Gabriel Harvey

Gabriel Harvey

Gabriel Harvey (* 1545 ; † 1630 ) was an English scholar and writer .

Life

He was the eldest son of the wealthy rope maker John Harvey in Walden, later Saffron Walden , Essex . He studied from 1566 at Christ's College (Cambridge) , and in 1570 became a “fellow of” Pembroke Hall . elected. During this time he developed a lasting friendship with Edmund Spenser , who may have been his student. As a highly respected scholar, his reputation suffered from his ongoing argument with Thomas Nashe .

Literary career

Approx. 1576 he became a lecturer in rhetoric and during the visit of Queen Elizabeth I at Sir Thomas Smith in Audley End House , he was chosen to publicly debate before her. In 1579 he complained to Edmund Spenser about the unauthorized publication of his satirical verses with allusions to high-ranking personalities who seemed to seriously threaten his career. In 1583 he was elected attorney ( junior proctor ) of the university and in 1585 Master of Trinity Hall , although this appointment was apparently rejected by the court. He was a protégé of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester , to whom he introduced Spenser. These connections likely led to his friendship with Philip Sidney .

In 1586, after receiving the degree of Doctor of Civil Law DCL from Oxford University , he moved to London as a practicing lawyer . His brother Richard Gabriel was involved in the Marprelate controversy and had offended Robert Greene with a disdainful appreciation of himself and his "colleagues". Greene responded in his essay Quip for an Upstart Courtier with some scathing remarks about the "Harveys". In 1599, Archbishop Whitgift launched an attack on contemporary satirists, in which, in addition to books by others, the treatises of Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe were destroyed and a re-edition was prohibited. He spent the last decades of his life in seclusion in his place of birth, Saffron Walden, until his death in 1630.

The extensive catalog of Harvey's library that has been preserved, with over 180 books and manuscripts, identifies Harvey as a highly educated man of his time.

Feud with Thomas Nashe

After Robert Greene's death, he published his Foure Letters and Certaine Sonnets (1592) in which, in a spirit of self-righteous superiority , he elaborated on Greene's later years. Nashe, who was superior to Harvey in his ability to invectives, avenged his friend Robert Greene in 1593 in a personal settlement with Harvey through the treatise Strange Newes . Harvey, in turn, challenged Nashe's personal insults in his Pierce's supererogation, or a New Prayse of the Old Asse (1593), on the basis of which Nashe apologized in his “religious” writing Christs Teares over Jerusalem (1593). Harvey resumed the controversy in his New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), probably because he only knew Nashe's printed apology as a supposed rumor at the time he wrote the New Letter and his attitude was deeply suspicious . Nashe withdrew his debt relief in a new edition of Christes Teares (1595). Two years later, Nashe responded with a biting satire Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596), to which Harvey never replied.

In a 1597 published by Richard Lichfield of Cambridge work The Trimming of Thomas Nashe Gentleman (1597), behind which one suspected Gabriel Harvey earlier, he attacked Thomas Nashe again.

Harvey and Marlowe

At the end of his New Letter of Notable Contents , dated September 15, 1593, Harvey wrote four poems, some of them enigmatic, in which he predominantly deals with the immediately preceding death of Christopher Marlowe (buried on June 1, 1593). The four poems are headed: 1. Sonet. Gorgon, or the Wonderfull year; 2. A stanza declarative; to the Lovers of Admirable Workes; 3. The Writer's Postscript; or a frendly Caueat to the Second Shakerly of Powles; 4. Glose

He compares Marlowe with the figure of the mighty Gorgon, a figure from his Tamburlaine ( thy Tamberlaine voutsafes to dye ), his death with the most powerful event ( the mightiest wonder ) 1593 ( ninety three ), Marlowe with the most impressive spirit ( magnifique mind ), with the qualities of gigantic proportions ( bred of Gargantuas race ), whose mind triumphed over Kent ( whose mind triumphed on Kent ), this gigantic mind ( that gargantuan mind ), the highest mind ever on earth etc. ( Highest minde, That ever haunted Powles, or hunted winde, Bereaft of that same sky-surmounting breath, That breath, that taught the Timpany to swell? ).

Harvey, who had apparently previously learned of Marlowe's death, assumed that he must have died of the plague ( He, and the Plague contended for the game ).

Latin scripts

• Ciceronianus (1577)
• G Hezrveii rhetor, sive 2 dierum oratio de natura, arte et exercitatione rhetorica (1577)
• Smithus, vel Musarum lachrymae (1578), In honor of Sir Thomas Smith
• Gabrieli Harveii congratulations on Valdensium libri quatuor. Written on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth I's visit to Audley End (1578).

literature

• VF Stern: Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library. Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 33, 1979.
• GC Moore Smith (Ed.): Introduction to Gabriel Harvey's Marginalia. Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-upon-Avon 1913, pp. 1-76.
• Harvey, Gabriel . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 13 : Harmony - Hurstmonceaux . London 1910, p. 41 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ pages.uoregon.edu
2. ^ CH Cooper: Athena cantabrigienses il. 258
3. ^ Virginia F. Stern The Bibliotheca of Gabriel Harvey, Renaissance Quarterly, 1972
4. ↑ oxford-shakespeare.com (PDF)
5. ↑ prestel.co.uk ( Memento of the original dated February 13, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ^ FG Hubbard, Possible Evidence for the Date of Tamburlaine, PMLA, 1918