Sirs, see that my harnesse, my tergat, and my shield, That I might therwith dimme mine enimies sight; I would have it cast beames as fast, I tell you playne, As doth the glittryng grasse after a showre of raine. And see that in case I shoulde neede to come to arming, All things may be ready at a minutes warning; For such chaunce may chaunce in an houre, do ye heare? M. M. As perchance shall not chaunce againe in seven yeare. R. R. Now draw we neare to hir, and here what shall be sayde. M. M. But I woulde not have you make hir too muche afrayde. R. R. Well founde! sweete wife (I trust) for al this your soure looke. C. C. Wife, why cal ye me wife? S. S. Wife? this gear goth acrook. M. M. Nay, mistresse Custance, I warrant you our letter weene. C. C. I did not refuse hym for the letters sake. Yet his ryng and tokens he sent, keepe safe with ye. Come in with me Sym Suresby to take some repast. S. S. I must, ere I drinke, by your leave, goe in all hast, To a place or two, with earnest letters of his. C. C. Then come drink here with me. S. S. I thank you. C. C. Do not misse. You shall have a token to your maister with you. S. S. No tokens this time, gramercies. God be with you. [Exeat. C. C. Surely this fellowe misdeemeth some yll in me ; Which thing but God helpe, will go neere to spill me. R. R. Yea, farewell fellow, and tell thy maister Goodlucke That he commeth to late of thys blossome to plucke. Let him keepe him there still, or at least wise make no hast, As for his labour hither he shall spende in wast. His betters be in place nowe. M. M. As long as it will hold. C. C. I will be even with thee, thou beast; Thou mayest be bolde. R. R. Will ye have us then? C. C. I will never have thee. R. R. Then will I have you? C. C. No, the devill shal have thee. I have gotten this houre more shame and harme by thee, Then all thy life thou canst do me honestlie. Of our other two comedies, the second, A newe, mery, and wittie Comedie or Interlude, treating upon the Historie of Jacob and Esau, has obtained less attention than it deserves, perhaps because of its Scriptural subject; it is, however, really a comedy, and a very pleasantly and brightly written one. Besides the Scriptural characters there are two neighbours, an old nurse, and three servants-Ragau, the unwilling attendant of Esau in his hunting; Mido, a boy who leads the blind Isaac; and Abra, 'a little wench, servant to Rebecca.' Mido, who practises walking with his eyes shut against the day when he may himself be blind, and offers to 'scud like a little elf' on a message, is a really delightful small boy; and Ragau is an admirable comic servant, his unkind treatment by Esau being skilfully emphasised to deprive the latter of the spectators' sympathy. The earliest extant edition of the play is dated 1568, but it was licensed in 1557-58, the probable date of its composition. Without any specific evidence its authorship has been attributed to William Hunnis, a minor poet who versified some psalms in 1549, and was entrusted with the charge of the children of the Chapel Royal by Queen Elizabeth, during whose reign he published several volumes of verse with pleasant titles, such as A Hiveful of Honey, A Handful of Honeysuckles, &c. Our third comedy, Gammer Gurton's Needle, comes still farther over the Elizabethan border, for it was played at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1566, and this (despite the earlier licensing of a play called Dyccon the Bedlam, a familiar character who appears in Gammer Gurton's Needle) was the probable date of composition. The earliest extant edition is one published in 1575, and in this it is said to have been made by Mr S. M[aste]r of Art.' This Mr S. was long identified with John Still, afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells; but in an edition of the play in Professor Gayley's English Comedies (not published at the time of writing), Mr Henry Bradley, whose name is sufficient guarantee for the certainty of his conclusions, is to show that the real author is a certain William Stevenson, as yet unknown to fame. The play itself suffers sadly from its prolongation through the five acts, which had now apparently become the fashion. How Gammer Gurton lost her needle while mending her husband's breeches, and how every one in turn was suspected of the theft till the said husband, on sitting down, became painfully aware of its presence in the mended garment, offered an excellent subject for an interlude on the lines of those of John Heywood, but is rather a thin subject for a comedy. On the other hand, Gammer Gurton's Needle is well written and full of rustic humour, and is notable, moreover, for having preserved to us the old drinking-song: I can not eate but lytle meate, But sure I thinke that I can drynke, I stuffe my skyn so full within booth foote and hande go colde; whether it be new or olde. From this convivial song, of which this one verse must suffice as a specimen, we turn to our first English tragedy. This was published in 1565 by William Griffith, under