Characteristics of English poets from Chaucer to Shirley

Front matter

GINN &r> CO. :

Gentlemen, — / /tave much pleasure in acknowledging your liberal offer to pay me on your reprint of my Characteristics of English Poets the same royalty that you pay to American authors. This offer seems to me quite satisfactory , and I accept it at once.

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Preface To The First Edition

Two things are attempted in the following work, which the author believes have not hitherto been systematically accomplished. My chief object has been to bring into as clear light as possible the characteristics of the several poets within the period chosen. And as a secondary object to this, I have endeavoured to trace how far each poet was influenced by his Uterary predecessors and his contemporaries. This is what I have attempted to do. The reader must not in this volume expect to find the works of our poets treated with reference to their race or their social surroundings. " What sort of a man was he?" not "How was he formed?" is the leading question to which I have endeavoured to supply an answer.

In thus deliberately adopting a method that is in one vital respect the opposite of M. Taine's I should be sorry if it were supposed that I am insensible to the value of what M. Taine has done for English literature. It may be, as one of his critics has said, that M. Taine has added little to the popular conception of the Englishman, as expressed in the nickname "John Bull"; but none the less on that account is it a great and valuable work to have shown that the characteristics thus vaguely summed up really pervade the whole of our literature. Justly viewed, indeed, the method pursued in this volume is not so much the opposite as the complement of M. Taine's. His endeavour was to point out what our writers had in common ; mine has been to point out what each has by distinction. I might advance, as a justification of my attempt, that a thorough study of the individual is indispensable to that higher study which has for its object the determination of the characteristics of the race. And besides, the most interesting study for mankind will always be the individual man.

VI PREFACE.

It may be objected to my method that it does not systematically follow successive periods in the career of the individual, the opening of new . veins, the development of new powers, the subjection to new influences. That is a method by itself, with its own value and its own dangers. It is the method suitable to monographs, or to history on a larger scale than is here attempted. I must say that it seems to me to have been of late somewhat overdone. It has been pursued without due respect to the individuality of the individual. Men's lives have been divided into clear-cut periods, and those periods characterised as if it were a law of nature that the individual became at sudden and definite epochs a wholly new creature. All division into periods, unless cautiously carried out, tends to obscure the fact that every animated being retains its individual characteristics from birth to maturity, from maturity to decay. The child is father to the man : a young cabbage does not become an old fig-tree. To trace the gradual growth of powers and qualities, extended range of effort, increased mastery of materials, is a most interesting task. This I have incidentally endeavoured to do. But I conceive that it is of prior interest to know what characteristics are of the essence of a man's being, and are manifested in all his outcomes ; and therefore my chief aim in each case has been to seize those characteristics, and to make my interpretation of them as plain and unmistakable as lay in my power.

A smaller point in which I am especially open to hostile criticism, is the modernised spelling of the texts of Chaucer and his contemporaries and immediate successors. I have done this after much consideration, resolving to attempt it more by way of experiment and for the purpose of eliciting opinion, than from any settled conviction that it is the only proper course. I am not insensible to the charm of the archaic spelling ; and I know that to some minds modernisation of spelling is as obnoxious as the performance of Othello in a dress-coat. My object is to help my readers to forget such small points as orthographical differences between them and those poets of an elder time, and to get nearer to the living spirit of them. The tendency of all archaisims, as I shall point out more fully in the

PREFACE. Vll

case of Chaucer, is to impart into the text a sentiment of old age and childishness, very delightful in itself, but not so favourable to truth of criticism.

W. MINTO.

August I, 1874.

Preface To Second Edition

There are three points in particular on which I have made any considerable alteration from the text of the first edition — the relation of Chaucer to the English Court and to French poetry (chap, i.) ; the connection, or rather the non-connection, of the Wars of the Roses with the decadence of English poetry in the fifteenth century (chap. ii. sect, iii.) ; and the " causes " of the development of the Elizabethan drama (chap. vi.). On these points I have tried to express more fully and clearly the views originally put forward. In revising this edition I have gained less than I had expected from the enormous mass of interesting commentary on Chaucer and Shakespeare published within the last ten years, the reason doubtless being that my book is concerned with one main purpose — the exposition of the characters, personal and artistic, of the poets dealt with. Every student of English literature must rejoice to find so many able and ingenious scholars at work in this field, and everybody must be sensible of the great value of their results ; but as regards my own special purpose, I have not found occasion for material change. How far this is due to prejudice and preoccupation, others must judge.

Some of the writer's incidental essays in the hazardous work of verifying anonymous allusions in EHzabethan literature, have been more favourably received than he had ventured to hope. Two of them have been almost universally accepted, the identification of the rival poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets with Chapman, and the identification of Spenser's "Action" with Drayton, under his poetical name "Rowland." The identification of " Our pleasant Willy " with Sidney, and of " That same gentle Spirit " with Spenser himself (Appendix A), I regard as equally certain,

Vlll PREFACE.

but such does not seem to be the general opinion of those who have taken any notice of my arguments.

The discussion of the age and character of Hamlet is much more argumentative than I should make it now when Goethe's view of the character is less generally accepted. The views I contended for were novel at the time. The arguments for Hamlet's age contained in the body of the play (see p. 309) had strangely escaped the notice of Shakespearian critics.

I have added in an Appendix a commendatory sonnet, of date 1 59 1, and have put forward some considerations, originally printed in the ' Examiner ' some ten years ago, for believing it to be Shakespeare's. I cannot expect many to take the trouble of following arguments of such minuteness. Most readers will judge, as I did myself at first, from a general impression. But I must beg those who do interest themselves in such a dilettante inquiry, to observe the nature of my argument, that it is not founded on single coincidences of expression, such as might be made out from any EHzabethan author, but on coincidence with a whole circle of associated ideas, images, and words.

W. M.

August, 1885.

Chapter I. — Geoffrey Chaucer. Page

I. His Life, Character, and Works, ....... i

II. His Words, INIetres, and Imagery, . . . . . . -17

III. The Chief Qualities of his Poetry, ...... 25

IV. His Dehneation of Character, ....... 39

Chapter II. —chaucer's Contemporaries • And Successors

I. English Contemporaries, —

I. William Langland. — 2. John Cower. — 3. Miracle-plays and Mysteries. — 4. Metrical Romances, ..... 45

II. Scottish Contemporaries, —

I. Barbour. — 2. Blind Harry, . . . . . . ' ^5

III. English Successors, —

I. Occleve. — 2. Lydgate. — 3. Sir Thomas Malory. — 4. John Skelton. — 5. Stephen Hawes, ...... 69

IV. Scottish Successors, —

I. James I. — 2. Robert Henryson. — 3. William Dunbar. — 4. Gawain Douglas. — 5. Sir David Lindsay. — 6. North-Country Ballad-Makers, 93

Chapter III. — Renaissance And Transition

I. Wyat, 116 in. Writers of Mysteries, Moralities, Moral Interludes — John Bale, . 130 IV. John Heywood — Merry Interludes, . . . . . '135

V. Udall — Ralph Roister Doister, 139

VI. Sackville, . 143

X CONTENTS.

VII. Edwards, 150

VIII. Gascoigne, 153

X. Translators of Seneca and Ovid, 159

I. Lyly, .

II. Marlowe,

III. Greene,

IV. Peele, .

V. Nash, .

VI. Kyd, VII. Munday, VIII. Chettle,

Chapter VII. — William Shakespeare

I. His Life and Character, . . . . . . . -257

II. His Words and Imagery, ........ 274

III. Certain Qualities of his Poetry, ....... 278

IV. His Delineation of Character, 305

V. The Interaction of his Characters, 317

VI. The Tranquillising Close of his Tragedies, ..... 319

CONTENTS.

XI

Chapter VIII. — Shakespeare's Contem- Poraries And Successors

I. Chapman, II. Marston,

III. Jonson,

IV. Dekker,

V. Middleton,

VI. Fletcher,

VII. Webster,

VIII. Tourneur,

IX. Ford, .

X. Massinger,

XI. Shirley,

357 360

363 366

APPENDIX A — "Our Pleasant Willy" 368

APPENDIX B — An Unrecognised Sonnet by Shakespeare? . 371

CHARACTERISTICS

OF

ENGLISH POETS.

Chapter I. Geoffrey Chaucer

(1340-1400.)

I. — His Life, Character, and Works.

To regard Chaucer as the first genial day in the spring of English poetry, is to take, perhaps, a somewhat insular view of his position. On a more comprehensive view, it would appear more apposite to call him a fine day, if not the last fine day, in the autumn of medii^val European poetry. He may be described as the father of English poetry — the first great poet that used the English language ; but it is more instructive to look upon him as the English son and heir of a great family of French and Italian poets. He was the great English master in a poetic movement that originated in the south of Europe, among the provinces of the Langue d'Oc, which had been going on with brilliant energy for more than two centuries before his birth, and had produced among its masterpieces the ' Romance of the Rose,' and the poetry of Dante and Petrarch.

How the Troubadours came by their poetry is not, and perhaps cannot be, sufficiently ascertained. Probably great significance ought to be attached to the fact that the south of France and the east coast of Spain received a large infusion of Greek blood from the Phocfean colonists of MassiHa (now Marseilles) and their offshoots. These Greek colonists were something more than a handful of adventurous settlers, such as might be absorbed in a community without appreciably affecting its character. Their chief city, Massilia, soon after its foundation, became one of the most prosperous and powerful communities on the coasts of the Mediterranean, the successful rival of Carthage, the independent ally of Rome, and, under the early emperors, the chief dispenser of liberal education to the young rulers of the world. It may well have been that, in these representatives of her race, taken from the home of lyric poetry — the region of Alcaeus and Sappho — ancient Greece left to Western Europe a more precious bequest, a bequest that gave a more vital impulse to modern literature than all the fragments of her art. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the various provinces speaking the Langue d'Oc, and especially Provence, were in a high state of commercial prosperity and political freedom. We may therefore, in the absence of certain knowledge, venture to speculate that, when the Provengals, having achieved the material basis for a great literary outburst, came in contact with Arabian poetry through the Moors, the artistic tendency of the Greek quickened with irrepressible life, and throwing itself into the metrical forms that had given it the awakening stimulus, blossomed and bore fruit with voluptuous luxuriance. But whatever may have been the origin of Provengal poetry — however the Troubadours caught their happy art, found it, or came by it — they certainly are the poetic fathers of the Trouveres and the early Italian poets ; and through them the grandfathers of our own Chaucer.

Although the Trouveres of the north of France received their impulse from the Troubadours of the south, they were not simply imitators and translators, rendering the productions of the Langue d'Oc into the Langue d'Oil. The bent of their genius was no less decidedly epic than the bent of the Troubadours was lyric. They poured out of fertile imaginations hundreds of chivalrous, amorous, and humorous tales. The history of this great creative movement, within its limits of two centuries, is a subject in itself. Englishmen took part in it, as a result of the close political connection between England and the north of France, but no writer of mark used any dialect of English. Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote in Latin ; Walter Map in French. These are great names in the literature of England and of the Middle Ages, but they do not belong to English literature.

