A History of Elizabethan Literature

Her by her sight; her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought
That one might almost say, her body thought;
She, she thus richly and largely hous'd is gone
And chides us, slow-paced snails who crawl upon
Our prison's prison earth, nor think us well
Longer than whilst we bear our brittle shell."

But no short extracts will show Donne, and there is no room for a full anthology. He must be read, and by every catholic student of English literature should be regarded with a respect only "this side idolatry," though the respect need not carry with it blindness to his undoubtedly glaring faults.

Those faults are not least seen in his Satires, though neither the unbridled voluptuousness which makes his Elegies shocking to modern propriety, nor the far-off conceit which appears in his meditative and miscellaneous poems, is very strongly or specially represented here. Nor, naturally enough, is the extreme beauty of thought and allusion distinctly noteworthy in a class of verse which does not easily admit it. On the other hand, the force and originality of Donne's intellect are nowhere better shown. It is a constant fault of modern satirists that in their just admiration for Horace and Juvenal they merely paraphrase them, and, instead of going to the fountainhead and taking their matter from human nature, merely give us fresh studies of Ibam forte via sacra or the Tenth of Juvenal, adjusted to the meridians of Paris or London. Although Donne is not quite free from this fault, he is much freer than either of his contemporaries, Regnier or Hall. And the rough vigour of his sketches and single lines is admirable. Yet it is as rough as it is vigorous; and the breakneck versification and contorted phrase of his satires, softened a little in Hall, roughened again and to a much greater degree in Marston, and reaching, as far as phrase goes, a rare extreme in the Transformed Metamorphosis of Cyril Tourneur, have been the subject of a great deal of discussion. It is now agreed by all the best authorities that it would be a mistake to consider this roughness unintentional or merely clumsy, and that it sprung, at any rate in great degree, from an idea that the ancients intended the Satura to be written in somewhat unpolished verse, as well as from a following of the style of Persius, the most deliberately obscure of all Latin if not of all classical poets. In language Donne is not (as far as his Satires are concerned) a very great sinner; but his versification, whether by his own intention or not, leaves much to desire. At one moment the ten syllables are only to be made out by a Chaucerian lengthening of the mute e; at another the writer seems to be emulating Wyatt in altering the accent of syllables, and coolly making the final iambus of a line out of such a word as "answer." It is no wonder that poets of the "correct" age thought him in need of rewriting; though even they could not mistake the force of observation and expression which characterises his Satires, and which very frequently reappears even in his dreamiest metaphysics, his most recondite love fancies, and his warmest and most passionate hymns to Aphrodite Pandemos.

These artificial characteristics are supplemented in the Elizabethan satirists, other than Donne, by yet a third, which makes them, I confess, to me rather tedious reading, independently of their shambling metre, and their sometimes almost unconstruable syntax. This is the absurd affectation of extreme moral wrath against the corruptions of their time in which they all indulge. Marston, who is nearly the foulest, if not quite the foulest writer of any English classic, gives himself the airs of the most sensitive puritan; Hall, with a little less of this contrast, sins considerably in the same way, and adds to his delinquencies a most petulant and idle attempt to satirise from the purely literary point of view writers who are a whole head and shoulders above himself. And these two, followed by their imitator, Guilpin, assail each other in a fashion which argues either a very absurd sincerity of literary jealousy, or a very ignoble simulation of it, for the purpose of getting up interest on the part of the public. Nevertheless, both Marston and Hall are very interesting figures in English literature, and their satirical performances cannot be passed over in any account of it.

Joseph Hall was born near Ashby de la Zouch, of parents in the lower yeoman rank of life, had his education at the famous Puritan College of Emanuel at Cambridge, became a Fellow thereof, proceeded through the living of Hawstead and a canonry at Wolverhampton to the sees of Exeter and Norwich, of the latter of which he was violently deprived by the Parliament, and, not surviving long enough to see the Restoration, died (1656) in a suburb of his cathedral city. His later life was important for religious literature and ecclesiastical politics, in his dealings with the latter of which he came into conflict, not altogether fortunately for the younger and greater man of letters, with John Milton. His Satires belong to his early Cambridge days, and to the last decade of the sixteenth century. They have on the whole been rather overpraised, though the variety of their matter and the abundance of reference to interesting social traits of the time to some extent redeem them. The worst point about them, as already noted, is the stale and commonplace impertinence with which their author, unlike the best breed of young poets and men of letters, attempts to satirise his literary betters; while they are to some extent at any rate tarred with the other two brushes of corrupt imitation of the ancients, and of sham moral indignation. Indeed the want of sincerity – the evidence of the literary exercise – injures Hall's satirical work in different ways throughout. We do not, as we read him, in the least believe in his attitude of Hebrew prophet crossed with Roman satirist, and the occasional presence of a vigorous couplet or a lively metaphor hardly redeems this disbelief. Nevertheless, Hall is here as always a literary artist – a writer who took some trouble with his writings; and as some of his satires are short, a whole one may be given: —

