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Updated: June 16, 2025
English, like Latin, lends itself superbly to ranting, a capacity discovered by the Elizabethans. Modern writers tend to more delicate excess, and have exploited the musical quality of English. There is an intolerable deal of sack to a very little bread among the imitators of Tennyson.
There were books enough; very few French books; but then any one who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, with extravagant enthusiasm. Lives of the Duke of Wellington, for example; Spinoza; the works of Dickens; the Faery Queen; a Greek dictionary with the petals of poppies pressed to silk between the pages; all the Elizabethans.
There is indeed frequent reference to 'nature' in the poetry of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century, and this is often significant in the early English poetry and charming in the romances and in Petrarch and Chaucer, while in Dante and the Elizabethans, and especially in Shakespeare, it reaches an almost incomparable beauty; yet in all these it is, as in the backgrounds of the great Tuscan and Umbrian painters, exquisite and significant and true, but not the prime subject which engages their attention.
The Elizabethans, that is, had not discovered the secret of the long poem; the abstract idea of the "heroic" epic which was in all their minds had to wait for embodiment till Paradise Lost. In a way their treatment of the pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too.
If Venus had her runaway, after whom the Elizabethans raised hue and cry, this is Ceres'. The municipal authorities, hot-foot, cannot catch it.
The genius of the Elizabethans was astonishing, but it was genius struggling with difficulties which were well-nigh insuperable; and, as a matter of fact, in spite of their amazing poetic and dramatic powers, their work has vanished from the stage, and is to-day familiar to but a few of the lovers of English literature. Shakespeare alone was not subdued to what he worked in.
I loved, also, the songs of the Elizabethans, for they reminded me of the girl who had sung to me in the June night. In the afternoons I took my exercise in long tramps along the good dusty English roads. The country fell away from Biggleswick into a plain of wood and pasture-land, with low hills on the horizon. The Place was sown with villages, each with its green and pond and ancient church.
The Elizabethans were, as a nation, triumphing in the first glow of exuberant and healthy youth: with the faults of youth as well as its virtues.
His proper place was among that noble band of Elizabethans, whose strong and splendid spirit gave to England, in one miraculous generation, the most glorious heritage of drama that the world has known.
Quickly and Doll Tearsheet to Rosalind and Imogen and Cordelia; we know how to Shakespeare, and in a lesser degree to some of the other great Elizabethans like Marlowe and Webster, there is nothing common and insignificant in life, nothing which the creative imagination of the artist cannot transform, transmute, from mere dross into pure gold.
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