Read Online The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England by Ian Mortimer - Free Book Online

writing and staging history plays. Despite early success as a playwright, his first published work is a poem, Venus and Adonis , which appears in 1593, when all the theatres are closed due to plague. You can pick up a copy from the stationers at St Paul’s for 1s – as many people do, for it goes through reprint after reprint. The following year a second long poem, The Rape of Lucrece , is published. In 1595, when the theatres reopen, he appears on the payroll of the acting company known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and thereafter devotes himself entirely to the stage. But quietly he is writing brilliant sonnets, building up a body of 154 poems, which is finally published in 1609. You will undoubtedly be familiar with many of these, such as ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ (sonnet 18) and ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediment …’ (sonnet 116). But perhaps you are lessfamiliar with sonnet 78, one of the more obviously personal poems, in which he refers to his comparative lack of ‘learning’ (i.e. his lack of a university education):
So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse,
And found such fair assistance in my verse
As every alien pen hath got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse.
Thine eyes, that taught the dumb on high to sing
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned’s wing
And given grace a double majesty.
Yet be most proud of that which I compile,
Whose influence is thine, and born of thee:
In others’ works thou dost but mend the style,
And arts with thy sweet graces graced be;
But thou art all my art, and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance.
    The seven lesser poets on John Taylor’s reading list have a collective wealth of ability, although not necessarily as much application as Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Sir Edward Dyer is a courtier who can turn an exquisite phrase and would be far more famous if he only put his pen to paper more often. He is well known as the author of the famous poem ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’ and the even more touching ‘The lowest trees have tops’. Robert Greene is a libertine, drunkard and philanderer who writes extensively – poems and plays alike – but he is a jealous and conceited man who sees Shakespeare as a rival. Before things come to a head, Greene kills himself with red wine and pickled herring in 1592, at the age of thirty-four. Thomas Nashe, a clergyman’s son from Suffolk, also manages to incur Greene’s wrath, but survives him to write a number of plays, satires and poems as well as a notorious work of erotica, The Choice of Valentines; he too dies at the age of thirty-four. Samuel Daniel is of more sober stock: the son of a music master, he writes plays, masques and poetry, including a series of sonnets to ‘Delia’ (for which he is best known), the romance The Complaint of Rosamond and a history of medieval England in verse, before he expires, aged fifty-six. Francis Beaumont is best known for collaborating onplays with John Fletcher, but is also a friend of Ben Jonson and frequents The Mermaid tavern in Cheapside. Sir John Harington has already been mentioned as a great wit, the inventor of the water closet and one of the queen’s 102 godchildren. He is an epigrammatist of the first order, but too risqué for his own good. Having incurred displeasure by translating some of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in a very racy style, he is requested by his godmother to leave court and not return until he has translated the entire work in a more appropriate manner. This he does – to great acclaim. Apart from Shakespeare, Joshua Sylvester is the only sixteenth-century poet on Taylor’s list who does not have a university education and the only one whose output is limited to translations (from the French), but he too is a highly accomplished wordsmith whose fame lasts for decades.
    We should remember, however, that Taylor’s poem only accounts for those poets who have