Analysis
In an age when the writing of poetry was an avocation for actors, courtiers, clergymen, and landed gentlemen, Michael Drayton devoted his life to poetry. In a verse epistle to his friend Henry Reynolds, Drayton writes of how, at the age of ten, he beseeched his tutor to make him a poet. Being a man of the Renaissance, the teacher started him on eclogues, first those of “honest Mantuan,” a currently popular Italian humanist, then the great Vergil himself, after which Drayton studied the English poets, beginning, of course, with Geoffrey Chaucer and working through to contemporaries such as Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Samuel Daniel, and Jonson (Drayton having of course grown up in the meantime). Both the classics and the native poetical tradition continued to inspire him throughout his long career, and in his most characteristic work he adapts classical models to his own time, place, and language.
To a greater extent, perhaps, than any of his contemporaries, Drayton straddles the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and raises the question of whether he was more Elizabethan or Jacobean. As he does not fall squarely into the usual categories of Spenserian, Jonsonian, or Metaphysical, his work challenges the usefulness—certainly the inclusiveness—of these categories of English Renaissance poetry. His career may be divided into three stages, the first and last of which are short but enormously energetic and productive, while the long middle stage demonstrates the characteristic development of his art while incidentally furnishing most of the poems for which he has become best known. In the first and, paradoxically, last stages, he is most Elizabethan, or, to use a term popularized by C. S. Lewis in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), most “golden.”
Early period
His early period begins with the publication in 1591 of a drab religious exercise called The Harmonie of the Church, but between 1593 and 1595, he brought out three works which typify and enrich that most remarkable period in English letters: Idea, the Shepheard’s Garland; Ideas Mirrour; and Endimion and Phoebe. The first of these demonstrates a young poet’s preliminary pastoral, Vergil having worked from the shepherds’ dale to epic heights—a program which the ambitious Spenser had already imitated and which many others, including John Milton, would imitate. The poems are eclogues, shepherds’ dialogues on love, death, the decline of the world, and poetry itself; they are meant to exercise a poet’s versatility in song. Drayton’s are not notable, except perhaps for their unusually frequent references to English topography; they do, however, demonstrate that the poet, at thirty, had long since learned his craft.
Ideas Mirrour
Ideas Mirrour is a sonnet sequence, not a classical form to be sure, but one associated with the great fourteenth century classicist, Petrarch. Since the posthumous publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella in 1591, poets had flooded England with sonnets featuring graceful tributes to beautiful ladies with stylized and often classical names such as Celia, Delia, and Diana, along with the laments of versifying suitors frustrated by the very aloofness that attracted them so fatally. Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady,” it might be noted, is in a number of respects the exception to the rule. Ideas Mirrour, fifty-one sonnets long, is conventionally melancholy, sometimes awkward, and regularly sensuous in the well-bred Elizabethan way.
Endimion and Phoebe
Endimion and Phoebe, in 516 pentameter couplets, is Drayton’s contribution to the Ovidian love narrative, a genre that had already generated Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598). Endimion is a shepherd lad who loves the fair goddess Phoebe at once passionately and chastely; she rewards him by wrapping him in a “fiery mantle” and lofting him to the empyrean, where he is shown a series of splendors both astronomical and divine. The poem is full of rich, smooth-flowing language—not so thoroughly a thing of beauty as John Keats’s Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818) but a joy nevertheless.
Mortimeriados
Myth, pastoral, and love lyrics provided only limited opportunities for another English obsession in the heady years following the defeat of the supposedly invincible Spanish Armada in 1588: the patriotism that rings forth in John of Gaunt’s “Methinks I am a prophet new inspired” speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II (pr. c. 1595-1596) and so many other poems of the 1590’s. Thus, 1596 found Drayton issuing Mortimeriados, on the political struggles of the reign of Edward II. Drayton was again following the lead of other poets, this time Shakespeare and Daniel (who had published the first four books of his Civile Warres in 1595) more than Spenser and Marlowe. Mortimeriados, which can be considered the last of the poems of Drayton’s early phase, is only one of a series, begun three years earlier in his Peirs Gaveston and continuing throughout most of his life, in which he delves into the history, topography, and presumed national virtues of England.
