by Will Durant
VII. WYATT AND SURREY
Not as a flood, but as a river flowing through many outlets to the sea, the influence of Italy passed through France and reached England. The scholarship of one generation inspired the literature of the next; the divine revelation of ancient Greece and Rome became the Bible of the Renaissance. In 1486 the plays of Plautus were staged in Italy, and soon thereafter at the rival courts of Francis I and Henry VIII. In 1508 Bibbiena’s Calandra began the vernacular classic comedy in Italy; in 1552 Jodelle’s Cléopatre captive began the vernacular classic tragedy in France; in 1553 Nicholas Udall produced the first English comedy in classical form. Ralph Roister Doister, said a critic, “smelt of Plautus”;41 it did; but it smelled of England too, and of that robust humor that Shakespeare would serve to the groundlings at the Elizabethan theaters.
The Italian influence appeared brightest in the poetry of the Tudor reigns. The medieval style survived in such pretty ballads as The Not-browne Mayd (1521); but when the poets who basked in the sun of young Henry VIII took to verse their ideal and model were Petrarch and his Canzoniere. Just a year before Elizabeth’s accession, Richard Tottel, a London printer, published a Miscellany in which the poems of two distinguished courtiers revealed the triumph of Petrarch over Chaucer, of classic form over medieval exuberance. Sir Thomas Wyatt, as a diplomat in the service of the King, made many a trip to France and Italy, and brought back some Italians to help him civilize his friends. Like a good Renaissance cortigiano, he burned his fingers in love’s fire: he was, said tradition, one of Anne Boleyn’s early lovers, and he was briefly imprisoned when she was sent to the Tower.42 Meanwhile he translated Petrarch’s sonnets, and was the first to compress English verse into that compact form.
When Wyatt died of a fever at thirty-nine (1542), another romantic figure at Henry’s court, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, caught the lyre from his hands. Surrey chanted the beauties of spring, reproved reluctant lasses, and vowed eternal fidelity to each in turn. He took to nocturnal excesses in London, served a term in jail for challenging to a duel, was summoned to trial for eating meat in Lent, broke some windows with his playful crossbow, was again arrested, again released, and fought gallantly for England in France. Returning, he toyed too audibly with the idea of becoming king of England. He was condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but was let off with decapitation (1547).
Poetry was an incidental ornament in this strenuous life. Surrey translated some books of the Aeneid, introduced blank verse into English literature, and gave the sonnet the form that Shakespeare was to use. Perhaps foreseeing that the paths of undue glory might lead to the block, he addressed to a Roman poet a wistful idyl of rustic routine and peace:
Martial, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
No change of rule nor governance;
Without disease the healthful life;
The household of continuance;
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom joined with simpleness;
The night dischargèd of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress;
The faithful wife, without debate;
Such sleep as may beguile the night;
Contented with thine own estate,
Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.
VIII. HANS SACHS
The mind of Germany, in the century that followed Luther’s Theses, was lost in the hundred years’ debate that prepared the Thirty Years’ War. After 1530 the publication of ancient classics almost ceased; in general, fewer books were issued; they were replaced by a torrent of controversial pamphlets. Thomas Murner, a Franciscan monk with an acid pen, scourged everybody with a chain of booklets about rascals or dolts —Schmelmenzunft (Guild of Rogues), Narrenbeschwörung (Muster of Fools)... all proliferated from Brant’s Narrenschiff.* Many of the fools lashed by Murner were churchmen, and he was at first mistaken for a Lutheran; but then he celebrated Luther as “a savage bloodhound, a senseless, foolish, blasphemous renegade.” 43 Henry VIII sent him £100.
