Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 5.djvu/529

In places, the Church is bitterly assailed, though in other passages Spenser clearly deprecates the desecration of monasteries, churches, altars, and images as the work of the "Blatant Beast of Calumny". Nor does he give by any means undiluted approval to the Anglican Church or the Puritans. Modern criticism, however, places little emphasis upon any portion of the historical allegory, regarding it as an antiquated hindrance rather than a living help to the true appreciation of the poem. The more purely spiritual elements of the allegory, such as the struggles of the human will against evil, aided by Divine power, are those which are valued by discerning readers. Considered in its essential aspect, the "Faerie Queene" is "the poem of the noble powers of the human soul struggling towards union with God".

Joseph Addison
After Painting by Sir Gofrey Kneller

Spenser holds the supreme place among a multitude of other poets of as real though of less genius than his in the sixteenth century, and the work of these, outside the drama, is perhaps seen at its best in the song and the sonnet, two forms which had now an extraordinary vogue. Nearly a dozen anthologies of Elizabethan lyrics, of which the finest is England's "Helicon" (1600), remain to show us the sweetness, beauty, and rarity of these songs. The sonnets, one of the new Italian poetic forms, introduced by Surrey and Wyatt, are less original, and many of them are translations from foreign sources, but those of Sidney and Shakespeare, at least, stand out by their exceptional force and beauty.

Among the many lesser poets of the time Michael Drayton (1563-1631) has been singled out as especially representative of the general character of Elizabethan poetical genius. He wrote every sort of poetry that was the fashion except moral allegory. His work deserves more notice than is often given to it, and his name is sometimes only associated with his long historical poem of the "Polyolbion". This type of poetry reflects the patriotism of the age, and Samuel Daniel and William Warner, both poets of some genius, also worked at it. The huge "Mirror for Magistrates", begun in 1555, and not in its final edition until James I's reign, had encouraged this kind of verse. Poetry of an argumentative and philosophic type was produced towards the end of the century, but very little of value that was religious, except the work of Robert Southwell. This heroic young Jesuit and martyr wrote with a high object: to show to the brilliant young poets of his time, whose love poems often expressed unworthy passion, "how well verse and virtue sort together". And he did this by using the literary manner of the age, "weaving", as he himself says, "a new web in their old loom". His book had a distinct influence on contemporary and later poetry, touching even Ben Jonson and perhaps Milton himself. Its quaintness of wit (allying it somewhat to the "meta-physical" school of the next generation) are shot through with warm human feeling which makes its direct appeal to the reader. And sincerity is the very note of it all.

But it is, of course, in the drama that we find all the well-known poets—with the one exception of Spenser—putting forth their greatest force. The sudden rise of the drama in the latter half of the sixteenth century is the most remarkable phenomenon of this supremely remarkable literary age. It has never been fully accounted for. Many of the contemporary records concerning plays and the theatre have undoubtedly been lost, so that we have to form our own judgment of Elizabethan dramatic literature and its causes upon, comparatively speaking, insufficient grounds. Out of some 2000 plays known to have been acted, only about 500 exist, as far as we know, and discoveries of new contemporary testimony or work might revolutionize our judgment on the history of Elizabethan drama. However that may be, the facts, as we have them, are that in the earlier half of the sixteenth century we find scarcely any dramatic work that would enable us to foresee the rise of the great romantic drama. Miracle-plays were acted up to1579, but clearly no great development could come from these, and still less, perhaps, from the scholarly movement towards a so-called classical drama, imitations of the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, such as "Ralph Roister Doister", named the "first English comedy", or of the dramas of Seneca, as in "Gorboduc", the "first English tragedy". There was also a popular tragi-comic drama of a somewhat rude kind (such as Shakespeare travestied in the play of "Pyramus and Thisbe" in the "Midsummer Night's Dream"), but this was no more prophetic than the others. Then suddenly there appear between 1580 and 1590 plays with life, invent ion, and imagination in them, often faulty enough, but living. The predecessors of Shakespeare, Peele, Greene, Kyd, and others, but most of all that wild and poetic genius, Marlowe, "whose raptures were all air and fire", and who practically created our dramatic blank verse, prepare the way for Shakespeare. Rejecting, gradually, by a sort of instinct, those elements in the drama of the past that were alien to the English genius, they struck out, little by little, the now well-known type of Elizabethan romantic drama which in Shakespeare's hands was to attain its highest. And Shakespeare's genius made of it not only a vehicle for the expression of Elizabethan ideals of drama and of life, but a mouthpiece of humanity itself.

Shakespeare belongs not to England but to the whole world, and most modern nations have vied with each other in acute and wondering appreciation of his genius. A mass of critical literature has grown up round his name, discussing problems literary, artistic, personal, of every kind, and continues to grow. Shakespeare and his work furnish inexhaustible matter for meditation upon almost every human interest and problem. After his time there are some fine dramatists, but none can approach him in completeness and height of genius. Ben Jonson, Chapman, Webster, Ford, Massinger, and Shirley—the two last Catholic converts—with others, carry on the line of dramatic writing with genius, skill, and energy, but the glory gradually departs until one is led to think that if the theatres had not been closed in 1640 on account of