English literature

ENGLISH LITERATURE. The following discussion of the evolution of English literature, i.e. of the contribution to literature made in the course of ages by the writers of England, is planned so as to give a comprehensive view, the details as to particular authors and their work, and special consideration of the greater writers, being given in the separate articles devoted to them. It is divided into the following sections: (I) Earliest times to Chaucer; (2) Chaucer to the end of the middle ages; (3) Elizabethan times; (4) the Restoration period; (5) the Eighteenth century; (6) the Nineteenth century. The object of these sections is to form connecting links among the successive literary ages, leaving the separate articles on individual great writers to deal with their special interest; attention being paid in the main to the gradually developing characteristics of the product, qud literary. The precise delimitation of what may narrowly be called " English " literature, i.e. in the English language, is perhaps impossible, and separate articles are devoted to American literature, and to the vernacular literatures of Scotland (see Scotland; and Celt: Literature), Ireland (see Celt: Literature), and Wales (see Celt: Literature); see also Canada: Literature. Reference may also be made to such general articles on particular forms as Novel; Romance; Verse, &c.

I. Earliest Times To Chaucer English literature, in the etymological sense of the word, had, so far as we know, no existence until Christian times. There is no evidence either that the heathen English had adopted the Roman alphabet, or that they had learned to employ their native monumental script (the runes) on materials suitable for the writing of continuous compositions of considerable length.

It is, however, certain that in the pre-literary period at least one species of poetic art had attained a high degree of development, and that an extensive body of poetry was handed down - not, indeed, with absolute fixity of form or substance - from generation to generation. This unwritten poetry was the work of minstrels who found their audiences in the halls of kings and nobles. Its themes were the exploits of heroes belonging to the royal houses of Germanic Europe, with which its listeners claimed kinship. Its metre was the alliterative long line, the lax rhythm of which shows that it was intended, not to be sung to regular melodies, but to be recited - probably with some kind of instrumental accompaniment. Of its beauty and power we may judge from the best passages in Beowulf; for there can be little of " Current Indexes," which are published monthly and annually, and consolidated into a digest at stated intervals (say) of five years. The Indian appeals series, which is not required by the general practitioner, is supplied separately at one guinea a year.

In the 16th and 17th centuries the corporate life of the Inns of Court in London became less and less active. The general decay of the organization of crafts and gilds showed doubt that this poem gained nothing and lost much in the process of literary redaction.

The conversion of the people to Christianity necessarily involved the decline of the minstrelsy that celebrated the glories of heathen times. Yet the descendants of Woden, even when they were devout Christians, would not easily lose all interest in the achievements of their kindred of former days. Chaucer's knowledge of " the song of Wade " is one proof among others that even so late as the 14th century the deeds of Germanic heroes had not ceased to be recited in minstrel verse. The paucity of the extant remains of Old English heroic poetry is no argument to the contrary. The wonder is that any of it has survived at all. We may well believe that the professional reciter would, as a rule, be jealous of any attempt to commit to writing the poems which he had received by tradition or had himself composed. The clergy, to whom we owe the writing and the preservation of the Old English MSS., would only in rare instances be keenly interested in secular poetry. We possess, in fact, portions of four narrative poems, treating of heroic legend - Beowulf, Widsith, Finnesburh and Waldere. The second of these has no poetical merit, but great archaeological interest. It is an enumeration of the famous kings known to German tradition, put into the mouth of a minstrel (named Widsith, far-travelled "), who claims to have been at many of their courts and to have been rewarded by them for his song. The list includes historical persons such as Ermanaric and Alboin, who really lived centuries apart, but (with the usual chronological vagueness of tradition) are treated as contemporaries. The extant fragment of Finnesburh (50 lines) is a brilliant battle piece, belonging to a story of which another part is introduced episodically in Beowulf. Waldere, of which we have two fragments (together 68 lines) is concerned with Frankish and Burgundian traditions based on events of the 5th century; the hero is the " Waltharius " of Ekkehart's famous Latin epic. The English poem may possibly be rather a literary composition than a genuine example of minstrel poetry, but the portions that have survived are hardly inferior to the best passages of Beowulf. It may reasonably be assumed that the same minstrels who entertained the English kings and nobles with the recital of ancient heroic traditions would also celebrate in verse the martial deeds of their own patrons and their immediate ancestors. Probably there may have existed an abundance of poetry commemorative of events in the conquest of Britain and the struggle with the Danes. Two examples only have survived, both belonging to the 10th century: The Battle of Brunanburh, which has been greatly over-praised by critics who were unaware that its striking phrases and compounds are mere traditional echoes; and the Battle of Maldon, the work of a truly great poet, of which unhappily only a fragment has been preserved.

One of the marvels of history is the rapidity and thoroughness with which Christian civilization was adopted by the English. Augustine landed in 597; forty years later was born an Englishman, Aldhelm, who in the judgment of his contemporaries throughout the Christian world was the most accomplished scholar and the finest Latin writer of his time. In the next generation England produced in Bede (Baeda) a man who in solidity and variety of knowledge, and in literary power, had for centuries no rival in Europe. Aldhelm and Bede are known to us only from their Latin writings, though the former is recorded to have written vernacular poetry of great merit. The extant Old English literature is almost entirely Christian, for the poems that belong to an earlier period have been expurgated and interpolated in a Christian sense. From the writings that have survived, it would seem as if men strove to forget that England had ever been heathen. The four deities whose names are attached to the days of the week are hardly mentioned at all. The names Thunor and Tiw are sometimes used to translate the Latin Jupiter and Mars; Woden has his place (but not as a god) in the genealogies of the kings, and his name occurs once in a magical poem, but that is all. Bede, as a historian, is obliged to tell the story of the conversion; but the only native divinities he mentions are. the goddesses Hreth and Eostre, and all we learn about them is that they gave their names to Hrethemonath (March) and Easter. That superstitious practices of heathen origin long survived among the people is shown by the acts of church councils and by a few poems of a magical nature that have been preserved; but, so far as can be discovered, the definite worship of the ancient gods quickly died out. English heathenism perished without leaving a record.

The Old English religious poetry was written, probably without exception, in the cloister, and by men who were familiar with the Bible and with Latin devotional literature. Setting aside the wonderful Dream of the Rood, it gives little evidence of high poetic genius, though much of it is marked by a degree of culture and refinement that we should hardly have expected. Its material and thought are mainly derived from Latin sources; its expression is imitated from the native heroic poetry. Considering that a great deal of Latin verse was written by Englishmen in the 7th and succeeding centuries, and that in one or two poems the line is actually composed of an English and a Latin hemistich rhyming together, it seems strange that the Latin influence on Old English versification should have been so small. The alliterative long line is throughout the only metre employed, and although the laws of alliteration and rhythm were less rigorously obeyed in the later than in the earlier poetry, there is no trace of approximation to the structure of Latin verse. It is true that, owing to imitation of the Latin hymns of the church, rhyme came gradually to be more and more frequently used as an ornament of Old English verse; but it remained an ornament only, and never became an essential feature. The only poem in which rhyme is employed throughout is one in which sense is so completely sacrificed to sound that a translation would hardly be possible. It was not only in metrical respects that the Old English religious poetry remained faithful to its native models. The imagery and the diction are mainly those of the old heroic poetry, and in some of the poems Christ and the saints are presented, often very incongruously, under the aspect of Germanic warriors. Nearly all the religious poetry that has any considerable religious value seems to have been written in Northumbria during the 8th century. The remarkably vigorous poem of Judith, however, is certainly much later; and the Exodus, though early, seems to be of southern origin. For a detailed account of the Old English sacred poetry, the reader is referred to the articles on Ciedmon and Cynewulf, to one or other of whom nearly every one of the poems, except those of obviously late date, has at some time been attributed.

The Riddles of the Exeter Book resemble the religious poetry in being the work of scholars, but they bear much more decidedly the impress of the native English character. Some of them rank among the most artistic and pleasing productions of Old English poetry. The Exeter Book contains also several pieces of a gnomic character, conveying proverbial instruction in morality and worldly wisdom. Their morality is Christian, but it is not unlikely that some of the wise sayings they contain may have come down by tradition from heathen times. The very curious Dialogue of Solomon and Saturn may be regarded as belonging to the same class.

The most original and interesting portion of the Old English literary poetry is the group of dramatic monologues - The Banished Wife's Complaint, The Husband's Message, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor and .Wulf and Eadwacer. The date of these compositions is uncertain, though their occurrence in the Exeter Book shows that they cannot be later than the 10th century. That they are all of one period is at least unlikely, but they are all marked by the same peculiar tone of pathos. The monodramatic form renders it difficult to obtain a clear idea of the situation of the supposed speakers. It is not improbable that most of these poems may relate to incidents of heroic legend, with which the original readers were presumed to be acquainted. This, however, can be definitely affirmed only in the case of the two short pieces - Deor and Wulf and Eadwacer- which have something of a lyric character, being the only examples in Old English of strophic structure and the use of the refrain. Wulf and Eadwacer, indeed, exhibits a still further development in the same direction, the monotony of the long line metre being varied by the admission of short lines formed by the suppression of the second hemistich. The highly developed art displayed in this remarkable poem gives reason for believing that the existing remains of Old English poetry very inadequately represent its extent and variety.

While the origins of English poetry go back to heathen times, English prose may be said to have had its effective beginning in the reign of Alfred. It is of course true that vernacular prose of some kind was written much earlier. The English laws of iEthelberht of Kent, though it is perhaps unlikely that they were written down, as is commonly supposed, in the lifetime of Augustine (died A.D. 604), or even in that of the king (d. 616), were well known to Bede; and even in the 12th-century transcript that has come down to us, their crude and elliptical style gives evidence of their high antiquity. Later kings of Kent and of Wessex followed the example of publishing their laws in the native tongue. Bede is known to have translated the beginning of the gospel of John (down to vi. 9). The early part of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is probably founded partly on prose annals of pre-Alfredian date. But although the amount of English prose written between the beginning of the 7th and the middle of the 9th century may have been considerable, Latin continued to be regarded as the appropriate vehicle for works of any literary pretension. If the English clergy had retained the scholarship which they possessed in the days of Aldhelm and Bede, the creation of a vernacular prose literature would probably have been longer delayed; for while Alfred certainly was not indifferent to the need of the laity for instruction, the evil that he was chiefly concerned to combat was the ignorance of their spiritual guides.

