrex and Porrex-- written by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton and produced around 1561-2 is considered the first successful English tragedy in the Senecan style:
• It is divided into 5 acts,
• It follows the classical manner in avoiding violence on the stage (instead, it presents it offstage), and
• It is written in blank verse, the first English play to be so.
Professional Players and Theatres
As drama became more abundant and more varied, professionalism developed both among authors and actors. Some actors were independent companies who roamed around; still others were attached as servants to wealthy noblemen and were under their protection.

Players & Theatres: Fast Facts Here are some quick facts about the development of professional players and theatres: • In 1583 Queen Elizabeth's Master of the Revels formed a company of players for the Queen. • In 1576, James Burbage, leader of the Earl of Leicester's men, build the first permanent theater, called "The Theatre," in a field near Shoreditch, out of the city and thus out of the control of the Lord Mayor, who was the official "censor" of plays. • Other permanent, public theatres soon followed: the Curtain, 1577; the Rose, 1588; the Swan, 1595. • Shakespeare's theatre, the Globe, was built in 1598. • In addition to the public theatres, there were private ones, chief among them the Blackfriars (1576). They were different from public theatres because they: # were roofed, # had more elaborate interior arrangements, and # presented plays originally acted by child players.

The University Wits
The growing popularity and diversity of the drama, its secularization, and the growth of a class of writers who were not members of holy orders led in the 16th century to a new literary phenomenon, the secular professional playwright.
The first to exploit this situation was a group of writers known as the University Wits, young men who had graduated at Oxford or Cambridge with no patrons to sponsor their literary efforts and no desire to enter the Church.
They turned to playwriting to make a living. In doing so they made Elizabethan drama more literary and more dramatic --and they also had an important influence on both private and public theatres because they worked for each. They set the course for later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and they paved the way for Shakespeare.
The University Wits were:
• John Lyly (1554-1606) is best known far court comedies, generally for private theatres, but also wrote mythological and pastoral plays. Endimion & Euphues.
• George Peele (1558-96) began writing courtly mythological pastoral plays like Lyly's, but also wrote histories and biblical plays. The Arraignment of Paris.
• Robert Greene (1558-92), who founded romantic comedy, wrote plays which combined realistic native backgrounds with an atmosphere of romance, as well as comedies. The Honourable History of Friar Bacon & Friar Bungay.
• Thomas Lodge (1557-1625) tended toward euphustic prose romances. His Rosalynde provided Shakespeare with the basis for As You Like It. His most important work is his picaresque tale The Unfortunate Traveller, an early novel.
• Thomas Kyd (155~94), who founded romantic tragedy, wrote plays mingling the themes of love, conspiracy, murder and revenge. Adapted elements of Senecan drama to melodrama. His The Spanish Tragedy (1580s) is the first of the series of revenge plays which captured the Elizabethan and Jacobean imaginations. In these plays, violence and grossness comes to the stage. For example, in The Spanish Tragedy, one of the characters bites off his tongue and spits it on the stage.

The Importance of The Spanish Tragedy The Spanish Tragedy brings to the Elizabethan stage numerous elements picked up by later writers: • the revenge theme, • the play within a play, • madness real and faked, and • the Machievellian master of malicious plotting. This play was the first truly popular tragedy af the English stage and one of the most influential.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Although great dramatic advances had been made to this point, English tragedy still hadn't discovered a proper language --meter, style-- for dramatic delivery. What it needed was a blank verse eloquent and musical enough to add the effect of poetic conviction to rhetorical excitement. Neither had it turned to themes that came truly home to the Elizabethan imagination.
It was up to Christopher Marlowe to begin the process of accomplishing these feats. Although he died young, Marlowe's technique and invention set the stage for the greatest Renaissance playwright, William Shakespeare.
Marlowe is the most impressive dramatist among the University Wits. His first play was the two-part Tamburlaine the Great (1587-88), which was important because it introduced his style of blank verse, referred to as Marlowe's mighty line: the lines were quick-paced, not slow; they mirrored the emotional pitch of the plot.
This play is also important for introducing the Overreacher character into the drama, someone who is intoxicated with power and stretches a bit too far beyond his means and control, thus losing what he has gained. The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (1588-89) presents a Tamburlaine on the intellectual level: his ambition is for ultimate knowledge. This play has a specific Christian background (i.e., forbidden knowledge), and it retains many elements of the old morality plays (psychomachia, for example).
In The Jew of Malta (around 1590), Marlowe writes about a Machiavellian man, full of greed & cunning.
Although Marlowe wrote other plays, nothing measures up to Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus. It has been said by many that his early and violent death in 1593--he was stabbed in a tavern brawl, which apparently began in a dispute over the bill--cut short a career that had it continued might actually have rivalled Shakespeare's.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Despite the iconic status which time and literary history have bestowed upon him, William Shakespeare probably saw himself as just another professional man of the theatre. Entering the scene first as an actor and later concerned first and foremost with making a living as a playwright, it's a good bet that he never considered any sort of long-lasting literary fame. He began his career as a poet, and he wrote plays during 1590-1611.
Shakespeare never wrote one single type of play at a time; therefore, it is nearly impossible to divide his career chronologically. We rather arbitrarily break Shakespeare's drama up into several categories:

Apprentice Plays (they show his experimentation with different genres and forms) • the 3 Henry VI plays (1590-92) • Titus Andronicus (1593) • The Comedy of Errors (1590): the only one not written for the public theatre • Richard III (1592-93) • The Taming of the Shrew (ca. 1594) Romantic Comedies • The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594) • Love's Labours Lost (1594) • A Midsummer Night's Dream (1596) • The Merchant of Venice (1596-97) • Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99) • As You Like It (1599-1600) • Twelfth Night (1599-1600) History Plays • Richard II (1595-96) • Henry IV Parts I & II (1597-98) • Henry V (1598-99) • King John (1596-97) Tragedies • Romeo and Juliet (1595-96) • Julius Caesar (1599-1600) • Hamlet (1600-01) • Othello (1603-04) • King Lear (1605-06) • Macbeth (1606) • Antony and Cleopatra (1607) Problem Plays or Bitter Comedies • Troilus and Cressida (1602) • All's Well That Ends Well (1602-04) • Measure for Measure (1604) Political Plays • Coriolanus Romances • Pericles (uncertain date) • Cymbeline (1609) • The Winter's Tale (1610) • The Tempest (1611) After The Tempest --which has often been called Shakespeare's literal farewell to the stage-- the playwright retired to his home in Stratford, and for the last few years of his life he wrote nothing at all, although he did collaborate on a few plays with fellow writers Beaumont and Fletcher. In addition to his plays, Shakespeare was also a prolific lyricist --many of his dramas contain embedded songs-- and a versatile sonneteer.

Ben Jonson (1573-1637)
The playwright who over time has been the most compared and contrasted with Shakespeare is Ben Jonson, who is the one great example in English of the Renaissance Humanist turned dramatist and poet.
Jonson is very much a bridge figure, and his work reflects a changing historical and social perspective. His life spanned the height of the Elizabethan Renaissance but reached well into the reign of Charles I and into a very different cultural atmosphere from that which prevailed at the end of the 16th century. Jonson was writing when Spenser was working on The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare was in the thick of his career as a playwright, but he outlived both of them.
Jonson's work is varied in theme and content. He wrote humour comedies, intrigue comedies, and satiric comedies, all of which are marked by a characteristic blend of savagery and humour, of moral feeling and the grim relish of the monstrous absurdities of human nature. He also produced two tragedies on Roman themes.

Jonson's Key Works • Every Man in His Humour (1598), a comedy of intrigue • Cynthia's Revels (1600), a mythological satire • The Poetaster (1601), which chronicles Jonson's feud with fellow playwrights like Marston, which came to be known as the War of the Theatres. • Volpone, or the Fox (1605), a satiric comedy that is Jonson's own invention: it includes overreachers and scenes of gulling. • Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609), another "gulling" comedy which hinges on the fooling of one character by another. • The Alchemist (1610), another satire which focuses again on gulling. • Bartholomew Fair (1614) • Sejanus (1603), a Roman tragedy • Catiline (1611), a Roman tragedy

Like Shakespeare, Jonson did not confine his artistry to one form but dabbled in a variety of genres and styles. He was particularly fond, however, of the satiric and faintly fierce, even misanthropic, comedies like The Alchemist and Volpone, which are perhaps his two most characteristic plays.
Although to modern readers, Jonson's abilities are dimmed by those of Shakespeare, to his contemporaries he was every bit as inventive and creative and entertaining --in fact, his plays were in some ways more accessible to audiences because they were not as dense and multifaceted. His poetry spawned an entire school of young poets who emulated his style, known as the Sons of Ben.

