A History of Elizabethan Literature — A Reader’s Guide

A Critic's Yardstick

Saintsbury's method is openly evaluative. He ranks authors by their 'certain literary faculty' and uses comparative judgments to establish a hierarchy. In the Breton passage, he declares that two lines of Greville 'are simply worth all the works of Breton, prose and verse, unless we count the Lullaby, put together.' This is not a historian's caution but a critic's verdict. He also relies on 'internal evidence' to question attributions, as when he doubts that Breton wrote the lullaby in The Arbour of Amorous Devices, calling the attribution 'based on little external and refuted by all internal evidence.' Saintsbury's yardstick is consistent: he prizes what he calls 'mots de lumière'—bright, memorable phrases—and finds Breton deficient in them.

The Texture of Elizabethan Prose

The excerpts include a long, ornate passage of Elizabethan prose—a mock-encomium on midday sleeping—that Saintsbury uses as a sample of the period's style. The prose is dense with metaphor: 'the sun with his flame-coloured wings hath fanned away the misty smoke of the morning,' and sleepers are urged to 'have thy wind-pipe cut in pieces' rather than greet anyone before noon. Saintsbury does not analyze this passage directly in the excerpt, but his inclusion of it suggests that he values the texture of Elizabethan writing as much as its content. His own prose, however, is more clipped and judgmental, creating a contrast between the florid originals and his terse assessments.

The Minor Figures as Evidence

Saintsbury devotes considerable space to writers now considered minor, such as Nicholas Breton, Samuel Rowlands, and John Davies of Hereford. He justifies this by arguing that Breton's work 'shows better perhaps than anything else the style of literature which a man, disdaining to condescend to burlesque or bawdry, not gifted with any extraordinary talent, could then produce with a fair chance of being published and bought.' This is a revealing statement: Saintsbury uses minor figures as evidence of the literary marketplace and the baseline of acceptable writing. The catalog subject 'Elizabeth I—Relations with authors' is not directly addressed in these excerpts; instead, Saintsbury focuses on the relationship between talent, genre, and commercial viability.

Saintsbury's history rewards readers who enjoy strong critical opinions and a willingness to engage with lesser-known writers. The excerpts show that he is less interested in providing a comprehensive overview than in making aesthetic discriminations. Readers should expect frequent comparisons, Latin phrases, and a tone that is both erudite and dismissive. The book is best approached as a series of essays rather than a reference work, and its value lies in Saintsbury's distinctive voice rather than its coverage of political or social history.