2 - The Birth of the English Essay

Summary

In 1615, Nicholas Breton dedicated his new book, Characters vpon Essaies Morall, and Diuine, to the Attorney General, Sir Francis Bacon. ‘Worthy Knight’, he wrote, ‘I haue read of many Essaies’ but ‘when I lookt into the forme, or nature of their writing, I haue beene of the conceit, that they were but Imitators of your breaking the ice to their inuentions’. Bacon had broken the ice when he published his collection of Essayes eighteen years earlier, in 1597: ten short pieces of largely aphoristic assertions on studies, discourse, ceremonies and respects, followers and friends, suitors, expense, regiment of health, honor and reputation, faction, and negotiation. Since then, there had indeed appeared ‘many Essaies’, as the essay collection, in many forms, both prose and verse, became a veritable vogue. Samuel Daniel published his Poeticall Essayes in 1599, and Sir William Cornwallis his two books of Essayes in 1600. Robert Johnson’s Essaies, or Rather Imperfect Offers in 1601 was followed by John Florio’s translation of The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne in 1603, Alexander Craige’s Poeticall Essayes in 1604 and John Davies’s Wittes Pilgrimage, (by Poeticall Essaies) in 1605. Within a decade, these would be joined by D. T. Gent.’s Essaies Politicke, and Morall (1608) and Essayes, Morall and Theologicall (1609), the minister Thomas Tukes’s New Essayes: Meditations, and Vowes (1614), George Wither’s Abvses Stript, and Whipt. Or Satirical Essayes (1613), a collection of Satyrical Essayes Characters and Others (1615) by John Stephens the younger of Lincoln’s Inn, and a revised set by Bacon (1612). But it was to Bacon’s 1597 volume that Breton looked as the great innovator of the genre.

To modern critics, however, the priority of Bacon is by no means a given. Chronologically, the icebreaker for the essay collection – and the title Essays – was clearly not Bacon, but Michel de Montaigne, whose Essais were first published a full seventeen years earlier and had appeared in revised editions in 1588 and 1595. Claire de Obaldia, in her influential study The Essayistic Spirit, is typical in referring to Montaigne as ‘the official founder of the genre’, who laid down the parameters of what the essay might be.