Stephen Hawes

Stephen Hawes (died 1523) was a popular English poet during the Tudor period who is now little known.

He was probably born in Suffolk when the surname was common, if his own statement of his age may be trusted, was born about 1474. He was educated at Oxford and travelled in England, Scotland and France. On his return his various accomplishments, especially his most excellent vein in poetry, procured him a place at court. He was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII, as early as 1502. According to Anthony Wood, he could repeat by heart the works of most of the English poets, especially the poems of John Lydgate, whom he called his master. He was still living in 1521, when it is stated in Henry VIII's household accounts that £6, 13s. 4d. was paid to Mr Hawes for his play, and he died before 1530, when Thomas Field, in his Conversation between a Lover and a Jay, wrote "Yong Steven Hawse, whose soule God pardon, Treated of love so clerkly and well". More recently, some critics, notably C. S. Lewis in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford University Press, 1944) have treated Hawes dismissively: "faculty was what he lacked; there was more and better poetry in him than he could express", referring to his "broken-backed metre and dull excursions into the seven liberal arts". But his metre is not consistently broken-backed: from time to time (though not very often) one encounters lines that would not have disgraced either Chaucer before him or Spenser after him: "The fragraunt fumes / dyde well encense out // All mysty vapours / of perturbacyon // ore lyker was / her habytacyon // Vnto a place / whiche is celestyall // Than to a terrayne / mancyon fatall" or " By her propre hande / soft as ony sylke // With due obeysaunce / I dyde her than take // Her skynne was whyte / as whalles bone or mylke // My thoughtes was rauysshed / I myght not aslake // My brennynge hert / she the fyre dyde make // These daunces truely / musyke hath me tought // To lute or daunce / but it auayled nought" and so on, where, so long as one pronounces at least some of the final 'e's, the metre seems to work quite well.

Novelist Hilda Lamb made Hawes a character of her novel "The willing heart" published in 1958, where he is fictionally portrayed as an illegitimate son of King Richard III's. No contemporary documents support this assumption.

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