The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (11 page)

In the dedication, written three days before he died, Cervantes, “with a foot already in the stirrup,” movingly bade farewell to the world. He died in 1616 and was buried in the convent of the Discalced Trinitarians in the Calle de Cantarranas (now the Calle de Lope de Vega). The exact spot is not marked.

(b. 1552/53, London, Eng.—d. Jan. 13, 1599, London)

E
dmund Spenser was an English poet whose long allegorical poem
The Faerie Queene
is one of the greatest in the English language.

Little is known for certain about Spenser before he entered the University of Cambridge in 1569. His first important published work,
The Shepheardes Calender
(1579 or 1580), can be called the first work of the English literary Renaissance. Following the example of Virgil and of many later poets, Spenser began his career with a series of eclogues (literally “selections,” usually short poems in the form of pastoral dialogues), in which various characters, in the guise of innocent and simple shepherds, converse about life and love in a variety of elegantly managed verse
forms, formulating weighty—often satirical—opinions on questions of the day. Spenser's
Calender
consists of 12 eclogues, one named after each month of the year, and was well received in its day.

Spenser appears by 1580 to have been serving Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester and to have become a member of the literary circle led by Sir Philip Sidney, Leicester's nephew, to whom the
Calender
was dedicated and who praised it in his important critical work
The Defence of Poesie
(1595). In 1580 Spenser was also made secretary to the new lord deputy of Ireland, Arthur Lord Grey, who was a friend of the Sidney family. As Grey's secretary, Spenser accompanied him on risky military campaigns as well as on more routine journeys in Ireland. Spenser may have witnessed the Smerwick massacre (1580), and his poetry is haunted by nightmare characters who embody a wild lawlessness.

For four or five years, from roughly 1584, Spenser carried out the duties of a second important official position in Ireland, deputizing for a friend as clerk of the lords president (governors) of Munster, the southernmost Irish province. In 1588 or 1589 Spenser took over the 3,000-acre (1,200-hectare) plantation of Kilcolman, near Cork. By acquiring this estate, Spenser made his choice for the future—to rise into the privileged class of what was, to all intents, a colonial land of opportunity rather than to seek power and position on the more crowded ground of the homeland, where he had made his poetic reputation. It was under these conditions that Spenser completed his greatest poem, on which he had begun work by 1580.

In its present form,
The Faerie Queene
consists of six books and a fragment (known as the “Mutabilitie Cantos”). As a setting Spenser invented the land of Faerie and its queen, Gloriana. To express himself he invented what is
now known as the Spenserian stanza: a nine-line stanza, the first eight of five stresses and the last of six, whose rhyme pattern is
ababbcbcc
.

What is most characteristic of Spenser in
The Faerie Queene
is his serious view of the capacity of the romance form to act as a paradigm of human experience: the moral life as quest, pilgrimage, aspiration; as eternal war with an enemy, still to be known; and as encounter, crisis, the moment of illumination—in short, as ethics, with the added dimensions of mystery, terror, love, and victory and with all the generous virtues exalted. In
The Faerie Queene
Spenser proves himself a master: picture, music, metre, story—all elements are at one with the deeper significance of his poem, providing a moral heraldry of colours, emblems, legends, folklore, and mythical allusion, all prompting deep, instinctive responses.

The first three books of
The Faerie Queene
were published in London in 1590, together with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth and commendatory sonnets to notables of the court. Spenser saw the book through the press, made a hurried visit to Ireland, and returned speedily to London—presumably in the hope of preferment, which he received in 1591, when Elizabeth gave Spenser a small pension for life.

Back in Ireland, Spenser pressed on with his writing, and in early 1595 he published
Amoretti
and
Epithalamion
, a sonnet sequence and a marriage ode celebrating his marriage. This group of poems is unique among Renaissance sonnet sequences in that it celebrates a successful love affair culminating in marriage. Books IV, V, and VI of
The Faerie Queene
appeared in 1596 and are strikingly more ambiguous and ironic than the first three books. This burst of publication was, however, the last of his lifetime. He was buried with ceremony in Westminster Abbey.

(b. Nov. 25, 1562, Madrid, Spain—d. Aug. 27, 1635, Madrid)

L
ope de Vega was the outstanding dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age, author of as many as 1,800 plays and several hundred shorter dramatic pieces, of which 431 plays and 50 shorter pieces are extant. He acquired a humanistic education from his abundant though haphazard readings in erudite anthologies. In 1583 he took part in the Spanish expedition against the Azores. By this time he had established himself as a playwright in Madrid and was living from his comedias (tragicomic social dramas). He also exercised an undefined role as gentleman attendant or secretary to various nobles, adapting his role as servant or panderer according to the situation. By 1608, however, when Vega was named to a sinecure position as a familiar of the Inquisition and then prosecutor (
promotor fiscal
) of the Apostolic Chamber, he had become a famous poet and was already regarded as the “phoenix of Spanish wits.”

After experiencing a deep religious crisis, he entered the first of several religious orders in 1609. From this time on he wrote almost exclusively religious works, though he also continued his theatrical work, which was financially indispensable. In 1614 he entered the priesthood, but his continued service as secretary and panderer hindered him from obtaining the ecclesiastical benefits he sought. New and scandalous romantic relationships eventually followed, in continuation of a pattern Vega pursued throughout his life. In 1627 his verse epic on the life and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, which was dedicated to Pope Urban VIII, brought in reward a doctorate in theology of the Collegium Sapientiae and the cross of the Order of Malta, out of which came his proud use of the title
Frey
(“Brother”). His closing years were
full of gloom, however, and his death in Madrid evoked national mourning.

