70

Stand up yourself and match him fairly:

Then see how the rascal yields!

oned:

Drop me a kiss-I'm the bird deadstruck!

I, lass, have lived no gipsy, flaunting Finery while his poor helpmate grubs:

Coin I've stored, and you won't be want

ing:

75

LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT

fiend

Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,

Where sinners hugged their specter of repose.

Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those. 5 1 "chirping," or cheering, cup.

Geoffrey Chaucer was born probably in 1340, the son of a London vintner. By April, 1357, he had taken service at the court, perhaps as a page. dia In 1359 he was a member of the army that was fighting the French in the Hundred Years' War, and was already of sufficient importance to be ransomed from his captors by the king. In 1370 he made the first of several diplomatic journeys to the continent, and in 1372 first went to Italy. In 1374 he was appointed controller of customs for the port of London, and in 1386 sat in Parlia

ficial

ement for Kent. In 1389 Richard II appointed

im clerk of the king's works, and in 1394 granted him a pension. In 1399 Henry IV succeeded Richard, and at the poet's petition largely increased his pension, and enabled him to spend the last year of his life in comparative affluence. He died in 1400, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Since the court in which Chaucer grew up was in many respects French, it was inevitable that when the young poet began to write his work should show strong traces of foreign literary influence. He early translated part or all of the Romance of the Rose, a famous French allegory, and in the Book of the Duchess (1369), composed at the death of Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt, wrote a poem which is saturated with French influence. When in 1372 he first visited Italy, he came under the spell of the Italian Renaissance, and in the works of Dante (d. 1321), Petrarch (d. 1374), and Boccaccio (d. 1375), found much that was new and inspiring. The effect of Renaissance art and literature on Chaucer's imagination is evident in the work of his second, the so-called Italian period. Here came the House of Fame (1379), and Troilus and Cressida (?1383), the latter one of his most important works, a character-novel in verse, concerned with the love of Troilus and Diomede for the Trojan girl Cressida. The poem is founded directly on Boccaccio, as is the Legend of Good Women (ca. 1385). Following these came Chaucer's greatest work, the unfinished Canterbury Tales (1385 and after). Here, although French and Italian influences still persist, the inspiration is predominantly English. Chaucer's busy life had brought him in contact with men and women of all sorts, and in the Canterbury Tales he gives us the most brilliant picture ever painted of fourteenth century English life. As the poem is Chaucer's largest work, so until the days of Spenser and Shakespeare it remained the chief glory of English literature.

The best editions of Chaucer for general reading are the Globe (Macmillan), and the Student's (Clarendon Press), although the serious student will have to consult Skeat's monumental Oxford

Edition (Clarendon Press). No adequate life of Chaucer has been written. There is much of value in Lounsbury's Studies in Chaucer (Harper), Root's The Poetry of Chaucer (Houghton Mifflin), and Kittredge's Chaucer and His Poetry (Harvard Univ. Press). Miss Hammond's Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (Macmillan) is invaluable to the serious student. Lowell's essay in My Study Windows (Houghton Mifflin) is suggestive and sympathetic, although slightly inaccurate as to details. Plannin 1

THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH POPULAR BALLADS

The great edition of the ballads is that of Francis James Child, in five volumes (Houghton Mifflin). This gives every text of every ballad that Child and his many assistants were able to discover, and is the starting point for all serious study of English balladry. A condensation of this edition in one volume (Cambridge edition, Houghton Mifflin), contains representative texts of practically all the ballads in the larger work, and is prefaced by Kittredge's valuable essay. Gummere's Old English Ballads (Ginn and Co.) is an inexpensive collection with valuable notes. The same author's The Popular Ballad (Houghton Mifflin) discusses the problems of ballad origins and related questions.

SPENSER (1552-1599)

Up to the age of Elizabeth England had produced but one great poet-Chaucer. Edmund Spenser was the second. He was born in London and received his early education in the famous school of the Merchant Tailors, to whose guild his father probably belonged. The family purse must have been lean, for the boy obtained help from a charitable foundation. At Cambridge University, too, he was entered in 1569 as a sizar, or needy student, who rendered certain services in return for food and tuition. At Cambridge Spenser formed the chief of his friendships, with Gabriel Harvey, who had some influence upon Spenser's poetical theory, and figures as one of the characters of The Shepherd's Calendar. After taking his master's degree in 1576 Spenser lived for a time with relatives in Lancashire, and later held two secretarial positions. By 1579 he had entered the service of the great Earl of Leicester, and in that year published The Shepherd's Calendar, a series of pastoral eclogues, one for each of the twelve months. In 1580 he became secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and spent the remainder of his life, apart from two visits to London, in Ireland. For some years he held office in Dublin, as a clerk of the Court of

