pillars of Hercules are the two promontories sepa- SPENSER'S HYMNS Pp. 120 ff. In 1596 Spenser published a little volume entitled Foure Hymnes. The first two have as their subjects Love and Beauty, respectively; the second two, Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty. All four were written under the influence of the poetico-philosophical ideas known as neo-platonism - a mixture of parts of the philosophy of Plato with elements drawn from oriental mysticism and from Christian doctrine. "The two original Hymnes in Honour of Love and of Beautie, taken together, suggest," as Professor Fletcher says, "the ascent from sensual to intellectual love. The two later Hymnes purge away all suggestion of romantic love, and develop at length the four higher grades of the soul's reascent to God. Thus the Foure Hymnes really constitute one complete doctrinal poem." Our selections are from the second and fourth of the hymns. The first selection sets forth the view that every earthly thing is made after a divine pattern and is beautiful just in proportion as it partakes of the nature and qualities of its pattern. It is the infusion of this celestial power which kindles beauty and love in all things beautiful; "for of the soul the body form doth take." A beautiful body therefore must be the residence of a beautiful soul. Yet the poet is forced to admit that sometimes, by some perversion of nature, a beautiful soul is found in an ugly body and a wicked, ugly soul in a beautiful body; this however he reconciles poetically, though not logically, with his theory. The Cyprian Queen (1. 55) is Venus as goddess of love and fruitfulness. The second selection shows how by contemplation of the beauty and goodness of created things we rise to a vision of the beauty and goodness and love of God. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY Pp. 122 ff. "The miracle of our age," Sidney was called by an enthusiastic contemporary, but the quality of his work does not account for his extraordinary influence upon the writers of his own day. This is rather to be explained by his strong enthusiasms, generous patronage of literature, social rank, physical prowess, personal charm, romantic love affair, and tragic early death, which, taken all together, touched the popular imagination. Fully two hundred memorials were pub lished at the time of his death, and for a generation after, Arcadian romance and sonneteering were literary fashions, while several plays drew their plots from episodes of the Arcadia. ASTROPHEL AND STELLA Pp. 122 f. Although Watson's sonnets were the first published as a series (1582), Sidney's were circulating in manuscript among his friends at that time; and it was their publication in 1591 that seems to have given the great impulse to sonnet writing. The series was called Astrophe and Stella (Star-lover and Star). Stella was Lady Penelope Devereux, the Earl of Essex's sister, who in 1581 married Lord Rich. A marriage between her and Sidney had been partly arranged by their parents, and the earlier sonnets seem to have been largely literary exercises. Only when it was too late did Sidney awaken to his love for her, and the later sonnets are believed to reflect real passion. I. 1. 6. inventions, methods of treating a theme; but in l. 9, 10 Invention is creative imagination. XV. 11. 5-6. dictionary's method. . . rimes. Sidney refers to alliteration, by which words beginning with the same letter are associated as, he says contemptuously, they are in the dictionary. For the use of alliteration, see Piers the Plowman; for its use combined with rhyme, see Pearl. 11. 7-8. Sidney means that the English sonneteers lack originality. They are still sighing over the woes that Petrarch long ago expressed in his sonnets, and their ideas (wit) are not their own but his, naturalized (denizen'd). P. 123. XXXIX. Compare Daniel's sonnet, No. LIV, Fletcher's Invocation to Sleep, Wordsworth's and Keats's sonnets entitled To Sleep and Macbeth, II, ii, 37–40. XLI. 1. 1. The occasion referred to is probably a tournament which was held in the spring of 1581, in honor of a French embassy (1. 4). 11. 6-7. A more fastidious judge declares too slight such praise as good form permits him to give; that is, he finds speech inadequate. 1. 