George Gascoigne

Abstract The publication of Petrarchist love poetry in Tottel’s Miscellany shortly before the accession of Elizabeth made fashionable literature that had been the possession of an exclusive coterie available to a general readership. Gascoigne, an ambitious young man from the lower gentry present at Elizabeth’s coronation, chose poetry as one of his ambitions—calling himself at one point “Petrarch’s journeyman”—and in a variety of genres wrote about his other fortunes in his other aspirations at the court, in love, and on the battlefield. He shaped these into a seriocomic life story of repeated failure at almost everything, and retold this story with various personae. As Master F. J. he deploys his own poetry in a campaign to seduce the mistress of a wealthy country house—at first successfully, only to be humiliatingly replaced afterwards. As Dan Bartholmew and the Green Knight in two sequences of poems embedded in verse narration, he alternates between entanglement with an irresistible but unreliable woman and an erratic military career, with no conclusion in sight. In his greatest poem, “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” a more comprehensive and straightforwardly autobiographical telling of his life story, he comes to an enigmatic vision of the comfort and nurture that can come with failure itself.