A clash of tastes
In this exciting age, verse and prose flourished together; the names of some two hundred Elizabethan poets are known. But after Spenser wrote his great poem, prose drew the attention of the English.
John Lyly was the first to write an imaginative prose work, Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit (1579). In it he tried to show how character and mind are well formed by education, experience, travel and wise counsel. Euphues, 'well-spoken', is a young Athenian whose adventures form the frame for long discourses on education, conduct, friendship, love and unbelief. What made the book sell was its style, packed with antitheses, echoing clauses, similes, wordplay, balanced phrases and classical allusions, which enchanted Elizabeth's court and stayed in fashion for a generation. A sample runs: this young lover, whose taste exceeded his wealth and whose wealth exceeded his wisdom, thought himself behind no one in pleasing fancies, ranked himself above all in honorable standing, and found himself so fit for everything that he hardly did anything at all.
It is unclear whether Lyly caught the disease from the Italian Marino, the Spaniard Guevara or the Dutch rhetoricians. He did not mind the charge and passed it on to a great many men of Elizabeth's time. The style spoiled Shakespeare's earliest comedies, infected Bacon's essays and added a word, 'euphuism', to the language.
Words received special attention. Gabriel Harvey, a Cambridge teacher, used all his influence to replace stress and accent in English verse with classical meters based on syllable length. At his urging Sidney and Spenser formed a literary club in London, the Areopagus, which for a time tried to fit the vitality of Elizabethan life into molds like Virgil's verse. Thomas Nashe mocked the verses of the Harvey brothers so effectively that they fell out of favor at court (the book's wording here is garbled; the sense is reconstructed). When Harvey added insult to pedantry and criticized the morals of Greene, Nashe's friend, he was abused in pamphlets, and the invective of the Renaissance crossed to England.
Robert Greene
Robert Greene's life was a summary of literary activity and loose living from Villon to Verlaine. At Cambridge he sat in the same class as Harvey, Nashe and Marlowe, and spent his time among witty and dissolute companions, withering, as he said, the flower of his youth. In his own confession he was drunk with pride, found his daily business in disreputable company, and took his only pleasure in gluttony and drink. He was so far from God that he seldom thought of him, though he enjoyed swearing and blasphemy; if he could get what his heart desired in life, he was content, and let death be what it would. He feared judges as much as he feared the judgment of God.
Greene traveled in Italy and Spain, and later wrote that he saw and committed such wickedness there that he was ashamed to tell it. Back in London he was known to all by his red hair, pointed beard, silk stockings and the personal bodyguard he kept in taverns. After marriage he wrote affectionate pieces on fidelity and marital happiness, yet left his wife for another woman and spent her fortune on her. From his firsthand knowledge of criminals he wrote A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (1591), warning country people who came to London against swindlers, tricksters and pickpockets, and for it the underworld sought to kill him. It is astonishing that in so short a life, spent in such excess, he could write, with a journalist's speed and heat, a dozen tales in the Euphues manner, thirty-five tracts and a number of lively plays. As his health and money failed he found some meaning in virtue and, as openly as he had sinned, repented.
In 1591 he published Greene's Farewell to Folly, and the next year two notable pamphlets. In A Quip for an Upstart Courtier he attacked Gabriel Harvey. In A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance he attacked Shakespeare as an upstart, and urged his dissolute fellows, apparently Marlowe, Peele and Nashe, to give up sin and join him in repentance. On 2 September 1592 he begged his wife, whom he himself had abandoned, to pay a ten-pound debt to a shoemaker, adding that without the man's charity he would have perished in the streets. The next day Greene died in that shoemaker's house, of, said Harvey, a surfeit of pickled herring and Rhenish wine. His landlady, who forgave his debts in view of his poems, crowned him with a garland of bay and paid for his burial.
Thomas Nashe
Among the pamphleteers, Tom Nashe, Greene's friend, had the sharpest tongue and the most readers. The son of a parish curate, tired of cleanliness and propriety, he left Cambridge for the world of the rogues and earned his bread by his pen, writing as much as his hand could. With The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton (1594) he made popular a kind of novel about the lives of vagabonds. When Greene died and Harvey attacked Greene and Nashe in Four Letters, Nashe replied with several pamphlets, the last called Have With You to Saffron Walden. In it he wrote: be merry, readers, for I will spare nothing that pleases you; though it brings about my fall, I will hoot him out of the university before I stop. Harvey survived the affair and outlived those who led dissolute lives, dying in 1630 at eighty-five (the book's figure). Nashe completed his friend Marlowe's play Dido, worked with Ben Jonson on The Isle of Dogs, was prosecuted for sedition and withdrew to seclusion for safety. At thirty-four his short life was rolled up (1601).
Philip Sidney, 1554 to 1585
Far from this turbulent company, Sidney lived quietly to the end. His portrait in the National Portrait Gallery shows a very slender man, with a lean face and fair hair, and according to Languet he was not in robust health. Aubrey says he was very beautiful, and though his face was not manly enough, he seemed brave and bold. Some critics thought him a little too fond of display and too conscious of his perfection; only his heroic end made detractors forgive his qualities. His mother, Mary Dudley, was a daughter of the Duke of Northumberland who had dominated England under Edward VI.
His father, Sir Henry Sidney, was governor of Wales and three times Lord Deputy of Ireland, and Philip II of Spain, his godfather, gave him his name. With such a heritage, who would not be proud? Philip spent part of his short life in the vast house at Penshurst, whose walnut-timbered roofs, painted walls and crystal chandeliers are among the finest things surviving from the age. At nine he was given a church office worth 60 pounds a year, according to the book. At ten he entered Shrewsbury School, not far from Ludlow Castle, where his father lived as governor of Wales and wrote him affectionate letters of advice.
Philip learned his lessons well and won the notice of his uncle Leicester and his father's friend William Cecil. After three years at Oxford he was sent to Paris as junior member of an embassy. At the court of Charles IX he was in the city during the violence of 1572, then traveled in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Italy. At Frankfurt he met Languet, a leader of French Protestant culture, and their friendship lasted all his life. In Venice he asked Veronese to paint his portrait, and in Padua he studied the rules of Petrarchan sonnets. Back in England he was well received at court and attended the queen for two years, but fell from favor by opposing her possible marriage to the Duke of Alençon. Philip Sidney had every knightly quality: a proud bearing, skill and great courage with the sword on horseback; besides, he was courteous at court, honorable in all his dealings, and eloquent in speaking of love. He had read Castiglione's Courtier and tried to behave as that philosopher judged a dignified, polished man should, while others imitated him. Spenser called him the leader of nobility and chivalry.
It was characteristic of the period that nobles who had once despised reading and writing now wrote verse and allowed poets into their presence. Sidney, though not rich, became the most active literary patron of his generation.