Читать книгу Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) - Linche Richard - Страница 8

Much of the literary value of these poems, it should be recognized, is historical. Like Henry Petowe's romance, The Second Part of Hero and Leander (1598), they are fully as interesting as reflections of the poetic genius of Marlowe and/or Shakespeare, mirrored in the works of their less gifted contemporaries, as they are in themselves. Apart from their historical significance, however, all these poems have intrinsic interest, and several, including Dom Diego, Mirrha and Hiren as well as Philos and Licia, have a considerable degree of literary merit as well. Whoever the author of Philos and Licia may have been, he was one who had thoroughly assimilated the conventions of the minor epic, especially those employed in Hero and Leander.[50] Unlike Page, whose imitation of Marlowe is for the most part blind, this author is skillful in working many of these conventions, and even particular words and phrases from other minor epics, into the context of his poem, somewhat as the bards of major epic are supposed to have done. Surprisingly, in view of this technique of composition, the poem is well integrated, and consistently smooth and fluent in its versification.[51]

As much as this unknown poet must have admired Marlowe's verse, he evidently could not stomach the elder poet's conception of a hostile universe, or his glorification of unwedded bliss. Accordingly he constructed in Philos and Licia a world in which all goes well provided one follows the rules, and where one of the key rules is that Hymen's rites must precede love's consummation. One of Licia's chief responsibilities, in addition to summing up all feminine perfections, is to enforce this rule. Philos, though severely tempted to violate it, soon yields to Licia's virtuous admonitions, for he is, let it be known, a pliant youth, almost as devoted to Licia's will as the knight in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's tale to the Loathly Lady's. The poem ends happily, with the gods attending the lovers' nuptials. The result of this too easily ordered union of souls and bodies, unhappily for this otherwise charming poem, is an insufficiency of conflict. Aside from the poem's un-Marlovian insistence on matrimony, its most notable feature is its skillful and sustained use of light and dark imagery, recalling Chapman's much less extensive treatment of such imagery in his conclusion of Marlowe's poem and in Ovid's Banquet of Sense.

Gale's Pyramus and Thisbe begins with a moderately engaging portrayal of the youngsters' innocent friendship; it soon falls into absurdity, from which it never subsequently gets entirely clear. Gale seems to have had no inkling of the ridiculous possibilities of "serious" verse. Consequently, he is able to write of Pyramus and Thisbe "sit[ting] on bryers,/Till they enjoyd the height of their desires," (Stanza 13), with no sense of the incongruity of the image employed. With similar ill effect in its pathetic context, Thisbe's nose bleed is introduced as an omen of disaster (Stanza 33), and Pyramus' "angry" blood, by a ridiculously far-fetched conceit, is said to gush out "to finde the author of the deed,/But when it none but Pyramus had found,/ Key cold with feare it stood upon the ground" (Stanza 30).

Dom Diego, though a pleasant, occasionally charming imitation of Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis, employs fewer of the epyllionic conventions than Philos and Licia, and uses them less imaginatively. Though it never achieves a style of its own, it is quite successful in recapturing the lachrymose artificiality that marks Lodge's poem.

Despite its oblique opening and occasionally awkward style, Barksted's Mirrha is a poem of more power than Dom Diego. Among its more affecting passages are a vivid portrayal of a "gloomy gallerie" lined with portraits of Mirrha's suitors (p. 126) and an inventive account of Hebe's spilling the nectar that rained spices on Panchaia (p. 147). Barksted's early and unqualified recognition of Shakespeare's greatness, and his humbly accurate assessment of his own limited powers, compared to "neighbor" Shakespeare's, are quite disarming. One gets the uncomfortable sense, however, that Barksted in both Mirrha and Hiren, like H. A. in The Scourge after him, is a moral fence straddler, enjoying vicariously the lasciviousness he so piously reprehends.

Hiren as treated by Barksted is also deficient in imagination of a high order, but is a more absorbing story than Mirrha. As signaled by his undertaking a more intricately rhymed stanza than he attempted in his first poem, Barksted's versification and composition in the second poem are superior. The poet achieves his most telling effects in Hiren not from invention but from the elaboration of such source materials in Painter as permit him to capture the distinctive glittering artifice of minor epic. His catalog of the senses (Stanzas 75–79) serves as an example of this power of embellishment at its best.

