Italy's Influence Reaches England
The influence of Italy passed through France like a rushing flood, or rather like a river creeping forward on its many fingers, and reached England. The scholarship of one generation inspired the literature of the next, and the revelation of ancient Greece and Rome became the Bible of the Renaissance. In 1486 the plays of Plautus were staged in Italy, and soon after at the rival courts of Francis I and Henry VIII. In 1508 Bibbiena's Calandria spread the classical manner of writing comedy in Italy. In 1552 Jodelle's Captive Cleopatra established classical tragedy in France, and in 1553 Nicholas Udall wrote the first English comedy in the classical manner. A critic of the time said of Ralph Roister Doister that it "smells of Plautus," and that was true; but Udall's lines also smell of England and of the particular humor that Shakespeare later used in the drama of the Elizabethan age.
Wyatt and the Sonnet
Italian influence is clearest of all in the poetry of the Tudor reign. The medieval manner lived on in ballads such as The Nut-Brown Maid (1521, the book's title is garbled here), but when the poets who warmed themselves in the sun of the young Henry VIII began to write, their ideal and model was Petrarch and his great collection of lyrics. Just a year before Elizabeth came to the throne, the London publisher Richard Tottel printed a collection of verse (Songs and Sonnets) in which two reputable court poets revealed the victory of Petrarch over Chaucer, that is, the triumph of the classical form over medieval rambling. Sir Thomas Wyatt, a political adviser of Henry VIII, made many journeys to France and Italy and brought several Italian artists back to England to help him civilize his friends. Like a true courtier of the Renaissance he gave himself to affairs of the heart; it is reported that Wyatt was among the first admirers of Anne Boleyn, and that when she was thrown into the Tower he too was held for a short time.
Wyatt translated Petrarch's sonnets into English and was the first to compress English verse into that compact form. When a fever took him at thirty-nine (1542), another romantic poet at Henry's court, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, took up the lyre.
The Earl of Surrey
Surrey sang the beauties of spring, scolded the coy maidens of the court, and swore eternal fidelity to each of them in turn. In London he gave himself to nightly excess; he spent time in prison for challenging a man to a duel; he was summoned to court for eating meat in Lent; on another occasion, in a prank, he broke the windows of a building with a crossbow and was jailed and released again; and out of patriotism he fought gallantly against the French. After his return from France he made a great stir with ambitions touching the royal succession, and in place of a throne he was condemned and executed (1547).
In this restless life poetry was an incidental ornament. Surrey translated several books of the Aeneid into English, introduced blank verse into English literature, and gave the sonnet a shape that Shakespeare later used. Perhaps foreseeing that the road of misplaced ambition ends at the scaffold, he rendered a short ode of the Roman poet Martial that expresses his inner longing for life and rural peace. In outline: the things that make life sweet are an inherited fortune rather than one won with blood and sweat, fertile land and an untroubled mind, an equal friend, no quarrels and no distress, no change in the law and no change of ruler, a healthy life free of sickness, the continuity of the family hearth, a light meal and not a rich table, true wisdom mixed with simplicity, a night free of every care, and a faithful wife of few words; content with what you own, you neither wish for death nor fear it.
Germany: Literature in the Service of Controversy
In the century after Luther's movement the German mind was caught up in a hundred years of disputation that prepared the ground for the Thirty Years' War. After 1530 the publication of classical texts in Germany almost stopped, and books in general were printed less, for polemical pamphlets had flooded the market. Thomas Murner, a Franciscan friar, put his sharp pen to work and wore the public out with a series of satires on rogues and fools, with titles such as The Guild of Rogues and The Exorcism of Fools, all under the influence of Brant's Ship of Fools. Many of the fools who felt his lash were churchmen. At first Murner was known as a loyal follower of Luther, until he turned on Luther with a string of abusive titles, and Henry VIII sent him a hundred pounds.
