A History of Elizabethan Literature

CHAPTER I. From Tottel's Miscellany to Spenser

FROM TOTTEL'S MISCELLANY TO SPENSER

The starting-point--Tottel's Miscellany--Its method and authorship--The characteristics of its poetry--Wyatt--Surrey--Grimald--Their metres --The stuff of their poems--The Mirror for Magistrates--Sackville --His contributions and their characteristics--Remarks on the formal criticism of poetry--Gascoigne--Churchyard--Tusser--Turberville-- Googe--The translators--Classical metres--Stanyhurst--Other miscellanies Pages 1-27

CHAPTER II. Early Elizabethan Prose

EARLY ELIZABETHAN PROSE

Outlines of Early Elizabethan Prose--Its origins--Cheke and his contemporaries--Ascham--His style--Miscellaneous writers--Critics-- Webbe--Puttenham--Lyly--Euphues and Euphuism--Sidney--His style and critical principles--Hooker--Greville--Knolles--Mulcaster 28-49

CHAPTER III. The First Dramatic Period

THE FIRST DRAMATIC PERIOD

Divisions of Elizabethan Drama--Its general character--Origins--Ralph Roister Doister--Gammer Gurton's Needle--Gorboduc--The Senecan Drama--Other early plays--The "university wits"--Their lives and characters--Lyly (dramas)--The Marlowe group--Peele--Greene--Kyd-- Marlowe--The actor playwrights 50-81

CHAPTER IV. "the Faërie Queene" and Its Group

"THE FAËRIE QUEENE" AND ITS GROUP

Spenser--His life and the order of his works--The Shepherd's Calendar --The minor poems--The Faërie Queene--Its scheme--The Spenserian stanza--Spenser's language--His general poetical qualities-- Comparison with other English poets--His peculiar charm--The Sonneteers--Fulke Greville--Sidney--Watson--Barnes--Giles Fletcher the elder--Lodge--Avisa--Percy--Zepheria--Constable--Daniel-- Drayton--Alcilia--Griffin--Lynch--Smith--Barnfield--Southwell--The song and madrigal writers--Campion--Raleigh--Dyer--Oxford, etc.-- Gifford--Howell, Grove, and others--The historians--Warner--The larger poetical works of Daniel and Drayton--The satirists--Lodge-- Donne--The poems of Donne generally--Hall--Marston--Guilpin--Tourneur 82-156

CHAPTER V. The Second Dramatic Period--Shakespere

THE SECOND DRAMATIC PERIOD--SHAKESPERE

Difficulty of writing about Shakespere--His life--His reputation in England and its history--Divisions of his work--The Poems--The Sonnets--The Plays--Characteristics of Shakespere--Never unnatural-- His attitude to morality--His humour--Universality of his range-- Comments on him--His manner of working--His variety--Final remarks-- Dramatists to be grouped with Shakespere--Ben Jonson--Chapman-- Marston--Dekker 157-206

CHAPTER VI. Later Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose

LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE

Bacon--Raleigh--The Authorised Version--Jonson and Daniel as prose-writers--Hakluyt--The Pamphleteers--Greene--Lodge--Harvey--Nash --Dekker--Breton--The Martin Marprelate Controversy--Account of it, with specimens of the chief tracts 207-252

CHAPTER VII. The Third Dramatic Period

THE THIRD DRAMATIC PERIOD

Characteristics--Beaumont and Fletcher--Middleton--Webster--Heywood-- Tourneur--Day 253-288

CHAPTER VIII

THE SCHOOL OF SPENSER AND THE TRIBE OF BEN

Sylvester--Davies of Hereford--Sir John Davies--Giles and Phineas Fletcher--William Browne--Wither--Drummond--Stirling--Minor Jacobean poets--Songs from the dramatists 289-314

