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Discovering Diverse Content Through
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Gammer Gurton's Needle.
The equally renowned "Gammer Gurton's Needle," was acted sixteen
years after "Ralph Roister Doister," at Christ's College, Cambridge. It
is usually attributed to John Still (born 1543) a member of Christ's,
Master of Arts in 1565, and later Master of that College, Vice-
Chancellor of the University, and finally Bishop of Bath and Wells
(died 1608). As Vice-Chancellor, Still was a stickler for Latin plays at
Cambridge, which were more educational but not so popular as
dramas in English. The plot turns on the loss of a needle by old
Gammer Gurton, the suspicion, raised by a wag, that another old
woman has stolen it; the search for the needle; combats about the
needle, and the final discovery of that implement in the seat of a
man's breeches. A sturdy beggar, Diccon, is "the Vice," and sets
Gammer Gurton and another gammer to a scolding match. Hodge, a
servant, with his broad dialect, and insistent demand for the needle,
that a large and unseemly hole which ventilates his breeches may
instantly be patched, has perhaps the most comic part, and when
somebody slaps Hodge and drives the needle (which had stuck in his
breeches), into a safe part of his person, the joy of a Cambridge
audience knew no limits. The play is thoroughly rustic, the language
is of an amazing breadth, and no doubt the drama made abundant
mirth among the Cantab wits. Members of the sister University,
where poets have been rare in comparison with these glories of
Cambridge, need not covet Still, unless he wrote the famous drinking
song in the Second Act, "Back and Side go bare, go bare!"
The Bishop of Bath and Wells probably looked back with mingled
feelings on the jolly, noisy achievement of his youth, which has
made him immortal, for all have heard of "Gammer Gurton's
Needle". It is written in rhyming lines of from fourteen to sixteen
syllables.

"Gorboduc."
"The Gammer," though low, is lively; not so is "Gorboduc"; it is a
tragedy of unspeakable dullness composed in blank verse which has
no merit except that of regularity, the sense usually, though not
always, ending at the close of each line. The author, Thomas
Sackville, later Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, and High
Treasurer under James VI and I, was born at Buckhurst, Sussex, in
1536. His grandmother was aunt of Anne Boleyn, so he was a
second cousin of Queen Elizabeth. At the Inner Temple, as a young
man, he met Thomas Norton, and the pair composed "Gorboduc,"
which was acted in the Inner Temple in 1561. The authors were
inspired by no other Muse than that of Seneca, the moral
philosopher, Roman tragedian, and tutor of the Emperor Nero. The
play tells how Gorboduc, a mythical King of Britain, abdicated, and,
dividing his realm into two parts, gave the country north of the
Humber to the younger, and the portion south of the Humber to the
elder of his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. Each had a kind of tutor,
and each had a favourite. They were both discontented, the younger
slew the elder son, and the mother of both avenges the elder on the
younger of her children. The result was national ruin, in which
"Fergus Duke of Albany" (apparently King of Scotland is meant) took
an active part. There are very long speeches, no action; a
messenger brings the news of the distressing occurrences, and a
Chorus moralizes on them. Carried away by grief when his wife
murders his surviving boy, Gorboduc pronounces the name of
Eubulus with the penultimate syllable short, and expires with
decency behind the scenes. Eubulus then utters a political forecast in
more than a hundred lines, and the drama concludes.
"Gorboduc" was printed in 1565: translations of Seneca's plays were
also being written: George Gascoigne translated a piece named
"Jocasta" (the wife of Œdipus) from the Italian, and a prose comedy,
"The Supposes" from Ariosto. This great Italian poet and his
countrymen adapted to Italian manners the plots and characters
which the ancient comic dramatists of Rome, Terence and Plautus,
derived from late Greek comedy of everyday life. Thus an element of
orderliness in comedy was introduced in England from adaptations of
Italian adaptations of Roman copies of late Greek plays. Such stock
characters as the austere father, the spendthrift son, the cunning
servant, the boastful soldier, the nurse, soft of heart and loose of
tongue, invaded the comedy of France, and, to a slighter degree,
that of England.
Meanwhile Richard Edwards produced a curious Interlude of a
classical nature, "Damon and Pythias," the characters being Greek,
Sicilian and English—a dash of buffoonery is mixed with very
lamentable matter. The Drama was formless, unable to attain
definite shape, till some twenty-five years had passed when we
reach the date of the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, such
as Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Peele, and the other University young men
about town. The influences of the old waggish or controversial
Interludes, of the Senecan school of stiffness, and of translations or
imitations of Italian comedies, were seething in the cauldron of the
age.

CHAPTER XVII.

WYATT AND SURREY. GASCOIGNE. SACKVILLE.

The names of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and of Henry Howard,

Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), are for ever memorable in English
poetry, not so much for what they actually achieved as for what they
attempted. They abstained from allegory, still lingering in its unlovely
dotage, and from doggerel. They wrote of themselves and their own
loves, joys, and sorrows, but though their verse is concerned with
their personal emotions, these are treated in a conventional way,
borrowed from continental poetry. They turned to the Italian
sonneteers, especially to Petrarch, and saw afar the dawning of the
"Pléiade," the company of French reformers of poetic style and
language, Ronsard, du Bellay, and the rest, or at least of Mellin de
Saint-Gelais, their predecessor. But both Wyatt and Surrey died
young, Wyatt by an unfortunate chance, Surrey as a victim of the
jealous tyranny of Henry VIII. The two young poets thus live
together in men's memories like the Bion and Moschus of Greece:
theirs is "unfulfilled renown".
Wyatt, of a Yorkshire family, was son of Sir Henry Wyatt, of Allington
in Kent, a man who had strange vicissitude of fortune in the reigns
of Richard III and Henry VII. Thomas went very early to St. John's
College, Cambridge, married at 17, was a glory of the Court of Henry
VIII, went on diplomatic missions to Italy (Venice, Ferrara, Bologna,
Florence, and Rome), studied Italian literature, was now in favour
and now in prison, and made love, with more or less of earnestness,
to Anne Boleyn, being fortunate in escaping from the doom of her
admirers when Henry VIII took her life. Favoured by Henry's
minister, Thomas Cromwell, but detested, and accused of diplomatic
misdeeds by Bishop Bonner, Wyatt defended himself with a success
then very rare, retired from Court and wrote satires and poems on
the advantages of retirement; paraphrased the Seven Penitential
Psalms, and died of a fever caught from fatigue and travel, in
October, 1542, lamented in verse by Surrey.
The reader of his sonnets, the earliest in English, is amazed to find
that we have travelled through so many centuries of the life of
English poetry, and only reached lame lines that can scarcely be
scanned. Since Chaucer the art of verse had become very dim,
perhaps in consequence of the transitional state of the language, the
obsolescence of the sound of the final e, and the Anglicizing of the
sounds of borrowed French words by throwing back the accent (as
in honour for honour, virtue for virtue). Wyatt, when he began to
write sonnets, put accents in strange places, and counted syllables
on his fingers, content if he could reckon ten of them, in a line. To
rhyme "aggrieved" to "wearied," is like the tramp's effort to make
"workhouse" rhyme with "sorrow". The young student in a novel of
Henri Murger's reads only the rhymes in sonnets. If we study in that
way Wyatt's sonnet "The Lover Waxeth Wiser," we find that the last
words in the first eight lines are
 aggrieved
last
past
wearied
buried
fast
haste
stirred.
He usually tried to keep to the Petrarchian arrangement of rhymes in
the first eight lines a b b a a b b a, but, contrary to Italian rule, his
last two lines were always a rhyming couplet, as in Shakespeare's
"Sonnets," in which the Petrarchian model is wholly disregarded. The
sonnet thus ends with an emphatic clench, usually moral, while in
the Italian sonnet the last six lines resemble the withdrawal of the
wave of the first eight lines.
The sonnet, with its concision and its technical difficulties, afforded
excellent practice to poets who endeavoured to bring delicacy and
order into the chaos and coarseness of verse as written by Skelton
and his contemporaries. But a good sonnet is among the rarest of
good things, and the mere technical difficulties once overcome,
men's minds may turn out sonnets of no value with the rapidity of
machine work. The stock character of this kind of poetry, the Lover,
with his strange far-fetched conceit in his almost metaphysical
refinements, is apt to become as tedious as the old figures of
allegory; however, he was a novelty. Wyatt improved with practice in
sonnet-making, though such rhymes as "mountains" "fountains,"
"plains," "remains," are a stumbling-block to the modern reader. But
his "And wilt thou leave me thus?" and "Forget not yet the tried
intent," with their brief refrains are immortal lyrics, heralding the
music of the age of Elizabeth.
His epigrams are not the stinging wasps of verse commonly called
epigrams, but are brief poems in the manner of the epigrams of the
Greek Anthology. The satires on the Court, based on Italian poems,
and including a form of the "Town and Country Mouse," are not in
Skelton's violent way, but the work of a gentle man, and the poems
in rhyme royal, seven line stanzas, with six syllables to the line, are
charming novelties.

