George Puttenham the Art of English Poesy Book 3

May 04, 2022 Post a Comment

16th-century English writer and literary critic

George Puttenham (1529–1590) was an English writer and literary critic. He is generally considered to be the writer of the influential handbook on poetry and rhetoric, The Arte of English Poesie (1589).

Family and early life [edit]

Puttenham was the second son of Robert Puttenham of Sherfield-on-Loddon in Hampshire and his married woman Margaret, the daughter of Sir Richard Elyot and sis of Sir Thomas Elyot.^[ane] ^[2] He had an elder brother, Richard.^[1] ^[2] He matriculated at Christ's Higher, Cambridge, in November 1546, aged 17, only took no degree, and was admitted to the Center Temple on 11 August 1556.^[iii]

In tardily 1559 or early 1560 Puttenham married Elizabeth, Lady Windsor (1520–1588), the daughter and coheir of Peter Cowdray of Herriard, Hampshire. She was the widow of both Richard, brother of William Paulet, 1st Marquess of Winchester, and William, Baron Windsor.^[1] ^[2] She brought a substantial dowry to the marriage.^[4] They had at to the lowest degree one daughter.^[one] ^[2]

Somewhere effectually 1562, Puttenham travelled abroad to buy Sherfield House from his elder blood brother Richard.^[v] He immediately quarrelled at Sherfield Firm with Lady Windsor's brother-in-police force, Thomas Paulet, for inciting others to steal a goshawk from him; Paulet albeit to having confronted Puttenham with a dagger and wounding him twice.^[5] His circumvolve of enemies notedly widened when Lady Windsor separated from him, suing him for divorce in 1566.^[5]

Domestic disputes and later legal troubles [edit]

Much of the information known nigh Puttenham's later personal and professional life stems from court records of the dissolution of his union and of his attempt to get out of debt by wresting control of Sherfield House from his niece Anne Morris and her husband, Francis.^[5] These documents pigment a troubled moving picture of Puttenham as a compulsive adulterer, a series rapist and a wife-beater.^[1] In addition he seems to take followed his elder brother's precedent in having at least one child with his maidservants.^[1] One he took to Flanders and abandoned.^[1] One of the more lascivious stories asserts that when Puttenham was forty-3, he besides had his retainer kidnap a 17-year-old girl in London and bring her to his farm at Upton Gray near Sherfield, where he raped her and kept her locked up for three years.^[one]

While the veracity of these court records should reasonably exist questioned (given the particularly nasty nature of Puttenham's divorce and the tendency of early modern court cases to present the most fantastical accounts of their participants), surprisingly little was said in defence of Puttenham'south graphic symbol. Information technology is, perhaps, telling that the neutral observer Richard Horne, Bishop of Winchester, reacted with surprise and disdain to Puttenham's appointment as a Justice of the Peace, writing to William Cecil, Lord Burghley hoping that information technology "be not true, for his evil life is well knowne."^[6]

In 1579 he presented to Elizabeth I his Partheniades (printed in a collection of manuscript Ballads past F. J. Furnivall), and he wrote the treatise in question especially for the delectation of the queen and her ladies. He mentions nine other works of his, none of which are extant. Puttenham is said to take been implicated in a plot against Lord Burghley in 1570 and in Dec 1578 was imprisoned. In 1585 he received reparation from the privy quango for alleged wrongs suffered at the hands of his relations. His will is dated 1 September 1590.

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The Arte of English Poesie was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1588, and published in the following year with a dedicatory letter to Lord Burghley written by the printer Richard Field, who professed ignorance of the writer's name and position. However, alterations to the text fabricated during the printing run indicate that the author must accept been live and that Field must accept known his identity. The first reference to the work was fabricated in the preface to Sir John Harrington's translation of Orlando Furioso (1591) in reaction to Puttenham'due south view of translators as mere versifiers. Harrington disparages Puttenham's assertion that poetry is an art rather than a gift, holding up Puttenham'southward ain poetry equally proof because "he sheweth himself so slender a gift in it." Although Harrington does not name Puttenham, in a surviving manuscript annotation apropos the publication of his own volume, he asks Field to publish it "in the same print that Putnams book is", which he did.^[7]

