William Basse - Career

Career

Basse was educated at Lord Williams's School.

The long interval of fifty-one years between the production of the first and last poems bearing Basse's signature has led Mr. J. P. Collier to conjecture that there were two poets of the same name, and he attributes to an elder William Basse the works published in 1602, and to a younger William Basse all those published later. The internal evidence offered by the poems fails, however, to support this conclusion. 'Urania,' the last poem of the collection, bearing the date 1653, has all the metrical characteristics of the 'Sword and Buckler' of 1602; and Bathurst's verses prove that Basse followed his poetical career through many generations. A William Basse 'of Suffolk' entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a sizar in 1629, and took the degree of B.A. in 1632, and that of M.A. in 1636, but it is highly improbable that this student was the poet. There was a family named Basse, of Benhall, Suffolk, in the seventeenth century, of whom a William died in 1607, aged 85, and left a son Thomas and a grandson William, probably the Cambridge student; but it is impossible to identify the poet with any member of this family. The fact that his 'Great Brittaines Sunnesset' was published at Oxford, and his intimate relations with two great Oxfordshire houses, seem to connect the poet with Oxfordshire rather than with Suffolk.