Page's Amos and Laura, like Gale's Pyramus and Thisbe, falls into bathos near the end when Amos, in an extended comparison, likens Laura's refusal to cure his love wound to an avaricious doctor's refusal to set a poor man's leg. Page's failure as a poet is not a result of temporary lapses, as here, but of his inability to invent significant conflict. As Amos says, with unintentional irony on [page 225]:
There are no Seas to separate our joy,
No future danger can our Love annoy.
This is precisely the problem. But in spite of the poem's obvious weakness, one is drawn to the man who wrote it for his obviously sincere, self-deprecatory references to his "weake wit" and "inferiour stile." Fully aware of his limitations, Page, like Barksted and many another unexceptional talent of his age, was nevertheless drawn to the composition of poetry like a moth to the flame.
The Scourge is a straightforward and lively but undistinguished redaction, in sing-song verse, of the well-worn Mirrha story. Its chief but nevertheless dubious merit, over against the epyllionic tradition, is its no-nonsense approach to the art of minor epic narration. Although it expands Ovid's speeches and descriptions where feasible and introduces a degree of invention en route, it is singularly barren of such adornments as epithets, set descriptions, and formal digressions. In consequence, it lacks the distinctive hard, bejewelled brilliance of minor epic that characterizes Barksted's poetry at its best.
In summation, then, we see that although Pyramus and Thisbe and Amos and Laura have slight literary value, The Scourge, while failing to score very high as a minor epic, yet has a certain crude, narrative vitality. And Dom Diego, Mirrha, Hiren, and Philos and Licia, by virtue of their charm, inventiveness, or skillful adaptation of minor epic conventions to their expressive needs, form a hierarchy of increasing literary value that raises them as a group well above the level of the merely imitative.
For permission to reproduce Philos and Licia (for the first time), Mirrha, and Hiren, I am much indebted to the Bodleian Library; for permission to reproduce Dom Diego and Ginevra I am similarly indebted to the Trustees of the British Museum. I am also under heavy obligation to the Folger Library for permission to reprint Pyramus and Thisbe, Amos and Laura, and The Scourge of Venus (1613), all for the first time.
I also wish to express my thanks to The British Museum, the Bodleian Library, the University of Michigan, and the Ohio State University libraries for generous permission to use their collections, and to the Board of College Education of the Lutheran Church in America for a six-week summer study grant, which enabled me to gather research materials for this project.
For help and encouragement in a great variety of ways I am grateful to the following mentors and colleagues: Professor John Arthos, who first introduced me to the beauty of minor epic, the late Professor Hereward T. Price, and Professor Warner G. Rice, all from the University of Michigan; Professor Helen C. White of the University of Wisconsin; librarians Major Felie Clark, Ret., U. S. Army, of Gainesville, Florida, and Professor Luella Eutsler of Wittenberg University; and Dr. Katharine F. Pantzer of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, editor of the forthcoming, revised Short-Title Catalogue.
Paul W. Miller
Wittenberg University
Springfield, Ohio
December, 1965
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