the title The Tragedie of Gorbodu, whereof three Actes were wrytten by Thomas Nortone, and the two last by Thomas Sackvyle. Set forthe as the same was shewed before the Quenes most excellent Majestie, in her highnes court of Whitehall, the xviij day of January Anno Domini, 1561. By the Gentlemen of th' ynner Temple in London.' Five years later another edition was issued by John Day, under the title of The Tragedie of Ferrex and Porrex. In the preface to this, William Griffith is scoffed at as 'one W. G. [who] getting a copie therof at some yong mans hand, that lacked a litle money and much discretion,' had taken advantage of the absence of the authors to 'put it forth excedingly corrupted,' a statement which rather exaggerates the faults in the first issue. 'The argument of the Tragedie' is thus given : Gorboduc, King of Brittaine, divided his realme in his life time to his sonnes, Ferrex and Porrex. The sonnes fell to discention. The yonger killed the elder. The mother, that more dearly loved the elder, for revenge killed the yonger. The people, moved with the crueltie of the fact, rose in rebellion and slew both father and mother. The nobilitie assembled and most terribly destroyed the rebels. And afterwardes for want of issue of the prince whereby the succession of the crowne became uncertaine, they fell to civil warre, in which both they and many of their issues were slaine, and the land for a long time almost desolate and miserably wasted. Among its dramatis personæ we find these neatly arranged pairs: Dordan, a counsellor assigned by the king to his eldest sonne, Ferrex. Philander, a counsellor assigned by the king to his Porrex. yongest sonne, Hermon, a parasite remaining with Ferrex. Tyndar, a parasite remaining with Porrex. Nuntius, a messenger of the elder brother's death. Nuntius, a messenger of Duke Fergus rising in armes. For once English literature had come under a foreign influence which, in appearance at least, was stifling and harmful. Even in this case the reality was far otherwise, for to receive the concep tion of the tragic drama in any form was a great gift, though we may well lament that it came from the Latin rhetorician, Seneca, rather than from Æschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides. The latter, however, were but just beginning to be read, and Seneca to the men of the sixteenth century still stood out as the chief ancient tragedian, just as Plautus and Terence were chiefs in comedy, and his lifeless, unactable plays, with their long, declamatory speeches and their absence of action, were regarded, even twenty years later by so good a critic as Sir Philip Sidney, as the true models of the tragic drama. How this model was displaced belongs to the story of the Elizabethan drama. Here, meanwhile, is the beginning of Act v. in this first English tragedy: Clotyn. Did ever age bring forth such tirants harts? The brother hath bereft the brothers life, Gwenard. Shall subjectes dare with force O wretched state, where those rebellious hartes Fergus. There can no punishment be thought to great Eubulus. Ye all, my lordes, I see, consent in one, I holde it more than neede with sharpest law Tragedy, be it noted, has brought with it its appropriate metre, blank verse; but to account for this we must now take up the history of English poetry as distinct from the drama. Wyatt and Surrey. Here, with Wyatt and Surrey, we come again to the really living poetry which we quitted at Chaucer's death, and these two writers, in a far truer sense than Lydgate and Hoccleve, are his immediate successors, owing something to his own example, and much to the Italian influences to which he himself was so greatly indebted. son Like Chaucer himself-and the point is of some importance-Wyatt and Surrey were no needy clerics, bound to a professional didacticism, but were connected, only much more highly, with the court, and lived interesting and crowded lives. The elder of the two, Thomas Wyatt, was the so of a Sir Henry Wyatt who stood well in the favour of Henry VII. He was born in 1503 at his father's castle at Allington, in Kent, and entered St John's College, Cambridge, at the age of twelve. In 1520 he took his master's degree, and married Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Brooke, Lord Cobham. His service at court seems to have begun as an esquire of the body to the king, a dignity to which Chaucer rose through preliminary stages. In 1527 he enjoyed another of Chaucer's experiences, attaching himself to the suite of Sir John Russell in a mission to Italy, in the course of which he visited Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, and acquittal, but his connection with Spain cost him his life after all, for in October 1542 he caught a chill in riding hastily to Falmouth to escort a Spanish ambassador to London, and died of fever at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire. The career of Wyatt's younger contemporary, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (a title of courtesy), was even more