derives its true fame from the birth of the lady whom he always celebrates : The first part of whose name, Godiva, doth fore-rede Her christened title, Anne. And as those virgins there A recluse long time lived, in that fair abbey placed Which Alared enriched, and Powlesworth highly graced, All noble like herself; and bidding of their beads, Which there should after live in whose dear self should end Idea, in her metempsychosis, was therefore Anne Goodere, and the significance and propriety of Drayton's description is further illustrated by the following passage from Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire : The Abbey of Powlesworth was sold to Francis Goodere, gentleman, which Francis had issue Sir Henry Goodere, knight, his son and heir (a gentleman much accomplished and of eminent note in the county, whilst he lived, having suffered imprisonment in behalf of that magnanimous lady, Mary, Queen of Scotland, of whom he was a great honourer), who had issue two daughters only, scilicet, Frances and Anne; the one married to Sir Henry Goodere, knight, son and heir to Sir William (brother to the before-specified Sir Henry), the other to Henry Rainsford of Clifford in Com. Glouc.2 From another poem of Drayton, a hymn in honour of his lady's birthplace, it appears that Anne Goodere (Idea) was born in Coventry on the 4th of August : 1 Polyolbion, song xiii. 1 Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, p. 1114. Of thy streets which thou hold'st best With brave garlands crown that door.1 To Frances, the elder of the two sisters, Drayton had already dedicated one of England's Heroical Epistles, in gratitude for the bounties which he had received from the family of Goodere. He now praised her under the name of Panape. I have dwelt at length on details, in themselves trivial, because of the light they throw both on the real nature of the supposed amorous poetry of the time, as we find it embodied in pastorals and sonnets, and also on the character and artistic motives of an eminent English poet. Perhaps the only parallel in the history of our poetry to the mingled spite and ingenuity of Drayton's revenge is to be found in the minute art with which Pope transferred his satire, under the same fictitious name, from one person to another, according as he was moved by the passion of the moment. Lady Bedford's fickleness was not the only disappointment which Drayton had to endure. In an epistle written to George Sandys, the translator of Ovid, he gives us a glimpse of the high hopes he had built on the favour of James I., to whom, while still only King of Scotland, he had addressed a flattering sonnet, and whose accession to the English throne he welcomed in 1603 with a A Gratulatory Poem, followed up in the next year with a "Pean Triumphall, composed for the Societie of the Goldsmiths of London." These efforts brought him no It was my hap before all other men To suffer shipwreck by my forward pen, When King James entered: at which joyful time I taught his title to this isle in rhyme, 1 Collier's edition of Drayton's Poems, p. 418. And to my part did all the Muses win He, next my God, on whom I built my trust, As we see from Daniel's Panegyric Congratulatorie, Drayton was by no means alone in his welcome of James, nor could he have been exposed to any real danger in espousing a cause which was decidedly popular. But he was doubtless soured by his various disappointments, and these may even have rendered his livelihood for a while precarious, for we find him in 1599 and 1600 assisting, as one of several hack playwrights, in the production of third-rate historical dramas. In 1603, however, he secured a new patron, Walter Aston, to whom he dedicated in succession The Owl-a poem written in imitation of Spenser's Mother Hubberd's Tale on the unworthy treatment of men of letters at Court, the edition of Poems, Lyric and Pastoral spoken of above, and The Legend of Great Cromwell, which in 1607 he published in a volume with the legends he had already written on Matilda, Gaveston, and Rober, Duke of Normandy. When Aston, at the coronation of James I., received the order of knighthood, he made Drayton one of his esquires. To him the poet makes a grateful allusion in the preface to the first eighteen books of his Polyolbion, which in 1613 he published, with a dedication to Prince Henry (then recently dead); and we may therefore conclude that his patron had at least placed him in a position which relieved him from the necessity of having to write for his living. A competence, however, was far from satisfying the poet's ambition. The note of discontent sounds plainly in the following passage from the same preface : And to any that shall demand wherefore, having promised this poem of the general island so many years, I now publish only this part of it, I plainly answer; that many times I had determined with myself to have left it off, and have neglected my papers sometimes two years together, finding the times since his majesty's happy coming in to fall so heavily on my distressed fortunes, after my zealous soul had laboured so long in that, which, with the general happiness of the kingdom, seemed not then impossible somewhat also to have advanced me. But I instantly saw all my long-nourished hopes even buried alive before my face: so uncertain in this world be the ends of our clearest endeavours. The concluding twelve songs of the Polyolbion were published in 1622. Five years later appeared a small folio containing The Battle of Agincourt (not the ballad on the same subject which had appeared in Poems, Lyric and Pastoral), The Miseries of Queen Margaret, Nymphidia, The Quest of Cinthia, The Shepherd's Sirena, and The Moon-Calf. In 1630 this was followed by The Muses' Elysium, Moses, his Birth and Miracles, Noah's Flood, David and Goliah. The new volume was dedicated to Edward, fourth Earl of Dorset, to whom the poet says: I have ever found that constancy in your favours, since your first acknowledging of me, that their durableness has now made me one of your family; and I am become so happy in the title to be called yours, that, for retribution, could I have found a fitter way to publish your bounties, my thankfulness before this might have found it out. Drayton died on the 23rd December 1631, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. He lies beneath a monument erected to him by the Countess of Dorset, the inscription on which was written by Quarles. The above sketch will enable the reader to divine why it is that a poet who enjoyed so great a reputation in his own day, who undoubtedly possessed many rare qualities, and who wrote so much, and often so well, as Drayton, should have left so little behind him which posterity finds of value. His works fill a volume as large as Spenser's, but the only complete poems of his which can be said to be still alive are the fine ballad on the He tried battle of Agincourt, the sonnet beginning: "Since there's no help, come let us rise and part!" and the charming fairy epic, Nymphidia. His contemporaries, as usually happens, failed to note either his merits or defects in their right proportions. They gave him the name of "Golden-mouth," intending to signify by it their appreciation of "the purity and preciousness of his style and phrase." 1 But Drayton was much more than what is called in the literary cant of our own day a "stylist." In fineness of fancy, in delicacy of humour, as well as in manly vigour of diction, he has few superiors among his contemporaries, and, with the exception of Ben Jonson, there were none of them who equalled him in versatility of invention and in the extent of his learning. many kinds of poetry, and wrote well in them all. Some critics of his time charged him, as they did Daniel, with imitation. Their criticism was superficially just. The Shepherd's Garland was imitated from the Shepherd's Calendar. Many, if not most, of the sonnets in Idea's Mirror are based on conceits first invented by Daniel or Constable. Endimion and Phabe was inspired by Marlowe's Hero and Leander; and if Drayton had not witnessed the same poet's Edward II., he would perhaps never have conceived the character of Mortimer, the hero of his Baron's Wars. When his critics spoke of him as an imitator, they were probably thinking of his England's Heroical Epistles, which were, of course, suggested by the Heroides of Ovid. Spenser and Shakespeare both supplied him with some fundamental ideas. From the episode of the marriage of the Thames and the Medway in the Faery Queen he got the structural design of 1 Meres' Palladis Tamia. The epithet "golden-mouth" was first given him by Fitzgeoffrey in a poem on Drake. 2 Drayton's condemned of some for imitation, But others say, 'twas the best poets' fashion. Traitor to kingdom mind, true judgment's tomb, A threefold name affinèd to the sun, GUILPIN, Skialetheia. |