Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion: Britain’s First Antiquarian EpicAngus Vine

A ‘poet historical’
Michael Drayton (1561–1631) has never been the most fashionable of English poets. Modern literary accounts,
if they discuss him at all, tend to represent him as a ‘belated’ writer: as a poet with an essentially Elizabethan
worldview, who had the misfortune to live out more than half his adult life after Queen Elizabeth I had died in 1603,
and as a writer whose work was defined by a powerful nostalgia for that earlier era. The American scholar RichardHardin, for example, characterized him as a writer who was ‘as conservative in poetry as he was in politics’, andwho ‘continued writing the kinds of verse that had already been out of date in his youth’.1However, whilst Drayton was undoubtedly both a conservative and a nostalgic writer, such views seriously
underestimate his significance as a ‘poet historical’ (a term invented by his contemporary Edmund Spenser [1552?–1599]), and his lifetime of experimenting with different forms and genres of history. Drayton, as the critic Bart VanEs has recently observed, sought to enact ‘a newly explicit interaction between literary and historical texts’.2 He
was also one of the most thoughtful contributors to the classic literary critical debate about the relationship between
poetry and history: a debate whose roots lay in Aristotle’s Poetics, the foundational work for European aesthetics.
For Aristotle and his Renaissance imitators such as Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), the essential difference between
poetry and history was that whereas poetry ‘ever setteth virtue so out in her best colours’, history ‘being captived
to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from well-doing and an encouragement to unbridled
wickedness’.3 Drayton, however, took a different view: for him, the two disciplines were not so clearly distinguished,
and were in fact at their most effective as teachers of virtue when they were mixed. As a result, he undertook alifelong project to bring the two disciplines into productive dialogue.
Drayton’s earliest attempts here were fairly conventional historical works in the genre known as ‘complaintpoetry’: Peirs Gaveston, Earle of Cornwall. His Life, Death, and Fortune (1593), Matilda. The Faire and Chaste
Daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwater (1594), and The Tragicall Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy, Surnamed
Short-Thigh, Eldest Sonne to William Conqueror (1596). Subsequent (and more successful) attempts included
Mortimeriados (1596), a narrative poem focusing on the turbulent reign of Edward II, The Barons Warres (1603),
an historical epic on the same subject, and Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597), a collection of fictional love lettersin verse by figures from medieval and Tudor history, written in imitation of Ovid’s Heroides.
These works were all, however, preliminary to Drayton’s most significant experiment with historical genre andform: Poly-Olbion (1612 and 1622). Issued in two parts ten years apart, Poly-Olbion mixes learned antiquarian
research into Britain’s past with detailed topographical descriptions of the country’s landscapes and literary
conventions from classical epic. The work’s scholarly credentials were burnished by the fact that it was also acollaboration with one of the leading antiquaries of the day: the lawyer, legal historian, and Hebraist John Selden(1584–1654). Selden provided an immensely learned prose commentary to the first part of Poly-Olbion, which wasintended to explain historical uncertainties and illuminate obscure or otherwise difficult matters.
Chorography, antiquarianism, and epic
In the programmatic opening lines of Poly-Olbion, Drayton signalled not only the scope of his poem, but also its
distinct mixture of genres, influences, disciplines, and traditions:
OF ALBIONS glorious Ile the Wonders whilst I write,
The sundry varying soyles, the pleasures infinite(Where heate kills not the cold, nor cold expells the heat,
The calmes too mildly small, nor winds too roughly great,
Nor night doth hinder day, nor day the night doth wrong,
The summer not too short, the Winter not too long)
What helpe shall I invoke to ayde my Muse the while?4
As an invocation to the Muse, these lines, first of all, align Poly-Olbion with classical epic. They also, though, map
out Drayton’s own distinctive territory in the poem and his particular mixture of interests. They underscore the factthat this will be a poem about the history, geography, and ecology of Britain (or ‘Albion’, as he dubs it here).
What then follows in the rest of Poly-Olbion is a richly imagined, self-consciously literary survey of Britain’shistory and topography. As Drayton’s narrator travels on his imaginary journeys up and down Britain, he encountersanthropomorphized rivers, forests, and mountains. These features of the landscape, depicted by Drayton as nymphs
and spirits, sing to his narrator, and when they sing, they narrate Britain’s history, map its geography, and describe
its ecology—the ‘Wonders’ of ‘ALBIONS glorious Ile’, as the opening line puts it.
