No More Learning

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.


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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


## p. 342 (#366) ############################################

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. Fletcher's Queen of Corinth, act iv, sc. I, and Shirley, The Ball, act u,
80. 1), is an admirable example of a traveller conscientiously intent upon seeing and
describing everything.
? So, the scene of the first version of Every Man in his Humour is laid at Florence.
3 See Every Man in his Humour.


## p. 351 (#375) ############################################

Relations of Classes
351
and of the capital in or near which was its ordinary residence,
as well as of the classes of society finding in that court and
capital the natural centres of their wider interests and more
ambitious projects, had contributed largely to the gradual change
in the social conditions of Elizabethan England. As yet it had
by no means lost its insular character; it was still completely
isolated from the rest of Europe so far as its language was con-
cerned, together with its literature, of which the continent knew
nothing-unless it were through the violently coloured glass of
the performances of English comedians. At home, the people was
gradually losing the character of a mainly agricultural community,
of which the several classes, though not differing very much in
their standard of tastes, amusements and, to some extent, even
of daily toil, were broadly marked off from one another by
traditional usage, and in which society still largely rested on a
patriarchal basis. Necessarily, it was an informal line, and one
to be effaced with very great rapidity by the revolving years
which divided what remained of the old nobility from the new
that had sprung up by their side or taken their place. The de-
marcation between nobility and gentry, which, in England (where
the contention between the armed nobility and the commons had
come to an end with the conflict between the two races), had long
since ceased to be definite, now retained little social significance.
More striking was what has been justly recognised as one of the
distinctive phenomena of this age—the growth of closer relations
between the nobility and gentry, on the one hand, and the wealthier
class of burgesses, the merchants, on the other. As a matter of
course, this tendency to the removal of traditional distinctions was
deplored by contemporary observers, anxious to escape the stigma
of a tacit assent to the inevitable processes of social evolution.
In this case, the change was hastened partly by intermarriage,
partly by the custom according to which younger sons of noble
or gentle families frequently took to trade, when they did not
prefer to enter the service of their elder brothers'. It was further
advanced by the fact that it was becoming not unusual for
i That mercantile venture of one sort or another thus often meant something very
like an opportunity of social emancipation for younger sons seems clear from a
comparison of such statements as that in The English Courtier, p. 66, according
to which even gentlemen of good descent were found toiling as farm labourers
(cf. Thomas Heywood's English Traveller), and the assertion of the author of The
Serving-man's Comfort (1598) (query Gervase Markham ? ), that he knew at this
day, Gentlemen younger brothers that weares the elder brothers Blew coate and Badge,
attending him with as reverend regard and dutifull obedience, as if he were their
Prince or Soveraign. '


## p. 352 (#376) ############################################

352. Political and Social Aspects of the Age
6
gentlemen landowners to seek to make industrial and commercial
profits out of their estates (instead of valuing them, as in the old
warlike days, for the number of retainers furnished forth by them),
‘turning farmers and graziers for money? ,' and, like other farmers
and graziers, making the soil do something besides sustain them-
selves and their families. Class interests and habits thus met half-
way, so that the upper and the upper middle class, as we might call
them in our ugly terminology, tended to amalgamate, and a practical
stratification of society was introduced, destined to a long-enduring
existence in English life. And there was also set up that form
of social pride which an acrimonious moralist like Stubbes could
denounce as a capital instance of the vice which he regarded as
the 'verie efficient cause of all evills. ' Everyone, he says, vaunts
''
himself, 'crying with open mouth, I am a Gentleman, I am worshipful,
I am Honourable, I am noble, and I can not tell what: my father
was this, my father was that; I am come of this house, and I am
come of that? ' It need hardly be said that a powerful impulse
was added to this widespread desire to claim the distinction of
gentility by the practice introduced under James I of the sale of
peerages and baronetcies—the latter an honour specially invented
for the purpose. The general movement of the well-to-do classes
of society towards equalisation on the basis of exclusiveness
manifested itself, among other ways, in the wearing by many
persons not belonging to the nobility of the sumptuous apparel
which had hitherto been held appropriate to that class only. In
the Elizabethan age, though merchants still dressed with fit gravity,
their young wives were said to show more extravagance in the
adornment of their persons than did ladies of the court. So
far, however, as landowners in a large part of the country were
>
1 Harrison, p. 243.
a see the instructive section on Elizabethan commercialism by Prothero, R. E. , in
Traill, H. D. , Social England, vol. III, pp. 352 ff. The break-up of the old agricultural
system is there explained, and the effects of the process of enclosure, of legal chicane
worked in the spirit of Sir Giles Overreach and of the growth of the wool trade up to
the middle of Elizabeth's reign, when arable farming once more became profitable, are
succinctly traced.
3 The Anatomie of Abuses (Part 1) (New Shakspere Society's Publ. , 1876), p. 29.
• Cf. Sheavyn, Phoebe, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, p. 2. The
tendency noted in the text continued even when political and religious reasons were
beginning once more to deepen class distinctions. Cf. & passage in Shirley's Gamester
(1634), act 1, sc. 1:
• We. . . cits, as you call us,
Though we hate gentlemen ourselves, yet are
Ambitious to make all our children gentlemen. '
6 Harrison, pp. 172--3.
6