The Earl of Surrey.

The date of Surrey's birth is uncertain: it was four or five years after
the battle of Flodden (1513), in which his grandfather—"an auld
decrepit carle in a chariot—" was victorious over the fiery James IV.
The title Earl of Surrey is a courtesy title, borne by the poet as son
of the Duke of Norfolk. He was at least a dozen years younger than
his friend Wyatt, and was a lively young courtier, who was made a
Knight of the Garter in 1541. He married very early, in 1532, and his
famous passion for fair Geraldine may have been merely poetical—
the usual story about Geraldine and the magic mirror is derived from
a novel of 1554. About 1542 he was imprisoned for a matter of a
duel, a challenge at least, and in 1543 went about London at night
breaking windows with a stone-bow. He wrote a poem in which he
gravely maintains that he was merely punishing the wicked city for
her sins. Again released from prison he saw some fighting in France,
and, returning, patronized a poet named Churchyard, who later wept
unmelodiously above his early tomb. Early in 1546 Surrey had the
worse of a battle with the French near Boulogne, was superseded by
the Earl of Hertford, and, in January, 1547, was accused of a sort of
heraldic high treason (quartering the arms of Edward the Confessor,
who, of course, had never heard of armorial bearings), and
executed, shortly before the death of the tyrant, Henry VIII.
Surrey's versification, especially in the sonnet, is much superior to
that of Wyatt, but he is less apt to keep to the rules of rhyme, in the
first eight lines; indeed he writes in the form of Shakespeare's
sonnets. His "Prisoned in Windsor" is a pleasant picture of a young
gallant's life, who takes his eye off the ball at Tennis to watch the
ladies in the dedans: hunts, tilts, and makes friends. The moral
poems in lines of fourteen feet are of no great merit, but Surrey's
translation of the Second Book of the Æneid is the first English
example of blank verse, borrowed from Italian practice. The lines are
stiff and hard; and the main merit is the novelty, the first birth of the
measure that was to become, in forty years, "Marlowe's mighty line".

Tottel's Miscellany.
The poems of Wyatt and Surrey were not published till long after the
deaths of the authors, when they appeared, with many other pieces,
in "Tottel's Miscellany". Other writers represented there are Nicholas
Grimald, with his jog-trot metre, the "poulter's" or poulterer's
measure of from twelve to fourteen syllables to the dozen—so were
eggs sold by a custom of the trade. Surrey's retainer, Thomas
Churchyard, a man very busy with sword and pen, was also a writer
in the "Miscellany"; and indeed was a literary hack-of-all-work. There
came, after the brief gleam of sunshine that fell on Wyatt and
Surrey, another generation of wooden versifiers and translators, with
whose names, Tusser the bucolic, Phaer, Golding, Googe, and
Whetstone, it is hardly necessary to fill the page and burden the
memory. They may be studied by the curious, but they wrought no
deliverance. To generations which possess superabundance of
versifiers and no great poets, these barren years are a kind of
consolation. For reasons not to be discovered there are such periods
in the literary life of all nations, as in England between Pope and
Cowper.
The versifiers in "Tottel's Miscellany" keep harping unmelodiously on
the strings of Surrey and Wyatt, many of their pieces are
complimentary addresses to ladies, or laments on the deaths of
friends. Poor conceits are twisted and tormented; there is hardly any
promise of advance; we scarcely hear any of the bird-like musical
notes with which the later part of the reign of Elizabeth sang so
wondrously.

Gascoigne.
George Gascoigne (1525 (?)-1577) was an interesting character. He
was a Cambridge man, a member of the Society of Gray's Inn, a
poet who, like Scott, composed his verses in the saddle: a Member
of Parliament who was opposed as "a common rhymer... noted for
manslaughter... a notorious Ruffian," and even a spy, certainly he
owed debts, and was disinherited by his father. He wrote on
woodmanship, but was apt to forget to shoot at the deer that came
within range of his cross-bow. As a captain in the Low Countries he
and his command were surprised and taken by the Spaniards: he
came home, published his Posies (1575) and, he says, got not a
penny by the venture: he then wrote "The Steel Glass," a kind of
satire, the mirror of the age, in blank verse, and next wrote in
common ballad measure the long and amazingly prosaic "Complaint
of Philomene".
In 1572 Gascoigne published "A Hundred Sundry Flowers, bound up
in one small Posy". The long title sets forth that some of the flowers
were culled in the gardens of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, and Ariosto,
others are from English orchards. The native flowers are the sweeter
and more fair. While our poets were turning into stiff measures the
sonnets of Italy, Gascoigne could write so naturally and melodiously
his own English, as in his "Lullaby of a Lover".
Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest,
And lullaby can I sing too,
As womanly as can the best.
Beneath the stiff borrowed phrases and metres there was always
this native and tuneful spirit of unsophisticated song.
In 1575 he was a maker of words for the Masques at Leicester's
famous reception of Elizabeth at Kenilworth (see the novel of that
name, where Scott calmly introduces Shakespeare as already a
successful dramatist). He satirized drunkards: we have already seen
that he translated a tragedy, "Jocasta," from the Italian; he wrote a
love story in rhyme of a personal kind, and his brief "Instructions" is
the earliest English work, in no way indebted to Aristotle, on the Art
of Poetry. As he also translated, we have seen, a comedy from the
Italian, and a prose tale, a kind of work later fashionable, Gascoigne
may be regarded as an intrepid explorer in many fields of literature.
"He first beat the path to that perfection which our best poets have
aspired to since his departure," says Nash (1589). "He brake the ice
for our quainter poets that now write," says Tofte (1615). But the
path as trodden by this pioneer continued to be rough. Gascoigne
was an example of the versatility and literary ambition which many
young gentlemen displayed in the age of Elizabeth; mingling poetry
and study and serious thought with their gallant adventures in love,
diplomacy, war, and travel.
His "Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse in
English" is a very brief pamphlet. He quotes "my master, Chaucer"
against alliterative "thunder in Rym, Ram, Ruff," but mentions no
other poet. Be original, he says, if you sing of a lady do not applaud
her "crystal eye" or "cherry lip," which Spenser did not disdain, for
these things are trite and obvious. The great matter is "to avoid the
uncomely customs of common writers," says this "common rhymer".
Do not use "obscure and dark phrases in a pleasant sonnet". Do not
wander out of your "Poulters measure" metre into lines of thirteen
syllables. Give every word its natural emphasis: do not make
treasure into treasure. Chaucer is to be followed as a master of
prosody. You should write:—
"I understand your meaning by your eye,"
not,
"Your meaning I understand by your eye",
"The more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you
shall seem".
There follows advice on the caesura, and all this counsel shows that,
in the early years of Elizabeth, versification was at a very low ebb.
In practice, Gascoigne did not always shine. There are few passages
of interest in the stiff blank verse of his "Steel Glass" (the mirror that
does not flatter). The best passage, and it is very good, describes
the labourer,
Behold him, priests, and though he stink of sweat,
Disdain him not, for shall I tell you what?
Such climb to heaven before the shaven crowns,
because the labourers
feed with fruits of their great pains
Both king and knight and priests in cloister pent.
It would be cruel to quote "Philomene," no stall-ballad creeps more
tardily on a longer road than Gascoigne in his tale of her who sings,
in a later poet's words,
Who hath remembered thee, who hath forgotten?
They have all forgotten, oh summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.

