1586. Shakespeare leaves Stratford-onAvon for London. Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity begun. Bacon becomes a member of Gray's Inn. English army supports Protestants of Low Countries. Sidney Governor of Flushing. Tobacco and potatoes introduced into England. 1587. Marlowe's Tamburlaine produced. Marlowe, Lodge, Greene, and Peele begin writing for English stage. Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. 1588. Defeat of Spanish Armada. Death of Paul Veronese. Montaigne's Essais (iii.) published. 1589. Bacon's Advertisement touching Controversies of the Church. Drake plunders Corunna. Lope de Vega commences his great series of dramas. Death of Jean Antoine de Baif. 1590. Sidney's Arcadia published. Spenser revisits London, and publishes his Faerie Queene (i.-iii.). Death of Walsingham. 1591. Bacon enters service of the Earl of Essex. Spenser receives a pension from the Queen. Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. Spenser's Daphnaida and Complaints. Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost written. 1592. Shakespeare remodels Henry VI. Death of Montaigne. Galileo supports Copernican theory in lectures at Padua. 1593. Death of Marlowe. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis published. 1594. Shakespeare's Lucrece published. Shakespeare acts at Court. Spenser marries Elizabeth Boyle. 1595. Ralegh sails to Guiana. 1595. Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie published. Spenser's Colin Clout, Amoretti, and Epithalamion published. Death of Tasso. 1596. Death of Sir Francis Drake. Ralegh's Discovery of Guiana written (published, 1606). Spenser's View of the State of Ireland completed, Faerie Queene (iv.-vi.) and Prothalamion published. 1597. First edition of Bacon's Essays. Shakespeare writes 1 Henry IV., and purchases New Place, Stratford-on-Avon. 1598. Globe Theatre built. Death of Lord Burghley. Spenser Sheriff of Cork. Sidney's Arcadia edited in folio. Humour acted. 1599. Death of Spenser and burial in Westminster Abbey. Expedition of Earl of Essex in 1600. William Gilbert's De Magnete published. Death of Hooker. Birth of Calderon. Fairfax's translation of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered published. Giordano Bruno burned at Rome. 1601. Earl of Essex's rebellion and execution. Death of Tycho Brahe; he is succeeded by Kepler as astronomer to the Emperor Rudolph II. 1602. Hamlet produced. 1603. Death of Queen Elizabeth. Accession of James I. Florio's translation of Montaigne published. Ralegh condemned for alleged treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London. 1604. Hamlet published in quarto. England makes peace with Spain. Kepler's Optics published. GREAT ENGLISHMEN OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY I THE SPIRIT OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 'What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how in- 'Nam ipsa scientia potestas est.' BACON, Meditationes Sacrae. [BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The subject of the European Renaissance I National and In the Dictionary of National Biography will be found the lives of more than two thousand Englishmen and Englishwomen who flourished in England in the sixteenth century. It is the first century in our history which offers the national biographer subjects reaching in number to four figures. The English- England. men who attained, according to the national biographer's estimate, the level of distinction entitling them to biographic A sixteenth century commemoration were in the sixteenth century thrice as numerous as those who reached that level in the fourteenth or fif teenth century. The number of distinguished men which a country produces depends to some extent, but to some extent only, on Causes of its population. England of the sixteenth century distinctive achievement. was more populous than England of the four teenth or fifteenth, but the increase of population is not as three to one, which is the rate of increase in the volume of distinctive achievement. Probably the four millions of the fifteenth century became five millions in the sixteenth, a rate of increase of twenty-five per cent., an infinitesimal rate of increase when it is compared with the gigantic increase of three hundred per cent., which characterises the volume of distinctive achievement. One must, therefore, look outside statistics of population for the true cause of the fact that for every man who gained any sort of distinction in fifteenth century England, three men gained any sort of distinction in the sixteenth century. It is not to the numbers of the people that we need direct our attention; it is to their spirit, to the working of their minds, to their outlook on life, to their opportunities of uncommon experience that we must turn for a solution of our problem. Englishmen of the sixteenth century breathed a new atmosphere intellectually and spiritually. They came under a new stimulus, compounded of many elements, each of them new and inspiring. To that stimulus must be attributed the sudden upward growth of distinctive achievement among them, the increase of the opportunities of famous exploits, and the consequent preservation from oblivion of more names of Englishmen than in any century before. The stimulus under which Englishmen came in the sixteenth century may be summed up in the familiar word The Renaissance. |