The Renais

tion in

thought and knowledge.

only Shakespeare know?" for the world he created is one of the chief sources of our knowledge of the social life, the mind, manners and morals of the epoch in which he lived. But one may say that they who know intimately the literature of that period, and are familiar with its rich interplay of social, religious and political forces, will thereby know much more of Shakespeare, and be enabled to learn much more from him.

The achievement of one man is in a sense the deed of all; and a multitude of forces had conspired to create the situation of which Shakespeare's powers were able to take advantage.

In the sixteenth century, geographical discovery sance revolu- had enlarged the world. The important accident that happened in 1492, when a Genoese gentleman on his way to the Indies blundered on the islands in the Gulf of Mexico and thought he had got there, was but one of a series of fortunate disclosures. The art of printing had disseminated throughout Europe what remained of the ancient wisdom of mankind. The stir of thought thus brought about had produced a religious upheaval. Even in England this revolution took an unfortunate course, though there its effects were never so disastrous as in other countries. In Shakespeare's day the mischievous consequences of the upheaval were only beginning to manifest themselves. Great evils had been got rid of, and good results-so necessary that scarcely any price was too great to pay for them-had been achieved. These were seen chiefly in a growing freedom of thought and in a new attempt to interpret Christianity in accord with changing views of the universe and of man's nature and history.

Schools were multiplied, many new books were written, and whole classes of men became for the first time readers and thinkers. Vernacular translations of the Bible opened a new world to men's wonder and speculation. Popular taste for the drama had given rise to permanent theatres in London, to several troupes of players, and to a whole school of dramatic authors, before Shakespeare left his native town. One may say with full conviction that it was the existence of this demand which caused Shakespeare's unique talents to select the special channel of dramatic authorship.

joy.

One of the outstanding distinctions of this period Gigantic is an unprecedented outburst of energy and joy in energy and life. This is characteristic especially of England, but in some degree of all the chief nations of Europe. Its beginnings, as regards England, are obscure; though they certainly antedate the life of Shakespeare, and even the reign of Elizabeth. But the development up to the beginning of Elizabeth's reign had not gone far enough to enable even the keenest of prophets to foresee what was to come. Indeed, one may say that almost any thinker of the school of Buckle or Marx-almost anyone who interpreted social developments in materialistic or economic terms alone would, in the year 1557, have been led by the history of the previous century to forecast something radically different from what actually ensued.

the XV

and XVI

That was the year before the death of Queen England in Mary, of irredeemable memory. It may be said to have marked the end of a century and a half of centuries. national misery and disruption. At the middle of the fifteenth century, England had been wasted by a series of foolish foreign wars, and was entering

The Reform

ation and its

causes.

upon a new and disastrous period of internecine war. That century, thanks to these causes, was almost barren of great intellectual and spiritual achievements. In the history of English literature it is nearly a blank. When, in 1485, King Richard III was defeated at Bosworth Field and the crown placed upon the head of Henry Tudor, the new monarch and his counsellors had to set about the task of re-creating their nation out of ruins and fragments.

No sooner had the sixteenth century dawned, than a new factor of seemingly disastrous portent emerged, in the shape of the religious conflict. The Reformation, which had really originated with Wiclif in the fourteenth century, was due to resentment against social injustices and political evils, and would undoubtedly have taken place in some form in England, though Luther had never lived. The changes in theology were one of the effects, and were not the cause, of the changes in social and intellectual conditions, and of the exigencies with which these confronted the nation and its rulers. It is to be remembered that, with the standards of that age, innovations in Church government and theological opinion were certain to involve persecution, and seemed inevitably destined also to produce foreign war. The persecution duly came, but the foreign war was happily averted for many a long day, by a combination of able diplomacy and rare good fortune. Henry VIII lived and died a Catholic; but a Catholic who, for political and national reasons, very rightly objected to the temporal government, the financial extortions, and the political machinations of the Papacy. He was thus quite consistent in directing his persecution impartially against both Papists

and Protestants. During the minority of his illstarred son Edward VI (that is, when England, for the second time, was rent asunder by the very disaster against which Henry's many marriages had been intended to provide),3 the Regency was monopolized by Protestant extremists, and persecution was directed only against Papists. Under Mary, the tables were turned. A vigorous attempt was made, by means of her Spanish marriage and the merrily blazing fires of Smithfield, to re-impose the Papal yoke, and to suppress all independent thinking as heresy.

Bearing in mind that everything is contingent before it happens, we may venture the speculation that had Queen Mary lived another ten years, or had she not been disappointed in her expectation of issue, England would have become a mere appanage of the Spanish crown. The policy of Charles V and Philip II was naturally directed to making it such. Hence Philip's long-indulged hope of contracting a marriage with his deceased wife's sister. "Reasons of State" would have atoned easily enough for the ecclesiastical irregularity of such a course, had it proved possible.

Upon the accession of our sovereign lady Eliza- The prospect beth, of much-disputed character, the outlook for in 1558.

3 I. e., the disaster of a disputed succession to the Crown. This had caused, in the preceding century, the Wars of the Roses. The office of the monarch was the very soul of the government in those days, and the purpose of Henry's matrimonial adventures was not to gratify any special licentiousness on his part, but simply to provide a legitimate son whose title to the Crown should be unassailable. Licentious kings did not need to plunge Europe into turmoil and imperil the peace of nations in order to secure divorces. And there is no evidence that Henry was at all an exceptional offender in the matter of sex immorality.

The defeat of Spain.

Beginnings of empire.

England among the hostile powers of the European world was black indeed. From the standpoint of Realpolitik, it would have seemed a fairly safe prophecy that the nation was chained and checked, and that she would need fifty or a hundred years of domestic peace and repose from foreign war to recover from past disasters and loss of blood, and to muster again her dissipated energies. It is one of the standing enigmas of history that, instead of this, England produced and utilized in various directions during the ensuing fifty years such a gigantic volume of spiritual power as she had never possessed before and has scarcely equalled since. The truth of this as regards literature is obvious: Spenser and Hooker, Shakespeare and Bacon, and the noble army at whose head they stand, are there to make it so. But scarcely less wonderful was the inexhaustible energy and resourcefulness by means of which the tiny island nation (with a population less than that of greater New York to-day) met and conquered the mightiest forces of Spain's far-flung empire. The overthrow of the Spanish Armada was ascribed with piety, and possibly with truth, to the interposition of Providence; Afflavit Deus et dissipantur: “He blew with His winds and they were scattered." The piety is commendable, no doubt; but one may safely say that, had it not been for the English fleet, the winds of heaven would not alone have saved England from Spanish conquest. It was during this same period that England's adventurous sons laid in "Virginia' the foundations of the American Commonwealth. In statesmanship, and in the enterprises of explora、 tion and commerce, the Elizabethan epoch produced parallels to its achievement in literature. In every one of these directions the results attained seem