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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
When Michael Drayton began work on Poly-Olbion, his vast poetic description of England and Wales, he committed himself to a course of action which was seriously to endanger his career. Drayton's reputation as a poet was injured by his faith in that strange, unfashionable poem, and he found himself increasingly out of touch with the main literary developments of his time. In his old age, fortunately, it led him to compose much of his most original and delicately beautiful poetry. The significance of Poly-Olbion in Drayton's life and art, however, has seldom been understood by the poet's biographers and critics, who have usually regarded it either as a charming eccentricity or as an unfortunate deviation from his true line of development. To Drayton, however, Poly-Olbion was his major work, innovating, he believed, a major new genre. When the first part was published in 1612, he boasted “My Poeme is genuine, and first in this kinde”; ten years later, bitter and depressed at its failure but determined to press on, he still proudly proclaimed that “it was a new cleere way, never before gone by any.” On its fortunes he was prepared to stake his literary reputation, and, as events were to prove, his commitment to “this strange Herculean toyle” (PO, 30:342) lasted well over thirty years.
Northop Frye has written that the epic, as Renaissance critics understood it, “is not a poem by a poet, but that poet's poem: he can never complete a second epic unless he is the equal of Homer, and hence the moment at which the epic poet chooses his subject is the crisis of his life. To decide to write an epic … is an act of considerable courage, because if one fails, one fails on a colossal scale.” The decision to write a poem on the scale of Poly-Olbion, whether “epic” in the strict sense of the word or not, involved Drayton in a similar risk. The spectres of ridicule and detraction haunted him for the rest of his life, and only his growing conviction of the political and literary importance of his magnum opus enabled him to continue writing.
1 The chapters on Drayton in Joan Grundy's penetrating study, The Spenserian Poets (London, 1969)Google ScholarPubMed, are a notable exception. As she concludes of Poly-Olbion, “Within the corpus of Drayton's work, it stands as his Faerie Queene” (p. 142).
2 The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. Hebel, J.W., 5 vols. (Oxford, corrected ed. 1961), 4:iii*, 391Google Scholar (hereafter cited as Works). The introductions, notes and variant readings in vol. 5 are by Kathleen Tillotson and B.H. Newdigate, and the bibliography is by Bent E. Juel-Jensen. Like all students of Drayton, I am deeply indebted to this splendid edition, and also to Newdigate's, B.H. pioneering biography, Michael Drayton and his Circle (Oxford, 1941)Google Scholar. Poly-Olbion, which is the fourth volume of Works, is hereafter cited as PO.
3 Five Essays on Milton's Epics (London, 1966), p. 3.Google Scholar Renaissance poetics were accommodating enough to allow Drayton and his friends to view PO as a species of epic. See Drummond's letter to Drayton, in Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, p. 183Google Scholar; Wither, George, “To his Noble Friend” (PO: 395)Google Scholar; and Ball, Lewis F., “The Background of the Minor English Renaissance Epics,” English Literary History 1 (1934): 63–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Meres, Francis, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury, p. 281r.Google Scholar
5 Works, 5:112, 129, 134 (variant readings).Google Scholar The only other major projects Drayton might have been working on at this time were revisions of his earlier historical poems.
6 To Henry Reynolds: 17-42 in Works 3:226–7.Google ScholarPubMed
7 See Tillotson's, commentary, Works, 5:4–6Google Scholar and her “Language of Drayton's Shepheards Garland,” Review of English Studies 13(1937):272–81.Google Scholar
8 Spenser's Minor Poems, ed. de Selincourt, Ernest (Oxford, 1910), p. 7.Google Scholar
9 For the development of this society, see Archaeologica 1(1770):i–xxiiiCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and Evans, A.J., “Presidential Address,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries 29(1917):155–84.Google Scholar For Stow's, MS collection, see A Survey of London, ed. Kingsford, C.L., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1908), 1:lxxxvi–xciii.Google Scholar
10 amico veteri et spectatissimo (MS ded. to Drayton, c. 1597, in Camden's commonplace book, printed in Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, p. 93Google Scholar).
