Want fewer ads?

Thomas Watson (1555—1592), English lyrical poet, was the son of William Watson (d.1559) and Anne Lee (d.1561). He was educated at Winchester College and Oxford. He then spent 7 years in France and Italy before studying law in London. Though he often signed his works with "student of law" he never practiced law, considering his true passion was literature.

His De remedio amoris, which was perhaps his earliest important composition, is lost, as is his "piece of work written in the commendation of women-kind", which was also in Latin verse. The earliest publication by Watson which has survived is a Latin version of the Antigone of Sophocles, issued in 1581, dedicated to Philip Howard, 20th Earl of Arundel. The version also contains an appendix of Latin Allegorical poems and experiments in classical metres.

The following year Watson appears for the first time as an English poet in some verses prefixed to George Whetstone's Heptameron, and also in a far more important work, as the author of the Hecatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love, dedicated to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who had read the poems in manuscript and encouraged Watson to publish them. Also entitled Watson's Passion the work contains over 100 poems in French and Italian styles, including a number of translations. The technical peculiarity of these interesting poems is that, although they appear and profess to be sonnets, they are written in triple sets of common six-line stanza, and therefore have eighteen lines each.He was largely recognized for his poetic "Methods + motifs" which occurred between 1580 and 1590. He was held in high regard by his contemporaries even though his style was drastically similar to his late 15th and eary 16th century Italian Predecessors Sannazaro and Strozzi. He openly drew from Petrarch and Ronsard, with what Sidney Lee describes as "drops of water from Petrarach and Ronsard's fountains." Watson seriously desired to recommend his 18 line form to future sonneteers; but in this he had no imitators. Nevertheless, according to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Watson's sonnets "appear to have been studied by Shakespeare and other contemporaries."

As his reputation grew, he began to align himself with such literary powers as Marlowe, Peele, Royden and Atchelow. He also grew a following of younger writers like Barnfield and Nashe, who regarded him as the best Latin poet in England. In 1585 he published his first Latin epic 'Amyntas', eleven days of a shepherd's mourning for the death of his lover, Phyllis. Watson's epic was afterwards translated into English by Abraham Fraunce, without permission of the author (1587). Fraunce's translation was highly criticized. "His sins of translation result generally from an excess of zeal rather than a failure to understand his author's intention." Although a relationship to Torquato Tasso's "Aminta' is often supposed, in fact there is none. In the fourth reprint of his English version in 1591 Fraunce also printed his own translation of the Tasso work, and it is this that has given rise to the confusion. . In 1590 he published, in English and Latin verse, his Meliboeus, an elegy on the death of Sir Francis Walsingham. Related to music, he also wrote a laudatory poem about John Case's The Praise of Musc (1586). in 1590, he published The First Set of Italian Madrigals a collection by Marenzio and given lyrics by Watson. They were set to music by two others and William Byrd. Of the remainder of Watson's career nothing is known, save that on the 26th of September 1592 he was buried in the church of St Bartholomew the Less, and that a month later his second Latin epic "Amintae Gaudia" was seen through the press by his friend Marlowe. This tells the story of Amyntas' love, and eventual winning, of Phyllis, and is therefore chronologically the first part of the earlier epic. In the following year his last book, The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained (1593), was posthumously published under the initials T.W. This is a collection of sixty sonnets, regular in form, so far at least as to have fourteen lines each. Spenser is supposed to have alluded to the untimely death of Watson in Colin Clouts Come Home Again, when he says: "Amyntas quite is gone and lies full low, Having his Amaryllis left to moan".

He is mentioned by Francis Meres in company with Shakespeare, Peele and Marlowe among "the best for tragedie", but no dramatic work of his except the translations above mentioned is extant today. It is certain that Watson enjoyed a great reputation in his lifetime, and that he was not without a direct influence upon the youth of Shakespeare. He was the first, after the original experiment made by Wyat and Surrey, to introduce the pure imitation of Petrarch into English poetry. "He shows his inventiveness by his variety of treatment...It is the number of different ways in which he can introduce these devices in this matter than measures his success as a poet." He was well read in Italian, French and Greek literature.

Watson plays a prominent part in the novel A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess, in which he is a close friend of Christopher Marlowe. In the book Watson introduces Marlowe to Sir Francis Walsingham and he also contributes to several of Marlowe's plays.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Thomas Watson", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0