The at the Tudor Court, and in 1578 accompanied Elizabeth on her royal progress. These foreign influences, for all their strength and importance, did not inhibit the native element in English drama, which is Element. seen strongly at work in the gay, as well as in the grave and Origins of moving, scenes of Richard Edwards's admirable tragi-comedy, Damon and Pithias (1564). Edwards, like William Hunnis (author of Narcissus [1572]), was Master of the Chapel Royal, and the numerous plays accredited to this pair, and other holders of the position, once more illustrate the immensely important part played by the Court in the evolution of English drama.1 More romantic in its theme than the foregoing dramas, and more popular in its appeal, is Promos and Cassandra (printed 1578), which possesses racy comic interludes, and has been well described 2 as the most typical example of an original romantic play before the period of Shakespeare's immediate predecessors'. 6 We must now glance back to the origins of English tragedy. English In its early stages this fuses so constantly with comedy, and Tragedy. even with low comedy, that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the two kinds. The primary motive of the Miracle play was, however, one of the most solemn tragedy, and the tragic motive predominates throughout the history of the sacred cycles. Despite their manifold crudities, these plays were suffused with that passionate romanticism which can only flourish where some kind of great faith prevails. The favourite themes of the Morality and Interlude were neither romantic nor tragic; so that we may regard the Miracle play as having kept alive the tragic feeling throughout the period when it was being threatened by these kinds. But a further influence of a secular kind helped to mould the beginnings of English tragedy. Hero-worship, a prevailing emotion in young communities, had early established a hold upon English literature. It is the moving force in all Anglo-Saxon poetry, inspiring alike the pagan and semi-mythical Beowulf, the sacred poems of Cynewulf, and that fine historical lay, The Battle of Maldon. In a later age it reappears in the long verse romances which sing the doughty deeds of Guy of Warwick and Huon of Bordeaux. It is the original and inspiring force of the Arthurian legend and the vast literature to which this gave rise. It is one of the main motives of the English ballad, as in Chevy Chase and A Little Lay of Robin Hood. Its beginnings in drama may be seen in the Robin Hood plays and in the choice of St. George as the hero of the Mummers' Play. The early steps by which this heroic drama developed are obscure, and the obscurity is increased by the fact that none of the very earliest, and very few of the intermediate, plays 1 For Edwards and the Court Drama generally see C. W. Wallace, The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare. 2 F. S. Boas, Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. v, p. 120. 3 See Tucker Brooke, The Tudor Drama, Chap. VII. have survived. But two things are certain-first, that they were written for popular audiences, and second, that they were loose and rambling in construction. They turned on the fortunes and doughty deeds of one man, and subordinated to these all other interests of plot or character. Stephen Gosson, the puritanical ex-playwright, writing in 1579, indicates that they had their origin in such romantic tales or poems as The Palace of Pleasure, and Amadis of France. They were commonly knightly and chivalrous in their setting, as may be seen from two surviving specimens, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes and Common Conditions, both of which deal with the magical adventures of certain doughty champions in strange lands. There is little to say as to the details of this variety of drama, even were there space to say it here; but it should be noted that it represents a native element holding the public stage, and that it is important since from its combination with the classical element evolves the greatest kind of English tragedy. This classical influence in English tragedy is in large measure The Influ the influence of Seneca making its way into England through ence of the playwrights of the Court, University, School, and Inns of Seneca. Court. Seneca, playwright, philosopher, millionaire, and tutor of Nero, represents the decadence of classical drama. Instead of terror, pity, and beauty, which had been the main marks of Greek tragedy, he gives his readers-for his plays were not written for the stage-horror and epigram. His dramas abound in gruesome acts or descriptions of violence. His dialogue is artificial, antithetical, and weighted with sententious maxims. Yet, both in dialogue and structure, he displays a certain strength and a certain symmetry which were to prove of value to the Renaissance drama which