11 See Tillotson's introduction to Gaveston, Piers (Works, 5:24–5)Google Scholar; Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, pp. 92–5, 162–5Google Scholar, and his notes on the sources of PO (Works, 5:231–47Google ScholarPubMed).
12 For the Goodere family and Lucy Countess of Bedford, see Newdigate, Michael Drayton, chaps, iii-v. “Bequeathed” is Drayton's, own term (Works, 5:112).Google Scholar
13 “Drayton's Sirena”, Publications of the Modern Language Association 39(1924):815–28.Google Scholar See also Tillotson, , Works, 5:207–8Google Scholar, and Newdigate, Michael Drayton, chap. v.
14 For Lucy Bedford's later career, see Bald, R.C., John Donne, A Life (Oxford, 1970), pp. 170–80Google Scholar, et passim.
15 Anonymous lampoon (1601), cited in Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, p. 62.Google Scholar
16 Works, 5:112.Google ScholarPubMed
17 “The Eighth Epilogue,” 79-84, in Works, 2:561Google ScholarPubMed, and cancelled stanzas from 1606 version in Works, 5:189.Google ScholarPubMed
18 Hebel, , “Drayton's Sirena,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 39(1924):815–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, pp. 63–69Google Scholar, discusses the likeliest candidates for “Cerberon”.
19 Perhaps, too, he suspected Lady Bedford of sabotaging his attempt to gain royal patronage for PO in 1603.
20 Works, 1:84 (1-20)Google ScholarPubMed; 2:257 (133-46); 2:260; 3:231 (195-201). Details of Drayton's career in the theatre are given in Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, pp. 101–11.Google Scholar
21 Ibid., chap, xi; D.N.B., s.v. Walter Aston.
22 See Chettle's, Henry comment in Englands Mourning Garment (London, 1603), sig. D2r.Google Scholar Drayton's own accounts of his “disgrace” are in Works, 3:206 (19-32)Google ScholarPubMed, and PO: vi*.
23 Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, pp. 149–50.Google Scholar
24 Camden testifies to Drayton's reputation in Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine (London, 1605)Google Scholar, “Certaine Poemes, etc.”, p. 8. See Newdigate, Michael Drayton, chap, xiv, for his literary circle at this time.
25 Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, p. 135.Google Scholar
26 D.N.B. s.v. Alexander, Aston, and Murray; Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, pp. 96, 154, 197.Google Scholar
27 Britannia, trans. Holland, Philemon (London, 1610), p. 164Google Scholar; for Henry's interests and his relationship with the king, see Wilson, E.C., Prince Henry and English Literature (Ithaca, N.Y., 1946), p. 99Google Scholar, et. passim, and Willson, D.H., King James VI and I (London, 1956), pp. 280–1Google Scholar, et. passim.
28 Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, p. 160.Google Scholar
29 See Juel-Jensen's full bibliographical account of the poem, Works, 5:297–304.Google ScholarPubMed
30 Jensen, Juel, Works, 5:301.Google Scholar
31 Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, pp. 183–4.Google Scholar The entire correspondence is reproduced pp. 179-90.
32 Hebel, , in PO: ix.Google Scholar
33 Juel-Jensen, , Works, 5:302–3.Google Scholar
34 D.N.B., s.v. Alexander, Aston, Murray.
35 Tillotson, , Works, 5:220Google Scholar, and Newdigate, , Michael Drayton, pp. 211–14.Google Scholar
36 Ibid., pp. 180-90
37 Ibid., p. 162.
38 Lewis, C.S., English Literature In the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), p. 534–5.Google Scholar
39 The comedy in PO, for example, provides many points of contact with these later poems. See my article, “Drayton's Poly-Olbion and the Alexandrine Couplet”, Studies in Philology 77 (1980):158–9.Google Scholar The “Fifth Nimphall” of The Muses Elizium might have been written specifically for PO. Space does not permit critical analysis for this topic, but it deserves study. Drayton's later period has received surprisingly little attention.