More and more I am tempted to return to the old pleasures of
reading wherever the moment leads. I miss it dearly. By most common measures, my
dedication to Shakespeare scholarship has gained me little and lost me precious
time.
The other day I finally gave in. I would just take a few
minutes to read from Cowley. Not because he is a great poet. He is not. But
because he is a mediocre poet in ways I so little understand. Back in the days
when I did little else but browse I read many a mediocre poet that proved to
have a great deal to offer scattered here and there throughout their work.
I began this round of hooky with the Cowley poems in Sylvester’s
old standby English Seventeenth Century Verse. Only now do I think of
Parfitt’s Silver Poets where I find a note here and there jotted
probably decades ago. Both are paper volumes from the floor to ceiling shelves that
fill the apartment. Almost immediately, I was taken back to the old hermit’s cottage
sitting in the back corner beneath a dingy yellow incandescent light.
This being the Age of the Internet I no longer must stop
within the limited bounds of the material world. Things have changed. I’m a
vastly bigger library to the good while the world in which I read the books is
declining even faster. But I didn’t download Grosart’s edition of Cowley’s
complete poems first. First I downloaded Edmund Gosse’s Seventeenth century
studies which I noticed included an essay on the poet.
Gosse is perhaps as fine an example of a professional gentleman-critic
as one might meet. Eminently readable. He informed me that Cowley was the first
English poet to employ Alexandrines, that Dryden’s “Song on St. Cecilia's
Day directly imitates Cowley's Ode on the Resurrection,”[1]
that Milton seems to have studied Cowley’s Davideis. Wandering at leisure
through the written word continually reveals facts large and small.
My persistent interest in Cowley, over the years, however,
was in his English versions of the Pindaric Ode. What exactly were the features
that made them Pindaric? While I reflected upon these I read many of the better
known anthology poems.
Now, thanks to Gosse, I was filling in a bit of biography.
That’s the joy of browsing. No need to be exhaustive at one go. There’s plenty
of time. (Or so it must seem however much there will prove to be far too
little.) Let the reading take you where it will. Eventually there will be the
Odes themselves — already sampled — and maybe a visit with Collins’ Odes
which I have not read in years.
Of course, there are ironies to browsing, as well. Almost
always. On this occasion, it was a great irony that I had escaped from the
fardels of Shakespeare scholarship for a few hours only to discover a chapter
in Gosse’s Seventeenth century studies entitled “Captain Dover's
Cotswold Games”.
The reader may know that the Cotswold games are the subject
of considerable debate regarding a brief swatch from Shakespeare’s The Merry
Wives of Windsor (I.i.).
Slen. How does your fallow
greyhound, sir? I heard say he was outrun on Cotsall.
Page. It could not be judged,
sir.
Slen. You’ll not confess, you’ll
not confess.
Shal. That he will not. ’Tis your fault, ’tis your fault;
’tis a good dog.
It’s a delightful bit of human color. Who wouldn’t want
Shakespeare to have written it? But it does not appear until the 1623 First
Folio. And all of the editions of The Merry Wives are a pretty serious
textual mess sutured together by generations of scholars as best they have been
able.
Captain Dover received license from James I to initiate
formal games in Cotswold north of London. Whoever wrote this passage from The
Merry Wives would seem to have found the sports-talk around the games —
either Dover’s games or informal predecessors adopted by Dover — an amusing
human touch.
But the play is thought to first have been performed around
1599. The first quarto was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1602. King
James could not have given permission for games played annually each “Thursday and Friday of Whitsun holiday
week”[2]
to begin any earlier than 1604.
A second quarto appeared among the false quartos of 1919. It
was merely a copy of the first. I’ve mentioned the circumstances. [Link]
The common reply among those who wish Shakespeare to have
written the dialogue is repeated by Gosse.
It is not certain when first Cotswold became celebrated for
its public sports; but certainly in the middle of the sixteenth century we find
John Heywood, the epigrammatist, talking familiarly of one who was as fierce "as
a lion of Cotswold," and it is understood that this allusion is to the
leonine youths who fought and raced in the fine bracing air of North
Gloucestershire.[3]
The citation is repeated again and again. Just who was the
first who can say? This would seem to be a prime example of collective delusion
as the precise 1546 allusion is:
She fometh lyke a bore, the beast shuld
seme bolde.
For she is as fiers, as a lyon of cotsolde.[4]
The pamphlet from which the “proverb” is taken is a
collection of sayings most regarding good and ill marriages. The proverb is recited
to describe a wife of impressive, boar-like fury, whose daunting self-image is
based upon a lack of predators.
What can be said with certainty is that the plays of Shakespeare
are full of references to coursing (dog-racing) — none of which seems to give
us the slightest hint of a popular location until this mention of the Cotswold
which we cannot give a date or provenance. Still, we know the text of The
Merry Wives to have been repeatedly mangled, the final occasion being the
text found in the First Folio.
As for Gosse on Cowley, I am taught about the biographer as
much as the subject. Grosart’s two volume collection of the poet’s works incorporates
another biographer who insightfully includes Cowley among the Metaphysical Poets.
Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, I was
surprised to discover, left Gosse looking pale. Nevertheless, I was indebted to
him for his hints as to further directions in Cowley and the Cotswold games.
Among many quotes from Donne and Cleveland, typical of the
Metaphysical style, we find in Johnson compelling examples from Cowley. His
being a “complete works,” Grosart goes on to present them all, these two
stanzas not the least among them.
Welcome, ah welcome, my poor Heart ;
Welcome; I little thought, l’le swear,
(Tis now so long since we did part)
Ever again to see thee here:
Dear wanderer, since from me you fled,
How often have I heard that you were
dead!
Hadst thou found each woman's breast
(The Lands where thou hast travelled)
Either by Savages possest,
Or wild, and uninhabited?
What Joy couldst take, or what repose
In countries so unciviliz'd as those? [5]
Grosart and Johnson introduced me to several lyrics,
decidedly not mediocre, by Cowley, that I do not remember ever having read
before. I really do need to get out more.
[1] Gosse,
Edmund. Seventeenth century studies (1913). 216.
[2] Grosart,
Alexander. Annalia Dubrensia, or Celebration of Captain Robert Dover's
Cotswold Games (1877). viii.
[3]
Gosse, 108.
[4]
Heywood, John. A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the
prouerbes in the englishe tongue, compacte in a matter concernyng two maner of
mariages, made and set foorth by Iohn̄ Heywood (1546).
[5] Grosart, Alexander. The complete works in verse and prose of Abraham Cowley (1881). I.116.
Also from the Library of Babel and Virtual Grub Street:
- The Gourmet Pirate: his recipes for Syllabub. May 4, 2022. 'Mixing with a "birchen rod" and drinking the beverage from custom porcelain “syllabub cups” were absolutely essential aspects in better circles in which the participants took their syllabub seriously.'
- Shakespeare and the End of Western Civilization. February 21, 2021. “The SLJ article posted at pretty much the same time that a featured interview of Germán was posted in the much more radical White Supremacy in Education issue of the Learning for Justice group’s Teaching Tolerance Magazine. Learning for Justice was founded by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
- The Best Translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia. July, 14, 2019. “For the next month, then, I put aside a few hours each night. Not only with Singleton and Merwin. In the glorious Age of the Internet, the first step could only be a search for what books relating to the subject were available on Google Book Search and the Internet Archive.”
- A Memoriam for W. S. Merwin. April 17, 2019. “It took about three days, as I recall, for me to surrender to the fact that W. S. Merwin was the finest English language poet of his time. I wished I’d been prepared to read him years ago.”
- Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
- Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.
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