H arvey, G abriel

Abstract

Gabriel Harvey (1552/53–1631) was one of the most significant intellectual figures in late Elizabethan England, who helped transform the state of English public culture. Yet he is known to most readers not familiar with his work as a pompous and foolish pedant who was trounced in a pamphlet war by the more brilliant and exciting Thomas Nashe. Like Thomas Shadwell, who was successfully lampooned by John Dryden, and Lewis Theobald, who fell foul of Alexander Pope, Harvey seems doomed to languish as a figure remembered only as the butt of literary jokes. Yet his achievements are manifold. He was instrumental in transforming the role of the scholar, arguing that intellectuals should play a more vital and public role than was generally assumed; he wrote a series of important works on rhetoric and oratory demonstrating the need to frame an argument carefully and showing how an individual could make a case successfully; he was a charismatic teacher at Cambridge, where he assumed a variety of roles including university lecturer in Greek; he was a poet in English and Latin of some distinction; he was instrumental in facilitating the rise of Edmund Spenser, the most important non‐dramatic poet of the English Renaissance; he left behind a significant library, among the largest and most complete of its time, of annotated volumes, which tell us a great deal about how scholars lived and worked in Elizabethan England; and, he fought a bitter and protracted pamphlet war with Thomas Nashe, which ended his publishing career after the Bishops’ Ban of 1599.