[In the following essay, Bradner analyzes the importance of point of view in Gascoigne's work and elucidates the author's narrative skill.]

When George Gascoigne first published his poems in 1573, his desire to dissociate himself from the events described in them led him to adopt a number of subterfuges. One of the most important of these was the creation of an outside editor or narrator from whose point of view we see the action. He used this device in presenting his miscellaneous poems and in two pieces of extended narrative. The first, Dan Bartholmew of Bath, a collection of poems connected by verse links attributed to a man called the Reporter, was incomplete when first printed in the Hundreth Sundry Flowres of 1573; in the second edition, called the Posies, two years later, it appeared in its completed form. The other piece of fiction was called The Adventures passed by Master F. J. in 1573, but on its reappearance in 1575 it was called The Pleasant Fable of Ferdinando Jeronimi and Leonora de Valasco and its English setting has been changed to Italy. The reasons for this change need not be discussed here. It seems evident from the incomplete state of Dan Bartholmew that it was mainly written just before publication. On the other hand, in the F. J. story the poems at least were written long before publication; but the prose links, which pretty well take over the action, could have been written at any time.¹

In spite of its later date of composition, Dan Bartholmew is distinctly inferior to the Adventures of Master F. J. in narrative skill. I shall therefore discuss it first. The story is told by an intimate friend of Bartholmew called the Reporter. In the prologue he says that he saw these lovers play their tragedy. He describes the woman's beauty and then transcribes three poems in which Bartholmew triumphs in the success of his love. The two men then go to Bath, where Bartholmew learns of his lady's unfaithfulness. After seventeen pages of poetical laments by our hero, the Reporter resumes the narrative and tells how Bartholmew was practically on his deathbed when a letter written in his lady's blood revived him. He believed all her excuses and returned to London, where she continues to fool him by her wiles. The poem ends with a series of obscure references to the Admiral, the Noble Face, and to bracelets, all of which whet our curiosity without satisfying it.

The place of the Reporter in all this is rather ambiguous. It is clear that he is a close friend of Bartholmew, but his relation to the lady is not clear. He knows her well enough to describe her beauty in some detail, but he says “I myself was never paramour.” Yet in his concluding narrative he suggests that in earlier years he had tasted the sour-sweet fruits of love and that in particular he knew all about the lady's fickleness.

The following stanza, in fact, sounds quite explicit:

Not I alone, but many mo with me,
Had found what ficklenesse his Idoll used,
And how she claimed Cressides heire to be,
And how she had his great good will abused,
And how she was of many men refused,
Who tride hir tricks and knew hir by the kinde,
Save only him she made no lover blinde.(2)

The impression one gets is that the Reporter is the older and more experienced Gascoigne commenting on the foolishness of his younger self. His sympathy is obvious, but so is his scorn of the younger man's credulity.

Bartholmew of Bath is an interesting but unsuccessful attempt to link together some miscellaneous love poems into a coherent narrative. The Reporter does not tell enough of the story to arouse our interest, and the arrangement of the poems into such solid blocks with rather abrupt transitions is not skillful. Worst of all, the Reporter never succeeds in making Bartholmew and his fickle lady seem real to us. We get the impression that the narrator is too close to the events to see them with the impartial eye of an artist, and also that he is trying to tell the tale too briefly and with too many omissions. It is hard to understand how this failure can have been written later than the very successful story of Master F. J., yet the evidence seems to show that it was. The only possible explanation is haste, an explanation supported by the unfinished state of the poem in the first edition.

In the Adventures passed by Master F. J. Gascoigne used the same method of telling the story through the person of a close friend. Here, however, through careful attention to the details of narrative and setting and through a subtle presentation of character, Gascoigne scored an artistic triumph. The start is hardly auspicious. The anonymous editor of this supposed collection of poems of various men, who signs himself “G. T.,” says that he will begin first with those written by Master F. J. Without any background of preliminary narrative, he open thus: “The said F. J. chaunced once in the northe partes of this Realme to fall in company of a very fayre gentlewoman whose name was Mistresse Elinor, unto whom bearing a hotte affection he first adventured to write this letter following.”³ As the story goes on he unobtrusively fills in the details of the setting, a country estate in northern England, and of the other characters. These consist of Elinor's father-in-law (the owner of the estate), his daughter Frances, and a number of guests. G. T. is not personally acquainted with any of these people, but he has evidently heard the story many times from F. J. and has drawn his own conclusions about them and about the incidents in which they participate. The action appears to have taken place some years in the past.

