In the first two parts of this book you have read selections that illustrate two great periods in the history of the human race: the Age of Chivalry and the Age of Discovery and Exploration. The first of these was medieval, that is, it belongs to the period following the fall of the highly developed ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome and preceding the birth of the modern world. The second period (the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) saw the beginnings of the modern world, not only because of the discovery and exploration of new continents and the expansion of Europe in colonies planted. across the seas, but also because such inventions as printing, the compass, and the telescope broadened immensely the range of human interests and led the way to modern ideas of progress.

It is useful for you to keep these changes in mind, because they will help you to discover the relation between history and literature. You will never learn what chivalry was until you have seen and felt its significance. Merely memorizing the facts will not do, no matter how attractively the facts are arranged. By reading Malory's story of Arthur, or Scott's story about Ivanhoe, or Tennyson's stories about the knights of the Round Table, you gain this feeling and this vision. As you read, you can live, in imagination, in that colorful age. The same thing is true as you read the stories of exploration and discovery told by the men who themselves took part in those stirring events. Literature is one expression of the thoughts and feelings of men; action is another. History narrates the actions; literature helps you to understand why these deeds were done.

You have also seen that these two great periods express ideals that are still alive. Chivalry as an institution is dead; but to be chivalrous is still possible for any boy or girl. No more Americas are to be discovered; even the South Pole has yielded, in recent years, to the restless desire of man to plant his foot where no member of his race has walked before. Yet the possibilities of finding an America on a camping trip or through a botanical expedition or through travel in the golden realm of books are yours today if you desire to use them.

In Part III you will see a third principle that has helped to make modern civilization and that, like the others, is still at work.

In medieval literature there was little of what we now call patriotism. The idea of the nation as something to love, to make sacrifice for, and if need be, to die for, is rare in the stories of Arthur and his knights. A knight might owe his allegiance to some lady, and give his life to her service. His allegiance to his king was personal, not that of a voter and citizen, as nowadays. Not merely in the romances, but in the actual life of the time, kings were thought of as military chieftains. The territory over which they ruled was regarded as their property. They were responsible only to God, and some of them thought their responsibility was very slight indeed. It is true that in 1215 the English nobles, at Runnymede, compelled King John to sign a great charter in which he promised them certain rights. But the rights were as between John and his nobles; the common people had no direct share. There was little national feeling

about the event, and Shakespeare's drama of King John does not mention the charter at all.

During the sixteenth century the movement toward national unity was marked among all European peoples. Spain became powerful through her possession of the rich, gold-bearing territories of Central and South America. In France and Italy brilliant writers, artists, and musicians helped to develop a feeling of national pride, and through them their nations influenced powerfully the intellectual life of Europe. Belgium and the Netherlands were struggling for independence from Spain. Germany had not attained national unity, but the Reformation centered there, and this movement, based on the right of men to think for themselves, was doing for Germany what gold was doing for Spain, what literature and art were doing for France and Italy, and what a passion for liberty was doing for the Netherlands. In England a similar process was at work.

Farsighted men, like Raleigh and hist friends, were advocating the establishment of colonies, not as sources of treasure or as military outposts but as an extension of England into a greater Britain. The conflict with Spain, which culminated in the defeat of the Armada in 1588, roused for the first time an intense patriotism. English literature in the short space of half a century became one of the greatest of all literatures, and in Shakespeare produced one of the foremost writers of all time. Thus began a period in which England developed into a great nation, with a new loyalty, not to a feudal lord or a feudal king but to the nation as a whole. In the process of this development, literature, as we shall see, played an important part.

To be chivalrous, to be mentally alert and eager for the discovery of new worlds, and to love one's native land-here are three of the strands that, woven together, help to make the modern man.

I

THE EPIC OF THE THIRTY YEARS

In 1558 Elizabeth Tudor became Queen of England. Something of the condition of the country when this mere slip of a girl ascended the throne may be gleaned from an account that was written at the time. It reads as follows:

"The Queen poor; the realm exhausted; the nobility poor and decayed; good captains and soldiers wanting; the people out of order; justice not executed; all things dear; division among ourselves; war with France; the French king bestriding the realm, having one foot in Calais and the other in Scotland; steadfast enemies, but no steadfast friends."

Thirty years later, in 1588, the great Armada, sent by Philip of Spain for the destruction of England, was itself destroyed. At that moment England became a world power, with influence constantly increasing, ready to establish colonies that were later to make her a mighty empire. In thirty years the nation had realized itself, had passed from weakness to power. One result of this great development was an intense interest in everything that related to the earlier history of England. Shakespeare's historical plays were centered around that interest, and showed men a great pageant of English history in which kings and nobles, knights and squires and captains, queens and fair ladies, the glory of chivalry and of former times now brought to new life, all passed across the stage to hearten England.

