No More Learning

The writers of Elizabeth's reign, high and low,
rich and poor, great and small, were very close to each other.
Chettle's Mourning Garment, written to commemorate queen
Elizabeth's death, is excellent prose, and contains descriptions of
contemporary poets in verse, which are as melodious as they are
judicious. The whole piece is eminently respectable and shows
considerable literary culture. It is Chettle in court dress. No
doubt, like Shakespeare, he would consider such a composition
more truly an 'heire of his invention' than his not altogether
reputable plays.
We have seen reason to think that, in the Two Lamentable
Tragedies, a glimpse is given us of the tragic style of William
Haughton. This writer, when he first appears in Henslowe's
diary, is called 'Yonge Harton, and we may suppose, therefore,
that he belonged to a group of younger men than are represented
by Munday and Chettle. Like Richard Hathwaye, he is known to
us only from Henslowe's notices, where he appears most frequently
in collaboration with John Day; but some six plays are referred to
his sole authorship. One of these, A Woman will have her Will,
was entered on the Stationers' register in August 1601, but the
first extant edition was printed in 1616 as English-Men For my
Money. For another extant play, printed in 1662 as Grim The
Collier of Croyden; Or, The Devil and his Dame : With The Devil
and Saint Dunston, Henslowe made a payment to Haughton in
1600. Both these plays, like Looke about you, were originally
named from a proverb or pithy phrase which is used with more or
less frequency in the play; but, if we may take them as examples of
Haughton's comedy, they represent him at the beginning and the
end of his development. The Devil and his Dame belongs in all its
characteristics to the sixteenth century, when a clear species of
comedy had not yet been evolved. A Woman will have her Will, on
the contrary, is regular comedy, with all the characteristics of the
earlier interlude, or earlier chronicle history, definitely discarded.
The Devil and his Dame is of the same type as the extant Munday
plays, although the claim may be urged that it exhibits more con-
structive ability in grafting upon a quasi-historical ground a comic
a


## p. 329 (#353) ############################################

>
William Haughton's Comedies 329
plot, which almost squeezes out of existence an earlier element of
confused folklore and history. Morgan, earl of London, and Lacy,
earl of Kent, are colourless historical characters. Robin Goodfellow
is introduced from English folklore. The comic scenes introducing
Grim the collier, Clack the miller and Joan, are good examples of
the comedy which was developed from the improvisations of
clowns like Kemp and Tarlton. But these familiar elements are
mixed with others which, perhaps, are Haughton's. The play
opens with a prologue from St Dunstan, who, 'on a sudden,' is
o'ercome with sleep,' and dreams that he sees Pluto and three
other judges of black hell’ sitting as 'justice-benchers'
To hear th' arraignment of Malbecco's ghost
-the Malbecco of the ninth and tenth cantos of the third book
of Spenser's Faerie Queene. Malbecco urges that his wife is
to blame for his suicide, and the judges decide that Belphegor shall
be sent among men to discover whether the many tales 'of men
made miserable by marriage' have any truth in them. Thus, the
real subject of the play is introduced, St Dunstan wakes up and
we proceed, with him as chorus, to watch the fortunes of the too
much married fiend. The conception of a single comic idea domi-
pating and unifying a succession of incidents is realised in this
play as it never is by Munday or even by the anonymous author
of Looke about you. In 1576, we hear of The Historie of the
Collier, which may have been the original upon which Haughton
worked. His play, in itself, is a good specimen of lesser Elizabethan
drama ; but it is also interesting as a link between the early
amorphous type of play and the later comedy of manners, of which
his second extant play, A Woman will have her Will, is a notable
example.
This play, in its general style, savours so fully of the seven-
teenth century that we are inclined to wonder whether any
revision of it took place before 1616, the date of the first ex-
tant edition. There is no mark of any such revision in the play
as we have it. A London merchant, whose rather unamiable
characteristics are excused by his supposed Portuguese extrac-
tion, has three daughters whom he wishes to marry to three
foreigners, a Frenchman, an Italian and a Dutchman. The comedy
describes how the three girls, with the help of their three English
lovers, succeed in outwitting the father and the three foreigners.
There is a brisk succession and variety of comic incident; but the
incident is not managed so cleverly or neatly as to justify us in
classing the play as a comedy of intrigue. Nevertheless, this is the
a
a


## p. 330 (#354) ############################################

330 Lesser Elizabethan Dramatists
stuff out of which the genius of a Jonson could produce his
comedies of intrigue and manners, and which holds us back from
regarding his work as so absolutely original as he thought it. The
three foreigners, each speaking a special variety of broken English,
seem, today, stupid and tedious; but the minute picture of the
lanes of the old city of London, in which, for a night, the charac-
ters play hide and seek, and the homely and lively reproduction
of citizen life, are full of movement and naturalness, and give
the play an attractiveness of its own. The characters have no
romantic charm; the daughters and their lovers lack refinement
of both manners and morals. Haughton has been claimed as a
university man, and his writing implies some culture; but his
purposes are somewhat blunted by his personages. The serving
man, Frisco, who is nearest of all the characters to the early clown
type of humour, is the fullest and heartiest personality in the piece.
The interest of the play, if we may date it in substance before
1600, lies in its being a comedy of mingled intrigue and manners,
without any archaic intermixture, written unaffectedly and easily,
alongside the romantic comedy of Shakespeare and, perhaps,
before the humorous comedy of Jonson.
In this respect, A Woman will have her Will resembles
another extant comedy, which it is surprising to find in
existence before 1600. Henry Porter's first work for Henslowe
is dated May 1598, and, in about eleven months, he took part
in five plays, producing three alone, and cooperating in the
others with Chettle and Jonson. Of these, there is extant only
The two angry women of Abington, of which there were two
editions in 1599. The most probable interpretation of Henslowe's
entries is that this play was the Love Prevented of 1598. But
Porter had probably served a short apprenticeship as a dramatist,
since we have record of a payment to him of £5 in December
1596. It would, indeed, be hard to believe that he wrote The two
angry women of Abington as his first piece of dramatic work. It
is a comedy of such full-blooded gusto and such strength and
decision of style that it lifts its author out of the ranks of lesser
dramatists. 'Abington' is the village of Abingdon near Oxford, and
the play is a strong and sturdy picture of rural life; it smacks of
the soil, and has in it something of the vigour and virility which
stamp Jonson's best work. The two angry mothers of the play are
not altogether pleasing characters, but they are alive and life-like;
and the husbands are delineated firmly and naturally, without any
fumbling or exaggeration. The daughter Mall, no doubt, is an


