Handbook of Universal Literature, From the Best and Latest Authorities

by Anne C. Lynch Botta

The Norman invaders of England took possession of the country as military masters. They suppressed the native polity by overwhelming force, made Norman-French the fashionable speech of the court and the aristocracy, and imposed it on the tribunals. Their romantic literature soon weaned the hearts of educated men from the ancient rudeness of taste, but the mass of the English people clung so obstinately to their ancestral tongue, that the Anglo-Saxon language kept its hold in substance until it was evolved into modern English; and the Norman nobles were at length forced to learn the dialect which had been preserved among their despised English vassals.

Emerging from the Middle Ages into the illuminated vista of modern history, we find the world of action much more powerfully influenced by the world of letters than ever before. Among the causes which produced this change are the invention of printing, the use of a cultivated living language, and in England the vindication of freedom of thought and constitutional liberty.

The period from the accession of Elizabeth to the Restoration (1558-1660) is the most brilliant in the literary history of England. The literature assumes its most varied forms, expatiates over the most distant regions of speculation and investigation; and its intellectual chiefs, while they breathe the spirit of modern knowledge and freedom, speak to us in tones which borrow an irregular stateliness from the chivalrous past. But this magnificent panorama does not meet the eye at once; the unveiling of its features is as gradual as the passing away of the mists that shroud the landscape before the morning sun.

The first quarter of the century was unproductive in all departments of literature. Of the great writers who have immortalized the name of Elizabeth, scarcely one was born five years before she ascended the throne, and the immense and invaluable series of literary works which embellished the period in question may be regarded as beginning only with the earliest poem of Spenser, 1579.

"There never was anywhere," says Lord Jeffrey, "anything like the sixty or seventy years that elapsed from the middle of the reign of Elizabeth to the Restoration. In point of real force and originality of genius, neither the age of Pericles nor the age of Augustus, nor the times of Leo X., or of Louis XIV., can come at all into comparison. In that short period we shall find the names of almost all the very great men that this nation has ever produced."

Among the influences which made the last generation of the sixteenth century so strong in itself, and capable of bequeathing so much strength to those who took up its inheritance, was the expanding elasticity, the growing freedom of thought and action. The chivalry of the Middle Ages began to seek more useful fields of adventure in search of new worlds, and fame, and gold. There was an increasing national prosperity, and a corresponding advance of comfort and refinement, and mightier than all these forces was the silent working of the Reformation on the hearts of the people.

The minor writers of this age deserve great honor, and may almost be considered the builders of the structure of English literature, whose intellectual chiefs were Spenser, Shakspeare, and Hooker.

Spenser and Shakspeare were both possessed of thoughts, feelings, and images, which they could not have had if they had lived a century later, or much earlier; and, although their views were very dissimilar, they both bear the characteristic features of the age in which they lived. Spenser dwelt with animation on the gorgeous scenery which covered the elfin land of knighthood and romance, and present realities were lost in his dream of antique grandeur and ideal loveliness. He was the modern poet of the remote past; the last minstrel of chivalry, though incomparably greater than his forerunners.

Shakspeare was the poet of the present and the future, and of universal humanity. He saw in the past the fallen fragments on which men were to build anew—august scenes of desolation, whose ruin taught men to work more wisely. He painted them as the accessory features and distant landscape of colossal pictures, in whose foreground stood figures soaring beyond the limits of their place, instinct with the spirit of the time in which the poet lived, yet lifted out of it and above it by the impulse of potent genius prescient of momentous truths that lay slumbering in the bosom of futurity.

By the side of poetry contemporary prose shows poorly, with one great exception. In respect to style, Hooker stands almost alone in his time, and may be considered the first of the illustrious train of great prose writers. His "Ecclesiastical Polity" appeared in 1594. Sir Philip Sidney's "Arcadia" had been written before 1587. Bacon's Essays appeared in 1596, and also Spenser's "View of Ireland," But none of these are comparable in point of style to Hooker.