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Michael Drayton
A Critical Study
With a Bibliography
By
Oliver Elton, M.A
ProfessoJ- of English Literature
in the University of Liverpool
London
Archibald Constable and Company
Limited
. 1905
This book is an enlarged and fully revised
edition, with a fresh Bibliography, of the
monograph published in 1895 by the Spenser
Society together with their Limited Reprint
of part of Drayton's works.
'f
Frontisi'Ieck to I III.: Tokms, 1619.
TO
M. E. SADLER
IN RECOLLECTION
OF DRAYTON'S COUNTRYSIDE
292659
PREFACE
This monograph was produced ten years
ago for the Spenser Society of Manchester.
After issuing many useful reprints of
Drayton's and other EHzabethan poetry, the
Society dissolved : but An Introduction to
Michael Drayton appeared as its last issue,
and was soon out of print. Owing to this
obscure method of publication, the new
biographical and other matter escaped the
notice of some of the historians of literature,
including Mr. Courthope and the writer
in Chambers's new Cyclopcedia of English
Literature. I regret that Mr. Courthope
was not saved some of the labour of his
independent inquiries, and hope that my
reasons may relieve him of some serious
doubts he has expressed in regard to
2fr2(^r^Q
viii MICHAEL DRAYTON
Drayton's behaviour. If Drayton acted as
Mr. Courthope thinks, he was the less a
gentleman : but if the charge is not true,
no other is left against his personal char-
acter. I also find more poetry in Drayton
than Mr. Courthope can concede ; and
there are signs that the old poet is now
coming to his rights. Mr. A. R. Waller
has now in hand, fortunately, a variorum
text of his poems ; and a selection and
criticism are promised by Mr. A. Symons,
whose encouragement has quickened my
wish to rescue this Introduction. I have
largely rewritten it, have added more quo-
tation and remark than the limited space of
the Spenser Society permitted, and have
noticed the stray fresh lights that have
been cast on Drayton during the last ten
years. Not much has been done, but Mr.
Beeching s selection, whilst all too short, must
have overcome the shyness of many readers
to encounter a dim, voluminous poet who,
they had vaguely felt, was well worth avoid-
ing. To save mere duplication of labour, I
PREFACE ix
have dropped some of the tabular matter
which the variorum edition of the text will
supersede.
Drayton's life, like that of most Eliza-
bethan writers, has sown the pages of
scholars with controversies, often tiny
enough. I have touched on these chiefly
in footnotes, the less to interrupt the text.
Nearly everything as yet known about this
poet ought to be found in this brief volume ;
* there is some charm in the experiment of
collecting the whole wreckage, which is
hardly possible with more modern writers.
I have been obliged to many helpers in local
and genealogical researches: among them to
my friend Mr. E. K. Chambers, of the Educa-
tion Office, especially for information on the
Goodere families and Rainsford ; to Mr. J.
Challenor Smith, of the Probate Registry,
Somerset House ; and to Mrs. and Miss
Annesley, of Clifford Chambers.
If the professors of bibliography had not
been proved as generous of trouble and
advice as their craft is severe, I should
X MICHAEL DRAYTON
hardly, as a layman in that craft and work-
ing far from the large libraries, have ven-
tured in their province. But the reader,
wandering through the maze of Drayton's
editions and revisions, often feels the need of
a bibliography, and none of any completeness
yet exists. My friends Mr. John Sampson,
University Librarian in Liverpool, and
Mr. Charles Sayle at Cambridge, have
spared no pains in suggestion and emenda-
tion ; neither has Mr. Jenkinson, the Cam-
bridge University Librarian. None of these
experts must be held to answer for any
errors, and the entries of the modern re-
prints are probably incomplete. The titles
and descriptions of all editions in the British
Museum have been carefully checked and
often transcribed by Miss P. Osier, and those
of works peculiar to the Bodleian by Mr.
F. C. Wellstood. Thanks are also offered
for help of various kinds to the authorities
of the libraries of Trinity College, Dublin,
of the University and the Advocates'
Libraries in Edinburgh, of the By lands
PREFACE xi
Library in Manchester ; to the owner of a
private library containing some unique early
copies ; to Mr. G. Gregory Smith, to Mr.
A. E. Waller, and to Mr. Gordon Duff. I
hope the bibliography may be right as far as
it goes, and save some work to any professional
hand that may perfect it hereafter. I am
also indebted to the authorities of the Dul-
wich Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery,
and the British Museum, for leave to re-
produce pictures. Drayton's signature is
also from the Henslowe MS. at Dulwich.
The modern works that do most to shorten
the way to the original authorities are
Collier's rare Roxburghe edition of some of
Drayton's poems : the article in the Diet.
Nat. Biog. by Mr. A. H. Bullen, and his
Selections, now long out of print ; and the
rash yet useful and instructive pages of Mr.
Fleay in his Biographical History of the
English Drama. The first renewal of in-
terest in Drayton came in 1748, after a
century of silence. The second was in the
time of Charles Lamb, and the labours of the
xii MICHAEL DRAYTON
three scholars I have named are a worthy
late aftermath of that enthusiasm. There
seems to be a third revival now : there are
hopes that the true rank of Drayton may
be clearly discerned and admitted, and his
whole works made accessible. Sunt aliquid
manes ; and the living fame, that he pro-
mised to his own verses, should not alto-
gether fail him.
O. E.
Liverpool, May 1905.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAP.
I. EARLIER YEARS
II. AN ELIZABETHAN POET .
III. SATIRES, ODES, AND POLY-OLBION
IV. THE RENEWAL OF DRAYTON :
WORKS . .
V. CRITICAL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
APPENDICES
LATER
INDEX
1
26
94
120
148
157
206
211
xiii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FRONTISPIECE TO THE POEMS, 1619 . . Frontispiece
PAGE
MICHAEL DRAYTON, AGED 36 .... 80
{From the National Portrait Oallery)
DRAYTON'S SIGNATURE IN FACSIMILE . . 86
MICHAEL DRAYTON, AGED 50 . . . .107
{Hole's engraved Portrait in the Poems o/"1619)
TITLE-PAGE OF THE POEMS, 1637 . . .133
MICHAEL DRAYTON, AGED 65 . . . .144
{From the Dtclwich Gallery)
MICHAEL DRAYTON
CHAPTEE I
EARLIER YEARS
My native country then, which so brave spirits hast bred,
If there be virtue yet remaining in thy earth,
Or any good of thine thou breath'd'st into my birth,
Accept it as thine own, whilst now I sing of thee.
Of all thy later brood th' unworthiest though I be.
Poly-Olbion, Song 13.
Michael Drayton, or Draiton, was born at
Hartshill/ near Atherstone, Warwickshire,
in 1563. The time and place are first re-
corded on the frontispiece to poems,^ which
he reprinted in 1619 with his own correc-
tions. If we can trust to the legend that
surrounds the portrait on the title-page, in
1613 he was in his fiftieth year.^ There
1 Not at Atherstone, as stated by Fuller, Worthies, iii. 285
(ed. 1840), and by Aubrey.
2 Bibliography, § xv. 5.
3 Effigies Michaelis Drayton, armigeri, looetm clariss. cetat.
sure L, A. Chr. GIODCXIII. The inscription runs : —
A
2 MICHAEL DRAYTON
is no other proof of his age. The register
of the Hartshill births is still at the
parent village of Mancetter, where they
were always entered at that date. It
does not begin till 1576, but offers circum-
stantial evidence for the descent of the
poet.
Of his kindred nothing is certainly estab-
lished but that he had a brother, Edmund,^
who after his death administered his estate.
There is but one Edmund Drayton in the
Mancetter list : he was the son of William
Drayton. The name of Elizabeth, daughter
of William, and born in 1576, is the first
entry in all the register. These were not
improbably the brother, father, and sister
of Michael Drayton. The objection is that
Michael is much older than Elizabeth.
His father would have died at a very
ripe age. The testament of William, who
died in 1622, has not been found. ^ But a
Lux Hareshulla tihi Warwici villa, tenehris
Ante tuas cunas ohsita prima fuit.
Arma, viros, veneres, patriam, modulamine, dixti ;
Te patriae resonant arma, viri, veneres.
1 See letters of administration quoted post.
2 Either in the Somerset House, Lichfield, or Worcester
indexes.
EARLIER YEARS 3
table ^ extracting a part of his pedigree
will show that he had five brothers living
at Atherstone, Hartshill, and Mancetter,
late in the sixteenth century. The Man-
cetter entries are much occupied with the
names of their offspring. Their father,
Christopher, was a butcher, and their
mother's name was Margerie. Aubrey'^ was
derided for saying that the poet was a
butcher's son ; he was, perhaps, one genera-
tion out. If the two Edmunds are the
same, we have an inkling of Drayton's birth
and quality. His family would be of the
well-to-do trading class, who overran from
^ Conjectural family tree of Michael Drayton :
Christopher Drayton, of= Margerie. (Will, 1559.)
Atherstone, butcher. I
(Will proved 155i3.) |
\
II I I I I
John, Christopher, Thomas. William, Edward. Hugh,
I t 1624. I t ltJ:^2. I t 1629.
Margt. Bridget, Sarah, Annas, | Edw. Hugh,
b. 157i3. b. 157S. b. 1595. b. 1597. I b. 1570. b. 1578.
[? Michael, Eliz. Edw. Edmund, = Dorothy, Susannali, ? Ralph,
15(53-1031.] 1570- b. 1580. 1579-1044.1 t 1025. t 1580. t 1643.
leis.
Dorothy,
t 1625.
This table is made from information, for which I am indebted
to Mr, J. Challenor Smith, of Somerset House, and the Rev.
G. F. Mathews, Vicar of Mancetter.
2 Lives, ii. 335 (ed 1813).
4 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Atherstone with their crowd of children
and settled at Hartshill. They may have
gone back to some stray bough of the
noble house of Drayton, said to be extinct
in the fifteenth century/ It is better to
believe with Burton^ that his neighbours
family originally brought their name from
Fenny Drayton in Leicestershire, one of the
many villages that show the compound form.
They had relatives at Atherstone who
verged on gentility and left a pedigree.^
1 Halstead's Succinct Genealogies, p. 73. The Harleian
Society's genealogies also mark the extinction of the male
line.
2 Burton, Description of Leicestershire, ed. 1777, p. 85.
' This place [Fenny Drayton] gave the name to the pro-
genitors of that ingenious Poet, Michael Drayton, Esq., my
near countryman and old acquaintance ; who, though those
Transalpines account us Transmontani, rude and barbar-
ous . . . yet may compare either with their old Dante,
Petrarch, or Boccace, or their Neoterick Marinella. . . . But
why should I go about to commend him whose own works
and worthiness have sufficiently proved to the world V
3 The College of Heralds tells us nothing of Michael, not
even recording any grant of the arms (see p. 95) which he
assumed at some unknown date. In the Visitation of
Warwickshire, 1683, preserved there in MS., a pedigree is
given oi another WiWiiim Drayton, of Atherstone (died 1G42),
who had among his descendants two Harrington Draytons,
father and son. Michael was a client of the house of Har(r)-
ington (see p. 14). Now this William Drayton of Atherstone
married a Mary or Alice Grey. Hunter MS., Chorus Vatum,
vol. i., s.v. 'Grey,' names a rare book Panthea, an elegy on
I
EARLIER YEA'RS 5
By some chance, or through the brightness
of his parts, Michael Drayton, while yet a
little boy, was picked out and made a
man of by a house of gentlefolk in the
same countryside. To his rearing by the
Gooderes he refers in The Owl (1604), if
it is himself he calls ' nobly bred and well
allied ' ; and not, as some have argued, to
any high descent.
Drayton's country (as a fantast might
say) befits his utterance — rather pedestrian,
seldom of the rarest, but often coming near
it — and lies a httle off the most enchanted
parts of Warwickshire, away from the dells
and waters of Shakespeare ; it stands at a
certain height, but near the plain. The
quarry village of Hartshill, on the north-
eastern edge of the shire, climbs the last
and steepest ripple of the quietly rolling
land, before it drops into the Leicestershire
levels. Behind, up to the crest of the
Elizabeth Grey, who is in it said 'by her sister Mrs. Mary
Drayton to be allied to the prince of English poets, Michael
Drayton, Esq.' This only shows, what the name would
show by itself, that William of Atherstone and William of
Hartshill were kin, but it brings us no nearer to Michael,
To name all this may save others from straying up the same
blind alleys.
6 MICHAEL DRAYTON
ridge, hangs a profound wood, damasked in
July with splashes of foxglove-bloom ; and
on the top is Oldbury, part of the old
Manduessedum of the Romans, and en-
trenched by them with the circle of ditch
that now encompasses a Georgian house.
Downwards on the east is a wide flat, with
Charnwood in the distance; and south-
easterly is the road to Nuneaton and
Coventry, whose patroness Godiva was to
Drayton a ' type' of Anne Goodere, born in
that city. In Hartshill itself, which is high
enough to be saved from any pollution
by the pillared smoke of factories, is still
pointed out, by old inhabitants, ' Drayton's
cottage.' It rests amidst a plot of roses
and lilies, clean and trimly kept. The tale
connecting it with the poet can be traced
back some fifty years. In the middle of the
last century it was used as a tiny meeting-
house, and in a map of 1748 it is marked as
a chapel.
Polesworth, then usually spelt Powls-
worth, the only other spot known to have
witnessed Drayton's youth, lies some miles
off in the valley beyond Atherstone. It now
EARLIER YEARS 7
consists chiefly of a street of ruddy-roofed
black-and-white cottagfes, with the church
and adjoining vicarage. Under the bridge
crawls Drayton's river, the Ancor, as if in
its sleep, like one of his own sluggish alex-
andrines. It is navigable by boats upwards
and downwards for some distance, and
winds among thick reeds, meadow-sweet,
and willows, into the Tame :
His Tarn worth at the last, he in his way doth win :
There playing him awhile, till Ancor should come in,
Which, trifling 'twixt her banks, observing state, so
slow.
As though into her arms she scorn'd herself to
throw.
The vicarage of Poles worth, formerly owned
by the Chetwynd family, stands on the
ground of the old nunnery, which on being
dissolved in 1545 was sold to the family of
the Gooderes. The auditorium, or as some
say the refectory, of the nuns, was turned
into the great hall, and is now the large room
of the vicarage, spaciously lit and panelled,
with the ancient tracery on the fireplace
fined away but still visible. It must have
been by this hearthstone that Drayton sat
and listened to the harper. Long after, he
8 MICHAEL DRAYTON
says of his own odes, addressing the younger
Sir Henry Goodere :
They may become John Hcwes his lyre,
Which oft at Polesworth by the fire
Hath made us gravely merry. ^
Who knows but that this Mr. Hewes, or
Hughes, hummed to his own accompaniment
those rough dactyls of the old folk- ballad
Agincourt, Agincourt, which gallop through
Drayton's own monumental war-chant ? He
may, from his name, have been one of *my
friends, the Camber-Britons, with their
harp/ to whom it is addressed.
Polesworth Hall must have been Dray-
ton's headquarters during boyhood and
early youth. There is a charming passage
in the Epistle to Reynolds (1627) relating
his boyish bent :
For from my cradle you must know that I
Was still inclin'd to noble poesy.
And when that once Pueriles I had read
And newly had my Cato construed,
In my small self I greatly marvell'd then
Amongst all other, what strange kind of men
These poets were ; and, pleased with the name,
To my mild tutor merrily I came
Dedication in ed. 1619 of collected poems.
EARLIER YEARS 9
(For I was then a proper goodly page,
Much like a pigmy, scarce ten years of age)
Clasping my slender arms about his thigh :
' 0, my dear master ! cannot you,' quoth I,
* Make me a poet ? Do it if you can,
And you shall see I '11 quickly be a man.'
Who me thus answered, smiling, 'Boy,' quoth he,
' If you '11 not play the wag, but I may see
You ply your learning, I will shortly read
Some poets to you.'
Besides Virgil's Eclogues, they read ' honest
Mantuan/ the Carmelite Baptista of Man-
tua, whose railing Latin ' pastorals ' were still
in fashion, in part perhaps as a text-book
against hireling shepherds.^ We hear no-
thing more of Drayton's childhood or book-
learning. The usual outfit in Horace, Ovid,
and Seneca^ may be imagined. It is little
proof of his knowing Greek that in the pre-
face to the Odes he talks of Anacreon and
Pindar with a certain familiarity. But,
as his first book will show, he studied the
songs of the Old Testament. We cannot
put a date to any of these studies, nor to
1 O moral Mantuan ! live thy verses long !
Honour attend thee and thy reverend song.
The Owl, 1604.
2 Are you the man that studied Seneca,
Pliny's most learned letters ?
Epistle to the Lady L. S., 1627.
10 MICHAEL DRAYTON
the limits of his dependence on Polesworth
Hall ; but he tells us himself what he owed
to its masters.
The head of the household, when Drayton
was a child, was Sir Henry Goodere the
elder/ His elder daughter, Frances, married
her first cousin. Sir Henry Goodere the
younger, Donne's intimate correspondent ;
the younger daughter was Anne. Of all
Sir Francis Goodere of Polesworth.
I
Ann G. Thomas G. Sir Henry G. = Frances Lowther. William G.
the elder, I I
d. 1595. I
I I
Sir Henry AnL„ j^ ^
the younger, (m. 1595). I (1577-1G22). the younger.
I I
Frances = Sir Henry Anne = Sir Henry Rainsford Sir Henry
I I I
William. Henry. Francis.
From Visitatio7i of Warwickshire, 1619, Harleian Soc. Puhl.
V. 67. (which however wrongly makes Anne the elder sister),
corrected by Dugdale's Warivickshire, ed. 1765 (copy of 1656
ed.), p. 159, and by Dray ton's own statement inEclogue 8 (1606) :
see p. 20 2^ost The elder Sir Henry's will was proved in
1595 : copy in Somerset House, Prerogative Court of Canter-
bury, ' Book Scott, fol. 29.' To Anne was bequeathed ^1500,
and she was an executor. Frances received the rents accruing
from Polesworth, and lived on there. Dugdale explains that
the testator, failing of male issue, and ' desiring that his lands
might continue unto his posterity and name, married
Fraunces, his elder daughter, unto his own brother's son.' See
2)ost, p. 128, on the relations of Drayton and Eainsford, and
Hunter MS., Chorus Vahim, vol. iii., s.v. 'Eainsford.' —
These dates and residences will throw light on Drayton's
biography.
EARLIER YEARS 11
these we hear afterwards through Drayton.
In 1595 the elder Sir Henry died, and
Drayton was a witness to his will, of which
only a copy is extant. In 1597, dedicating
one of the Heroical Epistles (Isabel to
Eichard) to the Earl of Bedford, the poet
paid his thanks to the memory of his patron
'that learn'd and accomplished gentleman.
Sir Henry Goodere, not long since deceased,
whose I was whilst he w^as, whose patience
pleased to bear with the imperfections of
my heedless and unstayed youth. That
excellent and matchless gentleman w^as the
first cherisher of my muse, which had been
by his death left a poor orphan to the world,
had he not before bequeathed it to that
lady' (the Countess of Bedford). In the
same volume is a dedication (of the Epistle of
Lady Jane Grey) to Lady Frances Goodere ;
• the love and duty I bare unto your father
whilst he lived, now after his decease is to
you hereditary.' He adds that he has wit-
nessed the education of this lady, ' ever from
your cradle.' Lastly, the Epistle of Mary
to Suffolk is dedicated to Sir Henry the
younger : and another tribute is paid ' to
12 MICHAEL DRAYTON
the happy and generous family of the
Gooderes, to which I confess myself behold-
ing to for the best part of my education.'
It may be seen from this that Drayton was
taken quite young by the Gooderes to be
civilised. He never forgot them ; and to
one of them he came to bear something
more than gratitude. The inmate of Poles-
worth Hall whom he never names in any of
his dedications is Anne Goodere, the younger
daughter, who married Sir Henry Ptainsford
in the year of her father's death, or the
next year. The proof that she is the
' Idea,' whom he celebrated, will appear
later. Drayton, if his word is to be taken,
did not ' lose his wit ' on her account till
1591 or 1593, perhaps because they had
been brought up together.^
All these early years of his life are obscure.
It is unknown how long he was at Poles-
worth, or whether he went to a university.
A couplet printed by Sir Aston Cokain
^ ' 'Tis nine years now since first I lost my wit.' This line
occurs in the sonnet ' To Lunacie,' first printed in 1602 ed. of
the Heroical Epistles (Bibl. § ix. 5) : unless it was in the 1 600
ed,, which I have failed to see. The sonnet is numbered ninth
in the 1605 ed.
EARLIER YEARS 13
twenty years after Drayton's death cannot,
despite the versifier's pious regard, and
his connection with Pooley Hall at Poles-
worth, outweigh the silence of all other
records ; ^ and what knowledge of the
classics is shown by the poet of Endimion
and Phoebe he might well have got for him-
self. It is equally uncertain when he went
to London ; but he was there by Feb. 1591.^
Something may be gleaned about his
means of support near the time of his first
arrival. His career, like that of so many
poets, was to be a series of honourable
dependences. The Gooderes, the Haring-
tons, the Astons, the Rainsfords, and the
^ Small Poems of Divers Sorts, 1658, p. 11 :
Oxford, our other academy . . .
Here smooth-tongu'd Drayton was inspired by
Mnemosyne's manifold progeny.
Cokain, ib., p. 66, laments Drayton's death.
Mr Fleay, Biog. Chron., i. 145, states, without furnishing any
evidence, that Drayton was ' sent to a university, most likely
to Cambridge, at Sir Henry Goodere's expense.'
2 Dedication of The Harmony of the Church, 1591, to Lady
Jane Devereux, sister-in law of the Earl of Essex. On this
letter Mr. Collier built a figment that Michael might have
been a page in the Earl's service. It does not serve or hinder
his hypothesis to find that a poem in the Camden Miscellany
shows Essex to have been popularly called ' Kobin,' and that
in the third eclogue of 1594 Robin is said to have ' gene to
his roost.'
14 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Cliffords, fostered him in turn ; and now,
before passing to his writings, may be told
what is known of his alliance with the
houses of Harlngton and Russell. Sir Henry
Goodere must have seen that Drayton
would not dream always by the Ancor, but
was sure to drift to London, and that once
there he must have a patron. But to a
patron's eye his poverty, his high temper,
and a genius as yet latent, would be feeble
testimonials. Goodere might not command
in London the needful position ; but he left
his young friend to the care of a family
which gave him subsistence, courage, and
repute, during the galliDg years when he
was forced to climb. In those days the
protector could throw out a rope and let
down provisions, while the poet cut his foot-
hold up the rock.
Some perplexities have gathered about
Drayton's subsequent dealings with the
house of Russell ; his loyalty, and even his
decency, have been put in question ; but a
little bibliography will, I think, clear his
character. The detail may appear less
tedious, if we remember that it cancels
EARLIER YEARS 15
the one aspersion ever cast upon Drayton.
In 1593 he pubHshed the first version of
his pastorals, Idea, the Shepherd's Gar-
land ; where in the fifth eclogue, without
disclosing who is meant, he offers con-
ceited compliments to 'Idea.' Next year
Matilda was dedicated to Lucy Haring-
ton ; and he also published his first sonnets,
called Amours; or, Idea's Mirror, with no
dedication at all. Idea is an abstract
title, possibly conveyed from an obscure
poet, De Pontoux. There is no sign who is
intended. Neither Anne Goodere nor Lucy
Harington is named in the book. The
poems range from icy fantasy to delicate
devotion. In 1595 Drayton produced
Endimion and Phoebe. Lucy Harington
had married the Earl of Bedford in Decem-
ber 1594, and to her is addressed a prefatory
sonnet :
To THE Excellent and Most Accomplished
Lady, Lucy, Countess of Bedford
Great Lady, essence of my chiefest good,
Of the most pure and finest temper'd spirit,
Adorn'd with gifts, ennobled by thy blood.
Which by descent true virtue dost inherit ;
16 MICHAEL DRAYTON
That virtue which no fortune can deprive,
Which thou by birth tak'st from thy gracious
mother,
Whose royal minds with equal motion strive
Which most in honour shall excel the other :
Unto thy fame my Muse herself shall task,
Which rain'st upon me thy sweet golden
showers.
And, but thy self, no subject will I ask,
Upon whose praise my soul shall spend her
powers.
Sweet Lady, then, grace this poor Muse of mine.
Whose faith, whose zeal, whose life, whose all is
thine.
Your Honour's humbly devoted
Michael Drayton.
An unknown admirer, ' E. P.', next accosts
Drayton in a sonnet by his shepherd-name of
Rowland, and tells him that even when he
had merely tuned his pastoral pipe unto the
river Ancor, the fame of the chaste Idea
had thus been made immortal. At the end
of Endimion and Phoebe, after making
excuse to Spenser, Daniel, and Lodge,
Drayton continues :
And if, ^weet maid, thou deign'st to read this story,
Wherein thine eyes may view thy virtues' glory,
Thou purest spark of Vesta's kindled fire,
Sweet nymph of Ancor, crown of my desire. . . .
EARLIER YEARS 17
Where thou dost live, there let the graces be,
Which want their grace, if only wanting thee.
Not even thus is Idea discovered. It
would have been natural to praise the
same person at the end of the poem, as in
its inscription. But these are not the
terms in which Drayton could have
addressed the lately married noble lady,
whom he had thanked by name as the
Countess of Bedford, and to whom doubtless
this poem was his wedding-gift. It is true
that Combe Abbey, on the Ancor, was one
of Sir John Harington's abodes. But Poles-
worth, the home of Anne Goodere, is also
on Ancor.
The sonnet, ' Great Lady/ was steadily
reprinted. It appears in the second edition
of the sonnets, called Idea, 1599, and in the
changed editions of 1602 (reprinted 1603)
and 1605. On the last four occasions the
sonnets accompanied England's Heroical
Epistles. He reprinted the sonnet in 1608,
1610, 1613, and 1631. Between 1596 and
1599 three other poems of Drayton were in-
scribed to Lady Bedford. Before Mortimeri-
ados (1596) comes a long series of stanzas in
B
18 MICHAEL DRAYTON
her honour, and next year the Legend of
Robert has a compliment to her in prose. In
1597 the first edition of the Heroical Epistles,
Drayton s most popular book, is addressed to
her as a whole, while separate epistles are
prefaced by words to her mother, Lady Anne
Harington, and to her husband, the Earl of
Bedford. Thus Drayton had recited his
gratitude to his patroness during almost
every year from 1594 to 1605, except in
1601, when he published nothing. Mean-
while there is no fresh allusion to Idea, no
fresh clue to her identity. The Epistles
contain dedications to several of the
Gooderes, but not to Anne. The sonnets,
even if we take a fanatical view of their
literary and artificial nature, would not be
addressed to Lady Bedford without ab-
surdity or impertinence. They profess, at
least, the tones of passion, remonstrance, and
regret. The reasonable deduction thus far
is that Drayton's devotion and promises of
fame to his patroness lasted without inter-
ruption for twelve years ; and that he also
sang of a different person. Idea, who was
unmarried in the year after Lucy Harington
was married.
EARLIER YEARS 19
In 1603 Mortimeriados was rewritten'
throughout in another metre, pubhshed as
the Barond Wars, and dedicated to Sir
Wilham Aston. Every allusion in it to
Lady Bedford is erased, both the opening
stanzas and passage in the body of the
poem. But in the same vokime comes Idea^
and the familiar sonnet to the great lady
who rains sweet golden showers. In 1605
this work was reprinted with Idea and the
sonnet. It is not possible that the extirpa-
tion of her name should be due to any
quarrel, when this sonnet was twice re-
printed with the same work. Why Drayton
made the change of patron in his dedication
has never been known, but the poem was in
effect a new poem, and the benefactor a new
benefactor. The last enigma is found in the
rewritten pastorals of 1606. There, in
eclogue the eighth, is a tirade against one
Selena, a capricious patroness who had
baulked the writer's ambition. These lines
were afterwards withdrawn. Viciously he
imprecates a swift old age and ugliness upon
her brow. And in the same eclogue Idea is
named anew, but this time with clearer
20 MICHAEL DRAYTON
features. Of two sisters, one, Panape, keeps
her flock by Ancor :
The younger than her sister not less good,
Bred where the other lastly doth abide,
Modest Idea, flower of womanhood
That Eowland hath so highly deified.
Idea is now
Driving her flocks unto the fruitful Meen
Which daily looks upon the lovely Stour,
Near to that vale, which of all vales is queen,
Lastly forsaking of her former bower ;
And of all places holdeth Cotswold dear,
Which now is proud, because she lives it near.
This is decisive. Anne Goodere had married
Sir Henry Eainsford in 1595 or 1596. She
now lived at Clifford Chambers, near Strat-
ford - on - Avon, in Evesham Yale, on the
Stour, and north of Meon Hill, an out-
lying spur of Cotswold. Her sister Frances
married her cousin and stayed at Poles-
worth. Now, in 1606, for the first time
we learn who was Idea. It is natural to
suppose that the same person had always
borne that name in Drayton's verse. Some
strong reason to show the contrary would
be needful. In Tlte Barouii Mars, 1603
EARLIER YEARS 21
(ii. 68), Drayton says that, but for the hor-
rors of these wars,
My lays had been still to Idea's bower,
Of my dear Ancor, or her lov^d Stour.
The passage is not in the version of 1596.
To complete the evidence, which was first
noted by Mr. Fleay,^ there is the thirteenth
song of PoIif-OIbion: Anne is not there
termed Idea, but Coventry is honoured as
her birthplace : ' An-cor prophesies her
Christian name and God-iv^ half her sur-
name.' And in the Hymn to his Ladys
Birthplace, later, it appears that Anne
was born in the street of Coventry called
Mich Park [Great Park] on a fourth of
August.
Before taking up the tale of Drayton's
poetical and personal ties with Anne Rains-
ford, a different explanation of these obscuri-
ties and allusions must be cited. It is said
that the praise of Idea in the eclogues of
1593 was 'merely a pastoral translation' of
the dedication to Endimion and Phoebe ;
1 Biog. Chron.,\. 14G. Mr. Fleay's indepeudent inquiries
were partially forestalled by Hunter, Chorus Vatnm, MS. 24,
489, s.v. ' Sir Henry Rainsford.'
22 MICHAEL DRAYTON
that the praise of Idea at the end of the
latter poem must refer, like the dedication,
to Lady Bedford, since 'to suppose that
Drayton meant to flatter two ladies at once
is to conclude him wanting equally in poeti-
cal ingenuity and in knowledge of human
nature ' ; and that the presence of Combe
Abbey on the banks of Ancor serves further
to show that the ' sweet nymph ' was Lady
Bedford. On this original error, which
has been exposed already, is based a heavy
charge, which can, I think, be disabled. It
is that Drayton's excision of the Countess's
name in The Barons Wars was due to a
pique caused by the withdrawal of patron-
age. But in the same book the sonnet
commending her munificence is kept. If,
then, there was a rupture, it must have been
between the issue of the volume of 1 GO 5 and
that of the volume of IGOG, entered in April.
It is suggested that in the lines on Selena
Drayton dealt a low buflet in verse to Lucy,
Countess of Bedford, whom he had honoured
consistently for twelve years, graiide spatmm
mortalis aevi. It is scarcely credible, and
it is unproved. Of his other friendships he
EARLIER YEARS 23
is known to have been tenacious. No one
knows who Selena was, but the burden of
proof lies with the prosecution.
The theory I have referred to has further
to account for Anne Goodere being ad-
mittedly afterwards praised under the style
of Idea. The explanation given deprives
Drayton of character. It is said that in pure
spite he transferred the name, Idea, from
Lady Bedford to Anne Goodere, now Lady
Rainsford : but, ' by a very subtle stroke of
art, she was transformed into the younger
sister of Panape (Lady Bedfdrd being the
elder of Lord Harington's two daughters),
and had her abode in Gloucestershire in-
stead of in Warwickshire.' The 'mingled
spite and ingenuity of Drayton's revenge'
is compared to that of Pope. But we have
seen the lack of any reason for supposing
that Drayton had ever entitled Lady Bed-
ford Idea. We must therefore dismiss the
only accusation that has ever been brought
against his behaviour as unproven and
improbable.^
* W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. iii. pp.
