SOURCE: Jensen, Ejner J. “Hall and Marston: The Role of the Satirist.” Satire Newsletter 4, no. 2 (spring 1967): 72-83.

[In this essay, Jensen compares Hall's concept of satire with that of John Marston, observing that Hall has a stronger sense of the satirist's purpose. Jensen concludes that Hall's assurance carries over to his poetic technique as well, making his satire more effective and more readable than that of Marston.]

It is extremely difficult for a modern reader to approach the work of the verse satirists of the last decade of the sixteenth century with any assurance of his ability to read them properly. To a student who has based his conception of satire on his reading of Dryden, Pope, Swift, and, to cite a contemporary example, Evelyn Waugh, the aims and methods of Hall and Marston are puzzling and even incomprehensible. Recently, scholars have attempted to clear away some of the obstacles imposed by the passage of time and to provide a meaningful historical perspective for the study of these writers. Arnold Davenport, Arnold Stein, John Peter, and Philip Smith have made significant progress in determining the sources of style and content in the satires of Hall and Marston.¹ Professor Hallett Smith finds that the work of these writers and others like them grew out of the circumstances of sixteenth-century English life rather than from the work of previous writers of satire. “The significant sources of satire,” he claims, “are not literary or philosophical; they are social and economic.”² More recently Anthony Caputi has disputed Professor Smith's declaration, for he has tried to demonstrate that Marston's satire grew out of and reflects, both in theme and structure, the author's Neo-Stoic philosophical position.³

But while recent critics of Hall and Marston have worked with considerable success to illuminate the sources which contribute to their satire, these same critics have withdrawn from the task of making literary judgments about the two writers. To some extent even this attention to sources marks a substantial improvement in the fortunes of these satirists. Hall's work in satire had been generally ignored, and Marston was apparently considered fair game for any critic with an urge to explore the psychological peculiarities of a man who was, at various times, poet, playwright, and priest.

The difficulty of combining historical criticism with careful attention to the work of art is strikingly illustrated in Anthony Caputi's treatment of Marston's satire. Caputi asserts that Marston's philosophical outlook determined his treatment of satiric themes. He tries to show that the personae the satirist employed were consciously adapted roles which were taken over from the Neo-Stoic philosophical system and used to point the way to reform. But Caputi does not refer to the satires frequently enough to show these personae functioning in the works themselves. In view of the criticisms usually directed at Marston's work this is a serious fault. Earlier critics of this poet have censured him for dwelling unnecessarily on the vices he attacks, for displaying a greater interest in the abuse than in its correction.⁴ It is not sufficient to demonstrate that Marston's intention was reform; the critic who hopes to show that Marston was a successful satirist must be able to document the writer's intention from the satires.

The Renaissance conception of satire was confused with regard to both the origin of the word and the characteristics of the genre. The untangling of these distinctions has been attempted elsewhere, and these matters are outside of the scope of this article.⁵ More important for the immediate purpose is the discovery of the working definitions employed by Hall and Marston. These definitions offered by the satirists are useful because they are direct and because they may provide our most trustworthy information about the attitude of the writers to their own work. In the prologue to his Virgidemiarum Hall indicates that his purpose is to expose wickedness:

Goe darling muse on with thy thanklesse taske,
And do the ugly face of vice unmaske.

(Prologue, 19-20)⁶

In his first satire, an attack on popular poetic forms, Hall reveals his reasons for writing satire. He lists and rejects the choices available to a beginning poet. He does not wish to write sonnets, or romances, or tragedies, or pastorals; and the terms in which he describes these and other forms are wholly unflattering. But his decision to become “the first English satirist” has no aesthetic basis. In fact, he explicitly dismisses artistic grounds as a consideration in his acceptance of the role of satirist:

Rather had I albee in careless rymes,
Check the mis-ordred world, and lawlesse times.