Chaucer was the first writer for all time that used the Englishs^ language. But viewed as a figure in European Hterature, he must be regarded as the last of the Trouveres. His works float on the surface of the same Hterary wave ; a deep gulf lies between them and the next, on the crest of which are the works of our great Elizabethans. Some patriotic Englishmen have strongly resented the endeavour of M. Sandras ^ to consider Chaucer as an imitator of the Trouveres. They are justified in taking offence at the word "imitator." It is too much to say that Chaucer produced nothing but imitations of G. de Lorris or other Trouveres, till he conceived the plan of the ' Canterbury Tales ' ; and that the ' Canterbury Tales,' though so far original in form, are animated throughout by the spirit of Jean de Meun. To say this is to produce a totally false impression as regards the decided individuality and pronounced English characteristics of Chaucer. He undoubtedly belongs to the line of the Trouveres. He was a disciple of theirs ; he studied in the school of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, by the side of Guillaume de Machault and Eustache Deschamps. He adopted the same poetical machinery of vision and allegory. He made the same elaborate studies of colour and form. From French predecessors he received the stimulus to his minute observation of character. It was emulation of them that kindled his happy genius for story-telling. The relation between Chaucer and the Trouveres is much closer than the relation between Shakespeare and the foreign originals that supplied him with plots, or than the relation between Mr Tennyson and the Arthurian legends. Making allowance for differences of national character, Chaucer owed as much to Guillaume de Lorris as Shakespeare to Marlowe, or Tennyson to Wordsworth ; and in spite of national character, there was probably more affinity between pupil and master in the one case than in the others. At the same time, we should keep clear of such a word as imitation, which would imply that Chaucer had no character of his own. He received his impulse from the French : he made liberal use of their forms and their materials ; yet his works bear the impress and breathe the spirit of a strong individuality ; and this individuality, though most obvious in the ' Canterbury Tales,' is throughout all his works distinctively English. Finally, to add one word on the comparative extent of Chaucer's obligations to Italian sources : while he translated largely from Boccaccio, and while it may be possible to trace an expansion of his poetic ideals coincident with the time when he may be supposed to have made his first acquaintance with Italian poetry, it is not to be questioned that he was most deeply indebted for general form, imagery, and characterization to the Trouveres, whose language and works he must have been famihar with from boyhood.

1 Etude sur G. Chaucer, considere comme imitaleur des Trouveres, 1859. See, in particular, Mr Furnivall's ' Trial-Forewords,' Chaucer Society.

Various circumstances helped to bring the son of a London vintner under the influence of French poetry. Many details of Chaucer's life have been gradually recovered by successive generations of antiquaries, from Thynne and Speght to Nicolas and Furnivall/ but none of them is more significant as regards the influences that shaped the growing poet than the recently discovered fact that in 1357 he was a page in the household of Prince Lionel. His age was then probably fifteen, or at the utmost seventeen, and whether or not he had been at Cambridge before — the University age being then much younger than it is now — this position ensured him the best education of the time. And while the youth was in this much-coveted service, a great public event happened. The French king, captured at Poictiers by the Black Prince, was brought to London in triumph. In accordance with the chivalrous usage then dominant at the English Court, the royal prisoner, so far from being treated with indignity, was received with as much show of respect and gorgeous ceremony as if he had been a distinguished potentate on a friendly visit. He brought a large retinue with him, and he was lodged in what was then considered the finest house in England, John of Gaunt's Savoy Palace. During his four years' captivity, tournaments were frequently held in his honoury hunting and hawking parties were arranged for his diversion, and everything possible was done to make life pleasant for him. Chaucer, as a member of Prince Lionel's household, must have made the acquaintance of some of King John's numerous retinue. He would naturally be thrown into company with youths in a similar position to himself, and as one of a page's duties was to amuse his master or mistress with reading, and the French king was a lover of poetry, Chaucer must thus have had his attention vividly turned, if it had not been turned before, to the French poetry then fashionable. Soon afterwards he had another opportunity. The page was advanced to the dignity of "squire" in 1359, and in Edward HL's unfortunate expedition of that year into France, was taken prisoner and detained till the following year. Of his treatment during this captivity we know nothing specific, but we may assume from the custom of the time that it was not harsh, and that the young squire, if he had a passion for poetry, would have access to congenial company. The king paid ;£i6 for his ransom after the Peace of Bretigny.