Middle period
As the childless Queen Elizabeth grew old, ambitious courtiers moved into position, and as the problem of the succession loomed, England’s mood changed. Spenser died in 1599, leaving The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) unfinished and its shadowy heroine, Gloriana, unwed to Prince Arthur. Shakespeare turned increasingly to the writing of tragedy. Drayton’s heart remained, as it always would remain, unabashedly Elizabethan. As his art matured, however, he welded his classicism and patriotism in poems of much greater originality.
Englands Heroicall Epistles
Englands Heroicall Epistles marks a turning point. Of this work can be said what surely cannot be said of anything in Drayton’s earlier poems: It is something new in English literature. His classical model, Ovid’s Heroides (before 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567), had been imitated as far back as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women (1380-1386), but instead of retaining Ovid’s subject matter—the plights of a group of legendary and historical women of the ancient world such as Dido, Medea, and Cleopatra—and forgoing Ovid’s epistolary form, as had Chaucer, Drayton wrote his poem in the form of letters to and from such women as Eleanor Cobham, Rosamond Clifford, and Alice, countess of Salisbury—that is, women involved in the political history of England, usually as royal wives or mistresses, although in the case of Lady Jane Grey, as the victim of political intrigue.
Drayton’s changes are instructive. All the letters of the Heroides are purportedly those of the women, mostly complaints by women abandoned by their consorts, with Ovid avoiding monotony through the exercise of his considerable psychological insight. Drayton, who much preferred to build situations involving the interactions of characters, hit upon the idea of an exchange of letters between the man and the woman, with sometimes hers coming first, sometimes his. Notorious royal mistresses such as Rosamond Clifford and Jane Shore had spoken in verse before, but chiefly in the moralizing vein of that stodgy Elizabethan perennial, A Mirror for Magistrates (1555, 1559, 1563), in which the ghosts of people fallen from high place appear for the purpose of lugubriously advising and admonishing the reader. Thomas Churchyard ends his account of Shore’s Wife (1563), for example: “A mirror make of my great overthrow;/ Defy this world and all his wanton ways;/ Beware by me that spent so ill her days.” Drayton’s Jane, on the other hand, concludes her letter to Edward IV: “thou art become my fate,/ And mak’st me love even in the midst of hate.” He refuses to subordinate his lovers to an abstract moral, though, to be sure, he has selected them in the first place as manifestations of the national spirit.
The Barrons Wars
Drayton’s professionalism drove him to protracted and extensive revisions, and many of the works of his middle period are reworkings of earlier poems. In The Barrons Wars, he turns the rime royal of Mortimeriados into ottava rima, explaining that although the former had “harmony,” the latter possessed “majesty, perfection, and solidity.” Drayton aspired to an epic, but he was no Vergil, and The Barrons Wars, though an improvement on Mortimeriados, was no Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553). In other cases, his critics find his “improvements” made in vain, as in his Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall, which surely made his contemporary readers wonder why, twenty-seven years after Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579), Drayton insisted on reworking old eclogues. As for his modern readers, they generally prefer Endimion and Phoebe to the new version, The Man in the Moon.
Odes
Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall is nevertheless important for introducing another of Drayton’s successful classical adaptations, his odes. A deservedly obscure poet named John Southern had made a few Pindaric odes in the 1580’s, but Drayton is the first Englishman to imitate the Horatian type. After acknowledging in his preface both Pindar’s triumphant and Anacreon’s amorous odes, Drayton intimates a fondness for the “mixed” odes of Horace. Having written in both the Ovidian and the Vergilian manner, Drayton was now treading in the footsteps of a poet notable for understanding and working within his limitations. In contrast to the high-flying poets, Horace compares himself in an ode to a bee gathering nectar on the banks of the Tiber. Eschewing the heroic and the passionate, he concentrates on such themes as moderation, hospitality, friendship, and the propriety of accepting one’s fate. Although Drayton did not easily accept his fate as a leftover Elizabethan in the age of James I, he recognized in the Horatian ode the vehicle for a range of expression that had not found utterance in earlier English poetry. What he suggested in his odes, Jonson and the neoclassicists of the new century would exploit more thoroughly.
