(1563-1631)
[Illustration: MICHAEL DRAYTON]
While London still crowded to the new "Theatre" in Shoreditch, the
first built in England; while Ben Jonson was still soldiering in the
Low Countries; while Marlowe was working out the tragedy that was to
revolutionize all stage traditions, and Shakespeare was yet but a
"looker-on at greatness,"--there came up from Warwickshire a young man
of good family who had served as page in a noble house, who had
studied possibly at Oxford, and who in the first flush of manhood
aspired to a place among those prodigies who made the later
Elizabethan period immortal. This was Michael Drayton, whose gentle
birth and breeding, education and talents, knowledge of the world and
of men, together with a most sweet and lovable disposition, made him
at once welcome in the literary Bohemia of the day. He became the
"deare and bosom friend" of Beaumont and Fletcher, and his work
received unquestioned honor from his illustrious contemporaries.
As a child he had demanded of his elders to know what kind of beings
poets were, had spent many hours in writing childishly fantastic
verses, and had begged of his tutor to make a poet of him. And
although he seems to have been poor and to have lived by the gifts of
wealthy patrons, he cast in his lot with literature, and cherished no
other ambition than that of writing well. His first book, a volume of
spiritual poems, or metrical renderings of the Bible, was published in
1590 under the title 'The Harmony of the Church.' It is difficult to
see why this commonplace and orthodox performance should have given
such umbrage that the Archbishop of Canterbury condemned the entire
edition to destruction. Yet this was its fate, with the exception of
forty copies which Archbishop Whitgift ordered to be reserved for the
ecclesiastical library at Lambeth Palace. Undiscouraged, the poet next
produced a cycle of sixty-four sonnets and a collection of pastorals
entitled 'Idea: the Shepherd's Garland,' in which under the name
"Rowland" he celebrated an early love. It is strange that the
intrinsic merit of these verses, and their undoubted popularity,
should not have urged Drayton to continue in the same vein. Instead,
however, he set about the composition of a series of historical poems
which extended over the next twenty-four years, and to which he gave
the best energies of his life. Beginning with the epic 'Matilda,'
studied from English history, the series was continued by a poem on
the 'Wars of the Roses,' afterward enlarged into 'The Barons' Wars.'
This was followed by the epic 'Robert, Duke of Normandy.' Destitute of
imagination, prolix and tedious, these verses were yet so popular in
Drayton's day that in 1612 he began the publication of a poem in
thirty books, meant to include the entire chronology and topography of
Great Britain, from the earliest times. This was the famous
'Poly-Olbion,' in which, in spite of the inspiring work of his
contemporaries, Drayton harked back in spirit to the dreary monotony
of the Saxon Chronicle; the detail is so minute, the matter so
unimportant, and the absence of discrimination so apparent, that
notwithstanding many noticeable beauties of thought and style, it is
hard to realize that this poem was a favorite with that brilliant
group which had known Shakespeare, and still delighted in Ben Jonson.
After issuing eighteen books of 'Poly-Olbion,' his publishers--with
whom he was always quarreling, and whom he declared that he "despised
and kicked at"--refused to undertake the remaining twelve books of the
second part. His friends, however, loyal in their love and praise of
him, secured a more complaisant tradesman to bring out the rest of the
already famous poem.
Fortunately for his fame, Drayton had in the mean time produced two
other volumes of verse, which displayed the real grace and
fancifulness of his charming muse. The first of these, 'Poems Lyrical
and Pastoral,' included the satire 'The Man in the Moon'; while in the
second were printed the 'Ballad of Agincourt,' the most spirited of
English martial lyrics, and that delightful fantasy 'Nymphidia, or the
Court of Faery,' in which the touch is so light, the fancy so dainty,
and the conceit so delicate, that the poem remains immortally fresh
and young. Because everybody wrote plays, Drayton turned playwright,
and is said to have collaborated with Massinger and Ford. Of his long
works, the 'Heroicall Episodes' is perhaps the most readable. His last
effort was 'The Muses' Elizium,' published in 1630. A year later he
died, and was buried in Westminster, where a monument was erected to
him by the Countess of Dorset.
Drayton's place in English literature is with that considerable and
not unimportant band who have done somewhat, but whose repute is much
more for what they were in their friends' eyes than for what they did.
In an age of great intellectual achievement, he yet managed, in spite
of the stimulus of kindred minds and his own undoubted gift, to
produce little that has sustained the reputation accorded him by his
acquaintances. Most of his work lives chiefly to afford pleasing
studies for the literary antiquary, to whom the tide of time brings
nothing uninteresting. Yet in the art of living, in the unselfish
devotion of his powers to his chosen calling, in the graces of
affection and the offices of noble friendship, he was so excellent and
exemplary that he won and kept the undying regard of the most able men
of the most brilliant period of English literature--men who felt a
personal and unrequitable loss when he passed away, and who spoke of
him always with admiring tenderness.
In person he seems to have been small and dark. He describes himself
as of "swart and melancholy face." Yet his talk was most delightful,
and a strong proof of his wide popularity appears in the fact that he
is quoted not less than one hundred and fifty times in 'England's
Parnassus,' published as early as 1600. The tributes of his friends
are innumerable, from the "good Rowland" of Barnfield to the
"golden-mouthed Drayton, musicall," of Fitz-Geoffrey, the "man of
vertuous disposition, honest conversation, and well-preserved
carriage" of Meres, or the tender lines of his friend Ben Jonson:--
"Do, pious marble, let thy readers know
What they and what their children owe
To Drayton's name; whose sacred dust
We recommend unto thy trust.
Protect his memory, and preserve his story,
Remain a lasting monument of his glory.
And when thy ruins shall disclaim
To be the treasurer of his name,
His name, that cannot die, shall be
An everlasting monument to thee."