Of the works translated by him and the scholars whom he employed, St Gregory's Pastoral Care and his Dialogues (the latter rendered by Bishop Werferth) are expressly addressed to the priesthood; if the other translations were intended for a wider circle of readers, they are all (not excepting the secular History of Orosius) essentially religious in purpose and spirit. In the interesting preface to the Pastoral Care, in the important accounts of Northern lands and peoples inserted in the Orosius, and in the free rendering and amplification of the Consolation of Boethius and of the Soliloquies of Augustine, Alfred appears as an original writer. Other fruits of his activity are his Laws (preceded by a collection of those of his 7th-century predecessor, Ine of Wessex), and the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Old English prose after Alfred is entirely of clerical authorship; even the Laws, so far as their literary form is concerned, are hardly to be regarded as an exception. Apart from the Chronicle (see Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), the bulk of this literature consists of translations from Latin and of homilies and saints' lives, the substance of which is derived from sources mostly accessible to us in their original form; it has therefore for us little importance except from the philological point of view. This remark may be applied, in the main, even to the writings of iElfric, notwithstanding the great interest which attaches to his brilliant achievement in the development of the capacities of the native language for literary expression. The translation of the gospels, though executed in YElfric's time (about 'coo), is by other hands. The sermons of his younger contemporary, Archbishop Wulfstan, are marked by earnestness and eloquence, and contain some passages of historical value.

From the early years of the 11th century we possess an encyclopaedic manual of the science of the time - chronology, astronomy, arithmetic, metre, rhetoric and ethics - by the monk Byrhtferth, a pupil of Abbo of Fleury. It is a compilation, but executed with intelligence. The numerous works on medicine, the properties of herbs, and the like, are in the main composed of selections from Latin treatises; so far as they are original, they illustrate the history of superstition rather than that of science. It is interesting to observe that they contain one or two formulas of incantations in Irish.

Two famous works of fiction, the romance of Apollonius of Tyre and the Letter of Alexander, which in their Latin form had much influence on the later literature of Europe, were Englished in the 11th century with considerable skill. To the same period belongs the curious tract on The Wonders of the East. In these works, and some minor productions of the time, we see that the minds of Englishmen were beginning to find interest in other than religious subjects.

The crowding of the English monasteries by foreigners, which was one of the results of the Norman Conquest, brought about a rapid arrest of the development of the vernacular literature. It was not long before the boys trained in the monastic schools ceased to learn to read and write their native tongue, and learned instead to read and write French. The effects of this change are visible in the rapid alteration of the literary language. The artificial tradition of grammatical correctness lost its hold; the archaic literary vocabulary fell into disuse; and those who wrote English at all wrote as they spoke, using more and more an extemporized phonetic spelling based largely on French analogies. The 12th century is a brilliant period in the history of Anglo-Latin literature, and many works of merit were written in French (see Anglo-Norman). But vernacular literature is scanty and of little originality. The Peterborough Chronicle, it is true, was continued till 1154, and its later portions, while markedly exemplifying the changes in the language, contain some really admirable writing. But it is substantially correct to say that from this point until the age of Chaucer vernacular prose served no other purpose than that of popular religious edification. For light on the intellectual life of the nation during this period we must look mainly to the works written in Latin. The homilies of the 12th century are partly modernized transcripts from lElfric and other older writers, partly translations from French and Latin; the remainder is mostly commonplace in substance and clumsy in expression. At the beginning of the 13th century the Ancren Riwle, a book of counsel for nuns, shows true literary genius, and is singularly interesting in its substance and spirit; but notwithstanding the author's remarkable mastery of English expression, his culture was evidently French rather than English. Some minor religious prose works of the same period are not without merit. But these examples had no literary following. In the early 14th century the writings of Richard Rolle and his school attained great popularity. The profound influence which they exercised on later religious thought, and on the development of prose style, has seldom been adequately recognized. The A y enbite of Inwyt (see Michel, Dan), a wretchedly unintelligent translation (finished in 1340) from Frere Lorens's Somme des vices et des vertus, is valuable to the student of language, but otherwise worthless.

The break in the continuity of literary tradition, induced by the Conquest, was no less complete with regard to poetry than with regard to prose. The poetry of the 13th and the latter part of the 12th century was uninfluenced by the written works of Old English poets, whose archaic diction had to a great extent become unintelligible. But there is no ground to suppose that the succession of popular singers and reciters was ever interrupted. In the north-west, indeed, the old recitative metre seems to have survived in oral tradition, with little more alteration than was rendered necessary by the changes in the language, until the middle of the 14th century, when it was again adopted by literary versifiers. In the south this metre had greatly degenerated in strictness before the Conquest, but, with gradually increasing laxity in the laws of alliteration and rhythm, it continued long in use. It is commonly believed, with great intrinsic probability but with scanty actual evidence, that in the Old English period there existed, beside the alliterative long line, other forms of verse adapted not for recitation but for singing, used in popular lyrics and ballads that were deemed too trivial for written record. The influence of native popular poetic tradition, whether in the form of recited or of sung verse, is clearly discernible in the earliest Middle English poems that have been preserved. But the authors of these poems were familiar with Latin, and probably spoke French as easily as their mother tongue; and there was no longer any literary convention to restrain them from adopting foreign metrical forms. The artless verses of the hermit Godric, who died in 1170, exhibit in their metre the combined influence of native rhythm and of that of Latin hymnology. The Proverbs of Alfred, written about 200, is (like the later Proverbs of Hendyng) in style and substance a gnomic poem of the ancient Germanic type, containing maxims some of which may be of immemorial antiquity; and its rhythm is mainly of native origin. On the other hand, the solemn and touching meditation known as the Moral Ode, which is somewhat earlier in date, is in a metre derived from contemporary Latin verse - a line of seven accents, broken by a caesura, and with feminine end-rhymes. In the Ormulum (see ORM) this metre (known as the septenarius) appears without rhyme, and with a syllabic regularity previously without example in English verse, the line (or distich, as it may be called with almost equal propriety) having invariably fifteen syllables. In various modified forms, the septenarius was a favourite measure throughout the Middle English period. In the poetry of the 13th century the influence of French models is conspicuous. The many devotional lyrics, some of which, as the Luve Ron of Thomas of Hales, have great beauty, show this influence not only in their varied metrical form, but also in their peculiar mystical tenderness and fervour. The Story of Genesis and Exodus, the substance of which is taken from the Bible and Latin commentators, derives its metre chiefly from French. Its poetical merit is very small. The secular poetry also received a new impulse from France. The brilliant and sprightly dialogue of the Owl and Nightingale, which can hardly be dated later than about 1230, is a " contention " of the type familiar in French and Provençal literature. The " Gallic " type of humour may be seen in various other writings of this period, notably in the Land of Cockaigne, a vivacious satire on monastic self-indulgence, and in the fabliau of Dame Siviz, a story of Eastern origin, told with almost Chaucerian skill. Predominantly, though not exclusively French in metrical structure, are the charming love poems collected in a MS. (Harl. 2253) written about 1320 in Herefordshire, some of which (edited in T. Wright's Specimens of Lyric Poetry) find a place in modern popular anthologies. It is noteworthy that they are accompanied by some French lyrics very similar in style. The same MS. contains, besides some religious poetry, a number of political songs of the time of Edward II. They are not quite the earliest examples of their kind; in the time of the Barons' War the popular cause had had its singers in English as well as in French. Later, the victories of Edward III. down to the taking of Guisnes in 1352, were celebrated by the Yorkshireman Laurence Minot in alliterative verse with strophic arrangement and rhyme.

At the very beginning of the 13th century a new species of composition, the metrical chronicle, was introduced into English literature. The huge work of Layamon, a history (mainly legendary) of Britain from the time of the mythical Brutus till after the mission of Augustine, is a free rendering of the NormanFrench Brut of Wace, with extensive additions from traditional sources. Its metre seems to be a degenerate survival of the Old English alliterative line, gradually modified in the course of the work by assimilation to the regular syllabic measure of the French original. Unquestionable evidence of the knowledge of the poem on the part of later writers is scarce, but distinct echoes of its diction appear in the chronicle ascribed to Robert of Gloucester, written in rhymed septenary measures about 1300. This work, founded in its earlier part on the Latin historians of the 12th century, is an independent historical source of some value for the events of the writer's own times. The succession of versified histories of England was continued by Thomas Bek of Castleford in Yorkshire (whose work still awaits an editor), and by Robert Mannyng of Brunne (Bourne, Lincolnshire). Mannyng's chronicle, finished in 1338, is a translation, in its earlier part from Wace's Brut, and in its later part from an Anglo-French chronicle (still extant) written by Peter Langtoft, canon of Bridlington.

Not far from the year 1300 (for the most part probably earlier rather than later) a vast mass of hagiological and homiletic verse was produced in divers parts of England. To Gloucester belongs an extensive series of Lives of Saints, metrically and linguistically closely resembling Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, and perhaps wholly or in part of the same authorship. A similar collection was written in the north of England, as well as a large body of homilies showing considerable poetic skill, and abounding in exempla or illustrative stories. Of exempla several prose collections had already been made in Anglo-French, and William of Wadington's poem Manuel des peches, which contains a great number of them, was translated in 1303 by Robert Mannyng already mentioned, with some enlargement of the anecdotic element, and frequent omissions of didactic passages. The great rhyming chronicle of Scripture history entitled Cursor Mundi was written in the north about this time. It was extensively read and transcribed, and exercised a powerful. influence on later writers down to the end of the 14th century. The remaining homiletic verse of this period is too abundant to be referred to in detail; it will be enough to mention the sermons of William of Shoreham, written in strophic form, but showing little either of metrical skill or poetic feeling. To the next generation belongs the Fricke of Conscience by Richard Rolle, the influence of which was not less powerful than that of the author's prose writings.

