The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry 9780198830696, 0198830696
The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of '
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Cover
The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Sixteenth-Century British Poetry: Volume 4
Copyright
Dedication
General Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Editorial Note
1: Introduction
Transitions and Contexts
Practices
Forms
Poets
Transitions
A Case Study: Spenser’s Temple of Venus and Sixteenth-Century Poetry
PART I: TRANSITIONS AND CONTEXTS
2: Transitions
Pyramus and Thisbe at Home
Morpheus in the Margins
Midas in the Database
The Transitions of Nick Bottom
3: Social Contexts
Rhetoric, Poetics, and Poetry
Religion
Politics and Government
4: Professional Contexts
PART II: PRACTICES
5: Poetics
Humanist Theories of Poetry: Sixteenth Century
Modern Theories of Poetry: Humanist and Post-Humanist
A Sublime Poetics of Literary Freedom
6: Style
Wyatt’s Rhythms
Gascoigne’s Long Lines
Stanyhurst’s Quantities
Marlowe’s Mighty Couplets
Spenser’s Archaisms
Drayton’s Hexameters
Donne Himself
7: Allusiveness
Imitation and Allusion
Type 1: Allusion to Authorial Names
Type 2: Repurposing of Texts
Type 3: Allusions to Proverbs
Type 4: Allusion to Verbal Style
Type 5: Formal Allusion
Type 6: Self-Allusion
Type 7: Parody and Plagiarism
A History of Sixteenth-Century Poetry?
8: Figuration
Metaphor
Metonymy
Synecdoche
Irony
Conclusion
9: Career
PART III: FORMS
10: Miscellany
Tottel’s Miscellany
The Mirror for Magistrates
England’s Helicon
11: Lyric
Lyric Theory, Modern and Early Modern
Lyric Poetry, Short and Sweet
12: Sonnet
Labouring for Invention
Labouring for Copia
Labouring for Renewal
13: Satire
Early Tudor Satire
Elizabethan Satire
14: Pastoral
Vernacular Music
Anglicising the Eclogue
Lyrical Pastoral
15: Epic
Models and Theories
Translations
Spenser, Shakespeare, and the Tears of Calliope
16: Minor Epic
The Minor Epic Canon and Prevalent Critical Approaches
Associative Emulation and the Poet’s Self-Pronouncement
Dissociative Emulation and the Evolving Poetic Career
17: History
The Medieval Inheritance: Metrical Chronicles
Sidney and the Conflict between Poetry and History
Briton Moniments
Drayton’s Historical Poetry
18: Elegy
Elegy Amongst the Genres
The Origins of Elegy
Ovidian Elegy in the Sixteenth Century
Funeral Elegy
‘Astrophel’ and The Shepheardes Calender
Elegy, Subjection, and Subversion in the 1590s
Donne’s Elegies
19: Complaint
Complaints Against the Times
The Mirror for Magistrates
Spenser’s Complaints
Personal Complaint
Love Complaints
Tottel’s Miscellany
Female Complaint
Spiritual Complaints
Conclusion
20: Devotional Poetry
PART IV: POETS
21: Skelton
Conspicuous Experiment: The Skeltonic
Inconspicuous Experiment: Skelton’s Rhyme Royal
Practical Experiment and Experimental Poetics
22: Scots Poetry
Lyrical Writing from James V Onwards
23: Wyatt and Surrey
‘The first reformers and polishers of our vulgar poesy’
‘Imitating very naturally and studiously theirmaster Francis Petrarch’
24: Mid-Tudor Poetry
Forms
Form: Printed Anthologies
Printed Anthologies: Thomas Howell
Printed Anthologies: George Turberville
Format
Formulation: The Discourses of Poetry—Gascoigne
Formulation: Structuring Ideologies—Whitney and the City
Conclusions
25: Philip Sidney
26: Spenser: Shorter Poetry
The New Poet: From the Theatre to the Calender
Styles of Complaint: Spenser’s Poetic Bildung
Beyond Epic: Spenser as Love Poet
27: Spenser: The Faerie Queene
Form, Mode, and Content
The Faerie Queene (1590)
The Faerie Queene (1596)
Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609)
28: Daniel, Drayton, Chapman
Daniel
Drayton
Chapman
29: Marlowe
Translation 1, Anti-Epic Model 1: Power That Crushes, Lucan’s First Book
Translation 2, Anti-Epic Model 2: A Poetry of Wanton Toys, All Ovid’s Elegies
A Poetry That Invites: ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’
A Poetry of Dallying: Hero and Leander
A Poetry of Sociability: Plays That Play With Me
30: Shakespeare
The Sonnets
Venus and Adonis
The Rape of Lucrece
‘The Phoenix and Turtle’
A Lover’s Complaint
31: Ralegh
Poetics and Reading Strategies
‘The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia’
Concluding Thoughts
32: Mary Sidney Herbert
Sidney Herbert In Print
Sidney Herbert’s Psalms
Sidney Herbert Beyond the Psalms: The Commendatory Poems and The Triumph of Death
Sidney Herbert the Poet
PART V: TRANSITIONS
33: The Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Century
Complete Bibliography
Index
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/3/2022, SPi
THE OXFORD HISTORY OF POETRY IN ENGLISH General Editor
PATRICK CHENEY Coordinating Editors ROBERT R. EDWARDS LAURA L. KNOPPERS STEPHEN REGAN VINAY DHARWADKER
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Dedicated to the Beloved Memory of Michael O’Neill 1953–2018 Professor of English, University of Durham, United Kingdom Founding Coordinating Editor, OHOPE, Great Romantics Scholar and Distinguished British Poet
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THE OXFORD HISTORY OF POETRY IN ENGLISH The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of ‘poetry’: from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. OHOPE both synthesises existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. 1. Medieval Poetry: c 670–1100 2. Medieval Poetry: 1100–1400 3. Medieval Poetry: 1400–1500 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry 5. Seventeenth-Century British Poetry 6. Eighteenth-Century British Poetry 7. Romantic Poetry 8. Victorian Poetry 9. Modern British and Irish Poetry: Twentieth Century to Today 10. American Poetry: First Encounters to 1865 11. American Poetry: 1865–1939 12. American Poetry: 1939–present 13. Poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania 14. Poetry in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean
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The Oxford History of Poetry in English Sixteenth-Century British Poetry
Volume 4 Edited by
CATHERINE BATES AND PATRICK CHENEY
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © The several contributors 2022 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946350 ISBN 978–0–19–883069–6 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
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To William J. Kennedy
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General Editor’s Preface The Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE) aims to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive survey of its vast and complicated topic: from Anglo-Saxon poetry through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global poetry, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other locales. By ‘poetry in English’, we mean, quite simply, poetry written in the English language: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Modern English. ‘English’ poetry certainly emerges in Anglo-Saxon England, around the sixth century ; but, as ‘poetry in English’ develops, it extends beyond the geographical boundaries of England. Today, poetry in English is planetary. While OHOPE necessarily limits the coverage, if not the scope, simply to come into existence, hopefully the Series will join other international projects in the world-service of ‘poetry’. What do we mean by ‘poetry’? While we believe that most readers will know what we mean, the topic is intricate, so much so that a quick definition proves elusive. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers six major definitions, with seven subdefinitions, bringing the total to thirteen. The definitions range from ‘Imaginative or creative literature in general; fable, fiction’, to ‘The art or work of a poet’, and can include even ‘A treatise on the art of poetry’, or, ‘figurative. Something comparable to poetry in its beauty or emotional impact; a poetic quality of beauty and intensity of emotion; the poetic quality of something’. The earliest attested use of the word ‘poetry’ traces to the 1380s, in contexts that emphasize the contested truth claims of figurative representation. In Chaucer’s House of Fame, one of the rivalrous authorities on the Troy story ‘seyde that Omer made lyes, / Feynynge in hys poetries’ (1477–8). The ending of Troilus and Criseyde includes a valediction for ‘the forme of olde clerkis speche / In poetrie’ (5.1854–5). John Trevisa’s translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon (finished in 1387) connects idolatry and poetry: ‘Of þe bryngynge forþ of mawmetrie com wel nyh al þe feyninge of poetrie’ (2.279). In the 1390s, by contrast, Chaucer’s Clerk sees poetry as an authoritative, illustrious tradition embodied in ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete, /. . . whos rethorike sweete / Enlumyned al Ytaille of poetrie’ (Canterbury Tales IV.31–3). Intriguingly, none of the OED definitions speaks of metre, let alone rhyme, and there is no suggestion that poetry includes different ‘kinds’ (or forms or genres). The recent and authoritative Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012), perhaps wisely, does not include an entry on ‘poetry’ itself. Because poetry remains such an elusive concept—and can include language in distinct metres (such as iambic pentameter) and rhymes (such as the ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg, or three quatrains and a couplet)—we might remain content simply to open the concept up, and let the volumes in the Series speak on their own. OHOPE does proceed through a general rubric. We have encouraged our contributors to address their project through the following formula: poetry as poetry—rather than say, poetry as context or in context. The goal is to highlight the art of poetry itself, as it unfolds historically in time, across idioms, forms, nations, and so forth. Yet we do not think such a goal at odds with context, nor should it be. Each volume is thus free to situate poetry historically, ideologically, as the editors see fit. Precisely because ‘Poetry in English’ spans some fifteen centuries, develops in four major historical ‘languages’ (Old, Middle, Early Modern, Modern), spread across multiple nations
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x ’ (ever-changing), and includes countless poets, both men and women, the fourteen-volume Oxford History of Poetry in English cannot succeed in mapping the full terrain. That has never been the goal. In keeping with the Press’s Oxford Series template, the volumes remain necessarily selective: no satisfactorily comprehensive ‘coverage’ is possible, or perhaps desirable. Each volume does the best it can to remain representative, and fair. We believe that OHOPE fills a gap in the available scholarship and criticism. At present, there is no authoritative history of poetry in English covering British, Irish, American, and Global poetry from the medieval through the modern eras. Readers might like to know that the origins to the present history evidently began with Alexander Pope. In the eighteenth century, Pope conceived of a history of ‘British’ poetry, but it took Thomas Warton to begin writing one, which he left unfinished at his death, still at work on the English Renaissance. Accordingly, the first to complete a comprehensive History of British Poetry was W. J. Courthope, who published a six-volume, single-authored work between 1895 and 1905. Other histories followed: in 1947, Herbert Grierson and J. C. Smith co-authored a one-volume Critical History of English Poetry (Oxford); in 1961, James Reeves published A Short History of English Poetry from 1340–1940 (New York); in 1962, Kenneth Hopkins published English Poetry: A Short History (London); and in 1981, G. S. Fraser produced A Short History of English Poetry (Shepton Mallet). Between 1977 and 1981, Routledge began a History of English Poetry, but evidently the series was never completed; only three volumes are in print: Old English and Middle English Poetry, edited by Derek A. Pearsall; Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660–1780, edited by Eric Rothstein; and Poetry of the Romantic Period, edited by J. R. de J. Jackson. In 1994, Carl Woodring, working with James Shapiro as Associate Editor, published The Columbia History of British Poetry, a one-volume edited collection beginning with Old English Poetry and ending in 1990. In 2010, the most recent attempt at such a history appeared, edited by the late Michael O’Neill, The Cambridge History of English Poetry, another single-volume collection, covering England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, with all chapters devoted to a single author or a small group of authors. As for histories of American poetry, in 1993 Jay Parini published an edited Columbia History of American Poetry, making Columbia the first press to print a history of poetry combining ‘British’ and ‘American’—anticipating the present Oxford History, yet on a much-reduced scale, minus Global poetry, and now thirty years from its publication date. Earlier histories in American poetry include Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska’s 1946 History of American Poetry 1900–1940 (Harcourt Brace) and Donald Barlow Stauffer’s 1974 Short History of American Poetry (Dutton). No histories of Global poetry in English exist. Consequently, the field remains wide open for a comprehensive history that includes Global, American, and British and Irish poetry, medieval to modern. The target audience for OHOPE is similarly complex, to include the general reader of poetry, students at several levels (upper-division secondary school, undergraduate, graduate), teachers at all levels, literary critics, and textual scholars—effectively, anyone interested in poetry in English. Each chapter aims to meet the primary criterion required for this readership: a combination of both a general orientation to its topic and a fresh approach and contribution to the field. A comprehensive Bibliography will be printed at the back of each volume. Moreover, each volume aims to feature a stable set of chapters. Not simply will there be chapters on major poets (‘Milton’), but each volume aims to include chapters on the following topics, geared to the particular era or century it covers: • The nature of authorship and literary career, as well as the role of the poet in society. • Imitation and intertextuality.
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’ xi • • • • • •
Prosody, poetics, and the nature of literary theory. Figuration and allusiveness. Modes of representation (e.g. allegory, ekphrasis, and blazon during the Renaissance). Genre, mode, and form. Translation. The material production and circulation of poetry (manuscript, performance, print), including the role of patronage.
OHOPE pays significant attention to such major cultural vectors as religion/theology, politics/nationalism, race/class, and gender/sexuality. However, the goal will be unusual in today’s critical climate: to connect such vectors to the matter of poetry itself; to discuss ‘history’ and the ‘material’ insofar as it allows for the historicisation of poetry as an art. Above all, The Oxford History of Poetry in English aims to provide an authoritative, useful helpmeet for enjoying and embracing one of the seminal achievements of world-art. Patrick Cheney
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Acknowledgements The Oxford History of Poetry in English has had a long history. Formally, it began on 16 April 2008, when Andrew McNeillie, then Senior Commissioning Editor of Literature at the Press, invited Patrick Cheney to be General Editor of the Series. The history continued when Penn State University offered its support—in particular, when the Head of the English Department at the time, Robin Schulze, offered financial and administrative support. Cheney then appointed four Coordinating Editors to manage the wide range of coverage for the Series, and we remain indebted to their early work and support: along with Professor Schulze, Robert R. Edwards, Laura L. Knoppers, and Robert Caserio. The Penn State team produced a detailed proposal to the Press, which in turn produced a series of readers’ reports, including recommendations for revision, one of which was to widen leadership of the project. At this point, a new set of Coordinating Editors was appointed: along with Professor Edwards for Medieval and Professor Knoppers for Early Modern (now at the University of Notre Dame), Michael O’Neill of the University of Durham for Modern British and Irish, Langdon Hammer of Yale for American, and Vinay Dharwadker of the University of Wisconsin for Global. A revised proposal then went to Press readers, to whom again we remain grateful. When Professor O’Neill passed away in 2018, his colleague at Durham, Stephen Regan, was appointed Coordinating Editor of Modern British and Irish. Recently as well, Professor Hammer has stepped down, and new appointments are underway. We wish to express our gratitude to all these early begetters of The Oxford History of Poetry in English. In particular, Cheney wishes to express gratitude to the subsequent Head of the English Department at Penn State, Mark Morrisson, for ongoing support, as well as the Heads of the Department of Comparative Literature, Caroline D. Eckhart and Bob Edwards. At Penn State, a sturdy group of Research Assistants has provided loyal help over many years: especially Danielle Ryle, the first designated OHOPE Research Assistant, but also Jayme Peacock, Brice Peterson, Ted Chelis, Paul Zajac, and Katharine Cleland. Throughout, Bob Edwards and Laura Knoppers have been a constant source of advice and support. Finally, Cheney wishes to thank John Watkins of the University of Minnesota for serving as an initial Co-Editor of Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. At the Press, we would like to thank Jacqueline Norton, current Senior Commissioning Editor of British, European, and American Literature, for her guidance over many years; and, more recently, Eleanor Collins, Senior Publishing Editor of Literature, and Karen Raith, Commissioning Editor of Humanities and Social Sciences. The project has been extremely complex, and we remain grateful for the advice we have received. Finally, we owe a special debt of gratitude to Nanami Kobayashi, Senior Research Assistant to Cheney at Penn State, for working heroically with Catherine Bates to compile a very complex document: the volume Bibliography. Nanami has displayed a remarkable eye for organisation and detail, right when the project needed it most. Nanami has also joined another Research Assistant, Mattison Schuknecht, in reading proofs for the entire book. Our work has been made immeasurably easier by the prompt and professional support of our Project Manager and production contact, Vasuki Ravichandran. We are extremely grateful to our superb copy editor, Jen Hinchliffe, whose eagle-eye identified (and saved us from)
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xiv many errors. Heartfelt thanks also go to Assistant Commissioning Editor, Aimee Wright, who has been closely involved with the volume in its final stages. OHOPE is dedicated to the memory of Michael O’Neill, who sadly passed away on 21 December 2018. Not merely a distinguished Romantics scholar and British poet, Michael was a Coordinating Editor of the Modern British and Irish unit of OHOPE, for which he provided expert, collegial leadership. Volume 4 of OHOPE, Sixteenth-Century British Poetry, is dedicated to William J. Kennedy, Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Cornell University. Bill has been a friend and colleague of the volume editors for many years. We admire his long-standing contribution to Renaissance studies, both English and Continental, and we appreciate the work he has done on behalf of our own careers. As recipient of the Renaissance Society of America’s Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award 2021, William J. Kennedy has himself had a truly distinguished ‘Renaissance’ career.
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Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Editorial Note
xix xxi xxiii
1. Introduction Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney
1
I. TRANSITIONS AND CONTEXTS 2. Transitions Seth Lerer
19
3. Social Contexts Andrew Hadfield
34
4. Professional Contexts Helen Smith
57
II. PRACTICES 5. Poetics Patrick Cheney
83
6. Style Jeff Dolven
101
7. Allusiveness Colin Burrow
122
8. Figuration Hannah Crawforth
143
9. Career Daniel Juan Gil
159
III. FORMS 10. Miscellany Tom MacFaul
177
11. Lyric Joseph Campana and Catherine Bates
191
12. Sonnet Chris Stamatakis
211
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xvi
13. Satire Michelle O’Callaghan
229
14. Pastoral Helen Cooper
244
15. Epic Tamsin Badcoe
262
16. Minor Epic Daniel Moss
285
17. History Philip Schwyzer
301
18. Elegy Andrea Brady
316
19. Complaint Paul D. Stegner
334
20. Devotional Poetry Claire McEachern
351
IV. POETS 21. Skelton Jane Griffiths
373
22. Scots Poetry Willy Maley and Theo Van Heijnsbergen
389
23. Wyatt and Surrey Cathy Shrank
405
24. Mid-Tudor Poetry Danielle Clarke
422
25. Philip Sidney Catherine Bates
439
26. Spenser: Shorter Poetry Ayesha Ramachandran
456
27. Spenser: The Faerie Queene Richard McCabe
477
28. Daniel, Drayton, Chapman Katharine Cleland
495
29. Marlowe Rachel Eisendrath
517
30. Shakespeare Dympna Callaghan
535
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xvii
31. Ralegh Andrew Hiscock
555
32. Mary Sidney Herbert Gillian Wright
569
V. TRANSITIONS 33. The Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Century Michael Schoenfeldt
587
Complete Bibliography Index
599 643
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List of Illustrations 4.1 Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender: Conteyning Twelve Aeglogues Proportionable to the Twelue Monethes (1579), sig. I3. Folger Shakespeare Library STC 23089. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
61
4.2 A page from John Lydgate’s ‘Kalendar’, a poetical paraphrase of the Sarum calendar © The British Library Board, Harley MS 1706, f. 4r.
63
4.3 Anon., ‘A most careles content of favors or disgrace’ © The British Library Board, BL Add MS 15, f. 9v.
65
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List of Contributors Tamsin Badcoe University of Bristol Catherine Bates University of Warwick Andrea Brady Queen Mary University of London Colin Burrow University of Oxford Dympna Callaghan Syracuse University Joseph Campana Rice University Patrick Cheney Penn State University Danielle Clarke University College Dublin Katharine Cleland Virginia Tech Helen Cooper University of Cambridge Hannah Crawforth Kings College London Jeff Dolven Princeton University Rachel Eisendrath Barnard College Daniel Juan Gil Texas Christian University Jane Griffiths University of Oxford Andrew Hadfield University of Sussex Andrew Hiscock Bangor University Seth Lerer University of California at San Diego Tom MacFaul University of Oxford Willy Maley University of Glasgow Richard McCabe University of Oxford Claire McEachern University of California at Los Angeles Daniel Moss Southern Methodist University Michelle O’Callaghan University of Reading Ayesha Ramachandran Yale University Michael Schoenfeldt University of Michigan Philip Schwyzer Exeter University Cathy Shrank Sheffield University Helen Smith York University
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xxii Chris Stamatakis University College London Paul D. Stegner California Polytechnic State University Theo Van Heijnsbergen University of Glasgow Gillian Wright University of Birmingham
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Editorial Note All OHOPE volumes work from the Series Style Guide, a modified version of the one used by Oxford University Press for humanities publications. Individual OHOPE volumes may further modify the Style Guide according to needs—for instance, the need to print and translate Old and Middle English in Volumes 1–3, or of early modern Scots in Volume 4. Because the OHOPE volumes include amongst their diverse readership the general reader and undergraduate students, the Series silently modernises all quotations of primary works, even when the texts being used rely on ‘old spelling’ form. Exceptions will be made in some cases, in keeping with scholarly understanding of the intentionality of the old spelling for a particular author. Where feasible, then, the standard editions of all authors have been quoted and cited. Primary texts are cited in full in the endnotes on their first occurrence, with abbreviated intext citations thereafter. Secondary texts are cited in full in the endnotes on their first occurrence, with an abbreviated endnote thereafter. When difficult words or phrases appear in the quotation of primary texts, they will be marked with an asterisk (*) and supported by a marginal gloss. Quotations from Classical authors generally come from the Loeb Classical Library. For convenience, all Greek words quoted in the texts are transliterated. All Latin quotations are translated into English. Each OHOPE volume concludes with a detailed, alphabetised Bibliography, combining primary and secondary sources, and citing works identified in the individual chapters themselves. Throughout the volume, OED abbreviates the Oxford English Dictionary online. ODNB abbreviates the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online.
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1 Introduction Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney
The sixteenth century forms the birth moment of modern ‘English’ poetry: that is, poetry written in the modern English language.¹ In our volume title—Sixteenth-Century British Poetry—we use the term ‘British’ to indicate our inclusion of poetry produced across Britain: in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. As Volume 4 in the fourteen-volume Oxford History of Poetry in English (OHOPE), Sixteenth-Century British Poetry aims to feature a history of the birth of modern poetry in greater detail than any previous volume.² To accomplish its aim, Sixteenth-Century British Poetry attends to the specific literary transitions, institutional contexts, artistic practices, and literary genres out of which, and within which, individual poets produce their poems. Although Sixteenth-Century British Poetry offers a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive survey of sixteenth-century British poetry, we acknowledge that the volume cannot cover everything, and everyone, and has no ambition to do so. Alternatively, the volume focuses on major topics and poets, with some attention given to less frequently covered material. In accord with the Oxford History series, the volume addresses a complex audience, including literary critics, textual scholars, the general reader of poetry, students at several levels (upper-division secondary school, undergraduate, graduate), and teachers at all levels. Each chapter attempts to meet the primary criterion required for this readership: a combination of both a general orientation and a fresh approach and contribution to the field. ¹ ‘Modern’ English replaces ‘Middle English’ during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, especially through the Great Vowel Shift: for example, the shift away from pronouncing long vowels. See Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, fifth edition (London, 2002); and Roger Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 3, 1476–1776 (Cambridge, 1999). ² OHOPE differs from the Oxford English Literary History series, edited by Jonathan Bate and Colin Burrow, which prioritises the historical over the literary; see, e.g., James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2, 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002); Vol. 3, 1533–1603: The Elizabethans, by Colin Burrow, is forthcoming. The Wiley-Blackwell A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, edited by Catherine Bates (Chichester, 2018), covers poetry in both the sixteenth and the seventeenth century. Excellent material, fundamentally contextual, also appears in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600 (Cambridge, 2000); Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009); and Michael Hattaway (ed.), A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Chichester, 2010). More broadly, Michael O’Neill (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Poetry (Cambridge, 2010), includes five chapters on the sixteenth century, ranging from Dunbar and Douglas to Marlowe and Shakespeare. More specifically, see David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2002). Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), focuses on the topic of the present volume, but does not include its coverage and scope (for a detailed bibliography, see 295–8). Earlier studies include especially C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954); but also Maurice Evans, English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century, second edition (London, 1967); and Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, second edition (London, 1993). For the historical background, see Patrick Collinson (ed.), The Sixteenth Century, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2002). The present volume complements recent volumes in the Oxford Handbook series, such as Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 2010); Jonathan Post (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry (Oxford, 2013); and Catherine Bates (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philip Sidney (forthcoming). Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Introduction In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Catherine Bates & Patrick Cheney 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0001
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2 - Overall, Sixteenth-Century British Poetry highlights a broad critical narrative about the advent of modern English poetry, from John Skelton at the beginning to Edmund Spenser at the end. These two poets are the major ‘laureate poets’ of the sixteenth century, and each produces a unique multi-genre corpus of poems relating the self-reflexive poet to both the nation and eternity, producing an art that features a link between politics and religion, usually narrated in a fiction structured around a gender dynamic, often male and female.³ In between Skelton and Spenser, such poets as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Isabella Whitney and George Gascoigne, Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, Sir Walter Ralegh and Christopher Marlowe, and finally William Shakespeare all contribute to the formation of a national poetic enterprise. Thus the volume aims to chart the way in which—during the four reigns of the century, Henrician (1485–1547), Edwardian (1547–53), Marian (1553–8), and Elizabethan (1558–1603)—sixteenth-century poets work with Classical, medieval, Continental, and native traditions (e.g., Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer) to develop a series of breakthroughs: in English prosody, especially iambic pentameter and blank verse; in literary genre, such as the sonnet, pastoral, epic, and satire; but also such complex verse forms as the sestina;⁴ the idea of a poetic career (including Virgilian, Ovidian, Horatian, and Petrarchan models; see Chapter 9); and the articulation of both an ‘inward’ and a ‘public’ style and voice (see Chapter 6). Sixteenth-Century British Poetry also attends to the momentous cultural events that underpin these literary achievements: the consolidation of the printing press and the humanist increase in education and literacy; the advent of the Reformation and the formation of the modern Church of England; the centralisation of the English monarchy and the counterpointing of anti-monarchical, ‘republican’ thought; the colonial exploration of the Americas and international competition with imperial Spain; the building of the new commercial theatres in London (intersecting with ‘poetry’ in compelling ways); the advancement of modern science; the new Protestant emphasis on companionate marriage and the consequent inauguration of women’s rights; and the harbinger of a shift from an ‘exterior’ episteme (or system of knowledge) to an ‘interior’ one, paving the way for the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes and others, as leading voices of modern identity. The volume includes both male and female poets, canonical and noncanonical, both ‘high’ and ‘popular’ forms, across the four major poetic idioms of the century: lyric, epic, narrative, and dramatic. We have designed the volume primarily to let contextual material underwrite the art of poetry, so as to emphasise such topics as metre and form, figuration and allusiveness, representation and literary career. The volume shows that, by the end of the century, literary
³ On Spenser as a laureate, see Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA, 1983), 55–100; on Skelton, see Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford, 2006), 18–37. For a magisterial history of the intersection of Tudor politics and religion, see John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988). For an important recent study of ‘The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature’ (book subtitle), see Melissa E. Sanchez, Erotic Subjects (Oxford, 2011). On the late sixteenth-century same-sex poetry of Richard Barnfield, see Ceri Sullivan, ‘Richard Barnfield’, in David Scott Kastan (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, 5 vols. (Oxford, 2006), 1.128–9; and Laura Aydelotte, ‘Barnfield, Richard’, in Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, and Alan Stewart (eds), The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, 3 vols. (Chichester, 2012), 47–9. ⁴ A sestina consists of six stanzas of six lines each followed by a three-line envoy: ‘The same six end words occur in each stanza, but in a shifting order that follows a fixed pattern: each successive stanza takes its pattern from the preceding stanza (i.e., last and first, then next to last and second, then third from last and third)’; in the envoy, the end words typically come from the six words in the above pattern: see A. Preminger, C. Scott, and D. Caplan, ‘Sestina’, in Roland Greene (gen. ed.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, fourth edition (Princeton, NJ, 2012), 1296–7.
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3 culture relies on the printing press and the commercial theatre (and, to an extent, on manuscript culture) to leave a lasting legacy for English literature: an authorial template yoking ‘dramatic’ and ‘nondramatic’ poetry within a literary career, as Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson take leadership, all in response to the poetic career of Spenser.⁵ Within OHOPE, Sixteenth-Century British Poetry forms a midpoint between Volume 3, Medieval Poetry: 1400–1500 (edited by Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards), and Volume 5, Seventeenth-Century British Poetry (edited by Laura L. Knoppers). Inside OHOPE’s comprehensive structure, Sixteenth-Century British Poetry forms the first of a three-volume set devoted to Early Modern British Poetry, to be concluded by Volume 6, Eighteenth-Century British Poetry (edited by Christine Gerrard). This specific Series design aims to establish continuity between the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, even as it registers important differences, disruptions, and discontinuities. Below, we review the structure and contents of the volume in more detail, and end with a case study that helps illustrate ‘sixteenth-century British poetry’ in the poem of one poet: Edmund Spenser in the Temple of Venus episode in Book 4, canto 10 of The Faerie Queene (1596).
Transitions and Contexts Sixteenth-Century British Poetry divides into five parts, the first of which we title ‘Transitions and Contexts’. Fulfilling its aim to ‘retell the history of early modern English poetry’, Seth Lerer opens the volume by tracing the shift from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and by showing how the poetry of the early and mid-sixteenth century not only marks that moment of transition but reveals a new fascination for the transitional itself. Reviving three little-known works, he discusses ways in which poets of that period used the Roman poet Ovid—specifically, the tales of Pyramus and Thisbe, Morpheus, and Midas in the Metamorphoses—to explore meta-poetic themes of literary translation, mutation, and change. Lerer ends by showing how, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594–6), Shakespeare celebrates and dramatises the literary transformations—witty, crazy, imaginative, experimental, and self-aware—of the century preceding it. In the first of two chapters on context, Andrew Hadfield goes on to explore the part the period’s unique social matrix played in its cultural production. Humanist educational practice disseminated a new familiarity with the classics that was to impact radically on vernacular literature, introducing ideals of Latinity in grammar, metre, argument, and genre that were both adopted and creatively changed. The confessional upheavals of the Reformation promoted a new attention to the scriptural Word and encouraged practices like translation as ways of personalising devotion and religious belief. And a newly centralised monarchical power prompted a complicated mix of eulogy, censorship, critique, advice-literature, and comparison with republican models. In the second chapter on context, Helen Smith looks at the professional environment from which the poetry of the period emerged. For poesy—literally, ‘making’—was the product not only of poets but a supporting cast of scribes, copyists, patrons, printers, publishers,
⁵ On the printing press as the premier invention for sixteenth-century England, see Colin Burrow, ‘The Sixteenth Century’, in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600 (Cambridge, 2000), 11–28. On both print and theatre, see Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National PoetPlaywright (Cambridge, 2004).
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4 - stationers, and booksellers. Without these agents (not to mention a material supply of paper, parchment, pens, quills, ink, book-bindings, nor the industrial machinery of the printing press), poetry could not have been written, circulated, read, copied, rewritten, and revised. The continuance of manuscript circulation and practices like commonplacing (collecting the sayings of other writers within a commonplace book) made possible the open-ended and collaborative projects by men and women that typify the century, and that the new medium of print both imitated and enabled.
Practices The second part of the volume, ‘Practices’, features five chapters: on poetics, style, allusiveness, figuration, and the literary career, respectively. In the first of these, Patrick Cheney argues that sixteenth-century poetics is characterised by the shift from a largely rhetorical model towards a theory of the sublime. He notes that one of the major innovations of the century was its recurrent publication of treatises on poetics (in Latin but increasingly in English): an indication of the renewed self-consciousness and selfdefinition with which poets of the period sought to fashion an art of poetry appropriate to their place and time. Along with paratexts and poetry itself, these treatises negotiated the competing claims of a civic-humanist rhetorical project, that justified literature on grounds of its benefit to the state, against a sublime poetics of inspiration and transport that emphasised a higher, almost mystical engagement with art and the drive towards individual freedom on the part of poet and reader alike. In the following chapter, on style, Jeff Dolven follows byways rather than highways, drawing attention to stylistic roads not taken in sixteenth-century poetry as a way of demonstrating the sheer creativity and experimentation of the period. It is from this ‘rich matrix’—‘a field of stylistic possibility as broad as the geography of Europe and as deep, and various, as its pasts’—that a recognisably sixteenth-century style was to emerge: the realisation, namely, that style is necessarily something idiosyncratic and individual. Style lies in what other poets forsake or leave behind, like the archaisms and allegory of Spenser, or the inimitable voice of John Donne. It was the sixteenth century that had the confidence to discover that ‘every good poet’s style is a dead end’. The two chapters that follow both consider features without which poetry would not be poetry. In the first, Colin Burrow writes about allusiveness: that ever-reverberating echochamber within which poets refer knowingly or otherwise to one another. Alluding to William Empson’s model in Seven Types of Ambiguity, Burrow unpacks seven types of allusiveness—no less ambiguous—that range from the ‘fully ideational’, at one end (in which a prior author or text is imitated but without any verbal allusions), to the ‘fully citational’, at the other (in which every line imitates or quotes an earlier text). Interesting things happen when one code or discourse is transposed onto another, as when a high form like tragedy alludes to a low form like the ballad and the different registers ‘audibly collide’. As the practice of allusion changes from John Skelton’s friendly embrace of his medieval masters at the beginning of the century, to John Marston’s aggressive parody of his fellow satirists at the end, it becomes a marker of the new kind of ‘possessive authorship’ that begins to emerge. In the second of this pair of chapters, Hannah Crawforth writes about figuration: that reliance on figures of speech such as simile and metaphor which makes poetry what it is. Taking her cue from Kenneth Burke, she presents figuration as thought in action: as what, for sixteenth-century writers, gave
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5 language its agency, drama, effectiveness, and instrumentality (in a word, its life). She maps onto the writing of Fulke Greville—especially his ‘sonnet’ sequence, Caelica—the four main tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, while acknowledging (along with Burke) their notorious tendency to merge into one another. Taking Greville as a representative example is itself, of course, a form of critical figuration, and Greville’s distinctive use of the tropes is thus illustratively figured as a synecdoche for sixteenthcentury poetic practice as a whole. In a final chapter of this section, Daniel Juan Gil discusses a major innovation of sixteenth-century poetry—the idea of a literary career—as the power invested in poetic figuration came to be extended to the power of the poet figure him- (and increasingly, her-) self. Revising the seminal work of Richard Helgerson, which had focused on individual poets and their careers, Gil presents a more sociological study of the conditions that made the existence of such ‘career poets’ possible at all. One such was the civic-humanist rhetorical model, discussed above, which gave poetry a social function and thus endowed it with cultural capital. A text like Richard Tottel’s famous miscellany, Songs and Sonnets, effectively extended such capital to a new elite—the ‘gentle reader’ who might not be courtly but was capable of fine literary discriminations and taste—as distinction came to be based less on social access than cultural competence.
Forms The third part of the volume, ‘Forms’, consists of eleven chapters which focus on the major forms and genres of the period, demonstrating the framing-vitality of genre in the revolutionary development of English verse. This section begins with Tom MacFaul on that quintessentially sixteenth-century phenomenon, the poetic miscellany. Continuing with the theme of the literary career, his chapter considers the role of the poet—and the attendant question of authorship—as it was seen to develop across three key miscellanies: Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets (1557), A Mirror for Magistrates (1559), and England’s Helicon (1600). Where the miscellany format initially served to create a sense of community amongst both poets and their readers by appealing to a common humanity and mobilising (a carefully non-sectarian) pity, the end of the century saw the emergence of greater individualism, akin to the ‘possessive authorship’ mapped out by Colin Burrow in Chapter 7. The next chapter, by Joseph Campana and Catherine Bates, looks at lyric (the most common component of the miscellanies), and after considering ways in which the form has been theorised, both then and now, it goes on to consider ways in which it has been practised. Typically, lyric is both short and sweet. Diminutive in size, a lyric poem is capable of being taken in at a glance, and it thus has a special appeal to the eye. At the same time, deriving its name from the lyre, lyric has anciently been associated with song, and its musical cadences of rhythm and rhyme also have a special appeal to the ear. While this chapter focuses on forms like the ode, epigram, riddle, song, and Psalm, the chapter that follows, by Chris Stamatakis, continues the investigation of lyric by looking at the particular form which the sixteenth century made its own: the sonnet. Here, these competing tendencies towards visual and acoustic constitute just one of a ‘series of dilemmas’ that characterise the sonnet form, as it pulls between closure and dilation, fixity and revision, copy and copia, rhyme and reason, sense and sound. ‘The history of the sixteenth-century sonnet’, Stamatakis writes, ‘is the history of these tussles’. Like every good sonnet, this chapter is governed by an overarching conceit—in this case the motif of ‘labour’—as, in
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6 - producing this deceptively easy form, the sonneteer is shown labouring for invention, copious abundance, and renewal. Towards the end of his chapter, Stamatakis notes that—towards the end of its own short but intense development throughout the sixteenth century—the sonnet ‘seems steadily to modulate into, and cede ground to, the epigram’. In the next chapter, Michelle O’Callaghan follows this lead by looking at the sharper, more pointed forms that characterise the period’s evolution of verse satire. She revises the conventional view that satire shifted from the humour, ridicule, and mockery associated with the Roman poet Horace (and imitated by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the earlier part of the century) to the bitter railing and rough invective associated with the Roman satirists Juvenal and Persius (and imitated by British satirists of the 1590s, including Joseph Hall, John Marston, and John Donne), to show that verse satire was always polyphonic, multi-vocal, and drawn from a variety of sources. The theme of satire continues into the chapter that follows in which Helen Cooper examines pastoral, again emphasising the form’s reliance on a range of different models (native, Classical, Continental), registers (high and low), and types of language (courtly and rustic, amorous and plainspoken). As with satire, generic variety proved to be one of pastoral’s key strengths, as it negotiated the distance between poetic ideals and idylls, on the one hand, and their social and political realities, on the other. The next two chapters look in turn at the genre which theorists of the period regarded as the highest and most serious of all—namely, epic—and its diminutive version, the minor or mock-epic, also known as the epyllion. Tamsin Badcoe opens the discussion by arguing that sixteenth-century epic invites us to look beyond what might be regarded as its most obvious features (eulogy, heroism, maleness) in order to consider the sheer multiplicity of voices it accommodates. Although handed down by the acknowledged greats of the literary past (such as Homer and Virgil, Dante and Petrarch), epic provided ample opportunities for cultural appropriation. Translation might seem an act of humble imitation, but it gave sixteenth-century poets a chance to develop a style and narrative suited to their own particular moment (and, indeed, to open up the singular epic voice to a plurality of voices, including those of women). In addition to The Faerie Queene, the chapter looks at less wellknown texts such as Albion’s England by William Warner, and an epic elegy on Sir Francis Drake by Charles Fitzgeoffrey. The plurality of epic is sufficiently generous to include within its compass the parodic counter-form of the epyllion, which Daniel Moss goes on to discuss in the chapter that follows. Ovidian rather than Virgilian in content and tone, the genre of the minor epic turns out to contain as much variety as the form it mocks if not modifies. Moss painstakingly unfolds a typology of minor epic which differentiates between ‘associative’ imitation—in which an author advertises his (it always is ‘his’) continuity with the form’s pioneers—and the ‘dissociative’ type, in which an author uses the form to distinguish himself from his rivals. As such, minor epic came to signal a distinctive opportunity for selffashioning and self-positioning in the course of a writer’s literary career. Philip Schwyzer next examines one of the knottiest problems to vex the writers of sixteenth-century verse: the relation between history (‘truth’) and poetry (‘fiction’). In some ways, history could be considered as a form of poetry. Sixteenth-century readers regarded the style of medieval chronicles as alien and ‘quaint’ by the standards of their own time, for example, in comparison with which a pared-down plain style seemed evidence of historical veracity. Yet, by focusing on moments when ‘history’ appears as a text-withina-text—most notably when Sir Guyon and Prince Arthur read the histories of their respective nations in Book 2, canto 10 of The Faerie Queene—Schwyzer demonstrates how inextricable the two forms really were. Far from being fictive or ‘made-up’, poetry
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7 reveals a deep historical truth: namely, that (going back to Homer’s Iliad) wars are only symptoms of passion or love, and ‘historia . . . founded in hysteria’. The last three chapters of this section consider poetic forms that deal with different kinds of human pain. In the first of these, Andrea Brady looks at the conflicting origins and definitions of elegy: from ancient times a form associated with both love (especially sex) and death. For all their differences, however, the love elegy and funeral elegy have a surprising amount in common, not least a shared generic ambiguity. Both forms appeal to collective human experience while emphasising the trauma of the individual, and—perhaps because of this—they both also serve the competitive function whereby a poet or persona gains distinction from the sheer incomparability of their frustration or grief. Ironically, elegy’s very ‘lack of distinction as a genre’ seems precisely to enable this distinction on the part of its speaker or maker. In the second of these chapters, Paul D. Stegner takes up the story of complaint, a form which seems implicitly to ask whether poetry can have an effect: bring about change, make a difference, correct injustices, and right wrongs. By the end of the chapter, the answer to this question seems to be ‘no’, but—as with elegy—the one purpose complaint does seem to serve is the poet’s own self-promotion and self-authorisation. Like elegy, complaint, too, lacks clearly defined formal characteristics, but again this generic ambiguity became an opportunity for poets to make the form their own and to further their status and literary careers by doing so. In the third of these chapters, Claire McEachern explores devotional poetry, the point at which sacred and profane—devotion to a human beloved or devotion to the divine—converge. Rather than see one lead causally to the other, however (as if the amorous poetry of, say, Philip Sidney led directly to the religious poetry of, say, George Herbert), McEachern reads sixteenth-century devotional lyric on its own terms, asking what Reformation-era mentalities thought the form was and was capable of doing. Her chapter thus focuses on the period’s obsession with scriptural paraphrase— especially that of the Psalms—as a place to explore relations between the divine Word and human words, to distinguish different kinds of authorship, and to find ways of expressing extremes of frustration, anxiety, sorrow, grief, and repentance (as well as love), on both an individual and a collective level, and across the confessional divide.
Poets The fourth part of the volume, ‘Poets’, features twelve chapters on sixteenth-century poets, ranging from Skelton at one end to Mary Sidney Herbert at the other. In the opening chapter, Jane Griffiths examines the formal experimentation which characterises Skelton’s poetry, above all, the distinctive form invented by him and known as ‘Skeltonics’. However wild or anarchic it might seem, this unique form is shown to be closely governed, its organising principle being the poet’s careful patterning of sound through rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and word association. It was on the practice of such technical skill that Skelton grounded his understanding of the poet’s cultural capital and authority: as a ‘maker’ who has the power to ‘make new matter out of words’, and to be ‘the maker of his own meaning’. In the chapter that follows, on the poetry of sixteenth-century Scotland, Willy Maley and Theo van Heijnsbergen take a similar approach, showing how elements that might seem chaotic—even ‘unpoetic’—in forms such as satire or flytings (competitive exchanges of insults) are in fact the result of careful decisions: guttural or alliterative lines, for example, might serve as the ‘structural attribute’ of a ‘purposeful phonaesthetics’, allowing verse in Scots to combine the scatological with the sublime. Scottish poets also conceived of
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8 - themselves as ‘makers’ (or ‘makars’), emphasising the technique and craft of their art with a self-consciousness that drew attention to its own creative process. Indeed, this ‘nexus of the metafictional, the reader-focused, and the moral’ can be described as the ‘core defining characteristic’ of Scottish poetry in this period. Scottish poets looked to French rather than Italian culture for much of the century, but the next chapter considers the poets largely responsible for introducing Italian forms into English verse: Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Here, Cathy Shrank draws out some of the differences between these two poets so commonly paired. Where Surrey is interested in ventriloquising or impersonating other voices, for example, Wyatt typically intensifies the lyric ‘I’ (although, no less typically, that ‘I’ proves more opaque than revelatory). Where Surrey is interested in the external, natural world, Wyatt is drawn to internal, closed, and claustrophobic spaces and to the experience of suffering within. Surrey’s self-sacrificing and stoical lover and his loyal, passive, wifely beloved, contrast with Wyatt’s offended and spiteful version, and his proactive but treacherous mistress. In the next chapter, Danielle Clarke does for mid-Tudor poetry what Seth Lerer did for the early decades of the century, emphasising the vibrant, experimental, democratising, socially mixed, and politically engaged nature of this transitional period, and the importance of stressing connections and continuities as the production of poetry and notions of authorship developed apace. One of the characteristic forms of this period, for example, was the single-authored collection, in which writers (women as well as men) appropriated the popular miscellany format in order to display their poetic virtuosity and variety, to create a readership, and to assert their own authority on the page by material, spatial, and typographical means. In the chapter on Sidney that follows, Catherine Bates brings out the underlying theme of the volume as a whole, namely that formalist analysis is inseparable from historicist study and central to understanding the history of poetry. Like Hannah Crawforth in Chapter 8, Bates too draws on the work of Kenneth Burke. By choosing to write almost exclusively in the genres of lyric and pastoral, Sidney implies that poetry is specifically called upon to transact power-relations that are discrepant or out of sync. When communication is attempted between different classes of being (or beings of a different class), an extra effort is required—a rhetoric of courtship, a need for persuasion, in a word, art—that proves quite unnecessary when the parties in question are on a par, speak the same language, and understand each other perfectly. In negotiating relations that are complex—whether sexually in the case of lyric, or socially in the case of pastoral—poetry is thus generated by the inequalities of gender and class. The next two chapters consider the vast poetic output of Edmund Spenser, and in the first of these Ayesha Ramachandran unfolds the complex communication that occurs between the poet’s shorter poems and his great epic, The Faerie Queene. Necessarily existing in a scalar relation to the latter, in a ratio of small to large, Spenser’s lyric, pastoral, satiric, and complaint poems are locked in ‘continuous conversation’ with the epic and offer an ‘oblique commentary’ on its contexts and content. The shorter poems thus serve as a ‘crucial counterpoint’ to the epic, mobilising a set of voices—personal, private, critical, marginalised, pessimistic, despairing—that take a different perspective on its nationalistic ambitions. In the second of these two chapters, Richard McCabe shows that this conversation— between different genres, between part and whole—is no less complex, active, and ongoing within The Faerie Queene itself. Spenser’s ‘generic fusion’ of epic and romance, for example, is central to the poem’s aesthetic, as is its endemic deferral of closure or meaning. Indeed, indeterminacy proves ‘aesthetically functional’ here, as the reader is drawn into the same
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9 interpretative doubts and struggles as the protagonists themselves. If the shorter poems comment on the epic from the outside, the narrator’s voice does the same from within, being ‘by turns assertive, apologetic, hopeful, or despondent’, and ultimately subject to attack. In the 1596 edition of the poem, Books 4–6 serve as a brooding reflection on the hope and optimism of Books 1–3, published in 1590. Katharine Cleland follows this with a chapter on three poets who fashioned their poetic identities and oeuvres in conversation both with each other and with Spenser, the undisputed laureate of their day. Presenting themselves as professional print-poets with a claim to ‘laureate’ status themselves, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and George Chapman each contributed to the formation of an English literary tradition addressed to a general readership rather than an elite few. Vying with one another as much as with Spenser, these three poets engage variously with lyric, pastoral, epic, and epyllion as ways of crafting their début and defining a coherent poetic career. The next two chapters consider the poet-playwrights, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, respectively. In describing Marlowe’s poetry as ‘anti-epic at its innermost core’, Rachel Eisendrath again shows how productive the period’s conversation with epic turns out to be. In this case, Marlowe exhibits a profound tension with, if not resistance to, epic poetry and all it signifies: machismo, empire, violence, subordination, and power grabs. Against the relentlessly teleological narrative and end-driven action of epic, he cultivates instead a poetics of dallying, dawdle, and delay that pits Ovid against Virgil in order to parody epic and subvert it. For Marlowe, it is poetry that has agency, not strongmen or epic heroes. The ability to create fictional realities and whole new worlds—not to mention selves—reveals an unknown power, albeit one that needs the ‘intense sociality of human life’ to avoid being illusory and lonely. In the chapter on Shakespeare’s poetry, Dympna Callaghan focuses on the largely Ovidian voice that characterises his verse. Shaped by convention and lyric artifice, Shakespeare’s poetic voice was early identified with Ovid: described by a contemporary as ‘mellifluous and honey-tongued’, its sound was heard as sweet and smooth. At the same time, the poet is often left ‘tongue-tied’ (sonnets 66, 80, 85)—his voice constricted—as if its flow was experienced most acutely at those very moments of impediment or block. These competing tendencies between an outpouring of words, on the one hand, and utter speechlessness, on the other, are worked out at greater length in Shakespeare’s longer narrative poems, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and to some extent A Lover’s Complaint. In the last two chapters of this section, the question of poetic voice is moot. One of the most striking features of Sir Walter Ralegh’s poetry, for example, is doubt about what he wrote or whether a poem (attributed, perhaps, to ‘Ignoto’) might be his. Acknowledging the characteristic elusiveness of the Ralegh canon, Andrew Hiscock uses it as an illustrative example of the ‘experience of early modern poetics more generally’. Ralegh’s surviving output includes a sententious poetry of common experience and proverbial wisdom, in which anything personal or individualised is rejected in favour of a more general and universal perspective on human life. In stark contrast to the plain style and authoritative voice of these poems, however, is the chaotic and hysterical voice of the ‘Cynthia’ poems (addressed to Queen Elizabeth), which goes to the opposite extreme in expressing both ‘personal defeat and cultural disintegration’. In the chapter that follows, Gillian Wright looks at the poetry of Mary Sidney Herbert, a similarly elusive figure whose poetic corpus it has also taken some time to establish. Wright engages with the full range of Sidney Herbert’s manuscript and print poetry, while asking why ‘such dazzling poetry [is] so difficult to write about’. As with Ralegh, there are issues of authorship and attribution, but also of voice.
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10 - In the work for which Sidney Herbert is most famous—her completion of the metrical paraphrase of the Psalms begun by her brother, Philip Sidney—she is shown to subordinate her own voice to his, or to the version in the Geneva Bible they both used, but also to speak boldly ‘in the voice of God’ and so to ventriloquise the deity Himself.
Transitions To close, the volume ends as it began, with a chapter on ‘Transitions’: this time, the transition to the seventeenth century. Here Michael Schoenfeldt summarises sixteenthcentury poetry by looking back at its various forms—including the sonnet, satire, pastoral, epyllion, and devotional verse—from the perspective of the seventeenth century. He shows that, however arbitrary such century divisions might be for the purposes of periodisation, the transition from one literary era to another is in this case a real one: ‘the death of a longserving female monarch is synchronised, almost precisely, with a profound change in literary style’. The idealisation that characterised the sonnet boom in the 1590s, for example, no longer seemed so appropriate after Elizabeth’s death in 1603, while the satire of that decade developed into an edginess, anxiety, and ‘general darkening’ of mood that is made particularly visible in the poetry of that ‘profoundly transitional writer’, John Donne. The chapter rounds off the volume by casting a backward glance at what has gone before while looking ahead to the century (and the volume in OHOPE) that follows.
A Case Study: Spenser’s Temple of Venus and Sixteenth-Century Poetry To illustrate succinctly what might be innovative about poetry in English during the sixteenth century, we turn by way of example to Spenser’s Temple of Venus episode in Book 4, canto 10 of The Faerie Queene. Perhaps remarkably, this episode depends on, gathers in, and revolutionises the major topics that are covered in the present volume. To begin with, the episode is unique within The Faerie Queene—and probably within sixteenthcentury British poetry as a whole—insofar as it proceeds via no fewer than five voices, all of which emerge in a single verse style: the style of The Faerie Queene itself.⁶ The first voice is that of Edmund Spenser, whose name is advertised as the author of the book on the 1596 title page. The second voice is that of the narrator, which scholars distinguish from the voice of the poet.⁷ The third voice is that of the hero inside the fiction, Sir Scudamour: a character written by the author and voiced by the narrator, who tells other characters in the fiction (including the heroine of Chastity in Book 3, Britomart) about his abduction of the virgin Amoret from the Temple of Venus. Fourth, inside the story that Scudamour tells, an anonymous ‘one’ (Faerie Queene, 4.10.43, line 7) sings a four-stanza Hymn to Venus (see Faerie Queene, 4.10.44–7).⁸ And fifth (as if coming round full circle), the voice singing this
⁶ In addition to Dolven in this volume (Chapter 6), see David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge, 2013). See also Richard Danson Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene (Manchester, 2019). ⁷ See Jerome S. Dees, ‘The Narrator of The Faerie Queene: Patterns of Response’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 12 (1971), 537–68, and ‘Ship Imagery’, in A. C. Hamilton (gen. ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto, 1990), 655–6. ⁸ Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007).
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11 Hymn records Spenser’s own English translation of the Hymn to Venus with which the Latin poet Lucretius opened his Latin epic, De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things].⁹ In assembling this choral set of voices, the Temple of Venus episode advances the poem’s famed nine-line ‘Spenserian stanza’, which rhymes ababbcbcc, and which Spenser adapts from the eight-line stanza known as ottava rima (rhyming abababcc) used by his two precursors in the genre of epic romance, Ludovico Ariosto in the Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso in the Gerusalemme Liberata. The Temple of Venus episode is a poetic tour de force, a high point of Spenserian authorship but also of sixteenth-century poetry in English. Spenser’s ‘imitation’ of other authors and texts exfoliates almost exponentially. In addition to the ‘Englishing’ of the Lucretian Hymn to Venus and the verse form of Tasso and Ariosto—that is, Classical and Renaissance—the episode imitates two key medieval works: lines 3150–256 of Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose (c 1275) for the figure of Daunger guarding the Temple of Venus (see Faerie Queene, 4.10.13–17); and lines 239–40 of Chaucer’s Parlement of Fowls (c 1380) for the figure of Dame Concord (see Faerie Queene, 4.10.31–5), as well as lines 269–73 of the same text for the description of Venus’s body (see Faerie Queene, 4.10.40–3).¹⁰ The intertextual concentration of medieval, Classical, and Renaissance texts in a single episode makes the Temple of Venus a veritable case study of Spenserian imitatio.¹¹ The presence especially of medieval texts marks the Temple of Venus episode as a ‘transitional’ text, as discussed by Lerer in Chapter 2. By linking the medieval period with a Renaissance work, the episode constructs a model of periodicity—of the way in which a ‘Renaissance’ work comes into being at a moment of ‘rebirth’ (‘renaissance’ in French) in European history.¹² Conversely, certain features of the episode—in particular, its biting edge, to be discussed presently—mark the Temple as a harbinger of the ‘darker’ poetry to emerge in the English literary landscape, mounted by the surge of satires in the late 1590s and early seventeenth century (Marston, Hall, Donne), by the fierce comic energy of Ben Jonson (Every Man In His Humour, Volpone, The Alchemist), and by the darkening shadows of Shakespeare in the great tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth), as well as in his ‘problem comedies’ (All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida) (see Schoenfeldt, Chapter 33 in this volume).¹³ The position of the Temple of Venus episode within the structure of The Faerie Queene is itself anomalous. While the episode presents what C. S. Lewis famously calls the ‘allegorical core’ of Book 4, it alone of the core cantos within the six Books emerges through the complexity of the five-voice harmony articulated above.¹⁴ To be precise, the Temple episode is the only core canto narrated by a character inside the fiction. The House of Holiness in Book 1, the Castle of Alma in Book 2, the Gardens of Adonis in Book 3, Isis Church in ⁹ See Anthony Esolen, ‘Spenserian Chaos: Lucretius in The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies, 11 (1994), 31–51. ¹⁰ See the notes of Hamilton (ed.), Faerie Queene, 484 (on Jean de Meun), and 487–8 (on Chaucer). On Chaucer in the episode, see Judith H. Anderson, ‘The “Covert Vele”: Chaucer, Spenser, and Venus’, English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994), 638–59. On The Romance of the Rose in Spenser, see Maureen Quilligan, ‘Words and Sex: The Language of Allegory in the De planctu naturae, the Roman of the Rose, and Book III of The Faerie Queene’, Allegorica, 2.1 (1977), 195–216; and Paul Piehler, ‘The Romance of the Rose’, in A. C. Hamilton (gen. ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto, 1990), 618–19. ¹¹ In addition to Burrow in this volume (Chapter 7), see his magisterial book: Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (Oxford, 2019). ¹² The seminal work on the Renaissance as a period concept in England and the Continent remains William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, 1989). ¹³ On this critical narrative, including criticism, see, Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry, 280–7. ¹⁴ C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1936), 334.
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12 - Book 5, and Mount Acidale in Book 6 are all told by the poet-narrator.¹⁵ Alternatively, the conspicuous narrative status of the Temple in the structure of The Faerie Queene draws attention to itself as a moment of authorship. There is nothing else like it in Spenser’s poetic canon, or, one wants to say, in the canon of sixteenth-century poetry. The poetry in the episode itself is ‘golden’, to borrow Lewis’s influential classification for the groundbreaking style of Spenser and Sidney: By golden poetry I mean not simply good poetry, but poetry which is, so to speak, innocent or ingenuous . . . [I]n the Golden period of Elizabethan poetry . . . [m]en have at last learned how to write; for a few years nothing more is needed than to play out again and again the strong, simple music of the uncontorted line and to load one’s poem with all that is naturally delightful—with flowers and swans, with ladies’ hair, hands, lips, breasts, and eyes, with silver and gold, woods and waters, the stars, the moon and the sun.¹⁶
In the Temple of Venus episode, Spenser’s description of the Garden of Venus outside the Temple exemplifies the style of golden poetry: Fresh shadowes, fit to shroud from sunny ray; Faire lawnds,* to take the sunne in season dew; *open spaces Sweet springs, in which a thousand Nymphs did play; Soft rombling brookes, that gentle slomber drew; High reared mounts, the lands about to vew; Low looking dales, disloignd* from common gaze; *remote Delightfull bowres, to solace louers trew; False Labyrinthes, fond runners eyes to daze: All which by nature made did nature selfe amaze. (Faerie Queene, 4.10.24)
Lines 1–8 feature parallelism: each line begins with a geographical phrase designating a specific feature of the landscape (‘Fair lawnds’, and so on), while the remainder of each line adds a detail regarding its use, value, or effect (‘Delightfull bowres, to solace louers trew’, and so forth). In this precise description, the artful verse presents the natural state of the landscape, so much so that the place amazes even Nature herself: a localised instance of what Paul de Man calls ‘the master trope of poetic discourse’, personification (or prosopopoeia).¹⁷ In his Art of English Poetry (1589), George Puttenham calls the larger figure of speech in this stanza parison, ‘the figure of even’—or ‘clauses of equal quantity’—where the
¹⁵ See Thomas P. Roche, Jr, The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ, 1964), 128. ¹⁶ Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 64–5. Lewis distinguishes late Tudor golden poetry from early Tudor ‘drab’ poetry. ¹⁷ Paul de Man, ‘Hypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterre’s Poetics of Reading’, Diacritics, 11.4 (1981), 17–35, 33. On the importance of the trope, including during the Renaissance, see James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge, 1994); Gavin Alexander, ‘Prosopopeia: The Speaking Figure’, in Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (eds), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge, 2007), 97–112; Andrew Escobedo, Volition’s Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature (Notre Dame, IN, 2017); and Evan Cheney, ‘ “Thou hast a free passeporte”: Poetic Personation and Literary Patronage in Spenser’s Prosopopeia, Or Mother Hubberds Tale, and The Shepheardes Calender’, Studies in Philology, 118 (2021), 538–64.
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13 parallel phrases culminate in a single operating verb (‘amaze’) that unifies the lines into a single grammatical construction.¹⁸ The lush and sunny description of the locus amoenus (place of beauty), with its lawns, springs, brooks, mountains, dales, bowers, and labyrinths, draws attention to the beauty of the place but also, simultaneously, to its golden verse. In this landscape, ‘Nymphs’ play, ‘louers’ solace, and ‘runners’ are ‘daze[d]’ by the ‘False Labyrinthes’ of the garden world.¹⁹ The word ‘False’ is at once playful and arresting, while the triple rhyme surrounding the ‘Labyrinth’—‘gaze . . . daze . . . amaze’—absents the depiction from a simple ethical standard to enter the condition increasingly classified as the sublime: a heightened verse that explodes simple ethics through rapture or terror or both.²⁰ Suddenly the ‘golden’ verse of the landscape acquires a complexity that may arrest the reader or catch her off guard. Paradoxically, line 9 scripts the harmony of art and nature, the only core canto in The Faerie Queene to do so—unlike, say, the Bower of Bliss (Book 2, canto 12), which features the authority of art alone, or the Gardens of Adonis (Book 3, canto 6), which feature the authority of nature.²¹ Once more, the poetics of the Temple makes it stand out as an inset artefact exemplary of sixteenth-century poetry. Scudamour describes the beautiful garden landscape to his auditors, but in his story he presents himself as bypassing it—‘all those sights . . . / Might not my steps withhold’ (Faerie Queene, 4.10.29, lines 1–2)—because he aims to march into the Temple of Venus itself, where he finds Amoret, his destined bride. As a knight traversing Faeryland in the Book of Friendship’s core canto, Scudamour—armed with the ‘shield of Loue’ (Faerie Queene, 4.10.8, line 4) that gives him his very name (French, éscu, ‘shield’, d’amour, ‘of love’)— emerges as a heroic exemplar of the poem’s genre, epic romance.²² That is to say, the Temple episode constitutes a mini-epic romance, a versification of Spenser’s heroic genre. Accordingly, critics see the episode as scripting an inset version of his literary career, for the name of the heroine in this mini-epic romance—Amoret—evokes in turn the title of Spenser’s sonnet sequence, the Amoretti (literally, ‘little loves’).²³ The link between the love lyrics and wedding poem published as Amoretti and Epithalamion in 1595, and the
¹⁸ George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (1589), in Brian C. Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1999), 190–296, 263–4. We owe this idea and phrasing to Andrew Zurcher (personal communication, 28 March 2020). ¹⁹ On the labyrinth and the temple as the ‘two cardinal images’ for Spenser’s ‘prophetic structure’, see Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago, IL, 1971), 11. Fletcher mentions the Temple of Venus episode only four times in passing, even though the word ‘labyrinth’ appears only three other times in Spenser’s poetry (one of which is his translation of Joachim du Bellay in The Ruines of Rome). ²⁰ For further detail on the sublime as a principle of sixteenth-century poetics, see Cheney, Chapter 5 in this volume. On the sublime exploding ‘Good and Evil’, see Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY, 1964), 223; on the Spenserian sublime, 268–78. On the sublime during the English Renaissance, see Patrick Cheney, English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson (Cambridge, 2018), including chapters 2 and 3 on Spenser; and Catherine Bates, On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (Oxford, 2017), xii. For the Classical sublime, see Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge, 2009); and James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2016). For the medieval sublime, see C. Stephen Jaeger (ed.), Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music (Basingstoke, 2010). The Oxford Handbook of the Sublime is forthcoming, edited by Emily Brady, Patrick Cheney, and Philip Hardie. ²¹ Millar MacLure, ‘Nature and Art in The Faerie Queene’, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser (Hamden, CT, 1972), 171–88, 174–5. ²² We borrow the generic classification from the title of Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993). ²³ Anderson, ‘The “Covert Vele” ’, 645, links the depiction to that of Orpheus in Epithalamion, revealing Spenser’s inset career linkage between his national epic and his marriage poetry.
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14 - second half of Spenser’s epic romance (Books 4–6 of The Faerie Queene) published in 1596, thus functions as an inset advertisement for Spenser’s literary career.²⁴ Yet, the gender dynamic of the inset epic romance is notoriously explosive and has troubled nearly everyone who has discussed it. The reason is that at the heart of the Book’s core canto the heroic Spenserian knight, Sir Scudamour, abducts Amoret from the Temple, where she is under the delusion that she is protected by the feminine authority of the goddess Venus. Scudamour violates the virgin’s will, as a ‘rape’²⁵: ‘She often prayd, and often me besought, / Sometime with tender teares to let her goe’ (Faerie Queene, 4.10.57, lines 1–2). Yet, Scudamour refuses to listen: ‘yet for nought, / That euer she to me could say or doe / Could she her wished freedome fro me wooe; / But forth I led her through the Temple gate’ (Faerie Queene, 4.10.57, lines 3–6). Even more shockingly, the knight abducts Amoret because her protector, Venus—hermaphroditic in nature, ‘both kinds in one, / Both male and female’ (Faerie Queene, 4.10.41, lines 6–7)—‘fauour[s]’ Scudamour’s ‘pretence’, even ‘laugh[ing]’ at his boldness and at Amoret’s victimisation with ‘amiable grace’ (Faerie Queene, 4.10.56, lines 3–4). As if to signal the ominous nature of the abduction, the combined voice and verse of Scudamour, his inset-narrator, and the poet Spenser likens the ‘daunger[ous]’ act to Orpheus’s recovery of his wife Eurydice from the Underworld (see Faerie Queene, 4.10.58, lines 1–5): a recovery that in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is both a heroic act of marital care and a tragic act of marital loss, for—after her joyful reunion with her husband—Eurydice violates the gods’ decree by turning to look back at the Underworld, thereby paying the ultimate price of eternal separation from her husband.²⁶ The reference to Orpheus, the premier icon of the poet in Classical, medieval, Renaissance, and Spenserian poetry, prepares for the sudden merging of narrative voices in the canto’s concluding line: ‘So ended he his tale, where I this Canto end’ (Faerie Queene, 4.10.58, line 9).²⁷ If ever Edmund Spenser marks an episode with an authorial signature, this is it. The complexity of the Temple of Venus episode, authoring as it does a troubling gender dynamic, helps explain why critics tend to pass it by, especially in comparison to the other core cantos.²⁸ Amongst those who do discuss the episode, we discover two fundamental interpretations: ‘benign and malefic’.²⁹ In an important recent interpretation, Melissa Sanchez sets the mould for seeing the complexity of Spenser’s design: ‘The actual brutality of Amoret’s experiences complicates the allegorical significance they should produce, and ²⁴ In addition to Gil in this volume (Chapter 9), see Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993), for the role of love lyric and epic in Spenser’s career. The inset lyric Hymn to Venus translated from Lucretian epic underwrites the episode’s career dynamic. ²⁵ Sanchez, Erotic Subjects, 63. ²⁶ Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10.1–85, in Frank Justus Miller (trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Metamorphoses, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1916), 2.64–71. See Thomas H. Cain, Praise in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Lincoln, NE, 1978), 166–7; and Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, NY, 1983), 204–5. ²⁷ On Spenser as Orphic poet, see Thomas H. Cain, ‘Spenser and the Renaissance Orpheus’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 41 (1971), 24–47; Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight; and Syrithe Pugh, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice in the Middle Books of The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies, 31–2 (2017–18), 1–41. ²⁸ Our two major studies of Books 3 and 4 have notably short units on the episode: Roche, Kindly Flame, 128–33; and Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 78–82. Today, critics tend to focus on the Temple’s photographic negative, the Bower of Bliss, taking the lead of Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL, 1980), 157–92. ²⁹ Anderson, ‘The “Covert Vele” ’, 657. For ‘benign’, see Roche, Kindly Flame, 128–33; for ‘malign’, Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore, MD, 1981), 88–92. For a ‘balanced overall interpretation’, Anderson cites Harry Berger, Jr, Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley, CA, 1988), 195–202. Anderson concludes: ‘Spenser’s Temple may be a troubling place and at best a morally mixed one, but it is not simply evil’ (656n29). One of the most recent readings follows Anderson: Andrew Escobedo, ‘The Sincerity of Rapture’, Spenser Studies, 24 (2009), 185–208, 199.
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15 thus troubles the idealized picture of devotion that her chastity should perpetuate.’³⁰ As Sanchez adds of ‘Spenser’s project of examining the irrational grounds of obedience’, ‘[i]n apprehending the distance between idealized narratives of mutual devotion and actual structures of unilateral sacrifice, the reader of The Faerie Queene may confront his or her own complicity with the failures and injustices of late sixteenth-century political practice’.³¹ Importantly, Sanchez lays bare the political context for the episode, which forms part of ‘Spenser’s pessimistic view of the possibilities of loyal resistance’ during ‘the “second reign” of Elizabeth’. The episode thus shows Spenser’s ‘allegiance to a group who drew the queen’s suspicion for their investment in the international Protestant cause and commitment to aristocratic participation in government’: ‘Scudamour’s initial abduction and chronic petulance and distrust would situate him as the prototypical tyrant described by Thomas Smith’³² in De Republica Anglorum (composed c 1562–5, published 1583), the sixteenth century’s most important apologia for the ‘mixed’ government of Elizabethan England, combining monarchy with republic.³³ This is not the place to respond to Sanchez—or criticism at large—but we might mention that her account does not refer to the vehicle for such a sexually charged political poetics in the Temple of Venus episode: Spenser’s poetry. To Sanchez’s analysis, we might add a sublime conundrum, for the poet manages to do something unparalleled in modern English poetry. By crystallising five poetic voices in his unitary authorship, the multi-voiced poet creates a riveting artefact in the genre of epic romance that self-consciously weds the natural beauty of English verse to one of the most profoundly unsettling ethical depictions in sixteenth-century British poetry.
³⁰ Sanchez, Erotic Subjects, 63. ³¹ Sanchez, Erotic Subjects, 64. ³² Sanchez, Erotic Subjects, 63. ³³ Patrick Collinson influentially speaks of ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, essay title, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 69 (1987), 394–424. For Spenser’s participation in mixed government, see David J. Baker, ‘Spenser and Politics’, in McCabe (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, 48–64.
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PART I
T R A N S I T I O N S A N D CO N T E X T S
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2 Transitions Seth Lerer
The idea of transition is both a matter of literary history and a history of literary matter. Traditional accounts of early sixteenth-century imaginative writing place its insecurities along the arc of transition. Scholars of the C. S. Lewis generation saw its verse as ‘drab’. The obeisances to Chaucer, the fascination with aureation, and the proliferation of manuscript anthologies of Middle English poetry created the impression that the literary culture of the first half of the century was largely backward looking. The poetry of John Lydgate, for example, filled personal and country-house anthologies from the 1470s through the 1540s. Stephen Hawes’ long allegories of virtuous journey and heroic encounter were some of the most popular books printed in the 1510s. And Chaucer himself continued to form the inventories of English printers through the reigns of Henry VII and VIII.¹ Any encounter with the poetry of early Tudor England will reveal spelling, vocabulary, and syntax so irregular that most modern readers would wonder how even audiences of the time could make sense of it. Verse lines of these decades seem to scan awkwardly, hovering between firm iambic pentameters and looser collocations of stress and rhythm. The subject matter of the period’s literature, to modern audiences, also jars against our expectations. Elaborate allegories of spiritual growth, extended personifications of virtues and vices, and static moral lessons fail to fit our idea of Henry VIII’s court as one of ‘pastime with good company’ lived to the lilt of ‘Greensleeves’.² It is little wonder that the poetic emergence of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, in the 1520s and 1530s has long been seen as an efflorescence. Their inwardlooking reflections and their carefully curated figurative diction make them seem to shine against the sullen ground of their forebears and contemporaries.³ How representative is
¹ For the idea of the ‘Drab Age’, see C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954). For accounts of Chaucer’s reception, the making of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century literary culture, and the place of medieval English literature in the first decades of print, see the following: A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985); Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ, 1993); David Carlson, English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475–1525 (Toronto, 1993); Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford, 2006); Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007); Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford, 2007); and Jane Griffiths, Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford, 2014). ² For surveys of the poetry of the early Tudor period that call attention to the challenges of manuscript presentation, literary language, and editorial intervention, see Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley, CA, 1990); Peter C. Herman (ed.), Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts (Urbana-Champaign, IL, 1994); and Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY, 1995). For the worlds of music and poetry in the age of Henry VIII, see the still-unrivalled John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (Cambridge, 1961). ³ See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL, 1980), with its immensely influential chapter, ‘Power, Sexuality, and Inwardness in Wyatt’s Poetry’. See, too, Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey, and Early Tudor Poetry (London, 1998). Seth Lerer, Transitions In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Seth Lerer 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0002
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20 - their poetry of the period when Wynkyn de Worde’s print shop was turning out religious allegories and beast fables, or when John Skelton’s drumbeat rhymes and rhythms were cracking fissures in the Henrician court’s decorum? Most teachers and students are only dimly aware of the large and rich production of literary works, in both manuscript and print, that do not look like Wyatt or Surrey. Our traditional literary history makes it seem as if what remade English verse a century after Chaucer was the discovery of Petrarch and the development of a heightened literary subjectivity. Most classroom surveys leapfrog over the stutters of the middle of the century to get from ‘They flee from me’ to Sidney and Spenser. Thanks to two generations of revisionary scholarship, we now have a far more textured sense of early modern English poetry than before.⁴ We know that, for example, Wyatt’s verse appeared in manuscript anthologies with rougher scansion and more irregular orthography than it did in the regularised form of Richard Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets of 1557. And we know, too, that this collection (known today as Tottel’s Miscellany) brims with poetry far unlike the lithe Petrarchism of its most famous authors. Much of the Miscellany offers the verse of the now forgotten Nicholas Grimald, whose long lines bristle with rough alliterations and onomatopoeia. The volume offers anonymous renditions of Ovidian mythology, elegies to barely remembered historical figures, and echoes of popular songs transmuted into printed stanzas. Even Chaucer himself appears, his poem ‘Truth’ printed, untitled, and unattributed, amidst a clutch of advisory stanzas.⁵ But if the literary history of the early sixteenth century cannot, any longer, be constructed as a time of secure transition, its content may be seen as fascinated by the theme. Whatever their idiom or ideology, texts from throughout the century concerned themselves with change. The gods made flesh, the lovers turned to birds, the dross of everyday turned to the gold of the imagination—these are the reference points of writers from Skelton through Shakespeare. Ovid’s Metamorphoses first appeared in print in 1471. By 1500, over thirty editions had appeared throughout Europe. William Caxton published an English prose version in 1480. Arthur Golding’s verse translation appeared in 1557. By then, its tales had become the touchstones for expressing art’s relationship to social life. The Ovidianism of early modern England is by no means homogeneous through time and region. Nonetheless, it became a strategy for reflecting on the place of aesthetic judgement in royal rule. The legend of King Midas, for example, raised this issue. Compelled to judge between the beauties of Apollo’s lyre and the rough tones of Pan’s pipes, Midas chose Pan. Widely read, retold, and reimagined throughout early modern English literature, this legend became the site of poetic and dramatic reflection on the arts of power and the insecurities of royal patronage. The tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, in addition, re-emerged as a model for forbidden love in an increasingly commercialised and urban world. And the stories of Orpheus, Morpheus, and Pygmalion came, more and more, to provoke cultural discussions of the transformative power of human artistry. This clutch of myths is by no means the only selection from Ovid that influenced the early modern audience. But they are amongst the most influential as lessons in aesthetic judgement. They offer stories of false metamorphoses or bad transformations. Midas gets his asses’ ears, Orpheus ends his life dismembered by the
⁴ Witness the range and inclusiveness of David Norbrook and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds), The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509–1659 (London, 1993). ⁵ For recent scholarship on the first decades of sixteenth-century poetry, print, and Tottel’s Miscellany in particular, see Paul A. Marquis, ‘Editing and Unediting Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes’, The Book Collector, 56 (2007), 353–75; and Stephen Hamrick (ed.), Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (Farnham, 2013).
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21 bacchantes, and Pygmalion’s statue, come to life, all-too-soon realises the price we pay for living as an object of desire.⁶ All of these tales found their expression in the Middle English of Chaucer, Gower, and their fifteenth-century heirs.⁷ What makes their early sixteenth-century appropriation different is a new access to Ovid, both in Latin and vernaculars, and a new social function for mythological poetry. To explore the transitions of the early modern period is to examine the new fascination with the transitional, the mutable, and the powerful. It is to see how an arc of literary writing moves across old myths to spark new outbursts of lyric, satire, and desire. My goal in this chapter is to call attention to a range of literary productivity still little known but at times brilliantly imaginative, formally experimental, and socially self-aware. This material also deeply influenced Shakespeare’s sense of his literary past. I close this chapter with an invitation to see his Midsummer Night’s Dream as a play that dramatises the transitions in poetic practice. With its framework of the royal Athenian wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta, the play hearkens back to Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and its dramas of rule and spectacle. With its rustic artisans planning a play of Pyramus and Thisbe, it draws on the afterlife of Chaucer’s version of the story in his Legend of Good Women. And with its vision of the long-eared, ass-headed Bottom, it recalls two centuries of Midas, from Chaucer’s version of his story in the Wife of Bath’s Tale—whose ‘asses eres’ are a secret only to himself and to his wife (Chaucer, Wife of Bath’s Tale, line 954, Riverside Chaucer, 118)—to the satires of mid-sixteenth-century poets.⁸ Finally, my purpose is pedagogical as well as scholarly. Armed with the access to online reproductions of early books and with the databases of poetic corpora and criticism, today’s teacher and student can engage with sixteenth-century literary culture in ways once accessible only to scholars in restricted archives. The study of this period of transition is tailor-made for a new digital humanities. What the critic Franco Moretti has said about the Victorian novel may stand for our experience of sixteenth-century poetry: we continue to work on a ‘canonical fraction . . . not even one percent of published literature’ of the age. Our techniques of close reading, Moretti has argued, ‘depend on an extremely small canon . . . You invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter.’⁹ Our classroom syllabi remain, still, deeply invested in a small number of individual authors and texts. Given the resources now available to students and to scholars, we can read this literary past in its broadest scope, recovering neglected texts and enabling collaboration in research and writing that enhances the production of literary knowledge. My goal, here, is to present some cases of that literary recovery. I do not neglect close reading as my point of access: indeed, I argue that many of these texts respond brilliantly to nuanced and attentive criticism. In the end, my chapter is a provocation to do more work with more texts and, in the process, to retell the history of early modern English poetry.
⁶ For the history of early modern English Ovidianism, see Sarah Anna Brown, et al. (eds), Ovid in English, 1480–1625. Part 1: Metamorphoses (London, 2013); Lindsay Ann Reid, Ovidian Bibliofictions and the Tudor Book (London, 2014). ⁷ See John Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, CT, 1979); James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (eds), Ovid in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2011); Andrew Galloway, ‘Ovid in Chaucer and Gower’, in John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands (eds), A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (Chichester, 2014), 187–201. ⁸ Geoffrey Chaucer, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edition (Boston, MA, 1987). For Shakespeare’s Chaucerianism and his use, more generally, of medieval literary materials, see E. Talbot Donaldson, The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer (New Haven, CT, 1985); Deanne Williams, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004); Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London, 2010); and Ruth Morse, et al. (eds), Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (Cambridge, 2013). ⁹ Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London, 2013), 48.
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22 -
Pyramus and Thisbe at Home Amongst the most popular of Ovid’s tales of thwarted love was that of Pyramus and Thisbe. The story of two lovers separated by familial mistrust and, then, by a physical barrier is eternal, echoing from Roman comedy through medieval allegory and modern tragedy. It was a story almost infinitely adaptable to different social worlds. Chaucer retold the lovers’ story in his Legend of Good Women, and his version circulated widely in the two centuries after his death. There, the lovers live within an architecture of desire: the houses, the wall, and finally the tomb of Ninus where they meet their end are all built structures that, instead of keeping them safe, provoke their danger.¹⁰ Inspired by Chaucer’s Tale, but distinct in emphasis and idiom, was the version of the narrative embedded in the poem that the printer Richard Pynson brought out (most likely in 1528), La conusaunce d’amours.¹¹ Written in the seven-line, rhyme royal stanza (with its ababbcc rhyme scheme) familiar from Troilus and Criseyde and its later-medieval heirs, La conusaunce d’amours begins with an equally familiar medieval trick. The poet finds himself wandering in a beautiful landscape in the spring. He sees a group of courtly men and women singing and dancing. Following a few of the women, he comes to a building, where another beautiful woman stands at the door. He enters and is led into a parlour, where he sits and talks with her. They speak of love, and she begins to lecture him on the true virtues of devotion and friendship. In the course of her instruction, she retells the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. The more they were kept apart, she recounts, ‘The more fervently / in love they burned’ (Anonymous, La Connaissance, line 133). Together, the lovers develop a kind of private language: a set of ‘signs / token and looking’ (Anonymous, La Connaissance, line 135) to express their minds. Soon, they agree to meet at the tomb of the ancient Babylonian king, Ninus. Thisbe arrives first, only to find a lion, still bloody from its kill, drinking at the tomb’s fountain. Frightened, she runs away, dropping her kerchief. The lion takes it up and bloodies it with its mouth. When Pyramus appears, he sees the bloody fabric, thinks Thisbe dead, and kills himself. His own blood spurts out, turning the white berries of the nearby mulberry tree all red. Thisbe returns, sees the bloody stains, finds her dead lover, offers a powerful lament, and then kills herself. What follows is an authorial commentary on the story, a summary of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (another tale of misbegotten love), and finally a set of moral exempla drawn from other myths. In this bald summary, little seems original. The poem is full of conventional medieval devices: the long laments, the repetitions of complaint and the prolix verbal texture built up out of doubling of terms, and a polysyllabic aureate vocabulary. But there are important features that present its old myth for a new audience. First and foremost is the moral of the story. In a section marked out as the Damosel’s interpretation, she notes that the lovers would still be alive if the parents had acceded to their wills.
¹⁰ ‘The Legend of Thisbe’ circulated separately, in Cambridge University Library MS Ff 1.6 (fols. 64–67v), and fragmentarily in Magdalene College, Cambridge, MS Pepys 2006 (53–88). The Legend of Good Women was not printed until William Thynne’s edition of Chaucer’s Works in 1532. John Gower offered a version of the story in his Confessio Amantis, 3.1331–494. The story is frequently alluded to by the Chaucerians John Lydgate and Stephen Hawes. ¹¹ Critical discussions of the poem are few. See Martine Braekman, ‘Prolegomena to an Edition of the Poem, la Conusaunce Damours, Printed Around 1528’, Studia Neophilologica, 68 (1996), 25–8; Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge, 1997), 23–5; and Reid, Ovidian Bibliofictions, 91–4. The text is available online at https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-linguistics/tudor/con naissance5631.html. I quote from this text, cited by line number. I have modernised spelling.
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23 Ye might have had your goodly children still If ye had done / as reason doth require To marry them / after their desire. (Anonymous, La Connaissance, lines 355–7)
She turns this argument, however, not into a claim for true love’s independence, but into an affirmation of the sacrament of marriage and the need for institutional approval of desire. These gentles did / as Christians now a day Most commonly / use for to do Which no doubt is / a much cursed way And causer of many evils also They marry / without consent of the two Which marriage is not worth a hawe * *the fruit of the hawthorn Damnable / and eke against the law. For to receive this high sacrament Is required much solemnity But one most special / that is free assent Of both persons / of high and low degree Without which / marriage cannot be Perfectly allowed / before the glorious face Of the high God / in the celestial place. (Anonymous, La Connaissance, lines 358–72)
In the contexts of the late 1520s, these lines transform a story of mythic love into a statement about domesticity, about parental authority, and about the sacramentality of marriage. Such passages fit well with what had been emerging as an English, Catholic response to the perceived threats of a Continental Reformation: arguments questioning the sacramental nature of worship, about the nature of hierarchical authority, and about the nature of law and religion. In fact, the whole question of parental control of marriage had become a touchstone of debates in the late 1520s and 1530s. Steven Ozment, in his tellingly titled book, When Fathers Ruled, looks closely at the family debates of the years on either side of the European Reformation, and he quotes this statute from the city of Augsburg from 1537: Children are not to be forced against their will into a marriage they find unpleasant and undesirable; parents should take the greatest care to respect and advance what is to the profit and well-being of their children’s persons and possessions.¹²
I find the resonances striking. Both the English poem and the German statute make clear that respecting the wishes of the children is central to successful marriage (where success, here, is not just a matter of personal desire but of economic advancement: profit and wellbeing). But what is distinctive about the English poem is the emphasis on sacrament. ‘Free
¹² Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 1983), 39, and see his broader discussion at 25–49.
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24 - assent’ matters; but what matters more is the institutional affirmation of that assent within the law and within the church. What the poem does is offer up another, ideal, built environment for socially acceptable desire. Now, it is not the household or the enclosed garden or the tomb. It is the ‘celestial place’ that is the house of love. Two hearts may be ‘closed in one’. But they must be enclosed in a divinely sanctioned place of being. There is much more to this poem, however, than polemic. It revives mythic tropes of poetic creation. Late in the story, as the narrator falls asleep, it is in Morpheus’s arms that he imagines his somnolence. At this point, the poem becomes a kind of displaced dream vision: a classic, medieval genre, but now put late in the narrative (instead of at its opening) in order to call attention to its artificiality.¹³ For this is a poem that uses earlier literary techniques and calls attention, in a highly self-conscious way, to the artful use of those techniques. This is not a simple dream vision or dialogue. It is a poem that deploys dream vision and dialogue as the building blocks for a text highly aware of its own textuality. The narrator opens with a statement that the body of the poem was ‘told . . . to me’—that is, it is a received text—but now, the mode of transmission is not telling but writing: ‘As here after / ye may read and see’ (Anonymous, La Connaissance, lines 20–1). This is not a medieval text (e.g., of the kind exemplified in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, where the fictional narrator of the Clerk retells, to a fictional audience of listeners, a story supposedly told to him by the historical Petrarch). This is an early modern document. As Lindsay Ann Reid has put it, the poem ‘takes as its subject the processes whereby literature is created as much as the seemingly central topic of amour’. She goes on, ‘[It] shape[s] and elucidate[s] the methods of literary composition that it internally fictionalizes’.¹⁴ Such interpretations link this poem with the highly self-aware, self-mediating tone of John Skelton, and they invite us, as modern readers, to see how the transmission of the past is not a transparent linear process but, instead, a complex backand-forth of allusion, appropriation, and reflection. These are the features that make La conusaunce d’amours, for all its medieval trappings, a powerful, early modern text. Its Ovidian myths now serve not simply as a source of plot or character but as a stimulus for reflecting poetic mythography itself: that is, how the exploration of tales of art and judgement enable the writer to assert a sense of literary ambition. Unlike its Chaucerian models—where the poems of the past serve as a guide to largely courtly models of behaviour, taste, and expression—La conusaunce d’amours suggests a new, domestic place for literature and its ambitions. And as a printed text, a product of and for commercial reproduction, this poem invites a new range of readers to participate in literary advice and in literary history.
Morpheus in the Margins Part of the job of poems such as La conusaunce d’amours (and there are many of them) was to teach new readers how the old realms of the imagination can become new places of pursuit. Ovid’s Morpheus oversaw the realms of sleep and dream. By the early modern period, he came, as well, to oversee the worlds of poetic and dramatic impersonation.¹⁵ His shape-shifting became, for early modern artists, a model for what the artist did. He is the maker of masks, the ventriloquist of others. The famous scene of Morpheus within the Cave ¹³ For the idea of the poem as a displaced dream vision, see Braekman, ‘Prolegomena’. ¹⁴ Reid, Ovidian Bibliofictions, 93. ¹⁵ Morpheus appears most extensively in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 11, in the story of Ceyx and Alcyone, when he is called upon to impersonate the dead King Ceyx, in a dream, to his queen, Alcyone. Chaucer
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25 of Sleep—a place where the god comes to be called upon to impersonate a dead man in the dream of his still-living beloved—had, as Colin Burrow notes, a story with the ‘richest afterlife’ of any in the poem. It offers up, in Burrow’s words, ‘an energetic defence of the imitative arts’, inviting us to ‘think of what it is to imitate both living people and past literatures’.¹⁶ How do we imitate both living people and past literatures? This question stands behind a range of early Tudor poetic experiments designed to test the limits of literary form. Some, like La conusaunce d’amours, appropriate earlier devices to make claims for contemporary polemic. Others, like the brilliantly bizarre poetic bricolage, The Fantasy of the Passion of the Fox, deform those devices to display an emerging poetic virtuosity in the vernacular.¹⁷ This poem survives in one copy, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1530. It tells the story of a poet who, mourning the death of his pet fox, falls asleep and dreams about that fox’s death. He spends much time describing the animal, its habits, and its actions, and concludes with a long testament to his virtues. In the course of these adventures and expostulations, the poet invokes the Ovidian story of Morpheus and the Cave of Sleep and offers up an imagined popular attack on the fox that sounds—in idiom, in verse form, and in rhyme choice—uncannily like Skelton at his most satiric. And in its elaborate attentions to the possibilities of beast fable and human–animal exchange, it looks back over a tradition of comic poetry running from Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale to Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe. There is polemic in this poem, but there is also a sublime lunacy, and it is that latter feature that I think makes it a brilliant critical commentary on vernacular poetic practice in transition. Unlike La conusaunce d’amours, whose dream vision starts amidst the beauties of late spring, The Fantasy of the Passion of the Fox begins in autumn. This move, as Jane Griffiths has suggested, aligns the poem immediately with Skelton’s legacy (the autumnal opening of his satire, The Bowge of Court, comes to mind).¹⁸ But what this move does, as well, is enable the poet to reflect on the place of his own poem on the generic map of early sixteenthcentury verse: In fantasies marvellous my mind was pight* For a fox-whelp that lacked a late* Though his manners would other / Curribus he hight* Full pleasant in pastime / pretending no debate To no person living / but a cruel fate Envy hath him banished / I wot not whether
*occupied *of late *was named
appropriated this section at the opening of his Book of the Duchess, transforming the so-called Cave of Sleep episode into a comedy of exaggeration. For the centrality of Morpheus to Classical representations of the artist as shape-shifter and impersonator, see Philip Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge, 2002), 259, 272–85. ¹⁶ Colin Burrow, ‘ “Full of the Maker’s Guile”: Ovid on Imitating and on the Imitation of Ovid’, in Philip Hardie, et al. (eds), Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and Its Reception (Cambridge, 1999), 271–87, 279–80. On different forms of imitation, see also Chapter 7 in this volume. ¹⁷ The Fantasy of the Passion of the Fox, survives in only one copy, now in the Cambridge University Library. Critical discussion is minimal: Elizabeth Porges Watson, ‘A Vulpine Martyr: The Fantasy of the Passion of the Fox’, Renardus, 6 (1993), 105–26; Jane Griffiths, ‘ “An Ende of an Olde Song”: Middle English Lyric and the Skeltonic’, Review of English Studies, 60 (2009), 705–22. The online edition is at https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-linguistics/ tudor/passionoffox10685.html. I quote from this text, cited by line number; I have modernised spelling. ¹⁸ Griffiths, ‘ “An Ende of an Olde Song” ’.
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26 - I fear me of death / but god forbid that That such mischance should us dissever. (Anonymous, Passion, lines 9–16)
The marvellous fantasies besetting the poet’s mind and the image of the fox-whelp recall the turnings of the sleepless narrator of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: a narrator who would himself descend into the cave of Morpheus to get a gift of sleep and, then, see in his dream a ‘whelp’ that leads him on his journey. Chaucer’s little dog becomes a fox here, as if the Nun’s Priest’s Reynard had taken over the courtly vision of the Book of the Duchess, with the whole scene transported into the early sixteenth-century allegory of Stephen Hawes, whose Pastime of Pleasure remained one of the most popular books of the period (note the phrase, ‘full pleasant in pastime’). Debate and envy, banishment and mischance, remain the tracer words of the late medieval allegorical tradition, now ironised into a story about a pet fox granted a learned Latin name: Curribus. We are in an increasingly learned world: a world in which the old verities of popular poetry become reread and retold by an annotating Latinist. What is so striking about the poem’s printed form, in fact, are the marginalia calling attention to the sources of its imagination. For when the poet falls asleep and dreams, he dreams in Ovid’s world. A beautiful woman appears to him: Such one I had not seen afore to appear Except it were Iris that Ovid in his fable Counteth unto Juno / his maiden and his messenger. (Anonymous, Passion, lines 70–2)
If the reader does not get this reference, the printed marginalia gives us direction: ‘lege ouidium li. ij’ (i.e., ‘read Ovid’, with the reference to Book 11 of the Metamorphoses). We are, increasingly, no longer in the medieval world of allusion but in the early modern, humanist world of citation. True, many medieval manuscripts would have been annotated with source markers, giving authors’ names and places in their works. But those annotations, for example in the manuscripts of Chaucer, would have been the learned additions of later scribes.¹⁹ Here, the printed text contains the annotations themselves. They are an integral part of the reading experience of the poem. They make, in other words, the poem not just a story but an anthology of reference. And so, when the narrator arrives at Morpheus’s Cave of Sleep, we get this printed explanation on the side: Morpheus Phobotor Phantasos be.iii. goddesses of dreams Morpheus showeth only the similitude of reasonable creatures. Phobotor sometimes showeth serpents / birds / and such unreasonable. Phantasos only stones / houses / the sea and such things without life. (Anonymous, Passion, marginalia to lines 133–4)
¹⁹ On the Latin marginalia to the Canterbury Tales, see Graham D. Caie, ‘The Significance of Marginal Glosses in the Earliest Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales’, in David L. Jeffrey (ed.), Chaucer and the Scriptural Tradition (Ottawa, 1984), 75–88; Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ‘Professional Readers at Work: Annotators, Editors, and Correctors in Middle English Literary Texts’, in Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, et al. (eds), Opening up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches (Ithaca, NY, 2012).
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27 This is not Chaucer’s comic descent into the realm of sleep, nor is it the allusive fantasy of the poet of La conusaunce d’amours. This is the scholar’s reading and translation of Ovid’s text, fully in keeping with contemporary sixteenth-century interpretations of the God of Sleep as the aegis of performance and impersonation. Morpheus me-thought began his kind anon To show me the similitude of many a man. (Anonymous, Passion, lines 145–6)
Morpheus was showing his similitudes not only in literature but also in visual and plastic art. Indeed, he came to be considered the presiding aegis not just over sleep and dreaming, but of all forms of representation. The Italian artist Annibale Caro, confidant of Michelangelo, designed the villa for Cardinal Allesandro Farnese with Morpheus in mind. There, in the villa’s bedroom, the god of sleep stood at the centre of a complex allegorical mural. Caro instructed the artist of the bedroom to depict the scene as follows: ‘Morpheus is called by Ovid the artificer and maker of figures; and therefore you will show him in the act of making masks of various appearances, placing some of them at his feet.’ Morpheus the mask-maker is the shower of similitudes, the figure for personification itself.²⁰ What a great break, then, from learned long lines and rich allusions of this portion of the poem to the pulsing Skeltonics²¹ of its ‘Exclamatio inuidorum’, the imagined scene of the pet fox’s escape and pursuit: Now to disclose How he broke lose Ye may suppose Great noise was made. (Anonymous, Passion, lines 177–80)
These scenes emerge as if the Nun’s Priest’s Tale—with its loud pursuit of Reynard the Fox—were being retold by the Skelton of Phyllyp Sparowe: Some cried hang him Some said save him Some would have slain him To have his skin. (Anonymous, Passion, lines 201–4)
After nearly a hundred lines of this metrical aggression, the poem then returns to the long lines of its opening, offering a Testament in the voice of the fox himself, a move reminiscent of the Testament of John Lydgate, complete with polysyllabic, aureate rhymes, and long strings of repetition:²² ²⁰ Quoted and discussed in Maria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams (Cambridge, 2004), 177. See 177–85 for discussions of Morpheus as mask-maker in the age of Michelangelo. ²¹ By Skeltonics, critics refer to the short, rhymed couplets of John Skelton’s satirical poetry. See John NortonSmith, ‘The Origins of “Skeltonics” ’, Essays in Criticism, 23 (1973), 57–62. ²² For the Testament of John Lydgate, and its historical, generic, and stylistic features (and potential influences), see Sebastian Sobecki, ‘Lydgate’s Kneeling Retraction: The Testament as a Literary Palinode’, The Chaucer Review, 49 (2015), 265–93.
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28 - I Curribus of Mere diocese of Sarum Of subtle mind and will *condo testamentum*. *offer my testament (Anonymous, Passion, lines 299–300)
The fox bequeaths each body part to a different profession: My feet to order spices to the apothecary My liver and my lungs more medicinable Take them who will I am agreeable. (Anonymous, Passion, lines 316–18)
What is this thing? More than a poem, it comes off as a material artefact of culture, a work of printing, editing, and careful compositing that shows the place of the humanist in the print shop. Like La conusaunce d’amours, the Fantasy offers an anthology of forms and tales. But far more than that earlier poem, it offers a survey of just about every possible way of writing English verse in the Henrician period. We may think of a poem such as this one as ‘transitional’, in that it bridges both historical and formal locales. But it is transitional, as well, in that it takes as its own theme the passages from one state to another: from death to life, from waking to sleeping, from heard tale to printed text.
Midas in the Database Morpheus may have been the aegis for transitions from one state or status to another. But for early modern poets, it was King Midas who embodied the very act of transformation. We know his story, these days, largely for his golden touch: the curse of avarice that turned all he grasped into glittering, but useless, gold. In Book 11 of the Metamorphoses, Ovid spent far more lines, however, on the story of his faulty literary judgement. Choosing Pan over Apollo, he gets asses’ ears in retribution for his bad decision. That part of his life had become so familiar to early sixteenth-century readers that Thomas Wyatt need not even call him by name to include him within his list of bad interpreters in his Satire to Sir John Poins. There, in a string of allusions calibrated to affirm the rough wit and ineloquence of the poet, Wyatt presents those who would prefer the crow to the swan, Sir Thopas to the Knight, and Pan to Apollo: And he that dieth for hunger of the gold, Call him Alexander, and say that Pan Passeth Apollo in music many fold. (Wyatt, ‘Mine Own John Poins’, lines 47–9, Complete Poems, 187)²³
The unnamed Midas here—who died for hunger of gold—may, by the foolish poet, be confused with Alexander, and his preference for Pan may be compared with Wyatt’s own self-deprecating foolishness. ‘My wit is naught. I cannot learn the way’ (Wyatt, ‘Mine Own John Poins’, line 57).
²³ Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978).
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29 By the middle of the century, Midas was everywhere. He shows up in brief social satires, in long allegories, and in lyrics about love and loss. A search through the online Literature Proquest database yields thirty poetic uses before 1600 (not to mention the eight dramatic appearances and twenty-three prose ones).²⁴ To scroll through these citations is to see a list of writers far from our anthologies and syllabi. It is, in some sense, to descend into the under-canon of English verse: Thomas Hedley, George Whittaker, John Hall, Edmund Elviden, Francis Rouse, Geoffrey Whitney. These, and a dozen or so other names, stand beside Christopher Marlowe, Barnabe Googe, John Lyly, Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare on the digital page. They are the great unread, or perhaps for the modern student, the great unreadable. What happens if we read them closely? The earliest of them is Thomas Hedley’s single printed sheet, ‘The Judgement of Midas’ of 1552.²⁵ At first glance, the poem it contains seems more like an Aesopic fable than a myth: a brief account, capped by a moral exhortation not to judge what you do not know. But, examined closely, it says something about the uses of poetic mythology in social satire. The poem opens: Of such as on fantasy decree and discuss On other men’s works, lo Ovid’s tale thus. (Hedley, ‘Of such’, title)
Given that the poem was originally printed as part of a set of polemical broadsides in an argument between two scholars, Thomas Churchyard and Thomas Camel, this opening may seem topically transparent. Those who would, in their ‘fantasy’, pass judgement on the works of other men (I paraphrase), read Ovid’s tale that follows. In a sense, this is a plea for reticence. But in another sense, this is a statement about literary criticism itself. Part of the emerging presence of poetry in the mid-sixteenth century is precisely this critical purpose. Exempla for moral behaviour, or social action, come increasingly to embrace reading and writing of literature. Poetry has become a form of courtliness, with both standing as forms of verbal and social behaviour designed to demonstrate the artfulness of what a man might be. Rough-hewn though Hedley’s poem might appear, it is contemporary with circulation of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: that great manual of humanist self-fashioning that would appear, in Thomas Hoby’s English, in 1561.²⁶ ‘Rude Pan’, the poem proper opens, seeks to ‘Compare to mend Apollo’s melody’ (‘Of such’, lines 1, 2). Here, Pan sets out not simply to compete but to improve—‘mend’— Apollo’s music, and the competition phrases itself in terms of a new, English vernacular vocabulary of artistic performance and criticism. Words such as ‘boisterously’ (line 7) and ‘melodiously’ (line 8) describe the playing of the two divinities. ‘Midas stood by to judge and to decree’ (line 11). Pan is the ‘rural’ god. What we have here is the emerging lexicon of literary judgement: a set of critical terms that would lie at the heart of an Elizabethan lyric aesthetic. But in this poem, they may well be new. ‘Boisterously’ is not recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1586 (and except for a lone Caxton quotation from the 1480s, the word boisterous does not appear until the middle of the sixteenth century). ‘Melodiously’, with the exception of a quotation from Lydgate, does not appear again in the ²⁴ Based on a search for texts dated 1477–1600, ‘Midas’. https://literature.proquest.com/searchTexts.do. ²⁵ Thomas Hedley, ‘Of Such as on Fantasy Decree & Discuss: On Other Men’s Works, lo Ovid’s Tale Thus’ (London, 1522), reprinted in 1560. See the discussion in Brown, Ovid in English, 8–9, and the edited text at 61–3. ²⁶ For the impact of Castiglione on the practices of mid-sixteenth-century poet/courtiers, see Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, NJ, 1978); and Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier (University Park, PA, 1996).
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30 - Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED) until 1566. And while the idiom of a ‘rural Pan’ is a Classical commonplace, it does not appear with any frequency in English until the middle of the sixteenth century.²⁷ These are the markers of a language in transition. They represent new ways of trying to express performance and reception. They come together with a set of more familiar terms— decree, excel, soft, sweet, strange—to form a way of talking about lyric ravishment. A survey of those poets in the database shows both divine and human musicians increasingly ‘melodious’. It shows ‘soft’, ‘sweet’, and ‘strange’ collocating into markers of aesthetic affect. Quam suave murmur? How sweet your murmur, asked the poet Thomas Campion, in 1595, of the great lutenist John Dowland.²⁸ ‘If music and sweet poetry agree’, begins the sonnet to Dowland by Richard Barnfield, printed in The Passionate Pilgrim of 1599.²⁹ For Shakespeare’s Caliban, a prisoner on his island full of noises, there are ‘Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not’ (Shakespeare, Tempest, 3.2.129, Norton Shakespeare, 3247), while his all-too-human visitors and cohabitants hear and see everything as ‘strange’ (that word shows up more times in The Tempest than in any other Shakespeare play).³⁰ Go back, now, and read Hedley’s lines: Apollo’s harp and song went very soft, And sweet and strange, as none might sweeter be, But yet, thought Midas, this music likes not me. (Hedley, ‘Of such’, lines 16–18)
Now we see Midas not just as a fool but as a listener unaware of shifting fashion. The new taste for the soft and sweet, for the strange sounds that would begin to fill Elizabethan ears, fails to please him. This kind of Apollonian song would become the model for new lyricism, and the now-neglected poets of my database ring with his melodies (a certain John Grange, in The Golden Aphroditis of 1577, has Apollo play ‘melodiously’).³¹ This is the pre-history of Prospero’s aesthetic world, the kind of verse that circulated in the adolescence of his author and his audience, the verse of the first decades of Elizabethan courts and print shops that, by the 1610s, would have seemed as old fashioned as, say, the rough lines of Nicholas Grimald would have seemed to audiences of the 1590s. For Grimald, writing in the 1540s and 1550s and appearing throughout Tottel’s Miscellany, sweetness was not absent.³² He certainly could sound like Surrey when he wanted to: ²⁷ Going beyond the OED, I can find only two sets of citations for the word ‘boisterously’ before 1600. William Warner (1558–1609) uses the word twice in his prose work, Pan his Syrinx (London, 1584); Thomas Beard (d. 1632) uses it once in his Theatre of God’s Judgements (London, 1597). For these citations and quotations, see the search for ‘boisterously’ at www.literature.proquest.com. ²⁸ Thomas Campion, in Poemata (London, 1595). I quote from the edition and translation in Diana Poulton, John Dowland (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 46. ²⁹ Originally published Richard Barnfield, Poems in Divers Humours (London, 1598), and reprinted in The Passionate Pilgrim (London, 1599). This latter volume offered Shakespeare’s name on the title page, but only five of its poems are actually by Shakespeare. For Barnfield’s authorship and the contexts of the poem’s making and circulation, see Colin Burrow (ed.), William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford, 2002), 348–9. ³⁰ William Shakespeare, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016). The word ‘strange’ appears nineteen times in the play; ‘strangely’ appears four times; ‘strangeness’ twice. ³¹ Within this book, two poems associate Apollo with this term: ‘Lucina grant Apollo may / melodiously devise / My filed phrase’ (‘Ye Muses Nine’, 35–7); ‘Methinks I hear Apollo grant / Melodiously for to devise’ (‘N. O. Beginning, A. O. Followeth, craving aide of the Muses and chief Musicians’, 13–14). I quote from the texts at literature.proquest.com. ³² On Grimald, his range of work, and his influence in possibly shaping the contents and ordering of Tottel’s Miscellany, see Marquis, ‘Editing and Unediting’; Paul A. Marquis, Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes: The
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31 What sweet relief the showers to thirsty plants we see: What dear delight, the blooms to bees: my true love is to me. (Rollins, Tottel’s Miscellany, 1.93, lines 3–4; poem 128, lines 1–2 sequential numbering)³³
But he could also be theatrical, if not histrionic, in his roughness. His long poem, ‘The Death of Zoroas’, opens with the sounds of ‘clattering arms’ and ‘raging broils of war’ (Rollins, Tottel’s Miscellany, 1.115, line 12; poem 165, line 1 sequential numbering). The fight against the Persians in the poem rings with onomatopoetic phrases and alliterations: ‘taratantars’, ‘shrouded with shafts’ (Rollins, Tottel’s Miscellany, 1.115, lines 13, 14; poem 165, lines 2, 3 sequential numbering). Amongst this welter, Zoroas speaks, condemning Alexander, while the conqueror replies: O monstrous man (quod he) what so thou art, I pray thee, live: ne do not, with thy death, This lodge of lore, the Muses mansion mar. (Rollins, Tottel’s Miscellany, 1.117, lines 5–7; poem 165, lines 71–3, sequential numbering)
What should we make of such lines? Should we learn Midas’s lesson and prefer sweet melodies to boisterous noise? These questions are the ones precisely raised for the early twenty-first century as much as for the mid-sixteenth. As poets began to experiment with using Classical mythology for new purposes, as they began to juxtapose different prosodic forms, and as they used the medium of print to reach an audience beyond the coterie of manuscript circulation—as they began to do all of these things—they challenged readers’ tastes and expectations. The myths that I have all-too-briefly touched on here—of Pyramus and Thisbe, Morpheus, and Midas—all came to express emerging aesthetic attitudes. They enabled writers to think of inspiration as part of a literary history. Things were both old and new; transition came to be an idea of the temporal as well as the metamorphic.
The Transitions of Nick Bottom In no work of canonical Renaissance literature are these myths and meanings explored so brilliantly as in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Take, for example, that great moment in Act 2, scene 2, when the rustic artisans (rural poets if ever there were any) plan out their play in celebration of the wedding of their royal rulers, Theseus and Hippolyta. They settle on the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, little aware how brilliantly inappropriate such a story would be for a royal marriage. Nonetheless, Peter Quince settles on the tale, and
Elizabethan Version (Tempe, AZ, 2007); and Seth Lerer, ‘Cultivation and Inhumation: Some Thoughts on the Cultural Impact of Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes’, in Stephen Hamrick (ed.), Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (Farnham, 2013), 147–61. I modernise the text of Grimald here. ³³ Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1965). I am citing from Q1, here, the first quarto of the Miscellany, published on 5 June 1557, as opposed to Q2, published only weeks later on 31 July 1557 and used as the basis for all later sixteenth-century editions. There are, however, substantive differences between Q1 and Q2; this poem by Grimald, for example, does not appear in Q2. Rollins’s is the only modern edition to use Q1 as its copy-text. I have provided both Rollins’s numeration (which starts afresh on each page) and sequential line numbering which is specific to each poem.
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32 - Nick Bottom the Weaver—great spinner of fables and mis-weaver of words—breaks in by asking whether Pyramus is a lover or a tyrant. Peter Quince answers: ‘A lover that kills himself, most gallant, for love’, and Bottom unwinds the stem of his wit to offer this now famous oration: The raging rocks And shivering shocks Shall break the locks Of Prison gates, And *Phibbus’ car* *the chariot of Phoebus Shall shine from far And make and mar The foolish Fates. (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.2.24–31, Norton Shakespeare, 1054)
Long derided for its mispronunciation and its metre, its clanging rhymes and awkward alliterations, Bottom’s speech may be better understood as the undigested memories of older prosodic forms. There is the feel, here, of the short Skeltonic lines of The Fantasy of the Passion of the Fox. There is the clang of Nicholas Grimald: Gan pass the noise of taratantars clang: Shrouded with shafts, the heaven: with cloud of darts, Covered, the air: against full fatted bulls, As forceth kindled ire the Lions keen: Whose greedy guts the gnawing hunger pricks. (Rollins, Tottel’s Miscellany, 1.115, lines 13–17; poem 165, lines 2–6 sequential numbering)
Such lines—with their bombast transmuted into rustic parody in Bottom’s mouth—would have seemed to a reader of the 1590s as overdone and archaic as the lines of the players in Hamlet, whose Classical exaggerations stand as verbal foil to Shakespeare’s own lithe idiom. Indeed, it may well be a commonplace of Shakespeare criticism to note that the playwright’s presentation of plays-within-plays often devolves to critiques of generational distance. Shakespeare’s players evoke idioms of earlier performance, whether they be the intricacies of the interludes at Inns of Court, or the rusticities of cycle drama and itinerant mummings. But neither Shakespeare nor his characters are done with Bottom’s classicism. A figure of transition himself, Bottom is constantly warping the thread of literary allusion, misquoting and mis-metring. And yet, before he has the chance to play his Pyramus before the royals, he plays another, metamorphic part before a different court. The pawn in Oberon’s revenge against Titania for stealing his beloved Indian Boy, Bottom becomes transformed into an ass before a besotted fairy queen. His foolish snout and his long ears make him, at this point, something of a rustic Midas, a literary aegis who calls not for Apollo’s pipes but for the rough sounds of a Pan: ‘I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have the tongs and bones’ (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.27–8, Norton Shakespeare, 1081). Bottom is now heir to a history of literary satire. The Midas of the Wife of Bath becomes, increasingly, an archetype of folly: Hedley called him ‘sad’ and ‘dismayed’; George Turberville called him a ‘dolt’, with a ‘beastly head’; and George Sandys, in his English verse
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33 version of the Metamorphoses, synthesised a century of social critique in his view of Midas as a ‘fool’, and ‘sottish’.³⁴ In Shakespeare’s play, Titania wants to ‘kiss’ the transformed Bottom’s ‘fair large ears’ (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.4, Norton Shakespeare, 1080). But such ears only make their wearer deaf to melody and blind to his own condition. Feeling his head, he announces to Cobweb: I must to the barber’s, monsieur; for methinks I am marvelous hairy about the face. And I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch. (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.23–5, Norton Shakespeare, 1080)
Strange that Bottom should wish to go to the barber’s, for it was the barber who had been uniquely privy to Midas’s deformity and, in Ovid’s tale, just could not keep the secret. He went into the reeds and told them that Midas had asses’ ears, and then when the reeds grew and the wind blew through them, they rustled out his secret words. Unlike Midas, however, Bottom gets his own head back, but not before he sleeps and wakes and thinks it all a dream. For this brief moment, resting in the arms of fairies, if not Morpheus, Bottom thinks back on all this strangeness and comes up with something sweetly benign. And it is left to Theseus, the royal aegis of aesthetic criticism, to watch the rustics’ play and generously judge. More strange than true. I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.2–3, Norton Shakespeare, 1086)
My chapter has set out to introduce the antique fables and the fairy toys to readers who may find them strange. The poetry of the English early sixteenth century is more fabulous (in all senses of that word) than we have often thought. To teach and study this collection is to travel through the website and the early printed book, through the digital facsimile and the database. It will take more than Theseus’s ‘cool reason’ to make sense of much of it. But in the process, we may find new poems to teach, new verses to study, and new melodies to hear.
³⁴ For Turberville, see his ‘The Lover Against One that Compared his Mistress with his Lady’, in Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (London, 1567), 14, 14v; for Sandys’, see his Ovid’s Metamorphoses Englished (London, 1626), 220.
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3 Social Contexts Andrew Hadfield
Sixteenth-century poetry can be read, like any poetry, without knowledge of the context in which it was produced. However, an ignorance of the conditions of writing is always likely to produce distorted and implausible readings, as well as limit both understanding and enjoyment of the verse. In this chapter, I will outline three fundamental aspects of English society in the period, which separate the past from our post-Enlightenment, post-Industrial Revolution society: humanism (in particular its dissemination through the education system); religion (specifically the impact of the Reformation); and political ideas of government before the advent of parliamentary democracy, concluding with a discussion of censorship.
Rhetoric, Poetics, and Poetry C. S. Lewis’s claim that ‘Rhetoric is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors’ points out that not only is each era defined by its education system but also that the system in question will determine what type of literature is written and read.¹ The rediscovery of many Latin and Greek writings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries led to a re-evaluation of the importance of what became known as the ‘classics’. Writers and educators—‘humanists’—transformed the education system of the late Middle Ages, which had been based on the assumption that a university’s primary function was to teach theology and philosophy in order to train the next generation of ecclesiastics and scholarly monks. A European-wide system of education was developed based on key figures such as Cicero and Quintilian, which was disseminated through schools (in particular, grammar schools) and universities. At the centre was the notion that students needed to comprehend the seven liberal arts: the Trivium, consisting of Grammar, Dialectic (logic), and Rhetoric, was taught first, followed by the Quadrivium, consisting of Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music. In particular, emphasis was placed on the study of rhetoric, the art of persuasion, which had been important in medieval schooling but now, following educational theorists such as Quintilian, assumed centre stage in education. Students were taught how to manipulate language to express different ideas and arguments. Specifically, they were taught how to argue in utramque partem [on either side], arguing for and against certain propositions in class, with examinations based on public disputation.² This intellectual culture of argument, based on the arts of persuasion, was designed to train ¹ C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), 61. ² See Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002); Helen M. Jewell, Education in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998); Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996); and Lisa Jardine, ‘Humanist Logic’, in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 173–98. Andrew Hadfield, Social Contexts In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Andrew Hadfield 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0003
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35 students for a variety of jobs and professions: secretaries, teachers, civil servants, stewards in great households, lawyers, clergymen, translators, amongst others.³ It should not surprise us that such a mode of thinking also aided the development of professional drama in London, nor that drama and the law were intimately linked through their common basis in the study of rhetoric.⁴ Poetry and poetic theory developed from the same root. Experiments with quantitative metre—attempts by Gabriel Harvey and Richard Stanyhurst to develop a form of English poetry based on Latin prosody—were inspired by the humanist belief in the value of Latin literature and culture and the need to make English writing Latinate.⁵ However, Stanyhurst’s translation of the first four books of the Aeneid in syllabic hexameters was caricatured by Thomas Nashe as treading ‘a foul lumbering boisterous wallowing measure’ (Nashe, Strange News, Works, 1.299).⁶ English poetry, it seemed, could not be made to sound quite like Latin. The opening, as much an adaptation as a translation, has little of the direct and bold style of the original, where the poet marks his change of genre and gestures towards the epic struggle of powerful men and women whose destiny is determined by forces beyond their control: I that in old season with reeds oaten harmony whistled My rural sonnet; from forest flitted I forced Thee* sulcking swincker* thee soil, though craggy, to sunder. *the *labourer A labour and a travail too plough-swains heartily welcome. Now manhood and garbroyls* I chant, and martial horror. *disturbance, tumult I blaze thee* captain first from Troy city repairing, *the Like wand’ring pilgrim too* famosed* Italy trudging, *to *famoused And coast of Lavyn: soused with tempestuous hurlwind,* *whirlwind On land and sailing, by God’s predestinate order: But chief through Juno’s long fostered deadly revenge. (Stanyhurst, First Four Books, sig. B3)⁷
Stanyhurst is, as Derek Attridge observes, faithful to Latin rules of composition, and attempts to write English poetry in terms of Latin quantitative metre, alternating short and long syllables (hence lengthening ‘to’ to ‘too’ and ‘the’ to ‘thee’). The problem for an English reader is that the scansion is based on the printed word, not its sound, so English words have to be read in terms of their syllables as if they were Latin, and their English sound irrelevant, which creates an unusual, eccentric effect.⁸
³ See Rosemary O’Day, The Professions in Early Modern England, 1450–1800: Servants of the Commonweal (Harlow, 2000). ⁴ See Quentin Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford, 2014); Lorna Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare (Oxford, 2015); and Jessica Winston, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581 (Oxford, 2016). ⁵ See Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974). ⁶ Thomas Nashe, Strange News, Of the intercepting certain Letters (1592), in Ronald B. McKerrow (ed.), revised F. P. Wilson, The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1958). See Lewis, English Literature, 365, and Thomas Herron, ‘Pale Martyr: Politicizing Richard Stanihurst’s Aeneis (1582)’, in Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton (eds), Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance (Dublin, 2011), 291–318. On ‘boisterous’ as a term of literary judgement, see also Chapter 2 in this volume. ⁷ Richard Stanyhurst, The First Four Books of Virgil His Aeneis (Leiden, 1582). See also the discussion of this passage in Chapters 6 and 15 in this volume. ⁸ See Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables, 166–7.
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36 - Equally importantly, the syntax is wrenched out of shape, and words have a variety of registers, many invented by Stanyhurst to fit his rules of scansion. Furthermore, a number of archaic and unusual terms are chosen for the same reason. He also makes slightly odd decisions, starting off an epic poem with comments about pastoral poetry in conspicuously rustic language, which imitate the homely, rural vernacular of works such as Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579). The first three lines, with their rustic, alliterative diction, can be read as a strange mixture of the opening to the prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote’ (Chaucer, Works, sig. A2); the first line of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, ‘In a summer season, when set was the sun’ (Langland, Vision, sig. A1); and Spenser’s Januarye eclogue, ‘A Shepeheards boye (no better doe him call) / when Winters wastful spight was almost spent, / All in a sunneshine day, as did befall’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, sig. A1).⁹ The attempt to transform English poetry, combining a vernacular tradition with Latin scansion, is clear enough and can be read alongside other contemporary poetic experiments such as Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, which acknowledged the need for English to learn from other traditions and tried out a variety of metres and styles.¹⁰ But the effect here is clumsy and surprising, and leaves the epic rooted in the pastoral rather than announcing itself as a newly ambitious and significant enterprise that will transform the possibilities of English literature. Phrases such as ‘manhood and garbroyls I chant’ are reminiscent of medieval romance rather than Latin epic, and ‘wandering pilgrim’ is surely more of the same, if it is not from a saint’s life, and the contrast between the Reformation-flavoured ‘God’s predestined order’ and ‘Juno’s long fostered deadly revenge’, which does finally have an epic quality, is confusing and, in keeping with the passage cited here, sends out mixed messages. Certainly, in contrast to Thomas Phaer’s translation (completed by Thomas Twyne), favoured by the self-styled classicist Thomas Nashe, Stanyhurst’s version looks forced and excessively self-conscious: I that my slender Oaten Pipe in verse was wont to sound Of woods, and next to that I taught for husbandmen the ground, How fruit unto their greedy lust they might constrain to bring, A work of thanks: Lo now of Mars, and dreadful wars I sing, Of arms, and of the man of Troy, that first by fatal fight Did thence arrive to Lavine land, that now Italia, hight. (Phaer and Twyne, Whole Twelve Books, sig. A1)¹¹
The same emphasis on the flight from pastoral is present in the opening lines, as it is in Stanyhurst, but the diction and scansion are clear and clean, marking a break with the historical vernacular and the variety of forms of English that characterise Stanyhurst’s translation. It is hardly a surprise that the famous phrase ‘arms and the man’, common to all subsequent English versions of the Aeneid, is first used here (Stanyhurst’s ‘manhood and
⁹ Geoffrey Chaucer, in William Thynne (ed.), The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (London, 1563); William Langland, The Vision of Pierce Plowman (London, 1561); Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579). On Spenser’s similar device in starting off an epic poem with comments about pastoral poetry, see also Chapter 27 in this volume. ¹⁰ See William J. Kennedy, ‘Petrarchan Poetics’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 3, The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1999), 119–26. ¹¹ Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne (trans.), The Whole Twelve Books of the Aeneids of Virgil (London, 1573). For Nashe’s praise of this translation, see his Preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589), in Works, 3.19.
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37 garbroyls’ did not catch on). Phaer situates the reader in a world of epic conflict, one that could be modern or ancient, while Stanyhurst struggles to forge something new, the experimental nature of the verse leaving us strangely rooted in the past. While experiments with quantitative metre may have proved something of a dead end, the new principles of education seem to have established other more durable features in English poetry. In particular, dialogue and dramatic speech assumed a greater significance. The importance of poetic dialogue has been neglected.¹² Many poets published verse dialogues on a variety of subjects, such as Richard Barnfield’s The Combat Between Conscience and Covetousness, in the Mind of Man (1598). Barnfield’s poem combines a traditional, homely moral with a more satirical and despairing edge, as Covetousness triumphs and becomes the dominating principle of government, validating his boast at the start: The greatest Princes are my followers, The King in Peace, the Captain in the Wars: The Courtier, and the simple Country-man: The Judge, the Merchant, and the Gentleman: The learned Lawyer, and the Politician: The skilful Surgeon, and the fine Physician: In brief, all sorts of men me entertain, And hold me, as their Soul’s sole Sovereign. (Barnfield, Combat, lines 30–7, Complete Poems, 162)¹³
Conscience does its best to stand up to Covetousness’s proud onslaught: Truth is the right, that I must stand upon, (For other title, hath poor Conscience none) First I will prove it, by Antiquity, That thou art but an up-start, unto me; Before that thou were ever thought upon, The mind of Man, belonged to me alone. (Barnfield, Combat, lines 51–6, Complete Poems, 163)
These are good humanist principles of argument, citing the first example as a means of establishing precedence, replicating contemporary arguments about history, whereby disputants sought to establish truth by uncovering the oldest source.¹⁴ Accordingly, Conscience is making a proper claim that should help it triumph. Conscience further argues that Adam was given a conscience when God created him ‘to rule his mind’ (line 60), and to be his governor. These claims fail to convince Covetousness, who counters, with a patronisingly worldly air: Alas poor Conscience, how thou art deceived? As though of sense, thou wert quite bereaved.
¹² The subject awaits the definitive study by Cathy Shrank. ¹³ Richard Barnfield, in George Klawitter (ed.), The Complete Poems (Selinsgrove, 1990; reprinted New York, 2005). ¹⁴ See T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London, 1950), particularly chapter 6.
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38 - What wilt thou say (that thinks thou canst not err) If I can prove myself the ancienter? Though into Adam’s mind, God did infuse thee, Before his fall, yet man did never use thee. What was it else, but Avarice in Eve, (Thinking thereby, in greater Bliss to live) That made her taste, of the forbidden fruit? Of her Desire was not I the root? (Barnfield, Combat, lines 71–80, Complete Poems, 163–4)
Unfortunately, Covetousness also knows how to dispute and appeals to the same principles as Conscience to counter his claim. He, too, claims precedence, arguing that avarice came before conscience, and so demonstrating a knowledge of the contemporary theological debates on the subject.¹⁵ Covetousness may be immoral, cynical, and self-interested but the figure knows the principles of forensic rhetoric (again revealing the close connection between law and literature).¹⁶ Its triumph is justified by the Fall of Mankind and the victory of appetite over reason, but also by the state of the world with the dominance of greed and hypocrisy. The only hope is that the astute reader will recognise the problem and take action to reassert the rights of Conscience. Barnfield employs his education and knowledge of rhetoric elsewhere in his writing. His most celebrated/notorious work, The Tears of an Affectionate Shepherd Sick for Love. Or The Complaint of Daphnis for the Love of Ganymede (1594), belongs to the well-established genre of complaint, the lament of a speaker for their loss, usually a loved one. Complaints were not an invention of the early modern period and both Chaucer and Lydgate had produced well-known examples, but they proliferated in the sixteenth century. They were almost invariably delivered by an imagined female speaker created by a male poet.¹⁷ Barnfield consciously subverts the expectations of the reader in imagining a male speaker lamenting the loss of a male lover. Daphnis is a familiar name in pastoral poetry, the Greek shepherd who invented the genre; Ganymede was also familiar to readers, especially in the 1590s, as the beautiful boy who inspired homosexual desire, most notably in Jupiter, king of the gods.¹⁸ Barnfield is clearly using these names to draw attention to his poem. Ganymede had featured in Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe’s play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, published in 1594, appearing on stage at the start of the play. Marlowe may have been in Barnfield’s mind (certainly by 1598 Marlowe was notorious as an atheist and homosexual).¹⁹ Furthermore, in dedicating the volume to Penelope Rich (1563–1607), Barnfield was signalling further the transgressive nature of his poem, as his dedicatee was the original Stella of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence, and was also well known by the late 1590s to be the lover of Charles Blount, eighth Baron Mountjoy (1563–1606), and she had had a son, christened Mountjoy in 1597, not included in her husband’s pedigree.²⁰ Indeed, Barnfield ¹⁵ See Abraham Stoll, Conscience in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2017). ¹⁶ See Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare, chapter 1. ¹⁷ See John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (Oxford, 1991). For more on the complaint genre, see also Chapter 19 in this volume. ¹⁸ See Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford, CA, 1991). ¹⁹ See Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God’s Judgement (London, 1597), 146–7; William Rankin, Seven Satires (London, 1598), 17; Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598), 286–7; and Russell A. Fraser, The War Against Poetry (Princeton, NJ, 1971), 23–4. ²⁰ See Sylvia Freedman, Poor Penelope: Lady Penelope Rich, An Elizabethan Woman (Abbotsbrook, 1983), chapter 10; and Alison Wall, ‘Rich [née Devereux], Penelope, Lady Rich’, ODNB (2004).
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39 would appear to have drawn attention to Lady Rich’s independent character in Daphnis’s lines exhorting his lover to be bold and to pay no attention to criticism and opposition: Learn of the Gentlewomen of this Age, That set their Beauties to the open view, Making Disdain their Lord, true Love their Page, A Custom Zeal doth hate, Desert doth rue: Learn to look red, anon wax pale and wan, Making a mock of Love, a scorn of man. (Barnfield, Affectionate Shepherd, Second Day’s Lamentation, lines 158–63, Complete Poems, 58)
Not only is Barnfield signalling a court scandal in obviously positive terms but he is also using his rhetorical skills to apply the standards of female beauty—a pale complexion with red cheeks—to a man. The Affectionate Shepherd was written by a poet who knew how to have an emotional impact on an audience and who understood the rhetorical nature of argument.²¹ The foremost authority on rhetorical training, Quintilian, had made a powerful case that appealing to the emotions should play a crucial role in the armoury of any skilled orator, in particular forensic oratory, for which ‘Emotion is justifiably combined with the Proofs of each fact’ (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Book 6, chapter 2, Orator’s Education, 3.45).²² Quintilian divides emotions into two, using Greek terms, pathos and ethos, the former signalling emotions as we might understand them (in particular the inspiration of sadness and sympathy), and the latter a more moral sense: The ethos which I mean, and which I want to see in a speaker, will be that which is recommended primarily by goodness: not only mild and calm, but usually attractive and polite, and pleasing and delightful to the listeners. The great virtue in expressing it lies in making it seem that everything flows from the nature of the facts and the persons, so that the speaker’s character shines through his speech and is somehow recognised. (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, Book 6, chapter 2, Orator’s Education, 3.51)
It is surely not stretching a point too far to suggest that Barnfield’s carefully crafted defence of same-sex love owes much to his knowledge of how to argue a persuasive case using existing forms of thinking and writing, and moulding them for his own purposes. The poem opens with an aubade (a song sung at dawn), the lover lamenting the departure of his partner in polite and affectionate terms designed to make the reader pause and wonder what could be wrong with his feelings: Scarce had the morning Star hid from the light Heaven’s crimson Canopy with stars bespangled, But I began to rue th’unhappy sight Of that fair Boy that had my heart entangled; Cursing the Time, the Place, the sense, the sin; I came, I saw, I viewed, I slipped in. ²¹ See Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford, 2002), 72–84. ²² Quintilian, in Donald A. Russell (ed. and trans.), The Orator’s Education, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2002).
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40 - If it be sin to love a sweet-fac’d Boy, (Whose amber locks trussed up in golden trammels* *plaits or braids Dangle adown his lovely cheeks with joy, When pearl and flowers his fair hair enamels) If it be sin to love a lovely Lad; Oh then sin I, for whom my soul is sad. (Barnfield, Affectionate Shepherd, lines 1–12, Complete Poems, 44)
The nature of these lines is made even more obvious when they are read in terms of the dedicatory poem to Lady Rich which precedes them, signed by ‘Your Honour’s most affectionate and perpetually devoted Shepherd: DAPHNIS’. This praises her as a ‘Fair lovely Lady, whose Angelic eyes / Are Vestal Candles of sweet Beauty’s Treasure’ (Barnfield, Affectionate Shepherd, dedicatory poem, lines 1–2, Complete Poems, 43), making the shepherd’s devotion to the adulterous courtier and the beautiful boy inseparable (perhaps even matching her eyes and his hair and cheeks). The second stanza of the poem proper stands as an interrogatio or erotema, a rhetorical question that requires no answer designed to make the reader acquiesce to the poet’s argument.²³ It is evidently not a sin to love a boy of such beauty, especially when he should be judged by the same standards of beauty as the poet’s patron. Barnfield’s poem uses a variety of rhetorical devices to adapt poetic traditions and modes of representing beauty and sexual relations to persuade his readers that same-sex love is as valid as heterosexual love. Poets often used enumeratio, the list—part of the principle of copia which, following Erasmus, emphasised that the amplification and expansion of writing was inherently enjoyable—to make a point.²⁴ Daphnis adopts this device to persuade Ganymede—and the reader—that his suit is honourable and valuable: Against my Birthday thou shalt be my guest: We’ll have Green-cheeses and fine Syllabubs; And thou shalt be the chief of all my feast. And I will give thee two fine pretty Cubs, With two Young Whelps, to make thee sport withal, A golden Racket, and a Tennis-ball. A gilded Nutmeg, and a race of Ginger, A silken Girdle, and a drawn-work* Band, *patterned by drawn threads Cuffs for thy wrists, a gold Ring for thy finger, And sweet Rose-water for thy Lily-white hand; A Purse of silk, bespanged with spots of gold, As brave a one as ere thou didst behold. A pair of Knives, a green Hat and a Feather, New Gloves to put upon thy milk-white hand, I’ll give thee, for to keep thee from the weather, With Phoenix feathers shall thy face be fanned, Cooling those Cheeks, that being cooled wax red, Like Lilies in a bed of Roses shed. (Barnfield, Affectionate Shepherd, Second Day’s Lamentation, lines 85–102, Complete Poems, 55) ²³ See Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (New York, 1968), 117–18. ²⁴ See Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979).
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41 This enticing inventory has, of course, been carefully selected. The gifts include fresh (green) cheese; syllabubs (dishes made from milk or cream with added wine or cider and sugar); expensive spices from an exotic destination such as the Spice Islands (the Moluccas), ginger and nutmeg; the very best quality sports equipment for a royal game (tennis was ‘real tennis’, played indoors); the finest clothes; perfume; and so on. The list becomes more conspicuously far-fetched towards the end, concluding with the speaker claiming he can procure a fan made of phoenix feathers taken from the mythical bird that could regenerate itself in fire every five hundred years or so. Barnfield is showing how desperate Daphnis is to procure Ganymede’s love, and, in doing so, demonstrating his skill at manipulating what might seem like a simple poetic device to the unwary reader. There are a number of precedents for Barnfield’s poem, in which the lover showers gifts on his beloved, notably in pastoral poems, such as the Januarye eclogue of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579), which also concerns the hopeless suit of the bereft shepherd, Hobbinol, for another, Colin Clout. The educational system which encouraged argument in utramque partem also fostered dispute and debate between poets, who were invariably conscious of what others were writing and often looked to respond in their own work.²⁵ It is likely that Barnfield was imitating Christopher Marlowe’s lyric, ‘Come live with me and be my love’ (entitled ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’), which was not actually published until 1599, but which circulated in manuscript after Marlowe’s death in 1593. It elicited a number of responses from other poets, including Walter Ralegh and John Donne.²⁶ Marlowe’s speaker, unlike Barnfield’s, is un-named, as is the addressee, but it is clear that the addressee is not necessarily a woman, making it a useful precedent. He or she is offered a range of thoughtfully assembled gifts: And I will make thee beds of Roses, And a thousand fragrant poesies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle, Embroider’d all with leaves of Myrtle. A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty Lambs we pull, Fair lined slippers for the cold: With buckles of the purest gold. A belt of straw and Ivy buds, With Coral clasps and Amber studs: And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. (Marlowe, ‘Come live with me’, lines 9–16, Complete Works, 1.215)²⁷
There is a mixture of intricately produced domestic treats—roses, cap, kirtle (tunic for either men or women)—and exotic ones made from coral and amber, two of the most expensive
²⁵ See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser’s Rosalind’, Modern Language Review, 104 (2009), 935–46. ²⁶ See R. S. Forsythe, ‘The Passionate Shepherd; and English Poetry’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 40.3 (1925), 692–742; and further discussions of this poem in Chapters 10, 14, 29, 31, and 33 in this volume. ²⁷ Christopher Marlowe, in Roma Gill, et al. (eds), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1987–98).
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42 - materials available.²⁸ The description moves outwards away from the intimacy of the bower to the wider pastoral community via the references to wool and fur, and then onwards to a global context with the references to coral and amber. The last lines cited here indicate the speaker’s increasingly desperate desire as heavy emphasis is placed on the conditional ‘if ’, foregrounding the likelihood that the suit is likely to fail. A similar development can be discerned in Barnfield’s lines, as Daphnis’s promises conclude with a fan of phoenix feathers. Barnfield is not responding directly to Marlowe’s poem as Ralegh was in his lyric, ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’, nor writing an exposure of the fictions of pastoral poetry as Donne was in ‘The Bait’. But like them he is showing that poets, trained in the art of rhetoric, liked to argue with each other, playfully, affectionately, and seriously, as they had done at school and university.
Religion However, when we consider what is surely the most significant element of life in the sixteenth century, most poets are conspicuously elusive. There is a vast number of poems directly or indirectly on religious subjects, but we know very little about the religious beliefs of most Elizabethan writers, apart from those who changed confessional allegiance, like Ben Jonson.²⁹ Even so, at the end of his long life it was hard to know which side Jonson was on.³⁰ Of course, it is probably a fair assumption that Thomas Dekker (c 1572–1632), author of the anti-Catholic satire The Whore of Babylon (1607), was likely a Protestant (unless he was covering his tracks or simply wanted to take the money), and that the martyred poet Robert Southwell (1561–95) was a Catholic. But it is extremely difficult to work out the religious beliefs of nearly all significant writers either from their writings or from surviving life records. Although Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe insulted each other in print in a conflict that had a strong relationship to the scandalous Puritan pamphlets known as the Marprelate Tracts (1588–9), we cannot easily work out what either really believed.³¹ Edmund Spenser is far more enigmatic and elusive than the frequently applied label ‘Protestant Poet’ assumes: no life records survive testifying to his religious affiliation, and it is clear that both his sons were suspected of Catholicism in the mid-seventeenth century.³² John Lyly (1554–1606) wrote for the bishops in the Marprelate conflict, alongside Nashe, but there is no clue to his religious affiliation in his life or work beyond this. Like Ben Jonson, John Donne (1573–1631) had a life defined by religious change and personal turmoil, but working out his beliefs is not a straightforward task, so shrouded are they in mystery.³³ Many claims have been made about Shakespeare’s beliefs but none has found general acceptance.³⁴ ²⁸ See Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York, 1996), 76; and Matthew Dimmock, ‘Guns and Gawds: Elizabethan England’s Infidel Trade’, in Jyotsna A. Singh (ed.), A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion (Oxford, 2009), 207–21, 213–14. ²⁹ This paragraph is partly based on one in an earlier essay, Andrew Hadfield, ‘Shakespeare, Biography, and Belief ’, in Hannibal Hamlin (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion (Cambridge, 2019), 18–33. ³⁰ See Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford, 2011), 138–44, 228–9, 256–9. ³¹ See Joseph Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge, 2008), lxi–lxii. ³² See Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford, 2012), 207. ³³ See David Wootton, ‘John Donne’s Religion of Love’, in John Brooke and Ian MacLean (eds), Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion (Oxford, 2005), 31–80. ³⁴ See David Scott Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (Oxford, 2014), chapter 1.
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43 This should not surprise any student of the sixteenth century. The Reformation came as a great shock to many who had no inkling that the King of England’s marital difficulties would transform a country known as somewhat culturally backward and relatively conservative in 1530 to a militant Protestant state twenty years later.³⁵ Nor could they have been aware that the country would then veer in the opposite direction and become a Catholic theocracy before settling down to a relative equilibrium under Elizabeth.³⁶ Even then, any hope of a relatively untroubled religious polity dominated by a state church that asked few direct questions of a believer was shattered with the Bull of Pope Pius V, ‘Regnans in Excelsis’, issued on 25 February 1570, declaring that the English queen was a heretic and it was the duty of her Catholic subjects to attempt to depose her and return England to the true religion.³⁷ The resulting propaganda war between Protestants and Catholics was one of the most significant features that shaped the culture of Elizabeth’s later reign.³⁸ In these uncertain and fractious times it is hardly surprising that writers were not eager to declare their confessional allegiance, and much recent scholarship has stressed the widespread allegiance to traditional religious practices and the Catholic Church as it became after the schism, the loyalty of many to the state church whatever their particular faith, and the careful disguise of belief.³⁹ People were invariably rooted in particular communities and were often reluctant to tear these apart for the sake of their individual beliefs: it may be that what mattered to many readers was Christian instruction and comfort in verse, not doctrinal adhesion. Furthermore, as Alison Shell has demonstrated, poets often shared a common stock of images, representations, and ways of thinking and writing, which makes it hard to line up loyalties and writings in a straightforward manner.⁴⁰ Shell points out that the publication of Robert Southwell’s Saint Peter’s Complaint in 1595 seems to have inspired other poets to publish: ‘It is as if the presence of Southwell in the market-place helped the value of all religious verse, and made it a more urgent matter to print.’⁴¹ John Donne was from a prominent Catholic family, his brother dying in prison for harbouring a priest. After his attempts to forge a career at court were thwarted by the discovery of his marriage, Donne eventually pursued a career in the Church of England as Dean of St. Paul’s (1621), having been ordained as a priest in January 1615. It is hard to establish where Donne’s religious sympathies really lay, whether he was always a Catholic at heart, or whether he was a sincere and committed convert.⁴² It is no surprise that Donne has been connected to the important sect The Family of Love, their evasive antinomian beliefs
³⁵ See Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987); and Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, Vol. 1, Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), 246–77. ³⁶ See Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT, 2009); and Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003), 357–62. ³⁷ See Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (London, 1993), 328–35. ³⁸ See Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016). ³⁹ See Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1999); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003), 382–93; and Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986). ⁴⁰ See Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), chapter 2. ⁴¹ Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, 66. ⁴² See Mary Arshagouni Papazian, John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives (Detroit, MI, 2003); Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge, 2009); Dennis Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington, IN, 1995); and Kimberly Anne Coles, ‘The Matter of Belief in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets’, Renaissance Quarterly, 68 (2015), 899–931.
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44 - enabling him to avoid unwelcome attention to his beliefs, answer difficult questions in evasive ways, and even lie.⁴³ Donne’s poetry neatly sidesteps religious disputes. Holy Sonnet 7, which may well predate Donne’s clerical career and was probably written in the early 1600s, possibly earlier, provides a familiar image of the Apocalypse: At the round earth’s imagin’d corners, blow Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go, All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow, All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes, Shall behold God, and never taste deaths woe. But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space, For, if above all these, my sins abound, ’Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace, When we are there; here on this lowly ground, Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good As if thou hadst seal’d my pardon, with thy blood. (Donne, Holy Sonnet 7, Poetical Works, 296)⁴⁴
Fears that the end of the world was nigh were common in the 1590s in particular, and the defeat of the Armada in 1588 proved less a springboard for a mood of national rejoicing than a fear that the strength of Catholicism had only been temporarily repelled, as the schism in Christendom heralded the last days before Christ returned to reclaim his rightful kingdom.⁴⁵ The skeletons would rise from their graves and assume the appearance of a fleshy form ready to spend eternity in heaven or hell. Donne’s sonnet expresses the fears of a speaker who worries that he is too sinful to repent, only for him to imagine God granting him grace through his own blood sacrifice, and realise that what he thinks is an impossible desire has in fact happened. There is no obvious clue of the speaker’s confessional allegiance: rather, he is gripped by the thought that God will not allow him to confess and absolve himself, a dilemma that had been staged in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, performed frequently throughout the 1590s and so a play that Donne was likely to have seen.⁴⁶ Faustus despaired that he was
⁴³ See Wootton, ‘Donne’s Religion of Love’. ⁴⁴ John Donne, in Sir Herbert Grierson (ed.), Poetical Works (Oxford, 1933). ⁴⁵ See Carol Z. Weiner, ‘The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean AntiCatholicism’, Past & Present, 51 (May 1971), 27–62; C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (eds), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Manchester, 1984); and Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2000). ⁴⁶ It might further be noted that in his final speech Faustus clings to the theory of metempsychosis, that his soul should disintegrate and he be changed into ‘some brutish beast’ because ‘all beasts are happy, for when they die, / Their souls are soon dissolv’d in elements’, and so do not have to be judged by God (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 13.104–5, Complete Works, 2.45). Donne’s Holy Sonnet 9 also urges God to forget him, the opening quatrain expressing the desire to be an animal or plant: ‘If poisonous minerals, and if that tree, / Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us, / If lecherous goats, if serpents envious / Cannot be damn’d; Alas; why should I be?’ (Donne, Holy Sonnet 9, lines 1–4, Poetical Works, 297).
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45 plagued by ‘A surfeit of deadly sin, that hath damned both body and soul’, and that his offence ‘can ne’er be pardoned, / The Serpent that tempted Eve may be saved, / But not Faustus’ (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 13.11–12, 15–17, Complete Works, 2.43). Like Marlowe’s speaker, Donne’s professes a widely held fear without a precise notion of how he can be saved other than by repenting of his sins. Late medieval and Catholic theology decreed that good works could outweigh sins, God keeping a tally of an individual’s state of grace. Those who live imperfect lives but who did not deserve eternal damnation had to spend a number of years in Purgatory, tormented for their sins, but with nothing like the agony reserved for those whom God abandoned to the devils in Hell.⁴⁷ Protestants condemned such theological doctrine as fraudulent, a means of the church exploiting the people by extorting money to pay for chantries, which offered up prayers for the dead. Indeed, the sale of indulgences was the principal target of Martin Luther’s protest in Wittenberg in 1517, which inaugurated the Reformation.⁴⁸ Instead, a theology based on God’s grace as a particular act which transformed the state of an individual was designed to counter what was thought to be the excessive power of the church over the people. Both Luther and John Calvin, the two most significant Reformation thinkers (along with, to a lesser extent, Ulrich Zwingli and Philip Melanchthon, both of whom were significant for English Protestants) made grace central to their soteriological thinking.⁴⁹ Donne’s speaker imagines that he is too wrapped up in sin to escape and enter the kingdom of heaven: the last line of the sonnet makes it clear that he is mistaken. But we do not know whether Donne is representing his speaker as psychologically right in his fears that sin is overwhelming him, and so, perhaps, confessing that this is how he thought himself (the poem was not published until after Donne’s death, so could be confessional). Nor do we know whether the speaker is mistaken, in which case he may be adhering to a Catholic understanding of sin, which is relieved by the sudden operation of grace promised at the end of the poem, making this a poem of conversion.⁵⁰ Either way, we have the speaker struggling against the weight of his sins, which could be because he has to cast off his Catholic past or because he has cast off his Catholic past and is pretending to be a Protestant in name only. Furthermore, the speaker’s repentance may be on account of his particular religious transgressions or because of his own sense of his ordinary failings, perhaps when young: he could be a version of Donne or a Christian everyman. In the end, we cannot know, which contributes to the poem’s particularly powerful sense of mankind suspended between grace and damnation. Religious conflict made translation especially problematic, often dangerous, as Brian Cummings has demonstrated.⁵¹ The Reformation did not only inaugurate a series of theological changes but also raised questions of language and grammar. As Cummings points out, the bitter polemical conflict between Thomas More and William Tyndale was not simply about heresy, but about how heresy was manifested in translation. An inability to translate the Word of God properly revealed much about the mind of the translator, so that
⁴⁷ See MacCulloch, Reformation, 11–16. ⁴⁸ See Martin Luther, in E. G. Rupp and Benjamin Drewery (eds), Martin Luther: Documents of Modern History (London, 1970), 11–69. ⁴⁹ See MacCulloch, Reformation, 118–34; Richard Stauffer, ‘Calvin’, in Menna Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1985), 1–15; and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999), 170–2. ⁵⁰ See Murray, Poetics of Conversion, chapter 2. ⁵¹ See Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2002), 199–206.
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46 - ‘errors of language and theology are . . . virtually synonymous’.⁵² To give just one example, which later led to disputes between the translators of the King James Bible, how was the Greek word ‘ekklisia’ to be translated into English? For More it was rendered as ‘church’, the institution on earth that God had founded and that he had sanctioned; for Tyndale, the word was to be translated as ‘congregation’, those assembled in Christ’s name who made up the ‘church’, independent of the actual sanction of the hierarchy of the church. For Tyndale, this was a reassertion of the rights of individual believers who could gather together and worship God as they saw fit; for More it was the heretical assertion of a wicked man trying to undermine God’s authority on earth.⁵³ It is, therefore, hardly surprising that much devotional translation concentrated on the Psalms, which became one of the most significant texts for Protestants. In part, this was because they represented the trials and tribulations of the individual Christian trying to make sense of a wicked world and so were particularly appropriate works for individuals without the authority of the church to guide them; and, in part, because they did not place undue pressure on issues of doctrine.⁵⁴ Psalms were translated by both men and women, notably by brother and sister, Sir Philip and Mary Sidney Herbert. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), was the most important woman writer of the sixteenth century in England. Her literary career developed after the death of her brother (1586), soliciting poems in his praise and completing the translation of the Psalms that he had started.⁵⁵ Many of Sidney Herbert’s Psalms are in quantitative metre, amongst the few successful attempts in English, characterised by ‘the imaginative power of her language’.⁵⁶ The translations are bold, direct, and speak with a clear, often confrontational voice. This quality is evident in her translation of Psalm 52, which expresses the confidence that God will overthrow proud tyrants and reward his faithful servants. In The whole Book of Psalms collected into English Metre (1562) by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins and others, the opening verses of the Psalm are rendered as Why dost thou, tyrant, boast abroad thy wicked works to praise! Dost thou not know there is a God, whose mercies last always? Why doth thy mind yet still devise such wicked wiles to warp? Thy tongue untrue in forging lies is like a razor sharp. On mischief why sett’st thou thy mind, and wilt not walk upright? Thou hast more lust more false tales to find, than bring the truth to light. Thou dost delight in fraud and guile, ⁵² Cummings, Literary Culture, 192. ⁵³ See David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT, 1994), 270. ⁵⁴ See Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2004); and Cummings, Literary Culture, 223–31. ⁵⁵ See Margaret Patterson Hannay, ‘Herbert [née Sidney], Mary, Countess of Pembroke’, ODNB (2004). For a further discussion of Mary Sidney Herbert’s translations of Psalms, see also Chapter 32 in this volume. ⁵⁶ Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 93; see also Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables, 203–6.
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47 In mischief, blood and wrong. Thy lips have learnt the flatt’ring style, O false deceitful tongue! Therefore shall God forever confound, and pluck thee from thy place, Thy seed root out from off the ground, and utterly deface. (Sternhold and Hopkins, Psalm 52, verses 1–5, Whole Book of Psalms, 123–5)⁵⁷
Sternhold and Hopkins based most of their translations on ballad metres, desiring to capture the spirit and substance of popular poetry for songs that were designed to be sung in church by a large congregation. The quatrains are neatly divided into couplets with an iambic tetrameter followed by an iambic trimeter, the feet characterised by a regular heavy alternating beat: x / x / x / x / Why dost thou, tyrant, boast abroad x / x / x / thy wicked works to praise! x / x / x / x / Dost thou not know there is a God, x / x / x / whose mercies last always?
Such style makes for easy and straightforward reproduction, and it should not surprise us that this Psalter was the most widely read collection of Psalms, often bound with the Geneva Bible, the one affordable Bible published in the sixteenth century. When compared with Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation, the limitations of the Sternhold and Hopkins version become more readily apparent: Tyrant, why swell’st thou thus, Of mischief vaunting? since help from God to us, is never wanting. Lewd lies thy tongue contrives, Loud lies it soundeth: sharper than sharpest knives with lies it woundeth. Falsehood thy wit approves, all truth rejected: thy will all vices loves, virtue neglected.
⁵⁷ Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, The whole book of Psalms collected into English metre by T[homas] Sternhold, J[ohn] Hopkins, and others (London, 1562).
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48 - Not words from cursed thee, but gulfs are powered. Gulfs wherein daily be good men devoured. Think’st thou to bear it so? God shall displace thee, God shall thee overthrow, crush thee, deface thee. (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 52, lines 1–20, Collected Works, 2.51–2)⁵⁸
Both versions excoriate those who oppress and deceive the people, using a mixture of force and fraud. They both use rhetorical questions—interrogation/erotema—much as Barnfield did in his poem (see above), confronting the addressee with unanswerable assaults. Both urge the nameless addressee to despair of his (possibly her) pointless manoeuvres against the Lord’s anointed because God will always defend and protect his people. The Sternhold and Hopkins poem varies its vocabulary in neat, balanced ways, in line with the tidy and careful nature of the metre. In the second stanza we have ‘wiles’ and ‘lies’ functioning as synonyms, whereas Sidney Herbert repeats the word ‘lies’ three times, placing heavy emphasis on the tyrant’s inability to tell the truth and desire wilfully to deceive his subjects.⁵⁹ In stanza four the Sternhold and Hopkins version emphasises the deceit and fraud uttered by the tyrant; the Sidney Herbert version pares down the vocabulary as the tyrant’s lies have already been established: now, the stanza uses the word ‘gulf ’ to establish the vast chasm that exists between the false governor and the truthful people, a gap that swallows the good. In the fifth stanza, perhaps the most powerful of the verses cited here, Sternhold and Hopkins cast God as the good gardener plucking out a vigorous weed and so protecting the ground in which his true servants will flourish. Sidney Herbert’s version is more dramatic and contemptuous. She imagines the speaker of the poem confronting the tyrant: perhaps in ways that Protestant martyrs like Anne Askew had stood up to the authorities under interrogation?⁶⁰ The rhetorical question has no answer because to even think about the possibility of bearing God’s wrath involves a failure to understand his power and his just anger. The final line cited here again has the poet’s favourite device, repetition for emphasis (epizeuxis), as the tyrant is warned that God will crush and destroy (deface) him. Sidney Herbert’s translation may—or may not—have had a political charge, but it might also have been a reflection on the ways in which men have worked to silence women’s voices, expressing an exasperated way of answering back at long last. Women had few opportunities to write and speak in sixteenth-century England, especially with their own voices, translation being one of the few literary activities that they could undertake.⁶¹ The anger expressed here may well reflect the author’s own anger; or, it may just be a thoughtful and sharp translation. ⁵⁸ Mary Sidney Herbert, in Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (eds), The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998). ⁵⁹ See Andrew Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture from the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance (Oxford, 2017), introduction. ⁶⁰ See Anne Askew, in Elaine V. Beilin (ed.), The Examinations of Anne Askew (New York, 1997). ⁶¹ See Margaret Patterson Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, OH, 1992); and Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Harlow, 2001), chapter 4.
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49 Sidney Herbert’s translation of Psalm 139 surely does have a particular slant in emphasising the omnipresence of God and the comfort that true believers felt in knowing that they could never be left alone: O lord in me there lieth nought, but to thy search revealed lies: for when I sit thou markest it: no less thou notest when I rise: yea, closest closet of my thought hath open windows to thine eyes. Thou walkest with me when I walk, when to my bed for rest I go, I find thee there, And ev’ry where: not youngest thought in me doth grow, no not one word I cast to talk, but yet unutt’red thou dost know. If forth I march; thou goest before; if back I turn, thou com’st behind: so forth nor back thy guard I lack, nay on me too, thy hand I find. well I thy wisdom may adore, but never reach with earthy mind. (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 139, lines 1–21, Collected Works, 2.234)
Modern readers might imagine that this constitutes a version of religion as a police state, especially after Sidney Herbert’s eloquent denunciation of tyranny in the earlier Psalm, but this is to risk misconstruing the religious significance of the poem. After the Reformation, many Protestants risked falling into despair, cast adrift from the church as a guide, and having to trust their own instincts and judgement, a reality for which many were not prepared. As Alec Ryrie has pointed out, ‘large numbers of Protestants were certainly haunted by the fear that they might be irrecoverably damned, and many were—at least sometimes—absolutely convinced that they were’.⁶² Furthermore, they were assailed by the Catholic taunt ‘Where was your church before Luther?’ designed to emphasise their isolation and remind Protestants that Catholics had a protective institution designed to guide them.⁶³ Sidney Herbert’s translation shows that no Protestant was ever alone at any point because God was there with them and would not allow the truly faithful to suffer without him. Locked away in a private chamber, sitting, walking, sleeping, or thinking, even though the feeble mind could not reach or understand God’s thoughts, he would always be there.
⁶² Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013), 28. ⁶³ See S. J. Barnett, ‘Where Was Your Church before Luther? Claims for Antiquity of Protestantism Examined’, Church History, 68 (1999), 14–41.