Other Playwrights of Note

While Shakespeare and Jonson are the two most popular Elizabethan and early Jacobean playwrights, there were other important figures. These writers invented new genres and took the tragedy in new, bold and occasionally even perversely horrible directions:

• George Chapman (1559-1634) infused ethical and philosophical spirit into his plays. Generally known as a translator of Homer, but was also a writer of several comedies and five tragedies which show the Elizabethan interest in Stoic philosophy. Bussy D'Ambois (1610).
• John Marston (d. 1634) began as a writer of coarse and violent verse satires and liked exuberant language. He wrote melodramatic tragedies of love and revenge, as well as cynical comedies which combine shows of bitter human folly with wild farce. The Malcontent (1604).
• Thomas Heywood (1570-1641) wrote on historical & patriotic themes; had a kind of ribald comedy he worked into all of his plays. His is known for his domestic tragedies, plays which deal with tragic results of passion or lust in ordinary family situations, like A Woman Killed with Kindness (1627).
• Thomas Dekker (1570-1641) wrote a variety of plays and is particularly known for his city comedies, plays which focus exclusively on urban life, like The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599). Also wrote morality plays.
• Cyril Tourneur (1575-1626) played variations on the revenge theme, exploring the corrupting power of revenge. He is best known for those plays which focus on the spectacle of injured innocence turning monstrous in an attempt to avenge wrongs against it. The Revenger's Tragedy (1607).
• Thomas Middleton (1570-1627) dealt in his comedies with London life, using tricksters & dupes, but he also wrote tragedies. A Trick to Catch the Old One .
• Frances Beaumont (1584-1616) & John Fletcher (1579-1625). In their plays the Jacobean drama gives up any attempt to grapple with moral problems to indulge in the skilful professional exploitation of titillating, pathetic or emotionally extravagant situations. The Maid's Tragedy (1611).
• Philip Massinger (15B3-1640) is best known for his comedies. A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1633).
• John Ford (1586 1639) developed an interest in the psychology of frustrated and of illicit love, which produced a number of plays like ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore (1624). He was fond of distraught melancholy.
• James Shirley (1596-1666) was in full career as a dramatist when the closing of the theatres by the Puritans in 1642 put an end for the time being to the publicly acted drama. He wrote tragedies of Italianate intrigue and villainy or of dark passion, tragicomedies in the Fletcher tradition and comedies of manners which to some degree point forward to the comedy of the Restoration. The Cardinal (1641).

John Webster (1580-1625)

John Webster (1580-1625) is one of the first wave of playwrights to begin working before the closing of the theatres. Although he was a contemporary of Jonson, his work is almost diametrically opposed in content, focus and tone.
Like Ford, Shirley and Tourneur, Webster was fascinated by how ambition, covetousness and lust could motivate the typical villain. Sometimes there is such an emphasis on villainy --on its cruel aspects, its horrors-- that motive seems really unimportant and the interest of the plays lies in the virtuosity with which cruelty is manifested or the nobility with which a vicious character meets his doom when there is no alternative.
The White Devil (1610) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614) are his best plays. They are episodic in structure, allowing Webster to halt the movement of the plot while he exploits the terror ar pathos of the moment.

The Closing of the Theatres

In September of 1642 the puritan parliament by edict* forbade all stage plays and closed the theatres.
They rapidly fell into disrepair and neglect; at the Restoration in 1660, only the Red Bull was still intact, and soon it too was superseded by the new, indoor theatres with their proscenium arches, and French traditions in acting --in particular, women were for the first time seen as actors.
Few of the great writers for the theatre were still active when the theatres were closed. John Ford, and James Shirley were still alive, but only William Davenant carried the older traditions into the new period.

*The edict (2 September 1642) "Whereas the distressed estate of Ireland, steeped in her own blood, and the distressed estate of England, threatened with a cloud of blood by a civil war, call for all possible means to appease and avert the wrath of God, appearing in these judgements; among which, fasting and prayer, having been often tried to be very effectual, having been lately, and are still enjoined; and whereas public sports do not well agree with public calamities, nor public stage-plays with the seasons of humiliation, this being an exercise of sad and pious solemnity, and the other being lascivious mirth and levity: It is therefore thought fit, and ordained, by the Lords and Commons in this Parliament assembled, That, while these sad causes and set times of humiliation do continue, public stage plays shall cease, and be forborn, instead of which are recommended to the people of this land the profitable and seasonable considerations of repentance, reconciliation, and peace with God, which probably may produce outward peace and prosperity, and bring again times of joy and gladness to these nations".

