THE ENGLISH VOYAGES 



Exotic ideals. Charles Lamb, who loved all that is familiar and 

 ancient and homely, somewhere expresses regret that 

 the plays of Shakespeare and some of his brother 

 dramatists hardly ever choose as their theme the simple 

 daily life of the England of their own time, the affairs 

 of the shop-keepers of Cheapside or of the countrymen 

 of Essex. Had the dramatists been of his mind, we 

 should have had no great English drama, and no Shake- 

 speare. The regret felt by Lamb is only natural ; he 

 was a true antiquary, and the touch of antiquity has 

 gilded the bucolics and citizens of Shakespeare's time. 

 Vulgarity and stupidity are amiable enough in dead 

 men. But the question at issue was a live question in 

 the time of Elizabeth. The men of the new school 

 turned impatiently away from the self-satisfied insularity 

 and rustic ineptitude of their forbears, and hastened to 

 become citizens of the world. The infection of foreign 

 literatures and foreign travel changed customs and manners 

 so fast that many sober observers stood aghast at the 

 rapidity of the movement, and the country rang with de- 

 nunciations of the innovators. In a single generation the 

 change was complete. At the time of Hawkins' earlier 

 voyages Gammer Gurtoits Needle was a comedy of the 

 newest fashion, and the highest reach of English tragedy 

 was still to be sought in the Miracle-plays ; before he 

 died Love's Labour s Lost and Doctor Faustus had been 

 seen on the boards of the London theatres. Action 

 The voyagers and imagination went hand in hand. If the voyagers 

 ofthouzht^ ^ explored new countries and trafficked with strange 

 peoples, the poets and dramatists went abroad too, and 

 rifled foreign nations, returning with far-fetched and 

 dear-bought wares ; or explored lonely and untried 



94 



