Gabriel Harvey

Harvey, Gabriel (c.1550–1631), became the friend of Spenser and was probably his tutor. He commemorated Sir Thomas Smith, his patron, in a series of Latin elegies, Smithus (1578), which may have influenced the form of Spenser's ‘Teares of the Muses’. After a brilliant but troubled academic career, he turned his interests towards the court and the vernacular. In his exchange of Letters with Spenser (1580) he sensibly indicated the difficulties and limitations of writing English verse in classical metres, but also delivered his famous judgement of The Faerie Queene, as it then existed, as ‘Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo’. His attack on the dying Greene in Foure Letters (1592) provoked Nashe's stinging replies which Harvey's Pierces Supererogation (1593) did not mitigate. With his old-fashioned humanist values and often awkward prose style Harvey came off worse in the controversy.

Gabriel Harvey 1545?-1630?, English author. He studied at Cambridge and became a fellow of Pembroke Hall. There he became friends with Edmund Spenser, who later celebrated Harvey as Hobbinol in The Shepherd's Calendar. In 1578, Harvey became a fellow of Trinity Hall and began the study of law, but the publication of some satirical verses in 1579 involved him in considerable trouble with the authorities, and his appointment as master was recalled. The publication of the Four Letters (1592), a scurrilous post-mortem attack on Robert Greene , involved Harvey in the heated Martin Marprelate controversy , which was terminated in 1599 by the intervention of the government. Much of Harvey's Martinist writings contained personal rebuffs, particularly to Thomas Nashe , who had described Harvey as an arrogant, tactless misfit.

Bibliography: See his complete works edited by A. B. Grosart (3 vol., 1884-85).