Seven Sonnets for Alexander Neville, from a Sequence of Five Sundry Sortes of Metre Uppon

“’Seven Sonnets for Alexander Nevile,’” from a Sequence of “Five Sundry Sortes of Metre Uppon Five Sundry Theames,” appearing in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) and Posies (1575) George Gascoigne

Robert E. Kibler, MSU

“Seven Sonnets” is the fourth in a series of five poems written by Gascoigne as he returned in 1565 from the high life of the Elizabethan court to the sober study of law at Grayes Inn. The sonnet appears in both A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) and in the “Flowers” section of Posies (1575). As is the case with all five poems in the series, “Seven Sonnets” takes its theme in response to a maxim, each suggested by a different friend. Alexander Nevile suggested the theme “If it be done quickly, let it be done well (sat cito, si sat bene)” to which Gascoigne responds with seven sonnets explicating the theme “if done too quickly, hardly done well (nimis cito, vix bene).” He uses his own recent experience of court life as the exemplar of his theme.

The poem describes the first time Gascoigne’s “gazing eye” beheld the “stately pompe of princes and their peeres” who seemed to “swimme in floudes of beaten goulde” amid all sorts of young and beautiful people, especially women, “so faire of hue, so freshe of their attire.” The sight made the country boy (“seemely swayne”) Gascoigne think he had stumbled into a kind of heaven. Thereafter, with “puffte up” heart and full of “peevish pride,” he desperately sought to “playe his parte” in courtly life. The rest of the poem explains the high cost of that decision for him. Seeking to maintain a lavish lifestyle while attempting to become ever “higher plaste” at court, he runs out of funds, and is compelled to lease all of his inherited farmlands for more. Soon enough, merchants demand his assets as payment on his debts, and with all his wealth lost, he leaves court having experienced very little gain at very heavy cost.

Gascoigne composed all five of the poems in the series containing the sonnet sequence written for Nevile because his friends at Grayes Inn wished him to write some worthy verse before rejoining them. Grayes Inn had long fostered the literary and dramatic arts, and like many of the works produced by students there, Gascoigne’s “Seven Sonnets” have about them a kind of nifty awareness and use of literary tradition combined with the clunkiness of an academic exercise. Having his “gazing eye” dedazzled by courtly life shows Gascoigne making sly use of the medieval tradition of love entering first through the eye by shifting its traditional focus from a love interest to an alluring political culture in order to morally condemn both its object and its effect. At the same time, each sonnet in the sequence begins with a pedantic repetition of the moralizing line ending the last, until the lines of the final sonnet conclude that all haste is good, so long as “wisdome makes the way”—a lesson his biography suggests Gascoigne was still too slowly learning when he wrote the poem.

SEE ALSO: Courtly Love; Early Tudor Drama; Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566); High Renaissance; Sequence; Sonnet.