For the ode to become a recognizable form in English, Drayton had to find an equivalent of Horace’s favorite four-line Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas. He wisely avoided the English imitations of Latin quantitative verse which had so intrigued some of the Elizabethans but had defeated all of them except Thomas Campion in a handful of lyrics. Drayton favored a five- or six-line stanza with short lines and prominent rhymes. Coupled with his usual end-stopped lines, the rhymes not only create an effect entirely different from Horace’s but also force Drayton into an unnatural syntax marked by ellipses, inversions, and the omission of transitions. English poets had tended to avoid short lines except in song lyrics, preferring the opposite risk of the hexameter line, which Alexander Pope would later compare to a “wounded snake,” and the even longer fourteener. Whether Drayton thought of his odes as singable or not, he knew that short lines and obtrusive rhymes had been used most successfully for satiric and humorous purposes, as in Chaucer’s “Tale of Sir Thopas” and John Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe (c. 1508).
Except in a few instances, such as “The Sacrifice to Apollo,” where he fell into a too self-consciously Horatian posture, Drayton avoided servility in the ode as he had in Englands Heroicall Epistles. In the odes on Agincourt and the peak, in “To the New Year” and “To the Virginian Voyage,” the reader senses an early seventeenth century Englishman responding directly to his milieu as Horace had responded to Rome in the first century b.c.e. The similarity between the two poets, less a formal or temperamental likeness than a kind of equivalent spirit grounded in love for land and landscape, kept Drayton from sounding like an “ancient.” He did not have to praise Horace’s Bandusian fountain and Caecubian wine, for he had “Buxton’s delicious baths” and good “strong ale” to celebrate. The whole “Ode Written on the Peak” is built on the proposition that England is as worthy of an ode as anything in ancient Rome. Drayton’s classicism, then, takes the form of an Englishman singing his own island in a diction and rhythm assertively Anglo-Saxon. Before Drayton, Englishmen, uncomfortable with Horace’s Epicureanism, had valued chiefly the Horace of the moral Satires (35, 30 b.c.e.; English translation, 1567) and Epistles (c. 20-15 b.c.e.; English translation, 1567). Having learned from Drayton, the later Cavalier poets achieved (not without some loss of intellectual vigor) the gracefulness and urbanity that Drayton had not caught in their common master’s odes.
Poly-Olbion
Drayton expressed the same patriotic convictions in a much more expansive way in his magnum opus, Poly-Olbion, on which he had been working for many years before its initial publication in 1612. His fondness for myth, the countryside, and antiquarian lore come together in this leisurely survey of England and Wales in which the favorite mode of travel is the river. The poem owes something to the researches of an early Tudor antiquarian, John Leland, and to Drayton’s learned contemporary, William Camden. If his preoccupation with rivers needs a model, Spenser, whose Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), Prothalamion (1596), and the now lost Epithalamion (1595) all feature rivers, probably is the man.
To assist the reader through his gigantic poem, Drayton employed the services of another learned man, John Selden, who wrote explanatory notes, and an engraver who furnished maps for each section of the poem. Not at all confident that the work would find a ready audience in what he called “this lunatic age,” Drayton wrote an introduction excoriating those who would “rather read the fantasies of foreign invention than to see the rarities and history of their own country delivered by a true native muse.” Ten years later, having “met with barbarous ignorance and base detraction” in the reception of the first edition, he nevertheless republished the poem with twelve additional sections.
Few readers today negotiate the full Poly-Olbion, but it is a pleasant, if sometimes prosaic, journey. Drayton probably did not visit all the localities described in the poem, and it is unlikely that the reader ignorant of his Warwickshire origin could guess it from this poem. It is an interesting section of the poem, however, detailing at length the Forest of Arden, which Shakespeare had used as the setting for much of As You Like It (pr. c. 1599-1600). There may be fools in Shakespeare’s Arden, but Drayton’s is populated by innumerable birds, beasts, hunters, and a happy hermit who has fled “the sottish purblind world.” He also traces the several little rivers that flow into the Avon, which he follows past Stratford, though without mentioning Shakespeare. In this poem, Drayton is more interested in the past, and he tells the legend of Guy of Warwick, who is credited with defeating the Danish champion Colbrand and thus turning away the tenth century invasion. Like many historical poems written in late Tudor and early Stuart England, this one shows the transition from the earlier uncritical acceptance of myth and legend to a more skeptical attitude. The legends still have vitality, but the scholars of the seventeenth century—Selden, Francis Bacon, and the earl of Clarendon—cast increasing doubt on their truthfulness and value.