Superficially the most important difference between these two works is the appearance of prose as the medium for G. T.'s narrative instead of the rather ineffective verse used by the Reporter. At first G. T. makes frequent use of letters and poems written or received by his friend; but as the story gathers momentum these become fewer and fewer, so that most of the time we find ourselves reading a straight prose narrative. The really important difference lies, however, in the infinitely greater skill as a narrator possessed by G. T. He tells the story of this adulterous summer love affair from beginning to end with adequate detail and with real understanding of the characters. He makes us see the attractive side of Elinor as well as her fickleness and duplicity; he makes us see the tolerant side of Frances as well as her love for F. J.; and he succeeds in making us rather sympathetic towards this foolish and deluded young man. He avoids moralizing, yet at the same time draws a moral.

It is true that we know no more about G. T. in the way of facts than we do about the Reporter; both are defined only as friends of the main character. Yet from the evidence just given we can deduce a good deal about G. T.'s personality. He is obviously a man of intelligence and experience, one who not only has the requisite knowledge about the story he is telling but also understands its significance. He expresses neither horror nor surprise at his friend's immoral adventures, but he deplores his blindness and lack of realistic appraisal of the situation. These qualities make him an ideal narrator, since he is both interested and well informed but not personally involved, as the Reporter in Bartholmew of Bath appears to be. He also obviously fancies himself as a literary critic, for he follows most of F. J.'s poems with brief discussions. And of course he uses the privilege of all imaginary story tellers to give us detailed reports of conversations at which he was not present. But Gascoigne consistently maintains the point of view of G. T. throughout the whole story. We never confuse him with a mere omniscient author; he writes in the first person, describing events which he has heard about, like Marlow in Conrad's novels. He frequently remarks that F. J. told him of this or that incident,⁴ and of course all the poems are supposed to have been given to him to publish. In this respect he can be said to function as editor as well as narrator, a combination not unknown in the later history of fiction. This editorial function is casually referred to at various points but most clearly in a passage just preceding the poem called “a Friday's breakfast.” Here G. T. says, “I dwell too long uppon these particular poynts in discoursing this trifling history, but that the same is the more apte meane of introduction to the verses which I meane to reherse unto you.”⁵ Finally, as if to make sure that we do not miss the point, all the prose sections are signed with the initials G. T.

It is exactly G. T.'s editorial function which makes us wonder whether Gascoigne really had any artistic purpose in making him the teller of the story. The whole volume is an elaborate hoax, since it pretends to be a collection of the poems of a number of different men. G. T., who has collected the material, presents it with running comment. His use of narrative is not limited to the story of F. J., for he provides descriptive introductions to several of the poems outside of this story, introductions which give dramatic settings to the poems. Before poem No. 10 in Prouty's edition he writes that the poem concerns a gentlewoman “who passed by him with her armes set bragging by her sides,” and before the next poem he writes that “whiles he sat at the dore of his lodging, devysing these verses above rehearsed, the same gentlewoman passed by agayne and cast a longe looke towards him, wherby he left his former invention and wrote thus.” And a little later he writes the following paragraph as an introduction to poem No. 16:

And for a further profe of this Dames quick understanding, you shall now understand that soone after this answer of hirs the same Author chaunced to be at a supper in hir company, where were also hir brother, hir husband, and an old lover of hirs by whom she had bin long suspected. Nowe, although there wanted no delicate viands to content them, yit their chief repast was by entreglancing of lookes. For G. G. being stoong with hot affection could none otherwise relieve his passion but by gazing. And the Dame of a curteous enclination deigned (now and then) to requite the same with glancing at him. Hir old lover occupied his eyes with watching: and hir brother, perceyving all this, could not absteyne from winking, whereby he might put his Sister in remembrance, least she should too much forget hirself. But most of all hir husband beholding the first, and being evill pleased with the second, scarse contented with the third, and misconstruing the fourth, was constreyned to play the fifth part in froward frowning.⁶

What strikes any reader at once is how much more interesting the introduction is than the poem which follows. Perhaps when Gascoigne started to present the poems dealing with F. J., who is really probably Gascoigne himself, he had no more in mind than this kind of running commentary. At any rate, the first twelve pages contain ten poems or letters, but the remaining forty-two pages only six. No matter what his original purpose, the scheme of writing through an invented person seems to have enthralled him, and he evidently discovered that writing prose could be a joy and not a task.

