In the second half of the XV с.

Europe enters one of the greatest periods of its

history, the epoch of Renaissance. THE classical renascence implied a knowledge
and imitation of the great literary artists of the golden past of classical antiquity, and,
as a preliminary, a competent acquaintance with, and some power to use, the Latin
and Greek languages. Italy gave it birth and it gradually spread beyond the Alps into
Germany, France and England. In the end it created, almost imperceptibly, a
cosmopolitan republic of which Guillaume Budé and Erasmus disputed the
sovereignty, and where, latterly, Erasmus, by universal consent, ruled as chief.
Erasmus visited England for the first time in the summer of 1499. His visit had been
short, lasting about 6 months, just long enough to make him acquainted with the most
prominent scholars in England (John Colet, William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre and
Thomas More); and his correspondence enables us to judge of the progress which the
classical renascence had made there. These earliest English humanists are little more
than names and the influence they exerted on their own land, however real it may
have been, is obscure and scarcely discernible.

Royal rule, based on the city dwellers, subdued feudal power and founded
absolute national monarchies, which developed modern European nations and
modern capitalistic society; meanwhile nobility and middle class were severely
fighting, which was shown by German peasants’ war. It was a great progressive coup,
the epoch, which needed titans and gave birth to titans of thought, passion and
character, versatility and erudition. There was no prominent man then who didn’t
travel far, didn’t know four-five languages, didn’t shine with different kinds of art.
They all lived the interest of the time, took part in practical fight with either word and
pen or sword or both. England as well as other European countries was a product of
the time, a result of which was an absolute monarchy that appeared in the end of the
XV c. and reached its hight in the XVI c. All the old barons were eliminated during
the war of the Roses, so the monarch – Henry VII could unite all branches of power
and his son Henry VIII did even more. These two monarchs made the basis of
English absolute monarchy, which reached its peak during the reign of Elizabeth.
Parliament became the obedient loudspeaker of king’s will. New nobility, created by
Tudors, was one of the supports of absolute monarchy.

Second powerful point in centralization of king’s power was church

reformation. Henry VIII finished domination of Roman pope over English church.
Having refused to obey the Pope’s authority, king proclaimed himself a head of the
Anglican church. Church administration was centralized by king who assigned
biscops. As a head of church Henry VIII confiscated all the monastery property.
Monasteries were closed, monks - banished and all their lands got into king’s
treasury, ordered uncontrollably. Thus, Henry VIII focused secular and ecclesiastical
authorities. Reformation bred vast theological literature, reflecting the struggle; but
not all of them were real literal monuments: “The Book of Martyrs” (1563) by John
Foxe (1516-1587), telling оf Christian great martyrs of all ages, especially about
protestants’ persecution during the Catholic reaction of Bloody Mary. Second
significant literary work of the time was “The Laws of Ecclesiastical Policy” (1593)
by Richard Hooker (1554-1600) including main doctrines of the Anglican church.
Reformation brought generally accessible Bible, banned to be translated by Catholic
church. In the XVI c. and the beginning of the XVII c. there appeared ten Bible
translations, starting from William Tyndale’s (1525-1535). They prepared
"authorized text", created by 47 translators in 1611. Bible’s popularity stipulated
considerable influence of its language on the everyday speech and literature.

Catholicism was the stronghold of European reaction that had its supporters on
the British Isles. Short reign of Mary Tudor (1553-1558), famous in history as
Bloody Mary, was a time of feudal-catholic reaction that were presented later by
Scottish queen Mary Stewart who claimed English throne after Mary Tudor’s death.
They both used political strength of Spain that was much interested in English affairs.
Marriage between Mary Tudor and Phillip II of Spain gave him formal right to
intrude England’s life. Elizabeth’s accession (1558) doomed all the attempts of inner
reaction. Young queen’s government suppressed them energetically. Anglo-Spanish
rivalry intensified. Almost 30 years before the last battle there took place numerous
fights. The fight wasn’t only about the political principles. But economical ones as
well as young English state became a competitor to powerful Spain for colonies and
sea trade. In the summer of 1588 Phillip II sent huge Invincible Armade of 130 ships
to English shores with about 25000 people. As for the English navy only 34 ships
were governmental. The rest were private. English ships were smaller and
manoeuvred better and the weather helped as well resulting in a defeat of Spain.

The Renaissance is the Golden Age of the English literature. Actually small
nation (about 5 mln), 4/5 of which were illiterate, brought forward about 300 writers.
Most prominent being – Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey, John Skelton, Thomas Sackville, Thomas Norton, George Gascoigne, Phillip
Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas
Kyd, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Johnson, John Fletcher, Francis
Beaumont, George Chapman, John Marston, John Webster, Michael Drayton, Bacon,
and the greatest genius of the English literature - Shakespeare. The leading
ideological movement of the era that shaped content and artistic forms of literature,
was humanism, that arose in Italy and spreaded throughout Europe. The term
“humanism” had at first a narrow meaning. The science of the Middle Ages was
engaged mainly in divina studia, but in the Renaissance centre of interests shifted.
Everything connected with a human, I of all human word was under investigation
(humana studia). The works of this kind were obviously the memorials of antique
literature opposed to “God’s word” – The Scripture. Thus, the humanists – were
people who dedicated themselves to studying of “human word” – mostly
philosophers and writers of antiquity. That’s why the I and obligatory sign of
humanism was knowledge of Latin and Old Greek – the beginnings of the
humanities. "Humana studia" was at I a subject of private education, but slowly the
representatives of the movement penetrated into universities and created special
schools with humanities as the subject. When humanistic professors began to lecture
and analyze Plato, Plutarch, Galen and other at university chairs that meant
revolution in the sphere of ideology: humanistic knowledge extruded theology. At I it
bore expressly philological character: they studied Latin and Greek grammar, but
they were just a key to antique philosophy and literature, which was of paramount
importance for the humanists. Philological knowledge was the scientific basis of new
worldview aimed against feudal medieval world view, church doctrine.

English Renaissance and humanism was peculiar as the last one in Europe.
English Reformation led from above, freed English humanists from the fight as
royalty crushed political and economical power of church, its dictature. That’s why
we don’t notice the anti-clericalism in the literary work of Shakespeare and his
contemporaries as it was with Boccaccio in Italy, Rabelais in France, Ulrich von
Hutten in Germany. Church problems were important on the I period of English
Reformation. It was a period of activity of Oxford humanists and Thomas More (end
XV - I third XVI c.), when humanistic literature was of purely theoretical character.

II period of the English Renaissance – is so called “Elizabethan Age”, II half of

the XVI c., the peak of the English absolutism; national enthusiasm and consolidation
of a young country. The most important feature of political life was the balance of
noble and middle class forces, taken by a fever of inner accumulation and outer
expansion. This period is characterized by humanistic literature from the I humble
steps by Wyatt and Surrey to absolute poetic art. The flowering of poetry was
marked with names of Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare (as the author of sonnets,
“Venus and Adonis” and “Lucretia”). Prosaic lit-re also develops, especially novel
represented by Sidney, Lyly, Nashe, Lodge, Greene, etc. It was a golden age of
drama. If in the mid-century Heywood created primitive interludes, bishop Bale
wrote “King John” more as a morality play than a historical drama, there appeared
in the end of the c. “Tamerlan” and “Faustus” by Marlowe, “The Merchant of
Venice”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “Henry IV”, “Julius Caesar”, other Shakespeare’s I
period works.

This is the most optimistic period of the English humanism, period marked with
literature development along with nation’s development in the illusionary golden age
The beginning of the XVII c. was the beginning of the III and the last phase of the
English Renaissance. We can start it with Spenser’s death (1599), Essex treason
(1601) or Elizabeth’s death (1603). New social life features differentiated the I years
of James I reign especially in the violation of political balance. Each next year led to
the sharpening of the intergroup hatred. Intensification of class conflicts affected lit-
re. This can be noticed in Shakespeare’s tragedies period. In the beginning of the
XVII c. lit-re witnessed the decay of dramatic art and social and political tension.
Humanists of earlier decades foresaw this – Thomas More created his utopia of ideal
society, opposed to contemporary England; Shakespeare in “The Merchant of
Venice” and especially in “Timon of Athens” criticized middle class corruptive role
of money, absolute monarchy. This social position in the middle of the XVII с. was
supported by poet and revolutioner Milton.

POLITICAL JOURNALISM AND ENGLISH HUMANISM

English Renaissance literature developed in germaneness with European

humanistic literatures, being the last to catch the trend. English humanists were
taught by their continental colleagues, especially Italian humanists (XIV-XV cc.)
Italian lit-re from Petrarch to Ariosto and Tasso was an inexhaustible source of
advanced political, philosophical and scientific ideas, rich treasury of artistic images,
plots and forms for all English humanists from More to Bacon and Shakespeare. One
of the great Italian humanists Giordano Bruno’s stay in England (1583-1585) was
an important event in its history. He was in favour of queen Elizabeth and her
ministers and befriended Phillip Sidney, to whom he dedicated 2 of six English
written poems. He well knew Spenser and doctor Harvey, the inventor of blood
circulation. Even more important for English humanism were Erasmus of Rotterdam
visits to England, his stay and work there. In 1497 infamous young Erasmus visited
England at first. He was amazed by what he saw: “When I hear my Colet, I seem to be
listening to Plato himself. In Grocyn, who does not marvel at such a perfect round of learning?
What can be more acute, profound and delicate than the judgment of Linacre? What has nature ever
created more gentle, more sweet, more happy than the genius of Thomas More? I need not go
through the list. It is marvellous how general and abundant is the harvest of ancient learning in this
country.” [The Epistles of Erasmus, F. M. Nichols, 1901, vol. 1, p. 226, Ep. 110.]. The persons
named by Erasmus were the I English humanists. Their activity took place in the end
of the XV-beginning of the XVI c. The three older ones – Linacre, Grocyn and Colet
– were students of Italian humanism.

Thomas Linacre (1460-1524) was educated in Oxford, where he learned Greek.

Though only his Italian trip converted him to humanism. He met Angelo Poliziaano
and his lectures in Florence he gave for Lorenzo Medici sons. At the medici’s
household he also listened to a famous Greek Demetrius Halkondil’s lectures. He
befriended Ermolao Barbaro, who researched Plinius, Galen and other antique
doctors in Rome. In Venetia Linacre helped famous editor of humanistic lit-re Ald
Manutsius in his publication of Aristotle’s works. He won an academic debate in
Padua and got a MD, so having returned home he began to lecture at Oxford. One of
his students of Greek course was Thomas More. He taught Greek also at court and
wrote a grammar book for princess Mary. A talented doctor, Linacre destroyed many
misconceptions in medicine. He translated from Greek into Latin a few Galen’s
works thus spreading them in Europe.

The oldest of Oxford humanists William Grocyn (1446-1519) was a talented

educator. The most peculiar early humanist – John Colet (1467-1519), 1 of the
greatest scholars of the time under the influence of Savonarola, Marsilio Ficino and
Pico della Mirandola. He tried to used gained in Italy knowledge for religious and
church reforms. He claimed that primary form of Christianity was perverted by
Catholicism, which juxtaposes him with German humanists and Erasmus, whose
friend and teacher he was. Colet taught Erasmus textological criticism and showed
him that later perversion can be cured by turning to literary monuments of early
Christianity and it was under Colet’s influence that Erasmus published his critical
version of New Testament. Pedagogical work of Colet was of great cultural
importance. In 1504 he founded in London St. Paul’s School – a sample of school of
new humanistic type.

The activity of the first English humanists bore mainly scientific and theoretical
character. They cultivated general questions of religion, philosophy, sociology and
upbringing. Early English humanism was fully reflected in the beginning of the XVI
c. in the work of Thomas More. Henry VIII favoured More and whished to
approximate him, but More every time escaped king’s benevolence, trying to be free.
After undertaking a diplomatic mission to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V,
accompanying Thomas Wolsey to Calais, Thomas More was knighted and made
undertreasurer in 1521. In 1525 he became the Lancaster dukedom chancellor.
Besides he was the House of Commons’ Speaker and after cardinal Wolsey’s fall in
1529, against More’s wish, Henry VIII appointed him his lord-chancellor. Being not
able to agree with the means of Henry VIII in preparation of church Reformation,
More resigned in 1532, devoting himself to family and science. But the king couldn’t
forget him this. In 1534 More didn’t swear of approving of king’s reformative policy.
He refused to sign the Act of Supremacy and was sent to Tower. The inspired by
Henry VIII court acknowledged More’s guilty of treason and sentenced to death.
More was accused of witchcraft by means of which he made the king to write the
pamphlet. Henry VIII, however did him a favour and changed the violent punishment
with head severance. More exclaimed when learnt this: “God, save my friends from
such a favour”. The execution took place on the 6th of July 1535.

More’s literary heritage was collected after his death and published in 1557 by
his nephew. It includes Latin epigrams, early works; “Life of Pico della Mirandola”,
translated from Latin and published in 1510; “Life of Edward V”, I published in
1516; church reform pamphlets; dialogues and essays of his Tower imprisonment
period. His teachers and Erasmus inspired More with an idea of church purification
by means of primary Christianity revival. He was much influenced also by the works
of Italian humanist-Platonist Pico della Mirandola, however, later More became an
enemy of reformation. He was not as his teachers a study scholar but actively
participated in social life trying to find a solution to a sad situation the folk was in.
Plato’s ideal of an ideal country mixed with his own in his masterpiece “A fruitful
and pleasant work of the best state of public weal, and of the new isle called
Utopia” – originally published in Latin in 1516, I English transl. by Ralph Robinson
in 1551. It was translated into most European languages; new editions appear
continually; and it has become one of the world’s classics. It may have been
suggested by Plato’s “Republic” — but the books have little in common. It borrows
something from Augustine’s “De Civitate Dei”. Yet the book is thoroughly original.

It consists of two parts. At first More wrote a description of a fantastic country

Utopia, which made up the II part of the book, and then he added a conversation on
economical and political situation of modern European countries, which made up its
first part. "Utopia" is derived from the Greek words (οὐ) "not" and τόπος "place" with
the suffix -ία that is typical of toponyms; hence Outopía "no-place-land". Thus the
book opposes an ideal social system of Utopia to horrible disasters of modern
humankind. The work begins with written correspondence between Thomas More
and several people he had met on the continent The letters explain the lack of
widespread travel to Utopia; during the first mention of the land, someone had
coughed during announcement of the exact longitude and latitude. The first book tells
of the traveler Raphael Hythloday (in Greek, his name and surname allude to
archangel Raphael, purveyor of truth, and mean "speaker of nonsense"), to whom
More is introduced in Antwerp. The sailor, who was one of the companions of
Amerigo Vespucci, clearly reflects in his monologues and conversations the ideas of
the author while his journeys. It’s he who can judge the social system of England
while More is just a humble listener who later rendered the thoughts of Hythloday.
The first discussions with Raphael allow him to discuss some of the modern ills
affecting Europe such as the tendency of kings to start wars and the subsequent
bleeding away of money on fruitless endeavours. He also criticises the use of
execution to punish theft saying that thieves might as well murder whom they rob, to
remove witnesses, if the punishment is going to be the same. He lays most of the
problems of theft at the cause of enclosure—the enclosing of common land—and the
subsequent poverty and starvation of people who are denied access to land because of
sheep farming. More tries to convince Raphael that he could find a good job in a
royal court, advising monarchs, but Raphael says that his views are too radical and
would not be listened to. Hythloday doesn’t believe in the educated monarchy and the
kings-philosophers.

In the second book sailor describes the political arrangements of the imaginary
island country of Utopia. Utopia is placed in the New World and Raphael is one of
the 24 men Vespucci who then travels further and finds the island of Utopia, where
he spends five years observing the customs of the natives. The island was originally a
peninsula but a 15-mile wide channel was dug by the community's founder King
Utopos to separate it from the mainland. The island contains 54 towns, each with
about 6000 households. The capital city, Amaurot, is located directly in the middle of
the crescent island. Each town has a mayor elected from among the ranks of the
Bencheaters. Every household has between 10 and 16 adults and people are re-
distributed around the households and towns to keep numbers even. If the island
suffers from overpopulation, colonies are set up on the mainland. Alternatively, the
natives of the mainland are invited to be part of these Utopian colonies, but if they
dislike it and no longer wish to stay they may return. In the case of underpopulation
the colonists are re-called.

There is no private ownership on Utopia, with goods being stored in warehouses

and people requesting what they need. More used the novel describing an imaginary
nation as a means of freely discussing contemporary controversial matters;
speculatively, More based Utopia on monastic communalism. There are also no locks
on the doors of the houses, which are rotated between the citizens every ten years.
Agriculture is the most important job on the island. Every person is taught it and must
live in the countryside, farming, for two years at a time, with women doing the same
work as men. Parallel to this, every citizen must learn at least one of the other
essential trades: weaving (mainly done by the women), carpentry, metalsmithing and
masonry. There is deliberate simplicity about these trades; for instance, all people
wear the same types of simple clothes and there are no dressmakers making fine
apparel. All able-bodied citizens must work; thus unemployment is eradicated, and
the length of the working day can be minimised: the people only have to work six
hours a day (although many willingly work for longer). More does allow scholars in
his society to become the ruling officials or priests, people picked during their
primary education for their ability to learn. All other citizens are however encouraged
to apply themselves to learning in their leisure time. Utopians live in large families of
about 40 people each headed by father and mother, and each 30 families are headed
by a philarch, etc. The council of philarchs chooses a prince for all his life. All other
social positions are elective once per year. All important cases, concerning the
nation’s destiny, are solved by folk’s gathering. Other significant innovations of
Utopia include: a welfare state with free hospitals, euthanasia permissible by the
state, priests being allowed to marry, divorce permitted, premarital sex punished by a
lifetime of enforced celibacy and adultery being punished by enslavement. Meals are
taken in community dining halls and the job of feeding the population is given to a
different household in turn. Although all are fed the same, Raphael explains that the
old and the administrators are given the best of the food. Travel on the island is only
permitted with an internal passport and anyone found without a passport they are, on
a first occasion, returned in disgrace, but after a second offence they are placed into
slavery. In addition, there are no lawyers and the law is made deliberately simple, as
all should understand it and not leave people in any doubt of what is right and wrong.

There are several religions on the island: moon-worshipers, sun-worshipers,

planet-worshipers, ancestor-worshipers and monotheists, but each is tolerant of the
others. Only atheists are despised (but allowed) in Utopia, as they are seen as
representing a danger to the state: since they do not believe in any punishment or
reward after this life, they have no reason to share the communistic life of Utopia,
and will break the laws for their own gain. They are not banished but encouraged to
talk out their erroneous beliefs with the priests until they are convinced of their
wrong. Raphael says that through his teachings Christianity was beginning to take
hold in Utopia. The toleration of all other religious ideas is enshrined in a universal
prayer all the Utopians recite. Wives are subject to their husbands and are restricted
to conducting household tasks. Only few widowed women become priests. While all
are trained in military arts, women are still subordinate to men, with women
confessing their sins to their husbands once a month. Gambling, hunting, makeup and
astrology are all discouraged in Utopia.

The Utopians knew money and gold, but used them only in internal affairs
treating them with defiance inland. Like other humanists Thomas More disliked
pervasive role of money in society: “...Gold, useless by its nature, now is valued
everywhere to the extent that a human being, by means of whose and for whose merit
it is valued is valued less than gold itself...”. On the contrary, the Utopians, free from
the power of gold, make pots and other utensils from it. The Utopians eat in
wonderful common palaces-canteens, which serve themselves. However, everyone
can eat separately if s/he likes. They all wear clothes in the same style and of same
fabric. Thomas More paid attention to the differentiation between the city and the
village. The Utopians bound cities’ growth and don’t let them grasp fields or forests.
Every family has to live and work in the village not less than 2 years. There’s not
difference between physical and intellectual work in Utopia. However, some
Utopians have right of only intellectual work. These are officials and scientists, but
there’re almost no one who would refuse physical work.

More gave the best characteristic of social controversies of the time and found
brilliant solution for them, but he didn’t show the means of reaching this solution in
his novel. This conditioned literary form of the work. “Utopia” is a fantastic novel.
On the narrative level it’s a dialogue in the I part and a descriptive narrative in the II
in the manner of travelers of the time. Literary form of “Utopia” became classical.
Thus the title became a philosophical and social-political term. More’s ideas bred
socialistic ideas and “Utopia” bred many imitations: “City of sun” Tomaso
Campanella, “New Atlantis” by Bacon, “Oceana” by Harrington, etc.

