THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD

Taupo Times, Volume 11, Issue 74, 17 June 1953, Page 4

THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD

Sir, In your editosi'ial eolmnns of June 3rd. you stated that it was an auspieious omen .that the first Elizabeth , had glven her name to one of th(e ! greatest periods in the history of our ! people. Let us consideir in what way this was a "great" period. A man of letters might call it great in the f i.eld of literature, but most of the great literature was written atfter her death. It was not until the reigns | of James I and the later Stuarts that we find the great dramas of Sbakespeatre, Jonson, Beaumont, and Fletcher, and the beautiful and pcwerful poetry of John Donne, George Herbert and Robert Heitriek. And were England's seamen, Drake, Raleigh, Hawkins and the rest, any better than common pirates? 'In the field of exploration, it was a Genoese who discovared the New World, a Portugese who found the sea route to India, a and another Portugeae who first cireumnavigated the world. England was a laggard in the race to explcre the unknown. Again, in colonisation, it was not until the glorious reigns of James I and Charles I that the English had any success at all as colonizers. In the England of Elizabeth unemp 1 oym en t was rife, and the highways were infested with brigands, driven to erime by being denied the fundamental "Righis of Man." One could point to the cver-priviledged position of the noble class,es, to the intolerabie conditions undeir whieh the common people were forced to live, to the poverty to which the yeomen wer(e redueed by the enclosure and loss of their lands, and to the corruption throughout the administiration of the country. There appears to be mucb. in "one of the greatest periods" of ouir history that woojjd be hetter forgotten. — f am, ,etc., R.G. [Note:— ' We agree \vith "R. G." that much in history would be best forgotten. But we suggest that he forgets the oardinal rule of historica! , criticism, that a given perio-d is moi^e

justly judged by its oivn canons than by those of our much later (we hesitate to say \yiser) generation. With all its faults, the Elizabethan era was a period of great beginnings, of adventurous and independent thought and action. We feel sutre that "R. G." will hope for a similar quickening of the national spirit in this second Elizabethan period. — Editor. ]