The Elizabethan World Picture

DR. TILLYARD’S little book is further evidence that not all the intellectual revolutions have been led by natural scientists. There is no more relationship between Shakespearean scholarship today and that of fifty years ago than there is between a Thunderbolt and a balloon. The spacious times of the Virgin Queen are now revealed as having been the Middle Ages at full tide, mentally embosomed in the concept of a world order inside which the laws of humankind were complements of the laws of the universe and of the Divine Mind. When poets said their prince was like the sun, they meant every word of it with startling literalness. The mundane had its omnipresent cosmic analogy: the portions of the body mirrored the segments of the Zodiac, the ocean and the air were seated likewise in the human breast, and what happened in man’s history was the counterpart of the Divine adventure with angels and demons. The universe had been made habitable for Platonists. Men heard, not too dimly, the “music of the spheres,” driving the stars and the souls of thinkers onward in a cosmic dance, and to follow its rhythm was the highest wisdom.

The book will startle and beguile many. It is an urbane postcript to much recent inquiry, but it has fresh points of its own to make. In so short a volume not everything can be said. Little notice is taken of the fact that many Elizabethans definitely felt that the Tudor dictatorship was an invasion of older sanctities, or that the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, really did turn the world upside down. There is an odd indifference to the Stoics who had come down partly in their own right and partly by reason of Augustine. But good fare is offered nonetheless, in particular a garner of citations from the poets and essayists of the period which will seem to many a reader quite as absorbing as Dr. Tillyard’s commentary. Macmillan, $1.75.

GEORGE N.SHUSTER