ENGLISH POETRY OF THE RENAISSANCE

Of Skelton's date or location of birth, there is no certainty. He was born in the

early 1460s and his family may have originated in Yorkshire. He begun his education
at the University of Cambridge, from whence he moved to the University of Oxford.
He was advanced to the title of 'poet laureate' (a higher degree in rhetoric) at Oxford
in 1488. The title of laureate was also conferred on him by the University of Louvain
in 1492, and by Cambridge in 1493. Gaining fame as a rhetorician and a translator,
Skelton entered into the service of Henry VII in late 1488. The first work that can
reliably be attributed to him is the Elegy on the Death of the Earl of Northumberland
(1489). By this time, he had also completed his translation of Diodorus Siculus.
Skelton became tutor to Prince Henry, later King Henry VIII, and served in this
capacity from 1496 to 1501.
Skelton wrote a book on pedagogy, entitled Speculum Principis (1501). This
was one of many books of pedagogy written by Skelton, but the rest are since lost. In
1498, Skelton was consecutively ordained subdeacon, deacon, and priest of the
Abbey of St. Mary Grace. In the autumn of the same year, Skelton wrote The Bowge
of Courte (rewards of court), a satire of court politics, printed in 1499 by Wynken de
Worde. In 1501-1502 Skelton was involved in court disputes which led to a brief
imprisonment for delinquency in a debt. Skelton retired about 1503 and became
rector of the parish church in Diss, Norfolk, as the reward for his services. He stayed
in residence there until 1512. Around 1505, Skelton wrote Phyllyp Sparrowe, the
lament of a young woman for her pet bird. In 1509, Skelton wrote 'A Lawde and
Prayse Made for Our Souereigne Lord the Kyng' and in 1512 an elegy in Latin for
Henry VII at the request of the abbot of Westminster.
In 1512 he returned to court, and received the title 'Orator regius', King's Orator,
from Henry VIII. In the following years he wrote several poems on the defeat of the
French, the Scots, and James IV. The only surviving dramatic work by Skelton,
Magnyfycence, was written sometime around 1515-16. He began his attacks on
Cardinal Wolsey, shortly after 1518. These included Speak, Parrot (1521?), Colin
Clout (1521-22), and Why Come Ye Not to Court? (1522). Skelton's apologetic and
autobiographical The Garland of Laurel (1523) appeared after he had made peace
with Wolsey. In it, Skelton lists many works written by himself, which appear to have
been lost. Skelton's last poem, A Replycacion (1527), is a rebuke against two
Cambridge graduates for succumbing to heretical opinions. Skelton died peacefully
on 21 June 1529, the day that Catherine of Aragon pleaded before King Henry VIII.
The tradition that he died in sanctuary at Westminster cannot be proved. He was
buried in St. Margaret's Church with a 'Ryngyng off knylles and pealles'.
John Skelton

GO, pytyous hart, rasyd with dedly wo,

    Persyd with payn, bleding with wondes smart,
Bewayle thy fortune, with vaynys wan and blo.
    O Fortune vnfrendly, Fortune vnkynde thow art,
    To be so cruell and so ouerthwart,
To suffer me so carefull to endure,
That wher I loue best I dare not dyscure !

One there is, and euer one shalbe,

    For whose sake my hart is sore dyseasyd ;
For whose loue, welcom dysease to me !
    I am content so all partys be pleasyd :
    Yet, and God wold, I wold my payne were easyd !
But Fortune enforsyth me so carefully to endure,
That where I loue best I dare not dyscure.
Skelton, laureat,                      
At the instance of a nobyll lady.                

The New English Poetry

The reign of Henry VIII was not a period of unbroken internal peace.
Nevertheless, when the wars of the Roses were over and a feeling of security had
been induced by the establishment of a strong dynasty, a social and intellectual life
became possible in England which the troubles of the reigns of Henry VIII and his
two successors were sufficient to check but not to destroy. More important still,
England, having more or less settled her internal troubles by a judicious application
of the balancing system, became a power to be reckoned with in European politics.
This brought her into touch with the kingdoms of the continent, and so, for the first
time in a more than incidental way, submitted her intellectual life to the influences of
the renaissance. The inspiration of the new poetry was almost entirely foreign. It was
upon French, and, especially, upon Italian, models that the courtiers of Henry VIII
founded the poems which now began to be written in large numbers. The extent to
which the practice of versifying prevailed cannot now be gauged; but modern
investigation shows it to have been very wide. To make poems was one of the
recognised accomplishments of the knight as conceived in the last phase of chivalry;
and it is not, perhaps, too much to say that every educated man made poems, which,
if approved, were copied out by his friends and circulated in manuscript, or included
in song-books. It was not, however, till 1557 that some few were, for the first time,
put into print by Richard Tottel, in the volume, Songes and Sonettes, written by the
ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other, commonly
known as Tottel’s Miscellany.

The pioneer was Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was joined in the leadership by
Henry Howard, known as earl of Surrey. A sketch of their lives, especially of that of
the former, may be of interest as helping to show the extent to which England was
brought into touch with European influences. Thomas Wyatt was born in or about
1503, and was educated at Cambridge, possibly, also, at Oxford. In 1511, his father
was joint constable with Sir Thomas Boleyn of Norwich Castle, and, as a boy, he
made the acquaintance of a lady—Sir Thomas’s daughter Anne—with whose name
report was to link his own very closely. In 1525, after holding certain offices about
the person of the king, Thomas Wyatt accompanied Sir Thomas Cheney on a
diplomatic mission to France. In 1526–7, he was sent with Sir John Russell, the
English ambassador, to the papal court; and visited Venice, Ferrara, Bologna and
Florence. On his return, he was captured by the imperial forces under the constable of
Bourbon, but escaped. In 1537, he went as ambassador to the emperor, and remained
abroad, mainly in Spain, till 1539; in the April of that year he was recalled, in
consequence of the intrigues of his fellow-ambassador, Bonner. At the end of the
same year he was despatched to Flanders to see the emperor and followed him to
Paris, returning in 1540. He retired to his house at Allington, in Kent, and employed
his leisure in writing his satires and his paraphrase of the penitential psalms. In 1542,
we find him knight of the shire for Kent; and, in the summer of that year, hastening in
ill health on a mission to conduct the imperial ambassador to London, he caught a
fever, and died on the road, at Sherborne, on 11 October. One other episode of his life
remains to be mentioned. He was commonly regarded as, in youth, the lover of Anne
Boleyn; and it was reported that, when the king wished to make that lady his wife,
Wyatt informed him of his previous relations with her. Whatever the truth of an
obscure matter, Wyatt was chief ewer at the coronation of Henry’s second queen in
1533; and, though we find him committed to the Tower in May, 1536, the period of
her downfall, it was probably only as a witness. One of his sonnets, Whoso list to
hunt, has clear reference to Anne Boleyn, ending, as it does, with the line: “Noli me
tangere; for Caesar’s I am”; for, though it is imitated from Romanello or Petrarch
(157, Una candida cerva), it may yet be of personal application. His confinement in
May, 1536, was, undoubtedly, one of the facts in his life which induced him to regard
May as his unlucky month. It will be seen that Wyatt frequently travelled abroad, and
that he spent a period of some months in Italy. And it was from Italy that he drew the
ideas and the form by means of which English poetry was rejuvenated. The changes
which English versification passed through in the period between Chaucer and the
Elizabethans are described elsewhere. Neither the principles of rhythm and accent, it
would seem, not even the grammar of Chaucer were fully understood by his
followers, Lydgate, Occleve and Hawes. In place of Chaucer’s care in arranging the
stress and pause of his line, here is chaotic carelessness; and the diction is redundant,
feeble and awkward. Meanwhile, the articulate final -e, of which Chaucer made
cunning use, had been dropping out of common speech, and the accent on the final
syllable of words derived from the French, such as favour, virtue, travail, had begun
to move back to the first syllable, with the result of producing still further prosodical
confusion and irregularity. It was the mission of Wyatt and his junior contemporary,
Surrey, to substitute order for confusion, especially by means of the Italian influence
which they brought to bear on English poetry, an influence afterwards united by
Spenser with the classical influence.

Wyatt’s chief instrument was the sonnet, a form which he was the first English
writer to use. Of all forms, the sonnet is that in which it is most difficult to be
obscure, turgid, or irregular. Its small size and precise structure force on the writer
compression, point and intensity, for a feeble sonnet proclaims itself feeble at a
glance. No better corrective could have been found for vague thought, loose
expression and irregular metre; and the introduction of the sonnet stands as the head
and front of Wyatt’s benefaction to English poetry. His model—in thought, and, up to
a certain point, in form—was the sonnet of Petrarch, of whom he was a close
student. Wyatt’s sonnets number about thirty: ten of them are translations of
Petrarch, and two others show a debt to the same author. But either he did not
apprehend, or he deliberately decided not to imitate, the strict Petrarchian form; and
the great majority of the English sonneteers before Milton followed his example. The
main difference is this: that, whereas the sextet of the strict Petrarchian sonnet never
ends with a couplet, the sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Elizabethan sonnets in
general, nearly always do. The effect produced, that of a forcible ending, is opposed
to the strict principles of the sonnet, which should rise to its fullest height at the
conclusion of the octave, to sink to rest gradually in the sextet. But the final couplet
has been used so freely and to such noble ends by English writers that objection is out
of place. Wyatt was possibly induced to adopt this form partly by the existence of the
favourite Chaucerian rime royal stanza of seven lines, riming ababbcc. Of Wyatt’s
sonnets, two or three (e.g. Was never file; Some fowles there be; How oft have I) do
actually, by their sense, fall into two divisions of seven lines; but it is plain that this
was not the principle on which he constructed his sonnets. For the most part, the
separation of octave and sextet is clearly marked, and the rimes of the former are
arranged in Petrarchian fashion, abbaabba, with occasional variations, of which
abbaacca is a not uncommon form. He was a pioneer, and perfection was not to be expected of him. He
has been described as a man stumbling over obstacles, continually falling but always pressing forward.
Perhaps the best way of illustrating his merits and his shortcomings is to quote one of his sonnets in full;
and it will be convenient for the purpose to take his version of a sonnet of Petrarch which was also
translated by Surrey, in order to compare later the advance made by the younger writer.

The longe love, that in my thought I harber,

And in my hart doth kepe his residence,
Into my face preaseth with bold pretence,
And there campeth, displaying his banner.
She that me learns to love, and to suffer,
And willes that my trust, and lustes negligence
Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence,
With his hardinesse, takes displeasure.
Wherwith love to the hartes forest he fleeth,
Leavyng his enterprise with paine and crye,
And there him hideth and not appeareth.
What may I do? when my maister feareth,
But in the field with him to live and dye,
For good is the life, endyng faithfully.
The author of this sonnet clearly has much to learn. The scanning of harber,
banner, suffer, campeth, preaseth, forest as iambics is comprehensible; but, in line 6,
we have to choose between a heavy stress on the unimportant word my, or an
articulated final -e in lustes; while, in line 8, we can hardly escape hardìnesse, and
must have either takës again, or displè-a-sùre (a possibility which receives some very
doubtful support from line 8 of the sonnet, Love, Fortune, and my minde, in the
almost certainly corrupt version in the first edition of Tottel’s Miscellany). In lines 11
and 12, we find the curious fact that appeareth is rimed with feareth, not on the
double rime but on the last syllable only; while the last line throws a heavy emphasis
on the. The author, in fact, seems to have mastered the necessity of having ten
syllables in a decasyllabic line, but to be very uncertain still in questions of accent
and rhythm. Some of the lines irresistibly suggest a man counting the syllables on his
fingers, as, indeed, the reader is often compelled to do on a first acquaintance; on the
other hand, we find a beautiful line like the tenth, which proves the author however
unskilled as yet, to be a poet. The use of the caesura is feeble and often pointless, and
the total impression is that of a man struggling with difficulties too great for him. But
it is fair to remember two things: first, that pronunciation was then in a state of flux
(in one of his satires we find Wyatt scanning honour as an iambic and as a trochee in
the same line); secondly, that he made great advance in technique, and that some of
the ruggedness of his work (not including this sonnet), as it appears in the first edition
of Tottel’s Miscellany, is due to a faulty text, partly corrected in the second edition.
Nott, who published the original MS. in 1816, discovered that Wyatt had occasionally
marked the caesura with his own hand, and sometimes indicated the mode of
disposing of a redundant syllable. There are sonnets (e.g., Unstable dream) which run
perfectly smoothly—to say no more—showing that mastery came with practice, and
that errors were not due to want of correct aim and comprehension.
Henry Howard, earl of Surrey
The exact relation of Surrey to Wyatt has been a matter of dispute. The accident
of birth, no doubt, led to Surrey’s poems being placed before those of Wyatt in
Tottel’s Miscellany, and this accident may have induced commentators to regard
Surrey as the master of Wyatt, rather than to take the probably more truthful view,
that each influenced the other, but that Wyatt was the pioneer. He was, at any rate, an
older man than Surrey, who was born in 1516(?). Henry Howard was the eldest son
of lord Thomas Howard, son of Thomas, earl of Surrey and duke of Norfolk, and
himself became, by courtesy, earl of Surrey in 1524, on his father’s succeeding to the
dukedom. From a poem to which reference will be made later it seems possible that
he was educated with the duke of Richmond, Henry VII’s natural son, who, later,
married his sister. At any rate, he was brought up in all the virtues and practices of
chivalry, which find a large place in his poems. He visited the Field of the Cloth of
Gold with the duke of Richmond, possibly accompanied him thence to Paris to study
and lived with him, later, at Windsor. In 1536, the duke died, and the same year saw
the execution of Surrey’s cousin, Anne Boleyn. In 1540, we find him a leader in the
tournament held at the marriage of Anne of Cleves, and, after a mission to Guisnes,
he was appointed, in 1541, steward of Cambridge university. Part of the next year he
spent in the Fleet prison, on a charge of having sent a challenge; but, being soon
released on payment of a heavy fine, he began his military career by joining his father
in an expedition against the Scots. On his release, he was sent, in October, 1543, to
join the English troops then assisting the emperor in the siege of Landrecy; and, in
1544, he won further military honour by his defence of Boulogne. On his return, he
was thrown into prison at Windsor, owing to the intrigues of his father’s enemy, Jane
Seymour’s brother, the earl of Hertford; was released, again imprisoned, and
beheaded in January, 1546/7.
In his military prowess, his scholarship, his position at court, his poetry and his mastery in
chivalric exercises, Surrey is almost as perfect a knight as Sidney himself. And what strikes the
reader most forcibly in the love poems which form the bulk of his work is their adherence to the
code of the chivalric courts of love. There is not to be found in Surrey the independence, the
manliness or the sincerity of Wyatt. In his love poems, he is an accomplished gentleman playing a
graceful game, with what good effect on English poetry will be seen shortly. Surrey was formally
married at 16; but the subject of many of his poems was not his wife, but his “lady” in the chivalric
sense, the mistress whose “man” he had become by a vow of fealty. Setting aside the legends that
have grown up about this fair Geraldine, from their root in Nashe’s fiction, The Unfortunate
Traveller (1594), to the sober “biography” of Anthony à Wood and others, the pertinent facts that
may be regarded as true are no more than these: that Elizabeth Fitz-Gerald was a daughter of the
IX earl of Kildare, and, on her father’s death in the Tower, was brought up in the household of
princess Mary, becoming one of her ladies of the chamber. That she was a mere child when Surrey
first began to address poems to her confirms the impression received by the candid reader: these
poems, in fact, are the result, not of a sincere passion, but of the rules of the game of chivalry as
played in its decrepitude and Surrey’s youth. Like Wyatt, he takes his ideas from Petrarch, of whose
sonnets he translates four completely, while Ariosto provides another; and his whole body of poetry
contains innumerable ideas and images drawn from Petrarch, but assimilated and used in fresh
settings. The frailtie and hurtfulnesse of beautie; Vow to love faithfully howsoever he be rewarded;
Complaint that his ladie after she knew of his love kept her face alway hidden from him;
Description of Spring, wherin eche thing renewes, save onelie the lover; Complaint of a lover, that
defied love, and was by love after the more tormented; Complaint of a diyng lover refused upon his
ladies injust mistaking of his writyng—such are the stock subjects, as they may almost be called, of
the Petrarchists which Surrey reproduces. But he reproduces them in every case with an ease and
finish that prove him to have mastered his material, and his graceful fancies are admirably
expressed. Earlier we quoted Wyatt’s translation of a sonnet by Petrarch. Let us compare with it
Surrey’s version of the same:
Love that liveth, and reigneth in my thought,
That built his seat within my captive brest,
Clad in the armes, wherin with me he fought,
Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.
She, that me taught to love, and suffer payne,
My doutfull hope, and eke my hote desyre,
With shamefast cloke to shadowe and refraine,
       
Her smilyng grace converteth straight to yre.
And cowarde Love then to the hart apace
Taketh his flight, whereas he lurkes, and plaines
His purpose lost, and dare not shewe his face.
For my lordes gilt thus faultlesse byde I paynes.
Yet from my lorde shall not my foote remove,
Swete is his death, that takes his end by love.
The advance in workmanship is obvious at a glance. There is no need to count
Surrey’s syllables on the fingers, and the caesuras are arranged with variety and skill.
The first line contains one of the very few examples in Surrey’s poems of an accented
weak syllable (livèth), and there, as in nearly all the other cases, in the first two feet
of the line. It will be noticed, however, that, whereas Wyatt was content with two
rimes for his octave, in Petrarchian fashion, Surrey frankly makes up his sonnet of
three quatrains and a couplet, which was the form the sonnet mainly took in the
hands of his Elizabethan followers. Once or twice, Surrey runs the same pair of rimes
right through his first twelve lines; but gains, on the whole, little advantage thus.
Whichever plan he follows, the result is the same: that, improving on Wyatt’s efforts,
he makes of the sonnet—what had never existed before in English poetry—a single
symphonic effect. It is worth nothing, too, that, though his references to Chaucer are
even more frequent than Wyatt’s, Surrey polishes and refines, never leaving unaltered
the archaisms which Wyatt sometimes incorporated with his own language.
His clearest title to fame, however, rests on his translations from the Aeneid of
Vergil into blank verse. There is unrimed verse even in Chaucer (Tale of Melibeus);
and the movement against rime as a piece of medieval barbarity, which was
supported, later, by Gabriel Harvey and even by Campion and found its greatest
exponent in Milton, had already begun. Still, it is most likely that it was from Italian
poetry (possibly Molza’s translation of Vergil, 1541) that Surrey immediately drew
the idea. The merits of the translation do not very much concern us; the merit of
having introduced to England the metre of Tamburlaine the Great, The Tempest,
Paradise Lost and The Excursion is one that can hardly be overrated. Surrey’s own
use of the metre, if a little stiff and too much inclined to make a break at the end of
each line, is a wonderful achievement for his time, and a further proof of his genuine
poetical ability. We have referred to Surrey as a perfect knight; and, in one of his
poems, which all readers will possibly agree in thinking his best and sincerest, he
gives a picture of his youth which shows in little all the elements of the courtier-
knight. This is the Elegy on the duke of Richmond, as it has been called (So cruell
prison how coulde betide, alas), which he wrote early in 1546 during his
imprisonment in “proude Windsor,” the scene of his earlier and happier days. In this,
he draws a picture of the life led by himself and his friend. We hear, first of all, of the
large green courts whence the youths were wont to look up, sighing, to the ladies in
the Maidens’ Tower; then of the dances, the tales of chivalry and love; the tennis-
court, where the ball was often missed because the player was looking at the ladies in
the gallery; the knightly exercises on horseback and on foot; the love-confidences
exchanged; the stag-hunt in the forest; the vows of friendship, the bright honour. Here
is as clear and complete a picture of the standard of knighthood as any that exists; and
chivalry, decaying and mainly reminiscent as it may even then have been, was the
inspiration of Surrey’s life and of his poetry. It must be noted of him, too, that he
shows a fresh and original delight in nature, and was probably the author (as stated in
England’s Helicon) of the famous pastoral Phylida was a fayer mayde.

That the remainder of the authors in Tottel’s Miscellany are declared “uncertain”
does not, necessarily, mean that they were unknown. Men, and sometimes women,
wrote for the amusement of themselves and their friends, not for publication. Their
verses were handed round, copied out into the manuscript books, of which many
survive in public and private libraries, and admired in a small circle. Tottel’s
Miscellany is the first symptom of the breaking down of this bashful exclusiveness,
under the desire for poetry felt by lovers and by those outside the court circle who
had begun to share in the spread of knowledge and taste due to the renascence. It was
the “book of songs and sonnets” the absence of which Master Slender lamented in
The Merry Wives of Windsor. Reading had gone some way towards taking the place
of listening to the bard or jongleur, and Tottel was enterprising enough to attempt to
satisfy the new demand. But the authors—living and dead—remained, in many cases,
anonymous. The reigns of Edward VI and Mary, and, to a great extent, the latter part
of that of Henry VIII, were not favourable to the growth of poetry; and we find the
fellows and successors of Wyatt and Surrey content to carry on their tradition without
improving on the versification of the latter or adding to the stock of subjects and
ideas. Some of the authors, clearly, were familiar with the work of Boccaccio—the
story of Troilus and Cressida is a favourite reference—and one poem contains the
earliest English translation of a passage of Ovid, the letter of Penelope to Ulysses. As
regards the metres, “poulter’s measure” is the most prominent; decasyllables and
eights are common, and the rimes are often on the scheme of the rime royal stanza.
Alliteration, which Grimald favoured to some extent, is more common among the
“uncertain” authors than in Wyatt and Surrey.

The Poetry of Spenser

THE life of Spenser extended from the years 1552 to 1599, a period which
experienced a conflict of elementary intellectual forces more stimulating to the
emotions and imagination than, perhaps, any other in the history of England.
Throughout Europe, the time-honoured system of society which had endured since
the age of Charles the Great was undergoing a complete transformation. In
Christendom, so far as it was still Catholic, the ancient doctrines of the church and
the scholastic methods of interpreting them held their ground in general education;
but the weakening of the central basis of authority caused them everywhere to be
applied in different ethical senses. In a larger measure, perhaps, than any country,
English society was the stage of religious and political conflict. As the leader of the
protestant nations, England was surrounded by dangers that presently culminated in
the sending of the Spanish armada. Her ancient nobility, almost destroyed by the wars
of the Roses, had been supplanted by a race of statesmen and courtiers called into
existence by the crown, and, though the continuity of Catholic tradition was still
preserved, the sovereign, as head of the church, exerted almost absolute power in the
regulation of public worship. The poet whose name is rightly taken as representative
of the general movement of literature in the first half of Elizabeth’s reign was well
fitted by nature to reflect the character of this spiritual conflict. A modest and
sympathetic disposition, an intelligence philosophic and acute, learned industry, a
brilliant fancy, an exquisite ear, enabled Spenser’s genius to respond like a musical
instrument to each of the separate influences by which it was stirred. His mind was
rather receptive than creative. All the great movements of the time are mirrored in his
work. In it is to be found a reverence for Catholic tradition modified by the moral
earnestness of the reforming protestant. His imagination is full of feudal ideas,
warmed into life by his association with men of action like Sidney, Grey, Ralegh and
Essex, but coloured by a contrary stream of thought derived from the philosophers of
the Italian renascence. Theological conceptions, originating with the Christian
Fathers, lie side by side in his poetry with images drawn from pagan mythology, and
with incidents of magic copied from the medieval chroniclers. These imaginative
materials are, with him, not fused and assimilated in a form of direct poetic action as
is the case in the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton; but, rather, are given an
appearance of unity by an allegory, proceeding from the mind of the poet himself, in
a mould of metrical language which combines native words, fallen out of common
use, with a syntax imitated from the great authors of Greece and Rome. In respect of
what was contributed to the art of Spenser by his personal life and character, it is
often difficult to penetrate to the reality of things beneath the veil of allegory with
which he chooses to conceal his thoughts. We know that he was born in London in
1552, the son of a clothier whose descent was derived from the same stock as the
Spencers of Althorp. To this connection the poet alludes in his pastoral poem Colin
Clout’s Come Home Again, when, praising the three daughters of Sir John Spencer,
he speaks of

The honor of the noble familie:

Of which I meanest boast my selfe

to be.

