The Battaile of Agincourt Part 1

The Battaile of Agincourt.

by Michael Drayton.

INTRODUCTION.

All civilized nations possessing a history which they contemplate with pride endeavour to present that history in an epic form. In their initial stages of culture the vehicles of expression are ballads like the const.i.tuents of the Spanish Romanceros and chronicles like Joinville's and Froissart's. With literary refinement comes the distinct literary purpose, and the poet appears who is also more or less of an artist. The number of Spanish and Portuguese national epics, from the Lusiad downwards, during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, is astonishing; and it was impossible that English authorship, rapidly acquiring a perception of literary form under cla.s.sical and foreign influences, should not be powerfully affected by the example of its neighbours.

A remarkable circ.u.mstance, nevertheless, while encouraging this epical impulse, deprived its most important creations of the external epical form. The age of awakened national self-consciousness was also the age of drama. The greatest poetical genius of that or any age, and his a.s.sociates, were playwrights first and poets afterwards. The torrent of inspiration rushed mainly to the stage. Hence the old experience was reversed, and whereas aeschylus described himself and his fellow-dramatists as subsisting on sc.r.a.ps filched from the great banquet of Homer, our English epic poets could but follow humbly in the wake of the dramatists, the alchemy of whose genius had already turned the dross of ancient chronicles to gold. In the mighty series of Shakespeare's historical plays, including in the enumeration Marlowe's "Edward the Second" and the anonymous "Edward the Third," England possesses a national epic inferior to that of no country in the world, although the form be dramatic. In one respect, indeed, this epic is superior to any but the Homeric poems, standing one remove less apart from the poetry of the people. The impression of primitive force which the Homeric poems convey by their venerable language is equally well imparted by Shakespeare's spontaneity and his apparent and probably real innocence of all purely literary intention.

Epic poets, however gifted, could be but gleaners after such a harvest.

Yet not every excellent poet, even of that dramatic age, was endowed with the dramatic faculty, and two of especial merit, singularly devoid of dramatic gift, but inferior to none in love of their country and self-consecration to its service, turned their attention to the epic.

These were Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton. The latter is our subject, but something should also be said of the former. Drayton not unfairly hit the blot in his successful rival when he said of him:

"His rimes were smooth, his meeters well did close, But yet his maner better fitted prose."

This is one way of putting it; from another point of view Daniel may be regarded as almost the most remarkable literary phenomenon of his time; he is so exceedingly modern. He outran the taste of his own period by a hundred years, and without teacher or example displayed the excellences which came to be preferred to all others in the eighteenth century.

"These poems of his," says his editor in that age (1718), "having stood the test of above a century, and the language and the versification being still pure and elegant, it is to be hoped they will still shine among his countrymen and preserve his name." At this time, and for long afterwards, Drayton, save for an occasional reprint of his "Nimphidia"

among miscellaneous collections, was utterly neglected. Even after the editions of 1748 and 1753 he is alluded to by Goldsmith as a type of the poet whose best t.i.tle to fame is his tomb in Westminster Abbey.

The nineteenth century has reversed this with other critical verdicts of the eighteenth, and, with all due respect to Daniel, Drayton now stands higher. Yet, where the two poets come most directly and manifestly into compet.i.tion, Drayton's superiority is not so evident. As a whole, Daniel's "Civil War" is a better poem than Drayton's "Barons' Wars." The superiority of the latter lies in particular pa.s.sages, such as the description of the guilty happiness of Isabella and Mortimer, quoted in Mr. Arthur Bullen's admirable selection. This is to say that Drayton's genius was naturally not so much epical as lyrical and descriptive. In his own proper business as a narrative poet he fails as compared with Daniel, but he enriches history with all the ornaments of poetry; and it was his especial good fortune to discover a subject in which the union of dry fact with copious poetic ill.u.s.tration was as legitimate to the theme as advantageous to the writer. This was, of course, his "Polyolbion," where, doing for himself what no other poet ever did, he did for his country what was never done for any other. Greece and Rome, indeed, have left us versified topographies, but these advance no pretension to the poetical character except from the metrical point of view, though they may in a sense claim kinship with the Muses as the manifest offspring of Mnemosyne. If any modern language possesses a similar work, it has failed to inscribe itself on the roll of the world's literature. The difficulties of Drayton's unique undertaking were in a measure favourable to him. They compelled him to exert his fancy to the uttermost. The tremendous difficulty of making topography into poetry gave him unwonted energy. He never goes to sleep, as too often in the "Barons' Wars." The stiff practical obstacles attendant upon the poetical treatment of towns and rivers provoke even the dragging Alexandrine into animation; his stream is often all foam and eddy. The long sweeping line, of its wont so lumbering and tedious, is perfectly in place here. It rushes along like an impetuous torrent, bearing with it, indeed, no inconsiderable quant.i.ty of wood, hay, and stubble, but also precious pearls, and more than the dust of gold. Its "swelling and limitless billows" mate well with the amplitude of the subject, so varied and s.p.a.cious that, as has been well said, the "Polyolbion" is not a poem to be read through, but to be read in.