## p. 331 (#355) ############################################

Other Lesser Dramatists.
Drayton 331
>
'animal'; she is without the romantic charm of Juliet, but is an
honest English lass for all that, living and breathing as Rubens
might have painted her. The life in the writing of the play is
what makes it remarkable. It does not smell of the lamp. The
author has a native power of imparting substance and vitality to
his characters, and he would have gone far if he had continued to
write. The merit of Porter's play has caused the suggestion that it
is to be identified with The Comedy of Humours of May 1597, and
that he suggested to Jonson his theories of 'humours' in the com-
position of comedy; but there is clear evidence that the latter play
is Chapman's Humerous dayes Myrth. Nevertheless, Jonson's
stimulus from such work as Porter's need not be doubted. He
collaborated with Porter in Hot Anger soon Cold in 1598, and
produced his Every Man in His Humour in the same year-in
which play it is not so much the theory of 'humours' that is
remarkable as the sober forceful painting of English life and
character. Ben Jonson was not so isolated as he supposed. Just
,
as we can perceive a background to Shakespeare's genius in the
work of Munday and Chettle, so the comedies of the younger men
among our lesser dramatists—such men as Haughton and Porter
-prove that Jonson's art was in the air when he began to write;
and from Porter he need not have disdained to learn.
We reach now the lesser dramatists whose work was too insig-
nificant to survive. Five of Henslowe’s writers have one play each
credited to their sole authorship with a considerable amount of
work done in partnership. But, of this work, almost nothing is ex-
tant. Richard Hathwaye appears in Henslowe’s diary from 1597 to
1603. The first play by him noted in the diary is King Arthur,
the only play in which he has no collaborator. It can hardly have
been his first work. Perhaps he was growing out of fashion ;
he is mentioned by Meres as a veteran. Of the seventeen plays in
which he collaborated, only the first part of Sir John Oldcastle
has survived. This play contains, also, the only extant work of
Robert Wilson, who collaborated in sixteen plays, and has one
ascribed to his sole authorship. W. W. Greg suggests that he is
mentioned by Meres because his main activity was in 1598 and,
therefore, his name was specially before the public when Meres
wrote. Wentworth Smith is the third writer with one play to his
He collaborated in fourteen others, of which not one has
survived. But, apparently, he began dramatic work in 1601, and
may, very possibly, be the Wentworth Smith whose play The
Hector of Germaine was acted about 1613 and printed in 1615.
name.


## p. 332 (#356) ############################################

332
Lesser Elizabethan Dramatists
It is to be feared that Michael Drayton's dramatic work, also,
must be conjectured to have lacked the force and personal im-
press by which plays were kept alive. Let us consider what
Henslowe's records say of him. He, again, has but a single play to
his sole credit, and this has perished. He takes part in twenty-
three plays, of which but one, the first part of Sir John Oldcastle,
is extant. Drayton, alone among Henslowe's writers, regarded
the writing of plays as discreditable ; and this fact suggested to
Fleay the theory that his plays could be safely appropriated by
unprincipled printers, but that, as the printer could not use
Drayton's name, Shakespeare's name or initials appear on the
title-pages of plays really by Drayton. This theory assigns to him
Cromwell, The London Prodigall, The Merry Devill of Edmon-
ton, A Yorkshire Tragedy and Sir Thomas More. It is added
that a great unevenness of activity is noticeable in the record
of Drayton's work for Henslowe, and that, therefore, he could
very well have written for other companies. The obvious weak
point of this theory is that unprincipled printers stole none of
the plays which Drayton wrote for Henslowe's company. If, in
these plays, there was work of the rank of A Yorkshire Tragedy
or The Merry Devill of Edmonton, it is reasonable to suppose that
they would not have been let die. Drayton's genius, moreover, as
we know it apart from his unknown plays, was essentially un-
dramatic, and, in competition with writers like Dekker and
Chettle, we should expect it to fail to assert itself. In spite, there-
fore, of the deference due to Fleay, we must reluctantly include
Drayton among the dramatists whose work could not live'.
John Day is represented by Henslowe as beginning work in
1598, receiving payment once only as sole author, and collaborat-
ing in twenty-one plays. Of all this work, we have left only the
first part of The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green-for we have
supposed that all Day's work was cut out ruthlessly from Two
Lamentable Tragedies. The basty vehement copious writing
which formed a large part of the partnership plays of Henslowe's
writers swamped the delicate and slowly flowing fountain of Day's
art. The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green is a confused, hastily-
written play, plotted on Munday's model, and taking its story and
hue from the ballad-lore of the day, but not so pleasant and sweet
as Munday would have made it. It may, probably, be taken as a
specimen of Chettle's comedy, and gave no scope to Day's special
gifts. Day's best work, The Parliament of Bees, dates from 1640,
1 Compare Child, H. , in vol, iv, chap. x, p. 183.


## p. 333 (#357) ############################################

Samuel Rowley
333
2
and is vitally connected in style and excellence with that small
group of extant plays by Day which began in 1606 after king
James's accession. We shall, therefore, treat Day's main work
as Jacobean ; as an Elizabethan, he cannot be shown to have
achieved success.
Samuel Rowley wrote comparatively little for Henslowe. He
was a player in the Admiral's company, and begins to receive pay-
ments as a playwright in 1601. He apparently showed capacity,
for, in 1602, he received £7 for a play called Joshua, not extant,
as well as £4 for additions to Doctor Faustus, written in con-
junction with W. Birde. But we must not judge him by his
attempts to introduce into Marlowe's masterpiece some comic relief
which would help the play with the groundlings. Comic scenes of
this nature were insisted upon by popular audiences, and it was pro-
bably this childish weakness which forced Shakespeare's imagina-
tion to that high flight which succeeded in harmonising these
comic scenes with tragedy in Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth.
Rowley's capacity must be judged by When you see me, You know
me. Or the famous Chronicle Historie of king Henry VIII,
acted in May 1603. In all respects, the play is like the Munday
plays discussed above, with this important difference, that it is
more definitely a history' than are these plays. It leaves the
region of folklore and chap-book and ballad, and attempts to
dramatise actual history. This it does more clearly and effectively
than Sir John Oldcastle, where the main character is dealt
with as a popular favourite and not historically. Rowley's play is
of great interest as the forerunner of Henry VIII; but, in
itself, it has merits. There is force and movement in the verse,
and Wolsey's character, as an embodiment of pride and ambition, is
presented with decision. The soliloquy in which he states his inten-
tion ‘To dig for glory in the hearts of men,' is the germ of his great
speeches in the later play. But the scenes in which Will Sommers
appears carry us back to the days when the leading clown was
allowed to display his comic talents regardless of the progress of the
play; and the element of popular tale and story is given full scope
in the night rambles of Henry VIII, while the naïve indelicacy of
the jokes at the end of the play is not to be paralleled in Munday's
work. We cannot, therefore, claim that Rowley has produced a
‘history' in Shakespeare's style, although, in this play, he may
be
said to have worked in that direction. There is extant, also, The
Noble Souldier, printed in 1634 as 'written by S. R. ' It is an in-
teresting play, containing work by Day which he uses over again


