Lorenzo dei Medici, from the sight of the Psyche of
Raphael, the Europa of Veronese, the Ariadne of Tintoret, men like
Greene and Dorset learned that revival of a more luscious and pictorial
antique which was brought to perfection in Shakespeare's "Venus and
Adonis" and Marlowe's "Sestiad." From the Platonists and Epicureans of
Renaissance Italy our greatest dramatists learned that cheerful and
serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing of death, that sense
of the finiteness of man, the inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines
out in such grand, paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of the bent
brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus, in Shakespeare, in Marlowe,
in Beaumont and Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster. But with
the abstract, with the imbibed modes of thought and feeling, with the
imitated forms, the Elizabethans brought back from Italy the concrete,
the individual, the personal. They filled their works with Italian
things: from the whole plot of a play borrowed from an Italian novel, to
the mere passing allusion to an Italian habit, or the mere quotation of
an Italian word; from the full-length picture of the actions of Italian
men and women, down to the mere sketch, in two or three words, of a bit
of Italian garden or a group of Italian figures; nay, to the innumerable
scraps of tiny detail, grotesque, graceful, or richly coloured, which
they stuffed into all their works: allusions to the buffoons of the mask
comedy, to the high-voiced singers, to the dress of the Venetian
merchants, to the step of a dance; to the pomegranate in the garden or
the cypress on the hillside; mere names of Italian things: the _lavolta_
and _corranto_ dances, the _Traglietto_ ferry, the Rialto bridge;
countless little touches, trifling to us, but which brought home to the
audience at the Globe or at Blackfriars that wonderful Italy which every
man of the day had travelled through at least in spirit, and had loved
at least in imagination. And of this wonderful Italy the Englishmen of
the days of Elizabeth and of James knew yet another side; were familiar,
whether travelled or untravelled, with yet other things besides the
buffoons and singers and dancers, the scholars and learned ladies, the
pomegranates, and cypresses and roses and nightingales; were fascinated
by something besides the green lagoons, the clear summer nights, the
soft spring evenings of which we feel as it were the fascination in the
words of