1572/3: The Move into Print

Abstract

I have thought good (I say) to present you with this written booke, wherein you shall find a number of Sonets, layes, letters, Ballades, Rondlets, verlayes and verses, the workes of your friend and myne Master F.J. and divers others… A HUNDRETH SUNDRIE FLOWRES George Gascoigne's career reached its nadir in 1570, when he was imprisoned in Bedford Gaol for debt, showing all the signs of what Prouty calls ‘financial ruin’. But within two years Gascoigne can be seen to be applying himself to all possible opportunities for advancement. By the Spring of 1572/3, he had decided to go to Holland to serve in the wars, presumably to escape his creditors and renew his fortune. At about the same time, he decided to collate and anonymously publish his early work, and to pursue at least two opportunities to gain patronage by his writing. Early patronage poems Gascoigne had written on behalf of ‘other men’ before, as we have seen in the assortment of poems preserved in the ‘Devises of sundrie gentleman’, but in the Spring of 1572/3 he wrote the first of his known patronage poems. Gascoignes devise of a maske for the right honorable Viscount Mountacute (71) was written for a double marriage of the heirs and daughters of two prominent Catholic families, the Dormers and the Montagues, who had retained Elizabeth's favour. It may be significant that one of the bridegrooms, Robert Dormer, had entered Gray's Inn in 1567, when Gascoigne's literary reputation there was at its height following the success of Supposes and Jocasta .