Literature and the age
In a tradition of literature
remarkable for its exacting and brilliant achievements, the
Elizabethan and early Stuart periods have been said to
represent the most brilliant century of all. (The reign of
Elizabeth I began in 1558 and ended with her death in 1603;
she was succeeded by the Stuart king James VI of Scotland,
who took the title James I of England as well. English
literature of his reign as James I, from 1603 to 1625, is
properly called Jacobean.) These years produced a gallery of
authors of genius, some of whom have never been surpassed,
and conferred on scores of lesser talents the enviable
ability to write with fluency, imagination, and verve. From
one point of view, this sudden renaissance looks radiant,
confident, heroic—and belated, but all the more dazzling for
its belatedness. Yet, from another point of view, this was a
time of unusually traumatic strain, in which English society
underwent massive disruptions that transformed it on every
front and decisively affected the life of every individual.
In the brief, intense moment in which England assimilated
the European Renaissance, the circumstances that made the
assimilation possible were already disintegrating and
calling into question the newly won certainties, as well as
the older truths that they were dislodging. This doubleness,
of new possibilities and new doubts simultaneously
apprehended, gives the literature its unrivaled intensity.
Social conditions
In this period England’s population doubled; prices
rocketed, rents followed, old social loyalties dissolved,
and new industrial, agricultural, and commercial veins were
first tapped. Real wages hit an all-time low in the 1620s,
and social relations were plunged into a state of fluidity
from which the merchant and the ambitious lesser gentleman
profited at the expense of the aristocrat and the labourer,
as satires and comedies current from the 1590s complain.
Behind the Elizabethan vogue for pastoral poetry lies the
fact of the prosperity of the enclosing sheep farmer, who
sought to increase pasture at the expense of the peasantry.
Tudor platitudes about order and degree could neither combat
nor survive the challenge posed to rank by these arrivistes.
The position of the crown, politically dominant yet
financially insecure, had always been potentially unstable,
and, when Charles I lost the confidence of his greater
subjects in the 1640s, his authority crumbled. Meanwhile,
the huge body of poor fell ever further behind the rich; the
pamphlets of Thomas Harman (1566) and Robert Greene
(1591–92), as well as
Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605–06),
provide glimpses of a horrific world of vagabondage and
crime, the Elizabethans’ biggest, unsolvable social problem.
Robert Greene
born July 1558?, Norwich, Eng.
died Sept. 3, 1592, London
one of the most popular English prose writers of
the later 16th century and Shakespeare’s most
successful predecessor in blank-verse romantic
comedy. He was also one of the first
professional writers and among the earliest
English autobiographers.
Greene obtained degrees at both Cambridge and
Oxford. He then went to London, where he became
an intimate of its underworld. He wrote more
than 35 works between 1580 and 1592. To be
certain of supplying material attractive to the
public, Greene at first slavishly followed
literary fashions. His first model was John
Lyly’s Euphues.
In the later 1580s Greene wrote prose
pastorals in the manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s
Arcadia, interspersed with charming, often
irrelevant lyrics that have given Greene a
reputation as a poet. The best of his pastorals
is Pandosto (1588), the direct source of
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
About 1590 Greene began to compose serious
didactic works. Beginning with Greenes never too
late (1590), he related prodigal son stories.
That Greene drew on his own experience is
evident from the tract Greenes groats-worth of
witte, bought with a million of repentance,
printed posthumously in 1592 with Greene’s
admission that Roberto’s experiences were
essentially his own. In Groats-worth appears the
first printed reference to Shakespeare, assailed
as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our
feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a
Players hide, supposes he is as well able to
bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you .
. . in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in
a countrie.” (The words in italics are from
Shakespeare’s I Henry VI.) Greene is thought to
be criticizing Shakespeare the actor.
Greene’s writings for the theatre present
numerous problems; the dating of his plays is
conjectural, and his role as collaborator has
produced much inconclusive discussion. With The
Honorable Historie of frier Bacon, and frier
Bongay (written c. 1591, published 1594), the
first successful romantic comedy in English,
Greene realized his comic talent in drama. In
The Scottish Historie of James the fourth,
slaine at Flodden (written c. 1590, published
1598) he used an Italian tale but drew on fairy
lore for the characters of Oberon and Bohan. It
was a forerunner of As You Like It and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. As Marlowe anticipated
the tragedies of Shakespeare, so, in a lesser
way, Greene furnished him a model in dramatic
comedy and romance.
In his last year Greene wrote exposés of the
Elizabethan underworld, such as A Notable
Discovery of Coosnage (1591) and the successful
and amusing A disputation betweene a hee
conny-catcher and a shee conny-catcher (1592).
|
Intellectual and religious revolution
The barely disguised social ferment was accompanied by
an intellectual revolution, as the medieval synthesis
collapsed before the new science, new religion, and new
humanism. While modern mechanical technologies were pressed
into service by the Stuarts to create the scenic wonders of
the court masque, the discoveries of astronomers and
explorers were redrawing the cosmos in a way that was
profoundly disturbing:
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets, and the firmament
They seek so many new….
The majority of people were more immediately affected by
the religious revolutions of the 16th century. A person in
early adulthood at the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 would,
by her death in 1603, have been vouchsafed an unusually
disillusioning insight into the duty owed by private
conscience to the needs of the state. The Tudor church
hierarchy was an instrument of social and political control,
yet the mid-century controversies over the faith had already
wrecked any easy confidence in the authority of doctrines
and forms and had taught people to inquire carefully into
the rationale of their own beliefs (as
John Donne does in
his third satire [c. 1596]). The Elizabethan ecclesiastical
compromise was the object of continual criticism, from
radicals both within (who desired progressive reforms, such
as the abolition of bishops) and without (who desired the
return of England to the Roman Catholic fold), but the
incipient liberalism of individuals such as
John Milton and
the scholar and churchman William Chillingworth was held in
check by the majority’s unwillingness to tolerate a
plurality of religions in a supposedly unitary state. Nor
was the Calvinist orthodoxy that cradled most English
writers comforting, for it told them that they were corrupt,
unfree, unable to earn their own salvations, and subject to
heavenly judgments that were arbitrary and absolute.
Calvinism deeply affects the world of the Jacobean
tragedies, whose heroes are not masters of their fates but
victims of divine purposes that are terrifying yet
inscrutable.
The race for cultural development
The third complicating factor was the race to catch up
with Continental developments in arts and philosophy. The
Tudors needed to create a class of educated diplomats,
statesmen, and officials and to dignify their court by
making it a fount of cultural as well as political
patronage. The new learning, widely disseminated through the
Erasmian (after the humanist Desiderius Erasmus) educational
programs of such men as John Colet and
Sir Thomas Elyot,
proposed to use a systematic schooling in Latin authors and
some Greek to encourage in the social elites a flexibility
of mind and civilized serviceableness that would allow
enlightened princely government to walk hand in hand with
responsible scholarship. Humanism fostered an intimate
familiarity with the classics that was a powerful incentive
for the creation of an English literature of answerable
dignity. It fostered as well a practical, secular piety that
left its impress everywhere on Elizabethan writing.
Humanism’s effect, however, was modified by the simultaneous
impact of the flourishing Continental cultures, particularly
the Italian. Repeatedly, crucial innovations in English
letters developed resources originating from Italy—such as
the sonnet of Petrarch, the epic of Ludovico Ariosto, the
pastoral of Jacopo Sannazzaro, the canzone, and blank
verse—and values imported with these forms were in
competition with the humanists’ ethical preoccupations.
Social ideals of wit, many-sidedness, and sprezzatura
(accomplishment mixed with unaffectedness) were imbibed from
Baldassare Castiglione’s Il cortegiano, translated as The
Courtyer by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, and Elizabethan court
poetry is steeped in Castiglione’s aristocratic
Neoplatonism, his notions of universal proportion, and the
love of beauty as the path to virtue. Equally significant
was the welcome afforded to Niccolò Machiavelli, whose
lessons were vilified publicly and absorbed in private. The
Prince, written in 1513, was unavailable in English until
1640, but as early as the 1580s Gabriel Harvey, a friend of
the poet
Edmund Spenser, can be found enthusiastically
hailing its author as the apostle of modern pragmatism. “We
are much beholden to Machiavel and others,” said
Francis
Bacon, “that write what men do, and not what they ought to
do.”
So the literary revival occurred in a society rife with
tensions, uncertainties, and competing versions of order and
authority, religion and status, sex and the self. The
Elizabethan settlement was a compromise; the Tudor pretense
that the people of England were unified in belief disguised
the actual fragmentation of the old consensus under the
strain of change. The new scientific knowledge proved both
man’s littleness and his power to command nature; against
the Calvinist idea of man’s helplessness pulled the humanist
faith in his dignity, especially that conviction, derived
from the reading of Seneca and so characteristic of the
period, of man’s constancy and fortitude, his heroic
capacity for self-determination. It was still possible for
Elizabeth to hold these divergent tendencies together in a
single, heterogeneous culture, but under her successors they
would eventually fly apart. The philosophers speaking for
the new century would be Francis Bacon, who argued for the
gradual advancement of science through patient accumulation
of experiments, and the skeptic Michel de Montaigne (his
Essays translated from the French by John Florio [1603]),
who denied that it was possible to formulate any general
principles of knowledge.
Cutting across all of these was the persistence of
popular habits of thought and expression. Both humanism and
Puritanism set themselves against vulgar ignorance and folk
tradition, but, fortunately, neither could remain aloof for
long from the robustness of popular taste.
Sir Philip
Sidney, in England’s first Neoclassical literary treatise,
The Defence of Poesie (written c. 1578–83, published 1595),
candidly admitted that “the old song [i.e., ballad] of Percy
and Douglas” would move his heart “more than with a
trumpet,” and his Arcadia (final version published in 1593)
is a representative instance of the fruitful
cross-fertilization of genres in this period—the
contamination of aristocratic pastoral with popular tale,
the lyric with the ballad, comedy with romance, tragedy with
satire, and poetry with prose. The language, too, was
undergoing a rapid expansion that all classes contributed to
and benefited from, sophisticated literature borrowing
without shame the idioms of colloquial speech. An allusion
in
Shakespeare’s
Macbeth (1606–07) to heaven peeping
“through the blanket of the dark” would become a “problem”
only later, when, for instance,
Samuel Johnson complained in
1751 that such words provoked laughter rather than awe.
Johnson’s was an age when tragic dignity implied politeness,
when it was below the dignity of tragedy to mention so lowly
an object as a blanket. But the Elizabethans’ ability to
address themselves to several audiences simultaneously and
to bring into relation opposed experiences, emphases, and
worldviews invested their writing with complexity and power.
John Colet
born 1467, London
died Sept. 16, 1519, Sheen, Surrey, Eng.
theologian and founder of St. Paul’s School,
London, who, as one of the chief Tudor
Humanists, promoted Renaissance culture in
England.
The son of a prosperous merchant who had been
Lord Mayor of London, Colet studied mathematics
and philosophy at Oxford and then travelled and
studied for three years in France and Italy. He
returned to England c. 1496 and was ordained in
1498. He lectured at Oxford University, to which
he invited Desiderius Erasmus, the brilliant
Humanist of the northern Renaissance. In
addition to Erasmus, Colet collaborated with and
influenced such prime Humanists as Sir Thomas
More and Thomas Linacre, prototype of the
scholar-physicians of the Renaissance. Colet was
appointed dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1504
and founded St. Paul’s School c. 1509.
Colet’s devotion to Humanism was diversely
expressed. His insistence that the classics be
taught diffused a sounder knowledge of Greek and
Latin and of ancient life and thought. He
revered the 3rd-century philosopher Plotinus,
founder of the Neoplatonist school; Marsilio
Ficino, one of the leaders of Renaissance
Platonism; and Dionysius the Areopagite,
allegedly an early Christian convert regarded as
the author of The Mystical Theology of the
Celestial Hierarchies, on which Colet wrote a
treatise. His contempt for contemporary
ecclesiastical abuses was so intense that his
denunciation of the sins of the clergy caused
him to be suspected of heresy.
Colet’s works, mainly unpublished until the
19th-century editions of J.H. Lupton (1867–76),
include commentaries on Romans and Corinthians
and treatises on the sacraments and the church.
With Erasmus and John Lily, he wrote a Latin
grammar that was widely used for many years.
|
|
|
Sir Thomas Hoby
born 1530, Leominster, Herefordshire, Eng.
died July 13, 1566, Paris, France
English diplomat and translator of Baldassare
Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (“The Book
of the Courtier”).
Educated at Cambridge, Strasbourg, and Padua,
Hoby traveled extensively on the European
continent. Given court employments in England
under King Edward VI, he went into exile during
the reign of Mary I. While in exile he
translated Castiglione’s work, which he
published as The Courtyer of Count Baldesser
Castilio in 1561. The influence of Hoby’s
translation in England was enormous, not only on
the social pattern of life at court but on such
writers as Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney.
Hoby also translated a Latin work on the Church
of England. He was knighted by Elizabeth I in
1566 and sent to Paris as English ambassador. He
died that same year. Hoby’s diary was first
published in 1902 as The Travels and Life of Sir
Thomas Hoby.
|
|
|
John Florio
born c. 1553, London
died c. 1625, Fulham, near London
English lexicographer and translator of
Montaigne.
Son of a Protestant refugee of Tuscan origin,
Florio studied at Oxford. From 1604 to 1619
Florio was groom of the privy chamber to Queen
Anne.
In 1580 he translated, as Navigations and
Discoveries (1580), Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s
account of the voyages of Jacques Cartier.
Florio His Firste Fruites (1578), a grammar and
a series of dialogues in Italian and English,
was followed in 1591 by Florio’s Second Frutes
and by Giardino di ricreatione, a collection of
more than 6,000 proverbs in Italian. His
Italian-English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes
(1598), for which he drew heavily upon the works
of Giordano Bruno, contains about 46,000
definitions. The second edition, Queen Anna’s
New World of Words (1611), was greatly enlarged.
In 1603 Florio produced his major
translation, the Essais of Michel de Montaigne,
which he revised in 1613. The freedom of this
version is questionable by modern standards of
accuracy, and the style is elaborate where
Montaigne is subtle and terse, but the book is
nevertheless thoroughly good reading.
|
Elizabethan poetry and prose
English poetry and prose
burst into sudden glory in the late 1570s. A decisive shift
of taste toward a fluent artistry self-consciously
displaying its own grace and sophistication was announced in
the works of Spenser and Sidney. It was accompanied by an
upsurge in literary production that came to fruition in the
1590s and 1600s, two decades of astonishing productivity by
writers of every persuasion and calibre.
The groundwork was laid in the 30 years from 1550, a
period of slowly increasing confidence in the literary
competence of the language and tremendous advances in
education, which for the first time produced a substantial
English readership, keen for literature and possessing
cultivated tastes. This development was underpinned by the
technological maturity and accelerating output (mainly in
pious or technical subjects) of Elizabethan printing. The
Stationers’ Company, which controlled the publication of
books, was incorporated in 1557, and Richard Tottel’s
Miscellany (1557) revolutionized the relationship of poet
and audience by making publicly available lyric poetry,
which hitherto had circulated only among a courtly coterie.
Spenser was the first significant English poet deliberately
to use print to advertise his talents.
Development of the English language
The prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its
lack of “terms” and innate inferiority to the eloquent
Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the humanists
Thomas Wilson,
Roger Ascham, and
Sir John Cheke, whose
treatises on rhetoric, education, and even archery argued in
favour of an unaffected vernacular prose and a judicious
attitude toward linguistic borrowings. Their stylistic
ideals are attractively embodied in Ascham’s educational
tract The Schoolmaster (1570), and their tonic effect on
that particularly Elizabethan art, translation, can be felt
in the earliest important examples, Sir Thomas Hoby’s
Castiglione (1561) and Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch
(1579). A
further stimulus was the religious upheaval that took place
in the middle of the century. The desire of reformers to
address as comprehensive an audience as possible—the bishop
and the boy who follows the plough, as
William Tyndale put
it—produced the first true classics of English prose: the
reformed Anglican Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552, 1559);
John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), which celebrates the
martyrs, great and small, of English Protestantism; and the
various English versions of the Bible, from
Tyndale’s New
Testament (1525), Miles Coverdale’s Bible (1535), and the
Geneva Bible (1560) to the syncretic Authorized Version (or
King James’s Version, 1611). The latter’s combination of
grandeur and plainness is justly celebrated, even if it
represents an idiom never spoken in heaven or on earth.
Nationalism inspired by the Reformation motivated the
historical chronicles of the capable and stylish Edward Hall
(1548), who bequeathed to
Shakespeare the tendentious Tudor
interpretation of the 15th century, and of Raphael Holinshed
(1577).
In verse, Tottel’s much reprinted Miscellany generated a
series of imitations and, by popularizing the lyrics of
Sir
Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, carried into the 1570s
the tastes of the early Tudor court. The newer poets
collected by Tottel and other anthologists include Nicholas
Grimald, Richard Edwardes, George Turberville, Barnabe
Googe, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and many
others, of whom Gascoigne is the most prominent. The modern
preference for the ornamental manner of the next generation
has eclipsed these poets, who continued the tradition of
plain, weighty verse, addressing themselves to ethical and
didactic themes and favouring the meditative lyric, satire,
and epigram. But their taste for economy, restraint, and
aphoristic density was, in the verse of
John Donne and
Ben
Jonson, to outlive the cult of elegance. The period’s major
project was A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; enlarged
editions 1563, 1578, 1587), a collection of verse laments,
by several hands, purporting to be spoken by participants in
the Wars of the Roses and preaching the Tudor doctrine of
obedience. The quality is uneven, but Thomas Sackville’s
Induction and Thomas Churchyard’s Legend of Shore’s Wife are
distinguished, and the intermingling of history, tragedy,
and political morality was to be influential on the drama.