22-46. The wide vogue of this History, whose philosophical
24 MICHAEL DRAYTON
The later history of Drayton's friendship
with Anne Goodere and her husband may
be deferred. And before passing to his true
poetry, his first publication, which is only
an experiment, may be mentioned. The
Harmony of the Chirch does not suggest
the work of a man of twenty-eight who
was presently to be a poet. It falls into
the crowd of paraphrases. The songs of
Deborah, Judith, and others, are metrified
into the jogging distich of fourteen syllables
which the band of Tottel had invented,
Warner had improved, but Chapman had
not yet redeemed. Truthfulness to the text
warms the transcript of the Song of Songs
quality I may be allowed to say I have recognised elsewhere,
makes it the more needful to rectify the unnecessary slur on
Drayton. To do full justice to the hypothesis, two minor
heads may be dealt with. Mr, Courthope thinks that 'Dray-
ton recast Endimion and Phoehe as The Man in the Moon,
taking from it all those allusions personal to Idea which ouce
assocTatfed it"c1ugBiy with Lady Bedford.' But if Idea was
not Lady Bedford, the changes have no such force as is im-
plied. Secondly, ' the pastorals were reissued with a pre-
fatory discourse on bucolic poetry, thus suggesting to the
reader that they were merely a literary exercise,' But this
discourse (first printed 1019) says that though the subject and
language of pastorals ' ought to be poor, silly, and of the
coarsest woof in appearance, nevertheless the niost high and
most noble matters of the world may be shadowed in them,
and for certain sometimes are.'
EARLIER YEARS 25
into somewhat more fervid colour than the
rest. This, it has been thought, was the
quality scented by the puritan inquisitors ;
and there is little else to account for the
doom of a book so innocent and so tedious.
In the Stationers' Registers for 1591 Mr.
Collier found an entry proving that the edi-
tion was seized by order, ^ and given over to
a Mr. Bishop for destruction ; although forty
copies were saved by express rule of Whit-
gift, and kept in Lambeth. None survive
there now, and only one copy of the first
edition, preserved in the British Museum,
seems to be known. Why the seizure
was made, and why Whitgifb interposed,
and why, in IGIO, the author thought
his paraphrase worth reprinting,^ is now
obscure.
1 ' Whereas all the seised books, mentioned in the last ac-
coumpte before this, were sould this yere to Mr. Byshop. Be
it remembered that fortye of them, being Harmonies of the
Churche, rated at ij^ le peece, were had from him by warrante
of my lordes grace of Canterburie, and remayne at Lambithe
with Mr. Doctor cosen ; and for some other of the saide
bookes, the said Mr. Bishop hath paid iij^', as appeareth in
the charge of this accoumpte, and the residue remayne in
the Hall to th' use of Yarrette James.' (Quoted by Collier,
pp. xi-xii.)
2 For full titles here and elsewhere see Bibliograpliy.
CHAPTER II
AN ELIZABETHAN POET
Moke than the masters, the explorers of
unknown forms, the original breakers -up of
the wilderness, Drayton has the title of an
Elizabethan poet, of a representative. He
tells of the current achievements and aims
of his age in poetic art. What others lend
him, he appropriates with power and rede-
livers, and he comes honestly by the pleasure
that his work gives him. The rarer part
of a truly originative mind like Spenser's —
his nicety of colour or his sense of the terror
of the sea — only isolates him from contem-
porary feeling : it is usually best felt by
far posterity, and it offers no hold to
discipleship. Drayton was no such weaver
of new hues and stories upon the arras of
dreams ; his delight is to utter sincerely the
ruling Elizabethan thoughts and ardours,
20
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 27
though he too, as will appear, struck, after
a while, on some fortunate inventions, and
heard rhythms of his own. He tried nearly
every kind of verse that was the mode during
the last ten years of the queen's reign,
except moral allegory. He wrote pastoral,
sonnet, paraphrase, vidian fable, narrative
chronicle, legend, and panegyric. If no
other poetry were left but his, we could
discover from it many of the imaginative
interests of those years. The assurance of i
fame, the praise of queen and patroness, the j
passion for the past of England, and the *'
curiosity for the world of the west ; the
feeling for the beauty of youth, the cordial
extravagance in friendship, the fashion of
loving; the conventions, too, of handling
accepted for all these themes ; are found irl
Drayton. ^ They are treated, doubtless, with
imperfect and fitful power, but poetry is
never far off. From those ten years, to us
foreshortened and so populous, a kind of
part-song upon all these motives seems to
arise, voice repeating and overlapping voice.
The darker and wearier strain is only casu-
ally present, and then chiefly in the Faerie
28 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Queene ; it is better heard in the reign of
James, from the lips of Timon or of Donne,
of De Flores or of Webster. The common
mood is unreserved and even exultant ; the
very conceits, which are everywhere, come
from high vitahty and critical inexperience ;
the moods of sadness are seldom due to the
conscious and dreary ebb of hopeful passion ;
and the enigmatic, questioning element in
poetic thought has seldom to be counted
with. The rougher and untruer use of the
term ' Elizabethan ' for early seventeenth-
century verse has concealed these distinc-
tions from us. And the temper of the earlier
time is well seen in Drayton, who treads at
high noon upon the frequented roads of
poetry, shunning twilight and the woven
shadows of the forest. His inequality is
that which besets almost all of his genera-
tion except Spenser. Like others, he
seldom writes a perfect poem, or one without
perfect lines. Some of the species he
attempted proved unresourceful in his
hands, like the legend, the chronicle, and
the satire ; others, like the ode and pastoral,
prospered ; and in one style, that of the
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 29
Heroical Epistles, he found an unborrowed
tune. He frankly submits to the sway
exercised by Sidney, by Spenser, and by
Daniel, upon the last verse written under
the Tudors, but his artistic tie with each of
them is different, and tells upon different
parts of his poetry.
The praise of Spenser is found in the
verse of Drayton at intervals over five-and-
thirty years, and if the influence fades,
admiration remains. The younger poet was
ever revising, and knew of the knots and
obstacles in his own talent, naturally level
and sturdy rather than gracious or dexterous,
and he was put to shame by the sure hand of
the always poetical Spenser. In E^idimioit
and Phoebe, 1595, he cries:
Dear Colin, let our Muse excused be,
Which rudely thus presumes to sing by thee ;
Although the strains be harsh, untuned, and ill,
Nor can attain to thy divinest skill.
And writing in the reign of Charles he still
honours ' Colin '
On his shawm so clear
Many a high-pitched note that had.
And to the last ho regarded 'grave, moral
30 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Spenser' as 'in all high knowledge surely
excellent/ and awarded him a kind of
Homeric scope for the bravery of his
invention :
I am persuaded there was none
Since the blind bard his Iliads up did make,
Fitter a task like that to undertake. ^
And this loyalty, filial, not servile, had
its reward when Drayton began himself to
be called ' golden-mouthed,' or to be com-
mended for the * purity and preciousness of
his phrase ' : epithets that we can still apply
to him at his best. Spenser, it will be seen,
served Drayton most in the fields of the
pastoral and the sonnet ; the debt extends
to subject and to cadence as well as to many
a strain of sentiment, whether pessimistic,
defiant, or Platonic. And he also infected
Drayton with his lofty and proud concep-
tion of what the poet's calling really is, when
it is confronted with the brute and bastard
ambitions of the world. Drayton often
exhales this feeling, and it became the cry
of a kind of caste numbering men so different
* Epistle to Reynolds^ 1627.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 31
as Jonson, Chapman, and Marston. Poets,
he says in The Oivl, are
Those rare Promethei, fetching fire from heaven,
To whom the functions of the gods are given,
Kaising frail dust with their redoubled flame,
Mounted with hymns upon the wings of fame.
It should be remembered that in such
deliverances the word poetry, though its
first application might be to verse, meant all
imaginative writing, all Dichtung : and we
trace in them the spirit of challenge that
animated Drayton's other master, Sidney,
and his companion Daniel, who found that
poetry, in such a sense, required defending,
like a newcomer with doubtful introductions.
By one of the chances of history, the
pastoral eclogue, arranged in a cycle of
months, had served, rather than any larger
form, to announce in 1579 the coming of the
new poetry. The Shepherd's Calendar, with
the variety of its adventures in rhythm, and
its flashes of the nobler style, had at once
caught attention, and found imitators. Of
Thomas Watson little can be said ; but,
fourteen years after, Drayton was the first
worthy pastoral follower of Spenser, and
32 MICHAEL DRAYTON
began his true poetical life as Spenser's
student. Idea, the Shepherd's Garland,
fashioned in nine Eglogs ; Rowland's Sacrifice
to the Nine Muses, was published in 1593.
Drayton here turns away from the shepherd
dialect that, to speak the truth, makes the
Calendar tiresome, as well as from that
habit of prudently obscure invective against
Church or State, which is traceable at last to
the Latin pastorals of Petrarch. But, like
Spenser, he uses the eclogue in one of its
most primitive extensions, for eulogy. The
third number contains an ode to Elizabeth,
which may well compare with the earlier
April. Splendour and onset are not want-
ing here, and the lengthy lines, which Dray-
ton always favoured, have the weight of a
broad and tumbling wave.
Trim up her golden tresses with Apollo's sacred tree :
O happy sight unto all those that love and honour
thee!
The blessed angels have prepared
A glorious crown for thy reward ;
Not such a golden crown as haughty Ciesar wears,
But such a glittering starry crown as Ariadne bears.
Make her a goodly chapilet of azur'd columbine,
And wreathe about her coronet with sweetest eglantine;
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 83
Bedeck our Beta all with lilies,
And the dainty dafFadillies,
With roses damask, white, and red, and fairest flower-
de-lice,
With cowslips of Jerusalem, and cloves of paradise.
O, thou fair torch of heaven, the day's most dearest light,
And thou, bright-shining Cynthia, the glory of the
night;
You stars the eye of heaven.
And thou, the gliding leven,i
And thou, O gorgeous Iris ! with all strange colours
dyed,
When she streams forth her rays, then dashed is all
your pride.
The other conventions of this kind of
verse are also accepted. Drayton, like
Spenser, uses the mask of a shepherd for
himself — whom he calls Eowland ^ — and his
friends, and is slighted by the world, and by
a harsh lady, but meditates a higher strain
in consolation, like Colin in the October
eclogue of the Calendar :
My simple reed
Shall with a far more glorious rage infuse.
And if the boast was borne out by the
1 Lightning.
2 Barnfield, in his Affectionate She2)herd, 1594, couples
' Rowland ' with Colin and Astrophel as ' suflfering great
annoy ' from the ' peevishness ' (perverse folly) of Cupid.
Collier, p. xix.
C
34 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Faerie Queene and the Hymn to Beauty, it
was borne out also by the Heroical Bpistles,
by parts of the Poly-Olhion, and by the
Ballad of Agincourt. Drayton also copes
with other familiar themes, such as the
rustic singing-match, a pleasant manner of
duet that strikes back to the Sicihan roots
of the pastoral ; and another ancient contest
that he versifies is that of youth and age.
He prefers to use the ten- syllabled line, and
he does his part with Spenser in beating it
out into shape and loveliness, preferably in
stanzas of five lines or six. And in these
measures he not only commands the strenu-
ous style :
No fatal dreads, nor fruitless vain desires,
Low caps and court'sies to a painted wall,
Nor heaping rotten sticks on needless fires,
Ambitious ways to climb, or fears to fall,
Nor things so base do I affect at all :
but his verse also springs into tenderness
and colour :
Shepherd, farewell, the skies begin to lower :
Yon pitchy cloud that hangeth in the west
Shows us ere long that we shall have a shower :
Come, let us home, for so I think it best,
For to their cotes our flocks are gone to rest.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 85
It is here also, in the eighth eclogue, that
Drayton first uses the jingle of the old
rhymed romances in a sportive way to which
he afterwards — thirty and more years after-
wards — gave his fullest finish in Nymphidia
and the Shepherds Sirena. This echo of
Chaucer's Sir Thopas may have come to him
through Spenser; and he finds just the
right, flat sheep-bell tinkle, and the right,
faded-archaic diction, miniveer, Dowsahel,
Ghanteclere, that is the far echo of a bur-
lesque of something itself long perished.
Otherwise there is, one may fear, some
commonness and extravagance in The Shep-
herd's Garland ; in the celebrations of
Sidney under the name of Elphin,^ and of
his sister under that of Pandora, and in
many other places. But thirteen years
^ In Notes and Queries^ Fourth Series, vol. xii. p. 442, Mr.
Brinsley Nicholson quoted two lines from N[athanier?]
B[axter'?]'3 Sir Philip Sidney's Ourania, 1606 :
noble Drayton ! well didst thou rehearse
Our damages in dryrie sable verse.
This certainly refers to Drayton's eclogue, since the name
Elfin is quoted later in the piece. But the inference of Mr.
Nicholson and others, that his eclogue was written about 1587,
does not follow. It may well be later. Spenser's A ttrophel,
for instance, came out long after Sidney's death. — There is
also a reference in Ourania to Drayton's Oiol.
36 MICHAEL DRAYTON
later, in 1606, Drayton re-edited these
pastorals thoroughly, and did them good,
although he inserted new enigmas. Quarrels
have meanwhile arisen with persons who
cannot now be identified under their classi-
cal costume of Olcon and Selena, the one an
ungrateful friend and the other a capricious
patroness. We care the less to fathom these
disputes, as they did not lead to excellent
poetry. The friendly lady Sylvia, who once
lived by the Trent, but is now in a Kentish
home, may be a member of the house of Sir
William Aston of Tixall, who by 1606 was
Drayton's protector.^ Frances and Anne
Goodere are, we saw, called Panape and
Idea. The improvements in this version
show the unabated sway of Spenser and
his perennial power to ennoble Drayton's
language. In the renewed praises of Sir
Philip Sidney, whose worth and honour, we
are told, some have been rashly censuring,
* Many unsubstantial theories have been woven out of the
fancy dresses assumed in the two editions of the eclogues.
They are one of the amusements of this kind of bal masqve.
Mr. Fleay thinks that Mirtilla and her brothers were ' cer-
tainly ' Elizabeth, John, and Francis Beaumont the poet. Mr.
Fleay's inferences may be found in his Biog. Chron., i. 143-9 ;
they deserve and need sifting.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 37
a few lines have the plangeiicy of their
original, the Ruins of Time :
And, learned shepherd, thou to time shalt live
When their great names are utterly forgotten,
And fame to thee eternity shall give
When with their bones their sepulchres are
rotten.
Nor mournful cypress nor sad widowing yew
About thy tomb to prosper shall be seen,
But bay and myrtle which be ever new,
In spite of winter flourishing and green.
Drayton shows also more of that power
of pure singing, which came to him late and
slow. He could not learn it from Spenser
who hardly practised in short lyric measures.
More than once we have a presentiment of
the music that the long-living Drayton was
to discover in himself twenty years later
still ; the riches of lyrical sound, the magic
of Carew and the age of Charles. To the
pastoral, of a lighter and more lovely shape,
he was to return in his old age, as The
Muses Elizium testifies.
It is likely ^ that Spenser soon requited his
chief lieutenant in pastoral with a famous
* I accept the view, though not all the reasons, of Todd,
Minto, and Fleay, for identifying .^tion with Droyton. See
38 MICHAEL DRAYTON
verse. In 1595 he published Colin Clout's
come Home agcdn, and among the poets in
repute mentions one, ' ^tion ' ;
And there, though last, not least, is ^tion :
A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found,
Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention,
Doth like himself heroically sound.
^tion [aiTLov] means an eaglet, and in 1594,
working nobly in an ancient convention,^
Drayton had built a sonnet upon the com-
parison of his thoughts to ' eaglet-birds of
love.' These he sent forth from their nest
to prove if they could gaze upon the sun :
But now their plumes, full summed with sweet desire,
To show their kind began to climb the skies :
Do what I could, my eaglets would aspire.
Straight mounting up to thy celestial eyes :
Fleay, Guide to Chaucer and Spenser, 1877, pp. 93-95.
The references fit Drayton better than Shukespeiire, who had
made no pastorals. Mr. Fleay adds some curious but
inconclusive evidence that ^tion is aXnov, and has in Eliza-
bethan dictionaries the sense of cause, beginning, being thus
the philosophic equivalent of the word Idea, tSe'a.
' *The sonnet was probably suggested by Watson's
'KKaTo^naOia (No. xcix.), which is itself an imitation of Serafino
(1550 ed., Sonnetto Primo) ; but the tradition of the genuine
eagle's visual capacity was quite as accessible, in the shape
that Drayton handled it, in French and Latin verse as in
Italian and English,' (Lee, Mizabethqn Sonnets, i. xc.^ This
is an instance of a good sonnet being little the worse for a
fair pedigree.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 89
And thus, my fair ! my thoughts away be flown,
And from my breast into thine eyes be gone.
Spenser might also well praise the author of
the Gaiiand as the gentlest of shepherds,
the nearest to himself of his own band.
The masque-name of Rowland (Orlando)
was full of * heroical ' associations ; and the
same word well fitted the patriot verse that
Drayton had already published.
Certainly those eclogues, like much that
Drayton did in these years, are helpless
enough at times in their broken grammar
and halting melody ; and this is true, too,
of the Legends to which he next betook
himself For he assisted in prolonging a
mediaeval form that might well be thought
to have had its day. Monks and preachers
had turned to account the dreary images,
truly classical in origin, but harped on out
of all measure when the great body of
thought into which they fitted was for-
gotten, of the whims of Fortune's wheel and
the falls of the mighty. But the poets, in
their inveterately secular way, had made a
kind of bastard epic, exemplified in Lyd-
gate's enormous Falls of Princes, and in a
40 MICHAEL DRAYTON
later day by the Mirror for Magistrates ; the
first edition of which had come in 1559, but
a new and enlarged one as late as 1587.
Long before, Chaucer had twice begun
something of the sort ; but, both in the
Monk's Tale and in the Legend of Good
Women t he had, what with his humour,
what with his artist's horror of an impos-
sible task, wearied of the plan ; seeing,
doubtless, what two centuries later his
floundering successors were still failing to
see, that a chain-gang of illustrious victims,
united only by scevitia Fortimce, was a
subject capable of impressive passages, but,
being without change, end, or beginning,
unfit for art. Yet this was the subject that
the penmen who accumulated the Mirror
were reviving in the public service, at a
season when the new patriotism assured
them readers, and the new chronicle — not
yet history proper — gave them matter.
And the fashion was still fresh when the
last decade of the century began ; so that
Daniel, and Drayton after him, fell to mak-
ing solemn compositions in this style, often
a little abortive. Warner's Albion s Eng-
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 41
land, 1586, is an earlier, plainer, equally
patriotic treatment of history, largely mythi-
cal. But Warner wrote more for the people,
and had no literary ' regrets,' though he also
made Legends : and the term Legend usually
implied a pathetic or tragical treatment of
a subject drawn from English history since
the Conquest. It is clear ^ that the Legends
form a kind of little affluent to the Mirror
and the chronicle play ; and the whole body
of historic narrative verse must be regarded
as a defeated rival of the chronicle play,
equally popular perhaps for a while, but in
true achievement far behind it. Daniel's
Complaint of Rosamond, the first poem of
this kind possessing any savour since Sack-
ville's, was entered in 1592. Drayton's
Legend of Piers Gaveston appeared in 1593.
In Marlowe's Edward the Second, entered
July of the same year, the tale of Isabel,
Mortimer, Gaveston, and Edward, was cast
once for all into clear and enduring form.
Yet Drayton returned to the subject with
^ See the striking list in Fleay, Biog. Ghron., i. 141-2, of
the kindred poems and plays written about this time on
subjects drawn from the Chronicles.
42 MICHAEL DRAYTON
blind fascination both in his Mortimeriados
and his Heroical Epistles. The rivalry was
idle ; and the incident figures the whole
destiny of the historic * epic ' in its race for
life with the historic play.
Yet the Legeiids give more than promise
of a poet. Gaveston's ghost, prosing in
sextains after the approved fashion, may be
too circumstantial ; and the catastrophe is
absurdly hurried over. In Matilda, whose
narrative is told with pathos, there are lines
that recall the Shakespeare of the opening
sonnets, where he cries out to his friend
the Elizabethan text of the obligation
that beautiful persons are under not to
die without leaving children. But the
most poetical of the Legends (not excluding
the later and tamer one on Cromtvell, Earl of
Essex ^) is that o^ Robert, Duke of Normandy,
1596. The story runs obscure and sluggish
as a canal ; but no verse written afterwards
^ See Bibliography, § xvii., for dates and titles. The
second edition is much altered. There is a curious introduc-
tion in it of Pierce the Plowman, and of a passage from the
Vidon. Langland had been revived, as is well known, by
the reformers as an early authority against corrupt Papists.
Selden quotes him in his illustrations to the Foly-Olbion.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 43
in English is so mediseval as the preliminary
* flyting ' between the two great personifica-
tions, Fame and Fortune, who had spread
their dark wings over much poetic homilis-
ing. Drayton, as this passage alone would
prove, had his momentary share of the
melancholy of Du Bellay and Spenser, so
deep, in spite of being a literary heirloom.
Some lines, which follow closely a passage
in the House of Fame, are among the latest ^
traced upon the walls of that abode before
it came into the hands of Pope, the eminent
eighteenth-century restorer.
In the year 1594 it was hard not to be
inditing sonnets, and Drayton happily was
drawn into the vogue. He was led by his
' ever kind Maecenas,' Anthony Cooke, after-
wards knighted, to make a first garland
public, which had already, it seems, been
some time composed.
Vouchsafe to grace these rude uiipolish'd rhymes,
Which long, dear friend, have slept in sable night.
The second line was altered in the issue of
1599 to
Which but for you had slept in sable night.
* See Milton, In Q^iintuni Novembris ; Samson^ 971.
44 MICHAEL DRAYTON
» Besides this dedication there are fifty-one
numbers oi Ideas Mirror, Amours in Quator-
zains. Long after the mode had begun to
pass, Drayton continued to send out changed
editions under the name of Idea. There
are four such recensions, in 1599, 1602,
1605, and 1619, not to speak of reprints.
In each of these there was much addition,
rejection, and reburnishing, not always to
the best advantage,^ and in the end Drayton
had added some fifty more sonnets. He has
thus left more than a century of these poems,
written in many moods, and at many stages of
his skill, during some four-and-twenty years.
1 See Bibliography, ^i v. By the edition of 1605, Dray-
ton's selection from his own works, there remain twenty-five
Amours^ often more or less rewritten, and forty-five new
sonnets have been added, including dedications. By the vol.
of 1619, there remain twenty Amours ; seventeen sonnets
which first appeared in 1599 ; eight that first appeared in
1602 (reprinted 1603) ; seven that first ajjpeared in 1605
(reprinted in 1608, 1610, and 1613). Seven were printed in
1619 for the first time. Some of these figures are given in
Mr. Sidney Lee's Elizabethan Sonnets (re-edition of An
English Garner^ 1904), vol. ii. p. 180. See also the notes in
Collier, and those in Fleay, Biog. Chron., i. 153. Mr. Waller's
variorum edition may be expected to give the full gathering
and collations for the first time. Some of these details, as
will be seen, have their artistic bearing. A table is printed
at p. 207 below of first lines of all the sonnets, and of the
editions where they occur.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 45
But in 1594 the first flush of the sonneteers
was unabated. Astrophel and Stella had
been three years an example ; and Delia ^
by Daniel, Drayton's nearest companion in
poetry, had thrice been issued. Lodge
and Constable and others had hastened to
publish in their wake. This old Southern
art-form, which had been revived in the
Italian and then in the French Renaissance,
was now used to the English climate, though
its prime was not for very long. It was still
entangled in the phase of translation and
adjustment ; and its unique transmissive
power was amply proven. A thought or
theme, a verbal modelling, an emotion, that
had once found sure expression in sonnet-
shape, above all from Petrarch's hand, ac-
quired a lease of poetic life, now in poorer,
now in richer embodiment, but apparently
without limit. We talk of the debts of this
man to that ; but in such a case the creditor
is a messenger rather than a giver. And
every such debt is a challenge to original
power of treatment, and is cancelled if that
be forthcoming. Treatment is all ; but then
the power to treat depends on the poet's soul
46 MICHAEL DRAYTON
and experience. When Drayton first wrote,
the studious and formal practice of the
sonnet was at its height. Mr. Sidney Lee,
for whose learned material and lucid order-
ing I am grateful, though we draw different
inferences therefrom, has shown, for the first
time, that the sonnet was the chief medium
through which French poetry influenced
ours during the last ten years of the century.
To this even the Italian influence was
second. Many of the Amours and their
successors are exercises, now in chill con-
ceits, now in the plastic beauty of word and
rhyme. In the dedication Drayton exclaims
that he does not ' filch from Portes' or from
Petrarch's pen,' and he echoes Sidney's
denial :
I am no pickpurse of another's wit.
He did, however, handle and pass the
current coin of sonneteering fancy which
Desportes and many more had sent into
England. The actual translations or borrow-
ings are less obvious than the origin of
Drayton's title. There is not much Platon-
ism in his composition; once, in his later
eclogues, he poises gracefully on the fancy
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 47
that love is the chain linking all things' in
the universe together ; but his nature was
alien to covert and subtle meanings, and this
side of Spenser's thought he did not try to
appropriate.^ But the Platonic keyword,
Idea, tSea, the type of perfection and beauty,
of which all other things are shadows and
faint gustations, was familiar in our meta-
physical verse from Lodge to Drummond,
who aptly gives its sense :
My mind me told, that in some other place
I elsewhere saw the Idea of that face,
And loved a love of heavenly pure delight. 2
Drayton does not make much of this
thought, but his title, as Mr. Lee has dis-
covered, had its precedent in a sonnet-series,
published in 1579, by a doctor of Chalons,
Claude de Pontoux, and entitled L'Idee.
There is thus the usual immigrant element
in his verses. But, not to go too hastily, we
^ See J. S. Harrison, Platonism in English Foetry of the
xvi"' and xvii^^ Centuries. Columbia University Press, 1903,
p. 125. The lines are in eclogue seven of the edition of 1606,
not in that of 1593.
^ See Fleay, Guide to Chaucer and Spenser, p. 95, for this
and other examples ; and the amplest exposition in Wynd-
ham, Foems of Shakespeare, introduction.
48 MICHAEL DRAYTON
find that even in the Amours, and even in
those numbers of them that Drayton too
diffidently cast away in later issues, there is
noble movement and cadence. Were the
following sonnets translations, their beauty
would be the same. But often — and this
is the truth about the Tudor and Stuart
sonnet-writing at large — they are neither
borrowings, nor yet need they transcribe
direct experience. They are plastic experi-
ments where the original impulse of love or
compliment is transfigured in the joy of the
fashioning : much as when a man should
begin to paint his mistress's face upon a fan,
but should find that it did not suit the
spaces and design, and then should alter it
into some happy pattern, perhaps inspired
by another artist ; but should still send her
the offering as his handiwork in her honour.
This kind of mood will be undreamed of, if
we forget that a shy gift may hide itself
in a line of translation, or in what seems
purely scholar's practice ; that the presence
of a common theme in many artists, per-
haps influencing one other, is a poor proof
of the insincerity of any of them ; and
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 49
that the existence of weaker work on the
same theme elsewhere or by the same hand
does not prejudice the quality of a noble or
graceful poem. Two sonnets, only once,
I believe, reprinted since 1594, may illus-
trate these points, and may vindicate the
Amours ; Spenserian here and there, they
cannot be called echoes of the Amoretti,
which were not published.
The glorious sun went blushing to his bed,
When my soul's sun from her fair cabinet,
Her golden beams had now discovered,
Lightening the world eclipsed by his set.
Some mused to see the earth envy the air,
Which from her lips exhaled refined sweet :
A world to see ! yet, how he joy'd to hear
The dainty grass make music with her feet !
But my most marvel was when from the skies
So comet-like each star advanc'd her light,
As though the heaven had now awak'd her eyes
And summon'd angels to this blessed sight ;
No cloud was seen, but crystalline the air,
Laughing for joy upon my lovely fair.
If chaste and pure devotion of my youth.
Or glory of my April-springing years.
Unfeigned love in naked simple truth,
A thousand vows, a thousand sighs and tears :
D
50 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Or if a world of faithful service done,
Words, thoughts, and deeds devoted to her
honour,
Or eyes that have beheld her as their sun,
With admiration ever looking on her :
A life that never joy'd but in her love,
A soul that ever hath ador'd her name,
A faith that time and fortune could not move,
A Muse that unto heaven hath rais'd her fame :
Though these, nor these, deserved to be embrac'd,
Yet, fair unkind ! too good to be disgrac'd.
The sonnets that Drayton added to this
series from time to time range from vain
conceit to gallant inspiration. So do Shake-
speare's, and so do the sonnets of all their
contemporaries. An artist, unlike a chain,
is to be judged by his strongest part ; and
out of such a test Drayton comes with some-
thing like triumph, though no poet of merit
has ever been less equal, and like AVords-
worth he lies at the mercy of the wind of
the spirit. Only once, throughout a sonnet,
which first appears in the garland of 1619,
does he attain full power and felicity.
There are races like the old Greeks or the
Highlanders who can weep without shame
and without detriment to their sorrow ; but
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 51
this wonderful dry-eyed poem comes from
another stock. The emotion of the sovereign
and sudden return, after the full accept-
ance of despair, of a fluttering hope, which
cannot believe in itself, must have been
something experienced ; or, if not in fact
experienced, it could only be imagined, with
a half-dramatic conviction, after some deep
schooling. Here, then, Drayton comes to
his highest fortune in passionate expression ;
in the sonnet" ' Since there 's no help, come
let us kiss and part.'!' I cannot agree with
one good critic who would withhold this
poem from Drayton on the ground of its
excellence. The external evidence is uncon-
tested : one such thought, one such hour of
poetical felicity in a lifetime, is not too much
to concede to a man even of slighter gift ;
and there are many seams and veins of the
same metal in Drayton. There are lines
and phrases elsewhere sealed with the same
assured style, the same hravura now so long
lost and mocking the literary mimicry of
studious versifiers :
Love in an humour play'd the prodigal,
And bids my senses to a solemn feast.
0^1
MICHAEL DRAYTON
Ov:—
An evil spirit your beauty haunts me still,
Wherewith, alas, I have been long possessed,
Which ceaseth not to tempt me unto ill,
Nor gives me once but one pure minute's rest.
Ill another sonnet, where the pride of style
is upheld throughout, is heard that Shake-
spearean sound, which has been supposed
to reflect on the author's originality :
Whilst thus my pen strives to eternise thee.
Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face.
Where, in the map of all my misery,
Is modelled out the world of my disgrace ;
Whilst, in despite of tyrannising times,
Medea-like, I make thee young again.
Proudly thou scorn'st my world-outwearing
rhymes.
And murderest virtue with thy coy disdain :
And though in youth my youth untimely perish.
To keep thee from oblivion and the grave,
Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish.
Where I, entomb'd, my better part shall save :
And though this earthly body fade and die.
My soul shall mount unto eternity.
This was first printed in 1599, when
Drayton published a revision of Amours.
He had his share in settling the high
Tudor tradition of the sonnet ; and it is
unnecessary to show at length how the
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 5??
Italian stanza, so carefully poised just after
its rigid octave, and shrinking from the
clang of the final couplet, had passed,
through the various intervening forms of
Sidney and Spenser,^ into the measure with
claims of its own so magnificent, where the
couplet crowns three quatrains of independ-
ent rhyme : so that the whole poem, with its
centre now shifted far forward, is tuned as
under no other metrical scheme it could be
to the loud Elizabethan chord of pride or
desire or defiance or desperation.
Then, sweet Despair, awhile hold up thy head,
Or all my hope for sorrow shall be dead.
