CHAPTER VII ELIZABETHAN PROSE IN the development of literary expression, artistic prose is always much later in its appearance than verse, owing apparently to an instinctive feeling that the speech of every-day life cannot be raised to the dignity of a literary instrument. We have already seen how Roger Ascham felt about the affectation of writing in Latin to give distinction to prose. Even when Latin was discarded in favor of the vernacular, writers continued to construct their English sentences on the basis of the Latin syntax, making them long, cumbrous, and artificial. In an age of intense literary enthusiasm, it was quite natural that more definite attention should be given to the artistic possibilities of prose. At first it was made rich and gorgeous with foreign decoration, like the splendid costumes which people wore, the stiff ruffs, huge farthingales, jeweled silks and velvet. "A golden sentence is worth a world of treasure," says one of these prose decorators. Growth of Gradually the classic architecture of the sentence was cleared away, and it became idiomatic and intelligible, and finally artistic. A native style appeared in prose, as in poetry, evolved, however, through many experimental pitfalls and monumental mistakes. Several things contributed to this growth of a simpler and more natural prose: the theological quarrels; the beginning of literary criticism; the new English Bible; the pamphlets that served in place of newspapers for breezy discussion, personal satire, and popular entertainment; and especially the drama, in which the prose sentence became clear and flexible, as in the admirable prose speeches in Hamlet. From these varied uses of prose by the Elizabethan writers, two great types of literature received their initial impulses, the novel and the essay. The first conscious effort to make prose a formidable rival of verse was John Lyly's Euphues, a book that occupies a unique position in English literature. The author wrote better things in his plays and lyric poems, but this book gave him his fame. Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit appeared in 1579, and the second part, Euphues and his England, in 1580. The two parts together constitute our first English novel. It is a Euphuism kind of romance, with a weak thread of story used mainly to connect the author's discourses on education, religion, love, friendship, the follies of youth, and the manners of society; concluding, like all loyal Elizabethan books, with unmeasured praise of the glorious Queen, who is "of singular beautie and chastitie, excelling in the one Venus, in the other Vesta"; all of which, as described on the title-page, is still measurably "delightful to be read, and nothing hurtful to be regarded." The chief interest of the book is its singularity of style, known in every school rhetoric as "Euphuism.' The main features of this style are antithesis, with balanced sentence structure; alliteration, used especially to emphasize antithetical words; puns, quaint conceits and affectations; and similes, often in elaborate lists, taken from classic history, mythology, and the medieval bestiaries. Thus the fickle heroine soliloquizes: So I, although I loved Philautus for his good properties, yet seeing Euphues to excell him, I ought by Nature to lyke him better. By so much the more therefore my chaunge is to be excused, by how much the more my choyce is excellent; and by so much the lesse I am to be condemned by how much the more Euphues is to be commended. Is not the Diamond of more valew then the Rubie bicause he is of more vertue? Is not the Emeraulde preferred before the Saphire for his wonderfull properties? Is not Euphues more prayse worthy then Philautus, being more wittie. But fye Lucilla, why dost thou flatter Vogue of Lyly was regarded as a prose artist. His ingenious expression, though based upon similar experiments in Spanish and Italian literature, was accepted as original and became enormously popular with the court exquisites. "That beautie in court which could not parley euphueisme was as little regarded as she which now there speaks not French," said Edward Blount in 1632. Thomas Nashe says that he read Euphues "when a little ape in Cambridge and “thought it was ipse ille"; and it long continued to be ipse ille for all who in the craze of a fashionable affectation desired, as Lyly himself hinted, "to hear finer speech than the language would allow." For fifty years literature was infected with it. But there were mockers as well as imitators. Shakespeare made merry with the euphuists in Love's Labor's Lost, and the crabbed Drayton jibed at Lyly's "ridiculous tricks" Talking of Stones, Stars, Plants, Fishes, Flyes, Lyly's success was naturally followed by many similar ventures, and a group of bright-witted writers was for a time busily engaged in supplying the demand for this new literary entertainment. The best of these flowery romances is Sidney's Arcadia, in which the euphuistic ornament is less artificial and Elizabethan more imaginative and poetic. Sidney's direct influence is seen in the Menaphon of Robert Greene, whose Pandosto furnished Shakespeare with the substance of his Winter's Tale. Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, the source of As You Like It, is still readable, affording a pleasing sense of far-away idyllic grace and sentiment. The plots of these stories were generally laid in Arcadia or some neighboring province of dreamland, where it is morning all the day long, where the fields are always strewn with roses and violets lush with heavenly dew, and where "shepherd boys pipe as though they should never be old." But there came a reaction against the romantic and sentimental story, and the story-writers, especially Greene, Nashe, Lodge, and Deloney, began to write realistic stories in which the scene was transferred from Arcadia to the streets of London. Realistic The most advanced and consistent of these experimenters with realism was Thomas Deloney, whose Gentle Craft is a series of stories about shoemakers. The picaresque novel of the Spanish type appeared, in which a rogue (picaro) is the hero and his rogueries are the substance of the story. As Lyly pictured the manners of court society, Greene and his associates now pictured the life of the common citizen, with a robust realism that anticipated the larger work of Defoe and Fielding. The Historians There was much historical writing in the Elizabethan period, devoted mainly to the celebration of England's glory, but with the exception of Bacon's History of Henry VII the historical method made little advance beyond the crude form of the "Chronicle." Holinshed's Chronicle of England, Scotland, and Ireland, comprehending the history of Great Britain from Noah's Flood to the year of publication, 1578, was immortalized by Shakespeare, who closely followed its facts and even its language in several of his plays. Harrison's Description of England, included in Holinshed's book, Stow's Survey of London, and Camden's Annals of Queen Elizabeth must be read if one would know intimately the England that Shakespeare knew. The celebrated History of the World by Raleigh, which did not get beyond the Roman conquest of Macedon, is a Saharan desert of unsifted facts, with here and there refreshing little oases of personal reflection where the author's fine creative talent was suddenly warmed to poetic eloquence. The best known prose of Raleigh is the manly and stirring account of the Last Fight of the Revenge at Sea, which Tennyson molded into a ringing ballad of English heroism. Among the historians must be included John Foxe, whose Book of Martyrs still smells of fire, an account of the Smithfield martyrdoms in homely, vigorous, and realistic prose that was once as generally read as the Bible. Translations The eager spirit of the Renaissance appears nowhere more definitely than in the busy work of the Elizabethan translators, who levied upon all provinces of ancient lore for the enrichment of the new English literature. They worked with joy and triumph, somewhat in the manner of conquest and plunder; for these translators were not scrupulous in their use of originals, taking what pleased them and using it in any of the Classics manner that pleased them. Homer, Virgil, and their fellows are often hardly recognizable in their English dress. The inspiration and the meat of the matter were the main things; the duty of "close" or literal rendering of texts, now required, was then unknown. Indeed, the originals were sometimes not consulted at all, the essence being more easily extracted from some French rendering. For example, North's celebrated translation of Plutarch's Lives was made from the French version of Amyot; with this second removal from the original, the Lives became an English classic of clear, robust prose with genuine Elizabethan flavor. This book would have exerted an important influence even had Shakespeare not taken from it the material for his Roman plays. How well he liked its sturdy language may be seen by comparing these lines with Julius Cæsar, act 1, sc. i, 192-5: Another time when Cæsar's friends complained unto him of Antonius and Dolabella, that they pretended some mischief towards him, he answered them again, "As for those fat men and smooth-combed heads," quoth he, "I never reckon of them; but these pale-visaged and carrion-lean people, I fear them most," meaning Brutus and Cassius. The prince of the translators was George Chapman, whose version of the Iliad and the Odyssey is one of the celebrated books of our literature. Keats said that it made him a poet, |