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: Oh these [those] were times Fit for you bards to vent your golden rymes. Then did I tread on arras, cloth of tissue, Hung round the fore-front of my stage: the pillers That did support the roofe of my large frame Double apparreld in pure ophir gold: Whilst the round circle of my spacious orbe Was throng’d with princes, dukes and senators. 2 In this passage, Heywood introduces several key concepts that recur in his prose defence: the involvement of noble and powerful figures, known for their political and military achievements, with the
horse-pack. Its fifteen small drawers would be ample for the pills and medication he would have needed. Hall would have travelled with a few of his medical textbooks as well to help him with diagnoses and cures. ℞: senna leaves 1oz, agaric 3dr, rhubarb 2dr, cinnamon 1½oz. Infuse according to practice in 3 pints white wine for twelve hours. Then strain six or seven times through a woollen bag and sweeten with ½lb [p. 2] of good sugar in the form of nectar . 6 Dose: 5oz twice a day, on an empty stomach in the morning and about four o’clock in the
sugar the pill of his moral discourse with an engaging ‘historicall fiction’ (LR, line 9), thereby making ‘good discipline’ (line 22) more palatable and accessible to the average reader. Yet to ‘clowdily enwrap’ bare ‘precepts’ with outward ‘showes’ (lines 22–4) is also wilfully to complicate the reader’s task. We need to be alert to sophisticated allegory masquerading as the kind of naïve allegory that (like Prudentius’s Psychomachia ) renders abstractions tangible and distinguishes absolutely between good and evil. Relevant here is what I have described as the
would be too much for human wit, but Spenser, W.L. tells us, is ‘excus'd sith Sidney thought it fitt’. Sidney is here credited with inspiring Spenser to celebrate Elizabeth in the Faerie Queene. Spenser himself also describes Sidney as his inspiration for the epic in a dedicatory sonnet appended to the Faerie Queene (1590). He acknowledges Lord Grey as ‘the pillor of my life, / And Patrone of my
part of the current stylistic repertoire of most poets. Drayton's revision of the rhyme royal Mortimeriados into ottava rima for The Barons’ Wars in 1603 shows this change in the process of happening. The ostensible reason he gives for the alteration is aesthetic: rhyme royal's double-couplet structure ‘ softned the verse more than the maiestie of the subiect would permit ’. Conversely, ottava rima ‘ hath in it a maiestie, perfection, & soliditie, resembling the piller which in Architecture is called the Tuscan ’. If majesty is what you want, Drayton suggests