GASCOIGNE, George (c. 1535-1577), one of the great pioneers of Elizabethan poetry, was born about 1535—as is believed, in Westmoreland. He was the son and heir of Sir John Gascoigne. He studied at Cambridge, and was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1555. His youth was unsteady, and hi3 father disinherited him. In 1565 he had written his tragicomedy of The Glass of Government, not printed until 1576. In 1566 his first published verses were prefixed to a book called The French Littleton, and he brought out on the stage of Gray’s Inn two very remarkable dramas, Supposes, the earliest existing English play in prose, and Jocasta, the first attempt to naturalize the Greek tragedy. Of the latter only the second, third, and fourth acts were from his hand. Soon after this he married. In 1572 there was published A Hundred sundry Flowers l>ouηd up in one small Posy, a pirated collection of Gascoigne’s lyrics, he having started in March of that year to serve as a volunteer under the Prince of Orange. He was wrecked on the coast of Holland and nearly lost his life, but obtained a captain’s commission, and acquired considerable military reputation. An intrigue, however, with a lady in the Hague, nearly cost him his life. He regained his position, and fought well at the siege of Middleburg, but was captured under the walls of Leyden, and sent back to England after an imprisonment of four months. In 1575 he issued an authoritative edition of his poems under the name of Posies. In the summer of the same year he devised a poetical entertainment for Queen Elizabeth, then visiting Kenilworth; this series of masques was printed in 1576 as The Princely Pleasures. Later on in 1575 he greeted the queen at Woodstock with his Tale of Hemetes, and presented her on next New Year’s day with ...the MS. of the same poem, which is now in the British Museum. He completed in 1576 his two most important works, The Complaint of Philomene, and The Steel Glass, the first of which had occupied him since 1562; they were printed in a single volume. Later on in the same year he published A delicate Diet for dainty-mouthed Drunkards. He fell into a decline and died at Stamford on the 7th of October 1577. We are indebted for many particulars of his life to a rare poem published in the same year by George Whetstone, and entitled A Remembrance of the Well-employed Life and Godly End of George Gascoigne, Esquire. In his poem of The Steel Glass, in blank verse, Gascoigne introduced the Italian style of satire into our literature. He was a great innovator in point of metrical art, and he prefixed to the work in question a prose essay on poetry, which contains some very valuable suggestions. His great claim to remembrance was well summed up in the next generation by Thomas Nash, who remarked in his preface to Greene’s Menaphon, that “Master Gascoigne is not to be abridged of his deserved esteem, who first beat the path to that perfection which our best poets aspired to since his departure, whereto he did ascend by comparing the Italian with the English.” The works of Gascoigne were collected m 1587, and partly republished in 1810 and 1821. The best modern edition of the principal poems is that edited, with full bibliographical notes, by E. Arber in 1868.
GASCOIGNE, Sir William, was chief-justice of England in the reign of Henry IV. Both history and tradition testify to the fact that he was one of the great lawyers who in times of doubt and danger have asserted the principle that the head of the state is subject to law, and that the traditional practice of public officers, or the expressed voice of the nation in parliament, and not the will of the monarch or any part of j the legislature, must guide the tribunals of the country. The judge was a descendant of an ancient Yorkshire family. The date of his birth is uncertain, but it appears from the Year Books that he practised as an advocate in the reigns of Edward IIL and Richard II. On the banishment of Henry of Lancaster, Gascoigne was appointed one of his attorneys, and soon after Henry’s accession to the throne was made chief-justice of the Court of King’s Bench. After the suppression of the rising in the north in 1405, Henry eagerly pressed thejudge to pronounce sentence upon Scrope, the archbishop of York, and the earl marshal Thomas Mowbray, who had been implicated in the revolt. The judge absolutely refused to do so, asserting the right of the prisoners to be tried by their peers. Although both were afterwards executed, the chief-justice had no part in the transaction. The often told tale of his committing the Prince of Wales to prison has of course been doubted by modem critics, but it is both picturesque and characteristic. Thejudge had directed the punishment of one of the prince’s riotous companions, and the prince who was present and enraged at the sentence struck or grossly insulted the judge. Gascoigne immediately committed him to prison, using firm and forcible language, which brought him to a more reasonable mood, and secured his voluntary obedience to the sentence. The king is said to have approved of the act, but there appears to be good ground for the supposition that Gascoigne was removed from his post or resigned soon after the accession of Henry V. He died in 1419, and was buried in the parish church of Harewood in Yorkshire. Some biographies of the judge have stated that he died in 1412, but this is clearly disproved by Foss in his Lives of the Judges; and although it is clear that Gascoigne did not hold office long under Henry V., it is not absolutely impossible that the scene in the fifth act of the second part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. has some historical basis, and that the judge’s resignation was voluntary.
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