Sir John Cheke
born June 16, 1514, Cambridge, Eng.
died Sept. 13, 1557, London
English humanist and supporter of the
Protestant Reformation who, as the poet John
Milton said, “taught Cambridge and King Edward
Greek” and who, with his friend Sir Thomas
Smith, discovered the proper pronunciation of
ancient Greek. Through his teaching he made the
University of Cambridge the centre of the “new
learning” and the Reformed religion. Henry VIII
made him the first regius professor of Greek at
Cambridge. He was tutor to Prince Edward (1544),
who as King Edward VI knighted him in 1552.
On the accession of Mary I (1553), Cheke lost
the last of a series of government positions,
was imprisoned briefly, and fled abroad. There
he published his letters on Greek pronunciation.
In 1556 he was captured in Belgium and confined
to the Tower of London. Faced with death, he
recanted his Protestantism publicly and is said
to have died of shame.
One of the most erudite men of his time,
Cheke was an indefatigable translator. His
English works are of little importance, except
for their avoidance of foreign words and for his
reformed phonetic spelling, which make his
letters some of the best plain prose of the
period.
|
|
|
Sir Thomas North
born May 28, 1535, London, Eng.
died 1601?
English translator whose version of Plutarch’s
Bioi parallēloi (Parallel Lives) was the source
for many of William Shakespeare’s plays.
North may have been a student at Peterhouse,
Cambridge; in 1557 he was entered at Lincoln’s
Inn, London, where he joined a group of young
lawyers interested in translating. In 1574 North
accompanied his brother on a diplomatic mission
to France. Thomas North had an extensive
military career: he fought twice in Ireland as
captain (1582 and 1596–97), served in the Low
Countries in defense of the Dutch against the
Spanish (1585–87), and trained militia against
the threatened invasion of England by the
Spanish Armada in 1588. He was knighted about
1596–97, was justice of the peace for Cambridge,
and was pensioned by Queen Elizabeth in 1601.
In 1557 North translated, under the title The
Diall of Princes, a French version of Antonio de
Guevara’s Reloj de príncipes o libro aureo del
emperador Marco Aurelio (1529; “The Princes’
Clock, or The Golden Book of Emperor Marcus
Aurelius”). Although North retained Guevara’s
mannered style, he was also capable of quite a
different kind of work. His translation of Asian
beast fables from the Italian, The Morall
Philosophie of Doni (1570), for example, was a
rapid and colloquial narrative. His The Lives of
the Noble Grecians and Romanes, translated in
1579 from Jacques Amyot’s French version of
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, has been described as
one of the earliest masterpieces of English
prose. Shakespeare borrowed from North’s Lives
for his Roman plays—Antony and Cleopatra, Julius
Caesar, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus—and, in
fact, he put some of North’s prose directly into
blank verse, with only minor changes.
|
|
|
John Foxe
born 1516, Boston, Lincolnshire, Eng.
died April 18, 1587, Cripplegate, London
English Puritan preacher and author of The
Book of Martyrs, a graphic and polemic account
of those who suffered for the cause of
Protestantism. Widely read, often the most
valued book beside the Bible in the households
of English Puritans, it helped shape popular
opinion about Roman Catholicism for at least a
century. The feeling of the English populace
against Spain, important in the politics of the
age, was fanned by the book’s description of the
Inquisition. It dealt chiefly, however, with the
martyrdom of English Protestants from the 14th
century through the reign of Queen Mary I in
Foxe’s own time.
After studying at the University of Oxford and
holding a fellowship for seven years, Foxe fell
under suspicion of harbouring Protestant views
more extreme than the authorities of his college
would allow. He resigned and in 1547 moved to
London, where he became tutor to the
grandchildren of the duke of Norfolk. He was
ordained a deacon of the Church of England. Foxe
worked for the Reformation, writing several
tracts. He also began his account of martyrs but
had carried it no further than 1500 when the
accession of the Roman Catholic queen Mary I in
1553 forced him to flee overseas. In Strasbourg,
France, he published his partly completed
martyrology in Latin as Commentarii rerum in
ecclesia gestarum (1554; “Commentaries on
Affairs Within the Church”). He then went to
Frankfurt, where he lent a moderating support to
the Calvinistic party of John Knox, and thence
to Basel, Switz., where he wrote a burning
appeal to the English nobility to restrain the
queen from persecuting Protestants: Ad inclytos
ac praepotentes Angliae proceres (“To the
Renowned and Powerful Nobles of England,” 1557).
With the aid of manuscripts sent to him from
England, he carried his account of the martyrs
up to 1556 and had it printed in 1559, the year
following the accession to the throne of the
Protestant queen, Elizabeth I.
Foxe returned to London and devoted himself
to the completion of his great work. Perusing
official registers and using the memories of
eyewitnesses, he enlarged his story. His English
translation was printed in March 1563 under the
title Actes and Monuments of these Latter and
Perillous Dayes. It immediately acquired the
popular name The Book of Martyrs. In 1570 he
produced his greatly improved second edition.
This was the crown of his achievement; he made
few changes in his third (1576) and fourth
(1583) editions.
Foxe was ordained an Anglican priest in 1560,
but having Puritan scruples he refused all
offices, obtaining two church stipends that
required no duties. He often preached, however,
and a sermon delivered at Paul’s Cross (A
Sermon, Of Christ Crucified [1570]) had a wide
sale. In the plague of 1563 he ministered to the
victims and wrote a moving tract of consolation.
When Anabaptists in 1575 and Jesuits in 1581
were condemned to death, Foxe wrote vehement
letters to Queen Elizabeth and her councilors,
begging reprieves.
Foxe’s monument is his book. It has been
criticized as prolix, carelessly edited,
one-sided, sometimes credulous, but it is
factually detailed and preserves much firsthand
material on the English Reformation unobtainable
elsewhere.
|
|
|
Miles Coverdale
born 1488?, York, Yorkshire [now in North
Yorkshire], Eng.
died Jan. 20, 1569, London
bishop of Exeter, Eng., who translated (rather
freely; he was inexpert in Latin and Greek) the
first printed English Bible.
Ordained a priest (1514) at Norwich, Coverdale
became an Augustinian friar at Cambridge, where,
influenced by his prior, Robert Barnes, he
absorbed Lutheran opinions and later busied
himself in biblical studies. In 1528, as a
secular priest in Essex, he began preaching
against images and the mass. In 1529 he helped
William Tyndale translate the Pentateuch in
Hamburg and then apparently settled in Antwerp,
where he translated the Bible. He later returned
to England and took up the Reform cause,
translating tracts and editing the Great Bible
(1539). In 1540 Henry VIII’s religious policies
forced him to flee, and he settled in
Strasbourg. After Henry’s death he returned to
England, supported the new Protestant religious
line, and was made bishop of Exeter (1551).
Under the Roman Catholic Mary, Coverdale lost
his bishopric and was spared burning by
intercession from Denmark, where he then briefly
went. During 1555–57 he was in Bergzabern near
Strasbourg and thereafter until 1559 was in
Switzerland. In 1559 he returned to England and
helped consecrate Queen Elizabeth’s archbishop,
Matthew Parker. Yet his Puritanism, strengthened
by stays abroad, prevented him from resuming his
bishopric of Exeter. He declined all preferments
save a brief one (1564–66) at St. Magnus, Old
London Bridge, but he often preached sermons
that were highly esteemed.
|
|
|
Edward Hall
born c. 1498, London, Eng.
died April 1547, Eng.
English historian whose chronicle was one of the
chief sources of William Shakespeare’s history
plays.
Educated at Eton and at King’s College,
Cambridge, Hall became common sergeant of London
in 1533 and undersheriff in 1535. He was also a
member of Parliament for Wenlock (1529) and
Bridgnorth (1542) in Shropshire. The value of
Hall’s great work, of which the full title is
The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate
Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (1548; 2nd ed.,
1550), is very considerable for the contemporary
reign of Henry VIII, and its literary quality is
higher than that of most chronicles of the time.
|
|
|
Raphael Holinshed
died c. 1580
English chronicler, remembered chiefly because
his Chronicles enjoyed great popularity and
became a quarry for many Elizabethan dramatists,
especially Shakespeare, who found, in the second
edition, material for Macbeth, King Lear,
Cymbeline, and many of his historical plays.
Holinshed probably belonged to a Cheshire
family. From roughly 1560 he lived in London,
where he was employed as a translator by
Reginald Wolfe, who was preparing a universal
history. After Wolfe’s death in 1573 the scope
of the work was abridged, and it appeared, with
many illustrations, as the Chronicles of
England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 2 vol. (dated
1577).
The Chronicles was compiled largely
uncritically from many sources of varying
degrees of trustworthiness. The texts of the
first and second (1587) editions were expurgated
by order of the Privy Council, and the excisions
from the second edition were published
separately in 1723. An edition of the complete,
unexpurgated text of 1587, edited by Henry Ellis
and titled Holinshed’s Chronicles of England,
Scotland, and Ireland, was published in six
volumes (1807–08, reissued 1976). Several
selections have also appeared, including
Holinshed’s Chronicle as Used in Shakespeare’s
Plays, edited by Allardyce and Josephine Nicoll
(1927); Shakespeare’s Holinshed, compiled and
edited by Richard Hosley (1968); and The
Peaceable and Prosperous Regiment of Blessed
Queene Elisabeth (2005).
|
|
|
Nicholas Grimald
born 1519/20, Huntingdonshire, Eng.
died c. 1559
English scholar and poet, best known as a
contributor to Songes and Sonettes (1557), known
as Tottel’s Miscellany, an anthology of
contemporary poetry he may have edited.
Grimald was educated at Cambridge and Oxford
universities. He graduated with an M.A. from
Oxford (1543) and was appointed to a lectureship
in theology at Christ Church College, Oxford, in
1547. He was licensed as a preacher in 1551–52
and named chaplain to Nicholas Ridley, bishop of
London. After the accession of the Catholic
queen Mary I in 1553, Ridley was imprisoned,
removed from his bishopric, and in 1554
executed. In 1555 Grimald was also imprisoned
but was released, presumably because he
recanted. In 1558 he is said to have returned to
the Protestant belief.
The first edition of Tottel’s Miscellany,
published in June 1557, contained 40 poems by
Grimald, including two early examples of English
blank verse. Only 10 of his poems appeared in
the second edition (published two months later)
and in later editions, perhaps because of his
religious inconstancy. Grimald also wrote two
plays in Latin: a tragicomedy, Christus
Redivivus (1543), produced at Oxford, and a
tragedy about John the Baptist, Archipropheta
(1548), produced at Cambridge. His plays and his
surviving poems, edited by L.R. Merrill, were
published in 1925.
|
|
|
George Turberville
Woodcut of a Falconer, from George
Turberville´s
The Booke of Faulconrie or Hauking and the Noble
Arte of Venerie
(also called the Book of Hunting) (1575)
George Turberville, or Turbervile (1540? -
before 1597) was an English poet, second son of
Nicholas Turberville of Whitchurch, Dorset, who
belonged to an old Dorsetshire family, the
D'Urbervilles of Thomas Hardy's novel, Tess of
the d'Urbervilles.
Turberville became a scholar of Winchester
College in 1554, and in 1561 was made a fellow
of New College, Oxford. In 1562 he began to
study law in London, and gained a reputation,
according to Anthony à Wood, as a poet and man
of affairs. He accompanied Thomas Randolph on a
special mission to Moscow to the court of Ivan
the Terrible in 1568. Of his Poems describing
the Places and Manners of the Country and People
of Russia mentioned by Wood, only three metrical
letters describing his adventures survive, and
these were reprinted in Hakluyt's Voyages
(1589).
His Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets
appeared "newly corrected with additions" in
1567. In the same year he published translations
of the Heroycall Epistles of Ovid, and of the
Eglogs of Mantuan (Gianbattista Spagnuoli, also
known as Mantuanus), and in 1568 A Plaine Path
to Perfect Vertue from Dominicus Mancinus. The
Book of Falconry or Hawking and the Noble Art of
Venerie (printed together in 1575) may both be
assigned to Turberville. The second of these is
a translation from the French of La Venerie de
Jaques du Fouilloux (1561). The title page of
his Tragical Tales (1587), which are
translations from Boccaccio and Bandello, says
that the book was written at the time of the
author's troubles. What these were is unknown,
but Wood says he was living and in high esteem
in 1594.
|
|
|
|
|
George
Gascoigne, The Noble Art of Venerie or
Hunting (1575)
Used by permission of The Henry E. Huntington
Library and Art Gallery.
|
|
George Gascoigne
1."Tam Marti quam Mercurio": self-portrait
from the frontispiece of Gascoigne’s
The Steele Glas and Complaynte of Phylomene
2.George Gascoigne, The Tale of Hemetes the
Heremyte (1576)
Used by permission of the British Library.
born c. 1539, Cardington, Bedfordshire, Eng.
died Oct. 7, 1577, Barnack, near Stamford,
Lincolnshire
English poet and a major literary innovator.
Gascoigne attended the University of Cambridge,
studied law at Gray’s Inn in 1555, and
thereafter pursued careers as a politician,
country gentleman, courtier, soldier of fortune,
and man of letters, all with moderate
distinction. He was a member of Parliament
(1557–59). Because of his extravagance and
debts, he gained a reputation for disorderly
living. He served with English troops in the Low
Countries, ending his military career as a
repatriated prisoner of war. In 1575 he helped
to arrange the celebrated entertainments
provided for Queen Elizabeth I at Kenilworth and
Woodstock and in 1576 went to Holland as an
agent in the royal service. Among his friends
were many leading poets, notably George
Whetstone, George Turberville, and Edmund
Spenser.
Gascoigne was a skilled literary craftsman,
memorable for versatility and vividness of
expression and for his treatment of events based
on his own experience. His chief importance,
however, is as a pioneer of the English
Renaissance who had a remarkable aptitude for
domesticating foreign literary genres. He
foreshadowed the English sonnet sequences with
groups of linked sonnets in his first published
work, A Hundreth sundrie Flowres (1573), a
collection of verse and prose. In The Posies of
George Gascoigne (1575), an authorized revision
of the earlier work, which had been published
anonymously, he included also “Certayne notes of
Instruction,” the first treatise on prosody in
English. In The Steele Glas (1576), one of the
earliest formal satires in English, he wrote the
first original nondramatic English blank verse.
In two amatory poems, the autobiographical “Dan
Bartholomew of Bathe” (published in A Hundreth
sundrie Flowres) and The Complainte of Phylomene
(1576), Gascoigne developed Ovidian verse
narrative, the form used by William Shakespeare
in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
“The Adventures of Master F.J.,” published in
A Hundreth sundrie Flowres, was the first
original prose narrative of the English
Renaissance. Another prose work, The Spoyle of
Antwerpe (1576), is an early example of war
journalism, characterized by objective and
graphic reporting.
Gascoigne’s Jocasta (performed in 1566)
constituted the first Greek tragedy to be
presented on the English stage. Translated into
blank verse, with the collaboration of Francis
Kinwelmersh, from Lodovico Dolce’s Giocasta, the
work derives ultimately from Euripides’
Phoenissae. In comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes
(1566?), a prose translation and adaptation of
Ludovico Ariosto’s I Suppositi, was the first
prose comedy to be translated from Italian into
English. A dramatically effective work, it
provided the subplot for Shakespeare’s The
Taming of the Shrew. A third play, The Glasse of
Government (1575), is a didactic drama on the
Prodigal Son theme. It rounds out the picture of
Gascoigne as a typical literary man of the early
Renaissance.
|
|
|
Sir John Harington
born 1561
died Nov. 20, 1612, Kelston, Somerset, Eng.
English Elizabethan courtier, translator,
author, and wit who also invented the flush
toilet.
Harington’s father enriched the family by
marrying an illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII;
his second wife was an attendant to the Princess
Elizabeth, who stood as godmother for John.
Educated at Eton, Cambridge, and Lincoln’s Inn,
London, Harington married in 1583. For
translating and circulating among the ladies a
wanton tale from the 16th-century Italian poet
Ariosto, he was banished from court until he
should translate the whole of Ariosto’s epic
poem Orlando Furioso. The translation, published
in 1591, remains one of the finest of the age.
Probably at that time he invented the flush
lavatory (toilet) and installed one for Queen
Elizabeth in her palace at Richmond, Surrey. In
1596, in The Metamorphosis of Ajax (a jakes;
i.e., privy), Harington described his invention
in terms more Rabelaisian than mechanical and
was again banished by Elizabeth. In 1599 he went
on a military expedition to Ireland, winning a
knighthood. His barbed epigrams and wanton
writings gave too much offense, particularly
under James I, to advance him beyond a
reputation as Elizabeth’s “saucy godson.”
|
|
|
Thomas Sackville
born 1536, Buckhurst, Sussex, Eng.
died April 19, 1608, London
English statesman, poet, and dramatist,
remembered largely for his share in two
achievements of significance in the development
of Elizabethan poetry and drama: the collection
A Myrrour for Magistrates (1563) and the tragedy
Gorboduc (1561).