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50 -
Politics and Government In sixteenth-century England, it was almost impossible to imagine political life without the monarchy. However, it is important to remember that there were republican states in contemporary Europe, notably Venice and the Dutch Republic, which had elected leaders and were based on institutions that encouraged, even demanded, the participation of their citizens.⁶⁴ Furthermore, much of the curriculum in schools and universities derived from writings produced during the Roman Republic, in particular, the work of Cicero.⁶⁵ Therefore, while it was extremely unlikely that many thought the monarchy could or should be challenged, it does not follow that republican thinking had no impact on political thought in Britain, especially in literary works. Ideas based on the need for the exercise of virtue in public life, the need to ensure that office holders did not become complacent or settled and so undermine the good work they may once have done, and debates about the relationship between individuals and the impact of institutions, along with many other issues, are related to the issues and questions that dominate republican political discourse.⁶⁶ The most common form of political discourse in the late Middle Ages, sometimes produced in verse, was the speculum principis [the mirror for princes].⁶⁷ Such works outlined a description of political ideals for a ruler to follow, both in terms of their personal behaviour in following reason and restraining their appetites, and in their conduct as a governor, being fair, just, farsighted, and assembling wise councillors from whom they would frequently seek advice. The opposite of a good and just ruler was a tyrant, a man or woman who could not control their desires, paid little attention to rational argument, and who regularly flouted the law in order to satisfy themselves. The historical record of ancient Rome and the Old Testament provided a wealth of examples, as did a large number of literary texts.⁶⁸ The most significant political literary work of the sixteenth century was The Mirror for Magistrates, a work that was reprinted, revised and widely read well into the reign of James I. The plan for the Mirror was originally conceived by William Baldwin, a prominent literary figure at the court of Edward VI, and the printer John Wayland.⁶⁹ The plan was to produce a new edition of John Lydgate’s popular work, The Fall of Princes (c 1431–8), a collection of verse tragedies that told the stories of princes whose reigns had ended in disaster because they had incurred God’s wrath through their personal failings or inability to govern properly. Other writers were involved, notably George Ferrars, and the first edition of the Mirror, based on material from a variety of histories and chronicles, was partially published with Lydgate’s poem in 1555 after Edward died. Unfortunately, the regime of the new monarch, Mary, was hostile to the project and it was supressed. The poem was re-licensed by the Stationers’ Company when Elizabeth acceded to the throne in 1558 and an edition of part of the original was published in 1559, with another containing more of the suppressed material following in 1563. A revised edition appeared in 1571, and ⁶⁴ See Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, 1555–1590 (Cambridge, 1992); and David McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark, DE, 1990). ⁶⁵ See Howard Jones, Master Tully: Cicero in Tudor England (Nieuwkoop, 1981). ⁶⁶ See Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1995); and Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, 2005). ⁶⁷ See L. K. Born, ‘The Perfect Prince: A Study in 13th and 14th Century Ideals’, Speculum, 3 (1928), 470–504. ⁶⁸ See Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1990). ⁶⁹ See Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994), 83–4; Elizabeth Evenden, ‘Day, John’, ODNB (2004); and John N. King, ‘Baldwin, William’, ODNB (2004).
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51 further editions with new material in 1578 and 1587. In 1574 and 1578, subsequent editions appeared, containing material based on early British history, before a collected edition of the whole series of poems was published in 1610.⁷⁰ The complicated publication history of the Mirror indicates the conflicted and divided nature of the project, which tells us a great deal about the nature of political culture in sixteenth-century England, and the relationship between literature and politics. The original design for the Mirror was to develop the tradition of ‘mirror for princes’ literature that advised monarchs how they should rule by producing a ‘mirror for magistrates’, a compendious work that would teach magistrates—which meant anyone who assumed a political office, from Justices of the Peace to the king’s councillors—how to govern through a series of historical examples, by showing monarchs and magistrates making mistakes. These verse tragedies were then discussed in prose links by fictionalised forms of the editors themselves. However, as the history of the text outlined indicates, the Mirror also became, like Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, a repository of verse tragedies of the good and great, and a patriotic celebration—rather than a critical analysis—of significant moments in the history of the British Isles. The 1559 edition of the Mirror, the version that most closely resembles the original project, outlines its moral and political purpose in the opening letter addressed ‘To the nobility and all other in office’: where the ambitious seek no office, there no doubt, offices are duly ministered: and where offices are duly ministered, it cannot be chosen, but the people are good, whereof must needs follow a good common weal. For if the officers be good, the people cannot be ill. Thus the goodness or badness of any realm lieth in the goodness or badness of the rulers. And therefore not without great cause do the holy Apostles so earnestly charge us to pray for the magistrates: For in deed the wealth and quiet of every common weal, the disorder also and miseries of the same, come specially through them. (Baldwin, Mirror, 64)⁷¹
Baldwin was well-versed in the writings of Greek and Roman writers, having already published A Treatise of Moral Philosophy Containing the Sayings of the Wise (1547), a collection of maxims and short moral commonplaces, which was widely read in the later sixteenth century. The Mirror letter seems to combine the accepted moral wisdom of medieval political traditions with an awareness of republican debates about the relationship between governors, governed, and institutions.⁷² The key to good government, Baldwin is instructing magistrates at all levels of society, is you, not kings, as it is your job to understand how to govern. Society can only function properly when magistrates act as servants of the state and people, not when they use their positions for personal gain. Most of the tragedies in the 1559 edition have the ghosts of once powerful English figures warning magistrates not to follow their example and to learn from their mistakes. The opening tragedy outlines the fate of Robert Tresilian, the chief justice of the king’s bench in the reign of Richard II who was executed in 1388 for his crimes in supporting what
⁷⁰ See Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield (eds), A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2016); and Harriet Archer, Unperfect Histories: The Mirror for Magistrates, 1559–1610 (Oxford, 2017). ⁷¹ William Baldwin, et al., in Lily B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge, 1938). ⁷² See James M. Blythe, ‘ “Civic Humanism” and Medieval Political Thought’, in James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism (Cambridge, 2000), 30–74.
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52 - was seen as the king’s ruthless exploitation of the people.⁷³ In his tragedy, Tresilian explains how it was ambition that brought him down. Ingratiating himself into the inner circle of a rapacious monarch, Tresilian explains how the king and his councillors betrayed the people by exploiting the law for personal gain: So working law like wax, the subject was not sure Of life, land, nor goods, but at the prince’s will: Which caused his kingdom the shorter time to dure*, *endure, last For claiming power absolute both to save and spill, The prince thereby presumed his people for to pyll*: *rob or steal from And set his lusts for law, and will had reason’s place, No more but hang and draw, there was no better grace. (‘Robert Tresilian’, lines 85–91, Mirror, 77)
Tresilian is guilty of complicity with a tyrant, helping the monarch exploit the peoples’ goodwill by using the law to accumulate property, one of the key definitions of tyrannous behaviour, as manifested in the actions of numerous Old Testament kings and Classical despots.⁷⁴ Instead of protecting the people, the law is transforming into an instrument of their downfall, the king moulding it to his will (Tresilian was executed for his strong defence of the royal prerogative). The Mirror pulls no punches in its criticism of the sins of English monarchs and their councillors, with Tresilian admitting that Richard’s aim was ‘his people for to pyll’. The last word quibbles on its obvious meaning to exploit, or extract riches from, and puns on ‘Pell’, as in the ‘Clerk of the Pell’, an officer of the crown who entered receipts on parchments (pells). Richard and, by implication, his officers are not in a state of grace, having used their greed to turn against God, as they confuse what is lawful with what they want (their lusts), using it to hang and dismember honest subjects (Tresilian was hated for his brutal suppression of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt). Eventually Tresilian’s crimes catch up with him and he is executed in turn. Tresilian draws the obvious moral from his sad fate. He abjures his greed and manipulation of the law: ‘Lo the fine of falsehood, the stipend of corruption, / Fie on stinking lucre, of all unright the lure’ (‘Robert Tresilian’, lines 120–1, Mirror, 79), and urges magistrates, Abandon all affray, be soothfast in your saws, Be constant and careless of mortal men’s displeasure, With eyes shut and hands close you should pronounce the laws Esteem not worldly hire, think there is a treasure More worth then gold or stone a thousand times in value, Reposed for all such as righteousness ensue, Whereof you cannot fail, the promise made is true. (‘Robert Tresilian’, lines 134–40, Mirror, 80)
The law should be administered impartially and should be greater than any individual officer who must shut out all thoughts of gain and administer justice blind like the goddess Iustitia.
⁷³ See John L. Leland, ‘Tresilian, Sir Robert’, ODNB (2004). ⁷⁴ See Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants, 73.
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53 Many of the subsequent tragedies tell other stories of the punishment of the unjust and point similar morals. The tragedy of Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers (c 1440–83), concentrates on the great noble’s capacity for falsehood.⁷⁵ Woodville was a prominent military and political figure during the Wars of the Roses, succeeding well through his military prowess, skilful manoeuvring, and good fortune, until he fell foul of Richard III and was executed. Woodville was also a well-known literary figure, translating the popular thirteenth-century compilation, Liber Philosophorum Moralium Antiquorum as The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers (1477).⁷⁶ Woodville’s case is more complicated than that of Tresilian. On the one hand, he has not really done much wrong, being a figure caught up in the maelstrom of a violent age who died a good death when his time was up. But, on the other, he is especially culpable, as someone who had the ability to speak out and explain what was going on, but failed to grasp the opportunity. Woodville’s ghost explains that one of the worst things that can happen is the promulgation of lies by writers who know better:⁷⁷ For hitherto sly writers’ wily wits Which have engrossed princes’ chief affairs, Have been like horses snaffled* with the bits Of fancy, fear, or doubt’s full deep despairs, Whose reins enchained to the chiefest chairs, Have so been strained of those that bare the stroke That truth was forced to chew or else to choke. This caused such as loathed loud to lie, To pass with silence sundry prince’s lives. Less fault it is to leave, then to lead awry: And better drowned, that ever bound in gyves*. For fatal fraud this world so fondly drives, That whatsoever writers’ brains may brew Be it never so false, at length is ta’en for true.
*restrained
*shackles
What harm may hap by help of lying pens How written lies may lewdly be maintained. The loathly rites, the devilish idol dens With guiltless blood of virtuous men bestained, Is such a proof as all good hearts have plained. The tally grounds of stories thoroughly tries, The death of martyrs’ vengeance on it cries. (‘Anthony, Lord Rivers’, lines 29–51, Mirror, 246–7)
The speaker’s dilemma recalls that of Raphael Hythloday in More’s Utopia, who argued that advising rulers would compromise his ideals, force him to become a flatterer rather than a free man able to speak frankly, and start lying. As Raphael complained to More in the first book, ‘If I’m to speak the truth, I will have to talk in the way I’ve described [i.e., obliquely]. ⁷⁵ See Michael Hicks, ‘Woodville [Wydeville], Anthony, Second Earl Rivers’, ODNB (2004). ⁷⁶ See Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, et al. (trans.), in Curt F. Bühler (ed.), The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers: The Translations Made by Stephen Scrope, William Worcester and an Anonymous Translator (London, 1941). ⁷⁷ See Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture, 173–8.
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54 - Whether it’s the business of a philosopher to tell lies, I don’t know, but it isn’t mine. Perhaps my advice may be repugnant to the king’s councillors, but I don’t see why they should consider it eccentric to the point of folly’ (More, Utopia, 36).⁷⁸ Hythloday will never become a counsellor to a monarch because he does not wish to sacrifice his right to tell the truth to power. Lord Rivers’ ghost represents himself in the same way, but as a man who made the wrong decision and took the wrong path. He serves as a warning, like Tresilian’s ghost, to ambitious magnates and magistrates not to aim too high and to undermine the commonwealth they are supposed to support, and to risk personal disaster. The first stanza cited above is a conspicuously poetic passage with its extravagant metaphors representing writers as wild horses who have been bridled with bits that censor their ability to write freely through fear, doubt, despair, and the false use of the imagination in times of acute anxiety. The lines articulate a common fear in the period, as censors sought to determine whether writers meant what they wrote and writers sought to evade attention through the cunning use of ambiguity.⁷⁹ The horse metaphor enables Baldwin to make a pun on reins/reigns, as these writers are tied to chairs, that is, chariots/thrones, so that as they are whipped by their riders, the horses/writers eat or choke on their truth. However, the last stanza cited qualifies our understanding of Lord Rivers’ life. He has represented himself as a foolish victim of a tyrannical ruler who forced writers to pull his chariots like a Roman emperor or an Oriental despot.⁸⁰ Lord Rivers realises the harm caused by ‘lying pens’, which enable dangerous and destructive lies to be maintained, as they continue to oppress the tyrant’s subjects. He connects these lies to Satanic rites and devilish lairs stained with the blood of the virtuous, not only confirming that wicked souls delight in lying and that the Devil is the father of lies, but, in making this connection, he is pointing out just how much damage a hired pen can do. The last line—‘the death of martyrs vengeance on it cries’—has a particular resonance in England after the creation of so many martyrs in the middle years of the century in Mary’s reign.⁸¹ Writers for the wrong cause—and perhaps the right cause too—have much to answer for, and their failings have led to significant bloodshed. Throughout the sixteenth century, poets were concerned that they would fall foul of the authorities: that their work would be censored and they would be punished for their opinions. The dilemma is expressed most directly in the Mirror in the tragedy of the poet William Collingbourne (c 1435–84), who was ‘cruelly executed for making a foolish rime’ (Mirror, 347). Collingbourne provoked the ire of the tyrannical Richard III for his couplet, ‘The Cat, the Rat, and Lovel our Dog, / Do rule all England, under a Hog’ (‘Collingbourne’, lines 69–70, Mirror, 349). This miniature beast fable was not, as the ghost confesses, difficult to understand, and many readers made the correct identifications: the Cat was Sir William Catesby; the Rat, Richard Ratcliffe; the Dog, Francis Lovell, first Viscount Lovell; and the Hog, the king himself, whose symbol was a boar.⁸² Collingbourne’s tale is different from that of Tresilian, and, in other ways, Lord Rivers, indicating the complex and varied nature
⁷⁸ Thomas More, in George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (eds), Utopia (Cambridge, 1989). ⁷⁹ See Dominique Brancher, ‘ “When the Tongue Slips it Tells the Truth”: Tricks and Truths of the Renaissance Lapsus’, Renaissance Studies, 30 (2016), 50–3. ⁸⁰ See René Graziani, ‘Philip II’s Impressa and Spenser’s Souldan’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27 (1964), 322–4. ⁸¹ See Scott C. Lucas, A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation (Amherst, MA, 2009), 205. ⁸² See Rosemary Horrox, ‘Catesby, William’, ODNB (2004); Rosemary Horrox, ‘Ratcliffe, Sir Richard’, ODNB (2004); and Rosemary Horrox, ‘Lovell, Francis, Viscount Lovell’, ODNB (2004).
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55 of the Mirror, which places heavy demands on the reading skills of magistrates, and, in doing so, alerts them to the rigours of political office. Collingbourne does not think he is guilty of treason, but he warns magistrates that ‘the guilty always are suspicious’ (‘Collingbourne’, line 267, Mirror, 357), and that they need to be subtle and careful in their actions. Collingbourne’s story points the opposite moral to that of Lord Rivers: the one wishes he had spoken out in a more subtle way; the other regrets that he failed to speak out when he could and should have done. The relationship between writers and politicians was fraught and required delicate negotiation. Writers lived with the fear of persecution and censorship. Some periods were more dramatic than others: the last years of Henry VIII’s reign were particularly fraught with danger for writers, as a youthful Renaissance prince was transformed into a vengeful and unpredictable autocrat; Edward VI’s short reign (1547–53) saw a relaxation of licensing laws and a burgeoning of literary activity; Mary I (1553–8) and her advisers insisted on greater orthodoxy in her equally brief monarchy.⁸³ Elizabeth was more concerned with stamping out dangerous religious dissent, especially after she was excommunicated by Pius V in 1570, who encouraged her true Catholic subjects to rebel against her, splitting the English Catholic community. Accordingly, there was often a fine line between religious and political criticism. Divisions between Protestants and Catholics were especially marked in the years immediately prior to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots on 8 February 1587.⁸⁴ Mary posed a threat to the dynastic succession of England, as she had a strong claim to be the next queen when Elizabeth died childless (the latter was fifty-three when Mary was executed). For Protestants, Mary’s Catholic faith would also cause a crisis, if not a civil war, should she succeed to the English throne. It was certainly convenient for many of the queen’s councillors that Mary was involved in so many plots against Elizabeth; a number certainly encouraged by the regime’s network of spies acting as agent provocateurs.⁸⁵ Equally, Catholic reaction against the Protestant regime was intense and a propaganda war ensued, more militant Catholics encouraging their co-religionists in England to institute a coup d’état and assassinate the hated Protestant queen, Elizabeth.⁸⁶ In the second edition of The Faerie Queene (1596), Edmund Spenser connected Mary’s execution to issues of censorship. In Book 5, canto 9, we witness events at the court of Mercilla, a straightforward allegory of Elizabeth’s regime. Despite her sympathy for another monarch, Mercilla (Elizabeth) is forced to agree to the execution of Duessa (Mary), who threatens the stability of her regime. The meaning did not escape Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland, who realised that if he wished to become the next king of England he did not want his mother’s fate broadcast abroad by the leading English poet.⁸⁷ Spenser predicted the hostility his poem was likely to encounter through his representation of the poet, Bonfont, who is punished at the entrance to Mercilla’s court:
⁸³ See Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005); and John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1982). ⁸⁴ See Anne N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth 1558–1585 (Cambridge, 1999); and Anne N. McLaren, ‘Gender, Religion, and Early Modern Nationalism: Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and the Genesis of English Anti-Catholicism’, American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 739–67. ⁸⁵ See John Guy, ‘My Heart is My Own’: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (London, 2004); and John D. Staines, The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots, 1560–1690 (Burlington, VT, 2009). ⁸⁶ See Lake, Bad Queen Bess. ⁸⁷ See Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI’, English Literary Renaissance, 17.2 (1987), 224–42.
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56 - There as they entred at the Scriene, they saw Some one, whose tongue was for his trespasse vyle Nayld to a post, adiudged so by law: For that therewith he falsely did reuyle, And foule blaspheme that Queene for forged guyle, Both with bold speaches, which he blazed had, And with lewd poems, which he did compyle; For the bold title of a Poet bad He on himselfe had ta’en, and rayling rymes had sprad. Thus there he stood, whylest high ouer his head, There written was the purport of his sin, In cyphers strange, that few could rightly read, BON FONT: but bon that once had written bin, Was raced out, and Mal was now put in. So now Malfont was plainely to be red; Eyther for th’euill, which he did therein, Or that he likened was to a welhed Of euill words, and wicked sclaunders by him shed. (Spenser, Faerie Queene, 5.9.25–6)⁸⁸
The brutal torture and mutilation of Bonfont takes place against the background of the execution of Mary Stuart. However, we never learn what the poet actually wrote, whether his criticisms were treasonable or whether he was telling the truth and was punished by a paranoid regime. The comments are clearly designed for the reader of The Faerie Queene: is that poem also treasonable, written by a bad poet who deserves punishment? Or is its complicated political and religious allegory fair comment on the British Isles in the 1590s? Many things changed in the course of the sixteenth century, but the anxiety of censorship and/or hostile treatment continued to haunt poets.
⁸⁸ Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). For a further discussion of this passage, see also Chapter 27 in this volume.
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4 Professional Contexts Helen Smith
In his Defence of Poesy (1595), Sir Philip Sidney observes that the English call a poet ‘a maker’ (Sidney, Defence, 77).¹ During the sixteenth century, poetry was often conceived as a process of framing and manufacture.² But poems were equally dependent on other craftspeople: writers and stationers. Writing and printing were skilled manual tasks, forms of embodied knowledge that demanded an intimate, responsive relationship between the worker and their tools. Authors wrote poems, but so too did scribes or scriveners, secretaries and amanuenses, and amateur copyists. Stationers put poems into print, sometimes altering them in the process, and introducing them to new audiences. Printing came to England in 1476, thanks to the entrepreneurial efforts of William Caxton. Before then, books made in England were written by hand, sometimes in rough, scrappy forms, sometimes in gorgeous presentation or commissioned manuscripts. Although print was firmly established by the end of the sixteenth century, script remained crucial to the composition and circulation of verse.³ As D. F. McKenzie remarks, ‘we did not stop speaking when we learned to write, nor writing when we learned to print’.⁴ Almost all authors composed their works in manuscript; verse was written out for particular occasions or audiences, like the elegant book of Greek and Latin verses presented to Elizabeth I by members of Eton College when she arrived at Windsor in 1563 (see British Library Royal MS 12 A XXX); and some poetic forms continued to circulate predominantly in manuscript, including on scraps of paper or in the blank spaces of other books. Few women before 1600 published their poetry in print, but significant numbers composed manuscript verse and were central to poetic communities. Many readers embraced writing in order to collect apt, striking, or meaningful poems alongside the shreds of verse that emerged from, and gave shape to, their social networks, a practice known as commonplacing.⁵ The commonplace book of Sir Edward Hoby (see British Library Add MS 38823), compiled between c 1582 and c 1596, reveals how extensive and varied manuscript books could be. In its pages, verses find a home alongside political news, historical texts and translations, aphorisms and mottos, information about shipping and tonnage, a letter celebrating the benefits of childlessness, the Lord’s Prayer translated ¹ Sir Philip Sidney, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973). ² See Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ³ Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser show that the total number of print publications in England tripled between 1559 and 1602; see ‘What is print popularity? A map of the Elizabethan book trade’, in Andy Kesson and Emma Smith (eds), The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2013), 19–54. ⁴ D. F. McKenzie, ‘Speech-Manuscript-Print’, in Dave Oliphant and Robin Bradford (eds), New Directions in Textual Studies (Austin, TX, 1990), 87–110, 87. ⁵ For a foundational account, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996).
Helen Smith, Professional Contexts In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Helen Smith 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0004
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58 - into Turkish, and estimates of the cost of provisions for a voyage of discovery across the Equator: a reminder that poetic making and reading were bound up with administrative and colonial practices. Brought together in these flexible formats, poems changed: ‘rather than being single, static instantiations, [poems] vary and mutate when reproduced’.⁶ In many books, manuscript and print worked together: David McKitterick has drawn our attention to books in which pen and press combine, from printed texts with gaps for manuscript initials to invitations to readers to pick up a pen and correct mistakes.⁷ Poems moved between print and script, as well as in and out of oral forms, taking on changed characteristics and borrowing from the different prestige, authority, and reach of each medium. This chapter takes a wide view of what constitutes poetry, from libel to lyric, ballad to epic. It considers how printed and written poems were made, and their material and formal conventions. Offering up examples from across the century, it explores the selfconsciousness of early modern authors, writers, and stationers about the affordances and reputation of script and print, as well as the attitudes articulated in paratexts: the verbal features that surround a text and establish it as a book.⁸ Attending to the literal making of meaning prompts us to think flexibly about authorship and the creation of literary effects. Poems were frequently collaborative: components of witty literary games and products of social and professional networks. They took on new meanings as they entered new contexts. Whether written or printed, sixteenth-century poetry was multiple-authored, inventive, alert to its material incarnations, and mobile in its meanings. Before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1541, England’s religious houses were home to scriptoria: rooms in which monastic scribes, often assisted by lay scribes and illuminators, wrote, copied, and illuminated manuscripts. After the Reformation, lay scribes and scriveners continued to flourish, writing and copying documents for legal, professional, and administrative purposes.⁹ Intriguing hints suggest that professional scriveners in the sixteenth century sometimes copied literary texts. In The Terrors of the Night (1594), for instance, Thomas Nashe claimed he had his book printed because it was wildly popular in manuscript. He kept the text private, he insists, until a friend ‘wrested a Copy from me. That Copy progressed from one scrivener’s shop to another, and at length grew so common, that it was ready to be hung out for one of their signs, like a pair of indentures’ (Nashe, Terrors of the Night, dedicatory letter to Elizabeth Carey, Works, 1.341).¹⁰ Nashe’s story is self-interested and tongue-in-cheek, mocking the trope of reluctant publication that I explore later in this chapter. Marcy North notes that ‘before the middle of the seventeenth century, there is little direct evidence that literary manuscripts were produced and sold on speculation’.¹¹ North points instead to the role of literate servants in taking dictation and copying verse. These writers ranged from professional secretaries (including John Donne and Edmund Spenser) or tutors (sometimes, like Michael
⁶ Matthew Zarnowiecki, Fair Copies: Reproducing the English Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare (Toronto, 2014), 7. ⁷ See David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order: 1450–1830 (Cambridge, 2003). ⁸ The term was coined by Gérard Genette in Seuils (1987), English version in Jane E. Lewin (trans.), Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge, 1997). See also Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (eds), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge, 2011). ⁹ On sixteenth-century scribal culture, see the essays collected in Richard Beadle and Colin Burrow (eds), Manuscript Miscellanies c. 1450–1700 (London, 2011). On the work of scribes from the 1580s to the 1660s, see Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998). ¹⁰ Thomas Nashe, in Ronald B. McKerrow (ed.), revised F. P. Wilson, The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1958), spelling modernised. An indenture is a legal agreement or contract. ¹¹ Marcy L. North, ‘Household Scribes and the Production of Literary Manuscripts in Early Modern England’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 4 (2015), 133–57, 135, italics original.
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59 Drayton or Samuel Daniel, talented literary writers) to noble children and young adults seeking to extend their education and connections by ‘serving’ in a powerful household.¹² A copyist or writer used specialist tools, including quills and knives, pounce or sand for blotting, ink and paper.¹³ Ink might be made at home: Giles Lodge’s ‘Lute Book’ (c 1559–75) contains recipes for black and red ink alongside lute music, recipes, instructions on making wills, a five-act play, and poems.¹⁴ The music staves are traced in red ink, and recipe titles and marginal notes are in red, suggesting that Lodge’s instructions to make ink were rooted in the demands of his scribal practice. Paper was the most expensive material in any printed book, accounting for up to half of the publisher’s initial investment, but for most literate households, writing paper, whether single sheets or a pre-bound manuscript book, was not a significant expense. The practice of squeezing additional lines of verse onto a tightly packed page or jotting fragments of verse on slips of paper or book margins tells us more about modes of composition, use, and portability than about economic constraints. Anne Southwell’s commonplace book, for instance (see Folger MS V.b.198) was not a book at all, but a collection of loose papers, some of which had evidently been folded and passed around. One page is marked with pin holes, suggesting its previous attachment to other papers or even domestic fabrics. Though some fine papers were of excellent quality, in extant pages from the period it is often possible to see traces of the flax and fabric used in rag paper manufacture, along with other imperfections, from water drops and fingerprints to the distinctive tinge of muddied or clouded water.¹⁵ The range of workers involved in making printed books was more tightly defined. Booksellers, as the name suggests, sold books, but were also usually the main economic agents behind publication, agreeing or soliciting to print a book, paying for raw materials, and accepting the financial risk. A master printer ran a printing house, whose outputs and activities might vary greatly, taking in everything from ephemera to weighty books, and from a relatively low volume of publications to a steady train of work. Starting with Caxton, a small number of printers and booksellers specialised in literary texts, including the bookseller and translator Edward Blount, and William Ponsonby who published the words of Spenser, Sidney, and other members of the Sidney circle. Widows sometimes worked as master printers, and there is good evidence that printers’ and booksellers’ wives took active roles in the trade.¹⁶ Compositors were the workers who took individual pieces of type from a case, setting them upside down in a composing stick to form lines of type. From there, they lifted the type onto galleys, put lines together on the composing stone, and locked them up in a metal frame (a ‘chase’) to create a forme: the block of type from which the page (or multiple pages) was printed. The forme was laid on the bed of the press, and two printers worked together to ink the type, attach the paper to the tympan, fold the tympan and frisket to bring the paper down onto the type, roll the bed of the press under the platen, and pull the handle, pressing
¹² On the early modern secretary, see Arnold Hunt, ‘The Early Modern Secretary and the Early Modern Archive’, in Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and Alexandra Walsham (eds), Archives and Information in the Early Modern World (Oxford, 2018), 105–30. For the secretarial careers of Spenser and Donne, see H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 79. ¹³ For an influential account of early modern handwriting, see Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA, 1990). ¹⁴ See Folger MS V.a.159, fols. 60v–61. ¹⁵ See Joshua Calhoun, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, PA, 2020). ¹⁶ See Helen Smith, Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012), especially chapters 2 and 3.
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60 - the damp paper onto the inked type. Another worker, often a child (or ‘printer’s devil’), took away the inked sheets and hung them to dry. A corrector checked freshly printed sheets for errors, which might be remedied in the forme or patched up in some other way. Numerous mistakes persist in early printed texts, testament to the complexity and speed of letterpress printing.¹⁷ Like the products of writing, the products of the press took multiple shapes, from printed slips, tickets, or single-sheet proclamations, playbills, and ballads, to weighty books. The format of the book was determined by the number of folds in a sheet of paper: a single fold produced large, folio pages, two a smaller quarto, and three an octavo, smaller yet and more portable. Duodecimos (twelve sheets per gathering) were made by cutting or folding a sheet into thirds along its long side, then folding it twice the other way. More diminutive formats (sextodecimo, thirty-twomo or even sixty-fourmo) were possible, though less usual. Some books were extremely complex, featuring volvelles [turning dials, also a feature of some manuscripts], fold-outs, and moveable flaps. In both print and manuscript, material constraints had an impact on the appearance of the text, influencing everything from the size of the typeface or writing to the appearance and even content of individual lines, or the length of a book. Sometimes content was squeezed out for want of space; more frequently additional material was patched in, especially in printed texts, to fill up blank pages. At the end of The Essays of a Prentice, in the Divine Art of Poesy (1584), for instance, King James VI of Scotland informed his readers that ‘I have insert[ed] for the filling out of their vacant pages, the very words of Pliny upon the Phoenix, as follows’ (James VI, Essays, sig. P4).¹⁸ Some authors had little or nothing to do with the publication of their works. But a holograph manuscript of Sir John Harington’s translation of cantos 14–46 of Ariosto’s epic poem, Orlando Furioso, shows how closely authors and printers could collaborate. The manuscript (see British Library Add MS 18920) was used as the copy-text for the edition of the work printed by Richard Field in 1591. It contains corrections and pasted alterations, as well as instructions to the printer, paying careful attention to the shape of the book. In a note to Field near the end of the volume, Harington noted ‘I doubt this will not come in in the last page, and therefore I would have immediately in the next page after the finishing of this last book, with some pretty knot [i.e., printer’s device] to set down the title, and a piece of the Allegory as followeth in this next page’.¹⁹ The elaborate decoration present in the printed book shows that Field followed Harington’s directions precisely. Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579) plays extensively with the material affordances of print. Each eclogue is prefaced with a bespoke woodcut. A large italic heading is followed by a smaller italic face for the poem’s argument. An elegant initial launches each poem, the body of which is printed in blackletter, by this point a nostalgic, backwardlooking face.²⁰ The initial for September invokes the most famous poet of the Renaissance: the Psalmist King David, tucked inside an initial D, and plucking at his harp (Figure 4.1). Might this have been a deliberate choice on the part of the compositor: an apt image of poetic song? Or was it a fortunate accident, in which the available materials created a
¹⁷ On errors of the press, see Alice Leonard, Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error (Basingstoke, 2020), chapter 5; and Adam Smyth, Material Texts in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2018), chapter 3. ¹⁸ James VI of Scotland, The Essays of a Prentice, in the Divine Art of Poesy (Edinburgh, 1584), spelling modernised. ¹⁹ British Library Add MS 18920, fol. 336, transcription modernised. ²⁰ See Zachary Lesser, ‘Typographic Nostalgia: Play-Reading, Popularity and the Meaning of Black Letter’, in Marta Straznicky (ed.), The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England (Amherst, MA, 2006), 99–126.
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Figure 4.1 Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender: Conteyning Twelve Aeglogues Proportionable to the Twelue Monethes (1579), sig. I3. Folger Shakespeare Library STC 23089. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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62 - pleasing resonance? A row of printers’ flowers prefaces the gloss to each poem. At the end of March, a decorative cluster of flowers forms a block, filling the blank space. Similar arrangements close June and August, where a decorative grotesque functions as a tailpiece. Juliet Fleming has noted the developing convention of using printers’ flowers to mark poetry’s generic status as well as its divisibility into units in the sonnet sequences of the 1590s.²¹ Samuel Daniel’s Delia and Rosamond augmented, published along with his Cleopatra in 1594, is laid out in this way, with each sonnet set on a single page, topped and tailed with arabesque patterns. The Bright manuscript (see British Library Add MS 15232)—a late sixteenth-century verse miscellany containing a set of Latin astronomical definitions, eighteen anonymous poems, some with authorial corrections, and a sequence of poems by Sir Philip Sidney— shows that the solid printed block is not the inevitable shape of a sonnet. Twenty-four of Sidney’s sonnets are copied neatly, each on its own page. But the sonnets are, unconventionally to modern eyes, split into two quatrains and two triplets, unhinging the parts of the sonnet and inviting a reading response that attends to the poems’ carefully spaced parts. Manuscript copyists sometimes also used knots or other decorations to divide poems or other contents, though this is perhaps less marked in sixteenth-century miscellanies and commonplace books compiled by amateur writers. A book compiled between c 1474 and 1524 (see British Library Harley MS 1706) shows how elaborately manuscript texts could be laid out in the early years of the century: decorated and coloured initials and rubrication [the use of red ink] divide up a set of Middle English devotional works, including poems by John Lydgate and a number of prayers and moralising verses (Figure 4.2). In his 1598 Survey of London, John Stow reflects that ‘Pater noster Bead makers and Text Writers are gone out of Pater Noster Row into Stationers of Paul’s Church yard’ (Stow, Survey, sig. G8).²² London’s street names commemorate the trades of their former denizens: by Stow’s time scriveners (‘text writers’) had moved from Paternoster Row to bustling, print-dominated St Paul’s, described by Thomas Nashe in Strange News, of the Intercepting Certain Letters (1592) as ‘the peruser of every man’s works, and Exchange of all Authors’ (Nashe, Strange News, Works, 1.278).²³ The relocation Stow describes is devotional as well as geographical, from Catholicism to Protestantism. It is also professional: manuscript writers have not simply left Paternoster Row but have turned into stationers, agents of print (often also trading in manuscript tools and materials). This change reinforces the increasing importance of print, but also highlights the different geographical bases of print and script in the sixteenth century. Print production was largely restricted to London, where the authorities controlled the number of presses and master printers in operation. Script, in contrast, was more dispersed: it had vibrant London centres (not least, as we will see, around the Inns of Court) and, like print, it clustered around the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Manuscript communities were frequently, however, centred around elite households in rural settings, structured according to friendship and family networks. A manuscript known as the Devonshire Manuscript, produced by members of Anne Boleyn’s extended household during the 1530s, brings together 194 poems and other items,
²¹ See Juliet Fleming, ‘Changed Opinion as to Flowers’, in Smith and Wilson (eds), Renaissance Paratexts, 48–64. ²² John Stow, A Survey of London (London, 1598). ²³ On the geographies of St Paul’s, see especially Peter W. M. Blayney, The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard (London, 1990).
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63
Figure 4.2 A page from John Lydgate’s ‘Kalendar’, a poetical paraphrase of the Sarum calendar. British Library Harley MS 1706, f. 4r. By permission of the British Library.
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64 - and offers a compelling example of ‘social authorship’, illustrating ‘how social phenomena contributed to early modern manuscript culture—and how, more specifically, men and (especially) women at court negotiated the relationship between poetry, politics, and power’.²⁴ As a concept, ‘social authorship’ asks us to turn away from an image of the author as a singular, controlling genius, and to embrace the creativity that emerges from collaboration, interchange, and conversation.²⁵ No author has been identified for around thirty of the Devonshire’s poems, suggesting that authorial attribution was less urgent for sixteenthcentury readers and writers, but also that the closeness of manuscript communities may have made attribution unnecessary.²⁶ Manuscript texts often offer evidence of the processes of composition and correction, whether by the author or by readers. The Bright manuscript, for instance, contains three copies of an anonymous poem ‘A most careless content of favours or disgrace’, presented one after the other, with alterations to each successive version (Figure 4.3). Unlike more formal collections, the Devonshire Manuscript does not present itself as a contained unit; verses appear to have been copied into the book on a more or less ad hoc basis, according to the accidents of opportunity and occasion. The poems vary in form, taking in the fashionable Italian strambotti (poems of six or eight hendecasyllabic or elevensyllable lines), frottole (secular songs, usually for four voices), and canzoni (longer lyrics in various song forms), as well as the increasingly popular sonnet. They include modes which are less familiar today, including acrostics, ciphers, and short notes or jottings, testimony to a poetic culture which rejoiced in puzzles and revelation, and anticipated a readership equipped to decipher secrets and enjoy in-jokes.²⁷ The poems look very different from the elegantly copied verses of presentation manuscripts. As the manuscript’s recent editors note, ‘some of the roughly 20 hands are even and regular, while others are only regular in their irregularity’.²⁸ The Devonshire Manuscript conveys how poetry remained a work in progress, taking on different meanings in different contexts, featuring sometimes significant variations between versions, and adapting poems to the moment and requirements of the compiler. The contributors to the Devonshire Manuscript included at least three women: Mary Shelton, Mary Fitzroy, and Margaret Douglas who entered sixteen poems in her own hand, and engaged with many more through annotations, corrections, and labelling.²⁹ Their shaping presence suggests the importance of women’s work as patrons, readers, mediators, and authors of poetry, even if their poetic interests were not always encouraged: Mary Shelton was allegedly chided by her cousin, Anne Boleyn, for doodling ‘idle poesies’ in her
²⁴ Bradley J. Irish, ‘Gender and Politics in the Henrician Court: The Douglas-Howard Lyrics in the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 64.1 (2011), 79–114, 80. ²⁵ See Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, MD, 1999). ²⁶ The volume is described in the introduction to A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS (BL Add 17492). https://dms.itercommunity.org/general-overview-the-works-of-the-devonshire-manuscript. ²⁷ On the value attached to ‘the play of enigmatic signification’, see Catherine Bates, ‘Wyatt, Surrey, and the Henrician Court’, in Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr (eds), Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion (Oxford, 2007), 38–47. On the riddle as a lyric form, see also Chapter 11 in this volume. ²⁸ See Raymond Siemens, Johanne Paquette, Karin Armstrong, Cara Leitch, Brett D. Hirsch, Eric Haswell, and Greg Newton (eds), ‘Drawing Networks in the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492): Towards Visualizing a Writing Community’s Shared Apprenticeship, Social Valuation, and Self-Validation’, Digital Studies/le Champ Numérique, 1.1 (2009). https://www.digitalstudies.org/articles/10.16995/dscn.142/. ²⁹ See Christopher Shirley, ‘The Devonshire Manuscript: Reading Gender in the Henrician Court’, English Literary Renaissance, 45.1 (2015), 32–59; and Elizabeth Heale, ‘Women and the Courtly Love Lyric: The Devonshire MS (BL Additional 17492)’, The Modern Language Review, 90.2 (1995), 296–313.
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65
Figure 4.3 Anon., ‘A most careles content of favors or disgrace’, BL Add MS 15, f. 9v. By permission of the British Library.
prayer-book.³⁰ Accurate or not, this anecdote, recorded by William Latymer, Dean of Peterborough, reminds us of the shared etymology, and imaginative connections, of ‘poetry’ and ‘posy’. Short poems might be used as a ‘posy’ engraved on a ring or woven into a bracelet, while poetry collections drew on the tradition of the florilegia, or collection of flowers, to characterise their varied contents. One thumpingly assonant example is Beautiful Blossomes, Gathered by John Byshop, From the Best Trees of all Kyndes, printed in London in 1577. ³⁰ See Maria Dowling (ed.), ‘William Latymer’s Chronicklle of Anne Bulleyne’, Camden Miscellany, Vol. 30, Fourth Series, 39 (1990), 23–65, 62, spelling modernised.
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66 - Juliet Fleming has demonstrated how poetic circulation extended beyond manuscript and print: ‘Pinned to trees and curtains, set upon conduits, and wrapped around gifts; or tied into bracelets, embroidered on to clothes and copied into books the posy played a crucial role in the material exchange of favours that articulated life at court.’³¹ In The Art of English Poesy (1589), George Puttenham describes these short poems as originating at the dining table, ‘sent usually for New Year’s gifts or to be printed or put upon their banqueting dishes of sugarplate, or of marchpane [marzipan], and such other dainty meats . . . We call them posies and do paint them nowadays upon the backsides of our fruit trenchers of wood, or use them as devices in rings and arms and about such courtly purposes’ (Puttenham, Art, 146).³² Poetic ‘favours’ of this kind moved in and out of script and print. George Turberville’s Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (1567), for instance, contains a poem ‘To his Ring given to his Lady, wherein was graven this Verse. My heart is yours’ (Tuberville, Epitaphs, sig. D1v).³³ The poem remarks the intensity of feeling packed into the abbreviated space of ‘a Lover’s true device’ (sig. D1v) and closes with a couplet commanding the ring ‘Sit fast to her finger, / But doe thou not wring her’ (sig. D2). ‘To his ring’ illustrates the creative typographical techniques printers used to express meaning. Set in a larger italic typeface, the concluding couplet stands out from the blackletter page, while the ring’s refrain, ‘my heart is hers’, is set in italics and marked out by parentheses. Accurate or not, it is appealing to read the poem as a printed version of a manuscript verse designed to accompany the ring and expand upon its meaning. Later in the same volume, verses ‘To his Love that sent him a Ring wherein was graved, Let Reason rule’ (see sig. L6v) and ‘To a Gentlewoman from whom he took a Ring’ (see sigs. O3v–O4v) imagine a two-way traffic in posies, with women as well as men using verse to communicate feeling and control the direction of a relationship. Some of the Devonshire Manuscript’s poems suggest their prior life before they found a home in its pages. Though we do not know for sure if and how letters passed between Margaret Douglas and her betrothed, Thomas Howard, while the two were imprisoned and then separated for their engagement, a number of verses known as the ‘prison lyrics’ present themselves as letters and respond to one another (see Devonshire MS, 97–108).³⁴ These lyrics are followed by a selection of stanzas from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, showing how one writer might use another’s lines to express his or her own emotions and situation.³⁵ In two striking instances of adaptation, the copyist, plausibly Thomas Howard, repeats Chaucer’s verse, but misses out Criseyde’s name, leaving a blank space instead: Since ye and me have fully brought into your grace and both our hearts sealed,
³¹ Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), 43. ³² George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ³³ George Turberville, Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (London, 1567), spelling modernised. ³⁴ For more on the prison lyrics and their context, see Irish, ‘Gender and Politics’. For the text of the Devonshire Manuscript, see Elizabeth Heale (ed.), The Devonshire Manuscript: A Women’s Book of Courtly Poetry (Toronto, 2012); all citations from this edition. ³⁵ For a list of medieval poems included in the Devonshire Manuscript, see Ethel Seaton, ‘ “The Devonshire Manuscript” and its medieval fragments’, Review of English Studies, 7.25 (1956), 55–6.
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67 reads the first stanza, followed, in the penultimate stanza, by a command: and follow always
thy lady dear. (Devonshire MS, 105, 106)³⁶
This is an example of the inventiveness possible on the page, and the private knowledge promised and refused by manuscript circulation. The writer offers a double test to readers, asked not only to understand that these lines should read Criseyde, but also to interpose the name that could more fittingly, in this context, be written into these gaps. The copyist took his (assuming it was indeed Howard) text from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Newly Printed (1532), edited by William Thynne and printed in London by Thomas Godfray. Thynne’s Chaucer features numerous paratexts. Its long title boasts that it includes ‘divers works which were never in print before: as in the table more plainly doth appear’ (Chaucer, Works, title page).³⁷ The book that follows has not one but two tables of contents: the first giving ‘all the names of the works contained in this volume’ ends with the line ‘thus endeth the first table and here followeth the second’ (sig. A3). There is a selfconsciousness here about the needs of the print reader, negotiating not only Chaucer’s works but an unfamiliar navigatory framework. The second table, in turn, tells readers: ‘In this table ye may find any thing that ye woll [wish to] have in this volume by the folio, as followeth’ (sig. A3v). The titles we have already seen in the first table (The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, and so on) are here subdivided into their constituent parts, with the initial folio number given for each. After ‘The testament of Love’, the table struggles to maintain its system, noting ‘All these works following be works by them self ’, and concluding the list by lumping together ‘Divers other ballads of Chaucer’ (sig. A4). Offering a way (albeit a partial one) to negotiate this bulky volume, these paired tables illustrate the ‘indexical imagination’ as it developed in relation to printed texts over the course of the sixteenth century.³⁸ Thynne’s preface, addressed to Henry VIII, presents a potted history of media. He argues that the post-Babel ‘confusion of tongues’ was overcome by the Phoenicians’ invention of writing: with such knittings and joinings of one [letter] to another by a marvellous subtlety and craft, as countervailed was and is equivalent to the same languages. So as the conceit of man’s mind, which at the beginning was used to be declared by mouth only, came to such point, that it was as sensibly and vively [in a lively manner] expressed in writing. (Chaucer, Works, sig. A2)
The reproduction of speech in writing, Thynne claims, had knock-on benefits for literary quality: ‘Hereupon ensued a great occasion and courage unto them that should write, to compone [compose] and adorn the rudeness and barbarity of speech, and to form it to an eloquent and ordinate [orderly] perfection’ (sig. A2). At this point, Thynne’s global history of writing narrows. He depicts himself digging into the manuscript past of English literature
³⁶ Heale (ed.), Devonshire Manuscript. See also the discussion of this poem in Chapter 7 in this volume. ³⁷ Geoffrey Chaucer, in William Thynne (ed.), The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer newly printed, with divers works which were never in print before: as in the table more plainly doth appear (London, 1532). ³⁸ On the ‘indexical imagination’, see Wendy Wall, ‘Reading the Home: The Case of The English Housewife’, in Smith and Wilson (eds), Renaissance Paratexts, 165–84.
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68 - to root out ‘very true copies’ of Chaucer’s works, including texts ‘never till now imprinted, but remaining almost unknown and in oblivion’ (sig. A2v). Thynne casts print as an heroic technology, perpetuating a long tradition of increasing eloquence, and recovering England’s cultural history from manuscript obscurity.³⁹ In his reflection on the ‘rudeness and barbarity of speech’, Thynne takes part in what Ian Smith describes as England’s ‘anxious mobilization of language to demonstrate a coming of age in vernacular achievement in order to dispatch its own barbarous linguistic past’.⁴⁰ Alert to English’s precarious status as a literary language, sixteenth-century writers and publishers displaced the accusation of barbarism onto a racialised, specifically African, other, in order to promote an ideal of English as a polished, sophisticated vernacular. This rhetorical and imaginative substitution allowed writers concerned with the status of English to render ineloquence distant and foreign. Locating the rejection of barbarism in an unspecified past—a moment at which elegant literary expression began to be possible—Thynne presents his edition of Chaucer as a further refinement of the trajectory from speech to writing. Despite Thynne’s protestations, oral forms remained current throughout the sixteenth century. Above a poem in the Devonshire Manuscript, now attributed to Wyatt, ‘Now all of change / must be my song’, Margaret Douglas inscribed the words ‘learn but to sing it’ (Devonshire MS, 227). Is this a note to self, or an instruction to another reader? In either case, it reminds us that the poetic genre of the ‘song’ was often intended literally: poems we experience as words on paper had vibrant lives in solitary or sociable performance.⁴¹ Another version of this poem, in the Arundel-Harington manuscript, is marked ‘To Smith of Camden’, plausibly the name of the ballad tune to be used as a melody.⁴² During her time in the Tower of London, Anne Boleyn noted the movement of poems within and beyond her prison, as well as the kinds of verse likely to be inspired by the misfortunes of the great. She is reported as having asked the wife of her gaoler, Sir William Kingston, about the comfort of her fellow prisoners. ‘[M]y wife answered and said nay, I warrant you, then she sai[d the]y might make balettes well now.’⁴³ This response plays on the near homonym between ‘pallets’ [beds] and ‘balettes’ [ballads].⁴⁴ Traditionally oral, ballads also circulated in manuscript. A number appear in commonplace books and manuscript miscellanies, reproduced from performance, manuscript sources, or printed books.⁴⁵ A manuscript containing copies of letters received by Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor from 1572–1607, contains a later ballad concerning the 1616 trial of Frances
³⁹ On Chaucer in print, see Alexandra Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books, 1473–1557 (Oxford, 2006). ⁴⁰ Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York, 2009), 8, italics original. ⁴¹ Paul G. Remley argues that this annotation makes sense of Douglas’s further injunction ‘and this’, repeated seventeen times, as marking out a group of texts to be sung; see ‘Mary Shelton and Her Tudor Literary Milieu’, in Peter C. Herman (ed.), Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts (UrbanaChampaign, IL, 1994), 40–77. On the close associations between lyric and song, see also Chapter 11 in this volume. ⁴² See the note in Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978), 537. ⁴³ J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, Vol. 10, No. 793 (letter from Kingston to Thomas Cromwell dated 3 May 1536), 22 vols. (London, 1862–1932). ⁴⁴ See Molly Murray, ‘The Prisoner, the Lover, and the Poet: The Devonshire Manuscript and Early Tudor Carcerality’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 35.1 (2012), 17–41, 17. ⁴⁵ The editors of Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England note that a handful of early modern printed texts describe themselves as ‘miscellanies’; it was not until the second half of the twentieth century—and especially the publication of Peter Beal’s indispensable Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 4 vols. (London, 1980–93)— that the term came to be applied routinely to manuscript books containing verse, and sometimes other genres, by several authors. See Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith, ‘Introduction: The Emergence of the English Miscellany’, in Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith (eds), Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (Abingdon, 2014), 1–16.
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69 Carr (née Howard), Countess of Somerset, which asks to be sung ‘to the tune of “Whoop do me no harm, good man”, or the Clean contrary way; which you please, as your voice and the tune can best agree’ (British Library Add MS 15891, fol. 245v, transcription modernised). The ballad seems to have been copied from a printed text, since the copyist has included an imprint: the short text on a printed title page which tells readers where and by whom the text was printed and sold. Something is odd about this imprint, though, which claims the ballad was ‘Imprinted at London in Paul’s Churchyard at the sign of the yellow band and Cuffs by Adam Arsenic for Rob[er]t Rosacre and are to be sold at the sign of the Andromeda Liberata in Turnbull Street’. Carr was a scandalous figure, who had divorced her first husband, Robert Devereux, and was convicted of murdering Sir Thomas Overbury (friend and adviser of her second husband, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset) by adding white arsenic and other poisons to jellies and tarts. She was also notorious for sporting fashionable yellow ruffs, bands, and cuffs. The mock imprint plays with Carr’s notoriety: rosaker was red arsenic, while Turnbull Street was home to a number of sex workers.⁴⁶ This manuscript ballad invokes the conventions of print only to flaunt them. The ballad, complete with imprint, appears again in Bodleian MS Don. C.54, suggesting at least one other copyist appreciated this elaborate parody of printing conventions. Its context in British Library Add MS 15891, added to the end of an extensive collection of political and administrative letters, suggests the poem was transcribed as much or more as a response to current affairs than for its poetic interest. The same is true of an incomplete copy of a poem attributed to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, ‘There was a time when silly bees could speak’ (see fols. 244v–245v), and a verse prophecy sent to Hatton by Sir William Morrice (see fols. 204–204v). All three texts remind us that poems might circulate in manuscript for reasons that had little to do with literary appreciation. Two printed texts illustrate the complexities of ballad authorship, and the relationship between performance, script, and print. ‘The Ballad Which Anne Askew Made and Sang When She Was in Newgate’ first appeared at the end of an account of the reformist Anne Askew’s 1545 examination and trial, published in 1546.⁴⁷ The ballad presents itself as a record of oral performance: it claims to be both made and sung by Askew. Scholars of early modern women’s writing have an ambivalent attitude to the Examinations, which presents the voice of a woman in vigorous dispute with senior ecclesiastical figures but was heavily edited and adapted by Askew’s fellow reformer, John Bale. Editors and critics have struggled with the question of how far the Examinations set forth Askew’s own words, not least as they record the crippling torture Askew underwent.⁴⁸ Even the ballad’s layout suggests something odd is in play: the title adopted by its modern editors appears at the foot of the previous page (see Askew, Examinations, sig. O3v), filling up the otherwise blank space that follows Askew’s interrogation. Above the ballad appears the simpler (now forgotten) title ‘Her song in Newgate’ (sigs. O4–O4v). If Askew made this ballad/song, and sang it in ⁴⁶ Thanks to Christopher Burlinson, Tracey Hill, Hester Lees-Jeffres, Will Tosh, and Andrew Zurcher, who helped decipher the intricacies of this short text. For more on Carr, see Alastair Bellany, ‘Mistress Turner’s Deadly Sins: Sartorial Transgression, Court Scandal, and Politics in Early Stuart England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 58.2 (1995), 179–210. On mock imprints, see Helen Smith, ‘ “Imprinted by Simeon such a signe”: Reading Early Modern Imprints’, in Smith and Wilson (eds), Renaissance Paratexts, 17–33. ⁴⁷ See Anne Askew, The first examinatio[n] of Anne Askew, lately martyred in Smithfield, by the Romish pope’s upholders, with the elucidation of John Bale (Wesel, 1546), sigs. O3v–O4v. ⁴⁸ See, especially, Patricia Pender, ‘Reading Bale Reading Anne Askew: Contested Collaboration in The Examinations’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73.3 (2010), 507–22. For the afterlife of the Examinations, see Thomas S. Freeman and Sarah Elizabeth Wall, ‘Racking the Body, Shaping the Text: The Account of Anne Askew in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” ’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54.1 (2001), 1165–96.
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70 - Newgate, who wrote it down? Who conveyed it from the prison to Bale or the printer? How did an ephemeral vocal lamentation become part of the printed record of a sustained theological dispute? The question is further complicated by the existence of a second ballad, A Ballad of Anne Askew, Intituled: I am a Woman Poor and Blind. In this ballad, the speaker laments her poverty of purse and intellect—‘I Am a Woman poor and blind / and little knowledge remains in me’—and suggests she has been almost overcome by a peculiarly horticultural devil: ‘this proud Gardner seeing me so blind, / he thought in me to work his will’.⁴⁹ It is much more conventionally ballad-like in appearance than ‘The Ballad Which Anne Askew Made and Sang When She Was in Newgate’ in the Examinations; printed ballads quickly took on a set shape, appearing most often as two or four columns on one side of a sheet of paper with a title and one or more woodcut images followed by the verses.⁵⁰ The earliest extant copy of this text dates from 1624, but a prior record survives in Thomas Nashe’s Have With You to Saffron-Walden (1596). Dissecting the paratexts assembled by his foe, Gabriel Harvey, Nashe lashes out at a commendatory verse supposedly written by a woman patron. Her first line, Nashe claims, ‘is stolen out of the Ballad of Anne Askew; for as that begins, “I am a woman poor and blind”, so begins this, “O Muses, may a woman poor and blind . . . ” ’ (Nashe, Have With You, Works, 3.113).⁵¹ Nashe’s accusation shows that the Askew broadside was circulating, and apparently well known, in the late sixteenth century. No manuscript survives of either ballad; each raises questions about its composition and circulation, as well as laying claim to the authority of Askew’s embodied, oral performance. Somewhere between the ephemeral performance of song and the relative permanence of the printed book or manuscript miscellany sit the scraps of paper and manuscript separates (small, folded booklets) described by Harold Love as the basic unit of manuscript transmission.⁵² As Daniel Starza Smith points out, miscellany compilers copied texts from a range of sources, including ‘single sheets, small gatherings of related texts, and shorter booklets of texts . . . once collected into a miscellany, single texts and groups of texts were frequently copied out of these volumes to be recirculated in other, often shorter, bibliographical formats’.⁵³ Starza Smith offers a detailed study of poems’ mobility in smaller manuscript formats through the example of Donne, whose verses were transcribed more often than those of any other British poet of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. Famously, when Donne considered printing some of his poems, he did not have copies to hand, writing to Sir Henry Goodere ‘to borrow that old book of you’, and lamenting that he had become a ‘Rhapsoder of mine own rags [which] cost me more diligence, to seek them, then it did to make them’ (Donne, Letters, sig. Cc3).⁵⁴ As social and occasional items, Donne’s poems were dispersed far from their author. The relative coherence of a miscellany can give a misleading sense of how poetry circulated in manuscript, where loose papers were more often the norm. A further
⁴⁹ Anne Askew, A Ballad of Anne Askew, Intituled: I am a Woman Poor and Blind (London, [1624?]). This is a covert reference to Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who had been one of her interrogators. ⁵⁰ On ballads, see especially Patricia Fumerton, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics (Philadelphia, PA, 2020). ⁵¹ One final Askew text, ‘The Prayer of Anne Askew, the Martyr, before her death’, appears in a substantial collection of women’s writing, Thomas Bentley’s The Monument of Matrons (London, 1582), sig. T5v. ⁵² Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst, MA, 1998), 13. ⁵³ Daniel Starza Smith, ‘Before (and After) the Miscellany: Reconstructing Donne’s Satyres in the Conway Papers’, in Eckhardt and Starza Smith (eds), Manuscript Miscellanies, 17–38, 17, italics original. ⁵⁴ John Donne, Letters to Several Persons of Honour (London, 1651).
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71 misrepresentation (and one that this chapter primarily repeats) is that manuscript verse was largely secular. This is mainly due to a critical emphasis on the sonnet sequences and poems that have entered the canon of English verse. Much writing was religious or devotional: a Scottish miscellany of verse and prose from the first half of the sixteenth century (see British Library Arundel MS 285) exemplifies this trend, mixing prayers, devotional poems, and meditations throughout its more than 400 pages. As we have seen in the Devonshire Manuscript’s ‘prison lyrics’, some sixteenth-century poems present themselves at the boundary between poem and letter in ways that feel, at times, intensely private, but whose poetic form suggests or imagines a wider readership. Thirty-four of Donne’s poems present themselves as letters, including seven addressed to Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, a major literary patron. A poem ‘To Sir Henry Wotton’ invokes the intimacy of epistolary exchange: ‘Sir, more then kisses, letters mingle Souls; / For, thus friends absent speak’ (Donne, ‘To Sir Henry Wotton’, lines 1–2, Poetical Works, 159).⁵⁵ In the absence of physical closeness, manuscript letters bring sympathetic minds together, expressing—and, in the context of this verse letter, promising other readers—a frank insight into the writer’s affections. The verse epistle concludes with a moment of characteristically playful mise-en-page, suggesting that the advice offered in Donne’s epistle needs to be internalised not by the recipient, but by the speaker, who ruefully concludes: . . . But if my self, I’have won To know my rules, I have, and you have DONNE: (Donne, ‘To Sir Henry Wotton’, lines 69–71, Poetical Works, 162)
Collections of printed verse often aimed to profit from the affective charge of poetry’s epistolary contexts. In the first printed anthology of English poetry, usually called Tottel’s Miscellany, published in 1557 by the printer and bookseller Richard Tottel, a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt protests against the speaker’s mistress for ripping up an amorous letter: Sufficed not (madam) that you did tear, My woeful hart, but thus also to rent: The weeping paper that to you I sent. (Wyatt, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 109)⁵⁶
Like many printed texts that invoke manuscript verse, scribal networks, or personal letters, Tottel’s Miscellany benefits from what Cathy Shrank terms ‘the latent intimacy of the scribal form’.⁵⁷ Deploying a rime riche (rhyme produced by words that look or sound the same but mean different things), unusual in English, Wyatt’s speaker matches ‘tear’ (to rip) with ‘tear’ (to cry) reinforcing the connection between the manuscript letter and his overspilling sentiment.
⁵⁵ John Donne, in Sir Herbert Grierson (ed.), Poetical Works (London, 1933). ⁵⁶ In Richard Tottel (ed.), in Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul (eds), Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (Harmondsworth, 2011), spelling modernised. ⁵⁷ Cathy Shrank, ‘ “These Fewe Scribbled Rules”: Representing Scribal Intimacy in Early Modern Print’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (2004), 295–314, 300.
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72 - Tottel was alert to Surrey and Wyatt’s market value: the full title of his miscellany was Songs and Sonnets Written By the Right Honourable Lord Henry Howard, late Earl of Surrey, Thomas Wyatt the Elder and Others. His strategy was successful: the book went through eight editions before 1600 (two in 1557, 1559, 1565, 1567, 1574, 1585, and 1587). It contained 271 poems, many written in the 1530s, and virtually none of which had previously been printed.⁵⁸ Tottel edited the texts he included, for instance by regularising Wyatt’s Italianate metre to a more conventional iambic pattern.⁵⁹ The poem titles constitute Tottel’s most evident transformation of his source material, creating a loosely structured biographical narrative that binds together the volume’s diverse contents.⁶⁰ Tottel was best known for publishing law books: in 1553 he was granted a lucrative patent that gave him sole right to print all books relating to English common law. His printing house was on the north side of Fleet Street, within Temple Bar, close to the Inns of Court (where lawyers trained, lodged, and worked) and the law courts. While Tottel’s proximity to the Inns makes sense in light of his legal printing, it also chimes with his decision to publish a poetry collection. Law and literature went hand-in-hand. James McBain demonstrates the trajectory many young men followed from university to the Inns of Court: the rhetorical and dialectical techniques imbibed at Oxford and Cambridge were essential to both poetry and legal learning.⁶¹ In George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundry Flowers (1573), a set of poems called ‘Gascoigne’s Memories’ records his determination to join Gray’s Inn to study law. In a form of early modern poetic hazing, five students, including Francis Kinwelmarshe (with whom Gascoigne later wrote Jocasta, a tragedy in Greek), Alexander Neville, and Richard Courtop, required him to write verses on themes of their choosing in order to secure admission.⁶² The sometimes rowdy atmosphere of the Inns is captured in an account of a riotous Middle Temple dinner in February 1598. Having participated in that season’s Middle Temple Revels, Sir John Davies, a trainee lawyer, had been ridiculed by another poet and lawyer, Richard Martin. Martin and his friends, Davies claimed, had posted libels ‘against him in all the famous places of the city, as Queen-Hithe, Newgate, the Stocks, Pillory, Pissing Conduit’.⁶³ In response, Davies marched into the Temple dinner, hit Martin with a cudgel, grabbed his servant’s sword, then ran down the steps to the river to escape by boat.⁶⁴ Davies was expelled from the Middle Temple and briefly imprisoned, at which point he set
⁵⁸ Surrey’s epitaph on Wyatt, ‘W[yatt] resteth here’, published (albeit anonymously) in An excellent epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt, with two other compendious ditties, wherein are touched, and set forth the state of man’s life (London, 1545), was an exception. ⁵⁹ On Tottel as editor, see Steven W. May, ‘Popularizing Courtly Poetry: Tottel’s Miscellany and its Progeny’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009), 418–33. ⁶⁰ See Craig Farrell, ‘ “Bound up in one Small Poesie”: Material Intertextuality and the Early Modern Poetic Collection (1557–1601)’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of York, 2017, 36–40. ⁶¹ See James McBain, ‘ “Attentive Mindes and Serious Wits”: Legal Training and Early Drama’, in Lorna Hutson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Literature, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2017), 80–96. ⁶² On the literary culture of the Inns, see Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), 31; Lynne Magnusson, ‘Scoff Power in Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Inns of Court: Language in Context’, Shakespeare Survey, 27 (2004), 196–208; and Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 35–7. ⁶³ See Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Le Prince d’Amour, or The Prince of Love (London, 1660), 80. For more on legal masques and revels, see Martin Butler, ‘The Legal Masque: Humanity and Liberty at the Inns of Court’, in Hutson (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Law and Literature, 180–97. ⁶⁴ See Jessica Winston, ‘Legal Satire and the Legal Profession in the 1590s: John Davies’s Epigrammes and Professional Decorum’, in Hutson (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Law and Literature, 121–41.
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73 to writing entertainments and poetry, including his lengthy Nosce teipsum, an extraordinary natural philosophical reflection in poetic form. Libels took many forms, encompassing political scandal as well as social controversy: ‘The form could include pamphlets, speeches and political declarations; however, libels were most commonly in verse, and could stretch from a pithy epigram to a lengthy ballad.’⁶⁵ It is, as Andrew Gordon notes, in the act of reception that libel becomes libel, ‘produced by a reading experience’.⁶⁶ Left at key points around London’s civic space, libels were designed to be discovered, provoke speculation and recognition, and prompt a buzz of discussion and onward circulation. Lawrence Manley has linked the popularity of the epigram in and beyond the 1590s to the rapid expansion of London as a busy urban centre. In pointed verses, poets sought to characterise and locate the people and places of the metamorphic City, ‘put[ting] everything neatly in its place’.⁶⁷ Davies’s own epigrams are testament to the liveliness and dangers of poetic composition in this period, especially in print: they were named explicitly in the Bishops’ Ban of 1599, which ordered the censorship of satires, epigrams, histories, and plays printed without the approval of the Privy Council, and commanded a public burning of offending texts. The libels created by Davies’ fellow Templars would have been short manuscript verses in the tradition of the pasquil or pasquinade. The form takes its name from Rome’s Pasquino statue, where locals pasted anonymous political commentary, jibes, and satires; in England the practice had been going since at least the sixteenth century. Pasquils are closely associated with epigrams; they look back to Greek and Roman literature, and the notorious (and, in this period, very popular) epigrams of Martial and Catullus. An image of Pasquil was translated into print on the frontispiece to the second edition of William Page’s Pasquine in a trance (1584), a translation of Celio Secondo Curione’s Pasquillus Extaticus (1544). The image mingles the writing technologies explored in this chapter: it is a printed woodcut, reliant on the operations of the press, but offers up manuscript fragments and carved stone as current communication technologies. Puttenham, too, located epigrams outside the technologies of ink and paper. An epigram: is but an inscription or writing made as it were upon a table, or in a window, or upon the wall or mantel of a chimney in some place of common resort . . . as now in our taverns and common tabling houses, where many merry heads meet and scribble with ink, with chalk, or with a coal such matters as they would every man should know and descant upon. (Puttenham, Art, 142)
Both the Pasquil woodcut and Puttenham’s potted history neatly illustrate Fleming’s characterisation of early modern England as ‘a historical moment when the distinction between the letter and the spirit could be differently understood’, when writing had a distinctive relationship to the place of inscription and was both social and occasional.⁶⁸ A collection of roughly 700 translated and original epigrams published in 1577 testifies to the popularity of the form, as well as the proliferating paratexts that declared and reinforced ⁶⁵ Andrew McRae, ‘The Verse Libel: Popular Satire in Early Modern England’, in Tim Kirk (ed.), Subversion and Scurrility: Popular Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present (Aldershot, 2000), 364–92, 365. For more on libel and other satiric forms, see also Chapter 13 in this volume. ⁶⁶ Andrew Gordon, ‘The Act of Libel: Conscripting Civic Space in Early Modern England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32.2 (2002), 375–97, 385. ⁶⁷ Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 1995), 422. ⁶⁸ Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts, 115.
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74 - poetic networks. Timothy Kendall’s Flowers of Epigrams, whose title page charts his educational trajectory—‘late of the University of Oxford: now a student of Staple Inn in London’—opens with a list of authors’ names, followed by a dedication to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a well-known literary patron, and an address ‘To the courteous and friendly Reader’. Arthur Marotti argues that ‘almost all English Renaissance Literature is a literature of patronage’, alert to the real and imagined structures of service and reward that underpinned the literary scene.⁶⁹ When Donne wrote to Goodere to bring home his poems, for instance, he planned to dedicate his printed verses to the Lord Chamberlain while continuing to celebrate his existing patronage relationship with the Countess of Bedford. He asked Goodere whether he might be able to include a verse from Goodere to the Countess, ‘for I desire very very much, that something should bear her name in the book’ (Donne, Letters, sig. Cc3). The printed addresses which preface Kendall’s collected poems are followed by seven commendatory verses, five in English and two in Latin, which puff Kendall’s poetic talent, and trace his literary and social circle. Dedicatory letters, addresses to the reader, and commendatory poems increased in frequency and volume over the course of the sixteenth century.⁷⁰ George Gascoigne’s writerly connections were reinforced through no less than twenty commendatory verses to his Posies (1575), followed by a tongue-in-cheek verse sharing ‘The opinion of the author himself after all these commendations’ (Gascoigne, Posies, sig. ¶¶¶¶3v).⁷¹ These paratexts positioned authors and texts in what Alexandra Halasz terms ‘the marketplace of print’: dedications laid claim to patronage and support from specific individuals while also acting as canny marketing strategies; addresses to the reader attempted to delimit who could access the text and on what terms.⁷² They also remind us that printed poetry, like manuscript verse, was generally the product of social and writerly networks. The poems that preface Kendall’s epigrams are attributed to W. Seymour, ‘gentleman of Gray’s Inn’, George Whetstone (who attended Furnival’s Inn), ‘E. G.’, Abraham Fleming, ‘A. W. Gent’, and G. L. Carmen. Fleming did not attend the Inns of Court but was firmly associated with the world of London print: he worked as a translator, editor, indexer, and compiler for at least fifteen different printers and booksellers, and his commendatory verses form part of the front matter of numerous books. Many of the close-knit webs presented in printed poetry collections are determinedly homosocial. In prefatory address ‘To the Readers generally’ Gascoigne brings the heterosexual ends of poetry into view, protesting that though he has written numerous love lyrics, few express his personal sentiment: ‘if ever I wrote line for my self in causes of love, I have written ten for other men in lays of lust’ (Gascoigne, Posies, sig. ¶¶¶1v). Gascoigne presents himself as a pen for hire, or at least at the disposal of other men, ready to turn his muse to the business of wooing any mistress. In this, he is emulating, and perhaps mocking, a culture in which poems might be commissioned to a variety of ends. In Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s North-ward Ho (1607), the Prostitute Doll hires the ‘City Poet’
⁶⁹ Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Patronage, Poetry, and Print’, in Andrew Gurr (ed.), The Yearbook of English Studies, Special number 21, Politics, Patronage and Literature in England, 1558–1658 (1991), 1–26, 26. ⁷⁰ See Franklin B. Williams, Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verse in English Books Before 1641 (London, 1962). ⁷¹ George Gascoigne, The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (London, 1575), spelling modernised. ⁷² See Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997); see further Kevin Dunn, Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford, CA, 1994).
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75 Bellamont to write ‘twelve posies for a dozen of cheese trenchers’ (Dekker and Webster, North-ward Ho, sigs. E3v–E4).⁷³ In an influential and enduring formulation, J. W. Saunders suggested in 1951 that elite writers shunned ‘the stigma of print’, seeing print as vulgar and commercial.⁷⁴ Sir Philip Sidney, for instance, complained that ‘base men with servile wits undertake it, who think it enough, if they can be rewarded of the printer’ (Sidney, Defence, 111), and grumps that he has seen ‘but few . . . [poems] printed, that have poetical sinews in them’ (Sidney, Defence, 112). Some printed volumes embraced their commercial contexts. Isabella Whitney’s printer, Richard Jones, is the first speaker the reader encounters when they open The Copy of a Letter, in a five-stanza address, ‘The Printer to the Reader’. Advertising the book as a witty blend of fact and fiction, ‘both false and also true’, Jones concludes with the simple demand: Therefore, buy this same Book, of him that here doth dwell: And you (I know) will say you have bestowed your money well. (Jones, ‘The Printer to the Reader’, in Whitney, Copy of a Letter, sig. A1v)⁷⁵
Conveniently filling a page that might otherwise be left blank, Jones’s poem also serves an advertising function. The poem assumes a browsing relationship: an idle and semiinterested reader who needs to be converted into a purchaser. The examples offered by Gascoigne, and by Dekker and Webster, in contrast, blur the alignment between manuscript and patronage and print and commerce, suggesting a lively trade (whether economic or otherwise) in manuscript verse. Many printed books presented themselves as an unlocking of England’s manuscript treasures, in descriptions that recall Thynne’s preface to Chaucer. Tottel, for instance, opens the Songs and Sonnets by praising English writers for being as well able as ‘divers Latins, Italians, and other’ to write well ‘in verse, yea and in small parcels’ (Tottel, ‘To the reader’, Tottel’s Miscellany, 3). Length matters here: shorter forms, particularly sonnets, are held up as the epitome of poetic accomplishment.⁷⁶ Tottel presents printing as releasing poetry from manuscript confinement: ‘It resteth now (gentle reader) that thou think it not evil done, to publish, to the honour of the English tongue, and for profit of the studious of English eloquence, those works which the ungentle hoarders up of such treasure have heretofore envied thee’ (Tottel, ‘To the reader’, Tottel’s Miscellany, 3). Manuscript readers are ‘ungentle’, grudging those outside their circles the best of English poetry. Tottel’s claim to a democratic (and commercial) desire to open the fruits of poetry to ‘the unlearned’ stands in contrast to the view expressed by Francis Meres in 1598: ‘As cherries be ⁷³ Thomas Dekker and John Webster, North-ward Ho (London, 1607), spelling modernised. ⁷⁴ See J. W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951), 139–64. For an influential response, see Steven W. May, ‘Tudor Aristocrats and the Mythical “Stigma of Print” ’, Renaissance Papers, 10 (1980), 11–18. ⁷⁵ Isabella Whitney, The Copy of a Letter, Lately Written in Metre, by a Young Gentlewoman (London, 1567), spelling modernised. On Whitney’s relationship with her printer, see Kirk Melnikoff, ‘Isabella Whitney amongst the Stalls of Richard Jones’, in Valerie Wayne (ed.), Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London, 2020), 145–62. ⁷⁶ On short forms being definitive of lyric, see also Chapter 11 in this volume; on the sonnet form specifically, see Chapter 12 in this volume.
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76 - fulsome when they be through [thoroughly] ripe, because they be plenty: so books be stale when they be printed in that they be common’ (Meres, Palladis Tamia, fol. 266).⁷⁷ Meres is now best known for his praise of Shakespeare, which similarly celebrates the exclusivity of manuscript. Shakespeare’s sonnets (which would not be published until 1609) are to be valued, Meres suggests, at least in part because of their limited circulation: ‘the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, etc.’ (Meres, Palladis Tamia, fols. 281v–282). Where Meres presents himself as part of an exclusive group of knowledgeable readers, Tottel’s preface creates a double frisson for his audience, invited to enjoy their newfound access to prestigious small-format cultural goods, and given the urgent sense that some scandal attaches to the poems’ release to a wider public. The readerly thrill of access to ‘private’ poetry is played out in ‘A Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F. J.’, included in George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundry Flowers, published anonymously by Richard Smith in 1573. The bawdy tale engages in an elaborate paratextual game, in which a series of figures, hidden behind initials, report the events leading to the book’s appearance in print. A letter from G. T. is presented as having accompanied a manuscript ‘wherein you shall find a number of Sonnets, lays, letters, Ballades, Rondlets [rondeaux], virelays [songs or light lyrics] and verses’ (Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundry Flowers, 204).⁷⁸ G. T. warns H. W. that the poems must be shared no further: ‘I only do adventure thus to participate the sight thereof unto your former good will, even so that you will by no means make the same common . . . and you will safely re-deliver unto me the original copy’ (Gascoigne, Hundreth Sundry Flowers, 204). Though there are good reasons to be sceptical about this narrative, and to believe that A Hundreth Sundry Flowers was always intended for print, these paratexts rely on the plausible fiction that a writer might seek to restrict the circulation of their manuscripts. Thomas Newman, who published an unauthorised copy of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1591, told a different tale, presenting the perspective of the printer rather than the author. He protested in a dedication to Francis Flower that ‘I have been very careful in the Printing of it, and where as being spread abroad in written Copies, it had gathered much corruption by ill Writers: I have used their help and advice in correcting and restoring it to his first dignity, that I know were of skill and experience in those matters’ (Newman, dedicatory epistle to Francis Flower, Sir P. S. his Astrophel and Stella, sig. A2v).⁷⁹ According to Newman, Sidney’s poems had become corrupt as a result of manuscript circulation, getting further from the poet’s original with every act of copying. Newman’s language of corruption strikingly pre-empts the concerns of Sidney’s later editors, keen to establish which of the manuscript exemplars are closest to Sidney’s original text, and which have been transformed in copying.⁸⁰ Newman published Astrophil and Stella twice in the same year. In the first edition, printed by John Danter, the poems appear unadorned, and the volume opens directly onto the first sonnet. It is in the second printing, by John Charlewood, that Newman’s protestations appear, along with the ‘sundry other rare sonnets of divers Noblemen and Gentlemen’ that are advertised on the volume’s title page and make the volume more akin to the ⁷⁷ Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598), spelling modernised. ⁷⁸ George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundry Flowers Bound up in one Small Poesy (London, 1573), spelling modernised. ⁷⁹ Thomas Newman, in Sir P. S. his Astrophel and Stella (London, 1591), spelling modernised. ⁸⁰ On the status and editing of Sidney’s manuscripts, see Woudhuysen, Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts.
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77 poetry collections that had proved so popular in the thirty years since Tottel’s anthology. These included Barnabe Googe’s Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets (1567), Thomas Howell’s The Arbour of Amity (1568) and New Sonnets, and Pretty Pamphlets (1570), Turberville’s Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (1567), Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundry Flowers (1573), expanded to form his Posies (1575), Isabella Whitney’s The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573), and George Whetstone’s The Rock of Regard (1576), all of which feature works by other writers, frequently framed as correspondence.⁸¹ In a peculiar preface, ‘Somewhat to read for them that list’, Thomas Nashe represents Newman’s efforts in violent terms, characterising Sidney’s genius as a force ‘Which although it be oftentimes imprisoned in Ladies’ casks [caskets], and the president [presiding] books of such as cannot see without another man’s spectacles, yet at length it breaks forth in spite of his keepers, and useth some private pen (in stead of a picklock) to procure its violent enlargement’ (Nashe, ‘Somewhat to read’, Works, 3.330). Nashe’s commentary offers an uneasy acknowledgement of women’s participation in manuscript culture (and Mary Sidney Herbert’s influence in particular): the reference to ‘Ladies’ casks’ makes it clear that women had access to coterie verse, but this familiarity is cast in unflattering terms, opposed to the uncontainable virility of Sidney’s poems. At the start of his eclogues, Barnabe Googe tells a now familiar story of stealth publication, blaming a friend for passing his poems to a printer. By the time his friend came clean, it was too late: ‘being so far past, and Paper provided for the Impression thereof: It could not without great hindrance of the poor Printer be now revoked’ (Googe, Eclogues Epitaphs and Sonnets, sigs. A6–A6v).⁸² In this instance, the friend identifies himself as Lawrence Blundeston, and confesses his infraction (see sigs. A8–B1v). Googe, Blundeston says, left a bundle of papers at his house, which he unwrapped and read. This scene of friendly reading is reinforced by the inclusion of a number of pairs of poems: ‘To L. Blundeston’ is followed by ‘The Answer of L. Blundeston to the same’ (see sigs. F2–F2v); late in the volume ‘The answer of L. Blundeston to the same’ responds to ‘To L. Blundeston of Ingratitude’ (see sigs. H3–H5); twice a poem ‘To Alexander Neville’ provokes ‘Alexander Neville’s Answer to the same’ (see sigs. F2v–F4, and G3–G3v); and ‘To Alexander Neville of the blessed S[t]ate of him that feels not the force of Cupids flames’ leads in to ‘The Answer of A. Neville to the same’ (see sigs. F6–F7). Blundeston’s second response poem reminds us of the importance of orality as well as manuscript exchange: after an opening 14-line stanza the poem continues in six-line stanzas, with a note, ‘To the Tune of Apelles’ (sig. H5), offering the reader a means to reproduce this homosocial song in performance. Googe’s Eclogues close with a list of ‘faults escaped in the Printing’ (sig. K7v), concluding with an entire eight lines that are missing from the end of the thirty-two line ‘sonnet’ ‘Once musing’ (see sig. G4v). In the errata list, four lines of Googe’s expansive metre are divided into eight, suggesting perhaps that Googe had no hand in the correction and that the exigencies of printing meant his lengthy lines had to be condensed. Puttenham criticises this practice, instructing poets to let their lines ‘run at full length, and do not as the common rhymers do, or their printer for sparing of paper, cut them off in the midst, wherein they make in two verses but half rhyme’ (Puttenham, Art, 162). The erratic addition of eight lines to Googe’s verse demonstrates how verses could be constrained or altered by the space of the page and the demands of print. The opposite problem occurs in Turberville’s Epitaphs where a poem ‘Of one that had little Wit’ uses a pair of lengthy brackets to divide the eight ⁸¹ See Farrell, ‘“Bound up in one Small Poesie”’, 44. ⁸² Barnabe Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets (London, 1563).
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78 - short lines of the poem into two distinct columns (Turberville, Epitaphs, sig. G3). This typographically inventive layout invites the reader to explore different modes of reading, especially given the fondness of writers in this period for acrostics and similar puzzles. But the poem makes little sense read across the columns (rather than as one continuous verse). Instead, it seems likely that this is a response by the compositor to the difficulties of printing short lines that left too large a space. An unbalanced forme meant the pressure of the platen was unevenly distributed, making it hard to print evenly, while paper, unsupported by type, could distort or even tear. Raphael Lyne has shown how one printer, Richard Lant, responded creatively to John Skelton’s characteristically skinny verse in his 1545 edition of Certain Books, ranging hederae (typographical symbols of ivy leaves ❦) and printers’ fists across the substantial blank space on the right of each page in order to bring the paper evenly against the platen, but also, Lyne suggests, matching the poem’s erratic energy in its distinctive, print-specific appearance.⁸³ The changing shapes of print are differently illuminated by a copy of Howell’s The Arbour of Amity. Howell’s double dedication ‘To the right Noble and most virtuous Lady, the Lady Anne Talbot’ and ‘Another to the same his honourable and very good Lady’ (Howell, Arbour of Amity, sigs. A2, A4) reminds us of women’s importance as patrons and sponsors of poetry.⁸⁴ In one extant copy, the book brings women’s cultural agency into view in a different, and unsettling, way. The Bodleian Library copy is bound together with A Notable History of Nastagio and Traversari, a novella by Boccaccio, translated into English by Christopher Tye and published in 1569. This is a modest example of what Jeffrey Todd Knight describes as ‘a culture of compiling and text collection that prevailed after the emergence of print but before the ascendancy of the modern, read-bound printed book’.⁸⁵ A large woodcut image of a woman framed between curtains closes A Notable History and stands opposite Howell’s title page: she is ‘Lucrecia Romana’, the Lucrece who would be celebrated in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, a quarter of a century later. Lucrece was Thomas Purfoot’s printer’s device, marking the Boccaccio volume as originating in his shop. The woodcut imagines a scene of writing, with Lucrece leaning on a desk or writing surface. The pen, however, is replaced with a sword, in an act of graphic if (going by Lucrece’s untroubled expression) nonchalant self-scripting. Early modern books were seldom sold ready-bound and might be shaped into personalised collections or volumes, organised by accidents of chronology or purchase, or along thematic lines. Drawing on influential studies of early printed sammelbände (composite volumes made up of two or more works, whether printed, manuscript, or both, and bound together), Knight argues that ‘[i]n the early handpress era, the printed work was relatively malleable and experimental—a thing to actively shape, expand, and resituate as one desired’.⁸⁶ This was also true in miniature for many books, both manuscript and print, which, as we have seen, accreted content, pulling together diverse texts and authors and refashioning them in new contexts. ⁸³ See Raphael Lyne, ‘Skelton and the Macaronic Book’, in Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher (eds), Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader (Abingdon, 2019), 89–106, 95–6. ⁸⁴ Thomas Howell, The Arbour of Amity, Wherein is Comprised Pleasant Poems and Pretty Posies (London, 1568). On women as patrons, see Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2014). ⁸⁵ Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia, PA, 2013), 3. ⁸⁶ Knight, Bound to Read, 4. See also Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelbände’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67.2 (2004), 189–214; and Seth Lerer, ‘Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 118 (2003), 1251–67.
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79 The Devonshire Manuscript contains a short extract from Troilus and Criseyde, complaining ‘And now my pen alas, with which I write, / quaketh for dread of that I must indite’ (Devonshire MS, 105). Brought back into manuscript from Thynne’s voluminous Chaucer edition, this verse rematerialises the hesitant experience of writing, conceived of here as the activity of copying. Later in the volume, a verse from The Remedy of Love (first printed in Thynne’s Chaucer) reflects: If all the earth were parchment scribable, speedy* for the hand, and all manner wood were hewed and proportioned to pens able, all water ink, in dam or in flood, every man being a perfect scribe and good, the faithfulness, yet, and praise of women could not be showed by the mean of pen.
* well prepared
(Devonshire MS, 249)
This verse represents a neat reworking of the original: in Thynne’s edition the penultimate line of this stanza laments ‘the cursedness yet and deceit of women’ (Chaucer, Works, sig. Dff1v). In the Devonshire Manuscript, the adapted verse expresses the opposite view, praising faithful womankind in hyperbolic terms. In both, the verse is intriguing for its attention to the sensation of writing, describing the imagined parchment as ‘speedy for the hand’. The conceit was well-received, and versions of it appear across the sixteenth century. In 1587, Turberville reflected: If all the earth were paper made, to write. And all the Sea converted into ink, It would not serve to show Cupido[’s], might. (Turberville, Tragical Tales, sig. N4v)⁸⁷
And in 1600, John Lane mused: If all the earth were writing paper made, All ploughshares pens, all furrows lines in writing, The Ocean, ink, wherein the sea-Nymphs wade,
And all men’s consciences scribes inditing: Too much could not be written of man’s sin. (Lane, Tom Tel-Troth’s Message, sig. B1v)⁸⁸
Another manuscript, a duodecimo miscellany of verse and prose compiled by someone associated with the royal court around 1605, features a short poem attributed to the popular poet and playwright John Lyly:
⁸⁷ George Turberville, Tragical Tales Translated by Turberville (London, 1587). ⁸⁸ John Lane, Tom Tel-Troth’s Message, and his Pen’s Complaint (London, 1600).
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80 - If all the Earth were paper white And all the sea were ink ’Twere not enough for me to write As my poor heart doth think. (British Library Add. MS 22601, fol. 60, transcription modernised)
These changing sentiments—from women’s cursedness to their deserved praise, from the blots of sin to inexpressible feeling—suggest the adaptability of poetry across sixteenthcentury print and manuscript culture. The content of this metamorphic verse tracks the chronological change from parchment to paper, while its material forms move back and forth between script and print. Intriguingly, it is the printed versions of this conceit, by Turberville and Lane, that are most alert to the conditions of manuscript, wondering what would happen if the earth were ‘paper made, to write’ or ‘were writing paper made’. In miniature, these mutating lines demonstrate how self-conscious texts could be about their own materiality, and their flexible movements between media. Sociable, circulating objects, sixteenth-century poems were, on one level, made by poets, but they were made and remade in absorbing ways by the agents of script and print.
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PART II
PRACTICES
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5 Poetics Patrick Cheney
The sixteenth century is the first great era of English poetics. By ‘poetics’, I mean a branch of literary criticism outlining a theory of poetry. Historically, poetic theory derives from Aristotle’s Poetics, which emphasises the formal qualities of poetry—its kinds or species— and which only intermittently refers to poetry’s effect: what Aristotle calls ‘proper pleasure’ (Aristotle, Poetics, 1459a.20, Basic Works, 1480).¹ Nonetheless, in an allied treatise, the Rhetoric, Aristotle features a theory of language that emphasises the goal of ‘persuasion’: ‘Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion’ (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1355b.27–8, Basic Works, 1318).² During the sixteenth century, humanist theorists of literature take the cue from Horace in The Art of Poetry to combine Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric with his theory of poetics, to advance a rhetorical poetics.³ In this theory, authors use the formal features of literature to persuade readers towards a designated end, usually ethical, and often on behalf of the state. Thus, in the sixteenth century a rhetoricised poetics has both a moral and a political goal: it is civicminded. As Edmund Spenser says famously in his ‘Letter to Ralegh’ appended to the 1590 Faerie Queene (his national epic romance dedicated to Queen Elizabeth): ‘The general end . . . of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, Faerie Queene, 714).⁴ Between 1500 and 1600, we can witness the birth moment of an English poetics rhetorically defined.⁵ ¹ Aristotle, in Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York, 1941). ² On rhetoric and poetics in Aristotle, see McKeon’s ‘Introduction’ to The Basic Works, xxix–xxxii. In The Book Named the Governor (1531), Sir Thomas Elyot defines rhetoric as ‘an artificial form of speaking wherein is the power to persuade, move, and delight’, extract in Brian Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1999), 57–69, 63–4. The threefold goal of rhetoric traces to Cicero, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, 1.4, in H. M. Hubbell (trans.), On Invention. The Best Kind of Orator. Topics (Cambridge, MA, 1949), 357. ³ Hence, in The Defence of Poesy (composed c 1579–81, published 1595), Sir Philip Sidney famously transposes the three aims of rhetoric to poetry: ‘poets’ aim to ‘delight and teach . . . and . . . move men to take that goodness in hand’: see Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (1595), in Brian Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1999), 336–91, 346. For the recurrent twinning of poetry and rhetoric, see Gabriel Harvey, Pierce’s Supererogation (1593) and A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), extracts in G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904), 2.245–84, 249, 267, 278, 283. The standard study is Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531–1555 (Urbana-Champaign, IL, 1946). On the 1540s arrival of Aristotle’s Poetics in England, see Micha Lazarus, ‘Aristotelian Criticism in SixteenthCentury England’, Oxford Handbooks Online (2016). ⁴ Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ⁵ Cf. Clarke Hulse, ‘Tudor Aesthetics’, in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Literature, 1500–1600 (Cambridge, 2000), 29–63: ‘the sixteenth century is the first great age of literary criticism’ (29). Hulse traces the idea to Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca, NY, 1962). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Early English Books Online, and the Chadwyk-Healey database, the word ‘poetics’ detached from Aristotle’s treatise appears to trace to 1651, when Clement Barksdale refers to ‘Hooker’s Clesiastic Poetics’. Today, Renaissance critics often use ‘poetics’ to designate both a formal treatise on literature and a theory derived from an author’s creative practice. Roland Greene (gen. ed.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, fourth edition (Princeton, NJ, 2012), subsumes its content largely under ‘Poetics’, printing entries on ‘Criticism’ (Jonathan Culler, 316–19) and ‘Poetics’ (B. M. Reed, 1058–64). Reed discusses poetics with ‘its curious ambiguity, signifying, on the one hand . . . a branch of literary criticism . . . and, on the other, . . . the compositional principles’ of ‘poets themselves’ (1064). Culler Patrick Cheney, Poetics In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Patrick Cheney 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0005
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84 - Although a rhetorical poetics forms the received model of current scholarship, it cannot account for the full theory of literature—or its practice—during the sixteenth century. What we notice especially during the last quarter of the century is an intensifying expression of yet a third theory of literature, one that eschews both a totalising principle of poetic form and a civic-directed rhetorical goal: ‘the sublime’. Probably during the first century , the Greek scholar Longinus defines ‘Sublimity’ as ‘a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse’, and he goes so far as to call it ‘the source of the distinction of the very greatest poets and prose writers and the means by which they have given eternal life to their own fame’: For grandeur produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer, and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. This is because persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer. (Longinus, On Sublimity, 1.4, Classical Literary Criticism, 143)⁶
The Latin word sublîmis translates the Greek word hypsous, meaning ‘lofty’ or ‘high’. Hence, the sublime qualifies as a theory of imaginative elevation, characterised not by formal unity but by sudden bursts of heightened inspiration: ‘Sublimity . . . tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s whole power at a single blow’ (Longinus, On Sublimity, 1.4, Classical Literary Criticism, 144). To illustrate the sublime, Longinus refers to the tragic myth of Phaethon in Euripides: ‘May one not say that the writer’s soul has mounted the chariot, has taken wing with the horses and shares the danger?’ (Longinus, On Sublimity, 15.4, Classical Literary Criticism, 160). Here, Longinus valorises a neglected principle of the English Renaissance, known as phantasia, or visualisation, an author’s expression of the high-flying imagination, in which he or she peeks through a fiction to reveal an exalted practice of authorship: ‘Sometimes a writer, in the course of a narrative in the third person, makes a sudden change and speaks in the person of his character. This kind of thing is an outburst of emotion . . . Here [in a passage quoted from Homer’s Iliad] the poet has given the narrative to himself, as appropriate to him’ (Longinus, On Sublimity, 27.1, Classical Literary Criticism, 170).⁷ Importantly, Longinus ends his treatise with what is at stake in this theoretical model of literary creativity: the democratic topic of freedom, ‘that fair and fecund spring of literature’ (Longinus, On Sublimity, 44.3, Classical Literary Criticism, 186). Hence, Longinus’s treatise suggests that a democracy is the natural home of sublime literature: ‘democracy nurtures greatness, and great writers flourished with democracy . . . Freedom . . . nourishes and encourages the thoughts of the great’ (Longinus, On Sublimity, 44.2, Classical Literary
writes: ‘Poetics, in the sense of a general account of literary possibilities and the rules or conventions of each, is central to the Western tradition of criticism’ (317). On the need to distinguish poetics from rhetoric in Aristotle, and then the sixteenth-century combination via Horace’s Art of Poetry, see Brian Vickers, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, in C. B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (eds), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 715–45. For the combination in Classical culture, see Jeffrey Walker, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, in Michael J. MacDonald (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (Oxford, 2017), 85–95, 86. ⁶ Longinus, On Sublimity, in D. A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom (eds), Classical Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1972, 1989), 143–87. ⁷ Most critics know phantasia as energeia—for example, James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2016), 155–60—but they neglect it as a formal principle of literary authorship. Compare Patrick Cheney, English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson (Cambridge, 2018), 38.
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85 Criticism, 185). In On Sublimity, a high-flying literature is the definitive mark of poetic freedom, the supreme artistic achievement of a free state.⁸ Scholars who feature a rhetorical poetics during the sixteenth century neglect the emergence of a liberating sublime poetics.⁹ Consequently, the present chapter brings front and centre a concept from Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, ‘by far the most important critical work of the English tradition’:¹⁰ ‘that high flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet’, one that allows the poet to ‘freely rang[e] . . . within the zodiac of his own wit’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 341, 343).¹¹ Although Sidney never cites Longinus, his liberating concept of the high-flying conceit lines up with Longinus’s notion of the sublime: ‘The universe . . . is not wide enough for the range of human speculation and intellect. Our thoughts often travel beyond the boundaries’ (Longinus, On Sublimity, 35.3, Classical Literary Criticism, 178).¹² We might say, then, that Sidney’s famed metaphor of height and flight in The Defence of Poesy takes the freedom of sixteenth-century English poetics into new territory: the territory of ‘the sublime’. In this chapter, I argue that sixteenth-century English poetics is important because it is the first to theorise sublime poetic freedom of the literary imagination itself.¹³ As we shall see, a sixteenth-century sublime poetics acquires value in English literary history precisely because it locates the hallmark of literary excellence in the ‘preeminent modern aesthetic category’: the ‘sublime’.¹⁴
Humanist Theories of Poetry: Sixteenth Century The first formal humanist treatise on English poetics dates to 1575, when George Gascoigne prints ‘Certain Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English’ in his Posies. If we include the memorable debate between Thomas Campion in Observations in the Art of English Poesy (1602) and Samuel Daniel in A Defence of Rhyme (1603), the ⁸ See Cheney, English Authorship, 41–2. ⁹ Gavin Alexander does mention Longinus in Gavin Alexander (ed.), William Scott, The Model of Poesy (Cambridge, 2013), xxxix, xl, xliv; and Gavin Alexander, ‘The Classics in Literary Criticism’, in Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie (eds), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 2, 1558–1660 (Oxford, 2015), 87–101, 89, 90; as does Catherine Bates in On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (Oxford, 2017), 16n24, 172n186, 217, but not with respect to freedom. Bates discusses poetic freedom (19–20, 24–6, 157–75), but not with respect to the sublime. ¹⁰ Alexander, ‘The Classics’, 94. ¹¹ Philip Sidney, Defence, in Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 336–91. ¹² Judith Dundas, in Sidney and Junius on Poetry and Painting: From the Margins to the Center (Newark, DE, 2007), does not think Sidney knew Longinus, but her book aligns one of Longinus’s early seventeenth-century spokesmen, Franciscus Junius, with Sidney. For the connection between Sidney’s Defence and Longinus, see Kelly Lehtonen, ‘Perὶ Hýpsous in Translation: The Sublime in Sixteenth-Century Epic Theory’, Philological Quarterly, 95 (2016), 449–65. ¹³ English theorists, of course, often pay homage to Continental theorists. Sidney, for instance, refers to Julius Caesar Scaliger (see Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 367, 376, 378, 390), as well as to Giovanni Pontono (328, 345), Pietro Bembo (390), and Cristoforo Landino (390), while Samuel Daniel is especially extensive in his references in A Defence of Rhyme (1603), in Gavin Alexander (ed.), Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth, 2004), 205–33, 218–19. Daniel even includes such medieval writers as ‘Walterus Map, Gulielmus Nigellus, Gervasius Tilburiensis, Bracton, Bacon, Ockham’ (Daniel, Defence of Rhyme, Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, 220). ¹⁴ David L. Sedley, Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), 153. Cf. Mark Robson, ‘Defending Poetry, Or, Is There an Early Modern Aesthetic?’, in John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas (eds), The New Aestheticism (Manchester, 2003), 119–30: ‘aesthetics emerges as that which is not poetics or rhetoric’ (123). Even so, Robson calls for ‘an early modern “aesthetic” in the form of rhetoric and poetics’ (127). The present chapter retains ‘poetics’ for both aesthetic succinctness and professional familiarity, recognising that some lexicons subsume ‘poetics’ under ‘literary criticism’ or ‘aesthetics’.
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86 - sixteenth century is notable for producing some eighteen treatises on poetics, seventeen of them written in English. This count includes three works preceding Gascoigne on the topic of rhetoric that nonetheless include valuable commentary on the art of poetry, all widely anthologised: Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor (1531), Sir Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (1560), and Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster (1570). The count also includes such lesser-known works as Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (1577, revised 1593), Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetoric (1588), and John Hoskins’ ‘Directions for Speech and Style’ (c 1599). Without question, the central treatises formally on poetics are Thomas Lodge’s A Defence of Poetry (1579), Sidney’s Defence, William Webbe’s A Discourse on English Poetry (1586), George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589), and Sir John Harington’s ‘A Brief Apology for Poetry’ (1591). We could augment this list with such lesser-known treatises as King James VI’s Ane Schort Treatise Containing Some Reulis and Cautelis, to be Obseruit and Eschewit in Scotis Poesie (1584) and Richard Carew’s The Excellency of the English Tongue (c 1595–6). The count, however, does not include Edmund Spenser’s lost The English Poet (glossed briefly in the Argument to the October eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender), but it does include two works never before anthologised: the Latin Oratio in Laudem Artis Poeticae (1572), attributed to John Rainolds but perhaps written by Henry Dethick,¹⁵ and the recently discovered Model of Poetry by William Scott (1599). In addition to these treatises, our principal modern anthologies include two other kinds of documents printing important statements on English poetics.¹⁶ First are paratexts, such as ‘The Dedicatory Epistle’ to Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579); Richard Stanyhurst’s dedication and preface to his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (1582); Thomas Nashe’s preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589) and his preface to Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591); and George Chapman’s dedication to Matthew Roydon prefacing Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595). The second kind of document appears in poems, plays, and prose fictions that represent a poetics, such as the Earl of Surrey’s elegies on Sir Thomas Wyatt (1540s); William Baldwin’s poem on the death of the poet Collingbourne in The Mirror for Magistrates (1563); and Shakespeare’s scene with King Edward and the poet Lodowick in Edward III (c 1592). This latter list could be extended exponentially, as a good deal of sixteenth-century verse dilates on verse itself, from John Skelton’s A Replycacion (1529) to Mary Sidney Herbert’s Protestant poetics in miniature, ‘Even Now That Care’ (1599).¹⁷ In such documents, poetry is poetics. What, more specifically, does a theorised rhetorical poetics look like in sixteenth-century England? While each theorist has his or her own response to this question, we may offer a brief overview of key topics: • A definition of poetry: Without question, theorists agree with Sidney that ‘Poetry . . . is an art of imitation’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 345). Yet, they disagree about the form that imitation takes: does it imitate the truth, or does it ¹⁵ See James Binns, ‘Henry Dethick in Praise of Poetry: The First Appearance in Print of an Elizabethan Treatise’, The Library, 3 (1975), 199–216. ¹⁶ See Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays; O. B. Hardison, Jr (ed.), English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance (New York, 1963); Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism; Alexander (ed.), Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism. ¹⁷ On Skelton’s Replycacion, see Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), 123–5; on Sidney Herbert’s ‘Care’, see 148–51.
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87 imitate a likeness? The distinction traces to the Sophist, where Plato speaks of ‘two forms of imitation’: eikastic imitation is ‘the making of likeness’, because it is ‘like the original’ it imitates; phantastic imitation is ‘the making of semblances’, because it is a mere ‘semblance’ of the original it imitates (Plato, Sophist, 235d–236c, Collected Dialogues, 978–9).¹⁸ Sidney famously adopts the latter position (see Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 200–1), albeit adjusting it, as indicated when he continues his definition: poetry is a ‘mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 345). Yet, Puttenham adopts the former, distinguishing between a ‘fantastical’ poet, who may be either ‘false’ or ‘right’, and a poet who is a euphantasiotos, a good imaginer: ‘a representer of the best, most comely, and beautiful images or appearances of things to the soul and according to their very truth’ (Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 201).¹⁹ • The vehicle of poetry: Although Puttenham and Sidney disagree about imitation, Sidney’s description of the form that imitation takes is arguably the most renowned in English. Poetry, he says, proceeds via an artistic attempt to represent, not the natural world, but an idealised form of nature: ‘Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up, with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature . . . Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 343).²⁰ • The relation between art and nature: As Sidney’s formulation about the ‘golden’ world intimates, theorists routinely relate nature to art. Stanyhurst can say that ‘Art is . . . bound to shape itself by all imitation to Nature’ (Stanyhurst, Aeneid, preface, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.144)²¹, while Puttenham goes further: ‘art is an aid and coadjutor to nature’ (Puttenham, Art English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 292; see also 296).²² • The goals of poetry: Theorists tend to agree that the end of poesy is not merely pleasure and instruction (see Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 99–100, 333–44, Art of Poetry, 458–9, 478–9), but also ethical action in society.²³ As Scott puts it, voicing Sidney, poetry uses ‘delight to teach and to move us to good’ (Scott, Model of Poesy, 6.4).²⁴
¹⁸ Plato, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton, NJ, 1961). ¹⁹ George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (1589), extracts in Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 190–296. See Gavin Alexander, ‘Seeing through Words in Theories of Poetry: Sidney, Puttenham, Lodge’, in Kent Cartwright (ed.), A Companion to Tudor Literature (Oxford, 2010), 350–63: ‘For Puttenham, a good imagination will produce images of the truth of things as they are . . . His position is the opposite of Sidney’s, for whom imitation is the representing of something that may well (and ideally should) be created in the mind’ (362). ²⁰ See Noam Reisner, ‘The Paradox of Mimesis in Sidney’s Defence of Poesie and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus’, Cambridge Quarterly, 39 (2010), 331–49: ‘Sidney’s theory of the inspired poet’s ability to create “another nature” is a calculated affront to Calvinism . . . but chiefly to Plato’ (333). ²¹ Stanyhurst, The First Four Books of Virgil his Aeneis (1582), preface, ‘To the learned reader’, in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.141–7. ²² On the complexity of art and nature in Puttenham, see Derek Attridge, ‘Puttenham’s Perplexity: Nature, Art, and the Supplement in Renaissance Poetic Theory’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds), Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts (Baltimore, MD, 1986), 257–79. ²³ Horace, in H. Rushton Fairclough (trans.), Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1926). ²⁴ Scott, in Alexander (ed.), The Model of Poesy; references to Scott give page numbers followed by line numbers.
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88 - • The method of poetry: Here, theorists feature ‘decorum’ as the key to composition, an attempt to suit art to its goals virtuously. In the words of a chapter title by Puttenham, ‘What it is that generally makes our speech well pleasing and commendable; and of that which the Latins call decorum’, by which he means ‘decency’ (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 285, 286): decorum ‘resteth in the good conformity of many things and their sundry circumstances with respect one to another, so as there be found a just correspondence between them by this or that relation, the Greeks call it analogy, or a convenient proportion’ (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 286). • The forms of poetry: Theorists agree that genre constitutes the formal vehicle for accomplishing the method and goals of poetry, and period treatises typically inventory what King James calls ‘The Kyndis of Versis’ (James VI, Schort Treatise, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.221),²⁵ as Sidney famously does the ‘parts, kinds, or species’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 360), discussing pastoral, elegy, satire, comedy, tragedy, lyric, and heroical or epic (see Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 360–6). • Poetry’s distinction from other humanities disciplines: Theorists emphasise poetry’s superiority—especially to its two chief siblings, philosophy and history—in its method, its goals, and the content of its truth. Sidney’s discussion is the most detailed (see Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 349–59): although both the ‘philosopher’ and the ‘historiographer . . . take . . . a great passport of poetry’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 340), the poet excels at both: whereas the philosopher ties himself to ‘precept’ and the historian to ‘example’, the ‘peerless poet peform[s] both’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 351).²⁶ Yet, sixteenth-century humanist theorists offer other ideas important to register. First is that of the primeval poet, rendered most compelling by Puttenham, who titles chapter 3 in Book 1 of The Art of English Poesy, ‘How poets were the first priests, the first prophets, the first legislators and politicians in the world’ (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 194). As is common during the period, Puttenham cites ‘Amphion and Orpheus’ as ‘two poets of the first ages’: Amphion built up cities, and reared walls with the stones that came in heaps to the sound of his harp, figuring the mollifying of hard and stony hearts by his sweet and eloquent persuasion. And Orpheus assembled the wild beasts to come in herds to hearken to his music, and by that means made them tame, implying thereby, how by his discreet and wholesome lessons uttered in harmony and with melodious instruments he brought the rude and savage people to a more civil and orderly life. (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 194)
The idea of the poet as civiliser is arguably the umbrella concept emerging from sixteenthcentury treatises. As Puttenham puts it, poets were, from the beginning, ‘fit to redress and
²⁵ James VI of Scotland, Ane Schort Treatise Containing Some Reulis and Cautelis, to be Obseruit and Eschewit in Scotis Poesie (1584), in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.208–25. ²⁶ The preceding inventory owes to Alexander’s list, ‘The Classics’, 87.
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89 edify the cruel and sturdy courage of man . . . Poets therefore are of great antiquity’ (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 194).²⁷ Accordingly, Elizabethan writers nationalise the civic function of the poet, making sixteenth-century treatises patriotic. Hence, Ascham speaks of ‘that scholar that should become hereafter either a good minister in religion, or a civil gentleman in service of his prince and country’, citing ‘Plautus and Terence’ (Ascham, Schoolmaster, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 155).²⁸ In particular, Stanyhurst joins a generational project of ‘beautifying our English language with heroical verses’ (Stanyhurst, Aeneid, dedication, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.137).²⁹ Such valuation of the native tongue leads many writers to vaunt English—and English poetry—as superior to any on the Continent: ‘there be as sharp and quick wits in England’, says Webbe (Webbe, Discourse, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.228).³⁰ For his part, Puttenham devotes a whole chapter to the topic: ‘That there may be a art of our English Poesy, as well as there is of the Latin and Greek’ (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 193). Writer after writer aims (in Sidney’s words) to ‘beautify our mother tongue’, expressing ‘love of our country’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 339, 352).³¹ Not surprisingly, we learn a lot about poets as favoured by princes. As Puttenham writes, ‘in all former ages and in most civil countries and commonwealths, good poets and poesy were highly esteemed and much favoured of the greatest princes’, citing examples from Euripides and Virgil to Chaucer and Gower (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 198–9). Boldly, Puttenham dedicates his treatise to Queen Elizabeth: ‘And now, most excellent Queen, having largely said of poets and poetry . . . we have . . . performed our . . . duty to your Majesty in the description of this art’ (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 290–1). At this time, the nationalist fervour over English poetry leads several treatise writers to offer a roll-call of distinguished English poets, the most famous being Sidney’s (see Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 377–89), set against the idea of ‘England (the mother of excellent minds)’ being ‘grown so hard a stepmother to poets’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 377).³² Sidney’s praise of English poets ranges from Chaucer to The Tragedy of Gorboduc by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. Often privileged for their leadership role in founding modern English verse are what Puttenham calls a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry, Earl of Surrey were the two chieftains, who having travelled into Italy . . . they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style. (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 210)
²⁷ On ‘Marlowe, the Primeval Poet’, see Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, NJ, 1981), 93–140. ²⁸ Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (London, 1570), extract in Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 140–61. ²⁹ Stanyhurst, The First Four Books, in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.136–41. ³⁰ William Webbe, A Discourse on English Poetry (1586), in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.226–302. ³¹ On the patriotic linguistic project, see especially Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, IL, 1992), 1–18; for the Continental context, see William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism (Baltimore, MD, 2003). ³² See also Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.309–24. Even the infamous Nashe–Harvey debate produces roll calls of English poets: see Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.240–1 (for Nashe) and 2.234, 249, 282–3 (for Harvey).
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90 - Some writers, however, follow Ovid in exceeding the bounds of nationalism (see Amores, 1.15.32–6), for they assert the poet’s superiority to the prince. Poetry is political; it is even above politics, as Marlowe asserts in his translation of this passage in the Elegies: ‘Verse is immortal, and shall ne’er decay. / To verse let Kings give place, and Kingly shows’ (Marlowe, Ovid’s Elegies, 1.15.32–3, Complete Works, 1.35).³³ ‘O heavenly Eloquence’, rings Daniel in his poem Musophilus (1599), ‘Thou that canst do much more with one poor pen / Than all the powers of princes can effect, / And draw, divert, dispose, and fashion men, / Better than force or rigour can direct’ (Daniel, Musophilus, lines 929, 935–8, Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, 279).³⁴ Such a notion can even lead patriotic poets like Spenser to call his persona, Colin Clout, ‘the souereigne of song’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, November, line 25, Shorter Poems, 139).³⁵ Poets are not simply ancient civilisers; they are English national sovereigns. This bold line of thinking underwrites the Elizabethan idea of the poet as deity.³⁶ The most famous articulation comes from Puttenham: A poet is as much to say as a maker . . . Such as (by way of resemblance and reverently) we may say of God; who without any travail to his divine imagination made all the world of nought, nor also by any pattern or mould, as the Platonics with their Ideas do fantastically suppose. Even so the very poet makes and contrives out of his own brain both the verse and matter of his poem. (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 191–2)
According to Gordon Braden, ‘The master topos of post-classical European literature is . . . “the assimilation of the poet to the creator of the universe”’, quoting Ernst Robert Curtius’s well-known formulation about Dante: ‘The whole plentitude of his inner vision must be applied to the whole extent of the world, to all the depths and heights of the world above . . . A structure of language and thought is created . . . as inalterable as the cosmos . . . Poetic production can be compared with that of the creator of the universe.’³⁷ Periodically, we see poets themselves practising a cosmic poetics, as Spenser does in Book 6, canto 10 of The Faerie Queene, when Colin Clout uses his art to conjure up the Dance of the Graces in the shape of the Ptolemaic universe.³⁸ Not merely is the poet a deity, he is many things—a Proteus—for the treatises use a number of metaphors to figure the poet and his civilising function in English national society. Certainly, the topic of figures or tropes is itself a broad and recurrent topic (see, e.g., Puttenham, Art, and Hoskins, ‘Directions’, in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 235–85 and 399–420, respectively).³⁹ But in these documents we also learn specifically that the poet is a bee because of his potency to ‘suck . . . honey from weeds’ (Whetstone, Promos ³³ Christopher Marlowe, in Roma Gill, et al. (eds), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1987–98), spelling modernised. ³⁴ Daniel, Musophilus (1599), extract in Alexander (ed.), Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, 274–80. ³⁵ Spenser, in Richard McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). ³⁶ See Julius Caesar Scaliger, in Frederick Morgan Padelford (ed. and trans.), Select Translations (New York, 1905): ‘the poet depicts quite another sort of nature, and a variety of fortunes; in fact, by so doing, he transforms himself almost into a second deity’ (8). ³⁷ Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 1999), 60, referencing Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Willard R. Trask (trans.) (Princeton, NJ, 1953), 379, 400. ³⁸ See Patrick Cheney and Paul J. Klemp, ‘Spenser’s Dance of the Graces and the Ptolemaic Universe’, Studia Neophilologica, 56 (1984), 27–33. ³⁹ Hoskins, ‘Directions for Speech and Style’ (c 1599), extracts in Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 398–427.
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91 and Cassandra, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 173), evoking ideas from goodness to gathering.⁴⁰ Hence, Stanyhurst refers to the ‘sweet scenting hives of Poetry’, through which the ‘learned’ can ‘apply themselves wholly . . . to the true making of verses’ (Stanyhurst, Aeneid, dedication, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.141). At issue, thus, is the very sweetness of verse, a high-water mark of eloquence (see Carew, Excellency of English, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.292–3).⁴¹ Allied is the medical idea of the poet as physician, as this from Lodge: ‘for seeing the world in those days was imperfect, it was necessary that they like good Physicians should so frame their potions that they might be applicable to the queasy stomachs of their werish [sick] patients’ (Lodge, Defence, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.66).⁴² Conjoining roles, Puttenham speaks of the poet as a ‘physician and gardener’ (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 293), and indeed the idea of poetry as a garden is amongst the most familiar representations (see Elyot, Governor, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 67), sometimes featuring ‘clear springs of poesy’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 377), with a ‘stream’ running through it (Daniel, Defence of Rhyme, Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, 229). Yet, often the metaphor shifts from nature to art itself. The poet becomes a builder; his construction, the art of framing; and his artefact, a building (see Daniel, Defence of Rhyme, Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, 225–6): the house has ‘rooms’ (Daniel, Defence of Rhyme, Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, 228). Hence, Scott can speak of ‘the several rooms of poetry’, which contain ‘the furniture of poetry, the rules and laws the poet must observe in his imitation’ (Scott, Model of Poesy, 29.31–6). In the Roman tongue, the poet is a vates, or prophet, as Sidney reminds us (see Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 341). The concept helps account for the idea of poetry as a prophetic mirror, into which readers bend their minds to witness miracles, as Harington observes: ‘therefore we do first read some other authors, making them as it were a looking-glass to the eyes of our mind, and then, after we have gathered more strength, we enter into profounder studies of higher mysteries’ (Harington, ‘Brief Apology’, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.198).⁴³ In The Faerie Queene, Spenser presents his epic romance as ‘mirrours more then one’, encouraging Queen Elizabeth ‘her selfe to see’ (Faerie Queene, 3.Proem.5.6–8). Spenser also depicts what Sidney calls ‘right poets’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 346) as benevolent magicians, such as Merlin in the quests of Arthur and Britomart: poetry is an art of magic, for it often enters the territory of the irrational, the sublime.⁴⁴ The magic, and the metaphors, are not always wholesome. For the poet can be a figure of sinister magic. ‘Englishmen’ who have become ‘Italianated’, writes Nashe, ‘enchant . . . chaste minds’ (Nashe, Anatomy of Absurdity, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.323).⁴⁵ Throughout The Faerie Queene, enchanters like Archimago function as dangerous poet figures, with the witch in Book 3 specifically a false Petrarchan poet, making a False Florimell out of Petrarchan conceits (see Faerie Queene, 3.8.5–9). Adjusting metaphors, Nashe criticises false English poets as ‘the alchemists of eloquence’ (Nashe, ‘Preface’ to ⁴⁰ George Whetstone, The right excellent history of Promos and Cassandra (1578), extract in Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 172–4. ⁴¹ Richard Carew, Epistle on the Excellency of the English Tongue (?1595–6), extract in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.285–94. ⁴² Thomas Lodge, Defence of Poetry (1579), in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.61–86. ⁴³ Sir John Harington, ‘A Brief Apology of Poetry’, prefacing his translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1591), in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.194–22. ⁴⁴ See Cheney, English Authorship, 123–8. ⁴⁵ Nashe, The Anatomy of Absurdity (1589), extract in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.321–37.
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92 - Greene’s Menaphon, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.308).⁴⁶ Underlying the idea of poetry as an art of magic is Puttenham’s work on ‘good makers’, who, like the ‘profession of a very courtier . . . cunningly . . . dissemble’ (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 291), an idea that derives from the Italian sprezzatura in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier.⁴⁷ As Scott puts it, glossing Castiglione, ‘art . . . conceals art’ (Scott, Model of Poesy, 47.39). No wonder Puttenham also uses the dubious legal concept of the poet, not as a ‘judge’, but as a ‘pleader’ (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 232). Even though sixteenth-century theorists work from a distinct command centre (or perhaps because they do), they sometimes seem prescriptive, as Hoskins does: ‘The rule of a metaphor is that it be not too bold nor too far-fetched’. Yet, even such a rule-setter can belie himself, offering something more compelling: ‘A METAPHOR, or translation, is the friendly and neighbourly borrowing of one word to express a thing with more light and better note’ (Hoskins, ‘Directions’, in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 400). Similarly, Puttenham calls ‘Metaphora’ the ‘figure of transport’: ‘There is a kind of wresting of a single word from his own right signification to another not of natural, but yet of some affinity or convenience with it’ (Puttenham, Art, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 242). As we shall see, the theorising of metaphor as a figure of transport makes this trope the ultimate figure for the Western art of transport: the sublime. It is precisely the sublime art of transport that Sidney identifies as liberating, when he speaks of ‘that high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet’, which, he adds, ‘did seem to have some divine force in it’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 341). Accordingly, Sidney unpacks the process of figuration by distinguishing between three versions of the figure that the right poet connects: the Platonic ‘idea’, which exists as an abstraction in the divine realm; ‘the fore-conceit’, which exists in the poet’s mind as an image of the Idea; and the ‘work’, which manifests the mental idea as it participates in the divine Idea (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 344).⁴⁸ Hence, Sidney concludes: ‘Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 344). Here Sidney unpacks the sublime liberating process of figuration itself.
Modern Theories of Poetry: Humanist and Post-Humanist Given the breadth and depth of sixteenth-century poetics, we should expect that modern critics spill a good deal of ink theorising it: or should we say, meta-theorising it.⁴⁹ Often, ⁴⁶ Nashe, ‘Preface’ to Greene’s Menaphon (1589), in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.307–20. ⁴⁷ See also Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 292n226; and Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton, NJ, 1978). ⁴⁸ See A. Leigh DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor (Durham, NC, 1982), 5–6. For more on figuration, see also Chapter 8 in this volume. ⁴⁹ The classic study is Joel Elias Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York, 1924); see also Charles Sears Baldwin, in Donald Lemen Clark (ed.), Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice: Classicism in the Rhetoric and Poetic of Italy, France, and England, 1400–1600 (New York, 1939); J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: The Renascence (London, 1947); Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1983); and Robert Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (Cambridge, 2000). On Renaissance Italian literary criticism, see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL, 1961); and Hathaway, The Age of Criticism.
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93 critics aim to anatomise what Renaissance literary critics say:⁵⁰ to outline theories of prosody, style, imitation, figuration, and so forth; to dilate on Renaissance understandings of the origins and ends of poetry; and to recover the historical context for such theories, including Classical, medieval, and Continental influences.⁵¹ Yet, as many recent theorists emphasise, we need (in the words of Robert Matz) to ‘analyze rather than repeat Renaissance claims about the pleasure and profitability of literary texts’.⁵² During the past few decades, critics have written no fewer than twelve overview essays for various ‘companions’ and ‘handbooks’ (mostly published by Oxford, Cambridge, and Wiley-Blackwell). These essays offer the present chapter an invaluable critical baseline: they range from Brian Vickers’ ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’ (1988) and Clarke Hulse’s ‘Tudor Aesthetics’ (2000), to Gavin Alexander’s ‘Seeing through Words in Theories of Poetry: Sidney, Puttenham, Lodge’ (2010) and Arthur F. Kinney’s ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’ (2017).⁵³ Such essays focus on the later Elizabethan era, but Chris Stamatakis counters the ‘general assumption that there is no such thing as a vernacular literary criticism in England in the first part of the sixteenth century’: ‘The poetry of Hawes, Skelton, Wyatt, and Surrey gestures . . . to the . . . synthesis of theory (poesis) and application (praxis)’, so that ‘literary criticism . . . can lay claim to a place at the centre of early Tudor poetic culture’.⁵⁴ At the centre of the conversation for Stamatakis is the notion of vernacular eloquence, which Catherine Nicholson features in her ‘English Eloquence: Sixteenth-Century Arts of Rhetoric and Poetics’ (2013).⁵⁵ According to Nicholson, ‘How to craft an English language that is eloquent without ceasing . . . to be English: this is the challenge taken up by many poets, playwrights, and prose writers of . . . the English Renaissance, but it is a challenge that is confronted most directly in the pages of vernacular treatises on rhetoric and poetics’.⁵⁶ In her book, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (2014), Nicholson recalls a pivotal debate during the century: whether authors should write in Latin or English, with both Elyot and Ascham arguing for the former and Wilson the latter. In particular, Wilson ‘marks an important turn in the vernacularization of rhetoric’, testifying ‘to the changes wrought upon a Classical ideal of eloquence when it is identified with England’s daily talk’ but also ‘to the changes wrought upon sixteenth-century
⁵⁰ In using the concept of anatomy, we might take the cue of Nashe, who calls his general censure ‘my Anatomy’ in The Anatomy of Absurdity, in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.337. Northrop Frye influentially borrows the concept in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ, 1957). ⁵¹ For an anthology of Classical criticism, see Russell and Winterbottom (eds), Classical Literary Criticism. For medieval anthologies, see Alex Preminger, O. B. Hardison, Jr, and Kevin Kerrane (eds), Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretations (New York, 1974); Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park, PA, 1999); and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert W. Russell (eds), Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translations, c.1120–c.1450 (Martlesham, 2016). For excerpts of Continental Renaissance criticism, see Alan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (Detroit, MI, 1962). ⁵² Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England, 8. ⁵³ Vickers, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’; Hulse, ‘Tudor Aesthetics’; Alexander, ‘Theories of Poetry’; and Arthur F. Kinney, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, in MacDonald (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, 437–48. ⁵⁴ Chris Stamatakis, ‘Early Tudor Literary Criticism?’, Oxford Handbooks Online (Oxford, 2016), 2, 17. ⁵⁵ Catherine Nicholson, ‘Englishing Eloquence: Sixteenth-Century Arts of Rhetoric and Poetics’, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640 (Oxford, 2013), 9–26. See also Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (Philadelphia, PA, 2014); and Wolfgang G. Müller, ‘Direction for English: Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric, and George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, and the Search for Vernacular Eloquence’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009), 307–22. ⁵⁶ Nicholson, ‘Englishing Eloquence’, 1.
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94 - ideals of Englishness as they assimilate an alien theory of eloquence’.⁵⁷ In a chapter in The Book Named the Governor titled ‘What Eloquence Is’, Elyot writes: Undoubtedly very eloquence is in every tongue, where any matter or act done or to be done is expressed in words clean, propoise [proper], ornate, and comely; whereof sentences be so aptly compact that they by a virtue inexplicable do draw unto them the minds and consent of hearers, they being therewith either persuaded, moved, or to delectation included. (Elyot, Governor, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 62)
In the overview essays, the most recent comes from Matz in his 2018 ‘Theories and Philosophies of Poetry’. Matz recalls that in Renaissance England theory is spread over ‘three interrelated and overarching areas of concern: poetry’s truth, function, and form’.⁵⁸ Such theory, he adds, responds to ‘strong waves of iconoclasm’, the most famous being Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse (1579), which attacks the theatre, prompting defences by both Lodge and Sidney.⁵⁹ One of the earliest of the overview essays serves as a springboard for many to follow: George K. Hunter’s ‘Elizabethan Theatrical Genres and Literary Theory’ (1999): ‘The practice of Elizabethan drama cannot easily be brought into focus for us by the statements of Renaissance literary criticism.’⁶⁰ Most critics have agreed with Hunter. Yet, Vickers dissents, ‘hop[ing] to show that the Renaissance made a far more coherent connection between creation and criticism than has yet been realized’.⁶¹ Following suit, Alexander, in the 2010 essay mentioned above, opens and closes with the ‘gap between . . . theory . . . and practice’, while more recently he responds to the received wisdom: ‘theory may yet have much light to shed on practice’.⁶² We can go further, and argue that the sixteenth-century inauguration of Renaissance poetics is instrumental to the development of sixteenth-century poetry. When poets themselves versify poetics in their poems, they formally represent a symbiosis between theory and practice.⁶³ Indeed, during this era a versified poetics may be the ultimate form that poetics takes, because it splits the aesthetic atom, at once theorising poetry and baffling it, because it represents it. Jumping the gap between reason and imagination, a verse poetics returns the project to its creative fount; it may be the quintessential form that poesis can take. How can you theorise what you cannot theorise? They do. By representing poetic theory, poets liberate the sublime energy of art. Although the modern critical tradition fusing sixteenth-century poetics with rhetoric has been invaluable, Catherine Bates challenges the enterprise. Recognising Sidney’s treatise as ⁵⁷ Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues, 5. ⁵⁸ Robert Matz, ‘Theories and Philosophies of Poetry’, in Catherine Bates (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Chichester, 2018), 154–65, 155. ⁵⁹ Matz, ‘Theories and Philosophies of Poetry’, 155. See also Alexander, ‘Seeing through Words in Theories of Poetry’, 360. ⁶⁰ G. K. Hunter, ‘Elizabethan Theatrical Genres and Literary Theory’, in Glyn Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 3, The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1999), 248–58, 248. ⁶¹ Vickers, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, 21. ⁶² Alexander, ‘Theories of Poetry’, 362, see also 351; Alexander, ‘The Classics’, 88. ⁶³ ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’ is itself a sixteenth-century topic: see Gabriel Harvey, Four Letters and certain Sonnets (1592), extracts in Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.229–38, 235. By ‘versify poetics’, I mean a poem that self-consciously transacts a poetics, which can range from Daniel’s Musophilus, whose subtitle is Containing a General Defence of Learning (a poem formally on the topic of poetics) to Wyatt’s ‘Mine Own John Poins’ (a poem nominally on another topic that represents a poetics; see Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry, 108–10, 129–32). For a final ‘companion’ essay on poetics, see Bronwyn Lea’s ‘Poetics and Poetry’, in David Morley and Philip Neilsen (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing (Cambridge, 2012), 67–86.
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95 ‘the foundational text of English poetics’, she questions the ‘prevailing view . . . that Sidney’s text articulates a model of poetry as ideal’. In particular, she argues that ‘Sidney’s text is feeling its way towards a model of poetry that is de-idealist’. Although the Defence advances an idealist theory, it includes ‘more than one “voice” ’, and ‘one of these “voices” is directly contravening—indeed, terminally disrupting—the argument for an idealist aesthetic that the treatise officially makes’.⁶⁴ In particular, Sidney’s treatise unearths a model in which poetry is ‘profitless’: ‘a poetry that is clearly capable of being free from profit-mindedness’.⁶⁵ In Bates’s model, ‘the counterfeit, the valueless, and the empty might be embraced as the qualities of true art’: this is ‘the unofficial argument of the Defence’.⁶⁶ Sidney’s freedomseeking project, Bates concludes, ‘intuits—even anticipates—an aesthetic that was not to be fully philosophised for nearly two hundred years; or to put it the other way round (and taking a cue, in this respect from the recent resurgence of interest in the Renaissance sublime), that elements of a post-Kantian aesthetic can indeed be traced back, possibly via Bacon, to Sidney’.⁶⁷ Bates’s work signals a new phase of work on English poetics. One way to classify this phase is to borrow the word she uses, and call it sublime.⁶⁸ Although Bates uses the word only a few times, she permits us to bring it front and centre, and recall the surge of work on the sublime today: in classics, medieval studies, and early modern studies.⁶⁹ If sublimity qualifies as the pre-eminent modern aesthetics, it also qualifies as the pre-eminent early modern poetics. The sixteenth century is the inaugural era of an English sublime poetics.
A Sublime Poetics of Literary Freedom As yet, critics have not studied sixteenth-century poetics by bringing the sublime into alignment with the Western idea of freedom. In particular, the allied topics of freedom and sublimity do not show up in our group of twelve overview essays.⁷⁰ Yet, historically the two topics conjoin to assume centre stage here: not merely because the time is ripe but because it has always been ripe. For, as Bates encourages us to see, a sublime poetics of literary freedom is at the heart of both sixteenth-century theory and sixteenth-century practice: it forms the very centre of their symbiosis. Longinus’s treatise constitutes the formal origin of a sublime poetics of literary freedom. In Russell and Winterbottom’s anthology, Classical Literary Criticism, the following works ⁶⁴ Bates, On Not Defending Poetry, vii. ⁶⁵ Bates, On Not Defending Poetry, viii, 32. ⁶⁶ Bates, On Not Defending Poetry, 159. ⁶⁷ Bates, On Not Defending Poetry, xii. ⁶⁸ In doing so, we follow Harvey, who uses the Elizabethan discourse of the sublime when speaking of ‘astonishing Rhetoric and ravishing Poetry’ (Harvey, A New Letter of notable contents, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.283). ⁶⁹ On the sublime in antiquity, see Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge, 2009); and Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity. On the medieval period, see Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, 1989); and C. Stephen Jaeger (ed.), Magnificence and the Sublime in Medieval Aesthetics: Art, Architecture, Literature, Music (Basingstoke, 2010). And on the early modern period, see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge, 1999); Sedley, Sublimity and Skepticism; and Caroline van Eck, Stijn Bussels, Maarten Delbeke, and Jürgen Pieters (eds), Translations of the Sublime: The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus’ ‘Peri Hupsous’ in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre (Leiden, 2012). Important recent overviews that leap over the Renaissance include Timothy M. Costello (ed.), The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2012); and Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge, 2015). Philip Shaw, The Sublime, New Critical Idiom (New York, 2017), corrects his earlier version (2006) by giving more space to the early modern period (41–8). ⁷⁰ Occasionally, liberty shows up, as in Kinney, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, 349 (no doubt with Sidney in mind).
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96 - do not include substantive concepts of liberty: Plato’s Ion and Republic; Aristotle’s Poetics; Horace’s A Letter to Augustus and The Art of Poetry; Dio of Prusa’s Philoctetes in the Tragedians; and Plutarch’s On the Study of Poetry. Only Tacitus’s Dialogue on Orators refers to the concept. Conversely, all of these works script the sublime. In his book The Sublime in Antiquity (2015), James Porter includes detailed discussions of both Plato and Aristotle, while Philip Hardie in his Lucretian Receptions: History, The Sublime, Knowledge (2009) devotes a chapter to Horace, including the Art of Poetry.⁷¹ Dio speaks more than once in terms of tragedy’s ‘grandeur and archaic splendour’, its ‘sublimity and dignity’ (Dio of Prusa, Philoctetes, Classical Literary Criticism, 188, 191). So does Plutarch, except that he aims precisely to tame poetry’s sublimity by rationalising it: ‘Poetry . . . is an imitation of the manners and lives of men . . . This kind of training and attitude in a young man exalted and inspired by good words and actions and unreceptive of, and distressed by, bad ones, will ensure that reading does no harm’ (Plutarch, On the Study of Poetry, Classical Literary Criticism, 212). Plutarch’s whole point is the exact opposite of Longinus’s: ‘to safeguard the disturbing and exciting elements of poetry’ (Plutarch, On the Study of Poetry, Classical Literary Criticism, 211). In contrast, the arch-republican Tacitus anticipates Longinus in linking sublimity with liberty. His first point is that only ‘free-born gentlemen’ (Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators, Classical Literary Criticism, 114) can achieve a sublime eloquence: ‘Eloquence is something awesome and supernatural, and over the centuries it gives many instances of men reaching the heights by sheer natural ability’ (Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators, Classical Literary Criticism, 115)—the concept of ‘reaching the heights’ appearing three other times (see Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators, Classical Literary Criticism, 111, 117, 137). While Tacitus classifies both Cicero and Plato as ‘sublime’ (Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators, Classical Literary Criticism, 123, 133), he focuses on the topic of a sublime poetics of freedom: ‘the mind is free to withdraw to fresh innocent places, and enjoy a holy world’ (Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators, Classical Literary Criticism, 118). Tacitus can even bring sublime transport and liberty into close conjunction, when offsetting the ‘supreme power’ of ‘Crispus and Marcellus’: ‘Freedmen have as much. I should prefer to be carried by Virgil’s “sweet Muses” to their sacred haunts and fountains’ (Tacitus, Dialogue on Orators, Classical Literary Criticism, 119). Sublime transport is the ultimate freedom. Even so, Tacitus cannot compete with Longinus when linking freedom with sublimity. While the unnamed philosopher talking with Longinus sees a democracy as the sublime home of poetic freedom, Longinus himself can also dilate on the sublime liberty of speech, as when he recurrently quotes Demosthenes: in the famed orator’s address to ‘you who fought for the liberty of Greece’ (Longinus, On Sublimity, 16.2, Classical Literary Criticism, 162); or again on ‘the right of free speech’ (Longinus, On Sublimity, 27.3, Classical Literary Criticism, 170); or once more in his attack on ‘Vile flatterers . . . who have given away liberty as a drinking present . . . overthrowing liberty and freedom from despotism’ (Longinus, On Sublimity, 32.1, Classical Literary Criticism, 173). But it is in the concluding section of On Sublimity, when responding to the philosopher about democracy as the home of sublime freedom, that Longinus addresses the topic in his own voice: ‘Greatness of mind wanes, fades, and loses its attraction when men spend their admiration on their mortal parts and neglect to develop the immortal. One who has been bribed to give a judgment will no longer be a free and sound judge of rightness and nobility’ (Longinus, On Sublimity, 44.8–9, ⁷¹ See Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, 557–601, on Plato; 289–97, on Aristotle (the Rhetoric), and 297–303 (the Poetics); and Hardie, Lucretian Receptions, 57–63, on Horace.
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97 Classical Literary Criticism, 187). Longinus’s treatise is important because it presents the citizen’s right to sublime language as the highest form of freedom. Admittedly, only a few sixteenth-century treatises we have mentioned use the word ‘sublime’. Ascham discusses the three styles coming out of Classical rhetoric and poetics: ‘Humile, Mediocre, Sublime’, referring to two of Longinus’s exemplars of sublimity, Demosthenes and Cicero, in whose ‘Orations Medium et Sublime be most excellently handled’ (Ascham, Schoolmaster, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 153). Nonetheless, we can find works of literary criticism not anthologised deploying the term. In his Bibliotheca Eliotae [Elyot’s Library] (1545), Elyot declines the Latin word and supplies English translations: for example, ‘Sublime, on high’.⁷² Subsequently, a whole host of writers, in theory and in practice, use the term, from Matthew Parker in 1567, to Sidney in the early 1580s, to Spenser in 1596.⁷³ In his letter ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’ prefacing Menaphon, Greene indicates that he writes in the sublime style to match his sublime topic: ‘If Gentlemen you find my style either magis humile in some place, or more sublime in another, if you find dark Ænigmas or strange conceipts as if Sphinx on the one side, and Roscius [a famous Roman actor] on the other were playing the wags; think the metaphors are well meant.’⁷⁴ The sublime style is not an end in itself; its metaphors have a meaning. In the period treatises, the concept of liberty may occur more frequently than does sublimity, but the key point is that, as in the passages quoted earlier from Sidney’s Defence, sixteenth-century poetics turns sublimity—including the sublime style—into an art of liberty, in ways that critics neglect.⁷⁵ According to Chapman, ‘Homer’s Poems were writ from a free fury’ (Chapman, Achilles Shield, Prefatory letter, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.298)⁷⁶, the word ‘fury’ referring to furor poeticus, a key concept of sublimity.⁷⁷ For Chapman, poetic fury is a principle of freedom, elevating the literary experience above the human to enter the godhead.⁷⁸ Yet, it is Sidney’s Defence that puts sublime liberty on the English map. We might say that Sidney gives sublime wings to the very concept of poetic licence recurrent during the century (see, e.g., Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes’; Stanyhurst, Aeneid, dedication; and Harington, ‘Brief Apology’, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.53, 1.137, 2.200, respectively), deriving from Cicero (De Oratore, 3.153), Quintilian (Orator’s Education, 10.5.4), and Horace (Art of Poetry, 9–11).⁷⁹ In the Defence, Sidney uses concepts of liberty eight times. While a few of these are incidental (see Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 341, 373, 391), most are substantive (see Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 341, 343, 346, 357, 369), and some are at the centre of his famous utterances; we have mentioned ‘the high-flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet’ and
⁷² Sir Thomas Elyot, Bibliotheca Eliotae (London, 1545), sig. Kk2. ⁷³ For inventories and discussion, see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (Basingstoke, 2009), 38–41; and Cheney, English Authorship, 4–9. ⁷⁴ Greene, ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’, Menaphon (London, 1589), sig. *2v. ⁷⁵ Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, has only two references to liberty: 274, 403. ⁷⁶ Chapman, Prefatory letter ‘To the Most Honoured Earl, Earl Marshall’, Achilles Shield (1598), in Smith (ed.). Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2.297–304. ⁷⁷ See Sedley, Sublimity and Skepticism, 9, 157n171. ⁷⁸ In Homer’s Odyssey (1614), Chapman is the first in English to discuss Longinus (see the extract in Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 512–25, 522); however, the first in England is Rainolds (1573/4), writing in Latin; see William A. Ringler, Jr, ‘An Early Reference to Longinus’, Modern Language Notes, 53 (1938), 23–4. ⁷⁹ Cicero, De Oratore, in E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (trans.), On the Orator: Books 1–2 (Cambridge, MA, 1942), 2.120–1; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoriae, in Donald A. Russell (trans.), The Orator’s Education, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 4.356–7; Horace, Ars Poetica, in Fairclough (trans.), Art of Poetry, 450–1.
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98 - ‘the poet . . . freely ranging . . . within the zodiac of his own wit’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 341, 343). Both of these utterances pertain to Sidney’s conception of imitation, which he specifies by adopting a ‘phantastic’ rather than an ‘eikastic’ model: ‘For I will not deny but man’s wit may make poesy, which should be eikastic (which some have defined, “figuring forth good things”), to be phantastic (which doth contrariwise, infect the fancy with unworthy objects)’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 371). For Sidney, phantastic imitation liberates the imagination, leading the poet to invent transportive conceits that participate in what we have seen called the European ‘master topos’: ‘the assimilation of the poet to the creator of the universe’ (see above and note 37). Hence, Sidney speaks of ‘the free course of [the poet]’s . . . own invention’, a form of gnosis [thought] that leads to praxis [action]: ‘the mind hath a free desire to do well’ (Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 346, 357). Yet, it is Daniel who articulates the most intricate formulation, when asserting the ‘liberty’ of the poet to compose the most tyrannical of forms, the sonnet, in the shape of the cosmos: So that if our labours have wrought out a manumission from bondage, and that we go at liberty, notwithstanding these ties, we are no longer the slaves of rhyme, but we make it a most excellent instrument to serve us. Nor is this certain limit observed in sonnets any tyrannical bounding of the conceit, but rather reducing it in gyrum [into a circle], and a just form . . . For the body of our imagination being as an unformed chaos without fashion, without day, if by the divine power of the spirit it be wrought into an orb or order and form, is it not more pleasing to nature . . . ? (Daniel, Defence of Rhyme, Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, 216)
Daniel’s and Sidney’s liberating cosmic poetics grounds poetic theory in the Western discourse of the sublime. Sidney especially shares with Longinus a striking idea: that the poet relies on sublime phantasia or imagination to enter a godlike state, a fully imaginative condition that exists independently of what Eugenio Refini calls an ‘external inspiration coming from the gods or some superior spiritual beings’.⁸⁰ We might, then, classify Sidneian liberty as freedom to evoke a poetics of the literary imagination. Recurrently, the Defence taps into a sublime poetics. For instance, it shares Longinus’s interest in the magical or enchanting quality of poetry (see Longinus, On Sublimity, 27.1, Classical Literary Criticism, 170; Sidney, Defence, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 338); in images of ravishment (see Longinus, 10.1–3, 154; Sidney, 341); in the relation between art and nature (see Longinus, 22.1, 167; Sidney, 387); in images of transport (see Longinus, 12.1, 156; Sidney, 348), specifically flight (see Longinus, 15.4, 160; Sidney, 380); in the legitimacy of violence (see Longinus, 1.4, 144; Sidney, 363); and in an interest in fame (see Longinus, 1.4, 143; Sidney, 390). For Renaissance critics, the most visible overlap is that
⁸⁰ Eugenio Refini, ‘Longinus and Poetic Imagination in Late Renaissance Literary Theory,’ in van Eck, Bussels, Delbeke, and Pieters, Translations of the Sublime, 39. Also see Bates, On Not Defending Poetry, who observes that Refini’s idea of an interior divinity ‘belonged to the theory of the sublime’ (16n24), and she locates the idea in Sidney: ‘The . . . view—what Sidney wants to but dare not say—would correspond to the position that poetry is entirely manmade, that the poet thereby does indeed exercise god-like creative powers, and that his (or her) effusions and transports thus have their own “divine force” without being dependent upon or grounded in a prior metaphysics’ (16–17n27); see also 26, and 172n186.
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99 of energeia (see Longinus, 15.2, 159; Sidney, 385) and furor (see Longinus, 32.7, 175; Sidney, 390). In all these cases, Longinus theorises the sublime; Sidney allows it to infiltrate. Accordingly, Sidney’s protégé, Scott, imitates his master. Yet, more than other treatise writers, Scott recurrently uses concepts of freedom, even more than Sidney: nine times in total.⁸¹ Nearly all of the uses pertain to the idea of poetic freedom, as when Scott refers to ‘the liberty of his own [the poet’s] feigning invention’ (Scott, Model of Poesy, 34.6). According to Alexander, ‘[t]here is no sign of Longinus in Scott’.⁸² This may be true, but it voices an outdated model, which assumes that inscriptions of the sublime must owe to Longinus, a model categorically rejected by Porter.⁸³ In fact, more than any sixteenthcentury treatise, Scott’s ‘model of poesy’ is sublime. Unlike Sidney, he is especially attracted to ‘poetical fury’ (Scott, Model of Poesy, 10.21). Accordingly, he peppers his treatise with key words in the vocabulary of the sublime, such as ‘marvellous’, ‘astonish’, and ‘admiration’ (Scott, Model of Poesy, 16.35, 43.36, 18.27–8). He also shows an interest in Longinian transport: ‘The end of the heroic is to lift up the mind by some worthy and manly affection to some more than ordinary pitch of virtue’ (Scott, Model of Poesy, 70.7–8). Scott can especially intensify such discourse, as when writing that ‘forcibleness or energeia . . . worketh by the highest intention of delight by astonishing admiration whilst the reader and beholder is as it were ravished and carried into the expressed passion’ (Scott, Model of Poesy, 43.20–37). Scott can thus rely on Longinian phantasia, in a way Sidney never does: ‘we seem to set out the thing or action before the eye’ (Scott, Model of Poesy, 66.3; cf. 65.8–11). Most importantly, Scott brings sublimity and liberty together: ‘the poet hath liberty sometime for admiration to pass ordinary and common reason, representing even wonders, but then still the means must be extraordinary’ (Scott, Model of Poesy, 34.38–35.2). The year is 1599, and the century is closing with a receptivity to an English sublime poetics of literary freedom. And so, we might close with one of the century’s most sublime representations of literary theory. Scholars rarely read Marlowe’s famous scene of Helen of Troy in Doctor Faustus in terms of Renaissance poetic theory—indeed, as Marlowe’s practice of an important feature of that theory—or situate the scene within the freedom of the literary sublime.⁸⁴ Usefully, Marlowe critics have moved away from the older notion that sees Helen simply as a demon, for today they tend to concentrate on her literary character. According to Stephen Orgel, what Faustus really wants is a ‘literary allusion, a paragon from his classical education . . . what is desirable about her is that she isn’t a woman’.⁸⁵ In particular, I suggest, in the Helen scene Marlowe stages a version of the debate between Puttenham and Sidney, on whether the literary image is, or should be, eikastic or phantastic, an accurate mimesis of life or an imaginative representation.⁸⁶ When Faustus kisses Helen, climactically, and leaves the
⁸¹ See Scott, Model of Poesy, 11.29–33, 11.36–7, 34.6, 34.38–35.2, 38.41–39.1, 53.39–40, 67.5, 69.16–17, 71.16–18. ⁸² Alexander (ed.), in Scott, Model of Poesy, xxxix. ⁸³ See Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, xvii–xx. ⁸⁴ Cf. Reisner, ‘The Paradox of Mimesis’, who sees Faustus and the Defence both scripting mimesis: ‘Like Sidney before him, Marlowe latches on to the idea that it is the mimetic act of imaginative conjuration itself which secures the truth-value of that which it cannot contain’ (342). Reisner briefly discusses the Helen scene (345, 346): ‘Unlike Sidney, who reads Homer for moral edification, Marlowe’s Faustus loses himself absolutely in Homer’s imagined world’ (345). Reisner does not mention the sublime. ⁸⁵ Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare, and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York, 2002), 228, italics original. ⁸⁶ Christine Edwards, ‘Marlowe’s Books: Reading, Writing, and Early Modern Drama’, PhD Diss., University of Queensland, Australia, 2018, cues me to this idea, although she does not mention the treatise dispute between
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100 - nation to burn, Marlowe practises a theoretical coup d’état: ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 12.81–2, Complete Works, 2.42). Relying on a familiar metaphor of sublime transport— magic—Faustus disappears inside the literary imagination itself. While nominally Faustus’s embrace of Helen is a tragic error, sealing the magician’s damnation, Marlowe plucks out of his tragic ecstasy the immortalising representation of a theoretical triumph, the Sidneian assertion of the phantastic imagination as the most sublime form that art can take: ‘Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss’ (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 12.83, Complete Works, 2.42). The boundary between tragedy and romance disappears, but that is not all. For Faustus succeeds in doing the impossible, and in the process performs his greatest feat of Marlovian magic: mimetically, he reverses what C. Stephen Jaeger classifies as the longstanding Western aesthetic achievement (at once immortalised by Sidney and challenged by him): the artist’s capacity to turn ‘art’ into ‘life’.⁸⁷ Instead, Faustus crosses from life back into art, ensuring that a liberating art of poetry comes to represent a poetic theory sublimely.
eikastic and phantastic: Faustus’s ‘necromancy can only embody an image and not resurrect the dead’ (74). The present discussion builds on my most recent discussion of this enigmatic play: Cheney, English Authorship, chapter 4. ⁸⁷ C. Stephen Jaeger, Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (Philadelphia, PA, 2012), 35.
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6 Style Jeff Dolven
There is a simple story to be told about the styles of English verse in the sixteenth century, one already current by its final decades. The story has three parts: a crude and awkward beginning, a middle phase of increasing technical competence, and the golden age of the later Elizabethans, when England at last produced poets to rival the eloquence of antiquity.¹ John Skelton, George Gascoigne, and Sir Philip Sidney can stand for each stage, and together they make a fine case: Skelton, a ‘sharp satirist, but with more railing and scoffery than became a poet laureate’; Gascoigne, admirable for ‘a good meter and . . . a plentiful vein’; Sidney, whose figurative language is so ‘excellently well handled’ (Puttenham, Art, 150, 151, 329).² These judgements are George Puttenham’s, from his Art of English Poesy (1589). The arrangement suits a strong habit of modern thought (indebted especially to the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel) according to which the career of style is progressive, three-phased, and tracks the movement of history in all its forms, social and political as well as artistic.³ There is no question but that this story can help a reader find her way through the century and allow for a rough guess about the placement of any given poem. But it will miss many byways, byways that may have looked, at the time, like royal roads. The concept of style itself, so complex and so contradictory, is to blame. On the one hand, style is a highly technical department of the art of rhetoric. It was identified particularly with the figures of speech, the schemes and tropes that could be used to dress language up or down, adjusting the level of style from high to middle to low. A well-trained schoolboy had a dictionary of countless figures—metaphor, isocolon, and many others to be encountered here—at his fingertips.⁴ On the other hand, ‘style’ can also be used in the period to refer to the idiosyncratic accomplishment of a particular writer. Perhaps there are ‘as many styles [genera dicendi] as there are orators’, the Roman rhetorician Cicero had mused, and his remark was much repeated (Cicero, De Oratore, 3.34, On the Orator, 29).⁵ This style is voice, ¹ C. S. Lewis tells such a story in his still-influential English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954). ² George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ³ E. H. Gombrich offers an excellent survey, ‘Style’, in David L. Sills (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 17 vols. (New York, 1968), 15.352–361. George Kubler, in The Shape of Time (New Haven, CT, 2008), offers a critical account of the tradition of historical phases. ⁴ The most influential account is to be found in Cicero’s Orator, 20–4, in G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell (trans.), Brutus. Orator (Cambridge, MA, 1939), 319–21. For a modern analysis, see Wilbur Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York, 1961), 66–137; and Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric (Oxford, 2011), 15–32. David Riggs gives an excellent description of what this training meant for schoolboys in The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York, 2004), 25–77. ⁵ Cicero, in H. Rackham (trans.), On the Orator: Book 3. On Fate. Stoic Paradoxes. Divisions of Oratory (Cambridge, MA, 1942). See also Baldassare Castiglione, in Thomas Hoby (trans.), The Book of the Courtier (London, 1561), sig. G3. Carlo Ginzburg discusses the relation between the two Ciceronian accounts in ‘Style: Inclusion and Exclusion’, in Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (trans.), Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (New York, 2001), 109–38. Jeff Dolven, Style In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Jeff Dolven 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0006
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102 - distinctive and possibly beyond the reach of art; a writer’s style ‘peradventure cannot easily alter into any other’, as Puttenham puts it (Puttenham, Art, 233).⁶ Style, then, can be technical and learnable, or it can be personal and stubborn. It can also be fashionable and sociable, reflecting the shifting affinities and advantages of life in city and court. John Hoskins, author of ‘Directions for Speech and Style’ (c 1599), observes halfabashedly, ‘I have used and outworn several styles since I was first Fellow of New College, and am yet able to bear the fashion of [the] writing company’ (Hoskins, ‘Directions’, 39).⁷ And then again, style can have the hoped-for constancy of a nation, an idiom fit for heroic origins, important events, and prophecies of empire. To observe this coincidence—style as an art, as a signature, as an index of season and faction, and as the durable idiom of Englishness—is to recognise how complex are style’s interactions with history. However powerful the progressive narrative may be, any number of particular poems will elude it, whether the precocious blank verse of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, or the wilful archaisms of Edmund Spenser. Any given poem will itself contain reminiscences of many different times, as Shakespeare’s new-fangled rhythms contend with his, sometimes oldfashioned, syntactic preferences.⁸ A poem is less a point on a timeline than a crumpled handkerchief, the present-day philosopher Michel Serres’ figure for the polytemporal object, folded irregularly in on itself so that pasts, presents, and futures make unpredictable contact.⁹ My procedure here will be to tell that old story again, but to tell it from underneath, or better, to tell it from the shifting vantages of several petering byways, the failed experiments of the age. The sixteenth century is rife with dead-end styles, more or less self-conscious, more or less ambitious proposals for setting the course of English poetry, proposals that found few or no takers. I will consider Thomas Wyatt’s broken lines, and Gascoigne’s singsong poulter’s measure; the quantitative metre of Richard Stanyhurst’s Aeneid, and Christopher Marlowe’s strong couplets; even Edmund Spenser’s archaisms. Together they are the negative image of what has lasted best, the versatile pentameter bequeathed by Sidney and Shakespeare to the next century. Even those poems that seem to be most sure-footed in their march towards present-day tastes emerged from a rich matrix of thwarted possibility.
Wyatt’s Rhythms Wyatt is a curious starting place for such an inquiry. His style is very much with us: his prestige amongst critics has grown steadily over the last seventy or so years, and he has been a model for twentieth-century poets as diverse as Thom Gunn and Frank O’Hara. His reputation was already secure by the time Puttenham identified him, along with Surrey, as ‘the first reformers of our English meter and style’ (Puttenham, Art, 140). The modern and early modern judgements, however, turn out to be based upon different texts, and opposite schemes of value. Consider, first, a sample of the Wyatt that Puttenham praised, the sestet of the sonnet that begins, ‘Avising the bright beams’. The source is the much-reprinted 1557
⁶ Puttenham’s discussion of style in the fifth chapter of his third book is the most thorough in the period. ⁷ John Hoskins, in Hoyt H. Hudson (ed.), Directions for Speech and Style (Princeton, NJ, 1935). ⁸ Jonathan Hope discusses the persistence of the periphrastic ‘do’ and other old-fashioned devices in Shakespeare’s work in The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge, 1994), 11–26. ⁹ Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, in Roxanne Lapidus (trans.), Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995), 60–1.
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103 compilation of courtly poems, Songs and Sonnets, better known today as Tottel’s Miscellany, after its editor, Richard Tottel: In such extremity thus is he brought: Frozen now cold, and now he stands in flame: Twixt woe and wealth: betwixt earnest and game: With seldom glad, and many a divers thought: In sore repentance of his hardiness, Of such a root lo cometh fruit fruitless. (Wyatt, ‘Avising the bright beams’, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 56, lines 9–14)¹⁰
There is much in these lines that was new to English poetry in the 1530s. Wyatt was amongst the first to translate Francis Petrarch, and ‘Avising’, a free rendering of Rime 173, carries over such favourite Petrarchan schemes of eloquence as isocolon (parallel structures like ‘woe and wealth . . . earnest and game’) and antithesis (‘cold . . . flame’). Wyatt had served on embassy in Italy for Henry VIII, and his borrowings from the Italians were many. The diction, however, is sturdy Anglo-Saxon, more plain John Skelton (‘For though my ryme be ragged, / Tattered and jagged . . . Yf ye take well therwith, / It hath in it some pyth’ (Skelton, ‘Collyn Clout’, lines 53–4, 57–8, in Complete Poems, 248)) than the last century’s aureate John Lydgate (‘enlumined with many curious flower / Of rhetoric, to make us comprehend’ (Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy, 3.7)).¹¹ Wyatt’s humanist rhetorical training is in evidence, but as Thomas M. Greene puts it, he ‘systematically reduced the tones of Petrarch’s highly ornamented surface’.¹² The rhetorical patterning is strong, then, if stiff, and the diction native and plain. What of the metre? The rhythm of a poem, its conformity or resistance to a metrical scheme, has always been closely identified with questions of style; it is at once technical and bodily, thought and felt. Observe the iambic movement of the lines above, the steady succession of two-syllable feet in a rising rhythm, unstressed syllable then stressed (-/), and then compare the original version, below. It comes from the Egerton manuscript, which has the authority of Wyatt’s own hand but did not see print until 1815: Thus is it in such extremity brought: In frozen thought now, and now it standeth in flame, ’Twixt misery and wealth, ’twixt earnest and game, But few glad and many a diverse thought, With sore repentance of his hardiness. Of such a root cometh fruit fruitless. (Wyatt, ‘Avising the bright beams’, lines 9–14, Complete Poems, 81)¹³
¹⁰ Richard Tottel (ed.), in Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul (eds), Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (Harmondsworth, 2011). ¹¹ John Skelton, in John Scattergood (ed.), The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth, 1983); John Lydgate, in Henry Bergen (ed.), Lydgate’s Troy Book (London, 1906–35). On diction see Veré L. Rubel, Poetic Diction in the English Renaissance from Skelton through Spenser (New York, 1961). ¹² Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982), 256. ¹³ Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978).
