[Sidenote: Pervading Characteristics]
The quality which conditions the whole English character through the period is an exuberant, often even a riotous energy, a vast imaginativeness, which breeds in the first place an immense daring, saved from degenerating into mere recklessness by a coolness of head in emergencies which is singularly marked. Whether we look at Elizabeth, Cecil, and Walsingham, or at Hawkins and Drake and Frobisher, or broadly at the actions of the rank and file, these characteristics are apparent. They are no less patent in the poets.
[Sidenote: displayed in the Drama and other fields]
Thus if we consider the tragedies of the period, their tremendous audacity is perhaps their most prominent feature. The stage reeks with blood and reverberates thunder, to an extent which could not fail to become merely grotesque but for the immense pervading vitality. These men could and did venture upon extravagances and imbue them with a terrific quality, when in weaker hands they would have become ridiculous. For anything less than the vibrating energy of Marlowe, the final scene of his Faustus would have sunk to burlesque. A cold analysis of the plot of Hamlet or Macbeth would suggest mere melodrama. A Shakespeare or a Marlowe had no hesitation in facing tasks which offered no mean between great success or great failure. Nor was the audacity in their choice of subjects more remarkable than in their methods, their defiance of recognised canons. Just as the seamen had ignored the convention of centuries, creating a new system of naval tactics and a new type of navy, so the Tragedians brushed aside the academic convention, creating new dramatic canons and a new type of drama. The innovation in the structure of comedy was no less daring, since it proceeded on parallel lines. And here again the same quality of superabundant vitality is equally prominent. But it is to be noted that while the Elizabethan vitality would have made the drama great in spite of its audacity, the greatest productions are distinguished from the less great precisely by that peculiar sanity which stamped the master-spirits of the time. As it is with the dramatists, so is it with the rest. The same fulness of life is apparent in the luxuriance of Spenser's imagination, and in the spontaneity of half a hundred anonymous song-writers, the same audacity in Raleigh, embarking on his History of the World, and in Bacon, assuming all knowledge to be his province, while affirming and formulating the principles of Inductive Reasoning in substitution for the Deductive methods by which the Schools had lived for centuries. Wherever the critic turns his glance, he can find no sign of the Decadent. In every field of life, in politics, in war, in religion, in letters, the Elizabethan was virile even in his vices. His offences against morals or against art were essentially of the barbaric not the effete order; as the splendours of his productions were the natural beauties of plants nurtured in the open, not in the hothouse.
[Sidenote: Breadth of view]
Other aspects of the national character could be readily inferred from the prevalent tone of this literature. Toleration as a political principle was not yet recognised: tolerance as a private attitude of mind was very prevalent. The Jesuit and the extreme Puritan, the doctrinal propagandists who would endure no deviation from their own standard, were thoroughly unpopular, and managed to put themselves outside the field of consideration; the immense bulk of the nation was in sympathy with neither the one nor the other, and it is only to the extremists that the men of letters show a direct antipathy. Catholics can make a presentable case for the theory that Shakespeare himself was a "crypto-Catholic," though the case is not more than presentable. Rome is abhorrent to Spenser, yet it is apparent that many of his ethical conceptions are infinitely nearer akin to those of mediaeval Catholicism than of the current Puritanism. Hooker, most earnest of Christians, was also the most liberal-minded of men. Jonson was half a Catholic. All were manifestly men of deep religious feeling, but none can be associated with any religious party. When England was pitted as a Protestant Power against a Power aggressively determined on the eradication of Protestantism, it was inevitable that the prevailing sentiment should be increasingly Protestant; on the whole, it is surprising that there should have been so little bigotry in it. The public inclination was to be tolerant of all but the intolerant, and that attitude is reflected in all the literature of the time, except the specifically partisan writings of controversialists.
[Patriotism]
So also another note of the day was the general patriotism, national pride, or insularity; the sentiment which made the Catholics themselves, even when they were most under suspicion and had most cause to welcome an opportunity for rebellion, ready and eager to fall into line and resist the invader who was to liberate them. Again the poets gave voice to the national feeling, none more emphatically or more admirably than Shakespeare himself. Patriotic lines might of course be written for the sake of the gallery's inevitable applause; but Shakespeare's panegyrics of England are absolutely and unmistakably whole hearted, and it may be doubted if in all his plays he presented any single character with a more thorough and convincing sympathy and appreciation than his Henry V., the incarnation of English aggressiveness.
[The Normal Types] Finally, what manner of men and women they were who peopled the England that Shakespeare knew, we can see from the men and women whom Shakespeare drew. The types manifest themselves; the normal and the exceptional are readily distinguishable. The normal type is keen of wit, impulsive; it is observable for instance that both men and women habitually—almost invariably—fall in love unreservedly at first sight; generous for the most part; in action prompt and more often than not over-hasty, but resourceful—the women more resourceful than the men. It is a commonplace of course to remark that his types are types for all time; but different types are more prevalent at one time than another, and the inference is that Shakespeare's prevalent types were the prevalent ones of his own day. Hamlet, Brutus, Cleopatra, belonged to eternal but not to normal types; Hotspur and Mercutio, Rosalind and Cordelia—even if the latter were glorified examples—were obviously normal. For in play after play, whether as leading or as minor characters, they recur again and again; and more than that we find the same characteristics—presented no doubt with less incisiveness and less brilliancy—reappearing in the Dramatis Personae of the whole Elizabethan group. Such were the gentlemen of England who fought the Spaniard and overthrew him; such were their sisters and their wives.