II: Drab Age Verse
The ‘new company of courtly makers’ who came up, says Puttenham, at ‘the latter end’ of Henry VIII’s reign are usually, and rightly, taken to constitute a decisive novelty in the history of our literature. Yet they too had their precursors. During the later Middle Ages in England the lyric had suffered less than any other form. The tune of the shorter line, as anyone can see by comparing Lydgate’s Reason and Sensuality with his Troy Book, had never been so completely lost as that of the decasyllable; and in the lyric, which was nearly always written to be sung, it was still further supported and disciplined by the music. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries we were a very musical nation. The art flourished at the courts of Henry VI and Henry VIII, the names of Dunstable, Fairfax, and Cornish are still remembered by the historians of music, and Erasmus complimented us on our skill. Most, perhaps all, the lyric poetry of that age is to be regarded as words for music; hence purely literary judgement on it may be as unfair as the study-criticisms we make about plays we never saw acted.
The stanzas used by this poetry are mainly derived from those of rhyming Latin. The rhyme schemes are never very complex, the macaronic is often used, refrains are common. Short lines or (what is the same thing to the ear) lines with internal rhymes are favourites. The language is very plain. There is little aureation, few metaphors, no stylized syntax, and none of the sensuous imagery loved by the Elizabethans. One reason for this plainness is that we are reading songs; richness and deliciousness would be supplied by the air and the lute and are therefore not wanted in the words. When they are read merely as poems it produces results which were probably unforeseen by the authors. It makes some pieces seem flat and dull; others, admirably fresh and ingenuous. But those which make dull poems need not have made dull songs. One that I had thought very dry and colourless came dancing into life soon as a learned pupil (Mr. Norman Bradshaw) played me the air on his recorder.
The best specimens of early Tudor lyric have long since won their place in our anthologies. The ‘Nut Brown Maid’ may be a little too long, but it has no other fault. ‘Who shall have my fair lady’ is alive with chuckling gaiety. ‘He bare him up he bare him down’ contrives, in homeliest language, to sound like news from another world. ‘My lady went to Canterbury’ is among the best nonsense poems in the language. The quatrain ‘Western Wind’ need fear no rival in the Greek Anthology. There is almost everything in it—weather, distance, longing, passion, and sober home-felt reality. Many poets (not contemptible) have said less in far longer pieces.
All that is best in Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) is rooted in this poetry, such poetry as the song books have preserved. But he cannot be regarded simply as the last of the early Tudor lyrists. He modified the tradition by several new borrowings and added something of his own.
He is, for one thing, the first of our Italianate poets, though this element in his work may not have quite that importance which the older critics claimed for it. In the first place, to translate Petrarch was not necessarily to introduce a new note into English poetry; it depended on the poems you chose and on the quality of your rendering. Thus Wyatt’s ‘Myne olde dere enmy my froward maister’ is in fact a version of Petrarch’s canzone Quel antiquo mio dolce; but the canzone (an erotic allegory in the Rose tradition) is so medieval, and Wyatt’s version in stumbling rhyme royal is so like the rhyme royal of Hawes or Skelton, that if the original had been lost and Wyatt were not known to be the author, no one would dream of classifying the poem as anything but late medieval. It is not a bad poem, but it is written by a medieval Wyatt, who appears again in the poem ‘Like as the bird’ (which is bad) and in the translation from Boethius ‘If thou wilt mighty be’, which is good though not very lucid. And some medieval habits hang about him elsewhere; tags like without any fable and of Livy doth not lie, and doggerel that reminds us of Heywood. And, secondly, even where the thing translated might be expected to impinge on English poetry as a novelty, the translation may be so bad that the impact is muffled: some of Wyatt’s sonnets from the Italian are so. No later sonneteer could learn anything from lines like
Yet this trust I have of full great aperaunce
Since that decept is aye retourneable
Of very force it is aggreable
And therewithal be done the recompense.
The rhyme scheme may be that of the sonnet: the poetics are those of Barclay. To be sure, Wyatt wrote better sonnets than this: the gap between his worst and best in this kind shows both the difficulties he faced and the fine perseverance with which he overcame them. Witness the liquid movement of
Vnstable dreme according to the place
Be stedfast ons; or else at leist be true:
By tasted sweetenes make me not to rue
The sudden losse of thy false fayned grace.
But it is not in these rare anticipations of the Elizabethan sonnet that Wyatt’s true importance lies. Knowledge of the Italians, both directly and through their French disciples, was to be so common in the Golden period that its poets had no need of such scanty help as Wyatt’s sonnets could give them. The Elizabethan sonnet might not have been very different if Wyatt had never lived.
His real place in the evolution of English poetry (as distinct from his intrinsic value, his place of honour among English poets) is really an unfortunate one. His own lyric gift he did not bequeath to most of his successors; he did bequeath to them, by his worst poems, the terrible poulter’s measure and the flat, plodding style which almost inevitably goes with it. His ‘Song of Iopas’ and ‘Complaint of the Absence of his Love’ proved a ruinous legacy. The latter, incidentally, shows how ambiguous the expression ‘Italian influence’ may be. It is a translation of Petrarch’s Si e debile il filo; but not one drop, not one breath, of the Petrarchan quality has gone into it. The thudding verbiage of
Thes new kyndes of plesurs wherein most men reioyse
To me they do redowble still off stormye syghes the voyce,
raises a wonder why the man who thought Petrarch could be translated so, also thought Petrarch worth translating. Historically considered, Wyatt is not the father of the Golden, but of the Drab, Age.
His metre has lately become a controversial subject. A majority of his lines scan according to the principles which governed English verse from Spenser to the Edwardians: a fairly large minority do not. The regular lines occur chiefly, not exclusively, in his lyrics: the irregular, chiefly, not exclusively, in what look like decasyllabic poems. The older critics took it for granted that the irregular lines were due to the blundering of a prentice poet who had not yet learned how to scan. Some modern critics find in them extreme, and deliberate, subtleties of rhythm. One critic thinks that this holds for some of the irregular lines, but that others are mere blundering. In favour of the modern view is the fact that some of the irregular lines give great pleasure to our ear. Most of us like the reading of the Egerton MS.
Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking
better than Tottel’s
Into a bitter fashion of forsaking.
This, I allow, favours the modern view; but everything else is against it. We have seen that Wyatt is often on a level with Barclay. We have seen that, at the other end of the scale, in his poulter’s, he ticks out regular metre with the ruthless accuracy of a metronome. Both phases are what we should expect in man who was escaping from the late medieval swamp; first, his floundering, and then, after conversion, a painful regularity. That both extremes should be absent from his lyrics is again what we should expect, for the lyrical music had never been lost. It is immensely improbable a priori that the same man at one period of his career should have gone on, beyond the regularity, to the subtlest departures from it. It is immensely improbable that such departures could have had for him or for his contemporaries the beauty they have for a modern. To us the variation is beautiful because we hear it against the background of the imagined norm: when the norm itself was a novelty to Wyatt (and a mystery to most of his hearers) the particular beauty which we feel could hardly have existed. Nothing, it seems, could incline us to the modern view except our reluctance to believe that melody can come by chance; and I am not sure whether it is a rational reluctance. Fortunately the question, though important for our verdict on Wyatt, is of no importance for the general history of our poetry. Even if Wyatt had such a subtle scheme as has been supposed, the secret of it had been lost before Tottel printed him, and had no influence on later poets.
Wyatt’s work as a translator or adapter was not confined to sonnets and epigrams. His longer attempts are of very unequal merit. The Penitential Psalms are based on a prose version by Pietro Aretino set in a narrative framework, with help from Ioannes Campensis and from Zwinglius. The pictures of David entering the cave and of the sunbeam falling upon him are striking. The two opening lines of the Prologue,
Love to gyue law vnto his subject hertes
Stode in the iyes of Barsabe the bryght,
show Wyatt in one of his rare Elizabethan moments. But the work as a whole is flat and sometimes cacophonous. Much better are the Satires based on Horace and Alamanni. From the latter he borrows terza rima. The excessive enjambment between the tercets which makes Wyatt’s satires read almost like blank verse is not wholly due to the original; by comparing Alamanni’s tenth satire with Wyatt’s second we find that Alamanni has thirty-four stopped tercets out of a total of thirty-six, Wyatt twenty-four out of a total of thirty-four. It is more an imitation (in the eighteenth-century manner) than a version: as Juvenal’s graeculus esuriens became Johnson’s ‘fasting monsieur’, so Alamanni’s Provenza becomes Wyatt’s ‘Kent’. Alamanni mentions winter to exult in the fact that, being now no courtier, he need not go out quando agghiaccia e piove; Wyatt sees in winter a chance of going out with a bow. The whole thing has a pleasantly English, country-house, atmosphere and reads like an original. The foreign model has here been thoroughly assimilated. In another piece the story of the town and country mouse is told with considerable spirit.
But Wyatt’s permanent value is to be found in his lyrics. They are not, except in a very few places, precursors of the Elizabethan lyric. A single line such as ‘The erth hath wept to here my heavines’ or a whole poem like ‘The answer that ye made to me my dere’ may look forward; but essentially Wyatt is doing work of a different kind. His language is usually as plain as that of his English lyric predecessors; to a taste formed on the decorated tradition which runs through English poetry from Spenser to Tennyson it may even sound sub-poetical. The point can be brought out by comparing his refrains with those of other poets. From others we get refrains like Αί̉λινον αί̉λινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ’ ευ̃̉ νικάτω, and cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet and Mais où sont les neiges d’antan? or ‘Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song’, or ‘Put on perfection and a woman’s name’, or ‘With hey-ho, the wind and the rain’. But Wyatt makes refrains out of words like ‘ye old mule’, ‘Spite of thy hap, hap hath well happ’d’, ‘Disdain me not’, ‘Therefore take heed’, ‘It is impossible’. Clearly, we are not dealing with an incantatory or evocative poet. We are in fact dealing with a Drab poet—provided we remember always that ‘Drab’ is not a pejorative term. All Wyatt’s weaknesses, and nearly all his strength, are connected with his unadorned style. When he is bad, he is flat, or even null. And when he is good he is hardly one of the irresistible poets. He has no splendours that dazzle you and no enchantments that disarm criticism. It is almost as though he said ‘If you don’t want to like me, you need not’. In order to appreciate Wyatt you must read with great attention and do your fair share of the work. He is not necessarily the worse on that account.
Here is a specimen of what I take to be bad Wyatt (though not Wyatt at his absolute worst)
For cause yourself do wink
Ye iudge all other blinde;
And secret it you think
Which euery man doth finde.
In wast oft spend ye winde
Yourself in loue to quit;
For agues of that kinde
Will show who hath the fit.
The thought and emotion are those of the dreariest wrangle, and the expression differs from that of prose only by being a little less flexible and lively. Compare with this,
I promiside you
And you promisid me,
To be as true
As I wolde bee.
It is, in one way, divided only by a hair’s breadth from the previous example. It is no more adorned and certainly no more elevated. But the creaking inversions are gone; the rhythm exactly underlines an intonation that would occur in real speech; and yet the rhythm pleases. It is characteristic of Wyatt that his bad pieces are very like his worst. He is a miniaturist; one false stroke mars the work.
It is possible to cull from Wyatt, as from other poets, phrases or lines which remain beautiful when torn from their context. Dr. Tillyard has analyzed with great accuracy the various ways in which the stanza ‘Perchance thee lie withered and old’ surpasses its Horatian counterpart (I do not say its Horatian original, for that would be hard to prove). Everyone remembers ‘With naked fote stalking in my chambre’ and
for sodenly me thowght
My hart was torn owte of hys place
and again
But yet, alas, that loke all sowle
That I do clayme of right to haue.
