So that his inattention to the printing of his plays may very conceivably have proceeded from sheer disgust at them--a frame of mind not unfamiliar to the artist when viewing his work in the light of his own ideals. Or of course it remains open to us--all things in the case of Shakespeare being open to us--to consider that he really regarded his work as commercial trivia that had much better be ignored in the later stages of his aggrandizement to the state of gentility. That frame of mind is so usual in the British novelist and ever since novels have been translated or written in England has proved so disastrous to the art itself that it is quite conceivable that the first--and the greatest--of them all may have shared in that national characteristic. Be that as it may, the assertion that the Elizabethan and Jacobean play answered in advance the call from the public for the novel that was so soon to come may very well be regarded as fact. And indeed the same may be regarded as true of all pre-Elizabethan or rather pre-Edwardian English literature. Or it might be more just to say that, the Grammar School spreading at once the capacity and the taste for reading, the enhanced national wealth of the age of Drake and countenanced piracy in Elizabeth’s day made the purchase and dissemination of books a possibility amongst a very much wider class of the public. We may then regard the rule of thumb definition of the novel as a printed book of some length telling one tale or relating the adventures of one single personage as reasonably acceptable. In that case you get an instance at once of supply created by demand and of that supply being rendered possible by the fact that education and material production arrived almost hand in hand. For although printing was available as a means of spreading knowledge almost a couple of centuries earlier, the exiguity of material wealth and leisure, the turmoil and the scarcity of labour of the centuries of pestilence, dynastic wars, and turmoil that preceded the firm establishment of the Tudors on the throne infinitely delayed and indeed indefinitely put back the clock of culture in these kingdoms.