The lyric impulse was fledged anew at the court of Henry VIII. The short lines and harping burdens of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s songs show the revival, not only of a love-poetry more plangent than anything in English since Verse to 1580. Chaucer, but also of the long-deadened sense of metre. In Wyatt’s sonnets, octaves, terzines and other Italian measures, we can watch the painful triumphant struggles of this noble old master out of the slough of formlessness in which verse had been left by Skelton. Wyatt’s primary deed was his gradual rediscovery of the iambic decasyllabic line duly accented—the line that had been first discovered by Chaucer for England; and next came its building into sonnet and stanza. Wyatt (d. 1542) ended with perfect formal accuracy; he has the honours of victory; and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (d. 1547), a younger-hearted and more gracious but a lighter poet, carried on his labour, and caught some of Chaucer’s as well as the Italian tunes. The blank verse of his two translated Aeneids, like all that written previous to Peele, gave little inkling of the latencies of the measure which was to become the cardinal one of English poetry. It was already the vogue in Italy for translations from the classics; and we may think of Surrey importing it like an uncut jewel and barely conscious of its value. His original poems, like those of Wyatt, waited for print till the eve of Elizabeth’s reign, when they appeared, with those of followers like Grimoald, in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), the first of many such garlands, and the outward proof of the poetical revival dating twenty years earlier. But this was a false dawn. Only one poem of authentic power, Sackville’s Induction (1563) to that dreary patriotic venture, A Mirror for Magistrates, was published for twenty years. In spirit medieval, this picture of the gates of hell and of the kings in bale achieves a new melody and a new intensity, and makes the coming of Spenser far less incredible. But poetry was long starved by the very ideal that nursed it—that of the all-sided, all-accomplished “courtier” or cavalier, to whom verse-making was but one of all the accomplishments that he must perfect, like fencing, or courting, or equestrian skill. Wyatt and Surrey, Sackville and Sidney (and we may add Hamlet, a true Elizabethan) are of this type. One of the first competent professional writers was George Gascoigne, whose remarks on metric, and whose blank verse satire, The Steel Glass (1576), save the years between Sackville and Spenser. Otherwise the gap is filled by painful rhymesters with rare flashes, such as Googe, Churchyard and Turberville.
The English Renaissance drama, both comic and tragic, illustrates on the largest scale the characteristic power of the antique at this period—at first to reproduce itself in imitation, and then to generate something utterly Drama to 1580. different from itself, something that throws the antique to the winds. Out of the Morality, a sermon upon the certainty of death or the temptations of the soul, acted by personified qualities and supernatural creatures, had grown up, in the reign of Henry VII., the Interlude, a dialogue spoken by representative types or trades, who faintly recalled those in Chaucer’s Prologue. These forms, which may be termed medieval, continued long and blended; sometimes heated, as in Respublica, with doctrine, and usually lightened by the comic play of a “Vice” or incarnation of sinister roguery. John Heywood was the chief maker of the pure interludes, and Bishop Bale of the Protestant medleys; his King Johan, a reformer’s partisan tract in verse, contains the germs of the chronicle play. In the drama down to 1580 the native talent is sparse enough, but the historical interest is high. Out of a seeming welter of forms, the structure, the metres and the species that Kyd and Marlowe found slowly emerged. Comedy was first delivered from the interlude, and fashioned in essence as we know it, by the schoolmasters. Drawing on Plautus, they constructed duly-knitted plots, divided into acts and scenes and full of homely native fun, for their pupils to present. In Thersites (written 1537), the oldest of these pieces, and in Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552 at latest), the best known of them, the characters are lively, and indeed are almost individuals. In others, like Misogonus (written 1560), the abstract element and improving purpose remain, and the source is partly neo-Latin comedy, native or foreign. Romance crept in: serious comedy, with its brilliant future, the comedy of high sentiment and averted dangers mingled still with farce, was shadowed forth in Damon and Pithias and in the curious play Common Conditions; while the domestic comedy of intrigue dawned in Gascoigne’s Supposes, adapted from Ariosto. Thus were displaced the ranker rustic fun of Gammer Gurton’s Needle (written c. 1559) and other labours of “rhyming mother-wits.” But there was no style, no talk, no satisfactory metre. The verse of comedy waited for Greene, and its prose for Lyly. Structure, without style, was also the main achievement of the early tragedies. The Latin plays of Buchanan, sometimes biblical in topic, rest, as to their form, upon Euripides. But early English tragedy was shapen after the Senecan plays of Italy and after Seneca himself, all of whose dramas were translated by 1581. Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, acted about 1561, and written by Sackville and Norton, and Hughes’ Misfortunes of Arthur (acted 1588), are not so much plays as wraiths of plays, with their chain of slaughters and revenges, their two-dimensional personages, and their lifeless maxims which fail to sweeten the bloodshot atmosphere. The Senecan form was not barren in itself, as its sequel in France was to show: it was only barren for England. After Marlowe it was driven to the study, and was still written (possibly under the impulse of Mary countess of Pembroke), by Daniel and Greville, with much reminiscence of the French Senecans. But it left its trail on the real drama. It set the pattern of a high tragical action, often motived by revenge, swayed by large ideas of fate and retribution, and told in blank metre; and it bequeathed, besides many moral sentences, such minor points of mechanism as the Ghost, the Chorus and the inserted play. There were many hybrid forms like Gismond of Salern, based on foreign story, alloyed with the mere personifications of the Morality, and yet contriving, as in the case of Promos and Cassandra (the foundation of Measure for Measure), to interest Shakespeare. Thus the drama by 1580 had some of its carpentry, though not yet a true style or versification. These were only to be won by escape from the classic tutelage. The ruder chronicle play also began, and the reigns of John and Henry V. amongst others were put upon the stage.
Verse from Spenser to Donne.—Sir Philip Sidney almost shares with Edmund Spenser the honours of announcing the new verse, for part of his Astrophel and Stella was written, if not known in unpublished form, about 1580-1581, and contains ten times the passion and poetry of Spenser. The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579). This work, of which only a few passages have the seal of Spenser’s coming power, was justly acclaimed for its novelty of experiment in many styles, pastoral, satiric and triumphal, and in many measures: though it was criticized for its “rustic” and archaic diction—a “no language” that was to have more influence upon poetry than any of the real dialects of England. Spenser’s desire to write high tragedy, avowed in his October, was not to be granted; his nine comedies are lost; and he became the chief non-dramatic poet of his time and country. Both the plaintive pessimism of Petrarch and du Bellay, with their favourite method of emblem, and the Platonic theory of the spiritual love and its heavenly begetting sank into him; and the Hymns To Love and To Beauty are possibly his earliest verses of sustained perfection and exaltation. These two strains of feeling Spenser never lost and never harmonized; the first of them recurs in his Complaints of 1591, above all in The Ruins of Time, the second in his Amoretti (1595) and Colin Clout and Epithalamion, which are autobiographical. These and a hundred other threads are woven into The Faerie Queene, an unfinished allegorical epic in honour of moral goodness, of which three books came out in 1590 and three more in 1596, while the fragment Of Constancy (so-called) is first found in the posthumous folio of 1609. This poem is the fullest reflex, outside the drama, of the soul and aspirations of the time. For its scenery and mechanism the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto furnishes the framework. In both poems tales of knightly adventure intertwine unconfused; in both the slaying of monsters, the capture of strong places, and the release of the innocent, hindered by wizard and sorcerer, or aided by magic sword and horn and mirror, constitute the quest; and in both warriors, ladies, dwarfs, dragons and figures from old mythology jostle dreamily together. To all this pomp Spenser strove to give a moral and often also a political meaning. Ariosto was not a vates sacer; and so Spenser took Tasso’s theme of the holy war waged for the Sepulchre, and expanded it into a war between good and evil, as he saw them in the world; between chastity and lust, loyalty and detraction, England and Spain, England and Rome, Elizabeth and usurpers, Irish governor and Irish rebel, right and wrong. The title-virtues of his six extant books he affects to take from Aristotle; but Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Justice, Friendship and Courtesy form a medley of medieval, puritanical and Greek ideals.
Spenser’s moral sentiments, often ethereally noble, might well be contrasted, and that not always to their credit, with those more secular and naturalistic ones that rule in Shakespeare or in Bernardino Telesio and Giordano Bruno. But The Faerie Queene lives by its poetry; and its poetry lives independently of its creed. The idealized figures of Elizabeth, who is the Faerie Queene, and of the “magnificent” Prince Arthur, fail to bind the adventures together, and after two books the poem breaks down in structure. And indeed all through it relies on episode and pageant, on its prevailing and insuppressible loveliness of scene and tint, of phrasing and of melody, beside which the inner meaning is often an interruption. Spenser is not to be tired; in and out of his tapestry, with its “glooming light much like a shade,” pace his figures on horseback, or in durance, with their clear and pictorial allegoric trappings; and they go either singly, or in his favourite masques or pageants, suggested by emblematical painting or civic procession. He is often duly praised for his lingering and liquid melodies and his gracious images, or blamed for their langour; but his ground-tone is a sombre melancholy—unlike that of Jaques—and his deepest quality as a writer is perhaps his angry power. Few of his forty and more thousand lines are unpoetical; in certainty of style amongst English poets who have written profusely, he has no equals but Chaucer, Milton and Shelley. His “artificial” diction, drawn from middle English, from dialect or from false analogy, has always the intention and nearly always the effect of beauty; we soon feel that its absence would be unnatural, and it has taken its rank among the habitual and exquisite implements of English poetry. This equality of noble form is Spenser’s strength, as dilution and diffusion of phrase, and a certain monotonous slowness of tempo, are beyond doubt his weaknesses. His chief technical invention, the nine-line stanza (ababbcbcC) was developed not from the Italian octave (abababcc), but by adding an alexandrine to the eight-line stave (ababbcbc) of Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale. It is naturally articulated twice—at the fifth line, where the turn of repeated rhyme inevitably charms, and at the ninth, which runs now to a crashing climax, now to a pensive and sighing close. In rhyming, Spenser, if not always accurate, is one of the most natural and resourceful of poets. His power over the heroic couplet or quatrain is shown in his fable, Mother Hubbard’s Tale, and in his curious verse memoir, Colin Clout; both of which are medleys of satire and flattery. With formal tasks so various and so hard, it is wonderful how effortless the style of Spenser remains. His Muiopotmos is the lightest-handed of mock-heroics. No writer of his day except Marlowe was so faithful to the law of beauty.
The mantle of Spenser fell, somewhat in shreds, upon poets of many schools until the Restoration. As though in thanks to his master Tasso, he lent to Edward Fairfax, the best translator of the Jerusalem Delivered (Godfrey of Bulloigne, 1600), some of his own ease and intricate Spenserians. melody. Harington, the witty translator of Ariosto (1591) and spoilt child of the court, owed less to Spenser. The allegorical colouring was nobly caught, if sometimes barbarized, in the Christ’s Victory and Triumph of the younger Giles Fletcher (1610), and Spenser’s emblematic style was strained, even cracked, by Phineas Fletcher in The Purple Island (1633), an aspiring fable, gorgeous in places, of the human body and faculties. Both of these brethren clipped and marred the stanza, but they form a link between Spenser and their student Milton. The allegoric form, long-winded and broken-backed, survived late in Henry More’s and Joseph Beaumont’s verse disquisitions on the soul. Spenser’s pastoral and allusive manner was allowed by Drayton in his Shepherd’s Garland (1593), and differently by William Browne in Britannia’s Pastorals (1613-1616), and by William Basse; while his more honeyed descriptions took on a mawkish taste in the anonymous Britain’s Ida and similar poems. His golden Platonic style was buoyantly echoed in Orchestra (1596), Sir John Davies’ poem on the dancing spheres. He is continually traceable in 17th-century verse, blending with the alien currents of Ben Jonson and of Donne. He was edited and imitated in the age of Thomson, in the age of William Morris, and constantly between.
