John Suckling

Sir John Suckling (1609-1642). Painting by Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Sir John Suckling (10 February 1609 - 1 June 1642) was an English poet, renowned for careless gaiety, wit, and all the accomplishments of a Cavalier poet.

Life

Overview

At the age of 19 Suckling went away to the continent, and wandered through France, Italy, Germany and Spain for 4 years, seeking adventure. He offered his sword to the King of Sweden, fought in command of a troop in front of Glogau and of Magdeburg, performed astounding feats of prowess in Silesia, and returned before the battle of Lützen simply because his imperious fancy began to find the great war a tedious pastime. He proceeded to London, and lived for six years in a style of such gorgeous profusion that at last he contrived to cripple one of the amplest fortunes of that age. He retired for a while, ostentatiously enough, into a literary seclusion at Bath, taking the obsequious Davenant with him as a sort of amanuensis. During this brief time, no doubt, his tragedies were composed. The King, however, fretted for his return, and he emerged as the leader of the Royalist party in its earliest troubles. After the crisis, Suckling fled to France, and then to Spain; at Madrid he reportedly fell into the clutches of the Inquisition, and underwent horrible tortures. He escaped to Paris, with a mind probably unstrung by these torments, for he poisoned himself in his 34th year. Such was the career of a man whose light verses, carelessly thrown off and half forgotten, have outlived the pomp and public glitter of his famous adventures, by which he now seems to us rather dwarfed and injured than exalted.

He was a noted gambler, and has the distinction of being the inventor of the game of cribbage. He wrote 4 plays, Aglaura (1637), Brennoralt (1646), The Goblins, and The Sad One (unfinished), now forgotten; his fame rests on his songs and ballads, including "The Wedding," distinguished by a gay and sparkling wit, and a singular grace of expression.

Family, youth, education

Suckling's father, also Sir John Suckling (1569-1627), had been knighted by James I, and was successively master of requests, comptroller of the household and secretary of state. He sat in the 1st and 2nd parliaments of Charles I.'s reign, and was made a privy councillor. During his career he amassed a considerable fortune, of which the poet became master at the age of 18.

Suckling the poet was born at Whitton, in the parish of Twickenham, Middlesex, and baptized there on 20 February 1609.

He was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1623, and was entered at Gray's Inn in 1627.

In 1628 be left London to travel in France and Italy, returning, however, before the autumn of 1630. ,

Soldier and courtier

In 1631 he volunteered for the force raised by the marquess of Hamilton to serve under Gustavus Adolphus in Germany. He was back at Whitehall in May 1632; but during his short service be had been present at the battle of Breitenfeld and in many sieges.

He was intimate with Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, Thomas Nabbes, and especially with John Hales and Sir William Davenant (who furnished John Aubrey with information about his friend).

He was handsome, rich and generous; his happy gift in verse was only 1 of many accomplishments, but it commended him especially to Charles I and his queen. He says of himself ("A Sessions of the Poets") that he "prized black eyes or a lucky bit at bowls above all the trophies of wit."

He was the best card-player and the best bowler at court. Aubrey says that he invented the game of cribbige, and relates that his sisters came weeping to the bowling green at Piccadilly to dissuade him from play, fearing that he would lose their portions.

In 1654 great scandal was caused in his old circle by a beating which he received at the hands of Sir John Digby, a rival suitor for the hand of the daughter of Sir John Willoughby; and it has been suggested that this incident, which is narrated at length in a letter (Nov. 10, 1634) from George Garrard to Strafford (Strafford’s Letters and Despatches (1739), i. 336.), had something to do with his beginning to seek more serious society.

In 1635 he retired to his country estates in obedience to the proclamation of June 1632 enforced by the Star Chamber[2] against absentee landlordism, and employed his leisure in literary pursuits. In 1637 A Sessions of the Poets was circulated in MS, and about the same time he wrote a tract on Socinianism entitled An Account of Religion by Reason (printed 1646).

