Harvey, Gabriel

Harvey, Gabriel,

1545?–1630?, English author. He studied at Cambridge and became a fellow of Pembroke Hall. There he became friends with Edmund Spenser, who later celebrated Harvey as Hobbinol in The Shepherd's Calendar. In 1578, Harvey became a fellow of Trinity Hall and began the study of law, but the publication of some satirical verses in 1579 involved him in considerable trouble with the authorities, and his appointment as master was recalled. The publication of the Four Letters (1592), a scurrilous post-mortem attack on Robert GreeneGreene, Robert,
1558?–1592, English author. His short romances, written in the manner of Lyly's Euphues, include Pandosto (1588), from which Shakespeare drew the plot for A Winter's Tale, and Menaphon (1589).
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, involved Harvey in the heated Martin Marprelate controversyMarprelate controversy
, a 16th-century English religious argument. Martin Marprelate was the pseudonym under which appeared several Puritan pamphlets (1588–89) satirizing the authoritarianism of the Church of England under Archbishop John Whitgift.
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, which was terminated in 1599 by the intervention of the government. Much of Harvey's Martinist writings contained personal rebuffs, particularly to Thomas NasheNashe or Nash, Thomas
, 1567–1601, English satirist. Very little is known of his life. Although his first publications appeared in 1589, it was not until Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil
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, who had described Harvey as an arrogant, tactless misfit.

Bibliography

See his complete works edited by A. B. Grosart (3 vol., 1884–85).