Round About Chaucer: John Gower

From Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature (1937)

Chaucer to the Renascence. 1. Round about Chaucer: 7) The Dialect of the East Midlands of King's English. John Gower. 

However important literary production, in the dialects we have reviewed, may have been, no one of them triumphed over the others. Victory fell to the speech of the east midlands, the district of London and the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and that in which the king had his residence. For this reason that language has been called the King's English. Its pre-eminence was established once for all in the end of the fourteenth century.

Although to-day this victory seems quite natural, since social forces were already making London the political and social centre, the universities the intellectual centre of the nation, the dialect of the east midlands was perhaps, when it was on the very eve of becoming English like none other, the poorest, the most completely disinherited of literature. Since Anglo-Saxon times, almost all English poetry had been produced apart from it. It could boast of hardly a poem besides the romance of Havelock and Robert Manning's Handlyng Sinne.  Reflection shows that the fact is not astonishing, for it was in the neighbourhood of the court and the universities that the English language was most degraded and existed most precariously, that it was always subordinate either to Latin or to French or rather Anglo-Norman. King, nobles, and clerks despised it. French, long the only tongue of those ouside the vulgar herd, had its natural stronghold in this district, and was more tenacious of life here than elsewhere. Men better endowed than their fellows avoided the common language or had recourse to it only for practical ends. Their literary ambitions did not find scope in a tongue which was so meanly prized.

The case of John Gower (1) is very representative of prevalent conditions. He used Latin and French in turn, and reached the point of writing in English only late, probably under the influence of Chaucer's success. The date of his birth is unknown. Was he, as was long believed, some ten years older than Chaucer, or was his junior? He died eight years after him, in 1408, and was probably his exact contemporary. The works of the two poets grew side by side, and, although Gower is not without merit of his own, he is chiefly valuable because he serves to measure the greatness of his rival.

He was a Kentish man, but this origin had only a slight effect on his language, which is hardly at all different from that of London and the court. He was a gentleman, possibly a clerk who did not take major orders. He was well read, and his library, if the word may be used, seems to have contained much the same French and Latin books as Chaucer's.

Undoubtedly he was once young for he wrote love ballades in English-French, ballades which lack fire but are not without a certain grace. This was a lover on the courtly model, seeking in vain to touch an unfeeling heart:

En le douls temps ma fortune est amière
Le mois de Maij sest en yverne mué;
Lurtie truis si jeo la Rose quière
Vous êtes franche et jeo suis fort lié. (2)

 (Ballade XXXVII.)

The third line at least needs translation—

I find the nettle when I look for the rose—

for its language is not Parisian. He is aware of the fact and excuses himself for it:

Et si je n'ai du français la faconde
Pardonnez-moi que je de ce fors voie, (3)
Je suis Anglais; si quiers par telle voie (4)
Être excusé. . . .

The very rhythm of his French verse tends to be Anglicized, to beat time to the iambic measure. In spite of his effort after correctness, Gower proves better than any one else how artificial was this uprooted language, at once learned and corrupt. He reminds us of Chaucer's Prioress:

And Frensch she spak ful faire and fetysly
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frensch of Paris was to hire unknowe.

Gower is the last in date of the Anglo-Norman poets. He deserves to rank among them less by a few little love-pieces than by his long poem or rather his long sermon in verse which is called Speculum Meditantis, or Miroir de l'Homme, and has recently been rediscovered. It is a sermon against the immorality of the age, and it justifies Chaucer's epithet of 'moral Gower' which was to cling to his friend's name for ever. This clerk, concerned especially to note and display the vices of his generation, was indeed much more a moralist than a poet. He is without a trace of that joy in life and pleasure and observing it which are so vivid in Chaucer. He compares what he sees with his ideal, that of a pious clerk and a student, finds all abominable, and condemns unreservedly.

Thus it was with his most remarkable work, Vox Clamantis, which was inspired by the Peasant's Rising of 1381 and which he elected to write in Latin. It is a very substantial poem written by a member of the wealthy class, by a frightened landlord whose misfortune it was to live in Kent, the county in which the formidable rebellion broke out. Gower's terror gives these verse a strength and emphasis which are lacking in his other work.

The rising under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw began near Gower's land, and more than one of his tenants was doubtless among the rebels. It was during the first years of the minority of Richard II. The impoverishment of the Treasury, the levy of new subsidies for an unfortunate war, and the insolence of the farmers of the taxes had provoked popular anger and rebellion. Several tax-collectors were put to death, and after them lawyers, courtiers, and partisans of the real regent, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. The number of the rebels increased. One hundred thousand men marched on London, demanding the abolition of serfdom and the reduction of rents. A true social revolution had been let loose in the country, and for a moment the insurgents were masters of London, where they sacked the palaces of the Archbishop of Canterbury and John of Gaunt. They destroyed but they did not steal: they even hanged a man in their own ranks for theft. Then the king rode out to meet them, and Wat Tyler, while in parley with him, was slain by the mayor. The king procured the dispersal of the rebels by promising redress of their grievances, then revoked his promise, and the rising was ended by cruel repressive measures.

Gower, now in his fifties, was haunted by this rebellion as by a nightmare. His interests were all on the side of the landlords. He had no sympathy with the popular cause, yet considered the ills of society to be the outcome of social vices which were ruining the state. His alarms and his grievances are voiced in the Latin distichs of Vox Clamantis. 

The poet first has a vision of a crowd of members of the populace changed into wild beasts and uncurbed by reason—asses, fierce as lions, who will bear no more burdens, oxen who refuse to draw the plough, dows who bark at huntsmen, cats who have reverted to wildness. A jay, who stands for Wat Tyler, harangues them, to the sound of 'Down with honour! Perish the law!' and at the tail of their company John Ball, an excommunicate priest, preaches on the text: 

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

The swarming mass of people lays Troynovant, or London, waste. Its strength is broken by the death of the jay, but the ship of the state is still adrift and puts in at the island of Disorder. Then a voice from heaven advises Gower to write down what he has seen in his nightmare. 

The rest of his poem contains his waking thoughts and is entirely didactic. The misfortunes of the age spring from the general corruption. There are three classes of society, the clerks, the warriors, otherwise knights and nobles, and the third estate, namely the villeins and labourers, the traders and the lawyers. All are riddled with vice. The court is a meeting-place for everything abominable. 

The poem ends with a prayer to the young king, Richard II, to bring virtue back to the court, and with an appeal to all men to mend their ways, remembering how short is earthly life. Gower declares his love for his cournty: he has wished, he says, that men should hear not only what he himself feels to be true, but also the voice of the people which is often the voice of God. 

It is a great pity that this work, into which Gower has put the best of himself, his utmost sincerity of thought, vehemence of satire, and depths of narrow but coherent morality, should have received the dress of a dead language, while on the one occasion when he used the speech of his country he worked against the grain of his temperament and talent, and wrote an entirely artificial poem.

For he did finally make up his mind to write in English, perhaps incited by the growing reputation of Chaucer, who had already produced most of his works and was soon to begin The Canterbury Tales. It was about 1383 or 1384 that Gower composed his single English poem, his Confessio Amantis, an immense compilation of stories extending to forty thousand octosyllabic lines. He tells us he did it at the bidding of King Richard, who charged him that 'some newe thing I shuldë boke,' and thus he excuses his use of the vulgar tongue:

And for that fewë men endite
In oure Enslisshe, I thenkë make
A bok for King Richardës sake.

He has the credit of having sought, a little before Chaucer, a thread on which to string some hundred stories. The idea was not quite new: it had been exemplified in the Speculum Historiale of Vincent de Beauvais, the Gesta Romanorum, and the Sept Sages, to which the Decameron would have to be added, were it not clearly unknown to Gower as to Chaucer. The idea was a happy one, but how awkwardly Gower executed it!

He tells us with a sigh that he is going to sing of love, rather than follow his own taste and write a moral book. Love is the last subject he would choose for himself, but something must be conceded to the reader who prefers amusement to wisdom:

For thilkë cause, if that ye rede,
I wolde go the middel wey
And write a boke betwene the twey,
Somwhat of lust, somwhat of lore.

I happens that Venus, who has little fondness for him, advises him one day in May to make his confession to her priest Genius.  The obedient poet goes to the confessional and asks Genius to question him, point by point, thus sounding his conscience in the article of love. Genius consents, but declares that, in order that the confession may be complete, he will be obliged, in the course of the examination, to speak of the different vices. He will explain each of them by means of a story, so that the lover may know whether or not he have the same guilt on his conscience. When the confession has ended, Venus mocks this superannuated lover, who decides to withdraw. 

The device allows the seven deadly sins, subdivided into many secondary sins, to defile thorugh seven books. Genius has received a complete scholastic education, but he ceases to excel when he endeavours to adapt his examples to his precepts. To illustrate hypocrisy he tells the tale of the deceiving Trojan Horse. To show that murder, an effect of anger, is to be condemned, he relates the story of Pyramus and Thisbe: Pyramus kills himself out of despair, which is anger, when he believes that Thisbe has been the lion's victim, and the moral is that nothing should be done in a hurry. The proof that carelessness is injurious to love is found in the story of Phaeton, who drove his father's chariot carelessly, freezing and burning the earth by turns, so that Phebus caused him, as a punishment, to fall from the chariot and be drowned.

The connection of these stories with the morality of love is so absurd that, after praising Gower for attempting a unified plan, we are tempted to regret that he did not write his little stories haphazard, without trying to give them a frame. For as a a narrator he is abundant and clear, and since he has read much, he has had no difficulty in finding curious and sometimes attractive studies among his books. Several of his tales recur in Chaucer, who sometimes preceded and sometimes followed him in selecting them. Once or twice Gower was inspired by a better original than Chaucer, as when he took the story of the Knight Florent which corresponds to the tale of the Wife of Bath.

This is as much as can be claimed for Gower. An almost immeasurable distance separates him from Chaucer. He is doing penance when he obliges himself to treat of love, undertaking a task so ungrateful and so contrary to his nature that he could have discharged it well only with the help of the sense of humour he lacked deplorably. Like him, Chaucer posed as despised by Venus and ill-used by Cupid, but—not to speak of his unrivalled and unfailing power to awaken sympathy for lovers—his confession of impotence is delightful because it is wrapped in humour. In Gower, there are, or seem to be, velleities of humour, but they are invariably abortive. There is too much reality in the awkwardness with which this poet resigns himself to his distasteful subject. Once and again, a sigh excapes him because he cannot return to the moral teaching natural to him, and these regrets are the sincerest part of his poem. He is indeed, as Chaucer said, 'moral Gower', and it is unfortunate that he ever forsook his role. Venus was right when she told him:

And tarie thou mi court nomore
but go ther vertu moral dwelleth,
Where ben thi bokes, as men telleth,
Which of long time thou hast write.

And we are grateful to Gower for having made the goddess own Chaucer for her true disciple and poet. 

Of dites and songës glad
The which he for my sakë made
The land fulfilled is over al.

Gower, learned, industrious, and copious, is the typical average poet of his century. His writings are what Chaucer's might have been without Chaucer's genius.