"A gentle squire would gladly entertain
Into his house some trencher-chaplain;[29 - "Chaplain" – trisyllable like "capellan."]
Some willing man that might instruct his sons
And that would stand to good conditions.
First, that he lie upon the truckle bed,
Whiles his young master lieth o'er his head.
Second, that he do, on no default,[30 - Missing syllable.]
Ever presume to sit above the salt.
Third, that he never change his trencher twice.
Fourth, that he use all common courtesies;
Sit bare at meals, and one half rise and wait.
Last, that he never his young master beat,
But he must ask his mother to define,
How many jerks she would his breech should line.
All these observ'd he could contented be
To give five marks and winter livery."

John Marston, who out-Halled Hall in all his literary misdeeds, was, it would appear, a member of a good Shropshire family which had passed into Warwickshire. He was educated at Coventry School, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, and passed early into London literary society, where he involved himself in the inextricable and not-much-worth-extricating quarrels which have left their mark in Jonson's and Dekker's dramas. In the first decade of the seventeenth century he wrote several remarkable plays, of much greater literary merit than the work now to be criticised. Then he took orders, was presented to the living of Christchurch, and, like others of his time, seems to have forsworn literature as an unholy thing. He died in 1634. Here we are concerned only with two youthful works of his —Pigmalion's Image and some Satires in 1598, followed in the same year by a sequel, entitled The Scourge of Villainy. In these works he called himself "W. Kinsayder," a pen-name for which various explanations have been given. It is characteristic and rather comical that, while both the earlier Satires and The Scourge denounce lewd verse most fullmouthedly, Pigmalion's Image is a poem in the Venus and Adonis style which is certainly not inferior to its fellows in luscious descriptions. It was, in fact, with the Satires and much similar work, formally condemned and burnt in 1599. Both in Hall and in Marston industrious commentators have striven hard to identify the personages of the satire with famous living writers, and there may be a chance that some at least of their identifications (as of Marston's Tubrio with Marlowe) are correct. But the exaggeration and insincerity, the deliberate "society-journalism" (to adopt a detestable phrase for a corresponding thing of our own days), which characterise all this class of writing make the identifications of but little interest. In every age there are writers who delight in representing that age as the very worst of the history of the world, and in ransacking literature and imagination for accusations against their fellows. The sedate philosopher partly brings and partly draws the conviction that one time is very like another. Marston, however, has fooled himself and his readers to the very top of his and their bent; and even Churchill, restrained by a more critical atmosphere, has not come quite near his confused and only half-intelligible jumble of indictments for indecent practices and crude philosophy of the moral and metaphysical kind. A vigorous line or phrase occasionally redeems the chaos of rant, fustian, indecency, ill-nature, and muddled thought.

"Ambitious Gorgons, wide-mouth'd Lamians,
Shape-changing Proteans, damn'd Briarians,
Is Minos dead, is Radamanth asleep,
That ye thus dare unto Jove's palace creep?
What, hath Ramnusia spent her knotted whip,
That ye dare strive on Hebe's cup to sip?
Ye know Apollo's quiver is not spent,
But can abate your daring hardiment.
Python is slain, yet his accursed race
Dare look divine Astrea in the face;
Chaos return and with confusion
Involve the world with strange disunion;
For Pluto sits in that adorèd chair
Which doth belong unto Minerva's heir.
O hecatombs! O catastrophe!
From Midas' pomp to Trus' beggary!
Prometheus, who celestial fire
Did steal from heaven, therewith to inspire
Our earthly bodies with a sense-ful mind,
Whereby we might the depth of nature find,
Is ding'd to hell, and vulture eats his heart
Which did such deep philosophy impart
To mortal men."

The contrast of this so-called satire, and the really satiric touches of Marston's own plays, when he was not cramped by the affectations of the style, is very curious.