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THE RENAISSANCE.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are the period of the European Renaissance or New Birth, one of the three or four great transforming movements of European history. This impulse by which the medieval society of scholasticism, feudalism, and chivalry was to be made over into what we call the modern world came first from Italy. Italy, like the rest of the Roman Empire, had been overrun and conquered in the fifth century by the barbarian Teutonic tribes, but the devastation had been less complete there than in the more northern lands, and there, even more, perhaps, than in France, the bulk of the people remained Latin in blood and in character. Hence it resulted that though the Middle Ages were in Italy a period of terrible political anarchy, yet Italian culture recovered far more rapidly than that of the northern nations, whom the Italians continued down to the modern period to regard contemptuously as still mere barbarians. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, further, the Italians had become intellectually one of the keenest races whom the world has ever known, though in morals they were sinking to almost incredible corruption. Already in fourteenth century Italy, therefore, the movement for a much fuller and freer intellectual life had begun, and we have seen that by Petrarch and Boccaccio something of this spirit was transmitted to Chaucer. In England Chaucer was followed by the medievalizing fifteenth century, but in Italy there was no such interruption.
The Renaissance movement first received definite direction from the rediscovery and study of Greek literature, which clearly revealed the unbounded possibilities of life to men who had been groping dissatisfied within the now narrow limits of medieval thought. Before Chaucer was dead the study of Greek, almost forgotten in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, had been renewed in Italy, and it received a still further impulse when at the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 Greek scholars and manuscripts were scattered to the West. It is hard for us to-day to realize the meaning for the men of the fifteenth century of this revived knowledge of the life and thought of the Greek race. The medieval Church, at first merely from the brutal necessities of a period of anarchy, had for the most part frowned on the joy and beauty of life, permitting pleasure, indeed, to the laity, but as a thing half dangerous, and declaring that there was perfect safety only within the walls of the nominally ascetic Church itself. The intellectual life, also, nearly restricted to priests and monks, had been formalized and conventionalized, until in spite of the keenness of its methods and the brilliancy of many of its scholars, it had become largely barren and unprofitable. The whole sphere of knowledge had been subjected to the mere authority of the Bible and of a few great minds of the past, such as Aristotle. All questions were argued and decided on the basis of their assertions, which had often become wholly inadequate and were often warped into grotesquely impossible interpretations and applications. Scientific investigation was almost entirely stifled, and progress was impossible. The whole field of religion and knowledge had become largely stagnant under an arbitrary despotism.
To the minds which were being paralyzed under this system, Greek literature brought the inspiration for which they longed. For it was the literature of a great and brilliant people who, far from attempting to make a divorce within man's nature, had aimed to 'see life steadily and see it whole,' who, giving free play to all their powers, had found in pleasure and beauty some of the most essential constructive forces, and had embodied beauty in works of literature and art where the significance of the whole spiritual life was more splendidly suggested than in the achievements of any, or almost any, other period. The enthusiasm, therefore, with which the Italians turned to the study of Greek literature and Greek life was boundless, and it constantly found fresh nourishment. Every year restored from forgotten recesses of libraries or from the ruins of Roman villas another Greek author or volume or work of art, and those which had never been lost were reinterpreted with much deeper insight. Aristotle was again vitalized, and Plato's noble idealistic philosophy was once more appreciatively studied and understood. In the light of this new revelation Latin literature, also, which had never ceased to be almost superstitiously studied, took on a far greater human significance. Vergil and Cicero were regarded no longer as mysterious prophets from a dimly imagined past, but as real men of flesh and blood, speaking out of experiences remote in time from the present but no less humanly real. The word 'human,' indeed, became the chosen motto of the Renaissance scholars; 'humanists' was the title which they applied to themselves as to men for whom 'nothing human was without appeal.' New creative enthusiasm, also, and magnificent actual new creation, followed the discovery of the old treasures, creation in literature and all the arts; culminating particularly in the early sixteenth century in the greatest group of painters whom any country has ever seen, Lionardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. In Italy, to be sure, the light of the Renaissance had its palpable shadow; in breaking away from the medieval bondage into the unhesitating enjoyment of all pleasure, the humanists too often overleaped all restraints and plunged into wild excess, often into mere sensuality. Hence the Italian Renaissance is commonly called Pagan, and hence when young English nobles began to travel to Italy to drink at the fountain head of the new inspiration moralists at home protested with much reason against the ideas and habits which many of them brought back with their new clothes and flaunted as evidences of intellectual emancipation. History, however, shows no great progressive movement unaccompanied by exaggerations and extravagances.
The Renaissance, penetrating northward, past first from Italy to France, but as early as the middle of the fifteenth century English students were frequenting the Italian universities. Soon the study of Greek was introduced into England, also, first at Oxford; and it was cultivated with such good results that when, early in the sixteenth century, the great Dutch student and reformer, Erasmus, unable through poverty to reach Italy, came to Oxford instead, he found there a group of accomplished scholars and gentlemen whose instruction and hospitable companionship aroused his unbounded delight. One member of this group was the fine-spirited John Colet, later Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, who was to bring new life into the secondary education of English boys by the establishment of St. Paul's Grammar School, based on the principle of kindness in place of the merciless severity of the traditional English system.
Great as was the stimulus of literary culture, it was only one of several influences that made up the Renaissance. While Greek was speaking so powerfully to the cultivated class, other forces were contributing to revolutionize life as a whole and all men's outlook upon it. The invention of printing, multiplying books in unlimited quantities where before there had been only a few manuscripts laboriously copied page by page, absolutely transformed all the processes of knowledge and almost of thought. Not much later began the vast expansion of the physical world through geographical exploration. Toward the end of the fifteenth century the Portuguese sailor, Vasco da Gama, finishing the work of Diaz, discovered the sea route to India around the Cape of Good Hope. A few years earlier Columbus had revealed the New World and virtually proved that the earth is round, a proof scientifically completed a generation after him when Magellan's ship actually circled the globe. Following close after Columbus, the Cabots, Italian-born, but naturalized Englishmen, discovered North America, and for a hundred years the rival ships of Spain, England, and Portugal filled the waters of the new West and the new East. In America handfuls of Spanish adventurers conquered great empires and despatched home annual treasure fleets of gold and silver, which the audacious English sea-captains, half explorers and half pirates, soon learned to intercept and plunder. The marvels which were constantly being revealed as actual facts seemed no less wonderful than the extravagances of medieval romance; and it was scarcely more than a matter of course that men should search in the new strange lands for the fountain of perpetual youth and the philosopher's stone. The supernatural beings and events of Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' could scarcely seem incredible to an age where incredulity was almost unknown because it was impossible to set a bound how far any one might reasonably believe. But the horizon of man's expanded knowledge was not to be limited even to his own earth. About the year 1540, the Polish Copernicus opened a still grander realm of speculation (not to be adequately possessed for several centuries) by the announcement that our world is not the center of the universe, but merely one of the satellites of its far-superior sun.
The whole of England was profoundly stirred by the Renaissance to a new and most energetic life, but not least was this true of the Court, where for a time literature was very largely to center. Since the old nobility had mostly perished in the wars, both Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor line, and his son, Henry VIII, adopted the policy of replacing it with able and wealthy men of the middle class, who would be strongly devoted to themselves. The court therefore became a brilliant and crowded circle of unscrupulous but unusually adroit statesmen, and a center of lavish entertainments and display. Under this new aristocracy the rigidity of the feudal system was relaxed, and life became somewhat easier for all the dependent classes. Modern comforts, too, were largely introduced, and with them the Italian arts; Tudor architecture, in particular, exhibited the originality and splendor of an energetic and self-confident age. Further, both Henries, though perhaps as essentially selfish and tyrannical as almost any of their predecessors, were politic and far-sighted, and they took a genuine pride in the prosperity of their kingdom. They encouraged trade; and in the peace which was their best gift the well-being of the nation as a whole increased by leaps and bounds.
THE REFORMATION.
Lastly, the literature of the sixteenth century and later was profoundly influenced by that religious result of the Renaissance which we know as the Reformation. While in Italy the new impulses were chiefly turned into secular and often corrupt channels, in the Teutonic lands they deeply stirred the Teutonic conscience. In 1517 Martin Luther, protesting against the unprincipled and flippant practices that were disgracing religion, began the breach between Catholicism, with its insistence on the supremacy of the Church, and Protestantism, asserting the independence of the individual judgment. In England Luther's action revived the spirit of Lollardism, which had nearly been crushed out, and in spite of a minority devoted to the older system, the nation as a whole began to move rapidly toward change. Advocates of radical revolution thrust themselves forward in large numbers, while cultured and thoughtful men, including the Oxford group, indulged the too ideal hope of a gradual and peaceful reform.
The actual course of the religious movement was determined largely by the personal and political projects of Henry VIII. Conservative at the outset, Henry even attacked Luther in a pamphlet, which won from the Pope for himself and his successors the title 'Defender of the Faith.' But when the Pope finally refused Henry's demand for the divorce from Katharine of Spain, which would make possible a marriage with Anne Boleyn, Henry angrily threw off the papal authority and declared himself the Supreme Head of the Church in England, thus establishing the separate English (Anglican, Episcopal) church. In the brief reign of Henry's son, Edward VI, the separation was made more decisive; under Edward's sister, Mary, Catholicism was restored; but the last of Henry's children, Elizabeth, coming to the throne in 1558, gave the final victory to the English communion. Under all these sovereigns (to complete our summary of the movement) the more radical Protestants, Puritans as they came to be called, were active in agitation, undeterred by frequent cruel persecution and largely influenced by the corresponding sects in Germany and by the Presbyterianism established by Calvin in Geneva and later by John Knox in Scotland. Elizabeth's skilful management long kept the majority of the Puritans within the English Church, where they formed an important element, working for simpler practices and introducing them in congregations which they controlled. But toward the end of the century and of Elizabeth's reign, feeling grew tenser, and groups of the Puritans, sometimes under persecution, definitely separated themselves from the State Church and established various sectarian bodies. Shortly after 1600, in particular, the Independents, or Congregationalists, founded in Holland the church which was soon to colonize New England. At home, under James I, the breach widened, until the nation was divided into two hostile camps, with results most radically decisive for literature. But for the present we must return to the early part of the sixteenth century.
SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS 'UTOPIA.'
Out of the confused and bitter strife of churches and parties, while the outcome was still uncertain, issued a great mass of controversial writing which does not belong to literature. A few works, however, more or less directly connected with the religious agitation, cannot be passed by.
One of the most attractive and finest spirits of the reign of Henry VIII was Sir Thomas More. A member of the Oxford group in its second generation, a close friend of Erasmus, his house a center of humanism, he became even more conspicuous in public life. A highly successful lawyer, he was rapidly advanced by Henry VIII in court and in national affairs, until on the fall of Cardinal Wolsey in 1529 he was appointed, much against his will, to the highest office open to a subject, that of Lord Chancellor (head of the judicial system). A devoted Catholic, he took a part which must have been revolting to himself in the torturing and burning of Protestants; but his absolute loyalty to conscience showed itself to better purpose when in the almost inevitable reverse of fortune he chose harsh imprisonment and death rather than to take the formal oath of allegiance to the king in opposition to the Pope. His quiet jests on the scaffold suggest the never-failing sense of humor which was one sign of the completeness and perfect poise of his character; while the hair-shirt which he wore throughout his life and the severe penances to which he subjected himself reveal strikingly how the expression of the deepest convictions of the best natures may be determined by inherited and outworn modes of thought.
More's most important work was his 'Utopia,' published in 1516. The name, which is Greek, means No-Place, and the book is one of the most famous of that series of attempts to outline an imaginary ideal condition of society which begins with Plato's 'Republic' and has continued to our own time.
'Utopia,' broadly considered, deals primarily with the question which is common to most of these books and in which both ancient Greece and Europe of the Renaissance took a special interest, namely the question of the relation of the State and the individual. It consists of two parts. In the first there is a vivid picture of the terrible evils which England was suffering through war, lawlessness, the wholesale and foolish application of the death penalty, the misery of the peasants, the absorption of the land by the rich, and the other distressing corruptions in Church and State. In the second part, in contrast to all this, a certain imaginary Raphael Hythlodaye describes the customs of Utopia, a remote island in the New World, to which chance has carried him. To some of the ideals thus set forth More can scarcely have expected the world ever to attain; and some of them will hardly appeal to the majority of readers of any period; but in the main he lays down an admirable program for human progress, no small part of which has been actually realized in the four centuries which have since elapsed.
The controlling purpose in the life of the Utopians is to secure both the welfare of the State and the full development of the individual under the ascendancy of his higher faculties. The State is democratic, socialistic, and communistic, and the will of the individual is subordinated to the advantage of all, but the real interests of each and all are recognized as identical. Every one is obliged to work, but not to overwork; six hours a day make the allotted period; and the rest of the time is free, but with plentiful provision of lectures and other aids for the education of mind and spirit. All the citizens are taught the fundamental art, that of agriculture, and in addition each has a particular trade or profession of his own. There is no surfeit, excess, or ostentation. Clothing is made for durability, and every one's garments are precisely like those of every one else, except that there is a difference between those of men and women and those of married and unmarried persons. The sick are carefully tended, but the victims of hopeless or painful disease are mercifully put to death if they so desire. Crime is naturally at a minimum, but those who persist in it are made slaves (not executed, for why should the State be deprived of their services?). Detesting war, the Utopians make a practice of hiring certain barbarians who, conveniently, are their neighbors, to do whatever fighting is necessary for their defense, and they win if possible, not by the revolting slaughter of pitched battles, but by the assassination of their enemies' generals. In especial, there is complete religious toleration, except for atheism, and except for those who urge their opinions with offensive violence. 'Utopia' was written and published in Latin; among the multitude of translations into many languages the earliest in English, in which it is often reprinted, is that of Ralph Robinson, made in 1551.
THE ENGLISH BIBLE AND BOOKS OF DEVOTION.
To this century of religious change belongs the greater part of the literary history of the English Bible and of the ritual books of the English Church. Since the suppression of the Wiclifite movement the circulation of the Bible in English had been forbidden, but growing Protestantism insistently revived the demand for it. The attitude of Henry VIII and his ministers was inconsistent and uncertain, reflecting their own changing points of view. In 1526 William Tyndale, a zealous Protestant controversialist then in exile in Germany, published an excellent English translation of the New Testament. Based on the proper authority, the Greek original, though with influence from Wiclif and from the Latin and German (Luther's) version, this has been directly or indirectly the starting-point for all subsequent English translations except those of the Catholics.
Ten years later Tyndale suffered martyrdom, but in 1535 Miles Coverdale, later bishop of Exeter, issued in Germany a translation of the whole Bible in a more gracious style than Tyndale's, and to this the king and the established clergy were now ready to give license and favor. Still two years later appeared a version compounded of those of Tyndale and Coverdale and called, from the fictitious name of its editor, the 'Matthew' Bible. In 1539, under the direction of Archbishop Cranmer, Coverdale issued a revised edition, officially authorized for use in churches; its version of the Psalms still stands as the Psalter of the English Church. In 1560 English Puritan refugees at Geneva put forth the 'Geneva Bible,' especially accurate as a translation, which long continued the accepted version for private use among all parties and for all purposes among the Puritans, in both Old and New England. Eight years later, under Archbishop Parker, there was issued in large volume form and for use in churches the 'Bishops' Bible,' so named because the majority of its thirteen editors were bishops. This completes the list of important translations down to those of 1611 and 1881, of which we shall speak in the proper place. The Book of Common Prayer, now used in the English Church coordinately with Bible and Psalter, took shape out of previous primers of private devotion, litanies, and hymns, mainly as the work of Archbishop Cranmer during the reign of Edward VI.
Of the influence of these translations of the Bible on English literature it is impossible to speak too strongly. They rendered the whole nation familiar for centuries with one of the grandest and most varied of all collections of books, which was adopted with ardent patriotic enthusiasm as one of the chief national possessions, and which has served as an unfailing storehouse of poetic and dramatic allusions for all later writers. Modern English literature as a whole is permeated and enriched to an incalculable degree with the substance and spirit of the English Bible.
WYATT AND SURREY AND THE NEW POETRY.
In the literature of fine art also the new beginning was made during the reign of Henry VIII. This was through the introduction by Sir Thomas Wyatt of the Italian fashion of lyric poetry. Wyatt, a man of gentle birth, entered Cambridge at the age of twelve and received his degree of M. A. seven years later. His mature life was that of a courtier to whom the king's favor brought high appointments, with such vicissitudes of fortune, including occasional imprisonments, as formed at that time a common part of the courtier's lot. Wyatt, however, was not a merely worldly person, but a Protestant seemingly of high and somewhat severe moral character. He died in 1542 at the age of thirty-nine of a fever caught as he was hastening, at the king's command, to meet and welcome the Spanish ambassador.
On one of his missions to the Continent, Wyatt, like Chaucer, had visited Italy. Impressed with the beauty of Italian verse and the contrasting rudeness of that of contemporary England, he determined to remodel the latter in the style of the former. Here a brief historical retrospect is necessary. The Italian poetry of the sixteenth century had itself been originally an imitation, namely of the poetry of Provence in Southern France. There, in the twelfth century, under a delightful climate and in a region of enchanting beauty, had arisen a luxurious civilization whose poets, the troubadours, many of them men of noble birth, had carried to the furthest extreme the woman-worship of medieval chivalry and had enshrined it in lyric poetry of superb and varied sweetness and beauty. In this highly conventionalized poetry the lover is forever sighing for his lady, a correspondingly obdurate being whose favor is to be won only by years of the most unqualified and unreasoning devotion. From Provence, Italy had taken up the style, and among the other forms for its expression, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had devised the poem of a single fourteen-line stanza which we call the sonnet. The whole movement had found its great master in Petrarch, who, in hundreds of poems, mostly sonnets, of perfect beauty, had sung the praises and cruelty of his nearly imaginary Laura.
It was this highly artificial but very beautiful poetic fashion which Wyatt deliberately set about to introduce into England. The nature and success of his innovation can be summarized in a few definite statements.

