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I can conceive some readers, not necessarily frivolous, anticipating little pleasure from a volume devoted to examples of Elizabethan and Jacobean pamphlets. It must be the business of the volume I have planned to convince them that they are wrong. But even before that volume is read, I think it not impossible to show cause for its right to exist. The originals of these pamphlets, except a few which have become familiar in consequence of their bearing on Shakespearian questions, were till recently almost unknown, except to a few scholars and antiquaries, and are still for the most part inaccessible except in the original editions, which are bought at large prices by collectors, or in limited and often privately issued modern reprints. Yet their interest is very great. The pamphlet of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century corresponded much more nearly to the modern periodical than to anything else, unless, indeed, it be the modern newspaper. It included fiction, sketches of society, accounts of travel, literary criticism, personal controversy, theology—the whole farrago, in short, of the non-political columns of our journals. It was in many cases written by men of much greater talent than the average journalist of the present day. In one remarkable case—that of the so-called Martin Marprelate controversy—it holds a position almost unique, or only shared by the not wholly dissimilar groups of literature which included and grew up round Pascal's Provinciales and the Tracts for the Times. Above all, it has the advantage of a singular variety of subject, and of presenting the opportunity of making a great number of lively extracts, certainly faithful to the manners of the time, and showing those manners in a fashion not easy to surpass in freshness, contrast of colour, and incisive outline.

The pamphlet was one of the most immediate and necessary creations of the printing press. Before that invention it was hardly possible, and a very considerable time had to elapse afterwards before the combination of education in the reader, command of mechanical means in the diffuser, and changed political conditions, enabled the newspaper to supplant it. The pamphlet, so far as production is concerned, when once private presses are accessible, gives few hostages to fortune or to the strong hand of authority. It may make but a single appearance, and then the type is broken up, the machinery removed, and the printed copies left to find their way and do their work. A newspaper must have more or less of a headquarters, definite managers, at the very least a regular place and time of appearance at which it can be waited for and snapped up. Of the advantages offered by the pamphlet there is a good example in the fact that under the active, intelligent, and almost despotic government of Elizabeth, though the Martin Marprelate tracts excited the intensest hatred not merely of the lay authorities but of a powerful and omnipresent ecclesiastical corporation, the presses were only once (at Newton Lane in Lancashire) discovered and seized. In less perilous matter the pamphlet, if it did not give so much protection, 'obliged' even less. Its cost was small; the author was in no way bound to follow it up with anything else. It took him but a little time to produce; its profit, if there was any, came in quickly; it could be sold out before pirates could get hold of it; it did not frighten the unlearned by bulk and pretensions. On the other hand, of course, it had its drawbacks. It was of its nature, and in more points than one of that nature, ephemeral. The chances were rather against than in favour of its being preserved; for even in these days when most people have a library or book-room of some kind, the very student himself acknowledges with gnashings of teeth the way things published in pamphlet form have of 'going under,' of simply disappearing, he cannot tell how or whither. Hence the real and intrinsic interest of the pamphlet has had added to it the accidental and factitious interest of rarity. It is hardly a paradox to say that one of the best chances which such a thing had of surviving was the fact of its being proscribed and burnt by the hangman. There was then some reason for treasuring it instead of letting it go to clean boots, light fires, and wrap pounds of butter.

The pamphlets of the Elizabethan age were almost as often in verse as in prose, the superior attraction of verse for early and uncultivated audiences not having died out. Indeed, far later than the period covered by this volume, things continued to be written in verse which were merely pamphlets, and gave us both matter of eternity, such as Absalom and Achitophel or Religio Laici, and hard-bound doggerel like Defoe's True-Born Englishman and Jure Divino. The Elizabethan verse pamphlet, which was largely written by Thomas Churchyard, Nicholas Breton, John Davies, Samuel Rowlands, and others, is a curiosity, but as a rule very little more; and I do not propose to give any examples of it here. Nor, the space at my command being all too limited, have I thought it necessary to draw in this present volume on the miscellaneous pamphlets of the times. The examples will be taken from what may be called the great single pamphleteers or pamphlet collections—that is to say, Lodge, Greene, Nash, Harvey, 'Martin Marprelate' and the anti-Martinists, Breton, and Dekker. Some particulars of each of the selected authors or groups may appropriately be given in this introduction.