Romantic poetry, which in French had been extensively cultivated, both on the continent and in England from the early years of the 12th century, did not assume a vernacular form till about 1250. In the next hundred years its development was marvellously rapid. Of the vast mass of metrical romances produced during this period no detailed account need here be attempted (see Romance, and articles, &c. referred to; ARTHURIAN Romance). Native English traditions form the basis of King Horn, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hamtoun and Havelok, though the stories were first put into literary form by Anglo-Norman poets. The popularity of these home-grown tales (with which may be classed the wildly fictitious Coer de Lion) was soon rivalled by that of importations from France. The English rendering of Floris and Blancheflur (a love-romance of Greek origin) is found in the same MS. that contains the earliest copy of King Horn. Before the end of the century, the French " matter of Britain " was represented in English by the Southern Arthur and Merlin and the Northern Tristram and Yvaine and Gawin, the " matter of France " by Roland and Vernagu and Otuel; the Alexander was also translated, but in this instance the immediate original was an Anglo-French and not a continental poem. The tale of Troy did not come into English till long afterwards. The Auchinleck MS., written about 1330, contains no fewer than 14 poetical romances; there were many others in circulation, and the number continued to grow. About the middle of the 14th century, the Old English alliterative long line, which for centuries had been used only in unwritten minstrel poetry, emerges again in literature. One of the earliest poems in this revived measure, Wynnere and Wastour, written in 1352, is by a professional reciter-poet, who complains bitterly that original minstrel poetry no longer finds a welcome in the halls of great nobles, who prefer to listen to those who recite verses not of their own making. About the same date the metre began to be employed by men of letters for the translation of romance - William of Palerne and Joseph of Arimathea from the French, Alexander from Latin prose. The later development of alliterative poetry belongs mainly to the age of Chaucer.

The extent and character of the literature produced during the first half of the 14th century indicate that the literary use of the native tongue was no longer, as in the preceding age, a mere condescension to the needs of the common people. The rapid disuse of French as the ordinary medium of intercourse among the middle and higher ranks of society, and the consequent substitution of English for French as the vehicle of school instruction, created a widespread demand for vernacular reading. The literature which arose in answer to this demand, though it consisted mainly of translations or adaptations of foreign works, yet served to develop the appreciation of poetic beauty, and to prepare an audience in the near future for a poetry in which the genuine thought and feeling of the nation were to find expression.

[[Chaucer To Renaissance] Bibliography]]. - Only general works need be mentioned here. Those cited contain lists of books for more detailed information. (I) For the literature from the beginnings to Chaucer: - B. ten Brink, Geschichte der englischen Litteratur, vol. i. 2nd ed., by A. Brandl (Strassburg, 1899) (English translation from the 1st ed. of 1877, by H. M. Kennedy, London, 1883); The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. i. (1907). (2) For the Old English period :- R. Walker, Grundriss zur Geschichte der angelsachsischen Litteratur (Leipzig, 1885); Stopford A. Brooke, English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest (London, 1898); A. Brandl, " Altenglische Litteratur," in H. Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, vol. ii. (2nd ed., Strassburg, 1908). (3) For the early Middle English Period: - H. Morley, English Writers, vol. iii. (London, 1888; vols. i. and ii., dealing with the Old English period, cannot be recommended); A. Brandl, " Mittelenglische Litteratur," in H. Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, vol. ii. (1st ed., Strassburg, 1893); W. H. Schofield, English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer (London, 1906). (H. BR.) II. Chaucer To The Renaissance The age of Chaucer is of peculiar interest to the student of literature, not only because of its brilliance and productiveness but also because of its apparent promise for the future. In this, as in other aspects, Chaucer (c. 1340-1400) is its most notable literary figure. Beginning as a student and imitator of the best French poetry of his day, he was for a time, like most of his French contemporaries, little more than a skilful maker of elegant verses, dealing with conventional material in a conventional way, arranging in new figures the same flowers and bowers, sunsets and song-birds, and companies of fair women and their lovers, that had been arranged and rearranged by every poet of the court circle for a hundred years, and celebrated in sweet phrases of almost unvarying sameness. Even at this time, to be sure, he was not without close and loving observation of the living creatures of the real world, and his verses often bring us flowers dewy and fragrant and fresh of colour as they grew in the fields and gardens about London, and birds that had learned their music in the woods; but his poetry was still not easily distinguishable from that of Machault, Froissart, Deschamps, Transoun and the other " courtly makers " of France. But while he was still striving to master perfectly the technique of this pretty art of trifling, he became acquainted with the new literature of Italy, both poetry and prose. Much of the new poetry moved, like that of France, among the conventionalities and artificialities of an unreal world of romance, but it was of wider range, of fuller tone, of far greater emotional intensity, and, at its best, was the fabric, not of elegant ingenuity, but of creative human passion, - in Dante, indeed, a wonderful visionary structure in which love and hate, and pity and terror, and the forms and countenances of men were more vivid and real than in the world of real men and real passions. The new prose - which Chaucer knew in several of the writings of Boccaccio - was vastly different from any that he had ever read in a modern tongue. Here were no mere brief anecdotes like those exempla which in the middle ages illustrated vernacular as well as Latin sermons, no cumbrous, slow-moving treatises on the Seven Deadly Sins, no half-articulate, pious meditations, but rapid, vivid, well-constructed narratives ranging from the sentimental beauty of stories like Griselda and the Franklin's Tale to coarse mirth and malodorous vulgarity equal to those of the tales told later by Chaucer's Miller and Reeve and Summoner. All these things he studied and some he imitated. There is scarcely a feature of the verse that has not left some trace in his own; the prose he did not imitate as prose, but there can be little doubt that the subject matter of Boccaccio's tales and novels, as well as his poems, affected the direction of Chaucer's literary development, and quickened his habit of observing and utilizing human life, and that the narrative art of the prose was influential in the transformation of his methods of narration.

This transformation was effected not so much through the mere superiority of the Italian models to the French as through the stimulus which the differences between the two gave to his reflections upon the processes and technique of composition, for Chaucer was not a careless, happy-go-lucky poet of divine endowment, but a conscious, reflective artist, seeking not merely for fine words and fine sentiments, but for the proper arrangement of events, the significant exponent of character, the right tone, and even the appropriate background and atmosphere, - as may be seen, for example, in the transformations he wrought in the Pardoner's Tale. It is therefore in the latest and most original of the Canterbury Tales that his art is most admirable, most distinguished by technical excellences. In these we find so many admirable qualities that we almost forget that he had any defects. His diction is a model of picturesqueness, of simplicity, of dignity, and of perfect adaptation to his theme: his versification is not only correct but musical and varied, and shows a progressive tendency towards freer and more complex melodies; his best tales are not mere repetitions of the ancient stories they retell, but new creations, transformed by his own imaginative realization of them, full of figures having the dimensions and the vivacity of real life, acting on adequate motives, and moving in an atmosphere and against a background appropriate to their characters and their actions. In the tales of the Pardoner, the Franklin, the Summoner, the Squire, he is no less notable as a consummate artist than as a poet.

Chaucer, however, was not the only writer of his day remarkable for mastery of technique. Gower, indeed, though a man of much learning and intelligence, was neither a poet of the first rank nor an artist. Despite the admirable qualities of clearness, order and occasional picturesqueness which distinguish his work, he lacked the ability which great poets have of making their words mean more than they say, and of stirring the emotions even beyond the bounds of this enhanced meaning; and there is not, perhaps, in all his voluminous work in English, French and Latin, any indication that he regarded composition as an art requiring consideration or any care beyond that of conforming to the chosen rhythm and finding suitable rhymes.

There were others more richly endowed as poets and more finely developed as artists. There was the beginner of the Piers Plowman cycle,' the author of the Prologue and first eight passus of the A-text, a man of clear and profound observation, a poet whose imagination brought before him with distinctness and reality visual images of the motley individuals and masses of men of whom he wrote, an artist who knew how to organize and direct the figures of his dream-world, the movement of his ever-unfolding vision. There was the remarkable successor of this man, the author of the B-text, an almost prophetic figure, a great poetic idealist, and, helpless though he often was in the direction of his thought, an absolute master of images and words that seize upon the heart and haunt the memory. Besides these, an unknown writer far in the north-west had, in Gawayne and the Grene Knight, transformed the medieval romance into a thing of speed and colour, of vitality and mystery, no less remarkable for its fluent definiteness of form than for the delights of hall-feast and hunt, the graceful comedy of temptation, and the lonely ride of the doomed Gawayne through the silence of the forest and the deep snow. In the same region, by its author's power of visual imagination, the Biblical paraphrase, so often a mere humdrum narrative, had been transformed, in Patience, into a narrative so detailed and vivid that the reader is almost ready to believe that the author himself, rather than Jonah, went down into the sea in the belly of the great fish, and sat humbled and rebuked beside the withered gourd-vine. And there also, by some strange chance, blossomed, with perhaps only a local and temporary fragrance until its rediscovery in the 10th century, that delicate flower of loneliness and aspiration, Pearl, a wonder of elaborate art as well as of touching sentiment. All these writings are great, not only relatively, but absolutely. There is not one of them which would not, if written in our own time, immediately mark its author as a man of very unusual ability. But the point of special concern to us at the present moment is not so much that they show remarkable poetic power, as that they possess technical merits of a very high order. And we are accustomed to believe that, although genius is a purely 1 Piers Plowman has been so long attributed as a whole to Langland, that in spite of modern analytical criticism it is most conveniently discussed under that name.

personal and incommunicable element, technical gains are a common possession; that after Marlowe had developed the technique of blank verse, this technique was available for all; that after Pope had mastered the heroic couplet and Gray the ode, and Poe the short story, all men could write couplets and odes and short stories of technical correctness; that, as Tennyson puts it, " All can grow the flower now, For all have got the seed." But this was singularly untrue of the technical gains made by Chaucer and his great contemporaries. Pearl and Patience were apparently unknown to the 15th century, but Gawayne and Piers Plowman and Chaucer's works were known and were influential in one way or another throughout the century. Gawayne called into existence a large number of romances dealing with the same hero or with somewhat similar situations, some of them written in verse suggested by the remarkable verse of their model, but the resemblance, even in versification, is only superficial. Piers Plowman gave rise to satirical allegories written in the alliterative long line and furnished the figures and the machinery for many satires in other metres, but the technical excellence of the first Piers Plowman poem was soon buried for centuries under the tremendous social significance of itself and its successors. And Chaucer, in spite of the fact that he was praised and imitated by many writers and definitely claimed as master by more than one, not only transmitted to them scarcely any of the technical conquests he had made, but seems also to have been almost without success in creating any change in the taste of the public that read his poems so eagerly, any demand for better literature than had been written by his predecessors.

