ENGLISH LITERATURE 



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ENGLISH LITERATURE 



prose as an artistic medium whose 

 finest result is the Morte d' Arthur of 

 Sir Thomas Malory. 



The revival of learning in the 

 15th century made Italy the centre 

 of influence in literary fashions as 

 definitely as France had been so in 

 the 12th and 13th centuries. That 

 influence came to England in two 

 successive waves from Italy direct 

 in the reign of Henry VIII. from 

 Italy by way of France in the 

 reign of Elizabeth. Stephen Hawes 

 was still writing dull allegory, and 

 John Skelton was burlesquing the 

 same in individual fashion; the 

 older tradition of amorous and gay 

 songs and carols after the French 

 manner was still in vogue with 

 Henry VIII and his musicians; 

 when Sir Thomas Wyatt and 

 Henry, earl of Surrey, having 

 " tasted the sweet and stately 

 measures and style of Italian 

 poesie," began to cultivate this 

 more dignified and passionate note 

 in sonnets, in irregular imitations 

 of the canzone and other Italian 

 forms, and in songs, all published 

 after their death in Tottel's Mis- 

 cellany (1557). 



French and Italian Influences 



The twenty years which fol- 

 lowed was a period of arrested 

 development and of experiment, 

 especially in verse translation 

 from Latin, e.g. Arthur Golding's 

 Ovid. The one bright ornament 

 is Thomas Sackville's Induction 

 and Legend of the Duke of Buck- 

 ingham, contributed in 1563 to 

 The Mirror for Magistrates, which, 

 apart from these poems, was but 

 a dull continuation of Lydgate's 

 moralising " tragedies," and sen- 

 tentiously narrated stories of the 

 overthrow of great men through 

 the fickleness of fortune. 



When the Shepheards' Calender 

 of Edmund Spenser appeared in 

 1579, the artistic influence of Italy 

 and France was reacted upon by 

 the temperament of a people whose 

 national self-consciousness had 

 grown eager and intense, and 

 whose spiritual life was being pro- 

 foundly modified by that religious 

 Reformation which tended to 

 separate them from the Latin 

 peoples who were their artistic 

 tutors. The result was naturally 

 complex, a literature at once 

 national and exotic, at times 

 Italian in its dissolute moral 

 tone, again already growing Puri- 

 tan in its moral ardour, rich in 

 felicities and beauties of style and 

 verse, yet abounding in fantastic 

 extravagances. 



Spenser's pastoral, The Shep- 

 heards' Calender, his allegorical 

 romance, The Faerie Queen 

 ( 1590-96), and all his shorter 

 poems, satirical, elegiac, and lyrical, 



reveal the influence of French 

 and Italian poetry, of Italian 

 Platonism, of Chaucer and of Sir 

 Thomas Malory ; but the spirit 

 which strives to harmonise the 

 whole is that of an Elizabethan 

 Englishman passionately patriotic 

 and Protestant. And if much re- 

 mains unharmonised, the discords 

 are held hi solution by a style dif- 

 fuse in picture and melody, a verse 

 in which the grave iambic move- 

 ment of Sackville's Induction is 

 heightened by every resource of 

 varied cadence which English 

 metre permits, and adorned with 

 all the accessories of alliteration 

 and vowel-music which English 

 verse welcomes. 



Of all the exotic forms natural- 

 ised by Wyatt and Surrey, the 

 sonnet enjoyed the greatest popu- 

 larity in the closing decades of the 

 century. One sequence of love 

 sonnets, after the fashion of 

 Petrarch's Laura, followed on 

 another in rapid succession, in- 

 cluding Sir Philip Sidney's Astro- 

 phel and Stella, Samuel Daniel's 

 Delia, Michael Drayton's Idea, 

 Spenser's Amoretti, and the later 

 published Sonnets of Shakespeare. 

