III: Verse in the ‘Golden’ Period

III: Verse in the ‘Golden’ Period

I have named the ‘Golden’ Age from those of its productions which seem to us, looking back, the most characteristic; but of course much work of a different kind was being produced. There is poetry, like Warner’s and much of Drayton’s, which simply lags behind and remains Drab. There is poetry like Donne’s which anticipates and indeed inaugurates the Metaphysical period. There is also poetry like Southwell’s which is sometimes Drab and sometimes Metaphysical, but never Golden: the poet, as it were, ignores the Golden Age and tunnels straight through from the Drab to the seventeenth century. Both these kinds I reserve for my Epilogue. There is poetry like Chapman’s which is partly Golden and partly Metaphysical: Shakespeare’s ripest work, which falls outside our province, belongs to this class. Finally, there is satiric work which neither lags behind the Golden movement through mere incompetence like Warner, nor departs from it in obedience to a revolutionary impulse like Donne, but eschews it for reasons of decorum, just as Spenser generally eschews it in Mother Hubberd’s Tale, because satire ought not to be mellifluous. I will deal first with the poets who simply lag behind the Golden Age: the belated, or vestigial, poetry.

I

It is noteworthy that this class includes not only Drab work but work which is unmistakably Late Medieval. Such is the Fig for Fortune (1596) of that ambiguous character Anthony Copley (1567–1607?). This is a recusant poem in which Doblessa, though equated in the ‘Argument’ with Fortune, obviously symbolizes the Protestant religion. Copley is poetically, no less than theologically, a recusant, who simply ignores the literary history of the last ninety years. He writes a continued dream allegory in the first person and shows a true Late Medieval uncertainty about metre and even about rhyme. His vocabulary is, however, his own and very curious: he deserves to be remembered for the delightful verb ‘to cravin-cockadoodle it’. The poem is a curiosity—an absurdity, if you like—but has a kind of earnestness which is not easily evaded by the reader.

Copley, a poet who outrages all chronological schemes, has dragged us for a moment to the end of the century: I now return to treat the Drab poets of the Golden Age in their proper order.

Humfrey Gifford’s Posie of Gillyflowers (1580), which contained, as well as verse, some prose translations from the Italian and French, is almost more characteristically Drab than anything the Drab Age proper had produced. All the symptoms are present; octosyllabic stanzas of Tottelian woodenness, poulters, fourteeners, fustian (‘When dreadfull death with dint of pearcing darte’, &c.), tasteless stanzaic experiments, and one poem, ‘A pleasant Jest’ which is a little better because the poet there drops what he thought his courtly vein and gives us something more ballad-like. The poem ‘For Soldiers’, fantastically overpraised by Grosart, looks like straight fourteeners but has in fact a most intricate (and unsuccessful) pattern of variations and internal rhymes. I do not doubt that it was written with intense enjoyment.

The attorney William Warner (1558?–1609) has been kindly treated both by his contemporaries and by posterity. Meres’s praise is, however, worthless, and Drayton, in his Epistle to Reynolds, is almost admittedly disarmed by kindness for an old friend. What Warner really deserves to be commended for is his conception. His work is separated from the main stream of the historical epic by a structural idea; that of dividing his matter into separate stories and arranging these not chronologically but by artful linking and inset narration after the manner of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This he carried out in the four books of his Albion’s England (1586), successively enlarged in 1589, 1592, 1596, and 1602 till it reached sixteen books in 1606 and came down to the reign of King James. It was a spirited attempt to avoid the formlessness of the mere metrical chronicle, but Warner failed in the execution. His fourteeners are usually Drab at its worst. From so vast a poem good phrases can of course be picked out: ‘her red disperst in shadowed white’, ‘she blusht out beauty’, ‘to pearce the pathlesse ayre with shaft’. There is some hideous vividness on the death of Hercules, and everyone has heard the line about the blow that Queen Eleanor gave to Rosamund. But no one should be deceived by these quotations into reading Warner. The good things in Albion’s England are as far divided as the suns in space. Warner may also have translated the Menaechmi (1595) and had published in 1584 a prose romance, or a nest of romances, called Pan his Syrinx or Pipe.

Matthew Grove’s Pelops and Hippodamia, published in 1587 but written (we are told) at least four years earlier, deserves mention only for two reasons: because these dismal fourteeners throw into even bolder relief the transcendent novelty of all the Golden epyllia—Lodge’s and even Marston’s as well as Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s—and because, in one of the shorter pieces that follow the Pelops, Grove in a sense anticipates Donne by wishing that ‘Jove would him convert’ into a ‘blacke flea’ in his lady’s bed. But in what a sense!

One of the best known Drab works produced in the Golden Age is Willoby his Avisa (1594), but its fame had from the first little connexion with its poetical quality. That a work so apparently edifying should have been ‘called in’ five years after its publication shows that it was in reality a scandalous roman à clef. In our own age it has excited the attention of Shakespearian scholars because one of its minor characters is called W. S. and W. S. gives Pandaric advice to his friend H. W. The literary historian, attempting to judge it on its own merits, will find that it is fairly good Drab. The style and metre of some of the better Tottelians are used to tell, chiefly in dialogue, how a virtuous woman of humble rank resisted various would-be seducers. Like the rhetorical prose fiction of the age, it clogs the story with letters and complaints. But it is not quite without dramatic life. There is a pretty contrast between the demure virtue of Avisa as a maid and the rounder language in which she belabours those who assail her after her marriage. The theme, the unadorned language, and the confined movement of some stanzas, oddly remind us of Lyrical Ballads, not at their best. The identity and even the existence of the Willoby to whom the first edition attributes this poem have been doubted. Some think it is by Chapman’s friend Matthew Roydon the mathematician. On stylistic grounds this is not improbable, for Roydon’s Elegy or Friend’s Passion on Astrophill (printed in Spenser’s Astrophel) is also Drab, and good Drab. Its octosyllabic stanzas have the true staccato effect, and its most famous lines, though far beyond anything in the Avisa, might have been written by the same man—

A sweete attractiue kinde of grace

A full assurance given by lookes,

Continuall comfort in a face,

The lineaments of Gospell bookes.

We shall also find in this period many Drab passages, or whole poems, by writers who also produced Golden work for which they are justly remembered. Drayton was hardly ever safe from relapses into the Drab. Certain metres and certain genres tend to be Drab whoever is writing. The Mirror for Magistrates continued to be a running sore in English poetry and no one could write a ‘tragedie’ on that model without losing his Golden powers. The only hint of a redemption for this execrable kind comes right at the end of the century in Thomas Storer’s Life and Death of Wolsey (1599): and here, it is interesting to notice, it is being redeemed not into Golden poetry but into Metaphysical poetry with a strong infusion of the dramatic:

Why some are gone already: looke about.

Did no man meete part of my soule before?

I had but three, one and a halfe are out.

Nay had I more then one? . . .

My mother Earth mine onely wife shall be

And yet no incest.

The beneficent influence of the commercial theatre on non-dramatic poetry is a feature of the nineties. The necessity of drawing and holding an audience forbade the dramatists to indulge in certain kinds (not all kinds) of folly and falsity, and the results of this discipline spread by example to others.

As might be expected, the Drab has a social distribution as well as a distribution by kinds. The Golden poets are chiefly poets who write for their living and have to face frank criticism: courtiers who versified at odd moments tended to be Drab. They may not have perceived the difference between the two styles, or may have preferred the old. The Queen herself had been a minor (or minimal) Drab poetess. Puttenham’s taste was for the Drab. The Phoenix Nest (1593), which boasts of presenting us with the ‘rare and refined’ work of ‘Noble men, worthy Knights, gallant gentlemen’, though it includes true gold by Lodge and others, is predominantly a Drab anthology. Some of the drab pieces are good, like Breton’s ‘Chess Play’ or the anonymous ‘The Brainsicke race’: many of them are the old mechanical fustian—‘by day I freeze, I frie, I wish, I wait’. It contains two beautiful lyrics by unknown authors: ‘O night, O ielious night’, where the alternate feminine rhymes improve the alexandrines almost out of recognition, and ‘Sweete Violets’ which has something of Campion’s delicacy. But the character of the collection as a whole becomes clear if we contrast it with that genuinely Golden anthology England’s Helicon (1600), which makes no similar boast on its title-page and, as the preface points out, ignores social position in arranging its poets. Raleigh, the most distinguished courtier poet of the period, wrote more Drab than anything else, though, for one or two pieces, I have placed him later among the Golden poets. Sir Edward Dyer (ob. 1607), when stripped of the pieces falsely attributed to him on the strength of the signature S. E. D. in England’s Helicon, emerges as an almost purely Drab writer. He is best when least gnomic, in ‘Amidst the fayrest mountayne toppes’ or ‘Amaryllis was full fayre’. The more famous ‘My minde to me a Kyngdom is’ does not quite live up to its opening lines. Modern research has brought home to him some very damning work; it is kind to emphasize the fact that he was no longer young in the nineties and most of his poetry may have been old when the great age began.

II

Satire as a literary kind must be distinguished from the satiric, an element which can occur (like the pathetic, or the heroic) in almost any composition. It had been frequent in our medieval literature. What is new in the nineties is the crop of satires imitated, on humanistic principles, from the satires of the Romans. Whether the Roman satire is a true literary kind at all may be questioned. It has no structural characteristics peculiar to it; by writing a ‘satire’ one is committed to nothing except to a continuous use of the satiric element, so that to have a book called ‘a satire’ is as odd, and as suspect, as it would be if we had a book called ‘A pathos’. It will be noticed that the Roman model, though it has produced great couplets and great paragraphs, has produced no great poem, no poem in which the parts really gain by belonging to the whole. The great works in the modern vernaculars which we usually call ‘satires’ do not descend from the Satira of the Romans. Animal Farm, Erewhon, Voltaire’s tales, Gulliver, the Dunciad, the Rape, Absalom, and Hudibras, belong to a different family. They are all fantastic or mock heroic narratives, and their true ancestors are Rabelais, Cervantes, the Apocolocyntosis, Lucian, and the Frogs and Mice. It was therefore, arguably, in an evil hour that the humanistic passion for reviving all ancient kinds led certain Elizabethans to express their satiric impulse in formal satire. It was much more fruitfully expressed in their comedies and pamphlets.

It is doubtful whether precedence in this enterprise should be given to Lodge or to Donne. Lodge’s Fig for Momus appeared in 1595, and Donne’s first two Satyres may well be assigned, on internal evidence, to an earlier date. But since it is clear that neither poet influenced the other, it matters little who wrote first. The interesting thing is that they display two different conceptions of satiric style and metre which were to contend until, in the hands of Dryden, Lodge’s conception finally won the day. A smooth Jacob and a hairy Esau were apparently twin-born.

Lodge’s book, which contains eclogues and epistles as well as satires, is of little interest to the general reader. All the pieces are clear, neat, and reasonable; they are also very tame and there is little trace of real satiric power. But to the literary historian this book is of fascinating interest. At a line like ‘Wit shines in Vertue, Vertue shines in Wit’ (Epistle V), he rubs his eyes. Have we blundered into the eighteenth century? He will find that Satires I and III are in almost perfectly end-stopped heroic couplets and that even the internal structure of the line often anticipates Augustan practice. He is, in fact, confronted with a manner which differs both from the harshness of some other sixteenth-century satirists and also from the richer manner of Lodge’s own ‘Golden’ poetry. In this volume only, and for satire and epistle only, Lodge has somehow achieved at a stroke something very like the style and versification which English satire developed in the age of its supremacy.

Donne, on the contrary, writes under the influence of the old blunder which connected satira with satyros and concluded that the one should be as shaggy and ‘salvage’ as the other. Everything that might make his lines come smoothly off the tongue is deliberately avoided. Accents are violently misplaced (II. 7), extra syllables are thrust in (II. 49), and some lines defy scansion altogether (I. 13, II. 103). The thought develops in unexpected and even tormented fashion. There is a complete absence of that cheerful normality which in Horace, or that occasional grandeur which in Juvenal, relieves the monotony of vituperation. In Donne if any simile or allusion leads us away from the main theme, it leads us only to other objects of contempt and disgust—to coffins, ‘itchie lust’, catamites, dearth, pestilence, a condemned wretch ‘at Barre’, vomit, excrement, botches, pox, ‘carted whores’. Instead of a norm against which the immediate object of satire stands out, we have vistas opening on corruption in every direction. This technique is chosen in obedience to an ideal of satire, and the apparent parallels in Donne’s lyric work are, I believe, superficial. In the lyrics metrical audacities are attempts (often successful) to achieve a subtler music; those in the first two Satyres are, and are meant to be, ugly. Violent or disturbing images in the lyrics have a definite part to play in building up a concrete dramatic situation; here, they belong rather to an ex officio censoriousness, supposed proper to the kind. It is difficult to guess how these two pieces would affect us if we did not know the author’s name; the second would not, perhaps, be much read save by specialists. The first, distantly related to Horace’s I. ix, is very much better; once Donne and his companion are out in the street there is admirable vividness. But the vice of the genre appears in lines 36–40. In real life a tuft-hunter might, no doubt, be a lecher, just as he might be red-haired or a B.Litt.; but there is no exploitable connexion between the two vices. Indeed the graver fault makes the lighter less comic and less interesting. The formal satire invites this kind of thing because it demands, in Elizabethan eyes, a more or less continuous display of virtuous indignation. This, even when sincere, can become very tedious, and it provides the inferior writer with an excuse for dabbling in saleable dirt and slander without loss of self-approval.

Donne had taken a vigorous step on the lane that came to a dead-end in Hudibras, and Lodge a feeble one on the road that led to Dryden and Pope. The same contrast, in a very much lower degree, will be found between their successors, Hall and Marston. Joseph Hall (1574–1656) was in his early twenties when he brought out the first three books of his Virgidemiae or Toothless Satires (1597) with the ungrounded boast that he was the first English satirist. The three last books or Biting Satires followed in 1598. He has a good deal to tell us about his art and seems, at first, more interested in satire than in the things satirized. The ‘ruder Satyre’ should go ‘rag’d and bare’, displaying ‘his hairy hide’. One of its proper characteristics is obscurity. In the Prologue to Book III we learn that the two previous books have been blamed for not being obscure enough, and Hall pleads that it is hard to make English as ‘darksome’ as Latin. But, like a persevering humanist, he does not despair and promises at the end of the third book that in future his meaning will be much harder to find. His pains were successful and IV. i. is, in places, a mere puzzle. Thus Hall’s theory of satire is the same as Donne’s. But his practice often inclines rather to that of Lodge. There are, indeed, some unmetrical lines, some half-lines (imitated absurdly, we must suppose, from Virgil), and some alexandrines: even two together (III. vii. 20) with a curiously disagreeable effect. But a great deal of his verse, though less of his than of Lodge’s, is smooth and even end-stopped. We often catch the Augustan note:

Giue him the numbred verse that Virgil sung,

And Virgil selfe shall speake the English tongue . . .

The nimble Dactils striving to out-goe

The drawling spondees pacing it below,

The lingring spondees labouring to delay

The breath-lesse Dactils with a sudden stay (I. vi).

Or a higher strain:

Fond foole, six feete shall serve for all thy store:

And he that cares for most, shall finde no more (II. ii. 58).

It was this quality, presumably, which moved Pope to declare the Virgidemiae ‘the best poetry and truest satire in the English tongue’.

He spoke, doubtless, in a moment of enthusiasm and cannot have meant exactly what he said. It was the first of Book VI that he especially admired. Here, instead of vituperation, we have an admirable ironic idea: Hall, in reply to his critic ‘Labeo’, recants, admits that ‘in so righteous age’ he ought never to have been a satirist, and proceeds to praise his contemporaries for all the virtues they notoriously lacked. The device is not Hall’s own but borrowed; it remains, however, a judicious borrowing, and well illustrates the power of an organizing idea to make what might have been a mere heap of poetry into a poem. The short ‘Advertisement for a Chaplain’ (II. vi) is well known, and stings by its restraint: Nashe, or even Donne, would have spoiled it by exaggeration and made the advertiser a monster. In Hall he is, far more effectively, simply a mean, purse-proud, philistine. In III. vi, the story of a dead toper who, in true Rabelaisian fashion, first drains and then replenishes the Styx, is good in its kind; Dunbar would have done it better. The longer pieces usually read best in quotation. Thus in II. iii (on the Law) the opening lines on Natural Law are moderately impressive and the concluding image of the sheep is good; in between we are reduced to

Wo to the weale where manic lawiers bee,

For there is sure much store of maladie.

V. ii (on the decay of hospitality) is more continuously pointed than most; here we have the ‘faire glittering Hals to tempt the hopefull eye’ which are as ill suited to the cold cheer within as ‘A golden Periwig on a Black-mores brow’, and the desolation of the unemployed chimneys is well imagined. Few of Hall’s satires lack passages that cling to the memory, but he is in constant danger of relapsing into flat querulousness. His conception of the art was not one that encouraged a man to write his best; ‘it is not for this kind to desire or hope to please’, he says in his ‘Postscript’, and he is seldom strong enough to horrify or shock.

John Marston (1576–1634), it must be allowed, makes his début as the most odious of literary characters, the man who publishes work he is not prepared to stand by and then pretends that he has been writing ‘with his tongue in his cheek’. The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image . . . and certain Satires appeared in 1598, but there is some reason for believing that the Pygmalion had been either printed, or circulated in manuscript, before that date. It is an erotic epyllion which looks as if it had been fadged up in haste by a man who believed that anyone could follow Marlowe and Shakespeare in this vein. Marston relies too much on those facile and ineffective rhymes which the abstract termination -ion (then disyllabic) provided for lazy poets. He claims the medieval licence of treating proper names inconsistently and once accents Pygmalion on the first and third (121). Having told us in line 7 that the image was carved in ivory, he forgets this and tells us in line 42 that ‘its breasts like polish’d ivory appear’, and by line 137 it is made of stone. In reality, of course, Marston is not thinking of the things (stone, ivory) at all: the words float into his mind from other men’s works. By the time this poor poem was published, along with the satires, in 1598, it had apparently been severely criticized and Marston appended ‘The Author in praise of his precedent Poem’, in which he claimed to have written Pygmalion as a parody of contemporary erotic verse. He returned to the matter in his Scourge of Villany (also 1598). By that time someone had pointed out that Pygmalion ought not to have apostrophized Ovid (Pygm. 68), and of course we are now told that this too was part of the joke (vi. 61). Few have believed the pitiful alibi, and even if we did it would save only Marston’s moral, not his literary, character. Read as serious, mildly pornographic, poetry, Pygmalion is admittedly poor stuff: read as parody or irony, it would be infantile. Authors in Marston’s position do not always realize that it is useless to say your work was a joke if your work is not, in fact, at all funny.