We know, also, that he was one of the first scholars of the recently founded
Merchant Taylors’ school, from which he passed as a sizar to Pembroke Hall,
Cambridge, on 20 May, 1569. Furthermore, it is evident, from the sonnets
contributed, in 1569, to A Theatre for Worldings, that he must have begun early to
write poetry. Spenser was strongly influenced by the religious atmosphere of his
college. Cambridge protestantism was, at this time, sharply divided by the dispute
between the strict disciplinarians in the matter of church ritual, headed by Whitgift,
master of Trinity, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, and those followers of
Cartwright, Lady Margaret professor of Divinity, from whom, in course of time,
came forth the Martin Marprelate faction.

But, however staunchly he held to the principles of the reformed faith, his
protestantism was modified and softened by another powerful movement of the time,
namely, the study of Platonic philosophy. The revival of Platonism which began
with the renaissance was the natural antithesis to the system of Aristotelian logic, as
caricatured by the late schoolmen; but it was also distinct from the Christianised Neo-
Platonism which culminated in the IX c., when Joannes Scotus (Erigena) popularised
the doctrines of the so-called Dionysius the Areopagite, embodied in his book The
Celestial Hierarchy. Modern Platonism implied an interpretation of the Scriptures in
the light of Plato’s philosophy studied, generally, at the fountain head, and
particularly in the dialogues of The Republic, Timaeus and the Symposium.
Originated in the Platonic academy at Florence by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, it
was taken up by the reforming party throughout Europe, and was especially favoured
in the universities of Paris and Cambridge.
After taking his B.A. degree in 1573, and proceeding to his M.A. degree in
1576, he seems to have left the university, and to have paid a visit of some length to
his relatives in Lancashire. There, he probably made the acquaintance of the
unknown lady who, in his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey, in The Shepheards
Calender and in Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, is celebrated under the name of
Rosalind. There is nothing in the pastoral allusions to her indicating that Spenser’s
attachment involved feelings deeper than were required for literary panegyric. Since
the time of Petrarch, every woman commemorated by Italian or English poets had
been of one type, beautiful as Laura, and “cruel” enough to satisfy the standing
regulations prescribed by the old courts of love. His Amoretti or sonnets, written in
praise of the lady whom he married towards the close of his life, are no better than
the average compositions of the class then fashionable. The “cruelty” of Rosalind,
probably not much more really painful to the poet than that caused in his later years
by “Elisabeth,” was recorded in a more original form, in so far as it gave him an
opportunity of turning his training in Platonic philosophy to the purposes of poetical
composition. His two Hymnes in honour of Love and Beautie, though not published
till 1596, were the product of his “green youth,” and it may reasonably be concluded that they were
among the earliest of his surviving works. The poet, however, by showing how truly he himself
comprehended the philosophy of Love and felt his power, conveyed an ingenious compliment to his
mistress:

Love, that long since hast to thy mighty powre

Perforce subdude my poor captivëd hart,
And, raging now therein with restlesse stowre,
Doest tyrannize in everie weaker part;
Faine would I seeke to ease my bitter smart
By any service I might do to thee,
Or ought that else might to thee pleasing bee.

Love, he thinks, would doubtless be best pleased with an exposition of the   10

doctrines of true love: hence his elaborate analysis of the passion, in which he
follows, step by step, the Symposium of Plato, or, rather, Ficino’s commentary on
that dialogue. Spenser, taking up Ficino’s reasoning about the two ages of Love,
combines it with the mythological account of Love’s birth reported by Socrates
from Diotima in the Symposium.
After spending some time in Lancashire, he was brought south, through the
influence of his friend, and employed in the service of the earl of Leicester. In this
capacity, he made the acquaintance of Leicester’s nephew, Philip Sidney, whose
ardent imagination and lofty spirit greatly stimulated him in the prosecution of his
poetical designs. He became one of an “Areopagus”, in which Sidney and Dyer
were the leading spirits, and the prime object of which was to naturalise in the
language a system of versification based on quantity. He himself ventures on some
experiments in this direction so wretched in execution as to remove all grounds for
wonder at the poor quality of his compositions in Latin verse. Whatever were the
precise reasons that determined Spenser to make his first poetical venture in the
region of pastoral poetry, there can be no doubt that he must have perceived the
opportunities afforded to invention by the practice of his literary predecessors. In
the first place, the eclogue gave great scope for allegory.
The Shepheards Calender was published in 1579. It was dedicated to “The
Noble and Vertuous Gentleman, worthy of all titles both of Learning and Chevalrie,
M. Philip Sidney.” With characteristic diffidence, the poet hesitated in giving his
work to the world, partly from the fear, as he confesses in a letter to Harvey, of
“cloying the noble ears” of his patron, and thus incurring his contempt, partly because
the poem itself was written in honour of a private person, and so might be thought
“too base for his excellent Lordship.” Sidney hastened to show that these
apprehensions were groundless, by bestowing high praise on The Shepheards
Calender, in his Defence of Poesie, qualified, indeed, by one important censure:
“That same framing of his style to an olde rusticke language, I dare not allow: since
neither Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazara in Italian, did affect it.”
For the age of Elizabeth it bore immediate fruit. On the one hand, Sidney’s praise
gave a vogue to the pastoral style; on the other, his censure of rusticity in language
warned those who attempted the pastoral manner off Spenser’s example. Drayton, in
his Eclogues, while preserving the clownish nomenclature of The Shepheards
Calender, takes care to make his speakers discourse in the language of polished
literature.
Spenser would have confined himself to a rendering of the traditional idea of
pastoral love adapted to the changes of the different seasons; but, as a mater of fact,
the unity of the design lies solely in an allegorical calendar, treated ethically, in
agreement with the physical characteristics of the different months. The idea of love
is presented prominently only in four of the eclogues, viz. those for January, March,
June and December: of the rest, four, those for February, May, July and September,
deal with matters relating to morality or religion; two are complimentary or elegiac,
those for April and November; one, that for August, describes a singing match pure
and simple; and one, that for October, is devoted to a lament for the neglect of poetry.
It we look away from the authorised account of Spenser’s design in The Shepheards
Calender to the actual gestation of the poem in his imagination, it is plain that, before
constructing his general idea, he had carefully studied the pastoral practice of
Theocritus, Bion, Vergil, Mantuan and Marot. For this purpose, he chose, as the basis
of his entire work, an allegory founded on the widely popular Kalendrier des Bergers
—a almanac describing the tasks of shepherds in the different months of the year—and resolved to include
within his poetical edifice the various subjects hitherto handled in the eclogue. In dealing with the subject
of love, he naturally took as his models the Greek and Latin idyllists, who had preceded him with many
complaints of shepherds unfortunate in their wooing. But the direct expression of passion by these pagan
poets had to be harmonised with the sub-tone of Platonism imported into amorous verse by the
troubadours and Petrarch. Colin Clout, the love-lorn shepherd, whose lamentations run, more or less,
through all seasons of the year, has been treated by Rosalind, “the widowe’s daughter of the glenne,” with
the “cruelty” prescribed to ladies in the conventional rules of the courts of love and utters his despair, in
the winter months of January and December. His feelings are much more complex than those ascribed for
example, by Theocritus to the lover of Amaryllis, and, in the following stanza, it is plain that the pastoral
sentiment has been transferred from the fields to the artificial atmosphere of court life:
A thousand sithes I curse that carefull hower
Wherein I longd the neighbour towne to see,
And eke tenne thousand sithes I blesse the stoure
Wherein I sawe so fayre a sight as shee:
Yet all for naught: such sight hath bred my bane.
Ah, God! that love should breede both joy and payne!
Again, in the complaint of Colin in December, the essential motive is distinctly
literary: it lies much less in the lover’s pain than in the recollections of his untroubled
youth, that is to say, in a passage of this character in Marot’s Eglogue au Roy, which
Spenser has very closely imitated. So, also, in the March eclogue, where the dialogue
is carried on between two shepherds called Thomalin and Willie, the real motive is to
imitate Bion’s second idyll—containing a purely pagan conception of love—in the
rustic style specially devised by Spenser for his speakers. The result is not very
happy. Bion’s idyll is, really, an epigram. It describes how a boy fowler spied Love
sitting like a bird on a tree, and how he vainly endeavoured to ensnare him with all
the arts he had lately learned. The boy relates his want of success to an old bird-
catcher who had taught him, and is bidden to give over the chase, since, when he
attains to man’s estate, instead of trying to catch Love, he will regret being caught by
him. Spenser’s imitation of this is comparatively clumsy. He represents two young
shepherds talking together in a manner befitting the spring season. Thomalin tells his
friend how he recently startled from the bushes a “naked swayne” (so Moschus
describes Love) and how he shot at him with his arrows till he had emptied his
quiver, when he ran away in a fright, and the creature shot at him, and hit him in the
heel. Willie explains to his friend that the swain was Love, a fact with which he is
acquainted because his father had once caught him in a fowling net, fortunately
without his bow and arrows. The eclogue concludes, as usual, with “emblems”
chosen by the two speakers. The epigrammatic terseness of Bion, whose idyll is
contained in sixteen lines, is lost in Spenser’s diffuse description, which runs to one
hundred and seventeen. No less melodious are the lyrical songs which, in the
eclogues for April and November, he turns to the purposes of compliment or elegy,
and which anticipate the still more exquisite music of the Prothalamion and
Epithalamion, the work of his later years.

In The Faerie Queene, Spenser applies the allegorical method of composition

on the same principle as in The Shepheards Calender, but, owing to the nature of the
theme, with great difference in the character of the results. He had taken up the idea
of allegorising romance almost at the same time that he contemplated the pastoral. He
was soon called away to more practical work by accepting, in 1580, the position of
secretary to lord Grey, who had been appointed lord deputy in Ireland. Public duties
and the turbulent state of the country, doubtless, only allowed him intervals of leisure
for excursions into the “delightful land of Faerie,” but we know that he continued to
develop his design—of which he had completed the first, and a portion of the second,
book before leaving England—for the work is mentioned by his friend Lodowick
Bryskett as being in progress in 1583. Spenser’s name appears as one of the
“undertakers” for the colonisation of Munster, in 1586, when he obtained possession
of Kilcolman castle, the scenery in the neighbourhood of which he often mentions in
The Faerie Queene. Here, in 1589, he was visited by Ralegh and read to him the three
books of the poem which were all that he had then completed. Ralegh, delighted with
what he heard, persuaded Spenser to accompany him to England, no doubt holding
out to him prospects of preferment at court, whither the two friends proceeded in the
winter of 1589. The first portion of The Faerie Queene was published in 1590.

In estimating the artistic value of this poem, we ought to consider not only what
the poet himself tells us about the design, but the motives actually in his mind, so far
as these discover themselves in the execution of the work. Allegory, no doubt, is its
leading feature. The book, says Spenser, is “a continued allegory or darke conceit.”
While adopting the form of the romantic epic as the basis of allegory throughout his
entire poem, Spenser seems soon to have discovered that he could only travel easily
by this path for a short distance. In his first two books, indeed, it was open to him to
represent chivalrous action of an allegorical character, which might be readily
understood as a probation undergone by the hero, prince Arthur, in the moral virtues
of holiness and temperance. The first book shows the militant Christian, in the person
of the Red Cross Knight, travelling in company with Una, the lady of his love,
personifying wisdom or the highest form of beauty, on an enterprise, of which the
end is to free the kingdom of Una’s parents from the ravages of a great dragon, the
evil one. The various adventures in which the actors in the story are involved are well
conceived, as setting forth the different temptations to which the Christian character
is exposed; and this idea is still more forcibly worked out in the second book, which
illustrates the exercise of temperance; for, here, the poet can appropriately ally the
treatment of this virtue in Greek philosophy with the many allusions to it in the New
Testament. In the allegories of the house of Mammon, the house of Alma and the
bower of Bliss, the beauty of the imagery is equalled by the propriety with which
treasures of learning are employed to bring the moral into due relief. At this point,
however, the capacities of the moral design, as announced by the poet, were
exhausted.

“To fashion a gentleman or noble person” in the discipline of chastity, the

subject of the third book, would have involved an allegory too closely resembling the
one already completed; and it is significant that a female knight is now brought upon
the scene; while, both in the third and in the fourth book, the moral is scarcely at all
enforced by allegory, but almost always by “ensample,” or adventure. Justice, the
virtue exemplified in the fifth book, is not, as would be anticipated from the preface,
an inward disposition of the knightly soul, but an external condition of things,
produced by the course of politics—scarcely allegorised at all—in real countries such
as Ireland, France and the Netherlands; on the other hand, the peculiarly knightly
virtue of courtesy is, in the sixth book, illustrated, also with very little attempt at
allegory, by means of episodes of adventure borrowed, almost directly, from the
romantic narrative of the Morte d’ Arthur.

He explains in his letter to Ralegh why his poem is called The Faerie Queene:
“In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceive the
most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land.
And yet, in some places els, I doe otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons,
the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady, this
latter part in some places I do expresse in Belphœbe, fashioning her name according to your owne
excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phoebe and Cynthia being both names of Diana.) So in the person of
Prince Arthure I sette forth magnificence in particular; which vertue, for that (according to Aristotle
and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all, therefore in the whole
course I mention the deedes of Arthure applyable to that vertue, which I write of in that booke. But
of the XII. other vertues I make XII. other knights the patrones, for the more variety of the history:
Of which these three bookes contayn three.”
This ambiguity of meaning is intensified by the mixture of Christian with pagan
imagery, and by the blending of classical mythology, both with local antiquarian
learning and with the fictions of romance. In the fifth canto of the first book, for
example, Duessa, or Papal Falsehood, goes down to hell, under the guidance of
Night, to procure aid from Aesculapius for the wounded paynim Sansfoy, or
Infidelity; and her mission gives an opening for a description of many of the torments
mentioned in Vergil’s “Inferno.” On her return to the upper air, she goes to the
“stately pallace of Dame Pryde,” in whose dungeons are confined many of the proud
men mentioned in the Old Testament, or in Greek and Roman history. Shortly
afterwards, prince Arthur relates to Una his nurture by the supposed historic Merlin;
and the latter, in the third book, discloses to Britomart the line of British kings, as
recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and prophesies the reign of Elizabeth. Such
profusion of material and multiplicity of motive, while it gives to The Faerie Queene
an unequalled appearance of richness and splendour, invalidates the profession of
Spenser that the poem is “a continued allegory.” The sense of Spenser’s allegory does
not lie in its external truth: its value is to be found in its relation to the beauty of his
own thought, and in the fidelity with which it reflects the intellectual temper of his
time.

To sum up the foregoing sketch of the poetry of Spenser, it will be seen that he
differed from the great European poets who preceded or immediately succeeded him,
in that he made no attempt to represent in his verse the dominant moving spirit in the
world about him. Chaucer and Shakespeare, the one in the fabliau, the other in the
romantic drama, held “the mirror up to nature” and showed “the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure.” Milton succeeded in telling the Christian story of the
loss of Eden in the form of the pagan epic. While Dante, like Spenser, made allegory
the basis of his poetical conception, no more vivid picture can be found of
contemporary life and manners in Italian cities under the Holy Roman Empire than in
The Divine Comedy. But, in the conduct of his story, Spenser never seems to be in
direct touch with his times: his personages, knights or shepherds, wear plainly the
dress of literary masquerade; and, though the fifth book of The Faerie Queene,
published in 1596, deals allegorically with such matters as the revolt of the
Netherlands and the recantation of protestantism by Henri IV of France, it contains
no allusion to the Spanish armada. The very absence of clear drift and purpose in the
allegory of The Faerie Queene made it a faithful mirror of the spirit of the age.
Through all the early portion of Elizabeth’s reign, in which the poetical genius of
Spenser formed itself, the nation, in its most influential elements, showed the doubt
and hesitancy always characteristic of times of transition.
A clergy, halting between catholic tradition and the doctrines of the reformers; a
semi-absolute queen, coquetting in her foreign policy between a rival monarch and
his revolted subjects; a court, in which the chivalrous manners of the old nobility
were neutralised by the Machiavelian statecraft of the new courtiers; a commercial
enterprise, always tending to break through the limits of ancient and stable custom:
these were the conditions which made it difficult for an English poet, in the middle of
the sixteenth century, to form a view, at once clear and comprehensive, of life and
action. Spenser himself evidently sympathised strongly with the old order that was
passing away. He loved the time-honoured institutions of chivalry, closely allied to
catholic ritual; he reverenced its ideals of honour and courtesy, its exalted woman-
worship, its compassion for the poor and suffering. But, at the same time, he was
strongly impelled by two counter-movements tending to undermine the ancient fabric
whose foundations had been laid by Charles the Great: the zeal of the protestant
reformer, and the enthusiasm for letters of the European humanist. The poetical
problem he had to solve was, how to present the action of these antagonistic forces in
an ideal form, with such an appearance of unity as should satisfy the primary
requirements of his art. To fuse irreconcilable principles in a directly epic or dramatic
mould was impossible; but it was possible to disguise the essential oppositions of
things by covering them with the veil of allegory. The unity of his poetical creations
lies entirely in the imaginative medium through which he views them. His poetical
procedure is closely analogous to that of the first Neo-Platonists in philosophy. Just
as these sought to evolve out of the decayed forms of polytheism, by means of Plato’s
dialectic, a new religious philosophy, so, in the sphere of poetry, Spenser attempted
to create, for the English court and the circles immediately connected with it, from
the perishing institution of chivalry, an ideal of knightly conduct. Glimpses of real
objects give an air of actuality to his conception; his allegory, as he himself declares
in his preface to The Faerie Queene, has reference to “the most excellent and glorious
person of our Soveraine the Queen.” The diction and the versification of Spenser
correspond felicitously with the ideal character of his thought. As in the later case of
Paradise Lost, what has been justly called the “out-of-the-world” nature of the
subject required, in The Faerie Queene, a peculiar vehicle of expression. Though it
be true that, in affecting the obsolete, Spenser “writ no language”; though, that is to
say, he did not attempt to amplify and polish the living language of the court, yet his
mixture of Old English words with classical syntax, in metres adapted from those
used by Chaucer, produces a remarkably beautiful effect. Native oppositions of style
disappear in the harmonising art of the poet. Though ill-qualified to be the vehicle of
epical narrative, the Spenserian stanza has firmly established itself in the language, as
a metre of admirable capacity for any kind of descriptive or reflective poetry; and it is
a striking illustration of what has been said in the foregoing pages that it has been the
instrument generally chosen by poets whose genius has approached nearest to the art
of the painter, or who have sought to put forward ideas opposed to the existing
condition of things. It is employed by Thomson in The Castle of Indolence, by
Keats in The Eve of St. Agnes, by Shelley in The Revolt of Islam and by Byron in
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. To have been the poetical ancestor of the poetry of
these illustrious writers shows how deeply the art of Spenser is rooted in the
imaginative genius of his country, and he needs no better monument than the stanza
in his own Ruines of Time:
For deeds doe die, however noblie donne,
And thoughts of men do as themselves decay;
But wise wordes, taught in numbers for to runne,
        Recorded by the Muses, live for ay;
Ne may with storming showers be washt away,
Ne bitter-breathing windes with harmfull blast,
Nor age, nor envie, shall them ever wast.

The Elizabethan Sonnet

The sonnet, which, for practical purposes, may be regarded as an invention of
XII c. Italy, slowly won the favour of English poets. Neither the word nor the thing
reached England till the third decade of the XVI c., when English sonnets were first
written, in imitation of the Italian, by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey. But
these primary efforts form an isolated episode in English literary history; they began
no vogue. A whole generation—more than a quarter of a century—separated the final
sonneteering efforts of Surrey and Wyatt from the birth of the Elizabethan sonnet. At
first, the Elizabethan growth was sparse; nor did it acquire luxuriance until queen
Elizabeth’s reign was nearing its last decade. Then, sonneteering became an
imperious and universal habit, a conventional recreation, a modish artifice of
gallantry and compliment. No poetic aspirant between 1590 and 1600 failed to try his
skill on this poetic instrument. During those ten years, more sonnets were penned in
England than in any other decade. The harvest of Elizabethan sonneteering is a
strange medley of splendour and dulness. The workers in the field included Sidney,
Spenser and Shakespeare, who, in varying degrees, invested this poetic form with
unquestionable beauty. Shakespeare, above all, breathed into the sonnet a lyric
melody and a meditative energy which no writer of any country has surpassed. It is
the value attaching to the sonneteering efforts of this great trio of Elizabethan poets,
and to some rare and isolated triumphs of their contemporaries, Daniel, Drayton and
Constable, which lends to the Elizabethan sonnet aesthetic interest.
It bears graphic witness to the Elizabethan tendency to borrow from foreign
literary effort. Even the greatest of Elizabethan sonneteers did not disdain occasional
transcription of the language and sentiment of popular French or Italian poetry. The
influence which Wyatt and Surrey, the English pioneers of the sonnet, exerted on the
Elizabethan sonneteers is shadowy and indeterminate. Their experiments, as has been
seen, were first published posthumously in 1557 in Tottel’s Miscellany, which
included verse from many other pens. The sixty sonnets contained in Tottel’s volume
—for the most part primitive reflections of Petrarch—represent, so far as is known,
all the English sonneteering work which was in being when queen Elizabeth’s reign
opened. George Gascoigne, in his treatise on poetic composition, which appeared as
early as 1575, accurately described the normal construction of the sonnet in sixteenth
century England when he wrote: “Sonnets are of fouretene lynes, every line
conteyning tenne syllables. The firste twelve do ryme in staves of foure lines by crosse
meetre, and the last two ryming togither do conclude the whole”.
Though Tottel’s Miscellany was reprinted seven times between 1557 and 1584,
and acquired general popularity, little endeavour was made during those seven and
twenty years to emulate its sonneteering experiments. Despite Wyatt and Surrey’s
efforts, it was by slow degrees that the sonnet came to be recognised in Elizabethan
England as a definite species of verse inviting compliance with fixed metrical laws.
George Gascoigne, although he himself made some fifteen experiments in the true
quatorzain, accurately diagnosed contemporary practice when he noted, in 1575, how
“some thinke that all Poemes (being short) may be called Sonets, as in deede it is a
diminutive worde derived of Sonare.” Writers like Thomas Lodge and Nicholas
Breton, who made many experiments in the true sonnet form, had no hesitation in
applying the term to lyric efforts of varied metre and in stanzas of varied length,
which bore no relation to the quatorzain. As late as 1604, Nicholas Breton brought
out a miscellany of poetry under the general title, The Passionate Shepheard; the II
part bore the designation “Sundry sweet sonnets and passionated Poems,” each of
which is separately headed “Sonet I,” and so forth; but two only of the poems are
quatorzains and those in rambling lines of fourteen syllables. The long continued
misuse of the word illustrates the reluctance of the Elizabethans to accept the sonnet’s
distinctive principles.

