Among his followers were some of the better
hack-writers of the time, who were also among the minor dramatists and
poets, especially Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge. Lodge's 'Rosalynde,' also
much influenced by Lyly, is in itself a pretty story and is noteworthy as
the original of Shakspere's 'As You Like It.'
Lastly, in the concluding decade of the sixteenth century, came a series of
realistic stories depicting chiefly, in more or less farcical spirit, the
life of the poorer classes. They belonged mostly to that class of realistic
fiction which is called picaresque, from the Spanish word 'picaro,' a
rogue, because it began in Spain with the 'Lazarillo de Tormes' of Diego de
Mendoza, in 1553, and because its heroes are knavish serving-boys or
similar characters whose unprincipled tricks and exploits formed the
substance of the stories. In Elizabethan England it produced nothing of
individual note.
EDMUND SPENSER, 1552-1599. The first really commanding figure in the
Elizabethan period, and one of the chief of all English poets, is Edmund
Spenser. [Footnote: His name should never be spelled with a _c_.] Born
in London in 1552, the son of a clothmaker, Spenser past from the newly
established Merchant Taylors' school to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a
sizar, or poor student, and during the customary seven years of residence
took the degrees of B. A. and, in 1576, of M. A. At Cambridge he
assimilated two of the controlling forces of his life, the moderate
Puritanism of his college and Platonic idealism.
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