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104 - These lines are much rougher. Tottel’s agenda as an editor was primarily to smooth them into a regular iambic pentameter. The awkward double stress of ‘Bŭt féw glád’ becomes the fluent ‘Wĭth séldŏm glád’; ‘Ĭn frózĕn thóught nŏw’, awkwardly trailing an unstressed syllable before the mid-line pause of the caesura, becomes ‘Frózĕn nŏw cóld’. (That initial trochee [/-], reversing the iamb to make a stressed-unstressed foot, is already by 1557 a variation used for emphasis without threatening the metrical contract with the reader).¹⁴ Wyatt could write strings of iambs when he wanted, as his many tetrameter songs demonstrate. He did not want to here. Prosodists have gone to great lengths to describe the tolerances of his pentameter, but it may be most economical to say that a line of five iambs was for him a resource—he could use it for effect—without being a standard.¹⁵ ‘Of such a root cometh fruit fruitless’ refuses fluency, whether we take it as a show of terse, proverbial authority, or a spasm of despair. That is to say that Wyatt writes expressive rhythms. His range of variation asks to be taken as a measure of shifting mood. The canonical contrast is with Surrey, who was the scion of one of the most powerful families of the old nobility. Surrey, the younger man by fourteen years, admired Wyatt, and celebrated his plain-style authority in three elegies: ‘A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme’, he wrote in one, ‘That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit’ (Surrey, ‘W. resteth here’, lines 13–14, Poems, 27).¹⁶ His own poems, however, which get top billing in the Miscellany, set the standard of regularity to which Tottel would make the older poet conform: This having said, she left me all in tears, And minding much to speak; but she was gone, And subtly fled into the weightless air. Thrice wrought I with my arms t’accoll her neck, Thrice did my hands’ vain hold th’image escape, Like nimble winds and like the flying dream. (Surrey, The Aeneid, Book Two, lines 1051–6, Poems, 62–3)
These lines are taken from Surrey’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, the moment when Aeneas must relinquish the ghost of his wife Creusa. They are in blank verse, which would not be common in non-dramatic poetry for almost another century. Their basic prosody, however, became characteristic of the mid-century pentameter in English, with its steady iambs, endstopped lines, and a caesura that falls reliably after the fourth or sixth syllables. Likewise, the Anglo-Saxon diction. It had a national significance for both poets, but for Surrey it made a case for the ancient liberties of the landed aristocracy. Where he sounds French—the borrowing of accoller, to embrace, and the French accent of ‘ĭmáge’—he writes as a soldier who had fought for England’s claim to Calais. Surrey’s biographer William Sessions emphasises his ambition to establish a heroic norm for English verse, a verse not locally
¹⁴ The phrase ‘metrical contract’ is used by John Hollander to describe how a poem sets the terms by which its tolerances and transgressions may be judged; see his chapter entitled ‘Romantic Verse Form and the Metrical Contract’, in Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (Oxford, 1975), esp. 188–9. ¹⁵ For a resourceful attempt to define the range of rhythmic possibility in Wyatt’s line, and to set it in the context of the century’s verse, see George T. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley, CA, 1991), 20–37. ¹⁶ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Emrys Jones (ed.), Poems (Oxford, 1964).
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105 expressive—not subject to the turbulence of changing emotion—but in the large, expressive of the linguistic confidence of a great nation.¹⁷ Surrey’s voice carries. It is the rhythmically volatile Wyatt, forever sacrificing rule to feeling, who is a dead end. When the expressive power of the pentameter opens up again, later in the century, it is not on account of any revival of his influence. His rhythmically inchoate urgency would wait almost three centuries to be heard beyond the circle of manuscripts in which the poems first travelled. Meanwhile, Tottel’s anthology was reprinted eleven times in the next thirty years. The collection answered to a wide curiosity about court life, especially amongst minor gentry and an expanding literate middle class in London; Tottel offered his readers ‘those works which the ungentle hoarders up of such treasure have heretofore envied thee’ (Tottel, Preface, Tottel’s Miscellany, 3). The same preface dedicates the work ‘to the honour of the English tongue, and for profit of the studious of English eloquence’ (Tottel, Preface, Tottel’s Miscellany, 3)—his readers, he knew, saw eloquence as a path to influence—and it contains epigrams and elegies alongside the love lyrics, and moralising imitations of the Roman poet Horace as well. Sonnets are prominent, as is Chaucerian rhyme royal (ababbcc) and Italian ottava rima (abababcc), and the long lines of poulter’s measure (about which more below). Perhaps the most important legacy, as Stephen May has argued, was sheer regularity, of the prosody and of the rhetorical structures that were disciplined to an end-stopped line and stable caesura.¹⁸ ‘I exhort the unlearned’, writes Tottel, ‘by reading to learn to be more skilful’ (Tottel, Preface, Tottel’s Miscellany, 3). English verse could be a skill, one practised to the honour of the nation and the national tongue.
Gascoigne’s Long Lines Skill was a cardinal virtue for Gascoigne. When he came to record his reflections on English verse, in his ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’ (1575), he modestly promised ‘to set down my simple skill in such simple manner as I have used’ (Gascoigne, Hundreth, 454).¹⁹ That skill—which Gascoigne makes available to any reader—is on display throughout his Posies, the volume in which ‘Certain Notes’ appeared. Here is a typical sestet, the final six lines of a sonnet on the theme ‘Audaces fortuna iuuat’ [fortune favours the bold]: If dread of drenching waves or fear of fire, Had stayed the wandering Prince amid his race, Ascanius then, the fruit of his desire, In Lavine Land had not possessed place. But true it is, where lots doe light by chance, There Fortune helps the boldest to advance. (Gascoigne, ‘If yielding fear’, lines 9–14, Hundreth, 275) ¹⁷ ‘The freedom and flexibility of a language for Tudor “noble hearts” had been consciously designed by the young earl’, writes Sessions in Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 1999), 260. As Susanne Woods puts it in Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino, 1984), ‘Wyatt was an experimenter, Surrey an inventor’ (72). ¹⁸ Steven W. May argues that the most influential poems in Tottel ‘exemplified a largely rhetorical art anchored in rhythmic expression and rhyme’ and were dependent on ‘a limited range of schemes and tropes’, including anaphora and isocolon, in ‘Popularizing Courtly Poetry: Tottel’s Miscellany and its Progeny’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009), 418–33, 428. ¹⁹ George Gascoigne, in G. W. Pigman III (ed.), A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Oxford, 2000).
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106 - The if–then structure that describes Aeneas’s boldness reprises praise of Caesar and Menelaus, respectively, in the preceding two quatrains; the sententious motto falls comfortably in the couplet. The iambic movement is steady throughout, the lines are endstopped, and there is a reliable caesura after the fourth syllable. In managing the accent Gascoigne is unafraid of monosyllables, typically working in a sturdy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, the plain style for which modern critics in the line of Yvor Winters have so celebrated him. As Winters puts it, Gascoigne offers ‘feeling restrained to the minimum required by the subject . . . the poet being interested in his rhetoric as a means of stating his matter as economically as possible, and not, as are the Petrarchans, in the pleasures of rhetoric for its own sake’.²⁰ Variations in the iambic movement are accordingly rare—there are none here—and when they occur, they are almost always inversions (trochee for iamb) at the beginning of the line or after the caesura, which can serve to mark structural units or turns in argument. These are the tolerances of the standard mid-century line, of which Tottel’s Surrey was first sponsor. The sonnet is an admirably controlled performance, almost an exercise, both formal and moral. It at once projects and fulfils the criteria of its own success. Indeed, it is as an exercise that the poem is presented, the first of five that Gascoigne claims that he was asked to undertake to gain readmission to the study of law at the Inns of Court. (The skeleton of such school exercises can be detected behind some of the most accomplished sonnets of Sidney and Shakespeare, the working out of a set theme, the unpacking of a sententia; rhetoric was still the master discipline of these poets’ education, and poetry would be a long time yet cutting ties). Gascoigne performs his humanist facility with the Classical topoi, or commonplaces, of courage, as well as his skill in verse. Notwithstanding the stoical self-reliance of his plain style, however, the royal court shaped his work at least as much as the classroom did. His poems are preoccupied with display and surveillance, the rivalrous triangulations of authority and desire that became so characteristic of Elizabeth’s ‘courtly makers’. His prose fiction, ‘The Adventures of Master F. J.’, is full of such games. The characters are constantly exchanging seductive and competitive verse, and the narrator is constantly evaluating it: ‘This sonnet was highly commended’, ‘this is but rough meter’, ‘these verses are more in number than do stand with contentation of some judgments’ (Gascoigne, Hundreth, 156, 162, 160). Gascoigne played these games in life, too, or tried. He printed the first collection of his writings, A Hundreth Sundry Flowers (1573), as a kind of successor to Tottel, a miscellany supposedly assembled by a secretive, unscrupulous editor. But in this self-occluding, self-fashioning gambit—and in the scandalous content of ‘F. J.’, which was printed in the same volume—he seems to have gone too far. The Flowers was withdrawn from circulation, and a whiff of scandal still clings to it. The Posies was published with a chastened apology for ‘sundry wanton speeches and lascivious phrases’ and a plea for renewed favour (Gascoigne, Hundreth, 359). Gascoigne went too far formally, too, at least for his posterity. The lines in ‘F. J.’ accused of being ‘more in number’ are written in a verse called poulter’s measure: And when she saw by proof, the pith of my good will, She took in worth this simple song, for want of better skill. And as my just deserts, her gentle hart did move, She was content to answer thus: I am content to love. (Gascoigne, ‘In prime of lusty years’, lines 41–4 sequential numbering, Hundreth, 160) ²⁰ Yvor Winters, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Lyric in England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 53.5 (1939), 262.
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107 Poulter’s measure, with its alternating lines of six and seven two-syllable feet, is so named, as Gascoigne explains in his ‘Certain Notes’, for the grocer who offers extra eggs for buying in bulk, ‘xii for one dozen and xiiii for another’ (Gascoigne, Hundreth, 461). Thirty-five of the 111 poems in Posies are in this form, and Gascoigne adopted it at a time when it seemed a plausible heir to the Classical hexameter. Thomas Phaer had published the first seven books of his Aeneid in fourteeners (fourteen syllable lines, usually comprised of seven iambic feet) in 1558, and Arthur Golding’s complete Metamorphoses followed nine years later: Of shapes transformed to bodies strange, I purpose to entreat, Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they that wrought this wondrous feat) To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begun, Grant that my verse may to my time, his course directly run. (Golding, Metamorphoses, Book 1, lines 1–4, Golding Translation, 3)²¹
Golding does a creditable job ennobling these long lines, but they suffer from a vulnerability that no skill could reliably control: the tendency of each to split in two, presenting to the ear not as a continuous utterance, but as the sing-song of a ballad stanza, or of the ubiquitous Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, which rang in the ears of every parish churchgoer: O holy, holy, holy Lord, Of Sabbath Lord the God, Through heaven and earth thy praise is spread, and glory all abroad. (Sternhold and Hopkins, Te Deum, ‘We praise thee, God’, lines 9–12, Whole Book, sig. A4v)²²
Just a few years later, in his Arcadia, Sidney would use such rhythms to make fun of the daughter of a country rube: ‘What length of verse can serve brave Mopsa’s good to show, / Whose virtues strange, and virtues such, as no man may them know?’ (Sidney, ‘What length of verse’, lines 1–2, Old Arcadia, 30).²³ No poet was more committed than Gascoigne to this length of verse, but it proved, like his career in court, a dead end, its Classical ambitions undermined by its grocer’s cadence.²⁴ Might the same be said of Gascoigne’s plain style? To Winters’ ear, plainness was the true path, and his investment in its sturdy virtues stopped his ears to some of Gascoigne’s vicissitudes and embarrassments (and indeed, his debts to Petrarch). To C. S. Lewis’s ear, plainness was the signature of the mid-century ‘drab age’.²⁵ The most celebrated poets of the succeeding decades, Sidney and Spenser, would let the plain style lie mostly fallow. But it had a Roman pedigree, in Seneca’s essays and Horace’s odes, and it held an honoured place ²¹ Arthur Golding (trans.), in John Frederick Nims (ed.), Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567 (New York, 1965). ²² Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, The whole book of Psalms collected into English metre by T[homas] Sternhold, J[ohn] Hopkins, and others (London, 1562). ²³ Sir Philip Sidney, in Jean Robertson (ed.), The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (Oxford, 1973). ²⁴ Lucy Munro has a sensitive discussion of the demands of the line in Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674 (Cambridge, 2013), 145–6. See also Woods, Natural Emphasis, 115. ²⁵ Lewis, English Literature, 222–71.
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108 - amongst the rhetoricians: ‘the low kind’, as Sir Thomas Wilson put it in his 1553 Art of Rhetoric, ‘when we use no metaphors, nor translated words, nor yet use any amplifications, but go plainly to work, and speak altogether in common words’ (Wilson, Art, sig. z2).²⁶ It had a future, too, in Ben Jonson’s neoclassicism, and the austere high Protestantism of the later Fulke Greville. Gascoigne’s ‘Certain Notes’ makes for something like a plain-style manifesto, urging the poet to avoid strange or obsolete words, ‘unless the theme do give just occasion’, and to ‘frame your style to perspicuity and to be sensible’ (Gascoigne, Hundreth, 459). At his best, he makes a good case for the plain poet’s limits, chosen or not: He cannot climb as other catchers can, To lead a charge before himself be led, He cannot spoil the simple sakeles* man, *innocent Which is content to feed him with his bread. (Gascoigne, ‘Gascoigne’s Woodmanship’, lines 73–6, Hundreth, 314)
The lines are from the famous ‘Gascoigne’s Woodmanship’, a petition-poem to a wouldbe patron in which the poet rehearses the incapacities that secure his virtue. Here, he is a soldier who can neither bring himself to break rank to seize glory, nor to take advantage of the poor man who helps him. There remain critics today who regard this starker idiom, with its debt to Wyatt’s stripped-down and cynical satires, and to Horace, and Skelton, as the strongest verse of the period. It is not, but it survives in the mouths of dissidents like the irascible Kent in Shakespeare’s King Lear, calling out the excesses of a higher style.²⁷ Its workmanlike skill is a counter to an age of increasing virtuosity, and even Sidney’s muse urges him, at moments, towards the willed authenticity of a plainer idiom: ‘look in thy heart and write!’ (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 1, line 14, Poems, 165).²⁸
Stanyhurst’s Quantities Speaking of excesses: Now manhood and garbroyls* I chant, and martial horror. *disturbance, tumult I blaze thee* captain first from Troy city repairing, *the Like wand’ring pilgrim too* famosed* Italy trudging, *to *famoused And coast of Lavyn: soused with tempestuous hurlwind*, *whirlwind On land and sailing, by God’s predestinate order. (Stanyhurst, First Four Books, sig. B3)²⁹
²⁶ Sir Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (London, 1553). ²⁷ ‘I can keep honest counsel, ride, run, mar a curious tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message bluntly’, says Kent of himself: see William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.4.29–30, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016), 2506. ²⁸ Sir Philip Sidney, in William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962). ²⁹ Richard Stanyhurst, The First Four Books of Virgil His Aeneis (Leiden, 1582). See also the discussion of this passage in Chapters 3 and 15 in this volume.
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109 Through the consonant-clotted wilderness of these lines, something familiar might be made out; indeed, very familiar: the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid. ‘Lo now of Mars, and dreadful wars I sing . . . and of the man of Troy’, Thomas Phaer had written, plainly enough, a few years before (Phaer, Whole XII Books, sig. A1);³⁰ and before that, there was the pellucid blank verse of Surrey’s version of Books 2 and 4. ‘Manhood and garbroyls’ comes from a 1582 translation by the Irish antiquary-alchemist Richard Stanyhurst. Its strangeness is by no means fully accounted for by comment on the metre, but metre is a place to start, for at the heart of Stanyhurst’s experiment was his determination to organise his lines according to syllable quantity.³¹ ‘Good God what a fry of such wooden rhythmers doth swarm in stationers’ shops’, he protests in his dedicatory letter, decrying the stressbased versification of his contemporaries. ‘The readiest way therefore to flap these drones from the sweet scenting hives of Poetry, is for the learned to apply themselves wholly . . . to the true making of verses in such wise as the Greeks and Latins’ (Stanyhurst, dedicatory letter ‘To the Right Honourable . . . Lord Baron of Dunsany’, First Four Books, sig. A4v). He insisted, that is, on observing not light and grave accent, as Gascoigne called them, but rather long and short syllables, a measure his age accepted as the prosodic basis of the Classical languages.³² Some of Stanyhurst’s most celebrated contemporaries lent their authority to experiments in quantitative metre. One of the surviving manuscripts of Sidney’s Old Arcadia gives the ‘rules observed in these English measured verses’, that syllables could be long by vowel quantity, a long vowel or a diphthong ‘such as have a double sound’, or by position, when a vowel is followed by two consonants (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 80). The over-educated pseudoshepherds of Sidney’s pastoral romance sing several songs in quantities, as Cleophila does here: But yet well I do find each man most wise in his own case. None can speak of a wound with skill, if he have not a wound felt. Great to thee my estate seems, thy estate is blest by my judgement: And yet neither of us great or blest deemeth his own self. (Sidney, ‘Lady, reserved by the heavens’, lines 70–3, Poems, 31)
The ear listening for patterns of stress will be baffled; there is no predictable alignment of accent with the long syllables of the quantitative hexameters. Sidney likely took his first interest in such experiments during his travels on the Continent, where he would have encountered several such classicising projects in French and Italian. His standing as a charismatic authority back home in England is attested in an exchange of letters, printed in 1580, between Edmund Spenser and the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey. Masters Sidney and Edward Dyer, Spenser wrote, had ‘prescribed certain laws and rules of quantities of English syllables for English verse . . . and drawn me to their faction’. But Spenser is uneasy with Harvey’s willingness to let quantities override stress, pronouncing ‘cárpĕntĕr’ as ‘cărpéntĕr’ simply on account of the two consonants before the first e. ‘Why, a Gods name, ³⁰ Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne (trans.). The Whole Twelve Books of the Aeneids of Virgil (London, 1573). ³¹ Scansion can depend on spelling, which is why words such as ‘thee’ (i.e., ‘the’) and ‘too’ (i.e., ‘to’) have been glossed in the quotation. ³² Gascoigne in fact identifies three kinds of accent, and refers to them at first as long, short, and indifferent, but from then on calls them grave and light, and considers their pitch as well as their length: ‘the grave accent is drawn out or elevated, and makes that syllable long whereupon it is placed: the light accent is depressed or snatched up, and makes that syllable short upon the which it lights’ (Gascoigne, Hundreth, 456).
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110 - may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language’, he asks—why not let the custom of spoken English govern our English speech, and reserve quantities for our verse (Spenser, Three Letters, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.98–9)?³³ The conflict opens a breach between the classicising and nationalist impulses, which would not, in the end, favour quantities.³⁴ Harvey seems to have believed that following the Classical rules properly would ensure a harmony of the systems. Spenser knew better, and that may be why he never actually wrote quantitative verse. There are scholars, notably Derek Attridge, who assert that long and short syllables on the Classical model have always been an ‘intellectual apprehension, not an aural one’ in English, an unhearable transposition of rules fundamentally unsuited to a stress-based tradition.³⁵ Still, the dream of English quantities did not die with the publication of Spenser’s emphatically accentual, unfailingly regular Faerie Queene. Sidney’s sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, translated eight of her Psalms ‘in imitation of the Greek and Latin lyrics’, and though she conceded that ‘our language is not suited so well for it’, she makes some effective embassies between the two, as in the loose accentual tetrameter audible here: Ás tŏ th’ĕtérnăl óftĕn ĭn ánguĭshĕs Éarst hăve Ĭ cállĕd névĕr ŭnánswĕred Ăgáin Ĭ cáll, ăgáin Ĭ cállĭng Dóubt nŏt ăgáin tŏ rĕcéive ăn ánswĕr. (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 120, lines 1–4, Renaissance Women Poets, 162)³⁶
These beautiful lines are a world of sophistication away from Sternhold and Hopkins, but still evocative of the ballad stanza. Equally accomplished in this vein is the poet and musician Thomas Campion, whose Observations in the Art of English Poesy (1602) contains several poems that gracefully reconcile quantity and stress. Attridge offers the following quantitative scansion of ‘Rose-Cheeked Laura’: Rŏse-cheéked | Lăurá, | cŏme, Sĭng thŏu | smoŏthlý | wĭth thý | bĕautiĕs Sĭlĕnt | mŭsíc, | ĕithér | ŏthĕr Sweĕtlý | grăcĭng. (Campion, ‘Rose-Cheeked Laura’, lines 1–4, Works, 310)³⁷
It is no accident that some of the most effective marriages of accent and quantity happened in song; Campion’s musical setting allows him a second language to express the duration of syllables. ‘The ear is a rational sense’, he proclaims in his Observations (Campion, Works, 294), and the poet’s work is to organise the double constraint of ‘natural emphasis’ ³³ Edmund Spenser, Three proper and witty, familiar letters (1580), in G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904). ³⁴ The classic treatment of this exchange is Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA, 1983), 19–62. ³⁵ Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974), 76. ³⁶ Mary Sidney Herbert, in Danielle Clarke (ed.), Renaissance Women Poets: Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemilia Lanyer (London, 2000). Woods discusses Sidney’s innovations in Natural Emphasis, 172. The accentual marks are my own. ³⁷ Thomas Campion, in Walter R. Davis (ed.), The Works of Thomas Campion (New York, 1970); scanned in Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables, 226.
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111 (Gascoigne’s phrase again; see Hundreth, 456) and syllable length such that they fall together, a marriage of nature and art. Sidney’s and Campion’s accomplishment is nonetheless acknowledged to be rare. Stanyhurst’s egregious example makes patent some of the problems that beset the everincipient, never triumphant quantitative movement. His indefatigably Anglo-Saxon diction—or Anglo-Irish, perhaps; he wrote the section on Ireland’s history in Holinshed’s Chronicles—is a nativist overcompensation for his Classical scansions. The almost Joycean crimes of diction are compounded by the idiosyncratic spelling, by which he cheats short vowels into long or vice versa, doubling an o and dropping a u, for example, in ‘too famosed Italie trudging’. Campion deplores such tactics (‘the sound of [the syllables] in a verse is to be valued, and not their letters’ (Campion, Works, 352)), but most quantitative practitioners, Sidney included, found them difficult to resist. The classicising criticism of rhyme may have had some influence on the development of blank verse as a heroic line. But in the later sixteenth century, blank verse, notwithstanding Surrey’s early example, was almost exclusively a phenomenon of the stage, where it was dramatic naturalism, rather than classicism, that drove its growth. Quantities were little heard in English by the end of the century, if heard they ever were.
Marlowe’s Mighty Couplets Rhyme, meanwhile, flourished. Tottel’s Miscellany had established a durable repertoire of forms. The next most popular verse anthology of the Tudor period, A Mirror for Magistrates, first published in 1559, featured nineteen monitory lives in rhyme royal (ababbcc), and added more with each of its subsequent six editions. Rhyme royal was identified with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and its use in the Mirror represented a sober repurposing of his poem of courtly love, one that advertised a debt to native tradition. (The Mirror’s verse is often disparaged, and indeed, much of it has Gascoigne’s propriety, without his ingenuity; for just that reason, it made an important contribution to setting the norms of the iambic pentameter). Pentameter couplets were less commonplace, but they were the form of choice for Christopher Marlowe, when, likely as a student at Cambridge, he tried his hand at translating the Roman poet Ovid’s Amores. The result was a countercultural exercise in several ways. The following lines are from Elegy 1.4, in which Ovid explains to his mistress how, if she must dine in public with her husband, she can send him reassuring signs across the table: If ought of me thou speak’st in inward thought, Let thy soft finger to thy ear be brought. When I (my light) do or say ought that please thee, Turn round thy gold ring, as it were to ease thee. (Marlowe, Elegy 1.4, lines 23–6, Complete Works, 1.17)³⁸
Marlowe embraces the wry erotic connoisseurship of his original. If the Petrarchism of so many contemporaries figured a tragically conflicted consciousness, Ovid offered him a
³⁸ Christopher Marlowe, in Roma Gill, et al. (eds), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1987–98).
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112 - self-effacing, self-amused wit.³⁹ The verse is steady and end-stopped; most couplets are complete sentences, bounded specimens of the poet’s intelligence. There is, in this forceful regularity and strong rhetorical patterning (when, then; when, then), a foreshadowing of what Jonson would call the ‘mighty line’ of Marlowe’s early dramas (Jonson, ‘To draw no envy’, line 30, Ben Jonson, 8.391).⁴⁰ Sensual divagations notwithstanding, it has the sound of self-certainty. What it does not sound like—and where the limits of its influence may best be recognised; where its dead end may be measured—is the verse of Philip Sidney. We have already glimpsed, in the deference Spenser pays to rumours of Sidney’s quantitative experiments, the latter’s prestige as an arbiter of poetic taste. By the time Marlowe was at university, Sidney had already written Astrophil and Stella and the first version of his Arcadia; they circulated in manuscript, but narrowly, and Marlowe—notwithstanding some tenuous connections to the Sidney circle—was unlikely to have read them before they were printed at the beginning of the next decade, in 1591 and 1590, respectively. Sidney’s sonnet sequence asserts its distance from Petrarch, and also from Ovid: Some lovers speak when they their Muses entertain, Of hopes begot by fear, of wot not what desires: Of force of heavenly beams, infusing hellish pain: Of living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms and freezing fires: Some one his song in Jove, and Jove’s strange tales attires, Bordered with bulls and swans, powdered with golden rain: Another humbler wit to shepherd’s pipe retires, Yet hiding royal blood full oft in rural vein. (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 6, lines 1–8, Poems, 167)
Some lovers, says Astrophil, but not me. In his scorn for Petrarchan paradox and Ovidian metamorphosis, there is a sketch of the fashions of lyric poetry c 1580; fashions from which his creator, writing a sonnet sequence after Petrarch, and a pastoral romance of virtuosic gender transformation after Ovid, hardly disentangled himself. The sonnet ends, however, with an effort to re-found Astrophil’s loyalties in a language of diplomacy and statecraft. ‘But think that all the map of my state I display, / When trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love’ (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 6, lines 13–14, Poems, 168). The statesman’s role was one for which Sidney’s superb humanist training (at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford) and wide travel equipped him impeccably. But his career was full of miscalculations, including a reckless broadside against the prospect of a French marriage for Queen Elizabeth. Other sonnets describe his unease in court, and its culture of rhetorical performance: Because I oft in dark abstracted guise, Seem most alone in greatest company, With dearth of words, or answers quite awry, To them that would make speech of speech arise. (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 27, lines 1–4, Poems, 178)
³⁹ On Ovid’s currency amongst London poets, and for an excellent account of the sociability of literary influence generally, see Daniel D. Moss, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England (Toronto, 2014). ⁴⁰ Ben Jonson, in C. H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52).
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113 The lover Astrophil is the avatar of a well-born young man whose fluent gifts and fine intelligence were forever balked by his circumstances. Sidney was no George Gascoigne— his every misstep had a special grace, or so, at least, he had the grace to represent it—but his exceptional sensitivity to the matrix of power, sexuality, worldliness, and learning at court never secured him a durable place there. His example, which only gained in lustre after his death in battle in 1586, nonetheless, or therefore, had for his contemporaries an inimitable charisma. Some of that charisma traded on the old aristocratic paradigm of manuscript circulation, the ungentle poem-hoarding of the gentlemen, as Tottel had described it, but by the early 1590s, a few years after his death, his poems—Astrophil and Stella’s sonnets and songs and the many poetic kinds embedded in Arcadia—could be had in print: With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies, How silently, and with how wan a face, What, may it be that even in heav’nly place That busy archer his sharp arrows tries? Sure, if that long with love acquainted eyes Can judge of Love, thou feel’st a Lover’s case; I read it in thy looks, thy languished grace, To me that feel the like, thy state descries. Then ev’n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me Is constant love deemed there but want of wit? Are beauties there as proud as here they be? Do they above love to be loved, and yet Those Lovers scorn whom that Love doth possess? Do they call virtue there ungratefulness? (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 31, Poems, 180)
This thirty-first sonnet of Astrophil handles the new skill in sonneteering with finely calibrated negligence. The enjambment is uncommonly open, but the units of quatrain and sestet, both syntactic and rhetorical, are strictly kept; meanwhile the caesura moves freely, and the complicated chain of speech acts—apostrophe, question, interjection, qualification—interrupts the lines repeatedly. The several sententiae are forceful but also incredulous, self-querying (‘Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?’). Most strikingly, rhythm and syntax acquire a new degree of expressiveness, which is to say, careful variations are in constant dialogue with argument. Rhythm: consider the justly famous languor of ‘how sad steps’. And syntax: how the predominance of end-stopped lines gives way to a tangle of self-qualifying dependencies, before a final, summary question, terse and anguished, occupies the final line. With his prosody, as with his humanist Ovid or his courtly manners, Sidney’s boundary-testing declares his virtuosity without ever quite declaring his independence. It is this expressive latitude more than anything that Sidney bequeaths to the sonneteers and poets who follow him in the last decades of the century, and arguably to the dramatists as well. It is also, again, what most distinguishes him from the strong couplets of Marlowe’s Elegies (his translation of Ovid’s Amores). Metrical performances like Sidney’s invite endless attention to local effects; those like Marlowe’s ask instead to be considered grosso modo, as a choice of significant ways to speak. Let the couplet-bound line of the Elegies—the first printing of which was banned in 1599 for lasciviousness—stand as another unfollowed road.
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114 - Unfollowed, in the event, even by Marlowe. In the years of his playwriting career his dramatic verse modulated from the mighty line of Tamburlaine towards the more expressive intricacy of Edward II. At the end of his short, turbulent life, he was at work on his epyllion Hero and Leander, which used the couplet to very different effect. Here is the moment when Leander arrives at Hero’s bedside, after swimming the cold Hellespont to reach her: She trembling strove, this strife of hers (like that Which made the world) another world begat, Of unknown joy. Treason was in her thought, And cunningly to yield her self she sought. (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 775–8, Complete Works, 1.208)
The poem’s polymorphous eroticism (Neptune’s caress of the swimming Leander is amongst its glories) and its playful, urbane, complicit cynicism are pure Marlowe. The verse, highly enjambed and self-interrupting, is written into a world that had by then received the poems of Philip Sidney.
Spenser’s Archaisms Sidney did not live to read Marlowe in return, but he did pass judgement on the early poetry of Edmund Spenser, in particular the anonymously published Shepheardes Calender (1579). It is ‘worthy the reading’, he declared in the Defence of Poesy (composed c 1579–81, published 1595), but ‘[t]hat same framing of his style to an old rustic language I dare not allow’ (Sidney, Defence, 112).⁴¹ The later sixteenth century was a moment of acute sensitivity to the historicity of style. Humanist editors of both Classical and sacred texts argued closely about historical convention and anachronism, and there was a corresponding debate about how the English vocabulary ought to grow. On the one hand, many humanists advocated for the Classical languages (with attendant dangers of ‘inkhornism’, of which Sidney was keenly aware: his preposterous schoolmaster Rombus, in the pastoral drama The Lady of May, is ridiculed for proclaiming himself ‘gravidated with child, till I have indoctrinated your plumbeous cerebrosities’ (Sidney, The Lady of May, lines 24–5, Miscellaneous Prose, 27)). On the other, there was a call to return to native roots, and to Chaucer in particular; the ‘well of English vndefyled’, as Spenser called him, the once-and-future source of a national lexicon (Spenser, Faerie Queene, 4.2.32).⁴² The Calender declares itself for Chaucer’s diction from the opening lines, which introduce the lament of young Colin Clout, an adolescent stand-in for the poet: A shepeheards boye (no better doe him call) when Winters wastful spight was almost spent, All in a sunneshine day, as did befall, Led forth his flock, that had bene long ypent.
⁴¹ Sir Philip Sidney, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973). ⁴² Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007).
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115 So faynt they woxe, and feeble in the folde, That now vnnethes their feete could them vphold. (Spenser, Januarye, lines 1–6, Shorter Poems, 35)⁴³
The sixain stanza (sometimes called the ‘Venus and Adonis stanza’, after Shakespeare’s poem of 1593) is a Continental form, descended from ottava rima and the Petrarchan canzone, but the vocabulary is squarely Anglo-Saxon, and there are a number of notably archaic words: ‘woxe’, a strong perfect form of ‘wax’, to grow; ‘vnnethes’, for ‘hardly’; and the archaic perfect-tense prefix -y, ‘ypent’, so common in Chaucer. ‘[A]ncient solemn words are a great ornament’, declares E. K.’s epistle to the anonymously published volume (‘E. K.’, ‘Epistle’, lines 48–9, Shorter Poems, 26), citing Livy and Sallust but turning humanist esteem for the past away from Rome, towards Chaucer’s London. The preference is partly guided by religious politics, the Protestant claim for the true ancientness of reformed doctrine; partly by a closely entangled nationalism, at the moment when Elizabeth was entertaining marriage to the French Duc d’Alençon, and forward Protestants—Sidney amongst them—were taking great risks to dissuade her. The Shepheardes Calender has amongst all its intricate purposes a warning against marrying foreigners. Diction, then, does a great deal of work. The Calender invokes northern dialects at moments, and dips from time to time into truly rustic language—‘Albee forswonck and forswatt I am’ (Spenser, Aprill, line 99, Shorter Poems, 63)—but mostly it is committed to the versatility of its renovated archaism.⁴⁴ What of its rhythms? The pentameter might appear to be Chaucerian, too, but not so: the sixteenth century no longer pronounced final e, so Chaucer’s lines were mostly heard as a loose tetrameter. The line of five iambs is of Spenser’s own moment, and the choice of historical lineage, native or Classical, attends its fate in the poem. Colin, the shepherd boy who falls in love with a shepherdess who scorns his ‘rurall musick’ (Spenser, Januarye, line 64, Shorter Poems, 37), has learned to sing pentameter sixains, and even a sestina. His shepherd friends, by contrast, are more likely to sing tetrameter, as when Perigot and Willye trade lines of a roundelay: Perigot. It fell vpon a holly eue, Willye. hey ho hollidaye, Per. When holly fathers wont to shrieue*: *hear confessions Wil. now gynneth this roundelay. (Spenser, August, lines 53–6, Shorter Poems, 109)
We have seen song allied with quantities in Mary Sidney Herbert and Thomas Campion, her pious offering and his courtly ornament. A high-style tetrameter could be pressed into service for elegy, as with the lament for Philip Sidney that opens the 1593 miscellany The Phoenix Nest: ‘The sky, like glass of watchet [pale blue] hue, / Reflected Phoebus’s golden hair’ (‘As then, no wind at all there blew’, lines 3–4, Phoenix Nest, sig. B1).⁴⁵ Still, the fourstress line is bound to the popular ballad, the measure that threatens to undermine the pretensions of poulter’s measure and the fourteener. So the poet-soldier Thomas Churchyard’s ‘A Tale of a Friar and a Shoemaker’s Wife’—‘This friar was fat and full of flesh, / ⁴³ Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). ⁴⁴ On regional dialect in poetry of the period, see Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London, 1996). ⁴⁵ R. S. (ed.), The Phoenix Nest (London, 1593).
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116 - A jolly merry knave’ (Churchyard, First part of Churchyard’s chips, 84)⁴⁶—or Nicholas Breton’s ‘Who can live in heart so glad / As the merry country lad?’ (Breton, ‘Who can live in heart so glad’, lines 1–2, Works, 1.n.p).⁴⁷ Breton turned the line’s populism towards political satire, in the long poem that insists ‘That service is no heritage’ (Breton, Works, 1.n. p); Timothy Kendall uses it to similar purpose translating Thomas More’s epigrams, ‘The king each subject counts his child, / The tyrant each his slave’ (quoted in Kendall, Flowers, sig. R5).⁴⁸ It is native, strong in stress-rhythm, and always rhymed; it is connected to the past, not the Classical past, but a rustic Englishness; aristocrats may sing it to the lute, but the people, like Perigot and Willye, have a stubborn claim to it. No poem is more sensitive to this ongoing argument between pentameter and the tetrameter than The Shepheardes Calender. Derek Attridge puts the dispute in the broadest context: pentameter ‘is the only simple metrical form of manageable length which escapes the elementary four-beat rhythm, with its insistence . . . and its close relationship with the world of ballad and song’.⁴⁹ Escape is just what Colin seeks, the shepherd’s lad who inhabits pastoral not as his home, but as the first stage of the rota Virgiliana, that Virgilian career wheel that will carry him on to epic.⁵⁰ His song celebrating Eliza, in the Aprill eclogue, is written in canzone stanzas rhymed ababccddc, with lines varying in length from pentameter to dimeter and a final tetrameter. The pentameter lines are acts of mature praise. As the song proceeds, however, they begin to waver, and by the ninth stanza’s middle couplet they strain to realise five iambs, but subside easily into a loose tetrameter: ‘Wánts nŏt ă fóurth grăce, tŏ máke thĕ dăunce éuĕn? / Lét thăt rówme tŏ my Lády˘ bĕ yéuĕn’ (Spenser, Aprill, lines 113–14, Shorter Poems, 64). Colin’s praise is an effort to represent and perhaps to fashion an Elizabeth whose debts and loyalties are native, and it cants therefore towards song; but he remains torn between his ambition for a higher style, with its long lines and long words, and allegiance to a plainer native idiom. The Shepheardes Calender, then, is a contest of styles at once social and historical, essaying new possibilities for the nation, and the self, by mixing old and new words and rhythms. It is a vivid dramatisation of how dynamics of affinity and aversion range across a field of stylistic possibility as broad as the geography of Europe and as deep, and various, as its pasts.⁵¹ What is so striking about Spenser’s subsequent career is that while his commitment to archaism endures, his metrical experiments, and his dalliance with song, do not. The Faerie Queene has a versatile stanza, but its iambs are the most unflagging of any great poem in the language: A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Ycladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde, Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, ⁴⁶ Thomas Churchyard, The first part of Churchyard’s chips, containing twelve several labours (London, 1575). ⁴⁷ Nicholas Breton, from The Passionate Shepherd (1604), in A. B. Grossart (ed.), The Works in Verse and Prose of Nicholas Breton, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1879). ⁴⁸ Timothy Kendall, Flowers of Epigrams (London, 1577). ⁴⁹ Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London, 1982), 124. I describe this back-and-forth between the four- and five-beat lines at greater length in ‘Spenser’s Metrics’, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 2010), 385–402. ⁵⁰ For more on the rota Virgiliana and its place in the poetic career, see Chapter 9 in this volume. ⁵¹ Lucy Munro’s Archaic Style is the best survey of the poetics of archaism in Spenser’s aftermath. See also Hannah Crawforth, Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2013), especially 19–63; and Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (Philadelphia, PA, 2014). Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s Anachronic Renaissance (Cambridge, MA, 2010) gives a valuable account of the complexities of the period’s sense of history in style.
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117 The cruell markes of many’ a bloudy fielde; Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield: His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, As much disdayning to the curbe to yield: Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt. (Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 1.1.1)
Here at the very beginning of the poem are many of the powers of the nine-line stanza (ababbcbcc) that would ever after bear his name. The surprising bb couplet that arises in the middle is propitious for second thought or double take; the final hexameter, after eight pentameters, is balanced, often sententious, and teases the reader of the endless poem with recurring dreams of closure. Through the first five lines, it recalls Chaucer’s rhyme royal, but its final stretch to six feet declares for epic. (David Wilson-Okamura considers the stanza’s resources to be Spenser’s alternative to the flexibility of the Classical, quantitative line he never wrote).⁵² So much of what is distinctive about Spenser’s poetry is forsaken by his successors, his archaism, his allegory, his strict metrics. He is neither metaphysical, nor baroque, nor neoclassical, all modes that would flower in the seventeenth century. The Faerie Queene nonetheless endures, an engrossing moral fiction, one that secures immortality, and sacrifices influence, in sounding so much older than it is.
Drayton’s Hexameters Which is not to say that Spenser is forsaken entirely. One of the few poets of the period who still attracts the adjective ‘Spenserian’ is Michael Drayton. His magnum opus of the next century, the hexameter epic Poly-Olbion, would show many debts to The Faerie Queene, including a commitment to the Arthurian past and a habit of personification learned from Spenser’s allegory. But as early as 1593, long before Poly-Olbion saw print, Drayton had already placed his bets. Idea: The Shepherd’s Garland is an imitation of the Calender, nine eclogues strewn with archaisms. A year later he wrote a short sonnet sequence, Idea’s Mirror: Amours in Quatorzains. Here is the sestet of sonnet 32: My hope becomes a friend to my desire, My heart embraceth love, love doth embrace my heart, My life a Phoenix is in my soul’s fire, From thence (they vow) they never will depart. Desire, my love, my soul, my hope, my heart, my life, With tears, sighs, and disdain, shall have immortal strife. (Drayton, ‘Amour 32’, lines 9–14, Works, 1.114)⁵³
The rhetorical patterning is ostentatious, with the elements of hope, desire, the heart, love, life, and soul disposed across three lines of lament, then concentrated in a virtuoso single line. The device is called correlatio, and it was a favourite of Spenser’s in his own sonnet ⁵² David Wilson-Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge, 2013), 42. On the stanza itself, see Jeff Dolven, ‘The Method of Spenser’s Stanza’, Spenser Studies, 19 (2004), 17–25. ⁵³ Michael Drayton, in J. William Hebel (ed.), Works, corrected edition, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1961).
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118 - sequence, the Amoretti (1595).⁵⁴ Also Spenserian is the juxtaposition of pentameter and hexameter lines. Above, however, the hexameters are scattered without evident pattern, in the second, fifth, and sixth lines of the sestet. Inspection of other sonnets in the sequence reveals more of these interpolated hexameters, also in no systematic order. Drayton’s contemporary Samuel Daniel would never do such a thing. He, more than any other poet of the period, is the man left standing untouched by my catalogue of futureless styles. If Drayton is Spenserian, Daniel is unmistakably Sidneian: twenty-eight of the sonnets published in 1592, under the title Delia, first saw print the year before, appended to a version of Astrophil and Stella. That pirated book was withdrawn, but Daniel’s relationship to the Sidney circle, as a young up-and-comer on the London literary scene, was apparently undamaged. Delia was dedicated to Mary Sidney Herbert, and Daniel later described her house at Wilton as his ‘best school’ (Daniel, Complete Works, 1.xvi).⁵⁵ He would go on, like Drayton, to work in the genre of history, with his Civil Wars, but his sonnets were his most enduring success. ‘Thou canst not die whilst any zeal abound’, begins one, apologising to his Laura that he makes such a poor Petrarch: But I may add one feather to thy fame, To help her flight throughout the fairest isle. And if my pen could more enlarge thy name, Then should’st thou live in an immortal style. For though that Laura better limned be, Suffice, thou shalt be loved as well as she. (Daniel, Delia, sonnet 43, lines 9–14, Complete Works, 1.65)
Another sonneteer, William Shakespeare, would learn from these lines, as Daniel had learned from Sidney, learned his elegant iambs, his mobile but never vagrant caesurae, and his mix of praise and ever-so-subtle aggression. (The imperative ‘suffice’ is no gentle petition, and aggression, too, is a style). Daniel was also a great apologist for English rhyme, and by extension, for accents over quantities. His Defence of Rhyme (1603), written against Campion’s Observations, offers a sympathetic account of the poetry of the Middle Ages, not just Chaucer, and an appreciation of the English measure, ‘which custom, entertaining by the allowance of the ear, doth endenize [nativise] and make natural’ (Daniel, Complete Works, 4.37–8). He was a reader of Montaigne, and a Montaignean shrug is almost audible when he writes that we are ‘labouring ever to seem to be more than we are, or laying greater burthens upon our minds, then they are well able to bear, because we would not appear like other men’ (Daniel, Complete Works, 4.44). His is just the sensibility to crystallise a period style, for he is historically comfortable—there is no pathos of distance from the classics here—and disinclined to rivalry, happy to bear Sidney’s legacy. Drayton, less so, but he was still a sufficiently sensitive, if not quite prompt enough student of his own age to cut the hexameters when he republished the sonnets in his 1605 Poems. Why did they disappear? From his work, and from the history of English poetry? Some part of the answer is Drayton’s own lack of social capital: He had little luck,
⁵⁴ See, e.g., the first sonnet, where the trick is performed with ‘Leaues, lines, and rymes’ (Spenser, Shorter Poems, 388). ⁵⁵ Samuel Daniel, in Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works in Verse and Prose, 5 vols. (London, 1885–96).
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119 throughout his life, finding patronage, and there was no obvious practical advantage for a younger poet in sounding like him. It may also be that the long lines were too easy to mistake for error, at a moment when the rules still felt fragile. In a poetic climate of avid imitation, such negative results are telling, for we know the poems were read with an imitative eye, read with an appetite, and written to propose new possibilities, and yet Drayton’s modest innovation went nowhere.
Donne Himself This chapter began with a simple story, of the progress of English poetry over the sixteenth century from the rough metres of the opening decades, through a middle phase of technical achievement and consolidation, and on to the golden age whose presiding star is Sir Philip Sidney. It could end with Shakespeare’s sonnets, which owe so much to Sidney, but are so intellectually and erotically polymorphous that they seem to cross beyond mastery; that are, like all his work, a baffling mix of nostalgia (sonnet sequences were well out of fashion by the time his were printed) and experiment. Or, it could end here: Stand still, and I will read to thee A lecture, love, in love’s philosophy. Those three hours which we’ve spent, In walking here, two shadows went Along with us, which we ourselves produced; But, now the sun is just above our head, We do those shadows tread, And to brave clearness all things are reduced. So, while our infant love did grow, Disguises did, and shadows, flow From us and our care; but now ’tis not so. That love hath not attained the high’st degree, Which is still diligent lest others see. (Donne, ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’, lines 1–13, Complete Poems, 205–6)⁵⁶
John Donne’s ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’ was likely written sometime in the 1590s, perhaps along with his elegies and early satires while he was a student at Lincoln’s Inn. Its canzone form is characteristic of the poems that would be collected, after his death, as Songs and Sonnets; it has their rough, expressive prosody, as in the unscannable ten syllables of ‘From us, and our cares; but now ’tis not so’. It sounds like Donne in so many other ways, too. For example, the elaborate, intellectualised conceit-making that would later earn him the label ‘metaphysical’. The two lovers have walked from morning to noon, their shadows shortening until they lie underfoot; physical description has the schematic clarity of a logical proof. Donne loves shadows, and also reflections, spheres, alchemical properties, and processes. If there is something lawyerly in the argument, as well as philosophical, it
⁵⁶ John Donne, in Robin Robbins (ed.), The Complete Poems of John Donne (Harlow, 2010).
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120 - would be one of many symptoms of his legal training. The half-convincing banishment of ‘others’ reminds us of a coterie audience just off stage.⁵⁷ And the poem is headed for a characteristic ending, as the two walk on, and the shadows reappear: ‘Love is a growing, or full constant light, / And his first minute, after noon, is night’ (Donne, ‘A Lecture upon the Shadow’, lines 25–6, Complete Poems, 207). So many of his poems puncture their lyricism with such wised-up sign-offs. All this is John Donne, to be sure. Is it all his style? This survey has emphasised such features of style as the choice of forms, diction, and prosody, all domains traditional to the disciplines of rhetoric and poetics. Much of what is most striking in Donne is most visible, most audible, against the background of consolidating norms of prosody and lexicon. His thorny rhythms count for more against the achieved fluency of the decade, with Samuel Daniel just behind him. (Donne’s friend Ben Jonson, no friend of Daniel’s, thought Donne deserved hanging for not keeping of metre). His canzoni, too, are a significant choice, ultimately from Petrarch; his diction, though studded with technical terms from law or alchemy, is Anglo-Saxon, without ever being archaic. What of the sophisticated, knowing, sometimes cynical posture? Perhaps he gets it from Marlowe (different as Marlowe’s metre may be), and perhaps from the homosocial banter of the Inns. His conceits, and his love of paradoxes and problems, share a legal precisianism. They also cast a flickering shadow of scholastic philosophy, and even hint at his family’s history of Catholic allegiance.⁵⁸ Does he look backward, or forward? Home or abroad? Time’s handkerchief, to return to Serres’ image, is balled tight, and it could equally well be a crumpled map of Europe. Imitatio is the humanists’ name for the schoolroom discipline of taking the past as a model, and it gave every Elizabethan schoolboy an education in the technical means of sounding like other writers, and other times. But it was at best a partial effort to master the unrulier, inescapably social, admiring, and rivalrous forms of imitation that inevitably shaped English verse, and that sampled so promiscuously and polemically from its histories. Donne’s singularity must be placed within, and tested against, such a rich, extracurricular matrix of affinities and aversions. It may still seem strange to end a survey of forsaken styles with Donne—stranger even than to begin with Wyatt, for if Wyatt’s star has risen of late, Donne’s has shone preeminent for the last century. Then again, there is a sense in which every good poet’s style is a dead end. As much as Donne has taught the poets who have followed him, as often as he has been imitated since his poems began to be printed in the seventeenth century, he is still inimitable. Inimitable principally in his wilful departures from a period style, departures which, like any act of individual poetic self-assertion, risked and still risk being taken for miscalculation, error, or failure (as indeed they were, by Jonson amongst others). It may be possible to write a line that sounds like Donne. But that is quite different from writing a line that might be mistaken for Donne. Drayton’s hexametric innovations were proposed for imitation, a show of his skill, and an opportunity for others. Donne’s singularity is a triumph of style—individual style, neither techne, nor fashion, nor nation, though drawing on them all—over the judgement of skill. He would insist, later in his life, that his poems were perfectly deliberate, as deliberate as the sermons he gave at St. Paul’s: no reader ever
⁵⁷ The classic account of Donne’s coterie audience is Arthur Marotti’s John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison, WI, 1986). ⁵⁸ John Carey’s study, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (London, 1990) is the most influential account of the influence of Donne’s Catholic background on his poetry.
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121 saw ‘of mine, a hand, or an eye, or an affection, set down with so much study, and discipline, and labour of syllables’ (Donne, Letters, 308).⁵⁹ But for all this study, discipline, and labour, what is distinctive in him invites no followers. Not very long before he wrote, such a performance would have been impossible. It was only by the end of the sixteenth century that English poetry was well enough defined to be so brilliantly undone.
⁵⁹ John Donne, in M. T. Hester (ed.), Letters to Several Persons of Honour (Delmar, NY, 1977).
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7 Allusiveness Colin Burrow
‘Allusiveness’ was not a sixteenth-century word: OED first cites it from Henry More’s Exposition of the Seven Epistles from 1669, which refers to the ‘the multifarious allusiveness of the prophetical style’. The word ‘allusion’ was most frequently used in the sixteenth century of religious texts, since the internal cross-references in the Bible were amongst the most culturally venerated and intensively studied instances of allusive writing.¹ When used of vernacular poetry ‘allusion’ carried a sense akin to what it means today: a reference in one text to an event, person, or specific prior text which a reader might know, or to which an author or a commentator might wish to draw a reader’s attention.² The poetic value of allusion, however, derives from its flexibility. Sir John Harington’s translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s massive, playful, and richly allusive romance epic Orlando Furioso (1591) included a commentary on each canto or Book, which concludes with a section called ‘Allusion’. The ‘Allusion’ Harington finds in the tenth Book is ‘In Angelica tied to the rock and delivered by Rogero he alludes manifestly to the tale in Ovid of Andromeda and Perseus, who with his shield turned the beholders into stones’ (Harington, Orlando Furioso, 122).³ Smaller-scale literary allusions are sometimes illustrated with quotations of two or three lines from a source text. So far, so like twenty-first century understandings of ‘allusion’. But Harington also sometimes calls a general similarity between Ariosto’s stories and historical events or narratives by an earlier writer an ‘allusion’: so ‘The cup that Rinaldo was offered puts me in mind of the like fancy in the History of Herodotus in the second book; briefly it is thus . . . ’ (Harington, Orlando Furioso, 491), and he relates the story. In the ‘Allusion’ to Book 43 he compares the antics of his spaniel Bungy to those of a dancing dog described by Ariosto, although he records that his own dog unfortunately ‘wants [i.e., lacks] that quality to shake ducats out of his ears’ (Harington, Orlando Furioso, 515). The word ‘allusion’ derives from the Latin verb to play (ludere), and Harington’s usage of it to denote a range of textual phenomena, from the deliberate imitation of Ovid to moments which just happen to remind him of his dog, indicates that sixteenth-century allusions could be playful, or serious, or put there by an author, or simply perceived by a reader, or any mixture of the above. It is easy to regard allusion-spotting as the dastardly super-ego of reading: unless you are a completely learned commentator, who can notice every moment when, say, Wyatt is alluding to Chaucer or when Spenser is alluding to Statius, then you should stop reading, let alone enjoying reading, and get learning. Harington’s baggy, doggy, and incoherent conception of ‘allusion’ ought in this respect to
¹ See Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford, 2013), 77–96. ² For a hardline intentionalist view of allusion, see William Irwin, ‘What Is an Allusion?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59 (2001), 287–97. ³ Sir John Harington, in Robert McNulty (ed.), Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso: Translated into English Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington (1591) (Oxford, 1972). Colin Burrow, Allusiveness In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Colin Burrow 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0007
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123 be liberating. Allusions can be references authors want readers to notice, or they can be what readers happen to notice, or a bit of both. Where a particular allusion is positioned on this sliding scale will vary from poem to poem and reader to reader, and that instability is a significant component in the power of allusiveness.
Imitation and Allusion One reason why allusion is such a rich poetic resource in this period is that most sixteenthcentury poets were, from a very early stage in their education, trained to imitate earlier authors.⁴ An allusion, in the sense of a ‘direct verbal reference to a prior text’, can point a reader towards a text or author which a new poem is imitating. Early in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) Venus says to Adonis that she will smother him with kisses, ‘And yet not cloy thy lips with loathed satiety, / But rather famish them amid their plenty’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, lines 19–20, Norton Shakespeare, 667).⁵ That allusion to the cry of Ovid’s Narcissus that ‘inopem me copia fecit’ [abundance makes me want] (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.466, Metamorphoses, 1.156–7)⁶ marks the poem as an imitation of Ovid, as well as making a connection between Adonis’s resistance to Venus’s swamping desire and the self-love of Narcissus. But imitation and allusion do not necessarily go along with each other, because ‘imitation’ of an earlier author in the sixteenth century did not necessarily require direct verbal reference. Most sixteenth-century male poets were trained to write Classical Latin, in part by imitating the prose of Cicero. That sounds like a deadly activity, but according to the educational theorist Roger Ascham (c 1515–58) in The Schoolmaster (1570) it was anything but: ‘Imitation is a faculty to express lively and perfectly that example which you go about to follow’ (Ascham, Schoolmaster, English Works, 264).⁷ That is, ‘imitation’ is not a matter of verbally replicating an ‘example’ but creating something ‘lively’ by analogy with the prior text—or, as Ascham went on, ‘This Imitatio, is dissimilis materei similis tractatio [a similar treatment of different matter] and also, similis materei dissimilis tractatio [a different treatment of the same material], as Virgil followed Homer’ (Ascham, English Works, 267). A style, a narrative content, or even a method of imitating earlier authors could be the object of imitation, the aim of which was not verbal replication but the creation of an analogous work. Ascham drew on accounts of imitation in the rhetorical tradition by Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian, as well as by his particular hero, the sixteenth-century Protestant rhetorician Johannes Sturm (1507–89).⁸ As Sturm put it, imitation was driven not by a wish to replicate the words of a prior text but by ‘an ardent desire and love to attain ⁴ See G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33.1 (1980), 1–32; Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982); Colin Burrow, Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity (Oxford, 2019); and Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979), 34–77. ⁵ William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016). ⁶ Ovid, in Frank Justus Miller (trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Metamorphoses, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1916). ⁷ Roger Ascham, in W. A. Wright (ed.), English Works of Roger Ascham (Cambridge, 1904). ⁸ Notably [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, 1.2.3, in Harry Caplan (trans.), Rhetorica ad Herennium (Cambridge, MA, 1954), 6–9; Cicero, De Oratore, 2.21–2, in E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (trans.), On the Orator: Books 1–2 (Cambridge, MA, 1942), 262–9; Seneca, Epistle 84, in Richard M. Gummere (trans.), Epistles, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1917–25), 2.276–85; and Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 10.1–3, in Donald A. Russell (ed. and trans.), The Orator’s Education, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 4.253–353. For discussion, see Greene, Light in Troy, 54–80; and Burrow, Imitating Authors, 71–105.
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124 - to that in the oration and speech of another, [which] seemeth worthy of praise and admiration. And is nothing else but a means and way how to express in your own talk those manners and forms of speaking: which the Greeks call eide and ideas, which be commendable and beautiful in the talk of another’ (Sturm, Rich Storehouse, fol. 32v).⁹ Like Ascham, Sturm associates imitating with ‘expressing’ in one’s own language the ‘forms of speaking’ of an earlier author. The verb ‘express’ there might suggest the prior text is a mould or stamp around which the new author more or less passively shapes a new text. But Ascham uses the word ‘express’ in a wider sense when he defines a ‘paraphrase’ as when we take a speech ‘or some notable commonplace in Latin, and express it with other words’ (Ascham, English Works, 243). The association of ‘expressing’ a prior text with active agency and word-choice on the part of the imitator indicates that an ‘imitation’ creates not a replica, but a new instantiation of the ‘idea’ of earlier writing which need not echo its words at all. An ‘imitator’ of this kind might occlude any overt debt to the texts which lay behind the later work: a form of imitation which G. W. Pigman III has called ‘dissimulative’.¹⁰ The hiding of verbal allusions, however, was an accidental by-product of this kind of imitation rather than its principal aim. An imitator could treat a prior text not as a sequence of words but as a template for future practice. Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (printed in 1598) is generally reckoned to be an ‘Ovidian’ poem, but it derives principally from a poem by Musaeus.¹¹ Nonetheless, its rhetorical structures, the ethos of its narrator, detached and erotically engaged at once, either ‘imitate’ or ‘allude to’ Ovid, even though the poem does not take a section from the Metamorphoses and remake it in a different language. It might be seen as ‘expressing’, in Sturm’s and Ascham’s sense of the word, an ‘idea’ of Ovid and of what an ‘Ovidian’ poem might be. Theorists of imitation such as Ascham and Sturm were also interested in the practicalities of education. Students needed to acquire a vocabulary and what Ascham called ‘some notable commonplace[s]’ in Latin or the vernacular, and the easiest way to do this was by compiling a ‘commonplace book’. This might be an empty manuscript book provided with headings such as ‘Death’ or ‘Idleness’ under which the student would record passages from his or her reading, though printed commonplace books, which saved students the labour of reading the whole of Latin literature, were also widely available.¹² These would then provide a storehouse for later composition, and could be customised to suit the interests of a particular student.¹³ Set to write a ‘theme’ or essay, or indeed a poem on any given topic, a would-be author could digest the texts by prior authors recorded in a personal or a printed commonplace book, and ‘express’ from them a new work. The practice of ‘commonplacing’ might suggest that a poem could be created from an amalgam of textual components gathered from a number of prior works. In this kind of imitative text almost every element might be regarded as in some sense an ‘allusion’ because it would derive from the records of an author’s own reading or from a printed commonplace book. There are sixteenth-century works, such as a neo-Latin poem, which that determined gatherer of textual fragments Francis Meres (1565–1647) compiled on the ⁹ Johannes Sturm, in T. Browne (trans.), A Rich Storehouse or Treasure for Nobility and Gentlemen (London, 1570). ¹⁰ Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation’, 10–11. ¹¹ See Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven, CT, 1978), 55–153. ¹² See Anne Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996). ¹³ See Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005), 147–8; and Desiderius Erasmus, in Craig R. Thompson (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 24, Literary and Educational Writings 2: De Copia. De Ratione Studii (Toronto, 1978), 636–9.
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125 death of his wife, that are entirely made up of lines from other poems, even if they (as we might say) ‘express’ the grief of the author.¹⁴ The ‘cento’, or ‘patchwork’ poem, which wholly consists of lines or phrases repurposed from Homer or Virgil, goes back to at least the third century . The fourth-century female Christian poet Faltonia Proba compiled a poem on the glory of Christ entirely from phrases of Virgil. This was widely reprinted, and stimulated several imitators of Petrarch in the sixteenth century to compile centos of his work.¹⁵ Hence ‘imitation’ could range from what might be called the fully ideational (in which it is an ‘idea’ of a prior author or text that is imitated, and which might be marked by no verbal allusions at all), to the fully citational (in which every line either alludes to, or is directly drawn from, an earlier text). Julia Kristeva coined the term ‘intertextuality’ to describe a process by which one system of signs was transposed into another: so the novel might absorb the signifying practices of dialogue at a carnival into a new code system, and so transform it.¹⁶ She later renamed this phenomenon ‘transposition’ because the word ‘intertextuality’ came rapidly to be used not just in what Kristeva called ‘the banal sense of “study of sources”’ but to describe the emergence of meanings from texts by virtue of their interrelationship with other texts, whether those interrelationships were voluntary or involuntary on the part of the author.¹⁷ ‘Intertextuality’ is sometimes also used as an umbrella term for ‘any verbal connection between texts, deliberate or otherwise’. The ‘commonplacing’ model of composition indicates the utility of this broad concept of intertextuality for interpreting poetry from this period in which poems could be made entirely from components of other poems. The use of a passage ‘commonplaced’ in this way would be an instance of ‘intertextuality’ in the broad sense but probably not an ‘allusion’, in that it might not direct the reader to any feature of the ‘source’ poem, apart from the words that were reused from it. However, as the classicist Stephen Hinds has argued, a fully depersonalised conception of intertextuality—in which all texts are intrinsically imbricated with other texts—does not enable readers to distinguish kinds of interconnection between texts that might yield something significant from interconnections between texts that occur simply because all texts are, to some degree, interconnected.¹⁸ And for that reason the concept of authorial agency can be useful for readers who wish to work out whether what appears to be an ‘allusion’ to an earlier work is akin to Harington finding an ‘allusion’ to his dog Bungy in Ariosto, or akin to identifying a text with which Ariosto would have wanted his readers to compare his poem. Foucault described the concept of the author as ‘a principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning’.¹⁹ He meant (if we can thriftily restrict his meaning in this way) that the notion of authorial intention restricts the potential plurality of significances in a text. But a degree of thrift in assessing the potentially infinite interconnections between early modern texts is a necessary means of distinguishing between different classes of
¹⁴ Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Commonplacing and Originality: Reading Francis Meres’, Review of English Studies, 68 (2017), 902–23, 921. ¹⁵ See Scott McGill, Virgil Recomposed: The Mythological and Secular Centos in Antiquity (Oxford, 2005); George Hugo Tucker, ‘From Rags to Riches: The Early Modern “Cento” Form’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 62 (2013), 3–67; and F. Erspamer, ‘Centoni e Petrarchismo nel Cinquecento’, in Giancarlo Mazzacurati and Michel Plaisance (eds), Scritture Di Scritture: Testi, Generi, Modelli Nel Rinascimento (Rome, 1987), 463–95. ¹⁶ See Julia Kristeva, in Leon S. Roudiez (ed.), Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (trans.), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York, 1980), 15 and 64–92. ¹⁷ Julia Kristeva, in Margaret Waller (trans.), Revolution in Poetic Language (New York, 1984), 60. ¹⁸ See Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge, 1998), 47–51. ¹⁹ Michel Foucault, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth, 1986), 118.
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126 - ‘allusion’, even if those distinctions are neither entirely clear nor binary. A citation from a text which an author is known to have read carries a different valence from the use of a cliché or set phrase, though the distinction between these two phenomena will not always be absolute or clear. The concept of a deliberate allusion is nonetheless a critically valuable one, not least because it has the potential to allow back into literary discussion some aspects of Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality as a ‘transposition’ of discourses or codes. An allusion can mark a moment when discourses audibly collide within a text. So, when Ophelia brings the idiom of popular song into Hamlet, this is not ‘intertextuality’ in the supra-authorial sense that would insist on the ‘interconnectedness of all texts’. Her instruction that ‘You must sing “a-down a-down”, and you, “Call him a-down-a”. O, how the wheel becomes it!’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 4.2.166–7, Norton Shakespeare, 1830) marks a theatrically deliberate rupture of registers, which brings together the world of popular song and the world of revenge tragedy in order to evoke an extreme mental state. That disjunctive allusion is audible despite the fact that editors here are uncertain which of Ophelia’s words are ‘quotations’ from the chorus (‘wheel’) of a ballad, and do not know if she is alluding to any specific ballad or popular song. ‘A-down’—the chorus from the generic ballad to which she is ‘alluding’—indeed becomes an ‘allusion’ to the death of her father, heading downwards towards the grave. Allusion can be a means by which, not just texts but authors recombine existing registers to make new literary effects, and this can occur even where the source of the allusion is unknown. So imitation and allusion are partially autonomous literary practices. Imitation of a prior text does not necessarily entail verbal allusion to it, and a work which does make precise verbal allusion to an earlier work does not necessarily ‘imitate’ it.²⁰ It is impossible to provide rigid theoretical grounds by which to distinguish an ‘allusion’ (as a cue to a reader to notice a specific intertextual relationship) from ‘intertextuality’ in the broad sense (the interconnectedness of all language uses) but it is, in practice, valuable for readers to have such a distinction in mind. Given all that, what are the different versions of allusiveness found in poetry from this period, and do they change in the course of the century? Those questions are best answered, like many questions in literary history, by accepting that literary phenomena blur into each other. Allusion encompasses a spectrum of practices which differ from each other in the way that colours in a rainbow fade from one to another. There are clear instances of different types, but more usually—and often in the most interesting cases—poems allude in ways that are hybrid or multiple. By setting out below a spectrum of seven types of allusiveness (which is no more definitive than William Empson’s famously indistinguishable seven types of ambiguity), I will attempt to indicate how allusion could function as a poetic resource in the sixteenth century, and will suggest some ways in which the practice of alluding to prior poems and authors changed towards the end of this period. In several of the seven types, the question ‘how far is the allusion controlled by the author?’ is one that can and often should be asked, even if it cannot always be answered, as is, in some of the outlier instances explored below, the question ‘is this type of allusion actually an allusion at all?’ That uncertainty is in the nature of the topic.
²⁰ On the distinction between the imitation of a specific passage and the imitation of a ‘model as code’ or generative structure, see Gian Biagio Conte, in Charles Segal (trans.), The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets (Ithaca, NY, 1986), 31.
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127
Type 1: Allusion to Authorial Names John Skelton (c 1463–1529) in the Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell gives a textbook instance of how late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century English poets tended to allude to earlier English writers. Skelton names them, and imagines them as physical presences who embrace him: I saw Gower, that first garnisshed our Englysshe rude, And maister Chaucer, that nobly enterprysyd How that our Englysshe myght fresshely be ennewed; The monke of Bury then after them ensuyd Dane Johnn Lydgate. Theis Englysshe poetis thre, As I ymagenyd, repayrid unto me, Togeder in armes, as brethern, enbrasid; There apparell farre passynge beyonde that I can tell. (Skelton, Garlande, lines 387–94, Complete English Poems, 323)²¹
Behind this method of allusion lay the concluding lines of the Thebaid, in which Statius instructed his poem to ‘essay [i.e., rival] not the divine Aeneid, but ever follow her footsteps from afar in adoration’ (Statius, Thebaid, 12.816–17, Thebaid, 2.308–9).²² This, in turn, was the deep origin of Dante’s representation of Virgil as his master and guide in the Inferno, in whose literal footsteps the wayfarer treads, and whose feet the spirit of Statius seeks to embrace in Purgatorio 21.130–6. Chaucer himself urged his Troilus and Criseyde to ‘kis the steppes, where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace’ (Chaucer, Troilus, 5.1791–2, Riverside Chaucer, 584).²³ So the allusion-by-name, or the allusion as embrace, is itself an allusion to a wider history of canon-formation. It is a means by which an author says ‘think of my texts in relation to those of these earlier writers’. In Skelton, the self-assertion implicit in this kind of allusion is offset by the modest claim that he cannot even describe the splendid dress of the earlier authors to whom he alludes. That modest disavowal of eloquence, however, is a further allusion, since it echoes the modesty of Chaucer and of Statius, which was in turn echoed by Gower and Lydgate. Skelton’s equally conventional insistence that the poets who greet him all served to renew ‘our Englysshe’ also depersonalises this mode of allusion by making all these distinct great authors part of a common national project. That alerts us to a more general feature of allusion: it distinguishes the object of allusion and then, by the very fact of alluding to it, implicitly draws it within a common store of knowledge. References to Chaucer, either by name or through a transparent pseudonym, certainly did not vanish by the later sixteenth century any more than his influence, but the topos of one author physically embracing a later one does, by the later sixteenth century, appear distinctly antiquated. Edmund Spenser alludes to Chaucer by name in The Faerie Queene (1596) in Book 4 canto 2, at the start of his attempt to conclude Chaucer’s unfinished The Squire’s Tale. He marks the ‘imitation’ of the lost work by a direct allusion to the start of
²¹ John Skelton, in John Scattergood (ed.), The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth, 1983). ²² P. Papinius Statius, in D. R. Shackleton Bailey (ed. and trans.), Thebaid. Achilleid, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2003–4). ²³ Geoffrey Chaucer, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edition (Boston, MA, 1987).
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128 - The Knight’s Tale—‘Whylome as antique stories tellen us’ (Spenser, Faerie Queene, 4.2.32, line 1)²⁴ from ‘Whilom, as olde stories tellen vs’ (Chaucer, Knight’s Tale, line 859, Riverside Chaucer, 37)—and goes on to relate how the actions of Cambell and Triamond, described in The Squire’s Tale, are lost: Though now their acts be no where to be found, As that renowmed Poet them compyled, With warlike numbers and Heroicke sound, Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefyled, On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled. But wicked Time that all good thoughts doth waste, And workes of noblest wits to nought out weare, That famous moniment hath quite defaste, And robd the world of threasure endlesse deare, The which mote haue enriched all vs heare. (Spenser, Faerie Queene, 4.2.32, lines 5–9, 33, lines 1–5)
The earlier poet is not invoked as a physical presence but as a source of nourishment (a well from which later writers can drink), and a text so eaten away by time that it invites completion. The attempt to complete The Squire’s Tale in Book 4 of The Faerie Queene is a paradigmatic instance of what I termed above ‘ideational’ imitation of Chaucer, since it imitates a text that does not exist.²⁵ The quest which frames the whole poem—Arthur’s pursuit of a vanishing faerie queene—is also an ‘imitation’ in this sense of Chaucer’s unfinished and unfinishable Tale of Sir Thopas.²⁶ The ‘imitation’ of a lost or fragmentary text, or what I have elsewhere called ‘the lost imitand’, was to become a dominant early modern form of imitation, and is the ultimate version of ‘ideational’ imitation.²⁷ Since the ending of The Squire’s Tale does not exist Spenser necessarily cannot make any verbal allusion to it, but he can create an imitation which corresponds to his ‘idea’ of what it would have been. He marks that imitation by a direct reference to Chaucer’s name, and by presenting himself as drinking in or even potentially reincarnating the spirit of Chaucer ‘by infusion sweete / Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me surviue’ (Spenser, Faerie Queene, 4.2.34.6–7). The shift from Skelton’s method of alluding to authors by name, and as bodily presences to Spenser’s representation of Chaucer as a transfusable spirit, is amongst the most significant changes in the way poets represented their relationship to earlier writing in the sixteenth century. It was directly related to developments in thinking about how authors imitate: if the goal is to ‘express’ an ‘idea’ of an earlier author, then attempting to complete an incomplete prior text (as Spenser does with The Squire’s Tale) is the strongest guarantee that a poet is at once doing something new (the lost text is necessarily no longer present so ²⁴ Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ²⁵ See Patrick Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Completion of The Squire’s Tale: Love, Magic and Heroic Action in the Legend of Cambell and Triamond’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 15 (1985), 135–55; Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore, MD, and London, 1981); and Rachel Stenner, Tamsin Badcoe, and Gareth Griffith (eds), Rereading Chaucer and Spenser: Dan Geffrey with the New Poete (Manchester, 2019). ²⁶ See J. A. Burrow, ‘Sir Thopas in the Sixteenth Century’, in Douglas Gray and E. G. Stanley (eds), Middle English Studies Presented to Norman Davis (Oxford, 1983), 69–91, 87–8. ²⁷ See Burrow, Imitating Authors, 151–66.
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129 there is no danger of replicating it) and something valuable, since the new text claims to continue a text by an author of high status. That practice goes along with a critical vocabulary that has two distinct components. A language of revival, reincarnation, or reembodiment co-exists with a language of textual loss (which itself alludes to Chaucer’s claim that ‘eld [ . . . ] Hath nygh devoured out of oure memorie’ the story of Anelida and Arcite (Anelida, lines 12–14, Riverside Chaucer, 376)): ‘wicked time’ has devoured the end of the ‘Squire’s Tale’, but a new poet can imitate or ‘express’ the old poet, and create a text which is a rebirth or reincarnation of the old. When Francis Meres claimed that ‘as the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare’ (Meres, Palladis Tamia, fol. 281v), he was drawing on one aspect of this stock of metaphors.²⁸
Type 2: Repurposing of Texts At the other extreme from a reference to an author’s name is the reuse of an earlier text in unchanged form, with or without a direct indication of the place from which it derives. These two types of allusion are not as distinct as they might appear, however, since a textual allusion can serve in the place of a reference to the name of the author if the text from which the allusion is taken is sufficiently well known. So, the shepherdess Phoebe in Shakespeare’s As You Like It says ‘Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: / “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” ’ (Shakespeare, As You Like It, 3.5.80–1, Norton Shakespeare, 1664). The line from Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, which Phoebe quotes (see Marlowe, Hero and Leander, line 176, Complete Works, 1.193)²⁹ was sufficiently well known by around 1599 for Marlowe to be identified by many in Shakespeare’s audience as the ‘dead shepherd’, even though he is not alluded to by name. Phoebe’s allusion to Marlowe is positioned exactly on a conceptual fault line towards which much sixteenth-century poetry was drawn: it presents Marlowe’s ‘saw’ or saying as both a reusable commodity and as the product of a singular author. Phoebe now knows that Marlowe’s general sententia is true by virtue of its applicability to her own love, and so her allusion to it is simultaneously an allusion to Marlowe and a reflection of her experience. Texts, and particularly sententious fragments of text which straddle the boundary between being products of individual agency and elements within a folk or collective memory, can be reapplied through this kind of ‘allusion’ to new settings. By the later sixteenth century, readers were increasingly conditioned to respond to texts in this way: sententiae were marked in English printed books (particularly in plays which were indebted to Seneca’s tragedies) from about the 1560s, either by inverted commas in the margin or by being set in a distinct typeface.³⁰ Harington’s Ariosto uses marginal notes to mark individual lines as a ‘Sentence’ or ‘Proverb’. These typographical conventions served as invitations to readers not so much to ‘allude’ to these general proverbs as to reuse or quote them. It was a technique which worked: a high proportion of the phrases italicised as sententiae in the satires of John
²⁸ Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598). ²⁹ Christopher Marlowe, in Roma Gill, et al. (eds), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1987–98). ³⁰ See G. K. Hunter, ‘The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances’, The Library, 5–6 (1951), 171–88.
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130 - Marston (1576–1634) from 1598 were more or less immediately ‘quoted’ in the poetical commonplace book England’s Parnassus of 1600. In the manuscript poetry of the earlier sixteenth century, the repurposing or direct quotation of texts could take extreme forms, which push at or even cross the elastic boundary between allusion and textual appropriation. The most striking instance are verses generally believed to be in the hand of Lord Thomas Howard (c 1512–37, half-uncle to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey), which appear in the manuscript of courtly verse known as ‘The Devonshire Manuscript’. Howard had made a binding verbal contract to marry Lady Margaret Douglas, the niece of Henry VIII, in early 1536. When Anne Boleyn was executed and her daughter, the future Elizabeth I, was declared a bastard in May of that year, Margaret Douglas became heir presumptive to the crown. The engagement came to light in July 1536 and was seen as a threat to the Tudor succession. Howard was imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he died of an ague. One of the ‘poems’ he is believed to have written there is a transcription from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (4.288–308, 323–9, Riverside Chaucer, 542). This version removes the name of Criseyde from the extract, and appears in the manuscript without any allusion to the name of Chaucer or its transcriber: O very lord, O Love, O god, alas, that knowest best mine heart and all my thought, what shall my sorrowful life do in this case if I forgo that I so dear have bought? Since ye and me have fully brought into your grace and both our hearts sealed, how may ye suffer, alas, it be repealed? (Howard, Devonshire MS, 105)³¹
In this case ‘allusion’ through the repurposing of prior texts has a political dimension.³² The person who had the power to ‘repeal’ the love between Margaret Douglas and Thomas Howard was not Cupid but Henry VIII, to whom the poem may, in an extended sense of the word, ‘allude’, but whom in the tense environment of 1536 it would have been suicide to name. The overtness of the textual allusion to Chaucer (where ‘allusion’ collapses into ‘quotation’ or ‘citation’) ensures deniability of any personal and historical allusions. A hostile interpreter who intercepted this poem, with its blank that may imply ‘Margaret’ in the place of the name of Criseyde, might be reassured that the ‘author’ was merely a transcriber who spent his time in the Tower harmlessly copying passages from Chaucer. The poetic power of allusion derives from the fact that it operates between authors and readers, and readers vary in their levels of knowledge and their willingness to identify allusions. So, an author may or may not be making an allusion to a person or a prior text,
³¹ London, British Library, MS Add. 17492, fol. 29v. Quotations from Elizabeth Heale (ed.), The Devonshire Manuscript: A Women’s Book of Courtly Poetry (Toronto, 2012). ³² See Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge, 1997), 143–57. Paul G. Remley, ‘Mary Shelton and Her Tudor Literary Milieu’, in Peter C. Herman (ed.), Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts (Urbana-Champaign, IL, 1994), 40–77, argued a minority view that the hand is that of Mary Shelton, resisted in Bradley J. Irish, ‘Gender and Politics in the Henrician Court: The Douglas-Howard Lyrics in the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17492)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 64.1 (2011), 79–114. See also the discussion of this poem in Chapter 4 in this volume.
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131 and a reader may or may not notice it. This enabled sixteenth-century court poets, many of whom experienced the tyrannical extremes of the later reign of Henry VIII as direct threats to their lives, to use varieties of allusion to create poems that occupied a relatively safe space between an intentional speech act to a particular addressee, which alluded to specific people and specific events, and an impersonal collective utterance.³³ Allusion is a chameleon: it can allow a text simply to blend into the background of its origins or—to an audience which has the relevant knowledge—it can suggest that the poem is boldly communicating unspeakable truths to its chosen field of addressees.
Type 3: Allusions to Proverbs Modern commentaries on sixteenth-century poems sometimes include notes which begin ‘Alluding to the proverb . . . ’. That formula is virtually a paradox. Proverbs in the early modern period tended not to have one single form or author. Dictionaries of proverbs generally list several versions: ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’ can become ‘then seek not moss upon a rolling stone’, for instance.³⁴ And although many ‘proverbs’ (including the one about moss and rolling stones) gained currency in English through Erasmus’s gigantic collection of Adages (which grew in augmented editions from 1500 to 1536) and its vernacular offshoots, these proverbs were not quite ‘texts’ in the sense that a stanza from Troilus and Criseyde is a text. They do not depend on iteration in more or less the same words in order to preserve their identity. It is the ‘proverb’ (the notion embodied in a rolling stone, that things which keep moving stay clean), rather than Erasmus’s Adages or any other exact verbal formulation, which is the object of allusion. Hence, they are perfect targets for ‘ideational’ imitation, where poets ‘allude’ to the proverb by rearticulating its core concept. However, ‘allusions to proverbs’ could serve a similar function in earlier sixteenth-century poetry as allusions to Chaucer. In the courtly poetry of the 1530s an ‘allusion to a proverb’ could have a cutting edge. The third satire of Sir Thomas Wyatt (c 1503–42) begins like this: ‘A spending hand that alway poureth out Had need to have a bringer-in as fast’; And ‘On the stone that still doth turn about There groweth no moss’—these proverbs yet do last. Reason hath set them in so sure a place That length of years their force can never waste. When I remember this and eke the case Wherein thou stands, I thought forthwith to write, Brian, to thee, who knows how great a grace In writing is to counsel man the right. (Wyatt, ‘A spending hand’, lines 1–10, Complete Poems, 192)³⁵ ³³ See Greg Walker, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005); and Colin Burrow, ‘The Experience of Exclusion: Literature and Politics in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII’, in David Wallace (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 1999), 793–820. ³⁴ See R. W. Dent, Proverbial Language in English Drama Exclusive of Shakespeare, 1495–1616 (Berkeley, CA, 1984), S885. ³⁵ Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978).
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132 - The addressee of this poem, Sir Francis Bryan (c 1490–1550), is known to have written at least one poem that consisted almost entirely of proverbs.³⁶ He was also famous for outrageous gambling and high living, for which he became known as ‘the Vicar of Hell’. So, Wyatt’s ‘allusions to proverbs’ here are also allusions to Bryan’s kind of authorship and to his life. The application of these proverbs to Bryan would have seemed instantly appropriate to courtly readers who encountered the poem in manuscript and who knew about the poem’s addressee. But ‘allusions’ to proverbial lore also have the potential to mute personal allusions when a poem reached a wider audience. When Wyatt’s epistle to Bryan was printed in the popular anthology known as Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557 under the title ‘How to use the court and himself therein, written to Sir Francis Bryan’ (see ‘A spending hand that always poureth out’, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 136),³⁷ it could be read as a statement of general principles about how to get on in court rather than as an allusively targeted address to a particular audience. Allusion can make proverbs and what we term ‘commonplaces’ become personal in several different ways. They can be rephrased and made to shine by a new author who hones the ‘idea’ behind a proverb into a new and sharper form, or they can be used to convey a direct personal allusion to a specific reader or group of readers, or they can be used to make a poem appear innocuously general. Wyatt was a master at all aspects of this art of allusion.
Type 4: Allusion to Verbal Style The distinction between what I have termed the repurposing of texts and an allusion to the style or language of an earlier author is amongst the blurriest zones in the whole rainbow of types of allusion. We might want to distinguish between ‘an allusion’ made by an author to an earlier writer on the one hand and ‘an affinity’ perceived by a reader between the verbal style of two texts on the other; but the desire to make that distinction is one which the experience of poetry both incites and disappoints. A single word can be enough to take a reader’s mind to an earlier text, and perhaps also to the context in which that word was used. But there is no definitive rule for establishing whether that response is distinctive to one reader or was expected by the author to be the response of all readers. However, when authors are writing poems in which they present themselves as readers there are good reasons to suppose the ‘allusions’ are less arbitrary than Sir John Harington being reminded of his dog by a story in Ariosto. So, one of the strongest instances of allusion to a verbal style—where a poet constructs and reproduces what he considers to be the key features of an earlier writer’s vocabulary, rhythms, and idiom—is the elegy by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516–47) on the older poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. The poem begins ‘W. resteth here’, as though Surrey’s dead predecessor resides within the elegy itself. That gives a particular force to its allusions to Wyatt’s language:
³⁶ See Huntington Library, MS 183, fols. 7–9v. See also Robert S. Kinsman, ‘ “The Proverbes of Salmon Do Playnly Declare”: A Sententious Poem on Wisdom and Governance, Ascribed to Sir Francis Bryan’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 42 (1979), 279–312. ³⁷ Richard Tottel (ed.), in Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul (eds), Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (Harmondsworth, 2011).
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133 A head, where wisdom mysteries did frame, Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain As on a stithy*, where that some work of fame *anvil Was daily wrought to turn to Britain’s gain. (Surrey, ‘W. resteth here’, lines 5–8, Poems, 27)³⁸
This alludes to Wyatt’s lines: Such hammers work within my head That sound naught else unto my ears But fast at board and wake abed. (Wyatt, ‘Since you will needs’, lines 7–9, Complete Poems, 153)
Surrey echoes the language of Wyatt’s weary lover in ‘Since you will needs that I shall sing’, but transforms his predecessor from an obsessive lover into a servant of the state, a purposive blacksmith forging works of national significance.³⁹ When Surrey himself was executed as a traitor in 1547, Sir John Cheke composed an elegy on him which used verbal allusions to Surrey’s elegy on Wyatt as substitutes for naming the disgraced poet.⁴⁰ Surrey’s way of commemorating Wyatt as a poet who wrote ‘to Britain’s gain’ in turn was imitated by Barnabe Googe (1540–94) in his ‘Epitaph of Master Thomas Phaer’, the translator of Virgil, a poem which alludes to the ‘mighty style’ with which Surrey ‘did bring a piece of Virgil’s work in frame’ (Googe, ‘Epitaph’, lines 19–20, Eclogues, poem 15).⁴¹ Googe, writing after many of both Surrey’s and Wyatt’s poems were published in Tottel’s Miscellany, could assume his readers would recognise and attach value to stylistic allusions to these vernacular authors. These are examples where an allusion implicitly positions the alluding author within a tradition. But there are other occasions in which verbal connections between one author and a predecessor fall into the wide boundary zone between allusion and general linguistic affinity. Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem ‘They flee from me’ is so steeped in Chaucerian language that separating ‘Chaucerian language’ from ‘Chaucerian allusions’ is almost impossible.⁴² The poem begins by describing the loss of an unspecified ‘they’ (birds, animals, lovers?) who flee from the speaker, and concludes with the poet abandoned by a singular lover: And I have leave to go of her goodness, And she also to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindly am served I would fain know what she hath deserved. (Wyatt, ‘They flee from me’, lines 18–21, Complete Poems, 117) ³⁸ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Emrys Jones (ed.), Poems (Oxford, 1964). ³⁹ See Frederic B. Tromly, ‘Surrey’s Fidelity to Wyatt in “Wyatt Resteth Here” ’, Studies in Philology, 77 (1980), 376–87. ⁴⁰ See Ruth Hughey (ed.), The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, 2 vols. (Columbus, OH, 1960), 1.332–3 and 2.429. See also Joel Grossman, ‘Remembering and Dismembering Henry Howard: Sir John Cheke’s Elegy on the Earl of Surrey’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 70 (2020), 1–20. ⁴¹ Barnabe Googe, in Judith M. Kennedy (ed.), Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets (Toronto, 1989). ⁴² See Dennis Kay, ‘Wyatt and Chaucer: “They Flee from Me” Revisited’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 47 (1984), 211–25; and Helen Cooper, ‘Wyatt and Chaucer: A Reappraisal’, Leeds Studies in English, 13 (1982), 104–23.
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134 - The word ‘newfangleness’ is used several times by Chaucer in ways that make it ambisextrous: in The Squire’s Tale it is said that ‘Men loven of propre kynde newefangelnesse, / As briddes doon that men in cages fede’ (Chaucer, Squire’s Tale, lines 610–11, Riverside Chaucer, 176, my italics), while in a ballade ascribed to Chaucer called ‘Against Woman Unconstant’, the word is associated with women: ‘Madame, for you newefangelnesse . . . I take my leve of your unstedfastnesse’ (Chaucer, ‘Against Woman’, lines 1–3, Riverside Chaucer, 657). Wyatt’s use of this fragment of Chaucerian vocabulary is openly perplexed: the woman has given him leave to go through her ‘goodness’ (which seems to have an ironical emphasis) and seems also to have given herself permission (or is it he who has done that?) to be changeable or use ‘newfangelness’; and does he also have that permission? ‘Newfangleness’ seems to shift awkwardly between genders, perhaps partly because in Chaucer it is both men (in The Squire’s Tale) and women (in the ballade) who are changeable. Is this an allusion to either or both of these Chaucerian texts, or is it better to regard it as ‘intertextuality’ in the broadest possible sense of ‘a shared vocabulary’? It might alternatively be considered as an ‘allusion’ not just to Chaucer but to an entire way of thinking about courtly love, which the poet’s experience has made dissolve around him. In the new world imagined by Wyatt, acting ‘kindly’ has turned into something closer to acting cruelly, and ‘newfangleness’ has unsettled both the author’s and the readers’ ethical bearings. Boundary cases such as this are endemic when thinking about allusions to a prior author’s style: one reader’s allusion can be another reader’s illusion.
Type 5: Formal Allusion Can writing in a particular poetic form be an act of allusion? Sometimes the use of a particular verse form does appear deliberately to mark a connection between texts. So, Spenser’s Faerie Queene includes six incomplete or ‘half ’ lines.⁴³ These are very likely to be formal allusions to the fifty or so half-lines found in Virgil’s Aeneid, and they implicitly identify Spenser’s unfinished epic with Virgil’s. The mid-century Protestant writer who called himself ‘Luke Shepherd’ (fl. 1548) wrote anticlerical satires in helter-skelter short rhyming lines, the form of which clearly alludes to the ‘Skeltonic’ rhymes used in Skelton’s attacks on Cardinal Wolsey in Collyn Clout. That stylistic debt could be called an ‘allusion’, since Shepherd implicitly established a tradition of vernacular anti-clerical satire with Skelton (an eccentric but militantly anti-Protestant priest) at its origin. Poetic form can carry an association not only with an author but also with a particular kind of discourse, and so, on occasion, a shared form can mark a ‘formal allusion’. But this is not always the case. Skelton may have composed The Bowge of Courte in rhyme royal stanzas in order to establish an affinity with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Or he may have used it because by the late fifteenth century rhyme royal was a well-established metrical form for narrative poetry. The authors of The Mirror for Magistrates (which grew in successive editions from 1559 and was one of the most successful volumes of verse from the mid-century) generally adopted rhyme royal stanzas too. This was convenient: it enabled most of the contributions to this collaborative volume of poetic complaints delivered through the personae of dead historical figures to look as though they were part
⁴³ See Richard Danson Brown, ‘ “And Dearest Loue”: Virgilian Half-Lines in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, Proceedings of the Virgil Society, 29 (2018), 49–74.
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135 of a single poetic project. But, again, the shared form brought with it the shadow of allusion: rhyme royal had been used by John Lydgate for The Fall of Princes (1431–8), which was the principal inspiration for the Mirror. By the later sixteenth century, the necessary tendency of a shared poetic form to assimilate one author to another sometimes provoked corresponding processes of differentiation and individuation, where a ‘new’ verse form established its novelty by ‘alluding’ to an earlier one in a way that transformed it. So, the distinctive nine-line stanzas with a final alexandrine used by Spenser in The Faerie Queene ‘allude’ to the ottava rima deployed by Ariosto and Tasso, but, by adding length and complexity to that stanzaic form, Spenser created what became known as the ‘Spenserian stanza’.⁴⁴ The seven-line stanzas of Shakespeare’s Lucrece (1594) might be thought of as ‘alluding’ in a similar way to the six-line stanzas of Venus and Adonis (1593), and this formal ‘allusion’ is one way in which Lucrece marks itself as the ‘graver labour’ promised in the dedication to the earlier poem. But ‘formal’ allusion often raises the recurrent question about the nature of allusion itself: where does a reader draw the boundary between a specific reference and a generic affinity between two writers or works? A poet who writes in blank verse is not necessarily ‘alluding’ to the Earl of Surrey’s translation of Virgil any more than a poet who writes in the sonnet form is necessarily ‘alluding’ to specific poems by Petrarch. But when Surrey wrote sonnets in the ‘Shakespearean’ form (three quatrains and a couplet) was he ‘alluding’ to the slightly different but analogous structure of Wyatt’s sonnets (which tended to divide into octave and sestet, but which by concluding with a couplet might appear to consist of three quatrains and a couplet)? Form is akin to rhythm in that it creates a pattern of expectation, and where there is a pattern of expectation there is an opportunity to change or frustrate it, and hence to point back to an earlier example of the form while modifying it. The very flexibility of the word ‘allusion’ is helpful in these instances: it can mean little more than ‘a nod towards’ or a structural gesture which encourages readers to see a new text in relation to an earlier one. Formal allusion might for this reason seem, like the use of a prior author’s vocabulary, to belong at or over the edges of what might be regarded as an allusion. But boundary instances can be revealing about the core of a concept. The use or modification of an earlier author’s rhyme-scheme or metrical form can do two entirely contradictory things at once: it can call to mind the work of that specific earlier author and at the same time transform that author into a replicable practice. And that, paradoxically, gives formal allusion a distinct family resemblance to other forms of allusion: allusion is a gesture towards a specific text which marks that text as something which is sufficiently well known to be regarded as a common resource. Allusion therefore displays a general tendency to assert authorial agency and distinctiveness at the same time as it establishes an impersonal body of topoi which is independent of particular authors, and which awaits transformation by the arrival of a new instance. This is most apparent in another kind of formal allusion: the allusion as structural indicator. A poem that begins with ‘Lo I the man who’, or ‘Arms and the man I sing’, or ‘I sing the wrath’, or which ends ‘Go little book’, or ‘I have made a monument more durable than . . . ’ is using allusions to Virgil, or Homer, or Ovid, or Chaucer in order to tell readers that it has begun, the direction in which it might go, or that it has ended. ‘Structural’ allusions of this kind allude as much to a depersonalised topos as to a particular author. It is
⁴⁴ For a further discussion of the Spenserian stanza, see also Chapter 27 in this volume.
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136 - not Chaucer, or his follower Lydgate, or Ovid, that is alluded to when a collection of verse concludes with ‘Go little book’, but the convention of having an envoi at the end of poems.⁴⁵ So, when Spenser ends The Shepheardes Calender with ‘Goe lyttle Calender’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, envoi, line 7, Shorter Poems, 156)⁴⁶ he was in some sense alluding to the end of Chaucer’s Troilus, or to Lydgate’s valedictory allusion to Chaucer at the end of The Fall of Princes, or indeed to Skelton’s near-parodic ‘Lenvoy’ to the Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell, ‘Go, litill quaire, / Demene you faire’ (Skelton, Garlande, lines 1533–4, Complete English Poems, 355). But at the point at which an ‘allusion’ becomes a convention it invites, like an established metrical form, authoritative transformation by a new contributor to the series. Hence, when Spenser wrote at the end of the Shepheardes Calender ‘Loe I haue made a Calender for euery yeare, / That steele in strength, and time in durance shall outweare’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, envoi, lines 1–2, Shorter Poems, 156) he was making a ‘formal’ allusion to Chaucer and Lydgate and Skelton and to the convention of the envoi. But he was also asserting a distinctive permanence that owed its distinctiveness to its ability to differentiate itself from a topos, which the ‘allusion’ itself was in part constructing. Implicitly, this formal allusion says to its readers ‘you know, that old topos “Go little book”; but this is not just a “little book”: it is a calendar, which, because it relates each of the months and seasons and those months and seasons recur, will live on for ever’ (as asserted, perhaps, in the format of this envoi which, distinct from its predecessors, consists of twelve twelve-syllable or hexameter lines). In that respect Spenser made a ‘lively expression’ out of the works he imitated, and he did so through the power of allusion to turn prior texts into deindividuated sources of convention, which then could be reinvented in new forms.
Type 6: Self-Allusion The objects of allusion can be an earlier author or an earlier text or a word or a phrase or a rhyme-scheme. Those authors and texts might be in the same language as, or in a different language from, the target text. But poets can also ‘allude’ or refer to their own works. In the wider history of Western poetry, self-allusion has been one of the dominant ways of claiming not just to belong to a canon of prior poetry but to have established a canon and career of one’s own.⁴⁷ Early editions of Virgil’s Aeneid often included a proem which presents Virgil as the author of both the Eclogues and the Georgics, and which gives the poet a career that culminates in epic. That prologue is post-Virgilian, but it was echoed by Spenser at the start of The Faerie Queene: Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,
⁴⁵ On the origin of the topos in Ovid, Tristia, 1.1 and Ex Ponto 4.5, and its development in Martial, Dante, and Petrarch, see J. S. P. Tatlock, ‘The Epilog of Chaucer’s Troilus’, Modern Philology, 18 (1921), 625–59. See Chaucer, Troilus, 5.1786–92, Riverside Chaucer, 584; Lydgate’s ‘Lenvoye’ to The Troy Book, lines 92–107, in Henry Bergen (ed.), Lydgate’s Troy Book (London, 1906–35), 876; and Fall of Princes, 9.3589–3604, in Henry Bergen (ed.), Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 4 vols. (London, 1967), 3.1020. ⁴⁶ Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). ⁴⁷ See Patrick Cheney and Frederick Alfred De Armas (eds), European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto, 2002); and Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993).
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137 Am now enforst a far vnfitte taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds. (Spenser, Faerie Queene, 1.Proem.1, lines 1–4)
The allusion is both to a Virgilian career pattern and to a Virgilian way of beginning an epic, but it is also an allusion to Spenser’s own Shepheardes Calender, which had been published anonymously in 1579. The self-allusion has the effect of gathering up Spenser’s works into a single collected oeuvre. At the other end of the sixteenth century in the Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell, Skelton created a record of his own writings in the form of an illuminated ‘boke of remembrauns’ (Skelton, Garlande, line 1149, Complete English Poems, 345) read by Lady Occupatioun (lines 1170–1260). This is a list of Skelton’s works—including such enticing lost poems as the ‘Ballad of the Mustard Tart’—which ends with a long defence of, and quotation from, his earlier poem called Phyllyp Sparowe (lines 1261–375 in the Garlande repeat lines 1268–382 of Phyllyp Sparowe; see Complete English Poems, 348–50, 103–6). This kind of ‘self-allusion’ was a means by which an author might virtually gather together a volume of collected works in a period before such collections took physical form. But even poets who were not particularly interested in the preservation and wide dissemination of their works might allude to their own earlier writing. Sir Walter Ralegh’s ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’, a work which remained in manuscript until the nineteenth century, and which was conceived as a petition to Queen Elizabeth after a fall from favour (probably in 1592), quotes one of Ralegh’s own earlier poems to illustrate how far he has fallen: Twelve years entire I wasted in this war, Twelve years of my most happy younger days, But I in them, and they now wasted are, Of all which past the sorrow only stays, So wrote I once and my mishap fortold. (Ralegh, ‘Ocean’, lines 120–4, Poems, 52–3)⁴⁸
That points back to the refrain of Ralegh’s earlier poem which begins like this: Like truthless dreams, so are my joys expired, And past return are all my dandled days: My love misled, and fancy quite retired, Of all which past, the sorrow only stays. (Ralegh, ‘Like truthless dreams’, lines 1–4, Poems, 17)
The self-quotation is a marker of time’s passage and time’s damage. The words remain true though they have taken on a new meaning in the context of Ralegh’s imprisonment in the Tower. Ralegh appears not to have been keen to have poems attributed to him in print: in the poetic anthology England’s Helicon (1600), cancel slips ascribing two poems to ‘Ignoto’ were pasted over the original ascriptions to ‘S. W. R.’, presumably at Ralegh’s insistence.⁴⁹
⁴⁸ Sir Walter Ralegh, in Michael Rudick (ed.), The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition (Tempe, AZ, 1999). ⁴⁹ Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), England’s Helicon, 1600, 1614, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1935), 2.31; poems on 1.83–4 and 1.100–1; see also Marcy L. North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago, IL, 2003), 76–7.
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138 - However, self-allusion was one form of authorial canon-formation that Ralegh did allow himself.⁵⁰ The self-allusion in ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’ is akin to a private allusion, reminding his royal mistress that he has written poems in her praise before, has suffered before, and that he is the same poet as the one that she used to favour. But self-allusions are also in part other-allusions, because the act of alluding to one’s own earlier writing can itself be an allusion. When Spenser alluded to his poetic persona of Colin Clout in The Faerie Queene (‘who knowes not Colin Clout?’, Spenser, Faerie Queene, 6.10.16, line 4) or in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), he alluded at the same time to the name adopted by Skelton in his satires on Cardinal Wolsey from the 1520s. Within Colin Clouts Come Home Againe he also alluded to Ralegh’s persona in ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’ as the ‘shepheard of the Ocean’ (Ralegh, ‘Ocean’, line 428, Poems, 64). A selfallusion can simultaneously make a link between one’s own works and link one’s own work to that of others, and bring with it allusions to another writer’s self-allusions. And in this respect once more ‘allusion’ takes us to the edges of paradox, but also close to the heart of sixteenth-century poetics. Allusions can be deliberate acts that establish authorial identities. They can also become intertextual processes so conventional that they dissolve those identities. They can be both of these things at the same time.
Type 7: Parody and Plagiarism Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality—the transposition of one discourse or code into another—implies that discourses can be distinct entities. It suggests that taking a mode of writing from one field of activity and deploying it in another can create clashes of register from which something new may emerge. That, in turn, implies that allusion can be aggressive and transformative as well as playful. An allusion can be scandalously or comically inappropriate, as when, in the undergraduate play The Return from Parnassus from c 1600, the foolish Gullio seeks to adapt snippets of Shakespeare, in what he calls ‘scholastical imitation’, to court his mistress: ‘sick-thoughted Gullio makes amain unto thee, and like a bold-faced suitor ’gins to woo thee’ (Return from Parnassus, lines 983–5, Three Parnassus Plays, 183; compare Venus and Adonis, lines 5–6, Norton Shakespeare, 666).⁵¹ ‘Parody’ was a word just coming into use in the late sixteenth century to mean ‘an aggressive transformation of a prior work which repurposed its words’. A very early usage occurs at the climax of Ben Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour (first performed in 1598, although the word itself is only found in the revised version printed in 1616). Justice Clement has the ‘town gull’ Matthew searched to discover where he has hidden his poetry, and finds in his hose ‘a whole realm, a commonwealth of paper’, including these lines: Unto the boundless ocean of thy face, Runs this poor river charged with streams of eyes. (Jonson, Every Man In, 5.5.23–4, Ben Jonson, 3.400)⁵²
⁵⁰ For more on the problematic status of the Ralegh canon, see Chapter 31 in this volume. ⁵¹ The Return from Parnassus, in J. B. Leishman (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601) (London, 1949). See, further, Julie Maxwell and Kate Louise Rumbold (eds), Shakespeare and Quotation (Cambridge, 2018). ⁵² Ben Jonson, in C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52).
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139 This is a slightly modified version of the opening of Samuel Daniel’s sonnet sequence Delia (1592), and Knowell responds to its discovery with ‘A parody! a parody! with a kind of miraculous gift, to make it absurder than it was’ (Jonson, Every Man In, 5.5.26, Ben Jonson, 3.400). The exposure of this ‘parody’ is another outlying instance of allusion, where the cited text is not assimilated into the body of the new work, but is held up in the form of quotation for ridicule within it. By the later sixteenth century, a dominant kind of ‘intertext’, in the sense of ‘transposition from one discourse to another’, was the use of passages from poems within works of literary criticism. George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589) repeatedly quotes (in italic, as with Jonson’s ‘quotation’ from Daniel) sections from earlier poetry in order to illustrate figures of speech or vices of style, and that makes the quotations into objects of a slightly different kind of attention than they would be when presented as poems within a collection of verse, or in a manuscript miscellany. Jonson, whose annotated copy of Puttenham survives, was willing to perform a similar critical form of ‘intertextuality’ with a well-known poem by a rival in Every Man in His Humour. It is an ‘allusion’ because Jonson’s audience and readers were supposed to recognise it as a reference to Daniel, but it is moving beyond allusion into the realm of what we would call literary criticism. A vocabulary for distinguishing between imitation and plagiarism emerged at almost the same time, and in almost the same milieu, as the term ‘parody’. Plagiarism and imitation had, since at least the period immediately after the Augustan age in Rome, a close and uneasy relationship, and the divorce between the two will probably never be complete.⁵³ When Petrarch imitated Latin poetry he avoided using the same three words in the same order as a Classical author, and the ‘three word rule’ remains today a criterion for marking an extract from another person’s work by quotation marks.⁵⁴ The first known usage of the word ‘plagiary’ (plagiarist) in English occurs in verse satire from the late 1590s: Joseph Hall (1574–1656) in his Virgidemiarum Liber (book of whipping rods) (1598) describes a ‘Plagiary sonnet-wright’ being accused by the spirit of Petrarch of stealing from his writings (Hall, Virgidemiarum, 4.2.84, Poems, 57).⁵⁵ The word ‘plagiary’, itself borrowed ultimately from Martial (see Epigrams, 1.52.9, Epigrams, 1.78–9)⁵⁶, was then rapidly adopted—it is tempting to say plagiarised—by Ben Jonson in his satirical drama Poetaster (1601), in which Tibullus accuses Crispinus of stealing a poem by Horace with ‘’tis Horace’s: hang him, plagiary!’ (Jonson, Poetaster, 4.3.96, Ben Jonson, 4.268). The concept of literary theft was a recurrent concern, in later sixteenth-century verse satire in particular, even if it was not overtly expressed through the language of plagiarism. And that concept potentially cast a negative light on ‘allusion’ in the form of a direct verbal citation by one vernacular author of another, and on forms of ‘imitation’ accompanied by verbal borrowing. So, in John Donne’s Satire 2 (composed in the later 1590s) other writers steal Donne’s words and attempt to ‘digest’ them (as Seneca had recommended in his discussion of imitation in his 84th Epistle) into their own substance: But he is worst, who beggarly doth chaw* Others’ wits’ fruits, and in his ravenous maw
*chew
⁵³ See Scott McGill, Plagiarism in Latin Literature (Cambridge, 2012); Harold Ogden White, Plagiarism and Imitation during the English Renaissance: A Study in Critical Distinctions (Cambridge, 1935); and Paulina Kewes (ed.), Plagiarism in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2003). ⁵⁴ See Burrow, Imitating Authors, 149–50. ⁵⁵ Joseph Hall, in Arnold Davenport (ed.), The Poems of Joseph Hall (Liverpool, 1949). ⁵⁶ Martial, in D. R. Shackleton Bailey (ed. and trans.), Epigrams, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
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140 - Rankly digested, doth those things outspew As his own things, and they are his own: ’tis true. For if one eat my meat, though it be known The meat was mine, th’excrement is his own. (Donne, Satire 2, lines 25–30, Poetical Works, 133)⁵⁷
The plagiaristic poet produces excrement rather than a fully ‘digested’ textual body from the fragments of others’ writing from which he steals. Everard Guilpin (c 1572–1607) had made use of Donne’s manuscript satires for his printed collection Skialetheia (1598). Donne’s Satire 1 imitated Horace’s Satire 1.10,⁵⁸ and Guilpin’s Satire 5 imitated the same poem while also ‘alluding to’, or perhaps ‘stealing from’, Donne’s imitation of it: so Guilpin avoids a bore by saying, ‘I would rather be encoffined in this chest / Amongst these books and papers’ (Guilpin, Satire 5, lines 9–10, Skialetheia, sig. D4v)⁵⁹, while Donne begs that ‘Consorted with these few books, let me lie / In prison, and here be coffined, when I die’ (Donne, Satire 1, lines 3–4, Poetical Works, 129). The printing of a poem under Guilpin’s name which ‘alluded’ to Donne’s manuscript work might appear more like an act of appropriation than citation because the ‘allusion’ was necessarily invisible to readers who had no access to the coterie within which the manuscript circulated. In late sixteenth-century verse satire too, overt citation from a contemporary vernacular author could become an act of literary criticism. So, John Marston’s ‘Reactio’ included in Certain Satires (1598) responded to Joseph Hall’s attacks on contemporary poetry by quoting passages from Hall’s satires and mocking them. This is not an instance of ‘intertextuality’ in the sense of an impersonal network of interconnected texts, but is an aggressively repurposed ‘transition’ from one textual mode to another. Allusion as quotation becomes an act of criticism: Come, somewhat say (but hang me when ’tis done) Worthy of brass, and hoary marble stone; Speak ye attentive swains that heard him never Will not his Pastorals endure for ever? Speak ye, that never heard him aught but rail, Do not his poems bear a glorious sail? Hath not he strongly jostled from above The Eagle from the stairs of friendly Jove’? (Marston, ‘Reactio’, lines 145–52, Poems, 85)⁶⁰
The phrases italicised here, as in the edition of 1598, are direct quotations or deliberate slight misquotations from Hall. It is striking that Marston concentrates his attacks on Hall’s introductory framing of his collection of satires as work at once new and canonical which will, like Horace’s Odes or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, last for ever. Marston did so because he recognised that Hall was attempting to use these ‘formal allusions’ in the way that Spenser
⁵⁷ John Donne, in Sir Herbert Grierson (ed.), Poetical Works (London, 1933). ⁵⁸ See Horace, Satire 1.10, in H. Rushton Fairclough (trans.), Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1926), 114–23. ⁵⁹ Edward Guilpin, Skialetheia. Or, A Shadow of Truth, in Certain Epigrams and Satires (London, 1598). ⁶⁰ John Marston, in Arnold Davenport (ed.), The Poems of John Marston (Liverpool, 1961).
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141 had done, to establish his own claim to be the first English satirist. Marston hit him where it hurts: by quoting Hall’s words he made his rival’s allusive attempt to present himself as the originator of a new genre appear both utterly conventional and ridiculous. Marston could also semi-parodically transform the words of his peers and rivals in ways that are not so evidently critical. His ‘Cynic Satire’ in The Scourge of Villainy (1598) begins, ‘A man, a man, a kingdom for a man’ (Marston, ‘Cynic Satire’, line 1, Poems, 140), alluding simultaneously to the cry of Shakespeare’s Richard III, ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’ (Shakespeare, Richard III, 5.4.7, Norton Shakespeare, 645), and to the cynic philosopher Diogenes, who was supposed to have called out for men and then told those who responded to him that it was men he wanted, not scoundrels.⁶¹ Shakespeare’s line was sufficiently well known amongst Marston’s readers to ensure that the allusion did not look like plagiarism from, or criticism of, Shakespeare, but an attack on men in general. But this allusion to Shakespeare became in Marston’s later works a self-allusion which enabled him to satirise his own incompetent assimilation of earlier texts: so, in What You Will (c 1600), Quadratus (who is probably a parodic self-portrait of Marston himself) quotes ‘A horse, a horse . . . ’ and then says ‘Look thee, I speak play scraps’ (Marston, What You Will, sigs. C1– C1v), and then in Parasitaster (1604) Marston transforms the same line into ‘a fool, a fool, a fool! My coxcomb for a fool!’ (Marston, Parasitaster, sig. H3v).⁶² By the end of the century an ‘allusion’ could enable critical reflection on the source text, or the target text, or on the author who bridges the two.
A History of Sixteenth-Century Poetry? In the very last years of the sixteenth century there was a rash of printed anthologies of poetry by various hands. Some of these included authorial attributions, some turned authors into generic ‘shepherds’, others made outright erroneous attributions. One of the most interesting is England’s Parnassus: or The Choicest Flowers of Our Modern Poets (1600), which used the format of a commonplace book to present quotable passages by named contemporary poets on such topics as ‘Friendship’ and ‘Idleness’. England’s Parnassus gives equal weight to the two aspects of later sixteenth-century textual culture which many readers today might find conceptually divergent to the point of mutual incompatibility. It presents a collection of textual fragments which its readers could imitate or simply incorporate into their own writing, but it also marks the authorship of the majority of those passages, as though even ‘commonplaces’ have owners. So, our friend the translator Sir John Harington is quoted under ‘Death’ as saying ‘Death certain is to all the proverb saith: / Uncertain is to all the hour of death’ (Allot, England’s Parnassus, 51).⁶³ On the same page, a stanza from The Faerie Queene on death is ascribed to ‘Ed. Spencer’. The fact that the Spenser quotation is uttered by a character called Despair, and that Harington is at once alluding to a proverb and translating an Italian text, does not stop the compiler of the anthology from ascribing those texts to named individuals.
⁶¹ See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 6.2.32, in R. D. Hicks (trans.), Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1925), 2.34–5. ⁶² John Marston, What You Will (London, 1607); John Marston, Parasitaster, or the Fawne (London, 1606). ⁶³ Robert Allot (ed.), England’s Parnassus: Or the Choicest Flowers of Our Modern Poets, with Their Poetical Comparisons (London, 1600).
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142 - England’s Parnassus is, like Harington’s Ariosto, a helpful tool for understanding the complexity of sixteenth-century allusive practices. It is tempting to see a miniature history of sixteenth-century poetry in the implied movement from the first of my seven types of allusiveness to the last: allusion turns, in the course of the century, from a friendly meeting of the poets into a method of making parodic reference to the work of an identifiable contemporary. That would frame the history of sixteenth-century poetry as marking the emergence of possessive authorship.⁶⁴ Authors who used allusion principally to unite themselves with a wider historical community of English poets gradually gave way to authors who asserted their proprietorial control over their own works, and who could cite the work of other poets, or even themselves, in order to criticise them. But allusiveness is intrinsically resistant to simplifying narratives. It operates differently in different genres as well as in different periods, and the satires written by poets and playwrights in the late sixteenth century were products of a distinct microclimate rather than simply a sign of a new age. Marston, Jonson, and Hall had printed texts of works by their rivals to hand or had words of plays recently performed on the public stage ringing in their ears or recorded in their commonplace books. They also wrote in a period when printers had developed a range of conventions for marking a direct quotation in a manner akin to a ‘scare quote’ today. All of that encouraged the use of direct quotation of a rival’s work as a satirical tool. Skelton’s manuscript poem ‘Agenst Garnesche’, from around 1514, attacked Sir Christopher Garnesche, who had attacked Skelton in verse, but that poem alludes to what Garnesche had written only through paraphrase rather than direct quotation: ‘Ye rayle, ye ryme, with “Hay, dog, hay!” / Your chorlyshe chauntyng ys all o lay [one poem]’ (Skelton, ‘Agenst Garnesche’, v.5–6, Complete English Poems, 129). The words which provoked Skelton’s retaliation do not survive, and presumably one reason why Skelton did not quote them was that he did not wish to preserve them. Allusion had the potential to become weaponised in the age of print because readers could, in principle, look up printed words from prior texts and identify them with their authors, and criticise not just the words but the person who wrote them, or the person who reused them. The reason why allusion is a good tool with which to think about sixteenth-century poetry is not because its history provides an easy narrative framework within which to arrange that poetry. It is because it pulls in two distinct directions in the way that the poetry of the period typically does. Allusion can identify texts with authors, but it can also depersonalise authorship by turning prior texts into a common body of writing, a topos, or even just a stanza form, on which future poets can draw and which they can transform. That was true at the start of this century as well as at its end, although the balance between these two forces shifted from decade to decade and from text to text. Imitation could function with a similar duplicity: an overt imitation, marked by allusions, could defer to an earlier poet, but an ‘ideational’ imitation might turn an earlier poem or poet into a formal template or generative grammar for a new performance, without any direct reference to that text or to its author. This combination of the depersonalising and the personalising use of allusion and imitation (in their full spectrum of senses) is one of the deepest features of sixteenth-century poetry. What happened in the course of the century was not anything quite as simple as the ‘rise of possessive authorship’; instead, the tools for both depersonalising and identifying authors with their words, rather than simply by their names, were sharpened and intensified.
⁶⁴ See Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge, 2002).
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8 Figuration Hannah Crawforth
Early modern poetic practice and theory is fundamentally figurative. It is figuration—or ‘Ornament Poetical’—that transforms language beyond ‘the ordinary and accustomed’ to ‘delight and allure as well the mind as the ear of the hearers’, writes George Puttenham in The Art of English Poesy (1589) (Puttenham, Art, 221).¹ This division of figuration into its intellectual and aural functions begins a process of taxonomising poetic schemes and tropes that will occupy Puttenham throughout the third book of his study. As we shall see in this chapter, such an undertaking has a long and distinguished history—stretching back to Quintilian and beyond—and an equally fascinating afterlife, continuing right into the twentieth century where critics such as Kenneth Burke make their own attempts to document and categorise poetic tropes and figures. This chapter will situate early modern figurative thought within this longer, ongoing, history. It will do so with reference to the poetry of Fulke Greville—poet, playwright, courtier, friend, and biographer of Philip Sidney—whose poems embody early modern figurative thought in particularly revealing ways. Greville’s poetry is enjoying a long-overdue resurgence after years of relative neglect, with a major new edition of his works currently in progress.² Writing at the beginning of the Second World War, critic Yvor Winters considered Greville both ‘greater’ and ‘more important’ than his famous friend, lamenting the fact his work had been ‘obscured’ by the ‘legend’ of Sidney.³ The modern poet Thom Gunn—who ceaselessly championed Greville’s work in both prose and his own poetry, which is highly influenced by his sixteenth-century predecessor—will provide one guide to Greville’s figurative practice here; the mid-twentieth-century writing of Burke, whose theory of ‘dramatism’ invests poetic figuration with the capacity for action of a potentially political kind, will offer another. Burke’s A Grammar of Motives (1945) is written from ‘a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action’.⁴ The ‘generating principles’ or key terms that underpin Burke’s analysis are dramatic in origin—‘Act, Scene, Agency, Purpose’—and his initial aim, we learn in the Introduction to the volume, was not to write a ‘Grammar’ at all, but rather ‘a theory of comedy’.⁵ Theatre provides Burke with a way of anchoring the word to the world, of understanding figurative theory by putting it on to a virtual stage and seeing how it behaves in front of an imagined audience. As such, his work can be seen as a precursor to the ¹ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ² The Complete Works of Fulke Greville are forthcoming from Oxford University Press; see also Russ Leo, Katrin Röder, and Freya Sierhuis (eds), Fulke Greville and the Culture of the English Renaissance (Oxford, 2018). Their introduction, ‘The Resources of Obscurity: Reappraising the Work of Fulke Greville’, provides a useful overview of the history of his critical reception (1–28). ³ Yvor Winters, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Lyric in England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation. Part I’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 53.5 (1939), 258–72, 259. ⁴ Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, CA, 1945), xxii. ⁵ Burke, Grammar, xv, xvii. Hannah Crawforth, Figuration In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Hannah Crawforth 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0008
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144 - instrumental view of figuration presumed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their influential account of Metaphors We Live By: ‘what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor’, they write.⁶ Puttenham goes on to elaborate his understanding of figuration in terms that also emphasise its instrumental—or dramatic—role in both poetic practice and public life: This ornament then is of two sorts: one to satisfy and delight the ear only by a goodly outward show set upon the matter with words and speeches smoothly and tunably running; another by certain intendments or sense of such words and speeches inwardly working a stir to the mind. That first quality the Greeks called enargeia, of this word argos, because it giveth a glorious luster and light. This latter they called energeia of ergon, because it wrought with a strong and virtuous operation. And figure breedeth them both: some serving to give gloss only to a language, some to give it efficacy by sense, and so by that means some of them serve the ear only, some serve the conceit only and not the ear. There be of them also that serve both turns, as common servitors appointed for the one and the other purpose, which shall be hereafter spoken of in place. (Puttenham, Art, 227)
Puttenham’s unusual distinction here between ‘enargeia’ and the more commonly invoked ‘energeia’ derives from Aristotle, whose account of rhetoric is strongly shaped by drama (and Athenian tragedy in particular).⁷ Accordingly, his definition of poetic ornament emphasises action, efficacy, and—above all—service, in an implicitly political sphere. Figuration is the means by which poetry performs its function in the world (as well as by which it is imbued with aesthetic value, its ‘luster and light’). We can see a similarly instrumental sense of poetic figuration at work in the writing of Greville, whose output included three Senecan closet dramas (never intended for performance) as well as three plays, Mustapha and Alaham (which survive) and Antony and Cleopatra (which does not).⁸ His posthumously published account of The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (1652) emphasises its subject’s ‘Principal Actions’ and figures his life in dramatic terms: But he that will behold these Acts upon their true Stage, let him look on that Stage wherein himself is an Actor, even the state he lives in, and for every part he may perchance find a Player, and for every Line (it may be) an instance of life, beyond the Author’s intention, or application, the vices of former Ages being so like to these of this Age, as it will be easy to find out some affinity, or resemblance between them, which whosoever readeth with this apprehension, will not perchance think the Scenes too large, at least the matter not to be exceeded in account of words. (Greville, Life, 246–7)⁹
Greville urges his reader to view ‘the state he lives in’ as intrinsically theatrical, to see himself as an actor upon a stage and his life embodied in every line. By a concise process of ‘affinity, ⁶ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, IL, 1980), 3. ⁷ On the Ancient Greek origin of the distinction between these terms, see Monica Westin, ‘Aristotle’s Rhetorical Energeia: An Extended Note’, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 20.3 (2017), 252–61. See also La Rue van Hook, ‘Greek Rhetorical Terminology in Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie’, Transactions of the Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 45 (1914), 111–28. See further Chapter 11, note 38; Chapter 21, note 29; and Chapter 31, note 25, in this volume. ⁸ The three plays were all written between about 1595 and 1600. See John Gouws, ‘Greville, Fulke, First Baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court (1554–1628)’, ODNB (2004). ⁹ Fulke Greville, The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (London, 1652).
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145 or resemblance’, Greville’s texts take on powerful agency, substituting for the ‘true Stage’ of life outside of the text. Greville is invoking political allegory here, the ‘application’ of worldly significance to the words on the page (or, imaginatively, stage). This is one of the ways in which his plays are figurative. But Greville’s concept of figuration is more fundamental than this, for it is not only that his drama depends on figurative practice. Figuration is itself inherently dramatic. Greville sees ‘language and thought primarily as modes of action’, to borrow Burke’s phrase again. In this he follows Quintilian, whose version of figuration (like Aristotle’s) insists upon the bodily nature of the act. ‘Figure’ has two senses, Quintilian reminds us: ‘In one, it means any shape in which a thought is expressed—just as our bodies, in whatever pose they are placed, are inevitably in some sort of attitude. In the second sense’, he continues, ‘it means a purposeful deviation in sense or language from the ordinary simple form; the analogy is now with sitting, bending forwards, or looking back’ (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 9.1.10–11, Orator’s Education, 4.14–17).¹⁰ In the Appendix to A Grammar of Motives, Burke looks back to ancient theorists such as Quintilian and Aristotle in order to recast the ‘Four Master Tropes’ of Classical rhetoric in the dramatic terms of his own argument. Notably, Burke registers no apparent unease at the uncomfortable resonances of ‘Master Tropes’, writing in the wake of a global conflict fought to vanquish the abhorrent concept of a ‘Master Race’ (much less do the gender politics of such mastery register as even a flicker here): a surprising moment of disconnect between his theory and practice, of detachment of his words from the world they inhabit. More in keeping with his embodied understanding of figuration—which he calls ‘dramatism’—these tropes are given a ‘different set of names’ in relation to their ‘ “literal” or “realistic” applications’: For metaphor we could substitute perspective; For metonymy we could substitute reduction; For synecdoche we could substitute representation; For irony we could substitute dialectic.¹¹
We can substitute Burke’s words for Greville’s here. Perspective: ‘let him look on that Stage’; reduction: ‘whosoever readeth with this apprehension, will not perchance think the Scenes too large’; representation: ‘for every part he may find a Player, and for every Line (it may be) an instance of life’; dialectic: ‘some affinity, or resemblance’ between ‘former Ages’ and ‘this Age’. Greville’s figurative practice, in other words, shows Burke’s theory in action. As such, it will form the foundation of this chapter, serving as a synecdoche for sixteenth-century poetry as a whole, representing (somewhat ironically) a poetic tradition to which it has often been seen as extraneous, dialectically situated outside of the mainstream. Burke’s recasting of the four master tropes in dramatic terms is also neatly anticipated by Greville’s description of Sidney’s rhetorical skill in persuading others to act: Wherein to incite those that tarried at home to adventure he propounded the hope of a sure, and rich return. To Martial men he opened wide the door of sea and land, for fame and conquest. To the nobly ambitious the far stage of America to win honour in. To the
¹⁰ Quintilian, in Donald A. Russell (ed. and trans.), The Orator’s Education, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2002). ¹¹ Burke, Grammar, 503, italics original.
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146 - Religious divines, besides a new Apostolical calling of the last heathen to the Christian faith, a large field of reducing poor Christians, misled by the Idolatry of Rome, to their mother Primitive Church. To the ingenuously industrious variety of natural richesses, for new mysteries, and manufactures to work upon. To the Merchant, with a simple people, a fertile and unexhausted earth. To the fortune-bound, liberty. To the curious, a fruitful womb of innovation. Generally the word gold was an attractive Adamant, to make men venture that which they have, in hope to grow rich by that which they have not. (Greville, Life, 133)
In Greville’s account, Sidney figures his expedition into being by taking the hopes and ambitions of his differing audiences and substituting them for rhetorical rewards beyond their wildest imaginings: fame, conquest, honour, faith, riches, resources, liberty, innovation.¹² Sidney’s words make it possible for those who tarry at home to imagine themselves into adventure, shifting their perspective as a means metaphorically to move them to act. For each instance Sidney metonymically reduces their desires to the rhetorical formulation he offers in return. Glittering before them all is the ultimate representation of their aspirations, the synecdoche that supersedes everything else: ‘the word gold’. It is this, above all, that will ‘make men venture that which they have, in hope to grow rich by that which they have not’, Greville tells us, setting up an ironic dialectic between their current state and their hopes that will figuratively move these men to action. Substituting Burke’s terms for Greville’s in this way—staging Burke’s thought in Greville’s words, his theory in poetic practice—shows the inherently dramatic understanding of the role of the word in the world that underpins them both. This works partly because—as Greville himself reminds us in the anaphora of its repetitive sentence structure—his version of the speech is itself a rhetorical construct, a dramatic re-staging of Sidney’s poetics. ‘Generally, the word gold was an attractive adamant’, Greville remarks in a brief intrusion of his own voice into the text—‘adamant’ in this instance is the figurative usage of a term originally signifying a hard, diamond-like rock or mineral that stands in for the attribute of attracting attention or affection (with the residual sense of hardness suggesting the new resolve that this dazzling image inspires in Sidney’s audience). Figuration is thus instrumental in Greville’s understanding: an understanding arrived at in dialectical relation with Sidney. Like Burke, Greville sees figurative language as essential, rather than merely decorative or superlative. The twentieth-century theorist’s iteration of the ‘Four Master Tropes’ can allow us figuratively to stage the dramatic rhetorical processes by which Greville enacts this understanding; Burke’s four-part division—or ‘quadratarian approach to topology’, in Michael S. Roth’s phrase—will structure the discussion that follows here.¹³
¹² In Caelica 59, lines 1–4, Greville charts the rewards and perils of transatlantic exploration: ‘Whoever sails near to Bermuda coast, / Goes hard aboard the monarchy of fear, / Where all desires (but life’s desire) are lost, / For wealth and fame put off their glories there’; see in Thom Gunn (ed.), with an Afterword by Bradin Cormack, Selected Poems of Fulke Greville (Chicago, IL, 2009), 87. ¹³ Michael S. Roth is describing Hayden White’s similar ‘fidelity to a fourfold deep structure’, in his Foreword to the reissued edition of White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD, 1973). ‘Some people see things in threes, I just happen to see things in fours’, Roth quotes White as saying (xiv). The several fourfold structures within Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ, 1957) also come to mind.
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Metaphor Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes [and] Tropes (1550)—one of the first vernacular rhetorical manuals in English—defines metaphor as ‘Translatio, translation, that is a word translated from the thing that it properly signifieth, unto an other which may agree with it by a similitude’ (Sherry, Treatise, sig. C4v).¹⁴ Greville’s Caelica 96 is an extraordinarily complex poem that metaphorically charts ‘the true map’ of man’s mortality. Here the ‘similitude’ is particularly poignant because the subject of the poem is itself translation— of the divine into earthly form (Christ becoming flesh) and the human into spiritual form (as Christian redemption imagines eternal life). Here are the last two of its seven stanzas: Which light of life doth all those shadows war Of woe and lust, that dazzle and enthrall, Whereby men’s joys with goodness bounded are, And to remorse his fears transformed all; His six days labour past, and that clear star, Figure of Sabbath’s rest, rais’d by this fall; For God comes not till man be overthrown; Peace is the seed of grace, in dead flesh sown. Flesh but the top, which only whips make go, The steel whose rust is by afflictions worn, The dust which good men from their feet must throw, A living-dead thing, till it be new-born, A phoenix-life, that from self-ruin grows, Or viper rather through her parents torn, A boat, to which the world itself is sea, Wherein the mind sails on her fatal way. (Greville, Caelica 96, lines 41–56, Selected Poems, 114)
As Greville’s editor, Thom Gunn would write when originally introducing his selection of the poet’s verse for his own publisher Faber and Faber in 1968, ‘the ingenuity of the conceits can be seen not as mere trifling but as psychologically functional in the poem’.¹⁵ Greville’s metaphors figure the divine subject of his poem not just in content but also in form; their miraculously transformative powers replicate those of divine love. The ‘light of life’ is gradually translated into ‘that clear star, / Figure of Sabbath’s rest’; and ‘dead flesh’ the soil in which divine ‘Peace’, the ‘seed of grace’, can take root. Greville’s perspective (Burke’s word again) upon this mysterious process grows out of the seeming incompatibility of these different figures. This method is even more apparent in the final stanza quoted above. In compound terms that strikingly anticipate ‘Prayer (I)’, George Herbert’s much better-known sonnet of the following century, the human body is pressed through a series of metaphorical transformations.¹⁶ ‘Flesh’ is at once steel (from which afflictions have worn the rust), dust ¹⁴ Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes [and] Tropes Very Profitable for the Better Understanding of Good Authors (London, 1550). ¹⁵ Gunn (ed.), Selected Poems, 25. ¹⁶ Herbert’s sonnet evokes ‘Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, / The six-days world transposing in an hour’, ‘Prayer (I)’, in Helen Wilcox (ed.), The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge, 2007), 176. Although published posthumously in Greville’s Certain Learned and Elegant Works in 1633 (the same year in which Herbert’s The Temple was also published), the Caelica poems were largely composed in the sixteenth century.
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148 - (thrown from men’s boots), ‘living-dead’, ‘new-born’, ‘A phoenix-life’, a plant growing out of ‘self-ruin’, a ‘viper’ (torn ‘through’, not ‘from’ its parents), and—perhaps most unexpectedly of all—‘A boat’. This latter metaphor—with its implicit movement, ‘Wherein the mind sails on her fatal way’—reminds us of the inherently spatial nature of figuration itself, its capacity to transform and to transport; ‘metaphor’ is ‘the Figure of Transport’, Puttenham states (Puttenham, Art, 263). Yoking together a series of metaphors that seem self-contradictory, Greville creates his poem out of their very disjunctions. His method resembles that advocated by Erasmus in De Copia (1534), where he commends metaphor as a source of ‘variation’, and hence one means for generating rhetorically accomplished writing (Erasmus, Copia, 333).¹⁷ ‘Metaphor contributes to richness of style by ensuring . . . that we never find ourselves with a concept for which there is no word available’, he writes, citing Quintilian. ‘It also provides embellishment, dignity, clarity, sublimity, charm’, a suitably copious list of attributes (Erasmus, Copia, 335). Sherry’s highly Erasmian account of poetic figuration emphasises metaphor’s capacity for this kind of copiousness: ‘among all other virtues of speech, this is the chief. None persuadeth more effectuously, none showeth the thing before our eyes more evidently, none moveth more mightily the affections, none maketh the oration more goodly, pleasant, nor copious’ (Sherry, Treatise, sig. C4v). In terms that sound like nothing so much as a sixteenth-century guide to generating Erasmian poetic invention, Burke likewise identifies metaphor with copiousness. ‘If we are in doubt as to what an object is’, he suggests, ‘we deliberately try to consider it in as many different terms as its nature permits: lifting, smelling, tasting, tapping, holding in different lights, subjecting to different pressures, dividing, matching, contrasting, etc.’¹⁸ By subjecting human flesh itself to such a process, considering it ‘in as many different terms as nature permits’, Greville’s Caelica 96 employs a comparable method to transport Christ’s sacrifice into the realms of human experience, generating a copious series of metaphors that—taken together—imaginatively figure Christian redemption. ‘Metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this’, Burke tells us. Or, in terms of the dramatic metaphors that underpin his whole critical project in A Grammar of Motives, ‘we could say that metaphor tells us something about one character as considered from the point of view of another character. And to consider A from the point of view of B is, of course, to use B as a perspective upon A.’¹⁹ To use Burke as a perspective upon Greville, perhaps, or Greville as a perspective upon Sidney. Rather than dissolving our sense of reality, Burke argues that it is only through a multiplicity of differing perspectives that reality emerges, an understanding that emerges from his sense of the fundamentally dramatic nature of the figurative process. Or—in Burke’s even more startling formulation—‘we could say that characters possess degrees of being in proportion to the variety of perspectives from which they can with justice be perceived’.²⁰ To such a view of Greville’s poem the number of different metaphors needed in order to convey the mystery of this spiritual experience within secular language is in itself significant, as will also be true of Herbert’s later ‘Prayer (I)’. Burke explains that
¹⁷ Desiderius Erasmus, in Craig R. Thompson (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 24, Literary and Educational Writings 2: De copia. De Ratione Studii (Toronto, 1978). ¹⁸ Burke, Grammar, 504. ¹⁹ Burke, Grammar, 503–4, italics original. Burke develops the relationship between metaphor and perspective further in Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley, CA, 1954). ²⁰ Burke, Grammar, 504, italics original.
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149 ‘Plants have “more being” than minerals, animals than plants, man than animals, etc.’.²¹ In Greville’s very different theological landscape we might presume that the divine would sit atop this hierarchy, that spiritual meaning requires an even greater ‘variety of perspectives’ in order to translate it into human understanding.
Metonymy The figure that performs a lot of this work in Greville’s lyric sequence Caelica is that of Cupid, who embodies idealised love in a childlike approximation of human form. As Catherine Bates observes, Cupid serves Greville (and Sidney) as ‘a particularly neat emblem of the paradoxical state of the desiring subject—whose own desire dissolves, mocks, and renders futile the formation of the centred, resolved, whole, uncastrated, masculine, heroic self that is supposedly capable of renouncing love and moving on to “higher things”’.²² As such he is a metonymy for the relation between Greville’s two loves—heavenly and earthly—symbolising the figurative reduction of one to the other. Puttenham gives as his prime instance of metonymy ‘when we call love by the name of Venus, fleshly lust by the name of Cupid, because they were supposed by the ancient poets to be authors and kindlers of love and lust’ (Puttenham, Art, 265). He defines the figure accordingly as ‘where ye take the name of the author for the thing itself, or the thing containing for that which is contained’. This is often a misattribution, hence his name for the figure, ‘the Misnamer’ (Puttenham, Art, 265). Sherry likewise calls metonymy ‘Transnomination, when a word that hath a proper signification of his own, being referred to another thing, hath another’ (Sherry, Treatise, C5v). We can see these theoretical definitions in practice in Caelica 56. The events of the poem have been set into motion by the shooting of Cupid’s dart, which charges with desire ‘All my senses, like beacons’ flame’ (line 1) and ‘set all my thoughts on fire’ (line 4), prompting the poet-lover to ask: Sweet god Cupid where am I, That by pale Diana’s light: Such rich beauties do espy, As harm our senses with delight? Am I borne up to the skies? See where Jove and Venus shine, Showing in her heavenly eyes That desire is divine: Look where lies the Milken Way, Way unto that dainty throne, Where while all the gods would play, Vulcan thinks to dwell alone. (Greville, Caelica 56, lines 13–24, Selected Poems, 72)
Caelica 56 dramatises the metonymic process as the poet-lover wonders aloud at the ‘heavenly eyes’ now embodying divine desire. Cupid is a particularly fitting figure for metonymy in Puttenham’s account because his very existence draws attention to the process ²¹ Burke, Grammar, 504. ²² Catherine Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford, 2013), 175.
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150 - of reduction whereby love’s ideal is figured in human bodily form. This makes him central to Greville’s poetic practice, and later to Gunn’s, especially his last collection Boss Cupid (2000), a sequence heavily influenced by Greville. The poet ‘knows that human relations require actions’, Burke tells us, ‘which are dramatizations, and that the essential medium of drama is the posturing, tonalizing body placed in a material scene’. At the same time, he is always aware that ‘these bodily equivalents are but part of the idiom of expression involved in the act. They are ‘“figures”’.²³ Burke’s model is particularly useful here in helping us to understand the way the dramatising nature of Greville’s poem stages its own figurative processes; the poet-lover places his own erotically charged body into the scene of the poem while never letting the reader lose sight of the symbolic function of this gesture. The poem’s speaker asks, ‘where am I’, seeking to know whether Cupid has in fact transported him (metaphorically) to ‘the skies’, transformed the bodily desire that so painfully overwhelms his senses to the heavenly realm occupied by Jove and Venus. The poem itself transmutes heavenly into earthly love, a process of reduction that its metre, alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, figures in the body of the verse itself. In its constant movement towards transcendence, Caelica 56 embodies the idea ‘That desire is divine’ (a sentiment that Gunn would also strongly endorse). As will be apparent from my reading of this poem, metaphor is, in practice, notoriously hard to distinguish from the workings of metonymy, Burke’s second ‘Master Trope’. ‘For since the four pairs overlap upon one another, we shall be carrying the first pair with us as we proceed’, Burke acknowledges in moving from the first section of his Appendix to the second (punning upon the etymological sense of metaphor itself here in his notion of ‘carrying’ one idea over into the next). He begins his exposition of metonymy by introducing yet another binary that soon proves difficult to sustain: that between poetry and ‘science’ or, more precisely ‘the limits of science’. Again, qualifications quickly follow as Burke is forced to admit the place that philosophy, theology, law, and even the supernatural all have within so-called scientific procedure. ‘Be the world “mind” or “matter,” “both,” or “several,” you will follow the same procedure in striking a match’, he writes, observing—in notably rhetorical terms—that ‘the many inventions to do with the chemistry of a match can be traced back to a source in the very explicit beliefs about substances and motivations of nature—and even of the supernatural’.²⁴ Burke speaks concomitantly of efforts to ‘give us a “science of human relations” after the analogy of the natural sciences’, believing that this ‘becomes necessarily the reduction of some higher or more complex realm of being to the terms of a lower or less complex realm of being’.²⁵ As such, we might note, he takes as his premise a hierarchy of the disciplines directly opposed to that which Philip Sidney argues for in his Defence of Poesy (1595), where he privileges poetry and art above all. Burke’s attempt to reduce figurative practice to his four ‘Master Tropes’ raises other complications too. As Erich Auerbach makes clear in his foundational study of ‘Figura’, ‘[t]he distinction between trope and figure proves to be difficult’, noting that ‘Quintilian himself often hesitates before classifying a turn of speech as one or the other’.²⁶ As Quintilian admits in the Institutio Oratoria, ‘[m]any in fact have held that Figures are Tropes; indeed, whether Tropes derive their name from being formed in a certain way or from their making changes in speech (hence their alternative name “Moves”), it has to be admitted that both these features are seen also in Figures. They have the same use too, for they both add force to the ²³ Burke, Grammar, 506–7, italics original. ²⁴ Burke, Grammar, 505. ²⁵ Burke, Grammar, 505, 506, italics original. ²⁶ Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis, MN, 1959), 26.
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151 subject and provide charm’ (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 9.1.2, Orator’s Education, 4.10–11). Despite the uncertainty of the enterprise, Quintilian—like Burke—persists in his efforts to categorise the rhetorical devices he names, proffering his taxonomical account as a metonymy for the workings of figuration itself. In a linguistic register closer to that of early modern poetry, Burke writes that the use of metonymy is ‘to speak of “the heart” rather than “the emotions”’.²⁷ Let no love-desiring heart, In the stars go seek his fate, Love is only Nature’s art, Wonder hinders love and hate. None can well behold with eyes, But what underneath him lies. (Greville, Caelica 56, lines 49–54, Selected Poems, 73)
Caelica 56 is Greville’s meditation on the relationship between an idealised form of love and its more pragmatic reality. The former belongs to the realm of stars and wonder; the latter is ‘only Nature’s art’ (in a line that elides the commonplace opposition of nature and art that Sidney responds to in his Defence). The figure of the poet has misguidedly followed his ‘love-desiring heart’, seeking the celestial affections of his beloved Cynthia. But—in the words of Greville’s more sexually frank twentieth-century reader, Gunn—these last lines reveal his discovery that love ‘is earthly or it is nothing. [ . . . ] While he was a god in the heaven of his imagination, the real Cynthia was still on earth’, Gunn notes. ‘Moreover, the ideal is “above” man, while sex is “beneath” him, a lower sort of activity. And Cynthia lying there as he stands by her bed is also physically beneath him.’²⁸ ‘Gunn was experimenting with forms of social experience far removed from Greville’s Petrarchan and religious subject matter’, Bradin Cormack writes, and his own poems celebrate ‘social life, gay desire, and the life of the senses’ in a way that may initially appear temperamentally at odds with Caelica 56, Cormack acknowledges. ‘Surely there is a lack of fit between Greville’s “radical Protestant” poetics’, and those of Gunn, writes Cormack.²⁹ As the sceptical quotation marks here suggest, Cormack is keen to challenge this misconception, which, we might note, depends upon metonymically reducing Greville to a figure for a particular kind of theology, and of poetry.³⁰ And Gunn immediately grasps the metonymic nature of Greville’s poem. Heavenly and earthly desire, divine and human love, are on a relative scale for Greville; the latter may be ‘beneath’ the former, but they are not fundamentally opposed. Burke’s term ‘reduction’ is key here, his proposed substitute for metonymy, the basic ‘strategy’ of which is ‘to convey some incorporeal or intangible state in terms of the corporeal or tangible’.³¹ Caelica 56 depends on the poet’s ability to reduce the one to the other. Describing his ‘Four Master Tropes’, Burke emphasises that his interest lies ‘not with their purely figurative usage’ but in ‘their rôle in the discovery and description of “the truth”’.³² It is a particular kind of ‘truth’ that interests both Greville and Gunn, Cormack reminds us: ‘by far the most important “reality” in the sequence—the thing described in the
²⁷ Burke, Grammar, 506. ²⁸ Gunn (ed.), Selected Poems, 28. ²⁹ Cormack, ‘Afterword’, in Gunn (ed.), Selected Poems, 162. ³⁰ Catherine Bates argues that desire in Caelica in fact takes a strongly homosocial, perhaps homosexual, form. See Masculinity and the Hunt, 188–204. ³¹ Burke, Grammar, 506. ³² Burke, Grammar, 503.
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152 - poems such that the accuracy of the description will be the measure of their achievement— is love’. More specifically, Cormack writes, ‘Caelica achieves its effects’, in Gunn’s view, ‘by keeping the two loves—earthly and divine—on a single continuum’.³³ Or, we might add, by figuring earthly love as a metonymic reduction of divine love.
Synecdoche If Caelica 56 alludes to the capacity for the individual human body to contain the entire cosmos, a universe of spiritual meaning, this idea is more fully elaborated in Greville’s verse Treatise of Human Learning (1633). It begins with a much more conventional expression of this topos: The Mind of Man is this world’s true dimension; And Knowledge is the measure of the mind: And as the mind, in her vast comprehension Contains more worlds than all the world can find: So Knowledge doth itself far more extend, Than all the minds of Men can comprehend. (Greville, Treatise, lines 1–6, Certain Learned and Elegant Works, 23)³⁴
Greville’s poem turns upon the familiar early modern figure of the microcosm, by which the ‘Mind of Man’ becomes a synecdoche representing the entire world, ‘[f]or by part we are enforced to understand the whole; by the whole, part; by many things, one thing; by one, many; by a thing precedent, a thing consequent; and generally one thing out of another by manner of contrariety to the word which is spoken’, as Puttenham defines the figure (Puttenham, Art, 270). Greville makes the singularity of ‘the mind’ stand in for the multiplicity of possible worlds here, and ‘Knowledge’ itself represents the many ‘minds of Men’ in all their varying states of comprehension. ‘One could thus look through the remotest astronomical distances to the “truth within” ’, Burke writes, ‘or could look within to learn the “truth in the universe without”’.³⁵ He cites this fashionable sixteenth-century trope as the ‘perfect paradigm or prototype’ of the ‘noblest synecdoche’, namely the ‘identity of “microcosm” and “macrocosm”’, by which ‘the individual is treated as the replica of the universe, and vice versa’.³⁶ The close resemblance between synecdoche and the previous figure, metonymy, will immediately be apparent. Indeed, the slipperiness of the term has long been attested: Quintilian tells us, ‘[t]here is no great gap between Synecdoche and Metonymy’ (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 8.6.23, Orator’s Education, 3.436–7). Puttenham lists ‘Synecdoche, or the Figure of Quick Conceit’, twice in the Art—as a ‘sensable’ figure that can consist ‘first in single words’, and again as one that can operate ‘in whole clauses or speeches’ (Puttenham, Art, 262, 270).³⁷ As such, it resembles both the single-word figures, metaphor and ³³ Cormack, ‘Afterword’, 166. ³⁴ Fulke Greville, A Treatise of Human Learning, in Certain Learned and Elegant Works (London, 1633). ³⁵ Burke, Grammar, 508. ³⁶ Burke, Grammar, 508. ³⁷ As Puttenham’s editors note here (Art, 262n), the spelling ‘sensable’ specifies a figure that consists in an alteration to the sense of a word, and is not to be confused with ‘sensible’, meaning something that is perceptible by the senses, evident (Puttenham draws out the distinction between the two in Book 3, chapter 10, at Art, 244). Puttenham’s treatment of synecdoche in its more sustained form appears at Art, 279.
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153 metonymy, and Burke’s fourth ‘Master Trope’, irony, which spans whole clauses or speeches. The classification of ‘Synecdoche’ is debatable for Quintilian, too. Although he treats it as a trope in the eighth book of the Institutio Oratoria, there is a form of synecdoche that works by subtraction, of which he says: ‘I prefer to think of this as a Figure, and will therefore come back to it in that connection’ (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 8.6.22, Orator’s Education, 3.436–7).³⁸ Burke also acknowledges the difficulty in keeping his terms apart: ‘as reduction (metonymy) overlaps upon metaphor (perspective) so likewise it overlaps upon synecdoche (representation)’.³⁹ n Caelica 56, the body of the poet in figurative motion between the divine and earthly realms, imagined as treading a starry path along the ‘Milken Way’, pre-empts Burke’s suggestion that metonymy can be imagined as a ‘road’ leading ‘in only one direction’. Synecdoche, which might look confusingly similar to an outside observer, is ‘like a road’ that ‘extends in either direction’.⁴⁰ This element of definitional instability—or what Burke calls ‘convertibility’—turns out to be inherent to synecdoche itself; as a two-way street, this figure consists for him in a series of ‘conversions’ in which terms can be exchanged for one another: ‘part for the whole, whole for the part, container for the contained, sign for the thing signified, material for the thing made (which brings us nearer to metonymy), cause for effect, effect for cause, genus for species, species for genus, etc.’.⁴¹ This ‘convertibility’ makes synecdoche capable of acts of representation that can have political, as well as poetic, consequences. As Burke reminds us, ‘there are many disagreements within a society as to what part should represent the whole and how this representation should be accomplished’, in politics (and in poetry).⁴² Puttenham cites both erotic and explicitly political instances of synecdoche at work. The lover asking ‘ “Mistress, will ye give me leave to unlace your petticoat,” meaning (perchance) the other thing that might follow such unlacing’, is represented in his account alongside the starving population of Antwerp (‘the town of Antwerp were famished’), or ‘the French king’ who ‘was overthrown at St. Quentin’ (by which ‘I am enforced to think that it was not the king himself in person, but the Constable of France with the French king’s power’, Puttenham notes) (Puttenham, Art, 279–80). Greville also connects debates about the different forms of political representation with the act of artistic representation in erotic verse. Caelica 30 makes an unexpected analogy between the demise of representational politics in Ancient Rome and the falseness of ‘Sweet Myra’: ‘Worthiness no more was of election cause, / Authority her owners did not know’, in the former, just as in the latter ‘Worthiness no more was of affection cause, / Desire did many heads like monsters show’ (Greville, Caelica 30, lines 7–8, 15–16, Selected Poems, 52, 53). The beloved has become monstrous through infidelity, and Greville’s love poem has betrayed the commonly accepted limits of its own form and been subsumed by ancient political debates. There is awkwardness in the conceit that comes from a mismatch in scale: politics at once too big to be reduced to an analogy for love, and at the same time not big enough. Greville’s poem figures political representation in poetic representation—and vice versa—and his reader is made to ask whether we are in fact seeing reduction at work. As Susanne Wofford reminds us, political ideology can itself be seen in poetic terms. ‘Ideology is by definition a figurative, substitutive system—it offers one meaning as a veil or cover for another—which resembles and uses the system of tropes’, she writes in her study
³⁸ He returns to this at Institutio Oratoria, 9.358, Orator’s Education, 4.134–5. ³⁹ Burke, Grammar, 507. ⁴⁰ Burke, Grammar, 509. ⁴¹ Burke, Grammar, 507–8. ⁴² Burke, Grammar, 508.
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154 - of the work of epic, work that is inextricably ‘both an aesthetic and an ideological kind’.⁴³ Greville’s Caelica 24 likewise asks how the visual arts can represent—in a synecdochic sense—the realities of lived experience in the fallen world, figuring the aesthetic and the ideological in terms of one another, both subject to the limitations of the human condition: Painting, the eloquence of dumb conceit, When it would figure forth confused passion, Having no tables for the world’s receipt, With few parts of a few, doth many fashion. Who then would figure worthiness disgraced, Nature and wit imprisoned, or sterved, Kindness a scorn, and courtesy defaced, If he do well paint want, hath well deserved. But who, his art in worlds of woe, would prove, Let him, within his heart but cipher love. (Greville, Caelica 24, lines 1–10, Selected Poems, 48)
Painting—itself internally split between ‘eloquence’ and being struck ‘dumb’—has only fragments with which to evoke whole worlds of ‘confused passion’. Its method is, therefore, a necessarily representative one: ‘With few parts of a few, doth many fashion’. Even a ‘great portrait painter’ can only hope to evoke his subject partially, by capturing certain suggestive synecdochic details. Or, as Burke has it, ‘artistic representation is synecdochic, in that certain relations within the medium “stand for” corresponding relations outside it’.⁴⁴ Indeed, Greville seems to suggest, the impossibility of fully capturing any living being through one’s ‘art’ might in fact have ideological value, a morally redemptive power; there are many aspects of human kind that are unworthy, cruel, lack wit and courtesy. These are failings that art cannot redeem, only love.
Irony As Greville’s sequence progresses, the limitations of art and the redemptive powers of love become more explicitly figured in terms of Christian theology and divine salvation. Caelica 102 tells the story of the Fall with extraordinary concision, compressing into thirteen sestets not just the essentials of the biblical narrative but also admitting multiple possible viewpoints upon the events depicted (in keeping with Burke’s definition of irony). The serpent, Sin, by showing human lust Visions and dreams enticed men to do Follies, in which exceed his God he must, And know more than he was created to, A charm which made the ugly sin seem good, And is by fall’n spirits only understood. (Greville, Caelica 102, lines 1–6, Selected Poems, 131)
⁴³ Susanne Lindgren Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford, CA, 1992), 3, 1. ⁴⁴ Burke, Grammar, 508.
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155 From this, the very first stanza, Greville’s poem captures the instability of temporal and moral perspectives that John Milton’s Paradise Lost takes twelve books to flesh out. The serpent’s ‘villainy’ and human ‘Folly’ are here, but the space between them collapses in that second line, where it is not clear whether the ‘Visions and dreams’ stem from Satan or man. Agency is uncertain here: Greville does not allow us the luxury of a single perspective, of straightforwardly blaming Satan for the actions that he (or perhaps their own ‘Visions and dreams’) ‘enticed men to do’. Is it Satan or man who must ‘exceed his God’? Who must ‘know more than he was created to’? The ambiguities of Greville’s verse maintain the ironic possibility of both being the case. The couplet likewise collapses temporal perspectives into one another: we look back, with Greville, to the moment in which Satan’s ‘charm which made the ugly sin seem good’, but at the same time forward to our own later fallenness, to the yet-undreamed consequences of the Fall that will permit the magnitude of this single action to be ‘understood’. If both the strength and the weakness of the figure of synecdoche lies in the incomplete nature of its representation, then irony is characterised—for better or worse—by its attempt at comprehensiveness, at total integration of disparate aspects of a subject that lie in dialectical relation to one another. It belongs to the practice of speaking ‘in derision or mockery’, Puttenham explains, which manifests in ‘many ways: as sometime in sport, sometime in earnest, and privily, and apertly, and pleasantly, and bitterly’, a multiplicity of registers that befits the tendency of irony to conjoin disparate ideas together under an appearance of unity (Puttenham, Art, 273). Puttenham considers irony a form of dissembling—‘I mean speak otherwise then we think’—and as such is closely related to allegory, the use of ‘covert and dark terms’ (Puttenham, Art, 271). ‘To be short, every speech wrested from his own natural signification to another not altogether so natural is a kind of dissimulation, because the words bear contrary countenance to the intent’, he writes (Puttenham, Art, 271). Sherry’s account likewise emphasises the disparity underlying ironic speech, noting the conflict between ‘words’ and their ‘pronunciation, or by the behaviour of the person, or by the nature of the thing’, a definition that pre-empts Burke’s dramatism in its emphasis on the speaker’s delivery, as well as the words themselves (Sherry, Treatise, sigs. C7–C7v). This aspect of irony makes it particularly inclined towards scepticism, Hayden White argues, in an account that treats irony as central to the genre of satire. ‘The trope of Irony’, he writes, ‘provides a linguistic paradigm of a mode of thought which is radically self-critical with respect not only to a given characterisation of the world of experience but also to the very effort to capture adequately the truth of things in language.’⁴⁵ Citing Burke’s dramatism, which highlights the dialectical function of irony, White observes that this trope ‘is deployed in the self-conscious awareness of the possible misuse of figurative language’ and hence shows how it ‘folds back upon itself and brings its own potentialities for distorting perception under question’.⁴⁶ ‘A charm that made the ugly sin seem good’, as Greville puts it in his description of Satan’s insinuating speech. There are political implications to irony as a poetic mode. White terms the figure ‘transideological’, noting that it ‘can be used tactically for defense of either Liberal or Conservative positions’, an argument that draws out the instrumentality of figuration as
⁴⁵ White, Metahistory, 37.
⁴⁶ White, Metahistory, 37.
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156 - elaborated by Burke (and as employed by Greville).⁴⁷ Burke, who repeatedly invokes political analogies as a means for explaining how figuration works, sees irony as having a democratising force in that its insistence upon multiple points of view refuses to privilege the ‘Superiority’ of any one perspective. In a rhetorical move that echoes Greville’s silent shifting of registers between the erotic, the political, and the religious in his verse, Burke detects irony in what he perceives as a non-hierarchical basis to the doctrine of original sin: ‘Folly and villainy are integral motives, necessary to wisdom or virtue’, he writes.⁴⁸ ‘Irony arises when one tries, by the interaction of terms upon one another, to produce a development which uses all the terms’, Burke writes. ‘Hence, from the standpoint of this total form . . . none of the participating “sub-perspectives” can be treated as either precisely right or precisely wrong. They are all voices, or personalities, or positions, integrally affecting one another.’⁴⁹ The resulting cacophony drowns out any single point of view (or ‘perspective’), generating a fragmentation of a different sort from that offered by synecdoche. Indeed, the greatest risk for irony is any ‘tendency towards the simplification of literalness’, in which a single ‘character’ (remember the dramatic origins of Burke’s critical idiom) ‘may be taken as the summarizing vessel, or synecdochic representative, or the development of the whole’. Instead, a fundamental ‘duality of rôle’ must be kept in sight at all times, for the practising ironist.⁵⁰ Throughout Caelica 102, Greville ironically offers multiple perspectives in this way while refusing to afford any point of view primacy, resisting any totalising narrative. Caelica 102 is one of a series of poems concerned with the workings of theology in which Caelica culminates. This gesture has been read as bringing a kind of closure, as Greville supposedly shows how bodily love is transcended by that of the divine. But such orthodoxy belies the complexity of Greville’s unique point of view: ‘Irony arises when one tries, by the interaction of terms upon one another, to produce a development which uses all the terms’, Burke reminds us. Caelica resists such developmental narratives. Gunn, whose own poetry so poignantly captures the pleasures of sex (and later the pain brought about by the AIDS epidemic spread through sexual contact), is alive to the tensions between the erotic and the divine in Greville’s sequence, as we have already seen. His somewhat unlikely sense of affinity with Greville also makes him unusually attuned to the heterodoxy of Caelica’s theology (or rather theologies, perhaps: the singular implies a consistency antithetical to the poems themselves). ‘For in his contrary grappling with Greville as a writer whose ideas he does not fully share but whose poems are such as to make him want to know them from the inside, Gunn allows you to hear where the ideas, too, may be more or differently complex than they at first appear’, writes Cormack.⁵¹ In Gunn’s reading, 102 explicitly ‘considers what would happen if there were no God’: But grant that there was no eternity, That life were all, and pleasure life of it, In sin’s excess there yet confusions be, Which spoil his peace, and passionate his wit, Making his nature less, his reason thrall, To tyranny of vice unnatural. (Greville, Caelica 102, lines 13–18, Selected Poems, 131) ⁴⁷ White, Metahistory, 38, italics original. ⁴⁹ Burke, Grammar, 512, italics original. ⁵¹ Cormack, ‘Afterword’, 162–3.
