CHAPTER XIV ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY The Beginnings: Wyatt and Surrey to Sackville Spenser - The OWING to causes which have been already outlined in this volume, there had been prosodic uncertainty in English poetry from the day of Lydgate to that of Skelton, Hawes, and Barclay, and where prosody is uncertain, poetry can never be great. From this condition English verse was rescued by an influence which had already stood it in good stead, the Italian. Though help was given by many other metres, the form which played the greatest part in the new development was one hitherto unpractised in England, the sonnet. The spread of the Italian influence was due to one man in especial, Wyatt. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), who in his early manhood visited Italy and Spain on diplomatic missions, had met in the former country the famous Baldassare Castiglione, and had been strongly influenced by his courtly manual, Il Cortegiano. It was in Italy, too, that Wyatt had studied the poetry of Petrarch. As a result he brought the sonnet into England, and practised a form of it differing only from the Petrarcan model in having a rhyming couplet at the close. The sonnet form, through its strictness and conciseness, was to become an admirable corrective to the prosodic lawlessness of the day. Wyatt has left thirty-one sonnets in all, the greater number of which are either translated or adapted from foreign models. He practised many other metres, including rime royal, the rondeau, Skeltonics', the octosyllabic couplet, and poulter's measure -a combination of the Alexandrine and the fourteener -and it is, perhaps, rather in these than in his sonnets that he shows the natural force that was in him. His poems, and especially those written in his longer metres, display the faulty sense of rhythm characteristic of the age; for instance, he begins a sonnet thus: Surrey. Because I have thee still kept from lies and blame, Yet Wyatt at his best shows himself to be much more than finer sense of poetic form. His superiority in this respect may be gathered from a comparison of the two men's versions of Petrarch's sonnet,' Amor, che nel pensier mio vive e regna'. Surrey saw, what Wyatt had not seen, that the alteration in the language since Chaucer's day necessitated a corresponding variation of poetic rhythm, and he managed that variation with skill and understanding. For this reason he may well be called the first of modern English poets. He departed, moreover, from the practice of Wyatt by deserting the Petrarchan sonnet structure, and devising a form, consisting of three independent quatrains and a concluding couplet, which was extensively practised by Elizabethan sonneteers, and was transfigured in the practice of Shakespeare. Surrey used most of Wyatt's metres, and, like Wyatt, drew largely on foreign sources both for his themes and language; but despite all debts, the man's own courtly and chivalrous nature finds free play in his verse, and especially in those of his love poems which are addressed to his Fair Geraldine'. A good deal has been written, considerably beside the point, in the attempt to disprove his attachment to this lady, who was Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of the ninth Earl of Kildare It is certain that even if he was not her lover in the full sense of the word, he was her knight, chosen and favoured after the romantic fashion prescribed by the mediaeval Courts of Love. To her is addressed the well-known sonnet : From Tuscane came my Lady's worthy race, But Surrey's most personal and moving poem is his Elegy on the Duke of Richmond, written while he was in captivity at Windsor, awaiting his execution and musing on the happy past. It has been well said that in these verses we seem to be listening to a lament over the chivalry that is passing out of the order of the modern world'. If Wyatt gave the sonnet to English poetry, it is indebted to Surrey for a yet more precious gift-blank verse, which he used for his translation of the Second and Fourth Books of Virgil's Aeneid. His choice of this metre was apparently dictated in part by the dislike of rhyme so common during the Renaissance, in part by his desire to devise a line which, with due allowance for the genius of the English language, should correspond with the Virgilian hexameter. It is probable that his immediate model was Molza's rhymeless translation of Virgil, published in Venice in 1541. It is unlikely that blank verse had been consciously used before Surrey's time by any English poet. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of an innovation which prepared the way for Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton. 1 See W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. ii, p. 96. Miscel Minor Poets. The poems both of Wyatt and Surrey originally saw the lanies and light in Tottel's Miscellany (1557), a verse collection compiled from the work of several contemporary poets. Such collections were frequent at the day; the most important of them, after Tottel, were The Miscellany, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, England's Helicon, England's Parnassus, and The Poetical Rhapsody. After Wyatt and Surrey, the two most important contributors to Tottel were Lord Vaux, a straightforward and vigorous writer, who dealt chiefly in chivalrous and religious themes; and Nicholas Grimald, a scholarly but uninspired versifier. The Paradise of Dainty Devices was compiled by the Court playwright, Richard Edwards, and published after his death. It includes contributions by Edwards's fellow-playwright, William Hunnis, by Sidney's friend, Fulke Greville, and by a certain W. R.', who may be Walter Raleigh. 6 In this connexion may be mentioned a number of minor poets, some of whom were represented in the different Miscellanies. Many of these were strongly influenced by Surrey. Thomas Churchyard (1520-1604), after soldiering in France and Scotland, took up the career of a writing man, and published several volumes of verse-among others the quaintly named Churchyard's Chips. He also translated from Ovid, and contributed a tragedy of Jane Shore to the Mirror for Magistrates. Barnabe Googe (1540-1594), in his Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Songs (1563), used the pastoral form without distinction, yet in such a fashion as to prepare the way for Spenser. George Turberville (1540 ?