(I.i.23-24)

Hall is emphatic about the conditions of his age; he considers the times evil because men lack discipline, because there is widespread luxury and pretension, because the old, stable society with its comfortable virtues is breaking down. In the face of such widespread disorder the satirist must take immediate action. He cannot afford to be a gentle mocker of the follies of men, subtly urging them to reform. He must convince particular men of their faults and urge them, by the vigor of his attack, to reform. Hall describes the satirist's function in a comparison which is so amusing to the modern reader that he is likely to miss the violence which the image serves to disguise:

          The Satyre should be like the Porcupine,
That shoots sharpe quills out in each angry line,
          And wounds the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye,
Of him that heares, and readeth guiltily.(7)

(V.iii.1-4)

Dismissing the question of the sources of Hall's natural history, the reader may see in these lines a suggestion of the acerbity which the poet desires in his satires. We speak today of the barbs of the satirists, but the term is little more than a dead metaphor. It is possible to imagine Hall actually visualizing his task, actually believing that his function was to wound mankind until it recognized its errors. But errors is perhaps the wrong word to use in Hall's case. He rarely uses the word himself; and he seldom employs folly, a word which is indispensable to our critical vocabulary in any discussion of satire. Hall's enemy was vice. The follies and errors of man may be occasioned by momentary lapses of judgment; vice is the willful rejection of a good which is both available and known. Derision is the best weapon against folly; a more violent method is required for those who willingly follow the path of falsehood.

Marston's comments on the role of the satirist and the function of satire are apparently designed to protect the writer from any charge of personal abuse. In the address “To him that hath perused me” at the end of The Scourge of Villanie he attempts to clarify the nature of satire, “which is under fained private names, to note generall vices” (p. 176). This is only a prose statement of the position he had adopted earlier in The Scourge, when he asserted his intention in a more agitated tone:

Preach not the stoickes patience to me,
I hate no man, but mens impietie.

(SV II.5-6)

There are, however, few general statements in Marston's work which point to his conception of the satirist's office. More frequently his references to satire are attempts to announce his immediate intention. At the conclusion of an attack on hypocrisy, for instance, he addresses these lines to guilty readers:

          Yee Fainers, leave t'abuse
Our better thoughts with your hipocrisie,
Or by the ever-living Veritie,
I'le stryp you nak'd, and whyp you with my rimes,
Causing your shame to live to after times.

(SV IX.126-130)

Such a charge is neither effective nor artful; and the use of a statement of intention is hardly appropriate, coming as it does at the end of an attack on the evildoers to whom Marston addresses his threat. Marston frequently includes statements of this type, warning evildoers that they are not safe from the satirist's whip; but these warnings rarely advance his thought or clarify his meaning. Instead they seem to be weak attempts at self-assurance on the part of a writer who is uncertain of his own ethical position and dubious of the effect of his satire.

Another hint concerning Marston's attitude toward satire appears in his address to Joseph Hall in “Reactio,” a reply to Hall's attack on contemporary poetry. Marston urges Hall:

Eate not thy dam, but laugh and sport with me
At strangers follie with a merry glee.
Lets not malign our kin.

(167-169)

This invitation sounds strangely out of place when it is compared with one of Hall's statements about the nature of satire. Of course Marston is trying to adopt a friendly, conciliatory attitude; but the entire statement is incompatible with a deeply felt seriousness about satire. Hall had rejected more profitable kinds of poetry; he hardly viewed satire primarily as a source of money. He was in earnest about the desire to reform, but he did not view the stripping off of vice's mask as a source of glee. Finally, it was not his intention to malign but to reform. If Marston's offer was put forward seriously, he misjudged his man; and if he believed in the implications which are obvious in his gesture of friendship, he justified the opinion of modern critics who see in his satire little concern with the reformation of vice and the correction of abuses.

Against those critics of Marston who charge that the poet dwells excessively on the vice he attacks, Caputi advances his claim that the poet had, in fact, a lofty conception of his role as a satirist. He suggests that the Stoics, Epictetus and others, who “furnished him with the essentials of his philosophy … provided him in the role of the teacher-philosopher with a way to dignify and ennoble the status of the satirist.”⁸ To demonstrate Marston's belief in the significant advance he was making in satire, Caputi quotes six lines from The Scourge of Villanie; I give the lines and the comment with which Caputi introduces them: “With a full awareness of his contribution to satiric tradition he could boast:

Oh how on tip-toes proudly mounts my muse!
Stalking a loftier gate than satires use.
Methinks some sacred rage warms all my veins,
Making my sprite mount up to higher strains
Than well beseems a rough-tongu'd satire's part;
But Art curbs Nature, Nature guideth Art.”(9)

(SV IX.5-10)

The interpretation of these lines offered by Caputi stands up only if the reader ignores the first four lines of this ninth satire. Marston opens satire nine with a stirring, mock-heroic invocation:

Grim-fac'd Reproofe, sparkle with threatning eye
Bend they sower browes in my tart poesie.
Avaunt yee curres, houle in some cloudie mist,
Quake to behold a sharp-fang'd Satyrist.