Wide and lasting Chaucer's influence undoubtedly was. Not only was all the court-poetry, all the poetry of writers who pretended to cultivation and refinement, throughout the century, in England and Scotland, either directly or indirectly imitative of his work, but even the humblest productions of unpretentious writers show at times traces of his influence. Scotland was fortunate in having writers of greater ability than England had (see Scotland: Literature). In England the three chief followers of Chaucer known to us by name are Lydgate, Hoccleve (see OccLEVE) and Hawes. Because of their praise of Chaucer and their supposed personal relations to him, Lydgate and Hoccleve are almost inseparable in modern discussions, but 15th century readers and writers appear not to have associated them very closely. Indeed, Hoccleve is rarely mentioned, while Lydgate is not only mentioned continually, but continually praised as Chaucer's equal or even superior. Hoccleve was not, to be sure, as prolific as Lydgate, but it is difficult to understand why his work, which compares favourably in quality with Lydgate's, attracted so much less attention. The title of his greatest poem, De regimine principum, may have repelled readers who were not princely born, though they would have found the work full of the moral and prudential maxims and illustrative anecdotes so dear to them; but his attack upon Sir John Oldcastle as a heretic ought to have been decidedly to the taste of the orthodox upper classes, while his lamentations over his misspent youth, his tales and some of his minor poems might have interested any one. Of a less vigorous spirit than Lydgate, he was, in his mild way, more humorous and more original. Also despite his sense of personal loss in Chaucer's death and his care to transmit to posterity the likeness of his beloved master, he seems to have been less slavish than Lydgate in imitating him. His memory is full of Chaucer's phrases, he writes in verse-forms hallowed by the master's use, and he tries to give to his lines the movement of Chaucer's decasyllables, but he is comparatively free from the influence of those early allegorical works of the Master which produced in the r 5th century so dreary a flock of imitations.

Lydgate's productivity was enormous, - how great no man can say, for, as was the case with Chaucer also, his fame caused many masterless poems to be ascribed to him, but, after making all necessary deductions, the amount of verse that has come down to us from him is astonishing. Here it may suffice to say that his translations are predominantly epic (140,000 lines), and his original compositions predominantly allegorical love poems or didactic poems. If there is anything duller than a dull epic it is a dull allegory, and Lydgate has achieved both. This is not to deny the existence of good passages in his epics and ingenuity in his allegories, but there is no pervading, persistent life in either. His epics, like almost all the narrative verse of the time, whether epic, legend, versified chronicle or metrical romance, seem designed merely to satisfy the desire of 15th century readers for information, the craving for facts - true or fictitious - the same craving that made possible the poems on alchemy, on hunting, on manners and morals, on the duties of parish priests, on the seven liberal arts. His allegories, like most allegories of the age, are ingenious rearrangements of old figures and old machinery, they are full of what had once been imagination but had become merely memory assisted by cleverness. The great fault of all his work, as of nearly all the literature of the age, is that it is merely a more or less skilful manipulation of what the author had somewhere read or heard, and not a faithful transcript of the author's own peculiar sense or conception of what he had seen or heard or read. The fault is not that the old is repeated, that a twice-told tale is retold, but that it is retold without being re-imagined by the teller of the tale, without taking on from his personality something that was not in it before. Style, to be sure, was a thing that Lydgate and his fellows tried to supply, and some of them supplied it abundantly according to their lights. But style meant to them external decoration, classical allusions, personifications, an inverted or even dislocated order of words, and that famous " ornate diction," those " aureate terms," with which they strove to surpass the melody, picturesqueness and dignity which, for all its simplicity, they somehow dimly discerned in the diction of Chaucer.

Stephen Hawes, with his allegorical treatise on the seven liberal sciences, came later than these men, only to write worse. He was a disciple of Lydgate rather than of Chaucer, and is not only lacking in the vigour and sensitiveness which Lydgate sometimes displays, but exaggerates the defects of his master. If it be a merit to have conceived the pursuit of knowledge under the form of the efforts of a knight to win the hand of his lady, it is almost the sole merit to which Hawes can lay claim. Two or three good situations, an episode of low comedy, and the epitaph of the Knight with its famous final couplet, exhaust the list of his credits. The efforts that have been made to trace through Hawes the line of Sp.enser's spiritual ancestry seem not well advised. The resemblances that .have been pointed out are such as arise inevitably from the allegories and from the traditional material with which both worked. There is no reason to believe that Spenser owed his general conception to Hawes, or that the Fairy Queene would have differed in even the slightest detail from its present form if the Pastime of Pleasure had never been written. The machinery of chivalric romance had already been applied to spiritual and moral themes in Spain without the aid of Hawes.

It is obvious that the fundamental lack of all these men was imaginative power, poetic ability. This is a sufficient reason for failure to write good poetry. But why did not men of better ability devote themselves to literature in this age ? Was it because of the perturbed conditions arising from the prevalence of foreign and civil wars ? Perhaps not, though it is clear that if Sir Thomas Malory had perished in one of the many fights through which he lived, the chivalric and literary impulses which he perhaps received from the " Fadre of Curteisy," Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, would have gone for nothing and we should lack the Morte Darthur. But it may very well be that the wars and the tremendous industrial growth of England fixed the attention of the strongest and most original spirits among the younger men and so withdrew them from the possible attractions of literature. But, after all, whatever general truth may lie in such speculations, the way of a young man with his own life is as incalculable as any of the four things which Agur son of Jakeh declared to be past finding out; local and special accidents rather than general communal influences are apt to shape the choice of boys of exceptional character, and we have many instances of great talents turning to literature or art when war or commerce or science was the dominant attraction of social life.

But even recognizing that the followers of Chaucer were not men of genius, it seems strange that their imitation of Chaucer was what it was. They not only entirely failed to see what his merits as an artist were and how greatly superior his mature work is to his earlier in point of technique; they even preferred the earlier and imitated it almost exclusively. Furthermore, his mastery of verse seemed to them to consist solely in writing verses of approximately four or five stresses and arranging them in couplets or in stanzas of seven or eight lines. Their preference for the early allegorical work can be explained by their lack of taste and critical discernment and by the great vogue of allegorical writing in England and France. Men who are just beginning to think about the distinction between literature and ordinary writing usually feel that it consists in making literary expression differ as widely as possible from simple direct speech. For this reason some sort of artificial diction is developed and some artificial word order devised. Allegory is used as an elegant method of avoiding unpoetical plainness, and is an easy means of substituting logic for imagination. The failure to reproduce in some degree at least the melody and smoothness of Chaucer's decasyllabic verse, and the particular form which that failure took in Lydgate, are to be explained by the fact that Lydgate and his fellows never knew how Chaucer's verse sounded when properly read. It is a mistake to suppose that the disappearance of final unaccented e from many words or its instability in many others made it difficult for Lydgate and his fellows to write melodious verse. Melodious verse has been written since the disappearance of all these sounds, and the possibility of a choice between a form with final e and one without it is not a hindrance but an advantage to a poet, as Goethe, Schiller, Heine and innumerable German poets have shown by their practice. The real difficulty with these men was that they pronounced Chaucer's verse as if it were written in the English of their own day. As a matter of fact all the types of verse discovered by scholars in Lydgate's poems can be discovered in Chaucer's also if they be read with Lydgate's pronunciation. Chaucer did not write archaic English, as some have supposed, - that is, English of an earlier age than his own, - it would have been impossible for him to do so with the unfailing accuracy he shows; he did, however, write a conservative, perhaps an old-fashioned, English, such as was spoken by the conservative members of the class of society to which he was attached and for which he wrote. An English with fewer final e's was already in existence among the less conservative classes, and this rapidly became standard English in consequence of the social changes which occurred during his own life. We know that a misunderstanding of Chaucer's verse existed from the 16th century to the time of Thomas Tyrwhitt; it seems clear that it began even earlier, in Chaucer's own lifetime.

There are several poems of the 15th century which were long ascribed to Chaucer. Among them are: - the Complaint of the Black Knight, or Complaint of a Lover's Life, now known to be Lydgate's; the Mother of God, now ascribed to Hoccleve; the Cuckoo and the Nightingale, by Clanvowe; La Belle Dame sans merci, a translation from the French of Alain Chartier by Richard Ros; Chaucer's Dream, or the Isle of Ladies; the Assembly of Ladies; the Flower and the Leaf; and the Court of Love. The two poems of Lydgate and Hoccleve are as good as Chaucer's poorest work. The Assembly of Ladies and the Flower and the Leaf are perhaps better than the Book of the Duchess, but not so good as the Parliament of Fowls. The Flower and the Leaf, it will be remembered, was very dear to John Keats, who, like all his contemporaries, regarded it as Chaucer's. An additional interest attaches to both it and the Assembly of Ladies, from the fact that the author may have been a woman; Professor Skeat is, indeed, confident that he knows who the woman was and when she wrote. These poems, like the Court of Love, are thoroughly conventional in material, all the figures and poetical machinery may be found in dozens of other poems in England and France, as Professor Neilson has shown for the Court of Love and Mr Marsh for the Flower and the Leaf; but there are a freshness of spirit and a love of beauty in them that are not common; the conventional birds and flowers are there, but they seem, like those of Chaucer's Legend, to have some touch of life, and the conventional companies of ladies and gentlemen ride and talk and walk with natural grace and ease. The Court of Love is usually ascribed to a very late date, as late even as the middle of the 16th century. If this is correct, it is a notable instance of the persistence of a Chaucerian influence. An effort has been made, to be sure, to show that it was written by Scogan and that the writing of it constituted the offence mentioned by Chaucer in his Envoy to Scogan, but it has been clearly shown that this is impossible, both because the language is later than Scogan's time and because nothing in the poem resembles the offence clearly described by Chaucer.

