The Columbia History of British Poetry (39 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 163
Jove slyly stealing from his sister's bed,
To dally with Idalian Ganymed,
And for his love Europa, bellowing loud,
And tumbling with the Rainbow in a cloud:
Blood-quaffing Mars, heaving the iron net,
Which limping Vulcan and his Cyclops set:
Love kindling fire, to burn such towns as Troy,
Sylvanus weeping for the lovely boy
That now is turn'd into a cypress tree,
Under whose shade the Wood-gods love to be.
The two protagonists are introduced in contrasting fashion. Hero is presented first in terms of her marvelous attire and second in terms of her effect on otherson gods, on nature, and on men who simply think on her and diewhile Leander is presented in all his natural beauty. On seeing Hero, Leander is instantaneously enamored, and he sets out at once to woo her like a "bold sharp sophister," employing the rhetoric extolled by humanists but here in the cause of seduction: "Honour is purchased by the deeds we do." Having been won by his "deceptive" rhetoric, Hero awaits her lover, who arrives at her turret "feeble, faint and wan" from swimming the Hellespont, which separates the city of Sestos from Abydos. The initial responses of the two are described in slightly mocking fashion, but the consummation is set forth in cosmic terms: ''this strife . . . (like that which made the world) another world begat / Of unknown joy."
The poet provides two analogous digressionsNeptune's attempt to woo Leander, now almost drowned, and Mercury's wooing of a country maid, an inverted
pastourelle
in that the god substitutes eloquence for "brutish force"; there are many etiological conceits explaining in short compass why, for example, the moon is pale or half the world is black. Throughout the two sestiads that make up Marlowe's contribution to the poem, his technique is to display his powers of invention as he ranges through the various arts for witty comparisons. It is a technique designed to compel admiration, and as the echoes and imitations of the poem indicate, it did so admirably. In 1598 George Chapman, impelled by a "strange instigation," added four more sestiads to complete the story, the long extension accounted for by his admitted reluctance to reach the tragic ending.
Within a year of the publication of
Venus and Adonis
, a conspicuous imitation was entered in the Stationers' Registerthe official record
 
Page 164
maintained by London printers and publishers to ensure their rights to print or sell books. Entitled
Oenone and Paris
, the poem appeared in 1594 with the dedication announcing it as the "maidenhead" of the author's pen, paralleling Shakespeare's reference to Venus and Adonis as the "first heir of his invention." This is signed only with the initials
T. H.
, and the (apparently) single extant copy, now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, lacks a title page. Not until the twentieth century was its relation to
Venus and Adonis
noted and its attribution to the dramatist Thomas Heywood suggested.
T. H. turns not to Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, as Shakespeare had done for his material, but rather to the
Heroides
for the account of Oenone, a nymph on Mount Ida who h ad been wooed and won by Paris before his fatal judgment and his reward of Helen as the most beautiful woman in the world. The poem is largely dialoguefirst the deserted Oenone's complaint and then Paris's jaunty response. Paris excuses himself on the grounds of the omnipotence of Cupid, which causes even the gods to take on "sundry shapes" for amorous endsa passage showing that the poet knew Marlowe's epyllion as well as Shakespeare's, although he opts for the sixain form of
Venus and Adonis
.
During the 1590s poets began to look to their work in a quite professional way, relying still on patronage but also increasingly on publication. This development explains in part the rise to popularity of certain genres. Michael Drayton, almost an exact contemporary of Shakespeare and Marlowe, illustrates one such professional response to literary trends. Perhaps as early as 1593 and 1594 he produced two examples of the complaint form now fashionably imbued with the erotic, each carrying the title of its protagonist. The first of these offered the novelty of a male protagonist, Piers Gavestonthe favorite of Edward IIwho had recently figured in Marlowe's history play on the romantically smitten sovereign. Although indebted to Marlowe's play both for language and interpretation, Drayton also used historical sources in what became his characteristic practice. In the second complaint the novel element was the selection not of a fallen but of a chaste heroine, Matilda the fair, who, resisting the blandishments of King John, is poisoned for her virtue.
Given his susceptibility to poetic fashions, Drayton also essayed his skill in the epyllion
Endymion and Phoebe
, published in 1595. A novel element here is the emphasis on the pastoral locale of Mount Latmus, a locale that is presented not in the naturalistic fashion of
Venus and
 