(SV IX.1-4)

The six lines that follow should not be read as Marston's inflated attitude concerning the nature of satire and his own role as a satirist; they should instead be seen as an explicit comment on the artificial loftiness of the introductory lines to the satire. Satire nine does, after all, bear the epigraph “Here's a toy to mocke an Ape indeede.”

Marston, then, provides us with no useful definition of satire; Hall, on the other hand, does not permit us to doubt his intention. Hall's attitude is less familiar to us; his pronouncements suggest that his satires may be too serious for modern taste. He seems to leave too little room for humor, and he apparently does not wish to attack those follies of man which may be cured by ridicule. Marston's emphasis on sporting and merriment, in his rare attempts to treat the subject of satire in a theoretical way, more accurately reflects modern views of satire. But writers are often the poorest critics of their own work; and although Hall's comments about his satire make him appear a most uncongenial figure, his satires have an appeal which is wholly lacking in those of Marston. Arnold Davenport has remarked that, although “one can return with enjoyment to Hall … Marston's … satires … are read only for curiosity, and re-read, if at all, on business only.”¹⁰ What is the basis of this judgment? Part of its foundation may be seen in what Davenport called “the polish and intellectual liveliness” of Hall's Virgidemiarum.¹¹ A critical verdict in favor of Hall cannot be based on his wisdom in the choice of subject matter, for he and Marston are basically concerned with the same set of problems. The satirists see the same vices, and there are no significant differences in the direction of their criticisms. Both Hall and Marston attack hypocrisy, effeminacy, the problem of enclosures, and the vanity of pride in one's heritage. They respond to the same world of experience; and they accept that world, in its totality, as the raw material of their verse.

The crucial difference between Hall and Marston is not to be found in their choice of targets for satire. It is to be found in their verse. It is a matter of technique and temper. Only in the verse itself can the questions of philosophical outlook be adequately explored; for Marston's intentions as a Neo-Stoic must be realized in the form he chose for the expression of those ideas or the satires must be regarded as failing in their basic purpose. By the same token Hall's Virgidemiarum must itself be the instrument with which the poet exposes vice and urges evildoers to reform.

Caputi, trying to show that the origin of Marston's satiric technique is found in the teaching of the Stoics, quotes Epictetus to illustrate Marston's purpose: “‘The real guide, whenever he finds a person going astray, leads him back to the right road, instead of leaving him with a scornful laugh or an insult.’”¹² But it is precisely the reforming element which Marston lacks; his satire seems to exist in a vacuum. When he should be pointing the way for those who accept his criticism, he continues to rail and to warn them of more abuse to come. It is as though he loses the moral intention in his fascination with the splendid scourging figure he cuts in his verse. He seems unable to see his principles for his poetry.

This is not to suggest that Marston does not see the general faults which underlie the abuses he attacks. On the contrary, he has frequent passages in which he illustrates a number of faults by reference to a specific current practice. In the first of his Certaine Satyres, for instance, he launches a remarkably successful assault on “upstart courtiers” through one

Who on his glorious soutchion
Can quaintly show wits newe invention,
Advancing forth some thirstie Tantalus,
Or else the Vulture on Promethius.

(CS I.31-34)

The barb still hits its mark; the theme of Marston's satire will find a receptive audience in any society in which individuals try to create for themselves a family history. But one effective thrust is not sufficient to earn a victory, and by the end of this attack on pretension Marston has apparently spent his force. He turns from hypocrites (the epigraph of this satire is Quedam videntur, et non sunt) to those who display obvious faults, and he concludes the attack:

Those I doe beare, because I too well know
They are the same, they seeme in outward show.
But all confusion sever from mine eye
This Ianian-bifront hypocrisie.

(CS I.134-137)

There is nothing in the conclusion which has not been said more effectively before. The reader finds in this first satire a number of obscure allusions, one or two successful attacks on pretension; at the end of it all he is told, in the most prosaic manner, that the author dislikes hypocrisy. This tendency to summarize, to say again what he has already made quite clear, is a besetting fault in Marston's satire. It is a fault because it weakens the structure of the individual satires, but it is a more serious error insofar as it betrays the poet's own uncertainty about the success of his work.

