Thomas Watson (poet)

Thomas Watson (1555-1592) was an English lyric poet. He wrote in both English and Latin, and was particularly admired for his compositions in Latin.

Thomas Watson (1555-1592), The Hekatompathia. London: Iohn Wolfe for Gabriell Cawood, 1586. Courtesy Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog.

Life

Overview

Watson, born in London, was at Oxford, and studied law. He was a scholar, and made translations, 1 of which was a Latin version of the Antigone of Sophocles. In 1582 he published Hecatompathia; or, The passionate centurie of love, consisting of 100 18-line poems, which he called sonnets. It was followed by Amyntas (1585) and Teares of Fansie (1593).

Youth and education

Watson was born in London, probably in 1557, the son of Anne (Lee) (died 1561) and William Watson (died 1559). He was educated at Winchester College and Oxford University.

While quite a young man he enjoyed a certain reputation, even abroad, as a Latin poet. His De remcdio amoris, which was perhaps his earliest important composition, is lost, and so is his "piece of work written in the commendation of women-kind," which was also in Latin verse.

He then spent 7 years in France and Italy before studying law in London. Though he often signed his works as "student of law", he never practised law as his true passion was literature.

Career

The earliest publication by Watson which has survived is a Latin version of the Antigone of Sophocles, issued in 1581. It is dedicated to Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, who was perhaps the patron of the poet, who seems to have spent some part of this year in Paris.

In 1582 Watson appeared for the 1st time as an English poet in some verses prefixed to Whetstone's HcptamcroH, and also in a far more important guise, as the author of the Hecatompathia; or, Passionate centurie of love .

Among those who were at this time the friends of Watson we note Matthew Royden and George Peele. In 1585 he published a Latin translation of Tasso's pastoral play of Aminla, and his version was translated into English by Abraham Fraunce in 1587. Watson was at that time, as the testimony of Nashe and others prove, regarded as the best Latin poet of England.

In 1590 he published, in English and Latin verse, his Melibocus, an elegy on the death of Sir Francis Walsingham, and a collection of Italian Madrigals, put into English by Watson and set to music by Byrd.

Of the remainder of Watson's career nothing is known, save that on 26 September 1592 he was buried in the church of St. Bartholomew the Less. Spenser is supposed to have alluded to the untimely death of Watson in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, when he says:—

"Amyntas quite is gone and lies full low,

Having his Amaryllis left to moan."

Writing

In 1593 Watson's last and best book. The Tears of Fancie; or Love disdained (1593), was posthumously published. This is a collection of 60 sonnets, regular in form, so far at least as to have 14 lines each.

It is certain that this poet enjoyed a great reputation in his lifetime, and that he was not without a direct influence upon the youth of Shakespeare. He was the earliest, after the original experiment made by Wyatt and Surrey, to introduce the pure imitation of Petrarch into English poetry. He was well read in Italian, French and Greek literature.

Watson died young, and he had not escaped from a certain languor and insipidity which prevent his graceful verses from producing their full effect. This demerit is less obvious in his later than in his earlier pieces, and with the development of the age, Watson, whose contemporaries regarded him as a poet of true excellence, would probably have gained power and music. As it is, he has the honor of being a direct forerunners of Shakespeare (in Venus and Adonis and in the Sonnets), and of being the leader in the long procession of Elizabethan sonnet-cycle writers.

Hecatompathia

Hecatompathia; or, Passionate centurie of love is a collection or cycle of 100 pieces, in the manner of Petrarch, celebrating the sufferings of a lover and his long farewell to love. The technical peculiarity of these interesting poems is that, although they appear and profess to be sonnets, they are really written in triple sets of common 7-line stanza, and therefore have 18 lines each. It seems likely that Watson, who courted comparison with Petrarch, seriously desired to recommend this form to future sonneteers; but in this he had no imitators.

Speaking of the Hecatompathia, Sidney Lee says:

Watson deprecates all claim to originality. To each poem he prefixes a prose introduction in which he frankly indicates, usually with ample quotations, the French, Italian or classical poem which was the source of his inspiration " {Elizabethan Sonnets, xxviii.).

In a footnote (p. xxxix.) he adds:

Eight of Watson's sonnets are, according to bis own account, renderings from Petrarch; twelve are from Serafino dell' Aquila (1466-1500); four each come from Strozza, the Ferrarese poet, and from Ronsard; three from the Italian poet, Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1548); two each from the French poet, Etienne Forcadel, known as Forcatulus (1514?-I.573), the Italian Girolamo Parabosco (fl. 1548), and Aeneas Sylvius; while many are based on passages from such authors as (among the Greeks) Sophocles. Thcocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes (author of the epic Argonaiitica); or (among the Latins), Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace, Propertius, Seneca, Pliny, Lucan, Martial and Valerius Flaccus; or (among the modern Italians) Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) and Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516); or (among other modern Frenchmen) Gervasius Sepinus of Sauraur, writer of eclogues after the manner of Virgil and Mantuanus.