Sackville settled in London in 1553. In 1558
he became a barrister and entered Parliament. He
began an extended visit to Italy c. 1563 and
returned upon his father’s death in 1566. The
next year he was created baron of Buckhurst. He
continued to serve the government, becoming a
member of the Privy Council in 1585; he conveyed
the death sentence to Mary, Queen of Scots, in
1586. He served on several diplomatic missions
to The Hague and became chancellor of the
University of Oxford (1591) and lord high
treasurer (1599; conferred for life in 1603). He
was created a knight and a baron in 1567 and
earl of Dorset in 1604. His house in Kent, Knole,
is one of the great buildings of the age.
Sackville’s “Induction,” the most famous part
of the Myrrour, describes the poet’s visit to
the infernal regions. Written with Thomas
Norton, The Tragedie of Gorboduc is the earliest
known English drama in blank verse.
|
|
|
Thomas Churchyard
born c. 1520, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Eng.
died 1604, London
English writer who won brief fame through his
occasional verse, pamphlets on wartime
experiences, pageants for Queen Elizabeth I, and
historical and antiquarian works—all reflecting
aspects of a crowded career. His works have
never been completely printed and are of only
intermittent quality. Churchyard’s earliest work
was A Myrrour for Man (about 1552), reflections
on the estate of man. His most important poem,
The Legend of Shore’s Wife, was
printed in the 1563 edition of A Mirror for
Magistrates, a collection of verse laments by
several authors. He is also thought to have
authored lyrics in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557).
After serving in the household of Henry Howard,
Earl of Surrey, Churchyard became a mercenary,
for 30 years fighting in almost every campaign
in Scotland, Ireland, the Low Countries, and
France under various banners. Later, at court,
he devised pageants for Queen Elizabeth’s
progresses to Bristol (1574) and Norwich (1578),
but a passage in his Generall rehearsall of
warres (1579) offended Elizabeth, and Churchyard
fled to Scotland. He was restored to favour
about 1584 and received a small pension in 1593.
|
Sidney and
Spenser
With the work of
Sir Philip Sidney and
Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors suddenly began to look old-fashioned.
Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance “universal man”: a
courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of
Poesie includes the first considered account of the state of
English letters. Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the
ground of its unique power to teach, but his real emphasis
is on its delight, its ability to depict the world not as it
is but as it ought to be. This quality of “forcibleness or
energia” he himself demonstrated in his sonnet sequence of
unrequited desire, Astrophel and Stella (written 1582,
published 1591). His Arcadia, in its first version (written
c. 1577–80), is a pastoral romance in which courtiers
disguised as Amazons and shepherds make love and sing
delicate experimental verses. The revised version (written
c. 1580–84, published 1590; the last three books of the
first version were added in 1593), vastly expanded but
abandoned in mid-sentence, added sprawling plots of heroism
in love and war, philosophical and political discourses, and
set pieces of aristocratic etiquette. Sidney was a dazzling
and assured innovator whose pioneering of new forms and
stylistic melody was seminal for his generation. His public
fame was as an aristocratic champion of an aggressively
Protestant foreign policy, but Elizabeth had no time for
idealistic warmongering, and the unresolved conflicts in his
poetry—desire against restraint, heroism against patience,
rebellion against submission—mirror his own discomfort with
his situation as an unsuccessful courtier.
Protestantism also loomed large in
Spenser’s life. He
enjoyed the patronage of the earl of Leicester, who sought
to advance militant Protestantism at court, and his poetic
manifesto, The Shepherds Calendar (1579), covertly praised
Archbishop Edmund Grindal, who had been suspended by
Elizabeth for his Puritan sympathies. Spenser’s masterpiece,
The Faerie Queene (1590–96), is an epic of Protestant
nationalism in which the villains are infidels or papists,
the hero is King Arthur, and the central value is married
chastity.
Spenser was one of the humanistically trained breed of
public servants, and the Calendar, an expertly crafted
collection of pastoral eclogues, both advertised his talents
and announced his epic ambitions. The exquisite lyric gift
that it reveals was voiced again in the marriage poems
Epithalamion (1595) and Prothalamion (1596). With
The Faerie Queene he achieved the central poem of the Elizabethan
period. Its form fuses the medieval allegory with the
Italian romantic epic; its purpose was “to fashion a
gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle
discipline.” The plan was for 12 books (6 were completed),
focusing on 12 virtues exemplified in the quests of 12
knights from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a
symbol for Elizabeth herself. Arthur, in quest of Gloriana’s
love, would appear in each book and come to exemplify
Magnificence, the complete man. Spenser took the decorative
chivalry of the Elizabethan court festivals and reworked it
through a constantly shifting veil of allegory, so that the
knights’ adventures and loves build into a complex,
multileveled portrayal of the moral life. The verse, a
spacious and slow-moving nine-lined stanza, and archaic
language frequently rise to an unrivaled sensuousness.
|
Illustration of Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene
by Walter Crane
|
The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the
queen, and politically it echoed the hopes of the Leicester
circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy.
Spenser’s increasing disillusion with the court and with the
active life, a disillusion noticeable in the poem’s later
books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again
(1591), voiced the fading of these expectations in the last
decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that
remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in
the monarchy. In the Mutability Cantos, melancholy fragments
of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in
1609),
Spenser turned away from the public world altogether,
toward the ambiguous consolations of eternity.
The lessons taught by
Sidney and
Spenser in the
cultivation of melodic smoothness and graceful refinement
appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring
of lyrics and sonnets. These are among the most engaging
achievements of the age, though the outpouring was itself
partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to
expect office or preferment but faced with courtly parsimony
channeled its energies in new directions in search of
patronage. For Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love
lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing one’s
relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an
appeal.
Sir Philip Sidney
"Poems"
born November 30, 1554, Penshurst, Kent,
England
died October 17, 1586, Arnhem, Netherlands
Elizabethan courtier, statesman, soldier, poet,
and patron of scholars and poets, considered the
ideal gentleman of his day. After Shakespeare’s
sonnets, Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella is
considered the finest Elizabethan sonnet cycle.
His The Defence of Poesie introduced the
critical ideas of Renaissance theorists to
England.
Philip Sidney was the eldest son of Sir Henry
Sidney and his wife, Lady Mary Dudley, daughter
of the duke of Northumberland, and godson of
King Philip II of Spain. After Elizabeth I
succeeded to the throne, his father was
appointed lord president of Wales (and later
served three times as lord deputy of Ireland),
while his uncle, Robert Dudley, was created earl
of Leicester and became the queen’s most trusted
adviser. In keeping with his family background,
the young Sidney was intended for a career as a
statesman and soldier. At age 10 he entered
Shrewsbury School, where his classmate was Fulke
Greville (later a court official under
Elizabeth), who became his lifelong friend and
was his early biographer. In February 1568 he
began a three-year period of studies at Christ
Church, Oxford, afterward traveling in Europe
between May 1572 and June 1575, perfecting his
knowledge of Latin, French, and Italian. He also
gained firsthand knowledge of European politics
and became acquainted with many of Europe’s
leading statesmen.
His first court appointment came in the
spring of 1576, when he succeeded his father as
cupbearer to the queen, a ceremonial position.
Then in February 1577, when he was only 22, he
was sent as ambassador to the German emperor
Rudolf II and the elector palatine Louis VI,
carrying Queen Elizabeth’s condolences on the
deaths of their fathers. But along with this
formal task, he also had secret instructions to
sound out the German princes on their attitude
toward the formation of a Protestant league—the
chief political aim being to protect England by
associating it with other Protestant states in
Europe that would counterbalance the threatening
power of Roman Catholic Spain. Sidney apparently
brought back enthusiastic reports on the
possibilities of forming such a league, but the
cautious queen sent other emissaries to check on
his reports, and they returned with
less-optimistic accounts of the German princes’
reliability as allies. He did not receive
another major official appointment until eight
years later.
He nevertheless continued to busy himself in
the politics and diplomacy of his country. In
1579 he wrote privately to the queen, advising
her against a proposal that she enter into a
marriage with the duke of Anjou, the Roman
Catholic heir to the French throne. Sidney,
moreover, was a member of Parliament for Kent in
1581 and 1584–85. He corresponded with foreign
statesmen and entertained important
visitors—including the French Protestant envoy
Philippe de Mornay in 1577, the German Calvinist
prince Casimir in 1578, the Portuguese pretender
Dom António in 1581, and, later, a number of
Scottish lords. Sidney was among the few
Englishmen of his time with any interest in the
newly discovered Americas, and he supported
maritime explorations by the navigator Sir
Martin Frobisher. In 1582 Richard Hakluyt, who
published accounts of English explorers’
enterprises, dedicated his Divers Voyages
Touching the Discoverie of America to him.
Sidney later became interested in the project to
establish the American colony of Virginia, sent
out by Sir Walter Raleigh, and he intended to
set out himself in an expedition with Sir
Francis Drake against the Spaniards. He had
wide-ranging intellectual and artistic
interests, discussed art with the painter
Nicholas Hilliard and chemistry with the
scientist John Dee, and was a great patron of
scholars and men of letters. More than 40 works
by English and European authors were dedicated
to him—works of divinity, ancient and modern
history, geography, military affairs, law,
logic, medicine, and poetry—indicating the
breadth of his interests. Among the many poets
and prose writers who sought his patronage were
Edmund Spenser, Abraham Fraunce, and Thomas
Lodge.
Sidney was an excellent horseman and became
renowned for his participation in
tournaments—elaborate entertainments, half
athletic contest and half symbolic spectacle,
that were a chief amusement of the court. He
hankered after a life of heroic action, but his
official activities were largely
ceremonial—attending on the queen at court and
accompanying her on her progresses about the
country. In January 1583 he was knighted, not
because of any outstanding accomplishment but in
order to give him the qualifications needed to
stand in for his friend Prince Casimir, who was
to receive the honour of admittance to the Order
of the Garter but was unable to attend the
ceremony. In September he married Frances,
daughter of Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of
state, Sir Francis Walsingham. They had one
daughter, Elizabeth.
Because the queen would not give him an
important post, he had turned to literature as
an outlet for his energies. In 1578 he composed
a pastoral playlet, The Lady of May, for the
queen. By 1580 he had completed a version of his
heroic prose romance, the Arcadia. It is typical
of his gentlemanly air of assumed nonchalance
that he should call it “a trifle, and that
triflingly handled,” whereas it is in fact an
intricately plotted narrative of 180,000 words.
Early in 1581 his aunt, the countess of
Huntington, had brought to court her ward,
Penelope Devereux, who later that year married
the young Lord Rich. Whether or not Sidney
really did fall in love with her, during the
summer of 1582 he composed a sonnet sequence,
Astrophel and Stella, that recounts a courtier’s
passion in delicately fictionalized terms: its
first stirrings, his struggles against it, and
his final abandonment of his suit to give
himself instead to the “great cause” of public
service. These sonnets, witty and impassioned,
brought Elizabethan poetry at once of age. About
the same time, he wrote The Defence of Poesie,
an urbane and eloquent plea for the social value
of imaginative fiction, which remains the finest
work of Elizabethan literary criticism. In 1584
he began a radical revision of his Arcadia,
transforming its linear dramatic plot into a
many-stranded, interlaced narrative. He left it
half finished, but it remains the most important
work of prose fiction in English of the 16th
century. He also composed other poems and later
began a paraphrase of the Psalms. He wrote for
his own amusement and for that of his close
friends; true to the gentlemanly code of
avoiding commercialism, he did not allow his
writings to be published in his lifetime.
The incomplete revised version of his Arcadia
was not printed until 1590; in 1593 another
edition completed the story by adding the last
three books of his original version (the
complete text of the original version remained
in manuscript until 1926). His Astrophel and
Stella was printed in 1591 in a corrupt text,
his Defence of Poesie in 1595, and a collected
edition of his works in 1598, reprinted in 1599
and nine times during the 17th century.
Although in July 1585 he finally received his
eagerly awaited public appointment, his writings
were to be his most lasting accomplishment. He
was appointed, with his uncle, the earl of
Warwick, as joint master of the ordnance, an
office that administered the military supplies
of the kingdom. In November the queen was
finally persuaded to assist the struggle of the
Dutch against their Spanish masters, sending
them a force led by the earl of Leicester.
Sidney was made governor of the town of Flushing
(Dutch: Vlissingen) and was given command of a
company of cavalry. But the following 11 months
were spent in ineffective campaigns against the
Spaniards, while Sidney was hard put to maintain
the morale of his poorly paid troops. He wrote
to his father-in-law that, if the queen did not
pay her soldiers, she would lose her garrisons
but that, for himself, the love of the cause
would never make him weary of his resolution,
because he thought “a wise and constant man
ought never to grieve while he doth play his own
part truly, though others be out.”
On September 22, 1586, he volunteered to
serve in an action to prevent the Spaniards from
sending supplies into the town of Zutphen. The
supply train was heavily guarded, and the
English were outnumbered; but Sidney charged
three times through the enemy lines, and, even
though his thigh was shattered by a bullet, he
rode his horse from the field. He was carried to
Arnhem, where his wound became infected, and he
prepared himself religiously for death. In his
last hours he confessed:
There came to my remembrance a vanity wherein
I had taken delight, whereof I had not rid
myself. It was the Lady Rich. But I rid myself
of it, and presently my joy and comfort
returned.
He was buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral in
London on February 16, 1587, with an elaborate
funeral of a type usually reserved for great
noblemen. The Universities of Oxford and
Cambridge and scholars throughout Europe issued
memorial volumes in his honour, while almost
every English poet composed verses in his
praise. He won this adulation even though he had
accomplished no action of consequence; it would
be possible to write a history of Elizabethan
political and military affairs without so much
as mentioning his name. It is not what he did
but what he was that made him so widely admired:
the embodiment of the Elizabethan ideal of
gentlemanly virtue.
William Andrew Ringler, Jr.
|
|
Edmund Spenser
"The
Faerie Queene"
(BOOK
I,
BOOK II,
BOOK III,
BOOK IV,
BOOK V,
BOOK
VI)
Illustrations by Walter Crane
born 1552/53, London, England
died January 13, 1599, London
English poet whose long allegorical poem The
Faerie Queene is one of the greatest in the
English language. It was written in what came to
be called the Spenserian stanza.
Youth and education
Little is certainly known about Spenser. He
was related to a noble Midlands family of
Spencer, whose fortunes had been made through
sheep raising. His own immediate family was not
wealthy. He was entered as a “poor boy” in the
Merchant Taylors’ grammar school, where he would
have studied mainly Latin, with some Hebrew,
Greek, and music.
In 1569, when Spenser was about 16 years old,
his English versions of poems by the
16th-century French poet Joachim du Bellay and
his translation of a French version of a poem by
the Italian poet Petrarch appeared at the
beginning of an anti-Catholic prose tract, A
Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings; they were no
doubt commissioned by its chief author, the
wealthy Flemish expatriate Jan Baptista van der
Noot. (Some of these poems Spenser later revised
for his Complaints volume.)
From May 1569 Spenser was a student in
Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College) of the
University of Cambridge, where, along with
perhaps a quarter of the students, he was
classed as a sizar—a student who, out of
financial necessity, performed various menial or
semi-menial duties. He received a Bachelor of
Arts degree in 1573. Because of an epidemic,
Spenser left Cambridge in 1574, but he received
the Master of Arts degree in 1576.
His best-known friend at Cambridge was the
slightly older Gabriel Harvey, a fellow of
Pembroke, who was learned, witty, and
enthusiastic for ancient and modern literature
but also pedantic, devious, and ambitious. There
is no reason to believe that Spenser shared the
most distasteful of these qualities, but, in the
atmosphere of social mobility and among the new
aristocracy of Tudor England, it is not
surprising that he hoped for preferment to
higher position.
Spenser’s period at the University of
Cambridge was undoubtedly important for the
acquisition of his wide knowledge not only of
the Latin and some of the Greek classics but
also of the Italian, French, and English
literature of his own and earlier times. His
knowledge of the traditional forms and themes of
lyrical and narrative poetry provided
foundations for him to build his own highly
original compositions. Without the Roman epic
poet Virgil’s Aeneid, the 15th-century Italian
Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and, later,
Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581),
Spenser could not have written his heroic, or
epic, poem The Faerie Queene. Without Virgil’s
Bucolics and the later tradition of pastoral
poetry in Italy and France, Spenser could not
have written The Shepheardes Calender. And
without the Latin, Italian, and French examples
of the highly traditional marriage ode and the
sonnet and canzone forms of Petrarch and
succeeding sonneteers, Spenser could not have
written his greatest lyric, Epithalamion, and
its accompanying sonnets, Amoretti. The patterns
of meaning in Spenser’s poetry are frequently
woven out of the traditional
interpretations—developed through classical
times and his own—of pagan myth, divinities, and
philosophies and out of an equally strong
experience of the faith and doctrines of
Christianity; these patterns he further enriched
by the use of medieval and contemporary story,
legend, and folklore.