⁴⁸ Burke, Grammar, 515. ⁵⁰ Burke, Grammar, 516.
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157 Gunn cites these lines as evidence of Greville’s commitment to the ‘mutability of all Nature’, to life’s refusal to settle into any single, developmental trajectory; ‘as part of fallen Nature, we contain our own confusions’, he writes in response to Caelica 102.⁵² We might extend this reading further still in the light of Burke’s insights about the workings of the figure that embodies such confusion or mutability—irony. Greville’s poem radically destabilises the reader’s sense of perspective at every point. Premised upon a hypothetical (‘grant that’), it proceeds to solicit a concession (‘That life were all, and pleasure life of it’) only in order to overthrow the reader’s sense of what this might mean; a life wholly devoted to pleasure becomes, before the stanza’s end, ‘tyranny of vice unnatural’. The subject of Greville’s lines is elusive: ‘his’ here refers back to the generic ‘man’ of the previous stanza, but seems to momentarily animate ‘sin’ too with a hint of personification. Words likewise shift their expected meanings (‘passionate’ seems to take on a verbal case here). And poetic registers collide in the political image of those last lines, in ‘thrall’ to ‘tyranny’. Greville’s poem is suspended in a dialectic between these different points of view, refusing to reconcile its own aesthetic and ideological dualities.
Conclusion The insights of Burke, Gunn, and others can allow us to see the figurative practice of Greville’s sixteenth-century poetics afresh. There is irony here, of course, in the disparity of these different perspectives, and we must be alert to the fact that anachronism is one possible manifestation of this. There is further irony (of a more traditional kind) in this chapter having focused upon Greville as a representative figure, or synecdoche, for the poetry of the period. Greville is almost universally acknowledged—from his own lifetime onwards—to be a man apart, an idiosyncratic poet, thinker, and individual, whose writing is more often remarked upon for its departure from, rather than adherence to, the norms of his own time. One of the most influential accounts of Greville’s work was written in 1939, by Gunn’s teacher, Yvor Winters. He works (somewhat successfully) to recuperate Greville’s poetry but does so by opposing it to the elaborately wrought figurative practices of the ‘Petrarchan’ school, in which he places Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and that leads to the metaphysical play of Donne. Instead, Greville writes in the ‘plain’ style, Winters argues, adhering to a poetics which he celebrates for its supposed truthfulness and resistance to the superficial attractions of ‘rhetoric of its own sake’.⁵³ Winters’ (welcome) efforts to reassess Greville’s verse are contingent upon an oppositional rhetoric that emphasises what is both non-representative and non-figurative in his work. Reading Greville with Burke has the reverse effect, revealing how a dramatic understanding of Greville’s figurative practice can instead reaffirm the central place his work holds within sixteenth-century poetics. Writing at the beginning of the Second World War, Winters’ clarity of conviction contrasts movingly with Burke’s more ‘evanescent moment’ at the end of the conflict; ‘not only does the dividing line between the figurative and literal usages shift’, he writes in 1945, but also ‘the four tropes shade into one another’.⁵⁴ Burke’s version of irony likewise allows for—even depends upon—a multiplicity of voices. We should not seek to understand early modern figurative practices simply as the manifestation of a few highly influential poetic or theoretical texts. Placing Greville back alongside his lifelong friend Sidney (and, ⁵² Gunn (ed.), Selected Poems, 31. ⁵⁴ Burke, Grammar, 503.
⁵³ Winters, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Lyric’, 259, 262.
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158 - for that matter, Greville alongside his modern imitator Gunn), can help re-establish figuration at the centre of sixteenth-century poetry and poetics. Burke, whose ‘dramatism’ insists upon the embodied life of his ‘Four Master Tropes’, reminds us of the physicality of this practice, a physicality to which Greville is no less committed than his poetic successor Gunn. Sixteenth-century poets found this understanding in Quintilian’s idea of the poetic ‘figure’ as a bodily act. We can, with Burke’s assistance, find it in their poetry, especially that of Fulke Greville.
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9 Career Daniel Juan Gil
In England, the sixteenth century witnessed the emergence of a new class of self-consciously ambitious poets who understood poetry to be an important calling and who hoped to secure fame and even immortality through their poetic work. For these poets, being a poet was a ‘career’, a social role that defined an important part of their social identity and life trajectory. This is a change from the then more common view that writing poetry was not a social role but an escape from social roles, a form of play or relaxation. Throughout the sixteenth century, writing poetry was often attacked on the grounds that it represented a wilful neglect of the responsibilities of—and the kinds of status that follow from—actual social roles within aristocratic kinship structures or in the economic spheres of trade and commerce, law, medicine, or within the growing state bureaucracy. For people to imagine writing poetry as a career it was first necessary for writing serious poetry to seem like a social role in its own right, one that could confer authority, prestige, status, and social recognition. Richard Helgerson proposed the most influential model for understanding the new phenomenon of ‘career poets’ in Self-Crowned Laureates.¹ Helgerson contrasted poets who presented themselves as amateurs or dilettantes or who framed their poetry as recreational to a new class of self-consciously ambitious writers who wanted social recognition as poets. Helgerson uses the word ‘laureate’ for this new kind of status, a word he derives from the Italian poets Dante and Petrarch, both of whom were officially recognised as ‘poet laureates’ in Italy. For Helgerson, the English ‘laureate’ poets had a high opinion of the importance of poetry and they sought recognition for themselves as poets from the state, from schools and universities, and from readers. Helgerson’s primary example of the ‘amateur’ self-presentation is Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86), whose substantial literary ambitions were nevertheless always couched in claims of writing merely for his own pleasure and the pleasure of others in his aristocratic and family circles. For Helgerson, the new laureate model of poetry emerges with Edmund Spenser, whose pastoral poem, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), announces him as England’s ‘New Poet’, heir to Geoffrey Chaucer and imitator of the great Roman epic poet Virgil. Spenser’s self-conscious imitation of Virgil is not incidental to how Helgerson understands the emergence of the new category of the ‘laureate’ or career poet. For Helgerson, poets like Spenser actively constructed a new role for themselves as poets by emulating the Roman poet, including the progression of genres that Virgil worked through in his career. Virgil began his career writing the Eclogues, pastoral poems set in an idyllic, pastoral landscape, and then progressed to his Georgics, which evinced a greater interest in the real world, including the rhythms of farming, before moving on to the great Roman epic, the Aeneid, which celebrated the founding of Rome and asserted the great historical destiny of Rome under Caesar Augustus. As William Kennedy argues, the earlier Italian poets Dante ¹ See Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA, 1983). Daniel Juan Gil, Career In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Daniel Juan Gil 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0009
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160 - and Petrarch were the first actively to present themselves as following the Virgilian career track, culminating with Petrarch’s great unfinished epic the Africa, which retells the story of the Punic wars.² Helgerson argues that Spenser does the same, beginning his career with the pastoral poetry represented by The Shepheardes Calender, which includes an editorial apparatus that announces his ambition to go on to write a great epic for England along the lines of Virgil’s Aeneid. Spenser’s promise to move on to writing a great epic (and thus to consummate the Virgilian career track) was fulfilled in 1590 with the publication of The Faerie Queene, Books 1–3. By setting himself within the career pattern defined by Virgil, Helgerson argues, Spenser defined a new status for the English poet as a social role in its own right, one that demands recognition from readers and even from the state, and one that promises to confer immortality after death. Though Helgerson’s model has been very influential, critics have raised a variety of objections.³ First, critics have asked how writers who sought to earn money through their writing, including playwrights, fit into Helgerson’s model. Helgerson himself contrasted the laureate poets with playwrights and other ‘professional’ writers who make their living with their pens. For Helgerson, these professional writers do not have the same desire to be recognised for their literary work as the laureates. But Patrick Cheney has questioned this assumption and has developed the notion of the ‘literary playwright’, arguing that at least some playwrights aimed for the same kind of literary recognition that Helgerson’s laureates did, even if they operated outside the Virgilian model.⁴ Secondly, critics have wondered whether Helgerson overemphasised the importance of Virgil at the expense of other Classical models of a literary career, including the careers of Ovid and Augustine.⁵ Thirdly, critics have wondered how substantially earlier poets who also defined themselves as ‘laureate’ poets, such as John Skelton, might challenge the model. Fourthly, critics have wondered whether Helgerson’s model is gendered in unacknowledged ways and have raised the question of how women writers like Mary Sidney Herbert, Isabella Whitney, Mary Wroth, and Amelia Lanyer might fit into it.⁶ In this chapter I address objections to Helgerson’s model by developing a more sociological understanding of the emergence of literary ‘career’ authors who aim for recognition as poets. I argue that Helgerson’s model overstates the simple ability of a poet like Spenser to assert a new careerist model based on imitating Virgil. The salient point about laureate or career poets is not just that they asserted that poetry is a social role but that at least some readers and social institutions were willing to endorse this view. I will argue that Helgerson’s argument underplays the question of what social institutions and forces make it possible for poetry to be legible as a social role in its own right, one that can plausibly confer status and recognition in the here and now as well as after the death of the author. I argue that posing the question in this sociological way makes it possible better to understand the ² See William J. Kennedy, ‘Versions of a Career: Petrarch and His Renaissance Commentators’, in Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. de Armas (eds), European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto, 2002), 146–64. ³ Important developments and modifications of Helgerson’s model include Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight (Toronto, 1993); and Richard A. McCabe, ‘Authorial Self-Presentation’, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 2010), 462–82, both of which raise some of the issues I describe below. ⁴ Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge, 2008). ⁵ See Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto, 1997); and Daniel D. Moss, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England (Toronto, 2014). ⁶ See Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1993); and Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (Oxford, 1999).
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161 phenomenon of the ‘literary playwright’ that Cheney has identified and also how women writers could present themselves as career poets. The key change that makes possible the new form of literary ambition first represented by Spenser is the consolidation of a new social function for serious English literature, namely to confer upon readers a distinctive cultural status based on their taste and cultural refinement, what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘cultural capital’.⁷ This cultural capital is based on readers’ ability to consume a kind of super-literary language which is quite distinct from normal, everyday language and which confers a form of status that supplements other more traditional forms such as being an aristocrat or possessing wealth or being of the masculine gender.⁸ As the emerging institution of English literature takes on the social function of conferring cultural capital, it is differentiated from other forms of cultural production and reception, such as those oriented towards self-help, religious improvement, public information, and mass entertainment, including theatre (with the important caveat that even here some writers push in the direction of allowing at least some consumers to use plays to generate cultural capital). The institution of English literature comes to be defined by an internal impulse towards formal innovation designed to maintain a sociologically significant border between itself and other forms of writing and speech. As such, the English literary tradition is increasingly viewed as a coherent, autonomous whole constituted by poets who undertake formal literary innovations within the tradition defined by their predecessors.⁹ This autonomous institution of English literature provides the social-institutional support that allows poets like Spenser successfully to assert the laureate or career status that Helgerson recognised and theorised. The rise of English poetry as a social institution, defined by the social function of conferring cultural capital, is one of the effects of the complex cultural movement of Renaissance humanism. Humanism was first and foremost a scholarly research programme that sought to recover and rehabilitate the culture of the Classical world and to disseminate Classical culture through education. Humanists were concerned to reform and revalue the educational apparatus by placing Classical culture at its core, and they produced pedagogical treatises and founded schools that aimed to teach mastery of Classical culture. Humanists framed mastery of Classical culture as a form of status alongside the more traditional forms. Gradually, the special status of Classical culture was broadened to include vernacular culture, but only a self-consciously sophisticated and highly wrought vernacular culture.¹⁰ Such a culture first emerged at the court of Henry VIII where English poetry was first used as a way of supplementing an aristocratic or courtly social standing. The importance of the Henrician court as a distinctive origin for elite and socially distinctive poetry in England was recognised a few decades into the Elizabethan era. Referring to the key Henrician poets, Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–47), for example, George Puttenham (1529–90) writes that:
⁷ See Pierre Bourdieu, in Richard Nice (trans.), Distinction (Cambridge, MA, 1984). ⁸ See Robert Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (Cambridge, 2000). ⁹ In making this argument, I am drawing on John Guillory’s influential account of the rise of a literary canon and its connection to school syllabi, in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, IL, 1993). ¹⁰ See Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (Philadelphia, PA, 2014), which argues that a self-consciously literary language arises out of humanist rhetoric that aims to appeal to a community but recognises that the most striking appeals are often based on departing from the speech conventions of that community. See also Corey McEleney, Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility (New York, 2017).
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162 - in the latter end of the same king’s reign sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry, Earl of Surrey were the two chieftains, who having travelled into Italy . . . they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style. (Puttenham, Art, 210)¹¹
The notion that these writers were ‘courtly makers’ captures their complex position between being, on the one hand, ‘courtly’—that is to say fundamentally members of a very small aristocratic elite who depended for their status on titles, lands, family ties, and access to the king—and, on the other hand, writers or poets (what Puttenham, following Aristotle, calls ‘makers’). Noting the connection between Wyatt and Surrey’s status as ‘makers’ and a new sophistication in language that their poetry demonstrated, Puttenham emphasised the special, ‘polished’ language they developed in opposition to the ‘rude and homely’ language that poets before them had used, and for this he calls them ‘the first reformers’ of English literary style. Puttenham transposes the idea of ‘reformation’ from the religious realm to the realm of art in language and he recognises an important connection between these selfconsciously literary authors and a more polished or sophisticated kind of English language driven forward by their work. Puttenham recognises that these courtly makers represent the very beginnings of the idea that English poetry can confer a status based on being able to produce and appreciate ‘polished’ writing as opposed to ‘vulgar’ forms of writing. It is this structural distinction that underpins the later idea of the ‘laureate poet’. Wyatt was a courtier and ambassador at the court of Henry VIII. His exposure to the poetry of Italy and Spain led him to translate poetry by European poets, especially Petrarch’s sonnets, into English. Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch’s sonnets define a new ‘content’ for English poetry: namely, psychological studies of desire, especially blocked desire, typically from a masculine point of view. But, more importantly, they define an artful, refined, linguistically self-conscious literariness. For Wyatt’s first readers, this new verbal style and sound was as captivating as the new content of his sonnets. Indeed, many of Wyatt’s sonnets align a story of wooing or courting a beloved who does not return the male speaker’s love with an implicit story of struggling to refine and polish the language that naturally comes out of the speaker’s mouth into the somewhat unnatural, artificial language of poetry. Thus, in ‘The long love that in my thought doth harbour’, Wyatt tells the story of a man unhappily pursuing a woman who demands a frustrating degree of erotic self-control and is not pleased with his too overt physical overtures. When the speaker expresses his desire, the lady takes displeasure, for She that me learneth to love and to suffer, And will that my trust and lust’s negligence Be reined by reason, shame, and reverence, With his hardiness taketh displeasure. (Wyatt, ‘The long love’, lines 5–8, Complete Poems, 76)¹²
In the final six lines of the sonnet, the speaker imagines fleeing with his (now personified) desire into what he imagines as a militaristic male–male bonding experience that is ¹¹ Geoerge Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (1589), extracts in Brian Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1999), 190–296. ¹² Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978).
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163 evidently more comfortable and familiar than the anguished self-consciousness that his heterosexual courtship provokes. But if the poem is about a struggle for a new and, to the speaker, unnatural degree of selfcontrol and restraint in the context of a heterosexual relationship, then at the level of the form the poem also enacts a struggle for a new degree of self-control and restraint in the English language itself, the very thing that Puttenham picks up on. Wyatt’s version of Petrarch’s poem (it is based on Rime 140) may well be the first sonnet written in English, and it demands an enormous degree of control over the words themselves in order to enact its regular metrical pattern and complex rhyme scheme. The formal pattern that Wyatt typically uses in his sonnet translations is one of near-iambic lines with an abbaabba rhyme scheme followed by a concluding unit of six lines having (in this case) a cdccdc rhyme pattern, a form that is extremely difficult to manage in English. As such, Wyatt injects an unprecedented degree of restraint, formal control, and sophistication into English verse which represents a departure from earlier ‘native’ poetic traditions.¹³ To see the contrast between Wyatt’s Italian-influenced verse and more traditional verse forms that are, in some sense, native to England (thus more ‘homely’, as Puttenham termed them), it is enough to quote a few lines of the great comic masterpiece by Wyatt’s senior by forty years, John Skelton (c 1460–1529), entitled The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge: Tell you I chyll,* *shall If that ye wyll A whyle be styll, *girl Of a comely gyll* That dwelt on a hyll; *harsh, cruel But she is not gryll*, For she is somewhat sage And well worne in age, For her vysage *assuage It wolt aswage* A mannes courage. (Skelton, Elynour Rummynge, lines 1–11, Complete English Poems, 214)¹⁴
Skelton’s poem tells the story of a woman who runs an alehouse, and in terms of the content it is full of ribald and sometimes coarse discussion of the body and its pleasures and failings. At the level of the formal pattern, Skelton’s poem is marked by a crazed verbal energy that very obviously draws on English oral traditions. The formal pattern that Skelton uses most frequently (and that scholars have, therefore, termed ‘Skeltonics’) consists of varying numbers of short lines tied together through repeated end-rhymes, a form that in some ways approximates modern rap. By contrast, Wyatt’s sonnets, marked by long iambic lines and a strict and challenging rhyme scheme, must have seemed highly controlled and highly literate (that is to say, non-oral), precisely what Puttenham in retrospect recognised as their ‘polished’ quality. Wyatt is very aware of the difficulty and challenge of his formal patterns
¹³ For an account of the specific form of sexuality expressed by the formal struggle to conform to the Petrarchan model in Wyatt, and also in Sidney and Shakespeare, see Daniel Juan Gil, Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England (Minneapolis, MN, 2006). ¹⁴ John Skelton, in John Scattergood (ed.), The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth, 1983).
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164 - and the kind of status it can confer. Skelton himself did express considerable literary ambition and he was crowned ‘laureate poet’ by Oxford University. But because Skelton does not see himself as part of an institution of English literature with a distinctive social function, he does not register as a precursor of the kind of self-consciously poetic career sensibility that will later be associated with Spenser but whose roots lie in Wyatt’s innovation of seeing vernacular poetic culture as a potential source of social distinction. Wyatt’s new formal techniques are aligned with a new social function for poetry. Wyatt’s poems were not printed in his lifetime but instead circulated in manuscript in court circles where people would share handwritten copies of poems and make copies for themselves (e.g., the Arundel-Harington manuscript and the Devonshire manuscript, which was compiled by three important women at court, both preserved at the British Library). In the context of manuscript circulation, readers who had access to Wyatt’s poems often felt provoked to write answering poems of their own, and by this means the impulse to superliterariness that Wyatt introduced at the court spread amongst the courtly elite. One of Wyatt’s most important readers and admirers at the court was Surrey. Though Surrey sometimes imitated Wyatt’s sonnets he also engaged in formal innovation in his own right. For example, Surrey developed a new version of the sonnet better suited to English because it requires fewer rhymes (taking the form of three separate quatrains and a final couplet, ababcdcdefefgg). This new sonnet form invented by Surrey was to become Shakespeare’s preferred form, so much so that it is often referred to as the ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet. Moreover, in his partial translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Surrey also invented ‘blank verse’, the unrhymed iambic pentameter that has played such a vital role in subsequent English poetry, including in the work of the great Elizabethan playwrights. For Surrey and other readers, the literary sophistication and ingenuity expressed by the kind of Italianate poetry that Wyatt introduced to the court represents a new source of cultural prestige, both for those capable of reading and appreciating it and for those capable of emulating Wyatt’s example with formally innovative poetry of their own. But this new form of cultural prestige could not yet supplant the traditional forms of social status at court: namely, aristocratic pedigree, courtly connections, and the authority of masculinity. In the context of manuscript circulation rather than print publication, only a small aristocratic elite had access to the newly sophisticated and refined poetry emerging at court. Because the new poetry did not circulate separately from aristocratic circles, it never severed its ties with other sources of status, seeming, at most, to express or make visible or announce a social status that is imagined to be non-cultural. The notion that sophisticated literary culture does not merely express aristocratic status but can confer an independent form of status appears with the posthumous publication of many of Wyatt’s and Surrey’s poems by Richard Tottel (c 1528–93), a publisher who specialised in printing reference works for lawyers. He was able to gain possession of a manuscript of poems by Surrey, Wyatt, and other ‘courtly makers’, and in 1557 printed these in a miscellany entitled Songs and Sonnets. In his preface, Tottel complained that these works had previously been ‘hoarded’ by aristocrats but that he was now making them available to a larger public: That to have well written in verse, yea and in small parcels, deserves great praise, the works of diverse Latins, Italians, and others does prove sufficiently. That our tongue is able in that kind to do as praiseworthily as the rest the honorable style of the noble Earl of Surrey and the weightiness of the deep-witted sir Thomas Wyatt the elder’s verse, with several graces in sundry good English writers, do show abundantly. It rests now (gentle reader)
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165 that thou think it not evil done to publish, to the honour of the English tongue, and for profit of the studious of English eloquence, those works which the ungentle hoarders up of such treasure, have heretofore envied thee. (Tottel, Preface, Tottel’s Miscellany, 3)¹⁵
Like Puttenham after him, Tottel emphasises the connection between the highly elaborate, formally inventive, literary poetry he is publishing and a new form of English usage that is differentiated from common, everyday language. Tottel closes his preface by worrying that ‘common’ readers will take offence at the elaborate, highly stylised verse (he refers to its ‘stateliness’) and its difference from normal vernacular: If perhaps some mislike the stateliness of the style removed from the rude skill of common ears, I ask help of the learned to defend their learned friends, the authors of this work. (Tottel, Preface, Tottel’s Miscellany, 3)
Notwithstanding Tottel’s democratic rhetoric of widening access to elite literature, it is precisely because he pushes these poems out of socially restricted manuscript circles at court and into the more public domain defined by printed material like the miscellany that he becomes especially aware of the stylistic difference between these poems and conventional language more familiar to ‘common ears’. By referring to ‘common ears’, Tottel also hints at a secondary distinction between a properly literate culture (of the emerging cultural elite) and the residually oral culture (of the masses). By breaking poetry out of the social restrictions of manuscript circulation, Tottel is laying the groundwork for a cultural system in which ‘access’ is not a question of membership in courtly social circles but rather a question of the ability to read and enjoy difficult, highly literate poetry as opposed to more accessible forms of entertainment or instruction. By separating the elite poetry of the court from the restricted social circles enforced by manuscript circulation, Tottel installed a purely cultural difference between those who enjoy literary works characterised by ‘stateliness’ and those who enjoy more vulgar cultural productions that appeal to ‘common ears’. In doing so, Tottel recognises a new elite (the ‘gentle reader’) whose status is defined not by aristocratic blood or courtly access but by cultural sophistication and an ability to read and appreciate the formally polished, non-vulgar ‘stateliness’ of writers like Wyatt and Surrey. This kind of cultural status is marked by a taste for formal experimentation and highly wrought verse forms. Indeed, Tottel’s publication of the poetry of Wyatt and other ‘courtly makers’ had the effect of devaluing some of the specific formal experiments of these poets and, therefore, led successor poets to engage in new formal experiments in order to further separate literary language from normal everyday language. The success of Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets led to the publication of other poetic miscellanies that were open to the work of less courtly writers than Wyatt and Surrey. One example of a writer who was empowered to publish her work by the example of Tottel was Isabella Whitney (fl. 1566–73), who is known as the first English woman to publish her own poetry under her own name. Whitney published two collections of verse, The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posy (1573), both of which also contain the ¹⁵ Richard Tottel (ed.), in Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul (eds), Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (Harmondsworth, 2011), spelling modernised. It is worth noting that there are two quite different versions of Tottel’s Miscellany, published only weeks apart. The differences are discussed in Paul A. Marquis, ‘Politics and Print: The Curious Revisions to Tottel’s “Songes and Sonettes” ’, Studies in Philology 97.2 (2000), 145–64. The edition cited here is based on the second version, Q2. For the first version, Q1, see Chapter 2, note 33 in this volume.
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166 - work of other, unidentified poets, and thus correspond to the miscellany form popularised by Tottel. Whitney is an important hybrid figure on the road to the kind of careerist ambitions that finally emerged in the 1580s and 1590s. She seems to have been a member of a semiimpoverished gentry family, and she worked for a time as a servant before turning to writing as a way of gaining at least a modest amount of additional income. But even as she writes out of necessity, there are strong indications that Whitney saw herself as a literary writer, as noted by Cheney.¹⁶ On the title pages of her two miscellanies, she is identified by her initials and throughout her writing she is self-assertive about herself as a poet and an ‘auctor’. This sense of her cultural status is associated (as Helgerson’s model would suggest) with her effort to lay claim to Classical culture, as with many references to Ovid and Virgil and (especially) to Virgil’s tragically suicidal character Dido, with whom Whitney often identifies. Ultimately, however, Whitney is not able to assert the status of a career poet and this is because she does not situate herself within the tradition of formally innovative poetry that we see starting to take shape in Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets. In terms of her verse forms, Whitney is not in dialogue with the increasingly artificial literary language of elite (and mostly male) poets in England. With few exceptions, Whitney’s preferred verse form is the traditional ‘fourteener’ or ballad form which connects her work to the oral tradition. Her two collections aim for accessibility; they also traffic in usefulness as well as entertainment. Thus A Sweet Nosegay offers advice and folksy sayings derived from Sir Hugh Plat’s Flowers of Philosophy (1572). Moreover, the aim of her miscellanies is to make money, as is clear from the preface written by the printer who praises the volume with the explicit goal of selling it. Whitney, therefore, combines a distinctive authorial self-awareness with a lack of interest in formal experimentation and super-literariness so that her work evinces no ability to confer cultural capital on readers. For this reason, she cannot frame herself as a career poet working in an autonomous and self-consciously literary tradition in the way that Spenser will. Indeed, nominally at least, she frames being a poet as the result of the absence of other social roles. She is a poet only because she is not married, has no children, is not working as a servant, and is poor: Had I a Husband, or a house, and all that longs thereto My self could frame about to rouse, as other women do: But till some household cares me tie, My books and Pen I will apply. (Whitney, ‘To her Sister Mistress A. B.’, lines 1–4, Sweet Nosegay, Renaissance Women Poets, 13)¹⁷
Because Whitney lacks the objective social support conferred by membership within the emerging institution of formally innovative English poetry, her claims to literary authority often collapse into a suicidal stance, as with her repeated identifications with Dido. Moreover, her most famous literary production is a poetic ‘last will and testament’
¹⁶ Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), 143–4, and throughout. ¹⁷ Isabella Whitney, in Danielle Clarke (ed.), Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemelia Lanyer: Renaissance Woman Poets (London, 2000).
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167 addressed to London.¹⁸ Whitney’s ‘Will’ hints at a wish to achieve a kind of immortality through her verse; but, without the support of an institutionalised tradition of English literature capable of conferring cultural capital upon readers, the wish for immortality collapses into a suicidal inability to function within any of the actual social roles available to her. Whitney represents something of a road not travelled because she combines substantial literary ambition with the absence of any interest in the restricted, artful literariness that was capable of conferring cultural capital. By contrast, and despite Helgerson’s claim that he embodies the ideal of the gentleman-amateur model of poetry, Sidney represents a substantial embrace of the notion that formally challenging poetry produces cultural distinction. Part of the reason Sidney is so engaged by the question of how literature can confer status is that his own social status is complicated. On the one hand, he was nephew and sometime heir to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and was virtually treated as a prince by many European elites. On the other, he had no inherited title and was disinherited when Leicester had a son. Sidney was also perennially short of cash and died with colossal debts. Many critics see this tension as working itself out in Sidney’s poetry and prose, and this fact complicates Helgerson’s argument that Sidney presented himself only as an amateurish gentleman-poet. Though he does not embrace an identity as a poet within an emerging institution of English literature (as Spenser will go on to do), Sidney nevertheless develops a hyper-awareness of formal innovation and artful sophistication as a source of status and theorises the emerging autonomy of English literature in his major treatise on poetry, The Defence of Poesy (1595). I will examine Sidney’s literary practice together with that of his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, before turning to the theory he articulates in the Defence. Sidney was famous for his sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella. Like Wyatt’s and Surrey’s poems, Sidney’s sonnets were not printed during his lifetime but circulated only in manuscript circles and were, therefore, highly restricted socially. But in their self-conscious artfulness these sonnets also create a form of cultural restriction based not on social access but on cultural competence, in which only sophisticated readers will have the cultural keys to understand and appreciate the verse. Right from the outset, Sidney has an intense awareness of other poets from whom he wants to distinguish himself through formal innovation. In sonnet 15 he refers to cheap imitators of ‘Petrarch’s long-deceased woes’ who utilise the ‘dictionary’s method’ to produce formally predictable and repetitive poetry, ‘rhymes, running in rattling rows’, as he alliteratively puts it (Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 15, lines 6–7, Poems, 172).¹⁹ Astrophil and Stella is characterised by a tension between conforming to the Petrarchan model as developed by Wyatt and Surrey and other poets, while pushing the envelope formally through innovative rhyme schemes and metrical models that distinguish him from other poets. One of Sidney’s key formal innovations is to return to Petrarch’s practice of assembling his erotic sonnets into a sequence and then to intersperse the sonnets with songs that are as striking for formal patterns that depart from the sonnet as for their subject
¹⁸ This is one of the poems in A Sweet Nosegay. The ‘parody will’ was a genre also used by other writers, for example Thomas Nashe in Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600). The irony of the genre is that the speaker has precisely nothing to bequeath, a stance that departs strikingly from the whole rhetoric of poetic fame and immortality as articulated by writers in the Virgilian tradition. ¹⁹ Sir Philip Sidney, in William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), spelling modernised.
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168 - matter.²⁰ The songs are remarkably dark and angry, but they also make the beloved woman present, including in speech, in a way that traditional Petrarchan sonnets often do not. It is not only the songs that are innovative in terms of the story they tell, however, for the sonnets themselves depart from the conventional focus on blocked or thwarted male desire to hint at some forms of erotic consummation, at a minimum a kiss, as in sonnets 69 and 70. In sonnet 69 Sidney notes a joy that is hard to express in the inherited Petrarchan style, which is better suited to woe: ‘O joy too high for my low style to show; / O bliss fit for a nobler state than me’ (Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 69, lines 1–2, Poems, 200). Here, it is the Petrarchan style itself that is inadequate to express any erotic consummation. In sonnet 70 Sidney concludes that silence might be the best expression of this new bliss: ‘Wise silence is best music unto bliss’ (Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 70, line 14, Poems, 201). Part of what makes Petrarchan rhetoric inadequate to communicate his erotic experience, in Sidney’s eyes, is that it is conventionally about grief and frustration. But another part is that this rhetoric has, in the wake of Tottel’s publication, itself become somewhat devalued, having become too widely imitated to produce social distinction. Throughout the sequence Sidney yearns for a new rhetoric that might differentiate him from other poets, and this accounts for his formal and verbal experimentalism. This impulse towards using rhetoric to differentiate himself socially is allegorised as the character Astrophil’s impulse to have love affairs only with highly elite and well-connected ladies at court as opposed to more readily socially available partners. Indeed, Astrophil’s claims that he is at least somewhat successful in courting his beloved testifies to his social elevation and his status as a courtly insider. Indeed, Sidney hints strongly that beneath the persona of the beloved Stella is a real person, namely Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich after her marriage to Robert Rich, third Baron Rich and later first Earl of Warwick. Throughout the sequence there are strong indicators of ‘Stella’s’ true identity; for example, sonnet 37 ends with the definitive ‘Rich she is’ (Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 37, line 14, Poems, 183). Here the wish for cultural restriction (addressing only the most sophisticated readers, who have a taste for the avantgarde and for the formally innovative) is perfectly aligned with laying claim to erotic access to elite women. In his sonnets, therefore, Sidney plays a double game. On the one hand, he experiments formally and lays claim to a form of cultural capital delivered by the superliterariness his poems demonstrate. On the other hand, like Wyatt and Surrey before him, Sidney never fully commits to culture as the source of his prestige, hinting instead that his poetic talents merely express the fact that he is a member of the aristocratic elite, which also includes the real Stella and where her supposed favours ultimately grant him more social prestige than poetry ever could. Sidney’s sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, takes advantage of the brand of sophisticated, genteel, well-connected cultural production associated with her brother to authorise herself as a writer. Sidney Herbert presented herself as continuing the tradition inaugurated by her brother, sometimes completing and publishing his work, as with her authorised, corrected versions of the pastoral romance, the Arcadia, and Astrophil and Stella, which she published in 1593 and 1598. Similarly, her ambitious translation of the Psalms was the continuation of a project that Philip had begun, for he had translated the first forty-three Psalms before his death. Sidney Herbert’s Psalm translations (like Sidney’s) are notable for their formal ingenuity and heterogeneity, including experiments in ²⁰ Sidney also distinguishes himself from Anne Vaughan Lock, who wrote the first sonnet sequence in English—‘A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner’, in her translation of Sermons of John Calvin, upon the song that Ezechias made (1560)—but focused it on religious as opposed to amatory material.
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169 quantitative verse. Although her Psalms circulated only in manuscript, they did so widely and had a major impact on subsequent formal practice in English poetry, including in nonreligious poetry, as evidenced by the many later poets who celebrated her work, including John Donne. Sidney Herbert did not assert herself as a career poet, but her attention to formal play does suggest some sense of herself as an artist first and foremost, even if this could only be expressed in limited ways. Like her brother, Sidney Herbert ultimately used her own cultural production, circulating in aristocratic circles as it did, to reaffirm her status as an aristocrat rather than asserting herself as a career poet. But at the same time, as with Sidney’s own work, Sidney Herbert’s cultural ambitions are seen in her formal innovativeness. If in their practice both Sidney and Sidney Herbert do not quite embrace the status of a career writer, in his theoretical work Sidney comes much closer to recognising the possibility of a poetic career rooted in a tradition of English literature whose pleasures confer a unique cultural capital marked by the taste and competence for highly elaborate, formally inventive language art. The combination of an autonomous tradition of English poetry defined by formal innovation and the social function of conferring cultural capital, both of which appear in Sidney’s theoretical work, are the sociological preconditions for the poets who finally do affirm that poetry is a career or a social role and who, therefore, demand recognition for their work as poets, both in their own historical world and even after their deaths. As a number of critics, including Catherine Bates, have recognised, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy moves in two somewhat different directions, one associated with subordinating poetry to social functions and the other with recognising and affirming poetry’s autonomy.²¹ On the one hand, Sidney follows the Roman poet Horace’s famous dictum that the purpose of poetry is to ‘teach and delight’ and argues that poetry teaches by presenting role models in so attractive a way that readers are pushed to imitate virtue. By writing a poem about Cyrus the Great (to cite Sidney’s main example), the poet is able ‘to make many Cyruses, if they [readers] will learn aright, why and how that maker made him’ (Sidney, Defence, 79).²² This view of poetry as educative subordinates poetry to other social purposes and goals, including inculcating virtue. On the other hand, Sidney emphasises the creative freedom of poets. In the most famous passage of the Defence, Sidney writes of the poet’s freedom to follow only his own invention: Only the poet . . . lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. (Sidney, Defence, 78).
Here Sidney comes close to imagining poetry as an autonomous practice characterised by freedom of the imagination. Moreover, Sidney associates the autonomy of poetry with the way poetry creates a special class of language separate from other, more conventional uses
²¹ See Catherine Bates, On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (Oxford, 2017). See also Chapter 5 in this volume. ²² Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesy, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973).
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170 - of language. Thus, he connects the ‘freedom’ of the poet to the special self-consciousness about language, including the ‘number’ (the number of syllables) and ‘measure’ (the rising and falling of the syllables, namely, metre) that poetry brings with it: ‘for that same exquisite observing of number and measure in the words, and that high flying liberty of conceit proper to the poet, did seem to have some divine force in it’ (Sidney, Defence, 77). Thus, for Sidney, self-consciousness about language can almost be said to define the autonomous realm of poetry and one of the chief purposes of poetry is to ‘beautify our mother tongue’. In the English tradition, Sidney singles out John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer for beautifying the language, just as Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch did for Italian: So in the Italian language, the first that made it aspire to be a treasure-house of Science, were the Poets Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. So in our English, were Gower, and Chaucer, after whom, encouraged and delighted with their excellent fore-going, others have followed to beautify our mother tongue, as well in the same kind as in other arts. (Sidney, Defence, 74)
For Sidney, poetry beautifies language, and he suggests that over time the distinctive linguistic beauty of poetry separates from ordinary language and becomes a separate discourse defined by special linguistic norms codified by the development of the literary tradition from Chaucer and Gower forward. Thus, Sidney starts by saying that poetry is a perfection of rhetoric and ends by suggesting that poetry is a class of language apart, a realm that has more affinities to painting or music than to oratory: For if oratio, next to ratio, speech next to reason, be the greatest gift bestowed upon mortality, that cannot be praiseless, which doth most polish that blessing of speech; which considers each word not only (as a man may say) by his most forcible quality, but by his best measured quantity, carrying even in themselves a harmony—without [unless], perchance, number, measure, order, proportion, be in our time grown odious. But lay aside the just praise it hath, by being the only fit speech for music, (music I say the most divine striker of the senses). (Sidney, Defence, 100)
For Sidney, thinking of poetry as a special creative activity marked by freedom of the imagination is aligned with recognising poetry as creating a special, highly refined class of language quite different from conventional usage. Needless to say, Sidney contrasts the special discourse of poetry and the art built on it with the unrestricted circuits of print, which he discounts: ‘Upon this necessarily followeth, that base men with evil wits undertake it, who think it enough if they can be rewarded of the Printer’ (Sidney, Defence, 111). It is not the mere fact of print, however, that Sidney condemns so much as the notion of culture that caters to a broad audience, including in its use of language. In contrast to the kinds of rewards that a mass or popular appeal offers, Sidney sees the essence of poetry as an address to a restricted audience whose restrictedness is defined not by the literal restriction of manuscript circulation but by the linguistic restriction of having competence to understand and appreciate the special class of poetic language.²³ In other words, what we glimpse in Sidney’s theory is the recognition of the mutually affirming role of poetry as a distinctive ²³ I am drawing the notion of ‘unrestricted’ cultural production, which is the opposite pole of culturally restricted production, from Pierre Bourdieu, in Randal Johnson (trans.), The Field of Cultural Production (New York, 1993).
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171 social practice separate from other social practices and the ability of poetry to affirm and confer a distinctive status on readers. This understanding of the social function of poetry to deliver and regulate cultural capital is very much associated with the recognition of a distinctive and coherent poetic tradition in England stretching from Gower and Chaucer into the present and within which ambitious poets can place themselves. This is the social-institutional basis for the notion that poetry is a career, a social role amongst others, and one capable of delivering social status and prestige to the poet him- or herself. In part because he really does have at least some social status separate from his work as a poet, Sidney does not fully assert himself as a career poet, but Sidney’s theory recognises the subterranean development that will indeed make a career-poet self-understanding possible for Sidney’s admirer, the common-born Edmund Spenser (1552/1553–99). As Helgerson rightly notes, Spenser’s self-understanding as a career poet is announced by The Shepheardes Calender, which was published before Sidney wrote the Defence and which Sidney there acknowledged (see Sidney, Defence, 112). The Shepheardes Calender is an elaborate printed production with complex woodcuts and an editorial apparatus including detailed glosses by an editor who signs himself ‘E. K.’ and who is either a friend of Spenser’s or Spenser himself. E. K. introduces Spenser as ‘our new Poete’ and explicitly compares Spenser’s career trajectory to that of Virgil—‘So flew Virgile’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, prefatory epistle, Shorter Poems, 25, 29)—who also began with pastoral poetry before moving through his Georgics to his major epic poem, the Aeneid, inspired by Augustus who ‘moved [Virgil] to write in loftier kinde, then he erst had doen’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, October, gloss to line 55, Shorter Poems, 135).²⁴ E. K. affirms that Spenser will move on to more ‘Heroicall argument’ inspired by ‘our most gratious soueraign, whom (as before) he calleth Elisa’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, October, gloss to line 43, Shorter Poems, 134). The kind of self-aware cultural positioning we see here is central to Helgerson’s argument that Spenser invents the idea of being a ‘career poet’ by explicitly modelling himself on Virgil’s career trajectory. But much of the editorial apparatus also capitalises on the development I have been tracing, emphasising the way in which Spenser’s project is centrally about an artificial, self-consciously literary language. In The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser uses a deliberately archaic language that is, in part, built on emulating Chaucer. E. K. notes that at first glance the language may be puzzling—he says the words may seem ‘hard’ and ‘straunge’—but then goes on to assert that it is precisely this difficulty and ‘straungenesse’ that lies at the heart of Spenser’s special status as a poet (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, prefatory epistle, Shorter Poems, 25). E. K. asserts that this strangeness results from Spenser’s absorption in his great predecessor poets—such language was ‘also vsed of most excellent Authors and most famous Poetes’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, prefatory epistle, Shorter Poems, 25–6)—and he likens it to a sunburn that results from being in the sun of the greats of the literary tradition. E. K. therefore asserts that readers should see Spenser’s ‘speache [as] so delightsome for the roundnesse, and so grave for the straungenesse’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, prefatory epistle, Shorter Poems, 25). This special poetic language places Spenser within an English poetic tradition that opens the door to the kind of respectful critical treatment that E. K. offers, for he writes by way of justifying the elaborate editorial apparatus, that ‘[h]ereunto haue I added a certain Glosse or
²⁴ Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999).
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172 - scholion for thexposition of old wordes and harder phrases’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, prefatory epistle, Shorter Poems, 29). E. K.’s glosses thus invite an awareness of the language that Spenser is using and its intertextual layers as a mark of the literary seriousness of Spenser’s work. They give Spenser’s text the status of a classic, albeit a classic in English, and as deserving of the same serious study as the annotated textbooks of Classical culture used in humanist schools. Though E. K.’s glosses appear democratising insofar as they explain the text, in fact they emphasise a specifically cultural divide between fit readers and those whose cultural knowledge is not adequate to understanding this challenging text. The Shepheardes Calender was printed and is thus, in principle, available to a wide public of readers. But precisely because it is available to a large public E. K. recognises that physical access to the text is not the same as intellectual access to the text. The literary density that E. K. draws attention to is itself a mechanism for sorting readers from least competent to most competent, with most competent being other writers, including, E. K. hints, a select group of learned young men with literary aspirations, including Sidney (to whom the Calender is dedicated) and Spenser’s close friend, the pedant Gabriel Harvey (to whom E. K.’s prefatory epistle is addressed). Thus, Spenser’s and E. K.’s consciousness of addressing a restricted audience of cultural sophisticates takes place precisely within the context of an unrestricted domain of print publication. E. K. specifically contrasts Spenser’s status as a poet to ‘rude wits, whych make more account of a ryming rybaud, then of skill grounded vpon learning and iudgment’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, October, gloss to line 78, Shorter Poems, 136). These ‘rude wits’ cater to common readers and reaffirm the low capabilities and tastes of common readers, including in their language (i.e., ‘common capacity’), that Spenser specifically rejects. ‘In regard whereof ’, E. K. writes, ‘I scorne and spue out the rakehellye route of our ragged rymers (for so themselues vse to hunt the letter) which without learning boste, without iudgement iangle, without reason rage and fome, as if some instinct of Poeticall spirite had newly rauished them aboue the meanenesse of common capacitie’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, prefatory epistle, Shorter Poems, 28).²⁵ The kind of strong poetic identity that Spenser asserts in The Shepheardes Calender is made possible by an institutionalised domain of poetry defined by an English literary tradition that houses a distinctive, self-consciously literary language that can confer cultural capital on readers and that is explicitly opposed to an unrestricted popular domain marked by linguistic accessibility. Pace Helgerson, we should not see Spenser as almost singlehandedly inventing the idea of being a career poet by self-consciously emulating Virgil. Rather, we should see Spenser as capitalising on a historical development that leads to the awareness within England of a restricted literariness that is addressed not to all but only to a group of super-literate readers (including such men as Harvey and Sidney). The structural position Spenser is able to occupy would have qualified him as a career poet even had he never successfully moved on to the epic poem the great example of Virgil demands of him. In the event, of course, Spenser did go on to write a truly monumental epic poem, The Faerie Queene. On the one hand, The Faerie Queene functions as a celebration of Englishness and of Queen Elizabeth, just as the Aeneid functioned as a national epic for Rome. This nationalist agenda is certainly part of what infuses the epic with its literary ²⁵ By contrast, Neil Rhodes argues that the Reformation bequeathed to English Renaissance culture the project of creating a ‘common’ language and imaginative tradition. See Neil Rhodes, Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth Century England (Oxford, 2018).
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173 seriousness, and what supports Spenser’s sense of himself as a career poet. Related to this nationalism is the self-fashioning project that Spenser announces in the prefatory letter to Sir Walter Ralegh. There he presents the poem as an allegory that is designed to inculcate moral virtues and political virtues that define an ideal of English citizenship by presenting readers with role models that they can emulate. However, many readers have been suspicious of whether this avowed nation-building and character-building project is a true description of the poem’s functioning, including Helgerson himself. In Forms of Nationhood, he argues that Spenser attacks absolutism and national unity in favour of a reactionary project of celebrating autonomous, militant aristocrats through a revitalisation of chivalric romance and its associated ‘gothic’ language.²⁶ Drawing on this revisionism, we can emphasise not Spenser’s service to the state but rather his service to an autonomous literary domain defined by formal, verbal, and imaginative play that moves him away from simple representation and story-telling. The Faerie Queene announces the emergence of a discursive domain of imaginative literature at the level of the English nation, built on a self-conscious embrace of the literary tradition of English language writers. Indeed, even the allegory, which Spenser connects to his moral self-fashioning project, is central to the distinctive literary experience of the poem insofar as it becomes a way of investing the imagined world of the poem with a shimmering polyvalency inviting rich games of interpretation that might almost be said to constitute the literary. As with The Shepheardes Calender, The Faerie Queene is a highly restricted text but it is not socially restricted, since it is printed and, in principle, available to all readers. There is no social barrier to physical access as there is with ‘courtly makers’ from Wyatt and Surrey through Sidney. The only barriers to access to the poem are cultural. The poem demands a taste for language, including the archaic language, the surprising rhymes, the spellings that bring out (sometimes false) etymology, and the awareness of English as a language composed of different layers, including Romance and Germanic languages. The poem demands a reader who is able to respond to and even to enjoy the special, hyper-literary language the poem provides. Moreover, Spenser’s hyper-literary language is created out of an awareness of the growing English literary tradition from Chaucer forward, and his text is marked by intertextuality, including with secular literature such as the Petrarchan sonnet tradition as well as religious literature, including English translations of the Bible. Thus, a reader who is fully adequate to reading the epic is a reader who has a rich understanding and mastery of the English literary tradition. To enter fully into The Faerie Queene, the reader must enjoy those elements that make the poem difficult. The fit reader of the epic must have considerable memory capacities and be able to make connections between disparate elements, to shift to a symbolic level, to see layers of meaning, and to engage with the formal structure. Spenser has created an imaginative, glittering, beautiful world shimmering with the promise of meaning. The autonomy of his imagined world is one of the milestones of English literary history, and his ability to create as fully realised a world as he does is inseparable from the emergence of a new, specifically cultural capital conferred upon readers who possess the cultural competence and taste to make sense of and enjoy this work.²⁷
²⁶ Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, IL, 1992). ²⁷ For an account of the role of Spenser in defining a secular vernacular literary canon in the eighteenth century, see Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (New York, 1998).
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174 - With important local variations, poets in the next generation after Spenser, including Donne, Lanyer, Wroth, and Ben Jonson, are able to capitalise on the English literary tradition whose possibilities for poetic identity-formation Spenser fully recognises. In varying ways their work is characterised by a sense of themselves as poets built on a selfconsciousness about a literary tradition and a systematic preference for formal innovation as a way of heightening the difference between their art and mere entertainment, with an awareness of the distinctive social cache that such literary poetry can confer on readers. Jonson (1572–1637) explicitly embraces his status as a career poet. In 1616 he went so far as to publish his collected works in an elaborate, expensive folio volume entitled simply Works. To the amazement of his contemporaries, Jonson included not only his poetry but even his plays, thus affirming that even if other plays were mere popular entertainment, his were art, thus suggesting how understanding the poetic career as based on delivering a distinctive super-literariness within a tradition of English literature allows him to embrace what Helgerson devalued as ‘professional’ or for-profit writing as part of his poetic career. Jonson’s Works and the model of the career poet that it consolidates also plays an important role in the work of ambitious women writers, including Lanyer but especially Wroth, whose monumental prose romance Urania was published five years after Jonson’s Works and was indebted to both Sidney’s prose romance, the Arcadia, and to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. For this generation of writers, the ability to secure recognition for poetry as a career in its own right, and to lay claim to fame and even eternity for their work as poets, is made possible by the slow historical emergence of a new institution: that of English literature. This institution performs an important social function, namely regulating differential forms of literacy by conferring a distinctive cultural capital on readers who possess the cultural competency to make sense of, and even to enjoy, the self-consciously literary work produced by the ‘career poet’.
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PART III
FORMS
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10 Miscellany Tom MacFaul
Some of the most influential poetic books of the sixteenth century were collections of poems by various authors. Though these were not referred to as ‘miscellanies’ at the time, the term is a useful umbrella concept for a highly varied set of books which have certain features in common.¹ The collocation of the poems of a number of different English authors creates a sense of poetic community, both in the present and across time. The representation of that community, in turn, often negotiates a tension between ideas of strict social hierarchy and a socially levelling effect produced by the idea of a republic of letters. By printing poems which had previously been circulated in private manuscript form, and doing so in ways which reproduced elite habits of poetic assembly, the editors of miscellanies saw themselves as doing a service to the national community, spreading the artistic and social mores of the elite to the reading nation as a whole.² A printed anthology of poems could clearly be considered analogous to a manuscript miscellany of verses or even a commonplace book.³ Renaissance readers were trained, as a result of commentaries on Classical poetic collections, to find moral, aesthetic, and political meaning in the structuring of such collections, and were ready to read miscellanies in this way, as ‘orchestrated arrangements of private and public sentiments’.⁴ Yet, although editors of miscellanies could impose meaning in this way, there was still a firm belief that original authorship mattered and had rights, even if those rights also had a communal component. In attempting to deflect copyright troubles, the probable editor of England’s Helicon (1600), ‘L. N.’, writes: if any stationer shall find fault, that his copies are robbed by anything in this collection, let me ask him this question, Why more in this, then in any divine or humane author: From whence a man (writing of that argument) shall gather any saying, sentence, simile, or example, his name put to it who is the Author of the same. (L. N., ‘To the Reader’, England’s Helicon, xxvii)⁵
L. N. seems to be making an early claim for the ‘fair use’ argument, suggesting that his collection of these poems is no different from someone quoting them in support of some point or copying them to his commonplace book. The argument might not wash legally, but ¹ See Matthew Zarnowiecki, Fair Copies: Reproducing the English Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare (Toronto, 2014), 23. The first recorded use of the word ‘miscellany’ is in 1601 (by Ben Jonson), and printed books were not titled miscellanies until later in the seventeenth century. ² See Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY, 1995). See also Chapter 9 in this volume. ³ See Anne Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996). ⁴ Paul A. Marquis, ‘Printing History and Editorial Design in the Elizabethan Version of Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes’, in Stephen Hamrick (ed.), Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (Farnham, 2013), 13–36, 19. ⁵ L. N. (ed.), in Hugh Macdonald (ed.), England’s Helicon (London, 1949). All references to this edition. ‘L. N.’ may possibly refer to Nicholas Ling; on this attribution, see also Chapter 14 in this volume. Tom MacFaul, Miscellany In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Tom MacFaul 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0010
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178 - it shows a desire to place poetry into the public domain, while still stressing the importance of attributing poems to their authors and thus privileging the author. L. N., indeed, tells authors who might be put out by any mistaken attributions, ‘If any man hath been defrauded of any thing by him composed, by another man’s title put to the same, he hath this benefit by this collection, freely to challenge his own in public, where else he might be robbed of his proper due’ (L. N., ‘To the Reader’, England’s Helicon, xxvii). The claim that he is doing authors a service, allowing them to claim their lost property, as it were, is somewhat disingenuous, but the privileging of authorial due here seems significant. Authors and readers have something like an equal stake in the poetic property of the nation. Miscellanies grew in popularity towards the end of the sixteenth century; notable examples include A Handful of Pleasant Delights (first printed c 1566, not extant; 1584), A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), A Paradise of Dainty Devices (1585, with at least nine subsequent editions), The Phoenix Nest (1593), and The Passionate Pilgrim (1599, a collection of poems by various authors, but attributed solely to Shakespeare).⁶ George Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573), meanwhile, is a single-authored volume which pretends to be a miscellany: Gascoigne, like Fernando Pessoa centuries later, evidently decided to create his own fictional poetic community, such was the power of the idea of a miscellany creating a social space for poetry.⁷ Whereas single-authored volumes promote individual poetic achievement, miscellanies celebrate the idea of poetry—and its collection—as a communal and community-building activity, and printed poetic books stand as a permanent repository for the nation’s shared values. This chapter will focus on three of the most important of the miscellanies—Tottel’s justly famous 1557 Miscellany; The Mirror for Magistrates (1559); and (more briefly) the last miscellany of the century, England’s Helicon (1600)—demonstrating the evolution of the idea of poetic community and of the role of the poet represented in these volumes.
Tottel’s Miscellany Tottel’s Miscellany—or more properly SONGES AND SONETTES, written by the right honourable Lord Henry Howard late Earle of Surrey, and other (1557)—was the first really significant miscellany of the century, and the most often reprinted.⁸ It begins with a fascinating justification for its own existence, its prefatory address ‘To the reader’: That to have well written in verse, yea and in small parcels, deserveth great praise, the workers of divers Latins, Italians, and other, do prove sufficiently. That our tongue is able in that kind to do as praise-worthily as the rest, the honourable style of the noble Earl of Surrey, and the weightiness of the deep-witted Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder’s verse, with several graces in sundry good English writers, do show abundantly. It resteth now (gentle reader) that thou think it not evil done, to publish, to the honour of the English tongue, and for profit of the studious of English eloquence, those works which the ungentle hoarders up of such treasure have heretofore envied thee. And for this point (good reader) ⁶ Texts of these books, along with valuable material on their publication and reception, can be found on the Verse Miscellanies Online website at http://versemiscellaniesonline.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. ⁷ In the second edition, The Posies of George Gascoigne, the poet dropped ‘the pretence of multiple authorship’; see George Gascoigne, in G. W. Pigman III (ed.), A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Oxford, 2000), xlix. For more on multiple- and single-authored ‘miscellanies’, see also Chapter 24 in this volume. ⁸ There were two further editions in 1557, and later editions in 1559 (twice), 1565, 1567, 1574, 1585, and 1587.
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179 thine own profit and pleasure, in these presently, and in more hereafter, shall answer for my defence. If perhaps some mislike the stateliness of style removed from the rude skill of common ears: I ask help of the learned to defend their learned friends, the authors of this work: And I exhort the unlearned, by reading to learn to be more skilful, and to purge that swinelike grossness, that maketh the sweet marjoram not to smell to their delight. (Tottel, Preface, Tottel’s Miscellany, 3)⁹
Tottel wants to promote the English language, for the sake of national honour and profit, to communicate noble and deep-witted sentiments and language to the general reading public. He regards it as ironically ‘ungentle’ of the gentry to hoard up such poems, and sees himself as doing a public service.¹⁰ Yet he needs the help of the community of the learned to defend his collection, which itself represents a community of poetic learning both in the present and across time.¹¹ Surrey’s favourite forms in particular—the English sonnet and poulter’s measure—are taken up by later poems in the collection, with varied degrees of success. Surrey is a master at handling of the long line in poulter’s measure: for instance, the line ‘Nothing more good as in the spring the air to feel a space’ (Surrey, ‘When summer took in hand’, line 10, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 5) beautifully modulates its vowels in simple, mostly monosyllabic words in such a way as to present a feeling of the mouth opening up to the air. Later poets, some living at the time of the Miscellany’s first publication, rarely reach the freshness of Surrey’s music and diction, however hard they try. Not only are the late Surrey and Wyatt put into the same collection as living authors (unnamed for the most part, though notably including the named Nicholas Grimald), but even Chaucer is included—if unnamed—in the ‘Uncertain Authors’ section. The need to create a feeling of community was particularly strong at the time of the Miscellany’s first publication, and its organisation and emphases reflect that fact. Tottel published his Miscellany at an acutely vexed moment in the sixteenth century: the Marian Counter-Reformation was in full swing, involving the execution of prominent Protestants. Although many authors in the Miscellany might have had Protestant leanings, it is possible that Tottel himself was broadly sympathetic to the return of Catholicism.¹² It is probably futile to find a confessional viewpoint in the Miscellany, but it is possible to see its representations of various kinds of suffering as evoking more generalised pity for individuals oppressed by the switchback of belief-systems which made the mid-century such a bewildering period, and as using that pity as a way of creating a sense of community. The first poem in the Miscellany is titled as a ‘Description of the restless state of a lover, with suit to his lady, to rue on his dying heart’. Although this title makes it clear that a ‘lady’ is the addressee and that her pity is demanded, it is easy for later readers to reframe it, and take their own pity as being summoned by the poem. The poem ends:
⁹ Richard Tottel (ed.), in Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul (eds), Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (Harmondsworth, 2011), spelling modernised. All references to this edition. ¹⁰ See Catherine Bates, ‘Profit and Pleasure? The Real Economy of Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes’, in Stephen Hamrick (ed.), Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (Farnham, 2013), 37–62, 42. ¹¹ For a very good account of the likely provenance of the poems in the collection, see Steven W. May, ‘Popularizing Courtly Poetry: Tottel’s Miscellany and Its Progeny’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009), 418–33, 421–3. ¹² See Stephen Hamrick, ‘Tottel’s Miscellany and the English Reformation’, Criticism, 44 (2002), 329–61; and Peter C. Herman, ‘Songes and Sonettes, 1557’ in Hamrick (ed.), Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context, 111–30; but see a rather different position in Marquis, ‘Printing History and Editorial Design’, 32.
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180 - I may plain my fill Unto myself, unless this careful song Print in your hart some parcel of my tene.* *woe For I, alas, in silence all too long, Of mine old hurt yet feel the wound but green. Rue on my life: or else your cruel wrong Shall well appear, and by my death be seen. (‘The sun hath twice brought forth’, lines 49–55, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 1)
The reference to ‘print’ here probably accounts for Tottel’s editor choosing to put the poem first in the collection: printing the poem in the Miscellany ensures that Surrey’s speaker is not only complaining to himself, but that his verse, which is full of ‘care’—in the dual senses of suffering and of careful artistry (the poem is in very deft terza rima)—also receives the careful attention and pity of an audience, which is not as blameworthy as the lady who is initially addressed. The caring reader is imagined as making up for the cruelty of the beloved. While Surrey was imagining his death as an hysterical reaction to his amorous suffering, meanwhile, a later reader, with a longer perspective, can think of Surrey’s actual death, executed as Henry VIII’s last victim.¹³ The reader of the Miscellany, then, can even make up somewhat for the cruelty of a king. That cruelty is on display in ‘So cruel prison how could betide’, the so-called ‘Windsor Elegy’ where Surrey laments his imprisonment in Windsor Castle by Henry VIII. The poem, however, also finds a strange kind of consolation in its memories of Surrey’s boyhood recreations alongside the Duke of Richmond, Surrey’s brother-in-law and the King’s illegitimate son. The boys enjoyed ‘greater feasts than Priam’s sons of Troy’ (‘So cruel prison’, line 4, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 15), and Surrey’s use of ‘we’ throughout his description of their activities creates a sense that they were both princes (like the princes of Troy). In lamenting the dead Richmond, Surrey reminds us—and possibly the King—of their familial connection. Surrey claims that he finds ‘relief ’ from his present ‘grief ’ (lines 53, 54) of imprisonment by thinking of the greater grief of Richmond’s death. In doing so, he may be appealing to Henry to relieve him of his present punishment, to put his supposed crimes in perspective. The poem layers its pathos as artfully as its alternating rhymes: Surrey recalls Richmond and himself giving looks to ladies which even tigers would ‘rue’ (line 11) and their pleading each other’s suits. As Surrey once spoke for Richmond, so the dead Richmond may now speak for Surrey to Richmond’s father. Even the meadows were full of ‘ruth’ (line 21) for the young men’s condition. If such a ‘proud’ castle as Windsor (line 2) could exhibit pity, so should the King. Printed after Surrey’s death in 1547 (and that of the tyrant Henry in the same year), the burden of communal pity is thrown onto a later reader, who is thereby connected to these great events, and even to their Classical, Trojan forerunners.¹⁴ The Miscellany redirects emotions which had a specific original context and intention into the more nebulous public sphere of print. When Surrey writes, in his elegy epitaph for Wyatt that ‘W. resteth here’ (‘W. resteth here’, line 1, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 35), he may
¹³ As his most recent biographer puts it: see Jessie Childs, Henry VIII’s Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (London, 2006). ¹⁴ See Alex Davis, ‘Tottel’s Troy’, in Hamrick (ed.), Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context, 63–86.
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181 well mean that ‘here’ to point to a grave, or to present the poem itself as a substitute grave.¹⁵ The poem itself is a kind of extended English sonnet (which was a form Surrey invented), with nine abab quatrains concluding in a couplet. As such, it inters Wyatt in an elaborated version of Surrey’s own signature form. Yet, the effect in the Miscellany is to point to the printed book, where indeed Wyatt’s most substantial achievements now rest, printed after Surrey’s own. Surrey of course admiringly laments that the living or ‘quick’ Wyatt ‘could never rest’ (line 1), and that irony is developed in a different direction by the adaptations Tottel himself makes to Wyatt’s poems: the changes he makes to them may make them live again, prevent them from restfully stagnating. Though modern readers may balk at the idea of altering poems for later tastes, it is clear that early modern editors saw such alterations as giving new life to poems.¹⁶ To give a famous instance, Tottel changes the end of Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ to read ‘since that I unkindly so am served, / How like you this, what hath she now deserved?’ (‘They flee from me’, lines 20–1, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 57), where Wyatt’s original reads ‘since that I so kindly am served / I would fain know what she hath deserved’ (Complete Poems, 117).¹⁷ Wyatt’s ironic ‘kindly’ is simplified by the use of its opposite, perhaps because irony depends on a context that the printing of the poem has lost.¹⁸ That is a simple change, though the effect on tone is considerable. Wyatt’s word perhaps depends on a general sense that women naturally (one meaning of kindly) treat him like this, a sense which may not have its full force if one does not know his own voice and attitude. The addition of ‘How like you this’ to the final line is more complex: it harks back to the happy moment in the poem’s previous stanza, where the woman asked ‘dear heart, how like you this?’ (line 14). Either Wyatt is being made—rather crudely, but with an irony provided by the text itself—to turn the woman’s words against her, or he is more delicately labelling her with the name ‘How like you this?’, crystallising her identity as the woman who said that lovely thing. In a way a new poem emerges, one which echoes itself and Wyatt’s original poem, highlighting the strange persistence of the woman’s voice. If Wyatt’s own voice is muted here, his impression of the woman is made more emphatic. At the same time, though, adding another layer of complexity, the poem itself is made to ask us more insistently how we like the poem and its situation. It is made to speak to us a bit more loudly. Most of the other changes to Wyatt’s poems in the Miscellany, however, are motivated by a desire to regularise metre and update language, and this has some unfortunate effects, blurring rather than reframing the poems concerned. In ‘Accused though I be’ (Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 79), Wyatt’s original makes an acrostic on the name ‘Anne Stanhope’ with the first letters of its lines, the first part of which Tottel destroys.¹⁹ In ‘Behold, Love, thy power how she despiseth’ (Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 74), the editing turns a rondeau into an odd kind of sonnet. ‘Mine own John Poins’ (Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 135), meanwhile, has an unflattering reference to the ‘common practice’ of forsaking Christ ‘For money, poison and treason, at Rome’ (lines 98–9) removed in the Miscellany. The more politically and poetically subversive elements of Wyatt’s poetry are tidied up, and Wyatt’s presence in the ¹⁵ Wyatt’s name in this and other poems about him is sometimes abbreviated to initials (in the titles to Poems 33 and 34, and in this line); sometimes given as ‘Wyatt’ (poem 33, line 6; poem 36, line 9). It was given as ‘Wyatt’ in the first 1559 edition, but changed to ‘What’ in the second edition of that year, effectively turning the poem into a riddle. ¹⁶ See Zarnowiecki, Fair Copies, 23. ¹⁷ Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978). ¹⁸ On the subtleties of Wyatt’s use of ‘kindly’ here, see Catherine Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford, 2013), 105–6. ¹⁹ See the notes to this poem in Tottel’s Miscellany, 412–13; and the original in Wyatt, Complete Poems, 100.
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182 - collection is somewhat occluded, perhaps because his name had become dangerous after his son’s rebellion against Queen Mary in 1554. While Wyatt’s authorship is muted, the authorship of the poems in the Miscellany in general is strangely presented. Surrey’s name appears in the title, but the only signal of his authorship of the first set of poems is the printing of his name at the end of that section. That is also true of the Wyatt section, and his authorship of those poems is even less obvious given his absence from the title page. By contrast, the section of poems ‘Songs and Sonnets of Uncertain Authors’ is signalled in advance, as is the section by ‘N. G.’ (Nicholas Grimald). It has been argued that Tottel’s volume, in giving titles to the poems, constructs a composite figure of ‘the lover’ who, as a kind of everyman, has arguably more transhistorical significance in the collection than any of the individual authors, whose names and identities are not immediately revealed to the casual reader, being put, as it were, under Surrey’s patronage.²⁰ The very idea of uncertain authorship, however, does highlight that authorship matters even if it is a mystery, and may give an air of subversiveness and secrecy to the collection.²¹ It remained hugely influential throughout the sixteenth century and beyond.²² Although love poems dominate the Miscellany, several other persistent strands emerge. The sufferings of love are made in some ways continuous with other forms of suffering, such as imprisonment, represented not only in Surrey’s Windsor Elegy, but also in ‘The life is long, that loathsomely doth last’ (Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 141), probably written in prison by John Harington (who was imprisoned in the Tower with Princess Elizabeth, the future Elizabeth I). That poem, which advocates Christian-Stoic patience, and an acceptance of death, being ‘armed against the day’ (line 39), links up in turn with a number of other poems accepting suffering and complaining of the fact that ‘no state on earth may last’ (‘Who list to live upright’, line 11, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 152). The stoic attitude in such poems is also represented in a number of other moral odes in the Miscellany, including three versions of Horace, Odes, 2.10, which stresses the dangers of public/political prominence, and advocates the acceptance of a middle state of fortune.²³ The cumulative effect of such poems, woven throughout the Miscellany, is to create a sense of communal suffering—in love, in political misfortune, both in the present and transhistorically—to invoke pity for that suffering, which further emphasises poetry’s role in mitigating it, and to promote an attitude of endurance. If this communal effect is not explicitly related to the sufferings of Protestants under the Marian regime, it more generally demonstrates that a poetic community can be built as a bulwark against the vicissitudes of political life.
The Mirror for Magistrates The Mirror for Magistrates (1559; further, augmented editions 1563, 1571, 1574, 1578, 1587) is more systematically organised than other miscellanies. It is a miscellany in the sense that
²⁰ See Zarnowiecki, Fair Copies, 23, 39. ²¹ See Marcy L. North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago, IL, 2003). ²² See Stephen Hamrick, ‘ “Their Gods in Verses”: The Popular Reception of Songes and Sonettes 1557–1674’, in Hamrick (ed.), Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context, 163–99; and Tom MacFaul, ‘Songes and Sonettes and Shakespeare’, in the same volume, 131–45. ²³ See ‘Of thy life, Thomas, this compass well mark’, ‘Who craftily casts to steer his boat’, and ‘The wisest way, thy boat, in wave and wind to guide’ (Tottel’s Miscellany, Poems, 32, 163, and 253, respectively). For Horace’s original poem, see Niall Rudd (ed. and trans.), Odes and Epodes (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 114–17.
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183 it was written by a range of different authors, but different from other miscellanies in that its historical ‘tragedies’ were written specifically for the volume, which is arranged (for the most part) in historical order, with bridging prose passages commenting on the verse narratives. It has been described as ‘the most influential English poetry collection of the sixteenth century’, and it had an important influence on the Elizabethan construction of late medieval history.²⁴ Like Shakespeare’s history plays, it reads the period from Richard II to Henry VII as a series of tragic falls, caused by individual failures of justice, though focusing rather more than Shakespeare does on the crimes and punishments of noble counsellors.²⁵ As some of the Mirror’s authors were themselves statesmen, this focus tends to emphasise the importance of that role in public life, and the need for historical understanding in order to function as magistrates.²⁶ The Mirror constitutes a kind of imagined historical community of past, present, and future magistrates, for whom poetic narrative and reflection acts as a kind of training ground. It is deeply aware of the tensions between poetry and history, and its attempts to negotiate them foreground the judiciousness needed to balance persuasive and truth-oriented forensic discourses.²⁷ While other miscellanies are formally various, the Mirror is homogeneous: almost all its tragedies are written in rhyme royal, following on from its main precursor, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (and, of course, harking back to its inventor, Chaucer). The exceptions, ironically enough, are the tragedies of Richard II and Henry VI: evidently kings need to be distinguished by different stanza forms.²⁸ The tragedy of Richard III is in rhyme royal, but in an avowedly ‘uncertain Metre’. The prose link explains that this is a matter of decorum: ‘Seeing . . . that king Richard never kept Measure in any of his doings, seeing also he speaketh in Hell, whereas is no order: it were against the decorum of his personage, to use either good Metre or order’ (Campbell, Mirror, 371).²⁹ The Mirror, particularly in its prose links, is deeply concerned with reflection on the art of poetry as an appropriate medium for the articulation of political sentiment and moral character.³⁰ The tragedies themselves are mostly rather dull and repetitive, but the second edition included Thomas Sackville’s ‘Induction’, a poem which might act as a preface to, or justification of, the collection as a whole, but which is placed before Sackville’s own account of the tragedy of Richard III’s supporter the Duke of Buckingham. The Mirror’s modern editor refers to the common view that it is ‘the best poem in English between Chaucer and
²⁴ See R. W. Maslen, ‘William Baldwin and the Tudor Imagination’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009), 291–306, 293. C. S. Lewis was less positive, backhandedly praising it as ‘the greatest composite monument of the Drab Age’, and concluding that ‘[n]o one lays down the Mirror without a sense of relief ’; see C. S. Lewis, English Literature of the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), 240, 246. ²⁵ The Mirror became a key lens through which Elizabethans read history. See Bart van Es, ‘ “They Do It with Mirrors”: Spenser, Shakespeare, Baldwin’s Mirror and Elizabethan Literature’s Political Vanishing Act’, in Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield (eds), A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2016), 216–30, 217. ²⁶ The Mirror’s authors include William Baldwin, who was evidently the guiding spirit of the collection, George Ferrers, Thomas Chaloner, Thomas Phaer, Thomas Sackville, Thomas Churchyard, John Dolman, and Francis Seager. For details of these men’s literary and political careers, see Lily B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge, 1938), 20–46. ²⁷ See Harriet Archer, Unperfect Histories: The Mirror for Magistrates, 1559–1610 (Oxford, 2017). ²⁸ The irony may not be intended: rhyme royal was not commonly called that until Gascoigne named it such in his ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’ (1575), although the form was often referred to as ballade royal. See Gascoigne, Hundreth, 460. ²⁹ Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates, spelling modernised. All references to this edition. ³⁰ See Mike Pincombe, ‘Tragic and Untragic Bodies in the Mirror for Magistrates’, in Archer and Hadfield (eds), A Mirror for Magistrates in Context, 53–70, 55.
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184 - Spenser’ (Campbell, Mirror, 3). That view has not been expressed so much in recent years: although it was once a fixture in anthologies, David Norbrook’s influential Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, for example, does not include it.³¹ The poem constitutes an attempt to reboot the Mirror, as it were. Worried that the Privy Council might ‘not suffer’ the printing of the book in its planned form (Campbell, Mirror, 297), Sackville provides a framing device for the tragedies in the form of an allegorical descent into Hell. The prose link that follows the tragedy of Buckingham further reframes that narrative, having one of Baldwin’s friends comment: whereas he faineth to talk with the princes in hell, that I am sure will be misliked, because it is most certain, that some of their souls be in heaven. And although he herein do follow allowed Poets, in their description of Hell, yet it savoureth so much of Purgatory, which the papists have digged thereout, that the ignorant may therby be deceived. Not a whit I warrant you (quoth I) For he meaneth not by his Hell the place either of damned soules, or of such as lie for their fees, but rather the Grave, wherein the dead bodies of all sorts of people do rest till time of resurrection. And in this sense is Hell taken often in the scriptures, and in the writings of learned christians. (Campbell, Mirror, 346)
Another voice merely comments that ‘it is a Poesy and no divinity, and it is lawful for poets to feign what they list, so it be appertinent to the matter’ (Campbell, Mirror, 346). The prose moves deftly through theological speculation (on the doctrine of soul-sleep) to a defence of poetic licence (linked back to a concern over what may be licensed for printing by the council). A sense of caution as to what may be lawful or allowed pervades the collection (because the work was initially suppressed under Queen Mary), forcing its authors into reflection on their own practices and on the basis of their fictions.³² The Induction itself is not marked by such hesitation. It begins with a powerful evocation of the beginning of winter, a kind of inversion of the evocations of spring which so notably situate the works of Chaucer and Surrey.³³ A sample stanza will give a taste of Sackville’s expert use of the rhyme royal stanza and the residual resources of alliterative verse: The soil that earst so seemly was to seen Was all despoiled of her beauty’s hew: And soot fresh flowers (wherewith the summer’s queen Had clad the earth) now Boreas’ blasts down blew. And small fowls flocking, in their song did rue The winter’s wrath, wherewith each thing defaced In woeful wise bewailed the summer past. (Sackville, Induction, lines 8–14, Campbell, Mirror, 298)
The lush ‘s’ alliteration of line 8 is ‘despoiled’ in line 9, returns in line 10 to be joined with ‘f ’ alliteration associated with residual life (‘flowers’, picked up with the ‘fowls’ of line 12); the enjambment of lines 10–11 builds energy which is released in the conclusive ‘b’ alliteration ³¹ See David Norbrook and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds), The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509–1659 (London, 1993). ³² See Archer, Unperfect Histories. On the suppression of the Mirror under Mary Tudor, see Scott C. Lucas, A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation (Amherst, MA, 2009). ³³ See Chaucer’s famous opening to the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, which Surrey echoes in his sonnet, ‘The soote season’ (Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 2).
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185 with which the first part of the stanza ends (anticipated in ‘despoiled’ and ‘beauty’s’ in line 9). The birds’ rueful song is tweeted into being in the ‘w’ alliteration of the last two lines (associated with winter), which nonetheless takes us back to the ‘s’ sound associated from the start with summer, so that what is lamented is represented in the moment of its loss. This alliterative pattern is so deft that the weaving of the rhymes themselves seem a mere bassline to the stanza’s music while holding it all tightly in place. The poem is poised on a temporal threshold, which seems to enable the transition into its allegorical subject matter, while setting a mood for the gloomy meditations that emerge. We meet Sorrow, who guides us to a hellish pit where other allegorical representatives of negative affect appear: Remorse, Dread, Revenge, Misery, and so on, all behave in ways that ‘well pertain’ to their emotional configurations (Sackville, Induction, line 135, Campbell, Mirror, 303), showing that a concept of decorum underpins all of Sackville’s—and the Mirror’s—poetic choices. There is also a recognition of some of the incongruities of allegorical representation: Sackville’s speaker sees the futility of trying to comfort Sorrow, as this would prevent her from being herself.³⁴ Such witty but meaningful paradoxes run through the whole Induction. At the end, we are told of the sounds of suffering in Pluto’s realm ‘That (oh alas) it was a hell to heare’ (Sackville, Induction, line 518, Campbell, Mirror, 316). The connections of real emotional states with fictive places and persons stresses the capacity of poetry to give moral shape to human feelings. Sackville’s style switches deftly from the expansively meditative, such as But who had seen him sobbing, how he stood Unto him self and how he would bemoan His youth forepassed, as though it wrought him good To talk of youth, all were his youth foregone He would have mused, and marvelled much whereon This wretched age should life desire so fain, And knows full well life doth but length his pain. (Sackville, Induction, lines 323–9, Campbell, Mirror, 309)
to the pithily compressed ‘brief the shape and messenger of death’ (Sackville, Induction, line 336, Campbell, Mirror, 310). His tone is urbane but humane, in a way which may dimly remind one of Dante. Like Dante and Chaucer before him, and like Spenser after him, Sackville is also skilled at seamlessly weaving Classical materials into his subject. The Induction gives neat little vignettes of the Trojan war and Classical history (painted on the shield of War), and the tragedy of Buckingham contains internally embedded reflections on the likes of Brutus and Cassius, Alexander and Dionysius, and more positive (but still tragic) narrative exempla of Scipio and Hannibal. Patterns of historical parallelism connect Britain’s history to that of the larger world (as they would in Shakespeare). The tragedy of Buckingham manages to be more dramatic than the other tragedies in the Mirror. When the spirit of Buckingham recalls his beheading, ‘with these words, as if the axe even there / Dismembered had his head and corse aparte, / Dead fell he down’ (‘The Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham’, lines 540–2, Campbell, Mirror, 337). The process of recollection here prompts a re-enactment/re-experiencing of his tragedy. It seems
³⁴ On such allegorical problems, see Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 21.
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186 - as if Buckingham’s spirit (wherever it is) is vividly playing himself, as in a theatre. It is in really—and transgressively—claiming to revive people of the past, as much as in its subject matter, that the Mirror anticipates Shakespeare’s history plays. Other than Sackville’s contributions—and perhaps Churchyard’s celebrated tragedy of Jane Shore—the most interesting poem in the Mirror is ‘How Collingbourne was cruelly executed for making a foolish rhyme’, probably written by Baldwin. As a warning to poets, it also constitutes a reflection on the purposes and limitations of poetry. Ventriloquising tyrants, Collingbourne urges that poets ‘dote’ if they think they can reform vicious rulers: We know our faults as well as any other, We also doubt the dangers for them due: Yet still we trust so right to guide the rother,* *rudder That scape we shall the s[c]ourges that ensue. We think we know more shifts than other knew. In vain therefore for us are counsels writ: We know our faults and will not mend a whit. (‘How Collingbourne’, lines 42, 43–9, Campbell, Mirror, 348)
Registering the vanity of poetic admonition does not, it seems, render it entirely worthless: why else produce the Mirror? Poetry may make nothing happen, but it still needs to be produced. The prose link commenting on Collingbourne’s tragedy claims that the poem itself revives the ‘ancient liberties’ of poetry (Campbell, Mirror, 359). The connection of poetry with ancient liberty asserted in the face of tyranny would be a powerful discursive tactic in the century and more after the Mirror’s publication. The tragedy also offers some advice about the exercise of poetic caution, saying poets should ‘mix their sharp rebukes with mirth’ (‘How Collingbourne’, line 141, Campbell, Mirror, 352). But it also makes a more barbed and ambitious point about how poets should act, making a traditional association of ‘a poet’s office’ with the flying horse Pegasus, who was born from the blood of Medusa: For he that shall a perfect poet be, Must first be bred out of Medusa’s blood: He must be chaste and virtuous as was she, Who to her power the Ocean-God withstood. To th’end also his doom be just and good He must (as she had) have one only eye, Regard of truth, that nought may lead awry. (‘How Collingbourne’, lines 148, 155–61, Campbell, Mirror, 352, 353)
The poet is to be ‘chaste’ and truthful like the goddess Pallas/Minerva (who destroyed Medusa for desecrating her temple), the text alluding here to the story told in Book 4 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.³⁵ Above all, the poet ‘must be swift when touched tyrants chafe, / To
³⁵ Medusa is punished (turned into the snake-haired Gorgon who is then beheaded by Pallas/Minerva’s brother, Perseus) for having sex with Poseidon/Neptune (‘the Ocean god’) within the precincts of the goddess’s temple: see Ovid, Metamorphoses, 4.765–803, in Frank Justus Miller (trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Metamorphoses, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1916), 1.232–5. The suggestion that the poet must have only one eye here confuses the
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187 gallop thence to keep his carcass safe’ (‘How Collingbourne’, lines 188–9, Campbell, Mirror, 354). The whole poem’s tone is full of salty irony, reminding us of the limitations of the claims of poetry, and the limitations of those limitations. That very irony helps to produce a stance of wisdom amongst the learned—of Horatian urbanity and stoic endurance—which forms a poetic community who can attend to public duties while recognising the limits of their power.³⁶ Throughout the Mirror, it is suggested that the theory of poetry is deeply connected with matters of statesmanship. Commenting on the Tragedy of Lord Hastings, the Mirror’s compiler writes: When I had read this, one said it was very dark, and hard to be understood: except it were diligently and very leisurely considered. I like it the better (quoth another.) For that shall cause it to be the oftener read, and the better remembered. Considering also that it is written for the learned (for such all Magistrates are or should be) it cannot be too hard, so long as it is sound and learnedly written. (Campbell, Mirror, 297)
This is a fascinating reflection on poetic difficulty aiding memorability, but also on the intended readership. Poetry like this is to be read by those who will take political-judicial responsibility, so that they ought to be learned. If one cannot understand this, it is implied, one is not fit for office. Comprehending difficult poetry becomes a condition for proper political participation.
England’s Helicon By the end of the century, a greater confidence in the powers of individual poets had developed, but at the same time the idea of a poetic community represented in a miscellany comes under considerable strain. England’s Helicon (1600) is concerned for the most part to give a central place to pastoral, even presenting itself as a kind of pastoral world, like the world of Sidney’s Arcadia, but it is rather less coherent than the earlier miscellanies.³⁷ The first few poems in an anthology are clearly significant in setting its agenda, and England’s Helicon begins with the fourth song from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, which is not an obvious choice. While the imposed title, ‘The Shepherd to his chosen Nymph’, is an obvious attempt to pastoralise the poem, there is nothing of the pastoral in it. The scene it sets seems to take place in or near a house, and the female addressee is literate, as shepherdesses rarely are. The obvious reason for putting the poem first is that Sidney is the most prestigious poet in the anthology, but there are actual pastoral poems of Sidney available and indeed included here, so why not put them first? It seems that the poem does something important to earn its place. The poem’s most salient feature is its call-and-response refrain, ‘Take me to thee, and thee to me; / No, no, no, no, my Dear, let be’, which ends on a clever and slightly sinister variation: ‘Soon with my death I will please thee: / No, no, no, no, my Dear, let be’ (‘Only joy, now here you are’, lines 5–6, 53–4, Englands Helicon, 1, 3). What had been a
goddess with the two daughters of Phorcys who shared a single eye between them, which Perseus stole so that he did not have to look directly at the Gorgon himself and so be turned to stone: see Metamorphoses, 4.774–6; and Scott C. Lucas (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge, 2019), 412–13. ³⁶ See Chapter 19 in this volume for a further discussion of this poem. ³⁷ For more on England’s Helicon, see also Chapter 14 in this volume.
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188 - denial is tentatively reframed here into a kind of acquiescence: in saying ‘no’ to the death of Astrophil/the Shepherd, the response of Stella/the Nymph becomes an acceptance of his advances. The poem’s persistence seems to work against the most vehement denial, even turning that very denial into consent. It shows how poetry, by repeatedly insisting on its claims, can work, even if to less than salutary ends. Astrophil tells Stella earlier that she can ‘write’ the letters her mother thinks she is at work on, but asks that she first let him ‘endite’: the identification of writing and sexual success is a key part of the anthology’s agenda. The next poem in England’s Helicon is more obviously part of its stated agenda to promote the status of poets. ‘Theorello’, by E. B. (probably Edmund Bolton) states a key element of Renaissance pastoral doctrine in its first stanza: You Shepherds which on hillocks sit like Princes in their thrones: And guide your flocks, which else would flit, your flocks of little ones: Good Kings have not disdained it, but Shepherds have been named: A sheep-hook is a Scepter fit, for people well reclaimed. The Shepherd’s life so honour’d is and praised; That Kings less happy seem, though higher raised. (‘You Shepherds which on hillocks sit’, lines 1–10, England’s Helicon, 3)
The analogy between kings and shepherds is systematically made here, but offers room for another analogy, the implicit and persistent analogy between poets and shepherds, which therefore mediates an analogy between poets and kings. In his epistle ‘To the Reader, if indifferent’, the anthology’s editor, L. N., argues that ‘the names of poets . . . have been placed with the names of the greatest Princes of the world, by the most authentic and worthiest judgements, without disparagement to their sovereign titles’ (L. N., ‘To the Reader’, England’s Helicon, xxviii). Pastoral allows for a connection between poets and kings, raising the status of poetic activity, and creating a kind of republic of poetic accomplishment.³⁸ L. N. argues that ‘if any man whatsoever, in prizing of his own birth or fortune, shall take in scorn, that a far meaner man in the eye of the world, shall be placed by him: I tell him plainly whatsoever so excepting, that, that man’s wit is set by his, not that man by him’ (L. N., ‘To the Reader’, England’s Helicon, xxviii). In the world of poetry which this Helicon represents, barriers of status break down. This topic is nicely captured in ‘Menaphon’s Roundelay’ by Robert Greene, taken from his prose romance Menaphon (1589), where we meet ‘A little Fly’ who ‘did presume’ to sit on an eagle’s perch (‘When tender ewes brought home with evening’s sun’, lines 8, 9, England’s Helicon, 30). The eagle is enraged, shaking ‘his royal wings’ at the fly, who persists in trying to sit next to him: The Fly crav’d pity, still the Eagle frowned. The silly Fly Ready to die: ³⁸ See William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935).
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189 Disgrac’d, displac’d, fell grovelling to the ground. The Eagle saw: And with a royal mind said to the Fly, Be not in awe, I scorn by me the meanest creature die. Then seat thee here: The joyful Fly up-flings, And sate safe shadowed with the Eagles wings. (‘When tender ewes’, lines 21–30, England’s Helicon, 30)
This is clearly an allegory of patronage, in which the idea of magnanimity amongst the great is deployed in order to claim a certain status for the humble. In the context of an anthology, however, it also allegorises and defends the juxtaposition of lowly and lordly poetry. A collection which contains poems by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (and heir to a dukedom) and the Earl of Oxford, and poems which have been sung before the Queen, also contains poems by the likes of Greene, and by a glovemaker’s son from Stratford.³⁹ Though it contains some very fine individual poems, and is no doubt, as C. S. Lewis claimed, a ‘genuinely Golden anthology’, England’s Helicon is, taken as a whole, less lively than the earlier miscellanies.⁴⁰ Its very coherence of mode and tone creates the problem, in that we are given poem after poem of pastoral love, in which the outer world is made to conform to, or contrast with, the state of the poet’s mind (usually lovelorn), with no narrative context to inform, motivate, or ironise them. The pure pastoral lyricism which the collection hopes to promote as a central national literary manner is, paradoxically, shown to have reached its limits. The ideal of equality through poetry is sometimes nicely developed, particularly early in the collection, but the impression that the poems are not really in communication with one another produces an atomistic effect which militates against the ideal of poetic community the collection hopes to build. Some poems are paired, as one poem answers another, but opportunities for dialogic connections are also lost. For instance, ‘The complaint of Thestilis the forsaken Shepherd’, attributed to Surrey in England’s Helicon, but actually from the ‘Uncertain Authors’ section of Tottel’s Miscellany, loses the response poem it has in the earlier miscellany.⁴¹ Shakespeare’s poem from Love’s Labour’s Lost, previously reprinted in The Passionate Pilgrim (both miscellanies remove the last two lines from the play’s version), has some similarities with an anonymous poem (probably by Richard Barnfield), printed a page later, but the intervention of another Barnfield poem (also anonymous; both poems also appear in The Passionate Pilgrim) dilutes the connection between the poems.⁴² If the earlier miscellanies succeeded in creating a sense of a national learned community, by the end of the sixteenth century this seems less convincing, starting to seem a rather superficial matter, involving an increasingly strained fiction about shepherds, all of whom seem to be speaking only about their own concerns. But there is a key exception to this absence of poetic interplay: Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ is famously answered by ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’, the ³⁹ The volume includes Shakespeare’s ‘On a day—alack the day!’—Dumaine’s ‘sonnet’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.3.96–115), in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016), 840: see England’s Helicon, 53. ⁴⁰ Lewis, English Literature, 468. ⁴¹ ‘Thestilis, a silly swain’ (England’s Helicon, 48–9). This is indicative of a vague if widely shared sense that the poems in Tottel’s Miscellany were all written by Surrey. ⁴² These poems are ‘My flocks feed not’ and ‘As it fell upon a day’, in England’s Helicon, 54, 55, respectively.
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190 - latter attributed here to ‘Ignoto’.⁴³ Marlowe’s very ‘golden’ poem, in which ‘Melodious birds sing madrigals’ to the accompaniment of waterfalls (‘Come live with me, and be my love’, line 8, England’s Helicon, 192), meets an equally brilliant response which undermines that aureate manner, warning that Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy poesies, Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten: In folly ripe, in reason rotten. (‘If all the world and love were young’, lines 14–16, England’s Helicon, 193)
It seems that the golden age of poetry is over, and its ‘pretty pleasures’ will no longer ‘move’ (‘If all the world and love were young’, line 3, England’s Helicon, 193). While a second answer poem tries to revive Marlowe’s idyll, claiming that they will revel ‘all the year’ (‘Come live with me, and be my dear’, line 2, England’s Helicon, 194), the response indicates that the very ripeness of aureate pastoral verse, embodied in this miscellany, has turned rotten, that the optimism of such elegant verse, the culmination of humanist poetics, now seems, from the perspective of reason, to have been mere folly. Ironically, in a poem which brilliantly does speak to another poem, we see a reflection on the end of the ideal of poetic community. Whereas the miscellany culture of the sixteenth century emphasises poetry as a socially binding force, the next generation of poets (John Donne, Ben Jonson) would concern themselves more with the atomistic individual, who insisted on owning his own verse, and not readily sharing it.
⁴³ The latter was once commonly attributed to Walter Ralegh; it is probably not his. See also the discussion of these poems in Chapters 3, 14, 29, 31, and 33 in this volume.
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11 Lyric Joseph Campana and Catherine Bates
Lyric Theory, Modern and Early Modern ‘During the Renaissance’, writes J. E. Spingarn in his now classic History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, ‘there was no systematic lyric theory. Those who discussed it at all gave most of their attention to its formal structure, its style, and especially the conceit it contained. The model of all lyrical poetry was Petrarch, and it was in accordance with the lyrical poet’s agreement or disagreement with the Petrarchan method that he was regarded as a success or a failure.’¹ As if to make up for this paucity in the period, critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced lyric theory in abundance. It is true that many struggle with the fundamental problem of definition. As David Lindley argues, ‘[i]t is clear that no attempt to arrive at a description of the lyric as a universal can ever quite succeed’.² Roland Greene refers to lyric as ‘the most fugitive of genres when it comes to a theory of its identity’.³ Northrop Frye suggests that ‘a more practicable approach’ to defining the undefinable ‘would be to say that a lyric is anything you can reasonably get uncut into an anthology. Or perhaps we can at least limit the subject by saying what the lyric is not’.⁴ For some, such ambiguity constitutes a strength. As Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins argue in their introduction to The Lyric Theory Reader, ‘[p]erhaps the lyric has become so difficult to define because we need it to be blurry around the edges, to remain capacious enough to include all kinds of verse and all kinds of ideas about what poetry is or should be’.⁵ Far from stunting modern lyric theory, however, such difficulties of definition have stimulated a whole range of different ideas and approaches. Scott Brewster, for example, emphasises ‘lyric as a performance’, which requires ‘close attention to the voices and structures of address that are heard or invoked in lyric texts’, adding that ‘[l]yric is seen as a suspension or interlude, a unique intensification of literary language distinct from everyday experience’.⁶ Jonathan Culler adds to the conversation by focusing on lyric’s ‘enunciative apparatus’ or voicing, by defining a lyric poem not as the representation of an occurrence but rather as ‘an event’ in itself, and by understanding the ‘ritualistic as opposed to fictional aspect’ that makes such poems ‘texts for reperformance’.⁷ Some critics
¹ Joel Elias Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York, 1924), 58. ² David Lindley, Lyric (London, 1985), 4. ³ Roland Greene, ‘The Lyric’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 3, The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1999), 216–28, 216. ⁴ Northrop Frye, ‘Approaching the Lyric’, in Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (eds), Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 31–7, 31. ⁵ Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (eds), The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Baltimore, MD, 2014), ‘General Introduction’, 1–8, 1. ⁶ Scott Brewster, Lyric (New York, 2009), 2, 6, italics original. ⁷ Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 34, 35, 37, italics original. Joseph Campana and Catherine Bates, Lyric In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Joseph Campana & Catherine Bates 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0011
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192 - stress the universality of lyric. Brian Boyd, for instance, takes an evolutionary approach to the ‘appetite for ordered information’ and ‘passion for nonnarrative pattern’ that explains the importance of lyric poetry, the pinnacle of which, in his analysis, is represented by Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609).⁸ Others, by contrast, stress lyric as a distinctly historical phenomenon. M. H. Abrams notes that the ‘soaring fortunes of the lyric may be dated from 1651, the year that [Abraham] Cowley’s Pindaric “imitations” burst over the literary horizon and inaugurated the immense vogue of the “greater Ode” in England’.⁹ Likewise, John Stuart Mill fundamentally changed the discourse of lyric when, in 1833, he introduced its key quality as being that of the ‘overheard’.¹⁰ Virginia Jackson even argues that lyric might not have been something discovered or defined by a particular era but rather something made in the process of reading: as ‘poetic subgenres collapsed into the expressive romantic lyric of the nineteenth century, the various modes of poetic circulation—scrolls, manuscript books, song cycles, miscellanies, broadsides, hornbooks, libretti, quartos, chapbooks, recitation manuals, annuals, gift books, newspapers, anthologies—tended to disappear behind an idealized scene of reading progressively identified with an idealized moment of expression’.¹¹ Mark Jeffreys refers to this very process of lyric reading (which Jackson develops in conversation with Yopie Prins) as ‘lyricization’.¹² Other theorists of lyric, meanwhile, view it through a more historicist lens. Greene sees the development of lyric in the early modern period as a consequence of humanistic thinking: If lyric is often defined in this period by the intersection of its material and representational properties, one convention in which they commonly meet is the depiction of the human subject . . . During the Renaissance the genre becomes, in effect, a widely acknowledged vehicle for both representing and rethinking many of the questions about subjectivity that become current in the age of humanism. How do human beings construct reality out of their particular experiences? What is the value of an individual consciousness, of one person’s experience? How may consciousness—as a complex of thought, emotion, and belief—be portrayed in a discursive medium?¹³
Patrick Cheney sets this humanist, ‘Horatian-Sidneian model of the poet as civic builder’ against a ‘darker, divine aspect [of] the model of the sublime poet’ best defined by Longinus’s On Sublimity: an aspect that conjures a quite different poetic aim, the sublime being ‘a form of heightened poetry that does not aim to persuade or civilize but rather to astonish and transport’.¹⁴ From this wealth of different approaches—of which only the briefest summary has been possible here—certain key features of lyric emerge. First, that it is a small form (magnitude always being understood as a relative term); and secondly, that it is in some way a musical form (deriving its name as it does from the lyre, the stringed instrument that, from Apollo on, has mythically accompanied song). Thus, Lindley distils the core features of lyric, ⁸ Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 3, 4. ⁹ M. H. Abrams, ‘The Lyric as Poetic Norm’, in Jackson and Prins (eds), The Lyric Theory Reader, 140–3, 141. ¹⁰ Quoted in Herbert F. Tucker, ‘Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric’, in Jackson and Prins (eds), The Lyric Theory Reader, 144–56, 144. ¹¹ Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 7. ¹² See Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, ‘Lyrical Studies’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 27.2 (1999), 521–30; and Mark Jeffreys, ‘Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 110.2 (1995), 196–205. ¹³ Greene, ‘The Lyric’, 224. ¹⁴ Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), 6, 22.
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193 familiar from most accounts, to its musicality, expressivity, intensity, and brevity: ‘the etymological derivation of “lyric” from the lyre’, he argues, ‘has furnished one element of the definition of lyric as universal’. Consequently ‘lyric is held to apply to poems employing a first-person speaker, and, by extension, to indicate a preoccupation with the expression of individual feeling or emotion’; it ‘deals in the present tense, with the immediacy of felt experience’. ‘One other adjective appears in most dictionary definitions—“short”.’ As a consequence, Lindley argues, ‘[o]ne way out of the problems that beset the word is to use it as an umbrella covering a variety of generic subclasses’.¹⁵ The characteristic brevity and musicality of lyric are famously summed up in Northrop Frye’s distinction between ‘the radicals of lyrical melos and opsis respectively’ as representing the core impulses of the lyric form.¹⁶ ‘The radical of melos is charm’, he writes, ‘the hypnotic incantation that, through its pulsing dance rhythm, appeals to involuntary physical response, and is hence not far from the sense of magic, or physically compelling power’.¹⁷ Meanwhile opsis refers to ‘the close relation between the visual and the conceptual in poetry, and the radical of opsis in the lyric is riddle, which is characteristically a fusion of sensation and reflection, the use of an object of sense experience to stimulate a mental activity in connection with it. Riddle was originally the cognate object of read, and the riddle seems intimately involved with the whole process of reducing language to visible form, a process which runs through such by-forms of riddle as hieroglyphic and ideogram’ (and, one might add, those forms particularly loved by the Renaissance such as the rebus, motto, emblem, impresa, blazon, heraldic achievement, and ekphrasis).¹⁸ As Andrew Welsh expands, Frye’s basic but durable distinction was anticipated by Ezra Pound’s division of poetry into three kinds: MELOPOEIA, wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning. PHANOPOEIA, which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination. LOGOPOEIA, ‘the dance of the intellect among words’ . . . it employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play.¹⁹
One of the reasons why the early modern period had so undeveloped a theory of lyric (by comparison with the modern theories outlined above), is that—precisely on account of these qualities of brevity and musicality—lyric was perceived as slight. It was small in space and fleeting in time: properties that made it seem particularly transient and unimportant. Lyric was little enough to be thrust into a lady’s pocket or slipped between the strings of a lute, but, by the same token, was ephemeral enough to be easily discarded or destroyed.²⁰ As
¹⁵ Lindley, Lyric, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. ¹⁶ Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ, 1957), 275, italics original. ¹⁷ Frye, Anatomy, 278, italics original. For a further discussion of melos, see also Chapter 21 in this volume. ¹⁸ Frye, Anatomy, 280, italics original. A heraldic achievement is ‘a representation of all the armorial devices to which a bearer of arms is entitled’ (including coat of arms, helm, crest, motto, slogan, supporting heraldic beasts, etc.), and is derived from the French hachement (an armorial device consisting of ribbons tied together and flowing about a shield or helmet in a coat of arms); see OED, achievement, n. 2. ¹⁹ Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton, NJ, 1978), 15, italics original. See also Frye, Anatomy, 244. ²⁰ See, e.g., the short lyric (comprising three sixains) attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh beginning ‘Lady, farewell, whom I in silence serve’, entitled ‘A Poem put into my Lady Leighton’s Pocket’, in Martin Dodsworth (ed.), The Poems (London, 2012), 24; the short lyric supposedly written by an amorous lady and
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194 - song, lyric might not even get as far as being written down at all, remaining a largely airborne phenomenon in which words would fade away forever into silence or sighs. Lyric was not yet the ‘poetic norm’ it would later become when, longer or dialogic forms having fallen into relative disuse, lyric would come to be more or less synonymous with poetry itself (a trend no doubt exacerbated in an age of ever more rapid communication, anchored in social media which prefer shorter and shorter forms).²¹ For Spingarn, while there were numerous attempts during the Renaissance to distinguish between different poetic forms, on the whole all these attempts ‘are fundamentally equivalent to that of [Antonio] Minturno, who recognizes three genres—the lyric or melic, the dramatic or scenic, and the epic or narrative. This classification is essentially that of the Greeks’, he adds, ‘and it has lasted down to this very day’.²² Of these three genres, it was the last two that were judged of any importance. Drama (especially tragedy) and epic were cultural juggernauts from Aristotle onwards and central to any discussion of what Spingarn calls ‘[t]he first problem of Renaissance criticism’, namely, ‘the justification of imaginative literature’.²³ Practically a contact sport of defence and definition, apology and rationalisation, early modern theories of literature, such as they were, paid more or less exclusive attention to those major forms that seemed most relevant to poetry’s moral and educative function. To grapple with the shorter poems of sixteenth-century English poetry, then, is to grapple with the fact that lyric was not yet the norm. In fact, one might say it was a minor literature. Other matters seemed grander than reflection on the nature of short poems or, indeed, on the shortness of short poems. In the period in question, lyric poems—and love lyrics above all—were routinely deprecated (however disingenuously) as juvenilia, trifles, and toys. W. R. Johnson reminds us that the Classical lyric also ‘suffered a general neglect, for the moral functions it performed had been taken over by epic and by tragedy, high comedy, history, and oratory’. Since ‘the living lyric of this period did not deeply engage the serious attention of most ancient readers’, Johnson suggests, ‘we shall not be surprised when we discover how relatively unimpressive ancient theories of this most protean and complex literary genre seem to have been’.²⁴ Indeed, Johnson reminds us that, according to Seneca, ‘Cicero said that even if his lifetime were to be doubled he would still not have time to waste on reading the lyric poets’.²⁵ What here appears as animosity, Culler considers an accident. ‘One might argue that it is for quite contingent reasons—the fact that Aristotle wrote a treatise on mimetic poetry, poetry as an imitation of action, and not on the other poetic forms that were central to Greek culture—that Western literary theory has neglected the lyric and, until the romantic era, treated it as a miscellaneous collection of minor forms, despite the flourishing of lyric in ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.’²⁶
slipped ‘between the strings of a gittern’ belonging to her music teacher, in James M. Osborn (ed.), The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (c 1576) (Oxford, 1962), 21; and Sonnet XLVIII of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), which describes its own destruction at the hands of its addressee: ‘Innocent paper whom too cruell hand / Did make the matter to auenge her yre: / and ere she could thy cause wel vnderstand, / did sacrifize vnto the greedy fyre’ (lines 1–4), in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999), 411. ²¹ Abrams, ‘Poetic Norm’; Abrams first mooted this idea of lyric as the poetic norm in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford, 1958). ²² Spingarn, History, 58, italics original. ²³ Spingarn, History, 3. ²⁴ W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley, CA, 1982), 77. ²⁵ Seneca, Epistles, 49.5, in Richard M. Gummere (trans.), Epistles, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1917–25), 1.324–5; quoted in Johnson, Idea of Lyric, 76. ²⁶ Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 1.
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195 Regardless, this relative lack of reflection on the ‘minor’ form of the lyric leaves one wondering what value might be associated with poems not categorised by subject matter, verse form, or some combination thereof. What associations, thoughts, and feelings were provoked by the relative magnitude of these lyrics? And might the smallness of their scale have other ramifications for understanding and appreciating the poetry of this, or of any other era? To be sure, period efforts to categorise and classify abound, as Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (composed c 1579–81, published 1595), George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589), and William Scott’s Model of Poesy (1599) each testify. It is true that such efforts were not necessarily endorsements: as Gary Waller notes, ‘at the bottom of Puttenham’s hierarchy of poetical kinds is the sixteenth-century poetry that today we find most interesting, the lyric’.²⁷ Nevertheless, it is what have been identified as the essential qualities of lyric—its brevity and musicality—that each of these contemporary theorists also pick out. In the Defence, Sidney examines the various ‘parts, kinds, or species’ of poetry not merely to taxonomise but to describe its capacity ‘to draw the mind more effectually than any other art doth’ to the ways of virtue (Sidney, Defence, 94).²⁸ While he begins with some ambivalence about mongrel or mixed forms (tragedy with comedy, prose with verse), the analysis proceeds with a familiar list: pastoral, elegiac, iambic, satiric, comic, tragic, lyric, and epic. All in the end are found ‘fully commendable’ (Sidney, Defence, 99). In the case of lyric, the poet is described as he ‘who with his tuned lyre and well-accorded voice, giveth praise, the reward of virtue, to virtuous acts; who gives moral precepts, and natural problems; who sometimes raiseth up his voice to the height of the heavens, in singing the lauds of the immoral God’ (Sidney, Defence, 97). For Sidney, the characteristic signature of lyric is first and foremost its song-like quality, leading him to associate it with such song-forms as the ode (specifically, the Odes that Pindar composed in praise of the great sportsmen and athletes of his day), the ballad (invoking his own personal love for ‘the old song of Percy and Douglas’, also known as ‘The Ballad of Chevy Chase’), and the Psalm (Sidney, Defence, 97). Earlier in the Defence, Sidney provides another example of the poet who raises his voice in praise of God by presenting King David, author of the Psalms, as the ultimate model for the lyricist: for what else is the awaking his musical instruments, the often and free changing of persons, his notable prosopopoeias, when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in His majesty, his telling of the beasts’ joyfulness and hills leaping, but a heavenly poesy, wherein almost he showeth himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith? (Sidney, Defence, 77)
Puttenham discourses more broadly on ‘poems and their sundry forms’, including poets defined as ‘heroic, lyric, elegiac, epigrammatist, or otherwise’ (Puttenham, Art, 115).²⁹ Unlike the heroic poets, who spin tales of battle and seem to be the standard against which poets of lesser length and scope are judged, there are
²⁷ Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1986), 70. ²⁸ Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poesy, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973). ²⁹ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007).
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196 - [o]thers, who more delighted to write songs or ballads of pleasure, to be sung with the voice, and to the harp, lute, or cithern, and such other musical instruments, they were called melodious poets (melici), or by a more common name lyric poets, of which sort was Pindar, Anacreon, and Callimachus with others among the Greeks, Horace and Catullus among the Latins. (Puttenham, Art, 115)
Again, musicality is key, with the ballad and the Pindaric Ode once more invoked by way of illustration, but also Anacreon, well-known for his drinking songs and hymns to be accompanied by music. Callimachus, meanwhile, was famous for praising shorter poems in favour of epic or longer poems, as in the pithy dismissal attributed to him that mega biblion, mega kakon [μέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν] or ‘a big book is a big evil’.³⁰ Shorter poems may be associated with the great Greek and Roman lyricists, but a relative lack of magnitude also comes to the fore in Puttenham’s chapter treating ‘[i]n what sort of poesy virtue in the inferior sort was commended’ (Puttenham, Art, 131–3). Decorum dictates that short forms are appropriate for the unimportant, insignificant, and socially low. For there we learn that ‘the poet, in praising the manner of life or death of any mean person, did it by some little ditty or epigram or epitaph, in few verses and mean style conformable to his subject’ (Puttenham, Art, 132–3). Thus, while immortal gods receive hymns of praise, and ‘great princes and historical personages’ receive ‘ballads of praise called encomia’, it is ‘inferior persons’ who may receive praise ‘by other slight poems’ (Puttenham, Art, 133). Separate chapters treat other kinds of poems defined by their brevity, such as the epigram, ‘a pretty fashioned poem short and sweet’ designed to ‘make his friend sport, and anger his foe, and give a pretty nip, or show a sharp conceit in a few verses. For this epigram is but an inscription or writing made as it were upon a table, or in a window, or upon the wall or mantel of a chimney in some place of common resort’ so that ‘every man should know and descant upon’ (Puttenham, Art, 142). The epitaph, a subspecies of epigram, receives separate treatment as a brief poem ‘applied to the report of the dead person’s estate and degree, or of his other good or bad parts, to his commendation or reproach, and is an inscription such as a man may commodiously write or engrave upon a tomb in a few verses, pithy, quick, and sententious, for the passerby to peruse and judge upon without any long tarriance’ (Puttenham, Art, 144). Scott’s Model of Poesy (1599) blends this attention to song and scale in his definition of ‘poesies . . . more sudden and short yet pithy and profitable, which may all be reduced under the lyric by the countenance of [Julius Caesar] Scaliger, that so enlargeth the word’. ‘Lyric are so called’, he goes on, ‘because properly they be appliable to music and song and might be married to some instrument, as the harp, which anciently was thought the fitliest agreeable to ditties . . . This is likewise called the melic or melodious kind, and this sweet part of poesy is of use in holy as well as civil matters’ (Scott, Model, 25).³¹ Under the broad rubric of lyric, Scott also includes a range of short works organised either by affective impulses (so that those of ‘desire and sorrow are called elegiac or plaintive’, those of ‘anger and hate . . . dirae’) or by occasions (so that poems of victory, peace and plenty are called ‘epinicia’ or ‘triumphals, pageant songs, or hymns of solemnity’, those that record birth are called genethliaca; marriage, epithalamia, and so on) (Scott, Model, 26–7). After a brief treatment of Psalms, elegies, and sonnets, Scott turns to a ‘last kind of lyric, which is called ³⁰ See Callimachus, in A. W. Mair and G. R. Mair (eds and trans.), Callimachus, Lycophron, Aratus: Hymns and Epigrams, Lycophron; Alexandra, Aratus; Phaenomena (Cambridge, MA, 1921), 4. ³¹ William Scott, in Gavin Alexander (ed.), The Model of Poesy (Cambridge, 2013).
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197 so because it is brief and vulgar, though it have no particular suitableness to music; and this is either more seriously grave, insinuating shortly a commendation of good or a discovery of false good, or else more merrily light and conceited’ (Scott, Model, 28–9). Included in this category are proverbs, epistles, and other efforts categorised under the heading of ‘lyrical epigram’, which are ‘fit to set on any statue, monument, table, window, banner, shield, etc.’ and ‘are tending or appliable to instruction as coming from wit, figuring out pleasant and well-disposed conceits’. Such epigrams and epitaphs include ‘poesies in rings, jewels and the like; likewise, mots in emblems and impresses [i.e., imprese]’ (Scott, Model, 29). It will be noted that the discussion of lyric so far has eschewed mention of what is arguably the best recognised lyric form of the period, namely, the sonnet. This is partly because the sonnet has a dedicated chapter of its own in this volume (see Chapter 12), but also to point out how much of lyric’s large domain is obscured when it is identified with this one form alone. It is not just the fact that ‘[l]ove was the main theme of the shorter forms of Elizabethan verse’, as Maurice Evans notes, but, more potently, that this era saw a veritable empire of sonnets: an empire, indeed, that without due caution might threaten to colonise the topic.³² The language of love as governed by Petrarchan discourse was indeed ‘a product for export in sixteenth-century Europe’, as Greene has argued, and Petrarchism ‘one of the original colonial discourses’, but left unchecked the Petrarchan sonnet is also in danger of dominating modern critical analyses of Renaissance lyric.³³ As Waller argues of the ‘Englishing’ of Petrarch, Petrarchism was, ‘as a rhetorical master-text, adaptable to the increasingly self-conscious rhetorical world of the Elizabethan Court, where display and selfaggrandizement were expressed with becoming humility, and were thus the means of acquiring place and, if not power, at least the possibility of power’. While ‘adapted to very precise political purposes, especially in England, where the fact of a Virgin Queen on the throne produced an extraordinary transference of the Petrarchan manner to politics’, it might be as well for the modern critic to be a little more wary lest this master discourse— powerful as it is—threatens to take over the many other aspects of Renaissance lyric.³⁴ What remains to be said for shorter poems or lyrics, then, if we find they have not already been overwritten by other poetic forms and political discourses? What follows is an attempt to answer that question. Resisting what might be called the ‘Petrarchisation’ or ‘sonnetisation’ of short poetry, this chapter surveys those terrains of lyric in the Renaissance that exist outside the boundaries of the Petrarchan sonnet: forms such as the epigram, riddle, ode, song, and Psalm. Referring back to Frye’s and Welsh’s threefold division of poetry, if sonnets seem most to capture the force of logopoeia or ‘the dance of the intellect among words’, the discussion that follows focuses by contrast on phanopoeia—the specific appeal of the short form to the visual—and on melopoeia: the particularly musical properties of the lyric’s short lines and short forms (though these three categories are not, of course, mutually exclusive). Addressed to the eye and the ear, respectively, the phanopoetic (opsis or riddle) has the more static quality of something that has been written down in order to be read (‘an inscription or writing’, as Puttenham called it, whether put down on paper, engraved on a ring or tombstone, scratched on a window pane, or painted on a banner or chimney mantel); while the melopoetic (melos or song) has the more mobile quality of something that has been spoken or sung (whether a solo, a dialogue, a refrain, a round, or a chorus) in
³² Maurice Evans, English Poetry in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1955), 83. ³³ Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, IL, 1999), 1. See also Greene’s influential Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, NJ, 1991). ³⁴ Waller, English Poetry, 80.
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198 - order to be heard or overheard, enjoyed and joined, even danced to, but that remains as traceless as breath, as evanescent as the movement of a body in space or of a sound in air.
Lyric Poetry, Short and Sweet As we have seen, the typically diminutive size of lyric poems, relative to more culturally freighted forms such as epic, led some contemporaries to question their value. Robert Van Hallberg has perhaps most ambitiously shifted this conception when he takes ‘lyric poetry’ to stand ‘for the power of art in a way that other literary genres have not’, and undertakes an exploration of these lyric powers by tracing ‘the authority of lyric’ to ‘three sources: first, traditions of religious affirmation; secondly, the social status of those who speak the idioms from which particular poems are made; thirdly, extraordinary cognition produced by the formal, and in particular musical, resources of some poems’.³⁵ For Heather Dubrow, lyric is similarly paradoxical. ‘Poets and rhetoricians’, she argues, ‘present that mode as evanescent and trifling yet powerful as a weapon and durable as stone.’³⁶ While remaining wary of overly transhistorical accounts, Dubrow is concerned with lyric as ‘the site of both extraordinary power and helpless passivity, and as the source of both glorious achievements, especially in military and spiritual spheres, and of perilously seductive threats’.³⁷ Small, in other words, is not necessarily the same as feeble. On the contrary, smaller scales of operation can create a distillation of energy and intensity of focus that are capable of claiming a special forcibleness all their own.³⁸ By way of an example, three epigrams by Wyatt might be taken to illustrate the point. These poems each take the same form—eight lines of iambic pentameter rhyming abababcc—that is to say, a single stanza of ottava rima, the Italian form invented by Giovanni Boccaccio and generally used (by him and by later Italian poets such as Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, and Torquato Tasso) for long, narrative, epic poems. Puttenham would later describe this verse form as ‘very stately and heroic’ (Puttenham, Art, 155), while Samuel Daniel would have the following to say about it, and other short stanza forms, in his Defence of Rhyme (1603): is it not most delightful to see much excellently ordered in a small room, or little . . . And these limited proportions, and rests of Stanzas, consisting of 6, 7, or 8 lines are of that
³⁵ Robert Van Hallberg, Lyric Powers (Chicago, IL, 2008), 7. ³⁶ Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD, 2008), 39. ³⁷ Dubrow, Challenges, 17. ³⁸ Sidney describes this quality of ‘forcibleness or energia’ as particularly appropriate to the short but ideally persuasive form of the love lyric (Defence, 117). The term (its first use in English, although for a possible allusion to it by Skelton, see Chapter 21, note 29, in this volume) derives from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 3.2.1411b, in J. H. Freese (trans.), revised Gisela Striker, Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge, MA, 2020), 404–5, where it indicates the dynamic power with which the rhetorician or poet succeeds in moving their audience, ideally to action (from its root ergon [ἔργον], ‘work’). The word was frequently confused and conflated with another Greek term, enargeia (from the root argos [ἀργος], shining, bright, glistening), which referred to the visual clarity which a rhetorician or poet might give to a pictorial description, thereby rendering it particularly vivid in the hearer or reader’s mind (see, e.g., Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 4.2.64; 6.2.32; 8.3.61–71, in Donald A. Russell (ed. and trans.), The Orator’s Education, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 2.250–1; 3.60–1; 3.374–81). Energeia and enargeia were thus associated with music and painting, respectively (or melos and opsis, in Frye’s terms). See Walter Bernhart, ‘Functions of Description in Poetry’, in Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart (eds), Description in Literature and Other Media (Amsterdam, 2007), 129–52, esp. 134; and Monica Westin, ‘Aristotle’s Rhetorical Energeia: An Extended Note’, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 20.3 (2017), 252–61. See also Chapter 8, note 7; Chapter 21, note 29; and Chapter 31, note 25, in this volume.
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199 happiness, both for the disposition of the matter, the apt planting the sentence where it may best stand to hit, the certain close of delight with the full body of a just period well carried, is such, as neither the Greeks or Latins ever attained unto. (Daniel, Defence, 138–9)³⁹
Wyatt’s use of this short and tightly rhymed stanza form as a singularity serves to invest it with all the weight and grandeur of the epic from which it derived.⁴⁰ His epigram and riddle, sometimes entitled ‘Description of a Gun’, serves as a particularly good example: Vulcan begat me. Minerva me taught. Nature, my mother. Craft nourished me year by year. Three bodies are my food. My strength is in naught. Slaughter, wrath, waste, and noise are my children dear. Guess, friend, what I am and how I am wrought: Monster of sea or of land, or of elsewhere? Know me and use me and I may thee defend And, if I be thine enemy, I may thy life end. (Wyatt, ‘Vulcan begat me’, Complete Poems, 94)⁴¹
Wyatt not only describes the object. He adopts the gun as a persona, while also giving clues to enable the reader to guess the speaker’s identity. The poem’s epigrammatic format offers an opportunity to distil epic warfare down to lyric dimensions, and, as a riddle, to indulge lyric’s tendency towards the visual (Frye’s opsis): a form short enough to be taken in by the eye, grasped in its entirety at a single glance (almost literally, in this case, a coup d’œil). One might say that this poem literalises the ‘pretty nip’ or ‘hit’ that Puttenham and Daniel would each attribute to the epigrammatic form—the reader is supposed to be struck by its piercing wit or ‘sharp conceit’, as Puttenham called it (a hit, a very palpable hit)—except that, in Wyatt’s case, that blow has an uncanny tendency to double back and rebound upon the speaker who delivers it: ‘if I be thine enemy, I may thy life end’. This riddle, that is to say, serves to unmask the pure aggression that is so often to be found lurking behind Wyatt’s lyric utterances, while it is equally characteristic of this poet that such aggression ends up being self-destructive. In another poem, for example, Wyatt makes the gun into an operative analogy for the sexual desire purpose-built for a Petrarchan scenario: The furious gun in his raging ire, When that the ball is rammed in too sore And that the flame cannot part from the fire, Cracketh in sunder, and in the air doth roar The shivered pieces. Right so doth my desire Whose flame increaseth from more to more; Which to let out I dare not look nor speak, So inward force my heart doth all to-break. (Wyatt, ‘The furious gun’, Complete Poems, 92) ³⁹ Samuel Daniel, in Arthur Colby Sprague (ed.), Poems and A Defence of Ryme (Chicago, IL, 1930), 138–9. ⁴⁰ Of the thirty-five poems classed as Epigrams by Wyatt’s editor, R. A. Rebholz, some twenty-seven (77 per cent) are poems consisting of eight lines, of which twenty-five (71 per cent) follow the strict rhyme scheme of the ottava rima stanza. ⁴¹ Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978).
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200 - Here the intense compression of the ottava rima format—which squeezes the heroic proportions of epic into lyric’s tiny space—perfectly mirrors the action described, as the lines, words, syllables, and rhymes are packed in as tight as the cannon ball so firmly rammed into the shaft that the igniting spark is unable to fire it, causing the weapon violently to self-destruct instead (the moment of explosion is marked by the enjambment that bursts through lines 4–5).⁴² Although the gun does not speak in the first person here, as in ‘Vulcan begat me’ (the latter being a common form, especially in Anglo-Saxon riddles), it is clear that the speaker identifies wholly with the malfunctioning firearm, using it as an unusual conceit with which to articulate the typical frustrations and burning self-lacerations of Petrarchan love. Wyatt seems determined to show that these dense, intense poems are quite literally capable of driving a point home (for the most part, into the all-too-vulnerable body of the characteristically self-wounded speaker). Within Wyatt’s epigrams, these guns thus find themselves in good company with similarly small but hurtful if not lethal objects: adders, needles, thorns, arrows, spiders, bees, and falcons.⁴³ The small, tight, closed forms to which lyric lends itself naturally evoke the experience of physical constraint. This is something Wyatt consciously exploits when he makes use of this favoured form in the following prison poem addressed to his friend, Sir Francis Bryan: Sighs are my food, drink are my tears; Clinking of fetters such music would crave. Stink and close air away my life it wears. Innocency is all the hope I have. Rain, wind, or weather I judge by mine ears. Malice assaulted that righteousness should save. Sure am I, Brian, this wound shall heal again But yet, alas, the scar shall still remain. (Wyatt, ‘Sighs are my food’, Complete Poems, 99)
Within the tight constraints of the ottava rima stanza, the poet has no more room to manoeuvre than the prisoner in an eight- by five-foot cell (stanza does mean ‘room’ in Italian, after all), and yet the experience of constraint—the fetters of rhyme, as it were— forces both poetic discipline and powerful focus, as the suffering speaker seeks to make poetic capital from his situation. The sighs, tears, and wounds more typical of Petrarchan love are adapted here to a different context, so as to enhance the sense of social injury and an unjustly damaged reputation, but the speaker has the last word when he reaches for the proverbial wisdom with which the poem concludes. As if in confirmation of its adamantine truth, only hardened by the passing of time, this line was subsequently repeated by Wyatt’s younger contemporary, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, when (in a still briefer admonitory
⁴² The poem is based on a verse of ottava rima (also known as a strambotto) by the Italian poet Serafino Aquilano, published in his Opere (1516). In the Egerton manuscript, Wyatt experiments with the first three words of his version of the poem, trying out ‘Like as the cannon’ and ‘Like as the bombard’ (from Serafino’s ‘una bombarda’) as alternatives. For Serafino’s poem and Wyatt’s different versions, see Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (eds), Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1969), 45, 312. ⁴³ See ‘The wandering gadling in the summer tide’ (Complete Poems, 91), ‘She sat and sewed’ (92), ‘Venemous thorns that are so sharp and keen’ (93), ‘Who hath heard of such cruelty before’ (96), ‘Sometime I fled the fire’ (96), ‘Th’en’my of life’ (97), ‘Nature that gave the bee so feat a grace’ (97), and ‘Lucks, my fair falcon’ (101).
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201 poem addressed to a friend of his own) he confirmed that ‘Wyatt said true, the scar doth aye endure’.⁴⁴ Other epigrammatic poems operate in the mode of moral commentary, much in the style of Martial, the Roman poet famous for his Epigrams. One such example is the following unattributed poem printed in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557): The longer life, the more offence: The more offence, the greater pain: The greater pain, the less defence: The less defence, the lesser gain. The loss of gain long ill doth try: Wherefore come death, and let me die. The shorter life, less count I find: The less account, the sooner made: The count soon made, the merrier mind: The merry mind doth thought evade. Short life in truth this thing doth try: Wherefore come death, and let me die: Come gentle death, the ebb of care, The ebb of care, the flood of life, The flood of life, the joyful fare, The joyful fare, the end of strife. The end of strife, that thing wish I: Wherefore come death, and let me die. (Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 144)⁴⁵
Here, the ‘short life’ that the Stoic persona seeks is embodied in the short tetrameter lines and the relatively brief format of three sixains (in the common ababcc rhyme that Shakespeare would later popularise in his epyllion or ‘little’ epic, Venus and Adonis, 1593). Compared with the epigrammatic poems by Wyatt just discussed, this lyric seems less aligned with image, object, and riddle, deploying rather the song-like qualities of rhythm, rhyme, and repetition, as it uses a chained echo-effect to ring a set of propositions about mortality through a series of gradual sonic changes. This brings us, then, to that other characteristic of sixteenth-century English lyric, namely, its tendency towards the musical or the melopoetic (although this is clearly not incompatible with the tendency towards the epigrammatic, phanopoetic, or optic). Expanding the domain of lyric beyond the otherwise all-encompassing empire of the sonnet, one might reimagine the period as not, or not only, a Petrarchan age but also as an era that stretched from the early Tudor songbooks (with works by William Cornish, Robert Fairfax, and Henry VIII) to the works of John Dowland and Thomas Campion later in the century, or from the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter of the mid-century to the later Sidney Psalter and beyond. For, however deep-rooted the conception that lyric typically expresses the ⁴⁴ ‘My Ratcliffe, when thy reckless youth offends, / Receive thy scourge by others’ chastisement; / For such calling, when it works none amends, / Then plagues are sent without advertisement. / Yet Solomon said, the wronged shall recure [regain health, make a recovery]; / But Wyatt said true, the scar doth aye endure’, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Emrys Jones (ed.), Poems (Oxford, 1964), 32. ⁴⁵ Richard Tottel (ed.), in Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul (eds), Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (Harmondsworth, 2011).
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202 - subjective thoughts and feelings of the individual as articulated in the first person, it was not always so. As Marisa Galvez notes in her study of medieval songbooks, the ‘multiauthor and anonymous lyric anthology’ tracks ‘the transformation of ephemeral, anonymous lyrics into modern conceptions of poetry and the poet’, arguing that ‘what we consider “poetry” is built on the remains of lyrics seen in the material formation of the songbook’.⁴⁶ A degree of resistance to such a revisionist history of lyric might be suspected in the way John Skelton, for example, has garnered relatively little attention as a lyricist by comparison with others. Yet, as Dubrow notes, Skelton’s ‘short lines, so idiosyncratic that they are aptly termed “Skeltonics,” may well be based on church music, especially plainsong’.⁴⁷ Musicality Skelton has aplenty as the opening stanza of the following poem, self-described as a ballad or ditty: ‘My darlyng dere, my daysy floure, Let me’, quod he, ‘ly in your lap’. ‘Ly styll’, quod she, ‘my paramoure, Ly styll hardely, and take a nap’. Hys hed was hevy, such was his hap, All drowsy, dremyng, dround in slepe, That of hys love he toke no kepe, With ‘Lullay, lullay’, lyke a chylde, Thou slepyst to long, thou art begylde! (Skelton, Dyvers Balettys and Dyties Solacyous, lullaby, lines 1–7, followed by the refrain, Complete Poems, 41)⁴⁸
With its rhyme royal stanzas (ababbcc) converted here into the short tetrameters typical of song metre, its repeated couplet refrain, and its alliterative lines more redolent of Middle English than of early modern verse, the poem creates a hypnotic, synaesthetic experience that weaves around the reader an appealing web of sound. In this sense, it is indeed a ‘solacyous’ ditty (affording or giving solace, that is). True, the lover ends up sleeping so soundly that the tavern prostitute that he is addressing makes off with his money without giving him any ‘solace’ at all, but while the song ends with the poet urging the ‘blynkerd blowboll’ or blind drunkard (line 24, Complete Poems, 42) to wake up and come to his senses, the reader is given the option of finding solace enough in the poetry alone. Caught up in an incantatory encounter—that, to the transported or willing mind, might well evoke those enchantresses of romance who strive to lull the wandering hero into erotic torpor and complacency—the reader may choose to stay dreaming. Both ‘incantation’ and ‘enchant’ derive from Latin cantare, to sing, and myth tells us that, no matter how dangerous, such siren-song proves for the most part quite irresistible to those that hear it. If one face of song is intoxication, the other is rapture. Wyatt was a song-maker as well, of course, or perhaps a transmitter of song, as in the much-travelled ‘Ah, Robin, / Jolly Robin’ which appears in both the Egerton and Devonshire manuscripts:
⁴⁶ Marisa Galvez, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago, IL, 2012), 2, 3, 5. ⁴⁷ Heather Dubrow, ‘Lyric Forms’, in Jackson and Prins (eds), The Lyric Theory Reader, 114–28, 116. ⁴⁸ John Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (Harmondsworth, 1983). The poem is among a group of lyrics collected under the title ‘Dyvers Balettys and Dyties Solacyous’.
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203 ‘Ah, Robin*, *a common name for a shepherd lover Jolly Robin, Tell me how thy leman* doth *sweetheart And thou shall know of mine’. ‘My lady is unkind, perdie!’* ‘Alack, why is she so?’ ‘She loveth another better than me And yet she will say no’.
*By God!
Réponse* I find no such doubleness. I find women true. My lady loveth me doubtless, And will change for no new.
*the answer
Le Plaintiff* Thou art happy while that doth last But I say as I find: That women’s love is but a blast And turneth like the wind.
*the complainer
Réponse If that be true yet, as thou say’st, That women turn their heart, Then speak better of them thou mayst In hope to have thy part. Le Plaintiff Such folks shall take no harm by love That can abide their turn; But I, alas, can no way prove In love but lack and mourn. Réponse But if thou wilt avoid thy harm, Learn this lesson of me: At others’ fires thyself to warm, And let them warm with thee. (Wyatt, ‘Ah, Robin, / Jolly Robin’, Complete Poems, 175–6)
Appropriately enough, given that the word ‘verse’ derives from Latin vertere, to turn, and is so called from turning to begin another line, the verse here turns on the ‘turns’ mentioned in lines 16, 18, and 22, as the two male speakers themselves take it in turn to debate different ways of dealing with female changeability. To the Respondent’s suggestion that women are more likely to be friendly if their lovers do not accuse them of inconstancy, Robin complains that such advice only works for those ‘That can abide their turn’ (line 22, Complete Poems, 175), that is, either wait in turn for the lady’s affection to come round to them again, or tolerate their fickleness. The last word goes to the Respondent who, this time, recommends the strategy of dealing with the problem of inconstancy by embracing it head on: that is to say, by sleeping with other men’s wives. Behind any idealised Petrarchan scenario that might be thought to lie within this sweetly set song lies Wyatt’s typically caustic, blaming,
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204 - and derogatory attitude. As with Skelton’s ditty, however, the lightness of tone created by the dialogic structure and simple speech militates against any gloomy mood. The song form is undoubtedly seductive, as the reader—so enchanted, so charmed—is cordially invited to enter into the game or join in the song, and to take their own turn in the debate rather than, as in so many Petrarchan sonnets, being left on the outside in the position of voyeur. Compared with the solitary and tortured individual so long associated with the Petrarchan mode of lyric complaint, a more communal Wyatt emerges here, in a song that may very well have begun its life outside the world of literary manuscripts or, later, printed texts (this particular song does not appear in Tottel’s Miscellany, for instance). As Wyatt’s editors note, a slightly different version of the first three stanzas was set to music by Cornish in Henry VIII’s songbook, while Feste sings another variant in Twelfth Night (4.2.68–75, Norton Shakespeare, 1961), suggesting that the poem may well be the expansion of a popular song.⁴⁹ In one of his best-known songs, Wyatt combines the musical or melopoetic tendency with the strongly phanopoetic draw towards the concretely visualised image and material object that he had demonstrated in the ‘gun’ poems discussed above: My lute, awake! Perform the last Labour that thou and I shall waste, And end that I have now begun; For when this song is sung and past, My lute, be still for I have done. (Wyatt, ‘My lute, awake!’, lines 1–5, Complete Poems, 144)
First circulated in manuscript amongst the elite coteries of the Tudor court, this powerfully situational poem realises—one might say brings to life—a distinct scene that performs its own performance; indeed, potentially re-performs it as an open-ended and ongoing drama every time the poem is read, recited, or sung (making it an excellent example of the lyric as a text ‘for reperformance’, as Culler suggests).⁵⁰ And quite a performance it is. Composed in the typical song metre of tetrameters, the poem rises to the challenge of the difficult sixteenth-century Spanish form known as the quintilla in which the five-line stanzas are restricted to a maximum of two rhymes (here aabab), with the additional constraint that they must not end with a rhyming couplet.⁵¹ Moreover, since in this particular poem the ⁴⁹ See Wyatt, in Muir and Thomson (eds), Collected Poems, 309; and Wyatt, in Rebholz (ed.), Poems, 432. For Feste’s song, see Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016). In Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry, Cheney likewise examines the transposition of a song (in this case by Thomas, Lord Vaux, published in Tottel’s Miscellany) to drama (in this case, Hamlet): ‘In a way that Vaux could not have predicted, the world’s most famous playwright puts the old Tudor lyric center stage, in a play renowned for creating a watershed model for a new European mindset. What has not quite been registered is that in Vaux’s aristocratic poem, Shakespeare finds the authentic populist voice of modernity’ (40–1). There is a quality worth capturing here, that song was both standard and surprising. Even in places and times where one might not anticipate lyric, it erupts from the texture of other modes or media (drama, narrative, or another kind of presentation), in a way that alters one’s perception of time and space, as one medium tunnels through another. ⁵⁰ See above and note 7. ⁵¹ It would be nice to think that Wyatt also chose this form in order to allude to the structure of the lute itself, since in the fifteenth century lutes commonly had five courses of strings. This is unlikely, however, since a sixth course was added in the sixteenth century to accommodate the development of polyphony and the use of more complex chords. The use of a Spanish form, however, may allude to the fact that, derived from the Arabic *al ’ūd (literally, ‘the wood’), the lute first entered Europe during the Moorish conquest and occupation of Spain (711–1492 ). See Richard Partridge, ‘Lute’, in Agnes Latham (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Music, revised online edition (Oxford, 2011).
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205 refrain is repeated in every final line, meaning the b rhyme must appear in each of the eight stanzas, and since the first and last stanzas are to all intents and purposes the same, this poem—which even obeying the form’s stringent rules, could have had up to sixteen rhymes—in fact has half that: a mere eight rhyme-words in forty lines. Or, to be more accurate, it has only seven, since in sixteenth-century pronunciation the second stanza could be said to consist entirely of b rhymes (none/stone/soon/moan/done). Were that argument to be accepted, nineteen of the poem’s forty lines (47.5 per cent) rhyme with ‘done’, a most emphatic way of saying that you have stopped saying something. It is a breathtaking feat of engineering, in other words, and Wyatt is clearly showing off.⁵² What happens, then, when Wyatt addresses this lute? The poet sings, alone but perhaps not unobserved. He sings not to a beloved but to his instrument. He sings of love but in so doing the poem gains a wider latitude. For, as the object of the poet’s direct address, the lute is vividly realised. It is ‘my’ lute, a beloved possession which the poet holds in his arms— close to his body and especially to his heart—and which vibrates to his touch as he lovingly fingers and strokes it. The lute, that is to say, has an embodied-ness, resonance, and materiality that is quite lacking in the distant lady, known only by her stony silence, and to that extent it takes her place in this fantasy of wish-fulfilment. As a stringed instrument that leaves the voice free to sing, the lute was considered more refined than woodwind, which uses the breath and so takes that human voice away. This was the reason why the lute’s sister instrument, the lyre—instrument of epic and lyric alike—was, in the mythical hierarchy of musical instruments, deemed superior to the panpipes or flute. Yet, in Wyatt’s poem the lyric poet speaks coaxingly, melodiously to his instrument only for both their voices to fall silent in the end: ‘Should we then sigh or sing or moan? / No, no, my lute, for I have done’ (lines 9–10, Complete Poems, 144). For all that their paired voices accompany one another in perfect harmony, what the poet and his lute will ultimately echo is not each other but the dumb, mute, and unresponsive silence of the lady. As so often with Wyatt, aggression is never far away. The poet vows that ‘Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain’ (line 21, Complete Poems, 144) as he vindictively imagines a future in which the lady will be full of regret as, ‘withered and old’ (line 26, Complete Poems, 145), she takes his part and comes to learn, all too late, what ‘Plaining in vain unto the moon’ (line 28, Complete Poems, 145) feels like, internal rhyme pressing the point home, should she miss it.⁵³ But—again, as so often with Wyatt—it is he who is silenced, not she.⁵⁴ For all its brilliance, the poet’s virtuoso performance rebounds upon itself, writing and singing itself into the silence that is acknowledged not only at the end of the poem but, thanks to the refrain, at the end of every stanza, too. Wyatt was the poet laureate of resignation, expressing not only the typically Petrarchan paradox of virtuoso display combined with the powerlessness to persuade, but also a distinctly un-Petrarchan virulence and bitterness. It is as if time itself might end with the failure of love, were it not for this lyric locking us into a moment in
⁵² The only other occasion on which Wyatt uses this precise form—in ‘Who list his wealth and ease retain’— the equivalent ratio of b rhymes to the whole poem is ten times out of twenty-five lines (40 per cent). ⁵³ Compare Wyatt’s ‘Blame not my lute’ in which ‘the songs which I indite / Do quit [i.e., requite or pay back] thy change with rightful spite’ (lines 19–20, Complete Poems, 130). ⁵⁴ As Ovid rehearses the hierarchy of musical instruments in the Metamorphoses, the lyre’s supposed superiority over woodwind is not so secure that it does not require an over-compensatory violence to dominate the ‘lower’ instrument and is sometimes overwhelmed by it and/or by its uncivilised, bacchic proponents. See Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books 1, 6, and 11 for the struggles experienced by Apollo and Orpheus, the archetypal lyricists of Classical myth, as discussed in Catherine Bates, ‘Abject Authorship: A Portrait of the Artist in Ovid and His Renaissance Imitators’, in John S. Garrison and Goran Stanivukovic (eds), Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature (Montreal, 2020), 48–67, 53n24.
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206 - which achievement and failure—a burst of brilliant playing followed by silence—alternate again and again, both within the poem and at every rendition of it. The lyric’s circular structure, beginning as it ends and vice versa, adds to the sense that, like a round or a fugue, the song could continue, plaintively, ad infinitum. As suggested by the full title of Tottel’s Miscellany (the premier lyric collection of the period within which, with the exception of Skelton’s ‘My darlying dere, my daysy floure’ and Wyatt’s ‘Ah, Robin, / Jolly Robin’, all of the poems discussed so far appear)—namely, Songs and Sonnets, written by the right honourable Lord Henry Howard late Earl of Surrey, and others—the pairing of songs and sonnets suggests that they were considered largely interchangeable in the period. Indeed, originally an Italian diminutive meaning a ‘little sound’ (sonetto from suono, sound), ‘sonnet’ would continue to mean ‘a song, tune, or ballad’ at least up until 1575 (when George Gascoigne gave it the more precise definition we generally use today), if not beyond.⁵⁵ Neither Barnabe Googe’s Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets (1563), nor George Turberville’s Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (1567), nor the ‘Songs and Sonnets’ section of John Donne’s Poems (published posthumously in 1633) contain any sonnets as such, although in the latter case two of the poems there are entitled ‘Song’.⁵⁶ Of these, one in particular traffics in lyric’s magical powers: Go, and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me, where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil’s foot, Teach me to hear Mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy’s stinging, And find What wind Serves to advance an honest mind. If thou beest borne to strange sights, Things invisible to see, Ride ten thousand days and nights, Till age snow white hairs on thee, Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me All strange wonders that befell thee, And swear No where Lives a woman true, and fair. If thou find’st one, let me know, Such a Pilgrimage were sweet; Yet do not, I would not go, Though at next door we might meet,
⁵⁵ See OED, sonnet n. In his ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’, first published in his Posies (1575), Gascoigne notes that ‘some think that all Poems (being short) may be called Sonnets . . . but yet I can best allow to call those Sonnets which are of fourteen lines, every line containing ten syllables. The first twelve do rhyme in staves of four lines by cross metre [i.e., abab], and the last two rhyming together do conclude the whole’, in George W. Pigman III (ed.), A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Oxford, 2000), 460. ⁵⁶ Donne’s poem entitled ‘Witchcraft by a picture’ comprises fourteen lines but as two stanzas of seven lines, each rhyming ababccc, so does not qualify as a sonnet. The other poem entitled ‘Song’ in this section is ‘Sweetest love, I do not go / For weariness of thee’.
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207 Though she were true, when you met her, And last, till you write your letter, Yet she Will be False, ere I come, to two, or three. (Donne, ‘Go, and catch a falling star’, Poetical Works, 8–9)⁵⁷
Along with the reference to superstitious practices redolent of sorcery, divination, fortunetelling, and witchcraft, the regular, rhythmic beat of the song’s tetrameter lines—punctuated by dimeters at the seventh and eighth lines—with its stanzas comprising a cross-rhymed quatrain followed by a rhyming couplet followed by a rhyming triplet, the complex repetitions of this poem have the incantatory quality of a charm (for Frye, the ancient root of lyric in its aspect as melos). The poem is more like the riddling enchantment or tricksy spell with which the hero of a romance or fairy tale is set an impossible task (as, for example, in the Wife of Bath’s Tale), rather than the statement of inwardness or subjectivity sometimes deemed definitive of lyric. As it slowly builds up a catalogue of ingredients and ritual actions, the poem taps into impulses in language that are older and more urgent than those afforded by mere self-representation: the attempt to find in human words a supernatural power capable of making wishes or curses come true. And—as with the songs by Skelton and Wyatt discussed above—the power that such incantation potentially has to overwhelm otherwise logical and rational male bodies and minds is once again associated with language in its non-rational and non-logical aspects: with the musicality and mystery of a poetic language that so readily finds itself identified with fickle females, be they goddesses, enchantresses, sirens, witches, hags, wise women, maddened maidens, wanton wives, tavern trulls, coy mistresses, or weird sisters.⁵⁸ Like songs, Psalms, too, share a root in music, for ‘even the name of Psalms . . . is nothing but songs’, as Sidney wrote in the Defence (Defence, 77), the word deriving from the ancient Greek ψάλλειν meaning to pluck a stringed instrument, thus putting the biblical King David alongside Apollo and Orpheus in the category of ideal and archetypal players of the harp or lyre. Indeed, the dominant pairing of the period might well have been articulated as ‘songs and psalms’ rather than ‘songs and sonnets’, and the editors of the Sidney Psalter agree: ‘the metrical Psalm rivalled the Petrarchan love poem as a popular lyric mode for English poets’.⁵⁹ Although a fairly loose designation, ‘song’ signals that core relationship between poetry and music that is embedded in the term lyric. While it is easy to acknowledge as a general principle what Katharine Larson refers to as ‘the musical grounding of lyric form’, it is also important to recognise that the constantly evolving relationship between poetry and
⁵⁷ John Donne, in Sir Herbert Grierson (ed.), Poetical Works (London, 1933). ⁵⁸ All figurations of the mother, of course. As Mutlu Konuk Blasing argues, lyric is precisely what ‘imperils rational language’ because it is ‘a nonrational linguistic system that is logically and genetically prior to its rational deployment’. She sources this system in the infant’s slow and embodied acquisition of the mother tongue: a process that begins (even in utero) with the absorption of the rhythms, stress patterns, pitches, timbres, tones, and unique alternations of sound and silence that make up human speech in a given language and that long precede the structures of grammar, semantics, or logic later laid down upon them. It is this non-rational system that poetic language—as deployed in lyric verse above all—uncannily respeaks and remembers. See her Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 1–2. On the use of song as a form of specifically female utterance to be differentiated from ‘normal’, logical, rational (i.e., male) speech, see also Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (eds), Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge, 1994). ⁵⁹ Hannibal Hamlin, Michael G. Brennan, Margaret P. Hannay, and Noel J. Kinnamon (eds), The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney (Oxford, 2009), xii.
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208 - music experienced a significant modulation in the Reformation.⁶⁰ John Stevens, for example, sees the zealous new focus on the Word and on textual interpretation during and after the Reformation as cause of that modulation. ‘In the Middle Ages’, he suggests, ‘words were fitted to music; but now music is to be fitted to words . . . It would be a grave mistake, however, to think of music as in the centre of events or of people’s thoughts’.⁶¹ Others suggest this was in fact the age of a waning relationship between poetry and music. ‘In the early modern period’, Brewster claims, ‘the development of print culture fundamentally altered the relationship between music and poetry, and the link grew progressively more vestigial.’⁶² Whether one considers music or poetry to be the dominant term, there is little question that songs and Psalms enjoyed a ubiquity rivalling that of sonnets in the sixteenth century. Stevens suggests the pervasive presence of Psalms in civic life after the Reformation: ‘The Reformers . . . were not innovating when they elevated the psalms to a position of importance in Christian worship and in Christian devotion . . . What the Reformers (in particular, the “Puritans”) did was to recover for the Psalms their popularity as congregational songs, by translating them into the vernacular, setting them in metre (mostly the ballad metre), giving them tunes that appealed, and making the people sing them.’⁶³ Lindley, too, argues that ‘[i]n the sixteenth century most people made their primary contact with poetry or verse when it was accompanied by music. Whether in the ballads sold by itinerant sellers such as Shakespeare’s Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, or in the metrical Psalms that were the only music permitted in the average parish church, or in the songs heard in the theatre, or in music sung for domestic entertainment, verses came most frequently attached to tunes.’⁶⁴ Dubrow likewise derives many features we associate with lyric from ‘a major change in ecclesiastical practice, the congregational singing of psalms, [which] affected both subject positions and the use of framing devices even in secular poems’, and which also helps explain ‘the vogue for poetry of praise in the early modern era, ranging from the guilt engendered by lauding a mistress or patron to its assuagement through celebrating God’.⁶⁵ And Hannibal Hamlin describes just how pervasive the presence of the Psalm was in the literary tradition: The earl of Surrey and Richard Stanyhurst translated Virgil’s Aeneid; Arthur Golding and George Sandys translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses; but all four translated the Psalms, as did John Milton, Sir Philip Sidney, the countess of Pembroke, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Phineas Fletcher, and Richard Crashaw. Virtually every author of the period (Shakespeare, Spenser, Bunyan, Donne, Herbert and Jonson) translated, paraphrased, or alluded to the Psalms in their major works. In fact, the translation or ‘Englishing,’ of the biblical Psalms substantially shaped the culture of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England, resulting in creative forms as diverse as signing psalters, metrical psalm paraphrases, sophisticated poetic adaptations, meditations, sermons, commentaries, and significant allusions in poems, plays, and literary prose, by English men and women of
⁶⁰ Katherine R. Larson, ‘A Poetics of Song’, in Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds), The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture (Oxford, 2014), 104–22, 122. ⁶¹ John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (Cambridge, 1961), 79. ⁶² Brewster, Lyric, 134. ⁶³ Stevens, Music and Poetry, 85, italics original. ⁶⁴ David Lindley, ‘ “Words for music, perhaps”: Early Modern Songs and Lyric’, in Marion Thain (ed.), The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge, 2013), 10–29, 10. ⁶⁵ Dubrow, Challenges, 8.
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209 varied social and intellectual backgrounds, accommodating the biblical texts to their personal agendas, whether religious, political, or aesthetic.⁶⁶
And, as Dubrow points out elsewhere, the Psalm had the advantage of divine provenance in an era of such intense anxieties about the legitimacy of poetry. ‘Attending to the commonplace that the Bible is a compendium of all genres’, she writes, ‘Renaissance lyricists could claim as their predecessor no less a figure than David, considered the author of the Psalms.’⁶⁷ Moreover, Psalms were also communal. Frequently set to music, they invoked the song-like properties of lyric but changed the scene from the solitary, introspective singer, complaining alone with/to his instrument, to an activity that could be shared by a group of likeminded individuals joined together in unison, in this case, in devotion and prayer. Where melos has its roots in charm, its mobilisation of language’s incantatory power works here in the mode of prayer, benediction, even propitiation. ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, hear my request’, Wyatt intones as he opens his translation of Psalm 143. ‘Complish my boon, answer to my desire / Not by desert but for thine own behest’ (Wyatt, A Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms, lines 727–9, Complete Poems, 215). As both religiously inflected Petrarchan poems and later devotional traditions would prove, self-abnegating and even de-individuating gestures might still be deployed in the service of creating a distinctively singular self. And, yet, the frequently collaborative nature of Psalm translation realises something more complex. The distinctive power of the joint Sidney Psalter, for example (a paraphrase of the Psalms begun by Philip Sidney but left unfinished at his death and completed by his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert), defies individuation. Mary suggests as much in the dedicatory poem to the Psalter which she addressed to her dead brother: To thee, pure sprite, to thee alone’s addressed This coupled work, by double interest thine: First raised by thy blest hand, and what is mine Inspired by thee, thy secret power impressed. So dared my Muse with thine itself combine, As mortal stuff with that which is divine; Thy light’ning beams give lustre to the rest. (Sidney Herbert, ‘To the Angel Spirit’, lines 1–7, Sidney Psalter, 8)⁶⁸
Donne, too, in his own dedicatory poem to the Sidney Psalter, famously describes this sibling collaboration as central to the project. Instead of authorship lodging in a single, authorial body, it appears, rather, that here God . . . hast cleft that spirit, to perform That work again, and shed it, here, upon Two, by their bloods, and by thy Spirit one;
⁶⁶ Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2004), 1. ⁶⁷ Dubrow, ‘Models of Lyric’, 118. ⁶⁸ Mary Sidney Herbert, in Hamlin, et al. (eds), The Sidney Psalter.
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210 - A brother and a sister, made by thee The organ, where thou art the harmony. (Donne, ‘Eternal God (for whom who ever dare’, lines 12–16, Sidney Psalter, 3)⁶⁹
If there is space for a single, unified, and undivided author here, that person can never be an imperfect and fallen human being. It can only ever be God, for—as Sidney himself wrote— the Psalms ‘are a divine poem’, ‘a heavenly poesy’, ‘that did imitate the unconceivable excellencies of God’ such that ‘[a]gainst these none will speak that hath the Holy Ghost in due holy reverence’ (Defence, 77, 80). Psalm paraphrase might seem the classic exemplar for lyric in its capacity as a ritualised text ‘for reperformance’, as the Sidneys—like so many others before and after them—took up the Psalms so as to ‘perform / That work again’. But all along, from King David to the myriad translators, imitators, and poets who came after him, the true author of those lyrics can only be the divinity: ‘the heavenly Maker of that maker’, as Sidney called him (Defence, 79). In Donne’s poem, God’s ‘blessed Spirit fell upon / These Psalms’ first author in a cloven tongue / (For ’twas a double power by which he sung)’ (lines 8–10, Sidney Psalter, 3). David’s tongue was ‘cloven’ or ‘double’ because it was both human and divine, but Donne is also punning David’s organ of speech with those ‘cloven tongues, like fire’ in which the Spirit descended upon the apostles at the first Pentecost, with the sound ‘as of a rushing and mighty wind’, and miraculously ‘gave them utterance’.⁷⁰ God has done much the same in the case of the Sidney Psalter, Donne is suggesting, having now ‘cleft that spirit’ again and divided it between Philip and Mary so that each might receive the gift of inspiration and grace and yet still speak with one voice: ‘Two that make one John Baptist’s holy voice’ (line 17, Sidney Psalter, 3), a voice that prepared for the coming of Christ and was similarly marked by the descent of the Spirit, in this case in the form of a dove.⁷¹ Honouring Sidney’s conception of David as God’s instrument, Donne rightfully returns the part of the singer/musician to the deity, while (with all due humility) the now indistinguishable bodies of Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert are made—like David—to serve as the mere instrument upon which God plays his miraculous harmonies: the siblings ‘made by thee / The organ, where thou art the harmony’. Donne’s play on ‘organ’ here (both tongue and musical instrument) inverts the hierarchy that traditionally put strings before wind, but since this is the breath of God we are talking about—the Holy Spirit, no less—that may, in the circumstances, be allowed.
⁶⁹ The editors of The Sidney Psalter suggest (287) that Donne may have written this poem around 1625 as the preface to a prospective edition of the Psalms, although it was not published until the 1635 edition of his collected Poems, by which time all the parties in question were dead. ⁷⁰ Acts 2:3, 2, 4, in The Bible and Holy Scriptures contained in the Old and New Testament (Geneva, 1560), sig. OO2v. ⁷¹ See Matthew 3:16.