Notes

(1). Complete edition in four volumes of his work, ed. by G. C. Macaulay (Clarendon Press, 1899-1902); Confessio Amantis, ed. by Henry Morley (1899).

(2) In the sweet season, my fate is bitter
     The month of May has changed into winter
      I find the nettle when I look for the rose;
     You are free whereas I am fast bound.

(3) I go astray.

(4) And therefore I beg.

 

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Founder of Our Language

—oOo—

 

The Part of the Humanists

From Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature (1937).

Book III - The Preparation for the Renascence (1516-78)

Chapter I - THE PART OF THE HUMANISTS

I. Special Characteristics of the English Renascence.— The Renascence showed in England almost all the characteristics which it had throughout Europe: thought was liberated and broadened so that it broke its scholastic framework; destiny and morals ceased to be the matter only of dogma and became problematical; a rebellion against the spiritual authority was first incited by the Reformation, which was soon afterwards the enemy of this ally, the Renascence; men loomed with a new wonder at the heavens and the earth as they were revealed by the discoveries of the navigators and astronomy; superior beauty was perceived in the literature of classical antiquity, particularly in the recently discovered works of ancient Greece.

At the same time, the Renascence had in England certain additional characteristics which were so special that they gave rise to a truly national literature. The difference was mainly at the time of flowering and in the quantitative mixture of elements, but it was also an outcome of the power each nation simultaneously acquired, when once it was enfranchised from the unifying Catholic discipline, of revealing its own character and of standing in opposition to other nations instead of blending with them. It was from the time of the Renascence that the various European nations began to follow the divergent paths which ended in the contrasts they now present.

The chief peculiarities of the English Renascence, as compared with the same movement in Italy and France, may be stated as follows:

The renewal affected literature later and more slowly in England than in those countries. Not because humanism was tardily introduced, for England's initiation into humanism was, if subsequent to that of Italy, yet quite as early as that of France. But humanism in England had for a long time no decided effect on poetry and prose. The national language was still immature. Prose lacked a strong tradition and glorious precedents, and the best humanists still made use of Latin. It is significant that the two books which appeared in this period attained to European fame—Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Bacon's Instauratio Magna (1620)—were both written in Latin. As for verse, it had, since Chaucer, been irregularized, and it did not definitely regain equilibrium and measure until Spenser's work began in 1579; all the preceding years of the sixteenth century show no more than a series of incomplete experiments, ground which was won and then lost. In consequence, English literature had its flowering season when the magnificent Italian literature had already entered on its decadence, when France had produced Rabelais and Ronsard and his Pleiad, and Montaigne's essays were appearing. Malherbe was nine years old when Shakespeare was born. It was therefore in a generation enriched by all the substance of France and Italy that England realized for the first time her high literary ambitions.

Secondly, the Renascence held more aloof from the plastic arts in England than in Italy or even in France. The English renascence occurred in a country which had no pictures or Renascence occurred in a country which had no pictures or statues except those bought abroad, and in which the most determined reformers were zealously protesting against images. It had therefore a more inward and moral effect than the similar movements on the Continent. It reached its triumph not before, but after, the Reformation, when the Anglican religion had spread throughout the country and was beginning, here and there, to be tinged with Calvinism. In so far as the Renascence was an aspiration to every form of beautyh and the cult of every kind of energy, it was not quite at ease in the already Puritan atmosphere breathed in this country. There were doubtless free spirits in England, but they were rebels and notorious. A morality which was sincere and natural in the majority had, on pain of obloquy, to be assumed by the others. The total result was increased seriousness, increasing pangs of conscience, less serenity, and intensified passion in the matter of faith and conduct.

On the other hand, although the spread of Protestantism all over England caused her to break with the Middle Ages more decidedly than France and Italy, her literature remained more nearly medieval than that of either of those countries. The fact is the more striking because literature in the preceding centuries had been a less direct expression of national sentiments of England than elsewhere. English literature had been almost all imported from France, had mainly consisted of translations and adaptations. It had not assumed a truly national shape. The greatest poet, Chaucer, had been essentially French. None the less, the truth remains that, although the Renascence and the Reformation beckoned to new paths. England was faithful to the cult of the past longer than the Continent. The fact is explained by the continuance of popular influences. While in France the Renascence was eminently aristocratic, in England it was always regardful of the masses. It preserved and increased the vogue of the ballads. The theatre, the home of the most magnificent product of the period, was accessible to all men, appealed to the humble as to the great. For the people follow in literature fashions derived from former days, hold to them tenaciously and do not abandon them.

A patriotism more and more intense and passionate, even aggressive and disdainful, favoured this continuity by glorifying the annals of the nation, its history, legends, traditions, and antiquities. While this patriotism gave rise to an ambition to rival the masterpieces of Greece and Rome as well as those of Italy and France, it inspired at the same time antagonism to the foreign influences which seemed to threaten the national genius. It was an obstacle to Italianism, that most potent of the infatuations of the Renascence. It is impossible to say whether in England, in this century, Italy were more the object of wonder or of scandal, of admiration or of disapproval. Increasingly England felt and wished herself to be different from the rest of Christendom.

2. The Beginnings of Humanism (1490-1578). (1) —During some thirty year, from 1490 until about 1520, when the religious quarrels began, there was in England an efflorescence of humanism which was accompanied only by a few elect spirits, but was pure, serene, and full of hope. Some young Englishmen were attracted to Italy by the desire to learn Greek, knowledge of which had been carried thither by refugees after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1493. They were eager to see the manuscripts of the masterpieces these fugitive Greeks had saved and brought with them, and in quest of this revelation they journeyed to Florence, Bologna, Padua, Venice, and Rome. Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), grammarian, physician, and translator of Galen, should be named among them, and William Grocyn (1446-1519), both of whom returned to Oxford about 1490 and there established the teaching of Greek on sound principles. John Colet (1467-1519) found in Italy, perhaps while he listeend to Savonarola, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, the inspiration of that enlightened and purified Christianity which he preached in London and Oxford, and founded on renewed study of the text of the New Testament and an historical examination of Saint Paul's mission. By the foundation of St. Paul's School in 1504, Colet also provided the first model for a reformed secondary school of which the teaching should be based on Latin and Greek. For this school he caused William Lily (1468-1522) to write and Erasmus to revise a Latin grammar which was to reign supreme in schools until our own day, and to become in the eighteenth century, after some rearrangement, the Eton Latin Grammar.

Such prestige did the New Learning acquire from these three masters, that Erasmus, when he resolved upon a profound study of Greek, being dissatisfied with Paris and the college of Montégut, but too poor to go to Italy, made several visits to England, from 1499 onwards, as much to complete his own education as in search of an easier life. Under Colet's influence his studies took a more religious turn, and he devoted himself for a time to the reform of Christianity, which both he and Colet would have wished to see accomplished by persuasion, knowledge, and the purification of morals, without a break in unity.

(a) THOMAS MORE.— The other side of the nature of Erasmus, his admiration for antique thought and form shown in his Adages (1500), his wit, his mockery which had free play in his Praise of Folly (1509), was better echoed by another of his English friends, Thomas More (1478-1535) (2). It was under More's roof that he wrote the Praise of Folly, and of him that he said: 'When did Nature mould a temper, more gentle, endearing and happy than the temper of Thomas More?' It was with Erasmus in his mind that More wrote his Utopia, the masterpiece of English humanism.

More was the pupil of the Oxford Hellenists and the friend of John Colet and William Lily. He was associated with Erasmus in the translation from Latin of some excerpts from Lucian. But he did not live only with books. He was a well-known lawyer and at one time a member of Parliament. In 1515 he was sent to the Continent to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Low Countries, and it was while on this mission that he began his famous book, which reveals a sagacious observer of his own times as well as the adventurous dreamer who was Plato's disciple. The other English humanists of his day were scholars and educationists. Only he of them all had the creative gift, and had he written his Utopia in his mother tongue instead of Latin, although European glory would doubtless have come to him less speedily, he would to-day be one of the leading figures in English literature. Instead he has strictly no place in it, except in right of some controversial treatises and a history of doubtful authorship.

His Utopia, which was not translated into English until 1551, cannot, however, be neglected because of the language which clothed it, for it is the true prologue of the Renascence. With most vigorous emphasis it opposes all the conceptions of the past. Better than any book it marks the new turning in the paths of thought.

The inspiration is twofold. Its frame is furnished by the recent maritime discoveries of the Portuguese and Spaniards. more particularly by the stories of Amerigo Vespucci. But fundamentally the book is derived from Plato's Republic, that Greek philosopher's dream of an ideal state, and from the impulse to react against the stiff, inert conception of society which had reigned for centuries.

More is in opposition to established ideas in almost every particular. He makes fun of scholasticism, which barred the way to thought with dialectical forms. He establishes that Greek is superior to Latin philosophy, which he considers insignificant save for some writings of Seneca and Cicero. His hero Hythloday earns a right in the gratitude of the Utopians by introducing them to the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch.

More is in revolt against the spirit of chivalry. As much a humanitarian as a humanist, his hatred and contempt for war are like Swift's. Soldiers are to him 'men-slayers,' and he makes little of the point of honour and of military glory, of all that made up the atmosphere of the admired romances which Caxton had lately broadcast through the land. War was, according to More, justifiable only in the last resort, and should be waged in a purely utilitarian spirit, using the tricks of espionage and treachery. Unwittingly he was taking up the same ground as Machiavelli, who at this moment was writing Il Principe.

He extols communism, forbids the acquisition of property, and, reverting to the ideas of Lycurgus, discredits gold, which he would put to the meanest uses. He would make work compulsory for all men, but only for nine hours a day. Thus theft would disappear from Utopia and there would be no occasion to apply the hard penal laws of England.

In More's mind, there is an ideal  of a life which would be easy for the whole community. He is not of those whose consolation for the miseries of this present life is a picture of the life to come, for he cites happiness as the end of existence. He protests against asceticism and the contempt of well-being and honourable pleasure. It is from him that Rabelais borrowed the doctrine of his abbey of Thélème.

Like all Utopians, More bases himself on faith in the goodness of human nature. He believes in it as did Rousseau. His disapproval of asceticism causes him to glorify the senses which reveal natural marvels and God who made nature. He is regardful of everything which pertains to the body, of bodily health, necessary to the health of the soul, and of the comfort of dwellings. The Utopians do not suffer a man to be either cruel to himself or 'unkind to nature.'

In Utopia all religions are authorized and toleration is the law. Even the Christian religion, which has been introduced thither, enjoys no privileges. No religion has anything to recommend it beyond the examples it provides.

This book should be read as the exercise of a mind giving itself free play and unconcerned with the practical application of its own theories. More wrote in Latin, not for the people but for the learned. We are brought to ask, in astonishment, whether he did not, more than once, write against his own deep convictions. For the creator of this Utopia was a fervent Christian, a submissive Catholic, and an ascetic who wore a hair shirt. This apostle of toleration was, as chancellor, a persecutor of the first Protestants and ended by dying a martyr to his faith. The contrast between his Utopia and his own life betrays a principle of unreality. The ideas of his book were on a level with his intelligence rather than deeply rooted in his conscience.