Spenser’s religious training was a most
important part of his education. He could not
have avoided some involvement in the bitter
struggles that took place in his university over
the path the new Church of England was to tread
between Roman Catholicism and extreme
Puritanism, and his own poetry repeatedly
engages with the opposition between
Protestantism and Catholicism and the need to
protect the national and moral purity of the
Elizabethan church. Contrary to a former view,
there is little reason to believe that he
inclined toward the Puritanical side. His first
known appointment (after a blank of several
years, when he may have been in the north of
England) was in 1578 as secretary to Bishop John
Young of Rochester, former master of Spenser’s
college at Cambridge. Spenser’s first important
publication, The Shepheardes Calender (1579 or
1580), is more concerned with the bishops and
affairs of the English church than is any of his
later work.
Early works
The Shepheardes Calender can be called the
first work of the English literary Renaissance.
Following the example of Virgil and of many
later poets, Spenser was beginning his career
with a series of eclogues (literally
“selections,” usually short poems in the form of
pastoral dialogues), in which various
characters, in the guise of innocent and simple
shepherds, converse about life and love in a
variety of elegantly managed verse forms,
formulating weighty—often satirical—opinions on
questions of the day. The paradoxical
combination in pastoral poetry of the simple,
isolated life of shepherds with the
sophisticated social ambitions of the figures
symbolized or discussed by these shepherds (and
of their probable readership) has been of some
interest in literary criticism.
The Calender consists of 12 eclogues, one
named after each month of the year. One of the
shepherds, Colin Clout, who excels in poetry but
is ruined by his hopeless love for one Rosalind,
is Spenser himself. The eclogue “Aprill” is in
praise of the shepherdess Elisa, really the
queen (Elizabeth I) herself. “October” examines
the various kinds of verse composition and
suggests how discouraging it is for a modern
poet to try for success in any of them. Most of
the eclogues, however, concern good or bad
shepherds—that is to say, pastors—of Christian
congregations. The Calender was well received in
its day, and it is still a revelation of what
could be done poetically in English after a long
period of much mediocrity and provinciality. The
archaic quality of its language, sometimes
deplored, was partly motivated by a desire to
continue older English poetic traditions, such
as that of Geoffrey Chaucer. Archaic vocabulary
is not so marked a feature of Spenser’s later
work.
The years 1578–80 probably produced more
changes in Spenser’s life than did any other
corresponding period. He appears by 1580 to have
been serving the fascinating, highly placed, and
unscrupulous Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester
and to have become a member of the literary
circle led by Sir Philip Sidney, Leicester’s
nephew, to whom the Calender was dedicated and
who praised it in his important critical work
The Defence of Poesie (1595). Spenser remained
permanently devoted to this brilliant writer and
good nobleman, embodied him variously in his own
poetry, and mourned his early death in an elegy.
By 1580 Spenser had also started work on The
Faerie Queene, and in the previous year he had
apparently married one Machabyas Chylde.
Interesting sidelights on his personal
character, of which next to nothing is known,
are given in a small collection of letters
between Spenser and Gabriel Harvey that was
printed in 1580. The ironies in that exchange of
letters are so intricate, however, as to make it
difficult to draw many conclusions from them
about Spenser, except that he was young,
ambitious, accomplished, and sincerely
interested in the theory and practice of poetry.
In 1580 Spenser was made secretary to the new
lord deputy of Ireland, Arthur Lord Grey, who
was a friend of the Sidney family.
Career in Ireland
Sixteenth-century Ireland and the Irish were
looked on by the English as a colony, although
the supposed threat of an invasion by Spain and
the conflict between an imposed English church
and the Roman Catholicism of the Irish were
further complicating factors. Irish chieftains
and the Anglo-Irish nobility encouraged native
resistance to newly arrived English officials
and landowners. As Grey’s secretary, Spenser
accompanied the lord deputy on risky military
campaigns as well as on more routine journeys.
He may have witnessed the Smerwick massacre
(1580), and his poetry is haunted by nightmare
characters who embody a wild lawlessness. The
conflict between Grey’s direct, drastic
governmental measures and the queen’s
characteristic procrastinating and temporizing
style soon led to Grey’s frustration and recall.
But Spenser, like many others, admired and
defended Grey’s methods. Spenser’s A View of the
Present State of Ireland (written 1595–96,
published 1633), a later tract, argues lucidly
for a typically 16th-century theory of rule:
firm measures, ruthlessly applied, with
gentleness only for completely submissive
subject populations.
For four or five years from roughly 1584,
Spenser carried out the duties of a second
important official position in Ireland,
deputizing for his friend Lodowick Bryskett as
clerk of the lords president (governors) of
Munster, the southernmost Irish province. The
fruits of his service in Ireland are plain. He
was given a sinecure post and other favours,
including the right to dispose of certain
forfeited parcels of land (he no doubt indulged
in profitable land speculation). For a time he
leased the small property of New Abbey, County
Kildare, and on this basis was first designated
“gentleman.” Finally, he obtained a much larger
estate in Munster. One of the chief
preoccupations of the presidents of this
province, scarred as it was by war and
starvation, was to repopulate it. To this end,
large “plantations” were awarded to English
“undertakers,” who undertook to make them
self-sustaining by occupying them with
Englishmen of various trades. In 1588 or 1589
Spenser took over the 3,000-acre (1,200-hectare)
plantation of Kilcolman, about 25 miles (40 km)
to the north and a little to the west of Cork.
No doubt he took there his son and daughter and
his wife, if she was still alive (she is known
to have died by 1594, when Spenser married
Elizabeth Boyle, a "kinswoman" of the earl of
Cork, one of Ireland’s wealthiest men). By
acquiring this estate, Spenser made his choice
for the future: to rise into the privileged
class of what was, to all intents, a colonial
land of opportunity rather than to seek power
and position on the more crowded ground of the
homeland, where he had made his poetic
reputation. In his new situation he, like other
undertakers, had much conflict with the local
Anglo-Irish aristocracy and had limited success
in filling the plantations with English
families. Nevertheless, it was under these
conditions that Spenser brought his greatest
poetry to completion.
The Faerie Queene and last years
In its present form, The Faerie Queene
consists of six books and a fragment (known as
the “Mutabilitie Cantos”). According to
Spenser’s introductory letter in the first
edition (1590) of his great poem, it was to
contain 12 books, each telling the adventure of
one of Gloriana’s knights. Like other poets,
Spenser must have modified his general plan many
times, yet this letter, inconsistent though it
is with various plot details in the books that
are extant, is probably a faithful mirror of his
thinking at one stage. The stories actually
published were those of Holiness (the Red Cross
Knight), Temperance (Sir Guyon), Chastity (Britomart,
a female knight), Friendship (ostensibly
concerning Triamond and Cambello, although these
play a small part), Justice (Artegall), and
Courtesy (Calidore). As a setting Spenser
invented the land of Faerie and its queen,
Gloriana. To express himself he invented a
nine-line stanza, the first eight of five
stresses and the last of six, whose rhyme
pattern is ababbcbcc.
What is most characteristic of Spenser in The
Faerie Queene is his serious view of the
capacity of the romance form to act as a
paradigm of human experience: the moral life as
quest, pilgrimage, aspiration; as eternal war
with an enemy, still to be known; and as
encounter, crisis, the moment of illumination—in
short, as ethics, with the added dimensions of
mystery, terror, love, and victory and with all
the generous virtues exalted. Modern readers’
impatience with the obscure allusions in the
poem, with its political and ecclesiastical
topicalities, is a failure to share the great
conflict of Spenser’s time between Protestant
England and Roman Catholic Spain; to Spenser,
the war between good and evil was here and now.
In The Faerie Queene Spenser proves himself a
master: picture, music, metre, story—all
elements are at one with the deeper significance
of his poem, providing a moral heraldry of
colours, emblems, legends, folklore, and
mythical allusion, all prompting deep,
instinctive responses.
The poem was published with the help of Sir
Walter Raleigh, who owned large lands to the
east of Spenser’s estate. He and the poet came
together at Kilcolman in 1589 and became well
acquainted with one another’s poetry. Spenser
implies that Raleigh persuaded Spenser to
accompany him back to England to present the
completed portion of The Faerie Queene to Queen
Elizabeth herself. The history of this episode
is charmingly evoked in Colin Clouts Come Home
Againe (completed 1595), which is also one of
Spenser’s most effective pastoral embodiments of
a provincial innocent up against the
sophistications of a centre of power, with
subsequent reflections on false, superficial
love and the true love that finally animates a
concordant universe.
Arriving thus in London with the support of
the queen’s favourite, Spenser was well
received—not least by Elizabeth herself. The
first three books of The Faerie Queene were duly
published in 1590, together with a dedication to
her and commendatory sonnets to notables of the
court. Spenser saw the book through the press,
made a hurried visit to Ireland, and returned
speedily to London—presumably in the hope of
preferment. At this time he supervised the
printing of certain other of his poems in a
collection called Complaints (1591), many of
which had probably been written earlier in his
career and were now being published so as to
profit from the great success of his new heroic
poem. It is difficult to believe that the many
titles of poems that have not survived but were
mentioned earlier in his career were not
published in revised form and under other titles
in his known work, for Complaints suggests by
its miscellaneous and uneven character that
Spenser was hastily bringing to the light of day
nearly every last shred that he had to offer;
early translations, an elegy, and the delightful
mock-heroic poem Muiopotmos are contained in it.
Another item, the beast fable Prosopopoia; or,
Mother Hubberd’s Tale, apparently caused the
authorities to withdraw unsold copies of the
volume (perhaps in 1592) because it contained a
covert attack on Lord Burghley, who was one of
the most powerful figures of the court.
Nevertheless, in 1591 Queen Elizabeth gave
Spenser a small pension for life.
Back in Ireland, Spenser pressed on with his
writing, in spite of the burdens of his estate.
In early 1595 he published Amoretti and
Epithalamion, a sonnet sequence and a marriage
ode celebrating his marriage to Elizabeth Boyle
after what appears to have been an impassioned
courtship in 1594. This group of poems is unique
among Renaissance sonnet sequences in that it
celebrates a successful love affair culminating
in marriage. The Epithalamion further idealizes
the marriage by building into its structure the
symbolic numbers 24 (the number of stanzas) and
365 (the total number of long lines), allowing
the poem to allude to the structure of the day
and of the year. The marriage is thus connected
with the encompassing harmonies of the universe,
and the cyclical processes of change and renewal
are expressed in the procreation of the two
mortal lovers. However, matters are less
harmonious in Books IV, V, and VI of The Faerie
Queene, which appeared in 1596 and are
strikingly more ambiguous and ironic than the
first three books. Book V includes much direct
allegory of some of the most problematic
political events of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and
Book VI’s Sir Calidore is a far less confident
and effective fairy knight than his predecessors
were. In the only surviving fragment of a
projected seventh book (published posthumously
in 1609), Spenser represents Elizabeth herself
as subject to Mutability, the inexorable
processes of aging and change.
This burst of publication was the last of his
lifetime. His early death may have been
precipitated by the penetration into Munster of
the Irish uprising of 1598. The undertakers and
other loyalists failed to make headway against
this. Kilcolman was burned, and Spenser,
probably in despair despite the Privy Council’s
having just recommended his appointment to the
important post of sheriff of Cork, carried
official letters about the desperate state of
affairs from the president to London, where he
died. He was buried with ceremony in Westminster
Abbey close by the grave of Geoffrey Chaucer.
Assessment
Spenser was considered in his day to be the
greatest of English poets, who had glorified
England and its language by his long allegorical
poem The Faerie Queene, just as Virgil had
glorified Rome and the Latin tongue by his epic
poem the Aeneid. Spenser had a strong influence
upon his immediate successors, and the sensuous
features of his poetic style, as well as his
nine-line stanza form, were later admired and
imitated by such poets as Lord Byron and Percy
Bysshe Shelley in the Romantic period of the
late 18th and early 19th centuries. He is widely
studied today as one of the chief begetters of
the English literary Renaissance and as a master
who embodied in poetic myth a view of the
virtuous life in a Christian universe.
A. Kent Hieatt
Ed.
|
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at
the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one that is not
still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing
prose fiction with lyric interludes, begun in the Arcadia,
was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably in
the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for
Shakespeare’s
As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]), and in the theatres plays of
every kind were diversified by songs both popular and
courtly. Fine examples are in the plays of
Jonson,
John
Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and
Thomas Dekker (though
all, of course, are outshone by
Shakespeare’s). The most
important influence on lyric poetry, though, was the
outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in
both the native tradition of expressive lute song,
represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and the
complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd
and Thomas Morley. The foremost talent among lyricists,
Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs
(four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their
clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic subtlety. Even the
work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton,
is remarkable for the suggestion of depth and poise in the
slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent
spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously
ordered and laboured artifice, attentive to decorum and
rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public
pieces, intended for singing and governed by a Neoplatonic
aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the
moral sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to
the discipline of reason and virtue. This necessitates a
deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible
situations of pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and
makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an
agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the
miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593), England’s Helicon
(1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602).
Thomas Lodge
born c. 1557, London?, Eng.
died 1625, London
English poet, dramatist, and prose writer
whose innovative versatility typified the
Elizabethan age. He is best remembered for the
prose romance Rosalynde, the source of William
Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
He was the son of Sir Thomas Lodge, who was
lord mayor of London in 1562. The younger Lodge
was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and at
Trinity College, Oxford, and he studied law at
Lincoln’s Inn, London, in 1578. Lodge’s earliest
work was an anonymous pamphlet (c. 1579) in
reply to Stephen Gosson’s attack on stage plays.
His next work, An Alarum Against Usurers (1584),
exposed the ways in which moneylenders lured
young heirs into extravagance and debt. He then
engaged in varied literary activity for a number
of years. His Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), an
Ovidian verse fable, is one of the earliest
English poems to retell a classical story with
imaginative embellishments, and it strongly
influenced Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.
Lodge’s Phillis (1593) contains amorous sonnets
and pastoral eclogues from French and Italian
originals. In A Fig for Momus (1595), he
introduced classical satires and verse epistles
(modeled after those of Juvenal and Horace) into
English literature for the first time. Aside
from Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacie (1590),
which provided the plot for Shakespeare’s
comedy, Lodge’s most important romance was A
Margarite of America (1596), which combines
Senecan motives and Arcadian romance in an
improbable love story between a Peruvian prince
and a daughter of the king of Muscovy. His other
romances are chiefly notable for the fine lyric
poems scattered through them. Lodge continued to
write moralizing pamphlets such as Wits Miserie,
and the Worlds Madnesse (1596), and in 1594 he
published two plays: The Wounds of Civill War
and (with Robert Greene) A Looking Glasse for
London and England.
To escape poverty Lodge took part in
unprofitable freebooting voyages to the Canary
Islands in 1588 and to South America in 1591. In
1597 he became a Roman Catholic, and he
graduated in medicine from the University of
Avignon in 1598. He received another M.D. degree
from Oxford in 1602 and thereafter practiced
medicine in London and in Brussels, where he
took refuge as a recusant following exposure of
the Gunpowder Plot (1605). He was back in
England by 1612, became a distinguished
physician in London, and died there while
fighting the plague in 1625. His later works
include A Treatise of the Plague (1603) and two
major translations: The Works of Lucius Annaeus
Seneca (1614) and The Famous and Memorable Works
of Josephus (1620), both of which went through
many editions.
Much of Lodge’s work before 1600 was
surreptitious translation, but in this regard he
shows a real talent for creative selection and
assimilation from classical, French, and Italian
sources. His reputation remains based chiefly on
his poetry and his romances. Of his pamphlets,
Wits Miserie and the Alarum are memorable for
their cameos of London life, reminiscent of the
writings of Thomas Nashe.
|
|
|
George Peele
born , c. July 25, 1556, London, Eng.
died , c. Nov. 9, 1596
Elizabethan dramatist who experimented in many
forms of theatrical art: pastoral, history,
melodrama, tragedy, folk play, and pageant.
Peele’s father was a London clerk who
contributed to several city pageants. Peele was
educated at Oxford, where he translated into
English a play by Euripides. He later moved to
London, but in 1583 he returned to Oxford to
supervise the performance at Christ Church of
two Latin plays by the noted academic dramatist
William Gager (1555–1622).
In London he became associated with Robert
Greene and others known as the university wits,
who were attempting to make a living as
professional authors, and he experimented with
poetry in various forms. His earliest important
work is The Arraignment of Paris (c. 1581–84), a
mythological extravaganza written for the
Children of the Chapel, a troupe of boy actors,
and performed at court before Queen Elizabeth.
The remainder of his career was devoted to
writing plays for the popular stage, only four
of which survive: a tragedy, The Battle of
Alcazar (c. 1589); a chronicle history, Edward I
(c. 1593); a biblical tragedy, The Love of King
David and Fair Bethsabe (1594); and his most
enduring achievement, the fantastical comic
romance The Old Wives’ Tale (c. 1591–94). He
also wrote commemorative poems and city
pageants.
|
|
|
Thomas Nashe
Polemical woodcut deriding Nashe as
jailbird
born 1567, Lowestoft, Suffolk, Eng.
died c. 1601, Yarmouth, Norfolk?
pamphleteer, poet, dramatist, and author of The
Unfortunate Traveller; or, The Life of Jacke
Wilton (1594), the first picaresque novel in
English.