In reading the finished work as a whole, no ordinary reader would suspect that the prose was merely a commentary on the poems. Elinor's character, though partly indicated in the poems, is mainly developed in the prose sections, and the character of Frances is entirely developed there. The elaborate and very important social setting occurs only in the prose also.

All this had to be changed in the second edition. Gascoigne's moral critics attacked him for retelling an old scandal about actual people. Consequently the whole volume was rearranged. As for the story of F. J., readers now learned that it had nothing to do with England but was a translation from an Italian author named Bartello (who, needless to say, does not exist). The names and geographical references were all changed to Italian ones; and, most important of all, G. T. disappears entirely. The pronoun I now refers sometimes to the supposed translator and sometimes to the supposed author. F. J. has become Ferdinando Jeronimi, and the narrator does not claim to be personally acquainted with him. Also, most of the critical discussions of the poems disappear, since Bartello is supposed to be an author, not an editor. Unfortunately this is the form in which the story is still known to most people, for the standard Cambridge edition of Gascoigne's works used the second edition for its text and only gave variants from the first edition in an appendix. All too many reference works describe the tale as a translation, and even C. S. Lewis called its origin “disputed” without pointing out that the evidence for Gascoigne as author is overwhelming and has been accepted by all competent scholars for a generation.⁷

It is true, of course, that the incidents of the story remain as they were, with the exception of two brief sexual passages, but we are given a more formal and informative introduction and a definitely moral conclusion instead of the abrupt ending of the original. Although the story remains the same, our approach to it has been changed. It is now given to us in the usual formal fashion by an omniscient author. Gone is the sense of immediacy which came from G. T.'s friendship with the main character; gone too are the comments on the poems and the occasional references to what other people thought of them. Finally, in a more subtle way, some of the sympathy for F. J. is gone. He is no longer the intimate friend of the man who is talking to us but just a poor deluded immoralist. Worse than this, he is, in the added conclusion, made responsible for the death of that charming character Frances, for

rejecting all proffers from her father and contempning all curtesies he took his leave, & without pretence of returne departed to his house in Venice, spending there the rest of his dayes in a dissolute kind of life and abandoning the worthy Lady Frauncischina, who dayly being gauled with the griefe of his great ingratitude dyd shortlye bring herself into a miserable consumption, whereof after three yeares languishing she dyed.⁸

Whatever his original intention, I think that the result of Gascoigne's handling of point of view in the first version of his story was an artistic triumph far ahead of anything else we find in English fiction for a long time. That Gascoigne was pleased with the method is shown by his use of it again in Bartholmew of Bath. But here the disparity in tone and quality of the various poems and the haste with which the compilation was done resulted, as we have seen, in failure. Only in the pretended editor G. T., whose office required a certain critical detachment, did Gascoigne succeed in creating someone who could tell a good story, one who by his zeal to make a group of mediocre poems interesting achieved a surprising skill in narrative.

Notes

1. For extended discussion of these problems see the introduction to C. T. Prouty's edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Columbia, Missouri, 1942).

2. Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, C. T. Prouty, ed. (Columbia, Missouri, 1942), p. 219. Hereafter referred to as Prouty.

3. Prouty, p. 51.

4. See Prouty, pp. 53, 54, 60, 70, and many others. R. P. Adams in “Gascoigne's Master F. J. as Original Fiction,” PMLA, lxxiii (1958), 315-326, gives a detailed analysis of G. T.'s place in the story. His purpose, however, was different from mine. F. B. Fieler in “Gascoigne's Use of Courtly Love in The Adventures passed by Master F. J., Studies in Short Fiction, i (Fall 1963), 26-32, discusses Gascoigne's use of G. T.'s editorial remarks to satirize the conventions of courtly love.

5. Prouty, p. 74.

6. Prouty, pp. 117-18.

7. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 269.

8. The Posies (Cambridge, 1907), p. 453.