Yet this book cannot be called the unstable product of a youthful imagination. More was thirty-eight years old when he wrote it, and more than one of its pages contains reflections suggested by his practical experience as a lawyer and a member of Parliament. When he sees in the existing society 'a conspiracy of the rich against the poor,' he is not guilty of mere rhetoric. He supports his assertion by facts which are contemporary and English, the enclosures of land which were depopulating the countryside, especially in the south-east, the eviction of small tenants because rich landlords found that grazing farms were more profitable than their holdings. The lessened demand for workers on the land was causing great misery, so that 'even a beast's life seems enviable' as compared with theat of a labourer. When More attacks the barbarous penal laws he is aiming a blow at the executions with which, as a lawyer, he was too familiar in a country where twenty criminals could be seen hanging from a gallows in a reow. He is the very antithesis of the judge Fortescue, who was proud of the bravery of English robbers. When he recommends houses of 'a gorgeous and gallant sort,' well lit by glazed windows,  he is thinking of the pleasant dwellings he had seen in Holland and comparing them with the dark, inconvenient, and miserable homes of the London and England of his day.

This book is partly the work of a dreamer led by his fancy and a logician who systematizes his ideas. But it is also written by a satirist who attacks the errors and evils bequeathed by the Middle Ages. It is unlikely that More thought his conception could be realized in its entirety, but he very heartily wished to awaken the desire for certain necessary changes.

His Utopia stands alone as representing England's literary contribution to pure humanism. Ten years after he wrote it More himself was drawn into the religious controversy, and obliged, whether whe would or no, to abandon the sphere of intellectual exercises for that of narrow ecclesiastical quarrels, in which he is next found.

It is a great pity that he did not write a work of such general interest as Utopia in English. His humanist's culture is not evinced only by his Latin writings. He left behind him certain pages in English which show, no less than Utopia, the degree to which this admirer of Plato was impregnated with Socratic dialectics. The dialogue between the old prisoner Anthony and his nephew Vincent, which More wrote in his prison, to prove that he was neither more unfortunate nor more of a prisoner than the rest of mankind, is so admirable that Socrates might have approved it or envied him its authorship. And if he be indeed the author of the historical fragment on Richard III attributed to him, he must be recognized as a rival of Tacitus, so vivid is the portrait he paints, so strong his colours, so intense his attack. It is to this fragment that the atrocious, implacable figure which has remained in men's memory is due, the character on which Shakespeare founded his famous tragedy. Whether the picture conforms to reality is doubtful, but artistically it is an astonishing success. It has unity of structure and effect far beyond anything hitherto achieved by an English chronicler.

The pages which prove More's solid classical culture represent only a part of his rich and complex personality, curious of everything in life and nature, conscious of the variety in the souls of various men. His favourite pastime was to observe the habits and instincts of animals. He had a spontaneous and most lively dramatic talent, and although he never wrote for the stage, he dramatized, in the driest controversial treatises, living and comic characters, who speak their own language or even their native dialect. His English prose abounds with humorous passages such as his predecessors lacked. It contains also many turns of familiar talk, sayings and popular expressions which he seems to have been the first to coin or circulate. One wonders if he took them from current speech, or invented them entirely. His natural gaiety, 'the kind and friendly cheerfulness with a little air of raillery' which was, Erasmus tells us, expressed on his face, season his prose, as it showed itself in his speech throughout his life and on the very scaffold. We do not know whether to praise him most for his humour or his wit.

Nevertheless, we cannot follow those who have called him the earliest of the modern English prose-writers. This humanist seems, if the doubtful case of Richard III be excerpted, to have done all his artistic work in Latin. His English prose is all improvisation, and he lets loose in it, without rule or measure, his extraordinary lawyer's flow of language. His latest critic calculates that some of his sentences are as much as four yards long, measured line by line in the original edition. He never sought to mould English prose, which then, above all things, needed to be made light and more definite. He left this task entirely to men who were much his inferiors in genius, openmindendess and liveliness of observation, men who recognized their duty of giving, on the model of the ancients, firmness and regularity to the structure of English sentences. Yet to More belongs the honour of having provoked one of the best prose works of his time, his biography by his son-in-law, William Roper, which was written about 1535 but did not appear until 1626, in Paris. This is an admirable book from every point of view. Nothing could be simpler, clearer, or more pathetic than its story of More's last moments, and it makes an impressive advance in clarity and construction on More's own writings.

(b) THE EDUCATIONISTS: ELYOT, CHEKE, WILSON, ASCHAM.—The men who were inspired by classical antiquity after More were educationists rather than imaginative writers. They have more in common with More's masters than with More himself. But they have over him the advantage that they wrote their best works in English and have not only a marginal place in English literature.

It is thus with Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) (3) whose Governour appeared in 1531. This treatise on moral philosophy and education, written for those who would be called to govern their country, was founded on the Italian works of Pontano and Patrizzi and is full of the spirit of antiquity. It abound with Greek and Latin reminiscences.

The influence of the civic morals of Rome is very evident in it, although Elyot was a convinced Christian. He adapts the manner of Plutarch to English history, for instance in the scene in which he shows the prince, afterwards Henry V, obeying the judge who sends him to prison, and the king congratulating himself on a fearless magistrate and a son submissive to justice. By this scene, of which the historical truth is mot doubtful, Elyot inculcates the Roman respect for law. His prose is less of the people and less spontaneous than More's, but, on the other hand, more restrained and classical.

The humanism of a man brought up on antiquity is also the most salient characteristic of a book written against the seditious, The Hurt of Sedition, how grievous it is to a Commonwealth (4), by Sir John Cheke (1514-57), teacher of Greek at Cambridge. This good Hellenist, noted for the love of Greek which he spread around him, gave in 1549 forcible expression to English conservatism in his Hurt of Sedition. It is directed against the Norfolk rebels who were led by the tanner Kett. Already we have that hostile picture of popular risings which recurs half a century later in Shakespeare's Henry VI and Coriolanus. Cheke shows himself vigorous in argument eloquent, and occasionally homely and humorous. He has both the tone and the arguments which are heard again from the Shakespearian Menenius Agrippa.

Form was almost as important to Cheke as matter, and he made attempts to reform the English language. Sir Thomas Wilson (1525-81) (5) was concerned solely with style in his Arte of Rhetorique, published in 1553, in which this so-called English Quintilan recommends purity and simplicity of language. He reviews and derides all the verbal affectations of his time, and proscribes 'inkhorn terms', 'outlandish English,' the barbarous legal language made up of deformed Anglo-Norman words, and the abuse of archaism by the 'fine courtier' who 'wil talke nothing but Chaucer.'

These men are good masters, sensible and sure, fashioning both mind and style by their precepts and example. But their personalities are too restrained to have made a deep imprint on their prose. Roger Ascham (1515-68) (6) had qualities which threw him more into relief. He was the most popular of the educationists of his time, and the most pungent of the group of writers—Cheke, Wilson, Sir Thomas Smith, and Watson—who about the middle of this century transferred from Oxford to Cambridge the honour of guiding England along the paths of the Renascence. Ascham was Cheke's friend, and in some degree his pupil, tutor to Elizabeth in his sixteenth year, a good Protestant, even tinged with Puritanism, yet prudent enough to be Mary Tudor's Latin secretary. He left behind him two books of which one was devoted to the physical education of the young and the other to their intellectual instruction.

The first of them, Toxophilus (1545), is intended to revive the love of archery for which Ascham felt an almost romantic passion. He even considers the bow to be a superior weapon to the cannon, and believes that the physical and moral health of his country is bound up with the practice of this obsolete sport.

His other book, The Scholemaster, was published in 1570, two years after his death, and contains his advice to masters on the teaching of Latin.

Ascham puts life into these treatises by his personal presentment of his ideas. He brings forward his own practice and experience, his memories, and interesting anecdotes related first-hand. His parentheses stimulate flagging attention. His preoccupation with Latinity does not debar him from a moral point of view. He admires the great writers of Rome of his own time. He vigorously attacks the Italianism of the English nobility, especially the dangerous sojourns in the country of licence which rich young men of wealth and fashion were wont to make. He cares less for literary beauty and refinement than for solid and healthy education.

He also has the merit of having worked assiduously to advance the progress of the English language. He is aware, he says in his preface to Toxophilus, that to write in Latin would have been 'more honest for my name,' but he decides to use English both to further 'the pleasure or commoditie of the gentlemen and yeomen of Englande,' and because everything has been written in English 'in a manner so meanly, bothe for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse.' Indisputably he helped to perfect the language by his use of it. His style is much laboured, penetrated with Latin turns of phrase and Latin elegancies. Numerous symmetrical, balanced, antithetical sentences, sometimes marked by alliteration, occur in his work, all that is best in the prose of the Euphuists without their eccentricity and false ornament. It is true that Ascham in his Romanized dress is a little stiff and hampered. But his faults are trifling as compared with the benefit prose derived from submitting to the discipline of the ancients, especially Cicero and Seneca, whose periodic style and nervous conciseness Ascham imitates by turns. The training which he imposed on himself and which he recommended for schoolboys had a salutary effect. He desired that a pupil should first translate a passage from Latin into English, and then, after a sufficient interval, be required to put his own English version back into Latin. By repeated use of this exercise Ascham himself acquired a relative facility of expression. The too heavy clothing of his thoughts finally became so pliable that the man, sincere, sensible and good-humoured, can be descried beneath it. He is one of the earliest writers of classical English prose.

These were the chief of the educationists, such of them as left a name behind them. The work which was being accomplished at this time cannot, however, be understood unless we add to their number all the nameless makers of the Renascence, all the unknown masters who were training their English pupils in the universities and the schools to admire and imitate the masterpieces of antiquity.

______________


(1) For this chapter see the general histories of literature cited at the beginning: Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. iii, Chap. I: Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. i, Chap. V and vol. ii, Chap. I; Morley, English Writers, vol. vii; Jusserand, Histoire Littéraire du peuple anglais, livre iv, Chap. I. See also Green, A Short History of the English People, and G. Saintsbury, A History of Elizabethan Literature (1890).

(2) The English works of Sir Thomas More, published in 1557. His poems reprinted in 1906. His Utopia translated into English by R. Robynson in 1551; by Richards in 1923 (Oxford). Edition of Latin and English text published in 1895. Studies on More by H. Morley, English Writers (1891); W. H. Hutton (1895); H. Brémond (1904); and J. Delcourt, Essai sur la langue de Sir T. More (1913).

(3) Edited by Croft (1889).

(4) 1st edition 1549. Reprinted by G. Langbaine (Oxford, 1641) and in Holinshed's Chronicle.

(5) 1st edition 1553. Reprinted, Oxford, 1908.


(6) Toxophilus, 1st edition 1545; reprinted by Arber (1861). The Scholemaster, 1st edition 1570; reprinted by Arber (1870), by Aldis Wright (1904) , and in Elizabethan Critical Essays by Gregory Smith. Complete works, ed. Giles, 4 vols. (1804-5). German life by Dr. Katterfeld (1879).

