culture. In Sackville's Mirror for Magistrates (1563), we recognize the influence of Dante, and the Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser (1590) is aglow with the warmer and more prodigal beauty of the South, and filled with reminiscences of the romantic poems of Tasso and Ariosto. the Translators. Through the example and stimulus of Italy, the literatures of Greece and Rome were made a living element in English culture. Not only did scholars and the fine ladies of the court pore over their Plato in The Work of Greek; translators were busily at work making the great classics the common quarry for all who could read the English tongue. During the latter half of the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth centuries, Virgil's Æneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, numbers of Seneca's plays, and Homer, in the famous translation of Chapman, were thus made English literature. The Elizabethan writers delighted in a somewhat ostentatious display of this newly acquired learning, and their works are often filled with classic allusions which we should now consider commonplace. But as a quickening power their effect was incalculable. Shakespeare's use of Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, admirably illustrates the way in which the Translator supplied material for the Author. Out of North's version Shakespeare built his Julius Cæsar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and, to some extent, Timon of Athens. The literature of Italy was likewise thrown open to the English reader. Harrington translated Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1591), Fairfax translated Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1600), while hundreds of Italian stories were circulated in England and became the basis of many a drama. ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND. The thought and imagination of England, thus expanding under the stimulus of the Renaissance, found many conditions in the reign of Elizabeth which favored their expression in literature. Freedom from cution. In the two preceding reigns much of the national force had been spent in religious controversies. Edward VI. (1547-1553) had forced Protestantism upon a nation not, as a whole, fully prepared to accept Religious Perse- it; Mary (1553-1558) with a religious zeal as pathetic as, in our eyes, it was cruel and mistaken, had striven to persecute the people back into Roman Catholicism. In Elizabeth's reign we pass out of the bitterness and confusion of this warfare of religions, into a period of comparative quiet. The religious and political difficulties which beset Elizabeth on her accession in 1558, slowly sank out of sight under her firm and moderate rule. Patience and toleration did much to soften the violence of the religious parties; the fierce fires of martyrdom, which had lit up the terrible reign of Mary, were cold, and the nation, relieved from pressing anxieties, was comparatively free to turn to other issues. The very year in which Shakespeare is supposed to have come up to London to seek his fortune (1587) saw the final removal of a threatened danger by the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. But the reign was more than a period of relief from past struggles or persecution; it was marked by a rapid advance in national prosperity and by a wide-spread increase in the comforts and luxuries of life. Among the people there were many causes of contentment. Improved methods of farming doubled the yield per acre; the domestic manufacture of wool greatly increased, and homespun came into favor. In Prosperity of the People. many little ways, by the introduction of chimneys, of feather beds, pillows, and the more general use of glass, the conveniences of living were greatly increased. The sea, as well as the land, yielded a large revenue. Not only did the English fishing boats crowd the Channel, but hardy sailors brought back cod from the Newfoundland banks, or tracked the whale in the vast solitudes of the polar seas. Growth of In 1566 Commerce. England was laying the foundations of her future commercial and maritime supremacy. Her trade increased with Flanders and with the ports of the Mediterranean, and her merchant ships pushed to Scandinavia, Archangel, and Guinea. Sir Thomas Gresham built the Royal Exchange in London, a hall in which the merchants met as the Venetians in their Rialto. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the famous East India Company was established. With the ease and wealth that sprung from this increasing prosperity, came that delight in beauty, that half-pagan pleasure in the splendid adornments of life, which characterize the Italian Renaissance. The Splendor Life, no longer shut within the heavy ma- of Life. sonry of the feudal castle, ran glittering in the open sunshine. Stately villas were built, with long gable roofs, grotesque carvings, and shining oriels, and surrounded with the pleached walks, the terraces, the statuary, and the fountains of an Italian garden. The passion for color showed itself among the wealthier classes in a lavish magnificence and eccentricity of costume. The young dandy went "perfumed like a milliner,"* and often affected the Dress. fashions of Italy as the Anglo-maniac of our own day apes those of England. In its luxury of delight in life and color, the nation bedecked itself * "King Henry IV.," act i. sc. 3. "With silken coats, and caps, and golden rings, Moralists and Puritans bitterly denounced the extrav agance and absurdities of the rapidly changing fashions. "Except it were a dog in a doublet," writes an author of the time," you shall not see any so disguised as are my countrymen of England." But ridicule and reproof were alike powerless to check the nation's holiday mood. Men put off their more sober garments to rustle in silks and satins, to sparkle with jewels; they were gorgeous in laces and velvets, they glittered with chains and brooches of gold, they gladly suffered themselves to be tormented by huge ruffs, stiff with the newly discovered vanity of starch. Shakespeare, whom we cannot imagine over-precise, is fond of showing such fashionable vanities in an unfavorable light, and from more than one passage we may suppose him to have felt an intense, country-bred dislike for painted faces and false hair. On the other hand, when we read his famous description of Cleopatra in her barge, we appreciate how all this glow of color appealed to and satisfied the imagination of the time. The same spirit showed itself in the costly banquets, in the showy pageants or street processions, with their elaborate scenery and allegorical characters, in the revels like those with which Queen Elizabeth was received at Kenilworth (1575), in the spectacular entertainment of the mask, a performance in which poet, musician, and—as we should say-the stage manager, worked together to delight * " Taming of the Shrew," act iv. sc. 3. Harrison's "Elizabethan England" (Camelot Series, p. 108). But the Elizabethan passion for dress and ornament is but a surface indication of the immense delight in life which characterizes the time. If we would appreciate the vital spirit of this crowded and bewildering age, we must feel the rush of its superb and irrepres-Elizabethan sible energy, pouring itself out through Delight in Life. countless channels. England was like a youth first come to the full knowledge of his strength, rejoicing as a giant to run his course, and determined to do, to see, to know, to enjoy to the full. The fever of adventure burned in her veins; Drake sailed round the world (1577-1580); the tiny ships of Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and the rest parted the distant waters of unplowed seas. The buc caneers plundered and fought with the zest and unwearied vigor of the Viking. When Sir Walter Raleigh was taken prisoner in 1603, he is said to have been decked with four thousand pounds' worth of jewels; yet courtier and fine gentleman as he was, he could face peril, hunger, and privation, in the untracked solitudes of the New World. With an insatiable and many-sided capacity for life typical of his time, Raleigh wrote poetry, boarded Spanish galleons, explored the wilderness, and produced in his old age a huge History of the World. In their full confidence of power, men carried on vast literary undertakings, like Sidney's Arcadia, Drayton's Poly * "L'Allegro." |