Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/441

Rh 1579-1660.] ENGLISH LITERATURE 421 attempt to preserve the unity of time except in Kumeo and Juliet ; here the action is powerfully and successfully con centrated. The Roman plays, based on Plutarch s Lives, though they abound in passages of great power and beauty, are not so constructed as to produce the highest dramatic effect. When we turn to the other dramatists, Shakespeare s con temporaries and successors, the one point about them all that most strikes us is, their amazing exuberance. The English genius, as M. Tainein substance remarks, is naturally abundant and full of force ; if left to itself, it attends more to quantity than to quality ; it is daring and enterprising, and knows not when it is over-matched, as English soldiers are said not to know when they are beaten. Of this national vigour a large proportion was in the Elizabethan times directed to literature, and particularly to the stage. The development of the drama had now gone on without any notable check for many generations. All the artistic faculty of the country which before the Reformation had applied itself to other arts, such as decorative architecture, painting, and sculpture, now, when the scope for the exercise of these was suddenly reduced to the narrowest limits, tended to seek and find a refuge in the Thespi in art. Space does not permit of our noticing these dramatists in any but ouson. the briefest manner. Ben Jonson, proud of his learning and his university education, invented most of his own plots, and plumed himself on his strict observance of the unities. In the plays of Beaumont arid Fletcher the influ ence of the Spanish drama, the glory of which had been carried to a great height by Calderon and Lope de Vega, is noticeable. The intensity of Massinger and the pathos of Ford, amid much that is grotesque or repulsive, preserve thuir dramas from entire oblivion. Other names are those of Webster, Chapman, Heywood, Dekker, Marston, Middleton, and Rowley. The plays of Shirley were at the height of their popularity when, after the breaking out of the civil war, the theatres were closed by order of the parliament. This order is the overt act of Puritanism, by which, after having first complained of, then protested against, then furiously denounced, the abuses of the stage, it proceeds, now that it has got the handling of the civil sword, to remove both use and abuse by force. The violent language of Prynne in the book (1633) to which he gave the title of Histriomastix (a barbarous compound signifying &quot; the player s scourge &quot;), though at the time cruelly punished by the Star Chamber, told of a great and increasing force of public opinion behind him, of which he was but the. mouth-piece. Puritanism, by the order of suppression, at once avenged the insults and ridicule with which the dramatists had assailed it, and cut down a vigorous scion which had grown up out of the root of the ancient civilization. The drama was restored before twenty years were over ; but it was a new creation, and never won the people s love as the old Elizabethan drama had done. It was an affair of courts and coteries, and was almost shaken down by the blunt reproaches of one honest, plain-spoken man, Jeremy Collier. Puritanism possessing itself more and more of the popular conscience, the revival of a national drama became impossible. Our theatres are supported by the miscellaneous urban population which is always to be found in great cities ; but as a nation we have had no drama since the civil war. iction. In the department of Fiction we have to note a new transformation of the romance, by which it assumes the farm of pastoral novel. The tale of chivalry, modified so as to recommend a religious ideal by Walter Map and his fellow workers, then passing into the love-story with allegorical embellishments in the hands of Lorris, was further changed by Sannazzaro, Montemayor, and other Spanish and Italian writers, into the love-story with pastoral and mythological embellishments. Here of course we trace the influence of the classical revival ; allegory is dropped as too cumbrous ; and a florid phraseology, culled from the idylls of Theocritus, the miscellaneous works of Lucian, and other classical or quasi-classical sources, takes its place. The Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney was suggested by Sidney. Sannazzaro s pastoral romance of the same name, but can be read with more interest, because AVC see that it has been made the vehicle by means of which a powerful mind makes known its thoughts on many intricate and important ques tions, in metaphysics, political science, art, and social ethics. But the prolixity of the work, together with its confused arrangement, would always prevent it from attaining to anything like the popularity which it enjoyed when, and for some time after, it appeared. The Euphues of Lyly, a Lyly. kind of philosophical novel, written in an affected and pedantic style, has, since the ascription to its influence by Sir Walter Scott of the magniloquent bombast which he puts iu the mouth of Sir Piercie Shafton in the Monastery, and considers to be characteristic of the conversation of courtiers at that period, given rise to the term &quot; euphuism.&quot; Yet it must be allowed that Sir Piercie Shafton s talk is quite a caricature of the language in Euphues ; of the two, it more resembles the high-flown language that we meet with in Sidney s Arcadia. The Mundus Alter et Idem of Hall (afterwards bishop of Norwich) is a satirical romance, written from the clerico- despotic point of view, in the aim of exhibiting the debase ment which the principle of democracy, if carried out con sistently and over a long period, would, according to the author s theory, bring upon both social and individual man. One of the last and most pernicious delusions of the infatuated community described in the book consists in establishing &quot; a perpetual parliament.&quot; Such were the advisers, obeying whose fatal suggestions Charles I. reigned eleven years without a parliament, and brought things to a pass whence civil war was the only issue. In the Ecclesiastical Polity of Richard Hooker, published Hooker, near the close of the 16th century, a solid intellectual basis, illustrated by great learning and the attractions of a grave and majestic style, was for the first time given to the con ception of the via media, in which Anglican churchmen&quot; believed they saw a secure shelter for moderate minds, midway between Rome and the extreme forms of Protestantism. The work is naturally directed rather against the Puritans, who were numerous both in church and state, and might eventually, as in fact they did, gain the upper hand, than against the Catholics, whom the laws already silenced and disarmed. The restiveness of the Puritans under the existing laws and church ordinances, which, as they thought, left religion insufficiently reformed, suggested to Hooker an inquiry into the nature of laws, and the grounds of their binding force ; this is the subject of the celebrated disquisition iu the first book. The Puritans were not convinced, and the struggle between them and the Anglicans went on increasing iu violence, until, after the outbreak of war, the ascendency of the Puritan element in the Lower House, and the secession of most of the peers to Oxford, enabled its enemies temporarily to suppress the established church, During the suppression, a work of great abiMty, entitled A Discourse on the Liberty of Pro- pkesyiny (1647), appeared from the pen of Jeremy Taylor. Taylor. Fifty years have made a great difference ; the champion of Anglicanism no longer insists on obedience, but pleads for toleration ; if only the Church of England could be estab lished again in certain districts, he would be willing to see the worship of many different sects, provided that they all agreed to accept the Apostles Creed as a common standard, carried on in other parts of the country. The lapse of a few years restored to the church its former status without