After this unsuccessful attempt at Golden verse Marston turned to satire. His sixteen pieces (five in the Pygmalion volume and eleven in the Scourge) are of considerable interest. In versification they conform to the ideal of satira-satyros. Like Hall, Marston uses half-lines and alexandrines: he has ‘headless’ or ‘trochaic’ lines such as we find in Chaucer (Pygm. Sat. I. 31, III. 51); and lines hardly metrical at all (Scourge, V. 14), for which he pleads ‘Rude limping lines fits this lewd halting age’ (ibid. 18). The first satire in the Scourge combines metrical violence with extreme obscurity, but in the prose address ‘To those that seem iudicial Perusers’ it appears that Marston has once more had his tongue in his cheek. He tells us he wrote the first satire, ironically, for those who think ‘all satires bastard which are not palpable dark’, and intended it as a shocking example. Whatever the truth may be about his motives in writing it, Marston elsewhere appears (in theory, and usually in practice) as an opponent of obscurity. He remarks with great good sense that Persius and Juvenal are ‘crabby’ only because they are ancient and ‘had we then lived, the vnderstanding of them had been nothing hard’. He ridicules ‘modern Satire’ for giving us ‘Sphinxian riddles’ wrapped in ‘such pitchy clouds’ as would have amazed Oedipus (Pygm. Sat. II. 14 et seq.). He may be referring to Donne as well as to Hall whom he regarded, for reasons that cannot be discussed here, as his prime enemy. But though Marston rejects the ideal of obscurity he has very little of the Augustan quality that sometimes appears in Hall; the general effect of his work is much closer to Donne’s.

The chief merit of Marston’s satire is his frequent success in striking an attitude which (for the moment, while the poetical illusion lasts) is convincing and even infectious. He does not always get it right. When he professes to be grieved, vicariously grieved, like the tender brethren in Cartwright, and exclaims

O split my heart lest it do breake with rage

To see th’ immodest loosenesse of our age! (Scourge, II. 104)

we are merely embarrassed: nor does ‘Fair Detestation of foul odious sin’ (ibid. Proem. Lib. III. 13) impress us at all. It is when Marston more frankly, though still theatrically, presents himself simply as an enraged Timon that he is most effective. He ends a Satire with the couplet

My pate was great with childe and here ‘tis eas’d:

Vexe all the world, so that thy selfe be pleas’d. (Scourge, VI. 111).

He addresses his work ‘To Detraction’. ‘Partial praise’ cannot heighten, nor malignant criticism lower, his self-esteem—‘I am my selfe, so is my poesie’. The Scourge is dedicated ‘To his most esteemed and best beloued Self’. He begins by bidding ‘mechanic slaues’ and ‘dung-hill peasants’ avaunt, but then changes his mind. No: let them all come and read. They won’t understand, but their railing will be the highest praise: ‘no greater honour craues my poesie’. This change of mood is a dramatic device which Marston elsewhere uses with success. The Reactio (Pygm. Sat. IV), which is his chief attack on Hall, ends unexpectedly:

Lets not maligne our kin. Then satirist,

I do salute thee with an open fist.

Thus it is never safe to read only the first half of a satire by Marston; he often has a card up his sleeve. He has indeed serious faults. There is far too much mythology: the second in the Scourge is very dull and general. But we seldom go far without coming to some passage which is almost as spirited as Nashe’s prose. The whole of the ‘Cynic Satire’ (Scourge, vii), and especially lines 8–17, is highly effective. Even the prurient meandering of Scourge III is sometimes redeemed by the vigour of the phrases.

This same prolific year, 1598, saw the appearance of two other satiric works; in which (though I protest I set out with no intention of so patterning my material) we can again distinguish Jacob and Esau. William Rankins’s Seven Satires would hardly be worth mentioning but for the paradox that in them one misconception cancels another. Rankins connects satira with satyros: but then since the satyr is to him an idyllic figure out of Ronsard and Spenser, his satyr’s song becomes smooth and gentle. The Satyr, the child of uncorrupted nature, comes forth from the woods to be shocked (like Goldsmith’s Chinaman, the King of Brobdingnag, and others) by the vices of our society. Edward Guilpin’s Skialetheia . . . Epigrams and Satires is a very different matter. The epigrams are beneath criticism, but the satires have some merit. The Preludium attacks the ‘oyle-buttred lines’, ‘wimpring sonnets’, and ‘puling Elegies’ of the Golden love poets on moral grounds, complains that even ‘the heroicke Poeme’ now admits ‘Cupid’s chivalrie’, and asserts that only satire and epigram have remained pure. The fifth satire owes something to Donne’s first (unless some common model still awaits discovery) but the two poems have different virtues: Guilpin is less concerned than Donne with an individual companion and gives us more of the general bustle in the streets. His sixth, on Opinion, has a certain genuine moral dignity and gives us an interesting echo of things that were being said about famous writers. Guilpin has openings full of promise: ‘Heere comes a Coach (my lads) let’s make a stand’ (II. i.), or ‘Mary and Gup! haue I then lost my cap?’ (III. i), but he cannot follow them up.

‘Satyre’ is now becoming as fixed a type as the sonnet sequence. In 1599 ‘T. M. Gent’, probably Thomas Middleton, who had published three years earlier his Wisdom of Solomon (a paraphrase which dilutes each verse of the original into two Venus and Adonis stanzas, not without a good line here and there) brought out Micro-Cynicon, Six Snarling Satyres. They exhibit in some places the usual half-lines and other metrical irregularities: elsewhere they are faintly Augustan. The familiar types are attacked. The fourth, on cony-catching, set beside Greene’s prose, helps to reveal the feebleness of this genre: the verse is doing nothing that prose could not do equally well. Such good phrases or images as T. M. offers us sound as if they had floated in from some different kind of poem: notably, in the first,

Into this hel sometimes an Angel falls

Whose white aspect black forlorne soules appals.

There are many obscure passages. Within a convention which affects obscurity it is not always possible to say which are intended and which result from mere incompetence.

It is difficult to understand how the satires of Hall and Marston have won such celebrity at the expense of Samuel Rowlands’s Letting of Humours Blood in the Head Vein (1600). Rowlands, alone of the Elizabethan satirists, has grasped the fact that it is useless to attack knaves unless you entertain readers, that neither moral purpose nor personal malice will do instead of comic power. With him satire ceases to shout and learns to chuckle, and by dropping the shrill moral pretensions of his predecessors he becomes far more amusing and certainly no less moral. He also quietly drops the tradition of obscurity and metrical violence. His speech, learned perhaps from the new theatres, is nearly always dramatic. His first is on an impostor. Rowlands sees him a long way off and does not recognize him: ‘Who haue we here? . . . some swaggring fellow. . . . Now, a shame take the buzzard. . . . I know the ruffiane.’ We have some excellent Munchausen stuff:

Heele tell you of a tree that he doth know

Vpon the which rapiers and Daggers grow

As good as Fleetstreete hath in any shoppe,

Which being ripe doune into scabbards droppe.

In IV we see ‘the age grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes near the heel of the courtier’. Rowlands complains that our comedians are out of date in their picture of the countryman; the modern rustic is just as concerned with eloquence (we are given specimens) as any townsman. The fifth attacks censorious moralists and is—perhaps unintentionally—a reproof to the other satirists, the poachers turned gamekeepers. Rowlands is never great, but he is sane, readable, and often funny.

There remains a freak. Cyril Tourneur’s Transformed Metamorphosis (1600) stands wholly outside the Roman and humanistic tradition which we have been following. He may have conceived himself as obedient to that tradition when he made his poem impenetrably obscure, but in reality he is going back to a different sort of obscurity, to the cryptographic obscurity of the Spider and the Fly or Speak Parrot. He may have coined his hard words in order to inspissate the darkness, but their literary effect is very like that of aureation. These characteristics, combined with rhyme royal, give us the feeling of returning to the Middle Ages. The poem deals (certainly) with popery, and (probably) with Essex and King James. Its editor Churton Collins speaks of ‘two stanzas which I shall not make myself ridiculous by trying to explain’: I can only extend his principle to the whole. At its cloudiest it can be like this;

The vine’s Aedonides: dead Murcianje:

Smooth Philoxenus: murder’s ground:

Disquiet Eriphila: hel’s syrenie:

Philocrematus: the soule’s deepe wound . . .

The coinages (or revivals) include such words as errorie, lycophosed, Israellize, egencie, minulise, fact (as a past participle, meaning ‘made’) and Endymionie (which appears to mean ‘sleep’). And yet there is a kind of pleasure, or at least a fascination, in the thing; a surrealist mixture of horror and nonsense. We see a hall whose foundations are in Phlegethon, compassed with ‘birds, vines, and flowres and eu’ry sundry fruite’, a bridge, and on the bridge a serpent ‘in female shape’ who ‘soothes with Leucrocutanized sound’. This might for most of us as well be runcible sound, but we are certainly reading a poet, though perhaps a poet who takes opium. After the loud-mouthed self-righteousness of the Marstons and Halls it may even be a relief.

For it must be confessed that the formal satires of the nineties are, in the aggregate, a weariness. They have their happy moments; but there is far too little irony and invention, and far too much direct denunciation. The shapeless Roman model was a fatal encouragement to the Elizabethan love of facile moral ferocity. Nothing is easier, or less interesting, than to proclaim with raucous conviction that whores are unchaste, misers ungenerous, and hypocrites insincere: and the raucous passes with equal ease into the falsetto. The frequent attacks of the satirists on Golden love poetry would be of considerable interest if we could assure ourselves that they expressed a genuinely literary reaction against the Golden style and were thus pioneer work for a new poetry; but this is doubtful. The professed motive of the satirists is ethical. The real motive is quite as likely to be personal as literary. Their own style is fully accounted for by decorum: everyone knew—Spenser himself knew—that satire ought not to be sweet or sublime. Marston had tried very hard to be Golden himself, and failed. I do not think we can make much of these satirists as leaders in a stylistic revolt.

The epigram in this period is closely connected with satire—Whitgift and Bancroft forbade both in 1599—but is of much less interest. The chief collections were the Epigrams of Sir John Davies (printed in one book with Marlowe’s Ovid in 1590), Edward Guilpin’s (prefixed to his Satires in 1598), Thomas Bastard’s Chrestoleros in the same year, John Weever’s in 1599, and Rowlands’s, published with his Satires in 1600. None of them rise so high as mediocrity. This form demands a polish and a ‘wit’ (in the modern sense of the word) which the Elizabethans could not supply. Guilpin’s are the most abysmal. Rowlands’s are sometimes tolerable, but this is when they cease to be epigrams and become in effect short satires: not much shorter than some of Hall’s. One of Davies’s (never ask me which) moved me to smile—but it did so by the story it told and would have been just as good in prose. Bastard vaunted that he had ‘taught Epigrams to speake chastlie’, but he had not made them much more delectable. The epigram usually affects the same style as the satire and is sometimes in doggerel metre, but some of Bastard’s complimentary pieces are Golden. In all the collections I have mentioned there is probably not a single epigram which displays as much talent as a good limerick in our own days.

III

We are now at last free to approach the Golden poetry proper. Two preliminary observations must be made.

1. Mellifluous though most of this poetry is, we shall find in it a metrical phenomenon distressing to the modern ear. I call it Simpsonian rhyme; as we name Bright’s disease after him who diagnosed it. Simpsonian rhyme in its simplest form is a rhyme on the second syllable of a disyllabic word where metre forbids that syllable to carry the stress. The second condition of course distinguishes it from mere terminal inversion, as when a ballad line ends ‘my fair bodíe’. Thus in a couplet like Chapman’s

Till our Leander that made Mars his Cupid,

With soft loue-sutes for iron thunders chid

(Hero and Leander, III. 211)

an inverted stress on Cupid would ruin the first line. This may be called ‘Simpsonian A’. We also have Simpsonian A2 where the same relation occurs between two pairs of monosyllables, as when Barnes (Sonnet IV) rhymes fróm thee with to mé: or between trisyllables (call it Simpsonian A3) when the same poet (XLIX) rhymes inextricáble with impórtable. We then go on to what may be called Plusquam-Simpsonian rhyme, or Simpsonian B where two unstressed syllables, again with no possibility of inversion, are rhymed together. Thus Abraham Fraunce calls the metre of his Nativity poem (The Countess of Pembroke’s Emanuel, 1591) ‘ryming hexameters’ because consecutive lines end with such words as abashed and saluted: or Richard Linche in his Diego and Ginevra (a fairly brisk stanzaic novella published with his sonnet-sequence Diella in 1596) has such rhymes as lády, húngry (St. 17) and lóve her, offénd her (44). If Simpsonian rhyme occurred only in satires we could explain it as a deliberate harshness: but it occurs in epyllia like Scylla’s Metamorphosis, and in sonnets. If only bad poets used it we could attribute it to incompetence: but it is used by Lodge, Shakespeare, and (excessively) by Chapman. We may indeed suppose that stress was a little less tyrannous, and the rights of unstressed syllables a little more respected, in Elizabethan than in modern English, but the greatest allowance we can make for such a change hardly explains the phenomenon. (When Keats used it, as in Endymion, I. 450, he was doubtless enjoying it as an archaism.)

2. The proper grouping of Golden poetry is by kinds, not by authors. Any poet’s sonnet has more in common with other sonnets than with his own other works. Any poem written in the tradition of the Mirror for Magistrates will contain much Drab, whoever writes it. Any song might, for all we can see, have been written by any poet. Our modern critical tradition of concentrating on idiosyncrasies is here a handicap. The likeness between all the Golden poets is much more important than their differences in poetic character, as distinct from their different degrees of perfection. And even these latter are curiously evasive. Nothing is more remarkable in the nineties than the way in which excellence may suddenly flow from the meanest pen. Incredible as it may seem, all external evidence points to the wretched Munday as the author of the song in England’s Helicon that begins

Beautie sate bathing by a Spring

Where fayrest shades did hide her.

Poetic power is spread in such ‘commonalty’ that if we were not on our guard we should come to take the ‘Spirit of the Age’ for more than a figure of speech and believe that poetry could really be ‘in the air’. But that way all the chimeras lie. This extension of poetry was possible because it was a poetry content to express the emotions in which all men are alike. What was new was a technique, a learnable technique, soon leading to a standard of workmanship which earlier poets had hardly even attempted. Masses of hitherto thwarted poetic impulse were released. The first Golden poets had not so much sown a seed as burst a dam. And the resulting poetry was very homogeneous, even impersonal. That is why it matters so little whether a given song or sonnet is a translation or an original. If it is harmonious, if it is sufficiently full of pathos, or sensuality, or pomp, or frolic, it will do. There is no demand that each poet should have an idiom of his own. In this chapter I shall yield to the modern mode by treating some great or copious poets separately, but I shall group much of the work by kinds.

This period begins with surprising suddenness. Apart from Spenser himself, who never became ‘all Gold’, the only poet who might show gradual aurification is Breton. In his Flourish upon Fancy (1577) we saw him writing purest Drab. If we were sure which pieces were his in Britton’s Bower of Delights (1591) we might catch him just at the turn; for here we have a Drab elegy on Sidney and Drab poulter’s, but a tinge of Gold in ‘Let me go seek’ and ‘Cupid’s Complaint’, and the truly Golden in ‘Pastoral’.

On a hill there growes a flower

Faire befall the daintie sweete;

By that flower there is a bower . . .

In the Pilgrimage to Paradise (1592) he is clearly established as a minor Golden poet. He is so minor that the change might escape notice unless you actually juxtapose the 1577 Breton and the 1592 Breton. The 1577 Breton writes:

My hart it selfe is bitten so with frost

That all my senses now are waxed nome,

My tongue his tast of pleasant ioyes hath lost . . .

The 1592 Breton writes:

The seconde calde, his charge was but to heare

In sweetest sounds which was the soundest sweete,

What graces might in Musickes ground appeare . . .

Both are unimportant. But in the one we have ruthless regularity of accent, end-stopped lines, colourless abstracts as keywords, the fatuous epithet ‘pleasant’, brutal alliteration; in the other, the phantasmal or merely theoretical stress on was in line 2, enjambment, the richer keywords, ‘sounds’, ‘graces’, ‘music’, and chiasmic alliteration in the last line. Breton has exchanged his boots for pumps.

Breton, then, is such a poet as the historian (not the general reader) sighs for: a textbook case, a human thermometer. But this is not characteristic. In the eighties Watson, Marlowe, and Peele are already Golden when we first meet them, and we can only guess how they achieved it. The two last names warn us that the separation between drama and other poetry forced upon us by the plan of this series becomes at this point artificial. It is significant that it had not troubled us before: until the Golden Period an historian of poetry need take hardly any notice of the stage. But now, no Form was more suddenly charged with gold than the dramatic. Peele, though no one could class him with Breton as an instance of gradual transmutation, grew more Golden as he went on. The Arraignment of Paris (1594) has gaps, as it were, in the gold leaf, and yokel ugliness shows through. But Peele, as he came to be in David and Bethsabe, cannot be left out of any account of the Golden Age. That play (so ineptly compared with the old miracles) is ablaze with the new, luxuriant beauties; ‘His thunder is entangled in my hair’, ‘Take but your lute and make the mountains dance’, ‘Unity infinite and innumerable’, or that line about the thunder’s spouse which has, quite rightly, been called Aeschylean. And Peele can go beyond mere gorgeousness. A common imagination, personifying sin, would offer us either a beautiful courtesan or a loathsome monster: but Peele’s David knows far better—

Sin with his seuenfold crowne and purple robe

Begins his triumph.

