Notes
 | This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations .(June 2010) |
Stephen Gosson (April 1554 – 13 February 1624) was an English satirist.
Gosson was baptized at St George's Church, Canterbury, on 17 April 1554. He entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1572, and on leaving the university in 1576 he went to London. In 1598, Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia mentions him with Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Abraham Fraunce, and others as the "best for pastorall", but no pastorals of Gosson's are extant. He is said to have been an actor.
After the publication of the Schoole of Abuse, Gosson retired to the country, where he acted as tutor to the sons of a gentleman (Plays Confuted. "To the Reader," 1582). Anthony à Wood places this earlier and assigns the termination of his tutorship indirectly to his animosity against the stage, which apparently wearied his patron of his company. Gosson took holy orders, was made lecturer of the parish church at Stepney (1585), and was presented by Queen Elizabeth I to the rectory of Great Wigborough, Essex, which he exchanged in 1600 for St Botolph's, Bishopsgate.
An anti-theatrical writer, Gosson by his own confession wrote plays, for he speaks of Catiline's Conspiracies as a "Pig of mine own Sowe." Because of their moral standpoint, he excludes such plays as these from the general condemnation of stage plays in his Schoole of Abuse, containing a pleasant invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters and such like Caterpillars of the Commonwealth (1579).
The euphuistic style of this pamphlet and its ostentatious display of learning were in the taste of the time, and do not necessarily imply insincerity. Gosson justified his attack on the grounds of the disorder which the love of melodrama and of vulgar comedy was introducing into the social life of London. Edmund Spenser, in his Teares of the Muses (1591), laments the same evils, if only in general terms. The tract was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, who seems to have resented being connected with it. Edmund Spenser wrote to Gabriel Harvey (16 October 1579) of the dedication that the author "was for hys labor scorned." Gosson dedicated, however, a second tract, The Ephemerides of Phialo ... and A Short Apologie of the Schoole of Abuse, to Sidney on 28 October 1579.
Gosson's attack on poets seems to have had a large share in inducing Sidney to write his Apologie for Poetrie, which probably dates from 1581. The publication of his polemic provoked many retorts, the most formidable of which was Thomas Lodge's Defence of Playes (1580). The players themselves retaliated by reviving Gosson's own plays. Gosson replied to his various opponents in 1582 by his Playes Confuted in Five Actions, dedicated to Sir Francis Walsingham. Pleasant Quippes for Upstart New-fangled Gentlewomen (1595), a coarse satiric poem, is also ascribed to Gosson.
The Schoole of Abuse and Apologie were edited (1868) by Edward Arber in his English Reprints. Two poems of Gosson's are included.
| This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations .(June 2010) |
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of nascent Modern English verse, and he is considered one of the great poets in the English language.
Sir Philip Sidney was an English poet, courtier, scholar and soldier who is remembered as one of the most prominent figures of the Elizabethan age.
Richard Barnfield was an English poet. His relationship with William Shakespeare has long made him interesting to scholars. It has been suggested that he was the "rival poet" mentioned in Shakespeare's sonnets.
Alexander Balloch Grosart was a Scottish clergyman and literary editor. He is chiefly remembered for reprinting much rare Elizabethan literature, a work which he undertook because of his interest in Puritan theology.
This article presents lists of literary events and publications in the 16th century.
This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1579.
Thomas Lodge was an English writer and medical practitioner whose life spanned the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke was among the first Englishwomen to gain notice for her poetry and her literary patronage. By the age of 39, she was listed with her brother Philip Sidney and with Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare among the notable authors of the day in John Bodenham's verse miscellany Belvidere. Her play Antonius is widely seen as reviving interest in soliloquy based on classical models and as a likely source of Samuel Daniel's closet drama Cleopatra (1594) and of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1607). She was also known for translating Petrarch's "Triumph of Death", for the poetry anthology Triumphs, and above all for a lyrical, metrical translation of the Psalms.
Sir Thomas Chaloner was an English statesman and poet.
The Shepheardes Calender was Edmund Spenser's first major poetic work, published in 1579. In emulation of Virgil's first work, the Eclogues, Spenser wrote this series of pastorals at the commencement of his career. However, Spenser's models were rather the Renaissance eclogues of Mantuanus. The title, like the entire work, is written using deliberately archaic spellings, in order to suggest a connection to medieval literature, and to Geoffrey Chaucer in particular. Spenser dedicated the poem to Philip Sidney. The poem introduces Colin Clout, a folk character originated by John Skelton, and depicts his life as a shepherd through the twelve months of the year. The Calender encompasses considerable formal innovations, anticipating the even more virtuosic Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, the classic pastoral romance by Sir Philip Sidney, with whom Spenser was acquainted. It is also remarkable for the extensive commentary or gloss included with the work in its first publication, ascribed to an "E.K." E.K. is an intelligent, very subtle, sometimes wrong, and often deeply ironic commentator, who is sometimes assumed to be an alias of Spenser himself. The term sarcasm (Sarcasmus) is first recorded in English in Spenser's poem (October).
Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature. In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels. Major writers include William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Hooker, Ben Jonson, Philip Sidney and Thomas Kyd.
The Areopagus is a proposed 16th-century society or club dedicated to the reformation of English poetry. The club may have involved figures such as Edmund Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, Edward Dyer and Sir Phillip Sidney. The existence of the Areopagus as a formal society was first noted by Henry Richard Fox Bourne in 1862 in his Memoir of Sir Philip Sidney. There is no direct evidence that the group was more than an idea found in the correspondence between Spenser and Harvey, and if it existed its membership is uncertain.
William Ponsonby was a prominent London publisher of the Elizabethan era. Active in the 1577–1603 period, Ponsonby published the works of Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and other members of the Sidney circle; he has been called "the leading literary publisher of Elizabethan times."
Events from the 1580s in England.
An Apology for Poetry is a work of literary criticism by Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney. It was written in approximately 1580 and first published in 1595, after his death.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Paul Bush was an English Augustinian and the first bishop of Bristol of the new diocese.
Lodowick Bryskett, was a poet, translator, diplomat and Irish official. He served as Special Ambassador from England to Tuscany in 1600-01.
Complaints is a poetry collection by Edmund Spenser, published in 1591. It contains nine poems. Its publisher, William Ponsonby, added an introduction of his own.
Astrophel: A Pastorall Elegy upon the Death of the Most Noble and Valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney is a poem by the English poet Edmund Spenser. It is Spenser's tribute to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney, who had died in 1586, and was dedicated "To the most beautiful and vertuous Ladie, the Countesse of Essex", Frances Walsingham, Sidney's widow.
