By Avon River by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

John Lyly is another of the great group. Euphues is remembered because of euphuism, a word coined from the name of the hero of Lyly’s extravagant Anatomy of Wit. It is said that both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson wrote parodies on Lyly and his intention to re-make the English language. We find Shakespeare’s parody in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Jonson’s in Every Man Out of His Humour. But John Lyly, the poet lives, though Lyly the exponent of rhetoric, is shelved and un-read save by experts and historians.

What bird so sings, yet so does wail?

O ’tis the ravished nightingale.

Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu! she cries,

And still her woes at midnight rise.

Brave prick-song! Who is’t now we hear?

None but the lark so shrill and clear;

How at heaven’s gate she claps her wings,

The morn not waking till she sings.

Hark, hark, with what a pretty throat

Poor robin redbreast tunes his note;

Hark how the jolly cuckoos sing

Cuckoo! to welcome in the spring!

Cuckoo! to welcome in the spring!

Thomas Heywood is reputed to be the author of two hundred and twenty plays, of which only twenty-three have survived. He dealt chiefly with country scenes and country people.

Pack clouds, away, and welcome day!

With night we banish sorrow.

Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft

To give my Love good-morrow!

Wings from the wind to please her mind,

Notes from the lark I’ll borrow;

Bird, prune thy wing, nightingale, sing:

To give my Love good-morrow!

To give my Love good-morrow!

Notes from them all I’ll borrow.

Francis Bacon, like John Lyly, was steeped in the policies and politics of the time. He has been called one of the greatest of philosophers. He wrote essays, Counsels, Civil and Moral, the Advancement of Learning, and a translation of De Augmentis Scientiarum. The following poem is a transcription from the Greek.

The world’s a bubble; and the life of Man

Less than a span:

In his conception wretched—from the womb

So to the tomb!

Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years

With cares and fears.

Who then to frail mortality shall trust

But limns on water, or but writes in dust.

Our own affection still at home to please,

Is a disease;

To cross the sea to any foreign soil,

Peril and toil;

Wars with their noise affright us; when they cease

We’re worse in peace.

What then remains, but that we still should cry

For being born, or, being born, to die?

This is one theme of the Elizabethan age. Webster and Middleton are outstanding examples of the black wave of terror and depression that swept over the island, as a result of the dissolution of the monasteries and the seven years, spent by Mary in seeking to restore them. Following the fires of martyrdom and the reeking stench of the unburied, was an aftermath or after-birth of Hell. I have spoken of Dante. Webster, Middleton, Nash, Lodge, Donne plunged lower into the Inferno. There was a Purgatorio, however, implicit in the Duchess of Malfi and a Mad World my Masters. Dante, like Sophocles, drew on the abstract. Webster, Middleton, Dekker, Ford, Massinger and a host of others, portrayed, in a renaissance setting, parables that represented unbearable actuality.

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