In Marlowe Gold so bathes the drama that drama all but disappears. The little, and often odious, puppets are as dwarfed by their own poetry as a circus-master by his own elephant. We forget Tamburlaine and Mortimer and even (at times) Faustus, and think only of Rhodope and Persepolis and celestial spheres and spirits ‘shadowing more beautie in their aery browes than haue the white breasts of the Queene of loue’. The trochaic in ‘What is beautie’ matters more than the whole pretence of drama which is crawling about, down on the stage, fathoms below this region: like a tragedy about beetles.

The history of the lyric at this period clearly forbids us to exclude the theatre. Indeed the old Drab or Tottelian lyric died harder among the literary poets than among the dramatists, who are pioneers and masters of Golden lyric. It differs from the old kind in three ways. First and most important is the formal difference. It abandons poulter’s and fourteeners: uses sparingly even the simple octosyllabic stanzas or eights and sixes of the better Tottelians; and explores the resources of stanzaic variation and variation within the line. Thus in Byrd’s Psalms, Sonnets and Songs (1588) the song ‘Though Amaryllis daunce’ contains very old ideas (‘friendly foes’, ‘flames of yce’, and ‘freezing fire’): the important thing is the varying line lengths within the stanza, the chiasmic rhyme, and the unexpected movement of the refrain. So in ‘Adieu Loue, untrue Loue’ from the same Byrd’s Songs of Sundry Natures (1589), take the second stanza (not the first, for a reason that will shortly appear), cut off the refrain, and you have a Tottelian effect. Then read the whole poem as it actually stands: you are in a different world. Sometimes a Golden lyric differs from the Tottelian only by a hair’s breadth: Lady Pembroke’s ‘Alas, with what tormenting fyre’ would be pure Gnomic Drab if you removed the third and sixth lines of each stanza with their feminine rhymes. The second distinction of the Golden lyric is that it does not disdain to learn from the ‘rakehelly rhymers’: popular phrases, even baby-talk and sheer nonsense, are welcomed. Nothing could be more innocent, closer to folk verse, than Peele’s ‘Fair and fair and twice so fair’: yet its melodic structure would make the best of the Tottelians’ work look ‘innocent’ in a very different sense. To the same class belong his ‘Whenas the rye’, Nashe’s ‘Spring, the sweet spring’, and some of Shakespeare’s songs. Let any man try to hit off in verse this note of almost idiotic happiness, and then bow to his betters. Very different is Nashe’s ‘Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss’, a subtle mixture of the immemorially popular and the extremely sophisticated. What it sounded like with the music I do not know: its peculiarity as verse is that it never allows you to accept any interpretation of its metre as final. There is an overall impression of a triple iambic beat (‘All things to end are made’). But then there are the dactyls of the fifth strophe, and the amphimacers of the third (who could give less than full value to died young?) and the last line of each. The third characteristic of Golden lyric is its delight in external nature. This had never been absent from the lyric, but there had, I think, been more of it in the Middle Ages than in the Tottelians. When I asked the reader to try an experiment on the second stanza of ‘Adieu loue, untrue loue’, that was because the first contained mountain and valley, a crystal well, and the ‘shadow of a green oak tree’. Of the three characteristics which I have attributed to the Golden lyric, this last is, however, the least certain guide.

Thomas Watson (1557?–1592) has the distinction of being the earliest of the poets who are Golden from their first word. He is also a very minor poet indeed, and I welcome the fact as a further safeguard against any tendency to make ‘Golden’ a eulogistic term. What poetry there is in Watson is of Golden type, but (save for historical interest) almost negligible. He is as pure an example as we can find of the ‘Renaissance’ poet. He is more of a scholar than most of his contemporaries and wrote neo-Latin works, including a translation of the Antigone. The medieval elements in his love poetry all come to him through the Italians: he did not know they were medieval. His first English volume, the Hecatompathia (1582), is almost as heavily weighted with ‘adminicular gear’ as the Shepheards Calendar itself; with analyses after the manner of the Vita Nuova, condescensions to ‘the vulgar sorte’, and diligent acknowledgement of every debt to Sophocles, Theocritus, Horace, Seneca, Petrarch, Aeneas Sylvius, Politian, Seraphino, Strozza, Parabosco, and Ronsard. These notes are the most interesting part of the book. The poems consist of three Venus and Adonis stanzas each, very tame, very derivative but all having that graceful movement which was then so new and (I suspect) still so far from easy. In 1590 came the Meliboeus, a lament for Walsingham translated from Watson’s own Latin: it is perhaps a little better than the Hecatompathia. His sonnets, The Tears of Fancy, were published in 1593. The thirtieth and fifty-first show traces of the Faerie Queene, but Watson is perhaps closer to Shakespeare than to any other sonneteer in his conception of the sonnet. One of the uses of Watson’s work is to show that, as between a plain and a beautiful face, so between supreme and mediocre poetry, there can be a clear likeness. All the elements of Petrarch’s beauty are present in the Hecatompathia, all those of Lycidas in Meliboeus, and nothing comes of them. Perhaps one line of Watson’s deserves to be remembered, ‘In all this world I think none loues but I’. There is also a song, pleasant enough, attributed to him in England’s Helicon (1600).

George Peele (1558?–1597) outside his lyrical and dramatic work is a very minor poet. He writes pageant verses, graceful and dignified, but tame. They were of course written to order, but if that is a sufficient explanation of their coldness this fact itself marks a momentous revolution in the history of poetry: such conditions would not have made Dunbar or Pindar cold. In some of these pieces, notably in Poly-hymnia (1590) and the Honour of the Garter (1593) the artificial simplicity of the syntax and the handling of the decasyllabic oddly remind us of Tennyson in his quiet moments. In the former the image of the old knight’s helmet used as a bee-hive is memorable.

Greene’s non-dramatic poetry with the exception of the Maiden’s Dream (1591), a dull allegorical elegy in Spenser’s unhappiest vein, consists of the lyrics scattered through his prose works. A few of these, such as the two songs from Arbasto, are gnomic Drab: the majority, eminently Golden. The subject is nearly always love, not passionate but playful or voluptuous. Almost invariably the mistress is praised, as Hamlet praised his father, by mythological comparisons. Menaphon’s eclogue—a catalogue of physical charms in the manner of the medieval Latin poets—is only an apparent exception, for it exists chiefly to be condemned by the answering eclogue of Melicertus which is both a defence and an example of Greene’s favourite method. The right way to praise, says Melicertus, is like this:

Apollo when my Mistresse first was born

Cut off his locks and left them on her head

or this

Once Venus dream’d vpon two prettie thinges . . .

And when she wak’d they were my Mistress breastes.

This continual recourse to Olympus might be expected to be tedious, but as we read the poems we do not find it so. Greene is a great metrical inventor and nearly all his stanzas are happy. Eurymachus’ ‘Fancy’ (in Never too Late) is interesting for the melody it achieves by a sparing use of rhyme; ‘Fair fields’ (in Menaphon), for variations in the shorter lines. Infida’s song in Never too Late is an almost impudent work of illusion; we feel we have read a charming lyric, yet there is really nothing in it but the refrain. In his longer, octosyllabic pieces Greene often uses what would now be called sprung rhythm, perhaps having learned to like it from Chaucer misread, and the results are sometimes pleasant. He is a great manager; his resources in thought and feeling are very narrow, but he lays them out to such advantage that we enjoy him more than many richer men. Even in his hexameters he knows that monosyllables are the only source of true English spondees. ‘Face rose-hued, cherry-red’ is a better opening for a line than we shall easily find in Sidney. ‘Weep not my wanton’ is, and perhaps deserves to be, his best-known poem.

There is no external evidence for the date at which Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) translated All Ovid’s Elegies, but it seems likely that this is the earliest work we have from his hand. He did not know very much Latin when he made it and even where he sees the point of the original he can sadly blunt it. The Amores, despite the sensuality which may have attracted him to them, are not really a work very congenial to Marlowe. Their metallic perfection of form, the almost scientific objectivity with which they expose the whole amorist’s life (impotence included), their cool gaiety, are foreign to his temperament. He could not reproduce their almost puerile cleverness: cedere iussit aquam, jussa recedit aqua turns to the jaw-breaking ‘Flye back his stream chargd, the stream chargd gaue place’. Conversely, Marlowe’s best lines are often far from the Latin in poetic quality. Ovid never wrote anything that sounds like

With beautie of thy wings thy faire haire guilded,

Ride golden love in chariots richly builded.

But the work is very interesting because we can here trace in little those varying effects of the Ovidian couplet upon English poetry which are writ large elsewhere. When Marlowe writes ‘Love slackt my Muse and made my numbers soft’ or ‘A scarlet blush her guilty face arayed’ we see Ovid the Master of the Augustans. Turn the page and we shall see Ovid the Master of Donne:

Vngrate why feignest new feares? and doest refuse;

Well maiest thou one thing for thy Mistresse vse.

If thou deniest foole, lie our deeds expresse

And as a traitour mine oune fault confesse . . .

This argumentative brutality Ovid bequeathed to Donne, as he bequeathed to the Augustans his closed couplet, his balance, his antithesis and ease.

Lucan’s First Book, mentioned in 1593 but not known in print till 1600, bears Marlowe’s name. If it were ever reasonable to reject a contemporary ascription on purely internal evidence, I should be tempted to deny this work to Marlowe. It is of very great merit. At what date Marlowe wrote such verse as this, I do not know;

young men left their beds

And snatcht armes neer their houshold gods hung vp

Such as peace yeelds; wormeaten leatherne targets

Through which the wood peer’d, headles darts, olde swords . . .

I should be inclined to put it late and see in it not an early manner which he outgrew but a new manner inspired by a congenial model, which, had he lived, might greatly have enriched his original work.

But of course Marlowe’s greatest poetical achievement is the two sestiads of his unfinished Hero and Leander. This is a more perfect work than any of his plays, not because their poetry is always inferior to it but because in it the poetry and the theme are at one. Here, and here only, he found matter to which his genius was entirely adequate. For Marlowe is our great master of the material imagination; he writes best about flesh, gold, gems, stone, fire, clothes, water, snow, and air. It is only in such concretes that his imagination can fix itself. Dramatic necessity, born of economic necessity, often drove him into alien fields and he failed to crystallize in passions proper to his characters the heady exuberance of his own emotion. The monotonous megalomania of his heroes argues as much penury as depravity in the poet. They utter screaming follies very largely because he cannot think of anything more relevant or probable for them to say. But what incapacitated him as a tragedian qualified him magnificently as a writer of erotic epyllion. This was the work he was born to do. In this form his sole business was to make holiday from all facts and all morals in a world of imagined deliciousness where all beauty was sensuous and all sensuality was beautiful. The honey-sweetness which appears as one element among many in the Faerie Queene or the Arcadia was to be the substance of the whole poem. Nothing could be simpler or more obvious than such a project, but this does not mean that it was easy to execute. Most attempts of the sort have been failures: Shakespeare himself, as I shall presently argue, largely failed in Venus and Adonis. For the poet has to be continuously sweet yet never cloy us. He must be realistic enough to keep us in touch with the senses (for his theme is the flesh) yet never so realistic as to awake disgust or incredulity. Nor our sense of humour: laughter at the wrong moment is as fatal in this kind as in tragedy. Sneers at ‘a pretty piece of Paganism’ are inadmissible. We may, no doubt, condemn the whole genre on moral grounds: but if it is to be written at all it demands powers which hardly any poet possesses.

Marlowe’s success is particularly instructive because it depends on the continual presence of a quality which would at first sight appear to be wholly inappropriate to his design: the quality of hardness. Marlowe chose for his epyllion a ringing, predominantly end-stopped couplet. He also excluded all tenderness. Love, in this poem, is not ‘full of pittie’ but ‘deafe and cruell’. Leander woos like ‘a bold sharpe sophister’. The temple of Love is decorated not with scenes of pathos and gentleness but with insolent grotesques:

the gods in sundry shapes

Committing headdie ryots, incest, rapes.

A male and immortal lover tries first to ravish Leander and then to murder him. The effect of all this is to dehumanize the story and thus, in one sense, to disinfect it. The mawkishness which (as Keats knew) frequently disfigures Endymion can win no entry. We do not think of Hero and Leander as a girl and a boy who have fallen in love; they are nothing but lovers and have no existence apart from their desires. It is as if we were allowed to share in the erotic experience of two daemons or two wild animals. And the word ‘share’ is here important. We do not see their frenzy from outside as we see that of Shakespeare’s Venus. We are at the centre and see the rest of the universe transfigured by the hard, brittle splendour of erotic vision. That is the real function of Marlowe’s preposterous, yet wholly successful, hyperboles. Hero has been offered Apollo’s throne. A necklace of pebbles shines like diamonds with the light reflected from her throat. When the ladies of Sestos walk in procession the street becomes a firmament of breathing stars. In that world there are boys so beautiful that they never dare to drink at a fountain: naiads would pull them under. These hyperboles are not, even if Marlowe thought they were, mere rhetoric. They build up something like the world as the world appears at a moment of wholly unrestrained passion. In Venus and Adonis we are the spectators of such a passion, and it sometimes sickens us. In Marlowe’s poem we see not the passion but what the passion thinks it sees. His very limitations here come to his aid. Shakespeare was even in youth too full and ripe a man to keep all reality and humanity (one thing excepted) out of his poem. Marlowe had no such difficulty: his difficulty had always been to bring them in, and this time he did not need them. We bid goodbye to the world of sober experience at the very outset. Hence the integrity, in a sense one might almost say the purity, of his poem. There is no nonsense about it, no pitiful pretence that appetite is anything other than appetite. I do not know that any other poet has rivaled its peculiar excellence. Lachrymose or melodramatic sensualists like Swinburne are of course out of the running. Byron and Ovid keep their sensuality tolerable (when they do) by being comic and ironical and thus write a wholly different sort of poetry.

Marlowe’s poem is best read with Chapman’s conclusion, but in a literary history we must postpone consideration of that great neglected work. Another epyllion, the Scylla’s Metamorphosis of Lodge demands our attention. It had not been Lodge’s first poem: but Truth’s Complaint over England, published with the Alarm in 1584, is of little value. It was in rhyme royal and conformed to the medieval pattern of vision poetry which had affected Lodge (probably) through Sackville’s Induction. Scylla’s Metamorphosis appeared in 1589, when Marlowe’s poem may have been unwritten. Neither seems to be indebted to the other. Lodge’s epyllion is set in a medieval frame; that is, it becomes a proper epyllion only after the poet, walking alone, has met Glaucus. Except for one passage in which the ‘outward show’ of comfort which Thetis offers her son is contrasted with her secret tears, the mingled complaints and narratives which form the body of the poem do not appeal strongly to our emotions. They were probably not intended to. Lodge’s chief aim was to paint richly for the inner eye and to charm the ear with fine phrases and feminine rhymes. Considering the early date of the poem, his frequent success is remarkable. His stanzas are full of lines that we repeat to ourselves for sheer pleasure: ‘a mortall wound is my immortall being’, ‘Daughter of Jove and sister to the Sunne’. Spenser had as yet published nothing that would give Lodge much help, and Sidney’s verse (if we suppose Lodge to have seen manuscript copies of it) though far more serious and passionate has seldom this airy, seeming-artless grace. The poet of whom Lodge most often reminds us is Shakespeare. Not all that Shakespeare learned from him was good: we could wish he had never seen such a stanza as that beginning:

Of loue (God wot) the louelie Nimph complained,

But so of loue as forced Loue to loue her.

It was in a happier hour that his eyes fell upon:

Mark how the morne in roseat colour shines

And strait with cloudes the sunnie tract is clad.

With all its beauties Scylla is a rather unsatisfactory poem. It is too static and deals too much in tears. The single stanza in which Lodge uses a wholly different metre (‘Wretched love let me die, end my love by my death’) is perplexing. We want to have heard the poet read it himself. If rattled off, as it could be, in Shenstonian ‘anapaests’, it would be detestable; read slowly, with full stresses on let and end, it might please.

Of the other pieces published with Scylla, ‘The Discontented Satire’ has many medieval traits, and the ‘Commendation of Solitary Life’ is a grave, harmonious poem in which appreciation of natural beauty counts for something. Both these, like Scylla, are in the stanza which Shakespeare used for Venus and Adonis.

In 1593 with Phillis, which I postpone, came the Complaint of Elstred, woeful and worthless stuff in the vein of the Mirror for Magistrates, and in 1595 those satires which I have already considered. Far more important than any of these are the lyrics, whether included in Phillis, scattered through his prose works, or preserved in contemporary anthologies. On these much of his lasting fame depends. In one or two of them—in the Hamadryad’s song ‘Pluck the fruit’ from William of Normandy or ‘Happy Phoenix’ from Euphues’ Shadow—there is just a hint of that slightly glib, overemphatic melody which we find in Dryden’s songs. Once, in Montana’s ‘second sonnet’ (‘When the dog’) the metrical scheme seems to me, or has sometimes seemed, a little arbitrary. But with these few concessions unfavourable criticism must end; for those, at least, who are prepared to accept this kind of poetry on its own terms. Some, like Sir Sidney Lee, demand originality and consider a poem to be somehow discounted if you can find a foreign original. Others may want high seriousness, or irony, or social awareness. Lodge offers nothing of that kind. He hardly offers even passion; only gestures, delightfully graceful gestures, symbolical of it. By varying line-lengths and artful disposition of the rhymes each stanza is a delicate surprise: when the pattern has been repeated often enough to be familiar, the poem ends. But it seldom seems to end just for that reason. Each poem has shape in the sense that the thought, or rather the playing at thought, progresses and comes to a full close. All these virtues can be illustrated from Rosalynde’s ‘Loue in my bosom’ alone. There is aural surprise in the mono-rhymed quatrain towards the end of each stanza and aural suspense, long but just not too long, while we wait for the feminine rhyme from one stanza’s end to another’s. There is a progression from complaint in the first two, through revolt in the third, to submission in the last. We are not left asking, as so often in a Drab lyric, why it ends where it does. In ‘Phoebe sate’ there is a wonderful minuet of rhymes. The freshness, the illusion of spontaneity which in all these lyrics so refreshes the reader, depends on filling the highly sophisticated form with all the silly-sooth of love-making, with flowers, birds, lips, sun, and shade. They are of course, as they were intended to be, trifles. That is one reason why only an artist could have made them. In large, serious works there are so many means besides poetic art with which to hold a reader’s attention.

