Poetry Criticism | Wyatt, Sir Thomas ca. - Perez Zagorin (essay date 1993)

Perez Zagorin (essay date 1993)

SOURCE: "Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Court of Henry VIII: The Courtier's Ambivalence," in The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 113-41.

[In the following essay, Wyatt's conflicting attitudes toward the court are examined as a key to understanding his work.]

In 1548, six years after Sir Thomas Wyatt's death, his good friend, Sir Francis Bryan, published an English translation of the Spaniard Antonio de Guevara's Menosprecio de Corte y Alabanza de Aldea.¹ As in the case of Wyatt, so also the most important fact about Bryan is that he spent his life as a courtier in the service of Henry VIII.² Like Wyatt, moreover, his contemporaries at Henry VIII's court knew him also as a poet. Those of his poems that may remain, however, are shrouded in anonymity, whereas Wyatt left a considerable body of identifiable work that has given him a secure...

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