Drayton.
Drayton[68] was a stronger man than Daniel, and there came forth more sweetness from him. No writer of the time was more voluminous. The sonnets, to which he seems to have been somewhat indifferent, form a very small portion of his work. Whenever he began to write (it is said that his love of literature was shown when he was a boy), he did not publish early. His first poem—A Harmonie of the Church—appeared in 1591. It was suppressed by the censorship, then directed by Archbishop Whitgift, but republished under another title, The Heavenly Harmonie of Spiritual Songs and Holy Hymns, in 1610. In 1593 he published nine eclogues with the title of Idea, a name also given to the sonnets printed in 1594. It is to be noted that the famous sonnet beginning, “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,” which is so superior to the others, and so like Shakespeare’s, was first included in the edition of 1619. Drayton, like Daniel, was much in the habit of revising his work. He not uncommonly incorporated his earlier poems in his later with great changes. In 1596 appeared the awkwardly named Mortimeriados, in the seven-line stanza, recast and republished in ottava rima in 1603 under the title of The Barons’ Wars. Between these two came the Heroical Epistles in 1597. In 1604 Drayton made a most unfortunate attempt to win the favour of James I. by flattery, and he also published a satirical poem, The Owl, and his Moses in a Map of his Miracles. To 1605 belongs a collection of short poems, including the most famous of his minor poems, except the universally known sonnet, the magnificent Ballad of Agincourt. The years which follow were employed in the composition of his vast Polyolbion, of which nineteen books appeared in 1613, and which was completed in 1622. Between these dates he brought out an edition of his poems in 1619. In 1627 he went back on the battle of Agincourt, and produced the poem of that name, together with Nymphidia and The Miseries of Queen Margaret. At the very close of his life, in 1630, he published the gay and graceful Muses’ Elysium. He wrote also for the stage, to which he had no natural inclination, in an occasional and subordinate way.
This list, which is not exhaustive, will show that the forty years of Drayton’s known activity were remarkably well filled. And the quality of this great bulk of work was not less remarkable than the quantity. It may be allowed at once, and without conceding too much to the eighteenth-century criticism, which talked of his “creeping narrative,” that much of his poetry is dull to other readers than those who find all dull except the last smart short story or newspaper scandal. The reader who can master The Battle of Agincourt (not the Ballad), The Miseries of Queen Margaret, and The Barons’ Wars without an effort may hold himself armed against the more laborious forms of study. Drayton indeed tempted dulness when he chose for subject the Barons’ War of Edward II.’s reign, and did not also decide to make the “she-wolf of France” his heroine and to throw history to the winds. Yet even in these the strong poetical faculty of the writer can never be forgotten. The longest of all his poems—the Polyolbion, or “Chorographical Description of all the Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests, and other parts of Great Britain,” which may be described as a poetical guide-book to his native country—is not dull, though it cannot be praised as exciting. Drayton may have made an error when he decided to write it in the long twelve-syllable line, and not in his favourite eight-line stanza, which, in the words of his preface to The Barons’ Wars, “both holds the time clean through to the base of the column, which is the couplet at the foot or bottom, and closeth not but with a full satisfaction to the ear for so long detention.” Yet he has mastered his unwieldy verse, and after a time, when the reader’s ear has become attuned to the melody, his at first rather strange mixture of topography, legend, and vigorous romantic flashes rolls on in a majestic course. It is a proof of the essential strength of Drayton that his most delicate work—the fairy poetry of the Nymphidia and the Nymphalls or Muses’ Elysium—belongs to his later years. He grew sweet as he mellowed.
The Satiric Poets.
A time so rich as the Elizabethan in new forms of literature could hardly fail to produce the satirist. In this case also there were Italian and, it need hardly be added, Classic models to follow, and they were followed. Satiric writing there had always been, and that inevitably, since so soon as men began to record observation at all they would see that there was much vice and folly in the world, and from this experience all satire springs. The satiric spirit abounded in the prose pamphlet literature of the time. Between this and the help afforded by the Latin models, who supplied the ready-made mould, the poetic satirists were led forward by the hand. As a class, and in so far as they were satirists, they were the least interesting body of writers of their time. It is very necessary to limit this estimate to their satires; for the four who may be mentioned here are all, for one reason or another, notable men, or even more. Lodge, without ever attaining to originality or power of the first order, was a successful writer in many kinds. Marston has a deservedly high place in our dramatic literature. Hall, though that part of his life lies outside the scope of this book, was a divine and controversialist of mark in his later years. Donne, who however belongs in the main to a later time, is one of the most enigmatical and debated, alternately one of the most attractive and most repellent, figures in English literature.
If Hall’s boast in the Prologue to his Satires—
“I first adventure, follow me who list,
And be the second English Satirist,”
is to be taken seriously, he must be supposed to have claimed the honour of leading. If so, he must also be presumed not to have known The Steel Glass of Gascoigne, an undeniable though rambling and ineffective satire, belonging to the first half of the queen’s reign. |Lodge.| He certainly ignored the earlier claim of Lodge, whose Fig for Momus appeared in 1595, two years before the first six books of Hall’s Virgidemiarum. But it may be that he wrote long before he printed, and in any case the originality is not great enough to be worth fighting over, since both were followers of Latin originals; while it appears more than probable that Marston and Donne were turning their thoughts in the same direction about the same time. In fact, the Poetic Satire was so certain to arise that many men may well have begun it together in complete independence one of another. The satire of Lodge is confessedly a mere echo of Horace.