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[_The portrait of Michael Drayton given here as a frontispiece is from a
picture, taken at the age of sixty-five (three years before he died), in
the Cartwright Collection at the Dulwich Gallery. The name of the
painter is not known, but the picture is signed "An^o 1628."_]


[Illustration: Michael Drayton]




  THE BATTAILE OF AGINCOURT
  BY MICHAEL DRAYTON:
  WITH INTRODUCTION AND
  NOTES BY RICHARD GARNETT


  [Illustration: Publisher's Device]


  LONDON PRINTED AND ISSUED BY
  CHARLES WHITTINGHAM & CO AT
  THE CHISWICK PRESS MDCCCXCIII




  CONTENTS.
                                                        PAGE

  Introduction                                           vii
  Drayton's Dedication                                     3
  Upon the Battaile of Agincourt, by I. Vaughan            5
  Sonnet to Michael Drayton, By John Reynolds              7
  The Vision of Ben Jonson on the Muses of his
    Friend M. Drayton                                      9
  The Battaile of Agincourt                               13
  To my Frinds the Camber-Britans and theyr Harp          93
  Illustrative Notes                                     101




INTRODUCTION.


All civilized nations possessing a history which they contemplate with
pride endeavour to present that history in an epic form. In their
initial stages of culture the vehicles of expression are ballads like
the constituents of the Spanish Romanceros and chronicles like
Joinville's and Froissart's. With literary refinement comes the distinct
literary purpose, and the poet appears who is also more or less of an
artist. The number of Spanish and Portuguese national epics, from the
Lusiad downwards, during the sixteenth and the first half of the
seventeenth centuries, is astonishing; and it was impossible that
English authorship, rapidly acquiring a perception of literary form
under classical and foreign influences, should not be powerfully
affected by the example of its neighbours.

A remarkable circumstance, nevertheless, while encouraging this epical
impulse, deprived its most important creations of the external epical
form. The age of awakened national self-consciousness was also the age
of drama. The greatest poetical genius of that or any age, and his
associates, were playwrights first and poets afterwards. The torrent of
inspiration rushed mainly to the stage. Hence the old experience was
reversed, and whereas Aeschylus described himself and his
fellow-dramatists as subsisting on scraps filched from the great banquet
of Homer, our English epic poets could but follow humbly in the wake of
the dramatists, the alchemy of whose genius had already turned the dross
of ancient chronicles to gold. In the mighty series of Shakespeare's
historical plays, including in the enumeration Marlowe's "Edward the
Second" and the anonymous "Edward the Third," England possesses a
national epic inferior to that of no country in the world, although the
form be dramatic. In one respect, indeed, this epic is superior to any
but the Homeric poems, standing one remove less apart from the poetry of
the people. The impression of primitive force which the Homeric poems
convey by their venerable language is equally well imparted by
Shakespeare's spontaneity and his apparent and probably real innocence
of all purely literary intention.

Epic poets, however gifted, could be but gleaners after such a harvest.
Yet not every excellent poet, even of that dramatic age, was endowed
with the dramatic faculty, and two of especial merit, singularly devoid
of dramatic gift, but inferior to none in love of their country and
self-consecration to its service, turned their attention to the epic.
These were Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton. The latter is our subject,
but something should also be said of the former. Drayton not unfairly
hit the blot in his successful rival when he said of him:

  "His rimes were smooth, his meeters well did close,
  But yet his maner better fitted prose."

This is one way of putting it; from another point of view Daniel may be
regarded as almost the most remarkable literary phenomenon of his time;
he is so exceedingly modern. He outran the taste of his own period by a
hundred years, and without teacher or example displayed the excellences
which came to be preferred to all others in the eighteenth century.
"These poems of his," says his editor in that age (1718), "having stood
the test of above a century, and the language and the versification
being still pure and elegant, it is to be hoped they will still shine
among his countrymen and preserve his name." At this time, and for long
afterwards, Drayton, save for an occasional reprint of his "Nimphidia"
among miscellaneous collections, was utterly neglected. Even after the
editions of 1748 and 1753 he is alluded to by Goldsmith as a type of the
poet whose best title to fame is his tomb in Westminster Abbey.