Miscellaneous

Watson is mentioned by Meres in company with Shakespeare, Peele and Marlowe among "the best for tragedie," but no dramatic work of his except the translations above mentioned has come down to us.

The English works of Watson, excepting the madrigals, were originally collected by Edward Arber in 1870. Watson's Italian Madrigals Englished (1590) were reprinted (edited by F.J. Carpenter) from the Journal of Germanic Philology (ii. 3, 337) with the original Italian, in 1899.

Critical introduction

by Thomas Humphry Ward

Watson is among the best of the Elizabethan ‘amorettists,’ or writers of wholly artificial love-poetry, and his Hecatompathia may be taken as a type and summary of the whole class. It consists of 100 so-called sonnets or "passions," each of 3 6-lined stanzas, and each headed with a prose introduction describing the purport and often the literary origin of the poem. A series so furnished tells its own story; and we do not require to go back to Watson’s epistle "To the frendly Reader" to appreciate his "trauaile in penning these louepassions,’ or to learn that his "paines in suffering them" were "but supposed."

Watson, in fact, was a purely literary poet. At Oxford, says Antony Wood, he spent his time "not in logic and philosophy, as he ought to have done, but in the smooth and pleasant studies of poetry and romance." To these studies, however, his devotion was serious; for he mastered 4 languages, so that he writes as familiarly of Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius as of Ovid, of Petrarch and Ariosto as of Ronsard.

He translated the Antigone into Latin, and it was 11 of his Latin poems that gave him the fancy name of Amyntas, under which the poets of the time ranked him with Colin Clout and with Astrophel. But the literature that he affected most was the love-poetry of the Italians — of Petrarch and his followers, of Seraphine and Fiorenzuola, and many others that are quite forgotten now. Sometimes translating, sometimes paraphrasing, sometimes combining them, he tells the story of his imaginary love, its doubts and fears and hopes, its torments and disappointment and final death, in that melodious Elizabethan English which not even monotony and make-believe can wholly deprive of charm.

But still, Watson and his kindred poets have little more than an historical interest. They are but the posthumous children of the Courts of Love; their occupation is to use the scholarship and the ingenuity of the Renascence to dress up the sentiment of the Middle Ages — a sentiment no more real to them than it is to ourselves. They make no appeal to us; their note has nothing of the note of passion and of truth that rings in the verse of Sidney and of Shakespeare.

Recognition

Watson is mentioned by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598), in company with Shakespeare, Peele, and Marlowe, as among "the best for tragedie".

In popular culture

Watson plays a prominent part in the novel A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess, in which he is a close friend of Christopher Marlowe. In the book Watson introduces Marlowe to Sir Francis Walsingham, and he also contributes to several of Marlowe's plays.

Publications

Poetry

• The Hekatompathia; or, Passionate centurie of loue (sonnet cycle). London: Iohn Wolfe for Gabriell Cawood, 1582.
• A Gratification unto Master Iohn Case. London: [1586?]
• The Lamentations of Amyntas for the Death of Phillis. London: Iohn Wolfe, 1587.
• An Eglogue vpon the Death of the Right Honorable Sir Francis Walsingham. London: Robert Robinson, 1590.
• The Teares of Fancie; or, Loue disdained. London: J. Danter, for William Barley, 1593.
• Poems (edited by Edward Arber). London: 1870; Westminster: Constable, 1895; New York: AMS Press, 1966.
• Thomas Watson's Latin Amyntas (1585) (with English translation by Walter F. Staton, Jr. & Abraham Fraunce; edited by Franklin M. Dickey). Chicago: University of Chicago Press / Newberry Library, 1967.

Translated

• The First Sett, of Italian Madrigalls: Englished, not to the sense of the originall dittie, but after the affection of the noate. London: Thomas Este, 1590.
  • Italian Madrigals Englished (edited by Albert Chatterley & Luca Marenzio). London: Stainer & Bell, 1999.

Collected editions

• Complete Works (edited by Dana Ferrin Sutton). Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

The Worst Things - Thomas Watson

See also

• List of British poets
• Timeline of British poetry

References

•  Gosse, Edmund (1911). "Watson, Thomas". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 28 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 413. . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 16, 2018.

External links

Poems

• Sonnet 51 ("Each tree did boast the wished spring times pride")
• Thomas Watson (1556 ca.-1592) at English Poetry, 1579-1830 (info & 2 poems)
• Watson in The English Poets: An anthology:
  • Extracts from The Hecatompathia: Passion II, Passion XL, Passion LXV
• Thomas Watson at Poetry Nook (17 poems)
• Hekatompathia: Sonnets 1-20

Books

• The Ekatompathia; or Passionate centurie of love at Google Books
• Thomas Watson at Amazon.com

About

• Watson, Thomas (1557?-1592) in the Dictionary of National Biography
• Thomas Watson by William Minto at Sonnet Central

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Original article is at "Watson, Thomas"