Edward Gilpin or Guilpin, author of the rare book Skialetheia, published between the dates of Hall and Marston, is, if not a proved plagiarist from either, at any rate an obvious follower in the same track. There is the same exaggeration, the same petulant ill-nature, the same obscurity of phrase and ungainliness of verse, and the same general insincerity. But the fine flower of the whole school is perhaps to be found in the miraculous Transformed Metamorphosis, attributed to the powerful but extravagant dramatist, Cyril Tourneur, who wrote this kind of thing: —

"From out the lake a bridge ascends thereto,
Whereon in female shape a serpent stands.
Who eyes her eye, or views her blue-vein'd brow,
With sense-bereaving glozes she enchants,
And when she sees a worldling blind that haunts
The pleasure that doth seem there to be found,
She soothes with Leucrocutanized sound.

"Thence leads an entry to a shining hall
Bedecked with flowers of the fairest hue;
The Thrush, the Lark, and night's-joy Nightingale
There minulize their pleasing lays anew,
This welcome to the bitter bed of rue;
This little room will scarce two wights contain
T' enjoy their joy, and there in pleasure reign.

"But next thereto adjoins a spacious room,
More fairly fair adorned than the other:
(O woe to him at sin-awhaping doom,
That to these shadows hath his mind given over)
For (O) he never shall his soul recover:
If this sweet sin still feeds him with her smack
And his repentant hand him hales not back."[31 - Mr. Churton Collins is "tolerably confident," and perhaps he might have been quite certain, that Leucrocutanized refers to one of the Fauna of fancy, – a monster that spoke like a man. "Minulise," from μινυριζω, "I sing." "To awhape" = "to confound."]

We could hardly end with anything farther removed from the clear philosophy and the serene loveliness of The Faërie Queene.

CHAPTER V

THE SECOND DRAMATIC PERIOD – SHAKESPERE

The difficulty of writing about Shakespere is twofold; and though it is a difficulty which, in both its aspects, presents itself when other great writers are concerned, there is no other case in which it besets the critic to quite the same extent. Almost everything that is worth saying has been already said, more or less happily. A vast amount has been said which is not in the least worth saying, which is for the most part demonstrably foolish or wrong. As Shakespere is by far the greatest of all writers, ancient or modern, so he has been the subject of commentatorial folly to an extent which dwarfs the expense of that folly on any other single subject. It is impossible to notice the results of this folly except at great length; it is doubtful whether they are worth noticing at all; yet there is always the danger either that some mischievous notions may be left undisturbed by the neglect to notice them, or that the critic himself may be presumed to be ignorant of the foolishness of his predecessors. These inconveniences, however, must here be risked, and it may perhaps be thought that the necessity of risking them is a salutary one. In no other case is it so desirable that an author should be approached by students with the minimum of apparatus.

The scanty facts and the abundant fancies as to Shakespere's life are a commonplace of literature. He was baptized on the 26th of April 1564 at Stratford-on-Avon, and must have been born either on the same day, or on one of those immediately preceding. His father was John Shakespere, his mother Mary Arden, both belonging to the lower middle class and connected, personally and by their relations, with yeomanry and small landed gentry on the one side, and with well-to-do tradesmen on the other. Nothing is known of his youth and little of his education; but it was a constant tradition of men of his own and the immediately succeeding generation that he had little school learning. Before he was nineteen he was married, at the end of November 1582, to Anne Hathaway, who was seven years his senior. Their first child, Susannah, was baptized six months later. He is said to have left Stratford for London in 1585, or thereabouts, and to have connected himself at once with the theatre, first in humble and then in more important positions. But all this is mist and myth. He is transparently referred to by Robert Greene in the summer or autumn of 1592, and the terms of the reference prove his prosperity. The same passage brought out a complimentary reference to Shakespere's intellectual and moral character from Chettle, Greene's editor. He published Venus and Adonis in 1593, and Lucrece next year. His plays now began to appear rapidly, and brought him money enough to buy, in 1597, the house of New Place at Stratford, and to establish himself there after, it is supposed, twelve years' almost complete absence from his birthplace and his family. Documentary references to his business matters now become not infrequent, but, except as showing that he was alive and prosperous, they are quite uninteresting. The same may be said of the marriages and deaths of his children. In 1609 appeared the Sonnets, some of which had previously been printed in unauthorised and piratical publications. He died on the 23d of April (supposed generally to be his birthday) 1616, and was buried at Stratford. His plays had been only surreptitiously printed, the retention of a play in manuscript being of great importance to the actors, and the famous first folio did not appear till seven years after his death.

