SOURCE: Wallace, William L. Introduction to George Gascoigne's The Steele Glas and The Complainte of Phylomene: A Critical Edition with an Introduction, pp. 4-70. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1975.

[In the essay which follows, Wallace provides an in-depth analysis of both The Steele Glas and The Complainte of Phylomene.]

Maister Gascoigne is not to bee abridged of his deserved esteeme, who first beate the path to that perfection which our best Poets have aspired to since his departure; whereto he did ascend by comparing the Italian with the English as Tully did Graeca cum Latinis. …

Thus Thomas Nashe “To the Gentleman Students of both Universities.”¹ But with the notable exception of Ivor Winters, who ranks George Gascoigne “one of the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the sixteenth century, and perhaps higher,”² modern scholars and critics have neglected the poet's virtues. Yet Gascoigne's writing is better than either anthologies or literary histories usually allow, and his pioneering contributions to English poetry, practical literary criticism, prose fiction, and drama are unrivaled in number. His Certayne Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse is the first critical treatise on English poetry. The great variety of metrical and rhyme patterns in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres shows his delight in the technical possibilities of English verse, and Gascoigne makes the only significant use of the sonnet form between Surrey and Spenser. The Steele Glas is both the first original English verse satire written on Roman models and the first extensive original poem in blank verse. The prose Adventures of Master F. J., an account of a psychologically complex love affair told through a series of letters, has been called the first English novel.³ In drama, the Supposes, his translation of Ariosto's Suppositi, is the first English prose comedy; and his Jocasta, a translation of Dolce's version of Euripides' Phoenissae, is the first Greek tragedy to be translated into English and only the second to be written in blank verse.

His accomplishments are important, but his reputation as an innovator has hindered appreciation of the poems themselves. The stylistic tradition of The Steele Glas, its social and biographical background, its classical provenience as well as its place in Renaissance English satire have been too much neglected. This introductory essay will discuss the intentionally “plain style” of The Steele Glas, those aspects of Tudor social history and Gascoigne's biography which inform its tone and themes, the poem's large debt to Horace, Juvenal, Plutarch and Valerius Maximus as well as to native English sources, and finally its relation to the more obviously neoclassical English satirists of the 1590's and early 1600's. The composition and provenience of The Complainte of Phylomene, a poem of less interest, I treat separately.

Critics have naturally seen Gascoigne's work in the context of larger trends and movements and have compared him with later poets to whom his best work bears little relation.⁴ Since his best efforts belong to a “plain style” tradition soon eclipsed by the rhetorically ornate poetry of Sidney and Spenser, his reputation dimmed rather early. In 1615 Robert Tofte wrote:

This nice Age, wherein wee now live, hath brought more neate and teirse Wits, into the world; yet must not old George Gascoigne, and Turbervill, with such others, be altogether rejected, since they first brake the Ice for our quainter Poets, that now write, that they might the more safer swimme in the maine Ocean of sweet Poesie.⁵

Gascoigne is a far better poet than Turberville and such others, and his best poems belong within a tradition different from and opposed to the eloquent style of Tofte's ‘quainter’ poets. Both The Steele Glas and, to a lesser degree, The Complainte of Phylomene are written in a plain style purposefully opposed to the rhetorically ornate, “eloquent” tradition adopted by Sidney and Spenser. The eloquent style, with its Petrarchan tropes and amatory themes, was identified with courtly worldliness and deceit. The plain style aimed at open dealing and simple truth through a traditional colloquial directness. The chief characteristics of this plain style are “direct summary statement tending toward folk aphorism, a predominantly Anglo-Saxon diction, folk proverb and metaphor, and a tone of moral severity.” The best plain style poems speak with a distinctly personal voice: their “exact and forceful expression of truisms particularized by the poet's personal experience” elicit a concern for the personal and human implications of often accepted but seldom realized verities.⁶

The plain style satirist of The Steele Glas has disappointed readers who, aware of Gascoigne's reputation as an innovator, came to the first formal English verse satire expecting a strident, neo-Juvenalian satirist like Marston or Guilpin. They found the style and tone of Gascoigne's satire to be controlled by the satirist's moral emphasis and identification with the objects of his attack in a manner more closely related to Piers Plowman than to the hispid voices of the 1590's. Thus, they frequently limited their comments to the poem's native elements and ignored or denied its classical form and substance, its debts to Juvenal, Horace, Plutarch, Valerius Maximus, and other Roman writers.⁷ This is a serious misreading. The tone of the poem is contemplative and reflective, and its focus is on corruption and vice rather than on the railing anger of later Elizabethan satirists. But the satirist of The Steele Glas belongs to the tradition of formal satire. Gascoigne's female persona, Satyra, (who, despite her androgyny, remains identified with Gascoigne himself) is a blunt plain-dealer disgusted and almost overcome by the vices and follies of the time. Satyra-Gascoigne is moved to satire by remorse for his past life and sadness because of his own condition and the world's.

Gascoigne's contemporaries were expected to have known of Gascoigne the man and to recognize the personal allusions in the poem. Though the satiric persona (the hemaphroditic Satyra) is carefully developed according to classical example, she is intentionally and obviously the reformed George Gascoigne: the ruined heir of a wealthy knightly family, the courtier in disgrace, the poet censured for his scandalous works, and a soldier of fortune home from an unprofitable war.⁸ Both The Steele Glas and The Complainte of Phylomene were published as a part of his continuing efforts to overcome his reputation as a wastrel and rakehell, to establish a name as a respected and respectable poet, and to demonstrate his capacity for public office. Gascoigne, trying to survive the ruin of his patrimony, at least two imprisonments, the censure of his poetry, and a general notoriety sufficient to keep him from taking the seat in Parliament to which he had been elected in 1573, ambivalently presented himself as the prodigal who is in fact guilty of much, but whose errors have been exaggerated and whose repentance is scorned. In both poems he speaks in the sad and serious tone of one who has not only seen and experienced the world's follies and corruption, but has fully and actively participated in them to his regret and ruin. Gascoigne's satirist is not merely the simple countryman who can objectively criticize the court and town, but one who has been directly involved with all levels of the society he attacks.

Although Gascoigne's readers have assumed that his own career informs the strongly realized personal and pessimistic tone which distinguishes his best poetry, they have neglected the significance and context of his ruin. No one has yet stressed the heights in the Tudor hierarchy from which he fell. No one has measured the extent of his ambitions or weighed the pressures which led him to Gray's Inn and Elizabeth's court. One thinks of Gascoigne's origins as something loftier than yeoman stock and recalls that he wasted a good deal of land. And since he was a ruined place seeker when his poetry was published, he finds a place in our memory of barely gentle poets like Churchyard, Whetstone, and Peele. But Gascoigne's family was in fact among the wealthiest and best established of England's gentry. The Bedford Gascoignes were descended from Sir William Gascoigne of Gawthorpe Hall, Yorkshire, Henry IV's Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench. (Sir William was popularly but incorrectly supposed to have imprisoned Prince Hal. 2 Henry IV. I. ii.) John Gascoigne, third son of Sir William, had moved to Bedford in the 1400's to marry Jane, sole heir of Lord Baldwin Pygot, and acquire with her the manors of Cardington and Dodyngton. From this time, the family history is one of advantageous marriages, good estate management, and the steady ingathering of wealth and influence. Early on, John Gascoigne lost Cardington to the Winters by siding with Warwick the Kingmaker in the Battle of Barnet in 1471. But by marrying Elizabeth Winter, Sir John's grandson, Sir William, gained the manor back. A shrewd and acquisitive man skilled in the patronage game, Sir William Gascoigne, George's grandfather, was twice sheriff of Bedfordshire, Cardinal Wolsey's Controller of the House, and, after the Cardinal's fall, steward to John Neville, Lord Latimer. Sir William's son, Sir John, continued the family tradition of marrying well. He went back to Yorkshire to marry Margaret Scargill, co-heir to Sir Robert Scargill's considerable property. Sir John held lands that entitled him (with Lord Latimer and others) to act as Almoner in royal coronations; he was Justice of the Peace, and Member of Parliament for Bedfordshire in 1542, 1553, and 1557.⁹ As Lawrence Stone has said, “the most prestigious position a country gentleman could hold was … that of knight of the shire, the representative of his county at Westminister.”¹⁰

A 1580 tax talley indicates the Gascoignes' relative financial standing among the gentry. Only eight hundred persons in all of England had lands valued at twenty pounds per year or more. George Gascoigne's 1568 inheritance, though diminished perhaps by half by large borrowing and bad relations with Sir John, amounted to £195 per year¹¹ when “few … received more than one hundred pounds, while even the greater gentry had only a few hundreds at the most.” When there were only about sixty peers in England and fewer than three hundred knights, the young Gascoigne had inherited a place among the greatest of the gentry.¹² But within a few years, he lay imprisoned for debt in Bedford jail, his patrimony squandered in courtier gallantry.