Sebastian Franck was of finer metal. The Reformation found him a priest in Augsburg; he hailed it as a brave and needed revolt, and became a Lutheran minister (1525). Three years later he married Ottilie Beham, whose brothers were Anabaptists; he developed sympathy for this persecuted sect, condemned Lutheran intolerance, was expelled from Strasbourg, and made a living by boiling soap in Ulm. He ridiculed the determination of religious orthodoxy by the German dukes, noting that “if one prince dies and his successor brings in another creed, this at once becomes God’s Word.”44 “Mad zeal possesses all men today, that we should believe .... that God is ours alone, that there is no heaven, faith, spirit, Christ, but in our sect.” His own faith was a universalist theism that closed no doors. “My heart is alien to none. I have my brothers among the Turks, Papists, Jews, and all peoples.” 45 He aspired to “a free, unsectarian... Christianity, bound to no outer thing,” not even to the Bible.46 Shocked by sentiments so unbecoming to his century, Ulm banished him in its turn. He found work as a printer in Basel, and died there in honest penury (1542).
German poetry and drama were now so immersed in theology that they ceased to be arts and became weapons of war. In this strife any jargon, coarseness, and obscenity were held legitimate; except for folk songs and hymns, poetry disappeared in a fusillade of poisoned rhymes. The lavishly staged religious dramas of the fifteenth century passed out of public taste, and were succeeded by popular farces lampooning Luther or the popes.
Now and then a man rose above the fury to see life whole. If Hans Sachs had obeyed the magistrates of Nuremberg he would have remained a shoemaker; for when, without securing the civic imprimatur, he published a rhyming history of the Tower of Babel, they suppressed the book, assured him that poetry was obviously not his line, and bade him stick to his last.47 Yet Hans had some rights, for he had passed through the usual stages to become a Meistersinger, and the anomaly of his being a cobbler and a poet fades when we note that the guild of weavers and shoemakers to which he belonged regularly practiced choral song, and gave public concerts thrice a year. For this guild, and at any other opportunity, Sachs wrote songs and plays as assiduously as if he were mouthing nails.
We must think of him not as a great poet, but as a sane and cheerful voice in a century of hate. His basic interest was in simple people, not in geniuses; his plays were almost always about such people; and even God, in these dramas, is a benevolent commoner, who talks like some parson of the neighborhood. While most writers peppered their pages with bitterness, vulgarity, or ribaldry, Hans portrayed and exalted the virtues of affection, duty, piety, marital fidelity, parental and filial love. His first published poems (1516) proposed “to promote the praise and glory of God,” and “to help his fellow creatures to a life of penitence”;48 and this religious spirit warmed his writings to the end. He turned half the Bible into rhyme, using Luther’s translation as a text. He saluted Luther as “the Nightingale of Wittenberg,” who would cleanse religion and restore morality.
Awake! awake! the day is near,
And in the woods a song I hear.
It is the glorious nightingale;
Her music rings on hill and dale.
The night falls into Occident,
The day springs up in Orient,
The dawn comes and sets alight
The gloomy clouds of parting night.49
Now Sachs became the bard of the Reformation, satirizing the faults of Catholics with doggerel tenacity. He wrote plays about rascally monks, and traced the origin of their tribe to the Devil; he issued burlesques and farces which showed, for example, a priest seducing a girl or saying Mass while drunk; in 1558 he published a History in Rhyme of the Popess Joanna—a fable which most Protestant preachers accepted as history. But Hans satirized Lutherans too, denou
ncing their lives as scandalously contrary to their creed: “With your flesh-eating, your uproars, your abuse of priests, your quarreling, mocking, insulting, and all your other improper behavior, you Lutherans have brought the Gospel into great contempt.”50 He joined a hundred others in mourning the commercialism and immorality of the age.
All in all, and discounting Wagner’s idealization, Hans Sachs may typify the bluff and crude but kindly German who, at least in the south, must have been in the majority. We picture him happy and melodious for forty years in his home and his poetry. When his first wife died (1560) he married, at sixty-eight, a pretty woman of twenty-seven, and survived even this trial. There is something to be said for an age and a city in which a cobbler could become a humanist, a poet, and a musician, acquire and use a large library, learn Greek literature and philosophy, write 6,000 poems, and live in reasonable health and happiness to die at the age of eighty-two.