## p. 334 (#358) ############################################

334
Lesser Elizabethan Dramatists
in his Parliament of Bees, and it probably had been worked
over by Dekker. Rowley, very possibly, wrote a large part of the
original play, and it adds to the impression of his talent produced
by When you see me, You know me.
The Elizabethan drama was essentially popular. The lesser
Elizabethan drama was popular in a double sense, as being that
large part of the total output which appealed to the tastes
of those who were not capable of rising to the imaginative
and intellectual standards of Shakespeare and Jonson. But,
if there was a lesser drama which was too popular to be
artistic in the high sense, there was, also, a lesser drama which
failed of the first rank because it was not popular enough; because
it was pedantic and learned, and tied to classical methods and
traditions. In France, this drama, which imitated Seneca, dominated
the stage, and, through the French poet Robert Garnier, it exer-
cised a fruitful influence upon a coterie of distinguished literary
people in England. In 1590, lady Pembroke translated Garnier's
Marc-Antoine into scholarly English blank verse, using lyrical
measures for the choruses and reaching, in this part of her work,
a high level of excellence. Daniel's Cleopatra, printed in 1594,
was a sequel to lady Pembroke's play, and his Philotas was a
second study in the same style. Both plays are meritorious and
may be read with pleasure. Thomas Kyd, also, at a date which
is uncertain, but under lady Pembroke's influence, translated
Garnier's Cornélie. The extant play is dated 1594. But in touch
with this circle of poets was a genius of very singular and rare
quality, Fulke Greville, born 1554, who produced two plays which
were probably written in the main before the end of the century-
Mustapha, printed 1609, and Alaham, which was not printed till
after lord Brooke's death'. While Greville imitates the Senecan
model, he largely discards what was characteristic of Seneca, and
evolves for himself a drama that is Greek in its intensity and
severity of outline, but peculiar to itself in its selection of dramatic
types and character from the world of politics and statesmanship.
His two plays, which are planned on the same lines, are attempts
to trace out the high waies of ambitious governours and to show in the
practice that the more audacity advantage and good success such Soveraign-
ties have, the more they hasten to theire own desolation and ruine2.
He tells us that his mind has been fixed more ‘upon the images of
Life than the images of Wit,' and that he writes for those only
that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world. But he has a
i Compare ante, vol. iv, chap. IX. Works (Grosart), vol. iv, pp. 222–3.


## p. 335 (#359) ############################################

6
6
6
Sir William Alexander
335
command of concentrated and often highly imaginative phrases,
such as: 'Despair hath bloody heels '; 'Confusion is the justice
of the devil'; 'Sickness mows down desire'; 'A king's just
favourite is truth'; 'Few mean ill in vain. In his choruses, his
verse, occasionally, reaches a gnomic weight and solemnity, which
rivals Milton's Samson Agonistes. His speculation, by its mere
intensity, is essentially poetical. The originality of his work be-
comes clear when we compare it with the dull though able con-
temporary Monarchick Tragedies of Sir William Alexander,
afterwards earl of Stirling. Greville is the seer or Hebrew
prophet of the Elizabethan dramatists, and, therefore, he is a
solitary figure. Although a practical politician of large ex-
perience, he was yet able to view politics sub specie aeternitatis and
to declare his convictions with extraordinary sincerity in his two
plays


## p. 336 (#360) ############################################

CHAPTER XIV
SOME POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE LATER
ELIZABETHAN AND EARLIER STEWART PERIOD.
THE present survey of English dramatic literature before the
civil war has now been carried to a midway point where it may
be permissible to pause in order to glance rapidly at some political
and social aspects of a period which, in the history of English
drama, may be said to have reached its height with the completion
of Shakespeare's creative career. The later years of Elizabeth's
reign, and the earlier part of her successor's, beyond which it is not
proposed, except in some occasional remarks, to extend the
range
of this chapter, constituted an age of singularly marked charac-
teristics in English political and social life. It was a period of high
aspirations, of much turbulence and unrest, of deeds mighty in
themselves and mightier in their results, and of numberless minor
changes in the conditions of things, which, as it were, break the
light in which the great achievements of the time display them-
selves to posterity. It was an age, too, of strong individualities,
of men and women moved by their passions and their interests to
think, speak and act without veiling their thoughts, words and
deeds; enjoying life to the full and not afraid of death; ardent,
revengeful, remorseless-it was, in a word, the height of the
English phase of the renascence. Some of these phenomena are
mirrored with more or less distinctness in the great stream of
dramatic production of which the present volume and its successor
seek to describe the course; of others, though but dimly or inter-
mittently reflected on the same surface, the presence is not to be
ignored. What little can be said of any of them in this place
may, at all events, serve to suggest closer and deeper research in
fields of enquiry inexhaustible alike in their variety and in their
special interest for students of the English drama.
Queen Elizabeth, we remember, had sat on the throne during
seventeen or eighteen eventful years before the first theatre was