I have said nothing about the sonnet-sequence Phillis because I wish now to consider several specimens of this form together. This will have the advantage of separating the sequences as far as possible from their authors. When they are thus separated the modern reader is more likely to treat them fairly and to cease demanding of them what they were never intended to give. The sonneteers wrote not to tell their own love stories, not to express whatever in their own loves was local and peculiar, but to give us others, the inarticulate lovers, a voice. The reader was to seek in a sonnet not what the poet felt but what he himself felt, what all men felt. A good sonnet (mutatis mutandis and salva reverentia) was like a good public prayer: the test is whether the congregation can ‘join’ and make it their own, not whether it provides interesting materials for the spiritual biography of the compiler. If we use the litany, this is not necessarily because we are interested in Cranmer. In this respect the Elizabethan sonnet is comparable to the Elizabethan song. It does not matter who is speaking to whom in ‘Since there’s no helpe’ any more than in ‘Oh mistress mine’. Love poetry of this sort is transferable. For this reason, and for another which will appear presently, it matters very little which sonnets are translations. Here again the analogy of a public prayer holds good. The whole body of sonnet sequences is much more like an erotic liturgy than a series of erotic confidences.

I hope no reader will take this to mean that sonnets are ‘literary exercises’. We are not assuming that the sonneteer was never in love any more than we are assuming that all who compose liturgies are infidels. It is perhaps always more probable that any young poet is in love than that he is not. As for ‘literary exercises’, I am not yet sure that any such things exist. There are exercises, properly so called, in other arts. A pianist plays scales; a painter makes a study of a foreshortened foot which is not intended ever to form part of a completed picture. But does any man write a verse without at least the momentary hope and intention of producing a poem which will be delightful, even immortal, for its own sake?

Watson’s sonnets have already been mentioned. John Southern’s Pandora (1584) was unmetrical rubbish, never praised by anyone (I think) except Puttenham. In 1591 we reach a sonneteer who matters. In that year Newman’s edition of Sidney’s Astrophel included twenty-eight sonnets by Samuel Daniel (1563–1631). In the following year Daniel published his sequence Delia which omitted a few of those printed by Newman and added many others, bringing the total up to fifty-five. Delia stands in a different class from the rest of Daniel’s work: if he had written nothing else we might hear less of Daniel but we should certainly hear less of ‘the prosaic Daniel’. For assuredly those who like their poetry ‘not too darn poetical’ should avoid Delia. It offers no ideas, no psychology, and of course no story: it is simply a masterpiece of phrasing and melody. To anyone who complains that it is a series of commonplaces we can only reply, ‘Yes, but listen’. Of course it is commonplace to tell your mistress that she is young and now’s the time for love: but he says, ‘Now whilst thy May hath fill’d thy lap with flowers’. Of course it is commonplace to say that she virtuous as well as young: but Daniel says she is a maid

deck’d with a blush of honour

Whose feet do treade green pathes of youth and loue.

Any man may complain that he grows old; but Daniel says

My cares draw on mine everlasting night

and builds out of it a hyperbole which leaves us not astonished (as the metaphysical hyperboles do) but bowed down before the magnanimity of the attitude it implies. In him, as in Shakespeare, the most ordinary statement turns liquid and delicious;

Still in the trace of one perplexed thought

My ceasles cares continually run on,

or

Shalt bend thy wrinkles homeward to the earth.

The truth is that while everything Daniel says would be commonplace in a prose abstract, nothing is commonplace as it actually occurs in the poetry. In that medium all the Petrarchan gestures become compulsive invitations to enormous sorrows and delights. And it really matters very little that he is so heavily indebted to Desportes. A poetic translation is always to some extent a new work of art. In the large, objective kinds, in epic or tragedy, the degree of novelty is limited, because situation, characters, and architectonics are common to both handlings. But in so small a poem as a sonnet a seemingly trivial change may alter an image, or an implied image, in such a way as to alter the lighting of the whole piece. Thus Desportes writes:

La beauté qui, si douce, à présent vous inspire,

Cédant aux lois du Tans, ses faveurs reprendra;

L’hyver de vostre teint les fleurettes perdra,

Et ne laissera rien des thresors que j’admire.

Cest orgueil desdaigneux qui vous fait ne m’aimer,

En regret et chagrin se verra transformer,

Avec le changement d’une image si belle . . .

Daniel turns it;

Her beauty now the burden of my song,

Whose glorious blaze the world’s eye doth admire,

Must yield her praise to tyrant Times desire,

Then fades the flower, which fed her pride so long;

When, if she grieve to gaze her in her glasse

Which then presents her winter wither’d hue . . .

Nothing in the French corresponds to Daniel’s throbbing first line nor, of course, to his alliterations and sub-alliterations throughout. Beauté in Desportes is a high abstraction which, in obedience to the lois of Time, resumes something it has lent to the lady: in Daniel, not beauty but ‘her beauty’ yields to Time conceived as a greedy tyrant. The two images almost imply two different and antagonistic myths; the one a vindication of law, the other, at least in part, a protest against tyranny. Then, in the French, another abstraction, orgueil, will see itself turning into regret: but out of se verra Daniel gets the concrete picture of a woman, not her pride, looking into a real mirror—a picture implied, if at all, very faintly in Desportes’s image. Thus the connexion between Daniel’s poem and Desportes’, though real, is superficial. The theme which they have in common with each other (‘She’ll be sorry some day’) they also have in common with countless other poems; they do different things with it and lead our imagination through different roads.

Henry Constable’s Diana, printed in 1592 and again ‘with divers Quatorzains of honourable and learned personages’ in 1594 (though the volume bears the false date 1584) is on a far lower level. Constable relies on the conceits rather than on the emotive resources of the Petrarchan tradition, and many of his contemporaries wrote lines that are sweeter on the tongue. No better, but interesting for other reasons, is the anonymous collection Licia, attributed on the strength of a passage in Phineas Fletcher’s ‘Piscatory Eclogue’ to his father Giles Fletcher the elder. It bears no date, but the Dedicatory Epistle ends ‘from my chamber Sept. 4. 1593’. I cannot accept Sir Sidney Lee’s view that either in this epistle or in the subsequent address ‘To the Reader’ Fletcher ‘deprecates’ the notion that he has, or ever had, a real love affair. What he actually does is to poke fun at critics who ask such irrelevant questions: perhaps (who knows?) Licia may be a personification of Travers’s ‘Discipline’. It is a just rebuke by which nineteenth-century critics might well have profited, but the main interest of Fletcher’s introductory matter lies elsewhere. His anti-puritanism, his serious reverence for love as the only proper ground of marriage, and his demand that a scholar should have the accomplishments of a gentleman, anticipate attitudes which were to become characteristically English. His sonnets (to which he added an eclogue and a dull poem on Richard III in the vein of the Mirror for Magistrates) are not quite without merit. In the Golden Age we hardly notice lines like

In tyme the strong and statelie turrets fall,

In tyme the Rose and siluer Lillies die,

but we should praise them in a fifteenth- or eighteenth-century poet. Nor has anyone said better what all must feel about the hazards and adventures of their own ancestors than Fletcher in the line ‘I might have dyed before my lyfe begunne’. The whole sonnet (XXII) is good. There is some feeling for nature in Licia, and some graceful fancy: no pathos and no exaltation.

Sir Sidney Lee can hardly find words strong enough for his dislike of Lodge’s Phillis (1593). He might have picked out for blame the thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh, in alexandrines, which revert to the clownishly over-emphatic diction of the Drab Age and thus show how form may determine style. Actually, what enrages him is ‘the mire of deceit and mystification’, and he ridicules Minto for praising their ‘seeming artlessness’. But to seem artless when you are in fact heavily indebted to Ronsard and Desportes is an offence, if at all, against morality, not against art. If a poem seems beautiful, it is beautiful. Lodge, though not great, is very often delightful. The tradition of lovers’ humility was very old when he wrote, but it renews its youth in a line like ‘And working wonders, yet say all is dutie’. We have heard before that swans sing against their death; but Lodge makes the myth local and immediate when he writes.

The rumour runs that here in Isis swim

Such statelie Swannes, so confident in dying,

That when they feele themselves near Lethes brim . . .

The second line, psychologizing the thing, limiting it to certain swans, is admirable. Sonnet XXXIV is a lesson in the perfect use of mythology (‘I would in rich and golden-colour’d rain’). Notice in the second quatrain, how he becomes—how we become—the god Zeus transformed into Europa’s bull and yet remain, thanks to the word ‘fineness’, the simplest of human, yokel lovers pleased to display his new clothes. In the original, by Ronsard, we do not find this. But Lodge is not always thus fanciful. Elsewhere we have the very note of work-day, unsuccessful passion, ever demanding

Such things as are not, cannot, may not be,

or lines that sum up a far larger mass of common experience:

So passe my ioyes as doth a new-plai’d storie,

And one poore sigh breathes all delight to naught.

The twenty-fourth might be called sub-Shakespearian. None of them is, perhaps, perfect; but, once more, the real test is to ask ourselves what we should think of them if they had been written in any other period. In his own, Lodge’s gold is ‘killed’ by even purer gold. Hector was killed; but by Achilles.

In the same year, 1593, appeared the Parthenophil and Parthenophe of Barnaby Barnes, containing madrigals, elegies, and odes as well as sonnets, and followed in 1595 by his Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets. In Parthenophil we find Simpsonian rhymes, a sonnet in alexandrines, and even the ‘broken-backed’ line of Lydgate (‘He gan with vermil, gold, white and sable’, Madrigal 4). We also see a characteristically Golden conceit losing its golden quality through lack of phonetic beauty (‘Restes mist with silver cloude had clos’d her sunne’, Sonnet IV). But ‘meaningless doggerel’ is no true estimate of his quality. He often, for a line or two, sounds like a weaker Shakespeare. The sixty-first sonnet (‘Ah sweet Content, wher is thy milde aboad’), even if its first line suggests the namby pamby of Bowles or the young Coleridge, soon recovers; and the Ode ‘On the plains’ (much influenced by Ronsard) is pretty enough. He follows the tradition of Ovid and Propertius by including a frankly sensual poem—Madrigal 13—and sometimes so links his sonnets in thought that they become like stanzas of a single poem. The Spiritual Sonnets are less good but have a certain polished dignity. If he were our only English sonneteer we should probably praise him.

The year 1594 produced three new sequences. Two of them, William Percy’s Sonnets to Coelia and the anonymous Zepheria, were worthless; the third was Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror, which grew by successive prunings and augmentations into the magnificent Idea of 1619. In this first version Drayton is still mainly the diligent apprentice, learning from other sonneteers both native and foreign. He has still much to learn. His seventh sonnet (the germ of his fine seventeenth in Idea) ends absurdly with a fourteener. The alexandrines of Mirror X are removed in Idea III. But already in the 1594 version we catch the voice of a great poet, in such a line as ‘How love begun, how love shall never end’; in the contrast between Cupid and the lady—

Thy Bowe halfe broke, is peec’d with olde desire,

Her Bowe is beauty, with ten thousand strings—

or in that passage which redeems the old comparison between the lover’s soul and a ship, ‘See where shee flotes, laden with purest love’. And already, in the Eagle sonnet, or in the apostrophe ‘O starre of starres, fayre Planet mildly mooving’, there are hints of that quality (by no means its only virtue) which sets Drayton’s final sequence apart from those of all his contemporaries—that exaltation, that wildness, which, as Mrs. Tillotson says, sounds ‘almost as if Marlowe were writing sonnets’. And indeed the quality cannot be better described than in the words which Drayton himself used of the real Marlowe’s genius ‘brave translunary things that the first Poets had . . . all ayre and fire’. And I think Drayton was aware of it himself. It is no doubt true that protestations of originality, such as we find in Idea XXXI and XLII, were themselves traditional: but ‘Ravish’d a world beyond the farthest Thought’ sums up the essence of Drayton’s best poetry too well to be so discounted. The madness he professes in Idea IX is not inappropriate: a poetic, not an erotic, madness. For though Drayton can be human and heartfelt when he pleases, his imagery of voyage, phoenix, star, and river (he was enamoured of rivers all his life) mediates something, not inconsistent with human passion, but going beyond it. He is

a Man that in some Trance hath seene

More than his wond’ring utt’rance can unfold,

one who ‘builds his Hopes a world above the Skie’. Yet when he speaks simply as any lover he can sometimes outsoar all the sonneteers except Shakespeare. ‘Since ther’s no helpe’ has an opening as direct, as dramatic, as anything in Donne. Very few poems can live up to such an opening: but in Drayton it is a true starting-point. The colloquial tone is preserved for the first eight lines, but with a subtle change of feeling as the mind passes from the present parting to a ruefully calm acceptance of the future. Then the ascent begins. We have four lines of intensely moving allegory. The sonnet might have closed on that note and, even so, would have been superb: instead, like a spell that reverses the whole preceding structure, we have the utterly unforeseeable last couplet. One cannot ask more of fourteen lines. Yet again, and in quite a different vein, that of towering hyperbole, Drayton (this time with no rival at all, neither Shakespeare nor any other) sets up the seamark beyond which poetry in that kind has never gone nor could go:

And Queens hereafter shall be glad to live

Upon the almes of thy superfluous prayse.

If he had never written another verse, these two would secure him that praise which is due to men who have done some one thing to perfection.

In 1595 Richard Barnfield brought out Certain Sonnets in a volume which contained also Cynthia and Cassandra. This was his first venture: in the Affectionate Shepherd (1594) he had shown how very bad ‘bad Golden’ can be, when the verse is too indiscreetly, as he says, ‘bath’d in a melting sugar-candie streame’. Cynthia is the first imitation of the Faerie Queene. Cassandra gives a good many delights unintended by the poet; Apollo, wooing Cassandra, ‘briefly t’her relates his pedigree’, refers to her as ‘my Cass’, and no one ‘seemed more fair’ than this god on an occasion when he ‘invisibly did glide’. His sonnets, like the Affectionate Shepherd, are pederastic, whether because Barnfield suffered in fact from the most uninteresting of all misfortunes or in a sheer humanist frenzy of imitation. They are better than the earlier poem: at least they keep to the point, whereas the Shepherd in the very article of wooing had somehow drifted into a lecture on the flavours of fish. Yet Barnfield is not always a fool. In his Lady Pecunia (1598) there are comic stanzas that almost anticipate Byron and even in Cynthia he could steal from Shakespeare and add something worth adding—a star

Shootes suddenly from the beholders eye

And leaves him looking there where she is not.

His lyric ‘As it fell upon a day’ is perhaps his most delightful production.

The Elizabethan sonnet was now past its prime: to follow its senility through the work of Smith, Griffin, and Linche (all in 1596) and Tofte (1597) would be wearisome, though the fifty-fourth in Griffin’s Fidessa shows a stately use of existing English models. Enough has, I hope, been said, to guard the reader from supposing that the corpus of sonnets contains only frigid conceits. The truth is almost exactly the opposite. Critics reading them, as they were never meant to be read, hastily and in bulk, are gorged and satiated with beauty, as a fish can be choked by holding its head upstream. The water is good water but there is too much of it for the fish.

We must now turn back to the important year 1593 and attempt to see Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis as an epyllion among epyllions, a successor to Scylla and Hero and Leander. We notice at once that it has abandoned Lodge’s medieval preliminaries and that it does not, like Marlowe’s poem, begin with long descriptions. The characters are in action by line 3. This is promising. We get, too, but not so soon nor so often as we might wish, lines of the deliciousness which was expected in this type of poem; ‘leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain’, ‘a lily prisoned in a gaol of snow’. But in that direction Shakespeare does not rival Marlowe. We get, with surprised pleasure, glimpses of real work-day nature, in the spirited courtship of Adonis’s horse or the famous stanza about the hare. The account of Venus’s growing uneasiness during the hunt and her meeting with the wounded hounds gives us a fairly strong hint that the poet has powers quite beyond the range which the epyllion requires. What is not so certain is that he has the powers it does require. For as we read on we become more and more doubtful how the work ought to be taken. Is it a poem by a young moralist, a poem against lust? There is a speech given to Adonis (769 et seq.) which might lend some colour to the idea. But the story does not point the moral at all well, and Shakespeare’s Venus is a very ill-conceived temptress. She is made so much larger than her victim that she can throw his horse’s reins over one arm and tuck him under the other, and knows her own art so badly that she threatens, almost in her first words, to ‘smother’ him with kisses. Certain horrible interviews with voluminous female relatives in one’s early childhood inevitably recur to the mind. If, on the other hand, the poem is meant to be anything other than a ‘cooling card’, it fails egregiously. Words and images which, for any other purpose, ought to been avoided keep on coming in and almost determine the dominant mood of the reader—‘satiety’, ‘sweating’, ‘leaden appetite’, ‘gorge’, ‘stuff’d’, ‘glutton’, ‘gluttonlike’. Venus’s ‘face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil’, and the wretched ‘boy’ (that word too was dangerous) only gets away ‘hot, faint and weary with her hard embracing’. And this flushed, panting, perspiring, suffocating, loquacious creature is supposed to be the goddess of love herself; the golden Aphrodite. It will not do. If the poem is not meant to arouse disgust it was very foolishly written: if it is, then disgust (that barbarian mercenary) is not, either aesthetically or morally, the feeling on which a poet should rely in a moral poem. But of course Shakespeare may well have failed because he was embarrassed by powers, essential for drama, which he could not suspend while writing an epyllion. Perhaps even then he could not help knowing what the wooing of Adonis by Venus, supposing it to be a real event, would have looked like to a spectator.

