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DOWDEN, E. Shakspere: His Mind and Art.

FLEAY, F. G. Life and Work of Shakespeare.

HALLIWELL PHILLIPPS, J. O. Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. 4th ed. 1887.

LEE, S. A Life of William Shakespeare. 1898. (This is a republication of the author's article in the D. N. B., revised and considerably added to. It is probably the best biography of the poet that we have; certainly the most usable one.)

ULRICI, H. Shakespeare's Dramatic Art. 2 v. (Bohu.)

CHAPTER V

THE PURITAN PERIOD (1634 to 1660)

Historical References

CARLYLE, T. Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations.

MASSON, D. Life of John Milton. 6 v. (This work is, in effect, a political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of the time.)

GARDINER, S. R. (Ed.) The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1628-1660.

GARDINER, S. R. The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution. 1603-1660. (Epochs of Modern Hist.)

JESSE, J. H. Memoirs of the Court of England during the Reign of the Stuarts, including the Protectorate. 2 v. (Bohn.)

Historical
Sketch.

THE culmination of the Elizabethan period may be placed early in the reign of the most un-Elizabethan king, James I. "Hamlet" appeared in its perfected form in 1602, "Othello" in 1604, "Lear" in 1605; "Macbeth" was produced in 1606, and "The Tempest" in 1610. After that date the productive energy of the English Renaissance seems to diminish. Writers were as active as ever, but the animating spirit is reminiscent of the past and less inventive and original than it was ten years earlier. The days of the great romantic drama were numbered, and it becomes an inspiration from the past rather than an expression of a living spirit. Most of the later dramatists are tame and tedious compared to their predecessors. James Shirley, 1594-1666, may be regarded as the last of the line of Elizabethan play

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wrights. He wrote many plays, respectable in merit, but interesting principally as showing the decadence of the original form.

After the accession of James I., 1603, the Puritan element in England slowly gained in strength and in intensity of conviction. The original spirit of the Reformation was hardly to be satisfied with the political change which made the sovereign head of the Church in place of the Pope. The Tudor conception of the king's prerogative, held also by the Stuarts, was incompatible with many of the most highly prized principles of the common law touching the rights of property and the liberty of the subject. A conflict between blind loyalty to the person of the king and loyalty to the principles of the unwritten constitution was almost inevitable, and was precipitated by the folly of James I. and Charles I. The energy of the nation went into civil war. Culture and love of learning and poetry remained in men's minds, but largely ceased to be practically productive. The forms of harmless amusement by which a community seeks to relieve the monotony of life were forbidden by law. The theaters were closed, and all that cultivates the refined pleasures of life was for a few years either neglected or made entirely secondary. It would be absurd to suppose that the nation changed its character radically, but the repressive forces attained for a short time physical supremacy. Even John Milton ceased to write poetry except an occasional sonnet, and devoted his pen to party pamphlets.

The greatness of England depends on the fact that in the spirit of her people two impulses are present, a respect for tradition and for visible authority, and a regard for precedent on the one hand, and on the other a profound regard for the abstract principles of

Two Impulses.

right and duty, and a sense of the value of individual judgment. There is in the constitution of their society at once an organized aristocracy and an organic people, the Norman and the Saxon traditions. These are so balanced that the conflict between them results in political progress. The triumph of one does not develop into a repressive despotism or of the other into a democracy in unstable equilibrium. The feudal tradition keeps up a certain fullness of association and an intimate connection with the past which supplies much that is suggestive to the literary artist. In England the spirit of liberty is conscious of progress and life, and consequently is not lethargic and dumb as in Germany, nor defiant and hopeless as in Russia. The balance and opposition of the progressive and conservative forces prevent literature from submitting entirely to authority and losing permanently its vitality in the forms of a rigid classicism or from entirely wasting its patrimony in a lawless and rebellious romanticism. It gives English literature a substratum of common sense and a true, healthy relation to life. Accordingly the Puritan period should be regarded as not in the artistic sense entirely iconoclastic and destructive, though the Puritan was hostile to art and little of literary worth sprang directly from his influence; for the Puritan influence is the temporary coming to the surface of one of the great underlying elements of the English national character, and has a profound literary significance. Bunyan, Macaulay, and Carlyle are related to its spirit in different degrees, and without the temper of mind of which Puritanism is the outcome we should have had no New England writers, and no American writers except Poe, Cooper, and Irving. Our national life and our literature are rooted in a moral subsoil.

In the Puritan period, however, two royalists, Richard Lovelace and Sir John Suckling, achieved literary imLovelace and mortality by the beauty of a few songs. They Suckling. were cavaliers, gentlemen who fought on the king's side, and in a general way represent the champions of ancient order and outworn privilege against innovation and the slow forward movement of society. The Cavalier, unreasonably and unselfishly loyal to the person of a selfish king, will always be one of the most picturesque figures in English history, and his songs appeal to one of the universal sentiments of human nature, sympathy for and devotion to a lost cause and an outworn order. "To Althea from Prison," and "To Lucasta on Going to the Wars" by Lovelace rank among the most perfect of English lyrics.

TO LUCASTA ON GOING TO THE WARS

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True; a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;

And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such,

As you, too, shall adore;

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honour more.

The last stanza is an example of that absolute felicity of phrase which is so rare, and so dear to all lovers of literature. Lyrical perfection or perfect harmony of cadence and sentiment has conferred immortality on this short poem and on some fifteen or twenty others in our literature.

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