‘Nedelesse Singularitie’: George Gascoigne’s Strategies for Preserving Lyric Delight
Zarnowiecki, Matthew
Early Modern Literary Studies 14.1/Special Issue 18
Abstract
George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) is among the most miscellaneous of early miscellanies printed in England. It contains two dramatic texts, a prose romance that is arguably England’s first novel, and more than seventy pages of poetry ranging from short lyrics to poems of more than three hundred lines. Judging from the attributions in the title page, front matter, and throughout the volume, the collection has almost as many authors as genres: the first play, Supposes, was “written in the Italian tongue by Ariosto and Englished by George Gascoygne,” Jocasta was “written in Greke by Euripides, translated and digested into Acte by George Gascoygne, and Francis Kinwelmershe,” The Adventures of Master F.J. is credited to a man by those initials but also contains text written by a “G.T.,” while the poems, or “Devises of Sundrie Gentlemen,” are either anonymous or credited to Gascoigne. The greatest influence on the form of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres was almost certainly Songes and Sonettes, a verse miscellany printed by Richard Tottel in 1557, with six editions by 1567. This collection was in fact multiply authored, with poetry by the Earl of Surrey (the only author mentioned on the title page), Sir Thomas Wyatt, Nicholas Grimald, and other poets. But recent bibliographical evidence suggests, and critics accept, that the multiple authorship of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (hereafter HSF) is a façade, with Gascoigne as its sole author.
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