But such things do not necessarily come in the best pieces; it is not on them that Wyatt’s success depends. It depends much more on the degree to which he has been able to give a whole poem a shape. His danger is that of being unprogressive, of writing poems that stop rather than end, poems that do not carry in themselves the reason for their length or for the order in which the stanzas come. Such are ‘Farewell the heart’ (or rayn) and ‘I see that chance’. Each stanza might occur in a good lyric, but you cannot make a poem by simply stringing half a dozen such stanzas together. I think Wyatt himself was aware of the problem. In ‘Marvel no more’ he seems to have realized by the end of the third stanza that something must be done to make a capital for the column he was building and to have attempted to supply it by some verbal wit on the word ‘chance’. In ‘Disdain me not’ the return to the original refrain in the last stanza was probably made for the same reason. But these are his unsuccessful pieces. In ‘My Lute Awake’ the whole poem is, as it were, an ending, but it turns from this into another idea at the fifth stanza and then resumes the main theme with an air of great finality in the eighth. ‘Perdie, I said it not’ similarly offers a new twist (a counter-attack) in the fifth, and after it a real conclusion. ‘What rage is this’, in a stanza admirably suited to the purpose, hurls line after line at us in a sullen monotony of passion for four stanzas and then rises to a curse. In eternum is subtler. The refrain is given a slightly different meaning at each repetition. The last two lines do not in my opinion mean that he has found a new mistress. They mean that another thought, the thought of eternity, now occupies him; he is doing his palinode, ‘Leave me, oh love that reachest but to dust’.
Except for the form of the rondeau (and he did not make much of that) Wyatt’s debt to French poetry is small. If one tried to reduce his lyrics under a recipe, one would have to say ‘Petrarchan attitudes expressed in the traditional form of the Tudor lyric’. But this would be most misleading. In a sense the Petrarchan matter is all there, the ice and fire, the implacable beauty. But when Wyatt handles them they all become different. Nothing could be more alien to him than the devout Frauendienst, and the drugged or tranced melancholy of the Rime. (Readers who do not know Italian will, by the way, learn much more of that strange, great work from Synge’s prose version than from all the Elizabethans and all the Pléiade put together.) His poems are full of resentment. Except in one short, pleasant trifle about fingers, he does not praise ladies. He never goes out of himself: how badly his mistress has treated him, how well he deserves to be treated, how much more fortunate he has been with other women, how sorry she will be some day—such are his recurrent themes. Hence when we read him in bulk, some of us find in him an atmosphere which is from the first oppressive and finally suffocating. Poor Wyatt seems to be always in love with women he dislikes. My sympathy deserts my own sex: I feel how very disagreeable it must be for a woman to have a lover like Wyatt. But I know this reaction to be unjust; it comes from using the songs as they were not meant to be used. Look at them again:
My days decaies, my grefe doeth gro
The cause thereof is in this place.
This was not intended to be read. It has little meaning until it is sung in a room with many ladies present. The whole scene comes before us. The poet did not write for those who would sit down to The Poetical Works of Wyatt. We are having a little music after supper. In that atmosphere all the confessional or autobiographical tone of the songs falls away; and all the cumulative effect too. The song is still passionate: but the passion is distanced and generalized by being sung. We may hear another of Sir Thomas’s inventions another night; but we are not going to have ten or twenty on end. Each will be judged by itself; they will never build up into the composite picture which the modern student gets from the printed page. So taken, his best pieces are very remarkable work indeed. They reach an intensity, and sometimes a dramatic quality which the English lyric had hardly even attempted before. And they do this with great economy, never going beyond the resources of Drab poetry, using little sensuous imagery and no poetic diction. For those who like their poetry lean and sinewy and a little sad, he is a capital poet. His fame is in the ascendant.
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was in his twenties when Wyatt died and there is no doubt that he greatly admired Wyatt both as a poet and as a man. But the relation between them was not exactly that of master and pupil. Surrey saw Wyatt as one who had ‘dayly’ produced some famous work ‘to turne to Britains gayn’ and ‘taught what might be sayd in ryme’. Though they come in a poetical elegy (where a man was not expected to be precisely critical) these words, as it happens, define pretty well what Wyatt meant to Surrey. He was not so much the technical master as the man who had suggested new possibilities, who had claimed, and partly shown, that the new-fashioned continental poetry could be naturalized in England. In that sense, he inspired Surrey. But Surrey had, of course, his own independent access to the Italians and the Romans, and his technical standards were, in their own way, higher than any that Wyatt could have taught him. In some respects he hardly competes with Wyatt. He is much less affected by the native lyrical tradition: perhaps less related to music at all. The pieces in which he is closest to Wyatt (‘Although I had a check’, ‘O lothsome place’, or ‘Though I regarded not’) are neither his best nor his most characteristic. He does not care for refrains, and is happiest as a lyric poet in octosyllabic stanzas. He loves what was newest (and worst) in Wyatt, the poulter’s measure. He is less medieval; with him the Drab Age is fully established.
His Petrarchan pieces are by no means his best; yet even in them it is easy to see why the Elizabethans preferred him to Wyatt. He was more accomplished, more useful. For the sonnet he often adopted that modified form less greedy of rhymes, which Shakespeare perfected, and availed himself of its greater ease to make sonnets which, if never very moving, are smooth and elegant and work up to a tolerable climax. Sometimes he produced equally good results with a more exacting rhyme scheme; as in ‘The Soote Season’ and his sonnet on sleep. His lyrics nearly all have the completeness, the shape, which Wyatt sometimes lacked. But the truth is that his love poetry is usually best when it is least about love. He takes every opportunity of bringing in external nature, or narrative, as if to take a holiday from the erotic treadmill. Oddly enough, the only two poems in which we are really moved by the theme of love are both put into the mouth of a woman; and of these women one certainly is, and the other may be, a wife in love with her husband. The better of the two is the lyric ‘O happie dames’ (freely adapted from an Italian original) which contains the best stanza he ever wrote. The other, in poulter’s (‘Good Ladies’), nearly triumphs over that jigging metre.
But if Surrey as a love poet is for the most part ‘correctly cold and regularly low’, he can express real feeling on other subjects: especially on friendship. His elegy on Wyatt has already been mentioned: it is a little clumsy and a little too like a catalogue, yet a credible picture emerges from it. More moving is the epitaph on his follower and comrade in arms, Thomas Clere. Best of all is the poem on his imprisonment at Windsor. It has its flaws (the tiger in l. II comes in very oddly) but it has caught the very spirit of that pleasure which flows over like-minded young men when they are all together and making their first friendships. We shall meet so many satires on the Court in the sixteenth century that it is important to learn from Surrey the other side—
The secret thoughtes imparted with such trust,
The wanton talke, the dyuers chaunge of playe,
The frendshipp sworne, eche promyse kept so iust
Wherewith we past the winter nightes away—
for though they were great lords, and skilled knights, huntsmen, and lovers, these courtiers were very young and very crowded, sleeping two in a room and talking late like schoolfellows.
The Satire against the citizens of London wins us by its sheer Falstaffian audacity. Surrey is in the Fleet for breaking windows. Breaking windows?—he admits the charge, but claims that he had the highest motives. He was acting as a prophet, almost as ‘the scourge of God’, awaking the conscience of that very wicked city. But the idea, which might have made an amusing epigram, hardly suffices for so long a poem. His religious works—a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes i–v, and another of certain psalms—are, of course, not good. Hebrew poetry, and Pindar, have led better poets than Surrey to disaster, and he had certainly not solved the problem raised by oriental imagery when he wrote—
Butter falles not so softe as doth hys pacyence long.
One line (‘In booste of outwarde works he taketh no delight’) suggests an unexpected sympathy with Lutheran theology. But the real interest of the paraphrases is metrical: not chiefly because in Psalm lv Surrey attempts the unrhymed alexandrine (nothing was to come of that till the Testament of Beauty) but because he is now trying to reform the poulter’s measure.
The vices of that metre are two. The medial break in the alexandrine, though it may do well enough in French, quickly becomes intolerable in a language with such a tyrannous stress accent as ours: the line struts. The fourteener has a much pleasanter movement, but a totally different one; the line dances a jig. Hence in a couplet made of two such yoke-fellows we seem to be labouring up a steep hill in bottom gear for the first line, and then running down the other side of the hill, out of control, for the second. In his Paraphrases (chiefly in the Ecclesiastes) Surrey is, I think, attempting to remedy this by restraining the run-away tendency of the fourteener. He does this sometimes by putting in another pause as strong as that at the eighth syllable, and thus cutting his line in three—
The World is false, man he is fraile, and all his pleasures payne
sometimes by inversions of stress in the neighbourhood of the pause—
Then aged Kings, wedded to will, that worke without advice—
sometimes by trisyllabic feet—
And carrey the roodde that skorgeth them that glorey in their gold.
With the alexandrine he takes fewer liberties, but those which he allows himself yield impressive lines, as
I, Salamon, Dauids sonne, King of Jerusalem,
or
We that live on the earth draw towards our decay.
Even if the process had been carried further it would hardly have made poulter’s a good metre, but it might have made more of the fourteener than Chapman ever did, and shows the continually growing and exploring artistry of Surrey.
His greatest exploration was that which led him to translate two books of the Aeneid in what the printer of the first edition called, on his title-page, ‘a strange metre’, and what we call blank verse. In this metre he had been anticipated by the Italians, and it is reasonable to suppose that he derived the idea from them: the suggestion that he found blank verse in the Tale of Melibeus does not seem to me worth considering. Trissino and others had already used the metre and Ippolito de Medici had used it for translating Virgil. Surrey’s version exists in the Hargreave MS., in the print by John Day, and in Tottel: variants are numerous and detailed criticism is inhibited by our uncertainty as to which text, if any, represents Surrey’s final intentions. Even if that were known, critical judgement would still be difficult: the original is so good that it will triumph over great defects of translation and to calculate what percentage of our pleasure is due to Surrey is a matter of great nicety. If, amid these perplexities, I am to hazard a verdict, it would be this; that Surrey has made a poor translation but good verses—for a pioneer, astonishingly good. A certain stiffness which we feel in his lines is not due to excessive end-stopping. It is rather a syntactical than a metrical stiffness. In his effort to keep close to the Latin Surrey does not leave himself room for flowing sentences. He thus becomes lapidary and laconic. This quality is not fatal to poetry but it is excessively anti-Virgilian. Virgil, like every great poet, is no doubt economic in fact (‘no word he wrote in vain’) but the impression he produces is one of lavishness—as of a rich wine swelled above the brim of the glass. He is full of echoes and vistas and partial repetitions. How different Surrey is, an example will show:
Chorebus then encouraged by this chaunce
Reioising sayd: Hold forth the way of health,
My feres, that hap and manhod hath us taught:
Chaunge we our shields: the grekes arms do we on.
Craft or manhod with foes what reckes it which?
That manhod in the third line is probably a misunderstanding of the Latin does not matter much. What matters is that we have asyndeton where Virgil has atque once and enclitic -que thrice, that my feres, as Surrey tucks the words in, has none of the enthusiasm of o socii, that the construction of reioising sayd (later so dear to the Miltonists) strikes a foreign and ‘classical’ note which nothing in the original would have struck for Roman readers, and that the hortatory inversions of the fourth line prolong the same effect. The generosity of the wine has been lost in the decanting. Surrey’s version as a whole is a little too severe, too cold. It is Virgil in corsets. If this effect is wholly unintended, it would be harsh to dwell on it: for we should stand by the first English blank verse as reverently as we stand by the springs of the Thames. But it may not be unintended: it may reflect the humanist or ‘classical’ misunderstanding of the ancients. In no case can Surrey be regarded as a rival to Douglas: he is less medieval and (almost in the same proportion) less Virgilian.
Nearly all that is good, and some things that are bad, in the Drab Age, can be found in Surrey’s poetry. He can, in poulter’s, give us specimens of its lumbering clownishness—
Unhappy hand, it had been happy time for me
If when to write thou learned first uniointed hadst thou be.
But he also contributed to our poetry a certain smooth and controlled dignity or propriety: and if the word ‘politeness’ rises to our lips we need not reject it, for the Drab Age has certain real affinities with that of the Augustans. He does not warble woodnotes nor thunder in high astounding terms nor wanton in luscious imagery: when he reminds us of the Elizabethans at all, he reminds us of ‘well languaged Daniel’ or sober Nosce Teipsum. He can make trifles pleasing by their neat structure and by the ease and consistency of his language. Once or twice he goes higher than this. Metrically, he is one of the great road-makers. If we adopted the ludicrous principle of judging poets not by their own work but by their utility to their successors, he would have to rank not only above Wyatt but above Chaucer and Milton; perhaps above Shakespeare too. By any sane standard, however, he is merely a man who served his generation well and has left one or two poems of permanent, though moderate, value.