English theatre 1520-1578

—oOo—

Anglo-Saxon Prose

(from Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature; London: Dent, 1937)

Origins. (12. Anglo-Saxon Prose. Alfred, Aelfric, Wulfstan). (1)

The breach between Anglo-Saxon and English poetry is everywhere apparent, and to pass from Cynewulf to Chaucer is to bridge a deep gulf. The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons is deliberately archaic. In order to produce a desired emotional state in its hearers, it reverts to traditional turns of expression, to words almost consecrated, as religion works its effects by the constantly recurring use of an ancient liturgy. This poetry is modelled on an earlier age of which the remoteness cannot now be determined. It retains many periphrases and locutions already obsolete, imitates and systematizes the disorder of primitive lyrical construction. The poetic form tends towards the past.

On the other hand, the tendency of the prose is towards observance of the rules of ordinary speech, unless it copies the Latin prose of the clerks. Its object is to instruct and inform, not to move, and since it thus educates the understanding, it necessarily turns to the future. There is therefore nothing surprising in the fact that the prose writings of the Anglo-Saxons, which are much less curious than their poetry, are also much nearer ourselves. No revolution seems to separate Alfred's pages from those of Caxton, Aelfric's from Wyclif's. There is a change but no break. National and linguistic continuity is felt to exist; there almost seems to be a continuity in the thought as it is framed in much the same mould as now. While an Englishman has to make a quite considerable effort in order to read the verse of the Anglo-Saxons, he finds it comparatively easy to understand their prose.

If such facility be not marked in the oldest prose literature, this is because it is either of earlier compilation than any of the poetry extant—like the laws of Ina, king of the West Saxons, which were promulgated at the end of the seventh century, although our transcription dates only from the time of Alfred—or because some of this prose is more than half poetry and seems to be fragments of old epic tales. This character belongs to many passages of the chronicle usually attributed to the influence of King Alfred, of which we have distinct versions written by the religious of different monasteries, those of Winchester, Canterbury, Abingdon, Worcester, and Peterborough, the last-named having continued its narrative to the middle of the twelfth century. In this chronicle several references to early times, brief but impressively vehement, are pagan in feeling and emphasis and seem to date from the pre-Christian period. Even in the references to the eighth century there are a suddenness and a roughness in the narrative which betray that mental and grammatical habits were still empirical. It is continually necessary to complete the ellipses and to relate the pronouns to their proper subjects, as with a story told by a small child. For instance, the chronicler relates, as follows, the beginning of the struggle between Cynewulf and Sebright in 755:

This year Cynewulf took from Sebright his kingdom, and the councillors of the West Saxon [did as much], for unrighteous deeds, except Hamptonshire, and he [that is, Sebright] reigned there [that is, in Hampshire] until he slew the alderman who stayed longest with him. Then Cynewulf drove him to the forest of Andred, where he remained until a swain stabbed him at Privett, and he [that is, the swain] revenged the alderman Cambra.

The alderman is not named until he is mentioned for the second time.

This formless prose was succeeded at the end of the ninth century by a regular prose possessed of nearly all its essential parts. Since it is modelled on Latin texts, which are almost literally translated, it is very near English prose, as that was fixed, and also near French prose which was formed under the same masters.

Alfred, the glorious king of Wessex, was the pioneer of the prose-writers. The exclusively poetic or Latin literature which had hitherto flourished had emanated principally from the north-east, the country of the Angles, or from central Mercia. About 800, the supremacy was passing to the south-west, and the king of Wessex was tending toward the sovereignty of all the Germanic groups settled in the island. But the Danish invasions supervened, and with them the destruction of the centres of religion and letters. In the year 878 it seemed as though nothing would escape the invaders. It was then that the young King Alfred withdrew to Athelney in Somerset, formed there a nucleus of resistance, defeated the Danes, and won from them a treaty which left him the south of England while they remained masters of the old country of the Angles and northern Mercia.

After his victory, Alfred set himself to retrieve his country from the barbarism to which it had relapsed. A decadent and demoralized clergy had sunk into depths of ignorance. Alfred did for Wessex what Charlemagne, a hundred years earlier, had done for the country of the Franks: he endeavoured to teach the people, and to re-establish Christian discipline and culture, and to this end he brought foreign monks into his kingdom and reformed education. It was under his influence that the earlier poetic works, which had almost all been written in the Northumbrian dialect, were transcribed into the language of the West Saxons.

The part which the king himself took in this literary movement was considerable. His early education had been much neglected, and he had to learn before he could teach. He surrounded himself with scholars and learned men, learnt Latin after he was grown up, for Saxon had been the only language of his childhood, and had no sooner learnt it than he began to translate the works which seemed to him most apt to civilize his people. It was thus that he became the father of English prose-writers.

Whether in the works he inspired or in those he himself produced, an effort is apparent to regularize the old elliptical, abrupt style, with its obscurity and lack of continuity. Thus the Annals or Chronicles of Winchester, Alfred's capital town, were amplified and given smoothness until they are almost a continuous story, in which, for instance, the history of the king's war against the Danes can be read without any irritating difficulty in following the text.

Alfred himself is credited with a translation of the Universal History of Orosius, the compilation which made antiquity known to the Middle Ages. The task was difficult, for Orosius, a Spanish historian and theologian of the fifth century, writes an obscure, tortured Latin. Sometimes Alfred, as he himself says, translates 'word by word, sometimes meaning by meaning.' Although the literal translation had the most formative influence on prose, it is naturally the free version which most attracts us. Its very weaknesses are characteristic. Alfred, who does not know Latin very well and who has acquired no historical sense, aims at producing a work of pedagogy. The result is that he is often very inexact, and that, as he diverges from his author, he attains to a certain originality. While he deletes what seems to him of little use to his subjects, he also makes additions, especially in the geographical section. One of the stories he adds, that of Ohthere's sail along the shores of Scandinavia, is so simple and elementary in style that its vocabulary differs only slightly from modern English. The conclusion is that the spoken language was almost fixed.

Of Alfred's other translations, either made or ordered by him—Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the Angles, the Pastoral Rule of Gregory the Great, and the Consolation of Boethius (2)—it is the Boethius which is the most interesting. His choice of this book, which was again translated by Chaucer, is characteristic. Boethius has reproduced the Platonic and Stoic doctrines, coloured by Christianity and at their highest moral level—the distinction between true and false happiness, the lofty discussions on the existence of evil, on human liberty, and on divine prescience. He gives these abstractions a dramatic frame. Philosophy herself appears to him in his prison, and drives away the Muses, those prostitutes who were vainly seeking to console him. Thus he makes use of allegory, and although his style is not always pure and is often mannered, it is full of life and movement. His book could not but suffer gravely when it was translated by Alfred, who mistakes the meaning fairly frequently and is incapable of conveying the fine shades. When he renders the metrical passages, which have a classic elegance, his limitations obtrude themselves. But in nobility of sentiment he is the equal of the Latin author. He explains, as follows, his reasons for undertaking this arduous task:

As I have desired material for the exercise of my faculties that my talents and my power might not be forgotten and hidden away, for every good gift and every power soon groweth old and is no more heard of, if wisdom be not in them. Without wisdom no faculty can be fully brought out, for whatsoever is done unwisely can never be accounted as skill. To be brief, I may say that it has ever been my desire to live honourably while I was alive, and after my death to leave to them that should come after me my memory in good works.

This king's literary work was, like his political work, interrupted for almost a century after his death in 901. The sketchy civilization of Wessex was once more scattered to the winds, and the clerks relapsed into ignorance and inertia. They were gradually redeemed thence, during the tenth century, by a reform of the monasteries which was inspired by the similar movement accomplished in France under the influence of the Benedictines. Religious houses were founded and organized in England, on the model of the abbeys of Cluny and Fleury, in which a strict rule enjoined intellectual work. This innovation was led by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his friend Aethelwold, 'the father of the monks.' Secular priests, not bound to celibacy, then abounded in the monasteries. They retained something of the patriarchal constitution which the Church of Ireland had originally given to their communities, and therewith very disorderly morals, much laziness, and gross superstition. The fact is proved by the so-called Blickling Homilies, a medley of canonical and uncanonical legends which swarm with strange arguments and allusions. It is to works of this kind that Aelfric alludes when he says: 'I have seen and heard many heresies in many an English book which unlearned men, in their simplicity, took for great wisdom.' Stories of the saints, replete with the marvellous, and the obsession that the end of the world was at hand, take up most space in this collection.

It was at this time that the strict rule of Saint Benedict was introduced. Morals once more became austere. The lives of the saints did indeed remain the principal subject of study and the marvellous continued to fill a large place in them, but the stories, as compared with their predecessors, were pure and even reasonable. Two men who with Alfred are the best writers of Anglo-Saxon prose are connected with this reform, Aelfric and Wulfstan.

Aelfric was a pupil of the monastic school which Aethelwold founded at Abingdon, and he wrote in the first years of the eleventh century. We owe to him a Colloquium for teaching Latin by conversation, and a vocabulary which was the first Latin-English dictionary. But he made his name by his Homilies, that is, his compilations and translations from the Fathers of the Church which form two series of forty sermons each, and commemorate the various saints venerated by the Anglo-Saxon Church.

Aelfric's prose, unlike that of Alfred, is written not to be read but to be spoken to the people, in the conventional tone of a priest delivering a sermon. It has therefore a rhythm which brings it near to verse: its sentences are divided into sections, more or less equivalent to the metrical line, and it is frequently alliterative. For this reason scholars were long uncertain whether to classify it as verse or prose. It celebrates the saints, as the scops once sang the deeds of warriors. This poetic prose marks a great advance on that of Alfred. It aims at beauty, measure and harmony. It is remarkably clear and finished. There is much less awkwardness and effort in the connection of phrases than in Alfred's writings. In fact, the author is consciously literate, even when he is using the vulgar tongue, and he excuses himself, with some shame, for the popular character of his translation of the Latin homilies, pleading the ignorance of his fellow-countrymen.

Wulfstan, who was Archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023, was first of all a preacher. The most remarkable of his homilies dates from 1012, the time when the English were suffering the ills of the Danish invasions. With deep feeling the homilist deplores the irreligion and immorality of his people to which he attributes their misfortunes, and he proclaims the near advent of the great chastiser, the Antichrist. Wulfstan is less of a finished artist than Aelfric, but the popular emphasis of his language gives it rich color and lively tones.

After Wulfstan all was over: the Antichrist came indeed. The Danes became masters of the country, and then, after a short interval of independence, the Anglo-Saxons were brought under the Norman yoke. Such prose writings as we have prove, however, that, even without the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon prose would have taken shape, modelling itself on Latin, and, with the exception of part of its vocabulary, would have become much what it was when in the fourteenth century it regained a place in literature.

It was poetry which was principally affected by the Conquest. The poetic form had outlived its time and had little life left in it. It was conventional and was getting further and further away from the real language of the people. It was fated to be abolished and superseded. The aesthetic ideal was to undergo a change, or rather a revolution. England was to learn to love verse of another kind, other cadences and new subjects. All the rich ornament which profusely decorated verse with a pomp still half barbaric was to go out of fashion. Poets were to shed their periphrases and ejaculations, and gradually to learn sobriety of style and an art almost unknown to them, that of stating facts clearly, grouping them, and inventing stories.




