ENGLISH LITERATURE 



293O 



ENGLISH LITERATURE 



form and features of Seneca's 

 Latin tragedies, e.g. in Sack- 

 ville's Gorboduc, and of Latin 

 comedy, e.g. Nicholas Udell's 

 Ralph Roister Doister. The at- 

 tempt miscarried, and the domi- 

 nant type of play of the '60's and 

 '70's was the story-play, the play 

 which brought on the stage all the 

 crowded incidents, dramatic and 

 undramatic, of a story drawn from 

 any and every source, with little 

 interest of character and no beauty 

 of style. The artistic, refining 

 effect of classical and Italian in- 

 fluence made itself felt when into 

 these story-plays was breathed 

 something of the spirit of ancient 

 comedy and tragedy, and they 

 were clothed in a new beauty of 

 form, prose and verse. 



Marlowe and Shakespeare 



John Lyly led the way in the 

 reform of 'the drama as literature 

 with his light and graceful, if 

 flimsy, mythological and courtly 

 comedies. George Peele sweetened 

 the versification and brightened 

 the fancy of comedy and romance, 

 and Robert Greene is mainly re- 

 sponsible for the woodland set- 

 tings and the fair maidens of 

 Shakespeare's As You Like it and 

 Twelfth Night. Thomas Kyd 

 achieved a success by his 

 Spanish Tragedy, which popu- 

 larised the melodramatic revenge- 

 motive and the stilted rhetoric of 

 Seneca, while eliminating the 

 choruses and loosening the struc- 

 ture. But the great forerunner of 

 Shakespeare was Christopher Mar- 

 lowe (Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, 

 Edward II), who gave to serious 

 English drama stateliness and 

 splendour of form, while quickening 

 within it the soul of dramatic 

 interest. His blank verse is the 

 overture to the fuller, more varied 

 harmonies of Shakespeare and 

 Milton. 



In William Shakespeare a great 

 tradition found its fullest expres- 

 sion. The statue had been 

 blocked out, the tools were ready 

 to his hand. It was no restraint to 

 him, it seems rather to have been 

 a help, to revise older work, to col- 

 laborate with lesser men. But the 

 miracle of genius remains. The 

 tradition broke into a new life in 

 his hands. The old play, the lesser 

 dramatist, found through him their 

 fulfilment. He neither led nor 

 followed, he moved instinctively 

 with the changing currents of 

 taste. His early tragic histories, 

 Henry VI and Richard III, are 

 Marlowesque in spirit and style ; 

 his early comedies and romances, 

 Love's Labour's Lost, and A Mid- 

 summer Night's Dream, absorbed 

 and enriched all the currents that 

 flowed more faintly in Lyly and 



Peele and Greene. As the century 

 draws to an end he satirisesthe bom- 

 bast of Marlowe and Kyd through 

 Ancient Pistol, and Lyly's Eu- 

 phuism in the wit of Falstaff, and 

 blends heroic history, full of the 

 same spirit as Daniel's and Dray- 

 ton's Chronicle poems, with genial 

 and boisterous comedy. 



And when Jonson turned drama 

 from romance to realism, Shake- 

 speare passed to tragedy, tragedies 

 of character and adverse stars in 

 Hamlet and Julius Caesar, tragedies 

 of great souls driven from their 

 orbit by passion to clash and de- 

 stroy and perish in Othello and 

 Lear, and the style and imagery 

 and verse change with the change 

 of theme. Lastly, when Beaumont 

 and Fletcher revive the flutings 

 and falsetto of romance, Shake- 

 speare, too, turns back to the 

 charm of romantic setting and 

 pathetic lovers and children and 

 flowers and poetry and recon- 

 ciliation. He works with all his 

 fellows, but gives to each kind of 

 play an infinitely richer dramatic 

 and poetic worth. 



