In the dramas of
Shakespeare the popular note is still audible, but only as an undertone,
furnishing comic relief to the romantic amours of courtly lovers or the
tragic fall of Princes; with Beaumont and Fletcher, and still more with
Dryden and the Restoration dramatists, the popular element in the drama
passes away, and the triumph of the court is complete. The Elizabethan
court could find no use for the popular ballad, but, like other forms of
literature, it was attracted from the country-side to the city. Forgetful
of the greenwood, it now battened on the garbage of Newgate, and 'Robin
Hood and Guy of Gisburn' yields place to 'The Wofull Lamentation
of William Purchas, who for murthering his Mother at Thaxted, was
executed at Chelmsford'.
We are justly proud of the Renaissance and of the glories of our
Elizabethan literature, but let us frankly own that in the annals of
poetry there was loss as well as gain. The gain was for the courtier and
the scholar, and for all those who, in the centuries that followed the
Renaissance, have been able, by means of education, to enter into the
courtier's and scholar's inheritance.
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