IV
The reader, therefore, who knows only Shakespeare among the Elizabethans, will get relatively very little of the intellectual atmosphere in which Milton and other Londoners of the next generation grew up. He will get less of this from Shakespeare than from any other eminent writer of the period.
The greatest of modern poets passed a quarter century amid the tremendous intellectual currents—social, religious, and imperial—of Elizabethan London, and his soul through all this time remained a stranger to them. ‘Multum incola fuit anima sua.’ His most apparent efforts to reflect the spirit around him are the relative failures of Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Merry Wives of Windsor. He gave his audiences, to be sure, what they liked immensely, but he gave it with a strange and stubborn indirectness. The Armada comes and goes; Drake and Ralegh light the beacons of a new and potent patriotism; and Shakespeare tunes his native woodland harp to sing, in Henry V, the praises of an obsolete Lancastrian policy. Great Britain has its birth in the union of Scotland and England, and Shakespeare weaves into Macbeth a musty dynastic compliment to the new monarch.
The London bookstalls groan with pamphlets about the discovery of Bermuda and the colonization of Virginia, about cannibals and noble savages, and the Isle of Devils and the Fountain of Perpetual Youth. Drayton, Shakespeare’s contemporary, friend, and neighbor in Warwickshire, writes his ecstatic stanzas, To the Virginian Voyage, urging all
Worthy your country’s name,
