by Will Durant
III. From Gaelic uisque-beatha, “water of life,” eau-de-vie.
CHAPTER III
On the Slopes of Parnassus
1558–1603
I. BOOKS
THEY were a swelling legion. “One of the great diseases of this age,” wrote Barnaby Rich in 1600, “is the multitude of books that doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the world.” “Already,” wrote Robert Burton (1628), “we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.”1 Both these plaintiffs wrote books.
The aristocracy, having learned to read, rewarded with material patronage authors who had softened them with dedications. Cecil, Leicester, Sidney, Raleigh, Essex, Southampton, the earls and the Countess of Pembroke were good patrons, who established between English nobles and authors a relation that continued even after Johnson lectured Chesterfield. Publishers paid authors some forty shillings for a pamphlet, some five pounds for a book.2 A few authors managed to live by their pens; the desperate profession of “man of letters” now took form in England. Private libraries were numerous among the well-to-do, but public libraries were rare. On the way home from Cádiz in 1596 Essex stopped at Faro, in Portugal, and appropriated the library of Bishop Jerome Osorius; he gave it to Sir Thomas Bodley, who included it in the Bodleian Library that he bequeathed to Oxford (1598).
The publishers themselves led a harried existence, subject to state law and public whim. There were 250 of them in Elizabeth’s England, for publishing and bookselling were still one trade. Most of them did their own printing; the separation of printer and publisher began toward the end of this reign. Publishers, printers, and booksellers united (1557) in a Stationers’ Company; registry of a publication with this guild constituted copyright, which, however, protected not the author but only the publisher. Normally the company would register only such publications as had obtained a legal license to be printed. It was a felony to write, print, sell, or possess any material injurious to the reputation of the Queen or the government, to publish or import heretical books or papal bulls or briefs, or to possess a book that upheld the supremacy of the popes over the English Church.3 There were several executions for violation of these decrees. The Stationers’ Company was empowered to search all printing establishments, to burn all unlicensed publications, and to imprison their publishers.4 Elizabethan censorship was more severe than any before the Reformation, but literature flourished; as in eighteenth-century France, wits were sharpened by the peril of print.
Scholars were few; it was an age of creation rather than criticism, and the humanistic current had run dry in those hot theological years. Most historians were still chroniclers, dividing their narratives by years; Richard Knolles, however, surprised Burghley with the comparative excellence of his General History of the Turks (1603). Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) gave him an unearned increment of fame by supplying Shakespeare with stories of the English kings. John Stow’s Chronicles of England (1580) was dressed up with “some colors of wisdom, invitements to virtue, and loathing of naughty facts,”5 but its scholarship was lamentable, and its prose had a powerful virtus dormitiva. His Survey of London (1598) was more scholarly, but brought him no more bread; in old age he had to be given a license to beg.6 William Camden, in good Latin, recorded the geography, scenery, and antiquities of England in Britannia (1582); and his Rerum Anglicarum et hiber-nicarum annales regnante Elizabetha (1615–27) based its story on conscientious study of original documents. Camden glorified the great Queen indiscriminately, lauded Spenser, ignored Shakespeare, and praised Roger Ascham, but mourned that so fine a scholar had died poor through love of dicing-and cockfighting.7
Ascham, secretary to “Bloody Mary” and tutor to Elizabeth, left at his death (1568) the most famous of English treatises on education, The Scholemaster (1570), primarily on the teaching of Latin, but containing, in strong, simple English, a plea for the replacement of Etonian severity with Christian kindness in education. He told how, at a dinner with men high in Elizabeth’s government, the conversation had turned on education through flogging; how Cecil had favored gentler methods; and how Sir Richard Sackville had privately confessed to Ascham that “a fond [foolish] schoolmaster … drave me, with fear of beating, from all love of learning.”8
