Before National Literary History

Unlike the "missing" twelfth century, recalled in Linda Georgianna's essay in this issue, the last two decades of the sixteenth century have always been very well treated by English literary history. These are, after all, the decades of Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney, of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, of Ben Jonson and John Donne. But if the 1580s and 1590s saw the extraordinary outpouring of poetry and drama that have won them their prominent place in subsequent histories, they themselves produced no work that could be fairly termed a national literary history. Indeed, by most accounts, it was not until Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry, whose first volume appeared in 1774, that English literature found a historian. ¹ What, then, am I doing discussing Elizabethan England in a collection of essays devoted to national literary histories? What can that distinctly prehistorical moment contribute to the examination of a phenomenon that belongs more to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries than to the sixteenth?

My answer is, "Quite a lot." If the sixteenth century produced no national literary history, it did spend much energy thinking and writing about the need for a national literature—for what it called, as Warton still did two hundred years later, an "English poetry"—whose history could one day be written. Perhaps the best-known of these expressions of need is Philip Sidney's anxious inquiry into "why England (the mother of excellent minds) should be grown so hard a stepmother to poets," but there were many others. Just a few years earlier Spenser's friend E. K. had complained "that our mother tongue, which truly of itself is both full enough for prose and stately enough for verse, hath long time been counted most bare and barren of both," a complaint directed still more specifically at poetry by E. K.'s follower William Webbe. "It is to be wondered at of all," writes Webbe, "and is lamented of many, that whereas all kind of good learning have aspired to royal dignity and stately grace in our English tongue . . ., only poetry hath found fewest friends to amend it." ²

What these and other similar complaints make clear is that there was an intense and unprecedented feeling of national lack in the generation of Sidney and Spenser. ³ Now this may have been little more than an advertising campaign for the poetry these young men and their friends were then writing. After all, across the Channel in France, du Bellay, Ronsard, and the other members of the Pléiade had engaged in a similar campaign just a few decades earlier. They, too, had declared a need and then rushed in to fill it. But in both countries the terms in which the declaration was made are nevertheless significant. In both cases, the honor of the national vernacular is at stake. A distinguished national poetry will prove that French and English are not the barbarous tongues many accused them of being. But for us, coming to these declarations after more than two centuries of Romantic and post-Romantic nationalism, they contain a surprise. Contrary to what we might expect, there is no thought here of expressing a specifically national experience or of giving voice to a uniquely national self. Their ambition is rather to do what others have done, to be what others have been. The models of civility are elsewhere. A truly national literature must therefore strive to emulate those foreign models. Likeness, not difference, will be the measure of success.

Applied negatively by Sidney, E. K., and Webbe—why, they ask, don't we have what others have?—that comparative measure was almost immediately turned around and applied positively by other English writers. Yes, they answered, we do have (or we can soon have) what others have. In his Art of English Poesy (1588), for example, George Puttenham writes, "Our nation is in nothing inferior to the French or Italian for copy [abundance] of language...