given in churchyards, and finally on village greens and at street corners. By this time, however, the Miracle plays had passed out of the hands of priests and into the hands of the labor guilds or unions. Thus not only the church but the rapidly rising merchant class have a share in the development of the drama. Each guild made a specialty of one play, and great was the rivalry among guilds. Out of the Miracle play grew what is called the Morality. The Morality does not tell a Bible story; yet, as the name suggests, its purpose is to teach a Moralities moral lesson. Vice, Gluttony, Mercy, Justice, Death, Mankind are among the characters found, each play being a little allegory picturing the struggle of the soul in the great conflict between right and wrong. Interludes A third early variety, the Interlude, takes us not to the great churches, nor to the guilds of the prospering middle classes, but to the homes of the nobles, the feudal aristocracy. The Interlude was hardly more than a dialogue, sometimes accompanied by music, coming between the courses at a banquet. Its purpose was simply to make folks merry. New Learning Thus early English drama is principally of native origin; it owes not a little, however, to the New Learning. When, Drama and in the fifteenth century, the classics were being studied with such enthusiasm, what more natural than that schoolmasters should have their boys learn and present, in the schoolroom, Latin comedies, first in the original, and later in English. Latin tragedies were given too. And from presenting Latin plays how natural the step to the writing of plays patterned after Latin models. Gorboduc, the first regular tragedy, though its plot is based upon a British legend, is patterned after a Latin model; so too is Ralph Roister Doister. Although this brief period produced so little that is of permanent value, we can see how it was preparatory in many ways to the brilliant Elizabethan period. Drama is passing through its experimental stages. Blank verse, the ve A period of preparation hicle of Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, and the sonnet, a form in which much of the best Elizabethan poetry is cast, are being acclimatized. The many translations of the Scripture are preparing the way for the noble King James version. We note, moreover, that scholars from the universities are entering the arena of letters, and that courtiers are winning laurels by writing verses. Literature is becoming popular at court. But few times in all the world's history has any country experienced such a golden age as that which England enjoyed during the reigns of Elizabeth and A golden age James the First, commonly termed the Elizabethan Age. It is all the more wonderful because it came practically unheralded. Previous to Spenser and Shakespeare, England had produced but one great poet, Chaucer, and but two prose writers whose works are still read, Malory and More. Crude and elementary, giving little promise of better things, are the religious plays of the Middle Ages and even the early examples of regular comedy and tragedy. As for songs, the best that we have found are the ballads of the common people, simple, unliterary products. We have found no trace of the novel or the essay. Yet during the Elizabethan period England teemed with writers, and practically every form of lit erature that we have today was ably represented. This was the age that produced Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare. They are the giants; yet one authority mentions over two hundred others associated with this great literary trio, and a second authority estimates that it would take from forty to fifty volumes of some size to accommodate whatever of Elizabethan drama alone has survived and is worthy of study. Practically one-fourth of the poems found in Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, selected from all English literature, are songs and lyrics from Elizabethan writers. Manifestly, where so much invites attention, a brief summary can but pick out here and there a representative name. Prose will be considered first, no attempt being made to preserve a chronological sequence. Of all the prose written during this period, two volumes only are in common circulation today and are admittedly classics of the first order. By far the greater The Bible is what we know as the Authorized, or King James, version of the Bible, made at royal request, by forty or more scholarly divines who based their translations largely on the many versions, beginning with Tyndale's, which had appeared during the preceding century. Setting aside one or two revisions of quite recent times, it is the last of that long line of scriptural translations which began far back in Anglo-Saxon days when Bede, on his death bed, dictated to his fellow monks the last words of a translation from the Latin of the Gospel according to St. John. It marks the final triumphal entrance into our literature of essentially all the literature of the ancient Jewish people, produced during a period not greatly different in extent from that of our own literary history. Wonderful in its original form, admirably translated into clear, simple, melodious English at a time when our lan guage was most vigorous, it has become our greatest classic, the one book which more than any other has moulded national character. Its strong, beautiful prose has been a model consciously or unconsciously followed by all writers from Shakespeare's time down to the present. Bacon's essays The second book is a small volume containing fifty or sixty essays varying in length from two pages to ten or twelve, by a prominent lawyer of Elizabeth's day, who in King James's reign climbed high and rapidly, reached the summit of his greatness as Lord Chancellor, and then, when living in great state, the foremost judge in all England, was accused of accepting bribes, was speedily convicted, heavily fined, and driven from public life. Bacon considered his essays of slight value beside his ten or more other works, in the fields of law, history, and science, most of which he translated into Latin that they might endure through all time in what he believed to be the only permanent language; yet the volume left to its fate in English has survived all the rest. These essays deal with such topics as truth, friendship, revenge, cunning, death. Each is a compact assembly of thoughts and opinions tersely expressed in smooth, brilliant sentences, many of them so to the point that, once read, they cling to the memory. The King James Bible marks the close of a long life of scriptural translations; Bacon's little book stands at the beginning of a long line of essays reaching to the present day. Below these two books range many other prose works in various fields. We have not ventured to include in our table Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World, written during his fourteen years of imprisonment in the Tower. It begins bravely with the Creation; one hundred and fifty pages or so barely take the reader beyond the Garden of Eden; Other prose works |