English prose in the 16th cen- 

 tury felt the influence of Latin in 

 vocabulary and structure. The 

 prose of the 16th century of 

 John Fisher, Thomas Elyot, Roger 

 Ascham, Thomas North, and others 

 is a happy blend of simple, 

 direct, colloquial English, with a 

 free importation of Latin words 

 and a sentence shaping towards the 

 Latin period. The finest product 

 of this are the translations of the 

 Bible, from Tyndale to the Au- 

 thorised Version, a book which has 

 shaped and coloured, as perhaps 

 no other, the diction and rhythm 

 of the best English prose and verse. 

 Hooker and English Prose 



For the last two decades of the 

 century prose, like verse, came 

 under the influence of the taste 

 for elaborate rhetoric. Lyly's 

 Euphues set the fashion of an- 

 tithesis, alliteration, and artificial 

 simile for a succession of imitators 

 in novels and pamphlets, Robert 

 Greene, Thomas Lodge, Thomas 

 Nash, and Thomas Dekker ; though 

 in Nash and Dekker a racy collo- 

 quialism blended with and super- 

 seded the tricks of Euphuism. 

 Sidney cultivated a more poetical 

 rhetoric in his Arcadia, and, with 

 much less of artifice, in the De- 

 fence of Poesie. Richard Hooker, 

 in the Ecclesiastical Polity, raised 

 the Latinised, periodic prose to a 

 higher level of rhythm, and digni- 

 fied eloquence, and made English a 

 fitting medium for philosophical 

 disquisition. 



The literature of the earlier 17th 

 century is as varied in character as 

 that of the 16th. The first fifteen 



years witnessed the culminating 

 achievement of the drama in 

 Shakespeare's great tragedies and 

 the sombre, extravagant, but im- 

 pressive work of Marston, Chap- 

 man, Middleton, and Webster, and 

 in the sardonic, unromantic "hu- 

 mours " comedy of Ben Jonson 

 and his classical tragedies. In 

 the work of Beaumont and Flet- 

 cher, Massinger and Ford, Shirley, 

 and smaller men, we study the set- 

 ting of a brilliant day in a sky rich 

 in the colours of sentiment and 

 phrasing. 



John Donne and Ben Jonson 



In poetry Spenser found no 

 follower in the endeavour to re- 

 vive, and give a new significance 

 to, the chivalry of medieval ro- 

 mance, though Ariosto and Tasso 

 were translated by Sir John Har- 

 rington and Edward Fairfax. But 

 Spenser's pastoralism was vari- 

 ously tuned by many poets, as 

 William Browne, Britannia's Pas- 

 torals ; and Drayton, The Muses 

 Elizium ; and the Scottish Drum- 

 mond of Hawthornden, a late 

 Elizabethan, in his Italianism and 

 his love for sonnets and pas- 

 torals. The didactic, allegorical, 

 religious aspect of Spenser's work 

 appealed more strongly than the 

 romantic and chivalrous to ardent 

 Protestants like the poet brothers 

 Giles Fletcher (Christ's Victory and 

 Triumph) and Phineas (The Purple 

 Island). 



None, however, of these over- 

 flows from Elizabethan poetry, 

 modified by the changing spirit of 

 the time, represents quite clearly 

 the two main directions in which 

 literature moved during the cen- 

 tury, on the one hand towards an 

 increasing weight and fullness of 

 thought and conceit, to which is 

 sacrificed grace and beauty of form 

 and verse, on the other towards 

 more definiteness, uniformity, and 

 correctness of style and verse. The 

 dominant influences in this two- 

 fold movement are the late Eliza- 

 bethan poets, John Donne and Ben 

 Jonson. The poems, erotic, satiri- 

 cal, complimentary, and religious, 

 of the former fascinated all the 

 younger, bolder spirits by their 

 intellectual subtleties and passion- 

 ate perversities of feeling, their 

 rugged strength and frequent felici- 

 ties of phrase, their contemptuous 

 violations of smoothness and sweet- 

 ness hi versification with the deep 

 and plangent harmonies which 

 none the less they repeatedly 

 achieve. 



Ben Jonson. in his songs and epi- 

 grams and odes and verses, compli- 

 mentary and satirical, combines 

 the same compacted pregnancy of 

 thought with a constant, though 

 not always successful, striving after 