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12 Sonnet Chris Stamatakis
Labouring for Invention The sixteenth-century sonnet, despite its artful poses of artlessness and ease, insists that it is a product of labour and difficulty. This labour, real or fictitious, often goes unrewarded or fails to persuade its addressee. Notwithstanding its fabled origins in the arts of legal persuasion—an invention attributed to lawyer Giacomo da Lentini in the mid-1230s—the sonnet appears uniquely suited to expressions of impotence, stasis, fruitless growth, estrangement, and frustration (amatory, political, or religious), as it typically apostrophises an intractable absence.¹ Even in its devotional figurations, the sonnet struggles to achieve: ‘I . . . Labour to’admit you’, John Donne’s speaker confesses to God, ‘but Oh, to no end’ (Donne, Holy Sonnet 14, lines 5–6, Poetical Works, 299).² As an instrument of dialectical argumentation and a ‘technology for representing voltas or “turns” of all psychic sorts’, the sonnet labours to elaborate an idea or conceit, to draw out a winning proof from evidence, or to effect a transformation.³ Displaying immense versatility, it is coopted readily for erotic, religious, commendatory, topical, historiographic, oneiric, preferment-seeking, epitaphic, autopoetic, and conversational occasions, whether for ‘exploring desire, service, and the act of writing poetry itself ’, or voicing a ‘diacritical desire’ for differentiation from other kinds of poetry, or seeking to convert an addressee to a new position.⁴ And it appears variously as a stand-alone form, gathered into sequences, and even as embedded ‘setpieces in dramas and romances’.⁵ Yet, regardless of occasion or function, English sonnets tend, often selfprofessedly, to fall short of those transformative ambitions, their labour petering out in wish-frustration. Continental commentators ascribed the sonnet’s laudable difficulty to its compactness. Sonneteers must constrain poetic invention into fourteen lines linked by a structural logic of strophic subdivisions and by an acoustic logic of rhyme. In English circles, Thomas Campion bemoaned these formal strictures, complaining that the sonneteer ‘handles his subject as tyrannically as Procrustes’ (Campion, Observations, 6),⁶ hacking and racking poetic invention into conformity, just as Ben Jonson ‘cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets’, using the same analogy of the ‘Tyrant’s bed’ (Jonson, ‘Conversations’, Ben Jonson,
¹ See Michael Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London, 1992), 17. ² John Donne, in Sir Herbert Grierson (ed.), Poetical Works (London, 1933). ³ Roland Greene, ‘Anne Lock’s Meditation: Invention Versus Dilation and the Founding of Puritan Poetics’, in Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (eds), Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Newark, DE, 2000), 153–70, 166. ⁴ Sasha Roberts, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and English Sonnet Sequences’, in Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr (eds), Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion (Oxford, 2007), 172–83, 172; Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 11–12. ⁵ Arthur F. Marotti, ‘ “Love is Not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order’, ELH, 49.2 (1982), 396–428, 396–7. ⁶ Thomas Campion, Observations in the Art of English Poesy (London, 1602). Chris Stamatakis, Sonnet In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Chris Stamatakis 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0012
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212 - 1.133–4).⁷ More favourably, for Samuel Daniel in A Defence of Rhyme (1603), ‘this certain limit observed in Sonnets’ does not imply ‘any tyrannical bounding of the conceit’ but does necessitate a process of ‘reducing’ into ‘form’: he cites the ‘multiplicity of Rhymes’ required in English sonnets as proof of the sonneteer’s ‘hard price of labour’ (Daniel, Complete Works, 4.44–5).⁸ In similar artisanal terms, Gabriel Harvey in Pierces Supererogation (1593) celebrates Petrarch’s ‘curious frame of exquisite workmanship’, identifying a signature feature of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse, the archetype for sixteenth-century English sonnets (Harvey, Works, 2.93).⁹ In Petrarch’s sonnets, transcendent inspiration jostles with technical craftsmanship—‘Platonic aesthetics (focused on visionary furor)’ clashes with ‘Aristotelian poetics (focused on the art or craft of writing poetry)’.¹⁰ The latter view treats poetry as a product of technê: it ‘acknowledges seams, imperfections, and unfinished thoughts’ even in seemingly polished redactions, and locates poetic craft at the ‘intersection of matter and form’.¹¹ Sixteenth-century sonnets register these conceptual tussles. For every appeal to divinely inspired furor—as in James VI’s plea for ‘facound Mercure’ [eloquent Mercury] to animate his ‘pen’ and ‘Ingyne’ [his ingenium or inventive faculty] (James VI, Essays, sonnet 11, lines 2, 4, sig. B4v),¹² or Barnabe Barnes’s entreaty to ‘copious fury’ (Barnes, Divine Century, sonnet 61, line 1, sig. E3)¹³—a countervailing sonnet acknowledges the sonneteer’s assiduous labour: ‘the work of careful hours’ (Daniel, Delia, sonnet 59, line 7, Complete Works, 1.76), or despondently grumbles that ‘these labours are inextricable’ (Barnes, sonnet 49, line 4, Parthenophil, sigs. E2v–E3).¹⁴ Labouring for invention—the struggle to find and persuasively articulate poetic conceits—is frequently a labour lost. The speaker in one of Michael Drayton’s sonnets in Idea (1619), commissioned by a ‘Witless Gallant’ to write ‘but one Sonnet to his Love’, remarks how his effortless effusion as a hired pen pouring out ‘what first from quick Invention came’ produced a more winning poem than his carefully honed compositions for his own beloved: But see, for you to Heav’n for Phrase I run, And ransack all ’s golden Treasure; Yet by my Froth, this Fool his Love obtains, And I lose you, for all my Wit and Pains. (Drayton, Idea, sonnet 21, lines 1, 4, 6, 11–14, Works, 2.321)¹⁵
In an inverted economy of value, spontaneous, unrevised ‘Froth’ surpasses the painstaking labour of searching out the choicest ‘Treasure’. Wasted poetic effort likewise vexes John Davies of Hereford, writing like Drayton in the early seventeenth-century afterglow of the
⁷ Ben Jonson, ‘Conversations with Drummond’ (1619), in C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, Vol. 1, The Man and his Works, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52). ⁸ Samuel Daniel, in Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works in Verse and Prose, 5 vols. (London, 1885–96). ⁹ Gabriel Harvey, in Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Works of Gabriel Harvey, 3 vols. (London, 1884–5). ¹⁰ William J. Kennedy, Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY, 2016), 2. ¹¹ Kennedy, Petrarchism at Work, 8, 10. ¹² James VI of Scotland, The Essays of a Prentice, in the Divine Art of Poesy (Edinburgh, 1584). ¹³ Barnabe Barnes, A Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets (London, 1595). ¹⁴ Barnabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe: Sonnets, Madrigals, Elegies and Odes (London, 1593). ¹⁵ Michael Drayton, in J. William Hebel (ed.), Works, corrected edition, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1961).
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213 sixteenth-century sonneteering boom. After briefly flirting with the pleasurable, cathartic possibilities of the form, his speaker concedes: A Labour’d Line’s too busy for my Brain, ... Let those Lines labour, that by Lines do gain; For, I have labour’d Lines, too long, for nought. (Davies of Hereford, sonnet 63, lines 9, 11–12, Wit’s Pilgrimage, sig. F1v)¹⁶
Lines that beget only more lines miss their intended ‘issue’ (line 8) or desired outcome. This conceit of labouring for a line reaches its apotheosis in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), usually considered the endpoint of the sonnet tradition in the long sixteenth century. Wroth’s collection features an interlinked ‘crown’ of fourteen ‘Sonnets dedicated to Love’, the last line of each sonnet repeated as the first of the next. The opening (and, completing the corona, closing) line of this mini sequence asks, ‘In this strange labyrinth [labourinth] how shall I turn?’ (Wroth, Pamphilia, sonnet 1, line 1; sonnet 14, line 14, Poems, 127).¹⁷ In its original orthography, ‘labourinth’ punningly signals the labour of finding the line, the ‘thread’ (sonnet 1, line 14; sonnet 2, line 1), providing a way out of enclosed form, whether the labyrinth is understood as the speaker’s erotic maze or, in this ostentatiously difficult feat of poesis, the poet’s self-imprisoning sonnet crown. At its core, the sixteenth-century sonnet encapsulates the labour of poetic invention: of finding and sustaining a line, through a sonnet or between sonnets, while contending with the trap of repetition and synonymy. By placing sonnet-writing in a wider rhetorical tradition and in the context of sixteenthcentury discussions about literary production, this chapter departs from some established critical assumptions that the sonnet embodies effortless articulacy or that sonnets inscribe themselves in a Continental tradition of stylised eloquence. Instead, following a recent resurgence of critical interest in the sonnet as—first and foremost—a literary form on the page, this chapter sees sixteenth-century sonnets as products of labour and of difficulty. The sonnet is a form that contends with competing pulls: in its longue durée over the sixteenth century, the sonnet must negotiate the demands of tradition and innovation; in the process of their composition, sonnets are caught between the need for closure and the yearning for dilation, between fixity and revision, between fruitless copy and copious abundance; and in their local, formal effects, sonnets labour to resolve the contending priorities of argument and rhyme, of sense and sound, and of the visual and the acoustic. Sixteenth-century sonneteering might best be understood in terms of a series of dilemmas, or competing requirements: a need to demonstrate inventiveness but to resist invention that threatens to harden into convention; to continue a line but to eschew mere verbal repetition that is static or fruitless; to exploit the liberating resources of form, yet break free from the formulaic patterns and methodical linkages into which sonneteering risks lapsing; to announce conformity with, and yet simultaneously reject, the algorithmic procedures that underpin the sonneteering tradition itself; and to refuse the potentially ossifying tendencies of print while embracing the canonising possibilities of that medium. The history of the sixteenthcentury sonnet is the history of these tussles. ¹⁶ John Davies of Hereford, Wit’s Pilgrimage (by Poetical Essays) (London, 1605). ¹⁷ Lady Mary Wroth, in Josephine A. Roberts (ed.), The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge, LA, 1983).
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214 - Given its perceived difficulty, the sonnet was instrumental in debates about vernacular prowess and literary nationhood. Amongst the Continental forms (sonnets, strambotti, madrigals, canzoni) domesticated over the sixteenth century, the sonnet became a barometer of literary prestige for English imitators of Italian poetics, following Petrarch’s canonisation in Pietro Bembo’s Le prose della volgar lingua (Discussions of the Vernacular Language) (1525) as a paragon of literary elegance, technical dexterity, and dolce varietà (sweet variety). Barring John Metham’s poetic romance Amoryus and Cleopes (1448/49), which features a presciently Surreian sonnet (ababcdcdefefgg) embedded within an overheard complaint about a lost beloved (see Metham, Amoryus, lines 388–401)¹⁸ and seeming thereby to announce the sonnet’s affinity with erotic plaint, the sonnet’s English naturalisation begins in earnest with Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in the 1530s. Composing eighteen sonnets with a Petrarchan source, Wyatt crucially reconfigures the Petrarchan sestet (lines 9–14) by introducing a concluding couplet, a rarity in Italian sonnets but a constituent of Tuscan strambotti (abababcc), another of Wyatt’s Italian models. Undercutting Petrarch’s idealism with cynicism, Wyatt’s final couplets typically express a parting reflection at odds with Petrarch’s closing sentiments. The tension is reflected by the mise-en-page of Wyatt’s personal manuscript (London, British Library, Egerton MS 2711), which routinely uses hanging indents for the opening lines of each strophic subdivision (lines 1, 5, 9, 12), recalling Petrarch’s subunits (quatrain, quatrain, tercet, tercet). Yet, Wyatt’s innovative rhyme scheme in the sestet (quatrain, couplet) jars with that Petrarchan structural legacy (tercet, tercet). The visual pattern, Petrarch’s architecture, contends with an acoustic pattern, Wyatt’s rhyme, introducing a dissonance between argument and cadence, sense and sound, that latently imperils all sixteenthcentury English sonnets. Wyatt seems drawn less to Petrarch’s ‘most introspective poems’ than to those ‘with sharp conceits, which enabled him to . . . develop English versions of the structural and metaphorical possibilities’ of Petrarch’s sonnets.¹⁹ Similarly, Surrey, five of whose sonnets adapt cherry-picked Petrarchan sources, innovates a rhyme scheme (ababcdcdefefgg) that becomes the English norm. Surrey partitions the sonnet into three quatrains and a couplet, encouraging a delayed volta (conceptual ‘turn’) that arrives in the last two lines rather than, as in Petrarch, traditionally between octave and sestet. As these formal recalibrations attest, English sonnets are caught between competing pulls: between retrospective reverence for Petrarchan archetypes and independent invention. From Wyatt’s and Surrey’s first forays to the sonnet sequences of the 1580s and 1590s, the sonnet was not exclusively ‘love-soppy’.²⁰ Many mid-Tudor collections of ‘sonnets’ composed by Barnabe Googe, George Turberville, and Thomas Howell deviate from the strict fourteen-line form, perhaps fuelling George Gascoigne’s curmudgeonly gripe that ‘some think that all Poems (being short) may be called Sonnets’ (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’, Hundreth, 460).²¹ These nonconformist sonnets, complicating the reductive critical narrative of the sixteenth-century sonnet as exclusively suited ‘to love poetry’ or as ‘inward looking’ or even as necessarily ‘fourteen lines long’ (Shakespeare’s sonnet 99 is, memorably, fifteen lines long), register their ‘potential contribution in building a native
¹⁸ For a modern edition of Metham’s romance, see John Metham, in Stephen Page (ed.), Amoryus and Cleopes (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999). ¹⁹ Karla Taylor, ‘Writers of the Italian Renaissance’, in Roger Ellis (ed.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. 1, To 1550 (Oxford, 2008), 390–406, 400. ²⁰ Michael D. Hurley and Michael O’Neill, Poetic Form: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2012), 84. ²¹ George Gascoigne, in G. W. Pigman III (ed.), A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Oxford, 2000).
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215 literary heritage’.²² In Hekatompathia (1582), Thomas Watson’s expanded eighteen-line ‘sonnets’ represent a literary assemblage of polyglot traditions: fragments from Ovid, Petrarch, Serafino Aquilano, Ludovico Ariosto, and Pierre de Ronsard are advertised in multilingual headnotes and marginalia that emulate the annotated editions of Petrarch wherein English sonneteers encountered the Rime Sparse. Inscribing his verse in this composite European genealogy, Watson acknowledges the bricoleur’s labour by which his ‘sonnets’ are not so much composed as, in his terms, ‘compiled’ (headnote to sonnet 45, Hekatompathia, sig. F3).²³ Bolder vernacularising strategies inform the young Elizabeth Carey’s translation of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse 146 as a Surreian sonnet (c 1594). Its concluding lines, since those thoughts are vain I’ll them exile And fill that land which ever hath been yet the chiefest place for learning and for wit[,] (Carey, sonnet 3, lines 12–14, Duncan-Jones, ‘Bess Carey’s Petrarch’, 316)²⁴
belligerently declare a relocation of literary excellence, a translatio studii, ditching Petrarch’s depleted (‘vain’) lines to cultivate sonnets anew in England’s fertile literary pastures. That same year, Drayton’s prefatory sonnet in Ideas Mirror (1594) announces a poetics of autonomous invention unindebted to French and Italian forebears: Yet these mine own, I wrong not other men, Nor traffic further than this happy Clime, Nor filch from Portes’* nor from Petrarch’s pen, *Philippe Desportes’ ... I am no Pickpurse of another’s wit. (Drayton, Ideas Mirror, ‘To the dear child of the muses’, lines 9–11, 14, Works, 1.96)
Airing another nationalist fantasy of autochthonous originality, Drayton nonetheless borrows the label ‘amour’ for his sonnets from Ronsard and Desportes, whom he here ostensibly disavows, just as he recycles, verbatim, Astrophil’s ‘I am no pick-purse of another’s wit’ from Sir Philip Sidney’s seminal sequence, Astrophil and Stella (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 74, line 8, Poems, 204).²⁵ The pose of unconventionality becomes its own convention. At the interface of tradition and novelty, English Petrarchism contends with anxieties of belatedness. Its invention—its inception and inventiveness—seems derivative. Conscious of their debts to a formative tradition they are keen to abjure, English sonneteers are impatient to demonstrate freedom from conventions now hollowed through reuse. Petrarchism invites its own counter-discourses, as if Petrarchism were Petrarchism’s recusatio (a refusal
²² Cathy Shrank, ‘ “Matters of Love as of Discourse”: The English Sonnet, 1560–1580’, Studies in Philology, 105.1 (2008), 30–49, 47, 48. ²³ Thomas Watson, The Hekatompathia or Passionate Century of Love (London, 1582). ²⁴ Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Bess Carey’s Petrarch: Newly Discovered Elizabethan Sonnets’, Review of English Studies, 50.199 (1999), 304–19. ²⁵ Sir Philip Sidney, in William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962).
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216 - to write on a particular topic or in a particular genre). English sonnets that ‘write within or react against the tradition confronted not one but several traditions—and not one but several Petrarchs’.²⁶ Beyond the ‘frequently parodied Petrarch of freezing fires and icy mistresses’ was a Petrarch ‘preoccupied with fame and with thoughtful solitude’.²⁷ The negotiation between indebtedness to, and ironic commentary on, Petrarch marks the start of the English sonnet tradition. Repeatedly, Wyatt’s sonnets, behind their erotic tenor, seem dissatisfied with their inherited resources. Wyatt’s sonnet ‘Such vain thought’ deviates from its Petrarchan inspiration: where Petrarch’s speaker describes a ‘wandering thought’ [‘vago penser’] that ‘separates’ him from others [‘me desvia’] (Petrarch, Rime 169, line 1, Lyric Poems, 315),²⁸ Wyatt’s conjures a ‘vain thought’ that ‘mislead[s]’ him, as if intimating a distracting model that proves inhibitive (Wyatt, ‘Such vain thought’, line 1, Complete Poems, 84).²⁹ And where Petrarch’s speaker concludes he has ‘so much to say’ that he ‘dare not begin’ [‘tanto gli ò a dir che ‘ncominciar non oso’] (line 14), Wyatt’s laments his inability to articulate at all—‘I [know] not how to begin’ (line 14).³⁰ Wyatt replaces Petrarch’s timid copia with a sense of depletion and incapacity, an emptiness foreshadowed in the opening line by ‘vain’ (Latin vanus, ‘empty, void’). Interpolating phrases that have no equivalent in his Petrarchan source, Wyatt introduces a similar sense of wasted expenditure to his most famous sonnet, ‘Whoso list to hunt’, a disillusioned rendering of Petrarch’s luminous vision in Rime 190. Where Petrarch’s speaker wilfully puts labour to one side, leaving ‘each labour in order to follow her’ [‘i’ lasciai per seguirla ogni lavoro’] (Petrarch, Rime 190, line 6, Lyric Poems, 337), for Wyatt’s speaker the labour—and a fruitless labour at that—is the pursuit, as he cautions the would-be hunter that he ‘As well as I may spend his time in vain’ (Wyatt, ‘Whoso list to hunt’, line 10, Complete Poems, 77), since the pursuit is merely ‘vain travail’ (line 3), the labour of an aftercomer ‘that farthest cometh behind’ (line 4), one who ‘Fainting . . . follow[s]’ (line 7). These local moments of belated, depletive expenditure counterpoint the Neoplatonic ascendancy to which Petrarch’s Rime Sparse tends. For Wyatt and his English successors, the labour of invention becomes all the harder when the sonneteer’s resources are already exhausted. Sidney’s opening sonnet in Astrophil and Stella more brazenly confronts these dilemmas of invention.³¹ Eliding the two senses of ‘invention’—both rhetorical inventio, the finding out of extant subject matter, and a more ambitious, emergent sense of originary, generative composition—Astrophil describes his writer’s block: . . . words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay, Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows, And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way. (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 1, lines 9–11 Poems, 165)
Organic invention becomes unnaturally trammelled by tyrannical conventions (‘Study’s blows’) and metrical schemes (‘others’ feet’), a stricture partly circumvented by Sidney’s ²⁶ Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 5. ²⁷ Colin Burrow (ed.), William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford, 2002), 111. ²⁸ Francis Petrarch, in Robert M. Durling (ed. and trans.), Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA, 1976), translation mine. ²⁹ Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978). ³⁰ For a discussion of sonnetic inarticulacy, see Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia, PA, 2009), 142–74. ³¹ For the double sense of ‘invention’, see Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, IL, 2013), 4–5, 18–20.
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217 epically ambitious iambic hexameter. Shakespeare’s sonnet 59, composed probably in the mid-1590s at the height of the Elizabethan sonnet-sequence binge, voices similar uneasiness about literary synonymy. Efforts at original expression merely effect a return to prior origins: If there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled, Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss The second burden of a former child? (Shakespeare, Sonnets, sonnet 59, lines 1–4, Norton Shakespeare, 2270)³²
Such poetic labours deliver a literary offspring (second burden) already brought into being (former child) by other writers. This dilemma in Shakespeare’s sonnets recurs in his plays. Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594–5) contains two embedded sonnets, Berowne’s (4.2.98–111, Norton Shakespeare, 836) and Longaville’s (4.3.55–68, Norton Shakespeare, 839), both reprinted in William Jaggard’s multi-author collection The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). Of Berowne’s ‘canzonet’, the schoolmaster Holofernes coldly comments that, at best, it conforms metrically to a sonnet—‘Here are only numbers ratified’—but lacks ‘the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy’, the ‘jerks of invention’ (sudden sparks of inventio) (4.2.113–17, Norton Shakespeare, 836). ‘Imitari’, to imitate, ‘is nothing’, Holofernes concludes (lines 17–18), recalling Quintilian’s privileging of inventio over imitatio alone in the Institutio Oratoria, 10.2.³³ Instead of mere formalist imitation, what is required, according to William Webbe’s critical treatise A Discourse of English Poetry (1586), are ‘rare devices, and pretty inventions which come from the fine poetical vein of many in strange and unaccustomed manner’; unexpected methods of ‘turning . . . verses’ and ‘infolding . . . words’ (Webbe, Discourse, sig. G2).³⁴ A balance is needed between observing and forgetting rules. For Drayton in Idea (1619), amatory sonneteering demands stretching the conceit past conventional allowances: my Conceit I further seem to bend, Than possibly Invention can extend. (Drayton, Idea, sonnet 34, lines 10–11, Works, 2.327)
Rather than facilitating expression, here the established procedures for finding subject matter fail to accommodate this speaker’s ambitions of out-inventing invention. Yet, even in boasting of its transgressiveness, this sonnet announces its ‘hyperconventionality’, activating a wellestablished idiom of professed newness.³⁵ Invention falls back into convention.
Labouring for Copia Sonnetic invention is, then, the labour of unfolding a conceit within formal constraints without falling into synonymy or mere copy. The sonnet’s mastery of compact lineaments— ³² William Shakespeare, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016). ³³ See Quintilian, in Donald A. Russell (ed. and trans.), The Orator’s Education, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 4.322–37. ³⁴ William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetry (London, 1586). ³⁵ Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge, 2004), 26.
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218 - Mrs Ramsay’s epiphanic experience of the sonnet as ‘suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here’—requires negotiating competing impulses: to extend, amplify, unfold, and to close off, compress, infold.³⁶ Surrey’s ‘The soote season’ exemplifies one kind of sonnetic amplification: The swift swallow pursueth the flies small; The busy bee her honey now she mings;* *mixes Winter is worn that was the flowers bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. (Surrey, ‘The soote season’, lines 10–14, Poems, 2)³⁷
An accretive list undergirded by anaphora (nine lines beginning ‘The’), the sonnet compounds details through isocola (successive clauses of identical length and structure) that are suddenly undercut by the final hemistich (the arresting half-line, ‘and yet my sorrow springs’). Surrey abandons the amatory themes of his Petrarchan model (Rime 310) and, crucially, postpones Petrarch’s volta from after the octave to the last line’s caesura (‘and yet . . . ’), concluding with the same abruptness as George Herbert’s later disarming finale, ‘something understood’ (Herbert, ‘Prayer (I)’, line 14, Works, 51).³⁸ In Surrey’s sonnet, which uses just two oscillating rhymes (ab), breaking from his customary ababcdcdefefgg scheme, the urge to dilate is arrested by the enforced closure of the final couplet (bb). Limiting this sonnet to just two rhyme sounds, Surrey experiments with a kind of closure that, perversely, sounds a note of renewal (‘springs’) at the very moment of apparent termination. In its deft counterpoise, this sonnet achieves the compact proliferation that Gascoigne considered the distinguishing virtue of short forms (including sonnets and sixains): namely, to ‘knit up your sentences as compendiously as you may’ (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’, Hundreth, 461). This tension, between controlled knitting-up and copious proliferation, underwrites the earliest poem to bear the label ‘sonnet’. At the very end of a presentation manuscript gifted to Mary Tudor (later Queen Mary I), a fifteen-line sonnet (c 1540) by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, is appended to an eight-line Latin lyric by Maffeo Vegio, itself appended to Morley’s prose translation of Cardinal Torquemada’s Psalm commentary. Morley’s poem, entitled ‘The English of these verses In an Italian Rhyme called .Soneto.’, represents an exercise in compendiousness, in copia: the artful abundance idealised in Desiderius Erasmus’ foundational handbook, De Copia (1512). Morley not only offers an expansive gloss on Vegio’s poem but also intimates the infinite plenitude of the Word of God. The sonnet, despite professedly obeying an Italian rhyme scheme, ends with an act of strophic nonconformity, replicating in parvo the bountiful energies of the creating Word: As the Judge of us all at the latter end. Then let us pretend.
³⁶ Virginia Woolf, in Stella McNichol (ed.), To the Lighthouse (London, 2000), 131. ³⁷ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Emrys Jones (ed.), Poems (Oxford, 1964). ³⁸ George Herbert, in F. E. Hutchinson (ed.), The Works of George Herbert (Oxford, 1941).
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219 His name to glorify his mercy to rehearse. Which David harps on in many a sweet verse. (Parker, ‘The English of These Verses’, lines 12–15)³⁹
Between the third quatrain and final couplet, Morley interpolates an extra hemistich. This superfluous half-line, ‘Then let us pretend’ (recalling its Latin etymon praetendere, ‘to stretch forth’),⁴⁰ betrays the sonnet’s urge to extend: beyond the sonnet’s expected form, beyond the provisional ‘Finis’ inscribed beneath it, and beyond the confines of the codex itself, reaching forwards both in space and time. Mary Sidney Herbert’s Psalm paraphrases in The Sidney Psalter (c 1584–99) grapple with the same paradox of encasing divine mercy in verse form. Her paraphrase of Psalm 100 as a Spenserian sonnet (ababbcbccdcdee), presented as the liturgy in a temple entranceway, concludes with equipoise rather than closure: Time in no terms his mercy comprehends; From age to age his truth itself extends. (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 100, lines 13–14, Sidney Psalter, 190)⁴¹
The couplet brings to a close the thread of interlocking rhymes in a concordia discors of reconciled opposites: of containment (‘comprehends’) and protraction (‘extends’). That the final word should be ‘extends’ renders the sonnet a temporary stay at best, a transitional entranceway to an uncircumscribed vista of divine forgiveness exceeding the sonnet’s parameters. Devotional poetics of all denominational stripes strives for limitless copiousness, given its inexhaustible, ineffable subject matter. William Alabaster’s manuscript sonnets, composed shortly after his conversion to Catholicism (c 1597), seek ‘To spread the carpets of invention’ and, impossibly, ‘To touch the limits of untermed end’ (Alabaster, sonnet 53, line 7; sonnet 55, line 3, Sonnets, 30, 31).⁴² The sonnet’s evident affinity with Psalms lies, moreover, in its propensity to expand copiously, centrifugally, into sequences. Anne Vaughan Lock’s Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (1560), appended to her translation of Calvin’s sermons, inaugurates the English sonnet sequence: its twenty-six sonnets, the first five constituting a proem, expansively recast Psalm 51 through paraphrase. Anchored in its biblical source (the copious, infinitely mineable Word), Lock’s Meditation arguably ‘refuses invention to a degree almost unprecedented’: in paraphrasing, it ‘expands its model twelvefold while struggling to say almost nothing new’.⁴³ The challenge of faithful amplification similarly exercises Henry Lok (Anne Lock’s son), whose sonnet sequence, Sundry Christian Passions, is appended to his Ecclesiastes (1597). Theorising the devotional sonnet as a frame into which he has ‘deduc[ed]’ his ‘passions’, Lok announces in his prose preface his poetic ambition ‘to contrive significatively in few words much matter’, perhaps echoing Gascoigne’s compendious knitting-up. The labour, for Lok, involves marshalling copious articulation over the whole sequence: his devotional ‘passions’, though momentarily reined into individual sonnets, jostle as a ³⁹ London, British Library, Royal MS 18 A. xv, fol. 9. ⁴⁰ OED, ‘pretend’, v., {6.a, ‘to extend in time’. ⁴¹ Mary Sidney Herbert, in Hannibal Hamlin, Michael G. Brennan, Margaret P. Hannay, and Noel J. Kinnamon (eds), The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney (Oxford, 2009). ⁴² William Alabaster, in G. M. Story and Helen Gardner (eds), The Sonnets of William Alabaster (Oxford, 1959). ⁴³ Greene, ‘Anne Lock’s Meditation’, 158, 163.
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220 - collective. Figured as a ‘disorder’, Lok’s heterogeneous sonnet collection patterns the metrical Psalm tradition in cultivating what Lok calls the ‘confused placing’ of poems (Lok, Ecclesiastes, sigs. I8v, I8).⁴⁴ Sonnet collections, then, attest thorny ‘problems of sequence’ akin to the crisis of succession—the difficulty of following in a sonnet tradition—noted above.⁴⁵ Although ‘sonnet sequence’ is an anachronistic tag, first used by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1880, the idea of grouped sonnets being read sequentially finds expression in Gascoigne’s avant-garde experiments with interconnected sonnets. In 1573, Gascoigne embeds three linked sonnets (a ‘Terza sequenza’) in ‘A Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F.J.’ and produces an interlocking corona of ‘Seven Sonnets in Sequence’ in ‘The Devices of Sundry Gentlemen’ (Gascoigne, Hundreth, 149–51, 278–81). Such interconnected runs— encountered later in Daniel’s Delia (1592), Bartholomew Griffin’s Fidessa (1596), William Smith’s Chloris (1596), and Donne’s ‘La Corona’ (c 1608), the opening line of one sonnet reprising the last line of its precursor—parade the sonnet’s capacity for copia, for abundant expansion of a given idea, conceit, or sententia. Illustrating this principle, two remarkable adjoining sonnets in Richard Linche’s Diella (1596), both numbered ‘13’, arise when a Spenserian sonnet mutates into a Surreian sonnet: ababbcbccdcdde||de.efef.fgfg.hh (Linche, Diella, sigs. B7–B7v).⁴⁶ The last two lines of the first, ending on a comma, serve seamlessly as the first two lines of the second, which syntactically completes the first. The couplet is pointedly delayed until the end of the second poem, as if the conceit had outrun a single sonnet: here dilation wins out over the impulse to close off. Half a century after the first experiments in isolated sonnets by Wyatt and Surrey, sonneteers increasingly capitalised on the form’s promiscuous tendencies for coalescing into continuous sequences: sequences that invited speculation as to their internal linkages. Modelled on Petrarch’s Rime Sparse, sequenced sonnets are frequently interspersed with, or followed by, other lyric forms, including the canzone, sestina, and balata: Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenophe: Sonnets, Madrigals, Elegies and Odes (1593) represents, in its title alone, a wantonly erratic collection. Of the compilational paradigms available to Elizabethan sonneteers, the tripartite ‘Delian’ structure inaugurated by Daniel’s Delia—sonnet sequence, plus Anacreontic interlude, plus long concluding complaint—proved particularly winning.⁴⁷ The arrangement was adopted by Thomas Lodge’s Phillis (1593), Giles Fletcher’s Licia (1593), Richard Barnfield’s Cynthia (1595), Linche’s Diella, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). Vexations of sequence are especially pronounced in Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595), comprising eighty-nine sonnets that commemorate Spenser’s courtship of his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle, then four Anacreontic epigrams, before the redemptive Epithalamion replaces expected complaint with matrimonial celebration. Despite the implied movement through both seasonal and ecclesiastical calendars, as futile Petrarchan adoration is converted into Protestant matrimony, the progression is a faltering one: final couplets in the sonnets are staggered on the page, visually denying perfect coupling, and the Amoretti as a whole concludes with three sonnets of absence (sonnets ⁴⁴ Henry Lok, Ecclesiastes . . . Whereunto are annexed Sundry Sonnets of Christian Passions (London, 1597). See also Debra Rienstra, ‘ “Disorder Best Fit”: Henry Lok and Holy Disorder in Devotional Lyric’, Spenser Studies, 27 (2012), 249–87. ⁴⁵ Georgia Brown, ‘Time and the Nature of Sequence in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: “In Sequent Toil All Forwards Do Contend” ’, in Laurie Maguire (ed.), How To Do Things with Shakespeare: New Approaches, New Essays (Malden, MA, 2008), 236–54, 245. ⁴⁶ Richard Linche, Diella, Certain Sonnets, Adjoined to the Amorous Poem of Dom Diego and Ginevra (London, 1596). ⁴⁷ For the ‘Delian’ tradition, see Kerrigan’s explanation in John Kerrigan (ed.), William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (Harmondsworth, 1986), 13–14.
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221 87–9), making the Epithalamion resemble a recuperative afterthought. In sonnet sequences, ‘frustration of narrative’ is the defining trait: ‘what matters is that we should try . . . and fail’ to read them as coherent.⁴⁸ Whether writing individual poems or connected sequences, sonneteers confront the labour of copia in two ways. First, in trying to be copious, the sonnet risks spilling beyond its fourteen-line confines; secondly, in trying to be copious, it risks regressing into vacuous amplification and synonymy. ‘Resourceful reuse’ degenerates into ‘debilitating routine’.⁴⁹ Sir John Davies’ ‘Gulling Sonnets’ (c 1594), wryly parodying the hyperstylised excesses of the sonnet vogue, demonstrate ‘how easily form could overtake matter’. Davies’ sonnet 3, in which the second half of each line is repeated as the start of the next, replays to absurdity the technique of gradatio: this internal repetition ‘takes almost twice the necessary space to present a set of conventional contrarieties which succeed brilliantly in saying nothing’.⁵⁰ Likewise, sonnet 6’s blazon of Cupid enumerates attire bearing no correspondence with its attributes except alliteratively: ‘doublet of desire’, ‘Codpiece of conceit’, ‘pantofles of passions’ (Davies, sonnet 6, lines 6, 9, 12, Poems, 166). In these parodies of sonnetic copia, Davies privileges sound over sense, phonic plenitude over ideational substance. So, the same problems of connection and sequence attending whole sonnet collections recur in miniature within individual poems. Several sonnets overtly deconstruct their compositional procedures, at the level of syllable and phoneme. Amour 11 in Drayton’s Ideas Mirror recounts the speaker’s schooling in an ‘Alphabet of love’ (Drayton, Ideas Mirror, Amour 11, line 1, Works, 1.103), and sonnet 9 in John Davies of Hereford’s Wit’s Pilgrimage, opening ‘When first I learned the A, B, C of love’, posits a grammar of sonnetic wooing comprised of vowels (looks), mutes (deeds), consonants (words), and liquids (tears) (Davies of Hereford, Wit’s Pilgrimage, sig. A4). This formulaic painting by numbers resembles a remorseless algorithm. Sidney’s Astrophil, associating these strategies of mechanical unfolding with false poesis, inveighs against sonneteers who: . . . do Dictionary’s method bring Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows. (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 15, lines 5–6, Poems, 172)
Attempting to reanimate ‘poor Petrarch’s long deceased woes’ (line 7), this ‘method’ results only in jangling sound-strings: uninspired or hollow acoustic effects. Shakespeare’s sonnet 76, bemoaning the tired familiarity of the speaker’s own method that keeps ‘invention in a noted weed’ (line 6), echoes Sidney’s unease: Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange? (Shakespeare, Sonnets, sonnet 76, lines 3–4, Norton Shakespeare, 2276)
A relatively new term lifted from literary-critical discourse, ‘method’ denotes a defined procedure, a systematic scheme akin to dispositio (arrangement), the second of rhetoric’s
⁴⁸ Anthony Mortimer, ‘Shakespeare and Italian Poetry’, in Jonathan Post (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry (Oxford, 2013), 116–33, 123. ⁴⁹ Raphael Lyne, Memory and Intertextuality in Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 2016), 99. ⁵⁰ Sir John Davies, in Robert Krueger and Ruby Nemser (eds), The Poems of Sir John Davies (Oxford, 1975), 391, 392.
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222 - five canons after inventio. The Elizabethan literary critic George Puttenham remarks, in The Art of English Poesy (1589), that English poetics is ‘in nothing inferior to the French or Italian for copy of language’ (copia) or for ‘good method, and proportion in any form of poem’ (Puttenham, Art, 147).⁵¹ Yet, rather than aiding copious eloquence, ‘method’ frequently designates those formulaic linkages, famously critiqued by Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1605), as artificial schemes that condemn discourse to reiterate outworn truisms. Summarising the antipathy to amplification by division (minute enumeration) described by Bacon in an earlier essay from 1597, John Hoskins, in his manual of ‘Directions for Speech and Style’ (c 1599), recalls Bacon’s view ‘that this Art of amplifying will betray itself in method’: a merely formulaic procedure, a simulacrum of true copia (Hoskins, Life, 136).⁵² Given its tendency over the century to harden into a prescribed rhyme scheme and argumentative pattern, the sonnet appears particularly vulnerable to these discursive solecisms. Its structural utility for syllogistic unfolding of ideas or conceits—for exposition (octave) and development or resolution (sestet)—is jeopardised by a mechanical adherence to the very structural rhythms that define the sonnet’s form. Its origins in traditions of legal disputation (faintly recalled in Elizabethan sonnets by the language of suits, forfeiture, contracts, and interpleading) would seem to equip the sonnet perfectly for the heuristic demands of proposition, counter-argument, and refutation: the requirement to ‘announce a theme, to change it, and to close it’.⁵³ But this structural potentiality often fails to produce arguments that unfold coherently, yielding instead syllogistic slippages, rhetorical sleightsof-hand, and acoustic rather than conceptual bridges between ideas. Such jumps are compelling without being formally valid. Drayton’s sonnets masterfully expose these procedures whereby conceits are developed less through logical progression than anamorphic distending.⁵⁴ Sonnets of this sort stoke Ramist suspicions that literary eloquence is all elocutio (style) and pronuntiatio (acoustic delivery): that is, in the evaluation of influential French humanist Petrus Ramus (1515–72), all rhetorical exornation unmoored from the instrumental logic of inventio (invention) and dispositio (arrangement).⁵⁵ Latent tools of dialectical argument, sonnets risk becoming merely vessels of sound or showcases of style, sacrificing function to ornament. By this account, form dwindles into formalism, formality, and formula. For Sidney, a sonnet’s failure can be attributed to its programmatic dependence on sonic amplification. Describing ‘that lyrical kind of songs and sonnets’, his Defence of Poesy faults poets enslaved to ‘certain swelling phrases’, whose compositional habitus jeopardises ‘the material point of poesy’ (Sidney, Defence, 116–17):⁵⁶ the point, endpoint, and epigrammatic pointedness that is the sonnet’s notional raison d’être. Auditory amplification inhibits the sonnet’s logical progression, stirring tacit fears that become more urgent in the sixteenth century: ⁵¹ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ⁵² John Hoskins, ‘Directions for Speech and Style’ (c 1599), in Louise Brown Osborn (ed.), The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566–1638 (New Haven, CT, 1937). ⁵³ Spiller, Development, 17. ⁵⁴ For ‘anamorphose textuelle’ (textual anamorphosis, the perspectival distorting of a form), see Rémi Vuillemin, Le Recueil pétrarquiste à l’ère du maniérisme: Poétique des sonnets de Michael Drayton 1594–1616 (Paris, 2014), 345. ⁵⁵ For Ramus, following the fifteenth-century humanist Rudolph Agricola (c 1443–85), the first two branches of rhetoric (invention and arrangement) more properly belonged to dialectic (logic). See Petrus Ramus, Scholae rhetoricae, in Scholae in liberales Artes (Basel, 1569), cols. 339–40. ⁵⁶ Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973).
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223 that stylistic embellishment and verbal texture (copia of words) have displaced argument and matter (copia of thought).⁵⁷ If the formula of acoustic patterning becomes the sonnet’s overriding essence, then matter has been reduced to a vehicle for form, rather than vice versa. In ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’ (1575), Gascoigne cautioned that ‘it is not enough to roll in pleasant words . . . in Rim, Ram, Ruff, by letter’ nor to ‘abound in apt vocables, or epithets, unless the Invention have in it also aliquid salis’ [some distinguishing excellence]. Shortly afterwards he expressly warns against ‘rhyme without reason’, advising that ‘your rhyme lead you not from your first Invention’, since many poets, after laying ‘the platform of their invention, are yet drawn sometimes (by rhyme) to forget it’ (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’, Hundreth, 454, 458). Drayton cleverly illustrates how rhyme is privileged over matter by playing on just two sounds, implying a modular, algorithmic rhyme pattern: I say, I Die, you Echo me with I: Save me I Cry, you sigh me out a No. (Drayton, Idea, sonnet 5, lines 7–8, Works, 2.313)
The practice is pushed to its extreme in Griffin’s Fidessa, every line of sonnet 23 ending ‘her heart’, of sonnet 60 ‘more’, and of the final sonnet, 62, ‘love’ (Griffin, Fidessa, sigs. C4, E6v, E7v).⁵⁸ Invention is sacrificed to acoustic showmanship, and sonnets reduced to occasions for self-echo. Copia turns out to be copy, the death-knell of sonnetic invention. Labouring for copia becomes a struggle to produce matter rather than just a profusion of sound-strings—the ‘vain lip-labour’ of ‘babbling form’ censured by Henry Lok (Lok, sonnet 17, lines 1, 13, Ecclesiastes, sig. R1v). Such perfunctory formalism pre-empts Lancelot Andrewes’ term ‘ear-service’ (Andrewes, Sermon, sig. E4)⁵⁹ and Drayton’s caricature of drudges ‘dull[ing] our satiate Ear’ (Drayton, Idea, sonnet 31, line 10, Works, 2.326). The retarding saturation of sounds amounts to ‘the inspissation of rhetoric, the opposite of copia, which is a fluent expansion of ideas’.⁶⁰ Elizabethan sonnets openly grapple with these suspicions of empty echo and synonymy. For Drayton in Ideas Mirror, augmentation depletes: ‘In plenty, am I starv’d with penury’ (Drayton, Ideas Mirror, Amour 50, line 11, Works, 1.123), recollecting Narcissus’ ‘inopem me copia fecit’ (my plenty makes me poor) (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.466, Arthur Golding Translation, 77).⁶¹ Likewise, within the Amoretti, Spenser brazenly repeats sonnet 35 almost verbatim as sonnet 83 (now in the context of betrothal) in a gesture that looks disturbingly like narcissistic self-quotation: ‘so plenty makes me po[o]re’ (Spenser, Amoretti, sonnets 35 and 83, line 8, Shorter Poems, 405, 429). Smith’s speaker in Chloris recounts ‘the rhymes and round delays’ which he expended ‘on wasteful hills’, the ambivalent orthography—roundelays, round delays—implying that recursive poetic form is both waste and endless deferral (Smith, Chloris, sonnet 15, lines 5–6, sig. B2v).⁶² And in a comparably echoic vein, in Henry Constable’s 1594 Diana: Or, the Excellent Conceitful Sonnets of H. C. Augmented with Divers Quatorzains, a professedly ⁵⁷ See Sylvia Adamson, ‘Synonymia: or, in Other Words’, in Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (eds), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge, 2007), 16–35. ⁵⁸ Bartholomew Griffin, Fidessa, More Chaste than Kind (London, 1596). ⁵⁹ Lancelot Andrewes, A Sermon preached before His Majesty, at Whitehall the fifth of November last, 1617 (London, 1618). ⁶⁰ Spiller, Development, 156. ⁶¹ Ovid, in John Frederick Nims (ed.), Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567 (New York, 1965). ⁶² William Smith, Chloris, or The Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepherd (London, 1596).
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224 - ‘augmented’ version of his 1592 Diana now containing sonnets by other hands, sonnet 8 in the fifth ‘decad’ concludes: Sighing, alas, what shall become of me? Whilst Echo cries, what shall become of me. (Constable, Diana, fifth ‘decad’, sonnet 8, lines 13–14, Poems, 201)⁶³
Bluntly illustrating synonymy, the couplet here binds the line with its own entropic echo, which continues to reverberate as the opening line of the next sonnet (sonnet 9). Anxieties about self-perpetuation without progression, about lapses into hollow sonority, exploit an economic vocabulary of futile expenditure at odds with copia’s bounty. Perhaps recalling Wyatt’s earlier image of wasteful expense (‘spend . . . in vain’) and recycling his own image of ‘Spending again what is already spent’ (Shakespeare, Sonnets, sonnet 76, line 12, Norton Shakespeare, 2276), Shakespeare’s sonnet 105 wryly countenances ineffectual, depletive repetition that empties as it reiterates: ‘Fair, kind, and true’ is all my argument; ‘Fair, kind, and true,’ varying to other words— And in this change is my invention spent. (Shakespeare, Sonnets, sonnet 105, lines 9–11, Norton Shakespeare, 2285)
Henry Peacham cautions against ‘Synonymies’ that ‘make too great a heap of words’ since ‘long time is spent’ and ‘little matter expressed’ (Peacham, Garden, 149–50).⁶⁴ Hoskins likewise warns that ‘heaping up’ by ‘foaming out Synonymies’ generates a ‘superfluity of words’ rather than a ‘sufficiency of matter’—sounds minus semantic freight (Hoskins, Life, 138). Shakespeare’s doubts about the value of this reiterative ‘varying’ are only heightened by the ambivalence of ‘spent’: ‘employed’, but also ‘exhausted’. Wasted expenditure recurs throughout Zepheria (1594), an anonymous sonnet sequence steeped in shimmering linguistic play and rhetorical ingenuity consonant with an Inns-of-Court milieu. Canzon 2 reflects on its own inadequate methods of mimesis: Though hath my Muse hyberboliz’d trajections: Yet stands it aye deficient to such task. ... For when my smoothed tongue hath sought to flatter, Thy worth hath dearthed his words for thy due praise: Then though my pencil glance here on thine eyes, Sweet think thy fair it doth but portionize. (Zepheria, canzon 2, lines 7–8, 11–14, sig. B1v)⁶⁵
Embroiled in hypermetricity (almost half the line-endings are feminine) and verbal inflation (the coinages ‘hyperboliz’d’, ‘trajections’, and ‘portionize’), the sonnet confesses its words have become depleted (‘dearthed’). Both despite and because of the vaunting ambitions of ⁶³ Henry Constable, in Joan Grundy (ed.), The Poems of Henry Constable (Liverpool, 1960). ⁶⁴ Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, revised edition (London, 1593). ⁶⁵ Anon., Zepheria (London, 1594).
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225 the speaker’s muse, the sonnet peters out in acoustic vacuity, as in the magnificently excessive, etymologically tautologous phrase ‘hyperboliz’d trajections’. Accordingly, it must settle for the diminutive triumph of capturing a portion of the subject’s beauty. Canzon 6 replays these suspicions of diminishing returns from sonic overkill: the speaker attempts ‘anew to Thesaurize’ so as to ‘enwealthy thy exchequer’, before drolly conceding he remains ‘Zepherias debtor’ (Zepheria, canzon 6, lines 10, 13–14, sig. B3v). This speaker’s thesaurus, like Sidney’s ‘Dictionary’s method’, plays out an algorithm of rewording from an artificial store. In a perversion of copia’s fecundity, verbal largesse engenders perpetual deficit. Pre-empting Shakespeare’s ‘invention spent’, Zepheria’s speaker laments, ‘How have I spent my spirit of invention’ (Zepheria, canzon 13, line 10, sig. C3). The augmentation-as-debt conceit is evidently fashionable, reappearing the same year in Drayton’s Ideas Mirror. Inexorably, labouring for copia modulates into a desperate labour of regretful recuperation.
Labouring for Renewal One solution to synonymy and depletion lies in revision. Affirming the sonnet’s paradoxical resistance to finality, Petrarch’s working papers reveal successive erasures, interpolations, and rearrangements between the first extant sequence of the Rime Sparse (1359–62) and the final work-in-progress at his death (1374). Scenes of cancellation and revision litter sixteenth-century sonnets too. Astrophil wistfully remarks, I cannot choose but write my mind, And cannot choose but put out what I write (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 50, lines 9–10, Poems, 190)
theorising a practice of self-revision adopted by Zepheria’s speaker, who ‘writ a Sonnet, which by syllable / Ate up the former’ (Zepheria, canzon 22, lines 10–11, sig. D3v). Compelled to perpetual re-beginning in Ideas Mirror—‘When first I ended, then I first began’ (Drayton, Ideas Mirror, Amour 50, line 1, Works, 1.123)—Drayton’s sonnets eagerly idolise textual caprice. Most famously, his sonnet ‘Since there’s no help’ in Idea centres on just such an image of provisional annulment: ‘Cancel all our Vows’ (Drayton, Idea, sonnet 61, line 5, Works, 2.341). Such sonnets indulge a fantasy of endless rewriting. With disarming frankness, Shakespeare’s sonnet 115 wryly opens, ‘Those lines that I before have writ do lie’, and closes with the impossibility of declaring ‘full growth to that which still doth grow’, forever postponing moribund textual fixity (Shakespeare, Sonnets, sonnet 115, lines 1, 14, Norton Shakespeare, 2289). Scenes of self-cancellation within poems are paralleled by poets’ successive recensions of their own sonnets. Daniel and Drayton, inveterate revisers, treat print publications as private, scribal documents, temporarily established but continually available for retraction and revision. Drayton revises his sonnet sequence over a quarter of a century: Ideas Mirror (1594), thereafter rebranded Idea, is progressively winnowed, only twenty sonnets from the first version enduring to the final 1619 redaction (in Drayton’s folio Poems), which introduces ten new sonnets. Daniel, too, serially tinkers with Delia: two authorised editions (containing fifty and fifty-four sonnets) were published in 1592 before successive revisions over nearly a decade saw the sequence swell to sixty sonnets in 1601. The tweaks and recalibrations fully attest what Daniel describes in his verse epistle prefacing Certain Small
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226 - Works (1607) as the ‘serious labour’ of the ‘curious builder’ who ‘Pulls down, and alters’ his previous constructions: As if the thing in doing were more dear Than being done. (Daniel, Certain Small Works, ‘To the Reader’, lines 7–9, Complete Works, 1.12)
For instance, a sonnet newly added to the 1594 Delia and Rosamond Augmented opens: Still in the trace of my tormented thought, My ceaseless cares must march on to my death. (Daniel, Delia and Rosamond, sonnet 27, lines 1–2, Complete Works, 1.59)
This supplemental sonnet corroborates the speaker’s previous state of self-perpetuating malaise, confirming his entrapment in the ‘trace’ (harness). Revised in 1601, the sonnet now removes the nominal telos of ‘death’: Still in the trace of one perplexed thought, My ceaseless cares continually run on. (Daniel, Delia, sonnet 33, lines 1–2, Complete Works, 1.58)
Revision forestalls closure. The speaker’s dilemma has become unterminated and even more entangled (‘perplexed’), an intricacy perhaps reflected by the switch from a Surreian rhyme pattern in 1594 to a partly Spenserian scheme (ababcdcddedeff) in 1601. The medium simultaneously authenticates and, in its changeableness, belies the message of an imprisoning ‘trace’. Paradoxically, labouring for renewal at times seems indistinguishable from regressing towards stasis and ossification. Over the century, sustained experimentation in the sonnet form subsides, notwithstanding a late flourish in the pyrotechnic displays of William Drummond’s Poems (1614), and sonnetic irregularity is increasingly disciplined into conformity. Wroth’s revisions to Pamphilia to Amphilanthus effectively yield two distinct sonnet sequences. Crucially, where the earlier sequence in her autograph fair-copy manuscript (Folger Library Manuscript V.a.104) entertains a sense of dialogic possibility between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus, the revised 1621 text printed in Urania reduces this dialogue and erotic frisson into a monologic plaint of unfulfilled desire. Cumulatively, Wroth’s deletions, revisions, and reorganisations render the sequence ‘static and uneventful’.⁶⁶ Such changes are consistent with a broader shift in the sixteenth-century sonnet towards concretisation, partly reflecting print’s regularising effects. Envisaging his poetry in the hands of the printer, John Lyly wryly notes this tendency in his commendatory letter to Watson’s Hekatompathia: ‘my fancies being never so crooked he would put them in straight lines’ (‘John Lyly to the Author’, in Watson, Hekatompathia, sig. ❦1v). Print culture customarily suppresses the refractoriness of manuscript sonnets, instead favouring
⁶⁶ Ilona Bell, ‘ “Joy’s Sports”: The Unexpurgated Text of Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, Modern Philology, 111.2 (2013), 231–52, 234.
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227 ‘rhythmic regularity’ and ‘stabilization of genre and of “literary” vocabularies’.⁶⁷ In making early Tudor manuscript poetry available to a print readership, Richard Tottel’s epochdefining miscellany, Songs and Sonnets (1557), regularised Wyatt’s metrically lithe sonnets and rondeaux into strophic obedience. Spenser’s innovative blank verse sonnets in A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), translating Du Bellay’s Une Songe (A Dream) (fifteen sonnets presented as a dream-vision epilogue to his 1558 Antiquitez de Rome [Antiquities of Rome]), are expanded and revised in The Visions of Bellay (1591), which reworks his earlier experiments in unrhymed, neoclassical poetics into conservatively Surreian sonnets. Similarly, despite professions of writing ‘Wild, madding, jocund, and irregular’ sonnets in the 1599 edition of Idea (Drayton, Idea, sonnet 73, line 12, Works, 1.485)—a sonnet pointedly dropped from his 1619 edition of the sequence—Drayton’s successive redactions progressively regularise metre and abandon his more unusual prosodic schemes (including alexandrines). Drayton’s revisions coincide with the couplet’s increasing prominence in the sonnet’s mise-en-page. Most sequences in the 1590s indented the opening lines of each strophic unit (the quatrains beginning lines 1, 5, and 9, and the couplet), yet Drayton’s revisions to Idea from 1599 onwards indent only the couplet, as if it were a detachable unit, the epigrammatic telos to which each sonnet tends. The shift parallels both the couplet’s ascendancy in translations of Classical elegy and the emergent vogue for the epigram, spurred by Sir John Davies’ Epigrams (1599). Although sonnets are still composed into the seventeenth century, very few new sequences are published after Shakespeare’s or after the wave of Scots sonnets following James’s accession in 1603. The sonnet seems steadily to modulate into, and cede ground to, the epigram, partly a consequence of the tendency to place the volta after the third rather than the second quatrain, whittling the sonnet down to an ingenious turn of thought compressed into the final couplet. This ‘12/2 structure’ superimposes ‘dismissive simplicity’ on ‘painfully built discourse, piled-up argument, or elaborated narrative’, reducing the sonnet to the point (the purpose, endpoint, and brevity) of its couplet.⁶⁸ An inalienably ‘“pointed” form’, the sonnet comes to privilege its final couplet as the superlative refinement of inventive wit.⁶⁹ For Julius Caesar Scaliger, in his monumental critical treatise Poetices Libri Septem [Seven Books on Poetry] (1561), this argutia [‘wit’, ‘point’] is the epigram’s defining essence.⁷⁰ Comparably, William Scott’s Model of Poesy (1599) taxonomises sonnets under the category of ‘lyrical epigram, which commonly stretcheth not to beyond a sonnet and is as much less as you will’, explicitly identifying the endpoint as the sonnet’s trademark: the sonnet is ‘contrived with a continual dependency of sense till it receive the life and completeness in the last verses’ (Scott, Model, 29.81).⁷¹ Accordingly, at the turn of the century, published English sonnets—Smith’s Chloris (1596), William Alexander’s Aurora (1604), John Davies of Hereford’s Wit’s Pilgrimage (1605), and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609)—typically favour functional indentation of just the final couplet.
⁶⁷ Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Tudor Verse Form: Rudeness, Artifice, and Display’, in Catherine Bates (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Chichester, 2018), 166–82, 176, 177. ⁶⁸ J. Paul Hunter, ‘Poetry on the Page: Visual Signalling and the Mind’s Ear’, in Ben Burton and Elizabeth ScottBaumann (eds), The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture (Oxford, 2014), 179–96, 189. ⁶⁹ Spiller, Development, 11. ⁷⁰ Robert Cummings, ‘Epigram’, in Victoria Moul (ed.), A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature (Cambridge, 2017), 83–97, 87. ⁷¹ William Scott, in Gavin Alexander (ed.), The Model of Poesy (Cambridge, 2013), page followed by line number.
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228 - On the page, the sonnet’s appearance progressively stabilises. Manuscript sonnets tend to embrace the heterogeneous format of scribal compilations: in manuscript, Wyatt’s and Surrey’s sonnets are scattered amongst other verse types, and half a century later Arthur Gorges’ sonnets, in his manuscript collection ‘The Vanities of S[i]r Arthur Gorges’ Youth’ (c 1586), are typically interspersed with other strophic forms that disrupt any formal continuity.⁷² In print culture, by contrast, from Watson’s 1582 Hekatompathia onwards, poems labelled ‘sonnets’ begin to be printed in continuous runs without interruption by other verse forms, and with a consistent mise-en-page that acknowledges the sonnet as an autonomous printed genre. Daniel’s Delia (1592), Fletcher’s Licia (1593), Lodge’s Phillis (1593), Drayton’s Ideas Mirror (1594), and the anonymous Zepheria (1594) all reproduce one sonnet per page, usually numbered and often framed within an ornamented border of printers’ flowers. While these typographic habits might suggest increasing regularisation and calcification, a regression at odds with ambitions of self-renewal, nonetheless a final twist to the sonnet’s sixteenth-century history arguably lies in the very attention it draws to its visual dimensions. From its nominal status as a ‘little sound’ (sonetto in Italian), the sonnet becomes a poem increasingly defined by its form on the page. As a reified object to be seen, the sonnet counters the threat of dissipation into echo and vacant sound.⁷³ The insistence on the sonnet’s visual criteria implied by printers’ schematic habits of standardised layout (one framed sonnet per page) is compounded by the increasing presence in sonnets of terminology borrowed from the visual arts. Adopting the lexis of draughtsmanship, sonnets quietly impress on their readers the importance of their visual lineaments. In canzon 2 from Zepheria (encountered above), the speaker unfurls an analogy between sonneteering and limning—‘limn’d’, ‘model’, ‘designs’, ‘empris’d’ (Zepheria, canzon 2, lines 1–5, sig. B1v)— describing his verse as ‘these designs’ in a strikingly early usage of ‘design’ to denote depiction.⁷⁴ Smith’s Chloris persistently construes its sonnets as (usually ‘sad’) ‘designs’ (see sonnet 20, line 6; sonnet 29, line 10; sonnet 49, line 4; and sonnet 50, line 4; Chloris, sigs. B4, C2, D3, D3v), and in Idea Drayton represents his speaker as ‘Painting [his] Passions in these sad Designs’ (Drayton, Idea, sonnet 45, line 4, Works, 2.333). Lacing their sonnets with this nascent critical terminology, these poets play a final variation on the labour of invention. As ‘design’ gestures to disegno from Italian aesthetic theory (designare and disegnare, ‘to delimit in space’), it perhaps also recalls Sidney’s idea of the ‘fore-conceit’ (Sidney, Defence, 79), the imagined work prior to its embodiment on the page. In Italian theory, disegno was related to ingegno (the poet’s imaginative wit and invention), since disegno explained how the imagined idea in the artist’s mind came to be materialised in verse form.⁷⁵ In English sonnets, ‘design’ ultimately attests the poet’s labour in reifying invention on the page, and perhaps offers a final, parting glimpse of invention within apparently ossifying convention.
⁷² See London, British Library, Egerton MS 3165. ⁷³ On this distinction, see also the discussion of opsis (which appeals to the eye) and melos (which appeals to the ear) in Chapter 11 in this volume. ⁷⁴ OED, ‘design’ n, 6. ‘preliminary drawing’; 7.a, ‘art of drawing’. ‘Limning’ was the art of ‘illuminating of manuscripts, etc.’, OED, limning n, 1. ⁷⁵ Alexander Marr, ‘Pregnant Wit: ingegno in Renaissance England’, British Art Studies, 1 (2015). https://doi. org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-01/amarr.
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13 Satire Michelle O’Callaghan
Sixteenth-century English verse satire is shaped by the twin forces of humanism and the Reformation. The first English translation of Horace’s satires by Thomas Drant mixes Classical and biblical models transforming this pagan poet into a godly Protestant: A Medicinable Moral, that is, the Two Books of Horace his Satires, Englished According to the Prescription of Saint Jerome. The Wailings of the Prophet Jeremiah, Done into English Verse (1566). When authors came to write satire in this period, they could draw on a rich storehouse of Latin, biblical, and native medieval models. George Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesy (1589), like many of his contemporaries, recognised these two lineages, one Roman and the other native English, in his account of satire: There was yet another kind of poet, who intended to tax the common abuses and vice of the people in rough and bitter speeches, and their invectives were called satires, and themselves satyrics. Such were Lucilius, Juvenal, and Persius among the Latins, and with us he [William Langland] that wrote the book called Piers Plowman. (Puttenham, Art, 116)¹
Authors were very aware of the stylistic choices available to them; while writers may have privileged one model over another, be it Latin or native, Horace or Juvenal, verse satire tends to be more multivocal than this suggests and takes over voices, themes, and topoi from a variety of sources. Notable in Puttenham’s taxonomy is the absence of Horace. This results from Puttenham’s definition of satire as rough and bitter invective; Horace, by contrast, favoured humour and ridicule. The different styles attributed to the Roman satirists were set out by Julius Caesar Scaliger in his Poetices Libri Septem (1561): ‘Iuuenalis ardet, instat apertè, iugulat. Persius insultat. Horatius irridet’ [Juvenal burns, makes open attack, and goes for the throat. Persius insults. Horace mocks].² All three Roman satirists had been taught in the upper forms of grammar schools from the medieval period and by the late 1570s were available in cheap Latin editions.³ The reception of Roman satire in the sixteenth century is often characterised in terms of a preference for either Horace or Juvenal. Horace dominates the period up to the late sixteenth century, as evidenced by the satires of Sir Thomas Wyatt;
¹ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ² Quoted in Stuart Gillespie, ‘Imperial Satire in the English Renaissance’, in Susanna Braund and Josiah Osgood (eds), A Companion to Persius and Juvenal (Chichester, 2012), 386–408, 388–9. ³ See Colin Burrow, ‘Roman Satire in the Sixteenth Century’, in Kirk Freudenberg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (Cambridge, 2005), 243–60, 248. Michelle O’Callaghan, Satire In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Michelle O’Callaghan 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0013
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230 - Juvenal and Persius are the satirists of choice in the 1590s, most notably in John Marston’s Certain Satires (1598) and The Scourge of Villainy (1598).⁴ What this tells us is that there was a wide array of choices available to authors. Verse satire is not a fixed genre; nonetheless it does have a recognisable ‘modal repertoire’ on which authors could draw.⁵ Puttenham, Scaliger, and other writers of poetic treatises, alongside authors and translators such as Drant, offered various definitions of satire.⁶ One common feature is that satire should tax or critique the times, whether it does so through preaching and diatribe or through abuse and invective. Satire was understood to be a low literary kind, like pastoral, and associated with stylistic roughness: characteristics that arose out of the common and productive etymological and generic confusion between satire and Greek satyr plays. Drant traced the etymology of satire to ‘Satyrus, the mossy rude, / Uncivil god’, to explain why those who ‘write / With taunting girds and glikes [jests] and gibes’ must ‘Strain courtesy’ (Drant, Medicinable Moral, sig. A4v). Puttenham similarly traced satire’s origins to ancient Satyr plays; these ‘base’ gods of the woods ‘desired by good admonishments . . . to bring the bad to amendment by those kind of preachings’ (Puttenham, Art, 121). Satire’s purpose was therefore moral reform, hence the medicinal properties Drant foregrounded in the title he gave to his translation of Horace, A Medicinable Moral. Because it ‘strain[s] courtesy’, satire foregrounds questions of decorum so that the difficulties of writing satire—its ethics and efficacy—often become one of its themes. The ethos of the satirist is one site of concern since the rhetorical process of creating a speaking voice calls upon its audience to imagine the speaker’s moral character. As a consequence, satire often calls into question the persuasive purpose of rhetoric, which is ideally directed to civic ends. To move his audience, the satirist deploys various rhetorical strategies that incite negative emotions, such as disgust, anger, and shame. Horace, who tended to avoid invective, secured his personal ethos through the epistolary form of his satires addressed to good men, which embodied the civic values of friendship.⁷ Persius, Francis Meres wrote in Palladis Tamia (1598), was ‘reported . . . to be of an honest life and upright conversation’; Juvenal was considered more suspect to the extent that Scaliger advised the good man to avoid reading his satires.⁸ Puttenham similarly viewed John Skelton with suspicion: he was ‘a sharp satirist, but with more railing and scoffery than became a poet laureate’ (Puttenham, Art, 150). The satirist’s claim to the moral qualities that permitted him to speak the truth underpinned the equation of satire with a plain style. Yet, it was also recognised that dangerous times could compel the satirist to speak obscurely. Juvenal’s famous injunction, ‘difficile est saturam non scribere’ [it is hard not to write satire] (Juvenal, Satire 1, line 30, Satires, 132),⁹ was cited to justify the satirist’s compulsion to speak truth, but also raised the spectre of tyranny, when the act of writing satire became hard and dangerous. The satires of Skelton ⁴ See Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 1959), 90–116. Certain Satires form the second half of Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image and Certain Satires (1598). ⁵ Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford, 1982), 110. ⁶ For critical definitions spanning late medieval and late sixteenth-century satire, see John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956); Douglas Gray, The Phoenix and the Parrot: Skelton and the Language of Satire (Dunedin, 2012), 101–16; Richard McCabe, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford, 1982), 32–40; and Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 1995), 372–89. ⁷ See Steven Shelburne, ‘The Epistolary Ethos of Formal Satire’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 36 (1994), 135–65, 135–9. ⁸ Quoted in Gillespie, ‘Imperial Satire’, 391, 388. ⁹ Juvenal, in Susanna Morton Braund (trans.), Juvenal and Persius (Cambridge, MA, 2004).
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231 and Wyatt, written under Henry VIII, as well as those of John Donne composed during the turbulent and factionalised political world of the 1590s, pose this question of the difficulty of satire with particular urgency.
Early Tudor Satire Skelton is a valuable starting point for an account of English verse satire in the sixteenth century. His major satires, Speke Parott, Collyn Clout, and Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?, written between 1519 and 1523, capture the rich field of Classical and medieval English satire available in the early sixteenth century. Skelton cites Juvenal and Persius, borrows from Horatian, Lucianic, and Menippean satire, as well as Chaucer, Langland, and Gower, and combines, as Puttenham notes, the buffoonery and invective of the Greek ‘pantomimi’ (Puttenham, Art, 150) with the prophetic voice of Jeremiah, the diatribe of Jerome, and native flytings.¹⁰ Skelton’s satire is avowedly heteroglot, reminding us that satire derives from the Latin satura, denoting a medley of varied styles. For his subject matter, Skelton follows the path of medieval estates satire, venting his anger at the church, city, and court, reserving his most bitter and scurrilous invective for Cardinal Wolsey, whom he attacks both openly and privily. In A Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence (1564), William Bullein pictured Skelton as warmed by ‘the hot burning choler kindled against the cankered Cardinal Wolsey; writing many sharp distichons with bloody pen against him’.¹¹ Skelton is the first English poet to realise satire’s potential for displaying virtuosity, especially in relation to voice. A distinctive feature of Skelton’s satire, and indeed his other poetry, is its multivocality.¹² Speke Parott is the most complex of all Skelton’s satires, a virtuoso performance that is not only aware of the risks it takes but stages those risks. The satiric persona, Parrot, is simultaneously a version of the pantomimi, skilled in mimicry, and Boccaccio’s wise Psyttacus, son of Deucalion. Speke Parott opens with a bravura satiric medley that is relentlessly polyglot. Copia is literalised in the parrot: ‘Such shredis of sentence, strowed in the shop / Of auncyent Aristippus and such other mo, / I gader together and close in my crop’ (Skelton, Speke Parott, lines 92–4, Complete Poems, 233).¹³ The mode of imitation Skelton practices, unlike that of Wyatt and the satirists of the 1590s, is not to imitate form or style, but rather to deploy small parcels strategically, ‘advertising their derivation from the subtexts they carry with them’, while simultaneously distancing the situation of the speaker from these subtexts by refusing to inhabit their voices fully.¹⁴ Skelton’s parrot quotes shreds of the Roman satirists, taking a tag from Martial’s Epigrams, then abruptly adopting the persona of clerical satire, only to be jibed by his auditors, ‘ “Harke, harke, / Parrot pretendith to be a bybyll [bible] clarke!”’ (Skelton, Speke Parott, lines 118–19, Complete Poems, 234). Parrot is called upon to speak by these other voices or warned by shadowy anonymous interlocutors: ‘ “But ware the cat, Parot, ware the fals cat!” / With, “Who is there? A mayd?” Nay, nay, I trow!’ (Skelton, Speke Parott, lines 99–100, Complete Poems, 233). Another speaks in his defence, repeatedly claiming for this parrot the
¹⁰ See Gray, The Phoenix and the Parrot, 114–16. See also Chapter 21 in this volume. ¹¹ Quoted in Gray, The Phoenix and the Parrot, 107. ¹² See Gray, The Phoenix and the Parrot, 197. For further discussion of Skelton’s dissonant polyvocality, see Jane Griffiths, ‘Parrot’s Poetics: Fragmentation, Theory and Practice in Skelton’s Writing’, Oxford Handbooks Online (2015). ¹³ John Skelton, in John Scattergood (ed.), The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth, 1983). ¹⁴ Griffiths, ‘Parrot’s Poetics’, 8.
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232 - traditional liberties of the satirist as truth-teller, ‘let Parrot have lyberte to speke’ (Skelton, Speke Parott, line 210, Complete Poems, 236). Yet, the licence he takes extends to wanton poetry, a song of ‘My praty [pretty] Besse’ (Skelton, Speke Parott, line 235, Complete Poems, 237), troubling his claim to moral probity, and is met with a Latin tag from Juvenal: ‘Concumbunt Grece. Non est hic sermo pudicus’ [They get laid in Greece. This language is not decent for an old woman] (Skelton, Speke Parott, line 269, Complete Poems, 238; citing Juvenal, Satire 6, lines 191, 193, Satires, 250). The polyphony of Speke Parott is cast aside in the final section in response to Galathea’s prompt to ‘speke now trew and playne’ (Skelton, Speke Parott, line 448, Complete Poems, 244), signifying a shift into prophetic biblical satire. Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? and Collyn Clout are sophisticated explorations of the ‘true and plain’ speaking claimed by the satirist at the end of Speke Parott, which is aligned with the voice of popular complaint. Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? is addressed to the London citizenry and dramatises the city’s clamour: ‘ “What newes? What news?” ’ (Skelton, Why Come Ye Nat, line 233, Complete Poems, 284). The speaker reports what he hears, his speech made up of the complaints of concerned citizenry, which act as prompts for a litany of accusations of corruption against Wolsey. The speaker distances himself from the satirist, disingenuously claiming that he is only imitating the famous dictum of Juvenal, ‘Quia difficule est / Satiram non scribere’ (Skelton, Why Come Ye Nat, lines 1216–17, Complete Poems, 309), and so is ‘forcebly constrayned / At Juvynals request’ (lines 1210–11). A similar satiric strategy is evident in Collyn Clout.¹⁵ The epigraph cites biblical prophets, casting Collyn, the plain-spoken English satirist, as a Jerome, the scourge of God who claims divine licence for his scurrility in denouncing wickedness.¹⁶ Yet, this godly defence of satire is articulated at one remove from the speaker. Collyn’s complaints are never quite his own, but instead record grievances voiced by others: ‘Men say, for sylver and golde, / Mytres are bought and solde’ (Skelton, Collyn Clout, lines 289–90, Complete Poems, 254). The poem begins to make sense of this dissociation, revealing it as a necessary protective strategy for the satirist in times of persecution. The voices of prelates take over the poem and turn on their accusers, ordering their imprisonment, torture, and execution, a fate that mirrors that of earlier prophet-satirists: ‘Lyke holy Jeremy; / Some hanged, some slayne, / Some beaten to the brayne’ (Skelton, Collyn Clout, lines 1209–11, Complete Poems, 276). Reformers read Skelton’s Collyn Clout alongside Piers Plowman as foundational texts in a native tradition of Protestant satire. When Spenser adopted the persona of Colin Clout in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), he located this work within this tradition.¹⁷ Immediate imitators of Skelton’s satires are to be found not amongst the courtly elite but amongst radical reformers.¹⁸ Luke Shepherd, a London physician, published a series of satires during the brief reign of Edward VI, written in Skeltonics. A Poor Help (1548) is a ‘remarkable reworking of Colin Clout’ that responds to his experimentations with voice.¹⁹ Shepherd’s speaker is not a Piers Plowman-style reformer, but one of Skelton’s prelates, who is used as a parodic mouthpiece to take advantage of the problem posed by invective: that, in deriding its subject, it simultaneously deforms its speaker. A Poor Help stages a satiric performance in which the priest’s use of ridicule rather than measured argument to counter reformers, rebounds upon its speaker. The rhetorical effect is to trivialise Catholic defences of doctrine. ¹⁵ See Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford, 2006), 162–3. ¹⁶ See Gray, The Phoenix and the Parrot, 107. ¹⁷ On Spenser’s engagement with Skelton, see Griffiths, John Skelton, 144–5, 167–70. ¹⁸ See David R. Carlson, ‘Protestant Skelton: The Satires of 1519–1523’, in David R. Carlson (ed.), John Skelton and Early Modern Culture: Papers Honoring Robert S. Kinsman (Tempe, AZ, 2008), 215–35, 233. ¹⁹ Griffiths, John Skelton, 166–7.
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233 Shepherd lacks Skelton’s control over voice, and the priest’s mask sometimes drops to reveal the Protestant satirist. Nonetheless, he is a skilful reader of Skelton.²⁰ The Reformation, with its violent doctrinal disputes, accusations of abuses and corruption, and martyrs’ fires, generates much of the satire written in the first half of the sixteenth century.²¹ The satire written by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in 1543, ‘London, hast thou accused me’—unsurprisingly given Surrey’s aristocratic status—eschews the voice of the common man, the conventional mouthpiece of Reformation satire, and instead has learnt many of its oratorical lessons from Juvenal’s attacks on Rome.²² That said, Surrey’s ‘Rome’ is that of Protestant reformers, rather than that of Juvenal. Occasioned by Surrey’s imprisonment in the Fleet after a night of roistering in London and breaking the windows of its citizens, the satire recasts this event within an explicitly reformist framework. Drawing on satire as an arraignment, it is not the speaker who stands accused but London and its citizens. Their ‘secret sin’ has caused the just anger of this satirist ‘to break forth’ and, like Jeremiah before him, to use his bow, ‘A figure of the Lord’s behest, / Whose scourge for sin the Scriptures show’, against a proud and corrupt city, the new Babylon (Surrey, ‘London, hast thou accused me’, lines 14, 7, 20–1, Poems, 30).²³ In keeping with its scriptural models, the satirist is the instrument of ‘God’s wrath’ (line 27). Surrey draws on Continental anticlerical satire, combining Petrarch’s satires on the papacy from his In Vita, ‘Oh shameless whore! Is dread then gone / By such thy foes as meant thy weal? / Oh member of false Babylon!’ (Surrey, lines 51–3, Poems, 31), with topical paraphrases of the Book of Revelation, ‘Thy martyrs’ blood, by sword and fire, / In Heaven and earth for justice call’ (lines 55–6), and of Ezekiel, imagining God’s justice delivered through London’s destruction, ‘Thy proud towers and turrets high, / Enemies to God, beat stone from stone; / Thine idols burnt, that wrought iniquity’ (lines 62–4). The satirist turns iconoclast in this startling example of Reformation satire. Little wonder that Richard Tottel did not include it alongside Surrey’s other poems in Songs and Sonnets in 1557 at the close of Mary’s reign. Tottel did publish Sir Thomas Wyatt’s epistolary satires, however—‘My own John Poins’, ‘My mother’s maids’, and ‘A spending hand’, probably written between 1536 and 1539— grouping them together as a distinct set of poems on public themes. It is Wyatt who is credited with introducing formal neoclassical verse satire into England.²⁴ Skelton, of course, was thoroughly grounded in the Latin satirists, but Wyatt practised a different mode of imitation that was emulative and engaged in a sustained creative dialogue with the form, voice, and ethos of Horace’s satires. Wyatt’s neoclassical satires emerge out of early Tudor humanism and its revival of Stoicism. From Horace and the Stoics, Wyatt learnt his ‘manly style’, characterised by brevity and plainness and exhibiting a ‘well-schooled mind’.²⁵ His Horace is nonetheless avowedly English. By turning to Chaucer for his literary examples and phrasing and replacing figures and topoi in his Latin and Italian sources with homely proverbs, Wyatt translated formal verse satire into a distinctly English idiom.²⁶
²⁰ On Shepherd, see Janice Devereux (ed.), An Edition of Luke Shepherd’s Satires (Tempe, AZ, 2001); and John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1982), 252–70. ²¹ On Reformation satire, see King, English Reformation Literature, 252–70, 341–4, 371–406. ²² See William A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 1999), 234–5. ²³ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Emrys Jones (ed.), Poems (Oxford, 1964). ²⁴ See Angela Wheeler, English Verse Satire from Donne to Dryden: Imitation of Classical Models (Heidelberg, 1992), 30. ²⁵ Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey, and Early Tudor Poetry (London, 1998), 119–20. ²⁶ See Heale, Wyatt, Surrey, 133–4.
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234 - Wyatt introduced into English satire, via Horace, the theme of the mean estate, a refuge for Stoic virtues and alternative to the dangerous fortunes of court life.²⁷ Wyatt places the question, whether it is possible to write satire and to speak frankly, at the heart of his poems. His speaker in the poems addressed to John Poins, ‘Mine own John Poins’ and ‘My mother’s maids’, makes a point of professing his honesty and truthfulness in a world that does not value these virtues. In ‘Mine own John Poins’, Wyatt reads Horace through Luigi Alamanni’s imitation in his Satira X, adopting the Italian’s terza rima. Alamanni, a Republican poet, wrote his satires in political exile from the Florentine court, thus bringing Horace into the service of Renaissance anti-court satire.²⁸ Wyatt maintains the framework of Alamanni’s epistolary satire, in which withdrawal from the court to his country estate allows the liberty and self-definition not possible at court, but Wyatt’s liberty is less certain and his language more guarded. When Wyatt’s speaker responds to Poins’ question as to why he has left the court—because he does not want ‘to live thrall under the awe / Of lordly looks’ (Wyatt, ‘Mine own John Poins’, lines 4–5, Complete Poems, 186)²⁹—he makes a point of denying that he is a railing satirist. He does not intend to ‘scorn or mock / The power of them to whom fortune hath lent / Charge over us, of Right, to strike the stroke’ (lines 7–9). Instead, following Horace’s example, his words are conciliatory, moderate, even as he reserves the right to speak plainly and frankly.³⁰ The problem with the court is that channels of counsel have become perverted; all courtly language is flattery, which turns free men into slaves. The speaker’s own plain-speaking, however, proves to be just as slippery. While flatly rejecting paradiastole (calling one thing another), the rhetorical formula favoured is litotes—‘I cannot’ or ‘I am not’—which is used to assert the speaker’s honesty. Puttenham called this figure ‘the Moderator’, because it ‘becomes us many times better to speak in that sort qualified than if we spoke it by more forcible terms’; and yet the rhetorical figure most closely related to litotes is paradiastole or ‘the Curry-Favel’, because ‘such moderation of words’ can tend ‘to flattery, or soothing, or excusing’ (Puttenham, Art, 269). In Wyatt’s poem, the speaker’s moderate language takes the sharp edge off invective, but it is hardly an example of plain-speaking. Such shiftiness is figured in the repeated use of the word ‘cloak’ throughout the epistle: on the one hand it figures flattery, ‘To cloak the truth for praise’ (Wyatt, ‘Mine own John Poins’, line 20, Complete Poems, 186), on the other, it is also the condition of the speaker, who is ‘wrapped within my cloak’ (line 5). The line perhaps reworks Horace’s ‘wrap[ped] myself in my virtue’ (Horace, Book 3, ode 29, lines 54–5; Odes, 214)³¹ or Alamanni’s ‘solo’, ‘alone’. Yet, Wyatt’s ‘cloak’ does not necessarily equate with Horace’s virtue or the stoicism of solo, but instead suggests obfuscation, and so carries with it the rhetorical double-speak present throughout. Even in the country it is not possible to speak plainly; instead the ‘thrall’ of the court intrudes on the country figured in the ‘clog’ that ‘doth hang yet at my heel’ (Wyatt, ‘Mine own John Poins’, line 86, Complete Poems, 188), rendering its liberties far more contingent and precarious.³² Wyatt consistently introduces an unsettling twist into the form of Horatian satire. ‘My mother’s maids’ begins with the Aesopian fable of the country mouse and the town mouse
²⁷ See Heale, Wyatt, Surrey, 122–3. ²⁸ See Burrow, ‘Roman Satire’, 247. ²⁹ Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978). ³⁰ On Horace’s conciliatory style, see Emily Gowers, ‘The Restless Companion: Horace, Satires 1 and 2’, in Freudenberg (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, 48–61. ³¹ Horace, in Niall Rudd (ed. and trans.), Odes and Epodes (Cambridge, MA, 2004). ³² See Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting: ‘Turning the Word’ (Oxford, 2012), 135–6.
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235 prompted by Horace (see Book 2, Satire 6, lines 77–117; Satires, 216–19),³³ which is then read through native versions, including Robert Henryson’s The Tale of the Uponlandis Mouse and the Burgess Mouse, and so assimilated into the homely vernacular forms of English satire. Wyatt’s fable differs radically from all other versions, which end with the country mouse returning safely home to extol the virtues of mean estate. Wyatt’s satire refuses any easy resolution. His country mouse rightly despairs at the deprivations of country life, with its floods and famine, but does not return enlightened to virtues of the country, rather falling prey to the dangers of the city, caught by the cat.³⁴ The most complicated of Wyatt’s epistolary satires, ‘A spending hand’, addressed to the diplomat Sir Francis Bryan, is based on Horace Satires Book 2, Satire 5 (see Horace, Satires, 198–207), and takes Horace’s parody of the advice poem a step further.³⁵ Wyatt’s speaker cannot be trusted since he advocates flattery and life in the country as an opportunity to ‘Feed thyself fat and heap up pound by pound’ (Wyatt, ‘A spending hand’, line 17, Complete Poems, 192); instead, the ‘lean and dry’ (line 24) Bryan is the plain-speaking Stoic, except he does not speak from the liberty of the country but from service at court. Bryan interprets the speaker’s words as a ‘thrifty jest’ (Wyatt, ‘A spending hand’, line 80, Complete Poems, 194), an exercise in humanist sophistry, of arguing in utramque partem, raising the question of who honestly holds either position.³⁶ Neither man can be held to their word. Like ‘Mine own John Poins’, the plain-speaking identified with the Stoic satirist is revealed as illusory; instead the mode of satire practised is more guarded and obscure.³⁷ Other authors followed Wyatt in choosing Horace as their model for satire in subsequent decades, but they did not engage with the topic of the difficulty of satire. It is Donne in the 1590s who again returns to these issues in his reading of Horace, particularly in his highly self-consciousness and selfcritical anti-court Satire 4.
Elizabethan Satire The standard history of verse satire is that it enters a lean period between Wyatt and the 1590s.³⁸ Satires produced in this period do lack Wyatt’s skilful engagement with Roman models. Thomas Churchyard’s satire, ‘Written from the Country twenty year ago to one that poorly remains at the Court yet’, only retains the barest remnant of ‘Mine own John Poins’ in its closing lines: ‘So thus farewell, mine own good John: / From Court dispatch thee if thou may, / That we may meet ere Easter day’ (Churchyard, Pleasant Labyrinth, 21).³⁹ Nonetheless, what emerges in these decades is a distinctive mode of moralising satire that brings together native traditions of complaint with a Classical tradition.⁴⁰ Drant’s 1566 translation, A Medicinable Moral, introduces an ‘overmoralized’ Horace into English satire, ‘which turned him into an openly didactic castigator in his Sermones, bitterly attacking and
³³ Horace, in H. Rushton Fairclough (trans.), Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1926). ³⁴ See Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt, 139–40. ³⁵ See Heale, Wyatt, Surrey, 136. ³⁶ See Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt, 146–7. ³⁷ See Catherine Bates, ‘ “A Mild Admonisher”: Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sixteenth-Century Satire’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 56 (1993), 243–58, 252–3. ³⁸ See Wheeler, English Verse Satire, 30–3. ³⁹ Thomas Churchyard, A Pleasant Labyrinth Called Churchyard’s Chance (London, 1580). ⁴⁰ See Burrow, ‘Roman Satire’, 248. On this native tradition, see Peter, Complaint and Satire. Raymond MacDonald Alden, The Rise of Formal Satire in England under Classical Influence (Philadelphia, PA, 1899), provides brief accounts of the books of satire produced in this period.
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236 - reprehending vice’.⁴¹ Drant’s ‘Englished’ Horace prompted Edward Hake to attempt his own ‘English Satires’ in his News out of Paul’s Churchyard, first published in 1567 (only the second 1579 edition survives). The title page bears a tag from Horace’s ‘satiric’ Book 3, ode 6: ‘Aetas parentum peior auis, tulit / Nos nequiores, mox daturos / Progeniem vitiosiorem’ [Iniquitous time! What does it not impair? Our fathers’ age, worse than our grandfathers’, gave birth to us, an inferior breed, who will in due course produce still more degenerate offspring] (Horace, Book 3, ode 6, lines 46–8, Odes, 164). His primary model, however, is native complaint and he defines English satire in its wholesome didactic terms: its plainspeaking sharpness is ‘For sole intent good living to erect: / And sin rescind which rifely reigns abroad’ (Drant, Medicinable Moral, sig. A2). George Gascoigne’s The Steel Glass: A Satire (1576) is the most experimental of all the books of satire produced in this period, not least because it is written in blank verse. Gascoigne claims Lucilius as his poetic father, but what is most striking is his etymology of satire. His ‘Satyra’ is not the conventional satyr but a version of Philomela: the twin sister of Poesy and daughter of Plain-dealing and Simplicity, she was raped by Vain Delight, who cuts out her ‘tongue with Razor of Restraint’ (Gascoigne, Complete Works, 2.146).⁴² Satire is explicitly equated with freedom of speech under the threat of censorship. Gascoigne’s Satyra is an ‘Hermaphrodite’ (2.144), figuring castration-as-censorship.⁴³ Gascoigne notably holds back from defining Satyra as fully female, probably because, conventionally, satire is an aggressively masculine literary mode, seemingly inimical to the female voice.⁴⁴ Only one woman author, Isabella Whitney, is credited with writing satire in this period. Her ‘Will and Testament’ in A Sweet Nosegay (1573) is an example of Menippean satire, although her speaker is careful to distance herself from the railing satirist, declaring she is ‘in no angry mood’ (Whitney, ‘The time is come I must depart’, line 27, Renaissance Women Poets, 19).⁴⁵ The vogue for satire in the 1590s is marked by turning away from native traditions to the Roman satirists. Why did neoclassical verse satire become the chosen genre of this generation of poets? Colin Burrow argues that in this period those poets born in the 1570s, and so young men in the 1590s, were conscious of entering a new phase of literary history. Sir Philip Sidney had died in 1586, Spenser had published the first three books of his Faerie Queene in 1590, meaning that those reaching poetic maturity in the early 1590s felt ‘prematurely decadent and post-classical’. London was also undergoing a ‘massive expansion’, creating a cityscape that could be apprehended through the Rome of Persius and Juvenal.⁴⁶ Authors in this period turned to Juvenal over Horace because of their sense of exclusion, often lacking a Maecenas. The practice of imitation also changes, indicative of the degree to which a Classical literary culture had been assimilated in England through the schoolroom and print culture. Rather than paraphrasing whole satires, authors borrow passages or mottoes which are used to set the tone or topic or are amplified and recast. This approach may point to the widespread use of florilegia in schools, such as Erasmus’s Adagia,
⁴¹ Neel Mukherjee, ‘Thomas Drant’s Rewriting of Horace’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 40 (2000), 1–21, 11. ⁴² George Gascoigne, in John W. Cunliffe (ed.), Complete Works, 2 vols. (New York, 1969). ⁴³ See Syrithe Pugh, ‘Ovidian Reflections in Gascoigne’s Steel Glass’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009), 571–86, 575–80. ⁴⁴ See John Henderson, Writing Down Rome: Satire, Comedy, and Other Offences in Latin Poetry (Oxford, 1999), 178. ⁴⁵ Isabella Whitney, in Danielle Clarke (ed.), Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (London, 2000). ⁴⁶ Burrow, ‘Roman Satire’, 250–2.
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237 which included lengthy passages from Persius, Horace, and Juvenal.⁴⁷ The practices of imitation that these collections fostered, Mary Crane explains, were the determining ‘mode of transaction with Classical antiquity and provided an influential model for authorial practice and for authoritative self-fashioning’.⁴⁸ There is a question of whether the 1590s do witness a decisive shift away from Horace to Juvenal.⁴⁹ The satires that Thomas Lodge includes in A Fig for Momus (1595) take their epistolary frames from Horace and are printed alongside conversational epistles and eclogues. This affiliation with Horace is strengthened through Lodge’s use of balanced heroic couplets, which give substance to his conciliatory, conversational style. Within this Horatian framing, Lodge incorporates paraphrases of Juvenal and Persius. His Satire 4, for example, reframes Juvenal’s warnings on the horrors of old age in his Satire 10 (see Juvenal, Satires, 366–97) within an admonitory Horatian address to a friend. This is an inoffensive style of satire without the bite of Juvenal or indignant roughness of Persius.⁵⁰ Donne’s satires, composed between 1593 and 1598, similarly engage with Horace, albeit in a manner closer to Wyatt than Lodge. Wyatt had posed the question of whether it was possible to write satires even when the age demanded it. In Donne’s hands, the practice of satire, its ethics and efficacy, is subjected to a sustained questioning, which gives English formal verse satire a philosophical seriousness. For Wyatt, friendship retained its Horatian credibility in which, as Shelburne writes, ‘[a]ccurate self-knowledge leads to the accurate assessment of others’.⁵¹ Friendship in Donne’s satires is compromised and the satirist often finds himself alone, like Persius.⁵² Donne reworks Horace Book 1, Satire 9 (see Horace, Satires, 104–11), across two satires. In Horace, the speaker walks through Rome importuned by a parasite, who wants to secure an introduction to his patron, Maecenas. Unable to rid himself of his unwanted companion, his predicament dramatises the limits of his civility; his words have no effect and he is only finally saved by the law. Donne is attracted by the discomfort of the satirist faced with the failure of admonition and intensifies this situation in Satire 1 by replacing the parasite with an inconstant friend. Here, Donne follows Persius’s Satire 3 (see Persius, Satires, 74–85),⁵³ in which a young man suffering from a hangover is lectured by his friend on how his moral weaknesses could be cured by a good dose of Stoic philosophy.⁵⁴ Donne’s satire opens by contrasting Stoic certainties, the ‘constant company’ of those books that line his study, with the errant mobility of the new metropolis, figured by his importuning companion, the ‘motley humorist’ (Donne, Satire 1, lines 11, 1, Variorum, 3.5).⁵⁵ Leaving his study against his better judgement, this scholar-satirist sets conditions on his friend’s behaviour in the knowledge that they will not hold. He delivers sharp sermons in the Stoic manner of Persius, intending to reform the character of his companion, but his chastisements fall on deaf ears; instead ‘A many-coloured peacock having spied / Leaves him and me: I for my lost Sheep ⁴⁷ See Wheeler, English Verse Satire, 26, 145–8; and Gillespie, ‘Imperial Satire’, 396. ⁴⁸ Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 3. ⁴⁹ McCabe substantially qualifies Kernan’s thesis, arguing that he wrongly assumes that Marston typifies 1590s satire: see Joseph Hall, 34–8. ⁵⁰ See Raman Selden, English Verse Satire, 1500–1765 (London, 1978), 57–8. ⁵¹ Shelburne, ‘Epistolary Ethos’, 139. ⁵² For Persius’s influence on Donne, see Selden, English Verse Satire, 59; and Gillespie, ‘Imperial Satire’, 397. ⁵³ Persius, in Braund (trans.), Juvenal and Persius. ⁵⁴ See Y Shikany Eddy and Daniel Jaeckle, ‘Donne’s “Satyre I”: The Influence of Persius’s “Satire III” ’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 21 (1981), 111–22. ⁵⁵ John Donne, in Gary A. Stringer (gen. ed.), The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol. 3, The Satyres (Bloomington, IN, 2016), spelling modernised.
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238 - stay’ (Donne, Satire 1, lines 92–3, Variorum, 3.7). The parable of lost sheep (Luke 15:1–7) maintains the values of Christian Stoicism, but within a context in which the moral persuasiveness of satire cannot be sustained.⁵⁶ The bustling streets of London are vividly realised in Donne’s Satire 1. Hake’s ‘English satires’ had dramatised Paul’s Walk as a satiric locus where abuses are observed; his speaker overhears the complaints of a young man to his companion as they walk its aisles. Yet, whereas Hake’s London prompted the didactic certainties of moralising satire, Donne’s streets are far more unsettling and akin to the disturbingly protean landscapes of Juvenal’s Rome. Conventional satiric topics are figured in terms of the novelty of leisure and fashion and so acquire a fundamental mobility and insubstantiality. Everard Guilpin’s imitation of this satire in Satire 5 of his Skialetheia (1598) was particularly drawn to Donne’s streetscape: Guilpin’s ‘idle City-walk’ (Guilpin, Satire 5, line 38, Skialetheia, sig. D5) is a hellish descent in which the ‘hotch-potch of so many noises’ (line 41) on these ‘peopled streets’ (line 40) drown out traditional forms of social discrimination.⁵⁷ Yet, Guilpin holds back from the radical moral uncertainties of Donne’s satire. Horace’s speaker had been able to rid himself of the parasite through the intervention of the law, and Guilpin’s satirist rejects his companion and the streets for the certainties of his study. Donne’s satirist, by contrast, embraces his ‘motley humourist’ when he returns bloodied from his encounters ‘And constantly awhile must keep his bed’ (Donne, Satire 1, line 112, Variorum, 3.7). Constancy has lost any conventional stoic meaning and is now a contingent and purely physical state. When Donne returns to rewriting Horace Book 1, Satire 9 in Satire 4, the court and its presence chambers replace the London streets and are a place of such horror that ‘A Purgatory such as feared hell is / A recreation, and scant Map of this’ (Donne, Satire 4, lines 3–4, Variorum, 3.135). Anne Lake Prescott writes of the ‘darker urgency’ of Donne’s reading of Horace in this satire.⁵⁸ The satirist is accosted by a courtier so decayed, sartorially and ethically, that he has no substance and soon will become ‘nought at all’ (line 34). His court news is so indigestible that when, in Juvenalian fashion, ‘He with home meats tries me; I belch, spew, spit, / Look pale and sickly like a Patient’ (lines 109–10, Variorum, 3.137). The satirist finds himself unable to distinguish his own state from the corruption he censures. Like the scholar-satirist of Satire 1, the speaker goes to court against his better judgement. There are remnants of the republican stoic distance claimed by Wyatt, which derives in part from Persius. The speaker returns ‘home, in wholesome Solitariness’ (line 155, Variorum, 3.138) from court, and reasserts his integrity: he is ‘none’s Slave, of high-born or raised men’, only serving ‘Mistress Truth’ (lines 162–3). Yet, he is compelled to return to court because he has become that which he satirises. The decayed courtier had recognised the speaker as one of his own, and ‘names me’ and ‘chooseth me’ (lines 49, 51, Variorum, 3.136). The particular rhetorical and political problem the courtier poses is not so much Wyatt’s flattery, but a more dangerous form of speech: libel. In the late 1590s, satire assumed a troubling proximity to verse libel. The conventional distinction, that satire aims at the general vice and libel at a particular individual, came under pressure.⁵⁹ Addressing the ⁵⁶ See Eddy and Jaeckle, ‘Donne’s “Satyre I” ’, 111–22. On the difficulties of discrimination posed by this satire, see Manley, Literature and Culture, 397–8. ⁵⁷ Edward Guilpin, in D. A. Carroll (ed.), Skialetheia: Or, a Shadow of Truth, in Certain Epigrams and Satires (Chapel Hill, NC, 1974). ⁵⁸ Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Evolution of Tudor Satire’, in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600 (Cambridge, 2000), 220–40, 230. ⁵⁹ See Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997), 198–217.
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239 reader at the close of his Scourge of Villainy (1598), Marston blamed those who, either not understanding the ‘nature of a Satire’ or through their own ‘private malice’, had identified the general vice with ‘some greater personage’, thus imperilling the ‘guiltless’ satirist (Marston, ‘To him that hath perused me’, Poems, 176).⁶⁰ Of course, this defence implies that such readings are possible. In a letter dated July 1612, Donne argued that verse libels were a type of political satire and ‘one may do his Country good service, by libelling against a live man’, in those cases ‘where a man is either too great, or his Vices too general, to be brought under a judiciary accusation’.⁶¹ His own satires may have ventured into libelling. The ‘Coscus’ of Satire 2, ‘a lawyer, which was alas of late / But scarce a Poet’ (Donne, Satire 2, lines 43–4, Variorum, 3.49), shares many features with the libellous satires attacking the lawyer-poet, Sir John Davies, which were penned by Donne’s friends at the Inns of Court, Benjamin Rudyerd and Guilpin.⁶² When the speaker of Donne’s Satire 4 listens to how this courtier ‘Libels now gainst each great Man’ (Donne, Satire 4, line 120, Variorum, 3.137), he undergoes a metamorphosis, ‘Becoming traitor’ (line 131, Variorum, 3.138). Libels are so dangerously contagious that they turn their auditors into authors, making ‘Men speak treason’ (line 46, Variorum, 3.136). Donne’s response to libels, shared with contemporaries, was ambivalent: libels could act to reveal abuses, but they were also suspect, simultaneously providing a necessary corrective and a symptom of a debased political rhetoric. Donne subjects satire as a genre to a rigorous process of questioning. Satire 2, which addresses the topic of the law, begins as an exercise in hyperbolic Juvenalian anger with the speaker announcing to his companion, ‘Sir, Though (I thank God for it) I do hate / Perfectly all this town’ (Donne, Satire 2, lines 1–2, Variorum, 3.48). Yet, the satirist ends by admitting, in stark contrast to Surrey, satire’s ineffectiveness as a mode of arraignment: ‘But my words none draws / Within the vast reach of th’huge Statute Laws’ (lines 111–12, Variorum, 3.50).⁶³ Satire 5 again addresses the theme of law in relation to office-holding: the sinews of state. Donne’s patron, the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, takes the place of Horace’s Maecenas, and is the exemplary magistrate who will ‘now, begin / To know and weed out this enormous sin’ (Donne, Satire 5, lines 33–4, Variorum, 3.210). The problem is the world is so fallen in this ‘Iron Age’ (line 37, Variorum, 3.211) that the law contains within itself that which corrupts: ‘She is all fair, but yet hath foul long nails, / With which she scratcheth Suitors’ (lines 74–5). The fallen state of man is the topic of his religious satire, too. Whereas earlier Protestant satirists were certain where religious truths were to be found, Satire 3 counsels against misdirected notions of doctrinal purity and an unthinking acceptance of religious truths, advocating instead a questioning faith, to ‘doubt wisely, in strange way, / To stand enquiring right, is not to stray’ (Donne, Satire 3, lines 77–8, Variorum, 3.95). Unlike earlier satirists, Donne turns not to Jeremiah or Jerome, but to Persius. Stuart Gillespie identifies his influence in Donne’s syntactically difficult figure ‘truth stands, and he that will / Reach her, about must, and about go; / And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so’ (lines 80–2, Variorum, 3.95–6).⁶⁴ Persius’s obscurity was conducive to Donne. Unlike other satirists of the 1590s, he chose to publish his book of satires scribally rather than through print. The type of libertas he claimed was private, restricted to close friends; it may have been necessary given he would later write to Henry Wotton that
⁶⁰ John Marston, in Arnold Davenport (ed.), The Poems of John Marston (Liverpool, 1961). ⁶¹ Quoted in David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2005), 209. ⁶² See Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), 31–3. ⁶³ See Manley, Literature and Culture, 398–9. ⁶⁴ See Gillespie, ‘Imperial Satire’, 397.
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240 - ‘to my satires there belongs some fear’.⁶⁵ Thomas Freeman equated Donne with Persius when he encouraged him to continue writing satire: ‘I prithee Persius, write a bigger book.’⁶⁶ The ‘difficulty and dissonance’ that for Joseph Hall characterised Persius’s style (Hall, Virgidemiarum, ‘Postscript to the Reader’, Poems, 99)⁶⁷ can explain Donne’s often jarring syntax as it follows ‘the rapidity and complexity’ of his thought and shifts between ‘different ideas and moods’.⁶⁸ If the 1590s are distinguished by a consciousness that literary culture was entering a new phase, then it was Hall who realised that satire was available for staging the new poet’s entrance into this literary scene. With Virgidemiarum (1597–8), Hall claimed to be the first English satirist: ‘I first adventure: follow me who list, / And be the second English Satirist’ (Hall, Virgidemiarum, Book 1, ‘Prologue’, lines 3–4, Poems, 11). This is clearly not true, but when Hall stakes his claim it is not to declare his singularity, but to place himself at the head of a line of succession. Hall was the first English poet to follow the Roman satirists in exploiting the theme of poetic succession. Horace had established himself as the successor to Lucilius, Persius to Lucilius and Horace, and Juvenal to all three predecessors. Persius and Juvenal had begun their collections with programmatic satires that defined their satiric style in relation to their predecessors and contemporary poetic models and set out standards for assessing poetry.⁶⁹ In Book 2, Satire 1, Hall borrows the figure of the bad poet, Labeo, from Persius’s programmatic Satire 1 (see Persius, Satires, 48–61) and also imitates Persius’s Prologue (see Persius, Satires, 44–5) with his own ‘Defiance to Envy’. Book 1 of Virgidemiarum amplifies Juvenal Satire 1 (see Juvenal, Satires, 130–45), in which he rejects epic, drama, elegy, and other literary forms, to proclaim his allegiance to satire. Hall similarly surveys and rejects the literary alternatives open to him—epic, sonnet, tragedy, even experiments in quantitative verse—having announced his commitment to ‘lowly Satire’ in his own ‘Prologue’ (Hall, Virgidemiarum, Book 1, ‘Prologue’, line 22, Poems, 11). When Hall fashions himself as the first ‘English Satirist’, he is clearly drawing on Roman precedents, but he also engages with native English forefathers. The primary literary forebear in Hall’s ‘Defiance to Envy’ is not Horace or Juvenal, but the Spenser of The Shepheardes Calender. Ronald Corthell argues that Hall chooses Spenser’s volume of eclogues because pastoral in the Virgilian cursus is the genre that belongs to the beginning of a career; substituting satire, another lowly, rude style, for pastoral therefore allows Hall to fashion himself as the new poet.⁷⁰ The shift from pastoral to satire is then accommodated by Hall within a larger schema that relates the decline from a golden to an iron age, in which the Muses now ‘Profaned are by each presuming tongue’ (Hall, Virgidemiarum, ‘Defiance of Envy’, line 110, Poems, 10), and the satirist’s rod necessarily replaces the pan pipes. Curiously, Hall’s fashioning of a golden age in Spenser suppresses this poet’s indebtedness to a native tradition of satire embodied in his authorial persona of Colin Clout. In the final Book of Virgidemiarum, Hall invokes ‘angry Skelton’s breath-less rhymes’ but to signify an earlier mode of satire that ‘fitted former times’ (Hall, Virgidemiarum, Book 6, Satire 1, lines
⁶⁵ Quoted in Burrow, ‘Roman Satire’, 257. ⁶⁶ Quoted in Gillespie, ‘Imperial Satire’, 397. ⁶⁷ Joseph Hall, in Arnold Davenport (ed.), The Poems of Joseph Hall (Liverpool, 1949). ⁶⁸ Heather Dubrow, ‘ “No Man is an Island”: Donne’s Satires and Satiric Traditions’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 19.1 (1979), 71–83, 79. ⁶⁹ On the theme of succession in the Roman satirists, see Josiah Osgood, ‘Introduction: Persius and Juvenal as Satiric Successors’, in Braund and Osgood (eds), A Companion to Persius and Juvenal, 1–16, 1–10. ⁷⁰ See Ronald J. Corthell, ‘Beginning as a Satirist: Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum Sixe Bookes’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 23.1 (1983), 47–60, 50–3. On the Virgilian cursus, see also Chapters 5, 9, and 14 in this volume.
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241 75, 76, Poems, 89) and not the depravity of the current age. While Hall certainly engaged with native modes of satire and complaint, he rested his claim to be the first English satirist on his Roman credentials. The distinction between Horace’s mild jesting mode of satire and the biting railing of Juvenal had long been made. Earlier satirists, including Lodge and Donne, although adopting the conversational style of Horace, also drew on Juvenal, Persius, and Martial, and yet were not compelled to declare allegiance to any. Hall was the first to codify the two styles within the format of the book by dividing the collection into a book of ‘Toothless Satires’ followed by a second book of ‘Biting Satires’, which loosely map onto the distinctions made between Horace and Juvenal.⁷¹ The title of his book derives from a Latin jest word ‘virgidemia’ meaning a ‘rod-harvest’ or a good beating; this analogy between satire and the scourge is associated with Juvenal and so frames Hall’s response to Horace. Even though Hall divided his book of satires according to different styles, he is less programmatic in his practices of imitation. In the ‘Biting Satires’, loose imitations of both Horace and Juvenal are woven into the texture of his verse. So, for example, the motto to Satire 6, ‘Quid placet ergo’, is taken from Horace (Book 2, epistle 1, line 101; Epistles, 404) and the opening lines borrow freely from Horace, Book 1, Satire 1, and Juvenal, Satire 10.⁷² The programmatic satires of Persius and Juvenal set out a model of literary succession and a poetic agenda that was highly combative and often defamatory. It was a model of literary culture that was particularly appealing to this late Elizabethan generation of satirists, all of whom were young men in the competitive homosocial worlds of the universities and Inns of Court.⁷³ When Hall published the two volumes Virgidemiae (1597–8), he was a member of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; hence the world of his satires ranges across Cambridge and London. His satires on the contemporary state of poetry, which range across the first and spill into the second book, draw much of their array of literary abuses from the pamphlet wars that had been played out between Gabriel Harvey, a fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and Thomas Nashe. Hall’s Virgidemiarum prompted its own battle of the books: Marston responded in his Certain Satires (1598) and his second 1599 edition of The Scourge of Villainy.⁷⁴ Both Hall and Marston used the printed book very effectively to promote this skirmish, which prompted fellow authors to take sides; hence, John Weever announced his allegiance to Hall in his Faunus and Melliflora (1600).⁷⁵ There is a bookishness to 1590s satire. This generation imitated the Romans in composing books of satires. Donne wrote a collection of five satires, Hall divides his into six books, and Marston into three.⁷⁶ The collection offered an opportunity to experiment with satura, a medley of styles, which offered a satiric variant on the organisational principle of varietio. Similar explorations of the format of the book are evident in the printed sonnet sequences of this period; a vogue that is specifically targeted by these satirists, although they, too, use the book-as-collection for authorial self-fashioning, albeit with a satiric twist.⁷⁷ With his Certain Satires and The Scourge of Villainy, Marston styled himself the Juvenal of his times.⁷⁸ Juvenal, of course, was not his only source, and he borrows tags, topoi, and
⁷¹ See Corthell, ‘Beginning as a Satirist’, 49. ⁷² See Selden, English Verse Satire, 66–8. ⁷³ See Manley, Literature and Culture, 390–2. ⁷⁴ See Davenport (ed.), Hall, Poems, xxxii. ⁷⁵ See Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Verse Satire’, in Catherine Bates (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Chichester, 2018), 389–400, 394. ⁷⁶ See Wheeler, English Verse Satire, 35–7. ⁷⁷ On the uses of the book in relation to sonnet sequences, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 23–109. ⁷⁸ See Gillespie, ‘Imperial Satire’, 400.
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242 - characters from Persius and Horace.⁷⁹ His epistle at the beginning of The Scourge of Villainy balances the merits of Persius, who ‘is crabby, because ancient, and his jerks, (being particularly given to private customs of his time) dusky’, and Juvenal, who ‘seems to our judgement, gloomy’ (Marston, Scourge, ‘To those that seem judicial perusers’, Poems, 100). The predominant humour of his satiric persona, Kinsayder, is that of ‘Ingenuous Melancholy’: ‘take thy gloomy seat, / Inthrone thee in my blood’ (Marston, Scourge, ‘Proemium in Librum Primum’, lines 10–12, Poems, 102). Marston draws heavily on humoural, medical language; his satire purges and is even surgical: ‘my sharp razor doth incision make’ (Marston, Scourge, Book 2, Satire 5, line 118, Poems, 134). Yet, whereas Hall expressed confidence in the efficacy of his satires, Marston’s Kinsayder is frequently overwhelmed by the sliminess of his times. This obsession with irredeemably fallen man derives from his Calvinism, which cannot easily be reconciled with the neo-Stoicism of his Roman models.⁸⁰ Slime is everywhere in his satires; ‘the slime that from our souls doth flow’ (Marston, Scourge, Book 2, Satire 7, line 197, Poems, 146) seems resistant to satire’s medicinal properties: ‘O what dry brain melts not sharp mustard rhyme / To purge the snottery of our slimy time’ (Marston, Scourge, Book 1, Satire 2, lines 70–1, Poems, 108). Jonson’s mockery of Marston’s ‘spurious snotteries’ in his Poetaster (5.3.283, Jonson, 4.306)⁸¹ points to how his rhetorical staging of the diseased body is itself repellent and excessive, acting less as a purgative than as a symptom of disease. This is the basis of Weever’s complaint in Faunus and Melliflora against Marston’s mode of satire: ‘What beastliness by others you have shown, / Such by yourselves ’tis thought that you have known’ (Weever, Faunus, sig. I4v).⁸² Marston’s Kinsayder has continued to disturb critics: most recently Gillespie has written of ‘the somewhat psychotic world of Marston’s satires’.⁸³ In his verse epistle before Certain Satires (1598), Kinsayder claims the selfawareness and objectivity of the stoic satirist, having engaged in self-censure and ‘rail’d against myself a while’, which gives him the moral authority to ‘snarl at those, which do the world beguile’ (Marston, Certain Satires, ‘The Author in Praise of his Pygmalion’, lines 43–4, Poems, 66). The problem is that the driving impulse to discover the slimy ‘polluting beastliness’ animating Kinsayder’s satire results in a failure to discriminate, and all he can do is obsessively rail: ‘Unless the destin’d adamantine band / Should tie my teeth, I cannot choose but bite’ (Marston, Scourge, Book 3, Satire 8, lines 49–50, Poems, 151).⁸⁴ Marston’s mode of satire is libidinal. In this he follows Roman satirists, particularly Juvenal, who engaged in the ‘rhetorical staging’ of ‘perverted bodies’ as a means of establishing normative masculine identities. Effeminate men and women function within this satiric economy to establish a stoic masculine subjectivity.⁸⁵ In The Scourge of Villainy, Marston’s Satire 1 takes its motto, ‘frontis nulla fides’ [There’s no trusting appearances] from Juvenal Satire 2, in which it introduces the observation ‘quis enim non vicus abundat / tristibus obscenis?’ [After all, isn’t every street packed with grim-looking perverts?] (Juvenal, Satire 2, lines 8–9; Satires, 148). As in Juvenal, the bodies of effeminate men and women are the primary ⁷⁹ See the notes to Davenport’s edition of Marston’s Poems for specific borrowings. ⁸⁰ See Lynnette McGrath, ‘John Marston’s Mismanaged Irony: The Poetic Satires’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 18 (1976), 393–408, 400–2. ⁸¹ Ben Jonson, in C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52). ⁸² John Weever, Faunus and Melliflora (London, 1600). ⁸³ Gillespie, ‘Imperial Satire’, 400. ⁸⁴ See Glenn Clark, ‘Zeal Or Vengeance? Anger, Performance, and Ministerial Figures in Marston and Shakespeare’, Religion & Literature, 42.3 (2010), 1–26, 10–11. ⁸⁵ See Erik Gunderson, ‘The Libidinal Rhetoric of Satire’, in Freudenberg (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, 224–40.
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243 sites of outrage. Marston returns obsessively to the sodomite in Satire 3: Luscus is a beastly indiscriminate ‘monster of a man’ (Marston, Scourge, Book 1, Satire 3, line 44, Poems, 112), while the insidious influence of Jesuits is figured as ‘Sodom villainy’ (line 60, Poems, 113). The ongoing degradation of generations of men, the topic of Horace’s ‘satiric’ Book 3, ode 6 (see Horace, Odes, 162–5), becomes a theme in these satires in relation to literary succession. Marston expresses the continual decline from fathers to sons in disturbingly phallic terms that are rendered in a rough colloquialism: ‘shall thy Dad’s lucky brat / Wear thy sire’s half-rot finger in his hat’ (Marston, Scourge, Book 1, Satire 3, lines 21–2, Poems, 111). Both Hall and Marston depict the current debased state of literary culture in feminised terms. The 1590s witnessed the eroticisation of literary culture.⁸⁶ Marston’s Satire 8 imagines an effeminate world in which men have willingly enslaved themselves to women through the feminised literary forms they favour, figured in the ubiquity of the sonnet sequence and its Petrarchan mistress. Satire for these writers simultaneously provided an opportunity to re-assert a manly style and to dramatise its impossibility because of the current Elizabethan cultural malaise. The late 1590s were a period of concentrated experimentation in the writing of formal verse satire. Authors avidly read and responded to each other’s explorations of the mode in their own works. The Bishop’s Ban of 1599 is said to bring this late Elizabethan flourishing of satire to a close, driving satire off the page and onto the stage. The printing of books of satires and epigrams was prohibited in June 1599 and the satires of Marston, Guilpin, Middleton, Davies, and Hall were ordered to be burnt, although Virgidemiarum was reprieved.⁸⁷ The characters populating the satires of Marston, Guilpin, Hall, and others do have recognisable forebears in Roman satires, but they are simultaneously individuated within in a London landscape. One should not underestimate the licentiousness of many of these satires, particularly those of Marston, which depict a slimy ungoverned London under the sway of women and pathic men. There are differences in practices of imitation, different choices made within satire’s repertoire, and changing literary allegiances across the sixteenth century. One feature that remains constant, however, is an engagement with Juvenal’s dictum that ‘it is hard not to write satire’.
⁸⁶ See Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge, 2004), 102–9. ⁸⁷ See Clegg, Press Censorship, 198–217.
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14 Pastoral Helen Cooper
Perigot. Willye. Per. Wil. Per. Wil. Per. Wil.
It fell upon a holly eue, hey ho hollidaye, When holly fathers wont to shrieue:* *give confession now gynneth this roundelay. Sitting vpon a hill so hye Hey ho the high hyll, The while my flocke did feede thereby, The while the shepheard selfe did spill. ... Ye wastefull woodes beare witnesse of my woe, Wherein my plaints did oftentimes resound: Ye careless byrds are priuie to my cryes, Which in your songs were wont to make a part: Thou pleasaunt spring hast luld me oft a sleepe, Whose streames my trickling teares did ofte augment. (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, August, lines 53–60, 151–6, Shorter Poems, 109–10, 113)¹
These two extracts from the August eclogue of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) present in miniature the poetic range of Renaissance pastoral. They exemplify the variety encompassed not just within the whole mode, but here within a single poem. Spenser’s English Poete, mentioned by E. K. in the ‘Argument’ to October, does not survive; but if it was a handbook of poetics as distinct from a defence of poetry, a predecessor to George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589) rather than Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (1595), we scarcely need it: The Shepheardes Calender makes a very good substitute. Spenser has his own chapters within this volume (see Chapters 26 and 27), but the Calender is such a crucial work in the development of pastoral poetry in the sixteenth century that it provides the clearest focus for understanding the pastoral that preceded as well as followed it. Spenser was not the first English poet to write pastoral poetry, but the Calender was the watershed between the various largely unconnected examples of the mode produced in the previous decades and the explosion of interest that followed its appearance. In Sukanta Chaudhuri’s words, the work is ‘the well-spring of the exceptional range of forms and practices found in English Renaissance pastoral’.² Many writers were selective in the influences they absorbed from it. Sidney and Jonson both had reservations about its
¹ Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). ² Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.), A Companion to ‘Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance’ (Manchester, 2018), 37. Helen Cooper, Pastoral In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Helen Cooper 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0014
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245 language, and there was only limited imitation of that; but it provided later pastoralists with a range of models that was often more important for the range itself than for what that contained. It provided models of different kinds of language, from the demotic imitation of rustic dialect to the elaborately Latinate; different forms of prosody, from an approximation of folksong (as in ‘Hey ho holliday’)³ to a multiplicity of lyric forms; different traditions, from the English vernacular to the Virgilian or (as in the sestina, the first stanza of which is quoted above) the high French or Italian; different realms of allusion, from the Classical or biblical to the contemporary; different landscapes, from idyllic spring to bitter winter; and different worlds, from Golden Age fantasies to ecclesiastical allegory. It might seem as if all those should be binaries, but that is not necessarily what happened in practice. Not only does the Calender as a whole embrace all of them, but often, as in August, it embraces several within the same eclogue. The work also encompasses a multiplicity of genres besides the eclogue itself: lyric, panegyric, satire, elegy, and the simply playful. The larger fashion for pastoral poetry that Spenser helped to inspire added yet more possibilities. It was used as an experimental ground for quantitative verse, and for narratives with inset poems, for drama, for pageantry, and for broadside ballads.⁴ Pastoral is a mode, a way of thinking and of expressing those thoughts, rather than a genre as the term is most usually understood, and its capacity for generic variety was one of its key strengths. The early modern period had a clear definition of pastoral. William Empson famously defined it as ‘putting the complex into the simple’, and included works such as Alice in Wonderland.⁵ Similarly influential has been Renato Poggioli’s exploration of a comparably wide series of authors, but with more emphasis on what would most often be defined as pastoral, that is, where the action focuses on the shepherd world, and that world functions as a metaphor for the real.⁶ That definition is the one most often found in the sixteenth century; it differs, therefore, from the broader modern usage, in which the term is widely used to encompass rural poetry or any literature that focuses on the natural or the organic world, including gardens. Early modern pastoral is never, therefore, authentically rural: rather, it presents shepherd life from the perspective of the court or the city, whether by demonstrating the ethical probity of the herdsman’s life, or as a fantasy of rural contentment. Both those, moreover, could carry contrasting satiric implications, just as Classical evocations of the Golden Age did. The scope for varied imagery and narrative within the shepherd world might sound as if it would be damagingly restrictive—good and bad shepherds, sheep-keeping, shearing, love, duty, music-making, festivals, landscapes, and wolves and dogs—but in practice it provided a basis of familiarity that enabled a work’s poetic and ethical position to be identified almost immediately, often in the very first line. Virgil’s Bucolics (the less confusing title for his Eclogues in a chapter such as this) authorised the confinement of the society of pastoral poetry to the shepherd world, but the first line of his fourth eclogue also allowed the Muses of that world—the Sicilian world of Theocritus that Virgil appropriated—to encompass a world far removed from literal shepherds: ‘Sicelides Musae, paulo maiora canamus’ [Sicilian Muses, let us sing a somewhat loftier
³ William Webbe describes it as a ‘round’ in A Discourse of English Poetry (London, 1586), sig. F4. ⁴ Sukanta Chaudhuri’s Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance: An Anthology (Manchester, 2016) contains examples of almost all these forms, with an index to their genres in his accompanying Companion, 295–6. The anthology, which aims to be representative rather than comprehensive, contains 277 poems or extracts up to the Civil War, including a number of the works discussed in this chapter. ⁵ William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935), 25. ⁶ Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Boston, MA, 1975).
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246 - strain] (Virgil, Bucolics, 4, line 1, Eclogues, 28)⁷ was noted by early modern theorists and became the watchword of many pastoral poets. Virgil was celebrating the birth of a son to the consul Pollio (soon allegorised as referring to the Nativity), and his eclogues had included praise of Augustus and an elegy for Julius Caesar. Not just the speaker, but the subject and the addressee must be considered, so that the woods, as Virgil put it, must be worthy of a consul. The ‘greater things’ covered by English Renaissance writers included such topics as antipapal invective, panegyrics of Elizabeth, and elegies for their own shepherd-poet, Sidney. The extension of pastoral to high matters, and the elaboration of style associated with such material, created interesting complications for that great principle of Renaissance poetics, decorum: the appropriateness of style to speaker. In the very first series of English eclogues (c 1513–14), Alexander Barclay already expresses concern about the issue, complete with the classic (and Classical) reference: It were not fitting a herd or man rural To speak in terms gay and rhetorical. So teacheth Horace in art of poetry, That writers namely their reason should apply Meet speech appropring to every personage. (Barclay, Prologue, lines 83–7, Eclogues, 3)⁸
As commentator after commentator noted, shepherds were ‘silly sots’ (Turberville, Eglogs, sig. A2v)⁹ whose speech was at best rude and barbarous, and various saving fictions or justifications were used to explain the gulf between Horace’s dictum and the art of pastoral poetry. The simplest was to invoke Virgil’s own apologia for his fourth eclogue: Abraham Fleming, in the heading to his 1589 translation, invokes Virgil’s own ‘honest confession’ that it is of ‘a somewhat loftier style than beseemeth the argument of a pastoral device’ (Fleming, ‘Argument’ to the fourth eclogue, Bucolics, 10).¹⁰ Another was the authority of what had already been written. Barclay lists a series of great poets, including Virgil, who had written eclogues as a starter mode for a high poetic career. Spenser’s commentator E. K. offers a closely similar list, and explains the ‘rustical rudeness’ of the Calender’s archaic language, both in terms of its being appropriate for shepherds and of preserving the authentic roots of English, not least as practised by Chaucer (Spenser, ‘Epistle’, Shorter Poems, 26). The need for justification continued into the seventeenth century. Michael Drayton added a preface to his 1616 edition of his Pastorals, which spells out that ‘the chief law of pastorals is the same which is of all poesie . . . to wit, DECORUM’, and if Virgil could appear to exceed it, so could he (Drayton, Works, 2.517).¹¹ By this date a flood of more artistry-flaunting Continental pastoral was becoming known in England, and John Fletcher accordingly extends the appeal to precedent to other vernaculars, the ‘former fictions and vulgar traditions’ that allowed highly unrealistic shepherds the quasi-natural skills of
⁷ Virgil, in H. Rushton Fairclough (trans.), revised G. P. Goold (ed.), Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1–6 (Cambridge, MA, 1999). ⁸ Alexander Barclay, in Beatrice White (ed.) The Eclogues of Alexander Barclay. Early English Text Society, 175 (London, 1928). ⁹ George Turberville’s ‘Epistle’ to The Eglogs of the poet B. Mantuan Carmelitan (London, 1567), his translation of Mantuan (i.e., Baptista Spagnuoli of Mantua). ¹⁰ Abraham Fleming (trans.), The Bucolics of Publius Virgilius Maro (London, 1589). ¹¹ Michael Drayton, in J. William Hebel (ed.), Works, corrected edition, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1961).
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247 singing and poetry (Fletcher, ‘Epistle to the Reader’, The Faithful Shepherdess, Dramatic Works, 3.497).¹² He also offered an alternative explanation for the disparity between shepherds and artistry by raising their social standing, claiming that in Classical times— and sometimes still—they were not hirelings but owned their own flocks, so giving them a higher economic and class status. Puttenham declared that the shepherds of pastoral had always been a poetic fiction, and the ‘rustical manner’ of their ‘rude speeches’ was a disguise for potentially dangerous political material (Puttenham, Art, 128).¹³ Theorists as well as poets, in fact, were fully conscious of the artistic range enabled by a pastoral setting, and were not so much troubled by it as inspired to provide ingenious explanations for something that very evidently worked. ‘Paulo maiora canamus’: not only the permission to fly higher but the first-person verb was immensely important. Writers from Virgil forwards saw in the herdsman, and especially in the shepherd-singer, a metaphor for the poet, and therefore more or less directly for themselves. Pastoral was a mode that laid a particular emphasis on poetics, as happens in the songs sung by, or on behalf of, Virgil’s shepherds, and in the singing-matches in which they compete; but the Virgilian singing-match itself was not so far removed from an inheritance from the medieval debate. The eclogue itself had been transformed over the course of the Middle Ages from a form that, in Virgil’s hands, highlighted its own aesthetics, however much else it contained, to a mode that emphasised its relevance to the real world of ecclesiastical and secular politics and the nature of the good life, with Christ as the Good Shepherd as its central model. Outside the eclogue form, there was a vibrant tradition in France of bergerie poetry of the shepherd world, often but not always idealising, which finds selective echoes in English; and there was a long-standing English tradition, too, of using shepherds as the mouthpiece of social criticism.¹⁴ Poets writing after Spenser, like Spenser himself, were happy to embrace the generosity of the mode. Almost every significant poet of the century, and a high proportion of minor ones, wrote pastoral poetry at some point: not just Spenser, but Barclay, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Barnabe Googe, Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Nicholas Breton, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Sir Walter Ralegh, Drayton, even John Donne, and a host of others, extending into the seventeenth century. Ben Jonson wrote three acts of a pastoral play, The Sad Shepherd, though he left it incomplete; Shakespeare wrote one play centrally in the mode, As You Like It (and perhaps its pastoralism was one of the things that the audience would ‘like’ about it), and another, The Winter’s Tale, that hinges on the scenes set in the pastoral world. Both its distinctiveness and its popularity are demonstrated by the appearance of an entire anthology of pastoral lyrics, England’s Helicon, in 1600, with a second expanded edition in 1614. That richness and multiplicity makes a study such as this difficult: there are too many possibilities for any single account to be adequate. For all Spenser’s key position in a large view of the history of the mode, he was not its sole inspiration or model. English eclogues written since the start of the century were supplemented by translations of Virgil and other Latin models from the 1560s forwards; these ran alongside the vibrant vernacular tradition which presented shepherds as unsophisticated singers, as moral teachers, or as favoured by God, but which also kept in touch in their portrayals of the shepherd world with rural
¹² John Fletcher, in Fredson Bowers (gen. ed.), The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1976). ¹³ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ¹⁴ On these see Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich, 1977).
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248 - naturalism. Spenser incorporated all those, but they continued to have a life of their own, which he may have helped to make fashionable but which did not always follow his own practice. Continental models also increasingly made themselves felt: Spenser drew on the French Clément Marot, others on the more idyllic or fantastic worlds of the Italian Jacopo Sannazaro and Giovanni Battista Guarini.¹⁵ Virgil’s shepherd world was a homosocial one, with women mentioned only in passing, as unresponsive lovers or as cooking the evening meal. English eclogues largely continued to confine themselves to the male subject, in keeping with their emphasis on the shepherd-poet, though the allowance offered by Virgil’s second eclogue to introduce male–male love was taken up on only a few occasions: for example, in Spenser’s Januarye, which elicits a defence citing Plato in E. K.’s accompanying commentary; and most extensively in Richard Barnfield’s Affectionate Shepherd (1594). Sheep-keeping in France was an occupation for both men and women (Joan of Arc is a famous example), but it was a male occupation in Britain, and ‘shepherdess’ first appears in English as a poetic word, in Gower’s Confessio amantis, in a scenario based on the French pastourelle (Gower, Confessio, Book 5, line 6115, Works, 113).¹⁶ The Continental genderinclusive model of the shepherd world opened up a whole new range of poetic subjects, and occasionally—especially in romances, plays, and lyrics—of speaking characters. How much this has to do with actual women is often moot; for Spenser, nymphs were a mythological species analogous to fairies, but by 1600 the word was often used as a synonym for a shepherdess of a singularly non-naturalistic variety. Shepherds, too, often underwent a metamorphosis into ‘swains’. The traditional English shepherd kept his sheep on the hills, but swains invited a rhyme with the altogether less demanding ‘plains’. That shift was a symptom of some narrowing of the expectations of pastoral after the expansion of its horizons over the last quarter of the sixteenth century, but the sparer models of traditional English vernacular or Latin were never lost. Idyllicism, indeed, often explicitly invoked satire as its dark shadow. Sixteenth-century pastoral developed a potential for the recreational and the light-hearted, but it remained at its core a serious mode that demanded serious attention.
Vernacular Music It is a good rule of thumb that whatever the differences are between Classical and early modern writings, they are largely due to what happened in between, in the Middle Ages. Those centuries not only modified the sense of what the eclogue should do, but invented a whole new area of vernacular pastoral with a range of different concerns and priorities. In French, that encompassed everything from light-hearted lyrics to allegorical political moralities and even an epic.¹⁷ The shepherd world might accordingly be portrayed as a fantasy idyll of a perfect simple society, though one that could be broken by the intrusion of the court or war; or as an object of desire for an intruder from the court (an object of desire that frequently took the form of the shepherdess). Medieval English poetry about, or put into the mouths of, shepherds, and as yet without the distraction of shepherdesses, was ¹⁵ On the significance of Continental models for English pastoral, see Sukanta Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments (Oxford, 1989). ¹⁶ John Gower, in G. C. Macaulay (ed.), The English Works of John Gower, Early English Texts Society, 82, 2 vols. (London, 1969). Chaucer uses the form ‘herdesse’ in Troilus and Criseyde, Book 1, line 653; see Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edition (Boston, MA, 1987), 482. ¹⁷ See Cooper, Pastoral, 47–99.
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249 consistently much more morally serious than that written in French, and it was only towards the end of the sixteenth century that its more playful elements came to the fore. In keeping with that, the shepherd world, as it is represented in Middle English, is an altogether harsher affair where the realistic herdsman suffers from cold and hardship, an austerity of life that, in turn, and less realistically, gives him the authority to speak out about such matters as abuses in society or the Church. The ‘rudeness’ of the shepherd in this tradition becomes a proof of plain-speaking. That ethical probity is reinforced by the frequent linking of shepherds to those of the Nativity, chosen by God to be summoned first to see the infant Christ. This might seem a very long way from the eclogue tradition, but there was a continuing awareness that the two could indeed link up. The herdsmen of the two shepherd plays of the Wakefield Master complain about bad landlords and heavy taxes, but in the first of them one shepherd also quotes Virgil’s fourth eclogue, in Latin, on the return of the Saturnian Golden Age: a quotation whose obscurity is greeted with scorn by his companion, but which is then expounded in paraphrase.¹⁸ It is worth remembering, too, that many of these plays were still being acted into the second decade of Elizabeth’s reign and beyond. The Chester shepherds’ play, part of a cycle rewritten in the 1530s, was performed before the Earl of Derby and his son Lord Strange, the future patron of the acting company Strange’s Men, in 1578.¹⁹ The cycle plays, moreover, have a well-deserved place in the history of English poetry. All were written in verse, often (not least those of the Wakefield Master) of considerable complexity; a number vary their verse forms as the subject matter of the action changes. The shepherds of the mystery cycles share a further characteristic with those found in more obviously pastoral literature: they make music and sing, and they do so ‘merrily’. The Chester shepherds sing ‘troly, loly, loly, lo’;²⁰ the ‘jolly shepards’ in the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors (1534) are given two songs, one of which describes how they sange terli, terlow, So merely the sheppards ther pipes can blow. (Greene, ed., Early English Carols, no.79B, 42)²¹
The same motif first appears in non-dramatic poetry at the start of the sixteenth century in a Nativity carol describing the shepherd Jolly Wat, who is introduced in the first line sitting ‘upon a hill’, as so many later English shepherds do, and piping: ‘In his pipe he made so much joy’ (Greene, ed., Early English Carols, no. 78, 40–1).²² It was a motif that remained vibrant into the seventeenth century. A shepherd boy in the anonymous play The Maid’s Metamorphosis (1600) is still merrily piping ‘terlitelo, terlitelo’, and Thomas Ravenscroft’s song collection, Pammelia, contains a similar song, probably older than its publication date of 1609, that brings together the hill and the piping:
¹⁸ The Wakefield Master, Prima pastorum (Play 8), lines 556–81, in Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley (eds), The Towneley Plays, Early English Text Society, 15, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994), 1.121–2. ¹⁹ See Lawrence M. Clopper (ed.), Records of Early English Drama: Chester (Toronto, 1979), 125. ²⁰ R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills (eds), The Chester Mystery Cycle, Early English Text Society supplementary series 3, 2 vols. (London, 1974), line 447. ²¹ Richard Leighton Greene (ed.), Early English Carols, second edition (Oxford, 1977). A related variant is given in no. 79A, 41. ²² See also Cooper, Pastoral, 116–17.
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250 - Jolly shepherd and upon a hill as he sat . . . Ever blew this little boy, so merrily piping: Tere liter lo.²³
‘Terli terlow’ is an imitation of the non-verbal music of the pipe, and the ‘hey ho’ refrains of August, often semantically redundant, are not so far distant. The kind of pipe illustrated in representations of the Annunciation to the Shepherds is usually a bagpipe, such as appears, too, in the woodcuts to the Kalender of Shepherdes, the all-purpose encyclopaedic almanac printed every few years from the start of the sixteenth century onwards: this is the work that gave Spenser his title, and which gets a mention from E. K. in his ‘Epistle’ to the work. Colin is shown breaking a similar bagpipe in the woodcut to Januarye. Other kinds of pipe are also frequently represented, and, in a step towards the tenuis avena, the slender oaten reed of Tityrus in Bucolics 1, a reed or an oat is often specified, especially in lyric. The occasional appearance of the distinctly non-rural rebec or violin accordingly marks a shift to ‘greater things’ on the Virgilian model. Shepherd-singers and their listeners, like the piping shepherds, are taking time out: August itself is one of the Calender eclogues ascribed by E. K. to his category of the recreative. If piping, however, correlates to some degree with pastoral otium, the leisured life of the fictional shepherd, then that can itself slide into a moral negative, of the dereliction of duty. There is no condemnation implied in Sidney’s ‘shepherds boy piping, as though he should never be old’ in the Arcadia (Sidney, New Arcadia, 11).²⁴ He is part of an idyllic landscape that bypasses age and death and where youth can be equated with innocence, though the work as a whole suggests rather more than that. The ability of the shepherd to pipe is one of the defining metaphors for the shepherd-poet, though that, too, can go wrong, as it does for Colin Clout when he breaks his pipe in Januarye, and again on the ‘hill’ of Acidale when its ‘merry sound’ is interrupted in Book VI of The Faerie Queene (Spenser, Faerie Queene, 6.10.10).²⁵ There is an equation there between music and harmony, but music is not always an ethical positive. The elderly Thenot of the Calender blames his young companion for the way that ‘crowing in pypes made of greene corne’ they ‘thinken to be Lords of the yeare’ (Spenser, Februarie, lines, 40–1, Shorter Poems, 42), and the ‘shole of shepeheardes’ dancing to the pipe in Maye are neglecting their sheep while they do so (Spenser, Maye, line 20, Shorter Poems, 73). The bad pastors of Lycidas are worse still, in that they can do no better than ‘grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw’ (Milton, Lycidas, line 124, Poems, 248).²⁶ The poetics used for satire can imitate a somewhat similar absence of harmony: a version of dialect and an irregular metre that never settles to any rule are used for the ecclesiastic polemic of September, which tells the story of a ‘iolly shepheard that was of yore’ who ‘is now nor iollye, nor shepehearde more’ (Spenser, September, lines 26–7, Shorter Poems, 117). This, by implication, is an ethics of plain-speaking wisdom, not of merriment or art, and even less of courtliness.
²³ Noted by Greene (ed.), Early English Carols, 360. ²⁴ Sir Philip Sidney, in Victor Skretkowicz (ed.), The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia) (Oxford, 1987). ²⁵ Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ²⁶ John Milton, Lycidas, in John Carey and Alastair Fowler (eds), The Poems of John Milton (Harlow, 1968).
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251
Anglicising the Eclogue No one ever wrote an eclogue by accident: every poet who took up the genre, in whatever language, did so in conscious imitation of the tradition deriving from the Bucolics. A number of medieval Latin poets had written eclogues on the approximate model of Virgil, though a Virgil modified by a commentary tradition that emphasised his political concerns. The genre’s potential for dialogue and debate also produced an eclogue by Theodulus (c 900) on the rival merits of paganism and Christianity, a work whose subject matter and comparatively easy Latin made it a standard school text until the early sixteenth century (seven editions were printed in England down to 1515). After that it was displaced by the eclogues of Mantuan, which became every Elizabethan schoolboy’s introduction to the mode. Intellectual accessibility had not, however, been the hallmark of all eclogues. Francis Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio both wrote allegorical Latin satires in eclogue form that are barely comprehensible without a key. Barclay’s list of predecessors cites Theocritus, Virgil, the Ecloga Theoduli, Petrarch, and Mantuan (though he is likely to have known Theocritus and Petrarch’s eclogues only by name); E. K. cites Theocritus, Virgil, Mantuan, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the later French and Italian pastoralists Marot and Sannazaro, though not all of those leave identifiable traces in the Calender.²⁷ Barclay’s eclogues were reprinted in 1570, but neither E. K. nor Spenser himself shows clear evidence of knowing them.²⁸ The shepherds of these post-Classical eclogues are generally a pretty miserable lot, and, in contrast to Jolly Wat, Tudor authors generally follow their model. Barclay’s are close to destitution, and they inhabit a world defined by storms, floods, and heavy snowfalls. Although his herdsmen have Latin names and their range of citation covers a wide range of Classical and biblical authors and characters, their topographical references are not to Arcadia but to Cambridge and Ely. Their greatest source of comfort, in his first three eclogues, is that at least they are not courtiers, who live even more miserably: the bulk of Barclay’s account of court life comes from a thoroughly non-rural source, the De miseriis curialium written by the humanist and future pope, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. His fourth eclogue, based on Mantuan, is a complaint about ‘the behaviour of Rich men against Poets’, spoken to a potential patron by a shepherd who was once ‘Wont to sing full merrily, / And to lie piping oftetime among the flowers’ (Barclay, Eclogue 4, lines 40–1, 25–8, Eclogues, 141–2), but whose skill in music has been destroyed by hunger. The fifth, again based on Mantuan but the least depressing of the series, debates the rival virtues of townsmen and countrymen, in which the decisive argument is derived from the Nativity shepherds, that ‘God hath had favour to people pastoral’ (Barclay, Eclogue 5, line 458, Eclogues, 198). That range of subject matter invites a wide range of poetics, and Barclay obliges. The metre he chooses as the equivalent of the Latin eclogue’s hexameters is the heroic line, the descendant of Chaucer’s riding rhyme but with the stresses distributed unevenly across the line’s ten or eleven syllables. He uses that for some overtly Chaucerian passages, as in writing a winter version of the spring opening of the Canterbury Tales:
²⁷ See Barclay, Prologue, lines 19–42, Eclogues, 1–2; and Spenser, ‘Epistle’, Shorter Poems, 29. ²⁸ Barclay does pre-empt E. K. in his image of a newly fledged bird for an inexperienced poet, but not specifically for a writer of eclogues: see Barclay, Prologue, lines 55–7, Eclogues, 2; and Spenser, ‘Epistle’, Shorter Poems, 29.
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252 - In cold January when fire is comfortable, And that the fields be near intolerable, When sheep and pastors leaveth field and fold, And draw to cotes for to eschew the cold, What time the verdure of ground and every tree By frost and storms is private of beautee. (Barclay, Eclogue 5, lines 1–6, Eclogues, 181)
He can also incorporate snatches of folk wisdom: As many whales as swimmeth in the fen, So many be there in cities of good men. (Barclay, Eclogue 5, lines 943–4, Eclogues, 215)
By contrast, the impoverished shepherd-poet of Eclogue 4 speaks two high-style homiletic poems that employ a much more regular pentameter line in eight-line stanzas. The first, which begins ‘As meadows painted with flowers redolent’, is halted by his interlocutor on the grounds that the style is inappropriate for a shepherd (Barclay, Eclogue 4, lines 759, 792–4, Eclogues, 168–9); the work was indeed inspired by the French rhétoriqueur, Jean Lemaire de Belges, and it retains a plethora of allusions to Classical mythology, history, and literature. The potential patron, however, remains unimpressed, and the shepherd-poet can do no more than curse him as he leaves. Barclay broke fresh ground not only in writing eclogues in English but in offering such a range of styles from the low to the high, the latter including the inset poem. The other English ecloguists who wrote before Spenser are more cautious in their stylistic choices. Barnabe Googe was the only other such poet to write a full series of original English eclogues (1563), though he made extensive use of Mantuan and of Montemayor’s Spanish pastoral romance, Diana, as sources. His choice of verse form was fourteeners laid out as quatrains in alternating lines of eight and six syllables, a metre popular for ballads and, especially with the lines undivided, for translations from Latin. Most of his eight eclogues take unrequited love as their subject, the later ones giving unusual space to female characters, one of them even allowed a speaking part: a rare exception in this most homosocial of genres. She speaks, moreover, to offer a defence of women: For women never would change their minds if men would still be true. (Googe, ‘Egloga septima’, lines 191–2, Eclogues, 71)²⁹
Googe’s attitude to love varies between tolerance and condemnation: at his most judgemental, his dying shepherd, Dametas, reappears two eclogues later to declare that he is in hell as a result (‘Egloga secunda’ and ‘quarta’). The poem between those, by contrast, homes in on a passage of ecclesiastical comment on the Church under Mary Tudor, when the sheep had been compelled to return to their ‘old corrupted Grass’ and the good pastors Daphnes and Alexis (Latimer and Ridley) had ‘flamed in Fire’ (Googe, ‘Egloga tertia’, lines 127, 139,
²⁹ Barnabe Googe, in Judith M. Kennedy (ed.), Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets (Toronto, 1989).
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253 Eclogues, 54–5). The final eclogue of the series brings the subjects together as it urges the replacement of human love by love of God. Initially the translators of Latin eclogues likewise chose fourteeners as the closest English equivalent of Classical hexameters, but they were increasingly ready to experiment with quantitative verse. George Turberville translated nine of Mantuan’s eclogues into fourteeners, laid out, like Googe’s, as quatrains, in 1567; he aimed for a plain style, as Mantuan himself had done. Virgil’s Bucolics were more likely to challenge their translators to attempt quantitative hexameters. William Webbe offered versions of the first two eclogues in his Discourse of English Poetry (1586) as a demonstration of how that might be done. The first begins: Tityrus, happily thou liest tumbling under a beech tree, All in a fine oat pipe these sweet songs lustily chanting. (Webbe, Discourse, sig. H2)³⁰
Abraham Fraunce did the same for the second eclogue in 1588, to accompany his analysis of the poem on principles of Ramus’s logic.³¹ He also used quantitative hexameters for his translation of Thomas Watson’s Latin Lamentations of Amyntas. Here Amyntas himself, grieving for his dead Phillis across eleven heavily rhetorical lamentations, is more of an Ovidian than a Virgilian figure, and is finally metamorphosed into an amaranthus in a passage that emphasises how gruesome a process metamorphosis was, as he feels his marrow resolve to a ‘cold juice’ (Fraunce, Lamentations, line 71, Fraunce’s Translation, 87).³² Fourteeners held their own alongside those, however. Abraham Fleming translated the Bucolics twice, once into rhymed fourteener couplets in 1575, again in 1589 into unrhymed fourteeners.³³ This latter version was designed largely as a line-by-line crib intended to assist ‘weak Grammarians’ (Fleming, Bucolics, sig. A2), so aesthetic effects are not its main aim; but perhaps because of that, the clunking mid-line caesura after the eighth syllable is played down, to the point where, as a guide to the reader, he will split a word with a medial hyphen to indicate the rhythm: mea-sure, ten-der, or ‘Thou shalt resemble Pan in sing-ing in the woods with me’ (sig. B3). The work has sometimes been accused, unfairly, of not having any prosodic base at all, but to an ear accustomed to the more flexible iambic rhythms of the later Elizabethans, the result can be a more fluent and attractive movement of the line than the fourteener’s traditional 8/6: ‘Now is the last age come whereof Sibylla’s verse foretold, / And now the virgin come again, and Saturn’s kingdom come’ (sigs. C1v–C2). Unusually, Fleming resists reading the eclogue as a prophecy of Christ. Outside translation, quantitative metre raised deeper issues of decorum. If the shepherds were explicitly Virgilian, it was easy to accept; and almost equally so if they were biblical. Abraham Fraunce wrote a hexameter poem on the Nativity that began, ‘Seely shepherds by the night their flocks were warily watching’, and includes such lines as the angel’s ‘Fear not friendly shepherds, for I bring good news from Olympus, / This day is born a babe, his name ³⁰ Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetry. ³¹ Abraham Fraunce, The Lawiers Logike (1588), originally entitled in manuscript The Shephierdes Logike, facsimile in R. C. Alston (ed.), The Lawiers Logike (Menston, 1969). ³² Abraham Fraunce, in Franklin M. Dickey (ed.), Abraham Fraunce’s Translation of ‘The Lamentations of Amyntas’ (1587) (Chicago, IL, 1967), in parallel with Thomas Watson, in Walter F. Staton, Jr (ed.), Thomas Watson’s Latin ‘Amyntas’ (Chicago, IL, 1967). ³³ For an unusually sympathetic account of the 1589 version, suggesting that it amounts to a ‘misguided experiment for a new direction of English verse’, see Robert Cummings, ‘Abraham Fleming’s “Eclogues” ’, Translation and Literature, 19 (2010), 147–69, 168.
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254 - is called Jesus’ (Fraunce, Emanuel, sig. A4v).³⁴ It became more of a problem if the shepherds were English peasants. Francis Sabie prefaced his Pan’s Pipe: Three Pastoral Eclogues, in English Hexameter (1595), with the claim that his shepherds speak in ‘rude country terms’ (Sabie, Pans pipe, sig. A2),³⁵ but his prefatory ‘Author ad librum’ [the author to his book] is written in Latin. The first two eclogues, furthermore, are introduced with descriptions of spring and winter in the headless tetrameters widely popular for Elizabethan pastoral lyric since Nicholas Breton’s ‘In the merry month of May’, composed for Elizabeth’s visit to Elvetham in 1591. Sabie’s version opens: It was in the month of May, All the field now looked gay: Little Robin finely sang, With sweet notes each greenwood rang. (Sabie, Pan’s Pipe, sig. A3)
The mixing of the Classical with the vernacular continues throughout the series, in content as well as in form. His shepherds have names derived from Virgil and Mantuan, but the first two eclogues tell stories of the vicissitudes of love in less than idyllic terms. In the first, which follows Mantuan in its antifeminist slant (though its protagonist never quite seems to realise), Tyterus gets to win the reluctant Phillida only after she has been made pregnant and abandoned by Alexis; the second offers a positive presentation of a woman more typical of vernacular pastoral, as the shepherd boy Faustus is separated from his beloved and faithful Alinda by having to serve a seven-year apprenticeship in London: an experience for which his father prepares him by warning him to avoid plays and attend sermons. The third eclogue includes a Horatian ode in praise of Eliza, which in a juxtaposition incongruous even by humanist standards has Jove give her the prize over Juno, Pallas, and Venus on the grounds of the great miracles Jehovah has wrought through her, including the defeat of the Spanish Armada and preservation from the pope. Along the way is a refashioning of the trope of rural food and pastimes into hexameter form. In winter Cards and dice brought now great sport, sitting by the fire, Bowls full of ale to quaff of, ripe pears and mellowed apples To devour, to crack small nuts, now he counted a pleasure. (Sabie, Pan’s Pipe, sig. C1)
Such scenes constitute a vigorous attempt to bridge the gap between the Classical eclogue and peasant shepherds, but the binaries are always slightly at odds with each other. That tension in decorum is to the fore in the poems that Sir Philip Sidney wrote for the Arcadia, not least those in the eclogue interludes that divide up the prose narrative, and which are discussed further elsewhere in this volume (see Chapter 25). The shepherd-poets whose songs comprise these interludes are given poems in English metres; only the two princes in disguise are allowed quantitative verse, as a poetic way of indicating social (and by implication cultural) level. This also allows for a rare example of eclogues in an apparently female voice, though the appearance is deceptive as the Amazon Cleophila (renamed Zelmane in the New Arcadia) is actually the prince Pyrocles in disguise. The narrative ³⁴ Abraham Fraunce, The Countess of Pembroke’s Emanuel (London, 1591). ³⁵ Francis Sabie, Pan’s Pipe: Three Pastoral Eclogues (London, 1595).
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255 also contains some explicitly bad verses by the boorish Dametas, but Sidney has the shepherds of his eclogues compose in a prosodic range even wider than that of The Shepheardes Calender. When the prince Musidorus (disguised as the shepherd Dorus) takes up Lalus’s challenge to a singing-match, he demonstrates his mastery in rhymed verse, too, as the contest starts off using triple rhymes, then comes down to two, then to one, then to complex patterns of interwoven single rhymes, until the challenger acknowledges himself defeated.³⁶ The quality of Sidney’s poetic experimentation is helped by the fact that the poems’ nature as eclogues is a given of their narrative setting, so he has freedom to move beyond explicitly pastoral content. Some of the finest do still deploy such content (the double sestina ‘Ye goatherd gods’, for instance);³⁷ and one of the most striking, the terza rima elegy on the apparent death of Basilius, ‘Since that to death is gone the shepherd high’, uses the same contrast of human death against the continuities of nature that pastoral had employed since the Greek examples of Moschus and Bion: Time ever old and young is still resolved Within itself, and never taketh end: But mankind is for aye to nought resolved. The filthy snake her aged coat can mend, And getting youth again, in youth doth flourish: But unto Man, age ever death does send. (Sidney, ‘Since that to death is gone’, lines 79–84, Poems, 127)
The image of the snake is, however, telling in a way not apprehensible to the singers, as Basilius, too, will be restored from apparent death. Sidney’s avoidance of anything resembling realistic shepherds was one, fairly drastic, solution to the issue of decorum, but he was far from being the only poet to be aware of the contradictions contained within it. George Peele, whose Eglogue Gratulatory on the return of the Earl of Essex to England after a martial adventure in Portugal appeared in 1589, makes it an explicit theme within the poem. It takes the form of a dialogue between Palinode and Piers (already used as names in Spenser’s May), which opens with Palinode complaining that Piers’ songs, with their triumphal refrain of the Greek ‘Io io Paean’, are too ‘loftie’ by comparison with his ‘rude tire, and grey russet coat’ (Peele, Eglogue Gratulatory, lines 12–13, Minor Works, 224).³⁸ Palinode is given the more pseudo-rustic Spenserian language of the two: Herdgroom, what gars* thy pipe to go so loud? *causes Why bin thy looks so smicker* and so proud? *smirking Perdie plain Piers, but this couthe ill agree With thilke bad fortune, that aye thwarteth thee. (Peele, Eglogue Gratulatory, lines 1–4, Minor Works, 224)
Piers by contrast is secure in his celebration of paulo maiora, somewhat greater things, though he refashions Essex as a ‘jolly groom’ in order to do so, even while he praises him as ³⁶ See ‘Come, Dorus, come’, in William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), 14–20. See also the discussion of this poem in Chapter 25 in this volume. ³⁷ In Sidney, Poems, 111–13. ³⁸ George Peele, in David H. Horne (ed.), The Life and Minor Works of George Peele (New Haven, CT, 1952).
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256 - flying as high as the most famous warriors, ‘equivalent with the Punic chivalry’ (Peele, Eglogue Gratulatory, line 139, Minor Works, 226). Here, the proclaimed low status of the shepherd becomes a trope of praise in itself, a means of emphasising the height of his subject over himself. One more series of eclogues requires mention here, although its author, Michael Drayton, is discussed later in this volume (see Chapter 28). Idea: The Shepherd’s Garland was first published in 1593 and revised as Pastorals, containing Eglogues in 1606 and 1616. Drayton informs us that his childhood ambition to be a poet was fostered by reading Mantuan and the Bucolics, but much the strongest influence on his own eclogues was The Shepheardes Calender.³⁹ They make their debt explicit in almost every poem: in his personal persona (Rowland for Spenser’s Colin); in his overt debt to Chaucer (most explicit in the tale of Dowsabell, a riff on Spenser’s parody of popular romance in Sir Thopas); in the range of verse forms he employs and their variety of language from the quasi-rustic to high rhetoric; in a wide generic variety that includes singing-matches, complaints on the Colin Clout model, a debate on age versus youth, elegy, satire, and panegyric as he praises (amongst others) Beta as a parallel to Spenser’s Eliza; and in the use of Latin mottoes to close each poem. He embraces opportunities to combine different expectations in single eclogues, as when the suggestion that two shepherds might tell each other stories of those popular heroes, Guy of Warwick or Robin Hood, is superseded by a lament for Elphin, Sir Philip Sidney, ‘of Pastorall, the lively springing sap’ (Drayton, Shepherd’s Garland, ‘Fourth Eclogue’, line 60, Works, 1.62). This opens with an invocation to Melpomene, but ends by imagining Elphin in a heavenly ‘Elizia’ (i.e., Elysium), piping his fill, on yonder hill, in best native fashion. (Drayton, Shepherd’s Garland, ‘Fourth Eclogue’, lines 138, 141–2, Works, 1.64).
Drayton treated the issues of decorum raised by this as a matter already settled in 1593; the addition of the preface to the 1616 edition spelling out its justification (cited above) may perhaps reflect how the public understanding of pastoral had shifted over those two decades. The later editions of Drayton’s eclogues incorporated substantial revisions, ranging from a few words to entire rewritings. Many of those relate to his own second thoughts about what can be encompassed within the bounds of decorum: the lines invoking ‘high enthronised Jove . . . battle-waging Mars . . . sage-saw’d Mercury’ (Drayton, Shepherd’s Garland, ‘Fifth Eclogue, lines 71–2, Works, 1.67), for example, disappear from the later Pastorals.⁴⁰ There is a general reduction in the archaism of language; and there are some political alterations. The widespread disappointment with James I results in an attack on him as a bad shepherd: a motif increasingly common in the pastoral poetry Drayton wrote after Elizabeth’s death.⁴¹ The new political context may also have driven the composition of a new eclogue that offers a nostalgic vision of a shepherd shearing-feast.⁴² One early revision—made before 1600, when the poem was anthologised in England’s Helicon—was
³⁹ ⁴⁰ ⁴¹ ⁴²
On Drayton’s childhood ambition, see his ‘Of Poets and Poesie’, lines 26–38, Works, 3.226–7. Compare Pastorals, ‘Sixth Eclogue’, Works, 2.546–51. See Pastorals, ‘Eighth Eclogue’, lines 97–100, Works, 2.562. See Pastorals, ‘Ninth Eclogue’, Works, 2.564–70.
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257 the removal of a description of the papacy as ‘that foul seven-headed beast’ from the panegyric of Beta.⁴³ Other revisions to that same poem seem to have been made purely for art’s sake, although the original scarcely needs improving, as Drayton demonstrates what could be done with even the fourteener in the hands of a late Elizabethan poet: Make her a goodly chapilet of azured columbine, And wreathe about her coronet with sweetest eglantine. (Drayton, Shepherd’s Garland, ‘Third Eclogue’, lines 79–80, Works, 1.57)⁴⁴
The eclogue had come a long way from the clumsiness of those early attempts at translating the Bucolics.
Lyrical Pastoral The publication of England’s Helicon in 1600 registers how thoroughly pastoral poetry had become embedded in late Elizabethan culture and how deeply it had become imbricated with lyric.⁴⁵ The volume drew extensively not only on free-standing lyrics but also on songs and other short poems contained in plays and romances or in singing-matches from within longer eclogues; George Chapman was saying nothing unfamiliar when he described Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess (1609) as ‘a Pastoral, being both a poem and a play’.⁴⁶ The anthology also bulked out its contents with a handful of poems that the editor, probably Nicholas Ling, reckoned could be made pastoral by the addition of a title (the very first one in the anthology, for instance, ‘The Shepherd to his chosen Nymph’, is actually one of the songs from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella). That breadth of source thus made it more representative of pastoral than the ‘lyric’ label alone would suggest; and it is representative, too, in its poetic variety, from minimalist simplicity to full rhetorical elaboration. Perhaps its most remarkable quality is the number of different verse forms it contains. Only a handful are repeated, and some of those are deliberate imitations of well-known originals, such as the ‘hey ho’ refrain of Spenser’s roundelay in August, or Breton’s ‘In the merry month of May’. There is inevitably rather less from areas that elsewhere are given more substantial treatment, or where a larger context is important: political comment (apart from celebrations of Elizabeth or figures representing her, of which there is an abundance), satire, and the state of the church disappear almost entirely, and so does the exploration of poetic subjectivity. When social comment does make an appearance, it avoids topicality by reverting to the long-standing pastoral theme of the superiority of the shepherd world to the court or city. Instead, the overwhelming subject is heterosexual love, and the aim is not so much of affect or the exploration of emotion—no reader is going to be much stirred by lines such as ‘Fain would I die, to end and free / This grief, that kills me most’ (Yong, ‘Love’s Queen long
⁴³ The phrase appears in Shepherd’s Garland, ‘Third Eclogue’, line 120, Works, 1.58; compare the version of N [icholas] L[ing] (ed.), in Hugh Macdonald (ed.), England’s Helicon (London, 1949), 27. All subsequent references to England’s Helicon will be to this edition. ⁴⁴ Compare the version in Pastorals, ‘Third Eclogue’, Works, 2.529. ⁴⁵ For more on England’s Helicon, see also Chapter 10 in this volume. ⁴⁶ From Chapman’s ‘Epistle to the Reader’ prefacing the play, in Fletcher, Dramatic Works, 3.492.