Venus and Adonis, if it were his only work, might not now be highly praised; but his next poem might stand higher if it stood alone and were compared solely with other Elizabethan products, not with his own masterpieces. The Rape of Lucrece (1594) presumably discharges the promise made in the Epistle to Venus and Adonis of ‘some graver labour’. It is heroic poetry as the heroic was understood before Virgil had been sufficiently distinguished from Lucan and Ovid; and it differs from its predecessor in merit as much as in kind. The theme would at that time have tempted almost any other poet to one more ‘tragedy’ modelled on the Mirror for Magistrates, and only those who have read many such ‘tragedies’ can adequately thank Shakespeare for rejecting that form. It is, however, very much a work of its own age. It contains prettinesses and puerilities which the later Shakespeare would have seen to be unsuitable to his heartrending subject. The conceit which makes Lucrece’s pillow ‘angrie’ at 388 would have been tolerable in Hero and Leander but is here repellent; and so is the aetiological myth at 1747, or the competitive laments of the husband and the father at Lucrece’s death. There is some of Kyd’s fustian in the apostrophe to Night (764–77). It is hard not to smile when Lucrece invites the nightingale to use her hair as a grove (1129), but Edward Lear may be partly to blame. The passage in which she becomes preoccupied, like Troilus or a lover in the Arcadia, about the style of her letter to her husband is more difficult to judge: perhaps it is not impossible that a woman of the nineties, brought up by a humanist tutor, might, even at such a moment, have remembered the claims of eloquentia. These are merely local imperfections. But there is also, whether we reckon it an imperfection or not, something in the structure of the whole poem which is not quite congenial to our taste. It starts indeed with twenty-one lines of purposeful narration, not rivaled in that age outside the Faerie Queene: then our sails flap in three stanzas of digression. And we must be prepared for this throughout. Shakespeare’s version of the story is about twelve times as long as Ovid’s in the Fasti and, even so, omits the earlier stages. Much of this length is accounted for by digression (131–54 or 1237–53), exclamatio (701–14), sententiae (131–54), and descriptio (1366–1526). The technique is in fact that of the medieval rhetoricians. Even in those passages which, taken as a whole, are narrative, a great deal of gnomic amplification is brought in. We have ‘theme and variations’. Thus at 211 (‘What win I if I gain the thing I seek?’) Tarquin states the theme of the game not being worth the candle in two lines: it is then varied for five. At 1002 Lucrece states her theme (noblesse oblige) in two lines and then varies it for twelve. At 1107 we have theme in two lines and again twelve lines of variation. Minor instances occur throughout. We must not put this down too exclusively to the Age, for Shakespeare was in fact fonder of amplification than many other Elizabethans and used it, sometimes rather grossly, in his earlier plays. There is nothing in Lucrece quite so crude as Gaunt’s successive variations on the theme ‘His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last’ in Richard II (II. i. 33 et seq.). There is a free use of simple one-for-one parallelism, as in the Psalms;

The shame that from them no device can take,

The blemish that will never be forgot,

or

Bearing away the wound that nothing healeth,

The scarre that will despite of cure remaine.

Whether the method shall prove tedious or delightful depends on style, in the narrowest sense of the word: that is, on the volubility of phrase which makes the variant seem effortless, and on phonetic qualities. Thus in shame, device, and blemish we have long monosyllable, disyllable in rising rhythm, disyllable in falling rhythm. In the second example we have the alliteration of away and wound and the very subtle consonantal pattern of scarre, despite, and cure. The first consonant group (sk) is not repeated, but one of its elements recurs in -spite and the other in cure.

Another example is:

To stamp the seal of time in aged things (941).

No one reads such a line without pleasure. Yet its emotional content is weak and its intellectual weaker still: to say that time stamps the seal of time on things that have existed a long time is near tautology. The charm depends partly, as before, on the distribution of a consonant group between the simple consonants of two later words (st, s, t), and partly on the fact that all the stressed syllables are long and all have different vowels.

But Lucrece has more than formal beauties to offer us. If not continuously, yet again and again, our sympathies are fully engaged. The rape itself, from the moment at which Tarquin strikes his falchion on the flint to the moment when he ‘creeps sadly thence’ is presented with a terror and horror unequalled in Elizabethan narrative verse. And here, certainly, the digression on ‘drunken desire’ before and after its ‘vomit’ is fully justified. ‘The spotted princess’ (Tarquin’s soul) is admirable: still a princess, unable to abdicate, and there’s the tragedy. Lucrece, too rhetorical in her agonies, is not quite so good as Tarquin, but she has her great moments: ‘I sue for exil’d majestie’s repeal’, pleading ‘in a wilderness where are no laws’. And of all the good things that Shakespeare said about Time he puts perhaps the best into her mouth:

Why work’st thou mischief in thy pilgrimage

Unless thou couldst returne to make amendes?

She should not have gone on (good though the line is) to add ‘Thou ceaslesse lackeye to eternitie’. It matters nothing that the historical Lucretia would have known neither Plato nor Boethius: the Elizabethan Lucrece ought not to have displayed her learning at that moment. For of course the characters are to be judged as Elizabethans throughout: even Christianity creeps in at 624 and 1156–8.

This poem contains what is rare, though not unique, in Shakespeare, a sort of Simpsonian rhyme at 352–4. To make 352 a decasyllable you must make resolution (as the Elizabethans often did) five syllables, and the rhyming syllable should then be -on. But in 354 you must make the third of absolution your last accented syllable: to which you could get a non-Simpsonian rhyme only by turning 352 into an octosyllabic.

Shakespeare would be a considerable non-dramatic poet if he had written only the Lucrece: but it sinks almost to nothing in comparison with his sonnets. The sonnets are the very heart of the Golden Age, the highest and purest achievement of the Golden way of writing. We do not know when they were composed. They were published in 1609 ‘by G. Eld for T. T.’ together with ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ (a still-born chanson d’aventure in rhyme royal, corrupt in text, poetically inconsiderable, and dialectally unlike Shakespeare). But at least two of them (CXXXVIII and CXLIV) existed as early as 1599, for these two were included in the poetical miscellany which William Jaggard published in that year under the title of The Passionate Pilgrim. A year earlier, in 1598, Meres had referred to ‘sugred sonnets’ by Shakespeare: how far these coincided with the sonnets we now have can only be conjectured. External evidence thus failing us, we look for internal, and find ourselves in a world of doubts. Even if an individual sonnet can be dated (and I think it much more likely that CVII refers to the queen’s death or her climacteric than to the Spanish Armada) this would not enable us to date the collection as a whole. Many sonnets, such as LXVI, LXXI, XCVII, and CVI, would be appropriate to any lover at any time and might, so far as their matter goes, be divided by years from other sonnets in the same collection. The evidence from style produces strong convictions in all readers, but not always the same convictions. On my own view it helps us much more to a terminus post quem than to a terminus ante quem: that is, I can hardly conceive a poet moving from the style of the best sonnets (which means in effect nearly all the sonnets) to that of Venus and Adonis, but can easily conceive one who had achieved Shakespeare’s mature dramatic technique still writing some of the sonnets we have. For in all ages, and especially in that, form affects style. If Shakespeare had taken an hour off from the composition of Lear to write a sonnet, the sonnet might not have been in the style of Lear. We cannot even be certain that Shakespeare wrote his sonnets when sonneteering was the vogue: there are expressions in XXXII, LXXVI, and LXXXII which can (though they need not) be interpreted to mean that he knew he was adopting a form no longer fashionable. But I am not arguing that the sonnets were later than is usually supposed. I am arguing for agnosticism. We do not know when, or at what different times, they were written.

Shakespeare’s sequence differs in character as well as in excellence from those of the other Elizabethans. It is indeed the peculiarity of these sonnets which has led to a misreading of all the rest. For here at last we have a sequence which really hints a story, and so odd a story that we find a difficulty in regarding it as fiction. It is the story of a man torn between passionate affection for another man and reluctant passion for a woman whom he neither trusts nor respects. No reading of the sonnets can obscure that amount of ‘plot’ or ‘situation’. Yet even this sequence is far from offering us the pleasure we expect from a good novel or a good autobiography. Treated that way, it becomes a mass of problems. I do not mean those problems which (rightly) attract students of Shakespeare’s life. With those the literary historian has no concern; he would not give a farthing to know the identity of the ‘man right fair’ or the ‘woman colour’d ill’. The difficulty which faces us if we try to read the sequence like a novel is that the precise mode of love which the poet declares for the Man remains obscure. His language is too lover-like for that of ordinary male friendship; and though the claims of friendship are sometimes put very high in, say, the Arcadia, I have found no real parallel to such language between friends in sixteenth-century literature. Yet, on the other hand, this does not seem to be the poetry of full-blown pederasty. Shakespeare, and indeed Shakespeare’s age, diet nothing by halves. If he had intended in these sonnets to be the poet of pederasty, I think he would have left us in no doubt; the lovely παιδικά, attended by a whole train of mythological perversities, would have blazed across the pages. The incessant demand that the Man should marry and found a family would seem to be inconsistent (or so I suppose—it is a question for psychologists) with a real homosexual passion. It is not even very obviously consistent with normal friendship. It is indeed hard to think of any real situation in which it would be natural. What man in the whole world, except a father or a potential father-in-law, cares whether any other man gets married? Thus the emotion expressed in the Sonnets refuses to fit into our pigeon-holes. And this, for two reasons, makes singularly little difference to our delight.

In the first place many individual sonnets, and some of the most prized, are very lightly attached to the theme of the sequence as a whole. CXLVI (‘Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth’) is not attached at all; it is concerned with the tension between the temporal and the eternal and would be appropriate in the mouth of any Christian at any moment. XXX (‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’), LXVI (‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’), LXXIII (‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’) are meditations respectively on bereavement, taedium vitae, and age, hooked on to the theme of love only by their concluding couplets. The effect of this ‘hook’ is twofold. On the one hand it makes richer and more poignant the emotion expressed in the preceding twelve lines, but not until that emotion has been allowed to develop itself fully; it converts retrospectively into a mode of love what nevertheless could be felt (and has been felt until we reach the couplet) on its own account. And, on the other hand, there is a formal or structural pleasure in watching each sonnet wind back through unexpected ways to its appointed goal, as if it said at the end vos plaudite. Even where the theme of love reaches farther back into the body of the sonnet it is often as universal, as suitable to every lover, as in a sonnet by Daniel or Lodge. Thus XXV (‘Let those who are in favour with their stars’) or XXIX (‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’) are poems that any man can walk into and make his own. And those must be few and fortunate who cannot do the same with XXXIII (‘Full many a glorious morning have I seen’) and XXXIV (‘Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day’).

Such is the effect of many individual sonnets. But when we read the whole sequence through at a sitting (as we ought sometimes to do) we have a different experience. From its total plot, however ambiguous, however particular, there emerges something not indeed common or general like the love expressed in many individual sonnets but yet, in a higher way, universal. The main contrast in the Sonnets is between the two loves, that ‘of comfort’ and that ‘of despair’. The love ‘of despair’ demands all: the love ‘of comfort’ asks, and perhaps receives, nothing. Thus the whole sequence becomes an expanded version of Blake’s ‘The Clod and the Pebble’. And so it comes about that, however the thing began—in perversion, in convention, even (who knows?) in fiction—Shakespeare, celebrating the ‘Clod’ as no man has celebrated it before or since, ends by expressing simply love, the quintessence of all loves whether erotic, parental, filial, amicable, or feudal. Thus from extreme particularity there is a road to the highest universality. The love is, in the end, so simply and entirely love that our cadres are thrown away and we cease to ask what kind. However it may have been with Shakespeare in his daily life, the greatest of the sonnets are written from a region in which love abandons all claims and flowers into charity: after that it makes little odds what the root was like. They open a new world of love poetry; as new as Dante’s and Petrarch’s had been in their day. These had of course expressed humility, but it had been the humility of Eros, hungry to receive: kneeling, but kneeling to ask. They and their great successor Patmore sing a dutiful and submissive, but hardly a giving, love. They could have written, almost too easily, ‘Being your slave, what should I do but tend?’: they could hardly have written, ‘I may not evermore acknowledge thee’, or ‘No longer mourn’ or ‘Although thou steal thee all my poverty’. The self-abnegation, the ‘naughting’, in the Sonnets never rings false. This patience, this anxiety (more like a parent’s than a lover’s) to find excuses for the beloved, this clear-sighted and wholly unembittered resignation, this transference of the whole self into another self without the demand for a return, have hardly a precedent in profane literature. In certain senses of the word ‘love’, Shakespeare is not so much our best as our only love poet.

This content is mediated to us through a masterpiece of Golden technique. On the metrical side all those wide departures from the norm which make the life of Donne’s or Milton’s work, or of Shakespeare’s own later blank verse, are excluded. That sacrifice was essential to his cantabile. He has to avoid the stunning regularity of Drab, yet to avoid it only by a hair’s breadth. There is a high percentage of lines in which every second syllable is not merely stressed but also long: ‘So I, for fear of trust, forget to say’, ‘So you in Grecian tires are painted new’, ‘When beauty lived and died as flowers do now’. Most of the rhymes are strong and many of them rest on monosyllables. There is a great use of alliteration both in its obvious and its less obtrusive forms. Thus in XV we have plain alliteration, ‘Cheered and check’d’ (6) and ‘Sets’ and ‘sight’ (10); gentler alliteration on unstressed syllables in 11 (‘debateth with decay’); consonant groups linked with simple consonants, where one is unstressed (as ‘perceive’ and ‘plants’ in 5) or both (as ‘perfection’ and ‘presenteth’, 2, 3). In XII we have the heavy alliteration ‘Born’, ‘bier’, ‘bristly’, ‘beard’ side by side with the much more artful pattern s, gr, g, sh in the previous line—groups linked with simples and arranged chiasmically. CXVI opens with a wonderful fantasia on the consonant m: full alliteration of initial stressed syllables in ‘marriage’ and ‘minds’, a stressed but not initial syllable in ‘admit’, and the unstressed ‘me’ and ‘ments’ in ‘impediments’. Then follow ‘love’ and ‘love’, no less an alliteration to the ear because they are the same word, and in the next line, a device Shakespeare used well, the play upon kindred words, ‘alters’ and ‘alteration’ (compare ‘beauty making beautiful’ in CVI, ‘the wardrobe which the robe doth hide’ in LII). Most of these devices are as sweet to us as they were to our ancestors. But Shakespeare does not share our modern dislike of sibilants (he will ‘summon’ remembrance to ‘sessions of sweet silent thought’) and in XLV we find the Simpsonian rhyme of ‘to thée’ with ‘melanchóly’.

In most of the sonnets there is a frank and innocent reliance on words which invite emotion and sensuous imagination. Thus in XII we have time, day, night, violet, sable, silver, trees, leaves, summer, green, bier, wastes: in XVIII, summer again, day again, buds, winds, sun, gold, death, shades; in XXI, heaven, sun again, moon, earth, sea, gems, April, flowers, mother; in XXX, remembrance, past, waste again, death again, night again, moan; in LXVIII cheek, flowers again, brow, golden again, sepulchres, fleece, hours, summer again, green again, and Nature. This differentia of the Golden style becomes tolerably clear if we notice, for contrast, the keywords in the first stanza of Herbert’s ‘Confession’; quest, grief, heart, closets, chest, trade, boxes, a till.

The rhetorical structure is often that of theme and variations, as in Lucrece. The variations more often than not precede the theme, and there is usually an application which connects the theme of the particular sonnet with what may be called the ‘running’ theme of that part of the sequence to which it belongs. There are exceptions to this. In CXLIV, for example, we have something like a continuous progression in which each line adds to the thought. CXXIX (‘The expense of spirit’) starts as if it were going to develop in that way, but progression almost ends with line 5, ‘Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight’. The next seven lines are largely, though not entirely, variations on the fifth. To see the typical Shakespearian structure at its simplest we may turn to LXVI (‘Tired with all these’). The theme occupies the first line, the application, the final couplet: in between we have eleven instances of the things which produce weariness of life. This numerical equality between the different variations is very uncommon, and chosen, no doubt, to give a special effect of cumulative bitterness. More often it is contrived that the variations should be either unequal simply, or, if they begin by being equal, that they should presently grow longer. Thus XII (‘When I do count the clock’) is built on the pattern variations—theme—application. The theme (‘You too will pass’) occupies the four lines beginning ‘then of thy beauty do I question make’, and the application is in the final couplet. The preceding variations have the numerical pattern 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2; a line each for the clock, the nightfall, the violet, and the curls, then two lines each for the trees and the harvest. The effect on the reader is one of liberation just at the moment when the one-line exempla were about to produce a feeling of constraint. In XXXIII (‘Full many a glorious morning’) we have only one variation in the form of a continuous simile filling the first eight lines. But then this simile contains its own pattern: one line announcing the morning, three which catch each one aspect of its beauty, and four to tell the sequel. XVIII (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’) is exquisitely elaborated. As often, the theme begins at line 9 (‘But thy eternal summer shall not fade’), occupying four lines, and the application is in the couplet. Line 1 proposes a simile. Line 2 corrects it. Then we have two one-line exempla justifying the correction: then a two-line exemplum about the sun: then two more lines (‘And every fair’) which do not, as we had expected, add a fourth exemplum but generalize. Equality of length in the two last variations is thus played off against difference of function. The same transition from variation by examples to variation by generalizing is found in LXIV (‘When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced’); theme in lines 1–2, first exemplum in line 3, second exemplum in line 4, the fourth exemplum triumphantly expanding to fill lines 5–8, generalization (9–10) passing into Application which occupies the last four lines. To some, I am afraid, such analysis will seem trifling, and it is not contended that no man can enjoy the Sonnets without it any more than that no man can enjoy a tune without knowing its musical grammar. But unless we are content to talk simply about the ‘magic’ of Shakespeare’s poetry (forgetting that magic was a highly formal art) something of the kind is inevitable. It serves at least to remind us what sort of excellence, and how different from some other poetic excellences, the Sonnets possess. They very seldom present or even feign to present passionate thought growing and changing in the heat of a situation; they are not dramatic. The end of each is clearly in view from the beginning, the theme already chosen. Instead of a single developing thought we get what musicians call an ‘arrangement’, what we might call a pattern or minuet, of thoughts and images. There are arithmetical elements in the beauty of this pattern as in all formal beauty, and its basic principle is idem in alio. Of course it affects those who have no notion what is affecting them. It is partly responsible for that immense pleasurableness which we find in the Sonnets even where their matter is most painful: and also for their curious stillness or tranquility. Shakespeare is always standing back a little from the emotions he treats. He left it to his created persons, his Lears and Othellos, to pour out raw experience, scalding hot. In his own person he does not do so. He sings (always sings, never talks) of shame and degradation and the divided will, but it is as if he sang from above, moved and yet not moved; a Golden, Olympian poet.