A number of economic, social, and cultural changes between the Battle of Barnet in 1471 and Queen Elizabeth's accession in 1558 presented obstacles to Gascoigne's remaining in Bedford and marrying well in the manner of his forebears. Most noticeably, the attitudes and practices of landholders were changing under the influence of a rapid price rise and an extraordinarily fluid land market. In earlier days, the lord had indeed been the head of his manor and responsible for the supervision and welfare of its tenants. Selling land was considered virtually immoral; changes in ownership and exploitation were being treated as mere commodities. Rackrenting, enclosure, and eviction accelerated. The increase in rents, prices, and standards of consumption made it difficult for either tenant or lord to live in his customary manner,¹³ though every tradition held that they must, condemning ambition as a deadly sin against commonwealth and God's cosmic order.¹⁴ Economic exploitation grew so much more efficient that England became the wealthiest country in Europe. But when he wrote The Steele Glas, Gascoigne had seen the effects of the new economics on those men who were unable to compete and fell from their station, men thrown off the land to become sturdy beggars, tenants whose lords enjoyed their rents in London and left the country prey to rackrenting lawyers serving as overseers.¹⁵ The involvement of gentlemen and peers in industry and trade, the abuse of monopolies, and the growth of usury especially upset those who, like Gascoigne, were unable to profit by these practices or were caught in their toils.¹⁶

Despite our perspective on these great changes, Elizabethans still thought of their society as an orderly, organic hierarchy of deferential relations; everyone had his place and ought to stay in it. The ensuing conflict between binding traditions and pressing realities made the times fertile for satire. The earlier hierarchical model in which each class had its traditional place and its duty to the commonwealth was no mere ideal but a once veridical image of the world and a plan for its perfection. The quickening of economic and societal change was not seen as ‘progress’ or ‘historical development’ but as acceleration in the world's decay.¹⁷ Gascoigne—the young landed esquire, the London gallant and courtier, the soldier of fortune, the ruined place seeker—experienced at first hand the decay and failure of this orderly cosmos, a degeneration which afflicted all degrees of society “from prince to poore, from high estate to lowe.”

But whatever the outlook of the ruined satirist in 1576, two decades earlier the allurements of London and the court had been irresistible to the young esquire. Not even the greater gentry remained any longer at home, busying themselves with country matters in the manner of old Sir John. Beyond the appeal of the court's glamour and adventure, the pressure of peer example, and the dream of securing high position, society had changed in ways which made it virtually impossible for Gascoigne to remain in Bedfordshire. England was now a princely national commonwealth. The decimation of old feudal families in the civil wars, a very purposeful Tudor policy of centralization, and a century of economic and cultural movement had made London and the court the hub of a centralized national life. Royal servants dependent on the royal favor had replaced the fifteenth century magnate whose influence frequently rested on how many acres and men at arms he could boast. The traditional hierarchy of birth was supposed to be maintained by educating the gentry and aristocracy to meet their new responsibilities in the modern state. Aristocrats and the greater gentry generally had first opportunity at public positions but were expected to prepare themselves for such service. No longer should they remain hunters and hawkers nor, even if inclined to learning, should they educate themselves for a contemplative life on their own estates. Instead, duty and fashion called them to serve the prince, the head of the national commonweal.¹⁸ But this renovation of medieval social ideals increased both social mobility and the traditional hostility toward it.¹⁹ The ideal of the gentleman educated to serve the commonwealth gave many young esquires new prospects as well as obligations. These opportunities at court were validated and publicized in such exemplary careers as those of Cecil and Hatton. The traditional life of the county gentry seemed, in contrast, backward and loutish.

When he wrote The Steele Glas, Gascoigne understood the relations of country to court, but his own career had taught him that self-interest blinded most to a proper concern for the nation. He had also seen those ambitious young men drawn too soon away from home and education, spoiled for duties in the country, and left financially and morally bankrupt—all before they gained the years or the experience needful to their country's welfare or their own. Tudor society as Gascoigne met it, despite the official opinions in the Homilies, was no longer an assembly of stable social classes. The courtier's place depended upon his ability to ingratiate himself with inner circles whose constitution might change with royal caprice.²⁰ The movement, chiefly at London and at court, from class to class, estate to estate, was not the celebrated rise to power of the gentry, and yet it is undeniable that obligations and opportunities in London made traditional country life seem stagnant and dull.²¹

Gascoigne attended Trinity College, Cambridge, but left without a degree. In 1555, probably sixteen years old, he entered Gray's Inn to study law. How seriously he (or most of his fellow students) pursued a legal education is open to question. In the second part of the century, admissions to the Inns of Court rose as cultural life centered more and more on London and the court. Acquaintance with the law was useful in a litigious society, but for most intending courtiers the Inns were simply finishing schools. There were no academic entrance requirements, no compulsions to study law or anything else, and few restrictions on student conduct. With London and the court near and beckoning, it is no surprise that many of Gascoigne's fellows used the Inns simply as an entry to the gallant life in London and at court.²²

In 1557, Gascoigne entered Philip and Mary's last Parliament as Burgess for Bedford; in 1558, he acted for his father as Almoner in Elizabeth's coronation. He was certainly active at court after Elizabeth's accession, but the emphasis in his poetry on his immaturity when first there suggests that he began this expensive life much earlier. When young Gascoigne came to court, he kept company with such well-connected ruffians as Arthur Hall, a ward of Cecil who resided in the Secretary's household, and Rowlande Yorke, a notorious tavern brawler who was to betray Zutphen to the Prince of Parma in 1586/87.²³ Scarcely more than a boy, inexperienced in court subtlety, protected by no great personage, and expectably naive, he accepted the court's appearances at face value. In “The greene knights farewell to Fansie,” Gascoigne writes:

The glosse of gorgeous courtes, by thee did please mine eye, A stately sight me thought it was, to see the brave go by: To see there feathers flaunte, to marke their straunge devise, To lie along in Ladies lappes, to lispe and make it nice: To fawne and flatter both, I liked sometimes well, But since I see how vayne it is, Fansie (quoth he) farewell.²⁴

“Gascoignes Wodmanship” provides a more damning account of the court itself. After Cambridge and Gray's Inn

… he shotte to catch a courtly grace,
And thought even there to wield the world at will,
But out alas he much mistooke the place,
And shot awrie at every rover still.
The blasing baits which drawe the gazing eye,
Unfethered there his first affection,
No wonder then although he shot awrie,
Wanting the feathers of discretion.
Yet more than them, the marks of dignitie,
He much mistooke and shot the wronger way,
Thinking the purse of prodigalitie,
Had bene best meane to purchase such a pray.
He thought the flattering face which fleareth still,
Had bene full fraught with all fidelitie,
And that such wordes as courtiers use at will,
Could not have varied from the veritie.
But when his bonet buttened with gold,
His comelie cape begarded all with gay,
His bumbast hose, with linings manifold,
His knit silke stocks and all his queint aray,
Had pickt his purse of all the Peter pence,
Which might have paide for his promotion,
Then (all to late) he found that light expence,
Had quite quencht out the courts devotion.
So that since then the tast of miserie,
Had bene alwayes full bitter in his bit. …(25)

The places available to courtiers fell into three rough categories. The first and largest consisted of keeperships of castles, parks, and royal lands: these were sought out by younger sons fearful of losing their gentility altogether. Second were the offices in service to a Leicester or a Burghley which guaranteed comfortable respectability if one survived. The adolescent Gascoigne aspired to the third group, those places which were dispensed by the Queen herself to a very small number with poise and wit enough to catch her eye. If one could keep her pleasure, there followed wealth, possibly title, and a place within the ruling circle.²⁶ As Gascoigne saw so clearly at the last, his attempt to move into this system was immature and foolish. The money spent acquired him only a reputation for profligacy when he could have purchased a substantial position outright. And yet such imprudent attempts to be called to the tables of princes were not always unsuccessful. The twenty-year-old Christopher Hatton first attracted Elizabeth's attention by dancing in an Inner Temple masque, but he was then no more qualified for royal service than the young Gascoigne. Hatton's ancestry was scarcely gentle. Like Gascoigne he left his university before taking a degree and quit the Temple before being admitted to the bar. But Hatton's comeliness (sustained by competence developed in royal service) led to appointments as a Gentleman Pensioner, Captain of Elizabeth's Guard, Vice Chamberlain, and (without yet having been admitted to the bar) Lord Chancellor of England.²⁷

The older, wiser Gascoigne of The Steele Glas and The Complainte of Phylomene had seen also the harsh, morally debilitating life at court. Social mobility brought social insecurity, an insecurity further complicated by the personal character of patronage. Suits were frequently delayed even after the right people had been paid. Outright bribery was common by Elizabethan standards and rampant by ours.²⁸ And too much practice of the art of pleasing left many courtiers pliant sycophants without decency or loyalty. Christopher Hatton, doubtless a genuinely useful royal servant, remained a willing executor of the wishes of others—dependent till the last on his ability to please the Queen. Burleigh, Hatton's lifelong opponent who sometimes lost the Queen's favor but never her respect, found him “readier to change offence taken than any other with whom I have had like occasion.” When Mary Queen of Scots was finally executed and Elizabeth's wrath demanded a scapegoat, Hatton sacrificed his longtime friend and secretary William Davidson. When the Bishop of Ely was ill, Hatton blackmailed him for his London House. Hatton's behavior was determined by this total dependence on court favor, and his behavior was not anomalous.²⁹

Gascoigne retired to Willington Manor in 1563; penury seems to have ended his first round at court. Expenses for clothes, ornaments, and servants were high for any courtier, and especially so for a young profligate like Gascoigne. Close Roll entries for 1562 and part of 1563 indicating payment of debts of over £1,000 hint at his pace of expenditure.³⁰ Litigation was another ruinous expense. Elizabeth Bacon Bretton Boyes, a propertied widow with children, had married Gascoigne in 1562, though the legality of her earlier marriage to Edward Boyes was still unresolved. Boyes' claims to rights and property, litigation concerning the rights and property of the Bretton children, and the numerous suits arising out of Gascoigne's own unscrupulous efforts to raise money against his inheritance were to occupy much of his time and wealth for the rest of his life.³¹

Having retired to the country in 1563, Gascoigne was back at Gray's Inn in 1564 and 1565. To judge from his expenditures, by 1566 he was again back at court (from 1566-1570 the Close Rolls indicate paid debts of over £4,000 and the court records indicate sales and attempts to sell land).³² Also from 1566-1570 he was in continual litigation over his own and his wife's legal troubles. Even his inheritance in 1568 was insufficient to stave off his creditors and legal opponents; by 1570 he was a ruined bankrupt, imprisoned for debt in Bedford jail. His meditation on his disastrous career and condition are poignantly expressed in his poem written on the theme Magnum Vectigal Parcimonia:

I not denie but some men have good hap,
To climbe a lofte by scales of courtly grace,
And winne the world with liberalitye:
Yet he that yerks old angells out apace,
And hath no newe to purchase dignitye,
When orders fall, may chaunce to lacke his grace.
For haggard hawkes mislike an emptie hand:
So stiffely some sticke to the mercers stall,
Till sutes of silke have swet out all their land.
So ofte thy neighbors banquet in thy hall,
Till Davie Debet in thy parler stand,
And bids the welcome to thine owne decay.(33)

Despite his long association with Gray's Inn, the reformed Gascoigne chose to define himself as a poet and soldier. In The Steele Glas the law is one of the few professions treated wholly without sympathy. Lawyers are frauds concerned wholly with self-aggrandizement, agents of rackrenting lords who exploit those whom they should protect. But worst of all, they connive at and profit from the ruin of gentlemen and nobility.

