[In the following excerpt, Hay argues that several of Vergil's works, notably his Anglica historia and De Inventoribus rerum, have had an influence on a large body of literature and thought.]

[Polydore Vergil's] importance in the development of English historiography has been evident since C. L. Kingsford's English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century was published in 1913. The basic authority of the Anglica Historia for the events of Henry VII's reign was established by W. Busch in the first (and only) volume of his history of England under the Tudors, which appeared in German in 1892 and in English three years later. A very little investigation shows that the Anglica Historia not only determined to a great extent the form which later histories of the Tudor period were to take, but influenced the treatment of the English past as a whole for many generations. Nor was this influence merely formal. The substance of Vergil's analysis, as well as the structure of his work, informed nearly all later histories. It is true that in his own day Englishmen were anxious to condemn his sceptical attitude to Brutus and Arthur and that by the seventeenth century more precise scholarship was replacing his account of Dark Age and early medieval history. But his picture of England in the fifteenth century remained undisturbed until a century ago, and his evaluation of the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII has had an even longer currency.

To explain the remarkable persistence of his interpretation of the political evolution of England from the deposition of Richard II to the birth of Edward VI we must look beyond the inherent rightness or wrongness of his views and beyond the value of the Anglica Historia as a primary source for the period. The explanation unquestionably lies in the adoption of his notions by Hall, whose Chronicle virtually translates the fifteenth-century portion of Vergil's book, and by later historians such as Holinshed. Equally important, the poets and dramatists turned their attention to the history of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The reasons for the literary importance of the Wars of the Roses in Elizabethan England are not far to seek. The dynastic disunity which characterizes the earlier period was a recurrent threat after 1559, just as it had been under Henry VII, intermittently under Henry VIII, and again in 1553. Even the remotest of these experiences was not very distant in time and the English country-side must have been alive with stories of civil war, abounding in fears of its repetition and in memories of the joys of harmony promised by the accessions of Henry VII and his son. Such traditions were no doubt lively in their own right; but the oppressive attitude of Elizabeth's brother-in-law Philip of Spain and the mere existence of Mary Queen of Scots, a Tudor through her grandmother, made them sickeningly relevant; in addition, religious differences were growing which would have heightened the disastrous consequences of any civil war. Hence it was natural that, from the Mirror for Magistrates onwards, the search for the moral and political lessons of the past was concentrated so largely on the history of the fifteenth century. Directly and indirectly, the material used was to a great extent derived from Vergil. Above all, through the mediation of the English chroniclers, Shakespeare faithfully reproduced the substance of the Anglica Historia. Henry IV, Richard III, and the other Shakespearian ‘histories’ are broadly speaking dramatizations of themes provided by Polydore Vergil. Though this fact has scarcely been acknowledged by students of Shakespeare,¹ there is nothing odd about it if one remembers how thoroughly Vergil accomplished his task of interpreting English history in favour of the Tudors. It is somewhat more surprising to realize how far the play Henry VIII reflects Vergil's point of view. For this there are other explanations. The play was written after Elizabeth's death, but her reign dominates it. Shakespeare (and his collaborators, if the play is not entirely his own) was faced with the problem of accounting for the divorce of Catherine of Aragon and the marriage of Anne Boleyn in such a way as to leave both Henry and Anne in as spotless a condition as possible: to denigrate Henry would have been to insult Elizabeth's father: to hint at Anne's profligacy would have been to insult Elizabeth's mother. The way out of the dilemma was in essentials provided by Vergil. Catherine of Aragon and her noble consort are made the dupes of Wolsey's tortuous ambition and Henry's passion for Anne becomes the main factor in the destruction of the overweening cardinal. In this play, therefore, as well as in the cycle of fifteenth-century plays, the dramatist was to hammer into the heads of succeeding generations the main elements of Vergil's narrative.

