Abraham Fraunce

Abraham Fraunce ( – ) was an English poet.

Life A native of Shropshire, he was born between 1558 and 1560. His name appears in a list of pupils of Shrewsbury School in January 1571, and he joined St John's College, Cambridge, in 1576, becoming a fellow in 1580/1. His Latin comedy, Victoria, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, was probably written at Cambridge, where he remained until he had taken his M.A. degree in 1583. He was called to the bar at Gray's Inn in 1588, and then apparently practised as a barrister in the court of the Welsh marches.

After the death of his patron, Sidney, Fraunce was protected by Sidney's sister, Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. His last work was published in 1592. and attributes the Cutler-Egerton epithalamium to Abraham Darcie.

Works His works are: The Lamentations of Amintas for the death of Phyllis (1587), a version in English hexameters of his friend, Thomas Watson's, Latin Amyntas The Lawiers Logike, exemplifying the praecepts of Logike by the practise of the common Lawe (1585) The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) Abrahami Fransi Insignium, Armorum ... explicatio (1588) The Countess of Pembroke's Yvychurch (1591/2), containing a translation of Tasso's Aminta, a reprint of his earlier version of Watson The Lamentation of Corydon for the love of Alexis (Virgil, eclogue II), a short translation from Heliodorus, and, in the third part (1592) "Aminta's Dale," a collection of "conceited tales" supposed to be related by the nymphs of Ivychurch The Countess of Pembroke's Emanuell (1591) The Third Part of Pembroke's Ivychurch, entitled Aminta's Dale (1592) Victoria, a Latin Comedy (written before or in 1583; not published until 1906). It is a translation of Luigi Pasqualigo's play, Il Fedele.

The Arcadian Rhetorike owes much to earlier critical treatises, but has a special interest from its references to Edmund Spenser, and Fraunce quotes from the Faerie Queene a year before the publication of the first books. In Colin Clouts Come Home Again, Spenser speaks of Fraunce as Corydon, on account of his translations of Virgil's second eclogue. His poems are written in classical metres, and he was regarded by his contemporaries as the best exponent of Gabriel Harvey's theory. Even Thomas Nashe had a good word for "sweete Master Fraunce".