And so, although writers of tragedy dwelt on the horrors of death and its accompaniments of blood and atrocity, and though they symbolized in their villains their sense of the reign of evil, yet, in Marlowe's treatment of an Asiatic conqueror or the ignoble fascination of Edward II, or in Peele's fancy that made musical the amours of David; everywhere indeed, in the Pantheas and Persedas, the Marii and Selimi, they were presenting human life as removed from the commonplace, the sordid, the usual, and as the abode of heroisms, splendors, and aspirations. Even evil deeds and villains, even death itself sometimes partook of this glorification; and tragic theory, moral purpose, and theological dogma were alike forgotten in the fascination of human character, passion, and achievement. This idealization of life was, as we noted at the beginning of the chapter, characteristic of the national temper and of the artistic impulses in every field of literature during its brief breathing spell between the Protestant and Puritan revolutions. Its power is curiously illustrated in the effect of the story of Romeo and Juliet upon Brooke in the course of his by no means despicable attempt to turn it into a tragic poem. In his Address to the Reader, he dilates with medieval propriety on the moral of the poem "to raise in the reader an hatefull lothyng of so filthy beastlynes." "And to this ende (good Reader) is this tragicall matter written to describe unto thee a coople of unfortunate lovers thralling themselves to unhonest desire, neglecting the authorite and advice of parents and frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of unchastitie)"--and so on through all their evil doings until "finallye, by all meanes of unhonest lyfe hastyng to most unhappye death." So wrote the conscious Puritan; but the story charmed the artist. It enticed his meagre art to a share in the joys of the lovers, it led him to a delight in unhonest life, it dissolved his sermon into romance and poetry, and left him enamored even of his "superstitious frier." And so the tragedy of the lovers became for Shakespeare as for Brooke and as other stories had become for Marlowe, Peele, and Greene, the spur and the means to an idealization of life. It is not in the reconciliation of the families, still less in the sense of a deserved punishment, that we find an antidote for death and evil; but in the assurance that human passion may be so lovely, human nature so full of strength and beauty. "The sun for sorrow will not show his head," says Prince Escalus at the end, but we believe with Romeo that "Jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops." NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY