The Life of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
Around 1525, Wyatt separated from his wife, charging her with adultery; it is also the year from which his interest in Anne Boleyn probably dates. He accompanied Sir Thomas Cheney on a diplomatic mission to France in 1526 and Sir John Russell to Venice and the papal court in Rome in 1527. He was made High Marshal of Calais (1528-1530) and Commissioner of the Peace of Essex in 1532. Also in 1532, Wyatt accompanied King Henry and Anne Boleyn, who was by then the King's mistress, on their visit to Calais. Anne Boleyn married the King in January 1533, and Wyatt served in her coronation in June.
Wyatt was knighted in 1535, but in 1536 he was imprisoned in the Tower for quarreling with the Duke of Suffolk, and possibly also because he was suspected of being one of Anne Boleyn's lovers. During this imprisonment Wyatt witnessed the execution of Anne Boleyn on May 19, 1536 from the Bell Tower, and wrote V. Innocentia Veritas Viat Fides Circumdederunt me inimici mei. He was released later that year. Henry, Wyatt's father died in November 1536.
Wyatt was returned to favor and made ambassador to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in Spain. He returned to England in June 1539, and later that year was again ambassador to Charles until May 1540. Wyatt's praise of country life, and the cynical comments about foreign courts, in his verse epistle Mine Own John Poins derive from his own experience.
In 1541 Wyatt was charged with treason on a revival of charges originally levelled against him in 1538 by Edmund Bonner, now Bishop of London. Bonner claimed that while ambassador, Wyatt had been rude about the King's person, and had dealings with Cardinal Pole, a papal legate and Henry's kinsman, with whom Henry was much angered over Pole's siding with papal authority in the matter of Henry's divorce proceedings from Katharine of Aragón. Wyatt was again confined to the Tower, where he wrote an impassioned 'Defence'. He received a royal pardon, perhaps at the request of then queen, Catharine Howard, and was fully restored to favor in 1542. Wyatt was given various royal offices after his pardon, but he became ill after welcoming Charles V's envoy at Falmouth and died at Sherborne on 11 October 1542.
None of Wyatt's poems had been published in his lifetime, with the exception of a few poems in a miscellany entitled The Court of Venus. His first published work was Certain Psalms (1594), metrical translations of the penitential psalms. It wasn't until 1557, 15 years after Wyatt's death, that a number of his poetry appeared alongside Surrey's in printer Richard Tottel's Songs and Sonnets written by the Right Honorable Lord Henry Howard late Earl of Surrey and other. Until modern times it was called simply Songs and Sonnets, but now it is generally known as Tottel's Miscellany. The rest of Wyatt's poetry, lyrics, and satires remained in manuscript until the 19th and 20th centuries "rediscovered" them.
Wyatt, along with Surrey, was the first to introduce the sonnet into English, with its characteristic final rhyming couplet. He wrote extraordinarily accomplished imitations of Petrarch's sonnets, including 'I find no peace' ('Pace non trovo') and 'Whoso List to Hunt'—the latter, quite different in tone from Petrarch's 'Una candida cerva', has often been seen to refer to Anne Boleyn as the deer with a jewelled collar. Wyatt was also adept at other new forms in English, such as the terza rima and the rondaeu. Wyatt and Surrey often share the title "father of the English sonnet."
THE LOVER FORSAKETH HIS
UNKIND LOVE.Y heart I gave thee, not to do it pain,
But to preserve, lo, it to thee was taken.
I served thee, not that I should be for-
saken ;
But, that I should receive reward again,
I was content thy servant to remain ;
And not to be repayed after this fashion.
Now, since in thee there is none other reason,
Displease thee not, if that I do refrain.
Unsatiate of my woe, and thy desire ;
Assured by craft for to excuse thy fault :
But, since it pleaseth thee to feign default,
Farewell, I say, departing from the fire.
For he that doth believe, bearing in hand,
Plougheth in water, and soweth in the sand.
