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THE ENGLISH REFORMATION.
strongest monarch in Christendom; they sailed round the globe, and penetrated all its seas.
An age of such activity and achievement almost of necessity gives birth to a strong and vigorous literature. And thus is explained, in part at least, how the English people during this period should have developed a literature of such originality and richness and strength as to make it the prized inheritance of all the world.
The Writers.—To make special mention of all the great writers who adorned the Elizabethan era would carry us quite beyond the limits of our book. Having said something of the influences under which they wrote, we will simply add that this age was the age of Shakespeare and Spenser and Bacon.[1]
REDUCED FAC-SIMILE OF THE SIGNATURE OF QUEEN ELIZABETH.
- ↑ William Shakespeare (1564–1616); Edmund Spenser (1552?–1599); Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Shakespeare and Bacon, it will be noticed, outlived Elizabeth. Two other names hold a less prominent place,—that of Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), the courtly knight, who wrote the Arcadia, a sort of pastoral romance, and A Defence of Poesy, a work intended to counteract the Puritanical spirit then rising; and that of Richard Hooker (1553–1600), who in his Ecclesiastical Polity defends the Anglican Church.