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258 - waiting’, lines 34–5, England’s Helicon, 113)⁴⁷—but of the poet showing off his rhetorical skills for the benefit of his readers. Many of the Helicon poems classicise the whole idea, introducing Cupid as an additional occupant of the pastoral world, and sometimes Venus, too. Shepherdesses appear much more frequently in the lyrics than in the eclogue tradition, though a number of such poems are extracted from pastoral romances and plays that already give such figures more space. They also appear much more in the texts than in the titles, since there the editor re-labels them all as nymphs. Women are also occasionally given speaking parts rather than just being spoken about, especially in dialogue with shepherds who love them; one poem consists entirely of a ‘heigh ho’ dialogue between two shepherdesses, its Spenserian original also being given a place in the anthology.⁴⁸ Another poem on the same model by Thomas Lodge, taken from his romance, Rosalynde (1590), is a dialogue between a squint-eyed ‘blithe and bonny country lass, / Heigh ho bonny lass’ pining for want of a lover, and the ‘lither swain’ [gentle youth] who comforts her fear of dying a maid by taking her off to church for a wedding (Lodge, ‘A blithe and bonny country lass’, lines 1–2, 5, England’s Helicon, 113–14). The poem deploys some vocabulary from the Calender, too: ‘bonny-bell’, ‘smicker’ [handsome], ‘gars’ [causes], perhaps even ‘lass’ itself.⁴⁹ The substitution of ‘swain’ for ‘shepherd’ is also widespread in the anthology, increasingly (though not in this particular instance) with literary connotations; a trend taken much further in succeeding centuries. The pastoral mode is generally much more accommodating to poems of fulfilled love than Elizabethan poetry more broadly, helped by the recurrent insistence that shepherds, in contrast to courtiers, genuinely mean their protestations of love. In Breton’s ‘In the merry month of May’, Phillida’s accusation that ‘never man was true’ is answered by Coridon’s: many a pretty oath, Yea and nay, and faith and troth, Such as silly shepherds use When they will not love abuse. (Breton, ‘In the merry month of May’, lines 9, 19–22, England’s Helicon, 23)
The vocabulary Breton uses underlines the point, since almost the entire lyric is written in Old English-derived near-monosyllables that allow no space for deception: ‘abuse’ itself, just five lines from the end, is its first non-Germanic word. This is about as close as the anthology comes to social criticism, but the point is made with much more force outside the lyric context in works such as Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595). The one poem in England’s Helicon that attacks the court and city more overtly is put into the mouth of a woodman, in an unconventional departure from the norms of the anthology; its inclusion is, however, a mark of how strong the association was between such social complaint and pastoral.⁵⁰
⁴⁷ From Bartholomew Yong’s translation of Jorge de Montemayor, Diana (1598), included in England’s Helicon. Yong is the most extensively represented poet in the anthology. ⁴⁸ See ‘Fie on the sleights that men devise’, England’s Helicon, 171–2, by ‘H. C.’ (i.e., either Henry Chettle or Henry Constable); the roundelay from Spenser’s August is at England’s Helicon, 20–2. ⁴⁹ ‘Lass’ itself seems to have been predominantly a dialect (northern) word until Spenser popularised it in the Calender. ⁵⁰ See ‘Through a faire forest as I went’, England’s Helicon, 195–8, and attributed to the pseudonymous ‘Shep [herd] Tonie’.
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259 Most of the dialogues between a shepherd and shepherdess end in agreement, in the promise of fulfilled love. Perhaps the most famous, however, does not, and it bases its rejection of such a dream on what is there in the real world: not social criticism, but the impossibility of fantasy. This case involves not two voices within a single poem but a separate reply written some years after the original: Marlowe’s ‘The passionate Shepherd to his love’, and ‘The Nymph’s reply to the Shepherd’, anonymous in the anthology but elsewhere ascribed to Sir Walter Ralegh.⁵¹ Despite the title, Marlowe’s speaker envisages a life spent watching ‘the shepherds feed their flocks’ (Marlowe, ‘Come live with me, and be my love’, line 6, England’s Helicon, 192) as if his own life is one of unbroken leisure. The female speaker of the answering poem has nothing of the nymph about her: she is thoroughly un-nymph-like, cool, and sensible, and if she is imagined as a shepherdess, as the poem invites, she is one of the most three-dimensional in all of pastoral lyric. Her response is modelled verse by verse on the preceding poem’s promise of a life of unalloyed pleasure, where every morning seems to be a May morning full of shepherds singing and dancing, where any hint of cold is reimagined as the cosiness of lambswool slippers, and where Nature and decorative herdsmen provide the entertainment. The response destroys such a vision with a reminder of both mortality and ethics: this is not a fantasy, but a world where a shepherd may have a ‘honey tongue’, and where Time drives the flocks from field to fold, When rivers rage, and rocks grow cold. (Ralegh, ‘If all the world and love were young’, lines 11, 5–6, England’s Helicon, 193)
Even so, the final stanza acknowledges the deep appeal of Marlowe’s idyll: if only the world were like that, Then these delights my mind might move To live with thee, and be thy love. (Ralegh, ‘If all the world and love were young’, lines 23–4, England’s Helicon, 193)
Both visions, the idyllic and the unillusioned, use the same formal methods, octosyllabic quatrains and a predominantly Germanic vocabulary; but they are used to build different realms within the imagination. Poetic eloquence is, however, emphatically not banished from the anthology, though it tends to make its appearance most forcefully in poems that have little pastoral about them except for a countryside setting or imagery. Melpomene can be invoked to open one poem; Aurora and five other Classical names can be used to announce daybreak in another.⁵² The most strikingly musical is the ‘Palinode’ by ‘E. B.’ (probably Edmund Bolton, better known as a historian), which is a kind of compressed double sestina in which the rhymes and the imagery (primrose, fountains, sun, bubble, snow) echo and mirror each other across two stanzas in Surreian sonnet form. It starts ‘As withereth the primrose by the river, / As fadeth ⁵¹ See England’s Helicon, 192–3. See also the discussion of these poems in Chapters 3, 10, 29, 31, and 33 in this volume. ⁵² For Melpomene, see Peele’s ‘Oenone’s Complaint’, England’s Helicon, 205; for Aurora etc., see Watson’s ‘Amintas for His Phillis’, England’s Helicon, 127.
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260 - summer’s sun from gliding fountains’ (E. B., ‘As withereth the primrose’, lines 1–2, England’s Helicon, 8), and uses such fading as an emblem for human treasures. The lyrics that are more firmly linked to the pastoral world rarely show off the poet’s skill so flamboyantly, though they may still be self-consciously aiming at high art. ‘The Shepherds Song: A Carol or Hymn for Christmas’ (also attributed to E. B.) opens with a shepherd responding to the heavenly music of the angels’ song, and telling his flocks to ‘Listen, o listen, now, o not to you / Our pipes make sport to shorten weary night’ (E. B., ‘Sweet music, sweeter far’, lines 7–8, England’s Helicon, 135), yet those pipes serve at least as a reminder of the more traditional kind of shepherd. The latter appears, too, in a lyric that directly recalls ‘Jolly Wat’, himself originally a Nativity figure: Jolly shepherd, shepherd on a hill On a hill so merrily, On a hill so cheerily, Fear not shepherd there to pipe thy fill. (Wootton, ‘Jolly shepherd, shepherd on a hill’, lines 1–3, England’s Helicon, 45)⁵³
This piping shepherd, however, in keeping with the main tenor of the anthology, is made happy not by the birth of Christ but by human love. One of the more thematically complex poems in the anthology succeeds in combining many of these contradictory elements into a single discourse. ‘Theorello: A Shepherds Edillion’ is identified as being by E. B. again, and further demonstrates his poetic skill. It is pitched at the literary rather than the demotic end of the poetic spectrum, though it opens with a comfortingly familiar image, ‘You shepherds which on hillocks sit’ (E. B., ‘You shepherds which on hillocks sit’, line 1, England’s Helicon, 3). It then reminds its readers that shepherds are comparable to kings in their care for their subject flocks, but superior in their contentment, and adds properly Classical nymphs and hamadryads to its landscape. The object of the speaker’s love is named Cosma, from the Greek κόσμος (cosmos), and she accordingly manifests herself as both the world and its beauty: ‘Yet hath the world no better name than she: / And than the world, no fairer thing can be’ (E. B., ‘You shepherds which on hillocks sit’, lines 29–30, England’s Helicon, 4). She inhabits a Neoplatonic world, not an English one, with clothing that ‘doth the forms express / Of all which may be seen’ (E. B., ‘You shepherds which on hillocks sit’, lines 63–4, England’s Helicon, 5), including the planets, the animal world, gods, men, monsters, and more surprisingly (since they are not a natural creation), cities. The poem ends by looking beyond her to her ‘parent’ God, and with a declaration of the speaker’s unending desire. Hamadryads apart, however, the poem maintains a clarity—a decorum—of imagery and lexis that reveals an epiphany within the pastoral world not explored elsewhere. Shakespeare’s pastoral work takes the form of drama rather than poetry, but he does have one lyric in England’s Helicon: the not-very-pastoral ‘On a day (alack the day)’, a version of Dumaine’s poem from Act 4, scene 3 of Love’s Labour’s Lost here freshly repurposed and entitled ‘The passionate Shepherd’s song’ (England’s Helicon, 53). Its metrical patterning after the Nicholas Breton model was no doubt one motive for its inclusion. Shakespeare’s use of language in his pastoral plays does, however, show a keen awareness of the same
⁵³ Entitled ‘Dametas Jigge in Praise of His Love’ and attributed to John Wootton.
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261 kinds of issues of decorum as do his contemporaries, though that does not mean that he necessarily follows the standard stylistic prescriptions. The ‘real’ shepherds of The Winter’s Tale do indeed follow the convention of having low-class and less-educated characters speaking in prose, while Perdita shows her true nature by speaking in blank verse. As You Like It, however, is very different. There, the aristocrats who escape to Arden speak predominantly in prose; the most poetic characters, the rejected lover Silvius and the disdainful object of his love Phoebe are, by contrast, native to that world but speak blank verse on the courtly model. At the other end of the spectrum—and in this play, style of speech runs the full spectrum of eloquence—is the goatherdess Audrey: a thoroughly lowclass name in keeping with the cultural and (from the Bible forwards) the moral inferiority of the animals she keeps. She is the only character in the whole Shakespeare canon not even to know what poetry is: ‘Is it honest in deed and word?’ Touchstone is not a ‘faith and troth’ man, and his response, that ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’, might be taken as the motto for pastoral poetry in general (As You Like It, 3.3.14–16, Norton Shakespeare, 1659).⁵⁴ It was nonetheless the Winter’s Tale that was Shakespeare’s last word on the mode. On the surface, and in terms of the poetics of decorum, it comes down on the side of the eloquent and the courtly; but here that is set against the way the play is structured around the mythic force of the pastoral world, summer against winter, a world of innocent goodness (even if that tends to take the form of ignorant naivety) against the damaged court. It is not exactly Neoplatonic, as E. B’s ‘Theorello’ is—the Neoplatonists were too intellectual for what is going on here—but it does suggest a comparable value within a vision of pastoral that can still keep in touch with the real world, and which is expressed at least as much by poetic as by dramatic means.
⁵⁴ William Shakespeare, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016).
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15 Epic Tamsin Badcoe
Models and Theories Poets, translators, and commentators of the sixteenth century positioned epic as the period’s most prestigious form. For the Italian humanist scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger, epic functioned as the ‘one perfect original’ that set the measure for all other poetry. In its handling of ‘the descent, life, and deeds of heroes’, it offered a poetic zenith whose ‘sovereignty’ cast all other imitations into relief (Scaliger, Select Translations, 54).¹ For the Englishman William Webbe, writing in his Discourse of English Poetry (1586), epic similarly encompassed the ‘princely part of poetry’, which, in taking its matter from ‘the noble acts and valiant exploits of puissant captains, expert soldiers, wise men, with the famous reports of ancient times’, held together systems of knowledge encompassing ethics, military strategy, and historiography (Webbe, Discourse, sig. E1).² For Webbe, ‘the heroical works of Homer in Greek, and the heavenly verse of Virgil’s Æneidos in Latin’, which began to circulate in increasingly numerous printed vernacular translations as the century unfolded, comprehended ‘the sum and ground of all poetry’ and were ‘verily and incomparably the best of all other’ (Webbe, Discourse, sigs. E1–E1v). Epic, Webbe ultimately suggests, offered models for government, of both selves and peoples, where the precedent set by Homer in particular, ‘in one sum comprehended all knowledge, wisdom, learning, and policy, that was incident to the capacity of man’ (Webbe, Discourse, sig. B4). Following Aristotle—who drew a distinction between the epic modes of the Iliad, which he categorised as ‘based on suffering’, and the Odyssey, categorised as ‘based on character’ (Aristotle, Poetics, 39)³—Webbe writes of how, from the former, ‘a prince shall learn not only courage, and valiantness, but discretion also and policy to encounter with his enemies’ while, from the latter, a man may ‘learn many noble virtues: and also learn to escape and avoid the subtle practices, and perilous entrappings of naughty persons: and not only this, but in what sort also he may deal to know and perceive the affections of those which be near unto him’ (Webbe, Discourse, sig. B4). By stressing the narrative and affective content that could be accessed by a judicious reader, Webbe offers a vision of epic that emphasises its reception in the sixteenth century as heroic poetry: that is, poetry concerned with the making of men and nations, and the location, elevation, and transmission of the values of an idealised past. For Sir Philip Sidney, who expands extravagantly upon this theme in his Defence of Poesy (composed c 1579–81, published 1595), the appreciation of heroical poetry is the best exercise for a poet’s skill and a reader’s investment because it is championed by champions—‘Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas, Turnus, Tydeus, and Rinaldo’—and as such contains
¹ Julius Caesar Scaliger, in Frederick Morgan Padelford (ed. and trans.), Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics (New York, 1905). ² William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetry (London, 1586), spelling modernised. ³ Aristotle, in Malcolm Heath (trans.), Poetics (London, 1996). Tamsin Badcoe, Epic In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Tamsin Badcoe 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0015
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263 within it the force not only to ‘teacheth and moveth’ a person ‘to the most high and excellent truth’ but also to ‘daunt all backbiters’ in the process (Sidney, Defence, 98).⁴ Indeed, the epic poet ‘who maketh magnanimity and justice shine, through all misty fearfulness and foggy desires’, can ‘inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy’ (Sidney, Defence, 98). For Sidney, it is the figure of Virgil’s Aeneas who takes centre stage, and how he ‘in storms, how in sports, how in war, how in peace, how a fugitive, how victorious, how besieged, how besieging, how to strangers, how to allies, how to enemies, how to his own: lastly, how in his inward self, and how in his outward government’, offers a model of ideal masculinity that is virtuous, virile, and worthy of both literary and lived imitation (Sidney, Defence, 98). This, as Kenneth Burke observes in his taxonomy of poetic categories, is the special preserve of epic: ‘it lends dignity to the necessities of existence, “advertising” courage and individual sacrifice for group advantage—and it enables the humble man to share the worth of the hero by the process of “identification”’.⁵ For modern readers, reading of the siege and destruction of Troy and the charged attempts to re-establish conditions for dwelling after warfare, understandings of epic have often been shaped by Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense that the world of which epic poetry speaks is ‘monolithic’ and ‘closed’, knowing only ‘a single and unified world view’. In its antiquated resistance to social and personal change, Bakhtin suggests, epic proposes an authorial position on an inaccessible past from the ‘reverent point of a descendant’.⁶ He writes in order to contrast epic forms with what he perceives to be the polyphonic, generative, and immediate modes of the novel. Yet, as Colin Burrow has argued in response, to look beyond epic’s concern with ‘eulogy, heroism, unity, dull officialdom, maleness’ is to find instead discursive ‘vastness’, which ‘emanates a multiplicity of blended voices to the future’.⁷ Epos, the Greek for ‘spoken word’, or ‘word which appeals to the imagination and evokes a picture of things or events’, is rarely used by sixteenth-century vernacular authors to name the epic form; however, its legacy is retained in the memory of the primary ancient Greek conception of epic as sustained verse, on a variety of subjects, uttered in dactylic hexameters.⁸ Indeed, contemporary critics have long drawn attention to the capacity of epic to hold together systems of beliefs, knowledge, and ethics, which retain the values of the past while simultaneously informing present ways of knowing. As Northrop Frye writes, for example, epic ‘has an encyclopaedic quality in it, distilling the essence of all the religious, philosophical, political, even scientific learning of its time’, becoming ‘if completely successful, the definitive poem for its age’.⁹ Back in the sixteenth century, George Puttenham, who was sensitive to the form’s flexibility, directs the reader’s eye to the use of hexameters in ‘the philosophical works of Lucretius Carus among the Romans, the astronomical of Aratus and Manilius—one Greek, the other Latin—the medicinal of Nicander, and that of Oppianus of
⁴ Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973). ⁵ Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Boston, MA, 1961), 36. ⁶ Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Epic and the Novel’, in Michael Holquist (ed.) and Caryl Emerson (trans.), The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, TX, 1981), 29, 35, 13. ⁷ Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: From Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993), 1, 3. ⁸ Quotation from Kurt von Fritz, ‘The Discovery of Incommensurability by Hippasus of Metapontum’, in Jean Christianidis (ed.), Classics in the History of Greek Mathematics (Dordrecht, 2004), 211–32, 218. See also Johannes Haubold, ‘Greek Epic’, in Edward Bispham, Thomas Harrison, and Brian A. Sparkes (eds), Edinburgh Companion to Ancient Greek and Rome (Edinburgh, 2006), 277–81, 277; and Gordon Braden, ‘Hexameter’, in Roland Greene (gen. ed.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, fourth edition (Princeton, NJ, 2012), 627–9. ⁹ Northrop Frye, Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (London, 1966), 3.
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264 - hunting and fishes’ (Puttenham, Art, 133).¹⁰ And indeed, as Webbe surmises, epic justly exemplifies the ‘right use of poetry’—that is, ‘to mingle profit with pleasure’ (Webbe, Discourse, sig. B4)—its scale and ambition holding together the passing on of knowledge of the world with knowledge of selves and civilisations encountering, and surviving, crisis. For Sir John Harington, writing of literary pleasures in the ‘Brief Apology of Poetry’ that prefaces his 1591 translation of Ariosto’s epic romance, Orlando Furioso, heroical poesy is the form of imaginative making ‘least infected’ with ‘laciviousness’ (Harington, ‘Brief Apology’, 8).¹¹ Yet, as perhaps befits a poet and translator who took on the vagrancies of Ludovico Ariosto, his epic muse is allowed to retain a seductive quality too: ‘her sweet stateliness doth erect the mind and lift it up to the consideration of the highest matters and allureth them that of themselves would otherwise loth them to take and swallow and digest the wholesome precepts of philosophy and many times even of the true divinity’ (Harington, ‘Brief Apology’, 3). It was Harington, whose ‘Apology’ tempers polemic with play, who perhaps provided the most expansive sixteenth-century overview of epic in English, though with an awareness that rules can be broken. With direct reference to Aristotle’s fragmentary statements in the Poetics, he outlines a series of strategies for the ‘Epopeia, that is, the heroical poem’: first, the poet ‘should ground on some history, and take some short time in the same to beautify with his poetry’; secondly, the poet should include ‘nothing . . . feigned utterly incredible’; and thirdly, the resulting ‘heroical poem (as well as a tragedy)’ should ‘be full of peripetia’ [a crisis or reversal], brought about by ‘an agnition’, or recognition, ‘of some unlooked for fortune either good or bad and a sudden change thereof ’. In addition, he writes, as Homer, Virgil, and Ariosto all amply demonstrate, there should be ‘apt similitudes, for passions well expressed, of love, of pity, of hate, of wrath’ (Harington, ‘Brief Apology’, 12–13). For Harington, the epic thus not only encompasses moral and epistemological matters but also offers a way of expressing the extremities of the passions using figurative language, through which the reader can participate in the most triumphant and most desolating of human experiences.
Translations The epic in English has its first sixteenth-century presence in translations, and these labours, which are often incomplete and experimental, provide the groundwork for the earliest vernacular epic poems crafted by poets such as William Warner and Edmund Spenser later in the century. The history of epic translation in the sixteenth century is thus as much a history of particular verse forms—and the associated reputation of English vernacular poetry as a capable conduit for the complex combination of ethics and eloquence that characterise epic—as it is a history of individual translators, each shaped by their own predilections and circumstances. For Frye, ‘the moment at which the epic poet chooses his subject is the crisis of his life’.¹² However, each poet surveyed here operates within his own distinct temporal as well as linguistic relationship to the work of epic song. Whether articulated on the margins or at the centres of English culture, the singular voice of epic
¹⁰ George Puttenham, in Frank Wigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ¹¹ Sir John Harington, ‘A Brief Apology of Poetry’, in Robert McNulty (ed.), Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Translated into English Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington (1591) (Oxford, 1972). ¹² Frye, Five Essays, 3.
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265 utterance is further revealed to be something of a myth by the plurality, and polyvocality, of ‘Englishes’ spoken.¹³ The frequently fragmentary or partial status of the epic experiments that reached print during this century often bear witness to lives prematurely ended or shaped by occupations and restrictions that place any real understanding of crisis often well outside the sphere of the purely literary. However, it is also worth bearing in mind that the epic form was itself associated with incompletion during the sixteenth century, owing to the inherently unfinished state of Roman epic works, including Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s Pharsalia, and Statius’s Achilleid, all of which were first printed in Europe during the fifteenth century.¹⁴ The period bears witness to dynamics identified by Thomas Greene in his study of ‘epic continuity’, which describes the epics of the Renaissance as ‘imperfectly coherent, uncertainly unified’, and even ‘divided by powerful forces not altogether controlled and understood’; yet, these works still participate in what Greene celebrates as the work of epic’s ‘expansiveness’ and imaginative apprehension.¹⁵ The path to sixteenth-century verse translations of Virgil’s Aeneid begins at the end of the fifteenth century, when William Caxton printed his Book of Eneydos (c 1490): a polyglot endeavour that worked from a French translation based on an Italian paraphrase.¹⁶ The perceptible inability of Caxton’s prose to convey the metrical rhythms of Virgil’s verse motivated the Scottish poet and churchman, Gavin Douglas, to complete the first verse translation from Latin into Scots (a vernacular also accessible to readers of English), so that Virgil’s ‘ornate golden verses’ ‘might be sung / In our language as well as Latin tongue’, that is, ‘in the language, of Scottish nation’ (Douglas, Prologue I, lines 149, 39–40, 103, Aeneid, 1.5, 2, 3).¹⁷ This work, which includes original additional prologues and epilogues that frame Virgil’s narrative with further narratives of poetic and Christian labour, as well as Douglas’s translation of Maffeo Vegio’s additional thirteenth book, was completed in 1513 and later printed as The xiii Books of Eneados of the Famous Poet Virgil in 1553 by William Copland, the title page acknowledging Douglas’s later appointment as Bishop of Dunkeld.¹⁸ The work turns Virgil’s hexameters into robust five-stress couplets and is characterised less by Douglas’s ability to ‘reproduce Virgil’s dense tension in Older Scots’, as Nicola Roylan observes, but rather more by his ability to ‘play to the strengths of his vernacular tradition to represent Virgil’s narrative’.¹⁹ As demonstrated by the moment at which Aeneas recalls his divine birth-right at his father’s house, having passed through the burning city of Troy, Douglas’s skill lies in his ability to fuse the register of the Classical narrative with alliterative
¹³ See Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Richard Carew, William Shakespeare, and the Politics of Translating Virgil in Early Modern England and Scotland’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5.4 (1999), 507–27; and Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London, 1996). ¹⁴ See Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (New Haven, CT, 1998), 91; and William J. Kennedy, ‘Heroic Poem Before Spenser’, in A. C. Hamilton (gen. ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto, 1990), 363–5, 363. ¹⁵ Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven, CT, 1970), 4, 11. ¹⁶ The progress of translating Virgil into English was clearly a gradual one and it is important to note that Virgil’s works sold consistently in Latin throughout the late sixteenth century in editions printed in London. The Latin edition of his Opera, first published by H. Bynneman in 1570, for example, was reprinted in 1572, 1576, 1580, 1583, 1593, and 1597. See A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, compiled by A. W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave, W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, second edition, 3 vols. (London, 1976–91). ¹⁷ Gavin Douglas, in Gordon Kendal (ed.), The Aeneid (1513), 2 vols. (London, 2011). ¹⁸ See Charles S. Ross, ‘Maffeo Vegio’s “schort Cristyn wark”, with a Note on the Thirteenth Book in Early Editions of Vergil’, Modern Philology, 78.3 (1981), 215–26. Vegio’s 600-line continuation of Virgil’s epic in Latin narrated the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia and the apotheosis of Aeneas. ¹⁹ Nicola Royan, ‘Gavin Douglas’s Eneados’, in Rita Copeland (ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 1, 800–1558 (Oxford, 2016), 561–82, 573–4.
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266 - techniques. The confident use of mid-line caesurae, hendiadys, and enjambment all temper the weight of the determined end-rhymes: Is this the way, my holy mother, that thou Should keep me, foes and fires passing through, That I beheld, within my chamber secret, Mine enemies, and see Ascanius sweet, My dear father, and Creusa my wife, Either on others hot blood lose their life? Harness servant, harness bring hither soon! The latter end, thus vanquished and undone, Calls us again to battle and assay: Have done, come on, this is our latter day! Render me to the Greeks, or suffer me The bargain again begun that I may see This day unwroken* we shall never all be slain. *unavenged (Douglas, 2.10.185–97, Aeneid, 1.91)
In his first prologue, Douglas writes of the debt he owes to ‘venerable’ Geoffrey Chaucer, who, in his ‘Legend of Notable Ladies’ (i.e., The Legend of Good Women), claimed he could ‘follow’ Virgil ‘word by word’ if he had wanted (Douglas, Prologue 1, lines 339, 344–5, Aeneid, 1.10).²⁰ However, his own free expansion of Virgil’s taut lines is a move that Stephen Guy-Bray associates less with archaic poetic conventions and more with a ‘refashioning of the classical heritage’ that we might now ‘consider as indicative of the advent of modernity’.²¹ As Douglas writes, advertising his own capacity for invention, ‘Sometime the text maun [may] have an exposition, / Sometime the colour will cause a little addition, / And sometime of a word I maun make three’ (Douglas, Prologue 1, lines 347–9, Aeneid, 1.10). As Florence H. Ridley has shown, the influence of Douglas’s translation is powerfully felt at the level of phrasing and word choice in the work of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, providing evidence for the circulation of Douglas’s work in manuscript amongst English readers.²² Surrey, who used unrhymed decasyllabic lines for the partial translation of the Aeneid he composed at some point between 1538 and 1544, lays claim to the distinction of writing the first blank verse in vernacular English.²³ His work was published after his death by John Day as The fourth book of Virgil (1554) and by Richard Tottel as Certain Books of Virgil’s Aeneis (1557), the latter of which contained translations of the second as well as the fourth book of Virgil’s poem. The title page of Day’s edition draws attention to how Virgil’s epic has been ‘drawn into a strange metre by Henry late Earl of Surrey, worthy to be embraced’.²⁴ However, for Tottel, on his title page the simpler description of ‘English metre’
²⁰ See Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘Gavin Douglas and Chaucer’, Review of English Studies, 21.84 (1970), 401–21. ²¹ Stephen Guy-Bray, ‘Embracing Troy: Surrey’s Aeneid’, in Alan Shepard and Stephen D. Powell (eds), Fantasies of Troy: Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto, 2004), 177–92, 185. ²² See Florence H. Ridley, ‘Surrey’s Debt to Gawin Douglas’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 76.1 (1961), 25–33. ²³ See William A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 1999), 260–87. ²⁴ John Day (publisher), The fourth book of Virgil intreating of the love between Aeneas and Dido, translated into English, and drawn into a stra[n]ge metre by Henry late Earl of Surrey, worthy to be embraced (London, 1554).
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267 sufficed.²⁵ Day’s use of the word ‘strange’, rather than ‘English’—if ‘strange’ is glossed as ‘outlandish’ or ‘foreign’ rather than merely ‘peculiar’—acknowledges the precedent set by Italian poets in using versi sciolti: verses, as Stephen Merriam Foley observes, ‘ “freed” from the fetters of rhyme’.²⁶ Later in the century, Thomas Nashe, addressing ‘the Gentlemen Students of both Universities’ in his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589), may have given this form its now more familiar name in English—‘blank verse’—but by this later date he associated it negatively with the bragging bombast of tragedians (Nashe, ‘To the Gentlemen Students’, Works, 3.311).²⁷ And indeed, as O. B. Hardison observes, ‘later efforts to create heroic poetry in English in the sixteenth century use almost every form but blank verse—fourteeners, poulter’s measure, decasyllabic couplets, quantitative dactylic hexameter, ottava rima, and Spenserian stanzas’: a phenomenon that has suggestive implications for thinking about why Surrey’s invention only truly found its voice when speaking to the audiences of the early modern theatre.²⁸ Indeed, the use of his ‘strange metre’ allowed Surrey to explore new interpretative possibilities. James Simpson has connected the ‘dramatic possibility’ of blank verse to Surrey’s choice of passages: the second book, he writes, ‘is surely the copy text for the catastrophic experience of having to pack quickly as one’s city is invaded and sacked at night from within’, and the fourth ‘the copy text for all elegiac literature, of the usually feminine figure unjustly abandoned by history’.²⁹ The charged, affective control of Surrey’s verse is created by the way he renders the immediacy of Aeneas’s speaking voice, which moves flexibly between descriptions of atrocity and the self-aware performativity of his testimony. Immediately following the telling of the death of Priam, for example, Surrey captures the isolation of Aeneas, where the recollection of past decisions and future fears intrudes even on moments of present crisis: Dismayed I was. Wherewith came to my mind The image eke* of my dear father, when I thus beheld the king of equal age Yield up the sprite with wounds so cruelly. Then thought I of Creusa left alone, And of my house in danger of the spoil, And the estate of young Julus eke. I looked back to seek what number then I might discern about me of my feeres;* But wearied they had left me all alone. Some to the ground were lopen* from above,
*also
*companions *had thrown themselves
²⁵ Richard Tottel (publisher), Certain books of Virgil’s Aeneis turned into English metre by the right honourable lord, Henry Earl of Surrey (London, 1557). ²⁶ Stephen Merriam Foley, ‘ “Not-Blank-Verse”: Surrey’s Aeneid Translations and the Prehistory of a Form’, in Sarah Spence (ed.), Poets and Critics Read Vergil (New Haven, CT, 2001), 149–71, 149. ‘Sciolto’ in Italian means unrestricted, free. See also the discussion in Chapter 23 of this volume. ²⁷ Thomas Nashe, in Ronald B. McKerrow (ed.), revised F. P. Wilson, The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1958), spelling modernised. ²⁸ O. B. Hardison, Jr, Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, 1989), 146. See also GuyBray, ‘Embracing Troy’, 181. ²⁹ James Simpson, ‘The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: The Exiled Reader’s Presence’, in Copeland (ed.), Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 1, 601–24, 614.
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268 - Some in the flame their irked bodies cast. There was no more but I left of them all. (Surrey, Aeneid, 2.731–43, Poems, 54)³⁰
The tautly wrought lines, smoothed for metrical regularity in Tottel’s edition, offer an exemplary exercise in moving an audience to pity, and the resonances of Surrey’s poetic legacy can be heard in the staging of Aeneas’s testimony in Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queene of Carthage (1594) and even in the complex moment of reception embodied by the first player, who delivers a third-person version of ‘Aeneas’ talk to Dido . . . when he speaks of Priam’s slaughter’ in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2.2.369–70, Norton Shakespeare, 1797).³¹ For Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, who offers a psychoanalytic approach to Renaissance dynastic epic, there is something inherently pathological about the compulsive quality of repetition in epic, whereby memories put into words are called upon less in service of glory but rather indicate a repression or negation of epic subjecthood.³² And indeed, as Guy-Bray observes, what Surrey perhaps discovered in Virgil’s epic was a means by which to defy the idea that ‘to tell grief is to lessen it’, or that ‘memory is in any way therapeutic’.³³ For Surrey’s Aeneas, for example, articulating the contemplation of loss typically prompts reiterative action, drawing on reserves of strength beyond the capacity of most mortal men: O sacred mother, was it then for this, That you me led through flame and weapons sharp, That I might in my secret chamber see Mine enemies; and Ascanius my son, My father, with Creusa my sweet wife, Murdered, alas, the one in th’other’s blood? Why, servants, then, bring me my arms again. The latter day us vanquished doth call. Render me now to the Greeks sight again, And let me see the fight begun of new. We shall not all unwroken die this day. (Surrey, Aeneid, 2.874–84, Poems, 58)
If we contrast this rendering with Douglas’s translation of the same moment, quoted above, Surrey’s borrowings are notable (‘unwroken’, for example), but they also illustrate how his ‘strange’ verse, in not seeking temporary resolution or rest through sounded end-rhymes, creates syntactical units that draw attention to the effortful labour of Aeneas’s onward drives. By articulating an ever-moving relationship between subjective thought and action, Surrey emphasises Aeneas’s emerging grim resolve: something which, as Simpson argues, ‘would resonate with a courtier on the losing side in Henrician England’.³⁴ ³⁰ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Emrys Jones (ed.), Poems (Oxford, 1964), spelling modernised. ³¹ William Shakespeare, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016). ³² See Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Ithaca, NY, 1992). ³³ Guy-Bray, ‘Embracing Troy’, 190. See also Andrew Hiscock, Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2011), 37–64. ³⁴ Simpson, ‘The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’, 617. As Colin Burrow observes, ‘most English translators of Virgil are anxious about their own standing, and usually they support losing political causes’: see ‘Virgil in English Translation’, in Charles Martindale (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge,
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269 Later in the century, the Welsh-born polymath Thomas Phaer dedicated his Seven First Books of the Eneidos of Virgil, first published in 1558, to the Catholic monarch Mary I. The work was reprinted after his death, in 1560, in a 1562 edition that had been enlarged to nine books, this time with a dedication to the Protestant politician Sir Nicholas Bacon, father of Sir Francis Bacon. If reprint rates are taken as a measure of popularity, the work found a warm reception with readers, and the translation was completed by Thomas Twyne, appearing as the full twelve books in 1573 before being reprinted with Twyne’s further translation of Vegio’s continuation in 1584.³⁵ Phaer’s efforts were praised by Webbe, who challenged his readers to place the translation alongside Virgil’s work and ‘weigh with himself, whether the English tongue might by little and little be brought to the very majesty of a right heroical verse’ (Webbe, Discourse, sig. E1v). Phaer chose to use fourteeners as a way of approximating hexameter verse in English. However, as Neil Rhodes has recently demonstrated by deconstructing Phaer’s long lines, the metre was not unlike that of ballads: ‘for less discerning readers’, he observes, ‘the sense that Phaer was always teetering on the brink of the common [metre] may have been a point in his favour’.³⁶ In Phaer’s hands, the famous opening four-line Ille ego proem—which was frequently printed in early modern editions of the Aeneid before the famous declaration arma virumque cano [I sing of arms and the man]³⁷—takes on a homely, yet musical, cadence: I that my slender oaten pipe in verse was wont to sound Of woods, and next to that I taught for husbandmen the ground, How fruit unto their greedy lust they might constrain to bring, A work of thanks: Lo now of Mars, and dreadful wars I sing, Of arms, and of the man of Troy, that first by fatal flight Did thence arrive to Lavine land, that now Italia hight. (Phaer, Aeneid, 1.1–6, Critical Edition, 7)³⁸
These famous lines, which set out the terms of the cursus Virgilii, or the path orientating the progression from pastoral, via georgic, to epic, that gives shape to the notion of the Virgilian literary career, are made distinctive in Phaer’s translation, owing to his employment of native diction.³⁹ The cumulative effect of Phaer’s chosen register, as seen in Aeneas’s journey to the underworld in Book 6, is that Virgil’s epic appears at times to be filtered 1997), 21–37, 21. Further evidence for this includes Thomas Wyatt’s epic fragment ‘Iopas’s Song’, which uses poulter’s measure to expand the moment at the end of the Aeneid’s first book when the lyre player at Dido’s feast sings of Atlas. In Wyatt’s intervention/expansion—which takes in contemporary astronomical knowledge to consider the interconnected spheres of the firmament, and thus reframe the trials of the suffering exiles by articulating a vast cosmographical perspective—the movements of the heavens are ‘scant sensible to man’ (line 33); see Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978), 218. See also Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), 74–7; and Cathy Shrank, ‘Finding a Vernacular Voice: The Classical Translations of Sir Thomas Wyatt’, in Copeland (ed.), Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 1, 583–600. That such an attitude might reflect Surrey’s own personal cast of thought is considered by Jonathan Crewe in Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 48–78. ³⁵ After the 1558, 1562, 1573, and 1584 editions, the work was further reprinted in 1596, 1600, 1607, and 1620. ³⁶ Neil Rhodes, Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England (Oxford, 2018), 176. ³⁷ See P. A. Hansen, ‘Ille Ego qui Quondam . . . Once Again’, The Classical Quarterly, 22.1 (1972), 139–49. ³⁸ Thomas Phaer, in Steven Lally (ed.), The Aeneid of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne: A Critical Edition Introducing Renaissance Metrical Typography (New York, 1987), spelling modernised. ³⁹ For Classical and early modern notions of a poetic ‘career’, see Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA, 1983); and Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (eds), Classical Literary Careers and their Reception (Cambridge, 2010). See also Chapter 9 in this volume.
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270 - through the archaising tendencies of medieval romance. As Steven Lally observes, for example, ‘Phaer adopts elements from the world of faerie for the chthonian language of book six’, resulting in the introduction of ‘Celtic bugges and the Middle English goblins into this Plutonic realm’.⁴⁰ Faced with these ‘divers monsters . . . of sundry sorts unkind’ (Phaer, Aeneid, 6.302, Critical Edition, 128), the epic hero responds to his guide, Dame Sibly (the Cumaean Sybil of Virgil’s epic), with a dynamic that casts the hero in the role of questing knight: Aeneas suddenly for fear his glistering sword out took, And as they threatening came, he towards them his fauchon* shook. *sword And (but his learned guide instruct him did, to let go by Those flittering tender forms, and not to touch those shapes that fly Which nothing been but life, and substance none, but likeness thin) He would with them have fought, and did in vain to beat begin. (Phaer, Aeneid, 6.308–13, Critical Edition, 129)
When considering the influence of Phaer’s translation of Virgil’s epic on later poets, it is striking how alike its cadences are to the poetry of Edmund Spenser’s epic allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), suggesting that Spenser drew heavily on Phaer’s work, although this connection is typically overlooked by critics, owing to a desire to identify instead the Latin editions of Virgil with which Spenser may have worked.⁴¹ Most notably, Aeneas’s entrance into Phaer’s underworld anticipates both the entrance of Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight into the shadowy wandering wood—where Una takes on Dame Sibly’s advisory role—and the last stages of Book 2’s Odyssean voyage towards the Bower of Bliss, when the Palmer offers similar advice to Guyon on encountering the horrors of the deep: ‘Feare nought, then saide the Palmer well auiz’d; / For these same Monsters are not these in deed, / But are into these fearefull shapes disguiz’d’ (Spenser, Faerie Queene, 2.12.26.1–3).⁴² Indeed, as David Scott Wilson-Okamura observes, reflecting on Spenser’s ‘pervasive’ interest in epic katabasis or ‘the journey down’, Spenser’s ‘Fairyland’ itself ‘is the underworld, an Elysium of sorts in which British heroes, dead and unborn, relive or rehearse their deeds in life’, which suggests the hold Book 6 of the Aeneid, accessed perhaps via Phaer’s translation, had over Spenser’s imagination.⁴³ As the Variorum edition of Spenser’s works notes, Phaer—together with Gavin Douglas and Arthur Golding, translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English in 1567—often translated ‘nymphae’ (nymphs) as ‘fairies’: a further indication of how the denizens of Classical epic found new dwelling places within the habitats of English poetry during the sixteenth century.⁴⁴ Further anticipating Spenser’s explanation of his own epic project as ‘clowdily enwrapped in Allegorical deuises’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, Faerie Queene, 716), the translator and historian Richard Stanyhurst observed in the preface of his First Four Books of Virgil his Aeneis (1582) that there is much matter ‘sealed up’ in the depths of Virgil’s ⁴⁰ Steven Lally, (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Aeneid of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne, xi–lxii, xvii. ⁴¹ See, e.g., David Scott Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2010), 26, 30–1. John Watkins, however, does use the work of Phaer and Twyne—the ‘standard Tudor translation of the Aeneid’—to discuss Spenser’s adoption of motifs from Vegius’s thirteenth book. See John Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic (New Haven, CT, 1995), 109–11, 106. ⁴² Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ⁴³ Wilson-Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance, 151. ⁴⁴ See Edmund Spenser, in Rudolf Gottfried (ed.), The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, Vol. 2, The Minor Poems (Baltimore, MD, 1947), 312.
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271 twelve-book epic, suggesting that its depictions of pagan societies could be read as shadowing the moral and spiritual issues of his day: ‘the shallow reader may be delighted with a smooth tale, and the diving searcher may be advantaged by sounding a precious treatise’ (Stanyhurst, First Four Books, sig. A2).⁴⁵ In seeking to distinguish his labours from those of Phaer and Tywne, Stanyhurst took on the challenge of being the first translator to attempt to render not only the contents but also the prosody of the Aeneid’s hexameter lines: an exercise that met varying degrees of success, as his opening translation of the Ille ego proem and subsequent line demonstrates: I that in old season with reeds oaten harmony whistled My rural sonnet; from forest flitted I forced Thee* sulcking swincker* thee soil, though craggy, to sunder. *the *labourer A labour and a travail too* plough-swains heartily welcome. *to Now manhood and garbroyls* I chant, and martial horror. *disturbance, tumult (Stanyhurst, First Four Books, sig. B3)⁴⁶
From the poem’s outset, Stanyhurst’s Aeneas appears awkwardly positioned within the Classical setting and, as a ‘wandering pilgrim’ cast off course ‘by God’s predestinate order’ (Stanyhurst, First Four Books, sig. B3), subject to the divergent influences of postReformation religious convictions.⁴⁷ As another of Virgil’s sixteenth-century politically dispossessed translators, who had been born into an Old English family living in Dublin, Stanyhurst converted to Catholicism in the late 1570s, and his work was published while he was an exile in Leiden. As Sheldon Brammall has observed, Stanyhurst’s translation is striking for the characterisation of its hero: ‘Stanyhurst’s Aeneas is not, as he was for Phaer and Twynne, the vir virtutis [man of virtue] and winner of glory; rather, he is an exile who martyrs himself for his religious cause.’⁴⁸ Indeed, in the words of Aeneas at the start of Book 3: I, salt tears shedding, my native country relinquished, The roads and platforms where Troy stood: sad to the seaward With my companions and with my young son Julus With Gods, mighty patrons, my course and passage I bended. (Stanyhurst, First Four Books, sig. H1)
For Stanyhurst, then, the sufferings of Virgil’s epic protagonist spoke to present concerns with dispossession, and the loss of a homeland is deeply felt: a dynamic that complicates David Quint’s sense of how the ‘two rival traditions of epic . . . associated with Virgil and Lucan’ set up ‘an opposition between epics of the imperial victors and epics of the defeated, a defeated whose resistance contains the term of a broader republican or antimonarchical politics’.⁴⁹ Stanyhurst, it seems, discovers a poetics of the defeated within his Virgilian model.
⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁷ ⁴⁸ ⁴⁹
Richard Stanyhurst, The First Four Books of Virgil His Aeneis (Leiden, 1582). For further discussions of this passage, see also Chapters 3 and 6 in this volume. See Hardison, Prosody and Purpose, 205. Sheldon Brammall, The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil, 1555–1646 (Edinburgh, 2015), 45. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 8.
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272 - Nevertheless, in taking on the challenges presented by Virgil—namely, in matching his skills as ‘surpassing poet’, ‘orator’, and ‘profound philosopher’—Stanyhurst took courage from the advice ‘of master Ascham . . . who, in his golden pamphlet, entitled The Schoolmaster, doth wish the university students to apply their wits in beautifying our English language with heroical verses’ (Stanyhurst, First Four Books, sig. A2v). Roger Ascham had advocated the imitation of Classical models and quantitative metre with the intention of beginning a project to reform English eloquence by developing a vernacular tongue capable of handling dactylic hexameters.⁵⁰ And for the benefit of those ‘that have lust to see how our English tongue, in avoiding barbarous rhyming, may as well receive, right quantity of syllables, and true order of versifying’, he had given as an example the opening lines of the Odyssey translated by Thomas Watson, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and later Bishop of Lincoln, into an hexameter couplet: ‘All travellers do gladly report great praise of Ulysses, / For that he knew many men’s manners, and saw many cities’ (Ascham, Schoolmaster, sig. H4).⁵¹ However, as Ascham ruefully observes, ‘our English tongue, having in use chiefly, words of one syllable which commonly be long, doth not well receive the nature of Carmen Heroicum, because dactylus, the aptest foot for that verse, containing one long and two short, is seldom therefore found in English: and doth also rather stumble than stand upon monosyllables’ (Ascham, The Schoolmaster, sigs. R4–R4v). Ascham’s deft use of wordplay to articulate the challenges faced by pedestrian English poets hoping to measure lines using dactylic feet finds a later parallel in Nashe’s Strange News (1592), which attacks the claim made by his literary rival Gabriel Harvey to be the first to experiment with English hexameters. As Nashe writes, The hexameter verse I grant to be a gentleman of an ancient house (so is many an English beggar) yet this clime of ours he cannot thrive in; our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough in: he goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man running upon quagmires up the hill in one syllable and down the dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gate, which he vaunts himself with amongst the Greeks and Latins. (Nashe, Strange News, Works, 1.298–9)
The fate of the Carmen Heroicum in English during the sixteenth century is thus cast not only in relation to a concern with the matters conveyed—namely those of both weight and elevation—but also in relation to formal and decorous uses of the English language. In his commitment to classicising experiments, for example, Stanyhurst was similarly mocked by his contemporaries, Nashe amongst them, who commented that ‘Master Stanyhurst (though otherwise learned) trod a foul lumbering boisterous wallowing measure, in his translation of Virgil’ (Nashe, Strange News, Works, 1.299). Recent criticism has not always been kinder. Derek Attridge, for example, despite emphasising the value of the boldness and conviction of Stanyhurst’s metrical experimentation, including his fascination with onomatopoetic words, comments on how a readerly experience often leaves the impression that ‘the language has been so wrenched out of shape as to have lost most of the subtlety of expression it possesses’.⁵² For Patricia Palmer, the overall effect of Stanyhurst’s labour ⁵⁰ For the rationale and history of experiments in quantitative metre in the sixteenth century, see Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974); and Gabriela Schmidt, ‘Realigning English Vernacular Poetics Through Metrical Experiment: Sixteenth-Century Translation and the Elizabethan Quantitative Verse’, Literature Compass, 7.5 (2010), 303–17. ⁵¹ Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (London, 1570), spelling modernised. ⁵² Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables, 170.
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273 ‘dismantles epic stylistically, hollowing it out through the relentless attrition of meaning produced, paradoxically, by the linguistic plenitude of his translation . . . To reformulate Quint: to the victors belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs linguistic extravagance, with its subversion of imperial purpose.’⁵³ This ‘subversion’, it seems, does not seek the recuperative potential of romance digression but instead incorporates loss and contingency into the epic mode itself. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, translations of Virgil’s Roman epic were joined by printed translations of Homer’s Iliad in English, though initially in less confident guises.⁵⁴ Arthur Hall, for example, author of Ten Books of Homer’s Iliades (1581), confessed his despair at trying to achieve the lofty heights of previous translators such as Phaer, let alone the Greek of Homer’s verse itself: These persons, whose books I am not worthy to carry, when I minded, I wished I had been otherwise occupied, I condemned my travail, I scratched my head as men do, when they are greatly barred of their wills. But when I lighted on M. Thomas Phaer’s Virgilian English, quoth I, what have I done? . . . I was so abashed looking upon M. Phaer’s heroical Virgil, and my satirical Homer, as I cried out, envying Virgil’s prosperity, who gathered of Homer, that he had fallen into the oddest man’s hands, that ever England bred. And lamented poor blind Homer’s case, who gathered of no body, to fall to me poor blind soul, poorly and blindly to learn him to talk our mother tongue. (Hall, Ten Books, sig. A3v)⁵⁵
Like Caxton, Hall worked from a mediating source—a translation by Hugues Salel—taking his ‘wares at the second hand, as by France out of Greece’ owing to his inability to ‘travail so far for them, not understanding the language’ (Hall, Ten Books, sigs. A3v–A4). The resulting work has several notable features that again anticipate Spenser’s English epic, including a familiar native vocabulary and a reliance on reading warfare through chivalric modes. When Odysseus recalls his fellow Greek warriors to remind them of their fealty following Agamemnon’s test of their courage in Book 2, for example, the corrective is framed as a lesson that concerns the subjection of any earthly ruler to divine will—here a Christian God—and couples words with the threat of violence: ‘For that power by the which he rules, proceeds from grace above, And who commands here in God’s place, him God doth always love’. Ulysses to his fellow knights thus courteously did say, Not irously*, but if he found a knave careful of prey, *angrily Or mutinous, who made as though he home would pass the seas, With his sceptre he dealt some blows, and, ‘beastly wretch’, he says: ‘Becomes it thee, thou Hedgehog thou, who loves no toil but ease, With murmurous words to go about thy captain to displease?’ (Hall, Ten Books, sig. D4v)
⁵³ See Patricia Palmer, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Literature, Translation and Violence in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2014), 127–31, 130. See also Quint, Epic and Empire, 9. ⁵⁴ For the European context, see Tania Demetriou, ‘The Homeric Question in the Sixteenth Century: Early Modern Scholarship and the Text’, Renaissance Quarterly, 68.2 (2015), 496–557. ⁵⁵ Arthur Hall, Ten Books of Homer’s Iliades (London, 1581), spelling modernised.
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274 - A further indicative example of Hall’s touch can be seen when the pagan goddess Venus, wounded in body and pride by Diomedes, petitions Mars for aid to assuage her hurts by taking to ‘her marybones’ [shin bones] (Hall, Ten Books, sig. M3v): a word choice that serves to fuse the language of early modern Marian devotion with the dynamics of vernacular complaint and Classical revenge.⁵⁶ At the very end of the sixteenth century, George Chapman’s initial Seven Books of the Iliads (1598) began to circulate in print. The partial translation is prefaced by an extraordinary dedicatory letter addressed to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who is venerated as ‘the most honoured now living instance of the Achillean virtues eternized by divine Homer’ (Chapman, Seven Books, dedicatory letter, Chapman’s Homer, 1.503),⁵⁷ as if he embodied the spirit of the Achaean warrior. The dedicatory letter bears witness to the capacity of heroic verse to take on present meaning in ways that go far beyond the abstract and idealising musings of Webbe and Sidney discussed above, as Chapman writes of how this work will ‘propose the true image of all virtues and humane government; (even in the heart of this tumultuous season) to your other serious affairs: especially since it contains the true portrait of ancient stratagems and disciplines of war’ (Chapman, Seven Books, dedicatory letter, Chapman’s Homer, 1.506). He notes the ‘affinity they have with your present complements of field: the orations, counsels, attempts and exploits not to be exceeded by the freshest brains of this hot-spirited time; the horror or arms endlessly thundering; piety, justice, valour, and royalty, eternally shining’. It is as if Homer’s ‘soul-infused verse’ holds a mirror up to Essex’s present, and his pursuit of fame and victory during Elizabeth’s Irish wars (Chapman, Seven Books, dedicatory letter, Chapman’s Homer, 1.506). In his reading of Chapman’s Seven Books, Burrow observes that Essex—as a subject, and critic, of Elizabeth I—had a ‘sufficient sense of his own right to reproduce something of Achilles’s just rage’.⁵⁸ Chapman’s initial partial translation is thus framed by the terms of the ‘tumultuous season’ in which it was engendered, which adds, in hindsight, a further charge to the epic poet’s interest in how the short-sighted pride of Agamemnon is challenged by Achilles. For example, following the prophecy of Calchas, who has revealed to Agamemnon that the plague visited upon the Achaeans has been orchestrated by Chryses, father of Agamemnon’s war-prize, the beautiful Trojan woman Chryseis, and Apollo, Chapman’s ‘divine’ Achilles—a man unafraid of speaking truth to power—counsels his stubborn king in order to defend the rights of his fellow warriors. Addressing Agamemnon thus, ‘divine, Achilles, said’: ‘Ambitious and most covetous man, what prize can be repaid By these our noble-minded friends, for thy desired supply? All know how scantly we have stored our common treasury. For what the spoiled cities gave, each soldier for his pain, Hath duly shared by our consents, which to exact again Were base and ignominious, but to the God resign Thy pleasure of our common good: and if the most divine So grace us that this well-walled town, we level with the plain
⁵⁶ See OED, marrowbone, n., 2: ‘Frequently used humorously in phrases referring to kneeling in supplication, prayer’. ⁵⁷ George Chapman, in Allardyce Nicoll (ed.), Chapman’s Homer, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1967), spelling modernised. ⁵⁸ Burrow, Epic Romance, 215.
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275 We fourfold will repay the loss thy fortunes now sustain’. The king replied, ‘Be not deceived nor think though thou art strong And godlike framed, thou canst persuade my patience to my wrong Or that thy feet into thy breath can transmigrated be To pass me with thy sleights as well as in outrunning me. Wouldst thou thyself enjoy thy prize, and I sit dispossessed?’ (Chapman, Seven Books, Book 1, lines 123–36, Chapman’s Homer, 1.512–13)
Like Hall and Phaer, Chapman used couplet-rhymed fourteeners for his translation; however, he also populated this metre with knotty Latinate constructions that frequently work against or temper the end-rhymes, creating sinuous enjambed lines. When the expanded text of Chapman’s translation was reprinted in folio during the first decade of the seventeenth century, the dedication to Essex was replaced with a dedication to Prince Henry in an outward move to neutralise the memory of Essex’s rebellious ambitions, and in particular, the attempted coup he had staged against Elizabeth I in 1601. However, as Burrow observes, the guise of translating Classical epic, ostensibly remote in time and place from the tumult of the times, enabled a freedom to persist in, and even intensify, Chapman’s earlier fascination with ‘rebellious energy’.⁵⁹ A further publication—a fragment of Homer’s eighteenth book containing the famous ekphrastic episode detailing the shield of Achilles—was also published in 1598. By choosing to work in ten-syllable lines for this translation, rather than in fourteeners, Chapman demonstrates the flexibility of his practices, and draws further attention to the cosmographical potential present in epic: for, as he proposes, ‘what is here prefigured by our miraculous artist, but the universal world, which being so spacious and almost unmeasurable, one circlet of a shield represents and embraceth?’ (Chapman, Achilles Shield, dedicatory letter, Chapman’s Homer, 1.543). The self-contained microcosmic episode famously keeps scale and perspective in constant motion, using the poet’s heightened verbal description to move from the world of the gods to a detailed account of the visual artifice of the shield’s surface, which depicts the ‘earth’s green globe, the sea and heaven, / Th’unwearied sun; the moon exactly round, / And all the stars with which the sky is crowned’ (Chapman, Achilles Shield, lines 158–60, Chapman’s Homer, 1.554). The shield’s microcosmic scope is populated, full of energy and motion, in a way that juxtaposes violence with fruitful activity; as a doubled work of craftsmanship, it draws attention to the labouring, world-making, art of the poet. The fragment draws attention to the room created within the epic form to speak of creation and the cosmos: a dynamic that reaches its full potential in the works of the Huguenot poet Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas, whose poems, Création du Monde, ou Première Sepmaine [Creation of the World, or the First Week] (1578) and La Seconde Semaine [The Second Week] (1584–1603), were first translated into English by William L’Isle, as Babilon, a Part of the Second Week of Guillaume de Saluste, Seigneur du Bartas (1595) and The Colonies of Bartas (1597), and by Joshua Sylvester, as The First Day of the World’s Creation (1596) and The Second Week or Childhood of the World (1598), at the end of the sixteenth century.⁶⁰ Chapman’s short volume also contains a letter addressed ‘To the Understander’, which offers further insight into his interests in the plasticity of language. He writes, appealing to ⁵⁹ Burrow, Epic Romance, 214–18, 217. ⁶⁰ See Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Reception of Du Bartas in England’, Studies in the Renaissance, 15 (1968), 144–73.
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276 - the pleasures granted by the perusal of ‘Italian and French poems to our studious linguists’, with the hope that what he calls his own ‘far-fetched, and as it were, beyond-sea manner of writing’ will find favour with those willing to go beyond ‘a discourse that falls naked before them’. His defence of the ‘variety of new words’ to which he gives ‘passport’ catches at the strain placed upon ‘discountryed’ forms (Chapman, Achilles Shield, ‘To the Understander’, Chapman’s Homer, 1.548). Epic translation may thus act as a vehicle for thinking about spatial and temporal elsewheres, and estrangement and homecoming, but it was one vitally connected to early modern understandings of self, tongue, and nation owing to its transmission of cultural authority: a combination of translatio imperii and translatio studii.⁶¹ It is noteworthy, then, that in an earlier original poem written in the epic mode, ‘De Guiana, Carmen Epicum’ [An epic poem about Guiana], which was composed in praise of Sir Walter Ralegh’s enterprise to locate the gold mines of El Dorado, and published within Lawrence Kemys’s A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana (1596), Chapman sings of ‘Riches with honour, conquest without blood, / Enough to seat the monarchy of earth, / Like to Jove’s Eagle, on Eliza’s hand’, as if the assimilation of westward lands under Elizabeth Tudor’s rule could occur without violence or compromise (Chapman, in Kemys, A Relation, sig. A1v).⁶² In using familiar Classical allusions to temper the strangeness of engaging with unfamiliar terrain, Chapman illustrates how the notion of a ‘beyond-sea manner of writing’ catches not only at the permeable boundaries of the English vernacular but also at the literary strategies provided by Classical epic to parse encounters with the horizons of an expanding world, and even the places of a new Golden Age that were traditionally situated, as A. Bartlett Giamatti observes, ‘at the world’s end’.⁶³ Chapman’s English translation of Homer’s Odyssey—the archetypal poem of nostos, or homecoming—would have to wait until the seventeenth century.
Spenser, Shakespeare, and the Tears of Calliope Writing in his Palladis Tamia (1598), Francis Meres contested that as ‘Homer and Virgil among the Greeks and Latins are the chief heroic poets: so Spenser and Warner be our chief heroical makers’ (Meres, Palladis Tamia, sig. Oo2v).⁶⁴ To be an ‘heroical maker’ in the late sixteenth century thus suggests a variety of occupations. Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for example, is routinely read through the frames of allegory and romance, in addition to epic, and draws on Italian sources, including Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532) and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581; partially translated as Godfrey of Bulloigne by Richard Carew and published in 1594; translated in full by Edward Fairfax in 1600). William Warner’s Albion’s England (1586), by contrast, advertises itself as a history that, beginning from Noah’s survival of the flood, narrates ‘this clyme’, or climate, ‘of ours’ and ‘acts of
⁶¹ As Bellamy notes, ‘the westward movement from Troy to Rome traces the origin of the theoretical structure of the translatio imperii’, and signals ‘that each suggestive attempt at the founding of empire throughout Western history is an act of “carrying across” ’. See Bellamy, Translations of Power, 72. See also Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (Philadelphia, PA, 2014). ⁶² Lawrence Kemys, A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana (London, 1596). ⁶³ A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, NJ, 1966), 19. See also David McInnis, ‘The Golden Man and the Golden Age: The Relationship of English Poets and the New World Reconsidered’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 13.1 (2007), unpaginated. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/13–1/ mcingold.htm. ⁶⁴ Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598).
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277 Englishmen’ (Warner, Albion’s England, sig. A1).⁶⁵ The one thing both authors have in common is their focus on epic as a dynastic mode and their adoption of the translatio imperii trope—now signalling a westward movement from Troy, to Rome, to the further territorial extremities of England and Ireland, and beyond—as an organising principle. In describing the foundation of the city of London, for example, Warner traces a narrative that connects distant soils and shores, investing in the idea that the inhabitants of Britain were descendants of Brutus, and thus perpetuated a bloodline that could be traced back to Trojan origins:⁶⁶ Now, of the conqueror, this isle had Britain unto name, And with his Trojans Brute began manurage* of the same. *occupation For raised Troy, to rear a Troy, fit place he searched then: And views the mounting northern parts: these fit (quoth he) for men That trust as much to flight, as fight: our bulwarks are our breasts, The next arrivals here, perchance, will gladlier build their nests. A Trojan’s courage is to him a fortress of defence. And leaving so, where Scots be now, he southward maketh thence: Whereas the earth more plenty gave, and air more temperature, And nothing wanted that by wealth or pleasure might allure. And more, the Lady Flood of Floods, the River Thamis, it Did seem to Brute against the foe, and with himself to fit. Upon whose fruitful banks therefore, whose bounds are chiefly said, The want-less counties Essex, Kent, with which the wealthy glade Of Hertfordshire for city’s store affords no little aid, Did Brute build up his Troy-novant, enclosing it with wall: Which Lud did after beautify, and Luds-town it did call That now is London: evermore to rightful princes true, Yea prince and people still to it as to their storehouse drew, For plenty and for populous the like we nowhere view. (Warner Albion’s England, sig. G4v)
For Spenser, whose Prince Arthur reads an ‘auncient booke, hight Briton moniments’ (Faerie Queene, 2.9.59.6) that tells of how the name, realm, and race of his ‘soueraine Queene’ (Faerie Queene, 2.10.4.1) can be traced to the legendary founder, Brutus combines, as Ayesha Ramachandran writes, ‘both an Aeneas-figure and a Columbus-figure’, who makes landfall ‘driuen by fatall error’ (Faerie Queene, 2.10.9.8) before spreading ‘his empire to the vtmost shore’ (Faerie Queene, 2.10.10.2).⁶⁷ The four stanzas comprising the proem to the first book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene both set up and complicate the relationship between the poem and Classical epic. In paraphrasing the Aeneid’s Ille ego proem, Spenser draws attention to his imitation—a somewhat vagrant one—of the cursus Virgilii, indicating his investment in the idea of the literary career that
⁶⁵ William Warner, Albion’s England (London, 1586). ⁶⁶ See David Galbraith, Architectonics of Imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton (Toronto, 2000); and Andrew Fichter, Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 1982). ⁶⁷ See Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, IL, 2015), 106–46.
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278 - aspires to culminate in epic.⁶⁸ He recalls his pastoral debut as the writer of The Shepheardes Calender (1579): Lo I the man, whose Muse whylome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shephards weeds, Am now enforst a farre vnfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds: And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds, Whose praises hauing slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broad emongst her learned throng: Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song. (Faerie Queene, 1.Proem.1)
The narrator’s promise to sing of both ‘love and (epic) fame’ has, as Philip Hardie observes, been read as a ‘correction’ of the Virgilian model, serving to offer ‘a reconciliation of human love and selfhood with the demands of empire, eased by Neoplatonic and Augustinian revaluations of love, and following the romance models of Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata’.⁶⁹ And, indeed, John Harington’s defence of the diversions Ariosto makes from Aristotle’s theories of epic also provides a partial account of the shifting generic terrain navigated by Spenser. As Harington had written, in an attempt to turn ‘two reproofs’ into ‘two peculiar praises’, Ariosto, for example, ‘breaks off narrations very abruptly’—a challenge to an inattentive reader—and also speaks ‘in his own person by digression which they say also is against the rules of poetry because neither Homer nor Virgil did it’ (Harington, ‘Brief Apology’, 13). Harington turns his mind to the cognitive effects of these techniques on the reader, drawing out an extended horticultural image in order to consider the effect of recreational places within epic space: ‘it is . . . an excellent breathing place for the reader, and even as if a man walked in a fair long alley to have a seat or resting place here and there is easy and commodious, but if at the same seat were planted some excellent tree, that not only with the shade should keep us from the heat but with some pleasant and right wholesome fruit should allay our thirst and comfort our stomach we would think it for the time a little paradise’ (Harington, ‘Brief Apology’, 13). If epic is associated with war-ravaged landscapes, privation, and, as in the case of the Aeneid, living in the aftermath, then Harington imagines the new capacities created by the narrative innovations of the Continental epicists to admit the possibility of verdant moral and pleasurable refreshment within the form. In the series of invocations that structure the successive stanzas of The Faerie Queene’s first proem, then, the poet seeks aid from guiding forces that each have the capacity to oversee the distinct strands of his epic vision. First, the ‘holy virgin chiefe of nyne’, the epic Muse, is petitioned for the strength to uncover from the ‘antique rolles’ the quest of Arthur ‘that most noble Briton Prince’ (Faerie Queene, 1.Proem.2.1, lines 4, 6). Secondly, the poet implores ‘Faire Venus sonne’ and his ‘mother mylde’ (Faerie Queene, 1.Proem.3.2, line 6) to
⁶⁸ See Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993). See also Chapter 27 in this volume. ⁶⁹ Philip Hardie, ‘Spenser’s Vergil: The Faerie Queene and the Aeneid’, in Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. Putnam (eds), A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and its Tradition (Chichester, 2010), 173–85. For a classic study see Merritt Y. Hughes, Virgil and Spenser (Port Washington, NY, 1929).
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279 Come both, and with you bring triumphant Mart, In loues and gentle iollities arraid, After his murdrous spoyles and bloudie rage allayd. (Faerie Queene, 1.Proem.3, lines 7–9)
Finally, the poet invokes the deific aspect of his monarch, the ‘Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine, / Great Ladie of the greatest Isle’, to illuminate his labours: Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne, And raise my thoughtes too humble and too vile, To thinke of that true glorious type of thine, The argument of mine afflicted stile. (Faerie Queene, 1.Proem.4, lines 5–8)
When read in sequence, the triple invocation—Calliope, Venus, Elizabeth I—positions the poet’s voice in relation to the feminine-inspired models of his Classical predecessors, illuminating The Faerie Queene’s concern not only with Briton moniments, but also with the capacity of generative love to temper strife in Christian epic, and the potential magnificence—and fragility—of labouring to sing of a dynasty presently embodied by a virgin queen.⁷⁰ The relationship between commemoration and epic is evoked when Spenser mentions the mnemonic function of material objects in Book 1 by writing of Arthur’s armour, fashioned by Merlin, which ‘when he dyde, the Faery Queene it brought / To Faerie lond, where yet it may be seene, if sought’ (Faerie Queene, 1.7.36, lines 8–9). Alongside this elegiac note, it is worth considering the strain in the poetry of the late sixteenth century, in which Spenser himself also participates, that laments the inadequacies of the age and elegises epic itself. In Spenser’s complaint poem The Teares of the Muses (1591), for example, the epic muse Calliope regretfully confesses that: . . . they to whom I vsed to applie The faithfull seruice of my learned skill, The goodly off-spring of Ioues progenie, That wont the world with famous acts to fill; Whose liuing praises in heroïck stile, It is my chief profession to compyle: They all corrupted through the rust of time, That doth all fairest things on earth deface, Or through vnnoble sloth, or sinful crime, That doth degenerate the noble race; Haue both desire of worthy deeds forlorne, And name of learning vtterly doo scorne. Ne doo they care to haue the auncestrie Of th’old Heroës memorizde anew, Ne doo they care that late posteritie
⁷⁰ See Kenneth Borris, ‘(H)eroic Disarmament: Spenser’s Unarmed Cupid, Platonized Heroism, and The Faerie Queene’s Poetics’, Spenser Studies, 31–2 (2017/18), 97–135.
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280 - Should know their names, or speak their praises dew: But die forgot from whence at first they sprong, As they themselues shalbe forgot ere long. (Spenser, Teares, lines 427–44, Shorter Poems, 201)⁷¹
In articulating the loss of an age of heroes, now passed, the stanzas emphasise the traditional epic concern with the preservation of fame and the prolongation of memory: a dynamic that connects the achievement and consolidation of imperial power to poetic immortality via the pursuit of ‘imperishable glory’, and which underwrites Spenser’s decision to name his elusive queen of faeries Gloriana.⁷² Spenser’s own epic is, of course, famously unfinished, and proposed reasons for this, as long-debated by critics, range from the impossibility of reconciling the demands of writing epic poetry with the demands of a career as a colonial administrator in Ireland, to the impossibility of resolving the ambitious but ultimately divergent visions of the work.⁷³ Another work that pursues epic fame is Charles Fitzgeoffrey’s elegy, Sir Francis Drake His Honourable Life’s Commendation, and his Tragical Death’s Lamentation (1596). In dwelling on treacherous saline spaces and the unforgiving mutability of the seas, Fitzgeoffrey’s elegy casts the departed Drake as national hero lost to the deep, and the poet’s concern with remains reflects not only the logistical conclusion of burial at sea but also a literary anxiety, for there is no epic written to eternise Drake’s fame: Had he been born in Agamemnon’s age, When stout Achilles’ lance scourged Troy’s proud towers: When men ’gainst men, and gods ’gainst gods did rage, Aeneas’, Achilles’, nor Ulysses’ powers, Had been so famous in this age of ours: All poets would have written in his praise Their Aeneids, Iliads, and Odysseys. (Fitzgeoffrey, Sir Francis, sig. B6)⁷⁴
Fitzgeoffrey even addresses ‘Heart-stealing Homer, marrow of the Muses’, asking him to forget the ‘hard adventures’ of his own hero Odysseus, ‘That famous Ithacensian rover’, in favour of Drake, who navigated beyond the waters charted by the seafarers of Classical epic—and also beyond the ken of most English men—becoming the first of his countrymen to circumnavigate the globe (1577–80).⁷⁵ By turning his mind to the poets of his age, initially singling out ‘SPENSER, whose heart enharbours Homer’s soul’, Fitzgeoffrey thus implores his fellow poets to redirect the action of their sustained poetic labours:
⁷¹ Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). ⁷² See Jonas Grethlein, ‘From “Imperishable Glory” to History: The Iliad and the Trojan War’, in David Konstan and Kurt A. Raaflaub (eds), Epic and History (Oxford, 2010), 122–44; and Philip Hardie, Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge, 2012). ⁷³ See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, 1967); and Balachandra Rajan, The Form of the Unfinished: English Poetics from Spenser to Pound (Princeton, NJ, 1985). ⁷⁴ Charles Fitzgeoffrey, Sir Francis Drake, His Honourable Life’s Commendation, and his Tragical Death’s Lamentation (Oxford, 1596). ⁷⁵ See Michael J. B. Allen, ‘Charles Fitzgeffrey’s Commendatory Lamentation on the Death of Drake’, in Norman J. W. Thrower (ed.), Sir Francis Drake and The Famous Voyage, 1577–1580 (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 99–111.
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281 Let famous RED CROSSE yield to famous DRAKE, And good Sir GUYON give to him his lance; Let all the MORTIMERS surrender make To one that higher did his fame advance; Cease LANCASTERS, and YORKES jars to enhance; Sing all, and all too few to sing DRAKE’S fame; Your poems need no laurel save his name. (Fitzgeoffrey, Sir Francis, sig. B5v)
Spenser’s Redcrosse knight defeated his dragon but here Fitzgeoffrey rewrites the victory as submission, punning on Drake’s infamous nickname, Draco (Latin for dragon). Fitzgeoffrey also asks the reader to bring to mind Samuel Daniel’s historical poem Civil Wars (1595) and Michael Drayton’s heroical complaint Mortimeriados (1596; later revised as epic under the title The Barons’ Wars, 1603), in order to re-emphasise the commemorative and panegyric role of the epic mode in recording history. Fitzgeoffrey’s imagined surrender of Guyon to Drake, as the embodiment of active virtue, ever-moving and persisting, thus alludes to the way in which epic quests are subsumed and inherited in The Faerie Queene. In the initial antagonism of the first encounter between Redcrosse and Guyon in Book 2, for example, the laying down of arms by one knight only ensures that the other is fated to continue the quest: Ioy may you haue, and euerlasting fame, Of late most hard atchieu’ment by you donne, For which enrolled is your glorious name In heauenly Regesters aboue the Sunne, Where you a Saint with Saints your seat haue wonne: But wretched we, where ye haue left your marke, Must now anew begin, like race to ronne. (Spenser, Faerie Queene, 2.1.32.1–7)
In the end of Redcrosse’s journey in pursuit of ‘euerlasting fame’, Guyon sees only the beginning of his own. Spenser’s stanza thus encapsulates a sense of unrelenting prowess, on which Fitzgeoffrey draws by combining eulogy and lament: his grief is expressed not only for a fellow West Countryman but also for an unwritten epic, as if, to borrow Spenser’s words, the ‘heauenly Regesters’ are still awaiting the inscription of Drake’s ‘glorious name’. In searching, then, to name and praise the fellow adventurers that ushered in the modern age, from John and Sebastian Cabot to Humphrey Gilbert and Martin Frobisher, where each over-goes the success of his predecessor,⁷⁶ Fitzgeoffrey thus considers the limits of the textual transmission, and remediation, of fame: How that their lofty minds could not be bounded Within the cancels, that the world do bound; How that the deepest seas they search’d, and sounded, Beyond all lands that ever have been found,
⁷⁶ See Fitzgeoffrey, Sir Francis, sigs. E5–F1v.
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282 - Making the far-most seas our praise resound: And nations, which not Fame herself had seen, To carrol England’s fame, and fame’s rare Queen. (Fitzgeoffrey, Sir Francis, sig. E3v)
In likening the ever-expanding horizons of worldly knowledge, first limned by the heroes of Classical epic, to the replaced leaves of a bound printed book, the image elides the capacity of epic to exist in ‘carrolled’ as well as in printed forms. These explorers, Fitzgeoffrey suggests, risk travailing beyond even the gaze of Fame herself. The moment thus resonates with what Catherine Bates has described as Edmund Spenser’s major contribution to the epic genre, namely the ‘bookishness’ of epic, whereby ‘even such large-scale issues as the perennial tension between the epic poet’s “public” and “private” voice or between optimistic and pessimistic assessments of the epic task in hand are mediated, typically, by literary means’.⁷⁷ Spenser, of course, writing in the proem to the second book of The Faerie Queene, imagines his reader moving into the world of his epic by turning the leaves, or quires, in which his poem has been printed: ‘Of faery lond yet if he more inquyre / By certein signes here sett in sondrie place / He may it fynd’ (Faerie Queene, 2.Proem.4, lines 1–3). Yet, for all its rhetoric of discovery, Spenser’s Faerie Queene is no match for the heroic verses penned by epicists of rival seafaring nations, as Fitzgeoffrey points out in his panegyric to the explorers of the English nation, including the elegised but epic-less Drake. Such achievements belong to the Portuguese author, Luís Vaz de Camões, perhaps, and his commemoration of Vasco da Gama in his epic poem in ottava rima, Os Lusíadas.⁷⁸ For Frye, ‘epic poets articulate the centre. Dramatic poets have an epiphanic or moveable centre, revealed in every play they write’.⁷⁹ Yet, it is in the staging of historical narratives in the public theatres of London at the close of the sixteenth century that epic song is heard once again. Marlowe deployed blank verse and tackled epic themes within his tragic plays, but further engaged with the epic mode via his Ovidian miniature epic, Hero and Leander (1598), and his translation (first printed in 1600, though entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1593) of the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia. As Patrick Cheney has argued, this unfinished ‘counter-epic of empire’, on the subject of the civil war between the forces of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great, shapes the way Marlowe juxtaposes the ideals of imperialism with those of republicanism in order to consider the nature of liberty.⁸⁰ His fellow poet-playwright William Shakespeare has also long been observed to engage with epic modes—if not in any straightforward way—in Henry V (c 1599), in particular.⁸¹ The lines spoken by Henry V’s Chorus, which open the play, for example, pit the tenor, if not the
⁷⁷ Catherine Bates, ‘The Faerie Queene: Britain’s National Monument’, in Catherine Bates (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Epic (Cambridge, 2010), 133–45, 140. ⁷⁸ See Nick Davis, Stories of Chaos: Reason and its Displacement in Early Modern English Narrative (Aldershot, 1999), 75–61. ⁷⁹ Northrop Frye, in Michael Dolzani (ed.), Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature, Vol. 20 (Toronto, 2006), 244. ⁸⁰ See Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto, 1997), 227; and Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (Basingstoke, 2009). ⁸¹ See Edward I. Berry, ‘ “True Things and Mock’ries”: Epic and History in Henry V’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 78.1 (1979), 1–16. See also Gary Taylor (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Shakespeare: Henry V (Oxford, 1982), 1–74, 52–8, 72. Taylor notes, for example, Shakespeare’s borrowings from Chapman’s Seven Books (1598) and the allusions to Essex.
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283 fulfilment, of an epic invocation alongside a call for the theatrical means fit to equal those of heroical verse: Oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene. Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels, Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire Crouch for employment. (Henry V, 1.Chorus.1–8, Norton Shakespeare, 1545)
The play glories in the prospect of victory, but the deaths of fallen soldiers and executed prisoners on both sides, and Henry’s doubts on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, are powerfully realised and complicate its overall vision.⁸² The play’s structure means that the monologic Chorus is typically followed by scenes that introduce polyphonic complexity into the world of the play, whether via political rhetoric (such as the niceties of Salic Law debated at the beginning of the first act) or low comedy (where the Chorus’s sense that ‘all the youth of England are on fire’ at the start of the second act is followed by words spoken by the flame-nosed Bardolph, a man later sentenced to an ignoble death for looting).⁸³ In his work on epic, Charles Martindale has commented on the tension created by the ‘paradoxical element of “congruence” between a poetics of loss and absence and an ideology of conquest and war’ in Virgil’s Aeneid, and Henry V can be read as heir to this tradition.⁸⁴ Shakespeare’s play admits a tragic dynamic that E. A. J. Honigmann locates in the chorus figure’s tendency to adopt ‘a point of view much more restricted than that of the play itself ’, which thus allows stage-response to shape audience-response.⁸⁵ In preparing the stage for the events of the fourth act, the Chorus, on the eve of battle, speaks of a scene held for a moment in stillness, in which darkness gives way to the taunts of the French and a cold dawn in which the prospect of unnumbered, un-commemorated, deaths must be faced: Proud of their numbers and secure in soul, The confident and over-lusty French Do the low-rated English play at dice, And chide the cripple tardy-gated night, Who like a foul and ugly witch doth limp
⁸² See Norman Rabkin, ‘Either/Or: Responding to Henry V’, in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago, IL, 1981), 33–62. ⁸³ For the additional charge brought by the play’s interest in ‘multivocal Englishes’, see Margaret TudeauClayton, ‘What Is My Nation? Language, Verse, and Politics in Tudor Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature: 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009), 389–403, 391. ⁸⁴ Charles Martindale, ‘Introduction: “The Classic of all Europe” ’, in Charles Martindale (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Virgil, 1–18, 11. ⁸⁵ E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare, Seven Tragedies: The Dramatist’s Manipulation of Response (London, 1976), 27.
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284 - So tediously away. The poor condemned English, Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires Sit patiently and inly ruminate The morning’s danger; and their gesture sad, Investing lank-lean cheeks and war-worn coats, Presenteth them unto the gazing moon So many horrid ghosts. (Henry V, 4.Chorus.17–28, Norton Shakespeare, 1581–2)
The repeated use of compound epithets (‘over-lusty French’; ‘low-rated English’; ‘tardygated night’; ‘war-torn coats’) achieves a heroic register, while privileging images of either hubris or deficiency: a subversion of the usual role of such textual strategies that resonates with how, in speaking of the ‘royal captain’ moving through ‘this ruined band’, the Chorus claims his looks disseminate ‘a largess universal, like the sun’ (Henry V, 4.Chorus.29, 43, Norton Shakespeare, 1582). In the following scene, the wearied, cautious responses Henry receives, as he passes unrecognised and unradiant through his men, serve instead to reflect his own doubts and fears. Indeed, as Greene writes, epic song may represent ‘the imagination’s manifesto, proclaiming the range of its grasp, or else it is the dream of the will, indulging its fantasies of power’, emphasising its apprehensive vitality in order to distinguish it from the isolating limits of tragedy; yet, the epics of the sixteenth century, in their self-conscious approach to the heroism of past ages, shadow the costs of attempting to achieve both literary and political sovereignty, and admit tragic elements when the expression of the heroic becomes a question of ‘capacity and control’.⁸⁶ Philip Hardie, for example, connects the lines of Henry V’s epilogue, which suggest that the play’s author, ‘in little room confining mighty men’, has thus mangled ‘by starts the full course of their glory’ (Henry V, Epilogue, lines 3–4, Norton Shakespeare, 1611), to ‘fama in its grandest and most complete epic manifestation’ while pointing out that such lives are ‘presented . . . imperfectly in the play we have just seen’.⁸⁷ The topos of comparing ‘great things with small’ is, as John S. Coolidge has shown, a way of mediating anxieties concerning authorial progression in relation to generic kinds, emerging from Virgil’s writings as a way of justifying ‘the processes of time to man’.⁸⁸ If we think of the epic translations of the early and mid-sixteenth century as the forerunners of both Spenser’s vernacular Christian epic and the dramatic works that carve out a role as epic’s heir in the English literary tradition, then the century as a whole can be seen to provide the fecund conditions out of which the seventeenth-century English epic—most famously epitomised by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, but also by its mock-epic satirical reflections—developed. The line of influence that connects Surrey’s blank verse to the labours of sixteenth-century dramatists, and which is shaped by the orality of the genre, thus also informs the drive within the work of tragic drama to repeat and retell epic in ways that are not always therapeutic but that wrestle figuratively and allusively with the prevailing ideologies of the day.⁸⁹
⁸⁶ Greene, The Descent from Heaven, 10, 16. ⁸⁷ Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 494. ⁸⁸ John S. Coolidge, ‘Great Things and Small: The Virgilian Progression’, Comparative Literature, 17.1 (1965), 1–23, 18. ⁸⁹ See Susanne Lindgren Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford, CA, 1992).
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16 Minor Epic Daniel Moss
The Elizabethans had no special name for one of the most popular literary genres of the 1590s: highly digressive but strangely static narrative poems of middling length (500–1,500 lines), treating mythological subjects mostly taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, thick with rhetorical ornament drawn from grammar school exercises, erotic but short of pornographic, often satirical or even cynical in tone, dedicated to aristocratic patrons but intended for university-educated readers like the lawyers of the Inns of Court. Today’s scholars alternatively term such poems ‘minor epics’ or epyllia. The latter term, favoured and largely invented by nineteenth-century classicists, hardly describes what William Shakespeare and his compatriots thought they were doing when they adapted the Ovidian mythographic mode and erotic voice to their post-Petrarchan verse, but ultimately the anachronism suits a set of early modern poems with a flickering and opportunistic relationship to their putative sources in the Classical tradition.¹ The term ‘minor epic’, while no less anachronistic, echoes the slight regard the poets themselves express for their own poems, as when Shakespeare worries he might ‘offend’ the dedicatee of Venus and Adonis, the Earl of Southampton, with his ‘unpolished lines’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, dedication, Norton Shakespeare, 666),² or Michael Drayton closes his Endymion and Phœbe (1595) with a triple apology to Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and Thomas Lodge for his ‘rugged and unfiled rhymes’ (Drayton, Endymion and Phœbe, line 998, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 205).³ Modern criticism has brought some clarity by ignoring Shakespeare’s affected self-denigration while heartily agreeing with Drayton’s, but already in the 1590s the poets and their readers had resolved the one crucial fact about the unnamed genre: there are major minor epics and minor minor epics. Not surprisingly, then, scholars today acknowledge three of these poems—Lodge’s Scylla’s Metamorphosis (1589), Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (c 1592, published 1598),⁴ and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593)—as supremely influential for the genre, while discussing the rest only as critical occasion warrants (see Table 16.1, below). This
¹ On the ‘reciprocal relationship between minor epic and [the] sonnet,’ see Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, NJ, 1981), 35–7. For discussions of the propriety of the term epyllion, see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, NJ, 1977), 22; and Lynn Enterline, ‘Elizabethan Minor Epic’, in Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie (eds), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 2, 1558–1660 (Oxford, 2015), 253–71, 253–4. Enterline claims that the term epyllion was ‘originally coined by nineteenth-century classicists’ (253), but Keach identifies an instance of its usage in a commentary from 1543 (Erotic Narratives, 22). ² William Shakespeare, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016). ³ Michael Drayton, Endymion and Phœbe, in Elizabeth Story Donno (ed.), Elizabethan Minor Epics (New York, 1963), 180–206. ⁴ Marlowe’s poem was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 28 September 1593, but the title page of the first edition reads 1598 (see Donno’s introduction to Elizabethan Minor Epics, 8). Patrick Cheney notes, ‘We do not know when Marlowe composed Hero and Leander, but critics agree that he wrote it either “early”, during his Daniel Moss, Minor Epic In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Daniel Moss 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0016
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286 - ready division into primary and secondary epyllia reflects the tendency of literary subcanons to emerge even within genres marked from the beginning as minor or marginal, but in the case of the minor epic, Lodge, Marlowe, and Shakespeare take chronological as well as critical priority. Most of the dozen or so secondary English epyllia—almost all published within fifteen years of Lodge’s prototype—are frankly derivative, yet they display a range of responses to the principal examples that can tell us a great deal about how the poets of the 1590s conceived of their work in relation to that of their colleagues and rivals.⁵ As scholars have long recognised, to study the Elizabethan minor epic is to explore the options available to those embarking on a literary career at a time of great cultural ferment and growing professional contention, as poets struggled to obtain the patronage of the great or secure a readership at the Inns of Court or amongst the learned.⁶ This venerable sense of the minor epic as commencement exercise-cum-professional debut, however, proves limited in general, and obviously insufficient to describe the works of Shakespeare and George Chapman in particular, as both produced more than one such poem. One promising strand of criticism, beginning with Clark Hulse’s sense of minor epic as ‘the proving ground for . . . epic’, has allowed for accounts of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) as complementary and progressive.⁷ Seizing on a pair of key phrases in the earlier poem’s dedication to Southampton, Hulse continues, ‘When Shakespeare turned from the stage in 1593 and set his hand to polite poetry, he called Venus and Adonis the “first heir” of his invention and followed it with the “graver labour” of Lucrece’, making minor epic ‘a genre for young poets ceasing to be young’.⁸ Even so, Shakespeare’s poems are still more often discussed separately than as a unit, while the intermittent critical treatments of Chapman’s minor epics have never persuasively integrated his work into broader accounts of the genre.⁹ Chapman—unlike Shakespeare, who largely abandoned narrative verse for drama after Lucrece—published minor epics throughout his career, even as he laboured over the
Cambridge years, or “late”, during the 1592–3 closing of the theatres, with the majority opting for a late date’; see Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto, 1997), 238n1. I have opted for a date of 1592, time enough for Shakespeare to respond with Venus and Adonis. ⁵ Some readers may find my inclusion of Lodge’s poem alongside those of Shakespeare and Marlowe puzzling; as Hulse complains, it ‘has suffered the curse of “historical significance” . . . It is usually passed over with a brief plot summary and an acknowledgment that it did after all inaugurate the “vogue” of the epyllion in the 1590s’ (Metamorphic Verse, 36). Critics have taken plenty of cognisance of Lodge’s poem, however, in the four decades since Hulse devoted his chapter to it. See Keach, Erotic Narratives, 37–51; Jim Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse (Toronto, 2003), 51–62; and Enterline, ‘Minor Epic’, 257–8, 263–4, 267–9. ⁶ Scholars routinely emphasise the minor epic’s special appeal to ‘the young men of the Inns’: see, e.g., Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 51; and Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, 40. Enterline observes, ‘Many, but not all, writers of minor epics were members of the Inns of Court’ (‘Minor Epic’, 254). At the same time, several of the poems, such as Drayton’s, are dedicated to aristocrats, while Chapman in particular appeals to a learned readership beyond the Inns. Shakespeare splits the difference by dedicating both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to the Earl of Southampton, who had attended Gray’s Inn: see Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 79. On the subject of the literary career in the period, see also Chapter 9 in this volume. ⁷ Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, 12. ⁸ Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, 12. Cheney builds on Hulse’s discussion, arguing, ‘Like the Dedicatory Epistle to Venus, the dedication to Lucrece maps out an Ovidian discourse, attenuating the Virgilian career model in a way that is consistent with a counter-epic of empire’, a ‘Marlovian maneuver’ which he reads as Shakespeare’s step down an alternative (i.e., non-Virgilian/Spenserian) career path—not ultimately realised—towards the publication of a major epic: see Cheney, Shakespeare: National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge, 2004), 120–2. ⁹ Although William P. Weaver pays some attention to complementarity in general—see his Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh, 2012), 7–8—and treats both of Shakespeare’s poems at length, the relationship between them as epyllia remains mostly implicit (but see 127). Georgia Brown considers Chapman a major player amongst the authors of epyllia, but discusses his poems ad hoc in support of larger thematic arguments, not as serial publications; see her chapter ‘Literature as Fetish’ in Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge, 2004), 102–77.
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287 translations of Homer that would secure him true epic stature; his serial contributions to the minor epic genre thus provide an important counterweight to the predominance of Lodge, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. The destabilising approaches of Shakespeare and Chapman are one reason why comprehensive definitions of the term minor epic prove quixotic or unsatisfying, but alternative routes into the genre present a more accurate and detailed, if less cohesive, picture. Accordingly, the first section below analyses the contents of the genre’s landmark anthology—Elizabeth Story Donno’s Elizabethan Minor Epics (1963)—to uncover the heterogeneity and instability at its heart, as well as some of the main critical consequences of that instability. There follows a new framework for productive study of the secondary minor epics as alternatively associative or dissociative imitations of the primary poems: the latter strategy a bid by the minor epicist to distinguish himself from his rivals, the former advertising continuity with the genre’s pioneers. Allowing the much-discussed primary epyllia to recede into the background, this chapter’s remaining sections each treat a pair of lesser-known examples of the genre. Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris (1594), a parasitic imitation of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, exemplifies the occasional desirability of appearing derivative to readers, while John Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598) illustrates the utility of associative emulation as the first step in a pivot between fashionable genres. The third section on dissociative minor epic turns to Phineas Fletcher’s Venus and Anchises, or Britain’s Ida (composed c 1600, published 1628) as an instance of a young poet’s declaration for an alternative career model under the guise of a purely nominal association with the primary examples of the genre, before closing with an examination of Chapman’s development of a new instrumentality for the minor epic in his 1598 continuation of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander.¹⁰
The Minor Epic Canon and Prevalent Critical Approaches That we speak of a minor epic canon at all is largely due to Donno, whose anthology remains the scholarly standard, and an analysis of her organising principles and criteria of selection serves to reintroduce the genre and its discontents. The volume’s lean, logical introduction still provides guidance as to what effectively constitutes minor epic despite the absence of explicit claims for the genre by the poets themselves. Donno identifies Ovidian imitative practice as the principle uniting the thirteen disparate examples of ‘eroticmythological verse narrative’ she has collected for her anthology.¹¹ Her emphasis on Ovid’s vital role in the curricula of sixteenth-century grammar schools and universities seems prescient, as recent scholars have returned again and again to the schools’ inculcation of rhetorical technique as laying the groundwork for the learned, laboured, highly artificial poems of the 1590s.¹² As for the minor epics themselves, Donno deftly extracts their characteristic elements from a brief survey: ‘a personal framework’; ‘the “complaint”
¹⁰ Fletcher’s minor epic, falsely or mistakenly attributed to Spenser, was published in 1628, but composed much earlier. A manuscript discovered by Ethel Seaton in 1923 includes a pastoral frame suited to the first decade of the seventeenth century: see Donno’s headnote in Elizabethan Minor Epics, 305–7; and my discussion below. Chapman’s continuation was published with Marlowe’s original in 1598, the same year as a rival edition containing only Marlowe’s poem: see Cheney, Counterfeit Profession, 238–9. ¹¹ Donno, ‘Introduction’, 6. For a full list of the poems included, see Table 16.1, below. ¹² See Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 40–64; Weaver, Untutored Lines, passim; and Enterline, ‘Minor Epic’, passim.
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288 - motif and the feminine wooer’; ‘the tendency to localise myth’ in England; ‘a mocking attitude towards the gods’; the incorporation of ‘a complete secondary tale, either borrowed or invented’; ‘a witty, ironic strain’ pitched to ‘sophisticated readers’; ‘a catalogue of present charms or future delights’; ‘the use of a common store of rhetorical devices’; above all a ‘delight in the artificial ’.¹³ Donno’s introduction leaves us with the strong impression of the genre’s happy coherence: a decade’s worth of similar poems by like-minded authors, with a common origin in the schools, an obvious audience in the Inns of Court, and Ovid as benevolent magister overseeing it all. This impression dissipates upon a closer look into the anthology’s contents, where Donno has shored up the canon’s essential triad of Lodge, Marlowe, and Shakespeare (though neither of the latter’s widely available poems appear) with such diverse pieces as Drayton’s ardently Platonic Endymion and Phœbe, Marston’s caustically satirical Metamorphosis, Fletcher’s obsequiously Spenserian Venus and Anchises, and Chapman’s 1616 translation of Musaeus Grammaticus’s Hero and Leander. Donno arguably raises more questions than she answers about what constitutes minor epic, as from every perspective one or another of the thirteen ostensibly canonical texts appears exceptional or outlandish. Are minor epics Elizabethan, as in Drayton’s case, or Jacobean, as with Chapman’s translation, or even Caroline, as in the case of James Shirley’s Narcissus, or the Self-Lover (1646)? How long are minor epics: a little over 200 lines, as in Marston’s case, or ten times that, as with Marlowe and Chapman’s composite Hero and Leander (1598)? What is the minor epic mode: close imitation, as in Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602); free adaptation, as in John Weever’s Faunus and Melliflora (1600); or incisive parody, as in Marston’s Metamorphosis? One recent scholar has even declared Chapman’s Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595)—Donno’s boldest choice for inclusion—the quintessential ‘anti-epyllion’.¹⁴ That controversial poem’s irreverent depiction of Ovid himself casts doubt on the true nature and extent of the magister’s influence, such that we might wonder how ‘Ovidian’ we should deem the translation of Musaeus, for example, or Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris (1595), with its ‘clear impress of Shakespearean influence’.¹⁵ Along the same lines, Fletcher’s contribution reads more like Spenserian pastiche than an imitation of the Metamorphoses, while Chapman’s Hero and Leander amounts to a pointed rejection of Marlowe’s Ovidianism.¹⁶ In other words, is the minor epicist primarily concerned with Ovid, his gaze retrospective and his work an homage, or with his contemporary rivals, his glances peripheral and his work contentious? However fragile, Donno’s canon has served admirably for nearly sixty years, forming the core of every major study, to which each scholar adds one or a few texts Donno excluded or overlooked, as the following Table 16.1 demonstrates:¹⁷
¹³ Donno (ed.), Elizabethan Minor Epics, ‘Introduction’, 6–10, 18–19. ¹⁴ Weaver treats Ovid’s Banquet ‘as a satire of the English epyllion’ and cites the omission of the poem from earlier work by Hulse and Keach to demonstrate that ‘its place in [Donno’s] anthology . . . has not been vindicated’: see his ‘The Banquet of the Common Sense: George Chapman’s Anti-Epyllion’, Studies in Philology, 111.4 (2014), 757–85, 759. See also Sarah Carter, Ovidian Myth and Sexual Deviance in Early Modern English Literature (New York, 2011), 137. ¹⁵ Donno, ‘Introduction’, 11. ¹⁶ See Cheney, Counterfeit Profession, for an account of Marlowe’s ‘Ovidian rivalry with Spenser’ (245) and the claim that ‘Chapman restores to the Hero and Leander myth . . . a Spenserian vision of love and marriage within the epic context of English nationhood’ (258). ¹⁷ Each category of the table is organised chronologically by publication date. The third and fourth categories are not exhaustive. For the poems not included by Donno but discussed as minor epics elsewhere, I have only provided the names of critics cited in this chapter.
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289 Table 16.1 Expanded minor epic canon. Author’s own. Primary minor epics
Secondary minor epics included in Donno’s anthology
Additional secondary minor epics treated in the criticism cited
Other poems occasionally discussed as minor epics
Thomas Lodge, Scylla’s Metamorphosis (1589)
Chapman, Hero and Leander (1598)
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander (c 1592, pub. 1598)
Thomas Heywood, Oenone and Paris (1594)
Edmund Spenser, Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie (1591): Hulse Samuel Daniel, The Complaint of Rosamond (1592): Hulse
William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (1593, not included in Donno’s anthology)
Thomas Edwards, Cephalus and Procris (c 1593, pub. 1595)
Thomas Peend, The Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (1565) John Clapham, Narcissus, sive amoris juvenilis descriptio (1591) Richard Barnfield, Cassandra (1595)
Michael Drayton, Endymion and Phœbe (1595) Chapman, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) John Marston, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598) John Weever, Faunus and Melliflora (1600) Francis Beaumont, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602) Phineas Fletcher, Venus and Anchises (c 1600, pub. 1628) James Shirley, Narcissus, or the Self-Lover (1646) George Chapman, The Divine Poem of Musaeus: Hero and Leander (1616) Source: Author’s own.
Michael Drayton, Piers Gaveston (1593), Matilda (1594), and Robert Duke of Normandy (1596): Hulse Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1594): Keach, Hulse, Cheney, Enterline, Ellis, Brown, Weaver Edwards, Narcissus (c 1593, pub. 1595): Duncan-Jones, Ellis R. B. [Richard Barnfield?], Orpheus his Journey to Hell (1595): Ellis Sir John Davies, Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing (1596): Weaver Henry Petowe, The Second Part of Hero and Leander (1598): Brown John Beaumont, The Metamorphosis of Tobacco (1602): Ellis William Barksted, Hiren, or the Fair Greek (1613): Ellis
Thomas Cutwode [ps. Tailboys Dymoke], Caltha Poetarum (1599) Philos and Licia (c 1606, pub. 1624) Barksted, Myrrha the Mother of Adonis, or Lust’s Prodigies (1607) H. A., The Scourge of Venus (1613) Henry Reynolds, The Tale of Narcissus (in Mythomystes, 1632)
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290 - The reincorporation of Shakespeare’s Lucrece, in particular, is all but inevitable, both for accounts of English rhetorical practices in the 1590s and for studies of the literary representation of the female body in the same period.¹⁸ Scholars have found much that is suggestive, too, in the venerable anthology’s introduction, both for what Donno emphasises—her fixation on Ovidian ‘artifice’, for instance, suits the rhetorical line of criticism—and what she understates, most obviously the genre’s alternating engagement with, and resistance to, gender fluidity and transgressive sexuality. Indeed, criticism of the minor epic since Donno can be divided, roughly but usefully, into parallel approaches to the genre’s rhetorical and erotic aspects, respectively. The former proves inseparable from discussions of the Elizabethan educational system, with its overwhelming emphasis on rhetorical training, while the latter corresponds to a view of the minor epic as a form of specifically Ovidian imitation. Of course, accounts of these poems as rhetorical display often merge with a discussion of their erotic content, and vice versa; as Jim Ellis writes, ‘subjectivity and sexuality must be understood as being bound up with other societal discourses: with education, law, economics, and political relations’.¹⁹ Even so, to read criticism of the minor epic is to watch for the alternate prioritisation of the rhetorical over the erotic or the erotic over the rhetorical.²⁰ Both lines of inquiry, moreover, all but insist upon the Inns of Court as the genre’s monolithic audience and on the epyllion as ‘the opening gesture in a specifically literary career . . . the moment when youth assumes a public identity’.²¹ The latter generalisation, however, oversimplifies the minor epic’s potential within the career models available to poets in the 1590s, pigeonholing the genre as apprentice or at best postgraduate work, rarely if ever the confident production of a professional seeking to adjust or correct readers’ perceptions of his work in relation to changing literary fashion.²² Discussions of the epyllion in relation to the poetic career, as a result, have been intermittent and largely confined to single authors, limiting if not foreclosing one promising way forward in the scholarship. The prevailing view of the Inns as the default audience for minor epic, meanwhile, contributes to a sense of the epyllion merely as a safe genre for poets and readers who speak the same social and ideological language. The result, even in much of the strongest criticism on the epyllion, is an overstated sense of the genre’s retrospective vision, though the focus of that retrospection is no longer Ovid or Musaeus, but the poets’ own youthful and adolescent experiences. Minor epics, we are told, are about rhetorical and/or sexual education. Some incorporate nostalgia for lost youth and innocence, while most express impatience with or ‘defection’ from familiar disciplinary regimes.²³ To be sure, much of this sense of the genre as fundamentally retrospective is ¹⁸ Enterline, for example, identifies Lucrece as an epyllion from the outset of her chapter on the poem in The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2000), 152. ¹⁹ Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 14. ²⁰ Enterline finds some success moving beyond this binary by merging the two lines of inquiry in her discussion of Venus and Adonis in Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia, PA, 2012), but the eroticised body still emerges as the main concern of her discussion: ‘the poem begins to unravel the heteronormative story about gender that critics assume must have been set in place by the institution in which Shakespeare learned the art of classical imitatio’ (94). ²¹ Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature, 107 (but see my discussion of Hulse, above). ²² One of the great, still understudied, analogues to the epyllion, Spenser’s Muiopotmos, with its intricate and ultimately subversive relationship to the 1590 Faerie Queene, exemplifies this deployment of a minor poem by an established poet to signal a major professional pivot. See Ayesha Ramachandran, ‘Clarion in the Bower of Bliss: Poetry and Politics in Spenser’s “Muiopotmos” ’, Spenser Studies, 20 (2005), 77–106, 80–1; and Chapter 26 in this volume. ²³ Weaver, Untutored Lines, 125. Notably, Weaver locates Shakespeare’s ‘defection’ in The Rape of Lucrece, while Enterline, in work published the same year, sees a similar move in Venus and Adonis, in which Shakespeare ‘manages to satirize the methods, principles, and assumed social effects on which contemporary pedagogy was founded’: see Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 74.
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291 justifiable, at least with regard to the debut poems. William Weaver, for example, has argued persuasively that Venus and Adonis evokes a shared restlessness amongst poet, readers, patron, and hero alike over rhetorically coded ‘rites de passage’ at the boundary of boyhood and adolescence.²⁴ If Venus and Adonis, by this reading, ‘solemnises a boy’s last rites of grammar, forestalling his symbolic entry into adolescence’, Lucrece looks back on youth and grammar school from the more mature perspective of adolescence and the rhetorical training that accompanies it.²⁵ Weaver’s account is valuable for its sense of the longer poem’s ‘continuity with certain discursive arcs begun in Venus and Adonis’, but it leaves us with the question of how to move beyond the image of a thirty-year-old Shakespeare still fixated on school.²⁶ One rather surprising way forward can be found in the best of the criticism treating the minor epic’s eroticism, which appears at first glance the most adolescent aspect of these poems. Georgia Brown, however, has demonstrated that ‘the fictional and recreative status of the epyllion enables writers to think the unthinkable, to challenge sexual, gender and aesthetic conventions, by exploiting its license’.²⁷ In no other public genre of the period is erotic play so consistent and wide-ranging: a ceaseless dance between staid and fluid gendering, overdetermined chastity and reckless deviance, mere titillation and downright scurrility. Yet, this copious eroticism is functional rather than ornamental, expressing a set of professional calculations as opposed to mere puerile fantasy. As William Keach, Ellis, Brown, Sarah Carter, and others have recognised, for these poets the erotic is a field for selfpresentation and emulation within a literary vogue.²⁸ The motivating force behind the outspoken eroticism of the minor epic is not, therefore, the absolute virility of the Inns of Court, but the potential for each poet to guide, if not control, audience perceptions of his attitude towards the erotic as it appears in the poems of his contemporaries. As such, the erotic, like the pedagogical, provides the minor epicist with a means to position himself relative to competing examples of the fashionable new genre. Such emulation is already taking place, certainly, amongst the primary examples of the genre: Marlowe with an eye on Lodge, Shakespeare with an eye on Marlowe (though the lingering question of Hero and Leander’s date of composition, publication, and distribution in manuscript poses difficulties for scholars attempting a genealogy of the early poems). Amongst the secondary minor epics, however, including The Rape of Lucrece, it is crucial to remember that the objects of imitation, properly speaking, are not the poems of Musaeus or Ovid, nor the pedagogy of Aphthonius or William Lily, but the primary epyllia themselves.²⁹ By this account, what Heywood, Marston, Fletcher, Chapman, and the rest seek above all in their work in this genre is a clear system of signalling their proximity to or distance from Scylla’s Metamorphosis, Hero and Leander, and/or Venus and Adonis to potential readers. Because Lodge engages critically with Ovidian and Petrarchan tropes, Marlowe plays subversively with gender roles and sexual norms, and Shakespeare exposes
²⁴ Weaver, Untutored Lines, 73. Weaver closes his chapter with a discussion of Southampton’s coming of age and imminent freedom from wardship as the poem’s occasion (90). ²⁵ Weaver, Untutored Lines, 72. ²⁶ Weaver, Untutored Lines, 127. ²⁷ Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature, 177. ²⁸ Keach, Erotic Narratives, 18–20; Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 6–7; Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature, 105–7; Carter, Ovidian Myth, 5. ²⁹ The Tudor scholar Lily’s Short Introduction of Grammar and humanist editions of the late Classical rhetorician Aphthonius’s textbook, the Progymnasmata, were both ubiquitous in the Elizabethan schoolroom and have figured heavily in recent criticism of the minor epic. Weaver, for instance, identifies Aphthonius as the key literary model for Chapman’s Banquet of Sense (‘Anti-Epyllion’, 771–4); while Enterline begins her discussion of Venus and Adonis with quotations from Lily’s Grammar (Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 62–5).
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292 - so incisively the shortfall of humanist rhetoric and pedagogy, their successors seize upon these and other discourses as they practise what I term associative or dissociative emulation. To embark on a poetic career via the minor epic, then, is not to introduce oneself ex nihilo to a non-judgemental readership, nor simply to publish one’s reflections on, and disaffections from, school and sex, but to proclaim oneself a next-Shakespeare or a not-Marlowe. This is not to claim that all the authors of secondary epyllia are equally ambitious, capable, or coherent; merely that the initial examples in this genre proved so immediately influential that subsequent poets located the value of publishing a minor epic less in their own learning and experience than in the success of the genre’s first wave.
Associative Emulation and the Poet’s Self-Pronouncement The authors of associative minor epic advertise their affiliation with the primary examples of the genre. Broadly speaking, they distribute their homage generally to Lodge, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, as when Thomas Edwards devotes consecutive stanzas of his Narcissus (1595) to declaring his hero’s kinship to Shakespeare’s Adonis and Marlowe’s Leander, or when Thomas Heywood, in Oenone and Paris, demonstrably takes rhetorical cues from Lodge and Marlowe, in addition to Shakespeare.³⁰ In terms of actual imitative procedure, however, these poets rely most heavily on one of the primary epyllia, beyond the token tribute paid to the other two. In the case of Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, for instance, ‘Marlowe is clearly a model for the poem, as seen in the tone, in the numerous aetiological asides, in the verse form (heroic couplets), and in its invocation of Mercury rather than Orpheus as its exemplar of rhetoric’.³¹ Heywood’s debt to Venus and Adonis, on the other hand, is so pronounced that his debut poem has been dogged by anachronistic charges of plagiarism since Douglas Bush’s use of the term in 1932.³² Heywood’s Oenone and Paris, however, rewards scrutiny precisely because it is the clearest acknowledgement of the primary poets’ immediate and extensive influence on their followers. From the perspective of disputatious or competitive models of literary influence and imitation—Harold Bloom’s, for example—Heywood’s ‘admiration for his master [Shakespeare] is slavish’, but an approach responsive to the fast-paced production and consumption of poetry in the 1590s might find Heywood peculiarly successful in identifying his poem as in the style of Shakespeare’s recent best-seller.³³ As Duncan-Jones observes, ‘No one who had read Venus and Adonis could fail to pick up the echoes [in Oenone and Paris], which are clear even in the prefatory material’, leading us to ask what work, exactly, the young poet expected so obvious an allusion on the first page to do.³⁴ Far from dodging future accusations of plagiarism or ‘mere literary pastiche’, in paraphrasing Shakespeare’s dedication to Southampton—replacing ‘the first heir of my invention’, for example, with ‘the first fruits of my endeavours’—Heywood draws his readers’ attention ³⁰ On the homage stanzas of Narcissus, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Much Ado with Red and White: The Earliest Readers of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis’, Review of English Studies, 44 (1993), 479–501, 491–2. On Heywood’s debts to the primary epyllia, see Weaver, Untutored Lines, 113–14. ³¹ Ellis, Sexuality and Citizenship, 146. ³² Bush, who identifies the author of Oenone and Paris only tentatively as Heywood, calls the poem ‘The earliest known full-length imitation, or rather plagiarism, of Venus and Adonis’: see his Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis, MN, 1932), 309. Weaver, attempting to rehabilitate Heywood’s poem, still admits in a footnote that ‘ “Imitation” is an understatement’ (Untutored Lines, 115n1). See also Donno, ‘Introduction’, 11; and Duncan-Jones, ‘Much Ado’, 494–5. ³³ Duncan-Jones, ‘Much Ado’, 494. ³⁴ Duncan-Jones, ‘Much Ado’, 494.
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293 at once to the new poem’s derivation from Venus and Adonis.³⁵ His purpose is not to distinguish his own work—he provides only his initials, not his full name, after the dedication—but the opposite: to make the particular association with Shakespeare unmistakable. Hence the controlled quality of the imitation as it unfolds over the course of the volume: the poem’s title, Oenone and Paris, as much as its middling length, would identify it as an epyllion to prospective customers at the bookstalls, but as that title recalls Hero and Leander as readily as it does Venus and Adonis, the dedication clarifies the new poet’s special relationship to Shakespeare. Lest readers skip the dedication—likely enough, as Heywood ‘lacked a courtier patron equivalent to Southampton’ and is obliged to address ‘Courteous Readers’ in general—the opening stanzas’ obvious recapitulation of the first stanza of Venus and Adonis ensures that anyone leafing through the new poem would identify ‘T. H.’ as the new Shakespearean, if not as Thomas Heywood.³⁶ Only later, once that association is ironclad, does Heywood admit echoes of Lodge and Marlowe into his poem.³⁷ Most of the authors of secondary minor epic, it is true, were more adventurous than Heywood, eager to declare a degree of independence from Lodge, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, but only a degree. As the fashion for biting satire overtook the London literary scene by the late 1590s, poets like Marston, Weever, and Beaumont used the epyllion model, already showing its age, to pivot to the genre du jour. In what Keach calls ‘a singularly ambiguous performance’,³⁸ Marston (writing under the alias ‘W. Kinsayder’) divides his 1598 debut volume in half—as reflected in the book’s title, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image and Certain Satires—first providing a polished, if comically brief and lewd epyllion treating Ovid’s myth of Pygmalion, then posing through the remainder of the volume as ‘a barking satirist’ (Marston, ‘The Author in Praise of his Precedent Poem’, line 46, Poems, 66).³⁹ This authorial metamorphosis takes place in a strange central interlude, ‘The Author in Praise of his Precedent Poem’, a 46-line manifesto in verse, which begins with ironic praise for The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (‘Are not my lines / Right in the swaggering humour of these times?’), transitions through self-mockery (‘My lines are froth, my stanzas sapless be’), and closes with a clear commitment to satire: ‘Thus having rail’d against myself awhile, / I’ll snarl at those, which do the world beguile / With masked shows’ (Marston, ‘Precedent Poem’, lines 46, 7–8, 42–5, Poems, 65, 66).⁴⁰ However sincere Marston’s sudden preference for satire over minor epic, in itself The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image remains fundamentally associative, advertising its kinship with the ³⁵ For Shakespeare’s dedication, see Norton Shakespeare, 666; for that of T. H. [Thomas Heywood], see Oenone and Paris (London, 1594), sig. A2. ³⁶ Duncan-Jones, ‘Much Ado’, 494. The sixain stanza likewise associates Oenone and Paris from the start with Venus and Adonis, as opposed to Marlowe’s couplets. ³⁷ Weaver links Paris’s oratory to Leander’s identity as a ‘bold sharp sophister’, citing Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (see Untutored Lines, 114) and cites ‘Oenone’s turn from complaint to cursing near the end of the poem’ and ‘Heywood’s marked use of alliteration’ as likely debts to Lodge (113). ³⁸ Keach, Erotic Narratives, 134. ³⁹ John Marston, in Arnold Davenport (ed.), The Poems of John Marston (Liverpool, 1961). Entered into the Stationers’ Register on 27 May 1598, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image and Certain Satires predates The Scourge of Villainy, entered 8 September (see Davenport, ‘Introduction’, Poems of John Marston, 1–2); hence if we read the two volumes as a composite self-presentation, Marston appears more resolute for satire than if we take the slightly earlier publication as the debut. For the traditional interpretation of Marston’s satiric pen name, ‘W. Kinsayder’, see Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 1959), 96. Kernan identifies the name as a pun on the practice of ‘kinsing’, or castrating a dog, hance ‘mar-stone’ (with ‘stone’ a synonym for ‘testicle’), but the closer pun might well be ‘kin-satyr’. ⁴⁰ Cheney sees ‘The Author in Praise of his Precedent Poem’ as a key step in ‘the structure of a literary career that leads to satire . . . Here, Marston bridges his minor epic and his Satires to foil the expectation of the Virgilian career-idea’, for which Spenser remained the model: see Cheney, ‘Marstonian Authorship: The Poems, Plays, and Masque’, Review of English Studies (forthcoming).
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294 - primary epyllia through such standard tropes as an apostrophe to Ovid, a blazon culminating in a coy ‘wink’ at the mistress’s vagina (see Marston, Pygmalion’s Image, stanza 12, lines 2–4, stanza 9, line 5, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 247, 246),⁴¹ and the narrator’s simultaneous penchant for fluid gendering and rampant gynophobia. The disjunction between the epyllion’s sensuality and its own author’s satirical indictment of erotic verse and the ‘lewd Priapians’ (Marston, ‘Precedent Poem’, line 6, Poems, 65) who crave it, led to charges of schizophrenia in an earlier critical age—‘the anguished expression of a troubled spirit’, according to Samuel Schoenbaum—but it is now far easier to see Marston associating himself simultaneously with the still-popular primary epyllia on the one hand and the new vogue for omnivorous satire on the other.⁴² The hybridity of Marston’s volume is itself associative, echoing Lodge’s choice to follow Scylla’s Metamorphosis with a ‘Discontented Satire’ and preceding Weever’s Faunus and Melliflora, another hybrid beginning with an erotic epyllion with clear affinities for Marlowe and Shakespeare, followed by a series of satires.⁴³ Half-lascivious and half-vicious, such volumes are metaphorical satyrs themselves.
Dissociative Emulation and the Evolving Poetic Career There is nothing hybrid about Phineas Fletcher’s Venus and Anchises, published in 1628 as the work of Spenser, but clearly composed around the turn of the century. Fletcher’s poem is entirely consistent with Brown’s characterisation of the minor epic as ‘the opening gesture in a specifically literary career’, though his failure to publish the work means in his case that this was not ‘the moment when youth assumes a public identity’.⁴⁴ In terms of its material— the ‘Ovidian’ amplification of a marginal myth, the young man’s sexual awakening, the usual blazon—there is so little to set Venus and Anchises apart from the more distinctive poems in Donno’s collection that critics have all but ignored it.⁴⁵ Yet, Fletcher’s utter devotion to Spenserian style marks a radical shift away from the primary epyllia, to the extent that we may feel we are not reading an epyllion at all, but a lost episode of The Faerie Queene. As he attempts to appropriate the minor epic and make it part of the Spenserian empire, Fletcher ventures beyond the half-steps Marston and Weever take towards satire, exemplifying dissociative emulation.
⁴¹ Marston, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image, in Elizabethan Minor Epics, 244–52. Ellis notes that ‘Marston’s literary satire extends to the blazon of the mistress, a standard feature of . . . the epyllion’, as well as other self-satirical aspects of the Metamorphosis, but such irony is itself standard in the epyllia, as, for instance, in Marlowe’s comical blazon of Leander, whose neck looks and feels good enough to eat (see Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 63–5, Complete Works, 1.190). Ellis also notes Marston’s more straightforward debts to Shakespeare and Lodge (see Sexuality and Citizenship, 72–3). On Pygmalion’s Image as ‘a fiercely masculinist, gynephobic, and homosocial performance’, but simultaneously ‘an equally fierce struggle over the meaning of sexual difference’, see Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, 151. ⁴² Samuel Schoenbaum, ‘The Precarious Balance of John Marston’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 67 (1952), 1069–78, 1070. ⁴³ On Lodge’s volume as a precedent for Marston’s, see Robert Darcy, ‘Marlowe and Marston’s Cursus’, in Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton (eds), Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman: Lives, Stage, and Page (Abingdon, 2010), 149–58, 155. Cheney disagrees, considering Lodge’s poem too slight to qualify as a precedent (see ‘Marstonian Authorship’ (forthcoming)). ⁴⁴ Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature, 107. On minor epic as ‘a training ground’ for epic, see Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, 12, and Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), 224–5. ⁴⁵ The exception is the inclusive Hulse, who treats the poem as ‘a studied re-creation of the poetic manner of 1590’ (Metamorphic Verse, 77), and whose reading anticipates my own. More recently, neither Ellis nor Weaver mentions the poem, Enterline includes it only in a footnote detailing the contents of Donno’s anthology (‘Minor Epic’, 253n1), and Carter mentions it only once (Ovidian Myth, 137).
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295 To be sure, Venus and Anchises nods just frequently and decorously enough to the major epyllia to identify itself as a belated contribution to the genre. Pondering Fletcher’s adoption, in the manuscript version of the poem, of a lovelorn pastoral persona named Thirsil, Donno observes how the poem’s ‘personal framework, together with the localising of the scene, accords with the mode Lodge had established in Scylla’s Metamorphosis, where the poet encounters Glaucus on the banks of the Isis’.⁴⁶ Fletcher’s Anchises is even more clearly a descendant of Shakespeare’s Adonis, scorning love and preferring ‘through the plains to chase the nimble hart / With well-tuned hounds; or with his certain dart / The tusked boar, or savage bear to wound’ (Fletcher, Venus and Anchises, canto 1, stanza 8, lines 4–6, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 310).⁴⁷ Later in the poem, when eros inevitably overtakes the Trojan shepherd, he briefly falls victim to a sexual naïveté that recalls Marlowe’s Leander in bed with Hero (see Fletcher, Venus and Anchises, canto 6, stanza 6, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 323). Fletcher’s passing nods to the primary epyllia, however, are superficial relative to his immediate, unvarying, at times fawning allegiance to Spenser. Indeed, each of the above examples of the new poet’s acknowledgement of his precursors seems, upon closer inspection, to draw Fletcher towards Spenser and away from minor epic. The pastoral frame of Thirsil’s song, most obviously, recalls Spenser’s Colin Clout more readily than Lodge’s lovelorn persona. Anchises’ sexual encounter with Venus, meanwhile, is more notable for its Spenserian diction than its titillation: the ‘kindly heat, inflaming his desiring’ (Fletcher, Venus and Anchises, canto 6, stanza 6, line 2, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 323), for example, sounds suspiciously like Spenser’s ‘kindly flame’ (Spenser, Faerie Queene, 4.Proem.2, line 2).⁴⁸ The poet’s clearest debt to Spenser is formal, however; any reader of the 1590s could easily reconstruct the genesis of the Fletcherian stanza via the removal of the seventh line of the Spenserian stanza, aligning Fletcher with contemporaries emulating or experimenting with the laureate’s signature form.⁴⁹ Thus couching allusions to The Faerie Queene in formal and linguistic folds of imitation, Fletcher repurposes the genre pioneered by Lodge, Marlowe, and Shakespeare as a comprehensive testament of literary affiliation. Fletcher complements this impression of Venus and Anchises as a broad, holistic imitation of Spenser with deep local forays into the Spenserian poetics, likely meant to evince penetrating insight into the master text (even if the effect is one of mere mimicry). An especially intricate passage combines the casuistry of Spenser’s Despair with the carpe diem theme of the ‘Song of the Rose’ in the Bower of Bliss, thirteen cantos later (compare Fletcher, Venus and Anchises, canto 2, stanzas 7–8, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 312, with Faerie Queene 1.9.44 and 2.12.74–6). It is true that Anchises soon submits to temptation, unlike Spenser’s Guyon, and one measure of the lingering generic distance between Spenser’s full-scale allegorical romance and Fletcher’s minor epic is the ease of erotic persuasion. Even this, however, notably dissociates Venus and Anchises from the three primary epyllia, where love must be hard-won and still eludes most of the lovers, as well as from the sexual frustrations of nearly all the intervening secondary epyllia. For Fletcher as for Heywood, Edwards, and others in the little genre’s second wave, the epyllion provides the vehicle for self-presentation as a poet amongst poets, but unlike their ⁴⁶ Donno (ed.), Elizabethan Minor Epics, citing 306. ⁴⁷ Phineas Fletcher, Venus and Anchises, in Elizabethan Minor Epics, 305–24. ⁴⁸ Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ⁴⁹ Chapman’s nine-line stanza for Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, with its slightly altered rhyme-scheme, and Donne’s ten-line stanza for Metempsychosis, which, like Spenser’s (and Fletcher’s), ends in an alexandrine, provide two prominent examples of such formal emulation in the minor or mock-epic poetry of the period.
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296 - associative bids for confraternity with Lodge, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, Fletcher signals from the outset his affiliation with (and subordination to) Spenser alone. The effect is apparent even in the published version, though it lacks much of the frame, where the opening line, ‘In Ida Vale (who knows not Ida Vale?)’, adapts Spenser’s famous parenthetical challenge to the reader: ‘Colin Clout (who knowes not Colin Clout?)’ (compare Fletcher, Venus and Anchises, canto 1, stanza 3, line 1, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 308, with Faerie Queene 6.10.16, line 4).⁵⁰ Fletcher’s imitation of Spenser may extend far beyond such allusions, however. Insofar as we can read Venus and Anchises as the prelude to an imitation of Spenser on a fully epic scale—namely, the allegorical The Purple Island of 1633—Fletcher reproduces the Spenserian literary career modelled on the medieval rota Virgilii.⁵¹ By rechannelling the minor epic into a Virgilian/Spenserian model of graduation to epic, Fletcher diverges from our prevailing critical sense of the genre as introducing or complementing careers devoted to drama or satire. While Chapman dabbled in both these other genres, the central dynamic of his career was likewise the interplay of minor and full-scale epic (namely, his translation of Homer). In recognising the minor epic’s utility for signalling his professional evolution to readers, Chapman proved both more sophisticated and more adventurous than Fletcher or any of the secondary authors in the genre. Unlike his contemporaries, Chapman returned to minor epic repeatedly, making him arguably the genre’s only serial practitioner in England.⁵² Each of his minor epics marks a strategic repositioning relative to trends in fashionable literature, with minor epic only one element in a larger calculation that takes the contemporaneous vogues for satire, Petrarchan lyric, and Spenserian allegory systematically into account. The first of these poems, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, thus reacts to resurgent Ovidian influence across the spectrum of fashionable literature, including complaint, satire, epic, and drama, in addition to minor epic.⁵³ At the same time, for Chapman minor epic continues to serve as the crucial nexus amongst the prevalent modes and genres of the 1590s, prompting him within three years to return to the genre as the logical vehicle for another comprehensive survey of, and decisive intervention in, the poetry of the moment. Like Fletcher, Chapman advertises his Spenserian credentials at the beginning of his continuation of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, though as Brown notes, the poem as a whole proves ‘unstable’, perhaps reflecting the ever-ambivalent Chapman’s refusal to commit to any contemporary style.⁵⁴ Chapman opens by proclaiming his departure from the content,
⁵⁰ Such is the opening line in the published edition of 1628, but the Seaton manuscript includes two preliminary stanzas framing the poem as pastoral, with Fletcher’s lovelorn persona, Thirsil, obviously derived from Spenser’s Colin. Spenser’s ‘Who knows not’ query was already a commonplace and subject to parody in the late 1590s; Thomas Middleton, for instance, inquires, ‘Who knowes not Zodon’ in his 1598 Micro-Cynicon, satire 2, line 3, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (eds), The Collected Works (Oxford, 2007), 1977. ⁵¹ For Spenser’s variation on the Virgilian career model, see Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry, 240–6. While Cheney sees much more complexity in the model Spenser actually adopted, my claim here is merely that Fletcher reproduces Spenser’s obvious initial move. ⁵² Shakespeare’s progression from Venus and Adonis to Lucrece provides some precedent, but the poems’ dedications promote a sense of their complementarity: a diptych rather than a series: see Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry, 262–4. Drayton’s historical ‘Legends’—for Hulse tantamount to the Ovidian minor epic—might serve for another analogue: see Metamorphic Verse, 220–1. ⁵³ See Daniel D. Moss, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England (Toronto, 2014), 61–73. For an account of the Banquet as a critique of the epyllion genre, see Weaver, ‘AntiEpyllion’, passim. For more on the poem, see also Chapter 28 in this volume. ⁵⁴ Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature, 156n82. Brown, who finds the continuation full of ‘comic confusions . . . in spite of Chapman’s more didactic interests in ceremony, lawful marriage, and his indebtedness to Spenser’ (156), is responding directly to Cheney, who describes the work much more decisively as ‘Chapman’s pro-Spenser project’ (Counterfeit Profession, 258).
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297 if not the form, of Marlowe’s original and the imitations it spawned. This initial dissociative pronouncement in favour of Spenser, however, is only the first of many tactical adjustments in a poem that ultimately seeks to demonstrate Chapman’s mastery of the full range of fashionable poetry throughout the decade, including, but by no means limited to, Spenserian allegory and the urbane style of the epyllia he simultaneously scorns and adopts. Indeed, Chapman’s decision to commence his continuation by transferring allegiance from Marlowe to Spenser speaks to his project’s ambition in vastly expanding the scope of the epyllion. Where Fletcher meant merely to pronounce himself a Spenserian and the associative poets to launch their careers with a popular form, Chapman embarked on a fullscale renovation of the minor epic, perhaps sensing an opening now that Marlowe was dead and Shakespeare and Lodge had moved on from narrative poetry. Upon his death in 1593, Marlowe had left his Hero and Leander well over half complete, if we take Musaeus’s version of the myth as our guide.⁵⁵ Of course, Marlowe retained only the barest essentials of the ancient story as a frame for his own Ovidian showmanship: the glorious ekphrasis of Venus’s glass, the bawdy interlude with Neptune, and the like. But as ‘ugly night . . . / Dang’d down to hell her loathsome carriage’ upon Marlowe’s death (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 816, 818, Complete Works, 1.209),⁵⁶ only Musaeus’s laboured account of the following day’s events, Leander’s ill-fated return voyage, and Hero’s suicide remained for further embellishment. What was Chapman thinking, then, when he decided to add over 1,500 lines to Marlowe’s 818, dividing the co-authored whole into six units he called ‘sestiads’—a grandiose nod to Homer’s Iliad—and verging (at least in terms of length) on major epic when he published the completed version in 1598? Chapman devotes some of this extra space to a puritanical correction for Marlowe’s libertine excesses, by extension counteracting the erotic abandon of the primary epyllia and their associative successors. ‘More harsh (at least more hard) more grave and high / Our subject runs, and our stern Muse must fly’, he declares at the outset of the third sestiad, promising, Love’s edge is taken off, and that light flame, Those thoughts, joys, longings, that before became High unexperienced blood, and maid’s sharpe plights Must now grow staid, and censure the delights, That being enjoyed ask judgement. (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 3, lines 3–9, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 85)⁵⁷
With this austere forewarning, Chapman quickly ambushes Marlowe’s ‘Amazed Leander’ with a visitation from the ‘Goddess Ceremony’, who ‘sharply did reprove / Leander’s bluntness in his violent love’ (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 3, lines 111–12, 145–6, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 88, 89), and shames the hitherto licentious youth into a commitment to marry the now-unchaste Hero at once. This grumpy new character’s ⁵⁵ Indeed, the reigning critical consensus is that Marlowe’s poem was substantially complete as published, and that its ‘fragmentary’ aspect was largely the result of Chapman’s self-interested representation of the poem as a fragment requiring correction and completion. For a detailed account of this trend in the criticism, see Cheney, Counterfeit Possession, 239. ⁵⁶ Christopher Marlowe, in Roma Gill, et al. (eds), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1987–98). ⁵⁷ George Chapman, Hero and Leander, in Elizabethan Minor Epics, 85–126.
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298 - elaborate appearance, however, provides a sense of Chapman’s larger strategy, which has little directly to do with Hero, Leander, or Musaeus: namely, the systematic imitation of successful contemporary verse. Everything about Ceremony—from her cosmic height (her ‘flaming hair’ reaches from heaven to earth), to her transparent body (‘For she was all presented to the sense’), to her divided gaze (‘One way looked ill, another graciously’), to her accoutrements (‘Her . . . hand a laurel rod applies’), to her attendants (‘The Hours and Graces bore her glorious train’) (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 3, lines 114, 119, 126, 137, 142, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 88, 89), to her obvious name—emulates Spenser’s signature approach to allegory in The Faerie Queene. Although she is a pastiche drawn from various passages in the much-expanded second edition of Spenser’s epic (1596), Ceremony’s ultimate resemblance to Mercilla, Spenser’s supreme figure for justice, suggests that Chapman wanted more from his stern goddess than a dutiful nod to England’s reigning laureate; he wanted to show himself to be a just arbiter of contemporary poetry, ordering and controlling the popular genres and voices of his literary moment. Since such a project demands amplitude, however, Chapman abandons Spenserian allegory as soon as he has demonstrated his mastery of the mode and his judiciousness in giving Spenser pride of place. Where Fletcher devotes himself to the one true laureate, Chapman adopts a protean identity that recalls Ovid and the Ovidians rather than Virgil and Spenser. He proceeds to dance through many of the other modes and genres then in vogue—pastoral romance, the Ovidian aetiology, sententiae, Neoplatonic standards like the numerological digression—not aping individual poets’ styles to the extent he had Spenser’s, but showing a comprehensive capability, as when he inserts a formal epithalamion into the lovers’ ill-fated wedding.⁵⁸ Chapman sometimes couches these set pieces as parody, rather than homage; prior to the epithalamion, for instance, a minor character—a long-faced maiden given to gossip—arrives too late with important news, and pines with disappointment into the ‘pied-plumed Psittacus, / That now the Parrot is surnamed by us, / Who still with counterfeit confusion prates / Nought but news common to the common’st mates’ (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 5, lines 421–4, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 116–17). The utter irrelevance of this incidental aetiology mocks rather than mimics poets like Marlowe, who routinely generate such offhand, yet outlandish aetiologies like so many ‘counterfeit’ parrots of Ovid.⁵⁹ Elsewhere, Chapman’s mastery takes the form of his superlative recapitulation of some rhetorical or mythographic flourish characteristic of the epyllia, as when Proteus, in love with Cupid, metamorphoses into Cupid in order to shoot his beloved with his own arrow ‘and make him love him’ (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 5, line 209, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 111), no doubt an effort to improve upon Marlowe’s famous interlude of Neptune wooing Leander. For all the showing off, Chapman has evidently learned a great deal from Marlowe, and acknowledges the debt in a moving invocation immediately following Ceremony’s intervention early in the continuation. Bidding his intellect take flight, Chapman seeks ‘th’eternal clime / Of his [Marlowe’s] free soul, whose living subject stood / Up to the chin in the Pierian flood, / And drunk to me half this Musean story, / Inscribing it to deathless memory’ (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 3, lines 188–92, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 90).
⁵⁸ See Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 5, lines 427–80, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 117–18. ⁵⁹ Marlowe’s opening description of Hero, for instance, includes a two-line explanation for Cupid’s blindness and a five-line account of Nature herself suffering such severe envy that ‘in sign her treasure suffered wrack, / Since Hero’s time hath half the world been black’ (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 37–8, 45–50, Complete Works, 1.190).
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299 Chapman here portrays Marlowe as a supremely gifted poet, bathing in the river flowing from the Muses’ Parnassus; at the same time, his posture recalls that of Tantalus, neck-deep in the river of hell, or Leander drowning in the Hellespont. Though he remains wary of his precursor’s reputation and dismal fate, Chapman nevertheless seeks communion with Marlowe’s spirit, urging his intellect to ‘Confer with it, and make my pledge as deep, / That neither’s draught be consecrate to sleep’ (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 3, lines 193–4, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 90). Such tribute mellows the earlier rebuke visited on Marlowe’s Leander by the Spenserian Ceremony, lending an ambivalent quality to the entire continuation. When Chapman’s Hero turns to sophistry to excuse her sexual Marlovian sin to herself—‘If then Leander did my maidenhead get, / Leander being my self I still retain it’ (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 3, lines 359–60, Elizabethan Minor Epics, 94)—it is hard to tell whether we should laugh at her weak logic, or whether she and Chapman have learned to produce such couplets from Marlowe and his Leander. To some extent, then, Chapman leaves it to his readers to choose between these interpretations—that is, to choose between the repudiation or celebration of Marlowe’s influence—but, in any case, his impulse to ‘confer’ with Marlowe’s ‘free soul’ works as undertow after the initial dissociation in favour of Spenser, partly reassociating his continuation with that of his predecessor and its imitators. While Chapman’s goal remains self-representation as a mature poet who has mastered the fashionable verse of his time, his Hero and Leander is still part of a series of publications, one stage in an ongoing process of maturation. The tribute to Marlowe can therefore be read as an acknowledgement that the process is not yet complete. If so, Chapman’s last engagement with the epyllion, The Divine Poem of Musaeus: First of all Books, marks the ultimate stage of his professional development. In his final, actual maturity—on the other side of his career-defining translation of Homer—Chapman dissociates himself completely from his own youthful dalliance, however ambivalent, with Marlowe and the epyllia of the 1590s. In the preface to his translation, Chapman calls the Greek original ‘the incomparable Love-poem of the world’, and emphatically rejects any connection between his translation and Marlowe’s version. ‘When you see Leander and Hero, the subjects of this pamphlet’, he warns ‘the Common Reader’, ‘I persuade myself your prejudice will increase to the contempt of it, either headlong presupposing it all one or at no part matchable with that partly excellent poem of Master Marlowe’s . . . The works are in nothing alike; a different character being held through[out], both the style, matter, and invention’ (Chapman, Divine Poem, sigs. A7–8).⁶⁰ Despite the lingering half-praise of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Chapman’s disavowal of the poetics and erotics of youthful exuberance is finally clear and complete, for Musaeus’s original, as the poet insists in his dedicatory epistle to the architect Inigo Jones, is of ‘a temper grave enough to become both the sight and acceptance of the gravest’ (Chapman, Divine Poem, sig. A5). At the same time, he cannot resist implying his predominance over the outmoded genre of the epyllion via Musaeus and his ‘First of all books’, making the translation the surprising epitome of dissociative emulation. For all its obsolescence, the epyllion serves the career-modelling occasion—yet another posture struck by an inveterate self-fashioner—for the Musaeus translation appears to have been one part of Chapman’s comprehensive programme to ‘English’ the most ancient Greek poetry, and therefore the most authoritative and prestigious poetry of all, including the Orphic hymns and Hesiod’s Works and Days, in addition to Homer’s major and minor poems. After twenty years refining his authorial persona as the ⁶⁰ George Chapman, The Divine Poem of Musaeus: First of All Books (London, 1616). Donno does not reproduce the prefatory material.
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300 - nation’s pre-eminent authority on Greek literature, uniquely qualified to introduce its poetry and philosophy into the vernacular, Chapman seeks to have the last word on the epyllion by translating and publishing the first word. The turn towards dissociative emulation in the later epyllia thus poses a useful challenge to the critical consensus that the genre is fundamentally and simultaneously retrospective and proleptic: its authors endlessly obsessed, on the one hand, with rhetorical techniques hammered into them in grammar school or with yesteryear’s rites of erotic passage, and on the other with the declaration of professional intent, the apprentice poet’s concern for the poems he will write once his epyllion is duly noted. Fletcher’s Venus and Anchises is undeniably a puerile piece of work, but it does perform the young poet’s transference of his affiliation from the major epyllia and their school rhetoric to Spenser’s more immediate and important example; responding to the 1596 Faerie Queene as much as to the 1590 touchstone, Fletcher updates his influences even as he looks towards the future of English poetry in the new century. As for Chapman’s ambivalent productions, of course they remain fixated on Marlowe, and to a lesser extent Shakespeare and Lodge, but only as juvenile foils for the poet’s own maturity—a man amongst adolescents, a graduate amongst schoolboys. That Chapman turned repeatedly towards and against the epyllion whenever he wished to signal his professional growth suggests that we ought also to rethink the traditional view of the minor epic as the late Elizabethan poet’s introductory act. The poets themselves found more uses for this genre than we have so far.
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17 History Philip Schwyzer
Not far from the opening of England’s Heroical Epistles (1597), in his notes on an imagined letter from King John, Michael Drayton offers an apology: ‘This Epistle of King John to Matilda is much more poetical then historical, making no mention at all of the occurrents of the time, or state, touching only his love to her’ (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, annotation to ‘King John to Matilda’, Works, 2.152).¹ In what was to prove the most frequently reprinted work of early modern historical poetry, the most indefatigable champion of that genre seems to throw up his hands in defeat. The description of the verse epistle as ‘more poetical then historical’ implies a firm distinction between these two modes of writing; whereas history can be expected to deal (in prose) with the martial and diplomatic ‘occurrents of the time, or state’, poetry’s proper sphere is the timeless experience of ‘love’. By this standard, had Drayton contrived to squeeze more history into John’s letter, it could only have come at the expense of the poetry. Like Drayton’s oft-quoted remark that his fellow historical poet Samuel Daniel was ‘too much Historian in verse’ (Drayton, ‘To Henry Reynolds’, line 126, Works, 3.229), the note on King John implies that poetry and history are ultimately incompatible. Yet, in spite of the persistence of this dichotomy, some of the most distinctive achievements of late Elizabethan verse are constructed on the shaky fault line of history and poetry. As this chapter will discuss, the challenges involved in finding a poetic mode that could convey essential truths about the past are provocatively explored in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and lie behind the formal innovation and anxious affectivity of works like Drayton’s Robert Duke of Normandy and England’s Heroical Epistles.
The Medieval Inheritance: Metrical Chronicles Historical poetry was certainly not an early modern invention. Or rather, the mode can be described as early modern only in its self-conscious awareness that conveying historical truths in verse involves a problematic blending of two distinct genres. In previous centuries, the metrical English chronicle had been an established and largely uncontroversial form. Early practitioners of the genre in England include the late thirteenth-century chronicler known as ‘Robert of Gloucester’, whose versified account of ancient and medieval British history came into the possession of John Stow in the sixteenth century and, through Stow, to the notice of a range of Elizabethan and Jacobean historians and poets.² Although William Browne in Britannia’s Pastorals (1613–16) would write admiringly of ‘The lay which aged Robert sung of yore / In praise of England’ (Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals, Book 2, song 4,
¹ Michael Drayton, in J. William Hebel (ed.), Works, corrected edition, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1961), spelling modernised. ² See Philip A. Shaw, ‘Robert of Gloucester and the Medieval Chronicle’, Literature Compass, 8 (2011), 700–9. Philip Schwyzer, History In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Philip Schwyzer 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0017
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302 - Whole Works, 2.70),³ Robert’s chronicle attracted the notice of early modern commentators primarily for the antiquity of the language and the perceived poverty of the verse (a tradition that has continued to this day). Yet, the very alien quality of Robert’s lines, for some readers, enhanced his standing as a historical poet, conveying the past not only in their content but in their form. In his annotations to Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612–22), John Selden regularly quotes from Robert, seemingly as much for his quaint style as for his matter. At one point he introduces ‘these rhymes, even breathing antiquity’ (Selden, in Drayton, Poly-Olbion, Works, 4.46); at another he admonishes the Jacobean reader, ‘Such was the language of your fathers between 300 and 400 years since’ (Selden, in Drayton, PolyOlbion, Works, 4.27). As Selden’s remarks suggest, poetry has more than one way of telling us what the past was like. The medieval metrical chronicle most widely known to early modern readers was that of John Hardyng (d. 1465). Writing in the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV (and enthusiastically adapting his matter to suit either Lancaster or York, the warring factions in the Wars of the Roses), Hardyng described himself not as a poet but as a translator, making the stuff of Latin histories accessible to the general (and royal) reader as ‘ballad’ (Hardyng, Chronicle, fol. 1).⁴ Employing the rhyme royal stanza popularised by Chaucer and Lydgate, Hardyng writes with reasonable grace and facility; at his best he is capable of conveying a remarkable degree of precise detail in a small space: In that same time also, of Scotland King James To Roxburgh came, and laid his siege about. Sir Ralph Grey then kept it from all shames Again his [as]saults, that then were full stout Th’earl then of Northumberland throughout Raised up the land, and when he came it near The King trumped up and went away full clear. (Hardyng, Chronicle, fol. 222)
The ingenuity involved in the crafting of a stanza like this should not be underestimated. If Hardyng’s verse could be described as prosaic, it is arguably prosaic in the best sense, in that it retains the focus and efficiency of good historical prose, while also observing rhyme and metre. Only the fourth line (which might be abbreviated to ‘against his stout assaults’) betrays any significant resort to metrical filler. Sixteenth-century readers were most likely to encounter Hardyng’s history as it was published by the printer and chronicler Richard Grafton in 1543, when Hardyng’s preoccupation with England’s rights over Scotland once again proved politically topical.⁵ Perhaps sensing that Hardyng’s use of rhyme would strike readers as odd or even suspicious, Grafton took the unusual step of composing a preface in the same rhyme royal stanza, taking the occasion to draw a portrait of the old chronicler as honest and industrious, if also a little naïve:
³ William Browne, in W. C. Hazlitt (ed.), The Whole Works of William Browne (London, 1868–9), spelling modernised. ⁴ John Hardyng, The Chronicle of John Harding in Metre (London, 1543), spelling modernised. ⁵ See E. J. Devereux, ‘Empty Tuns and Unfruitful Grafts: Richard Grafton’s Historical Publications’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 21 (1990), 33–56, 35–6.
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303 And though his cunning were not so much As some others, nor his intelligence, Yet his good mind, intent, and zeal was such That in him lacked no point of diligence After such books as he thought of credence Faithfully to describe such things in rhyme As happened to England, from time to time. (Grafton, ‘Preface’, in Hardyng, Chronicle, sig. *7)
In Grafton’s account, Hardyng’s use of verse does not signal the intrusion of potentially falsifying art, but quite the opposite; rhyme here is associated with the chronicler’s plain honesty and lack of craft. Grafton’s adoption of the same verse form for his preface underscores the point that verse is compatible with historical truth-telling.
Sidney and the Conflict between Poetry and History By the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Grafton’s attempt to reconcile historical veracity with verse seemed far out of reach. History and poetry had apparently gone separate ways, their divorce solemnised in the pages of Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (composed c 1579–81, published 1595).⁶ Sidney did not deny that poetry could deal with historical material, but argued that it distinguished itself precisely by its divergence from contingent and often disappointing historical fact. Poetry could be relied upon to provide the moral exempla which history frequently failed to furnish. ‘History, being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness’ (Sidney, Defence, 90).⁷ Thus ‘the feigned Aeneas in Virgil’ is obviously superior in moral terms to the self-serving and treacherous ‘right Aeneas’ in the Trojan history of Dares Phrygius (Sidney, Defence, 88). Poetry, moreover, is paradoxically more plausible than the random mass of events treated by history: the poet doth so far exceed [the historian] as he is to frame his example to that which is most reasonable (be it in warlike, politic, or private matters), where the historian in his bare Was hath many times that which we call fortune to overrule the best wisdom. Many times he must tell events whereof he can yield no cause; or, if he do, it must be poetically. (Sidney, Defence, 89)
At the time Sidney wrote, at the dawn of the 1580s, contemporary English historical poetry consisted largely of verse in the Mirror for Magistrates tradition, which indeed sought to instil moral lessons, reshaping the historical narrative to any extent necessary. John Higgins marked himself out as a poet after Sidney’s heart when, in The First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1575), he explained that where chronicle matter was wanting, ‘in writing the ⁶ The sundering of history and poetry should not be overstated: ‘at least until the middle of the seventeenth century the overlap of the two . . . was more obvious than the divergence’; Blair Worden, ‘Historians and Poets’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 71–93, 74. As Donald Kelley and David Sacks put it, early modern history still ‘enjoyed an affinity, and sometimes an intense sibling rivalry, with poetry, its sister genre’; The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 2010), ix. ⁷ Sir Philip Sidney, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973).
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304 - Tragedies of the first infortunate Princes of this Isle, I was often fain to use mine own simple invention’ (Higgins, Parts Added, 36).⁸ It was only after Sidney’s death, and in the years immediately surrounding the posthumous printing of the Defence of Poesy in 1595, that a new generation of poets began seriously to interrogate the possibility of a kind of writing that could be simultaneously true to History and to Poetry. The names of paramount importance in this regard are Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, with Daniel generally to be found leading the charge in terms of generic and formal innovation, while Drayton followed up with subtler and more searching experiments in the same vein. In the first half of the 1590s, both poets had worked in the vein of historical complaints or ‘legends’, pursuing a format familiar from the Mirror for Magistrates while at least sometimes displaying a closer engagement with historical sources. The year 1595 saw the publication of Daniel’s First Four Books of the Civil Wars, the most serious and ambitious effort in well over a century to convey a detailed and accurate account of the national past in English stanzas. Rather surprisingly, the first edition offers no explanation as to why the author has chosen poetry over prose, and Daniel pointedly chooses no muse but England’s queen, whose reign provides a peaceful contrast to the bloody conflicts he must describe. Daniel effectively declares himself to be on the side of the historian’s ‘bare Was’, rather than the artifices of poetry: ‘Unintermixed with fiction’s fantasies. / I versify the troth, not Poetize’ (Daniel, Civil Wars, Book 1, stanza 6, lines 7–8, Complete Works, 2.12).⁹ Although this can be read as a rebuke to Sidney’s valorisation of poetry over history, Daniel’s declaration leaves untroubled Sidney’s basic dichotomy between the Poet and the Historian. The stance adopted in the opening stanzas of the Civil Wars clearly underlies Drayton’s later judgement that Daniel was ‘too much Historian in verse’.¹⁰ In 1595, the question remained open whether Drayton, or any poet, could be more successful in crafting a form of historical poetry that did justice to the demands of both. The disparaging (sometimes self-disparaging) remarks of Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton on the question of historical poetry have set the tone for modern criticism. Critics have been concerned to explore the extent to which historical poetry ever constituted an intellectually coherent, let alone aesthetically successful, project. In the 1960s, Anthony LaBranche examined the rhetorical underpinnings of the Elizabethan genre, emphasising the influence of Lucan on both Daniel and Drayton.¹¹ Attuned to the kind of generic and formal quandaries that vexed the minds of Elizabethan historical poets, LaBranche probed the most basic suppositions of the genre: ‘can the poem really be viewed as an extended oration based on historical incident? Or must it be viewed as the imitation of an oration based on historical incident? Or for that matter, are there not portions of the poem which imitate the historical events directly, either as “relation” or “chronicle”?’¹² More recently, Bart van Es has explored the generic perplexities of historical poetry from a historicist perspective, ⁸ John Higgins, The First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates, in Lily B. Campbell (ed.), Parts Added to ‘The Mirror for Magistrates’ (Cambridge, 1946), spelling modernised. ⁹ Samuel Daniel, in Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works in Verse and Prose, 5 vols. (London, 1885–96), spelling modernised. ¹⁰ David Galbraith observes that Daniel did not hold true to his initial stance: ‘Daniel repudiates the narrator’s claim in the opening invocation to have successfully demarcated the poetic and the historical by introducing the very “fictions, fantasies” which had been repudiated. He does this, moreover, in a manner which associates these fictions with a national destiny whose legitimacy he continually affirms’; David Galbraith, Architectonics of Imitation in Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton (Toronto, 2000), 98. ¹¹ See Anthony LaBranche, ‘Drayton’s “The Barons Warres” and the Rhetoric of Historical Poetry’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 62 (1963), 82–95; and ‘Poetry, History, and Oratory: The Renaissance Historical Poem’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 9 (1969), 1–19. ¹² LaBranche, ‘Poetry, History, and Oratory’, 4.
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305 noting how these problems provided a spur for poets, especially Drayton, to ponder and articulate the poet’s public role and importance to national discourses: [Historical poets] evince a consistent concern with the category of the literary: both in terms of commercial success and in terms of their status and duties as part of a national enterprise . . . Setting themselves up in self-conscious opposition to the literature of manuscript, many of these authors also take significant pride in the production of printed artefacts. In a way that is less evident in prose history or drama, they exhibit a dynamic understanding of the moral interaction between text and reader.¹³
Delving further into the theme of nationhood, Sukanya Dasgupta has explored Drayton’s attempts to shape national consciousness in relation to his evolving oppositional politics, as reflected in successive Elizabethan and Jacobean editions of the Heroical Epistles.¹⁴ In recent years, the female protagonists at the heart of much late Elizabethan historical poetry have commanded fresh attention from a number of critics concerned with issues of gender, sex, and sexuality.¹⁵ This critical shift has encouraged fresh attention to the representation of problematic and passionate emotion in texts such as Heroical Epistles, an aspect of the work which Drayton seems driven both to advertise and to apologise for. Mike Rodman Jones has situated Drayton’s and Daniel’s historical project in a postPurgatory, post-Foxean moment, in which new techniques were required to re-forge a connection with the medieval dead, on the basis of imagined aural reception and passionate emotional connection.¹⁶ The present chapter will explore further the capacity of Drayton’s historical verses, and in particular the verse letters of England’s Heroical Epistles, to serve as vessels of such emotion, not least through their imagined status as medieval artefacts. This discussion must begin, however, in a reading of the scene of reading in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, to which I now turn.
Briton Moniments The Faerie Queene is not usually categorised as a historical poem, at least not in the sense employed by critics of Daniel and Drayton. Even as it engages profoundly and innovatively with historical themes of central importance to Tudor dynastic ideology, including the legendary history of King Arthur, the British inheritance from Troy, and the wars between native Britons and Anglo-Saxons in the early medieval period, the poem works to keep such matter confined from the main body of the romance, almost under a kind of quarantine (though it is not entirely clear which would be in danger of infection from which). In the ¹³ Bart van Es, ‘Michael Drayton, Literary History and Historians in Verse’, Review of English Studies, 59 (2007), 255–69, 268–9. ¹⁴ See Sukanya Dasgupta, ‘Imagining Britain: Reconstructing History and Writing National Identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles’, The Seventeenth Century, 33 (2018), 393–409. ¹⁵ See Alison Thorne, ‘ “Large complaints in little papers”: Negotiating Ovidian Genealogies of Complaint in Drayton’s Englands Heroicall Epistles’, Renaissance Studies, 22 (2008), 368–84; Danielle Clarke, ‘Ovid’s Heroides, Drayton and the Articulation of the Feminine in the English Renaissance’, Renaissance Studies, 22 (2008), 385–400; Andrew Fleck, ‘Exemplarity and Its Discontents in Michael Drayton’s Englands Heroical Epistles’, in John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti (eds), Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (New York, 2016), 66–80; and Dasgupta, ‘Imagining Britain’. ¹⁶ Mike Rodman Jones, ‘The Uses of Medievalism in Early Modern England: Recovery, Temporality, and the “Passionating” of the Past’, Exemplaria, 30 (2018), 191–206; see also Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge, 2004), chapter 4.
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306 - course of the three books published in 1590, Spenser recounts the full history of the Trojan– British bloodline, including the fall of Troy, the flight of Aeneas, and the arrival of his descendant Brutus in Albion, as recounted to Britomart over dinner by the flirtatious Paridell (see Spenser, Faerie Queene, 3.9.33–51);¹⁷ the history of the British monarchs from Brutus to Uther Pendragon, father of Arthur, as recorded in the chronicle entitled Briton Moniments (see Faerie Queene, 2.10); and the future (from the poem’s perspective) history of the British bloodline, as foretold by the prophet Merlin (see Faerie Queene, 3.3), including the feats of medieval Welsh princes destined to preserve the Trojan lineage until its marvellous restoration to the throne in the form of the Tudor dynasty. For the purposes of this chapter, the Briton Moniments canto is worth closer inspection, providing as it does not only an example of poetic history but a model of the encounter between the genres of poetry and history, and their combined impact on an imagined reader. This model, I will go on to argue, helped shape Drayton’s understanding of what historical poetry was, and what it might achieve. Visiting the chamber of Eumnestes (Memory) in the Castle of Alma, Prince Arthur discovers amongst the dusty rolls ‘An auncient booke, hight Briton moniments, / That of this lands first conquest did deuize’ (Faerie Queene, 2.9.59, lines 6–7). Arthur’s companion, Guyon, simultaneously happens upon The Antiquitee of Faerylond, and both protagonists are seized with ‘feruent fire, / Their countreys auncestry to vnderstond’ (Faerie Queene, 2.9.60, lines 6–7). The ensuing canto (Faerie Queene, 2.10) is devoted entirely to the content of these two histories, and their impact on their respective readers, with Arthur and Briton Moniments receiving more detailed treatment by far. At the opening of the canto, Spenser signals that this account of ancient British history will constitute an epic task, wishing for ‘wings, with which from ground / My lowly verse may loftily arise, / And lift it selfe vnto the highest skyes’ in order to recount ‘the famous auncestryes / Of my most dreaded Soueraigne’ (Faerie Queene, 2.10.1, lines 3–5, 7–8). The desire for wings recalls the ‘famous flight’ of poetry first promised in The Shepheardes Calender (1579) (see October, line 88, Shorter Poems, 131)¹⁸ and rather astonishingly suggests that it is Briton Moniments specifically for which the poet has been preparing all his life, with the preceding twenty-one cantos of epic romance standing in relation to Book 2, canto 10 as The Shepheardes Calender to The Faerie Queene.¹⁹ If we take seriously Spenser’s description of his epic exemplars Homer and Virgil as ‘Poets historicall’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, Faerie Queene, 715), then it is in this explicitly historical canto that his poem’s historico-epic ambitions are at last to be fully realised.²⁰ It is fair to say that few readers have been persuaded that Briton Moniments in fact constitutes the epic pinnacle of The Faerie Queene. It has been suggested that the sectioning off of this historical material into a single canto is intended to minimise its importance for the wider poem, although sixty-four stanzas of chronicle history that Spenser was not required to provide at all may seem an oddly labour-intensive way of accomplishing this aim.²¹ Moreover, the reader will swiftly notice that Briton Moniments does not closely resemble the works of ‘poets historical’, as defined by Spenser himself in his letter to Ralegh. ¹⁷ Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ¹⁸ Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). ¹⁹ See Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993). ²⁰ See Catherine Bates, ‘The Faerie Queene: Britain’s National Monument’, in Catherine Bates (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Epic (Cambridge, 2010), 133–45, 133. ²¹ See John E. Curran, Jr, ‘Poetical History’, in Andrew Escobedo (ed.), Edmund Spenser in Context (Cambridge, 2017), 185–93.