The major and most fruitful function of the scholars was to impregnate the English mind with foreign thought. In the second half of the sixteenth century a wave of translations swept over the land from Greece, Rome, Italy, and France. Homer had to wait till 1611 for George Chapman, and the lack of English versions of Greek plays probably shared in giving the Elizabethan drama a “romantic” rather than a “classical” form. But there were translations of Theocritus’ idyls, Musaeus’ Hero and Leander, Epictetus’ Enchiridion, Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Oeconomicus, the speeches of Demosthenes and Isocrates, the histories of Herodotus, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Josephus, and Appian, the novels of Heliodorus and Longus, and Sir Thomas North’s racy translation (1579) of Amyot’s French translation of Plutarch’s Lives. From the Latin came Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Martial, Lucan, the plays of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, the histories of Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, and Suetonius. From Italy came Petrarch’s sonnets, Boccaccio’s Filocopo and Fiammetta (but no Decameron till 1620), the histories of Guicciardini and Machiavelli, the Orlandos of Boiardo and Ariosto, Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano, the Gerusalemme liberata and Aminta of Tasso, Guarini’s Pastor fido, and many fabulous novelle by Bandello and others, gathered into such collections as William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566). Machiavelli’s Il Principe was not done into English till 1640, but its substance was familiar to the Elizabethans; Gabriel Harvey reported that at Cambridge “Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, with the whole rabblement of Schoolmen … were expelled the University,” and were replaced with Machiavelli and Jean Bodin.9 From Spain came one of the longest romances, Amadis de Gaula; one of the first picaresque novels, Lazarillo de Tormes; one of the classic pastorals, the Diana of Montemayor. The best spoils from France were the poems of the Pléiade, and the essays of Montaigne, nobly Englished by John Florio (1603).
The influence of these translations upon Elizabethan literature was immense. Classical allusions began—and for two centuries continued—to encumber English poetry and prose. French was known to most memorable Elizabethan authors, so that translations were not indispensable. Italy fascinated England; English pastorals looked back to Sannazaro, Tasso, and Guarini, English sonnets to Petrarch, English fiction to Boccaccio and the novelle-, these last gave plots to Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Massinger, and Ford, and Italian locales to many Elizabethan plays. Italy, which had rejected the Reformation, had gone beyond it to break down the old theology, even the Christian ethic. While Elizabethan religion debated Catholicism and Protestantism, Elizabethan literature, ignoring that conflict, returned to the spirit and verve of the Renaissance. Italy, struck down for a time by a change in trade routes, handed the torch of the Rebirth to Spain, France, and England.
II. THE WAR OF THE WITS
In this Elizabethan exuberance both poetry and prose poured down in a turbulent flood. We know the names of two hundred Elizabethan poets. But until Spenser introduced his Faerie Queene (1590), it was prose that caught the ear of Elizabethan England.
John Lyly did it first with his fanciful Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit—i.e., of intelligence—in 1579. Lyly proposed to show how a fine mind and character can be formed through education, experience, travel, and wise counsel. Euphues (Good Speech) is a young Athenian whose adventures provide the scaffolding for wordy discourses on education, manners, friendship, love, atheism. What made the book the best seller of its time was its style—a flux of antitheses, alliterations, similes, puns, balanced clauses, classical allusions, and conceits that took the court of Elizabeth by storm and held the fashion for a genera
tion. For example:
This young gallant, of more wit than wealth, and yet of more wealth than wisdom, seeing himself inferior to none in pleasant conceits, thought himself superior to all in honest conditions, insomuch that he deemed himself so apt to all things that he gave himself almost to nothing.10
Whether Lyly caught this disease from the Italian Marini or the Spaniard Guevara or the rhetoriker of Flanders is in dispute. In any case Lyly welcomed the virus and transmitted it to a host of Elizabethans; it spoiled Shakespeare’s early comedies, tinged Bacon’s Essays, and gave a word to the language.
