The Faerie Queene was a public poem, addressed to the queen, and politically it echoed the hopes of the Leicester circle for government motivated by godliness and militancy. Spenser’s increasing disillusion with the court and with the active life, a disillusion noticeable in the poem’s later books and in his bitter satire Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1591), voiced the fading of these expectations in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, the beginning of that remarkable failure of political and cultural confidence in the monarchy. In the “Mutability Cantos,” melancholy fragments of a projected seventh book (published posthumously in 1609), Spenser turned away from the public world altogether, toward the ambiguous consolations of eternity.
The lessons taught by Sidney and Spenser in the cultivation of melodic smoothness and graceful refinement appear to good effect in the subsequent virtuoso outpouring of lyrics and sonnets. These are among the most engaging achievements of the age, though the outpouring was itself partly a product of frustration, as a generation trained to expect office or preferment but faced with courtly parsimony channeled its energies in new directions in search of patronage. For Sidney’s fellow courtiers, pastoral and love lyric were also a means of obliquely expressing one’s relationship with the queen, of advancing a proposal or an appeal. Elizabethan lyric
Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to write one that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]), and in the theatres plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly. Fine examples are in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on lyric poetry, though, was the outstanding richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, in both the native tradition of expressive lute song, represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and the complex Italianate madrigal newly imported by William Byrd and Thomas Morley. The foremost talent among lyricists, Thomas Campion, was a composer as well as a poet; his songs (four Books of Airs, 1601–17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness, and rhythmic subtlety. Even the work of a lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and laboured artifice, attentive to decorum and rhetorical fitness. These are not personal but public pieces, intended for singing and governed by a Neoplatonic aesthetic in which delight is a means of addressing the moral sense, harmonizing and attuning the auditor’s mind to the discipline of reason and virtue. This necessitates a deliberate narrowing of scope—to the readily comprehensible situations of pastoral or Petrarchan hope and despair—and makes for a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an agreeable one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593), England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602). The sonnet sequence
The publication of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella in 1591 generated an equally extraordinary vogue for the sonnet sequence, Sidney’s principal imitators being Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Fulke Greville, Spenser, and Shakespeare; his lesser imitators were Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Giles Fletcher the Elder, Lodge, Richard Barnfield, and many more. Astrophel had re-created the Petrarchan world of proud beauty and despairing lover in a single, brilliant stroke, though in English hands the preferred division of the sonnet into three quatrains and a couplet gave Petrarch’s contemplative form a more forensic turn, investing it with an argumentative terseness and epigrammatic sting. Within the common ground shared by the sequences, there is much diversity. Only Sidney’s sequence endeavours to tell a story, the others being more loosely organized as variations focusing on a central (usually fictional) relationship. Daniel’s Delia (1592) is eloquent and elegant, dignified and high-minded; Drayton’s Ideas Mirror (1594; much revised by 1619) rises to a strongly imagined, passionate intensity; Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) celebrates, unusually, fulfilled sexual love achieved within marriage. Shakespeare’s sonnets (published 1609) present a different world altogether, the conventions upside down, the lady no beauty but dark and treacherous, the loved one beyond considerations of sexual possession because he is male. The sonnet tended to gravitate toward correctness or politeness, and for most readers its chief pleasure must have been rhetorical, in its forceful pleading and consciously exhibited artifice, but, under the pressure of Shakespeare’s urgent metaphysical concerns, dramatic toughness, and shifting and highly charged ironies, the form’s conventional limits were exploded. Other poetic styles
Sonnet and lyric represent one tradition of verse within the period, that most conventionally delineated as Elizabethan, but the picture is complicated by the coexistence of other poetic styles in which ornament was distrusted or turned to different purposes; the sonnet was even parodied by Sir John Davies in his Gulling Sonnets (c. 1594) and by the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell. A particular stimulus to experiment was the variety of new possibilities made available by verse translation, from Richard Stanyhurst’s extraordinary Aeneid (1582), in quantitative hexameter and littered with obscure or invented diction, and Sir John Harington’s version of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1591), with its Byronic ease and narrative fluency, to Christopher Marlowe’s blank verse rendering of Lucan’s First Book (published 1600), probably the finest Elizabethan translation.
The genre to benefit most from translation was the epyllion, or little epic. This short narrative in verse was usually on a mythological subject, taking most of its material from Ovid, either his Metamorphoses (English version by Arthur Golding, 1565–67) or his Heroides (English version by Turberville, 1567). This form flourished from Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) to Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602) and is best represented by Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (published 1598) and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593). Ovid’s reputation as an esoteric philosopher left its mark on George Chapman’s Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) and Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe (1595), in which the love of mortal for goddess becomes a parable of wisdom. But Ovid’s real attraction was as an authority on the erotic, and most epyllia treat physical love with sophistication and sympathy, unrelieved by the gloss of allegory—a tendency culminating in John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image (1598), a poem that has shocked tender sensibilities. Inevitably, the shift of attitude had an effect on style: for Marlowe the experience of translating (inaccurately) Ovid’s Amores meant a gain for Hero and Leander in terms of urbanity and, more important, wit.