After jail Gascoigne next reappears as a soldier of fortune in the Dutch wars. The story of this disillusioning campaign among an irregular band of greedy and undisciplined volunteers is told in his “Dulce Bellum Inexpertis.”³⁴ He fought against the Spanish in two campaigns, in the second gaining honor, reward, and the personal friendship of Prince William of Orange himself. But in both adventures he found that even the most honorable profession was corrupted by the self-deluding pride that infected all of Elizabethan society.³⁵ Gascoigne, especially as his fortunes disintegrated, was painfully aware that he came from a knightly family (his first poem published in 1566 had affixed his motto Tam Marti, quàm Mercurio, As Much for Mars as for Mercury). In The Steele Glas his knights are “worthy soldiers” and he himself is one of them. Because of his knightly self-perception and his military experience, the poem examines soldiery at greater length than any other estate.

In 1572, having failed his studies and exhausted his patrimony, disgusted with both soldiery and manor life, Gascoigne turned to poetry as a means to the recovery of his dignity. His wedding masque for Viscount Montague gained him patronage and election to Parliament in the winter of 1573. But his rehabilitation was hindered by both his dissolute past and his ‘vaine poetrie.’ Soon after his election to Parliament the Privy Council received an anonymous note endorsed “Against Georg Gascoyne that he ought not to be Burgess.” The note charged that while he had formerly dared not enter London for fear of arrest he now used his parliamentary immunity to flout his creditors. More damagingly, he was charged with being a notorious ruffian, a spy, “an Atheist and godlesse personne,” “a defamed person … noted as well for Manslaughter as well as for other great crimes,” and “a common Rymer and a deviser of slaunderous Pasquelles againste divers persons of greate calling.”³⁶ Though Gascoigne's creditors were hardly disinterested, their charges illustrate the dissolute life he refers to in The Steele Glas and The Complainte of Phylomene. Rather than settle these troubles, Gascoigne hurriedly left on a second military expedition into Holland. No record of the alleged manslaughter remains, but the accusation may refer to a duel. His friendship with such notorious brawlers as Roland Yorke and Arthur Hall supports the epithet “ruffiane.”

The reference to his poetry and “Pasquelles” indicates the embarrassment his early ‘vaine poetrie’ was to cause him. When A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres had been published earlier in 1573, the Queen's Majesty's Commissioners banned it as immoral and libelous. Though the Flowres had been published anonymously it was immediately recognized as Gascoigne's. In the 1575 Posies Gascoigne acknowledged that his Flowres had “not onely bene offensive for sundrie wanton speeches and lascivious phrases, but further … the same have been doubtfully construed and (therefore) scandalous.” The Flowres contained a great deal of lascivious and amorous poetry. Gascoigne clumsily explained that he wrote it for others to use in pressing their attentions upon ladies of the court:

I thought good to advertise thee, that the most part of [these amorous verses] were written for other men. And out of doubt, if ever I wrote lyne for my selfe in causes of love, I have written tenne for other men in layes of lust.³⁷

The charge of “slaunderous pasquelles” had equal currency and substance. Gabriel Harvey repeats it in an obituary poem on Gascoigne:

Me thinkes thou skornist seigniores
And gibist at thrice mightye peeres. …(38)

Specifically, The Adventures of Master F. J., a prose novella about courtly adultery, was read as a libelous roman a clef, perhaps upon Leicester himself.³⁹

In 1575 Gascoigne published The Posies, which contained his two dramas and poems on his military experiences, as well as the revised Flowres. He revised and bowdlerized Master F. J., omitted three poems (which, since they are not obviously scandalous or libidinous, must have made specific people uncomfortable), and divided his matter into “Floures to comfort,” “Herbes to cure,” and “Weedes to be avoyded.” He then explained in prefatory epistles “to al the yong gentlemen” and “To the reverende divines” that he intended The Posies for the moral benefit of readers, for the improvement of the English language, and for proof of his worthiness for better employment. The Queen's Majesty's Commissioners, the ‘Divines’ to whom The Posies was dedicated, responded by banning it.

Thus, next year, in the 1576 The Steele Glas … togither with The Complainte of Phylomene, Gascoigne's personae speak out of a remembrance of misdeeds past but also out of the intention of reform. If his talents and experience go wasted, it will be because of unforgiving judges and censorious critics.⁴⁰ Having failed to clear his name with The Posies, Gascoigne needed a patron to whom he might justify and promote himself in future publications. A patron, or even a great man who accepted the dedication of a work, was a real asset. A strong man with a famous name could protect the poet and broadcast the merit of his work to buyers and critics.⁴¹ Patronage was especially important in the case of The Steele Glas and The Complainte of Phylomene: the reception or even the publication of a satire and an Ovidian poem of rape and atrocity depended in large measure upon their being recognized as sharp departures from Gascoigne's earlier ‘vaine poetri.’ Thus, he chose to dedicate them to a noble friend who already knew his poetry: Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, a prominent but moderate Puritan.⁴²

Gascoigne intended The Steele Glas to be an obvious departure from his earlier work. It was to be an unquestionably serious, moral, and substantial poem, demanding the respect of even his most censorious critics. Thus he chose to write a formal verse satire in imitation of Horace and Juvenal. He chose blank verse (the meter of Gorbuduc, his Jocasta, and Surrey's translations from the Aeneid) as loftier and more praiseworthy than rhyme—a meter appropriate to the poem's intended dignity. Having only judgement and taste to guide him, Gascoigne could not know that Momus would soon declare the ten syllable couplet the only form for English verse satire.

The Steele Glas is the first conscious attempt to write in English a formal satire on the Roman model, combining native English and Roman material and technique. Gascoigne brought together two satiric traditions which were in the sixteenth century seen as much closer than they are today: the native English, best represented by Langland, and the classical, which for Gascoigne meant Horace and Juvenal.⁴³

Aside from Wyatt and Skelton, neither of whom were considered formal satirists,⁴⁴ Gascoigne had no English predecessors who had tried to unite the two traditions. Contemporary theory maintained that satire should viciously and mercilessly reprove the vices of men in harsh, obscure lines such as might be spoken by a fiercely unlettered woodland satyr,⁴⁵ but theory was quite removed from actual practice. Thomas Drant's introduction to his 1566 translation of Horace illustrates this confusion. He describes satire as

… a tarte and carpyng kynde of verse, An instrument to pynche the prankes of men, … those that wyll them write, With taunting gyrds and glikes and gibes must vex the lewd, Strayne curtesy, ne reck of mortall spyte.

But only two pages before he has given a very different description of his translations:

I have done as the people of god wer commanded to do with their captive women that were hansome and beautiful: I have shaved of his heare, and pared of his nayles (that is) I have wyped awaye all his vanitie and superfluitie of matter. Further, I have for the moste parte drawen his private carpyng of this or that man to a general moral. I have englished thinges not accordyng to the vain of the Latin proprietie, but of our own vulgar tongue. I have interfaced (to remove his obscuritie and sometymes to better his matter) much of myne owne devysinge. I have peeced his reason, eekede, and mended his similitudes, mollyfied his hardnes, prolonged his cortall kynd of speeche, changed, and much altered his wordes, but not his sentence: or at leaste (I dare say) not his purpose.⁴⁶

Like Drant's translations, most sixteenth century satires before the 1590's maintain a solemn moral tone, a serious and pessimistic view of society. They make their attack within a religious and moral framework influenced by the still strong homiletic tradition.⁴⁷

The chief native influence upon The Steele Glas was Langland, whose Piers Plowman was to the Elizabethans the archetypal English satire. Poems like the anonymous Pierce the Ploughman's creede had dropped all allegorical content to attack political and ecclesiastical corruption. By the sixteenth century the Piers figure—rough, humble, but perceptive and honestly plainspoken, was a recognizable satiric type.⁴⁸The Steele Glas draws more heavily for its themes and their treatment on Piers Plowman than on any later English poem.⁴⁹ Langland and Gascoigne are both conservative in their view of the organization of society: Langland clearly subscribes to the principle of hereditary estates, condemning upstarts who leave their vocation (i.e., B. V. 25-27; B. VI. 317-319). But, as in The Steele Glas, all classes, including officers and nobles, have positive duties: it is not enough for magistrates and aristocracy to stop abusing those whom they have in charge; they must actively work for their welfare (i.e., B. III. 75-85; VI. 25-45).⁵⁰ Neither Langland nor Gascoigne was a progressive advocating reform by royal decree or social reorganization. The roots of social and individual disease are in deadly sins like pride, envy, and avarice. Neither poet has any easy specific cures nor any expectation of immediate earthly reform. Both attack the failure of institutions and the men who run them, but they know that institutions depend for their character on inherently corrupt men. This attitude is best exemplified in their attitudes toward law and justice. Both poets treat these as important guides for human conduct, but they know that institutions depend for their character on inherently corrupt men. This attitude is best exemplified in their attitudes toward law and justice. Both poets treat these as important guides for human conduct, but for both, justice is an ideal, virtually opposed to the law as it actually exists.⁵¹