It may almost be said to have been an accident that Chaucer did not write in French, as his contemporary Gower began by doing. But he had the sense to discern a capable literary instrument in the nascent English, which the king at this time was

1 Of late years Mr Furnivall and the Chaucer Society have left hardly a paper unturned in extant official records.

doing his utmost to encourage. A poet is not begotten by circumstances, but circumstances may do much to make or mar him, and a man of genius, able to make the new language move in verse, was sure of a warm welcome at the Court of Edward III. The atmosphere was most favourable to the development of a poet of genial pleasure-loving disposition. Edward's reign was the flowering period of chivalry in England. It was the midsummer, the July, of chivalry ; the institution was then in full blossom. All that it is customary to say about the gladness of life in the England of Chaucer's time was true of the Court ; if a whole nation could be gladdened by the beautiful life of a favoured few, then all England must have been happy and merry. Pageantry was never more gorgeous or more frequent, courtesy of manner never more refined. The Court was like the Garden of Mirth in the ' Romance of the Rose ' ; there were hideous figures on the outside of the walls, but inside all was sunshine and merry-making, and now and then the doors were thrown open and gaily attired parties issued forth to hunt or tournament. These amusements were arranged on a scale of unparalleled splendour.

It was a most gladsome and picturesque life at the Court of Edward III., and in that Hfe Chaucer's poetry was an incident. This is a key to its joyous character. Animated playing on the surface of passion without breaking the crust, humorous pretence of incapacity when dull or difficult subjects come in the way, an eye for the picturesque, abundant supply of incident, never-failing fertility of witty suggestion — these are some of the qualities that made Chaucer's poetry acceptable to the audience for which he wrote. He never ventured on dangerous ground. He kept as far as possible from disagreeable realities. We search in vain for the most covert allusion to the painful events of the time. Devastating pestilences, disaster abroad, discontent and insurrection at home — he took for granted that his audience did not care to hear about such things, and he passed such things by. They wished to be entertained, and he entertained them charmingly, with lively adventures in high and human life, pictures of the life chivalric with its hunts and tournaments, pictures of the life vulgar with its intervals of riotous mirth, sweet love-tales, comical intrigues, graphic and humorous sketches of character.

It would seem that Chaucer, like Shakespeare after him, was brought professionally face to face with the people whose sympathies he wished to command, and thus, like Mr Gladstone's orator, drew from his audience in a vapour what he gave back to them in a shower. Seven years after his return from imprisonment in France, he received a life pension of twenty marks for good service done the king as a '' valettus," and in the year following he appears in the Exchequer Rolls as an Esquire of the

Household. Unfortunately the Household Book of Edward HI. has not been recovered, so that we cannot know directly what Chaucer's official duties were. But Mr Furnivall has examined the book in which Edward IV. 's domestic system is set forth, with a word of compliment to Edward HI. as " the first setter of certainties among his domestical meyne," and it appears there that the Esquires of Household " were accustomed, winter and summer, in afternoons and evenings, to draw to Lords' chambers within Court, there to keep honest company after their cunning, in talking of chronicles of kings and of others policies, or harping, singing, or other acts martials, to help to occupy the Court and accompany strangers till the time of their departing." This, then, was probably the practice when Chaucer served the king, and it was one of his official duties to make the time pass pleasantly for the king's visitors. He could, if he liked, instead of harping or singing, or talking history or politics, try the effect of his own verses on an audience not likely to submit to boredom. At the time when Chaucer passed into manhood, in the seventh decade of his century, there was a remarkable concurrence of circumstances favourable to the development of an English poet. Given a man of poetic genius within the circle of the Court, the time had come if the man was there : he could hardly escape such a conspiracy of influences to stimulate and foster his gift. Poetry was recognized as one of the graces of a courtly life ; the queen was interested in the art, and had French metricians about her, Froissart among the number : the king also was an emulous patron, and besides was anxious, along with all his Court, for a poet who should do honour to the language which had at last established itself as the language of the whole nation. The opportunity was there ; the call was urgent. Chaucer was able to respond. The hour had come, and the man as well.

