The greater the display of feeling in such tales of Italian origin, the bitterer were the denunciations of moral censors, and the greater at the same time their popularity with the public. The quarrel did not abate for one minute during the whole of the century; the period is filled with condemnations of novels, dramas and poems, answered by no less numerous apologies for the same. The quarrel went on even beyond the century, the adverse parties meeting with various success as Cromwell ruled or Charles reigned; it can scarcely be said to have ever been entirely dropped, and the very same arguments used by Ascham against the Italian books of his time are daily resorted to against the French books of our own age.
Be this as it may, the Italian novels had the better of it in Elizabethan times; they were found not only "in every shop," but in every house; translations of them were the daily reading of Shakespeare, and as they had an immense influence not only in emancipating the genius of the dramatists of the period, but, what was of equal importance, in preparing an audience for them, we may be permitted to look at them with a more indulgent eye than the pre-Shakespearean moralists.
A curious list of books, belonging during this same period (1575) to a man of the lower middle class, an average member of a Shakespearean audience, has been preserved for us. It is to be found in a very quaint account of the Kenilworth festivities, sent by Robert Laneham, a London mercer, to a brother mercer of the same city. Laneham states how an acquaintance of his, Captain Cox, a mason by trade, had in his possession, not only "Kyng Arthurz book, Huon of Burdeaus, The foour suns of Aymon, Bevis of Hampton," and many of those popular romances, illustrated with woodcuts of which a few specimens are to be seen above, but also, mason as he was, the very same Italian book, the "Lucres and Eurialus," of which we have just given an account.[48]
With the diffusion of these small handy volumes of tales of all kinds, from all countries, a quite modern sort of literature, a literature for travellers, was being set on foot. Manuscript books did not easily lend themselves to be carried about; but it was otherwise with the printed pamphlets. Authors began to recommend their productions as convenient travelling companions, very much in the same manner as the publishers recommend them now as suitable to be taken to the Alps or to the seaside. Paynter, for example, who circulated in England from the year 1566 his collection of tales translated or imitated from Boccaccio and Bandello, Apuleius and Xenophon, the Queen of Navarre, and Bonaventure Desperriers, Belleforest and Froissart, Guevara and many others, assures his reader that: "Pleasaunt they be for that they recreate, and refreshe weried mindes defatigated either with painefull travaile or with continuall care, occasioning them to shunne and to avoid heavinesse of minde, vaine fantasies and idle cogitations. Pleasaunt so well abroad as at home, to avoide the griefe of winters night and length of sommers day, which the travailers on foote may use for a staye to ease their weried bodye, and the journeours on horsback, for a chariot or lesse painful meane of travaile in steade of a merie companion to shorten the tedious toyle of wearie wayes."[49]
It is pleasant to think of Shakespeare in some journey from Stratford to London, sitting under a tree, and in order to forget "the tedious toyle of wearie wayes," taking out of his pocket Paynter's book to dream of future Romeos and possible Helenas.
III.
The Italian and French languages were held in great honour; both were taught at Oxford and Cambridge; the latter especially was of common use in England, and this peculiarity attracted the notice of foreigners. "As regards their manners and mode of living, ornaments, garments and vestments," writes the Greek Nicander Nucius, in 1545, "they resemble the French more than others, and, for the most part, they use their language."[50] But besides these elegant languages, Greek and Latin were becoming courtly. They were taught in the schools and out of the schools; the nobles, following the example of King Henry VIII. and his children, made a parade of their knowledge. Ignorance was no longer the fashion, no more than the old towers without windows. The grave Erasmus went to hear Colet, the Dean of St. Paul's, and "he thought he was hearing Plato"; Sir T. More, according to Erasmus, is the "sweetest, softest, happiest genius nature has ever shaped." In a word, "literature is triumphant among the English. The king himself, the two cardinals, almost all the bishops, favour with all their soul and adorn Letters."[51] To learn Greek and Latin was to move with the times and to follow the fashion. "All men," says Ascham, less displeased with this novelty than with the travelling propensities of his compatriots, "covet to have their children speake latin"; and "Sophocles and Euripides are more familiar now here than Plautus was formerly."[52] Dazzled by what he saw and heard, Erasmus was announcing to the world in enthusiastic letters that "the golden age" was to be born again in this fortunate island.[53] His only regret was that he would perhaps not live long enough to see it. Well might he regret it, even though it were not to follow exactly as he had foreseen; for the golden apple of the golden age was not to be plucked in the Greek Hesperides' garden, but in a plain Warwickshire orchard: nor was it the less golden.
This fermentation of mind lasted for more than a century; lives were often shortened by it, but they had been doubly well filled. From this restless curiosity, bent towards past ages and foreign countries, towards everything that was remote, unknown and different, came that striking appearance of omniscience and universality, and that prodigious wealth of imagery, allusions and ideas of every kind that are to be found in all the authors of that time, small as well as great, and which unites in one common bond Rabelais and Shakespeare, Cervantes and Sidney and the "master of the enchanters of the ear," Ronsard.
When the armour, worn less often, began to grow rusty in the great halls, and the nobles, coming forth from their coats-of-mail like the butterfly from the chrysalis, showed themselves all glistening in silk, pearls in their ears, their heads full of Italian madrigals and mythological similes, a new society was formed, salons of a kind were organized, and the rôle of the women was enlarged. English mediæval times had been by no means sparing of compliments to them. But there is a great difference between celebrating in verse fair, slim-necked ladies, and writing books expressly for them: and it is one of the points in which, during the Middle Ages and even until the middle of the sixteenth century, England differed from the nations of the south. In England no Lady Oisille had gathered round her in the depth of green valleys tellers of amorous stories; no thickly-shaded parks had seen Fiammettas or Philomenas listening to all kinds of narratives, forgetful of the actual world and its sorrows. The only group of story-tellers, bound together by a true artist's fancy, Chaucer's pilgrims, had ridden in broad daylight on the high road to Canterbury, led by Harry Bailly, the jovial innkeeper of Southwark, a blustering, red-faced dictator, who had regulated the pace of the nags, and silenced the tedious babblers: very different in all things from Fiammetta and the Lady Oisille.
Under the influence of Italy, France and mythology, the England of the Tudors, changed all that. Women appeared in the foreground: a movement of general curiosity animated the age, and they participated in it quite naturally. They will become learned, if necessary, rather than remain in the shade; they will no longer rest contented with permission to read books written for their fathers, brothers, lovers, or husbands; some must be written especially on their account, consulting their preferences and personal caprices; and they had good reason to command: one of them sat on the throne.