ILE OF AGINCOURT
BY MICHAEL DRAYTON:
WITH INTRODUCTION AND
NOTES BY RICHARD GARNETT

[Illustration: Publisher's Device]

LONDON PRINTED AND ISSUED BY
CHARLES WHITTINGHAM & CO AT
THE CHISWICK PRESS MDCCCXCIII

CONTENTS.
PAGE

Introduction vii
Drayton's Dedication 3
Upon the Battaile of Agincourt, by I. Vaughan 5
Sonnet to Michael Drayton, By John Reynolds 7
The Vision of Ben Jonson on the Muses of his
Friend M. Drayton 9
The Battaile of Agincourt 13
To my Frinds the Camber-Britans and theyr Harp 93
Illustrative Notes 101

INTRODUCTION.

All civilized nations possessing a history which they contemplate with
pride endeavour to present that history in an epic form. In their
initial stages of culture the vehicles of expression are ballads like
the constituents of the Spanish Romanceros and chronicles like
Joinville's and Froissart's. With literary refinement comes the distinct
literary purpose, and the poet appears who is also more or less of an
artist. The number of Spanish and Portuguese national epics, from the
Lusiad downwards, during the sixteenth and the first half of the
seventeenth centuries, is astonishing; and it was impossible that
English authorship, rapidly acquiring a perception of literary form
under classical and foreign influences, should not be powerfully
affected by the example of its neighbours.

A remarkable circumstance, nevertheless, while encouraging this epical
impulse, deprived its most important creations of the external epical
form. The age of awakened national self-consciousness was also the age
of drama. The greatest poetical genius of that or any age, and his
associates, were playwrights first and poets afterwards. The torrent of
inspiration rushed mainly to the stage. Hence the old experience was
reversed, and whereas Aeschylus described himself and his
fellow-dramatists as subsisting on scraps filched from the great banquet
of Homer, our English epic poets could but follow humbly in the wake of
the dramatists, the alchemy of whose genius had already turned the dross
of ancient chronicles to gold. In the mighty series of Shakespeare's
historical plays, including