Tendre Cropps and Flourishing Metricians: Gabriel Harvey’s Chaucer

Abstract

Gabriel Harvey’s extant copy of Speght’s 1598 edition of Chaucer has attracted attention since the eighteenth century because of a marginalium which potentially sheds light on the date of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The note has been the focus of intense scrutiny leading to contradictory conclusions. This essay looks at this Shakespearean scholarship, focussing on the primary evidence it has circumstantially turned up over the years. Properly appraised, it is argued, this evidence clarifies ambiguities in Harvey’s note that have often been deemed intractable and yields some indications as to the form in which he is likely to have encountered Shakespeare’s play. More importantly, it provides a fascinating, detailed picture of Harvey’s reading of Thomas Speght’s Chaucer. It shows Harvey engaging with this edition’s philological and literary critical priorities to develop a poetics of his own, with its own distinctive idiom and material articulation. In this sense, Harvey’s Chaucer invites us to nuance some of recent scholarship’s lessons on early modern reading and to make space for the unpragmatic and the unpredictable—for the literary—even in the key exponent of what Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton describe as ‘studying for action’.