The Bishop of Bath and Wells probably looked back with mingled feelings on the jolly, noisy achievement of his youth, which has made him immortal, for all have heard of "Gammer Gurton's Needle". It is written in rhyming lines of from fourteen to sixteen syllables.
"Gorboduc."
"The Gammer," though low, is lively; not so is "Gorboduc"; it is a tragedy of unspeakable dullness composed in blank verse which has no merit except that of regularity, the sense usually, though not always, ending at the close of each line. The author, Thomas Sackville, later Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, and High Treasurer under James VI and I, was born at Buckhurst, Sussex, in 1536. His grandmother was aunt of Anne Boleyn, so he was a second cousin of Queen Elizabeth. At the Inner Temple, as a young man, he met Thomas Norton, and the pair composed "Gorboduc," which was acted in the Inner Temple in 1561. The authors were inspired by no other Muse than that of Seneca, the moral philosopher, Roman tragedian, and tutor of the Emperor Nero. The play tells how Gorboduc, a mythical King of Britain, abdicated, and, dividing his realm into two parts, gave the country north of the Humber to the younger, and the portion south of the Humber to the elder of his two sons, Ferrex and Porrex. Each had a kind of tutor, and each had a favourite. They were both discontented, the younger slew the elder son, and the mother of both avenges the elder on the younger of her children. The result was national ruin, in which "Fergus Duke of Albany" (apparently King of Scotland is meant) took an active part. There are very long speeches, no action; a messenger brings the news of the distressing occurrences, and a Chorus moralizes on them. Carried away by grief when his wife murders his surviving boy, Gorboduc pronounces the name of Eubulus with the penultimate syllable short, and expires with decency behind the scenes. Eubulus then utters a political forecast in more than a hundred lines, and the drama concludes.
"Gorboduc" was printed in 1565: translations of Seneca's plays were also being written: George Gascoigne translated a piece named "Jocasta" (the wife of Œdipus) from the Italian, and a prose comedy, "The Supposes" from Ariosto. This great Italian poet and his countrymen adapted to Italian manners the plots and characters which the ancient comic dramatists of Rome, Terence and Plautus, derived from late Greek comedy of everyday life. Thus an element of orderliness in comedy was introduced in England from adaptations of Italian adaptations of Roman copies of late Greek plays. Such stock characters as the austere father, the spendthrift son, the cunning servant, the boastful soldier, the nurse, soft of heart and loose of tongue, invaded the comedy of France, and, to a slighter degree, that of England.
Meanwhile Richard Edwards produced a curious Interlude of a classical nature, "Damon and Pythias," the characters being Greek, Sicilian and English—a dash of buffoonery is mixed with very lamentable matter. The Drama was formless, unable to attain definite shape, till some twenty-five years had passed when we reach the date of the immediate predecessors of Shakespeare, such as Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Peele, and the other University young men about town. The influences of the old waggish or controversial Interludes, of the Senecan school of stiffness, and of translations or imitations of Italian comedies, were seething in the cauldron of the age.
[CHAPTER XVII.]
WYATT AND SURREY. GASCOIGNE. SACKVILLE.
The names of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), are for ever memorable in English poetry, not so much for what they actually achieved as for what they attempted. They abstained from allegory, still lingering in its unlovely dotage, and from doggerel. They wrote of themselves and their own loves, joys, and sorrows, but though their verse is concerned with their personal emotions, these are treated in a conventional way, borrowed from continental poetry. They turned to the Italian sonneteers, especially to Petrarch, and saw afar the dawning of the "Pléiade," the company of French reformers of poetic style and language, Ronsard, du Bellay, and the rest, or at least of Mellin de Saint-Gelais, their predecessor. But both Wyatt and Surrey died young, Wyatt by an unfortunate chance, Surrey as a victim of the jealous tyranny of Henry VIII. The two young poets thus live together in men's memories like the Bion and Moschus of Greece: theirs is "unfulfilled renown".