Notes

(1) Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, edited by C. W. M. Grein, R. P. Wülker, and H. Hecht, Leipzig and Hamburg, 1872 et seq. The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great, edited by J. A. Giles, 3 vols. (Oxford and Cambridge, 1858); Stopford Brooke, King Alfred as Educator of his People and Man of Letters (1901); H. Sweet, Selections from Aelfric's Homilies (Oxford, 1896); A. Napier, Wulfstan's Homilies (Berlin, 1883); B. Thorpe, Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, vols. (Aelfric Society, 1844-6); C. L. White, Aelfric, a New Study of his Life and Writings (Yale Studies in English, 1898).

(2) King Alfred, Old English Version of Boethius, ed. Sedgefield (Oxford, 1899).

Around Cynewulf

—oOo—

Samuel Daniel

Samuel Daniel

(by Émile Legouis, from Legouis and Cazamian, A History of English Literature, Dent, 1937 ed. Notes are renumbered).

Poetry from 1590 to 1625

I. Elizabethan Poetry from 1590 to 1603. (NOTE 1).—Outside the theatre, almost all the literature of the Elizabethan period properly so called, that is down to 1603, derived from Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser. Romances bore the imprint of Euphues and Arcadia in turn or simultaneously. Pastorals imitated from Spenser or Sidney abounded. Astrophel and Stella, from the moment of its publication, provoked a whole flowering season of sonnets. The successive appeareance, about 1590, of Sidney's sonnets and Arcadia, and of the first books of The Faerie Queene, was the signal for an intense literary activity. It was then that a whole generation born some ten years after Spenser entered the arena of letters. The poetry alone shows such a literary ferment as makes very difficult the task of presenting the new works methodically. Doubtless drama attracted the writers who were most vital and energetic, but the majority of them turned from time to time to pure poetry as a relaxation, and wrote verses in the fashionable poetic genres. We are thus led to follow genres rather than individuals. First, however, we must deal with the voluminous works of two poets whose contribution to the drama was slight and unimportant. Their production continued into the next century, but the date of their birth and the atmosphere in which their talent was formed make them true Elizabethans. They are Daniel and Drayton.

Each of them produced one of the longest poems of the period, The Faerie Queene excepted. The American critic Lowell could call Daniel's Civil Wars and Drayton's Poly-olbion the megalosaurus and plesiosaurus of the Renascence. These poets express, more directly than Spenser, their patriotic feeling, which is less troubled than his by the dream of a golden age or by hostility to the present. They survive only ina a few pages of verse and a few short poems, but their figures are distinct and can be traced in every part of the considerable body of their works.

NOTE 1. F. E. Schelling, English Literature during the Lifetime of Shakespeare (1910).

(a) SAMUEL DANIEL.—  (1562-1619)

 Samuel Daniel (NOTE 2) was born in Somerset, the son of a music master. After having passed through Oxford and visited Italy, he was tutor first to William Herbert, son of the earl of Pembroke and of Sidney's sister, and then to a daughter of the virtuous Countess of Cumberland. After Spenser's death he became a sort of voluntary poet laureate. Under James I he was dramatic censor and groom of the chamber to the queen. His tastes were sober and moderate: he lived quietly in his London house cultivating the Muses; then retired to a Somersetshire farm. By the even march of his existence he contrasted with most of his contemporary poets. His poetry, well behaved as he, is the most tranquil and classical of the period. Nearly everything in the English Renascence which shocked French taste when this had been purified by the seventeenth century is missing from Daniel's work, and so is the 'fine frenzy' beloved of the Elizabethans. He was a moralist and historian first of all; he wrote the poetry of reflection, not of passion. His calm voice could, in that tumultuous time, hardly make itself heard. A correct and pure writer, he brought the qualities of prose into verse. Imagination is rare in his subjects and never disturbs his style.

NOTE 2. Complete poetical works in Chalmers's British Poets, vol. iii; complete works in prose and verse published by Grosart, 5 vols. (1885). His Delia reprinted by Arber in An English Garner, vol. iii.

He made trial of the theatre, but since he lacked the impetuous vigour of his dramatic rivals, since he was in love with nobility and serenity, he turned from the popular stage and wrote tragedies, classical in form, modelled on Seneca and the French poet Garnier—Cleopatra in 1594 and Philotas in 1611. These academic dramas could have no more than a succès d'estime. He succeeded better with his masques, which contain very attractive passages: The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604), The Queen's Arcadia, a Pastoral Tragi-comedy (1606), and Hymen's Triumph.

Round about his chief work, The Civil Wars, are grouped a fair number of miscellaneous poems, sonnets to Delia, epistles, dedications, panegyrics, funeral eulogies, pastoral songs. The even quality of his verses is surprising for his day.

He translates with charm the suave elegy of the golden age in Tasso's Aminta. There is real feeling in his Letter from Octavia to Antony (1599), and even more in his Complaint of Rosamond (1592), in which the unhappy mistress of Henry II mingles her regret for her transgressions and her sighs for her lost beauty. She draws the moral from her story herself, and it is softened as it passes through her lips.

But a mood of serious reflection was more habitual to Daniel than Fancy or tenderness. It is not only by accident that the lines from his work which are most often quoted are the lyrical dialogue between Ulysses and the Siren, standing for honour and pleasure, labour and rest, and the Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland, in which he defines, in fine, strong, and calm stanzas, the sage who inhabits the serene temples of wisdom and is raised above private passion or political agitation.

 Apt as he is to discourse and discuss in verse, his talent is happily displayed in a didactic poem in the form of a dialogue, Musophilus (1599), which contains a general defence of letters. Musophilus constitutes himself champion of letters against Philocosmus, who recommends an active life and rules out all poetry which does not impel to heroic action. Like Spenser in The Teares of the Muses, but with less vehement rhetoric, Musophilus deplores that so little patronage should be given to literature. He sees poetry and eloquence as the guardians of lofty morals and the forces which cleanse a nation. He has a deep faith in the strength and destiny of his mother tongue. What a great thing it would be if England, first of the nations in worth, became first in poetry also! Daniel has a vision of an English literature which should be read over the whole world. It should supplant Italian literature, now decadent:

When all that ever hotter spir'ts express'd,
Comes better'd by the patience of the north.

Patriotism was Daniel's dominant feeling and it led him to devote his capital effort to the history of his country. He recounts no such dream of the past as Spenser, nor such a long, mainly legendary chronicle as William Warner, in rude and awkward fourteen-syllabled lines, told in Albion's England (1586), a miscellany of ill-arranged stories which was so successful that it was republished in successive and enlarged editions until the author's death in 1609. Daniel did not share Warner's desire to begin his book at the Flood and bring it down to the execution of Mary Stuart. He was impressed by the effects of civil war and uneasy lest, since the succession to Elizabeth was entirely uncertain, it should be renewed.

He therefore chose no period of glory for his theme, but told in narrative the story which was at this moment being dramatized, which Shakespeare was taking for the subject of plays, the story of the bloodthirsty struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York. The eight cantos of Daniel's Civil Wars, published from 1595 to 1609, treat of the misfortunes of England from the reing of Richard II until the break between Warwick and Edward IV, and, in spite of their seven to eight thousand lines, they leave the tale unfinished. It corresponds exactly to the Shakespearian 'histories,' Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, and the two first parts of Henry VI, sometimes following them and sometimes going ahead of them. Daniel's exposition is more accurate, cool, and dignified than the plays, which bring on to the stage a succession of animated pictures by turns chivalrous and comic, arbitrary alike in their omissions and additions. It is strange to read Daniel's calm stanzas, and to remember the tumultuous dramas in which the same stories are told, or Spenser's romantic transfiguration of the national annals. Daniel's clear and expressed intention is to transfigure nothing:

I versify the truth, not poetize.

Unfortunately he poetizes all too little. Conscientiously he keeps pace with facts, adding fictions only very rarely. It is remarkable that his fictions have the same turn as in the pseudo-classical epics. They are inserted deliberately as ornaments, intellectual relaxations, for instance the mythological origin he fabricates for printing and artillery, two ill-omened inventions which Nemesis orders Pandora to supply.

This element of the marvellous is exceptional in Daniel's work. If his facts are dull, so much the worse; if dramatic, so much the better. Nor does he seek to interest by penetrating or lively portrayal of character. His calm narrative does scant justice to such outstanding personalities as the wild Margaret of Anjou, or to scenes of violence like Jack Cade's rebellion. If there is fairly lifelike psychology in his story of the first interviews between Edward IV and Lady Elizabeth Grey, it probably is that the author is inpired by the staging of this incident in Henry VI. The best part of his poem, apart from a few vigorous stories, consists of the moral reflections arising out of his patriotism as it is wounded by his own story of atrocious intestine conflict.

On the whole this long poem is a mistake. The careful and correct Daniel, treating the most tragic of subjects, is tedious. It is his misfortune to have misused his gifts. It would have taken a d'Aubigné to do justice to material as sombre and as bloodstained.

Whith his qualities and defects, Daniel was the writer of that day whose work was most justly estimated when it appeared. Spenser, who knew him at the outset of his career, praised his harmony and the pathos of his Complaint of Rosamond, but blamed him for flying too timidly and near the ground, exhorting him:

Then rouse thy feathers quickly, Daniell.

Ben Jonson more bluntly says that he was 'a good honest man, but no poet.' Drayton considered that he was 'too much historian in verse' and that 'his manner better fitteth prose.' He was indeed, as will be seen, one of the best prose-writers of his time. William Browne, on the other hand, admired the purity of this poetic style and called him 'well-languaged.'

This purity, then so rare, won him a recrudescence of favour in the nineteenth century. Wirters like Wordsworth and Coleridge who were working for the simplification of the language praise Daniel for having banished eccentricities and arbitrary inventions from his style. Southey is struck by his discreet use of the pathetic and says that he writers 'always in a strain of tender feeling, and in language as easy and natural as it is pure.'

His contemporaries, who loved ardour, missed in his work the passionate qualities and the movement, brilliancy, and variety which they prized more than aught else. For us, the very absence of the merits which the Elizabethans often carried to excess makes pleasantly restful reading of his verses. It is as though we sailed for a day on smooth waters after passing through a storm. Moreover, if his reflections are not strikingly new, they are, as a rule, full of good sense and reason and are lit by a serene philosophy: he is dignified and proud as well as wise. He is, moreover, never harsh and constantly self-controlled.

