come to recognise that the Elizabethans had their faults, and that
the best apology for their weaknesses as well as the best explanation of
their merits was to be found in a clearer appreciation of the whole
conditions. It is impossible of course to overlook the connection
between that great outburst of literary activity and the general
movement of the time; of the period when many impulses were breaking up
the old intellectual stagnation, and when the national spirit which took
the great Queen for its representative was finding leaders in the
Burleighs and Raleighs and Drakes. The connection is emphasised by the
singular brevity of the literary efflorescence. Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_
heralded its approach on the eve of the Spanish Armada: Shakespeare, to
whom the lead speedily fell, had shown his highest power in _Henry IV._
and _Hamlet_ before the accession of James I.: his great tragedies
_Othello_, _Macbeth_ and _Lear_ were produced in the next two or three
years; and by that time, Ben Jonson had done his best work. When
Shakespeare retired in 1611, Chapman and Webster, two of the most
brilliant of his rivals, had also done their best; and Fletcher
inherited the dramatic throne. On his death in 1625, Massinger and Ford
and other minor luminaries were still at work; but the great period had
passed. It had begun with the repulse of the Armada and culminated some
fifteen years later. If in some minor respects there may afterwards have
been an advance, the spontaneous vigour had declined and deliberate
attempts to be striking had taken the place of the old audacity. There
can be no more remarkable instance of a curious phenomenon, of a
volcanic outburst of literary energy which begins and reaches its
highest intensity while a man is passing from youth to middle age, and
then begins to decay and exhaust itself within a generation.

A popular view used to throw the responsibility upon the wicked Puritans
who used their power to close the theatres. We entered the
'prison-house' of Puritanism says Matthew Arnold, I think, and stayed
there for a couple of centuries. If so, the gaolers must have had some
difficulty, for the Puritan (in the narrower sense, of course) has
always been in a small and unpopular minority. But it is also plain
that the decay had begun when the Puritan was the victim instead of the
inflictor of persecution. When we note the synchronism between the
political and the literary movement our conception of t