10. The Sidneys were knights and soldiers as early as the time of Henry II. On his mother's side, Sir Philip was descended from the Dukes of Northumberland. THE NIGHTINGALE According to classical legend, Tereus, King of Thrace, married Procne, daughter of Pandion, King of Athens, and by her had a son Itys, or Itylus. After five years, at the request of his wife, he went to Athens to persuade her younger sister Philomela to visit her; but falling in love with Philomela, he, on the way to Thrace, ravished her, and cut out her tongue in order that she might not be able to betray him. She, however, wove pictures of her wrongs in a web of cloth and sent it to Procne. The two sisters then, for revenge, killed Itys and served him up to his father to eat. When Tereus learned what they had done, he tried to kill them; but the gods changed him into a hawk, Procne into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale, and the pursuit and attempt to slay still continues. The story is frequently alluded to by Elizabethan poets. They had studied it in school in Ovid's Metamorphoses (VI, 412-674). Compare the love song on p. 94, Lyly's Spring's Welcome (p. 128), and As It Fell Upon a Day (p. 162). For modern versions, see Matthew Arnold's Philomela (p. 616), and Swinburne's Itylus (p. 642). The tereu (Spring's Welcome, 1. 3) and teru (As It Fell Upon a Day, l. 14) come from a fancied .resemblance between the vocative Tereu and the nightingale's song. HYMN TO APOLLO Apollo is addressed in his double character as the sun and as the god of intellectual endeavor, as appears in ll. 1–2. 1. 5. Python's skin. The Python was a serpent-monster slain by Apollo near Delphi, as is related in Ovid's Metamorphoses, I, 416-451. 1. 8. Doth teach to learn the good what travails do belong, i.e., what labor is involved in learning the good. ARCADIA Pp. 124 ff. Sidney's Arcadia was written to amuse his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke. He seems to have considered it what it is mere elaborate trifling, and on his deathbed he asked to have the manuscript burned. His sister, however, took charge of its publication in 1590. Its influence on Elizabethan prose was pronounced although perhaps not so great as was that of the sonnets on verse. It is too leisurely in movement and too complicated in structure to be well illustrated by a continuous selection, except as to its style, but the passage here presented seems better suited than any other of similar length to convey an idea of the nature of the story and the sources of its charm for Sidney's contemporaries. On the Countess of Pembroke herself (cf. Browne's Epitaph, p. 177). JOHN LYLY Pp. 127 f. The selection from John Lyly's Euphues and his England may seem to some teachers shorter than is warranted by Lyly's reputation and his indubitable services to English prose. But the characteristics of his style are such as can be exhibited in comparatively small compass, and its excessive ornamentation soon becomes monotonous and unendurable. Moreover, it is not by its ornamental but by its structural features that it rendered its services to English prose, and the most significant of these, as Professor Morsbach has shown, is exact balance of accents in correlative phrases and clauses. P. 128. Lyly's classical comedies, which delighted Elizabeth's court, were written for the boy actors of St. Paul's and the Savoy, and were played by them. Some scholars have thought that the exquisitely fanciful lyrics scattered through the plays were not written by Lyly; but the weight of evidence seems to me entirely against this view, and I have therefore presented them here, under Lyly's name. Pp. 129 ff. The subtitle of Rosalynde shows that Lodge was one of the immediate heirs to Lyly's affectations. Rosalynde is quite as artificial as Euphues and much more sentimental. Shakespeare borrowed the plot of As You Like It from Lodge's novel; but he made many important changes in structure and characterization, and the difference in atmosphere between the two works is as great as between a perfumed, lighted room and a forest glade in the sunshine. Compare this passage with Act III, Sc. ii, and Act IV, Sc. i, of the play. Read the madrigal from this romance published in England's Helicon, p. 164 of this volume. P. 129 a. like the Syren. Cf. the passage from Chapman's Odysseys, pp. 145 f. P. 129 b. Enone charming song, p. 161. Paris. See