THOMAS LORD VAUX, THOMAS TUSSER, THOMAS SACKVILLE EARL OF DORSET, GEORGE GASCOIGNE, EDWARD DE VERE, ISABELLA WHITNEY
In the sixteenth century the native tradition of lyric poems builds on and away from medieval traditions of grammar and rhetoric. A line can be drawn from Skelton to Sir Thomas More, Wyatt, Lord Vaux, George Gascoigne, and then Barnabe Googe, George Turberville, Sir Walter Ralegh. (The language is so close to current English that I take the liberty of adopting modern spelling from this point onward, except where archaic forms are intended.) Here is Thomas, Lord Vaux, from a poem published by Tottel the year after his death.
My lusts they do me leave,
My fancies all be fled,
And tract of time begins to weave
Grey hairs upon my head.
For age with stealing steps
Hath clawed me with his crutch,
And lusty life away she leaps
As there had been none such.
Each stanza explores a set of figures: metaphor does not decorate but carries the argument.
The harbinger of death,
To me I see him ride;
The cough, the cold, the gasping breath
Doth bid me to provide
A pickaxe and a spade,
And eke a shrouding sheet,
A house of clay for to be made
For such a guest most meet.
A poetry austere and rich at once, true without a hint of sentiment, wise with the wisdom of a life lived in the world and not merely by the grace of literature.
These poets explore broad, generic themes of permanent significance and moral importance. Personal experience, stripped of contingency and universalized, is an ingredient. Reasonable men address reasonable readers with wit, with passion. Their structures are argumentative or cumulative, the purpose didactic, cautionary. Metaphors revive the force of allegorical figuration: they affect us as meaning on several levels, but they need not be “construed” according to an interpretative code in the way that allegorical figures do. A fashion for the Petrarchan drove native poetry underground; it resurfaces at the end of the century in another form.
Bad native poetry is immediately recognizable. It has nothing to hide behind. The most obvious is the “useful,” or “instrumental,” poem. Thomas Tusser’s Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557) is full of instruction on farming, housekeeping and gardening, charming we may think at first, but soon tedious and flat: Rudyard Kipling made an edition of this “serviceable” verse; contemporary poets like C. H. Sisson enjoy it because the age’s customs and habits are unfolded before our eyes from the irregular little pleats of Tusser’s couplets. Bad in another way is the queen’s cousin Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset’s “Induction” and “The Complaint of Buckingham” for The Mirror for Magistrates (1563 edition)—one of the most popular volumes of the time, printed and reprinted, revised and re-revised—and his (assumed) contributions to the last two acts of Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc. Verbose, labored, he is mechanical in unpacking the nuances of conventional metaphor. If Tusser charms with awkward aphorisms, Sackville is merely pedantic. The fall of Troy provides him with a tremendous, conventional canvas. What’s Hecuba to him?
Not worthy Hector, worthiest of them all,
Her hope, her joy; his force is now for nought.
O Troy, Troy, Troy, there is no boot but bale;
The hugy horse within thy walls is brought;
Thy turrets fall, thy knights, that whilom fought
In arms amid the field, are slain in bed,
Thy gods defiled and all thy honour dead.
The closing couplet is not remote in cadence from Pope’s in “Eloise to Abelard”: a moment of prosodic definition in a standard mess of language. Sackville, like Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote verse early and fell silent in later life. Wyatt, Surrey and Sidney died young. Lyric poetry was a young man’s art. Here is the plain, figurative, logical, wonderful voice of the young Edward de Vere:
Were I a king, I could command content;
Were I obscure, hidden should be my cares;
Or were I dead, no cares should me torment,
Nor hopes, nor hates, nor loves, nor griefs, nor fears.
A doubtful choice, of these three which to crave,
A kingdom, or a cottage, or a grave.
Plain diction, general equivalence between metrical and syntactical units. It declares, a verse of bold subtlety, choosing characteristic detail, universal images, and is uninterested in the nuanced concreteness of image, the tentativeness of feelings. The native style at its best beguiles because it is clear in intention and lucid in execution.
