The Later Renaissance

by David Hannay

Elizabethan prose.

The reign of Elizabeth and the first years of James, which cover the period of the Later Renaissance in England, were times of poetry and not of prose. It is true that much prose was written, that some of it is admirable, and that more is interesting. It is also true that some of the greatest masters of English prose were alive, and were working in these years. Yet these men, whose chief was Bacon, belong, by their character, their influence, and by the dates of their greatest achievements, to the generations described as Jacobean and Caroline. In the Elizabethan time proper there is but one very great name among prose-writers, that of Hooker; while before him and around him there are many whose work was meritorious, or interesting, or curious—anything, in fact, but great—and of not a few of them it has to be said that in the long-run they were not profitable.

The difficulty of marshalling these men of letters in an orderly way is not small. The chronological arrangement, besides being ill-adapted to contemporaries, does not show their real relations to one another, or their place in English literature. The division by subject is utterly mechanical, when very different matter was handled in the same style and often by the same men. Nash is always Nash, whether he was writing Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem, or Have with you to Saffron Walden, or The Unfortunate Traveller. We shall be better able to make a survey of this side of the literature of the Later Renaissance in England if we class its prose-writers by their spirit and their style, and treat their dates and their matter (which, however, are not to be dismissed as of no importance) as subordinate.

Two schools of writers.

If this classification, then, is permitted, we may divide the Elizabethan prose-writers into those whose aim it was to give “English matter in the English tongue for Englishmen,” and those who strove for something better, more ornate, lofty, peculiar, and, as they held, more literary, than was to be reached by the pursuit of this modest purpose. The chief of the first in order of time was Ascham, who, however, belonged to an earlier generation, though he died in the queen’s reign, and part of his work was published after his death. The great exemplar of the second was Lyly. In neither case did the followers merely imitate their leader. There is much in Hooker which is not in Ascham. The enredados razones—the roundabout affectations of the authors of the Spanish Libros de Caballerías—may have had some influence on Sidney, who certainly knew them. Rabelais and Aretino were much read and imitated by some who also “parled Euphues.” But the distinction holds good none the less. On the one side are those who, having something to say, were content to say it perspicuously. On the other were those who, whether they had something to say or whether they were simply determined to be talking, were careful to give their utterances some stamp of distinction. If the first were liable to become pedestrian, the second were threatened by an obvious danger. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the writer who has got tired of milking the cow, and wants to milk the bull, to escape sheer affectation—which affectation, again, is in the great majority of cases a trick, a juggle with words repeated over and over again.

The prose which was first written for literary purposes in Elizabeth’s time was an inheritance from the reign of Henry VIII. It was the plain downright style of Ascham—the style of a man who thought in Latin, and turned it into good current English.

Webbe and Puttenham.

Yet the writers who were content to be as plain and downright as Ascham do not require many words. Such treatises as Webbe’s Discourse of English Poetrie, printed in 1586, or the Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, and attributed to George Puttenham by Carew in 1614, are interesting, but it cannot be said that they hold an important place in English literature, or had any considerable effect. The Arte of English Poesie is indeed a very sane and thorough critical treatise, one proof among others that if so many of the Elizabethan writers were wild and shapeless, it was not because none in their time thought wisely on questions of literary principle and of form. The explanation of their extravagance may be more safely looked for elsewhere. When Nash was reproached for his “boisterous compound words,” he answered, “That no wind that blows strong but is boisterous, no speech or words of any power or force to confute, or persuade, but must be swelling and boisterous.” This is Brantôme’s excuse for the rodomontade, that superb and swelling words go well with daring deeds. The Elizabethans were so vehement and headlong, that they sought naturally for the “word of power,” for the altisonant and ear-filling in language, and were more tolerant of bombast than of the pedestrian. |The sentence.| Their general inability to confine themselves to the sentence may be excused on the same ground. They felt so much, and so strongly, that they could not stop to disentangle and arrange. Certainly if Englishmen sinned in this respect it was against the light. Models were not wanting to them, and they were not unaware of the virtue of being clear and coherent. Whoever the author of Martin Marprelate’s Epistle may have been—Penry, Udall, Barrow, or another—he knew a bad sentence as well as any of the Queen Anne men. He fixes, as any of them might have done, on the confused heap of clauses which did duty for sentences in Dean John Bridges’s Defence of the Government of the Church of England. “And learned brother Bridges,” he writes, “a man might almost run himself out of breath before he could come to a full point in many places in your book. Page 69, line 3, speaking of the extraordinary gifts in the Apostles’ time, you have this sweet learning,[77] ‘Yea some of them have for a great part of the time, continued even till our times, and yet continue, as the operation of great works, or if they mean miracles, which were not ordinary, no not in that extraordinary time, and as the hypocrites had them, so might and had divers of the Papists, and yet their cause never the better, and the like may we say of the gifts of speaking with tongues which have not been with study before learned, as Anthony, &c., and divers also among the ancient fathers, and some among the Papists, and some among us, have not been destitute of the gifts of prophesying, and much more may I say this of the gift of healing, for none of those gifts or graces given then or since, or yet to men, infer the grace of God’s election to be of necessity to salvation.’”

The Dean’s meaning reveals itself at the third or fourth reading, but this is the style of Mrs Nickleby. Martin Marprelate saw its vices, and noted on the margin, “Hoo hoo, Dean, take breath and then to it again,” as Swift himself might have done. Dr Bridges is no authority in English literature, but he was a learned man, and must have had some practice in preaching. Yet we see that he fell into a confusion which at any time after the seventeenth century would have been a proof either of extreme ignorance, or of some such defect of power to express himself as accounts for the obscurity of Castlereagh. Dean Bridges shows only the disastrous consequences of that disregard of the proper limit of the sentence which was common with some of the greatest writers of his time. Take, for instance, this passage from Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of the loss of the Revenge, published in 1591. He begins admirably: “All the powder of the Revenge was now spent, all her pikes were broken, forty of her best men slain, and the most part of the rest hurt.” Several rapid sentences follow, and then we come to:[78] “Sir Richard finding himself in this distress, and unable any longer to make resistance having endured in this fifteen hours’ fight, the assault of fifteen several Armadoes, all by turns aboard him, and by estimation eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many assaults and entries, and that himself and the ship must needs be possessed by the enemy, who were now all cast in a ring about him; the Revenge not able to move one way or other but as she was moved with the waves and billow of the sea, commanded the Master Gunner, whom he knew to be a most resolute man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of glory or victory to the Spaniards, seeing in so many hours’ fight, and with so great a navy they were not able to take her, having had fifteen hours’ time, fifteen thousand men, and fifty and three sail of men of war to perform it withal. And persuaded the company or as many as he could induce to yield themselves unto God, and to the mercy of none else, but as they had like valiant resolute men repulsed so many enemies, they should not now shorten the honour of their nation, by prolonging their own lives for a few hours or a few days.”