(...)

from ch. 8, Prose from 1578 to 1625

(...) In addition to their controversy on the morality of poetry and their consideration of dramatic art,the men of the English Renascence gave a fair share of attention to a discussion on the comparative merits of measured, or reformed, and rhymed verse. The dispute arose in Italy and France, but it was the occasion in England of a long series of attacks and counter-attacks which prove it to have been waged in this country with more heat than elsewhere. It is remarkable that the first antagonists of rhyme were so carried away by their cult of antiquity that they disregarded the existence of blank verse, which seemed to them a bastard and inadequate compomise. They wished, at the same time, to abolish rhyme, which they held to be Gothic and barbarous, and they claimed to make English syllables quantitative, long or short as in Latin. Some of them, like Sir John Cheke and Ascham, vaunted the iambic line, and Gabriel Harvey even championed the hexameter. It can serve no purpose to speak of the unreadable poems which Harvey, Stanyhurst, Abraham Fraunce, Campion, and others—even, passingly, Sidney and Spenser—produced in accordance with these rules. The metricians of the day were exercised by the question. William Webbe, in A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), shows himself the determined partisan of measured verse. George Puttentham, in The Arte of English Poetrie (1586), the most voluminous of the technical treatises of the period, is less willing to commit himself and holds the balance between the contesting parties. The poet Thomas Campion, author of so many charming rhymed songs, was in the enemy camp in 1602. In his Observations on the Art of English Poesie he condemns rhyme as improper to poetry. The only good effect of his attack was that it induced the poet Samuel Daniel to write his Defence of Rhyme (1603), which closed this controversy of more than thirty years' standing and was the first example in England of sane aesthetic criticism applied to a special subject. Hitherto all the blows had been aimed wide. On either side there had been pedantry, abuse of authorities, ignorance of essential facts, disregard of blank verse, even confusion between the meanings of the wods rhythm and rhyme. Daniel evinced a reasonableness, exactness, and perspicacity unknown to the others. Even to-day it is worth while to meditate on his words. He bases himself on uses. While he denies that the admission of rhyme, which exists and please many nations, is a matter for discussion, he does not shirk the task of founding rhyme on reason. He does not bow before the ancients. That rhyme makes rhythm of a kind unknown to them is, he says, their loss, who knew not this 'Echo of a delightful report.' Nor does rhyme exclude measure from English verse, which is based on tonic accent. To complain of the shackles of rhyme is to ignore the nature of the pleasure of poetryand of its creation. The poet finds that 'Rhyme is no impediment to his conceit, but rather gives him wings to mount, and carries him not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a far happier flight.' Rhyme is a means of imparting form, outline, and limits to imaginative conceptions. It organizes chaos. Its terminal cadence gives 'a certainty' as well as measure.

Daniel has a secret preference for the stanza over the couplet, and he would reserve feminine rhymes for songs. But these are personal tastes, as he himself knows and says, and modestly refuses to erect them into law. It was doubtlessly his fondness for the stanza rather than the coupulet which prevented the classical school from acknowledging him as one of the best of their forerunners.

His own moderation impels him to condemn the intransigence of those who would, at one stroke, rule out all the past. But in him this moderation is accompanied by frank independence. He throws off the yoke of antiquity:

All our understanding are not to be built by the square of Greece and Italie. We are the children of Nature as well as they, we are not so placed out of the way of judgement, but that the same Sunne of Discretion shineth upon us ... Wee must not looke upon the immense course of times past, as men overlooke spacious and wide countreys, from off high mountaines, and are never the neerer to judge of the true nature of the soile.

From end to end of his short treatise Daniel unfolds his argument in the same wise and reasonable spirit. His pleading, often directed against the superstition of the humanists, is finely classical in form. It is oratory, less poetic and nervous than the language of Sidney's Defence, at times a little redundant, but exceptional in this period by its sequence, its logic, and its urbanity. More than any one of his contemporaries, Daniel possessed the qualities of the perfect writer of prose.

¿Son sombras lo que aquí vemos?

—oOo—

English theatre 1520-1578

By Émile Legouis

("The Theatre from 1520 to 1578", from Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature, 1926-1937)

I. Humanism in the theatre.

English dramatic writing produced no masterpiece in this period, yet felt its way along the most various paths, and acquired an experience without which the Elizabethan drama would have been impossible. It partook both of the past which had survived, and of the future for which it was preparing. 


The miracle plays were performed almost till the end, although, since the Protestants looked askance at them, they gradually lost ground, and the cycles of the different towns disappeared, one after another, as the Reformation advanced. In any case, these plays did no more than prolong their existence. They no longer changed: they merely persisted in the form which they had assumed in the fifteenth century. The interesting point is that they still had a large public, and that dramatic innovations did not supplant them, but were introduced side by side with them.

Moralities, on the other hand, did not only continue to be much appreciated, but were also modified and renewed in accordance with circumstances. Those produced until about 1520 were Christian and no more. They may be said to have had neither place nor date. But the moralities came to be impregnated with the spirit of the Renascence or the Reformation. Two distinct groups of them appeared, which voiced respectively humanist and Protestant tendencies.

Tedious though was the morality Magnificence, written by John Skelton about 1516, it yet showed a new standpoint. It did not merely, like its predecessors, represent the struggle between Heaven and Hell. Skelton, who seems to have aimed at warning Henry VIII against mad extravagance, does not deal wih the great problem of Christianity, but enforces a particular moral lesson. His hero, Magnificence, is brought to ruin by a succession of bad counsellors, and would kill himself were he not saved by the intervention of Good Hope, Circumspection, Perseverance, and others. This is the first specimen of a laicized morality.

In its two successors the spirit of the Renascence is much more clearly marked. They are inspired neither by the usual moral lesson nor by religious faith, but by the love of knowledge. Manifestly they were born in academic circles in which knowledge is the ideal goal and in which the devil is named Ignorance.

The morality of The Four Elements, which was printed in 1519, and of which fragments are extant, is very curious. It is contemporary with More's Utopia. Like More, the author is under the influence of the tales of Amerigo Vespucci. He teaches geography, cosmography, almost all the sciences known to his time. The Messenger, who speaks the prologue, discourses gravely on science and deplores the lack of learned books in England and English. Only frivolous books, he says, are written in English, and only the rich man is esteemed wise in England. Yet true wisdom is in knowledge, in knowledge of God who can be known only by His works, and therefore in the study of nature. The play leaves theology on one side. The subject is the instruction of the child Humanity, son of 'Natura Naturata'. He is entrusted to Studious Desire, but his progress is interrupted by the temptations of Sensual Appetite, who takes him to the tavern. The child has interpreted ill the works of Nature, who bade him use his senses. Only at the end of the play does he again show a taste for knowledge.

Sensual Appetite here plays the part of clown, as does his friend Ignorance, who detests philosophers and astronomers and boasts of his own power, saying that he is mightier than the king of England or France, that he is the greatest lord alive, and has more than five hundred thousand servants in England. He addresses the audience directly:

For all that they be now in this hall,
They be the most part my servants all,
    And love principally
Disports, as dancing, singing,
Toys, trifling, laughing, jesting;
For cunning they set not by.

A geography lesson produces a burst of patriotism. Studious Desire instructs Humanity that the earth is round; Experience displays a globe, enumerates the countries she has visited, dwelling on America, and deplores that Spaniards, Portuguese, and Frenchmen have gone farther than Englishmen:

O, what a thing had be then,
If that they that be Englishmen
Might have been the first of all
That there should have taken possession.

She would have wished all these countries to have been civilized and converted to religion by the English.

A like ardour to instruct fills John Redford's pedagogic morality, The Play of Wyt and Science, which dates from the end of the reign of Henry VIII. Reason, after the manner of a highborn father, wishes to marry his daughter Science to Human Wit, the son of Nature. It matters not that Wit is neither well born nor rich:

Wherefore, syns they both be so meet matches
To love each other, strawe for the patches
Of worldly mucke! syence hath inowghe
For them both to lyve.

But Wit for long lacks wisdom. In his youthful eagerness to know he imprudently attacks Tediousness and is saved only just in time by Honest Recreation. She, unfortunately, does not satisfy him and he leaves her and falls asleep in the lap of Idleness. Without knowing it he has become a fool, when, at last, he reaches the presence of Science, who repels him for an ignorant suitor. But in a mirror he sees himself as he is and is disgusted. After a term of chastisement and hard labour, he again attacks Tediousness, this time with a good sword, and slays him. Science, who has witnessed the encounter from the summit of Mount Parnassus, now accepts her destined spouse, first warning him:

But if ye use me not well, then dowt me,
For, sure, ye were better then wythout me!

This is an ingenious and well-arranged morality, which is pervaded by strong rationalist conviction. It resumes the spirit of the Renascence well, and bears witness to the appetite for knowledge which caused schools and colleges to be born in the land. The comic element is supplied by an episode in which Ignorance is heard blundering through a lesson in the alphabet given him by his mother, Idleness. The mistress, who represents the old somnolent methods of teaching, is no less ridiculous than her idiot pupil.


2. The Reformation on the Stage. Lyndsay. John Bale.

Very early, the Reformation attempted to take possession of the morality and use it for its own ends. Passion, inevitably unjust and sometimes brutal, gave life to more than one Protestant morality play. They appeared in the north and in the south. The first in date was written by the Scot Sir David Lyndsay, whose reforming zeal we have already seen.

His Satire of the Thrie Estaitis was played in 1540 at Linlithgow before the King of Scotland, the bishops, and the people. It is as political as it is religious. The three estates are the nobles, the clergy, and the merchants, and all three are pilloried together, censured for giving too much ear to Sensuality, Wantonness, and Deceit. The grievances which John the Common Weal, the man of the people, has against them are just enough, and it is pleasant to see him obtain the needed reforms with the help of Good Counsel and Correction.

Lyndsay's special attack is against the Church. Dame Veritie, who desires access to the king, finds her way barred by the lords spiritual, scared at her advent. An abbot wishes to cast her into prison, and a parson recommends that she be put to death, under cover of the king's momentary subjection to Dame Sensuality. The same priest summons Veritie to declare by what right she is addicted to preaching. He threatens her with the stake, and when she refuses to retract, Flattery, a monk, exclaims:

Quat buik is that, harlot, into thy hand?
    Out, walloway! This is the New Test'ment,
In Englisch toung and printit in England:
    herisie, herisie! fire, fire! incontinent.

In a comic interlude the social satire is dominant. Pauper recounts his misadventures. He used to keep his old father and mother by his labour and owned a mare and three cows. When his parents died the landlord took the mare as a heriot; the vicar seized the best cow at his father's, and the second best at his mother's, death. The third cow went the same way when his wife died of grief, when also the vicar's clerk bore off the uppermost clothes of the family. There is nothing left for Pauper to do but to beg. The parish priest has refused him Easter communion because he no longer pays tithes. He has only one farthing in his pocket with which to plead for justice. A Pardoner arrives, boasting of his relics and insulting the New Testament, which sells to the injury of his trade. With his last farthing Pauper buys a thousand years' indulgence, but when he asks to see his purchase a fight ensues and the relics fall into the gutter.

These passages give an idea of the violence of the attack and of the life it imparted to the morality.

The Protestants of England were no less ferocious. Their most famous dramatic champion was Bishop John Bale (1495-1563), who even attempted to turn the fixed and traditional miracle plays to Protestant uses. Under the name of tragedies, comedies, and interludes, he wrote scenes in harmony with the reformed faith, taking them from sacred history and principally from the life of Christ. But he gave the chief of his efforts to morality plays, combined with history which was sometimes contemporary, as in his Proditiones Papistarum and Super utroque Regis Coniugio. The most interesting of his dramatic essays is, however, his allegory King Johan, in which he recasts history to his liking. He makes of the deplorable John a great king, hated and calumniated by the clergy. For John had been bold enough to rebel against Rome, and all his faults, crimes, and cowardice are therefore wiped out. He is represented as a man misunderstood, a noble victim, the first Protestant. This play merits a particular place in the history of the theatre. It is the half-open chrysalis, the morality play whence the historical drama is about to emerge. Real and allegorical characters are mingled in it. John is betrayed by Dissimulation and threatened by Sedition. Moreover, abstractions are changed in the course of the play into living beings. Sedition, for instance, becomes Cardinal Stephen Langton, Usurped Power the Pope. This is a travesty of history and yet history, and, through the medium of another and Elizabethan work on the same reign, it was to leave its mark on Shakespeare's King John.


