Michael Drayton

• 1. Introduction

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  Michael Drayton was born in Hartshill, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, in early 1563, and he would spend the next seven decades producing a body of work that stretched from Queen Elizabeth's court to the reign of Charles I. His first book appeared in 1590. His last was published in 1630. In between, he wrote sonnets, pastorals, satires, historical epics, fairy tales in verse, and plays. He was the first writer in the English language to bring the term "ode" to popular use. He ended up buried in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, a monument carved by Edward Marshall placed above him with memorial lines attributed to Ben Jonson.

  What drove a man of lower social standing than Shakespeare or Edmund Spenser to produce so relentlessly, across so many forms and reigns? Who was the mysterious "Idea" at the center of his sonnets? And how did the enormous geographical poem he began planning in 1598 go on to become both a famous work and a commercial near-disaster? Those are the questions worth following.

• 2. A Poet's Formation

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  By 1580, Drayton was in the service of Thomas Goodere of Collingham, Nottinghamshire. Later he came under the care of Sir Henry Goodere, who provided for his education. Scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries speculated, based on scattered allusions in his poems and dedications, that he might have studied at the University of Oxford and been close to the Polesworth branch of the Goodere family. More recent analysis has pushed back on that picture.

  The newer view holds that Drayton's social status was, in his contemporaries' terms, inferior to Shakespeare's and well below that of Spenser or Samuel Daniel, both of whom held university degrees. That gap in formal credentials did not stop him from corresponding familiarly with Drummond, numbering Ben Jonson and William Browne among his friends, or writing acknowledgments of literary help from Thomas Lodge.

  His connection to the Goodere family also seems to have touched him personally. A recurring figure in his poems is an unnamed woman associated with the river Ankor in Warwickshire, and scholars have long linked her to the Polesworth Gooderes. Jean Brink has called such biographical readings "romantic flourishes," a caution worth keeping in mind as his sonnet cycle comes into focus.

• 3. The Destroyed First Book

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  In 1590, Drayton published The Harmony of the Church, a volume of spiritual poems dedicated to Lady Devereux. The book was notable for a version of the Song of Solomon rendered with what critics described as considerable richness of expression. Almost none of it survived.

  With the exception of forty copies seized by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the entire edition was destroyed by public order. The reasons for this suppression are not spelled out in the record, but the fact of it is stark: a first book, gone. Drayton did not retreat. He published a vast amount within the following few years, beginning a run of output that would continue without serious interruption for four more decades.

  That resilience in the face of official destruction is one of the more striking early signals of how Drayton operated. The book that brought him to grief has become, partly because of its rarity, one of the curiosities of Elizabethan literary history.

• 4. Ideas and the Sonnet Cycle

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  In 1593, Drayton published Idea: The Shepherd's Garland, a collection of nine pastorals in which he wrote about personal love under the pseudonym Rowland. That same year he began developing a parallel project: a cycle of 51 sonnets called Ideas Mirrour, which appeared in 1594. He expanded and revised that cycle repeatedly, through multiple versions from 1599 to 1619.

  The sonnets reveal, obliquely, that the woman he called his "Idea" lived by the river Ankor in Warwickshire. He never appears to have won her. The conventional interpretation is that he lived and died a bachelor as a result, though Brink's label of "romantic flourishes" applies here too. Whatever the biographical truth, the poems themselves were considered to have a direct and universal appeal, praised for a simple, straightforward quality that critics said anticipated the smooth style of Fairfax, Waller, and Dryden.

  Drayton was also the first writer to bring the term "ode," in the sense of a lyrical poem, to popular use in England. He was described as a master of the short, staccato Anacreontics measure, a form defined by its rapid, clipped rhythm. An epyllion titled Endimion and Phoebe: Ideas Latmus appeared in 1595; Drayton never republished it, but the work contained autobiographical material and acknowledgments of help from Lodge, and possibly from Spenser and Daniel as well.

• 5. Historical Poems and the Heroic Couplet

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  The first of Drayton's historical poems, The Legend of Piers Gaveston, appeared in 1593. The following year brought Matilda, an epic in rhyme royal. Then in 1596 came Mortimeriados, a serious production in ottava rima that he later reworked and republished in 1603 as The Barons' Wars.