CHAPTER IX. Milton, Taylor, Clarendon, Browne, Hobbes

MILTON, TAYLOR, CLARENDON, BROWNE, HOBBES

The quintet--Milton's life--His character--His periods of literary production--First Period, the minor poems--The special excellences of Comus--Lycidas--Second Period, the pamphlets--Their merits and defects--Milton's prose style--Third Period, the larger poems-- Milton's blank verse--His origins--His comparative position--Jeremy Taylor's life--His principal works--His style--Characteristics of his thought and manner--Sir Thomas Browne--His life, works, and editions --His literary manner--Characteristics of his style and vocabulary-- His Latinising--Remarkable adjustment of his thought and expression-- Clarendon--His life--Great merits of his History--Faults of his style--Hobbes--His life and works--Extraordinary strength and clearness of his style 315-353

CHAPTER X. Caroline Poetry

CAROLINE POETRY

Herrick--Carew--Crashaw--Divisions of Minor Caroline poetry--Miscellanies --George Herbert--Sandys--Vaughan--Lovelace and Suckling--Montrose-- Quarles--More--Beaumont--Habington--Chalkhill--Marmion--Kynaston-- Chamberlayne--Benlowes--Stanley--John Hall--Patrick Carey--Cleveland --Corbet--Cartwright, Sherburne, and Brome--Cotton--The general characteristics of Caroline poetry--A defence of the Caroline poets 354-393

CHAPTER XI. The Fourth Dramatic Period

THE FOURTH DRAMATIC PERIOD

Weakening of dramatic strength--Massinger--Ford--Shirley--Randolph--Brome --Cokain--Glapthorne--Davenant--Suckling--Minor and anonymous plays of the Fourth and other Periods--The Shakesperian Apocrypha 394-427

CHAPTER XII. Minor Caroline Prose

MINOR CAROLINE PROSE

Burton--Fuller--Lord Herbert of Cherbury--Izaak Walton--Howell--Earle-- Felltham--The rest 428-444

CONCLUSION 445

CHAPTER I

FROM TOTTEL'S "MISCELLANY" TO SPENSER

In a work like the present, forming part of a larger whole and preceded by another part, the writer has the advantage of being almost wholly free from a difficulty which often presses on historians of a limited and definite period, whether of literary or of any other history. That difficulty lies in the discussion and decision of the question of origins--in the allotment of sufficient, and not more than sufficient, space to a preliminary recapitulation of the causes and circumstances of the actual events to be related. Here there is no need for any but the very briefest references of the kind to connect the present volume with its forerunner, or rather to indicate the connection of the two.