## p. 337 (#361) ############################################

National Life and Literature
337
erected in her capital; the passing of the ordinance of the lords
and commons which put a stop to the performance of any stage-
play was, within a few weeks, followed by the actual outbreak of
the great civil war. Long before her decease, the person of the
English queen who had 'swum to the throne through a sea of
sorrow' had become, in very truth, the incarnation of the nation's
highest hopes; twoscore years had not gone by after Elizabeth's
death when the English parliament levied against the king an army
in defence of' him and itself. In the last decade of the sixteenth
century, England, whose foes, a generation earlier, had judged her
easy to conquer 'because she wanted armor,' had successfully
defied the Catholic reaction and the would-be world-monarchy of
Spain ; towards the middle of the seventeenth, the great war
which had swallowed up all other European wars came to a close
without England so much as claiming a voice in the settlement.
Side by side with the series of events and transactions which
prepared or marked these tremendous changes, the history of
English drama and of English dramatic literature-hitherto a
gradual growth, whether in the highways of popular life or in the
tranquil habitations of scholars and their pupils—-pursued its now
self-assertive course. Those would err who, in this or in any
other instance, should look for a perfect or precise correspondence
between a particular chapter of a nation's literary history and
contemporary national affairs directly connected with the condition
of its government and with its action as a state. But it is not the
less certain that, in a national life in which an intensification of
impetus and a concentration of purposes have declared themselves
as they had in Elizabethan England, it becomes impossible for
any sphere of literary activity-least of all one which, like the
drama, directly appeals to popular sympathies and expressed
approval-to remain in isolation from the rest.
Thus (to follow the rough division already indicated), during
the earlier half of Elizabeth's reign, while English literature could
not be said to differ largely, in its general character, from that of
the preceding generation, the drama, still moving slowly onward
in more or less tentative forms, was only gradually finding its way
into English literature at all. When, in 1581, Sir Philip Sidney,
president of his own small Areopagus, composed An Apologie for
Poetrie, in which he bestowed praise on a very restricted number
of English poets, he had very little to say in the way of commenda-
tion of recent labours in the field of the drama; and, though
among English tragedies he politely singled out Gorboduc for both
22
E, L, V.
CH, XIV.


## p. 338 (#362) ############################################

338 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
>
compliment and criticism, he was more at his ease in censuring
the 'naughtie Play-makers and Stage-Keepers' who had brought
English comic pieces into disrepute. But the creative literary
impulse attested by Sidney's immortal treatise was awakening
the literary sense of a much wider public than that to which
its appeal, at any point of time in his short life, could have
been consciously addressed ; and it had already given rise to a
dramatic productivity which he could not foresee, but which had
reached a considerable height at the time of his death. Thus, in
this even more notably than in other spheres of the national
literature, the process of growth was gradual; but, in the end,
the shell was rapidly burst, and the new life issued forth into the
vigour of freedom about the very time when the England of
Elizabeth became conscious of its advance to a knowledge of its
political purposes and of its means for accomplishing them.
In the history of English dramatic literature, the last decade
but one of the sixteenth century covers the literary beginnings of
nearly all the poets of high original power whose activity as play-
wrights began before Shakespeare's, and, possibly, some tentative
dramatic efforts in which Shakespeare himself had a hand. In
the last decade of the century, several of those whom, by an
inaccurate use of the term, it was long customary to describe as
'Shakespeare's predecessors,' had passed away; when the new
century opened, he was at the height of his creative energy, and
the number of plays by him that had been acted amounted to
more than half of the total afterwards included in the Shakes-
pearean canon. Within the same ten years, some of the comic
masterpieces of Jonson, and several other plays of relatively high
importance, had been produced. Thus, the epoch extending from
1589 to the years on which falls the shadow of Elizabeth's
approaching end is marked out with signal splendour in the
history of English dramatic literature, as, indeed, it is, though
not throughout in the same degree, in that of English literature
as a whole? Without, therefore, excluding from the scope of
.
6
The penultimate decade of the sixteenth century opened in the year after that
of the publication of Spenser's Shepheards Calender, and of Lyly's Euphues, and
was ushered in by the year in which Sidney wrote his Arcadia. The beginning of
the last decade of the century was marked by the dedication of the first three books
of The Faerie Queene to Elizabeth in 1590. Drayton began his career as an original
writer in 1591 ; Daniel his in the following year. Bacon's Essays, in their earliest
form, appeared in 1597. The earliest of Ralegh's prose publications dates from 1591,
and of his contributions in verse from 1593; Hooker's great prose work appeared in
1594. Donne and Hall in verse, and North and Hakluyt in prose, entered upon
authorship in the course of the same period.


## p. 339 (#363) ############################################

The Tudor Monarchy
339
these remarks the period of the first two Stewart reigns, during
which the drama, though still bringing 'fruit to birth,' was already,
in accordance with the law of mortality proclaimed by Dante",
showing signs of decline and decay, we shall be justified in giving
our chief attention to some of the characteristic aspects of political
and social life in what may properly be designated as the Eliza-
bethan age.
It is not to the personality of queen Elizabeth, or even to the
statesmanship of her chief advisers and to the acceptance almost
always given by her, before it was too late, to their counsels, that
should be ascribed, in the first instance, the great political results
achieved by the Tudor monarchy of whose rule her own was the
crown and the consummation. The primary cause of these results,
without which the achievement of them is inconceivable, was
the principle of that monarchy itself, which supplied unity and
strength, and made possible the direct control of national action
by individual intelligence. The Tudor monarchy in England, like
the other strong monarchies of Europe of which the latter part of
the fifteenth century had witnessed the consolidation, was a creation
of the renascence? ; but the conditions in which it sprang into life
and, after a short period of cautious circumspection, established its
system, acquired fresh force as it progressed. It was an aristocratic
monarchy, but based, not on the doubtful consent of great nobles,
their sovereign's peers in power and influence almost as much as
in name, but on the assured support of far-seeing statesmen,
learned and surefooted lawyers, and merchants whose ambition
spanned seas and lands--all of whom were chosen and maintained
in high place by the personal confidence of the monarch. The
policy of the crown was not dictated by the will of the people at
large, expressed by such representation as it possessed in parlia-
ment; yet, in the midst of all the changes through which troubles
at home and abroad obliged this policy to pass, it contrived, while
deliberately pursuing its own path, to remain in general harmony
with popular sentiment.
The dramatists of the age were monarchists to a man; and,
1
though, of course, their sentiments herein accorded with their
interests, it would be shortsighted to ascribe the tenacity with
which they adhered to the monarchical principle of government
merely to a servile attachment to the powers that were ; indeed,
i Paradiso, canto XXII.
. This point is well brought out by Erich Marcks, in his admirable popular essay,
Königin Elisabeth von England (1897), p. 12.
22-2