Whatever may be true of the authorship of the Assembly of Ladies and the Flower and the Leaf, there were women writers in England in the middle ages. Juliana of Norwich wrote her Revelations of Divine Love before 1400. The much discussed Dame Juliana Berners, the supposed compiler of the treatise on hunting in the Book of St Albans, may be mythical, though there is no reason why a woman should not have written such a book; and a shadowy figure that disappears entirely in the sunlight is the supposed authoress of the Nut Brown Maid, for if language is capable of definite meaning, the last stanza declares unequivocally that the poem is the work of a man. But there is a poem warning young women against entering a nunnery which may be by a woman, and there is an interesting entry among the records of New Romney for 1463-1464, " Paid to Agnes Forde for the play of the Interlude of our Lord's Passion, 6s. 8d.," which is apparently the earliest mention of a woman dramatist in England. Finally, Margaret, countess of Richmond, the mother of Henry VII., not only aided scholars and encouraged writers, but herself translated the (spurious) fourth book of St Thomas a Kempis's Imitatio Christi. Another Margaret, the duchess of Burgundy, it will be remembered, encouraged Caxton in his translation and printing. Women seem, indeed, to have been especially lovers of books and patrons of writers, and Skelton, if we may believe his Garland of Laurel, was surrounded by a bevy of ladies comparable to a modern literary club; Erasmus's Suffragette Convention may correspond to no reality, but the Learned Lady arguing against the Monk for the usefulness and pleasure derived from books was not an unknown type. Women were capable of many things in the middle ages. English records show them to have been physicians, churchwardens, justices of the peace and sheriffs, and, according to a satirist, they were also priests.

The most original and powerful poetry of the 15th century was composed in popular forms for the ear of the common people and was apparently written without conscious artistic purpose. Three classes of productions deserve special attention, - songs and carols, popular ballads and certain dramatic compositions. The songs and carols belong to a species which may have existed in England before the Norman Conquest, but which certainly was greatly modified by the musical and lyric forms of France. The best of them are the direct and simple if not entirely artless expressions of personal emotion, and even when they contain, as they sometimes do, the description of a person, a situation, or an event, they deal with these things so subjectively, confine themselves so closely to the rendering of the emotional effect upon the singer, that they lose none of their directness or simplicity. Some of them deal with secular subjects, some with religious, and some are curious and delightful blendings of religious worship and aspiration with earthly tenderness for the embodiments of helpless infancy and protecting motherhood which gave Christianity so much of its power over the affections and imagination of the middle ages. Even those which begin as mere expressions of joy in the Yule-tide eating and drinking and merriment catch at moments hints of higher [[[Chaucer To Renaissance]]!

joys, of finer emotions, and lift singer and hearer above the noise and stir of earth. Hundreds of songs written and sung in the 15th century must have perished; many, no doubt, lived only a single season and were never even written down; but chance has preserved enough of them to make us wonder at the age which could produce such masterpieces of tantalizing simplicity.

The lyrics which describe a situation form a logical, if not a real transition to those which narrate an episode or an event. The most famous of the latter, the Nut Brown Maid, has often been called a ballad, and " lyrical ballad " it is in the sense established by Coleridge and Wordsworth, but its affinities are rather with the song or carol than with the folk-ballad, and, like Henryson's charming Robin and Malkin, it is certainly the work of a man of culture and of conscious artistic purpose and methods. Unaccompanied, as it is, by any other work of the same author, this poem, with its remarkable technical merits, is an even more astonishing literary phenomenon than the famous single sonnet of Blanco White. It can hardly be doubted that the author learned his technique from the songs and carols.

The folk-ballad, like the song or carol, belongs in some form to immemorial antiquity. It is doubtless a mistake to suppose that any ballad has been preserved to us that is a purely communal product, a confection of the common knowledge, traditions and emotions of the community wrought by subconscious processes into a song that finds chance but inevitable utterance through one or more individuals as the whole commune moves in its molecular dance. But it is equally a mistake to argue that ballads are essentially metrical romances in a state of decay. Both the matter and the manner of most of the best ballads forbid such a supposition, and it can hardly be doubted that in some of the folk-ballads of the 15th century are preserved not only traditions of dateless antiquity, but formal elements and technical processes that actually are derived from communal song and dance. By the 15th century, however, communal habits and processes of composition had ceased, and the traditional elements, formulae and technique had become merely conventional aids and guides for the individual singer. Ancient as they were, conventional as, in a sense, they also were, they exercised none of the deadening, benumbing influence of ordinary conventions. They furnished, one may say, a vibrant framework of emotional expression, each tone of which moved the hearers all the more powerfully because it had sung to them so many old, unhappy, far-off things, so many battles and treacheries and sudden griefs; a framework which the individual singer needed only to fill out with the simplest statement of the event which had stirred his own imagination and passions to produce, not a work of art, but a song of universal appeal. Not a work of art, because there are scarcely half a dozen ballads that are really works of art, and the greatest ballads are not among these. There is scarcely one that is free from excrescences, from dulness, from trivialities, from additions that would spoil their greatest situations and their greatest lines, were it not that we resolutely shut our ears and our eyes, as we should, to all but their greatest moments. But at their best moments the best ballads have an almost incomparable power, and to a people sick, as we are, of the ordinary, the usual, the very trivialities and impertinences of the ballads only help to define and emphasize these best moments. In histories of English literature the ballads have been so commonly discussed in connexion with their rediscovery in the 18th century, that we are apt to forget that some of the very best were demonstrably composed in the 15th and that many others of uncertain date probably belong to the same time.

Along with the genuine ballads dealing with a recent event or a traditional theme there were ballads in which earlier romances are retold in ballad style. This was doubtless inevitable in view of the increasing epic tendency of the ballad and the interest still felt in metrical romances, but it should not mislead us into regarding the genuine folk-ballad as an out-growth of the metrical romance.

Besides the ordinary epic or narrative ballad, the 15th century produced ballads in dramatic form, or, perhaps it were better to say, dramatized some of its epic ballads. How commonly this was done we do not know, but the scanty records of the period indicate that it was a widespread custom, though only three plays of this character (all concerning Robin Hood) have come down to us. These plays had, however, no further independent development, but merely furnished elements of incident and atmosphere to later plays of a more highly organized type. With these ballad plays may also be mentioned the Christmas plays (usually of St George) and the sword-dance plays, which also flourished in the 15th century, but survive for us only as obscure elements in the masques and plays of Ben Jonson and in such modern rustic performances as Thomas Hardy has so charmingly described in The Return of the Native. The additions which the 15th century made to the ancient cycles of Scripture plays, the so-called Mysteries, are another instance of a literary effort which spent itself in vain (see Drama). The most notable of these are, of course, the world renowned comic scenes in the Towneley (or Wakefield) Plays, in the pageants of Cain, of Noah and of the Shepherds. In none of these is the 15th century writer responsible for the original comic intention; in the pageants of Cain and of the Shepherds fragments of the work of a 14th century writer still remain to prove the earlier existence of the comic conception, and that it was traditional in the Noah pageant we know from the testimony of Chaucer's Miller; but none the less the 15th century writer was a comic dramatist of original power and of a skill in the development of both character and situation previously unexampled in England. The inability of Lydgate to develop a comic conception is strikingly displayed if one compares his Pageant for Presentation before the King at Hereford with the work of this unknown artist. But in our admiration for this man and his famous episode of Mak and the fictitious infant, we are apt to forget the, equally fine, though very different qualities shown in some of the later pageants of the York Plays. Such, for example, is the final pageant, that of the Last Judgment, a drama of slow and majestic movement, to be sure, but with a large and fine conception of the great situation, and a noble and dignified elocution not inadequate to the theme.

The Abraham and Isaac play of the Brome MS., extant as a separate play and perhaps so performed, which has been so greatly admired for its cumulative pathos, also belongs demonstrably to this century. It is not, as has been supposed, an intermediate stage between French plays and the Chester Abraham and Isaac, but is derived directly from the latter by processes which comparison of the two easily reveals. Scripture plays of a type entirely different from the well-known cyclic mysteries, apparently confined to the Passion and Resurrection and the related events, become known to us for the first time in the records of this century. Such plays seem to have been confined to the towns of the south, and, as both their location and their structure suggest, may have been borrowed from France. In any event, the records show that they flourished greatly and that new versions were made from time to time.

Another form of the medieval drama, the Morality Play, had its origin in the 15th century, - or else very late in the 14th. The earliest known examples of it in England date from about 1420. These are the Castle of Perseverance and the Pride of Life. Others belonging to the century are Mind, Will and Understanding, Mankind and Medwall's Nature. There are also parts of two pageants in the Ludus Coventriae (c. 1460) that are commonly classed as Moralities, and these, together with the existence of a few personified abstractions in other plays, have led some critics to suppose that the Morality was derived from the Mystery by the gradual introduction of personified abstractions in the place of real persons. But the two kinds of plays are fundamentally different, different in subject and in technique; and no replacement of real persons by personifications can change a Mystery into a Morality, Moreover, the Morality features in Mysteries are later than the origin of the Morality itself and are due to the influence of the latter. The Morality Play is merely a dramatized allegory, and derives its characters and its peculiar technique from the application of the dramatic method to the allegory, the favourite literary form of the middle ages. None of the 15th ] century Moralities is literature of the first rank, though both the Castle of Perseverance and Pride of Life contain passages ringing with a passionate sincerity that communicates itself to the hearer or reader. But it was not until the beginning of the 16th century that a Morality of permanent human interest appeared in Everyman, which, after all, is a translation from the Dutch, as is clearly proved by the fact that in the two prayers near the end of the play the Dutch has complicated but regular stanzas, whereas the English has only irregularly rhymed passages.

Besides the Mysteries and Moralities, the 15th century had also Miracle Plays, properly so called, dealing with the lives, martyrdoms and miracles of saints. As we know these only from records of their performance or their mere existence - no texts have been preserved to us, except the very curious Play of the Sacrament - it is impossible to speak of their literary or dramatic qualities. The Miracle Play as a form was, of course, not confined to the r 5th century. Notwithstanding the assertions of historians of literature that it died out in England soon after its introduction at the beginning of the 12th century, its existence can be demonstrated from c. 1 r ro to the time of Shakespeare. But records seem to indicate that it flourished especially during this period of supposed barrenness.

What was the nature of the " Komedy of Troylous and Pandor " performed before Henry VIII. on the 6th of January 1516 we have no means of knowing. It is very early indeed to assume the influence of either classical or Italian drama, and although we have no records of similar plays from the 15th century, it must be remembered that our records are scanty, that the middle ages applied the dramatic method to all sorts of material, and that it is therefore not impossible that secular plays like this were performed at court at a much earlier date. The record at any rate does not indicate that it was a new type of play, and the Griselda story had been dramatized in France, Italy and the Netherlands before 150o.

