Spenser's "Amyntas": Three Poems by Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, Fifth Earl of Derby

Abstract

Spenser devoted twelve lines of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe to a lament for Amyntas: ... the noblest swaine / That ever in an oaten quill: / Both did he other which could pipe maintaine, / And eke could pipe himselfe with passing skill (lines 440-43). Modern scholars have consistently identified Amyntas with Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange from 1572 to September 25, 1593 and Earl of Derby from the latter date until his death, April 16, 1594.1 Stanley's artistic patronage is best seen in his maintenance, from at least 1576 until his death, of a company of actors with which Shakespeare may have been associated.2 His contemporary reputation as a poet is supported beyond Spenser's claim by the appearance of his name in the list of noble personages whose works are supposedly represented in Belvedere, or, The Garden of the Muses (1600, sig. A5); here Stanley is listed with such better-known Elizabethan court poets as Oxford, Ralegh, and Dyer. To date, however, our only tangible proof that Stanley ever piped in an oaten quill has been the poem ascribed to him in a manuscript owned by Sir John Hawkins, who submitted the text to The Antiquarian Repertory (3 [London, 1780]: 133-38).3 On the merits of this verse, Alexander C. Judson concluded that Stanley indeed a poet (though no poem of consequence by him is known today).4 In what follows, I hope to bulwark Spenser's praise of Stanley by showing, first, that the Hawkins text is more consequential than Judson believed and, second, that it does not fully represent Stanley's muse, to judge from two heretofore unpublished poems, attributed to him in Cambridge MS Dd.5.75, fol. 32v and Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 85, fols. 76v-77r. The title of the Hawkins text, SONNETT by FERDINANDO EARLE of DERBY, indicates a date of transcription after September 25, 1593, when Stanley succeeded to his father's title. The poem's aimless narrative and absurd style point, I believe, not to the author's incompetence, but to his conscious burlesque of the unlearned and homely pastoral stance. This burlesque was not aimed at the inverted syntax and archaic diction of Spenser's pastorals but, more probably, at the redundant style of such works as Abraham Fraunce's The Lamentations of Amyntas for the Death of Phillis (1587), or the celebration of rustic amours in Breton's Sweet Phillis if a sillie Swaine, or Sillie Shepheard lately sate, from Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591, sig. F4-4v, G1v-2). Breton's own lyric, beginning Fair in a morn (o fairest morn / was never morn so fair),''6 parodies these same forms in a manner quite similar to Stanley's in the Hawkins text. Both poems are written primarily in ballad stanza and concern a shepherd's futile love for a shepherdess named Phyllis. Both achieve their effect through the exaggerated use of the same rhetorical devices: 1 See Ronald B. McKerrow, The Works of Thomas Nashe (Oxford, 1966), 4:150-51; Alexander C. Judson, The Life of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore, 1945), p. 6; Kelsie Harder, Nashe's Rebuke of Spenser, Notes and Queries 198 (1953): 145. 2 John Tucker Murray, English Dramatic Companies (1910; repr. New York, 1963), 1:75; E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), 2:118-26. 3 Ed. Francis Grose and Thomas Astle, 4 vols. (London, 1775-84), reprinted 1807-9. The Stanley verse was reprinted from the first edition in Thomas Park's enlarged revision of Walpole's A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 5 vols. (London, 1806), 2:46-51. 4 Judson, p. 5. 5 I have been unable to trace Hawkins's manuscript, which was probably destroyed in the fire which gutted his house in Westminster, along with his valuable collection of books and prints, in 1785 (Percy A. Scholes, The Life and Activities of Sir John Hawkins [Oxford, 1953], p. 157). 6 Printed in Englands Helicon (1600), sig. G4-5; manuscript versions in Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 85, fols. lv-2r, and British Museum Additional MS 34,064, fols. 17v-18r.