The war waged by the propagandists of Puritan extremism against the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline stages and the dramatists' counter-strategy of satiric portraiture that was often nothing more than gratuitous misrepresentation of the Puritan as a type are by now a familiar story to students of the Renaissance. How the case for comedy was restated in Caroline theatrical apologetics has not, however, been adequately set forth.

In 1911 Edwin Greenlaw offered the following interpretation of the fable in the February eclogue of Spenser's Shepheards Calendar:

Towneley XX, the Conspirado (et Capcio), is one of the most composite plays in the Towneley manuscript. Not only does it show the hand of several poets and editors, but it covers the ground of three plays as registered at York—the Conspiracy, the Last Supper, and the Capture—the last of these including the Agony. It opens with six Wakefield stanzas, which are, rather certainly, the last writing upon it. These stanzas are spoken by Pilate and are in the typical Pilate vein, beginning with a demand for silence, followed by elaborate self-boasting, and then by the theme of the play, Pilate's fear of Jesus, who had declared that “if he lyf a yere / dystroy oure law must vs.” These stanzas offer no problem.

The first pamphlet issued in the Martin Marprelate controversy, the Epistle to the right puissante and terrible priests, represents the earliest experiment in the dissemination of printed matter in colloquial English for the purpose of influencing public opinion. In order to acquaint the common people with the Puritan criticism of the episcopacy, the author, calling himself Martin Marprelate, hit upon the idea of playing the buffoon in print. In a sort of monologue consisting of simple words and short sentences he mingles seemingly good-humored raillery with bits of scandal about various prominent clergymen. With this device to arouse the curiosity of his readers he attacks the basic organization of the Established Church. The Epistle set the pace for the whole fight.

The story of the Troglodytes in “Letters 11—14” of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes is an allegory which deals with the problem of man's nature and its bearing on the origin and development of morality and society. The problem emerges from Montesquieu's treatment of the question whether society resulted from the natural benevolence, justice, and social instincts of man, or whether, on the contrary, it was the result of a compact of men devoid of a natural sense of justice. Montesquieu shows that the basis of the social instinct is natural equity; but his demonstration involves also—explicitly or implicitly—questions concerning man's state of nature, his primitive goodness, his knowledge of moral distinctions and obligations, his capability to act in a disinterested manner, the nature of virtue, and the relation of morality and religion.

Milton writes in his preface to Samson Agonistes that “Chorus is here introduc'd after the Greek manner, not antient only but modern, and still in use among the Italians”; that “In the modeling therefore of this Poem … the Antients and Italians are rather follow'd, as of much more authority and fame.” It is not unreasonable, therefore, to expect to find in Italian drama of the seventeenth century these evidences of classical usage to which he refers. Milton is here concerned, it would appear, only with the use of chorus, and he implies that there was common in Italy in his day an imitation of Greek drama which differed from similar efforts in other countries in the handling of the chorus. He is not writing of dramatic criticism, but of dramatic practice. An interest in Minturno and Castelvetro does not explain so direct a statement. Furthermore, the phrase, “still in use,” cannot be accepted as a reference to drama of the sixteenth century, however convenient it would be to fall back upon proved relationships. Trissino's Sophonisba, for example, so close a copy of Sophocles and Euripides, presents many parallels to Samson Agonistes, but it was written more than a hundred and fifty years earlier (in 1515), and presented in 1562. Certain sixteenth-century Italian pastoral plays, such as the Aminta, show interest in the use of chorus which is derived from Greek tragedy, but the Aminta, in spite of its classical ancestry, and Milton's known admiration for its author, was written in 1573, and can scarcely answer for chorus “still in use among the Italians.” Even the seventeenth-century revivals of it would be too infrequent to account for a statement as broad as Milton's. Much the same may be said of the Pastor Fido. Moreover, at the same time, between 1550 and 1590, Jodelle and Garnier in France were writing tragedies at least as much after the Greek manner as were Tasso and Guarini. We must return to the fact that Milton is concerned with a trend in his own century.

Somewhat more than a century and a quarter past, Dugald Stewart, philosopher and critic second only to Sir William Hamilton, wrote:

Thomas Campion was a gifted pioneer in the polished and sophisticated seventeenth-century lyric that freed English poetry from the adoration of conventional sonnet mistresses. But the significance of his contribution is obscured when his authentic work is weighted down with the worn-out motifs and frequently slipshod workmanship of the poems appearing in Part ii of A Booke of Ayres. This songbook was brought out in 1601 by Philip Rosseter, lutenist, later King's Musician and Manager of the Children of the Queen's Revels, and Campion's lifelong friend. It was divided, as Rosseter took pains to make clear, into two parts, the first consisting of twenty-one songs by Campion, the second of twenty-one more—“the rest of the Songs contained in this Booke, made by Philip Rosseter.” No one has denied to Rosseter the musical settings of this second part, several of them among the most charming of the period; but almost everyone has kidnaped the lyrics from those settings and presented them as a free gift to Campion, who, I think, might not greatly relish the honor.

