never more so than in the era that looked back only a little way, with shuddering fascination, to the deeds of the Borgias. Tales of the papal and ducal courts united, especially in Protestant lands, to confirm the teachings of religion that man, unhindered by divine grace, was depraved in desires, and might easily become a monster of evil. Lust cruelty, avarice, revenge, were viewed not-as often in our more cheerful philosophy-as mild aberrations of character, unfortunate distortions of purposes good at bottom, but as the direct manifestation of pure evil, often deliberate and self-conscious in its ill designs. A curious and influential application of this view is found in the remarkabledevelopment of the traditional character of Machiavelli, the Florentine statesman who died in 1527. Already, before Shakespeare had begun to write for the stage, there was a Machiavellian myth which treated its hero as the very incarnation of evil. Modern students have traced this, in good part, to attacks upon Machiavelli's reputation by French Huguenots, notably one Gentillet, who in 1576 published a translation, with commentary, of portions of Machiavelli's great work, The Prince, tracing to its cynical doctrines many of the evils which had cursed the age, and including, as a particularly horrid example, the recent massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day. The book was promptly translated into English, and was widely circulated under the popular name of the Anti-Machiavel. Of the resulting popular belief the most interesting illustration is the Prologue to Marlowe's Jew of Malta, produced about 1590, in which Machiavelli appears as speaker, telling the audience that his soul had been incarnate in the French Duke of Guise, but since the Duke's death had

crossed the channel to "frolic with his friends" in England. The villainous Jew whose story is to be told had filled his money-bags, says Machiavelli, not "without my means." Notwithstanding this, the villain proves to be not of England but of Malta, and the Elizabethan stories of crime were for the most part represented as having their place in Mediterranean lands. There, as in Byron's time, hot-blooded passion and villainy could have free course and be glorified, in the same romantic background which added to the fascination of beauty and love. For this reason, as well as because of the always different standards of realism and romance, one must be careful not to infer the actual moral conditions of Elizabethan society from the drama and other fiction of the period.

So much for matters which connect the Elizabethans with the continental Renaissance. But the sixteenth century was the age when the Reformation, as well as the Renaissance, had its full effect in England; and it has often been observed that we of the English race have special cause for gratitude that the two great forces, moving westward, arrived almost together upon that happy island. Germany had the Reformation without the Renaissance; Italy the Renaissance without the Reformation; in England they were united, and some of the finest elements in the following age are the product of that union. This, like all simple and attractive concepts, is a little too simple to tell the whole story, but there is enough of truth in it to serve useful ends. We dare not forget that the Reformation, so far as its actual external consummation is concerned, was not, in England, a great spiritual movement but a political coup, and a rather sordid

one at that. A good part of the people must still have been essentially Catholic in religious feeling, the main question seeming, for the time, to be whether the headship of their Catholicism was at Rome or London. Hence it is typical that a good part of the literature of the age, including the plays of Shakespeare, while thoroughly Protestant on the political side, is neutral on that of personal religion, moving freely in the field of both Catholic and evangelical thought. On the other hand, it is also true that the Reformers, especially, John Calvin, had come into full control of large elements of English life, including, for a considerable period, the dominant personalities in the Anglican Church. For very many Englishmen, then, the Reformation was a vital religious reality, and the visible center of their religion was neither at Rome nor London, but at Geneva. Calvin died in the year when Shakespeare was born. Four years earlier, in 1560, the Geneva version of the English Bible was issued,—a version destined to run through some two hundred editions in fifty years, and to become the household Scripture of the common people of England. In the year following the publication of the Geneva Bible, Calvin's Institutes appeared in their English form. Two years later came Foxe's Acts and Monuments, commonly called the Book of Martyrs, which for Protestants of a century to come was what the Saints' Legends were for medieval Christians. When Shakespeare was three or four years old, the term "Puritan" was first applied to evangelicals who proved particularly zealous to distinguish their religious practices from those of Rome. Later the word came to suggest not so much an ecclesiastical as a moral attitude,

and its history is wrapped up with that characteristic middle-class British morality which, even to the present hour, we recognize as combining a spirit of intolerance, of hostility to beauty and pleasure, with a sturdy sense of personal responsibility to God and to man which has wrought strength and high-mindedness into the fibres of the whole race.

It is hard indeed, if not impossible, to sum up with any accuracy the meaning, for the spirit of Elizabethan England, of the combined action of all these forces which we have been calling to mind. In literature the Renaissance was certainly dominant. It had thrown off the shackles of spiritual authority which in the Middle Age made art so largely the mere servant of faith, and was developing, with the zest of a youth running away from a monastic school, the joyous possibilities of realizing for its own sake the life of this present world. The Reformation even aided this process, so far as concerns freedom from authority; at first thought one would say that it had little else to do with the arts. But a moment's reflection not only brings to mind certain poets, notably Spenser, in whom we see the deliberate and fairly successful attempt to fuse the beauties of the Renaissance with the moral seriousness of the Reformation, but assures us that even in the more worldly literature, such as the drama of Shakespeare's generation, we can feel the underlying substance of that same moral seriousness. In other words, though the players and the playwrights lost no opportunity to pay their debt of scorn to the Puritans, and the Puritans did all they could to make life a burden to the players, there was something which they had in common and which dif

ferentiated them from the men of Renaissance Italy. If proof be needed, consider (though the Elizabethans were not given to squeamishness, and dared to enjoy poems and plays which we promptly expurgate) how impossible it would have been that a work marked by the moral cynicism of Boccaccio's Decameron should become a representative classic of England, or that the moral sincerity characteristic, on the whole, of Elizabethan comedy, should have dominated the Italian stage. It must not be assumed that the element in English character which is here emphasized was the specific product of the Reformation: it doubtless appears, one way or another, in the more characteristically racial products of every previous era. For good or ill, the Anglo-Saxon has always been disposed to take life seriously on the moral side. The influences of sixteenth-century Protestantism were simply the special formative forces for the old spirit in the new age. In the seventeenth century they were to rise, for a time, to the point of dominating the chief literary products of the age; in the age of Shakespeare they were undercurrents, helping to determine, no doubt, the main course of the stream, while allowing its surface to bear freely hither and thither the bright airy elements of worldly pleasure. Thus but two Elizabethan poets of first-rate importance, Spenser and Donne, were important as interpreters of spiritual things, and in this aspect of their work they were children of the Middle Age rather than of the Renaissance. For the greater number God and the other world were no doubt realities, but, like Falstaff's hostess, they hoped there was no need to trouble themselves with such thoughts yet, while the things of this world were so many and precious.