It is natural to compare Surrey’s blank verse with the two pieces which Nicholas Grimald (1519–62) wrote in the same metre and which Tottel printed in his Miscellany. It is not certain that they owe anything to Surrey. Both are translations, the one from the twelfth-century Alexandreis by Philippus Gualterus and the other from Beza’s Mors Ciceronis, and both record heroic deaths. Grimald can be very clumsy. He omits articles in a fashion which English ears cannot tolerate and uses uncouth inversions, as in ‘Wherefore the hands also doth hee of smyte’. Yet in a sense he carries out his undertaking more successfully than Surrey. The fee-fo-fi-fum manner of the Alexandreis was much less worth reproducing than Virgil, but it was really within Grimald’s reach as Virgil was not within Surrey’s. Witness the opening lines:
Now clattering arms, now ragyng broyls of warr
Gan passe the noyes of taratantars clang:
Shrowded with shafts, the heuen; with clowd of darts
Covered, the ayre—(Tottel, 265.)
There is life, of a sort, in this, and the pauses are not badly managed. The last line of the poem (‘From derk obliuion of deuouryng death’) is worthy of Marlowe.
With Grimald we have already reached Tottel’s Miscellany. Richard Tottel was printer and bookseller and his Miscellany, which he called Songes and Sonettes, first appeared in 1557 to be republished with additions and deletions in the same year and frequently after that till 1587. It was a goldmine to its publishers. With the additions it contains 310 poems: first come those of Surrey, Wyatt, and Grimald, and then follow the ‘Uncertain Auctors’. Some of these have been identified: but the appearance of Chaucer among them warns us that we have no certain knowledge of the period covered by the collection. Among the known authors Lord Vaux died in 1556, Sir John Cheke and W. Gray in 1557, Sir Anthony St. Leger in 1559, Grimald about 1562. Combining this with Puttenham’s statement that the ‘new makers’ came up in the latter years of Henry VIII, we ordinarily conclude that Tottel represents a movement which began about 1530 and was still going on when he went to press in 1557. But we must remember that this is only probable. Earlier work may be included, and what we take to be minor tendencies within the Drab Age may really be relics from a previous period. Only philological evidence could give us complete certainty, and unfortunately Tottel’s text, wherever it can be tested by manuscripts, proves so licentious that it can give the philologist no sure foothold. But though our common assumption is only probable, the probability is strong: almost nothing in Tottel looks as if it belonged to the fifteenth, or even the early sixteenth century. I take it to be essentially a Drab Age anthology.
‘Essentially’—for there are pieces in it which look forward, and pieces which, without looking forward, are anomalous. ‘Phylida was a fayer maid’ (181, p. 138), with its pastoralism and its flowers and beasts, looks forward: so does the eloquent opening of No. 233 (p. 189),
Though in the waxe a perfect picture made
Dothe shew as fayre as in the marble stone,
and you may add, though from that most unpromising strain ‘Grimald out of Beza’,
Gorgeous attire, by art made trym and clene,
Cheyn, bracelet, perl, or gem of Indian river (146, p. 107).
Or again, Grimald translating Pseudo-Ausonius, may momentarily anticipate the tone of Sylvester:
So greeted floods: that, where ther rode before
A ship, a car may go safe on the shore (157, p. 112).
But these are not typical. The other class of anomalous poems is, in a way, more interesting: they show not where poetry was going but where it might have gone. The grand function of the Drab Age poets was to build a firm metrical highway out of the late medieval swamp; but in Tottel we can discover traces of one or two uncompleted highways, systems of meter that were never worked out. That the authors were not simply losing their way (as some still suspect Wyatt of doing) but genuinely working on an alternative route is shown by the fact that Lord Vaux, who can elsewhere be as iambic as Tate and Brady, is one of them. His No. 217 (p. 177), ‘O temerous tauntres’, and someone’s No. 220 (p. 179), ‘Cruel and vnkind’, both regularize the floundering line of Hawes and Barclay not into decasyllables but into five ‘lifts’ and ‘dips’ (or, if you prefer, five anapaests or dactyls) and produce a very clear rhythm:
Cruell and vnkind whom mercy cannot moue,
Harbor of vnhappe where rigours rage doth raigne,
The ground of my griefe where pitie cannot proue,
Too tickle to trust, of all vntruth the traine.
Elsewhere, in an iambic poem (‘Sith that the way’), alliteration is so persistently used that it is no longer a decoration but structural, and we almost return to the technique of Pearl:
And take no skorne to scape from skill,
To spend my spirits to spare my speche,
To win for welth the want of will;
And thus for rest to rage I reche (192, p. 156).
Such experiments are, however, rare. Much commoner, and more important, is what may be called the neo-medieval manner. Several poems, and some of them very good, apply the language and metre of Surrey to themes and to an outlook indistinguishable from those of the fourteenth century. Thus Lord Vaux’s ‘Assault of Cupid’ (211, p. 172) gives us in Drab Age stanzas an erotic psychomachia which is perfectly medieval. ‘The Sun when he’ (278, p. 230), which some have attributed to Surrey, is simply Gower brought up to date. Without any servile imitation the poet has caught exactly the equable flow, the tenderness, and wistfulness of the Confessio Amantis, but all in the prosody of his own time. But the best and most interesting poem in this class is ‘Sythe singing gladdeth oft’ (185, p. 144), which illustrates once more how misleading some of our traditional categories may be. It is based on Petrarch’s canzone Nel dolce tempo (Rime. In Vita, xxiii), but a reading of the poem at once dispels the idea that it must therefore be new or of ‘the Renaissance’. The canzone is Petrarch at his most medieval. The English poet has omitted the characteristically Petrarchan transformations of the lover into a fountain, a stag, and a laurel. He sees his original through the eyes of Chaucer and produces what is almost exactly an abridged version of the mourner’s narrative in the Boke of the Duchesse. The result is a very gem of this transitional art, the disarming tenderness of the Middle Ages in the sober quatrains of the Drab Age: so good, and so little known, that I feel justified in quoting three stanzas:
I lingred forth tyll I was brought
With pining in so piteous case,
That all that saw me sayd, me thought,
Lo, death is painted in his face . . .
And closed up are those faire eyes
That gave me first the signe of grace:
My faire swete foes, myne enemies,
And earth dothe hide her pleasant face . . .
And ending thys my wofull song,
Now that it ended is and past,
I wold my life were but as long
And that this word might be my last.
But the bulk of the collection does not thus look back, and (I think) looks forward only in so far as its metrical regularity will presently make possible the freedoms of the Golden Age. It is the great treasure house of Drab style, both good and bad. At its worst the Drab can be very loutish, as in Grimald’s
From yeres tuise ten if you in count wil but one yere abate,
The very age then shall you finde of Lord Mautrauers fate (163, p. 118).
or in
I would not have it thought hereby
The dolphin swimme I meane to teach (170, p. 529).
From these abysses it sometimes attempts to rise by means of the Ercles vein, as in ‘The restlesse rage’ (179, p. 137) which is all about deep, devouring hell and ‘Tantale’ and ‘Promethus,’ or in No. 246 (p. 201), possibly by Churchyard, which begins a compliment to a lady with the line ‘I heard when Fame with thundrying voice did sommon to appere’. At other times there is an attempt to escape from dullness by excessive rhetoric, as in the intolerable No. 174 (p. 132), ‘The lenger lyfe’, an example of Puttenham’s ‘marching figure’. Most often, however, the poets do not seem to feel the need of any enrichments. They sacrifice to the Muses with great parsimony and think they have done enough. The lines, the sentences, and even the words are short and this often produces an unpleasantly staccato effect, aggravated by a fondness, which the Drab Age bequeathed to its successor, for filling up their poems with short ‘gnomes’ or pithy maxims. And when the Drab style becomes good it does not do so by departing from its plainness, its sententiousness, or its brevity. It is good when these very qualities somehow attain dignity and force. In ‘The plage is great’ two lines,
The cause of things I will not blame
Lest I offend the prince of peas (176, p. 534),
are very clearly in the same manner as the absurd lines about teaching the dolphin. They are plain and monosyllabic, closed up in themselves. The difference is that they have something to say, have no clumsy inversion, have a half alliteration, and two Kenningar. Thus again, that air of finality, which elsewhere produces the staccato, gives most of its charm to the following stanza from ‘The smoky sighes’:
The frutes were faire the which did grow,
Within my garden planted,
The leaves were grene of every bough,
And moysture nothing wanted,
Yet or the blossoms gan to fall,
The caterpillar wasted all (214, p. 175)
It might almost come from Cowper or from one of the great eighteenth-century hymn writers: and the resemblance is not accidental. Nothing is gained by treating Drab Age poetry as if it were Golden Age poetry in embryo; that, indeed, is the way to miss its real merits. At its best it has a severity, a neatness, a precision, which bring it much closer to the work of the Augustans than to Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare.
Some pieces in Tottel have just been classified as ‘neomedieval’, but the most fully developed specimen of the class comes elsewhere. It is the anonymous Court of Love which Stow printed in his Chaucer of 1561. The arguments by which Skeat demolished the attribution to Chaucer and moved the date of the poem forward into the sixteenth century need not be repeated here. The unknown poet was trying to do to Chaucer what the neo-Latin poets of that age did to the classics; to make a pastiche so good that it could succeed as a forgery. And though he had not philology enough to deceive modern scholars he was astonishingly clever. Considered as an original poem, his work towers above most Drab Age verse by its sheer accomplishment. Except here and there in Wyatt this chapter has not yet led us to mention anything so light, so graceful, and so sophisticated as the Court of Love. The matter is in places wanton, even scabrous, but in the allegory all grossness disappears, and there is music, humour, and even at times a lyrical intensity.
After Tottel the greatest composite monument of the Drab Age is the Mirror for Magistrates. In a way, just because it is so much worse, it reveals the movement of taste more clearly than Tottel—as a derelict shows the set of the tide more clearly than a ship under sail. Its earliest strata are late medieval, and its latest pieces were written when the Golden Age had begun. It thus overlaps the Drab Age at both ends and in a sense records its whole history.
The conception of the book was derived, of course, from Boccaccio’s De Casibus and in its earliest form (the suppressed edition of about 1555) the Mirror appeared along with Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and as an addition to them. The new ‘tragedies’, according to the title-page which is almost all we have of this print, were ‘diligently collected out of the Chronicles’. The advertisement is significant. The printer and the editor (William Baldwin) are appealing to an historical, not to a purely literary, taste. This attitude continued in the historical verse of Drayton and Daniel: it is to be judged as applied poetry. This fusion of poetry and history descends from the epic, the common parent of both those arts, and had long been practiced in the metrical chronicle. But Baldwin and his collaborators were departing from pure metrical chronicle under the disastrous, late medieval influence of ‘tragedy’ (as Chaucer’s Monk understood it) just as Drayton and Daniel were to depart from it under the influence of Lucan and Ovid. Both changes were for the worse: the monotony of ‘tragedy’ and the laborious dignity of the pseudo-epic are a poor exchange for the springy variety of the unambitious chronicle.
The oldest work in the Mirror is found not in the first extant edition of 1559 but in that of 1587. In that, there occur two pieces, on Flodden and on James IV, which, as the prose link tells us, were composed ‘even shortly after the death of the sayd King’. Internal evidence supports this statement. Both are in the style and metre of the first decade of the century, and both beneath contempt. One line (‘My rewarde is no more but the showle and the spade’) lives in the memory. Of the same vintage is No. XIX (Edward IV) in the 1559 volume, in a twelve-line stanza with a Latin refrain. It is better, in so far as the lines approximate more consistently to a rough four beats.
