The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins Page 12

  Following the example of Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), Sidney imagined, at length and ease, a world of brave princes, exquisite princesses, knightly combats, mystifying disguises, and fascinating scenery. “The loveliness of Urania is the greatest thing the world can show, but the least that may be praised in her”;22 and Palladius had “a piercing wit quite devoid of ostentation, high erected thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy, an eloquence as sweet in the uttering as slow to be uttering, a behavior so noble as gave majesty to adversity”;23 clearly Sidney had read Euphues. The story is an amorous maze: Pyrocles disguises himself as a woman to be near the fair Philoclea; she frustrates him by loving him as a sister; her father falls in love with him, thinking him a woman; her mother falls in love with him, perceiving him to be a man; however, everything ends according to the Ten Commandments. Sidney did not take the tale very seriously; he never corrected the sheets he had dashed off for his sister; on his deathbed he ordered them burned. They were preserved, edited, and published (1590), and were for a decade the most admired work in Elizabethan prose.

  While writing this romance and the Defence, and amid his life as diplomat and soldier, Sidney composed a sonnet sequence that paved the way for Shakespeare’s. For this he needed some unsuccessful love. He found it in Penelope Devereux, daughter of the first Earl of Essex; she welcomed his sighs and rhymes as lawful game, but married Baron Rich (1581); Sidney continued to address sonnets to her, even after his own marriage to Frances Walsingham. Few Elizabethans were shocked by this poetic license; no one expected a man to write sonnets to his own wife, whose generosity stilled the muse. The sequence was published (1591) after Sidney’s death under the title of Astrophel and Stella—star lover and star. It followed the style of Petrarch, whose Laura had strangely anticipated the eyes, hair, brow, cheeks, skin, and lips of Penelope. Sidney was quite aware that his passion was a poetic mechanism; he himself had written: “If I were a mistress, [sonneteers] would never persuade me they were in love.”24 Once accepted as fair play, these sonnets are England’s best before Shakespeare’s. Even the moon is sick with love:

  With how sad steps, O Moon, thou clim’st the skies,

  How silently, and with how mean a face!

  What, may it be that even in heavenly place

  That busy Archer his sharp arrows tries?

  Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes

  Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case,

  I read it in thy looks, thy languish’d grace

  To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.

  Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,

  Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?

  Are beauties there as proud as here they be?

  Do they above love to be loved, and yet

  Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?

  Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?25

  In 1585 Sidney was sent by Elizabeth to aid the Netherland rebels against Spain. Though not yet thirty-one, he was made governor of Flushing. He displeased the pinching Queen by asking for more supplies and better wages for his soldiers, who were being paid in debased currency.26 He led his men to the capture of Axel (July 6, 1586) and fought in the front of the action. But in the battle of Zutphen (September 22) he was too brave. His horse having been killed in a charge, Sidney leaped upon another and fought his way into the enemy’s ranks. A musket ball entered his thigh. His horse, out of control, fled back to Leicester’s camp.I Thence Sidney was taken to a private home in Arnhem. For twenty-five days he suffered under incompetent surgeons. Gangrene set in, and on October 17 the “wonder of our age” (so Spenser mourned him) welcomed death. “I would not change my joy,” he said on that last day, “for the empire of the world.”28 When his corpse was brought to London it received such a funeral as England would not see again before Nelson’s death.

  IV. EDMUND SPENSER: 1552–99

  “Sidney is dead,” wrote Spenser, “dead is my friend, dead is the world’s delight.”29 It was Sidney who had given Spenser the courage to be a poet. Edmund had begun unpropitiously as the son of a journeyman clothmaker, too distantly related to the aristocratic Spensers to allow the boy to be noticed. Charitable funds sent him to the Merchant Taylors’ School, then to Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, where he worked for his board. By seventeen he was writing—even publishing—poetry. Harvey tried to guide him into classic molds and themes; Spenser tried humbly to please him, but soon rebelled against the bonds that uncongenial meters placed upon his muse. In 1579 he showed Harvey the first portion of The Faerie Queene; Harvey had no fancy for its medieval allegorical content, no appreciation for its fine metrical form. He advised the poet to abandon the project. Spenser continued it.