The second set of sonnets, which, under the name of The Visions of Petrarch,
Spenser penned in his early days, were drawn, not from the Italian, but from Marot’s
French poem, in twelve-lined stanzas, entitled Les Visions de Petrarque. Spenser’s
first draft of 1569 slavishly adhered to the French. These youthful ventures of
Spenser herald the French influence on Elizabethan sonneteering. But, among French
sonneteers, neither the veteran Marot nor his junior Du Bellay, to whom Spenser
offered his boyish homage, was to play the foremost part in the Elizabethan arena. Du
Bellay, though a writer of sonnets on a very generous scale, fell below his leader
Ronsard alike in productivity and in charm. Thomas Watson was the earliest
Elizabethan to make a reputation as a sonneteer. Watson’s example largely
encouraged the vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet, and crystallised its imitative temper.
The majority of Elizabethan sonneteers were loyal to his artificial method of
construction. Some of his successors were gifted with poetic powers to which he was
a stranger, and interwove the borrowed conceits with individual feeling, which, at
times, lifted their verse to the plane of genuine poetry. Yet even from those sonnets
which bear to Watson’s tame achievement the relation which gold bears to lead, signs
of his imitative process are rarely obliterated altogether.
 Philip Sidney entered the field very soon after Watson set foot there; for some
years both were at work simultaneously; yet Watson’s influence is discernible in
much of Sidney’s effort. Sidney, admittedly, is a prince among Elizabethan lyric
poets and sonneteers. He loiters far behind Shakespeare in either capacity. But
Shakespeare, as a sonneteer, should, of right, be considered apart. With that
reservation, Sidney may fairly be credited as marching at the head of the
contemporary army of sonneteers.

Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Sir Philip Sidney was born on November 30, 1554, at Penshurst, Kent. He was
the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and nephew of  Robert
Dudley, Earl of Leicester.  He was named after his godfather,  King Philip II of
Spain. After private tutelage, Philip Sidney entered Shrewsbury School at the age of
ten in 1564, on the same day as Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who became his fast
friend and, later, his biographer. After attending Christ Church, Oxford, (1568-1571)
he left without taking a degree in order to complete his education by travelling the
continent. Among the places he visited were Paris, Frankfurt, Venice, and Vienna.
Sidney returned to England in 1575, living the life of a popular and eminent
courtier. In 1577, he was sent as ambassador to the German Emperor and the Prince
of Orange. Officially, he had been sent to condole the princes on the deaths of their
fathers. His real mission was to feel out the chances for the creation of a Protestant
league. Yet, the budding diplomatic career was cut short because Queen Elizabeth I
found Sidney to be perhaps too ardent in his Protestantism, the Queen preferring a
more cautious approach. Upon his return, Sidney attended the court of Elizabeth I,
and was considered "the flower of chivalry." He was also a patron of the arts, actively
encouraging such authors as Edward Dyer, Greville, and most importantly, the young
poet Edmund Spenser, who dedicated The Shepheardes Calender to him. In 1580, he
incurred the Queen Elizabeth's displeasure by opposing her projected marriage to the
Duke of Anjou, Roman Catholic heir to the French throne, and was dismissed from
court for a time. He left the court for the estate of his cherished sister Mary Herbert,
Countess of Pembroke. During his stay, he wrote the long pastoral romance Arcadia.
At some uncertain date, he composed a major piece of critical prose that was
published after his death under the two titles, The Defence of Poesy and An Apology
for Poetry. Sidney's Astrophil and Stella ("Starlover and Star") was begun
probably around 1576. Astrophil and Stella, which includes 108 sonnets and 11
songs, is the first in the long line of Elizabethan sonnet cycles. Sidney married
Frances Walsingham, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1583. The Sidneys had
one daughter, Elizabeth, later Countess of Rutland. While Sidney's career as courtier
ran smoothly, he was growing restless with lack of appointments. In 1585, he made a
covert attempt to join Sir Francis Drake's expedition to Cadiz without Queen
Elizabeth's permission. Elizabeth instead summoned Sidney to court, and appointed
him governor of Flushing in the Netherlands. In 1586 Sidney, along with his younger
brother Robert Sidney, another poet in this family of poets, took part in a skirmish
against the Spanish at Zutphen, and was wounded of a musket shot that shattered his
thigh-bone. Some twenty-two days later Sidney died of the unhealed wound at not yet
thirty-two years of age. His death occasioned much mourning in England as the
Queen and her subjects grieved for the man who had come to exemplify the ideal
courtier. It is said that Londoners, come out to see the funeral progression, cried out
"Farewell, the worthiest knight that lived."
Sidney’s sonnets, like those of Petrarch and Ronsard, form a more or less
connected sequence. The poet, under the name of Astrophel, professes to narrate the
course of his passion for a lady to whom he gives the name of Stella. The relations
between Astrophel and Stella closely resemble those between Petrarch and his poetic
mistress Laura, in the first series of the Italian poet’s sonnets, which were written in
the lifetime of Laura. There is no question that Sidney, like Petrarch, was, to a certain
extent, inspired by an episode in his own career. Stella was Penelope, the wayward
daughter of Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, and sister of Robert Devereux,
second earl of Essex, queen Elizabeth’s favourite. When she was about fourteen years
old, her father destined her for Sidney’s hand in marriage; but that project came to
nothing. In 1581, when about nineteen, she married Robert, second lord Rich, and
became the mother of a large family of children. The greater number of Sidney’s
sonnets were, doubtless, addressed to her after she had become lady Rich. In sonnet
XXIV, Sidney plays upon her husband’s name of Rich in something of the same
artificial way in which Petrarch, in his sonnet V, plays upon the name of Laura his
poetic mistress, who, also, was another’s wife. Sidney’s poetic courtship of lady Rich
was continued till near the end of his days.
Astrophel’s sonneteering worship of Stella enjoyed a popularity only second to
that of Petrarch’s poetic worship of Laura. It is the main theme of the collection of
elegies which was written immediately after the tragically premature close of
Sidney’s life. The elegiac volume bore the title Astrophel; it was dedicated to
Sidney’s widow; his sister, the countess of Pembroke, wrote a poem for it; Spenser
was the chief contributor. Throughout the work, Sidney’s lover-like celebration of
Stella is accounted his most glorious achievement in life or literature. Sidney’s
sonnets rehearse a poetic passion, to which the verse of Petrarch and his disciples
supplied the leading cue. The dedication to Sidney’s wife of Astrophel, that tribute of
eulogy which acclaims his mastery of the sonnet, seems to deprive his sonnet-story of
the full assurance of sincerity. Wife and sister would scarcely avow enthusiastic pride
in a husband’s and a brother’s poetic declaration of illicit love, were it literally true.
Sidney, as a sonneteer, was an artist rather than an autobiographer. No mere
transcript of personal sensation won him the laurels of an English Petrarch.
Charles Lamb detected in Sidney’s glorious vanities and graceful hyperboles
“signs of love in its very heyday,” a “transcedent passion pervading and illuminating”
his life and conduct. Hazlitt, on the other hand, condemned Sidney’s sonnets as
jejune, frigid, stiff and cumbrous. The truth probably lies between these judgments.
Felicitous phrases abound in Sidney’s sonnets, but he never wastes his genius on a
mere diet of dainty words. He was profoundly touched by lyric emotion. Both in his
Apologie for Poetrie and in his sonnets, Sidney describes with scorn the lack of
sincerity and the borrowed artifices of diction, which were inherent in the
sonneteering habit. He complained that his English contemporaries sang
poor Petrarch’s long deceasëd woes
 With new-born sighs and denizëd wit.
 
(Sonnet XV.)
Echoing Persius, he professes to follow a different method:
I never drank of Agannipe’s well …
I am no pickpurse of another’s wit.

(Sonnet LXXIV.)
Sidney showed a higher respect than any of his native contemporaries for the
metrical institution of the Italian and French sonnet. As a rule, he observed the
orthodox Petrarchian scheme of the double quatrain riming thus: abbaabba. In the
first eight lines of Sidney’s sonnets, only two rimes were permitted. In the last six
lines his practice was less orthodox. Four lines, which were alternately rimed, were
often followed by a couplet. But, in more than twenty sonnets, he introduced into the
concluding sizain such variations of rime as ccdeed, which brought his work into
closer relation with the continental scheme than that of any other Elizabethan.
Although Sidney’s professions of originality cannot be accepted quite literally, he
may justly be reckoned the first Englishman to indicate the lyric capacity of the
sonnet. Sidney’s example, far from discouraging competition, proved a new, and a
very powerful, stimulus to sonneteering endeavour. It was, indeed, with the
posthumous publication of Sidney’s sonnet-sequence, Astrophel and Stella, in 1591,
that a sonneteering rage began in Elizabethan England. Samuel Daniel’s Delia and
Henry Constable’s Diana first appeared in 1592, both to be revised and enlarged two
years later. Three ample collections followed in 1593; they came from the pens
respectively of Barnabe Barnes, Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher, while Watson’s
second venture was then published posthumously and for the first time. To the same
period belong the composition, although the publication was long delayed, of the
Scottish poet, Sir William Alexander’s Aurora and of the Caelica of Sidney’s
friend, Sir Fulke Greville. All these collections were sequences of amorous sonnets.
The Elizabethan sonnet was not exclusively applied to themes of love. Religious
meditation and friendly adulation frequently commanded the attention of sonneteers.
In his metre alone, did Spenser follow a line of his own devising; his prosody
diverged alike from the ordinary English, and the ordinary foreign, model. Most of
his sonnets consisted of three quatrains, each alternately rimed, with a riming couplet.
Alternate rimes and the couplet were unknown to sonnets abroad. Yet Spenser
followed the foreign fashion in restricting the total number of rimes in a single sonnet
to five instead of extending it to seven as in the normal English pattern. He made the
last lines of his first and second quatrains rime respectively with the first lines of his
second and third quatrains, thus abab bcbc cdcd. Spenser approached no nearer the
prosody of Italy or France. In three instances, he invests the concluding riming
couplet with a wholly original effect by making the final line an alexandrine.

The pertinacity with which the crude artificialities and plagiarisms of the sonnet-
sequence of love were cultivated in the last years of queen Elizabeth’s reign involved
the sonnet as a form of poetic art in a storm of critical censure before the vogue
expired. The rage for amorous sonneteering came to excite an almost overwhelming
ridicule. The basest charges were brought against the professional sonneteer. Sir John
Harington, whose epigrams embody much criticism of current literary practices,
plainly states that poets were in the habit of writing sonnets for sale to purchasers
who paraded them as their own. When the sonnet-sequence of love was yielding to
the loud protests of the critics, Ben Jonson, in Volpone (Act III, sc. 2) struck at it a
belated blow in a contemptuous reference to the past “days of sonneting” and to the
debt that its votaries owed to “passionate Petrarch.” Elsewhere, Jonson condemned,
root and branch, the artificial principles of the sonnet. Elizabethan sonneteers who
coloured, in their verse, the fruits of their foreign reading with their own individuality
deserve only congratulation. The intellectual assimilation of poetic ideas and even
poetic phraseology conforms with a law of literature which is not open to censure.
But literal translation, without acknowledgment, from foreign contemporary poetry
was, with little qualification, justly condemned by contemporary critics. Although the
sonnet in Elizabethan England, as in France and Italy, was mainly devoted to the
theme of love, it was never exclusively confined to amorous purposes. Petrarch
occasionally made religion or politics the subject of his sonnets and, very frequently,
enshrined in this poetic form the praises of a friend or patron. As a vehicle of spiritual
meditation or of political exhortation or of friendly adulation, the sonnet long enjoyed
an established vogue in foreign literature. When the sonnet-sequence of love was in
its heyday in Elizabethan England, the application of the sonnet to purposes of piety
or professional compliment acquired popularity. The art of the sonnet, when it was
enlisted in such service, largely escaped the storm of censure which its amorous
extravagances excited.
Sonnets inscribed by poets in the way of compliment to their friends or patrons
abound in Elizabethan literature. James I, in his Treatise of poetry, 1584, ignores all
uses of the sonnet save for the “compendious praising” of books or their authors and
for the prefatory presentation in brief summary of the topic of any long treatise. The
latter usage was rare in England, though Shakespeare experimented with it by casting
into sonnet form the prologues before the first two acts of Romeo and Juliet. But,
before, during and after Shakespeare’s day, the English author was wont to clothe in
the sonnet shape much professional intercourse with his patron. Few writers were
guiltless of this mode of address. Not infrequently, a long series of adulatory sonnets
forms the prelude or epilogue of an Elizabethan book. Spenser’s Faerie Queene and
Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad are both examples of literary work of repute
which was ushered into the world with substantial supplement of adulatory sonnets.
Both Spenser and Chapman sought the favour of a long procession of influential
patrons or patronesses in a series of quatorzains. Even those self-reliant writers of the
day who contemned the sonnet-sequence of love, and declined to make trial of it with
their own pens—men like Ben Jonson and Chapman—were always ready to salute a
friend or patron in sonnet-metre. Of sonnets addressed in the way of friendship by
men of letters to colleagues of their calling, a good example is the fine sonnet
addressed by the poet Spenser to Gabriel Harvey, “his singular good friend.” Some of
these occasional sonnets of eulogy or compliment reach a high poetic level, and are
free from most of the monotonous defects which disfigured the conventional sonnet
of love. To the first book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Sir Walter Ralegh, the poet’s friend,
prefixed two sonnets, the first of which was characterised by rare stateliness of diction. No better
illustration is to be found of the characteristic merits of the Elizabethan vogue. Ralegh’s sonnet was written
in 1595, when the sonneteering rage was at its height; and, while it attests the predominant influence of
Petrarch, it shows, at the same time, how dependence on a foreign model may be justified by the spirit of
the adaptation. Ralegh’s sonnet runs as follows:
A Vision upon this conceit of the Faery Queene.
Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that Temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn; and passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair love, and fairer virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queene:
        At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept,
And from thenceforth those graces were not seen;
For they this Queen attended, in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura’s hearse.
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce:
Where Homer’s sprite did tremble all for grief,
And cursed th’ access of that celestial thief.
“Celestial Thief” is a weak ending, and crudely presents Ralegh’s eulogistic
suggestion that Spenser, by virtue of his great poem, had dethroned the older poetic
deities. Ralegh’s prophecy, too, that oblivion had, at length, “laid him down on
Laura’s hearse” was premature. The tide of Petrarchian inspiration flowed on long
after the publication of The Faerie Queene. But Ralegh’s sonnet, viewed as a whole,
illustrates how fruitfully foreign imagery could work in Elizabethan minds, and how
advantageously it could be applied to new purposes by the inventiveness of poetic
genius.
In the two famous writers in whom the reformation of English verse first
distinctly appears, the reforming influences—or, to speak with stricter correctness,
the models chosen in order to help the achievement of reform—are, without doubt,
Italian, though French may have had some subsidiary or go-between influence.
Sonnet and terza rima in Wyatt, and the same with the addition of blank verse in
Surrey (putting aside lyrics), tell the tale unmistakably. And it is to be noticed that
sonnet, terza rima and blank verse—the first two by their actually strict and rigid
outline and the third through the fear and caution imposed on the writer by the
absence of his usual mentor, rime, act almost automatically. But (and it is a precious
piece of evidence in regard to their erring predecessors as well as to their penitent and
reformed selves) it is quite clear that even they still have great difficulty in adjusting
rhythm to pronunciation. They “wrench accent” in the fashion which Gascoigne was
to rebuke in the next (almost in the same) generation; they dislocate rime; they have
occasional recourse to the valued -e which we know to have been long obsolete, and
even to have turned in some cases to the -y form in adjectives. Whatever their
shortcomings, however (and, in fact, their shortcomings were much less than might
have been expected), there is no doubt that the two poets whose names have long
been and must always be inseparable deserve, in prosody even more than in poetry
generally, the credit of a “great instauration”—of showing how the old patterns of
Chaucer and others, adjusted to the new pronunciation, could be got out of the
disarray into which they had fallen, by reference (immediately) to Italian models. Nor
is it superfluous to point out that Italian, though apparently a language most different
in vocalisation and cadence from English, has the very point in common with us
which French lacks—the combination, that is to say, of strict, elaborate and most
various external conformation of stanza with a good deal of syllabic liberty inside the
line. These two things were exactly what wanted encouragement in English: and
Italian gave them together.

English Renaissance Drama

English Renaissance drama grew out of the established Medieval tradition of the
mystery and morality plays. These public spectacles focused on religious subjects
and were generally enacted by either choristers and monks, or a town's tradesmen (as
later seen lovingly memorialized by Shakespeare's 'mechanicals' in A Midsummer
Night's Dream). At the end of the XV c., a new type of play appeared. These short
plays and revels were performed at noble households and at court, especially at
holiday times. These short entertainments, called "Interludes", started the move
away from the didactic nature of the earlier plays toward purely secular plays, and
often added more comedy than was present in the medieval predecessors. Since most
of these holiday revels were not documented and play texts have disappeared and
been destroyed, the actual dating of the transition is difficult. The first extant purely
secular play, Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres, was performed at the
household of Cardinal Morton, where the young Thomas More was serving as a page.
Early Tudor interludes soon grew more elaborate, incorporating music and dance, and
some, especially those by John Heywood, were heavily influenced by French farce.
HEYWOOD, JOHN, English dramatist and epigrammatist, is generally said to have been a native of
North Mimms, near St. Albans, Hertfordshire, though Bale says he was born in London. A letter from a John
Heywood, who may fairly be identified with him, is dated from Malines in 1575, when he called himself an
old man of seventy-eight, which would fix his birth in 1497. He was a chorister of the Chapel Royal, and is
said to have been educated at Broadgates Hall (Pembroke College), Oxford. From 1521 onwards his name
appears in the king's accounts as the recipient of an annuity of ten marks as player of the virginals, and in
1538 he received forty shillings for "playing an interlude with his children" before the Princess Mary. He is
said to have owed his introduction to her to Sir Thomas More, at whose seat at Gobions near St. Albans he
wrote his epigrams, according to Henry Peacham. More took a keen interest in the drama, and is represented
by tradition as stepping on to the stage to take an impromptu part in the dialogue. William Rastell, the
printer of four of Heywood's plays, was the son of More's brother-in-law, John Rastell, who organized
dramatic representations, and possibly wrote plays himself. Mr. A.W. Pollard sees in Heywood's firm
adherence to Catholicism and his free satire of legal and social abuses a reflection of the idea of More and his
friends, which counts for much in his dramatic development. His skill in music and his inexhaustible wit
made him a favorite both with Henry VIII and Mary. Under Edward VI, he was accused of denying the king's
supremacy over the church, and had to make a public recantation in 1554; but with the accession of Mary his
prospects brightened. He made a Latin speech to her in St. Paul's Churchyard at her coronation, and wrote a
poem to celebrate her marriage. Shortly before her death she granted him the lease of a manor and lands in
Yorkshire. When Elizabeth succeeded to the throne he fled to Malines, and is said to have returned in 1577.
In 1587 he is spoken of as "dead and gone" in Thomas Newton's epilogue to his works. John Heywood is
important in the history of English drama as the first writer to turn the abstract characters of the morality
plays into real persons.