That not much good prose was written in the r 5th century is less surprising than that so little good verse was written. The technique of verse composition had been studied and mastered in the preceding age, as we have seen, but the technique of prose had apparently received no serious consideration. Indeed, it is doubtful if any one thought of prose as a possible medium of artistic expression. Chaucer apparently did not, in spite of the comparative excellence of his Preface to the Astrolabe and his occasional noteworthy successes with the difficulties of the philosophy of Boethius; Wycliffe is usually clumsy; and the translators of Mandeville, though they often give us passages of great charm, obviously were plain men who merely translated as best they could. There was, however, a comparatively large amount of prose written in the 15th century, mainly for religious or educational purposes, dealing with the same sorts of subjects that were dealt with in verse, and in some cases not distinguishable from the verse by any feature but the absence of rhyme. The vast body of this we must neglect; only five writers need be named: John Capgrave, Reginald Pecock, Sir John Fortescue, Caxton and Malory. Capgrave, the compiler of the first chronicle in English prose since the Conquest, wrote by preference in Latin; his English is a condescension to those who could not read Latin and has the qualities which belong to the talk of an earnest and sincere man of commonplace ability. Pecock and Fortescue are more important. Pecock (c. 1395 - c. 1460) was a man of singularly acute and logical mind. He prided himself upon his dialectic skill and his faculty for discovering arguments that had been overlooked by others. His writings, therefore - or at least the Repressor - are excellent in general structure and arrangement, his ideas are presented clearly and simply, with few digressions or excrescences, and his sentences, though sometimes too long, are more like modern prose than any others before the age of Elizabeth. His style is lightened by frequent figures of speech, mostly illustrative, and really illustrative, of his ideas, while his intellectual ingenuity cannot fail to interest even those whom his prejudices and preconceptions repel. Fortescue, like Capgrave, wrote by preference in Latin, and, like Pecock, was philosophical and controversial. But his principal English work, the Dif f erence between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, differs from Pecock's in being rather a pleading than a logical argument, and the geniality and glowing patriotism of its author give it a far greater human interest.

No new era in literary composition was marked by the activity of William Caxton as translator and publisher, though the printing-press has, of course, changed fundamentally the problem of the dissemination and preservation of culture, and thereby ultimately affected literary production profoundly. But neither Caxton nor the writers whose works he printed produced anything new in form or spirit. His publications range over the whole field of i 5th century literature, and no doubt he tried, as his quaint prefaces indicate, to direct the public taste to what was best among the works of the past, as when he printed and reprinted the Canterbury Tales, but among all his numerous publications not one is the herald of a new era. The only book of permanent interest as literature which he introduced to the world was the Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory, and this is a compilation from older romances (see Arthurian Legend). It is, to be sure, the one book of permanent literary significance produced in England in the 15th century; it glows with the warmth and beauty of the old knight's conception of chivalry and his love for the great deeds and great men of the visionary past, and it continually allures the reader by its fresh and vivid diction and by a syntax which, though sometimes faulty, has almost always a certain naïve charm; " thystorye (i.e. the history) of the sayd Arthur," as Caxton long ago declared, " is so gloryous and shynyng, that he is stalled in the first place of the moost noble, beste and worthyest of the Crysten men "; it is not, however, as the first of a new species, but as the final flower of an old that this glorious and shining book retains its place in English literature.

Whatever may have been the effect of the wars and the growth of industrial life in England in withdrawing men of the best abilities from the pursuit of literature, neither these causes nor any other interfered with the activity of writers of lesser powers. The amount of writing is really astonishing, as is also its range. More than three hundred separate works (exclusive of the large number still ascribed to Lydgate and of the seventy printed by Caxton) have been made accessible by the Early English Text Society and other public or private presses, and it seems probable that an equal number remains as yet unpublished. No list of these writings can be given here, but it may not be unprofitable to indicate the range of interests by noting the classes of writing represented. The classification is necessarily rough, as some writings belong to more than one type. We may note, first, love poems, allegorical and unallegorical, narrative, didactic, lyrical and quasi-lyrical; poems autobiographical and exculpatory; poems of eulogy and appeal for aid; tales of entertainment or instruction, in prose and in verse; histories ancient and modern, and brief accounts of recent historical events, in prose and in verse; prose romances and metrical romances; legends and lives of saints, in prose and in verse; poems and prose works of religious meditation, devotion and controversy; treatises of religious instruction, in prose and in verse; ethical and philosophical treatises, and ethical and prudential treatises; treatises of government, of political economy, of foreign travel, of hygiene, of surgery, of alchemy, of heraldry, of hunting and hawking and fishing, of farming, of good manners, and of cooking and carving. Prosaic and intended merely to serve practical uses as many of these were, verse is the medium of expression as often as prose. Besides this large amount and variety of English compositions, it must be remembered that much was also written. in Latin, and that Latin and French works of this and other centuries were read by the educated classes.

Although the intellectual and spiritual movement which we call the Italian Renaissance was not unknown in England in the 14th and r 5th centuries, it is not strange that it exercised no perceptible influence upon English literature, except in the case of Chaucer. Chaucer was the only English man of letters before the 16th century who knew Italian literature. The Italians who visited England and the Englishmen who visited Italy were interested, not in literature, but in scholarship. Such studies as were pursued by Free, Grey, Flemming, Tilly, Gunthorpe and others who went to Italy, made them better grammarians and rhetoricians, and no doubt gave them a freer, wider outlook, but upon their return to England they were immediately absorbed in administrative cares, which left them little leisure for literary composition, even if they had had any inclination to write. They prepared the way, however, for the leaders of the great intellectual awakening which began in England with Linacre, Colet, More and their fellows, and which finally culminated in the age of Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson, Gilbert, Harvey and Harriott.

When the middle ages ceased in England it is impossible to say definitely. Long after the new learning and culture of the Renaissance had been introduced there, long after classical and Italian models were eagerly chosen and followed, the epic and lyric models of the middle ages were admired and imitated, and the ancient forms of the drama lived side by side with the new until the time of Shakespeare himself. John Skelton, although according to Erasmus " unum Britannicarum literarum lumen ac decus," and although possessing great originality and vigour both in diction and in versification when attacking his enemies or indulging in playful rhyming, was not only a great admirer of Lydgate, but equalled even the worst of his predecessors in aureate pedantries of diction, in complicated impossibilities of syntax, and in meaningless inversions of wordorder whenever he wished to write elegant and dignified literature. And not a little of the absurd diction of the middle of the 16th century is merely a continuation of the bad ideals and practices of the refined writers of the r 5th.

In fine, the 15th century has, aside from its vigorous, though sometimes coarse, popular productions, little that can interest the lover of literature. It offers, however, in richest profusion problems for the literary antiquarian and the student of the relations between social conditions and literary productivity, - problems which have usually been attacked only with the light weapons of irresponsible speculation, but which may perhaps be solved by a careful comparative study of many literatures and many periods. Moreover, although in the quality of ifs literary output it is decidedly inferior to the 14th century, the amount and the wide range of its productions indicate the gradual extension of the habit of reading to classes of society that were previously unlettered; and this was of great importance for the future of English literature, just as the innumerable dramatic performances throughout England were important in developing audiences for Marlowe and Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.

For bibliography see vol. ii. of the Cambridge History of Literature (1909); and Brandl's Geschichte der mittelenglischen Literatur (reprinted from Paul's Grundriss der germanischen Philologie). Interesting general discussions may be found in the larger histories of English Literature, such as Ten Brink's, Jusserand's, and (a little more antiquated) Courthope's and Morley s. (J. M. MA.) III. Elizabethan Times General Influences, and Prologue to 1579. - The history of letters in England from More's Utopia (1516), the first Platonic vision, to Milton's Samson Agonistes (1671), the latest classic tragedy, is one and continuous. That is the period of the English Renaissance, in the wider sense, and it covers all and more of the literature loosely called " Elizabethan." With all its complexity and subdivisions, it has as real a unity as the age of Pericles, or that of Petrarch and Boccaccio, or the period in Germany that includes both Lessing and Heine. It is peculiar in length of span, in variety of power, and in wealth of production, though its master-works on the greater scale are relatively few. It is distinct, while never quite cut off, from the middle age preceding, and also from the classical or " Augustan " age that followed. The coming of Dryden denoted a new phase; but it was still a phase of the Renaissance; and the break that declared itself about 1660 counts as nothing beside the break with the middle ages; for this implied the whole change in art, thought and temper, which re-created the European mind. It is true that many filaments unite Renaissance and middle ages, not only in the religious and purely intellectual region, but in that of art. The matter of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the tales of Arthur and of Troilus, the old fairy folklore of the South, the topic of the Falls of Princes, lived on; and so did the characteristic medieval form, allegory and many of the old metres of the 14th century. But then these things were transformed, often out of knowledge. Shakespeare's use of the histories of Macbeth, Lear and Troilus, and Spenser's of the allegoric romance, are examples. And when the gifts of the middle ages are not transformed, as in the Mirror for Magistrates, they strike us as survivals from a lost world.

So vital a change took long in the working. The English Renaissance of letters only came into full flower during the last twenty years of the 16th century, later than in any Southern land; but it was all the richer for delay, and would have missed many a life-giving element could it have been driven forward sooner. If the actual process of genius is beyond analysis, we can still notice the subjects which genius receives, or chooses, to work upon, and also the vesture which it chooses for them; and we can watch some of the forces that long retard but in the end fertilize these workings of genius.

What, then, in England, were these forces ? Two of them lie outside letters, namely, the political settlement, culminating in the later reign of Elizabeth, and the religious settlement, whereby the Anglican Church grew out of the English Reformation. A third force lay within the sphere of the Renaissance itself, in the narrower meaning of the term. It was culture - the prefatory work of culture and education, which at once prepared and put off the flowering of pure genius. " Elizabethan " literature took its complexion from the circumstance that all these three forces were in operation at once. The Church began to be fully articulate, just when the national feeling was at its highest, and the tides of classical and immigrant culture were strongest. Spenser's Faerie Queene, Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity and Shakespeare's Henry V. came in the same decade (1590-1600). But these three forces, political, religious and educational, were of very different duration and value. The enthusiasm of 1590-1600 was already dying down in the years 1600-1610, when the great tragedies were written; and soon a wholly new set of political forces began to tell on art. The religious inspiration was mainly confined to certain important channels; and literature as a whole, from first to last, was far more secular than religious. But Renaissance culture, in its ramifications and consequences, tells all the time and over the whole field, from r soo to 1660. It is this culture which really binds together the long and varied chronicle. Before passing to narrative, a short review of each of these elements is required.

