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Drayton's “To the Virginian Voyage”: From Heroic Pastoral to Mock-Heroic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Michael D. West
Michael D. West*
Affiliation:
HigganumConnecticut
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Extract

From their early appearance in Idea the Shepheards Garland to their luminous apotheosis in The Muses Elizium, visions of the idyllic world of pastoral haunted Drayton's thought, as they haunted the Elizabethan culture he typified. At the same time he shared the Renaissance's admiration for the martial glories of the epic. Although in its various versions The Barons Wanes is perhaps his most ambitious effort in this genre, the depth of his response is also evident in the exultant rhythms of his paean to true English hearts, the famous and deservedly beloved ‘Ballad of Agincourt.’ Of particular interest in ‘To the Virginian Voyage’ is the curious inconsistency that results when Drayton tries to combine the attractions of both pastoralism and heroism in the same poem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , Winter 1971 , pp. 501 - 506
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1971

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References

1 On the importance of pastoral and heroic conventions to Drayton's imagination see Grundy, Joan, The Spenserian Poets: A Study in Elizabethan and Jacobean Poetry (London, 1969)Google Scholar, chs. iv, v.

2 Works, ed. J. William Hebel et al. (Oxford, 1931-1941), n, 363-364, and see n. ad loc.

3 The parallels first adduced by Joseph Quincy Adams, ‘Michael Drayton's To the Virginia [sic] Voyage,’ MLN, 33 (1918), 405-408, have been supplemented by Friedrich, Gerhardt, ‘The Genesis of Michael Drayton's Ode to the Virginian Voyage,’ MLN, 72 (1957), 401–406 Google Scholar.

4 The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, ed. Richard Hakluyt (London, 1598-1600), in, 249. For examples of the frequency with which the voyagers were viewed as heroes, or the new world as a pastoral paradise, see Robert Ralston Cawley, Unpathed Waters: Studies in the Influence of the Voyagers on Elizabethan Literature (Princeton, 1940), pp. 3-15, 20-31, 140-144, 150-153. The fundamental importance that the mythic golden age assumes in this ode renders implausible the contention of Joseph A. Berthelot, Michael Drayton (New York, 1967), p. 128, that the poem succeeds artistically because Drayton ‘eschewed the classical and mythological allusions which had commonly appeared in his work.'

5 ‘The Fourth Eglogue,’ vv . 89-92, Works, n, 534. On the pervasiveness of the theme see Levin, Harry, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance, Bloomington, 1969 Google Scholar. Drayton might have encountered it in any of a dozen classical authors or in the Renaissance mythographers; see Bush, Douglas, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, (Minneapolis, 1932), pp. 30–35 Google Scholar.

6 From the preface to the Odes (Works, 11, 345). Only Maddison, Carol, Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode (London, 1960), p. 295 Google Scholar, appears to have sensed the nature of the mixture in this ode, which she characterizes in passing as ‘a lively account of the voyage, interrupted by a description of Virginia based on classical pictures of the golden age which stands as a myth in relation to the whole’ (my italics).

7 See Bartlett Giamatti, A., The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, Princeton, 1966.Google Scholar

8 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), pp. 386, 523.

9 See Bush, pp. 294-296; see Summers, Joseph H., ed., Marvell (New York, 1961), pp. 15–25 Google Scholar, and Toliver, Harold, ‘Pastoral Form and Idea in Some Poems of Marvell,’ TSLL 5 (1963), 83–97 Google Scholar.