It was a word-conscious age. Gabriel Harvey, a Cambridge tutor, exerted all his influence to turn English poetry from accent and rhyme to classic meters based on syllabic quantities. At his urging, Sidney and Spenser formed in London a literary club, the Areopagus, which strove for a time to force Elizabethan vitality into Virgilian forms. Thomas Nash parodied Harvey’s “hopping” hexameters and laughed them literally out of court. When Harvey added insult to pedantry by condemning the morals of Nash’s friend Greene, he became the prime target in a pamphlet war that brought into England all the resources of Renaissance vituperation.
Robert Greene’s life summarized a thousand literary Bohemian careers from Villon to Verlaine. He was a fellow student at Cambridge with Harvey, Nash, and Marlowe; there he spent his time among “wags as lewd as” himself, with whom he “consumed the flower of his youth.”
I was drowned in pride; whoredom was my daily exercise, and gluttony with drunkenness was my only delight. … I was so far from calling upon God that I seldom thought on God, but took much delight in swearing and blaspheming the name of God. … If I may have my desire while I live, I am satisfied; let me shift after death as I may. … I feared the judges of the bench no more than I dread the judgments of God.11
He traveled in Italy and Spain, and there, he tells us, he “saw and practiced such villainy as is abominable to declare.” Returning, he became a familiar figure in London taverns, with his red hair, pointed beard, silk stockings, and personal bodyguard. He married and wrote tenderly of marital fidelity and bliss; then he forsook his wife for a mistress, upon whom he spent his wife’s fortune. From his firsthand knowledge he described the arts of the underworld in A Notable Discovery [uncovering] of Cozenage (1591) and warned rural visitors to London against the wiles of swindlers, cardsharpers, pickpockets, panders, and prostitutes; whereupon the underworld tried to kill him. It surprises us that in a life so assiduously devoted to vice he found time to write, with journalistic haste and verve, a dozen novels (in Euphuestic style), thirty-five pamphlets, and many successful plays. As his vigor and income declined, he saw some sense in virtue, and repented as eloquently as he had sinned. In 1591 he published a Farewell to Folly. In 1592 he composed two tracts of some moment. One, A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, attacked Gabriel Harvey. In the other, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance, he attacked Shakespeare and called upon his fellow lechers—apparently Marlowe, Peele, and Nash—to quit their sinning and join him in piety and remorse. On September 2, 1592, he sent to his forsaken wife an appeal to reimburse with ten pounds a shoemaker without whose charity “I had perished in the streets.”12 The next day, in the house of this shoemaker, he died—according to Harvey, from “a surfeit of pickled herring and Rhenish wine.” His landlady, forgiving his debts for his verse, crowned his head with a laurel wreath and paid for his funeral.13
Of all the Elizabethan pamphleteers, Greene’s friend Tom Nash had the sharpest tongue and the widest audience. Son of a curate and tired of decency, Nash graduated from Cambridge into London’s Bohemia, buttered his bread with his pen, and learned to write “as fast as [his] hand could trot.” He established the picaresque novel in England with The Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton (1594). When Greene died, and Harvey assailed both Greene and Nash in Four Letters, Nash retaliated with a series of pamphlets culminating in Have with You to Saffron Walden—Harvey’s birthplace—in 1596.
Readers, be merry, for in me there shall want nothing I can do to make you merry … It shall cost me a fall, but I will get him hooted out of the University … ere I give him over. What will you give me when I bring him upon the stage in one of the principalest colleges in Cambridge?14
Harvey survived this experience, outlived the Bohemians, and died at eighty-five in 1630. Nash completed his friend Marlowe’s play Dido, collaborated with Ben Jonson in The Isle of Dogs (1597), was indicted for sedition, and subsided into a cautious obscurity. At the age of thirty-four (1601) he crowned a fast life with an early death.
III. PHILIP SIDNEY: 1554–85
Far from this maddened crowd, Sidney rode serenely to an even earlier end. Facing us still in the National Portrait Gallery of London, he seems too delicate for a man: slender of face, with auburn hair, and “not a morsel too much of health,” said Languet;15 “extremely beautiful,” said Aubrey,16 “not masculine enough, yet … of great courage.” Some grumblers thought him a bit pompous17 and felt that he carried perfection to excess; only his heroic end won him pardon for his virtues.