Page's Amos and Laura, like Gale's Pyramus and Thisbe, falls into bathos near the end when Amos, in an extended comparison, likens Laura's refusal to cure his love wound to an avaricious doctor's refusal to set a poor man's leg. Page's failure as a poet is not a result of temporary lapses, as here, but of his inability to invent significant conflict. As Amos says, with unintentional irony on page 225:

There are no Seas to separate our joy,

No future danger can our Love annoy.

This is precisely the problem. But in spite of the poem's obvious weakness, one is drawn to the man who wrote it for his obviously sincere, self-deprecatory references to his "weake wit" and "inferiour stile." Fully aware of his limitations, Page, like Barksted and many another unexceptional talent of his age, was nevertheless drawn to the composition of poetry like a moth to the flame.

The Scourge is a straightforward and lively but undistinguished redaction, in sing-song verse, of the well-worn Mirrha story. Its chief but nevertheless dubious merit, over against the epyllionic tradition, is its no-nonsense approach to the art of minor epic narration. Although it expands Ovid's speeches and descriptions where feasible and introduces a degree of invention en route, it is singularly barren of such adornments as epithets, set descriptions, and formal digressions. In consequence, it lacks the distinctive hard, bejewelled brilliance of minor epic that characterizes Barksted's poetry at its best.

In summation, then, we see that although Pyramus and Thisbe and Amos and Laura have slight literary value, The Scourge, while failing to score very high as a minor epic, yet has a certain crude, narrative vitality. And Dom Diego, Mirrha, Hiren, and Philos and Licia, by virtue of their charm, inventiveness, or skillful adaptation of minor epic conventions to their expressive needs, form a hierarchy of increasing literary value that raises them as a group well above the level of the merely imitative.

For permission to reproduce Philos and Licia (for the first time), Mirrha, and Hiren, I am much indebted to the Bodleian Library; for permission to reproduce Dom Diego and Ginevra I am similarly indebted to the Trustees of the British Museum. I am also under heavy obligation to the Folger Library for permission to reprint Pyramus and Thisbe, Amos and Laura, and The Scourge of Venus (1613), all for the first time.

I also wish to express my thanks to The British Museum, the Bodleian Library, the University of Michigan, and the Ohio State University libraries for generous permission to use their collections, and to the Board of College Education of the Lutheran Church in America for a six-week summer study grant, which enabled me to gather research materials for this project.

For help and encouragement in a great variety of ways I am grateful to the following mentors and colleagues: Professor John Arthos, who first introduced me to the beauty of minor epic, the late Professor Hereward T. Price, and Professor Warner G. Rice, all from the University of Michigan; Professor Helen C. White of the University of Wisconsin; librarians Major Felie Clark, Ret., U. S. Army, of Gainesville, Florida, and Professor Luella Eutsler of Wittenberg University; and Dr. Katharine F. Pantzer of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, editor of the forthcoming, revised Short-Title Catalogue.

Paul W. Miller

Wittenberg University Springfield, Ohio December, 1965

Footnotes:

[1] See in this connection my article "The Elizabethan Minor Epic," SP, LV (1958), 31–38, answered by Walter Allen, Jr., pp. 515–518. My chief concern in this article was to show that the kind of poetry described therein, though in years past loosely and variously referred to by such terms as "Ovidian poetry" or "mythological love poetry," and often lumped together indiscriminately with other kinds such as the complaint, the tragical history, and the verse romance, actually constitutes a distinct genre recognized in practice by Renaissance poets. Whether or not there is classical authority for use of the term "epyllion," though a significant point of scholarship, is not the main issue here. Either the term "minor epic" or "epyllion" is satisfactory, provided its referent is clear, and accurately described.

[2] Published with I. C's [John Chalkhill's?] Alcilia, Philoparthens Loving Folly. Whereunto is Added Pigmalion's Image … and Also Epigrammes by Sir I. H. [John Harington] and Others, STC 4275.

[3] Bibliographical Collections and Notes, 1893–1903 (London, 1903; reprinted 1961 by Burt Franklin), p. 301.

[4] Or Linche's.

