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George Wither (11 June 1588 O.S. (21 June 1588 New Style) – 2 May 1667 O.S. (12 May 1667 New Style)) was a prolific English poet, pamphleteer, satirist and writer of hymns.Hyamson, Albert M., A Dictionary of Universal Biography: Of All Ages and of All Peoples, page 725 Wither's long life spanned one of the most tumultuous periods in the history of England, during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, the Civil War, the Parliamentary period and the Restoration period.
It is thought that he spent some time in Ireland, perhaps with Adam Loftus at Rathfarnham Castle. He wrote what amounted to a masque for a wedding that took place there in 1610, of the parents of Francis Willughby.Andrew Carpenter, Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland (2003), p. 135.
He wrote an elegy (1612) on the death of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, and a volume of gratulatory poems (1613) on the marriage of the princess Elizabeth.
In A Satyre: Dedicated to His Most Excellent Majestie, Wither made a bold appeal to King James for his release, claiming that he had "not sought to scandalize the state, nor sowne sedition." The cause for his initial imprisonment is somewhat unclear, as the Abuses were in fact very general, and had not satirized any one person by name.
Charles Lamb commented
that a man should be convicted of libel when he named no names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is like one of the indictments in the Pilgrim's Progress, where Faithful is arraigned for having 'railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly of his honourable friends, the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord Luxurious'.
This view has been held by most later critics and scholars, in addition to the possibility of earlier editions containing text which was erased in later editions. Several scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries also claimed that Wither had offended Lord Chancellor Ellesmere with one of the verses in Abuses. This claim, however, was rejected by Pritchard, who blames the misreading of the verses.
Pritchard makes the case that the reason for Wither's imprisonment was that he angered Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton, by accusing him and others of colluding with the Spanish—and Catholic—government. Pritchard mentions that Northampton was at the height of his power when Wither was arrested, and notes that he was not able to secure his release until after Northampton's death in June 1614.The view is shared by Jonathan F. S. Post, English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (1999), p. 69.
After his release from prison, Wither was admitted, in 1615, to Lincoln's Inn.
In 1621, Wither's satirical Wither's Motto: Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo (Latin for "I have not, I want not, I care not") sold over 30,000 copies of this poem were sold, according to his own account within a few months. Like his earlier invective, it was said to be libellous, and Wither was again imprisoned, but shortly afterwards released without formal trial on the plea that the book had been duly licensed.
Ben Jonson turned satire back on Wither, portrayed as the Chronomastix of the masque Time Vindicated. Wither avenged himself, by a reference to Jonson's drunken conclave. He was obliged to print this book with his own hand, in consequence of his quarrel with the Stationers Company.
In 1635 he was employed by Henry Taunton, a London publisher, to write English verses illustrative of the allegorical plates of Crispijn van de Passe, originally designed for the emblem book by Gabriel Rollenhagen, "Nucleus emblematum selectissimorum" (1610–1613). The book was published as a Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne, of which the only perfect copy known is in the British Museum. A collection of emblemes, ancient and moderne in Internet Archive In 1636 he translated The Nature of Man by Nemesius.
A reported episode from 1642 or 1643 has Wither with Henry Marten mocking the coronation regalia. At this time, in any case, Wither's views were converging with those of the advocates of true popular sovereignty, and his political poem Vox Pacifica called for a purge of Parliament.David Wootton, Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (2003), p. 53.
He was promoted to the rank of major. He was present at the siege of Gloucester (1643) and at Naseby (1645). He had been deprived in 1643 of his nominal command, and of his commission as justice of the peace, in consequence of an attack upon Sir Richard Onslow, who was, he maintained, responsible for the Farnham disaster. In the same year parliament made him a grant of £2000 for the loss of his property, but he apparently never received the full amount, and complained from time to time of his embarrassments and of the slight rewards he received for his services. An order was made to settle a yearly income of £150 on Wither, chargeable on Sir John Denham's sequestrated estate, but there is no evidence that he ever received it.
Wither was a trustee of the Committee for the Sale of the Late King's Goods and was paid £100 in March 1650 for his work making inventories of the former royal palaces.Allan Pritchard, 'George Wither and the Sale of the Estate of Charles I', Modern Philology, 77:4 (May 1980), pp. 370-381. A small place given him by the Protector was forfeited after Wither expressed criticism of Cromwell. He was involved in 11 court cases, from 1643 to 1661, including Onslow's libel suit over the poem Justiarius Justificatus.Dorothy Auchter, Dictionary of Literary and Dramatic Censorship in Tudor and Stuart England (2001), p. 362. At the Restoration he was arrested, and remained in prison for three years.
He was a conforming Anglican; but by this time he had moved closer to the Quakers. In Parallelogrammaton (1662) he compared to them as predecessors the prophets Ezekiel and Habakkuk.Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution (1993), p. 262 and p. 201.
