Amadis de Gaul. 70. No edition of Amadis de Gaul has been proved to exist before that printed at Seville in 1519, which yet is suspected of not being the first.[612] This famous romance, which in its day was almost as popular as the Orlando Furioso itself, was translated into French by Herberay between 1540 and 1557, and into English by Munday in 1619. The four books by Vasco de Lobeyra grew to twenty by successive additions, which have been held by lovers of romance far inferior to the original. They deserve at least the blame, or praise, of making the entire work unreadable by the most patient or the most idle of mankind. Amadis de Gaul can still perhaps impart pleasure to the susceptible imagination of youth; but the want of deep or permanent sympathy leaves a naked sense of unprofitableness in the perusal, which must, it should seem, alienate a reader of mature years. Amadis at least obtained the laurel at the hands of Cervantes, speaking through the barber and curate, while so many of Lobeyra’s unworthy imitators were condemned to the flames.
[612] Brunet, Man. du Libraire.
Gringore. 71. A curious dramatic performance, if it may deserve such an appellation, was represented at Paris in 1511, and published in 1516. It is entitled Le Prince des Sots et la Mère sotte, by one Peter Gringore, who had before produced some other pieces of less note, and bordering more closely on the moralities. In the general idea there was nothing original. A prince of fools had long ruled his many-coloured subjects on the theatre of a joyous company, les Enfans sans souci, who had diverted the citizens of Paris with their buffoonery, under the name, perhaps, of moralities, while their graver brethren represented the mysteries of scripture and legend. But the chief aim of La Mère sotte was to turn the pope and court of Rome into ridicule during the sharp contest of Louis XII. with Julius II. It consists of four parts, all in verse. The first of these is called The Cry, and serves as a sort of prologue, summoning all fools of both sexes to see the prince of fools play on Shrove Tuesday. The second is The Folly. This is an irregular dramatic piece, full of poignant satire on the clergy, but especially on the pope. A third part is entitled The Morality of the Obstinate Man; a dialogue in allusion to the same dispute. Finally comes an indecent farce, unconnected with the preceding subject. Gringore, who represented the character of La Mère sotte, was generally known by that name, and assumed it in his subsequent publications.[613]
[613] Beauchamps, Recherches sur le Théâtre Français. Goujet, Bibl. Française, xi. 212. Niceron, vol. xxxiv. Bouterwek, Gesch. der Französen Poesie, v. 113. Biogr. Univers. The works of Gringore, says the last authority, are rare, and sought by the lovers of our old poetry, because they display the state of manners at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Hans Sachs. 72. Gringore was certainly at a great distance from the Italian stage, which had successfully adapted the plots of Latin comedies to modern stories. But, among the barbarians, a dramatic writer, somewhat younger than he, was now beginning to earn a respectable celebrity, though limited to a yet uncultivated language, and to the inferior class of society. Hans Sachs, a shoemaker of Nuremberg, born in 1494, is said to have produced his first carnival play (Fast nacht spiel) in 1517. He belonged to the fraternity of poetical artizans, the meister-singers of Germany, who, from the beginning of the fourteenth century, had a succession of mechanical (in every sense of the word) rhymers to boast, to whom their countrymen attached as much reverence as might have sufficed for more genuine bards. In a spirit which might naturally be expected from artizans, they required a punctual observance of certain arbitrary canons, the by-laws of the corporation Muses, to which the poet must conform. These, however, did not diminish the fecundity, if they repressed the excursiveness, of our meister-singers, and least of all that of Hans Sachs himself, who poured forth, in about forty years, fifty-three sacred and seventy-eight profane plays, sixty-four farces, fifty-nine fables, and a large assortment of other poetry. These dramatic works are now scarce, even in Germany; they appear to be ranged in the same class as the early fruits of the French and English theatres. We shall mention Hans Sachs again in another chapter.[614]
[614] Biogr. Univ. Eichhorn, iii. 948. Bouterwek, ix. 381. Heinsius, iv. 150. Retrospective Review, vol. x.
Stephen Hawes. 73. No English poet, since the death of Lydgate, had arisen whom it could be thought worth while to mention.[615] Many, perhaps, will not admit that Stephen Hawes, who now meets us, should be reckoned in that honourable list. His “Pastime of Pleasure, or the Historie of Graunde Amour and La bel Pucel,” finished in 1506, was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1517. From this title we might hardly expect a moral and learned allegory, in which the seven sciences of the trivium and quadrivium, besides a host of abstract virtues and qualities, play their parts in living personality, through a poem of about six thousand lines. Those who require the ardent words or the harmonious grace of poetical diction, will not frequently be content with Hawes. Unlike many of our older versifiers, he would be judged more unfavourably by extracts than by a general view of his long work. He is rude, obscure, full of pedantic latinisms, and probably has been disfigured in the press; but learned and philosophical, reminding us frequently of the school of James I. The best, though probably an unexpected, parallel for Hawes is John Bunyan; their inventions are of the same class, various and novel, though with no remarkable pertinence to the leading subject, or naturally consecutive order; their characters, though abstract in name, have a personal truth about them, in which Phineas Fletcher, a century after Hawes, fell much below him; they render the general allegory subservient to inculcating a system, the one of philosophy, the other of religion. I do not mean that the Pastime of Pleasure is equal in merit, as it certainly has not been in success, to the Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan is powerful and picturesque from his concise simplicity; Hawes has the common failings of our old writers, a tedious and languid diffuseness, an expatiating on themes of pedantry in which the reader takes no interest, a weakening of every feature and every reflection by ignorance of the touches that give effect. But if we consider the Historie of Graunde Amour less as a poem to be read than as a measure of the author’s mental power, we shall not look down upon so long and well-sustained an allegory. In this style of poetry much was required, that no mind ill stored with reflection, or incapable of novel combination, could supply; a clear conception of abstract modes, a familiarity with the human mind, and with the effects of its qualities on human life, a power of justly perceiving and vividly representing the analogies of sensible and rational objects. Few that preceded Hawes have possessed more of these gifts than himself.
[615] I have adverted in another place to Alexander Barclay’s translation of the Ship of Fools from Sebastian Brandt; and I may here observe, that he has added many original strokes on his own countrymen, especially on the clergy.
74. This poem has been little known till Mr. Southey reprinted it in 1831; the original edition is very rare. Warton had given several extracts, which, as I have observed, are disadvantageous to Hawes, and an analysis of the whole;[616] but though he praises the author for imagination, and admits that the poem has been unjustly neglected, he has not dwelt enough on the erudition and reflection it displays. Hawes appears to have been educated at Oxford, and to have travelled much on the Continent. He held also an office in the court of Henry VII. We may reckon him therefore among the earliest of our learned and accomplished gentlemen; and his poem is the first-fruits of that gradual ripening of the English mind, which must have been the process of the laboratory of time, in the silence and darkness of the fifteenth century. It augured a generation of grave and stern thinkers, and the omen was not vain.
[616] Hist. of Engl. Poetry, iii. 54.