poems are less moral. In his youthful poetry, he delights in verbal and social play for its own sake. In a slightly cynical, worldly way, he portrays the very real court society in which he lived—with such flair, in fact, that commentators in his age and in the twentieth century have read him as writing romans à clef, relating actual events involving real personalities of the day.

Gascoigne also sought to extend the range and power of vernacular poetry by exploring a variety of poetic lines and stanzas. His “Certayne Notes of Instructions Concerning the Making of Verse” describes many verse forms, identifying their characteristic uses and effects. Here Gascoigne shows sound judgment; for one, he opposes the common use of the term “sonnet” to mean any short, songlike poem, preferring the meaning that has come to be accepted in modern times. On the other hand, some less forward-looking aspects of Gascoigne’s practices in form and meter require comment. As other poets of the generation before Spenser and Sidney did, Gascoigne often uses the long line of twelve or fourteen syllables, with obvious, unmodulated meters. Long verses had first become popular for their handiness in translating Latin epic meters; they gave what was thought to be a stately effect and allowed for ease of line-for-line translation. The main forms are the “fourteener,” rhymed iambic couplets of fourteen syllables each, and “the commonest sort of verse which we use now adayes,” a couplet made of a twelve-syllable line followed by a fourteen-syllable line. (Gascoigne calls this “Poulter’s measure,” after the dairyman’s habit of giving two extra eggs when a second dozen was bought.) Long verses resist compression of language and, moreover, tend to pause heavily in mid-line, with a sing-song effect. The jog-trot of these meters was increased by the preference of the poets of Gascoigne’s generation for monosyllabic words and for a regularized iambic stress, with the heavy stresses evenly strong and the light stresses evenly light. The old-fashioned, obvious effects of these meters have obscured Gascoigne’s other poetic values for many readers. As he matured, his metrical touch lightened, and he used the longer lines less frequently.

“Gascoignes Memories”

Gascoigne’s virtuoso talent is strikingly shown in five poems grouped together as “Gascoignes Memories.” Upon his return in 1566 to Gray’s Inn, five friends had challenged him to a verse-writing contest. Each was assigned a different theme, a proverb or a familiar Latin saying, for expansion and comment. In one weekend, Gascoigne produced five poems, 258 lines in all. Each has a unique verse structure, and all were composed on horseback without pen and paper—indeed a feat of memory. The most difficult verse form is seen in the poem on the theme Sat cito, si sat bene (“No haste but good,” as the poet translates it), written in seven sonnets linked by repeated lines. In addition, the poems vary in tone and style, showing here the conversationality of proverbs, there an urbane polish. Each of the five poems meditates on the youthful poet’s wasted time at court; they predict his later, mature voice of didactic seriousness that, without self-pity, works toward honest self-perception. In these same poems, however, Gascoigne performs a feat of brilliant poetic improvisation.

Poetry as social exchange

The young writer of society verse similarity took delight in his skill at verse making, which was closely tied to actual uses in court society. In Gascoigne’s amatory poetry, one senses specific, real events, real lovers, and real affairs. In Elizabethan high society, fashionable amatory play did not necessarily imply actual affaires d’amour. Poems of amatory praise could gain remunerative recognition for their aspiring authors from quite proper court ladies—including the queen. Men and women typically paired off for a variety of social interactions, playing at pleasant amatory fictions. It is precisely these conventional social exchanges that Gascoigne manipulates with zest and skill.

One poem discusses the ill chance of the loser in a contest with another man for a woman’s kiss. “Three Sonnets in Sequence” was written in a woman’s copy of Lucius Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (second century; The Golden Ass, 1566), a copy given by “her David” to “his Berzabe.” Riddles in verse are propounded (but not solved). An amusing exchange of poems is made on the occasion of a dinner attended by a woman, her husband, her brother, her old lover, and a hopeful new suitor (the poem’s speaker).

“Invention” is at the heart of these poems. A clever “invention” is analogous in poetic content (that is, in the poem’s concept of what to say in order to respond effectively to a given social or amatory occasion) to the skillful realization of poetic language and form. The amatory poems praising court ladies strikingly show this element. Indeed, the poems “In Prayse of Brydges, Nowe Lady Sandes” and “In Prayse of a Gentlewoman Who Though She Were Not Very Fayre, Yet Was She as Hard Favored as Might Be” follow precisely the poet’s suggestions in the “Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse” to “finde some supernaturall cause whereby [one’s] penne might walke in the superlative degree” or “to aunswere for any imperfection that shee hath.” The poem praising Bridges explains a birthmark on the lady’s forehead as the scar of a wound made by jealous Cupid.