Sackville.
The poetry of Thomas Sackville (1536-1608) is not to be found in his
dull tragedy, "Gorboduc," but in his contributions to a vast and once
popular collection, "The Mirror for Magistrates". This work is
intended to admonish men in power by rhymed histories of the falls
of English peers and princes. This was the plan of Chaucer's Monk,
in "The Monk's Tale," which that sound critic, the Host, could not
long endure. The model was Boccaccio's work on "The Falls of
Princes," Englished by Lydgate. The enterprise started by Baldwin
and others in 1554-1559, suggests a dread lest English verse should
return to Lydgate in the den of Giant Despair, and take up with
sepulchral solemnity the tale of tragedies from the darkest days of
the unfortunate ancient Britons. A mammoth compilation was
gradually evolved, for doleful matter was not far to seek, but
Sackville's two contributions, the "Induction," and the "Complaint of
Buckingham"—the Buckingham executed under Richard III,—alone
concern us.
In the "Induction" the poet describes the gloom of winter, and, in
the mediaeval way, dwells long on the constellations. As he muses,
he is met by a very deplorable female form—
With doleful shrieks that echoed in the sky.
She proclaims herself to be Sorrow, a goddess, and guides Sackville
"to the grisly lake" of Avernus, over which no fowl may fly and live.
A number of rueful figures of allegory are encountered, Dread,
Revenge, Misery, Care, Old Age, and Sleep, and these are drawn
with abundant vigour and variety. The stanza on Sleep gives the
measure of the versification, which is rapid, concise, various,
sustained, and in its music heralds the arrival of Spenser.
The body's rest, the quiet of the heart,
The travail's care, the still night's frere was he,
And of our life on earth the better part,
Reiver of sight, and yet in whom we see
Things oft that tide, and oft that never be,
Without respect, esteeming equally
King Croesus' pomp and Irus' poverty.
One stanza in the description of the home of the dead seems to
have been suggested by famous lines in the Eleventh Book of the
"Odyssey".
The "Induction" ends with the appearance of the spirit of
Buckingham, who not only tells his own tragedy at great length, and
in full historical detail, but introduces several other ancient tragedies,
those of Cyrus, Cambyses, Brutus, Cassius, Besseus, Alexander the
Great, Clitus, Phalaris, Pheræus, Camillus, and Hannibal. From these
fallen princes we drop to
One John Milton, Sheriff of Shropshire then,
who arrested Buckingham, and to
A man of mine, called Humphrey Banastaire,
who betrayed his master. Banastaire is then cursed in eleven
stanzas. "May Banastaire live to the age of eighty, and then be tried
for theft. May his eldest son expire in a pig-sty; his second son be
strangled in a puddle, and his daughter be smitten by leprosy."
It cannot be denied that this tragedy, including as it does the murder
of the Princes in the Tower, is rather too rich in terrible components,
and does not, especially when Banastaire is being dealt with, affect
us in the same measure as Dante's pictures of the Inferno. On the
whole it is the manner, not the matter, of Sackville that contains
more than mere promise: his management of the stanza and of the
music of the line is far in advance of anything that had come from
an English pen since the death of Chaucer. As for the gloom and
horror, these were congenial to a people which, since the burning of
the Maid of France (1431), had seen an endless sequence of
violence, murder, martyrdoms, and massacres of peers, Princes,
Queens, Bishops, and humble folk.

CHAPTER XVIII.

PROSE OF THE RENAISSANCE.

A great, indeed an inestimable influence in literature at this juncture,

was that of the long-forgotten Greek language, Greek poetry, and
Greek philosophy. When Erasmus, who then had little Greek, arrived
in England and visited Oxford (1499), he found there Grocyn,
Linacre, and Colet, who had acquired Greek on the continent; and,
with Sir Thomas More, were already competent classical scholars.
But their Greek learning was mainly turned into the channel of
theology, the study of the sources of Christian doctrine, the New
Testament, the Greek Fathers; and they were attracted by the
philosophy of Plato which appeared to "utter a Christian voice" much
more clearly than do the writings of the idol of the Middle Ages,
Aristotle.
Greek, however, does not visibly affect the poetic literature of
England much, before the date of Spenser, about 1580. The violent
times of Henry VIII and Mary Tudor were not favourable to severe
study and exquisite appreciation of the Greek genius, a most
desirable corrective of the prolixity of mediaevalism, and of the
English passion for horrors in stage plays. To most people knowledge
of the contents of the Greek classics came through translations, and
these translations, as in the case of the historian Thucydides, were
done from French versions, while Plato was read through Italian
commentators, much influenced by Plato's disciples in early Christian
times, the Neoplatonists, dreamers of beautiful dreams concerning
things that cannot be uttered.
Study produced also a very wide acquaintance with Greek mythology
—Shakespeare's humblest characters have heard of many a Grecian
fable—yet the spirit, the exquisite balance, and the refinement of the
Greek genius, hardly affected our authors. We may detect it in
More's (1478-1535) "Utopia," where the adventurers carry with them
to "Nowhere" a "pretty fardel," or parcel, of the cheap neat Greek
books printed by Aldus. The fancied State of Utopia, with its
comfortable communism and perfect freedom in religion, is derived
from the "Republic" of Plato, and in religion is more liberal than, in
his later work, "The Laws," he would have permitted it to be. But the
"Utopia," written in Latin, was meant for the learned.
Though the "Utopia" was published in 1516, and became famous in
Europe, it did not reach unlearned English readers till an English
translation, by Ralph Robynson, appeared in 1551. They now had
More's eloquent advocacy of communism before them as regulated
in his imaginary state, with a Six Hours' Day, universal training of
men and women for war, and habit of assassinating the leaders of
hostile nations. There is tolerance of all religions which accept a
deity and the immortality of the soul: atheists are disqualified for
public offices.
In his English works on religious and social controversy, which are
little read, More is not only a Catholic and a Conservative, but in
discussion is given to abusive and violent language which would
have horrified the courteous Plato, the urbane Aristotle, and that
model of a devout and ardent student, and perfect gentleman, Pico
della Mirandola, whose Life More gave in English. On both sides the
controversialists of the Reformation delighted in violent personal
abuse, in some Greek orators they found examples of that art. The
first effect of Greek in England, by producing a new Biblical criticism
and an attack on the foundations of the mediaeval Church, was to
"bring not peace but a sword," the wars of religion.