Nothing in our literature, perhaps, except the "Faery Queen," more perfectly satisfies Keats's desideratum: "Do not the lovers of poetry like to have a little region to wander in, where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second reading: which may be food for a week's stroll in the summer? Do they not like this better than what they can read through before Mrs. Williams comes down stairs? a morning work at most?"

The "Polyolbion" was completed by 1619, though the concluding part was not published until 1623. "The Battaile of Agincourt," the poem now reprinted, appeared with others in 1627. As none of the pieces comprised in it had appeared in the collected edition of Drayton's works (the "Polyolbion" excepted) which he had published in 1620, it is reasonable to conclude that they had been composed between that date and 1627. They prove that his powers were by no means abated. "Nimphidia," in particular, though lacking the exquisite sweetness of some of his lyric pastorals, and the deep emotion of pa.s.sages in his "Heroicall Epistles,"

excels all his other productions in airy fancy, and is perhaps the best known of any of his poems. Nor does the "Battaile" itself indicate any decay in poetical power, though we must agree with Mr. Bullen that it is in some parts fatiguing. This wearisomeness proceeds chiefly from Drayton's over-faithful adherence, not so much to the actual story, as to the method of the chronicler from whom his materials are princ.i.p.ally drawn. It does not seem to have occurred to him to regard his theme in the light of potter's clay. Following his authority with servile deference, he makes at the beginning a slip which lowers the dignity of his hero, and consequently of his epic. He represents Henry the Fifth's expedition against France as originally prompted, not by the restless enterprise and fiery valour of the young king, much less by supernatural inspiration as the working out of a divine purpose, but by the craft of the clergy seeking to divert him from too nice inquiry into the source and application of their revenues. Henry, therefore, without, as modern investigators think, even sufficient historical authority, but in any case without poetical justification, appears at the very beginning of the poem that celebrates his exploits in the light of a dupe.

Shakespeare avoids this awkwardness by boldly altering the date of Henry's emba.s.sy to France. His play opens, indeed, with the plots of the ecclesiastics to tempt the king into war, but it soon appears that the emba.s.sy claiming certain French dukedoms has been despatched before they had opened their lips, and that they are urging him to a course of action on which he is resolved already. Spenser or Dryden would have escaped from the difficulty in a manner more in accordance with epic precedent by representing Henry's action as the effect of a divine vision. Edward the Third or the Black Prince would have risen from the grave to urge him to renew and complete their interrupted and now almost undone work; or the ghosts of chiefs untimely slain would have reproached him with their abandoned conquests and neglected graves.

Drayton has merely taken the story as he found it, without a thought of submitting its dross to the alchemy of the re-creative imagination of the poet. The same lack of selection is observable in his description of the battle itself. He minutely describes a series of episodes, in themselves often highly picturesque, but we are no better able to view the conflict as a whole than if we ourselves had fought in the ranks. As in painting, so in poetry, a true impression is not to be conveyed by microscopic accuracy in minutiae, but by a vigorous grasp of the entire subject.

Notwithstanding these defects, which one might have thought would have been avoided even by a poet endowed with less of the bright and sprightly invention which Drayton manifests in so many of his pieces, "The Battaile of Agincourt" is a fine poem, and well deserving the honour of reprint. It is above all things patriotic, pervaded throughout by a manly and honourable preference for England and all things English, yet devoid of bitterness towards the enemy, whose valour is frankly acknowledged, and whose overweening pride, the cause of their disasters, is never made the object of ill-natured sarcasm. It may almost be said that if Drayton had been in some respects a worse man, he might on this occasion have been a better poet. He is so sedulously regardful of the truth of history, or what he takes to be such, that he neglects the poet's prerogative of making history, and rises and falls with his model like a moored vessel pitching in a flowing tide. When his historical authority inspires, Drayton is inspired accordingly; when it is dignified, so is he; with it he soars and sings, with it he also sinks and creeps. Happily the subject is usually picturesque, and old Holinshed at his worst was no contemptible writer. Drayton's heart too was in his work, as he had proved long before by the n.o.ble ballad on King Harry reprinted in this volume. If he has not shown himself an artist in the selection and arrangement of his topics, he deserves the name from another point of view by the excellent metrical structure of his octaves, and the easy fluency of his narrative. One annoying defect, the frequent occurrence of flat single lines not far remote from bathos, must be attributed to the low standard of the most refined poetry in an age when "the judges and police of literature" had hardly begun either to make laws or to enforce them. It is a fault which he shared with most others, and of which he has himself given more offensive instances. It is still more conspicuous in the most generally acceptable of his poems, the "Nimphidia." The pity is not so much the occasional occurrence of such lapses in "The Battaile of Agincourt," as the want of those delightful touches in the other delightful poems which give more pleasure the more evidently they are embellishments rather springing out of the author's fancy than naturally prompted by his subject. Such are the lines, as inappropriate in the mouth of the speaker as genuine from the heart of the writer, near the beginning of Queen Margaret's epistle to the Duke of Suffolk ("England's Heroicall Epistles"):