## p. 340 (#364) ############################################

340 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
>
6
with these they were not unfrequently in conflict! The stedfast-
ness with which these popular poets upheld the authority of the
crown as the pivot on which the whole state machine turned
is evident from the fact that their whole-hearted loyalty was
transferred, without halt or hesitation, from Elizabeth to James, as
it afterwards descended from him to his successor. Its root, no
doubt, was some sort of belief in the divinity' that 'doth hedge
a king'; but, as the personality of the speaker who, in Hamlet,
makes use of this famous phrase, may, perhaps, serve to indicate,
the divine authority to which appeal is made was derived less
from any claim of birth than from the fiat of Providence, com-
manding the assent of the people. By means, as it were, of a
dispensation from on high, accepted by the countrymen’ of
successive kings and dynasties, in the person of the sagacious
Henry IV and, still more, in that of his heroic son, the royal
authority of the house of Lancaster was established in disregard of
the principle of legitimate right, and, again, disestablished in the
person of Henry VI, the gentle scholar equally unfit to hold a
sceptre and to wield a sword. The sovereign ruling by such an
authority as this is he whom the people is bound to obey-not
the chief of some faction of turbulent barons using him either
as their captain or their puppet; for it is the fitness recognised
and acclaimed by the people which warrants the confidence with
which he assumes and maintains supreme control. Such seems
to be the cardinal principle of the English monarchy as it stood
under the Tudors, and the spirit to which the dramatists
remained true, even when they expressed it in the elaborate
forms proclaimed as orthodox under the first two Stewarts.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the interdependence of royal will and
popular sentiment in the Elizabethan age more conspicuous than
in two questions which it may not be altogether incongruous
to mention side by side—the queen's marriage and the religious
settlement of the country. The former issue directly included
that of the security of the throne; and, notwithstanding the
ruptures of dramatic and other Elizabethan poets, ' Diana's rose
6
For examples, see post, vol. vi, chap. VI.
Greene's Frier Bacon and Prier Bongay, ad fin. This, the most national, as it
must have been one of the most acceptable, of all the classical and semi-classical
similes applied to queen Elizabeth by the dramatists, recurs in a simpler, but more
attractive, form in The Blessednes of Brytaine, an overflowing outpour of patriotic
sentiment produced by the great outburst of loyalty in 1586—7, one of the Fugitive
Tracts written in Verse, etc.
, 1493—1600, privately printed by Huth, H. , in 1875:
“Our kingly rooted rose fresh flow'ring stands. '


## p. 341 (#365) ############################################

The Question of Queen Elizabeth's Marriage 341
might have been won by a French suitor with the goodwill
of many Englishmen, before the massacre of 1572 undid the
effects of the treaty with France which had seemed on the eve
of developing into a league of war against Spain. But, though
the rose might have been won, she could hardly have been worn
with the assent of the English people after the old hatred of France
had, though only for a time, flared up again! As a matter of
fact, it may be confidently asserted that, save in passing, no
thought either of a French or of any other foreign marriage-still
less of a match with a subject of her own—was ever seriously
entertained by Elizabeth. So long as her marriage was still a
matter of practical politics, she humoured the popular hope that
the question of the succession might find this easy solution ;
and, in the case of Leicester (who was cordially hated outside his
own party) she gratified her own fancy, long after she can have
entertained even a passing thought of actually bestowing on him
her hand? But she knew what her subjects would approve in
the end, and that the fact of her remaining unmarried must become
an integral element of her unique popularity. On the one
hand, marriage with a foreign prince could not but have implied
the definite adoption of a particular 'system' of foreign policy-
a decision which Burghley and she were desirous of avoiding while
it could be avoided ; and, in the second place, it would have meant
her subjection to the will of another—a consummation which had
gradually become inconceivable to her.
2
· The Alençon-Anjou intrigue which followed was, as is known, very unpopular,
and was denounced by representatives of patriotic protestant feeling so different as
Philip Sidney and the heroic fanatio John Stubbs. The best account of both the
important French marriage negotiations (for the idea of a match between Elizabeth
and Henry of Navarre was little more than a happy thought) is to be found in
Stählin, K. , Sir Francis Walsingham und seine Zeit, vol. 1 (1898), a book of much
general value.
Lyly's Endimion, even if the usual interpretation of the allegory be accepted, can,
at the most, be regarded as a plea, assured of a kindly reception, for the restriction of
Leicester to the queen's favour-not for anything beyond. Creizenach (vol. iv, part 1,
p. 59), repudiates the supposition that any particular person was allegorised in the
character of Endimion, or that there is an allusion in the same dramatist's Sapho
and Phao to Anjou's departure from England (1582). As to Endimion, however, see
a full discussion of the whole subject in Feuillerat, A. , John Lyly, contribution à l'his.
toire de la Renaissance en Angleterre (Cambridge, 1910), pp. 119 ff. , where, while
Cynthia is identified with queen Elizabeth, Tellus and Endimion are identified with
Mary queen of Scots and her son James. Concerning Lyly's plays, cf. ante, chap. VI.
Leicester, though he enjoyed the confidence of many puritans, was so constant a friend
and patron of the drama, that he might not unnaturally have thought 'the play the
thing'; but since, notwithstanding, his arrogance was tempered by the exercise of self-
control, he would certainly have been very careful in his instructions, and we cannot
know for certain what the queen would at any particular moment have liked to hear.
2


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342 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
6
'Of greater significance is the attitude of queen Elizabeth
towards the religious problem of the age, in so far as the
treatment of it contributed to shape the destinies of her kingdom.
For herself, she at no time showed herself moved by any strong
religious impulse, or obedient to the dictate of conclusions
reasoned out so as to have taken a firm root in her mind. But
the circumstances of her birth and early years drew her, perforce,
into association with the great religious movement which, as it
swept over a large part of Europe, absorbed so many currents of
thought and feeling, so many passions and so many interests, that
whoever was not against it must be for many of its axioms, and
that she, for instance, was left no choice as to a series of
opinions which, at all events, it behoved her to make her own.
When, after suffering persecution tanquam ovis (more or less),
on account both of her birth and of her faith, she succeeded to
her ill-starred sister's throne, she thanked the lord mayor for the
city of London's welcoming gift of a Bible as for 'the jewel that
she still loved best! To the tenets- elastic in one direction, un-
yielding in the other-of which the Scriptures (as distinct from a
larger body of traditional authorities) were regarded as the symbol
she adhered firmly throughout her reign; and, in so doing,
she rightly read the signs of the times and the convictions
which were more and more widely taking hold of her people? .
The social changes, in this instance, came to the aid of the
religious. In a population among which, already in the days
of Elizabeth's youth, a well-instructed middle class—made up,
mainly, of country gentry and town merchants, and with a not
inconsiderable infusion of smaller tradesmen and yeomen—was
fast becoming the dominant social element, the Scriptures in the
vernacular, together with a few popular commentaries and ex-
positions, were certain, if read at all, to be read widely; and any
attempt to interfere with their circulation must prove futile.
Again, the generation which was in its prime when queen Elizabeth
came to the throne consisted of the men whose childhood had
coincided with the times of the first rise of the English
reformation; while some who were to be numbered among that
1 The incident appears both in Thomas Heywood's England's Elizabeth and in
Part 1 of his If you know not me, etc. , act v, ad fin.
2 Harrison relates that in every office at the queen's court was placed a Bible,
chronicle or the like, so that the court looked more like a university school than a
palace; and he adds a pious wish that the houses of the nobility were furnished in
similar fashion. Description of England, ed. Furnivall, F. J. , p. 275.


