NPPF Cloutish: Spenser For [Pale] Fire

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English writer and friend of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser; the latter
celebrated their friendship in The Shepheardes Calender (1579) through the
characters of Hobbinol (Harvey) and Colin Clout (Spenser). Harvey was also
noted for his tenacious participation in literary feuds.

Harvey, Gabriel
(b. 1550?, Saffron Walden, Essex, Eng.--d. 1630), English writer and friend
of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser; the latter celebrated their
friendship in The Shepheardes Calender (1579) through the characters of
Hobbinol (Harvey) and Colin Clout (Spenser). Harvey was also noted for his
tenacious participation in literary feuds.
The son of a ropemaker, Harvey matriculated at Christ College, Cambridge, in
1566, received his bachelor's degree in 1570, and became a fellow at
Pembroke Hall (later Pembroke College) that same year. At Pembroke he became
an intimate friend of Spenser. In 1578 Harvey became a fellow of Trinity
Hall, Cambridge, and began to study civil law, but in 1585 he failed to be
elected master of Trinity Hall and was not admitted to a doctor's degree
there. He completed his doctorate in civil law at Oxford University. In 1592
he published Foure Letters and Certaine Sonnets, which contained a malicious
account of the death of the writer Robert Greene and which further embroiled
him in a long-running pamphlet war with the author Thomas Nashe. The ensuing
literary combat with Nashe continued until 1599, when the archbishop of
Canterbury ordered each man's satires to be burned. In 1598 Harvey
petitioned for the mastership of Trinity Hall but again was not elected, and
about this time he retired.

Though represented as an argumentative and malicious pedant by some of his
contemporaries, Harvey was nonetheless a talented scholar and literary
stylist. He entered into print only reluctantly; his few published writings
include two lectures on rhetoric, elegies and other verses in Latin, and
several elegantly styled letters between himself and Spenser. His chief,
though unfulfilled, aim was the introduction of the classical hexameter into
English poetry.