The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (59 page)

A masque brings together music and dance. If invited to attend one, you should wear a suitable costume, such as the dress of a foreigner or something fantastical. Moors and blackamoors are common subjects for masques, as are the ancient Roman gods and medieval knights and queens with their maidens. Torches will illuminate the night and people will process in their costumes, with their faces covered. Sometimes there is scenery and actors are hired to play specific parts: don’t worry, you won’t be called upon to speak impromptu. Masques are always ceremonial and symbolic: they do not have moments of
high drama, and no serious acting is ever included. After the spoken parts are complete, the court dances begin; and after the dancing comes the banquet. At the end guests remove their masks to reveal their identities to the people with whom they have been dancing, speaking and eating. Few things in Elizabethan England are certain, but you can be wholly confident that your partner at a masque will not turn out to be Philip Stubbes.

Literature

The explosion in the number of books published over the course of the reign means that you will find reading material on almost every conceivable subject. And people do love to read. In 1576 William Carnsew records reading a history of the Turks, an account of the Protestant martyrs Ridley and Latimer, assorted sermons, Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
, Humphrey Gilbert’s
A discourse of a discoverie for a new passage to Cataia
, an account of the Acts of the Council of Basel, Calvin’s letters and
De Triplice Vita
by the Italian humanist Marsilio Ficino.
⁵⁴
Well-educated people also love to read the ancient classics, such as Homer and Virgil, both in the original and in translation, and quite a few classic medieval works are now in print, such as Lord Berners’s translation of
The Chronicles of Froissart
and Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
. However, when it comes to contemporary creative writing, two forms dominate: poetry and writing for the stage.

POETRY

Almost every intelligent, well-educated person writes poetry – whether it be a short lyric on a special occasion or a pretty rhyme to amuse a potential lover. As a result, more than 440 volumes of verse are published during the reign (including reprints). But far more poetry is circulated in manuscript. Much of this is the work of gentlemen who do not wish to publish their private words. In some cases publication is quite out of the question – for instance, in the case of Chidiock Tichborne’s moving poem written ‘on the eve of his execution’ in 1586. The last stanza reads:

I sought my death and found it in my womb,

I looked for life and saw it was a shade,

I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb

And now I die, and now I was but made:

My glass is full, and now my glass is run,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

The queen herself is not too high for occasional versification, writing a hauntingly sad poem on the departure of the duke of Anjou, her last suitor and her last chance of marrying someone of suitable rank, wit and disposition. Entitled ‘On Monsieur’s departure’, it reads:

I grieve and dare not show my discontent;

I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;

I do, yet dare not say I ever meant;

I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.

I am, and not; I freeze and yet am burned,

Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun –

Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,

Stands, and lies by me, doth what I have done;

His too familiar care doth make me rue it.

No means I find to rid him from my breast,

Till by the end of things it be suppressed.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,

For I am soft, and made of melting snow;

Or be more cruel, Love, and so be kind.

Let me or float or sink, be high or low;

Or let me live with some more sweet content,

Or die, and so forget what love e’er meant.

With so much poetry being published and far more being written, how do you pick the finest? Perhaps the best guide is John Taylor, a waterman and poet in his own right, known to history as ‘the Water Poet’. In his 1620 poem
The praise of hemp-seed
he lists those deceased English writers whose fame strikes him as well deserved and secure:

In paper, many a poet now survives

Or else their lines had perish’d with their lives.

Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,

Sir Philip Sidney, who the laurel wore,

Spenser, and Shakespeare did in art excel,

Sir Edward Dyer, Greene, Nashe, Daniel.

Sylvester, Beaumont, Sir John Harington,

Forgetfulness their works would over run

But that in paper they immortally

Do live in spite of death, and cannot die.

His reading list includes just three pre-Elizabethan writers: the two great medieval poets John Gower (d. 1408) and Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400), whose works are still read in Elizabethan times, and Sir Thomas More (d. 1540), Henry VIII’s chancellor, who wrote
Utopia
and published various religious and historical works, but is not actually known for his poetry. Few would deny that the next three writers really do ‘excel’: Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. With the exception of the controversial poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe, no writer of verse dying in the century before 1620 comes anywhere near these three in terms of poetic skill, originality and sustained achievement. Yet they all hail from different backgrounds and display varied ambitions.