"The little bird yet to salute the morn Upon the naked branches sets her foot, The leaves then lying on the mossy root, And there a silly chirruping doth keep, As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep; Praising fair summer that too soon is gone, Or sad for winter too soon coming on."

On a more exact comparison of Drayton with Holinshed we find him omitting some circ.u.mstances which he might have been expected to have retained, and adding others with good judgment and in general with good effect, but which by some fatality usually tend in his hands to excessive prolixity. This is certainly not the case with his dignified and spirited exordium, but in the fourth stanza he begins to copy history, and his muse's wing immediately flags. No more striking example of the superiority of dramatic to narrative poetry in vividness of delineation could be found than the contrast between Shakespeare's scene representing the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely in actual conversation, and Drayton's tame exposition of the outcome of their deliberations. In his report of the session of Parliament where the French war is discussed he closely follows Holinshed, so closely as to omit Shakespeare's masterly embellishment of Henry's solemn appeal to the Archbishop to p.r.o.nounce on the justice of his cause as in the sight of G.o.d. Drayton must a.s.suredly have perceived how greatly such an appeal tended to exalt his hero's character, and what an opening it afforded for impressive rhetoric. Nor could the incident have escaped his notice, for there is abundant internal evidence of his acquaintance with Shakespeare's drama in the closet as well as on the stage. It can only be concluded that he did not choose to be indebted to Shakespeare, or despaired of rivalling him. His notice of his great contemporary in the "Epistle to Reynolds" is surprisingly cold; but the legend, however unauthentic, of Shakespeare's death from a fever contracted at a merry-making in Drayton's company, seems incompatible with any serious estrangement, and Shakespeare's son-in-law was Drayton's physician when the latter revisited his native Warwickshire. The same jealousy of obligation must have influenced his treatment of the incident of the Dauphin's derisive present of tennis b.a.l.l.s, which both Shakespeare and he have adopted from Holinshed or his authorities, but of which the former has made everything and the latter nothing. Nor can the omission of the highly dramatic incident of the conspiracy of Scroop and Cambridge, found in Holinshed, be otherwise well accounted for. In compensation, Drayton introduces two episodes entirely his own, the catalogue of Henry's ships, and that of the armorial ensigns of the British counties. Ben Jonson may be suspected of a sneer when he congratulates Drayton on thus outdoing Homer, as he had previously outdone, or at least rivalled, Virgil, Theocritus, Ovid, Orpheus, and Lucan. Ben might have said with perfect sincerity that Drayton's descriptions are fine pieces of work, showing great command of language, and only open to criticism from some want of proportion between them and the poem of which they are but subordinate episodes. This censure would have been by no means just if the whole piece had been executed on the scale of the description of the siege of Harfleur. It is difficult to imagine what could have tempted Drayton to spend so much time upon an episode treated by Holinshed with comparative brevity. Some of the stanzas are exceedingly spirited, but as a whole the description certainly fatigues. If the same is to some extent the case with the description of the Battle of Agincourt itself, the cause is not so much prolixity as the mult.i.tude of separate episodes, not always derived from the chroniclers, and the consequent want of unity which has been already adverted to. The result is probably more true to the actual impression of a battle than if Drayton had surveyed the field with the eye of a tactician, but here as elsewhere the poet should rather aim at an exalted and in some measure idealized representation of the object or circ.u.mstance described than at a faithful reproduction of minor details.

Even the Battle of the Frogs and Mice in Homer is an orderly whole; while Drayton's battle seems always ending and always beginning anew, a Sisyphian epic. What, however, really kindles and vivifies the unequal composition into one glowing ma.s.s is the n.o.ble spirit of enthusiastic patriotism which pervades the poet's mind, and, like sunlight in a mountainous tract, illuminates his heights, veils his depressions, and steeps the whole in glory.

