selves nevertheless provided subject matter for writers in a number of other genrescomplaints, tragic legends (''mirror" poems), chronicle history plays, and versified histories. Although the handling of verse in the
Mirror
much of it in the seven-line rime-royal stanza of Chaucer's
Troilus and Criseyde
was often less than effective, the metrical form established the general pattern for later writers of complaints.
|
Acknowledged as novel at the time, the "Induction" to Thomas Sackville's complaint of Henry, duke of Buckingham (written in 1561 and included in the 1563 edition of the
Mirror
) is of a different literary order from the other accounts. Sackville, too, uses rime royal, butinfluenced by Virgil and Dantehe presents a dramatic setting with a descent into hell, where the poet encounters a range of figures, some of them abstractions, like Revenge, others worthies of history, like Alexander and Caesar, who once had been at the summit of Fortune's wheel. The figures are as sharply delineated as in a woodcut, and the verse is smoothly sustained. Also in 1561, Sackville (with Thomas Norton, later known as the "Rackmaster General" for his persecution of religious dissenters) applied the moral lessons of the
Mirror
in writing the first regular English tragedy,
Gorbuduc
; the two works signaled the end of his literary career at the age of twenty-five.
|
Another instance of a literary work stemming from the 1560s more notable for its literary influence than for its reputation is the long poem on Romeo and Juliet by the young Arthur Brooke, who drowned in 1563, the year of its publication. Brooke's narrative was derived from a French version, based in turn on an Italian source, but his own handling of matter, character, and language proved so suggestive that, it is generally acknowledged, Shakespeare recalled the work almost verbatim, or worked on his tragedy with a copy of the text at hand. Written in a popular verse form of the time, poulter's measurerhymed couplets of alternating twelve-and fourteen-syllable lines broken by caesurasBrooke's poem was also popular. A third edition appeared in 1587, the same year Christopher Marlowe was to mock the "jigging veins of riming mother wits" and introduce his mighty line with Part I of
Tamburlaine
.
|
In accord with a thematic emphasis drawn from the
Mirror
tradition, Brooke places his narrative in the context of Fortune's roleconstant in nothing save inconstancyalluding to her intervention some forty times. He also elaborates his characters, most memorably Juliet's nurse, and despite the heavy moralizing address to the reader, treats the lovers'
|
|