The nineteenth century has reversed this with other critical verdicts of
the eighteenth, and, with all due respect to Daniel, Drayton now stands
higher. Yet, where the two poets come most directly and manifestly into
competition, Drayton's superiority is not so evident. As a whole,
Daniel's "Civil War" is a better poem than Drayton's "Barons' Wars." The
superiority of the latter lies in particular passages, such as the
description of the guilty happiness of Isabella and Mortimer, quoted in
Mr. Arthur Bullen's admirable selection. This is to say that Drayton's
genius was naturally not so much epical as lyrical and descriptive. In
his own proper business as a narrative poet he fails as compared with
Daniel, but he enriches history with all the ornaments of poetry; and it
was his especial good fortune to discover a subject in which the union
of dry fact with copious poetic illustration was as legitimate to the
theme as advantageous to the writer. This was, of course, his
"Polyolbion," where, doing for himself what no other poet ever did, he
did for his country what was never done for any other. Greece and Rome,
indeed, have left us versified topographies, but these advance no
pretension to the poetical character except from the metrical point of
view, though they may in a sense claim kinship with the Muses as the
manifest offspring of Mnemosyne. If any modern language possesses a
similar work, it has failed to inscribe itself on the roll of the
world's literature. The difficulties of Drayton's unique undertaking
were in a measure favourable to him. They compelled him to exert his
fancy to the uttermost. The tremendous difficulty of making topography
into poetry gave him unwonted energy. He never goes to sleep, as too
often in the "Barons' Wars." The stiff practical obstacles attendant
upon the poetical treatment of towns and rivers provoke even the
dragging Alexandrine into animation; his stream is often all foam and
eddy. The long sweeping line, of its wont so lumbering and tedious, is
perfectly in place here. It rushes along like an impetuous torrent,
bearing with it, indeed, no inconsiderable quantity of wood, hay, and
stubble, but also precious pearls, and more than the dust of gold. Its
"swelling and limitless billows" mate well with the amplitude of the
subject, so varied and spacious that, as has been well said, the
"Polyolbion" is not a poem to be read through, but to be read in.
Nothing in our literature, perhaps, except the "Faery Queen," more
perfectly satisfies Keats's desideratum: "Do not the lovers of poetry
like to have a little region to wander in, where they may pick and
choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten
and found new in a second reading: which may be food for a week's stroll
in the summer? Do they not like this better than what they can read
through before Mrs. Williams comes down stairs? a morning work at most?"

The "Polyolbion" was completed by 1619, though the concluding part was
not published until 1623. "The Battaile of Agincourt," the poem now
reprinted, appeared with others in 1627. As none of the pieces comprised
in it had appeared in the collected edition of Drayton's works (the
"Polyolbion" excepted) which he had published in 1620, it is reasonable
to conclude that they had been composed between that date and 1627. They
prove that his powers were by no means abated. "Nimphidia," in
particular, though lacking the exquisite sweetness of some of his lyric
pastorals, and the deep emotion of passages in his "Heroicall Epistles,"
excels all his other productions in airy fancy, and is perhaps the best
known of any of his poems. Nor does the "Battaile" itself indicate any
decay in poetical power, though we must agree with Mr. Bullen that it is
in some parts fatiguing. This wearisomeness proceeds chiefly from
Drayton's over-faithful adherence, not so much to the actual story, as
to the method of the chronicler from whom his materials are principally
drawn. It does not seem to have occurred to him to regard his theme in
the light of potter's clay. Following his authority with servile
deference, he makes at the beginning a slip which lowers the dignity of
his hero, and consequently of his epic. He represents Henry the Fifth's
expedition against France as originally prompted, not by the restless
enterprise and fiery valour of the young king, much less by supernatural
inspiration as the working out of a divine purpose, but by the craft of
the clergy seeking to divert him from too nice inquiry into the source
and application of their revenues. Henry, therefore, without, as modern