IX. THE IBERIAN MUSE: 1515–55
This was a lively time in the literature of Portugal. The exciting stimulus of the explorations, the spreading wealth of expanding commerce, the influence of Italy, the humanists at Coimbra and Lisbon, the patronage of a cultivated court, joined in an efflorescence that would soon culminate in the Lusiads (1572) of Camoëns. A merrv battle raged between the Eschola Velha—Old School—of Gil Vicente, who cherished native themes and forms, and Os Quinhentistas—The Men of the Fifteenth (our Sixteenth) Century—who followed Sá de Miranda in enthusiasm for Italian and classic modes and styles. For thirty-four years (1502–36) Gil Vicente, “the Portuguese Shakespeare,” dominated the theater with his simple autos, or acts; the court smiled upon him, and expected him to celebrate every royal event with a play; and when the king was quarreling with the pope Gil was allowed to satirize the papacy with such freedom that Aleander, seeing one of Vicente’s plays in Brussels, “thought I was in mid-Saxony listening to Luther.”51 The fertile dramatist wrote sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in Portuguese, sometimes in both, with scraps of Italian and French, Church Latin and peasant slang, thrown in. Often the action of the piece was interrupted, as in Shakespeare, with lyrics that crept into the hearts of the people. Like Shakespeare, Gil was actor as well as playwright; he was stage manager as well, and directed the settings. For good measure he was one of the best goldsmiths of the age.
In 1524 Francisco Sá de Miranda returned from a six years’ stay in Italy, and brought with him the classical fever of the Renaissance. Like Ronsard and the Pléiade in France, like Spenser and Sidney in England, he proposed to dignify the national literature by modeling its subjects, meters, and style on classical lines; like Joachim du Bellay, he included Petrarch among the classics, and introduced the sonnet to his countrymen; like Jodelle he wrote the first classical tragedy in his native tongue (1550); and he had already (1527) written the first Portuguese prose comedy in classic form. His friend Bernardim Ribeiro composed bucolic poetry in the style of Virgil, and lived a tragedy in the manner of Tasso: he made such a stir with his passion for a lady of the court that he was banished; he was forgiven and restored to royal favor, and died insane (1552).
A school of colorful historians recorded the triumphs of the explorers. Caspar Correa went out to India, rose to be one of Albuquerque’s secretaries, denounced official corruption, and was murdered in Malacca in 1565. Amid this active life he wrote in eight volumes what he called “a brief summary” of the Portuguese conquest of India (Lendas da India), full of the color of that expansive era. Fernäo Lopes de Castanheda traveled for half a lifetime in the East, and labored for twenty years on his Historia do descobrimento e conquista da India pelos Portuguezes. Joao de Barros served in several administrative capacities at India House in Lisbon for forty years, and disgraced his predecessors by amassing no fortune. He had access to all the archives, and gathered them into a history which he called simply Asia, but which acquired the name of Decades because three of its four huge volumes covered periods of some ten years each. In order, accuracy, and clarity it bears comparison with any contemporary historical composition except the works of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. The proud nation would have rejected the exceptions, and gave Barros the title of “the Portuguese Livy.”
The Castilian tongue had now become the literary language of Spain. Galician, Valencian, Catalonian, Andalusian dialects survived in the speech of the people, and Galician became Portuguese; but the use of Castilian as the language of state and Church under Ferdinand, Isabella, and Ximenes gave that dialect an insuperable prestige, and from their time to ours its masculine sonority has carried the literature of Spain. An infatuation with language appeared in some writers of this age. Antonio de Guevara set an example of linguistic conceits and rhetorical flourishes, and the translation of his Reloj de principes (Dial of Princes, 1529) by Lord Berners helped to mold the euphuism of John Lyly’s Euphues, and the silly wordplay of Shakespeare’s early comedies.
Spanish literature sang of religion, love, and war. The passion for romances of chivalry reached such a height that in 1555 the Cortes recommended that they be prohibited by law; such a decree was actually issued in Spanish America; had it been enforced in Spain we might have missed Don Quixote. One of the romances spared by the curate in the purification of the Knight’s library was the Diana enamorata (1542) of Jorge de Montemayor; it imitated the Arcadia (1504) of the Spanish-Italian poet Sannazaro, and was itself imitated by Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590). Montemayor’s prose-and-poetry romance was one of a thousand instances of Italian influence on Spanish literature; here again the conquered conquered the conquerors. Juan Boscan translated Castiglione’s Cortigiano into prose quite worthy of the original, and accepted the suggestion of the Venetian poet Navagero to popularize the sonnet form in Spain.
