Barnabe Googe - Poetry

Poetry

Googe's poems are written in the Plain or Native Style, which preceded and subsequently competed with the Petrarchan style. Petrarchan love poetry (much of the work of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Campion...) was decorative, metaphorical and often exaggerated; it also involved a more fluid mastery of iambic English poetry than the alliterative Native Style: Googe's tonic accents are heavy, the unaccents light; the result is sometimes deliberately blunt and plodding. The poems of George Turberville, Thomas More, George Gascoigne and Walter Raleigh are examples of a similar style.

Plain Style dealt with serious subjects in a serious way: its goal was not ornamental beauty, but truth. Googe's poem Of Money ("Give money me, take friendship whoso list / For friends are gone come once adversity...") is a well-known example of the tradition.

Googe was an ardent Protestant, and his poetry is coloured by his religious and political views. In the third "Eglog", for instance, he laments the decay of the old nobility and the rise of a new aristocracy of wealth, and he gives an indignant account of the sufferings of his co-religionists under Mary of England. The other eclogues deal with the sorrows of earthly love, leading up to a dialogue between Corydon and Cornix, in which the heavenly love is extolled. The volume includes epitaphs on Nicholas Grimald, John Bale and on Thomas Phaer, whose translation of Virgil Googe esteemed.

The English pastoral poem "Phyllida was a fayer maid" (from Tottel's Miscellany of 1558) has been doubtfully ascribed to Googe, despite showing little stylistic rapport with his acknowledged works. But Googe's important contribution to pastoral poetry in English rests with his cycle of eclogues that synthesise trends from classical pastoral, the work of Mantuan, and the pastoral elements of Spanish romance, and he was the first English writer to reflect the influence of the Diana Enamorada of Montemayor.

His other works include: a translation from Marcellus Palingenius (said to be an anagram for Pier Angelo Manzolli) of a satirical Latin poem, Zodiacus vitae (Venice, 1531?), in twelve books, under the title of The Zodyake of Life (1560); The Popish Kingdome, or reign of Antichrist (1570), translated from Thomas Kirchmeyer or Naogeorgus; The Spiritual Husbandrie from the same author, printed with the last Foure Bookes of Husbandrie (1577), collected by Conradus Heresbachius; The Overthrow of the Gout (1577), a translation from Christopher Ballista (Christophe Arbaleste), and The Proverbes of Lopes de Mendoza (1579). The Zodyake of Life was a significant translation, being adopted as a textbook for English grammar schools. As such, its ideas colour many of the works of English writers of the latter part of the sixteenth and the first part of the seventeenth centuries. Part of the book's appeal, in addition to its poetical astronomy, was its notoriety as a Reformist text: Palingenius was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Inquisition and consequently enjoyed popularity in Protestant regions across Europe.