Though most satirists between Langland's time and Gascoigne's shared their religious and social conservatism, Gascoigne seems to have learned most from Langland's tone and technique. Since both identify with the objects of their satire, they avoid harsh shifts in tone from strident, self-demeaning contempt to serious exhortations to a virtuous satiric norm.⁵² Both use the enumeration of estates to show, in Raleigh's words, “unpartially … abuses all … from prince to poore, from high estate to lowe. …” Langland's exposure of the ubiquity of avarice as various types clamber about Mede suggests Gascoigne's catalogue of social stations and their typical vices:

To marie this maydene was many man assembled:
As of knightes and of clerkis and other comune poeple,
As sysours and sompnours, shireves and here clerkes,
Bedelles and baillives and brokoures of chaffare,
Forgoeres and vitaillers and vokates of the Arches. …

(B. II. 56-60)

Langland, like Gascoigne, uses anaphora and “when … then” clauses to heap up evidence for his satiric indictment. When the King asks Reason to forgive Wrong, Reason answers that she will not until the vices characteristic of each estate have been reformed:

                    ‘Rede me noughte,’ quod Resoun, ‘no reuthe to have,
Til lordes and ladies lovien alle treuthe,
And haten al harlotrye, to heren it, or to mouthen it;
Tyl Pernelles purfil be put in here hucche,
And Childryn cherissyng be chastyng with yerdes,
And harlotes holynesse be holden for an hyne;
Til clerken coveitise be to clothe the pore and to fede,
And religious romares recordare in here cloistres,
As seynt Benet hem bad, Bernarde and Fraunceys;
And til prechoures prechyng be preved on hemselven;
Tyl the kynges conseille be the comune profyte;
Tyl bisschopes baiardes ben beggeres chambres,
Here haukes and her houndes helpe to pore religious. …’

(B. IV. 113-125)

The same comprehensiveness and repetitive structure are found in the fifteenth century ballad “Nowe a Dayes.”⁵³ Even Skelton, whose strident tone often anticipates the neo-Juvenalian imitations of the 1590's, organizes Colin Clout by estates. Colin Clout is not merely an attack on the proud Wolsey, but on the self-aggrandizing pride of the clergy, the nobility, and the laity—all responsible for the disorder of the times.⁵⁴ Though Gascoigne was not drawn to Skeltonian invective, Skelton's development in Colin Clout of Langland's technique of accumulation, repetition, and parallel structuring of verse lines anticipates The Steele Glas:⁵⁵

And where the prelates be
Come of low degree,
And set in majeste
And Spirtuall dyngnyte,
Farwell symplicitee,
Farwell humylyte,
Farwell good charyte!

587-594.⁵⁶

Skelton is the only satirist between Langland and Gascoigne to focus on self-deluding, self-aggrandizing pride as the basis of human folly. When Barclay, Crowley, and Hake look to causes, they attack the secondary sins of greed and ambition. Usually they merely cite evils and recommend facile solutions. Barclay's criticism is socially comprehensive, but he is narrowly preoccupied with the universal desire to change one's estate for a higher:

Promote a yeman, make hym a gentyl man
And make a Baylyf of a Butcher's son
Make of a squyer knyght, yet wyll they if they can
Covyt in theyr myndes hyer promosyon. …(57)

Robert Crowley, the shallowest of the three in ideas, continues the same socially comprehensive attack together with narrow concern for the stability of social degree. His works show no overall plan or logical division coming from a coherent view of society: his Epigrams proceed alphabetically from “Abbayes” and “Allyes” (bowling) to “Usururs.” When he does assert the ideals of common weal and the stewardship of goods (“You are not borne to your selfe”) he directs them to usurers, rather than the landlords and monopolists who were still supposed to respect them. Both his simplicity and optimism are evident in the full title of The Voice of the Last Trumpet:

The voyce of the laste trumpet blowen bi the seventh angel as is mentioned in the eleventh of the apocalips callynge all the estates of menne to the right path of their vocation, wherein are contained xii lessons to twelve several estates of menne, which if they learne and follow, al shal be well and nothynge amise.⁵⁸

Edward Hake's News from Powles Churchyard is a framed series of soliloquies overheard by a man raving outside of St. Paul's. He enumerates the vices of each estate and finds avarice to be the cause of all.⁵⁹ Barclay, Crowley, and Hake could at most have reinforced what Gascoigne got firsthand from Langland. His tracing of the causes of the world's evils beyond mere covetousness to self-aggrandizing pride (cupiditas) is closer to Langland's satiric view than to any poet between.

Gascoigne's debt to classical satirists and moralists is as important as his relation to Langland and the English tradition. The Steele Glas is modeled on the formal verse satires of Horace and Juvenal. Much of its substance, exempla of ancient virtue, is taken from classical historians, chiefly Plutarch's Lives and the Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium of Valerius Maximus. The satires of Horace and Juvenal, usually discursive monologues written in a colloquial style and frequently addressed to a specified audience, provided Gascoigne not only a pattern for The Steele Glas but also models of serious moral and ethical criticisms of vice presented against strongly realized traditional norms.

Much in Juvenal touched a sympathetic chord in Gascoigne: his general pessimism about the state of Rome and his attacks on the imperial court, his sense of a plainer, greater past against which the luxurious and effete present must be measured (6.286-351), the use of historical exemplars to point up present vices (8.211-235; 10.246-288), criticism of nobles and officers who failed their social obligations (7.150-214; 8), and especially the strong and acerbic note of personal disappointment, the profound and pervading resentment of a society which allows upstart favorites to root deserving men from office (1.26-29, 129-131).⁶⁰ Though Juvenal is reticent about personal details, his life as a penurious place-seeker, a resentful hanger-on of the rich, undeniably influenced the themes and tone of his poetry. Gilbert Highet has constructed from available evidence a life similar in outline to Gascoigne's: Juvenal, a young Roman of high position in his town, came to Rome and tried his fortune at the imperial court; he failed to achieve promotion and grew disgusted with the sycophants he met. A lampoon against the influence of Domitian's favorites drew the emperor's wrath, and Juvenal was banished to the provinces. At the accession of the new emperor Nerva he returned to Rome a penurious client. Carefully avoiding reference to living persons, he expressed his bitter insights in strident satire.⁶¹ Gascoigne shares Juvenal's scornful pessimism and his sense of personal injustice and humiliation, but his invective foregoes Juvenal's aggressive, strident indignation and the ruthless lust for blood so much valued by the English satirists of the 1590's.

The tone and technique of The Steele Glas remind one more of Horace, who, like Gascoigne and Langland, identifies with the objects of his satire. He refuses to damn Rome or Romans absolutely. Horace's satire is like Gascoigne's in its mode of autobiography; the satirist is a part of his corrupt world and refers to his own life in it. Though he frequently sermonizes and holds the reader at a distance, his topics include the importance of acknowledging one's own faults (Sat. 1.3. 19-37) and mutual toleration among friends (Sat. 1.3. 38-76). Unlike Juvenal, who held all vices to be equally evil, Horace argued the necessity of a humane recognition of different degrees of wrongdoing (Sat. 1. 93-119).⁶² These themes occur frequently in The Steele Glas as Gascoigne first subjects himself to scrutiny in his mirror (223-252), identifies himself with the soldiers to whom he is preaching (473), and asks his priests to pray for him as well as the rest of society (1123-1130).

Today, we too frequently read Horace simply as an urbane, genial, witty, all-observing, but all-forgiving man of the world.⁶³ But from antiquity to the eighteenth century Horace, like Juvenal, was read primarily for his moral content. The first translator of the Satires into English called them A Medicinable Morall …, and even such scholarly editors of the Opera omnia as Denys Lambin and Henri Estienne valued them chiefly for their ethical emphasis.⁶⁴ Though every age discovers in the artifacts of earlier times whatever it most enjoys and values, the Renaissance understood Horace's moral themes with particular sympathy. Although his satiric norms are rooted in Roman instead of Christian virtue, his themes, substance, and tone are quite compatible with the native English tradition.⁶⁵ Like Gascoigne, Horace denied that satire maliciously attacks specific persons (Sat. 1.4. 64-102) and stressed its straightforward, prosaic nature and its educational purpose (Sat. 1.4. 38-66, 103-136). Gascoigne valued in Horace the perspicacious satirist who penetrates the world's hypocrisy and self deception to reveal to his readers the truth of their human condition (Sat. 1.4. 103-136). The function of satire was the examination of states of being and their consequences; if the truths enforced were truisms honored in the breach, so much greater the need for their reinforcement.

Gascoigne, like Horace, Shakespeare, and Pope, analyzed institutions in terms of their member's characters. In this he found material useful to hand in the classical moralists Valerius Maximus and Plutarch. Both writers are dominated by their didactic purpose at the expense of fact. Drawing uncritically from earlier authors, both subordinate historical accuracy and perspective to their interest in anecdotes which illustrate specific qualities of character. But their emphasis on the isolated speech and deed made them all the more useful. Gascoigne draws most of his exempla, good and bad, from these two authors.

