A History of English Literature

already indicated, of Shakspere's authorship of the plays and poems. No
theory, further, could be more preposterous, to any one really acquainted
with literature, than the idea that the imaginative poetry of Shakspere was
produced by the essentially scientific and prosaic mind of Francis Bacon.
As to the cipher systems supposed to reveal hidden messages in the plays:
First, no poet bending his energies to the composition of such masterpieces
as Shakspere's could possibly concern himself at the same time with weaving
into them a complicated and trifling cryptogram. Second, the cipher systems
are absolutely arbitrary and unscientific, applied to any writings whatever
can be made to 'prove' anything that one likes, and indeed have been
discredited in the hands of their own inventors by being made to 'prove'
far too much. Third, it has been demonstrated more than once that the
verbal coincidences on which the cipher systems rest are no more numerous
than the law of mathematical probabilities requires. Aside from actually
vicious pursuits, there can be no more melancholy waste of time than the
effort to demonstrate that Shakspere is not the real author of his reputed
works.]
NATIONAL LIFE FROM 1603 TO 1660. We have already observed that, as
Shakspere's career suggests, there was no abrupt change in either life or
literature at the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603; and in fact the
Elizabethan period of literature is often made to include the reign of
James I, 1603-1625 (the Jacobean period [Footnote: 'Jaco'bus' is the Latin
form of 'James.']), or even, especially in the case of the drama, that of
Charles I, 1625-1649 (the Carolean period). Certainly the drama of all
three reigns forms a continuously developing whole, and should be discussed
as such. None the less the spirit of the first half of the seventeenth
century came gradually to be widely different from that of the preceding
fifty years, and before going on to Shakspere's successors we must stop to
indicate briefly wherein the difference consists and for this purpose to
speak of the determining events of the period. Before the end of
Elizabeth's reign, indeed, there had been a perceptible change; as the
queen grew old and morose the national life seemed also to lose its youth
and freshness. Her successor and distant cousin, James of Scotland (James I
of England), was a bigoted pedant, and under his rule the perennial Court
corruption, striking in, became foul and noisome. The national Church,
instead of protesting, steadily identified itself more closely with the
Court party, and its ruling officials, on the whole, grew more and more
worldly and intolerant. Little by little the nation found itself divided
into two great factions; on the one hand the Cavaliers, the party of the
Court, the nobles, and the Church, who continued to be largely dominated by
the Renaissance zest for beauty and, especially, pleasure; and on the other
hand the Puritans, comprising the bulk of the middle classes, controlled by
the religious principles of the Reformation, often, in their opposition to
Cavalier frivolity, stern and narrow, and more and more inclined to
separate themselves from the English Church in denominations of their own.
The breach steadily widened until in 1642, under the arbitrary rule of
Charles I, the Civil War broke out. In three years the Puritan Parliament
was victorious, and in 1649 the extreme minority of the Puritans, supported
by the army, took the unprecedented step of putting King Charles to death,
and declared England a Commonwealth. But in four years more the
Parliamentary government, bigoted and inefficient, made itself impossible,
and then for five years, until his death, Oliver Cromwell strongly ruled
England as Protector. Another year and a half of chaos confirmed the nation
in a natural reaction, and in 1660 the unworthy Stuart race was restored in
the person of the base and frivolous Charles II. The general influence of
the forces which produced these events shows clearly in the changing tone
of the drama, the work of those dramatists who were Shakspere's later
contemporaries and successors.