In the same volume we have two tragedies (Tresilian and Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloster) by George Ferrers, a lawyer and courtier who had the knack of surviving many unfortunate patrons. To the 1563 volume he contributed Edmund of Somerset: to the 1578, Eleanor Cobham and Duke Humfrey of Gloster, but it is probable from bibliographical evidence that the Duke Humfrey and the Somerset were written, or bespoke, for the 1559 edition, and Eleanor Cobham written before 1563. Ferrers was old enough to publish a translation of Magna Carta in 1534 and we shall probably not be far wrong if we date none of his works later than the fifties.
Ferrers is no poet but he is of curious interest as a metrist. None of his five pieces is in regular decasyllabic verse. Eleanor Cobham comes nearest to it, but strays into the irregular nursery-rhyme movement of Beryn. Duke Humfrey begins in pure decasyllables but by line 15 has dropped into
In their most weal to beware of vnhap,
and later, as if to emphasize the skipping measure with internal rhyme,
Not heeding, lesse dreedinge al unaware (34).
In these two poems, since there is some attempt at decasyllabics, the irregular lines can, if we please, be regarded as mere blunders, but his remaining tragedies are in a different category. In Tresilian Ferrers keeps throughout within the norm of Beryn; and here again we meet internal rhyme:
Greedy and euer nedy, prollyng for theyr praye (61).
This is not the work of a man trying unsuccessfully to write decasyllables but of a man deliberately writing a different metre. In Thomas of Woodstock he is again following a path of his own, but a different one: the four beat line (precursor of some eclogues in the Shepherd’s Calendar) predominates:
And the soldiers of Brest were by me made bolde
To clayym entertainment, the towne being solde (146)
or with internal rhyme
With swurdes and no wurdes we tryed our appeale (123).
Close to this, from Edmund of Somerset, though there decasyllabics are creeping in, is the couplet
The more ye lop trees the greater they growe,
The more ye stop streames the higher they flowe (27).
Thus in Ferrers, as sometimes in Tottel, we find a hint of things that might have happened; his work is the beginning of one more unfinished causeway across the swamp.
If Churchyard spoke the truth when he said that his Shore’s Wife (No. XXV in the 1563 volume) was written ‘in King Edwardes daies’ we must place it in an early stratum of the Mirror. Here, in sharp contrast to the work of Ferrers, we see the triumph (at first a desolating triumph) of the new Drab poetry. The lines are of wooden regularity and the story is drowned under declamation and proverbs. Yet Shakespeare used a similar narrative technique in his Lucrece and Marlowe may have remembered from Churchyard the line ‘And bent the wand that might have growen full streight’ (140).
Other named poets in the 1559 volume are Thomas Phaer, the translator of Virgil, here notable for being wooden without being regular; Thomas Challoner, a diligent translator whose Richard II scans and is dull: and William Baldwin, the editor. Three tragedies are certainly by him (VIII, Richard Earl of Cambridge, XIII, Richard of York, XVIII, Duke of Clarence). Most of the remaining twelve, though not No. XVII (Henry VI), may be his. All are regular, or nearly regular, in metre and all set the execrable example followed by Daniel and Drayton of oscillating between passages where political and genealogical fact is forced into verse without the slightest poetical colouring and others of gnomic digression. In No. IX (Montague Earl of Salisbury) there are two good satiric lines:
Duke Thomas’ death was Iustice two yeres long,
And euer sence, sore tiranny and wrong (34).
But in general the work is disastrous: just not bad enough to be harmless to public taste. One other piece in this volume which deserves mention is No. XVII, Henry VI. This is a very up-to-date metrical experiment whose stanza, rhyming abab, consists of three alexandrines followed by one fourteener. The design is indeed utterly tasteless: but it proves that the new regularity has reached the stage at which you can begin to play tricks with it.
In 1563 Thomas Marsh printed the Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates, but there is evidence that most of its eight new tragedies were written in the reign of Queen Mary. Two of them, the work of Ferrers and Churchyard, have already been dealt with. No. XXIV, Richard Duke of Gloster by Francis Seager, and No. XXVII, The Blacksmith by H. Cavell, are in the old, shambling metre: but this is now so out of fashion that it has to be defended in the prose links on grounds of dramatic decorum. What matters very much more is that in this volume the Mirror for the first time offers us two poems which deserve attention on their own merits. The first is Hastings (No. XXI) by John Dolman, a fellow of the Inner Temple who translated Cicero’s Tusculans in 1561. It is not a satisfactory poem: it is obscure and tormented and in actual achievement the dull work of Baldwin might, without absurdity, be placed above it. It is inferior to Baldwin’s poetry as a baby at six months is inferior to a dog at the same age: but then the baby is full of possibilities that the puppy lacks. In the same way Dolman is full of—is partly disabled by—an inner fermentation of poetry with which Baldwin never was embarrassed. He understands better than any of his collaborators, better even than Sackville, what a poem ought to be. The other ghosts are mere mouth-pieces of moral and political doctrine: but Dolman really tries by changes of mood and human inconsistencies to dramatize his Hastings. He attempts the conceit, and tough, sinewy conceits too, not flowers, as in ‘Yet circlewise into themselves do run’ (60), or, of a beast inspired to carry God’s warning, ‘Who is deaf bearer of His speaking dumb’ (464). His description of Richard enraged (555–560) is something better than the usual Drab Age fustian, and even when he is gnomic there is music and passion in his saw:
God for adultery slay’th
Tho’ ye it thynk too sweet a synne for death (616),
or again,
In Lethe’s floud long since in Stigian vale
Selfe-love I dreynt (10).
Above all, here at last the sweet richness which was soon to transform English poetry begins to appear:
Shonning those synnes that shake the golden leaves
Perforce from boughes ere Nature bare the greaves (37).
and
That twynckkling sterres fling downe the fixed fate (501).
The poem is confused (the prose link acknowledges it ‘very darke and hard to be understood’), crowded, and uncomfortable. But it anticipates, in however dim a form, nearly every one of the excellences which were soon to be knocking at the door—the Golden tongue of Spenser, the turgid grandeur of Chapman, the twisted strength of Donne.
Thomas Sackville, in this volume, has come far nearer than Dolman to achievement, but his promise is less various. His Buckingham (No. XXII) is quite unremarkable and, as readers of Gorboduc would expect, shows none of Dolman’s dramatic capacity. He tears passions to tatters and endeavours to compensate for lack of real sympathy by mechanic exaggerations. His fame must rest on the Induction. The idea of writing an induction at all and of thus giving some artistic unity to the Mirror is itself praiseworthy: and the vision poetry of which it consists is well suited to a writer who is more at home among moods and atmospheres than among passions. There are too many exempla for a modern taste, but where these do not clog Sackville’s flow the images follow one another with a satisfactory stateliness of gloom. Some of the allegorical personages are described with a woodcut energy not below Spenser’s: and, in the famous lines on sleep we hear, in momentary perfection, the note of the coming ‘Golden’ age.
In 1574 the persistent Thomas Marshe published the First Part of the Mirrour, so called because it deals with earlier periods than those touched in the previous collections. Its sixteen tragedies are all by John Higgins, a diligent lexicographer and book-maker born about 1545. In 1575 Higgins added one more, and in 1587 all of his work (some of it re-written) was included in a new edition along with that of the original team. He made about forty tragedies in all. His name cannot have sounded in sixteenth-century ears as it does in ours, for he considers it suitable to verse and lets a ghost say
I pray thee Higgins take in hand thy pen (Bladud, I, 1587).
Wordsworth similarly began a sonnet with the word Jones. The matter is worth more than a smile: the downward trend in the overtones of common surnames must have a cause and the cause would be worth finding. Higgins is a gnomic and pedestrian poet of no merit; his importance is that he illustrates the riot of metrical experiment which provides the background to Spenser’s early work. We are here miles away from the confusions of the late Middle Ages. Higgins understands many different types of line and is experimenting with new combinations. In Albanact the story is in rhyme royal but the oracles in fourteeners. In Cordila we have the rhyme scheme of rhyme royal but the first four lines are alexandrines and the remaining three are decasyllables. In Nennius the story is again in rhyme royal, Caesar’s letter in decasyllabic quatrains and Casibellane’s in alexandrine couplets. Porrex in its 1574 form is in eights and sixes. In 1587 he was still experimenting (the rewritten Bladud is an extraordinary gallimaufry) but by 1587 he has ceased to have even historical significance, is only an owl that ought to have gone to bed or a ghost that has stayed for breakfast. In 1574 he was still a precursor. His experiments are quite tasteless, his combinations arbitrary, but as far as knowledge goes he has mapped the whole metrical world which the ‘Golden Age’ was to inhabit. He thus illustrates those conditions without which that ‘Golden Age’ could not have come into existence, though he is quite powerless to anticipate it. He is a hen that mothers ducklings but will never learn to swim.
With Higgins the history of the Mirror is almost at an end. Of Thomas Blenerhasset, whose Second Part of the Mirror (1578) was an independent and rival venture, little need be said except that in his Cadwallader you will find some alexandrine blank verse in a very tedious vein of fee-fo-fi-fum.
No one lays down the Mirror without a sense of relief. An immense amount of serious thought and honest work went to its composition and it remains, with Tottel, the chief poetical monument of the Drab Age. Like Tottel it did useful work in re-establishing metrical regularity, but in other respects its influence on succeeding poets was mainly bad. It encouraged that taste for heavily doctrinal history in verse which is partly responsible for the Mortimeriados and Polyolbion.
To Tottel and the Mirror we must add the third great composite work of the Drab Age, the rhyming psalter commonly known as ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’. The French metrical version had been begun by Marot in 1533 and finished by Beza in 1562. Thomas Sternhold, a courtier of Henry VIII’s, working independently, had begun in the forties. His work was continued by the parson John Hopkins, and later by the Protestant exiles at Geneva. The Whole Book of 1562 includes work by William Whittingham, W. Kethe, Thomas Norton, T. Becon, Robert Wisdom, and John Craig. Some attribute to Kethe the ‘old hundredth’ (All people that on earth do dwell) but without conclusive evidence. Whittingham is perhaps the best of the team and offers considerable metrical variety. He is happiest in heroic couplets:
I have no need to take of thee at all
Goats of thy fold or calfe out of thy stall—
I know for mine all Birds that are on mountaines;
All beasts are mine that haunt the fields and fountaines (L).
Norton ventures on rhymeless octosyllabics for No. CXXXVI. Kethe, for No. CIV, uses what we must call anapaests till some better word wins general acceptance;
By these pleasaunt Springs and Fountaines full faire
The fowles of the aire abide shall and dwell,
Who moued by nature to hop here and there,
Among the greene branches their songs shall excell.
But the staple of the book is poulter’s and fourteeners (or ‘eights and sixes’). Its poetical level has been a butt for critics almost ever since it appeared; the common people accepted it as an inspired book. Something like poetry of a rude, ballad kind can here and there be found in it. Thus the sun is likened to
a valiant champion
Who for to get a prize
With ioy doth hast to take in hand
Some noble enterprize (XIX)
or again
The voice of God doth rent and breake
The cedar trees so long,
The cedar trees of Libanus
Which are both high and strong (XXIX)
or even
Lord, make the King unto the iust
Like raine to fields new moune,
And like to drops that lay the dust
And fresh the land new soune (LXXII).
But these are exceptional. The book did no harm to taste: neither its faults nor its few merits were of a kind to appeal to cultivated writers. Those who used it in church were not looking for poetry and such poetry as they got crept into their mind unconsciously mixed with the devotion and the music. Hence we do these artless verses a kind of outrage in wrenching them from their natural context and dragging them before the bar of criticism. They are to be enjoyed, if at all, as we enjoy the epitaphs in a village churchyard.