Elyot.
No man did more for the intelligence of Greek than Sir Thomas Elyot
(1499 1546)1 author of "The Governour," a long treatise, on the
education of a gentleman, and on the nature of forms of
government. Elyot bubbles over with Greek, and translates such
passages of Homer as he quotes into English verse, the alternate
lines rhyming. He is of the Greek opinion that a gentleman should be
taught, if he has a taste for art, to draw, paint, and execute works in
sculpture, not as a base professional artist, but as an amateur.[1]
Elyot would have a boy, at 7 years old, begin with Greek, learning it
through Latin, which he picks up, with French, in conversation.
Grammars of Greek are now almost innumerable. Grammar, he says
with much truth, "if it be made too long and exquisite to the learner,
in a manner mortifieth his courage. And by that time he cometh to
the most sweet and pleasant reading of old authors, the spark of
fervent desire of learning is soon quenched with the burden of
grammar." Elyot would start his pupil as early as possible with what
will interest a child, Æsop's Fables in Greek, and then pass to Lucian,
who is amusing as well as elegant. "But I fear me to be too long
from noble Homer, from whom as from a fountain proceeded all
eloquence and learning." Throughout, Elyot wishes first to interest
the pupil; but where, he asks, is he to find qualified schoolmasters?
They were as cruel as in the days of St. Augustine, and while Elyot's
system of education, in sports as well as in books, is free and
joyous, like that of Gargantua in Rabelais, little boys were suffering
the horrors described by Agrippa d'Aubigné in his Memoirs. Elyot
translated works of Isocrates, Plutarch, and others, wrote a medical
work "The Castle of Health," was clerk of the Privy Council, and went
on various diplomatic missions. Elyot was not a professional
instructor of youth: he was, it seems, educated privately, and of
neither university; what pleases us in him is his unstaled zest for
learning, his fresh enthusiasm.
The best English of the age and the most durable is that of Thomas
Cranmer (1489-1556) as we read it in the Liturgy of the Church of
England, while much of the merit of King James's Authorized Version
of the Bible rests on the foundation of Miles Coverdale's translation
(1488-1568). How easy it is to translate the Bible into English which
is not a marvel of diction and rhythm, we are too frequently
reminded by the Revised Version.

Ascham.
Roger Ascham (1515-1568) was a Yorkshire man of the middle
classes, who lived by his learning, and did not find that it paid him
as well as he wished. Going early to St. John's College, Cambridge,
he was a pupil of the famous Sir John Cheke, who introduced the
English way of pronouncing Greek. It is certainly wrong—no people
pronounce the vowels as we do; but if Cheke resisted the
pronunciation of the modern Greeks, perhaps he is not much to be
blamed. Ascham obtained a Fellowship and a Readership in Greek,
the Fellowship he lost when he married: he did not long retain his
tutorship to the Princess Elizabeth; as secretary to an ambassador in
Germany he continued to teach Greek to his chief; and in his letters,
Latin or English, we find him often in straits for money and begging
for assistance. Camden, writing under James I, says that he lost
money at dicing, and in his attack on gambling, in his "Toxophilus," a
dialogue on Archery (1545), Ascham shows a rather unholy
knowledge of all the tricks on the dice-board. Probably he had paid
for his education. He contemplated a work on the noble sport of
cock fighting, on which, of course, there was betting, and perhaps
Ascham was not in all respects so severe a Puritan as in his
unworthy attacks on that noblest of romances, "The Morte d'Arthur".
Sir Lancelot is a better gentleman than many who were to be met at
a cock fight. Ascham had little sympathy with the Italian influences
that were so potent in Elizabethan literature. Italy was certainly
profligate and luxurious,
An Englishman that is Italianate
Doth quickly prove a devil incarnate,
was an English translation of an Italian proverb. Ascham, like his
contemporaries, was nothing if not patriotic. The bow of yew and
the grey goose shaft had won many a victory over Scots and French,
as in "Toxophilus," Ascham reminds these peoples; therefore he
desired that archery should be universally practised. But the
harquebus, a musket lighter than the heavy hand gun of the
fifteenth century, was already, in disciplined hands, more than a
match for the bow.
"Toxophilus," to our age, appears pedantic. We have endless
classical examples, and learn that the Trojans drew the bow-string
only to the breast, not the ear (which is true), while they used iron
arrow-heads as against the bronze arrow-heads of the Greeks, a fact
not so certain. When he does come to practice, Ascham's teaching in
archery is reckoned sound and good. His ideas are summed up in
the prayer that the English
Through Christ, King Henry, the Book, and the Bow
May all manner of enemies quite overthrow.
In writing English, Ascham was all for plain English. Foreign words
Anglicized make such a mixture "as if you put malmsey and sack,
red wine and white, ale and beer, all in one pot". Yet he advocates in
his "School Master," published after his death, a yet more
unhallowed blend, the use of Greek measures in English verse. "Our
English tongue in avoiding barbarous rhyming may as well receive
right quantity of syllables as either Greek or Latin." (He means
"quantity" as opposed to accent, as if one said carpenter.) As an
example he quotes Mr. Watson's rendering of the third line of the
"Odyssey" into two English hexameters
All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses,
For that he knew many men's manners and saw many cities.
Obviously if we are to say "men's manners," making "man" in
"manners" long, we must not make "vellers" in "travellers" short, as
Mr. Watson does. We are reduced to
Gladly report great praise of Ulysses do the travellers.
This absurd manner of imitating Greek measures in English was
upheld, twenty years later, by Gabriel Harvey, who, for a moment,
nearly corrupted the practice of Spenser, the most naturally musical
of poets. Ascham's own prose style is unaffected, not corrupted by
eccentricities, but not harmonious. A new perfection, a false
perfection, was to be sought later, through the antitheses,
alliterations, and pedantic wit of Lyly's "Euphues!"

Lyly's Euphues.
The prose of Ascham was clear and was plain, disdaining decoration
and far-fetched gorgeous phrases. But for the gorgeous and the
exotic, the taste of the Elizabethan Age was pronounced, as we see
in the strange over-gaudy costumes of the period, the various ruffs,
the jewelled velvets and silks, worn by men and women. A like
dressing for thoughts was demanded, and the supply was provided
by John Lyly, whose plays are to be mentioned later. Lyly was born a
Kentish man (1554?); Magdalen, in Oxford, was his college; his
plays, acted by the boys of the Chapel Royal and St. Paul's, are of
1584-1594. But he made his mark earlier, as a prose writer, in his
"Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit" (1579), and the sequel, "Euphues
and his England" (1580). The style became a fashion, a fashion
which affected even those who, like Sidney, were in would-be revolt
against it. Lyly, like all writers of the periods just before and after
him, was copious in classical allusions. He was not the first to hunt
in all directions, especially in fictitious natural history, for similes, and
needless decorations; but he hunted further and more assiduously:
emphatically his style is that of the unresting Bird of Paradise. Every
sentence is a thing bristling with points and antitheses and
alliterations. The first part of the book was a kind of novel; two
friends, at Naples, woo the same woman, quarrel, write long letters,
and the question of education, in the wide sense in which the
Renaissance understood education, is always prominent. There is
endless conversation and discussion of life, love, and learning,
always in the same style of fantastic decoration and allusion: all
continued when Euphues arrives in England, all conveying general
information not verified by experiment. "I have read that the bull,
being tied to a fig tree, loseth his strength; that a whole herd of
deer stand at the gaze if they smell a sweet apple"; facts on which
the cattle-breeder or the hunter would not, if well advised, rely. This
was the kind of science against which Bacon uprose. But Lyly
appealed, in his Dedication, and with success, "To the Ladies and
Gentlewomen of England," who found in the book a kind of love-
story, much philosophizing on that dear theme; and a pleasurable
example of a new way of being witty and romantic. Lyly was the
chief cause of the difficulty in telling a plain tale plainly which besets
the minor writers of the age of Elizabeth.
Before approaching the chief prose writers of Elizabeth's time, we
must turn aside to her greatest poet, and his friend, to Spenser and
Sir Philip Sidney, and to the Drama.

