[BROWNE, William]

A very good copy, finely bound by Stikeman of New York, of the first complete edition of Browne s best-known pastoral poem. Britannia s Pastorals is a pastoral romance in which William Browne presents the adventures of Marina, Fida, and Aletheia in five songs with an interpolated elegy for Prince Henry. Walter Greg describes Browne s major works as the longest and most ambitious poem ever composed on a pastoral theme Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama. The commendatory verses by John Selden, Michael Drayton, Edward Heyward, Christopher Brook, Fr. Dynne, Thomas Gardiner, W. Ferrar, and Fr. Oulde acknowledge Browne of Tavistock as a second Colin Clout.

Edmund Spenser was Browne s poetic model throughout his career, most obviously in Britania s pastorals, although he was influenced by Italian pastoral drama (specifically by Torquato Tasso s Aminta). In Britannia s pastorals, Browne mixes the pastoral and romantic genres, as Spenser did in the Faerie Queene, and, like Spenser, Browne attempts to write an epic that will be thoroughly English. His greatest quality was probably his talent for natural description . The passages in which he describes what is recognizably his native Devonshire are especially fine. In his own lifetime Browne was considered an important English poet, but his fame did not last. Still, it has often been argued that not only Milton but also such later poets as Keats, Tennyson, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were influenced by his work, and in particular his treatment of nature. The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature. Britannia s pastorals may be the most elaborate attempt ever made to imitate The Faerie Queene with respect to atmosphere of romance, general structure, and interlacing of many subplots. .. Britannia s Pastorals embodies a genuinely Spenserian tradition: intricate romance narrative in an idealised setting, passing at times into open allegory, reaching out towards moral concerns on the one hand and politics, society, literature and culture on the other. Albert Charles Hamilton. The Spenser Encyclopedia.

A rare copy, finely bound, of the first complete edition of this important work of English pastoral poetry.