MICHAEL DRAYTON'S 'POLY-OLBION': A STUDY IN PERSPECTIVE

This dissertation provides a study of Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612;1622), a loco-descriptive poem divided into two parts consisting of eighteenand twelve Songs, respectively, each one being prefaced by anengraved map. The verse describes the topography of the English and Welsh counties and the historical feats that took place in the locations in question: the ”narrators” are local landscape features, such as woodlands, forests, mountains and valleys, but mainly rivers. In the first part only, each Song closes with a learned prose commentary by the antiquarian John Selden. The study’s purpose is to highlight the position Poly-Olbion held in the network of seventeenth-century and subsequent English literature and culture. It aims to bring together the fragmentary criticism and literary influence of the poem into a coherent view leading to a joint analysis of its contents and the history of its reception. It thus reveals, on the basis of a large amount of information, the interaction of synchronic and diachronic perspectives in order to discuss the poem’s matter in the light of contemporary and later criticism, and vice versa. The reasons for the many ever-shifting opinions on Poly-Olbion are related both to the times and modes of composition and to its content. The work is therefore first contextualised in Drayton’s life and times, as an essential milestone in the poet’s search for patronage and career, which also aims to provide an explanation of the difficulties the work may have encountered in the book market. An analysis of the two main topics dealt with in Poly-Olbion – the topography and the history of Britain – sheds some light on Drayton’s possible authorial intentions and his sources, as well as on the kind of readership he might have had in mind and the reasons for the work’s poor success (according to Drayton himself) in the book market. The use of topography is discussed as an organisational device for antiquarian matter, and is also connected with Drayton’s rhetorical description of the land of ...