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307 It does not begin in medias res (unless one counts it as part of the larger historical narrative including Paridell’s Trojan recollections and Merlin’s prophecy); it does not focus on a single national hero (unless it is Arthur, the hero-as-reader, at whose birth the chronicle does not quite arrive); and it does not conspicuously endeavour to convey any moral precepts. Spenser’s approach here is, in fact, less like that of the poet historical than of the denigrated ‘Historiographer [who] discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, Faerie Queene, 716). Indeed, the text of Briton Moniments seems almost awkwardly close to one of Spenser’s chief sources for this section, Hardyng’s chronicle.²² Compare the stanzas in each text dealing with the legendary British king Guitheline, and his wife, the law-giver Martia. Hardyng writes: Guitheline his son gan reign as heir Of all Britain about, unto the sea Who wedded was to Marcian full fair That was so wise in her femin[in]ity That laws made of her singularity That called were the laws Marcian In Briton tongue of her own wit alone. (Hardyng, Chronicle, fol. 30v)
In Briton Moniments this becomes: After him raigned Guitheline his hayre, The iustest man and trewest in his daies, Who had to wife Dame Mertia the fayre, A woman worthy of immortall praise, Which for this Realme found many goodly layes, And wholesome Statutes to her husband brought: Her many deemd to haue beene of the Fayes, As was Aegerie, that Numa tought: Those yet of her be Mertian lawes both nam’d and thought. (Faerie Queene, 2.10.42)
What is remarkable here is not the critically anticipated transformation of base metal into poetic gold, but rather the essential comparability of the two passages. Spenser has transposed the matter of Hardyng’s rhyme royal stanza into his own nine-line structure and employed the extra two lines to drop in a reference to the faerie realm with a glance at Livy’s History of Rome. Yet, since Mertia is not definitively identified as a fairy changeling (but is only said by some contemporaries to be so), the added lines do not involve a significant alteration or development of Hardyng’s account. Beyond this, the only important alterations to Hardyng’s version are the removal of references which might be considered anachronistic in the time the poem is set (e.g., to writing in the ‘Briton tongue’, which would hardly require comment since it is understood to be the language of Arthur and the
²² On the sources of Briton Moniments, see Carrie Anna Harper, The Sources of the British Chronicle History in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1910).
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308 - chronicle he reads, and to the British realm encompassing the whole island, which might be considered a point of controversy in the fifteenth century, but not in the fifth). Briton Moniments thus looks like an authentic heir (or, in the poem’s terms, a precursor) to the medieval metrical tradition, and to Hardyng in particular. But this raises a further question: are we in fact reading what Arthur reads, the literal text of the book? In the case of The Antiquitee of Faerylond, Spenser makes clear that he is providing only a summary, since it is ‘a great / And ample volume, that doth far excead / My leasure, so long leaues here to repeat’ (Faerie Queene, 2.10.70, lines 3–4). The text of Briton Moniments might likewise be supposed to be longer than the ten-page openings the chronicle occupies in the 1590 edition. Yet, Spenser contrives to suggest that what he presents in this canto is not merely a précis of Briton Moniments, but the book itself, allowing us to participate alongside Arthur in what Catherine Bates terms ‘reading [ . . . ] as a heroic task’.²³ The transition from the fourth stanza, which addresses Queen Elizabeth, to the fifth (which commences the chronicle history) is not immediately jarring, but introduces a subtle temporal shift: Thy fathers and great Grandfathers of old, Whose noble deeds aboue the Northern starre Immortall fame for euer hath enrold; As in that old mans booke they were in order told. The land, which warlike Britons now possesse, And therein haue their mighty empire raysd, In antique times was saluage wildernesse. (Faerie Queene, 2.10.4, lines 6–9, 5, lines 1–3)
As the fifth stanza commences, it is just about possible to suppose that Spenser is still addressing the Queen, and that it is her realm that is currently inhabited by warlike Britons who have raised a mighty empire. This was after all the common parlance of monarchpleasing Cambrophilic fantasy. Yet, it soon becomes clear that the ‘now’ of the first line is the ‘now’ of the fifth century, Arthur’s era rather than Elizabeth’s: we have at this point embarked on reading the chronicle itself, in whose temporal terms the puissance of the British race and the power of British empire constitute contemporary political facts. The impression that we are here reading the verbatim text of Briton Moniments receives further stress at the point where the chronicle breaks off in mid-sentence: After him Vther, which Pendragon hight, Succeeding There abruptly it did end, Without full point, or other Cesure right, As if the rest some wicked hand did rend, Or th’Author selfe could not at least attend To finish it. (Faerie Queene, 2.10.68, lines 1–6)
‘There’ in the second line, like ‘now’ in stanza 5, marks the precise limit of the quoted chronicle, which we witness ending ‘without full point’ even before we are informed that it
²³ Bates, ‘The Faerie Queene’, 134.
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309 has done so.²⁴ As Sarah Wall-Randell observes, it is at this point (if not before) that we as readers ‘realize . . . that we have been reading Briton Moniments all this time, have been holding it in our hands, looking through Arthur’s eyes’.²⁵ This moment of realisation may seem of tertiary significance, if we assume that what matters to Arthur and to us is what the chronicle ‘says’ rather than how it says it; yet, the small shock given to the reader at this stage is, I shall argue, crucial to the development of historical poetry in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Arthur’s response to the interruption of his reading (which, if it continued, could only arrive at himself) is interestingly ambivalent: ‘that so vntimely breach / The Prince him selfe halfe seemed to offend, / Yet secret pleasure did offence empeach’ (Faerie Queene, 2.10.68, lines 6–8). In addition to these emotions, Arthur experiences ‘wonder of antiquity’ (Faerie Queene, 2.10.68, line 9) and ‘delight, to heare / The royall Ofspring of his natiue land’ (Faerie Queene, 2.10.69, lines 1–2). Yet, while his wonder and delight are linked to the historical content of Briton Moniments (and could, presumably, be as powerfully provoked by a prose chronicle), his ‘secret pleasure’ is rooted in the formal and material qualities of the text—not only that it is a poem, but that it ends so abruptly. Critics have suggested various sources for Arthur’s seemingly perverse pleasure at this juncture. For Richard Rambuss, it is the pleasure of secrecy itself, the delight in something yet-to-be-revealed; for Jennifer Summit, a grateful relinquishment of the quest for complete knowledge in favour of post-Reformation historical scepticism.²⁶ In WallRandell’s view, ‘what is ultimately . . . pleasurable is the pastness of the past, its very impenetrability, its remoteness’.²⁷ There is, in any case, something ironic in that nothing in the long annals seems to provide the same degree of satisfaction as their abrupt suspension. If, as Spenser suggests here, the pleasure of historical poetry lies in what the text does not provide access to—is located, even, in the moment of realising that the promised access has been denied—then the gulf between History and Poetry which loomed so large for Sidney and his followers may not be the insurmountable obstacle it has sometimes appeared to be, but rather the very source of this hybrid genre’s attraction.
Drayton’s Historical Poetry As mentioned above, the sources for Drayton’s late Elizabethan vision of historical poetry are usually traced through the complaint tradition and in particular the powerful influence of Samuel Daniel. Just as Daniel’s hugely popular Complaint of Rosamond (1592) gave Drayton the cue for historical legends such as that of Matilda (who complains that the unchaste Rosamond and Churchyard’s subject Jane Shore are praised where she is neglected), and Piers Gaveston, so Daniel’s Civil Wars (1595) provided a model for Drayton’s treatment of fourteenth-century conflict, Mortimeriados; when Drayton revised the poem as The Barons’ Wars he in fact drew still closer to Daniel’s model, exchanging the rhyme royal ²⁴ As Bart van Es notes, ‘Nowhere else in The Faerie Queene do we find a capitalized adverb not preceded by a full stop’; although van Es argues that the chronicle history recounted in Faerie Queene 2.10 cannot be identical with Briton Moniments as described in Faerie Queene 2.9, he observes that the two histories ‘here meet at a vanishing point’; Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford, 2002), 47. ²⁵ Sarah Wall-Randell, The Immaterial Book: Reading and Romance in Early Modern England (Ann Arbor, MI, 2013), 25. ²⁶ Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge, 1993), 68; Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago, IL, 2008), 125–8. ²⁷ Wall-Randell, Immaterial Book, 33.
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310 - of Mortimeriados for Daniel’s eight-line stanza. Yet, this chapter argues, Drayton’s understanding of historical poetry was fundamentally different from Daniel’s, and that difference owes much to the influence of Spenser’s Briton Moniments and the scene of historical reading in The Faerie Queene, 2.10. Specifically, Drayton follows Spenser in: a) foregrounding scenes and experiences of reading within his historical poems; b) finding imaginative ways of presenting his verse not merely as a poetic retelling of history but as a genuine historical document (in modern academic parlance, a primary source); and c) embracing gaps and limitations in historical knowledge as a paradoxical source of pleasure and fulfilment. Although these methods and motifs are particularly evident in England’s Heroical Epistles, they are already to be noted in his earlier historical ‘legends’, in particular that of Robert Duke of Normandy (1596). Robert Duke of Normandy begins with the poet strolling by a river, a motif familiar from earlier examples of historical complaint, such as Thomas Lodge’s Complaint of Elstred (1593) and Spenser’s Ruines of Time (1591). Prefiguring the personified rivers of Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, which sing their histories and those of the surrounding region as they glide along, the Thames is presented as a monarch, looking back to inspect its own winding course, and thereby prompting the poet to glance back to contemplate the skyline of London and muse upon the fall of empires. ‘So Troy (thought I) her stately head did bear, / Whose crazed ribs ye furrowing plough doth ear’ (Drayton, Robert Duke of Normandy, lines 34–5, Works, 1.254). The poet is soon encountered by a parade of allegorical personages, led by Fame and Fortune, who will vie over the fate and historical reputation of the miserable Duke Robert. So far, so conventional, indeed so medieval and Chaucerian. In conclusion, however, Drayton reveals that Fame, on departing in triumph, ‘Gave me this book, wherein was writ at large, / Great Norman Roberts famous history, / T’amaze the world with his sad Tragedy’ (Drayton, Robert Duke of Normandy, lines 1417–19, Works, 1.303). As with Briton Moniments, the reader discovers only at the end that what they have been reading is a book-within-a-book; given that Robert Duke of Normandy first appeared at the head of a 1596 volume, which also included the tragedies of Matilda and Gaveston, the content of ‘this book’ may be considered to encompass those legends as well. References to the ‘book’, ubiquitous in historical poetry, are generally worthy of scrutiny. The point holds true not only for Drayton and Spenser, but for earlier metrical chroniclers like Hardyng, who regularly reminds the reader of the sources he is working from: ‘as books tell’, ‘Some books sayen’, ‘as sayeth the book’ (Hardyng, Chronicle, fols. 44v, 102v, 152v). As Hardyng remarks, new chronicles like his own are rooted in the soil of older historical literature: ‘As in old fields, corns fresh and green grew / So of old books cometh our cunning new’ (Hardyng, Chronicle, fol. 5v). Reference to the ‘book’ provides Elizabethan historical poets such as Spenser and Drayton with a prompt for niggling away at the difference between history and poetry, a difference which, for the purposes of the genre, must somehow be simultaneously vast and easily bridged. The urge to niggle is evident in the revised final stanza of Robert Duke of Normandy in the later edition of 1619, which reintroduces an uncertain distinction between the poem and the book: ‘this Book, wherein was writ at large, / His life, set out, though in this Legend short, / T’amaze the World with this so true report’ (Drayton, Robert Duke of Normandy (1619), lines 941–3, Works, 2.410).
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311 Here, ‘this Book’ seems to refer at once to the volume Drayton’s reader is holding and to a longer, more exhaustive history on which ‘this legend’ is based. Drayton’s nervous toying with the ‘book’ in Robert Duke of Normandy has a serious point. The book is, after all, the gift of Fame, and the poem has revolved around a debate between (good) Fame and (bad) Fortune. The question at hand is whether Robert’s historical reputation will outlive, and in some sense redeem, his miserable end, blinded and imprisoned by his brother, Henry I. The legend is closely concerned, in other words, not only with conveying certain historical truths, but with the means by which such truths are conveyed and preserved. Significantly, Fame wears upon her breast a crystal table (or, in the 1619 text, a crystal tomb) ‘stuffed with Poets, Saints, and Conquerors’ (Drayton, Robert Duke of Normandy, line 90, Works, 1.256). Fame cherishes poets because they are her darlings in a double sense, performing deeds worthy of record and providing the means by which such deeds are recorded and preserved. The essence of history, seen in this light, consists of books by poets about the makers of poetry. Yet, for all this praise of poets, in Robert Duke of Normandy the poet-hero proves curiously passive. Drayton himself, introduced as ‘this Poet [who] must compile’ the nobleman’s tragedy (Drayton, Robert Duke of Normandy, line 130, Works, 1.257), is revealed finally as another reader, not unlike Arthur in the library of Eumnestes.²⁸ Reading as a kind of historical action—a deed worthy of memory—is again highlighted in Mortimeriados, which concludes with the rebellious earl Roger Mortimer’s final letter from prison to his lover, Queen Isabella (nine stanzas), and Isabella’s receipt, opening, and slow reading of the letter (ten stanzas). The royal reader’s interaction with the physical document, with its recalcitrant wax seal, is described in lingering detail. With sensitive sadism, Drayton tracks the Queen’s reactions as the full content of the message, in which Mortimer recalls his glorious career and reveals that he has been sentenced to death, gradually dawns on her. This historical poem concludes, in other words, with a recapitulation of the Briton Moniments canto. Like Spenser, Drayton is ultimately less concerned with conveying historical information than with imagining the effect on a royal reader of a historical document, whose text is for a certain space identical with that of his poem. A year after Robert Duke of Normandy and Mortimeriados, Drayton published England’s Heroical Epistles. This would prove by far his most successful work, with at least a dozen editions in his lifetime (and several more in the latter half of the seventeenth century), and can surely lay claim to being the most commercially successful historical poem of the early modern period.²⁹ The work is loosely modelled on Ovid’s Heroides, and more specifically on the Double Heroides (a supplement to the original poem, not always attributed to Ovid), which features exchanges of letters between Classical lovers. Drayton applied this model to historical British protagonists of the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, overlaying his Ovidian model with a national narrative leading towards the presumed harmony of the Elizabethan present.³⁰ The first edition featured nine pairs of
²⁸ In the 1596 text, Drayton is tasked with compiling Robert’s ‘history’; in 1619 his ‘Tragedy’ (Drayton, Robert Duke of Normandy (1619), line 130, Works, 2.386). ²⁹ On the popularity of Heroical Epistles and its place in Drayton’s career, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Michael Drayton’s Brilliant Career’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 125 (2005), 119–47; and Richard Hardin, ‘Convention and Design in Drayton’s “Heroicall Epistles” ’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 83 (1968), 35–41. ³⁰ Hardin’s optimistic reading of the poem, in terms of the trajectory of national time (in ‘Convention and Design’), is disputed by Dasgupta (in ‘Imagining Britain’).
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312 - lovers, comprising Rosamond and Henry II; King John and Matilda; Queen Isabel and Mortimer; Queen Isabel and Richard II; Queen Katherine and Owen Tudor; the Duke of Suffolk and Queen Margaret; Edward IV and Mistress Shore; Mary of France and the Duke of Suffolk; and Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley. Later editions included the additional pairings of Edward the Black Prince and the Countess of Salisbury; Elinor Cobham and Duke Humphrey; and the Earl of Surrey and Lady Geraldine. Notably, most of these historical couples had received recent treatment in poetry and drama, including by Drayton himself. Of the first three in the collection, the tragedy of Rosamond had been the subject of a famous complaint by Samuel Daniel, while Drayton had composed his own Legend of Matilda (1594) and had explored the love of Isabel and Mortimer in Mortimeriados (following in the footsteps of Marlowe’s Edward II). Several of the later couples feature prominently in plays such as Shakespeare’s Richard II, Henry VI, and Edward III.³¹ The reign of Richard III is passed over, but his character as drawn by Shakespeare is remembered, with Margaret castigating him as ‘That foul, ill-favoured, crookback’d stigmatic, / That like a carcass stol’n out of a tomb, / Came the wrong way out of his mother’s womb / With teeth in’s head, his passage to have torn, / As though begot an age ere he was born’ (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, ‘Queen Margaret to William de la Poole’, lines 63–7, Works, 2.240). The fact that Drayton was content to cover such well-trodden ground, rather than seeking out new historical vistas, may shed some light on his intentions. His aim was not simply to put English history into verse, but to devise a means by which poetry could genuinely be historical, in terms of form as well as content. In the late Elizabethan complaint tradition, the poet is typically confronted with a ghost. As noted above, Lodge, Spenser, and Drayton all figure themselves strolling by a river when they are encountered by a spectre or a vision. Daniel’s Rosamond likewise describes herself as a ghost suffering the pains of an unsettled afterlife, requiring ‘Lovers sighs on earth’ (Daniel, ‘Complaint of Rosamond’, line 14, Complete Works, 1.81)—and therefore the assistance of Daniel the poet—to deliver her to Elysium. ‘The fearful ghost of woeful Gaveston’ in Drayton’s poem (Drayton, Robert Duke of Normandy, ‘Legend of Pierce Gaveston’, line 10, Works, 1.159) emerges from a comparable underworld, though with less hope of ultimate redemption. The motif of the complaining ‘ghost’ is rooted in the Mirror for Magistrates tradition (though in earlier editions of that work the word is never used). In these late complaints, however, the function of the ghost is not simply to crystallise the de casibus theme, but also to provide a means whereby the past can speak in the present: ‘Here on this earth, but once to speak again’, as Drayton’s Matilda puts it (Drayton, Robert Duke of Normandy, ‘Legend of Matilda’, line 9, Works, 2.411).³² To the extent that they are voiced by ghosts, these poems are not merely accounts of the past, but of the past itself erupting into the present. The desire they appeal to, intimately familiar to Renaissance writers from Francis Petrarch to Shakespeare, is the impossible longing for real communication with the dead and the lost world of the past.³³ Yet, to the extent that they are
³¹ On Drayton’s borrowings from Shakespeare, see Meghan C. Andrews, ‘Michael Drayton, Shakespeare’s Shadow’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 65 (2014), 273–306. Shakespeare’s authorship of Edward III remains a subject of scholarly debate. ³² See Jones, ‘Uses of Medievalism’. Works in the de casibus tradition, stemming from Boccaccio’s influential De casibus virorum illustrium (Of the Falls of Illustrious Men), deal with the falls from fortune’s heights of famous and powerful men and women. ³³ On the longing for the lost past in the Renaissance, see Jürgen Pieters, Speaking With the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History (Edinburgh, 2005), esp. chapter 1; see also Jones, ‘Uses of Medievalism’.
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313 conscious of, and address themselves to, an audience in the Elizabethan present, the ghosts of complaint poetry are not purely historical beings; even as they forge a supernatural bridge between the past and the present, their desire to persuade and self-exculpate arguably adulterates their capacity to provide a genuine experience of the past. This consideration, I would suggest, lies behind Drayton’s shift from speaking spectres to haunted historical artefacts in England’s Heroical Epistles. Here, as in the earlier ghostly complaints, we hear the dead speak, but in this case the dead have no knowledge of the future (beyond what may come to them through intuition, foreboding, or flashes of prophetic insight). Drayton’s dead letter-writers fully inhabit their lost historical moment, speaking to us (or rather, letting their voices be heard) across the gulfs of time. Although he does not adapt the antiquated English of a Robert of Gloucester, the epistolary form gives Drayton a means of making his verses ‘breathe antiquity’. In line with a major strain of Elizabethan historical thought, Heroical Epistles revolves around the fantasy of lost documents.³⁴ Drayton’s protagonists repeatedly refer to ‘these letters’—those they receive and those they write—not just in terms of their content, but of the feel and hue of the paper, the colour of the ink, the style of writing, the wax required for sealing, and the ripping of the seal. In her agony of mind, Matilda loses and then finds her paper, pen, and wax, and laments the state of the manuscript she will ultimately send to King John: ‘I write, endite, I point, I raze, I quote, / I enterline, I blot, correct, I note’ (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, ‘Matilda to King John’, lines 35–6, Works, 2.154). The printed page of Heroical Epistles cannot convey Matilda’s blots, corrections, and interlineations, yet the reader is thus encouraged to imagine the genuine medieval manuscript behind the printed verses, which, we are invited to assume, has somehow found its way into the poet’s hands. Drayton is not offering his readers new books made out of old, like a Hardyng or a Daniel, but faux-historical text-objects, old books new-made. The letters as imagined documents take their place in Heroical Epistles alongside a panoply of hoary monuments and artefacts. One of the primary uses of the prose annotations that follow each letter is to affirm the existence of monuments, ruined or otherwise, that corroborate the account. Thus, in the first note on Rosamond’s opening epistle, Drayton assures the reader that ‘Rosamond’s Labyrinth, whose ruins together with her well, being paved with square stone in the bottom, and also her tower from which the labyrinth did run, are yet remaining’ (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, annotation to ‘Rosamond to Henry II’, Works, 2.139). Likewise, the notes to Katherine’s letter to Owen Tudor affirm the splendour of Camelot and the knights who attended Arthur’s court there, ‘as to this day is perceived by their ancient monuments’ (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, annotation to ‘Queen Katherine to Owen Tudor’, Works, 2.207). In his notes on Mistress Shore, Drayton claims to have seen a contemporary portrait of her, ‘such as she rose out of her bed in the morning, having nothing on but a rich Mantle, cast under one arm over her shoulder’ (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, annotation to ‘Mistress Shore to Edward IV’, Works, 2.258–9). Yet, in spite of these antiquarian endnotes, England’s Heroical Epistles maintains an uneasy, ambivalent relation to the material remnants of the past. On the one hand, Drayton takes care to implant the idea of the letters themselves as physical objects, in some way equivalent to ruined palaces and old portraits in their capacity to provide a direct and tactile link to the past, rather than just a report. On the other hand, he insists on the absolute superiority of verse. If the letters are imagined as material artefacts, ³⁴ See Summit, Memory’s Library, chapter 2; and Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory, chapters 2 and 3.
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314 - their supposed survival proves the recurring point of much Elizabethan poetry, that verse is what endures. Poetry is the best guide to historical truth because it is the only art form that can be trusted to escape time’s wrack.³⁵ In the preface to the reader, Drayton explains why he has included explanatory notes at the end of each epistle: ‘because the work might in truth be judged brainish, if nothing but amorous humour were handled therein, I have interwoven matters historical, which unexplained, might defraud the mind of much content’ (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, ‘To the Reader’, Works, 2.130). As we have seen, the putative opposition between love and history soon threatens to derail the whole poetic project, when Drayton is forced to confess that King John’s letter is ‘more poetical then historical, making no mention at all of the occurrents of the time, or state, touching only his love to her’. Yet, the case of King John also provides an opportunity for the poet to suggest that the real history, and more importantly the real touch of the past, is to be found precisely in amorous epistles like John’s, rather than in the notes. As Drayton goes on to argue, John’s failure to be historical is historical, since this is what the wayward monarch was really like: ‘the extremity of his passions forced by his desires, rightly fashioning the humour of this King as it hath been truly noted by the best and most authentical writers’ (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, annotation to ‘King John to Matilda’, Works, 2.152). The historical King John would not have filled his letters with references to contemporary events. Thus, poetry reveals a historical truth in a way that ‘history’, defined as ‘the occurents of the time, or state’, cannot. Drayton even goes so far as to suggest that the events usually taken for history—that is, the military exploits and political manoeuvres filling the pages of most chronicles—are effectively only symptoms of the love matters and ‘extremity of passion’ his poems treat of. In her reply to John, Matilda reminds him of the acts of brutality he has committed in pursuit of her, deeds he neglects to mention in his own epistle: Is this the mean that mightiness approves, And in this sort do princes woo their loves? With rarest music, which the hearing charms, Fill they our ears with noise of clattering arms? To please the smell with odours sweet perfuming, The smoky steam of towers with fire consuming? (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, ‘Matilda to King John’, Works, 5.105)³⁶
While King John is apparently incapable of noticing the bloody battles and burning towers provoked by his excessive love, traditional historians are equally myopic if they mistake occurrences like these for the true stuff of history. They are rather, as Matilda recognises, the incidental music accompanying real emotional events captured only, if at all, in letters between long-dead lovers. While King John’s passions leave no room in his imagination for historical particulars, elsewhere in Heroical Epistles the opposite holds true. Many of the most densely ‘historical’ passages—in terms of cataloguing names, places, and incidents—spring from an overflow of
³⁵ As van Es comments, ‘Drayton’s notes, by acknowledging gaps in the record, stake his claim as an “ingenious” poet making a mark on the national past’ (van Es, ‘Michael Drayton’, 262). On comparable manoeuvres in Briton Moniments, see van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History. ³⁶ This passage is much abridged in editions after 1599 (Drayton, Works, 2.156).
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315 emotion on the part of the letter-writer, as if extreme feeling sought to relieve itself in the compulsive itemisation of facts. Disgraced and exiled to the Isle of Man for dabbling with sorcery, Elinor Duchess of Gloucester reviews the dynastic tangles and international scandals of fifteenth-century England in a self-justifying tirade addressed to her husband, Humphrey: What blood, extract from famous Edward’s line, Could boast itself to be so pure as thine? Who else, next Henry, should the realm prefer? If it allow the line of Lancaster? But Rayner’s daughter must from France be fet, And with a vengeance on our throne be set; Mauns, Maine, and Anjou, on that beggar cast, To bring her home to England in such haste, And what for Henry thou hadst laboured there, To join the King with Armagnac’s rich heir, Must all be dash’d, as no such thing had been. Poole needs must have his darling made a Queen. (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, ‘Eleanor Cobham to Duke Humphrey’, lines 69–80, Works, 2.217)
Here, historia is founded in hysteria. In the fact-filled ranting of an imprisoned Elinor or an exiled Mortimer, the stuff of history is introduced to plug a gap, to repair a loss beyond redress. With a few exceptions (Queen Katherine and Owen Tudor really seem to believe that their best years lie ahead of them), Drayton’s protagonists are obsessed with a past state—of happiness, love, freedom, or honour—which may feel close enough to touch yet can never be regained. Like crazed chroniclers desperately piling up place names (‘Mauns, Maine, and Anjou’) and mounting fact on fact, they strive in vain to reverse the flow of time. In this respect, their condition hyperbolically mirrors that of Elizabethan writers and readers in relation to the lost medieval past. Like Drayton’s passionate protagonists, the readers of England’s Heroical Epistles can never hope to inhabit the historical vistas that hover so enticingly before their eyes. Whereas historical drama sometimes seems to promise the impossible—the dead walking and speaking in our presence—historical poetry ultimately offers its readers nothing more tangible than a mirror of their own impossible desires. If Heroical Epistles holds out the possibility of genuine communion with its long-dead protagonists, it is only because what these protagonists feel most keenly is precisely a longing to recapture what they have lost forever. Drayton thus transforms the scene of reading in The Faerie Queene—and more specifically the scene of that reading’s interruption, in the unpunctuated, quasi-textual space between two capitalised words—into the substance of a new kind of historical poetry. Judging by the success of the collection, there was some pleasure in it.
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18 Elegy Andrea Brady
Elegy Amongst the Genres Elegy is the term we now associate with poems of mourning, composed in response to a death or to be performed at a funeral. In the sixteenth century, however, the genre was a complex palimpsest, encompassing the lament, dirge, or complaint; poems of erotic desire, subjection, and violence; and a specific metre. In this period elegy was not considered a subgenre of lyric. In The Defence of Poesy (first published 1595), Philip Sidney identified it amongst the multiple varieties of poetry that included ‘heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satiric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others: some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with, some by the sort of verse they liked best to write in’ (Sidney, Defence, Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, 11).¹ Sidney describes ‘the lamenting elegiac’ (26) as a highly affective poetic genre, that ‘weeps the want of his mistress’ (35). Elegy ‘in a kind heart would move rather pity than blame’ (26) and bewails ‘the weakness of mankind and the wretchedness of the world’ (26). Sidney is here identifying the form practised by the Roman poets Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, but the accent on suffering provides a link to the tearful genre of funerary elegy. Elegy’s capacity to elicit pity also supports what Sidney defends as the ethical function of poetry, against critics who claim that it ‘abuses men’s wit, training it to wanton sinfulness and lustful love’ (35). This is a necessary defence of a genre which, as represented by Ovid’s Amores, often included sexually explicit and even sadistic scenes of desire. To explore the interaction in the sixteenth century between love, death, loss, and violence which could be contained in the word ‘elegy’, this chapter will offer readings of examples of funerary and Ovidian elegies alongside a discussion of the peculiarities of elegiac distich. Following Sidney, Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) named the elegiac amongst the ‘eight notable several kinds of poets’ (Meres, Palladis Tamia, fol. 282v).² He compares the famous Greek and Latin elegists to English contemporaries, including Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Francis Bryan, Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Edward Dyer, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and William Shakespeare. These are not poets who wrote in elegiac metre, but all are writers of love poetry. Like Sidney, Meres identifies elegy as a genre concerning love and loss: these poets are ‘the most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love’ (Meres, Palladis Tamia, fol. 284). The theory that funerary and love elegy have in common the tendency to bewail loss can be found throughout early modern poetics. The medieval grammarian John of Garland had
¹ Philip Sidney, in Gavin Alexander (ed.), Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth, 2004). ² Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598). Andrea Brady, Elegy In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Andrea Brady 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0018
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317 written (c 1231–5) that elegy is the song of misery [miserabile carmen] ‘because it contains or voices the sorrows of lovers’ (John of Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 5.365–6).³ In his Poetices libri septem (1561), Julius Caesar Scaliger argued that elegy originated as a funerary genre and was later applied to other subjects such as love: ‘And not without reason. For in love affairs there is much complaining and genuine death, which we in our insanity experience with that insane and ungrateful sex’, although he later revoked this theory.⁴ The emphasis on loss and the influence of Roman love elegy in genealogies of elegy can be traced through much medieval and Renaissance love poetry and prose, including Dante’s Vita Nuova and Petrarch’s Rime Sparse. Petrarch, who wrote (c 1343–5) that ‘there is no poet who can equal Ovid’, also owned a rare Propertius manuscript that may have included poems by Catullus and Tibullus.⁵ Many of Ovid’s conceits from the Amores can be traced in Petrarch’s Rime Sparse and Triumph of Life (the title draws on the Roman ritual of the triumph, an important Ovidian topos). But, like Dante, Petrarch strips Ovid of his carnality. Petrarch’s Laura is no Corinna, and their relationship is nothing like the sexually explicit, sometimes violent, and often cynical one portrayed in the Amores. When Ovid’s Amores, a series of erotic elegies, were first translated into English by Christopher Marlowe in the 1580s (they were not published until 1593), the poems also presented a dramatic alternative to English Petrarchism as initiated by Wyatt and Surrey. The Ovidian corpus provided a vocabulary and set of tropes for erotic ambivalence, and a resistance both to the wounds of love and the desire for advancement that was pursued through sophisticated expressions of courtly love. In particular, imitating the Roman elegists’ embrace of softness and eschewal of public life became a means for young poets at the end of the sixteenth century to stage a refusal to cooperate with standards of conduct that might provide opportunities and status. Concurrently, however, funerary elegy was also emerging as an important genre for the performance of poetic virtuosity, and the assertion of affective ties that superseded those of class and family.
The Origins of Elegy In ancient Greece, the word elegos referred to any song performed to the aulos, a double reeded wind instrument. Gregory Nagy traces the form of the mortuary elegy to the thrēnos (a lament performed by professional male singers) and góos (a lament performed by male or female non-professionals attested in ancient Greek epic).⁶ A false etymology derived the word elegos from e e legeis, ‘to cry woe! woe!’.⁷ Elegiac distich—a couplet consisting of a hexameter followed by a pentameter line—is also attested from around 700 in archaic Greek poetry, but it did not bear a particular relation to funerary writing; most ancient epitaphic inscriptions were hexameter verses.⁸
³ John of Garland, in Traugott Lawler (ed.), The Parisiana Poetria (New Haven, CT, 1974). ⁴ Cited in Gordon Braden, ‘Classical Love Elegy in the Renaissance (And After)’, in Karen Weisman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (Oxford, 2010), 153–69, 158. ⁵ Francis Petrarch, Rerum Memorandum Liber, 2.20, cited in Gordon Braden, ‘Classical Love Elegy’, 265. ⁶ See Gregory Nagy, ‘Ancient Greek Elegy’, in Weisman (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, 13–45, 13, 30. ⁷ See Thea Thorsen (ed.), ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy (Cambridge, 2013), 1–20, 2. ⁸ See Bruno Gentili, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece (Baltimore, MD, 1988), 33–4; also, Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘The Elegy and the Elegiac Mode: Praise and Alienation’, in Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 147–57.
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318 - The elegiac distich was related to other genres through its form: hexameter is the metre in which epic was composed. Particularly in Roman verse, elegists call attention to the pentameter line as its deficient companion. The lack of a foot in every alternating line creates an asymmetry which ‘weakens’ the verse. In the Ars Poetica (c 19 ), Horace describes elegy as ‘versibus impariter iunctis’ [verses yoked unequally] (Horace, Ars Poetica, line 75, Art of Poetry, 456–7),⁹ or in Ben Jonson’s translation as verses ‘unequall match’d’ (Jonson, ‘Horace, of the Art of Poetry’, line 107, Ben Jonson, 8.309).¹⁰ The pentameter line ‘seems designed to frustrate its yoke mate’ and introduces an experience of lack or loss through the missing foot which—in Ovid’s opening poem in the Amores—has been ‘stolen’ by Cupid.¹¹ This asymmetry made the elegiac distich a fitting form for the ethical nonconformity of Roman love elegy. The ‘hobbled’ distich did not translate well to English. In The Art of English Poesy (1589), George Puttenham heard in it a prosodic echo of the sorrow of love; elegy is ‘a piteous manner of meter, placing a limping pentameter after a lusty hexameter, which made it go dolorously more than any other meter’ (Puttenham, Art, 137).¹² Jonson avoided it, arguing that it ‘asks a strain / too loose, and capering, for thy stricter vein’ (Jonson, The Forest, ‘Proludium’, lines 1–2, Ben Jonson, 8.108).¹³ Marlowe also does not attempt to use it in his translations of Ovid’s Amores. But his choice to recreate the unequal distich with a balanced pentameter couplet creates a jarring effect, because the poems repeatedly call attention to their form. In the opening poem, Ovid compares the distich to a wave: ‘sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat’ [in six numbers let my work rise, and sink again in five] (Ovid, Amores, 1.1.27, Amores, 320–1).¹⁴ And Ovid plays with the ironic potential created by the asymmetry of the distich throughout. As Heather James notes, in Amores 2.17.15–22 the metre is compared to the erotic relations of Calypso and Ulysses, Thetis and Peleus, Egeria and Numa, Venus and Mars.¹⁵ Ovid places the women on top, in the hexameter line, and their male lovers in the pentameter line: an inversion of conventional sexual hierarchies which also relates to the representation of the male lover as weakened and impotent, unable or unwilling to take on the heroic expectations signified by hexameter.
Ovidian Elegy in the Sixteenth Century A history of Ovid’s enormous influence on sixteenth-century poetry is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to note that Chaucer described Ovid as ‘Venus’ clerk’ in The House of Fame, the poet ‘That hath ysowen wonder wide / The great god of Love’s name’ (Chaucer, House of Fame, lines 1487–9, Riverside Chaucer, 366).¹⁶ The Ars and Heroides circulated ⁹ Horace, in H. Rushton Fairclough (trans.), Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1926). ¹⁰ Ben Jonson, in C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52). ¹¹ Heather James, ‘The Poet’s Toys: Christopher Marlowe and the Liberties of Erotic Elegy’, Modern Language Quarterly, 67.1 (2006), 103–27, 111. ¹² George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ¹³ Compare love elegies in The Underwood, for example, Poems, 18 (‘Can Beauty that did prompt me first to write’); 19 (‘By those bright Eyes, at whose immortal fires’); 22 (‘Though Beauty be the Mark of praise’); 40 (‘That Love’s a bitter sweet, I ne’re conceive’); and so on: see Ben Jonson, 8.169–70, 170–1, 173–4, 197–8. On Jonson’s abandonment of Ovidian elegy, see David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 75. ¹⁴ Ovid, in Grant Showerman (ed. and trans.), Heroides. Amores (Cambridge, MA, 1914). ¹⁵ See James, ‘Poet’s Toys’, 113. For the passage referred to, see Amores, 434–5. ¹⁶ Geoffrey Chaucer, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edition (Boston, MA, 1987). See also James G. Clark, ‘Introduction’, in James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley (eds), Ovid in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2011), 20.
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319 widely in Latin from the twelfth century onward.¹⁷ By 1500, the Latin elegists Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid had been collected in several editions; new editions continued to appear throughout the sixteenth century, primarily on the Continent.¹⁸ Ovid was also central to the ars dictaminis [art of letter writing] in the twelfth through sixteenth centuries.¹⁹ The Metamorphoses, Fasti, Tristia, and Heroides were standard schoolroom texts in England in the sixteenth century, but the scandalous Amores were less often recommended for students than Ovid’s other works.²⁰ Ovid’s sexually explicit verse made him a potentially dangerous figure for a pedagogy based on imitation that was meant to instil rhetorical and ethical skills in the young. His ‘reputation for resisting rather than complying with authority made him a dubious choice for imitation, and his myths are poor illustrations of Constantia [constancy], patientia [endurance], and pietas [duty], the Roman virtues that Elizabethan culture admired most’.²¹ Numerous poets produced their own versions of the Latin elegy. Robert Southwell wrote several Latin elegies on Catholic themes (c 1580), remembering the dead and celebrating earthly love.²² Thomas Campion published a sequence of Latin elegies in his Poemata (1595), where he claims to be ‘vatem . . . Bruti de nomine primum / Qui molles elegos et sua furta canat’ [the first British poet to sing soft elegies] (Campion, Elegeia 1, lines 7–8, Works, 336).²³ Victoria Moul notes the religious force of vates and the appearance in Campion’s opening lines of the ‘docta puella’ [learned girl] who is familiar to readers of Latin elegy, arguing that they redefine Roman elegy in relation to ‘Elizabethan military victory and religious independence from Rome’.²⁴ Campion remodels elegiac topoi such as the servitium and militia amoris [slave and soldier of love], suggesting that ‘because they are free of the real slavery and unrest on the continent, the English are free to sing of the arma (“weapons”) and fera bella (“wild battles”) of love’.²⁵ English-language elegies also began to appear. Some poets attempted to imitate the metre, including Philip Sidney (eight of the poems in the Old Arcadia, which Sidney completed c 1580, are in elegiac distich). In the obscene fabliau ‘The Choice of Valentines’ (composed c 1592–3), Thomas Nashe made use of the form of ‘wanton elegy’ (Nashe, ‘Choice of Valentines’, dedicatory sonnet, line 4, Works, 3.403) and refers to Ovid as ‘the fountain whence my streams do flow’ (Nashe, ‘Choice of Valentines’, closing sonnet, line 5, Works, 3.415).²⁶ The earliest elegies to appear in English include two examples by Theodore Beza, which were translated for the June 1557 edition of Richard Tottel’s Songs and
¹⁷ See Marilynn Desmond, ‘Gender and Desire in Medieval French Translations of Ovid’s Amatory Works’, in Clark, Coulson, and McKinley (eds), Ovid in the Middle Ages, 108–22, 108. ¹⁸ See Victoria Moul, ‘English Elegies of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century’, in Thorsen (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy, 306–19, 306. ¹⁹ See Marilynn Desmond, ‘Venus’s Clerk: Ovid’s Amatory Poetry in the Middle Ages’, in John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands (eds), A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (Chichester, 2014), 161–73, 170. ²⁰ See Ann Moss, Ovid in Renaissance France: A Survey of the Latin Editions of Ovid and Commentaries Printed in France before 1600 (London, 1982), 3. Also, T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, IL, 1944), 1.155–60, 2.417–55. ²¹ Sean Keilen, ‘Shakespeare and Ovid’, in Miller and Newlands (eds), Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, 232–45, 237. ²² See Robert Southwell, S. J., in Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney (eds), Collected Poems (Manchester, 2007), 104–14. ²³ Thomas Campion, in Percival Vivian (ed.), The Works of Thomas Campion (Oxford, 1909). ²⁴ Moul, ‘English Elegies’, 311. ²⁵ Moul, ‘English Elegies’, 314. ²⁶ Thomas Nashe, in Ronald B. McKerrow (ed.), revised F. P. Wilson, The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1958).
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320 - Sonnets but excluded from the second edition in July.²⁷ Sometime in the late sixteenth century, Sir John Harington wrote an imitation of Ovid’s Amores 2.4, ‘To live in lust I make not my profession’, which is headed ‘Ovid’s Confession’ in the Arundel-Harington manuscript.²⁸ The poem consists of heroic quatrains, like Surrey’s elegiac ‘So cruel prison’ and epitaph on Wyatt. Harington’s first stanza is hypercatalectic—that is, has an extra syllable at the end of the line—in lines 1 and 3, offering an approximation of the distich, though the pattern is not maintained.
Funeral Elegy Harington’s Ovidian elegy finds a place alongside funerary elegies in that manuscript, such as the verses ‘made by a Catholic’ for Edmund Campion, which Harington believed to be ‘the best English verse . . . that ever he read’.²⁹ Nonetheless, the funerary and the erotic elegy are usually kept separate by critics, with the few examples of poems in elegiac distich about death within sequences of Roman love elegy cited as points of contact between otherwise disparate forms: Catullus wrote a lament for his brother; Propertius an epitaph on Gallus, an elegy for Paetus, and another for the emperor’s nephew Marcellus; and Ovid in the Amores wrote an elegy for Tibullus.³⁰ The association between elegy and complaint draws out the performance of loss in Ovid’s Heroides, whose female speakers lament their abandonment or mistreatment by their lovers. The Roman elegists also wrote mock funerary poems: Catullus mourned the death of Lesbia’s sparrow, as Ovid did Corinna’s dead parrot.³¹ These mock elegies were imitated by John Skelton, in his poem for a pet sparrow called Philip, spoken by its owner, Jane Scrope.³² The Renaissance funerary elegy emerged from a distinct set of sources in what in the medieval period was usually called a complaint, lament, or planctus. These genres are themselves already mixed: the complaint ‘admits poems of spiritual intensity but also social anger, mixes love lament with burlesque, borders into elegy’.³³ The genre was also subdivided depending on its occasion. Julius Caesar Scaliger separated the funerary elegy into the epicede, which is spoken over an unburied corpse; the ‘epitaphium recens’, produced for a newly buried body; and the ‘epitaphium anniversarium’, remembering the dead at yearly intervals.³⁴ This association between the elegy and specific forms of commemorative occasions and temporalities can also be found in Puttenham’s observation in a chapter on ‘poetical lamentations’, that ‘the lamenting of deaths was chiefly at the very burials of the dead, also at month’s minds and longer times, by custom continued yearly’ (Puttenham, ²⁷ See Gordon Braden, ‘Love Poems in Sequence: The Amores from Petrarch to Goethe’, in Miller and Newlands (eds), Handbook to the Reception of Ovid, 262–76, 270. ²⁸ See Ruth Hughey (ed.), The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, 2 vols. (Columbus, OH, 1960), poem 222, 1.253–4 (notes on the poem can be found at 2.350–2). For the Ovidian original, see Amores, 390–3. ²⁹ Hughey, Arundel Harington, poem 66, 1.106–11, traditionally attributed to Henry Walpole of Norfolk. Harington’s comment can be found in the notes at 2.63. ³⁰ For Catullus, see Poems, 101, in F. W. Cornish, J. P. Postgate, and J. W. Mackail (trans.), revised by G. P. Goold, Catullus. Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris (Cambridge, MA, 1913), 172–3. For Propertius, see Elegies, 1.21 and 3.7, 3.18, in G. P. Goold (ed. and trans.), Elegies (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 96–7, 240–5, 282–7. For Ovid, see Amores, 3.9, 486–91. ³¹ For Catullus, see Poems, 3, 4–5. For Ovid, see Amores, 2.6, 398–403. ³² See John Skelton, in John Scattergood (ed.), The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth, 1983), 71–106. See also Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), 95–6. ³³ John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (Oxford, 1991), 2. ³⁴ See Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (1561), in Frederick Morgan Padelford (ed. and trans.), Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics (New York, 1905), 425–6.
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321 Art, 137). These commemorations included ‘cladding the mourners, their friends, and servants, in black vestures of shape doleful and sad . . . also by woeful countenances and voices, and besides by poetical mournings in verse’ (Puttenham, Art, 137). The changing modes of funeral elegy are related in complex ways to the history of mortuary ritual, including both orthodox religious observance and folk customs.³⁵ In addition to its roots in medieval complaint and changing mortuary customs, elegy was also shaped by deliberative rhetoric.³⁶ Students in the sixteenth century learned the topoi of consolation, copied down exemplary laments in their commonplace books, and studied how to enter into what Sir Thomas Wilson calls a ‘fellowship of sorrow’ with the bereaved (Wilson, Art, 102).³⁷ Advising readers in The Art of Rhetoric (1553, 1560) on the rhetoric of ‘comforting’, Wilson presents a selection of useful topoi: death is common and spares none, ‘neither king nor kaiser, neither poor nor rich’; the dead are in everlasting bliss in heaven; life is a loan, and so forth (Wilson, Art, 103). Many elegiac poems in the sixteenth century read like compilations of these topoi. Thomas Nashe’s poem in time of plague—‘Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss’, from his play Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592)—is a valediction to the world by a dying speaker who recommends detachment from earthly joys such as lust, wealth, beauty, and strength, and ends with an invitation to ‘each degree’ to hasten to heaven and exit the earthly ‘player’s stage’ (Nashe, Summer’s Last Will, lines 1609, 1612, Works, 3.283, 284). Nashe draws on the medieval tradition of the danse macabre, which represented Death leading members of the social hierarchy from kings to peasants and levelling class distinctions. While these topoi may seem stale and formulaic to modern readers, Wilson’s advice begins with the recommendation that the writer needs to address the emotional needs of the bereaved: ‘the sorrowful would be cherished, that their grief might be assuaged and the passions of man brought under the obedience of reason’ (Wilson, Art, 102). Effective rhetoric begins with compassion. Wilson recognises that those suffering extreme grief ‘cannot abide comfort, but rather seek a mourner that would take part with them’ (Wilson, Art, 103). By ‘entering into fellowship of sorrow[,] we seek by a little and little to mitigate their grief ’ (Wilson, Art, 102–3). Nonetheless, Wilson believes—in line with the religious and cultural mores of his time—that the job of the rhetorician is to encourage the sorrowful to re-establish rational control over their intemperate grief. The bereaved should either be persuaded not to grieve at all, or their ‘just cause to be sad’ granted and shared (Wilson, Art, 102). Sixteenth-century rhetoricians also advised on the correct topics for elegiac encomium, which include the goods of nature, fortune, and character; most followed Cicero and Quintilian in highlighting the goods of character as most deserving of praise.³⁸ Many sixteenth-century elegies are constructed around these topics. Surrey’s commendatory poem ‘W[yatt] resteth here’, for example, announces itself as an epitaph, and praises Thomas Wyatt’s goods of nature (his visage and ‘valiant corpse’), fortune (his diplomatic career and ‘courteous talk’), and character (‘a mind / With virtue fraught, reposed, void of ³⁵ See Matthew Greenfield, ‘The Cultural Functions of Renaissance Elegy’, English Literary Renaissance, 28 (1998), 75–94. See also Andrea Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century (Basingstoke, 2006). ³⁶ See O. B. Hardison, Jr, The Enduring Monument (Chapel Hill, NC, 1962); Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison, WI, 1950); Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford, 1990); and Thomas O. Sloane, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley, CA, 1985), 93–4, 130–44. ³⁷ Sir Thomas Wilson, in Peter E. Medine (ed.), The Art of Rhetoric (1560) (University Park, PA, 1994). ³⁸ See Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton, NJ, 1973), 16.
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322 - guile’) (Surrey, ‘W[yatt] resteth here’, lines 29, 18, 23–4, Poems, 27).³⁹ Surrey celebrates Wyatt’s fortitude ‘Amid great storms . . . / To live upright’, and his inimitable poetry, ‘That reft Chaucer the glory of his wit’ (lines 11–12, 14). Chaucer’s forfeiture is mirrored by our loss of ‘this jewel’ whom we did not appreciate, ‘Sent for our health, but not received so’ (lines 37, 36, Poems, 28). These implied recriminations against Wyatt’s contemporaries are more passionately articulated in his sonnet ‘Divers thy death do diversely bemoan’, in which Surrey claims that he alone knew to ‘Honour the place that such a jewel bred’ (Surrey, ‘Divers thy death’, line 11, Poems, 28). In this poem, Surrey compares himself to Pyramus weeping for Thisbe: an Ovidian fable which also colours their relation with an element of erotic loss. Robert Greene’s A Maiden’s Dream (1591), a funeral elegy on the death of the Privy Councillor Sir Christopher Hatton, also draws on the Ovidian scenario of the bereft female speaker from the Heroides. Hatton was close to Queen Elizabeth and addressed her frequently in the terms of courtly love; the queen apparently brought him broth in his final illness. She is represented in the poem as Astraea and takes her place amongst nymphs and goddesses mourning a knight who lies dead beside a stream. The poem presents a sequence of ‘complaints’ by the virtues (Justice, Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance, and so on) who praise the knight’s charity and generosity to friends and strangers. Hatton is identified as a ‘grave advisor of the commonweal’ and ‘prudent counsellor unto his prince’, a ready soldier, and a stoical philosopher who ‘despising all, said man was grass: / His date a span, and omnia vanitas [all is vanity]’ (Greene, Maiden’s Dream, sig. B3).⁴⁰ After the goddesses pay their tributes, the poem stages a heraldic funeral procession, with ‘noblemen’ dressed in ‘mourning weeds’, soldiers trailing their pikes with their beavers down, and flocks of commoners. The maiden speaker comes last, and in her tears is comforted by Astraea: Virgin (quoth she), no boot by tears is had, Nor doth laments ought pleasure them that die, Souls must have change from this mortality, For living long sin hath the larger space, And dying well they find the greater grace. (Greene, Maiden’s Dream, sig. C4)
Astraea’s advice draws on the conventional solaces provided in consolatory literature: there is no use in grieving; death is inevitable, and to live a long life is to be exposed to more opportunity for sin; a good death is the greatest boon. Each of these aphorisms occupies a single line of verse, which emphasises their somewhat banal nature: the poem at this climactic point of moral and spiritual instruction merely lists the familiar clichés that anyone receiving a consolatory letter might expect to read. Nonetheless, the poem does retain the sound of dissent against such easy resolutions: it ends with the maiden awakened from her dream by the people’s ‘scream’ of grief: an inconsolable noise that disrupts the peaceful conclusion the poem is attempting to achieve. This scream signifies the other, inferior elegies produced on Sir Christopher’s death by his contemporaries. At the text’s beginning, Greene ‘began to call to mind what a subject was ministered to the excellent wits of both universities to work upon’, in the university miscellanies and commemorative volumes which began to be popular in the sixteenth century; however, as he pondered ³⁹ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Emrys Jones (ed.), Poems (Oxford, 1964). ⁴⁰ Robert Greene, A Maiden’s Dream (London, 1591).
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323 whether to write his own poem, he saw ‘some mechanical wits blow up mountains and bring forth mice, who with their follies did rather disparage his honours than decipher his virtues’ (Greene, Maiden’s Dream, sig. A3). As in Surrey’s sonnet for Wyatt, ‘Divers thy death do diversely bemoan’, Greene contrasts his efforts with the insincerity and violence of his competitors; their failure justifies his intrusion on the scene of grief. This competitive positioning is generic to the funeral elegy. Greene’s poem is representative of many sixteenth-century elegies in other ways. It incorporates references to the funeral; visits all the topoi recommended by rhetorical treatises for the construction of epideictic, that branch of Classical rhetoric related to praise and blame; and invents an excuse for its composition through a competitive dismissal of other poets. These characteristics reveal the funerary elegy to be both individualistic and collective: it focuses on the individual dead person and signals the virtues of the poet in a crowded field; but it also makes use of dialogic or collective forms of commemoration, both the voices of multiple personifications of the virtues, and the funeral itself.
‘Astrophel’ and The Shepheardes Calender It has been argued that the death of Philip Sidney in 1586 inaugurated not just the tradition of funerary anthologies, but the English vernacular funeral elegy itself, particularly in its pastoral form.⁴¹ Sidney’s death was memorialised in several anthologies containing hundreds of Latin and English elegies, including one from Cambridge and two from Oxford. Four elegies, by George Whetstone, John Phillip, Angel Day, and Thomas Churchyard, were published singly, along with engravings of Sidney’s funeral from drawings by Thomas Lant in 1588.⁴² These poems range from sonnets (one by King James VI) to hexameters, deploying the prosodic versatility that interested Sidney himself.⁴³ Spenser’s elegy for Sidney, ‘Astrophel’, appeared much later, as the first poem in a section of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595). Drawing on Theocritus’s (fl. 300–260 ) poem for Daphnis, Moschus’s (fl. 150 ) lament for Bion, Bion’s (120–50 ) ‘Death of Adonis’, Virgil’s (70–19 ) fifth and tenth Eclogues, and Ronsard’s Adonis (1563), ‘Astrophel’ represents Sidney as an Arcadian shepherd and paragon of physical excellence, able to wrestle, run, shoot, and swim better than any competitor. He falls in love with Stella, and courts her with poems and ‘brave deeds’ (Spenser, ‘Astrophel’, line 69, Shorter Poems, 375).⁴⁴ The elegy offers a subtle criticism of Sidney for being ‘Both wise and hardie (too hardie alas)’ (line 72), implying that because his powers of poetic persuasion are inadequate he must throw himself ‘greedily’ at a ‘brutish nation’ and attempt mercilessly ‘to slaughter them’ in order to impress Stella (Spenser, ‘Astrophel’, lines 104, 98, 105, Shorter Poems, 376, 377).⁴⁵ When he is subsequently stabbed in the thigh and bleeds to death, Astrophel is brought before Stella, who tears her hair and scratches her cheeks before joining him in death, extinguishing both of Sidney’s fictional personae in one elegiac coup.
⁴¹ See Raphael Falco, ‘Instant Artefacts: Vernacular Elegies for Philip Sidney’, Studies in Philology, 89.1 (1992), 1–19, 3. ⁴² See A. J. Colaianne and W. L. Godshalk (eds), Elegies for Philip Sidney (1587) (Delmar, NY, 1980), viii–x. ⁴³ See Falco, ‘Instant Artefacts’, 5–6. ⁴⁴ Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). ⁴⁵ See Raphael Falco, ‘Spenser’s “Astrophel” and the Formation of Elizabethan Literary Genealogy’, Modern Philology, 91.1 (1993), 1–25, 12.
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324 - Other shepherds gather to see his corpse, and in the familiar pattern of elegiac competition, each ‘meanes deviz’d to shew his sorrow best’ (Spenser, ‘Astrophel’, line, 208, Shorter Poems, 380), some undoubtedly by composing elegies for the volumes named above. However, these songs are displaced by the ‘dolefull lay’ of Clorinda, Astrophel’s sister. Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, wrote her own elegy for her brother (‘To the Angel Spirit of the Most Angelic Sir Philip Sidney’), but in ‘Astrophel’ she is ventriloquised as the mourning female speaker familiar from the Heroides as well as medieval traditions of female complaint.⁴⁶ When she finishes, a new poem begins: an elegy by ‘Thestylis’ (i.e., Sidney’s friend and servant, Lodowick Bryskett), after which ‘full many other moe, / As everie one in order lov’d him best’ (Bryskett, in ‘Astrophel’, lines 103–4, Shorter Poems, 384).⁴⁷ Spenser gives priority to Sidney’s sister, and the procession of elegies in the volume is ordered by affection rather than social status, as it would be in the heraldic funeral depicted by Lant, and in which a female relative such as Mary Sidney Herbert could not serve as chief mourner. Spenser’s adoption of a feminised voice of complaint also undermines some of the heroic representation of Sidney as a courtier and soldier, which features in the earlier elegies. This feminised voice appears in numerous examples of funerary elegy, including as we have seen Surrey’s ventriloquisation of Thisbe mourning Pyramus, and Greene’s representation of Astraea and the mourning virtues. It recalls Ovid’s Tristia, but also suggests an implicit fear that grief was effeminising: the French theologian Pierre Charron argued that the ‘strange and effeminate’ habit of sorrow ‘taketh away whatsoever is manly and generous in us, and puts upon us the countenances and infirmities of women’, and ‘makes men eunuchs’ (Charron, Of Wisdom, 97).⁴⁸ This fear of women’s emotional lability as a form of castration is suggested in the mortal injury to Astrophel’s (and Sidney’s) thigh, which recalls the Ovidian fable of Venus and Adonis.⁴⁹ In Shakespeare’s epyllion Venus and Adonis (1593), Venus is decidedly on top: the sexual aggressor, whose eventual physical domination of Adonis anticipates his inability to master the boar. Shakespeare’s poem also recalls the association between heterosexuality and a castrating wound in Ovid’s Amores. In Marlowe’s translation of the latter, the speaker laments, ‘I lately caught will have a new made wound, / And captive like be manacled and bound’ (Marlowe, Elegies, 1.2.29–30, Complete Works, 1.15).⁵⁰ Through his sexual desire for a woman, this male speaker has been wounded, captive, manacled, and bound. As in Ovidian elegy, Spenser’s poem also subtly undermines the logic of militarism by demonstrating how Astrophel’s abandonment of poetry led to disaster; refusing military duty in order to dwell with her in sensual indulgence might well have kept Sidney alive. Spenser wrote several pastoral elegies which run counter to the conventions of the elegiac genre and its ethics of consolation. Daphnaïda (1591) represents Sir Arthur Gorges as the shepherd Alcyon mourning for Daphne, his wife Douglas Howard. Alcyon is physically transformed by grief—‘His carelesse locks, vncombed and vnshorne / Hong long adowne,
⁴⁶ See Pamela Coren, ‘Edmund Spenser, Mary Sidney, and the “Doleful Lay” ’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 42.1 (2002), 25–41, 37. See also Chapter 32 in this volume. ⁴⁷ See Frederic B. Tromly, ‘Lodowick Bryskett’s Elegies on Sidney in Spenser’s Astrophel Volume’, Review of English Studies, 37.147 (1986), 384–8. ⁴⁸ Peter [Pierre] Charron, in Samson Lennard (trans.), Of Wisdome (London, [1608]). ⁴⁹ That Astrophel meets his death from a stab wound to the thigh in Spenser’s poem alludes to the death of Adonis who, in Ovid’s version of the myth in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses, was gored in the groin by a wild boar while out hunting. Sidney was in fact mortally wounded when shot in the thigh on the battlefield at Zutphen in the Low Countries. ⁵⁰ Christopher Marlowe, in Roma Gill, et al. (eds), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1987–98).
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325 and beard all ouer growne’ (Spenser, Daphnaïda, lines 43–4, Shorter Poems, 326)—and like Stella in ‘Astrophel’ he ‘did rend his haire, and beat his blubbred face’ in response to the narrator’s attempt at consolation (Spenser, Daphnaïda, line 551, Shorter Poems, 341). This habiliment and violent self-mortification were associated in the period with the excesses of pagan grief, including the keening women who performed at Old Irish funerals.⁵¹ When he begins his praise of Daphne’s virtues, Alcyon warns: ‘Ne let Elisa royall Shepeardesse / The praises of my parted loue envy’ (Spenser, Daphnaïda, lines 225–6, Shorter Poems, 331). For Elizabeth has her own shepherd singing her praises, Colin Clout. In this way, the elegy acknowledges the danger that the idealisation of the dead can provoke envy amongst survivors, particularly in a courtly context where the ultimate object of such idealisation should be the monarch. His lament ends, but Alcyon refuses to be consoled, and proceeds on a terrible pilgrimage, filled with hate for the world, life, death, and his body. Alcyon is out of the world—he shuns human habitation, and even the light of day—but he cannot forget its political structures. He concludes his lament with an appeal to ‘ye true Louers, whom desastrous chaunce / Hath farre exild your Ladies grace, / To mourne in sorrow and sad sufferaunce’: if they hear him ‘Lamenting lowde my Daphnes Elegie’, they should share it (Spenser, Daphnaïda, lines 505–7, 509, Shorter Poems, 339). Here again, funerary and love elegy come into contact; Alcyon’s intemperate grief—pagan, violent, self-destructive—can perhaps also be attributed to his excessive attachment to his mortal beloved, in violation of all the advice given by the memento mori tradition.⁵² The form of this poem—a dialogue between two shepherds—recalls Spenser’s earlier work, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), whose critiques of ecclesiastical and political corruption are threaded through with erotic longing, loss, and death. The scorned lover is represented as behaving like a mourner in the Aprill eclogue: ‘He plongd in payne, his tressed locks dooth teare’ (Spenser, Shepheardes Calender, Aprill, line 12, Shorter Poems, 61). In June, Colin laments the death of ‘The God of shepheards Tityrus’ who lies ‘wrapt in lead’, depriving the poet-shepherd of his power of song (Spenser, June, lines 81, 89, Shorter Poems, 90). The Shepheardes Calender also draws copiously on Ovidian vocabulary. In the gloss by E. K. to the Januarye eclogue, Colin Clout’s beloved Rosalind is identified as ‘a feigned name . . . So as Ouide shadoweth hys love under the name of Corynna, which of some is supposed to be Julia, themperor Augustus his daughter’ (Spenser, Januarye, gloss to line 60, Shorter Poems, 39). These themes are most firmly interwoven in the lament for Dido in the November eclogue. Dido is usually read as representing Elizabeth, her intention to marry the Duc d’Alençon considered as a symbolic death or abandonment.⁵³ Another shepherd invites Colin to perform the lament for Dido by channelling his loss of Rosalind: And if thy rymes as rownd and rufull bene, As those that did thy Rosalind complayne, Much greater gyfts for guerdon thou shalt gayne. (Spenser, November, lines 43–5, Shorter Poems, 139–40)
⁵¹ See Andrea Brady, ‘To Weep Irish: The Politics of Early Modern Keening’, in Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey (eds), Law and Mourning (Amherst, MA, 2017), 59–93. ⁵² Alcyon’s grief has also been interpreted as a response to a particular legal battle over the right of Douglas Howard’s daughter Ambrosia to inherit her estate. See Jonathan Gibson, ‘The Legal Context of Spenser’s “Daphnaïda” ’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 55.218 (2004), 24–44. For a further discussion of this poem, see also Chapter 19 in this volume. ⁵³ See Paul E. McLane, ‘The Death of a Queen: Spenser’s Dido as Elizabeth’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 18.1 (1954), 1–11.
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326 - As in Daphnaïda, this suggests a commonality between the mournfulness of the lover in the Ovidian mode, and the elegiac mourning for a death: both elicit poetic performances which can share an affective vocabulary of desire and loss.
Elegy, Subjection, and Subversion in the 1590s Ovid’s poetry emerged from what Paul Miller describes as a crisis in the late republic and early Roman empire, which manifested as anxiety about sexual and personal conduct. The upper classes were perceived to be in decline: aristocratic men seemed increasingly effeminate, their women too liberal or powerful, their families failing to reproduce.⁵⁴ The traditional duties of fides [faithfulness] and virtus [manly valour] were waning, and there was fear that retreat from public honour into the domestic and sexual life of the individual would sap the state of its strength. These anxieties are voiced in many Roman elegies, in which the lover turns his back on public life, embracing sensual leisure and masochistic suffering instead of his duties in law or politics. Mollitia [softness] was a central characteristic of Roman elegy: Propertius describes elegiac metre as mollis [soft] and argues that ‘peaceful Love calls for gentle strains’ (see Propertius Elegies, 1.7.19, 1.9.11–12, Propertius, 58, 62–3). This quality of softness, like the grief discussed above, is effeminising. A pseudoetymology derived mollitia from mulier [woman].⁵⁵ It reflects the enervating effect of heterosexual desire on the male lover, particularly in relation to a perversely hard [dura] mistress. The elegiac lover consents to become the servus amoris: the slave of love to a married domina [mistress]. This metaphor of enslavement is rare in Greek erotic poetry but becomes ubiquitous in Roman elegy.⁵⁶ The poems suggest that heterosexual desire leads to the inversion of traditional class and gender hierarchies in which active, hard, heroic men dominated passive, soft, submissive women and slaves.⁵⁷ Another metaphor which dominates Roman elegy is that of the militia amoris: the soldier of love. As in the opening of Ovid’s Amores, this topos constantly returns the reader to the context of imperial militarism, which the lover is repudiating to devote himself to sensual battles with his beloved. Maria Wyke argues that ‘[i]n a society that depended on a slave mode of production and in which citizenship carried the obligation of military service, these two metaphors define the elegiac male as socially irresponsible. As a slave to love he is precluded from participating in the customary occupations of male citizens. As a soldier of love he is not available to fight military campaigns.’⁵⁸ In Elegy 1.1, Tibullus repudiates Messalla’s military service and praises the pleasures of sensual indulgence (though he did perform real militia in Messalla’s Aquitanian campaign).⁵⁹ In Elegy 1.6, Propertius rejects an invitation from Tullus, nephew of the proconsul of Asia, to accompany him as member of his uncle’s staff: ‘You must attempt to surpass your uncle’s merited axes and to restore the old laws to forgetful allies . . . / I was born unfit for glory, unfit for arms: love is the warfare [militia] fate wishes me to undergo’ (Propertius,
⁵⁴ See Paul Allen Miller, Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 23. ⁵⁵ See Maria Wyke, The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (Oxford, 2002), 169. ⁵⁶ See George Luck, The Latin Love Elegy (London, 1969), 129. ⁵⁷ See Miller, Subjecting Verses, 24–5. ⁵⁸ Wyke, The Roman Mistress, 44. ⁵⁹ See Tibullus, Elegies, 1.1.53–8, in F. W. Cornish, J. P. Postgate, and J. W. Mackail (trans.), revised G. P. Goold. Catullus. Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris (Cambridge, MA, 1913), 196–7.
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327 Elegies, 1.6.19, 29–30, Propertius, 54–5).⁶⁰ Ovid, who performed no military service, turns war into a metaphor for sexual conflict, and triumphs and other militaristic occasions as opportunities to pick up women.⁶¹ The subversive social and political potential of these tropes re-emerges strongly in the poetry of the 1590s, particularly as a response to courtly love lyric. Ovid’s conflation of political and sexual life offered a model of rebellious, ‘soft masculinity’, and an opportunity to introduce explicit sexual desire and activity into the decorous scenes of Platonic love that filled Petrarchan poetry. Marlowe probably produced his translation of Ovid’s Amores, the first complete translation of Ovid’s love elegies into any vernacular European language, during his student years in Cambridge (1580–4). The poems had circulated in six surreptitiously printed editions in the 1580s and 1590s, but the complete set of elegies was not published until in or after 1602 (Marlowe was killed in 1593). In 1596, John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, by order of the High Commission, attempted to regulate printed pamphlets, ‘some containing matter of ribaldry, some of superstition and some of flat heresy’, which would corrupt readers and ‘seduce’ them from ‘that dutiful obedience which they owe to her highness’, an act of censorship known as the Bishops’ Ban.⁶² In 1599, a volume of Epigrams and Elegies by J. D. and C. M. which contained ten of Marlowe’s translations of Ovid’s Amores was called in for burning. Marlowe’s poems are certainly erotic; but the subversive political effects that are anticipated by the Bishop’s Ban also reflect the significance in Ovidian elegy of the turn away from public duty, and towards the pleasures of otium [leisure]. In Ovid’s elegies, sexual pleasure and violence displace the heroic quests and battles of conventional epic. The Amores open with the word arma [arms] as does Virgil’s Aeneid. However, this epic ambition is immediately ironised, as Ovid complains that Cupid has stolen a foot from the distich. The only battles we witness thereafter are amorous ones. In his translation, Marlowe brings out the echo of the Virgilian opening of Ovid’s poem, only to bid farewell to ‘stern war’ (Marlowe, Elegies, 1.1.32, Complete Works, 1.14).⁶³ The Muse ‘upreard’ (line 5) quickly slackens and softens after its upright (phallic, but also anal, with the pun on ‘uprear’d’) beginning. Roman elegy represented its protagonists as enslaved, occasionally—as in Amores 3.6, or Thomas Nashe’s Choice of Valentines—impotent, or even symbolically castrated.⁶⁴ Ovid’s famous elegy on impotence (3.6) explores sexual failure in ways that also call attention to the composition of elegy. When Corinna’s efforts to revive the speaker fail, ‘With that, her loose gown on, from me she cast her; / In skipping out her naked feet much graced her’ (Marlowe, Elegies, 3.6.81–2, Complete Works, 1.73). The naked foot which signals sexual intimacy is related to the ‘hobbled’ elegiac metre, whose collapse from epic fullness and missing foot are signs of inadequacy. The poem also describes the speaker’s penis. When he
⁶⁰ See also R. O. A. M. Lyne, ‘The Life of Love’, in Paul Allen Miller (ed.), Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader (London, 2002), 348–65, 355, 325. ⁶¹ See Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 1.177–80, in J. H. Mozley (trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Art of Love. Cosmetics. Remedies for Love. Ibis. Walnut-tree. Sea Fishing. Consolation (Cambridge, MA, 1929), 24–5. See also, J. P. Sullivan, ‘The Politics of Elegy’, in Miller (ed.), Latin Erotic Elegy, 312–28, 317, 320. ⁶² Cited in Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), 103. ⁶³ See Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto, 1997), 32–4. ⁶⁴ See Nashe, Works, 3.403–16, and Ovid, Amores, 466–75.
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328 - lay with Corinna, ‘like one dead it lay, / Drooping more than a rose pulled yesterday’ (lines 65–6); now, when he is trying to write, it has suddenly revived: Now, when he should not jet, he bolts upright, And craves his task, and seeks to be at fight. (Marlowe, Elegies, 3.6.67–8, Complete Works, 1.73)
Potent, erect masculinity is signified as a desire to ‘fight’; the penis ‘bolts upright’, like the Muse ‘uprear’d’ in the opening poem, and interferes with the work of composition, which is best done in a ‘numbers soft’ (Marlowe, Elegies, 1.1.22, Complete Works, 1.13). Heterosexual desire in the poem is represented as unruly and counterproductive, with slackness countering reproduction and hardness countering the production of verse. Ovid’s Elegy 3.7, the poem following the impotence elegy, opens with a question: ‘What man will now take liberal arts in hand, / Or think soft verse in any stead to stand?’ (Marlowe, Elegies, 3.7.1–2, Complete Works, 1.73). The writing of verse and the practice of liberal arts are related to his phallic failure in the previous poem. The verse is soft, the art cannot be taken in hand (masturbated until it can stand up for itself), the mistress is not moved by his poems; instead she takes up with a knight, who wears ‘a sharp sword’ (line 14). The lover cannot force her to be repulsed by the rival’s body scarred by war, whose right hand (writing hand) is ‘bloodsprinkled’ (line 16). He can only stand by idly and offer his mistress an education in the ways of the world, which he explains is pillaged for political and economic gain. Her choice of the actual miles [soldier] for her lover confirms that his impotence as a man is not overcome by his ‘upreard’ Muse: poetic performance is no compensation for sexual failure. As in the example of Spenser’s ‘Astrophel’, the failure of the poet’s powers of persuasion signal that outside the world of the poem, the values of militarism are not so easily overcome. The Amores regularly conflates the unequal form of the distich with gendered sexual relations. For example, Elegy 2.17 attests: Venus with Vulcan, though smith’s tools laid by, With his stump-foot he halts ill-favouredly. This kind of verse is not alike, yet fit, With shorter numbers the heroic sit. (Marlowe, Elegies, 2.17.19–22, Complete Works, 1.57)
Here, the mismatched elegiac metre imitates the relation of the goddess Venus and Vulcan, whose ‘stump-foot’ is represented by the shorter pentameter line. Marlowe repeatedly calls attention to the (prosodic and physical) foot: When in this work’s first verse I trod aloft, Love slacked my Muse, and made my numbers soft. (Marlowe, Elegies, 1.1.21–2, Complete Works, 1.13)
These lines translate ‘cum bene surrexit versu nova pagina primo, / attenuat nervos proximus ille meos’ [My new page of song rose well with first verse in lofty strain, when that next one—of thy making—changes to slightness the vigour of my work] (Ovid, Amores, 1.1.17–18, Amores, 320–1). Marlowe makes explicit that the ‘slackening’ of the Muse through erotic expenditure results in a poetic enfeeblement (‘trod’, ‘numbers soft’). The
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329 poet’s intentions are admitted only to be immediately undercut, as the poem’s form and content are determined by a loss: something ‘taken away’ in the experience of heterosexual desire. These relations of erotic domination also find expression in the language of the triumph. Ovid represents the lover as one of many conquered prisoners, being marched in Elegy 1.2 with ‘their hands tied at their back’ in Cupid’s triumphal procession: Lo I confess, I am thy captive I, And hold my conquered hands for thee to tie. ... Yoke Venus’ doves, put myrtle on thy hair, Vulcan will give thee chariots rich and faire. The people thee applauding thou shalt stand, Guiding the harmless Pigeons with thy hand. Yong men and women, shalt thou lead as thrall, So will thy triumph seem magnifical. (Marlowe, Elegies, 1.2.19–20, 23–8, Complete Works, 1.14–15)
The lover’s submission is imagined as the most abject form of political subjection: the lover as a conquered slave, manacled, driven before the chariot of the conquering general as spectacle for the crowd. In the Roman triumph, defeated enemy soldiers and other booty would be paraded to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill in front of the chariot of the conquering general. Often it was the ‘tallest and most beautiful’ who would be included in the procession, or those who looked evidently foreign and exotic.⁶⁵ Ovid’s triumphal image makes the lover into an other, a captured and defeated slave; but it also places him at the heart of a Roman ritual which celebrated the military as the source of political power. Ovidian elegies also seek to recover the masculine superiority which they lose in their enslavement by domina through sadistic violence. This violence takes both subtle and overt forms. Marlowe’s translation of Amores 1.5, which depicts a scene of love ‘In summer’s heat, and mid-time of the day’ (Marlowe, Elegies, 1.5.1, Complete Works, 1.18), echoes Wyatt’s poem ‘They flee from me’: ‘She took me in her arms long and small, / Therewithal sweetly did me kiss’ (Wyatt, ‘They flee from me’, lines 12–13, Complete Poems, 117).⁶⁶ The effect, however, is very different: I snatched her gown: being thin, the harm was small, Yet strived she to be covered therewithal, And striving thus as one that would be cast, Betrayed her self, and yielded at the last. (Marlowe, Elegies, 1.5.13–16, Complete Works, 1.19)
Her ‘thin’ gown translates ‘venit tunica velata recincta’ [ungirdled tunic], and recalls Wyatt’s ‘thin array’ (‘They flee from me’, line 10). But where Wyatt is unable to capture his prey, Marlowe’s poem represents erotic consummation as violent conquest (‘yielded at the last’ [victa est]); where Wyatt’s beloved are dainty, animals pricking barefoot in his chamber like stalked deer, Marlowe’s Ovidian beloved resembles Semiramis, the legendary Babylonian ⁶⁵ See Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, 2007), 118–19. ⁶⁶ Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978).
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330 - queen known for her sexual prowess. Elsewhere, the Ovidian lover inflicts violent retribution on Corinna, scratching her and beating her and her slaves. Elegy 1.7 invites the speaker’s friends to ‘Bind fast my hands, they have deserved chains’ for having struck her (Marlowe, Elegies, 1.7.1, Complete Works, 1.21). This violent relationship combines actual domination with the fantasy of sadistic play: the speaker wishes that her scratched cheeks could be replaced by lips and shoulders ‘blue with kissing’ (line 41). The poem includes another ironic reference to the triumph, in which the violent lover should go forth wreathed in laurel, to solicit the shameful commendations of the crowd—‘Lo a strong man conquered this Wench’ (line 38)—while the assaulted mistress walks before his chariot, dishevelled and pale, with bloody scratches on her cheeks.
Donne’s Elegies Donne’s elegies, the last example from the sixteenth century that I will address, imitate some of the conventions of Roman erotic elegy, particularly the retreat from negotium [business] to the pleasurable dissipations of sexual love. But as in the pastoral, the business of court and city are never obliterated by this attempted withdrawal. Many of Donne’s poems also follow Ovid in depicting the male lover not as a degraded slave to the domina, but as actively resisting the servitude of heterosexual coupling. They fantasise about gendered roles and their transgression through the occasions of sexual love, but also about the restitution of social hierarchies. Numerous critics have read these poems as symptomatic of patriarchal anxieties during the rule of a female monarch.⁶⁷ Rather than adopting the politically pliable conventions of courtly love, Donne mocks and undermines them, substituting for Petrarchan idealisation a more pragmatic and sometimes vicious depiction of the realities of gendered interactions. In Elegy 10, ‘The Anagram’, and Elegy 2, ‘The Comparison’, Donne engages in the witty competitiveness and brutal anti-Petrarchanism that typifies the poetry that emerged in centres other than the court.⁶⁸ Donne’s elegies are believed to have been mostly written at Lincoln’s Inn between 1593 and 1596. Like Marlowe’s translations they are student productions, and their audience of fellow young men is implicit in the poems’ wit, comedy, and sexual risk-taking. As Donne admits, they are displays of ‘my words’ masculine persuasive force’ in all its variety (Donne, Elegy 11, ‘On His Mistress’, line 4, Variorum, 2.246). Many of them echo Ovid’s poems quite directly: they have watchful porters, sleepless lovers who wish to delay the dawn, references to ‘triumphs’, ‘household spies’, betrayed speakers, and jealous husbands. Ovid’s lovers communicate through a tablet and a ring, Donne’s through bracelets, pictures, ‘letters still and gifts, / And thoughts and dreams’ (Donne, Elegy 15, ‘His Parting from Her’, lines 71–2, Variorum, 2.333). Elegy 6, ‘Nature’s Lay Idiot’, likens the speaker to the praeceptor amoris [instructor in the arts of love] from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria; Ovid’s suggestions in that book of how to woo women at parades and plays are followed by the speaker in Elegy 16, ‘The Expostulation’.⁶⁹
⁶⁷ See Achsah Guibbory, ‘ “Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So”: The Politics of Love in Donne’s Elegies’, English Literary History, 57.4 (1990), 811–33, 814. ⁶⁸ These poems can be found in Gary A. Stringer (gen. ed.). The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Vol. 2, The Elegies, 8 vols. (Bloomington, IN, 1995–), 217–18, and 51–2. ⁶⁹ These poems can be found in Variorum, 2.127, and 369–70.
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331 Donne’s elegies do not represent the beloved as a hardened domina who controls her enslaved lover. In some of his gentler elegies, the lovers are partners negotiating a relation of equality: the woman’s power to withhold sexual pleasure requires the male speaker to perform acts of persuasion for and to her. In Elegy 8, ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’, Donne invokes the elegiac figure of the militia amoris: ‘The foe oft times having the foe in sight / Is tyr’d with standing though they never fight’ (Donne, Elegy 8, lines 3–4, Variorum, 2.163). The imagined undressing of the mistress in this poem echoes Amores 1.5 (see Ovid, Amores, 332–5); but where the latter recalls after the event how Corinna was stripped bare, and then leaves unspoken the moment of consummation, Donne’s poem addresses the beloved directly in the moment, attempting to persuade her to undress through sophisticated imagery and rich allusions, but also through the vulnerability of the male body, which turns out to have been exposed throughout the performance of the poem. There is no indication either that he is successful or that they eventually make love, but the speaker does fantasise about ending up on top, restoring the natural order which is inverted in Amores 2.17 (see Ovid, Amores, 432–5). Donne’s elegies are not models of sexual equality; many are infused with a gross misogyny and revulsion from the female body. Several of the elegies describe a communised love of the kind recommended by Plato’s Republic as the ultimate expression of freedom (at least until old age forces the promiscuous speaker to commit); but that freedom entails subjection to the sovereignty of love itself: Only some few strong in themselves and free Retain the seeds of ancient liberty Following that part of Love although depressed And make a throne for him within their breast In spite of modern censures him avowing Their sovereign, all service him allowing. (Donne, Elegy 17, ‘Variety’, lines 61–6, Variorum, 2.394)
To ‘glory in subjection’ (line 69) is an elegiac condition, particularly when the sovereign is the degrading god of love. By electing to be the servitium amoris, the lover can avoid serving ‘as those men serve’: starved by the smoke of honour, ‘poorly enrich’d’ by the favour of ‘great men’ (Donne, Elegy 5, ‘Oh let me not serve so’, lines 2–3, Variorum, 2.110). The lover who refuses a career in the military or the law in Amores 1.15 (see Ovid, Amores, 376–9), chooses poetry and fame instead; but as I have suggested, for the Roman elegists such abandonment of public duty is still shameful. The speaker in Donne’s elegies refuses to be ashamed. That refusal is worked through angry recriminations of the more embarrassing aspects of love—sexual vulnerability, betrayal, duplicity—and through philosophical metaphors; but it is done especially by infusing the poems with the diction of public life. Donne’s elegies draw on Roman themes but update them, portraying London and its inhabitants in an international political context that includes the Reformation, papal excommunication, mining, and colonial enterprise. While explorers such as Sir Walter Ralegh represented the New World as an undefiled female body, Donne imagines the female body as his New World. The lover informs his mistress that he ‘with amorous delicacies / Refined thee into a blissful paradise’; ‘I planted knowledge and life’s tree in thee’ (Donne, Elegy 6, ‘Nature’s Lay Idiot’, lines 23–4, 26, Variorum, 2.127): he has tamed and cultivated her, ‘planting’ her in the fashion not only of the garden of Eden but also of a colony. The lover exploring the female body is directed on a path towards the locus amoenus of her
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332 - genitals, who by ‘sailing towards her India in that way / Shall at her fair Atlantic navel stay’ (Donne, Elegy 14, ‘Love’s Progress’, lines 65–6, Variorum, 2.302). The most famous example of this metaphor occurs in Elegy 8, where Donne celebrates the female body as My America, my newfound land, My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d, My Mine of precious stones; My Empiry; How blest am I in this discovering thee! To enter in these bonds, is to be free, Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. (Donne, Elegy 8, lines 27–32, Variorum, 2.163)
While this poem seems to epitomise the gendered and racialised privileges which underwrote colonial domination, with the female body pictured as natural wealth to be extracted, reading it in relation to the servitium amoris trope of Roman elegy focuses our attention on Donne’s often overlooked assertion that ‘to enter in these bonds, is to be free’. If he can only be liberated through subjection to desire, then his freedom is contingent; his hands can ‘roving’ go, but only once she has issued the ‘licence’ (line 25). That word invokes both the licentious nature of Donne’s elegies, and the state authorities that granted permission to travellers, players, and printers. The female body can provide this sealed ‘licence’, in the place where Donne’s hand is ‘set’, a pun whose layers surely include the fear that this exclusive encounter depicted for a coterie audience and circulated in manuscript might eventually become public in the way typeset books are. The Amores offered sixteenth-century poets a model of masculinity made servile through heterosexual desire, that reclaims its social status through poetic fama and violent assaults on the mistress. The lover’s erotic submission is figured not against but within the language and symbolism of militarised political life. The lover may claim to have shunned the law, politics, and warfare, but love is repeatedly described as itself a kind of warfare, and the poems that memorialise it as a way of reclaiming a public identity. While they also scatter references to negotium across their scenes of erotic privacy, Donne’s elegies draw on Ovid as a scandalous precedent for the reassertion of dominance within sexual relations, and the social relations that extended from or were symbolised by sex. Like Marlowe’s translations, Donne’s elegies are not written in elegiac distiches. They have features in common with epigram, satire, and epistolary poetry; this is characteristic of the elegy’s lack of distinction as a genre in the sixteenth century. They also have little of the mortuary genre about them. Orgasm’s little death is conflated with actual dying, to be sure, and there are some melancholic reflections on ageing or parting. Nonetheless, Donne’s poems return us to the definition of the genre provided at the start of this chapter: elegy is a ‘lament’ which ‘weeps the want of his mistress’ and appeals for pity rather than blame. They suggest that love is a kind of practice for death, not just in its orgasmic fulfilment, but in the pain of separation and loss it entails. ‘Since she must go, and I must mourn’ (Donne, Elegy 15, ‘His Parting from Her’, line 1, Variorum, 2.332), the poem offers a kind of compensation: it is a space to remember and recreate the presence of another, be it mistress or reader, when the poet is alone. This is also a consolation elaborated by funerary elegies; and Donne’s poems share with that genre the ability to move fluidly through numerous topoi, to compete with other performers, and to draw on all manner of rhetorical devices in order to achieve its aim. For the funeral elegist, that aim was to persuade the bereaved to be consoled, often through the
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333 idealisation of the deceased and recitation of commonplaces about death and grief. When they apostrophised the dead body, or addressed the bereaved family, these poets also spoke to—and performed for—a community of readers who expected them both to confirm social norms (restrained grief, surrender to providence) and to surpass them (by writing a poem distinguished from the crowd, as in Greene’s elegy, or on a superior subject, as in Surrey’s poems for Wyatt). Donne’s erotic elegies aim at something different, which is sometimes a select spot on the mistress’s body, sometimes the transgression and restoration of gendered hierarchies. But his poems also compete for attention and entangle the pleasures of sex in the pleasures of persuasion. From Spenser’s Alcyon, whose hatred of the world prevents him from abandoning it, to Donne’s lovers trying to avoid ‘policies’, ‘plots’, jealous husbands, and ‘spies’, the elegy reveals the presence of the social in our most intimate experiences of loving and dying.
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19 Complaint Paul D. Stegner
The development of early modern complaint poetry is best interpreted as a process of continuation and expansion of, rather than departure from, medieval complaint. These lines of filiation result from the inherent orthodoxy that governs the poetic voice of the majority of social and religious complaint. From the thirteenth century to the late sixteenth century, as John Peter once contended, ‘[t]here is thus no need for Complaint to develop at all, any more than there is a need for the Bible to be periodically rewritten’, because it focuses on the ‘perennial frailties’ of humanity.¹ The ubiquity of complaint across poetic forms in the medieval period also extends to the sixteenth century because the mode—an orientation, attitude, or set of ‘assumptions about man’s nature and situation’—confronted the same fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of poetry.² As Lee Patterson has observed, ‘[i]f language is a form of action that mediates between subject and the world, then complaint interrogates its relation between these two presences: can language objectify the subject and/or have an effect upon the world?’³ The poetics of sixteenth-century complaint follows existing medieval English and Continental forms. The prominence of rhyme royal (a seven-line stanza rhyming ababbcc) in early modern complaint, which originated with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c 1380s), emerges from John Lydgate’s use of the verse form in The Fall of Princes (1431–8). In his translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (Of the Falls of Illustrious Men) (c 1350s), Lydgate adopted rhyme royal to reflect the ‘grandeur and tragedy’ of Chaucer, and to ‘domesticate’ his source material.⁴ The frequent use of rhyme royal in The Mirror for Magistrates (1559, with later additions included in 1563, 1571, 1574, 1578, 1587, and 1610)—a collection of de casibus tragedies featuring English historical figures— intensified the verse form’s connections with the English complaint tradition, so much so that George Gascoigne described it as ‘serving best for grave discourses’ (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.54).⁵ The opening stanza of Thomas Sackville’s ‘The Complaint of Henry, Duke of Buckingham’ in the Mirror reflects the tonal decorum of rhyme royal for complaint: Who trusts too much in honour’s highest throne And warily watch not sly dame Fortune’s snare: Or who in court will bear the sway alone,
¹ John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956), 59. ² Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago, IL, 1996), 50. ³ Lee Patterson, ‘Writing Amorous Wrongs: Chaucer and the Order of Complaint’, in James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher (eds), The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard (Newark, DE, 1992), 55–71, 56. ⁴ Guyda Armstrong, The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (Toronto, 2013), 93. ⁵ George Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’ (1575), in G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904), 1.46–57, spelling modernised. Paul D. Stegner, Complaint In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Paul D. Stegner 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0019
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335 And wisely weigh not how to wield the care, Behold he me, and by my death beware: Whom flattering Fortune falsely so beguiled That lo she slew, where erst full smooth she smiled. (Sackville, ‘Henry, Duke of Buckingham’, lines 1–7, Mirror, 318)⁶
The end rhymes to the second, fourth, and fifth lines, with their emphasis on the hazards of ambition, correspond to Gascoigne’s observation that these lines ‘answer each other’, and the final couplet appropriately ‘shut[s] up the Sentence’ (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’, Elizabethan Critical Essays, 1.54), by manifesting the deceptiveness of Fortune that is anticipated by the heavy alliteration in the eighth line. Although rhyme royal ‘passed in favour in Elizabethan literature’, poets nevertheless regularly returned to the form to establish a serious tone in their complaints.⁷ Later sixteenth-century examples include Edmund Spenser’s The Ruines of Rome (1591), Samuel Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond (1592), William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), Michael Drayton’s Matilda (1594), Thomas Middleton’s The Ghost of Lucrece (1600), and Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint (1609). Even the closely intertwined relationship between complaint and the sonnet finds precedent in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. In the ‘Canticus Troili’ [Song of Troilus], Chaucer introduces the Petrarchan love sonnet into English literature through his translation of sonnet 132 from the Rime Sparse. Chaucer expands his source material from a fourteen-line poem into a twenty-one-line poem divided into seven-line stanzas, and he preserves much of the imagery that would become hallmarks of love complaint in sixteenthcentury Petrarchan sonnet sequences. Troilus’s nautical metaphor—‘Thus possed [tossed] to and fro, / All steerless within a boat am I / Amid the sea’—and description of his contrary physical sensations—‘For hot of cold, for cold of hot, I die’—would be frequently repeated by early modern sonneteers (Chaucer, Troilus, 1.415–17, 420, Riverside Chaucer, 479).⁸ In Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), for example, Sir Thomas Wyatt maintains these Petrarchan tropes in his translations of Petrarch’s Rime 134 and 189 through his lover-complainant’s self-identification as ‘a galley charged with forgetfulness’ (Wyatt, ‘My galley charged with forgetfulness’, line 1, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 55), and lament that ‘I burn, and freeze like ice’ (Wyatt, ‘I find no peace, and all my war is done’, line 2, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 54).⁹ Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, may have followed Chaucer’s lead in their reintroduction of Petrarchan love sonnets into English literature; but their retention of the fourteen-line structure indicates a formal innovation that would be highly influential for later authors, and it stands as a representative example of how early modern complaint poetry develops within—and at times reinvigorates—pre-existing poetic forms and traditions. Complaint poetry’s formal and stylistic conventionalism and its conservative outlook have resulted in its relative critical marginalisation in the history of early modern poetry.
⁶ Lily B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge, 1938), spelling modernised. ⁷ Robert Cummings, ‘The Province of Verse: Sir Thomas More’s Twelve Rules of John Picus Earle of Mirandula’, in Gabriela Schmidt (ed.), Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture (Berlin, 2013), 201–26, 208. ⁸ Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edition (Boston, MA, 1987). ⁹ Richard Tottel (ed.), in Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul (eds), Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others (Harmondsworth, 2011).
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336 - Unlike the poetic modes of pastoral and satire, which have been the subject of extensive scholarly attention, the last general study of early modern complaint was Peter’s Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (1956), and the most recent monograph on an individual author’s treatment of complaint was Richard Danson Brown’s ‘The New Poet’: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints (1999), which focuses on Spenser’s volume of Complaints, Containing Several Small Poems of the Worlds Vanitie (1591).¹⁰ Although several articles and book chapters on complaint have been published, a comprehensive survey of the mode in the early modern period has not appeared. The lack of defined formal characteristics in complaint and its complex presence across other literary forms and modes, including epigram, libel, satire, minor epic (epyllion), and elegy, have contributed in part to its under-theorisation and the lack of a systematic attempt to chart its poetic development and influences.¹¹ Yet, complaint poetry is unified through its representation of the plaintive voice, which allows authors not only to reimagine literary kinds and forms by transforming the way discontent was expressed, but also (as this chapter demonstrates) to comment on the nature of poetry and authorship. Despite the lack of any formal definition in the early modern period, the majority of complaint poetry would fall under what Sir Philip Sidney, in A Defence of Poesy (composed c 1579–81, published 1595), calls ‘lamenting Elegiac; which in a kind heart would move rather pity than blame; who bewails with the great Philosopher Heraclitus, the weakness of mankind and the wretchedness of the world’ (Sidney, Defence, 95).¹² George Puttenham, in The Art of English Poesy (1589), would similarly identify complaint as a ‘form of poetical lamentations’, which could include such diverse subjects as loss, death, separation from friends and loved ones, defeat in battle, unrequited love, and the loss of honour and material goods (Puttenham, Art, 135).¹³ Sidney’s and Puttenham’s classifications underscore the extent to which sixteenth-century complaint included a vast array of texts, including independent complaint poems as well as those embedded within larger texts. As such, this chapter groups complaints according to their subject matter: the first section examines complaints directed towards social, political, and religious conditions (also known as complaints against the times), while the second section analyses complaints written in response to more personal crises, specifically love and spirituality. The boundaries between these areas were permeable, of course, for personal laments often registered broader social ills, just as political abuses frequently resulted from ecclesiastical corruptions. Attending to these different areas of complaint poetry (with consideration given to canonical and lesser-known texts) demonstrates the specific poetic and thematic issues localised within each subgroup as well as the many intersections between them.
¹⁰ Richard Danson Brown, ‘The New Poet’: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints (Liverpool, 1999). ¹¹ On the relationship between satire and complaint, see Peter, Complaint and Satire, 1–39; and John N. King, ‘Traditions of Complaint and Satire’, in Michael Hattaway (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2000), 367–77, 369. On complaint and epyllion, see Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, MA, 1966), 102–26. On complaint and elegy, see John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (Oxford, 1991), 8. ¹² Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poesy, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973). ¹³ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). A similar description is found in Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577), sig. P3.
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Complaints Against the Times The tumultuous political and religious events of the Tudor period provided ample material for authors of complaint poetry. Many of these verse complaints against the times respond to periods of unrest, and they often reflect the subject matter of contemporary prose complaints. An exemplary work of this kind is A Pretty Complaint of Peace (1538), a political complaint written in rhyme royal that appeared in the wake of the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), an uprising against Henrician religious policies. The poem reiterates Erasmus’s argument in Querela Pacis (1517), which was later translated into English as The Complaint of Peace (1559), that ‘[w]hosoever brings tidings of Christ, brings tidings of Peace. He that divulges war, divulges him that is most unlike Christ’ (Erasmus, Complaint, sig. B7).¹⁴ The anonymous author of A Pretty Complaint adapts Erasmus’s central theme for the nationalist context of Tudor England. He adopts the persona of the allegorical figure of Peace to condemn the participants in the northern uprising as enemies of social unity and to praise Henry VIII: ‘And I doubt not, but that there is a king / In England, which so well doth favour me / That I again shall come to my degree’ (Anon., Pretty Complaint, sig. C1v).¹⁵ The author’s use of prosopopoeia (speaking as another person or object) highlights one of the most prominent poetic strategies for authorising complaint, for it provides a method ‘whereby much morality is taught’ (Puttenham, Art, 324), and shields the poet from censure. Prosopopoeia had always been a common feature of complaints, from the lament of Jerusalem in the Book of Lamentations to the series of ploughman complaints in such texts as William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c 1370–90) and the anonymous Complaint of the Ploughman (c 1394–1401) in the medieval period. Sixteenth-century complaints against the times repeatedly espouse a conservative outlook, nostalgia for the past, advocacy of social and political stability, and an emphasis on English nationalism. Contemporary literary authors of complaints against the times drew on many of the common tropes of the complaint tradition, but transformed them to advance their own artistic and authorial projects. John Skelton—while typically labelled a satirist in the tradition of Juvenal (a genealogy that Skelton himself constructs)—stands as the most sophisticated complaint poet in the early Tudor period. In Collyn Clout (1521–2), he laments general religious decay and emphasises how church officials ‘yoke’ the poor ‘[w]ith sommons and citacyons / And excommunycacyons’ (Skelton, Collyn Clout, lines 323, 324–5, Complete Poems, 254).¹⁶ Underlying Skelton’s complaints is the common ‘habitual nostalgia’ that permeates so much complaint literature.¹⁷ But in contrast to the confident orthodoxy of much medieval complaint poetry, Skelton betrays an awareness of the inability of complaint to accomplish any reform. At the conclusion of Speke Parott (1521), for instance, he departs from the irregular metre and short lines (defining characteristics of Skeltonics) of many of his satires and uses rhyme royal to create an elegiac, almost liturgical tone. Deploying both prosopopoeia through the speaker of the Parrot and anaphora (repetition of the same word at the beginning of each line), Skelton laments the state of the world:
¹⁴ ¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷
Desiderius Erasmus, in Thomas Paynell (trans.), The Complaint of Peace (London, 1559). Anon., A Pretty Complaint of Peace That Was Banished out of Divers Countries (London, 1538). John Skelton, in John Scattergood (ed.), The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth, 1983). Peter, Complaint and Satire, 71.
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338 - So many complayntes, and so smalle redresse; So myche* callyng on, and so smalle takyng hede; *much So myche losse of merchaundyse, and so remedyles; So lyttel care for the comynweall, and so myche nede; So myche dowghtfull daunger, and so lyttel drede*; *dread So myche pride of prelattes, so cruell and so kene— Syns Dewcalyons flodde, I trowe, was nevyr sene. (Skelton, Speke Parott, lines 470–6, Complete Poems, 245)
Complaining may fail to effect social or religion reform, but Skelton reveals that he has a more self-interested purpose for adopting the position of a complainant, that is, to further his own poetic fame and authority. Hence Speke Parott ends with the Latin epigram ‘Crescet in immensum me vivo Psitacus iste; / Hinc mea dicetur Skeltonidis fama’ [This Parrot will grow immensely in my lifetime; hence my glorious Skeltonian fame will be celebrated] (Skelton, Speke Parott, lines 519–20, Complete Poems, 246). Skelton here provides an early Tudor example of how an author could use complaint for a dual purpose: to decry abuses even as he or she uses poetry for self-promotion.
The Mirror for Magistrates The 1559 publication of the first edition of The Mirror for Magistrates substantially contributed not only to the growing body of Tudor complaints against the times, but also to the evolution of the topoi of the overall literary mode. The main editor of the work, William Baldwin, announces in his dedication to the English nobility that ‘here as in a looking glass, you shall see (if any vice be in you) how the like hath been punished in other heretofore, whereby admonished, I trust it will be a good occasion to move you to sooner amendment’ (Baldwin, ‘Dedication’, Mirror, 65–6). Representing the rises and (almost always justified) falls of figures from English history who return as ghosts to relate their stories, the Mirror firmly belongs to the complaint tradition that, on the one hand, critiques the abuse of power and exploitation of the commonweal, and, on the other, praises social stability and political obedience. The editors’ revival of the medieval de casibus framing device between individual speakers and the narrators would become a central feature of later sixteenth-century complaint poetry. This additional layer of editorial (or authorial) ventriloquising, as John Kerrigan notes, creates a ‘friction’ between the speaker and the observer that reveals the observer’s ‘prejudice’: a feature that will be especially problematic in later female complaints.¹⁸ Commenting on the lack of decorum in the complaint of Richard III, for instance, the editors explain that ‘[i]t is not meet that so disorderly and unnatural a man as King Richard was, should observe any metrical order in his talk’ (‘Richard, Duke of Gloucester’, ‘To the Reader’, Mirror, 371). Richard’s poetic discord reaffirms the righteousness of ‘God’s vengeance’ (‘The Poet Collingbourne’, ‘To the Reader’, Mirror, 359) against his moral defects, even as it underscores the imitative skill of Francis Segar (or Seagar), the author of Richard’s complaint. Likewise, the headnote before the complaint of the poet William Collingbourne (who was executed for treason by Richard III after publishing a short
¹⁸ Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 35.
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339 political poem) describes him as delivering his complaint ‘courageously’ (‘The Poet Collingbourne’, headnote, Mirror, 346). In so doing, the editors affirm Collingbourne’s nostalgia for the treatment of Horace and Juvenal, who had enjoyed ‘the Poet’s ancient liberties / Had been allowed plea[s] at any bar’ (‘The Poet Collingbourne’, lines 197–8, Mirror, 354), and his assessment of the dangers facing satiric poets: ‘Be rough in rhyme, and then they say you rail, / . . . / With Jeremiah you shall be had to jail, / Or forced with Martial, Caesar’s faults to flatter’ (‘The Poet Collingbourne’, lines 8, 10–11, Mirror, 347). Moreover, this editorial praise effectively broadens Collingbourne’s lament—‘I had forgot how newfound tyrannies / With right and freedom were at open war’ (‘The Poet Collingbourne’, lines 199–200, Mirror, 355)—from a condemnation of the government of Richard III into a critique of contemporary attitudes towards poets.¹⁹ More than a collection of complaints against the times, then, the Mirror demonstrates a self-consciousness through which it provides poetic self-commentary and reflects on the place and function of poetry in society.
Spenser’s Complaints Spenser’s Complaints volume stands as the most prominent collection of poetic complaints that treats the abuses of the age as well as the status of poetry itself. The volume includes four original works—The Ruines of Time, The Teares of the Muses, Prosopopoia: Or Mother Hubberds Tale, and Muiopotmos—and four translations: Virgils Gnat, The Ruines of Rome, The Visions of Bellay, and The Visions of Petrarch. In his prefatory letter to the volume, the printer William Ponsonby describes these poems as ‘dispersed abroad in sundry hands’ (Ponsonby, ‘The Printer to the Gentle Reader’, in Spenser, Complaints, Shorter Poems, 165).²⁰ His intimation that Spenser was not involved in the publication process appears to mark Complaints as an ‘anthology of fugitive pieces and hitherto uncollected poems’ printed in response to the success of the first instalment of The Faerie Queene (1590).²¹ The bibliographic features of the volume, which contains four separate title pages (one for the entire volume and three for individual poems) and three dedicatory epistles, further suggest a lack of internal cohesion. Yet, recalling Sidney’s description of elegiac poetry, Ponsonby also states that each of the poems treats the same theme, ‘for they all seem to contain like matter of argument in them: being all complaints and meditations of the worlds vanity, very grave and profitable’ (Ponsonby, ‘The Printer to the Gentle Reader’, in Spenser, Complaints, Shorter Poems, 165). The collection is bookended by images of the fallen nature of the world. The first poem, The Ruines of Time, begins with Verlame, female spirit of the ruined Roman city of Verulamium (modern-day St Albans), lamenting, ‘Ah what delight . . . in earthlie thing, / Or comfort can I wretched creature haue’, and it concludes with an envoy to Mary Sidney Herbert: ‘So vnto heauen let your high minde aspire, / And loath this drosse of sinfull worlds desire’ (Spenser, Ruines of Time, lines 22–3, 685–6, Shorter Poems, 167, 187). The speaker of the final sonnet of The Visions of Petrarch, the last poem of the volume, asks his ‘faire Ladie’ to read his poem and ‘Loath this base world, and thinke of heauens blis’ (Spenser, Visions of Petrarch, lines 93, 96, Shorter Poems, 322). A few of the complaints
¹⁹ See Chapter 10 in this volume for a further discussion of this poem. ²⁰ William Ponsonby, in Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). For a further discussion of Spenser’s Complaints, see also Chapter 26 in this volume. ²¹ From the introduction to the Complaints volume in William A. Oram, et al. (eds), The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven, CT, 1989), 217.
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340 - were composed in response to particular events or people. In the dedication to the deceased Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Spenser explains that he wrote Virgils Gnat, a poem focused on a shepherd’s unjust killing of a gnat, in response to a long-hidden wrong that he suffered at Leicester’s hands. Likewise, critics have established that Mother Hubberds Tale—a beast fable detailing the rise and fall of a fox and ape—satirises Queen Elizabeth’s chief advisor William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and comments on the corruption of the church and government. Underlying these more specific complaints, however, is Spenser’s persistent representation of the unpredictability and mutability of all human endeavours. Spenser’s Complaints volume repeatedly foregrounds the dilemma of the place of poetry in a transitory world. At first glance, his most dramatic response to this problem is to depict the apparent failure of poets to redress the abuses of the age. In The Teares of the Muses, for instance, after each of the nine Muses relates the corruption of her respective art, they collectively ‘weep and waile and made exceeding mone, / And all their learned instruments did breake’ (Spenser, Teares of the Muses, lines 598–9, Shorter Poems, 209). This image is not unique to the complaint tradition, for it appears as early as Sappho’s silencing of her lute in Ovid’s Heroides.²² Moreover, it is anticipated earlier in Spenser’s career when his poetic persona Colin Clout breaks his pipe in the Januarye eclogue and hangs up his pipes in the December eclogue in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), and it will reappear when Colin again breaks his pipes in The Faerie Queene, 6.10.18 (1596). Instead of marking the end of poetic generation, however, Spenser transforms the act of breaking one’s artistic instruments into a promise of future poetic production. For Spenser, writes Katherine A. Craik, ‘[t]o have nothing to say is, paradoxically, figured as the condition for complaint’.²³ Complaint functions as a self-generating mode that succeeds when it reinscribes emotional intensity through the production of more poetry. Spenser offers his most complex commentary on the nature of complaint as poetry in The Ruines of Time. In his dedicatory epistle to Mary Sidney Herbert, he explains that the occasion for the complaint is his failure to memorialise her brother Philip Sidney and thereby to ‘suffer [his name] to sleep in silence and forgetfulnesse’ (Spenser, Ruines of Time, Dedicatory Epistle, Shorter Poems, 166): a lament repeated by Verlame, who explains that ‘carelesse’ Colin Clout has failed ‘his idle bagpipe up to raise’ (Spenser, Ruines of Time, lines 225, 226, Shorter Poems, 173). This threat of oblivion is broadened in the complaint to include Verlame herself, who complains that she is now ‘but weedes and wastfull gras’, and the Earl of Leicester, whose ‘name is worne alreadie out of thought, / Ne anie Poet seekes him to reuiue’ (Spenser, Ruines of Time, lines 42, 222–3, Shorter Poems, 168, 173). These appeals hold forth the possibility that poetry can successfully memorialise its subject. Verlame herself reinforces this position through her description of the power of the Muses to ‘them immortall make, which els would die, / In foule forgetfulnesse, and nameles lie’ (Spenser, Ruines of Time, lines 377–8, Shorter Poems, 177), as well as through her nostalgic invocation of Homer’s preservation of Achilles’ memory, and her reference to the success of the Elizabethan poet Thomas Watson’s elegy for Walsingham. In this figuration, Verlame’s complaint becomes the very vehicle for memorial preservation that she claims is lacking in the present age.
²² For this Ovidian intertext, see Ovid, Heroides, 15.195–8, in Grant Showerman (ed. and trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Heroides. Amores (Cambridge, MA, 1914), 194–5. ²³ Katherine A. Craik, ‘Spenser’s Complaints and the New Poet’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 64 (2001), 63–79, 68–9.
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341 Spenser nevertheless indicates that complaint as an act of commemoration is insufficient. He concludes Verlame’s complaint with a return to a contemptus mundi lament on the present age and details the narrator’s inability to understand its ‘meaning’ because it was above his ‘slender reasons reach’ (Spenser, Ruines of Time, lines 486, 487, Shorter Poems, 181). This inadequacy is underscored when the narrator cannot comprehend the meaning of the two series of emblems that succeed Verlame’s complaint, with the first focused on the destruction of material objects such as an altar and a bridge, and the second staging the transcendence of such objects as a swan or Philisides’ (Sidney’s) harp. In the envoy, however, Spenser shifts from the narrator’s confusion to his own voice, and explains that the ‘last duties of this broken verse, / Broken with sighes’, is ‘to decke [Sidney’s] sable hearse’, a task that will be completed if Mary Sidney Herbert would ‘Vouchsafe this moniment of his last praise, / With some few siluer dropping teares t’adorne’ (Spenser, Ruines of Time, lines 678–9, 682–3, Shorter Poems, 187). In so doing, he gestures towards complaint’s broader tendency towards irresolution and its effort to dilate its emotional force by evoking Mary Sidney Herbert’s ‘few siluer . . . teares’. The repeated use of the term ‘broken’ in these lines also advances the inherent limitations of complaint as an alwaysalready imperfect poetic mode. In contrast to Spenser’s identification of The Faerie Queene as able ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, Faerie Queene, 714),²⁴ which espouses the confidence expected from the genre of national epic, here he calls attention to the brokenness of his verses to highlight that the success of complaint must always be confirmed by the reader. ‘In Spenser’, writes Richard Danson Brown, ‘complaint’s traditional concern with the instability of the external world is transformed into a concern with the instability of poetry itself ’.²⁵ Whether framed in the ephemerality of physical beauty in Muiopotmos—which relates the death of the butterfly Clarion at the hands of the spider Aragnoll—or the recurring laments of ‘this worlds inconstancies’ in The Visions of Bellay (Spenser, Visions of Bellay, line 12, Shorter Poems, 311), Spenser’s various complaint poems foreground their ability to diagnose the faults of the world and prescribe the need to turn towards the immutable rewards of heaven. Yet, they repeatedly demonstrate how complaint cannot immortalise its subjects or effect consolation in the face of the abuses of the age because complaint, too, carries within itself the image of the fractured world from which it emerges. The very limitations of this alwaysalready imperfect mode could—in accordance with the period’s emphasis on decorum— itself be seen as peculiarly appropriate to the genre.
Personal Complaint Love Complaints Centring on unrequited or lost love, love complaints range from lyric poems to longer minor epics and legends. Ovid’s Heroides (c 25–16 ), a collection of epistolary complaints from the perspective of famous Greek and Roman women to their estranged lovers, and six paired Heroides that include a woman’s letter and response from her male lover, was the most significant Classical influence on early modern English love complaints. Ovid’s Heroides was part of the Latin curriculum in grammar schools, and it was translated into ²⁴ Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ²⁵ Brown, ‘The New Poet’, 24.
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342 - English by George Turberville as The Heroical Epistles (1567). It also provided an epistolary structure for later complaint writers to emulate, such as Isabella Whitney’s The Copy of a Letter (1567), Peter Colse’s Penelope’s Complaint: Or, A Mirror for Wanton Minions (1596), and Michael Drayton’s England’s Heroical Epistles (1597). Ovid’s imitation of ‘Roman school exercises known as suasoria, an impassioned persuasive plea, and ethopoeia, the recreation of a historical figure at a decisive moment of her life’, also established the rhetorical groundwork for later poets who would ventriloquise female complainants.²⁶ Theocritus’s Idylls 12 and 23 and Virgil’s Eclogue 2 also provided Classical authorisation for early modern poets to explore homoerotic desire in love complaint.²⁷ These include Drayton’s Piers Gaveston (1593), a de casibus complaint on the rise and fall of the favourite and likely male lover of Edward II, and Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd (1594), a pastoral complaint focusing on the shepherd Daphnis’s unrequited love for Ganymede. Broadly defined, love complaint could also include the majority of Tudor sonnet sequences. William Smith goes so far as to identify his sonnet sequence Chloris, or The Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepherd (1596) as an extended pastoral complaint. Like other varieties of complaint poetry, the topoi of sixteenth-century love complaint remained relatively unchanged from its medieval and Classical predecessors. The concluding stanza of the anonymous Here Beginneth a Complaint of a Dolorous Lover (1531) typifies an early Tudor amorous complaint: My whole desire is to be alone That I may have her in remembrance That is the causer of my moan The root and ground of all my grievance. (Anon., Here Beginneth, sig. A4)²⁸
At the end of century, the lover-complainant of John Dickenson’s The Shepherd’s Complaint (1596) uses the same trope when bemoaning the shepherdess Amaryllis’s rejection of his love: Thus I resolv’d to seek a place, fit place for an abject, Found this darksome grove, since when still here I remained, Here to the woods I wailed. (Dickenson, Shepherd’s Complaint, sig. B3)²⁹
Whitney’s The Copy of a Letter, an epistolary complaint written by a ‘young Gentlewoman’ to ‘her inconstant Lover’, provides a catalogue of Classical figures (mostly derived from Ovid’s Heroides) before the complainant admits that ‘all in vain for this I seek, / wishes may not attain it / Therefore may hap to me what shall, / and I cannot refrain it’ (Whitney,
²⁶ M. L. Stapleton, ‘Epistolary and Dialogic Forms’, in Catherine Bates (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Chichester, 2018), 365–75, 366. ²⁷ See Theocritus, Idylls, 2, 23, in Neil Hopkinson (ed. and trans.), Theocritus. Moschus. Bion (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 38–57, 316–21; and Virgil, Eclogue 2, in H. Rushton Fairclough (trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1–6 (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 30–7. ²⁸ Anon., Here Beginneth a Complaint of a Dolorous Lover (London, 1531). ²⁹ John Dickenson, The Shepherd’s Complaint (London, 1596).
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343 Copy of a Letter, lines 117–20, Renaissance Women Poets, 33).³⁰ Yet, Whitney does more than simply incorporate Classical models of complaint; she refashions and ‘self-consciously carve[s] a place for herself in the line of complainants’.³¹ In ‘A Careful Complaint by the Unfortunate Author’, for instance, Whitney evokes Dido’s love complaint for Aeneas only to comment that ‘O Dido thou hadst lived, a happy Woman still, / If fickle fancies had not thralled thy wits: to reckless will’, and she then shifts course to lament her own physical illness: ‘But I unhappy most, and gripped with endless griefs / Despair (alas) amid my hope, and hope without relief ’ (Whitney, Copy of a Letter, lines 13–14, 21–2, Renaissance Women Poets, 14). In contrast with Whitney’s lover-poet, an undercurrent running through several male-authored love complaints is a hostility towards the unjust or fickle behaviour of women. For instance, when Colin Clout complains in the The Shepheardes Calender that Rosalind ‘hateth as the snake’ his ‘Shepheards deuise’ and ‘laughes [at his] songes’ (Spenser, Januarye, lines 65, 66, Shorter Poems, 37), the impression is that she has misjudged the quality of his love tokens and songs and treated him with ‘discurtesee’ (Spenser, June, line 97, Shorter Poems, 90). Implicit (and explicit) critiques of women signal that love complaints, even though they assume a voice of authenticity and intimacy through lyric, should not be taken as straightforward professions of unfulfilled desire. Instead, these complaints participate in a male-dominated literary system that largely reflects and reinforces the misogyny of the period.
Tottel’s Miscellany The publication of Richard Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets (usually referred to as Tottel’s Miscellany) stands Janus-like as both a register of earlier literary trends of the court of Henry VIII and a watershed moment for the development of love complaint in English poetry. The volume introduced the majority of English readers to the love sonnets of Petrarch through the translations of Wyatt and Surrey.³² The sonnet functions as an ideal verse form for representing the conflicted subject position of the lover-complainant and complaint’s tendency towards narrative stasis and irresolution. Wyatt’s ‘Some fowls there be’ (titled ‘How the Lover Perisheth in His Delight, as the Fly in the Fire’, and a translation of Petrarch’s Rime 19) highlights both the internal tensions afflicting the Petrarchan lover and Wyatt’s own tenuous position as a courtier in the Henrician court: Some fowls there be that have so perfect sight, Against the sun their eyes for to defend; And some, because the light doth them offend, Never appear but in the dark or night: Other rejoice to see the fire so bright, And ween to play in it, as they pretend, But find contrary of it, that they intend. Alas! of that sort may I be by right; ³⁰ Isabella Whitney, in Danielle Clarke (ed.), Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemelia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (Harmondsworth, 2000). ³¹ Katherine Jo Smith, ‘Ovidian Female-Voiced Complaint Poetry in Early Modern England’. PhD Diss. University of Warwick, 2016, 66. ³² Editors Holton and MacFaul identify seventy-seven of the 280 poems in the first quarto of the miscellany as love complaints; see Tottel’s Miscellany, 536–7.
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344 - For to withstand her look I am not able; Yet can I not hide me in no dark place; So followeth me remembrance of that face, That with my teary eyes, swollen, and unstable, My destiny to behold her doth me lead; And yet I know I run into the gleed*. *fire, live coal (Wyatt, ‘Some fowls there be’, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 52)
Wyatt here deploys an animal metaphor, or what Puttenham would describe as the figure of similitude, by ‘likening himself to the fly, and neither the eagle, nor to the owl’ (Puttenham, Art, 327). He places himself in a subjugated role and, in the process, ‘transform[s] . . . Petrarch’s conceit into an exploration of the moral and psychological implications of service to the Tudor court’.³³ His choice of the verse form of the Italian sonnet (abbaabbacddcee) rather than the typical Petrarchan sonnet (an octave of abbaabba and a sestet of cdcdcd or cdecde) allows him to incorporate two further couplets into the sestet, which serve to emphasise the self-destructiveness of the speaker’s desire. The rhymes of the penultimate couplet (lines 10–11) suggest that the ‘dark place’ is not the place of refuge it would seem to be because it is identified with the lady’s ‘face’. For all its apparent radiance and beauty, the lady’s face has a hidden darkness about it that lures the speaker to his death as surely as the flame attracts the equally suicidal moth: something the final couplet (‘lead’, ‘gleed’) goes on to affirm. Wyatt thus capitalises on the forcefulness of the Italian sonnet’s final couplet ‘to exhibit a self-awareness expressed in a conclusive paradox: that the lover goes ineluctably and willingly to what will destroy him’.³⁴ The speaker’s admission that he ‘runs into the gleed’—a translation of Petrarch’s ‘dietro a quel che m’arde’ [I follow what will burn me] (Petrarch, Rime Sparse, sonnet 19, line 14, Canzoniere, 20–1)³⁵—reflects a trope common in early modern love sonnets that reaches its dark apotheosis in Shakespeare’s conclusion that ‘Desire is death’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 147, line 8, Norton Shakespeare, 2300).³⁶ In so doing, Wyatt underscores how the sonnet serves as an ideal vehicle for representing the emotional intensity of the lover’s complaint even as it withholds any sense of reconciliation or satisfaction. In addition to male lovers’ complaints, Tottel’s Miscellany includes several poems in which authors adopt female personae, thereby anticipating the rise of female complaint later in the century. Surrey’s ‘O happy dames’, for instance (titled ‘Complaint of the Absence of Her Lover Being upon the Sea’), is one of two complaints where he adopts the voice of a female lover.³⁷ The collection also offers one of the first printed English translations of Ovid’s Heroides, the anonymous poem titled ‘The Beginning of the Epistle of Penelope to Ulysses, Made into Verse’, which appeared over a decade before the publication of Turberville’s complete 1567 translation.³⁸ Moreover, several poems take more experimental structural or thematic approaches to complaint. In ‘It burneth yet, alas my heart’s desire’ (titled
³³ Jon Robinson, Court Politics, Culture and Literature in Scotland and England, 1500–1540 (Burlington, VT, 2008), 113. ³⁴ Michael Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London, 1992), 87. ³⁵ Petrarch, in Mark Musa (trans.), The Canzoniere, or Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Bloomington, IN, 1996). ³⁶ William Shakespeare, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016). ³⁷ Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 17. The second is ‘Good Ladies, you that have your pleasures in exile’ (titled ‘Complaint of the absence of her lover being upon the sea’), Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 19. ³⁸ ‘O lingering make [mate], Ulysses dear’, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 225.
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345 ‘The Lover Complaineth and His Lady Comforteth’)—one of the few complaints that take the form of a dialogue—Wyatt represents the lady’s acceptance of her lover: Lady Thou wilt needs so: be it so: but then be true. Lover Naught would I else, nor other treasure none, Thus, hearts be won, by love, request, and moan. (Wyatt, ‘It burneth yet, alas my heart’s desire’, lines 30–2, Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 113)
In so doing, he abandons the common topoi of the complainant’s ineffectual appeals and the irresolution of the speaker’s discontent. With few exceptions, most of the complaints in Tottel’s Miscellany had Classical, medieval, or Italian predecessors, but its importance lies not in its originality but in its popularisation of many of the forms that complaint would take later in the sixteenth century.³⁹
Female Complaint The publication of Thomas Churchyard’s ‘Shore’s Wife’, which was first published in the second edition of The Mirror for Magistrates (1563) and later expanded and republished as ‘The Tragedy of Shore’s Wife’ in Churchyard’s Challenge (1593), laid the foundations for what would become a ‘literary vogue’ in the 1590s for female complaint written by male authors.⁴⁰ The narrative of Jane Shore fits the general template of the de casibus tragedies of the Mirror, particularly in its emphasis on Fortune’s influence on her rise and fall. As the only woman included in the collection up to that date, however, Jane Shore’s gender takes on an increased importance. Her rise from the middle classes to become the mistress of Edward IV, a triumph that she expresses through her claim that ‘I governed him that ruled all this land / I bare the sword though he did wear the crown’ (Churchyard, ‘Shores Wife’, lines 173–4, Mirror, 379), comes at the expense of her loss of chastity and innocence. Further, she frames Edward’s seduction in terms of power by rhetorically asking, ‘Who can withstand a puissant king’s desire?’, and by describing herself elsewhere as powerless: ‘A pleasant prey enticeth many a thief ’ (Churchyard, ‘Shores Wife’, lines 89, 98, Mirror 376). She also highlights her helplessness at the hands of Richard III, who falsely accuses her of poisoning his brother Edward IV and reduces her to begging ‘alms, / With book in hand, and say[ing] S[aint] David’s Psalms’ (Churchyard, ‘Shores Wife’, lines 363–4, Mirror, 385). Like the other stories in the Mirror, her story concludes with a moral, warning all ‘maid[s] and wive[s] to ‘Defy this world, and all his wanton ways, / Beware by me, that spent so ill her days’ (Churchyard, ‘Shores Wife’, lines 388, 391–2, Mirror, 386). ‘Shore’s Wife’ establishes many of the conventions that subsequent writers of female complaint would incorporate or react against. These include a narrative frame in which a female complainant relates her story to an unnamed male poet-narrator; her naïveté and passivity in opposition to her seducer’s sophistication and authority; an overwhelming sense of her isolation and lack of
³⁹ In addition to love complaints, Tottel’s Miscellany includes Surrey’s ‘So cruel prison how could betide, alas’ (titled ‘Prisoned in Windsor, He Recounteth His Pleasure There Passed’), Tottel’s Miscellany, poem 15, one of the first English examples of prison complaint. ⁴⁰ Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, 104.
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346 - resolution; and her loss of reputation and attempt to restore her fame with the aid of the narrator and his text.⁴¹ Samuel Daniel’s Delia Containing Certain Sonnets: With the Complaint of Rosamond (1592), which launched the fashion of including a complaint poem after a sonnet sequence and amorous short poems or epigrams (also called anacreontics), attests to the continuing popularity of ‘Shore’s Wife’. In The Complaint of Rosamond, Daniel relates the story of Rosamond Clifford’s affair with Henry II and her sequestration in an underground labyrinth in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, before her eventual poisoning at the hands of Henry’s wife, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. At the opening of her complaint, the ghost of Rosamond refers to Jane Shore as part of her effort to indicate the worthiness of her own, nobler story: Each pen doth overpass my just complaint, Whilst others are preferred, though far more base; Shore’s wife is graced and passes for a Saint; Her Legend justifies her foul attaint*. *stain upon her honour Her well-told tale did much compassion find, That she is passed, and I am left behind. (Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, lines 23–8, Complete Works, 1.82)⁴²
Daniel incorporates this intertextual reference not simply to pay homage to his literary predecessor, but also to create what Wendy Wall identifies as ‘a discursive site for literary competition and authorization’.⁴³ Daniel makes this strategy explicit when, at the conclusion of her complaint, Rosamond invokes the intercessory power of Delia, the titular Petrarchan mistress from the preceding sonnet sequence, to release her from the ‘Stygian flood’ and allow her to enter the Elysian Fields: ‘Yet ere I go, this one word more I pray, / Tell Delia, now her sigh may do me good’ (Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, lines 898, 899–900, Complete Works, 1.113). Daniel transforms female complaint into a currency of sympathetic exchange regarding all spurned lovers from Rosamond to himself. In the penultimate stanza of the poem, he intensifies this self-referentiality when he identifies his retelling of Rosamond’s complaint as a recital of his poetic skills. Through Rosamond’s farewell—‘And if I pass unto those happy banks, / Then she [Delia] must have her praise, thy pen her thanks’ (Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, lines 902–3, Complete Works, 1.113)—Daniel creates a transactional sequence whereby Delia’s intervention on Rosamond’s behalf manifests her benevolence as well as his successful performance as a poet: ‘So vanished she, and left me to return / To prosecute the tenor of my woes, / Eternal matter for my Muse to mourn’ (Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, lines 904–6, Complete Works, 1.113). Churchyard, in his revised version, ‘The Tragedy of Shore’s Wife’, participates in a sort of intertextual feedback loop in which he responds in turn to Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond.⁴⁴ He announces in the dedication that ‘because Rosamond is so excellently set forth . . . I have somewhat beautified my Shore’s wife, not in any kind of emulation, but to
⁴¹ On male authors ventriloquising female voices, see Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London, 1992); and Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1993). ⁴² Samuel Daniel, in Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works in Verse and Prose, 5 vols. (London, 1885–96). ⁴³ Wall, Imprint of Gender, 252. ⁴⁴ On the continuing popularity of Jane Shore, see Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago, IL, 2000), 33–56.
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347 make the world know, my device in age is as ripe and ready, as my disposition and knowledge was in youth’ (Churchyard, Churchyard’s Challenge, ‘Tragedy of Shore’s Wife’, sig. S4v).⁴⁵ Alongside this tradition, an alternative strain of female complaint developed that focused instead on virtuous women who resist their seducers’ temptations but who nevertheless still come to tragic ends. In Matilda (1594), a long poem comprising nearly a hundred stanzas of rhyme royal, Drayton praises Matilda’s unwavering chastity and uses it to critique the poetic fashion of celebrating ‘looser wantons’ like Jane Shore and Rosamond over their virtuous counterparts (Drayton, Matilda, line 48, Works, 1.215).⁴⁶ Matilda’s complaint recounts King John’s failed seduction, her retreat into a convent to become a nun, and her eventual murder at the command of the king. Matilda’s complaint begins with her lament that ‘black Oblivion hath too often concealed’ the story of her preservation of her ‘sacred Chastity’ (Drayton, Matilda, lines 7, 61, Works, 1.214, 215). Like other female complaints, Matilda contains all of the conventional markers, including a description of her exceptional beauty, the unequal power relationship between her and the king, John’s duplicity in seduction, and her conflict of conscience of whether to give in to his temptations. What differs is Matilda’s resolute commitment to her chastity when she ‘leave[s] the Court, the Spring of all my woe’ (Drayton, Matilda, line 464, Works, 1.227). Like Daniel with Rosamond, Drayton uses Matilda’s complaint to promote his own poetic ability: the poem begins with Matilda’s desire for a ‘mortal Pen’ to reawaken the reader’s compassion, and it concludes with her hope that her ‘soul may be blessed’ in the ‘sight’ of Idea, the female beloved of Drayton’s sonnets (Drayton, Matilda, lines 11, 1118, Works, 1.214, 245). Even in this countertradition, then, female complaint serves as a means for male authorial self-presentation. Drayton’s championing of Matilda’s chastity and his role in it proved successful, for her mantle is taken back up in Barnfield’s short poem The Complaint of Chastity (1594), which praises not only the poetic subject, but also Drayton as a poet. Perhaps the most popular example of the virtuous female complainant is Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594). The poem is an epyllion, but it contains Lucrece’s complaints against Opportunity, Time, and Night, all of which concentrate on her lost chastity and exonerate her from any blame in Tarquin’s sexual assault. Central to Lucrece’s complaints is her belief that her laments will neither assuage her grief nor effect justice: ‘In vain I rail at Opportunity, / At Time, at Tarquin, and uncheerful Night; / . . . / This helpless smoke of words doth me no right’ (Shakespeare, Lucrece, lines 1023–4, 1027, Norton Shakespeare, 726). In considering the painting of the destruction of Troy, Lucrece goes on to connect the Greek Sinon’s ‘False creeping craft’ with Tarquin’s duplicity (Shakespeare, Lucrece, line 1517, Norton Shakespeare, 737). Yet, Shakespeare’s poem demonstrates how the lack of resolution present in so much complaint literature gives way to narrative action and conclusion. Indeed, Lucrece comes to the realisation that speech alone—the ‘helpless smoke of words’, as she calls it—offers no remedy, so she resolves to commit suicide instead.⁴⁷ However, for the majority of virtuous female complainants who appear in standalone poems—which include John Trussell’s Raptus I Helenae: The First Rape of Helena of Troy (1595), Peter Colse’s Penelope’s Complaint (1596), and Thomas Middleton’s
⁴⁵ Thomas Churchyard, ‘The Tragedy of Shore’s Wife’, in Churchyard’s Challenge (London, 1593), sigs. S4–X1v. ⁴⁶ Michael Drayton, in J. William Hebel (ed.), Works, corrected edition, 5 vols. Oxford, 1961. ⁴⁷ A similar shift may be seen in other complaints inset into larger narrative poems. See, for instance, Britomart’s love complaint in Spenser, Faerie Queene, 3.4.12.8–17.
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348 - The Ghost of Lucrece (1600)—the only option available to them is to lament, to curse, or to withdraw into silence.
Spiritual Complaints Nowhere in the sixteenth century is the plaintive voice more pronounced than in the outpouring of translations and paraphrases of the Bible and biblically rooted complaint literature. The penitential figure of David was the most popular template for expressing spiritual sorrow and emotional turmoil, as the numerous translations and paraphrases of the Psalms attest. Over the course of the century, numerous treatments of the Psalms circulated in manuscript or were printed, ranging from Wyatt’s Certain Psalms Chosen out of the Psalter of David, Commonly Called the Seven Penitential Psalms (written c 1536–42, published 1549), Surrey’s paraphrase of the Psalms (composed c 1546–7), and Anne Vaughan Lock’s A Meditation on a Penitent Sinner (1560), to Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert’s Sidney Psalter (composed mid-1570s–1585, completed by 1599). As with complaints against the times, authors repeatedly use prosopopoeia to express their discontent under the protection of scriptural authorisation. For example, in A Larum Bell for London (1573), John Carr, a ‘citizen of London’, updates Jeremiah’s prophecies in the Book of Lamentations about Jerusalem’s destruction to mid-Tudor London, warning the city that ‘Thy sins will sink thee down to hell’ (Carr, A Larum Bell, title page and sig. a2).⁴⁸ Spiritual complaints typically focus on the speaker’s sinfulness, the soul’s corruption by the flesh, the inevitability of death, and the need for divine mercy. Not surprisingly, the defining feature of spiritual complaint is its inward focus, especially the speaker’s grievance against his or her sinfulness, rather than outward towards other individuals or issues. Lock’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner—an extended paraphrase of Psalm 51, which was also the first sonnet sequence published in English—exemplifies this category of complaint poetry. In her verse preface (comprising five sonnets), Lock identifies the subsequent sonnets as a supplication for grace, stating that she will ‘Pour forth my piteous plaint with woeful sound’ before ‘the Lord, whom sinner I, / I cursed wretch, I have offended so’ (Lock, Meditation, ‘Preface’, sonnet 5, lines 7, 9–10, Collected Works, 63–4).⁴⁹ And she concludes the sonnet sequence proper (comprising twenty-one sonnets) with a final prayer focused on the hope of forgiveness: ‘Be, Lord of mercy, merciful to me: / Restore my feeling of thy grace again / Assure my soul, I crave it not in vain’ (Lock, Meditation, sonnet 21, lines 12–14, Collected Works, 71). For early modern women writers, especially, adopting biblical personae or patterning their own lives on scriptural examples provided an authorised space for publicly representing their private emotional and spiritual lives in print.⁵⁰ For women writers like Mary Sidney Herbert, moreover, assuming the voice of biblical complainants also took on distinct political overtones. In her translation of Psalm 82, for instance, Sidney Herbert rebukes unfit monarchs, stating that ‘You should the fatherless defend: / You should unto the weak extend / Your hand’, and she critiques their inaction and ignorance: ‘This should you do: but what do you? / You nothing know, you nothing see’ (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 82,
⁴⁸ John Carr, A Larum Bell for London (London, 1573). ⁴⁹ Anne Vaughan Lock, A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, in Susan M. Felch (ed.), The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (Tempe, AZ, 1999). ⁵⁰ This precedent had been set by the publication of Queen Catherine Parr’s prose text, The Lamentation of a Sinner (1547).
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349 lines 11–13, 16–17, Collected Works, 2.119).⁵¹ Echoing conventional complaints against the times, Sidney Herbert here adopts the voice of David to demonstrate that political authorities must serve the needs of the people, particularly the most vulnerable. For Roman Catholic writers, spiritual complaints often blended into larger considerations of the relationship between the spiritual and religious life of the reader and the broader religious conditions of Elizabethan England. Robert Southwell’s Saint Peter’s Complaint (1595), written in response to the persecution of Roman Catholic priests and laity in the early 1590s, offers the most sophisticated example of this combination of personal lament and indictment of the religio-political situation. He begins the complaint with an overview of the dire religious conditions in England, explaining that ‘The world doth wax in evil, but wane in good. / This makes my mourning muse resolve in tears’ (Southwell, Saint Peter’s Complaint, lines 12–13, Poems, 75).⁵² The isolation experienced by Peter involves not simply an estrangement from Christ caused by his sinfulness—the conventional subject position of the spiritual complainant—but also from the religious and sacramental rituals provided by the Roman Church. Southwell concludes the poem with Peter’s petition to Christ to ‘Tender my suit, cleanse this defiled den, / Cancel my debts, sweet Jesus, say Amen’ (Southwell, Saint Peter’s Complaint, lines 791–2, Poems, 100). In so doing, Southwell gestures towards an expectation of Christ’s forgiveness, so much so that many readers have argued that the poem itself serves as a substitute for the lost religious rituals of the old faith.⁵³ The deferral of Christ’s response may provide solace in presenting Peter’s successful repentance, but it ultimately withholds the consolation that comes with forgiveness. For Southwell, complaint preserves the memory of the past even as it evokes the pains of nostalgia in reminding Roman Catholic readers of what has been lost.
Conclusion As a literary mode, complaint has the capacity to generate new branches in the development of a particular genre or form, as in the case of female complaint and epyllion in the 1590s. At the same time, it can also alter or even subvert readers’ generic or formal expectations. Take, for instance, the presence of complaint in some early modern elegiac poems. According to Mark David Rasmussen, elegy and complaint differ in how each of them processes grief: ‘Elegy works upon loss, works upon death, to create something new: Lycidas exalted, Lycidas the poem. This is precisely what complaint will not do. Its strength comes from its impassioned refusal to “get over” the trauma it mourns.’⁵⁴ However, in Wyatt’s sonnet ‘The pillar perished is whereto I leant’—most likely written as a response to the death of his patron Thomas Cromwell in 1540 (though Tottel titled it ‘The Lover Laments the Death of His Love’)—the speaker seeks to ‘mourn till death’, and the poem concludes with an image of his self-division and longing for death: ‘And I my self, my self always to hate, / Till dreadful death do ease my doleful state’ (Wyatt, ‘The pillar perished’, lines 8, 13–14, Tottel’s
⁵¹ Mary Sidney Herbert, in Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (eds), The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998). ⁵² Robert Southwell, S. J., in James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (eds), The Poems of Robert Southwell, S. J. (Oxford, 1967). ⁵³ See Nancy Pollard Brown, ‘The Structure of “Saint Peter’s Complaint” ’, Modern Language Review, 61 (1966), 3–11. ⁵⁴ Mark David Rasmussen, ‘Complaints and Daphnaïda (1591)’, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 2010), 218–36, 223.
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350 - Miscellany, poem 106). Instead of ‘getting over’ grief, Wyatt’s speaker turns in on himself to create an image of unending sorrow. Moreover, this lack of consolation leads to poetic creation, for the speaker announces that he will direct his ‘pen, in plaint’ until his own death (line 11). Likewise, in Daphnaïda (1591)—a pastoral elegy on the death of Douglas Howard, wife of the poet Arthur Gorges—Spenser recalls Wyatt’s plaintive speaker through the shepherd Alcyon. Despite his beloved Daphne’s deathbed request for him not to lament, Alcyon exclaims, ‘How happie was I then, and wretched now?’, before going on to describe his ‘selfe-consuming paine’ and hatred towards the ‘vaine and transitorie’ world around him (Spenser, Daphnaïda, lines 308, 436, 495, Shorter Poems, 333, 337, 339). The poem effectively ends where it began, with the narrator describing Alcyon’s total dejection: ‘Thus when he ended had his heauie plaint, / The heauiest plaint that euer I heard sound, / His cheeks wext pale, and sprights began to faint’ (Spenser, Daphnaïda, lines 540–2, Shorter Poems, 340). Alcyon’s complaint undermines the therapeutic work of elegy by representing through this impasse, amongst other issues, a confrontation with the idea of death as oblivion.⁵⁵ Through these apparently inconsolable figures, Wyatt and Spenser signal that complaint need not serve as a vehicle for tradition and orthodoxy; on the contrary, their use of complaint to destabilise the consolatory potential of elegy questions the relationship between poetry and action in the world. They anticipate W. H. Auden’s conclusion in his elegy titled ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’ (1939) that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ (Auden, ‘He disappeared in the dead of winter’, line 36, Collected Poems, 246),⁵⁶ by representing a complainant who calls out for intervention, but who must wait for a response that—as in so many instances of complaint poetry—never comes.
⁵⁵ For a further discussion of this poem see also Chapter 18 in this volume. ⁵⁶ W. H. Auden, in Edward Mendelson (ed.), Collected Poems (New York, 2007).
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20 Devotional Poetry Claire McEachern
The genre of devotional poetry in English most often conjures up the lyric poets of the seventeenth century: John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne are the representative and most recognised authors, those whose poems are likely to be anthologised as examples of their species. The expectations for the genre are, most obviously, that its subject matter concern some address to Christian experience. Devotional poems are typically on the short side; while a devotional sonnet sequence might well encode a protracted experience like conversion, this kind of writing is not primarily long-form narrative poetry but brief descriptions of moments and models of meditation (the words ‘devotionals’ and ‘devotional’ refer to the activity of private prayer). Critics classify Paradise Lost, for instance, as epic poetry rather than devotional, despite the sacred subject matter and its evidence of devotion on the part of its author; no more does Book 1 of The Faerie Queene qualify, though it is very much concerned with how to worship. Like the other principal strain of English poetry in the early modern period dedicated to devotion—poems about and to erotic objects—sacred devotional poetry can take the form of praise or persuasion or lament; it can also, meditatively, explore the vicissitudes of the speaker’s interior life and contemplate the nature of divine mysteries. The Christian exegetical tradition provides for a complex understanding of symbol. Also like erotic poetry, devotional poetry can include meta-critical reflection on the capacity of language to express the indescribably wondrous. Unlike poetic devotions to an earthly goddess, however, celebration of the literally heavenly beloved can seem relatively less playful, witty, or ironic (suspense over eternal salvation being more sobering an activity than the hope of sexual conquest). An erotic poet who employs religious imagery to describe a beloved knows he is being naughty and clever; a religious poet who uses erotic imagery to describe a longing for the divine gives the sense he is searching for the most intense idiom available, and/or following the precedent of the Song of Songs. Consequently, critical evaluation of devotional poetry is often dogged by the suspicion that there may exist in it some tension between the commitments to devotion and to poetry—or at least that excellence in one respect might not mean it in the other—a tension exacerbated by the knowledge that, in the early modern historical moment, poetry was associated with ornament and devotion amongst some Protestants with an aversion to man-made representations of the divine. Of course, such an expectation of the antagonism between piety and verbal ingenuity may be an anachronistic one, the property of a post-modern culture with a tendency to preen itself on its own edginess by imagining the devout past as less open to scepticism. The expectation should be weighed against the understanding of early modern writers that God Himself was, as Donne had it, a ‘metaphorical God’ (Donne, ‘Devotions upon Emergent
Claire McEachern, Devotional Poetry In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Claire McEachern 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0020
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352 - Occasions’, ‘Expostulation XIX’, Donne, 309),¹ and that formal order and pattern—in nature, for instance—were His signatures (as was the ingenuity of the human mind). But the sense that the respective allegiances of devotion and poetry may conflict underlies one seventeenth-century reader’s perception that the sixteenth-century Psalm paraphrases of Thomas Sternhold (a courtier of Edward VI) savour ‘more of Jordan than of Helicon’,² and it similarly prompts the twentieth-century editors of William Alabaster’s Divine Meditations to ‘confes[s] that a good many . . . can only be regarded as successful if the criterion adopted be a religious one’.³ The converse suspicion is that excellent poetry may not be entirely devoted—or at least exclusively so—to God. On the other hand, given the relatively austere aspects of the Calvinist God who made His presence felt in the early modern period, there can be in some Protestant devotional poetry just as much if not more psychic angst as we find in the love poetry: uncertainty, unrequited longing, ambivalence, ambiguity, and self-division are rife. The psychological ramifications of original sin can make for complex and nuanced self-exploration, and in Catholic writing the perils of recusancy (the refusal of a Catholic to attend Church of England services) supply the condition of poetic pathos, much as the persecutions in the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary I did for Protestant writers. Indeed, devotional poetry tends to be evaluated as autobiographical in nature rather than driven by fictional personae; in this sense it tallies well with the post-modern sense that the province of lyric poetry is selfexpression, the representation of ‘subjectivity’.⁴ Hence the seventeenth-century devotional poets continue to be taught for their portraits of inner struggle and its relation to poetic form. Perhaps the chief defining characteristic of what we think of as devotional poetry is the following: while its language may stand in some allusive relationship to scriptural images, themes, or events, the object under discussion is usually the experience of belief ostensibly belonging to the speaker, and original (if not unique) to that speaker, in his or her own words, as it were. Anything else tends to be classified as a hymn, or a prayer, in part because the latter are texts for collective voicing; they are designed to speak for, and be spoken by, every soul. Devotional poetry can model and inspire devotional practices; it can even be used as prayer; but it is not considered prayer precisely. Nor, while prayers can have poetic form, do they really count as devotional poetry. While the expectation that the words of a poem should originate with their author may seem a fairly self-evident point about any poetry, in the field of sixteenth-century religious poetry it is, for reasons that will become clear, a point that bears specifying. It is also, in the Reformation, a controversial one. Luther wrote original hymns for congregational singing. Calvin, however, held that all language of worship ought to hew closely to the words of Scripture. Originality of expression has become the mark of what we now define as devotional poetry, which is why the seventeenth-century poets stand as its exemplars. But in the earliest decades of the Reformation the taxonomies of both devotion and poetry were not as they would become. Certainly sixteenth-century adumbrations of the later species exist; for instance, the Psalm paraphrases (more on the term shortly) of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, have much in common with Donne or Herbert’s explorations of faith. ¹ John Donne, in Janel Mueller (ed.), John Donne (Oxford, 2015), italics original. ² Thomas Fuller’s seventeenth-century description of Sternhold’s Psalm paraphrases is cited in J. S. Brewer (ed.), The Church History of Britain, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1845), 4:73. ³ G. M. Story and Helen Gardner (eds), The Sonnets of William Alabaster (Oxford, 1959), xxix. ⁴ See, for instance, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ, 1979).
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353 (Coincidentally—or not—the same two ‘courtly makers’ (Puttenham, Art, 148)⁵ of erotic poetry in sixteenth-century England are amongst the earliest progenitors of the devotional tradition). While ostensibly recapitulations of the scriptural texts, Wyatt’s and Surrey’s Psalm renderings are detailed and unique expressions of interior life that take flight from Scripture as ‘conspicuously artful verse’, and in some instances bear a fairly loose relation to the scriptural prompt.⁶ Wyatt’s rendering of the seven ‘penitential’ Psalms (composed 1534–42, published 1549) depicts a nuanced struggle with the raw emotions of shame and contrition; his use of the interweaving terza rima (ababcbcdcede . . . ) contributes to an innovative psychological portrait of overflowing emotion and ‘real spiritual perplexity’: ‘solitary, morally hyper-aware, theologically cocky, flamboyantly self-disgusted, ironic’.⁷ Given that the Psalms in Scripture are relatively succinct, there are plenty of his own words. Psalm 6, for instance, occupies ten verses in the King James Bible, and two hundred lines in Wyatt’s.⁸ His gestures in the direction of the Protestant theology of grace give the poems a political edge, and his verse reworking of Pietro Aretino’s narrative prose frame for the Psalms into interstitial original poems sets the dramatic scene for each Psalm and expounds its emotional journey. The frames have the paradoxical effect of increasing the fictive quality of the series even as they detail their historical occasion, which is King David’s anguished response to the rebuke of the prophet Nathan concerning his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of her husband.⁹ Like some of Wyatt’s love poetry, then, his Psalm paraphrases depict the experience of desire from the perspective of a lover inclined to rue his former attachment. So, too, Surrey’s rendering of Psalm 55—like his others (Psalms 88 and 73), thought to have been composed during his 1546 imprisonment for treason prior to his execution in January 1547—‘drops all pretence of translating the psalm’, as his editor Emrys Jones notes.¹⁰ For Beth Quitslund (going on to cite Elizabeth Heale), ‘the overall effect is to inhabit the psalms so completely that they become occasional poems: “the voice of the biblical speaker disappears entirely before an insistent and personal ‘I’ ” ’.¹¹ The comparably dire political straits that served as the backdrop to the translation of Psalms by other persons—Anne Askew, George Buchanan, the two sons of the Duke of Northumberland, Sir Thomas Smith, the Marian exile Anne Vaughan Lock—lend their efforts a personal piquancy of self-expression even when their formal innovations or ‘originality’ quotient may not be as marked as that of the two ‘courtly makers’. In some sense, then, we can trace a clear link from the later seventeenth-century devotional poets back to poets working in the same mode nearly a century earlier: a through line that provides a useful corrective to literary histories that narrate the emergence of the ⁵ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ⁶ Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603 (Farnham, 2008), 14. ⁷ Robert G. Twombly, ‘Thomas Wyatt’s Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms of David’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 12.3 (1970), 345–80, 347. In Protestant Bibles, the seven ‘penitential’ Psalms are numbered 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143. ⁸ For the King James Bible (the Authorised Version), see The Holy Bible containing the Old Testament, and the New: newly translated out of the original tongues: and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by his Majesty’s special co[m]mandment. Appointed to be read in churches (London, 1611). ⁹ On the distinction between ritual and fictional understandings of the lyric tradition, see Roland Greene, ‘Sir Philip Sidney’s Psalms, the Sixteenth-century Psalter, and the Nature of Lyric’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 30.1 (1990), 19–40. See also note 35 in this chapter. ¹⁰ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Emrys Jones (ed.), Poems (Oxford, 1964), 160. ¹¹ Quitslund, Reformation in Rhyme, 16, citing Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey, and Early Tudor Poetry (London, 1998), 173.
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354 - devotional lyric as developing only subsequent to the boom in erotic sonnets prompted by the 1591 publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. Such accounts are undoubtedly encouraged by the poets themselves, as in Donne’s claim about his deceased wife in Holy Sonnet 17 that ‘Here the admiring her my mind did whet / To seek thee God’ (Donne, Holy Sonnet 17, lines 5–6, Poetical Works, 301)¹²; or Herbert’s question in ‘Jordan (1)’: ‘Who says that fictions only and false hair / Become a verse?’ (Herbert, ‘Jordan (1)’, lines 1–2, Works, 56).¹³ The opening gesture of most religious poetry of this moment is the farewell to human attachments. As Barnabe Barnes writes at the outset of his 1595 religious sonnet sequence, A Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets, ‘No more lewd lays of Lighter love I sing’ (Barnes, sonnet 1, line 1, Divine Century, sig. A4).¹⁴ It also should be noted that the turn away from the earthly to the divine is a trope throughout the Psalms, as well as a rationale for many published collections of religious verse from the 1530s onwards. The latter often come prefaced with the hope that they will supplant all other ‘feigned rhymes of vanity’ (Sternhold, dedication to Edward VI, Certain Psalms, sig. A3),¹⁵ and as such—in the words of another metrical Psalmist, Robert Crowley—were ‘most necessary to be beaten into the heads of all men at this day’ (Crowley, dedication to Elizabeth Fane, Pleasure and Pain, sig. A2).¹⁶ In some cases this replacement was a matter of word for word. For example, John Hall’s collection of pious poetry, The Court of Virtue (1565), styles itself as a riposte to the popular erotic miscellany The Court of Venus (1538–63) and goes so far as to rewrite some of the love songs by Wyatt found therein as religious poems. Such conversions of erotic poems to devotional ones became a standard move: in the late 1580s, the Catholic poet Robert Southwell retools a love lyric of Sir Edmund Darnley; in the mid-1590s, Edmund Spenser re-verses his own, presenting his Hymnes of Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beautie as an antidote to his secular Hymnes ‘in the praise of Loue and beautie’ in his Fowre Hymnes (1596) (Spenser, Fowre Hymnes, dedication, Shorter Poems, 452).¹⁷ Also true: insofar as Astrophil and Stella refers to Sidney’s desire for the married Penelope Rich, the sequence has something in common with King David’s transgression. More to the point, however, searching for sixteenth-century religious poetry that anticipates a generic standard founded to describe works written decades later risks an error of back-formation that discounts poetry of the earlier moment that does not conform to the later standard. It also obscures what it was that composers and consumers of religious poetry in the earliest throes of the Reformation thought it to be and to do. In order to approach this understanding, we must grapple with a major arena of devotional verse activity in the Tudor period: scriptural paraphrase, or the rendering of the Psalms and other ‘poetic’ portions of Scripture into English words and metres. Like our ordinary use of the term ‘paraphrase’, a scriptural paraphrase involves rephrasing the words of Scripture in one’s own, most obviously into the words of one’s own tongue. However, early modern Psalm paraphrases typically embellish and artfully dilate the
¹² John Donne, in Sir Herbert Grierson (ed.), Poetical Works (London, 1933). ¹³ George Herbert, in F. E. Hutchinson (ed.), The Works of George Herbert (Oxford, 1941). ¹⁴ Barnabe Barnes, A Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets (London, 1595). ¹⁵ Thomas Sternhold, Certain psalms chose[n] out of the Psalter of David, and draw[n] into English metre (London, 1549). ¹⁶ Robert Crowley, Pleasure and Pain, Heaven and Hell, Remember these, and All Will be Well (London, 1551). For Crowley’s metrical translation of the Psalms, discussed below, see The Psalter of David newly translated into English metre . . . (London, 1549). ¹⁷ Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). In Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York, 1989), Thomas P. Roche, Jr, argues that all sonnet sequences of the period are ultimately religious in orientation.
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355 scriptural passage. In this they are unlike the simple translation of the words of one language into their equivalents in another (presuming, that is, such one-to-one correspondence exists), and also unlike our common current meaning of the term paraphrase, which tends to mean rewording a text so as make it less poetic in a less ornate, conversational syntax (as when a student is asked to paraphrase a literary passage by putting it into her own words). The humanist Desiderius Erasmus, for instance, defined paraphrase as ‘to set forth at greater length what has been expressed concisely’ (Erasmus, Paraphrase on John, Collected Works, 46.3).¹⁸ In the sixteenth century, paraphrasing also could mean introducing metre and rhyme and (occasionally) grafting additional figures of speech onto the prose scriptural precedent: in other words, changing its form, in some cases into a more condensed and also more artful verse form. In verse paraphrases, both ornament and interpretation come to the fore, perhaps even more so for the reader familiar with the scriptural version and thus able to appreciate the workmanship involved. Thomas Sternhold, for instance, writes to King Edward VI that ‘as ye have the Psalm itself in your mind, so ye may judge mine endeavour by your ear’ (Sternhold, Certain Psalms, sig. A3). Titled the ‘Psalms of David’ in most sixteenth-century bibles—‘because’, according to the Geneva Bible’s marginal note, ‘the most part were made by him’ (Geneva Bible, fol. 235)¹⁹— the Psalms comprise a collection of 150 separate texts, written between 1000 and 450 , that appear as the first book of the third division of the Hebrew Bible, which also includes other frequent candidates for English versification: the Book of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. In the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible (the authoritative text transcribed in the seventh to tenth centuries ), the Psalms, Proverbs, and parts of Job are in fact the only texts that include cantillation notes (typographical indications of the presence of figurative speech). Early modern exegetes thus recognised the language of the Psalms as an idiom apart from other parts of the Bible, even those specifically designated as songs, such as the ‘Song of Moses’ or the ‘Song of Deborah’. As Sir Philip Sidney asserts in his Defence of Poesy (in which the Psalms warrant the virtue of all poetic endeavours), the Hebrew ‘is fully written in metre . . . although the rules be not yet fully found’ (Sidney, Defence, 77).²⁰ Further evidence of the special qualities of the Psalms’ language lay in the presence, in Hebrew, of a figural operation termed parallelism, in which the words of a given syntactic unit are rephrased by the statement immediately following, for the purpose of clarification, elaboration, incantatory emphasis, figuration, or antithesis. In a sense, then, the work of paraphrase, if defined as restatement with elaboration and variation, is already innate to the structure of the Psalms themselves. They arrive, as it were, as selfparaphrasing texts. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that these 150 texts, along with the several other portions of the Bible identified as ‘songs’, became a prime site of English metrical endeavour. In certain respects, the Psalms became to devotional verse what Petrarch’s sonnets were to erotic poetry: a source for translation, a model for imitation, a compendium of moods, and, in the charismatic King David—shepherd, giant-slayer, singer, king, lover, sinner, penitent—the suggestions of a single authorial persona and autobiographical narrative sequence (though most early modern scholars of the Bible acknowledged that there were ¹⁸ Desiderius Erasmus, in Robert D. Sider, and Jane E. Phillips (eds and trans.), Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 46, Paraphrase on John (Toronto, 1991). ¹⁹ For the Geneva Bible, see The Bible and Holy Scriptures contained in the Old and New Testament. Translated according to the Hebrew and Greek, and conferred with the best translations in divers languages (Geneva, 1560). ²⁰ Sir Philip Sidney, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973).
