THE ARTE OF ENGLISH POESIE (1589)

Abstract

In July of 1588, the English navy defeated the Spanish Armada, and Elizabeth I (1533-1603) entered the glorious final years of her reign. Recent stage presentations included Tamburlain the Great by Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). The early works of John Lyly (1554-1606) and Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) and the fiction of Robert Greene (1560-1592) were in the bookstalls around St. Paul's Cathedral. And Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) had already written his last sonnet sequences, which were still awaiting publication. The Stationers' Company had only been established, and at least twenty five printing houses were turning out scores of books annually in print runs of 1,250 to 1,500 copies.1 In the decade or so leading up to 1588, London printing houses were also bringing out books providing information about the distant lands of Asia, which throughout the first three quarters of the sixteenth century had been the provenance of the seafaring Portuguese and Spaniards. And, for the first time in English history there was interest in a great and distant Asian empire that was now being called China. Some of the publications about this newly-recognized land were English translations of Portuguese and Spanish material. For example, in 1577, Richard Willes' Certain reports of China, learned through the Portugals there imprisoned appeared in his History ofTrauayle in the West and East Indies and other countreys lying eyther way towards the fruitfull and ryche Moluccas, a translation from an Italian version of a Portuguese text. Two years later John Frampton published his translation from the Spanish called A discourse of the nauigation which the Portugales doe make to the Realmes and Prouinces of the East partes of the worlde, and of the knowledge that growes by them of the great thinges which are in the Dominions of China. Written by Barnardine of Esca-