Idea
While at work on Poly-Olbion, Drayton was also overhauling his sonnets, now titled simply Idea. In this work, his tireless revising paid off handsomely, for by 1619, he had added and rewritten forty-three new sonnets to go with twenty early ones, and the sequence had become a masterpiece. By this time, Donne, the first of the great Metaphysical poets, was writing love poems in other forms and reserving the sonnet for religious purposes, while Jonson and his tribe scorned the sonnet and other nonclassical forms altogether. As a poet born in the decade before Donne and Jonson, Drayton had been enough of a working Elizabethan (and enough of a conservative) to prefer building on the accomplishments of that age. In this endeavor, however, he was alone; all the other Elizabethan poets of consequence—Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Daniel, all the people he might have wished to please, it must have seemed—were dead. Only Drayton worked on, increasingly testy and ill-humored in his prefaces but as devoted as ever to the perfection of poems of a kind that had fallen out of favor.
As far back as Sidney, English sonneteers had presented the lover as a sometimes comic figure. Despite certain resemblances to his creator, Sidney’s Astrophel is a character at whom readers are sometimes encouraged to laugh. In Idea, Drayton’s speaker even seems to laugh at himself. In the splendid Number 61, “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part,” the speaker, after asserting in a matter-of-fact tone and words chiefly of one syllable—the first thirty-three words, in fact, being monosyllables exclusively—that nothing but a complete break makes any sense, that he is willing to “shake hands” on it, reverts in the third quatrain to a sentimental deathbed scene of love personified, and closes with a couplet the irony of which the speaker surely recognizes: “Now if thou would’st, when all have given him over,/ From death to life, thou might’st him yet recover.” The lover in these poems knows that love and passion are silly and that their stylized portrayal in language is sillier yet, but he also knows that to reject them outright is to reject life and the art that attempts to portray it. The perspective here is Horatian: a delicate balance, a golden mean, between involvement and detachment. The poet has mastered his form: He writes English sonnets which frequently retain the capacity of the Italian sonnet for a turning point just past the middle as well as a distinct closing couplet that sometimes brings another, unexpected turn.
Drayton’s wit is on display in Number 21, about a “witless gallant” who has asked for and received from the speaker a sonnet to send to his own love. The speaker, however, has written it “as fast as e’er my pen could trot”—just the opposite of the correct, painstaking way. The third quatrain reports that the lady “doted on the dolt beyond all measure,” the rueful couplet sadly concluding: “Yet by my troth, this fool his love obtains,/ And I lose you, for all my wit and pains.” The reader understands that the “gallant’s” success was a hollow one; Idea, whose name is Plato’s word for that highest type of beauty and goodness, of which all ordinary earthly manifestations are but shadows, is worth the inevitable disappointments.
In Drayton’s very Elizabethan sonnets, the reader comes upon many of the witty, argumentative ploys so characteristic of Donne and Jonson. For Drayton, such wit amounted to a perfecting of the now largely abandoned sonnet cycle in which he saw further possibilities for variety within unity, flexibility within firmness. He is not being Metaphysical or neoclassical, only bringing out the latent potential of the earlier poetry, while displaying in the process a wit, irony, and plainness of diction more characteristic of the new poetry that he was supposedly rejecting.
