Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/112

98 The work is carried down to the year 1616. It is impossible not to regret that the history from that perhaps arbitrary date to the Civil War still remains unwritten. True it is that this may be the furthest limit to which the term “Elizabethan” can with propriety be stretched; but though conditions changed they changed slowly and continuously. There is no such break between Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama, as between these and the Mediaeval on the one hand and the Restoration on the other. At the same time we have been waiting twenty years for the present instalment; we must have waited appreciably longer for the continuation, and I do not think I am giving voice to mere impatience if I say that we could not afford to do so. The interest in the early stage and early drama was never keener or more widespread than now; new lines of approach are constantly being opened up, and these lead to new theories that require to be brought to the touchstone of ascertained fact. Hitherto, with only Collier and Fleay, apart from minor works, to guide us, we have been groping in a jungle or picking our way across a morass, often both at once. Now at last we know where we stand: we know the general structure and outline of the subject, the hard skeleton of fact with which our more fleshy reconstructions have to conform. The gain is enormous and most opportune.

But that does not mean that we should give up hope for the future. I for one look forward eagerly to seeing the quarter of a century that lies between the death of Shakespeare and the death of the stage he knew mapped out on a similar scale by Dr. Chambers or under his inspiration. First, however, I want to see that “little book about Shakespeare” for which these six mighty volumes in maroon and green are the prolegomena. That we already ask for more marks our appreciation of what we have received.

And how good it is! There is an epic quality in the story. As Dr. Chambers sees it, the history of the Elizabethan stage at its most critical period is the struggle of the Court and Humanism on the one part against the City and Puritanism on the other, and it was the final triumph of the former under the guidance of Tudor statesmanship that, not indeed produced the genius of Shakespeare, but conditioned its manifestation as the crowning blossom of what the world has come to regard, perhaps rightly, as one of its supreme achievements in literature. On the narrower issue Dr. Chambers writes: “The history of play-licensing in London … really