"I see the serpent vile, that lurks under the green, How subtilly he shrouds himself that he may not be seen : And yet his foster'd bane his leering looks bewray. Wo worth the wily heads that seeks the simple man's decay! Wo worth the feigning looks on favour that do wait! All worldly wily heads that seeks the simple man's decay!" His coadjutors are equally miserable and indignant against wrong-doing. W. Hunnis is eloquent in lover's melancholy: he repents the folly of misplaced affection and misspent youth: he compares himself to a dove on a leafless branch weeping and wailing and tearing its breast: finding no joy in life he desires death. He is no less unhappy in his notions of friendship. Thomas, Lord Vaux, several of whose pieces had appeared in Tottell's Miscellany, is also a sorrowful singer and Jasper Heywood, Francis Kinwelmarsh, Sands, F. M., and Richard Hill, are all laid under contribution for poems of a grave or lugubrious cast. The liveliest of the company is Edward, Earl of Oxford. indeed, bewails the loss of his good name, and cries for help to gods, saints, sprites, powers, and howling hounds of hell; writes of rejected loves and unattained desires, of trickling tears and irremediable pensiveness. But his wounds are obviously shallow. The sprightly verses on a reply given by Desire have more of his heart in them :— "The lively lark did stretch her wing I went abroad to take the air, Clad in carnation colour fair. He also, I did salute the youthful wight; Desire I did desire to stay, Awhile with him I craved talk : The courteous wight said me no nay, What thing did please and what did pain. He smiled and thus he answered me : Than for to see another man The thing desired to obtain. No joy no greater too than this Than to enjoy what others miss. VIII. GEORGE GASCOIGNE (1525-1577). Within the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign another novelty was added to the drama. In 1566, George Gascoigne translated from Ariosto, for representation at Gray's Inn, the prose comedy Gli-Suppositi. This, acted under the title of "The Supposes," is the first comedy written in English prose, and in plot, situation, and character, it approaches nearer than "Damon and Pythias" to the established type of English comedy. One great tribute to its excellence is the use made of its plot and its situations by Shakespeare: the underplot in the "Taming of the Shrew" is an adaptation of the plot of "The Supposes," and a great many of the situations or relations between the various characters might be paralleled from Shakespeare's comedies. George Gascoigne, "soldier and poet" as he loved to describe himself, was the most versatile writer belonging to the first half of Elizabeth's reign; and contrived to anticipate more than one of the forms of composition in which the later Elizabethans achieved their fame. Few writers can claim a more varied list of literary exploits. Besides his prose comedy, he translated from the Italian of Bandello the prose tale of "Jeronimi," perhaps the first novel printed in English wrote the mock-heroic poem of "Dan Bartholomew," our first attempt to rival the mock-heroic poetry of the Italians: wrote three acts of "Jocasta," the first adaptation of a Greek tragedy performed on the English stage: prepared masques for Queen Elizabeth: composed in prose a dull "tragical comedy" "The Glass of Government:" and wrote the "Steel Glass," the first extensive English satire. His personal history is not without interest. It affords a touching example of middle-age rendered miserable by thoughtless youth. When he went up from Cambridge to the Inns of Court, a vigorous, enthusiastic young fellow, "well-born, tenderly fostered, and delicately accompanied," he was ready to join friends and companions in any excitement, animal or intellectual. One of his earliest adventures in London was a temporary imprisonment during the year 1548, on a charge of dicing and other disreputable practices. Entering into the fashion of the time, he wrote love-verses whose coarse boisterous humour was warmly resented by the graver sort when first they appeared in print. Aspiring to political distinction, he sat as a burgess for Bedford during the reign of Mary. When play-writing became the rage, he at once figured in the front of play-wrights. Before this, having impaired his estate by his extravagance, and being disinherited as a prodigal son, he had sought to retrieve his fortunes by marrying a rich widow; but either the money was tied up from him for behoof of the lady's children by her former husband, or he got it into his hands and ran through it before 