His interludes link the morality plays to the modern drama, and were very popular in their day. They
represent ludicrous indicents of a homely kind in the style of the broadest farce, and approximate to the
French dramatic renderings of the subjects of the fabliaux. The fun in them still survives in spite of the long
arguments between characters and what one of their editors calls his "humour of filth." Heywood's name was
actually attached to four interludes. The Play called the foure PP; a newe and a very mery interlude of a
palmer, a pardoner, a potycary, a pedler (not dated) is a contest in lying, easily won by Palmer, who said he
had never known a woman out of patience. The Play of the Wether, a new and mery interlude of all maner
of Wethers (printed 1533) describes the chaotic results of Jupiter's attempts to suit the weather to the desires
of a number of different people. The Play of Love (printed 1533) is an extreme instance of the author's love of
wire-drawn argument. It is a double dispute between "Loving not Loved" and "Loved not Loving" as to which
is the more wretched, and between "Both Loved and Loving" and "Neither Loving nor Loved" to decide which
is the happier. The only action in this piece is indicated by the stage direction marking the entrance of
"Neither loved nor loving," who is to run about the audience with a huge copper tank on his head full of
lighted squibs, and is to cry "Water, water! Fire, fire!" The Dialogue of Wit and Folly is more of an academic
dispute than a play. But two pieces universally assigned to Heywood, although they were printed by Rastell
without any author's name, combine action with dialogue, and are much more dramatic. In The Mery Play
between the Pardoner and the Frere, the Curate and Neybour Pratte (printed 1533, but probably written
much earlier) the Pardoner and the Friar both try to preach at the same time, and, coming at last to blows,
are separated by the other two personages of the piece. The Mery Play betwene Johan Johan the Husbande,
Tyb the Wyfe, and Syr Jhan the Preest (printed 1533) is the best constructed of all his pieces. Tyb and Syr
Jhan eat the "Pye" which is the central "property" of the piece, while Johan Johan is made to chafe wax at the
fire to stop a hole in a pail. This incident occurs in a French Farce nouvelle très bonne at fort joyeuse de
Pernet qui va au vin. Heywood has sometimes been credited with the authorship of the dialogue of
Gentylnes and Nobylyte printed by Rastell without date, and Mr. Pollard adduces some ground for
attributing to him the anonymous New Enterlude called Thersytes (played 1538). Heywood's other works are
a collection of proverbs and epigrams, the earliest extant edition of which is dated 1562; some ballads, one of
them being the "Willow Garland," known to Desdemona; and a long verse allegory of over 7000 lines entitled
The Spider and the Flie (1556). A contemporary writer in Holinshed's Chronicle said that neither its author
nor any one else could "reach unto the meaning thereof." But the flies are generally taken to represent the
Roman Catholics and the spiders the Protestants, while Queen Mary is represented by the housemaid who
with her broom (the sword) executes the commands of her master (Christ) and her mistress (the church). Dr.
A.W. Ward speaks of its "general lucidity and relative variety of treatment." Heywood says that he laid it
aside for twenty years before he finished it, and, whatever may be the final interpretation put upon it, it
contains a very energetic statement of the social evils of the time, and especially of the deficiencies of English
law.

NICHOLAS UDAL [or Udall], English schoolmaster, translator and playwright, author of the earliest extant
English comedy, Roister Doister, came of the family of Uvedale, who in the 14th century became lords of Wykeham,
Hants, by marriage with the heiress of the Scures. The name was probably pronounced Oovedale, as it appears as
Yevedale, Owdall, Woodall, with other variants. He latinized it as Udallus, and thence anglicized it as Udall. He is
described as Owdall of the parish of St Cross, Southampton, 12 years old at Christmas 1516, when admitted a scholar of
Winchester College in 1517. He was therefore not 14 (as Anthony Wood says) but 16 years of age when admitted a
scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in June 1520; he is called Wodall as a lecturer at that college in 1526 to
1528. With John Leland he produced "dites" (ditties) "and interludes" at Anne Boleyn's coronation on the 31st of May
1533. Leland's contributions are all in Latin; those of " Udallus," which form the chief part, are mostly in English, the
speeches being each spoken by a 'child,' "at Cornhill beside Leadenhall," "at the Conducte in Cornhill" and "at the little
Conducte in Cheepe." His Floures for Latine Spekynge, selected and gathered out of Terence and the same translated
into Englysshe, published by Bartlet (in aedibus Bertheleti), were dedicated "to my most sweet flock of pupils, from the
monastery of the monks of the order of Augustine," on the 28th of February 1533-1534. There were no monks of that
order, and whether Austin Friars or Augustinian canons were meant is open to doubt. The book was prefaced with
laudatory Latin verses by Leland and by Edmund Jonson. The latter was a Winchester and Oxford contemporary of
Udal's, in 1528 lower master (hostiarius) at Eton, a post which he left to become master of the school of St Anthony's
Hospital, then the most flourishing school in London. From the dedication we may infer that Udal was usher under
Jonson and "the sweet flock" was at St Anthony's school next door to Austin Friars.

At Midsummer 1534 he became head master of Eton (informator puerorum or ludi grammaticalis; Eton Audit
Book. 25-26 Hen. VIII.). It has been suggested (Dic. Nat. Biog.) that the Floures was dedicated to Eton boys in
advance; but this is unlikely, as in those days schools never got their masters till the place was vacant, or on the verge of
vacancy. At Eton Udal's salary was £10 and £1 for livery, with "petty receipts" of 8s. 4d. for obits, 2s. 8d. for laundress,
2s. for candles for his chamber, and 23s. 4d. "for ink, candles and other things given to the grammar school by Dr
Lupton, provost." One of his school books, Commentaries on the Tusculan questions of Cicero (ed. Berouldus, 1509),
with the inscription "sum Nicolai Udalli 1536," is in the King's Library at the British Museum. There was a yearly play,
3s. being paid for the repair of the dresses of the players at Christmas, and 1s. 4d. to a servant of the dean of Windsor
for bringing his master's clothes for the players. A payment for repair of the players' dresses recurs every year. Udal has
been credited (E. K. Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 144, 192) with producing a play at Braintree while vicar there,
recorded in the churchwardens' accounts for 1534 as "Placidas alias Sir Eustace." The play is actually called in the
accounts (only extant in 17th-century extracts) "Placy Dacy alias St Ewastacy," and is the old play of Placidas,
mentioned in the 9th century. Udal did not become vicar of Braintree till the 27th of September 1537 (Newcourt's
Repert. ii. 89). At Michaelmas he resigned the mastership of Eton to reside at Braintree, being called "late schole-master
wose roome nowe enjoyeth and occupieth Mr Tindall" in a letter from the provost to Thomas Cromwell, then privy seal,
on the 7th October 1537 (Lett. and Pa. Hen. VIII., 1537).
 He returned to Eton, however, or rather to Hedgeley, the school being removed there on account of the plague, at
Midsummer 1537, being paid for the third and fourth terms of the school year (Eton Audit Book, 29-30 Hen. VIII.). In
October 1538 "Nicholas Uvedale, professor of the liberal arts, informator and schoolmaster of Eton," was licensed to
hold the vicarage of Braintree, "with other benefices," without personal residence. The accounts of Cromwell for 1538
include "Woodall, the scholemaster of Eton, to playing before my lord, £5." Presumably he brought a troupe of Eton
boys with him. In that year he published a second edition of his Floures of Terence for the benefit of Eton boys. The
often-questioned account of Thomas Tusser (Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie) is typical of Eton at the time,
as Udal's predecessor Cox is said in Ascham's Scholemaster to have been "the best scholemaster and greatest beater of
our time". Udal's rule of the rod at Eton was brought to an abrupt conclusion by his being brought up before the privy
council on the 14th of March 1540/1541 for being "counsail" with two of the boys, Thomas Cheney, a relation of the
lord treasurer of the household, and Thomas Hoorde, for stealing some silver images and chapel ornaments. He denied
the theft, but confessed to a much more scandalous offence with Cheney, and was sent to the Marshalsea prison.

He tried, but failed, to get restored to Eton. Attempts have been made to whitewash him. But his own confession,
and an abject letter of repentance with promises of amendment, addressed, (probably) to Wriothesley, a Hampshire man
and a family friend, cannot be got over. It shows that he was a bad schoolmaster as well as an immoral one, since he
pleads "myn honest chaunge from vice to vertue, from prodigalitee to frugall lyving, from negligence of teachyng to
assiduitee, from play to studie, from lightness to gravitee." In 1542-1543, after the bursar of Eton had ridden up to
London to the provost, Udal was paid "53s. 4d. in full satisfaction of his salary in arrears and other things due to him
while he was teaching the children"; but on the other side of the account appears an item of "60s. received from Dr
Coxe for Udal's debts." So no money passed to Udal. He seems to have maintained himself by translating into English,
in 1542, Erasmus's Apophthegms and other works. In 1544 he published a new edition of the Floures of Terence. He
seems to have taken a schoolmastership in Northumberland or Durham, as Leland in one of his Encomia speaks of him,
probably at this time, as translated to the Brigantes. He seems to have been made to resign his living at Braintree, a
successor being appointed on the 14th of December 1544. He purged himself, however, by composing the Answer to the
Articles of the Commoners of Devonshire and Cornwall (Pocock, Troubles of the Prayer Book of 1549, Camd. Soc.,
new series, 37, 141, 193), when they rose in rebellion in the summer of 1549 against the First Prayer Book of Edward
VI. In 1551 he received a patent for printing his translation of Peter Martyr's two works on the Eucharist and the Great
Bible in English (Pat. 4 Edw. VI. pt. 5, m. 5, Shakespeare Soc. iii. xxx.). He was rewarded by being made a canon of
Windsor on the 14th of December 1551. On the 5th of January "after the common reckoning 1552" (i.e. 1551/2) he
edited a translation of Erasmus's Paraphrases of the Gospels, himself translating the first three, while that on St John
was being translated by the princess Mary, till she fell sick and handed her work over to Dr Malet. The work was done
at the suggestion and expense of the dowager queen Katharine, in whose charge Mary was. A translation by Udal of
Geminus's Anatomie or Compendiosa totius anatomiae delineatio, a huge volume with gruesome plates, was published
in 1553." Udal's preface is dated the 10th of July 1552 "at Windesore."  In June and September 1553 (Trevelyan Pap.
Camd. Soc. 84, ii. 31, 33) "Mr Nicholas Uvedale" was paid at the rate of £13, 6s. 8d. a year as "scholemaster to Mr
Edward Courtney, beinge within the Tower of London, by virtue of the King's Majesty's Warrant" - the young earl of
Devon, who had been in prison ever since he was twelve years old.

Queen Mary on the 3rd of December 1554 issued a warrant on Udal's behalf reciting that he had "at soundrie
seasons convenient heretofore shewed and myndeth hereafter to shewe his diligence in setting forth Dialogues and
Enterludes before us for our royal disporte and recreacion," and directing "the maister and yeomen of the office of the
Revells" to deliver whatever Udal should think necessary for setting forth such devices, while the exchequer was
ordered to provide the money to buy them (Loseley MSS. Kempe 63, and Hist. MSS. Corn. Rep. vii. 612). One of these
interludes was probably Roister Doister; for it was in January 1553, i.e. 1554, that Thomas Wilson, master of St
Katharine's Hospital by the Tower, produced the third edition of The Rule of Reason, the first text-book on logic written
in English,which contains, while the two earlier editions, published in 1551 and 1552 respectively, do not contain, a
long quotation from Roister Doister. It gives under the heading of "ambiguitie," as " an example of such doubtful
writing whiche, by reason of poincting, maie have double sense and contrarie meaning . . . taken out of an intrelude
made by Nicholas Udal," the letter which Ralph Roister procured a scrivener to compose for him, asking Christian
Constance, the heroine, to marry him. Roister's emissary read it "Sweete mistresse, where as I love you nothing at all,
Regarding your substance and richnesse chiefe of all," and so on; whereas it was meant to read "Sweete mistresse,
whereas I love you (nothing at all Regarding your substance and richnesse) chiefe of all, For your personage, beautie,
demeanour and wit." The play was entered at Stationers' Hall, when printed in 1566. Only one copy is known, which
was given to Eton by an old Etonian, the Rev. Th. Briggs, in 1818, who privately printed thirty copies of it. As the title-
page is gone the only evidence of its authorship is Wilson's quotation. Wilson being an Etonian, it has been argued that
his quotation was a reminiscence of his Eton days, and that the play was written for and first performed by Eton boys.
But the occurrence of the quotation first in the edition of 1554, and its absence in the previous editions of 1551 and
1552, coupled with the absence of anything in the play to suggest any connexion with a school, while the scene is laid
in London and among London citizens and is essentially a London play, furnish a strong argument that Roister Doister
first appeared in 1553, and therefore could not have been written at Eton or for Eton boys.

Nor could it have been written at Westminster School or for Westminster boys, as argued by Professor Hales in
Eng. Studien (1893) xviii. 408. For though Udal did become head master of Westminster, he only became so nearly two
years after Wilson's quotation from Roister Doister appeared. He was at Winchester in the interval, for Stephen
Gardiner, bishop of Winchester and chancellor, by will of the 8th of November 1555 (P.C.C. 3 Noodes), gave 40 marks
(£26, 13s. 4d.) to "Nicholas Udale, my scholemaister." In what sense he was Gardiner's schoolmaster it is hard to guess.
He was not head master or usher of Winchester College; but he may have been master of the old City Grammar or High
School, to which the bishop appointed (A. F. Leach, Hist. Winch. Coll. 32 , 48). The schoolhouse had been leased out
for 41 years in 1544 but it is possible Gardiner had revived the school or kept a school at his palace of Wolvesey. At
Westminster "Mr Udale was admitted to be scholemaster 16 Dec. anno 1555" (Chapter Act-Book). The last act of the
secular canons, substituted by Henry VIII for the monks, was the grant of a lease on the 24th of September 1556. When
the monks re-entered, on Mary's restoration of the abbey (Nov. 21, 1556), the school did not, as commonly alleged,
cease, nor had Udal ceased to be master (Shakespeare Soc. iii. xxxiv.) when he died a month later. The parish register of
St Margaret's, Westminster, under "Burials in December A.D. 1556" records "11 die Katerine Woddall," "23 die
Nicholas Yevedale," i.e. Udal. Katharine was perhaps a sister or other relation, as Elizabeth Udall was buried there on
the 8th of July 1559. The abbey cellarer's accounts ending Michaelmas 1557 contain a payment "to Thomas Notte,
usher of the boys, £6, 10s., and to the scholars (scolasticis vocatis le grammer childern), £63, 6s. 8d.," showing that the
usher carried on the school after Udal's death. Next year (1557-1558) the abbey receiver accounted for £20 paid to John
Passey, (the new) schoolmaster, to Richard Spenser, usher, £15, and £133, 6s. 8d. for 40 grammar boys. So it is clear
that the school never stopped. Udal therefore was master of Westminster for just over two years. He died at the age of
52. Roister Doister well deserves its fame as the first English comedy. It is infinitely superior to any of its predecessors
in form and substance. It has sometimes been described as a mere adaptation of Plautus's Miles Gloriosus. Though the
central idea of the play - that of a braggart soldier (with an impecunious parasite to flatter him) who thinks every
woman he sees falls in love with him and is finally shown to be an arrant coward - is undoubtedly taken from Plautus,
yet the plot and incidents, and above all the dialogue, are absolutely original, and infinitely superior to those of Plautus.
Even the final incident, in which the hero is routed, is made more humorous by the male slaves being represented by
maidservants with mops and pails. The play was printed by F. Marshall in 1821; in Thomas White's Old English
Dramas (3 vols., 1830); by the Shakespeare Society, vol. iii., the introduction to which contains the fullest and most
accurate account of his life; in Edward Arber's reprints in 1869; and Dodsley's Old Plays (1894), vol. iii. (A. F. L.)

THOMAS SACKVILLE, Lord Buckhurst, and Earl of Dorset, was the son of Sir Richard Sackville, and was
born at Withyam, in Sussex. He was educated at both universities, and enjoyed an early reputation in Latin as well as in
English poetry. While a student of the Inner Temple, he wrote his tragedy of Gorboduc, which was played by the young
students, as a part of a Christmas entertainment, and afterwards before Queen Elizabeth I at Whitehall, in 1561. In a
subsequent edition of this piece it was entitled the tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex. He is said to have been assisted in the
composition of it by Thomas Norton; but to what extent does not appear. T. Warton disputed the fact of his being at all
indebted to Norton. The merit of the piece does not render the question of much importance. This tragedy and his
contribution of the Induction and legend of the Duke of Buckingham to the "Mirror for Magistrates," compose the
poetical history of Sackville's life. The rest of it was political. He had been elected to parliament at the age of thirty. Six
years afterwards, in the same year that his Induction and legend of Buckingham were published, he went abroad on his
travels, and was, for some reason that is not mentioned, confined, for a time, as a prisoner at Rome; but he returned
home, on the death of his father, in 1566, and was soon after promoted to the title of Lord Buckhurst. Having entered at
first with rather too much prodigality on the enjoyment of his patrimony, he is said to have been reclaimed by the
indignity of being kept in waiting by an alderman, from whom he was borrowing money, and to have made a resolution
of economy, from which he never departed.

The Queen employed him, in the fourteenth year of her reign, in an embassy to Charles IX of France. In 1587 he
went as ambassador to the United Provinces, upon their complaint against the Earl of Leicester; but, though he
performed his trust with integrity, the favourite had sufficient influence to get him recalled; and on his return, he was
ordered to confinement in his own house, for nine or ten months. On Leicester's death, however, he was immediately
reinstated in royal favour, and was made Knight of the Garter, and Chancellor of Oxford. On the death of Burleigh he
became Lord High Treasurer of England. At Queen Elizabeth's demise he was one of the Privy Counsellors on whom
the administration of the kingdom devolved, and he concurred in proclaiming King James. The new sovereign
confirmed him in the office of High Treasurer by a patent for life, and on all occasions consulted him with confidence.
In March, 1604, he was created Earl of Dorset. He died suddenly at the council table, in consequence of a dropsy on the
brain [stroke]. Few ministers, as Lord Orford remarks, have left behind them so unblemished a character. His family
considered his memory so invulnerable, that when some partial aspersions were thrown upon it, after his death, they
disdained to answer them. He carried taste and elegance even into his formal political functions, and for his eloquence
was styled the belle of the Star Chamber. As a poet, his attempt to unite allegory with heroic narrative, and his giving
our language its earliest regular tragedy, evince the views and enterprize of no ordinary mind; but, though the induction
to the Mirror for Magistrates displays some potent sketches, it bears the complexion of a saturnine genius, and
resembles a bold and gloomy landscape on which the sun never shines. As to Gorboduc, it is a piece of monotonous
recitals, and cold and heavy accumulation of incidents. As an imitation of classical tragedy it is peculiarly unfortunate,
in being without even the unities of place and time, to circumscribe its dulness.

Not only were plays shifting emphasis from teaching to entertaining, they were
also slowly changing focus from the religious towards the political. John Skelton's
Magnyfycence (1515), for example, while on the face of it resembling the medieval
allegory plays with its characters of Virtues and Vices, was a political satire against
Cardinal Wolsey. Magnyfycence was so incendiary that Skelton had to move into the
sanctuary of Westminster to escape the wrath of Wolsey.

The first history plays were written in the 1530's, the most notable of which was
John Bale's King Johan. While it considered matters of morality and religion, these
were handled in the light of the Reformation. These plays set the precedent of
presenting history in the dramatic medium and laid the foundation for what would
later be elevated by Marlowe and Shakespeare into the English History Play, or
Chronicle Play, in the latter part of the century. Not only was the Reformation taking
hold in England, but the winds of Classical Humanism were sweeping in from the
Continent. Interest grew in the classics and the plays of classical antiquity, especially
in the universities. Latin texts were being "Englysshed" and latin poetry and plays
began to be adapted into English plays. In 1553, a schoolmaster named Nicholas
Udall wrote an English comedy titled "Ralph Roister Doister" based on the traditional
Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence. The play was the first to introduce the Latin
character type miles gloriosus ("braggart soldier") into English plays, honed to
perfection later by Shakespeare in the character of Falstaff. Around the same time at
Cambridge, the comedy "Gammer Gurton's Needle", possibly by William Stevens of
Christ's College, was amusing the students. It paid closer attention to the structure of
the Latin plays and was the first to adopt the five-act division.

Writers were also developing English tragedies for the first time, influenced by
Greek and Latin writers. Among the first forays into English tragedy were Richard
Edwards' Damon and Pythias (1564) and John Pickering's New Interlude of Vice
Containing the History of Horestes (1567). The most influential writer of classical
tragedies, however, was the Roman playwright Seneca, whose works were translated
into English by Jasper Heywood, son of playwright John Heywood, in 1589. Seneca's
plays incorporated rhetorical speeches, blood and violence, and often ghosts;
components which were to figure prominently in both Elizabethan and Jacobean
drama.

The first prominent English tragedy in the Senecan mould was Gorboduc
(1561), written by two lawyers, Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, at the Inns
of Court (schools of law). Apart from following Senecan conventions and structure,
the play is most important as the first English play to be in blank verse. Blank verse,
non-rhyming lines in iambic pentameter, was introduced into English literature by
sonneteers Wyatt and Surrey in the 1530's. Its use in a work of dramatic literature
paved the way for "Marlowe's mighty line" and the exquisite poetry of Shakespeare's
dramatic verse. With a new ruler on the throne, Queen Elizabeth I, who enjoyed and
encouraged the theatrical arts, the stage was set for the body of dramatic literature we
today call Elizabethan Drama.

In 1600, the city of London had a population of 245,000 people, twice the size
of Paris or Amsterdam. Playwriting was the least personal form of writing, but clearly
the most profitable for literary men since the demand was so great: 15,000 people
attended the playhouses weekly. What is often exploited in the plays is the tension
between a Court culture and a commercial culture, which in turn reflected the tension
between the City government and the Crown. The period from 1576 (date of the first
public theatre in London) to 1642 (date that the Puritans closed the theatres) is
unparalleled in its output and quality of literature in English. The monarchy rested on
two claims: that it was of divine origin and that it governed by consent of the people.
The period was one of great transition. This period of history is generally regarded as
the English Renaissance, which took place approximately 100 years later than on the
continent. The period also coincides with the Reformation, and the two eras are of
course mutually related. Imposed upon the Elizabethans was a social hierarchy of
order and degree—very much medieval concepts that existed more in form than in
substance. The society of Shakespeare's time had in many ways broken free of these
rigidities. It was not that people were rejecting the past; rather, a new more rigid
order was replacing the old. This was set into motion during Henry VIII's reign in the
1530s when he assumed more power than had hitherto been known to the monarchy.
The Act of Supremacy of 1534 gave to Henry the power of the Church as well as
temporal power.

