Peace was made with Spain:
national pride was wounded by the solicitous anxiety of the King for a
Spanish marriage for the heir to the throne. Sir Walter Raleigh, a
romantic adventurer lingering beyond his time, was beheaded out of hand
by the ungenerous timidity of the monarch to whom had been transferred
devotion and loyalty he was unfitted to receive. The Court which had
been a centre of flashing and gleaming brilliance degenerated into a
knot of sycophants humouring the pragmatic and self-important folly of a
king in whom had implanted themselves all the vices of the Scots and
none of their virtues. Nothing seemed left remarkable beneath the
visiting moon. The bright day was done and they were for the dark. The
uprising of Puritanism and the shadow of impending religious strife
darkened the temper of the time.
The change affected all literature and particularly the drama, which
because it appeals to what all men have in common, commonly reflects
soonest a change in the outlook or spirits of a people. The onslaughts
of the dramatists on the Puritans, always implacable enemies of the
theatre, became more virulent and envenomed. What a difference between
the sunny satire of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and the dark animosity of _The
Atheists' Tragedy_ with its Languebeau Snuffe ready to carry out any
villainy proposed to him! "I speak sir," says a lady in the same play to
a courtier who played with her in an attempt to carry on a quick witted,
"conceited" love passage in the vein of _Much Ado_, "I speak, sir, as
the fashion now: is, in earnest.
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