GASCOIGNE, George

(1539-1577)

George Gascoigne was an English poet and dramatist as well as a politician, courtier, and soldier of fortune who is chiefly remembered for successfully im­porting and domesticating foreign literary genres. Born in Bedfordshire, En­gland, and educated at the University of Cambridge and Gray's Inn, Gascoigne was the eldest son of Sir John and Margaret Scargill Gascoigne of Cardington. He developed an early fascination with court life that continually drained his finances. He married Elizabeth Bacon Breton in 1561, who was in fact already married, and the process of extracting her from her first marriage combined with the litigation that followed also contributed to the drain on his fortune. In need of money, Gascoigne joined Sir Humphrey Gilbert's forces in 1572 in support of William of Orange in the Dutch wars against the Spaniards. He returned within a year, no better off than before, and decided to use his writings and his connections to gain advancement.

Gascoigne continually sought royal favor and finally received it by assisting with the entertainments of Elizabeth I* on her visits to Kenilworth and Wood­stock in 1575. In 1576 he was granted an appointment by her advisor, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was sent to Holland as an agent, and returned with a report of the siege of Antwerp by the Spanish, entitled The Spoil of Antwerp, Faithfully Reported, by a True Englishman, Who Was Present—one of the first examples of war correspondence in English.

Gascoigne was greatly interested in proving that English was a language fit for poetry, and many of his works can be seen as serving that end. He wrote the first Greek tragedy to be presented on the English stage (Jocasta, performed in 1566), the first prose comedy translated from Italian into English (Supposes, 1566), the first treatise on prosody in English ("Certayne Notes of Instruction" in The Posies of George Gascoigne, 1575), and one of the earliest formal satires in English (The Steele Glas, 1576). Finally, Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) foreshadowed later English sonnet sequences.

Bibliography

C. T. Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet, 1942.

Richard J. Ring