HARVEY, GABRIEL

born 1550?, Saffron Walden, Essex, Eng. died 1630 English writer and friend of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser; the latter celebrated their friendship in The Shepheardes Calender (1579) through the characters of Hobbinol (Harvey) and Colin Clout (Spenser). Harvey was also noted for his tenacious participation in literary feuds. The son of a ropemaker, Harvey matriculated at Christ College, Cambridge, in 1566, received his bachelor's degree in 1570, and became a fellow at Pembroke Hall (later Pembroke College) that same year. At Pembroke he became an intimate friend of Spenser. In 1578 Harvey became a fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and began to study civil law, but in 1585 he failed to be elected master of Trinity Hall and was not admitted to a doctor's degree there. He completed his doctorate in civil law at Oxford University. In 1592 he published Foure Letters and Certaine Sonnets, which contained a malicious account of the death of the writer Robert Greene and which further embroiled him in a long-running pamphlet war with the author Thomas Nashe. The ensuing literary combat with Nashe continued until 1599, when the archbishop of Canterbury ordered each man's satires to be burned. In 1598 Harvey petitioned for the mastership of Trinity Hall but again was not elected, and about this time he retired. Though represented as an argumentative and malicious pedant by some of his contemporaries, Harvey was nonetheless a talented scholar and literary stylist. He entered into print only reluctantly; his few published writings include two lectures on rhetoric, elegies and other verses in Latin, and several elegantly styled letters between himself and Spenser. His chief, though unfulfilled, aim was the introduction of the classical hexameter into English poetry.