Sidney.
Spenser did not more surely attain immortality by his verse than Sir
Philip Sidney (1554-1586) by his life, writings, and character. He was
one of those who, as Plato says, are born good, exemplars of natural
charm and excellence. He is the ideal gentleman of the type which
Spenser professed to educate by the examples of his virtuous
knights, brave, pious, courteous, and just. The son of Sir Henry
Sidney and nephew of Elizabeth's Leicester, Philip Sidney was born
into the Court, but was not of it; his heart was set on other things
than pleasure, splendour, flattery, and promotion. Educated at
Shrewsbury School, he went to Christ Church at 14, being already
the friend of the noble Fulke Greville, who, however, went from
Shrewsbury to Cambridge. In 1572 he was attached to the English
embassy in France, and, on the night of the Bartholomew massacre
was sheltered in the house of his future father-in-law, Walsingham.
Till 1575 he travelled, chiefly in Germany, and made the
acquaintance of his constant correspondent and adviser, Languet,
whom he celebrates as a shepherd of the Ister, and as his own
religious Mentor. In Venice his portrait was painted by Veronese; at
Vienna he perfected himself in horsemanship under Pugliano, whose
enthusiasm he describes so amusingly in his "Defence of Poesie". For
a man so earnest as Sidney was, he had a fine sense of humour.
Returning to England in 1575, he, like Gascoigne, was with Elizabeth
at the famous pastimes at Kenilworth, now best known through
Scott's novel, "Kenilworth". Afterwards, at the house of the Earl of
Essex, he met the Earl's daughter, Penelope, later Lady Rich, the
Stella of his sonnets. Essex desired their marriage, but fate decided
otherwise. In 1577 Sidney went, a young diplomatist, to the
Emperor and the German Princes, and later, was obliged to attend
the Court, while his mind was set on adventures beyond the Atlantic;
on failing in that, he trifled with the idea of introducing Greek metres
into English poetry. In 1579, he quarrelled with the Earl of Oxford in
the tennis court. A duel was not permitted, but as Sidney also gave
Elizabeth his opinion about her distasteful flirtation with the odious
Duc d'Anjou, the worst of the bad Valois Princes, he retired to
Wilton, the house of his sister, Lady Pembroke, and there wrote the
pastoral romance, "Arcadia".
He was recalled to Court, sat in Parliament for Kent, and in 1583
parried a daughter of Walsingham. He was forbidden to join Drake's
American expedition of 1585, in fact he was always thwarted in his
desire for action and for such deeds of chivalry as the conditions of
his age permitted—they leaned somewhat to piracy and filibustering.
At length, as Governor of Flushing, while Leicester commanded the
forces engaged against Spain in the Low Countries, he fell in a
cavalry charge against a superior force at Zutphen. His leg was
broken by a musket bullet from the Spanish trenches: it was now
that he handed the cup of water that was at his lips to the soldier
whose need was greater than his. He lingered for some weeks, and
died on 17 October, 1586.
The beautiful character of Sidney cannot be more strongly attested
than by the agony of grief exhibited, at his death, by the handsome
and wicked Master of Gray. He was about to be sent on the Scottish
embassy to plead for the life of Mary Stuart, while his desire was to
be fighting under Sidney's banner. He expresses, in a touching letter,
the sudden revulsion of his nature from his wonted treacheries; and,
contrary to the falsehood of tradition, he did not betray, but, to his
own loss, did his best to save the Queen whose cause he had
previously deserted.
As a poet, Sidney, whose works were all published after his death, is
best remembered for the sonnets of Astrophel to Stella, Lady Rich.
There is a controversy as to whether these are mere exercises in
gallant but "platonic" love-verse, or whether they reveal a true
passion, as Charles Lamb maintained. The sonnet in which he says
that he has found his fortune too late, and has lost what he had
unwittingly won,
O punisht eyes
That I had been more foolish or more wise,
seems to set forth a truly tragic situation. Perhaps only poets can be
the critics in such a case as this of Sidney.
The sonnets vary much in poetic value; some are written in
Alexandrines, a metre not consonant with the traditions of the
English Muse.

Sidney's "Defence of Poesie."

