Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 Excerpt: ... Shakespeare's day, and an ideal very different from the sobriety of the time of Cromwell. The Elizabethan period was one of extraordinary vitality, of exuberant activity, and of unusual creativeness. It was an age of expansion, a time in which people lived quickly and abundantly. The narrow limits of life in Chaucer's day had been gradually broadened until they opened on "the spacious times of great Elizabeth." The great queen's mariners were seeking those "straunge strondes" and those "feme halwes" of which Chaucer's pilgrims may have dreamed; her bold explorers were standing "upon a peak in Darien" whence they caught a Pisgahglimpse of a new world; and her writers were essaying "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." The half-century that preceded Elizabeth's death (1603) witnessed indeed a phenomenal blossoming of English life with a quick fruition in every aspect of national activity; the half-century that followed Shakespeare's death (1616) brings us within the earlier limits of the Restoration Age. The former creative enthusiasm has died; the moral earnestness and the personal probity of the Puritan has held its brief sway; but a reaction was now to follow. The English mind seemed oppressed with a sense of ennui. It was as if the genius of the race had for the moment become exhausted, and as if it had become spiritually depleted after the passion and the excitement of the previous age. This sense of ennui shows itself in a lack of originality in subject-matter and in an inability to create new forms or. to imagine new experiences.-Attention is centered upon the externals of life. People come to believe that manners make the man, and that style is the whole of literature. Here indeed is a differenc...
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