came under his influence. To Seneca, moreover, must be attributed the division of drama into five acts, and the chorus which makes its appearance in early English tragedy. To him, too, we owe that convenient figure of tragedy, the ghost, and probably also the nurse and the conventional tyrant.1 As early as the beginning of the fourteenth century translations of Seneca had been published in Italy, and dramas had been written in the vernacular on the Senecan model. His influence on French drama, though later, was equally great, and took shape in the tragedies of Garnier and Jodelle. In England the classical influence was already evident in the themes, and, to some slight extent, in the handling of Richard Edwards's Damon and Pithias, John Pickeryng's Horestes (printed 1567), R.B.'s Appius and Virginia (1563 ?), and Thomas Preston's Cambyses (written before 1569). But most of these are overweighted by elements of the older Morality; for all their natural vigour they are crude in development and handling, and their comic and tragic elements are unskilfully blended. There is little in them of the true classical model. This was becoming familiar See A. D. Godley, 'Senecan Tragedy', in English Literature and the Classics (Clarendon Press). Gorboduc. Early to English readers and writers through English translations of Seneca's tragedies. Six of these appeared between 1559 and 1566, and in 1581 the whole ten were collected and published in a single volume. It was mainly through these versions, and from the Italian adaptations of Seneca by Ludovico Dolce that the Elizabethan playwright learnt and practised the methods of his Roman forerunner. Such methods are strongly evident in the first regular English tragedy, Gorboduc. This was written by the lawyer, Thomas Norton, and the famous courtier and poet, Thomas Sackville, and was performed before Queen Elizabeth at the Inner Temple in 1562. It portrays the tragedy of a legendary British king who divides his country between his sons, Ferrex and Porrex, and consequently undergoes a fate similar to that of Lear. Up till the end of the fourth act, the play remains a lurid tragedy, in which the essential characteristics of Senecan drama are interwoven with the native theme. The fifth act, which is a homily addressed to Elizabeth on the evils of an unsettled succession, reverts to the methods of the political Morality. Gorboduc is a most important production, not only for the reasons just mentioned, but because it was the first play to discard the old rhyming measures, on which English drama had hitherto depended, for blank verse, which had recently been introduced into England by Surrey in his translation of the Aeneid. It is hardly possible to overrate the importance to our literature of this attempt to find an English equivalent for the Senecan senarius. Other tragedies on the Senecan model followed, though not at once nor in any great number. Jocasta (1566) by Gascoigne Tragedies. and Kinwelmershe, takes its plot from the Phoenissae of Euripides, transmitted through the Italian of Dolce. Tancred and Gismunda (1568) by Robert Wilmot and others, develops a tale of Boccaccio's in fairly regular Senecan form, and with lavish Senecan transcriptions. The Misfortunes of Arthur, by Thomas Hughes and six others, reverts for its theme to the legends of ancient Britain, and to Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. Gorboduc and the three plays just mentioned are academic in their authorship and appeal. The Senecan elements of horror and rhetoric and revenge in the more popular Selimus (printed 1594) and Locrine (1586), show that, for good and for bad, the classical influence has spread to the public stage, and has helped to prepare the way for the mightiest period of English drama. Before we pass to this, and the dramatists who ushered it in, we may glance for a moment at a curious development of the Senecan drama. This consisted of the plays written by Sir Philip Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and her coterie, in translation or imitation of the French tragedies, composed on the Senecan model, of Robert Garnier (15341590). She herself translated Antonie. Thomas Kyd followed with a version of Cornélie, and Samuel Daniel produced an original play, The Tragedy of Cleopatra, written after the model set by Garnier. In this class, too, may be reckoned Fulke Greville's Alaham and Mustapha, which are strictly classical in structure, though not in subject. These plays had little or no influence upon the course of English drama. CHAPTER XII ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE The Beginnings: Fisher to Ascham - Lyly, Sidney, Hooker The ENGLISH literature, like English life, during the sixteenth The New century, is moulded by two main influences, the religious Learning. reformation and the classical renascence, and in many phases of