Down to 1579 the Tudor rule was hardly a direct inspiration to authors. The reign of Henry VII. was first duly told by Bacon, and that of Henry VIII. staged by Shakespeare and Politics. Fletcher, in the time of James I. Sir Thomas More found in Roper, and Wolsey in Cavendish, sound biographers, who are nearly the earliest in the language. The later years of Henry VIII. were full of episodes too tragically picturesque for safe handling in the lifetime of his children. The next two reigns were engrossed with the religious war; and the first twenty years of Elizabeth, if they laid the bases of an age of peace, well-being, and national self-confidence that was to prove a teeming soil for letters, were themselves poor in themes for patriotic art. The abortive treason of the northern earls was echoed onl y in a ringing ballad. But the voyagers, freebooters, and explorers reported their experiences, as a duty, not for fame; and these, though not till the golden age, were edited by Hakluyt, and fledged the poetic fancies that took wing from the " Indian Peru " to the " still-vext Bermoothes." Yet, in default of any true historian, the queen's wise delays and diplomacies that upheld the English power, and her refusal to launch on a Protestant or a national war until occasion compelled and the country was ready, were subjects as uninspiring to poets as the burning questions of the royal marriage or the royal title. But by 1580 the nation was filled with the sense of Elizabeth's success and greatness and of its own prosperity. No shorter struggle and no less achievement could have nursed the insolent, jubilant patriotism of the years that followed; a feeling that for good reasons was peculiar to England among the nations, and created the peculiar forms of the chronicle play and poem. These were borrowed neither from antiquity nor from abroad, and were never afterwards revived. The same exultation found its way into the current forms of ode and pastoral, of masque and allegory, and into many a dedication and interlude of prose. It was so strong as to outlive the age that gave it warrant. The passion for England, the passion of England for herself, animates the bulk of Drayton's Poly-Olbion, which was finished so late as 1622. But the public issues were then changing, the temper was darker; and the civil struggle was to speak less in poetry than in the prose of political theory and ecclesiastical argument, until its after-explosion came in the verse of Milton.

The English Reformation, so long political rather than doctrinal or imaginative, cost much writing on all sides; but no book like Calvin's Institution is its trophy, at once and marking a term of departure in the national prose. Still, the debating weapons; the axes and billhooks, of vernacular English were sharpened - somewhat jaggedly - in the pamphlet battles that dwarfed the original energies of Sir Thomas More and evoked those of Tyndale and his friends. The powers of the same style were proved for descriptive economy by Starkey's Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, and for religious appeal by the blunt sound rhetoric and forthright jests in the sermons of Latimer (died 1555). Foxe's reports of the martyrs are the type of early Protestant English (1563); but the reforming divines seldom became real men of letters even when their Puritanism, or discontent with the final Anglican settlement and its temper, began to announce itself. Their spirit, however, comes out in many a corner of poetry, in Gascoigne's Steel Glass as in Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar; and the English Reformation lived partly on its pre-natal memories of Langland as well as of Wycliffe. The fruit of the struggle, though retarded, was ample. Carrying on the work of Fisher and Cranmer, the new church became the nursing mother of English prose, and trained it more than any single influence, - trained it so well, for the purposes of sacred learning, translation and oratory, and also as a medium of poetic feeling, that in these activities England came to rival France. How late any religious writer of true rank arose may be seen by the lapse of over half a century between Henry VIII.'s Act of Supremacy and Hooker's treatise. But after Hooker the chain of eloquent divines was unbroken for a hundred years.

Renaissance culture had many stages and was fed from many streams. At the outset of the century, in the wake of Erasmus, under the teaching of Colet and his friends, there tongues, of the classic texts, and so of the ancient life and mind. This period of humanism in the stricter sense was far less brilliant than in Italy and France. No very great scholar or savant arose in Britain for a long time; but neo-Latin literature, the satellite of scholarship, shone brightly in George Buchanan. But scholarship was created and secured; and in at least one, rather solitary, work of power, the Utopia (which remained in Latin till 1551), the fundamental process was begun which appropriates the Greek mind, not only for purposes of schooling, but as a source of new and independent thinking. In and after the middle of the century the classics were again put forward by Cheke, by Wilson in his Art of Rhetoric (1553), and by Ascham in his letters and in his Schoolmaster (1570), as the true staple of humane education, and the pattern for a simple yet lettered English. The literature of translations from the classics, in prose and verse, increased; and these works, at first plain, business-like, and uninspired, slowly rose in style and power, and at last, like the translations from modern tongues, were written by a series of masters of English, who thus introduced Plutarch and Tacitus to poets and historians. This labour of mediation was encouraged by the rapid expansion and reform of the two universities, of which almost every great master except Shakespeare was a member; and even Shakespeare had ample Latin for his purpose.

The direct impact of the classics on " Elizabethan " literature, whether through such translations or the originals, would take long to describe. But their indirect impact is far stronger, though in result the two are hard to discern. This is another point that distinguishes the English Renaissance from the Italian or the French, and makes it more complex. The knowledge of the thought, art and enthusiasms of Rome and Athens constantly came round through Italy or France, tinted and charged in the passage with something characteristic of those countries. The early playwrights read Seneca in Latin and English, but also the foreign Senecan tragedies. Spenser, when starting on his pastorals, studied the Sicilians, but also Sannazaro and Marot. Shakespeare saw heroic antiquity through Plutarch, but also, surely, through Montaigne's reading of antiquity. Few of the poets can have distinguished the original fountain of Plato from the canalized supply of the Italian Neoplatonists. The influence, however, of Cicero on the Anglican pulpit was immediate as well as constant; and so was that of the conciser Roman masters, Sallust and Tacitus, on Ben Jonson and on Bacon. Such scattered examples only intimate the existence of two great chapters of English literary history, - the effects of the classics and the effects of Italy. The bibliography of 16th-century translations from the Italian in the fields of political and moral speculation, poetry, fiction and the drama, is so large as itself to tell part of the story. The genius of Italy served the genius of England in three distinctive ways. It inspired the recovery, with new modulations, of a lost music and a lost prosody. It modelled many of the chief poetic forms, which soon were developed out of recognition; such were tragedy, allegory, song, pastoral and sonnet. Thirdly, it disclosed some of the masterthoughts upon government and conduct formed both by the old and the new Mediterranean world. Machiavelli, the student of ancient Rome and modern Italy, riveted the creed of Bacon. It might be said that never has any modern people so influenced another in an equal space of time - and letters, here as ever, are only the voice, the symbol, of a whole life and culture - if we forgot the sway of French in the later 17th and 18th centuries. And the power of French was alive also in the 16th. The track of Marot, of Ronsard and the Pleiad and Desportes, of Rabelais and Calvin and Montaigne, is found in England. Journeymen like Boisteau and Belleforest handed on immortal tales. The influence is noteworthy of Spanish mannerists, above all of Guevara upon sententious prose, and of the novelists and humorists, headed by Cervantes, upon the drama. German legend is found not only in Marlowe's Faustus, but in the byways of play and story. It will be long before the rich and coloured tangle of these threads has been completely unravelled with due tact and science. The presence of one strand may here be mentioned, which appears in unexpected spots.

As in Greece, and as in the day of Coleridge and Shelley, the fabric of poetry and prose is shot through with philosophical ideas; a further distinction from other literatures like the Spanish of the golden age or the French so ph ophy. of 1830. But these were not so much the ideas of the new physical science and of Bacon as of the ethical and metaphysical ferment. The wave of free talk in the circles of Marlowe, Greville and Raleigh ripples through their writings. Though the direct influence of Giordano Bruno on English writers is probably limited to a reminiscence in the Faerie Queene (Book vii.), he was well acquainted with Sidney and Greville, argued for the Copernican theory at Greville's house, lectured on the soul at Oxford, and published his epochmarking Italian dialogues during his two years' stay (1583-- 1585) in London. The debates in the earlier schools of Italy on the nature and tenure of the soul are heard in the.

IX. 20 a Religious defining the religious change for millions of later men change. spread a sounder knowledge of the Greek and Latin p g Italy Nosce Teipsum (1599) of Sir John Davies; a stoicism, " of the schools " as well as " of the blood," animates Cassius and also the French heroes of Chapman; and if the earlier drama is sown with Seneca's old maxims on sin and destiny, the later drama, at least in Shakespeare, is penetrated with the freer reading of life and conduct suggested by Montaigne. Platonism - with its vox angelica sometimes a little hoarse - is present from the youthful Hymns of Spenser to the last followers of Donne; sometimes drawn from Plato, it is oftener the Christianized doctrine codified by Ficino or Pico. It must be noted that this play of philosophic thought only becomes marked after 1580, when the preparatory tunings of English literature are over.

We may now quickly review the period down to 1580, in the departments of prose, verse and drama. It was a time which left few memorials of form.

Early modern English prose, as a medium of art, was of slow growth. For long there was alternate strife and union (ending in marriage) between the Latin, or more rhetorical, and th e ancestral elements of the language, and this was true both of diction and of construction. We need to begin with the talk of actual life, as we find it in the hands of the more naïf writers, in its idiom and gusto and unshapen power, to see how style gradually declared itself. In state letters and reports, in the recorded words of Elizabeth and Mary of Scotland and public men, in travels and memoirs, in Latimer, in the rude early versions of Cicero and Boethius, in the more unstudied speech of Ascham or Leland, the material lies. At the other extreme there are the English liturgy (1549, 1 55 2, 1 559, with the final fusion of Anglican and Puritan eloquence), and the sermons of Fisher and Cranmer, - nearly the first examples of a sinuous, musical and Ciceronian cadence. A noble pattern for saga-narrative and lyrical prose was achieved in the successive versions (1526-1540-1568) of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, where a native simple diction of short and melodious clauses are prescribed by the matter itself. Prose, in fact, down to Shakespeare's time, was largely the work of the churchmen and translators, aided by the chroniclers. About the mid-century the stories, as well as the books of conduct and maxim, drawn from Italy and France, begin to thicken. Perverted symmetry of style is found in euphuistic hacks like Pettie. Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566) provided the plots of Bandello and others for the dramatists. Hoby's version (1561) of Castiglione's Courtier, with its command of elate and subtle English, is the most notable imported book between Berners's Froissart (1523-1525) and North's Plutarch (1579). Ascham's Schoolmaster is the most typical English book of Renaissance culture, in its narrower sense, since Utopia. Holinshed's Chronicle (1577-1587) and the work of Halle, if pre-critical, were all the fitter to minister to Shakespeare.

The lyric impulse was fledged anew at the court of Henry VIII. The short lines and harping burdens of Sir Thomas Wyatt's songs show the revival, not only of a lovepoetry more plangent than anything in English since p Y p g y g g Chaucer, but also of the long-deadened sense of metre. In Wyatt's sonnets, octaves, terzines and other Italian measures, we can watch the painful triumphant struggles of this noble old master out of the slough of formlessness in which verse had been left by Skelton. Wyatt's primary deed was his gradual rediscovery of the iambic decasyllabic line duly accented - the line that had been first discovered by Chaucer for England; and next came its building into sonnet and stanza. Wyatt (d. 1542) ended with perfect formal accuracy; he has the honours of victory; and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (d. 1547), a younger-hearted and more gracious but a lighter poet, carried on his labour, and caught some of Chaucer's as well as the Italian tunes. The blank verse of his two translated Aeneids, like all that written previous to Peele, gave little inkling of the latencies of the measure which was to become the cardinal one of English poetry. It was already the vogue in Italy for translations from the classics; and we may think of Surrey importing it like an uncut jewel and barely conscious of its value. His original poems, like those of Wyatt, waited for print till the eve of Elizabeth's reign, when they appeared, with those of followers like Grimoald, in Tottel's Miscellany (1557), the first of many such garlands, and the outward proof of the poetical revival dating twenty years earlier. But this was a false dawn. Only one poem of authentic power, Sackville's Induction (1563) to that dreary patriotic venture, A Mirror for Magistrates, was published for twenty years. In spirit medieval, this picture of the gates of hell and of the kings in bale achieves a new melody and a new intensity, and makes the coming of Spenser far less incredible. But poetry was long starved by the very ideal that nursed it - that of the all-sided, all-accomplished " courtier " or cavalier, to whom verse-making was but one of all the accomplishments that he must perfect, like fencing, or courting, or equestrian skill. Wyatt and Surrey, Sackville and Sidney (and we may add Hamlet, a true Elizabethan) are of this type. One of the first competent professional writers was George Gascoigne, whose remarks on metric, and whose blank verse satire, The Steel Glass (1576), save the years between Sackville and Spenser. Otherwise the gap is filled by painful rhymesters with rare flashes, such as Googe, Churchyard and Turberville.

The English Renaissance drama, both comic and tragic, illustrates on the largest scale the characteristic power of the antique at this period - at first to reproduce itself in imitation, and then toenerate something utterly g g Y rss?a. different from itself, something that throws the antique to the winds. Out of the Morality, a sermon upon the certainty of death or the temptations of the soul, acted by personified qualities and supernatural creatures, had grown up, in the reign of Henry VII., the Interlude, a dialogue spoken by representative types or trades, who faintly recalled those in Chaucer's Prologue. These forms, which may be termed medieval, continued long and blended; sometimes heated, as in Respublica, with doctrine, and usually lightened by the comic play of a " Vice " or incarnation of sinister roguery. John Heywood was the chief maker of the pure interludes, and Bishop Bale of the Protestant medleys; his King Johan, a reformer's partisan tract in verse, contains the germs of the chronicle play. In the drama down to 1580 the native talent is sparse enough, but the historical interest is high. Out of a seeming welter of forms, the structure, the metres and the species that Kyd and Marlowe found slowly emerged. Comedy was first delivered from the interlude, and fashioned in essence as we know it, by the schoolmasters. Drawing on Plautus, they constructed duly-knitted plots, divided into acts and scenes and full of homely native fun, for their pupils to present. In Thersites (written 1537), the oldest of these pieces, and in Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (1552 at latest), the best known of them, the characters are lively, and indeed are almost individuals. In others, like Misogonus (written 1560), the abstract element and improving purpose remain, and the source is partly neo-Latin comedy, native or foreign. Romance crept in: serious comedy, with its brilliant future, the comedy of high sentiment and averted dangers mingled still with farce, was shadowed forth in Damon and Pithias and in the curious play Common Conditions; while the domestic comedy of intrigue dawned in Gascoigne's Supposes, adapted from Ariosto. Thus were displaced the ranker rustic fun of Gammer Gurton's Needle (written c. 1559) and other labours of " rhyming motherwits." But there was no style, no talk, no satisfactory metre. The verse of comedy waited for Greene, and its prose for Lyly. Structure, without style, was also the main achievement of the early tragedies. The Latin plays of Buchanan, sometimes biblical in topic, rest, as to their form, upon Euripides. But early English tragedy was shapen after the Senecan plays of Italy and after Seneca himself, all of whose dramas were translated by 1581. Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex, acted about 1561, and written by Sackville and Norton, and Hughes' Misfortunes of Arthur (acted 1588), are not so much plays as wraiths of plays, with their chain of slaughters and revenges, their two-dimensional personages, and their lifeless maxims which fail to sweeten the bloodshot atmosphere. The Senecan form was not barren in itself, as its sequel in France was to show: it was only barren for England. After Marlowe it was driven to the study, and was still written (possibly under the impulse of Mary countess of Pembroke), by Daniel and Greville, with much reminiscence of the French Senecans. But it left its trail on the real drama. It set the pattern of a high tragical action, often motived by revenge, swayed by large ideas of fate and retribution, and told in blank metre; and it bequeathed, besides many moral sentences, such minor points of mechanism as the Ghost, the Chorus and the inserted play. There were many hybrid forms like Gismond of Salern, based on foreign story, alloyed with the mere personifications of the Morality, and yet contriving, as in the case of Promos and Cassandra (the foundation of Measure for Measure), to interest Shakespeare. Thus the drama by 1580 had some of its carpentry, though not yet a true style or versification. These were only to be won by escape from the classic tutelage. The ruder chronicle play also began, and the reigns of John and Henry V. amongst others were put upon the stage.

Verse from Spenser to Donne

Sir Philip Sidney almost shares with Edmund Spenser the honours of announcing the new verse, for part of his Astrophel and Stella was written, if not known in unpublished form, about 1580-1581, and contains ten times the passion and poetry of The Shepherd's Calendar (1579). This work, of which only a few passages have the seal of Spenser's coming power, was justly acclaimed for its novelty of experiment in many styles, pastoral, satiric and triumphal, and in many measures: though it was criticized for its " rustic " and archaic diction - a " no language " that was to have more influence upon poetry than any of the real dialects of England. Spenser's desire to write high tragedy, avowed in his October, was not to be granted; his nine comedies are lost; and he became the chief non-dramatic poet of his time and country. Both the plaintive pessimism of Petrarch and du Bellay, with their favourite method of emblem, and the Platonic theory of the spiritual love and its heavenly begetting sank into him; and the Hymns To Love and To Beauty are possibly his earliest verses of sustained perfection and exaltation. These two strains of feeling Spenser never lost and never harmonized; the first of them recurs in his Complaints of 1591, above all in The Ruins of Time, the second in his Amoretti (1595) and Colin Clout and Epithalamion, which are autobiographical. These and a hundred other threads are woven into The Faerie Queene, an unfinished allegorical epic in honour of moral goodness, of which three books came out in 1590 and three more in 1596, while the fragment Of Constancy (so-called) is first found in the posthumous folio of 1609. This poem, is the fullest reflex, outside the drama, of the soul and aspirations of the time. For its scenery and mechanism the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto furnishes the framework. In both poems tales of knightly adventure intertwine unconfused; in both the slaying of monsters, the capture of strong places, and the release of the innocent, hindered by wizard and sorcerer, or aided by magic sword and horn and mirror, constitute the quest; and in both warriors, ladies, dwarfs, dragons and figures from old mythology jostle dreamily together. To all this pomp Spenser strove to give a moral and often also a political meaning. Ariosto was not a vales sacer; and so Spenser took Tasso's theme of the holy war waged for the Sepulchre, and expanded it into a war between good and evil, as he saw them in the world; between chastity and lust, loyalty and detraction, England and Spain, England and Rome, Elizabeth and usurpers, Irish governor and Irish rebel, right and wrong. The title-virtues of his six extant books he affects to take from Aristotle; but Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Justice, Friendship and Courtesy form a medley of medieval, puritanical and Greek ideals.

Spenser's moral sentiments, often ethereally noble, might well be contrasted, and that not always to their credit, with those more secular and naturalistic ones that rule in Shakespeare or in Bernardino Telesio and Giordano Bruno. But The Faerie Queene lives by its poetry; and its poetry lives independently of its creed. The idealized figures of Elizabeth, who is the Faerie Queene, and of the " magnificent " Prince Arthur, fail to bind the adventures together, and after two books the poem breaks down in structure. And indeed all through it relies on episode and pageant, on its prevailing and insuppressible loveliness of scene and tint, of phrasing and of melody, beside which the inner meaning is often an interruption. Spenser is not to be tired; in and out of his tapestry, with its " Blooming light much like a shade," pace his figures on horseback, or in durance, with their clear and pictorial allegoric trappings; and they go either singly, or in his favourite masques or pageants, suggested by emblematical painting or civic procession. He is often duly praised for his lingering and liquid melodies and his gracious images, or blamed for their langour; but his ground-tone is a sombre melancholy - unlike that of Jaques - and his deepest quality as a writer is perhaps his angry power. Few of his forty and more thousand lines are unpoetical; in certainty of style, amongst English poets who have written profusely, he has no equals but Chaucer, Milton and Shelley. His " artificial " diction, drawn from middle English, from dialect or from false analogy, has always the intention and nearly always the effect of beauty; we soon feel that its absence would be unnatural, and it has taken its rank among the habitual and exquisite implements of English poetry. This equality of noble form is Spenser's strength, as dilution and diffusion of phrase, and a certain monotonous slowness of tempo, are beyond doubt his weaknesses. His chief technical invention, the nine-line stanza (ababbcbcC) was developed not from the Italian octave (abababcc), but by adding an alexandrine to the eight-line stave (ababbcbc) of Chaucer's Monk's Tale. It is naturally articulated