A History of Elizabethan Literature

Saintsbury covers far more ground than his title promises. The book runs from Tottel’s Miscellany of 1557 and the verse of Wyatt and Surrey through the early dramatists, Spenser and the group around The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s period, then past Elizabeth’s death into Jacobean and Caroline writing: Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Clarendon, Browne and Hobbes, the Caroline poets, and the last of the playwrights. Macmillan’s own listing gives the real span as 1560 to 1665. Saintsbury held that a literary history earns its keep through critical judgment drawn from direct, first-hand reading, with summary and biography a distant second, and the verdicts here are audibly his own. Published in 1887 for Macmillan’s multi-volume History of English Literature, it remains a readable map of the period, opinionated in ways later scholarship has not always upheld.