ABSTRACT
PEELE, CAMPION, AND THE PORTUGAL EXPEDITION OF 1589
BY HUGH GAZZARD
The events of a few tumultuous weeks in the summer of 1588 still have a talismanic power in English, and British, narratives of national history, and of course they had a far stronger talismanic power for those who lived through them: ‘Triumph {0 English people) leap for ioy’ James Aske exhorted in that fateful year. Less memorialized, both now and at the time-with good reason-was England’s Counter-Armada of the following year, the expedition to Portugal under the command of Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris. But the expedi tion’s hopeful outset, and its far from trium phant return, were marked in two poems by George Peele, poems by turns heroic and ambivalent, and in a short Latin poem (published later) by Thomas Campion. In this article I shall closely examine these poems both in their character as public, occasional verse, and in the contexts of the events and the poets’ wider careers.