The most elaborate explanation of Marston's tactics in his satires has been put forward by Caputi. He finds that Marston employs a pattern which consists of attack, digression, and didactic peroration.¹³ In Certaine Satyres he finds that the first three poems constitute the attack. These are followed by a digression, “Reactio.” The final poem, then, is the peroration. In The Scourge of Villanie Caputi finds that “the constituent poems divide themselves into three sustained attacks, culminating in didactic passages at the end of Satires IV, VIII, and XI.”¹⁴ How does this analytical scheme work when it is applied to the poetry? The final poem of Certaine Satyres has as its epigraph Parva magna, magna nulla. Marston returns to this theme several times in the course of the fifth satire:

Thus petty thefts are payed, and soundly whipt,
But greater crimes are slightly overslipt.

(CS II.35-36)

Thus little scapes are deeply punished,
But mighty villanes are for Gods adored.

(CS V.57-58)

Thus slight neglects are deepest villanie,
But blasting mouths deserve a deitie.

(CS V.121-127)

Euge! small faults to mountaines straight are raised,
Slight scapes are whipt, but damned deeds are praised.

(CS V.137-138)

After working several variations on the theme suggested by the epigraph, Marston concludes this satire with a lengthy passage of rather heavy-handed sarcasm. Nowhere in this satire does one find the attitude of the reformer who is eager to guide those who have strayed from the path of virtue.

It is less difficult to find a constructive attitude in those passages of The Scourge of Villanie which Caputi finds so important. The conclusions of Satires IV, VIII, and XI are much more obviously didactic than Marston's usual verse; these passages stress the importance of man's spiritual nature and the need for man to establish and maintain a close relationship with Divinity. These passages are emphatically hortatory; they break off sharply from the satires to which they are joined. They represent, in fact, an attempt to persuade the reader, through reasoned argument, that he should turn to virtue. Again, Marston's confidence in the power of his satire gives out, and he turns to explicit commentary to clarify his position. His reliance on this technique is perhaps Marston's most serious artistic fault, for the poet should not have to use the techniques of the pulpit. In Satire XI, which is the final satire of The Scourge of Villanie, Marston expresses the folly of individual hobbyhorses, the “Humours” which keep men from the truth. The first part of this satire is successful because the poet presents a series of vignettes in which characters in action reveal their own folly and wickedness. But Marston is not content to let the implications of this treatment make an impression as they should through the vehicle of his art. Instead he breaks off his list of humorous characters to apostrophize:

                                                                      Gallants,
Me thinks your soules should grudge, and inly scorne
To be made slave, to humors that are borne
In slime of filthy sensuality.

(SV XI.204-207)

The illusion is destroyed; the satirist who was beginning to find an instrument of persuasion in art abandons art for oratory. A modern critic might suggest that Marston violates the principle of aesthetic distance. No matter how this abrupt transition is described, it is clear that it destroys the reader's involvement and calls attention to a purpose which might have been achieved wholly by artistic means.

The technique in Marston's satires is faulty because the poet often seems unsure of himself. His constant reiteration of purpose and his abrupt shifts from poetry to argument reveal his uncertainty again and again. The temper of his satires is equally damaging to their chances for critical acceptance. Marston was never more scurrilous and abusive than in these works, and the accumulation of vulgar epithets and filthy imagery which is scattered through Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie threatens at times to overwhelm his satiric intention. The vulgarity of language which pervades these works is not, however, the only factor which determines the temper of his satire. The temper is more significantly influenced by the studied cleverness of the presentation of The Scourge of Villanie to Detraction. It is suggested too by his emphasis on his personal enjoyment of the task at hand; “to sport with folly” seems to be an end in itself. Taken together, these indications of Marston's attitude suggest that his use of verse satire is tentative and incomplete. The poet, striking a pose or shoring up a weak attack with straightforward persuasive rhetoric, is always too obviously present.