## p. 353 (#377) ############################################

2
1
1
Rise of Prices
353
concerned, the infusion of the new element must have overthrown
many cherished traditions of life and manners, and, while bringing
the country into closer contact with court and town, have con-
tributed to substitute, for the easy-going and quiet conditions of
the past, a régime in which 'lawyers, monopolists and usurers'
became founders of some of the county families of the future!
The general increase of commercial and industrial activity had
led to a rise of prices, which, as a matter of course, benefited the
money-making part of the community, though not the whole of it
in the same degree. Primarily, this rise was to the advantage of
the great merchants of London and of the other chief ports of the
country, and persons engaged in large farming operations, such as
landlords of the old style had shrunk from undertaking. Smaller
tradesmen, and the middle classes in general, to some extent
profited by the change-chiefly by obtaining more comfortable con-
ditions of life. Not so the labourers, whose wages long continued
stationary, while the cost of necessaries advanced. This rise of
prices, although partly due to the influx of silver from 'old Philip's
treasury? ,' may, no doubt, be dated from the time when protective
2.
restrictions were applied to the importation of foreign goods, and
was advanced by the buying-up processes of the 'bodgers' and
other tricks and frauds of the corn market*. The price of corn
rose wildly, and, no doubt, it was more than once thought that
“there will soon be no wheat- or rye-bread for the poor? A serving-
man is cited, about 1598, as declaring that, in his lifetime, ordinary
articles of wear have trebled in price,' and yet my wages not more
then my great grandfathers, [he] supplying the same place and
office I doe. '
Usury-a remedial process in times of dearth which rapidly
accommodates itself to the needs of any and every class-had
become a crying evil of the age which Greene and Lodge ser-
6
了​。
Es
6
be
1 See the section The Landlord' in Hall, Hubert, Society in the Elizabethan Age
(3rd ed. 1901).
2 Doctor Faustus, 8C. I.
3 Harrison, who recalled with something like regret the times when strange
bottoms were suffered to come in' (p. 131), was an imperialist as well as a free-trader,
and could hardly believe that com exported from England served to relieve the
enemies as well as the friends of church and state (ibid. p. 297). As to exportation,
that of sheep was strictly prohibited, while, as a matter of course, that of wool was
open,
See Symes, J. E. , ap. Traill, 4. 8. vol. III, where a summary is given of the
Elizabethan regulation of trade, industry and labour.
4 Harrison, pp. 297–301.
5 Ibid. p. 163.
6 The Serving-man's Comfort.
E. L. V. CH. XIV.
23


