ntrasts in character, as Bacon
or Raleigh, or Elizabeth herself. The drama mingles its sentiment and
fancy with horrors and bloodshed; and no wonder, for poetry was no
occupation of the cloister. Read the lives of the poets--Surrey, Wyatt,
Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Marlowe, Jonson--and of these, only Spenser
and Jonson died in their beds, and Ben had killed his man in a duel. The
student of Elizabethan history and biography will find stranger
contrasts than in the lives of these poets, for crime, meanness, and
sexual depravity often appear in the closest juxtaposition with
imaginative idealism, intellectual freedom, and moral grandeur.

[Page Heading: Elizabethan Incongruities]

The Italian Renaissance, with its mingled passions for beauty, art,
blood, lust, and intellect, seems for a time transferred to London and
dwelling alongside of commerce and Puritanism. Yet these incongruities
of character, manners, and motives that seem so striking to us to-day
may probably be explained by conditions already described. The
opportunities created by the changes in church and religion, the new
education and prosperity, the new America, and the revived classics, all
tended to create a new thirst for experience. This thirst for experience
led to excess and incongruity, but it also furnished an unparalleled
range of human motive for a poet's observation and imitation.

In the wide range of our poet's survey, there is, however, one notable
omission. The reign of Elizabeth, like those of her three predecessors,
was one of religious controversy, change, and persecution. But all this
strife, all this debate, repression, persecution, and all of this great
turmoil working in the minds of Englishmen, find little reflection in
Shakespeare's plays, and little in the whole Elizabethan drama.
Religious controversy had played a part in the drama of the reign of
Edward and Mary, but it rarely enters the Elizabethan drama, and then
mainly in the form of ridicule for the puritan. Shakespeare's plays seem
almost to ignore the most momentous facts of his time. They treat pagan,
Catholic, and Protestant with cordiality and only smile at the puritan
or Brownist. His England of the merry wives or Falstaff's justices seems
strangely untroubled by questions of faith or ritual. There is, to be
sure, plenty of religion and controversy in the literature of the time,
but the drama as a whole is singularly non-religious. It reflects
rather that freedom from