The Battaile of Agincourt and Elegies upon Sundry Occasions
With the publication of the complete Poly-Olbion, Drayton’s most elaborate tribute to the native land he had been praising so long, the poet, now entering his sixtieth year, might have been expected to taper off. Instead, he brought out two books composed primarily of previously unpublished poems. The first, named for a long historical poem, The Battaile of Agincourt (no improvement on his “ballad” and not to be confused with it), included another Horatian genre, the complimentary verse epistle, one of which was the letter to Henry Reynolds revealing his early desire to be a poet. He may not have been the first in the field, for Donne and Jonson were also writing them, but his Elegies upon Sundry Occasions, as he called them, are more carefully adapted to the “occasions,” suggesting that his primary aim was communication at once functional, artful, and expressive of genuine feeling. In this aim, he came closer to the spirit of his Roman Master than did other poets of the time, whose style and tone tend to vary little with the occasion and the identity of the recipient.
Shepheards Sirena
Two poems in The Battaile of Agincourt, Shepheards Sirena
and Nimphidia, illustrate Drayton’s final lyrical stage. Shepheards Sirena sings more purely than any of his earlier pastorals. Sirena dwells in the vicinity of the River Trent, here transmuted into a domestic Arcadia. While vestiges of the competitions and complaints of early English pastoral remain, the best part of the poem is its 170 liquid lines in praise of the lady—praise that never slides into the convolutions of Jacobean wit.
Nimphidia
Nimphidia is quite different. It can be classified roughly as mock-heroic. Pigwiggen, in love with Queen Mab, entices her away from King Oberon and challenges the latter to a duel for the “dear lady’s honor.” Having secured seconds and gone through all necessary preliminaries, the champions hack briskly away at each other, though, when the contest threatens to get too bloody, Prosorpina administers the Lethe water that makes them forget their enmity entirely. At the end, the King and Queen, as if nothing had happened, are sitting down to a good fairy meal. That the poem has a satirical purpose is indicated by Drayton’s name-dropping: Sir Thopas, Pantagruel, and Don Quixote are all mentioned. The poem brims with parodies of heroic clichés. The emphasis, though, is on fun and fantasy in a delicate miniature world made of spiders’ legs and butterflies’ wings. Its eighty-eight tripping stanzas, rhyming aaabcccb (tetrameter except for the b lines, which are a syllable shorter with feminine rhymes), “carry the vein of Sir Thopas into the world of Oberon,” as Oliver Elton puts it in Michael Drayton: A Critical Study (1966).
The Muses Elizium
Drayton’s final volume, issued thirty-nine years after his first and only one year before his death, includes three long “divine poems” on Noah, Moses, and David, but it is best remembered for its title poem, The Muses Elizium. Elizium, a “paradise on earth” whose name honors the queen who had now been dead twenty-seven years, can be seen as a nostalgic retreat from the realities of a nation now entered on the “Eleven Years’ Tyranny” of Charles I. Made up of ten eclogues, or “nymphals,” the work is, like Shepheards Sirena, almost purely lyrical, full of flowery meadows and crystal springs, with occasional reminders of the prosaic real world.
One of these occurs in the tenth nymphal. Two nymphs discover a “monster” whom the shepherd Corbilus recognizes as an old satyr, refugee from “Felicia,” which is the everyday world, now destroyed by “beastly men.” After a suitable opportunity to lament the denuding of the forest by crass builders, the satyr is invited to “live in bliss” in Elizium until such time as the true Felicians reclaim the land. Thus, in his old age, Drayton metamorphoses his conservatism, love of the land, displeasure with the world of 1630, and perhaps—if readers take the satyr to represent the author—a disposition toward a bit of humor at his own expense, into a calm, dispassionate poem whose very preface is, for a change, sweet-tempered. In this last stage, Drayton has receded from the Stuart milieu to the extent of cultivating a pure, “irrelevant” art. The attitude is that of an old man, but one who has ceased to rage; the lyric freshness is that of a young poet not yet fully aware of the indifferent children of the earth whom Drayton has not forgotten.
With its delight in plain, shaggy, rural life, The Muses Elizium is likely to remind readers of classical pastoral more of Theocritus than of the more polished poet of the Roman Empire, Vergil. The style here is not of the Greek or Roman Golden Ages, but of the Elizabethan. Drayton had outlived his age, but this poem has outlived the seventeenth century strife in the midst of which it seemed so old-fashioned.