eventful. His grandfather, Thomas, Earl of Surrey, had fought against Henry VII. at Bosworth field, but was pardoned and subsequently created Duke of Norfolk for his victory at Flodden. On the death of that duke, in 1524, the poet's father, another Thomas Howard, became Duke of Norfolk, and he himself, then a boy of seven or eight (he was probably born in 1516 or the following year), enjoyed the second title of Earl of Surrey. His youth was passed between Tendring Hall in Suffolk and Kenninghall in Norfolk, and he was fortunate in having as his tutor John Clerke, an Oxford scholar, who had travelled in Italy, and knew and wrote both French and Italian as well as Latin. From 1529, or earlier, Surrey was much in the company of the king's illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond and Somerset, who in November 1533 was married to his sister, Lady Mary Howard, a union abruptly ended by the bridegroom's death in 1536. In October 1536 Surrey was knighted, and commanded a force sent against the Lincolnshire rebels. In 1537 he suffered a polite imprisonment at Windsor for a blow given within the precincts of the court, and wrote two of his happiest poems, one recalling an earlier stay there with the Duke of Richmond, the other in honour of the nine-yearold Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of the Earl of Kildare, who had died a prisoner in the Tower in 1534. The poor little maid was now a pet at the English court, and Surrey wrote this sonnet, which has come down to us with the title, 'Description and praise of his love Geraldine': SIR THOMAS WYATT. After Drawing by Holbein. Rome. In 1529-30 he was High Marshal at Calais, and in 1533 was ewerer at the marriage of Anne Boleyn, with whom a misplaced ingenuity has represented him as having been in love. In May 1536 his sister waited on Anne at her execution, and he himself was imprisoned in the Tower from 5th May to 14th June, apparently as a sympathiser with the queen. In the following October he was employed against the rebels in Lincolnshire, and in 1537 was knighted and sent, against his will, on an embassy to the Emperor Charles V., from which he was not released till April 1539. After he had been home but a short time he was sent on another mission to the emperor; but in July 1540, shortly after his second return, came the execution of Thomas Cromwell, the head of the Protestant party, to which Wyatt belonged, and he was promptly accused by one of his late colleagues of treachery and unseemly behaviour during his Spanish embassy, and again imprisoned in the Tower. A lively and straightforward defence procured his From Tuskane1 came my ladie's worthy race: Honsdon did first present her to mine eyne: 1 The Fitzgeralds claimed descent from the Giraldi of Florence. 2 Cambria-i.e. Wales. 3 Elizabeth Grey, granddaughter of Eliza. beth Woodville, wife of Edward IV. 4 The Princess Mary. In other headings to his poems as first published Surrey is spoken of as 'the lover,' and there is mention of 'his love' and 'his lady,' but this is the only explicit reference to Elizabeth Fitzgerald. Drayton, however, in his Heroical Epistles, inserts an imaginary letter from 'Geraldine' to Surrey, and in Nash's Jack Wilton (see below at page 332) Surrey is represented as touring Italy (where he never set foot) as a knight-errant in her service. Working on these hints, in editing Surrey's poems in 1815, Dr G. F. Nott invented fancy headings, into which the Fair Geraldine' is dragged on every possible occasion, without any real justification, and the legend is not yet quite dead. In May 1541 Surrey was created a Knight of the Garter; in July 1542 he suffered a short imprisonment in the Fleet for challenging one John à Leigh, and next January took part in a foolish frolic in which stones were shot from cross-bows at the windows of London citizens, and also at the houses of ill-fame on the south side of the river. The Mayor complained to the Privy Council, and on 1st April Surrey was again committed to the Fleet. Here he wrote 'A Satire against the Citizens of London,' beginning (in Nott's edition): London! hast thou accused me Of breach of laws? the root of strife! That even the hate of sins, that grow Before the Privy Council Surrey had simply con- Council, and on the 12th both he and his father were arrested and sent to the Tower. A charge of making pretensions to the crown by using the arms of Edward Confessor, to which his family had a right, was trumped up against Surrey. He was condemned by a packed jury on 13th January 1547, and beheaded six days later. Round Wyatt and Surrey, whose varied lives brought English poetry into a new atmosphere, sprang up, as Puttenham tells us in The Arte of English Poesie (see infra, page 266), 'a new company of courtly makers,' of whom Thomas Lord Vaux (1511-62), Sir Francis Bryan (d. 1549), Nicholas Grimald (1519–62), and Thomas Churchyard (1520?