The period between the defeat of the Spanish fleet in 1588 and the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 was among the most dramatic in English history. It was a time of Irish ‘troubles’, of war and plague, faction and rebellion, global exploration and religious fanaticism. These 15 years also witnessed the dazzling career and mysterious death of Christopher Marlowe, the publication of English literature’s national epic (The Faerie Queene), the intellectual brilliance and emotional intensity of John Donne’s love poetry, and the first performance of an astonishing variety of Shakespeare’s plays, ranging from his English histories to his greatest comedies to Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.
No other 15-year period in the nation’s history has produced so many irreplaceable works of imaginative genius. How did this come about? And what was the relationship between the troubled times and the flowering of theatrical and poetic genius? These questions have fascinated historians and literary critics ever since the 18th century. Each generation comes at them according to their own light.
In 1952, the year of King George VI’s death, the Oxford historian A. L. Rowse delivered a presidential address to the English Association. He called it ‘A New Elizabethan Age?’ Rowse had already published one very fine and highly successful book about the first Queen Elizabeth (he would go on to publish many more, of gradually declining quality). In that brief period of renewed national energy between the Festival of Britain and the Suez crisis, Rowse expressed the hope that England would recover some of its greatness under the second.
On the threshold of the diamond jubilee, the prolific A. N. Wilson has produced a new survey of the age of the first Elizabeth. It is written with all the verve of the young Rowse, but none of his naïve patriotism. The preface begins with a death knell: ‘We have lived to see the Elizabethan world come to an end.’ This is true in a number of ways, most notably in the fact that Britain is no longer the world power it began to be in the latter part of the 16th century.
Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe, the establishment of the Virginia colony, the formation of the East India Company: the older generation of historians celebrated the Elizabethan age for laying the foundations of the ‘British Empire’—a phrase, Wilson reminds us, that was coined by Elizabeth’s astrologer, John Dee. But historians never stand outside their own time. Where once Sir John Hawkins was a brave seadog, now he is the reviled father of the Atlantic slave trade. Where once Edmund Spenser was the poet of fairyland, now he is the author of a political treatise advocating genocide in Ireland.
Wilson knows that there is no place in 21st-century historiography for what he neatly calls Rowse’s ‘celebratory brio’ regarding the Elizabethans. Many of their ideas and practices — torturing Catholics, mocking Jews, baiting bears, hanging petty thieves — we regard as barbaric. And yet the book still reads, quite rightly, as a glorious celebration of an age of glorious culture.
The deeply intellectual and astutely politic Elizabeth remains the most admired monarch in English history and William Shakespeare will always remain the most admired creative mind in the history of the world. This conjunction is not a coincidence: she commissioned his acting company to play at court on numerous occasions, and his tragedies, comedies and histories are the most extraordinary mirror of an extraordinary age. Wilson brings his book to a climax with Hamlet, but in general he makes less use of Shakespeare than he might have done — perhaps because he knows that so many others have written so much about the plays. He is splendid on the poetry of Spenser and the prose of Sir Philip Sidney, though this reader wished for rather more on the astonishing expansion of the English language and the sheer verbal inventiveness of such figures as the highly fashionable novelist John Lyly.
Although the organisation of the book is chronological, a number of key themes recur, foremost among them the way in which English national identity was shaped in the wake of the Reformation and the break from Rome. This was the period when a multi-authored book that became known as Holinshed’s Chronicles made the nation’s past available to the people as never before—and gave Shakespeare the raw material for his history plays. It was also the period when England was mapped for the first time: only when you have an accurate map of your country can you really have a sense of national identity.
The flipside of what Rowse once called ‘the discovery of England’ was the recognition of those who were not English: resident aliens, outsiders, Irishmen, Jews, Moors, Islamic fundamentalists, Machiavellian Italians, native Americans. Wilson makes rich use of another multi-author compilation, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, with its extraordinary encounters between new worlds and old.
He is also alert to the revolution in ideas caused by the advent of the printing press and the proliferation of books in the Elizabethan age. As a writer, he has much to say about the role of writers, especially poets, in shaping the mind of the age, though there is not enough attention to the people who made it possible for them to write: the patrons who sponsored them and the entrepreneurs and booksellers who effectively invented the publishing trade at this time.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth was the time when England became England as we know it and the foundations of the modern world were laid. Wilson tells this familiar story by focusing on key moments, such as the Earl of Leicester’s pageant for the Queen at Kenilworth, the Armada, of course, and the Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France, which brought an influx of Huguenot refugees to London, who would go on to make a huge contribution to English culture, especially in the crafts and visual arts.
Along the way, he looks through the eyes of some of the most colourful and celebrated characters in English history and culture, including Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake and the second Earl of Essex. The actions and writings of great men and women are used to dramatise the intellectual and cultural revolutions that created the most vibrant age in English history.
In this sense, despite his ‘end of empire’ jaundice, Wilson remains a very traditional historian, or at least a historian who is first and foremost a novelist, with an eye for a good story and a strong character. Academic historians will sneer, but readers will take delight.
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