English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama) by C. S. Lewis

Author:C. S. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

II

Prose in the ‘Golden’ Period

In the last quarter of the century we find a greatly increased output of literature. There is on the whole a remarkable improvement in quality; but even if this had not been so, the mere quantity would be striking. Part of the explanation is that literature is now finding its feet as a commercial art and printers are eager for saleable copy. Many of the authors are victims of that academic overproduction which Mulcaster deprecated, men who have been helped through the universities by friends who could help them no further and who try to live (if nothing better turns up) by the pen. The more fortunate of them make plays for the new theatres; the others depend on the patron and the bookseller. There are also, of course, many ‘gentle’, pious, or learned authors who write from other motives.

Among the forms which commercial prose took at this time fiction holds a very important place; so important that we may wonder why this vein was so little exploited again before the eighteenth century. But the truth is that Elizabethan fiction points only rarely and uncertainly towards the novel properly so called. It appealed to rather different tastes and the eighteenth-century novelists had to make a new start. The other dominant form was the pamphlet; if indeed we can call it a form. Often it contains matter that might well have been served as fiction: presumably the taste for confessed fiction was then (as it still is) rarer than the taste for sensational reading which claims to be ‘news’. The lowest sort of reader wants to be assured (like Shakespeare’s Mopsa) that what he reads is true. Hence the pamphlet absorbed much that would now go into the daily or Sunday papers; murders, apparitions, spy-stories, executions, advertisement. Mr. H. Platt of Lincoln’s Inn, in his Discovery of certain English Wants (1595) finds himself ‘forced even by the bond of charity . . . and the tender loue and affection which he owes his natiue countrey’ to draw attention to the great utility of ‘colebals’ and of an incredibly cheap and long-lived candle that can be ‘sodainly made’; interested readers may get his address from the publisher. Controversy, if properly seasoned with personal abuse, was a good line; a man who had bought any one number of, say, the Harvey-Nashe flyting, would find it hard not to buy the next. Moralizing, preferably of an indignant, censorious kind, was highly popular. It need hardly be added that I attach no note of infamy to any text in calling it commercial. Many of the best books have been written for money.

I will deal first with the pamphlets, and where a pamphleteer has also written fiction, his work in that kind, if of sufficient importance, will be reserved for later treatment.

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