6.  The Cambridge Shakspere. (Clark & Wright.)

7.  Charles Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.

8.  Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Silent Woman.  Cunningham’s Edition.  London:  J.C.  Hotten, (3 vols.)

CHAPTER IV.

THE AGE OF MILTON.

1608-1674.

The Elizabethan age proper closed with the death of the queen, and the accession of James I., in 1603, but the literature of the fifty years following was quite as rich as that of the half-century that had passed since she came to the throne, in 1557.  The same qualities of thought and style which had marked the writers of her reign prolonged themselves in their successors, through the reigns of the first two Stuart kings and the Commonwealth.  Yet there was a change in spirit.  Literature is only one of the many forms in which the national mind expresses itself.  In periods of political revolution, literature, leaving the serene air of fine art, partakes the violent agitation of the times.  There were seeds of civil and religious discord in Elizabethan England.  As between the two parties in the Church there was a compromise and a truce rather than a final settlement.  The Anglican doctrine was partly Calvinistic and partly Arminian.  The form of government was Episcopal, but there was a large body of Presbyterians in the Church who desired a change.  In the ritual and ceremonies many “rags of popery” had been retained, which the extreme reformers wished to tear away.  But Elizabeth was a worldly-minded woman, impatient of theological disputes.  Though circumstances had made her the champion of Protestantism in Europe she kept many Catholic notions; disapproved, for example, of the marriage of priests, and hated sermons.  She was jealous of her prerogative in the State, and in the Church she enforced uniformity.  The authors of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets against the bishops were punished by death or imprisonment.  While the queen lived things were kept well together and England was at one in face of the common foe.  Admiral Howard, who commanded the English naval forces against the Armada, was a Catholic.

But during the reign of James I. (1603-1625) and Charles I. (1625-1649) Puritanism grew stronger through repression.  “England,” says the historian Green, “became the people of a book, and that book the Bible.”  The power of the king was used to impose the power of the bishops upon the English and Scotch Churches until religious discontent became also political discontent, and finally overthrew the throne.  The writers of this period divided more and more into two hostile camps.  On the side of Church and king was the bulk of the learning and genius of the time.  But on the side of free religion and the Parliament were the stern conviction, the fiery zeal, the exalted imagination of English Puritanism.  The spokesman of this movement was Milton, whose great figure dominates the literary history of his generation, as Shakspere does of the generation preceding.