1572, for at that date he endeavoured to gain admission into Parliament as burgess for Midhurst, and was defeated by formal objections, which represented him as being a slanderous rhymer, a notorious ruffian, an atheist, a manslaughterer, and an extensive debtor lurking about in fear of apprehension, and seeking admission to Parliament that he might be able to defy his creditors. It may have been this last ignoble motive, if not the motive of retrieving his name by brave achievements, that induced him to cross over to Holland and seek a commission under the Prince of Orange. After his return from Holland in 1573, he made shift to live by his pen. He was now well on to fifty, harassed by debt, met on all sides with cold looks, bitterly regretful of the mad follies of his youth. During his absence, some of his questionable poesies had been printed, and were read with indignation by the guardians of public morality. Soon after his return, in 1575, he issued an edition of his works under the title of 'Flowers, Herbs, and Weeds.' In a prefatory epistle to "reverend divines," he apologises humbly but with some bitterness for the faults of his youth; and out of deference to them reprints his youthful effusions in a purified form, and with the self-accusing title of "weeds." There is a bitterness in all his later compositions. He often writes as if experience had taught him that he must not speak evil of dignitaries, while he chafed against the enforced restraint; in the tone of his protestations of respect, he betrayed a somewhat savage sense of the injustice done him by merciless remembrance of his misspent youth. Poor man he might have written well if the world had gone pleasantly with him, but he was disconcerted and embittered by coldness and suspicion. Yet he was not wholly without countenance and patronage. Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton was a steady friend to him, and might have secured him preferment had he not himself fallen into disgrace. He was asked by the Earl of Leicester to help in the pageants for the entertainment of Elizabeth in the famous reception at Kenilworth. Still his poems have a consistent tinge of gloom. In the epistle dedicatory to his "Steel Glass" (1576), he records how he was "derided, suspected, accused, and condemned; yea, more than that, vigorously rejected when he proffered amends for his harm." "The Drum of Doomsday," "The view of Worldly Vanities," "The Shame of Sin," "The Needle's Eye," " Remedies against the Bitterness of Death," " A Delicate Diet for Dainty-mouthed Drunkards," "The Grief of Joy," "The Griefs or Discommodities of Lusty Youth," "The Vanities of Beauty," "The Faults of Force and Strength," "The Vanities of Activities," are the significantly cheerless titles and sub-titles of his last productions. He died at Stamford towards the end of 1577. Not that Gascoigne was a man of first-rate genius. He never would have been anything higher than a versatile master of verse. But his energy was prodigious; and the career of such energy is always an interesting spectacle. Some of the precepts in his "Notes of Instruction" in verse-making may be put in evidence regarding his qualifications as a poet. The most suggestive is his advice to young poets in search of rhyme-"When you have set down your first verse, take the last word thereof, and count over all the words of the self-same sound by order of the alphabet." Another sound practical advice is to use as few polysyllables as possible; first, because the most ancient English words are of one syllable, but also because "words of one syllable will more easily fall to be short or long as occasion requireth." Characteristic of his own clearness and vigour is his advice to study perspicuity, to abstain from Latin inversions, to be sparing of poetical licences, and to avoid. commonplaces. It is remarkable also that he enunciates a principle which is sometimes spoken of as being of later growth-"Remember to place every word in his natural emphasis or sound, that is to say, in such wise, and with such length or shortness, elevation or depression of syllables as it is commonly pronounced and used." He also lays down a strict rule of cæsura. The "Jocasta," an adaptation from the "Phoenissæ" of Euripides, contains some powerful situations, but they are lost in the mass of tedious narrative dialogue. The blank verse has every appearance of having been patched up hurriedly. One of the best passages is the interchange of defiance between Etiocles and Polynices in the presence of 1 Reprinted by Mr Arber along with the "Steel Glass" and the "Complaint of Philomene." |