Nashe was educated at the University of
Cambridge, and about 1588 he went to London,
where he became associated with Robert Greene
and other professional writers. In 1589 he wrote
The Anatomie of Absurditie and the preface to
Greene’s Menaphon. Both works are bold,
opinionated surveys of the contemporary state of
writing; occasionally obscure, they are
euphuistic in style and range freely over a
great variety of topics.
In 1589 and 1590 he evidently became a paid
hack of the episcopacy in the Marprelate
controversy and matched wits with the
unidentified Puritan “Martin.” Almost all the
Anglican replies to Martin have variously been
assigned to Nashe, but only An Almond for a
Parrat (1590) has been convincingly attributed
to him. He wrote the preface to Thomas Newman’s
unauthorized edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s
Astrophel and Stella (1591). Though Nashe penned
an extravagant dedication to Sidney’s sister,
the countess of Pembroke, the book was withdrawn
and reissued in the same year without Nashe’s
foreword.
Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the
Divell (1592), a satire focused on the seven
deadly sins, was Nashe’s first distinctive work.
Using a free and extemporaneous prose style,
full of colloquialisms, newly coined words, and
fantastic idiosyncrasies, Nashe buttonholes the
reader with a story in which a need for
immediate entertainment seems to predominate
over any narrative structure or controlling
objective. Having become involved in his friend
Greene’s feud with the writer Gabriel Harvey,
Nashe satirized Harvey and his brothers in
Pierce and then joined the combat in an exchange
of pamphlets with Harvey, Strange Newes (1592)
and Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596). If
Harvey is to be credited, Nashe was a hack for
the printer John Danter in 1593. The controversy
was terminated in 1599, when the archbishop of
Canterbury ordered that “all Nasshes bookes and
Doctor Harveyes bookes be taken wheresoever they
maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee
ever printed hereafter.”
Apparently Nashe wrote Strange Newes while he
was living at the home of Sir George Carey, who
momentarily relieved his oppressive poverty. In
Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593), Nashe
warned his countrymen during one of the
country’s worst outbreaks of bubonic plague
that, unless they reformed, London would suffer
the fate of Jerusalem. The Terrors of the Night
(1594) is a discursive, sometimes bewildering,
attack on demonology.
Pierce Penilesse excepted, Nashe’s most
successful works were his entertainment Summers
Last Will and Testament (1592, published 1600);
his picaresque novel The Unfortunate Traveller;
or, The Life of Jacke Wilton; Dido, Queen of
Carthage (1594; with Christopher Marlowe); and
Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599). The Unfortunate
Traveller is a brutal and realistic tale of
adventure narrated with speed and economy. The
book describes the travels through Germany and
Italy of its rogue hero, Jacke Wilton, who lives
by his wits and witnesses all sorts of historic
events before he is converted to a better way of
life. Lenten Stuffe, in praise of herrings,
contains a charming description of the town of
Yarmouth, Norfolk, a herring fishery. Nashe
retreated to Yarmouth when he and Ben Jonson
were prosecuted as a result of their satirical
play The Isle of Dogs (1597).
Nashe was the first of the English prose
eccentrics, an extraordinary inventor of verbal
hybrids. The Works were edited by R.B. McKerrow,
5 vol. (1904–10; reprinted and reedited by F.P.
Wilson, 1958).
|
|
|
Thomas Dekker
born c. 1572, London, Eng.
died c. 1632
English dramatist and writer of prose
pamphlets who is particularly known for his
lively depictions of London life.
Few facts of Dekker’s life are certain. He may
have been born into a family of Dutch immigrants
living in London and is first mentioned as a
playwright in 1598. He apparently wrote to
support himself, and he had a hand in at least
42 plays written in the next 30 years. In the
dispute known as “the poets’ war” or “the war of
the theatres,” he was satirized in Ben Jonson’s
Poetaster (produced 1601) as Demetrius Fannius,
“a very simple honest fellow. . . a dresser of
plays.” This precipitated Dekker’s own attack on
Jonson in the play Satiro-mastix (produced
1601). Thirteen more plays survive in which
Dekker collaborated with such figures as Thomas
Middleton, John Webster, Philip Massinger, John
Ford, and William Rowley.
Of the nine surviving plays that are entirely
Dekker’s work, probably the best-known are The
Shoemakers Holiday (1600) and The Honest Whore,
Part 2 (1630). These plays are typical of his
work in their use of the moralistic tone of
traditional drama, in the rush of their prose,
in their boisterousness, and in their mixture of
realistic detail with a romanticized plot.
Dekker’s ear for colloquial speech served him
well in his vivid portrayals of daily life in
London, and his work appealed strongly to a
citizen audience eager for plays on
middle-class, patriotic, and Protestant themes.
He exhibited a similar vigour in such prose
pamphlets as The Wonderfull Yeare (1603), about
the plague; The Belman of London (1608), about
roguery and crime, with much material borrowed
from Robert Greene and others; and The Guls
Horne-Booke (1609), a valuable account of
behaviour in the London theatres.
Between 1613 and 1619 Dekker was in prison
for debt. This firsthand experience may be
behind his six prison scenes first included in
the sixth edition (1616) of Sir Thomas
Overbury’s Characters. Dekker was partly
responsible for devising the street
entertainment to celebrate the entry of James I
into London in 1603; he provided the lord
mayor’s pageant in 1612, 1627, 1628, and 1629.
All this labour did not bring prosperity,
however, for Dekker was likely in debt when he
died.
|
|
|
Thomas Campion
born Feb. 12, 1567, London
died March 1, 1620
English poet, composer, musical and literary
theorist, physician, and one of the outstanding
songwriters of the brilliant English lutenist
school of the late 16th and early 17th
centuries. His lyric poetry reflects his musical
abilities in its subtle mastery of rhythmic and
melodic structure.
After attending the University of Cambridge
(1581–84), Campion studied law in London, but he
was never called to the bar. Little is known of
him until 1606, by which time he had received a
degree in medicine from the University of Caen,
France. He practiced medicine from 1606 until
his death.
Campion’s first publication was five sets of
verses appearing anonymously in the pirated 1591
edition of Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella.
In 1595 his Poemata (Latin epigrams) appeared,
followed in 1601 by A Booke of Ayres (written
with Philip Rosseter), of which much of the
musical accompaniment and verses were Campion’s.
He wrote a masque in 1607 and three more in
1613, in which year his Two Bookes of Ayres
probably appeared. The Third and Fourth Booke of
Ayres came out in 1617, probably followed by a
treatise (undated) on counterpoint.
Campion’s lyric poetry and songs for lute
accompaniment are undoubtedly his works of most
lasting interest. Though his theories on music
are slight, he thought naturally in the modern
key system, with major and minor modes, rather
than in the old modal system. Campion stated his
theories on rhyme in Observations in the Art of
English Poesie (1602). In this work he attacked
the use of rhymed, accentual metres, insisting
instead that timing and sound duration are the
fundamental element in verse structure. Campion
asserted that in English verse the larger units
of line and stanza provide the temporal
stability within which feet and syllables may be
varied.
With the exception of his classic lyric Rose-cheekt
Lawra, Come, Campion usually did not put his
advocacy of quantitative, unrhymed verse into
practice. His originality as a lyric poet lies
rather in his treatment of the conventional
Elizabethan subject matter. Rather than using
visual imagery to describe static pictures, he
expresses the delights of the natural world in
terms of sound, music, movement, or change. This
approach and Campion’s flowing but irregular
verbal rhythms give freshness to hackneyed
subjects and seem also to suggest an immediate
personal experience of even the commonest
feelings. The Selected Songs, edited by W.H.
Auden, was published in 1972.
|
|
|
Nicholas Breton
born 1553?
died 1625?
prolific English writer of religious and
pastoral poems, satires, dialogues, and essays.
Breton’s life was spent mainly in London. He
dedicated his works to many patrons, including
James I; his chief early patron was Mary
Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. In 1598 Breton
was accounted one of the best lyrical poets, but
he outlived his reputation. His satires are
rather mild and general; more successful are the
descriptions of simple country pleasures,
whether in the pastoral poetry of The Passionate
Shepheard (1604) or in the prose descriptions of
the months and the hours in his Fantasticks
(1604?), which in some respects anticipates the
fashion for character books. Modeled on the
Characters of the Greek philosopher
Theophrastus, which became available in Latin
translation in 1592, these books contained brief
sketches, describing a dominant virtue or vice
in such characters as the thieving servant, the
cringing courtier, the generous patron, or the
pious fraud. Breton himself wrote two character
books, The Good and the Badde (1616) and
Characters Upon Essaies (1615), the latter
containing essays as well.
|
The sonnet sequence
The publication of
Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella in 1591
generated an equally extraordinary vogue for the sonnet
sequence, Sidney’s principal imitators being Samuel Daniel,
Michael Drayton, Fulke Greville,
Spenser, and
Shakespeare;
his lesser imitators were Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes,
Giles Fletcher the Elder, Lodge, Richard Barnfield, and many
more. Astrophel had re-created the Petrarchan world of proud
beauty and despairing lover in a single, brilliant stroke,
though in English hands the preferred division of the sonnet
into three quatrains and a couplet gave Petrarch’s
contemplative form a more forensic turn, investing it with
an argumentative terseness and epigrammatic sting. Within
the common ground shared by the sequences, there is much
diversity. Only Sidney’s sequence endeavours to tell a
story, the others being more loosely organized as variations
focusing on a central (usually fictional) relationship.
Daniel’s Delia (1592) is eloquent and elegant, dignified and
high-minded; Drayton’s Ideas Mirror (1594; much revised by
1619) rises to a strongly imagined, passionate intensity;
Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) celebrates, unusually, fulfilled
sexual love achieved within marriage. Shakespeare’s sonnets
(published 1609) present a different world altogether, the
conventions upside down, the lady no beauty but dark and
treacherous, the loved one beyond considerations of sexual
possession because he is male. The sonnet tended to
gravitate toward correctness or politeness, and for most
readers its chief pleasure must have been rhetorical, in its
forceful pleading and consciously exhibited artifice, but,
under the pressure of Shakespeare’s urgent metaphysical
concerns, dramatic toughness, and shifting and highly
charged ironies, the form’s conventional limits were
exploded.
Samuel Daniel
born 1562?, Taunton, Somerset, Eng.
died 1619
English contemplative poet, marked in both verse
and prose by his philosophic sense of history.
Daniel entered Oxford in 1581. After publishing
a translation in 1585 for his first patron, Sir
Edward Dymoke, he secured a post with the
English ambassador at Paris; later he travelled
in Italy, visiting the poet Battista Guarini in
Padua. After 1592 he lived at Lincoln in the
service of Sir Edward Dymoke, at Wilton as tutor
to William Herbert, later earl of Pembroke, and
at Skipton Castle, Yorkshire, as tutor to Lady
Anne Clifford. In 1604 Queen Anne chose him to
write a masque, The Vision of the Twelve
Goddesses, in which she danced. She awarded him
the right to license plays for the boy actors at
the Blackfriars Theatre and a position as a
groom, and later gentleman, of her privy
chamber.
Edmund Spenser praised Daniel for his first
book of poems, Delia, with The Complaint of
Rosamond (1592). Daniel published 50 sonnets in
this book, and more were added in later
editions. The passing of youth and beauty is the
theme of the Complaint, a tragic monologue. In
The Tragedie of Cleopatra (1594) Daniel wrote a
Senecan drama. The Civile Warres (1595–1609), a
verse history of the Wars of the Roses, had some
influence on Shakespeare in Richard II and Henry
IV; it is Daniel’s most ambitious work.
Daniel’s finest poem is probably “Musophilus:
Containing a Generall Defence of Learning,”
dedicated to Fulke Greville. His Poeticall
Essayes (1599) also include “A Letter from
Octavia to Marcus Antonius.” His Defence of Ryme,
answering Thomas Campion’s Observations in the
Art of English Poesie, a critical essay, was
published in 1603. Fame and honour are the
subjects of “Ulisses and the Syren” (1605) and
of A Funerall Poeme uppon the Earle of
Devonshire (1606). He had to defend himself
against a charge of sympathizing with the Earl
of Essex in The Tragedie of Philotas, acted in
1604 (published 1605). His other masques include
Tethys’ Festival (1610), staged with scenery by
Inigo Jones, and The Queenes Arcadia (published
1606), a pastoral tragicomedy in the Italian
fashion. Daniel’s last pastoral was Hymens
Triumph (1615). He also wrote The Collection of
the Historie of England (1612–18) as far as the
reign of Edward III.
|
|
|
Michael Drayton
born 1563, Hartshill, Warwickshire, Eng.
died 1631, London
English poet, the first to write odes in English
in the manner of Horace.
Drayton spent his early years in the service of
Sir Henry Goodere, to whom he owed his
education, and whose daughter, Anne, he
celebrated as Idea in his poems. His first
published work, The Harmonie of the Church
(1591), contains biblical paraphrases in an
antiquated style. His next works conformed more
nearly to contemporary fashion: in pastoral,
with Idea, The Shepheards Garland (1593); in
sonnet, with Ideas Mirrour (1594); in erotic
idyll, with Endimion and Phoebe (1595); and in
historical heroic poem, with Robert, Duke of
Normandy (1596) and Mortimeriados (1596). The
last, originally written in rhyme royal, was
recast in Ludovico Ariosto’s ottava rima verse
as The Barrons Warres (1603).
Drayton’s most original poems of this period
are Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597), a series
of pairs of letters exchanged between famous
lovers in English history.
Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603,
Drayton, like most other poets, acclaimed in
verse the accession of King James I, but he
failed to receive any appointment or reward. The
disappointment adversely affected his poetry of
the next few years: it is reflected in his
bitter satire The Owle (1604) and in his
nostalgia for the previous reign and his
implicitly negative attitude toward James I. In
Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall (1606) he introduced
a new mode with the “odes,” modeled on Horace.
“The Ballad of Agincourt” shows Drayton’s gift
for pure narrative.
Further collected editions culminated in his
most important book, Poems (1619). Here Drayton
reprinted most of what he chose to preserve,
often much revised, with many new poems and
sonnets. He had also published the first part of
his most ambitious work, Poly-Olbion (1612), in
which he intended to record comprehensively the
Elizabethan discovery of England: the beauty of
the countryside, the romantic fascination of
ruined abbeys, its history, legend, and present
life. He produced a second part in 1622. Written
in alexandrines (12-syllable lines), Poly-Olbion
is among the longest poems in English. Although
a monumental achievement, it is read only rarely
today.
In his old age he wrote some of his most
delightful poetry, especially the fairy poem
Nymphidia (1627), with its mock-heroic
undertones, and The Muses Elizium (1630). The
Elegies upon Sundry Occasions (1627), addressed
to his friends, often suggest, with their easy,
polished couplets, the manner of the age of
Alexander Pope.
|
|
|
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron
Brooke
born October 3, 1554, Beauchamp Court,
Warwickshire, England
died September 30, 1628, Warwick
English writer who, on his tomb, styled
himself “Servant to Q. Eliz., councellor to King
James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney,” but who
is best remembered as a powerful philosophical
poet and exponent of a plain style of writing.
Greville’s Life of the Renowned Sir Philip
Sidney (1652) is a valuable commentary on
Elizabethan politics. His sonnet collection
Caelica (first printed 1633) differed in tone
from most Elizabethan cycles, its treatment
being realistic and ironic. His mind was
melancholy and Calvinistic, emphasizing the
“wearisome condition of humanity,” torn between
this world and God’s commands. His tragedies on
Oriental themes traced the political results of
this division, and his verse treatises showed
how statesmen can best keep order in a naughty
world. His poem “Humane Learning” was skeptical
about the instruments and aims of earthly
knowledge and, in stressing practical
improvements, probably owed something to his
friend Francis Bacon. Greville was a favourite
of Queen Elizabeth.
After matriculating at the University of
Cambridge in 1568, he was given a post in the
Court of the Welsh Marches in 1576 but the next
year went on an embassy to Europe—the first of
several diplomatic missions—and later visited
the Low Countries, Ireland, and France. Grants
of land and minor offices enriched him, and in
1598 he became treasurer of the navy.
By alienating the influential Sir Robert
Cecil, he forfeited immediate promotion to high
office at James I’s accession but was made a
Knight of the Bath. He later restored Warwick
Castle (bestowed on him in 1605 by James) and
wrote verse treatises and plays. His tact and
business ability were finally rewarded: he was
made chancellor of the Exchequer in 1614 and a
baron in 1621.
Works definitely by Greville are Certaine
learned and elegant workes (1633) and Remains
(1670). The tragedy Mustapha was printed
(probably piratically) in 1609, and some songs
were set to music.
He never married but was “a constant courtier
of the ladies.” He died of stab wounds inflicted
by a disgruntled manservant.
|
|
|
Barnabe Barnes
born 1569?, Yorkshire, Eng.
died 1609
Elizabethan poet, one of the Elizabethan
sonneteers and the author of Parthenophil and
Parthenophe.
Barnes was the son of Richard Barnes, bishop
of Durham. He entered Brasenose College, Oxford,
in 1586 but took no degree; in 1591 he joined
the expedition to Normandy led by the Earl of
Essex. On his return he published Parthenophil
and Parthenophe (1593), containing sonnets,
madrigals, elegies, and odes, on which rests his
claim to fame. In 1598 he was prosecuted in the
Star Chamber on a charge of attempted poisoning,
but he escaped to the north. His other works
include A Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets
(1595), Four Books of Offices (1606) in prose,
and two plays, The Battle of Hexham (now lost)
and the anti-Roman Catholic The Devil’s Charter
(1607). At his best his poems, particularly the
madrigals, have exuberance and occasional
felicity of language; the sonnets show French
influence.
|
|
|
Giles Fletcher the Elder
born c. November 1546, Cranbrook, Kent, Eng.
died March 11, 1611, London
English poet and author, and father of the
poets Phineas Fletcher and Giles Fletcher the
Younger; his writings include an account of his
visit to Russia.
