SHAKESPEARE AT THE COURT OF QUEEN

ELIZABETH.

Photogravure from the original painting by Edouard Ender.

Shakespeare is presented in the act of reading his tragedy, Macbeth, to Queen Elizabeth and the most distinguished personages of her Court.

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was much used before the first murrain (the plague of 1349), and is since somewhat changed; for John Cornwal, a master of grammar, changed the lore in grammar school and construing of French into English; and Richard Pencrych learned this manner of teaching of him, as others did of Pencrych. So that now, the year of our Lord, 1385, and of the second King Richard after the Conquest nine, in all the grammar schools of England children leaveth French, and construeth and learneth in English." A more formal note of the change is found when English was ordered to be used in courts of law in 1362" because the French tongue is much unknown;" and in the following year it was employed by the Chancellor in opening Parliament. Bishops began to preach in English, and the English tracts of Wyclif made it once more a literary tongue. This drift towards a general use of the national tongue told powerfully on literature. The influence of the French romances everywhere tended to make French the one literary language at the opening of the fourteenth century, and in England this influence had been backed by the French tone of the court of Henry the Third and the three Edwards. But at the close of the reign of Edward the Third the long French romances needed to be translated even for knightly hearers. "Let clerks indite in Latin," says the author of the "Testament of Love," "and let Frenchmen in their French also indite their quaint terms, for it is kindly to their mouths; and let us show our fantasies in such wordes as we learned of our mother's tongue." But the new national life afforded nobler material than "fantasies" now for English literature. With the completion of the work of national unity had come the completion of the work of national freedom. Un

done little more than copy this work, making however large additions from his own inquiries, especially in the Flemish and Breton_campaigns and the account of Crécy. A Hainaulter of Valenciennes, Froissart held a post in Queen Philippa's household from 1361 to 1369; and under this influence produced in 1373 the first edition of his well-known Chronicle. A later edition is far less English in tone, and a third version, begun by him in his old age after long absence from England, is distinctly French in its sympathies. Froissart's vivacity and picturesqueness blind us to the inaccuracy of his details; as an historical authority he is of little value. The incidental mention of Crécy and the later English expeditions by Villani in his great Florentine Chronicle are important. The best modern account of this period is that by Mr. W. Longman, "History of Edward III." Mr. Morley ("English Writers ") has treated in great detail of Chaucer.

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[Dr. Stubbs' Constitutional History" (vol. ii.), published since the chapter was written, deals with the whole period.—Ed.]