An age of doubt and energy
Copernicus had unsettled everyone by saying the world turns in space. Giordano Bruno came to Oxford in 1583 and spoke seriously of the new astronomy and of infinite worlds. Poets like John Donne felt the earth slipping beneath their feet. In 1595 Florio began translating Montaigne, and from then on nothing seemed certain; the very air people breathed was tinged with doubt. As Marlowe resembled Machiavelli, so Shakespeare seemed to resemble Montaigne. While wise men doubted, the young made plans. With heaven wrapped in philosophy, they resolved to enjoy life, to use any truth however deadly, any beauty however fleeting, any power however poisonous. Marlowe drew on the same springs in his plays on Faustus and Tamburlaine.
This probing of old beliefs, and the freeing of thought to voice new hopes and dreams, made the Elizabethan age unforgettable. Take away what was fleeting, the political rivalries, the religious quarrels, the military triumphs and the lust for gold, and the literature still speaks for the hopes and doubts of thinking men in every age. Many forces fed it: voyages that opened lands, markets and ideas; the wealth of the middle class; the recovery of Greek and Roman letters; the Reformation and the expulsion of papal influence; religious debate that led people, without their noticing, from doctrine to reason; schooling and a growing public for books and plays; a long peace followed by a stirring struggle with Spain and an intoxicating victory; and a growing trust in human power and thought. All of these made England great and brought Shakespeare forth. After nearly two centuries of silence since Chaucer, English prose and verse flourished, and the country spoke boldly to the world.
Books and their makers
The number of books kept growing. In 1600 Barnabe Rich complained that one of the plagues of the age was the multiplication of books, too many for anyone to digest the nonsense hatching every day. In 1628 Robert Burton wrote that we have too many, our eyes ache from reading and our fingers from turning pages. It is remarkable that both complainers wrote books themselves.
Nobles, who had learned to read and write, helped authors who softened them with dedications. Cecil, Leicester, Sidney, Raleigh, Essex, Southampton and the Earls and Countesses of Pembroke were patrons of letters, and a bond grew between English nobility and writers that lasted even after Johnson scolded Chesterfield. According to the book, publishers paid about 40 shillings for a tract and about 5 pounds for a book. Few writers could live by the pen, and the always disappointed 'man of letters' appeared in England. Rich men had private libraries; public ones were rare. Returning from Cadiz, Essex stopped at Faro in Portugal and seized the library of Bishop Jerome Osorius, which he gave to Sir Thomas Bodley, who left its books within the Bodleian for Oxford University (the book dates this 1598).
Publishers lived uneasily, subject to state law and public whim. There were two hundred and fifty publishers in England under Elizabeth, since publishing and selling books were still one trade, and many printed their own books; toward the end of the age printer and publisher parted. In 1557 publishers, printers and booksellers formed the Stationers' Company, and registering a work with it carried the exclusive right to print it. This protected the publisher, not the author. Usually the Company registered only works already licensed by the authorities. It was an offense to write, print, sell or own anything harmful to the reputation of the queen or the government, or to publish or import heretical books, papal bulls and letters, or books upholding papal authority over the English Church, and violations brought severe penalties, in some cases death. The Company had legal power to search all printing houses, burn unlicensed publications and jail those who issued them. Censorship under Elizabeth was harsher than in any period before the Reformation, yet literature flourished; as in eighteenth-century France, the danger of printing sharpened wit.
Scholars and historians
Scholars were few. The age was one of invention, not criticism. In years when theology was intense, the spring of humanism had dried up. Many historians were still chroniclers who divided events by years. Richard Knolles surprised Lord Burghley with his fairly good General History of the Turks (the book dates this 1603, though Burghley died in 1598, an inconsistency in the source). Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles gave Shakespeare his information about the kings of England and won him undeserved extra fame. John Stow gave his Chronicles of England a coat of wisdom, called people to virtue and hated bitter truths, but the work had little mastery and its prose put readers to sleep. His other book, the Survey of London (1598), was somewhat scholarly but earned him no bread, and in old age he was granted a license to beg. William Camden, with fine Latin, gathered the geography, landscapes and antiquities of England in Britannia (1582) and in another book grounded his history in careful study of original documents. Camden praised the queen with impartiality and admired Spenser, passed over Shakespeare, and praised Roger Ascham while lamenting that so fine a scholar died poor through his love of dice and cockfighting.
Ascham, secretary to 'Bloody Mary' and tutor to the young Elizabeth, left the most important English treatise on education. His Schoolmaster (1570) was written chiefly to teach Latin, but in plain, firm English it pleads for Christian kindness in teaching in place of Eton's harshness. He tells of dining with powerful men of Elizabeth's government when talk turned to teaching by the rod, Cecil favoring gentler ways. Sir Richard Sackville said a foolish schoolmaster, by frightening him with beatings, had driven all love of learning out of him.
The flood of translations
The most important and effective task of scholars was to bring foreign thought to the English. In the second half of the sixteenth century many books were translated from Greek, Latin, Italian and French. George Chapman translated Homer (1611), and the lack of English versions of Greek plays kept Elizabethan drama romantic rather than classical in form. Translated were Theocritus, Musaeus's Hero and Leander, Epictetus's Enchiridion, Aristotle's Ethics and Politics, Xenophon's Cyropaedia and Economics, speeches of Demosthenes and Isocrates, the histories of Herodotus, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Josephus and Appian, the romances of Heliodorus and Longus, and above all Sir Thomas North's vivid Plutarch (1579), made from Amyot's French version of Lives. From Latin came Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Martial and Lucan; the plays of Plautus, Terence and Seneca; and the histories of Livy, Sallust, Tacitus and Suetonius. From Italian came Petrarch's sonnets, Boccaccio's Filocolo and Fiammetta (the Decameron only in 1620), the histories of Guicciardini and Machiavelli, Boiardo's Orlando in Love, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Castiglione's Courtier, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered and Aminta, Guarini's Faithful Shepherd, and tales by Bandello and others gathered in collections like William Painter's Palace of Pleasure. Machiavelli's Prince was translated only in 1640, but Elizabethan statesmen knew its content. Gabriel Harvey reported that at Cambridge the works of Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas were driven out and replaced by Machiavelli and Jean Bodin. From Spanish came Amadis of Gaul, among the longest romances, one of the first rogue tales, Lazarillo de Tormes, and Montemayor's pastoral Diana. The best translations from French were the poems of the Pleiade and Montaigne's essays by John Florio (1603).
The effect of these translations on English literature was astonishing. Quotation from the classics began, and English verse and prose were adorned with it for two centuries. Many English writers knew French and needed no translation. Italy enchanted the English: pastoral verse imitated Sannazaro, Tasso and Guarini, sonnets copied Petrarch, tales copied Boccaccio and the novella, a form that became the model for Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Massinger and Ford. Italian cities became the scenes of English plays. Italy, which had not accepted the Reformation, went further and broke the old theology and even the moral rules of Christianity. While Catholics and Protestants quarreled in England, English writers, ignoring the dispute, turned to the vitality of the Renaissance. Italy, for a time crippled by shifting trade routes, handed the torch of the Renaissance to Spain, France and England.