3. Heywood's Interludes. 'Calisto and Meliboea'

John Heywood's (1497?-1580) interludes or farces, written under Henry VIII, cannot be called Catholic answers to Protestant attacks since they preceded the offensive of the Reformers. Two of them were printed as early as 1533. Heywood, a good Catholic and the friend of Thomas More, wrote in the medieval tradition, in the spirit of the fabliaux which certainly did not spare churchmen. He was original in avoiding morality plays and in having no purpose but to amuse. he has no notion of ecclesiastical or theological controversy. His interludes are mere comic dialogues, scenes from fabliaux sometimes modelled on the French. But he is of his own nation almost the only representative of this school of dramatic writing. The four interludes which he certainly wrote are controversies in burlesque. In Witty and Witless, James and John discuss whether it is better to be a fool or a wise man; they are echoing the Dyalogue du fol et du sage performed at the court of Louis XII. In Love, an unloved lover and his unloving mistress seek, each of them, to prove himself the more miserable, while another couple, a lover beloved and a man who is neither loved nor a lover, dispute the right to be called the happier. In The Play of the Weather, ten characters demand of Jupiter that he sends them weather suited to their needs or desires, and the god finally decides that each of them shall be satisfied in turn. In The Four P's, four characters, a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potycary, and a Pedlar, discuss which of them shall tell the biggest lie. The pilgrim declares that in all his travels he has never seen a woman lose patience, and the others themselves allow that he has won the prize.

These plays are, it is seen, without plot, but Heywood puts life into his characters and expresses himself with a drollery which recalls Chaucer. There is a grotesque description of hell equal to the Sompnour's in the prologue to his Tale. Good humour reigns everywhere. Yet these writings are hardly dramas. If, as is probable, Heywood also wrote The Pardoner and the Friar and Johan Johan, the story of a husband deceived by his wife, Tyb, and Sir Johan, the parish priest, he came much nearer to farce in them. Their characters and incidents conform excellently to the old comic tradition, and their dramatization could not be more vigorous. In these two pieces Heywood was inspired by French originals, Farce nouvelle d'un pardonneur, d'un triacleur et d'une tavernière and Farce de Pernet qui va au vin. Although he wrote under Henry VIII he never even suggests the Renascence.

Not, that is, unless the comic monologue Thersites, played about 1537, may be ascribed to him on the evidence of style. Its subject and its allusions are loaded with classical reminiscences. The play is a free adaptation from the Latin of Ravisius Textor, or Jean Tixier de Ravisé, professor of rhetoric in Navarre College in Paris. Antiquity supplied the material for this farce, which had many analogies with the Franc Archer de Bagnolet, and which brought the braggart on to the English stage for the first time.

Another novelty isolated in the reign of Henry VIII was the adaptation of the famous Spanish play Celestina which was printed in 1530 as Calisto and Meliboea. The English playwright has kept only the first four of the sixteen acts of his original. He has changed the long crowded drama with its tragic conclusion to a romantic comedy having a moral and cheerful ending. The character of the procuress Celestina, the descendant of Dame Siriz and the prototype of Macette, is indeed the same in the English as in the original version, but before she throws Meliboea into the arms of Calisto, the girl's father intervenes to save her on the brink of the abyss. Thus the didactic instinct cuts short a romantic drama.


4. Progress of the theatre after 1550.

There was no further change in the first half of the century, but from 1550 onwards innovations came thick and fast.

It is about the middle of the century that the formation of troops of professional players, in addition to the amateurs who performed in the miracle plays, can be clearly traced. In more than one school and more than one college of the universities there were performances especially of classical pieces, but usually they were written by the masters and acted by the pupils. But the people of the provinces as well as those of the capital wished to be amused, and they were no longer satisfied with the miracle plays and moralities. Interludes, otherwise farces, were in great demand and were provided by professional actors. These were at first poor wretches, always under suspicion, who were harried by the authorities as rogues and vagabonds. Before they could be left in peace they had to obtain the patronage of a magnate, a baron at the least. There was no lack of such willing protectors who appreciated their services. The first company to obtain letters patent was Leicester's, in 1574, but it was not the first to stroll about the country. In London the players were at the mercy of the civic authorities, who made their life hard, less perhaps from Puritan prejudice, than because the highly popular dramatic performances constantly gave occasion for disorder, and by attracting a great concourse of spectators might spread the plague, during these years in which it was endemic.

Against the persecuting lord mayor the actors invoked the help of the queen and the magnates. Their chief plea was that they contributed to the queen's pleasure and had need of practice in order to be worthy to play before her. The Privy Council supported them against the City. They first played in London in the courtyards of certain inns. Then, to escape constant annoyance and prohibitions, some of them built, in 1576, their first theatre, outside the city but on its confines, on waste land in Shoreditch.

London meanwhile enjoyed more select performances. The Inns of Court were a home for the drama of classical tendencies, and a connecting link between the stage of the universities and that of the popular theatres.

That the queen might be ensured a supply of worthy actors, the choristers or children of the Chapel Royal were trained to perform plays, both those specially written for them by the master of the Chapel Royal, and others. These boys, both singers and actors, performed for the public as well as for the court, and were for some fifty years the dreaded competitors of adult and professional actors. Their example was followed by other London schools—St. Paul's, Westminster, and Merchant Taylors'—where the most gifted pupils were trained to act and were proud to contribute to the royal diversions. Nothing, nor Puritan disapproval nor civic alarms, could stem the growing passion for the theatre which was felt by the whole nation—nobles, burghers, and people.

(a) THE CLASSICAL INFLUENCE. COMEDY. — The first English comedy of the classical school was Ralph Roister Doister, written about 1533 by Nicholas Udall (1506-56), head master successively of Eton and Westminster. Instead of making the Westminster boys act Plautus, Udall wrote for them, according to the laws of the classical drama, a comedy in five acts, inspired by Latin comic plays. He borrowed some characters from the ancients, but took others straight from English life. The hero Ralph recalls the Pyrgopolinices and Therapontigone of Plautus, is swaggering, stupid, and fatuous as they. Since the play is intended for schoolboys, Udall does not make him a libertine as in the Latin original, but a man really in love, even sentimentally and tearfully amorous. As he endows him also with avarice, so that the keeps an eye on his lady's dowry, the character is confused and lacks verisimilitude. Side by side with Ralph appears Merrygreek, a parasite from ancient comedy, but one who plays his part for fun rather than self-interest. It is the parasite about to be changed into Mascarille or Scapin.

Besides these imitated characters, ther is the heroine, Dame Constance, who is courted by Ralph, a worthy and chaste matron annoyed by an impudent fool. When she knows that she has been slandered to the merchant Goodrich, whom she loves honourably, she sends up to heaven a fine prayer for protection. About her are her maids, one young and the other old, real English servans painted with merry realism. In fact, Udall acccepts aid from Plautus, but has no superstitious veneration for him. His aim, like that of his contemporary Rabelais, is to amuse, 'for mirth,' he says, 'prolongeth life and causes health'. The principal scenes are that in which Merrygreek reads to Constance a love-letter from Ralph and makes it insulting by revising the punctuation, and that in which the roisterer besieges his mistress's house and, in spite of a warlike disguise—Merrygreek has put a hencoop on his head for a helmet—is routed by the dame and his maids.

Udall may have had a moral purpose—he may have desired to satirize vainglory—but his chief aim was to cause innocent laughter. He has not only produced a frace on the classical model, but has also constructed a plot without expelling gaiety. His verse is stiff and stilted, but his language has savour.

There is even more go in a farce performed about the same time in Christ's College, Cambridge. This takes nothing from antiquity except its distribution in acts and its regular consturction. Subject and characters are completely English and completely rustic. Gammer Gurton's Needle, which was printed in 1575, was written by a Master of Arts of the University, reputedly by a certain William Stevenson. Gammer Gurton loses the needle with which she sews breeches for her servant Hodge. The good-for-nothing Diccon persuades her that it has been stolen by her neighbour, Mother Chatte, and quarrels and recriminations follow. The whole village is turned upside down. The parson intervenes, and Diccon takes advantage of the confusion to steal a ham. Finally Hodge utters a scream and the needle is found sticking in his breeches, and all is thereupon discovered. This story is not refined, but the dialogue has go; the rhymed verse, nimbler than Udall's, lends itself to comic effects; the realism is not adulterated by borrowings from antiquity, and there is an unsurpassable drinking-song, 'Back and sidego bare.'

(b) THE CLASSICAL INFLUENCE. TRAGEDY.— But farces, even when they were divided into acts in the ancient manner, could not lead to dramatic progress. They had had a place in the miracle plays. The novelty was all in the isolation of the comic element. It was in tragedy that the national theatre and the theatre of angiquity came together most significantly.

Like the Italians and the French, the English were far more inspired by Seneca than by the Greek theatre. He was a somewhat dangerous model, for his were oratorical tragedies, and it is a moot poin whether they were written to be staged or to be declaimed. He used again the mythological themes of the Greeks, but used them, like a romantic, neither for their national sentiment nor because he believed in their legends, but for their brilliancy. He knew nothing of dramatic movement, and there is no action in his tragedies. His characters rarely voice real sentiments: their speeches abound with maxims; thir language is emphatic and lyrical, full of choice metaphors which show great force of oratory and real subtlety in analysis. Long monologues alternate with passages made up of short question and answers, each crowded into a single line. Seneca's political allusions are frequent and he often attacks tyrants. Most of these characteristics recur in the work of his imitators, but what they have taken from him by preference is certain of his expedients, sometimes his choruses and more often his phantom who has the duty of explanation. Above all, they have been impressed by the atrocity of his subjects, and have learnt from him to associate the idea of tragedy with that of crime, nearly always monstrous crime. Agamemnnon and the horrors of the Atrides, Oedipus, Medea, Phaedra, and, above all, Thyestes and the horrible banquet of Atreus, led to tragedies of atrocious vengeance like Titus Andronicus and The Duchess of Malfi.

Five of Seneca's plays were separately translated and perhaps performed between 1559 and 1566, before the translation, published in 1581, of his Ten Tragedies. As early as 1562 Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton produced the tragedy of Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, which was imitated from him although it had an independence. Sackville was the author of the Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates and the best poet of his day, and both playwrights were lawyers and politicians. Their tragedy was given in one of the Inns of Court.

Seneca's influence is apparent in the uninterrupted seriousness of the play; in the sustained nobility of the style; in the almost abstract character of the scenes, where all the action falls to messengers and to confidants, male and female; in the abundant speechifying, and also in the sanguinary plot. King Gorboduc abdicates in favour of his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex, who, like another Eteocles and Polynices, at once take up arms against each other. Ferrex is slain, and their mother, whose favourite son he is, kills her other son, Porrex, the slayer. The people are angered, rise in rebellion, and put father and mother to death. Anarchy, usurpation, and the death of the usurper ensue.