Gascoigne handles the Petrarchan amatory conventions with verve and with something of a showman’s skill. Italianate verse supplied rich material for his own independent uses, pulled out of any original context, although the poems reproduce neither Petrarch’s idealism nor his refined tone. Thus, in “Gascoignes Anatomie,” the poet describes a lover’s physical appearance feature by feature. The unkempt hair, hollow eyes, wan cheeks, and trembling tongue are familiar, stereotyped details, but piled on with a characteristic exuberance. Another poem, “Gascoignes Passion,” plays cleverly on Petrarchan contradictions, finding opportunity for unusual comparisons and inventive wordplay (“I live in love, even so I love to live”). One of the cleverest amatory poems is “Gascoignes Araignement,” in which the speaker is accused of unjust flattery by Beauty in a court of law. The poem is Cavalier in tone and very successful in its use of a shorter, eight-syllable line.

The amatory poems tend to hint at underlying stories. This tendency is heightened by the many prose headnotes that give the occasions of their composition. (Probably to disguise his own participation in many social events—or to display his facility in creating personas—Gascoigne presented the first short poems in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers Bounde Up in One Small Poesie anonymously.) This potential for narrative is inherent in Petrarchan conventions and may indeed have been consciously adapted by Gascoigne from similar headnotes in sixteenth century editions of Petrarch’s sonnets—Gascoigne’s autograph appears on the title page of a copy of an edition by Giovanni Gesualdo. Since Petrarch’s poems trace his love for Laura in vito and in morte, these explanatory notes serve to narrate the story of the poet’s love.

Gascoigne twice tried his hand at an extended linking of amatory poems to tell a story. The less complex attempt is “The Delectable History of Sundry Adventures Passed by Dan Bartholomew of Bathe.” The affair opens with three poems of “triumph” at the protagonist’s attaining “the bathe of perfect blisse” in love. Immediately, however, there follow his “Dolorous Discourses” on being jilted, then a series of increasingly despairing poems culminating in “His Last Wyll and Testament” and “His Farewell.” The narrative success of these poems is heightened by the use of “the Reporter,” a third-person narrator whose interspersed verse comments add an objective yet sympathetic context for the poet-persona’s writings.

The Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F. J.

The Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F. J. refines this technique. Here the place of “the Reporter” is taken, in prose, by a friend who tells the circumstances of the protagonist’s writing a series of love poems considerably after the time when they were written. This narrator’s commentary on the young poet’s inexperience creates the sort of rich context which the Dan Bartholomew sequence lacks. The tale tells of the first love affair of F. J., with an experienced married woman, in a country house in the north of England. F. J. learns something of society and a good deal about himself. The narrator relates all this with sympathy and humor from the knowing perspective of a man who has rejected amatory folly but understands its pathos, idealisms, and delusions. He is, presumably, Gascoigne himself, looking back on his days of writing love poetry.

Although The Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F. J. is usually cited as prose fiction, it contains some of Gascoigne’s most interesting amatory poems. The narrator’s commentary includes critical assessments of the poems and explains poetic devices and intentions. Many of the poems are frankly adulterous—for example, F. J.’s “Frydayes Breakefast,” which tells of a morning’s lovemaking. The poems are “inventive”; the daring poem opening “Beautie shut up thy shop” claims that the mistress’s beauty excels all others, leaving other men’s ladies to seem like painted and trussed-up shopwares left behind once the genuine article has been sold. Such poems are questionable from any point of view requiring propriety or seriousness of content. Characteristically, however, Gascoigne defends them, including them among the “pleasant” poems of The Posies of George Gascoigne on the grounds of their “rare invention and Method before not commonly used.”

In sum, Gascoigne’s amatory vers de société is characterized by virtuoso display and clever, unusual content. The poet evokes a real world of social interplay and witty poetic exchanges. The narrative of The Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F. J. also suggests what Gascoigne can do when writing introspectively, as he often does on moral topics. In spite of the conservatism of his preferred theme of reformed youthful folly, Gascoigne handles it in his best poems with a perception and honesty that modern readers can appreciate. Although this reformed persona is often profoundly disillusioned, he still respects important values that are rare in a society whose snares have led him astray. In the important poem “Gascoignes Wodmanship,” for example, this recognition leads to a double vision that balances the poet’s sense of his own failings against those of his world, which in many ways has failed him. Such a persona makes an effective medium for satire.

