George Gascoigne
1."Tam Marti quam Mercurio": self-portrait
from the frontispiece of Gascoigne’s
The Steele Glas and Complaynte of Phylomene
2.George Gascoigne, The Tale of Hemetes the
Heremyte (1576)
Used by permission of the British Library.
born c. 1539, Cardington, Bedfordshire, Eng.
died Oct. 7, 1577, Barnack, near Stamford,
Lincolnshire
English poet and a major literary innovator.
Gascoigne attended the University of Cambridge,
studied law at Gray’s Inn in 1555, and
thereafter pursued careers as a politician,
country gentleman, courtier, soldier of fortune,
and man of letters, all with moderate
distinction. He was a member of Parliament
(1557–59). Because of his extravagance and
debts, he gained a reputation for disorderly
living. He served with English troops in the Low
Countries, ending his military career as a
repatriated prisoner of war. In 1575 he helped
to arrange the celebrated entertainments
provided for Queen Elizabeth I at Kenilworth and
Woodstock and in 1576 went to Holland as an
agent in the royal service. Among his friends
were many leading poets, notably George
Whetstone, George Turberville, and Edmund
Spenser.
Gascoigne was a skilled literary craftsman,
memorable for versatility and vividness of
expression and for his treatment of events based
on his own experience. His chief importance,
however, is as a pioneer of the English
Renaissance who had a remarkable aptitude for
domesticating foreign literary genres. He
foreshadowed the English sonnet sequences with
groups of linked sonnets in his first published
work, A Hundreth sundrie Flowres (1573), a
collection of verse and prose. In The Posies of
George Gascoigne (1575), an authorized revision
of the earlier work, which had been published
anonymously, he included also “Certayne notes of
Instruction,” the first treatise on prosody in
English. In The Steele Glas (1576), one of the
earliest formal satires in English, he wrote the
first original nondramatic English blank verse.
In two amatory poems, the autobiographical “Dan
Bartholomew of Bathe” (published in A Hundreth
sundrie Flowres) and The Complainte of Phylomene
(1576), Gascoigne developed Ovidian verse
narrative, the form used by William Shakespeare
in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
“The Adventures of Master F.J.,” published in
A Hundreth sundrie Flowres, was the first
original prose narrative of the English
Renaissance. Another prose work, The Spoyle of
Antwerpe (1576), is an early example of war
journalism, characterized by objective and
graphic reporting.
Gascoigne’s Jocasta (performed in 1566)
constituted the first Greek tragedy to be
presented on the English stage. Translated into
blank verse, with the collaboration of Francis
Kinwelmersh, from Lodovico Dolce’s Giocasta, the
work derives ultimately from Euripides’
Phoenissae. In comedy, Gascoigne’s Supposes
(1566?), a prose translation and adaptation of
Ludovico Ariosto’s I Suppositi, was the first
prose comedy to be translated from Italian into
English. A dramatically effective work, it
provided the subplot for Shakespeare’s The
Taming of the Shrew. A third play, The Glasse of
Government (1575), is a didactic drama on the
Prodigal Son theme. It rounds out the picture of
Gascoigne as a typical literary man of the early
Renaissance.