Plutarch, though he has suffered in prestige in the last hundred years, was from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century the standard source from which educated men drew their conceptions of the ancient classical world. Gascoigne would have been especially sympathetic to Plutarch's political and social conservatism, his emphasis on the dangers of ambition and self-deluding pride, his insistence on distinguishing between minor vices and major crimes, and his emphasis on the absolute necessity of military discipline.⁶⁶ The Lives were not available in English until Sir Thomas North's translation of 1579 (‘Shakespeare's Plutarch’) but were easily accessible in Latin, in the Italian translations of Domenichi (1555) and Sansovino (1564), and the more convenient French of Amyot (1559).⁶⁷ Plutarch was, of course, a biographer and moralist, not a historian. His purpose was to record the virtues of the great so that his readers might be improved and society be made better and more cohesive. Believing that the private character of public men determines the course of history, Plutarch emphasizes their individual human qualities at the expense of their broad historical significance.⁶⁸ He praises Alexander for his stern and impartial justice (Vit. Alex. 42.1-2, 43.3; cf. 22.1-5, 57.203) and reports that Pericles chided his friends for praising his military victories instead of his equity and impartiality to domestic enemies (Vit. Per. 38.3-4). Gascoigne draws directly on these passages (310, 717; 544-553), directly paraphrasing the anecdote about Pericles.⁶⁹

Unlike Plutarch's Lives, Gascoigne's other main source of illustrative moral anecdote, the Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX of Valerius Maximus, had an important place in medieval as well as Renaissance education. This is attested by two late epitomes and a great number of manuscripts. The editio princeps was published about 1470 in Strassburg, the Aldine edition appeared in 1502, and the edition of Stephanus Viandus Pighius was published in Antwerp in 1567. The work is hardly read today, but it was well known by Petrarch and Montaigne.⁷⁰ In Valerius as in Plutarch Gascoigne found political and social conservatism and emphasis on military discipline. But the chief appeal of the Factorum was utilitarian. It is a reference book for orators, a collection of sententiae and anecdotes. In the first sentence of the dedication Valerius announces his purpose and plan: he has collected together under appropriate headings memorable deeds and sayings to save his readers from having to consult the authors (e.g., Cicero, Livy, Varro) which he himself ransacked.⁷¹ Each of nine books is divided into chapters on separate moral and philosophical topics, and each chapter is further subdivided into Roman and foreign (mostly Greek) examples. Two chapter titles from each book will illustrate its commonplace character as well as its variety and scope:

I. “Of Religion,” and “Of Omens”

II. “Of Military Discipline,” and “Of Magistries”

III. “Of Bravery,” and “Of Degeneracy”

IV. “Of Moderation,” and “Of Generosity”

V. “Of Gratitude,” and “Of Ingratitude”

VI. “Of Chastity,” and “Of Justice”

VII. “Of Wise Sayings or Acts,” and “Of Necessity”

VIII. “Of Industry,” and “Of Eloquence”

IX. “Of Luxury and Lust,” and “Of Avarice”

The work has none of Plutarch's excellence, but its variety and convenience insured its popularity as long as an epideictic rhetoric of praise and blame remained a major influence on English poetry.

Though there are direct links between the Roman satirists and Gascoigne, the consistent structural principle of their formal verse satires is thematic: some irrational vice or folly with many ramifications is turned about for exposure and illumination—and its opposing virtue recommended. Whatever techniques the formal satirist uses, the satire is held together by its argumentative core, that satirical point which all the devices are supposed to prove. Regardless of whatever appearance of simplicity or nonchalant urbanity the satire may have, underneath there is the didactic and dialectic argument—the vice and its correction.⁷²The Steele Glas frames one vice at the root of Elizabethan corruption—willful “pevishe pride” or “surcuydry” which blinds men to their real good. The satire attacks self-deluding pride by means of the steel mirror, which exposes and illuminates the manifestations of this root evil throughout the infected Elizabethan society. After this arraignment, Gascoigne prescribes his cure: “true humilytie” such as is found in Epaminondas (697-712), Pericles (544-554) and Augustus Caesar (581-584, 770-780), as well as in Piers Plowman (1030).

The title of Gascoigne's poem, The Steele Glas, denotes a mirror of burnished metal like those used by the ancients and thus indicates that this formal satire is based upon Roman models. But more important, the glass (or glasses; one steel, the other crystal), has an actual and symbolic function within the poem itself. The satirist and his contemporary Maecenas, Lord Grey, are looking into a steel mirror together. Gascoigne occasionally addresses one of the groups he sees in the mirror but more often speaks personally to his friend. The newfangled crystal glass of proud self-delusion gives a false and flattering picture of society and its members, a view which is responsible for the decline of all estates. The plain, rough steel glass inherited from Lucillius, the founder of Roman satire, will not flatter. It sees through cant, hypocrisy, and deception to reveal not only the actual condition of persons and estates but also the ideal from which they have declined. The contrast between the two mirrors is developed at the beginning of the poem. Throughout, the steel mirror both denies self-delusion and emphasizes honest perception of actuality against the poem's ideal satiric norms.⁷³

Gascoigne's Satyra is a carefully developed persona moved to satire by grief and sadness: both personal, for her own woes, and general, for the world which is so badly out of joint. Her development both establishes her satiric credentials and provides motivation for her sweeping indictment of Elizabethan society. Because of his reputation for profligacy and the censoring of two earlier publications, Gascoigne cultivates an image of a sincerely repentant prodigal whose every late effort is maliciously misrepresented and suppressed by envious, unforgiving critics. Nevertheless, he continues to write plain, honest works based upon his personal experience of past error and his appreciation of the hard truths within commonplaces he had ignored in his youth. After the ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ has ambiguously confessed to actual misdeeds (which are nonetheless too severely punished), the exordium allegorically separates Gascoigne's life into two periods represented by two sisters. The younger sister is Poesys, the title of Gascoigne's early amatory poetry which had been condemned; the elder is Satyra, the second-born twin of Poesys. The Steele Glas is, of course, written from the older Satyra's point of view. Poesys married Vaine Delight (Gascoigne's lascivious early poems), who raped Satyra and silenced her by cutting out her tongue with a “Raysor of Restraynte.” Satyra's suffering and sorrow inform the serious, pessimistic tone of the satire. In the six short stanzas outlining the confinements under which she sings, Gascoigne links Satyra's personal grief to her more generalized grief for the whold world. After describing her condition, she explains:

“And thus I meane, in mournfull wise to sing …
A trustie tune …
A playne song note. …
For whyles I mark this weak and weary world,
Wherein I see, howe every kind of man
Can flatter still, and yet deceives himselfe. …,

(ll. 157-163)

I see and sigh (bycause it makes me sadde)
That pevishe pryde, doth al the world possesse. …”

(ll. 174-175)

The poem's didactic thesis is that the whole commonwealth is dominated by willful, self-aggrandizing and self-deluding pride. This pride blinds men to their real nature and makes them indifferent to their proper dignity and obligations. The concern for honest perception and integrity informs the whole poem, even its most conventional details, and gives it a thematic coherence rare in Renaissance satire. In the exordium, deceptive courtiers seduce Poesys into marrying Vaine Delight, who rapes Satyra and cuts out her tongue to conceal his own lewdness. Satyra sings her plainsong in the night of the commonwealth's self-deception to make Reprovers see themselves honestly in the Steele Glas. The world is ‘pevishe,’ lacking in ‘good foundation’ (213); it refuses to see itself correctly unless plainly confronted. Satyra can see plainly: her view is rooted in experience (224-248) and she has not only witnessed but also suffered the vanities of human pride.

Because of its strongly and personally realized satiric stance, The Steele Glas achieves a depth and coherence rare among both its predecessors and the neo-Juvenalian satires which followed. Gascoigne's attack on the evils of Elizabethan society is more profound than those of Crowley and Hake, or those of Marston and Guilpin who followed him in the 1590's. The misdeeds of avaricious soldiers, lawyers, merchants, and ministers grow ultimately from their failure to see themselves truly and maintain their right relation to society. Gascoigne's priests pray that all governing estates remember the twin ideals of truth and commonwealth (813 ff., 883-890). Concern for honesty and plain-dealing colors even the longest of the poem's catalogues (1066-1120): when the ideal priests ask when their prayers can stop, the answer is a review of nearly every position in English society—in effect, not until that great busy day when men must be honest with themselves and one another. Barclay, Hake, and Crowley had also enforced a moral standard upon society, but their morality is almost wholly on the surface of conventions accepted but mostly ignored by right-thinking people.