  It was the gruff and bellicose Harvey who secured for Spenser a place in the service of the Earl of Leicester. There the poet met Sidney, loved him, dedicated to him The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579). The form echoed Theocritus, but followed the plan of popular almanacs, allotting the tasks of shepherds according to the season of the year. The theme was the unrequited love of the shepherd Colin Clout for the cruel Rosalind. It is not recommended reading, but Sidney’s praise won Spenser some acclaim. To butter his bread, the poet accepted the post of secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey, the new Lord Deputy of Ireland (1579); accompanied him to war, and saw and approved Grey’s slaughter of the surrendering Irish and Spaniards at Smerwick. After seven years of clerical service to the English government in Ireland he was granted, from the confiscated property of Irish rebels, the Castle of Kilcolman, on the road between Mallow and Limerick, and three thousand acres.

  There Spenser settled down to gentleman farming and genteel poetry. He commemorated Sidney’s death in an eloquent but lengthy elegy, Astrophel (1586). Then he polished and elongated The Faerie Queene. Warm with enthusiasm, he crossed to England in 1589, was presented by Raleigh to the Queen, and dedicated the first three “books” to her “to live with the eternity of her fame.” To ensure a wide reception he prefaced the poem with laudatory verses addressed to the Countess of Pembroke, Lady Carew, Sir Christopher Hatton, Raleigh, Burghley, Walsingham, Lords Hunsdon, Buckhurst, Grey, and Howard of Effingham, and the earls of Essex, Northumberland, Oxford, Ormonde, and Cumberland. Burghley, feuding with Leicester, called Spenser an idle rhymer, but many hailed him as the greatest poet since Chaucer. The Queen relaxed enough to award him a pension of fifty pounds a year, which Burghley, as Lord Treasurer, delayed in paying. Spenser had hoped for something more substantial. Disappointed, he returned to his Irish castle and continued his idealistic epic amid barbarism, hatred, and fear.

  He had planned the poem to be in twelve books; he published three in 1590 and three more in 1596, and proceeded no further; even so The Faerie Queene is twice the length of The Iliad, thrice that of Paradise Lost. Each book was offered as an allegory—of holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, courtesy; the whole was intended “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline”30 by giving him formative instances; all this accorded with Sidney’s conception of poetry as morality conveyed by imagined examples. So dedicated to decency, Spenser could allow himself only a few voluptuous passages; he glances once at a “snowy breast bare to ready spoil,”31 but goes ne plus ultra. Through six cantos he sings the high note of chivalric love as unselfish service to fair women.

  To us, who have forgotten chivalry and are bored by knights and confused by allegories, The Faerie Queene is at first quaintly delightful, at length unbearable. Its political allusions, which contemporaries enjoyed or resented, are lost upon us; the theological battles that it adumbrates are the subsiding tremors of our infancy; its narratives are at best melodious echoes of Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso. No poem in the world’s literature surpasses The Faerie Queene in artificial conceits, awkward inversions, pretentious archaisms and neologisms, and romantic grandiosities unleavened with Ariosto’s smile. And yet Keats and Shelley loved Spenser and made him “the Poets’ poet
.” Why? Was it because, here and there, some sensuous beauty of form redeemed a medieval absurdity, some splendor of description adorned an unreality? The new nine-line Spenserian stanza was a difficult medium, and Spenser often startles us with its rounded perfection and flowing ease; but how many times he spoils its reason for a rhyme!

  He interrupted the Queene to write some briefer poems that perhaps justify his fame. His Amoretti, “little loves” in sonnet form (1594), may have been Petrarchan fantasies, or may have reflected his year-long courtship of Elizabeth Boyle. He married her in 1594 and sang his wedding joy in his finest poem, Epithalamium. He shares her charms with us unselfishly:

  Tell me, ye merchants’ daughters, did ye see

  So fayre a creature in your towne before,

  So sweet, so lovely, so mild as she,

  Adornd with beautyes grace and vertues store,

  Her goodly eyes like saphyres shining bright,

  Her forehead yvory white,

  Her cheekes like apples which the sun hath rudded,

  Her lips like cherryes charming men to byte,

  Her breast like to a bowl of cream uncrudded,

  Her paps like lyllies budded,

  Her snowie necke lyke a marble toure,

  And all her body like a palace fayre …

  When the wedding and feasting are over he bids his guests depart with-out delay:

  Now cease, ye damsels, your delights forepast;

  Enough is it that all the day was yours;

  Now day is doen, and night is nighing fast.