## p. 354 (#378) ############################################

354 Political and Social Aspects of the Age
monised in A Looking Glasse for London and England', and
established itself as one of the ordinary themes of the satire of
English comedy? Of old, loans had usually been made without
interest being demanded, and any demand of this sort had been
illegal; but, after the principle of the illegality of interest had
been abrogated by parliament in 1545, Elizabeth's government had
proved unable to revive it. About the middle of her reign, ten per
.
cent. was the legal rate; but twelve per cent. was quite common.
Under James I, the ordinary rate sank to eight per cent. 3
Though the general condition of the labouring classes does not
appear to have changed very much for the worse during the reign
of Elizabeth, it was, on the other hand, not materially raised from
the low point to which it had sunk by the sixth decade of the
century. In some parts of the country, the poor were so much at
the mercy of the rich that small houses seem to have been almost
swept off the face of the ground; and a general decay of towns
set in, of which, however, the statistics, as is frequently the case
in the matter of depopulation, hardly admit of being either accepted
or rejected". Yet, in defiance of such phenomena, mercantile
enterprise swept forward on its course, made possible, in the first
instance, by the wise initial policy of the queen's government in
establishing coinage on a sound basis, and continuously expanded,
thanks to the farsighted intelligence of those who watched over both
the emancipation and the development of English trade. Crown and
city cooperated, with a notable concurrence of insight, in this policy,
which, during a considerable part of the queen's reign, was under
the guidance of Thomas Gresham, as great a minister (though
without a portfolio) as has at any time taken charge of the com-
mercial interests of a modern states Largely under the influence,
i See, especially, the scene in which the usurer's poor client Alcon is on the point of
losing both cow' and 'gown’unless he resorts to corruption, and the tirade of Oseas:
When hateful usury,
Is counted husbandry, etc.
2 Among the usurers of Elizabethan comedy, there were several who, like Sordido
in Every Man out of His Humour, 'never pray'd but for a lean dearth, and ever wept
in a fat harvest. '
* Cf. Symes, u. s. , and see Harrison, p. 272.
They are given in Harrison, pp. 257—8.
5 Hubert Hall, who has chosen “the great master of exchange, the useful agent of
the Crown, the financial advisor of ministers, the oracle of the city, the merchant
prince, patron and benefactor,' as the type of «The Merchant' in Society of the
Elizabethan Age, pp. 58 ff. , has, while maintaining the proportion necessary in
the treatment of such a theme, shown how unscrupulously Sir Thomas Gresham
also took charge of his own interests. Heywood, in Part I of lj you know not me, etc. ,
appends to the imposing figure of the great nerchant a good deal of what may
probably be set down as idle fiction about his family troubles.
*
<


## p. 355 (#379) ############################################

2
fc
a
CES
Advance of Trade and Industry 355
or through the personal agency, of this ‘merchant royall*,' English
trade had been freed from subjection to that of the Hanseatic
league, and to that of the great Flemish towns; colonial enterprise
on a comprehensive scale was encouraged, and great merchant com-
panies were established, which came, it was said, to absorb the whole
English trade except that with France. At the same time, the
home trade and the home industries on which that trade depended
were actively advanced-especially those which, like the crafts of
the clothier, the tanner and the worsted-maker, might be trusted to
bring money into the country. Companies of craftsmen under the
authority of the crown took the place of the old municipal guilds;
attempts at a better technical education (not for the first time)
were set afoot; and a select immigration of skilled foreign work-
men in special branches of production was encouraged. English
trade abroad, so far as possible, was protected, and a vigorous
banking system—the sovereign instrument for the facilitation of
commercial and industrial activity at home and abroad-was
called into life. Thus, while English merchants became familiar
visitors in distant lands, the goods, domestic or imported, with
which the English market abounded were countless in their mere
names—'all men's ware?
The point which we have reached in this fragmentary survey
seems to allow of a brief digression concerning one of the causes
of that engrossing love of wealth in which many observers recog-
nised one of the most notable signs of the times. Among these
observers were the comic dramatists, and those of them-Ben
Jonson above all-who wrote with a didactic purpose recognised
in this master passion one of the most dangerous, as from an
ethical point of view it was one of the most degrading, of the
tendencies of the age. Yet, even the love of wealth for its own
sake has aspects less ignoble than those which belong to the
pursuit of it for the sake of a luxurious way of living unknown
to earlier generations or less affluent neighbours. In his whole
tis
wala
các
tur
1 As a technical term, this designation seems to have superseded that of merchant
venturer. See the passage from Tell-Trothes New Yeares Gift, ed. Furnivall, F. J. , Publ.
of New Shaksp. Soc. , ser. VI, No. 4, cited by Vatke, T. , Culturbilder aus Alt-England,
p. 201. Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, is more than once called a 'royal merchant. '
2 Cf. Symes, u. s. p. 370.
8 See the interesting series of dialogues by William Stafford, A Briefe Conceipt of
English Policy (1683), p.