Drayton wrote that ; and in spite of all his
sinkings into flatness, it is never safe to say
that he will not suddenly write likewise when
he speaks of his own fame, or of his poetic
sincerity, or when he gives utterance to the
pride of the rejected, or to the old Catullan
counsel to his mistress to enjoy before Time
has encroached.
The original power, as well as the adap-
^ One such form Drayton at times uses himself, '' in
his earlier sonnets ; abba cddc tfft gg, fnot the usual ah«b
cdcd efef gg. Fleay, Biog. Chron., i. 153.
54 MICHAEL DRAYTON
tive craft of Drayton, is shown by his
relation to the sonneteers around him. He
catches, but he blends, rays from them all ;
from Spenser, from Daniel, from Sidney,
and probably from Shakespeare. Canon
Beeching, in his edition of Shakespeare's
sonnets, has pointed out that the style of
Daniel — and I would add that of Spenser — is
apparent in the sonnets of 1594, while those
of 1599 betray the study of Astrophel and
Stella. ' Sidney,' he well puts it, * employs
a line of swift simplicity, with little orna-
ment, while Daniel's line is slow, sometimes
a little sluggish, often precieuxJ Yes, and
Sidney's higher mood is passionate, while
Daniel's is meditative. The same writer
notes that Drayton's first sonnet of 1594,
' Read here, sweet maid, the story of my
woe,' is founded upon Daniel's * Read in my
face a volume of despair.' But if it begins
with the servility of a pencil tracing, it
rises to a lofty heat of adoration that was
almost beyond Daniel, when Drayton swears
By my strong faith ascending to thy fame,
My zeal, my hope, my vows, my praise, my prayer,
My soul's oblations to thy sacred name.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 55
As a rule, Drayton does not echo the best
of Sidney ; but ' Since there 's no help,'
while Sidney never rose so high for so long,
has Sidney's direct and lifelike tone, as of
a declaration flung out face to face with
the person addressed.
How far the two Warwickshire poets
were acquainted is unknown. Drayton is
heard of as a part-author of the curious play
Sir John Oldcastle, which was provoked by
the success of Henry IV. ; and as sharing
in the probably mythical orgy said to have
shortened the life of Shakespeare. In his
Legend of Matilda he had inserted, but
later dropped, an allusion to Lucrece. He
has been guessed to follow a passage of the
same poem in his sixth sonnet (first printed
1592), to Harmony, where his heart is the
treble that makes the air, while his sighs
bear the base, or ' diapason ' ; a piece of
wit he afterwards withdrew. But this and
other likenesses, which have been carefully
mustered by critics, show little, except that
both poets dipped their hand in the poetical
currency of the hour. Sometimes, as in the
poems quoted already, they promise that their
56 MICHAEL DRAYTON
verse will outbrave time, a topic that has been
treated as a conceit, but is a sincere thought
and an immemorial hope, of far classical
ancestry.^ Others turn on the metaphysical
identity between lover and beloved, others
on the strife of blood and judgment, others
on the wakeful or dream-beleaguered nights
of the poet. On the whole there is more
likeness between Drayton and Shakespeare
as sonneteers than between either of them
and any other writer. This cannot be
wholly chance ; but if not, the question
which of the two was the lender is insoluble,
so long as we only know that some of Shake-
speare's sonnets were in private circulation
in 1598, while two were printed by^tTaggard
in 1599, and the rest not till ten years
later. The passages in Drayton with that
deeper sound, which we have learnt to call
Shakespearean, hardly begin till his editions
of 1599 or 1602.^ The evidence is only
* For an elaboration of this see a paper on Poetic Fame,
A Renaissance Study, in Otia Merseiana, Transactions of
of the Arts Faculty, Liverpool University, 1904, by the
present writer.
2 See T. Tyler, ShakesjJcare's Sonnets, 1890, pp. 38-43. The
resemblances cited, however, are more in the rhyme endings
and general complexion than in the actual ideas.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 57
cumulative, and how uncertain may be
gauged from one example. In Shakespeare's
116th sonnet he says of his own love for his
friend :
no ! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken ;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth 's unknown, although his height be
taken.
Drayton's 43rd sonnet, first found in 1605,
runs :
So doth the plowman gaze the wandering star,
And only rests contented with the light,
That never learned what constellations are,
Beyond the bent of his unknowing sight.^
Still, as there is some tie between the two
poets, it is natural to think that Drayton,
glancing round after his assimilative fashion,
early caught some deep accents and noble
1 For this and other suggestions of the kind, see Wyndham,
Poems of Shakesijeare, pp. cv, 255-8, 319. (The inference
that the sonnet
To nothing better can I thee compare
Than to the son of some rich pennyfather,
must have been written to a man, is hazardous.) The point is
further vexed in Fleay, Biog. Chron., ii. 226 ; and Lee {Liff, of
Shalcespeare, pp. 110 sq.\ iind Eliz. Sonnets^ Ic, is controverted,
I think, happily by Beeching {Sonnets, pp. 132-140), who
pleads for Shakespeare's influence.
58 MICHAEL DRAYTON
rhythms from Shakespeare's poems, which he,
like others, may have seen unprinted. His
interesting allusion to his own work in the
theatre (Son. 47, first out in 1605), which has
been adduced as a parallel, may quite well
be due to his experience ; the thought is
not Shakespearean at all, and the whole
may be given as a last example of his grave
sentiment and powerful handicraft, now and
then only just above prose, but showing
how Drayton can put his own stamp even
on what Shakespeare may have lent him.
In pride of wit, when high desire of fame
Gave life and courage to my labouring pen,
And first the sound and virtue of my name
Won grace and credit in the ears of men :
With those the thronged theaters that press,
I in the circuit for the laurel strove,
Where the full praise, I freely must confess,
In heat of blood and modest mind might move :
With shouts and claps at every little pause,
When the proud round on either side hath rung,
Sadly I sit unmoved with the applause.
As though to me it nothing did belong :
No public glory vainly I pursue,
The praise I strive, is to eternise you.
In all the eight sonnets first printed in
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 59
1619 Drayton stands essentially free from
his masters ; he is hot and earnest and does
not spare a reckless but manly irony, as in
his scoif at the
Paltry, foolish, painted things.
That now in coaches trouble every street.
Such a poet, however reminiscent, is never
at the last a slave to models.
The excellence of these poems, and also
the veracity of their emotion, have both been
questioned ; but the two points must be
distinguished. As poetry, the best of them
speak for themselves ; who cannot hear it,
would not be convinced were it proved that
Drayton had never read another man's verses
in his life. It is nothing that some of them,
good or bad, are adaptations, or at times
half-translated. The presence of De Pontoux
in the shadowy background does not make
the lines other than they are. As to the
veracity, let the style also speak ; there is
no other canon available. But the progress
of creation in our Renaissance poets is often
ill-understood, even by those who are best
acquainted with its historic roots. The
60 MICHAEL DRAYTON
study of the past of poetry may as easily dull
us to its essential beauty and to the nature
of artistic appropriation as the study of the
past of dress. How far dress is a part of the
person, is another metaphysical question,
and one not to be asked. It is the same
with the fashion of poetical loving, which
at any moment is partly traditional and
codified, and partly due to the individual.
To find traces of the same costume of
feeling in the thirteenth century, or in Italy,
shows the long continuance and the wide
extension of the fashion. By such modes a
true and heartfelt experience may become
transfigured in presentment. Once more, no
one who has written verses, however mean,
is ignorant that their impelling occasion
does not always remain their theme. What
I am suffering, and wish to record, becomes
clay in my hands ; it may not prove a subject,
as it stands, for verse ; but it leads me to
find a subject, in which the motive is
changed, while the force of the original
passion is yet manifested. And one or
other of the thoughts, worn smooth by
greater predecessors, may prove the easiest
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 61
mould. The Kenaissance sonnet has lent
itself to such vicissitudes more than any
other form of verse. Drayton, fitful as his
inspiratio*hs are, writes at his best with a
proud mastery that enforces our question
to the sceptics — How then would he have
written, had he been sincerely moved ?
The authentic poetry and warmth of the
best of these sonnets have been obscured by
another cause : by Drayton's habit, in which
he followed the mode, of binding under one
abstract title poems of various mood and occa-
sion. They are not all love-lyrics. He tried
to save what he thought were his best
sonnets upon any subject. Some are of the
grotesque-satiric tone, so familiar in Donne,
and easily toppling over to the monstrous.
In one he says that his remedy for his love
shall be compounded of the powdered heart
of a woman who was in life impassive ' to
gold or honour,' and of other ingredients that
could never exist, since women are what
they are.^ Elsewhere Drayton, returning
^ It is hard to concur with Mr. Lee's view that this is
' clearly intended to apply to the simples out of which the
conventional type of sonnet was for the most part exclusively
compounded.' It is apiece of strained and cracked misogj'ny.
62 MICHAEL DRAYTON
on his trail, warns the reader that he is
not always to expect passion and sincerity ;
and more than once, honestly, invites him to
expect changefulness and even caprice :
And in all humours sportively I range ;
My active Muse is of the world's right strain
That cannot long one fashion entertain.
And again :
My wanton verse ne'er keeps one certain stay :
. . . Madding, jocund, and irregular.^
This is the spirit in which to read him, and
he will bide the touch.
Before ploughing further that stubborn
glebe, the verse -chronicle, by the side of
Daniel, Drayton, open of taste and appre-
hensive as ever, turned aside to decorative
poetry. Hero and Leauder, not published
till 1598, had been entered after the murder
of its author in 1593, and it must have been
known in manuscript. Venus and Adoiiis
»
^ Were we sure that Drayton had read Shakespeare's lOoth
sonnet^
Therefore my verse, to constancy confin'd,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument —
we might think he was playfully disclaiming any likeness in
Ills own muse.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 63
came out in the same year, and it was long
common for the young poets, Shakespeare,
Beaumont, and others, to introduce them-
selves by studies of the kind. Usually the
work bore a double mythological title ; it
was founded on Ovid, and was in the Italian
taste. Often it echoed those cadences of
Marlowe, which he first had bestowed upon
the couplet, or it was touched with his deli-
cate tracery of image. But seldom did others
attain to the lucid glow, as of a burning ala-
baster lamp of Greek design, that fills Hero
cmd Leander ; there alone was the secret of
satisfying form, pure amid its richness.
Seldom did they escape the dalliance with
phrase and the blurring of colour, then so
nearly universal, but fatal to a love -tale
drawn from the clear, ancient fountains. Yet
in these pieces, as in the second and third
books of the Faerie Queene, can best be
studied the great early school of plastic
ornament and colouring in the poetry of our
Renaissance. Harmony, beauty, grouping,
posture, are sought for rather than life and
passion ; this, at least, is the spirit in which
I read Venus and Adonis and also Drayton's
64 MICHAEL DRAYTON
experiment, though in Marlowe Hfe and
passion are by miracle superadded. Endi-
mion and Phoebe, Idea's Latonus, entered in
1595, probably came out soon afterwards,
though it bears no date. It is alluded to
in Lodge's Fig for Monius, of that year,
which contains both an eclogue and an
epistle inscribed to Drayton — * Pieria's
Michael.' ^ The two poets were well enough
acquainted for Drayton to refer to Lodge,
under an anagram, as
Goldey, which in summer days
Hast feasted us with merry roundelays,
And, when my Muse was able scarce to fly,
Didst imp her wings with thy sweet poesy.
But Endimio7i and Phoebe shows the un-
acknowledged influence of Marlowe, crossing
the more familiar one of Spenser. It is well
worthy of being rescued by some enthusiast
from the darkness of very rare editions. It
is a bright and silvery love-story, or rather
a row of pictures or panels, not unmarred
by pedantry and misplaced philosophising,
^ ' I have perused thy learned nines and threes ' ; refer-
rincj to some jargonish verse in Endimion and Phoebe on the
nine hierarchies and the like, drawn ultimately from the
pseudo-Dionysius. See Collier, p. 236.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 65
but showing a livelier motion towards pure
beauty than anything else written by Dray-
ton. As in the case of his continuator,
Chapman, Marlowe could for a moment
sway and clear a gift that was distant from
his own, and much more uncertain.
She laid Endimion on a grassy bed,
With summer's arras richly overspread,
Where, from her sacred mansion next above,
She might descend and sport her with her love,
Which thirty years the shepherd safely kept.
Who in her bosom soft and soundly slept.
Yet as a dream he thought the time not long,
Remaining ever beautiful and young,
And what in vision there to him befell,
My weary Muse some other time shall tell.
This is nearer the manner of the dead
shepherd than much of the Endymion of
Keats. The poem is not always so pure in
diction, but its verse keeps up the tune. It
is of historical as well as artistic note, as an
early piece in which one of the perfect
varieties of the English couplet is sustained.
For the metre ripples easily, yet is firmly
embanked and swift of current ; far alike
from the rough, interrupted, snaggy measure
found in Donne and the satirists and often
66 MICHAEL DRAYTON
in Ben Jonson, and from the balanced oratory
of the classic rhymers like Dryden — oratory
which Drayton also forecasts, as we shall
see, in the Heroical Epistles. It avoids that
sweet and slothful overflow of line into line
which Keats learned in youth from Leigh
Hunt, and he from the Jacobean Browne :
He cannot love, and yet forsooth he will ;
He sees her not, and yet he sees her still !
He goes unto the place she stood upon
And asks the poor soil whither she was gone.
Fain would he follow her, yet makes delay ;
Fain would he go, and yet fain would he stay ;
He kissed the flowers depressed with her feet,
And swears from her they borrow'd all their
sweet.
Fain would he cast aside this troublous thought ;
But still, like poison, more and more it wrought ;
And to himself thus often would he say,
' Here my love sat, in this place did she play,
Here in this fountain hath my goddess been,
And with her presence hath she grac'd this
green.'
That is good verse-craft, and would be so
at any date. We seem to see Drayton in
his studio, ranging attentively from pattern
to pattern, and doing his very best, often
trying to eke out by care what might fail
him in natural gift, and repeatedly shaping
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 67
the same stuff, sometimes for the better.
Endimion and Phoebe is tapestry- work ;
he would use and vary a design or tint of
Spenser's, laying in plenty of orient pearl
and vermeil. He promised to pursue the
story, but kept his promise less than
happily. Endimion and Phoebe Drayton
never reissued ; it was doubtless quenched
in popularity by Venus and Adonis ; but in
1606 he wove many lines of it into a non-
descript poem called The Man in the Moon,
which is full of ill-cohering fancies, and
rightly falls amongst his adventures in
satire. The close of Endimion and Phoebe
shows the writer's continued admiration for
Daniel, by whose side, a little in the rear, he
had been pacing as a verse-historian. It is
the respect of a consciously harsh writer for
one who had without effort won to height
and ease ;
And then, the sweet Musseus of these times,
Pardon my rugged and unfiled rhymes,
Whose scarce invention is too mean and base
When Delia's glorious Muse doth come in place.
Drayton had not much to fear even in
the neighbourhood of Daniel. In old age.
L^
68 MICHAEL DRAYTON
writing the Upistle to Reynolds, he has
moved away from old models and idolatries,
and thinks with some others that Daniel's
' manner better fitted prose ' ; so approach-
ing Coleridge's more just and pertinent
description of that author as a 'model of
the middle style.'
On the same page the dwelling of Idea
by the Ancor, which we saw was Poles-
worth, is bravely celebrated :
Let stormy winter never touch the clime,
But let it flourish as in April's prime :
Let sullen earth that soil ne'er overcloud,
But in thy presence let the earth be proud.
It has been shown that under the abstract,
borrowed, and unrhythmical name of Idea,
Anne Goodere was signified ; and it is
pleasing to find that something further is
known of Anne personally. On the testi-
mony of her own doctor, the son-in-law of
Shakespeare,^ she was ' beautiful, and of a
^ John Hall, Select Observations of English Bodies, tr. 1657
by Cooke, Obs. 48, p. 203. This was Hall's case-book, with
list of cures, written in Latin. He cured her, then Lady
Eainsford, of some pains after childbirth. This notice proves
that she was married before the age of twenty-seven. John
Hall, ^6., p. 26, at some date unnientioned, also cured Drayton
himself, ' an excellent English poet, labouring of a tertian.'
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 69
gallant structure of body,' when in the
twenty-eighth year of her age. As we have
seen, Drayton, if the arithmetic of a sonnet
can be trusted, dates his devotion to her
from about 1592, when he had already
left for London ; and in the eclogues of
the following year he celebrates her. Had
he said no more, his gallantry might be
purely literary : for a counterpart, real or
manufactured, to Spenser's Rosalind was a
necessity in a pastoral book of the kind ;
and there is no note of passion in it. But,
in the sonnets of-15£L4^and after, though
much, as in Astrophel and Stella, is merely
verbal, the fancy, like Sidney's, has become
serious. Many of the poems, though they
lack the strength of some of those he added
later, show Drayton singing in earnest. (Re-
jected, he is galled and wrung as no mere
book-amorist could be. About a year later,
in 1595, after her father's death, Anne
Goodere married, as we saw, Sir Henry
Rainsford,^ of Clifford Chambers, who was
^ See references on pp. 128-9. The monument to Sir
Henry in Ciitford Church states explicitly that Rainsford
was born in 1576, and died in 1622. I can find no record
of the age of Anne, her death not being in the Clifford
70 MICHAEL DRAYTON
afterwards to be Drayton's cherished and
hospitable friend. The history of this regard
can be not unfairly conjectured. For nearly
a quarter of a century after the marriage of
the lady, sonnets, some of them merely
gallant, some fervent, were written and
published by Drayton to ' Idea.' The evi-
dence given above, especially the passage
from the Poly-Olhion, forbids us to suppose
that ' Idea ' became a mere label for offer-
ings really intended to many loves. ^ In
1605^ the wooer repeats his vow: 'I am
registers ; but she was married to Sir Henry twenty-seven
years, and as she plainly outlived him, this would put the
date of the marriage about 1595 or 1596. The Polesworth
registers are only extant from 1635 ; those at Coventry
also begin too late. The young Sir Henry Goodere, her
brother-in-law and cousin, who put up the monument, was
the correspondent of Donne, and subject of Jonson's Forest,
Nos. 85 and 86.
^ As Canon Beeching, op. cit., p. 133, has detected, a
sonnet inscribed in 1603 'to the Lady L. S. ' (whom it would
be satisfactory to identify), had by 1619 slipped in among
the sonnets to Idea. 'A bachelor poet,' he pleasantly says,
' may be excused for an occasional shifting of his ideal,
especially after the marriage of its first incarnation.' He
may ; but to bind under one title many high and fervent
poems really addressed to diflerent women would have been
a kind of spiritual promiscuity little in character. I now
agree with Canon Beeching that the poem ' Since there 's no
help ' is not likely to have been written early.
2 In a sonnet (51, repeated 1619), which was composed
after 1603, as it names the death of Elizabeth.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 71
still inviolate to you ' ; and the sonnet of
1599, 'An evil spirit, your beauty haunts
me still,' had its startlingly Shakespearean
ring of sincerity. It might therefore be that
Drayton kept, for long after her marriage,
a regard, sometimes passionate, for Lady
Hainsford. But the feeling, we may judge
from other poems, finally weakened, or rose,
into a friendship, which spoke often in terms
of mere compliment, but lasted none the
less. The ' Hymn to his Lady's Birthplace,'
first published in 1627, though undated,
bears the stamp of his later, nicer, and more
ingenious handiwork ; it may well be as late
as the age of Charles. The ' elegies ' ' On
his Lady's not coming to Town,' and on her
husband, are in the same spirit. There is
no record of Drayton ever having married.^
I now return to his early writings.
In 1594 the Contention of the Two Houses
of York and Lancaster was acted. Daniel's
1 Gayton, Pleasant Notes on Don Quixote^ 1654, p. 150,
says, indeed : ' Our nation also hath had its poets and they
their wives. To pass the bards . . . My father Ben begat
sons and daughters ; so did Spenser, Drayton, Shakspere,
and more might be reckoned.' As Mr. BuUen, to whom this
reference is due, remarks, Gayton is 'no very sure guide.'
72 MICHAEL DRAYTON
History of the Civil Wars was entered in
the same year, and bears traces of being
written in rivalry with the play. Drayton,
once more a zealous follower of Daniel, ac-
complished also a long epic founded on the
chronicles. Mortimeriados, published in
1596, was first written in the seven-line
stanza of Chaucer's Troilus and Spenser's
Hymns. No poem of Drayton's was more
sedulously filed. In 1603 it appeared wholly
remodelled as The Barons' Wars. The sub-
stitution of compliments to Sir W. Aston
for those to the Countess of Bedford has
been noticed already. But, besides a mass
of textual alterations, the measure of seven
lines (abahhcc) is expanded into the ottava
rima (ahabahcc) by the addition of a line
after the fourth.^ The preface on the various
stanzas available for heroic story, and their
several powers and faults, is as full and
sound a piece of metrical criticism as we
find in English for generations. Of the
seven-line stave :
1 For a valuable table of Drayton's metres see Fleay,
Biog. Chron., i. 7-9, though it is going far to find in them a
chronological test.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 73
The often harmony softened the verse more
than the majesty of the subject would permit,
unless they had all been Geminels, or couplets.
Therefore (but not without fashioning the whole
frame) I chose Ariosto's stanza, of all other the
most complete and best proportioned, consisting
of eight — six interwoven, and a couplet in base.
The Quadrin [abab] doth never double, or to use
a word of heraldry, never bringeth forth Gemells :
the Quinzain [ababb], too soon. The Sestin
[ababcc] hath twins in the base, but they detain
not the music or the close (as musicians term it)
long enough for an epic poem. The stanza of
seven is touched before. This of eight both holds
the tune clean through to the base of the coluran
(which is the couplet, the foot, or bottom) and
closeth not but with a full satisfaction to the ear
for so long detention. Briefly, this sort of stanza
hath in it majesty, perfection, and solidity,
resembling the pillar which in architecture
is called the Tuscan, whose shaft is of six
diameters, and bases of two. The other reasons
this place will not bear, but generally in my
opinion all stanzas are but tyrants and tor-
turers, when they make invention obey their
number, which sometime would otherwise scantle
itself.
We would have given much for a dis-
course of this kind from Spenser : but no-
thing better could be said of the measures
which all the poets had been exploring, in
74 MICHAEL DRAYTON
their dream of finding one that should be
perfect for the long poem, the heroic narra-
tive, itself supreme, as they believed, above
all other forms as a canvas for heroic char-
acter. Of blank verse for such a purpose,
and outside the drama, no one yet dreamed.
Spenser's stanza and the couplet chiefly sur-
vived in the struggle for life among the
metres. We see Drayton haunted with
the sense, which underlay the practice of a
century later, that the true satisfaction to
the ear must come in a rhymed couplet, but
he felt that some prelude in the way of an
interlinked stave of due and dignified length
was wanted to give the couplet value. In
his Poly-Olhion he tried the couplet, but
the lines were too long. He speaks nobly of
the Italian octave, and its ' majesty, perfec-
tion, and solidity,' though not of its room
for irony and caprice — its capacity for
being as nobly modelled, and as swift of
change, as a cloud. The Barons' Wars
attains more dignity than its predecessor.
Most of the classical tags and crude strokes
disappear. But the writer has already left
some of his youth behind him : he has
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 75
passed from the land of Marlowe and
Spenser^ into that of Daniel and the his-
tories of Shakespeare : which indeed he must
carefully have read.^ And he seems to feel
that the staple of an historical poem should
be grave, gnomic, perhaps a little dull ; and
one of the few and fortunate remnants of
his earlier freshness is visible in the final
interview, full of perfume and misty colour,
of luxury and invading bloodshed, between
Mortimer and Isabel. Here Drayton once
more turns to mural decoration, forcing his
usually not too supple hand to Renaissance
^ He ouiits these Spenserian lines :
Tiie cheerful morning clears her cloudy brows,
The vapoury mists are all dispersed and spread ;
Now sleepy time his lazy limbs doth rouse,
And once beginneth to hold up his head ;
Hope bloometh fair whose root was well near dead,
The clue of sorrow to the end is run ;
The bow appears to tell the flood is done.
2 See MorL, ed. Collier, p. 254 : 'As when we see the
spring-begetting sun In heaven's black night-gown covered
from the night.' In The Barons' TVars, 1603, not only is the
night-gown [dressing-gown] omitted, but the lines are re-
modelled with what is, to my ear, a reminiscence of Prince
Henry's famous speech in Henry IV., i. ii. end (1598). There
is also the allusion to Lucrece in the earlier edition of Matilda ;
and for recollections of Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer
Night's Dream, see Nymphidia. The parallels in the sonnets
have been noted.
76 MICHAEL DRAYTON
broiderers' work. Behind the tapestry of
the room —
The naked nymphs, some up and down descending,
Small scattering flowers at one another flung,
With nimble turns their limber bodies bending,
Cropping the blooming branches lately sprung
(Upon the briars their coloured mantles rending)
Which on the rocks grew here and there among.
Some comb the hair, some making garlands by
As with delight might satisfy the eye.
Drayton's Edward the Second, like Shake-
speare's Clarence, had bad dreams :
And still aff'righted in his fearful dreams
With raging fiends and goblins that he meets,
Of falling down from steep rocks into streams,
Of tombs, of burials, and of winding sheets,
Of wandering helpless in far foreign realms.
Of strong temptation, by seducing sprites :
Wherewith awak'd, and calling out for aid.
His hollow voice doth make himself afraid.
Such a verse, as so often with Drayton,
shows the right kind of power ; but it is un-
wrought, and is spoilt by his worst technical
fault, want of clear construction, which hurts
many a good poem of his making. Drayton
does not tell a tale clearly, or make it move.
He produces a number of set pictures, and
moralises between the slides. And he
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 77
can invoke, adjure, commemorate ; and he
has energy and loftiness. But this is to
anticipate; for by the time he wrote The
Barons' Wars, he had long carried to their
height his powers of lyrical monologue in
the most popular of all his poems. Eng-
land's Heroical Bpistles came out in 1597,
but may have been circulated some years
earlier.^ They were more sounding, more
telling, better adjusted to his public than
anything Drayton had written ; they fixed
his popularity, and deserved to fix it. With
their many editions, they were the
Macaulay's Lays of that period, lacking
power to last as a whole, sometimes un-
deniably flashing into reality, ever fluent
and adroit, and now and then splendid in
their versification. Drayton, who ' professed
himself a pupil ' of the poet of the Heroides,
enlarged and reproduced his model, for
a patriotic purpose, with variations. The
characters, both heroine and companion
hero, are drawn from the same field as
the Legends and the Mirror and the
1 The Address to the Reader begins, 'Seeing these Epistles
are now to the world made public'
78 MICHAEL DRAYTON
History plays ; and of this whole school of
verse the Epistles are certainly the fairest
fruit.
The long-drawn pathetic argument, with
its opportunities for lyrical declamation,
suited Drayton well ; and it was here that
he made his most skilful and prophetic use
of the couplet. In Endimion and Phoebe it
had been Marlowesque ; it is here the equi-
valent of Ovid's elegiac, and is used for a
reasoned lament, with an epigram lurking in
each pair of lines, which is complete in itself
like the Latin hexameter and pentameter.
Such a model as the Heroides can only have
sharpened that isolation of the individual
couplets from one another, which we mark
with wonder in so early a writer as Dray-
ton. Not Marlowe, nor Spenser save here
and there, had gone so far in this practice,
though we hear something like it in the early
histories of Shakespeare, where they are
rhymed. But in diction, as in cadence, we
are ever reminded by these poems of Dray-
ton, not so much of his own contemporaries,
as of the stentorian but gallant senti-
ment of Dryden ; — the Dryden, however,
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 79
of the heroic plays, not the Dryden of
The Medal
The depth of woe with words we hardly sound ;
Sorrow is so insensibly profound.
The placing and cadence of the word
insensibly, longer and louder than the words
about it, are absolute Dryden : but the lines
come from the Epistle of the Lady Jane
Grey to Lord Gilford Dudley. Indeed
a feature of the Epistles is the modernness
of hundreds of their couplets. * Waller was
smooth ' ; ^ but Drayton was smooth earlier ;
and who does not hear, in such verse as the
following, the overture to the rhetoric that
was to rule a whole province of our poetry,
from Tyrannic Love, and from the Elegy to
an Unfortunate Lady, down to the last years
of Crabbe ?
And is one beauty thought so great a thing
To mitigate the sorrows of a king ?
^ This is put in the eighteenth-century way, in reference
to the Shepherd's Sirena, etc., by the unknown writer of the
Historical Essay prefixed to the 1748 edition of Drayton.
These poems ' fully refute the notion that the harmony of
numbers in English poesy was unknown till Waller stole the
secret from Fairfax.'
80 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Barred of that choice the vulgar often prove,
Have we than they less privilege in love ?
Is it a king, the woful widow hears ?
Is it a king dries up the orphan's tears ?
Is it a king regards the client's cry ?
Gives life by law to him condemned to die 1
In other places, where Drayton speaks of
spring, youth, and the reappearance of
flowers, he is more of his own time, and
some of his Hnes might serve as a text
for the new Tudor poetry itself, which had
come up as sudden and cordial as the spring
in Russia.
Thy presence hath repaired in one day
What many years and fortunes did decay,
And made fresh beauties' fairest branches spring
From wrinkled furrows of Time's ruining.
Even as the hungry winter-starved earth.
When she by nature labours towards her birth,
Still as the day upon the dark world creeps,
One blossom forth after another peeps,
Till the small flower whose root is now unbound,
Gets from the frosty prison of the ground,
Spreading the leaves unto the powerful noon,
Deck'd in fresh colours, smiles upon the sun.
Not many Elizabethans besides Marlowe and
Shakespeare write in this measure more easily
or changefully. And the quality was noticed
by admirers. 'The author is termed in
Mil H\Ki. Drayton, aged 36.
I''ror,i the Xatioiial Forty ait Gallciy.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 81
FitzgeofFrey's Drakey Golden-mouthed/ for
the purity and preciousness of his phrase.'
Meres, who thus speaks in his Palladis
Tamia of 1598, is the fullest witness to
Drayton's reputation. He names him in f
the best of company as one ' by whom the
English tongue is mightily enriched,' and
praises him for his histories, epistles, lyrics,
and love-poems. He is also the chief but
by no means the only witness to his char-
acter. 'As Aulus Persius Flaccus was
reported among all writers to be of an
honest disposition and upright conversation,
so Michael Drayton, quern toties honoris
causa nomino, among scholars, soldiers,
poets, and all sorts of people, is held for a
man of virtues and well-governed carriage,
which is almost miraculous among good wits
of this declining and corrupt time.' In the
same year Barnfield, in his Lady Pecunia,
names him beside Spenser, Daniel, and
Shakespeare for his ' well- written tragedies
^ In that ungainly work, Guilpin's Shialetheia, 1598, it is
stated :
Drayton 's condemned of some for imitation,
But others say, 'tis the best poets' fashion . . .
Drayton's justly surnamed ' golden-mouth'd.'
F
82 MICHAEL DRAYTON
and sweet Epistles/ and for his * stately
numbers.' ^ So Fuller says, long after : ' He
was a pious poet, his conscience having
always the command of his fancy, very
temperate in his life, slow of speech, and
inoffensive in company.' Equally well
known is the testimony in the Return from
Parnassus (1600), that he 'wants one true
note of a poet of our times, and it is this :
he cannot swagger it well at a tavern, or
domineer at a hot-house ' (brothel). We also
hear of what his letters and works confirm,
his humanity and good nature. The young
Charles Fitzgeofirey, in the Latin lines pre-
ceding his AffanicB (1601), records that his
master did not only not deride his efforts,
but even condescended to polish them, limd
sua : and, in the poem on Sir Francis Drake
(1596), which is written on the model of
the Legends, he speaks of ' golden-mouthed
Dfayton musical' as a disciple of Sidney.
Lastly, in the poetical commonplace book
called England's Parnassus (1604), edited
by R. Allot, Drayton's verses, especially the
Epistles, are quoted, often wrong, but nearly
two hundred times. Upon the publica-
^ Collier, p. xxxix.