Civil War and death

On the outbreak of the Civil War, Suckling raised a troop of 100 horse, at a cost of £12,000, and accompanied Charles on the Scottish expedition of 1639. He shared in the earl of Holland's retreat before Duns, and was ridiculed in an amusing ballad (pr. 1656), in Museum deliciae "on Sir John Sucklinn's most warlike preparations for the Scottish war."[4]

He was elected as member for Bramber for the opening session (1640) of the Long Parliament; and in that winter he drew up a letter addressed to Henry Jermyn, afterwards earl of St. Albans, advising the king to disconcert the opposition leaders by making more concessions than they asked for. In May of the following year be was implicated in an attempt to rescue Strafford from the Tower and to bring In French troops to the king's aid. The plot was exposed by the evidence of Colonel George Goring, and Suckling fled beyond the seas.

The circumstances of his short exile are obscure. He was certainly in Paris in the summer of 1641. A pamphlet related a story of his elopement with a lady to Spain, where he fell into the hands of the Inquisition.

The manner of his death is uncertain, but Aubrey's statement that he put an end to bis life by poison in May or June 1642 in fear of poverty is generally accepted.

Writing

Drama

As a dramatist Suckling is noteworthy as having applied to regular drama the accessories already used in the production of masques. His Aglaura (1638) was produced at his own expense with elaborate scenery. Even the lace on the actors' coats was of real gold and silver. The play, in spite of its felicity of diction, lackss dramatic interest, and the criticism of Richard Flecknoe (Short Discourse of the English Stage),[3] that it seemed "full of flowers, but rather stuck in than growing there," is not altogether unjustified.

The Goblins (1658, printed 1646) has some reminiscences of The Tempest; Brennorait; or, Yhe discontented colonel (1639, pr. 1646) is a satire on the Scots, who are the Lithuanian rebels of the play; a 4th play, The Sad One, was left unfinished owing to the outbreak of the Civil War.

Verse

Suckling's reputation as a poet depends on his minor pieces. They have wit and fancy, and at times exquisite felicity of expression. "Easy, natural Suckling," Millamant's comment in Congreve’s Way of the World (Act iv., sc. i.) is a just tribute to their spontaneous quality. Among the best known of them are the "Ballade upon a Wedding," on the occasion of the marriage of Roger Boyle, afterwards earl of Orrery, and Lady Margaret Howard, "I prithee, send me back my heart," "Out upon it, I have loved three whole days together," and "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" from Aglaura. "A Sessions of the Poets," describing a meeting of the contemporary versifiers under the presidency of Apollo to decide who should wear the laurel wreath, is the prototype of many later satires.

A collection of Suckling's poems was 1st published In 1646 as Fragmenta aurea. The so-called Selections (1836} published by Rev. Alfred Inign Suckling (author of the History and Antiquities of Suffolk) with Memoires based on original authorities and a portrait after Van Dyck. is really a complete edition of his works, of which W.C. Hazlitt'a edition (1874; revised 1899) is little more than a reprint with some additions. The Poems and Songs of Sir John Sucking, edited by John Gray and decorated with woodcut border and initials by Charles Ricketts, was artistically printed at the Ballantyne Press in 1896. In 1910 Suckling's works in prose and verse were edited by A. Hamilton Thompson.

Critical introduction

by Edmund Gosse

It is impossible to consider the poems of Suckling without regard to his career. No English poet has lived a life so public, so adventurous and so full of vicissitude as his. Nothing short of an irresistible bias towards the art of poetry could have induced so busy and so fortunate a man to write in verse at all. Beautiful and vigorous in body, educated in all the accomplishments that grace a gentleman, endowed from earliest youth with the prestige of a soldier and a popular courtier, his enormous wealth enabled him to indulge every whim that a fondness for what was splendid or eccentric in dress, architecture and pageantry could devise. Such a life could present no void which literary ambition could fill, and Suckling’s scorn for poetic fame was well known to his contemporaries....

Written under such circumstances, and preserved in a fragmentary state by friends, it would be surprising if the poems of Suckling presented any great finish or completeness. In point of fact, they display to us but the ruins of his genius. A ballad of wonderful brightness and sweetness, half-a-dozen songs full of the most aery and courtly grace, these alone of all he has left behind him are in any sense worthy of their author’s splendid fame. His contemporaries, and the men of the next generation, remembering his shining qualities of personal presence, his wit, his fluent fancy and, perhaps, many fine poems that we shall never see, spoke of him as an epoch-making writer, in terms that we reserve for Herrick, of whom they never speak. His name still lives in the popular ear, as the names of poets far greater than he will never live.

