Harvey, Fellow of Pembroke Hall. His letters
to Edmund Spenser have been preserved, as you know. Now Gabriel Harvey
was a man whom few will praise, and very few could have loved. Few will
quarrel with Dr Courthope's description of him as 'a person of
considerable intellectual force, but intolerably arrogant and conceited,
and with a taste vitiated by all the affectations of Italian humanism,'
or deny that 'his tone in his published correspondence with Spenser is
that of an intellectual bully.'[1] None will refuse him the title of fool
for attempting to mislead Spenser into writing hexameters. But all you
can urge against Gabriel Harvey, on this count or that or the other, but
accumulates proof that this donnish man was all the while giving
thought--giving even ferocious thought--to the business of making
an English Literature.

Let me adduce more pleasing evidence. At or about Christmas, in the year
1597, there was enacted here in Cambridge, in the hall of St John's
College, a play called "The Pilgrimage to Parnassus," a skittish work,
having for subject the 'discontent of scholars'; the misery attending
those who, unsupported by a private purse, would follow after Apollo and
the Nine. No one knows the author's name: but he had a wit which has kept
something of its salt to this day, and in Christmas, 1597, it took
Cambridge by storm. The public demanded a sequel, and "The Return from
Parnassus" made its appearance on the following Christmas (again in St
John's College hall); to be followed by a "Second Part of the Return from
Parnassus," the author's overflow of wit, three years later. Of the
popularity of the first and second plays--"The Pilgrimage" and "The
Return, Part I"--we have good evidence in the prologue to "The Return,
Part II," where the author makes Momus say, before an audience which knew
the truth:

"The Pilgrimage to Parnassus" and "The Returne from Parnassus" have
stood the honest Stagekeepers in many a crowne's expense for linckes
and vizards: purchased many a Sophister a knocke with a clubbe:
hindred the butler's box, and emptied the Colledge barrells; and now,
unlesse you have heard the former, you may returne home as wise as you
came: for this last is the last part of The Returne from Parnassus;
that is, the last time that the Author's wit will turne upon the toe
in this vaine.

In other words, these plays had set everybody in Cambridge agog, had been
acted by link-light,