The Steele Glas, a Satyre

It is thus significant to observe that Gascoigne’s long satirical commentary on the corruptions of his times, The Steele Glas, a Satyre, is not merely objective. Its opening compares the speaker himself to the nightingale of myth, its tongue (his art) silenced by detractors and by worldly obstacles. This unusual opening frames the poem in the context of personal experience. Moreover, it helps the poet define his genre for his reader: His voice, like the bird’s, is mournful and halting; like the bird “closely cowcht” in a thicket, he is a covert observer of men. Gascoigne also observes himself, in a well-known passage of self-description explained by this marginal gloss: “He which wil rebuke other mens faults, shal do wel not to forget hys owne imperfections.”

As a central device, the satirist presents images in two mirrors, one of steel that cannot falsify and one of crystal that sees into the soul. The social satire is conveyed by an immense variety of examples of abuses of human potential or social responsibility; yet Gascoigne intersperses visionary descriptions of an ideal political state to counter an all-critical attitude. The ideas here are traditional, urging renewal of a hierarchical social order and attributing social corruptions to such cardinal sins as lust and greed. The Chaucerian language and vivid heaping of details from contemporary life create a distinctive English flavor. As Ronald Johnson comments, “At no one place is Gascoigne’s perception unusually keen; breadth of vision rather than depth recommends the poem to us.”

The most perceptive of the poems of personal analysis is “Gascoignes Wodmanship.” As mentioned above, the poem mixes a satirist’s awareness of society’s faults with an introspective man’s recognition of personal failings. The speaker’s follies are portrayed with humor and sympathy. Thus the tone is at once serious, ironic, and bemused. Like many of the amatory poems, this one is based on a controlling “invention” supplied by an event in the poet’s experience. While a guest of Lord Grey of Wilton, Gascoigne has poor luck in hunting, which he seeks to excuse by describing how “he shoots awrie almost at every marke” which he aims at in life. The metaphor of hunting is suspenseful and significant as well, because skill at hunting was a distinguishing accomplishment for an Elizabethan gentleman. The poem’s main theme is the fleeting value of the goals for which the poet has aimed—favor at court, amatory pleasures, soldierly reputation. Something deeper is also suggested: In part, the poet has failed because his own morality prevents him from playing the games of society; ironically, his own codes of behavior make him unlikely to enjoy the world’s rewards. “Gascoignes Wodmanship” is didactic and yet metaphorically and technically innovative, combining social satire with personal introspection and achieving an exemplary economy of style and control of tone.

A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres Bounde Up in One Small Poesie

A final type of poetry with which Gascoigne had success is the lyrical, songlike short poem. The maker of heavy fourteeners could also write lyrics for music: A tailnote to “Gascoignes Good Nyghte” in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres Bounde Up in One Small Poesie lists eight poems that “have verie sweete notes adapted unto them.” Among the most attractive of his writings is an original psalm, “Gascoignes Good Morrow,” which expresses the pleasure of simple piety in direct language and a subtle stanza form. For a song with amatory content, “Of all the byrds that I do know,” a charming melody was given in John Bartlett’s Booke of Ayres (1606). This song was composed to praise a lady named “Phillip”—clearly a pseudonym, for “Phillip” was a stock name for a sparrow, as “Tom” is for a male cat. Likening the woman to a pet bird is lightly amusing, though teasingly salacious in its implication; for example, she is always on call for sexual play. In his songs, as in other forms, Gascoigne shows a virtuoso’s talent for evoking a range of themes and effects; he handles the deceptively simple language of the form with skill.

Also in the form of a song is “Gascoignes Lullabie,” the one among his short poems that has received, as it deserves, the most attention. Renouncing love, the speaker sings “as women do” to lull to sleep the lusts of youth. In an order assigned by the Elizabethan psychology of desire, they are his vanished youth itself and then his “gazing eyes” (which seek out feminine beauty), his “wanton will” (which impels him to desire), and his “loving boye” (a euphemism for his male potency). The poem’s rich meaning results, in part, from the disarming music of the lullaby itself, which makes accepting the rigors of age seem ironically easy. Moreover, the central metaphor is significantly inappropriate in one sense, as babies, not old men, are to be sung to sleep; within the older man there remain, hidden, “full many babes” of youth’s impulses that are not easily stilled. By the end, singing the poem serves as a frail distraction for the old man from still-active youthful urges. Treasuring what he must abandon, then, with some grimness, the speaker resolves to “welcome payne, let pleasure passe.” This poem shows Gascoigne at his best. A governing metaphor, used as an “invention” around which the poem is built, provides richness of meaning and depth of feeling, accomplished with an ease that renders unobtrusive the artifice of the poem’s language and verse form.