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 83
tion of these Epistles, he was probably at
the height of his vogue, his luck, and his
popularity. His * purity and preciousness
of phrase ' was the flower of a severe life and
a fortunate temper, not yet crossed with
uncouth rhetorical rancour against society,
or overtasked by the Poly-Olhion.
The career of Drayton to the end of the
reign was divided between the revision of
his works and his novel industry of play-
writing. He was a theatre hack, and often
a partner with fourth-rate men. Plays were
then written on the sand as much as a modern
review or leader, and saved for print by
happy chance. Often the titles only remain
by an accident. In 1598, when he was most
active, he is named by Meres as one of those
who are ' best for tragedy.' An anonymous
work, of the same year. Poems of Divers
Humours, speaks of his ' well - written
tragedies.' Of all the twenty pieces (ex-
cluding separate parts) in which Drayton's
name figures, only one remains in which he
took a share, but the names tell us of his
dramatic bent. He had exhausted the
chances of the chronicle poem, and to the
chronicle drama, which had largely beaten
84 MICHAEL DRAYTON
it out of the field under the leading of
Marlowe and Shakespeare, he turned by
instinct. His earlier legends boded ill for
his dramatic power, but we can hardly judge
how far he possessed any. He wrought
almost always in partnership, and we should
expect him to contribute the tirades, mono-
logues, and sententious parts rather than the
living scenes. Henry I., Earl Godtvin, Piers
of Exton, Richard Cordelions Funeral, Piers
of Winchester, The Civil Wars in France (in
three parts), William Long sword, Sir John
Oldcastle, Owen Tudor, and the Rising of
Cardinal Wolsey, were all ' histories ' ; that
is, they handled some reign or episode of an
English reign later than the Norman Con-
quest. In the first six of these, and in four
other pieces, Drayton took his share during
the years 1598. The rest, and three other
pieces to which his name is attached, are
sprinkled over the years 1599 to (May) 1602.
The table ^ will show that during the first two
1 The list of titles may be summarised from Henslowe ;
and see Fleay, Biog. Chron., I 157. The fire coadjutors are
denoted by initials ; Dekker by D. ; Munday by M. ; Wilson
by W. ; Middleton and Webster by name.
1597, December. Mother Redcap, M.
1598. Famous Wars of Henry I. and the Prince of Wales,
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 85
years and a half he was partner of Chettle,
Dekker, Hathway, Munday, and Wilson,
and once of one Smith ; but in the later
period the very different names of Middleton
and Webster are also associated with his.
Of the earlier group, only Dekker was a
poet worthy to be his companion, and the
play- writing of Dekker is often scrapwork.
The main witness for this dreary episode
is Henslowe, in whose diary are set down
the names of the plays, the authors, and the
sums ' paid in full,' paid in parts, ' or lent in
earnest ' of the work not yet finished or not
delivered. Drayton, about Christmas 1597,
seems to have drifted among the needy
syndicates that were dependent upon
C. D. Earl of Godwin and his three sons, two parts, C. D. W.
Piers of Exton, same. Black Batman of the North, part i.,same.
Richard Cordeliori's Funeral, C. M. W. The Madman's
Morris, J). W. Hannibal and Hermes, Worse Feared than
Hurt, perhaps two plays, D. W. Piers of Winchester, D. W.
Chance Medley, M. D. W. Civil Wars in France, three parts,
D. Connan (corrected by Fleay Corin, cf. Poly-Olbion, Song
I.), Prince of Cornwall, D.
1599. William Longsword, receipt signed by Drayton, no
partner named. Sir John Oldcastle, two parts, first part
extant, M. H. W.
1600. Owen Tudor, H. M. W. June 3rd, Fair Constance of
Rome, part 1., D. H. M.
1601, Oct. 10. Rising of Cardinal Wolsey, C. M., Smith.
1602, May 29. Ccesar's Fall, M., Webster, Middleton, and
others. Two Harp[i]es, D. M., Webster, Middleton.
86
MICHAEL DRAYTON
c
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1 1
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 87
Henslowe. Each play or part of a play
usually cost Henslowe about £6, and it has
been reckoned that Drayton had from first
to last about £52 from this source. About
£40 of this came in his year of hardest
piecework, 1598. Taking the buying power
of money to be seven times what it is at
present, this would give a total of £300, of
which £280 came in 1598. It was a barren
chapter, both materially and for Drayton's
fame. Half a century later he was for-
gotten as a playwright. In The Great
Assizes holden at Parnassus, 1645, he is
coupled with Sandys and Sylvester, and
discriminated from Beaumont and others, as
a poet who did not write dramas. He toiled
in haste with others to satisfy the vogue for
chronicle plays while it lasted. Kepeatedly
moneys are entered to his sole name, or to
his name in conjunction with one or two
more, as ' lent in earnest ' : once the loan
was as little as ten shillings. The only
signature of his that is known to survive,
and which is given opposite in facsimile,
shows him receiving an advance on the one
play he is known to have written unaided,
88 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Longsivord} Once he shared in a nameless
' comedy of the court ' ; ' Mr Drayton hath
given his word for the work to be done
within one fortnight ' is a significant entry,
and may imply that he was a kind of leader
among his group ; indeed, he often had the
largest share, and doubtless earned it, of the
pittance that was the market-price. It is a
sorry record, which it is idle to fill out by
fine conjecture.
Once the heart of Henslowe was glad, and
he presented ten shillings — it is entered * as
a gift ' — for division amongst four authors,
Munday, Hathway, Wilson, and Drayton.
This was for the successful part of Sir John
Oldcastle, which is preserved. Drayton
received nearly half of the total earnings for
the two parts of this play, and we may
assume the sum answered to his share in the
composition. The first part was probably
played in the first week of November, 1599.
An edition was entered August 11, 1600,
* He did not also write a play Longheard, as Collier sug-
gests (Henslowe's Diary, 1845, p. 142). Mr. Stretton, the
librarian at Dulwich, wrote me that Malone was correct in
reading this entry Longsword ; the name in the other entry
of our facsimile (see ib., p. 95).
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 89
and published that year, giving no author's
name, but stating that the play was printed
' as it hath been lately acted ' by the
Admiral's Servants. Either earlier or later
in that year came another issue, differing
by the addition of the impudent words,
'Written by William Shakespeare.' We
must not charge Drayton with this piratical
proceeding. In fact the play, as Mr Wynd-
ham has pointed out, was a curious counter-
blast, written part in theatrical rivalry, part
in Protestant resentment, to Shakespeare's
Henry IV.,^ the two parts of which had pros-
pered during the years 1598-9. Falstaff,
and Hotspur in part, had made their fortune.
The First Fart had already run through
two editions, having been first entered 25th
February 1598. It is well known that the
name of Falstaff was substituted for the
original one of the Lollard victim of Henry
v., Sir John Oldcastle, whom Shakespeare
may have inadvertently taken over from the
old play, the Famous Histories of Henry V.
The printed text retains a jest founded on
this name, when the Prince calls Falstaff
^ Poems of Shakespeare, pp. 1, li.
90 MICHAEL DRAYTON
^ my old lad of the castle/ and it also retains
the word Old. in a stage direction. The
descendants of Oldcastle had protested, and
Shakespeare proceeded to borrow the name of
a different person, Sir John Fastolfe. But
in 1600 the feeling still smouldered against
his original mistake, and it broke out in the
extant play of which Drayton was part-
author. This, as Mr. Wyndham says, was
written 'specifically in reply to Shakespeare's
abuse of Oldcastle's name ' :
It is no pampered glutton we present,
Nor aged Counsellor to youthful sin ;
But one, whose virtue shone above the rest,
A valiant martyr and a virtuous Peer.
. . . Let fair truth be grac'd.
Since forg'd invention former time defac'd.
Twelve days later (August 23rd) the
Second Part of King Henry IV. was entered,
and in the epilogue of the printed quarto,
after the advice, which was a natural finale,
to ' kneel to the queen,' came an addition
containing the sentences where ' our humble
author ' promises to continue the story, and
to cause Falstaff to ' die of a sweat ' ; 'for
Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 01
man.' This addition may have been made
when the new name finally supplanted the
old one. And the change may have been
quickened by the appearances of Oldcastle
at the rival house. The play is a flat one ;
full of echoes and allusions to the First Part
of Henry IV., with an obvious attempt to
make an impartial hero of Henry V., as
Shakespeare was promising to do. Cobham
is glorified in a way that Holinshed,
and still more modern history, does not
authorise, as a pattern of loyalty. The
conspiracy of Scroope and Grey is detected
and disclosed by him rather meanly, and is
told at length. Perhaps this was why Shake-
speare discharges the same story so abruptly
at us in Henry V., where the plot is full-blown
and already discovered, and where nothing
is said of its inception, which was still so
familiar on the rival stage. Oldcastle seems
to have kept a certain market value, for in
1626 the widow of the printer Pavier trans-
ferred the copyright of it together with that
of Henry V.^
^ I am indebted for some points to an article, Michael
Drayton as a Dramatist^ by Dr. Lemuel Whitaker, in the
92 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America^
vol. xviii. No. 3. Dr. Whitaker disputes some views of
Mr. Fleay, and also some remarks in my former edition of this
work : not, however, without ascribing to me far more agree-
ment with Mr. Fleay than was the case. His main doubt,
whether Drayton was really poor and struggling during this
period, his own analysis of Henslowe's entries seems to set at
rest, but unfavourably. It was not my opinion that Drayton's
'dramatic career was consequent upon the failure of his
patron's promises,' for I argued that the evidence for his
rupture with the Eussells was not valid. It is, however, un-
likely that he would have served Henslowe without necessity.
Dr. Whitaker saddles me with sundry other references, and
I do not see how the ' whole record presents a picture of a
talented, hard-working, and prosperous man.' Mr. Fleay
says : 'In the four years, 1599-1603, during which Drayton
continued to write for the stage, he only assisted in producing
six plays for Henslowe. It seems probable that during this
time he must have been writing also for another company ; he
had to live, and had lost his patronage from the Bedford
family, and certainly produced nothing for the press. Is there
any trace left of what he produced for the theatre ? ' {Biog.
Chron., i. 151.) Mr. Fleay states the problem clearly, but his
answer is unconvincing. He suggests that Drayton assisted
in writing for Shakespeare's company at the Globe, and reasons
thus : Oldcastle was, in some of the first issues, published as
by Shakespeare ; Drayton was one of its four authors. The
Life and Death of Cromwell, published 1602, and The London
Prodigal, 1605, were also printed as by Shakespeare. The
Merry Devil of Edmonton was traditionally given to Shake-
speare, and resembles parts of Oldcastle in style. Drayton
must have done something from 1599-1602 besides his work
for Henslowe. All this is true, but it makes very poor evi-
dence for Drayton's authorship of any but the plays named by
Henslowe. The fact that he was one oi four authors of Old-
castle makes every inference highly doubtful. The passage
quoted (Biog. Chron., i. 161) from Robert of Normandy, 'So
many years,' etc., in comparison with 3 Henry VI., ii, v. 31-
40, merely shows imitation by Drayton, for which cf. our
AN ELIZABETHAN POET 93
quotations, p. 75. The list, on the contrary, in Biog. Chron.,
p. 142, throws great light on the whole movement of what
may be called historical heUes lettres, and claims study.
Mr. Fleay's unfounded assumption throughout his previous
Life of Shaksjjere, that Drayton wrote the Merry Devil of
Edmonton, rests partly on the assertion of Coxeter that he
had once seen an old MS. in which the work is said to be
Drayton's, and partly on the resemblance in some comic
scenes between this play and Oldcastle. Drayton's share
in this is unknowable. But comedy was probably not his
gift.
CHAPTER III
SATIRES, ODES, AND ' POLY-OLBION
Drayton did not write for the theatre after
the accession of James, but came back for
good to his proper work. Meres tells us in
1598 that * Michael Drayton is now penning
in English verse a poem called Poly-Olhion ' :
and he can have spared little enough time to
write or travel or buy the books requisite for
what he calls his ' strange Herculean toil.'
But by 1603 he had found a new patron in
an old friend, Walter Aston of Tixall in
Staffordshire, whose 'generous and noble
disposition ' he had praised six years earlier.
The tie was now to be closer ; for Aston, on
being invested by James with the Knight-
hood of the Bath, made Drayton one of his
' esquires,' ^ a style which henceforth appears
on his title-pages.
^ Douglas, Peerage of Scotland, i. 147. As was said before,
there is no record in the College of Heralds of any grant of
94
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 95
Between 1602 and 1607 no less than five
works ^ are dedicated to Sir Walter Aston ;
and in the twelfth song of Poly-Olhion, 1612
he speaks of Tixall, ' which oft the Muse hath
found her safe and sweet retreat.' The pre-
face to the poem is yet plainer, and says,
memorably enough : ' Whatever is hercrn
that tastes of a free spirit I thankfully con-
fess it to proceed from the continual bounty
of my truly noble friend Sir Walter Aston ;
which hath given me the best of those hours
whose leisure hath effected this which I now
publish.'
But Aston had to console his friend for
the loss of richer hopes, incurred by joining
too soon in the stampede for front places
which attended the advent of the literary
arms to the poet. There is a drawiog in a book of grants of
arms, Harl. MS. 6140, fol. 45 back : ' On a field azure, gutty
d'eau, a winged horse argent, with the crest on the sun in
his glory or a cap of Mercury vert, winged argent.' Above
is written ' Michaell Drayton of Warwickshire Esq.' Authori-
tative or not, this is a pleasant and apt symbol of Drayton's
muse.
1 See Bibliography. Collier notes that two of these last
are addressed ' to the deserving memory of my esteemed
patron,' who lived till 1639 ; and suspects some angry irony
inspired by a suspension of funds. But the words only
promise fame to Aston. Compare Tixall Poetry^ edited by
A. Clifford, Edinb. 1813, appendix.
/
96 MICHAEL DRAYTON
king. After ' the quiet end of that long-
living queen/ Drayton, who had not, so far
as we know, had a farthing from her or a
word of encouragement, omitted to cry La
reine est morte, and confined his lament
almost to a single line of verse. But at such
times there is supposed to be a threnody,
and also a fair interval before the compli-
ments begin to the living. According to
Chettle, his Gratulamy Poem (1603), and
his Pcean Triumphal, made for the entry
into London, were ignored for this reason.
Think, 'twas a fault to have thy verses seen
Praising the king, ere they had mourned the queen.
At the reception of his eulogies (which may
be sufficiently described by a line in one of
them, ' Panting for breath flies our elaborate
song ') Drayton was deeply hurt. ' I in-
stantly saw all my long-nourished hopes
buried alive before my face. ' Nearly a quarter
of a century later, in the Epistle to George
Sandys (1627), he confirms Chettle's explana-
tion of his failure.
It was my fault before all other men
To suffer shipwreck by my fonvard jjcn
When King James entered. . . .
/
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 97
When cowardice had tied up every tongue,
And all stood silent, yet for him I sung ;
And when before by danger I was dar'd,
I kick'd her from me, nor a jot I spar'd ;
Yet had not my clear spirit in fortune's scorn
Me above earth and my afflictions borne.
He, next my God on whom I built my trust.
Had left me trodden lower than the dust.
Thus, while Jonson and Daniel and so many
others were accepted, he was put aside.
The poem called The Owl (1604) he asserts
in its preface ^ to have been written before
this event ; but it is full of strain and
obscure allegory, behind which we seem to
divine a rage ineffectually smouldering.
Mother HuhhardJs Tale and the Parliament
of Birds are in some measure his models.
The Eagle is the monarch ; the Owl, sharp-
sighted in the darkness, is the satiric
observer of the evils of court and society,
and is therefore spurned and ignored.
Attacked by various ohscence volucres, she
pleads her case to the Eagle in a long tirade
1 'A year is almost past since this small poem was lastly
finished ; at which time it gave place by my enforcement,
undertaking then in the general joy ... to write a poem
gratulatory.' In Beaumont and Fletcher, The Scornful Lady,
ii. 2, there is an allusion to the poem, as hard for a lover to
' expound,' and also to the Heroical Epistles.
G
98 MICHAEL DRAYTON
against the lust and jobbing of courts. The
poet himself may or may not be figured by
the ragged and wretched Crane, who laments :
Weary at length, and trusting to my worth,
I took my flight into the happy North ;
Where, nobly bred as I was well allied,
I hoped to have my fortune there supplied ;
But, there arrived, disgrace was all my gain. . . .
Other had got for which I long did serve.
Still fed with words, while I with wants did
sterve.
This is the only evidence for the figment,
which has passed into some biographies, and
seems to be first named and refuted by
Oldys (1750), that Drayton was introduced
by Aston to James, and sent to Scotland on
some unsuccessful public mission. No fresh
light has been cast on the allusion, except
that he did actually go northwards before
1606 : one of the best of his odes being
written from the Peak, and praising
' Buxton's delicious baths.'
In 1605 Drayton published the first
anthology of all his hitherto published
poetry that seemed worth reclaiming. To
atone for his facility, he had the sound habit
of thrusting much hastily begotten verse
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 99
into silence. Little of any worth but
Endimion and Phoebe was sacrificed. Our
Bibliography (§ xv. 1) will show what this
volume contained, and what reprints of it
were speedily called for. His wholly new
lyrics he included in a separate book, the
Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall; Odes and
Eglogs, 1606. Of the revised 'Eglogs'
something has been said ; but nothing he
wrote is more his own than the Odes. His
lyric gift had come late, he was forty-three ;
but it grew finer and lighter as he lived, for
at the age of fifty-six, in the volume of 1619,
he added seven more odes, including the
amended version of the Ballad of Agincourt.
After the Heroical Epistles, the Odes are
the first poems in which Drayton forbore to
lean upon an English model, and they are,
of their species, the earliest in our tongue.
Some of them are among the best odes we
have. If our pleasure is checked by a
rude inversion and an obscure build of
sentence, those are the obstacles of any poet
who uses measures of four or six syllables.
Short is the roll of our English masters of
the curt, heroic, and harping metres. Cowper
100 MICHAEL DRAYTON
and Campbell and Tennyson have few fit
predecessors except Drayton. The ode was
a classical, and therefore a E-enaissance
form : it had been lifted by Ronsard and his
companions into sonority and splendour.
Drayton's preface of 1606 warns us that he
.desires to follow 'the inimitable Pindarus,'
as well as the odes of Anacreon, ' the very
delicacies of the Grecian Erato, which Muse
seemed to have been the minion of that
Teian old man which composed them.' His
own odes are to be mixed, the ' arguments
being amorous, moral, or what else the
muse pleaseth.' He left it, however, to Ben
Jonson to initiate the regular or irregular
Pindaric ode. Horace and the pseudo-Anac-
reon are Drayton's nearest models. Once
he lapses into ' Skelton's rhyme.' But he
was chiefly haunted by the loud and sharp
accompaniment of the Irish or British harp ;
and its twangle, its decisive note, passed
into the loudest of his verses :
And why not I, as he
That 's greatest, if as free,
In sundry strains that strive
(Since there so many be)
Th' old lyric kind revive 1
SATIRES, ODES"/ ETC lOl
I will, yea, and I may :
Who shall oppose my way ?
For what is he alone,
That of himself can say
He 's heir of Helicon 1
Apollo and the Nine
Forbid no man their shrine
That Cometh with hands pure ;
Else they be so divine,
They will not him endure.
There is a struggling melody in all this,
and in other cases it is achieved : in the ode
To the New Year, in that To the Virginian
Voyage, in his Ballad of Agincourt. In the
first of these there is one stanza that makes
us think of the sure and silken web of Mr.
Swinburne's falling rhymes. It might have
come out of the Poems and Ballads of the
year 1866 :
Give her th' Eoan brightness
Wing'd with that subtle lightness
That doth transpierce the air :
The roses of the morning
The rising heaven adorning
To mesh with flames of hair.
Drayton speaks of his ' ode, or, if thou wilt,
ballad ' ; but the cadence of his pieces is as
far from the march of the nobler folk-ballad,
102 MIGKAEL DRAYTON
as it is from the slouch of the inferior. Often
it has the true music, as of the harp speeding
a vessel that is launched with colours flying
to win some new continent of odorous
tropic fruits and illimitable gold. The
Virginian Voyage has some wonderful
words, sassafras, Hachluit, that make the
fortune of their rhymes, and the relief is
heightened by the subtle — not really
prosaic — soberness of their epithets: indus-
trious Hackluit, tiseful sassafras, like words
almost in the ordinary pitch interjected in a
chant. This ode runs more easily than the
others in spite of the lacework of its rhymes :
You brave heroic minds,
Worthy your country's name,
That honour still pursue,
Go, and subdue,
Whilst loitering hinds
Lurk here at home for shame.
The oars plash to the loud and hopeful
thrumming of the player, as he faces out-
ward to where beyond the Pillars a far
world awaits him, one day to be populous
with poets and heroes, the descendants of
the high-hearted voyagers. In the odes of
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 103
love or compliment we are in a later
day, far from Sidneian flights, nearer the
dexterous and delicate that we associate
with the verse of Carew or Suckling. In
1619, when most of these pieces were in-
serted, the strain is lessened, and there is
something like gaiety, as in the ode His
Rival, or the lovely canzonet To his coy
Love. Then also came The Heart, which is
one of Drayton's few dealings in metaphysical
fancy ; is there one heart or two ? and if but
one, where is it ? Then also the poem To
his Valentine, which Donne might have
written on a day when all his demons
except the rarest were in attendance.
But lo, in happy hour,
The place wherein she lies,
In yonder climbing tower,
Gilt by the glimmering rise :
Jove, that in a shower,
As once that thund'rer did,
When he in drops lay hid,
That I could her surprise.
If this was written, as it was published,
after the age of fifty, few poets are so late
susceptible to so alien a genius. The mark
of the best metaphysical verse of that period
104 MICHAEL DRAYTON
is the irregular and inconstant feeling of
shock, which does not amount to jar or dis-
cord, but wins the imagination over by the
sense of beauty, the poet bringing out his
remote image suddenly, from his pocket, as
a sailor might his sea-borne occidental
treasure. But this was in 1619 ; in 1606
the style is still Elizabethan. It was not
many years since the great theatrical suc-
cess of Henry V. ; and the most famous of
Drayton's odes may be taken as a lyrical
epilogue, or rather intermezzo, by Shake-
speare's countryman. It has been so
arranged by Mr. Henley in his Lyra
Heroica, Usually known as the Ballad of
Agincourt, it was first entitled ' To my
Friends the Camber-Britons and their
Harp.' The old popular ditty, Agioicourt,
Agincourt, was in the writer's ears. He
liked his poem, if we may judge by his nice
and numerous improvements. The earlier
version suffers from ungainliness or elliptical
grammar ; a few remaining traces of them
in the later one are the only interruption to
its felicity. There is also a tendency to
multiply the spondees, the better to hear
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 105
the thud of the marching army — left, right.
A few lines can show the change.
(1) 1606 ' 1619
Fair stood the wind for Fair stood the wind for
France France
When we our sails advance When we our sails advance
And now to prove our Nw now to prove our
chance chance
Longer not tarry : Longer will tarry :
But j9ii/ unto the main But putting to the main
At Kaux the mouth of At Kaux the mouth of
Seine Seine
With all his warlike train With all his martial train
Landed King Harry. Landed King Harry.
(2)
And now preparing were Lord, how hot they were
Fm- the false Frenchmen. On the false Frenchmen.
^hen now that noble king This, while our noble king
His broadsword brandish- His broadsword brandish-
ing iug
Into the host did fling Down the French host did
As to o'erwhelm it.
As to o'erwhelm it.
This poem, the fine flower of old patriot
lyric, shows a happier and more sensitive use
of proper names than the play of Henry V.
Shakespeare, in his list of those who fell at
Agincourt, uses names for purely memorial
reasons, copying Holinshed like an inscrip-
/
106 MICHAEL DRAYTON
tioii ; and ' Sir E,ichard Ketley, Davy Gam,
esquire/ is the worst line in his works.
* Ferrers and Fanhope ' in the ballad have a
different value to the ear.
After 1606 Drayton was almost silent
for six years, only producing the last and
flattest of his Legends, that of The Great
Cromwell, Earl of Essex. He was labouring
at Poly-Olhion, but how much he wandered
over England in order to write it is un-
certain. He was enabled to keep to his
task not only by Aston's bounty, but by
assistance from high quarters. The first
instalment of the poem (1612) is offered
to the prince who within a year was to be
cut off. Drayton writes to Henry in a
strain of proud gratitude, of a man escaping
from the sickness of discouragement :
' My soul, which hath seen the extremity of
Time and Fortune, cannot yet despair. The
influence of so glorious and fortunate a star may
also reflect upon me : which hath power to give
me new life, or leave me to die more willingly and
contented. My poem is genuine, and first in this
kind. It cannot want envy: for, even in the
birth, it already finds that. Your gracious accept-
ance, mighty prince, will lessen it.'
10 V
'^ i*i t ^i
■iij..^.' ^'i^i{i<''' U^anvici VI fui.fr m(^ri%,
f^- ■i/ortyait in iltc rociiis ()/ 1619.
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 107
By the dedication of 1622 it appears that
Charles I. had continued the bounty of
Prince Henry, which ' gave me much en-
couragement to go on with this second part.'
What obstacles he met with in publishing
the whole poem, will be seen in his letters
to William Drummond. But meanwhile the
gift of Henry was more than timely. To a
man of Drayton's temper, sensitive to the
manner of a gift, and justly taking it more
as a pension for merit than as alms, Henry's
usage, ever considerate to poets, must have
counted for more than the money fee. But
this annuity of £10, whenever it was
begun, together with the help of Aston,
made him more independent of the stage. It
was continued after Henry's death, though
it does not appear for how long.^
In 1613 we see Drayton's features. He
^ P. Cunningham, Accounts of Bevels, p. xvii. Among
'Anuyties and Pencons' is noted by Sir D. Murray 'Mr.
Drayton a poett for one yeare x^V The heads of the House-
hold, after the Prince's death in 1612, recommended to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer persons ' whoe by the co-
maundement of the late prince w^'^out anie graunte in
wrytinge were allowed yerely somes by way of Anuyties or
Pencons out of the privie purse of the said late prince :
viz. Joshua Silvester a poett xx^'. Mr. Drayton a poett x^*,
etc' (p. xviii.).
108 MICHAEL DRAYTON
was now fifty ; and his portrait, engraved
by Hole, is in the volume of 1605. It shows
the * swarth and melancholy face ' of which
he speaks himself.^ A harassed, half-sub-
merged but unbeaten doggedness, a mal-
content energy, a temper with which life has
gone hard, speak from its lines. The picture
in the National Portrait Gallery, dated 1598,
of less sure date and origin, is more youthful
and buoyant ; it figures the hopeful Eliza-
bethan poet, with laurels still fresh. It
formerly belonged to Lady Mary Thompson,
of Sheriff Sutton Park in Yorkshire, a
daughter of the fifth Earl Fitzwilliam.
The Dulwich portrait was taken fifteen
years later, being dated 1628, when he was
sixty -three ; it is mellower, and has more of
prosperous dignity. The face in both is wide,
the forehead well modelled, crowned with
laurel ^ in the engraving. The Abbey bust
is vacant of expression.
1 Legend of Robert, 1596, stanza ix.
'^ The Dulwich picture, dated 1628, and marked cet. 65.
was given by Cartwright the actor ; the artist is unknown.
A reproduction may be seen as our frontispiece. Oldys,
Biog. Brit, 1750, names some other pictures, which are lost :
one, ' a delicate portrait of him in miniature,' said to have
been painted by Peter Oliver.
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 109
The first eighteen Songs of the Poly-
Olhion appeared in 1612: the other twelve
were not out till 1622, though they were
finished before 1619/
The great poem was brought to the birth
with as much ceremony as an heir-
apparent. Only the stately reprint by
the Spenser Society can do full justice to
the frontispiece with its attendant verses,
representing Albion with the symbols of
power and plenty, framed in an archway
whose background is the sail-clad ocean :
and on the pillars beside her are her princes,
from Brutus to Csesar, and Caesar to the
Normans. The title-page consists of one
hundred words. There are more verses,
besides the prose dedication, opposite the
noble full-length engraving by Hole of
Prince Henry, who stands with his lance
in rest. There is a ' table ' of the chief
passages : epistles by the author of the
poem *to the general reader,' and ' to my
friends, the Cambro-Britons ' ; and another
from the author of the * illustrations,' John
Selden, whose notes bristle after each of the
^ See p. 124, second letter to Drummond.
no MICHAEL DRAYTON
first eighteen Songs. It is plain in what
temper the poem was written. Into^Dray-
ton^ English as he was, had sunk the Ilenais-
sance feeling of the wreck and destruction
accomjpjished„.bj JTime upon beauty, and
power ,_aiid-Jiiihla_jrisiHe_.inon^ a ,n d
%^^JJ. 9l^l^^^^^' From the Triumphs
of Petrarch down to the Ruins of Du Bellay
and Spenser, that sense of the mingled loss
and salvage from antiquity, itself so newly
rediscovered, had inspired many a lament
oyer the passing of oldand splendid things;
and sometimes over newer potentates_^nd
lordly families, which_ had. gone, they -also,
the way of the others. The same spirit had
T)een carried into English history and legend
by the school of Sackville, which Drayton
had already followed. He now turns, in
the wake of Camden, to the huge task of
collecting the memories and sagas of Great
Britain. He will fight with Time to save
L, Antiquity, which men are disregarding:
^ and it is his affair, by 'world-outwearing
j^ rhymes,' to stay the oblivion that endangers
^J^ the 'delicacies, delights and rarities' of
k ws England and Wales.
*^' I .-t -X
^
'/X/yi'
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. Ill
O Time, what earthly thing with thee itself can trust,
When thou in thine own course art to thyself unjust 1
Dost thou contract with Death, and to oblivion give
Thy glories, after them yet shamefully dar'st live 1
(Song 21.)
Again :
So, when injurious Time such monuments doth lose
(As, what so great a work by Time that is not wrackt "?),
We utterly forgo that memorable act :
But, when we lay it up within the minds of men.
They leave it their next age ; that leaves it hers again.
(Song 10.)
Alas ! the great poem, like an over-
freighted galleon, has foundered. It has
become an antiquity underseas, and is left
to the divers, the antiquaries and antho-
logists, who bring up fragments for the
glass-cases of museums.
Drayton did not invent his geographical
scheme, nor was he the first to watch the
natural scenery and monuments of England
in anxiety for their preservation. It has
been thought that the Itinerary of Leland
offered him his plan, but there is little in
those arid entries that could serve him.
Nor could he with Leland say that ' there is
almost neither cape nor bay, haven, creek,
or pier, river or confluence of rivers,
112 MICHAEL DRAYTON
breaches, washes, lakes, meres, fenny waters,
mountains, valleys, moors, heaths, forests,
woods, cities, boroughs, castles, principal
manor places, monasteries, colleges, but I
have seen them, and in so doing noted a
whole world of things very memorable/
Drayton shows no signs of having travelled
thus; perhaps he was too light of pocket.
Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Gloucestershire,
Kent, and London, these places and more
he knew himself : but derives much of the
animating spirit of his poem, and his actual
route, from Camden s Britannia. ' I would
restore Antiquity to Britain, and Britain
to his Antiquity. Who is so skilful, that,
struggling with Time in the foggy dark sea
of Antiquity, may not run upon rocks ? '
The Latin original of this passage, here
cited from the noble translation (1616) of
Philemon Holland, was printed in 1586,
long before Drayton had begun. The
traditional opening in praise of the
tempered climate of England is taken from
Camden, whose journey ' The Muse ' of
Poly-Olhion painfully follows for several of
the Songs, beginning with Cornwall, and
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 113
working through ' Devon, Dorset, Hamp,
Wilt, Somerset.' After this she pursues the
main river-systems, and draws now much
and now little from Britannia, whilst in
Wales she discovers, from her book, many
such curiosities as the one-eyed fish in the
Snowdon tarns. But the greater part of
the Songs of Wales are concerned with the
chronicle or the personifications, both of
which are foreign to Camden. Then comes
the most unborrowed portion of the poem,
from the tenth Song to the eighteenth, as
the way lies from Cheshire to the Western
midlands towards London, on the upward
road. The Cambridge dikes, the Lincoln
fens, the Derbyshire mines, and the journey
through Yorks, are described chiefly from
the book ; but the close of the Poly-Olbion,
where the Muse stumbles to her rest
among the hills of Westmorland, is from
some other authority.