No minor Elizabethan author is better known than Robert Greene, partly from the fact that he touches Shakespeare, and partly from the other fact that his short and ill-spent life was that of the typical Bohemian, and so interests those who like gossip about men of letters. He was born in 1560 at Norwich, was educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge (being also subsequently incorporated at Oxford), travelled on the Continent, married, treated his wife very badly, may have been both a clerk in orders and a student of medicine, lived recklessly in London as a dramatist and pamphleteer, and died at the age of thirty-two either propter or merely post undue consumption of pickled herrings and Rhenish wine. His plays, though full of the ante-Shakespearian crudity and unskilled workmanship, have many graceful touches; the songs which he scattered about both his plays and his poems are frequently charming; his pamphlets, which, short as his life was, are very numerous, perhaps rank, on the whole, above those of any other Elizabethan writer for combined bulk, variety, and merit. They were produced in the space of about ten years (1583–92). Those certainly known to be his, or probably attributed to him, are nearly thirty in number, and almost defy classification. Some of them approach that strange type of novel consisting of a minimum of story, a maximum of moralising, and, if I may say so, a plusquam-maximum of conceited style, the example of which had been set in Lyly's Euphues. Not a few are personal reminiscences—how far deliberately imbued with an exaggerated profession of repentance in order to hit readers with both barrels it is very hard to say. A distinct and very interesting set deals with the ways of the Elizabethan 'conny-catcher,' the 'Captain Rook' (though usually of lower grade) of the time. Others are pure book-making, as we should call it now, about subjects which for political or other reasons happened to be in the public eye at the moment. Greene is certainly one of the most typical of his fellowship.

With him and close to him may be ranked Thomas Lodge, who was his contemporary, and for a time his comrade; but who, unlike Greene, settled down as a Roman Catholic physician, and outliving the hapless 'Roberto' more than thirty years, did not die till the last year of James. Lodge had perhaps higher powers than Greene, except in drama. One of his pamphlets, 'Rosalynde' or 'Euphues' Golden Legacy', gave Shakespeare, as most people now know, the subject of As You Like It, and has been more than once reprinted for that reason. He had also a faculty of which Greene shows no trace whatever—that of an accomplished literary critic; and twice, in answer to Gosson and Campion, took the right side against some of the literary heresies which animated that active and fruitful time. He was decidedly best in the euphuist romance, but he also practised the social satire pamphlet with no small success.

Nash and Harvey shared with Greene the luck, good or other, of being earlier presented in their lives, and in at least some of their works, to modern writers than their fellows. Indeed, Greene's not wholly enviable fame is as much due to the quarrels of these two as to his own works. Gabriel Harvey, the elder but very much the less able of the two, was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, a friend of Sidney and of Spenser (whose Faërie Queene he unmercifully snubbed, preferring the curious fancy of classical metres which was long patronised by the 'Areopagus' or Sidneian clique), and a man of real scholarship. But his exemplification of the worst faults of the university prig, and the pitiless exposure of them in his controversy with Thomas Nash (a younger Cambridge man, and wielder of the sharpest and most unscrupulous pen of his time), have brought down such hard language on him from most literary historians that one or two charitable or paradoxical souls have been tempted to take up the cudgels on his side. To this length, I cannot go. Why Harvey and Nash quarrelled no one knows exactly; but the quarrel, the pamphlet results of which make up the greater part of Harvey's work, plays only a small part in that of Nash. The very quarrel itself had, or seems to have had, something to do with the strange Marprelate business to be noticed presently, and Nash is at least with great probability supposed author of some of the chief numbers of that controversy on the anti-Martinist side. But he wrote not a little other pamphlet-matter, never quite attempting the euphuist romance in which his friends Greene and Lodge delighted, but producing discourses of apparitions in anticipation of Defoe, pious tractates expressing, or professing to express, his repentance for evil living, puffs (though this is rather an unkind word), such as his Lenten Stuff, eulogistic of the herrings which were the staple commodity of his native coast, and a curious book called The Unfortunate Traveller, dealing with the grand tour, and containing among other things the well-known romance (for romance it would seem to be) of Surrey the poet and his Geraldine. Where Nash stands eminent among the writers of the time is in his faculty of boisterous and burlesque abuse, which, in his famous lampoon upon Harvey, Have with you to Saffron Walden (Harvey's birthplace), displayed itself in a manner not easy to parallel elsewhere in English.

