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[_The portrait of Michael Drayton given here as a frontispiece is from a
picture, taken at the age of sixty-five (three years before he died), in
the Cartwright Collection at the Dulwich Gallery. The name of the
painter is not known, but the picture is signed "An^o 1628."_]
[Illustration: Michael Drayton]
THE BATTAILE OF AGINCOURT
BY MICHAEL DRAYTON:
WITH INTRODUCTION AND
NOTES BY RICHARD GARNETT
[Illustration: Publisher's Device]
LONDON PRINTED AND ISSUED BY
CHARLES WHITTINGHAM & CO AT
THE CHISWICK PRESS MDCCCXCIII
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Introduction vii
Drayton's Dedication 3
Upon the Battaile of Agincourt, by I. Vaughan 5
Sonnet to Michael Drayton, By John Reynolds 7
The Vision of Ben Jonson on the Muses of his
Friend M. Drayton 9
The Battaile of Agincourt 13
To my Frinds the Camber-Britans and theyr Harp 93
Illustrative Notes 101
INTRODUCTION.
All civilized nations possessing a history which they contemplate with
pride endeavour to present that history in an epic form. In their
initial stages of culture the vehicles of expression are ballads like
the constituents of the Spanish Romanceros and chronicles like
Joinville's and Froissart's. With literary refinement comes the distinct
literary purpose, and the poet appears who is also more or less of an
artist. The number of Spanish and Portuguese national epics, from the
Lusiad downwards, during the sixteenth and the first half of the
seventeenth centuries, is astonishing; and it was impossible that
English authorship, rapidly acquiring a perception of literary form
under classical and foreign influences, should not be powerfully
affected by the example of its neighbours.
A remarkable circumstance, nevertheless, while encouraging this epical
impulse, deprived its most important creations of the external epical
form. The age of awakened national self-consciousness was also the age
of drama. The greatest poetical genius of that or any age, and his
associates, were playwrights first and poets afterwards. The torrent of
inspiration rushed mainly to the stage. Hence the old experience was
reversed, and whereas Aeschylus described himself and his
fellow-dramatists as subsisting on scraps filched from the great banquet
of Homer, our English epic poets could but follow humbly in the wake of
the dramatists, the alchemy of whose genius had already turned the dross
of ancient chronicles to gold. In the mighty series of Shakespeare's
historical plays, including in the enumeration Marlowe's "Edward the
Second" and the anonymous "Edward the Third," England possesses a
national epic inferior to that of no country in the world, although the
form be dramatic. In one respect, indeed, this epic is superior to any
but the Homeric poems, standing one remove less apart from the poetry of
the people. The impression of primitive force which the Homeric poems
convey by their venerable language is equally well imparted by
Shakespeare's spontaneity and his apparent and probably real innocence
of all purely literary intention.
Epic poets, however gifted, could be but gleaners after such a harvest.
Yet not every excellent poet, even of that dramatic age, was endowed
with the dramatic faculty, and two of especial merit, singularly devoid
of dramatic gift, but inferior to none in love of their country and
self-consecration to its service, turned their attention to the epic.
These were Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton. The latter is our subject,
but something should also be said of the former. Drayton not unfairly
hit the blot in his successful rival when he said of him:
"His rimes were smooth, his meeters well did close,
But yet his maner better fitted prose."
This is one way of putting it; from another point of view Daniel may be
regarded as almost the most remarkable literary phenomenon of his time;
he is so exceedingly modern. He outran the taste of his own period by a
hundred years, and without teacher or example displayed the excellences
which came to be preferred to all others in the eighteenth century.
"These poems of his," says his editor in that age (1718), "having stood
the test of above a century, and the language and the versification
being still pure and elegant, it is to be hoped they will still shine
among his countrymen and preserve his name." At this time, and for long
afterwards, Drayton, save for an occasional reprint of his "Nimphidia"
among miscellaneous collections, was utterly neglected. Even after the
editions of 1748 and 1753 he is alluded to by Goldsmith as a type of the
poet whose best title to fame is his tomb in Westminster Abbey.
The nineteenth century has reversed this with other critical verdicts of
the eighteenth, and, with all due respect to Daniel, Drayton now stands
higher. Yet, where the two poets come most directly and manifestly into
competition, Drayton's superiority is not so evident. As a whole,
Daniel's "Civil War" is a better poem than Drayton's "Barons' Wars." The
superiority of the latter lies in particular passages, such as the
description of the guilty happiness of Isabella and Mortimer, quoted in
Mr. Arthur Bullen's admirable selection. This is to say that Drayton's
genius was naturally not so much epical as lyrical and descriptive. In
his own proper business as a narrative poet he fails as compared with
Daniel, but he enriches history with all the ornaments of poetry; and it
was his especial good fortune to discover a subject in which the union
of dry fact with copious poetic illustration was as legitimate to the
theme as advantageous to the writer. This was, of course, his
"Polyolbion," where, doing for himself what no other poet ever did, he
did for his country what was never done for any other. Greece and Rome,
indeed, have left us versified topographies, but these advance no
pretension to the poetical character except from the metrical point of
view, though they may in a sense claim kinship with the Muses as the
manifest offspring of Mnemosyne. If any modern language possesses a
similar work, it has failed to inscribe itself on the roll of the
world's literature. The difficulties of Drayton's unique undertaking
were in a measure favourable to him. They compelled him to exert his
fancy to the uttermost. The tremendous difficulty of making topography
into poetry gave him unwonted energy. He never goes to sleep, as too
often in the "Barons' Wars." The stiff practical obstacles attendant
upon the poetical treatment of towns and rivers provoke even the
dragging Alexandrine into animation; his stream is often all foam and
eddy. The long sweeping line, of its wont so lumbering and tedious, is
perfectly in place here. It rushes along like an impetuous torrent,
bearing with it, indeed, no inconsiderable quantity of wood, hay, and
stubble, but also precious pearls, and more than the dust of gold. Its
"swelling and limitless billows" mate well with the amplitude of the
subject, so varied and spacious that, as has been well said, the
"Polyolbion" is not a poem to be read through, but to be read in.
Nothing in our literature, perhaps, except the "Faery Queen," more
perfectly satisfies Keats's desideratum: "Do not the lovers of poetry
like to have a little region to wander in, where they may pick and
choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten
and found new in a second reading: which may be food for a week's stroll
in the summer? Do they not like this better than what they can read
through before Mrs. Williams comes down stairs? a morning work at most?"
The "Polyolbion" was completed by 1619, though the concluding part was
not published until 1623. "The Battaile of Agincourt," the poem now
reprinted, appeared with others in 1627. As none of the pieces comprised
in it had appeared in the collected edition of Drayton's works (the
"Polyolbion" excepted) which he had published in 1620, it is reasonable
to conclude that they had been composed between that date and 1627. They
prove that his powers were by no means abated. "Nimphidia," in
particular, though lacking the exquisite sweetness of some of his lyric
pastorals, and the deep emotion of passages in his "Heroicall Epistles,"
excels all his other productions in airy fancy, and is perhaps the best
known of any of his poems. Nor does the "Battaile" itself indicate any
decay in poetical power, though we must agree with Mr. Bullen that it is
in some parts fatiguing. This wearisomeness proceeds chiefly from
Drayton's over-faithful adherence, not so much to the actual story, as
to the method of the chronicler from whom his materials are principally
drawn. It does not seem to have occurred to him to regard his theme in
the light of potter's clay. Following his authority with servile
deference, he makes at the beginning a slip which lowers the dignity of
his hero, and consequently of his epic. He represents Henry the Fifth's
expedition against France as originally prompted, not by the restless
enterprise and fiery valour of the young king, much less by supernatural
inspiration as the working out of a divine purpose, but by the craft of
the clergy seeking to divert him from too nice inquiry into the source
and application of their revenues. Henry, therefore, without, as modern
investigators think, even sufficient historical authority, but in any
case without poetical justification, appears at the very beginning of
the poem that celebrates his exploits in the light of a dupe.
Shakespeare avoids this awkwardness by boldly altering the date of
Henry's embassy to France. His play opens, indeed, with the plots of the
ecclesiastics to tempt the king into war, but it soon appears that the
embassy claiming certain French dukedoms has been despatched before they
had opened their lips, and that they are urging him to a course of
action on which he is resolved already. Spenser or Dryden would have
escaped from the difficulty in a manner more in accordance with epic
precedent by representing Henry's action as the effect of a divine
vision. Edward the Third or the Black Prince would have risen from the
grave to urge him to renew and complete their interrupted and now almost
undone work; or the ghosts of chiefs untimely slain would have
reproached him with their abandoned conquests and neglected graves.
Drayton has merely taken the story as he found it, without a thought of
submitting its dross to the alchemy of the re-creative imagination of
the poet. The same lack of selection is observable in his description of
the battle itself. He minutely describes a series of episodes, in
themselves often highly picturesque, but we are no better able to view
the conflict as a whole than if we ourselves had fought in the ranks. As
in painting, so in poetry, a true impression is not to be conveyed by
microscopic accuracy in minutiae, but by a vigorous grasp of the entire
subject.
Notwithstanding these defects, which one might have thought would have
been avoided even by a poet endowed with less of the bright and
sprightly invention which Drayton manifests in so many of his pieces,
"The Battaile of Agincourt" is a fine poem, and well deserving the
honour of reprint. It is above all things patriotic, pervaded throughout
by a manly and honourable preference for England and all things English,
yet devoid of bitterness towards the enemy, whose valour is frankly
acknowledged, and whose overweening pride, the cause of their disasters,
is never made the object of ill-natured sarcasm. It may almost be said
that if Drayton had been in some respects a worse man, he might on this
occasion have been a better poet. He is so sedulously regardful of the
truth of history, or what he takes to be such, that he neglects the
poet's prerogative of making history, and rises and falls with his model
like a moored vessel pitching in a flowing tide. When his historical
authority inspires, Drayton is inspired accordingly; when it is
dignified, so is he; with it he soars and sings, with it he also sinks
and creeps. Happily the subject is usually picturesque, and old
Holinshed at his worst was no contemptible writer. Drayton's heart too
was in his work, as he had proved long before by the noble ballad on
King Harry reprinted in this volume. If he has not shown himself an
artist in the selection and arrangement of his topics, he deserves the
name from another point of view by the excellent metrical structure of
his octaves, and the easy fluency of his narrative. One annoying defect,
the frequent occurrence of flat single lines not far remote from bathos,
must be attributed to the low standard of the most refined poetry in an
age when "the judges and police of literature" had hardly begun either
to make laws or to enforce them. It is a fault which he shared with most
others, and of which he has himself given more offensive instances. It
is still more conspicuous in the most generally acceptable of his poems,
the "Nimphidia." The pity is not so much the occasional occurrence of
such lapses in "The Battaile of Agincourt," as the want of those
delightful touches in the other delightful poems which give more
pleasure the more evidently they are embellishments rather springing out
of the author's fancy than naturally prompted by his subject. Such are
the lines, as inappropriate in the mouth of the speaker as genuine from
the heart of the writer, near the beginning of Queen Margaret's epistle
to the Duke of Suffolk ("England's Heroicall Epistles"):
"The little bird yet to salute the morn
Upon the naked branches sets her foot,
The leaves then lying on the mossy root,
And there a silly chirruping doth keep,
As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep;
Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,
Or sad for winter too soon coming on."
On a more exact comparison of Drayton with Holinshed we find him
omitting some circumstances which he might have been expected to have
retained, and adding others with good judgment and in general with good
effect, but which by some fatality usually tend in his hands to
excessive prolixity. This is certainly not the case with his dignified
and spirited exordium, but in the fourth stanza he begins to copy
history, and his muse's wing immediately flags. No more striking example
of the superiority of dramatic to narrative poetry in vividness of
delineation could be found than the contrast between Shakespeare's scene
representing the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely in
actual conversation, and Drayton's tame exposition of the outcome of
their deliberations. In his report of the session of Parliament where
the French war is discussed he closely follows Holinshed, so closely as
to omit Shakespeare's masterly embellishment of Henry's solemn appeal to
the Archbishop to pronounce on the justice of his cause as in the sight
of God. Drayton must assuredly have perceived how greatly such an appeal
tended to exalt his hero's character, and what an opening it afforded
for impressive rhetoric. Nor could the incident have escaped his notice,
for there is abundant internal evidence of his acquaintance with
Shakespeare's drama in the closet as well as on the stage. It can only
be concluded that he did not choose to be indebted to Shakespeare, or
despaired of rivalling him. His notice of his great contemporary in the
"Epistle to Reynolds" is surprisingly cold; but the legend, however
unauthentic, of Shakespeare's death from a fever contracted at a
merry-making in Drayton's company, seems incompatible with any serious
estrangement, and Shakespeare's son-in-law was Drayton's physician when
the latter revisited his native Warwickshire. The same jealousy of
obligation must have influenced his treatment of the incident of the
Dauphin's derisive present of tennis balls, which both Shakespeare and
he have adopted from Holinshed or his authorities, but of which the
former has made everything and the latter nothing. Nor can the omission
of the highly dramatic incident of the conspiracy of Scroop and
Cambridge, found in Holinshed, be otherwise well accounted for. In
compensation, Drayton introduces two episodes entirely his own, the
catalogue of Henry's ships, and that of the armorial ensigns of the
British counties. Ben Jonson may be suspected of a sneer when he
congratulates Drayton on thus outdoing Homer, as he had previously
outdone, or at least rivalled, Virgil, Theocritus, Ovid, Orpheus, and
Lucan. Ben might have said with perfect sincerity that Drayton's
descriptions are fine pieces of work, showing great command of language,
and only open to criticism from some want of proportion between them and
the poem of which they are but subordinate episodes. This censure would
have been by no means just if the whole piece had been executed on the
scale of the description of the siege of Harfleur. It is difficult to
imagine what could have tempted Drayton to spend so much time upon an
episode treated by Holinshed with comparative brevity. Some of the
stanzas are exceedingly spirited, but as a whole the description
certainly fatigues. If the same is to some extent the case with the
description of the Battle of Agincourt itself, the cause is not so much
prolixity as the multitude of separate episodes, not always derived from
the chroniclers, and the consequent want of unity which has been already
adverted to. The result is probably more true to the actual impression
of a battle than if Drayton had surveyed the field with the eye of a
tactician, but here as elsewhere the poet should rather aim at an
exalted and in some measure idealized representation of the object or
circumstance described than at a faithful reproduction of minor details.