The most secret of his poems remains. In 1601 there came out Love’s Martyr by Robert Chester, a long, mysterious allegory about a male Turtle-dove and a female Phoenix, halting in metre, defective in rhyme, and almost to be classed with Copley’s Fig for Fortune as Late Medieval. To this are appended ‘diverse poeticall Essaies’ on the same subject, signed by Vatum Chorus, Ignoto, William Shakespeare, John Marston, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson. Shakespeare’s piece is, of course, what we call ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, though it appears without title. Whatever the external occasion may have been, Shakespeare uses his poem to expound a philosophy of love; the last word, presumably, that he has given us in his own person on that subject. Its doctrine consummates that of the Sonnets. In them the ‘naughting’ had been one sided. He had lost himself in another but that other had not lost himself in Shakespeare. Now Shakespeare celebrates the exchanged death, and life, of a fully mutual love. He is not writing ‘metaphysical poetry’ in the technical sense critics give to that term, but he is writing in the true sense, a metaphysical poem. Such a task leads some poets (Browning, for example) into a loose form and a style sermoni proprior. Shakespeare, on the other hand, gives us formality within formality, the threnos within the funeral poem, the conduct of his work ritualistic, his metres rigid, deliberately, hypnotically, monotonous. His supreme invention was the introduction of Reason as the principal speaker. The words which sum up Shakespeare’s doctrine, ‘Love hath reason, reason none’ owe all their importance to the fact that it is Reason who utters them. In the mouth of a passionate lover or a passionate mourner they would be the stalest claptrap; one more expression of ‘will’ revolting against ‘wit’, one more confirmation of the assumption, traditional since Chrétien, that Love and Reason are adversaries. But it is Reason who here exalts love above reason. It is Reason who has seen rational categories overthrown: ‘distincts’ becoming indivisible, propriety (proprium) ‘appalled’ by the discovery that the self-same is yet not the same (for of course the self in 38 does not mean ‘the ego’), and something brought into existence which cannot be called two or one. It is Reason who confesses that neither truth (which is Reason’s natural goal) nor beauty is the highest good. For beauty is only a brag or a bravery, a sign or hint, of the true good: and truth ‘cannot be’, it is not being, but only ‘about’ being. Reason, in fact, rationally recognizes what is beyond reason. We could not have guessed, I think, from internal evidence that this poem was by Shakespeare. As an anonymous work it would command our highest admiration. The oracular, which of all styles is most contemptible when it fails, is here completely successful; the illusion that we have been in another world and heard the voices of gods is achieved. Approached, as we usually approach it, after long familiarity with the plays, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ has, in addition, another interest. We feel that we have been admitted to the natura naturans from which the natura naturata of the plays proceeded: as though we had reached the garden of Adonis and seen where Imogens and Cordelias are made.

In a previous chapter we had to observe what I called ‘unfinished causeways’, the beginnings of techniques whereby poetry might have emerged from its Late Medieval condition, though in fact it emerged in a different way. We have now to consider another unfinished causeway: an incipient movement away from Golden poetics, distinct from that Bartasian or ‘Metaphysical’ movement which was actually going to prevail. It might be called poetry of the Cryptic school, and there are three monuments of it left. One, the latest in time has already been mentioned among satires; Tourneur’s Transformed Metamorphosis. A resemblance (probably accidental) to medieval work, and a nightmare quality, not without flashes of poetry, were its chief characteristics. Earlier than this came the Cephalus and Procris and Narcissus of 1595, which purport to be by Thomas Edwards. Both the poems (Cephalus in couplets and Narcissus in rhyme royal) are so loaded with mythological decoration that it is almost impossible to follow the story, and the mythology itself is often abstruse. Some kind of poetry is, however, fermenting in the man: once—I think, only once—it gets out, in the couplet about Sidney:

And thou Arcadian knight, earthes second Sunne

Reapt ere half ripe, finisht ere half begunne.

His work is like a bad imitation of Chapman at his worst. And that is probably just what it is: for the earliest document of this Cryptic school, Chapman’s Shadow of Night, had been published in 1594.

Much work has been done on the circle in which George Chapman moved and on its relation to ‘the school of Night’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost. It included the ‘damnable proud’ Raleigh, the scandalous Marlowe, Roydon the mathematician, and Harriot the astronomer (both these, serious scientists). Suspicions of atheism hang about them. What is known of their opinions helps hardly at all to elucidate the Shadow, though some of its characteristics are those we expect in the poem of a côterie. There are degrees of silliness which the individual can hardly reach in isolation.

This literary curiosity consists of two long poems, the Hymnus in Noctem and the Hymnus in Cynthiam, both bad but the In Noctem very clearly the worse. Chapman himself would have attributed our unfavourable verdict to ignorance: but, alas, it is just the passages we do understand that repel us. What remains obscure might, for all we know, hide something of value: it is the flat, stale moralizing of the intelligible patches that damns the poet. The In Noctem suffers from having that amorphous subject which never attracts a good writer and always exposes a bad one: the general state of the world today. It uses ‘Night’ in three senses which do not enrich but collide with one another. It is (a) the original Chaos, conceived as a friend, because it is a pity that Cosmos ever dispossessed her; (b) the ‘stepdame’ Night of ignorance, the enemy, which enfolds everyone except Chapman and his circle; (c) the ordinary Night which occurs every twenty-four hours: apparently a friend. On top of this, Chaos, besides being the kindly womb which we ought never to have quitted, is also the horrid destination for which we are now heading. Chapman’s modest proposals for remedying things are all on the lines of ‘Ye gods, annihilate but space and time’; why doesn’t Night (I think Night in sense c) rouse the Eumenides, ‘drowning the world in Blood’? or couldn’t Hercules shoot the sun? Or how about Atlas letting the sky drop? Through all this black smoke there come, very rarely, flashes of Chapman’s real genius. They are more frequent in the poem to Cynthia. The multiple significances of this goddess agree together much better than those of Night in the previous hymn. Queen Elizabeth and the moon (under whose sphere, as everyone knew, lies all contingence) can both very well be described as

the powre of fate

In perfect circle of whose sacred state

The circles of our hopes are compassed,

and there is nothing in either to repel the ideas of virginity and contemplation, or to prevent our crying to the real moon ‘Wash thy bright bodie in th’ Atlanticke streames’. The long allegorical story of the creation and pursuit of Euthimya (who became a Panther and finally turned ‘a Bore’) is indeed bad; not because its significatio is obscure today—which might not be Chapman’s fault—but because the sensus literalis is hard to follow and very languid. Yet anything that is picturable and moves is a relief after the mere sermonizing of the In Noctem. On the other hand, nothing in either hymn is quite so bad as In Cynthiam, 369 et seq., where England is

pau’d with Dames select,

On whom rich feete in fowlest bootes might treade

And never fowle them.

Throughout both poems the obscurities are often of the least pardonable kind: mere manufactured puzzles (like the use of ‘Cynthian’ to mean not ‘lunar’ but ‘solar’) or slovenly tangles in the syntax. Simpsonian rhyme is used with tormenting frequency.

In Chapman’s next volume (Ovid’s Banquet of Sense. A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy and his amorous Zodiac, 1595) the sunlight of his sultry genius is beginning to break through the fog. Chapman has now learned the Golden style but uses it in an original way: with more than Golden ‘points’ and with learned subtleties that bring him to the border of the metaphysical. Ovid’s Banquet is erotic epyllion sophisticated, no longer ‘once born’. It does not lack absurdities: Ovid lectures his mistress at the most inopportune moments and Chapman ruins the atmosphere he ought to be creating by such a line as ‘With this digression wee will now returne’. There are many metrical licences which I do not think successful, including a ‘Trochaic’ or ‘headless’ line. The old, querulous moralizing breaks out at 35 and 53. The thin and vague pretence of some ultimate philosophical justification for the sensuality really introduces a tinge of nastiness from which Marlowe’s more shameless ardours had been quite free. Yet the poem is full of beauties. We have, in the first place, some very pure Gold; ‘The blisse of her sweet brests diuinitie’, ‘Me thinks her tunes flye guilt like Attick bees’, and beauty as ‘The curtesie that speakes before the tongue’ and pours forth ‘All Rhetorick’s flowers in lesse then in a word’. Secondly, we have the Gold, still Golden, but sharpened with a new brightness of paradox, as in ‘The downward-burning flame of her rich hayre’. Then we have the Golden style, expressing a conceit so subtle that the result is Golden and metaphysical in one, as when Ovid, wishing that his soul could migrate into the singing Corinna, says:

Thus should I be her notes before they be

While in her blood they sitte with fierye wings.

The whole of Stanza 30 illustrates this beautiful moment of transition in the history of our poetry. The obscurities are worth puzzling over in the Banquet, as they were not in the Shadow: we are ready to believe that if we knew enough alchemy, optics, and acoustics our reading of the poem would be really enriched. ‘Beautie, loues cold fire’ is well worth pausing on. The triple analogy in 8—Corinna undressing and the sky casting off night and the upper aether, the real day (see Lucan, Pharsalia, IX. 13) casting off the sky as we know it—is in my opinion delightful. Two passages point to a greater work which Chapman was presently to write. ‘Riches in a little Roome’ (49) shows his allegiance to Marlowe, and at 51 he shows a sad awareness of the transience of pleasure which rings far truer than his supposedly philosophic apology for it;

This beauties fayre is an enchantment made

By natures witchcraft, tempting men to buy

With endles showes what endlessly will fade,

Yet promise chapmen all eternitie.

Of the other pieces in this volume the Coronet (ten sonnets) shows Chapman in moralizing vein but more melodiously than in the Shadow, the Zodiac is from the French of Gilles Durant, and the Amorous Contention, when it appeared separately in 1598, was attributed to R. S., presumably the Richard Stapleton whose complimentary sonnet to Chapman appears in the Banquet volume. It is a very free paraphrase of the De Phyllide et Flora. Thus the first four lines swell to eight in Stapleton, because picto terrae gremio vario colore becomes ‘When Tellus’ herbals painted were With issue of disparant cheer’, and so forth.

In 1596 Chapman contributed to Lawrence Keymis’s Second Voyage to Guiana what he called a Carmen Epicum, though it contains no narrative at all. This exclamatory poem in blank verse (though with a rhyme to end each paragraph and a few others thrown in) reads rather like Marlowe modified by enjambments and intellectually sophisticated. Chapman here at last successfully assumes that magnanimity which he had tried vainly to assume before. It ends with some serious praise of marriage, significant of the direction in which his thoughts were moving. It is also one of his most melodious poems.

In 1598 Chapman achieved the work that he was born to do; which was not, as he imagined, translating Homer but finishing Hero and Leander. The very idea of a poem begun by one poet and ended by another is repugnant to modern taste, and modern taste is usually confirmed by the event. The Roman de la Rose has to be treated as two poems. Not so the Hero and Leander; for there it so happens that the very nature of the story utilizes the differing excellences of its two narrators and gets told between them better than either could have told it alone. Chapman has well described the central impression which any adequate telling of it must produce:

Loue is a golden bubble full of dreames

Which waking breakes and fils us with extreames.

It is certain that Marlowe could not have done the tragic ‘waking’ very well. Hero in her first love (as he had conceived love in his two Sestiads) is half an animal, half a goddess: Hero in her grief would have to have been a woman and Marlowe’s women are uninteresting. Chapman, with the powers he had acquired by 1598, would indeed have done Marlowe’s part, though not so well as Marlowe did it, yet better than Marlowe could have done his. For though Chapman’s theme is that ‘Joy grauen in sence, like snow in water wasts’, he has both a keen sensibility to that joy and no small mastery in expressing it. He can be rapturous and delicious when he pleases: can speak of ‘white skin softer than soundest sleep’ (even Shakespeare did not disdain sibilants), can tell how Leander, still wet with Hellespont, flew to his sister ‘singing like a shower’ and ‘All the sweetned shore as he did goe Was crownd with odrous roses’, or say of Music personified that ‘Wanton Ayre in twentie sweet forms danst After her fingers’. Again, passing beyond Marlowe and becoming Golden and metaphysical at once, he can write (of a girl yielding to a virtuous love):

The bribde, but incorrupted garrison

Sung Io Hymen.

Finally, in the lyric Epithalamion (Sestiad V), which is perhaps the crown of all Chapman’s poetry, he can say:

O come soft rest of Cares, come night

Come naked vertues only tire,

The reaped haruest of the light

Bound vp in sheaues of sacred fire.

Any notion that Chapman is merely the dull moralist, playing skeleton at the Marlovian feast because he cannot relish it, is utterly mistaken. He knew well how Golden the ‘bubble’ had been.

His business, however, was to tell how it broke. At the beginning of the Third Sestiad he rightly warns us (like Milton in Paradise Lost, IX. 5) that the poem here changes its style;

More harsh (at lest more hard) more graue and hie

Our subject runs, and our sterne Muse must flie,

Loues edge is taken off.

In the books that follow there are, it must be admitted, unwelcome traces of the old Chapman, digressive, cryptic, anxious to be wiser than nature allowed him. But there is also a real wisdom, a real psychological insight, and a grandeur of passion. Essentially Chapman’s continuation is a eulogy of marriage. The lawless loves of Hero and Leander are contrasted with the solemn wedding of Hymen and Eucharis. Marriage has the omens on its side (that is the significance of Teras) and disposes forever of the losengier (Adolesche) who had been love’s troubler through the Middle Ages. It is significant that Chapman’s condemnation of lawless love is based neither on the Christian law nor on any admiration of virginity. Leander is rebuked (III) neither by Diana nor Juno but by Ceremonie. This goddess clearly fills the same place in Chapman’s thought as Concord in Spenser’s or Degree in Shakespeare’s: ‘From her bright eyes Confusion burnes to death.’ She lends ‘sightly figures’ to Morallitie and Comelinesse. Her enemies are Barbarisme and Auarice, who, but for her, would storm the city of the gods, and who even now are always at her heels ‘eating earth and excrement And humane lims’. Her ally is Time in the sense of timeliness (opportunitas), the choice of the right moment, patiently awaited, Time whose

golden Thie

Vpholds the flowrie bodie of the earth

In sacred harmonie, and euery birth

Of men and actions makes legitimate.

Ceremonie is in fact the specifically human, the ordered, the chosen, the civilized, as against the merely natural and instinctive. She is even, from one point of view, luxury, for that also is the mark of the human. ‘What simply kils our hunger, quencheth thirst’ is not good enough: Ceremonie demands ‘delicious cheere’. In her eyes the loves of Hero and Leander had been simply a coarse meal snatched ravenously,

And who like earth would spend that dower of heauen

With ranke desire to ioy it all at first?

Whatever else this is, it is not ready-made moralizing. I do not know any passage more quintessentially Elizabethan. It is linked up with so much in Shakespeare and Spenser, in the Arcadia, in Hall’s chronicle; in their emblems and gardening and the conduct of their public life: in their very cosmology and theology. Yet it is not in these passages but in his study of Hero that Chapman is at his greatest. He shows the whole tormenting process from her first despair and remorse:

She was a mother straight and bore with paine

Thoughts that spake straight and wisht their mother slaine,

through the pause when passion sleeps

(And all this while the red sea of her blood

Ebd with Leander)

into reawakening passion, when once more ‘all her fleete of sprites came swelling in With childe of saile’ till she idiotically believed that ‘the logick of Leander’s beautie’ would eke out her defence before the tribunal of the gods, and so at last into settled hypocrisy. Nothing could be finer or truer than the moment at which, after Venus had appeared and the appalling portents had begun to render self-deception impossible, still

Betwixt all this and Hero, Hero held

Leanders picture as a Persian shield.

Except for academic purposes the two parts, Marlowe’s and Chapman’s, should always be read together. Between them a great story is greatly told; and an important chapter in the history of poetry is unconsciously told too.

In the same year, 1598, appeared the first installment of his Homer, Seven Books of the Iliads. The history of the whole gigantic work would carry us far beyond our chronological limits, but it makes such an interesting pendant to Douglas’s Aeneid and illustrates so well the nature of the humanistic revolution that a brief notice of ‘Chapman’s Homer’ (in general) is relevant. Its absolute merits, which have perhaps been exaggerated ever since the time of the Romantics, need not be canvassed here; our concern is with Chapman and Douglas as gauge-readings of our changing relation to the ancient poets. Both translators read their own philosophy into their originals. As Virgil’s after-world became hell and purgatory in Douglas, so in Chapman the nod of Zeus (I. 525) is related to the doctrine of the first Mover. In an age with no real historic sense this was perhaps inevitable. Again, both read their own practical ideals into their authors: but here Chapman is far more disabled than Douglas. The Scot’s knightly and Christian ideal is not, for poetical purposes, very far removed from Virgilian pietas and valour: but there is a yawning abyss between the despair and passion of Homer’s warriors and Chapman’s half-Stoical, half-Machiavellian, idea of the Great Man. Chapman’s Homer is always teaching lessons (not always very noble) of civil and domestic prudence which never crossed the real Homer’s mind. We may say of Chapman, as he (gratuitously) makes Hecuba say of Hector, ‘policy was his vndoing’ (xxiv. 214). His Jove hardly ever addresses Juno without some comment by Chapman on the proper treatment of shrewish wives. When Agamemnon sacrifices (I. 315–19) we are told how ‘the politick king made show respectes to heauen’. In VI. 160 et seq. Homer says that Anteia wanted Bellerophontes to lie with her in secret ‘but did not at all persuade the right-minded and prudent Bellerophontes’: Chapman explains that his prudence led him to shun ‘the danger of a princesse loue’. Later in the same book (325) we have twelve wholly original lines explaining Hector’s reason for addressing Paris exactly as he did.