The contrast between Marston and Hall is nowhere more apparent than in this matter of temper. I have suggested earlier that Hall described his role in the most unequivocal terms. Satire was to be harsh and unrelenting, and the satirist was to be the passionate whipper of vice. But Hall's satires rarely display a tendency to violence. Instead of railing ceaselessly against vice, Hall merely demonstrates the foolishness of those who have abandoned virtue. Rather than lash the wickedness of current practices, he refers the reader to the behavior of men in an earlier and better age. He mocks effeminate courtiers and bad poets; he smiles pityingly upon those whose only virtue has been inherited and who have not shown that they deserve to bear the names of their fathers. But Hall never preaches; he never pleads the cause of virtue with the voice of the orator. His values and judgments are implicit in his poetry, and the reader who is unable to discover the moral purpose which informs the Virgidemiarum is not likely to be moved in the direction of improvement by long passages of bold exhortation.

Most of the evils Hall attacks may be grouped under the categories of disproportion and disorder. Much of his criticism of contemporary literature, for example, is based on a belief in the value of “good form,” a value which is now associated popularly with snobbery but which is also a criterion employed generally by men of culture. Hall does not bother to conceal his contempt for writers who violate the principle of decorum:

A goodly hoch-poch, when vile Russettings,
Are match'd with monarchs, and with mighty kings.(15)

(I.iii.39-40)

Equally blameworthy are those who allow their imaginations free rein, who find in poetic license the freedom to disregard facts. This is a fault which frequently escapes notice in poetry, says Hall:

But if some painter in presuming skill
Should paint the stars in center of the earth,
Could ye forbeare some smiles, and taunting mirth?

(I.iv.18-20)

Although Hall's sharp eye spies out the faults in contemporary writers, it is also quick to see poetic merit. He declares Spenser off limits for the satirist:

But let no rebell Satyre dare traduce
Th' eternall Legends of thy Faery Muse,
Renowned Spencer: whome no earthly wight
Dares once to emulate, much less dares despight.

(I.iv.21-24)

The reference to Spenser is not haphazard, nor is Hall's praise of The Faerie Queene merely an attempt to point out an exception to the rule. Rather, the use of Spenser as an example of a good poet, one who avoids the errors and excesses into which other writers have slipped, illustrates Hall's habitual satiric technique. Time after time he makes his point by comparing the existing situation with the way things are or were in model cases or in better times. The device is effective because it establishes an implicit moral imperative. Hall is not saying merely that this is the way things can be and sometimes are; he is suggesting that this is the way things should be. The moral center of Hall's attitude is located, then, within his verse; the poetry itself is made an instrument of delightful teaching.

Much of the reader's enjoyment of Hall's satire has its source in the poet's use of exaggeration as a technique for exposing vice. The technique is particularly appropriate when used to attack distortion and disproportion. Hall simply enlarges upon the excesses of those whom he attacks until their faults are apparent to all but the most foolish of his readers. The boundless imagination of the sonneteers was a stock subject for ridicule; but Hall exaggerates their already absurd extravagances:

As wittie Pontan in great earnest said
His Mistress brests were like two weights of lead,
Another thinks her teeth might likened bee
To two fayre rankes or payles of yvory
To fence in sure the wild beast of her tongue,
From eyther going farre, or going wrong.

(VI.i.281-286)

The attack on a convention which was being made ridiculous does not stop with exaggeration. Hall goes on to question the very foundation on which the convention is based; if other poets exaggerate the romantic elements of the sonnet, he can write an equally excessive realistic treatment of the lady's qualities. The satirist merely extends the exaggeration in the other direction; he reveals the disparity between the apparent and the real in grand, hyperbolic verses.

Of course, Hall does not believe his own exaggerations; but by making them as horrifying or as repugnant as he can he manages to suggest the possibility of a mean between the extremes he places before the reader. His attack on Roman Catholicism, for example, is among the most bitter of his satires, but the reader is always able to see the general ideas—a distrust of superstition and a hatred of excessive ceremony—above the harsh particularity of the incidents through which the satirist expresses them:

To see an old shorne Lozell perched hye
Crossing beneath a golden Canopy,
The whiles a thousand hairelesse crowns crouch low
To kisse the precious case of his proud toe.

(IV.vii.13-16)

It is the distortion of the purpose of worship to which Hall objects; men's abjectness is not proper before any human representative of Divinity, and Hall makes his point by stressing the baseness of the humans who participate in this travesty of true religion.