The typical Elizabethan poet is Michael Drayton; who followed Spenser in pastoral, Daniel, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare in sonnet, Daniel again in chronicle and legend, and Marlowe in mythological story, and who Drayton and Daniel. yet remained himself. His Endimion and Phoebe in passages stands near Hero and Leander; his England’s Heroical Epistles (1597) are in ringing rhetorical couplets; his Odes (1606), like the Ballad of Agincourt and the Virginian Voyage, forestall and equal Cowper’s or Campbell’s; his Nymphidia (1627) was the most popular of burlesque fairy poems; and his pastorals are full of graces and felicities. The work of Drayton that is least read and most often mentioned is his Poly-Olbion (1612-1622), a vast and pious effort, now and then nobly repaid, to versify the scenery, legend, customs and particularities of every English county. The more recluse and pensive habit of Samuel Daniel chills his long chronicle poems; but with Chapman he is the clearest voice of Stoicism in Elizabethan letters; and his harmonious nature is perfectly expressed in a style of happy, even excellence, free alike from “fine madness” and from strain. Sonnet and epistle are his favoured forms, and in his Musophilus (1599) as well as in his admirable prose Defence of Rhyme (1602), he truly prophesies the hopes and glories of that illustre vulgare, the literary speech of England. All this patriotic and historic verse, like the earlier and ruder Albion’s England (1586) of William Warner, or Fitzgeoffrey’s poem upon Drake, or the outbursts of Spenser, was written during or inspired by the last twenty years of the queen’s reign; and the same is true of Shakespeare’s and most of the other history plays, which duly eclipsed the formal, rusty-gray chronicle poem of the type of the Mirror for Magistrates, though editions (1559-1610) of the latter were long repeated. Patriotic verse outside the theatre, however, full of zeal, started at a disadvantage compared with love-sonnet, song, or mythic narrative, because it had no models before it in other lands, and remained therefore the more shapeless.
The English love-sonnet, brought in by Wyatt and rifest between 1590 and 1600, was revived as a purely studious imitation by Watson in his Hekatompathia (1582), a string of translations in one of the exceptional measures that Sonnets. were freely entitled “sonnets.” But from the first, in the hands of Sidney, whose Astrophel and Stella (1591) was written, as remarked above, about 1581, the sonnet was ever ready to pulse into feeling, and to flash into unborrowed beauty, embodying sometimes dramatic fancy and often living experience. These three fibres of imitation, imagination and confession are intertwisted beyond severance in many of the cycles, and now one, now another is uppermost. Incaution might read a personal diary into Thomas Lodge’s Phillis (1593), which is often a translation from Ronsard. Literal judges have announced that Shakespeare’s Sonnets are but his mode of taking exercise. But there is poetry in “God’s plenty” almost everywhere; and few of the series fail of lovely lines or phrasing or even of perfect sonnets. This holds of Henry Constable’s Diana (1592), of the Parthenophil and Parthenophe of Barnabe Barnes (1593), inebriate with poetry, and of the stray minor groups, Alcilia, Licia, Caelia; while the Caelica of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, in irregular form, is full of metaphysical passion struggling to be delivered. Astrophel and Stella, Drayton’s Idea (1594-1619), Spenser’s Amoretti and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (printed 1609) are addressed to definite and probably to known persons, and are charged with true poetic rage, ecstatic or plaintive, desperate or solemn, if they are also intermingled with the mere word-play that mocks or beguiles the ebb of feeling, or with the purely plastic work that is done for solace. In most of these series, as in Daniel’s paler but exquisitely-wrought Delia (1591-1592), the form is that of the three separate quatrains with the closing couplet for emotional and melodic climax; a scheme slowly but defiantly evolved, through traceable gradations, from that stricter one of Italy, which Drummond and Milton revived, and where the crisis properly coincides with the change from octave to sestet.
The amorous mythologic tale in verse derives immediately from contemporary Italy, but in the beginning from Ovid, whose Metamorphoses, familiar in Golding’s old version (1555-1557), furnished descriptions, decorations and Mythic poems. many tales, while his Heroides gave Chaucer and Boccaccio a model for the self-anatomy of tragic or plaintive sentiment. Within ten years, between 1588 and 1598, during the early sonnet-vogue, appeared Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe. Shakespeare owed something to Lodge, and Drayton to Marlowe. All these points describe a love-situation at length, and save in one instance they describe it from without. The exception is Marlowe, who achieves a more than Sicilian perfection; he says everything, and is equal to everything that he has to say. In Venus and Adonis the poet is enamoured less of love than of the tones and poses of lovers and of the beauty and gallant motion of animals, while in The Rape of Lucrece he is intent on the gradations of lust, shame and indignation, in which he has a spectator’s interest. Virtuosity, or the delight of the executant in his own brilliant cunning, is the mark of most of these pieces.