Such reckless interpolations are one of the features that distinguish Chapman’s work from that of Douglas. Yet we are sure that Douglas did not reverence Virgil more than Chapman reverenced Homer. The truth is almost the opposite. In this passage, I think, we can see how his mind worked. He was surprised (as we have all been) that Hector at that moment should accuse Paris of ill temper rather than cowardice. But Homer is to Chapman like a sacred text; whatever seems inconsequent must really conceal wisdom. Homer wrote for people so wise that they would see the real ‘politic’ motive of Hector’s speech: Chapman interpolates to make explicit what (he feels sure) must have been implicit in Homer. Thus reverence for Homer leads to re-writing Homer: the more sacred a text is, the more subject it is to glosses and strained interpretations. Douglas’s reverence for Virgil was not quite of this blinding sort. He knew that Virgil had hidden significations ‘wnder the cluddes of dirk poetry’ (I, Prol.): an allegorical sense under the literal. But he did not think that Virgil had left the literal narrative half-written or full of puzzles and pitfalls. He thought he had made it ‘quik’ and ‘lusty’,

felable in all degre

As quha the mater held to foir thar ee (I, Prol. 13).

The difference of approach appears at once. Douglas begins with praise of Virgil for obvious virtues which all men agreed in praising—his ‘dulce ornate fresch endite’, his ‘eloquence’. Chapman in the preface to his Seven Books begins ‘I suppose you to be no meare reader, since you intend to reade Homer.’ Thus the simplest and most direct poet in the world, the poet whom everyone can enjoy that can enjoy poetry at all, is from the outset erected into a cryptic wiseacre on the model of Chapman himself. Hence the real Homer has to be darkened and bedaubed to make him more like the idol Chapman has conceived; hence the knowingness of Chapman’s incessant interpolations, so sophisticated and yet so much less sophisticated than he himself supposed: hence the sheer nastiness (who can give it a milder name?) which he foists upon one of the most beautiful passages in Greek literature (Iliad, III. 154–7).

It is true that the fault is shared between Chapman and his teachers: that is what makes it significant of the veil that had fallen between us and the ancient world. Chapman’s conceits, though always very un-Homeric and sometimes mere puerile ‘clenches’, do less harm than his ‘wisdom’. But his hyperboles are ruinous in scenes of heroic action. Any medieval metrical chronicler (let alone Layamon, or the authors of Maldon and Roland) can do a better battle piece than Chapman. In VI. 327 Homer says, ‘The people are being killed fighting about the city and the high wall’, and we believe; Chapman bombasts this out into

our slaughter’d friendes

Besiege Troy with their carcasses on whose heapes our high walles

Are ouerlooked by enemies,

and at once every image of real war fades from our minds; we back in the world of books and declamations.

Yet Chapman was a very great man. His plays, with all their dramatic faults, are full of exalted poetry, though perhaps exalted in a rather unbalanced, Wagnerian way. He was the sort of man to whom the restraints of commercial art were necessary.

Since Walter Raleigh (1552?–1618) was associated with Chapman in life, he may be dealt with here, though he might almost equally well have been included among the belated writers of Drab. Of the forty-odd poems attributed to him about seventeen are in that earlier style. ‘Sweete were the sauce’ and ‘Many desire but few or none deserue’ for example, show the Drab in its gnomic mood, so heavily represented in Tottel. ‘Your face, your tongue, your wit’ and ‘Fayne would I, but I dare not’, are Drab knick-knacks, ‘dainty devices’ such as we met in the Paradise of 1576. (The former may be by Breton: let us hope it is.) ‘The prayse of meaner wits’ is in poulter’s. The Epitaph on Sidney (a good poem) reads very like the work of Surrey. The ‘Excuse’, which has shape and point, is good Drab; and the epitaph on himself ‘Euen such is Time’, in its quietness, clarity, and finality, shows the Drab poetics at their very best. It will be noticed that much of this eight-line poem (which appears alone in the Prerogative of Parliaments, 1628) is also found as the last stanza of a six-stanza poem attributed to Raleigh in Harleian MS. 6917: and that the isolation, as well as the variants, improve it enormously. That is characteristic: Raleigh has happy moments but seldom gets through a longer piece without disaster. Some of his best lines occur in the fragments of translation scattered through the History of the World. Side by side with his Drab poetry we find weak Gold: ‘Methought I saw the graue’ or ‘Like truthles dreames’, or even (in ‘What is our life?’) a groping towards the metaphysical. The truth is that Raleigh has no style of his own; he is an amateur, blown this way and that (and sometimes lifted into real poetry) by his reading. Thus we attribute to him the famous Walsingham poem because it is so attributed to him in the Rawlinson MS., but I should not like to do so on internal evidence. Indeed, when we examine the poem we find that it has no unity of style at all. The early stanzas are clearly modelled on a popular poem and owe all their beauty to that model. In Stanza 3 we begin to get into a different, anapaestic metre. By the end this has worked up to the fine stanza ‘Butt loue is a durable fyre’: in the preceding stanza we had flat Tottelian morality, and sub-Totteian cacophony, in ‘Of women kynde suche indeed is the loue’. Thus, in forty-four lines, we have several heterogeneous virtues and vices. ‘Give me my Scallop shell’ is poetry of a far higher order. It might indeed be argued that even this is three poems rather than one; an ode with varied line lengths and plenty of sensuous imagery, ending at line 34, a regular octosyllabic poem which depends on analogies addressed to the intellect, ending at line 50, and a concluding stanza differing from both these in manner and metre. But the differences are not violent enough to neutralize the over-all unity. Of his magnum opus, the Book of the Ocean to Cynthia only fragments survive. These are in the Hatfield MS. and written by the poet’s own hand. The Simpsonian rhymes (including Simpsonian B) might well have contented Raleigh even in a finished work, but there are other indications that these fragments were not ready for the press. As often happens in the work of an amateur, what is unfinished is more impressive, certainly more exciting, than what is finished. The hypothesis of the Cynthia is that Raleigh is the deserted lover of the queen. This is uncongenial to modern taste; but the quatrains do in fact vibrate with sombre passion. The monotony, the insanity, and the rich, dark colours of an obsessive despair are powerfully expressed. This, like Gray’s Elegy, is one of those few poems in which the decasyllabic quatrain is the right form. The imagery constantly directs our minds to things ‘under dust’, fallen blossoms, sapless trees, broken monuments, mud, fading light, frozen winter, ‘a tale told out of time’; and the effect of all this is every now and then relieved, yet also aggravated, by short glimpses of a happier past or sudden lifts of anger or adoration. The best of these, ‘Shee is gonn, Shee is lost, shee is found, shee is euer faire’, suggests possibilities in Raleigh which were never realized. Poetry, after all, made a small part of his life.

Of the verse translators, other than Chapman, who worked at this time, three deserve to be mentioned. The earliest is the unknown author whose Six Idyllia out of Theocritus were published at Oxford in 1588. He is a sensitive and original metrist who deliberately uses the alexandrine without a medial break—

With louely Netehearde Daphnis on the hills, they say (VIII)

and rids the fourteener also of its even more tyrannous ‘cesure’—

Vpon a rocke, and looking on the sea, he sung these rimes;

O Galatea faire, why dost thou shun thy louer true? (XI).

Both modifications really create new metres, whose possibilities have not even yet been fully exploited. XXXI, in trimeters, is intended to be like Philip Sparrow. Elsewhere this version sounds far more like Greek poetry than anything that was to be written in English before the nineteenth century;

O Iupiter, and thou Minerva fierce in fight,

And thou Proserpina, who with thy mother hast renoune

By Lysimelia streames in Ephyra that worthy towne,

Out of our iland drive our enemies, our bitter foe . . .

(XVI. 82 et seq.)

All that I have said about humanism in this book would have to be retracted if there had been many such humanists.

The other two translations are Harington’s Orlando Furioso (1591) and the Godfrey of Bouloigne (that is, Tasso’s Gierusalemme Liberata) which Edward Fairfax brought out in 1600. Both provide an interesting contrast to Chapman’s Homer. Neither Harington nor Fairfax was, like Chapman, a man of genius. You could search their pages in vain for splendours like his ‘the ladie of the light, the rosie-fingerd Morne’, or (of Iris) ‘dewie and thin, footed with stormes’, or for a line that goes to the heart like ‘Neuer again to be restor’d, neuer receiu’d but so’. In a word, there are fewer ‘plums’ in Harington and Fairfax than in Chapman: but then the cake is incomparably better. Those, therefore, who read (as Homer, Ariosto, and Tasso wrote) for the story will be held hour after hour by Harington and Fairfax, whereas in Chapman they will soon founder. This is largely because Harington and Fairfax are translating what they really enjoy: Chapman, incapable of appreciating the real Homer, chases a chimera. Harington’s failures are mostly in the more licentious parts of the Furioso. The great Italian, at his most wanton, is always elegant and civilized to his fingertips: Harington’s waggishness is, by comparison, a little raw and provincial. The trisyllabic rhymes, which he imitated from the original, have a more farcical effect in English than in Italian. The Furioso is not quite so like Don Juan as it appears to be in Harington. As for Fairfax, everyone knows that Dryden made him Waller’s father in versification. This may be right, but the matter, and the rhyme scheme of the ottava, protect his version from any alien ‘Augustan’ quality. I read the Jerusalem in Fairfax long before I knew Italian enough to read the original, and it held me to the end. That is not, of course, the only test, but it is the supreme one. A man who knows no language but English need not be entirely ignorant of Ariosto and Tasso: he can get, not all, but a great deal, of their real quality from Harington and Fairfax.

Harington’s preface, in a good working prose, repeats the ordinary defence of poetry and shows an appreciation of Ariosto’s structural virtues. He is justly proud of the pictures, ‘cut in brass’ at his own directions: it is of interest that he thinks it necessary to explain perspective to his readers.

Before proceeding to the four interesting poets who will close this chapter we must glance at the attractive crowd of minor lyrists who appear only, or to best advantage, in song books and anthologies. Breton, in bulk, is so wearisome that we hardly notice his few successes: but in England’s Helicon, isolated, his ‘In the merry merry moneth of May’ and, still more, ‘Shall we go dance the Hay, the Hay’ are delightful. In the same collection Ignoto’s ‘Coridon, arise my Coridon’ is an almost perfect poem of happy love: its rhythmical effects, subtle and delicate. ‘Come away, come sweet loue’, from Dowland’s First Book of Songs (1597) on the same theme, is even fresher and more piercing: it owes something to the Song of Songs, and perhaps anticipates some of the quality of Blake. Both these have a certain austerity in their art, though not in their matter. At the opposite end of the scale, homely and obvious, but no less successful, is ‘What pleasures haue great Princes’ which first appeared in Byrd’s Psalms, Sonnets and Songs (1588). Of the named authors in England’s Helicon, Edmund Bolton (1575?–1633?) is perhaps the finest. In metrical and emotional structure his ‘Palinode’ is almost as naïve as a poem could be, but compels us by its unity of tone and by the elusiveness (this was perhaps an unforeseen effect) of its imperfect rhymes. It contains one of the loveliest of all Golden phrases—‘The daliance of the undiscernèd winde’. His primrose, like Milton’s, is ‘rathe’, and in his ‘Canzon Pastorall’ the ‘Matron-like’ earth, attiring herself ‘in habite graue’, owes something to Du Bartas and perhaps contributed something to the ‘Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. The lively ‘Bright shines the Sun, play Beggars play’ is attributed by Walton to Frank Davison only, I suppose because it was printed in Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody (1602). The sonnet ‘Were I as base as is the lowly playne’, in the same collection, shows how a theme and a manner are never so old that a good poet cannot rejuvenate them.

It would be wrong not to notice that Golden poetry also has its limitations, which become its vices when it attempts matter beyond its reach. That failure of reach is what distinguishes it from certain other great styles—the style of Homer, Dante, or Chaucer; for they could handle anything. The Golden style not only fails but becomes ludicrous, even odious, when it attempts to present heroic action occurring in the real world. The Tragedy of Sir Richard Grenville (1595) by Gervase Markham is a good illustration. This is an epic narrative in ottava rima. All the deities are brought in. On that fatal day the sun began to decline soon after noon (not, by the by, an unusual phenomenon) because he feared lest Thetis should suspect him of an affaire with Virgo. A subordinate officer, arriving in the greatest possible haste, to tell Grenville that the Spanish fleet is in sight, describes in thirty-nine stanzas the debate in Olympus which had brought this about; Grenville listens without pistolling him, knocking him down, or even interrupting. It is true that Markham is a poor poet—witness his Poem of Poems or Sion’s Muse (1596) with its

You Daughters of Ierusalem behold

The sable tinkture of my spotted face—

but the imbecility of his epic manner is in fact symptomatic of a defect in that whole age, a defect visible in the battle poetry of Drayton, Spenser, and even Shakespeare.

Fulke Greville (1554–1628), the first Lord Brooke, has a double interest. To the historian he is interesting as a poet who began by being, as far as his talent allowed, Golden, and then went on to develop a new manner which pointed neither to the metaphysical nor to the Augustan, though it had more in common with the latter. Except for a few pieces that found their way into anthologies and for Mustapha, printed without his authority in 1609, his works were all posthumously published and cannot be dated with confidence. His Golden phase is seen in the earlier parts of Caelica—which is not a sonnet-sequence but a collection of poems in different metres and on different themes. No. IV (‘You little starres that liue in skyes’) is a really remarkable interweaving of courtly compliment, Platonic renunciation, astrology, and Calvinism, all made to sound effortless, like a song. No. XLV (‘Absence, the noble truce’) is even better, though few would agree that

Where Wonder rules the heart

There Pleasure dyes—

a doctrine reiterated in LVI (‘Wonder hinders loue and hate’). The later pieces, more often religious than erotic, are less Golden. In them, as indeed often in the earlier, there is a toughness of thought which saves them from ever being vapid, but we are sometimes tantalized by the spectacle of such an interesting writer failing so often, and only just failing, to bring off a success. There is good satire in LXXVIII on little arrivistes who ‘moue easily vpward as all frailties doe’: stately compliment in ‘Vnder a throne I saw a Virgin sit’ (LXXXI): and in LXXXVII three lines on death which make most sixteenth-century poetry on that subject seem a little facile and external: Greville represents the soul as having fled from the body

To see it selfe in that eternall glasse

Where time doth end and thoughts accuse the dead,

Where all to come is one with all that was.

In his later non-dramatic poems which he called ‘Treaties’ (Of Human Learning, of Wars) and an ‘Inquisition’ (Upon Fame and Honour) he departed widely from the Golden norm and wrote genuinely didactic verse, verse utterly unadorned and dependent for interest almost exclusively on its intellectual content. It is this that brings him into line with Davies and (to a less degree) with his friend Daniel.

But Greville has an interest quite apart from literary history. He wrote as he thought, and, being a man of his age, he thought chiefly about religion and government. Being a logical man, he connected his thoughts on the two subjects. What this led to he finally succeeded in expressing in four lines of such precision and such sombre melody that nothing can ever be added to them. They are, of course, the opening of the Chorus Sacerdotum from the end of his Senecan closet drama Mustapha,

Oh wearisome Condition of Humanity!

Borne under one Law to another bound:

Vainely begot, and yet forbidden vanity,

Created sicke, commanded to be sound.

He did not know how good they were, for the rest of the chorus (except the sting in its tail) is quite unworthy of them and his other works are little more than an attempt to say the same thing. I had to say of Spenser (and I might have said of many others) that he was the reverse of an Existentialist. Not so Greville. His mind was like Kierkegaard’s and even more like Pascal’s. His skepticism in the Treatie of Human Learning is the skepticism of the Pensées: he demolishes human learning to make way for revelation. Of course he uses contemporary resources for doing so: Agrippa’s De Vanitate Scientiarum, the humanistic attack on metaphysics, the new Baconian contempt for all knowledge that is not utilitarian. But his end is theological in the most alarmingly practical sense. Disobedience that wants to ‘deale With hidden knowledge’ is to be silenced by ‘powerful Councels’ not by arguments (St. 85.) And though the State (this is characteristic) can really care nothing for divine truth, which indeed she despises (88), she must set up ‘the discipline And practice of Repentance, Piety, Loue’ (89). The name ‘Discipline’ raises cold fear in the mind of all who have studied this period: it is immediately confirmed. The State ‘must assist Church-censure, punish Error’ (92), and ‘to the wounds of Conscience adde her paines’ (93). The voice of Greville is now hardly distinguishable from that of Cartwright. Only superficial readers of the Arcadia will be surprised that such a man was Sidney’s bosom friend. On one side—the side that created Gynecia—Sidney was very close to him. You might say that Greville was a Sidneius dimidiatus, or half Sidney. That half, living on through the long years after Zutphen by itself, would easily become the Greville of the Treaties, the man who said ‘I know the world and believe in God’. But the commonplace words are in his mouth terrible: for they primarily mean the perpetual consciousness of an absolute gulf between the two, the incurable ‘oddes betweene the earth and skie’.

Sir John Davies (1569–1626), though a very different man from Greville, occupies a poetical position not dissimilar. His Orchestra (1596) and Hymns of Astraea (1599) are Golden, but his Nosce Teipsum (also 1599) is, like Greville’s Treaties, an unadorned and genuinely didactic poem. In this versified essay on the nature of the soul there is no question of using science as a peg on which to hang poetry. It is a perfectly serious textbook in which the arguments are as lucid as prose could make them. The writer’s talent appears in the success with which, while keeping our noses to the grindstone, he yet gives us a sort of pleasure by the verse. Some passages, such as the close of the introduction or the (wholly relevant) simile of the water nymph, rise higher than this: but the work as a whole produces admiration rather than pleasure. Both, perhaps, can be aroused by the Astraea where the poet sets himself the task of writing twenty-two acrostics (all in the same metre) on the words Elisabetha Regina, and succeeds so well that some of them are songs of real, though minor, charm. In ‘Earth now is Queen’ or ‘Earley, cheerfull, mounting Larke’ we forget all about the capitals: but it is a silly tour de force that vanishes from consciousness in proportion as it is successful. Davies’s real fame rests on Orchestra, a poem of Dancing. Saintsbury, justly praising this work, used it as an illustration of his theory that in poetry the subject is immaterial—surely a misunderstanding, for to those who understand our ancestors’ genial and mythical conception of Nature, the true subject of Orchestra is ‘all the choir of heaven and all the furniture of earth’. If there is no personal passion in the poem, there is delighted and passionate contemplation. It was as truly ‘nature poetry’ for the Elizabethans as Wordsworth was for the Romantics. The style is Golden, a little sharpened (as the theme demanded) in the Bartasian direction.