In an essay published in the second edition of William Camden'due south Remaines (1614), Richard Carew writes, "wait into our Imitations of all sorts of verses past any other language, and you shall finde that Sir Phillip Sidney, Maister Puttenham, Maister Stanihurst, and defined more than have made utilise how farre wee are within compasse of a fore imagined impossibility in that behalfe".^[8] Effectually the same fourth dimension, in his Hypercritica (non published until 1722), Edmund Bolton writes of "the elegant, witty, and bogus book of the Art of English Poetrie, (the work as the fame is) of ane of [Queen Elizabeth's] Gentleman Pensioners, Puttenham". Since Puttenham received two leases in reversion from the queen in 1588, this seems to clearly identify him as the author.^[nine]

Certain biographical details in The Arte may point to a Puttenham as the author. He was educated at Oxford, and at the age of 18 he addressed an eclogue entitled Elpine to Edward VI. In his youth he had visited Kingdom of spain, France, and Italy, and was meliorate acquainted with foreign courts than with his own.

There is no direct evidence beyond Bolton'south ascription to place the author with George or Richard Puttenham, the sons of Robert Puttenham and his wife Margaret, the sister of Sir Thomas Elyot, who defended his treatise on the Education or Bringing up of Children to her for the benefit of her sons. Furthermore, since Bolton's ascription occurs 15 years after George's death and four later on Richard's neither human being would have been able to either take or reject the attribution. Both made unhappy marriages, were constantly engaged in litigation, and were frequently in disgrace. One fact that points towards George'southward authorship is that Richard was in prison house when the book was licensed to be printed, and when he made his volition in 1597 he was in the Queen's Bench Prison house. He was buried, according to John Payne Collier, at St. Clement Danes, London, on 2 July 1601. Richard Puttenham is known to have spent much of his fourth dimension abroad, whereas George is only known to have left England a single time, to get the human activity for Sherfield House from his blood brother. This agrees improve with the author's account of himself; simply if the argument that he addressed Elpine to Edward VI when he was xviii years of age exist taken to imply that the production of this work brutal within that king's reign, the appointment of the author's birth cannot be placed anterior to 1529. At the date (1546) of his inheritance of his uncle, Sir Thomas Elyot's estates, Richard Puttenham was proved in an inquisition held at Newmarket to accept been twenty-six years erstwhile. The history of the Puttenhams is discussed in H. H. S. Croft's edition of Elyot's Boke called the Cover nour. A careful investigation brought him to the conclusion that the evidence was in favour of Richard. There are other modernistic editions of the book, notably 1 in Joseph Haslewood's Aboriginal Critical Essays (1811–1815). For editions with disquisitional apparatus see Willcock and Walker's Cambridge edition of 1936 and Whigham and Rebhorn's new critical edition (Cornell UP, 2007).

The Arte of English Poesie [edit]

Whoever the author may take been, at that place is no doubt virtually the importance of the piece of work, which is the most systematic and comprehensive treatise of the time on its subject. It is "contrived into three books: the starting time of poets and poesies, the 2nd of proportion, the third of ornament." Puttenham's book covers a full general history of the fine art of verse, and a give-and-take of the various forms of poesy; the second treats of prosody, dealing in turn with the measures in utilize in English poetry, the caesura, punctuation, rhyme, accent, cadence, proportion in figure, which the author illustrates by geometrical diagrams, and the proposed innovations of English quantitative verse; the department on ornament deals with style, the distinctions between written and spoken language, the figures of speech; and the author closes with lengthy observations on practiced manners. He deprecates the use of archaisms, and although he allows that the purer Saxon speech communication is spoken beyond the Trent, he advises the English writer to take equally his model the usual speech of the court, of London and the home counties.

Book I, "Of Poets and Poesie," contains a remarkably credible history of poetry in Greek, Latin and in English. All subjects, including science and law, were in primitive times written in verse, and the types of poetry number in the dozens. Because it is decorated with versification and figures of speech, poesy is a more persuasive and melodious form of language, and is very much given to structure and accuracy. The countless examples of dignities and promotions given to poets throughout history, and the numerous examples of purple poets, bear witness upward the ignorance of Renaissance courtiers who suppress their poetry or publish under a pseudonym.

