Brief History of English and American Literature

by Henry A. Beers

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CHAPTER III.

THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE.

1564-1616.

The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spenser's Shepheard's Calendar, in 1579, and closed with the printing of Milton's Samson Agonistes, in 1671. Within this period of little less than a century English thought passed through many changes, and there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature. Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who was a boy of eight years at Shakspere's death, lived long enough to witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not improperly be called the Elisabethan. In strictness the Elisabethan age ended with the queen's death, in 1603. But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their forerunners; and "the spacious times of great Elisabeth" have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the Restoration (1660). There is a certain likeness {77} in the intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance, and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with the queen's seal.

Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal prerogative that the name of the monarch has attached itself to the literature of her reign and of the reigns succeeding hers. The expression "Victorian poetry" has a rather absurd sound when one considers how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time. But in Elisabethan poetry the maiden queen is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser's Gloriana, and even Shakspere, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in Henry VIII., and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little allegory introduced into Midsummer Night's Dream.

"That very time I marked—but thou could'st not—
Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal throned by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart
Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on
In maiden meditation, fancy free"—

an allusion to Leicester's unsuccessful suit for Elisabeth's hand.

The praises of the queen, which sound through {78} all the poetry of her time, seem somewhat overdone to a modern reader. But they were not merely the insipid language of courtly compliment. England had never before had a female sovereign, except in the instance of the gloomy and bigoted Mary. When she was succeeded by her more brilliant sister, the gallantry of a gallant and fantastic age was poured at the latter's feet, the sentiment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to the crown. The poets idealized Elisabeth. She was to Spenser, to Sidney, and to Raleigh, not merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the champion of Protestantism, the lady of young England, the heroine of the conflict against popery and Spain. Moreover Elisabeth was a great woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and ingratitude which disfigured her character, and the vacillating, tortuous policy which often distinguished her government, she was at bottom a sovereign of large views, strong will, and dauntless courage. Like her father, she "loved a man," and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. She was a patron of the arts, passionately fond of shows and spectacles, and sensible to poetic flattery. In her royal progresses through the kingdom, the universities and the nobles and the cities vied with one another in receiving her with plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in the mythological taste of the day. "When the queen paraded through a country town," says Warton, the historian of English poetry, "almost every {79} pageant was a pantheon. When she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility, at entering the hall she was saluted by the Penates. In the afternoon, when she condescended to walk in the garden, the lake was covered with tritons and nereids; the pages of the family were converted into wood-nymphs, who peeped from every bower; and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in the figure of satyrs. When her majesty hunted in the park she was met by Diana who, pronouncing our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of unspotted chastity, invited her to groves free from the intrusions of Acteon." The most elaborate of these entertainments of which we have any notice, were, perhaps, the games celebrated in her honor by the Earl of Leicester, when she visited him at Kenilworth, in 1575. An account of these was published by a contemporary poet, George Gascoigne, The Princely Pleasures at the Court of Kenilworth, and Walter Scott has made them familiar to modern readers in his novel of Kenilworth. Sidney was present on this occasion, and, perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy of eleven, and living at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken to see the spectacle, may have seen Neptune, riding on the back of a huge dolphin in the castle lake, speak the copy of verses in which he offered his trident to the empress of the sea, and may have

"heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back, Utter such dulcet and harmonious breath, That the rude sea grew civil at the sound."