Biography Gabriel Harvey

Poet Biography

Gabriel Harvey was a well known Elizabethan writer, lecturer, and critic. Born the son of a rope-maker in Saffron-Walden, near Cambridge, he gradually became something of a fixture at the University. In his youth Harvey knew the poet Edmund Spenser, and was loosely associated with the literary circle around Sir Philip Sidney. Harvey became Professor of Rhetoric at Cambridge in 1574. Harvey got in trouble in 1579 for his published correspondence with Spenser, in which he attacked the Earl of Oxford in verse. Later Harvey feuded with satirists Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe in a series of pamphlets which are remembered as the War of Words of the University Wits. After failing to receive advancement in his career, Harvey retired in 1598, and spent the next 33 years in his library studying Literature Science, and Medicine.

Gabriel Harvey and Oxford

During the Earl of Oxford's youth he was apparently on good terms with, and gave financial assistance to Gabriel Harvey, a Cambridge Don. In 1578 the Queen visited Cambridge, accompanied by the whole Court. Harvey met the procession at Audley End, presented verses written in their honor.

By 1580, Harvey had secured the patronage of the Puritan DudleySidney faction and endorsed the new poetic dicta of Sidney and Spenser. Harvey's vitriolic pen now turned against his former benefactor, expressed in the Speculum Tuscanismi.

This insult to a man of Oxford's standing was not to be tolerated by the establishment, and Lyly launched an attack on Harvey, finally forcing from him an apology.

Harvey's career was later ruined by increasingly intemperate quarrels, opposed equally ferociously by the gifted Thomas Nashe. Lady Pembroke withdrew her protection from Harvey; and in 1599 Archbishop Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft ordered an immediate calling-in of various apparently objectionable publications, including an instruction that "all NASSHES and DOCTOR HARVEYES bookes bee taken wheresoeer they maye be found and that none of theire bookes bee euer printed hereafter." John Davies of Hereford summed up the quarrel: "Well, God forgive them both, they did me wrong, To make me beare their choller spude, so long."

A Question On Rhyme (rime)

In the heyday of Elizabethan literature a serious attempt was made in England to reject rhyme altogether, and to return to the quantitative measures of the ancients. The prime mover in this heresy was not a poet at all, but a pedantic grammarian of Cambridge, Gabriel Harvey (1545 ?—163o). He considered himself a great innovator, and for a short time he actually seduced no less melodious a poet than Edmund Spenser to abandon rhyme and adopt a system of accented hexameters and trimeters. Spenser even wrote largely in those ‘measures, but the greater portion of his experiments in this kind, of which The Dying Pelican is supposed to have been one, have’ disappeared.