CLASSICAL ELEMENTS IN ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM
I. Introductory: Romantic Elements
It were no less than supererogation to adduce evidences of the romantic spirit of the age of Shakespeare. No period in English literature is more distinctly romantic; and although in England criticism is less affected by creative literature, and has had less effect upon it, than in France, it is only natural to suppose that Elizabethan criticism should be as distinctly romantic as the works of imagination of which it is presumably an exposition. As early as Wilson's Rhetoric we find evidences of that independence of spirit in questions of art which seems typical of the Elizabethan age; and none of the writers of this period exhibits anything like the predisposition of the French mind to submit instinctively to any rule, or set of rules, which bears the stamp of authority. From the outset the element of nationality colors English criticism, and this is especially noticeable in the linguistic discussions of the age. At the very time when Sidney was writing the Defence of Poesy, Spenser's old teacher, Mulcaster, wrote: "I love Rome, but London better; I favor Italy, but England more; I honor the Latin, but I worship the English."[536] It is this spirit which pervades what may be called the chief expression of the romantic temper in Elizabethan criticism,—Daniel's Defence of Rhyme (1603), written in answer to Campion's attack on rhyme in the Observations in the Art of English Poesy. The central argument of Daniel's defence is that the use of rhyme is sanctioned both by custom and by nature—"custom that is before all law, nature that is above all art."[537] He rebels against that conception which would limit
"Within a little plot of Grecian ground
The sole of mortal things that can avail;"
and he shows that each age has its own perfections and its own usages. This attempt at historical criticism leads him into a defence of the Middle Ages; and he does not hesitate to assert that even classical verse had its imperfections and deficiencies. In the minutiæ of metrical criticism, also, he is in opposition to the neo-classic tendencies of the next age; and his favorable opinion of enjambement and his unfavorable comments on the heroic couplet[538] drew from Ben Jonson an answer, never published, in which the latter attempted to prove that the couplet is the best form of English verse, and that all other forms are forced and detestable.[539]
II. Classical Metres
Daniel's Defence of Rhyme may be said to have dealt a death-blow to a movement which for over half a century had been a subject of controversy among English men of letters. In reading the critical works of this period, it is impossible not to notice the remarkable amount of attention paid by the Elizabethans to the question of classical metres in the vernacular. The first organized attempt to introduce the classical versification into a modern language was, as Daniel himself points out,[540] that of Claudio Tolomei in 1539. The movement then passed into France; and classical metres were adopted by Baïf in practice, and defended by Jacques de la Taille in theory. In England the first recorded attempt at the use of quantity in the vernacular was that of Thomas Watson, from whose unpublished translation of the Odyssey in the metre of the original Ascham has cited a single distich:—
"All travellers do gladly report great prayse of Ulysses,
For that he knew many mens maners, and saw many cities."[541]