Drayton has no constant poetical vision
for the face of nature, and it is often un-
certain if he saw what he writes of, or is
adapting it from a book. The list of the
plants of his own shire, Warwick, might
H
114 MICHAEL DRAYTON
have come from a herbal, with its receipts
for sauces and purges. In observing, his
manner is likely to be hard and docu-
mentary ; spirited without illumination.
Shakespeare's wrongly praised specification
of the horse in Venus and Adonis is near to
the habitual manner of his countryman ; but
Drayton never came to hear the tunable
bay of the Spartan hounds of Theseus, or
even the Dauphin's boast over his charger
on the eve of Agincourt. And, much as he
uses Camden, he often misses his vividness.
Camden, crossing the Wharfe upon his cob,
stumbles on the slippery stones, and adds :
'he runneth with a swift speedy stream,
making a great noise as he goeth, as if he
were froward, turbid, and angry ; and is
made more full and testy with the number
of stones lying in his channel' : and this
gives the essential raging life of the swollen
river better than Poly-Olbion with all its
personifying.
But the glitter of a crowded, civilised
river suited Drayton better. His view of
London from the water is full of change and
motion. He does not allow himself to wait
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 115
long; and thus he can paint instead of
merely counting. The passage well shows
the pitch oi PoJy-Olhion in its braver mood.
Drayton is parenthetical, he never seems to
be out of sight either of prose or of poetry,
and his curious middle style soon pleases.
But now this mighty Flood, upon his voyage prest
(That found how, with his strength, his beauties still
increas'd
From where brave Windsor stood in tiptoe to behold
The fair and goodly Thames, so far as ere he could,
With kingly houses crowned, of more than earthly
pride,
Upon his either banks, as he along doth glide)
With wonderful delight, doth his long course pursue,
Where Otlands, Hampton Court, and Richmond he
doth view.
Then Westminster the next great Thames doth enter-
tain :
That vaunts her palace large, and her most sumptuous
fane :
The land's tribunal seat, that challengeth for hers,
The crowning of our kin^-: their famous sepulchres.
Then goes he on along by that most beauteous Strand,
Expressing both the wealth and bravery of the land
(So many sumptuous bowers, within so little space,
The all-beholding Sun scarce sees in all his race).
And on by London leads, which like a crescent lies.
Whose windows seem to mock the star-befreckled
Besides her rising spires so thick themselves that shov/-
As do the bristling reeds within his banks that grow :
116 MICHAEL DRAYTON
There sees his crowded wharfs, and people-pestered
shores,
His bosom over-spread with shoals of labouring oars :
With that most costly bridge, that doth him most
renown,
With which he clearly puts all other rivers down.
The river then pronounces a catalogue of
the kings and queens since the Norman con-
quest. Personification and legend beguile
the long journey of the poet. Matter is
inwrought from Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Matthew of Paris, Higden, Holinshed, and
other annalists. There are dreary rolls of
sovereigns and battles : the legends, indeed,
furnish better poetry than the chronicles.
There is no line between legend and fact;
both are matter for the Muse, both have to
be saved from forgetfulness. There is not
much humour ; but one of the few glimpses
of it is to be found in Selden's erudite notes,
when he applies a gentle and sympathetic
cautery to the figment that the English
monarchy is descended from Brutus the
Trojan. For this belief the poet pleaded
not without generous heat. Were such tales,
forsooth, spurious because Julius Caesar had
known nothing of them ? Drayton is at
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 117
his best when he works up this kind of
legend, or history with a film of legend. The
songs of Wales ring of Merlin, the Cornish
of Corineus ; who suggests at once a picture
of the local style of wrestling. The Danes
recall the tale of Guy of Warwick, which is
excellently told. In Sherwood there are
Robin Hood and his men, of whom Drayton
knew in the best of the English ballads.
All these things were part of the native
record, not different in essence from the
tale of our naval heroes or of the English
saints.
It is not clear if Drayton took his trick
of personifying river and hill from the map-
makers, whose moonstruck tutelar nymphs
and Pans agreeably answer to his text. It
is needless to suppose this, for the literary
fancy wrought up, for instance, by Geoffrey
of Monmouth had long peopled Thames or
Severn with mythic figures. The poet of
Comus took leave to reassociate the Severn-
goddess, Sabrina, with her legendary scene.
Drayton doggedly works in the same device
through thirty chapters. To hill and stream
he applies the same half-humanising, half-
118 MICHAEL DRAYTON
abstracting process, made by Spenser delight-
ful in variety, but becoming a little worn in
the hands of the masque-makers and their
stage artists. Once more Spenser asserts his
influence : the meeting of Thames and Isis in
the fifteenth Song oi Poly-Olhion is a lavish
imitation of the marriage of the Thames
and Medway in the Faerie Queene. The
address of the North Wind to the vale of
Cluyd (Song 10) has a gorgeous tasteless-
ness that is delightful. It was indeed hard
deliberately to go back to this more primi-
tive state of thought, which was once, long
ago, in the ' angel infancy ' of the world's
imagination, taken seriously.
In the old age of a literary period the
desire of great things outlives the perform-
ance. Hence arise works like the Poly-
Olhion and The Purple Island. In the
reign of James the drama came to its full
power, but outside the drama the strength
of our poetry was lyrical. Eoly -Olhion owes
i^s incej)tion to the spirit. q£ the- reign, before,
but_was carried out when that inspiration
was fading down.. It is written in the alex-
andrine, or rhyming couplet of twelve
SATIRES, ODES, ETC. 119
syllables, with a uniform break in the midst.
Drayton, it is likely, brings out of this
lumbering measure most of the effects of
which it is capable under such terms. It is
often apt for long bravura passages, it has a
kind of heavy dignity, like a Lord Mayor's
coach. To the huge poem as a whole — often
bare and dry, never mean — if we treat it
as an antique itself, the lines well apply,
which show both Drayton's tender zeal for
what is old, and his natural spaciousness of
style :
Even in the aged'st face, where beauty once did dwell,
And nature in the least but seemed to excel,
Time cannot make such waste, but something will
appear,
To show some little tract of delicacy there.
CHAPTER lY
THE RENEWAL OF DRAYTON ! LATER WORKS
The Poly-Olhion was hard to publish, and
the first instalment fell flat. ' Some of the
stationers, that had the selling of the first
part of this poem, because it went not so
fast away in the sale as some of their
beastly and abominable trash . . . have
either despitefully left out, or at least care-
lessly neglected, the Epistles to the readers,
and so have cozened the buyers with un-
perfected books/ So writes the author in
his letter 'To any that will read it,' 1622.
He did not find a London publisher for the
last twelve Songs without much trouble,
and at one time made an eflbrt to bring the
book out in Edinburgh. The history of this
affair and of this chief literary friendship
is found in the correspondence exchanged
with Drummond of Hawthornden from 1618
120
LATER WORKS 121
onwards. For a nearly full text of all the
letters, and a commentary, should be con-
sulted Dr. Masson's Life of Drummond}
The four letters written by Drayton (the
only ones, exclusive of dedications and the
like, that have been saved) deserve quoting
in full. Written to one whom he had never
met, they testify to his hearty, generous
temper, in terms that are special not so
much to himself as to the high language of
friendship in that age.
Drummond had long studied and admired
the author of the Epistles and Poly-Olhio7i,
and in his Characters of Several Poets,
written about 1614, is loud in his praise.
Correspondence did not begin till 1618,
when Drummond composed a long and
weary compliment to the king on his Scot-
tish progress. It may have been the Forth
Feasting that drew the notice of Drayton in
London. More probably, the tie began
1 Pp. 78 seqq., 112 seqq., 180 seqq. Drayton's letters are
originally given in the 1711 ed. of Drummond's Works, pp.
154, 233 ; and copied in the Transactions, 1828 to 1836, of
the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (Arch(eologia Scotica),
vol. iv. pp. 90 seqq. ; the extracts were ruade by Laing. The
MSS. of them seem to be now lost, not surviving among the
Drummond papers in the hands of the Society.
122 MICHAEL DRAYTON
through a common friend, Sir William
Alexander of Menstrie, who passed to and
fro between North and South, and whose
name comes constantly in the letters.
Whatever the cause, Drayton seized the
occasion of a certain Joseph Davies visiting
Scotland to send to Hawthornden a message
of friendly encouragement, the terms of
which are lost. Drummond replied with
grateful, slightly mannered cordiality, reveal-
ing himself an admirer of long standing,
whom ' your most happy Albion \_Poly-
Olbion] put into a new trance ' ; and, like
others, observes upon Drayton's ' great love,
courtesy, and generous disposition/ Two
other notes in a similar strain follow, before
the first reply was received from Drayton.
It runs thus :
To Tny Honourable friend,
Mr. William Drummond of Hawthornden.
My Dear Noble Drummond, — Your letters
were as welcome to me as if they had come from
my mistress, which I think is one of the worthiest
living. Little did you think how oft that noble
friend of yours, Sir William Alexander, that man
of men, and I, had remembered you before we
LATER WORKS 123
trafficked in friendship. Love me as much as
you can, and so I will you. I can never hear of
you too often, and I will ever mention you with
much respect of your deserved worth. I enclosed
this letter in a letter of mine to Mr. Andrew
Hart of Edinburgh, about some business I have
with him, which he may impart to you. Fare-
well, noble Sir, and think me ever to be your
faithful friend,
Michael Drayton.
London, 9 Nov. 1618.
Joseph Davis is in love with you.^
As Dr. Masson suggests, the work about
which Drayton wrote to Hart was almost
certainly the Poly-Olhion. On 20th Decem-
ber 1618 Drummond replies: *I have been
earnest with him in that particular. How
I would be over-joyed to see our North once
honoured with your works as before it was
with Sidney's ' (an edition of the Arcadia).
The next letter from Drayton rages at his
further embarrassments. It may be recalled
that Ben Jonson's famous walk to Scotland
and visit to Hawthornden occurred in the
interval, at the Christmas of 1618.
^ Works of Drummond, 1711, p. 153.
124 MICHAEL DRAYTON
To my noble friend Mr. William Drummond
of Hawthornden in Scotland.
My Noble Friend, — I have at last received
both your letters, and the last in a letter of Sir
William Alexander's enclosed sent to me into the
country, where I have been all this winter, and
came up to London not above four days before
the date of this my letter to you. I thank you,
my dear sweet Drummond, for your good opinion
oi Poly-Olhion. I have done twelve books more,
that is from the eighteenth book, which was Kent,
if you note it ; all the East part and North to
the river Tweed ; but it lies by me ; for the book-
sellers and I are in terms [bargaining] ; they are
a company of base knaves, whom I both scorn
and kick at. Your love, worthy friend, I do
heartily embrace and cherish, and the oftener
your letters come the better they shall be wel-
come. And so, wishing you all happiness, I
commit you to God's tuition, and rest ever your
assured friend, Michael Drayton.
I have written to Mr. Hart a letter which comes
with him.
London, 14 Ajpril 1619.^
The business with Hart came to nothing,
and Drummond did not, it would seem,
answer this letter. The next is dated more
than two years afterwards.
^ Works of Drummond^ 1711, p. 153.
LATER WORKS 125
To Tny dear Noble friend Mr. WilliaTn Drwmniond
of Hawthornden in Scotland.
Noble Mr. Drummond, — I am often thinking
whether this long silence proceeds from you or
from me, whether I know not ; but I would have
you take it upon you to excuse me ; and then I
would have you lay it upon me, and excuse your-
self; but you will, if you think it our fault as I
do, let us divide ; and both, as we may, amend it.
My long being in the country this summer, from
whence I had no means to send my letter, shall
partly speak for me; for believe me, worthy
William, I am more than a fortnight's friend.
Where I love, I love for years, which I hope you
shall find. When I wrote this letter, our general
friend, Sir William Alexander, was at court at
Newmarket; but my lady promises me to have
this letter sent to you. Let me hear how you
do so soon as you can; I know that I am and
will be ever your faithful friend,
Michael Drayton.
London, 22 November, 1621, in haste. ^
The letter travelled at leisure, for Drum-
mond did not receive it till 20th April in
the next year. He replies in his high-
pitched strain :
'Of our long silence let us both excuse our-
selves, and as our first parents did, lay the fault
1 Works of Drummond, p. 154.
126 MICHAEL DRAYTON
upon some Third . . . and [I] testify that neither
years nor fortune can ever so affect me, but that
I shall ever reverence your worth and esteem
your friendship as one of the best conquests of
my life, which I would have extended if possible,
and enjoy even after death; that, as this time, so
the coming after, might know that I am and
shall ever be your loving [friend].' ^
In a further letter,""^ of uncertain date, but
appearing to refer to the expected poems of
1627, the same language is kept up. But
nothing comes back from Drayton until the
year before his death, and this, the last of
his extant letters, is one of the best.
To my worthy and ever honoured friend
Mr. William Drummond of Hawthornden
in Scotland.
Sir, — It was my chance to meet with this
bearer Mr. Wilson at a knight's house in
Gloucestershire, to which place I yearly use to
come in the summer-time to recreate myself,
and to spend some two or three months in the
country; and, understanding by him that he
was your countryman, and after a time inquiring
of some few things, I asked him, if he had heard
of such a gentleman, meaning yourself; who told
me he was your inward acquaintance, and spake
1 Arch. Scot.j vol. iv. p. 90. ^ ji^^,^ ^ 91
LATER AVORKS 127
much good to me of you. My happiness of
having so convenient a messenger gave me the
means to write to you and to assure you that I
am your perfect faithful friend in spite of destiny
and time. Not above three days before I came
from London (and I would have been there above
four days) I was with your noble friend and mine
Sir William Alexander, when we talked of you.
I left him, his lady, and family, in good health.
This messenger is going from hence, and I am
called upon to do an earnest business for a friend
of mine. And so I leave you to God's protection,
and remain ever your faithful servant,
Michael Drayton.
Clifford in Gloucestershire, 14 July 1631, in haste.
Next year, writing to Sir William Alex-
ander, Drummond had to pour out his
lament for the old friend whom he had
never seen. No other letters by Drayton
remain ; but in these four his character is
shown answering to the high language
which he instinctively uses : a language
with its serious, invincible bravado, which
only a few old poets like himself remem-
bered, the language of a man nurtured
upon a day which had passed for England.
His perfect faithful Jrieiidship in spite of
destiny or time, and / commit you to God's
128 MICHAEL DRAYTON
tuitio7i, are phrases Elizabethan in the true
sense.
These letters furnish some other notices
of his later life. ' Where I love, I love for
years.' Unless the sonnets printed for the
first time in 1619 were all written much
earlier, the cult of ' Idea ' was tenacious.
Anne, now for more than twenty years past
Lady Rainsford, was doubtless the mistress
praised in the letter of 1619 as * one of the
worthiest living.' But by this time such
utterances were tokens of gallantry, with
friendship behind it. The Epistle Of his
Ladys not coming to Toivn, published 1627,
and written in the defter and later style, is
ingenious, but sincere in its note. Certainly
Drayton's intercourse with the E-ainsfords
was kept up for many years before his death.
The letter of 1631 speaks of his yearly resort
in summer to their seat of Clifford Hall, and
the country visits named in the second and
third letters were probably to the same
place. In Poly-Olhion, he says that Clifford
hath ^been many a time the Muses' quiet
port.' And, in Sir Henry Rainsford, he
found a friend of whom he writes with
LATER WORKS 129
a flash of the spirit of Hamlet praising
Horatio/
Could there be words found to express my loss,
There were some hope that thus my heavy cross
Might be sustained, and that wretched I
Might once find comfort ; but to have him die
Past all degrees that was so dear to me !
As, but comparing him with others, he
Was such a thing, as if some Power should say,
' I '11 take man on me to show Man the way
What a friend should be.' But words come so
short
Of him, that when I thus would him report,
I am undone, and having nought to say.
Mad at myself, I throw my pen away,
And beat my breast, that there should be a woe
So high, that words cannot attain thereto,
'Tis strange that I, from my abundant breast,
Who others' sorrows have so well exprest.
Yet I by this in little time am grown
So poor, that I want to express my own.
I think the Fates, perceiving me to bear
My worldly crosses without wit or fear.
Nay, with what scorn I ever have derided
Those plagues, that for me they have oft provided,
Drew them to council ; nay, conspired rather.
And in this business laid their heads together
^ Neither this elegy nor three others (see Bibl. § xix.)
seem to have been reprinted since the earliest editions.
There is a fine image in that to Mr. JeflFrey. Virtue cannot
get into kings' cabinets :
For Ignorance against her stands in state
Like some proud porter at a palace gate.
I
180 MICHAEL DRAYTON
To find some one plague that might me subvert
And at an instant break my stubborn heart :
They did indeed, and only to this end
They took from me this more than man or friend. . . .
. . . Methinks that man, unhappy though he be.
Is now thrice happy in respect of me.
Who hath no friend ; for that, in having none,
He is not stirred, as I am to bemoan
My miserable loss, who but in vain
May ever look to friend the like again : —
This more than mine own self ; that, who had seen
His care of me wherever I have been,
And had not known his active spirit before
Upon some brave thing working evermore,
He would have sworn, that to no other end
He had been born, but only for my friend.
These lines, in which the lapidary notes a
want of gloss, and the grammarian a harsh-
ness of construction, have a plain Jonsonian
manliness and faithfulness in their regret,
and rise once or twice to the high imaginative
style that our time has lost. To Drayton, a
man of reserved and retentive heart, words
are a metal that is but slowly hammered into
a glow — into a noble if not a consummate
outline. They are hard to say, but once said
he will never take them back, their sincerity
enduring, to re-quote his phrase, ' in spite
of destiny and time.' Sir Henry died on
LATER WORKS 131
27th Jan. 1622; and Drayton continued,
as appears, his visits to the family. The
* knight,' whose house in 1631 he had ' yearly
visited,' was the younger Sir Henry Rains-
ford, now long since grown up.^ It is not
clear when Anne died.-^
Drayton's last eight years (1623-31) were
productive; even Poly- Olhion did not leave
him effete. Before referring to his other
friendships and his latter days, there is more
verse to notice. In 1619 he had published
a revised selection, what would now be
called a definitive edition, of all that he
had written up to that time, apart from
his great work (see Bibl. § xv. 5). A book
of wholly fresh matter followed in 1627, and
yet another in 1630. The first of these con-
tains The Battle of Agincourt, The Miseries
of Queen Margaret, Nymphidia, The Quest
of Cynthia, The Shepherd's Sirena, The
^ Anne's son and heir wrote lines before Sandys' Fara-
phrase of Job, etc., 1638, and seems to have belonged to the
set of Falkland. He was a strong royalist; his estates were
sequestered in the war, and he compounded for £900. See
Rudder, New History of Gloucestershire^ 1779, p. 375, under
' Clifford Chambers.' Also The Genealogist, first series, ii. 105-
108, for a full pedigree of the Rainsford family.
'-^ Doubtless after 1627, when the Epistle on her * not
coming to town ' was published. (See p. 70.)
132 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Mooncalf, and the Elegies. The volume of
1630 contains The Muses' Elizium, and the
three biblical paraphrases, Noah's Flood,
Moses his Birth and Miracles, and David
and Goliah. In these volumes, if certain
faculties have faded, new ones have been
born. The torch of the old man's passion is
low, he has begun to forget what once he
felt ; the high oratorical tones of the Epistles
are gone for ever. Over some of the longer
compositions, excepting the Epistle to
Reynolds and some other ' elegies,' lies the
burden of that dullness, which in Poly-
Olhion had been frequent. The most spirited
of them — for the Miseries of Margaret is an
exercise of the old kind — is the Battle of
Agincourt. But the energy, which in the
Ballad is heated to a glow, is here frittered
over pages. Of the Ballad, not the Battle,
Jonson should have written :
I hear again thy drum to beat
A better cause, and strike the bravest heat
That ever yet did fire an English blood.
The Mooncalf is Drayton's contribution to
the censorious school of Hall and Marston,
TllLK-rAGE Ul JllE I'UKMS, lOj/.
LATER WORKS 133
with its affectation, its distorted bloodshot
vision of society. It is a rank satire of the
conventional stamp, containing amidst its
splutter against avarice and luxury some
quaint documents of frivolous or corrupt
manners. The Mooncalf, a bastard son of
the world and the devil, represents the
ignorant sot, who in youth is a wanton,
but who rises on the strength of his vices to
place and consideration above the good. He
is to be seen
In his caroche, with four white Frieslands drawn,
And he is pied and garish as the Pawn,
With a set face, in which, as in a book,
He thinks the world for grounds of state should
look. . . .
Eats capons cooked at fifteen crowns apiece
With their fat bellies stufF'd with ambergris ;
And, being to travel, he sticks not on to lay
His post-caroches still upon his way ;
And, in some six days' journey, doth consume
Ten pounds of suckets and the Indian fume.
For his attire, when foreign parts are sought.
He holds all vile in England that is wrought,
And into Flanders sendeth for the nonce.
Twelve dozen of shirts providing him at once,
Laid in the seams with costly lace, that be
Of the smock fashion, whole below the knee. . . .
With the ball of 's foot the ground he may not feel,
But he must tread upon his toe and heel ;
134 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Doublet and cloak with plush and velvet lined ;
Only his headpiece, that is filled with wind.
Rags, running horses, dogs, drabs, drinks, and dice
The only things that he doth hold in price.
The whip is heartily used, but the fables
that fill the poem are turbid. Of the
scriptural poems, the history of Moses (the
work of 1604 altered) is stolidly enough
expanded from the original, but has a touch
of Drayton's human and compassionate
temper. The joy of the mother of Moses
when the princess unwittingly calls on her
to tend her own child, like the scene of the
parting of kindred in the Battle ofAgincourt,
refreshes the wastes of narrative. Of David
and Goliah there is little to say : but the
overture to Noah's Flood deserves to be
known for its dignity, its presentiment of a
greater sacred diction :
let thy glorious angel which since kept
That gorgeous Eden, where once Adam slept.
When tempting Eve was taken from his side.
Let him, great God, not only be my guide.
But with his fiery fauchion still be nigh,
To keep affliction far from me, that I
With a free soul thy wondrous works may show.
Then like that deluge shall my numbers flow,
Telling the state wherein the earth then stood,
The giant race, the universal flood.
LATER WORKS 135
In these final poems such music is rare
enough ; but one class of them discovers not
so much a renewal of youthful grace as an
unsealing in the old poet's spirit of fresh,
sweet, and unsuspected sources. Certain
late lyrics of Landor and Tennyson, and the
Sad Shepherd of Ben Jonson, come to our
memory. The fragment of Jonson is the
closest of all ; for it was now the second age
of pastoral, when the direct influence of
Spenser was beginning to confine itself to a
caste or school, and was losing that wide
predominance which had marked it for
thirty years after the Calendar. The
pastoral dramas of Italy, which had lain on
the desks of Jonson and of Fletcher, had
inspired, not merely a preference for the
theatrical form, but a change of the ruling
motives in pastoral ; or rather, a kind of
even and pure elegance, with a marked ab-
sence of those allusions to the poet's loyalty,
assurance of immortality, and personal pride,
which had marked the earlier eclogues, and
Drayton's, as we have seen, among them.
We do not know that Drayton had read
Tasso or Guarini ; neither did he pass be-
136 MICHAEL DRAYTON
yond the simple and familiar form of dia-
logue in song. But to compare the Shep-
herd's Ga7iand with The Muses' Elizium is
to feel that the first is an Elizabethan
poem, while the second is a Caroline poem,
written under the same class of influences,
with the same flow and glory of rhythm, as
the verse of Carew.
O let not those life-lightening eyes
In this sad veil be shrouded,
Which into mourning puts the skies
To see them overclouded.
my Mertilla, do not praise
These lamps so dimly burning :
Such sad and sullen lights as these
Were only made for mourning !
Much of The Shepherd's Sirena, The Quest
of Cynthia, and The Muses Elizium, is in
this style. Over Drayton's pastoral has
come a light playfulness and a fancy for
tripping rhyme. The real shepherd life,
with its pasture-craft and country fare, is
noted far more than in his earlier Ga^iand,
although there is once a kid mentioned that
will follow its master for a whole furlong on
its hind feet. The eighth eclogue, like the
LATER WORKS 137
lyrical part of a masque, describes a fairy
wedding, and links the whole collection
with the finest of all seventeenth-century
fantasies, Nymphidia. To conceive common
things wholly in miniature, fitted to the
needs of an elf ; to plant the faintest sting
of satire in a gay parody of the well-nigh
forgotten chivalrous ballads ; to carry the
vein of Sir Thopas into the world of Oberon ;
it is all done, and yet without one touch of
the sufiusing imagination of Shakespeare's
Dream, which Drayton had before him.
The Nymphidia does not move in the land
of dreams at all, their wings do not brush
it. The smallest things described are in
clear daylight. But the verses are kept
fresh by the nicety of their cutting. This
poem was a favourite in the mid-seven-
teenth century, unlike most of Drayton's
works, and was often reprinted later. A
loan is gracefully levied on it, not only by
Herrick, but perhaps by Margaret, Duchess
of Newcastle, in her Poems and Fancies,
1653, on the Pastime and Recreation of the
Queen of Fairies.
The Elegies are complimentary letters,
138 MICHAEL DRAYTON
or conversational satires, or reminiscence.
Their couplets no longer glide as in En-
dimion or the Heroical Epistles. They
are sudden, rugged, familiar, sometimes
high - inspired : they are not unlike the
epistles of Ben Jonson. Traces of the
angry old platitude remain when Dray-
ton harps on the ill-treatment of poets
and the vileness of the world. But it
was also the age of queerness in verse,
and the elegy on the Lady Penelope
Clifton might have furnished Dr. Johnson
with further illustrations at the cost of
' metaphysical poetry.' Others are ad-
dressed to Drayton's Jacobean friends, for
so we may call them ; to William Browne,
and to the travelling poet George Sandys
on his departure for Virginia. The elegy
on Sir Henry Kainsford has been heard
already. Another, To my most dearly
loved friend, Heiiry Reynolds, Esquire, of
Poets and Poesy, is none the less genial
for being addressed to a warm admirer.
Henry Reynolds, in 1628, produced a
translation of Tasso's Aminta, and later
an Ovidian poem on the tale of Narcissus.
LATER WORKS 139
In an epilogue to this work, My thorny stes,^
Eeynolds, after praising Chaucer, Sidney,
Spenser, and Daniel, proceeds : ' We have
among us a late- writ Poly-Olhioii also, and
an Agincourt, wherein I will only blame
their honest author's ill fate, in not having
laid him out some happier clime, to have
given honour and life to, in some happier
language.' Drayton was in a good vein
when he wrote his review of the English
poets from Chaucer to Sir William Alex-
ander. It is the evening talk of a whole-
some, strenuous old man, who knows better
than to burden us with reasons, even for his
prejudices, and who rhymes out his tastes
and distastes, stopping now and then for the
right epithet, which will give the impres-
sion that long years have formed. Some of
the names are those of his masters — part of
his own poetical life ; some of those he
praises, more tepidly than posterity, are the
greatest ; but therein lies the interest. To
see the change of taste, of estimates, when
^ This poem, and prose extracts, have been edited by Mr.
James Starkey of Dublin from Dr. Grosart's transcript, and
are to be published in Englische IStudien.
140 MICHAEL DRAYTON
we read the judgment of a contemporary,
ought not to make us modest in judging
our own time ; rather it should make us
franker, if we can write as well as Drayton :
for then we shall be interesting. The praise
of Chaucer only echoes that uttered by all
the great Elizabethans like Spenser and
Daniel; but, like them, Drayton is under
the illusion that Chaucer wrought in a
rugged and imperfect tongue :
As much as then
The English language could express to men
He made it do.
The patronage of John Gower by later critics
was also foreshadowed by Drayton. The
' princely ' Surrey, the ' reverence ' borne to
Wyatt, and the ' dainty passages ' of their
wit — we feel the old poet has hit the right
words. Spenser, as we saw, is praised for
his epic enterprise rather than for the
kinds that Drayton himself had imitated.
It is curious to hear of Sidney only as the
redeemer of English prose from the euphu-
ism of Lyly ; Drayton does not say that
Sidney's own prose was wrought in a differ-
LATER WORKS 141
ent artifice. Three famous judgments may-
be quoted, to illustrate the manner of the
elegy :
Next 1 Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had ; his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear ;
For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.
And surely Nash, though he a proser were,
A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear.
Sharply satiric was he, and that way
He went, since that his being to this day
Few have attempted, and I surely think
Those words shall hardly be set down with ink
Shall scorch and blast so as his could, where he
Would inflict vengeance ; and be it said of thee,
Shakespeare, thou hadst as smooth a comic vein
Fitting the sock, and in thy natural brain
As strong conception and as clear a rage.
As any one that traflicked with the stage.
This praise has been considered, wrongly,
feeble ; the incommensurable part of Shake-
speare was after all little seen by contempo-
raries, who honoured those gifts akin to their
own, which he was seen to have in greater
measure than they, not the gifts that only
came in sight on the eve of the nineteenth '
^ The original text has ' Neat Marlowe.'
142 MICHAEL DRAYTON
century. The praise is as great as could be
hoped for. ' As strong conception and as
clear a rage ' ; — ' clear ' is noble, illustrious,
and ' rage ' is the power that possesses the
poet : ' conception ' applies to plotting and to
hold on character ; so that Drayton spoke
highly here. Jonson is distinguished, in
perfectly apt and even modern terms, for his
^ knowledge,' for being ' lord of the theatre,'
and as one who 'made our learned'st to stick,'
or halt behind, both in comedy and tragedy.
The last great name is Chapman's, and he is
celebrated as a translator of Homer and
Hesiod, and of Musseus, that is, as the poet
of Hero and Leander ; he was, along with
Drayton himself, the disciple of Marlowe. The
rest of the elegy is on the writer's friends.
In these verses there is much of Drayton's
own life, of his own admirations : it is a
curious and beautiful study in distances and
values, to see his admiration of Sandys' ' un-
usual grace ' and * neatness ' — which are
exactly his qualities. The couplets of
Sandys may well have been balanced and
cleared and smoothed by the example of
Drayton's earlier ones. Perhaps the con-
LATER WORKS 143
eluding lines, concerning those who send
their poems ^ by transcription daintily ' and
' through private chambers,' glance at Donne.
Drayton cares not for such ; and certainly
he had himself never shown any fastidious-
ness in facing the printer. Drummond also
receives his tribute ; but three other poets,
* my dear companions whom I freely chose
my bosom friends,' are particularly named,
who must, unlike Drummond, have been
personal associates. One was Francis Beau-
mont ; the second was Sir John Beaumont,
whose death in 1627 led Drayton to offer
desolately, in the prefatory verses to Bos-
luorth Field, ' this poor branch of my wither-
ing bays ' ; the third was William Browne,^
by whom Drayton is often mentioned with
regard. We know little else about his
dealings with other men of letters. With
the dictator, Jonson, who survived him
six years, his relations were cordial. His
stilted, but essentially hearty epistle, pre-
fixed in 1627 to Drayton's folio, may be
1 See Poems of W. Browne, ed. Gordon Goodwin (Lawrence
and Bullen ; reissued by Koutledge), London, 1894, index to
vol. ii., s,v. 'Drayton.'
144 MICHAEL DRAYTON
taken to efface his remark (thrown out
years before over Drummond's table, and
sedulously chronicled) that ' Drayton feared
him, and he [Jonson] esteemed not of him/
Energy, hatred of sham, a tendency to shout
too loud, some lack of the finer vision, and
a manly, almost heroic, acceptance of for-
tune, were qualities common to both poets,
and stayed with both to the end.
