'Shitcan the Sass'

George Turberville writes in his epilogue to Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (1567): “I write but of familiar stuffe because my stile is lowe.” Today we call him a master of the “plain style,” the opposite of ornate poeticizing, along with his contemporaries George Gascoigne and Barnabe Googe. He describes his poems as “the unripe seedes of my barraine braine.”

 

We don’t know a lot about Turberville (c. 1540-c. 1610). He was born in Dorset, though his birth and death dates are uncertain. He translated Boccaccio and Ovid. In 1568 he visited Russia as secretary to Thomas Randolph, England’s ambassador to the Emperor, Ivan the Terrible. He was the first English poet to publish a book of verse dedicated to his lady, a genre that became fashionable during the Elizabethan age.  He was an early practitioner of blank verse. There’s a pleasing modesty and directness to Turberville’s poems. Here is one on having a hangover, “Of drunkenness”:

 

“At night when ale is in,

like friends we part to bed;

In morrow gray, when ale is out,

Then hatred is in head.”

 

Some of Turberville’s poems read like an early form of light verse, as in “Of an open foe and a feigned friend”:

 

“Oh both give me the man

that says, I hate in deed;

than him that hath a knife to kill,

yet wears a friendly weed.”

 

Weed here means, according to the OED, “an item of clothing, a garment.” Here is one of Turberville's barbed moral lessons, “Of a rich miser”:

 

“A miser’s mind thou hast,

thou hast a prince’s pelf:

which makes thee wealthy to thine heir,

a beggar to thy self.”

 

Pelf, the OED tells us, is “stolen goods; booty, spoil.” Yvor Winters used Turberville’s “To the Reader” as one of the epigraphs to Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969):

 

“I thee advise

If thou be wise

To keep thy wit

Though it be small;

 

“’Tis rare to get

And far to fet,

’Twas ever yit

Dear’st ware of all.”

 

R.L. Barth has a little fun with Turberville’s poem in his “Sgt. Turberville Speaks”:

 

“I would advise

If you’d be wise

To keep your gear

In good repair.

 

“Shitcan the sass;

It’ll save your ass

When hit, and fear

Threatens despair.”

 

As Turberville writes in his epilogue to Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets: “Reade the good, and reiect the evill: yea rather condemne it to perpetuall silence. For so woulde I wyshe thee to deale wyth unworthye Bookes: But assuredlye there is nothing in thys whole slender Volume that was ment amisse of me the Writer, howsoever the Letter goe in thy iudgement that arte the Reader.”