the literature now under discussion, these forces are seen operating in unison. At the beginning of the century, the sojourn of Erasmus in England, and the influence of such great English scholars as Grocyn, Colet, and Linacre had deepened the love of the new learning and the new humanism, and had helped to point imaginative minds to fresh worlds of thought and beauty. Everywhere the old canons and formulae were being tested, and either rejected entirely or reinterpreted and amplified. Alike in theology, scholarship, and literature, a richer and wider human conception of life appeared, and after some hesitation and opposition, prevailed. The physician Linacre helped to humanize science by uniting it with the classical learning which he had acquired from the great Greek scholar Leonides. Colet the divine pointed his students away from the dialectical Scotist theology, and even from the broader doctrine of Aquinas, to a more elemental and personal conception of religion. Grocyn the scholar gave to Oxford the new classical lore which he imbibed in Italy from Politian and Chalcondylas. Within the Church, the new learning affected Fisher the reactionary no less powerfully than the reformer Latimer. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (1459 ?-1553), like his Fisher. friend and fellow martyr, Thomas More (1478-1535), had been the close friend and protector of Erasmus, who fanned, if he did not kindle, the eager spiritual flame which make both of these Englishmen notable in literature and great in history. With the content of Fisher's sermons we are not here concerned; but their style, with its conscious grace and finish, and deliberate fusion of English and Latin elements, shows how strongly the classical models were at this period affecting the practice of the vernacular. More's Latimer. Cranmer. More's greatest work, Utopia (1516), was originally written in Latin, and therefore can be only briefly discussed here. Like Plato's Republic and Augustine's De Civitate Dei, it is the picture of an ideal commonwealth. The broad humanism of More's character and training manifests itself in his insistence on pacificism, communism, clemency to criminals, kindness to animals, and the elimination of grinding drudgery from the worker's life. The frequent economic and the occasional ethical weaknesses of his treatise are hardly matter for present notice; but its fine sympathy and keen preoccupation with everything that makes for the dignity and worth of life, are typical of all that is best in the new order of thought. Apart from the Utopia, More is important in literature through his carefully written controversial writings, his Latin epigrams, and one or two of his interesting but uneven English poems. The humanism of Hugh Latimer (1485–1555) was directed rather toward deepening and purifying religious faith than toward widening the boundaries of secular knowledge. The honesty and directness which characterized his whole life and brought him a martyr's fate and glory, are everywhere evident in his sermons. These are written in vigorous and simple English, constantly lit up with racy allusion and homely anecdote. In the evolution of the English sermon his style represents a happy interlude between the uncouthness of much that had gone before, and the ornateness of much that was to follow. In his last communications to Ridley and others, as preserved in his Conferences, his simple speech becomes poignantly tragic. Tindale, Great importance attaches to three men, William Tindale Coverdale, (1484-1530), Miles Coverdale (1488-1568), and Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), owing to their connexion with the new English Bible and the English Prayer Book. Tindale's life was a stormy one throughout the years he spent on the Continent he was persecuted by his enemies, who eventually had him put to death for his religious writings and beliefs. His English translation of the New Testament made from the Latin, Greek, and German versions, found its way into England at first surreptitiously but afterwards with the acquiescence of Henry VIII. Tindale had already translated part of the Old Testament; but it was left to Coverdale to publish a complete English Bible. The first edition of this appeared in 1535, and was based on the Vulgate, two other Latin versions, the German versions of Zwingli and Luther, and Tindale's translation of the New Testament and the Pentateuch. The so-called Matthew Bible (1537) incorporated all Tindale's extant work, making up the remainder from Coverdale's version: though soon superseded, it is important as supplying the basis for later translations, including the great Authorized Version. Tindale was a far better scholar than Coverdale, and the superb rhythm and language of the Authorized Version are ultimately due to his genius. The language of the New Bible was simple and |