 The Elizabethan sonnets are 

 largely translations and imitations, 

 and abound in the conventional and 

 extravagant conceits which are 

 common to the kind, while few or 

 none have the exquisite perfection 

 of form which makes Petrarch 

 a classic. But on the best of the 

 English sonnets, as on Michael 

 Angelo's, is set the impression of 

 personality, the insolent gallantry 

 and passion of Sidney, the brooding 

 thought, the self-abnegation in 

 friendship, of Shakespeare. 

 Elizabethan Poetry 



The same poets experimented in 

 many kinds, e.g. in the decorative 

 Ovidian idyll, as Marlowe's Hero 

 and Leander, Shakespeare's Venus 

 and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece ; 

 and the same overwrought rhetoric 

 characterises Daniel's Rosamund, 

 a continuation of the Mirror for 

 Magistrates type of story, and 

 Drayton's antithetic imitations of 

 Ovid's Heroides, imaginary love- 

 letters in verse, England's Heroical 

 Epistles. But Daniel and Drayton 

 cultivated a severer style in their 

 historical poems, suggested by 

 Lucan's Pharsalia, Daniel's Civil 

 Wars between York and Lancas- 

 ter, and Drayton's Barons' Wars. 



Daniel, George Chapman, Dray- 

 ton, Sir John Davies, author of 

 Orchestra and Nosce Teipsum, 

 John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, 

 and others cultivated a grave 

 philosophical poetry, frequently 

 epistolary in form, in which 

 Stoicism and Christianity are 

 blended. Distinctively religious 



poetry, whether Roman Catholic, 

 like Robert Southwell's St. Peter's 

 Complaint and Henry Constable's 

 Spiritual Sonnets, or Protestant, 

 like Joshua Sylvester's translation 

 of Du Bartas' Divine Weeks and 

 Works, shows the same elaboration 

 of style and sentiment. The crown 

 of Elizabethan verse translations 

 are George Chapman's Iliad and 

 Odyssey. 



/ The greatest and happiest work 

 was achieved in drama and song. 

 In the closing decades of the cen- 

 tury a new impetus was given to 

 song writing by the study of lute 

 music and the coloured, cadenced 

 lyric of the French renaissance 

 poets, Ronsard and his fellows, 

 with the result that a lyric of many j 

 moods, and a new wealth of 

 imagery and harmony, adorned 

 romance and drama, or was gar- 

 nered in song-books and antholo- 

 gies such as England's Helicon 

 and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. 

 Songs were composed by all the 

 poets of the day, and many of the 

 most charming are anonymous. 

 Growth of the Drama 



The drama is a larger subject, 

 and its history in the 16th cen- 

 tury is one of shifting and confus- 

 ing development, of overlapping 

 kinds, of natural evolution crossed 

 and disturbed and directed by ex- 

 traneous influence. The Morality, 

 which had produced in the later 

 15th century such a fine flower of 

 serious drama as Everyman, was 

 responsible in the 16th for the im- 

 pressive Cradle of Security. Farce , 

 of a realistic kind thumb-nail 

 sketches of low life in London 

 mingles with the serious element, 

 especially in Moralities dealing 

 with the follies of youth. 



The general tendency of the 

 Morality is to be dull, and this was 

 intensified by the Renaissance 

 schoolmaster's love for the didactic, 

 as in John Rastell's Interlude of the 

 Four Elements, by such political 

 allegory as Lord Governance, and 

 by the Reformation passion for 

 polemic, as in John Bale's The 

 Three Laws, etc., Lusty Juventus 

 Respublica, and others. Queen 

 Elizabeth checked this intrusion 

 into controversy. The same Bale's 

 Kyng Job an and a play like 

 Thomas Preston's King Cam- 

 byses, or the weird version of 

 Aeschylus's great story, Horestes, 

 show how Morality blended with 

 story and developed into the 

 characteristically Elizabethan pro- 

 duct, the story play, serious or 

 farcical, or more commonly a 

 blend of both. 



Classical influence made itself 

 felt, here as in other countries, in 

 attempts to reproduce the exact 



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