## p. 343 (#367) ############################################

>
Queen Elizabeth's Church Policy 343
generation's leaders had spent part of their adolescence in the
continental homes of the new learning. Inevitably, too, those
regions of England which naturally lay most open to influences
from abroad were, together with the capital and in a special way)
the universities (Cambridge in particular), the home counties,
including Kent, of which, during many a generation, it might fairly
be said that they were wont 'to think today what all England
would think tomorrow. '
Queen Elizabeth no more shared the ardour of many con-
temporaries of her own youth than she understood the temper of
those puritans of the combative sort who grievously ruffled her
serenity in her mature years. Far from being timid by disposition,
she had been inured to caution by experience; and, during the
earlier half of her reign, while her foreign policy, under the
guidance of Burghley, continued to be, in the main, though not, of
course, absolutely, a defensive policy, she manifested no intention
of moulding the church of which she had become the supreme
governor in the forms either of an aggressive protestantism or
of a rigid Anglican exclusiveness. With the former current of
thought, she had no sympathy, either moral or intellectual ; and
to that opposed to it, she came to incline more largely in her later
years, doubtless because she, as honestly as the two Stewart kings
who followed her, believed that the exercise of authority furnished
a sufficient answer to searchings of heart and stirrings of mind into
which it was not given to her to enter. In those latter days, how-
ever, much success had brought with it many illusions; and, as
Ben Jonson told Drummond, the late queen 'never saw her self
after she became old in a true glass? . '
The dramatists of the Elizabethan age, taken as a whole,
exhibit the willingness for conformity and the instinctive ab-
horrence of nonconformity which satisfied the queen's con-
ception of a national religion. They were, of course, directly
interested, and, on various occasions, personally implicated, in the
perennial struggle of the stage against puritanism, of which a
full account will be given in a later chapter, and which, in its
final phase, if their traditional loyalty to church as well as state
be taken into account, might be regarded by them as a cam-
paign for altar as well as hearth? In the earlier part of the
6
1 Notes of Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond, xiv. The remark
is quoted in F. E. Schelling's The Queen's Progress and other Elizabethan Sketches, p. 249.
3 Cf. post, vol. VI, chap. xiv, and see as to the replies and retorts to Prynne's
Histrio-Mastix, Ward, vol. 11, p. 275 note.


## p. 344 (#368) ############################################

344 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
period under survey, their own protestantism, where it obtrudes
itself with unmistakable intention, still wears a militant and
aggressive aspect, and is of the demonstrative anti-papist and
anti-Jesuit variety"; this character it exhibits even in later times,
on occasions when there was a sudden revival of the old dread of
the machinations of Rome in association with the designs of Spain
Nothing is more notable in Shakespeare than his detachment, even
in a play which, like King Henry VIII, brought him into near
contact with it, from this kind of popular current of feeling;
though, on the other hand, nothing could be more futile than to
seek in his plays for signs of a positive leaning towards the church
of Rome, such as, in different ways and degrees, is shown by
Chapman, Massinger and Shirley.
But, to go back for a moment to the days when Elizabeth's
personal fate hung in the balance, together with the political
independence of the nation which she ruled and the form of faith
for which she stood. Both the queen and her counsellors long
shrank from hastening the decision, and, for herself, it was part of
her statecraft that she could never be induced to choose her side
till she was quite certain of the support of the nation. When,
in 1568—the year in which Alva set foot in the Low Countries in
order to reduce their population to submission-Mary queen of
Scots had taken refuge on English soil, the struggle for the English
throne really became inevitable; but it was not till nineteen years
later, when the head of the prisoner was laid on the block, and
Philip. of Spain had become the inheritor of her claims, that
Elizabeth finally took up the challenge. That interval of time
had witnessed the launching of the papal bull excommunicating
Elizabeth; the massacre which, whether or not she would acknow-
ledge it, had cut through her alliance with France; the invasion
of Ireland ; the participation by English volunteers in the rising
of the Netherlands, of which, at a later date, the queen formally
1 For a brief survey of plays displaying this spirit or colour, see Creizenach, vol. IV,
parti, pp. 115–6. They extend from The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, and
Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, to Samuel Rowley's When you see me, You know me and
Thomas Heywood's If you know not me, etc. , and include several of the works of Munday,
2 So, in the instance of the wave of public excitement marked by Middleton's A
Game at Chesse, and its anti-Jesuit polemics.
3 Cf. Creizenach, u. s. pp. 116—7, where it is justly observed that Jonson's tem.
porary conversion had no perceptible influence on him as a writer.
4 Whether one of these, George Gascoigne, who, in more ways than one, is prominent
in the early history of the English drama, was the author of the prose tract The Spoyle
of Antwerp, on which was founded the play, A Larum for London or The Siedge of
Antwerpe, printed in 1602, is more than doubtful. R. Simpson thought Shakespeare's
hand visible in the play.


## p. 345 (#369) ############################################

The New Generation of Elizabethans 345
assumed the protection; the Jesuit missions for the conversion
of England, and the executions of priests and seminarists; the
legalisation of the Association for the protection of the queen's
person; Parry's plot”; the expedition of Drake, this time with the
queen's permission, into the Spanish main ; and the maturing of
the Babyngton conspiracy, nursed by Walsingham with remorse-
less craft into the proportions which it bore in the final proceedings
against Mary. Her execution was the signal for the formal
declaration of a rupture which had long yawned wide. In 1588,
the Armada sailed, and was dissipated %.
In these years of suspense, preparation and contest, there
had grown into manhood the generation which included the
statesmen, soldiers and sailors, and various types of adventurers
declining to be classified, who came to the front in the later
years of the reign of queen Elizabeth. It was a new England on
which she looked-full of men eager for glory as well as for gain,
self-confident as well as self-seeking, ready to plunder the wealth
of the Spanish coast and to go shares with the Dutch in appro-
priating the profits of the trade of the far east. And the character
of the leaders seemed to have changed as the outlook of the country
had become more ambitious and impatient. Burghley, indeed, who
survived till 1598, was followed in his chief offices (sooner or later)
by his son, a lesser man than himself, but one who proved able,
before long, to command the confidence not only of the queen but
of her probable successor. Walsingham, a puritan at hearts, but
(like the greatest of the parliamentary puritans of a later genera-
tion, Pym) not afraid of plunging his foot into the maze of court
intrigues, passed away in 1590; and another partisan and affecter
of puritanism“, Leicester, the people's 'violent hate,' if he was the
queen’s chosen companion, died two years earlier, on the very
morrow of the great victory. The men to whom, together with the
indispensable Robert Cecil, the queen granted her confidence in
her declining years, or on whom, when that confidence was but
imperfectly given, she bestowed at least the waning sunshine of her
* Commemorated on the stage by John Dekker and Thomas Heywood.
2 It is certainly curious that, as Creizenach notes, the name of Drake should not
occur in any contemporary play, and that (with the exception of an allusion in Lyly's
Midas, and the treatment of the subject, such as it is, in Heywood's If you know not me)
the references to the Armada in the Elizabethan drama should be few and slight.
3 Walsingham appears to have been, if not a friend of the theatre, at least fair.
minded in his treatment of actors and plays. See post, vol. vi, chap. XIV; and cf. the
reference to Harington ap. Creizenach, vol. rv, part 1, p. 39.
* 'I never yet,' writes Sir Robert Naunton, . saw a stile or phrase more seemingly
religious' (than Leicester's). (Fragmenta Regalia. )
6