Readers who fail to find brilliant merit in English literary poetry
between Chaucer and Spenser may not be ill-pleased to note that Sir
Philip Sidney was strong on their side. Acquainted as he was with
the poetry of Greece, Rome, Italy, and France, he could see nothing
to admire in the efforts and experiments of such writers as Occleve,
Lydgate, Hawes, Googe, Churchyard, and Turbervile. His "Defence of
Poesie" (or, according to the title of the first edition (1595), his
"Apologie for Poesie") was elicited by the unauthorized dedication to
himself of Stephen Gosson's "School of Abuse". Gosson was a young
Oxford man who had tried his hand as a playwright, and been
disgusted, he says, by the disorders of the playhouses, where his
comedy and morality may have been hooted. He therefore tried to
make himself notorious, or he expressed his penitence, by assailing
poets who deal in the silly conceits of Lyly's "Euphues".
"The scarab flies over many a sweet flower and lights in a cow-
shard... it is the manner of swine to forsake the fair fields and
wallow in the mire: and the whole practice of poets, either with
fables to show their abuses, or with plain terms to unfold their
mischief, discover their shame, discredit themselves, and disperse
their poison through the world". Gosson chooses Virgil as one of his
terrible examples, and whether he is a genuine or a hypocritical
puritan, or a mere fribble in search of notoriety, he made a mistake
when he thought to find a patron or a butt in Sidney, who does not
advertise Gosson's name in the "Defence of Poesie".
After a general defence of poetry furnished with precedents drawn
from every quarter, even from the respect paid to their minstrels by
the Irish, Sidney defines the final end of poetry as being "to lead
and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made
worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of...." If poetry does not
always attain this end, "it is not the fault of the art, but that by few
men that art can be accomplished". He quotes Aristotle's "Poetics" to
the effect that poetry is more philosophical and more serious than
philosophy. Nothing in history is so noble but that "the poet may, if
he list, make it his own, beautifying it both for further teaching, and
more delighting, as it please him, having all, from Dante's heaven to
his hell, under the authority of his pen". Here Sidney seems to differ
from Scott, who regarded some examples of human fortunes, for
example in the case of Mary Stuart, as beyond the range of the
poetic art. But Sidney, foreseeing the objection, adds, "I speak of the
art, not of the artificer". Sidney then discusses the various Kinds of
poetry. As to the Comedy, "naughty play-makers and stage-keepers
have made it justly odious,"—so far he sides with the Puritans of his
time. In speaking of the lyric, he says: "I must confess mine own
barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas"
("Chevy Chase"), "that I found not my heart moved more than with
a trumpet". Indeed the true spirit of poetry did dwell, disregarded by
wits and courtiers, in the popular poetry and the ballads. But poetry,
he knows not why, finds, in our time, a hard welcome in England: "I
think the very earth laments it, and therefore decks our soil with
fewer laurels than it was accustomed, for heretofore poets have in
England also flourished". If poets are not esteemed it is because
they do not deserve esteem, for we are "taking upon us to be poets
in despite of Pallas," invita Minerva. Our would-be poets are
destitute of genius—which was very true. "Chaucer undoubtedly did
excellently in his 'Troilus and Cressida': of whom truly I know not
whether to marvel more either that he, in that misty time, could see
so clearly, or that we, in this clear age, go so stumblingly after him."
What ailed Sidney's age was lack of terseness and clearness. Most
poets did not know what they would be at; they were confused by
the tumult of religion, the loss of old ideals, the language in
transition, the tyranny of the misunderstood classics, the constant
effort to imitate Greece, Rome, France, and Italy. They could not yet
see life and literature steadily, and see them whole. Sidney found
little that "had poetical sinews," except in Chaucer; parts of "The
Mirror for Magistrates," the Earl of Surrey's lyrics, and Spenser's
"'Shepherd's Calendar' hath much poetry in his 'Eclogues,' indeed
worthy the reading, if. I be not deceived. That same framing of his
style to an old rustic language I cannot allow..."
Sidney then banters the absurdities of the lawless stage, of the
alliterative writers, of the seekers after unnatural history, like Lyly in
his "Euphues," and of the love poets. "If I were a mistress never
would they persuade me that they were in love, so coldly they apply
fiery speeches," "swelling phrases" learned from books.
It was poetry, not the English poets of his age, that Sidney
defended, and he might well marvel at our modern zeal which
devotes time and scholarship to a chaos of tentative experiments by
men who wished to be poets without possessing the poetic genius.
Sidney's best poems and his "Defence of Poesie" retain their
freshness; but that book of his which was most popular suffers from
the changes of time and taste. At most periods prose fiction is more
welcome to human nature than poetry or criticism. Sidney's book
"The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," is a novel, written by the
author at Wilton, when, as we saw, he was neither in favour at Court
nor permitted to risk himself in adventures on sea or land. The book
was to Sidney what "The Faery Queen" was to Spenser, a wilderness
of delights of his own creation, a retreat into a world of fantasy. He
wrote it in sheets read, or sent as soon as finished, to his sister, the
Countess of Pembroke; the book was meant for her, not for the
world. Not long after his death, an unauthorized copy was published
(1590), and unauthorized edition followed, and the general delight in
the romance is attested by its constant reissues.
The author did not construct any regular plot, he allowed his fancy
to wander among the shipwrecks and piratical adventures of the late
Greek romances; and in an Arcadia which never existed, and a
Laconia most unhistorical. But the high and chivalrous ideals of the
author, in his rural prose idylls, as in his battles and combats; the
truth and constancy of his lovers; the beauty of his descriptions,
made this mixture of the Spanish heroic romances that infatuated
Don Quixote with the Arcadian pastorals, the delight of four
generations. Milton blamed the captive Charles I for copying the
beautiful and appropriate prayer of the captive Pamela, long after
Shakespeare had interwoven with the story of King Lear, Sidney's
tale of the blind King of Paphlagonia.
In its new mode "The Arcadia" was to four generations what
Malory's "Morte Arthur" had been in its day. As late as 1660, we find
Sir George Mackenzie imitating the "Arcadia" in his heroic and
historic romance, "Aretina," where Argyll and Montrose play their
parts. Indeed the "Arcadia" was a fruitful parent of the interminable
heroic French romances which Major Bellenden laughs at in "Old
Mortality," and from which Scott did not disdain to borrow a
description in "Ivanhoe". It is indeed curious to compare Sidney's
description of an Amazon (Book I, Chap, XII.) with an actual
representation of a genuine Amazon by a Hittite artist, discovered on
the stone work of a gate at Boghaz Keui. That lady-warrior wears a
corslet of scale armour, while Sidney's has a doublet of sky-coloured
satin, covered with plates of gold. Her feet are shod in crimson
velvet buskins, while the massive legs of the real Amazon are naked.
The contrast of fact and fancy are violent, of course, throughout the
romance. The style is less conceited than that of "Euphues," and is
always noble, but the long sentences and overabundance of
parentheses are not in accordance with modern taste. The profusion
of love-passages and of martial adventures, "with notable images of
virtues, vices, or what else," and the poetic if uncurbed fancies, were
what the world demanded from a novel, and what Sidney gave in
the Arcadia, with many lyrics, and imitations of the amœbean verse
of the shepherds of Theocritus.