Isabella Whitney, the first woman to publish a volume of her verses, A Sweet Nosegay or Pleasant Posy, Containing a Hundred and Ten Philosophical Flowers (1573), flourished in the decade after 1565. She adopted the plain style with prosaic confidence and a kind of tripping energy that tends to fall over its feet in its eagerness to close a rhyme. Her fictional “Wyll and Testament: on having to leave London” is less predictable and derivative than her aphoristic, Senecan Philosophical Flowers: a lively doggerel, almost rising to satire.
George Gascoigne exemplifies the plain style as no one else does, and because he is a “transitional poet” (falling between the stools of “silver” and “golden” poets, between Wyatt and Spenser, between the first and second halves of the century) he is often forgotten.
My worthy Lord, I pray you wonder not
To see your woodman shoot so oft awry,
Nor that he stands amazèd like a sot
And lets the harmless deer, unhurt, go by.
His neglect is one of the not uncommon outrages in English poetry: Donne and Herbert were overlooked and misvalued for centuries; Smart and Cowper are only now being brushed down. Gascoigne for centuries has been more a footnote than part of the living text. He deserves as much celebrity at least as Surrey, as Ralegh—maybe even as Sidney.
The American poet Yvor Winters considers Gascoigne to be “one of the great masters of the short poem in the century.” Winters loves “sentence” in poetry: the concise, sometimes aphoristic expression of general truths (taken to excess “sentence” becomes “sententious”). Gascoigne’s best poems are extraordinarily good. No wonder he was among Ralegh’s favorites. Ben Jonson admired him, and Shakespeare was touched by him: there are echoes in the language of the plays. He takes up the original qualities of Wyatt—and his vices, especially facile wordplay and poulter’s measure, which he puts to good use. He advances the native tradition, occasionally dusted but ungilded by Italian influences. He advances it because he understands it.
Born in 1530 in Cardington, Bedfordshire, George was descended from Sir William Gascoigne, Henry IV’s chief justice. His father, Sir John, was a man of substance. Gascoigne studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1555 entered Gray’s Inn, London and represented Bedfordshire in parliament. At Gray’s Inn he produced two plays. One, Supposes, out of Ariosto’s Suppositi, is probably our first English prose comedy. It provides Shakespeare with the subplot of The Taming of the Shrew. The other is a translation of an Italian version of Euripides, the first classical Greek play to appear on the English stage.
A prodigal, Gascoigne was disinherited. To mend his finances, and perhaps for love, he married in 1562 Elizabeth Breton, a widow and the mother of the poet Nicholas Breton. Debt continued to dog him. He fled from his creditors to Holland, where he served the Prince of Orange (1572–74) and was imprisoned by the Spanish and released. On his return to England he discovered that some of his poems had been issued in unauthorized versions—not by a predecessor I would acknowledge. Printers and publishers have been scrupulous (for the most part) with the living, whatever liberties they have taken with the dead. He contacted another printer and together they published authorized versions in the laboriously entitled An Hundred Sundrie Floures bound up in one Poesie. This included the first linked sonnet sequence in English (an example of the form is “Gascoigne’s Memories IV”) and the prose narrative The Adventures of Master F. J., which, if not translated from an Italian original, has claims to being the first English “novel,” or roman à clef. In 1575 he issued The Posies, in which he scored another first by including “Certain Notes of Instruction,” a treatise on the writing of English verse derived from Ronsard’s 1565 treatise. James I (James VI of Scotland) later based his Reulis and Cautelis of Scottish Poesie on it.
The next year Gascoigne produced The Glass of Government (a “prodigal son” play) and The Steele Glass, the first use of blank verse for nondramatic original composition. His Complaint of Philomene, also in 1576, set the pattern of Ovidian narrative verse that Shakespeare follows in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. When he died in 1577, he had been an MP, courtier, soldier, farmer, writer and friend of writers, including Spenser. He has as many “firsts” to his credit in poetry as Christopher Columbus does in geography. Yet by his own account, especially in “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship” and “The Green Knight’s Farewell to Fancy,” he failed in all he attempted.