It is the purpose of this introduction to present, in outline, this Pageant of History that forms one of the three great aspects of Shakespeare's genius. In order to understand this, you need, first, to recall

what you have learned about Shakespeare and his period in earlier books of this series. Something of his method of dealing with historical characters you have learned from your study of Julius Cæsar. From your study of As You Like It you have learned of the fondness of the English people for stories told through action, and something about the presentation of these plays. You are now ready to deepen these impressions through the study of King Henry the Fifth, and to add pictures that will make not only the plays themselves but the English history that was being made in Shakespeare's time, the history that these plays in a sense reflect, seem like a mighty pageant.

To do this you will have to use your imagination as vigorously as you can. These plays that you have read, the plays that you are yet to read in your study of Shakespeare, are just pictures of a life. that was intensely dramatic. The stage is England. Elizabeth is a Fairy Queen. The leaders of her court are men like Gareth, Lancelot, Gawain, Arthur himself. There is a wicked giant that plans to carry the lady off into captivity. There are battles that are much greater than those you read about in the Arthurian story. There are tournaments, also, and stories of love and hate and jealousy, and the sports of the people, and an evergrowing sense of unity and loyalty as to a sovereign that presided over the Round Table. To help you picture all this, a few facts must be set down.

During those thirty years from Elizabeth's accession to the victory over the Armada, the old feudal nobility disappeared. The new leaders were men who rose to high place because of superior ability. Religious persecution, for the time being, died out. The Queen entered

on no war of conquest, and until the conflict with Spain, the land was free from war.

This peaceful condition gave farmers and laborers and merchants a chance to build homes, to get money, and to find happiness. They called their country "Merrie England." Men could make something of themselves. A shoemaker might become Lord Mayor of London. In As You Like It you have a picture of some of the phases of life in that time. If you will read such a book as Rolfe's Shakespeare the Boy or some of the chapters in Shakespeare's England, you will be able to fill in many other details to make your picture more vivid.

Against this free and prosperous England a plot was being formed. Philip of Spain, the head of a powerful and wealthy state, sought to conquer all Europe. He had great dominions in America, and from these a stream of gold was flowing. He had a large navy, and in his armies were the best soldiers in Europe.

To those who looked with English eyes across the Channel and tried to pierce the darkness, Philip seemed like a giant of old romance. For a long time he moved cautiously, first trying to form an alliance with England or to prevent England from allying herself with France. Then he grew bolder. He put spies in England to spread stories about the Queen and to cast doubt upon her claims to the throne. He stirred up discontent in Scotland, whose Queen, the beautiful Mary, had claims, some thought, to the English crown. He sent troops to Ireland. Most of all, he sought to crush the Netherlands, almost at the door of England, in order to make that country another base of operations. Finally, he prepared the Great Armada.

But as with most giants, Philip's vast strength was joined to a certain mental slowness. Against him two forces were at work. One was the superior intelligence of Elizabeth, quick, ready to seize occasion, postponing war until England was ready, confusing her adversary by her sudden and unaccountable shifts in policy. For this game Philip, with all his wealth, was no fit player. The other force on which he had not counted was the passionate

adoration of all England, from highest court officer to the veriest peasant, for their Queen. To them she was no woman, but a personification of the realm. She was England, the Fairy Queen whom they would die to defend.

So when, in 1588, the great fleet of ships came, England was ready. The Invincible Armada melted away like late winter snows under the advancing sun. And when it had gone, a united English people found for the first time the thrill of a national patriotism, and England had become a nation.

II

SHAKESPEARE'S PAGEANT OF HISTORY

Pros

A year or two after the giant had been driven back to his lair and the Fairy Queen was free from danger, young Will Shakespeare, a country lad like Gareth, went to London to seek his fortune. perity and vigorous life he found everywhere. The town was filled with sailors back from perilous voyages, with foreigners who spoke the strange jargon of Italy and France and Spain and Germany, with scholars and philosophers intent upon the new learning, with poets and dramatists and eager young men like himself. He turned his hand to revising plays for the theaters to which all London flocked; presently he tried original composition.

The first part of Spenser's great poem, the Farie Queene, was just published, and all London talked of the witchery imprisoned in its lines. Kit Marlowe had attained fame with several plays about conquerors and kings and about a man who sold his soul to Satan and at length paid the price. Sidney was dead, dead at Zutphen, in the Low Countries, where he had fought against Philip; but his Arcadia, a romance that seemed to Londoners to translate into a beautiful story their ideals about love and courtiership and poetry, was first published in 1590, and his series of love sonnets had become famous. A new kind of comedy by John Lyly was also famous, a series of plays filled with witty dialogue, flowery speeches, characters that stood for persons whom London had known well. The court beauties learned to "par