Michael Drayton

English poet

• Born: 1563
• Birthplace: Hartshill, Warwickshire, England
• Died: December 23, 1631
• Place of death: London, England

A prolific English poet with laureate ambitions, Drayton published sonnets, satires, pastorals, historical poems, biblical poems, and Poly-Olbion, a topographical survey of Great Britain.

Early Life

Modern biographies of Michael Drayton have largely been fictionalized accounts inspired by autobiographical statements found in Drayton’s poetry and dedications. The principal source for such accounts of Drayton’s early life is a passage in his poem, “Of Poets and Poesie” (1627), written when he was 64. He reports that he was a “goodly page” and that he asked his tutor what sort of men poets were; his Renaissance tutor naturally directs him to read Latin classics to answer the question. In the late nineteenth century, this allusion to a tutor was interpreted by Drayton’s biographers as a reference to Sir Henry Goodere of Polesworth (1534-1595), and Drayton was posthumously provided with a genteel background and a classical education in the Goodere household.

In actuality, Drayton was a servant in the household of Sir Henry’s younger brother. He is specifically identified as a servant in a deposition given on August 16, 1598, during a court case involving the Thomas Goodere estate. There is no evidence that Drayton attended a university, but his work, like that of Shakespeare, shows that he had read classical and English authors. His early works were dedicated to members of the gentry who had estates near his home in Warwickshire. Although he wrote intermittently for the theater, Drayton was dependent upon the patronage system, so the dedications of his many publications offer a record of his attempts to establish himself as a client in that system.

Life’s Work

His Idea, the Shepheards Garland (1593), consisting of nine pastoral eclogues, was intended as Drayton’s early poetic manifesto and was aimed at attracting the clientage of Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke. In the fourth eclogue, he mourns the death of Mary’s brother, Sir Philip Sidney, portraying him as Elphin, god of poetry. He follows this pastoral eclogue with a panegyric on the countess, who is praised as Pandora, the true patroness of poetry.

Drayton followed these early pastorals with a sonnet sequence. He addressed his mistress in these sonnets as Idea, emphasizing his interest in Neoplatonism, but early literary criticism insisted that Idea was Anne Goodere, the daughter of his patron, Sir Henry Goodere. Drayton dedicated the first of many versions of this sonnet sequence, Ideas Mirrour (1594), to the countess of Pembroke. Later in 1594, however, he turned to Lucy Harington as a possible patron, dedicating to her Matilda (1594), Endimion and Phoebe (1595), and Mortimeriados (1596), his first attempt at epic. Signaling his interest in being taken seriously as a laureate poet, Drayton adopted Rowland as his pen name; Rowland is probably an anglicized allusion to the title character of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516, 1521, 1532; English translation, 1591), himself based on the medieval French folk hero Roland.

Drayton’s Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597) was an emphatic bid for patronage, appearing with nine dedications. This collection of verse epistles is modeled upon Roman poet Ovid’s Heroides (before 8 c.e.; English translation, 1567), but Drayton introduces figures from English history as the lovers who exchange letters. Englands Heroicall Epistles was a popular success and went through five separate editions between 1597 and 1602. Drayton took advantage of these editions to revise and add to the collection, but he seems to have recognized that it was already largely a success: Although he supplemented the collection, he did not subject it to the meticulous revision that he devoted to his pastorals, sonnets, and historical verse.

In 1598, Drayton began to write for the professional theater, and he has been identified as a collaborator on twenty-one plays between 1598 and 1604. Only one of these plays, The First Part of the True and Honorable Historie of the Life of Sir John Old-Castle the Good Lord Cobham (pr. 1599), was printed and has survived. This play appears to have been commissioned by the Cobham family to defend the reputation of their ancestor. The character Falstaff in William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I (pr. c. 1597-1598), Henry IV, Part II (pr. c. 1598), and The Merry Wives of Windsor (pr. 1597, revised c. 1600-1601), was originally called Sir John Oldcastle.

