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- Title
Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney and—Abraham Fraunce?
- Authors
MAY, STEVEN W.
- Abstract
By the late 1580s, the lawyer, rhetorician and poet Abraham Fraunce enjoyed far more prestige as a man of letters than he claims today. A popular author and esteemed protégé of the Sidney-Herbert circle, he gained access to pre-publication manuscripts of both Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Fraunce was ideally situated to transmit this and other privileged manuscript poetry to a variety of recipients: to the undergraduates at his own St. John’s College, Cambridge, who copied elite courtier verse into their poetic anthologies; to Christopher Marlowe, who worked excerpts from the Faerie Queene into both parts of Tamburlaine; to Thomas Newman, who published the first edition of Astrophil and Stella in 1591 as a poetic anthology, then used a second manuscript of the work to correct the text of the second quarto. Fraunce’s role in these significant literary developments is plausible and in some cases, quite likely, although the available evidence falls tantalisingly short of proof.
- Subjects
FRAUNCE, Abraham; POETS; MARLOWE, Christopher, 1564-1593; SPENSER, Edmund, ca. 1552-1599; LAWYERS; POETRY (Literary form)
- Publication
Review of English Studies, 2011, Vol 62, Issue 253, p30
- ISSN
0034-6551
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1093/res/hgp117