Thomas Watson

Thomas Watson (1555–1592) was an English poet and translator, and the pioneer of the English madrigal. His lyrics aside, he wrote largely in Latin, also being the first to translate Sophocles's Antigone from Greek. His incorporation of Italianate forms into English lyric verse influenced a generation of English writers, including Shakespeare, who was referred to in 1595 by William Covell as "Watson's heyre" (heir). He wrote both English and Latin compositions, and was particularly admired for the Latin. His unusual 18-line sonnets were influential, although the form was not generally taken up. Early life Thomas Watson was born in mid-1555, probably in the parish of St Olave, Hart Street, London, to a prosperous London couple, William Watson and Anne Lee. His father's death in November 1559 was followed by his mother's in 1561, and Watson and his older brother went to live with their maternal uncle in Oxfordshire. From 1567, Watson attended Winchester College in Westminster, and later attended Oxford University without gaining a degree. Sometime after his uncle's death in April 1572, Watson went to Europe, spending seven and a half years in Italy and France, according to the preface of his version of Antigone. While there he was already gaining a reputation as a poet. When he returned he studied law in London. Though he often signed his works as "student of law", he never practised law, as his true passion was literature. However, Roger Fisher has noted that "Watson's early legal training and associations have been downplayed by biographers in favour of his later image as a literary wit and reckless rake," but that he associated "with many well-known barristers in his day and frequented the Inns of Court." Watson's De remedio amoris, perhaps his earliest important composition, is lost, as is his "piece of work written in the commendation of women-kind", which was also in Latin verse. His earliest surviving work is a 1581 Latin version of Antigone dedicated to Philip Howard, 20th Earl of Arundel. It also contains an appendix of Latin allegorical poems and experiments in classical metres. English poetry The following year Watson appears for the first time as an English poet in verses prefixed to George Whetstone's Heptameron, and in a far more important work, as the author of the Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love, dedicated to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who had read the poems in manuscript and encouraged Watson to publish them.