Among the arts of English poesie, the most ample and most curious is an anonymous work.[1] The history of an anonymous book is sometimes liable to the most contradictory evidence. The present, first printed in 1589, we learn from the work itself, was in hand as early as in 1553. The author inscribed the volume to Queen Elizabeth, and the courtly critic has often adroitly addressed “the most beautiful, or rather the beauty, of queens;” and to illustrate that figure which he terms “the gorgeous,” has preserved for us some of her regal verses.

Yet notwithstanding this votive gift to royalty, the printer has formally dedicated the volume to Lord Burleigh, acknowledging that “this book came into my hands with its bare title without any author’s name.” The author himself could not have been at all concerned in delivering this work to the press, for having addressed the volume to the queen, he would never have sought for a patron in the minister.

This ambiguous author remained unknown after the publication, for Sir John Harrington, who lived in the circle of the court, designates him as “the unknown Godfather, that, this last year save one (1589), set forth a book called ‘The Arte of English Poesie.’” About twelve years afterwards, Carew, in his “Survey of Cornwall,” appears to have been the first who disclosed the writer’s name as “Master Puttenham;” but this was so little known among literary men, that three years later, in 1605, Camden only alludes to the writer as “the gentleman who proves that poets are the first politicians, the first philosophers, and the first historiographers.” Eleven years after, Edmund Bolton, in his “Hypercritica,” notices “this work (as the fame is) of one of Queen Elizabeth’s pensioners, Puttenham.” The qualifying parenthesis “as the fame is,” leaves the whole evidence in a very ticklish condition.

Who was Puttenham? A name unknown, and whose writings are unnoticed by any contemporary. Even the baptismal name of this writer has been subject to contradiction.[2]

In the work itself the writer has interspersed many allusions to himself, from his nursery to his court-days. His nurse, a right-lined ancestor of the garrulous nurse of the Capulets, had exercised his prurient faculties in expounding an indecent riddle,[3] which our mature critic still deemed “pretty;” but, according to one of his rhetorical technical terms, “it holds too much of the cachemphaton or foule speech, and may be drawn unto a reprobate sense.” Our author was a travelled gentleman, and by his residence at various courts, seems to have been connected with the corps diplomatique, for he had been present on some remarkable occasions at foreign courts, which we discover by coeval anecdotes of persons and places. One passage relating to himself requires attention. Alluding to the polished hypocrisy practised in courts, he observes:—“These and many such like disgustings we find in men’s behaviour, and specially in the courtiers of foreign countries, where in my youth I was brought up, and very well observed their manner of life and conversation; for of mine own country I have not made so great experience.”

This seems as ambiguous as any part of our author’s history, for at eighteen years of age he had addressed Edward the Sixth by “Our Eclogue of Elpine.” When he tells us that “he had not had so great experience of his own country as of others,” we may be surprised, for no contemporary writer has displayed such intimacy with the court anecdotes of England, which have studded many of his pages. Neither does the style, which bears no mark of foreign idiom, nor the collected matter of his art of poetry, which discovers a minute acquaintance with every species of English composition, preserving for us much fragmentary poetry, at all betray a stranger’s absence from home. But, what seems more extraordinary, the writer frequently alludes to learned disquisitions, critical treatises, and to dramatic compositions of his own—to “our comedy” and to “our enterlude,” and has frequent illustrations drawn from poems of all sorts and measures of his own growth. It is one of the singularities of this unknown person that his writings were numerous, and that no contemporary has ever mentioned the name of Puttenham. How are we to reconcile these discrepancies, and how account for these numberless vernacular compositions, with the condition of one who was “brought up abroad,” and who had such “little experience of his own country?” We appear to read a work composed by different persons.

The same anomalous character is attached to the work as we have discovered concerning the writer.

This “Arte of English Poesie,” which Warton observes “remained long as a rule of criticism,” and still may be consulted for its comprehensive system, its variety of poetic topics, and its contemporary historical anecdotes, is the work of a scholar, and evidently of a courtier. His scholastic learning furnished the terms of his numerous figures of rhetoric, each of which is illustrated by examples drawn from English literature; but aware that this uncouth nomenclature might deter, as he says, “the sort of readers to whom I write, too scholastical for our Makers,” as he classically calls our poets, “and more fit for clerks than for courtiers, for whose instruction this travail is taken,” our logician was cast into the dilemma of inventing English descriptions for these Greek rhetorical figures. We had no English name—“the rule might be set down, but there was no convenient name to hold it in memory.”

To familiarise the technical terms of rhetoric by substituting English descriptive ones, led to a ludicrous result. The Greek term of histeron proteron was baptised the preposterous; these are words misplaced, or, as our writer calls it, “in English proverb, the cart before the horse,” as one describing his landing on a strange coast said thus preposterously, that is, placing before what should follow—

When we had climb’d the cliff, and were ashore.