By Shakespeare's time the state had asserted its right in attempting to gain
authority in secular and spiritual matters alike. The so-called "Tudor myth" had
sought to justify actions by the crown, and selections for the monarchy, as God-
sanctioned: to thwart those decisions was to sin, because these people were selected
by God. The population of the City quadrupled from Henry VIII's reign to the end of
Shakespeare's life (1616), thus adding to the necessity for civil control and law. The
dissolution of the monasteries had caused much civil unrest, and the dispossessed
monks and nuns had been forced to enter the work force. Thus the employment, or
unemployment, problem was severe. Puritanism, which first emerged early in
Elizabeth's reign, was a minority force of churchmen, Members of Parliament, and
others who felt that the Anglican Reformation had stopped short of its goal. Puritans
used the Bible as a guide to conduct, not simply to faith, but to political and social
life, and since they could read it in their own language, it took on for them a greater
importance than it had ever held. They stressed particularly the idea of remembering
the Sabbath day. The conflict between the Puritans and the "players" of the theatre—
who performed for the larger crowds that would turn out for productions on the
Sabbath—was established early.

The old Medieval stage of "place-and-scaffolds", still in use in Scotland in the

early XVI c., had fallen into disuse; the kind of temporary stage that was dominant in
England about 1575 was the booth stage of the marketplace—a small rectangular
stage mounted on trestles or barrels and "open" in the sense of being surrounded by
spectators on three sides. The stage proper of the booth stage generally measured
from 15 to 25 ft. in width and from 10 to 15 ft. in depth; its height above the ground
averaged a bout 5 ft. 6 in., with extremes ranging as low as 4 ft. and as high as 8 ft.;
and it was backed by a cloth-covered booth, usually open at the top, which served as
a tiring-house (short for "attiring house," where the actors dressed). In the England of
1575 there were two kinds of buildings, designed for functions other than the acting
of plays, which were adapted by the players as temporary outdoor playhouses: the
animal-baiting rings or "game houses" (e.g. Bear Garden) and the inns. Presumably, a
booth stage was set up against a wall at one side of the yard, with the audience
standing in the yard surrounding the stage on three sides. Out of these "natural"
playhouses grew two major classes of permanent Elizabethan playhouse, "public" and
"private." In general, the public playhouses were large outdoor theatres, whereas the
private playhouses were smaller indoor theatres. The maximum capacity of a typical
public playhouse (e.g., the Swan) was about 3,000 spectators; that of a typical private
playhouse (e.g., the Second Blackfriars), about 700 spectators.

At the public playhouses the majority of spectators were "groundlings" who

stood in the dirt yard for a penny; the remainder were sitting in galleries and boxes
for two pence or more. At the private playhouses all spectators were seated (in pit,
galleries, and boxes) and paid sixpence or more. In the beginning, the private
playhouses were used exclusively by Boys' companies, but this distinction
disappeared about 1609 when the King's Men, in residence at the Globe in the
summer, began using the Blackfriars in winter. Originally the private playhouses
were found only within the City of London (the Paul's Playhouse, the First and
Second Blackfriars), the public playhouses only in the suburbs (the Theatre, the
Curtain, the Rose, the Globe, the Fortune, the Red Bull); but this distinction
disappeared about 1606 with the opening of the Whitefriars Playhouse to the west of
Ludgate. Public-theatre audiences, though socially heterogeneous, were drawn
mainly from the lower classes—a situation that has caused modern scholars to refer
to the public-theatre audiences as "popular"; whereas private-theatre audiences
tended to consist of gentlemen (those who were university educated) and nobility;
"select" is the word most usually opposed to "popular" in this respect.

James Burbage, father to the famous actor Richard Burbage of Shakespeare's

company, built the first permanent theatre in London, the Theatre, in 1576. He
probably merely adapted the form of the baiting-house to theatrical needs. To do so
he built a large round structure very much like a baiting-house but with five major
innovations in the received form. First, he paved the ring with brick or stone, thus
paving the pit into a "yard". Second, Burbage erected a stage in the yard—his model
was the booth stage of the marketplace, larger than used before, with posts rather than
trestles. Third, he erected a permanent tiring-house in place of the booth. Here his
chief model was the passage screens of the Tudor domestic hall. They were modified
to withstand the weather by the insertion of doors in the doorways. Presumably the
tiring-house, as a permanent structure, was inset into the frame of the playhouse
rather than, as in the older temporary situation of the booth stage, set up against the
frame of a baiting-house. The gallery over the tiring-house (presumably divided into
boxes) was capable of serving variously as a "Lord's room" for privileged or high-
paying spectators, as a music-room, and as a station for the occasional performance
of action "above" as, for example, Juliet's balcony.

Fourth, Burbage built a "cover" over the rear part of the stage, called "the
Heavens", supported by posts rising from the yard and surmounted by a "hut." And
fifth, Burbage added a third gallery to the frame. The theory of origin and
development suggested in the preceding accords with our chief pictorial source of
information about the Elizabethan stage, the "De Witt" drawing of the interior of the
Swan Playhouse (c. 1596). It seems likely that most of the round public playhouses—
specifically, the Theatre (1576), the Swan (1595), the First Globe (1599), the Hope
(1614), and the Second Globe (1614)—were of about the same size. The Second
Blackfriars Playhouse of 1596 was designed by James Burbage, and he built his
playhouse in the upper-story Parliament Chamber of the Upper Frater of the priory.
The Parliament Chamber measured 100 ft. in length, but for the playhouse Burbage
used only two-thirds of this length. The room in question, after the removal of
partitions dividing it into apartments, measured 46 ft. in width and 66 ft. in length.
The stage probably measured 29 ft. in width and 18 ft. 6 in. in depth.

In the private theatres, act-intervals and music between acts were customary
from the beginning. A music-room was at first lacking in the public playhouses, since
public-theatre performances did not originally employ act-intervals and inter-act
music. About 1609, however, after the King's men had begun performing at the
Blackfriars as well as at the Globe, the custom of inter-act music seems to have
spread from the private to the public playhouses, and with it apparently came the
custom of using one of the tiring-house boxes over the stage as a music-room. The
drama was conventional, not realistic: poetry was the most obvious convention,
others included asides, soliloquies, boys playing the roles of women, battles (with
only a few participants), the daylight convention (many scenes are set at night,
though the plays took place in mid-afternoon under the sky), a convention of time
(the clock and calendar are used only at the dramatist's discretion), the convention of
"eavesdropping" (many characters overhear others, which the audience is privy to but
the overheard characters are not), and movement from place to place as suggested by
the script and the audience's imagination. Exits were strong, and when everyone
departed the stage, a change of scene was indicated. There was relatively little
scenery. Scenery was mostly suggestive; for example, one or two trees standing in for
a whole forest. The elaborate costumes—for which companies paid a great deal of
money—supplied the color and pageantry. Minimal scenery and limited costume
changes made the transitions between scenes lightning-fast and kept the story
moving.
 There was often dancing before and after the play—at times, during, like the
peasants' dance in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. Jigs were often given at the end of
performances, a custom preserved still today at Shakespeare's Globe. The jigs at the
theatre were not always mere dances, they were sometimes comprised of songs and
bawdy knockabout farces filled with commentaries on current events. Perhaps the
most famous jig was the one performed by Will Kemp, the clown in Shakespeare's
company, over a nine day period in 1599, on the road from London to Norwich. It
was published in 1600 as Kemps nine daies wonder. After 1600, the bawdy jigs fell
into derision and contempt and were only performed at theatres such as the Red Bull,
which catered to an audience appreciative of the lowest humor and most violent
action. The clowns were the great headliners of the Elizabethan stage prior to the rise
of the famed tragedians of the late 1580s, such as Edward (Ned) Alleyn and Richard
Burbage. Every company had a top clown along with the tragedian—Shakespeare’s
company was no exception: Richard Tarleton was the clown until his death in 1588,
Will Kemp was the clown until forced out of the company in 1599, to be replaced by
another famous clown, Robin Armin. The clowns not only performed the
aforementioned jigs, but also played many of the great comic characters; Kemp most
likely played Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing,
Armin the parts of Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear.

From contemporary documents, we know there were over a thousand actors in

England between 1580-1642*. Most were poor, "starving actors", but a few dozen
were able to make names for themselves and become shareholders in their respective
companies, and make a good living. The repertory system was demanding—besides
playing six days a week, a company would be in continual rehearsal in order to add
new plays and to refresh old ones in their schedule. A player would probably learn a
new role every week, with thirty to forty roles in his head. No minor feat, especially
considering that an actor would only get his lines and cues (in a rolled up parchment,
his "roll", from which we get the word "role"), not a whole script! Over a period of
three years, a tragedian such as Edward Alleyn, lead player for the Admiral's Men,
would learn not only fifty new parts but also retain twenty or more old roles.

George Peele (1558-1598)

GEORGE PEELE (1558 - c. 1598), English dramatist, was born in London in
1558. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, and entered Broadgates Hall (Pembroke
College), Oxford, in 1571. In 1574 he removed to Christ Church, taking his B.A.
degree in 1577, and proceeding M.A. in 1579. In 1579 the governors of Christ's
Hospital requested their clerk to "discharge his house of his son, George Peele." He
went up to London about 1580, but in 1583 when Albertus Alasco (Albert Laski), a
Polish nobleman, was entertained at Christ Church, Oxford, Peele was entrusted with
the arrangement of two Latin plays by William Gager (fl. 1580-1619) presented on
the occasion. He was also complimented by Dr Gager for an English verse translation
of one of the Iphigenias of Euripides. In 1585 he was employed to write the Device of
the Pageant borne before Woolston Dixie, and in 1591 he devised the pageant in
honour of another lord mayor, Sir William Webbe. This was the Descensus Astraeae
(printed in the Harleian Miscellany, 1808), in which Queen Elizabeth is honoured as
Astræa.
Peele had married as early as 1583 a lady who brought him some property,
which he speedily dissipated. Robert Greene, at the end of his Groatsworth of Wit,
exhorts Peele to repentance, saying that he has, like himself, "been driven to extreme
shifts for a living." The sorry traditions of his reckless life were emphasized by the
use of his name in connexion with the apocryphal Merrie conceited Jests of George
Peele (printed in 1607). Many of the stories had done service before, but there are
personal touches that may be biographical. He died before 1598, for Francis Meres,
writing in that year, speaks of his death in his Palladis Tamia. His pastoral comedy of
The Araygnement of Paris, presented by the Children of the Chapel Royal before
Queen Elizabeth perhaps as early as 1581, was printed anonymously in 1584. Charles
Lamb, sending to Vincent Novello a song from this piece of Peele's, said that if it had
been less uneven in execution, Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess " had been but a
second name in this sort of writing." Peele shows considerable art in his flattery. Paris
is arraigned before Jupiter for having assigned the apple to Venus. Diana, with whom
the final decision rests, gives the apple to none of the competitors but to a nymph
called Eliza, whose identity is confirmed by the further explanation, "whom some
Zabeta call."
His Famous Chronicle of King Edward the first, sirnamed Edward
Longshankes, with his returne from the holy land. Also the life of Lleuellen, rebell in
Wales. Lastly, the sinking of Queen Elinor, who suncke at Charingcrosse, and rose
again at Pottershith, now named Queenehith, was printed in 1593. This chronicle
history, formless enough, as the rambling title shows, is nevertheless an advance on
the old chronicle plays, and marks a step towards the Shakespearian historical drama.
Peele is said by some scholars to have written or contributed to the bloody tragedy
Titus Andronicus, which is normally attributed to Shakespeare. This theory is in part
due to Peele's predilection for gore, as evidenced in The Battell of Alcazar with the
death of Captaine Stukeley (acted 1588-1589, printed 1594), published anonymously,
which is attributed with much probability to him. The Old Wives Tale, registered in
Stationers Hall, perhaps more correctly, as The Owlde wifes tale (printed 1595), was
followed by The Love of King David and fair Bethsabe (written ca. 1588, printed
1599), which is notable as an example of Elizabethan drama drawn entirely from
Scriptural sources. F.G. Fleay sees in it a political satire, and identifies Elizabeth and
Leicester as David and Bathsheba, Mary Queen of Scots as Absalom. Sir Clyomon
and Sir Clamydes (printed 1599) has been attributed to Peele, but on insufficient
grounds.
Among his occasional poems are The Honour of the Garter, which has a
prologue containing Peele's judgments on his contemporaries, and Polyhymnia
(1590), a blank verse description of the ceremonies attending the retirement of the
Queen's champion, Sir Henry Lee. This is concluded by the sonnet, "His golden locks
time hath to silver turnd," quoted by Thackeray in the 76th chapter of The Newcomes.
To the Phoenix Nest in 1593 he contributed The Praise of Chastity. Fleay (Biog.
Chron. of the Drama) credits Peele with The Wisdom of Doctor Doddipoll (printed
1600), Wily Beguiled (printed 1606), The Life and Death of Jack Straw, a notable
rebel (1587?), a share in the First and Second Parts of Henry VI, and on the authority
of Wood and Winstanley, Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany. Peele belonged to the
group of university scholars who, in Greene's phrase, "spent their wits in making
playes." Greene went on to say that he was in some things rarer, in nothing inferior,
to Christopher Marlowe. Thomas Nashe, in his preface to Greene's Menaphon, called
him "the chief supporter of pleasance now living, the Atlas of Poetrie and primus
verborum artifex, whose first encrease, the Arraignement of Paris, might plead to
your opinions his pregnant dexteritie of wit and manifold varietie of invention,
wherein (me judice) hee goeth a step beyond all that write." This praise was not
unfounded. The credit given to Greene and Marlowe for the increased dignity of
English dramatic diction, and for the new smoothness infused into blank verse, must
certainly be shared by Peele.
Professor F.B. Gummere, in a critical essay prefixed to his edition of The Old
Wives Tale, puts in another claim for Peele. In the contrast between the romantic
story and the realistic dialogue he sees the first instance of humour quite foreign to
the comic business of earlier comedy. The Old Wives Tale is a play within a play,
slight enough to be perhaps better described as an interlude. Its background of rustic
folklore gives it additional interest, and there is much fun poked at Gabriel Harvey
and Richard Stanyhurst. Perhaps Huanebango, who parodies Harvey's hexameters,
and actually quotes him on one occasion, may be regarded as representing that arch-
enemy of Greene and his friends. Peele's Works were edited by Alexander Dyce
(1828, 1829-1839 and 1861); by A.H. Bullen (2 vols., 1888). An examination of the
metrical peculiarities of his work is to be found in F.A.R. Lammerhirts Georg Peele,
Untersuchungen bei sein Leben und seine Werke (Rцstock, 1882). See also Professor
F.B. Gummere, in Representative English Comedies (1903); and an edition of The
Battell of Alcazar, printed for the Malone Society in 1907.

Robert Greene (c.1560-1592)

ROBERT GREENE (c.1560-1592), English dramatist and miscellaneous writer, was born at Norwich
about 1560. The identity of his father has been disputed, but there is every reason to believe that he belonged
to the tradesmen's class and had small means. It is doubtful whether Robert Greene attended Norwich
grammar school; but, as an eastern counties man (to one of whose plays, Friar Bacon, the Norfolk and
Suffolk borderland owes a lasting poetic commemoration) he naturally found his way to Cambridge, where
he entered St John's College as a sizar in 1575 and took his B.A. thence in 1579, proceeding M.A. in 1583 from
Clare Hall. His life at the university was, according to his own account, spent "among wags as lewd as
himself, with whom he consumed the flower of his youth." In 1588 he was incorporated at Oxford, so that on
some of his titlepages he styles himself "utriusque Academiae in Artibus Magister"; and Nashe humorously
refers to him as "utriusque Academiae Robertus Greene."

Between the years 157,8 and 1583 he had travelled abroad, according to his own account very extensively,
visiting France, Germany, Poland and Denmark, besides learning at first-hand to "hate the pride of Italie"
and to know the taste of that poet's fruit, "Spanish mirabolones." The grounds upon which it has been
suggested that he took holy orders are quite insufficient; according to the title-page of a pamphlet published
by him in 1585 he was then a "student in phisicke." Already, however, after taking his M.A. degree, he had
according to his own account begun his London life, and his earliest extant literary production was in hand as
early as 1580. He now became "an author of playes and a penner of lovepamphlets, so that I soone grew
famous in that qualitie, that who for that trade growne so ordinary about London as Robin Greene ?"  "Glad
was that printer," says Nashe, that might bee so blest to pay him deare for the very dregs of his wit."

By his own account he rapidly sank into the worst debaucheries of the town, though Nashe declares that he
never knew him guilty of notorious crime. He was not without passing impulses towards a more righteous
and sober life, and was derided in consequence by his associates as a "Puritane and Presizian." It is possible
that he, as well as his bitter enemy, Gabriel Harvey, exaggerated the looseness of his conduct. His marriage,
which took place in 1585 or 1586, failed to steady him; if Francesco, in Greene's pamphlet Never too late to
mend (1590), is intended for the author himself, it had been a runaway match; but the fiction and the
autobiographical sketch in the Repentance agree in their account of the unfaithfulness which followed on the
part of the husband. He lived with his wife, whose name seems to have been Dorothy ("Doll"; and cf.
Dorothea in James IV.), for a while; "but forasmuch as she would perswade me from my wilful wickednes,
after I had a child by her, I cast her off, having spent up the marriage-money which I obtained by her. Then
left I her at six or seven, who went into Lincolnshire, and I to London," where his reputation as a playwright
and writer of pamphlets of "love and vaine fantasyes" continued to increase, and where his life was a feverish
alternation of labour and debauchery.

In his last years he took it upon himself to make war on the cutpurses and "conny-catchers" with whom he
came into contact in the slums, and whose doings he fearlessly exposed in his writings. He tells us how at last
he was friendless "except it were in a fewe alehouses," where he was respected on account of the score he had
run up. When the end came he was a dependant on the charity of the poor and the pitying love of the
unfortunate. Henri Murger has drawn no picture more sickening and more pitiful than the story of Greene's
death, as told by his Puritan adversary, Gabriel Harvey - a veracious though a far from unprejudiced
narrator. Greene had taken up the cudgels provided by the Harvey brothers on their intervention in the
Marprelate controversy, and made an attack (immediately suppressed) upon Gabriel's father and family in
the prose-tract A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, or a Quaint Dispute between Velvet Breeches and Cloth
Breeches (1592). After a banquet where the chief guest had been Thomas Nashe - an old associate and
perhaps a college friend of Greene's, any great intimacy with whom, however, he seems to have been anxious
to disclaim - Greene had fallen sick "of a surfeit of pickle herringe and Rennish wine." At the house of a poor
shoemaker near Dowgate, deserted by all except his compassionate hostess (Mrs Isam) and two women - one
of them the sister of a notorious thief named "Cutting Ball," and the mother of his illegitimate son,
Fortunatus Greene - he died on the 3rd of September 1592. Shortly before his death he wrote under a bond
for £10 which he had given to the good shoemaker, the following words addressed to his longforsaken wife:
"Doll, I charge thee, by the loue of our youth and by my soules rest, that thou wilte see this man paide; for if
hee and his wife had not succoured me, I had died in the streetes. - Robert Greene."

Four Letters and Certain Sonnets, Harvey's attack on Greene, appeared almost immediately after his death,
as to the circumstances of which his relentless adversary had taken care to inform himself personally. Nashe
took up the defence of his dead friend and ridiculed Harvey in Strange News (1593) ; and the dispute
continued for some years. But, before this, the dramatist Henry Chettle published a pamphlet from the hand
of the unhappy man, entitled Greene's Groat's-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance (1592),
containing the story of Roberto, who may be regarded, for practical purposes, as representing Greene
himself. This ill-starred production may almost be said to have done more to excite the resentment of
posterity against Greene's name than all the errors for which he professed his repentance. For in it he
exhorted to repentance three of his quondam acquaintance. Of these three Marlowe was one - to whom and
to whose creation of "that Atheist Tamberlaine" he had repeatedly alluded. The second was Peele, the third
probably Nashe. But the passage addressed to Peele contained a transparent allusion to a fourth dramatist,
who was an actor likewise, as "an vpstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygres heart wrapt
in a player's hyde supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you; and being an
absolute Iohannes-fac-totum, is in his owne conceyt the onely shake-scene in a countrey." The phrase
italicized parodies a passage occurring in The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York, &c., and retained in
Part III. of Henry VI. If Greene (as many eminent critics have thought) had a hand in The True Tragedie, he
must here have intended a charge of plagiarism against Shakespeare. But while it seems more probable that
(as the late R. Simpson suggested) the upstart crow beautified with the feathers of the three dramatists is a
sneering description of the actor who declaimed their verse, the animus of the whole attack (as explained by
Dr Ingleby) is revealed in its concluding phrases. This "shake-scene," i.e. this actor had ventured to intrude
upon the domain of the regular staff of playwrights - their monopoly was in danger!

Two other prose pamphlets of an autobiographical nature were issued posthumously. Of these, The
Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts (1592), must originally have been written by him on his death-
bed, under the influence, as he says, "of Father Parsons's Booke of Resolution" ( The Christian Directorie,
appertayning to Resolution, 1582, republished in an enlarged form, which became very popular, in 1585) ;
but it bears traces of having been improved from the original; while Greene's Vision was certainly not, as the
title-page avers, written during his last illness.

Altogether not less than thirty-five prose-tracts are ascribed to Greene's prolific pen. Nearly all of them are
interspersed with verses; in their themes they range from the "misticall" wonders of the heavens to the
familiar but "pernitious sleights" of the sharpers of London. But the most widely attractive of his prose
publications were his "love-pamphlets," which brought upon him the outcry of Puritan censors. The earliest
of his novels, as they may be called, Mamillia, was licensed in 1583. This interesting story may be said to
have accompanied Greene through life; for even part II., of which, though probably completed several years
earlier, the earliest extant edition bears the date 1593, had a sequel, The Anatomie of Love's Flatteries, which
contains a review of suitors recalling Portia's in The Merchant of Venice. The Myrrour of Modestie (the story
of Susanna) (1584); The Historie of Arhasto, King of Denmarke (1584); Morando, the Tritameron of Love (a
rather tedious imitation of the Decameron (1584); Planetomachia (1585) (a contention in storytelling
between Venus and Saturn); Penelope's Web (1587) (another string of stories); Alcida, Greene's
Metamorphosis (1588), and others, followed.