  Now bring the bryde into the brydall bowres …

  And in her bed her lay;

  Lay her in lilies and in violets,

  And silken curteins over her display,

  And odoured sheets, and Arras coverlets …

  But let the night be calme and quietsome,

  Without tempestuous storms or sad afray,

  Lyke as when Jove with fayre Alcmena lay …

  And let the mayds and yongmen cease to sing;

  Ne let the woods them answer, nor their echo ring.

  Was ever maid brought to fulfillment more melodiously?

  Spenser sustained this flight in Four Hymns (1596) honoring earthly love, earthly beauty, heavenly love, and heavenly beauty. Following Plato, Ficino, and Castiglione, and leading to Keats’s Endymion, he cried peccavi over his “many lewd layes,” and bade his soul pierce through physical loveliness to find and feel the divine beauty that hides in divers degrees in all earthly things.

  Living on a volcano of Irish misery, Spenser’s life was every day near death. Just before the volcano of resentment erupted again, he wrote in fine prose (for only a poet can write good prose) his View of the Present State of Ireland, advocating a better deployment of English funds and forces for the thorough subjugation of the island. In October 1598 the dispossessed Irish of Munster rose in wild revolt, drove out English settlers, and burned down the Castle of Kilcolman. Spenser and his wife barely escaped with their lives and fled to England. Three months later, all funds and passion spent, the poet died (1599). The young Earl of Essex, destined soon to follow him, paid for the funeral; nobles and poets walked in the procession, and threw flowers and elegies into the Westminster Abbey grave.

  A craze for sonnets now ran through England, rivaling the drama’s fury—nearly all excellent in form, stereotyped in theme and phrase, nearly all addressed to virgins or patrons and bemoaning their strait-laced or tight-fisted frugality. Beauty is urged to let itself be reaped before it rots on the stalk; sometimes an original note intrudes, and the lover promises the lady a child as reward for expeditious conjugation. Every poet seeks and finds a Laura—Daniel’s Delia, Lodge’s Phillis, Constable’s Diana, Fulke Greville’s Caelia. Most famous of these sonneteers was Samuel Daniel; however, Ben Jonson, who was more tough than “rare,” called him “an honest man, but no poet.”32 Michael Drayton’s Pegasus roamed through all forms of poetry with his feet of prose, but one of his sonnets struck a fresh note, stinging the lass out of her stinginess by bidding her farewell—“Since there’s no help, come, let us kiss and part!”

  All in all, outside the drama, Elizabethan literature was still a generation behind the French. The prose was vigorous, flexible, often involved, verbose, and fanciful, but sometimes moving with a royal dignity or a stately rhythm; it produced no Rabelais or Montaigne. The poetry echoed foreign models timidly, except for the Epithalamium and The Faerie Queene. Spenser never found an audience on the Continent, but neither did Ronsard in England; poetry makes of language and feeling a music that cannot be heard across the frontiers of speech. Ballads noticed and reached the people more intimately than the poetry of the palace and the court; they were posted on house and tavern walls, and were sung and sold in the streets; “Lord Randall” still moves us with its dirge.33 Perhaps it was this popular poetry, and not the pretty artifices of the sonneteers, that prepared the Elizabethans to appreciate Shakespeare.

