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The Model of Poesy is a Renaissance English treatise about the art of poetry written by William Scott in about 1599. It contains a theoretical description of what poetry is, and practical guidelines about how to write well. Scott, following on from Philip Sidney's An Apology for Poetry, develops his poetics in the classical and continental tradition, and includes examples from many English writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. Scott also quotes from his partial translation of Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas' La Sepmaine that is found directly after the Model in the sole surviving manuscript copy of both texts. The Model was re-discovered in the early 2000s and printed in a modern critical edition, edited by Gavin Alexander, in 2013.
Contents
Manuscript
The only known copy of the Model of Poesy is found in British Library Additional Manuscript 81083. The Modell of Poesye: Or The Arte of Poesye drawen into a short or Summary Discourse (to give its full title in the manuscript) is found on folios 1 to 49, written in a scribal italic hand with scribal and authorial/authorized corrections throughout. At least one gathering (i.e. eight pages) close to the start has been lost. Scott's dedicatory letter to Sir Henry Lee introduces the treatise, describing it as 'the first fruits of my study'. Folios 51 to 76 contain a partial translation of the first two jours of Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas' La Sepmaine. The translation ends mid-sentence during 'The Second Day', and water damage to the final surviving leaves has made some lines illegible.
Author
William Scott was born in Kent in the early 1570s. Scott produced the Model while a law student at the Inner Temple, probably completing much of the work during the summer vacation of 1599. Scott was related to the Henrician poet Sir Thomas Wyatt through his mother's side of the family: his uncle George Wyatt of Boxley (1553-1624), to whom Scott dedicated his Du Bartas translation, was Thomas' grandson (and the only surviving son of the rebel leader Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger). Possibly as a result of dedicating the Model to Sir Henry Lee, Scott entered Lee's employment and served as MP for New Woodstock in 1601. In 1604 he travelled to Russia as part of Sir Thomas Smythe's embassy to the Russian Tsar Boris Gudunov. Little is known about the rest of Scott's career. He married Barbara Tomlyn in 1610 or 1611 and settled in Westenhanger, Kent He died in 1617. There is no record of Scott's burial, nor of whether he wrote further works after writing the Model and the Du Bartas translation.
Summary
The Model is divided into three sections. In the first Scott defines poetry, making his debts to earlier theorists clear:
All antiquity, following their great leader Aristotle, have defined poetry to be an art of imitation, or an instrument of reason, that consists in laying down the rules and way how in style to feign or represent things, with delight to teach to move us to good; as if one should say with the lyric Simonides (after whom Sir Philip Sidney saith) the poem is a speaking or wordish picture' (Cambridge edition, p. 6).
Scott then discusses the 'genus' (matter), difference' (form) and 'end' of poetry in turn, dealing with such questions as the source of poetic inspiration, and the temperament required of the poet.
The second section turns to different kinds of poems: heroic, pastoral, tragedy, comedy, satire and lyric. The third and longest section discusses poetic practice: what to write about, what the distinctive qualities of good poetry are, and what rules apply to individual genres. Scott uses a variety of examples from classical and modern poetry to illustrate how poetry achieves its purpose to teach, move and delight. Scott, following Julius Caesar Scaliger, dwells in particular on the four virtues of poetry that apply to both the poet's choice of material and style: Scott writes that Scaliger
observes that to strike with the pleasure of our poem the doors of men's sense these four virtues are especially requisite: first a proportionableness or uniformity; secondly variety; thirdly sweetness; lastly that energeia, force effectualness, or vigour, which is the character of passion and life of persuasion and motion' (p. 33).
Influences
Scott's reading in classical literature was broad. He had certainly read Aristotle (including the Organon and Nicomachean Ethics), Horace (Ars poetica), Quintilian, Cicero and Plutarch (Parallel Lives). He had also encountered more recent texts like Julius Caesar Scaliger's Poetices libri septem, Giovanni Antonio Viperano's De poeti libri tres, Baldassare Castiglione's Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) and Gian Paolo Lomazzo's Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura.
Philip Sidney was central to Scott's conception of what poetry was and what it could achieve, and in the Model he cites Astrophel and Stella, the Arcadia and, of course, An Apology for Poetry. Gavin Alexander writes that 'The model of poesy is in many ways a commentary on The defence of poesy, adopting its basic theory, filling in its gaps, interrogating and weighing its sources, glossing and elaborating its difficulties. But it is also a very different sort of work, a much more ambitious and comprehensive exercise inspired by the Defence but not bounded or constrained by it' (p. liii).
Scott also had an up-to-date knowledge of contemporary poetry. Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece is quoted twice, and Scott alludes to the garden scene in Richard II. Scott has also read Sir Thomas Wyatt, George Buchanan's Latin plays, Gorboduc, The Mirror for Magistrates, Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Samuel Daniel's The Civil Wars, Michael Drayton's Englands Heroical Epistles, Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar, View of the Present State of Ireland and Faerie Queene, and Robert Southwell's Saint Peters Complaint. Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso and Giovanni Batista Guarini are among the continental poets Scott knows.
Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas held a special place in Scott's thought. Du Bartas, who was already well known in English literary circles in the 1590s, was a model of Protestant poetry for Scott: he is 'our incomparable Bartas' who has 'opened as much natural science in one week, containing the story of creation, as all the rabble of schoolmen and philosophers have done since Plato and Aristotle' and 'hath minced and sugared [divine teachings] for the weakest and tenderest stomach, yet thoroughly to satisfice the strongest judgement' (p. 20). Scott's translations from the first two days of La Sepmaine are linked to the Model in various ways, both as a demonstration of Scott's theories (which he quotes several times in the treatise to this end) and a text that contains similar words, imagery and ideas.
Modern Edition
Cambridge University Press published an edition of The Model of Poesy, edited by Gavin Alexander, in October 2013. The edition contains an introduction about Scott's life and literary contexts for the Model including classical and continental sources, late-Elizabethan literature, the visual arts, Sidney and Du Bartas. The text of Model uses modernized spelling and punctuation. An edition that retains original spelling and records the pagination and lineation of the manuscript can be downloaded for free from the Cambridge University Press website.
The edition has been well received. In a review for Spenser Studies, Roger Kuin commended Alexander's thorough editorial work for making accessible a discovery of a text of 'incalculable value' to scholars and students of English Renaissance literature: 'for anyone working in any way with the literature, and the literary scene, of the sixteenth century’s last two or three decades, Scott's Model is indispensable'. A special issue of the Sidney Journal published in 2015 introduces the Model's significance for students and scholars of Elizabethan literature, and identifies areas for further research.