In spite of these piled-up crimes, the play is cold and lacks movement and drama. Its authors were better fitted to express ideas than to put life in characters. They had a didactic aim, for they wished to depict the misfortunes of a kingdom to which the succession is uncertain—a constant preoccupation of Elizabethan politicians—and the horrors which accompany civil war and result from anarchy. Their tragedy would assuredly have interested Corneille had he known it. It is Seneca after the style of lawyers and members of Parliament. The authors have a certain originality because of the didactic sense which, in spite of everything, connects Gorboduc with the moralities, and because of the patriotic feeling which made these young humanists choose thir subject from the annals of Great Britain, as the subject of King Lear, with which it has analogies, was thence taken. They stand less apart from the national tradition than at first appears from their superficial resemblance to Seneca, that is, from their use of choruses, and their cult of gloomy effects combined with their rejection of the spectacular. But the symmetrical plan of their scenes—Ferrex and Porrex consulting thir good and their bad adviser in turn, advisers who are almost as much abstractions as vice and virtue—betrays an artless simplification inspired by morality plays rather than Seneca.

That the moral of the play may be the more distinct, and perhaps also that spectators unused to such heights of seriousness may be diverted, each act opens with a pantomime in which the lesson it conveys is illustrated.

This is therefore no mere academic tragedy. It is a work which stands first in a line of succession, the first unrelieved English tragedy and therefore the play which led to Kyd's Spanish Tragedie. It brought the idea of fatality on to the English stage. In spite of its great defects it established a high artistic level. Finally, it was the first play in which the blank verse formed under the influence of antiquity was used. The metre which Surrey had invented for his translation of Virgil served Sackville and Norton when they emulated Seneca. They handled it forcibly and with dignity, but were incapable of giving it the ductility necessary for the stage. Twenty-five years were to pass before their inititative was followed triumphantly. Their merit is that, though they did not reach success, they made the attempt.

(c) VARIOUS INFLUENCES.— Gorboduc was insignificant, but appeared in isolation. Round this play there were many tentative efforts and importations from abroad, all of them pointing English drama along different paths. It has been possible to group several plays under the title 'Prodigal Son Series'. This time the prototype was a work by a Neo-Latinist, the Dutchman Gnaphaeus whose Acolastus had been translated by John Palsgrave in 1540. He was imitated with great talent and with original additions in Misogonus, performed about 1560. The author, uncertainly identified as Thomas Richardes, wrote a strongly constructed and well-arranged play, enlivened by frankly comic scenes. The morality Nice Wanton, which appeared about 1560, connects with the same series and is a commentary on the adage 'Spare the rod and spoil the child'. In 1575 George Gascoigne produced his Glass of Government, imitated both from Acolastus and from the Rebels of Macropedius.

Geroge Gascoigne, ever in quest of novelty, is the best witness to the diversity of the influences operative at this time and of the sources whence plays derived. Besides The Glass of Government he wrote The Supposes, a prose translation of a comedy by Ariosto, and Jocasta, a tragedy which purports to be a translation from the Phoenissae of Euripides, but is in truth a rearrangement of the Greek tragedy by the Italian Lodovico Dolce.

Italian influence is yet more apparent in a free adaptation by an unknown author of the Florentine Grazzini's La Spiritata, under the title The Bugbears (1561), in which a son obtains three thousand crowns from a misely father by frightening him at night with noises attributed to ghosts, and is thus enabled to marry his mistress. Other plays inspired by Italian comedies also appeared, but only their names have been preserved.


(d) FORMATION OF THE NATIONAL DRAMA.— Each of these classical, neo-classical, and Italian influences had its part in blazing the track to the English national drama, which absorbed the most diverse elements. But there is a group of plays then acted which were not adaptations but truly English, and although they have weaknesses and an element of the ridiculous, they reveal the national drama as already almost a reality. They conform to that broad type which was finally adopted for drama and was followed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Dramas of this type still partook of the morality plays, at least in right of certain characters, but they tended more and more to stage the scenes of an episode of history or a romance, and they were wont to relieve tragedy or romance by scenes of broad comedy, more or less skilfully related to the principal plot, thus observing the great tradition of the miracle plays.

The most striking of these plays are Appius and Virginia (1551?), Damon and Pytias (1564), Horestes (1567), Gismond of Salerno (1567), Cambyses (1569), and Promos and Cassandra (1578). 

Three are obviously connected with the moralities. Like Bale's King John, they mingle abstractions and real characters. Horestes is entitled 'A Newe Enterlude of Vice Conteyninge the Historye of Horestes' (Orestes). Appius and Virginia, of which the ridiculously emphatic language remained dear to Shakespeare's Pistol—'The furies fell of Limbo lake'—dramatizes the well-known story of Virginius, who slew his daughter to save her from the wicked judge Appius. Appius is impelled by the vice called Haphazard, and Conscience and Justice appear to him. Homely and comic scenes alternate with tragedy. There is a curious mingling of all the earlier dramatic elements with a classic theme.

Cambyses is yet more significant. The author is usually identified as Thomas Preston, Master of Arts of King's College, Cambridge, a learned man who became master of Trinity Hall. The marked and yet artless bad taste of the style has thrown doubt on this authorship, yet the play shows signs of having been written by a humanist, for Herodotus is followed step by step, and there are many mythological reminiscences. The full title, as printed, is very characteristic. A Lamentable Tragedie mixed full of plesant mirth containing the Life of Cambises, King of Persia, from the beginning of his kingdome unto his Death, his one good deede of execution, after that, many wicked deedes and tyrannous murders committed by and thorugh him, and last of all, his odious death by Gods Justice appointed.

Preston's method is that of the authors of the miracle plays. He cuts up the story from Herodotus into scenes as they did the Scriptures. Not the whole of the story is in his play, but nearly all of it. He makes no attempt to weave a plot or by simplification to give unity to characters. Cambyses is represented in all the diversity and chronological incoherence of his actions. He begins well by ordering the execution of a prevaricating delegate, then, impulsive undr the influence of wine, commits a series of atrocious crimes, almost all of them instantaneously, and passes immediately from the exaltation of love at first sight to passionate and murderous fury against his new-made bride. The playwright, by refusing to make any selection among the deeds of his hero, has rendered him lifelike and complex enough, has shown his double physical and moral nature and given him a temperament. There is here a character which ought already to be called Shakespearian.

Cambyses is not always on the stage, but gives place to buffoons. We can discern, in the raw, the expedients of a playwright who, chiefly by varying his scenes, appeals to a heterogenous public, caters for coarse as for other tastes in order to reach all his audience.

Allegorical mingle with historical characters, the better to bring out the moral, the most important abstraction being the vice called Ambidexter, whose part it is both to impel to evil and to ensure the punishment of the guilty. Ambidexter is a cynic who takes pleasure in discovering and encouraging human perversity, and revels in the sight of foolishness. In his chuckle we seem already to hear Iago, even more Gloucester  (Richard III) winning Queen Anne's heart by false protestations of love. This is the sardonic, diabolical, and sharp-sighted sinner, bad all through, without a trace of conscience, snapping his fingers at prejudices, his philosophy a fundamental atheism.

The connection of the buffoonery with the tragedy is weak, yet exists and is already a little Shakespearean. Thus, Cambyses has just decided to make war on Egypt when three soldiers enter, rejoicing in the prospective expedition, counting on slaughter and plunder. The truth, as undoubted in the days of Cambyses as in the sixteenth century, is illustrated that war is not the exclusive concern of princes and generals, but is as much the common soldier's business as the king's. Similarly Shakespeare, when he deals with Falstaff's enrolments, shows the seamy side of the glorious profession of arms, adopting the point of view he keeps in all his popular scenes, whether English or Roman. It is the tradition of the miracle plays combined with that of the morality plays.

In Cambyses all the education of the plot is spectacular. The murders are not recounted, as in Gorboduc, but the playwright carefully stages them in full. He reproduces the execution of Sisamnes, who is beheaded and scalped—the artless stage directions stipulate for a false skin—his scalp being afterwards pulled down over his ears. On the stage, Cambyses, to prove that he is not drunk, pierces the son of Praxaspe full in the heart with an arrow.

At the same time, this author carries pathos to the highest point. He puts into the mouth of the dying child of Praxaspe touching complaints which bring tears perforce. The scene recalls little Isaac ready to go to the stake in the mystery of Abraham, and anticipates the child Arthur in Shakespeare's King John seeking to move Hubert who has been ordered to burn out his eyes. But Preston reaches a yet higher degree of pathos. He sends a mother to mourn over the body of her son, and causes Cambyses to have the child's heart cut out that the father may know it was wounded in the very centre. After this, how could an audience be satisfied with only hearsay of butchery, messengers' tales?

To compensate for these episodes, Preston gives his public an open-air scene, a garden in which a fair lady and a lord stroll along the paths while the lord supplies the absence of scenery by describing the landscape and the flowers. Thus a breath of fresh air blows through the horrors of the melodrama.

This play reveals on examination all the characteristics of English drama of the great period. It lacks only two things, genius and style, or rather, perhaps, only one, genius made manifest in style.

The awkwardness of Preston's writing is so complete and his bombast so ridiculous that his play, after a long term of popularity, became the laughing-stock of succeeding dramatists. Shakespeare amused himself by parodying it in Falstaff, who says, when he wishes to use fine language, 'I will do it in King Cambyses' vein.' Preston's rhetoric is in the highest degree both frantic and artless. Some of his metaphorical epithets have the most ludicrous effet, as when a character speaks of her 'christall eyes', or the mother of little Prexaspe of her 'velvet paps.' Moreover, the playwright is so little at his ease with the fourteen-syllabled rhymed lines which he uses for tragic passages, that he mutlates grammar by the suppression of articles or by most astonishing inversions in the very places in which he aims at simple statements of fact.

Undoubtedly the great lack was of a metre fitted to drama, a ductile line which would leave freedom of movement to the playwright. Failing this, verse might have been relinquished for prose. In verse, the attempt made in Gorboduc had not yet been pursued, and prose had been tried only by Gascoigne in his Supposes. English drama made decided progress when a flexible metre had been adopted, more or less generally, and when prose was used with increasing frequency. As for the remaining and too prominent traces of the morality play, it was not difficult to get rid of them. Even in Cambyses they appeared only in the name of characters. To eliminate them from that play it would have been necessary only to rebaptize a few supernumeraries including Ambidexter, who were still called after abstractions. Richard Edwards, the author of Damon and Pythias, a far better if possibly less significant play than Cambyses, contrived to do without abstractions altogether. He produced a tragi-comedy which, save for its versification, would not have seemed out of place had it appeared among a number of others of the great period. The same praise could be given to Whetstone, who in 1578 wrote Promos and Cassandra, from which Shakespeare derived Measure for Measure, that gloomy comedy. Hitherto all had been experiment, but the advent of the undeniably great works was very near.

The Spanish Tragedie

 —oOo—