A History of Elizabethan Literature

The starting-point--Tottel's _Miscellany_--Its method and authorship--The characteristics of its poetry--Wyatt--Surrey--Grimald--Their metres --The stuff of their poems--_The Mi...

Spenser--His life and the order of his works--_The Shepherd's Calendar_ --The minor poems--_The Faerie Queene_--Its scheme--The Spenserian stanza--Spenser's language--His genera...

Difficulty of writing about Shakespere--His life--His reputation in England and its history--Divisions of his work--The Poems--The Sonnets--The Plays--Characteristics of Shakesp...

The quintet--Milton's life--His character--His periods of literary production--First Period, the minor poems--The special excellences of _Comus_--_Lycidas_--Second Period, the p...

In a work like the present, forming part of a larger whole and preceded by another part, the writer has the advantage of being almost wholly free from a difficulty which often p...

The history of the earlier Elizabethan prose, if we except the name of Hooker, in whom it culminates, is to a great extent the history of curiosities of literature--of tentative...

It does not belong to the plan of this division of the present book to trace the earliest beginnings of the English theatre, or those intermediate performances by which, in the...

There is no instance in English history of a poet receiving such immediate recognition, and deserving it so thoroughly, as did Edmund Spenser at the date of _The Shepherd's Cale...

The difficulty of writing about Shakespere is twofold; and though it is a difficulty which, in both its aspects, presents itself when other great writers are concerned, there is...

One name so far dominates the prose literature of the last years of Elizabeth, and that of the whole reign of James, that it has probably alone secured attention in the general...

They had in the air around them an English purged of archaisms and uncouthnesses, fully adapted to every literary purpose, and yet still racy of the soil, and free from that bur...

I have chosen, to fill the third division of our dramatic chapters, seven chief writers of distinguished individuality, reserving a certain fringe of anonymous plays and of less...

The reign of James I. is not, in mere poetry, quite such a brilliant period as it is in drama. The full influence of Donne and of Jonson, which combined to produce the exquisite...

During the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, or (to take literary rather than chronological dates) between the death of Bacon and the publication of _Absalom...

There are few periods of poetical development in English literary history which display, in a comparatively narrow compass, such well-marked and pervading individuality as the p...

Two great names remain to be noticed in the Elizabethan drama (though neither produced a play till after Elizabeth was dead), some interesting playwrights of third or fourth-rat...

The greatest, beyond all doubt, of the minor writers of the Caroline period in prose is Robert Burton. Less deliberately quaint than Fuller, he is never, as Fuller sometimes is,...