His friend Garcilaso de la Vega almost at once brought the form to perfection in Castilian. Like so many Spanish writers of this period, he came of high lineage; his father was ambassador of Ferdinand and Isabella at Rome. Born at Toledo in 1503, Garcilaso was early dedicated to arms. In 1532 he distinguished himself in the repulse of the Turks from Vienna; in 1535 he was twice severely wounded in the siege of Tunis; a few months later he shared in Charles V’s futile campaign in Provence. At Fréjus he volunteered to lead an attack upon an obstructive castle; he was the first to mount the wall; he received a blow on the head from which he died a few days later, aged thirty-three. One of the thirty-seven sonnets which he bequeathed to his friend Boscan struck a note that has echoed in every war:
And now larger than ever lies the curse
On this our time; and all that went before
Keeps altering its face from bad to worse;
And each of us has felt the touch of war-
War after war, and exile, dangers, fear—
And each of us is weary to the core
Of seeing his own blood along a spear
And being alive because it missed its aim.
Some folks have lost their goods and all their gear,
And everything is gone, even the name
Of house and home and wife and memory.
And what’s the use of it? A little fame?
The nation’s thanks? A place in history?
One day they’ll write a book, and then we’ll see.52
He could not see, but a thousand books commemorated him fondly. Historians recorded his death among the leading events of the time. His poems were printed in handy volumes which were carried in the pockets of Spanish soldiers into a dozen lands. Spanish lutenists put his lyrics to music as madrigals for the vihuela, and dramatists turned his eclogues into plays.
The Spanish drama marked time, and could not know that it would soon rival the Elizabethan. One-act comedies, farcical satires, or episodes from popular romances were performed by strolling players in a public square or the corrale—yard—of an inn, sometimes at a princely seat or royal court. Lope de Rueda, who succeeded Gil Vicente as chief provider of autos for such troupes, made his fame—and gave us a word—with his bobos, clowns.<
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Historians abounded. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo was appointed historiographer of the New World by Charles V, and acquitted himself indifferently well with a voluminous and ill-ordered Historia general y natural de las Indias Occidentales (1535). During forty years of residence in Spanish America he grew rich from mining gold, and he resented the Brevisima relacion de la destruycion de las Indias (1539 f.), in which Bartolomé de las Casas exposed the merciless exploitation of native slave labor in the American mines. Las Casas sailed with Columbus in 1502, became Bishop of Chiapa in Mexico, and gave nearly all his life to the cause of the Indians. In Memorials addressed to the Spanish government he described the rapidity with which the natives were dying under the arduous conditions of work imposed upon them by the settlers. The Indians had been accustomed by their warm climate and simple diet to only casual labor; they had not mined gold, but had been content to derive it from the surface of the earth or the beds of shallow streams, and used it only as an ornament. Las Casas calculated that the native population of the “Indies” had been reduced from 12,000,000 (doubtless too high a guess) to 14,000 in thirty-eight years.53 Dominican and Jesuit missionaries joined with Las Casas in protesting against Indian slavery,54 and Isabella repeatedly denounced it.55 Ferdinand and Ximenes prescribed semi-humane conditions for the conscription of Indian labor,56 but while these gentlemen were engrossed in European politics their instructions for the treatment of the natives were mostly ignored.
A minor debate concerned the conquest of Mexico. Francisco López de Gómara gave a very Cortesian account of that rape; Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in protest, composed (1568 f.) his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, which, while giving due praise to Cortes, condemned him for taking all the honors and profits of the conquest, leaving little for such brave soldiers as Bernal. It is a fascinating book, full of the lust of action, the joy of victory, and honest amazement at the wealth and splendor of Aztec Mexico. “When I beheld the scenes that were around me, I thought within myself that this was the garden of the world.” And then he adds, “All is destroyed.”57