1. Imitating Petrarch, Wyatt nearly limits himself as regards substance to the treatment of the artificial love-theme, lamenting the unkindness of ladies who very probably never existed and whose favor in any case he probably regarded very lightly; yet even so, he often strikes a manly English note of independence, declaring that if the lady continues obstinate he will not die for her love.
2. Historically much the most important feature of Wyatt's experiment was the introduction of the sonnet, a very substantial service indeed; for not only did this form, like the love-theme, become by far the most popular one among English lyric poets of the next two generations, setting a fashion which was carried to an astonishing excess; but it is the only artificial form of foreign origin which has ever been really adopted and naturalized in English, and it still remains the best instrument for the terse expression of a single poetic thought. Wyatt, it should be observed, generally departs from the Petrarchan rime-scheme, on the whole unfortunately, by substituting a third quatrain for the first four lines of the sestet. That is, while Petrarch's rime-arrangement is either a b b a a b b a c d c d c d or a b b a a b b a c d e c d e Wyatt's is usually a b b a a b b a c d d c e e.
3. In his attempted reformation of English metrical irregularity Wyatt, in his sonnets, shows only the uncertain hand of a beginner. He generally secures an equal number of syllables in each line, but he often merely counts them off on his fingers, wrenching the accents all awry, and often violently forcing the rimes as well. In his songs, however, which are much more numerous than the sonnets, he attains delightful fluency and melody. His 'My Lute, Awake,' and 'Forget Not Yet' are still counted among the notable English lyrics.
4. A particular and characteristic part of the conventional Italian lyric apparatus which Wyatt transplanted was the 'conceit.' A conceit may be defined as an exaggerated figure of speech or play on words in which intellectual cleverness figures at least as largely as real emotion and which is often dragged out to extremely complicated lengths of literal application. An example is Wyatt's declaration (after Petrarch) that his love, living in his heart, advances to his face and there encamps, displaying his banner (which merely means that the lover blushes with his emotion). In introducing the conceit Wyatt fathered the most conspicuous of the superficial general features which were to dominate English poetry for a century to come.
5. Still another, minor, innovation of Wyatt was the introduction into English verse of the Horatian 'satire' (moral poem, reflecting on current follies) in the form of three metrical letters to friends. In these the meter is the terza rima of Dante.

