Nor bring me no more letters for no man’s pleasure,
But thou know from whom.
M. Mumble. I warrant ye shall be sure.
Ralph Roister Doister
Summary. We can thus see the material that lay to the hand of Shakespeare and his fellows. It was almost of uniform development and of ancient and diverse origin; it was frequently coarse and childish, but its material was abundant and vital. The time was at hand, and so was the genius of the master to give this vast body a shape and impulse. Almost in a day, after centuries of slow ripening, the harvest came, with a wealth and excellence of fruition that is one of the marvels of our literature.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITERARY STYLE
1. Poetry. In English poetry there was a marked decadence in style. In the works of Lydgate, Skelton, and Hawes the meters often became mere doggerel; there was little trace of real poetical imagination and phrasing; and the actual vocabulary is not striking. Compared with that of Chaucer, their work seems childish and inept. Many reasons have been advanced to explain this rapid collapse. The most obvious one is the sheer lack of talent: there is nobody to carry on the Chaucerian tradition with any great credit. Another cause is probably the rapid decay of the use of the final e, which in the meter of Chaucer was an item of much moment. Pronunciation of English was rapidly changing, and the new race of poets had not the requisite skill to modify the old meter to suit the new age. In Scottish poetry there is much activity. To a large extent the Scottish poets were content to imitate the mannerisms of Chaucer. In one respect, indeed, they carried his descriptive-allegorical method too far, and made their poems lifeless. Such were the less successful poems of Dunbar (The Golden Targe), and of Gawain Douglas (The Palice of Honour). On the other hand, peculiar Scottish features were not lacking: a breezy and sometimes vulgar humor, bred, perhaps, of the ruder folk and the bleaker air; a robust independence and common sense; a note of passion and pathos; and a sense of the picturesque both in nature and in man. We find such features illustrated, wholly or in part, in such poems as Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estatis, in Dunbar’s Lament for the Makaris, and at the close of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid.
2. Prose. The development of prose style was marked by a number of small improvements which in the aggregate represented no small advance. Unlike the poetry of the time, prose suffered from no retrogression. There was a perceptible increase in skill, due to increased practice; there was a growing perception of the beauties of rhythm and cadence; and, in the purely formal sense, there was the appearance of the prose paragraph. Above all, the chief prose styles—the ornate, the middle, and the plain—are appearing faintly but perceptibly. With their arrival the rapid development of English prose is assured.
EXERCISES
1. The following prose passages are early examples of ornate, middle, and simple styles. Analyze them carefully with respect to their sentence-construction, vocabulary, and rhythm, and show how each deserves its name.