Gibson, Jonathan Ralf Dehany; (1998) Sir Arthur Gorges (1557-1625) and the patronage system. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis analyses the life and works of the courtier and writer Sir Arthur Gorges, reading Gorges's poetic and prose texts as a sequence of attempts to come to terms with the pressures of the renaissance patronage system. The first chapter is a survey of Gorges's career. Further chapters analyse texts by genre. Chapter 2 studies Gorges's manuscript letters, most of them written to his patron Sir Robert Cecil, in the light of renaissance epistolographic conventions. Chapter 3 gives an account of the textual history of Gorges's manuscript poetry and the context of its composition at the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. Chapter 4 analyses three poems which present the reader with the spectacle of Gorges mourning the death of a patron- figure: Daphnaida (Spenser's elegy on the death of Gorges's first wife), 'A Pastoral Unfinished' (Gorges's response to Daphnaida), and The Olympian Catastrophe, (Gorges's long elegy on the death of Prince Henry). Chapter 5 provides a textual history of Gorges's manuscript treatises and analyses the ways in which Gorges revised his treatises in response to the changing nature of his patronage relationships. Chapter 6 looks at Gorges's late translations, reading his version of Lucan's Pharsalia as a patronage text undertaken initially for Prince Henry but fatally undermined by Henry's death before its publication. The thesis ends with an account of Gorges's translations of Bacon's Essays (1612) into French and Bacon's De sapientia veterum into English. I argue that Bacon conceived of these two works as closely related texts and encouraged their joint publication in a number of languages as a means of advancing his European reputation and extending his patronage contacts in preparation for the publication of the Novum organum.

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