VIII. Lodge, Barnes, and Fletcher

Lodge’s indebtedness to Ronsard has been strangely ignored by modern critics, but it did not (as might be guessed) escape the attention of contemporaries. In an anonymous tract entitled Tarlton’s News out of Purgatory, (1590), the author of which has been doubtfully identified with Thomas Nashe, a company of poets of all nations is represented as meeting in Purgatory. Prominent in the assembly sits ‘old Ronsard,’ ‘with a scroll in his hand, wherein was written the description of Cassandra his mistress.’ There follows an English parody of Ronsard’s lyrics, which the satiric author slyly introduces with the words, ‘because [Ronsard’s] style is not common, nor have I heard our English authors write in that vein, mark it, and I will rehearse it, for I have learnt it by heart.’ The quoted poem assigned to Ronsard, is an obvious skit on one of the lyrics which figures in Lodge’s Romance of Rosalynd. The whole passage ironically suggests that Lodge’s debt to Ronsard was known to be discreditably large.

Ronsard, however, was only one of Lodge’s many foreign masters. His indebtedness to Desportes is hardly less pronounced. Of the two examples of translations from that poet which I give below, it is worth noting that Lodge had already published a literal rendering of the first as an original poem in his early volume of verse, which he called Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589). He also turned the same sonnet of Desportes into a lyric, which appears in his Rosalynd. Neither in its original shape nor in its adaptations can this poem be commended. Lodge usually seems indeed to have been attracted by the worst examples of Desportes’ art. The second sonnet, cited below, is justly denounced by Desportes’ modern French editor as ‘une merveille de recherche et de mauvais goût.’ It is worth noting that Lodge, in this second example, put himself, with clumsy effect, to the pains of following Desportes’ scheme of rhymes.

From many obscure Italians (Dolce, Pascale, and Martelli), Lodge also drew without any hint of acknowledgment several of his sonnets to Phillis. To illustrate his method in dealing with Italian poets of eminence, I print his Sonnet xxi., together with its original in Ariosto.

It is unnecessary to pursue Lodge further. The general opinion hitherto held of his sonnets is thus expressed by Professor Minto:—‘There is a seeming artlessness in Lodge’s sonnets, a winning directness, that constitutes a great part of their charm. They seem to be uttered through a clear and pure medium straight from the heart; their tender fragrance and music come from the heart itself.’ Facts require the substitution in this passage for the word ‘heart’ of the words ‘French and Italian sonneteers.’ Lyric faculty need not be denied Lodge, even after his habits of plagiarism have been brought to light; but it is a misuse of terms to describe him as an original poet seeking to give voice to his individuality. He is a clever and spirited adapter of foreign texts, whose sense of rhythm and literary sensibility are not altogether obscured in his borrowed lines; but no trace of his own personality remains there when his methods of composition are rightly apprehended. Of the morality of those methods little that is agreeable can be said. The censure which was bestowed by a contemporary critic on Soothern, the clumsiest of English plagiarists from Ronsard, applies with small qualification to Lodge, despite his infinitely superior dexterity: ‘This man deserues to be endited of pety larceny for pilfering other mens deuises from them and conuerting them to his owne use, for in deede as I would wish every inventour which is the very Poet to receaue the prayses of his inuention, so would I not haue a translatour to be ashamed to be acknowen of his translation.’

Barnabe Barnes, who made his reputation as a sonneteer in the same year as Lodge (1593), was more voluminous than any of his English contemporaries. The utmost differences of opinion have been expressed by modern critics as to the value of his work. One denounces him as ‘a fool’; another eulogises him as ‘a born singer.’ He clearly had a native love of literature, and gave promise of lyric power which was never quite fulfilled. His Sonnet lxvi. on ‘Content’ reaches a very high level of artistic beauty, and many single stanzas and lines ring with true harmony. But as a whole his work is crude, and lacks restraint. He frequently sinks to meaningless doggerel, and many of his grotesque conceits are offensive.

To the historian of the Elizabethan sonnet his work is, however, of first-rate importance. No thorough investigator into the history of Shakespeare’s sonnet can afford to overlook it. Constantly he strikes a note which Shakespeare clearly echoed in fuller tones. There are circumstances, too, in his biography and in the estimation in which he was held, that make it probable that he was the poet whose rivalry in the pursuit of the favour of a common patron is one of Shakespeare’s themes.

In May 1593 there appeared Barnes’ interminable series of love-poems. It bore the title, ‘Parthenophil and Parthenophe: Sonnets, Madrigals, Elegies, and Odes. To the right noble and virtuous gentleman, M. William Percy, Esq., his dearest friend.’ Here a hundred and five sonnets are interspersed with twenty-six madrigals, five sestines, twenty-one elegies, three ‘canzons,’ twenty odes (one in sonnet form), and what purports to be a translation of Moschus’ first ‘Eidillion.’

Barnes’ Muse has no greater claim than that of other Elizabethan sonneteers to English birth. Her paternity is indeed distributed with more than ordinary catholicity. Many of Barnes’ poems are echoes of Sidney’s verse, both in the Arcadia as well as in Astrophel and Stella. His Canzon 2 is a spirited tribute to Sidney under his poetic name of Astrophel. Of his debt to Petrarch he openly boasted. The kindly contemporary critic, Thomas Churchyard, paid him the compliment of dubbing him ‘Petrarch’s scholar.’ In Sonnet xliv. he makes handsome, if ungraceful, acknowledgment to the Italian master:—

The name of Barnes’ heroine, Parthenophe, reflects his reading of the Latin verse of a very popular Neapolitan of the early sixteenth century, Hieronymus Angerianus, who entitled a brief section of his collected poetry ‘De Parthenope,’ and included those two words in his title-page. The Neapolitan was paying court to his native city under her alternative Greek name, but he apostrophised Naples with the warmth that befitted an address to a mistress.

French influence at the same time largely affected the drift of Barnes’ literary efforts. It is indeed to be suspected that French example impelled Barnes to classical imitation, and that he was often content to follow the French adaptation of classical poetry rather than classical poetry in its original form. He wrote largely in an Anacreontic vein, and most of his knowledge of the Greek lyrists probably reached him through France.

The poem which Barnes introduces in the course of his miscellany, under the heading, The first Eidillion of Moschus describing Love, describes Venus’ hue and cry after her straying son Cupid. This Greek poem was extremely popular in French versions. Clément Marot had first adapted it about 1540, in a poem of over one hundred and fifty lines, called L’Amour Fugitif. De Baif, having met the poem anew in Greek some thirty years later, composed a second poem on Moschus’ theme. The conceit had thus been completely Gallicised before Barnes worked on it, and he doubtless owed more to the French adaptations than to the Greek original.

The exceptionally miscellaneous character of Barnes’ volume, with its elegies in addition to its odes and madrigals, though it can be nearly matched in Italian literature of the century, seems to bear a deeper impress of contemporary France. His reading in French was obviously far-reaching. In his 12th Madrigal (‘Like to the mountains are my high desires’) he paraphrases Melin de St. Gelais’ popular sonnet:

In Sonnet xci. he develops Petrarch’s conceit (Sonnet clvi.) that his love-stricken soul is a storm-tossed ship in imminent peril of destruction. But it is Desportes’ rendering of the Italian poem which seems to have directly inspired Barnes. His ‘fancy’s ship tossed here and there by troubled seas,’ floating ‘in danger, ranging to and fro,’ is a mere echo of Desportes’ story of his heart’s vagaries:—

In accordance with the practice of the most degenerate of his French and Italian contemporaries, Barnes repeatedly succumbs to the temptation of chaining the planets to his poetic car. In a sequence of twelve sonnets (xxxii.–xliii.), he likens the progress of his passion to the passage of the sun through the twelve signs of the Zodiac. The strained conceit is valueless from all literary points of view, but it is interesting to learn the immediate channel through which it gained entrance into English poetry, and the path which it subsequently followed there. Gilles Durant, the French versifier, published in 1588 an exceptionally ample development of the extravagant fancy in a poem entitled Stances du Zodiaque (in thirty-three six-line stanzas). Barnes wrote his twelve sonnets with his eye on Durant’s verses. But he contented himself with a general paraphrase. His acceptance of the theme, however, stirred contemporaries to further action. Barnes’ slender treatment of foreign notions about the Zodiac fired a more eminent Elizabethan poet, George Chapman, to give English readers a literal rendering of the standard account by the Frenchman Durant of the Zodiac’s figurative relations with mundane love. Chapman’s poem was called The Amorous Zodiac, and was published in his volume called Ovid’s Banquet of Sense in 1595, two years after the publication of Barnes’ sonnet collection. Chapman reproduced with almost miraculous exactness Durant’s stanzas; the metre is the same throughout, and at times Chapman contrives to employ the identical rhyming syllables. Barnes contributed no little to the circulation in England of the sentiments and phraseology of foreign poetry.

Barely four months passed after the publication of Barnes’ encyclopædic effort than there was offered to the Elizabethan reading public a somewhat smaller volume of very similar temper. The author, Giles Fletcher, a former Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, was forty-four years old, and he made no secret of his method of work in his capacity of sonneteer. He bears, in fact, useful testimony to the procedure in vogue among his sonneteering contemporaries by announcing on his title-page that his ‘poems of love’ were written ‘to the imitation of the best Latin poets and others.’ In the address to his patroness, the wife of Sir Richard Molineux, he deprecates the notion that his book enshrines any episode in his own experience. He merely claims to follow the fashion, and to imitate the ‘men of learning and great parts’ of Italy, France, and England, who have already written ‘poems and sonnets of love.’ Most men, he explains, have some personal knowledge of the passion, but experience is not an essential preliminary to the penning of amorous verse. ‘A man may write of love and not be in love, as well as of husbandry and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none, or of holiness and be flat profane.’ He regrets the English poets’ proclivities to borrow ‘from Italy, Spain, and France their best and choice conceits,’ and expresses a pious preference for English homespun; but this is counsel of perfection, and he makes no pretence to personal independence of foreign models. He laughingly challenges his critics to identify his lady-love Licia with any living woman. ‘If thou muse, What my Licia is? Take her to be some Diana, or some Minerva: no Venus, fairer far. It may be she is Learning’s Image, or some heavenly wonder: which the Precisest may not mislike. Perhaps under that name I have shadowed “Discipline” [i.e., the ideal of puritanism]. It may be, I mean that kind courtesy which I found at the Patroness of these Poems, it may be some College. It may be my conceit, and pretend nothing. Whatsoever it be, if thou like it, take it.’ To his sonnets Fletcher appends an ode, three elegies, and a verse rendering of Lucian’s dialogue ‘concerning Polyphemus.’

Fletcher’s verse is quite passable, and shows a command of the sonnet form and metre which few of his contemporaries excelled. His ideas are mainly borrowed from minor Latin poetry by Italian or French writers, of recent or contemporary date. He does not, however, disdain levying loans on Watson and Sidney, as well as on French and Italian sonneteers writing in their own tongue. Though his phrases are very often plagiarised, his adaptations are felicitous; and, unlike Lodge and Daniel, he rarely descends to wholesale literal translation.

Fletcher very often betters his instruction. In Sonnet xxvii., where he represents his nymph heating, by force of her passion, the water of the fountain in which she bathes, he reproduces with effect an epigram from the Greek anthology which was familiar in a Latin version, and was utilised by Shakespeare, probably after reading Fletcher’s effort. Fletcher’s next sonnet (xxviii.)—

In Fletcher’s Sonnet xlv., ‘There shone a comet, and it was full west,’ he had in mind the Latin hexameters of Jean Bonnefons, the far-famed contemporary writer of France, whose Latin verses were turned into French, just before Fletcher wrote, by his poetic friend, Gilles Durant.

Fletcher in his penultimate Sonnet li. renders anew the sonnet of Ronsard (Amours, I. xxxii.) which Lodge had already translated in Phillis, xxxiii. The subject is the familiar conceit, how the mistress’s beauty was the gift of the gods and goddesses, who endowed her with their most characteristic features. Fletcher’s rendering is somewhat freer than Lodge’s literal translation, although at times the phraseology is almost identical:—

Fletcher’s concluding Sonnet lii. which apostrophises Licia’s ‘sugared talk,’ smile, voice, and the like—