Idle Hours in a Library

It is the purpose of the present paper to give some glimpses of every-day life in the English metropolis in the latter part of the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth centuries. Our subject will take us from the main highways of history into by-paths illuminated by the popular literature of the time. It is not the grave historian, the statesman, or the philosopher, but rather the common playwright, the ballad-monger, the pamphleteer, whom we must take here as our guides. Yet ere we intrust ourselves to their care it will not be amiss if, with the view of making the clearer what we shall presently have to say, we pause for a moment at the outset to consider some of the more general aspects of the period with which we are to deal.

Looking, then, first of all, at the political conditions of the time, we may describe the history of the reign of Elizabeth as the history of consolidation rather than of superficial change. What strikes us most is not the addition of fresh culture-elements, but the reorganization and expansion of elements already existing. The forces of evolution had turned inward, acting more upon the internal structure than upon the external forms of society. The Wars of the Roses were now things of recollection only, the fierce contentions which the struggle between York and Lancaster had produced having subsided with most of the bitter feelings engendered by them. Save for the collision with Spain, which ended in the defeat of the great Armada, England enjoyed a singular immunity from complications with foreign powers; and an opportunity, freely made use of, was thus offered for the development of foreign trade. The growth of a strong commercial sentiment, consequent on this, acted as a powerful solvent in the dissolution of feudal ideas and the disintegration of feudal forms of life. The conflict was now mainly between opinions—between rival forces of an intellectual and moral character. The power of the upper classes—the representatives of the ancient régime of chivalry—was on the wane; the power of the middle classes—the representatives of the modern régime of commerce—showed corresponding growth. The voice of the people, through their delegates in Parliament, began to be acknowledged by the caution exhibited on sundry critical occasions by the crown; the country at large was growing richer and stronger; the sense of English unity was intensified by the very dangers which menaced the national life; and as men came more and more to recognize their individualities, they demanded greater freedom of thought and speech. “England, alone of European nations,” as Mr. Symonds pointed out, “received the influences of both Renaissance and Reformation simultaneously.” The mighty forces generated by these two movements in combination—one emancipating the reason, the other the conscience, from the trammels of the Middle Ages—told in countless ways upon the masses of society. But with all this,—partly, indeed, in consequence of all this,—there was a deep-seated restlessness at the very springs of life. The contests of opposing parties were carried on with a fierceness and acerbity of which we know little in these more moderate days; the minds of men were set at variance and thrown into confusion by a thousand distracting issues; and, unrealized as yet in all their significance and power, those Titanic religious and political agencies were beginning to take shape which were by and by to rend English society to its very core.

When we turn from the political character of the age to the moral character of the people, we find it difficult to avoid having recourse to a series of antitheses, after the familiar manner of Macaulay, so violent and surprising are the contrasts, so diverse the component qualities which analysis everywhere brings to light. The age was virile in its power, its restlessness, its amazing energy and fertility; it was virile, too, in its unrestraint, its fierceness, its licentiousness and brutality. Men gloried in their newly conquered freedom, and in that wider knowledge of the world which had been opened up to them by the study of the past, by the scientific researches of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, by the discoveries of Amerigo Vespucci, Columbus, Jenkinson, Willoughby, Drake. National feeling was strong; the national pulse beat high. Yet, in spite of Protestantism and an open Bible, it was essentially a pagan age; in spite of its Platonism and Euphuism, a coarse and sensual one. You had only to scratch the superficial polish to find the old savagery beneath. Your smiling and graceful courtier would discourse of Seneca and Aristotle, but he would relish the obscenest jest and act his part in the grossest intrigue. Your young gallant would turn an Italian sonnet, or “tune the music of an ever vain tongue,” but within an hour he might have been found in all the blood and filth and turmoil of the cockpit or the bear-ring. The unseemliest freedom prevailed throughout society—amidst the noble ladies in immediate attendance upon the queen, and thence all down the social scale. Laws were horribly brutal, habits revoltingly rude. All the powerful instincts of a fresh, buoyant, self-reliant, ambitious, robust, sensuous manhood had burst loose, finding expression now in wild extravagance, indulgence, animalism, now in great effort on distant seas, now in the mighty utterances of the drama; for these things were but different facets of the same national character. Still, with all its gigantic prodigality of energy, with all its untempered misuse of genius and power, the English Renaissance kept itself free from many of the worst features of the Spanish and Italian revivals. It was all very well for Benvenuto Cellini to call the English “wild beasts.” Deep down beneath the casuistry and Euphuism, beneath the artificiality and the glittering veneer, beneath the coarseness and the brutalism, there was ever to be found that which was lacking in the Southern character—a stern, hardy, tough-fibred moral sense, which in that critical period of disquietude and upheaval formed indeed the very sheet-anchor of the nation’s hopes. It must never be forgotten that it was this age of new-found freedom, and of that license which went with it like its shadow, that produced such types of magnificent manhood as Raleigh, strong “the fierce extremes of good and ill to brook”; as Spenser, sweetest and purest of poets and of men; as Sidney, whom that same Spenser might well describe as “the most noble and virtuous gentleman, most worthy of all titles, both of learning and chivalry”; as Shakspere, whom, all slanders notwithstanding, we, like his own close friends, still think and speak of as our “Gentle Will.”

Such, so far as we are able to sum them up in a few brief sentences, were some of the salient characteristics of the great age of the Virgin Queen—an age, as Dean Church has said, “of vast ambitious adventure, which went to sea, little knowing whither it went, and ill-provided with knowledge or instrument”; but an age of magnificent enterprise and achievement, none the less. And now it is for us to follow down into some of the details of their private, every-day existence the men and women who, to use a suggestive phrase of Goethe’s, were the citizens of this period, and whose little lives shared, no matter in how small and obscure a way, in the movements and destinies of the large world into which they were born.