Sir Philip Sidney has gained a reputation as an English classic for his Defense of Poesie, but his romance of Arcadia is the more widely known, as it was the more warmly appreciated on its publication. Later critics have censured it, but it is rich and highly finished in its phrases, and “full of fine enthusiasm and courtesy of high sentiment, and of the breath of a gentle and heroic spirit.”
Beginning of English Comedy and Tragedy.—The first English comedy, Ralph Roister Doister, was written by Nicholas Udall, Master of Eton, between 1534 and 1541. It was avowedly modeled upon Plautus, and intended for the edification of Eton boys.
The first tragedy was Gorboduc, a new rendering of the old British story of Ferrex and Porrex by Thomas Sackville (Lord Buckhurst), and Thomas Norton. It was acted at the Inner Temple in 1561, and also before the queen by command. It substituted English for Latin in a play constructed after the manner of Seneca, and “its grave dwelling upon the need of union to keep a people strong, a truth of deep significance to England at that time, pleased Elizabeth.” But nearly twenty years yet elapsed before the drama obtained a stable hold, and theaters began to be built.
John Lyly, author of the Euphues, wrote a number of mythological plays, and George Peele produced The Arraignment of Paris and The Device of the Pageant in 1584-1585; but Christopher Marlowe, with his “mighty line,” was the first great Elizabethan dramatist. His genius was somber, and his tragedies dark and terrible. His Tamburlaine the Great was produced in 1587, but his Doctor Faustus was not published until ten years after his death, which occurred in 1593.
William Shakespeare.—In the latter part of the sixteenth century began the career of the greatest poet the world has ever seen, William Shakespeare. A period of less than twenty-five years covers the production of all those comedies and histories which are the wonder of modern literature. We marvel what kind of man that could be whose intellect could conceive such widely different works as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Venus and Adonis, Romeo and Juliet, The Rape of Lucrece, the famous Sonnets, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Hamlet. Shakespeare seems to sum up within himself the whole of poetry and of human philosophy. His power and universality are unique, and will probably ever remain so.
Ben Jonson, the greatest and most scholarly of his contemporaries, wrote from 1596 to 1637; but he lacked the freedom and naturalness of Shakespeare. Beaumont and Fletcher worked in unison with a success rarely attained by collaborators. Massinger was a dramatist of undoubted power, as his New Way to Pay Old Debts testifies; and Dekker, Heywood, Marston, and Middleton would all have taken a higher niche in the temple of fame had they lived in a less prolific age. Ford and Webster produced plays of a dark and terrible cast, and the list of Elizabethan dramatists closes with James Shirley who was purer in thought and expression than any of his predecessors. Other poets of this period were Thomas Tusser, who gave an excellent picture of English peasant life in his Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, and Michael Drayton described this favored isle itself in his Polyolbion. The learned John Donne gave utterance to his metaphysical conceits, while Drummond of Hawthornden attested his claim to the title of the finest Scottish poet of his day. Carew, Herrick, and Suckling produced their exquisite lyrics, and Herbert chanted the solemn strains of The Temple.
Elizabethan Prose Writers.—The great prose writers of the period must be headed with the illustrious name of Francis Bacon. The father of the inductive philosophy was regarded by those of his contemporaries who knew him best as “one of the greatest men and most worthy of admiration that had been for ages.” His adventurous intellect could not be bound by mere tradition. He brought his keen analytical faculty to bear upon the study of man and nature, so that in his matchless Essays we have the result of his penetration into the human mysteries, while his philosophy of nature stands revealed in the two books of the Advancement of Learning, in which he laid the basis for his New Organon.
“Who is there,” Burke demands, “that upon hearing the name of Lord Bacon does not instantly recognize everything of genius the most profound, everything of literature the most extensive, everything of discovery the most penetrating, everything of observation of human life the most distinguishing and refined?”
George Buchanan ranks as the Scottish Virgil from the elegance of his Latin verse, while he exhibited equal command over Latin prose. Richard Hooker gave a new elevation and dignity to English prose by his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Sir Walter Raleigh, the admirable Crichton of his age, carried the English name abroad, but returned only to find imprisonment and the scaffold. He glorified his prison life by the production of his great History of the World, which is especially memorable for its vivid recital of the histories of Greece and Rome. Camden the antiquary constructed his Britannia, and Hakluyt and Purchas indited their wonderful records of travel. James I. threw his ill-digested learning into treatises on Divine Right, Witchcraft, etc.; Burton wrote his quaint and erudite work, The Anatomy of Melancholy; Selden, the chief of the learned men of his time, according to Milton, alternated politics with the production of his Treatise on Titles of Honour and his History of Tithes; Hobbes of [766] Malmesbury, the terseness of whose style is unique, promulgated his theory of action and morals, as well as his absolutism in politics, in The Leviathan; Howell first showed what correspondence might become in his Familiar Letters, and genial old Izaak Walton wove an immortal spell over all lovers of good literature by his Lives of Donne, Hooker, and others, and The Complete Angler. Altogether the age was one eminently full of intellectual life.
The Puritan Period.—The decline of the drama, and the end of what we may call the Pagan Renaissance, were contemporaneous with the birth of the great constitutional struggle which began with James I. and did not terminate until the English Revolution.