It is very hard to give in very brief space an account of the Martin Marprelate matter, yet without some such account extracts from it must be hardly intelligible. It began about the year 1588, chiefly owing to the action of a certain Reverend Nicholas Udall, a puritan divine who struck into the controversy between the Episcopal and Presbyterian parties in the Church, and embittered it by the use of language so violent that he himself was imprisoned and his printer's press seized. This printer, Waldegrave, enraged thereat, lent his art to members of the puritan sect even more violent than Udall (their exact identity is matter of controversy), and a fire of pamphlets was opened by them, the earliest being called The Epistle and The Epitome. In the first place, Dean Bridges of Salisbury and Bishop Cooper of Winchester, then other dignitaries, were assailed with real vigour and ability, but with the most unscrupulous partisanship, and in a dialect which for extravagance of abusive language had not been surpassed in the heat of the earlier Reformation controversies, and has scarcely been approached since. The partisans of the Church were fully equal to the occasion; and a counter fire of pamphlets, some of which are attributed with great probability to Nash, and others with hardly less to the Oxford dramatist and euphuist Lyly, was returned. The heat of the controversy lasted chiefly through three years—1588, 1589, and 1590; but it may be said in the widest sense to have endured for nearly seven—from 1586 to 1593, when Penry and Barrow, the supposed chiefs of the Martinists, were executed. Of the style of this singular controversy the extract will, I trust, give a sufficient idea. As to its matter, it is difficult to be more precise than this: that the object of the Martinist pamphleteers was to decry episcopacy by every possible description of personal abuse, applied to the holders and the defenders of the episcopal office, and that the object of their opponents of the same class (for men like Cooper and Bridges, still more like Whitgift and Hooker, stand in an entirely different category) was not so much to defend that office as to fling back in double measure the abuse upon 'Martin,' as the generic name went, and upon his known or supposed embodiments and partisans.

There can be few greater contrasts than between this furious ribaldry, as it too often is, and the mild mediocrity of Nicholas Breton. His claim to a place here (even if his merit be rated much lower than some have rated it) is, that he is the chief writer of the kind who is both in verse and prose a pamphleteer pure and simple. You cannot (at least I cannot) call Breton a poet, but he wrote immense quantities of verse, and in prose he pamphleted with such copiousness and persistence for nearly half a century, that it is clear there must have been money to be made by the practice.

The last of our chief single authors is Thomas Dekker, a very much greater man than Breton, though not so great in prose as in verse. He was somewhat later even in his beginning than the other writers I have noticed; and though his prose has not the formal merit or charm of his exquisite songs and his wonderful romantic character in drama, it is very interesting in matter. He paraphrases (The Bachelor's Banquet, The Gull's Hornbook) with remarkable freedom and skill; he chronicles plague years; he takes a hint from Greene, and extends and varies that author's satirical exposition of London tricks in a long and extremely vivid series of pamphlets, such as The Bellman of London, The Seven Deadly Sins of London, Lanthorn and Candle Light, News from Hell, and half a dozen others. In these, though of course a certain allowance must be made for the pressman's exaggeration in dealing with such subjects, there is a most singular and interesting picture of the lower and looser classes in England, at least in the English capital, at the time.

In this little book, after one or two changes of plan, I have finally decided on giving only entire pamphlets—a specimen of literary criticism from Lodge, of autobiographic romance from Greene, of politico-religious controversy from the Martin Marprelate series, of mingled self-panegyric and lampoon from Harvey, of burlesque from Nash, of paraphrase of foreign matter adapted to English conditions from Dekker, and of what may be called hack-work for the press from Breton. The annotation is deliberately limited to the removal of some of the most obvious stumbling-blocks to current reading. A full commentary on The Gull's Hornbook alone would fill another volume, and the object in these books is to give text not comment.

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