His figure takes a place in poetic literature which the student fresh from his pages is apt to consider unduly high, and which his "golden fragments" scarcely seem to justify. But the instinct of the people, in this as in so many other cases, is probably right, and though the imperfections of his poems may cloud it, there is no doubt that his genius existed. It shows itself even more in his disciples than in himself; his manner of writing affected the course of English literature, and showed its strength less in his own lyrics, than in the fact that for the next fifty years no one could write a good love-song without more or less reminding the reader of Suckling. To the very end of the century ‘natural, easy Suckling’ was the type of literary elegance to the Millamants and Lady Froths of fashion.

His existing works consist of a slender collection of lyrical and complimentary poems, and of four plays, one of them incomplete. Suckling, who had a creditable adoration for Shakespeare, inherited none of his dramatic genius. A worse playwright is scarcely to be found, even in that miserable period, among the Gomersalls, Lowers, and Killigrews. Aglaura, a monster of tedious pageantry, was arranged with a tragic and a comic ending, according to choice: but this was not so unique as has been supposed, for we find the same silly contrivance in Howard’s Vestal Virgin and in the Pandora of Sir William Killigrew.

The only drama of Suckling’s which is at all readable is Brennoralt, which is incoherent enough, but does contain some fine tragic writing. The only real merit of these plays however consists in the beautiful songs they contain.

The lyrical pieces of Suckling’s which were collected under the title of Fragmenta Aurea present considerable difficulty to the critic. Never was a volume of poems so unequal in merit presented to the public. Side by side with songs that will be enjoyed as long as the English language exists, we find stanzas which it is impossible either to scan or to construe, and which would disgrace the Poet’s Corner of a provincial newspaper. The famous "Session of the Poets", one of those pieces which were most admired in the age that saw its production, is full of laxities of style that fairly astonish the modern reader. Such a stanza, for instance, as that dedicated to Jonson, limps and waddles along with a strangely gouty gait:—

‘The first that broke silence was good old Ben,

Prepared before with Canary wine,

And he told them plainly he deserved the bays,

For his were called works, while others were but plays.’

In the case of other poems, in which we find awkward and confused passages, we may suppose that Suckling left the verse confused or incomplete, and that the text suffers from inartistic revision, but "The Session of the Poets" is one of the few pieces published in his lifetime, and we are therefore inclined to suppose that he was but little affected by errors of style that are palpable to us.

When, however, he is at his best, he throws off all awkwardness and obscurity; his versification becomes liquid and nimble, and in one instance, the famous "Ballad upon a Wedding", he has contrived to keep up his tone of airy vivacity through twenty-two incomparable verses. But as a rule his lyric flights are brief. His songs owe their special charm to their gallantry and impudence, their manly ardour and their frivolous audacity. The temper expressed in "Why so pale and wan, fond lover?" was in sympathy with the age, and gave a delight which seems to us extravagant; Suckling’s admiration for Shakespeare not preventing him from being one of the chief heralds of the poetry of the Restoration. He sings like a royalist gentleman; he leaves the weaving of conceits to learned contemporaries, such as Cowley and Lovelace; he inaugurates a simpler, most straightforward expression of inflamed fancy and amorous discontent. This is in his songs only; in his moral pieces, such as that beginning

‘My dearest rival, lest our love

Should with eccentric motion move,’

he is as quaint and conceited, if not so ingenious, as the best of the poets once called Metaphysical. His great praise is his manliness: after all the rhymesters who for a century had been sonneting their mistress’ eyebrow, and avowing the most abject deference, the attitude of Suckling strutting with his impudent smiling face through the galaxy of ladies, struck the contemporary mind as refreshing, and a new fashion in gallantry set in. What had been good sense in Suckling, soon however became effrontery in Sedley, and cynicism in Congreve, and the base sensual feast to which the poets of the Restoration sat down we feel to have been a sorry exchange for the Arcadian diet of the Elizabethans. Even here also there was some brisk music of a gallantry not wholly base, and for this we have to thank Suckling and his sprightly mood.

Recognition

Suckling was knighted in the autumn of 1630.