Chancery, but resigned in 1588 to become clerk of the Council of Munster; he had previously bought the estate of Kilcolman, in the county of Munster, where he took up his residence. Sir Walter Raleigh was then living some thirty miles away. While on a visit to Kilcolman in 1589 he saw the manuscript of the first three books of The Faerie Queene. Enthusiastic about their merits, he took the poet with him to London, where the three books were published in 1590. The work confirmed the reputation earned by The Shepherd's Calendar, and won for Spenser the patronage of the Queen and many people of high rank. Its favorable reception encouraged Spenser to hope for political preferment in England, but the only tangible reward was a pension of fifty pounds. Disappointed in his political ambitions, he returned to Ireland early in 1591. In 1594 he married an Irish lady, Elizabeth Boyle; a poetical record of his courtship may be found in the Amoretti and the Epithalamion, published together in 1595. The following year saw him again in London, superintending the printing of the second three books of The Faerie Queene, and once more seeking advancement-in vain. In 1598 a rebellion broke out in Munster. Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his wife and four children, fled to Cork. From there he was sent with despatches to London, where he died Jan. 16, 1599. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer.

The record of Spenser's life is one of unsatisfied ambition. Although he enjoyed the friendship of Sidney and Raleigh and the favor of the Queen, he was, like Swift, compelled to live most of his life in a country he detested, balked of the honors he hoped for. As a poet, however, he won immediate recognition, and on the appearance of The Faerie Queene was at once acclaimed as heir to the mantle of Chaucer. Spenser is the most truly representative of Elizabethan poets, because his work, especially The Faerie Queene, shows to perfection the blending of the spirit of the Renaissance with that of the Reformation.] It is of the Renaissance in its sensuous beauty, its intimate connection with the literatures of Greece, Rome, and Italy, and the depth and sweep of its imagination; its profound moral earnestness it owes to the Reformation.

Much the best single volume edition of Spenser is that by R. E. N. Dodge in the Cambridge Poets (Houghton Mifflin). There are fine critical essays by Lowell (in Among My Books) and by Edward Dowden (in Transcripts and Studies).

ELIZABETHAN SONNETS

The sonnet, like several other artificial forms of the lyric, owes its existence to Provençal poets, whose work furnished models for the Italian lyrists of the thirteenth century. It was Petrarch (1304-1374), however, who perfected its form, established its amorous tone, and gave vogue to the "conceited" style distinctive of its early history. From Italy the spreading of the Renaissance influence brought the sonnet to France and later to England. Wyatt, who introduced it

into English poetry, and Surrey, who gave it its characteristic Elizabethan form of three alternating quatrains followed by a couplet, were both avowed Petrarchists.

In the last decade of the sixteenth century the sonnet was cultivated by English poets with an assiduity which for a time amounted almost to mania. Sir Sidney Lee estimates that the number of sonnets printed in the years 1591-1597 "far exceeds two thousand." Both subject-matter and style were largely dependent upon French and Italian models. There are, for instance, a large number of sonnets addressed to friends or patrons, and as many on philosophy and religion. But love is the favorite theme, and the poet protests his devotion and bewails his mistress's coldness in a hundred pretty hyperboles passed from pen to pen. Such sonnets were usually published in the form of a sequence, including from twenty to a hundred or more sonnets, and frequently entitled by the name assigned by the poet to the real or imaginary mistress of his affections. Thus we have Daniel's Delia (1592), Constable's Diana (1592), Lodge's Phillis (1593). In these only occasional sonnets rise to the first rank of excellence.

From such sonnet sequences three stand out preeminent by reason of their superior beauty of phrasing and apparently greater sincerity of emotion. Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (written early in the eighties, printed 1591) purports to reflect the love of Sidney (Astrophel) for Penelope Devereux (Stella), who married Lord Rich. While Sidney employs all the familiar tricks of the Petrarchists, his sonnets are marked by a fervor thoroughly in accord with his ardent and chivalrous temper. Spenser's Amoretti (1595) are addressed to Elizabeth Boyle, who became his wife. In general they are distinguished by a greater sense of fact and a deeper seriousness than Sidney's. Into the maze of conjecture raised by Shakespeare's Sonnets (printed 1609, though written considerably earlier) it would be profitless to plunge. Suffice it to say that they are divided into two series, one addressed to a youthful male friend, the other to a "dark lady," who has played the poet false. The question of whether or not the sonnets are biographically true is not essential to an appreciation of their quality. The fact remains that "the best, for depth and fulness of thought, for mastery of poetical phrase, at times for the white heat of passion and perfection of literary finish, rise above the erotic poetry of their own age as they serve yet for the goal and ultimate exemplar of their kind" (Schelling).

Sidney Lee's Elizabethan Sonnets (2 vols., Constable and Co.) contains most of the important sonnet sequences and a valuable introduction. Lee's chapter on the sonnet in vol. iii of the Cambridge History of English Literature puts the whole matter in brief compass, and is equipped with a useful bibliography.