The canon of Shakespere's plays, like everything else connected with him, has been the subject of endless discussion. There is no reasonable doubt that in his earlier days (the first printed play among those ordinarily assigned to him, Romeo and Juliet, dates from 1597) he had taken part in dramatic work which is now mostly anonymous or assigned to other men, and there is also no doubt that there may be passages in the accepted plays which he owed to others. But my own deliberate judgment is that no important and highly probable ascription of extant work to Shakespere can be made outside the canon as usually printed, with the doubtful exception of The Two Noble Kinsmen; and I do not believe that in the plays usually accepted, any very important or characteristic portion is not Shakespere's. As for Shakespere-Bacon theories, and that kind of folly, they are scarcely worthy even of mention. Nor among the numerous other controversies and errors on the subject shall I meddle with more than one – the constantly repeated assertion that England long misunderstood or neglected Shakespere, and that foreign aid, chiefly German (though some include Voltaire!), was required to make her discover him. A very short way is possible with this absurdity. It would be difficult to name any men more representative of cultivated literary opinion and accomplishment in the six generations (taking a generation at the third of a century) which passed between Shakespere's death and the battle of Waterloo (since when English admiration of Shakespere will hardly be denied), than Ben Jonson, John Milton, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their lives overlapped each other considerably, so that no period is left uncovered. They were all typical men of letters, each of his own time, and four at least of them were literary dictators. Now, Ben Jonson's estimate of Shakespere in prose and verse is on record in more places than one, and is as authentic as the silly stories of his envy are mythical. If Milton, to his eternal disgrace, flung, for party purposes, the study of Shakespere as a reproach in his dead king's face, he had himself long before put on record his admiration for him, and his own study is patent to every critical reader of his works. Dryden, but a year or two after the death of Shakespere's daughter, drew up that famous and memorable eulogy which ought to be familiar to all, and which, long before any German had spoken of Shakespere, and thirty years before Voltaire had come into the world, exactly and precisely based the structure of Shakespere-worship. Pope edited Shakespere. Johnson edited him. Coleridge is acknowledged as, with his contemporaries Lamb and Hazlitt, the founder of modern appreciation. It must be a curious reckoning which, in face of such a catena as this, stretching its links over the whole period, maintains that England wanted Germans to teach her how to admire the writer whom Germans have done more to mystify and distort than even his own countrymen.

The work of Shakespere falls into three divisions very unequal in bulk. There is first (speaking both in the order of time and in that of thought, though not in that of literary importance and interest) the small division of poems, excluding the Sonnets, but including Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the few and uncertain but exquisite scraps, the Lover's Complaint, The Passionate Pilgrim, and so forth. All these are likely to have been the work of early youth, and they are much more like the work of other men than any other part of Shakespere's work, differing chiefly in the superior sweetness of those wood-notes wild, which Milton justly, if not altogether adequately, attributed to the poet, and in the occasional appearance of the still more peculiar and unique touches of sympathy with and knowledge of universal nature which supply the main Shakesperian note. The Venus and the Lucrece form part of a large collection (see last chapter) of extremely luscious, not to say voluptuous, poetry which the imitation of Italian models introduced into England, which has its most perfect examples in the earlier of these two poems, in numerous passages of Spenser, and in the Hero and Leander of Marlowe, but which was written, as will have been seen from what has been already said, with extraordinary sweetness and abundance, by a vast number of Elizabethan writers. There are extant mere adespota, and mere "minor poems" (such as the pretty "Britain's Ida," which used to be printed as Spenser's, and which some critics have rather rashly given to Phineas Fletcher), good enough to have made reputation, if not fortune, at other times. There is no reason to attribute to Shakespere on the one hand, any deliberate intention of executing a tour de force in the composition of these poems or, in his relinquishment of the style, any deliberate rejection of the kind as unworthy of his powers on the other. He appears to have been eminently one of those persons who care neither to be in nor out of the fashion, but follow it as far as suits and amuses them. Yet, beautiful as these poems are, they so manifestly do not present their author at the full of his powers, or even preluding in the kind wherein the best of those powers were to be shown, that they require comparatively little critical notice. As things delightful to read they can hardly be placed too high, especially the Venus; as evidences of the poet's many-sided nature, they are interesting. But they are in somewhat other than the usual sense quite "simple, sensuous, and passionate." The misplaced ingenuity which, neglecting the unum necessarium, will busy itself about all sorts of unnecessary things, has accordingly been rather hard put to it with them, and to find any pasture at all has had to browse on questions of dialect, and date, and personal allusion, even more jejune and even more unsubstantial than usual.