Endeavors of Art: A study of form in Elizabethan drama [antikvár]

Preface This book is an essay in historical criticism. It is based on the premise that to know and understand the frame of artistic reference within which the practising dramatists of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods worked is to understand better their artistic achievement. They were limited in some directions, freed in others, by the artistic possibilities open to them in their own time, those possibilities that were shaped for them by their literary heritage, their predominantly rhetorical education, the commonplaces of renaissance aesthetic and poetic, and contemporary taste. To see both the weakness and the strength of the Elizabethan drama from this perspective is a corrective against anachronistic expectations. At the same time, though the setting of this study is historical, the point of view is aesthetic. The plays are regarded, not as documents illustrative of social or intellectual history, but as plays; the assumption is that their lasting value depends upon the degree of their success as works of art. When Thomas Nashe in 1589, at the age of twenty-two, undertook to write a preface to his friend Robert Greene's pastoral romance, Menaphon, he made it the occasion of a remarkable survey of the contemporary state of English letters. With the intolerance of a gifted young man (and a new-made Cambridge Master of Arts to boot) he girded at upstart and ill-educated writers who sought to cover their lack of talent with imitations of classical and continental poetry and drama—"a sort of shifting companions, that run through every trade and thrive by none," that "leave the trade of Noverint whereto they were born, and busy themselves with the endeavors of art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck-verse if they should have need." The consequence of their activities is that English Seneca read by candle light yields many good sentences, as Blood is a beggar, and so forth: and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches. But o grief! tempus edax rerum, what's that will last always? The sea exhaled by drops will in continuance be dry, and Seneca let blood line by line and page by page, at length must needs die to our stage: