The Later Renaissance

by David Hannay

These verses, which are from Barnabe Googe’s Epitaph on Thomas Phayre, are not bad examples of a kind of metre which seems to come naturally to Englishmen, but their capacity for turning to doggerel is patent. They, with here and there a note which shows that if the writer had had the good fortune to be young after, and not before, The Shepherd’s Calendar, he might have contributed to the great body of exquisite Elizabethan songs, make the staple of the verse of the first half of the reign. These men are entitled to their own honour. They rough-harrowed the ground. George Turberville, who was born about 1530 and died about 1594; George Gascoigne, whose dates are 1535 or thereabouts to 1577; and Barnabe Googe, born in 1540, who died in 1594, tried many things; and if they did nothing else, they helped to extend the knowledge of the average Englishman, and to give practice to the language by their translations. The strongest of the three was Gascoigne, who, in addition to his attempt to write a verse satire—The Steel Glass—was the author of some pretty occasional poetry, of a translation of Ariosto’s Gli Suppositi, stories from Bandello, and a tragedy of Euripides, and who may be said to have begun the writing of critical essays in English by his brief note of Instruction for the construction of English verse, published as a preface to The Steel Glass.[61]

Spenser.

The sincerity with which the best intellects in England were studying poetry, and looking for a poet, helps to explain the instant recognition of Spenser. At this moment the times called for the man, and he came. Edmund Spenser was born in London, probably in 1552, of a Lancashire branch of a very ancient and famous house. His family was poor, and he received his education at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar. He remained at Cambridge from 1569 to 1573, and it is believed that he then spent some time in the north of England with his family before coming to London to seek his fortune. It could be obtained in one way only—by the favour of friends who could secure him a place. That Spenser was resolved to make poetry the chief aim of his life is certain; but he could not live by it at a time when no form of literature, with the exception of the drama, brought certain payment, and even the drama gave but starvation wages. He had to rely on the willingness of powerful patrons to see him provided for because he was a poet. Spenser was not without friends who might have been useful. At Cambridge he had become known to Gabriel Harvey, who, as the older man, a good scholar, and perhaps also as a person of pragmatical self-confidence and indomitable pertinacity, exercised a certain limited influence over him. Harvey introduced Spenser to Leicester and Leicester’s kinsman, Sir Philip Sidney. His undoubted Puritanism was, it may be, in part learnt from the equally undoubted though very different Puritanism of the queen’s favourite. But Leicester did, and it may be could do, little for his client. The Shepherd’s Calendar was published in 1579, a year or two after Spenser came to London, but he had no share in “the rich fee which poets won’t divide.” There is no need to look far for the causes of his disappointment. Elizabeth had little money, and much to do with it, while her Lord Treasurer, Burghley, who had no love for Leicester, was the man to meet any pensioned poet with the ungracious attitude of Sully to Casaubon: “You are no use, sir, and you cost the king as much as two captains.” In 1580 Spenser accompanied Lord Grey to Ireland, where estates of confiscated land were to be won. From that time he was plunged into the horrible strife between the anarchy of Celtic Ireland and the repression of the queen’s officers, who fought for order with ferocious means. He obtained a grant of land in County Cork, married in 1594, and reached some measure of prosperity. A small but apparently ill-paid pension was granted him. The rebellion of 1598 shattered his fortunes altogether. His house at Kilcolman was burnt in the usual fashion of the brutal Irish wars, and it was said that one of his children perished with it. Spenser fled to England, and died on the 16th January 1599—“for lack of bread,” according to Ben Jonson, and undoubtedly in great poverty.

Order of his work.

It seems certain that he began writing very young, for some translations from Petrarch and Joachim du Bellay, which were afterwards reprinted unchanged, or changed only by rhyme, in his acknowledged works, appeared in The Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings of John Van Noodt in 1569. Ten years, however, passed before he published The Shepherd’s Calendar, and then an equal period before he prepared to bring out the first three books of The Faërie Queen, which was registered at Stationers’ Hall on the last day of 1589, and appeared in the following spring. Next year—1591—appeared the minor poems, under the name of The Complaints (The Ruins of Time, The Tears of the Muses, Virgil’s Gnat, Mother Hubberds Tale, The Ruins of Rome, Muiopotmos, and The Visions). The address to the reader gives a promise of other poems, which have been lost; and it may be noted that the same thing had happened with The Shepherd’s Calendar. The Daphnaida followed. In 1596 the Amoretti, the Epithalamium, Colin Clout’s Come Home Again, the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of The Faërie Queen, the Hymns, and the Prothalamium were published within a short time of one another. Nothing more was to appear in his life. Part of a seventh book of The Faërie Queen, and a prose treatise giving a very vivid, very true, and very terrible “View of the Present State of Ireland,” were printed after his death. The treatise did not come out for thirty years, when it was published by Sir J. Ware. The Fragments were included in the new edition of The Faërie Queen in 1611.

