The Elizabethan Miscellanies;<br>Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England

Abstract

war were largely bluff and that there was much enthusiasm in England for the campaign. Louis A. Knafla, on the other hand, looks at Elizabeth's reign in a stimulating and \aluable article on the admissions to the Inns of Court, which clarifies, indeed modifies, Lawrence Stone's educational "revolution." It is a pity that a work of such quality should l)e marred by the use, if not the invention, of such a clumsy term as "antihumanism." In his concluding article on the rule of law, G. R. Elton surveys the whole Tudor period, and is concerned once again to dispell the tenacious concept of Tudor despotism. In true Eltonian style he slays the paradox that has been found in sixteenth-century England of a deference to sovereign law accompanied by an augmentation of regal power. There is no paradox once it is recognized that regal power only grows by means of statute. The prerogative, though perhaps growing in effectiveness, remained subordinate to parliament.