The Facts About Shakespeare | Page 5

before which gathered the crowd of coaches that annoyed the puritans of the neighborhood, was a symptom of the growth of wealth and luxury, and of the increased power of the monarchy; the protests of the puritan neighborhood were an indication of the growth of a large class hostile alike to an arbitrary court, luxury, and the theater.
Shakespeare's lifetime, however, saw little of this sharp division into parties or of that narrow moral consistency which Puritanism came to require. Looking back on his age in contrast with our own, we are perhaps most impressed by its striking incongruities. This London of dirt and disease was also the arena for extravagant fashion and princely display. This populace that watched with joy the cruel torment of a bear or the execution of a Catholic also delighted in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare. This people, so appallingly credulous and ignorant, so brutal, childish, so mercurial compared with Englishmen of to-day, yet set the standard of national greatness. This absurdly decorated gallant could stab a rival in the back or write a penitential lyric. Each man presents strange, almost inexplicable, contrasts in character, as Bacon or Raleigh, or Elizabeth herself. The drama mingles its sentiment and fancy with horrors and bloodshed; and no wonder, for poetry was no occupation of the cloister. Read the lives of the poets--Surrey, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Marlowe, Jonson--and of these, only Spenser and Jonson died in their beds, and Ben had killed his man in a duel. The student of Elizabethan history and biography will find stranger contrasts than in the lives of these poets, for crime, meanness, and sexual depravity often appear in the closest juxtaposition with imaginative idealism, intellectual freedom, and moral grandeur.
[Page Heading: Elizabethan Incongruities]
The Italian Renaissance, with its mingled passions for beauty, art, blood, lust, and intellect, seems for a time transferred to London and dwelling alongside of commerce and Puritanism. Yet these incongruities of character, manners, and motives that seem so striking to us to-day may probably be explained by conditions already described. The opportunities created by the changes in church and religion, the new education and prosperity, the new America, and the revived classics, all tended to create a new thirst for experience. This thirst for experience led to excess and incongruity, but it also furnished an unparalleled range of human motive for a poet's observation and imitation.
In the wide range of our poet's survey, there is, however, one notable omission. The reign of Elizabeth, like those of her three predecessors, was one of religious controversy, change, and persecution. But all this strife, all this debate, repression, persecution, and all of this great turmoil working in the minds of Englishmen, find little reflection in Shakespeare's plays, and little in the whole Elizabethan drama. Religious controversy had played a part in the drama of the reign of Edward and Mary, but it rarely enters the Elizabethan drama, and then mainly in the form of ridicule for the puritan. Shakespeare's plays seem almost to ignore the most momentous facts of his time. They treat pagan, Catholic, and Protestant with cordiality and only smile at the puritan or Brownist. His England of the merry wives or Falstaff's justices seems strangely untroubled by questions of faith or ritual. There is, to be sure, plenty of religion and controversy in the literature of the time, but the drama as a whole is singularly non-religious. It reflects rather that freedom from restraint, that buoyancy of spirit, that lively interest in experience, which had their full course in the few years when the old garment was off and the new not quite fitted. The immense intellectual and imaginative activity of the period consists precisely in this freedom from restrictions, partisanship, dogmas, or caste. Things had lost their labels and some time and argument were required to find new ones. Ideas were free and not bound to any school, party, or cause. You grasped an idea without knowing whether it made you realist, romanticist, or classicist; papist, puritan, or pagan. After centuries of imprisonment, individuality had its full chance in the world of ideas as elsewhere.
[Page Heading: An Age of Freedom]
In a few years this was all over, and your sphere of life and the ideas proper to that sphere were prescribed for you. By another century, England had fought out the issues of creed and government with expense of blood and spirit, and had settled down to the compromise of 1688. In Shakespeare's day there was also, of course, some movement toward fixity of ideas, and there were great men who strove to convert others to their ideas and to dictate belief and conduct. But there was a breathing spell in which, comparatively speaking, men were not alike, but individual, and in which their motives and ideas revelled in