despite the seven-foot lines in which it was written and the stiff moral allegory
prefixed to each book. Many of the original poems of this century are also trans-
lations; the converse is true as well.nElizabethan literature
Ve r s e
After the fallow, the flower: in 1552 were born Edmund Spenser and Walter Ralegh,
and in 1554 Philip Sidney, John Lyly and Richard Hooker. This generation began
what was completed by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare (b.1564),
and John Donne and Ben Jonson (b.1572).
Sidney and Spenser were the pupils of humanist schools, and their writing shows
a new conscious art and formal perfection. There are perfect single Middle English
lyrics, such as ‘I sing of a maiden’ (p. 68), but literature was not its author’s vocation.
With the exception of lyrics by Chaucer, such as ‘Hyd Absolon thi gilte tresses cleere’,
metrical perfection was not an aim. The instability of Middle English did not help.
English verse had learned French syllabic metres in the 12th century, and had
adapted them to its own stress-based rhythms; but Chaucer was right to worry that
change in the form of speech would cause scribes to mismetre his verses (p. 39).
Linguistic changes such as the loss of the final -emade many 15th-century poets lose
their metre. The printer Richard Tottel tried to regularize Wyatt’s metre. Chaucer’s
music was inaudible to Tudor ears (its secret was rediscovered by Thomas Tyrwhitt
in 1775). The metrical basis of English verse was re-established by Sidney and his
circle.
In the 1580s,the musical regularity of poems such as Marlowe’s ‘Come live with
me and be my love’ was admired. In the 1590s, with Spenser and Campion, it had
become a common accomplishment. Sidney’s verse set a standard to the
Elizabethans,as they in turn did to Herbert and Milton and their successors. Late-
Elizabethan verse is too exuberant to be classical in the way of Horace or Virgil, but
its for mal perfection made it classical for future English poets. Despite its preten-
sions,and one implication of the word Renaissance, Elizabethan verse was not neo-
classical. Neo-classical concision in English is first found in Jonson’s Jacobean verse.Sir Philip Sidney
The fame of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Books I–III, 1590;IV–VI, 1596) should not
conceal the primacy in non-dramatic poetry ofSir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), to
whom Spenser dedicated his apprentice work,The Shepheardes Calender (1579):
‘Goe little booke: thy selfe present, / As child whose parent is unkent: / To him
that is the president / Of noblesse and of chevalree.’ Sidney’s glamour, death and
legend have obscured the quality and quantity of his writing, widely circulated but
printed posthumously; his verse was edited properly only in 1962.
Sidney led a group which sought to classicize English metre; called the Areopagus,
it met at Leicester House, Strand, the home of Sidney’s uncle Leicester, the Queen’s
favourite. Its members included the poets Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville. After
Shrewsbury School and Oxford, Sidney made a three-year European tour. When he
was in Paris in 1572, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestants took place.
He also visited Germany, Vienna, Padua, Venice (where his portrait was painted by92 3 · TUDOR LITERATURE: 1500–1603