8 - Locating Continuity: The Early Religion of Albion in Michael Drayton' Poly-Olbion

Summary

Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,

Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)

To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,

Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne.

The respective openings of Songs 1 and 30 bookend the vast project of Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion, measuring the distance travelled from the poem's fresh and creatively empowered beginnings in the mid-1590s, to the wearier appearance of its second (and final) part some twenty-five years later, in 1622. In Song 1, Drayton had invoked the ‘Genius of the place’ (1.8), a tutelary spirit imagined to have existed ‘long before the All-earth-drowning Flood’ (1.9) in the almost impenetrable fog of the island's pre-Christian past. This pagan genius loci is called upon to help Drayton's Muse navigate the ‘wandring Maze’ (1.12) of the island's geography, the poem's primary axis of movement along which an accompanying and dauntingly heterogeneous body of material – including chorographical description, chronicle history, hagiography, and medieval romance – is to be plotted. In the opening to the final song, however, the Muse receives a quite different instruction: ‘look aloft tow’rds heaven, to him whose powerfull ayd; / Hath led thee on thus long’ (30.2–3). Here the assistance of the Christian god is required simply to propel the work over its own finishing line, giving sustenance to the poet's ‘labouring Muse’ (27.1) and ‘tyred hand’ (28.512) as he doggedly sees through the completion of ‘This strange Herculean toyle’ (30.342).

The shift from pagan to Christian invocation is symptomatic of more fundamental changes in style, tone and outlook between Part One and Part Two that have led critics to chart a transition from ‘monumentalism’ to ‘bleak antiquarianism’. It is also emblematic of the poem's profound interest in Albion's spiritual transformations, transformations which were important, discrete subjects of antiquarian enquiry in themselves, but which are put to special service in the poem's Ovidian threading of the past to the present. Rarefied antiquarian debate about the origins of Christianity in the island conducted by members of Drayton's circle reveals a complex field beset by insubstantial and often contradictory evidence. For religious controversialists, however, the beginnings and nature of the early British church had assumed a more profound significance by the time Drayton came to write his poem of the nation.