Much of the most characteristic work of the Drab Age is to be found in its copious translations from the Latin, which are so homogeneous that only a super-human critic could attribute them to their several authors on internal evidence. But almost anyone could attribute them to their period. Their metres (fourteeners, poulter’s, and, more rarely, blank verse) mark them off from medieval work; their clumsiness and their diction, from the Golden Age. That diction may now give pleasure, but a pleasure wholly alien from most of their originals. It now pleases by sounding rustic, quaint, and even ‘low’. The difficulty is to find whether it was low then. No one can read Drab and even Golden verse for long without coming to the conclusion that the overtones of, say, the noun gripe and the verb fry have deteriorated since the sixteenth century; otherwise even moderately good poets would not have used them where they did. But once the question has been raised we become sceptical about our whole reaction to the diction of the Drab Age translators. They are full of words like clummes, grunt (of a woman in travail), patch (as a term of abuse), snudge, sluttish, trull, glumme, and wagge (both as noun and verb). Were these bad when they were written or were they as innocent of the modern overtones as Anglo-Saxon stincan? We can only guess, guided by the following considerations: (1) most of them were soon abandoned by good poets in elevated contexts, and Puttenham condemns trudge and tugge; (2) there is some evidence that the Drab Age was in fact grossly insensitive to the quality of the Latin poetry it was translating. Thomas Blundeville in 1566 praises Golding for translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses in a ‘thondrying’ style—which is as if we praised a translation of the Rape of the Lock for sounding like Aeschylus. My tentative conclusion is that the diction of the Drab translators, as a whole, was already a little mean and clownish when they used it, and became much more so as usage changed: but this conclusion is much more doubtful about any one given word than about the cumulative effect. At the very least we are probably safe in inferring from it that none of them was being strongly affected by a humanistic feeling for dignity. To that extent they belong with Douglas, not with Surrey or Dryden. And with all their faults they are honest translators who try hard to get the sense of the original, though in places either their Latinity or, more probably, their texts were very odd.
The earliest of these translators, Thomas Phaer (1510?–1560) seems to me very much the best. His Seven first books of the Eneidos (1558) can be very easily misrepresented in whichever direction you please either by quoting bad lines like
But we your stock whom to the starres of heauen admit you please (i. 250)
or good ones like
The grenewood like a garland growes and hides them al with shade (i. 164).
But the only fair test is prolonged reading. His faults, even with the linguistic allowances suggested in the preceding paragraph, are obvious. He has strained inversions, and he can be flat. He can badly misrepresent the original as in i. 170 or again in iii. 325 (Nec victoris heri tetigit captiva cubile) where ‘Nor neuer she to masters bed was captiue fixed fast’, besides suggesting a ludicrous domestic arrangement, does very little justice to the shrinking tetigit. These faults he shares with all the Drab translators; but in the others they become less endurable the longer we read, whereas in Phaer the general effect is so good that we come to overlook them. The explanation is that he is a master of his metre. He uses hardly any enjambment (the fourteener will not stand it) and relies for variety on a free use of elision and other variations within the line. In quotation such an elision as ‘To come to Italia where we trust to fynd our resting ends’ (i. 205) may seem harsh, but it is not so when we meet it in its context; nor is the disregard of the medial break in ‘And Mighty Gias and Cloanthus mourned he most of all’ (i. 222). To an ear numbed with the monotony of Turberville or racked with Golding’s cacophonies Phaer offers refreshment. The phrasing too is often (not always) good: ‘of precious Ladies seven and seven about me do I keepe’ (i. 71), ‘Robes and painted pomp of Troy’ (i. 119), ‘the gladsome giftes of God’ (i. 636), or, for umbraeque silentes, ‘soules of silence dumme’ in vi. 264. Sometimes for two or three lines together he keeps a level almost worthy of Virgil
And now the mornyng read doth ryse and starres expulsed be
When, farre aloof with mountaines dymme and low to looke, we see
Italia land. ‘Italia’ first of all Achates cryed,
‘Italia’ than with gretyng loude my mates for ioy replied (iii. 521).
At some of the great lines (not at lacrimae rerum) he has come as near to success as anyone: as in
Alas to thinke how sore berayed, how from that Hector sore
He chaunged was (ii. 274).
or
Why should we hennes remove? Who letts us here our walls to bylde (iii. 631)
or
And stretching held their hands desiring moch the further shore (vi. 314).
Phaer naturalizes and even medievalizes Virgil, making Nereids into mermaids and domos Ditis vacuas into ‘Lymbos Kingdoms wast’, but he is little the worse for that. On the whole, any man who cares for epic and cannot master either Virgil’s Latin or Douglas’s Scots will be tolerably safe with Phaer.
Most of us, I suspect, would advise a mediocre poet, if he must translate, to avoid the greater originals and choose the less, as if these would be easier. But this is probably a mistake. The great poets have so much wealth that even if you lose two-thirds of it on the voyage home you can still be rich on the remainder: slighter art, when it loses the perfection of its original form, loses all power of pleasing. Thus not only Douglas’s Virgil, but Surrey’s and Phaer’s Virgil are still worth reading, but the Drab translators of Ovid are not. Ovid without his neatness, his pert dexterity, is nothing, except (as we shall see) in the Metamorphoses.
In 1560 there appeared anonymously The Fable of Ovid treating of Narcissus. It consists of a translation in poulter’s measure, a long Moralization in rhyme royal, and two stanzas From the Printer to the Booke which use the floundering Late Medieval line. In the Moralization the author’s desire to show that Ovid ‘no follye mente’ is no more specifically puritan than it is medieval. He reveals some sensibility to one important aspect of Ovid’s art by pointing out that
Hys tales do ioyne in suche a goodly wyse
That one doth hange upon anothers ende.
The poetical quality both of his translation and of his original verse is beneath criticism, but the unmetrical lines are rare enough to be attributed to the printers’ errors.
In 1565 Thomas Peend brought out his Pleasaunt Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis. In it the humanistic fashion of strict translation has not yet fully emerged from the medieval fashion of helping yourself to Ovid as you pleased. Peend is retelling the story in his own way, with references to Dame Nature and her mould and plenty of medieval stopgaps (‘as ancient stories tell’, ‘if poets truly wryte’) and only at times keeps close enough to Ovid to be called a translator. He uses poulter’s but every now and then horribly slips in an octosyllabic couplet (printed as a single long line). Like Chaucer, he is inconsistent in his scansion of classical names, accenting Hermaphrodite sometimes on the second and fourth but sometimes on the first and third. He too adds a moral, and he too is very, very bad.
In the same year Arthur Golding (1536–1605?) produced the first four books of the Metamorphoses; the whole fifteen followed in 1567. This industrious man also translated Aretine’s History, Calvin’s sermons, Trogus, Caesar, and what not? His version of Ovid providentially forestalled one which Peend, by his own confession, had intended: providentially, because Golding is a little better. At the same time the indulgence which more than one writer has extended to his ugly fourteeners demands some explanation. The truth is, I think, that he is saved by his original. The Ovidian manner, the flippant and sophisticated brilliance, was beyond his reach as it was beyond the reach of all the Drab poets. But in the Metamorphoses this manner surprisingly coexists with an unspoiled and hearty relish in sheer story-telling; it is puff-pastry (the finest ever cooked) but puff-pastry enclosing a homely and nourishing food. This element in his original, and this alone, Golding cannot destroy. He can therefore be read with a simple pleasure which is very unlike the total pleasure given by Ovid, though it made part of that total. Thus Materiam superabat opus (ii. 5) is very much weakened in
But yet the cunning workmanship of thinges therein farre past
The stuffe whereof the doores were made.
But we are still getting on with the story of Phaethon and Golding cannot kill it. The great defect of his version is that he uses enjambment not for musical delight but (as he also uses strained inversion) for mere convenience, and to a degree which the fourteener will not endure. He uses it like this:
My God Apollos temple, I will set you open and
Disclose the wondrous heauens themselues (xv. 144).
If I quoted from his introduction ‘there is alreadie shewd sufficient to detect that Poets tooke the grounde of all their deepest fables out of Scripture’ who (if not warned by the present context) would suspect that the introduction was in verse? He expands freely. Lucum (iii. 35) becomes ‘a thicke and queachie plot’ because he wants a rhyme to ‘sticke’. Notitiam primosque gradus vicinia fecit: Tempore crevit amor (iv. 59) is dragged out into the shuffling rigmarole of
This neighbrod bred acquaintance first, this neighbrod first did stirre
The secret sparkes, this neighbrod first an entrance in did showe
For love to come to that to which it afterward did growe.
It ought to be unendurable, and it almost is—but not quite. The stories keep us going, and some not very Ovidian traits in Golding’s language—his ‘thondryng’ style, which makes sanguinea lingua a ‘blo and blasting tung’ or immensos saltu sinuatur in arcus ‘and bending into bunchy bowghts his bodie forth he hales’ (iii. 42) have an Englishness and pungency which wins from us a smile (partly) of pleasure. If a man had read Golding in boyhood, and knew the stories first or only through him, he would probably have an affection for Golding which maturer taste would never quite reject. But if we are to be pleased we must read him, like Sternhold and Hopkins, with indulgence. Prospero’s speech in the Tempest and Medea’s in Golding have five or six words in common, but there the resemblance ends.
His versified preface, though it shows Golding at his worst as a poet, is of interest. Like the anonymous translator of 1560, and like the medievals who had ‘moralized’ even the Romance of the Rose, he believes that Ovid is profitable and philosophical. He bases his belief not only on the supposed morals of the individual stories but on the theme of the whole work—‘this same dark Philosophie of turned shapes’. By this Ovid teaches us that nothing ‘doth in stedfast state remayne’ but also that ‘nothing perisheth’, and the Pythagorean doctrine of Metempsychosis in Book XV is true, if not of the rational, yet of the sensitive and vegetable souls. Ovid is thus found to contain most of the ‘philosophy’ which reappears in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis and cantos of Mutabilitie. He also in many places agrees with scripture. I think we shall misunderstand the age if we take this to be the special pleading of the ‘Humanist’ in Golding against the ‘Puritan’. He is not merely finding excuses. This is how our ancestors really approached Ovid. The all-embracing syncretism of their thought and a readiness (inherited from the Middle Ages) to expect multiple senses and heterogeneous pleasures from a single text made it natural for them to do so.
The year 1567 which saw the completion of Golding’s Metamorphoses saw also Turberville’s Heroical Epistles, a version of the Heroides: ten in poulter’s, six in blank, and five in fourteeners. The blank verse is not perhaps intrinsically better than the fourteeners (anything is better than poulter’s) but it refreshes our jaded ears. Turberville is a better poet than Golding, but not a good one. He has one beautiful line, ‘Demophon to the windes ingagde his promise with his sayle’ (ii. 25), but the elegant rhetoric of the original usually evades him and when that is lost the Heroides has nothing to offer us. The ‘low’ diction of the Drab Age (if it was low) is more marked in him than in any of the other translators. He accents classical proper names very erratically, and once preserves in English the vocative inflection ‘O Macareu’ (as Kingsley wrote ‘Andromeden and Persea’ in his Andromeda, 423). Few books less repay perusal.
Thomas Underdowne has deserved well of us all by translating Heliodorus: his Ovid his invective against Ibis (1569) in ordinary Drab fourteeners, with notes (as we should now call them) on mythology and archaeology, adds nothing to his fame. Thomas Churchyard’s Three first Books of Ovid de Tristibus (1572), also in fourteeners, is one of the better specimens of its kind. He stops his couplets with almost Popian regularity, surrenders himself to the swing of the metre, and is not unmusical. But the original has few qualities that can survive in Drab style and homely verse.
Other translators were meanwhile attempting an even harder original. The plays which go under the name of Seneca (though it is hard to believe that he wrote Hercules Furens, 858–67) are by no means contemptible. They excel, as Mr. Eliot says, in ‘the verbal coup de théâtre’ and if the poet were not so incessantly on his top note would even have a kind of greatness. But he was doubly unsuitable for our Drab translators. In him the prehistoric tales of anguish were re-clothed in despairing epigram and enormous rhetoric, not quite wantonly but because they really, if ‘obliquely’, represent such an outlook on life as the expiring Roman nobility must have had under the successive imperial Terrors. The real world was for them not very unlike the world of Senecan tragedy: Agrippina’s Occidat dum imperet or Arria’s Paete, non dolet might have come in the plays. Art raised on so volcanic a soil could only be a monstrous exotic when transplanted to England. And secondly, the Drab poets were of all men least able to reproduce the epigrammatic. They muff it every time. Thus in Medea, 166 (out of which Corneille made his famous Dans un si grand revers que vous resta-t-il?—Moi), Studley gives us:
Medea yet is lefte (to much) and here thou mayst-espye
The seas to succour us in flyght and lands aloofe that lye.