In view of these facts it might be fair to call the Anglica Historia one of the most important histories of England which have ever been published. But this work was not the only book by Vergil to exercise a profound effect in his own day and later. The De Inuentoribus Rerum may be claimed as of even greater significance in the general cultural evolution of Europe. As a work of vulgarization it had no rival in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and its influence has been not unjustly compared to that of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville.² Available in scores of Latin editions and in translations into all the main languages of Europe (including Russian), it spread a knowledge of Hellenistic and Christian antiquity so widely that it is difficult to assess its effects. As far as classical scholarship in a precise sense is concerned, the material in the De Inuentoribus Rerum was soon to be replaced. At a level lower than that of the trained philologist, however, the book remained serviceable for an extraordinarily long time. Its avowed intention, to indicate who first introduced the various arts and sciences and who first established the religious and secular institutions of civilized society, obviously catered for an interest which preoccupied many persons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The evidence for this may be seen not only in the frequency with which the De Inuentoribus Rerum was printed and translated and in the care with which the Roman Church tried to make it innocuous. Its chief monument may be seen in the familiarity with which it was introduced into the pages of Rabelais and Cervantes, where it is, so to speak, taken for granted in a careless manner: these authors did not need to gloss their references to a book which was profoundly familiar to the majority of their readers. Its positive influence will only become clear when this general use is remembered by students of later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature: Maurice Scève will, I am confident, not be the only writer whose dependence on the De Inuentoribus Rerum can be established.

Vergil's other writings have not the importance of the two works already touched on. Yet two of them are worthy of more attention than they have so far had. The Adagia anticipated Erasmus's more famous collection of proverbs, though only by a few months, and can thus claim to inaugurate that astonishing outpouring of collections of proverbial wisdom which, with common-place books and a generally held appreciation of the value of the sententious and the sensible, lends the age of Montaigne, Bacon, and their successors one of its most important characteristics. The De Prodigiis cannot be said to create a genre of literature like the Adagia, but it represents an attitude to the supernatural which was characteristic of an age when scepticism was prepared to challenge all but Christian phenomena, and its frequent reprinting is testimony to the esteem in which it was held. …

If one wishes to analyse the ideas of an author one is at once caught up in the analysis of the thought of his contemporaries. The problem is hard enough when one is dealing with a single book by a single-minded man: it is overwhelming when one is faced, as one is in Vergil, with a writer who not merely intended to compass in one of his books the totality of human experience, but whose attitude to the anxieties of his day was extremely varied. The res of the De Inuentoribus Rerum are of a diversity which defies simple organization: the views of the author range from bitter attacks on monks and clerical celibacy to denunciations of Lutheranism as a brand of insanity. Such a multiplicity of topics and critical asides has, of course, to be accounted for in estimating the general position of Vergil in the changing currents of sixteenth-century opinion. But each problem can also be viewed in its own right, as an independent issue with a past and a future of its own. The De Inuentoribus Rerum abounds in such questions: Vergil's observations on the best method of preaching, for instance, provoke speculation on those developments in pulpit oratory in the Renaissance period which were to have such important repercussions not only in Reformed Churches but also in the work of counter-reformation; the emphasis which he gives to the decree Frequens of the Council of Constance invites attention to conciliar thought in the sixteenth century, and its relation to papal policy up to, and after, the Council of Trent. Even the minor writings of Vergil suggest many fruitful lines of inquiry. The short ‘Commentary on the Lord's Prayer’ must take its place in that long evolution of popular devotion from the Dutch and German mystics of the fourteenth century to the pietists of the seventeenth, and be viewed as in some sense a humanist protest against the temporizing empiricism of the orthodox Church. The edition of Gildas needs to be viewed within the broad context of emerging national consciousness and compared with similar productions in other countries, like those which were published in Austria and Germany at the instigation of Maximilian.

Notes

1. W. G. Boswell-Stone in his Shakespeare's Holinshed (1896), while revealing Holinshed's indebtedness to Vergil, especially for the reign of Henry VIII, was not equally aware of the dependence of Hall on Vergil's narrative for the earlier period.

2. T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (1950), p. 81.