Spenser.
After two centuries of verse that was tuneless or tentative, the
second great English poet came, Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599). We
know from his "Prothalamion" that Spenser was born in London—
my most kyndly Nurse,
That to me gave this Lifes first native sourse,
Though from another place I take my name,
An house of auncient fame—
that is, the House of the Spencers of Althorp who are in the ancestry
of the Duke of Marlborough's Churchills.
Spenser was certainly their kinsman, in what degree is unknown, but
his own family must have been poor. He was educated at Merchant
Taylors' School, was aided by the munificent Robert Nowell, and
obtained a Sizarship (corresponding to the old Oxford servitorship),
at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (1569). Here he made two friends,
Gabriel Harvey, a true friend, if a rather pedantic don (the Hobbinol
of his "Shepherd's Calendar"), and E. Kirke, the E. K. who furnished
the notes explanatory of old English words in that poem. Spenser
also gained the good graces of Grindal, then Bishop of London, later
Primate, a puritan, who fell into Elizabeth's disgrace, and is
applauded as Algrind by Spenser in the "Shepherd's Calendar".
Spenser's youth was passed in an England disturbed by the claims of
the captive Mary Stuart to the Crown; by the rebellion of her
adherents in the North; by the papal excommunication of Elizabeth,
and by the pretensions of the extreme puritan exiles who, driven
abroad by the Marian persecution, had imbibed at Geneva the
doctrines of Calvin. In their attacks on the English Bishops they out-
wearied even the successors of Calvin in Geneva, who regarded
them as men not to be satisfied by any concessions; "a sect of
perilous consequence who would have no king but a presbytery,"
said Elizabeth. Here were all the elements which caused Elizabeth's
cruel persecution of Catholics, the long struggle of the puritans
under Elizabeth and James I, the wars under Charles I, and the
strife with Spain and Catholic Ireland. In the words of James VI, it
was "a world-wolter," and Spenser, as a poor young man, eager to
make his fortune, had to swim as best he might in the cross-currents
of this troublesome world. He never enjoyed the peaceful leisure of
a Tennyson or a Wordsworth; he had to play an active part in
strenuous and most unhappy affairs.
His nature, too, was divided. With all his love of pleasure and of
beauty he leaned, though not virulently, towards the puritan party,
and, as a good patriot, loathed and detested Rome.
It is probable that, when a freshman at the age of 17, he contributed
to a Miscellany, Van der Noodt's "Theatre of Worldlings" (1569),
translations in blank verse of certain sonnets of the French poet
Joachim du Bellay, and of Petrarch. These, re-cast into the form of
sonnets, recur in a volume of Spenser's, of 1591.
After taking his Master's degree (1576) Spenser visited Lancashire,
and if his words as Colin Clout in the "Shepherd's Calendar" be
autobiographical, lost his heart to a lady whom he calls Rosalind,
"the widow's daughter of the glen". According to Gabriel Harvey she
"christened him her Signior Pegaso," though neither his poetry nor
his wooing won her from her cruelty. Many years later he still writes
of her with chivalrous affection, so, like Scott, he had his heart
broken and cleverly pieced again.
By 1579 Spenser was in London, a literary retainer or protégé of
Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester; while he also enjoyed the
friendship of Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, the Flower of
Chivalry, himself a poet, and the best beloved man of his time. Now
(1579) Spenser published, and dedicated to Sidney, his "Shepherd's
Calendar," a set of twelve eclogues or pastoral poems, one for each
month. The pastoral had wandered far from the rural beauty of
Theocritus, and, in the hands of Mantuan and Clement Marot, had
become a vehicle for allegory, and even of Protestant
argumentation. Spenser does not stray far into party and puritanic
politics, but they are not unknown to his shepherds. In January, as
Colin Clout, he bewails the coldness of Rosalind,
She laughs the songs that Colin Clout doth make,
which is carrying cruelty very far. February is occupied with a rustic
dispute between youth and age: the metre is one of the measures of
the "Lay of the Last Minstrel":—
Who will not suffer the stormy time,
Where will he live tyll the lustry prime?
(Shepherd's Calendar, Feb., 11. 15, 16.)
They burn'd the chapel for very rage
And cursed Lord Cranstoun's Goblin-page.
(Lay of the Last Minstrel, C. II., Stanza, 33).
March, with the dialogue of Willie and Thomalin about the strange
bird, Love, is adapted from the Greek of Bion in a most pleasant
manner, and April contains a melodious song of fair Eliza, a Maiden
Queen; which probably procured Spenser's presentation to Elizabeth.
The great variety of melodious verse of which Spenser was already a
perfect master is, for us, perhaps the chief merit of his pastorals.
Through life Spenser keeps up the shepherd's mask, and Raleigh, in
his verse, is "The Shepherd of Ocean". The rival Protestant and
Catholic clergy also appear as shepherds, good or bad, while in
another eclogue the perfect poet, Cuddie, complains, like Theocritus,
of public indifference, and is advised to sing of redoubted knights:
and, indeed, Spenser had already conceived the idea of his knightly
romantic poem "The Faery Queen," and was ambitious to excel his
model, Ariosto. In this Harvey discouraged him; "Hobgoblin" must
not "run away with the garland from Apollo".
Fortunately Spenser followed his own genius, and, though he dallied
with the fashion for wedding Greek measures to English words, as in
the English hexameters of Watson and Harvey, he dropped many
projects at which he had glanced, and was constant to his "Faery
Queen".
The manuscript of that great poem must have been the companion
of Spenser in many strange wanderings,
In savage soil far from Parnassus Mount,
as he says. He was attached, as we have seen, in 1578, to the
household of Leicester, and may have gone on a mission of his to
France. To be patronized by Leicester was to risk incurring the
enmity of Burleigh. The long rivalry between Elizabeth's brilliant and
wavering favourite—who once so nearly brought her into a plight
almost as bad as that of Mary Stuart—and her sagacious counsellor,
Sir William Cecil (Lord Burleigh)—who now and again saved his
Queen "as by fire"—might have furnished Spenser with a high theme
for a poetic allegory. But chance had made him Leicester's man, not
Burleigh's man, so that he never won the fortune for which he
sought. Who, indeed, would seek fortune in Ireland? Spenser did,
accompanying Lord Grey of Wilton to an isle more than commonly
distressful.
To the natural hatred between the Irish and their English invaders
was now added the fury of religious rancour. Rebellion after rebellion
was punished by horrible reprisals. Lord Grey is notorious for his
massacre of six hundred disarmed Italian and Spanish filibusters at
Smerwick (November, 1580), and the poet of the "Faery Queen" was
present at this abominable deed. It was neither without precedent
nor imitation. Seventy years later David Leslie, urged on by a
preacher, massacred the remnant of Montrose's Irish contingent at
Dunaverty. Spenser himself in his most Interesting "View of the
Present State of Ireland" says concerning the foreign prisoners,
"there was no other way but to make that short way with them
which was made". He defends Grey's ruthless policy; he had made
Ireland "ready for reformation" when he was recalled, on the charge
of being "a bloody man" who had left the country in ashes (1582).
Grey was pursued by the clamour of a horrified people, that is, he
was Spenser's Sir Arthegal, molested by the Blatant Beast, the
public. The idea of the public is a Blatant Beast is borrowed from
Plato.
It was in the service of Grey, and in a land laid waste, that Spenser,
acting as Grey's secretary during the horrors of the war in Munster,
wrote part of the "Faery Queen". He held public posts, was Clerk of
Decrees, and Clerk of the Council of Munster, he received 3000 acres
of land, and a ruinous castle of the Desmond family, Kilcolman,
between Mallow and Limerick (1586).
Unhappy was his fortune, but, in absence from London, he had the
advantage of being beyond the influences of the critical literary
society of the capital with its reviews in form of pamphlets, its
satires, jealousies, and quarrels. There is a record of a conversation
of 1584 (published in 1606) in which Spenser described to his
friends the aim and scope of the "Faery Queen". Each virtue was to
be incarnate in a knight, whose adventures should teach it by
example. In a letter to Raleigh, whom he met in Ireland, Spenser
says that Prince Arthur (as in the first Canto) is to be a perfect
exemplar of "the twelve private virtues". The Faery Queen herself is,
first, Glory in general and next Gloriana, the royal and "most virtuous
and beautiful" Queen Elizabeth, who also appears as Belphœbe. He
is to begin in the middle, before telling how knights, ladies, dwarfs,
and a palmer bearing an infant with bloody hands came seeking
adventures to a festival of the Faery Queen. "Many other adventures
are intermeddled."
The "Faery Queen" is not, and does not aim at being an epic. It is
without beginning, middle, or end, for the last six books were not
written, or the manuscript perished when Spenser was driven from
Kilcolman.
The original scheme is that of the "Morte d'Arthur," moralized, and
intermingled with allegory. The poem is an allegorical romance
adapted to the state of England, Ireland, and the Continent under
Elizabeth, and to the war of the Reformation against the dragon of
Rome and the Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills, the seeming fair
and inwardly filthy Duessa, who is occasionally meant for Mary
Stuart. Such unity as the poem possesses is given by the conflict of
Good, as Spenser understood it, against Evil, private and public, the
vices, and the Church of Rome. The Red Cross Knight wears the
armour which St. Paul describes, and in which Bunyan equipped
Christian and Greatheart.
There are people, says Spenser, who prefer to have Virtue
"sermoned at large, as they use". But while Spenser insists on being
taken as a moral preacher in his way, his true ideal is Beauty, and it
is the gleam of Beauty that he follows as he wanders with knights
