An edition of William Scott's 'The Model of Poesy' (c. 1600)

The rediscovery of a manuscript treatise on poetics, The Model of Poesy, written c. 1600 by William Scott, was announced by Stanley Wells in the TLS in 2003. The treatise is dedicated to Sir Henry Lee, Queen Elizabeth's sometime champion and a notable patron and occasional poet. Although it was mentioned in passing in E. K. Chambers's 1936 study of Lee, it does not appear to have been studied before Wells looked at it. The manuscript is now in the British Library. It is a work of considerable significance: among other things, Scott is Shakespeare's first critic. The aim of this project is to complete the first ever edition of the work, including a substantial commentary and introductory material.

William Scott was born around 1579 and died some time after 1611, when he wrote Lee's epitaph. He was related to the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt (and, Scott tells us, to Sir Henry Lee too); he entered the Inner Temple in 1595, and then Parliament in 1601. Further research should bring more biographical detail to light. However, the most important question concerning the Model - its date - has been accurately settled on internal evidence.

The Model, as its name suggests, attempts an anatomy of the art of poetry. It begins with general principles - imitation, the ethical dimension of poetics, the genres; and then moves on to a consideration of the details, organised, following convention, into 'matter' - what is said - and then 'words' - how it is said. Scott's work stands comparison to Sidney's celebrated Defence of Poesy (written c. 1580; printed 1595) for its coherence and clarity of analysis. It contains as much good sense as Puttenham's Art of English Poesy (1589), but without Puttenham's tendency for diffuseness, repetition, and digression (and indeed confusion). There are other well-known Elizabethan treatises on various aspects of poetry and literature - ethical, prosodic, and so forth - by people like Gascoigne, Lodge, Campion, and Daniel. Scott's is more comprehensive than all of these, and as thought-provoking as the best. Looking forward, there are works of the mid to late seventeenth century by, for example, Davenant and Dryden of equal interest, but there is nothing from the first half of the century to challenge Sidney, Puttenham, and, now, Scott for interest and scope. This newly available work is one of the most important treatises on poetics of the English Renaissance.

Scott has read widely among ancient and vernacular works on poetics (Sidney's Defence of Poesy is the most important vernacular source, Aristotle's Poetics the most important classical) and important neo-Latin treatises on poetics by Scaliger (1561) and Giovanni Antonio Viperano (1579). Scott is learned and curious, and has good judgement; he writes well. He manages an original and coherent synthesis of all that the classical, continental, and vernacular traditions have given him, and he shapes that synthesis into an exceptionally well-organised and efficient treatise. He has his own views and follows his own outline.

The unusual and refreshing extent of his interest in modern English literature means that his system is constantly being tested against modern practice. Indeed, he is the only significant critical voice of the 1590s and 1600s to comment on the literature of the 1590s, perhaps the most important and revolutionary decade in English literary history. We lack reference in the major works of Elizabethan literary criticism to Spenser's The Faerie Queene, to Sidney's Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella, to the poetry of Daniel, Drayton, and other major Elizabethan poets, and - most crucially, perhaps - to the earlier writings of Shakespeare. In discussing all of these writers, Scott fills a key gap in the histories both of literary criticism and of the reception of Elizabethan dramatic and non-dramatic literature. Once Scott's treatise has been edited and published, no future work on Elizabethian literature will be able to avoid it.