If we go to the lyrics, the versified mythic tales and the sonnets of Elizabethan times for the kind of feeling that Molière’s Alceste loved and that Burns and Shelley poured into song, we shall often come away disappointed, and think Lyric. the old poetry heartless. But it is not heartless, any more than it is always impassioned or personal; it is decorative. The feeling is often that of the craftsman; it is not of the singer who spends his vital essence in song and commands an answering thrill so long as his native language is alive or understood. The arts that deal with ivories or enamelling or silver suggest themselves while we watch the delighted tinting and chasing, the sense for gesture and grouping (in Venus and Adonis), or the delicate beating out of rhyme in a madrigal, or the designing of a single motive, or two contrasted motives, within the panel of the sonnet. And soon it is evident how passion and emotion readily become plastic matter too, whether they be drawn from books or observation or self-scrutiny. This is above all the case in the sonnet; but it is found in the lyric as well. The result is a wonderful fertility of lyrical pattern, a wonderfully diffused power of lyrical execution, never to recur at any later time of English literature. Wyatt had to recover the very form of such verse from oblivion, and this he did in the school of translation and adaptation. Not only the decasyllabic, but the lyric, in short lines had almost died out of memory, and Wyatt brought it back. From his day to Spenser’s there is not much lyric that is noteworthy, though in Gascoigne and others the impulse is seen. The introduction of Italian music, with its favourite metrical schemes, such as the madrigal, powerfully schooled and coloured lyric: in especial, the caressing double ending, regular in Italian but heavier in English, became common. The Italian poems were often translated in their own measure, line by line, and the musical setting retained. Their tunes, or other tunes, were then coupled with new and original poems; and both appeared together in the song-books of Dowland the lutanist, of Jones and Byrd (1588), and in chief (1601-1619) of Thomas Campion. The words of Campion’s songs are not only supremely musical in the wider sense, but are chosen for their singing quality. Misled awhile by the heresy that rhyme was wrong, he was yet a master of lovely rhyming, as well as of a lyrical style of great range, gaily or gravely happy. But, as with most of his fellows, singing is rather his calling than his consolation. The lyrics that are sprinkled in plays and romances are the finest of this period, and perhaps, in their kind, of any period. Shakespeare is the greatest in this province also; but the power of infallible and unforgettable song is often granted to slighter, gentler playwrights like Greene and Dekker, while it is denied to men of weightier build and sterner purpose like Chapman and Jonson. The songs of Jonson are indeed at their best of absolute and antique finish; but the irrevocable dew of night or dawn seldom lies upon them as it lies on the songs of Webster or of Fletcher. The best lyrics in the plays are dramatic; they must be read in their own setting. While the action stops, they seize and dally with the dominant emotion of the scene, and yet relieve it. The songs of Lodge and Breton, of Drayton and Daniel, of Oxford and Raleigh, and the fervid brief flights of the Jesuit Southwell, show the omnipresence of the vital gift, whether among professional writers of the journalistic type, or among poets whose gift was not primarily song, or among men of action and quality or men of religion, who only wrote when they were stirred. Lullaby and valentine and compliment, and love-plaint ranging from gallantry to desperation, are all there: and the Fortunate Hour, which visits commonly only a few men in a generation, and those but now and then in their lives, is never far off. But the master of melody, Spenser, left no songs, apart from his two insuperable wedding odes. And religious lyric is rarer before the reign of James. Much of the best lyric is saved for us by the various Miscellanies, A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584), the Phoenix Nest (1593) and Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody (1602); while other such collections, like England’s Helicon (1600), were chiefly garlands of verse that was already in print.
There is plenty of satiric anger and raillery in the spirit of the time, but the most genuine part of it is drawn off into drama. Except for stray passages in Spenser, Drayton and others, formal satire, though profuse, was a literary unreal thing, a pose in the manner of Persius or Juvenal, and tiresome in expression. In this kind only Donne triumphed. The attempts of Lodge and Hall and Marston and John Davies of Hereford and Guilpin and Wither are for the most part simply weariful in different ways, and satire waited for Dryden and his age. The attempt, however, persisted throughout. Wyatt was the first and last who succeeded in the genial, natural Horatian style.