Complete. From Dowden’s “Shakespeare,” London 1879.

IN the closing years of the sixteenth century the life of England ran high. The revival of learning had enriched the national mind with a store of new ideas and images; the reformation of religion had been accomplished, and its fruits were now secure; three conspiracies against the Queen’s life had recently been foiled, and her rival, the Queen of Scots, had perished on the scaffold; the huge attempt of Spain against the independence of England had been defeated by the gallantry of English seamen, aided by the winds of heaven. English adventurers were exploring untraveled lands and distant oceans; English citizens were growing in wealth and importance; the farmers made the soil give up twice its former yield; the nobility, however fierce their private feuds and rivalries might be, gathered around the Queen as their centre. It was felt that England was a power in the continent of Europe. Men were in a temper to think human life, with its action and its passions, a very important and interesting thing. They did not turn away from this world, and despise it in comparison with a heavenly country, as did many of the finest souls in the Middle Ages; they did not, like the writers of the age of Queen Anne, care only for “the town”; it was man they cared for, and the whole of manhood—its good and evil, its greatness and grotesqueness, its laughter and its tears.

  When men cared thus about human life, their imagination craved living pictures and visions of it. They liked to represent to themselves men and women in all passionate and mirthful aspects and circumstances of life. Sculpture which the Greeks so loved would not have satisfied them, for it is too simple and too calm; music would not have been sufficient, for it is too purely an expression of feelings, and says too little about actions and events. The art which suited the temper of their imagination was the drama. In the drama they saw men and women, alive in action, in suffering, changing forever from mood to mood, from attitude to attitude; they saw these men and women solitary, conversing with their own hearts—in pairs and in groups, acting one upon another; in multitudes, swayed hither and thither by their leaders.