Yet, before we pass nil to consider the drama in this period (for its earlier history, see DRAMA; MYSTERY; MIRACLE-PLAY ; !MORALITY ), there is one name which must lie set, in the non-dramatic literature of the time, in a position comparable only with Shakespeare's, and one work which more fully than any other in English sums up the manifold effects of the Renaissance. Let Spenser be, as Lamb called him, the poet's poet; grant that lie will never take hold of the great popular mass, of whose common life he is so wholly careless; lie is yet one of the immortals, and it is to a world beyond space and time that lie intro duces us in The Fuerie ()acetic. A Puritan by conviction, though fortunately a Puritan born before his party thought it necessary to war upon everything that was beautiful, he has a moral purpose in his writing, and an allegory lies in wait for us as we wander through his enchanted land. We may elude it, however, and merely note that the mural seriousness which lies at the root of the poem differentiates Spenser entirely front his Italian model, Ariosto, to whom lie owes so much in form. But his style is richer and more elaborate than his master's; he builds up, on the suggestion of the Italian ()Ham rind°, the more eomplex and effective stanza which goes by his name. His childlike delight in the world of sense, which, with all the marvelous resources of his imagery and his music, he strives to make us share, is touched at times by that note of melancholy so common and so significant in the Renaissance writers who stop to think of the shortness and uncertainty of that human life on which they concentrate their highest powers. Among the other poets of the time, Chapman must have a word of commendation, if only for his great translation of Horner, in which, for the Iliad, he employed what is probably the most successful metre in English—the swinging 'four teener' of the old ballads.
The causes for the phenomenal, one may say unparalleled, outburst of great literature which distinguishes the age of Elizabeth are many and varied. It was not only that the sunlight of the Renaissance, whose rays had been long in reach ing England, now shone in all its radiance there; nor that the invention of printing had made it possible to circulate books by the thousand, and raised the gains of authors to a point where they tempted new men into the field; nor that the personality of the Queen, exalted by the hyper boles of poets, formed a focus for their enthusi asm, while her gracious patronage of every art encouraged them to do their best. There was also the life and death struggle with Spain, wide!) called out all that was highest and noblest in the hearts of patriotic Englishmen at the same time that donu•stie controversies sharpened their wits to do their best for the side they had espoused. There was the rise of the new middle class to increase the number of both authors and readers. And the discoveries of strange, half fabulous lands beyond the seas seemed a lit pendant to the conquest of whole new provinces of thought, and spurred men•s minds on to explore the furthest regions of the knowable and the thinkable.
The drama, whose very nature appealed to that age of stir and vigorous action, wits naturally the form that expressed its spirit hest, aside from the filet that a century of printing had not yet made reading the daily habit of every man. And since the drama was to be the characteristic lit erary form of the period, it was most fortunate that it escaped the snares set for it by some of its earliest formal practitioners in England. With the enthusiasm of Renaissance scholars for the work of the ancients, they insisted that the English drama should be modeled strictly upon its Roman predecessor; Seneca was to be the standard of tragedy, and Terence, who had pre served a sort of charmed life all through the Dark Ages, of comedy. The academic school of playwrights strove hard to enforce this model upon all their fellows, aided by Sir Philip Sid ney's vigorous blows in his Defener of l'oesie. The effort was not without its good results in the direction of imposing care for structure and checking too loose imagination; but that it failed was an inestimable advantage to the growth of the literature which is our pride. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the young Davids of the day, tried the armor of Saul before they went out to the battle, then wisely laid it off. Across the Chan nel, Malherbe and other literary dictators were able to enforce their canons, with the result that French classical tragedy, stately and finished as it is, has never been a living thing, able to thrill and dominate the nation, because it has always been alien from the nation's life.
Sackville and Norton, with their Gorboduc, are enshrined in a special place of honor by historians of literary development; the first English tragedy is a noteworthy event. But to Marlowe belongs a much more significant mention. It is lie who first showed the way to the construction of a true English drama. first exemplified a unity more potent than the artificial conventions of classicism—that which centres around the devel opment of one mighty character and his deeds. It was he who, though the iambic pentameter was not new to English verse. is yet really the creator of the 'mighty line' which became recognized as the regular medium for serious drama, and in Milton's skillful hands became even mightier and more perfect. He, like his own Faustus, "sums up for us the Renaissance passion for life, sleep less in its search, and daring in its grasp after the infinite in power, in knowledge, and in pleasure." and the career which ended so miser ably in a tavern brawl, after less than thirty years, was yet full of splendid achievement.
The place of Shakespeare in a survey of this kind must be in exact disproportion to his abso lute greatness. Precisely because of the tower ing command of that greatness, because "lie was not of an age, hut for all time," he has less to do with the general development of thought and expression than many a lesser man. it is not the mighty rock that rears its sturdy shoulders out of torrent to which we look for indications of the direction and force of the current. In fact, though in a sense the crowning glory of English literature. he belongs not so much to it as to the whole world. lie may of course be considered in part as a product of the conditions which affected the general literary growth ; but when we stop to consider the other dramatists of his age we shall he struck by the difference more in kind than in degree between him and them; in the bold hyperbole with which Swinburne closes sonnet, "All stars are angels, but the sun is God." The one of his contemporaries who comes near est to him in rank, Ben Jonson, is also, it so happens, the one whose characteristics are the most instructive for the purposes of a philosophic contrast of tendencies. While the old theory of a personal envy of his master on Jonson's part is now discredited, the fact remains that he repre sents two points of view diametrically opposite to Shakespeare's. Almost alone in an age of far going romanticism, he stood unflinchingly for the classical ideals in the drama—for the enforce ment of the unities from which Shakespeare had escaped, as well as for wider and happier applica tions of what we call the classical tradition, for the calm, ordered sanity of that school in an age when the riot of imaginative license ran nn checked. While the struggle seemed fruitless at the time, his attitude was not without its re sults. The seed slumbered in the ground for a while; but in the end it sprang up and brought forth trnit in the fully developed classicism of Dryden and Pope. The other point of contrast touches the never - ending controversy between realism and idealism. The former, for our pur pose, may he taken to mean the kind of por traiture which is content to seize with fidelity the external characteristics of a man or a woman. IA !lily the latter designates the spirit of penetrat ing insight which goes far below the surface into the eternal verit ies of human nature—which sees men not only as they appear, but as they are, and perhaps even more as they may be. This was the spirit of Shakespeare, and it is largely because of his possession of this insight that be holds to this day his mastery over the world, while donson is read only by students of litera ture. In his own day Jonson v as far more popu lar than the supreme dramatist: his faculty of hitting off to the life the little foibles and fash ions of his generat ion, of painting (in his own phrase) 'every man in his humor.' appealed to an audience who could recognize each detail as part he daily life of their own circle; but when that generation had passed away, and new man ners had come in with another, these old-fash ioned humors roused no more than the PVIIIIIPSPellt interest with which to-day we regard the faded daguerreotypes of our grandfathers. ,Ionson's most dire. I influenee upon his age was found in the graceful lyrics which served as models for the cavoli• r poets, and in his domestication in Eng land of the nuclue, which made Comas possible.