Thomas May
Thomas May (1594/95[1] – 13 November 1650) was an English poet, dramatist and historian of the Renaissance era.[1]
Early life and career until 1630
May was born in
Acquaintance with Carew, Massinger and Jonson
In 1615 May registered as a lawyer at Gray's Inn in London. There is no record of what he did for the next five years.
During the 1620s May was associated with dramatic circles. In 1620 his romantic comedy, The Heir,
In 1625 May was responsible for the verse translations in Kingsmill Long's translation of William Barclay's Arcadian political allegory.
Bellum Civile translation
May's career-defining work was his translation of the Latin poet
In June 1627 May composed a poem celebrating Charles I as absolute ruler of the seas, probably as part of the upswell of support for the Isle de Rhé expedition. It re-uses the Pythagorean trope May first employed in his poem of 1612.
Other works and translations
1626 also saw the performance of May's tragedy Cleopatra, although it isn't known where or by whom; it was printed later in 1639. A manuscript version in the British Library, of uncertain date, contains a number of small but interesting textual variants. During the next few years he wrote two further classical tragedies, Antigone (published 1631) and Julia Agrippina (1639); the first was probably never staged but the second claims a 1628 performance on its title page. May's tragedies are modelled on Jonson and are also plausibly influenced by Massinger; they concentrate on political themes, rather than erotic passions; Cleopatra and Antigone draw linguistically and thematically on Lucan.
During the later 1620s May also published two further translations of Latin poetry:
May in the 1630s
Until 1630 May seems to have lacked much reward or recognition for his literary efforts. None of the dedicatees to his early works, including the eight titled nobles addressed in his 1627 translation of Lucan, can be connected to his later activities. In dedicating his Georgics May even turned to a fellow alumnus of his old college,
Continuation
May's fortunes probably improved towards the end of the decade. In 1630 a seven-book Continuation of Lucan appeared, in which May took the narrative up to
May and Ben Jonson
May did have acquaintances. After the
Together with Jonson (and probably because of him) May became intimate with Sir Kenelme Digby, later Jonson's literary executor and sponsor of his 1640 Folio Works. Jonson and May were the first two poets in a manuscript collection of poems commemorating the unfortunate death of Digby's wife, Venetia, in 1633. Their shared poetic concerns also surface in a short treatise written by Digby on Edmund Spenser (Elizabethan author of The Faerie Queene), apparently at May's request. This work talks of Jonson as Spenser's literary heir. May complimented Digby for his Spenserian criticism in an effusive sonnet, and later dedicated the published version of Cleopatra to him.
Jonson died in 1637 and the following year May contributed an elegy to the memorial collection Jonsonius Virbius: it began by comparing Jonson to Lucan. During the 1640s a story arose that May had expected to be given Jonson's royal pension, and became disaffected when it passed instead to William Davenant. This story was designed to paint May as an ingrate, and reflects less what he did or thought at the time than his later activities as a writer for the Parliamentary cause.
A comedy of May's, The Old Couple, later published in 1658, claims to have been performed in 1636.
The 1640s: May and Parliament
In 1640 May published a Latin adaptation and translation of his Continuation of Lucan, the Supplementum Lucani. Befitting a major work of Neo-Latin poetry it was published in Leiden, one of the centres of continental humanist scholarship, and received dedications from a number of Dutch intellectuals including Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn and Nicolaus Heinsius. Letters from Heinsius's father Daniel to Patrick Young, the Royal Librarian, and John Selden indicate that May wrote the translation while in the Netherlands (on what business is unclear). It retained the Continuation's dedication to Charles I, although it has plausibly been argued that it expresses greater hostility to Caesar and monarchy than the original.
Parliamentarian views
During the early 1640s – it is unclear when – May gravitated towards support for Parliament. In 1642, he wrote a tract supporting brief but regular meetings between King and Parliament, probably to agitate for the
History of the Parliament and the Breviarium
Partly as a result of his early
.In October 1649, following the regicide and the emergence of an English republican government, May contributed a dedicatory epistle to Charles Sydenham's attack on the Leveller John Lilburne, addressing the members of the Rump Parliament, Roman style, as 'Senators'. May's epistle counsels against legislating for greater freedom of conscience, arguing that it is alienating the regime from potential allies such as the Presbyterians. He dismisses Lilburne and fellow democratic agitators for having no landed interest in the kingdom (echoing the position taken up by Ireton in the Putney Debates of 1647) and warns MPs to heed the 'better sort'. The regicide and subsequent events are hailed as miracles of God.
In 1650 May published a revised history of Parliament eschewing (for the most part) classical citations and other rhetorical adornments in favour of a curt, Sallustian Latin prose style. First published in Latin in April 1650, the Breviarium was swiftly rendered into English, presumably by May himself, as the Breviarie; it appeared in June 1650.
In November 1650 May died. Royalist propaganda later held he had suffocated on the strings of his sleeping bonnet after a heavy drinking binge, but there is no particular reason to believe this: he was already fifty-five. The republicans Henry Marten and Thomas Chaloner were charged by the Council of State with seeing to May's 'burial', setting aside £100 for the purpose, and both men and Sir James Harrington with finding a replacement historian of Parliament. May was interred in
External links
- Works by Thomas May at the Internet Archive.
- May Family History: Thomas May
- Chester, Allan Griffith, Thomas May: Man of Letters 1595–1650 (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania 1932) is still the best study of May in English.
References
- ^ a b c d e f Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 930.
- ^ "May, Thomas (MY609T)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
- ^ Epicedium Cantabrigiense in obitum immaturum & semper deflendum, Henrici ... (Cambridge: 1612), p.103
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.