Vega became identified as a playwright with the comedia, a comprehensive term for the new drama of Spain's Golden Age. Vega's productivity for the stage, however exaggerated by report, remains phenomenal. He claimed to have written an average of 20 sheets a day throughout his life and left untouched scarcely a vein of writing then current. Cervantes called him “the prodigy of nature.”

The earliest firm date for a play written by Vega is 1593. By the beginning of the 16th century, through sheer force of creative genius and fertility of invention, Vega had given the comedia its basic formula and raised it to a peak of splendour. It was essentially a social drama, ringing a thousand changes on the accepted foundations of society: respect for crown, for church, and for the human personality, the latter being symbolized in the “point of honour” (
pundonor
) that Vega commended as the best theme of all “since there are none but are strongly moved thereby.” This “point of honour” was a matter largely of convention, “honour” being equivalent, in a very limited and brittle sense, to social reputation. It followed that this was a drama less of character than of action and intrigue that rarely, if ever, grasped the true essence of tragedy.

Few of the plays that Vega wrote were perfect, and in theme they range over a vast horizon. But he had an unerring sense for the theme and detail that could move an audience conscious of being on the crest of its country's greatness to respond to a mirroring on the stage of some of the basic ingredients of that greatness. Because of him the comedia became a vast sounding board for every chord in the Spanish consciousness, a “national” drama in the truest sense.

All Vega's plays suffer from haste of composition, partly a consequence of the public's insatiable desire for novelty. His first acts are commonly his best, with the third a hasty cutting of knots or tying up of loose ends that takes scant account both of probability and of psychology. There was, too, a limit to his inventiveness in the recurrence of basic themes and situations, particularly in his cloak and sword plays. But Vega's defects, like his strength, derive from the accuracy with which he projected onto the stage the essence of his country and age. Vega's plays remain true to the great age of Spain into which he had been born and which he had come to know, intuitively rather than by study, as no one had ever known it before.

Vega's nondramatic works in verse and prose filled 21 volumes in 1776–79. Much of this vast output has withered, but its variety remains impressive. Vega wrote pastoral romances, verse histories of recent events, verse biographies of Spanish saints, long epic poems and burlesques upon such works, and prose tales, imitating or adapting works by Ariosto and Cervantes in the process. His lyric compositions—ballads, elegies, epistles, sonnets (there are 1,587 of these)—are myriad. Formally they rely much on the conceit, and in content they provide a running commentary on the poet's whole emotional life.

(baptized Feb. 26, 1564, Canterbury, Kent, Eng.—d. May 30, 1593, Deptford, near London)

T
he Elizabethan poet Christopher Marlowe was Shakespeare's most important predecessor in English drama. He is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse.

Marlowe obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge in 1584. After 1587 he was in
London, writing for the theatres, occasionally getting into trouble with the authorities because of his violent and disreputable behaviour, and probably also engaging himself from time to time in the government's secret service. Marlowe won a dangerous reputation for “atheism,” but this could, in Queen Elizabeth I's time, indicate merely unorthodox religious opinions. There is evidence of his unorthodoxy, notably in the denunciation of him written by the spy Richard Baines and in the letter of the playwright Thomas Kyd to the lord keeper in 1593 after Marlowe's death. Kyd alleged that certain papers “denying the deity of Jesus Christ” that were found in his room belonged to Marlowe, who had shared the room two years before. Whatever the case may be, on May 18, 1593, the Privy Council issued an order for Marlowe's arrest. On May 30, however, he was killed by Ingram Frizer at a lodging house where they and two other men had spent most of the day and where, it was alleged, a fight broke out between them over the bill.

In a playwriting career that spanned little more than six years, Marlowe's achievements were diverse and splendid. Perhaps before leaving Cambridge he had already written
Tamburlaine the Great
(in two parts, both performed by the end of 1587; published 1590), in which he established blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing. Almost certainly during his later Cambridge years, Marlowe had translated Ovid's
Amores
(
The Loves
) and the first book of Lucan's
Pharsalia
from the Latin. About this time he also wrote the play
Dido, Queen of Carthage
(published in 1594 as the joint work of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe). With the production of
Tamburlaine
he received recognition and acclaim, and playwriting became his major concern in the few years that lay ahead. Both parts of
Tamburlaine
were published anonymously in 1590, and the publisher
omitted certain passages that he found incongruous with the play's serious concern with history; even so, the extant
Tamburlaine
text can be regarded as substantially Marlowe's. No other of his plays or poems or translations was published during his life. His unfinished but splendid poem
Hero and Leander
, which is almost certainly the finest nondramatic Elizabethan poem apart from those produced by Edmund Spenser, appeared in 1598.

There is argument among scholars concerning the order in which the plays subsequent to
Tamburlaine
were written. It is not uncommonly held that
Faustus
—Marlowe's most famous play, in which he tells the story of the doctor-turned-necromancer Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power—quickly followed
Tamburlaine
and that then Marlowe turned to a more neutral, more “social” kind of writing in
Edward II
and
The Massacre at Paris
. His last play may have been
The Jew of Malta
, in which he signally broke new ground: the main character, Barabas, is more closely incorporated within his society than either Tamburlaine, the supreme conqueror, or Faustus, the lonely adventurer against God. It is known that
Tamburlaine, Faustus
, and
The Jew of Malta
were performed by the Admiral's Men, a company whose outstanding actor was Edward Alleyn, who most certainly played Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas the Jew.

(baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, Eng.—d. April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon)

W
illiam Shakespeare is often called the English national poet and is considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time. He occupies a position unique in world literature. Other poets, such as Homer
and Dante, and novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy and Charles Dickens, have transcended national barriers as well. But no writer's living reputation can compare to that of Shakespeare, whose plays, written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for a small repertory theatre, are now performed and read more often and in more countries than ever before. The prophecy of his great contemporary, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time,” has been fulfilled.