The fame of Tottel's book made the miscel lany a fashionable vehicle of publication throughout the Elizabethan age, though the growing habit of general publishing tended to diminish its importance. (The Paradise of Dainty Devices' (1576), is interesting for the work it preserves of Richard Edwards (1523? 66), of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), and of Sidney's friend, Sir Edward Dyer' (—?-1607), whose fine "My mind to me a kingdom is,* appears in this anthology. (A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions' (1578), illustrates the fashion of translation, and bears witness, in the names of tunes for the poems, to the growing invasion of poetry by music. 'A Handful of Pleasant Delights' (1584), is a weaker anthology, of practically no merit, but (The Phcenix Nest) (1593), is note worthy for the elegies on Sidney— one by Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?-1618), and for other poems by Raleigh and Thomas Lodge (1558? 1625). (England's Helicon' (1600) includes selections from Sidney, Spenser, Breton, Lodge, Peele and Barnfield the great writers of the first Elizabethan period, strongly marked by the pastoral vein; the book v ould be notable for one poem alone, Marlowe's aCome live with me and be my love.* (England's Parnas sus> and (Belvidere, or the Garden of the Muses' (1600), are mere collections of quota tions; (Davison's Poetical Rhapsody' (1602), is of little more importance, though its selections reflect the sonnet vogue. An earlier and more important book, (The Passionate Pilgrim, by William Shakespeare' (1599) is clearly a mis cellany, as only part of its contents, some songs from (Love's Labour's Lost' and some sonnets, are by Shakespeare.
In subject matter the earlier part of the Elizabethan age was pastoral, following the tone set by Sidney's (Arcadia' (1590). This Eliz abethan pastoral, literary and artificial as in Sanazzarro and other Italian models, left its im press on the incidental songs in the prose ro mances. Sidney himself was the most zealous experimenter in classical metres, in the general attempt that Gabriel Harvey fostered, to bring English verse under the laws of Latin prosody. Green and Lodge, the great writers of prose romance after Sidney, were less pedantic in their lyrics, yet their songs have the idyllic method of the pastoral, the method of painting.
The best representative of this pastoral period is Edmund Spenser (q.v.). His first book, (The Shepherd's Calendar' (1579), was an imitation of the Virginian eclogue, with the same bookish flavor — here increased by Edward Kirke's commentary—and with the same alle gorical treatment of contemporaries and events under the pastoral mask; but with an English setting and with English ideals that stamp the book as native. In (Th Faerie Queene' (1590 96) and the (Amoretti) (1595), Spenser speaks also through the pastoral convention — that subduing of all things to loveliness, which is the mark of the world of the Sicilian Muses. The 'Faerie Queene) especially, as might be ex pected from its ancestry in the Italian romantic epics, has the irresponsibility of pastoral ro mance—the arbitrary management of the facts of life as if those facts themselves were a flex ible language. The paradox of the Renaissance,
of Elizabethan literature, is illustrated here on the largest scale, in the gorgeous, archaic lan guage, the unreal, un-English world of the story on the one hand, and on the other the stern English fibre of the ground theme. This same blending of Italian imagery and expression with English spirituality is seen in the (Epithala mion) (1595) and in the (Prothalamion) and the 'Four Hymns' (1596).
The pastoral convention, molded hy Spen ser, remained popular, though less characteris tic, in the succeeding decades. Michael Dray ton (1563-1631), remembered now for his splen did (Battle of Agincourt' (1605), and for his great sonnet, (Since there's no help' (1619), wrote much in the Spenserian pastoral, as did William Browne (1591-1643). In another vray also the pastoral habit of beauty was trans ferred to poems not strictly pastoral, such as Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis' (1593), (Lucrece) (1594), and Marlowe's (Hero and Leander' (before 1593), where the convention of old-world beauty blends with thc Elizabethan zest for a story, evidenced more popularly in the broadside ballads. The tradition of narra tive poetry was strong throughout the Tudor period, from the (Mirror for Magistrates' (1559) to Drayton's (Barons' Wars' (160.3).
As the first period of Elizabethan poetry is pastoral, so the second period, roughly from 1590 to 1600, is marked by the sonnet fashion. The Italian sonnet had been introduced in de tached imitations and translations by Wyatt and Surrey but the fashion of sonnet sequences was set by Sir Philip Sidney's' (1554-86) (Astro phel and Stella,) published in 1591, but known much earlier. Sidney here followed Petrarch, after the example of the innumerable French sonneteers. His sonnets, however, derive vital and individual interest from the circumstances of his own love for Penelope Devereux, a pas sion as famed among his contemporaries as Pe trarch's love for Laura. His poems have had the not unprecedented fate of being called merely literary in their inspiration, and it can not be denied that his borrowings were prob ably many; yet in the mediaeval way he con sidered himself sincerely original, and much in his work supports the claim. The amount of actual incident that he takes over from his own life is large, especially in the noble sonnets that deal with horsemanship and knightly exercise, and his story in one point was radically differ ent from Petrarch's or Dante's. His love was known and returned; the bar between Penelope and himself was one of honor, since she was married to another; this lofty sense of this kind of honor was Sidney's characteristically English contribution to the world-theme of love.