SOURCE: Bradner, Leicester. “Point of View in George Gascoigne's Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 3, no. 7 (fall 1965): 16-22.

In the following essay, Bradner analyzes the importance of point of view in Gascoigne's work and elucidates the author's narrative skill.

When George Gascoigne first published his poems in 1573, his desire to dissociate himself from the events described in them led him to adopt a number of subterfuges. One of the most important of these was the creation of an outside editor or narrator from whose point of view we see the action. He used this device in presenting his miscellaneous poems and in two pieces of extended narrative. The first, Dan Bartholmew of Bath, a collection of poems connected by verse links attributed to a man called the Reporter, was incomplete when first printed in the Hundreth Sundry Flowres of 1573; in the second edition, called the Posies, two years later...