PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK: MICHAEL DRAYTON DRAYTON’S WORKS “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Michael Drayton HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK A WEEK: The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand PEOPLE OF within it. Old Drayton thought that a man that lived here, and A WEEK would be a poet, for instance, should have in him certain “brave, translunary things,” and a “fine madness” should possess his brain. Certainly it were as well, that he might be up to the occasion. That is a superfluous wonder, which Dr. Johnson expresses at the assertion of Sir Thomas Browne that “his life has been a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not history but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.” The wonder is, rather, that all men do not assert as much. That would be a rare praise, if it were true, which was addressed to Francis Beaumont, — “Spectators sate part in your tragedies.” Think what a mean and wretched place this world is; that half the time we have to light a lamp that we may see to live in it. This is half our life. Who would undertake the enterprise if it were all? And, pray, what more has day to offer? A lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil, say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less obstruction. Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns. MICHAEL DRAYTON DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1563 Michael Drayton was born at Hartshill, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Michael Drayton “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1580 Almost nothing is known about Michael Drayton’s life earlier than this year, in which he is recorded to have been in the service of Thomas Goodere of Collingham, Nottinghamshire, a member of the family of Sir Henry Goodere of Powlsworth (now Polesworth), on the river Ancor, not far from Tamworth. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Michael Drayton HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1591 Michael Drayton’s THE HARMONY OF THE CHURCH, a volume of spiritual poems dedicated to Lady Devereux. The edition was destroyed under public order, except for 40 copies seized by the Archbishop of Canterbury — in these preserved copies, we can note that this poet’s version of the Song of Solomon had been guilty of a remarkable richness of expression. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Michael Drayton “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1593 Michael Drayton’s historical poem THE LEGEND OF PIERS GAVESTON. His IDEA: THE SHEPHERD’S GARLAND, a collection of pastorals in which under the pen name “Rowland” he reprocessed his love-sorrows. It is conjectured that at this point, when Richard Barnfield left grad school at Brasenose College without an advanced diploma, he probably went to London and there presumably made the acquaintance of Thomas Watson, Michael Drayton, and possibly Edmund Spenser (bear in mind that in the preceding year one resident in every ten in this teeming capital city had died in an outbreak of the plague, and that in this year the spasm of mortality was moving on to the university town of Oxford). LONDON CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Michael Drayton “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1594 Michael Drayton’s epic poem in rhyme royal MATILDA, his ENDIMION AND PHOEBE, and a cycle of 64 sonnets, IDEA’S MIRROR. Robert Greene’s THE HISTORY OF ORLANDO FURIOSO (based on Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem), GREENE’S ORLANDO FURIOSO FRIAR BACON AND FRIAR BUNGAY, FRIERS BACON & BUNGAY and A LOOKING GLASS FOR LONDON AND ENGLAND. A LOOKING GLASS THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Michael Drayton HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1596 Michael Drayton’s MORTIMERIADOS, about the Wars of the Roses, in ottava rima. Also published in this year was a volume THE LEGEND OF ROBERT, DUKE OF NORMANDY, in which also was reprinted his PIERS GAVESTON. THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Michael Drayton HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1597 Michael Drayton’s ENGLAND’S HEROICAL EPISTLES, historical studies in imitation of those of Ovid, in heroic couplets. For the following five years Drayton would be one of the group of playwrights who would be supplying material for the theatrical syndicate of Philip Henslowe. In Henslowe’s DIARY, although Drayton’s name is associated with 23 plays during this period, it is clear that almost always he was working in collaboration with other playwrights such as Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, and Henry Chettle, etc. There was one play in which he was supposedly the sole author, the play William Longsword — but said script didn’t got completed, let alone performed. A surviving portion of the play Sir John Oldcastle, allegedly composed by Drayton in collaboration with Anthony Munday, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathwaye, provides us with no markers of whatever his involvement might have amounted to. HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1598 By this point Michael Drayton had already made a monumental resolve, that he was going celebrate in verse all the points of topographical or antiquarian interest in the island of Great Britain. Jean Bauhin, a former student of Conrad Gesner, prepared a monograph about the medicinal waters and surrounding environment of the German fountains at Boll, and this has turned out to amount to a really important first — the 1st publication of a complete set of fossils from a specific location. THE SCIENCE OF 1598 PALEONTOLOGY WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF Michael Drayton “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1599 Michael Drayton sat for his portrait: HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1602 Francis Beaumont’s SALMACIS AND HERMAPHRODITUS. John Beaumont, who had begun early to write verse, at the age of 19 was able to create an anonymous publication, METAMORPHOSIS OF TABACCO, written in couplets. In this book he addressed Michael Drayton as his loving friend, and for many years, at Grace-Dieu in Leicestershire, he would live as a bachelor while explaining himself as a man “who never felt Love’s dreadful arrow.” HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK 1603 Michael Drayton enlarged and modified his poem MORTIMERIADOS and republished it as THE BARONS’ WARS. HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK July 25, Sunday (Old Style): Queen Elizabeth having died on March 23rd, on this day King James VI of Scotland was crowned in London (he was, not incidentally, alleging his Stuarts to be descended from the King Arthur of British fakelore). In his service Francis Bacon would flourish. On this day of the new king’s coronation Bacon was knighted, becoming Sir Francis. He would rise to become Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans and Lord Chancellor of England. His fall would come about in the course of a struggle between King and Parliament. He would be accused of having taken a bribe while a judge, and found guilty as charged. He thus would lose his personal honor, as well as his fortune and his place at court. By the coronation of James VI of Scotland as James I, King of England (1603-1625), the idea that the educated, informed, and sometimes conflicting and confused voices of esquires, merchants, lawyers, and HDT WHAT? INDEX MICHAEL DRAYTON MICHAEL DRAYTON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK clergymen might be tolerated and even encouraged had received the sanction of decades of experience. JAMES I (The portrait above does not reveal a couple of significant things about the person of this scholarly monarch. His tongue was too large for his mouth, and he had some sort of neurological condition in his legs that was causing numerous stumbles, and injuries.) This monarch would extend and modify the Lieutenant’s house at the Tower of London, which had been built in the 1540s and now is referred to as the Queen’s House. He would relocate his royal lions to better dens in the west gate barbican. He would come to refer to his kingdom as “Great Britain.” Sir Walter Raleigh, accused of treason against him (“him” = James, not “him” = Arthur), was imprisoned in the Tower. King James’s efforts to suppress dissent would alienate many of his citizen-subjects, and then his son, ruling as Charles I, would attempt even greater rigour, reasserting censorship with a comprehensiveness not before experienced in England. Thus, after the English civil war, it would be due not to John Milton’s AEROPAGITICA but rather to a Hobbesian pragmatism, that the need to inform the general public, if only in a rudimentary manner, would be becoming accepted as an integral part of English politics.