One of the important themes of Virgidemiarum is the weakness and degeneracy of the present. Hall bemoans the loss of traditional values and the rise of upstarts in every area of life. Men are no longer men; they are either bestial or effeminate. Vanity and pretension triumph over common sense; a young man will skip meals in order to buy a fine outfit, even though his stomach is unable to support his belt and his sword drags along the ground. This emphasis on appearances results in the abandonment of virtues which are of benefit to the society as a whole. Disorder sets in; the visible evidence of an ordered, unified society exists no longer. In its place appear signs of personal vanity and concern for self:

Looke to the towred chymneis which should bee
The wind-pipes of good hospitalitie,
Through which it breatheth to the open ayre,
Betokening life and liberall welfaire,
Lo, there th' unthankfull swallow takes her rest,
And fills the Tonuell with her circled nest,
Nor half the smoke from all his chymneis goes
Which one Tobacco-pipe drives through his nose.

(V.ii.67-74)

The humorous absurdity of the comparison, the clear visual image of present conditions, and the sense of enormous disproportion work together to urge the need for reform; the continuing reminders of a better past suggest the possibility of its achievement.

Hall's purpose, the desire to express the faults so prevalent in a disordered world and by exposing error to urge men to improve, is achieved through the use of poetic techniques over which he exercises a sure control. He writes with the calm authority of one who has reason on his side, and he never doubts the ability of his poetry to convince others of the correctness of his position. The Virgidemiarum displays all the qualities for which we search without success in the satires of Marston. Hallett Smith, attempting to explain this difference, suggests that “Marston makes explicit the fact, essential to our understanding of his satire, that he is a part of what he is attacking. The position of the superior and aloof satirist he leaves to Hall.”¹⁶ Professor Smith's distinction supplies the primary reason for a critical judgment which favors Hall over Marston. The significance of Hall's choice is reflected throughout his satires, for his attitude and the technique with which he expresses it give to his verse both strength and wit. We may admit that Marston chose another position, but we may also suggest that he was wrong.

Notes

1. Arnold Davenport's editions—The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall (Liverpool, 1949) and The Poems of John Marston (Liverpool, 1961)—provide the student with fully annotated texts and clarify many of the basic problems involved in poetry which is filled with personal and topical allusions. All quotations from the satires are taken from these editions. A useful article by Davenport gives new and significant grounds for an appreciation of the poetry of Hall. See “Interfused Sources in Joseph Hall's Satires,” RES, XVIII (1942), 208-213. Stein has two useful articles for the student concerned with Hall or Marston—“The Second English Satirist,” MLR, XXXVIII (1943), 273-278, and “Joseph Hall's Imitation of Juvenal,” MLR, XLIII (1948), 315-322. John Peter's book Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956) is most useful for its study of the native medieval sources of these writers. Philip Smith wrote on “Bishop Hall, ‘Our English Seneca,’” PMLA, LXIII (1948), 1191-1204.

2. Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 194.

3. John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca, 1961).

4. Samuel Schoenbaum, “The Precarious Balance of John Marston,” PMLA, LXVII (1952), 1069-1078. Schoenbaum's treatment of Marston attempts too much psychoanalysis on too little evidence. He is ostensibly concerned with Marston the playwright, but his discussion centers on Marston the man.

5. Caputi offers a short but useful attempt to cover these vexing problems—John Marston, Satirist, pp. 25-26. John Peter (Complaint and Satire, p. 301) cites a poem that prefaced Thomas Drant's Medicinable Morall (1566) in which the poet traces the etymology of the word satyre.

6. The references in parentheses will be to book and line in Davenport's editions. For Marston I shall identify quotations in the same manner. CS will represent Certaine Satyres and SV will represent The Scourge of Villanie.

7. Satyre here means satirist.

8. Caputi, p. 77.

9. Caputi quotes here (p. 77) from Bullen, and I have recorded this quotation as he offers it. In Davenport's edition the entire tenth line is italicized. The line in Davenport concludes, “Nature guildeth Art.”;

10. “Interfused Sources in Joseph Hall's Satires,” p. 208.

11. Ibid.

12. Caputi, p. 76.

13. Caputi, p. 41.

14. Caputi, p. 41.

15. I have not seen a study of Hall's debt to Sidney. The critical principles he advances in Virgidemiarum echo the Defense of Poesie, and his practical application of those principles has an equally familiar ring.

16. Elizabethan Poetry, p. 242.