CHAPTER I CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY IN ENGLAND AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ARTISTIC DRAMA NLY two other countries in the world can show a period of such brilliancy as the sixteenth century in England: Greece, in the age of Pericles, Phidias, and Sophocles; and Germany, in the century which produced Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. In later times, England has attained even greater external power and influence; she has brought continents under her sway and played a leading part in the councils of Europe; she has produced much that is imperishable in the domain of literature and science; but she has never again passed through so glorious an age as the sixteenth century, so unique a period of ascendency in the history of man. Shakespeare, and the movement which made him possible only recur once in a thousand years. England entered the new intellectual world that was opened up by the revival of classical studies just at the time when the welding together of the nation was fulfilled. The fusion of Saxon and French elements was complete, the power of the foreign nobles broken by the Wars of the Roses, the self-consciousness of her citizens elevated. Intellectually, she was in a condition which recalls the eleventh century; literature, exhausted, was waiting to be impregnated with germs of life from outside, just as, five centuries before, the literature of old England had put forth fresh blossoms by contact with the Norman. The effects of the revival of Greco-Roman studies were at first confined within narrow limits. Men's minds had been stirred more generally, and therefore to a greater extent, by the questions raised by the Reformation. French literature had no such leavening, and, apart from differences in the national character, this is one of the chief reasons for the separation of French and English literature that became definite after the sixteenth century. If we read in succession the prose and poetical literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we feel as if the writers had been liberated from the burden of intellectual dulness. There is a vigour, almost an exuberance in the new literature of that period, as if the people of England also from that time began to feel "the delight of living in such a century."1 As a consequence of the Renaissance, mankind everywhere resumed possession of the earth and of earthly life. The moral centre of gravity, which during the Middle Ages was situated somewhere outside man, in the bosom of the Church, was restored to its proper position in the heart of the ordinary man himself. We shall find this difference most distinctly marked in Shakespeare. The connexion between literary and political development is by no means a necessary one; Goethe and Schiller produced immortal work at a time when Germany itself was in a pitiful condition, whereas a quarter of a century of a revived German Empire has as yet produced nothing that will endure. The literary splendour of England in the sixteenth century has been attributed to various causes: the national enthusiasm aroused by English victories, the reign of Elizabeth, the destruction of the Spanish Armada. This, however, does not explain the wealth of literary productions in the first half of the sixteenth century, before the time of Elizabeth, in the reigns of Henry VIII. (1509-47), Edward VI. (1547-53), Mary (1553-58). Further, before England had broken the power of Spain, and, with the aid of her brave sailors and the elements, had destroyed the Armada, her greatest glory in the literature of the world, the national drama, had already reached a state of development which, leaving Shakespeare out of the question, cannot fail to excite the greatest astonishment. This being so, the origin of the abundant harvest of great men in England during the short span of a generation will always remain a riddle. Just as little can we answer the question why the period from 1724 to 1759 presented Germany with its greatest creators of language and revivers of poetry, from Klopstock to Schiller. Of all the great questions that concern humanity there is hardly one more fascinating than this: in what relation did the four most important countries of civilised Europe, Italy, Germany, France and England, stand to the sudden and overwhelming revival of the study of classical antiquity? An intellectual convulsion such as this, especially as it was almost contemporaneous with the religious revival due to the Reformation, had not been known since the spread of Christianity. In Italy, where the march of culture had never been interrupted, the regeneration of antiquity was accepted in all simplicity as merely a revival of its own past; there was no break in the mental life of the nation. Germany was subject to the influence of foreign culture for two, 1 Ulrich Hutten. France for three centuries. The Renaissance never penetrated deeply into the heart of the German people; but as long as the philological caste exercised the supremacy, the influence of pseudo-Hellenism and pseudo-Romanism on the intellectual development of the governing classes was no less injurious than in France. Of all literary peoples, the French have certainly suffered the greatest losses in national characteristics through that misunderstood "classicism." Even the romantic movement at the commencement of the nineteenth century, which was essentially a revolt against Latinism, did not liberate them completely from the classical yoke. In France, all poetical forms and laws of verse have been under the spell of classicism for three hundred years. The English completed their knowledge of ancient civilisation in quite a different manner. In England, the invasion of classicism left no trace upon the core of national literature; in France it well-nigh obliterated it after the year 1600. Not one of the great English writers of the sixteenth century, especially the poets, fell a victim to the imitation of Romanism; for the form in which antiquity presented itself to the peoples of the Renaissance period, was Roman. The knowledge of genuine Greek art, even after the Renaissance, remained a sealed book, which was not opened until the eighteenth century in Germany. It was not until long after the Renaissance, and then only for a short time, that the English succumbed outwardly to a kind of spurious classicism, the classical wig and pigtail age after the Boileau pattern which was introduced to them by France at the commencement of the seventeenth century. It was, in fact, during the Renaissance period proper, that the genuine spirit of England secured its most brilliant triumphs in Shakespeare and the national drama generally. In France, the savants and formalists gained the day, in England the poets. One might speak with much greater reason of an Italian influence upon English composition, especially the lyric poetry of the sixteenth century. The English learned Latin and also some Greek, they accepted in many cases material and form from the ancient literatures, but their peculiar manner of "adopting the world with full expression of the same" was English to the core. Never was foreign culture more successfully adapted and worked up than by the English on two occasions; that of the French in the eleventh, that of the ancients in the sixteenth century. The Drama is the centre of the Renaissance literature of England. In its efforts to attain free artistic scope and form, it did not succeed so soon as lyric poetry and prose, and, from a purely chronological point of view, it must be placed after them. Its hold upon the English people in the sixteenth century was, however, so engrossing |