Mathew Roydon

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Mathew Roydon (sometimes spelled Matthew, c. 1580-1622) was an English poet associated with the School of Night group of poets and writers.

Contemporary George Chapman wrote of Roydon, "It is in the exceeding rapture of delight in the deepe search of knowledge, none knoweth better than thyselfe, sweet Mathew, that maketh men manfully indure th'extremes incident to that Herculean labour."[1]

Martin Garrett writes that Roydon "was associated at various times with Spenser, Marlowe, and Chapman",[2] and quotes Thomas Nashe, prefacing Robert Greene's Menaphon (1589), in saying that Roydon "hath shewed himselfe singular in the immortall Epitaph of his beloved Astrophell, besides many other most absolute Comike inventions".[3] According to Garrett:

If the epitaph was the same as the elegy, and if it was not revised between composition and publication, it constitutes the earliest known account of Astrophil and Stella. As in Spenser's elegy-as a source of which it should perhaps be classed-the boundary between Sidney and Astrophil, life and work, is unclear and Stella idealized rather than 'identified'... The 'Elegie' was first published with those of Ralegh and Dyer, in The Phoenix Nest (1593), and then in the Astrophel collection.

—Martin Garrett, Sidney: The Critical Heritage (1996) p.105-6.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Dedication to George Chapman's The Shadow of Night (1594) in "Notices of Mathew Roydon", Egerton Brydges, ed., Restituta: Or, Titles, Extracts, and Characters of Old Books in English Literature, Revived (1815) p.51.
  2. ^ Martin Garrett, Sidney: The Critical Heritage (1996) p.105-6.
  3. ^ The works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols, Oxford, 1958, vol. 3, p. 323.

[edit] External links

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