-1610) translated from Ovid and Mantuan, and in his Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs, and Sonnets (1567) showed himself to have been strongly influenced by Wyatt and Surrey. Somewhat apart from these stands Thomas Tusser (1515-1580), a scholar who took to farming, and in 1573 published his Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, a quaint and frequently lively treatise on English country life, written in jumpy anapaests. Gascoigne. A truer poet than any of these was George Gascoigne (1525 ?-1577), a university man of good family, who had had experience of warfare and diplomacy, and wrote in several different kinds. His dramatic and critical work is noticed elsewhere. His poems were originally published, together with other work, in 1573, under circumstances of some mystery. In 1575 he reissued them with certain alterations and additions and omissions, as The Poesies of George Gascoigne. The most valuable part of this collection was the lyric poetry, and especially that section of it which is entitled The Flowers. This includes such charming poems as Gascoigne's Goodmorrow' and 'The Lovers' Lullaby', in which he combines great sweetness of utterance with complete technical mastery. Gascoigne uses many metres, and in all of them shows skilful craftsmanship. His Dulce Bellum Inexpertis is written in rime royal: it tells of his martial experiences with an easy rough 6 and-ready realism. His Don Bartholomew of Bath describes his early love adventures : he subsequently repented of these, and, like Greene, wrote several prose tracts with a moral purpose. His changed attitude towards life is evident in his verse satire, The Steel Glass, which arraigns many features of English life, and has a good deal in common with Piers the Plowman, to which it makes several references. Gascoigne was a true, though not a great, poet, and in view of the numerous literary kinds in which he worked, he may perhaps be ranked with Drayton as a typical Elizabethan man of letters. A greater than Gascoigne, however, is Thomas Sackville Sackville (1536-1608), afterwards Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, and The who contributed an Induction and The Complaint of the Duke Mirror for of Buckingham to The Mirror for Magistrates, a huge collection Magisof tragic tales in verse, written by various hands and published trates. in several editions or instalments between 1555 and 1610. This work consists entirely of stories from English history, legendary or real, extending from the mythical Albanact to Elizabeth herself. Its original projectors were two Oxford men, William Baldwin and George Ferrers: its subsequent editors were John Higgins and Thomas Blennerhasset. Among the contributors, besides the men just mentioned, were John Skelton, Thomas Churchyard, and Thomas Phaer. The contributors' chief sources were, for the legendary part, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and for the historical, the chronicles of Hall and Fabyan. The work was intended as a continuation of Lydgate's Falls of Princes, itself an adaptation from Boccaccio. Its object was partly to teach history-or what was conceived to be history in the form of poetry, partly, as Baldwin indicates, to induce rulers to take warning from the terrible examples cited. It is not possible here to discuss further the collection's complicated history and elaborate contents, but apart from the work of its greatest contributor, it has a certain importance owing to the stimulus it gave to the historical play and the historical poem during the Elizabethan period. The only poetry of first-rate quality which it contains is that of Sackville. His metre was rime royal, the great measure which had been used to such purpose by Chaucer, and James I of Scotland, and Henryson. This he adapts with perfect mastery to the new laws which the English language had evolved since the day of these poets. But his mastery of metre goes far beyond such merely adaptive skill: his stanza has a rhythm and a majesty which none save the great poets achieve. He wields it with the superb power which Spenser was to impart to his own great measure. Spenserian, too, is Sackville's use of allegory throughout The Induction, his dissociation of it from merely didactic ends, and his magical fusion of it with perfect poetry. His conception of Hell and its terrors has a classical largeness and a Dantesque Spenser. intensity. His mighty vision and rhythm are already evident in the opening description of Winter, and are sustained throughout the scenes where he is shown walking with Sorrow for guide, till the close, at which the broken Buckingham prepares to pour out his soul in despair. No poem was ever more surely conceived in the grand style than the Induction. There is every promise that if Sackville's achievement had been more considerable, his would have been one of the greatest names in English poetry. With fuller leisure for production, Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) has left work sufficient in volume and quality to give him place as the greatest poet since Chaucer. In appraising his work we must not forget that the age, as far as English poetry was concerned, was one of beginnings, or at least of recommencements, and that no high and unbroken literary tradition existed to help the poet to perfection. In 1569 Spenser matriculated at Cambridge and in poetry, his first verse consisting of translations of Petrarch and du Bellay. At Cambridge he came under two main influences, the Puritanical and the Platonic, between which, as the theological history of the time shows, a stronger analogy existed than might at first appear. Both took strong hold on his sensitive and impressionable nature, and both are strongly reflected in his subsequent poetry. Renaissance humanism had made him familiar with the Platonic theory of ideas, and with the conHis Early ception of God as the Master Craftsman. The result is splendidly Writings evident in his two youthful Hymns in Honour of Love and and Life. of Beauty: What time this world's great Workmaster did cast To make all things, such as we now behold: It seems that he before his eyes had placed His Puritanism was probably not the extreme form advocated by Cartwright, but the milder persuasion of Grindal, the head of his college, whom he afterwards portrays with affection as Algrind in The Shepherd's Calendar. An even more powerful personal influence was that of Gabriel Harvey, Fellow of Pembroke, the Hobbinol' of The Shepherd's Calendar. Harvey's behaviour was often that of a truculent pedant, but he was a man of genuine intellectual power, and a true friend of Spenser, who always showed the strongest regard for him. As has been elsewhere shown, he was an enemy to rhyme, and a champion of rhymeless classical metre. Mainly |