4 of his poems ("A Doubt of Martyrdom," "The Constant Lover," "Why so Pale and Wan?", and "When, Dearest, I but think of Thee") were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

Publications

Poetry

• Poems. London: Johnson, 1810.
• The Poems of Sir John Suckling (edited by Frederick Abbot Stokes). New York: Stokes, 1886.
• The Poems and Songs (edited by John Gray). London: Ballantyne Press, 1896.
• Ballads, and other poems. Hull, UK: J.R. Tutin, 1906.
• The Love Poems. Cedar Rapids, IA: privately published, 1906.

Plays

• Aglaura. London: John Haviland for Thomas Walkley, 1638.

Non-fiction

• A coppy of a letter fovnd in the privy lodgeings at White-Hall. London: 1641;
  • also published as "To Mr. Henry German, in the beginning of Parliament, 1640," in Fragmenta Avrea, 1646.
  • also published as A letter from Sir John Suckling to Mr. Henry German, in the beginning of the late Long Parliament, anno 1640. London: 1679.
• The Coppy of a Letter Written to the Lower House of Parliament Touching Divers Grievances and Inconveniences of the State &c. London. London: Iohn Dawson for Thomas Walkley, 1641.

Collected editions

• Fragmenta Aurea: A collection of all the incomparable peeces. London: Ruth Raworth & Thomas Walkley for Humphrey Moseley, 1646. (comprises Poems, Letters, An Account of Religion by Reason, Aglaura, The Goblins, and Brennoralt)
  • revised 2nd edition, London: Humphrey Moseley, 1648.
• The Last Remains of S^r John Suckling. Being a Full Collection of his Poems and Letters. London: Printed by Thomas Newcombe for Humphrey Moseley, 1659;
  • republished with Fragmenta Avrea. London: Humphrey Moseley, [1672?]
  • republished as The Works of Sir John Suckling: Containing all his poems, plays, letters &c.. London: Henry Herringman, 1676;
  • revised edition, London: Henry Herringman, 1696.
• The Works of Sir John Suckling: Containing his poems, letters, and plays. London: Jacob Tonson, 1719.
• Selections from the Works (edited by Alfred Inigo Suckling). London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1836.
• The Poems, Plays, and other remains (edited by William Carew Hazlitt). (2 volumes), London: F. & W. Kerslake, 1874; London: Reeves & Turner, 1892; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. Volume I, Volume II
• The Works: In prose and verse (edited by A. Hamilton Thompson). London: Routledge / New York: Dutton, 1910.
• Works. (2 volumes), Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1971.
  • Volume I: The non-dramatic works (edited by Thomas Clayton).
  • Volume II: The plays (edited by L.A. Beaurline).

"The Constant Lover etc." by Sir John Suckling (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the WorldCat.

A Ballad Upon a Wedding by Sir John Suckling

Play productions

• Aglaura, London, at Court, 1638; tragicomic version, London, Cockpit theater, 3 April 1638.
• The Goblins, London, Blackfriars theater, 1641(?).
• Brennoralt; or, The discontented Colonel, London, Blackfriars theater, 1641(?).

See also

• Cavalier poets
• List of British poets

References

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). "Suckling, Sir John". Encyclopædia Britannica. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 7. . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 8, 2018.

External links

Poems

• Suckling in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900: "A Doubt of Martyrdom," "The Constant Lover," "Why so Pale and Wan?", "When, Dearest, I but think of Thee"
• Selected Poetry of Sir John Suckling (1609-1642) (7 poems) at Representative Poetry Online.
• Sir John Suckling 1609-1642 at the Poetry Foundation
• Suckling in The English Poets: An anthology: "A Ballad upon a Wedding," "Truth in Love," "The Dance," Orsames' Song in Aglaura, Song: ‘I prithee send me back my heart’, The Lute Song in The Sad One, "Constancy"
• Sir John Suckling at PoemHunter (14 poems)
• Sir John Suckling at Poetry Nook (80 poems)

Books

• John Suckling at the Online Books Page

Audio / video

• John Suckling poems at YouTube

About

• Sir John Suckling in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Sir John Suckling at NNDB
• Suckling, John in the Dictionary of National Biography
• Sir John Suckling in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature.
• Sir John Suckling (1609-1642) at Luminarium.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Original article is at "Suckling, Sir John".