Though they are markedly different in tone and satiric focus from their English predecessors, the satires of the 1590's are marred by the same easy acceptance of social and literary conventions (though the conventions themselves are often quite different). While the focus of early satire was on the objects of attack and the standards by which they were judged, the focus in most neoclassical English Renaissance satire is on the satirist and his indignation. This satirist's artificially cultivated moods are seldom of much interest; His posture is an assumed and artificial hostility.⁷⁴ Marston addresses his poetry “To Detraction” and dedicates The Scourge of Villany “To his most esteemed and best beloved Self.”⁷⁵ Hall's satiric pose reminds one of a small boy throwing stones:

Nowe laugh I loud, and breake my spleen to see
This pleasing pastime of my poesie,
Much better than a Paris-garden Beare,
Or prating puppet in a theatre.
Go to then ye my sacred Sermones,
And please me more the more you do displease.(76)

Though the devil-may-care quality of these poems is initially appealing, it does not last. The great majority of these neo-Juvenalian formal satires are thematically shallow. More concerned with writing a satire than with satirizing important and fundamental human failings, their authors attack violations of accepted social norms such as extravagance in fashion, bad manners, and social pretension and affectation. There is little of the deeply felt ethical concern found in Langland and Gascoigne. Thomas Bastard, for instance, attacks usurers not so much for lending money at exorbitant interest as for their shamelessness in daring to mix as equals with reputable merchants and gentry. Social intrusiveness, not immoral assaults against the common weal, is Bastard's chief complaint.⁷⁷

Donne is the best and most profound writer of formal satires in the sixteenth century. Among the satirists, of course, he is far the best poet as well, but the permanent appeal of his satires owes to qualities also apparent in Gascoigne's work: his concern for morality rather than mere propriety and his empathy with the subjects of his satire. Like Gascoigne, Donne recognized the blinding, warping effect which selfish pride has on human values: “Selfelove cannot be called a distinct sin … but the roote of all sins.”⁷⁸ Though Donne's “Satyre I” uses the device of a Horatian stroll⁷⁹ to satirize a fop's absorption in such superficial braveries as tobacco taking and modish clothing, his subject is actually the young man's typical blindness to virtue. A monologue sets up the satiric criterion against which the young man's values as well as his behavior must be judged:

Why shoulds't thou (that dost not onely approve,
But in ranke itchie lust, desire, and love
The nakednesse and barenesse to enjoy,
Of thy plumpe muddy whore, or prostitute boy)
Hate vertue, though shee be naked, and bare?
At birth, and death, our bodies naked are;
And till our Soules be unapparrelled
Of bodies, they from blisse are banished.
Mans first blest state was naked, when by sinne
Hee lost that, yet hee was cloath'd but in beasts skin. …

37-46

“Satyre IV” illustrates Donne's identification with the objects of his satire: he recognizes that he, unlike the fop who afflicts him, has no suit to press, no reason for being at court other than the vanity common to postlapsarian humanity (ll. 7-20). Perhaps it is Donne's “Satyre V” on courtiers and suitors which links him most closely to Gascoigne. After describing the evil fortunes of suitors who (like Gascoigne) lose their patrimony seeking to increase it, Donne turns on the object of his commiseration and charges him with self-destroying blindness to his own good:

O wretch that thy fortunes should moralize
Esops fables, and make tales, prophesies.
Thou'art the swimming dog whom shadows cosened,
And div'st, neare drowning, for what's vanished.

88-91

Gascoigne's guiding concern with this theme of human pride and perception makes The Steele Glas not only an important experiment, but also the most significant satire between Skelton and Donne.

.....

Though an interesting poem, The Complainte of Phylomene has neither the serious purpose nor the unity of The Steele Glas. Despite Gascoigne's profession of observing “the same determinate invention” throughout, the poem is a mixed effort. One notes this in its two verse forms and in Gascoigne's statements in the prose dedications at its beginning and end. With sections written and altered from 1562 to 1576, the thematic emphases of the early poulter's measure “Fable of Philomela” are different from those of the pentameter frame tale.

It appears that the poet started with a rough paraphrase of the Philomela story in Ovid's Metamorphoses, to which he added some emphasis on standard complaint motifs (“The Fable of Philomela,” ll. 1-612). Then, probably in 1575, he added the frame tale (“Philomene” and the Conclusion) and that part of the “Fable” (ll. 613-808) that explicates and moralizes the nightingale's notes.

In the 1575 revision he uses the early paraphrase, “The Fable of Philomela” as the central exemplum in a moral complaint. This revision incorporates and alters devices taken from the Old French love vision (the chanson d'aventure) as inherited from Chaucer and fifteenth century Chaucerians. Unlike his chief source, The Mirror for Magistrates complaints, Gascoigne tells the central narrative exemplum, “The Fable …,” in the third person and uses it to enforce a personal and moral rather than a political theme. This theme—the horror of lechery and the importance of chastity—is further enforced by eighty-two lines of autobiographical allusion added with the prose note dated April, 1576.

Gascoigne began The Complainte of Phylomene in April of 1562, and left it substantially alone until April, 1575, when he wrote the first prose dedication. He completed the poem and its final prose appendage in April, 1576. Gascoigne invited speculation as to what was composed when by challenging Lord Grey “to gesse (by change of style) where the renewing of the verse may be most apparantly thought to begin.” We may assume that the poulter's measure paraphrase of Ovid's narrative (“The Fable” 1-612) was composed first since Gascoigne's other poulter's measure poems are early compositions and because this paraphrase relates the Philomela story on which the exegesis of the notes of the nightingale and the pentameter introduction and conclusion are based. Though Gascoigne may have paraphrased Ovid's narrative in 1562, the indebtedness of this section of the poem in both details and phrasing to Thomas Cooper's 1565 Thesaurus and William Golding's 1567 translation of The Metamorphoses indicates that he at least modified the “Fable” after 1567. The nightingale's reference to speaking against her sex (389) also indicates that the central exemplum was modified after the frame tale was planned or written.⁸⁰

Gascoigne's invitation to “gesse by change of style” where he took up again provides another method of determining which parts follow which. “Style” here refers both to moral emphasis and to metrical differences between the frame tale and the “Fable.”⁸¹ The shift in moral emphasis indicates that the additions start with the moralization of the nightingale's notes beginning at l. 613 of the “Fable.” Changes in Gascoigne's metrical preferences suggests that the pentameter frame tale was written after the poulter's measure paraphrase of Ovid. Since the frame tale is a later addition but contains with its narrative structure both a description of the nightingale's notes and the dreamer's wish for their explication, lines 613-808 of the “Fable” are connected in terms of composition, and were thus also written in 1575. The first eight lines of the concluding pentameter section complete the frame tale and logically belong to the section composed in 1575, but lines 9-90 must be that portion of the poem finished in 1576. They are really an epilogue explaining the moral application of the preceding poem and relating it to Gascoigne's life. Also, these eighty-two lines are addressed directly to Lord Grey, as in the 1576 prose note.

Thus, lines 1-612 of “The Fable of Philomela” were completed first, sometime after 1567. Then, in 1575, the prose dedication to Lord Grey, the introductory pentameter lines, the remainder (613-808) of the poulter's “Fable,” and the first eight lines of the concluding pentameter section were written. The final autobiographical eighty-two lines of the concluding pentameter section with the concluding prose note to Lord Grey were written in April of 1576.

The earliest section of the poem is an unabashed paraphrase of Ovid which suppresses Ovid's decorative details and adds standard contemptus motifs of fickle fortune and the unsteadfastness of this world. But this section is, strangely enough, a more significant predecessor of such narrative verse tragedies as Daniel's Complainte of Rasamund than is the poem as a whole. The complete poem—for all its theme of personal, instead of political morality—looks backward to The Mirror for Magistrates and fifteenth century allegory. Gascoigne's interest in a single figure, Philomela, and the events motivated by her character and behaviour causes him to suppress most of Ovid's description and psychological interest in other characters. Compare, for instance, Gascoigne's curt four-line treatment (133-136) of the evening's banquet and Tereus's lustful state with the following passage from F. J. Miller's Loeb translation:

Now Phoebus' toils were almost done and his horses were pacing down the western sky. A royal feast was spread, wine in cups of gold. Then they lay them down to peaceful slumber. But although the Thracian king retired, his heart seethes with thoughts of her. Recalling her look, her movement, her hands, he pictures at will what he has not yet seen, and feeds his own fires, his thoughts preventing sleep. Morning came and Pandion, wringing his son-in-law's hand as he was departing, consigned his daughter to him with many tears. …⁸²

VI. 486-493

Gascoigne's intention in “The Fable” was not to write a sensuous Ovidian poem; he prunes that part of Book Six dealing with the House of Pandion to focus on what happened to Philomela and why.⁸³ In addition to this sharp focus on a single figure, the early paraphrase of Ovid also anticipates other characteristics of later she-tragedies: their personal rather than political subjects, their heightened dramatic elements, and the flaws of character which motivate and render credible their protagonists' falls.⁸⁴ Gascoigne's shift from Ovid's delight in Philomene's beauty to a study of its tragic implications looks forward to Daniel's Rosamund with its interest in a single tragic character who misuses her beauty and is trapped by the consequences.⁸⁵

An examination of Gascoigne's treatment of Ovid's tale of Philomela makes clearer his anticipation of the tragic narratives of the 1590's. He concentrates on the description and psychological exploration of one character. He preserves entire such scenes as that of Philomela's rape (209-228) but condensed much of the rest. In lines 425-436 of “The Fable” Gascoigne describes the action dramatically, in contrast to Ovid's third person report:

… Philomela could not lift her eyes to her sister, feeling herself to have wronged her. And, with her face turned to the ground, longing to swear and call all the gods to witness that that shame had been forced upon her, she made her hands serve for voice.

VI. 605-609

Gascoigne's effort to motivate and make credible Philomela's fall is the most mature feature of “The Fable” and the one which relates it most closely to later Elizabethan she-tragedies. There had been little emphasis on internal causation in earlier Elizabethan narrative; in the 1559 Mirror for Magistrates fortune was to blame and an ethic of contemptus mundi is implicit. Of all nineteen tragedies of the 1559 edition, only those of Mowbray and Clifford are motivated by genuine tragic retribution. In only one of these does the fault punished resemble a flaw in character which leads to downfall in a secular world.⁸⁶ In Gascoigne's account, Philomela's own character and actions are responsible for her tragedy. Her vanity and willful pride in her beauty are important causes of her misfortune (81-84). These traits, which complement her more justifiable vengefulness, are added to Ovid's account. In The Metamorphoses, there is no hint of her wrongdoing:

Philomela entered, attired in rich apparel, but richer still in beauty; such as we are wont to hear the naiads described. …

451-453

And in Ovid's account, the onus of blame is totally on Tereus:

The moment he saw the maiden Tereus was inflamed with love, quick as if one should set fire to ripe grain, or dry leaves, or hay stored away in the mow. Her beauty, indeed, was worth it; but in his own case his own passionate nature pricked him on, and besides, the men of his clime are quick to love: his own fire and his nation's burnt in him.