-1604) are known to us by name. With no patrons to please, it was characteristic of the 'courtly makers' for more than a century to let their poetry be passed round only among their friends, and it was thus not until June 1557 that (from the press of Richard Tottel, whence its familiar name of 'Tottel's Miscellany') there appeared a thin volume entitled Songes and Sonettes written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward, late Earle of Surrey, and other. This was reprinted, with alterations, the next month; went through six other editions (1559, 1565, 1567, 1574, 1585, and 1587); and formed a kind of 'Golden Treasury' on which all the Elizabethan poets were brought up. The first edition contained forty poems by Wyatt, ninety-six by Surrey, forty by Grimald, and ninety-five of 'Uncertain Auctours;' in the second edition thirty of Grimald's were omitted, and the poems of uncertain authorship increased by thirty-nine. In addition to any defects due to posthumous editing, we must remember that Wyatt, in leading English poetry into fresh fields, had to contend with many difficulties. The printed editions of Chaucer were so corrupt as to obscure his melody; Wyatt was probably hardly a good enough Italian scholar to catch the secret of that of Petrarch, while English poetical diction had to be rescued from its dreadful polysyllables and built up anew. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that Wyatt sometimes halts between what he took to be a Chaucerian pronunciation and that of his own day; that, in introducing the sonnet into English, he neither followed Petrarch correctly nor hit on the modification of three quatrains and a couplet, invented by Surrey, and so gloriously handled by Shakespeare; and that his more formal verse is frequently slow of movement and sometimes impossible to scan. As chance would have it, the first sonnet of his writing in 'Tottel's Miscellany' exhibits all his faults at their worst, and has more than once been singled out for unkind quotation. If the reader will remember the Chaucerian spellings 'resoun,' 'sesoun,' condicioun,' 'facyoun,' Wyatt will be seen to better advantage in this, entitled 'Of Change in Mind': Eche man me tell'th I change most my devise: To change purpose, like after the seasón. For in ech case to kepé still one guise Is mete for them, that would be taken wise. But alwaies one, your owne, both firm and stable. But though it is part of Wyatt's glory to have introduced the sonnet into English, it is not by his ten imitations of Petrarch, or his own essays on the same lines, that his contribution to our literature may most fairly be judged. His real innovation was the revival of that lyrical mood which had produced some charming snatches of English verse in the thirteenth century and had then died away, even Chaucer having but a faint touch of it. In Wyatt it is predominant, and to illustrate it a few quotations are worth much disquisition. Here, from Nott's edition of Surrey and Wyatt (1816), which contains many poems not in 'Tottel's Miscellany,' is one of the most often quoted of Wyatt's lyrics : Forget not yet the tried intent Of such a truth as I have meant ; Forget not yet when first began Another poem, entitled 'The lover praieth not to be disdained, refused, mistrusted, nor forsaken,' is a good example of the cumulative effect which Wyatt sometimes attains : Disdaine me not without desert, Nor leave me not so sodenly, This carefull knot neades knit I must. Mistrust me not, though some there be That fain would spot my steadfastnesse : The proofe is not as they expresse. Forsake me not, till I deserve : Nor hate me not, tyll I offend. Refuse me not, that am so true: Forsake me not, ne for no new. There is a touch of another kind in the poem beginning, 'They flee from me that sometime did me seke;' and lyrics which contain such stanzas as Forget not yet the great assays, The cruel wrong, the scornful ways, The painful patience in delays, Forget not yet! or, Forget not, oh forget not this, How long ago hath been, and is Forget not then thine own approv'd, Scarcely less well known than this is the stouthearted poem, 'To a ladie to answere directly with yea or nay,' for which we have the advantage of Mr Arber's reprint of Tottel's Miscellany (1870): Madame, withouten many wordes, Once I am sure, you will or no. jests And use your wit, and shew it so : For with a beck you shall me call. And if of one, that burns alway, Ye have pity or ruth at all, Answer him fayer with Yea, or Nay. If it be Yea, I shall be faine. If it be Nay, frends as before. You shall another man obtain, Blame not my Lute! for he must sound For lack of wit the Lute is bound And wilt thou leave me thus in their feeling, their melody, and their simplicity of phrase break away altogether from the wordy rhetoric of Wyatt's predecessors, and are a worthy prelude to the best Elizabethan verse. Besides his sonnets and lyrics, Wyatt versified the Penitential Psalms, not very happily, and also wrote some satires, which may be illustrated by a few lines from that entitled 'Of the Courtiers Life, written to John Poyns': My Poyns, I can not frame my tune to fayne, Midas |