Fovre Letters and Certeine Sonnets, Especially Touching Robert Greene and Other Parties by Him Abused (The Bodley Head Quartos) [Four, 4, Certain]

102 pp. The Bodley Head Quartos series printed by Curwin Press. Facsimile of title page from original 1592 edition precedes text. Gabriel Harvey (c. 1552/3 – 1631) was an English writer. Harvey was a notable scholar, whose reputation suffered from his quarrel with Thomas Nashe. Henry Morley, writing in the Fortnightly Review (March 1869), has argued that Harvey's Latin works demonstrate that he was distinguished by qualities very different from the pedantry and conceit usually associated with his name. In 1585 he received the degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford, and is found practising at the bar in London. Gabriel's brother, Richard Harvey, had taken part in the Martin Marprelate controversy, and had given offence to Robert Greene by contemptuous references to him and his fellow wits. Greene retorted by inserting a few lines in the first edition of his A Quip for an Upstart Courtier containing scathing remarks on the four Harvey brothers, drawing attention, among other things, to the fact that they were the sons of a ropemaker. In 1599 Archbishop Whitgift made a raid on contemporary satire in general, and among other books the tracts of Harvey and Nashe were destroyed, and it was forbidden to reprint them. Harvey spent the last years of his life in retirement in Saffron Walden, dying there on 7 February 1631.