[3] In late 1559 or early 1560 Puttenham married Elizabeth, Lady Windsor (1520–1588), the daughter and coheir of Peter Cowdray of Herriard, Hampshire.
[5] Much of the information known about Puttenham's later personal and professional life stems from court records of the dissolution of his marriage and of his attempt to get out of debt by wresting control of Sherfield House from his niece Anne Morris and her husband, Francis.
[1] One of the more lascivious stories asserts that when Puttenham was forty-three, he had his servant kidnap a 17-year-old girl in London and bring her to his farm at Upton Grey near Sherfield, where he raped her and kept her locked up for three years.
It is, perhaps, telling that the neutral observer Richard Horne, Bishop of Winchester, reacted with surprise and disdain to Puttenham's appointment as a Justice of the Peace, writing to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, hoping that it "be not true, for his evil life is well knowne.
"[6] In 1579 he presented to Elizabeth I his Partheniades (printed in a collection of manuscript Ballads by F. J. Furnivall), and he wrote the treatise in question especially for the delectation of the queen and her ladies.
[7] The Arte of English Poesie was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1588, and published in the following year with a dedicatory letter to Lord Burghley written by the printer Richard Field, who professed ignorance of the writer's name and position.
[9] In an essay published in the second edition of William Camden's Remaines (1614), Richard Carew writes, "look into our Imitations of all sorts of verses by any other language, and you shall finde that Sir Phillip Sidney, Maister Puttenham, Maister Stanihurst, and divers more have made use how farre wee are within compasse of a fore imagined impossibility in that behalfe".
[10] Around the same time, in his Hypercritica (not published until 1722), Edmund Bolton writes of "the elegant, witty, and artificial book of the Art of English Poetrie, (the work as the fame is) of one of [Queen Elizabeth's] Gentleman Pensioners, Puttenham".
This agrees better with the writer's account of himself; but if the statement that he addressed Elpine to Edward VI when he was 18 years of age be taken to imply that the production of this work fell within that king's reign, the date of the author's birth cannot be placed anterior to 1529.
At the date (1546) of his inheritance of his uncle, Sir Thomas Elyot's estates, Richard Puttenham was proved in an inquisition held at Newmarket to have been twenty-six years old.
Puttenham's book covers a general history of the art of poetry, and a discussion of the various forms of poetry; the second treats of prosody, dealing in turn with the measures in use in English verse, the caesura, punctuation, rhyme, accent, cadence, proportion in figure, which the author illustrates by geometrical diagrams, and the proposed innovations of English quantitative verse; the section on ornament deals with style, the distinctions between written and spoken language, the figures of speech; and the author closes with lengthy observations on good manners.
All subjects, including science and law, were in primitive times written in verse, and the types of poetry number in the dozens.
In Book II, "Of Proportion Poetical", Puttenham compares metrical form to arithmetical, geometrical, and musical pattern.
Book III, "Of Ornament", which comprises a full half of the Arte, is a catalogue of figures of speech, in the tradition of Richard Sherry, Henry Peacham, Abraham Fraunce and Angel Day.
Figures give more "pithe and substance, subtilitie, quicknesse, efficacie or moderation, in this or that sort tuning and tempring them by amplification, abridgement, opening, closing, enforcing, meekening or otherwise disposing them to the best purpose ..." (134).
The introduction of these new Italian forms in turn necessitated the flurry of Renaissance poetry manuals, by George Gascoigne, Samuel Daniel, Charles Webb and Sir Philip Sidney, in addition to Puttenham's Arte.