In these popular productions he appears very distinctly as a follower of John Lyly; indeed, the first part of
Mamillia was entered in the Stationers' Registers in the year of the appearance of Euphues, and two of
Greene's novels are by their titles announced as a kind of sequel to the parent romance: Euphues his Censure
to Philautus (1587), Menaphon. Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues (1589), named in some later
editions Greene's Arcadia. This pastoral romance, written in direct emulation of Sidney's, with a heroine
called Samila, contains St Sephestia's charming lullaby, with its refrain "Father's sorowe, father's joy." But,
though Greene's style copies the balanced oscillation, and his diction the ornateness (including the proverbial
philosophy) of Lyly, he contrives to interest by the matter as well as to attract attention by the manner of his
narratives. Of his highly moral intentions he leaves the reader in no doubt, since they are exposed on the
title-pages. The full title of the Myrrour of Modestie for instance continues: " wherein appeareth as in a
perfect glasse how the Lord delivereth the innocent from all imminent perils, and plagueth the blood-thirsty
hypocrites with deserved punishments," &c. On his Pandosto, The Triumph of Time (1588) Shakespeare
founded A Winter's Tale; in fact, the novel contains the entire plot of the comedy, except the device of the
living statue; though some of the subordinate characters in the play, including Autolycus, were added by
Shakespeare, together with the pastoral fragrance of one of its episodes.

In Greene's Never too Late (1590), announced as a "Powder of Experience: sent to all youthfull gentlemen"
for their benefit, the hero, Francesco, is in all probability intended for Greene himself, the sequel or second
part is, however, pure fiction. This episodical narrative has a vivacity and truthfulness of manner which
savour of an 18th century novel rather than of an Elizabethan tale concerning the days of "Palmerin, King of
Great Britain." Philador, the prodigal of The Mourning Garment (1590), is obviously also in some respects a
portrait of the writer. The experiences of the Roberto of Greene's Groatsworth of Wit (1592) are even more
palpably the experiences of the author himself, though they are possibly overdrawn - for a born rhetorician
exaggerates everything, even his own sins. Besides these and the posthumous pamphlets on his repentance,
Greene left realistic pictures of the very disreputable society to which he finally descended, in his pamphlets
on "connycatching":  A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (1591), The Blacke Bookes Messenger. Laying open
the Life and Death of Ned Browne, one of the most Notable Cutpurses, Crossbiters, and Conny-catchers that
ever lived in England (1592). Much in Greene's manner, both in his romances and in his pictures of low life,
anticipated what proved the slow course of the actual development of the English novel; and it is probable
that his true métier, and that which best suited the bright fancy, ingenuity and wit of which his genius was
compounded, was pamphletspinning and story-telling rather than dramatic composition. It should be added
that, euphuist as Greene was, few of his contemporaries in their lyrics warbled wood-notes which like his
resemble Shakespeare's in their native freshness.

Curiously enough, as Mr Churton Collins has pointed out, Greene, except in the two pamphlets written just
before his death, never refers to his having written plays; and before 1592 his contemporaries are equally
silent as to his labours as a playwright. Only four plays remain to us of which he was indisputably the sole
author. The earliest of these seems to have been the Comicall History of Alphonsus, King of Arragon, of
which Henslowe's Diary contains no trace. But it can hardly have been first acted long after the production of
Marlowe's Tamburlaine, which had, in all probability, been brought on the stage in 1587. For this play,
"comical" only in the negative sense of having a happy ending, was manifestly written in emulation as well as
in direct imitation of Marlowe's tragedy. While Greene cannot have thought himself capable of surpassing
Marlowe as a tragic poet, he very probably wished to outdo him in "business," and to equal him in the rant
which was sure to bring down at least part of the house. Alphonsus is a history proper - a dramatized
chronicle or narrative of warlike events. Its fame could never equal that of Marlowe's tragedy; but its
composition showed that Greene could seek to rival the most popular drama of the day, without falling very
far short of his model.

In the Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (not known to have been acted before
February, 1592, but probably written in 1589) Greene once more attempted to emulate Marlowe; and he
succeeded in producing a masterpiece of his own. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, which doubtless suggested the
composition of Greene's comedy, reveals the mighty tragic genius of its author; but Greene resolved on an
altogether distinct treatment of a cognate theme. Interweaving with the popular tale of Friar Bacon and his
wondrous doings a charming idyl (so far as we know, of his own invention), the story of Prince Edward's love
for the Fair Maid of Fressingfield, he produced a comedy brimful of amusing action and genial fun. Friar
Bacon remains a dramatic picture of English Elizabethan life with which The Merry Wives alone can vie; and
not even the ultraclassicism in the similes of its diction can destroy the naturalness which constitutes its
perennial charm. The History of Orlando Furioso, one of the Twelve Peeres of France has on unsatisfactory
evidence been dated as before 1586, and is known to have been acted on the 21st of February 1592. It is a free
dramatic adaptation of Ariosto, Harington's translation of whom appeared in 1591, and who in one passage is
textually quoted; and it contains a large variety of characters and a superabundance of action. Fairly lucid in
arrangement and fluent in style, the treatment of the madness of Orlando lacks tragic power. Very few
dramatists from Sophocles to Shakespeare have succeeded in subordinating the grotesque effect of madness
to the tragic; and Greene is not to be included in the list.

In The Scottish Historie of James IV. (acted 1592, licensed for publication 1594) Greene seems to have
reached the climax of his dramatic powers. The "historical" character of this play is pure pretence. The story
is taken from one of Giraldi Cinthio's tales. Its theme is the illicit passion of King James for the chaste lady
Ida, to obtain whose hand he endeavours, at the suggestion of a villain called Ateukin, to make away with his
own wife. She escapes in doublet and hose, attended by her faithful dwarf; but, on her father's making war
upon her husband to avenge her wrongs, she brings about a reconciliation between them. Not only is this
well-constructed story effectively worked out, but the characters are vigorously drawn, and in Ateukin there
is a touch of Iago. The fooling by Slipper, the clown of the piece, is unexceptionable; and, lest even so the play
should hang heavy on the audience, its action is carried off by a "pleasant comedic" — i.e. a prelude and some
dances between the acts — "presented by Oboram, King of Fayeries," who is, however, a very different person
from the Oberon of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

George-a-Greene the Pinner of Wakefield (acted 1593,1593, printed 1 599), a delightful picture of English life
fully worthy of the author of Friar Bungay, has been attributed to him; but the external evidence is very
slight, and the internal unconvincing. Of the comedy of Fair Em, which resembles Friar Bacon in more than
one point, Greene cannot have been the author; the question as to the priority between the two plays is not so
easily solved. The conjecture as to his supposed share in the plays on which the second and third parts of
Henry VI. are founded has been already referred to. He was certainly joint author with Thomas Lodge of the
curious drama called A Looking Glasse for London and England (acted in 1592 and printed in 1594) - a
dramatic apologue conveying to the living generation of Englishmen the warning of Nineveh's corruption and
prophesied doom. The lesson was frequently repeated in the streets of London by the "Ninevitical motions"
of the puppets; but there are both fire and wealth of language in Greene and Lodge's oratory. The comic
element is not absent, being supplied in abundance by Adam, the clown of the piece, who belongs to the
family of Slipper, and of Friar Bacon's servant, Miles.

Greene's dramatic genius has nothing in it of the intensity of Marlowe's tragic muse; nor perhaps does he
ever equal Peele at his best. On the other hand, his dramatic poetry is occasionally animated with the breezy
freshness which no artifice can simulate. He had considerable constructive skill, but he has created no
character of commanding power - unless Ateukin be excepted; but his personages are living men and women,
and marked out from one another with a vigorous but far from rude hand. His comic humour is undeniable,
and he had the gift of light and graceful dialogue. His diction is overloaded with classical ornament, but his
versification is easy and fluent, and its cadence is at times singularly sweet. He creates his best effects by the
simplest means; and he is indisputably one of the most attractive of early English dramatic authors.

Greene's dramatic works and poems were edited by Alexander Dyce in 1831 with a life of the author. This
edition was reissued in one volume in 1858. His complete works were edited for the Huth Library by A. B.
Grosart. This issue (1881-1886) contains a translation of Nicholas Storojhenko's monograph on Greene
(Moscow, 1878). Greene's plays and poems were edited with introductions and notes by J. Churton Collins in
2 vols. (Oxford, 1905) ; the general introduction to this edition has superseded previous accounts of Greene
and his dramatic and lyrical writings. An account of his pamphlets is to be found in J. J. Jusserand's English
Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (Eng. trans., 1890). See also W. Bernhardi, Robert Greenes Leben and
Schriften (1874) ; F. M. Bodenstedt, in Shakespeare's Zeitgenossen and ihre Werke (1858) ; and an
introduction by A. W. Ward to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (Oxford, 1886, 4th ed., 1901).

George Gascoigne (1539-1578)

There is some confusion about the biography of George Gascoigne, particularly since recent
(as yet unpublished) research by Dr. Evelyn Lord of Cambridge University has revealed that there
was more than one person of this name living at the same time, and that at least one of the others
was a poet. Biographers seem to agree that our man was a Cardington (Bedfordshire) Gascoigne,
born within one or two years of 1539, the son of Sir John Gascoigne, a landowner and farmer.
George is said to have attended Trinity College, Cambridge, although the records do not include his
name, and by 1555 he seems to have been in London at Gray's Inn. He even sat as a very young MP
in Queen Mary I's last Parliament (1558), according to his biographer Prouty.
      Gascoigne first went to court as a replacement for his father as almoner at Elizabeth I's
coronation, and after that he spent his life trying to establish himself as a courtier, something he
consistently failed to do and which failure he shared with a later courtly aspirant-cum-poet, John
Donne. He did make some connections, however, and married Elizabeth Breton, a wealthy widow,
but even here things began to go wrong. It seems that Elizabeth had already been contracted in
marriage to one Edward Boyes (before she met Gascoigne), but that she did not consider the
marriage valid. Boyes, unfortunately, disagreed, and took them to court. They were separated, and
Elizabeth's goods impounded, but after much legal wrangling they finally won their case.
      In 1566 Gascoigne wrote his play Supposes, a translation of Ariosto's I Suppositi (1509), for a
carnival at Gray's Inn. Gascoigne, like his father, tried his hand at farming, but he was not very
successful and he was not helped by his father's vow to disinherit him nor by his mother's stealing
his sheep. His own brothers, also, took actions against him in court for various reasons, and by 1570
Gascoigne had already been in prison for debt. Getting re-elected to Parliament was one way out,
because it provided one with immunity, but when Gascoigne tried that tactic in 1571 he was
disallowed by the Privy Council as being "a notorious ruffian....an atheist and godless person."
There was nothing for it but to join the army, and late in 1571 we find Gascoigne volunteering to
serve in the Netherlands under William the Silent.
      In 1572 Gascoigne returned to England and wrote a wedding masque for Lord Montague, and
prepared for press his collected works under the name of A Hundreth Sundry Flowres. His
biographers mention further catastrophes which made him return to Holland almost immediately,
but in any case he was accused of treason, acquitted, but lost most of his personal assets. In a new
book, The Steele Glas, he attacked the futility of war, but in 1575, when Gascoigne was again in
England, he had to revise parts of Flowres to satisfy the censors. Much of the rest of his literary
output, which includes the famous Adventures of Master F.J., was revised to contain declarations of
his good moral intentions, and hence the major works, including F.J., have two versions.
      In 1576 Gascoigne's luck seemed to turn, for Lord Burghley appointed him to head a "fact-
finding" mission (as we would call it today) to Paris and Antwerp, which produced Gascoigne's
Spoyle of Antwerp, a vivid first-hand account. In October 1577, however, Gascoigne came down
with an unspecified illness which killed him, just at the time when his life seemed to be turning
around.

2.Works
Gascoigne's first significant work was the play Supposes, which was a substantial
contribution to the introduction of Italian erudite comedy into England, and which Shakespeare
used as a source for the sub-plot of The Taming of the Shrew. Gascoigne was a fine translator,
trying to remain faithful to the spirit of Ariosto's Italian text while at the same time endowing it
with uniquely English characteristics of bawdy wit and double entrendre, which would have
appealed to his student audience.
      Critics have concentrated on Gascoigne as a poet because they have felt, since the time of C.S.
Lewis at any rate, that the early period of the Renaissance in England produced few poets of note.
Apart from Surrey and Wyatt, and perhaps Sackville (co-author of Gorboduc), late Henrician and
Marian literature has been dismissed as, in Lewis's word, "drab." More recently, however, Alicia
Ostriker, writing in Christopher Ricks's anthology, called Gascoigne one of the best poets writing in
what she still calls "that fallow time." Ivor Winters thought him a better poet than Samuel Daniel or
Michael Drayton, and his poems are appearing in greater quantity in anthologies, not to mention
being reprinted on the Web, where the complete text of A Hundreth Sundry Flowres may be read.
His account of military expeditions in Holland deserve a reading, too, and The Adventures of
Master F.J. is a signifcant work of early Renaissance prose fiction which deserves at least as much
attention as Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller.

John Lyly (1554-1606)

      John Lyly was born in Kent in 1554. He was brought up in Canterbury where he likely attended
the King's School at the same time as Marlowe. Lyly received the A.M. degree at Magdalen
College, University of Oxford, in 1575. After failed petitions for support from Lord Burghley for a
fellowship, Lyly removed to London.
      He became instantly famous with the publication of the prose romance Euphues, or the Anatomy
of Wit (1578) and its sequel Euphues and His England (1580). Euphues is Greek for "graceful." 
Euphuism, as the elaborate prose style modelled on Lyly came to be called, was at the height of
popularity in the 1580s. Euphuistic style has two features:
an especially elaborate sentence structure based on parallel figures from the ancient rhetorics and a wealth of ornament
including proverbs, incidents from history and poetry, proverbs, and similes drawn from pseudoscience, from Pliny,
from textbooks, or from the author's imagination.1
Lyly's style had a marked impact on contemporary writers, not the least on Shakespeare.
Polonius in Hamlet, Moth in Love's Labour's Lost, and the repartees of Beatrice and Benedick in
Much Ado About Nothing show signs of Lyly's influence.
      In 1583, Lyly married Beatrice Browne, a Yorkshire heiress. The same year he became in
control of the first Blackfriars Theatre. He wrote several prose comedies for children's companies,
all geared towards the courtly audience. These plays included Campaspe (1584), Sapho and Phao
(early 1580s), Endymion: The Man in the Moon (1586-7), Love's Metamorphosis (1589), Midas
(1589), and Mother Bombie (1589). Lyly's only play in verse was the comedy The Woman in the
2

Moone (1594?).
Lyly's contribution to the Martin Marprelate controversy, on the bishops' side, was 1589's Pap with an
Hatchet. Lyly served as an MP three times, the first of which was for Hindon in Wiltshire, in 1589. Lyly
spent most of the remainder of his life at his wife's home in Mexborough, Yorkshire.

Thomas Kyd (1558-1594)

THOMAS KYD, one of the most important of the English Elizabethan dramatists who preceded
Shakespeare. Kyd remained until the last decade of the eighteenth century in what appeared likely to be
impenetrable obscurity. Even his name was forgotten until Thomas Hawkins about 1773 discovered it in
connection with The Spanish Tragedy in Thomas Heywood's Apologie for Actors. But by the industry of
English and German scholars a great deal of light has since been thrown on his life and writings. He was the
son of Francis Kyd, citizen and scrivener of London, and was baptized in the church of St Mary Woolnoth,
Lombard Street, on the 6th of November 1558. His mother, who survived her son, was named Agnes, or
Anna. In October 1565 Kyd entered the newly founded Merchant Taylors' School, where Edmund Spenser
and perhaps Thomas Lodge were at different times his school-fellows. It is thought that Kyd did not proceed
to either of the universities; he apparently followed, soon after leaving school, his father's business as a
scrivener. But Nashe describes him as a " shifting companion that ran through every art and throve by none."
He showed a fairly wide range of reading in Latin. The author on whom he draws most freely is Seneca, but
there are many reminiscences, and occasionally mistranslations of other authors. Nashe contemptuously said
that "English Seneca read by candlelight yeeldes many good sentences," no doubt exaggerating his
indebtedness to Thomas Newton's translation. John Lyly had a more marked influence on his manner than
any of his contemporaries.

It is believed that he produced his famous play, The Spanish Tragedy, between 1584 and 1589; the quarto in
the British Museum (which is probably earlier than the Gottingen and Ellesmere quartos, dated 1594 and
1599) is undated, and the play was licensed for the press in 1592. The full title runs, The Spanish Tragedie
containing the Lamentable End of Don Horatio and Bel-imperia; with the Pitiful Death of Old Hieronimo ,
and the play is commonly referred to by Henslowe and other contemporaries as Hieronimo. This drama
enjoyed all through the age of Elizabeth and even of James I and Charles I so unflagging a success that it has
been styled the most popular of all old English plays.

Certain expressions in Nashe's preface to the 1589 edition of Robert Greene's Menaphon may be said to have
started a whole world of speculation with regard to Kyd's activity. Much of this is still very puzzling; nor is it
really understood why Ben Jonson called him "sporting Kyd." In 1592 there was added a sort of prologue to
The Spanish Tragedy, called The First Part of Jeronimo, or The Warres of Portugal, not printed till 1605.
Professor Boas concludes that Kyd had nothing to do with this melodramatic production, which gives a
different version of the story and presents Jeronimo as little more than a buffoon. On the other hand, it
becomes more and more certain that what German criticism calls the Ur-Hamlet, the original draft of the
tragedy of the prince of Denmark, was a lost work by Kyd, probably composed by him in 1587. This theory
has been very elaborately worked out by Professor Sarrazin, and confirmed by Professor Boas; these scholars
are doubtless right in holding that traces of Kyd's play survive in the first two acts of the 1603 first quarto of
Hamlet, but they probably go too far in attributing much of the actual language of the last three acts to Kyd.
Kyd's next work was in all probability the tragedy of Soliman and Perseda, written perhaps in 1588 and
licensed for the press in 1592, which, although anonymous, is assigned to him on strong internal evidence by
Mr. Boas. No copy of the first edition has come down to us; but it was reprinted, after Kyd's death, in 1599.

In the summer or autumn of 1590 Kyd seems to have given up writing for the stage, and to have entered the
service of an unnamed lord, who employed a troop of players. Kyd was probably the private secretary of this
nobleman, in whom Professor Boas sees Robert Radcliffe, afterwards fifth Earl of Sussex. To the wife of the
Earl (Bridget Morison of Cassiobury) Kyd dedicated in the last year of his life his translation of Gamier's
Comedia (1594), to the dedication of which he attached his initials. Two prose works of the dramatist have
survived, a treatise on domestic economy, The House-holders Philosophy, translated from the Italian of
Tasso (1588); and a sensational account of The Most Wicked and Secret Murdering of John Brewer,
Goldsmith (1592). His name is written on the title-page of the unique copy of the last-named pamphlet at
Lambeth, but probably not by his hand. That many of Kyd's plays and poems have been lost is proved by the
fact that fragments exist, attributed to him, which are found in no surviving context.

Towards the close of his life Kyd was brought into relations with Christopher Marlowe. It would seem that in
1590, soon after he entered the service of this nobleman, Kyd formed his acquaintance. If he is to be believed,
he shrank at once from Marlowe as a man intemperate and of a cruel heart and irreligious. This, however,
was said by Kyd with the rope 'round his neck, and is scarcely consistent with a good deal of apparent
intimacy between him and Marlowe. When, in May 1593, the lewd libels and blasphemies of Marlowe came
before the notice of the Star Chamber, Kyd was immediately arrested, papers of his having been found
shuffled with some of Marlowe's, who was imprisoned a week later. A visitation on Kyd's papers was made in
consequence of his having attached a seditious libel to the wall of the Dutch churchyard in Austin Friars. Of
this he was innocent, but there was found in his chamber a paper of vile heretical conceits denying the deity
of Jesus Christ.

Kyd was arrested and put to the torture in Bridewell. He asserted that he knew nothing of this document and
tried to shift the responsibility of it upon Marlowe, but he was kept in prison until after the death of that poet
(June 1, 1593). When he was at length dismissed, his patron refused to take him back into his service. He fell
into utter destitution, and sank under the weight of bitter times and privy broken passions. He must have
died late in 1594, and on the 30th of December of that year his parents renounced their administration of the
goods of their deceased son, in a document of great importance discovered by Professor Schick.

The importance of Kyd, as the pioneer in the wonderful movement of secular drama in England, gives great
interest to his works, and we are now able at last to assert what many critics have long conjectured, that he
takes in that movement the position of a leader and almost of an inventor. Regarded from this point of view,
The Spanish Tragedy is a work of extraordinary value, since it is the earliest specimen of effective stage
poetry existing in English literature. It had been preceded only by the pageant-poems of Peele and Lyly, in
which all that constitutes in the modern sense theatrical technique and effective construction was entirely
absent. These gifts, in which the whole power of the theatre as a place of general entertainment was to
consist, were supplied earliest among English playwrights to Kyd, and were first exercised by him, so far as
we can see, in 1586. This, then, is a more or less definite starting date for Elizabethan drama, and of peculiar
value to its historians.

Curiously enough, The Spanish Tragedy, which was the earliest stage-play of the great period, was also the
most popular, and held its own right through the careers of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Fletcher. It was
not any shortcoming in its harrowing and exciting plot, hut the tameness of its archaic versification, which
probably led in 1602 to its receiving additions, which have been a great stumblingblock to the critics. It is
known that Ben Jonson was paid for these additional scenes, but they are extremely unlike all other known
writings of his, and several scholars have independently conjectured that John Webster wrote them.

