Born about 1530: died about 1600. An English author. He was educated at Oxford, and had traveled. The “Art of English Poesie” (1589) has been attributed to him, but there is a dispute as to his authorship. He wrote a number of other works, of which 14 or 15 are extant.

  For though the poore gentleman laboreth greatly to proue, or rather to make Poetrie an art, and reciteth as you may see in the plural number, some pluralities of patterns, and parcels of his owne Poetrie, with diuers pieces of Partheniads and hymnes in praise of the most praisworthy; yet whatsoever he would proue by all these, sure in my poore opinion he doth proue nothing more plainly, then that which M. Sidney and all the learneder sort that haue written of it, do pronounce, namely that it is a gift and not an art, I say he proueth it, because making himselfe and so manie others so cunning in the art, yet he sheweth himselfe so slender a gift in it.

  Of the dignity of Poetry much hath beene said by the worthy Sir Philipp Sidney, and by the gentleman which proved that Poets were the first Politicians, the first Philisophers, the first Historiographers.

  Queen Elizabeth’s verses, those which I have seen and read, some extant in the elegant, witty and artificial Book of the “Art of English Poetrie,” the work as the fame is of one of her gentlemen-pensioners, Puttenham, are Princely, as her prose.

  It contains many pretty observations, examples, characters, and fragments of poetry for those times, now nowhere else to be met with.

  Puttenham was a candid but sententious critic. What his observations want in argument is made up for by the soundness of his judgment; and his conclusions, notwithstanding their brevity, are just and pertinent.

  By far the most valuable work which was published in the province of criticism, during the life-time of Shakspeare, was written by George Puttenham.

  Puttenham is perhaps the first who wrote a well-measured prose: in his “Art of English Poesie,” published in 1589, he is elaborate, studious of elevated and chosen expression, and rather diffuse, in the manner of the Italians of the sixteenth century, who affected that fulness of style, and whom he probably meant to imitate…. In some passages of Puttenham, we find an approach to the higher province of philosophical criticism.

  Was this critic qualified by nature and art to arbitrate on the destines of the Muses? Were his taste and sensibility commensurate with that learning which dictated with authority, and that ingenuity which reared into a system the diversified materials of his critical fabric? We hesitate to allow the claims of a critic whose trivial taste values “the courtly trifles,” which he calls “pretty devices,” among the inventions of poesy; we are startled by his elaborate exhibition of “geometrical figures in verse;” his delight in egg or oval poems, tapering at the ends, and round in the middle; and his columnar verse, whose pillars, shaft, and capital can be equally read upwards and downwards. This critic, too, has betrayed his utter penury of invention in “parcels of his own poetry,” obscure conceits in barbarous rhymes; by his intolerable “triumphals,” poetical speeches for recitation; and a series of what he calls “partheniades, or new-year’s gifts,”—bloated eruptions of those hyperbolical adulations which the maiden queen could endure, but which bear the traces of the poetaster holding some appointment at court. When the verse flowed beyond the mechanism of his rule of scanning, and the true touch of nature beyond the sympathy of his own emotions, the rhetorician showed the ear of Midas.

  The most valuable part of this work is that which treats of the formal requisites of poetry, and especially of versification, because it throws a good deal of light on the pronunciation of that age—a subject respecting which we are far from being well informed. When, however, we compare these chapters of Puttenham with what had long before been accomplished in the Romance languages in the same branch of criticism—for example, with the Provençal Flors del Gay Saber, estier dichas Las Leys d’Amors, of the fourteenth century, published by Gatien Arnoult—we must admit that the technicalities of the poetic art, if instinctively practised, had been as yet but imperfectly discussed in England.

  It must ever be remembered that this Ladies’ book was first published anonymously; that the printer was or feigned to be in ignorance of its Author; that similarly Sir John Harington, in 1591, only refers to him as “that unknowne Godfather, that this last yeare saue on, viz. 1589, set forth a booke called the ‘Arte of English Poesie,’” and again as that “same Ignoto;” and lastly, that the authorship of the work was never openly claimed by any of Elizabeth’s contemporaries.

  Has given us the most complete and elaborate Elizabethan treatise of its kind. He upholds the dignity and universality of poetry, and affirms, with entire confidence, the possibility of an art of English poetry, as complete and as perfect as that of either Greece or Rome. While drawing many of his illustrations, both historical and other, from the classic and foreign authors, he does not hesitate to give his judgment of the previous English poets, although in this, as we have seen above, greatly limited, as to his contemporaries, by his courtly vision. In Puttenham’s second book we have an intelligent and systematic presentation of the subject of the art of versifying, in which not a few of the real principles underlying the subject are clearly set forth. If the chatty old critic does go off into a needlessly particular examination of the carmina figurata anagram and other curiosities, we can pardon him for the humor and good sense which form the two pervading traits of this engaging book.

  The writer shows wide knowledge of classical and Italian literature; in his sections on rhetoric and prosody he quotes freely from Quintilian and other Classical writers, and bestows commendation on English poets that is often discriminating. He may fairly be regarded as the first English writer who attempted philosophical criticism of literature or claimed for the literary profession a high position in social economy. Compared with it, Webbe’s “Discourse of English Poetry” (1586) and Sidney’s “Apologie for English Poesie,” first published in 1595, are very slight performances. The “Arte” at once acquired a reputation.

  Puttenham, who quotes his own verse freely and seems to have written it fairly in the stiffer manner of the first half of the reign, is rather a formalist, but his judgment, when he can get it out of stays, is not contemptible. The book is very full, learned, and careful, the work of a scholar and a gentleman, and far exceeding in detail and scope anything of the kind that was written for ages afterwards.