Educated at Eton and at King’s College,
Cambridge, Fletcher was employed on diplomatic
service in Scotland, Germany, and Holland. In
1588 he was sent to Russia to the court of the
tsar, Fyodor I, with instructions to conclude an
alliance between England and Russia, to restore
English trade, and to obtain better conditions
for the English Muscovy Company. He returned to
England in 1589 and in 1591 published Of the
Russe Common Wealth, a comprehensive account of
Russian geography, government, law, methods of
warfare, church, and manners. In 1610 Fletcher
was employed to negotiate with Denmark on behalf
of the merchants of the Eastland Company.
Of the Russe Common Wealth was issued in an
abridged form in Richard Hakluyt’s The principal
Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries
(2nd ed., 1598); in Purchas His Pilgrimes
(1625); and as History of Russia in 1643.
Fletcher also wrote a sonnet sequence, Licia
(1593).
|
Other poetic styles
Sonnet and lyric represent one tradition of verse within
the period, that most conventionally delineated as
Elizabethan, but the picture is complicated by the
coexistence of other poetic styles in which ornament was
distrusted or turned to different purposes; the sonnet was
even parodied by Sir John Davies in his Gulling Sonnets (c.
1594) and by the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell. A particular
stimulus to experiment was the variety of new possibilities
made available by verse translation, from Richard
Stanyhurst’s extraordinary Aeneid (1582), in quantitative
hexameter and littered with obscure or invented diction, and
Sir John Harington’s version of Ariosto’s
Orlando furioso
(1591), with its Byronic ease and narrative fluency, to
Christopher Marlowe’s blank verse rendering of Lucan’s First
Book (published 1600), probably the finest Elizabethan
translation.
The genre to benefit most from translation was the
epyllion, or little epic. This short narrative in verse was
usually on a mythological subject, taking most of its
material from Ovid, either his Metamorphoses (English
version by Arthur Golding, 1565–67) or his Heroides (English
version by Turberville, 1567). This form flourished from
Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) to Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602) and is best represented
by Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (published 1598) and
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593). Ovid’s reputation as
an esoteric philosopher left its mark on George Chapman’s
Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) and Drayton’s Endimion and
Phoebe (1595), in which the love of mortal for goddess
becomes a parable of wisdom. But Ovid’s real attraction was
as an authority on the erotic, and most epyllia treat
physical love with sophistication and sympathy, unrelieved
by the gloss of allegory—a tendency culminating in John
Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image (1598), a
poem that has shocked tender sensibilities. Inevitably, the
shift of attitude had an effect on style: for Marlowe the
experience of translating (inaccurately) Ovid’s Amores meant
a gain for Hero and Leander in terms of urbanity and, more
important, wit.
With the epyllion comes a hint of the tastes of the
following reign, and a similar shift of taste can be felt
among those poets of the 1590s who began to modify the
ornamental style in the direction of native plainness or
Classical restraint. An astute courtier such as Davies
might, in his Orchestra (1596) and Hymns of Astraea (1599),
write confident panegyrics to the aging Elizabeth, but in
Sir Walter Raleigh’s Eleventh Book of the Ocean to Cynthia,
a kind of broken pastoral eclogue, praise of the queen is
undermined by an obscure but eloquent sense of hopelessness
and disillusionment. For Raleigh, the complimental manner
seems to be disintegrating under the weight of disgrace and
isolation at court; his scattered lyrics—notably The Lie, a
contemptuous dismissal of the court—often draw their
resonance from the resources of the plain style. Another
courtier whose writing suggests similar pressures is
Greville. His Caelica (published 1633) begins as a
conventional sonnet sequence but gradually abandons
Neoplatonism for pessimistic reflections on religion and
politics. Other works in his sinewy and demanding verse
include philosophical treatises and unperformed melodramas
(Alaham and Mustapha) that have a sombre Calvinist tone,
presenting man as a vulnerable creature inhabiting a world
of unresolved contradictions:
Oh wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
Greville was a friend of Robert Devereux,
2nd earl of
Essex, whose revolt against Elizabeth ended in 1601 on the
scaffold, and other poets on the edge of the Essex circle
fueled the taste for aristocratic heroism and individualist
ethics. Chapman’s masterpiece, his translation of Homer
(1598), is dedicated to Essex, and his original poems are
intellectual and recondite, often deliberately difficult and
obscure; his abstruseness is a means of restricting his
audience to a worthy, understanding elite. Daniel, in his
verse Epistles (1603) written to various noblemen, strikes a
mean between plainness and compliment; his Musophilus
(1599), dedicated to Greville, defends the worth of poetry
but says there are too many frivolous wits writing. The cast
of Daniel’s mind is stoical, and his language is classically
precise. His major project was a verse history of The Civil
Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York
(1595–1609), and versified history is also strongly
represented in Drayton’s Legends (1593–1607), Barons’ Wars
(1596, 1603), and England’s Heroical Epistles (1597).
The form that really set its face against Elizabethan
politeness was the satire. Satire was related to the
complaint, of which there were notable examples by Daniel
(The Complaint of Rosamond, 1592) and
Shakespeare (The Rape
of Lucrece, 1594) that are dignified and tragic laments in
supple verse. But the Elizabethans mistakenly held the term
satire to derive from the Greek satyros, a satyr, and so set
out to match their manner to their matter and make their
verses snarl. In the works of the principal satirists,
Donne
(five satires, 1593–98), Joseph Hall (Virgidemiarum,
1597–98), and Marston (Certain Satires and The Scourge of
Villainy, 1598), the denunciation of vice and folly
repeatedly tips into invective, raillery, and sheer abuse.
The versification of
Donne’s satires is frequently so rough
as barely to be verse at all; Hall apologized for not being
harsh enough, and Marston was himself pilloried in Jonson’s
play Poetaster (1601) for using ridiculously difficult
language. “Vex all the world,” wrote Marston to himself, “so
that thyself be pleased.” The satirists popularized a new
persona, that of the malcontent who denounces his society
not from above but from within. Their continuing attraction
resides in their self-contradictory delight in the world
they profess to abhor and their evident fascination with the
minutiae of life in court and city. They were
enthusiastically followed by Everard Guilpin, Samuel
Rowlands,
Thomas Middleton, and Cyril Tourneur, and so
scandalous was the flood of satires that in 1599 their
printing was banned. Thereafter the form survived in
Jonson’s classically balanced epigrams and poems of the good
life, but its more immediate impact was on the drama, in
helping to create the vigorously skeptical voices that
people The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) and Shakespeare’s
Hamlet (c. 1599–1601).
Sir John Davies
born April 1569, Tisbury, Wiltshire, Eng.
died Dec. 8, 1626
English poet and lawyer whose Orchestra, or a
Poem of Dancing reveals a typically Elizabethan
pleasure in the contemplation of the
correspondence between the natural order and
human activity.
Educated at the University of Oxford, Davies
entered the Middle Temple, London, in 1588 and
was called to the bar in 1595. Much of his early
poetry consisted of epigrams published in
various collections. Epigrammes and Elegies by
J.D. and C.M. (1590?) contained both Davies’
work and posthumous works by Christopher Marlowe
and was one of the books the archbishop of
Canterbury ordered burned in 1599. Davies’
Orchestra (1596) is a poem in praise of dancing
set against the background of Elizabethan
cosmology and its theory of the harmony of the
spheres. In Nosce teipsum (1599; “Know
Thyself”), he gave a lucid account of his
philosophy on the nature and immortality of the
soul. In the same year, he published Hymnes of
Astraea in Acrosticke Verse, a series of poems
in which the initials of the first lines form
the words “Elisabetha Regina.” His last poetic
works were two dialogues contributed to Francis
Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody (1602). He published
a collected edition of his poetry in 1622.
On the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603,
Davies was one of the messengers who carried the
news to James VI of Scotland, who succeeded
Elizabeth as James I. James received him with
great favour, sent him to Ireland as solicitor
general, and conferred a knighthood on him. In
1606 Davies was made attorney general for
Ireland and created sergeant-at-law. He took an
active part in the Protestant settlement of
Ulster and wrote several tracts on Irish
affairs. He entered the Irish Parliament and was
elected speaker; on his return to England he sat
in the English Parliament of 1621. He was
appointed lord chief justice in 1626 but died
before he took office. He was one of the
founders of the Society of Antiquaries.
|
|
|
Robert Southwell
born 1561, Horsham St. Faith, Norfolk, Eng.
died March 4, 1595, London
English poet and martyr remembered for his
saintly life as a Jesuit priest and missionary
during a time of Protestant persecution and for
his religious poetry.
Southwell was educated at Jesuit colleges in
France and in Rome. In 1585 he was ordained
priest and made prefect of studies at the
English College at Rome. He returned to England
as a missionary in 1586, when he became chaplain
to Anne Howard and spiritual adviser to her
husband, the 1st Earl of Arundel, a recusant
imprisoned in the Tower of London. Southwell
lived in concealment at Arundel House, writing
letters of consolation to persecuted Roman
Catholics and making pastoral journeys. His An
Epistle of Comfort was printed secretly in 1587;
other letters circulated in manuscript.
Southwell was arrested in 1592 while
celebrating mass. He was tortured in an attempt
to make him reveal the whereabouts of his fellow
priests and imprisoned in the Tower of London in
solitary confinement. In 1595 he was tried for
treason under the anti-Catholic penal laws of
1585 and executed. Southwell’s devotional lyrics
and prose treatises and epistles reflect the
ardent piety of his life. His best works achieve
an unusual directness and simplicity, and his
use of paradox and striking imagery is akin to
that of the later Metaphysical poets. He is the
foremost representative of Roman Catholic
letters in Elizabethan England.
|
|
|
Francis Beaumont
born c. 1585, Grace-Dieu, Leicestershire,
Eng.
died March 6, 1616, London
English Jacobean poet and playwright who
collaborated with John Fletcher on comedies and
tragedies between about 1606 and 1613.
The son of Francis Beaumont, justice of common
pleas of Grace-Dieu priory, Charnwood Forest,
Leicestershire, Beaumont entered Broadgates Hall
(later Pembroke College), Oxford, in 1597. His
father dying the following year, he abruptly
left the university without a degree and later
(November 1600) entered London’s Inner Temple,
where he evidently became more involved in
London’s lively literary culture than in legal
studies.
In 1602 there appeared the poem Salmacis and
Hermaphroditus, generally attributed to
Beaumont, a voluptuous and voluminous expansion
of the Ovidian legend that added to the story
humour and a fantastic array of episodes and
conceits. At age 23 he prefixed to Ben Jonson’s
Volpone (1607) some verses in honour of his
“dear friend” the author. John Fletcher
contributed verses to the same volume, and, by
about this time, the two were collaborating on
plays for the Children of the Queen’s Revels.
According to John Aubrey, a 17th-century
memorialist, in Brief Lives,
They lived together on the Banke side, not
far from the Play-house, both batchelors; lay
together…; had one wench in the house between
them…; the same cloathes and cloake, &c.,
betweene them.
Their collaboration as playwrights was to last
for some seven years. In 1613 Beaumont married
an heiress, Ursula Isley of Sundridge in Kent,
and retired from the theatre. He died in London
in 1616 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
It is difficult to disentangle Beaumont’s
share in the 35 plays published in 1647 as by
"Beaumont and Fletcher" (to which another 18
were added in the 1679 collection). Scholars now
believe that only 10 of these were by the two
friends, while Beaumont’s hand also appears in 3
plays substantially written by Fletcher and
Philip Massinger. The rest are plays written by
Fletcher alone or in collaboration with other
dramatists, except for The Knight of the Burning
Pestle, which is Beaumont’s unaided work.
Attempts to separate the shares of Beaumont and
Fletcher in any given work are complicated by
the fact that Beaumont sometimes revised scenes
by Fletcher and Fletcher edited some of
Beaumont’s work. The Knight of the Burning
Pestle parodies a then popular kind of
play—sprawling, episodic, with sentimental
lovers and chivalric adventures. It opens with
The Citizen and his Wife taking their places on
the stage to watch “The London Merchant”—itself
a satire on the work of a contemporary
playwright, Thomas Dekker. Citizen and Wife
interrupt, advise, and insist that the play
should be more romantic and their apprentice
should take a leading part. Thereafter these two
contradictory plots go forward side by side,
allowing Beaumont to have fun with bourgeois
naïveté about art.
|
|
|
George Chapman
born 1559?, Hitchin, Hertfordshire, Eng.
died May 12, 1634, London
English poet and dramatist, whose translation of
Homer long remained the standard English
version.
Chapman attended the University of Oxford but
took no degree. By 1585 he was working in London
for the wealthy commoner Sir Ralph Sadler and
probably traveled to the Low Countries at this
time. His first work was The Shadow of Night . .
. Two Poeticall Hymnes (1593), followed in 1595
by Ovids Banquet of Sence. Both philosophize on
the value of an ordered life. His poem in praise
of Sir Walter Raleigh, De Guiana, Carmen Epicum
(“An Epic Poem about Guiana,” 1596), is typical
of his preoccupation with the virtues of the
warrior-hero, the character that dominates most
of his plays.
The first books of his translation of the
Iliad appeared in 1598. It was completed in
1611, and his version of the Odyssey appeared in
1616. Chapman’s Homer contains passages of great
power and beauty and inspired the sonnet of John
Keats “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
(1815).
Chapman’s conclusion to Christopher Marlowe’s
unfinished poem Hero and Leander (1598)
emphasized the necessity for control and wisdom.
Euthymiae Raptus; or the Teares of Peace (1609),
Chapman’s major poem, is a dialogue between the
poet and the Lady Peace, who is mourning over
the chaos caused by man’s valuing worldly
objects above integrity and wisdom.
Chapman was imprisoned with Ben Jonson and
John Marston in 1605 for writing Eastward Ho, a
play that James I, the king of Great Britain,
found offensive to his fellow Scots. Of
Chapman’s dramatic works, about a dozen plays
survive, chief of which are his tragedies: Bussy
d’Ambois (1607), The Conspiracie, and Tragedie
of Charles Duke of Byron . . . (1608), and The
Widdowes Teares (1612).
|
|
|
John Marston
baptized Oct. 7, 1576, Oxfordshire, Eng.
died June 25, 1634, London
English dramatist, one of the most vigorous
satirists of the Shakespearean era, whose best
known work is The Malcontent (1604), in which he
rails at the iniquities of a lascivious court.
He wrote it, as well as other major works, for a
variety of children’s companies, organized
groups of boy actors popular during Elizabethan
and Jacobean times.
Marston was educated at the University of Oxford
and resided from 1595 at the Middle Temple,
London. He began his literary career in 1598
with The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and
Certaine Satyres, an erotic poem in the newly
fashionable Ovidian style. In the same year, the
rough-hewn, obscure verses of The Scourge of
Villanie, in which Marston referred to himself
as a “barking satirist,” were widely acclaimed.
In 1599 Marston began writing for the
theatre, producing Histrio-mastix (published in
1610), probably for performance at the Middle
Temple. In his character Chrisoganus, a “Master
Pedant” and “translating scholler,” the audience
was able to recognize the learned Ben Jonson. A
brief, bitter literary feud developed between
Marston and Jonson—part of “the war of the
theatres.” In Poetaster (produced 1601) Jonson
depicted Marston as Crispinus, a character with
red hair and small legs who was given a pill
that forced him to disgorge a pretentious
vocabulary.
For the Children of Paul’s, a theatre
company, Marston wrote Antonio and Mellida
(1600); its sequel, Antonio’s Revenge (1601);
and What You Will (1601). The most memorable is
Antonio’s Revenge, a savage melodrama of a
political power struggle with elements of parody
and fantasy.
In 1604 Marston transferred his allegiance to
the boy company at the Blackfriars Theatre
(i.e., the Children of the Queen’s Revels, later
Children of the Blackfriars), for which he wrote
his remaining plays. The Dutch Courtezan
(produced 1603–04) as well as The Malcontent
earned him his place as a dramatist. The former,
with its coarse, farcical counterplot, was
considered one of the cleverest comedies of its
time. Although Marston used all the apparatus of
contemporary revenge tragedy in The Malcontent,
the wronged hero does not kill any of his
tormentors and regains power by sophisticated
Machiavellian stratagems.
In 1605 Marston collaborated with Jonson and
with George Chapman on Eastward Ho, a comedy of
the contrasts within the life of the city. But
the play’s satiric references to opportunistic
Scottish countrymen of the newly crowned James I
gave offense, and all three authors were
imprisoned.
After another imprisonment in 1608,
presumably once again for libel, Marston left
unfinished The Insatiate Countesse, his most
erotic play, and entered the Church of England.
He took orders in 1609, married the daughter of
James I’s chaplain, and in 1616 accepted an
ecclesiastical post in Christchurch, Hampshire.
