Thomas Watson (poet)

Thomas Watson

Thomas Watson (around 1557, † 1592) was an English poet of the Elizabethan era .

life and work

Watson likely graduated from Oxford University and was a law student in London . He spent some time abroad and, as a young man, enjoyed great esteem as a poet in Latin.

His De remedio amoris , considered his earliest work, has been lost. Its earliest publication, 1581, which has survived as a Latin translation of Antigone by Sophocles , is dedicated to Philip Howard, 20th Earl of Arundel.

He first appeared as an English poet in 1582 in verses preceded by George Whetstone's Heptameron . His already more important work, The Ekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love , dedicated to Edward de Vere , 17th Earl of Oxford (who read the poems in manuscript and encouraged Watson to publish them) is a collection Cycle of a hundred poems reflecting classic French and Italian poems, some of which are translations. The peculiarity of these poems is that, although they appear in sonnet form , they are written in groups of three of ordinary six-line stanzas and have 18 lines each.

His friends included Matthew Royden († 1622) and George Peele . In 1585 he published his first verses in Latin Amyntas , eleven days of the shepherd's mourning for the death of his lover, Phyllis . Watson's epic was translated into English by Abraham Fraunce in 1587. Although a relationship with Torquatos Aminta has often been suspected, it does not seem to have existed. The conjecture came about because in the fourth edition of the English version in 1591, Fraunce also printed his own translation of Tasso's work. Watson was considered the best Latin poet in England at the time, as evidenced by the earliest source on Watson by Thomas Nashe in 1589 and later by others (George Peele, Gabriel Harvey , Barnfield, Meres, Allot, Edmund Spenser, and others). In 1590 he published his Meliboeus , an elegy on the death of Sir Francis Walsingham and a collection of Italian madrigals mainly by Luca Marenzio with English poems by Watson and two others, and compositional arrangements by William Byrd in English and Latin verse .

A source records that he intervened on September 18, 1589 when Christopher Marlowe got into an argument with William Bradley in Hog ​​Lane, in the parish of St. Giles Without Cripplegate. Watson, who was attacked by Bradley, killed him in self-defense. Thomas Watson and Christopher Marlowe, both from Norton Folgate, Middlesex, were arrested and Watson held in Newgate for about six months on suspicion of murder.

Little is known of the rest of his career, except for the fact that he was buried in the church of St. Bartholomew the Less on September 26, 1592 and that his second Latin epic " Amintae Gaudia " was published shortly afterwards , with a dedication to the deceased Thomas Watson by Christopher Marlowe on November 10, 1592. The following year, his last book The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained (1593), was published posthumously under the initials TW. It is a collection of 60 14-line sonnets. It is believed that Spenser alludes to Watson's death in Colin Clout's Come Home Again .

Francis Meres mentions him together with Shakespeare , Peele and Marlowe under " the best for tragedie ", but apart from his Latin translations, no dramatic work by him has survived or remained known. It seems certain that he was considered a recognized poet during his lifetime and that he had an influence on the youthful Shakespeare. After Wyat and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, he was among the first to introduce the poetry of Francesco Petrarch into English poetry. He must have been a great connoisseur of Italian, French and Greek literature.

literature

• William Ringler: Spenser and Thomas Watson. Modern Language Notes 1954.
• Louise George Clubb: Gabriel Harvey and the Two Thomas Watsons. Renaissance News.
• Walter F. Staton: The Influence of Thomas Watson on Elizabethan Ovidian Poetry. Studies in the Renaissance 1959.
• H. Morris: Richard Barnfield, "Amyntas," and the Sidney Circle. PMLA 1959.
• Walter F. Staton Jr .: Harry Morris, Thomas Watson and Abraham Fraunce. PMLA 1961.
• A. Chatterley: Thomas Watson: Works, Contemporary References and Reprints. Notes and Queries. 48, 2001, pp. 239-249.

Web links

• Thomas Watson, Poet (c 1556–1592) on marlowe-society.org (PDF file; 42 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ His Schäferspiel Aminta (1573), German 1742, is considered the most beautiful pastoral poetry in Italian
2. ↑ Nashe: Amintas, and his translated Antigone may march in equippage of honor with any of our ancient poets
3. ↑ to Eglogue Upon the death of Sir Francis Walsingham
4. ↑ Archived copy ( 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. 
5. ↑ Amintae Gaudia (printed posthumously in 1592) is dedicated to Lady Mary Herbert , Philip Sidney's sister, with a Latin dedication by Christopher Marlowe (initials CM). In ten letters and eight elegies, Watson's epic praises erotic and platonic love and a dream [Epyllion] of Sidney's elevation by the gods
6. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from March 15, 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. 
7. ↑ when he says: " Amyntas quite is gone and lies full low, Having his Amaryllis left to moan "