INTRODUCTION
1.Sir John
Stradling [1563 - 1637] was born of Francis and Elizabeth
(Gage) Stradling of St. George’s near Bristol, received his
early education at the Bristol cathedral school, matriculated from
Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1580, and took the B. A. from Magdalen
Hall in 1584. NOTE 1 After
a brief
sojourn in the Inns of Court and the usual
gentleman’s continental Tour, he revealed a literary bent. In
1592 he published A Direction for Travailers, a translation of
Justus Lipsius’ Epistola de Peregrinatione Italica. This
was followed three years later by Two Bookes of Constancie, a
translation of Lipsius’ 1584 De Constantia Libri Duo. In
1597 he published a philosophical dialogue, De Vita et Morte
Contemnenda Libri Duo. Epigrammatum Libri Quatour appeared in
1607, and, after a lengthy interval, there appeared two volumes of
vernacular religious verse, Beati Pacifici(1623) and
Divine Poems (1625). In the same year he wrote a political
dialogue, A
Politike Discourse (National Library of Wales document
5666c). Another manuscript work, the little treatise The Storie of
the Lower Borowes of Merthyr Mayr (1593) was first printed as the
first volume of the South Wales and Mon Record Society, edited by
William Rees and H. Randall. Stradling was sheriff of
Glamorganshire in 1607, as he was again in 1620, and it was
presumably for this service that he was knighted in 1608. In the
following year he inherited the Stradling family seat Castle
St. Donat’s, the Glamorganshire manor of his great-uncle Sir
Edward, and in 1611 was created first Baronet Stradling. He was
elected Member of Parliament for St. Germans, Cornwall in 1625, and
for Old Sarum later in the same year. After performing various other
civic duties and founding a grammar school at Cowbridge, he died in
1637.
2.
Epigrammatum Libri Quatour is one of a number of collections
of Latin epigrams that proliferated in England in the early
seventeenth century, all of which were ultimately imitative of
Martial, but took their immediate inspiration from the vernacular
epigrams of Sir John Harington, whose efforts were unprinted in his
lifetime but circulated widely in manuscript. NOTE
2 The first conspicuous example were the two
Books of epigrams included in Thomas Campion’s 1595 Thomae
Campiani Poemata. This was followed in 1601 by the
appearance of the Affaniae
by Campion’s friend Charles Fitzgeoffrey, and then by the
first volume of epigrams by Stradling’s fellow-Welshman John Owen,
Ioannis Audoeni Epigrammatum libri III. Of these
writers, Stradling only acknowledges familiarity with two. He counted
Harington (whom he thanks for sending him a manuscript of his
epigrams in I.74 - cf. also II.101
translation and IV.8 ) among his friends.
And in II.90 he explicitly states that it
was a reading of Owen’s collection that inspired him to publish
his own volume; Owen is also alluded to in IV.106
(see the commentary note on that
poem).
3. Yet,
although
Stradling does not acknowledge any familiarity with
Fitzgeoffrey’s Affaniae,
in a number of ways his Epigrammatum Libri Quatuor resembles
that work much more closely than it does Ioannis Audoeni
Epigrammatum libri III. Owen’s volume consists exclusively
of epigrams written in elegiac couplets. In imitation of his friend
Campion, Fitzgeoffrey offers considerably more varied fare. Likewise,
particularly in his first two Books, Stradling provides relief from
the regularity of elegiac couplets with a liberal admixture of
dactylic hexameters, hendecasyllables, and an assortment of iambic
meters. And, as with Fitzgeoffrey, variety in form is matched by
variety of content: besides humorous and laudatory epigrams here too
one finds versified narratives, epitaphs, miniature verse epistles,
and at least one attempt to write in a more sustained and serious
vein (I.119). Likewise the heartfelt
emotions revealed in a number of Stradling’s poems can be
matched in items by Fitzgeoffrey, but scarcely in the facile epigrams
of Owen.
4. More to
the
point, one comes away from both Fitzgeoffrey and Stradling with a
sense both of the poet’s personality and of the social milieu in
which he moved, something that can scarcely be said about Owen. Both
poets use their short poems to write much about things near and dear
to them, and in doing so manage to present us with a kind of
cumulative self portrait. And in a number of ways the near and dear
things were strikingly similar: family, friendships, and region (the
major way in which this comparison breaks down is that in Book I of Affaniae,
as in Campion’s elegies, there is a strong erotic component,
which is absent from Stradling save a couple of isolated items,
notably III.126).