Of Kyd himself it seems needful to point out that neither the Germans nor even Professor Boas seems to
realize how little definite merit his poetry has; he is important, not in himself, but as a pioneer. The influence
of Kyd is marked on all the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, and the bold way in which scenes of
violent crime were treated on the Elizabethan stage appears to be directly owing to the example of Kyd's
innovating genius. His relation to Hamlet has already been noted, and Titus Andronicus presents and
exaggerates so many of his characteristics that Mr. Sidney Lee and others have supposed that tragedy to be a
work of Kyd's, touched up by Shakespeare. Professor Boas, however, brings cogent objections against this
theory, founding them on what he considers the imitative inferiority of Titus Andronicus to The Spanish
Tragedy. The German critics have pushed too far their attempt to find indications of Kyd's influence on later
plays of Shakespeare. The extraordinary interest felt for Kyd in Germany is explained by the fact that The
Spanish Tragedy was long the best known of all Elizabethan plays abroad. It was acted at Frankfurt in 1601,
and published soon afterwards at Nuremberg. It continued to be a stock piece in Germany until the
beginning of the 18th century; it was equally popular in Holland, and potent in its effect upon Dutch
dramatic literature.
 Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, English dramatist, the father of English tragedy, and instaurator of
dramatic blank verse, the eldest son of a shoemaker at Canterbury, was born in that city on the 6th
of February 1564. He was christened at St George's Church, Canterbury, on the 26th of February,
1563/4, some two months before Shakespeare's baptism at Stratford-on-Avon. His father, John
Marlowe, is said to have been the grandson of John Morley or Marlowe, a substantial tanner of
Canterbury. The father, who survived by a dozen years or so his illustrious son, married on the 22nd
of May 1561 Catherine, daughter of Christopher Arthur, at one time rector of St Peter's, Canterbury,
who had been ejected by Queen Mary as a married minister. The dramatist received the rudiments
of his education at the King's School, Canterbury, which he entered at Michaelmas 1578, and where
he had as his fellow-pupils Richard Boyle, afterwards known as the great earl of Cork, and Will
Lyly, the brother of the dramatist. Stephen Gosson entered the same school a little before, and
William Harvey, the famous physician, a little after Marlowe. He went to Cambridge as one of
Archbishop Parker's scholars from the King's School, and matriculated at Benet (Corpus Christi)
College, on the 17th of March 1571, taking his B.A. degree in 1584, and that of M.A. three or four
years later.

Francis Kett, the mystic, burnt in 1589 for heresy, was a fellow and tutor of his college, and may
have had some share in developing Marlowe's opinions in religious matters. Marlowe's classical
acquirements were of a kind which was then extremely common, being based for the most part
upon a minute acquaintance with Roman mythology, as revealed in Ovid's Metamorphoses. His
spirited translation of Ovid's Amores (printed 1596), which was at any rate commenced at
Cambridge, does not seem to point to any very intimate acquaintance with the grammar and syntax
of the Latin tongue. Before 1587 he seems to have quitted Cambridge for London, where he
attached himself to the Lord Admiral's Company of Players, under the leadership of the famed actor
Edward Alleyn, and almost at once began writing for the stage.

Of Marlowe's career in London, apart from his four great theatrical successes, we know hardly
anything; but he evidently knew Thomas Kyd, who shared his unorthodox opinions. Nash criticized
his verse, Greene affected to shudder at his atheism; Gabriel Harvey maligned his memory. On the
other hand Marlowe was intimate with the Walsinghams of Scadbury, Chiselhurst, kinsmen of Sir
Francis Walsingham: he was also the personal friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, and perhaps of the
poetical earl of Oxford, with both of whom, and with such men as Walter Warner and Robert
Hughes the mathematicians, Thomas Harriott the notable astronomer, and Matthew Royden, the
dramatist is said to have met in free converse. Either this free converse or the licentious character of
some of the young dramatist's tirades seems to have sown a suspicion among the strait-laced that his
morals left everything to be desired. It is probable enough that this attitude of reprobation drove a
man of so exalted a disposition as Marlowe into a more insurgent attitude than he would have
otherwise adopted. He seems at any rate to have been associated with what was denounced as Sir
Walter Raleigh's school of atheism, and to have dallied with opinions which were then regarded as
putting a man outside the pale of civilized humanity.

As the result of some depositions made by Thomas Kyd under the influence of torture, the Privy
Council were upon the eve of investigating some serious charges against Marlowe when his career
was abruptly and somewhat scandalously terminated. The order had already been issued for his
arrest, when he was slain in a quarrel by a man variously named (Archer and Ingram) at Deptford,
at the end of May 1593, and he was buried on the 1st of June in the churchyard of St Nicholas at
Deptford. The following September Gabriel Harvey referred to him as "dead of the plague." The
disgraceful particulars attached to the tragedy of Marlowe in the popular mind would not seem to
have appeared until four years later (1597) when Thomas Beard, the Puritan author of The Theatre
of God's Judgements, used the death of this playmaker and atheist as one of his warning examples
of the vengeance of God. Upon the embellishments of this story, such as that of Francis Meres the
critic, in 1598, that Marlowe came to be "stabbed to death by a bawdy servingman, a rival of his in
his lewde love," or that of William Vaughan in the Golden Grove of 1600, in which the unfortunate
poet's dagger is thrust into his own eye in prevention of his felonious assault upon an innocent man,
his guest, it is impossible now to pronounce.

We really do not know the circumstances of Marlowe's death. The probability is he was killed in a
brawl, and his atheism must be interpreted not according to the ex parte accusation of one Richard
Baines, a professional informer (among the Privy Council records), but as a species of rationalistic
antinomianism, dialectic in character, and closely related to the deflection from conventional
orthodoxy for which Kett was burnt at Norwich in 1589. A few months before the end of his life
there is reason to believe that he transferred his services from the Lord Admiral's to Lord Strange's
Company, and may have thus been brought into communication with Shakespeare, who in such
plays as Richard II and Richard III owed not a little to the influence of his romantic predecessor.

Marlowe's career as a dramatist lies between the years 1587 and 1593, and the four great plays to
which reference has been made were Tamburlaine the Great, an heroic epic in dramatic form
divided into two parts of five acts each (1587, printed in 1590); Dr Faustus (1588, entered at
Stationers' Hall 1601); The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta (dating perhaps from 1589,
acted in 1592, printed in 1633); and Edward the Second (printed 1594). The very first words of
Tamburlaine sound the trumpet note of attack in the older order of things dramatic:

"From jigging veins of riming mother wits

 And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay
 We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
 Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
 Threatening the world with high astounding terms
 And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword."

It leapt with a bound to a place beside Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and few plays have been more imitated by
rivals (Greene's Alphonsus of Aragon, Peele's Battle of Alcazar) or more keenly satirized by the jealousy and
prejudice of out-distanced competitors. With many and heavy faults, there is something of genuine greatness
in Tamburlaine the Great; and for two grave reasons it must always be remembered with distinction and
mentioned with honour. It is the first play ever written in English blank verse, as distinguished from mere
rhymeless decasyllabics; and it contains one of the noblest passages, perhaps indeed the noblest, in the
literature of the world, ever written by one of the greatest masters of poetry in loving praise of the glorious
delights and sublime submission to the everlasting limits of his art. In its highest and most distinctive
qualities, in unfaltering and infallible command of the right note of music and the proper tone of colour for
the finest touches of poetic execution, no poet of the most elaborate modern school, working at ease upon
every consummate resource of luxurious learning and leisurely refinement, has ever excelled the best and
most representative work of a man who had literally no models before him and probably or evidently was
often if not always compelled to write against time for his living.

The just and generous judgment passed by Goethe on the Faustus of his English predecessor in tragic
treatment of the same subject is somewhat more than sufficient to counterbalance the slighting or the
sneering references to that magnificent poem which might have been expected from the ignorance of Byron
or the incompetence of Hallam. Of all great poems in dramatic form it is perhaps the most remarkable for
absolute singleness of aim and simplicity of construction; yet is it wholly free from all possible imputation of
monotony or aridity. Tamburlaine is monotonous in the general roll and flow of its stately and sonorous
verse through a noisy wilderness of perpetual bluster and slaughter; but the unity of tone and purpose in
Doctor Faustus is not unrelieved by change of manner and variety of incident. The comic scenes, written
evidently with as little of labour as of relish, are for the most part scarcely more than transcripts, thrown into
the form of dialogue, from a popular prose History of Dr Faustus, and therefore should be set down as little
to the discredit as to the credit of the poet. Few masterpieces of any age in any language can stand beside this
tragic poem — it has hardly the structure of a play — for the qualities of terror and splendour, for intensity of
purpose and sublimity of note. In the vision of Helen, for example, the intense perception of loveliness gives
actual sublimity to the sweetness and radiance of mere beauty in the passionate and spontaneous selection of
words the most choice and perfect; and in like manner the sublimity of simplicity in Marlowe's conception
and expression of the agonies endured by Faustus under the immediate imminence of his doom gives the
highest note of beauty, the quality of absolute fitness and propriety, to the sheer straightforwardness of
speech in which his agonizing horror finds vent ever more and more terrible from the first to the last equally
beautiful and fearful verse of that tremendous monologue which has no parallel in all the range of tragedy.

It is now a commonplace of criticism to observe and regret the decline of power and interest after the
opening acts of The Jew of Malta. This decline is undeniable, though even the latter part of the play (the text
of which is very corrupt) is not wanting in rough energy; but the first two acts would be sufficient foundation
for the durable fame of a dramatic poet. In the blank verse of Milton alone — who perhaps was hardly less
indebted than Shakespeare was before him to Marlowe as the first English master of word-music in its
grander forms — has the glory or the melody of passages in the opening soliloquy of Barabbas been possibly
surpassed. The figure of the hero before it degenerates into caricature is as finely touched as the poetic
execution is excellent; and the rude and rapid sketches of the minor characters show at least some vigour and
vivacity of touch.

In Edward the Second the interest rises and the execution improves as visibly and as greatly with the course
of the advancing story as they decline in The Jew of Malta. The scene of the king's deposition at Kenilworth
is almost as much finer in tragic effect and poetic quality as it is shorter and less elaborate than the
corresponding scene in Shakespeare's King Richard II. The terror of the death-scene undoubtedly rises into
horror; but this horror is with skilful simplicity of treatment preserved from passing into disgust. In pure
poetry, in sublime and splendid imagination, this tragedy is excelled by Doctor Faustus; in dramatic power
and positive impression of natural effect it is certainly the masterpiece of Marlowe. It was almost inevitable,
in the hands of any poet but Shakespeare, that none of the characters represented should be capable of
securing or even exciting any finer sympathy or more serious interest than attends on the mere evolution of
successive events or the mere display of emotions (except always in the great scene of the deposition) rather
animal than spiritual in their expression of rage or tenderness or suffering. The exact balance of mutual
effect, the final note of scenic harmony, between ideal conception and realistic execution is not yet struck
with perfect accuracy of touch and security of hand; but on this point also Marlowe has here come nearer by
many degrees to Shakespeare than any of his other predecessors have ever come near to Marlowe.

Of The Massacre at Paris (acted in 1593, printed 1600?) it is impossible to judge fairly from the garbled
fragment of its genuine text which is all that has come down to us. To Mr. Collier, among numberless other
obligations, we owe the discovery of a noble passage excised in the piratical edition which gives us the only
version extant of this unlucky play, and which, it must be allowed, contains nothing of quite equal value. This
is obviously an occasional and polemical work, and being as it is overcharged with the anti-Catholic passion
of the time has a typical quality which gives it some empirical significance and interest. That antipapal ardour
is indeed the only note of unity in a rough and ragged chronicle which shambles and stumbles onward from
the death of Queen Jeanne of Navarre to the murder of the last Valois. It is possible to conjecture, what it
would be fruitless to affirm, that it gave a hint in the next century to Nathaniel Lee for his far superior and
really admirable tragedy on the same subject, issued ninety-seven years after the death of Marlowe.

In the tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage (completed by Thomas Nash, produced and printed 1594), a servile
fidelity to the text of Virgil's narrative has naturally resulted in the failure which might have been expected
from an attempt at once to transcribe what is essentially inimitable and to reproduce it under the hopelessly
alien conditions of dramatic adaptation. The one really noble passage in a generally feeble and incomposite
piece of work is, however, uninspired by the unattainable model to which the dramatists have been only too
obsequious in their subservience. It is as nearly certain as anything can be which depends chiefly upon
cumulative and collateral evidence that the better part of what is best in the serious scenes of King Henry VI
is mainly the work of Marlowe. That he is at any rate the principal author of the second and third plays
passing under that name among the works of Shakespeare, but first and imperfectly printed as The
Contention between the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, can hardly be now a matter of debate
among competent judges. The crucial difficulty of criticism in this matter is to determine, if indeed we should
not rather say to conjecture, the authorship of the humorous scenes in prose, showing as they generally do a
power of comparatively high and pure comic realism to which nothing in the acknowledged works of any pre-
Shakespearian dramatist is even remotely comparable. Yet, especially in the original text of these scenes as
they stand unpurified by the ultimate revision of Shakespeare or his editors, there are tones and touches
which recall rather the clownish horseplay and homely ribaldry of his predecessors than anything in the
lighter interludes of his very earliest plays. We find the same sort of thing which we find in their writings,
only better done than they usually do it, rather than such work as Shakespeare's a little worse done than
usual. And even in the final text of the tragic or metrical scenes the highest note struck is always, with one
magnificent and unquestionable exception, rather in the key of Marlowe at his best than of Shakespeare
while yet in great measure his disciple.

A Taming of a Shrew, the play on which Shakespeare's comedy was founded, has been attributed, without
good reason, to Marlowe. The passages in the play borrowed from Marlowe's works provide an argument
against, rather than for his authorship; while the humorous character of the play is not in keeping with his
other work. He may have had a share in The Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591), and Fleay conjectured
that the plays Edward III and Richard III usually included in editions of Shakespeare are at least based on
plays by Marlowe. Lust's Dominion, printed in 1657, was incorrectly ascribed to him, and a play no longer
extant, The True History of George Scanderbage, was assumed by Fleay on the authority of an obscure
passage of Gabriel Harvey to be his work. The Maiden's Holiday, assigned to Day and Marlowe, was
destroyed by Warburton's cook. Day was considerably Marlowe's junior, and collaboration between the two is
not probable.

Had every copy of Marlowe's boyish version or perversion of Ovid's Elegies (P. Ovidii Nasonis Amorum
compressed into three books) deservedly perished in the flames to which it was judicially condemned by the
sentence of a brace of prelates, it is possible that an occasional bookworm, it is certain that no poetical
student, would have deplored its destruction, if its demerits could in that case have been imagined. His
translation of the first book of Lucan alternately rises above the original and falls short of it,— often inferior
to the Latin in point and weight of expressive rhetoric, now and then brightened by a clearer note of poetry
and lifted into a higher mood of verse. Its terseness, vigour and purity of style would in any case have been
praiseworthy, but are nothing less than admirable, if not wonderful, when we consider how close the
translator has on the whole (in spite of occasional slips into inaccuracy) kept himself to the most rigid limit of
literal representation, phrase by phrase and often line by line. The really startling force and felicity of
occasional verses are worthier of remark than the inevitable stiffness and heaviness of others, when the
technical difficulty of such a task is duly taken into account.

One of the most faultless lyrics and one of the loveliest fragments in the whole range of descriptive and
fanciful poetry would have secured a place for Marlowe among the memorable men of his epoch, even if his
plays had perished with himself. His Passionate Shepherd remains ever since unrivalled in its way — a way of
pure fancy and radiant melody without break or lapse. Marlowe's poem of Hero and Leander (entered at
Stationers' Hall in September 1593; completed and brought out by George Chapman, who divided Marlowe's
work into two sestiads and added four of his own, 1598), closing with the sunrise which closes the night of
the lovers' union, stands alone in its age, and far ahead of the work of any possible competitor between the
death of Spenser and the dawn of Milton. In clear mastery of narrative and presentation, in melodious ease
and simplicity of strength, it is not less pre-eminent than in the adorable beauty and impeccable perfection of
separate lines or passages. It is doubtful whether the heroic couplet has ever been more finely handled.

The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost
impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the
greatest among them been so deeply and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any great writer's influence upon
his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an influence for good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into
the right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man's before him, found its own echo in the
more prolonged but hardly more exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring
and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a
genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight, for
Shakespeare.

Ben Jonson was born around June 11, 1572, the posthumous son of a clergyman. He was educated at
Westminster School by the great classical scholar William Camden and worked in his stepfather's trade, bricklaying.
The trade did not please him in the least, and he joined the army, serving in Flanders. He returned to England about
1592 and married Anne Lewis on November 14, 1594. Jonson joined the theatrical company of Philip Henslowe in
London as an actor and playwright on or before 1597, when he is identified in the papers of Henslowe. In 1597 he was
imprisoned in the Fleet Prison for his involvement in a satire entitled The Isle of Dogs, declared seditious by the
authorities. The following year Jonson killed a fellow actor, Gabriel Spencer, in a duel in the Fields at Shoreditch and
was tried at Old Bailey for murder. He escaped the gallows only by pleading benefit of clergy. During his subsequent
imprisonment he converted to Roman Catholicism only to convert back to Anglicism over a decade later, in 1610. He
was released forfeit of all his possessions, and with a felon's brand on his thumb. Jonson's second known play, Every
Man in His Humour, was performed in 1598 by the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the Globe with William Shakespeare in
the cast. Jonson became a celebrity, and there was a brief fashion for 'humours' comedy, a kind of topical comedy
involving eccentric characters, each of whom represented a temperament, or humor, of humanity. His next play, Every
Man Out of His Humour (1599), was less successful. Every Man Out of His Humour and Cynthia's Revels (1600) were
satirical comedies displaying Jonson's classical learning and his interest in formal experiment.

Jonson's explosive temperament and conviction of his superior talent gave rise to "War of the Theatres". In The
Poetaster (1601), he satirized other writers, chiefly the English dramatists Thomas Dekker and John Marston. Dekker
and Marston retaliated by attacking Jonson in their Satiromastix (1601). The plot of Satiromastix was mainly
overshadowed by its abuse of Jonson. Jonson had portrayed himself as Horace in The Poetaster, and in Satiromastix
Marston and Dekker, as Demetrius and Crispinus ridicule Horace, presenting Jonson as a vain fool. Eventually, the
writers patched their feuding; in 1604 Jonson collaborated with Dekker on The King's Entertainment and with Marston
and George Chapman on Eastward Ho. Jonson's next play, the classical tragedy Sejanus, His Fall (1603), based on
Roman history and offering an astute view of dictatorship, again got Jonson into trouble with the authorities. Jonson
was called before the Privy Council on charges of 'popery and treason'. Jonson did not, however, learn a lesson, and was
again briefly imprisoned, with Marston and Chapman, for controversial views ("something against the Scots") espoused
in Eastward Ho (1604). These two incidents jeopardized his emerging role as court poet to King James I. Having
converted to Catholicism, Jonson was also the object of deep suspicion after the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes
(1605). In 1605, Jonson began to write masques for the entertainment of the court. The earliest of his masques, The
Satyr was given at Althorpe, and Jonson seems to have been appointed Court Poet shortly after. The masques displayed
his erudition, wit, and versatility and contained some of his best lyric poetry. Masque of Blacknesse (1605) was the first
in a series of collaborations with Inigo Jones, noted English architect and set designer. This collaboration produced
masques such as The Masque of Owles, Masque of Beauty (1608), and Masque of Queens (1609), which were
performed in Inigo Jones' elaborate and exotic settings. These masques ascertained Jonson's standing as foremost writer
of masques in the Jacobean era. The collaboration with Jones was finally destroyed by intense personal rivalry.

Jonson's enduring reputation rests on the comedies written between 1605 and 1614. The first of these, Volpone,
or The Fox (performed in 1605-1606, first published in 1607) is often regarded as his masterpiece. The play, though set
in Venice, directs its scrutiny on the rising merchant classes of Jacobean London. The following plays, Epicoene: or,
The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614) are all peopled with dupes and those
who deceive them. Jonson's keen sense of his own stature as author is represented by the unprecedented publication of
his Works, in folio, in 1616. He was appointed as poet laureate and rewarded a substantial pension in the same year. In
1618, when he was about forty-five years old, Jonson set out for Scotland, the home of his ancestors. He made the
journey entirely by foot, in spite of dissuasion from Bacon, who "said to him he loved not to see poesy go on other feet
than poetical dactyls and spondæus." Jonson's prose style is vividly sketched in the notes of William Drummond of
Hawthornden, who recorded their conversations during Jonson's visit to Scotland 1618-1619. Jonson himself was
sketched by Hawthornden: " He is a great lover and praiser of himself ; a contemner and scorner of others ; given rather
to lose a friend than a jest ; . . . he is passionately kind and angry ; careless either to gain or keep ; vindictive, but, if he
be well answered, at himself . . . ; oppressed with fantasy, which hath ever mastered his reason." 1 After his return,
Jonson received an honorary Master of Arts degree from Oxford University and lectured on rhetoric at Gresham
College, London. The comedy The Devil is an Ass (1616) had turned out to be a comparative flop. This may have
discouraged Jonson, for it was nine years before his next play, The Staple of News (1625), was produced. Instead,
Jonson turned his attention to writing masques. Jonson's later plays The New Inn (1629) and A Tale of a Tub (1633)
were not great successes, described harshly, but perhaps justly by Dryden as his "dotages."

Despite these apparent failures, and in spite of his frequent feuds, Jonson was the dean and the leading wit of the
group of writers who gathered at the Mermaid Tavern in the Cheapside district of London. The young poets influenced
by Jonson were the self-styled 'sons' or 'tribe' of Ben, later called the Cavalier poets, a group which included, among
others, Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace. Jonson was appointed City
Chronologer of London in 1628, the same year in which he suffered a severe stroke. His loyal friends kept him
company in his final years and attended the King provided him some financial comfort. Jonson died on August 6, 1637
and was buried in Westminster Abbey under a plain slab on which was later carved the words, "O Rare Ben Jonson!"
His admirers and friends contributed to the collection of memorial elegies, Jonsonus virbius, published in 1638.
Jonson's last play, Sad Shepherd's Tale, was left unfinished at his death and published posthumously in 1641.