Wyatt's work was continued by his poetical disciple and successor, Henry Howard, who, as son of the Duke of Norfolk, held the courtesy title of Earl of Surrey. A brilliant though wilful representative of Tudor chivalry, and distinguished in war, Surrey seems to have occupied at Court almost the same commanding position as Sir Philip Sidney in the following generation. His career was cut short in tragically ironical fashion at the age of thirty by the plots of his enemies and the dying bloodthirstiness of King Henry, which together led to his execution on a trumped-up charge of treason. It was only one of countless brutal court crimes, but it seems the more hateful because if the king had died a single day earlier Surrey could have been saved.
Surrey's services to poetry were two:

1. He improved on the versification of Wyatt's sonnets, securing fluency and smoothness.
2. In a translation of two books of Vergil's 'Aneid' he introduced, from the Italian, pentameter blank verse, which was destined thenceforth to be the meter of English poetic drama and of much of the greatest English non-dramatic poetry. Further, though his poems are less numerous than those of Wyatt, his range of subjects is somewhat broader, including some appreciative treatment of external Nature. He seems, however, somewhat less sincere than his teacher. In his sonnets he abandoned the form followed by Wyatt and adopted (still from the Italian) the one which was subsequently used by Shakespeare, consisting of three independent quatrains followed, as with Wyatt, by a couplet which sums up the thought with epigrammatic force, thus: a b a b c d c d e f e f g g.

Wyatt and Surrey set a fashion at Court; for some years it seems to have been an almost necessary accomplishment for every young noble to turn off love poems after Italian and French models; for France too had now taken up the fashion. These poems were generally and naturally regarded as the property of the Court and of the gentry, and circulated at first only in manuscript among the author's friends; but the general public became curious about them, and in 1557 one of the publishers of the day, Richard Tottel, securing a number of those of Wyatt, Surrey, and a few other noble or gentle authors, published them in a little volume, which is known as
'Tottel's Miscellany.' Coming as it does in the year before the accession of Queen Elizabeth, at the end of the comparatively barren reigns of Edward and Mary, this book is taken by common consent as marking the beginning of the literature of the Elizabethan period. It was the premature predecessor, also, of a number of such anthologies which were published during the latter half of Elizabeth's reign.
THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD.
The earlier half of Elizabeth's reign, also, though not lacking in literary effort, produced no work of permanent importance. After the religious convulsions of half a century time was required for the development of the internal quiet and confidence from which a great literature could spring. At length, however, the hour grew ripe and there came the greatest outburst of creative energy in the whole history of English literature. Under Elizabeth's wise guidance the prosperity and enthusiasm of the nation had risen to the highest pitch, and London in particular was overflowing with vigorous life. A special stimulus of the most intense kind came from the struggle with Spain. After a generation of half-piratical depredations by the English seadogs against the Spanish treasure fleets and the Spanish settlements in America, King Philip, exasperated beyond all patience and urged on by a bigot's zeal for the Catholic Church, began deliberately to prepare the Great Armada, which was to crush at one blow the insolence, the independence, and the religion of England. There followed several long years of breathless suspense; then in 1588 the Armada sailed and was utterly overwhelmed in one of the most complete disasters of the world's history. Thereupon the released energy of England broke out exultantly into still more impetuous achievement in almost every line of activity. The great literary period is taken by common consent to begin with the publication of Spenser's 'Shepherd's Calendar' in 1579, and to end in some sense at the death of Elizabeth in 1603, though in the drama, at least, it really continues many years longer.
Several general characteristics of Elizabethan literature and writers should be indicated at the outset.

1. The period has the great variety of almost unlimited creative force; it includes works of many kinds in both verse and prose, and ranges in spirit from the loftiest Platonic idealism or the most delightful romance to the level of very repulsive realism.
2. It was mainly dominated, however, by the spirit of romance.
3. It was full also of the spirit of dramatic action, as befitted an age whose restless enterprise was eagerly extending itself to every quarter of the globe.
4. In style it often exhibits romantic luxuriance, which sometimes takes the form of elaborate affectations of which the favorite 'conceit' is only the most apparent.
5. It was in part a period of experimentation, when the proper material and limits of literary forms were being determined, oftentimes by means of false starts and grandiose failures. In particular, many efforts were made to give prolonged poetical treatment to many subjects essentially prosaic, for example to systems of theological or scientific thought, or to the geography of all England.
6. It continued to be largely influenced by the literature of Italy, and to a less degree by those of France and Spain.
7. The literary spirit was all-pervasive, and the authors were men (not yet women) of almost every class, from distinguished courtiers, like Ralegh and Sidney, to the company of hack writers, who starved in garrets and hung about the outskirts of the bustling taverns.