In 1633 he apparently insisted upon the removal
of his name from the collected edition of six of
his plays, The Workes of John Marston, which was
reissued anonymously the same year as Tragedies
and Comedies.
|
|
|
Sir Walter Raleigh
born 1554?, Hayes Barton, near Budleigh
Salterton, Devon, England
died October 29, 1618, London
English adventurer and writer, a favourite of
Queen Elizabeth I, who knighted him in 1585.
Accused of treason by Elizabeth’s successor,
James I, he was imprisoned in the Tower of
London and eventually put to death.
Raleigh was a younger son of Walter Raleigh
(d. 1581) of Fardell in Devon, by his third
wife, Katherine Gilbert (née Champernowne). In
1569 he fought on the Huguenot (French
Protestant) side in the Wars of Religion in
France, and he is known later to have been at
Oriel College, Oxford (1572), and at the Middle
Temple law college (1575). In 1580 he fought
against the Irish rebels in Munster, and his
outspoken criticism of the way English policy
was being implemented in Ireland brought him to
the attention of Queen Elizabeth. By 1582 he had
become the monarch’s favourite, and he began to
acquire lucrative monopolies, properties, and
influential positions. His Irish service was
rewarded by vast estates in Munster. In 1583 the
queen secured him a lease of part of Durham
House in the Strand, London, where he had a
monopoly of wine licenses (1583) and of the
export of broadcloth (1585); and he became
warden of the stannaries (the Cornish tin
mines), lieutenant of Cornwall, and vice admiral
of Devon and Cornwall and frequently sat as a
member of Parliament. In 1587, two years after
he had been knighted, Raleigh became captain of
the queen’s guard. His last appointment under
the crown was as governor of Jersey (one of the
Channel Islands) in 1600.
In 1592 Raleigh acquired the manor of
Sherborne in Dorset. He wanted to settle and
found a family. His marriage to Elizabeth,
daughter of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, possibly
as early as 1588, had been kept a secret from
the jealous queen. In 1592 the birth of a son
betrayed him, and he and his wife were both
imprisoned in the Tower of London. Raleigh
bought his release with profits from a
privateering voyage in which he had invested,
but he never regained his ascendancy at court.
The child did not survive; a second son, Walter,
was born in 1593 and a third son, Carew, in 1604
or 1605.
Although Raleigh was the queen’s favourite,
he was not popular. His pride and extravagant
spending were notorious, and he was attacked for
unorthodox thought. A Jesuit pamphlet in 1592
accused him of keeping a “School of Atheism,”
but he was not an atheist in the modern sense.
He was a bold talker, interested in skeptical
philosophy, and a serious student of mathematics
as an aid to navigation. He also studied
chemistry and compounded medical formulas. The
old idea that Shakespeare satirized Raleigh’s
circle under the name of the "School of Night"
is now entirely discredited.
Raleigh’s breach with the queen widened his
personal sphere of action. Between 1584 and 1589
he had tried to establish a colony near Roanoke
Island (in present North Carolina), which he
named Virginia, but he never set foot there
himself. In 1595 he led an expedition to what is
now Venezuela, in South America, sailing up the
Orinoco River in the heart of Spain’s colonial
empire. He described the expedition in his book
The Discoverie of Guiana (1596). Spanish
documents and stories told by Indians had
convinced him of the existence of Eldorado (El
Dorado), the ruler of Manoa, a supposedly
fabulous city of gold in the interior of South
America. He did locate some gold mines, but no
one supported his project for colonizing the
area. In 1596 he went with Robert Devereux, 2nd
earl of Essex, on an unsuccessful expedition to
the Spanish city of Cádiz, and he was Essex’s
rear admiral on the Islands voyage in 1597, an
expedition to the Azores.
Raleigh’s aggressive policies toward Spain
did not recommend him to the pacific King James
I (reigned 1603–25). His enemies worked to bring
about his ruin, and in 1603 he and others were
accused of plotting to dethrone the king.
Raleigh was convicted on the written evidence of
Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, and, after a
last-minute reprieve from the death sentence,
was consigned to the Tower. He fought to save
Sherborne, which he had conveyed in trust for
his son, but a clerical error invalidated the
deed. In 1616 he was released but not pardoned.
He still hoped to exploit the wealth of
Venezuela, arguing that the country had been
ceded to England by its native chiefs in 1595.
With the king’s permission, he financed and led
a second expedition there, promising to open a
gold mine without offending Spain. A severe
fever prevented his leading his men upriver. His
lieutenant, Lawrence Kemys, burned a Spanish
settlement but found no gold. Raleigh’s son
Walter died in the action. King James invoked
the suspended sentence of 1603, and in 1618,
after writing a spirited defense of his acts,
Raleigh was executed.
Popular feeling had been on Raleigh’s side
ever since 1603. After 1618 his occasional
writings were collected and published, often
with little discrimination. The authenticity of
some minor works attributed to him is still
unsure. Some 560 lines of verse in his hand are
preserved. They address the queen as Cynthia and
complain of her unkindness, probably with
reference to his imprisonment of 1592. His
best-known prose works in addition to The
Discoverie of Guiana are A Report of the Truth
of the Fight About the Iles of Açores This Last
Sommer (1591; generally known as The Last Fight
of the Revenge) and The History of the World
(1614). The last work, undertaken in the Tower,
proceeds from the Creation to the 2nd century bc.
History is shown as a record of God’s
Providence, a doctrine that pleased
contemporaries and counteracted the charge of
atheism. King James was meant to note the many
warnings that the injustice of kings is always
punished.
Raleigh survives as an interesting and
enigmatic personality rather than as a force in
history. He can be presented either as a hero or
as a scoundrel. His vaulting imagination, which
could envisage both North and South America as
English territory, was supported by considerable
practical ability and a persuasive pen, but some
discrepancy between the vision and the deed made
him less effective than his gifts had promised.
Agnes M.C. Latham
|
|
|
Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of
Essex
born Nov. 10, 1567, Netherwood,
Herefordshire, Eng.
died Feb. 25, 1601, London
English soldier and courtier famous for his
relationship with Queen Elizabeth I (reigned
1558–1603). While still a young man, Essex
succeeded his stepfather, Robert Dudley, earl of
Leicester (died 1588), as the aging queen’s
favourite; for years she put up with his
rashness and impudence, but their relationship
finally ended in tragedy.
Devereux was a cousin of Elizabeth on his
mother’s side, and when he was nine, he
succeeded to the title held by his father,
Walter Devereux, 1st earl of Essex. Young Essex
first attained prominence by fighting bravely
against the Spanish in the Netherlands in 1586.
The following year Elizabeth made him master of
the horse. Even at this early date he
consistently provoked the queen’s anger while
managing to remain in her favour. Contrary to
her wishes, he took part in the English
operation against Lisbon in 1589 and secretly
married Frances Walsingham, widow of the poet
Sir Philip Sidney, in 1590. In 1591–92 he
commanded the English force in France, which
helped King Henry IV, then still a Protestant,
in his campaign against the French Roman
Catholics.
For the next four years Essex remained in
England, becoming an expert on foreign affairs
in an unsuccessful attempt to challenge the
long-established ascendancy in this field of the
Cecil family. He was made privy councillor in
1593 and in 1594 uncovered an alleged plot
against the queen’s life by her physician,
Roderigo Lopez.
When the revival of offensive operations
against Spain in 1596 opened new opportunity for
military adventure, Essex became one of the
commanders of the force that seized and sacked
Cádiz on June 22. This spectacular but
indecisive action put him at the height of his
fortunes and made him a leading advocate of a
more vigorous strategy against Spain. A force
that he commanded in 1597, however, failed to
intercept the Spanish treasure ships at the
Azores. Next year the possibility of peace with
Spain sharpened his rivalry with the Cecils,
while the growing seriousness of a major
rebellion in Ireland led to bitter differences
between Essex and Elizabeth over appointments
and strategy.
By this time Elizabeth was growing alarmed by
Essex’ importunate ambition, finding him to be
“a nature not to be ruled.” During one of their
disputes, Essex turned his back upon the queen,
who promptly slapped his face. Nevertheless, in
1599 she sent him to Ireland as lord lieutenant.
After an unsuccessful campaign against the
rebels he concluded an unfavourable truce and,
suddenly deserting his post, returned to England
to vindicate himself privately to the queen. She
responded by depriving him of his offices (June
1600). Politically ruined and financially
destitute but confined only to house arrest, he
and 200 to 300 followers tried, on Feb. 8, 1601,
to raise the populace of London in revolt. The
poorly planned attempt failed, and Essex
surrendered. He was executed at the Tower of
London after being found guilty of treason.
Francis Bacon, the scientist-philosopher for
whose advancement in the government Essex had
continually pressed, was one of the prosecutors
at Essex’ trial.
|
|
|
Joseph Hall
born , July 1, 1574, Ashby-de-la-Zouch,
Leicestershire, Eng.
died Sept. 8, 1656, Higham, Norfolk
English bishop, moral philosopher, and satirist,
remarkable for his literary versatility and
innovations.
Hall’s Virgidemiarum: Six Books (1597–1602; “A
Harvest of Blows”) was the first English satire
successfully modeled on Latin satire, and its
couplets anticipated the satiric heroic couplets
of John Dryden in the late 17th century. Hall
was also the first writer in English to emulate
Theophrastus, an ancient Greek philosopher who
wrote a book of characters, with Characters of
Vertues and Vices (1608). As a moral philosopher
he achieved a European reputation for his
Christianization of Stoicism.
Educated under Puritan influences at the
Ashby School and the University of Cambridge
(from 1589), he was elected to the university
lectureship in rhetoric. He became rector of
Hawstead, Suffolk, in 1601 and concentrated
chiefly on writing books for the money “to buy
books.” Mundus Alter et Idem (c. 1605; “The
World Different and the Same”), an original and
entertaining Latin satire that influenced
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726),
dates from this period, as does Heaven upon
Earth (1606), a book of moral philosophy. Hall
later became domestic chaplain to Prince Henry
(James I’s eldest son). He was made dean of
Worcester in 1616 and accompanied King James to
Scotland in 1617. He was a royal representative
at the Synod of Dort (1618–19), an assembly of
the Reformed Church of the Netherlands, and
became bishop of Exeter in 1627. Suspected of
Puritan leanings by William Laud, archbishop of
Canterbury, he counterattacked Puritans on
episcopacy’s behalf.
Hall took part in the literary campaign
between Anglicans and Puritans at the opening
(1642) of the English Civil War. John Milton,
poet and Puritan, wrote Animadversions against a
Defence of Hall’s, but amid the ensuing exchange
of invective Hall pleaded for unity and
tolerance among Christians. In 1641 Hall was
given the bishopric of Norwich but was
imprisoned for four months by an anti-episcopalian
House of Commons before arriving at his new see.
Deprived of his episcopal revenues in 1643, he
was finally ejected from his palace and retired
to Higham.
|
|
|
Cyril Tourneur
born c. 1575
died Feb. 28, 1626, Kinsale, County Cork, Ire.
English dramatist whose reputation rests largely
upon The Atheist’s Tragedie, which is written in
verse that is rich in macabre imagery.
In 1625 Sir Edward Cecil appointed Tourneur
secretary to the council of war. This
appointment was canceled by the duke of
Buckingham, but Tourneur sailed with Cecil on an
expedition to Cádiz. On the return voyage, he
was put ashore at Kinsale with other sick men,
and he died there. His poetical satire, The
Transformed Metamorphosis, was published in
1600.
The Atheist’s Tragedie: Or The Honest Man’s
Revenge was published in 1611. The Revenger’s
Tragedie, which is sometimes attributed to
Tourneur, had appeared anonymously in 1607. In
1656 the bookseller Edward Archer entered it as
by Tourneur on his list, but most recent
scholarship attributes it to Thomas Middleton.
The plays differ in their attitude toward
private revenge; and The Revenger’s Tragedie,
although earlier, is more mature in its
structure and sombre brilliance.
|
Prose styles, 1550–1600
Prose was easily the principal medium in the
Elizabethan period, and, despite the mid-century
uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and
strengths—whether coined and imported words should be
admitted; whether the structural modeling of English prose
on Latin writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain,
a pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the expense of
“soundness of argument”—the general attainment of prose
writing was uniformly high, as is often manifested in
contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such
as tracts, pamphlets, and treatises. The obvious instance of
such casual success is Richard Hakluyt’s Principal
Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation
(1589; expanded 1598–1600), a massive collection of
travelers’ tales, of which some are highly accomplished
narratives. William Harrison’s gossipy, entertaining
Description of England (1577), Philip Stubbes’s excitable
and humane social critique The Anatomy of Abuses (1583),
Reginald Scot’s anecdotal Discovery of Witchcraft (1584),
and John Stow’s invaluable Survey of London (1598) also
deserve passing mention. William Kempe’s account of his
morris dance from London to Norwich, Kempe’s Nine Days’
Wonder (1600), exemplifies a smaller genre, the newsbook (a
type of pamphlet).
The writers listed above all use an unpretentious style,
enlivened with a vivid vocabulary; the early prose fiction,
on the other hand, delights in ingenious formal
embellishment at the expense of narrative economy. This runs
up against preferences ingrained in the modern reader by the
novel, but Elizabethan fiction is not at all novelistic and
finds room for debate, song, and the conscious elaboration
of style. The unique exception is Gascoigne’s
Adventures of
Master F.J. (1573), a tale of thwarted love set in an
English great house, which is the first success in English
imaginative prose. Gascoigne’s story has a surprising
authenticity and almost psychological realism (it may be
autobiographical), but even so it is heavily imbued with the
influence of Castiglione.
The existence of an audience for polite fiction was
signaled in the collections of stories imported from France
and Italy by William Painter (1566), Geoffrey Fenton (1577),
and George Pettie (1576). Pettie, who claimed not to care
“to displease twenty men to please one woman,” believed his
readership was substantially female. There were later
collections by Barnaby Rich (1581) and George Whetstone
(1583); historically, their importance was as sources of
plots for many Elizabethan plays. The direction fiction was
to take was established by
John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy
of Wit (1578), which, with its sequel Euphues and His
England (1580), set a fashion for an extreme rhetorical
mannerism that came to be known as euphuism. The plot of
Euphues—a rake’s fall from virtue and his recovery—is but an
excuse for a series of debates, letters, and speechifyings,
thick with assonance, antithesis, parallelism, and balance
and displaying a pseudoscientific learning. Lyly’s style
would be successful on the stage, but in fiction its density
and monotony are wearying. The other major prose work of the
1570s, Sidney’s Arcadia, is no less rhetorical (Abraham
Fraunce illustrated his handbook of style The Arcadian
Rhetoric [1588] almost entirely with examples from the
Arcadia), but with Sidney rhetoric is in the service of
psychological insight and an exciting plot. Dozens of
imitations of Arcadia and Euphues followed from the pens of
Greene, Lodge, Anthony Munday, Emanuel Forde, and others;
none has much distinction.
Prose was to be decisively transformed through its
involvement in the bitter and learned controversies of the
1570s and ’80s over the reform of the English Church and the
problems the controversies raised in matters of authority,
obedience, and conscience. The fragile ecclesiastical
compromise threatened to collapse under the demands for
further reformation made by Elizabeth’s more godly subjects,
and its defense culminated in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws
of Ecclesiastical Polity (eight books, 1593–1662), the first
English classic of serious prose. Hooker’s is a monumental
work, structured in massive and complex paragraphs
brilliantly re-creating the orotund style of Cicero. His air
of maturity and detachment has recommended him to modern
tastes, but no more than his opponents was he above the cut
and thrust of controversy. On the contrary, his magisterial
rhetoric was designed all the more effectively to fix blame
onto his enemies, and even his account (in Books VI–VIII) of
the relationship of church and state was deemed too
sensitive for publication in the 1590s.
More decisive for English fiction was the appearance of
the “Martin Marprelate” tracts of 1588–90. These seven
pamphlets argued the Puritan case but with an un-Puritanical
scurrility and created great scandal by hurling invective
and abuse at Elizabeth’s bishops with comical gusto. The
bishops employed Lyly and Nashe to reply to the pseudonymous
Marprelate, and the consequence may be read in Nashe’s prose
satires of the following decade, especially Piers Penniless
His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Unfortunate
Traveller (1594), and Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599), the
latter a pamphlet in praise of herring. Nashe’s “extemporal
vein” makes fullest use of the flexibility of colloquial
speech and delights in nonsense, redundancy, and
disconcerting shifts of tone, which demand an answering
agility from the reader. His language is probably the most
profusely inventive of all Elizabethan writers’, and he
makes even Greene’s low-life pamphlets (1591–92), with their
sensational tales from the underworld, look conventional.
His only rival is Thomas Deloney, whose Jack of Newbury
(1597), The Gentle Craft (1597–98), and Thomas of Reading
(1600) are enduringly attractive for their depiction of the
lives of ordinary citizens, interspersed with elements of
romance, jest book, and folktale. Deloney’s entirely
convincing dialogue indicates how important for the
development of a flexible prose must have been the example
of a flourishing theatre in Elizabethan London. In this
respect, as in so many others, the role of the drama was
crucial.
Richard Hakluyt
born c. 1552, London?
died Nov. 23, 1616, England
English geographer noted for his political
influence, his voluminous writings, and his
persistent promotion of Elizabethan overseas
expansion, especially the colonization of North
America. His major publication, The principall
Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the
English nation, provides almost everything known
about the early English voyages to North
America.
