Clive Staples Lewis - English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1944).pdf.PDF

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ENGLISH LITERATURE
ENGLISH LITERATURE
IN THE
SIXTEENTH CENTURY
EXCLUDING DRAMA
C.S. LEWIS
FELLOW OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD
The Completion of
THE CLARK LECTURES
Trinity College, Cambridge
1944
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
CONTENTS
-0- INTRODUCTION: NEW LEARNING AND NEW IGNORANCE 1
BOOK I. LATE MEDIEVAL
-1A- I. THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES IN SCOTLAND 66
-1B- II. THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES IN ENGLAND 120
BOOK II. DRAB
-2A- I. RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY AND TRANSLATION 157
-2B- II. DRAB AGE VERSE 222
-2C- III. DRAB AND TRANSITIONAL PROSE 272
BOOK III. GOLDEN
-3A- I. SIDNEY AND SPENSER 318
-3B- II. PROSE IN THE GOLDEN' PERIOD 394
-3C- III. VERSE IN THE GOLDEN' PERIOD 464
-4- EPILOGUE: NEW TENDENCIES 536
-5- CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 559
-6- BIBLIOGRAPHY 594
INDEX 687 -USE ELECTRONIC INDEX-
PREFACE
WHEN I began this book I had the idea - perhaps most literary
historians have - of giving each author space in proportion to the
value I set on him; but I found it would not do. Things need to be
treated at length not in so far as they are great but in so far as they
are complicated. Good books which are remote from modern
sympathy need to be treated at greater length than good books
which everyone already knows and loves. Bad books may be of
importance for the history of taste and if they are passed over too
briefly the student's picture of a period may be distorted. Finally, if I
had worked strictly to scale I should have been forced either to leave
out many minor authors altogether (as roads and small rivers could
not be made visible in maps unless their width were exaggerated) or
else to say more on some great authors not because more needed to
be said but for the sake of proportion.
Where I have quoted from neo-Latin authors I have tried to
translate them into sixteenth-century English, not simply for the
fun of it but to guard the reader from a false impression he might
otherwise receive. When passages from Calvin, Scaliger, or Erasmus
in modern English jostle passages from vernacular writers with all
the flavour of their period about them, it is fatally easy to get the
feeling that the Latinists are somehow more enlightened, less
remote, less limited by their age, than those who wrote English. It
seemed worth some pains to try to remove so serious and so latent a
misconception.
As I write French' not Français, I have also written Scotch' not
Scottish aware that these great nations do not so call themselves,
but, claiming the freedom of `my ain vulgaire'.
It is the rule of this series that the titles of books (with certain
exceptions) should be modernized in the text but given exactly in
the Bibliography.
I have to thank the Master and Fellows of Trinity College,
Cambridge, for allowing me to use this book, in an embryonic state,
as the Clark Lectures (1944); Professor F. P. Wilson for such
painstaking and skilled help as few authors have ever had from
their friends; Mr. Dowling for much help with my Bibliography, and
Professor Douglas Bush for submitting to certain petty pilferings
from his; Mr.R.E. Alton for guidance through the labyrinth of our
Faculty library; Dr. J.A.W. Bennett and Mr. H.V.D. Dyson for advice
and criticism; and Miss Joy Davidman for help with the proofs.
C.S.L.
Magdalen College
OXFORD
7 October 1953
0 INTRODUCTION
NEW LEARNING AND NEW IGNORANCE
THE rough outline of our literary history in the sixteenth Century
is not very difficult to grasp. At the beginning we find a literature
still medieval in form and spirit. In Scotland it shows the highest
level of technical brilliance: in England it has for many years been
dull, feeble, and incompetent. As the century proceeds, new
influences arise: changes in our knowledge of antiquity, new poetry
from Italy and France, new theology, new movements in philosophy
or science. As these increase, though not necessarily because of
them, the Scotch literature is almost completely destroyed. In
England the characteristic disease of late medieval poetry, its
metrical disorder, is healed: but replaced, for the most part, by a
lifeless and laboured regularity to which some ears might prefer the
vagaries of Lydgate. There is hardly any sign of a new inspiration.
Except for the songs of Wyatt, whose deepest roots are medieval,
and the prose of the Prayer Book, which is mostly translation,
authors seem to have forgotten the lessons which had been
mastered in the Middle Ages and learned little in their stead. Their
prose is clumsy, monotonous, garrulous; their verse either
astonishingly tame and cold or, if it attempts to rise, the coarsest
fustian. In both mediums we come to dread a certain ruthless
emphasis; bludgeon-work. Nothing is light, or tender, or fresh. All
the authors write like elderly men. The mid-century is an earnest,
heavy-handed, commonplace age: a drab age. Then, in the last
quarter of the century, the unpredictable happens. With startling
suddenness we ascend. Fantasy, conceit, paradox, colour,
incantation return. Youth returns. The fine frenzies of ideal love and
ideal war are readmitted. Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Hooker -
even, in a way, Lyly - display what is almost a new culture: that
culture which was to last through most of the seventeenth century
and to enrich the very meanings of the words England and
Aristocracy. Nothing in the earlier history of our period would have
enabled the sharpest observer to foresee this transformation.
Some have believed, or assumed, that it resulted from what (p2)
seemed at the time to be a resurrection, rejuvenescence, or
renascentia (Note: Revertuntur... graeca et latina lingua seu
renascuntur verius' (Vives, De Causis Corruptarum Artium, I).
(Poesis) tametsi rediviva novam sub Petrarcha pueritiam inchoasse'
(Scaliger, Poet ., vi. i). In veterum lucubrationibus restituendis
laborant et ceu a mortuis revocant' (Huldrichus Coccius, Ep. Ded. to

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