## p. 346 (#370) ############################################

346 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
smiles, were true children of their age. Instead of circumspectly
and silently choosing their path between dangers on the right and
on the left, they pressed forward in the race for honour and wealth
'outspoken and turbulent, overflowing with life and energy? '
Of these men, by far the most conspicuous was Essex, whom
his kinsman Leicester, disquieted by the fear of being supplanted
by some stranger, had introduced into the royal presence.
Although Essex could hardly be said to have been born to
greatness, and certainly in no sense achieved it, the peripeteia
of his fate was tragic, and was recognised as such by more than
one English dramatic poet? Undoubtedly, there was much in the
generous character and impetuous conduct of Essex to make him
not only a favourite of the populace, but an object of attraction
and interest to aspiring minds among his contemporaries, while
there were many for whose speculative purposes his rapidity of
action seemed to promise a multiplication of opportunities. He
was a friend to letters and their votaries, and a hereditary patron
of players: As a Maecenas, and, perhaps, in real intellectual
ability and insight, Essex was surpassed by his friend and fellow-
plotter Southampton, a man, like him, self-willed and impatient of
restraint both in his outbursts of high temper and in his serious
passions. Southampton was fortunate or, perhaps, astute enough
to escape the doom of Essex, and when, with the advent of the
new reign, 'peace proclaimed olives of endless age,' he passed
from prison into new prosperity and influence. His liberal
patronage of men of letters, of books and of plays, blossomed out
afresh ; but he was of the new age, full of eager ambition and
intent upon increasing the abundance of his wealth. Thus, he
* See bishop Creighton's monograph, Queen Elizabeth, p. 241.
Shakespeare unmistakably referred to Essex's Irish expedition as in progress,
in the chorus before act v of Henry V. He cannot, of course, be brought into any
direct connection with the significant performance, on the eve of the outburst of
Essex’s rebellion, of a play which (as J. W. Hales established beyond reasonable doubt)
was no other than Shakespeare's Richard II; but the dying speech of Essex was certainly
worked up in Buckingham's speech on the way to execution in King Henry VIII (cf.
Ward, vol. 11, pp. 104, 125, 203 ; also p. 133). Daniel denied before the privy council that
the story or the chief character of his Philotas referred to Essex, and 'apologised'in
the printed edition (Schelling, vol. 11, p. 10). The Unhappy Favourite, by John Banks
(1682, again a ticklish 'date), treats the story of Essex, with which Heinrich Laube
familiarised the modern German stage.
3 The first earl of Essex died in 1576, when his eldest son was nine years of age;
but, in 1578, the earl of Essex's company seem to have played at Whitefriars, though
they did not perform at Christmas in that year at court. See Fleay, History oj' the
Stage, pp. 40 and 34. This is the more curious, as the first earl's affairs were in
disorder at the time of his death.
1


## p. 347 (#371) ############################################

Leading Spirits of the New Age 347
became one of the chief directors—one might almost use the word
in its modern technical sense-of early colonial activity; and there
can be little doubt that the story of the play with which Shakespeare
bade farewell to the stage was suggested by the narrative of an
expedition organised by the earls of Southampton and Pembroke? .
William Herbert earl of Pembroke, and his brother and successor
Philip (Montgomery), nephews of Sir Philip Sidney, and the
incomparable pair of brethren’ to whom the first folio was
dedicated, were alike warmly interested in colonial undertakings;
and, in their case also, the love of enterprise and an impatience
of restraint which gave rise to many a scandal was united
to a generous patronage of scholarship, literature or art, though
it is in the elder of the pair only that an actual love of letters
seems traceable. Among other young nobles exemplifying the
ambitious unrest characteristic of the last period of Elizabeth's
reign and the inrush of the tide of the Elizabethan drama, may
be mentioned here Charles Blount lord Mountjoy (earl of
Devonshire), rival of Essex in the favours of the aging queen,
and, with more signal success, in the subjection of rebellious
Ireland. Blount's life, like the lives of many of these men,
had its episode of tempestuous passion. He, too, was in close
touch with several men of letters of his days. Finally, there had
stood forth among the most typical representatives of the spirit of
adventure and ambition which pervaded the last years of the
Elizabethan age, a man of action both intense and diverse, who,
at the same time, was himself a man of letters and an intimate of
the literary leaders of his times? . Long, however, before the many
variations of Ralegh's career ended in his being sacrificed to the
resentment of Spain, the Jacobean age had set in. The policy of the
crown had now become that of a Cabbala, to which the nation and
the parliament which sought to represent it were refused a key; and
those who were admitted to the intimacy of the sovereign, wrapped
up as he was in his shortsighted omniscience, either did not care,
or, as in the case of Buckingham, the fruits of whose policy were as
1 The expedition of the adventurers and company of Virginia, which was wrecked
on the Bermudas in 1609. Fletcher's Sea Voyage (which Dryden unjustly described
as a copy of Shakespeare's Tempest) is supposed by Meissner, Untersuchungen über
Shakespeare's Sturm (1872), to have made use of the same source.
2 Both brothers were patrons of Massinger.
3 As to Ford's elegy on Mountjoy's death, see post, vol. vi, chap. VIII, where reference
is also made to the connection between the story of Stella and the plot of The Broken
Heart.
* As to Ralegh's intimacy with Ben Jonson and Beaumont, and his reported inter-
course with Marlowe, of. ante, vol. iv, chap. III, p. 55.


## p. 348 (#372) ############################################

348 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
dust and ashes in patriotic mouths, did not know how to guide
him in the ways in which England still aspired to be led. It would
serve no purpose to carry the present line of comment further.
Its object has been to indicate how, at the height of the Elizabethan
age and that immediately ensuing, the main course of the national
history imparted to the national life a new fulness of ideas and
purposes certain to find reflection in the English drama, first and
foremost among the direct manifestations of the national genius.
6
Queen Elizabeth's court, designated by William Harrison as
‘one of the most renowm'd in Europe,' and, in a more full and
pregnant sense in which the description could have applied to the
English court at any other period of the national history, as 'the
very centre of the land, 'drawing all things to it,' was anything
but a stationary institution; and, in this respect, king James did
his best to follow his predecessor's example. As the same authority
puts it, every gentleman's house in England was the sovereign’s
for her progresses; and her unflagging love of display and
adulation combined with her inbred frugality to impose upon
her subjects-greater and lesser nobles, and corporations both
learned and unlearned-a constant endeavour to outdo each other
in costly exhibitions of their loyalty. In her own palaces-many
of them ‘worthy the owner, and the owner it',' others built with
a view to appearance rather than endurance, and most of them
surrounded by those vast parks which were among the most
distinctive inheritances of English royalty-she maintained a
becoming splendour and dignity. And, with this, her court united
an openness to intellectual interests such as only her unfailing
regard for learning and letters could have long maintained in
an atmosphere swarming with germs of greedy ambition and
frivolous self-indulgence. No similar effort was made by king
James, whose literary tastes, like most of his thoughts and impulses,
were self-ended ; and it was only in the reign of Charles, who sin-
cerely loved art, and of his refined though fanciful French consort,
that the English court might, in more propitious circumstances, have
recovered something of its former distinction. In the great days
of Elizabeth, the outward and visible fact of its central position in
English life corresponded to what may be called an ethical, as well
as a political, conception which still held possession of the age, and
might almost be described as the last afterglow of chivalry. The
1 See the felicitous reference to Windsor castle in The Merry Wives, actv,
so. 5.


## p. 349 (#373) ############################################

The Elizabethan
Courtier
349
2
ideal which the famous Cortegiano of Baldassare Castiglionel had
spread far and wide through the higher spheres of European
civilisation—the ideal of a high-minded Christian gentleman-was
directly or indirectly commended in many 'an Elizabethan or
Jacobean treatise, often at the expense of less elevated 'plans of life. '
On the same principle, a popular Elizabethan dialogue belonging
to this group admonishes its readers that arms and learning are
alone fit professions for a gentleman, and that, for such a one, the
proper course of life, after passing through school and university, is
to qualify himself for the service of his country by the study of the
common law, or, if that service is to take an official and, more
especially, a diplomatic form, by the study of the civilians, or
again, if it is to be cast in the form of military service at home or
abroad, by application to the mathematical sciences. Such was
the training thought fittest for those desirous of giving of their
best for the noblest of purposes and of leading that 'higher life
which ‘Astrophill' and the few who were capable of following in
his footsteps were (nor altogether unjustly) credited with leading.
Numberless heroes of tragedy and comedy dazzled the imagination
of their public by the semblance of similar perfection; and, though
never completely presented, the ideal, in some of the very noblest
creations of the Elizabethan drama, might seem to have almost
reached realisation :
The courtiers, scholars, soldiers, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers.
In this sketch of the complete training of an English gentleman,
as in the early life of the actual Sidney and the Hamlet of the
tragedy, the element of foreign travel must not be overlooked.
There was not much travelling at home (partly in consequence of
1 Cf. ante, vol. iv, p. 7 et al.
On Cityle and uncivyle life (1579), afterwards (1583) reprinted under the title
The English Courtier and the Countrey-gentleman.
3 Much might be added in illustration of these lines—inter alia-on the subject of
duelling, long an integral part of the courtier's code, and, in its several aspects, the
theme of celebrated treatises. The duel and the problems connected with it play a
considerable part in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; see, for the most striking
example, Middleton and William Rowley's A Faire Quarrell in vol. vi, chap. In, post.
As to the decline of the practice, see a note in Ward, vol. II, pp. 226–7. In general,
it is noticeable how this court ideal sank under James I-never to recover itself.
See, for instance, Barnabe Rich, The Honestie of this Age (p. 23, in Percy Soc. Publ. ,
vol. x): •It hath bene holden for a maxime that a proud court doth make a poore
countrey, and that there is not so hatefull an enemie to the common wealth as those
that are surnamed the Moathes of the court. '


## p. 350 (#374) ############################################

350 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
the state of the roads, which forced even the queen to make most
of her progresses on horseback). Even more than in the earlier
days of the English renascence, Italy, with all its great memories
and treasures, and with all its charms and seductions, was the
favourite resort of English travellers, and such it remained during
the long reach of years which bridge the interval between the
times of Ascham and those of Milton? The frequency with which
the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists lay the scenes of their
plays in Italy, no doubt, was originally due to the use made by
them of Italian fiction; but we often find a play localised in Italy
for no better reason than deference to custom, or the possibility of
greater freedom of movement
The perfect courtier (we are apprised in the same dialogue),
who has put such a training as the above to the proof, should quit
the court which has been the scene of his self-devotion after his
fortieth year, having by that time reached the decline of his age.
Instead of making himself a laughing-stock by lingering in livelier
scenes, and among more aspiring companions, he should now
withdraw among everyday experiences and responsibilities, and
become a country gentleman. The range of his duties has now
been narrowed to that of looking after his property, doing his
duty as justice of the peace and quorum—it is to be hoped after
the originally equitable fashion of Mr Justice Clement: rather than
in the 'countenancing' ways of Mr Justice Shallow-attending
to musters and surveys of arms, perhaps occasionally riding up to
Westminster as a parliament man. His years do not permit of
his taking much share in the sports of younger country gentlemen
-among which hawking holds the first place, hare-hunting or, in
some places, stag-hunting coming next; but he can lend his
countenance to the various country feasts which, from Shrove
Tuesday to Martinmas or Christmas even in protestant England
still dot the working year.
Although the contrast between court and country which has
served us as a text is rhetorically overstated, yet there can be no
doubt that the increasing sense of the more intense, and more
diversified, ways of life and thought now characteristic of the court
1 Harrison repeats Ascham's lament over the dangers of the seductions of Italy.
Coryate, to whose travels there are many allusions in later Elizabethan drama-
tists (e. g.