Samuel Daniel (1562–1619) has already been considered as a sonneteer. It is shocking to find that the same year (1592) which saw the production of his admirable Delia saw also the production (in its first form—he tinkered it a good deal afterwards) of his Complaint of Rosamond. But we have learned to expect the worst from any descendant of the Mirror for Magistrates, and Daniel is here not even trying to achieve the sweetness and finish of his sonnets. After the historical ‘tragedie’ came the full-blown historical epic. The First Four Books of his Civil wars between Lancaster and York appeared in 1595, and this work rose by gradual additions to the eight-book text of 1609. It belongs to the same (happily extinct) species as Drayton’s Mortimeriados, a species separated by its epic pretensions from the metrical chronicle of the Middle Ages, but still catering for readers who are at least as much interested in history as in poetry. Authorities are quoted and Daniel piques himself on having added nothing to the facts except speeches—as Sallust and Livy did in prose. He does not expect his work to be judged as ‘pure’ literature. We must not therefore be surprised if it is often prosaic (as in I. i-xxxvi) or if what would have been excellent prose (like I. 94–98) makes very tame verse. What is less pardonable is the clumsiness with which some sentences are forced into the metre as in

And so become more popular by this;

Which he feares, too much he already is (I. 63).

Here, as often in Drayton, we see the need for critical standards. A practiced versifier like Daniel could have improved such a passage by five minutes’ work: he was content with it because his readers demanded nothing better.

Yet he has carried out his ill-chosen task better than Drayton. Both poets relieve their narrative with reflections, but whereas Drayton’s reflections are usually gnomic platitude, Daniel’s show real, and interesting, thought: witness the passages on Order (II. 96), on the mixed causes of good and evil (V. 38–39), on popular blame (ibid. 65), and on the substantial indifference, to the people, of the issues for which they fought (VIII. 7). In the aetiological myth at the beginning of Book VI he opens to us his whole mind about the age in which he lived, and traces its miseries to the growth of great nation states (28), the ‘swelling sciences, the gifts of griefe’ which have ‘let in light That all may all things see, but what is right’ (35), religious controversy (36), printing (37), and gunpowder, whereby ‘basest cowards from afar shall wound’ (40). The latter complaint may, but need not, owe something to Orlando Furioso, IX. 90. Such passages, which illustrate a very important side of Daniel’s literary character, would be equally interesting in prose, but he has others of more poetical appeal. He has expressed better than any poet I know what a man feels at the moment of his first big success: Bolingbroke, entering London in triumph,

Admiring what hee thought could neuer be

Did feele his blood within salute his state (II. 64).

The river that ‘glides on with pomp of waters unwithstood’ (II. 7) fully deserved the honour of being borrowed by Wordsworth. Henry VI’s words as he looks down on both armies before Towton, ‘They must a People bee When we shall not be kings’ (VIII. 24) are memorable. No one perhaps has said anything better about the great deeds of our ancestors than ‘The eternall euidence of what we were’. Best of all is the scene (II. 68–71) in which Queen Isabel waits to see Richard entering London and mistakes Bolingbroke for him. Here for a few stanzas the narrative is worthy of Chaucer. And these beauties, though rarer than we could wish, are never mere purple patches inorganically added to the story (as the beauties in Drayton’s epic sometimes are); they arise naturally where the poet is kindled by his matter.

In 1599 came A Letter sent from Octavia to Marcus Antonius written to the formula of the Heroides. It is more gracefully executed than the Rosamond. Octavia says the things that a deserted wife of noble character (yet not too noble—she can be sufficiently catlike about Cleopatra) might be expected to say, but the verse does not carry passion enough to stir us. Yet here, as often and henceforward increasingly in Daniel, the thought holds our attention. Octavia disgresses in an interesting way on the exclusion of women from affairs;

We, in this prison of our selues confin’d

Must here shut vp with our owne passions liue

Turn’d in vpon us (18)

The matter of the poem is better than the manner. Daniel is never silly.

The long verse-colloquy Musophilus belongs to the same year. Philocosmos attacks, and Musophilus defends, the literary life, but it is not at all like a medieval conflictus between Miles and Clericus. Daniel is in earnest: the arguments of Philocosmos were those that really troubled his own mind and his defence has nothing glib about it. It is costly and difficult as though he were fighting for his life. He knows that he is living in a great age in which ‘Nature hath laid doune at last That mighty birth wherewith so long she went’ (247). Yet, like Pope in the Dunciad, he sees the enemy ahead—Confusion ‘that hath all in chace, To make of all an vniuersal pray’ (245). He realizes (and it is the vocational disease of scholars to forget) how small a part literature, even at the best, plays in human life; ‘how many thousands never heard the name’ of Sidney or Spenser (440), how the real ‘managing’ of the world’s affairs requires arts unknown to literary men, so that often

While timorous knowledge stands considering

Audacious ignorance hath done the deede (490).

There are too many books already. Fame is at all times uncertain; and what fame can be hoped by those who write in a ‘barbarous language’ confined to a minute island? To this, as all know, Daniel makes at one point the spirited reply that English may have a great future on ‘strange shores’ in the ‘yet vnformed Occident’ (955 et seq.). It is well that he did not rest his whole case on that promise which history has ‘kept to the ear’ and ‘broken to the heart’, for though Daniel is read in America today, he is read there (as here) only by professional scholars; not such an audience as poets dream. He is wiser, and more appealing, when he faces squarely the possibility of almost total, or total, failure. How if very few read books? ‘That few is all the world’ (556), the world’s heart which feels and knows only in a small minority. But how, if none? Certainly (for Daniel is very honest) that will cut off the author’s ‘comfort’; it cannot annihilate his love for his art. He must continue to do the thing he feels himself born to do. I am not at all sure that these thoughts have proved healthy to literature. It may well be that the author who claims to write neither for patron nor public but for himself has done our art incalculable harm and bred up infinite charlatans by teaching us to emphasize the public’s duty of ‘recognition’ instead of the artist’s duty to teach and delight. Things may have been better when you could order your ode from Pindar as you ordered your wine from the wine merchant. But that does not alter the fact that in Musophilus we find a sort of intellectual intimacy that hardly any English poet had offered us before. There is no common measure between this and the formal, external poetry about poetry which we find in Spenser and others. We are with Daniel in his solitude, chewing the bitter questions which come to all of our trade. In this poem every reader who is also a writer finds himself. It has also many other merits, and beauties too numerous to quote. I allow myself only this, on Stonehenge,

That huge dumbe heape that cannot tell us how,

Nor what, nor whence it is (339).

Daniel’s Senecan closet dramas hardly concern us. His lyrical gifts were small, though the Pastorall ‘O happy golden Age’, loosely translated from Guarini’s Pastor Fido (IV. ix), combines with curious success wantonness of theme and stateliness of movement; perhaps not the best thing in the world to do. The Epistles (1603) carry us beyond our chronological boundary and have been dealt with excellently by another hand. They claim to be ‘after the manner of Horace’, but of course the stanzaic form and the loftiness of Daniel’s mind preclude any real similarity. In them Daniel is moving out of the Golden Age not in the ‘Metaphysical’ direction but towards a greater severity and weight. That to Sir Thomas Egerton is an essay (in prose it would have been a good one) on Equity as ‘the soul of law’. That to Lord Howard is even more prosaic. But that to the Countess of Cumberland, a Christian-Stoical appropriation of the theme suave mari magno, is almost a success. It is at any rate frequently moving; and it is here that we catch Seneca’s quam res est contempta homo nisi supra humana surrexenit (Nat. Quaest. Prolog.) on its way through Daniel to its predestined home in The Excursion (IV. 330).

Though Daniel’s poetry is often uninspired, sometimes obscure, and not seldom simply bad, he has two strong claims on our respect. In the first place, he can at times achieve the same masculine and unstrained majesty which we find in Wordsworth’s greater sonnets, and I believe that Wordsworth learned it from Daniel. (The two poets had much in common and Daniel would have liked Laodamia.) And secondly Daniel is, in the nineteenth-century sense of the words, a poet of ideas. There had of course been ideas in Chaucer, and Spenser: but I think those poets felt themselves to be simply transmitting an inherited and accepted wisdom. There are, again, plenty of ideas in Donne, but they are, in my opinion, treated merely as the tools of his peculiar rhetoric: he was not interested in their truth or falsehood. But Daniel actually thinks in verse: thinks deeply, arduously, and perhaps with some originality. This is something quite different from Dryden’s power of neatly poetizing all the stock arguments for the side on which he is briefed. Dryden states: Daniel can doubt and wrestle. It is no necessary quality in a poet, and Daniel’s thinking is not always poetical. But its result is that though Daniel is not one of our greatest poets, he is the most interesting man of letters whom that century produced in England.

Michael Drayton (1563–1631) is also a poet only half Golden, but in quite a different way from Greville, Davies, and Daniel. They began with Gold and moved away from it; he began with Drab, constantly relapsed into it, and in his old age, when the Golden period was over, at last produced his perfect Golden work, so pure and fine that no English poet has rivaled it. His weakness is the very opposite of Daniel’s; he was in a sense too poetical to be a sound poet. His sensibility responded almost too quickly to every kind of subject—myth, the heroic past, tragic story, and (most of all) the fruitful, sheep-dotted, river-veined, legend-haunted expanse of England. He had an unquenchable desire to write poetry about them all, and he always seemed to himself to be succeeding because he mistook heat which they aroused in him for a heat he was communicating to the reader. He himself has told us (in the Epistle To Henry Reynolds) how at the age of ten he hugged his ‘mild tutor’ begging to be made into a poet, and how the good man granted his request, in typically sixteenth-century fashion, by starting him on Mantuan. In that scene we have what is essential in Drayton the man: a man with one aim, devoted for life to his art, like Milton or Pope. If the Muse regarded merit he would have been one of our greatest poets.

His career began inauspiciously with The Harmony of the Church (1551), drab scriptural paraphrases to which critics are too kind when they accuse them of ‘wooden regularity’ for they are in reality wooden without being regular. Idea, The Shepherd’s Garland (1593) might be the work of a different man. These ‘eglogs’ are much influenced by Spenser’s pastoral poetry but wisely refrain from his attempts at rustic realism. They were republished later with so many alterations as to make them a new book. But even the 1593 version shows promise: the lyrics, as always in Drayton, are the best part.

Idea’s Mirror (1594), which I have already noticed, makes us think that Drayton is now going on from strength to strength, but with Endimion and Phoebe (1595) there is another check. In this perplexing poem the style of the erotic epyllion jostles with that of Du Bartas, and there is a similar wavering in Drayton’s conception of his theme. He has, rightly, a feeling that this myth demands something more than a sensuous treatment, but has not quite made up his mind what that something more should be. I think he would like to have depicted the Platonic ascent from carnal to intelligible love, but has really no idea of what one would find at the top of the ladder. He has to fill up with astronomy and the theory of numbers. When he re-wrote it eleven years later as The Man in the Moon the discrepancy remained and was aggravated by a syntax so contorted as to be almost unreadable. In the earlier version the descriptive passages often have the prettiness that was intended. The movement of the couplets is a little monotonous.

His continual rewritings set us a problem. Detailed comparisons between versions are impossible in a short account, and if these are abandoned it becomes difficult to keep any kind of chronology. The ‘Legends’ of Matilda, Pierce Galveston, and Robert of Normandy were originally written between 1593 and 1596; that of Cromwell did not follow till 1607. All four reappeared in 1619, with much revision. The Mortimeriados of 1596, much altered, became the Barons’ Wars of 1603. Drayton’s second thoughts are often important, but cannot of course be more important than the poems in which they occur. The truth is that this enormous body of historical verse, including the Agincourt and Miseries of Queen Margaret (1627), adds very little to his reputation.

Of ‘legends’ and ‘tragedies’ the reader of this book has now, I hope, heard all that he ever wishes to hear. And the historical epic is, almost equally, a genre diseased at the heart. Drayton, like Daniel, takes his historical poetry seriously as history: his marginal notes are significant. At the same time he adopts all the rhetoric and (on occasion) the sensuous richness which his age considered proper to high poetry. But such purple patches, like the fig-leaf in sculpture, only emphasize what they are meant to hide. The whole layout of the poem remains that of prose history. We are told that public persons did this or that and for such and such reasons, but we are not shown them doing it. In the Barons’ Wars we are well into the second canto before we reach anything like an epic scene with a concrete where and when. No ‘historical estimate’ should deter us from saying that this is bad, bad work: interesting only in so far as it shows us how necessary the introductory letter to the Faerie Queene still was. Drayton has learned no structural lessons from all the great narrative poets who preceded him. He has not advanced on the old rhyming chroniclers. If you are going to be as artless as they in ordonnance it would be better to be artless in style too. It offends less and gets over the ground more briskly. Comparison between Drayton’s epic Agincourt and his ballad on the same subject is instructive. The epic panoply adds nothing and loses all the race and relish of the humbler poem. The attempts to produce greatness and terror by such slaughter-house details as ‘There drops a cheeke and there falls off a nose’ are pitiable. The only good things in Agincourt occur in the speeches; notably in Gem’s rodomontade

I tell thee Woodhouse, some in presence stand

Dare prop the Sunne if it were falling down.

It was not till 1597, when the first version of England’s Heroical Epistles appeared, that Drayton’s historical interests found successful poetic expression; so successful that his revisions in the later editions were less drastic than usual. The Epistles are of course modelled on Ovid’s Heroides and we get rid of the epic chimera. They show a mingling of three styles, the genuinely Ovidian, the Golden, and the early Metaphysical. Thus the description of the grove in Surrey to Geraldine is pure Golden, the passage on gold in Edward the Fourth to Mrs. Shore faintly suggests an Elegy by Donne, and Rosamond is so like Ovid that we catch ourselves trying to remember the Latin. These styles, however, melt into one another without producing any discomfort; nor are conceit and hyperbole (common to them all) so managed as to exclude nature. Real passions at that time expressed themselves flamboyantly. Queen Isabel’s remark on the element of fear in all sorrows is true and, I think original; Henry II on kingship has pathos; the haggish malice of Elinor Cobham and the chivalrous patience of her husband are well brought out; Mortimer sustains his character of Stoic magnanimity successfully. One great virtue of the whole collection is the sweetness and vigour of its verse. The heroic couplet is here in its early perfection, looser than the Augustan mode but far from the meandering of the seventeenth century or the Romantics. It can throw up every now and then a line of astonishing force—‘And care takes vp her solitarie inne’, or ‘Where the disheuel’d gastly sea-nymph sings’, or (of lipstick) ‘On Beauties graue to set a crimson Hearse’.

With the exception of these Epistles nearly all Drayton’s valuable work falls outside my period: accounts of the interesting though very uneven Polyolbion and of Nimphidia (dear to some who do not care for ‘faerie’ and hateful to all who do) must be sought elsewhere. I cannot thus surrender either the Shepherd’s Sirena, which appeared in the 1627 volume, or the Muses Elizium (1630). No history of Golden poetry could possibly omit them. In these the unfashionable old poet who had long been fighting a rear-guard action against those who would

exile

All braue and ancient things foreuer from this Ile

and proclaiming in his solitude

Antiquitie I loue nor by the worlds despight

I cannot be remoou’d from that my dear delight,

received at last his reward and was allowed to conclude the Golden Age with something (as the poetess said) ‘more gold than gold’. For in these last poems of his all that richness turns finer, more rarefied, more quintessential, than ever before. The Shepherd’s Sirena is in one way like all Golden poetry: yet in another way there is no poem at all like it. A hundred and twenty lines in the lulling incantatory metre of the Phoenix and the Turtle, lines full of winter and heartbreak, provide the base. Against this, silvery, cascading, the song stands out with startling beauty. Its incomparable music—which would be rather like Mr. de la Mare’s if it were not so passionless and so free from his undercurrent of misgiving—depends on taking a metre which, of itself, is always threatening to develop into a commonplace dactylic tumble, and then delicately, deftly, variously holding it back from that development. The charm of this song is its inhumanity. We are nominally praising a woman, yet it is a river as much as a woman, or neither. It is almost ‘about’ nothing: as near to ‘pure’ poetry as the nature of language will allow. This ‘purity’ continues in the best parts of the Muses Elizium. Nothing more Golden had ever been produced. They teach nothing, assert nothing, depict almost nothing; or, if anything, Scaliger’s and Sidney’s naturam alteram. Their methods are those of Pastoral, but the last links with real shepherd life have been severed. But not the last images from actual nature. There is an exquisite mingling of impossible beauties with things really observed, ‘either other sweetly gracing’. Thus on the one hand all seasons are blended so that the fruits hang ‘Some ripening, ready some to fall, Some blossom’d, some to bloome’; the eyes of Lirope turn pebbles to diamond and tempest to calm; it is not beyond hope

To swerue up one of Cynthias beames

And there to bath thee in the streames

Discouer’d in the Moone,

or that all the pearls of all the seas and either India should dissolve into a lake,

Thou therein bathing and I by to take

Pleasure to see thee clearer than the Waue.

But then, on the other hand, the reflection of a girl’s yellow hair upon the lily wreath that surrounds it casts a light ‘like the sunnes vpon the snow’; the ‘west winde stroakes the violet leaues’: an early morning sky is ‘chequerd’ with ‘thin clouds like scarfs of Cobweb lawne’: bees stagger homeward ‘vp in hony rould More than their thighes can hould’. The power of this Elizian poetry to transform its material is perhaps best seen in the first ‘Nimphall’. Taken in itself the subject of that poem is scarcely tolerable. Each nymph praises the other’s beauty by preferring it to her own. The perversity of the original Greek models survives only in the fact that this preference is dissociated from all idea of envy or even of regret: we are left with two inhuman, inexplicable voices uttering their passion for beauty and, save for that, passionless. It is thus that real fairies (not the bric-à-brac of Nimphidia) would speak if they existed. It is the ultimate refinement of Golden poetry, Gold ‘to ayery thinnesse beate’, without weight, ready to leave the earth.

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