  Also in 1596 he published The Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy. In 1597 came England's Heroical Epistles, a series of historical studies written in imitation of Ovid's Heroides. Those epistles, composed in heroic couplets, were considered to contain some of the finest passages in all of Drayton's writings.

  By that point, Drayton had moved through spiritual verse, pastoral, sonnet, epyllion, and multiple forms of historical epic in under a decade. In 1605, he gathered his most important works, the historical poems and the Idea, into a single volume. That collected volume ran through eight editions during his lifetime, suggesting the audience for his work was real and sustained even when individual ventures struggled. He also published a second collection around 1605, Poems Lyric and Pastoral, gathering odes, eclogues, and a satire called The Man in the Moon.

• 6. Poly-Olbion's Long Journey

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  As early as 1598, Drayton committed to an extraordinary project: celebrating every point of topographical or antiquarian interest in the island of Great Britain. He worked on it for years. At last, in 1613, the first part appeared under the title Poly-Olbion, eighteen books in length, with notes supplied by the learned John Selden.

  The reception was poor. The work that would later become famous found almost no audience at first. Drayton searched for years for a publisher willing to take on the second part, and not until 1622 did he find one. That second part, twelve more books, completed the survey of England. He had hoped to extend his work through Scotland and reach the Orcades, but he never crossed the Tweed. The Scotland he imagined crowning with flowers remained unwritten.

  There is something characteristically Draytonesque about Poly-Olbion: a massive, laborious undertaking sustained over decades, commercially uncertain, ultimately incomplete, and yet remarkable enough that later generations rescued it from obscurity. The work is now cited among the most ambitious geographical poems in the English language.

• 7. Theatre and Henslowe

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  From 1597 to 1602, Drayton supplied material for the theatrical syndicate run by Philip Henslowe. Henslowe's Diary records his name in connection with 23 plays from those five years. He almost always worked in collaboration, alongside regulars like Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, and Henry Chettle.

  Of those 23 plays, only one has survived: Part 1 of Sir John Oldcastle, which Drayton wrote with Munday, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathwaye. The text of Oldcastle shows no clear signs of Drayton the poet. The rich vocabulary of plant names and star names that marks his verse, the unusual contractions like "th'adult'rers" or "pois'ned'st" that appear across his poetry, are wholly absent. Scholars have concluded that his contribution to the collaborative work was probably not substantial.

  The one play Henslowe's Diary records as a solo Drayton effort, William Longsword, was never finished. Drayton may have been better suited to the role of impresario. He was one of the lessees of the Whitefriars Theatre when it opened in 1608, partnering with Thomas Woodford, nephew of the playwright Thomas Lodge. Around 1606 he also joined a syndicate that chartered a company of child actors called The Children of the King's Revels. The venture ended in litigation in 1609.

• 8. Friends, Legacy, and Later Volumes

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  Vicar John Ward was transferred to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1661. Among the hearsay about Shakespeare he tried to compile was a note that Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and that Shakespeare died of a fever contracted by drinking too hard on that occasion. Ward's account is secondhand gossip, but it captures something real about Drayton's place in the world: he was close enough to the center of Elizabethan and Jacobean literary life to appear in the same sentence as Shakespeare and Jonson.

  He had hoped for the same court favor under James I that he enjoyed under Elizabeth. In 1603, he addressed a complimentary poem to the new king on his accession. It was ridiculed, and his services were rejected. His bitterness found its way into a satire, The Owl, published in 1604, though he acknowledged that he had no real talent in that mode.

  His 1627 miscellany is considered to contain some of his most characteristic writing. It included The Battle of Agincourt in ottava rima, The Miseries of Queen Margaret, and Nimphidia, the Court of Faery, an epic of fairyland that became one of his most critically acclaimed works. The last publication of his career was The Muses' Elizium in 1630. He left behind an elegy addressed to Henry Reynolds that offered his own criticism of English poets from Chaucer's time to his own, including Shakespeare. He died on the 23rd of December 1631 in London, and the Countess of Dorset placed a monument over his grave in Poets' Corner, with the memorial lines attributed to Ben Jonson.