Even the Battle of the Frogs and Mice in Homer is an orderly whole;
while Drayton's battle seems always ending and always beginning anew,
a Sisyphian epic. What, however, really kindles and vivifies the unequal
composition into one glowing mass is the noble spirit of enthusiastic
patriotism which pervades the poet's mind, and, like sunlight in a
mountainous tract, illuminates his heights, veils his depressions, and
steeps the whole in glory.
Of the literary history of "The Battaile of Agincourt" there is little
to be said. It was first published in 1627, along with "Nimphidia," "The
Shepheard's Sirena," and others of Drayton's best pieces. It was
accompanied by three copies of congratulatory verse, reprinted here, the
most remarkable of which is that proceeding from the pen of Ben Jonson,
who admits that some had accounted him no friend to Drayton, and whose
encomiums are to our apprehension largely flavoured with irony. Drayton,
in his "Epistle to Reynolds," which Jonson must have seen, had compared
him to Seneca and Plautus,[*] and Jonson seems to burlesque the
compliment by comparing Drayton himself to every poet whom he had ever
imitated, until his single person seems an epitome of all Parnassus. The
poem and its companions had another edition in 1631, since which time it
has been included in every edition of Drayton's works, but has never
till now been published by itself. Even here it is graced with a
satellite, the splendid Ballad of Agincourt ("To my Frinds the
Camber-Britans and theyr Harp"), originally published in "Poemes lyric
and pastoral," probably about 1605. This stirring strain, always
admired, has attracted additional notice in the present day as the
metrical prototype of Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," which,
in our estimation, fails to rival its model. The lapses of both poets
may well be excused on the ground of the difficulty of the metre, but
Drayton has the additional apology of the "brave neglect" which so
correct a writer as Pope accounted a virtue in Homer, but which Tennyson
never had the nerve to permit himself.
[Footnote: Pope's celebrated verse,--
"Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring,"--
is "conveyed" from this passage of Drayton.]
Comparisons between modern and ancient poets must necessarily be very
imperfect; yet our Drayton might not inaptly be termed the English
Theocritus. If not so distinctly superior to every other English
pastoral poet as Theocritus was to every other Greek, he yet stands in
the front rank. He is utterly free from affectation, the great vice of
pastoral poetry; his love of the country is sincere; his perception of
natural phenomena exquisite; his shepherds and shepherdesses real swains
and lasses; he has happily varied the conventional form of the pastoral
by a felicitous lyrical treatment. Paradoxical as it may appear, Drayton
was partly enabled to approach Theocritus so nearly by knowing him so
imperfectly. Had he been acquainted with him otherwise than through
Virgil, he would probably have been unable to refrain from direct
imitation; but as matters stand, instead of a poet striving to write as
Theocritus wrote in Greek, we have one actually writing as Theocritus
would have written in English. But the most remarkable point of contact
between Drayton and Theocritus is that both are epical as well as
pastoral poets. Two of the Idylls of Theocritus are believed to be
fragments of an epic on the exploits of Hercules; and in the enumeration
of his lost works, amid others of the same description, mention is made
of the "Heroines," a curious counterpart of Drayton's "Heroicall
Epistles." Had these works survived, we might not improbably have found
Drayton surpassing his prototype in epic as much as he falls below him
in pastoral; for the more exquisite art of the Sicilian could hardly
have made amends for the lack of that national pride and enthusiastic
patriotism which had died out of his age, but which ennobled the
strength and upbore the weakness of the author of "The Battaile of
Agincourt."