For magna momento obrui Vincendo didici (Troades, 263) Jasper Heywood has:
In beating downe that warre hath wonne by proofe I have ben taught
What pompe and pride in twinke of eye may falle and come to naught.
In Studley’s Agamemnon (287) Pretio parata vincitur pretio fides becomes
The trust that hyred is and bought by brybes and moneies fre
Thy counsell to bewray agayne with brybes entyste wil be.
Even the fact that he was misled by a false attribution in his text can hardly excuse the same Studley for translating Fortem facit vicina libertas senem (‘Freedom, now near, makes bold the white-haired slave’, Hippolitus, 139),
The neighbors weale great comfort brings unto the honrie head.
Thus the translators go on. All the sharp detonations of the original (without which it is nothing) disappear in the yokel garrulity of their style. One begins to suspect that they hardly perceived or did not value the epigrams, and were interested only in the fustian which gave them an excuse for such phrases as ‘Whose growyng gutts the gnawing grypes and fylthie foules doe fyll’, or ‘Thwack not about with thunder thumpes’. And very small excuses satisfied them. In Newton’s Phoenissae (or Thebais, 5) permitte labi is swollen into ‘Let mee I pray thee headlong slyde in breaknecke tumbling plight’, and the original Oedipus has nothing at all to correspond to Neville’s ‘And filthy feendes spout out their flames out of their darksome caues’.
This unhappy enterprise was begun by the Jesuit Jasper Heywood (1535–97), son of old Heywood the epigrammatist. His Troas (which we call Troades) appeared in 1559, his Thyestes in 1560, and his Hercules Furens in 1561. In this short period he moved from a medieval to a humanistic conception of his task. In the Troas he treats his original with great freedom, adding a new character, and substituting a chorus of his own for one which, he thinks, ‘should have no grace in the englishe tonge’. The rhyme royal stanzas which he inserts at one point are not dramatic, but addressed to the reader: ‘good ladies have your teares in reddines’. It is the Chaucerian technique: Auctour should be written in the margin. Thyestes is preceded by a dream (purely medieval but for its fourteeners) in which Heywood meets Seneca’s ghost. The Hercules Furens is quite a different matter, translated ‘verse for verse’ and ‘word for word’ and accompanied with the Latin in an eclectic text of his own manufacture. In all three alike he uses fourteeners for the iambic parts, and octosyllabic or decasyllabic metres for the lyrics. The general superiority of these, and especially of his original chorus (Troas, 814 et seq.) suggests that he had poetry in him but shipwrecked on an ill-chosen metre and an ill-chosen original. He is interested in the ‘augmentation’ of the vernacular, rendering rogae as ‘roges’ and stadia as ‘stadies’.
Alexander Neville (1544–1614) produced his Oedipus in 1563. In the collected Ten Tragedies of 1581 he made a great point of his precocity, but since the 1581 text is in fact almost a new version (of which he says nothing) there was some suggestio falsi in this. Neville follows Peend’s strange practice of slipping in a sixteen-syllable line (or octosyllabic couplet) every now and then among his fourteeners. Once, his excuse is that he is translating trochaic septenarii, but he forgets about this and reverts to fourteeners after two lines that remind us irresistibly of a Gilbert and Sullivan ‘patter song’:
God graunte I may it safely tel, the hearyng was to terrible,
My senses al amased are, it is a thing so horrible (Oedipus, 223).
Unlike Heywood he often used fourteeners even for the choruses. He is very, very bad.
He was succeeded by Thomas Nuce (ob. 1617) who translated the Octavia. To this work, simply because it is in decasyllabics, the reader turns in hopes of relief, but they are soon dashed. It is like this:
Though much I beare that boyling brest do beate
And tolerably take divorcements threate,
Deathes only deadlie darte, I see, &c. (Octavia, 100 et seq.).
After Nuce came John Studley (who took his B.A. in 1567) with the Agamemnon (1566), Medea (1566), Hercules Oetaeus, and Hippolytus. Like Heywood in the Troas he treats his original freely and inserts a chorus of his own in the Medea: it is very medieval and throws the emphasis, as Chaucer would have done, on Jason’s inconstancy in love. Here, for a moment, as if he had thrown off an incubus, he achieves a shadow of poetry:
Who lysteth to the flateryng Maremaides note
Must needes commit his tyred eyes to sleepe,
but against this must be set the fact that he pursues us even in tragedy with the poulter’s measure (Hercules Oetaeus, 172 et seq.) and that he scored the record failure of them all in rendering a Senecal Gnome:
Curae Leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent.
Light cares have wordes at will, but great do make us sore agast (607).
He also uses more often than his fellows that diction which, whether ‘low’ in his own day or not, cannot now be read without a smile—‘frostyface’, ‘topsy turvy’, and (for Tacitae Stygis in Hippolytus 625) ‘Stygian puddle glum’.
In 1581 Thomas Newton (b. 1542) shoveled all the existing versions together, added his own of the fragmentary Phoenissae, and published the whole as The Ten Tragedies. Out of this bog of verbiage Mr. Eliot has picked, with exquisite taste, the only lines (Hercules Furens, 1131 et seq.) which deserve praise: and even those no man could construe unless he had seen the Latin first. In my sad progress I have sometimes thought that I could find others to set beside them: but it was only the same sort of illusion which might make a man, by long residence in Lincolnshire, come to take a mound for a mountain. As soon as we return to good literature, or even to ordinary conversation, the imagined beauties fade. ‘English Seneca’ is execrable: the metre a torment to the ear, the language at once artless and unnatural. Its influence on English drama is reserved for an abler pen. But I suspect the chief value of that story will be to increase our admiration for the native genius that could so soon and (on the whole) so completely recover from it.
Thomas Drant (ob. 1578) who published a version of Horace’s Satires in 1566, followed by the Ars Poetica and Epistles in 1567, makes far better reading than the Senecans, not because he is very much better either as a poet or a translator but because Horace suffers less than the tragedies from such style and metre as the Drab Age could afford. Drant’s homely and pungent manner gives us a quality which, if different from the Horatian urbanity, is at least not simply antagonistic to it. With what eyes he saw Horace may be inferred from the fact that he called him ‘a muche zealous controller of sinne’ and combined his Satires in one volume with the Wailings of Hieremie, comparing his two authors with the laughing Democritus and the weeping Heraclitus and entitling the whole A Medicinable Moral. Though he claims to have ‘waied’ his version of Jeremiah ‘with the Chaldie Targum’ he is not always master of Horace’s Latin: as when dum ingenuus (I. vi. 8) becomes ‘so that our oune demeanour be not yll’. In general there is no knowing what trains of English imagery any phrase of the original may start in his lively mind, and they are often delightful. Thus in I. i. 37 Horace’s colourless Non usquam prorepit et illis utitur ante Quaesitis sapiens blossoms into
Then ladye Pismyer stirrs no where, shes claspde in closset deepe,
She keepes her Chrystemnasse in cave and ther they make bon cheare.
A man can only say, ‘Bless thee, Horace, thou art translated’. More legitimately, but with equal pleasure, we find loquaces (I. ix. 33) rendered ‘iangling iacks’ and furcifer (II. vii. 22) ‘thou stretche-hempe’. Some of his more violent departures from the original are made for decency in obedience to the maxim quoted from St. Jerome on his title-page, quod malum est muta; but these too may lead us into pleasant by-paths. Like Peend and Neville he allows himself amid his fourteeners an occasional line of eight beats. His own Latin verses, oddly called Epigrammata and appended to the Medicinable Moral, are very curious. Such a line as O Mors, Mors, quid ages? quove feres pedem? is indeed in a metre that Geoffrey de Vinsauf never knew: that it marks in any other respect an advance from O Veneris lachrymosa dies is not clear.
This list of Drab translations from the Classics (which does not claim to be exhaustive) may close with the first attempt at an English Homer, by A. H. (Arthur Hall, 1563–1604). Though not published till 1581, this work had been started ‘about eighteen or nineteen years’ earlier and had been encouraged by Jasper Heywood. It consists of Iliad, i-x done into fourteeners, not from the Greek but from the version of Hugues Salel in French decasyllables which was finished in 1545; hence the jibe about ‘the French Midwife’ in Chapman. In reality very few of Hall’s faults are due to Salel. His version is extremely bad and worth mentioning only because a comparison between it and Salel and Chapman brings out so prettily (thus summing up the whole lesson of the last few pages) the character which sets the Drab translators apart from all others. A single quotation will do it. Homer said,
Αύτίκα δ΄άργεννη̃σι καλυψαμένη ὀθόνησιν
ώρμα̃τ΄ ἐκ θαλάμοιο τέρεν κατὰ δάκρυ χέουσα (111 141).
Salel renders it
Si se leva debout et se vestit
De beaux habits puis quant et quant sortit
Hors son logis, iectant la larme tendre
Que l’on voyait par ses joues descendre.
Hall, thus
She riseth vp and deckes herself with gorgeous attyer
And out she goes distilling teares as they wel saw stoode by her.
And finally Chapman
she hied,
Shadowed her graces with white veils, and (though she took a pride
To set her thoughtes at gaze and see in her cleare beauties flood
What choice of glorie swum to her yet tender womanhood)
Seasonde with teares her ioyes to see more ioyes the more offence
And that perfectioun coulde not flowe from earthlie excellence.
The style of the French, a little cold yet beautifully limpid, is above all a narrative style. French poetry has not yet lost the power that had made the romances and the chansons de gestes: something of Homer comes through. Chapman’s lines, filled with rich beauties foreign and even opposite to those of the original, illustrate the deeply unclassical richness of the ‘Golden’ manner in its later and almost overripe development. Homer has completely vanished but we are given something else instead. Hall cannot preserve Homer (nor even Salel) and cannot compensate for the loss: between the other quotations his couplet shows like a splash of mud on our page.
We must now turn to the original poets of the Drab Age. These are more numerous than we easily remember and not all of them deserve critical mention in a work on this scale. Thus the religious poems of William Hunnis (ob. 1597)—the Seven Sobs, the Handful of Honeysuckles, the Poor Widow’s Mite, and the Comfortable Dialogues, all in 1583—belong to the history of piety rather than that of poetry; Hugh Rhodes’s Book of Nurture (1545?), to the history of manners.
Barnaby Googe (1540?–1594) was a diligent translator from the neo-Latin and an anti-papistical propagandist. He began his career with a translation of the first six books of Palingenius’ Zodiacus Vitae which he completed in 1565. The original, a diffuse and tedious satirical-moral diatribe in hexameters, lost little in Googe’s fourteeners. Perhaps it gained; Vincit amor Musae, vincit deus is ordinary schoolroom nullity, whereas ‘The love of Muse and Hie Jehoue doth both within me dwell’ is at least a curiosity. In 1570 followed the Popish Kingdom from the Latin of Thomas Naogeorgus (or Kirchmeyer), and Googe may be the ‘B. G.’ responsible in 1579 for a New Year’s Gift, a scurrilous scissors-and-paste compilation against the Papists. The Four Books of Husbandry in prose translated (with additions) from Heresbachius in 1577 make slightly better reading. His claim to be an original poet rests on the Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets of 1563. The eclogues (in fourteeners) conform to humanistic ideas of ‘imitation’ by introducing pederasty and a suicide for love, and to Christian morals by bringing back the suicide’s ghost to tell us he is damned; omne tulit punctum. The story of Faustus in the fifth eclogue resembles one of the plots in Twelfth Night. The so-called sonnets are grave compliments in decasyllabic quatrains. The decasyllables are cut up into two lines each, an arrangement which, if it derives from the author, may throw some light on his conception of that metre. Cupido Conquered is a purely medieval poem, an allegory complete with spring morning, complaint, well of Narcissus, and a psychomachy. Two of the epitaphs show clearly, what the eclogues sometimes suggest, how close to the surface the ballad spirit and broadsheet style lie beneath Googe’s veneer of Tottelianism. He is at his poor best when he forgets to be a courtly maker and thumps out
Ten Scottes to one (a dredeful thyng
A dolfull fyghtyng daye).