In Book Two, "Of Proportion Poetical," Puttenham compares metrical grade to arithmetical, geometrical, and musical pattern. He adduces five points to English verse structure: the "Staffe," the "Measure," "Concur or Symphony," "Situation" and "Figure".

The staff, or stanza, is four to ten lines that join without suspension and finish upwards all of the sentences thereof. Each length of stanza suits a poetic tone and genre. Each is overlaid past a closed rhyme scheme. This latter, termed "band" (65) and "enterlacement" (70), is of master concern to Puttenham. He views English as having solely a syllabic arrangement of measure, or metre. The length of lines may alternating in patterns that support the rhyme scheme, then increase the ring. Syllabic length is a factor just accentuation is non. Caesura should occur at the aforementioned identify in every line; it helps to keep upwards distinctness and clarity, 2 virtues of civil language.

"Concord, chosen Symphonie or rime" (76) is an accommodation made for the lack of metrical anxiety in English versification. The matching of line lengths, rhymed at the end, in symmetrical patterns, is a further accommodation. A number of graphs are shown to illustrate the multifariousness of rhyme schemes and line-length patterns, or situation. The poet who tin work melodiously inside the strictures of versification proves a "crafts master," a valuable literary virtue. Proportion in figure is the composition of stanzas in graphic forms ranging from the rhombus to the spire.

Book III, "Of Ornament," which comprises a full one-half of the Arte, is a catalogue of figures of oral communication, in the tradition of Richard Sherry, Henry Peacham, Abraham Fraunce, and Angel Day. Since language is inherently artificial, and "not naturall to man" (120), the added artifice of figures is particularly suitable. Figures give more "pithe and substance, subtilitie, quicknesse, efficacie or moderation, in this or that sort tuning and tempring them by amplification, abridgement, opening, closing, enforcing, meekening or otherwise disposing them to the best purpose ..." (134). From page 136 to 225, Puttenham lists and analyses figures of speech. His volume concludes with a lengthy analysis of "decency," and the artificial and natural dimensions of language.

Influence of The Arte of English Poesie [edit]

Many later "poetics" are indebted to this book. The original edition is very rare. Edward Arber's reprint (1869) contains a articulate summary of the various documents with regard to the authorship of this treatise. According to George Puttenham, presumptive author of The Arte of English Poesie, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, "trauailed into Italie" (49) and brought back the verse forms that make them "the first reformers of our English meter and stile" (49). The introduction of these new Italian forms in turn necessitated the flurry of Renaissance poetry manuals, past George Gascoigne, Samuel Daniel, Charles Webb, and Sir Philip Sidney, in addition to Puttenham'southward Arte. In that location is currently argue about Puttenham's relative authority in comparison to these other figures.

References [edit]

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h May, Stephen W (2008). "George Puttenham'south Lewd and Illicit Career". Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Academy of Texas Press. fifty (2): 143–176. doi:10.1353/tsl.0.0001. S2CID 162082799.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Whigman, Frank; Redhorn, Wayne A, eds. (2007). The Fine art of English Verse: A Critical Edition. Ithaca: Cornell Upwardly.
^ "Putenham, George (PTNN546G)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. Academy of Cambridge.
^ M. Eccles, Cursory lives: Tudor and Stuart authors (1982): 26–30, p. 29.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Steven W. May, "Puttenham, George (1529–1590/91)", Oxford Lexicon of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004: 22913.
^ Salisbury MSS, ane.392–iii, Horne to Cecil, 21 January 1569
^ Whigham, Frank, and Wayne A. Rebhorn. (2007) The Art of English Poesy, by George Puttenham, A Critical Edition. Ithaca: Cornell University Printing, p. xviii.
^ Whigham and Rebhorn, p. 19.
^ Whigham and Rebhorn, pp. 17, 19.

This article incorporates text from a publication at present in the public domain:Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Puttenham, George". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Printing.

External links [edit]

Works past George Puttenham at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about George Puttenham at Net Archive
Steven West. May, 'Puttenham, George (1529–1590/91)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Printing, 2004, accessed viii November 2007
The Arte of English Poesie online from the Electronic Text Center, Academy of Virginia Library

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Puttenham

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