Geoffrey Whitney
Geoffrey (then spelt Geffrey) Whitney (c. 1548 – c. 1601) was an English poet, now best known for the influence on
Life
Geoffrey Whitney, the eldest son of a father of the same name, was born in or about 1548 at
During his residence at Yarmouth, Whitney appears to have had much contact with the
His sister Isabella Whitney was likewise a writer of verses. Her principal work, A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posye, contayning a Hundred and Ten Phylosophicall Flowers, appeared in 1573.
Poetry
Whitney's reputation depends upon his celebrated emblem book, the full title of which was A Choice of Emblemes and other Devises, for the moste parte gathered out of sundrie writers, Englished and moralised, and divers newly devised, by Geffrey Whitney. A worke adorned with varietie of matter, both pleasant and profitable: wherein those that please maye finde to fit their fancies: Because herein, by the office of the eie and the eare, the minde maye reape dooble-delighte throughe holsome preceptes, shadowed with pleasant devises: both fit for the vertuous, to their incoraging; and for the wicked, for their admonishing and amendment.[2] It was published in a two-part quarto edition from the Plantin Press in Leyden and dedicated to the Earl of Leicester from London, 28 November 1585, with an epistle to the reader dated Leyden, 4 May 1586.
The work was the first of its kind to give to Englishmen an adequate example of the emblem books from the great continental presses. It was mainly from this book, representing the greater part of emblem literature preceding it, that
The poems are for the most part in six-line stanzas; a few are in quatrains or are even two-line epigrams. They are addressed to Whitney's kinsmen or friends, or to a notable contemporary, and give information of persons, places, and things rarely to be found elsewhere. The verses are often of great merit and always show extensive learning. Some are translations or adaptations of Classical authors such as
Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxonienses credits Whitney with another collection of Fables or Epigrams 'printed much about the same time', but no evidence of it has been found. The title sounds more like a description of the contents of Choice of Emblemes. Two other poems were printed in his friend Jan Dousa's Odae Brittanicae, also printed by the Plantin Press in 1586. One is a translation of complimentary verses addressed to the Earl of Leicester; the other is a 90-line commendation of the book of odes, very much in the style of his own emblem book:
- There needes no bushe, wheare nectar is to drinke;
- Nor helpes by arte, wheare bewtie freshe doth bloome;
- Wheare sonne doth shine, in vayne wee lyghte the linke;
- Wheare sea dothe swelle, the brookes do loose their roome;
- Let Progne cease, wheare Philomela singes,
- And oaten pipe, wheare Fame her trompet ringes.
More recently it has been argued that the two commendatory sonnets that preface Edmund Spenser's Amoretti (1595) were written by Whitney and his father.[3]
Notes
- Details are taken from the Dictionary of National Biography (London and New York, 1900), vol. LXI, pages 142–143.[4]
References
- ^ Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses 1721, vol.1, p.230
- ^ A facsimile reprint is available online
- ^ Rudolf Gottfried, The G.S.Senior and G.W.I. of Spenser’s Amoretti, Modern Language Quarterly 1942.3, pp.543–546
- ^ Available at Wikisource