455-460

Gascoigne suppresses all mention of Thracian lechery so that “hir looke” and “comely garments” not only “prinke it out her part” but are wholly responsible for pricking up Tereus's lust as well (77-90). Gascoigne's characterization makes him merely the instrument of Philomela's rape, to which her pride and vanity have laid her open.

Gascoigne's late additions make the poem a moral complaint modeled on fifteenth century nightingale poems. The fierce morality which Gascoigne draws from his narrative and explication may seem ill-suited to his material—an Ovidian tale within a love vision induced by a bird identified with courtly love—but this combination was not incongruous in the Renaissance. Throughout the Middle Ages Ovid had been interpreted allegorically and moralistically by men who believed that he had had a thorough acquaintance with the Old Testament. In 1565 Golding still felt obliged to explain Ovid's account of creation in terms of Genesis, and as late as 1632 Sandys explained the ‘philosophical’ sense of the Metamorphoses.⁸⁷ Ovid's tales were frequently the texts for moral homily. In 1560 one T. H. wrote The Fable of Ovid Treting Narcissus, Translated Out of Latin into English Mytre, with a Moral Thereunto, Very pleasant to Rede. Narcissus, of course, is damned by vanity, and the usual contemptus theme is enforced: honors and riches may be desired, but “they wracke them that possess.”⁸⁸

And the nightingale was not always an accomplice in illicit couplings; her song was frequently an allegory of the Passion.⁸⁹ One allegorized poem so closely resembles The Complainte of Phylomene in outline and points of variance from the conventional love vision as to raise the question of direct influence. In “A Sayenge of the Nightingale” the poet walks out on a June evening and hears the nightingale. He understands her song asking Venus for vengeance on false lovers and help for the true. The poet falls asleep and dreams of an angel who teaches him the true meaning of the nightingale's song: pure love free from any sinful thought. Rather than singing of fleshly love, the nightingale bewails Christ's sufferings for men's sins. This complaint is followed by a long allegory of Christ's passion.⁹⁰ Even though the poem is unfinished, the parallels with Gascoigne's poem are clear: the two poets' understanding of the nightingale's notes, the emphasis on false and true lovers, and the supernatural explicator.

Whether or not Gascoigne drew directly on “A Sayenge,” it exemplifies one of the traditions which shaped his poem; the other was the moral complaint. Thematically, as well as chronologically, The Complainte of Phylomene stands halfway between the medieval mirror complaints and the she-tragedies of the 1590's.

Both The Steele Glas and The Complainte of Phylomene show Gascoigne's importance as a literary pioneer who extended and developed the resources of English poetry for greater talents capable of producing more lasting works. The Complainte of Phylomene is an improvement upon Churchyard's Jane Shore but is not the equal of Daniel's Rosamund. It has been deservedly forgotten except by specialists. But, to recall Thomas Nashe's admonition on changing literary tastes, The Steele Glas has been abridged of its deserved esteem. It is ironic that what Gascoigne's contemporaries valued most in the poem—its gravity and serious morality, its examination of the roots of Elizabethan corruption, and its constant accumulation of evidence for a satiric indictment—should now stand between the satire and its readers. Though The Steele Glas does not speak to us with the immediacy of Donne's satires, and though we no longer seek accurate pictures of ages past in solitary poems, this satire is worth the effort of an informed reading. The social and moral comprehensiveness of its criticism and its strongly realized tone of bitter knowledge painfully won give it more than a textbook interest.

Notes

1. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London, 1904-1910; rpt. 1957 with corrections and supplementary notes by F. P. Wilson), III, 319.

2. “The Sixteenth Century Lyric in England,” Poetry, 53 (1939), 266.

3. Leicester Bradner, “The First English Novel: A Study of George Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F. J.,” PMLA, 45 (1930), 543-552.

4. See, for instance, John W. Cunliffe, “George Gascoigne,” The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (New York, 1911), III, 236; and C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 269.

5. Quoted by Cunliffe (“George Gascoigne,” p. 236) from “To the Courteous Reader” in Tofte's translation of Benedetto Varchi's The Blazon of Jealousie (London, 1615).

6. Douglas Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne (Princeton, 1967) pp. 152-153; also see Ivor Winters, pp. 262, 263.

7. R. M. Alden, The Rise of Formal Satire in England (Philadelphia, 1899; rpt. New York, 1962), pp. 70-72; G. K. Smart, “English Nondramatic Blank Verse in the Sixteenth Century,” Anglia, 61 (1937), 382-384; Lewis, p. 270.

8. The authoritative biography is Charles Tyler Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (New York, 1942; rpt. 1966).

9. Felix E. Schelling, The Life and Writings of George Gascoigne (Philadelphia, 1893; rpt. New York, 1967), pp. 3-5; Prouty, pp. 5-6, 8-10.

10. The Causes of the English Revolution, 1549-1642 (London, 1965), p. 107.

11. For the complex and sordid details of Gascoigne's inheritance see Prouty, pp. 21, 35-40, 315-324.

12. Wallace T. MacCaffrey, “Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics,” Elizabethan Government, ed. S. T. Bindoff, et al. (London, 1961), pp. 103, 111.

13. R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912), p. 402; and Stone, Revolution, pp. 67-76.

14. The 1547 and 1573 Books of Homilies were required to be read regularly from the pulpit. The best access to these official doctrines is still E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1944; rpt. 1962), pp. 28-30, 78-84 et passim. For a more complete treatment see Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies (Melbourne, 1934).

15. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 257-268.

16. Prouty's study of Close Roll entries (pp. 305-314) documents the transfer of Gascoigne's patrimony to specific lawyers, saddlers, and fishmongers.

17. For an account of how Tudor domestic policy was still shaped by the old hierarchical ideals see J. H. Hexter, “The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England,” Reappraisals in History (Evanston, 1961; rpt. New York, 1963), pp. 105-111. Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936) explains the cosmological hierarchical views on which medieval social theory was based; Otto Gierke, Political Theories of The Middle Ages, tr. F. W. Maitland (Cambridge, 1900) enunciates the political theory. The durability of the medieval ideal is indicated by the early Puritan's desire and attempt to return to it. He insisted on the inseparability of one's moral and social conscience, and claimed that the responsibility of each individual, peasant to noble, is to subordinate his own interest and aggrandizement to the common good. G. R. Elton, England Under the Tudors (London, 1956), p. 424. Also see M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939), pp. 397-404.

18. Hexter, “The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance,” Reappraisals in History, pp. 48-56, 65-70.

19. Lawrence Stone, “Social Mobility in England, 1500-1700,” Past and Present, 33 (1966), p. 38.

20. Elton, p. 256; MacCaffery, pp. 97-101, 125.

21. Hexter, “The Myth of the Middle Class,” Reappraisals, pp. 93-116.

22. Wilfred Prest, “Legal Education of the Gentry, 1560-1640,” Past and Present, 38 (1967), 20-39.

23. Both were notoriously quarrelsome and dangerous. Camden's History … describes Yorke as “a man of loose and dissolute Behaviour, desperately audacious, famous in his time amongst the common Hacksters and Swaggerers, as being the first that, to the great Admiration of many at his boldness first brought into England that bold and dangerous way of Foining with the Rapier in Duelling.” Quoted by Prouty, p. 64.

24. The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. J. W. Cunliffe (Cambridge, 1907-1910), I, 380. Hereafter cited as Works.

25. Works, I, 349.

26. MacCaffrey, pp. 108-109.

27. Eric S. Brooks, Sir Christopher Hatton (London, 1946), pp. 14-15, 19, 23, 28-31.

28. J. E. Neale, “The Elizabethan Political Scene,” Essays in Elizabethan History (London, 1958), p. 69.

29. Brooks, pp. 19, 145-166, 311-315; MacCaffrey, 119, 125. See Lewis Einstein, Tudor Ideals (New York, 1921), pp. 26-46 for a view of the court similar to Gascoigne's own, reinforced with anecdote.

30. Prouty, p. 25.

31. Prouty, pp. 26-48.

32. Prouty, p. 44.

33. Works, I, 65.

34. Works, I, 139-184.

35. Prouty, Ch. III. The corruption and abuses which Gascoigne could only mention were normally expected and sometimes officially recognized Elizabethan military procedures. See C. G. Cruikshank, Elizabeth's Army (Oxford, 1966), Chs. II-XII.

36. See Prouty, pp. 61-65, who quotes the note in full.

37. Works, I, 3, 16. See also I, 462, “A letter devised for a young lover” which Gascoigne assigned to his “Weedes to be avoyded.”

38. Quoted by Prouty, p. 63.

39. Works I, 7 and Prouty, p. 193.

40. Though this concern with detractors and carping critics was part of a literary tradition [See H. S. Bennet, English Books and Readers: 1558-1603 (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 6-8], it was nonetheless a real concern. See Phoebe Sheavyn, The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, 2nd edition, revised throughout by J. W. Saunders (New York, 1967), especially p. 57.

41. Eleanor Rosenberg, Leicester: Patron of Letters (New York, 1955), p. xvii; and Sheavyn, p. 27.

42. Knappen, p. 280.

43. Though Gascoigne was well read in classical authors and drew on Horace and Juvenal for the idea and form of his satire, he had deep roots in medieval literature. Lydgate's 1422 prose tract, The Serpent of Division, condemns individual wilfulness and surquedry (Gascoigne's word for wilful, self-deluding pride) as the chief internal cause of the fall of states. See Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate, tr. Ann E. Keep (Berkeley, 1961), pp. 84-87. The Grief of Joye draws on Petrarch's De Remediis Fortunae; The Droome of Doomes Day contains translations of parts of Pope Innocent III's De Contemptu Mundi and of St. Augustine's Sermons. His diction and structural devices indicate close familiarity with medieval literature. Besides many archaisms sometimes found in Elizabethan poetic diction, Gascoigne's Posies contain a number not found in Tottel's Miscellany or even Chaucer. See T. S. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's Small Latin and Less Greek. (Urbana, 1944), I, passim; Vere Rubel, Poetic Diction in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1941), p. 189; Maveety; and Thomas B. Stroup and H. Ward Jackson, “Gascoigne's Steele Glas and the Bidding of the Bedes,” SP, 58 (1961), 52-60.