[5] Actually Grosart edited the second impression of The Scourge, STC 969 (1614), the earliest impression he knew at the time, though by 1883 he had become aware of the unique Huth copy of the 1613 edition. (See pp. 49–50 issued with copy no. 38 of Grosart's edition of The Scourge.)

[6] Philos and Licia was probably not composed much before Oct. 2, 1606, when it was entered in A Transcript of the Registers … 1554–1640, ed. Arber, III (London, 1876), 330. I have placed it first, however, because of the undeserved neglect from which it has suffered over the years and because of its literary superiority to the other poems in the collection. I have placed Pyramus and Thisbe second because, though not known to have been published prior to 1617, it was doubtless composed by Nov. 25, 1596, the date given in the dedication, and probably printed shortly thereafter in an edition now lost.

[7] "Thomas Heywood's Art of Love Lost and Found," The Library, III (1922), 212.

[8] The Francis Freeling-Henry Huth-W. A. White copy, here reproduced by courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

[9] These evident errors appear to have been corrected in ink on the Bodleian copy of the 1620 impression, of which I have seen a microfilm.

[10] Gerald Eades Bentley has gleaned and summarized a few additional facts about Barksted in The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, II (Oxford, 1941), 357–358. For an account of the correspondences between The Insatiate Countess and the poems, see R. A. Small, "The Authorship and Date of The Insatiate Countess," Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, V (1896), 279–282. For a more recent survey of Barksted's probable contribution to The Insatiate Countess see A. J. Axelrad, Un Malcontent Élizabéthain: John Marston (Paris, 1955), pp. 86–90.

[11] The attribution was made by Thomas Corser in Collectanea Anglo-Poetica, LII (Manchester, 1860), 24–25, and has been generally accepted. In further support of Corser's attribution, one might mention the anecdote in Amos and Laura about a merchant seaman, followed by a vivid description of a storm at sea (pp. 218–219). Such a tale and description are appropriate in a poem by Page, who had been a naval chaplain and who published several sermons and other devotional works for seamen.

[12] Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598). Introduction by Don Cameron Allen (New York, 1938), p. 284.

[13] Anthony a Wood, Athenae Oxonienses and Fasti Oxonienses, 2 vols. in one (London, 1691), 467. Page was vicar of St. Nicholas Church in Deptford from 1597 until his death in 1630.

[14] Shakespeare's Ovid Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London, 1904; reprinted Carbondale, Ill. 1961), IV, 67–201; X. 327–605.

[15] Not Orpheus, as stated by Professor Douglas Bush in Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition (Minneapolis, 1932), p. 183.

[16] Shakespeare's Ovid, X, 343–346.

[17] Despite these departures from Ovid, the British Museum Catalogue continues to list this as a "translation" of Ovid's Metamorphoses, X. For a somewhat later example of an actual translation of this tale, considerably amplified, see James Gresham's (not Graham's, as in STC) The Picture of Incest, STC 18969 (1626), ed. Grosart (Manchester, 1876). In idiomatic English, occasionally ornamented with such triple epithets as "azure-veyned necke" and "Nectar-candied-words," Gresham expands Golding's Ovid by more than 300 lines. Although he invents a suitable brief description of Mirrha's nurse, whom he calls "old trott," and throws in a few erotic tid-bits quite in the spirit of the minor epic, he never departs from Ovid's story line and never introduces descriptive detail of which there is not at least a hint in Ovid.

[18] No. 95 in the edition cited below.

[19] Mary A. Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (Boston, 1916), pp. 20, 144.

[20] Poems by Richard Linche, Gentleman (1596), ed. Grosart, p. x; The Love of Dom Diego and Gynevra, ed. Arber in An English Garner, VII (Birmingham, 1883), 209.

[21] "The Source of Richard Lynche's 'Amorous Poeme of Dom Diego and Ginevra,'" PMLA, LVIII (1943), 579–580.

[22] William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, IV (London, 1929), 74. (Actually, "Catheloigne" in Painter.)

[23] Certain Tragical Discourses of Bandello, trans. Geffraie Fenton anno 1567. Introd. by Robert Langton Douglas, II (London, 1898), 239.

[24] Painter, I, No. 40, 153–158.

[25] Painter, I, 156.

[26] Painter, I, 157.

[27] Bush, p. 139.