Drayton was latterly assisted by the Earl
and Countess of Dorset (born Mary Clifford).
We do not know when they began to favour
him ; but in the dedication to the Earl, pre-
fixed to The Muses Elizium, he states that
* the durableness of your favours hath now
made me one of the family.' The ' Divine
Poems ' in the same volume are addressed to
'your religious Countess.' There is reason
to suppose that whatever support could thus
be given was needed, and that Drayton died
in poor circumstances. Not only the deed
of administration quoted below, but a curi-
ous independent notice, confirms this tradi-
tion. According to Peacham, a contemporary
writer, ' Honest Mr. Michael Drayton had
about some five pounds lying by him at his
Michael Draviox, a(;ki) 05.
J''ro!i: tlic Duiivick Callcry.
LATER WORKS 145
death, which was satis viatici ad ccelum.' ^
With friends to bury him, this or a little
more was enough for a bachelor.
Drayton died at the end of 1631 ; there is
no evidence for the month or day,^ even in
the registers of the Abbey, where he was
buried. Our only account of his end is from
Aubrey, who says : * He lived at the bay
window next the east end of St. Dunstan's
Church in Fleet St. Sepult. in north of
Westminster Abbey. The Countess of
Dorset (Clifford) gave his monument. Mr.
Marshall the stone-cutter who made it told
it me.' Aubrey then quotes the inscription,
* Do, pious Marble, etc.,' commonly put down
to Jonson,^ and states, on the authority of
the same Mr. Marshall, that the verses were
'made by Mr. Francis Quarles.'* There is
^ H. Peacham, Truth of our Times, 1638, p. 37, quoted in
Grosart's Introduction to the Foems of Sylvester, vol. i. p. xix.
2 Though 23rd December is named, I know not on what
authority, by Laing, Arch. Scot, I.e. supra, iv. 93. I have
seen this date quoted in almanacs. See Appendix B for the
MS. verses supposed to be written 'the nyght before he
dyed.' They are metaphysical in fantasy, and Drayton some-
times fell into that strain.
3 Printed as Underwoods, No. 17.
* Lives of Eminent Men, reprint of 1813, London, vol. ii.
p. 335.
K
146 MICHAEL DRAYTON
a corroboration of Aubrey's statement that
Drayton was not buried in Poets' Corner,
where his bust, by an unknown hand, stands
crowned with laurel and inscribed with the
tributary verses. The Apjjeal of Injured
Innocence, 1639, printed at the end of
Fuller's Church History, is cast in the form
of a dialogue between Heylin and Fuller.
Fuller names the resting-place of the poet ;
and Heylin then answers that ' Drayton is
not buried in the south aisle of that [West-
minster] Church, but under the North wall
and in the main body of it, not far from
the little door that opens into one of the
prebend's houses . . . though, since, his
Statue hath been set up in another place.'
Heylin adds that he is sure of this, because
he happened to be bidden to the funeral.
Fuller asks, ' Have then stones learnt to lie,
and must there needs be a fiction in the
epitaph of a poet ? ' ^
The burial, in the case of a person so^ not-
able, may well have been semi-public and
fully attended. Drayton did not leave a
1 This reference is named in Collier's preface, last page.
Church History, ed. 1659, ii. 42.
LATER WORKS 147
will. In default of it, his brother Edmund,^
who lived on till 1644, took out letters of
administration which were granted 17th
January 1632.^ They are to the effect that
the poet died, as Aubrey implies, in St.
Dunstan's parish ; that administration was
granted to his lawful brother Edmund ; that
the final formalities were to be completed
next Ascension ; and that his effects were
valued at a little under £25.
1 Dorothy, the daughter of Edmund, was buried 26th
March 1625, and Dorothy his wife on 4th April 1625, both
at Mancetter.
2 This was first, I believe, noted in Mr. Goodwin's ed. of
William Browne, 1894, ii. 32. The full document is here
extracted from the principal Registry of the Probate Division,
in the Commissary Court of London.
'Mense Januarii, 1631 [1632 N.S.].
Michael Drayton. Decimo septimo die p[er] m[agist]rum
Willmum lames legum D[o]c[t]orem Surrogatum &c. Em[an]-
avi[t] Com[m]issio Edmundo Drayton fr[atr]i natural[i] et
l[egi]timo Michael Drayton nup[er] p[ar]o[chia]e S[anct]i
Dunstan in occiden[te] London ab intestato Defunct[o] Ad
administrand[a] bona, &c., de bene, &c., ac de pleno, &c.,
necnon de vero, &c., Jurat., &c., Salvo iure, &c.
Civit. London.
Ascen[sione] In[ventorium] ex[pedituni]. 24'' 2^ 8'^'
/
CHAPTER V
CRITICAL
/
In aweary satire, printed in 1645, and im-
puted to George Wither, The Great Assizes
liolden in Parnassus by Apollo and his
Assessors, the weekly Mercuries and casual
press of that hour are accused of slandering
literature. The judges, with Apollo presid-
ing, range from Erasmus and Pico della
Mirandula to Bacon and Grotius. The
jurors are Jacobean and Caroline poets,
from Shakespeare to May, and include
Drayton. They are challenged in turn by
the accused ; Drayton on the score of his
Poly-Olhion, that 'rude embryon of wit.'
Apollo then utters his eulogy at length ;
praises his * sonnets sweet of love heroic,'
his ' illustrious poem,' Agincourt, and even
his earlier 'Tragic legends' and their
* pathetic fancies.'
148
CRITICAL 149
Thus spake Apollo ; and old Drayton smil'd
To see him curb'd that had him thus revil'd.
Such a scrap of driftwood shows a current
of opinion. Drayton was not yet merely one
of the lesser Elizabethans famous in their
day. But there remain few allusions to him
for another hundred years, and it was not
till 1748 that his works were reprinted.
This anonymous edition was a fruit of that
requickened love of our poetry which was
working in Gray and Tyrwhitt and Hurd
and Percy. Goldsmith's Chinaman, walking
in Westminster Abbey,^ was pointed by his
guide
* to a particular part of the temple. " There," says
the gentleman, pointing with his finger, " there is
the poets' corner ; there you see the monuments
of Shakespeare, and Milton, and Prior, and
Drayton." — " Drayton 1 " I replied, " I never heard
of him before ; but I have been told of one Pope
— is he there ? " " It is time enough," replied my
guide, " these hundred years ; he is not long dead ;
people have not done hating him yet." '
The Chinaman, like Goldsmith, had formed
his taste in the classical age. It was the
1 The Citizen of the World, 1760, Letter xiii.
150 MICHAEL DRAYTON
new spirit, whose backward view was not
blocked by Pope and Prior, that had begun
to recognise Shakespeare's companions. But
there were reasons why Drayton should
suffer eclipse during the day of Dryden and
Pope ; for he had begun to be obscured
even earlier. He had overlived the bitter
end of the great patriotic age of which
he tried to be the voice ; he had produced
much that died at once ; and his instinct
to absorb and copy, though he is far too
strong to be called a mimic, did not always
enable him to shape his materials. In
his big work he attempted so much that
it is hard to rescue attention for its noble
episodes. He left no school, though he had
created some original forms like the Heroi-
cal Epistles, the Odes, and the Nymphidia.
The last of these leaves a tiny wake behind
it in the history of our poetry.
But the change of poetical taste also un-
duly marred his fame. He and not Milton
is the last Elizabethan in the truer sense.
He had sounded the bugle -calls of the older
generation ; he had sung his fervent and
chivalrous love and his hope of enduring
CRITICAL 151
verse, and his love for the land and all its
ancient things. In the middle of the seven-
teenth century the themes of Milton and
those around him were different, and Dray-
ton's somewhat fitful executive talent failed
to buoy up his reputation. But with Mar-
lowe and Chapman to share his oblivion he
was in good society.
If Drayton left no school, he had never
been vowed to any. He touched and
studied poets, from Spenser to Carew, who
were of different worlds. During his first
twenty years we can tell from his verse
what kinds of non-dramatic poetry were
in acceptance, and how a gallant and cap-
able craftsman could realise them. He was
justified in his courage, but it is curious to
see the frequent struggle of his strong and
stiff-grained spirit with subjects that call for
a sure and supple hand. Often he seems to
prevail, in the English way, by pure force of
toil and character. But the variety of his
successes is imposing. He wrote hardly
anything that is not luminous here and
there, that fails of articulate and beautiful
passages, and he wrote much that is
152 MICHAEL DRAYTON
sustained. If we are to name his most in-
superable flaw, apart from his bluntness, it
can be seen by any pedagogue ; it is that
want of clear and right grammar, which
raises smoke and friction in the axles of his
chariot. But in youth and age he was
often a master of the eclogue and its en-
chanting artifice. As sonneteer he could
step into the circle of Shakespearean splen-
dour and intensity, and once he leapt full
into the centre, having murmured the right
incantation. He had his days of decorative
felicity, when he made Endimion and Phoebe,
and not then only. He moved easily in the
Ovidian declamatory style, harping on love
and desiderium. Even in satire and religious
verse, his least fortunate field, he struck out
flashes. No man tried in so many forms to
utter the passion for England, the passion
of England for itself In some he failed,
but he v\^ent on undismayed to others not
less exacting. He is least impeded and
bravest and most musical in several of his
odes. Age brought him a lighter hand ; he
achieves the pitch of good-natured and
manly gaiety in his epistles on himself and
CRITICAL 158
his friends. But he is latterly happiest in
lyric of the gallant, faintly mannered,
not too vehement kind, where he is think-
ing of his cadence and enjoying it. His-
torians have begun to talk as if they
were ashamed of Drayton, but theirs is the
sacrifice.
His importance in the musical, and not
only in the mechanic, evolution of our verse
is real and distinct. He gave an accent of
his own to nearly every measure that he
practised ; and he practised sextain, rhyme
royal, sonnet, Italian octave, heroic couplet,
short-lined ode, octosyllabic couplet, dithy-
rambic stanza, and alexandrines. There is
not one of these that he did not sometimes
write as well as any poet of the English
Renaissance. It was in the ode and the
couplet that his tunes, if not very subtle
or abstrusely harmonised, were most his
own, and most fertile as examples. The
angel of rhythm visits him forgetfully and
capriciously, and like Wordsworth he goes
on doggedly in its absence. But he has
notes at first of the shawm and trumpet,
and latterly of the flute as well.
154 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Near to the silver Trent
Siren a dwelleth,
She to whom nature lent
All that excelleth :
By which the Muses late,
And the neat Graces
Have for their greater state
Taken their places ;
Twisting an anadem
Wherewith to crown her,
As it belonged to them
Most to renown her.
The slight ruggedness in these verses is not
unpleasing, and saves their nerve. And else-
where Drayton is among the first to strike
out the tune that is heard all through the
seventeenth century in Cowley, in Rochester,
in Dryden, down to the darker days of lyric :
I pray thee, love, love me no more,
Call home the heart you gave me,
I but in vain that saint adore
That can, but will not save me ;
These poor half-kisses kill me quite ;
Was ever man thus served.
Amidst an ocean of delight
For pleasure to be starved ?
To learn to write this after sixty shows a
great vitality of assimilation or invention ;
how far Drayton has travelled in his musical
CRITICAL 155
art from his Spenserian days, or from the
style of 1597, — from this ! —
When heaven would strive to do the best it can,
And put an angel's spirit into man,
The utmost power it hath, it then doth spend,
When to the world a Poet it doth intend. . . .
When Time shall turn those amber locks to grey.
My verse again shall gild and make them gay.
And trick them up in knotted curls anew.
And to thy autumn give a summer's hue :
That sacred power, that in my ink remains.
Shall put fresh blood into thy withered veins,
And on thy red decayed, thy whiteness dead,
Shall set a white more white, a red more red.
And yet, as we have seen, this earlier
oratory has its own line of descendants, and
will startle those who think that it began
with Sandys or with Waller. We cannot
say of Drayton, in the pedigree of literature,
as we must of so many poets, ohiit sine prole.
Nor is his interest at all purely of the damn-
ing historical kind, which is only another
name for a second death, unless it be rein-
forced by absolute excellence : for to this
excellence he often attains, and in the register
of the poets he is himself, not simply one of
our ancestors who made experiments. If he
does not rank without question among the
156 MICHAEL DRAYTON
highest, he is an athlete, suspected of half-
Olympian and half-terrestrial blood, who is
of commanding stature and can lift many
weighty burdens ; with a sturdy, dignified
beauty of his own, and a soft, musical grace ;
and speaking now and then with something
of the divine accent.
BIBLIOGRAPHY^
I. THE HARMONY OF THE CHURCH
1 1591. The I Harmonie | of the Church. \
Containing, | The Spirituall Songes and
I holy Hymnes, of godly men, Patriarkes
and I Prophetes : all, sweetly sounding, to
the praise | and glory of the highest. |
Now (newlie) reduced into sundrie kinds
of I English Meeter : meete to be read or
sung, I for the solace and comfort of the
godly. I By M. D. | [Device.] | London. |
Printed by Richard Ihones, | at the Rose
and Crowne, neere Holborne | Bridge.
1591. I
Quarto : pp. 48, blk. lett. (no pagination). Dedica-
tion : ' To the Godly and vertuoiis Lady, the Lady
lane Deuoreux, of Meriuale,' dated from London by
Drayton, 10 February 1590 (1591), and letter ' To the
curteous Reader.' Entered 1 February 1591, as
' The Triumphes of the Churche.'
Copy in Brit. Mus.
2 1610. A I Heauenly Har- | monie of Spirituall |
* The University Library, Cambridge, is here denoted by
U.L.C. ; that of Trinity College, Cambridge, by T.C.C. ; and
that of Trinity College, Dublin, by T.C.D.
167
158 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Songes, and holy Himnes, of | godly Men,
Patriarkes, and Prophets. | Imprinted at
London. | 1610. |
Quarto : pp. 46, blk. lett. Reissue of 1 -with a
new title-page and without the leaf of dedication.
Copy in a private library.
3 1843. In Percy Society Publications, vol. vii.
Reprint edited by Dyce.
4 1856. In Works (§ xv. 13).
5 1876. In Works (§ xv. 14).
II. IDEA, THE SHEPHERD'S GARLAND
1593. Idea | The | Shepheards | Garland, |
Fashioned in nine Eglogs. | Rowlands
Sacrifice | to the nine Muses. | EfFugiunt
auidos Carmina sola rogos. | [Device with
garland] By Peace Plenty. By Wisdome
Peace. T. 0. | Imprinted at London for
Thomas Woodcocke, dwelling in Pauls |
Churchyarde, at the signe of the black
Beare. 1593. |
Quarto : 70 pages.
Dedication to Kobert Dudley.
Entered 23 April 1593.
Copy in Brit. Mus.
[1606]. In Poemes Lyrick And Pastoral
(§ XVI. 1)
as Eglogs. Each of the 9 eclogues is much revised,
and one new one, the 9th in 2, is added. The
BIBLIOGRAPHY 159
numbering of four is changed : No. 4 in 1 becomes
No. 6 in 2, No. 6 becomes No. 8, No. 8 becomes
No. 4, and No. 9 becomes No. 10. In the new
No. 8 is the passage (see p. 19 ante) about Selena,
Cerberon, Idea, Panape, etc.
3 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5).
This is 2 with some further changes, such as
omission of the passage about Selena, and under
title of Pastorals Containing Eglogues.
4 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6). As in No. 3.
5 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), Appendix; as in
No. 3.
6 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10). The same; as in
No. 3.
7 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11). As in No. 3.
8 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). As in No. 3.
9 1856. In Poems (Collier, § xv. 13). The first
and only full reprint of 1 (1593).
10 [?1870]. Idea | [surrounded by garland, and
musicians with various musical instru-
ments on either side] The | Shepheards
I Garland, | Fashioned in nine Eglogs. |
Rowlands Sacrifice | to the nine Muses. |
Effugiunt auidos Carmina sola rogos. |
[Device : By Peace Plenty ; by Wis-
dome Peace. T. 0.] Imprinted at London
for Thomas Woodcocke, dwelling in Pauls
160 MICHAEL DRAYTON
I Churchyarde, at the signe of the black
Beare. 1593.
Edited by John Payne Collier.
Quarto : 4 pp. and 70 pp.
[In Introduction : ' The following tract is a typo-
graphical facsimile of Michael Drayton's second
publication. ... In reprinting these Pastorals we
have not merely imitated the types, but we have
followed the pagination, the spelling, and even the
corrupt punctuation.']
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl.
11 1891. In Poemes, | Lyrick and Pastoral! |
By I Michaell Drayton, Esquire. | Printed
For The Spenser Society. | 1891. |
4 pp. blank ; title as above and 1 p. : then reprint
page by page of 2 (1606) ; with original pagination
at foot (pp. 1-120) as noted under 2 : total pp. 126.
12 1896. In An English Garner . . . edited by
Edward Arber . . . vol. viii. . . . 1896.
III. LEGEND OF GAVESTON
I [1593 or 1594]. Peirs Gaueston | Earle Of Corn-
wall. I His life, death, and fortune. | Effu-
giunt auidos carmina sola rogos. [Device.]
At London, | Printed by I. R. for N. L.
and John | Busby, and are to be sold at
the West | doore of Paules.
Quarto : pp. 78 (no pagination).
Dedicated to ' Maister Henry Cauendish, Esquire.'
Entered 3 Dec. 1593, and named in Preface to
Matilda (§ iv. 1., 1594) as * already successful.'
Copy in a private library.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 161
2 [1595]. [Peirs, etc.]
A second, faulty and surreptitious edition, named
in preface to Legend of Kobert (§ viii. 1) according
to Heber.
3 1596. In § VIII. 1, ' newly corrected and aug-
mented ' : q.v. for later editions.
IV. LEGEND OF MATILDA
1 1594. Matilda. | The faire and chaste | Daughter
of the Lord Robert | Fitzwater. | The Trve
Glorie Of The | Noble Hovse Of | Svssex. |
Phoebus erit nostri princeps, et carminis
author. | At London, | Printed by lames
Roberts, for N. L. and | lohn Busby. 1594.
Quarto : pp. 64 (no pagination).
Dedicated to ' Mistres Lucie Harrington ' ; pre-
fatory address 'To the Honourable Gentlemen of
England, and true fauorers of Poesie.'
Not entered in Stationers' Registers.
Copy in a private library.
2 1594. Matilda . . . author. Printed by Valen-
tine Simmes for N. L. and John Busby 1594.
This is 1, with a different title-page.
3 1596. In § VIII. 1 ; q.v. for later editions.
' Much altered ' according to Heber.
V. SONNETS : IDEA
I 1594. Ideas | Mirrovr. | Amovrs | In Qvator-
zains. | Che serue e tace assai domanda. |
L
162 MICHAEL DRAYTON
[Device] At London, | Printed by lames
Roberts, for Nicholas | Linge. Anno.
1594. I
Quarto : pp. 56 (no pagination).
Dedicatory sonnet to Anthony Cooke by Drayton ;
sonnet by ' Gorbo il fidele,' unidentified, but named
also in the Eclogues. Contains 51 sonnets, entitled
* Amour 1, Amour 2,' etc.
Description from Collier, § xv. 13.
Entered 30 May 1594.
Copy in a private library.
For index of first lines of all Drayton's sonnets
and their numbering in Nos. 1, 2, 4, 6, 10 (the only
five really difi'erent editions), see Appendix B, and
note on p. 44.
2 1599. In England's Heroical Epistles . . . with
Idea (§ IX. 3), q.v.
Here there are 59 sonnets, no longer labelled
Amours ; the original Amours are sometimes re-
tained, sometimes altered, sometimes omitted; and
new sonnets are added.
3 1600. In Englands Heroical . . . with Idea
(§ IX. 4).
Probably 2 reprinted.
4 1602. With Englands Heroicall Epistles
(§ IX. 5)
Here there are 67 sonnets, including some fresh
ones. The third real edition.
5 1603. With The Barrens Wars (§ vii. 3).
Here there are 67 sonnets, including alterations
and additions. No. 4 repeated.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 163
6 1605. In [Collected] Poems (§ xv. 1).
Here there are 3 prefatory sonnets, 62 to Idea,
and 5 more, called Certaine other Sonnets to great
and worthy Personages. The fourth real edition,
which Nos. 7-9 repeat.
7 1608. In Poems (§ xv. 2).
8 1610. In Poems (§ xv. 3).
9 1613. In Poems (§ xv. 4).
10 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5).
Here there are 63 sonnets, including more altera-
' tions and additions. The fifth and last real edition.
1 1 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6).
12 1630. In Poems (§ xv. 7).
1 2a 1631. In Poems (§ xv. 7a).
13 1637. In Poems (§ xv. 8).
14 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9).
15 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10).
16 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11).
17 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12).
Nos. 11-16 reprint the 1619 edition of the Sonnets.
18 1856. In Works (§ xv. 13). Collier reprints
Ideas Mirrovr (1) on pp. 145-175, for the
first time since 1594, with notes. Also,
under the heading Sonnets Under the Title
of Idea (pp. 439-465), he gives 'all those
sonnets which were not originally inserted
164 MICHAEL DRAYTON
in "Ideas Mirrour/" with notes. 'Our
text,' he adds, ' has usually been that of the
impression of Drayton's Poems in 1605';
and in the notes ' the most material varia-
tions ' are pointed out. Thus Collier's
edition is at present the only work in
which every one of Drayton's sonnets, in
one of its forms, can be read. For a full
collation we must await the complete
variorum text.
19 1883. An English Garner . . . edited by
Edward Arber . . . vol. vi. pp. 289-322.
A reprint of 10, the 1619 edition.
20 1887. In The Barons' Wars . . . with an
introduction by Henry Morley . . . 1887.
The 1619 edition once more, in pp. 216-247.
21 1888. In Poems . . . 1605. Printed for the
Spenser Society. 1888. (§ xv. 15.)
Keprint of No. 6 of this section.
22 1897. In Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles. Edited
by M. F. Crow . . . 1897.
No. 10 ; in the vol. containing also sonnets by
Griffin and Smith.
23 1904 In An English Garner . . . Elizabethan
Sonnets newly arranged and edited by
Sidney Lee . . . Westminster. Archibald
Constable & Co. 1904. In 2 vols.
No. 10 reprinted with notes in vol. ii. pp. 179-212.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 165
VI. ENDIMION AND PHOEBE
1 [1595]. Endimion | and Phoebe. | Ideas Latmvs. |
Phoebus erit nostri princeps, et | carminis
Author. I At London, | Printed by lames
Roberts, for | lohn Busbie. |
Quarto.
Dedicatory sonnet signed by Drayton to Lucy,
Countess of Bedford : Verses by E. P. and S. G.
Entered 12 April 1595.
Description of title-page from Collier, § xv. 13.
2 1606. Portion inserted with changes in The
Man in the Moon (§ xvi. 1) : q.v. for later
editions.
3 1856. In Works (§ xv. 13) = 1 reprinted.
4 Endimion | and Phoebe. | Ideas Latmvs. |
Phoebus erit nostri princeps, et | carminis
Author. I At London, | Printed by James
Roberts for | John Busbie. |
Edited by John Payne Collier. London. 1870 1
Reprint of 1.
In Introduction : ' Only 2 copies of " Endimion
and Phoebe" are extant, and of one of them (the
only perfect exemplar) the following pages are a
typographical facsimile, with all its peculiarities.
We were fortunate enough to have procured the
imperfect copy before 1837; until then the poem had
never been heard of : the perfect copy is also in a
private collection.— J. P. C
Copy in Brit. Mus., Bodl.
166 MICHAEL DRAYTON
VII. MORTIMERIADOS, afterwards
THE BARONS' WARS
1 1596. Mortimeriados. | The Lamen- | table
ciuell wanes of | Edward the Second and
the I Barrens. | At London, | Printed by
I. R. for Mathew Lownes, | and are to bee
solde at his shop in S. Dunstons | Church-
yard. 1596. I
Quarto : 136 pages (no pagination).
Stanzas of dedication by Drayton to Lucy,
Countess of Bedford. Sonnet to the same by E. B.
There are no books or cantos marked in this version
of the poem, except by spacings in the printing.
Entered 15 April 1596.
Copies in Brit. Mus., T.C.C.
2 [1596 ?]. Mortimeriados . . . Printed by I. R.
for Humfrey Lownes . . . Churchyard.
Another issue of 1 ; ' only differs in the imprint '
(Collier).
* No doubt the two Lownes, Mathew and Henry,
had a joint interest in the publication' (Collier).
Copy in Bodleian.
3 1603. The | Barrons Wars | in the raigne of
Edward | the second, | with Englands |
Heroicall Epistles. | By Michaell Drayton. ]
[Device.] At London, | Printed by I. R. for
N. Ling. I 1603.
Octavo.
Barons' Wars, pp. 169. Epistles, 103 leaves.
Idea, not paged.
Dedication to Master Walter Aston ; Sonnets
by Thomas Greene and J. Beaumont ; and address
BIBLIOGRAPHY 167
To the Keader, explaining the reasons of the very
great changes made in the poem and its metre (see
supra, p. 72). Drayton also now divides the work
into six 'books' or 'cantos,' with an 'argument'
heading each. The Barons' Wars is reprinted in the
following, Nos. 4-12.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodleian (imperfect).
4 1605. In (Collected) Poems (§ xv. 1).
5 1608. In Poems (§ xv. 2).
6 1610. In Poems (§ xv. 3).
7 1613. In Poems (§ xv. 4).
8 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5).
9 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6).
9a 1631. In Poems (§ xv. 7a).
10 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9).
11 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10).
12 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11).
13 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12).
14 1856. In Poems, ed. Collier (§ xv. 13).
The first and only reprint of 1, Mortimeriados,
with valuable notes, pp. 241-376.
1 5 1887. In The Barons' Wars, etc. H. Morley's
Selections (§ xxi. 2).
16 1888. In Poems . . . printed for the Spenser
Society. 1888.
A reprint of 4, the Poems of 1605 (§ xv. 15).
168 MICHAEL DRAYTON
VIII. LEGENDS OF ROBERT, MATILDA, AND
GAVESTON
1 1596. The | Tragicall Legend of Ro | bert,
Duke of Normandy, surna | med Short-
thigh, eldest Sonne to | William Conqueror.
I With the Legend of Matilda the | chast,
daughter to the Lord Robert Fitzwa | ter,
poysoned by King | lohn. | And the Legend
of Piers Gaueston, the | great Earle of
Cornwall : and mighty fauorite | of king
Edward the second. | By Michaell Drayton.
I The latter two, by him newly corrected
and I augmented. | At London, | Printed
by la. Roberts for N. L. and | are to be
soldo at his shop at the West | doore of
Paules. I 1596. |
8vo : 222 pages (no pagination).
Dedication to Lucy Countess of Bedford in prose
and to the Lady Anne Harington in verse. Verses
by H. G., R. L., * Mirocinius.'
Entered 21 November.
Copy in Brit. Mus.
2 1605. In (Collected) Poems (§ xv. 1).
3 1608. In Poems (§ xv. 2).
4 1610. In Poems (§ xv. 3).
5 1613. In Poems (§ xv. 4).
6 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5).
7 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 169
8 1630. In Poems (§ xv. 7).
8a 1631. In Poems (§ xv. 7a).
9 1637. In Poems (§ xv. 8).
10 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9).
11 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10).
12 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11).
13 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12).
14 1888. In Spenser Society's reprint (§ xv. 15)
of Poems of 1605.
IX. ENGLAND'S HEROICAL EPISTLES
1 1597. Englands | Heroicall | Epistles. | By
Michael Drayton. | [Device] At London, |
printed by I. R. for N. Ling, and are to
be I sold at his shop at the West doore of |
Poules. 1597. |
Octavo : 164 pp. ; 8 unpaged, 77 fols. + 1 fol. blank.
Dedication to Countess of Bedford.
Verses by E. Sc, Gent.
Dedicatory Epistles to The Keader, Lord Mount-
eagle, Lady Anne Harrington, Earl of Bedford,
Lord Henry Howard, Mistress Elizabeth Tanfield,
Sir T. Mounson, Sir H. Goodere, and Lady F.
Goodere.
Entered 12 October 1597.
Copies in Bodleian.
2 1598. Englands | Heroicall | Epistles. | Newly
enlarged, | by Michaell Drayton. | At
London, | Printed by P. S. for N. Ling,
170 MICHAEL DRAYTON
and are to be | sold at his shop at the West
doore of | Poules. 1598. |
Octavo : 208 pp. ; 4 unpaged, 99 fols. + 1 fol. blank.
Dedicated to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and
verses by Thos. Hassall, and address to Reader.
The ' new enlargements ' consist of Epistles be-
tween Edward the Black Prince and Countess of
Salisbury.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodleian.
3. 1599. Englands | Heroicall | Epistles. | Newly
Enlarged. | With Idea. | By Michaell
Drayton. | [Device.] At London, | Printed
by I. K for N. L. and are to be sold | at
his shop at the West doore of | Poules.
1599. I
Octavo : 121 fols. ; paged up to fol. 105.
Dedication to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and
verses by E. Sc. and T. Hassall. Address to Reader.
New : Epistles between Elinor Cobham and Duke
Humfrey, and Epistle of H. Howard, Earl of Surrey,
to Geraldine (not Geraldine's to Surrey).
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodleian.
4 1600. Englands Heroicall Epistles newly cor-
rected with Idea.
Not in Brit. Mus., etc.
Hazlitt : 'only one copy known.'
5 1602. Englands | Heroicall | Epistles | newly
corrected with Idea. | By Michaell Drayton. |
At London | Printed by I. R. for N. L. and
are to be sold | at his shop in Fleetstreete,
neere Saint | Dunstones Church. 1602.
Octavo : 124 fols. (unpaged).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 171
Dedication to Lady Bedford. Verses as before.
New : dedication (of Elinor's Ep.) to James Huish,
and Epistle of Geraldine to Surrey.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodleian, T.C.C.
6 1603. In the Barrons Wars (§ vii. 3).
7 1605. In Poems (§ xv. 1).
New : dedication (of Ep. of Katharine) to Sir
John Swinerton.
8 1608. In Poems (§ xv. 2).
9 1610. In Poems (§ xv. 3).
10 1613. In Poems (§ xv 4).
11 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5).
12 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6).
13 1630. In Poems (§ xv. 7).
13a 1631. In Poems (§ xv. 7a).
14 1637. In Poems (§ xv. 8).
15 [169-]. England's | Heroical Epistles, |
written | In Imitation of the Stile and
Manner | of | Ovid's Epistles : | with | An-
notations I of I The Chronicle History. |
By Michael Drayton Esq.; | Newly Cor-
rected and Amended. | Licensed according
to Order. | London, | Printed for S. Smeth-
wick, in Dean's Court, and | R. Gilford,
without Bishops-Gate.
Octavo : 225 pp. (paginated). No dedications.
Prose address to reader, verses by J. W. and B. C,
Sir E. Sadleyr, and T. B.
Copy in Brit. Mus.
172 MICHAEL DRAYTON
i6 1697. England's Heroical Epistles, | Written |
In Imitation of the Stile and Manner | of [
Ovid's Epistles : | with | Annotations | of |
The Chronicle History. | By M. Drayton
Esq. ; newly corrected and Amended. |
Licensed according to Order. | London, |
Printed for J. Conyers, at the Bible and
Anchor | in Cornhil, 1697. |
Octavo : 225 pp. (paginated) pastoral illustration.
Address to Keader. Verses by Sir E. Sadleyr,
T. B., J. W., and B. 0.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Advocates. Same ed. as
15, with varied title.
17 1737. England's | Heroical Epistles, | written |
In Imitation of the Stile and Manner | of |
Ovid's Epistles. | with | annotations. | By
Michael Drayton, Esq.; j London: | Printed
in the Year m.dcc.xxxvii.
Duodecimo : 272 pages (paginated).
Dedication by R. Dodsley to H.R.H. the Princess
of Wales.
With a pastoral illustration. Author's Preface.
Verses by Thos. Hassall, E. St., and Wm. Alexander.
Copies in Brit. Mus., T.0.0.