5. To both
poets, family was of cardinal importance. Fitzgeoffrey writes little
about his own family, a small amount about the Mohuns into which he
was absorbed by his mother’s remarriage, but a much more about
that of Sir Anthony Rous, into which he seems to have been all but
adopted (a matter of considerable interest for the modern reader,
because the future parliamentarian John Pym was Rous’ stepson),
and in whose bosom he lived out his adult life. Stradling belonged to a leading Welsh
family that allegedly could trace its origin to one of the
original Norman colonizers of Glamorganshire, and was connected by
marriage to such powerful families as the Gamages, Herberts, Mansels,
Pophams, Portmans, and Sidneys. Like Fitzgeoffrey, who appended to
his volume a special collection of epitaphs under the title Cenotaphia,
Stradling was a master of that genre, and a large number of the
ones he wrote were for his relatives. Each such epitaph read in
isolation might seem no more than a memorial for a kinsman. Read
collectively, they amount to a glorification of the Stradling clan,
and even in such details as the dedications he prefixes to his more
lighthearted epigrams the poet loses no opportunity for advertising
his family and the social class to which it belongs. Hence many
commentary notes in this edition are genealogical in nature.
Likewise, both poets use their poems to address and otherwise
commemorate members of their circle of friends. One learns of
Stradling that he numbered among his friends Sir John Harington and
the great William Camden, although the great majority are members of
the local intelligentsia, physicians, legalists and clergymen of
South Wales and the West Country of England. Finally, both poets
employ their epigram-collections for a rather aggressive display of
regional pride. Fitzgeoffrey’s celebration of Cornwall and the
West finds a close match in Stradling’s proud presentation of
himself as a Welshman and his glorification of national heroes of
Welsh birth (such as John Norris, Sir Thomas Morgan, and Sir Roger
Williams) or at least from the West (such as Drake and Hawkins). All
in all, in its spirit and contents, Stradling’s volume is so
strikingly similar to Fitzgeoffrey’s that it is difficult to
dismiss the impression that Fitzgeoffrey, much more than Owen,
provided the actual inspiration. Acknowledgment of debt only to Owen
may be another manifestation of Welsh self-consciousness.
6. In I.2
our poet states that as a mature man he is publishing poetry written
as a youth (iuvenis). “Youth” here is a relative
term. At least if we assume that poems about specific historical
occurrences were written reasonably soon after the event, the
earliest datable poems in this volume emanate from 1586, the date of
the death of Sir Philip Sidney (I.52 ,
I.108 and I.114)
or at most from 1585 ( I.113, about the
death of Francis, Earl of Bedford). Strikingly absent from the
collection are any poems from the poet’s Oxford days, although
during his university years Oxford was beginning to be a hotbed of
literary activity, especially in the circle of poets presided over by
William Gager of Christ Church. Evidently the Oxford Latin poetry to
which he must have been exposed left no visible mark on him, nor he
on it. Possibly this was because the kind of short epigrammatic
miniature at which he excelled had not yet come into vogue, or maybe
he simply was unconscious of any literary talent until he had left
Oxford. Nor, for that matter, can one point to any friendship he
mentions that seems to date from university days.
7.
Judging by the evidence of the present volume, the individual to whom
he was closest, and who exerted the greatest influence over him, was
the head of his family, his great-uncle Sir Edward [1529 -
1609], NOTE 3
who, being childless, adopted him and made him his heir. Sir
Edward was antiquarian, chiefly remembered as the author of a
historical memoir, The Winning of the Lordship of Glamorgan out of
the Welshmen’s Hands (printed in David Powell’s edition
of Humphrey Llwyd’s 1584 Historie of Cambria), a work in
which the origins of the Stradling family, and of the other powerful
Glamorganshire families to with the Stradlings were linked by
intermarriage, play a conspicuous role. NOTE
4 He was also the sponsor of Dr. John Davydd Rhys’
linguistic researches into the Welsh language, a subject in which he
himself also dabbled. Since the poet was himself a member of a junior
and English branch of the Stradlings, it is not difficult to surmise
that his family pride and sense of a Welsh heritage was instilled or
at least greatly enhanced by Sir Edward. Hence upon Sir Edward’s
death his great-nephew was well prepared to inherit the position of
head of the Stradling family and master of the family seat. The
extent to which John had been absorbed into Sir Edward’s world
can be seen by a comparison with Sir Edward’s correspondence,
edited in the nineteenth century by Traherne.
Many of the individuals who figure in this correspondence, or in some
cases kinsmen thereof, also figure in John's poetry. This is true to
the extent that the letters to and from Sir Edward and John’s
poetry are perfect complements to each other. It has been written of
his family (by Griffiths p. 42):