This combination of interests (history, geography, topography, ecology) was also the defining characteristic of
the genre that was the single most important influence on Poly-Olbion: ‘chorography’. The ancient Greekmathematician and geographer Claudius Ptolemy defined ‘chorography’ as that discipline which ‘sets down theindividual localities, each one independently and by itself, registering practically everything down to the least thing
therein (for example, harbours, towns, districts, branches of principal rivers, and so on)’.5 The same understandingof the word applied in Drayton’s day. The mathematician Arthur Hopton (c. 1580–1614), for example, calledchorography ‘the Arte, whereby wee be taught to describe any particular place […] delivering all things of note
contained therein, as ports, villages, rivers, not omitting the smallest’.6
This kind of comprehensive topographical description is exactly what Drayton set out to do in the poem. The
work’s thirty Songs are characterized by lengthy catalogues, from genealogies of kings and queens to lists of rivers
and forests. In applying this approach to both geographical and historical subject matter, Drayton was following in
the footsteps of a number of recently published antiquarian surveys. Works such as William Lambarde’s A
Perambulation of Kent (1576), William Harrison’s The Description of England (1577, 1587), and William
Camden’s Britannia (first published in 1586) had pioneered this mixed historical and geographical approach.
Drayton signalled his own debt to the chorographic tradition
most obviously through his work’s two title-pages. Both theletterpress title and the magnificent, engraved frontispiece presentPoly-Olbion as an intervention in this genre. The former (theprinted title-page) explicitly identifies Poly-Olbion as a work ofchorography: ‘POLY-OLBION. | or | A Chorographicall
Description of Tracts, Rivers, | Mountaines, Forests, and otherParts of this renowned Isle | of Great Britaine, | With intermixtureof the most Remarquable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, | Rarityes,Pleasures, and Commodities of | the same: | Digested in a Poem’.
The latter, which was the work of the prolific engraver WilliamHole (d. 1624), suggested the same thing through its complexiconography and its series of figures and images.
Hole’s frontispiece similarly mixes geography and history. As
such, it offers a visualization of Drayton’s chorographic poetics.
The frontispiece is dominated by the large female figure, Albion,
who sits underneath the grand arch at its centre. This figure is a
representation of Britain itself. The shape of her dress is designed
to resemble a map of the British Isles, whilst around her neck she
wears a necklace of three strings of pearls as an allusion to the three
kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Wales, and she is surroundedby the sea. In her right hand, she holds a sceptre, one of the symbolsof monarchy. In her left hand, she carries a cornucopia, or horn of plenty: an emblematic representation of thecopiousness of Drayton’s project. Surrounding her, and standing on the capitals and plinth, are four foundational
figures from British history and myth (the Trojan Brutus, the Roman Julius Caesar, the Saxon Hengist, and theNorman William the Conqueror). These four figures represent four different genealogies (Trojan, Roman, Saxon,and Norman), four different national origins for Britain and the Britons, and four different traditions that historiesof Britain from Drayton’s period commonly recounted. The frontispiece signals that Poly-Olbion, in keeping with
its copious poetics, will do the same.

A commercial flop
Drayton’s literary ambitions for Poly-Olbion were, in the end, not matched by commercial success. For all hisbold experimentation with history and geography, copies of the poem did not sell in anything like the numbers thateither he or his publishers had hoped. Readers, it seems, were not quite ready for this ‘Topo-chrono-graphicall
POEME’ (as the poet George Wither [1588–1667] called it in a commendatory poem that he wrote for the secondpart). Critics over the years have proposed all sorts of reasons for Poly-Olbion’s commercial failure, from its
forbidding length (at over 15,000 lines long) to its often obscure antiquarian subject matter. However, its mixed
nature may also have been a significant factor here. That is to say, the thing which made Poly-Olbion so innovativeand significant a work—its mixtures of history and geography, of history and poetry, of traditions, genres, andforms—may well also have been what made it such a challenge to some contemporary readers at least.
1Richard F. Hardin, Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973), 9.
Bart Van Es, “Michael Drayton, Literary History, and Historians in Verse,” The Review of English Studies 59, no. 239 (2008): 255.
3
Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson, 1965), 111.
4Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, in The Works of Michael Drayton, eds J. William Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson, and Bernard H. Newdigate, 5 vols
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961; first published 1931–41), 1. 1–7.
5
Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters, eds and trans J. L. Berggren and A. Jones (Princeton and Oxford:Princeton University Press, 2000), 57.
6
Arthur Hopton, Speculum Topographicum: or the Topographicall Glasse (London: Nicholas Okes for Simon Waterson, 1611), B1r.
2