Hakluyt’s family was of some social standing in
the Welsh Marches and held property at Eaton.
His father died when Richard was five years old,
leaving his family to the care of a cousin,
another Richard Hakluyt, a lawyer who had many
friends among prominent city merchants,
geographers, and explorers of the day. Because
of these connections, and his own expertise in
overseas trade and economics, the man was well
placed to assist young Richard in his life work.
With the help of various scholarships,
Hakluyt was educated at Westminster School and
Christ Church, Oxford, entering in 1570 and
taking his M.A. degree in 1577. His interest in
geography and travel had been aroused on a visit
to the Middle Temple, one of the four English
legal societies, while in his early teens. As he
writes in the “Epistle dedicatorie” to The
principall Navigations, his cousin spoke to him
of recent discoveries and of the new
opportunities for trade and showed him “certeine
bookes of Cosmographie, with an universall Mappe.”
His imagination thus stirred, the schoolboy had
thereupon resolved to “prosecute that knowledge
and kinde of literature” at the university. Some
time before 1580 he took holy orders, and,
though he never shirked his religious duties, he
spent considerable time reading whatever
accounts he could find about contemporary
voyages and discoveries.
Hakluyt also gave public lectures—he is
regarded as the first professor of modern
geography at Oxford—and was the first to display
both the olde imperfectly composed, and the
new lately reformed Mappes, Globes, Spheares,
and other instruments of this Art for
demonstration in the common schooles.
He made a point also of becoming acquainted with
the most important sea captains, merchants, and
sailors of England. This was the time when
English attention was fixed on finding the
northeast and northwest passages to the Orient,
and on Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the
world. Hakluyt was concerned with the activities
of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Martin Frobisher,
who were both searching for a passage to the
East; was consulting Abraham Ortelius, compiler
of the world’s first atlas, and Gerardus
Mercator, the Flemish mapmaker, on
cosmographical problems; and was gaining
approval for future overseas exploration from
such politically prominent men as Lord Burghley,
Sir Francis Walsingham, and Sir Robert Cecil. He
thus embarked upon his career as a “publicist
and a counsellor for present and future national
enterprises across the ocean.” His policy,
constantly expounded, was the exploration of
temperate North America in conjunction with the
search for the Northwest Passage, the
establishment of England’s claim to possession
based on the discovery of North America by John
and Sebastian Cabot, and the foundation of a
“plantation” to foster national trade and
national well-being. These views are first set
out in the preface he wrote to John Florio’s
translation of an account of Jacques Cartier’s
voyage to Canada, which he induced Florio to
undertake, and are further developed in his
first important work, Divers voyages touching
the discouerie of America (1582). In this he
also pleaded for the establishment of a
lectureship in navigation. In 1583 Walsingham,
then one of the most important secretaries of
state, sent Hakluyt to Paris as chaplain to Sir
Edward Stafford, the English ambassador there.
He served in Paris also as a kind of
intelligence officer, collecting information on
the fur trade of Canada and on overseas
enterprises from French and exiled Portuguese
pilots. In support of Walter Raleigh’s
colonizing project in Virginia, he prepared a
report, known briefly as The Discourse on the
Western Planting (written in 1584), which set
out very forcefully the political and economic
benefits from such a colony and the necessity
for state financial support of the project. This
was presented to Queen Elizabeth I, who rewarded
Hakluyt with a prebend (ecclesiastical post) at
Bristol cathedral but took no steps to help
Raleigh. The Discourse, a secret report, was not
printed until 1877. In Paris, Hakluyt also
edited an edition of the De Orbe Novo of Pietro
Martire so that his countrymen might have
knowledge of the early successes and failures of
the Spaniards in the New World.
Hakluyt returned to London in 1588. The
outbreak of war with Spain put an end to the
effectiveness of overseas propaganda and the
opportunity for further exploration so he began
work on a project that he had had in mind for
some time. This was The principall Navigations,
Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation .
. . , which, by its scholarship and
comprehensiveness, transcended all geographical
literature to date; the first edition, in one
volume, appeared in 1589. About this time he
married Duglesse Cavendish, a relative of Thomas
Cavendish, the circumnavigator, and was
appointed to the parish of Wetheringsett in
Suffolk. Until after the death of his wife in
1597, little is heard of any geographical work,
but he then completed the greatly enlarged
second edition of the Voyages, which appeared in
three volumes between 1598 and 1600. Shortly
before its completion, he was granted by the
Queen the next vacant prebend at Westminster so
that he might be at hand to advise on colonial
affairs. He gave information to the newly formed
East India Company and continued his interest in
the North American colonizing project; he was
one of the chief promoters of the petition to
the crown for patents to colonize Virginia in
1606 and at one point contemplated a voyage to
the colony. Nor did his belief in the
possibility of Arctic passages to the East fade,
for he was also a charter member of the
Northwest Passage Company of 1612. In 1613
appeared the Pilgrimage of Samuel Purchas,
another clergyman fascinated with the new
discoveries of the age; in spirit, it was a
continuation of Hakluyt’s own work, and the two
editors probably became acquainted. Purchas
procured some of Hakluyt’s manuscripts after his
death and used them in Hakluytus Posthumus or
Purchas his Pilgrimes of 1625.
Works by Hakluyt in addition to those
mentioned above include translations of Antonio
Galvão’s Discoveries of the World . . . (1601)
and of Hernando de Soto’s account of Florida,
under the title Virginia richly valued by the
description of . . . Florida . . . (1609). But
it is the Voyages that remain his memorial.
This, the prose epic of the English nation, is
more than a documentary history of exploration
and adventure; with tales of daring it mingles
historical, diplomatic, and economic papers to
establish British right to sovereignty at sea
and to a place in overseas settlement. Its
overriding purpose was to stimulate, guide, and
encourage an undertaking of incalculable
national import. Hakluyt was not blind to the
profits arising from foreign trade. It has been
asserted that the income of the East India
Company was increased by £20,000 through a study
of Hakluyt’s Voyages.
Gerald Roe Crone
|
|
|
John Stow
born 1525, London, Eng.
died April 6, 1605, London
one of the best-known Elizabethan
antiquaries, author of a famous Survey of London
(1598; revised and enlarged, 1603).
Stow was a prosperous tailor until about
1565–70, after which he devoted his time to
collecting rare books and manuscripts, a hobby
that left him impoverished. Self-educated, with
a passion for learning, he became the friend of
famous antiquaries and was employed by Matthew
Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, to edit
medieval chronicles. He had already published an
edition of Chaucer (1561) and a Summarie of
Englyshe Chronicles (1565; many abridged
versions). His first original work was The
Chronicles of England (1580), revised as Annales
of England (1592).
The Survey, which is in the form of a
perambulation around the London wards, contains
details of the buildings, monuments, people,
life, and customs of London at a time of
transition from medieval to modern, along with
an account of the city’s origins and growth.
|
|
|
William Painter
born c. 1540
died February 1594, London, Eng.
English author whose collection of tales The
Palace of Pleasure, based on classical and
Italian originals, served as a sourcebook for
many Elizabethan dramatists.
Educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge,
Painter was ordained in 1560. In 1561 he became
a clerk of the ordnance in the Tower of London,
a position in which he appears to have amassed a
fortune out of public funds. In 1591 his son
Anthony confessed that he and his father had
abused their trust, but Painter retained his
office until his death.
The first volume of The Palace of Pleasure,
which appeared in 1566, contained 60 tales. It
was followed in the next year by a volume
including 34 new stories. An improved edition
(1575) contained seven more new stories. To its
popularity, and that of similar collections, is
due the high proportion of Elizabethan plays
with Italian settings.
Appius and Virginia, a Tragedy and Robert
Wilmot’s The Tragedy of Tancred and Gismund were
taken from Painter’s book, and it was also the
source for William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens
and All’s Well That Ends Well (and probably for
details in Romeo and Juliet and The Rape of
Lucrece), for Philip Massinger’s The Maid of
Honour and The Picture, and for James Shirley’s
Loves Crueltie.
|
|
|
Anthony Munday
born 1560?, London, Eng.—buried Aug. 9, 1633,
London
English poet, dramatist, pamphleteer, and
translator.
The son of a draper, Munday began his career as
an apprentice to a printer. In 1578 he was
abroad, evidently as a secret agent sent to
discover the plans of English Catholic refugees
in France and Italy, and under a false name he
obtained admission to the English College at
Rome for several months. On his return he became
an actor and a prolific writer. He published
popular ballads, some original lyrics, much
moralizing in verse, translations of many
volumes of French and Spanish romances, and
prose pamphlets, but only two of his many plays
were printed.
In 1581–82 Munday was prominent in the
capture and trials of the Jesuit emissaries
(many of whom he had known at Rome) who followed
the martyr Edmund Campion to England. Critics
have found his English Romayne Lyfe (1582) of
permanent interest as a detailed and
entertaining, though hostile, description of
life and study in the English College at Rome.
By 1586 he had been appointed one of the
“messengers of her majesty’s chamber,” a post he
seems to have held for the rest of Elizabeth I’s
reign.
Munday wrote at least 17 plays, of which only
a handful survive. He may be the author of
Fedele and Fortunio (c. 1584), an adaptation of
an Italian original; it was performed at court
and printed in 1585. His best-known plays are
two pseudo-histories on the life of the
legendary outlaw hero Robin Hood, The Downfall
of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon and The Death of
Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (both 1598). He was
probably the main author of Sir Thomas More (c.
1590–93), a play that William Shakespeare helped
to revise. Munday ceased to write plays after
1602, but during 1605–23 he wrote at least five
of the pageants with which the lord mayor of
London celebrated his entry into office. A
friend of the chronicler John Stow, he was
responsible for enlarged editions of Stow’s
Survey of London in 1618 and 1633.
|
|
|
Richard Hooker
born March 1554?, Heavitree, Exeter, Devon,
England
died November 2, 1600, Bishopsbourne, near
Canterbury, Kent
theologian who created a distinctive Anglican
theology and who was a master of English prose
and legal philosophy. In his masterpiece, Of the
Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, which was
incomplete at the time of his death, Hooker
defended the Church of England against both
Roman Catholicism and Puritanism and affirmed
the Anglican tradition as that of a “threefold
cord not quickly broken”—Bible, church, and
reason.
Early years and Oxford
Hooker was born at the end of 1553 or the
beginning of 1554 near the city of Exeter,
Devon. His family lacked the financial means to
send him to the University of Oxford, but, with
John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, as his patron,
in 1568 Hooker entered Corpus Christi College,
Oxford. The dominant influence in the Church of
England at that time was John Calvin’s
Institutes of the Christian Religion, and thus
Hooker was trained in the traditions of Genevan
Protestantism. Leading scholars at Oxford were,
however, loyal to the Anglican Book of Common
Prayer and used the vestments demanded by the
ecclesiastical law of the realm. Hooker, a
staunch Anglican, went beyond even liberal
Calvinism and read the best scriptural
interpretation of his day, the early Church
Fathers, and even Renaissance Thomism (the
philosophical school influenced by the thought
of St. Thomas Aquinas). He thus avoided the
limits of narrow academic Calvinism and became a
man of wide Renaissance learning. Hooker said
that he grew in his opinions and gave up narrow
conceptions previously held. Hooker became a
scholar of Corpus Christi College in 1573, took
his M.A. in 1577, and became a fellow of the
college that same year.
Master of the Temple
In 1585 Hooker was elected master of the
Temple Church in London. The other candidate for
this position was Walter Travers, an ardent
Calvinist who had written A Full and Plaine
Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline out of
the Word of God (1574); although he had not
received Anglican orders, he was made lecturer
(preacher) of the Temple Church. Hooker, a loyal
Anglican, preached in the morning, and Travers,
a firm Calvinist, in the afternoon. Thus it was
said that the Temple congregations heard
Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the
afternoon.
With the defeat of the Spanish Armada in
1588, the Church of England no longer faced the
possibility of the restoration of Roman
Catholicism in the country. However, the English
church was now challenged by Calvinism, not only
in doctrine but in ecclesiastical organization.
Small cells, or conventicles, of Reformed
worship were formed throughout the realm. Their
hold on general sympathy was so strong that even
the bishops were lukewarm about suppressing them
and allowed their growth to increase unchecked.
Travers, in fact, set up an organization in the
afternoon congregation on the model of the
Reformed Church in the Low Countries and chided
Hooker for not using the Reformed organization
in the Temple Church.
The difference between the two men was
radical. Hooker did not agree with many of the
decisions of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent
(1545–63), which attempted to reform the
Catholic church following the Protestant
Reformation, but he did approve of many of the
medieval Scholastic philosophers and
theologians, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, and he
used their teaching. This was anathema to
Travers, who thought of the teaching of the
Scholastics as sheer rubbish. Hooker seems to
have lived not in the parsonage of the Temple
but with John Churchman, a good friend of the
Church of England. There were two reasons for
this: first, the parsonage was not in good
repair, and, second, Travers lived there.
On February 13, 1588, while still master of
the Temple, Hooker married Joan Churchman,
daughter of his friend and host. Izaak Walton,
the English author and biographer, was
responsible for the story, accepted for 300
years, that Hooker’s future father-in-law
tricked him into the marriage with his ill-favoured
daughter. In 1940 it was proved by examination
of the Court of Chancery records about Hooker’s
estate that the story was a tale devised to
explain the incomplete state of the last books
of the Politie. Joan Churchman brought with her
a large dowry. At the time of his marriage
Hooker had no known financial means, and yet at
his death he left a considerable estate.
Title page of
Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie
|
His major work
Hooker left his position at the Temple
Church in 1591 and accepted the living of
Boscombe in Wiltshire. Despite his new position,
Hooker continued to live in his father-in-law’s
house, where he wrote his masterpiece, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. The Politie
was the final chapter of the so-called
admonition controversy: in June 1572 the London
clerics John Field and Thomas Wilcox had issued
from a secret press An Admonition to Parliament,
which demanded that Queen Elizabeth I restore
the “purity” of New Testament worship in the
Church of England. Although its consideration by
Parliament was forbidden by the queen, the
Admonition became the platform of the
Puritans—members of the Church of England who
wished for religious reforms along the lines
developed in Geneva by Calvin. The leading
bishops, now alarmed by the influence of the
Admonition, knew that an answer was needed, and
the archbishop of Canterbury turned to John
Whitgift, vice chancellor of the University of
Cambridge, to reply to the Admonition. Whitgift
responded and was answered in turn by Thomas
Cartwright, professor at Cambridge and the
leading Puritan clergyman. The controversy was
continued in a whole series of books.
The Admonition was still much in the mind of
England when Hooker left the Temple, and he
assumed the responsibility of replying to it.
The Politie was to be a work of eight books, but
the fifth book was the last one to appear in
Hooker’s lifetime. The tradition that his
manuscripts were destroyed by Puritan ministers
who were assisted by Hooker’s wife does not seem
to be correct. The incomplete condition of the
last books of the Politie merely means that
Hooker had not yet revised them at the time of
his death.
|
|
In the Politie, Hooker defended the
Elizabethan church against Roman Catholics and
Puritans. He upheld the threefold authority of
the Anglican tradition—Bible, church, and
reason. Roman Catholics put Bible and tradition
on a parity as the authorities for belief, while
Puritans looked to Scripture as the sole
authority. Hooker avoided both extremes,
allowing to Scripture absolute authority when it
spoke plainly and unequivocally; where it was
silent or ambiguous, wisdom would consult the
tradition of the church, but he insisted that a
third element lay in human reason, which should
be obeyed whenever both Scripture and tradition
needed clarification or failed to cover some new
circumstance. The core of Hooker’s thinking on
the relations of church and state is unity. In
his view, the Puritans adopted an impossible
position: they claimed to be loyal to the queen
while repudiating her church. By law and by
reason, the people of England must be Anglican,
pledged to serve Elizabeth as the supreme
magistrate of the country and the supreme
governor of the church.
According to tradition, Hooker served the
churches at Drayton Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire,
and Boscombe, Wiltshire, following his term as
master of the Temple, but more probably he
practiced pluralism, which means he received his
salary as a vicar but allowed a lesser clergyman
to perform the duties that the parish required.
In 1595 he accepted an appointment as vicar of
Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, and in 1597 the
fifth book of the Politie was published. He died
three years later and was buried at
Bishopsbourne.
John S. Marshall
|
|
|
Thomas Deloney
born 1543?, Norwich?, Eng.
died 1600
writer of ballads, pamphlets, and prose stories
that form the earliest English popular fiction.
By trade a silk weaver, probably of Norwich,
Deloney wrote topical ballads and, through his
pamphlets, took part in religious controversy.
He was proscribed in London for alleged sedition
but, as an itinerant weaver and ballad seller,
collected material in the provinces for his
prose stories. His “many pleasant songs and
pretty poems to new notes” appeared as The
Garland of Good Will (1593). His Jacke of
Newberie (1597), The Gentle Craft, parts i and
ii (1597–c. 1598), and Thomas of Reading (1599?)
furnished plots for such dramatists as Thomas
Dekker. The Gentle Craft is a collection of
stories, each devoted to glorifying one of the
crafts: the clothiers, the shoemakers, the
weavers.
Though widely read, Deloney was condemned by
the university-educated writers as a mere ballad
maker and purveyor of plebeian romance, and his
literary merits went unrecognized until the 20th
century.
|
|
