that only. For purely stage purposes, too, their convention is inferior to the Spanish. The Dama Melindrosa would be easily intelligible and interesting to any audience to-day, but not Every Man in his Humour, or Epicene. With Shakespeare, when the suppressions have been made and the scenes have been adapted to new mechanical conditions, there still remains-not in all cases, indeed, but in most-a play-that is, a consistent action-carried on by possible characters, behaving and speaking differently from us in those things which are merely external, but in perfect agreement in all the essentials, both with themselves and with unchanging human nature.

It is this inner bond of life which gives to Shakespeare's plays their unity and their enduring vitality. The superb verse, the faultless expression of every human emotion, from the love of Romeo or the intrepid despair of Macbeth down to the grotesque devotion of Bardolph, "Would I were with him wheresome'er he is, either in Heaven or in Hell," are the outward and visible signs of this inward and spiritual truth to nature. Henry IV. and Henry V. may seem to be but straggling plays when they are compared with the exactly fitted plots of Lope de Vega or the arranged, selected, concentrated action. of Racine. So the free-growing forest-tree Shakespeare's is less trim and balanced than the clipped yew. But it has the higher life and the finer unity. The Henry V. who meets Falstaff with

The reality of

characters.

"I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!"

is the same man as he who said

"I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness.
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will."

Nor is he altered when he seeks a complacent archbishop to provide him with an excuse for a war of aggression, and so having provided for both worlds, takes advantage of his own wrong to throw the responsibility for the miseries of the war on the French. In the tavern, in the council-chamber, on the battlefield, by the sick-bed of his father, he is always the same Henry of Monmouth, a foundation of cold able selfishness, a surface of valour and showy magnanimity which costs him nothing—a perfect portrait of the "unconscious hypocrite." The circumstances may change but not the man. He only adapts the outward show to them. The incomparably more honest nature of Falstaff is as consistent as the king's. He is a Bohemian who is not vicious nor cruel, but who simply follows the lusts of the flesh spontaneously, and is lovable for his geniality, his wit, and his perfect sincerity. Falstaff is not, properly speaking, immoral. He is only exterior to morals. If he were cruel or treacherous he would be horrible, but he is neither. He is only a humorous, fat, meat-, drink-, and easeloving animal. Given these two, and around them a crowd of others, heroic, grotesque, or even only commonplace, all doing credible things on the green earth, and the result is a coherent action, not made

on the model of a Chinese puzzle, but yet consistent, because being real and true to life, the characters act intelligibly, and do nothing uncaused, unnatural, or inconsequent.

The mere fact that it is possible to differ as to the real nature of some of Shakespeare's characters is a tribute to their reality. We are never in the least doubt as to the meaning of the heroes of Corneille or Racine, or the galanes, damas, and jealous husbands of Lope and Calderon. In them we have certain qualities, certain manifestations of character, selected and kept so well before us that they explain themselves, as a Spaniard might say, a crossbow-shot off. Even Molière, who comes nearest to Shakespeare, is simple and transparent, because he also is, in comparison, narrow and arbitrary. We may differ as to his purpose in writing Don Juan or Tartuffe. Was he only drawing infidelity and hypocrisy to make them hateful? Was he speaking for the libertins of the seventeenth century, the forerunners of the philosophy of the eighteenth, who were in revolt against the claim of religion to be a guide of life and to control conduct? But the personages explain themselves. Again, when we meet one of those sudden, unexplained, or insufficiently explained alterations of the whole nature of a man or woman, so common with the other Elizabethan dramatists, and not very rare with the Spaniards, we know it to be false to life, and put it down at once as a clumsy playwright's device. But the characters of Shakespeare are like the great figures of history, real, and yet not always to be understood at once, because

R

they have the variety, the complexity, and the mystery of nature.

The men who grew up around Shakespeare in the last years of the sixteenth century, and who outlived him, do not belong to our subject. It is enough to point out how unlikely it was that they would continue him. Ben Jonson, who was by far the strongest of them, tacitly confessed that there could be no Shakespearian drama without Shakespeare, when he deliberately sacrificed character to the convenient simplicity of the "humour," and looked for the structural coherence of his plays to the unities. Other men who were less wise preferred to keep the freedom which they had not the strength to bear.

259

CHAPTER IX.

THE ELIZABETHAN PROSE-WRITERS.

ELIZABETHAN PROSE-TWO SCHOOLS OF WRITERS-ROGER ASCHAM-HIS BOOKS AND STYLE-WEBBE AND PUTTENHAM-THE SENTENCEEUPHUISM-THE 'ARCADIA 'SIDNEY'S STYLE-SHORT STORIESNASH'S UNFORTUNATE TRAVELLER'-NASH AND THE PAMPHLETEERS-MARTIN MARPRELATE-ORIGIN OF THE MARPRELATE TRACTS -THE 'DIOTREPHES'-COURSE OF THE CONTROVERSY-ITS PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY-HOOKER-THE ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY.'

THE reign of Elizabeth and the first years of James, which cover the period of the Later Renaissance in Elizabethan England, were times of poetry and not of

prose.

prose. It is true that much prose was written, that some of it is admirable, and that more is interesting. It is also true that some of the greatest masters of English prose were alive, and were working in these years. Yet these men, whose chief was Bacon, belong, by their character, their influence, and by the dates of their greatest achievements, to the generations described as Jacobean and Caroline. In the Elizabethan time proper there is but one very