In his time he was not regarded as a failure. Indeed he was the best-known writer of his day. The Steele Glass, a satire on the debasing effect of Italian manners in England, provoked Ralegh’s first surviving poem. His plain-speaking style appealed widely. Yvor Winters calls it “almost an affectation of plainness, even of brusqueness.” His “I” talks in the diction of the day (“like a sot”); it is not refined like the constructed “I” of polite writers. Gascoigne makes no secret of his circumstances, incompetence and failure; he plays them up, jokingly exaggerates them. There’s candor in his confessions, without the self-pity and self-regard of Hoccleve’s heart-on-sleevery or the poised disappointment, moaning and bellyaching of Wyatt and Surrey.
An advantage of a plain style is that good poems stand out from bad; no figured veil obscures the faults. And from the weak poems good passages float free with the force of aphorism:
If so thy wife be too, too fair of face,
It draws one guest too many to thine inn;
If she be foul, and foilèd with disgrace,
In other pillows prickst thou many a pin.
The thought is commonplace; but tone, diction, conciseness bring the commonplace to life. What is good in Gascoigne, and there is considerable and varied good, has an abrupt clarity and a positive verbal impact.
Elegy—serious and satirical—is his natural mode. He memorializes failure and loss in a tone without resignation. An almost physical sense of the material reality and the desirability of what he has lost or failed in is captured in the accentual and alliterative lines of his “native” poems. His most delicate achievement is his humor: bittersweet without burlesque, without loss of poetic seriousness.
In “Certain Notes of Instruction” Gascoigne emphasizes poetic “invention”: find the right word or phrase to illustrate and amplify; avoid “trita et obvia,” the merely conventional and familiar. Verbal discovery, surprise: he revives convention in new structures, new metaphors. The alliteration that binds many poems together produces, not the archaic effect we might expect, but a colloquial tone, a sense of unrefinement. In writing about failure his mastery is clearest. “The Lullaby of a Lover,” who puts his youth, his eyes, his will, his sex, to sleep, is in metrical verse, heightened by alliteration and assonance. Here he sings his youth to sleep:
First lullaby my youthful years;
It is now time to go to bed,
For crooked age and hoary hairs
Have won the haven within my head.
With lullaby, then, youth be still;
With lullaby content thy will;
Since courage quails and comes behind,
Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind.
He advances naturally, from image to image. Other poems, for instance the religious “Gascoigne’s Good Morrow,” are less alive, accumulating imagery, repeating a theme, but not developing a poetic argument.
In “Gascoigne’s Memories III” he celebrates spiritual and material failure:
Is this Thomas Tusser at court, proffering the hackneyed advice he could not follow himself? It’s similar in kind, yet different in effect. One begins to hear, not fancifully I think, the tones of the Ben Jonson of Timber, even suggestions of the colloquial Shakespeare.
In “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship” he confesses to his lord that he has failed in hunting, philosophy, everything. He is luckless, ill-starred. A quiet, persistent line of satire accompanies his confession: he is not the sole object of his irony. “The Green Knight’s Farewell to Fancy” shows him at his most accomplished. Another account of failures, it is his most original and witty production. Here he gardens:
To plant strange country fruits, to sow such seeds likewise,
To dig and delve for new found roots, where old might well suffice;
To prune the water-boughs, to pick the mossy trees—
Oh, how it pleased my fancy once! to kneel upon my knees,
To graft a pippin stock when sap begins to swell;
But since the gains scarce quite the cost, Fancy (quoth he) farewell.
The “Green Knight” is a version of Gascoigne: the visor does not hide him. His one hope is divine grace, for on earth he is doomed, in each vocation, to fail. Coming to Gascoigne after reading Surrey is like stepping out of a library into the wide open air, a thoroughly English air. Only he could have written off his own Muse so disarmingly, and only a dull reader would believe him:
A fancy fed me once, to write in verse and rhyme,
To wray my grief, to crave reward, to cover still my crime:
To frame a long discourse, on stirring of a straw,
To rumble rhyme in raff and ruff, yet all not worth a haw:
To hear it said there goeth, the man that writes so well,
But since I see, what poets be, Fancy (quoth he) farewell.