PROSE FICTION.
The period saw the beginning, among other things, of English prose fiction of something like the later modern type. First appeared a series of collections of short tales chiefly translated from Italian authors, to which tales the Italian name 'novella' (novel) was applied. Most of the separate tales are crude or amateurish and have only historical interest, though as a class they furnished the plots for many Elizabethan dramas, including several of Shakespeare's. The most important collection was Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure,' in 1566. The earliest original, or partly original, English prose fictions to appear were handbooks of morals and manners in story form, and here the beginning was made by John Lyly, who is also of some importance in the history of the Elizabethan drama. In 1578 Lyly, at the age of twenty-five, came from Oxford to London, full of the enthusiasm of Renaissance learning, and evidently determined to fix himself as a new and dazzling star in the literary sky. In this ambition he achieved a remarkable and immediate success, by the publication of a little book entitled 'Euphues and His Anatomie of Wit.' 'Euphues' means 'the well-bred man,' and though there is a slight action, the work is mainly a series of moralizing disquisitions (mostly rearranged from Sir Thomas North's translation of 'The Dial of Princes' of the Spaniard Guevara) on love, religion, and conduct. Most influential, however, for the time-being, was Lyly's style, which is the most conspicuous English example of the later Renaissance craze, then rampant throughout Western Europe, for refining and beautifying the art of prose expression in a mincingly affected fashion. Witty, clever, and sparkling at all costs, Lyly takes especial pains to balance his sentences and clauses antithetically, phrase against phrase and often word against word, sometimes emphasizing the balance also by an exaggerated use of alliteration and assonance. A representative sentence is this: 'Although there be none so ignorant that doth not know, neither any so impudent that will not confesse, friendship to be the jewell of humaine joye; yet whosoever shall see this amitie grounded upon a little affection, will soone conjecture that it shall be dissolved upon a light occasion.' Others of Lyly's affectations are rhetorical questions, hosts of allusions to classical history, and literature, and an unfailing succession of similes from all the recondite knowledge that he can command, especially from the fantastic collection of fables which, coming down through the Middle Ages from the Roman writer Pliny, went at that time by the name of natural history and which we have already encountered in the medieval Bestiaries. Preposterous by any reasonable standard, Lyly's style, 'Euphuism,' precisely hit the Court taste of his age and became for a decade its most approved conversational dialect.
In literature the imitations of 'Euphues' which flourished for a while gave way to a series of romances inaugurated by the 'Arcadia' of Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney's brilliant position for a few years as the noblest representative of chivalrous ideals in the intriguing Court of Elizabeth is a matter of common fame, as is his death in 1586 at the age of thirty-two during the siege of Zutphen in Holland. He wrote 'Arcadia' for the amusement of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, during a period of enforced retirement beginning in 1580, but the book was not published until ten years later. It is a pastoral romance, in the general style of Italian and Spanish romances of the earlier part of the century. The pastoral is the most artificial literary form in modern fiction. It may be said to have begun in the third century B. C. with the perfectly sincere poems of the Greek Theocritus, who gives genuine expression to the life of actual Sicilian shepherds. But with successive Latin, Medieval, and Renaissance writers in verse and prose the country characters and setting had become mere disguises, sometimes allegorical, for the expression of the very far from simple sentiments of the upper classes, and sometimes for their partly genuine longing, the outgrowth of sophisticated weariness and ennui, for rural naturalness. Sidney's very complicated tale of adventures in love and war, much longer than any of its successors, is by no means free from artificiality, but it finely mirrors his own knightly spirit and remains a permanent English classic. Among his followers were some of the better hack-writers of the time, who were also among the minor dramatists and poets, especially Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge. Lodge's 'Rosalynde,' also much influenced by Lyly, is in itself a pretty story and is noteworthy as the original of Shakespeare's 'As You Like It.'
Lastly, in the concluding decade of the sixteenth century, came a series of realistic stories depicting chiefly, in more or less farcical spirit, the life of the poorer classes. They belonged mostly to that class of realistic fiction which is called picaresque, from the Spanish word 'picaro,' a rogue, because it began in Spain with the 'Lazarillo de Tormes' of Diego de Mendoza, in 1553, and because its heroes are knavish serving-boys or similar characters whose unprincipled tricks and exploits formed the substance of the stories. In Elizabethan England it produced nothing of individual note.
EDMUND SPENSER, 1552-1599.
The first really commanding figure in the Elizabethan period, and one of the chief of all English poets, is Edmund Spenser. [Footnote: His name should never be spelled with a c. ] Born in London in 1552, the son of a clothmaker, Spenser past from the newly established Merchant Taylors' school to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar, or poor student, and during the customary seven years of residence took the degrees of B. A. and, in 1576, of M. A. At Cambridge he assimilated two of the controlling forces of his life, the moderate Puritanism of his college and Platonic idealism. Next, after a year or two with his kinspeople in Lancashire, in the North of England, he came to London, hoping through literature to win high political place, and attached himself to the household of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's worthless favorite. Together with Sidney, who was Leicester's nephew, he was for a while a member of a little group of students who called themselves 'The Areopagus' and who, like occasional other experimenters of the later Renaissance period, attempted to make over English versification by substituting for rime and accentual meter the Greek and Latin system based on exact quantity of syllables. Spenser, however, soon outgrew this folly and in 1579 published the collection of poems which, as we have already said, is commonly taken as marking the beginning of the great Elizabethan literary period, namely 'The Shepherd's Calendar.' This is a series of pastoral pieces (eclogues, Spenser calls them, by the classical name) twelve in number, artificially assigned one to each month in the year. The subjects are various--the conventionalized love of the poet for a certain Rosalind; current religious controversies in allegory; moral questions; the state of poetry in England; and the praises of Queen Elizabeth, whose almost incredible vanity exacted the most fulsome flattery from every writer who hoped to win a name at her court. The significance of 'The Shepherd's Calendar' lies partly in its genuine feeling for external Nature, which contrasts strongly with the hollow conventional phrases of the poetry of the previous decade, and especially in the vigor, the originality, and, in some of the eclogues, the beauty, of the language and of the varied verse. It was at once evident that here a real poet had appeared. An interesting innovation, diversely judged at the time and since, was Spenser's deliberate employment of rustic and archaic words, especially of the Northern dialect, which he introduced partly because of their appropriateness to the imaginary characters, partly for the sake of freshness of expression. They, like other features of the work, point forward to 'The Faerie Queene.'
In the uncertainties of court intrigue literary success did not gain for Spenser the political rewards which he was seeking, and he was obliged to content himself, the next year, with an appointment, which he viewed as substantially a sentence of exile, as secretary to Lord Grey, the governor of Ireland. In Ireland, therefore, the remaining twenty years of Spenser's short life were for the most part spent, amid distressing scenes of English oppression and chronic insurrection among the native Irish. After various activities during several years Spenser secured a permanent home in Kilcolman, a fortified tower and estate in the southern part of the island, where the romantic scenery furnished fit environment for a poet's imagination. And Spenser, able all his life to take refuge in his art from the crass realities of life, now produced many poems, some of them short, but among the others the immortal 'Faerie Queene.' The first three books of this, his crowning achievement, Spenser, under enthusiastic encouragement from Ralegh, brought to London and published in 1590. The dedication is to Queen Elizabeth, to whom, indeed, as its heroine, the poem pays perhaps the most splendid compliment ever offered to any human being in verse. She responded with an uncertain pension of L50 (equivalent to perhaps $1500 at the present time), but not with the gift of political preferment which was still Spenser's hope; and in some bitterness of spirit he retired to Ireland, where in satirical poems he proceeded to attack the vanity of the world and the fickleness of men. His courtship and, in 1594, his marriage produced his sonnet sequence, called 'Amoretti' (Italian for 'Love-poems'), and his 'Epithalamium,' the most magnificent of marriage hymns in English and probably in world-literature; though his 'Prothalamium,' in honor of the marriage of two noble sisters, is a near rival to it.
Spenser, a zealous Protestant as well as a fine-spirited idealist, was in entire sympathy with Lord Grey's policy of stern repression of the Catholic Irish, to whom, therefore, he must have appeared merely as one of the hated crew of their pitiless tyrants. In 1598 he was appointed sheriff of the county of Cork; but a rebellion which broke out proved too strong for him, and he and his family barely escaped from the sack and destruction of his tower. He was sent with despatches to the English Court and died in London in January, 1599, no doubt in part as a result of the hardships that he had suffered. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' is not only one of the longest but one of the greatest of English poems; it is also very characteristically Elizabethan. To deal with so delicate a thing by the method of mechanical analysis seems scarcely less than profanation, but accurate criticism can proceed in no other way.
1. Sources and Plan. Few poems more clearly illustrate the variety of influences from which most great literary works result. In many respects the most direct source was the body of Italian romances of chivalry, especially the 'Orlando Furioso' of Ariosto, which was written in the early part of the sixteenth century. These romances, in turn, combine the personages of the medieval French epics of Charlemagne with something of the spirit of Arthurian romance and with a Renaissance atmosphere of magic and of rich fantastic beauty. Spenser borrows and absorbs all these things and moreover he imitates Ariosto closely, often merely translating whole passages from his work. But this use of the Italian romances, further, carries with it a large employment of characters, incidents, and imagery from classical mythology and literature, among other things the elaborated similes of the classical epics. Spenser himself is directly influenced, also, by the medieval romances. Most important of all, all these elements are shaped to the purpose of the poem by Spenser's high moral aim, which in turn springs largely from his Platonic idealism.