Of the literary history of "The Battaile of Agincourt" there is little to be said. It was first published in 1627, along with "Nimphidia," "The Shepheard's Sirena," and others of Drayton's best pieces. It was accompanied by three copies of congratulatory verse, reprinted here, the most remarkable of which is that proceeding from the pen of Ben Jonson, who admits that some had accounted him no friend to Drayton, and whose encomiums are to our apprehension largely flavoured with irony. Drayton, in his "Epistle to Reynolds," which Jonson must have seen, had compared him to Seneca and Plautus,[*] and Jonson seems to burlesque the compliment by comparing Drayton himself to every poet whom he had ever imitated, until his single person seems an epitome of all Parna.s.sus. The poem and its companions had another edition in 1631, since which time it has been included in every edition of Drayton's works, but has never till now been published by itself. Even here it is graced with a satellite, the splendid Ballad of Agincourt ("To my Frinds the Camber-Britans and theyr Harp"), originally published in "Poemes lyric and pastoral," probably about 1605. This stirring strain, always admired, has attracted additional notice in the present day as the metrical prototype of Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," which, in our estimation, fails to rival its model. The lapses of both poets may well be excused on the ground of the difficulty of the metre, but Drayton has the additional apology of the "brave neglect" which so correct a writer as Pope accounted a virtue in Homer, but which Tennyson never had the nerve to permit himself.

[Footnote: Pope's celebrated verse,-- "Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring,"-- is "conveyed" from this pa.s.sage of Drayton.]

Comparisons between modern and ancient poets must necessarily be very imperfect; yet our Drayton might not inaptly be termed the English Theocritus. If not so distinctly superior to every other English pastoral poet as Theocritus was to every other Greek, he yet stands in the front rank. He is utterly free from affectation, the great vice of pastoral poetry; his love of the country is sincere; his perception of natural phenomena exquisite; his shepherds and shepherdesses real swains and la.s.ses; he has happily varied the conventional form of the pastoral by a felicitous lyrical treatment. Paradoxical as it may appear, Drayton was partly enabled to approach Theocritus so nearly by knowing him so imperfectly. Had he been acquainted with him otherwise than through Virgil, he would probably have been unable to refrain from direct imitation; but as matters stand, instead of a poet striving to write as Theocritus wrote in Greek, we have one actually writing as Theocritus would have written in English. But the most remarkable point of contact between Drayton and Theocritus is that both are epical as well as pastoral poets. Two of the Idylls of Theocritus are believed to be fragments of an epic on the exploits of Hercules; and in the enumeration of his lost works, amid others of the same description, mention is made of the "Heroines," a curious counterpart of Drayton's "Heroicall Epistles." Had these works survived, we might not improbably have found Drayton surpa.s.sing his prototype in epic as much as he falls below him in pastoral; for the more exquisite art of the Sicilian could hardly have made amends for the lack of that national pride and enthusiastic patriotism which had died out of his age, but which enn.o.bled the strength and upbore the weakness of the author of "The Battaile of Agincourt."

RICHARD GARNETT.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

EFFIGIES MICHAELIS DRAYTON ARMIGERI, POETae CLARISS.

aeTAT. SVae L. A. CHR. ?.DC.XIII

_Lux Hareshulla tibi Warwici villa, tenebris, Ante tuas Cunas, obsita Prima fuit.

Arma, Viros, Veneres, Patriam modulamine dixti: Te Patriae resonant Arma, Viri, Veneres._]

THE BATTAILE OF AGINCOVRT.

FOVGHT BY HENRY THE fift of that name, King of _England_, against the whole power of the _French_: vnder the Raigne of their CHARLES the sixt, _Anno Dom._ 1415.

The Miseries of Queene MARGARITE, the infortunate VVife, of that most infortunate King Henry the sixt.

NIMPHIDIA, the Court of _Fayrie_.

The Quest of CINTHIA.

The Shepheards SIRENA.

The _Moone-Calfe_.

Elegies vpon sundry occasions.

_By MICHAELL DRAYTON Esquire_.

_LONDON_,

Printed for WILLIAM LEE, at the Turkes Head in Fleete-Streete, next to the Miter and Phaenix.

1627.

[_The preceding page is a reduced reproduction of the t.i.tle-page of the first edition, which contains, as will be seen, several poems besides "The Battaile of Agincourt" which are not included in the present reprint._]

_To you those n.o.blest of Gentlemen, of these Renowned Kingdomes of Great Britaine: who in these declining times, haue yet in your braue bosomes the sparkes of that sprightly fire, of your couragious Ancestors; and to this houre retaine the seedes of their magnanimitie and Greatnesse, who out of the vertue of your mindes, loue and cherish neglected Poesie, the delight of Blessed soules, and the language of Angels. To you are these my Poems dedicated,_

_By your truly affectioned Seruant,_

MICHAELL DRAYTON.

VPON THE BATTAILE OF AGINCOVRT, WRITTEN BY HIS DEARE FRIEND MICHAEL DRAYTON ESQVIRE.