There has been little difference of opinion as to the long dead-season of English poetry, broken chiefly, if not wholly, by poets Scottish rather than English, which lasted through almost the whole of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries. There has also been little difference in regarding the remarkable work (known as Tottel's Miscellany, but more properly called Songs and Sonnets, written by the Right Honourable Lord Henry Howard, late Earl of Surrey, and other) which was published by Richard Tottel in 1557, and which went through two editions in the summer of that year, as marking the dawn of the new period. The book is, indeed, remarkable in many ways. The first thing, probably, which strikes the modern reader about it is the fact that great part of its contents is anonymous and only conjecturally to be attributed, while as to the part which is more certainly known to be the work of several authors, most of those authors were either dead or had written long before. Mr. Arber's remarks in his introduction (which, though I have rather an objection to putting mere citations before the public, I am glad here to quote as a testimony in the forefront of this book to the excellent deserts of one who by himself has done as much as any living man to facilitate the study of Elizabethan literature) are entirely to the point--how entirely to the point only students of foreign as well as of English literature know. "The poets of that age," says Mr. Arber, "wrote for their own delectation and for that of their friends, and not for the general public. They generally had the greatest aversion to their works appearing in print." This aversion, which continued in France till the end of the seventeenth century, if not later, had been somewhat broken down in England by the middle of the sixteenth, though vestiges of it long survived, and in the form of a reluctance to be known to write for money, may be found even within the confines of the nineteenth. The humbler means and lesser public of the English booksellers have saved English literature from the bewildering multitude of pirated editions, printed from private and not always faithful manuscript copies, which were for so long the despair of the editors of many French classics. But the manuscript copies themselves survive to a certain extent, and in the more sumptuous and elaborate editions of our poets (such as, for instance, Dr. Grosart's Donne) what they have yielded may be studied with some interest. Moreover, they have occasionally preserved for us work nowhere else to be obtained, as, for instance, in the remarkable folio which has supplied Mr. Bullen with so much of his invaluable collection of Old Plays. At the early period of Tottel's Miscellany it would appear that the very idea of publication in print had hardly occurred to many writers' minds. When the book appeared, both its main contributors, Surrey and Wyatt, had been long dead, as well as others (Sir Francis Bryan and Anne Boleyn's unlucky brother, George Lord Rochford) who are supposed to be represented. The short Printer's Address to the Reader gives absolutely no intelligence as to the circumstances of the publication, the person responsible for the editing, or the authority which the editor and printer may have had for their inclusion of different authors' work. It is only a theory, though a sufficiently plausible one, that the editor was Nicholas Grimald, chaplain to Bishop Thirlby of Ely, a Cambridge man who some ten years before had been incorporated at Oxford and had been elected to a Fellowship at Merton College. In Grimald's or Grimoald's connection with the book there was certainly something peculiar, for the first edition contains forty poems contributed by him and signed with his name, while in the second the full name is replaced by "N. G.," and a considerable number of his poems give way to others. More than one construction might, no doubt, be placed on this curious fact; but hardly any construction can be placed on it which does not in some way connect Grimald with the publication. It may be added that, while his, Surrey's, and Wyatt's contributions are substantive and known--the numbers of separate poems contributed being respectively forty for Surrey, the same for Grimald, and ninety-six for Wyatt--no less than one hundred and thirty-four poems, reckoning the contents of the first and second editions together, are attributed to "other" or "uncertain" authors. And of these, though it is pretty positively known that certain writers did contribute to the book, only four poems have been even conjecturally traced to particular authors. The most interesting of these by far is the poem attributed, with that which immediately precedes it, to Lord Vaux, and containing the verses "For age with stealing steps," known to every one from the gravedigger in Hamlet. Nor is this the only connection of Tottel's Miscellany with Shakespere, for there is no reasonable doubt that the "Book of Songs and Sonnets," to the absence of which Slender so pathetically refers in The Merry Wives of Windsor, is Tottel's, which, as the first to use the title, long retained it by right of precedence. Indeed, one of its authors, Churchyard, who, though not in his first youth at its appearance, survived into the reign of James, quotes it as such, and so does Drayton even later. No sonnets had been seen in England before, nor was the whole style of the verse which it contained less novel than this particular form.

As is the case with many if not most of the authors of our period, a rather unnecessary amount of ink has been spilt on questions very distantly connected with the question of the absolute and relative merit of Surrey and Wyatt in English poetry. In particular, the influence of the one poet on the other, and the consequent degree of originality to be assigned to each, have been much discussed. A very few dates and facts will supply most of the information necessary to enable the reader to decide this and other questions for himself. Sir Thomas Wyatt, son of Sir Henry Wyatt of Allington, Kent, was born in 1503, entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1515, became a favourite of Henry VIII., received important diplomatic appointments, and died in 1542. Lord Henry Howard was born (as is supposed) in 1517, and became Earl of Surrey by courtesy (he was not, the account of his judicial murder says, a lord of Parliament) at eight years old. Very little is really known of his life, and his love for "Geraldine" was made the basis of a series of fictions by Nash half a century after his death. He cannot have been more than thirty when, in the Reign of Terror towards the close of Henry VIII.'s life, he was arrested on frivolous charges, the gravest being the assumption of the royal arms, found guilty of treason, and beheaded on Tower Hill on 19th January 1547. Thus it will be seen that Wyatt was at Cambridge before Surrey was born, and died five years before him; to which it need only be added that Surrey has an epitaph on Wyatt which clearly expresses the relation of disciple to master. Yet despite this relation and the community of influences which acted on both, their characteristics are markedly different, and each is of the greatest importance in English poetical history.

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