Chaucer continued to rise steadily in royal favour, and in the prime of his life was frequently employed in important diplomatic missions — a sufficient testimony to his powers of making himself agreeable. Up to 1386, fortune would seem to have been uniformly kind to him. Among other places, he had an opportunity of visiting Italy while Petrarch was still alive and Boccaccio was in the height of his fame. In 1372 he was appointed one of the commissioners for arranging a commercial treaty with the Genoese, and visited Florence and Genoa in the following year. Unless royal favourites were then intrusted with very unsuitable posts, our poet must have had a decidedly commercial turn. In 1374 he was appointed Comptroller of the Customs and Subsidy of Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides in the Port of London ; and he had to perform his duties in person, without the option of a deputy. In his " House of Fame," perhaps with a reference to these duties, he speaks of going home when his reckonings were made up and poring over books till his eyes were dazed ; and doubtless, between business and poetry, he must have been closely occupied. For several generations before Chaucer's time, the successful poets of France had been in the habit of receiving munificent presents, which enabled them to give their whole time to poetry. Chaucer was not so fortunate, or unfortunate ; his patron, instead of handing over to him jewels, horses, houses, or lands, obtained a moderate pension for him from the Crown, and the privilege of discharging the dry duties of a moderately lucrative office — an arrangement which may, perhaps, be considered peculiarly English, and which probably combined a certain amount of leisure with a solid feeling of independence.

Besides his pension and his salary, he seems to have had an allowance for robes as one of the king's esquires ; and he received the custody of a wealthy minor, which brought him something equivalent to about ^{^looo of our money. The accession of Richard II. (1377) did not injure his position: his pension was confirmed, and he received, besides, another annuity of twenty marks, in lieu of a daily pitcher of wine. The Issue Rolls contain further entries of money paid to him for his expenses abroad on the king's service. In 1382 he was appointed Comptroller of the Petty Customs of the Port of London, with the privilege of appointing a deputy. In 1385 he was allowed to name a deputy for his other comptrollership. In 1386 he sat in Parliament as a Knight of the Shire of Kent. This was the zenith of his fortunes. In that year John of Gaunt lost his authority at Court. A commission was issued for inquiring, among other alleged abuses, into the state of the subsidies and customs, and Chaucer was superseded in his two comptrollerships. The new brooms had probably little difficulty in finding an excuse for sweeping away the protege of the fallen Minister. As is often the manner of poets, he had saved little of his pensions and salaries as a royal favourite and a public officer ; if, at least, we may draw the natural inference from his two years afterwards getting both his annuities transferred to another man. The revival of John of Gaunt's influence in 1389 again brightened his prospects. He was appointed Clerk of the King's Works. In 1394 he obtained an annuity of ;2^20 ; but the decay of his fortunes is too plainly indicated by the fact that he was several times under the necessity of applying for small portions of this pension in advance. It is pleasing, however, to know that the last year of his life was made happy by the accession of his patron's son, Henry Bolingbroke, who immediately more than doubled his annuity by the additional grant of forty marks. He would seem to have retired to a tenement in the garden of the chapel of the Blessed Mary, of Westminster. According to the inscription on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, confirmed by the cessation of the minutes of his pension, he died on the 25th October 1400.

These main facts in Chaucer's Hfe are drawn from official records. While they leave the imagination room enough to picture the poet's life at Court, they mark the outlines of that life with sufficient distinctness. We must be careful about filling in details of his inner history from supposed autobiographical references in his poems. Chaucer's biographers too often take the poet literally, ignoring his ironic humour and his conventional artistic pretences. They argue from one or two jests at his wife's expense, of a kind that might be made by the most affectionate of husbands, provided there was no real ground for them, that his wife was a shrew and his married life far from happy. They accept as matter of fact to be gravely discussed the poet's statement in the opening of the * Book of the Duchess,' which serves happily as part of the artistic setting of that poem, that he has been unable to sleep night or day for eight years. This confession of a long and hopeless love-passion is taken with such unhesitating faith, that it is set against and allowed to overbear otherwise plain documentary evidence of the date of Chaucer's marriage to one of the " damoiselles " of the Queen's Chamber. But why take such conventional artistic pretences literally? In the beautiful Prologue to the ' Legend of Good Women ' the poet tells us that on the first of May he hied him to the fields before sunrise to see the daisy unclose, and that he spent the whole day leaning on his elbow and side,