[28] Two (Philos and Licia, Amos and Laura) employ the Marlovian couplet, two (Dom Diego and The Scourge) the Shakespearean sixain, and Barksted's two employ eight-line stanzas, with Mirrha rhyming ababccdd (the Shakespearean stanza plus a couplet), and Hiren rhyming ababbcac, a more tightly knit departure from Shakespeare's stanza. The last, Pyramus and Thisbe, suggests its debt to both masters—or plays both ends against the middle—by employing a 12 (2×6)-line stanza composed of couplets, with the last couplet having a double rhyme probably designed to echo the concluding couplet of the Shakespearean sixain.

[29] Thomas Lodge, Scillaes Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Minor Epics, ed. Donno, p. 35, stanza 71.

[30] Yet Dom Diego seems not to have been previously identified as a minor epic. The late C. S. Lewis, a few pages before his brilliant discussion of Hero and Leander as an epyllion, refers to Lynche's poem as a "stanzaic novella." See Lewis' English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), p. 479, pp. 486–488.

[31] For a complete list of Burton's books in the Bodleian and Christ Church libraries, numbering 581 and 473 items respectively, see "Lists of Burton's Library," ed. F. Madan, Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings & Papers, I, Part 3 (1925; printed 1926), 222–246.

[32] No. 376 in Ronald B. McKerrow, Printers' & Publishers' Devices in England & Scotland 1485–1640 (London, 1913), p. 144. According to McKerrow, the bird in this handsome device, with the word "wick" in its bill, is probably a smew, with a pun intended on the name of the owner of the device, Smethwick.

[33] For these notes I am indebted to an excellent article, "The library of Robert Burton," ed. F. Madan, p. 185 especially, in the Oxford Bibliographical Society volume listed above.

[34] No. 240 in McKerrow, Printers' Devices, p. 92. "Framed device of a lion passant crowned and collared, a mullet for difference, on an anchor; with Desir n'a repos, and the date 1586."

[35] A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London, 1910), p. 151.

[36] Ibid., p. 199.

[37] Arber, A Transcript, IV, 149.

[38] Contributing to the unattractive appearance of the Bodleian copy of Mirrha, which Grosart consulted, is the close cropping of its upper margins.

[39] The poems of William Barksted, ed. Grosart (Manchester, 1876), p. x.

[40] Barksted, p. xiv.

[41] Henry Plomer, A Short History of English Printing (London, 1900), p. 163.

[42] The Oxford and Folger copies, of which only the first is listed in the STC. There is a third, imperfect copy at Trinity College, Cambridge, from the Edward Capell collection. According to Mr. L.W. Hanson, Keeper of Printed Books at the Bodleian, the tipping of the type in the Bodleian copy represents a fault at binding.

[43] Though the printer's name is not given, the printer's device, a fleur-de-lis, no. 251 in McKerrow, was used by Okes about this time.

[44] Grosart, p. xiii, n. 17, stanza 20, line 7, which has "adoration[e]" in both the original and Grosart's "corrected" version, and p. xiii, n. 19, stanza 41, line 6, "graces" in both copies.

[45] The printer was Thomas Creede, as revealed by the printer's device, no. 299 in McKerrow, p. 117: "Framed device of Truth being scourged by a hand from the clouds. Between her feet the initials T. C. The motto Viressit vulnere veritas."

[46] The presence of these dedicatory verses in the Huntington copy has been noted by Franklin Williams in his Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses (London, 1962), p. 193.

[47] The Folger copy, here reproduced, is complete except for Sig. £4 (pp. 214), which have been supplied from another copy.

[48] This error goes back to the first entry in A Catalogue of the Library of Henry Huth (London, 1880), which says the second edition is the same as the first.

[49] The first word of the next stanza is changed from "And" in the 1613 edition to "Then" in the second impression.

[50] Rather surprisingly, in view of its silent emulation of Marlowe's poem, Philos and Licia pays lavish tribute to Sidney. But since tributes to Sidney were common in the period, this one may be no more than a conventional recognition of his greatness.

[51] Occasionally, though, it introduces odd off-rhymes such as "forth" and "mouth" (p. 5), "vaines" and "streames" (p. 6), "either" and "fairer" (p. 8).