England was still merry England in the times of good Queen Bess, and rang with old songs, such as kept this milkmaid company; songs, said Bishop Joseph Hall, which were "sung to the wheel and sung unto the pail." Shakspere loved their simple minstrelsy; he put some of them into the mouth of Ophelia, and scattered snatches of {94} them through his plays, and wrote others like them himself:
"Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song,
That old and antique song we heard last night,
Methinks it did relieve my passion much,
More than light airs and recollected terms
Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain.
The knitters and the spinners in the sun
And the free maids that weave their threads with bones
Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth
And dallies with the innocence of love
Like the old age."
Many of these songs, so natural, fresh, and spontaneous, together with sonnets and other more elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in miscellanies, such as the Passionate Pilgrim, England's Helicon, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. Some were anonymous, or were by poets of whom little more is known than their names. Others were by well-known writers, and others, again, were strewn through the plays of Lyly, Shakspere, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other dramatists. Series of love sonnets, like Spenser's Amoretti and Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, were written by Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton, Drummond, Constable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some mistress real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were written in great number, such as William Browne's Britannia's Pastorals and Shephera's Pipe (1613-1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl, {95} The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, which Shakspere quoted in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. There were love stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's Romeo and Juliet (the source of Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, Hero and Leander, and Shakspere's Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece, the first of these on an Italian and the other three on classical subjects, though handled in any thing but a classical manner. Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere, that he "could not have written an epic: he would have died of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two narrative poems, indeed, are by no means models of their kind. The current of the story is choked at every turn, though it be with golden sand. It is significant of his dramatic habit of mind that dialogue and soliloquy usurp the place of narration, and that, in the Rape of Lucrece especially, the poet lingers over the analysis of motives and feelings, instead of hastening on with the action, as Chaucer, or any born story-teller, would have done.
In Marlowe's poem there is the same spendthrift fancy, although not the same subtlety. In the first two divisions of the poem the story does, in some sort, get forward; but in the continuation, by George Chapman (who wrote the last four "sestiads"), the path is utterly lost, "with woodbine and the gadding vine o'ergrown."
One is reminded that modern poetry, if it has {96} lost in richness, has gained in directness, when one compares any passage in Marlowe and Chapman's Hero and Leander with Byron's ringing lines:
"The wind is high on Helle's wave,
As on that night of stormy water,
When Love, who sent, forgot to save
The young, the beautiful, the brave,
The lonely hope of Sestos' daughter."
Marlowe's continuator, Chapman, wrote a number of plays, but he is best remembered by his royal translation of Homer, issued in parts from 1598-1615. This was not so much a literal translation of the Greek, as a great Elisabethan poem, inspired by Homer. It has Homer's fire, but not his simplicity; the energy of Chapman's fancy kindling him to run beyond his text into all manner of figures and conceits. It was written, as has been said, as Homer would have written if he had been an Englishman of Chapman's time. Certainly all later versions—Pope's and Cowper's and Lord Derby's and Bryant's—seem pale against the glowing exuberance of Chapman's English. His verse was not the heroic line of ten syllables, chosen by most of the standard translators, but the long fourteen-syllabled measure, which degenerates easily into sing-song in the hands of a feeble metrist. In Chapman it is often harsh, but seldom tame, and in many passages it reproduces wonderfully the ocean-like roll of Homer's hexameters.
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"From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fire,
Like rich Autumnus' golden lamp, whose brightness men admire,
Past all the other host of stars when, with his cheerful face,
Fresh washed in lofty ocean waves, he doth the sky enchase."
Keats's fine ode, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, is well-known. Fairfax's version of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1600) is one of the best metrical translations in the language.