Arthur Broke (ob. 1563) owes his shadowy immortality to the fact that Shakespeare used for a play his Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562). It is derived from Bandello through Belleforest and Broke adds something of his own. He did not add much poetry. His History, in poulter’s, is extremely long and his style can descend to
How happie had he been had he not ben forsworne,
But twice as happie had he ben had he ben never borne.
George Turberville (1540–95?) is a little better than Googe and Brooke. He has already met us as a translator of Ovid. He also followed Barclay by translating both Mantuan (before 1567) and Mancinus (A Plain Path to Perfect Virtue, 1568). Turberville’s Mantuan set beside Barclay’s fourth and fifth eclogues thus give us an instructive contrast between the Late Medieval and the Drab technique when both working under the same humanistic impulse. Barclay takes you bumping over a ploughed field; Turberville keeps you ruthlessly on the march along the hard shadeless road of poulter’s and fourteeners. It is merely a matter of temperament which you find worse. His Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets seem to have been published before 1567. Many of them are imitated from classical trifles which demand, more than any other kind of poetry, the lightness that Turberville lacked. His play is elephantine. He is less unhappy when he attempts the Tottelian lyric. Wyatt is his chief model and he sometimes varies Wyatt’s stanza-forms with new complexities. He often spoils what he borrows but one or two of his pieces can give a faint pleasure: ‘The green that you did wish me wear’, ‘Shall Reason rule’, or ‘The Phoenix shall have many nests’. The stanza used in ‘Of Tantalus plight’ seems to me tasteless but might be redeemed by the music. ‘Of Lady Venus’ is an interesting, though unsuccessful experiment in alexandrines written with no medial break. The verse epistles written from Russia in 1568 (and printed in Hakluyt) are wretched stuff.
But this is not the whole story about Turberville. There are indications that far from being a man raised to the little stature he has by Petrarch and humanism and the Tottelians, he is a man who might have done better if he had heard of none of them. His two prose treatises of Faulconry and Hunting (1575) are of course compilations ‘collected out of the best approved authors’: but Turberville on kennels is much better reading than the Ovidian and Tottelian Turberville, and the poems put into the mouths of the beasts are not without interest: one regrets that the Badgerd (of whom there is a most fearsome cut) had apparently no turn for verse. Even more interesting from this point of view are his Tragical Tales. Seven of these are from Boccaccio; the other three, as modern research has shown, have a more complicated descent. Now those which are not damned (as four are) by poulter’s measure do not quite fail: you can still read them for the story. And the odd thing is that their most obvious fault is very closely connected with their sole merit. Their fault is their ready acquiescence in the stopgaps of the debased ballad style—‘As here my penne will show’, ‘As I before have penned’, or even ‘He was content to hold his tong and so he went to bed’. Yet at the same time Turberville is best when he is content to keep closest to this humble kind of art. The beer is indeed very small, but even the smallest beer is better than grocer’s port. Hence the sixth tale (‘Gerbin and the King’s daughter of Tunis’), which has a purely medieval content and admits ballad irregularities of metre, is easily his best work; at one moment, just before the sea fight, it strikes the note of the great ballads:
Good faith, quoth he, I neede no glove
My Faulcon is not here.
Turberville like Googe, thus suggests that if the poetry of the Drab Age was usually bad, that might be because new models induced minor talents to turn away from the thin, but real, trickle of poetry that still survived among the people, and might have saved them. This is the most interesting thing about Turberville. For the rest, he has several peculiarities of language. He carries the ‘low’ vocabulary further than any of his contemporaries. He omits auxiliary have, writing might tolde and might been, which can be paralleled, and repeatedly puts mother law for mother in law, which (I think) cannot.
Thomas Howell, who published The Arbor of Amity (1568), the New Sonnets and pretty Pamphlets, and Howell his Devises (1581), does all the things we have learned to expect from a Drab poet—neat, but tepid, lyrics in the Tottelian vein, thumping fourteeners (‘Most greedie gripes and plunging paines do pierce his ruthfull harte’), poems in ‘the Marching Figure’, and poulter’s. He is full of gnomic morality and much indebted to Petrarch and Chaucer. He attempts ‘anapaests’, not very melodiously, and acrostics. But he has also something of his own. ‘Jack to Jone’, in dialect, faintly reminds us of the Scotch essays in poetical rusticity. ‘Sing all of greene laurell’, in a complex stanza, has some merit. ‘A Dreame’ uses, not quite consistently, the stanza of Sir Richard Maitland’s poem on the Fall. The complaint of a betrayed woman To her Lover contains the only lines still quoted from Howell,
I doubt the Dryades
Amidst the forest chase
And thinking on the seas
I dread the Marmayds grace.
The rest is not so good. The following, though defenceless against a stern critic, has its charm:
Tell her I will come
Knowing not how soone,
Speede well.
Love may no let have,
This is all I crave,
Farewell.
If Googe and Turberville misapplied their small talents, Thomas Tusser (1529?–80) knew exactly what to do with his. The Hundred Good Points of Husbandry (1557), ‘maried’ in the 1570 edition to a Hundred Good Points of Huswifery, was revised and augmented into the Five Hundred Points of 1573, and ran through many editions. Here is one of those works before which the literary critic hesitates, doubtful whether his commission extends so far. Though Tusser had been at Eton (he records Udall’s detestable cruelty) and at Trinity, he writes no Georgics and seems to claim no literary honours:
What lookest thou herein to haue?
Fine verses thy fancie to please?
Of many my betters that craue,
Look nothing but rudenes in these.
It is doubtful whether his work is to be treated as literature. If we complain that his ‘anapaests’, though at first a relief from the eternal fourteener, prove in the end only a variety of torment, may it not be replied that we are absurdly judging as poetry what were only meant to be mnemonic jingles? Yet we cannot so leave them. The truth is that, after Wyatt, Tusser is the most readable of all the Drab versifiers. The pleasure, no doubt, results partly from our nostalgia for the land and for an age which, if not much softer than our own, was hard in different places. Tusser can be stern and suspicious: ‘shew servaunt his labour and shew him no more’, ‘Maids, vp I beseeche yee, least Mistress doe breach yee’, ‘Make hir crie creake and teach hir to stirre’. But one can set against this his precepts of alms-giving, his demands that from May to August ‘Patch’ must be allowed ‘an hower or two’ for midday sleep or be that nothing be ‘grutched’ to sick labourers, above all the vanished community of country life:
In haruest time haruest folke, seruants and all
Should make all togither good cheere in the hall
And fill out the black boule of bleith to their song,
And let them be merie all haruest time long.
So also at Christmas, since our plenty ‘was sent us (no doubt on) good houses to keepe’. And all the year round the best workers are those who ‘sing in their laboure as briddes in the wood’: therefore ‘disdaine not the honest though merie they seeme’. To the beasts, too, he displays a farmer’s characteristic blend of callousness and tenderness. All this, no doubt, gains by distance. So does his unquestioning piety, a piety not specifically Christian but inherent in the life of the farmer from times before all record: Virgil, with a few explanations, could have understood it. There is, as Tusser says, ‘no doubt’ about anyone’s duty at any moment, and duties cannot be altered by the character of particular people:
Though Vicar be bad or the Parson as euill
Go not for thy tithing thyself to the deuill.
Closely connected with this is a piety towards the very earth which finds expression in a kind of anthropomorphism or ‘pathetic fallacy’ unaffected by literary models and indeed current down to our own day. Excessive carting ‘brings out of hart’ both the land and the horse. North winds are as ill to the hops ‘as a fraie in a feast’ but south wind is ‘ioy’ to them like ‘a welcomed gest’. A bad farmer ‘defraudeth the land’: you must give nature her way, ‘let seede have her longing, let soile have her lust’. That, indeed, is almost a description of what has happened in Tusser’s homely verses. They are scarcely art: they let Nature have her way and she almost saves the book as literature. You cannot read long without feeling earth between your fingers. He thus comes far closer to one real classic (Hesiod) than his courtly rivals ever came to the real Ovid or the real Petrarch. In a sense, to be sure, Tusser is of no importance: the course of English poetry would be the same if he had never written. The chief critical truth we learn from him is that very minor talents should stick to ‘applied’ poetry and avoid the ‘pure’. The eighteenth century was quite right in recommending to them such subjects as the Mediterranean and the Barometer.
As far as chronology is concerned, Thomas Churchyard (1520?–1604) might be placed almost anywhere in this book. He had known Surrey and he lived to celebrate James I’s entry into London. His long and checkered career as hack poet, would-be courtier, and soldier would make a good subject for an historical novel: the impression it left on poor Churchyard himself was summed up in the lines
If fiue and forty sons I had
Not one to court nor wars should goe.
(A Pleasant Discourse, 1596.)
But by his literary character he belongs to this chapter. In his earliest work we can, indeed, detect a pre-Drab, a late medieval stratum. In the Mirror of Man, which he declared to be ‘almost fifty yeares old’ in 1594, his metre is close to that of Robert Crowley: each line is divided into two half-lines which are usually dimeters in rising rhythm, but which sometimes fail to reach that norm and thus surrender the whole line to the floundering metre of Barclay. And at the other end of his career we find sporadically, faint and belated, a tinge of ‘Gold’, as in A Musicall Consort.
Among the Dames of faire Dianas traine
Where beautie shines like silver drops of raine
In sunnie day.
But the most part of his work is purest Drab and explores all varieties of Drab poetics except the genuine lyrical impulse that descends from Wyatt. His best work was done in the neo-Chaucerian manner. In the ‘Spider and the Gowt’ and ‘Churchyards Dream’ (both found in his Chips) he attempts, not quite contemptibly, the humorous garrulity of Chaucer’s octosyllabics. Much more often he was driven to the sort of poetry that paid: pageant-verses for royal progresses, epitaphs, ‘tragedies’, metrical journalism about the wars, an advertisement for a new paper mill, what not? He was, as he says, ‘apt to take any theam’. In the Worthiness of Wales (1587) he even translates the law-Latin of an Earl’s patent into fourteeners. His pageant verse and his heavily gnomic style often bring him very close to the Emblematists: in A Pleasant Discourse (1596) the stanzas which successively compare the court to a cage, a crossbow, a maze, &c., seem incomplete without the allegorical plates. He has no standards. Here and there we meet a poem less bad than the rest (‘Of my Lord Chief Baron’, for example, or ‘Mistress Mabel Broune’) and here and there a pleasing line (‘In peascod time when hound to horne gives eare til Buck be kilde’): but they are probably accidental. In metre, he drums away regularly enough and invents some rhyme schemes (bad ones) of his own. The poor man knew already by 1580 that ‘yong witts hath ronne old Churchyard out of breathe’. It is of some interest that in the Epistle Dedicatory to his Light Bundle (or Charge, 1580) he seems to feel that the new, Golden poetry differed from his own kind by superior gravity, complaining that the world now grows weary of ‘frevolous verses’, yet re-affirming his own belief that ‘the nature of Rime is to reuiue the spirites or moue a smile’. This, with his ‘crank’ spelling and the interest of his biography, is now, I fear, his chief claim on our attention.
Churchyard, then, continued to write Drab all through the age of Gold. Nicholas Breton (1551?–c. 1623), on the other hand, after starting as a Drab poet, had strength to follow the lead that his betters gave him and become a minor Golden poet. He cannot be called a transitional poet for he contributed nothing to the change; he is merely a convertite. His Flourish upon Fancy (1577) and Toys of an Idle Head (1582) show that in his Drab and unconverted days he was not one of the worst of his kind. His ‘Service is no heritage’ is a passable song and there is even a faint anticipation of Donne’s conversational openings in:
If any man do liue of ioyes berefte,
By heauens I sweare, I thinke that man am I.
His seventeenth-century works are dealt with in another volume.