In 1615, the year of his release from prison and admission to Lincoln's Inn, Wither printed privately Fidelia, a love elegy, of which there is a unique copy in the Bodleian Library. Other editions of this book, which contained the lyric "Shall I, wasting in despair", appeared in 1617 and 1619.
In 1621, he returned to the satiric vein with Wither's Motto: Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo (Latin for "I have not, I want not, I care not"). It was said to be libellous, and Wither, for the second time, was imprisoned, but shortly afterwards released.
In 1622 appeared his Faire-Virtue, The Mistresse of Phil Arete, a long panegyric of a mistress, partly real, partly allegorical, written chiefly in seven-syllabled verse.
Preparation to the Psalter (1619) was an early work in English on literary aspects of the Bible, and initiated a campaign by Wither to substitute his own writings for the dominant .David Norton, A History of the English Bible as Literature (2000), p. 131.Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (2004), p. 52.
His Hymnes and Songs of the Church (1622–1623) were aimed to counter exclusive psalmody, represented by the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter. Orlando Gibbons provided tunes for some of them. They were issued under a patent of King James I ordaining that they should be bound up with every copy of the authorized metrical psalms offered for sale. This patent was opposed, as inconsistent with their privilege to print the singing-psalms, by the Stationers Company, to Wither's great mortification and loss, and a second similar patent was finally disallowed by the House of Lords. Wither defended himself in The Schollers Purgatory (1624).J. R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (1999), pp. 57-8/ In this document, a 140-page diatribe against the Stationers Company for their refusal to print his work, Wither blames them for his financial ruin and hardship.
Some more of Wither's religious poetry is contained in Heleluiah: or Britain's Second Remembrancer, which was printed in Holland in 1641. This work assumed the knowledge of metrical psalms.Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church (1988), p. 262. Besides hymns, the book contains songs, especially the Cradle Song, Part 1 No. 50 ("Sleep, baby, sleep, what ails my dear"), the Anniversary Marriage Song, Part 2 No. 17 ("Lord, living here are we"), the Perambulation Song, Part 2 No. 24 ("Lord, it hath pleased Thee to say"), the Song for Lovers, Part 3 No. 20 ("Come, sweet heart, come, let us prove"), the Song for the Happily Married, Part 3 No. 21 ("Since they in singing take delight") and the Song for a Shepherd, Part 3 No. 41 ("Renowned men their herds to keep").
According to Christopher Hill:
... we can trace a line from Spenser ... through a group of poets ... ranging from Shakespeare, Drayton, the two Fletchers, William Browne and Samuel Daniel to George Wither.Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977), p. 19.
Or again:
A line of poets could be traced from Philip Sidney and Spenser through Sylvester and Browne to Wither— not, admittedly, of a rising quality, but of a consistent political attitude.Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), p. 138.
Where Hill identifies connections via the aristocratic patrons and politics, Alastair Fowler takes Drayton to be the poetic centre of a group,Joan Grundy attributes the observation that "Drayton was ... Spenser's chief heir" to Professor Douglas Bush; see Grundy page 107 which besides Wither comprised Browne, John Davies of Hereford, William Drummond of Hawthornden, George Sandys and Joshua Sylvester.Alastair Fowler, The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse (1991), p. xxxviii.
From c.1640 onwards, Wither assumed an overtly prophetic voice.James Doelman, King James I and the Religious Culture of England (2000), p. 50. His wide range of publication, in prose as well as various poetic genres over nearly half a century, has left a very uneven impression of his interests and affected his poetic reputation. George Gilfillan wrote that "Wither was a man of real genius, but seems to have been partially insane". Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Volume 2 Herbert Grierson found something to praise in early love poems, but spoke of "endless diffuse didactic and pious poems, if they can be called poems".Herbert Grierson, Cross-currents in 17th Century English Literature (1958 edition), p. 148.
C. V. Wedgwood wrote "every so often in the barren acres of his verse is a stretch enlivened by real wit and observation, or fired with a sudden intensity of feeling".C. V. Wedgwood, Poetry and Politics under the Stuarts (1960), p. 90.
Most of Wither's works were edited in twenty volumes for the Spenser Society (1871–82); a selection was included by Henry Morley in his Companion Poets (1891); Fidelia and Fair Virtue are included in Edward Arber's English Garner (vol. iv, 1882; vol. vi, 1883), and The Poetry of George Wither was edited by Frank Sidgwick in 1902. The Poetry of George Wither, online text
A selection of Wither's hymns was published in 2011 by The Phoenix Press in The Gibbons Songbook. The Gibbons Songbook While primarily a realisation of the tunes Orlando Gibbons wrote for The Hymns and Songs of the Church, a selection of verses from the hymns is paired with the original verses from the King James Bible which inspired Wither to create the hymns.
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