Nosce Teipsum (1599) of Sir John Davies; a stoicism, “of the
schools” as well as “of the blood,” animates Cassius and also
the French heroes of Chapman; and if the earlier drama is sown
with Seneca’s old maxims on sin and destiny, the later drama,
at least in Shakespeare, is penetrated with the freer reading of
life and conduct suggested by Montaigne. Platonism—with its
vox angelica sometimes a little hoarse—is present from the
youthful Hymns of Spenser to the last followers of Donne;
sometimes drawn from Plato, it is oftener the Christianized
doctrine codified by Ficino or Pico. It must be noted that
this play of philosophic thought only becomes marked after 1580,
when the preparatory tunings of English literature are over.
We may now quickly review the period down to 1580, in the departments of prose, verse and drama. It was a time which left few memorials of form.
Early modern English prose, as a medium of art, was of slow growth. For long there was alternate strife and union (ending in marriage) between the Latin, or more rhetorical, and the ancestral elements of the language, and this was true both of diction and of construction. We need Prose to 1580. to begin with the talk of actual life, as we find it in the hands of the more naïf writers, in its idiom and gusto and unshapen power, to see how style gradually declared itself. In state letters and reports, in the recorded words of Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland and public men, in travels and memoirs, in Latimer, in the rude early versions of Cicero and Boëthius, in the more unstudied speech of Ascham or Leland, the material lies. At the other extreme there are the English liturgy (1549, 1552, 1559, with the final fusion of Anglican and Puritan eloquence), and the sermons of Fisher and Cranmer,—nearly the first examples of a sinuous, musical and Ciceronian cadence. A noble pattern for saga-narrative and lyrical prose was achieved in the successive versions (1526–1540–1568) of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, where a native simple diction of short and melodious clauses are prescribed by the matter itself. Prose, in fact, down to Shakespeare’s time, was largely the work of the churchmen and translators, aided by the chroniclers. About the mid-century the stories, as well as the books of conduct and maxim, drawn from Italy and France, begin to thicken. Perverted symmetry of style is found in euphuistic hacks like Pettie. Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566) provided the plots of Bandello and others for the dramatists. Hoby’s version (1561) of Castiglione’s Courtier, with its command of elate and subtle English, is the most notable imported book between Berners’s Froissart (1523–1525) and North’s Plutarch (1579). Ascham’s Schoolmaster is the most typical English book of Renaissance culture, in its narrower sense, since Utopia. Holinshed’s Chronicle (1577–1587) and the work of Halle, if pre-critical, were all the fitter to minister to Shakespeare.
The lyric impulse was fledged anew at the court of Henry VIII. The short lines and harping burdens of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s songs show the revival, not only of a love-poetry more plangent than anything in English since Chaucer, but also of the long-deadened sense of metre. Verse to 1580. In Wyatt’s sonnets, octaves, terzines and other Italian measures, we can watch the painful triumphant struggles of this noble old master out of the slough of formlessness in which verse had been left by Skelton. Wyatt’s primary deed was his gradual rediscovery of the iambic decasyllabic line duly accented—the line that had been first discovered by Chaucer for England; and next came its building into sonnet and stanza. Wyatt (d. 1542) ended with perfect formal accuracy; he has the honours of victory; and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (d. 1547), a younger-hearted and more gracious but a lighter poet, carried on his labour, and caught some of Chaucer’s as well as the Italian tunes. The blank verse of his two translated Aeneids, like all that written previous to Peele, gave little inkling of the latencies of the measure which was to become the cardinal one of English poetry. It was already the vogue in Italy for translations from the classics; and we may think of Surrey importing it like an uncut jewel and barely conscious of its value. His original poems, like those of Wyatt, waited for print till the eve of Elizabeth’s reign, when they appeared, with those of followers like Grimoald, in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), the first of many such garlands, and the outward proof of the poetical revival dating twenty years earlier. But this was a false dawn. Only one poem of authentic power, Sackville’s Induction (1563) to that dreary patriotic venture, A Mirror for Magistrates, was published for twenty years. In spirit medieval, this picture of the gates of hell and of the kings in bale achieves a new melody and a new intensity, and makes the coming of Spenser far less incredible. But poetry was long starved by the very ideal that nursed it—that of the all-sided, all-accomplished “courtier” or cavalier, to whom verse-making was but one of all the accomplishments that he must perfect, like fencing, or courting, or equestrian skill. Wyatt and Surrey, Sackville and Sidney (and we may add Hamlet, a true Elizabethan) are of this type. One of the first competent professional writers was George Gascoigne, whose remarks on metric, and whose blank verse satire, The Steel Glass (1576), save the years between Sackville and Spenser. Otherwise the gap is filled by painful rhymesters with rare flashes, such as Googe, Churchyard and Turberville.
The English Renaissance drama, both comic and tragic, illustrates on the largest scale the characteristic power of the antique at this period—at first to reproduce itself in imitation, and then to generate something utterly different from itself, something that throws the antique Drama to 1580. to the winds. Out of the Morality, a sermon upon the certainty of death or the temptations of the soul, acted by personified qualities and supernatural creatures, had grown up, in the reign of Henry VII., the Interlude, a dialogue spoken by representative types or trades, who faintly recalled those in Chaucer’s Prologue. These forms, which may be termed medieval, continued long and blended; sometimes heated, as in Respublica, with doctrine, and usually lightened by the comic play of a “Vice” or incarnation of sinister roguery. John Heywood was the chief maker of the pure interludes, and Bishop Bale of the Protestant medleys; his King Johan, a reformer’s partisan tract in verse, contains the germs of the chronicle play. In the drama down to 1580 the native talent is sparse enough, but the historical interest is high. Out of a seeming welter of forms, the structure, the metres and the species that Kyd and Marlowe found slowly emerged. Comedy was first delivered from the interlude, and fashioned in essence as we know it, by the schoolmasters. Drawing on Plautus, they constructed duly-knitted plots, divided into acts and scenes and full of homely native fun, for their pupils to present. In Thersites (written 1537), the oldest of these pieces, and in Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552 at latest), the best known of them, the characters are lively, and indeed are almost individuals. In others, like Misogonus (written 1560), the abstract element and improving purpose remain, and the source is partly neo-Latin comedy, native or foreign. Romance crept in: serious comedy, with its brilliant future, the comedy of high sentiment and averted dangers mingled still with farce, was shadowed forth in Damon and Pithias and in the curious play Common Conditions; while the domestic comedy of intrigue dawned in Gascoigne’s Supposes, adapted from Ariosto. Thus were displaced the ranker rustic fun of Gammer Gurton’s Needle (written c. 1559) and other labours of “rhyming mother-wits.” But there was no style, no talk, no satisfactory metre. The verse of comedy waited for Greene, and its prose for Lyly. Structure, without style, was also the main achievement of the early tragedies. The Latin plays of Buchanan, sometimes biblical in topic, rest, as to their form, upon Euripides. But early English tragedy was shapen after the Senecan plays of Italy and after Seneca himself, all of whose dramas were translated by 1581. Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, acted about 1561, and written by Sackville and Norton, and Hughes’ Misfortunes of Arthur (acted 1588), are not so much plays as wraiths of plays, with their chain of slaughters and revenges, their two-dimensional personages, and their lifeless maxims which fail to sweeten the bloodshot atmosphere. The Senecan form was not barren in itself, as its sequel in France was to show: it was only barren for England. After Marlowe it was driven to the study, and was