18 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9).
19 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10).
20 1788. Corser names an 8° edition ' with
Notes and Illustrations by Rev. James
Hurdis, D.D.' : not found under either
Hurdis or Drayton in B. M. Catalogue.
21 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11).
BIBLIOGRAPHY 173
22 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12).
23 1888. In Spenser Society's reprint (§ xv. 14)
of Poems of 1605.
Selections :
24 1653. The Epistles of Henry and Rosamond,
and also a rendering of them into Latin
verse are in :
Amanda ... by N. H[ookes] . . . 1653.
25 1658. The Epistle of Henry to Rosamond is
in Deliciae Poetarum Anglicanorum, which
is published in Birkhead's Otium Literatum,
etc., by H. Stubbe, according to Hazlitt.
Otium Literatum is not in Brit. Mus.
26 The Epistle of Rosamond to Henry is in
The I Unfortunate Royal Mistresses, | Rosa-
mund Clifford, I and | Jane Shore, | Con-
cubines I to King Henry the Second, | and |
Edward the Fourth, | with | Historical and
Metrical Memoirs | of those | Celebrated
Persons. | by Sir Thomas More, Michael
Drayton, | Thomas Hearne, &c. | London: |
Printed by and for William Cole, | 10,
Newgate-Street. |
For other selections see § xxii. 1, 2, 3.
X. SIR JOHN OLDCASTLE
I 1600. The first part | Of the true and bono | r-
able historic, of the life of Sir | John Old-
castle, the good | Lord Cobham. | As it
174 MICHAEL DRAYTON
hath been lately acted by the right honor-
able the Earle of Notingham | Lord high
Admirall of England | his seruants. |
[Device.] London | Printed by V. S. for
Thomas Pauier, and are to be solde at |
his shop at the signe of the Catte and
Parrots | neere the Exchange. | 1600.
Octavo : 40 leaves (no pagination).
Entered 11 August 1600.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl.
2 [1600]. The first part | Of the true and
bono- I rable history, of the Life of | Sir
John Old-castle, the good | Lord Cobham. |
As it hath bene lately acted by the Right |
honorable the Earle of Notingham | Lord
High Admirall of England, | his Seruants. |
Written by William Shakespeare. | [Device
Heb Ddiev Heb ddim] | London printed
for T. P. I 1600. I
40 leaves (no pagination). Slight differences in
text and directions.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl.
The device is Welsh : ' Without God, without all.'
3 1780. In Supplement | to the Edition of |
Shakspeare's Plays | published in 1778 |
by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens |
. . . London . . . mdcclxxx. 2 vols.
This play is in vol. ii. pp. 265-370.
4 1810. In The Ancient British Drama [called ' a
drama ... by A. Munday? M.D. ? and
others ' in Cat. of B. M.]
Vol. i. pp. 318-349.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 175
5 1848. In I A Supplement To The Plays | Of |
William Shakspeare . . . Comprising The
Seven Dramas | ... Sir John Oldcastle |
[&c.] . . . Edited By William GiUmore
Simms | . . . New York | . . . 1848. |
Pp. 87-115.
6 1852. In The | Supplementary Works | Of |
William Shakspeare | Comprising | His
Poems And Doubtful Plays | . . . A New
Edition, | By William Hazlitt, Esq. |
London | . . . 1852. |
Pp. 105-164.
7 1887. In The Doubtful Plays | Of | Wilham
Shakspeare | . . . by | William HazHtt.
London | George Routledge And Sons |
. . . 1887. I
Pp. 105-164.
8 1894. In Shakespeare's Doubtful Plays | The
First Part | Of | Sir John Oldcastle |
Edited With An Introduction | By | A. F.
Hopkinson | London | M. E. Simms and
Co. I . . . 1894.
Octavo : pp. 4 (unpaged) + xxiii -i- 97.
The only separate edition, apparently, of this
play ; the editor's introduction attempts, on slender
evidence, to distinguish Drayton's share in the
work.
XI. TO KING JAMES
I 1603. To the Ma | iestie of King | James. | A
gratulatorie Poem | by Michaell Drayton. |
176 MICHAEL DRAYTON
At London | Printed by lames Roberts,
for T. M. I and H. L. 1603. |
Quarto : seven leaves (unpaginated) ; To the
Reader, and plate are at end of the book.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl.
XII. THE OWL
1 1604. The | Ovvle. | by Michaell Drayton |
Esquire. | Noctuas Athenas. | [Illustration:
owl on a tree and birds flying; device,
suspended from tree, Prvdens non
Loqvax.] | London | Printed by E. A. for
E. White and N. Ling: | and are to | be
soldo neere the litle north doore of S.
Paules Church, j at the signe of the Gun.
1604. I
Quarto : 27 leaves.
Dedication to Sir W. Aston, and address to the
Reader. Latin lines by A. Greneway.
Entered 8 Feb. 1604.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., Rylands.
2 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5).
3 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), Appendix.
4 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10).
5 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11).
6 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12).
XIII. A P^AN TRIUMPHAL
I 1604. A Pa3an Trivmphall | composed for the
Societie of I the Goldsmiths of London :
BIBLIOGRAPHY 177
congratulating his High- ] nes magnificent
entring the citie. | To the Maiestie of the
King. I By Michael Drayton. | Dicite io
psean, io bis dicite psean. London | printed
for lohn Flasket, and are to be sold at his
shop in I Pauls Churchyard at the signe of
the black Beare. 1604.
Octavo : 8 leaves (first and last blank), no pagina-
tion.
Entered 20 March 1604.
Copy in Bodl, T.C.D.
2 1828. In The | Progresses, | Processions, and
Magnificent Festivities, | of | King James
the First, | his royal consort, family and
Court, I collected from | Original Manu-
scripts . . &c. . . . I By John Nichols, F.S.A.
Lond. Edinb. and Perth. | Volume i. |
London . . . 1828. Vol. i. pp. 402-407.
XIV. MOSES
1 1604. Moyses | in a Map of | his Miracles. \
By Michael Drayton | Esqvire. | [Device.]
At London | Printed by Humfrey Lownes,
and are to be sold by | Thomas Man the
Younger. | 1604. |
Quarto : 90 pages (paginated), 5 pages unpaginated.
Dedication in verse to Sir W. Aston ; letter to the
Keader. Lines by (Sir) J. Beaumont ; to Drayton and
Aston by Beale Sapperton, lines by T. Andrewe
Entered 25 June 1604. Copy in Brit. Mus., Bodl.
2 1630. Altered as Moses, his Birth and Miracles,
in § XXI. 1.
M
178 MICHAEL DRAYTON
3 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), Appendix.
4 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10).
5 1795. In Works (§ xvi. 11).
6 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12). 7 1892. § xxi. 6.
XV. COLLECTED POEMS
1 1605. Poems: | ByMichaellDraiton | Esquire. |
[Device] London, | Printed for N. Ling. |
1605.
Octavo : 500 pp.
Arguments, verse to Sir W. Aston, Address to
Reader, verses by T. Greene and J. Beaumont on
unnumbered pp. Barons Wars pp. 1-159. Another
address to Reader, verses by E. St. [not E. Sc, as in
earlier edd.], &c., on unnumbered pp. Englands H.
Epistles (with new dedication to Sir J. Swinerton
added in midst), 104 pages, commencing paging
again ; Sonnets, and 3 Legends on unnumbered pp.
Coi^ies in Brit. Mus., Bodl.
2 1608. Poems : | by Michael Drayton | Esquire.
Newly corrected by the | Author. | London |
Printed for lohn Smethwicke, and | are to
be sold at his Shop in | Saint Dunstones
Church- I yard, vnder the Diall. | 1608. |
Octavo : pp. 500.
Same contents as 1.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl, Edin. Univ.
3 1610. Poems ... by | Michael Drayton | Es-
qvire. | Newly Corrected by the | Author. |
London | Printed for John Smethwicke,
and to bee | sold at his Shop in Saint
BIBLIOGRAPHY 179
Dunstanes | Church-yard, vnder the Diall. I
1610.
Octavo : paging as No. 1.
Same contents, with additional sonnets by John
Selden, and by E. Heyward 'To his friend the
Author.'
Copies in Brit. Mus.
4 1613. Poems : | by I Michael Drayton | Esqvire, |
Newly Corrected by the | Author. | [De-
vice.] I London | Printed by W. Stansby
for John Smethwicke, | and are to bee sold
at his Shop in Saint Dunstanes Church-
yard, vnder | the Diall. 1613. |
Octavo : paged in part ; contents as in No. 3.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., T.C.C., Chatsworth.
5 1619. Poems : ( by | Michael | Drayton | Es-
qvire I Viz. I The Barons Warres, | Eng-
lands Heroicall Epistles, | Idea, | Odes, |
The Legends | of Kobert, Duke of Nor-
mandie, | Matilda, | Pierce Gaveston ! And,
Great Cromwell, | The Owle, | Pastorals,
Contayning Eglogues, | With the Man in
the Moone. | [Device] Peto I.S. Non Altum.
London, | Printed by W. Stansby for lohn
Smethwicke, and are to be sold | at his
Shop in Saint Dunstanes Church-yard in |
Fleet-streete vnder the Diall. [No date.]
The titles are in a vertical list on the title-page.
There is alscP a frontispiece with title :
Poems I by | Michael Drayton | Esquyer. |
Collected into | one Volume | With |
sondry Peeces i inserted I neuer before Im-
180 MICHAEL DRAYTON
printed. | London | printed for | John |
Smethwick. |
Fresh title-page for each section :
Englands | Heroicall \ Epistles. | By | Michael
Drayton, | Esquire. | With | Some short
Annotations of the Chronicle | Historie
to the same: To which, the | Reader is
directed, by this Marke * | in the begin-
ning of euery Line, to | which the Annota-
tions I are pertinent. | London, | Printed
for lohn Smethvvicke. | 1619.
Address to Keader.
Idea. I In | Sixtie three | Sonnets. | By
Michael Drayton, | Esquire. | London, |
Printed for lohn Smethvvicke. | 1619. |
Address in verse to Keader.
Odes. I With | Other Lyrick | Poesies. | By |
Michael Drayton, | Esquire. | London, j
Printed for lohn Smethvvicke. | 1619.
Verses to Sir Henry Goodere — Address to Keader.
The I Legends | of | Robert, Duke of Nor-
mandie. ] Matilda the Faire. | Pierce
Gaveston, Earle of Cornwall. ] Thomas
Cromwell, Earle of Essex. | By | Michael
• Drayton, | Esquire. | London, | Printed for
lohn Smethvvicke. | 1619.
Verses to Sir W. Aston — Address to Keader.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 181
The I Owle. | By 1 Michael Drayton, | Es-
quire. I Noctuas Athenas. | London, |
Printed for lohn Smethvvicke. | 1619.
Verse to Sir W. Aston— Address to Keader—
Latin Verse In Noctuani Draytoni by A. Grenewai.
Pastorals. | Contayning | Eglogves, | With
the I Man in the Moone. | By | Michael
Drayton, | Esqvire. | London, [ Printed for
John Smethvvicke. | 1619.
Dedicated to Sir W. Aston — Address to Keader.
The whole work is 487 pages folio.
Dedication to Sir W. Aston. Address to Headers
of Barons' Wars. Lines by T. Greene, J. Beaumont,
E. Heyward, J. Selden, Thos. Hassell, W. Alexander
and E. Scory.
Copies in Brit. Miis., Bodl, T.C.C., Advocates.
With portrait of Drayton engraved by William
Hole, garland stating his age (see p. 1 supra), and
Latin lines Lux Hareshulla, &c. It is not known
why this portrait, dated 1613, only appeared in 1619.
We are not to be misled by the pasted copy named
under § xviii. 1.
1620. Poems .... 1620.
Identical with 4 and 5 but for date and spacing
of words at bottom of page. Imprint here as follows :
London, | Printed by William Stansby for lohn |
Smethwicke, and are to be sold at his Shop | in
Saint Dunstans Church-yard in | Fleetstreete. 1620.
1630. Poems | by | Michael | Drayton | Es-
quyer. | Newly Corrected | & Augmented |
London | Printed title-page on illustrated
leS2 MICHAEL DRAYTON
plate I by Willi : | Stansby | for John |
SmetliAvick.
Octavo : 496 pp. (pagination).
Prose dedication to Sir W. Aston, and address to
the Keader : the lines by T. Greene, J. Beaumont,
Heyward, Selden.
Contains The Barons Warres, England's Heroicall
Epistles, with separate title, the four Legends, with
separate title, and Idea (ed. 1619).
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl, U.L.C. (wants general
title-page).
Separate title-page: — Englands | Heroicall
Epistles. I By | Michael Drayton, | Esqvire. |
With I Some short Annotations of the |
Chronicle Historie to the same : | To which
the Reader is directed, | by this Marke *
in the beginning | of euery Line, to which
the I Annotations are pertinent. | [Device.] |
London, | Printed for lohn Smethwicke,
1630. I
Separate title-page: — The | Legends | of |
Robert, Duke of Normanclie | Matilda, the
Faire. | Pierce Gaveston, Earle of Corn-
wall. I Thomas Cromwel, Earle of Essex. |
By I Michael Drayton, | Esqvire. | [Device.] |
London, | Printed for lohn Smethwicke. |
1630. I
7a [? 1631].
Poems: | by | Michael Drayton | Esqvire, |
Newly Corrected by the | Avthor. | [De-
vice.] I London, | Printed by William
BIBLIOGRAPHY 183
Stansby, for lohn Smethwicke, and | are to
be sold at his Shop in Saint Dunstanes |
Church-yard, vnder the Dyall. |
Octavo.
Dedication in verse to Sir W, Aston, Epistle to
Eeader, Verses by J. Selden, E. Heyward, J. Beau-
mont, and Greene.
Contains The Barons Warres, Englands Heroicall
Epistles, Idea, Legends of Robert, Matilde and Pierce
Gaveston. Before Epp. is another Epistle to Reader,
and verses by E. St., W. Alexander, Dedication to
Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and Sonnet to the same.
Copy in Brit. Mus. [catalogue dates ? 1631], Bodl.
8 1637. Poems | by | Michael Dray ton | Esquyer. |
Collected into | one Volume. | Newly
Corrected | mdc.xxxvil | London | Printed
for I John Smethwick.
Duodecimo : 487 pp. Title-page with wreathed
head of Drayton (not half-length as in Hole's, of
whose portrait this head looks like a partial copy)
on pedestal, with female figures either side, and male
figures below, and a dog. The title is on a slab
in the middle : ' William Marshall sculp: '.
The last new edition of Drayton's collected works
for over a century.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., Advocates (no title-
page).
9 1748. The | Works | Of | Michael Drayton,
Esq. ; I A Celebrated Poet in the Reigns of |
Queen Elizabeth, King James i. and
Charles i. | Containing | I. The Battle of
Agincourt. | II. The Barons [sic] Wars. |
III. England's Heroical Epistles. | IV. The
Miseries of Queen Margaret, the | Un-
fortunate Wife of the most Unfor I tunate
184 MICHAEL DRAYTON
King Henry vi. | V. Nymphidia: or the
Court of I Fairy. | VI. The Moon-Calf. |
YII. The Legends of Robert Duke of |
Normandy, Matilda the Fair, Pierce j
Gaveston, and Tho. Cromwell E. of Essex. |
VIII. The Quest of Cynthia. | IX. The
Shepherd's Sirena. | X. Poly-Olbion, with
the Annotations of j the learned Selden. |
XL Elegies on several Occasions. | XIL
Ideas [sic]. Being all the Writings of that
celebrated Author, | Now first collected
into One Volume. | [Device.] | London:
Printed by J. Hughs, near Lincoln's-Inn-
Fields, I And Sold by R. Dodsley, at TuUy's-
Head, Pall-Mall : J. JollifFe in St. James's |-
Street: and W. Reeve in Fleet-Street.
MDCCXLVIII.
Folio : pp. 400 ; pp. 3-12 contain An Historical
Essay On The Life and Writings of Michael Drayton,
Esq. : This anonymous biograj)hy is the first
attempt of the kind after the casual notices of
Fuller, Phillips, and Winstanley. Oldys, in Biogra-
phia Britannica, 1750, s.v. 'Drayton,' controverts it
and increases the material. There are separate title-
pages (not the old ones) for most of the poems, and
engravings heading each principal poem. In some
copies, without mention of date, the pagination is
contmued to page 490 by the addition of an ap-
pendix with the following title-page :
Appendix | to the | Works j Of Michael Drayton,
Esq. I Containing \ The Owl. | The Man in the
Moon. I Odes, with other Lyrick Poems. | Eclogues. |
The Muses [sic] Elysium, &c. | Since the Publication
of Mr. Drayton's Works by Subscription | in 1748,
the Publisher has been favoured with the follow-
ing I Pieces of that Author, extracted from the
BIBLIOGRAPHY 185
Cabinets of the | Curious, which did not come to
hand in time to be inserted in | the former Collection.
The Odes are the recension of 1619. The ' Pas-
torals containing Eclogues' are those of 1606 [§ xvi.
1]. The ' &c. ' means Noah's Flood, Moses His Birth
and Miracles, and David and Goliah.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., etc.
10 1753. The | Works | of | Michael Drayton
Esq.; I A Celebrated JPoet in the Reigns
of I Queen Elizabeth, King James i. and
Charles i. | Containing [&c.] . . . London :
Printed for W. Reeve, at Shakespear's
Head in Fleet-street, mdccliii.
Octavo : 4 vols. A reprint of the folio 1748
edition and its Appendix. Illustrated plate repre-
senting tomb, with bust.
Copy in Brit. Mus.
11 1795. The | Works | of the | British Poets. |
With Prefaces, | Biographical And Criti-
cal, I by Robert Anderson, M.D. | Volume
Third : | Containing | Drayton, Carew, and
Suckling. I London | . . . 1795. |
With a separate title-page : —
The I Poetical Works j of | Michael Drayton,
Esq. I Containing his
Poly-Olbion,
Barons Wars,
England's Heroical
Epistles,
Battle of Agincourt,
Elegies,
&c. &c. &c i
Legends,
Ideas, [sic]
Nymphidia,
Quest of Cynthia,
Sonnets,
186 MICHAEL DRAYTON
To which is prefixed | The Life Of The
Author. I [Verses from Kirkpatrick's Sea-
Piece.] I Edinburgh : | Printed By Mundell
and Son, Royal Bank Close, | Anno 1793.
Octavo : pp. vi. 1-670 occupied with Drayton.
The ' &c.' inchides The Miseries of Queen Margaret,
The Mooncalf, The Owl, The Man in the Moon,
Odes, 'Pastorals containing Eclogues,' The Muses
[sic] Elysium, Noah's Flood, Moses' Birth and
Miracles, David and Goliah.
The ' Life ' is meag-re, inexact, and of no value.
12 1810. The Works of the English Poets The
Additional Lives by Alexander Chalmers.
. . . Vol. IV. . . . 1810.
Same contents in same order, plus some more of
the dedications by and to Drayton. Another but
equally bad Life.
13 1856. Poems | By | Michael Drayton, | From
The I Earliest And Rarest Editions, | Or
From unique Copies. | Edited By | J.
Payne Collier, Esq. | Printed For The |
Roxburghe Club. | London : | J. B. Nichols
And Sons, 25 Parliament Street. |
MDCCCLVI. I
With a frontispiece page also : —
Poems by Michael Drayton | [Engraving.] |
Roxburghe Club.
Quarto : Ten pages unnumbered ; then Introduc-
tion, pp. i-li and one blank ; and pp. 1-173 and one
blank ; and 2 pp. blank.
Contains Collier's valuable Introduction ; The
Harmony of the Church ; Idea, The Shepherd's
Garland ; Idea's Mirror ; Endimion and Phoebe :
BIBLIOGRAPHY 187
Mortimeriados, The Lamentable Civil Wars, &c. ;
Poems Lyric And Pastoral ; Idea, Sonnets by-
Michael Drayton (from the editions of 1599 and 1613).
With the original title-pages copied of all these
works except the last, and Collier's notes after each
poem.
This volume contains nearly all of the important
works that are not reprinted in any other number of
this section.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., U.L.C.
14 1876. The complete works of | Michael
Drayton, | now first collected. | With
introductions and notes by | the Rev.
Richard Hooper, M.A. | Vicar of Upton
and Aston Upthorpe, Berks, | and editor
of Chapman's Homer, Sandys' Poetical
Works, etc. | London, | John Russell
Smith, I Soho Square, | 1876.
3 vols. 8vo, published in the Library of Old
Authors, and containing : Hole's portrait, introduc-
tion, reprint in modern spelling of 1622 edition of
Poly-Olbion, and of The Harmony of the Church.
No more of this edition of Drayton has appeared.
15 1888. Poems: | By Michael Draiton, Esquire. |
Printed for the Spenser Society. | 1888.
Quarto : 2 pp. blank, 4 pp. containing above title,
then pp. 1-500. Bound in Two Parts (Part i. is
pp. 1-256) + 2 pp. blank. Title-page of 1605 edition
and its separate pagination given.
XVI. POEMS LYRIC AND PASTORAL
I [1606?]. Poemes | Lyrick and pastorall. | Odes, |
Eglogs, I The man in the Moone. | By
188 MICHAEL DRAYTON
Michaell Drayton, | Esquier. | At London, |
Printed by R. B. for N. L. and I. Flasket, |
Octavo : 119 pages (no pagination).
Prose address to Reader.
No date.
Dedication : ' To the deseriiing memory of my |
most esteemed Patron and friend, | Sir Walter
Aston, . . .'
Entered 19 April 1606.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., Edin. Univ.
2 1856. In Poems, ed. Collier (§ xv. 13).
3 1891. Poemes, | Lyrick and Pas tor all. | By
Michaell Drayton, Esquire. | Printed for
the Spenser Society. | 1891. |
Quarto : 2 pp. with above title and printer's
mark ; then reprint of 1, with title-page, pp. 1-120.
For reprints of Eclogues see under § ii.
Other reprints of Odes and The Man in the
Moon : —
4 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5).
5 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6).
6 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), Appendix.
7 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10).
8 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11).
9 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12).
lo 1896. In
An English Garner . . . edited by
Edward Arber . . . Vol. viii. . . . 1896.
(The Odes and Eclogues.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY 189
II 1903. In
An English Garner. Some Longer Eliza-
bethan Poems, with An Introduction by
A. H. Bullen . . . 1903.
Odes of 1606 and 1619.
XVII. LEGEND OF CROMWELL
1 1607. The | Legend | Of Great Cromwel. | By
Michael Drayton | Esquier. [Device.] At
London | Printed by Felix Kyngston, and
are to be sold by I. Flasket, | dwelling in
Paules Churchyard at the signe of | the
black Beare. 1607.
Quarto, pp. 50, no pagination.
Dedicated ' to the deseruing memorie of Sir W.
Aston.'
Entered 12 October 1607. Copy in a private
library.
2 1609. The | Historic | of the Life | and Death
of the I Lord Cromwell, sometimes | Earle
of Essex, and Lord Chancel | lor of Eng-
land. I By Michael Drayton | Esquier. |
At London, | Imprinted by Felix Kyng-
ston, for { William Welby, dwelling in
Pauls Churchyard | at the signe of the
Greyhound. | 1609.
Quarto : 40 pages (pagination). Text altered
(Hazlitt).
Dedication to Sir W. Aston. Words To the
Reader. Verses by I. Cooke, H. Lucas, Chr. Brooke.
Identical with 1 but for title-page.
Copies in Brit. Mus. (imperfect), Bodl.
190 MICHAEL DRAYTON
3 1610. In A I Mirour | for Magi- | strates : Being
a trve Chronicle | Historic of the Vn timely
I falles of such vnfortunate Princes and men
of note, I as haue happened since the first
entrance of Brute | into this Hand, vntill
this our I latter Age. | Newly Enlarged
with a Last | part, called A Winter nights
Vision, being an addition of such Tragedies,
especially famous, as are exempted | in the
former Historic, with a Poem annexed, |
called Englands Eliza. | At London. | Im-
printed by Felix Kyngston. | 1610. |
Pp. 520-547.
Copy in Brit. Mus., s.v. ' Higgins, John,' in
catalogue.
4 1619. In Poems (§ xv. 5).
5 1620. In Poems (§ xv. 6).
6 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9).
7 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10).
8 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11).
9 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12).
10 1815. In A Mirror for Magistrates. | edited by |
Joseph Haslewood. | Volume ii. | London : |
Printed for | Lackington, Allen and Co.
Finsbury Square ; | and | Longman, Hurst,
Rees, Orme and Brown, Paternoster Row. |
1815. I
Pp. 502-539.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 191
XVIII. POLY-OLBION
1613. Poly-Olbion | or | A Chorographicall
Description of Tracts, Riuers, | Mountaines,
Forests, and other Parts of this renowned
Isle I of Great Britaine, 1 With intermix-
ture of the most Bemarquable Stories,
Antiquities, Wonders, | Rarityes, Plea-
sures, and Commodities of | the same : |
Digested in a Poem | By Michael Dray-
ton, I Esq. 1 With a Table added, for
direction to those occurrences of Story and
Antiquitie, | whereunto the Course of the
Volume easily leades not. | [Device.] —
London, Printed by H. L. for Matthew
Lownes : I. Browne : I. Helme, | and I.
Busbie. 1613.
Succeeding this title-page is a frontispiece repre-
senting Albion, and labelled ' Great Britaine ' ; a
woman with the sceptre and a cornucopia. Castle
and forest are speckled over her robe. Behind is the
open sea, with ships, visible through the archway.
On the columns of the arch stand jfigures of the
Princes whom 'Time hath seen ambitious of her.'
The wording runs : —
Poly-Olbion | By | Michaell Drayton | Esqr. : |
London printed for M. Lownes, I. Browne |
I. Helme. I. Busbie \ Ingraue by W. Hole.
Folio : 303 pp. and 15 unnumbered leaves, con-
taining verses ' Vpon the Frontispiece,' the frontis-
piece, title-page, dedication, verses, &c., and a table.
Dedication in prose to Prince Henry ; portrait of
' Henricus Princeps,' full-length, with pike in aim,
and plumed helmet on the ground, ' William Hole |
sculp :', and verses opposite concerning the portrait ;
192 MICHAEL DRAYTON
epistle to The Generall Keader, and another to My
friends, the Cambro-Britans ; preface From the
Author Of The Illustrations, namely, John Selden,
dated ' from the Inner Temple,' May 9, 1612. These
Illustrations, or notes, follow each of the Eighteen
Songs in the volume. Eighteen double-page engraved
maps, one to each Song. Entered 7 Feb. 1612.
In some copies the frontispiece is absent, and in
some the Illustrations.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., U.L.C., T.C.C.,
Rylands, T.C.D.
In Brit. Mus. an earlier and undated issue [? 1612],
with no title-page ; a frontispiece, verses, dedication,
portrait (earlier state, without Henricus Princeps)
of Prince Henry, epistles, etc., as in 1613 edition,
18 songs. Folio, 303 pp. and 10 unpaginated leaves,
no table, maps before each song. A copy of this
issue in the Edinb. Univ. Library has Hole's portrait
of the 1619 ed. of the Poems carefully pasted in ;
the watermark shows that it was not part of the
original book.
2 1622. A I Chorographicall | Description Of
All I the Tracts, Rivers, | Mountains,
Forests, | and other Parts of this Re-
nowned I Isle of Great Britain, | With
intermixture of the most Remarkeable |
Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarities,
Pleasures, | and Commodities, of the
same. | Diuided into two Bookes ; the
latter containing | twelue Songs, neuer
before Imprinted. | Digested into a Poem |
By I Michael Drayton, Esquire. | With a
Table added, for direction to those Occur-
rences I of Story and Antiquitie, where-
unto the Course of the | Volume easily
BIBLIOGRAPHY 193
leades not. | London, | Printed for John
Marriott, lohn Grismand, | and Thomas
Dewe. 1622. | [No frontispiece, and no
picture of Prince Henry. Dedications,
&c., as before; but before Song Nineteen
comes separate title-page : — ]
The I second part, | or | A Continvance | Of
Poly-Olbion | From The Eight | eenth
Song. I Containing all the Tracts, Riuers,
Moun I taines, and Forrests: | Intermixed
with the most remarkable Stories, | Anti-
quities, Wonders, Rarities, Pleasures, and
Com I modities of the East, and Northerne
parts of this Isle, | lying betwixt the two
famous rivers of | Thames and Tweed. |
London, | Printed by Augustine Mathewes
for lohn Marriott, | lohn Grismand, and
Thomas Dewe. | 1622. Dedication to
Prince Charles : letter ' To any that will
read it.' Verses by W. Browne, George
Wither, John Reynolds.
Folio : 12 leaves (impaginated) ; pp. 1-303 (and
one blank) include the first 18 Songs ; then, preced-
ing the Second Part, 7 leaves (unpaginated), and pp.
1-168 include Songs 19 to 30 = 254 flf.
Entered 6 March 1622.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., U.L.C., T.C.C., T.C.D.
There are variations and difficulties in the collation
of Poly-Olbion, especially at the beginning, and a
full comparison of the copies has yet to be made.
3 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9).
4 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10),
N
194 MICHAEL DRAYTON
5 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11).
6 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12).
7 1831. In Select Works of the British Poets,
edited by R. Southey (without Selden's
illustrations).
8 1876. In Works, ed. Hooper (§ xv. 14).
9 1890. The | Poly-Olbion : | A | Chorographicall
Description of | Great Britain. | By | Michael
Drayton. | Printed for the Spenser Society. |
1890. I
Facsimile reprint of 2 in Publications of the
Spenser Society, New Series, Issue No. 1.
Folio : 4 pp. blank ; title as above ; then reprint
of 2 as above. In three parts, the third part begin-
ning Song 10 (' The Second Part') of Poly-Olbion.
XIX. ELEGIES
I 1618. An Elegie on the Lady Penelope Clifton,
by M. Dr. ; and
An Elegie on the death of the three sonnes
of the Lord Sheffield, drowned neere where
Trent falleth into Humber.
In
Certain | Elegies, | done | by Svndrie | Ex-
cellent Wits. I With I Satyrs and Epigrames.
[Device] London, | Printed by B: A: for
Miles Partriche, and are | to be solde at
his shoppe neare Saint | Dunstons Church
in Fleet | streete. 1618. |
Copy in Brit. Mus.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 195
2 1620. In ^ n • ,T.
Certain | Elegies, | Done by Sundrie |Ex-
cellent Wits. With Satyrs and Epigrams.
[Device] | London. | Printed for Thomas
lones, and are to be sold at | his shop m
Chancery Lane, over a- | gainst the Roles.
1 1620.
Another edition.
For later reprints of these see under § xx.
Copy in Bodl.
XX. THE BATTLE OF AGINCOURT, Etc.
I 1627. The | Battaile | of | Agincovrt. \ Fovght
by Henry the | fift of that name, King of
England, a | gainst the whole power of the
French: | vnder the Raigne of their Charles
I the sixt, Anno Dom. 1415. | The Miseries
of Queene Margarite, | the infortunate wife
of that most in | fortunate King Henry the
sixt. I Nimphidia, the Court of Fayrie. |
The Quest of Cinthia. | The Shepheard's
Sirena. 1 The Moone-Calfe. | Elegies vpon
sundry occasions. 1 By Michaell Drayton |
Esquire. | London, | printed for William
Lee, at the Turkes Head | in Fleete-
Streete, next to the Miter and Phaenix. |
1627. 1
Folio : pp. 218.
Portrait as in Poems of 1613 (§ xv. 4) by W.
Hole. Dedication by Drayton 'To you, &c., those
Noblest Gentlemen, &c.' : verses on 'Battle of Agin-
court' by I. Vaughan. Sonnet by John Reynolds.
196 MICHAEL DRAYTON
' Vision of Ben. lonson, on the Mvses of his Friend
M. Drayton.'
Entered 16 April 1627.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., U.L.C., T.C.C.
Rylands,
2 1631. The Battaile . . . London, printed by
A. M. for William Lee . . . Phoenix. 1631.
As No. 1.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl.