44. Many of Skelton's poems are satires and he even quotes Juvenal's Difficile est satiram non scribere, but he did not consider his poems to be formally in Juvenal's tradition. See Alden, p. 29. Wyatt's three satires (not so called till Thomas Wharton's 1774 History of English Poetry), though perhaps the most successful of any in the sixteenth century in catching Horace's urbanity, ease, and natural conversational tone, are translations and adaptations. See Patricia Thompson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background (Stanford, 1964), pp. 238-269.

45. The origins of this conception are various and not always clear. Aelius Donatus's treatise prefixed to Terence's Vetus Comoedia located satire's origin in satyr plays distinguished for their viciousness of attack. To this Thomas Drant added a false etymology from the Arabic word for spear, also identifying the form with the planet Saturn. See John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956), pp. 301-303.

46. A Medicinable Morall, that is, the two Bookes of Horace his Satyres, Englyshed accordyng to the presecription of saint Hierome (London, 1566), A₃^v, A₄^v.

47. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd edition (New York, 1961), p. 216; see J. W. Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York, 1967), pp. 244-270. Owst (pp. 232, 312) maintains that Barclay, in his translation of Brant's Ship of Fools is completely within the medieval homiletic tradition, and quotes a passage from a Bromyard sermon that closely resembles Gascoigne's own lines on social ambition (405-408): “The squire is not satisfied unless he lives like a knight, the knight wants to be a baron; the baron, an earl; the earl, a king.”

48. To Robert Crowley, his first printer, as well as to Puttenham and Meres, Langland was considered a satirist, ranked with Lucillius, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius. Milton attacked Hall's claim to be the first English satirist by reference to the “vision and creed of Pierce Plowman.” Hallet Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 208; English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. O. B. Hardison (New York, 1963), p. 159; Francis Meres' Treatise “Poetrie,” ed. D. C. Allen (Urbana, 1933), p. 79; and An Apology against a Pamphlet Call'd A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions of the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus, ed. H. M. Ayres in The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York, 1931-1938), III, i, 329.

49. There were three editions of the B-text of Piers Plowman in 1550; it was reprinted in 1561. The echo of the following theme in The Steele Glas (1029-1030) clearly suggests Gascoigne's familiarity with the poem:

    Ne none sooner saved ne sadder of beleve
    Than plowmen and pastoures and pore comune laborers.
    Soulerers and shepherdes, such lewed iottes
    Percen with a pater-noster the paleys of hevene.

    B.X. 455-458. Cited by Walter W. Skeat, ed. Specimens of English Literature, (Oxford, 1871), III, 460. Stanley R. Maveety, “Versification in The Steele Glas,” SP, 60 (1963), 166-173, makes a very good case for the direct influence of Langland's alliterative, four stress verse upon Gascoigne's writing of blank verse.

50. The edition cited is that of J. H. W. bennett (Oxford, 1972).

51. John Hurt Fisher, “Wyclif, Langland, and the Pearl Poet on the Subject of Aristocracy,” Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. MacEdward Leach (Philadelphia, 1961), p. 147.

52. John Lawlor, Piers Plowman: An Essay in Criticism (New York, 1962), p. 212.

53. Ballads from Manuscript, ed. F. J. Furnivall, (London, 1868), I. 96.

54. A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire (Chicago, 1961), pp. 196-207.

55. The term “accumulative” is from Alan Swallow, “John Skelton: The Structure of the Poem,” PQ, 32 (1953), 35. “He gathers data not once but time after time to cover the same point again and again. … And this accumulative method is apparent not only in terms of materials, but also in terms of the structure of the verse line. …”

56. The Poetical Works of John Skelton, ed. Alexander Dyce, (London, 1843; rpt. New York, 1965), I, 333.

57. The Ship of Fools, tr. Alexander Barclay, ed. T. H. Jamieson, (New York, 1874, rpt. 1966) I, 187.

58. The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M. Cowper (London, 1872), p. 53.

59. Newes out of Powles Churchyarde Written in English Satyrs Wherein is reprooved excessive and unlawfull seeking after riches, and the evill spending of the same (London, 1579). The only edition extant is the 1579 one, but Hake in his dedication to Leicester mentions having published it originally about 1566 or 1567. The shift of satiric focus from pride to avarice follows a similar shift in the homiletic tradition. The preoccupation with this narrower cause of human folly is evident in the titles of mid-century interludes: All for Money, Enough is as Good as a Feast, and The Trial of Treasure. Blench, pp. 244-270.

60. The text cited is Juvenal and Persius, tr. G. G. Ramsay (London, 1918).

61. Gilbert Highet, Juvenal the Satirist (New York, 1954), pp. 2-41.

62. The text cited is Horace: Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough (New York, 1929).

63. Against this tendency see W. S. Anderson, “The Roman Socrates: Horace and His Satires,” Satire: Critical Essays on Roman Literature, ed. J. P. Sullivan (Bloomington, 1963), pp. 11, 16-30; Thomas E. Maresca, Pope's Horatian Poems (Columbus, Ohio, 1966), pp. 52, 197, 211-221.

64. Peter E. Medine, ed. Horace his arte of Poetrie, Pistles and Satyrs, tr. Thomas Drant (New York, 1972), p. ix.

65. Smith, 217.

66. C. P. Jones, Plutarch and Rome (Oxford, 1971), pp. 70-78; Alan Wardman, Plutarch's Lives (Berkeley, 1974), p. 34.

67. R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage (New York, 1954; rpt. 1964), pp. 520-522; John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, 3rd edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1920; rpt. New York, 1958). II, 489.

68. Wardman, pp. 3, 19.

69. The text cited is Plutarch's Lives, tr. Bernadotte Perrin (New York, 1914).

70. Sandys, I, 627; II. 496; Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1949), p. 190. The most recent edition of the Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX is the Teubner, ed. Carolus Kempf (Lipsiae, 1888).

71. Charles Thomas Cruttwell, A History of Roman Literature (New York, 1908), pp. 346-347; J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome in the Silver Age, 2nd edition, ed. A. M. Duff (New York, 1960), pp. 56-63.

72. Mary Claire Randolph, “The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire,” PQ, 21 (1942), 369, 373, 380-384.

73. R. C. Johnson, George Gascoigne (New York, 1972), pp. 102-107. Small mirrors made of polished metal kept in a case (“Epilogus,” ll. 1-2) or of brown stained glass had been the best available until the sixteenth century. The newly available Venetian crystal mirrors backed with silver and mercury could be as much as four feet long and achieved a flattering brightness heretofore unknown.

74. See Lewis, pp. 469-478.

75. The Poems of John Marson, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1961), pp. 94-95.

76. The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1949), p. 51.

77. See Alden, pp. 95, 109-111, 123, et passim. See also Peter, pp. 138-148.

78. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G. R. Potter and E. M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1962), IV. 330.

79. Cf. Horace, Satires I. ix. The text of Donne here quoted is The Poems of John Donne, ed. Sir Herbert Grierson (London, 1933).

80. See DeWitt T. Starnes, “Literary Features of Renaissance Dictionaries,” SP, 27 (1940), 36-38; and “Gascoigne's The Complainte of Philomene: A Rejoinder,” The University of Texas Studies in English, 27 (1947), 28-41.

81. See Works I, pp. 3, 9, where he apologizes to the “Divines” for his lascivious poems in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres; in his address “To al yong Gentlemen,” he refers to the worthless style of the poems in connection with “the doubtfulnesse of some darke places” which had made them dangerous.

82. The text cited is Ovid's Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justus Miller, (Cambridge, 1921), I, 323.

83. The stark narrative of the central sections of the poem has been compared to a medieval ballad. See Louis R. Zocca, Elizabethan Narrative Poetry (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1950), pp. 222-226.

84. Following on the success of Samuel Daniel's The Complaint of Rosamund (1592) a number of first person verse narratives appeared in which fallen beauties told of their lapse from virtue with lovers of high estate and of their inevitable misery. E.g., Thomas Lodge's The Tragicall Complaint of Elstred (1593, Anthony Chutes Bewtie Dishonoured (1593), and Richard Barnfield's The Legend of Cassandra (1595).

85. See pp. 42, 55 in Poems and a Defence of Rhyme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Chicago, 1930). Gascoigne's poem echoes the contemptus mundi tradition, but Philomela's pride and selfish misuse of her beauty are causes of her rape and mutilation.

86. William Peery, “Tragic Retribution in the 1559 Mirror for Magistrates,” SP, 17 (1949), 113-130. Pride led Mowbrey to his envy of Henry Earle of Hartforde, which in turn caused him to overreach himself and be banished the kingdom. Lord Clyfford, for his cruelty in slaying the son of his enemy the Duke of York, was struck by a headless arrow through the throat as a judgement of God. See The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1938, rpt. New York, 1960), pp. 110, 194-195.

87. Davis P. Harding, Milton and the Renaissance Ovid (Urbana, 1941), pp. 20-21.

88. Zocca, p. 213.

89. D. A. Pearsall, ed. The Floure and the Leafe and The Assembly of Ladies (London, 1962), p. 35.

90. Lydgate's Mirror Poems: The Two Nightingale Poems, ed. Otto Glauning, EETS (ES), vol. 80 (London, 1900).