Two recent studies, which ascribe to Rochester's Satyr against Mankind an originality which has long been in dispute, differ as to the nature and degree of that originality. V. de Sola Pinto is convinced that the Satyr “is a thoroughly original poem,” but he supports his opinion only with the observation that Rochester's poem has “a passionate vehemence which makes the carefully meditated art of Boileau's satire seem frigid.” Kenneth Murdock, in his recent biographical study of Rochester, treats the ideas of the poem as clues to Rochester's mind and thought, but he nevertheless refers to the Satyr as a “skilful adaptation of Boileau's verses.”

The neo-Latin Cornus of Erycius Puteanus (Hendrik van der Putten) has been much neglected as a source of Milton's masque, in which Comus, the post-classical god of revelry, appears as the central figure. As early as 1790, Sir John Hawkins, in a note on Johnson's Life of Milton suggested Puteanus's fantasy as a source of Milton's fiction. To date, however, no serious attempt has been made to trace Milton's debt to this curious extravaganza, although its probable influence upon Milton has been universally recognized.

Since Dryden lived in a period when the authority of Aristotle in matters of poetry was gaining rather than losing strength, and since he was both a critic and a writer of serious plays, it was inevitable that he should come to grips with the principle of a tragic catharsis and with the broader problem of the function of tragedy. The passages in which he gave his answer to these problems are well known, but the significance of his remarks in relation to the ideas of his time has not always been understood. Especially, the assumption in recent years that all Neo-Classical renditions of the Aristotelian catharsis are irrelevant because of the strong moral bias of the period has led to the ignoring of quite important differences between the theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The silva is a form of verse which was used by Lope de Vega in increasing quantity from about 1620. Though it never rose to take a place among the most popular meters, Lope used as many as 259 lines of silvas in La Noche de San Juan (Acad. N., VIII), of 1631, and 255 lines in Las bizarrías de Belisa (Acad. N., XI), of 1634. This represents respectively 8.5 and 9.3 per cent of the total number of lines in the play. Among plays of less certain date, La boba para los ostros y discreta para sí has 315 lines of silvas, or 11.1 per cent of the play in that meter, while Más pueden celos que amor has 304 lines of silvas, representing 11.4 per cent of the total number of lines. This trend towards a freer use of silvas in the drama was likewise reflected in the works of other writers.

Investigation has revealed that a number of the minor writers, the decadent writers of neoclassic French tragedies, contributed a comparatively large number of dramas which were accorded wide and enthusiastic acceptance in Spain during the second half of the eighteenth century. The chief reasons for this wide acceptance are that they came at a time when the greatest efforts were being made to introduce the neo-classic tragedy into Spain, and that these same tragedies had been first accepted with applause in Paris. If Crébillon's Rhadamiste et Zénobie seemed so good to Paris audiences that they applauded it thirty-three times during the first year of its appearance, why should Spaniards not feel safe in adapting it to their stage? Paris had been forming a taste for neo-classic tragedy during a period of two hundred years; it was the home of modern tragedy, and what Paris applauded, certainly Madrid could accept with assurance.

A panoramic view of hell's in training,
After the style of Virgil, and of Homer,
So that my name of Epic's no misnomer.

The extraordinary voyage and the journey to the moon, types of voyages imaginaires popular in French and English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are now recognized literary types, and their interesting connections with the development of science and of poetry have been studied. Another kind of imaginary voyage merits attention, one that goes back not only to Lucian, the grand parent of most of these fantasies, but still farther to that remote time when man, having evolved the idea of a world of life after death, first thought with an archaic grin of the discomfort his enemies might feel when they were sent by Death to his realm of shades and skeletons.

Cursory critics of John Oldham have quite correctly noted that his Satyrs Upon the Jesuits are distinguished from the rougher popular satire of the early Restoration by their more pretentious literary quality, the generalized nature of the satire, and the greater concentration and force of the invective. But beyond noting Oldham's acknowledged indebtedness to Persius, Horace, Ben Jonson, and Buchanan's Franciscanus, such critics have been generally somewhat vague on the subject of his literary patterns. Currently accepted views seem to be divided between two theories, stressing the classical or the neo-classical elements in his work: (1) According to one view, advanced by Mr. C.W. Previté-Orton, the lurid, violent tone of the poems is derived directly from Juvenal. (2) According to the analysis of Mr. A. F. B. Clark, the direct inspiration of the Satyrs was Boileau's Le Lutrin, which Oldham was engaged in translating at the time he began their composition. It is obvious from a survey of critical comments on Oldham that no English influence has been given much consideration, and that Oldham's almost complete separation from the popular English school of political satire has been generally taken for granted.