and ladies through enchanted forests, and "awtres dire". Like the
knights in the "Morte d'Arthur" he "rides at adventure"; in every
page a new adventure opens, and leads to others endlessly, through
conflicts with Saracens,—Sansfoy, Sansloy, Sansjoy,—with the wily
Magician, Archimage, and his glamour; with Despair, in a wonderful
passage; with dragons and dragonettes, with Acrasia and all the
charms of her abode of wanton bliss, which is depicted with great
enthusiasm (Book II, Canto XII). This canto is remote indeed from
the puritan taste, despite its moral ending
Let Gryll be Gryll, and have his hoggish mind,
But let us hence depart, whilst weather serves and wind.
The whole is derived, in the last resort, from the palace of Circe in
the Tenth book of the "Odyssey," and it is curious to compare the
severe and classic charm of the Greek with the boundless luxury of
the Italian Renaissance in Spenser.
The "Faery Queen," indeed, despite the moral intention, which is
perfectly sincere, is the very Lotusland of poetry. It is a garden of
endless varieties of delight, endless but not prolix, for there is a
perpetual change of scene and of characters and nothing is constant
but the long and ever-varying music of the verse, Spenser's own
measure, in which each stanza is a poem, while the strong stream of
melody carries the half-dreaming reader down the enchanted river,
and forth into the fairy seas.
The Spenserian measure with the Alexandrine that ends the stanza
may not be the best vehicle for narrative. But Spenser's stream does
flow from the mountains of Lotusland, and the air of Lotusland
occasionally lulls the vigilance of the poet as well as of the the
reader. The stanza (Book VI, Canto X) which opens
One day, as they all three together went
To the greene wood to gather strawberries,
There chaunst to them'a dangerous accident:
A Tigre forth out of the wood did rise,
narrates an accident as unexpected as dangerous! We cannot but be
reminded of the "Swiss Family Robinson," and when Spenser makes
Sir Calidore kill the tiger and cut off its head with a shepherd's
crook, he is plainly overcome by "drowsihead".[2]
It is true that Spenser soon lost hold of his main allegory, and
allegorized the moving events and some of the personages of his
time. The gods, in Euripides, make a false Helen of clouds and
sunbeams and for her the Trojans and Achæans war and die. So, in
Spenser's poem, the witch makes a false Florimel of snow, informed
by "a wicked spright" with burning eyes for the destruction of
mankind, and the false Florimel is another form of the white witch,
Mary Stuart. The affairs of Ireland, France, "Belge," and Spain
appear in knightly or magical disguise in the procession of dissolving
views; a pageant of the rivers of Ireland and England anticipates
Drayton's "Polyolbion": the romance becomes, like "Piers Plowman,"
a farrago of all that is in the poet's mind.
Of Spenser, Ben Jonson might have said, as of Shakespeare,
Sufflaminandus erat, "he needed to have the drag put on". Like
Pindar in youth, "he sowed from the sack, not from the hand". His
archaic words and unsuccessful imitations of archaic words annoyed
the critics of his time more than they vex us. If he "writ no
language," "writ the language of no time," as Ben Jonson said, the
"Iliad" and "Odyssey," too, are in the language of no time, represent
no one dialect that ever was actually spoken. But Spenser was
writing about no actual time: his own age is confused with the fairy
age of chivalry, and the ages of the "Morte d'Arthur," and of Greek
mythology. With Spenser we are "out of space, out of time," and of
his adoration of Chaucer, his ancient words keep us in mind. That
great and noble effort towards perfection, the spirit of chivalry, was
his ideal; and in Sir Philip he saw the last of the gentle and perfect
knights. To the flattery of Elizabeth we must submit: she needed it
all if to her subjects she was to, stand for England and their love of
England.
Spenser's blemishes are of his age; no pure and perfect work of
immaculate art could arise in a poetry which was only emerging
from a kind of chaos, too much learning being the successor of too
much ignorance, and a divine genius being left at large with no
control from sane and temperate criticism.
Somewhat eclipsed by the new star of Elizabeth's fresh favourite,
Essex, Raleigh visited his Irish lands in 1589, met Spenser, read the
"Faery Queen" in manuscript, and brought "Colin Clout Home again".
The poem of that name (1591) while full of sugared compliments to
Elizabeth, is also touched with satire of her new courtiers. Sidney
was dead, Leicester was dead, Burleigh "hated poetry and painting".
The first part of the "Faery Queen" (1590) had made Spenser
famous, but had won him no prize of Court favour save a small
pension.
His "Mother Hubberd's Tale of the Ape and the Fox" may have been
written earlier and now was published; in this the satire is much
more keen; the poet finds even "the Comic Stage defaced and
vulgarized, in his 'Tears of the Muses,' where "our pleasant Willy that
is dead of late," cannot conceivably be Shakespeare—the silence of
John Lyly may be intended.
When Spenser returned to Ireland a collection of his miscellaneous
poems was published, containing, among other things, "Mother
Hubberd's Tale," "The Tears of the Muses," "The Ruines of Rome"
(sonnets from the French of Joachim du Bellay).
The "Ruines of Time," dedicated to "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's
mother," Lady Pembroke, begins with a vision of the genius of the
ruined Roman city, Verulam, and in a far-off way reminds us of the
Anglo-Saxon poem on the Ruined City. There is a lament for the fall
of ancient empires, and the sorrows of the House of Dudley.
Spenser's mood was that of melancholy and disappointment,
presently cheered by his marriage with Elizabeth Boyle. From his
love came his sonnets, and his matchless "Epithalamion," his "love-
learned song". If the "Faery Queen," and all else that Spenser did
were lost, the "Epithalamion" and the "Prothalamion" would win for
him the crown of the chief of English poets before Shakespeare. The
marriage occurred in June, 1594: then troubles with the Irish whom
he had supplanted, or some other cause, sent him to England, with
the last three books of his romance. The affair of Duessa's treatment
caused James VI to remonstrate through Bower, the English
ambassador to Holyrood, and though the poet was not punished, his
designs may not have been advanced. He now published his Hymns
to Love and Beauty, Earthly and Heavenly, the latter under the
influence of Plato, and his "Prothalamion" for the Ladies Elizabeth
and Katherine Somerset. These splendid poems were his swan-song;
Ireland called him, and in October, 1598, the natives whom he had
despoiled drove him from Kilcolman, which they burned. Spenser
died, a ruined man, in Westminster (16 January, 1599), Essex paid
for his funeral, he lies in Westminster Abbey.
As Hephæstus, when he fashioned the arms of Achilles, melted
bronze and gold and silver in his furnace, so Spenser combined the
wealth of Greece and Italy, France, Rome, and England in the great
crucible of his genius. In the "Epithalamium," for example, we find a
translation of four lines from a sonnet of Ronsard, mingling with
notes from Theocritus and the Song of Songs, with all the beautiful
things of all the creeds. It would, perhaps, be unfair to call the style
of Spenser, as it appears in the "Faery Queen," "Corinthian". Yet the
metal in which he works is like that "Corinthian bronze" formed, at
the conflagration of the city, from the molten gold and silver and
copper of the sacred vessels and images of the gods. The spoils of
all old poetry are mingled with his own. He has been called "the
poets' poet"; his successors have taken from him his very tones. As
has been said well, when Spenser writes—
Scarcely had Phœbus in the glowing East
Yet harnessëd his fiery-footed team,
that is Shakespeare, the Shakespeare of "Romeo and Juliet".
And taking usury of time forepast
Fit for such ladies and such lovely knights,
that is Shakespeare again, the Shakespeare of the Sonnets.
Many an Angel's voice
Singing before the eternal Majesty
For their triune triplicities on high:
that is the younger voice of Milton.
And ever and anon the rosy red
Flasht thro' her face,
one might fancy the unmistakable note and accent of Tennyson.[3]
English poetry fell with the neglect of Spenser, who was buried and
forgotten from the middle of the seventeenth century till Thomson
revived his measures in the middle of the eighteenth, and English
poetry came fully to her own again when the magic book of Spenser
was opened by Keats.
 [1] A well-known diplomatist of Queen Elizabeth, Harry Killigrew,
is said to have been "a Holbein in oils".
[2] On this and on the more than mediaeval size of "The Faery
Queen," see Mr. Mackail's "Springs of Helicon," pp. 132-28.
[3] Mackail, "Springs of Helicon," pp. 90, 91.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE AND PLAYWRIGHTS.

The rejoicing age of Elizabeth was fond of "variety entertainments".

The Court Masques, such as those of Lyly, and George Peele's
"Arraignment of Paris," abounded in songs, music, and dancing, and
were expensively furnished. The Universities had their own amateur
authors and performers. The "children" of St. Paul's and other
schools acted so naturally that, as we read in "Hamlet," they became
serious rivals of the professional actors.[1] "An aery of children, little
eyases, that cry out on the top of question, and are most
tyrannically clapped for it, these are now the fashion". Polonius
indicates the many sorts of plays, "tragedy, comedy, pastoral,
pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-
comical, historical-pastoral, scene individual, or poem unlimited.
Seneca cannot be too heavy or Plautus too light." From authors of
the heavy Senecan school came blank verse: "the light people"
continued, when Shakespeare wrote "Love's Labour's Lost," to
employ rhymes in many measures; till Peele, and above all Marlowe,
introduced a more free and varied and accomplished blank verse.
The general taste turned from many imitations of the ponderous
Seneca to plays of more freedom, but even moralities and interludes
of the old sort continued to be played in the age of the
Shakespearean drama.
There were countless troops of players, vagabonds in the eyes of the
law—those who held no licence from a noble (as "the Earl of
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