3 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), excepting the four
Elegies upon the death of Sir Henry Rains-
ford, upon the death of the Lady Olive
Stanhope, To Master William Jeffreys, and
upon the death of Mistress Elinor Fallow-
field.
4 1753. In Works (§ xv. 9), with the same excep-
tions as in 3.
5 1795. In Works (§ xv. 10), with the same
exceptions.
6 1810. In Works (§ xv. 11), with the same
exceptions.
REPRINTS OF SEPARATE POEMS
The Battle of Agincourt.
7 1893. The Battaile of Agincourt | by Michael
Drayton: | with introduction and | notes
by Richard Garnett | London printed and
issued by | Charles Whittingham & Co at
I the Chiswick Press, mdcccxciii.
Octavo : pp. xxiii. 120.
Contains Hole's and the Dulwich portraits. The
BIBLIOGRAPHY 197
latter portrait is partly reproduced in Harding's
Biographical Mirrour, 1795, vol. i. p. 102. K.
Clamp sculpt.
Nymphidia
8 1751. The | History | of | Queen Mab; | or, the
I Court of Fairy. | Being | The Story upon
which the Entertain | ment of Queen Mab,
now exhibiting at | Drury-lane, is founded.
I By Michael Drayton, Esq. ; | Poet Laureat
to King James i. and King Charles i. |
London : | Printed for M, Cooper in Pater-
noster-row, 1751. I
Quarto : 24 pp. (paginated).
Nymphidia reprinted.
9 1814. Nymphidia | The Court of Fairy: | [verses
and woodcut] | Kent : | Printed at | The
private press of Lee Priory. | By Johnson
and Warwick. | 1814.
Edited by Sir Egerton Brydges. Contains also
verses by Jonson ; Advertisement, Address to
Eeader ; verses by Wm. Browne, George Wither,
Th. Greene, J. Beaumont, E. Heyward, John Selden,
W. Selden, W. Alexander, E. Scory ; verses by
Drayton to W. Brown, and to Sir Henry Goodere ;
the Epistle to Eeynolds, and Sonnet to river Ankor
beginning, 'Clear Ankor, on whose silver-sanded
shore.'
Copies in Brit. Mus., T.C.D., Bodl., U.L.C., T.C.C.
10 1819. In The Works of the British Poets . . .
by Ezekiel Sanford. Philadelphia. 1819.
In vol. ii., together with the Mooncalf.
1 1 1831. In Select Works of British Poets, edited
by R. Sou they.
198 MICHAEL DRAYTON
12 1883. In § XXII. 1.
13 1887. In § XXII. 2.
14 1887. In CasselFs National Library, vol. 79,
with Midsummer Night's Dream.
15 1896. In Nymphidia and the Muses Elizium
. . . Edited by John Gray . . . [Ballantyne
Press] London. 1896.
16 1899. In § XXII. a
There are probably other modern reprints.
XXL THE MUSES ELIZIUM, Etc.
I 1630. The Mvses | Elizium, | Lately discouered,
I By A New Way Over | Parnassvs. | The
passages therein, being the subiect of | ten
sundry Nymphalls, | Leading three Diuine
Poemes, | Noahs Floud, | Moses, his Birth
and Miracles | David and Goliah. | By
Michael Drayton Esquire. | London, |
Printed by Thomas Harper, for lohn
Waterson, and | are to be sold at the signe
of the Crowne in | Pauls Church-yard.
1630. I
Quarto : 6 pp. (unpaginated) : pp. 1-207 and one
blank = 107 ff.
Dedication to Edward, Earl of Dorset ; address To
The Reader. Separate dedication (p. 87) of the
Divine Poems to Mary, Countess of Dorset.
Entered 6 March 1630.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl., U.L.C.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 199
2 1748. In Works (§ xv. 9), Appendix.
3 1753. In Works (§ xv. 10).
4 1795. In Works (§ xv. 11).
5 1810. In Works (§ xv. 12).
6 1892. The Mvses Elizium. | By | Michael
Drayton, Esquire. | Reprinted from the
Edition of 1630. | Printed for the Spenser
Society. | 1892. |
Quarto : 2 pp. with above title ; then reprint of 1,
with its pagination, but also with pagination at foot
of the reprint, pp. 1-215 and one blank. This is
Issue No. 5 of Publications of the Spenser Society,
New Series.
7 1896. With Nymphidia in § xx. 13.
XXII. MODERN SELECTIONS
1 1883. Selections from the Poems | of | Michael
Drayton. | Edited by | A. H. BuUen. |
Privately Printed by | Unwin Brothers,
Chilworth. | 1883.
Quarto.
A valuable Introduction and notes. Of entire
poems are reprinted here Ballad of Dowsabel, and
various short poems, Nimphidia, the Court of Fayrie,
the Quest of Cynthia, The Shepherd's Sirena.
Copies in Brit. Mus., Bodl.
2 1887. The Barons' Wars | Nymphidia | And
Other Poems | By | Michael Drayton. |
With An Introduction by Henry Morley |
LL.D., Professor of English Literature at
200 MICHAEL DRAYTON
I University College, London | London |
George Routledge and Sons | . . . 1887. |
Octavo : pp. 1-288.
The ' Other Poems ' include 4 of the Heroical
Epistles, Idea (63 numbers, ed. 1619), 4 Elegies
(including that to Jeffries), and Quest of Cynthia.
No table of contents.
3 1899. A Selection | From the Poetry Of |
Samuel Daniel | & \ Michael Drayton |
With an Introduction and Notes by | The
Rev. H. C. Beeching, M.A. | London | J. M.
Dent & Co I ... I 1899. |
Octavo : pp. xxiii ^and one blank ; pp. 1-196.
Valuable introduction and notes ; table of dates ;
Dulwich and Hole's portraits of Drayton ; pp. 57-
end are devoted to selections from Drayton. Ten of
the Odes are given, 21 Sonnets, Nymphidia, Shep-
herd's Sirena, several Nymphalls from Muses'
Elizium, Elegy to Reynolds, and extracts from other
pieces.
XXIII. PREFATORY LINES, Etc.
1 1595. ' Such was old Orpheus' cunning.'
In A First Book of Ballets . . . T. Morley
. . . 1595.
Headed : ' Mr. M. D. to the Author.' In Bodl.
2 1600. Poems by Drayton : — ' Rowlands Song in
praise of the fairest Beta/ 'A Roundelay
betweene two Sheepheards/ 'Rowland's
Madrigall,' and ' The Sheepheards An-
theme,'
In
Englands | Helicon. | Casta placent superis, |
BIBLIOGRAPHY 201
pura cum veste venite, | Et Manibus puris |
sumite fontis aquam. | [Device] At London |
Printed by I. R. for lohn Flasket, and are |
to be sold in Paules Church-yard, at the
signe I of the Beare. 1600. |
Quarto.
2a InEnglands | Helicon: | or | TheMvses | Har-
mony. I The Courts of Kings heare no such
straines, | As daily lull the Rusticke
Swaines. | [Device.] London: | Printed for
Richard More, and are to | be sould at his
shop in S. Dunstanes | Church-yard.
1614.
Contains the above 4 poems and ' The Shepherd's
Daffodil.'
Octavo.
In Brit. Mus.
2b And in
Englands Helicon . . . London . . . 1614 :
reprinted by A. H. Bullen, 1887.
3 1600. ' Like as a man, on some aduenture
bound.'
In
The I Legend | of Hvmphrey | Duke of
Glo I cester. | by Chr: Middleton. |
Device. . . . London | Printed by E. A. for
Nicholas Ling, and are | to be soldo at his
shop at the west doore of | S. Paules
Church. 1600. |
Octavo : unpaginated 23 leaves. Poem is headed
' To his friend, Master Chr. M. his Booke.'
In Brit. Mus., Bodl.
202 MICHAEL DRAYTON
4 1607. Lines in
The I Perfect Vse | of Silk-Wormes, | and
their benefit. | With the exact planting,
and artificiall handling of | Mulberrie trees
whereby to nourish them, and the fi- | gures
to know how to feede the Wormes, and |
to winde off the Silke. | And the fit maner
to prepare the barke of the white Mulberrie
to I make fine linnen and other workes
thereof. | Done out of the French original!
of D'Oliuier de Serres Lord | of Pradel into
English, bj Nicholas Geffe Esquier. |
With an annexed discourse of his owne, of
the meanes and | sufficiencie of England for
to haue abundance of fine silke by feeding |
of Silke-wormes within the same; as by
apparent proofes by | him made and con-
tinued appeareth. For the generall vse |
and vniuersall benefit of all those his
countrey | men which embrace them.
Neuer the like yet here discouered by
any. | Au despit d'enuie. | At London |
Imprinted by Felix Kyngston, and are to
be sold by Richard Sergier | and Christo-
pher Purset, with the assignment of |
William Stallenge. 1607. | Cum Pri-
uilegio. I
Octavo : 75 leaves (partly paginated). Poem ' To
Master Nicholas Geffe ' by Michael Drayton, com-
mencing ' As thou deare friend with thy industrious
hand,' Quarto.
In Brit. Mus.
5 1609. * Such men as hold intelligence with
BIBLIOGRAPHY 203
letters.' In ' The | Holy | Roode ' . . . | by
lohn Davies [of Hereford] . . . London . . . |
for N. Butter.
Reprinted by Grosart in Works of J. D. Vol. i.
1878.
6 1611. ' In new attire.'
In Sophonisba by David Murray.
Octavo.
No title-page. 35 leaves (unpaginated). Said poem
headed ' To my kinde friend Da: Murray.'
6a 1611. 'Many there be that write before thy
book'
In Coryat's Crudities . . . 1611.
7 1616. Two pieces, one commencing 'Describe
what is faire painting of the face/ the other
' To what may I a painted wench compare ? '
In
A I Treatise | against Pain- | ting and
Tinctvring | of Men and Women : ... By
Thomas Tuke.
Signed Thos. Draiton, however. A Thomas
Drayton, D.D., was writing in 1665.
Quarto. In Brit. Mus., Bodl.
8 1618. ' Chapman ; We finde by thy past-prized
fraught,' headed ' To my worthy friend
Mr. George Chapman, and his translated
Hesiod.'
In
The I Georgicks | of | Hesiod, | by George
Chapman | Translated Elaborately | out
of the Greek: | Containing Doctrine of
Husbandrie, Moralitie, I and Pietie; with
204 MICHAEL DRAYTON
a perpetuall Calendar of Good | and Bad
Dales; Not superstitious, but necessarie |
(as farre as naturall Causes compell) for
all I Men to obserue, and difference in fol~ |
lowing their affaires. | Nee caret vmbra
Deo. I [Device] | London, | Printed by
H. L. for Miles Partrich, and are to be
solde I at his Shop neare Saint Dunstans
Church in | Fleetstreet. 1618. |
Quarto.
39 paginated pp. ; 7 unpaginated. In Brit. Mus.,
Bodl.
9 1619. 'If in opinion of judicial wit.'
In The | famovs and Renowned | Historic of
Primaleon of Greece, | Sonne to the great
and mighty Prince | Palmerin d'Oliva,
Emperour | of Constantinople. | Describing
his Knightly deedes of Armes, as also | the
Memorable Aduentures of Prince Edward
of I England : And continuing the former
History of | Palmendos, Brother to the
fortunate | Prince Primaleon, &c. | The
first Booke. | Translated out of French and
Italian, into English, by A. M. | [Device.] |
London : | Printed by Thomas Snodham. |
1619.
Octavo. The translator is Munday. The lines face
p. 1 of bk. ii. in Bodl. copy. Copy also in Brit. Mus.
10 [1621.] In Manvdvctio | ad | Artem | Rhe-
toricam, Thomas Vicars.
In Brit. Mus. only 1621 and 1628 editions,
wherein nothing by Michael Drayton. Named by
Bullen, s.v. ' Drayton,' in Diet. Nat. Biog.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 205
11 1622. 'To my friend M. A. H.' commencing
'By this one line, my Holland, we may
see.'
In Navmachia, or | Hollands | Sea-fight. |
[Surrounded by device.] Non equidem
inuideo. | [Device of ship in full sail]
London, Printed by T. P. for Thomas Law,
and William (by Abra : Holland) Garrat. |
An. Dom. 1622. |
Quarto.
18 leaves (unpaginated). In Brit. Mus.
12 1629. 'This posthumous, from the brave
parent's name.'
In
Bosworth-field : | ... by Sir John Beau-
mont I . . . London | . . . 1629.
Reprinted by Grosart in Works of Sir J. B. 1889.
13 1636. 'Dover, to do thee right who will not
strive.'
In Annalia Dvbrensia. | Vpon the yeerely
celebration of | Mr. Robert Dovers Olim-
pick I Games vpon Cotswold-Hills. | Written
by I Michaell Dray ton, Esq. | lohn Trvssell,
Gent. . . . Ben lohnson . . . Owen Felltham,
Gent. . . . William Basse, Gent. . . . Thomas
Heywood, Gent. | London. | . . . 1636.
Reprinted in Grosart's Occasional Issues . . .
Vol. iv. . . . 1877.
APPENDIX k
INDEX AND EDITIONS OF THE SONNETS
Many inferences have been drawn as to the
poets whom Drayton imitated in his sonnets, but
they often turn on questions of priority and
bibliography. There is also no full and correct
account of the sonnets which were added or with-
drawn in the successive editions (following that of
1594) of 1599, 1602, 1603, and 1619. See the
Bibliography. No other editions come in question,
for that of 1603 repeats 1602, and those of 1610
and 1613 repeat 1605, while those of 1630 and
1637 repeat 1619. The five relevant editions may
therefore be numbered a, h, c, d, and e. The table
of first lines gives in alphabetical -order all the
sonnets printed at any time by Drayton in con-
nection with ' Idea.' The numbers in the columns
show the place each sonnet occupies in each edition
where it is found. The counting has usually gone
wrong, partly because in d (1605) three different
sonnets are numbered 61 (61* in table) and two
are numbered 62 (62* in table), and also because
sonnets are often more or less rewritten, with a
different first line. In all such cases the earliest
version is numbered and quoted first in the table,
APPENDIX A
207
the variants of the first line being appended
and named again in cross-references. Thus in LV.
the version a of 1594 is that numbered LV. ; the
versions of 1599 (6) and of 1619 (e) follow, and are
found in cross-references under * Taking my pen '
. . . and ' Yet read at last,' which are unnumbered.
bed
1594 1699 1602 1606 1619
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
XX.
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
XXV,
XXVI,
XXVII.
XXVIII.
XXIX.
XXX.
XXXI.
XXXII.
XXXIII,
XXXIV
An evil spirit, your beauty haunts me still,
As in some countries far remote from hence
As love and I late harboured in one inn,
As other men, so I myself do muse, .
A witless gallant, a young wench that woo'd
Beauty sometime in all her glory crown'd .
Black pitchy night, companion of my woe,.
Bright star of beauty, on whose eyelids sit .
Calling to mind, since first my love begun,
Clear Ankor, on whose silver-sanded shore
Cupid, dumb idol, peevish saint of love,
Cupid, I hate thee, which I 'd have thee know,
Dear, why should you command me to my rest
Define my love, \ and tell the joys of heaven, a
weal, e )
Die, die, my soul, and never taste of joy, .
Eyes with your teares, blind if you be.
Go you, my lines, embassadors of love.
Great Lady, essence of my chiefest good, .
[End. and Phoebe, 1595.]
How many paltry, foolish, painted things, .
I ever love where never hope appears.
If chaste and pure devotion of my youth, .
If ever wonder could report a wonder,
If he from heaven that filched that living fire
If those ten regions registered by fame
I gave my faith to Love, Love his to me, ,
I hear some say, this man is not in love.
In former times such as had store of coin
In the whole world is but one Phoenix found a
Within the compass of this spacious round b, J- 1
'Mongst all the creatures in this spacious round
In pride of wit, when high desire of fame .
Into these loves who but for passion looks,
Is not love here as 'tis in other climes
Letters and lines we see are soon defac'd, .
Like an adventrous seafarer am I,
, Looking into the glass of my youth's miseries, a
Viewing the glass of my youth's miseries, b,
45
22
66
62
64 61
I
29 1 26
14
27
24
68
16
47
pref.
13
15
208
MICHAEL DRAYTON
XXXV
XXXVI.
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX,
XL,
XLI,
XLII,
XLIII,
XLIV,
XLV,
XLVI,
XLVII
XLVIII.
XLIX
L.
LI,
LII.
LIII,
LIV.
LV.
LVI.
LVII,
LVIII.
LVIX.
LX.
LXI.
LXII.
LXIII.
LXIV.
LXV.
LXVI.
LXVII.
LXVIII.
LXIX.
LXX.
LXXI.
LXXII.
, Love, banish' d heaven, on earth was held in scorn
Love in a humour play'd the prodigal,
. Love once would dance Avithin my mistress' eye
, Madam, my words cannot express my mind,
[To Lady A. Harington.]
Many there be excelling in this kind, .
, Marvel not, love, though thy power admire,
Methiuks I see some crooked mimic jeer, .
['Mongst all the creatures. See xxviii.]
Muses, which sadly sit about my ehair,
, My fair, had I not erst adorned my lute, .
, My fair, if thou wilt register my love,
. My fair, look from those turrets of thine eyes,
My heart, imprisoned in a hopeless isle,
, My heart, the anvil where my thoughts do
beat,
My heart was slain, and none but you and I,
, My love makes hot the fire whose heat is spent,
My thoughts, bred up with eagle birds of love, a, "
When like an eaglet I first found my love, h,
Nothing but no and I, and I and no, .
Not thy grave counsels, nor thy subjects' love, .
[To James I.]
Now love, if thou wilt prove a conqueror, .
eyes, behold your happy Hesperus,
Oft taking pen in hand with words to cast my ^
woes, ^
62
41
APPENDIX B^
VERSES FROM ASHMOLE, 38, f. 77.
These verses weare made by Michaell Drayton
Esquier Poett Laureatt the night before he dyed.
1. Soe well I love thee, as w%out thee I
Love nothing, yf I might chuse, I 'de rather dye
Than bee on day debarde thy companye.
2. Since Beasts, and plants doe growe and live and move,
Beasts are those men, that such a life approve
Hee only lives, that Deadly [sic] is in love.
3. The Corne that in the ground is so wen first dies
And of on seed doe manye eares arise
Love this worlds corne by dying multiplies.
4. The seeds of love first by thy eyes weare throwne
Into a grownd untild, a harte unknowne
To beare such fruitt, tyll by thy hande 'twas sowen.
5. Looke as your Looking glass by chance may fall
Devyde and breake in manye peycies small
And yet shews forth, the selfe same face in all.
6. Proportions, Features, Graces, just the same
And in the smalest peyce, as well the name
Of Fayrest one deserves as in the richest frame.
7. Soe all my thoughts arc peyces but of you
Whiche put together makes a glass soe true
As I therein noe others face but yours can Veiwe.
^ I have to thank Professor Firth for this transcript.
210
INDEX
The roman figures {preceded by §) refer to sections of the
bibliography.
* ^TiON,' 37 and n.
Agincourt^ Ballad of, 99, 104-
106, 139, 148.
Agincourt, Battle of, 132, § xx.
Alexander, Sir W., 122, 125,
127, 139.
Allot, R. See England^s Par-
nassus, 82.
Amours. See Idea's Mii^ror.
Ancor, river, 17, 20, 21, 22.
Anderson's British Poets, § xv.
11.
Annalia Duhrensia, § xxiii.
13.
Arber, Dr. E., § ii. 12 ; § v. 19.
Arms of Drayton, 94, and
cover.
Ariosto's octave stanza, 73.
Aston, Sir W., 19, 36, 72, 94-
95, 106-107.
Atherstone, 1, 3, 4.
Aubrey, 1 n., 145, 147.
Barnfield, W., 33 n., 81.
B[axter], N., his Ourania, 35.
Barons' Wars, The. SeeMorti-
meriados.
Beaumont, Francis, 36, 63, 97
n., 143.
Beaumont, Sir John, 143, §
xxiii. 11.
Bedford, Lucy (Harington),
Countess of, 11, 14, 23, 72.
Beeching, Canon, 54, 57 n.,
§ xxii. 3.
Browne, WilHam, 66, 143 and n.
BuUen, Mr. A. H., ix, x, 199,
§ xxii. 1.
Burton, 4.
Camden's Brlttannia, 110, 112-
113.
Carew, 103, 130, 151.
Chalmers' British Poets, § xv.
12.
Chapman, George, 142 ; lines
of D. to, § xxiii. 8.
Charles I., 107.
Chaucer, House of Fame, 43 ;
MonTc's Tale and Legend of
Good Women, 40 ; Troilus
and Cressida, 72; Parlia-
j ment of Birds, 37 ; ■S'tV
j Thopas, 137; Praise of
1 Chaucer, 140.
j Chettle, Henry, 85 and n.
Civil Wars in France, The, 84,
. 85 n.
211
212
MICHAEL DRAYTON
Clifford Chambers, 20, 126-
128.
Cobham, Lord, 91.
Cokain, Sir Aston, 12-13.
Collected Poems of D., 98, 99,
131-134, § XV.
College of Heralds, 94.
Collier,J.P.,ix.,13?i.,25,33n.,
82?i.,95??-.,146w. ; §ii. 10; §
V. 18 ; § vi. 4 ; § xv. 13, etc.
Combe Abbey, 22.
Constable, Henry, 45.
Contention of Two Houses, etc. ,
71.
Cooke, (Sir) A., 43.
Coryate, § xxiii. 6^
Courthope, Prof. W. J., vii,
viii, 23-24 and n.
Daniel, Samuel, Gom2)laint of
Rosamond, 41, 62, 67 ; Delia,
45, 54 ; History of the Civil
Wars, 72.
David and Goliah, 132, 134.
Davies, John, of Hereford,
§ xxiii. 5.
Dekker, 84-85 and n.
De La Serres, 0., § xxiii. 4.
Desportes, Philippe { ' Portes '),
46.
Donne, John, 61, 103, 143.
Dorset, Earl and Countess of,
144-145.
Drayton family and pedigree,
2-5.
Drayton, Edmund, 2, 3, 147.
Drayton, Michael, passim.
Drummond, William, corre-
spondence witli Drayton,
121-12S, 121 n., 144.
Dryden, 66, 78-79.
Du Bellay, 43.
Elegies, 128-129, 137-144, §
xix, § XX (see Epistles).
'Elphin,' pastoral name for
Sidney, 35.
'-Endimion and Phoebe, 21, 64-
68, 78, 99, 138, 152, § vi.
England's Helicon, § xxiii. 2.
England's Heroical Epistles,
11, 17, 42, 77-80, 138, 150,
§ix.
England's Parnassus, 82.
Epistles: Of His Lady's Not
Coming to Town, 128 ; To
Reynolds, 68, 139-143 ; to
G. Sandys, 96; on Sir H.
Rainsford, 131.
Essex, Robert, Earl of, 13 n.
Famous Victories of Henry V. ,
89.
Fitzgeoffrey's Affaniae and
Drake, 81, 82 ; his Elegies, §
xix. 1.
Fleay, Rev. F. G., x., 13 ?i., 21
and n. , 36 n. , 37 n. , 41 7i. , 47,
53 ?i., 57 n., S5n., 92-93 ?^.
Fuller, 82, 146.
Gayton, Edwakd, 71 n.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 116-
117.
Godwin, Earl, 84.
' Goldey. ' See Lodge.
Goldsmith, Citizenofthe World,
149.
Goodere or Goodyere family,
genealogy, 10 n.
Goodere, Anne, or ' Idea,' 6,
10-12, 20; Lady Rainsford,
20, 21, 23, 68-71, 128.
Goodere, Frances, 10-12, 20,
36.
INDEX
213
Gooderc, Sir Henry the elder,
7-12.
Goodere, Sir Henry the
younger, 10, 11.
Gower, 140.
Qratulatory Poem, 96.
Great Assizes, etc., 148-149.
* Great Lady, essence' (sonnet),
16-19.
Guilpin's Skialetheia, 81 n.
Hall, John, 68 and w.
Harington, Lady Anne and Sir
John, of Exton, 17-18.
Harington, Lucy. See Bed-
ford, Countess of.
Harmony of the Ghtirch, 24-25,
§i.
Harrison, J. S., on Platonism,
47 n.
Hartshill, 1, 5, 6.
Hathway, 85 and n., 88.
Henley, Lyra Heroica, 104.
Henry, Prince, 106-107, 109,
191-192.
Henry I. , 84.
Henslowe, Philip, 85-88, 92.
Heroical Epistles. See Eng-
land's Her. Ep.
Hewes, John, 8.
Heylin, P., 146.
Hole, W., engraver, 108, 109,
181.
Holland's Naumachia, § xxiii.
11.
Holland, Philemon, tr. of
Camden, 112.
Hooper, Rev. R., edition of
Drayton, § xv. 14.
Horace, 100.
Hunter's MS. Chorus Valum,
4 w., 21 n.
Hymn to his Lady's Birth-
place, 21.
* Idea,' Anne Goodere, q.v.
Idea; The Shepherd's Garland
(eclogues), 32-39, 136, § ii.
Idea's Mirrour, afterwards
Idea (or Ideas), sonnets, 17,
44-55, § v., and App. A.
James i. , 94. See A Pman
Triumjfhal and To the
Majesty of K. J.
Jefifrey, Mr., epistle to, 129 n.
Jonson, Ben, 100, 123, 135,
138, 142, 143, 145.
Laing, 121 n.
Langland's Vision of William
concerning Piers the Plough-
man, 42 n.
Legends, 39-43 ; of Cromwell,
106, § xvii. ; of Gaveston,
§ iii. ; of Matilda, 42, 55,
§ iv. ; of Robert, 18, 42, 108,
§ viii.
Lee, Mr. Sidney, 38 n., 46-47,
57 ?i., 61 n., 164.
Leigh Hunt, 66.
helaxid.' a Itinerary, 111-112.
L'Idde, of De Pontoux, 47, 59.
Lines ivritten the night before
he died, App. B.
Longsioord, William, 84, 85n.,
88.
Lydgate's Falls of Princes,
39.
214
MICHAEL DRAYTON
Macaulay's Lays, 77.
Man in the Moon, The, 67,
§ XV. 5.
Mancetter, 2, 3, 147.
Mautuanus, Baptista, 9.
Margaret, Duchess of New-
castle, 187.
Marlowe, Christopher, 78, 80,
141-142; Hero and Leander,
62-66; Edward II., 141.
Masson, Dr., 121, 123.
Meres, Francis, 81, 83, 94.
Merry Devil of Edmonton, The,
91-93 n.
Metrical criticism by D., 73.
Middleton, Chr., § xxiii. 3.
Middleton, Thos., 85 and n.
Milton, 43 ?i., 117, 150, 151.
Mirror for Magistrates, The,
40-41.
' Mirtilla,' 36 n.
Miseries of Queen Margaret,
131-132, § XX.
Monday, A., 84-85, 204;
§ xxiii. 9.
Mooncalf The, 132-134, § xx.
Morley, H., § xxii. 2.
Morley, T., § xxiii. 1.
Mortimeriados, 17, 19 ; revised
as The Barons' Wars, 72-74,
77, § vii.
Moses in a Map of his Miracles,
132, 134, § xiv. ; his Birth
and Miracles, § xxi.
Muses' Elizium, The, 37, 132,
136, 144, § xxi.
Mythomystes, by H. Reynolds,
138.
Narcissus, by H. Reynolds,
138.
Nash, Thomas, 141.
Noah's Flood, 132, 134, § xxi.
Nymphidia, or. The Court of
Fairy, 131, 137, 150, § xx.
1 and 8-15.
Odes, 99-103, 150, § xvi. ; To
the Neio Year, 101 ; To the
Virginian Voyage, 101-102.
'01con,'36.
Oldcastle, Sir John, 84, 85, 88-
91, 92 w., §x.
Oldys, John, 98.
Otia Merseiana, 56 n.
Ovid, Heroides, 77, 78.
Oioen Tudor, 84, 85 n.
Owl, The, 5, 97-98, § xii.
Poian Triumphal, -4, 96, § xiii.
'Panape,'20, 23.
' Pandora,' 35.
Peacham, H., 144-145.
Petrarch, 45-46, 110.
Piers of Winchester, 84, 85 n.
Platonism, 46-47, 47 n.
Plays by Drayton, 83-93.
Poems, Lyric and Pastoral, 99,
§xvi.
Polesworth, 6-8, 17, 20.
Poly - Olblon, 21, 83, 94-95,
109-122, 124, 128, 139, 148,
§ xviii.
Pontoux, Claude de, L'Idce,
47, 59.
Poems of Divers Humours, 83.
Portraits of Drayton, 107-108.
Prince Henry, 106-107, 109.
QuARLKS, Francis, 145.
INDEX
215
Quest o/Gynthia, The, 131, 136,
§xx.
Kainsford, Sir Henry, 12,
20, 128-131, 131 n.
Return from Parnassus, The,
82.
Richard Gordelion's Funeral,
84, 85 n.
Rising ofCardinalWolsey, The,
84, 85 n.
Reynolds, Epistle to Henry,
138-143; Mi/thomystes, 139
and n.
' Robin,' 13 n.
Ronsard, 100.
'Rowland,' 33, 39.
Sandys, Geo., 87, 142, 155.
Scornful Lady, The, 97 n.
Selden, John, 42 ; illustrations
to Poly - Olbion, 109 - 110,
116.
Selections from Drayton, x.,
§ xxii.
♦ Selena,' 19, 22-23, § ii, 2, 3.
Seneca, 9.
Shakespeare, 54-60, 75, 78, 80,
141 ; Venus and Adonis, 63,
67, 114 ; Lucrece, 55, 75 n. ;
Richard III. , 76 ; Henry I V. ,
55, 75 71., 89-91; Henry V.,
91, 105; Sonnets, relation to
Drayton's, 50, 55-59; iMid-
siimmer Ni(jht's Dream, 137.
Shex)herd''s Garland. See Idea ;
The Shepherd's Garland.
Shepherd's Sirena, The, 79 n.,
132, 136, § XX.
Sidney, Lady Mary, 35.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 35 and n.,
36, 45, 53-55, 69, 123, 140.
' Since there's no help,' Sonnet,
61, 152.
Smith or Smythe, playwright,
85 and n.
Sonnets of Drayton. See
Amours; Idea's Mirror; Sid-
ney, Shakespeare, Spenser.
Spenser, Edmund, 26-34, 37,
38, 39, 43, 49, 53, 67, 69, 73,
75, 135, 151 ; Shepherd's
Gdlendar, 32, 69 ; Faerie
Queene, 27; Astrophel and
Stella, 35; Ruins of Time,
37 ; Golin Glout, 38 ; Mother
Hubbard's Tale, 97 ; Hymns,
72.
Spenser Society reprints of
Drayton, § xv. 15, § xvi. 3,
§ xviii. 9, § xxi. 6.
Surrey, Earl of, 140.
Swinburne, Mr., 101.
* Sylvia,' 36.
Tasso, 135, 138.
Thames, verse-picture of, 115.
Tixall, 95.
To his Coy Love, 103.
To his Valentine, 103.
To the Majesty of King James,
§xi.
Tuke, § xxiii. 7.
Tyler, T., on Shakespeare's
Sonnets, 56 n.
'Verses on the night before
he (Drayton) died,' 210,
App. B.
Versification of Drayton, 24,
32, 34, 53, 65, 66, 72-74, 78-
80, 99-106, 118-119, 15.3.
Vicars' Afanuductio, § xxiii.
10.
216
MICHAEL DRAYTON
Waller, Mr. A. R., ix. 44.
Waller, E., 155.
Warner, William, Albion's
England, 40-41.
Watson, T., 38 n.
Webster, John, 85 and n.
Whitaker, Dr. L.,91m.
Whitgift, Archbishop, 25.
Wither, 148.
Wordsworth, 50, 153.
Wyatt, 140.
Wyndham, Rt. Hon. G., 47 n.
57 n:
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh Univovsity Press
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