Michael Drayton
Michael Drayton was born at Hartshill in Warwickshire in 1563 and as a youth he became page to Sir Henry Goodeere of Polesworth. Goodeere is to be credited for Drayton's education. Drayton fell in love with Sir Henry's daughter, Anne, who served as an inspiration for 'Idea'.
Drayton's career as a poet was long: from his first published work in 1591 to his last in 1630. Drayton constantly revised his works, rewriting and reissuing them, sometimes under different titles. His first published work was Harmonie of the Church (1591), a metrical rendering of scriptural passages, rife with alliteration. Soon thereafter Drayton, a disciple of Edmund Spenser, wrote Idea, the Shepherd's Garland (1593), consisting of nine eclogues, or pastoral verse dialogues. Drayton revised and reissued it in 1606. Next, Drayton published the historical poems Peirs Gaveston (1593), and Matilda (1594). Drayton used Holinshed as one of the sources. Idea's Mirror (1594) is a collection of love sonnets, the first version of his later sonnet sequence Idea. In 1595 Drayton published Endymion and Phoebe, one of the sources for Keats' Endymion. Endymion and Phoebe is an epyllion, an erotic treatment of mythological narratives. It, too, was later revised and reissued as The Man in the Moon (1606 and 1619).
In 1596, Drayton published Robert, Duke of Normandy (revised 1605 and 1619), a legend. In it, Fame and Fortune tell Robert's story in the presence of Robert's ghost. In the same year, 1596, Drayton also published the historical poem Mortimeriados, which underwent an extensive rewriting and reappeared as The Barons' Wars in 1603. Both versions owe a debt to Marlowe's Edward II. The first was in rhyme royal, a series of scenes, the latter in ottava rima, several hundred lines longer and more serious in tone and in its interest in the nature of civil war. The Barons' Wars was itself revised in 1619.
One of Drayton's finest works, England's Heroical Epistles (1597), a collection of verse letters by lovers, earned Drayton the title of 'our English Ovid'.1 The work was in the model of Ovid's Heroides, but instead of mythological lovers, Drayton's lovers were figures from English history.
Drayton's only extant play, The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1600), played on the popularity of Falstaff from Shakespeare's plays. It may have been a collaboration, like the now lost plays of which only records survive.
Drayton's Poems Lyric and Pastoral (1606) was the first to introduce imitations of Horace's Odes. The collection contains the odes To the Virginian Voyage and The Battle of Agincourt. Drayton's masterpiece, however, is Poly-Olbion (1612 and 1622), a thirty-thousand-line historical-geographical poem celebrating all the counties of England and Wales.2
In 1627 appeared The Battle of Agincourt, an attempt at epic, The Miseries of Queen Margaret, and Nymphidia, the Court of Fairy, Drayton's most popular work. Nymphidia is a mock-heroic series of fairy poems, or 'Nimphalls'1, much influenced by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Drayton's last published work, The Muses' Elizium, is a return to the pastoral. Michael Drayton died in London on December 2, 1631. He was buried in Westminster Abbey under a monument with an epitaph by Ben Jonson commissioned by the Countess of Dorset.
To Humour by Michael Drayton
You cannot love, my pretty Heart! and why?
There was a time you told me that you would;
But now again, you will the same deny!
If it might please you, would to God you could!
What, will you hate? Nay, that you will not neither!
Nor love, nor hate! How then? What will you do?
What, will you keep a mean betwixt either?
Or will you love me, and yet hate me too?
Yet serves not this! What next, what other shift?
You Will, and Will Not; what a coil is here!
I see your craft! Now, I perceive your drift!
And all this while, I was mistaken there.
Your love and hate is this, I now do prove you!
You love in hate, by hate to make me love you. (1599)
Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Philip Sidney was born on November 30, 1554, at Penshurst, Kent. He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and nephew of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. He was named after his godfather, Philip II of Spain. After private tutelage, he entered Shrewsbury School at the age of ten in 1564, on the same day as Fulke Greville, who became his fast friend and, later, his biographer. After attending Christ Church, Oxford, (1568-1571) he left without taking a degree in order to complete his education by travelling the continent. Among the places he visited were Paris, Frankfurt, Venice, and Vienna.