Peele's 706 ENGLISH PROSE AND POETRY Sonnet. Cf. Sonetto on p. 131. Note that neither is in the conventional sonnet form. P. 130 b. with Ixion embrace Juno. Ixion was a king of the Lapithe, who, for boasting that he had won the love of Juno, was bound forever to a revolving wheel in Tartarus, the place of punishment for the wicked. flew to the fist. When the falconer whistles, the bird flies back and settles on his fist. So Ganimede, i.e., Rosalynde, recognized in Rosader her master and showed her preference for him, even though he did not know her and had not sent any "call." Phyllis ... Ariadne. Chaucer tells both stories, and also that of Dido, in his Legend of Good Women (11. 2394-2561, 1886-2227, and 924-1367). Cf. Gayley's Classic Myths. Phyllis hanged herself in despair of the return of her lover Demophoon and was changed into an almond tree. Lodge calls the tree philbert (filbert, i.e., hazel), evidently thinking that the name is derived from Phyllis. Ariadne helped Theseus to slay the Minotaur in the labyrinth, and was afterwards forsaken by him. ROBERT GREENE Pp. 131 ff. Robert Greene had the reputation of being one of the most dissolute and disreputable men of his time. Strangely enough his plays and his novels are singularly free from immorality and coarseness, and his songs are not only sweet and clean but have an astonishing accent of innocence and simplicity. A GROAT'S WORTH OF WIT BOUGHT Pp. 133 ff. Although this purports to be a deathbed confession and admonition by Greene, it is probably, as some of his friends declared when it was published (after his death), the work of Henry Chettle. Professor Vetter's arguments against Greene's authorship (Abhandl. d. 44ten Sammlung d. d. Schulmänner, Teubner, 1897) seem to me conclusive, and it would not be difficult to add to them. The extract given, however, is interesting as showing a contemporary Puritan view of Greene, and as touching upon the lives of several of his famous companions. Allusions to charP. 133 a. Delphrigus, etc. acters in plays and to plays of the time not now identified. P. 133 b. thou famous gracer of tragedians, Marlowe, who, for the unconventional utterances in his plays, especially Tamburlane, was regarded as nothing less than an atheist. In point of fact, he was a kind of Unitarian. P. 134 a. Machiavellian policy. To the Elizabethans Niccolo Machiavelli was the devil incar nate, and from his name is said to come the term Old Nick. In reality he merely set forth in his treatise The Prince the methods which successful rulers used and still use. He recognized their immorality and brutality as clearly as any one. perished as ill as Julian, the Emperor Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, who because of ill-treatment by Christians in his youth abjured their religion. He died of a spear-thrust in battle. He was one of the stock examples of the punishment of atheists. young Juvenal, Thomas Nash, the bitterest satirist of the age, who was repeatedly referred to by that name. thou no less deserving, perhaps George Peele; certainly the description fits him. P. 134 b. an upstart Crow totum (Jack-of-all-trades) undoubtedly Shakespeare. The Tiger's heart, etc., is a parody of 3 Henry VI, I, iv, 137. Johannes fac Shake-scene, buckram gentlemen, imitation gentlemen. Buckram was a coarse linen cloth (often stiffened with glue or gum). It seems to have been worn only by the lower classes (see Falstaff's account of the 'rogues in buckram" who robbed him, r Henry IV, II, iv), and was used as a general term of contempt: "Thou say (i.e. silk), thou serge, nay, thou buckram lord!" 2 Henry VI, IV, vii, 27. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE HERO AND LEANDER Pp. 135 ff. This unfinished poem was Marlowe's last work. He seems to have written only two books and a fragment of the third. Seemingly at his request, his friend Chapman, the translator of Homer, finished the poem and published it in 1598, five years after Marlowe's death. The story of Hero and Leander is taken from a Greck poem, attributed to a pre-Homeric legendary poet named Musæus (1. 