Sebastian Franck
Sebastian Franck was of better stuff. A priest in Augsburg in the years of the Reformation, he called the movement a bold and necessary revolution and joined the Lutheran clergy (1525). Three years later he married Ottilie Behaim, whose brothers were Anabaptists. He expressed sympathy for that persecuted sect and condemned Lutheran intolerance; he was expelled from Strasbourg and had to earn his living at Ulm as a soap-maker. He mocked the German princes' control of creeds: "If a ruler dies and his successor follows another confession, at once the new confession becomes the word of God." And: "Today a mad fanaticism has seized all people, as if we had to be certain that God belongs only to us, and that outside our sect there is no heaven, no faith, no Jesus and no spirit." His own faith was a universal belief in God that shut the door on no one: "My heart is a stranger to nobody. My brothers are scattered among Turks, Jews, papists and all the peoples of the world." He wished for "a Christianity free, undivided, and bound to no outward authority," and for the Bible itself to be spread everywhere. Ulm, disgusted by such untimely views, banished him. He went to Basel, took work in a printing house, and died there in honorable poverty (1542).
Hans Sachs the Cobbler-Poet
By now poetry and theater in Germany had become so mixed with theology that they lost their artistic character and were used like weapons of war. In this quarrel every kind of nonsense, violence and slander was permitted. Except for folk songs and religious hymns, the other kinds of poetry gave up the ghost under a downpour of poisoned rhymes. The lavish religious dramas that flourished in the fifteenth century fell from favor, and popular farces mocking Luther or the popes took their place.
Now and then someone rose out of the anger to see life whole. Had Hans Sachs obeyed the Nuremberg magistrates, he would have remained a cobbler all his life; for when, without a license, he published a rhymed history of the Tower of Babel, the council banned his book and assured him that making verses was not his business, ordering him to keep to shoemaking. But Hans had rights and privileges, since he had passed through the ordinary stages and entered the guild of the Mastersingers. If we recall that the guild of weavers and shoemakers, to which he also belonged, regularly practiced choral songs and gave three public concerts a year, the question of how Sachs could make shoes and verses together leaves our minds. For his guild, and on every suitable occasion, he composed songs and plays, and shrank from no difficulty in the work.
We should not regard Hans Sachs as a great poet, but as a wholesome and cheering voice in a century full of the clamor of hatred. His chief concern was ordinary people, not geniuses, and the audiences of his plays were almost always such people. In his dramas even God appears as a decent common man whose words resemble the sermons of the neighboring village priest. At a time when other writers seasoned their pages with foul spice, coarseness and obscenity, Hans described and honored a sense of duty, kindness, inward faith, fidelity in marriage and love of parents and children. His first collection, published in 1516, contained thoughts and counsels of this kind: "the proclamation of God's praise and glory" and "helping and guiding our fellows to live in repentance and virtue." This innate piety made his writing warm and engaging from start to finish. He turned half of the Bible into verse, taking Luther's translation as his source. He honored Luther as "the Nightingale of Wittenberg," the one man who could cleanse religion of its impurities and revive moral principles. In his poem, in outline: arise, for day is near, and from the forests a song reaches my ear; this is the proud nightingale whose voice echoes over hill and plain; night sinks in the west, day leaps up in the east, dawn comes and scatters light on the darkness of the passing clouds.
So Hans Sachs became the poet and minstrel of the Reformation and mocked the errors of the Catholics with stubborn persistence. He wrote plays about hypocritical monks and traced their genealogy to the devil, and composed satires and farces on corrupt clergy. In 1558 he published a rhymed history of the female pope called Joan, which was only a fiction, yet most Protestant preachers accepted it as true history. On the other side, he satirized the Lutherans too and showed that their way of life flagrantly contradicted their creed: "With your habit of eating flesh, your insults to the priests, and all your shouting, quarreling, mockery, cursing and other unseemly conduct, you Lutherans have brought the Gospel into contempt." Sachs joined hundreds of thinkers in lamenting the moral decay and greed of the age. On the whole we can take him as a true specimen of the boastfulness, rawness and kindness of ordinary Germans, particularly in the south. He spent forty years among his fortunate family and made songs.
When his first wife died (1560), at sixty-eight he married a beautiful young woman of twenty-seven, and his life survived even this difficult trial and went on. A century and a city in which a cobbler could become a poet, a musician and a humanist, assemble a large library and use it, learn Greek literature and philosophy, write 6,000 poems, and live in moderate health and happiness to the age of eighty-two is not without historical importance, and deserves a few words.