In 1602, Drayton seems to have succeeded in establishing himself as the client of Sir Walter Aston (1583-1639), a wealthy landowner with estates in Stafford, Derby, Leicester, and Warwick. Although we know that the 1619 folio of Drayton’s collected verse is dedicated to Sir Walter Aston, we do not know what kind of patronage or how much Drayton received from Aston. From Drayton’s verse, we know that he felt ill-used by the court and resented the patronage extended to poets who were less ambitious. In his revised pastorals of 1606, he takes to task his early patroness, Lucy Harington, by then Lucy Russell, countess of Bedford, for her ingratitude. He calls for time to devour any mention of her name and hopes that age will sit soon and ugly on her brow. He removed the passages cursing Lady Bedford into oblivion from Poems (1619), a folio edition of his works, but he also removed all of his earlier dedications and compliments addressed to her.

In 1612, Drayton published the first part of Poly-Olbion (1612-1622) with a dedication to Henry, prince of Wales, and Henry’s household accounts record that Drayton was given a pension of ten pounds. Fate intervened to thwart Drayton’s hopes, however, as Henry died on November 6, 1612. Poems contains revisions of Drayton’s earlier work; this major publication appeared with a frontispiece of a stern-faced Drayton, crowned with a laurel wreath but disapproving of seventeenth century England. Poly-Olbion was not a popular success. Drayton finished the second part in 1618, but he was not able to find a printer until 1622.

He published two more folio collections of his poetry: The Battaile of Agincourt (1627) and The Muses Elizium (1630). The Battaile of Agincourt contains a twenty-five-hundred-line poem celebrating the English victory over the French in 1415. The volume also contains a number of verse epistles, which Drayton called elegies. His extremely important elegy addressed to Henry Reynolds, “Of Poets and Poesie,” defines a canon of English poetry. The title poem of The Muses Elizium was Drayton’s last pastoral. Elizium is an idealized golden world, and this paradise for poets is contrasted to Felicia, the actual world of seventeenth century England. The old Satyr is Drayton’s persona, and he remains bitterly critical of contemporaries who are defacing the land and ravaging the forests.

Drayton concludes The Muses Elizium with three divine poems, including Moses His Birth and Miracle (wr. 1604), Noahs Floud, and David and Goliah. These divine poems, like all of Drayton’s seventeenth century poems, lament the loss of heroic aspiration in life and art. When he died in 1631, his brother Edmund reported that he had an estate of less than twenty-five pounds. Drayton’s contemporaries, however, praised his learning and called him “golden-mouthed.” He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and a statue of him was later erected in the poet’s corner near Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare.

Significance

Drayton was regarded by his contemporaries as a major poet, particularly because of his sonnets, historical poetry, and satires. In modern criticism, the verdict has been more critical, perhaps because less attention has been paid to his sonnets and satires than to Poly-Olbion. In addition to his poetic work, Drayton was an important literary critic, commenting upon the works of others and formulating his own theory of poetics. In Poly-Olbion, he differentiated public from private, or coterie, poetry; in Poems, he defined a number of genres, and in his elegy, “Of Poets and Poesie,” he evaluated English and Scottish poets, beginning with Chaucer and concluding with William Browne. Drayton’s widely acknowledged masterpiece, “Since there’s no help, Come let us kiss and part,” (1619) is so magnificent a sonnet that there have been attempts to claim it for Shakespeare.

Bibliography

Brink, Jean R. Michael Drayton Revisited. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Substantially revises Drayton’s biography and offers an analysis of each of his major poems and a comprehensive annotated bibliography.

Hebel, J. William, Kathleen Tillotson, and Bernard H. Newdigate, eds. The Works of Michael Drayton. 5 vols. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell for the Shakespeare Head Press, 1961. Standard edition of Drayton’s work, but difficult to use. Editors use the 1619 folio as copy text for the Elizabethan verse, and so Drayton’s many revisions to his verse are printed only as variants in the fifth volume, where the notes are printed in very small type.

Klein, Bernhard. “The Imaginary Journeys: Spenser, Drayton, and the Poetics of National Space.” In Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, edited by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Examines Poly-Olbion in relation to maps and a developing sense of nationhood.

Lewalski, Barbara. “Lucy, Countess of Bedford: Images of a Jacobean Courtier and Patroness.” In Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Excellent biographical study of Lucy, countess of Bedford, the patroness whom Drayton spurned.

Lyne, Raphael. Love’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567-1632. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Study of Drayton’s handling of Ovidian themes.

Speed, Stephen. “The Cartographic Arrest: Harvey, Raleigh, Drayton, and the Mapping of the Sense.” In At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies, and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, edited by Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Analyzes Poly-Olbion in relation to natural philosophy.