Philip Sidney is an aristocrat, the grandson of the duke of Northumberland, educated at Oxford. A position at court is practically his birthright. Travelling on the Continent – through Germany and Austria to Italy, Poland and Hungary – is only to be expected of someone of his class. He is the epitome of the enlightened and educated courtier. But he is also proud and quick to defend himself. In August 1579, on the tennis court at Whitehall Palace, he challenges the earl of Oxford to a duel as they violently disagree about the merits of the queen’s prospective marriage to the duke of Anjou. Elizabeth has to intervene to stop the bloodshed. Sidney then makes the mistake of presenting the queen with his argument against the marriage in written form; the queen is not amused and he hastily retreats from court. His ignominy does not last long, however, and he is soon restored to favour, being knighted in 1582. Four years later he dies in battle, at the siege of Zutphen, after receiving a
bullet in the thigh. He never sees his thirty-second birthday, but in his short life he revolutionises English literature, composing a long pastoral romance,
Arcadia
(1590), remodelling the Petrarchan sonnet in his sequence
Astrophel and Stella
(1591), and robustly defending poetry against its critics in
The Defence of Poesy
(1595). To give you a taster of his poetic touch, the following is taken from
Arcadia:

My true-love hath my heart, and I have his,

By just exchange one for the other given:

I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;

There never was a bargain better driven.

His heart in me keeps me and him in one,

My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides;

He loves my heart for once it was his own;

I cherish his because in me it bides.

His heart his wound received from my sight;

My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;

For as from me on him his hurt did light,

So still methought in me his hurt did smart:

Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,

My true love hath my heart and I have his.

Edmund Spenser is the son of a London merchant. Educated at Cambridge, where he too translates Petrarch’s sonnets, he meets and befriends Sidney in the household of the earl of Leicester. A friendship develops and Spenser dedicates his first book,
The Shepheardes Calender
(1579), to Sidney. Shortly afterwards he travels to Ireland, where he pens his great work,
The Faerie Queene
, a series of courtly tales composed in a deliberately archaic style celebrating Elizabeth and the Tudor dynasty. The first three books of this poem (he plans to write twenty-four) are published in 1590 and championed by Sir Walter Raleigh. Spenser travels to London to present them to the queen, hoping for a position at court; unfortunately Elizabeth does not oblige him. Disappointed, he returns to Ireland, where he writes the next three books of
The Faerie Queene
and composes a sonnet sequence for his much-loved new bride,
Amoretti
(1594), followed by a poem that celebrates their marriage,
Epithalamion
(1596). Having attracted the hostility of the Irish, he is burnt out of his home, Kilcolman Castle,
by 2,000 rebels in 1598, who force him and his family to escape by a secret underground passage. He returns to England and dies the following year at the age of forty-seven. This is sonnet 75 from his
Amoretti:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand

But came the waves and washed it away;

Again I wrote it with a second hand

But came the tide and made my pains his prey.

Vain man, said she, that dost in vain assay

A mortal thing so to immortalize,

For I myself shall like to this decay

And eke my name be wiped out likewise.

Not so, quoth I, let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your virtues rare shall eternize

And in the heavens write your glorious name

Where when as death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.

By comparison with Sidney and Spenser, Shakespeare is of relatively humble background. Born in 1564, he does not attend a university but marries Anne Hathaway in 1582, when he is eighteen and she twenty-six. They have three children together before he is twenty-one, during which time he remains living at his father’s house in Henley Street. But within six years he has moved to London and begun writing and staging history plays. Despite early success as a playwright, his first published work is a poem,
Venus and Adonis
, which appears in 1593, when all the theatres are closed due to plague. You can pick up a copy from the stationers at St Paul’s for 1s – as many people do, for it goes through reprint after reprint. The following year a second long poem,
The Rape of Lucrece
, is published. In 1595, when the theatres reopen, he appears on the payroll of the acting company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and thereafter devotes himself entirely to the stage. But quietly he is writing brilliant sonnets, building up a body of 154 poems, which is finally published in 1609. You will undoubtedly be familiar with many of these, such as ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ (sonnet 18) and ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediment …’ (sonnet 116). But perhaps you are less
familiar with sonnet 78, one of the more obviously personal poems, in which he refers to his comparative lack of ‘learning’ (i.e. his lack of a university education):

So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse,

And found such fair assistance in my verse

As every alien pen hath got my use

And under thee their poesy disperse.

Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing

And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,

Have added feathers to the learned’s wing

And given grace a double majesty.

Yet be most proud of that which I compile,

Whose influence is thine, and born of thee:

In others’ works thou dost but mend the style,

And arts with thy sweet graces graced be;

But thou art all my art, and dost advance