ELIZABETHAN LYRICS

Samuel Johnson's description of Pembroke College, Oxford, as "a nest of singing birds," may aptly be applied to all England in the fifty years

centering at 1600. Not only did this half-century produce the greatest drama the world has ever seen, but it also gave voice to an amazing outburst of lyric verse. In contrast with that of the Romantic period, whose history is that of a few great names, Elizabethan verse is the product of a very large number of men. Even writers of the veriest jog-trot doggerel now and then caught a spark of the divine fire and rescued their names from oblivion through an exquisitely turned song or two. The Renaissance came to full flower in the reign of Elizabeth, and the immense enjoyment of life, the youthful buoyancy, the delight in sensuous beauty, and the sheer pleasure of artistic workmanship characteristic of the Renaissance spirit, all find perfect expression in these lyrics. Here is found too the influence of the classical learning and of Italian and French models, but the material has been assimilated and made thoroughly and unmistakably English. The fondness for the use of "conceit," elaborately wrought metaphor or simile, frequently characterized by ingenuity rather than appropriateness, and sometimes degenerating into mere delight in cleverness for its own sake, is apparent in such a lyric as Southwell's The Burning Babe, though here, as in many another poem, the intensity of the imagination and personal emotion raises to the plane of high poetry what would otherwise be a rhetorical curiosity.

The history of the Elizabethan lyric starts with the publication in 1557 of Tottel's Miscellany. Wyatt and Surrey are the most important of the poets represented, and these courtiers of Henry VIII are the "birds of dawning" whose song

"Preluded those melodious bursts which fill The spacious times of great Elizabeth." Miscellanies such as Tottel's were very popular, the best of them being The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), The Phoenix' Nest (1593), England's Helicon (1600), and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody (1602). After 1600 the characteristic form in which lyrics were collected was the songbook, where songs were accompanied by their musical settings. John Dowland's First Book of Songs or Airs (1597, followed by others in 1600 and 1603) and Campion's Book of Airs (1601, others 1613, 1617) are good examples. Nor must the lyrics scattered through the drama be forgotten: "Back and side, go bare, go bare" is an early example. Lyly emphasized the fashion of enlivening plays with musical moments, and Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher merely did supremely well what practically all their contemporaries were doing.

Two men may be singled out for special mention. Thomas Campion (1567?-1620), a Cambridge graduate, was a lawyer by training, a doctor by profession, and a poet by instinct. One of the few men who have composed both words and music, he is also unrivalled, save by Ben Jonson, for skillful use of classical suggestions. His work is notable for its good taste, its limpid diction and freedom from affectation, and for an exquisitely light gracefulness of touch.

John Donne (b. 1573), after a youth checkered by adventure, changes of occupation, and dire

poverty, at last took holy orders in 1615, and rose rapidly in the church. He soon became the most famous preacher in London, with an extraordinary reputation for piety and fervor, was made Dean of St. Paul's in 1621, and only his death in 1631 kept him out of a bishopric. It has been customary to class Donne with the Jacobean, or even with Caroline poets. This is surely uncritical, since practically all his love poetry was written by 1600. Donne is one of the most strikingly original and independent poets in the language. In contrast with other lyrists of the time he follows no fashions, uses no models, borrows no material. The "strangely intellectual" fire of Donne's verse, its combination of pulsating passion and keen intellectual power, also sets it apart. Donne's extravagance of conceit, wherein he outdoes the Petrarchists, led Dr. Johnson to entitle him (however wrongly) the founder of the "metaphysical school" of poetry. Finally, his verse, always masculine in vigor, and sometimes rough to the point of uncouthness, is capable of the most subtle harmony, and at its best, as in "Sweetest love, I do not go," is as melodious as that of the smoothest of the Cavalier poets.

A fine anthology is Arthur Symons's A Pageant of Elizabethan Poetry (Blackie); A. H. Bullen's Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age and Lyrics from the Dramatists of the Elizabethan Age are delightful collections. F. E. Schelling's A Book of Elizabethan Lyrics (Ginn) has a valuable introduction, a good brief selection, and useful notes. A helpful book of general criticism is Schelling's The English Lyric (Houghton Mifflin).

LYLY (1554?-1606)

The first of a group of clever young college men who, in the decade 1580-90, did much to put English drama on its feet and to pave the way for Shakespeare, John Lyly took a bachelor's degree at Oxford in 1573, a master's in 1575. He first sought public favor in 1579 with a didactic romance, Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit, the success of which led to a sequel, Euphues and his England, in 1581. The same year saw the production of Lyly's first comedy, Alexander and Campaspe. During the next ten or twelve years Lyly produced several other comedies, influenced by classical models, of a light and fantastic nature, well adapted for court presentation. He held a minor position at court, but his efforts to obtain the important post of Master of the Revels were in vain. He was a member of four Parliaments between 1589 and 1601.

Lyly gave vogue to the prose style called from the title of his first book, Euphuism. It is a thoroughly artificial. style, employing a balanced sentence structure, wherein antithesis is emphasized by alliteration, and a free use of ornament, largely in the way of classical allusion and of illustration drawn from pseudo-scientific sources. Euphuism for a time furnished the model for polite conversation, and though its affectations were soon abandoned it did a useful service to English prose by aiding the development of a firmer and neater sentence structure.