One poet remains who will perhaps claim more attention from the historian of drama than can be given him in this volume. George Whetstone (ob. 1587) in the Rock of Regard (1576) offers us a very mixed bill of fare. The metre of ‘Medea’s Complaint’, where each stanza consists of a poulter’s couplet followed by two octosyllabic lines, illustrates the freedom to experiment which the Drab Age had achieved and also the lack of taste which renders their experiments so fruitless. The burlesque mythological poem on the wedding of Venus, in which Vulcan becomes ‘a Croydon Chuffe’, can still almost extort a smile. What he liked best was narrative. His Rock includes one prose novella. In verse (fourteeners) we have the story of Lady Barbara, whose virtue, like Imogen’s was subjected to a wager by her husband and who clapped the unsuccessful Iachimo in prison and set him to spin. Spenser’s Radigund may owe something to this episode. In ‘The Disordered Life of Bianca Maria’ and ‘Cressid’s Complaint’ Whetstone prefers the technique of the Mirror for Magistrates and puts the ‘tragedies’ (both in rhyme royal) into the mouths of their protagonists. Indeed he was so wedded to this device (tasteless when not inspired by the imagination of a Browning) that when, in 1577, he brought out a ‘Remembraunce’ of his friend George Gascoigne, he made it also into a sort of ‘tragedie’ and put it into Gascoigne’s mouth. He is a very lugubrious and sententious poet; the title of one of his pieces (Fiftie apples of admonicion late growing on the tree of good government) is significant.
Mere literary criticism is not wholly competent to deal with the three miscellanies which will conclude this account of Drab Age verse. All of them were intended to provide singing matter; the purchaser paid his money for an aid to social success not for a pleasure to be enjoyed in his study. The earliest of these is A Handful of Pleasant Delights by Clement Robinson ‘and divers others’—at least, if we follow its latest editor in identifying it with Very pleasant sonettes entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1566. But what matters more than its date is that character which sets it apart from its two rivals. The Handful is clearly intended for citizens, not courtiers: it knows nothing of a Renaissance, or of the Italians, cares for no ‘tragedies’ and relies on broadsheet material. Some of its pieces hardly exist without the music: even ‘Greensleaves’, if we could forget the tune, would die in print. But in general the effect of turning from most Drab poetry to the Handful is like that of passing from a gimcrack parlour into sweet open air:
Tantara, tara, tantara, this trumpet glads our hearts.
The ‘Nosegaie’ had perhaps a place in Shakespeare’s memory. In ‘Diana and Acteon’ we read:
The leaves were gay and greene
And pleasant to be seene,
They went the trees betweene
In cool array.
Surely these lines, or even the two last words of them, outweigh in value 90 per cent of the verse that has been considered in this chapter? But with the Paradise of dainty devices (1576) ‘written for the most part by M. Edwards, sometimes of her Maiesties Chappel’, we are back at court, back among poulter’s and ‘sentences’ and verse knick-knacks in which the first two feet of every line read downwards as well as across. Edwards, who had died ten years before the Paradise was printed, might be excused for being old fashioned, but there is no sign that taste had outgrown his sort of poetry. On the contrary, the popularity of his collection (reprinted in 1578, 1580, 1585, 1596, 1600, 1606) is shocking. We must again remind ourselves that its contents were ‘aptly made to be set to any song in fiue partes’ besides being, in general, very staid and edifying. Here was ‘honest’ recreation; doubtless a suitable present for a gentlewoman or for young master. The very knick-knacks were admired. They gave the Elizabethans the same sort of pleasure which the Victorians drew from a summer-house curiously lined with shells or a model of the Leaning Tower made out of coal. Not all the authors have been identified. Edwards himself once raises hopes (in the poem that begins ‘In goyng to my naked bed’) but the flicker of narrative is soon over and the gnomic deluge descends. William Hunnis is a little better here than in his independently published devotional verses. Francis Kindlemarsh is better than either of these. His poems on Christmas and Whitsunday show ‘promise’. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, shows, here and there, a faint talent, but is for the most part undistinguished and verbose. Lord Vaux in ‘Of a Contented Mynde’ transforms what would easily have been a dull moral poem by his opening—‘When all is doen and said’—which produces the illusion of real speech in a real situation. But the Paradise is a poor book, and its texts often look to me unsound. It was followed two years later by A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions. Thomas Proctor was the editor: Owen Roydon, Churchyard, Howell, Jasper Heywood, and others contributed. It was much less successful than the Paradise, perhaps because it came later, certainly not because it is worse. How inferior it is to the Handful may be seen by comparing its ‘Pyramus and Thisbie’ (in fourteeners) with the Handful’s ballad on the same story. But it contains better work than the Paradise, besides printing in a better text the best piece which the Paradise offered (‘I woulde I were Acteon whom Diana did disgrace’). The finest poem in the book, in a strangely, yet pleasingly, inconsequent metre, is the song ‘Ay mee, Ay mee, I sigh to see the Sythe a field’. But there is also much inferior work. The tradition of ‘tragedie’ is still strong and Helen speaks from the abyss to tell us ‘the rewarde of Whoredome’.
Though the mind sickens at the task of dragging all these poetasters back to the cruel light, our labour will not have been wasted if we are now cured of some false notions about the Drab Age. It is not a period during which the genial spring of a ‘Renaissance’ gradually ripens poetry towards its ‘Golden’ summer. In this age there was no such advance; save in metrical smoothness, there was a decline. The earliest Drab poetry, that of Wyatt, was the best: so incomparably the best that his inclusion in the Drab Age at all might be questioned if we forgot that the plain diction which can be so admirable in him is, in a sense, the other side of the fatal flatness which damns his successors and that he, soon heavily reinforced by Surrey, inaugurated the vogue of the poulter’s measure. Nor is there any indication that humanism or the Italians had a tendency to arrest the decline. Except on Surrey it is doubtful whether they were good influences. Wyatt himself is not best when he is most Italianate: left wholly to Petrarch and stripped of what he owed to the English song, he would perhaps hardly be a poet at all. As for the rest, the Drab poetry which can still be read with some approach to pleasure is that which owes most to the Middle Ages or to the popular tradition. Even the metrical regularity which, if not delightful in itself, is yet the most useful legacy which the Drab Age bequeathed to later poets, was almost certainly not learned from the humanists. In a later chapter the controversy about classical metres will show—what some of us have learned from our own experience as teachers—that ‘doing Latin verse’ at school is a hindrance rather than a help to the understanding of English prosody. If our knowledge of literature ended with these poets there would be nothing to suggest that English poetry was soon, or ever, going to rise again. We should suppose that we had been watching by its death-bed: and all the evidence would be consistent with the belief that the ‘Renaissance’ was helping to kill it. It has, of course, been suggested that Henry VIII (that hard-worked whipping boy) was responsible for the Drab Age by cutting off the heads of scholars or poets. But who (save Surrey) were the promising poets that he killed? It is not clear that our poetry would be much the poorer if he had beheaded nearly every writer mentioned in this chapter.
George Gascoigne (1539?–77) I have set apart because he does not belong completely to the Drab Age. In him at last we find what we have vainly sought among his contemporaries, a transitional poet—one in whom we see the Golden quality coming to birth. He has set posterity a number of small but intricate problems which cannot be adequately discussed here. It is disputed whether he wrote all, or only some, of the poems in A Hundred Sundry Flowers (1573). It is disputed whether his prose narrative The Adventures of Master F. J., is really translated, as he himself said, from the Italian of an unknown ‘Bartello’ or is, as contemporaries believed, a libelous roman à clef. (It is always difficult to convince unimaginative readers that anything is invented.) If the Adventures are original fiction they rise to some importance as our earliest novel or (longish) short story. They tell an adulterous love story in easy and elegant prose with sufficient psychology and good dialogue; but the inset poems and letters have, for Gascoigne, more importance, and the narrative less, than modern taste demands. A very different kind of prose story appears in the Tale of Hemetes the Hermit, ‘pronounced’ before the queen at Woodstock in 1575. This, in little space, shows the ‘heroic romance’ just branching off from the medieval, chivalric stem. It is rhetorically written, winds up with a compliment, and was probably, for its purpose, a pretty enough trifle. In his more serious vein (for he was intermittently a moralist) he made a version of the De Contemptu Mundi which he called The Drum of Doom’s Day, and in the same year (1576) a temperance tract, the Delicate Diet for dainty-mouthed Drunkards. It is slightly rhetorical and not without vigour. His finest prose work, The Supposes, falls to the historian of drama, and so perhaps should the Glass of Government (1575): but though it is divided into Acts and Scenes, the speeches (highly edifying) are so long and many scenes so undramatic that it reads more like an Erasmian ‘colloquy’ than a play. The Spoil of Antwerp (1576), almost certainly by Gascoigne, is a good, straightforward piece of reporting. His poetry displays the same versatility as his prose. The Steel Glass, because it is in blank verse and can, in a sense, be called our first satire, has had more attention than it deserves. It is medieval in everything but metre; an allegorical account of the birth of Satire followed by the traditional flyting of all ‘estates’. Dan Bartholmew of Bath teases us with the expectation of a story, and its flowing stanzas could well have carried one; but Gascoigne has no story to tell, fills up with indifferent lyrics, and leaves us in doubt where we are meant to laugh. Much better is the Fruits of War, which begins with mere diatribe but blossoms unexpectedly into a narrative of the poet’s own military experience in Flanders. It is the sort of thing that would now be done in prose and is very like many memoirs written by officers—quite free from fire-eating rhetoric, and characteristically full of respect for enemies, hatred for allies, and distrust of the General Staff. But it is on his shorter pieces that Gascoigne’s fame as a poet depends. He writes poulter’s, fourteeners, songs, sonnets, decasyllabic stanzas, and couplets. What sets him at times above the Drab poets and brings him to the verge of the Golden quality is his grace and melody. He is only a minor poet. He has neither enough invention for narrative nor enough passion for lyric. If he had followed, instead of anticipating (however faintly) the Golden poets, he would be nothing. As things are, he is like the first streak of dawn. Two of his songs, the ‘Lullaby’ and ‘In Praise of Philip Sparrow’, cling pleasantly to the memory. He often reminds us of the weaker parts of Spenser; and once, if I am not deceived, of Shakespeare himself:
When I recorde within my musing mynde
The noble names of wightes bewitcht in loue,
Such solace for my self therein I fynde
As nothing may my fixed fancie moue . . .
We have left the hard high-road at last; we are already ‘gliding meteorous’, though only an inch from the ground.
His unpretentious Certain Notes of Instruction on English verse are of great importance because they tell us what he really wanted and what difficulties he found (he recommends lists of rhyme words). ‘The rule of Inuention . . . of all other rules is most to be marked’ . . . ‘if I should vndertake to wryte in prayse of a gentlewoman, I would neither prayse her christal eye nor her cherrie lippe &c., For these things are trita et obuia. But I would either finde some supernaturall cause wherby my penne might walke in the superlatiue degree, or els I would vndertake to aunswere for any imperfection that shee hath.’ The ‘Invention’ here is the ‘conceit’ or the ‘idea’, the thing that makes the poem different from what any man might say without being a poet. It secures in poetic thought that departure from the literal and ordinary (the κύριον and the ἰδιωτικόν) which Aristotle demands in poetic language. When Donne thought of his flea or his will, ideas which organize the poems named after them, he had made an ‘invention’. In many Shakespearian sonnets only the last couplet directly bears on the theme of love; the preceding twelve lines, which place this theme in a new light, are the ‘invention’. The knick-knacks in the Paradyse are an earlier, and much lower, kind of ‘invention’. In other words, Drab poetry, Golden poetry, and metaphysical poetry alike are dominated by an impulse which is the direct opposite of Wordsworthianism, naturalism, or expressionism. The poets are never concerned solely to communicate an experience; they are also concerned—usually more concerned—to fabricate a novel, attractive, intricate object, a dainty device. They would hardly have understood how a modern can use words like ‘pretty’ and ‘clever’ in dispraise of a poem. There are, no doubt, other passages in the Notes of Instruction worth remembering. But this passage on invention is the most important and should be constantly borne in mind as a prophylactic against that continual slight misinterpretation of the Elizabethans to which our own austerer tastes incessantly tempt us.