Page 165
Adonis
but in the more typical Elizabethan manner of highlighting its artificeit appears as a tapestried gallery trailing "clustered grapes" and "golden citrons," its silver sands strewed with pearl, and its birds tuning their ''small recorders" to their loves. Here the chaste goddess, disguised as a nymph, woos the disdainful shepherd boy, disdainful because he is sworn servant to the goddess and to virginity. Given the unpredictable nature of love, Endymion in due course becomes the wooer; he is later transported to the sphere of the moon, where he learns of numerical mysteries which the poet, his muse now wearied, does not explain.
Drayton's best claim to a novel workwhich also proved to be his most popular, with many editions during his lifetimewas
England's Heroical Epistles
(15971631). This, too, took its point of departure from the
Mirror for Magistrates
in that the aristocratic subjects are all British, but its form derives from the
Heroides
. Written in well-articulated couplets, which anticipate the later closed form with its abundant use of antitheses, Drayton's paired letters project both an immediate and a retrospective situation, with each pair of letters becoming, as it were, a miniature drama seen from the vantage point of the two protagonists. Thus in the exchange between Rosamond and King Henry the heroine admits her error and applies the image of her "strayed" youth to her present situation: "Only a clue doth guide me out and in / But yet still walk I circular in sin." The king, in contrast, recites a litany of ills attending his lofty state to excuse his action: "Is one beauty thought so great a thing / To mitigate the sorrows of a king?"
In terms of literary influence, Drayton's two
Epistles
between the earl of Surrey and the Lady Geraldine were the most important of the series, the first one appearing in 1598 and the second in 1599. Lacking historical verification, the romantic connection between one of Henry VIII's courtly makers and the youthful heroine was nonetheless to compel acceptance for two centuries. Surrey's poetic achievement as recorded in Tottel's
Miscellany
in 1557 had made him a significant figure to the Elizabethans, and although only one of his sonnets (which Drayton quotes in part in his annotations) links him directly to the lady, their relationship became widely established as fact. In 1594 it was buttressed by Thomas Nashe in his picaresque novel
The Unfortunate Traveller
, where Nashe offers a boisterous account of Surrey's (fictitious) Italian travels, including his defense of Geraldine at a tournament in Florence. Coupled with Surrey's sonnet and a reference in Holinshed's
Chronicles
,
 
Page 166
Nashe's account led Drayton, like other of his contemporariesand, it may be said, later readersto accept the romance as true.
Drayton's interest in historical sources, attested by his Piers Gaveston, prompted him in 1596 to publish the
Mortimeriados
a long narrative poem on the civil wars of Edward II. The poem incorporates a number of genre trends, among them the epic, including such devices as the invocation to the muses, battle scenes, and catalogues of the main contenders. Although the conventional intrusion of Fortune is acknowledged, Drayton emphasizes the heroic, even hubristic, nature of his titular figure: "To Mortimer all countries are his own." He is seen as a "mighty malcontent"a character type, reflecting social tensions of the time, that became increasingly prominent in the literature of the 1590s. But Mortimer is also presented as the queen's lover, whose opposition to the king and daring escape from the Tower are shown in both a political and a romantic context. In 1603 Drayton revised the poem as
The Barons' Wars
, making it more historical and lessening the romantic aspects, with a consequent diminution of its most winning qualities.
Witness to his revisionist urge is Drayton's altering the verse from rime royal to ottava rimaa stanza form (
a b a b a b c c
) that he considered well proportioned, with the couplet providing a proper closure. This endorsement of the ottava form shows the impact perhaps of Daniel's
Civil Wars
but certainly of the two most popular Italian epics, Ariosto's
Orlando Furioso
and Tasso's
Jerusalem Delivered
, translated, respectively, by John Harington in 1591 and by Edward Fairfax in 1600.
Whether the epyllion seemed too focused on aesthetic and therefore pleasurable concerns, or whether it seemed altogether too frivolous for serious readers, by the mid-1590s discordantor at least differentelements begin to intrude. This can be seen, for example, in Drayton's
Endymion and Phoebe
, where the poet makes a tentative approach to something mystical at the conclusion and then leaves off because of his wearied muse. That same year George Chapman, in his uniquely bizarre fashion, attempted to add intellectual depth to his epyllion
Ovid's Banquet of Sense
, selecting for his narrative not a mythological subject but the purported relationship of the Emperor Augustus's daughter, Julia (here called Corynna), with the most wanton of poets.
The slight narrative simply records Ovid's secret spying of Corynna as she is bathing, playing upon her lute, and singing; this permits him to register the responses of his senses, presented in no accepted hierar-
 
Page 167
chial order but beginning with hearing and breaking off with touch (and an explanatory Latin gloss). One of Chapman's concerns is to render a verbal equivalent for each sensory response; a second is to elevate that response to a spiritual or intellectual level. Although elements of the erotic genre he has adopted jar at times with his serious approach, Chapman can introduce splendid imagesas in his description of Corynna in a loose robe of tinsel: "The downward-burning flame, / Of her rich hair did threaten new access, / Of ven'trous Phaeton to scorch the fields." Each of these sensory responses is described in highly charged erotic language interwoven with Neoplatonic ideas, so that twentieth-century critics have diversely viewed the poem as a sensual debauch or a spiritual epiphany.
Another epyllion-related poem with a serious import, at least in the view of some twentieth-century interpreters, is John Davies's
Orchestra or a Poem of Dancing
(1596). Written by a young lawyer at the Middle Temple in the space of fifteen days, its sportive nature was acknowledged by two of his contemporaries, one of whom called it a "caper" and the other a "rhetorical trick." The description in each case is fitting, since the author's single technique throughout the poem's nearly one thousand lines is to exploit the device of amplification. The result is that the entire cosmos, as well as everything in it, is said to dancethe heavens, the elements, extending even to the laws of commonwealths and the affairs of men. The only exception to this, Davies says, is the Earth, but taking cognizance of the relatively recent heliocentric theory, he allows that some learned men would deny even that:
Only the Earth doth stand for ever still,
   Her rocks remove not, nor her mountains meet,
(Although some wits enricht with learning's skill
   Say heav'n stands firm, and that the Earth doth fleet
   And swiftly turneth underneath their feet);
Yet though the Earth is ever steadfast seen,
On her broad breast hath Dancing ever been.
The intent of this amplificationthe many analogies and their elaborations-as with other poets was to compel admiration, the dressing out of the poem's "fine invention" demonstrating its author's ingenuity and cleverness. One such instance is the account of the way rivers dance:

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