52). No genuine writings of Musæus, however, are known. Marlowe's original was written by an unknown author, probably in the fifth or sixth century after Christ. Of this work, however, Marlowe used little more than the bare outlines; the imaginative fire and strong power of visualization that enter into his wonderful pageantry of pictures are as much his ciate its splendor, read with it the selection from Venus and Adonis (p. 137), in which even Shakespeare, writing, as he undoubtedly did on that occasion, in a commercial spirit, lags far behind. The First Sestiad. Sestiad is derived from Sestos as Iliad from Ilium; hence, Sestiad means a poem about Sestos as Iliad a poem about Troy (Ilium). But the Elizabethans used both words in the plural for the whole work and in the singular for each book. Marlowe's familiarity with the classics appears from many allusions, which may be studied in Gayley's Classic Myths or in the special references given below with each. ll. 12-14. Adonis was a huntsman and scorned the goddess of love. The outcome of the story as told by Shakespeare follows on pp. 137 ff. Il: 45-50. Hero was so lovely that Nature wept because she took more than half of the beauty of the world; and as a sign of her loss, since Hero's time, half the people of the world have been black. Hl. 56-58. Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece of Colchis and his flight with Medea, the king's daughter, are told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, VII, 1-452, Heroides, VI, and in William Morris's Life and Death of Jason. 1.59. Sphere. See the note on Milton's astronomy, p. 717 below. P. 136. 1. 65. the white of Pelops' shoulder, ivory. Pelops was killed and served as a banquet to the gods by his father Tantalus; but was afterwards restored to life. The only part missing, his shoulder, was replaced by one of ivory (Metamorphoses, VI, 403-411). 11. 73-76. Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool and pined away because he could not embrace it (Metamorphoses, III, 339-510). 1. 77. wild Hippolytus, son of the Amazon Antiope, served Artemis (Diana); and was untamed by love (Ovid, Heroides, IV). ll. 81-82. Thrace was a mountainous country. In classical times mountaineers were called barbarians, as over against the more civilized inhabitants of cities. Il. 101-102. Phaeton, son of Apollo, tried to drive his father's chariot; the horses ran away with him and almost destroyed the world by fire (Metamorphoses, II, 1-400). 1. 105. Cf. Chapman's Odysseys, p. 146. 11. 114-115. Ixion's shaggy-footed race. Ixion was the father of the Centaurs, a race of beings half-man and half-horse (Metamorphoses, XII, 210-535). 1. 137. Proteus was a sea god, a shape-shifter, who could assume any form he wished (cf. Odyssey, IV, 384 ff., and Vergil, Georgics, IV, 387-452). 1. 158. turtles' blood. It should be noted that in Elizabethan English turtle always means "dove"; it was not until nearly a century later that it was applied to the water-tortoise. 1. 161. Love has two arrows: one, with a golden head, which causes successful love; the other, with a leaden head, causes unreciprocated love; cf. Midsummer Night's Dream, I, i, 170. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE VENUS AND ADONIS Pp. 137 ff. Venus and Adonis was Shakespeare's first work to be printed (in 1593) and, in his own words, "the first heir of " his "invention." It was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton in extremely formal and respectful language. That it met with his approval is shown by the affectionate tone of the dedication to him in 1594 of The Rape of Lucrece. Venus and Adonis became immediately popular and continued so. It went through about a dozen editions within the next fifty years. The story was taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses (X, 519739, with details from IV, 271-388, and VIII, 267-371) a book familiar to every one who went to school in Shakespeare's time with not a little added (perhaps through an intermediary) from the Greek pastoral writers. Cf. Andrew Lang's Theocritus, Bion and Moschus (in the Golden Treasury Series), especially The Lament for Adonis by Bion and the fifteenth idyl of Theocritus. A familiar love story, with the fashionable idyllic background, and handled with the utmost license, was sure to succeed even though it showed little originality and only moderate imaginative fire. The verse form and some details are borrowed from Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis (also derived from Ovid), published in 1589. P. 138. l. 