But who would not be proud to have had for his mother Lady Mary Dudley, daughter of that Duke of Northumberland who had ruled England under Edward VI; and to have had for his father Sir Henry Sidney, Lord President of Wales and thrice Lord Deputy of Ireland; and to have received his Christian name from King Philip II of Spain as his godfather? Part of his fleeting life was lived in spacious Penshurst Place, whose oak-beam ceilings, picture walls, and crystal chandelier are among the fairest relics of that time. At the age of nine he was appointed lay rector to a church benefice, which brought him sixty pounds a year. At ten he entered Shrewsbury School, which was not too far from Ludlow Castle, his father’s residence as Lord President of Wales. To the boy of eleven Sir Henry wrote loving words of wisdom.18
Philip learned these lessons well and became a favorite with his uncle Leicester and his father’s friend William Cecil. After three years at Oxford he was sent to Paris as a minor member of an English mission. He was received at the court of Charles IX and witnessed the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. He traveled leisurely in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Italy. At Frankfurt he began a lifelong friendship with Hubert Languet, one of the intellectual leaders of the Huguenots; at Venice he had his portrait painted by Paolo Veronese; at Padua he imbibed the traditions of the Petrarchan sonnet. Back in England, he was welcomed at court and for almost two years danced attendance on the Queen, but he forfeited her favor for a time by opposing her prospective marriage with the Duke of Alençon. He had all the knightly qualities—pride of bearing, skill and bravery in tournament, courtesy in court, honor in all dealings, and eloquence in love. He studied Castiglione’s Courtier and tried to model his conduct on that gentle philosopher’s ideal of a gentleman, and others modeled themselves on Sidney. Spenser called him “the President of Noblesse and of Chivalry.”
It was a mark of the times that the aristocracy, which had once scorned literacy, now wrote poetry and suffered poets to come to them. Sidney, though not rich, became the most active literary patron of his generation. He helped Camden, Hakluyt, Nash, Harvey, Donne, Daniel, Jonson, and, above all, Spenser, who thanked him as “the hope of all learned men and the patron of my young muse.”19 It was quite out of order that Stephen Gosson should dedicate to Sidney his Schoole of Abuse (1579), whose title page described it as “a pleasant invective against poets, pipers, players, jesters, and such like caterpillars of the commonwealth.” Sidney took up the gauntlet and wrote the first of the Elizabethan classics—The Defence of Poesy.
Taking a lead from Aristotle and Italian critics, he defined poetry as “an art of imitation … representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth … a speaking picture” designed “to teach and delight.”20 Placing morals far above art, he justified art as teaching morality by pictured examples:
The philosopher … and the historian … would win the goal, the one
by precept, the other by example; but both, not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny arguments the bare rule [of morals], is so hard of utterance, and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old, before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest. For his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and the general that happy is that man that may understand him … On the other side the historian, wanting the precept, is tied, not to what should be but to what is … that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.
Now doth the peerless poet perform both, for whatsoever the philosopher said should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one by whom he supposeth it was done, so as he completed! the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture, I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as that other doth.21
Poetry, therefore, in Sidney’s view, includes all imaginative literature—drama, verse, and imaginative prose. “It is not rhyming and versifying that maketh poetry. One may be a poet without versifying, a versifier without poetry.”
He added example to precept. In the same year 1580 that produced the Defence, he began to write The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. This Countess, his sister, was one of the best-flattered ladies of the century. Born in 1561 and therefore seven years younger than Philip, she received all the education she could stand, including Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but her charm survived. She became a member of Elizabeth’s household and accompanied the Queen on the royal progresses. Her uncle Leicester advanced part of the dowry that enabled her to marry Henry, Earl of Pembroke. “She was very salacious,” according to Aubrey, and took some lovers to supplement her husband; but this did not deter Philip from adoring her and writing the Arcadia at her request.