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Updated: June 16, 2025
The impression then of a Greek play is that it is a somewhat thin performance compared with the vivacity and complexity of the great Elizabethans. The plot, where it exists, seems very narrow in Attic drama; it could hardly be otherwise in a society which was content with a repeated discussion of a rather close cycle of heroic legends.
Thus, whereas the Greeks religiously ascribed the source of all inevitable doom to divine foreordination, and the Elizabethans poetically ascribed it to the weaknesses the human soul is heir to, the moderns prefer to ascribe it scientifically to the dissidence between the individual and his social environment.
Elizabethan England was indeed 'a nest of singing birds. Prose was often far too pedestrian for the exultant life of such a mighty generation. As new worlds came into their expectant ken, the glowing Elizabethans wished to fly there on the soaring wings of verse.
The action moves on a narrow stage set with the austere simplicity of the Elizabethans; the personages are extremely commonplace, the incidents in the main small and unexciting. Yet the tremendousness of human fate is constantly implied and brought home in the most impressive way.
III. We consider the recognition by revelation of death. We have, again, adroit ways of shutting the gate upon that sackcloth which is the sign of death. A recent writer allows that Shakespeare, Raleigh, Bacon, and all the Elizabethans shuddered at the horror and mystery of death; the sunniest spirits of the English Renaissance quailed to think of it.
To obtain it Racine and his school avoided both the extreme contrasts and the displays of physical action which the Elizabethans delighted in.
Sometimes, not always, his genius enabled him to render it delightful; but in most of the Elizabethans though it be heresy to say so it is an extremely tedious mannerism.
In our own age we have seen a somewhat similar fallacy committed by writers who, in their admiration of the richness and flexibility of Elizabethan English, have tried to write with the same copiousness of vocabulary and the same freedom of structure as the Elizabethans.
It is hard to say why, for there are passages in the plays he had already written that challenge comparison with anything in the poems; but praise from the great Elizabethans was not to be lightly won, and no poet could have sought to wear a worthier garland than theirs. Shakespeare was admitted at once to the most select circles. Queen Elizabeth became his patron.
Dead and gone Elizabethans had begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth. Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a Zeitgeist that made for change, Gates did at times display a disposition towards developments.
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