  V. THE STAGE

  How, then, did English literature, so negligible in the long drought between Chaucer and Spenser, rise to Shakespeare? Because of wealth growing and spreading; because of a long and fruitful peace, a stimulating and triumphant war; because of foreign literature and travel broadening the English mind. Plautus and Terence were teaching England the art of comedy, Seneca the technique of tragedy; Italian actors played in England (1577f.); a thousand experiments were made; between 1592 and 1642 England saw 435 comedies performed. Farces and interludes developed into comedies; mysteries and moralities gave way to secular tragic dramas as the once sacred myths lost their hold on belief. In 1553 Nicholas Udall produced in Ralph Roister Doister the first English comedy in classic form. In 1561 the lawyers of the Inner Temple staged there Gorboduc, the first English tragedy in classic form.

  For a time that form, descended from Rome, seemed destined to mold the Elizabethan drama. University scholars like Harvey, lawyer-poets like George Gascoyne, men of classical learning like Sidney, pleaded for the observance of the three “unities” in a play: that there should be only one action or plot, and that this should occur in one place, and represent no longer time than a day. These unities, so far as we know, were first formulated by Lodovico Castelvetro (1570) in a commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle himself requires only unity of action; he recommends that the action should fall “within a single revolution of the sun”; and he adds what might be called unity of mood—that comedy, as “a representation of inferior people,” should not be mingled with tragedy, as “a representation of heroic action.”34 Sidney’s Defence of Poesy took the doctrine of the dramatic unities from Castelvetro and applied it with rigor and yet good humor to Elizabethan plays, in whose highhanded geography

  you shall have Asia of the one side, and Africa of the other, and so many other under kingdoms, that the player, when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is…. Now of time they are much more liberal; for ordinary it is, that two young princes fall in love; after many traverses she is got with child; delivered of a fair boy; he … groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get another child; and all this in two hours’ space.35

  France followed the classic rules and produced Racine; England rejected them, gave its tragic drama romantic freedom and naturalistic scope, and produced Shakespeare. The ideal of the French Renaissance was order, reason, proportion, propriety; the ideal of Renaissance England was liberty, will, humor, life. The Elizabethan audience, composed of lordlings, middlings, and groundlings, had to have a rich and varied diet; it demanded action, not lengthy reports of hidden actions; it had a belly for laughter and did not mind gravediggers bandying philosophies with a prince; it had an untamed imagination that could leap from place to place and cross a continent at the bidding of a sign or the hint of a line. The Elizabethan drama expressed the Elizabethan English, not the Periclean Greeks or the Bourbon French; hence it became the national art, while arts that followed alien models took no English root.

  The Engli
sh drama had to fight another battle before it could proceed to Marlowe and Shakespeare. The nascent Puritan movement rejected the Elizabethan stage as a home of paganism, obscenity, and profanity; it denounced the presence of women and prostitutes in the audience, and the propinquity of brothels to the theaters. In 1577 John Northbrooke published a furious diatribe against “dicing, dancing, plays, and interludes,” writing:

  I am persuaded that Satan hath not a more speedy way and fitter school to work and teach his desire, to bring men and women into his snare of concupiscence and filthy lusts of wicked whoredom, than those plays and theaters are; and therefore it is necessary that those places and players should be forbidden and dissolved, and put down by authority, as the brothels and stews are.36

  Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse was relatively moderate, and acknowledged some plays and actors to be “without rebuke”; but when Lodge replied to him Gosson abandoned all distinctions, and in Players Confuted in Five Actions he described plays as “the food of iniquity, riot, and adultery,” and actors as “masters of vice, teachers of wantonness.”37 Critics saw in the comedies demoralizing pictures of vice and rascality, and in tragedies stimulating examples of murder, treachery, and rebellion.38 In the earlier years of Elizabeth’s reign, Sunday was the usual day for plays; trumpets announced them just as church bells called the people to afternoon prayer, and clergymen were dismayed to find their congregations skipping services to crowd the theater. “Will not a filthy play, with the blast of a trumpet,” asked a preacher, “sooner call thither a thousand than an hour’s tolling of a bell bring to a sermon a hundred?”39 And North-brooke proceeded: “If you will learn … to deceive your husbands, or husbands their wives, how to play the harlot … how to flatter, lie … murder … blaspheme, sing filthy songs … shall you not learn, at such interludes, to practice them?”40