Sidney returned to England in 1575, living the life of a popular and eminent courtier. In 1577, he was sent as ambassador to the German Emperor and the Prince of Orange. Officially, he had been sent to condole the princes on the deaths of their fathers. His real mission was to feel out the chances for the creation of a Protestant league. Yet, the budding diplomatic career was cut short because the Queen found Sidney to be perhaps too ardent in his Protestantism, the Queen preferring a more cautious approach. Upon his return, Sidney attended the court of Elizabeth I and actively encouraged such authors as Edward Dyer, Greville, and most importantly, the young Edmund Spenser, who dedicated The Shepheardes Calender to him.
In 1580, he incurred the queen's displeasure by opposing her projected marriage to the Duke of Anjou, Roman Catholic heir to the French throne, and was dismissed from court for a time. He left the court for the estate of his cherished sister Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. During his stay, he wrote the long pastoral romance Arcadia. At some uncertain date, he composed a major piece of critical prose that was published after his death under two titles, The Defence of Poesy and An Apology for Poetry. Sidney's Astrophil and Stella ("Starlover and Star") was begun probably around 1576, during Sidney's courtship with Penelope Devereux. Astrophil and Stella, which includes 108 sonnets and 11 songs, is the first in the long line of Elizabethan sonnet cycles. Most of the sonnets are influenced by Petrarchan conventions.
Yet Sidney was growing restless with lack of appointments. In 1585 he made a covert attempt to join Drake's expedition to Cadiz. Elizabeth summoned Sidney to court, and appointed him governor of Flushing in the Netherlands. In 1586 Sidney, along with his younger brother Robert Sidney, took part in a skirmish against the Spanish at Zutphen, and was wounded of a musket shot that shattered his thigh-bone. Some twenty-two days later Sidney died of the unhealed wound at not yet thirty-two years of age. His death occasioned much mourning in England as the Queen and her subjects grieved for the man who had come to exemplify the ideal courtier. It is said that Londoners, come out to see the funeral progression, cried out "Farewell, the worthiest knight that lived." 1
Astrophel and Stella
Sonnet XIV
Alas, have I not pain enough, my friend,
Upon whose breast a fiercer gripe doth tire
Than did on him who first stole down the fire,
While Love on me doth all his quiver spend ;
But with your rhubarb words ye must contend,
To grieve me worse in saying, that Desire
Doth plunge my well-formed soul even in the mire
Of sinful thoughts, which do in ruin end?
If that be sin which doth the manners frame,
Well stayed with truth in word and faith of deed,
Ready of wit and fearing nought but shame
If that be sin which in fixt hearts doth breed
A loathing of all loose unchastity,
Then love is sin, and let me sinful be!
John Donne
John Donne was born in Bread Street, London in 1572 to a prosperous Roman Catholic family, a precarious thing at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment was rife in England. His father, John Donne, was a well-to-do ironmonger and citizen of London. Donne's father died suddenly in 1576, and left the three children to be raised by their mother, Elizabeth, the daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist, and a relative of Sir Thomas More.
Donne's first teachers were Jesuits. At the age of 11, Donne and his younger brother Henry were entered at Hart Hall, University of Oxford, where Donne studied for three years. He spent the next three years at the University of Cambridge, but took no degree at either university because he would not take the Oath of Supremacy required at graduation. He was admitted to study law as a member of Thavies Inn (1591) and Lincoln's Inn (1592), and it seemed natural that Donne should embark upon a legal or diplomatic career.
In 1593, Donne's brother Henry died of a fever in prison after being arrested for giving sanctuary to a proscribed Catholic priest. This made Donne begin to question his faith. His first book of poems, Satires, written during this period of residence in London, is considered one of Donne's most important literary efforts. Although not immediately published, the volume had a fairly wide readership through private circulation of the manuscript. Same was the case with his love poems, Songs and Sonnets, assumed to be written at about the same time as the Satires.