A History of Elizabethan Literature

The Elizabethan age produced the most extraordinary efflorescence of English literature the world has ever witnessed, and no Victorian critic understood this flowering better than George Saintsbury. This sweeping history traces the arc from Tottel's Miscellany, which opened the Elizabethan age, through the zenith of Spenser and Shakespeare, down to the Jacobean twilight. Saintsbury illuminates how English poetry shed its medieval skin and found a voice at once classical and startlingly modern, with particular attention to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, whose experiments with form laid the groundwork for everything that followed. The result is not mere chronology but a considered argument about why this sixty-year span matters: because in it, English became a literary language equal to Latin and Italian. For students of the Renaissance, historians of the book, and anyone who wants to understand the deep roots of English poetry, Saintsbury remains indispensable.