Few great poets were ever so little beholden to predecessors as Spenser. He had before him Chaucer, and near his own time Sackville, who had written with original force in Chaucer’s stanza. There were also the Italians, whom he knew well, their few English followers, and the French poets of the Pléiade. In his Shepherd’s Calendar Spenser imitated the Italian copies of the classic Eclogues, and he translated from the French. Neither he nor any man could live uninfluenced by his time. The notes of the Renaissance are abundantly audible in his work—its love of beauty, its desire for joy, and the melancholy which was natural in men whose ideals were unattainable in a very harsh world, which was never harder than amid the disruption of faith, the violent clash of contending forces, and the unchaining of violent passions, of the sixteenth century. But there might have been all this, and no Spenser. |His metre.| He is great by what was wholly his own, both in form and spirit. The Shepherd’s Calendar may be called the work of his prentice hand, done when he had not attained complete control of his own vast powers. Yet it is not so far below the impeccable verse of his later years as it is above the level of his immediate predecessors in Elizabeth’s reign. The part of imitation which there is in it is the weakest. What he inherited from nobody was the new melody he imparted to English poetry. It is out of his own genius that he perfected the form in which that melody found its full expression. The Spenserian stanza does not appear in The Shepherd’s Calendar; but it had been constructed, and was being used in the earlier cantos of The Faërie Queen at least immediately after the earlier work was finished. It is surely no longer necessary to argue that this form was not imitated from the Italians. The ottava rima and the sonnet may have—indeed must have—helped Spenser with indications, but they did no more. Had he been an imitator he would have done as the Spaniards did,—he would have taken an already finished form, and would have adhered to it slavishly. But he did a very different thing. He constructed a stanza which is to English what the ottava rima is to the Italian. It is just the difference between a successor and a mere follower, that whereas the second toils to reproduce the letter, the first gives a new form to the spirit. The relation in which Spenser stands to the Italians is that he carried on the torch of great poetry, but he lit it of English wood, and bore it to a measure of his own. His sonnet is hardly less independent than his stanza, and all talk of obligation to any model becomes idle indeed when we think of the melody of the Hymns, the Epithalamium, and the Prothalamium.

The character of his poetry.

The matter which this form bodied forth to the world is not to be expressed in our meagre prose. It could be uttered only in his own perfect verse. The mere doctrine may be defined with no overwhelming amount of difficulty, for there is a strong and, not only unconcealed but, firmly avowed didactic aim in Spenser. It was no purpose of his to be “the idle singer of an empty day.” He held with his friend Sir Philip Sidney that the poet “doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue.” The poet in their creed was the seer, and Spenser strove to fulfil his lofty function by teaching the Platonism which endeavours to trace back the love of virtue and the love of beauty to that divine origin where they are one, and by singing a Puritanism which is the poetic expression of the Englishman’s innate conviction that the religion which is not interpreted into conduct is an empty hypocrisy. But all this didactic side of Spenser is the side which was not necessarily poetic. In so far as the Hymns merely teach a Platonist doctrine, they do not surpass the final pages of Castiglione’s Courtier. In so far as The Faërie Queen is an allegory, it is no more consistent, ingenious, or perfectly adapted to its purpose than The Pilgrim’s Progress. But over all that could be adequately expressed in prose Spenser cast a spell which carried it into the realm of fancy—that golden world of the poet which Sir Philip Sidney contrasted with nature’s “brazen” earth. A very trifling change in the wording of one passage of The Apologie for Poetrie is all that is needed to make it applicable to The Faërie Queen: “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry as ‘this poet hath’ done, neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers; nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely.” It is to this word that the attempt to estimate Spenser finally leads. By the magic of his melody, and the force of that imagination which could transmute all from prose to poetry, he made a lovely world of poetry out of the real earth. When he used ugliness, as he could, it was for the purpose of heightening beauty by contrast.

As the poet of The Faërie Queen, Spenser stands apart in his time. He is connected with his contemporaries by the sonnet. This form, introduced into English literature by Surrey and Wyatt, had been little, and ill, cultivated in the duller generation which followed them. But with the revival of the poetic genius of England towards the middle of the queen’s reign, it naturally attracted men who were in search of richer and more artful forms of verse. Moreover, it lent itself to the expression of feeling, and that was of itself enough to make it popular with a lyrical generation. For this reason the sonnet work of the Elizabethans has been made subject to a great deal of comment which is not of the nature of literary criticism. It has been treated as a form of confession and veiled autobiography. Various considerations—the limits of space being not the least important among them—make it impossible to discuss the question at length here. Moreover, where the external evidence is naught, and the internal evidence is subject to various interpretations, which is always the case, comment on the inner meaning of the sonnets must always be more or less guesswork. To start from arbitrary premisses, with the certainty of arriving at no definite conclusion, ought to be considered a waste of time. Sidney may have decided to leave it on record that he found out his love for Penelope Devereux too late, and that he then hovered round the thought of adultery. Shakespeare may have made poetry out of his friendship and his love. If so, the passions which left them so much masters of themselves as to be able to produce these artistic forms of verse cannot have been very absorbing. Finished sonnets do not come to men either in their sleep or in anguish. What we know for certain of Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and others is, that they lived active lives in the world, and that they were artists. The nature of the artist is that he endeavours to give form to the passion or action which he can conceive, in the terms of his art, whether he be poet, painter, or actor. It is because he has the constructive imagination and the power of expression that he gives truth to his work. The genius which could give reality to the sorrow of Constance, to the manhood of the Bastard, to the jealousy of Othello, to more men, women, and passions than could be named on this page, was quite adequate to giving the same reality to the scheme of the Sonnets. As much may be said of the other Elizabethans, each in his place in the scale. From the literary point of view, too, it is of no importance how the debate be settled. Poetry is not valuable because it tells us that this or the other dead poet felt as a man the common hopes and disappointments of humanity, but because it fixes what all men can feel in forms of immortal beauty.

Sir P. Sidney.