1109-1116. Cf. Theocritus, The Dead Adonis, in Idyl XXX. SONNETS P. 139 ff. The only edition of Shakespeare's sonnets in his lifetime was seemingly unauthorized. We do not know for whom they were written or whether they are now placed in the order in which he meant them to be read. Although the critics agree that Nos. I-CXXVI are, for the most part, addressed to a young man who was at once patron and friend, and CXXVII-CLIV to a dark lady with whom the poet was in love, this conclusion is based entirely upon internal evidence, and does not explain some features of the texts as they stand. No attempt to identify the persons mentioned has been universally accepted as convincing. The sonnets are very unequal in value, ranging from the extravagant commonplaces of conventional Elizabethan flattery to serious reflections of personal experience and opinion. It is best to judge each on its own merits without regard to the series as a whole. In form they belong to the loosely-knit English The best sonnet writers of the nineteenth XII, 1. 10. thou among the wastes of time must XV, 1. The stars comment upon the unsubstantial forms and events of life by making or marring them through their secret influence. ll. 11-12. Time discusses with Decay how to change your youth to age. ll. 13-14. Warring with Time because of my love for you, I, in my verses, give you life as fast as he takes it. XVII, 1. 11. Cf. what Theseus says of "the lunatic, the lover and the poet," Midsummer Night's Dream, V, i, 2-17. 1. 12. stretched metre, exaggerated verse. Cf. Lyly's Spring's Welcome, XXIX, ll. 10-12. Il. 6-8, p. 128, Shakespeare's first song from Cymbeline, l. 1, p. 145, and Par. Lost, V, 198. P. 140. LV, l. 1 ff. The traditional idea, which goes back to Horace, that a poem, as poetry, will live forever, does not necessarily involve any personal conceit on the part of the poet. 1. 4. Than uncared-for gravestone stained by Time. 1. 13. Till the Judgment Day that bids you rise from the dead. LXIV and LXV are closely connected, and should be read together. The first is pessimistic, and the second returns to the traditional poetic hope. LXIV, 1. 2. monuments. Elaborate, expensive, and ancient 1. 4. Possibly suggested by Horace's monu mentum ære perennius, “a monument more enduring than brass"; but here eternal modifies slave. Mortal rage means, simply, violence that destroys. Cf. CVII, ll. 13-14. = 1. 8. Shakespeare regards land as the positive element (store abundance), water as the negative (loss). LXV, 1. 2. sad mortality, destruction, not limited to human beings, but applied to everything that exists. 1. 3. hold a plea, contend successfully. 1. 10. P. 141. LXXI. Cf. Christina Rossetti's Remember, p. 652. LXXIII, ll. 1–4. This is a double metaphor: first of his own condition as that of the leafless boughs among which no birds now sing; then of the condition of those boughs as that of the choir of a ruined abbey. At the disestablishment of the monasteries by Henry VIII many were stripped and ruined and left to decay. These, as Steevens points out, would have been familiar and impressive sights to Shakespeare. 1. 12. The fire is consumed by the burning of the fuel which maintains it. XCVII, 1. 5. time removed, time of absence. ll. 4-10. The autumn is represented as ready to bring forth the fruit begotten by the spring (the prime, 1. 7), but as the spring is dead, the autumn is a widow, and consequently the fruit hoped for will, when it is brought forth, be orphaned. XCVIII, 1. 4. Saturn, the planet whose metal is lead, is supposed to govern heaviness and melancholy, and therefore stands here for all dull and low-spirited creatures. XCIX. The first line is introductory; the sonnet is complete without it. It is made to fit the rhyme scheme of the first quatrain thus: babab. 1. 7. i.e., have stolen its fragrance, but some editors think that color (dark auburn) is meant. 1. 13. canker, canker-worm. P. 142. CVII. Massey explained this as a song of triumph at the death of Elizabeth and the deliverance of Shakespeare's friend, the Earl of Southampton, from imprisonment in the Tower. Elizabeth would be the eclipsed mortal moon of 1. 5. This seems impossible on any hypothesis. The reason why the augurs are sad and mock their own prediction (1. 6) is certainly that the moon has passed through her eclipse and now shines clear |