What the plan of the poem is Spenser explains in a prefatory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. The whole is a vast epic allegory, aiming, in the first place, to portray the virtues which make up the character of a perfect knight; an ideal embodiment, seen through Renaissance conceptions, of the best in the chivalrous system which in Spenser's time had passed away, but to which some choice spirits still looked back with regretful admiration. As Spenser intended, twelve moral virtues of the individual character, such as Holiness and Temperance, were to be presented, each personified in the hero of one of twelve Books; and the crowning virtue, which Spenser, in Renaissance terms, called Magnificence, and which may be interpreted as Magnanimity, was to figure as Prince (King) Arthur, nominally the central hero of the whole poem, appearing and disappearing at frequent intervals. Spenser states in his prefatory letter that if he shall carry this first projected labor to a successful end he may continue it in still twelve other Books, similarly allegorizing twelve political virtues. The allegorical form, we should hardly need to be reminded, is another heritage from medieval literature, but the effort to shape a perfect character, completely equipped to serve the State, was characteristically of the Platonizing Renaissance. That the reader may never be in danger of forgetting his moral aim, Spenser fills the poem with moral observations, frequently setting them as guides at the beginning of the cantos.
2. The Allegory. Lack of Unity. So complex and vast a plan could scarcely have been worked out by any human genius in a perfect and clear unity, and besides this, Spenser, with all his high endowments, was decidedly weak in constructive skill. The allegory, at the outset, even in Spenser's own statement, is confused and hazy. For beyond the primary moral interpretation, Spenser applies it in various secondary or parallel ways. In the widest sense, the entire struggle between the good and evil characters is to be taken as figuring forth the warfare both in the individual soul and in the world at large between Righteousness and Sin; and in somewhat narrower senses, between Protestantism and Catholicism, and between England and Spain. In some places, also, it represents other events and aspects of European politics. Many of the single persons of the story, entering into each of these overlapping interpretations, bear double or triple roles. Gloriana, the Fairy Queen, is abstractly Glory, but humanly she is Queen Elizabeth; and from other points of view Elizabeth is identified with several of the lesser heroines. So likewise the witch Duessa is both Papal Falsehood and Mary Queen of Scots; Prince Arthur both Magnificence and (with sorry inappropriateness) the Earl of Leicester; and others of the characters stand with more or less consistency for such actual persons as Philip II of Spain, Henry IV of France, and Spenser's chief, Lord Grey. In fact, in Renaissance spirit, and following Sidney's 'Defense of Poesie,' Spenser attempts to harmonize history, philosophy, ethics, and politics, subordinating them all to the art of poetry. The plan is grand but impracticable, and except for the original moral interpretation, to which in the earlier books the incidents are skilfully adapted, it is fruitless as one reads to undertake to follow the allegories. Many readers are able, no doubt, merely to disregard them, but there are others, like Lowell, to whom the moral, 'when they come suddenly upon it, gives a shock of unpleasant surprise, as when in eating strawberries one's teeth encounter grit.'
The same lack of unity pervades the external story. The first Book begins abruptly, in the middle; and for clearness' sake Spenser had been obliged to explain in his prefatory letter that the real commencement must be supposed to be a scene like those of Arthurian romance, at the court and annual feast of the Fairy Queen, where twelve adventures had been assigned to as many knights. Spenser strangely planned to narrate this beginning of the whole in his final Book, but even if it had been properly placed at the outset it would have served only as a loose enveloping action for a series of stories essentially as distinct as those in Malory. More serious, perhaps, is the lack of unity within the single books. Spenser's genius was never for strongly condensed narrative, and following his Italian originals, though with less firmness, he wove his story as a tangled web of intermingled adventures, with almost endless elaboration and digression. Incident after incident is broken off and later resumed and episode after episode is introduced, until the reader almost abandons any effort to trace the main design. A part of the confusion is due to the mechanical plan. Each Book consists of twelve cantos (of from forty to ninety stanzas each) and oftentimes Spenser has difficulty in filling out the scheme. No one, certainly, can regret that he actually completed only a quarter of his projected work. In the six existing Books he has given almost exhaustive expression to a richly creative imagination, and additional prolongation would have done little but to repeat.
Still further, the characteristic Renaissance lack of certainty as to the proper materials for poetry is sometimes responsible for a rudely inharmonious element in the otherwise delightful romantic atmosphere. For a single illustration, the description of the House of Alma in Book II, Canto Nine, is a tediously literal medieval allegory of the Soul and Body; and occasional realistic details here and there in the poem at large are merely repellent to more modern taste.
3. The Lack of Dramatic Reality. A romantic allegory like 'The Faerie Queene' does not aim at intense lifelikeness--a certain remoteness from the actual is one of its chief attractions. But sometimes in Spenser's poem the reader feels too wide a divorce from reality. Part of this fault is ascribable to the use of magic, to which there is repeated but inconsistent resort, especially, as in the medieval romances, for the protection of the good characters. Oftentimes, indeed, by the persistent loading of the dice against the villains and scapegoats, the reader's sympathy is half aroused in their behalf. Thus in the fight of the Red Cross Knight with his special enemy, the dragon, where, of course, the Knight must be victorious, it is evident that without the author's help the dragon is incomparably the stronger. Once, swooping down on the Knight, he seizes him in his talons (whose least touch was elsewhere said to be fatal) and bears him aloft into the air. The valor of the Knight compels him to relax his hold, but instead of merely dropping the Knight to certain death, he carefully flies back to earth and sets him down in safety. More definite regard to the actual laws of life would have given the poem greater firmness without the sacrifice of any of its charm.
4. The Romantic Beauty. General Atmosphere and Description. Critical sincerity has required us to dwell thus long on the defects of the poem; but once recognized we should dismiss them altogether from mind and turn attention to the far more important beauties. The great qualities of 'The Faerie Queene' are suggested by the title, 'The Poets' Poet,' which Charles Lamb, with happy inspiration, applied to Spenser. Most of all are we indebted to Spenser's high idealism. No poem in the world is nobler than 'The Faerie Queene' in atmosphere and entire effect. Spenser himself is always the perfect gentleman of his own imagination, and in his company we are secure from the intrusion of anything morally base or mean. But in him, also, moral beauty is in full harmony with the beauty of art and the senses. Spenser was a Puritan, but a Puritan of the earlier English Renaissance, to whom the foes of righteousness were also the foes of external loveliness. Of the three fierce Saracen brother-knights who repeatedly appear in the service of Evil, two are Sansloy, the enemy of law, and Sansfoy, the enemy of religion, but the third is Sansjoy, enemy of pleasure. And of external beauty there has never been a more gifted lover than Spenser. We often feel, with Lowell, that 'he is the pure sense of the beautiful incarnated.' The poem is a romantically luxuriant wilderness of dreamily or languorously delightful visions, often rich with all the harmonies of form and motion and color and sound. As Lowell says, 'The true use of Spenser is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them.' His landscapes, to speak of one particular feature, are usually of a rather vague, often of a vast nature, as suits the unreality of his poetic world, and usually, since Spenser was not a minute observer, follow the conventions of Renaissance literature. They are commonly great plains, wide and gloomy forests (where the trees of many climates often grow together in impossible harmony), cool caves--in general, lonely, quiet, or soothing scenes, but all unquestionable portions of a delightful fairyland. To him, it should be added, as to most men before modern Science had subdued the world to human uses, the sublime aspects of Nature were mainly dreadful; the ocean, for example, seemed to him a raging 'waste of waters, wide and deep,' a mysterious and insatiate devourer of the lives of men.
To the beauty of Spenser's imagination, ideal and sensuous, corresponds his magnificent command of rhythm and of sound. As a verbal melodist, especially a melodist of sweetness and of stately grace, and as a harmonist of prolonged and complex cadences, he is unsurpassable. But he has full command of his rhythm according to the subject, and can range from the most delicate suggestion of airy beauty to the roar of the tempest or the strident energy of battle. In vocabulary and phraseology his fluency appears inexhaustible. Here, as in 'The Shepherd's Calendar,' he deliberately introduces, especially from Chaucer, obsolete words and forms, such as the inflectional ending in -en which distinctly contribute to his romantic effect. His constant use of alliteration is very skilful; the frequency of the alliteration on w is conspicuous but apparently accidental.
5. The Spenserian Stanza. For the external medium of all this beauty Spenser, modifying the ottava rima of Ariosto (a stanza which rimes abababcc), invented the stanza which bears his own name and which is the only artificial stanza of English origin that has ever passed into currency. [Footnote: Note that this is not inconsistent with what is said above, of the sonnet.] The rime-scheme is ababbcbcc and in the last line the iambic pentameter gives place to an Alexandrine (an iambic hexameter). Whether or not any stanza form is as well adapted as blank verse or the rimed couplet for prolonged narrative is an interesting question, but there can be no doubt that Spenser's stanza, firmly unified, in spite of its length, by its central couplet and by the finality of the last line, is a discovery of genius, and that the Alexandrine, 'forever feeling for the next stanza,' does much to bind the stanzas together. It has been adopted in no small number of the greatest subsequent English poems, including such various ones as Burns' 'Cotter's Saturday Night,' Byron's 'Childe Harold,' Keats' 'Eve of St. Agnes,' and Shelley's 'Adonais.'
In general style and spirit, it should be added, Spenser has been one of the most powerful influences on all succeeding English romantic poetry. Two further sentences of Lowell well summarize his whole general achievement:

'His great merit is in the ideal treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a ray of enthusiasm. He is a standing protest against the tyranny of the Commonplace, and sows the seeds of a noble discontent with prosaic views of life and the dull uses to which it may be put.'

ELIZABETHAN LYRIC POETRY. 'The Faerie Queene' is the only long Elizabethan poem of the very highest rank, but Spenser, as we have seen, is almost equally conspicuous as a lyric poet. In that respect he was one among a throng of melodists who made the Elizabethan age in many respects the greatest lyric period in the history of English or perhaps of any literature. Still grander, to be sure, by the nature of the two forms, was the Elizabethan achievement in the drama, which we shall consider in the next chapter; but the lyrics have the advantage in sheer delightfulness and, of course, in rapid and direct appeal.
The zest for lyric poetry somewhat artificially inaugurated at Court by Wyatt and Surrey seems to have largely subsided, like any other fad, after some years, but it vigorously revived, in much more genuine fashion, with the taste for other imaginative forms of literature, in the last two decades of Elizabeth's reign. It revived, too, not only among the courtiers but among all classes; in no other form of literature was the diversity of authors so marked; almost every writer of the period who was not purely a man of prose seems to have been gifted with the lyric power.
The qualities which especially distinguish the Elizabethan lyrics are fluency, sweetness, melody, and an enthusiastic joy in life, all spontaneous, direct, and exquisite. Uniting the genuineness of the popular ballad with the finer sense of conscious artistic poetry, these poems possess a charm different, though in an only half definable way, from that of any other lyrics. In subjects they display the usual lyric variety. There are songs of delight in Nature; a multitude of love poems of all moods; many pastorals, in which, generally, the pastoral conventions sit lightly on the genuine poetical feeling; occasional patriotic outbursts; and some reflective and religious poems. In stanza structure the number of forms is unusually great, but in most cases stanzas are internally varied and have a large admixture of short, ringing or musing, lines. The lyrics were published sometimes in collections by single authors, sometimes in the series of anthologies which succeeded to Tottel's 'Miscellany.' Some of these anthologies were books of songs with the accompanying music; for music, brought with all the other cultural influences from Italy and France, was now enthusiastically cultivated, and the soft melody of many of the best Elizabethan lyrics is that of accomplished composers. Many of the lyrics, again, are included as songs in the dramas of the time; and Shakespeare's comedies show him nearly as preeminent among the lyric poets as among the playwrights.
Some of the finest of the lyrics are anonymous. Among the best of the known poets are these: George Gascoigne (about 1530-1577), a courtier and soldier, who bridges the gap between Surrey and Sidney; Sir Edward Dyer (about 1545-1607), a scholar and statesman, author of one perfect lyric, 'My mind to me a kingdom is'; John Lyly (1553-1606), the Euphuist and dramatist; Nicholas Breton (about 1545 to about 1626), a prolific writer in verse and prose and one of the most successful poets of the pastoral style; Robert Southwell (about 1562-1595), a Jesuit intriguer of ardent piety, finally imprisoned, tortured, and executed as a traitor; George Peele (1558 to about 1598), the dramatist; Thomas Lodge (about 1558-1625), poet, novelist, and physician; Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), the dramatist; Thomas Nash (1567-1601), one of the most prolific Elizabethan hack writers; Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), scholar and critic, member in his later years of the royal household of James I; Barnabe Barnes (about 1569-1609); Richard Barnfield (1574-1627); Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618), courtier, statesman, explorer, and scholar; Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618), linguist and merchant, known for his translation of the long religious poems of the Frenchman Du Bartas, through which he exercised an influence on Milton; Francis Davison (about 1575 to about 1619), son of a counsellor of Queen Elizabeth, a lawyer; and Thomas Dekker (about 1570 to about 1640), a ne'er-do-weel dramatist and hack-writer of irrepressible and delightful good spirits.
THE SONNETS.
In the last decade, especially, of the century, no other lyric form compared in popularity with the sonnet. Here England was still following in the footsteps of Italy and France; it has been estimated that in the course of the century over three hundred thousand sonnets were written in Western Europe. In England as elsewhere most of these poems were inevitably of mediocre quality and imitative in substance, ringing the changes with wearisome iteration on a minimum of ideas, often with the most extravagant use of conceits. Petrarch's example was still commonly followed; the sonnets were generally composed in sequences (cycles) of a hundred or more, addressed to the poet's more or less imaginary cruel lady, though the note of manly independence introduced by Wyatt is frequent. First of the important English sequences is the 'Astrophel and Stella' of Sir Philip Sidney, written about 1580, published in 1591. 'Astrophel' is a fanciful half-Greek anagram for the poet's own name, and Stella (Star) designates Lady Penelope Devereux, who at about this time married Lord Rich. The sequence may very reasonably be interpreted as an expression of Platonic idealism, though it is sometimes taken in a sense less consistent with Sidney's high reputation. Of Spenser's 'Amoretti' we have already spoken. By far the finest of all the sonnets are the best ones (a considerable part) of Shakespeare's one hundred and fifty-four, which were not published until 1609 but may have been mostly written before 1600. Their interpretation has long been hotly debated. It is certain, however, that they do not form a connected sequence. Some of them are occupied with urging a youth of high rank, Shakespeare's patron, who may have been either the Earl of Southampton or William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to marry and perpetuate his race; others hint the story, real or imaginary, of Shakespeare's infatuation for a 'dark lady,' leading to bitter disillusion; and still others seem to be occasional expressions of devotion to other friends of one or the other sex. Here as elsewhere Shakespeare's genius, at its best, is supreme over all rivals; the first recorded criticism speaks of the 'sugared sweetness' of his sonnets; but his genius is not always at its best.
JOHN DONNE AND THE BEGINNING OF THE 'METAPHYSICAL' POETRY.
The last decade of the sixteenth century presents also, in the poems of John Donne, a new and very strange style of verse. Donne, born in 1573, possessed one of the keenest and most powerful intellects of the time, but his early manhood was largely wasted in dissipation, though he studied theology and law and seems to have seen military service. It was during this period that he wrote his love poems. Then, while living with his wife and children in uncertain dependence on noble patrons, he turned to religious poetry. At last he entered the Church, became famous as one of the most eloquent preachers of the time, and through the favor of King James was rapidly promoted until he was made Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. He died in 1631 after having furnished a striking instance of the fantastic morbidness of the period (post-Elizabethan) by having his picture painted as he stood wrapped in his shroud on a funeral urn.
The distinguishing general characteristic of Donne's poetry is the remarkable combination of an aggressive intellectuality with the lyric form and spirit. Whether true poetry or mere intellectual cleverness is the predominant element may reasonably be questioned; but on many readers Donne's verse exercises a unique attraction. Its definite peculiarities are outstanding: 1. By a process of extreme exaggeration and minute elaboration Donne carries the Elizabethan conceits almost to the farthest possible limit, achieving what Samuel Johnson two centuries later described as 'enormous and disgusting hyperboles.' 2. In so doing he makes relentless use of the intellect and of verbally precise but actually preposterous logic, striking out astonishingly brilliant but utterly fantastic flashes of wit. 3. He draws the material of his figures of speech from highly unpoetical sources--partly from the activities of every-day life, but especially from all the sciences and school-knowledge of the time. The material is abstract, but Donne gives it full poetic concrete picturesqueness. Thus he speaks of one spirit overtaking another at death as one bullet shot out of a gun may overtake another which has lesser velocity but was earlier discharged. It was because of these last two characteristics that Dr. Johnson applied to Donne and his followers the rather clumsy name of 'Metaphysical' (Philosophical) poets. 'Fantastic' would have been a better word. 4. In vigorous reaction against the sometimes nerveless melody of most contemporary poets Donne often makes his verse as ruggedly condensed (often as obscure) and as harsh as possible. Its wrenched accents and slurred syllables sometimes appear absolutely unmetrical, but it seems that Donne generally followed subtle rhythmical ideas of his own. He adds to the appearance of irregularity by experimenting with a large number of lyric stanza forms--a different form, in fact, for nearly every poem. 5. In his love poems, while his sentiment is often Petrarchan, he often emphasizes also the English note of independence, taking as a favorite theme the incredible fickleness of woman.
In spirit Donne belongs much less to Elizabethan poetry than to the following period, in which nearly half his life fell. Of his great influence on the poetry of that period we shall speak in the proper place.

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