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356 - likely multiple composers). The Psalms include a wide variety of moods and tones, sometimes within a single Psalm: praise, thanksgiving, lament, self-recrimination, appeals to divine succour or vengeance. They come voiced both by an individual ‘I’ and a communal ‘we’. Indeed, given that many of them are highly agonistic, even bellicose in nature, addressing struggles with enemies or persecutors, they were, for Tudor English persons, a chief repository of what we would call national sentiment. Many contemporary collections refer to the classification of the Psalms according to occasion and need that had been made by Athanasius (c 296–373 ): for example, ‘if thou seest that evil men lay snares for thee . . . sing [Psalm] 5’ (Parker, Whole Psalter, sig. C3).²¹ The Psalms were understood to be texts that could supply a voice which the user might embrace as their own: a universal language of the human being in discourse with the deity (universal both in the sense of viable for all humans and apt for all occasions). Not understood, in other words, as bound to their ‘original’ speaker. In the words of the Geneva Bible, ‘here we have most present remedies against all temptations, and troubles of mind and conscience’ (Geneva Bible, fol. 235). The publishing history of the earliest printed metrical psalters displays typographic attention to these texts’ status as poetry: that is, language that is arranged with an emphasis on ornament, pattern, sound, and imagery. For instance, from Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Bible onwards, printed bibles present the Psalms as prose (although beginning with the Geneva Bible some later editions came bound with an additional metrical psalter).²² The so-called ‘Matthew Bible’ of 1537, however, renders their individual syntactic segments discretely, on separate lines rather than in paragraph form, with the further internal punctuation of discrete clausal units indicated by ‘/’ marks.²³ This feature precedes the introduction of verse lineation and typography into bible printing. It was only in the wake of Robert Étienne’s 1551 French edition of the New Testament that verse numbering was introduced into the entirety of the printed bible (as in the phrase ‘chapter and verse’). After Étienne’s innovation, the non-poetic books in printed bibles also began to be visually marked and numbered as discrete statements rather than as running blocks of text. (The Latin meaning of ‘verse’ simply means a ‘turning back’, as at the end of a line, rather than language that is rhythmic or rhyming or concerned with lineation for reasons other than the available space of the writing surface). However, whereas the Matthew Bible prints the non-poetic books simply as block paragraphs, the Psalms are disaggregated by the clause, making the specialness of the latter’s language typographically visible and strikingly different from the rest of the text. Taking this innovation one step further, the Song of Songs—described as ‘A mystical device of the spiritual and godly love between Christ the spouse and the church or congregation his spousesse’ (Matthew Bible, sig. Hh5v)—is typeset as a dramatic dialogue, with red letter speech prefixes for the dramatis personae: ‘The Church’ ‘The Synagogue’, ‘the spousesse’, and ‘Christ’ (sigs. Hh5v–Hh7). In 1535, Coverdale also published his Ghostly psalms and spiritual songs.²⁴ This volume made the distinct quality of the Psalms’ language even more evident to the eye. For, whereas his Bible renders a given Psalm as a list of discrete prose statements, the song collection,
²¹ Archbishop Matthew Parker, The Whole Psalter Translated into English Metre (London, 1567). ²² For the Coverdale Bible, see Biblia the Bible, that is, the holy Scripture of the Old and New Testament, faithfully and truly translated out of [German] and Latin into English [Zurich/Cologne/Marburg?], 1535. ²³ For the Matthew Bible, see The Bible which is all the holy Scripture: in which are contained the Old and New Testament truly and purely translated into English by Thomas Matthew [pseudonym for John Rogers] (London, 1537). The Matthew Bible was a version of the Coverdale Bible. ²⁴ See Miles Coverdale, Ghostly psalms and spiritual songs drawn out of the holy Scripture, for the co[m]forte and consolation of such as love to rejoice in God and his Word (London, 1535).
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357 modelled after Lutheran hymnals, included variously metred and rhymed versions of fifteen Psalms in stanzaic form, complete with musical settings and similar versifications of the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and other religious songs. This songbook was intended for private and household rather than liturgical use, and it was by no means the first rendition of the Psalms into either the vernacular or verse in England (there is, for instance, an Anglo-Saxon psalter from the ninth century, and versified Psalms regularly appeared in Books of Hours).²⁵ Coverdale’s songbook conceives of verse as a vehicle by which Scripture and doctrine are rendered memorable, digestible, and tuneful through the mediation of metrically regular and sonically harmonious arrangements of language, with sound and beat as a means of reinforcing easy memorisation of content. Such versifications of Scripture ‘drawn into metre’ provided no small measure of its sixteenth-century vernacular forms, particularly from the 1540s through the 1560s, although we also find incidences through the end of the century. Proverbs, the Ten Commandments, Genesis, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the Acts were the other recipients of such treatment, although in 1569 one ambitious William Samuel published An Abridgement of All the Canonical Books of the Old Testament, and in 1596 Henoch Clapham, A Brief of the Bible, Drawn First into English Poesy (first published in Edinburgh and followed by three English editions in 1603, 1608, and 1639). As these titles suggest, transforming holy Scripture into verse was considered a way to make it more portable and easily remembered, and not an act of semantic simplification or transformation (nor, indeed, intended as a replacement for the Bible’s prose). As Archbishop Matthew Parker rhymed in the preface to his own 1567 psalter, ‘with tune and time aright: / It sinketh more sweet, and deeper goeth, / In heart of man’s delight’ (Parker, Whole Psalter, sig. B1). The presumption is that the conversion from prose to verse is neutral as regards meaning, but not efficacy; verse is merely a vehicle to deliver scriptural meaning more effectively and memorably, ‘in such sort that [the Psalms] may the more decently, and with more delight of the mind, be read and sung of all men’ (Crowley, Psalter of David, title page). Further merit in the Psalms’ musical rendering lay in the function of song as an instrument of solace and consolation: ‘the Psalmist stayed: with tuned song, / The rage of minds aghast’ (Parker, Whole Psalter, sig. B1v). Like the proverbial spoonful of sugar, song was considered a means to sweeten the homiletic force of doctrine, and the communal singing of Scripture a way to implement its goal of social harmony. In the words of St Basil (c 380 ), reprinted by Parker, ‘the song of the Psalm worketh charity, which is the greatest treasure of all goodness that can be, by devising this inducement of concord singing the knot and bond of unity, so joining the people together after the similitude of a choir in their unity of singing’ (Parker, Whole Psalter, sigs. E2v–E3). This is a highly practical, social, and utilitarian understanding of sung verse as a medium that, like print itself, could disseminate, educate, and inculcate. Such verse need not necessarily be crude or repetitive in form or rhyme; Parker, for instance, promises (although he does not always deliver) ‘rhythms of diverse kind[s]’ (Parker, Whole Psalter, sig. B2v), and Thomas Tallis’s nine song settings composed for Parker’s volume supplied complex and various musical settings. Socially sung harmony need not mean metrical regularity or sonic homogeneity. Surrey fashions Psalm 55 in unrhymed hexameter verse (his other four Psalms and the first five chapters of Ecclesiastes are in poulter’s measure, twelve and fourteen syllable alternating and rhyming lines). But the balance of the published evidence
²⁵ See Helen C. White, The Tudor Books of Private Devotion (Madison, WI, 1951).
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358 - in the sixteenth century suggests that the project of rendering Scripture user-friendly produced, in English at least, a designedly undazzling use of rhyme and rhythm. This may have been because technical ingenuity, even if it left the scriptural meaning unruffled, might mark the paraphrase as idiosyncratic or semantically nuanced in a way that could hinder its appropriation by any soul in need. Remember, however, that if religious poetry in this moment could claim a homiletic and innocently mnemonic rationale for what can seem to our ears sing-song and simple verse, it is also true that until the third quarter of the century most English poetry on any subject partook of the same aesthetic. It was 1557 before Richard Tottel’s anthology Songs and Sonnets made the metrical experiments of Wyatt and Surrey available in print (albeit voided by Tottel’s smoothings of some measure of experiment). It is telling, nonetheless, that Coverdale chose to present the Psalms concurrently in two different formats, packaged, as it were, in two different forms, for two different types of consumption: the prose form in the Bible text, read (or heard), perhaps studied in a meditative fashion, and the verse form in Ghostly psalms and spiritual songs: sung, communal, musical, and mnemonic. While these two kinds of reception are not necessarily mutually exclusive—even unrhymed and metrically irregular poems can be set to music, and metrically simple language might enable meditative focus on the meanings of words— Coverdale’s dual formats signalled a division of receptions and corresponding forms that was sustained throughout the sixteenth century and ultimately would be recapitulated within the category of verse itself (consider, for example, what is at stake in the difference between the terms ‘versification’ and ‘poetry’, or better yet, ‘versifier’ and ‘poet’).²⁶ So, too, in 1549 we find another issue of diversely oriented publications of verse Psalms: Wyatt’s aforementioned seven ‘penitential’ Psalms in terza rima, and Sternhold’s vernacular translation of nineteen Psalms into what is called (in Sternhold’s wake) common or ballad metre: a four-line rhyming stanza suitable for setting to standard popular tunes in which the first and third tetrameter lines have four iambic stresses and the second and fourth trimeters have three, rhyming either abab or abcb.²⁷ They were joined by Crowley’s Psalter of David (1549). The phrase ‘English metre’ featured regularly on the title pages of metrical psalters, and seems to have either been a name for common metre (although Crowley prefers rhymed couplets), or a means of designating that the book was in the vernacular: that is, metres in English, as in ‘drawn into English metres by Sir Thomas Wyatt Knight’ (Wyatt, Certain psalms, title page).²⁸ Coincidentally, the term also signals the congeniality of the rhythmic ballad form to the stressed nature of spoken English, a language also distinguished by its inheritance of Germanic consonants, which can make rhyme harder to come by than in the Latinate romance languages, and hence the more arresting. Sternhold was a courtier attendant on Edward VI, and in his preface he described his work as intended to be sung for the young monarch. Critics have noted the way in which his translation subtly crafts the nineteen paraphrases with an eye to homiletic instruction in the administration of a godly commonwealth.²⁹ However, the subsequent assembly line rendition of the remaining 131 Psalms into the ballad metre by other hands, as well as that
²⁶ As discussed, for example, by Sidney in the Defence of Poesy; see Defence, 87, 100. ²⁷ Quitslund observes, ‘the meter was neither especially common nor associated with psalmody before Sternhold popularized it’, Reformation in Rhyme, 22. ²⁸ See Wyatt, Certain psalms chosen out of the psalter of David, commonly called the.vii. penitential psalms, drawn into English metre by Sir Thomas Wyatt knight, whereunto is added a prologue of [the] author before every psalm, very pleasa[n]t [and] profitable to the godly reader (London, 1549). ²⁹ See Quitslund, Reformation in Rhyme, 19–57.
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359 metre’s relative sonic monotony in light of later metrical innovations (a perception aggravated by the fact that the same tune could be used with any Psalm so metred—hence the ‘common’), have combined to occlude our sense of the political and interpretative subtleties of Sternhold’s project.³⁰ The adoption of Sternhold-style metrical Psalms for congregational singing by the Marian exiles, a usage that persisted for centuries, has also veiled Sternhold’s ingenuity. Even in 1549, however, the contrast between Sternhold’s version and Wyatt’s must have been striking. Compare, for instance, the two men’s renderings of the opening of Psalm 32: Sternhold: The man is blessed whose wickedness the lord hath clean remitted, And he whose sin and wretchedness is hid also and covered. And blessed is he to whom the lord imputeth not his sin, Which in his heart hath hid no guile, nor fraud is found therein. (Sternhold, Psalm 32, lines 1–8, Certain Psalms, sig. B5v) Wyatt: O happy are they that have forgiveness got Of their offence, not by their penitence, As by merit, which recompenseth not (Although that yet pardon hath none offence Without the same), but by the goodness Of him that hath perfect intelligence Of heart contrite and cover’th the greatness Of sin within a merciful discharge. (Wyatt, Penitential Psalms, lines 217–24, Complete Poems, 201)³¹
The latter’s narrative framing of the seven penitential Psalms as soliloquy-like speeches, the highly wrought interwoven complexity of his rhyme choice (ababcbcbdcdc . . . ) and the use of enjambment and metrical variation within the iambic pentameter in ways that mimic the meandering nature of thought, mark out Wyatt’s effort as intellectually knotty and readerly rather than designed for mellifluous performance or mnemonic ease. Sternhold’s is verse to sing, and live by; Wyatt’s, to think about, and through. The perceived difference between the technical approaches of Sternhold and Wyatt has been aggravated by centuries of reception history, but implicit in it are two understandings of what verse is for—and hence what it does, and should sound like—that resonate throughout the Tudor century. The 1560 sonnet sequence of Anne Vaughan Lock, for instance, published as the work of ‘a friend’ in a volume bound with her translations of two of Calvin’s sermons, advertises ‘meditation’ in the very title: ‘A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, Written in the manner of a Paraphrase upon the 51 Psalm of David’. Like Wyatt’s
³⁰ The expansion of Sternhold’s original translation of nineteen Psalms to include all 150 of them began with John Hopkins’ augmentation, All Such Psalms of David as Thomas Sternhold Late Groom of [the] King’s Majesty’s Robes, Did in His Life Time Draw into English Metre (London, 1549). The combined Sternhold–Hopkins text was to prove the most frequently published psalter of the period. ³¹ Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978).
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360 - work, Lock’s sequence begins with an original preface of five sonnets narrating the occasion and ‘expressing the passioned mind of the penitent sinner’ (Lock, ‘Meditation’, Preface, title, sig. Aa2).³² It then devotes one sonnet in iambic pentameter to seventeen of the Psalm’s nineteen verses, with two each to verses 1 and 4.³³ Each sonnet dwells on and expounds the meaning of the words contained in a single verse. While the emotional intensity of Lock’s focus on personal depravity precludes much sense of verbal playfulness, dwelling as it does on ‘The loathsome filth of my disdained life’ (Lock, ‘Meditation’, Preface, sonnet 1, line 5, sig. Aa2), what Anne Lake Prescott calls her ‘curiously sensuous’ method nonetheless bespeaks a desire to mine the greatest amount of meaning out of each verse.³⁴ Her poems are conscientiously (if not especially dexterously) artful. Indeed, in a certain light the work resonates with a ritualistic meditative practice like saying the rosary, or the liturgical recitation of the Psalms over the course of the church year.³⁵ (George Gascoigne’s 1575 paraphrase of Psalm 130 proceeds similarly, assigning an eleven-line stanza to each verse of the Psalm).³⁶ Incidentally, it is Anne Lock’s religious sonnet sequence—not Sir Philip Sidney’s erotic one—that can claim the distinction of being the first sonnet sequence in English. That of her son Henry Lock (or Lok), Sundry Christian Passions Contained in Two Hundred Sonnets (1593) is—at 204 poems, in fact—the longest. A veritable one-man devotional sonnet-factory, Henry Lock also wrote two further religious sequences, at 102 and twenty-two poems respectively. Anne Lock is not the only female writer for whom a religious subject enabled a public voice (and we should keep in mind that our records of religious poetry written in this moment are inevitably conditioned not only by what has survived the centuries but also by contemporary conventions governing publication and restrictions related to confessional identity; that is, what we can read today may only be a non-representative sliver of what got written).³⁷ A less rarified and perhaps more widely available body of poetry than Lock’s was published by Elizabeth Tyrwhit, a gentlewoman who served as lady of the Privy Chamber to both queens Jane Seymour and Katherine Parr and played a part in shepherding Princess Elizabeth (the future Queen Elizabeth I). Tyrwhit’s Morning and Evening Prayers, with ³² Anne Vaughan Lock, ‘A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, Written in the Manner of a Paraphrase upon the 51 Psalm of David’, in Sermons of John Calvin, upon the song that Ezechias made after he had been sick and afflicted by the hand of God (London, 1560), sigs. Aa1–Aa8. ³³ Most of the sonnets are in the three-quatrains-and-a-couplet format (4/4/4/2, rhyming ababcdcdefefgg) popularised by Surrey, although the ninth sonnet of the ‘Meditation’ proper—‘With sweet Hyssop besprinkle thou my sprite’—has more of the 8/6 or octave/sestet format of the Italian or Petrarchan (here rhyming ababacacdedeff). ³⁴ Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Two Annes, Two Davids’, in Chanita Goodblatt and Howard Kreisel (eds), Tradition, Heterodoxy and Religious Culture: Judaism and Christianity in the Early Modern Period (Beer-Sheva, Israel, 2006), 311–29, 315. ³⁵ On ritual, see Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2005). See also note 9 in this chapter. ³⁶ See Claire Costley King’oo, Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (South Bend, IN, 2012), 159. The text of Gascoigne’s paraphrase can be found in G. W. Pigman III (ed.), A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (Oxford, 2000), 290–3. Although the Psalm was clearly intended to be published in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573)—which prints an introductory sonnet by way of preface—it was for some reason left out and first appeared in print in Gascoigne’s Posies (1575). The rhyme scheme adopted in each of the eight stanzas (abbaaccdeed) is described elsewhere by Gascoigne (describing an incongruously ribald poem of the same form in ‘The Adventures of Master F. J.’) as ‘not common, I have not heard many of like proportion’ (Hundreth, 171). ³⁷ For instance, in 1550 Robert Crowley published the translation (now lost) of ‘certain psalms of godly meditation in number 21. with 102 proverbs’ by the staunchly Protestant Elizabeth Fane (dedicatee of his Pleasure and Pain). See Cathy Shrank, ‘Fane [Vane; née Brydges], Elizabeth, Lady Fane’, ODNB (2006). Robert Miola (ed.) has compiled an anthology of Catholic materials, including many manuscript items, in Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Oxford, 2007).
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361 Divers Psalms Hymns and Meditations was first published in 1574, and an expanded edition was included in Thomas Bentley’s Monument of Matrons (1582), a collection of femaleauthored devotional texts and excerpts of Scripture ascribed to female voices and intended for the private devotions of women.³⁸ Like Bentley’s anthology, Tyrwhit’s prayer book is largely compiled of prose and verse texts first found in other devotional collections, but several original poems complement the originality of the volume’s selections and structure. The high quotient of prose meditations suggests the collection was designed primarily for reading (both aloud and silently); however, metrically and sonically Tyrwhit’s verses more resemble Sternhold’s ballad measures than Lock’s technically ambitious and overwrought ones. Rhyming couplets, straight rhymes, single syllable words, and end-stopped lines predominate. Tyrwhit’s verse style suggests that any division of the devotional poetry of this moment into read/meditative versus sung/memorised, or any alliances of these two species with differing degrees of formal complexity (i.e., sophisticated versus plodding), is not always tenable. The frontispiece of Michael Drayton’s 1591 Harmony of the Church advertises ‘sundry kinds of English Metre: meet to be read or sung’ (Drayton, Harmony of the Church, frontispiece, my italics).³⁹ That musicality and rhythmic monotony need not be joined at the hip is witnessed by the efforts of Continental writers such as the French poet Clément Marot, whose paraphrases of a significant portion of the Psalter circulated in manuscript and print during the 1530s and 1540s. Marot’s paraphrases, which were also adopted for congregational singing, exhibit an impressive medley of verse forms, far more varied than anything extant in English poetry from the same period. (The respective sonic habits of the two languages may have played a part. English verse in this period emphasises a beat throughout the line; French tends to concern itself with stress solely at the terminus of what is usually an alexandrine). So, too, in his Psalmorum Davidis paraphrasis poetica (editions from 1565–82), the Scottish humanist George Buchanan rendered the Psalms in a wide variety of quantitative Latin metres, that is, organised by syllable length rather than stress (he, too, began paraphrasing in the 1530s, also while imprisoned, in Spain). A metrically diverse collection also existed in Dutch as of 1540, with a different folk song assigned to each Psalm, and the French Psalter (completed by Theodore Beza by 1565) was translated into both Dutch and German by 1573.⁴⁰ Thus it is perhaps not surprising that the English devotional poets who demonstrate the greatest interest in technical experimentation and stanzaic variety are those cosmopolitans known to have had some contact with Continental efforts: the diplomat Wyatt and courtier Surrey, the Marian exile Lock, and, above all, the well-travelled Sir Philip Sidney and his intellectually connected sister Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Metrical complexity and innovation are a calling-card throughout Philip Sidney’s poetic works; witness the ceaselessly inventive eclogues of the Arcadias, or the varied inset songs of Astrophil and Stella, not to mention the attention-sustaining technical diversity within the 108 sonnets themselves. Sometime between the mid-1570s and his death in 1586 at age 31, the enthusiastically Protestant Sidney also composed paraphrases of the first forty-three Psalms in an astonishing variety of sophisticated stanzas and metres, some of which were
³⁸ See Susan M. Felch (ed.), Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Morning and Evening Prayers (Farnham, 2008). ³⁹ Michael Drayton, The Harmony of the Church (London, 1591). ⁴⁰ See Richard Todd, ‘ “So well attired abroad”: A Background to the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter and its Implications for the Seventeenth-century Religious Lyric’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 29.1 (1987), 74–93.
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362 - extant in European poetry, some invented for the occasion. After his death, his sister continued with even greater technical proficiency to produce paraphrases of the remaining 107 Psalms, including twenty-two different verse forms alone for Psalm 119 (at seventy-six verses in the Hebrew, the longest of the Psalms). Metrical variety is thus a guiding principle of the siblings’ work; their psalter uses the same form only three times in 172 poems. They write in both iambic and trochaic metres (the latter rare in English), and, as their recent editors note, they used stanzas from both English and Continental traditions: Chaucer’s rhyme royal, common metre, Surrey’s blank verse, the sonnet, terza rima, ottava rima, imitations of Marot, and Classical metres such as Latin hexameters, anacreontics, sapphics, phaelacian hendecasyllables.⁴¹ This spectacular (verging on vainglorious) degree of technical accomplishment was acknowledged at the time as ‘more Rare and Excellent for the Method and Variety than ever yet hath been done in English’.⁴² The latter praise appears on a manuscript of the poems, which is the form in which they circulated, very widely, beginning in the 1590s upon Mary Sidney Herbert’s completion of the work. Such praise is not as obvious a response as it might appear to us. Michael Drayton reassures his own ‘courteous reader’ that ‘my meaning is not with the variety of verse to feed any vain humor, neither to trouble thee with devices of mine own invention, as carrying an overweening of mine own wit’ (Drayton, ‘To the courteous reader’, Harmony of the Church, sig. A3). Yet, the Sidney Psalter is at once an elaborate display of technical accomplishment and an act of meditative devotion. It did for lyric poetry what blank verse had done for dramatic: liberated it, made it responsive to rhythms of speech and thought, enabled the match of mood and metre, and implicitly raised the question of whether form, content, and tongue might condition each other, either in mutual affirmation or ironic counterpoint. Stanzaic variety in a single volume had existed prior to this collection, but not variety within stanzas: and not simply the alternation of short and long lines, but interesting line breaks, enjambments, internal rhymes, and so on. No longer was there one common ‘English metre’, but a myriad English metres and the myriad moods they conjured. In a very real sense, the Sidney siblings invented the conditions of possibility for the modern practices of close reading. Another function of their emphasis on metrical diversity is to individuate the Psalms. While it is a truism that the Psalms corpus contains many different types of songs, and for centuries readers had designated thematic subgroupings within it (the ‘penitential’ Psalms, for example, or the ‘ladder’ Psalms), it must also be acknowledged that, consumed in their entirety, there is something rather repetitive about their persistently exhortatory tone, and this even without the homogenising force of Sternhold’s metre. It requires an aficionado or a devout to perceive the subtleties amongst them. But in the Sidney Psalter the eye detects the stanzaic particularity of Psalms even from a distance; up close, the dynamism and suppleness of individual lines urge a granular reading of psychologically variegated states. Witness the contrast between poignant simplicity and passionate exorbitance that Mary Sidney Herbert constructs in her deployment of different sounds and metres in Psalm 130:
⁴¹ See Hannibal Hamlin, Michael G. Brennan, Margaret P. Hannay, and Noel J. Kinnamon (eds), The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney (Oxford, 2009), xxiv. ⁴² Cited in William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), 550. Ringler also provides a description of the manuscript (dated 1599) in which the Psalms—with this headnote—are transcribed (in Ringler’s sigla, MS J).
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363 From depth of grief Where drowned I lie, Lord, for relief To thee I cry: My earnest, vehement, crying, praying, Grant quick, attentive hearing, weighing. (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 130, lines 1–6, Sidney Psalter, 255)
The rhythms and rhymes here—a simple, even cautious iambic abab dimeter, exploding into a longer and more insistent tetrameter couplet of gerunds—are crafted to mimic the halting-to-passionate motions of beseeching they recount. This is poetry that invites deep scrutiny in the reception and demands it in the composition; scholars have detected that Sidney Herbert’s lexical choices, in particular, display a scholar’s engagement with multiple vernacular translations and contemporary prose paraphrases. One of the governing conditions of Psalm paraphrase is the need to milk the meaning of scriptural language without introducing new non-scriptural figures of speech. Like the nonnegotiable fourteen lines of the sonnet form, this is both a constraint and a fertile condition of composition, especially as the Psalms are not, despite the vaunted parallelism, particularly image-rich. Philip Sidney’s response to this condition is to deploy modifiers that supercharge meaning with multiple senses. In Psalm 42, for instance, he renders the first image as follows: As the chafèd hart which brayeth Seeking some refreshing brook, So my soul in panting playeth, Thirsting on my God to look. (Sidney, Psalm 42, lines 1–4, Sidney Psalter, 81)
‘Chafèd’ is Sidney’s adjective. Coverdale’s version is ‘Like as the hert desireth the water brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God’ (Coverdale Bible, sig. Dd1).⁴³ The Geneva Bible has ‘As the hart brayeth for the rivers of water, so panteth my soul after thee, o God’ (Geneva Bible, fol. 243v). Chafed can translate as ‘heated’, but may also spell and sound (given early modern f/s typographic and orthographic substitution) like ‘chased’, a condition which of course would render a deer both heated and thirsty. But ‘chafed’ could also mean rubbed sore, and until ‘brayeth’ occurs to specify the ‘hart’ as an animal, ‘chafed hart’ could suggest a heart worn sore with inferred pain (the hart/heart coincidence is frequent in Elizabethan poetry). ‘Playeth’, moreover, suggests some art or even pleasure in the desire for God’s slaking. Like any well-behaved paraphrase, Sidney’s version thus shadows and expounds the scriptural language, but also smuggles other meanings into it. Elizabethan poetry in general is renowned for semantic multiplicity: ‘to contrive significatively in few words, much matter’, as Henry Lock put it (Lock, ‘To the Christian Reader’, Sundry Christian Passions, sig. A5v). This feature is partly a consequence of the pressure of form, and a love of wordplay, but it is also deeply indebted to the meditative and exegetical cast of mind which treats Scripture as a mine to be probed, explored, and extended for spiritual treasure.
⁴³ For the Coverdale Bible, see note 22 in this chapter.
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364 - Another way Sidney animates his material is by emphasising the dramatic qualities of the songs, either in his construction of narrative through the use of tenses, or by posing questions that intensify the sense of a dialogue between speaker and God. Mimicking this structure of call and response are patterns of rhymes that anticipate and then satisfy moments of sonic and semantic suspense. Take, for instance, the opening measures of Psalm 39, which recall the pressure to speak also dramatised at the beginning of Astrophil and Stella (‘ “Fool”, said my Muse to me, “Look in thy heart and write”’ (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 1, line 14, Poems, 165)): Thus did I think, ‘I well will mark my way, Lest by my tongue I hap to stray. I muzzle will my mouth, while in the sight I do abide of wicked wight*’. *person And so I nothing said, I muet* stood, *mute I silence kept, ev’n in the good. But still the more that I did hold my peace, The more my sorrow did increase. The more me thought, my heart was hot in me, And as I mused such world to see, The fire took fire and forcibly out-brake; My tongue would needs and thus I spake. (Sidney, Psalm 39, lines 1–12, Sidney Psalter, 76)
Here we have the tinge of humour that attends the plight of best intentions self-foiled, reinforced by the homely drollery of alliteration and archaisms (‘muzzle will my mouth’, ‘wicked wight’). It is a portrait of the Psalmic self, overcome not only, as usual, by external forces, but by internal rebellion to boot (‘my tongue would needs’). In short, characterisation. This enables a real lightness of touch when it comes to the relation between singer and deity, for example, in Psalm 13: How long (O Lord) shall I forgotten be? What? Ever? How long wilt though thy hidden face from me Dissever? ... No, no, I trust on thee, and joy in thy Great pity: Still therefore of thy graces shall be my Song’s ditty. (Sidney, Psalm 13, lines 1–4, 17–20, Sidney Psalter, 28)
In his poem ‘Upon the Translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke His Sister’, Donne writes ‘Eternal God (for whom who ever dare / Seek new expressions, do the circle square . . . ’ (lines 1–2, Sidney Psalter, 3); but as his own body of metrically innovative poetry indicates, with the arrival of the Sidney Psalter the shapes and sounds of English lyric poetry would never be the same again.⁴⁴ ⁴⁴ For more on Donne’s poem of praise for the Sidney Psalter, see also Chapter 11 in this volume.
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365 The story of devotional poetry in this period is not just about increasing formal variety but also subject matter. Psalm paraphrases, whether they are deliberately creative explorations of meaning or ‘mere’ versification, track the language of Scripture in a manner that Calvin would have smiled upon. This makes technical innovation more likely than conceptual. It is perhaps significant that the earliest examples of non-paraphrase poetry in the 1500s were composed by Catholic writers perhaps less bent on vernacular translation of Scripture: Thomas Robinson’s Life and Death of Mary Magdalene (1560s), for example, and William Forrest’s History of Joseph (c 1544, published 1569). (Forrest, Mary Tudor’s chaplain—clearly a political survivor—had also dedicated vernacular translations of the Psalms to the Duke of Somerset in the reign of Edward VI). So, too, in 1551 Crowley came out with Pleasure and Pain, Heaven and Hell, Remember These Four, and All Shall be Well, which delivered a portion of the Gospel of Matthew in the voice of Christ (a social reformer, Crowley also was responsible for overseeing the first printing of William Langland’s Piers Plowman in 1550). As their titles suggest, such poems, like the medieval saint’s life or the dramatic realisations of the cycle plays, focused on the persons of the Bible, either recounting their experiences or rephrasing their songs and laments in metre. Most of this type of writing lights on laudable figures, although in The Mirror of Mutability (1579) Anthony Munday links biblical sinners with the seven deadly sins (Nebuchadnezzar with pride, Herod with envy, and so on). Munday’s title echoes the Mirror for Magistrates, and like the latter, his poem’s de casibus treatment of this rogues’ gallery has them recounting their falls and repentances in ‘complaints’ in which they review and rue their former ways. Yet, even non-paraphrase poetry concerning scriptural characters and events cannot alter scriptural components such as, say, plot: Adam must fall, Christ must die on the cross. ‘It eminently describeth the act or acts of some one or other eminent Person; not with too much labour, compass or extension’, as Michael Drayton wrote in The Legends of Robert, Duke of Normandy, etc. (1619), ‘but roundly rather, and by way of Brief, or Compendium’ (Drayton, Legends, ‘To the Reader’, Works, 2.382).⁴⁵ Hence this kind of poetry has a different scope for innovation: for instance, in the domain of the psychology of scriptural personages. Again, French poetry spurred English forays into a different approach to scriptural material: the work of the Protestant Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas in particular. Du Bartas’s poems first appear in Scotland a decade after their appearance in France, in a translation by the court musician Thomas Hudson of The History of Judith in Form of a Poem, Penned in French, by the noble Robt. G. Saluste, Lord of Bartas (1584). In the same year, in his Essays of a Prentice, James VI of Scotland brought out his own translations into Scots of du Bartas’s poem Urania (eighty-six quatrains in which the divine muse recommends sacred subjects), as well as portions of Divine Weeks and Works. (James also deserves more credit than he gets for attempting—à la Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata—a nonbiblically based but nonetheless thoroughly Christian original epic poem on the 1571 Battle of Lepanto). Philip Sidney was also apparently engaged in translating du Bartas, an entry for which appears in the Stationer’s Register in 1588. The Divine Weeks and Works retells the story of Creation while enfolding, accordionlike, enormous dilations and digressions within it: catalogues of creations (twenty streams, seventy types of trees, and so forth); moral and theological disquisitions; ‘epic battles,
⁴⁵ Michael Drayton, in J. William Hebel (ed.), Works, corrected edition, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1961).
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366 - allegorical interludes, ecphrases, soliloquies, and passionate speeches of love and war’.⁴⁶ In effect, Scripture becomes a structure upon which to hang authorial riffs on a wide variety of subjects. Notwithstanding the epic and encyclopaedic thing-oriented compass of the work (to be echoed in Milton’s catalogues of fish, birds, or mammals in Book 7 of Paradise Lost), there is also a sense of an opinionated first-person narrator wrestling his material and seeking to earn the confidence placed in him by his divine muse. Du Bartas’s poetry was translated into English in the 1590s by the merchant Joshua Sylvester and was immensely popular for decades. It modelled a new relation of poet to Bible: instead of handmaid or midwife to Scripture, merely ushering it into vernacular verse, the poet could turn to Scripture for material to be retold in his or her own words: stories, heroes, or heroines, or inspiration for moral reflection on God’s greatness and goodness. Much as playwrights in search of plots and personages to stage in the professional theatre turned to the pages of English chronicle history in the last decade of the century, so poets began to turn to the Bible for literary source material. The 1590s saw a surge of such poetry coming out of the London print shops. The work of paraphrase continued but was joined by work composed in this different strain. French poetry should not get all the credit for inspiring it. The last decade of the sixteenth century marked the coming of age for a generation of English writers who had, from birth, been reared with the Bible in their native tongue, and for whom the novelties, prohibitions, and mortal risks that attended the earliest vernacular approaches to God’s Word had faded even as the natural restlessness that attends the flowering of aesthetic endeavour had intensified. Confessional differences over doctrine were of course ongoing, and some writers did choose to conduct polemic in poetry: in A Fig for Fortune (1596) the Catholic Anthony Copley parodied Book 1 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which itself caricatures Catholic worship. But both the forms and liturgies of the national church had been relatively settled since 1558 (if not, in some quarters, uncontested), creating a sense of a common body of stories and characters, as well as a catechised public fully informed to appreciate imaginative literature about them. Much of this poetry newly focused on biblical character studies. If such persons’ plots could not be changed, the nuances of their motives and responses provided scope for innovative interpretation. Some of these were straightforwardly heroic figures, such as Drayton’s Moses and Deborah, or Susannah, or even Christ, as in Abraham Fraunce’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Emmanuel, Hexameters on the Nativity and Passion of Christ (1591). More often we find, however, interestingly chequered careers, such as those of Judas, Joseph, Mary Magdalene, or St Peter, who, like the Psalms’ King David, had complex histories of conversion or fall (or at least stumbles), and were offered up as exemplary models of spiritual struggle taking place even amongst the most illustrious biblical personages: ‘Muse not to see some mud in clearest brook’, as Robert Southwell wrote of St Peter (Southwell, Saint Peter’s Complaint, ‘The Author to the Reader’, line 3, Poems, 75).⁴⁷ Despite the verse from James 5:13 that prefaced many a psalter, claiming the contents as apropos to all occasions—‘Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms’ (King James Bible, New Testament, sig. Y2v)—most such poems were on the order of lamentations or complaints. That said, in 1596 one daring Francis Sabie did attempt an
⁴⁶ Susan Snyder (ed.), in Joshua Sylvester (trans.), Guillaume du Bartas, The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1979), 1.2. ⁴⁷ Robert Southwell, S. J., in James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (eds), The Poems of Robert Southwell, S. J. (Oxford, 1967).
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367 erotic epyllion about David and Bathsheba (1596) along the lines of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis or Marlowe’s Hero and Leander.⁴⁸ Such character studies, like the ‘I’ voiced in the Psalms, not only provide models for identification, but they also create protagonists in a world-historical story upon which readers had some prior purchase and hence the advantage of dramatic irony on an individual’s plight. Trends of poetry about Mary Magdalene and St Peter—‘the literature of tears’ genre popular on the Continent—were set in motion on English soil by the work of the recusant missionary Catholic priest Robert Southwell, whose own life story (covert, captured, tortured, and executed) gave a him a celebrity of his own that, much like the Psalm-penning prisoners of the Henrician decades, informed the prescient pathos of his subject matter.⁴⁹ Southwell’s poetic corpus includes fifty-two short lyrics on events from the lives of Christ, the Virgin Mary, St Peter, David, and Mary Magdalene; polemical topics like the Eucharist; and proverbial ones such as the follies of carnal love or procrastination. He also wrote the longer poem Saint Peter’s Complaint (1595), 132 conceit-laden sixains (his favourite stanza form) that anatomise the apostle’s remorse at having denied Christ. The poem is at once a nuanced portrait of a sinner’s psychology and a bravura feat of sustained rhetorical invention. This poetry is both ‘Divine and Witty’, as advertised on the frontispiece of his collection Moeoniae (Southwell, Moeoniae, title page, my italics). Southwell composed this collection prior to his imprisonment in 1592, after which he was denied writing materials. Attributed only to ‘R. S.’ on the title page, the poems were published in 1595, and had undergone fifteen editions by 1640, all but two of which were not issued from clandestine presses. Much of Southwell’s poetry ventriloquises scriptural persons to explore the recesses of the penitent’s psychology, implicitly offering up the flawed subject as a model for admiration and emulation. Yet, perhaps the most striking of his works are the first-person lyrics which drop the biblical persona (or conversely, begin in the first-person voice and then go on, riddle-like, to disclose the identity of the biblical speaker). Some of these are also lamentations on sin, but others, like some Psalms, oppose the stalwartness of the speaker to external predations in ways that scholars have argued reference the recusant’s trials: Let fickle fortune run her blindest race: I settled have an unremoved mind: I scorn to be the game of fancy’s chase, Or vain to show the change of every wind. ... My choice was guided by fore-sightful heed, It was averred with approving will, It shall be followed with performing deed: And seal’d with vow, till death the chooser kill. (Southwell, ‘From Fortune’s Reach’, lines 1–4, 7–10, Poems, 66)
⁴⁸ See Francis Sabie, ‘David and Beersheba’, in Adam’s complaint. The old world’s tragedy. David and Bathsheba (London, 1596), sigs. F1–G3. ⁴⁹ For example, two Magdalene poems appeared in 1595, two more in 1601; St Peter rated one in 1597 and another in 1598; St John one in 1600; even more appeared in the first decades of the seventeenth century. For the European context, see Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer (1955); and for the English, Gary Kuchar, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011).
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368 - Louis Martz argues persuasively for the debt that Southwell’s modes of self-reflection owe to the counter-Reformation prose texts and traditions of Ignatian meditation, which became popular across confessional lines beginning in the mid-1500s.⁵⁰ What this sourcing does not entirely account for, however, is why Southwell—who also wrote such prose tracts—chose to retool the meditative arts in poetry. Apropos here may be the fact of the 1582 publication of the Douai-Rheims New Testament in English: a Catholic concession that, in the intra-confessional struggle for congregants, it behoved the Roman church to take a page (or many pages) from their rival’s playbook. Southwell spent time at the English college in Douai in the late 1570s. Like the metrical Psalm paraphrases in the earliest English Protestant generations, Southwell’s devotional poetry could be considered an effort at proselytising in the verse medium now well-established in England as a means of asserting the truth of one’s confessional allegiance. A preface of his resembles those to the earliest metrical psalters that urged the transfer of ‘tongues and pens’ from carnal to spiritual objects of desire: ‘Passions I allow, and loves I approve, only I would wish that men would alter their object and better their intent’ (Southwell, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, sig. A3v).⁵¹ Like poets in the first flush of Reformation, Southwell’s body of poems includes those which rewrite extant erotic lyrics with religious vocabulary. Unlike the Protestant prefaces to such poems, however, which tend to configure the competition between profane and sacred poetry as a zero-sum game, Southwell has a somewhat more Neoplatonic understanding of the relation between them: ‘Love is but the infancy of true charity, yet sucking nature’s teat, and swathed in her bands, which then groweth to perfection, when faith besides natural motives proposeth higher and nobler grounds of amity’ (Southwell, Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears, sig. A4). Also unlike those earlier poets, and more like the acolytes of Du Bartas, Southwell meditates upon scriptural figures and events rather than paraphrases Scripture’s accounts. Whatever the constellation of provocations, Southwell’s lyrics are virtually the first in English to devote supple measures to a first-person self-examination in relation to the divine.⁵² The difficulty of imagining confession-inflected paraphrases—or indeed recusants engaged in congregational singing—may have also been a factor here. Southwell’s poetry, like its recusant author, resided in the interior spaces, not public ones, the reading closet, not the church. The 1590s also saw the (re)dedication of the sonnet to sacred matter, often at the hands of poets who had previously composed erotic verse. Henry Constable—the author of the secular sequence Diana (1592)—marked his 1591 conversion from militant Protestantism to an equally enthusiastic Catholicism by turning his hand to ‘spiritual sonnets’ during this decade (though none were published in his lifetime), each of which addresses a sacred personage (plus one on the ‘blessed Sacrament’): God the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, our blessed Lady, St Michael, John the Baptist, and so on.⁵³ The penitent Mary Magdalene
⁵⁰ And thus could have also influenced Anne Vaughan Lock’s 1560 sonnet sequence. See Louis Martz, The Poetic Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT, 1976). ⁵¹ Robert Southwell, S. J., Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears (London, 1591). ⁵² Martz also references two poems of Jasper Heywood, the translator of Senecan drama-turned-recusant priest (and uncle of John Donne), included in the 1585 edition of the anthology The Paradise of Dainty Devices; see Martz, Poetic Meditation, 183. ⁵³ Constable’s editor, Joan Grundy, speculates that the secular Diana sonnets were written prior to the poet’s conversion: see Joan Grundy (ed.), The Poems of Henry Constable (Liverpool, 1960), 59–60, 84–5.
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369 garners four sonnets and her praises produce the interesting gender identification of the poet with a reformed female soul: For like a woman spouse my soul shall be, Whom sinful passions once to lust did move, And since betrothed to God’s son above, Should be enamored with his deity. (Constable, ‘Sonnet in Honour of Mary Magdalene’, lines 5–8, Poems, 192)
Self-characterisation in the feminine position of a cis-gendered relationship to God was a popular choice of Protestant poets, who sought to express the deeply dependent and subordinate plight of the soul with respect to God in familiar political terms. Another sonneteer who redirected his efforts from profane to sacred objects was Barnabe Barnes. His Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets (1595) is an assiduous sequence of sonnets to and about Christ that exhibits many Petrarchan techniques and a dark Calvinist awareness of the speaker’s depravity that out-plumbs the abjection of any erotic sonneteer. In Caelica (begun in the 1580s, published posthumously in 1633), Fulke Greville also switches from Cupid to a Christian muse mid-sequence. William Alabaster was not formerly a love poet (instead, he was a composer of Latin verses, including an unfinished epic on Queen Elizabeth), but, like Barnes, Constable, and Donne, he was attached to military undertakings of the Earl of Essex (the latter seems to have attracted poetadventurers prone to conversion in one direction or the other). Alabaster and Donne both sailed on the Cadiz voyage (a pre-emptive strike against the Spanish fleet in 1596), Alabaster as the ship’s chaplain. Alabaster’s first confessional transit was from Protestantism to Catholicism, and while this did not prove a permanent state, it is perhaps not surprising that, given the affiliation of the sonnet form by the 1590s with both introspection and conversion, in 1597 Alabaster threw himself into sonnet writing as a way to think through his change of faith. (The affiliation is not just thematic but also structural, whether in the ruminative 4/4/4/2 structure of the Surreian sonnet, or the more pronounced volta of the 8/6 Petrarchan form which models reversal).⁵⁴ While a fair number of Alabaster’s seventy-seven sonnets are fairly garden-variety addresses to or about aspects of Christ, a subset of ‘penitential sonnets’ depicts self-examination through what would become known as metaphysical conceits: My soul a world is by contraction, The heavens therein is my internal sense, Moved by my will as an intelligence, My heart the element, my love the sun. (Alabaster, sonnet 15, lines 1–4, Sonnets, 8)⁵⁵
The description of soul as world, with the senses as heavens, the will as thought, the heart as weather, and love as the sun, while a bit convoluted in Alabaster’s phrasings, anticipates the similarly contracting conceits of Donne and Herbert. The strongest of Alabaster’s poems ⁵⁴ As, perhaps, with Anne Vaughan Lock, see note 33 in this chapter. ⁵⁵ William Alabaster, sonnet 15, in G. M. Story and Helen Gardner (eds), The Sonnets of William Alabaster (Oxford, 1959).
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370 - display real energy: ‘Away, fear, with thy projects, no false fire / Which thou dost make can ought my courage quail, / Or cause me leeward run or strike my sail’ (Alabaster, sonnet 46, lines 1–3, Sonnets, 26). If Protestant poetic self-examinations tended to brood on fallen human nature, Catholic compositions were frequently exercises in self-steeling—battle hymns of the self—that lean on the dialogic structure of the sonnet to work towards a sense of resolve. As the numerous publications on Puritan self-examination during this decade evince, Catholics had no monopoly on introspection or self-expression. Perhaps the most sustained effort of first-person lyric exploration in the sixteenth century belongs to the aforementioned Henry Lock, whose 328 total sacred sonnets not only exceed Barnes’s century but come close to rivalling the European record.⁵⁶ First appearing in print in 1593, and supplemented with a metrical Ecclesiastes in 1597, Lock’s poetry has not been viewed kindly by literary history, perhaps because acknowledging his efforts means rewriting Donne’s claims to originality. But his sequence offers a surprisingly engaging series of imaginations of Christian selfhood in which the poetic ‘I’ is front and centre, anatomised as an object lesson in the ‘abrupt passions of my passed afflictions . . . not . . . altogether unprofitable for others to imitate’ (Lock, Sundry Christian Passions, sig. A5). Lock’s preface nods to what was by 1593 an established understanding of the practical utility of verse as an aidememoire and appeal to the senses. He claims, for instance, that his attraction to the sonnet form has simply to do with the appeal of its ‘shortness’ to the convenience of those readers pressed for time or powers of focus: ‘it answereth . . . best . . . to the nature of passions, and the common humour of men, who are either not long touched with good motions, or by their worldly affairs not permitted to continue much reading’ (Lock, Sundry Christian Passions, sig. A5v). Such utilitarian disclosures notwithstanding, his sonnets mark the arrival of an early modern poetic self-dedicated to active and inventive dialogue with the conventions of poetry and devotion alike.
⁵⁶ The 366 lyrics of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, most obviously, but also the French Catholic nun Anne de Marquets, whose 334-poem sonnet sequence was composed during the 1570s and 1580s and published in 1605.
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PART IV
P OE TS
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21 Skelton Jane Griffiths
John Skelton (c 1460–1529) has long been recognised as a poetic innovator, most notably for his invention of the verse form that bears his name: the Skeltonic. In recent years, however, his poetic practice has attracted less interest than his poetics. This is in no small part due to his own very evident interest in poetic self-fashioning. His insistent use of the title ‘laureate’ and his concern to align himself with the Tudor court, as well as with both Classical and vernacular poetic traditions, clearly invite enquiry into the cultural and theoretical positions that underpin his writing.¹ So, too, do his startlingly direct assertions of the poet’s divine inspiration in A Replycacion (1528) and his exploration of the status and function of poetry in works including The Bowge of Court (1498), Speke Parott (1521), and A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell (1490s, revised for publication in 1523). Yet, these positions not only inform his practice, they are also informed by it. The bricolage of Skelton’s writing and his experiments with verse form both help shape his sense of the poet’s power: his ability to make new matter out of words. Focusing on the two verse forms that Skelton used most frequently, Skeltonic and rhyme royal, this chapter will explore the connections between them, arguing that formal experimentation shapes his understanding of poetic authority as something derived from the poet’s own technical skill rather than from external sources.
Conspicuous Experiment: The Skeltonic The verse form that Skelton is credited with inventing—the Skeltonic—is decidedly idiosyncratic. Characterised by short two or three stress lines and irregular, often extremely long rhyme leashes, it runs down the page in an unusually thin, straggly column, and frequently goes on for a surprising number of pages. Its origins have been extensively debated: it has been linked to a variety of styles and genres, including alliterative Latin prose,² Latin poems on the signs of death,³ English prose doggerel,⁴ alliterative Middle English verse,⁵ and the Middle English lyric.⁶ The one thing these diverse suggestions have in common is that each relates the Skeltonic to a form with recognisable sound patterns and rules of construction. This matters, because at first sight it may appear that the Skeltonic is a non-form, whose only rule is that there are no rules. Such a suggestion would be misleading, however; ¹ See Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge, 2007), 205–19; and Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford, 2006). ² See William Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate (New York, 1939), 82–101. ³ See Robert S. Kinsman, ‘Skelton’s “Uppon a Deedmans Hed”: New Light on the Origin of the Skeltonic’, Studies in Philology, 50 (1953), 101–9. ⁴ See John Norton-Smith, ‘The Origins of “Skeltonics” ’, Essays in Criticism, 23 (1973), 57–62. ⁵ See Ian Gordon, John Skelton: Poet Laureate (Melbourne, 1943), 193–5. ⁶ See Jane Griffiths, ‘ “An Ende of an Olde Song”: Middle English Lyric and the Skeltonic’, Review of English Studies, 60 (2009), 705–22. Jane Griffiths, Skelton In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Jane Griffiths 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0021
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374 - although Skelton seems to have little or no regard for the structure of his verse, in fact he governs it closely. His description of divine inspiration in A Replycacion Agaynst Certayne Yong Scolers is a case in point: . . . there is a spyrituall, And a mysteriall, And a mysticall Effecte energiall, As Grekes do it call, Of suche an industry, And suche a pregnacy, Of hevenly inspyracion In laureate creacyon, Of poetes commendacion, That of divyne myseracion God maketh his habytacion In poetes whiche excelles, And sojourns with them and dwelles. By whose inflammacion Of spyrituall instygacion And divyne inspyracion We are kyndled in suche facyon With hete of the Holy Gost, Which is God of myghtes most, That he our penne dothe lede, And maketh in us suche spede That forthwith we must nede With penne and ynke procede. (Skelton, Replycacion, lines 365–88, Complete English Poems, 384–5)⁷
Of all Skelton’s writing, these lines come closest to enacting what they describe. Claiming that the poet is possessed when he composes, ‘kyndled’ (line 382) and imbued with ‘hete’ (line 383) and ‘spede’ (line 386) by the Holy Ghost, they seem to practice what they preach, running on as if the writer had little or no control of his pen.⁸ Yet, appearances are misleading. Although the poem lacks both regular metre and a predictably patterned verse form, Skelton is careful to insert checks and balances of his own. The poem’s rhyme leashes are meticulously varied: in the lines quoted above, the opening run of five rhymes is followed by a couplet, which in turn is followed by another leash of five rhymes, a second couplet, a quatrain, a third couplet, a further quatrain and a final couplet. While this pattern is not exactly replicated elsewhere in the poem, the interpolation of couplets between longer rhyme leashes is characteristic of Skelton’s practice. Allowing him to regulate the pace of the lines, it constitutes an important method of formal control. So, too, does the way he plays with rhythm. In his description of the ‘effecte energiall’ in lines ⁷ John Skelton, in John Scattergood (ed.), The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth, 1983). ⁸ For Skelton’s theory of inspiration in A Replycacion, see Vincent Gillespie, ‘Justification by Faith: Skelton’s Replycacion’, in Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (eds), The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray (Oxford, 1997), 273–311; and Griffiths, John Skelton, 31–7, 130–40.
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375 365–7, he builds speed not just through anaphora, but also by noticeably deferring the main stress in each of the first three lines. When he breaks this pattern in the line ‘Effecte energiall’ (line 368), which has a strong stress on the second syllable as well as on the antepenultimate one, he interrupts the impetus. In the following lines, it is as if he pauses for thought, concluding the –all rhyme leash with a scrap of contextualising information and providing two parallel attempts at defining the ‘effecte energiall’ (‘industry’ and ‘pregnacy’), but then abandoning definition for a new rhyme leash that runs and runs, showing the ‘effecte’ in action. Yet here, too, the insistence of the repeated rhyme is modified by variation in rhythm. Most notably, the three consecutive unstressed syllables at the beginning of the line ‘That of divine myseracion’ (line 375) interrupt the building pace of the rhythmically parallel lines that precede it, and thus prepare for a more substantial alteration of the rhythm in the final couplet of the verse paragraph. Here, reduction of the number of syllables from eight to six in the penultimate line places particular emphasis on the word ‘poetes’, while the last line is slowed by two centrally positioned, unstressed monosyllables: ‘And sojourns with them and dwelles’ (line 378). Both features confirm what is suggested by the strong rhyme of the final couplet: that the thought these lines articulate has been concluded, if only temporarily, and that its emphasis is firmly on how inspiration affects the poet rather than simply on the assertion that he is inspired. Far from representing a single unmediated and unpremeditated outpouring that ends only when the speaker runs out of breath, the passage witnesses carefully paced inspiration; rather than spiralling out of control, these lines stage being run away with. Skelton’s confident management of stress and sound in A Replycacion is the result of decades of experience with both the Skeltonic and a range of related experiments with form. These go back to some of his earliest poems, several of which read as a series of approaches to Skeltonic: never quite committing to it, but anticipating some of its characteristics. For example, in Upon a Deedmans Hed (published 1527, but composed c 1495), Skelton adapts the form of Latin poems on the signs of death for use in the vernacular, and in doing so seems to discover almost by accident the striking aural effects that can be achieved by combining short lines with long rhyme leashes as its opening couplet, ‘Youre ugly tokyn / My mynd hath brokyn’ (Skelton, Upon a Deedmans Hed, lines 1–2, Complete English Poems, 39), enjambs into four monorhymed lines. Another point where Skelton’s early writing anticipates the Skeltonic is in the lyrics of A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell, whose showcase of different lyric forms includes one in particular (‘Mirry Margaret’) that closely resembles Skeltonic in its short lines and long rhyme leashes, yet by combining these with regular stanza form and refrain, fuses Skeltonic characteristics with elements of stanzaic Middle English lyric.⁹ What is often described as the first ‘true’ Skeltonic also emerges out of an existing verse form. Ware the Hauke (c 1505) initially presents its short two- or three-stressed lines as couplets; it then gradually moves into longer rhyme leashes, as Skelton vigorously enacts his outrage at finding a neighbouring priest flying his hawks inside ‘my church of Dys’ (Skelton, Ware the Hauke, line 42, Complete English Poems, 62). These longer leashes (which occur at lines 61–3, 72–4, 147–51, and 222–7) only temporarily disrupt Skelton’s use of couplets,
⁹ See Griffiths, John Skelton, 710–14. Additionally, several of the other lyrics in A Garlande are also in short two- or three-stress lines, but these are either cross-rhymed and/or consist of shorter rhyme leashes, so that the resemblance to Skeltonic is less marked. For the Garlande lyrics, see further Julia Boffey, ‘ “Withdrawe your hande”: The Lyrics of “The Garland of Laurel” from Manuscript to Print’, Trivium, 31 (1999), 73–87; for Skelton’s lyrics more generally, see further Julia Boffey, ‘Lyrics and Short Poems’, in Sebastian Sobecki and John Scattergood (eds), A Critical Companion to John Skelton (Cambridge, 2018), 102–13; and John Scattergood, John Skelton: The Career of an Early Tudor Poet (Dublin, 2014). For the text of ‘Mirry Margaret’, see Skelton, Complete English Poems, 340–1.
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376 - however, and even when, in the final part of the poem, Skelton roundly curses the hawking priest in macaronic verse and outrageous doggerel rhyme, he abandons the couplet, not for open-ended rhyme leashes, but for a series of verse paragraphs of differing lengths that each conclude with the refrain that gives the poem its title: Wherto shuld I rehers The sentens of my vers? In them be no scolys For braynsycke frantycke folys: Construas hoc*, *work this out Domine Daucock*! *Master Simpleton Ware the hauke! Maister sophista*, *sophist Ye simplex silogista* *simpleminded logician Ye develysh dogmatista*, *philosopher Your hawke on your fista, To hawke when you lista In ecclesia ista*, *this church Domine concupisti*, *Master, you have been desirous With thy hawke on thy fysty? Nunquid sic dixisti*? *Did you never speak thus? Nunquid sic fecisti*? *Did you never behave thus? Sed ubi hoc legisti* *But where did you read that? Aut unde hoc*, *Or whence this? Doctor Dawcocke? Ware the hawke! (Skelton, Ware the Hauke, lines 246–66, Complete English Poems, 68–9)
In its parallelisms, anaphora, alliteration, macaronics, and nonsense rhymes—in the sheer riskiness of the performance—this is fully fledged Skeltonic, yet the repeated ‘Doctor [or ‘Domine’] Dawcocke / Ware the hawke!’ functions as a form of refrain. Its repetition momentarily halts the verse, signalling a change of thought in a way that anticipates the function of the change of rhythm at the end of the verse paragraphs of A Replycacion. Like ‘Mirry Margaret’, then, Ware the Hauke implies that the free-form Skeltonic has formal ancestors. At the same time, the way the poem’s longer rhyme leashes emerge out of a sequence of couplets and then return to couplet form suggests that the Skeltonic was a gradual discovery. Just how gradual appears most clearly from Skelton’s early work in the very different form of rhyme royal. Although this has generally not been considered experimental, it reveals that Skelton does not explore the management of sound patterns exclusively through his Skeltonics, but that such exploration also permeates work that appears—at least at first sight—to be a great deal more conventional.
Inconspicuous Experiment: Skelton’s Rhyme Royal Prior to 1505, Skelton wrote almost exclusively in rhyme royal, and he never entirely abandoned it, revisiting it in Agenst Garnesche (1514), Magnyfycence (1519), and Speke
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377 Parott (1521), as well as in his revision and amplification of A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell. Despite its evident importance to Skelton, it is a verse form that appears to be diametrically opposed to the Skeltonic. Whereas the Skeltonic is ostentatiously immoderate and idiosyncratic, rhyme royal stands to fifteenth-century English poetic practice as iambic pentameter does to that of the twentieth; it is the almost inevitable choice for any kind of narrative poem as well as for many shorter ones. In part, this is because it is a very adaptable form. Its stanzas of seven lines, rhymed ababbcc, provide a usefully flexible template. Each stanza is long enough to develop a rhetorical point or narrative incident, while the rhyme scheme allows for the stanza to be divided in a number of different ways (most obviously abab/bcc or ababb/cc). This enables poets to introduce variety in the structure, pace, and perspective of their writing over the course of a longer poem; in particular, the way the rhyme scheme renders the last line of the opening quatrain identical with the first line of the medial couplet creates the potential for a haunting disruption of the linear progression of the narrative.¹⁰ The popularity of the form is not due only to such flexibility, however. Rhyme royal is—famously—the form used by Chaucer for The Parliament of Fowls, parts of The Canterbury Tales, and Troilus and Criseyde. Its association with Troilus, in particular, lends it authority.¹¹ For poets such as Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, who consciously positioned themselves as successors to Chaucer, choice of the verse form used for Chaucer’s ambitious experiment in vernacular epic allowed them tacitly to stake a claim to be seen as inheritors and perpetuators of an emergent English poetic tradition.¹² Their use of it in turn consolidated its position as a marker of that tradition: Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (c 1411) and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (completed 1438–9), both of which were widely circulated in manuscript, are likely to have been especially influential in this regard.¹³ In Lydgate’s work, in particular, the form repeatedly occurs in conjunction with what has been identified as one of the main distinguishing marks of the laureate poet: the use of a selfaware, semi-historicised ‘I’-speaker who self-consciously embodies the conventional position of advisor to princes.¹⁴ By the time that Skelton was writing, then, while it remained possible to use rhyme royal by default, it was also possible to use it with full awareness of its cultural significance. Skelton’s Upon the Dolorus Dethe of the Erle of Northumberland (1489) makes particularly effective rhetorical use of the form’s cultural capital. In this attack on the men who murdered Henry Percy, Fourth Earl of Northumberland, as he attempted to enforce a new tax on the King’s behalf, the use of rhyme royal silently reaffirms the poet’s attempt to present himself as the King’s loyal spokesperson. Writing before he had any formal connection with the court, Skelton repeatedly seeks to demonstrate how worthy he is to
¹⁰ See Theresa Krier, ‘Rhyme Royal’, in Roland Greene (gen. ed.), The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, fourth edition (Princeton, NJ, 2012), 1193–4; cf. Martin Stevens, ‘The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 94 (1979), 62–76. ¹¹ See Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, 49–87. ¹² For Hoccleve and Lydgate as heirs to Chaucer, see Nicholas Perkins, ‘Haunted Hoccleve? The Regiment of Princes, the Troilean Intertext and Conversations with the Dead’, Chaucer Review, 43 (2008), 103–39; Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, 2005), 1–32; and Robert Meyer-Lee, ‘Lydgate’s Laureate Pose’, in Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (eds), John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), 36–60; cf. also Stephanie Kamath, Authorship and First-Person Allegory in Late-Medieval France and England (Cambridge, 2012), 103–72. ¹³ For Hoccleve’s and Lydgate’s manuscripts, see Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (Cambridge, 2001), 151–91; and Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes: Narrative Tragedy in Its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford, 2005), 219–78. ¹⁴ See Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, 38–42.
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378 - be offered a position. Its opening stanzas deploy many of the tactics that Lydgate has been shown to use to assert his laureate status: a centralized, named ‘I’; the epideictic linking of aristocratic and poetic aura; an assertion of poetry’s memorializing function; and an invocation of Clio [the muse of history] couched in a humility topos that means the opposite of what it literally says.¹⁵
To these, Skelton adds sustained word-play centred on the word ‘trew’, which he uses both in the sense of ‘truthful’ and in the sense of ‘loyal’: specifically, loyal to the king.¹⁶ Unlike later poems such as Speke Parott, A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell, and A Replycacion, in which there is considerable tension between the poet’s attempt to associate himself with the monarch and his claim to derive authority from his poetic predecessors, or even from God, here the two positions are mutually reinforcing. Skelton simultaneously grounds his claim to be considered worthy to advise the king in his multi-faceted ‘truth’, and implies that this worthiness affirms his status as poet.¹⁷ By aligning Skelton with Lydgate, the use of rhyme royal similarly supports both aspects of his self-fashioning: it posits him as heir not just to a vernacular poetic tradition, but specifically to a tradition in which the poet is recognised as one who speaks to and for the king. In other rhyme royal poems, however, Skelton creates and exploits significant discrepancies between form and content. In Magnyfycence, rhyme royal is used by the virtuous counsellor Measure—who, like the Skelton of the Dolorus Dethe, is a self-consciously worthy advisor to princes—but it is also one of the defining characteristics of the corrupt courtiers.¹⁸ In ‘The auncient acquaintance, madam, betwen us twayn’, one of the lyrics from Dyvers Balettys and Dyties Solacyous (c 1495, published 1527), Skelton combines rhyme royal with highly Latinate language to raise the expectation that the poem will be a courtly love lyric, but then turns it by degrees into a metaphorical, yet graphic, accusation of promiscuity. In the playfully autobiographical dream vision of A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell, rhyme royal seems initially to function as it does in the Dolorus Dethe, affirming Skelton’s claim to be considered the heir to Chaucer and Lydgate and thus, by extension, to their Classical and Continental laureate predecessors. Yet, when the dreaming ‘poeta Skelton’ encounters these figures in person, his ventriloquising of Lydgate is wickedly parodic, mirroring the historical Lydgate’s ostentatious humility, aureate terms, and use of grammatical inversions to facilitate rhyme: ‘So am I preventid of my brethern tweyne In rendrynge to you thankkis meritory, That welny nothynge there doth remayne Wherwith to give you my regraciatory*, *thanks But that I poynt you to be prothonatory* *chief clerk Of Fames court . . . ’ (Skelton, Garlande of Laurell, lines 428–33, Complete English Poems, 324) ¹⁵ Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, 207. ¹⁶ See Griffiths, John Skelton, 22–5. ¹⁷ For the tension between conflicting senses of the term ‘laureate’, see Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power, 15–42; and Griffiths, John Skelton, 18–37. ¹⁸ See Jenni Nuttall, ‘How to Make Fun of Rhyme Royal’, Stylisticienne (10 August 2015). http://stylisticienne. com/how-to-make-fun-of-rhyme-royal/.
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379 The way Skelton inhabits Lydgate’s mannerisms shows both the extent to which he has internalised his predecessor’s practice and his refusal to use his literary inheritance as an entirely serious means of self-authorisation. Mockery of his sponsor’s style is the equivalent of his assertion that Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate ‘wantid nothynge but the laurell’ (Skelton, Garlande of Laurell, line 397, Complete English Poems, 323); it at once acknowledges their merit and implies that he himself has the capacity not just to assume their mantel, but to outperform them. Just as Skelton refuses to make unquestioning use of the cultural connotations of rhyme royal, he also quite literally stress-tests it. In The Bowge of Court (his own take on the ‘ship of fools’ device), these two things fall together as Skelton’s disruption of the form serves as a means of expressing his protagonist’s dilemma. The use of rhyme royal initially appears to underwrite Drede’s desire to align himself with ‘poetes olde’ who ‘spared not vyce to wrythe / [And] of moralyte nobly did endyte’ (Skelton, Bowge of Courte, lines 9, 13–14, Complete English Poems, 46). Both Drede’s assumption that poetry has an ethical purpose and his reference to its ‘fresshe utteraunce’ (line 12) indicate that the models he has in mind are English poets of the fifteenth century.¹⁹ But although—as in the Dolorus Dethe—Skelton’s verse form seems to reaffirm that allegiance, in practice Drede signally fails to fashion himself in their mould. On going aboard the ship, ‘The Bowge of Court’, he instantly identifies a number of stereotypical court vices who look likely to provide him with subject matter for his moral satire. Far from ‘wrything’ vice, however, he is himself ‘wrythed’ by the vices, as each in turn approaches him with dire warnings of danger and patently false professions of friendship, ultimately terrifying him to the point where he decides to leap overboard.²⁰ Drede’s loss of control of his subject is mirrored by the gradual disruption of both sense and sound within the confines of the rhyme royal stanzas. The first stanza of the Prologue shows how this works in practice: In autumpne, whan the sonne in Vyrgyne* *Virgo By radyante hete enryped hath our corne; Whan Luna, full of mutabylyte, As emperes the dyademe hath worne Of our pole artyke, smylynge halfe in scorne At our foly and our unstedfastnesse; The tyme whan Mars to werre* hym dyd dres . . . *war (Skelton, Bowge of Courte, lines 1–7, Complete English Poems, 46)
The first lines are perfectly measured, broadly iambic decasyllables; their metrical regularity is reinforced not only by an emphatically strong b-rhyme, but also by the extensive use of
¹⁹ For the ethical basis of late medieval poetry, see Judson Boyce Allen, The Ethical Poetic of the Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction (Toronto, 1982); for the highly specific poetic vocabulary of the period, which effectively constituted a poetics, see Lois Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln, NE, 1988). ²⁰ There are many studies of the Bowge. Notable amongst them are A. R. Heiserman, Skelton and Satire (Chicago, IL, 1961), which remains unrivalled as a study of its sources and analogues; Helen Cooney, ‘Skelton’s Bowge of Court and the Crisis of Allegory in Late-Medieval England’, in Helen Cooney (ed.), Nation, Court and Culture: New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry (Dublin, 2001), 153–67, which links it to contemporary literary developments; and Antony J. Hasler, Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland: Allegories of Authority (Cambridge, 2011), which examines its responses to and reflections of the court culture of the time. For a recent reappraisal, see Scattergood, John Skelton, 104–26.
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380 - descriptive phrases and clauses whose syntactical breaks fall together with line breaks to pace and articulate the sentence.²¹ But this pattern falters in the line ‘At our foly and our unstedfastnesse’ (line 6), which begins with a clumsily stuttering anapest and ends in a feminine rhyme; although the following line seems initially to reassert the iambic pattern, it consists of only nine syllables, and its awkward ending on four, more or less equally stressed, syllables aurally draws attention to the deficit. If it were a one-off, such an interruption of the established metrical pattern could be considered appropriate to the sense, encapsulating the unsteadfastness to which the line refers, yet it proves instead to introduce a sustained series of mismatches between content and form. In rhyme royal, each stanza conventionally functions as an end-stopped and grammatically complete unit, consisting either of a single sentence or of multiple sentences that correspond either with quatrain and tercet or with the first five lines and the couplet, so that grammar and divisions of rhyme scheme mutually reinforce one another. Each line is typically also a complete grammatical unit (a sentence, clause, or sub-clause), with speech and song melos (the rhythms of spoken language and the regular, pulsing rhythms of dance) combining in a single sound pattern. Here, however, the main sentence concludes at the end of the penultimate line, and the last line provides a kind of coda: a second, more compact way of identifying the time of year when the action takes place.²² Because the final couplet yokes together two separate statements, the aural cohesiveness of its rhyme is at odds with its disjunction of sense, and this disconnect between form and content is continued in the awkward, unexpected enjambment of the first into the second stanza. The line ‘The tyme whan Mars to werre hym dyd dres’ (line 7) hovers awkwardly between concluding the astrological scene-setting of the first stanza and reaffirming that this is when the poet began his poem (continuing the sentence, the next stanza begins ‘I, callynge to mynde the great auctoryte / Of poetes olde . . . ’ (lines 8–9)). It is both an afterthought and so crucial a bit of information that most of the first stanza is made to look like an unfortunate digression. Such small clumsinesses recur throughout the following stanzas, for example in the bathetic use of ‘same’ (line 17) to rhyme with ‘fame’ (line 15), and in Drede’s clunky, near-monosyllabic response to Ignorance’s claim that he is ‘to dulle’ to be a poet (line 20): ‘Yet have I knowen suche er this’ (line 25). All of these things suggest that Ignorance is right to tell the would-be poet Drede that he is ‘not sure’ in his art (line 19), insufficiently competent to follow in his predecessors’ feet. This shaky start anticipates a much more pronounced disintegration of regular metre later in the poem. But even as its aural dis-ease marks the extent of Drede’s loss of poetic and satirical control, it also signals Skelton’s own technical virtuosity. Rather than allowing the shape and structure of the rhyme royal stanza to govern its contents, Skelton introduces alternative sound patterns that work against the conventional fourstress metre and familiar rhyme scheme of rhyme royal. This is characteristic of his early writing. The poems in his two collections of short poems, Dyvers Balettys and the roughly contemporary Agaynst a Comely Coystrowne (c 1495, published 1527), for example, show Skelton restlessly experimenting with form. Although Upon a Deedmans Hed is the most obviously innovative, the poems in seven-line stanzas are formally less straightforward than they initially appear. In several of them, Skelton modifies rhyme
²¹ The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century decasyllabic line is not strictly equivalent to iambic pentameter. See Susanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino, 1984), 32–47. ²² Skelton is not the first to use the rhyme royal stanza in unexpected ways; one notable earlier example is the way Chaucer breaks lines and stanzas into smaller fragments in the dialogue in Troilus and Criseyde.
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381 royal by the introduction of a refrain: something that is at odds with the form’s conventional narrative function.²³ Thus, in ‘Go, pytyous hart’ (Skelton, Dyvers Balettys, poem 5, Complete English Poems, 45–6), the last line of each stanza and the rhyme-word of the penultimate line provide an internal refrain that emphasises the stasis of unrequited love; while in ‘My darlyng dere my daysy floure’ (Skelton, Dyvers Balettys, poem 1, Complete English Poems, 41–2), the full refrain ‘With “Lullay, lullay”, lyke a chylde, / Thou slepyst to long, thou art begylde!’ belies both its own message and the poem’s cynical narrative of betrayal.²⁴ Attesting Skelton’s interest in the way sound alters sense, such refrains are consonant with his other experiments in these lyrics. In ‘Knolege, acquayntance’, for example, he develops a complex series of aural patterns within the body of the stanzas: Knolege, acquayntance, resort, favour, with grace; Delyte, desyre, respyte, with lyberte; Corage wyth lust, convenient tyme and space; Dydayns, dystres, exylyd cruelte; Wordys well set with good habylyte; Demure demenaunce, womanly of porte; Transendyng plesure, surmountyng all dysporte; Allectuary* arrectyd* to redress *a sweetened medicine *made up These feverous axys*, the dedely wo and payne *agues, fevers Of thoughtfull hertys plungyd in dystres; Refresshyng myndys the Aprell shoure of rayne; Condute of comforte and well most soverayne; Herber enverduryd*, contynuall fressh and grene; *made green Of lusty somer the passyng goodly quene. (Skelton, ‘Knolege, acquayntance’, lines 1–14, Complete English Poems, 43–4)
Here, in addition to extensive use of alliteration within individual lines, Skelton also establishes unpredictable patterns of assonance that run across line breaks. Thus, in the first stanza, ‘lust’ (line 3) alliterates with ‘lyberte’ (line 2), while ‘corage’ (line 3) anticipates ‘cruelte’ (line 4), and the vowel sound in ‘space’ at the line’s end (line 3) is echoed in the very next word, ‘Dysdayns’ (line 4), which is separated from it only by a line break. In a similar series of connections, ‘womanly’ in the penultimate line (line 6) harks back to ‘Wordys well’ (line 5), while its suffix resonates with the medial syllables of ‘habylyte’ (line 5). Finally, ‘porte’ (line 6) not only provides the rhyme for ‘dysporte’ (line 7), but also alliterates with ‘plesure’ (line 7), while (conversely) ‘dysporte’ alliterates with ‘Demure demenaunce’ (line 6), creating aural cross-references between lines that supplement and counterpoint their end-rhyme. Equally off-beat assonances occur in the second stanza, where ‘redres’ (line 8) is rhymed with ‘dystres’ two lines later (line 10), but that rhyme is partially anticipated by ‘axys’ (line 9) and ‘hertys’ (line 10), as well as being echoed by ‘myndys’ (line 11). In a similar way ‘Aprell’ (line 11), ‘well’ (line 12), and ‘contynuall’ (line 13) establish a run of mid-line rhymes, while ‘contynuall’ also alliterates with ‘Condute of comforte’ (line 12) and, ²³ For the effects of refrain, see John Hollander, ‘Breaking into Song: Some Notes on Refrain’, in Chaviva Hošek and Patricia Parker (eds), Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 73–89. ²⁴ See Chapter 11 in this volume for a further discussion of this poem.
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382 - in conjunction with ‘fressh’, provides a sequence of vowel and consonants that are repeated in slightly modified form in ‘lusty somer’ (line 14). The effect is an aural knitting together of the stanza that is much more complex than that achieved by predictably positioned rhyme words alone, and that makes Skelton’s rhyme royal a singularly dense medium: rather than resting in the familiar verse form, the reader’s attention is drawn to the physical and material qualities of the words he uses. Such experiments with ‘charm-melos’—defined as the ‘closed, internal rhythms of language, the echoing reflections of sound’²⁵—take on particular significance in lyrics where Skelton combines them with a further kind of experiment: fragmented utterance that often takes the form of bricolage.²⁶ Manerly Margery Mylke and Ale, for example, is an exercise in frustrating expectations: Ay, beshrewe yow! Be my fay This wanton clerkis be nyse* allway. *foolish Avent, avent*, my popagay*! *away, away *parrot, foolish person ‘What, will ye do nothing but play?’ Tully, valy*, strawe, let be I say! *an exclamation of contempt Gup*, Christian Clowte, gup, Jak of the Vale, *gee-up With manerly Margery Mylk and Ale. (Skelton, Manerly Margery, lines 1–7, Complete English Poems, 35)
Its seven-line stanzas raise the expectation of rhyme royal, but prove to be rhymed aaaaabb, with the b-rhymed couplet serving as internal refrain. Moreover, the dialogue consists of short exclamations presented without context and without any indication of who the speakers are, nor (except where it is provided by modern editors) of where one ends and another begins; the phrases are so entirely without context (and arguably without content, too) that it is as if disembodied voices have been caught on the page as they flit by.²⁷ Yet, even though the lyric’s meaning is located in the gaps between words and lines, and in what is not said rather than in what is, the insistent a-rhymes and the recurrence of the final couplet contribute a sound pattern that substitutes for literal sense as a means of holding the poem together. A comparable technique appears in Agaynst a Comely Coystrowne, where Skelton’s contemptuous attack on a ‘coystrowne’ (kitchen boy) with social pretensions is made less through coherent argument than through a series of disconnected proverbs, allusions, and quotations, including numerous fragments of the songs the boy sings: ‘Wyth, “Hey, troly-loly-lo, whip here, Jak”’ (Skelton, Agaynst a Comely Coystrowne, line 15, Complete English Poems, 37); ‘“Roty bully joyse”, / “Rumbyll downe, tumbyll downe, hey, go, now, now!”’ (lines 29–30); ‘Jak wold jet and yet Jyll sayd nay’ (line 43); ‘What though ye can cownter Custodi nos? [‘Protect us’, the first words of a plain chant] / As well it becomyth
²⁵ Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton, NJ, 1978), 195. For a further discussion of melos, see also Chapter 11 in this volume. ²⁶ Welsh also provides an excellent reading of Skelton’s poetic techniques in Roots of Lyric, 199–221. ²⁷ The recently discovered version of the lyric written on the final flyleaf of the Trinity College Cambridge copy of Caxton’s Dictes or Sayeingis of the Philosophres implies a slightly different narrative from the version contained in Scattergood (1983) and all previous editions, but the operative word is ‘implies’. See further, A. S. G. Edwards and Lynne R. Mooney, ‘A New Version of a Skelton Lyric’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 10.4 (1994), 506–10.
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383 yow, a parysh towne clarke, / To syng Sospitati dedit egros [‘he has helped the sick to salvation’, from another plain chant]’ (lines 57–9). Here, as in Manerly Margery, in the absence of any other kind of coherence, sound becomes the organising principle. It does so in a slightly different way, however. In Manerly Margery, the sound patterns take the form of internal assonance and rhyme. In Agaynst a Comely Coystrowne, the echoes and repetitions are of familiar phrases and (especially) songs divorced from their original contexts. Whereas Manerly Margery draws attention to Skelton’s own skilful verbal construction—the way each of his words remembers previous words or sounds in the poem—Agaynst a Comely Coystrowne remembers the refrains and repetitions of other songs. In their original settings, these would have functioned as the internal patterning of Manerly Margery does; divorced from those contexts, as fragments of familiar phrases, they recall lost sound patterns. Both, though, constitute forms of verbal memory, and this suggests something important about Skelton’s composition technique.²⁸ For Skelton, it seems that words precede thought: that, in the terms of Classical rhetoric, his inventio (or choice of subject matter) and his elocutio (choice of words) are indistinguishable.
Practical Experiment and Experimental Poetics What, then, does this mean in practice? One effect of Skelton’s experimentation is to link rhyme royal with the emergence of the Skeltonic. If we return to the passage from A Replycacion, with which we began, we see how the insistently repeated rhymes and short parallel lines of the Skeltonic might be read as a formal rationalisation of Skelton’s breakdown of the rhyme royal stanza into discrete, unpredictably patterned fragments. In addition, it is possible to trace a connection between Skelton’s dependence on verbal memory and the theory of inspiration that he formulates there. If we look carefully at what he says, we see that the energy of poetic creation precedes inspiration; a paraphrase might run: ‘there is such energy in the act of writing that it causes God to descend’. This suggests that it is the heat and speed of the poet’s own writing—effectively, his improvisation—that provokes inspiration, or provokes the poet to believe that that is what he is experiencing.²⁹ But improvisation does not happen in a vacuum: it has to have materials to work with, and Skelton’s materials are verbal ones. The effects of Skelton’s early experiments with sound are not visible only in his Skeltonic verse, however. It is a later poem in rhyme royal, Speke Parott, that most spectacularly fuses the fragmentation and the dense verbal patterning that Skelton playfully explored in his early lyrics, elevating them to a satirical method. Spoken in the voice of the caged yet prophetic pet, Parrot, this densely hermeneutical allegorical attack on Cardinal Wolsey and on new educational practices is constructed almost entirely through the accumulation of what Parrot himself calls ‘shredis of sentence’ (Skelton, Speke Parott, line 92, Complete English Poems, 233): quotations, proverbs, puns, and colloquialisms in French, German, Spanish, Greek, Dutch, Portuguese, and Latin, as well as English, and, especially, biblical ²⁸ See Jane Griffiths, ‘Parrot’s Poetics: Fragmentation, Theory and Practice in Skelton’s Writing’, in Oxford Handbooks Online (2015). https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/. ²⁹ See Griffiths, John Skelton, 129–57. This might suggest, perhaps, that the ‘Effecte energiall’ (Replycacion, line 368), which Skelton here describes, derives from the concept of energeia as discussed by Aristotle in the Rhetoric, and subsequently taken up by Renaissance poets as a topic of interest. See also Chapter 8, note 7; Chapter 11, note 38; and Chapter 31, note 25, in this volume.
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384 - allusions.³⁰ One obvious effect of this technique is to create gorgeous verbal patterns that— as in the early lyrics—hold the poem together in the absence of any easily graspable meaning. A particularly elusive stanza serves as an example: ‘Moryshe myne owne shelfe’, the costermonger sayth; ‘Fate, fate, fate, ye Irysh water-lag’. In flattryng fables men fynde but lyttyl fayth; But moveatur terra, let the world wag, Let Syr Wrig-wrag wrastell with Syr Delarag: Every man after his maner of wayes, Pawbe une aruer, so the Welche man sayes. (Skelton, Speke Parott, lines 85–91, Complete English Poems, 233)
While it is possible to unpick such passages—here, for example, Parrot is suggesting that individual self-interest is a profound threat to the greater good of the nation—much is lost in the telling. A paraphrase might run as follows. The first two and last three lines of the stanza emblematise the self-interest that concerns Parrot. The costermonger says that he himself is Morris (in a positively Shakespearean attempt at Irish dialect); the Welshman says ‘every man to his own’ in his own language; the two fictitious knights whose names indicate that they are much of a muchness and both of equally little consequence are engaged in a pointless struggle: the direct result of the indifference expressed in the lines ‘let the world wag’ (‘let the world go hang’, proverbial) and ‘Every man after his maner of wayes’ (translating the Welsh proverb). In the third and fourth lines of the stanza, Parrot’s anxiety at this state of affairs comes through. ‘Moveatur terra’ is a phrase from Psalm 99:1 (‘Dominus regnavit: irascantur populi; qui sedet super cherubim: moveatur terra’: ‘The Lord reigneth; let the people tremble: he sitteth between the cherubims; let the earth be moved’), and to translate it as ‘let the world wag’ is an error so profound that it threatens the nation with extinction: the translation is, in fact, a kind of ‘flattryng fable’ (line 87). Read in the context of Parrot’s two main concerns— Wolsey’s misappropriation of power and changes in the way Latin was taught as a result of the new, humanist learning—the stanza thus berates people who are too self-interested to unite as a nation in face of the threat posed by Wolsey, but also implies that the new teaching methods, which privileged the acquisition of eloquence by means of imitation over strict grammatical instruction, are contributing to the parlous state of the country: they will result in such poor education that students may genuinely believe that ‘moveatur terra’ means ‘let the world wag’, and will not be able to heed Parrot’s other warnings either. Their failure of comprehension both epitomises and directly causes their inability to respond to the threat to the nation: they will be unaware of what is happening until it is too late. But while such an explanation does tease out some of Skelton’s allusions, and the connections between them, it is very far from adequately conveying what, and how, Parrot’s lines mean. One of the main points of Parrot’s speech is that sound and sense are not really separable; when Skelton concludes the first part of the poem with the lines ‘Amen, ³⁰ Speke Parott has been the subject of much critical discussion. A key reading is F. W. Brownlow, ‘Speke Parott: Skelton’s Allegorical Denunciation of Cardinal Wolsey’, Studies in Philology, 55 (1968), 124–39; more recent studies include Greg Walker, ‘Ordered Confusion: The Crisis of Authority in Skelton’s Speke Parott’, Spenser Studies, 10 (1992), 213–28; Griffiths, John Skelton, 79–100; and Scattergood, John Skelton, 284–301.
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385 Amen, / And sette to a D, / And then hyt ys “Amend”, / Owur new-founde A. B. C.’ (Skelton, Speke Parott, lines 274–7, Complete English Poems, 238), he is not only satirising the humanist concern to make medieval Latin conform to Classical principles, but also illustrating his own composition practice, in which one word leads inevitably to another. The habit of word association is so engrained that in one striking instance it appears to lead Skelton to fluff a satirical point. One of Parrot’s main charges, made through a series of biblical allusions, is that Henry VIII, as virtuous monarch, has been led astray by Wolsey, who, as the monarch’s chief advisor, is abusing his power. Thus, when Parrot exclaims O Esebon, Esebon*, to the is cum agayne *Heshbon, a city ruled by Sihon Seon*, the regent Amorreorum, *Sihon, king of the Amonites And Og*, that fat hog of Basan, doth retayne *Og, king of Bashan The crafty coistronus Cananeorum* *‘of the Canaanites’ (Skelton, Speke Parott, lines 120–3, Complete English Poems, 234)
the expectation is that—like Melchisedeck [Melchizedek] earlier in the poem (line 60)— Seon and Og will figure Henry VIII. Since Esebon was a traditional figure of London, the equation of ‘Seon’ and Henry seems fairly unproblematic, and the introduction of ‘Og’ follows naturally, as both kings are mentioned together in Psalm 135:11.³¹ The assertion that Og retains ‘The crafty coistronus Cananeorum’ is also unproblematic, since the reference to the ‘coistronus’, or kitchen boy, clearly echoes Skelton’s common complaint about Wolsey’s ‘greasy’ origins as a butcher’s son. At this point, however, things seem to go astray, as the sound of the name ‘Og’ invites Skelton to use the near-homonym ‘hog’, and if Og is ‘that fat hog of Basan’ and Wolsey is the overweight former butcher’s boy, Og represents not only the King deceived by his false counsellor, but—in an odd kind of portmanteau—the false counsellor as well. It looks as if sound association has led Skelton to make nonsense of his own satire, and perhaps it has. But an alternative is also possible: the collapse of distinction between King and counsellor may suggest that there is no limit to Wolsey’s power of corruption: that he renders all that he touches hog-like, even the King who rules by divine right. Since Skelton is concerned to stress Parrot’s loyalty to the King—‘ “Cryste save Kyng Herry the viiith, owur royall kyng, / The red rose in honour to flowrysshe and sprynge!”’ (Skelton, Speke Parott, lines 34–5, Complete English Poems, 231)—the apparently unconscious slip caused by sound patterning allows him to say something that he would not be able to say explicitly, even under the veil of allegory.³² Skelton’s privileging of sound over sense and words over matter results in a kind of supra-rational language: the very thing that he identifies as the result of writing with ‘hete’ and ‘spede’ in A Replycacion. This remarkable facility with rhyme royal, evident in both his early lyrics and in Speke Parott, raises a new kind of question about the Skeltonic. Rather than enquiring into its origins, we might ask what the impetus was for Skelton to develop the new form, when he had already turned rhyme royal into such a fluent method of expression. Or, to put it differently, what did Skelton gain from the Skeltonic? The answer may be less to do with form per se, than with its connotations. Despite the stresses to which it subjects the rhyme
³¹ See Brownlow, ‘Speke Parott’, 129. ³² For Speke Parott as an attempt on Skelton’s part to exploit a rift between Henry and Wolsey, and Parrot’s professions of loyalty as part of that attempt, see Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge, 1988), 73–89.
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386 - royal stanza, Speke Parott depends on these connotations no less than Upon the Dolorus Dethe or A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell: Parrot’s use of the verse form reflects his attempt to align himself with the vernacular tradition of advice to princes, while his deconstruction of it attests to the impossibility of doing so. Even as the poem speaks passionately about the poet’s vocation and the threat to that vocation arising from the diabolical mismanagement of the nation at the level of both court and grammar school, Parrot suggests that Wolsey’s usurpation renders impossible the intimate mutually supporting and mutually authorising relationship between monarch and poet-advisor, implicit in Skelton’s titles of laureate and orator regius. At the same time, Skelton’s fear that new teaching methods will de-skill the country’s readers, rendering them incapable of deciphering Parrot’s cryptic satire, is shown to be well-founded; the envoys, in which Skelton and Parrot lament the failure of their warnings, become proof of the seriousness of the situation, the justice of their attack. In this poem more than in any other, Skelton’s use of rhyme royal encapsulates both his laureate ambitions and the political and educational conditions that frustrate them. In contrast, the Skeltonic liberates Skelton from rhyme royal’s cultural baggage. It is notable that the emergence of the Skeltonic as his form of choice corresponds with his departure from the court; the implication is that its emergence marks his freedom from the expectation to write as a laureate poet, allowing him instead to align himself with alternative poetic traditions. Collyn Clout, in which Skelton adopts the persona of a plain-speaking ‘common man’, is the most obvious case in point; the scolding Juvenalian anti-court satire of Why Come Ye Nat to Court? is similarly enabled by Skelton’s abandonment of rhyme royal.³³ Unlike Skelton’s court poetry, even his satirical court poetry, such as Speke Parott and The Bowge of Court, both depend on the speaker’s refusal to align himself with the centres of power or to use the verse form associated with such alignment. Yet, satire is not the only freedom the Skeltonic allows. It also enables an alternative kind of escape, into voices and settings wholly unrelated to Skelton’s own professional ones. In The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge, for example, use of the Skeltonic enables Skelton not just to recreate a subversive all-female ale-house scene, but also to participate in its customers’ anarchic defiance of normal boundaries.³⁴ It is striking that when, at the end, Skelton does after all pronounce judgement on the women, he does so in a Latin ‘distichon’ that is both linguistically and formally separate from the rest of the poem. Although the text concludes with a characteristically assertive ‘Quod Skelton Laureat’, the distichon allows for an element of doubt as to what, exactly, the laureate is putting his name to: the carnivalesque exchanges of the ale-house or the envoy that holds them up to judgement. But while Skelton here reveals a degree of ambivalence towards the liberties with voice that he is able to take in Skeltonic, in Phyllyp Sparowe he unambiguously revels in them. The self-professedly naïve girl (Jane Scrope, the owner of the pet bird) who speaks the first part of the poem is not only a strikingly non-traditional voice, but specifically a non-poet; her account of indiscriminate reading in Chaucer, Gower, romance, and Classical mythology is diametrically opposed to the sophisticated ventriloquising and rewriting of the English
³³ For Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Nat to Court?, see Heiserman, Skelton and Satire, 190–290; Douglas Gray, The Phoenix and the Parrot: Skelton and the Language of Satire (Dunedin, 2012), 80–90; and Scattergood, John Skelton, 302–50. For the background to Skelton’s adoption of populist personae, see Walker, John Skelton, 53–123. On Skelton’s satire, see also Chapter 13 in this volume. ³⁴ For the anarchic qualities of Elynour Rummyng, see further Peter C. Herman, ‘Leaky Ladies and Droopy Dames: The Grotesque Realism of Skelton’s The Tunnynge of Elynour Rummynge’, in Peter C. Herman (ed.), Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts (Urbana-Champaign, IL, 1994), 145–67.
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387 poetic traditions that Skelton engages in.³⁵ This is not something that could have been done in rhyme royal: But for I am a mayde, Tymerous, halfe afrayde, That never yet asayde* *tried Of Elyconys well*, *the fountain of Helicon Where the muses dwell, Though I can rede and spell, Recounte, reporte, and tell Of the Tales of Caunterbury ... And though that rede have I Of Gawen, and Syr Guy, And tell can a great pece Of the Golden Flece ... Or Arturs rounde table. (Skelton, Phyllyp Sparowe, lines 607–14, 628–31, 634, Complete English Poems, 87)
Such freedom to experiment with voice parallels the freedom to experiment with setting found in Elynour Rummyng. But in Phyllyp Sparowe the Skeltonic form not only allows Skelton to represent marginal voices; it subsumes the laureate voice as well. The point where Skelton interrupts Jane’s monologue to assert that ‘Per me laurigerum / Britanum Skeltonida vatem / Hec cecinisse licet / Ficta sub imagine texta’ [Through me, Skelton the laureate poet of Britain, these compositions could be sung under a feigned likeness] (Skelton, Phyllyp Sparowe, lines 834–7, Complete English Poems, 92) is embedded within Skeltonic lines; although it breaks with their rhyme, its short lines mean that it is visually indistinguishable from Jane’s speech.³⁶ It thus indicates how Skeltonics also allow Skelton to establish his own ‘I’ as one that is different from the ‘I’ implied by the use of rhyme royal, and thus different from the ‘I’ of the laureate tradition Skelton inherits from Lydgate.³⁷ Rather than being grounded in vernacular tradition, this ‘I’ is visibly the maker of his own meaning: as the source of all utterance and all allusion, it is the unifying principle of the poem. What Skeltonics grant Skelton is the ability to make visible the freedom he has already discovered through his early experiments with form. What a comparison of Skelton’s rhyme royal with his Skeltonics suggests, then, is that the latter are not a radical departure from his previous practice, but coterminous with it. While
³⁵ For voice in Phyllyp Sparowe and Elynour Rummyng, see further Elisabeth Dutton, ‘Skelton’s Voice and Performance’, in Sobecki and Scattergood (eds), Critical Companion to John Skelton, 114–19; for Phyllyp Sparowe, cf. also Susan Schibanoff, ‘Taking Jane’s Cue: Phyllyp Sparowe as a Primer for Women Readers’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 101 (1986), 832–47; and Celia Daileader, ‘When a Sparrow Falls: Women Readers, Male Critics, and John Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe’, Philological Quarterly, 75 (1996), 391–409. ³⁶ Modern editions distinguish Latin by use of italics, but in the earliest editions of the poem (STC 22594, 22595, 22595.5, 22596 and 22596a), Skelton’s Latin is printed in black letter, just as Jane’s English is; it is only with Stow’s 1568 edition (STC 22608), that the Latin is first distinguished by being printed in italic. ³⁷ Cf. Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 195–9.
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388 - they are the most conspicuous of his innovations, his experiments with sound encompass both verse forms, and both equally affect Skelton’s evolving understanding of the nature of poetic making. Encouraging a view of poetry not as meaning couched in words, but rather as words that shape meaning, both draw attention to the poet as maker. In addition, by positing him as bricoleur rather than laureate advisor, they show him establishing the technical as well as the theoretical liberty to speak, and also reveal just how intimately the two are linked.
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22 Scots Poetry Willy Maley and Theo Van Heijnsbergen
This chapter discusses sixteenth-century literature in Scots. Older Scots—subdivided into Early Scots (1375–1450) and Middle Scots (1450–1700)—was a late arrival amongst European literary vernaculars, still relatively close to English.¹ This may tempt one to apply the same critical parameters to their literatures: invariably, those derived from the study of texts from England. While these two literatures share features and influences, however, such a critical model overlooks much of what is distinctive and attractive about writing in Scots. The challenge is to allow Older Scots verse to speak its own language and create its own poetic sensibilities, literary conventions, and critical categories. Older Scots literary evidence suggests that we should think not in terms of progress from medieval to modern but, rather, map texts onto the parallel trajectories of key concepts— such as rational and affective, Scots and English, or, indeed, medieval and early modern— that cut across chronological boundaries, with authors and audiences moving between such juxtaposed modes. A similar continuum characterises the social sphere: in Scotland, a relatively cash-strapped monarchy made access to the sovereign easier than in most other national courts. Meanwhile, urban architecture in Edinburgh—expanding upwards rather than sideways because the town was built on a volcanic ridge within a cramped urban space—forced those in more affluent accommodation at the top of tenement buildings to share turnpike staircases and social spaces with less well-heeled people living nearer to the noises and smells of the street. William Dunbar, a court-connected poet and priest (all known references to him are between 1500 and 1513, his earliest datable poem is from 1503, with all textual witnesses dating from the sixteenth century) knows all about the hustle and bustle of town life: May nane* pas throw your principall gaittis*, *no one *gates For stink of haddockis and of scattis*, *skate [fish] For cryis of carlingis* and debaittis, *old women For *feusum flyttingis* of defame. *foul-mouthed quarrelling Think ye not schame, *in front of Befoir* strangeris of all estaittis, That sic* dishonour hurt your name? *such (Dunbar ‘Quhy [Why] will ye, merchantis of renoun’, lines 8–14, Poems, 1.174)²
¹ On Scots language, see ‘What Is Scots?’ (2018), Scottish Language Dictionaries (SLD). www.scotsdictionaries. org.uk/Scots/index.html. ² William Dunbar, in Priscilla Bawcutt (ed.), The Poems of William Dunbar, 2 vols. (Glasgow, 1998).
Willy Maley and Theo Van Heijnsbergen, Scots Poetry In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Willy Maley & Theo Van Heijnsbergen 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0022
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390 - The stanza-initial aaa rhymes are robust, the shorter fifth lines create conversational effects and, as internal refrains, provide a marked leitmotif, its variations in later stanzas purposefully shifting meaning. These are formal hallmarks of sixteenth-century Scots verse, creating the illusion of dynamic, three-dimensional utterance particularly effective also in verse drama, as witness the many different stanza-forms used in David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (c 1552), early modern Scots’ outstanding play. They allowed poets to range widely and with confidence across literary modes and subjects, grounding a young vernacular whose performative energy frequently allows modern readers to grasp its meaning by sounding out the words. Such a performative poetics centres on the artful creation of spontaneity, a Scots sprezzatura that captures the everyday in the formal and collapses the boundaries between art and life, between social strata, between individuals. What is often belittled turns positive: formal experiment enhancing rather than hindering expression, the proverbial as a structural attribute of both content and style, the guttural and alliterative as purposeful phonaesthetics, the rapid oscillation between different styles within one text not regrettable lapses but the stuff of life, of language, and of full-blooded literary expression owned by its speakers. Thus, Dunbar’s verse moves without any self-consciousness from Edinburgh street life to aureate religious discourse: Hale, *sterne superne*, hale, in eterne *star on high In Godis sicht to schyne, *lamp *darkness Lucerne* in derne* for to discerne, Be* glory and grace devyne. *by means of (Dunbar, ‘Ane Ballat of Our Lady’, lines 1–4, Poems, 1.83)
Part of a poetics almost high on itself, such a parallel delight in language and devotion transcends the everyday in such a way that language becomes devotion, making expressive what might seem excessive. Style is content here, a late medieval sublime rivalling the transcendence other lyrics sought in the amatory.³ Likewise, this churchman’s allegorical description of the arrival on his literary shores of the goddess of love and her ladies is conventional, yet conveys a young vernacular’s freshness akin to the realistic details in illuminated manuscripts, Classical goddesses morphing into native supernatural creatures: Als* fresch as flouris* that in May vp spredis*, *as *flowers *unfold In kirtillis* grene, withoutyn kell* or bandis*. *gowns *cap *headbands Thair brycht hairis hang gleting* on the strandis*, *gleaming *shores In tressis clere wyppit* wyth goldyn thredis*, *bound about *threads With *pappis quhite* and mydlis* small as wandis*. *white breasts *waists *sticks (Dunbar, The Goldyn Targe, lines 59–63, Poems, 1.86)
Such enchanting embodiment is not merely decorative. On plot-level it anticipates the danger of sexual attraction, but on another level it draws attention to the treacherous potential of language, its allure leading to temptation. The poem’s final line likewise
³ See also Chapter 5 in this volume for a further discussion of the sublime.
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391 expresses a conventional modesty topos, the fear of seeing the ‘light’, of being read: ‘Wele [duly] aucht thou be aferit [afraid] of the licht’ (line 279). But the undercurrent here flows the other way, warning readers against the radiance of language and imagery. This paradox of admonishing us, in sensuous images and resplendent language, to distrust sensuousness and language is a key Older Scots topos, reflecting the fact that in Scottish writing churchmen and men of learning, rather than courtiers, dominated discussions on the nature and uses of language. To Dunbar the erotic never becomes a gateway towards knowledge. Beyond allegorical visions such as The Goldyn Targe and a small number of perfunctory amatory stanzas, Dunbar represents a Scots poetic tradition light on love lyric until then. An observer rather than a participant, he writes about love, excelling especially in the satirical mode. The scandalous diction in his Tretis of the Tua [Two] Mariit Wemen finds less patriarchal expression in his Flyting with Walter Kennedy, fellow poet and Gaelic-speaking priest. Flyting is a distinctively Scots genre in which two poets seek to outdo one another in soulful abuse of the other’s character, genealogy, language, and body. Anything goes because of a shared poetics between poets in which the realm of language and rhetoric takes precedence over the personal. Dunbar shows considerable respect, even affection, for Kennedy in what is possibly his best-known lyric, often referred to as ‘The Lament for the Makaris’, where he lists, in a sombre roll call, Scots poets who have died before him: Gud maister Walter Kennedy *death *in truth, actually In poynt of dede* lyis veraly*. Gret reuth* it wer that so suld* be: *pity *should Timor mortis conturbat me [The fear of death distresses me]. (Dunbar, ‘I that in heill wes and gladnes’, lines 89–92, Poems, 1.96)
The language and imagery of the Tretis and Flyting are no longer considered unacceptable, though the latter has a modern case to answer in that it exposes one of the red lines of late medieval patriarchal masculinity: men are castigated not for acknowledging sexual desire but for not controlling that desire, thereby allowing women (‘passion’) to overpower ‘reason’. An additional cause of modern unease is ‘body-shaming’ that involves race: Dunbar’s poem ‘Lang heff I maed [composed verse] of ladyes quhytt [white]’, with its refrain, ‘My ladye with the mekle [big] lippis’ (Dunbar, ‘Of Ane Blak-Moir’, lines 1 and 5 (refrain), Poems, 1.113) to describe a black female, is now viewed from a postcolonial perspective as bound up with racism and slavery.⁴ On the whole, though, Dunbar’s work evidences Older Scots’ literary distinction. There is a levelling of the sociocultural playing field, not necessarily through what the poems say but rather by how they do so, through their linguistic register, rhythms, and metaphors. Dunbar looms large in the small corpus of early Scottish prints, the so-called Chepman and Myllar prints (1507/8), which included the Targe, Tretis, Flyting, and a few shorter Dunbar poems. This suggests a wider audience alert to such qualities, creating a space in which diction, imagery, and sentiment were shared freely between people from different social layers. The resultant performance of language and social interaction provides alternatives to the kinds ⁴ See Sue Niebrzydowski, ‘The Sultana and her Sisters: Black Women in the British Isles before 1530’, Women’s History Review, 10.2 (2001), 187–210, 201–4; and David Parkinson, ‘Scottish Prints and Entertainments, 1508’, Neophilologus, 75.2 (1991), 304–10, 308.
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392 - of self-fashioning previously associated with royal courts and the literary expression of modern selfhood. Printing arrived late in Scotland, with the Chepman and Myllar prints, and even then remained a fledgling industry for decades. Between 1510 and 1532, we have evidence of only two prints from a Scottish press—one of them a single leaf, the other a Latin text—and not until 1560 does Scotland produce a steady stream of printed texts. However, looking through a Scottish lens unveils a feature that offsets such a dearth—again, one that literary criticism has now identified in England as well—for Scots verse continued to rely on manuscript circulation side by side with print, particularly through bulky miscellanies that reveal textual communities enjoying a wide range of texts.⁵ Pre-eminent amongst these miscellanies is the Bannatyne Manuscript (1565–8), presently consisting of a ‘Main’ manuscript of 375 double-sided, verse-only folios, and a smaller, partly duplicative manuscript of twenty-seven folios. Its explicit addresses to the reader and its sheer range and unparalleled taxonomy, arranging its alphabetically indexed poems in thematic and generic groupings, suggest it was meant to be used by others. The ‘Book of the Dean of Lismore’ indicates that Gaelic writing, too, used miscellanies to preserve a highly varied repertoire— including texts in Scots and Latin—yet, like its Scots counterparts, it nevertheless manifests a coherence because ‘its composers shared a field of literary reference’.⁶ The verse miscellany format acted as a resource or even catalyst for a heterogeneous textual community, effectively making a virtue of the absence of a printing press by offering more flexibility for its users: a manuscript is more readily adaptable to individual use than a printed book, and, through personal references or allusions to experience shared within a community, miscellany manuscript verse can develop a more intimate address than printed material, while generally accommodating a wider range of tones. Such miscellanies manifest dynamic (inter)textual practices, operating in a sociocultural context in which numerous Scottish ownership inscriptions adding ‘et amicorum’ [and of friends] to the owner’s name instance the humanist habit of circulating books and manuscripts. Whereas noble rather than royal patronage fuels literary activity in the fifteenth century, the epicentre of literature in Scots for most of the sixteenth century lies at the intersection of urban legal and mercantile elites, the landed gentry, churchmen, and graduates. This affects style, topics, and authorship. Sixteenth-century Scots lyricists tend not to be aristocrats, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, or Sir Philip Sidney, but men of the cloth, lawyer-poets, academics, professional musicians. This leads to diverse kinds of lyrical self-fashioning and to different relationships between author and text, as well as between author and audience. For example, rather than courtiers, Scottish lyricists were often relatively anonymous professional musicians with positions as clerics within the Chapel Royal or as masters of burgh song schools. Consequently, the close relationship between lyric and music remains a going concern in Scots literary composition for longer: refrains abound, there is an emphasis on metrical regularity, and imagery and language have to be relatively straightforward. These qualities distinguish the great ballad tradition as much as courtly genres. Difficult to date, these anonymous ballads thrived as popular, oral literature but regularly feature in sixteenth-
⁵ See Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘Scottish Manuscript Miscellanies from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 12 (2005), 46–73. ⁶ William Gillies, ‘The Book of the Dean of Lismore: The Literary Perspective’, in Janet Hadley Williams and J. Derrick McClure (eds), Fresche Fontanis: Studies in the Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013), 179–216, 209; see also 183, 208.
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393 century literary ‘elite’ contexts, too, such as ‘Johnnie Armstrong’, on James V’s hanging of this Border reiver [raider] in 1530.⁷ Their patterned technique of storytelling, their emphasis on stark dramatic action, their diction similarly chiselled through time into highly accessible and memorable narrative, their choice of topic often lying within the domestic (the supernatural, family relations) but somehow representative of the universal, their apparent simplicity of form and diction masking tightly organised narrative structures: all these characteristics allowed the Scots ballad to survive into the modern era. Literary criticism has been slow to acknowledge that other sixteenth-century Scots verse likewise derives its essential qualities from its orality. In a courtly context, too, where courtgravitating English poets such as Wyatt and Sidney strike out for novel, seemingly more autotelic and idiosyncratic modes of self-reference inspired by Italian sources, their Scots counterparts tend to evolve late medieval home-grown conventions based on French sources, often set to music and continuing to use collective reference points in selfrepresentation. Think poems on love, not love poems; a deeply ingrained view of poetry as rhetorical performance means that the self in Scots lyrics is frequently an effect of judgement rather than impulse. Likewise, think proverb and aphorism, not idiosyncratic imagery; or, chanson (French polyphonic song) rather than sonnet—the latter one of many areas in which sixteenth-century Scots writing continues to use French rather than Italian sources. From an Anglo-centred perspective, contrastive pairings such as ‘chanson/sonnet’ may initially be interpreted as documenting a lack in Scots writing, but after prolonged, immersive engagement with Older Scots verse one begins to savour its qualities, its sinuous lines often using a ‘knotted’ plain style, generally fitting style to content. At the end of the century, this is how Alexander Montgomerie (c 1550–98) addresses his sovereign, James VI, in a sonnet: Shir, clenge* your Cuntrie of thir cruell crymis, *cleanse Adultreis, witchcraftis, incests, sakeles* bluid. *innocent Delay not, bot (as David did) betymis* *promptly Ȝour Company of such men soon seclude*. *dissociate Out with the wicked, garde* you with the gude. *take care of Of mercy and of Judgment sey* to sing. *try Quhen* ye suld stryk I *wald ye* understude. *When *would like you to Quhen ye suld spair* I wish ye were bening. *show leniency Chuse godly Counsel, leirne to be a King. *burdens Beir not thir burthenis* longer on your bak. Jumpe* not with justice for no kynd of thing; *Play To just Complantis gar* gude attendance tak. *cause (a person) to do something Thir* bluidy sarks* cryis alwayis in your eiris*. *These *shirts *ears Prevent the plague that presently appeirs. (Montgomerie, ‘To his Majestie’, Poems, 1.103)⁸
This is an altogether different rhetorical universe from that of the Elizabethan or even the Henrician court, with their emphasis on the sonnet as a poem of love. Here, the sonnet is first and foremost a rhetorical construct, a tool to allow the author to practise the language ⁷ See Emily Lyle (ed.), Scottish Ballads (Edinburgh, 1994), 39–43. ⁸ Alexander Montgomerie, in David J. Parkinson (ed.), Alexander Montgomerie: Poems, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 2000).
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394 - of persuasion in any topic, and as such a genre open to all discourses and tones. In Scots sonnets, language can roam as freely as in Dunbar’s Flyting or in his exalted religious verse, or sublimate erotic desire, but also fling a Petrarchan heart back to an unresponsive mistress: Ressave* this harte vhois* Constancie wes sik* *Receive *whose *such Quhill* it wes quick*, I wot* ye never kneu* *While *alive *know *knew A harte more treu within a stomak stik* *enclosed Till tym the prik of Jelousie it slue*, *slew Lyk as my heu* (by deidly signis) furthsheu*, *(facial) colour *made known Suppose* that feu* persav’d* my secreit smart. *Even though *few *perceived Lo heir the hairt that ye your self ou’rthreu*. *conquered, destroyed Fairweill, adeu, sen death mon* vs depart*. *must *separate (Montgomerie, ‘The Poets Legacie’, lines 1–8, Poems, 1.55)
The internal rhyme scheme (half-lines rhyming with the final word of the preceding line) on top of end rhyme not only showcases the poet’s ability but also charges the emotion. In many Scots poems, such energy seeks the effect of language rather than its transcendence. Away from religious writing, sustained sublimation of affective experience did not feature large in Scots verse until the legacy of Petrarch and Sidney manifests itself in William Fowler and Sir William Alexander, from the mid-1580s into the early seventeenth century, even then often framed in godly, moral, or Neoplatonic terms.⁹ Observing the rhetorical requirement of fitting style to content means not only that Scots verse foregrounds a middle style that blends Latinate with popular diction to create persuasive eloquence, but also that it accommodates colourful language at both ends of the spectrum, graphic description in Tretis and Flyting matching the aureate magnificence of religious ecstasy. Scots poets on the whole saw poetry, within a late medieval and Christian humanist worldview, as serving universal rather than solipsistic ends, seeking to accommodate rather than erase contradictions, in a wider frame of reference. Such a rhetorically constructed concordia discors allowed Scots verse to cultivate a poetics that includes both the scatological and the sublime but upsets popular-Romantic and genteel notions of verse. Poetry is asked to function as a rhetorical, formally tight vehicle that has to accommodate a cacophonous universe full of contrasts and open-ended meanings that at first sight seem mutually exclusive. At its best, this created conceptually challenging, invigorating verse, with a formal tightness that points inward to an engagement not just with the text’s meaning but also with its creative process, drawing attention to how poetic language works as a rhetorical structure. To empower readers to accommodate a wide range of meanings, it was important not just to entertain but also educate them on how to distil meaning from texts, by foregrounding in the poem itself the ways in which text constructs meaning. The ‘middling’ background and the affective demand upon the reader of such metafictional Scots writing are linked to one of the key legacies of contemporary Scottish culture: education. At the start of the sixteenth century, Scotland already had three universities (St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen). Moreover, James IV’s 1496 Education Act required landowners ‘of substance’ to send their eldest sons to school until they had sufficient knowledge ⁹ The essential study here is Sarah M. Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary, Queen of Scots and James VI (Basingstoke, 2002).
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395 of Latin and the law to ensure that ‘justice may reigne universalie throw all the realme’.¹⁰ This emphasis on education kept Scots abreast of cultural and intellectual developments abroad and also laid the foundations for the relations and understanding between authors and their readers, in relatively close-knit textual communities. Formal training in Latin and rhetoric prioritised the analysis and manipulation of language, resisting the more cathartic expression that we nowadays associate with poetry. Scots referred to poets as ‘makars’, that is, ‘craftsmen’, in line with the origin of the word ‘poet’ as ‘maker’, derived from Greek ποίησις [poiésis], that is, ‘calling something into existence that was not there before’ (Plato, Symposium, 205b8 Collected Dialogues, 557).¹¹ Such a view of poetry as craftsmanship has often been presented as a flaw, but Older Scots verse has benefited from the renewed critical appreciation of poetry as a craft, the conscious manipulation of language and its structures rather than divinely inspired vision; in the process, poetry’s formal dimensions were also reevaluated. In other words, Older Scots verse has responded well to recent critical currents that study not just the meaning of words, but their use, shifting attention from the author to the audience, and defining ‘meaning’ as a dynamic process between texts or between author, audience, and occasion. Such views of language and meaning pervaded sixteenth-century thought well beyond literature. Studying not just how things and meanings ‘were’ but rather how they were made ultimately made readers aware of contingency, of the nature of history, of the need to accept change. A ‘rhetorical’ view of life in tandem with the emphasis on education and the above-mentioned porous nature of social and cultural categories thus provided the public sphere in Scotland with particular sociopolitical dimensions: a focus on ‘the word’ and its manipulation, an interrogative attitude vis-à-vis authority, and sometimes quite radical political views. Such roads towards modernity and selfhood differ from their sixteenth-century English equivalents, yet are highly self-aware and more relevant to Enlightenment beginnings. A related feature is the prevalence of poems dramatising the act of writing and/or reading. They manifest a growing awareness that literature had a history, that it was an evolving, mind-shaping process. It created, transformed. Scots poets here often name Chaucer as a key influence. Poems such as Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (?1490s) instance a creative use of Chaucer, the manner in which it fills a gap in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde creative invention rather than monochrome imitation.¹² Henryson’s poem implicates readers in this literary process by explicitly asking *Quha wait gif* all that Chauceir wrait* was trew? *Who knows if *wrote I wait* nocht gif* this narratioun *know *if Be authoreist*, or fenyeit* of the new *authorised *invented Be* sum poeit, throw his inventioun. *By (Henryson, Testament of Cresseid, lines 64–7, Poems, 113)¹³
¹⁰ See https://www.scottisharchivesforschools.org/Flodden/reignJamesIvSource03.asp. ¹¹ Plato, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton, NJ, 1961). ¹² Henryson died shortly before 1505; oldest extant witness to the poem is c 1515–20; it was known to most sixteenth-century readers as an anonymous addition to Troilus and Criseyde in William Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer. ¹³ Robert Henryson, in Denton Fox (ed.), The Poems of Robert Henryson (Oxford, 1981).
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396 - This is ‘the first use in English of the term inventioun . . . to apply not to the “finding” of material in existing sources but to a poet’s “making-up” of an untrue story’.¹⁴ Henryson here anticipates by nearly a century Sidney’s use of ‘invention’ in the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella as ‘the word [that] registers the changes that lend the Renaissance some of its complexity’, nudging poetry along from an art that primarily discovers what is present, in past authorities, to one that conceptualises what is not present until the literary text creates it.¹⁵ Sixteenth-century prints acknowledge Henryson’s engagement with the gradual progression towards a modern poetics, highlighting how the preceding stanza—often indented in these prints—articulates, in acrostic fashion, a rhetorical address to fiction: O f his distres *me neidis nocht reheirs*, *I need not give an account F or worthie Chauceir in the samin* buik, *same I n gudelie* termis* and in ioly veirs, *excellent, ample *words C ompylit hes his cairis*, quha* will luik. *sorrows *who T o brek my sleip ane vther quair* I tuik, *book I n quhilk* I fand* the fatall destenie *which *found O f fair Cresseid, that endit wretchitlie. (Henryson, Testament of Cresseid, lines 57–63, Poems, 113)
The poem signals from behind its textual structure that it is reading us, and thus our uses of fiction, just as much as we are reading the poem. In the powerful narrative that ensues, Cresseid evolves her original, medieval conception of ‘tragedie’ (Henryson, Testament of Cresseid, line 4, Poems, 111) as fate caused by some outer agency into a Renaissance one that embraces Classical notions of tragedy that instead see one’s destiny as linked to individual psyche. Through purgative incidents—‘The northin wind had purifyit the air’ (line 17)—Cresseid achieves Aristotelian catharsis, thereby acknowledging individual agency in one’s ‘fortune’. Henryson provides similar challenges in other Classical adaptations. In Orpheus and Eurydice, as with several of his Fables, Henryson leaves a gap between story and subsequent moralitas. This forces readers to consider multiple interpretations, until the continuous oscillation between narrative and reflection on that narrative becomes the narrative, another quintessentially metafictional move. Henryson’s major pieces thus, on the threshold of the sixteenth century, analyse the nature and epistemological status of poetry, questioning whether a contemporary poet could acquire auctoritas. Striking at the core of Scottish humanism, Orpheus embodies the poet as civiliser, ‘arguably the umbrella concept emerging from sixteenth-century treatises’.¹⁶ Gavin Douglas, Provost of St Giles’ in Edinburgh, later Bishop of Dunkeld, provides the next step in this evolution of a Scots early modern poetics. In his Palyce of Honour (1501), a bumbling Chaucer-derived narrator-persona learns about Classical and medieval literature from a demanding female guide. But Douglas’s main claim to fame is Eneados (1513), the second complete translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in any European vernacular, complete with Douglas’s own prologues to each book. What stands out again is the immediacy of the ¹⁴ A. C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (Oxford, 2005), 23. ¹⁵ Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago, IL, 2013), 19–20. For Sidney’s use of ‘invention’ in Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 1, lines 6, 9, 10, see Sir Philip Sidney, in William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), 165. ¹⁶ Citing Patrick Cheney in Chapter 5 in this volume.
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397 language, the unselfconscious relish of matching a real world with an imagined world that, like an illusion, breaks the boundary between artifice and reality. Eneados was not printed until 1553 (nota bene in England), but enjoyed wide circulation in manuscript, illustrating the self-sufficiency of manuscript networks in contemporary Scotland. It continues Henryson’s engagement with literary ‘invention’: one manuscript contains Douglas’s own annotations, in which he comments on his opening invocation of the muses: ‘Musa in Grew [Greek] signifies an inventryce or invention in our langgage, and of the ix Musis sum thing in my Palyce of Honour and be Mastir Robert Hendirson in New Orpheus’ (Douglas, Virgil’s Aeneid, 2.19).¹⁷ Douglas’s insistence that translations stick closely to their sources likewise sounds a modern note, and he lacerates Caxton’s adaptation of the Aeneid on that score. It also provides him with an excuse to chastise Chaucer’s Dido and present her as a temptress endangering Aeneas’s providential destiny of founding Rome. The poet-bishop here accommodates humanist ideas about literature with both Classical and religious orthodoxy, foreshortening boundaries between medieval and modern. Six weeks after Douglas completed Eneados, its dedicatee, James IV, led his army into disastrous defeat: the battle of Flodden decimated the ranks of the Scottish nobility and clergy. This allegedly introduced a pattern of stop-start cultural activity, aligned with adult reigns of the Stewart monarchs: James V (1528/9–42), Mary Queen of Scots (1561–7), and James VI (c 1583 until departing for England in 1603). The reign of James V saw the rise of Sir David Lyndsay (c 1490–c 1555), the country’s chief heraldic officer, who wrote in a range of poetic genres, including a ‘flyting’ with the king, dream vision, political satire, and complaint, before completing Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (performed 1552 and 1554). As herald and ambassador, Lyndsay used his experience of public speech to shape his above-mentioned variety of metre and stanza-form. This also illustrates his knowledgeable reading of earlier Scots verse, the variable line-length of rollicking tail rhyme contrasting effectively with the official, more statuesque ballat royal (ababbcbc). Past criticism often focused on Lyndsay as figurehead of the Scottish Reformation (1560–8), a reputation institutionalised by the printer’s preface to the 1568 edition of Lyndsay’s Warkis. Consequently, for centuries his non-factional concern with matters of commonwealth, the res publica, was neglected, as were his aesthetic accomplishments. A refocused interest particularly in his Historie and Testament of Squyer Meldrum (c 1550; the earliest extant witness a 1594 print) is rectifying this. This light-touch heroic romance, topped with a literary testament, commemorates Lyndsay’s friend, William Meldrum. It narrates the change from a more chivalric outlook (the young Meldrum’s romance-like journeys and battles) to one in which experience moves the older hero to civic service as a magistrate. Critics disagree whether Lyndsay gently mocks the romance universe or whether the deeper undercurrent is one of nostalgia for lost masculinity, an ambiguity reinforced by the ironic undertone of the appended Testament. As with the earlier makars, a poetics of open-endedness and its attendant ambiguities—forcing the reader to engage with the process of attributing meaning by withholding the author’s own—is at work here. Squyer Meldrum thus draws attention to the sophistication of Scots romance, a genre still written exclusively in verse well into the seventeenth century because poetry was credited with a more ambitious conceptual scope than prose. In this, too, Scottish sixteenth-century poetry continued medieval, humanist conduits. ¹⁷ Gavin Douglas, in David F. C. Coldwell (ed.), Virgil’s Aeneid, Translated into Scottish Verse by Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1956–60). For a further discussion of Douglas’s Aeneid, see also Chapters 15 and 23 in this volume.
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398 - The next narrative poem that catches the eye is Roland Furious, John Stewart of Baldynneis’s ‘abbregement’ of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Stewart does more than ‘abridge’ his notoriously complex source: in his poem’s only witness, a three-part manuscript dedicated to James VI, c 1585 (and thus predating John Harington’s translation of 1591), Roland Furious is followed by a set of lyrical ‘rapsodies of the authors youthfull braine’, before a religious allegory completes the volume (Stewart of Baldynneis, Poems, 2.115).¹⁸ The pared-down Roland Furious and its manuscript context combine to isolate more exclusively Ariosto’s emphasis on how passion can deprive one of reason and lead to (self-)destructive ‘fury’. As often with Scots texts, a prominent advisory impulse directs the reader to the need for self-governance. It does so by using French intermediaries to redact episodes of the Italian original towards its own purpose, another characteristic Scots feature. Though ultimately deriving from the Italian Renaissance when transferring meaning from the source into the target culture, Stewart’s repointing of characters and narrative strands provides a kind of closure that suggests the pressures on the text of more orthodox moral and religious sensibilities. Within contemporary Scots poetics, the creative objective is self-consciously to evolve native cultural practices rather than to import Renaissance ones wholesale, thereby ‘transcreating’ new texts by extending—as Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid does—the late medieval practice of inflecting sources afresh rather than inventing something entirely first-hand.¹⁹ Continuing the makars’ experiments, Stewart imposes on his source material a Chaucerian as well as a humanist desire to explore the nature of reading and writing as a means towards moral discernment, while simultaneously engaging with the history of poetry itself. The latter two run along parallel lines, ethics and poetics mutually defining each other: ‘To read sixteenth-century poetry is . . . to learn how the poets themselves understand their art historically. By remembering this simple formula, we discover a view of what the century’s poetry is, how it works, for whom, and toward what ends’.²⁰ Not until we grasp this can we write a history of sixteenth-century poetry in Britain, and this nexus of the metafictional, the reader-focused, and the moral is manifestly a core defining characteristic of Middle Scots poetry. Moreover, learning to articulate an awareness of such a poetics, students of Older Scots verse become acutely aware of the interpretative models that subsequent literary-critical practices have put between us and sixteenth-century texts, making an Anglo-centric literary-critical tradition no longer the sole measure, nor its evolution self-evident. The religious teleology of Stewart’s manuscript provides a template for Scots postReformation writing more widely. The first major female poet emerges from such a combination of literary self-consciousness within a confessional worldview. Elizabeth Melville was persuaded by her own coterie in Fife to publish her allegorical Ane Godlie Dreame (1603, though almost certainly composed in the 1590s).²¹ This spiritual autobiography demonstrates affective piety rather than firebrand Calvinism. When her recently discovered ¹⁸ John Stewart of Baldynneis, in Thomas Crockett (ed.), Poems of John Stewart of Baldynneis, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1913). ¹⁹ Transcreation is the ‘aesthetic re-interpretation of the original work suited to the readers/audience of the target language in the particular time and space. This reinterpretation is done with a certain social purpose and is performed with suitable interpolations, explanations, expansions, summarising and aesthetic innovations in style and techniques’: G. Gopinathan, ‘Translation, Transcreation and Culture: The Evolving Theories of Translation in Indian Languages’, in Theo Hermans (ed.), Translating Others, Vol. 1 (Manchester, 2006), 236–46, 237. ²⁰ Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), 3. ²¹ See Elizabeth Melville, in Jamie Reid-Baxter (ed.), Poems of Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (Edinburgh, 2010).
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399 shorter, more intimate lyrics are better known, this will further emancipate contemporary Calvinist writing from its fanaticist stereotype, foregrounding instead particularly female religiously inspired seventeenth-century writers such as Lilias Skene (1628–97). This draws attention to the growing involvement of women in literary production, not necessarily as writers but as readers, manuscript compilers (Marie Maitland’s involvement with the Maitland Quarto, c 1585), or calligraphers (Esther Inglis, 1571–1624), again emerging from cross-sections of family networks of legal, mercantile, and magistrate elites and lairds [the landed gentry] rather than the court. Women’s appearance in the cultural dynamic embodies the quest of Scots textual communities trying to evolve public literary voices.
Lyrical Writing from James V Onwards The body of medieval Scots lyric is surprisingly small.²² Dunbar, instanced above, is a singular exception. His vernacular freely synthesises churchmen’s Latin with Chaucerian English and the language of the French rhétoriqueurs to deliver a ‘slee’ [intellectually acute, even wily], sappy, subtle, sinuous vernacular. Subsequent lyricists developed a literary Scots exploiting, respectively, Dunbar’s emphasis on lyric as something spoken; his awareness of the tension between the spontaneity of colloquial orality and literary artifice; and his exceptional variety in prosody and diction, accommodating brisk changes of tone and matter, and including popular discourse. James V’s two marriages in quick succession to French brides of great political-dynastic calibre heralded a new lyrical era. Madeleine de Valois, daughter of the French king, died shortly after the wedding (1537), but James’s next wife, Mary of Guise, outlived her husband and eventually became Regent of Scotland (1554–60). This French influence gave courtly lyric a new impetus, and where contemporary England experiences the initial impact of Italian sonnets, Scots embrace the French chanson and related influences to shape its lyrical personae.²³ French influence continues with Mary Queen of Scots’ return from France in 1561 to rule Scotland in person. Events, however, curtailed her literary impact.²⁴ Her personal reign ended in 1567, and, while the Bannatyne Manuscript manifests contemporary interest in literature for courtly occasions, this literature is more often at court rather than emanating from it, appearing, in particular, where urban agents overlap with the wider court household. In the poems on or of love in the fourth section of the Bannatyne Manuscript (its ‘buik of lufe’), any foreign influence courses through native veins rather than being filtered through the consciousness of courtiers in the mode of Wyatt or Surrey. Three of the four key contemporary lyricists in this section (Alexander Scott, John Fethy, Alexander Kyd) were employed by burgh song schools, collegiate churches, and/or the Chapel Royal. Musical dimensions as well as didactic, clerical, and moral rather than idiosyncratic emphases shape their poems. In Bannatyne’s ‘buik of lufe’, courtly poems encounter those that address profane love from different angles, their tones ranging from thoughtful contemplation to misogynist satire. Helena Shire’s analysis of what happens in the Scots adaptation of a ²² See Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘The Cultural Repertory of Middle Scots Lyric Verse’, in Gillis J. Dorleijn and Herman L. J. Vanstiphout (eds), Cultural Repertoires: Structure, Function and Dynamics (Leuven, 2003), 59–86. ²³ See Helena Mennie Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King James VI (Cambridge, 1969), 38. ²⁴ The extraordinary ‘casket sonnets’ attributed to Mary are in French and thus fall outside the remit of the present volume, though their notoriety may have adversely affected literary expression by women in Scotland generally.
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400 - Marot chanson applies to a number of Scottish poems: ‘in the French, a suit is pressed in a love-song; in Scots a gesture of love is celebrated . . . the northern poet has carried the piece back into the Middle Ages’.²⁵ Crucially, as stated earlier, rather than referring to consecutive historical periods ‘the medieval’ and ‘the modern’ here represent twin sets of cultural sensibilities operating simultaneously, in the same way that one can still appreciate Beethoven when the Beatles have happened. Refusing to acknowledge this risks not hearing the literature and obscuring the way Shire’s comment marks an achievement as well as its limitation, implying the continued Scots penchant for polyphonic song, in which clerical and courtly sensibilities combined memorably evoke feeling. A song by John Fethy illustrates the ‘knotted plain style’ of such poet-musicians, the keynote again provided by a poignant refrain: First quhen* I kest my fantasy*, thair fermly did I stand, *when *fancy And howpit weill that scho* suld be all hail* at my command *she *wholly Bot suddanly scho did ganestand* and contrair* maid debait. *gainsay *contrarily Cauld*, cauld culis* the lufe that kendillis *our het*. *Cold *cools *too hotly Hir proper makdome* so perfyt, hir visage cleir of hew, *shape, appearance Scho raissis on me sic* appetite and causis me hir persew. *such an Allace, scho will nocht on me rew*, nor gre* with mine estait. *take pity *agree Cauld cauld culis the lufe that kendillis our het. (Fethy, ‘Pansing [pondering] in hairt with spreit opprest’, lines 22–35, Ballattis of Luve, 60)²⁶
Somewhere between didactic message and sober reflection on amatory experience, such haunting reminders of love’s anguish readily align with both clerical emphases and Ovidian satire. Such writing straddles the porous borderline between courtly love and the remedy of love, easily shading into misogyny. Lyrics that avoid the latter while contributing to the querelle des femmes often do so through recourse to universals that frame such poems as a querelle de l’homme, gravitating towards the patriarchal, though space remains for relishing the purely physical: Thou, Cupeid king, rewardit me with this. *own, natural *disloyalty I am thy awin* trew liege without tressone*. Thair levis* no man in moir eis*, welth and blis. *lives *ease, comfort I knaw no siching*, sadnes nor yit soun*, *sighing *sound, outcry Walking*, thocht*, langour, lamentatioun, *Waking *thought, anxiety ... *look after, take care of My lady, lord, thou gaif me for to hird*, Within mine armes I *nureis on* the nycht. *cherish Kissing, I say: ‘My bab, my tendir bird, *person, creature Sweit maistres, lady luffe and lusty wicht*, Steir*, rewll and gyder of my sensis richt’. *Controller (Alexander Scott, ‘Up, helsum hairt, thy rutis rais and lowp’, lines 11–15, 21–5, Ballattis of Luve, 81–2)
²⁵ Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry, 40. ²⁶ John MacQueen (ed.), Ballattis of Luve: The Scottish Courtly Love Lyric, 1400–1570 (Edinburgh, 1970).
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401 The persona is no longer Dunbar’s ironic bystander but a participant in the sexual, expressing amatory joy through subverting the encoded movements of courtly love (sighing, sadness, languor) and through concretising the lady as ‘gyder’ of his senses. What the poem lacks in transcendent sublime it gains by celebrating the transformative effect of the real thing (a frequent modus operandi in later Scots lyric, too: we are on our way to Burns here). Moreover, such playful, not necessarily satirical generic parody highlights a crucial feature of sixteenth-century Scots lyric: what we learn about the persona’s heart is expressed in terms of the poet’s metafictional engagement with his art. This aligns with the discussion of Scots narrative verse above, requiring ‘a shift from reading for the subject of power to reading for the intertext of the author’; it is here we see ‘how a poet contributes to the formation of identity, because in our reading method we attend to the author’s role in the making of the subject’.²⁷ The following poem instances an additional twist in the evolution of Scots lyric: *Richt soir* opprest am I with paines smart *Very painfully Both night and day makand* my wofull moan *making To Venus quein, that ladie hes my heart *beset, overcome Put in so gret distres with wo begone*, *Bot gif* that she send me remeid anone* *Unless *immediately I list* no langer my lyf *till induir* *wish *to endure Bot to the death bound* cairfull* creatour. *bound, prepared *sorrowful (Anonymous, ‘Richt soir opprest am I with paines smart’, lines 1–7, Music of Scotland, 160–1)²⁸
Reformers regularly ‘repurposed’ such worldly songs by using their melodies and opening lines but changing subsequent lines towards godly ends. Protestant sensibilities could thus be suggestively conveyed and readily passed on, here by changing the third line to ‘To God for my mysdeid, quhilk [who/which] hes my hart’, and changing ‘she’ into ‘he’ in line 5 (Gude and Godlie Balllatis, 134).²⁹ The popular Gude and Godlie Balllatis includes many such ‘godlified’ songs. Its oldest extant print dates from 1565 but contains texts going back several decades. Later editions constantly revise earlier content, again indicating the functionality of Scots verse and its attendant (inter)textual practice. The same applies to satirical poems that circulated as polemical broadsheets during the civil conflict (1567–73) after Mary Queen of Scots’ divisive reign. Their tone is partisan, their content, unlike Lyndsay’s Satyre, often reduced to their historical moment, but this literature, too, exploits features of earlier Scots verse and stanza-forms, again as part of a continued attempt to craft public literary voices. One voice stands out in particular: ‘Maddie of the Fish/Kail Mercat’, articulating ‘the people’ in demotic fashion.³⁰ In a less centrally controlled public sphere, different voices prevail in Scots literature compared to its metropolitan counterparts. The conventional notion that it waxed and waned in line with adult monarchs’ reigns requires nuancing: Scots poetry continuously adapted to political situation, and we need to (re-) educate ourselves to hear its many voices. ²⁷ Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry, 3–4. ²⁸ Kenneth Elliott, and Helena Mennie Shire (eds), Musica Britannica, Vol. 15, Music of Scotland 1500–1700, third revised edition (London, 1975). ²⁹ Alasdair A. MacDonald (ed.), The Gude and Godlie Ballatis (Edinburgh, 2015). ³⁰ See James Cranstoun (ed.), Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1889–93), 2.33n.
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402 - James VI (born 1566) is a key catalyst for the evolution of Scots lyric. His tutor, George Buchanan (arguably Europe’s most formidable mid-century neo-Latin poet and playwright), taught James a love of literature and rhetoric, particularly in Latin. Nevertheless, James encouraged Scots poets to use the expressive qualities of the vernacular in literature, as in ‘Ane Schort Treatise Conteining Some Reulis and Cautelis [crafty stratagems] to be Observit and Eschewit [achieved] in Scottis Poesie’ in his Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie (1584). Pedantic at times, the treatise shows real insights into Scots verse of the past and genuine commitment to its future. In gamely fashion, it discusses metre and prosody; promotes proverbs and alliteration as effective ways of capitalising on linguistic features of Scots; stipulates what is off limits to poets (notably ‘materis of commoun weill’, that is, matters of the commonwealth or of state); and which stanza-form best suits which topic: for example, ababbcc (rhyme royal) for ‘tragicall materis, complaintis or testamentis’, and ababcc (sixain) for ‘materis of love’, reserving the sonnet for ‘compendious praysing of any bukes or the authoris thairof or ony argumentis of uther historeis’ (James VI, ‘Schort Treatise’, Mercat Anthology, 468–70).³¹ This intervention shows James’s humanist grounding, defining the sonnet as a forensic, intellective rather than affective format. Scotland had ignored the mid-century generation of ‘Italianising’ sonneteers in England. When Scots sonnets do arrive in numbers in the 1580s, they display a refreshing width of both topic and tone, giving the makars’ register full rein. In an Elizabethan context, the Petrarchan scenario of writing to an unattainable ‘sovereign’ female made sense; in contrast, James VI’s court poets write sonnets more as part of homosocial discourse. When Alexander Montgomerie, James’s ‘maister poet’, thanks the lawyer who lost him a life-defining court case, his sonnet’s tenor is neither Petrarchan nor courtly: A *Baxters bird*, a bluiter* beggar borne, *baker’s boy *upstart, fool, scoundrel *Ane ill heud huirsone lyk a barkit hyde*, *a whoreson ill-hued like a tanned hide A *saulles suinger* seuintie tymes mensuorne*, *ignoble rogue *perjured A *peltrie pultron poyson’d vp* with pryde, *worthless wretch envenomed A treuthless tongue that turnes with eviry tyde, *endued A double deillar with dissait indeu’d*, A *luiker bak* vhare he wes bund to byde*, *[see Luke 9:62] *stay in place A retrospicien* vhom the Lord outspeud*, *‘looker-back’ *[see Revelation 3:16] *A brybour baird that mekle baill hes breud*, *A vagrant bard who has bred much woe Ane Hypocrit, ane ydill Atheist als*, *also A skurvie skybell* for to be esheu’d*, *rogue *avoided A faithles, fekles, fingerless* and fals *faithless [see John 20:27] A turk* that tint* Tranent* for the Tolbuith*: *infidel *lost *nearby town *income? Quha reids this riddill he is sharpe* forsuith. *[John Sharp of Houston, his lawyer] (Montgomerie, ‘Of M. J. Sharpe’, lines 1–14, Poems, 1.112)
Mixing flyting with faith, scurrility with Scripture, Scots lyrical experimentation provides many such surprises, and those raised on an English sonnet diet are required to ‘disremember’ their expectations. Scots sonnets also instance how the argumentative and intellective predominate in Scots lyric generally, sometimes closer kin to Gaelic than to English writing.
³¹ R. D. S. Jack, and P. A. T. Rozendaal (eds), The Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature 1375–1707 (Edinburgh, 1997).
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403 Stanza-form is again instrumental in establishing the distinctiveness of Scots. Where English poets refashioned the usual Italian structure of octave and sestet into a more linear set-up of three quatrains and a couplet (most commonly ababcdcdefefgg), Scots poets, guided by James’s Reulis and Cautelis, evolved a sonnet format of three interlaced quatrains, perhaps simply through expanding ballat royal (ababbcbc), their much-favoured high-style rhyme scheme. This means Scots poets initially favoured ababbcbccdcdee, now known as the ‘Spenserian’ sonnet, apparently named after ‘its occurrence in Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), but its published debut appears to have been in James VI’s Essayes of a Prentise . . . (1584), where both the king’s own sonnets and those dedicated to him are all in the “Spenserian” form’.³² Most critically, Scots poetry arrived here by pursuing its own predilections: a formal challenge, presented by a demanding rhyme scheme (the interlacing means fewer rhymes are available) that facilitates a linear mindset rather than going round in Petrarchan circles, covering any topic that requires persuasive argumentation, using any tone that may assist in that objective. In terms of sonnet sequences, too, the Scottish experience is different. Where English authors follow Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Scots poets often preferred shorter sequences, on a range of thematic issues, such as ‘Of Death’ by William Fowler. In another short sonnet sequence, the same author’s ‘Sonett pedantesque’ represents a grotesque parody of conventional sonneteering that again instances the Scots’ fondness for form and experiment, content often relevant mainly as a catalyst for an engagement with the medium (Fowler, Works, 224–5, 233–43).³³ Not until William Alexander’s Aurora (written prior to 1601; printed 1604) does Scotland produce an amatory sonnet sequence in print that resembles those of Petrarch or Sidney; it was, moreover, thoroughly Anglicised. Montgomerie’s attempts to articulate a new Zeitgeist push him towards the mannerist, or even Baroque.³⁴ Another, contrastive influence should be mentioned here: Protestantism. The language and imagery of Protestant polemics of sixteenth-century Scotland had developed apocalyptic and prophetic, sometimes militant tendencies. In poetry this manifested itself in the above-mentioned broadsheets. Where the makars, often through allegory, confronted the reader with ambiguity and open-endedness, much post-Reformation energy was aimed at pinning down the meaning of Scripture in the vernacular. An old-style poetics of words and their contingency gives way to a poetics of the Word and the Absolute, in which Boccaccio’s command to ‘read, and read again’ and explore multiple layers of meaning in literary text now becomes a command to ‘read diligently’ to find the one Truth.³⁵ An explicitly Protestant poet whose verse nevertheless connects with pre-Reformation vernacular writing is Alexander Hume. He burnt his own court poetry and became minister of Logie near Stirling, urging Elizabeth Melville to publish her work. His appealing ‘Of the ³² Roderick J. Lyall, ‘ “A New Maid Channoun”? Redefining the Canonical in Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Literature’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 26 (1991), 1–18, 13. There is no evidence of any cross-border influence. ³³ William Fowler, in Henry W. Meikle, et al. (eds), The Works of William Fowler, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1914–40). On Fowler’s sequences, see Sebastiaan Verweij, ‘The Manuscripts of William Fowler: A Revaluation of The Tarantula of Love, A Sonnet Sequence, and Of Death’, Scottish Studies Review, 8.2 (2007), 9–23. ³⁴ See Roderick J. Lyall, Alexander Montgomerie: Poetry, Politics, and Cultural Change in Jacobean Scotland (Tempe, AZ, 2005). ³⁵ For ‘read, and read again’, see Douglas, ‘Reid, reid agane’, Virgil’s Aeneid, 6, Prologue, line 12, referencing Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, Book 14, section 12; see Giovanni Boccaccio, in Charles G. Osgood (ed. and trans.), Boccaccio on Poetry (Princeton, NJ, 1930), 62. The command to ‘read diligently’ comes from the ‘Argument’ to Revelation in the Geneva Bible (1560), cited in Crawford Gribben, ‘Deconstructing the Geneva Bible: The Search for a Puritan Poetic’, Literature and Theology, 14.11 (2000), 1–16, 5.
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404 - Day Estivall’ [summer’s day] (1599) seeks to hide literary effect but nevertheless conveys the beauty of God’s creation. Its serenity is achieved by using the tone of Dunbar’s meditative verse to filter the highly stylised language of Gavin Douglas’s nature prologues. Hume’s ‘Epistle to Gilbert Moncrieff ’ similarly appeals because of its confessional tone expressed in everyday language.³⁶ It uses the epistolary genre as a front for autobiography to produce a vernacular far removed from the hectoring tone of more polemical writing, shaping Scots as a literary language from within its own resources. Other less militant Protestant poets included the king himself. James VI took a profound interest in religion and theology, as did some of the poets connected to his court, such as William Fowler, translator of Machiavelli. James was particularly keen on the work of Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, the renowned French Huguenot poet. Leading by example, James urged writers at his court to translate work by Du Bartas, such as Thomas Hudson’s Judith (1584). While the notion that poets at James’s court formed a ‘Castalian Band’ of brothers is now discredited, James’s joined-up thinking does indicate a ‘community’ of sorts.³⁷ Hudson agreed to translate Judith over dinner with James, an image that suggests a different cultural dynamics from the Elizabethan court. By 1600, James’s Protestant credentials were beyond doubt, allowing him to succeed Elizabeth on the English throne. His literary interests played a significant part in this, having encouraged English poets to visit Scotland, and despite controversies around James’s own epic poem Lepanto (1591), which celebrated the Catholic victory over the Ottoman fleet in 1571, and the depiction of James’s mother as Duessa in The Faerie Queene.³⁸ Marking their king’s departure to England in 1603, Scottish poets remind James of particular emphases within Scots poetics, even if expressed in an increasingly Anglicised Scots. Sir Robert Ayton’s sonnet ‘Faire famous flood, which sometyme did devyde’ commemorates the moment when James crossed the River Tweed into England in 1603. It makes the Tweed ‘spokesperson’ of the Scots, urging the river to deliver its valediction via the seas ‘To that Religious place whose stately walls / Does keepe the heart which all our hearts inthralls’ (Ayton, ‘Faire famous flood’, lines 13–14, English and Latin Poems, 167),³⁹ namely, Westminster. But a Scots eye uncovers another poem beneath this sonnet’s surface: it adopts the rhyme scheme James advised (ababbcbccdcdee), and a Scots ear makes better sense of the key rhyme ‘farewell / reveale’ (lines 6, 8). Moreover, the ‘heart’ in line 14 may also be the heart of King Robert the Bruce, buried in Melrose Abbey, a ‘Religious place whose stately walls’ are indeed on the banks of the River Tweed. Again, reading Scots poetry one has to practise a ‘double hermeneutics’: formalist and historicist, court and ‘commoun weill’, English and Scots. Only then will we understand why sixteenth-century England, when looking for a complete, Anglophone translation of the foundational epic of the Western world, printed Gavin Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid before producing its own.
³⁶ These two poems can be found in Alexander Lawson (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Hume (Edinburgh, 1902), 25–33 and 68–79, respectively. ³⁷ Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘James VI’s Castalian Band: A Modern Myth’, Scottish Historical Review, 80.2 (2001), 251–9. ³⁸ See Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Masks of Duessa: Spenser, Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI’, English Literary Renaissance, 17.2 (1987), 224–42. ³⁹ Sir Robert Ayton, in Charles B. Gullans (ed.), The English and Latin Poems of Sir Robert Ayton (Edinburgh, 1963).
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23 Wyatt and Surrey Cathy Shrank
In the latter end of [Henry VIII’s] reign sprung up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder and Henry, Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having travelled into Italy and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English meter and style. (Puttenham, Art, 148)¹ George Puttenham’s much-cited assessment of the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey—published in 1589 but written in the mid-1560s, only two decades after both men’s deaths—is emblematic of their subsequent reception. Despite the work of critics such as Seth Lerer and Maura Nolan, who have done much to remind us of the use these poets made of their vernacular, medieval heritage, it is as Italianate innovators that they are generally remembered.² This focus on Italian influences often obscures their role as translators of Classical Latin (most notably, Surrey’s verse translations of Aeneid 2 and 4) and as authors of the earliest Tudor vernacular verse paraphrases of biblical material (Psalms and, for Surrey, Ecclesiastes); these works were all available in print by the time Puttenham was composing his treatise. Puttenham also contributes to a long tradition (further witnessed by this chapter) of treating Wyatt and Surrey as a pair: for him they are the ‘two chief lanterns of light’, ‘between whom [he] find[s] little difference’ (Puttenham, Art, 150). This chapter uses Puttenham’s comments as a starting point for exploring the two poets’ oeuvres: it examines them as metrical innovators and translators, and considers the reasons for their being yoked together, as well as the differences that this effaces.
‘The first reformers and polishers of our vulgar poesy’³ The habitual pairing of Wyatt and Surrey must owe at least something to Surrey’s own selffashioning as the older man’s literary heir. Wyatt’s premature death aged thirty-eight in October 1542 spawned a flurry of elegies: by Sir Thomas Chaloner the Elder, John Leland,
¹ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ² See Seth Lerer, ‘The Medieval Inheritance of Early Tudor Poetry’, in Catherine Bates (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Chichester, 2018), 3–15; and Maura Nolan, ‘Style’, in Brian Cummings and James Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford, 2010), 396–419. ³ Puttenham, Art, 211. Cathy Shrank, Wyatt and Surrey In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Cathy Shrank 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0023
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406 - Sir Anthony St Leger, and Surrey.⁴ The fact that one of Surrey’s elegies—‘W[yatt] resteth here’—was printed, albeit anonymously, is described by William Sessions as a ‘startling act’.⁵ Printed elegies for persons below royal status were rare enough in the period. Surrey’s ‘W[yatt] resteth here’—printed in An Excellent Epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt alongside two anonymous ‘ditties’ on ‘the state of man’s life’—saw Surrey, heir to one of the country’s most powerful dukedoms, hyperbolically celebrating a ‘mere’ gentleman, a man whose father, Henry Wyatt, had only been granted arms in 1507–8, some years after Thomas’s birth.⁶ Surrey’s elegiac sonnet on Wyatt, ‘Divers thy death do diversely bemoan’, circulating in manuscript during Surrey’s lifetime, further strengthens the association between the two, portraying Surrey as Wyatt’s soulmate, weeping ‘As Pyramus did on Thisbe’s breast’ (Surrey, ‘Divers thy death’, line 14, Poems, 28).⁷ This poem also depicts Surrey as having a unique understanding of the dead man. The turn of the sonnet comes in line 9: ‘But I that know what harboured in that head’. The contrastive conjunction which begins the line positions Surrey as Wyatt’s one true mourner, distinguishing his emotion from the false or misplaced grief of ‘divers’ others described in the preceding quatrains. The conventional coupling of Wyatt and Surrey was given further heft and longevity by Songs and Sonnets (1557), commonly known as Tottel’s Miscellany. The poetry of both men seems to have circulated fairly widely in manuscript, and was—in Steven May’s words—‘in far more plentiful supply than is ordinarily supposed’.⁸ Copies of poems attributed to Wyatt appear in nineteen sixteenth-century manuscripts; Surrey’s much smaller oeuvre, in sixteen.⁹ As May observes, however, the number of extant manuscripts is no accurate measure of how many once circulated, since ‘the loss rate’ for manuscript copies of some poems, including Surrey’s translation of Aeneid 2, is ‘a 100 per cent’.¹⁰ Nonetheless, despite the undoubted significance of scribal circulation, most sixteenth-century readers would have encountered Wyatt’s and Surrey’s poetry via Richard Tottel’s best-selling miscellany: the first successful printed anthology of English secular verse, which went through no fewer than eleven printings before 1587.¹¹ Here, Surrey and Wyatt are bound together as authors of the first two sections of the book, their poems comprising over a third of the volume: they are the only poets referenced in the prefatory note ‘The Printer to the Reader’, and—after the erasure of Nicholas Grimald’s name from the second edition onwards—the only two acknowledged by name across the entire work. Their poems are then homogenised both by Tottel’s generic titles—often categorising poems in relation to ‘love’ or ‘the lover’—and by the ‘regularizing of metres . . . to align these poems with the cutting-edge accentual-syllabic
⁴ See Sir Thomas Chaloner the Elder, ‘Epitaphium nobilissimi equititis D. Tho. Viati, Senioris’, printed posthumously in his De Rep[ublica] Anglorum Instauranda Libri Decem (London, 1579), sigs. Z3v–Z4; John Leland, Naeniae in mortem Thomæ Viati equitis incomparabilis (1542); and Sir Anthony St Leger, ‘Thus liveth the dead’, in London, British Library, Harley MS 78, fol. 15. For Wyatt’s age at the time of his death, see Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (London, 2012), 65. ⁵ William A. Sessions, Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life (Oxford, 1999), 244. ⁶ See Susan Brigden, ‘Howard, Henry, earl of Surrey’, ODNB (2004). For the publication, see [Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, et al.], An excellent epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt with two other compendious ditties, wherein are touched, and set forth the state of man’s life (London, 1542). ⁷ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Emrys Jones (ed.), Poems (Oxford, 1964), spelling modernised. ⁸ Stephen May, ‘Popularizing Courtly Poetry: Tottel’s Miscellany and its Progeny’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009), 418–33, 418. ⁹ Data from Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM). www.celm-ms.org.uk. These figures exclude manuscripts containing only ‘incipits’ for musical settings, although those offer further evidence of the circulation of the two poets’ verses. ¹⁰ May, ‘Popularizing Courtly Poetry’, 422. ¹¹ May, ‘Popularizing Courtly Poetry’, 418.
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407 standards that were gradually replacing the rough accentual metres that had dominated English verse for at least a century’, a process that impacted on Wyatt’s poetry ‘above all’.¹² Since works of this period commonly circulated without ascriptions, or accrued erroneous ones, discussions of the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey are dogged by problems of attribution. Around 150 poems are either accredited to Wyatt in the sixteenth century and/or exist in the Egerton Manuscript (British Library MS Egerton 2711), which Wyatt owned and which contains poems revised or composed in his hand.¹³ Just under a third of these can be traced to an Italian source, with Francis Petrarch by far the most frequent author, followed by Serafino Aquilano. This core of 150 poems displays—as Chris Stamatakis observes—‘unprecedented experimentation in a range of literary modes and metres’.¹⁴ This ‘generic variety’ includes vernacular forms, such as rhyme royal, which is strongly associated with Chaucer and which Wyatt often deployed in his longer lyrics. However, Wyatt also repeatedly turns to non-Anglophone models, including French rondeaux and Italian ottava rima, as well as ‘new verse forms and genres’—‘sonnets and terza rima epistolary satire’—the importation of which is credited to Wyatt.¹⁵ The only prior example of English terza rima is ‘a short experiment’ by that other Italophile, Geoffrey Chaucer, comprising a brief section of ‘A Complaint to his Lady’ (lines 24–39).¹⁶ In addition to Stamatakis’s list of Wyatt’s metrical and generic innovations, we also have poulter’s measure—couplets of alternating hexameters and heptameters—and Psalm paraphrase. While translations and paraphrases of the Psalms became a well-established genre from the later 1540s, the creation of such works before the mid-1530s had been hampered by the ‘long shadow’ cast by Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions (1409), which outlawed English translations of any part of the Bible.¹⁷ This ‘punitive state and ecclesiastical legislation’ held until the 1530s, ‘even in the 1520s under pressure from the Lutheran heresy’.¹⁸ Probably composed in 1541, only two years after the publication of the first authorised English bible (the so-called ‘Great Bible’ of 1539),¹⁹ Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms thus have a novelty that tends to be obfuscated by the rapid growth in the genre in the years immediately after his death.²⁰ Wyatt’s Psalms also demonstrate his ability to recast his ¹² May, ‘Popularizing Courtly Poetry’, 425. ¹³ For a concise discussion of the issues regarding the authority of Egerton as ‘the keystone of the Wyatt canon’—Richard Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1975), vii—see Chris Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting: ‘Turning the Word’ (Oxford, 2012), 10–12. Wyatt’s oeuvre is probably larger than the ‘core’ of 150 poems. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (eds), in Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1969), include 268 poems (many certainly not by Wyatt). Joost Daalder (ed.), in Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems (London, 1975), includes 184. ¹⁴ Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting, 35. ¹⁵ Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting, 35. ¹⁶ See James Simpson, The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2, 1350–1547, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), 329. This poem can be found in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edition (Boston, MA, 1987), 642–3. ¹⁷ Vincent Gillespie, ‘Chichele’s Church’, in Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (eds), After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England (Turnhout, 2011), 1–42, 8. ¹⁸ Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 336. ¹⁹ For the Great Bible, see The Bible in English, that is to say the content of all the holy scripture, both of the old and new testament, truly translated after the verity of the Hebrew and Greek texts, by the diligent study of divers excellent learned men, expert in the forsaid tonges (London, 1539). ²⁰ For example, the year that Wyatt’s Psalms were printed—1549—also marked the publication of three other verse translations/paraphrases: Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins’ metrical Psalms (the most popular collection of ‘singing Psalms’ for the next 150 years); John Hall’s Certain chapters take[n] out of the Proverbs of Solomo[n], with other chapters of the holy scripture, [and] certain Psalms of David, translated into English metre, wrongly attributed to Sternhold, but containing at least one of Surrey’s translations; and Robert Crowley’s Psalter of David. See Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2004). See also Chapter 20 in this volume for a further discussion of Psalm paraphrase.
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408 - source material into different forms: none of Wyatt’s main sources—the Latin Vulgate; John Fisher’s Treatise Concerning the Fruitful Sayings of David (1508); Joannis Campensis’s Latin Psalmorum omnium . . . interpretatio (1532) and its anonymous English translation, Paraphrasis upon all the Psalms of David (1539); Pietro Aretino’s I Sette Salmi (1534); George Joye’s David’s Psalter (1534), translating Zwingli’s Latin version; and the Coverdale Bible (1535)²¹—are in verse. Wyatt renders Aretino’s prose—which he utilises for the narrative frame—into stanzas of eight decasyllabic lines: the first six alternating rhymes (ababab) both demonstrate Wyatt’s facility with rhyme and help to push on the narrative, while the couplet (cc) in lines 7–8 acts as climax and summary of the preceding stanza. The Psalms themselves are transformed into terza rima: these chain-rhymed tercets (ababcbcdc . . . )— looking backwards but ultimately driving forwards—are ideally suited to tracking the shape of David’s emotional and spiritual travails, as he experiences outbreaks of doubt—‘the shade / Of his offence again his force assays’ (Wyatt, Penitential Psalms, lines 421–2, Complete Poems, 206, my italics)—but gradually inches towards recognition of the ‘salvation’ that God’s ‘benignity’ provides (Wyatt, Penitential Psalms, lines 714, 774, Complete Poems, 215, 216).²² Even here, though, in this metrical and generic novelty, we can see Wyatt marrying innovation and tradition, giving his translation a robustly vernacular voice, a feature that also characterises his translations from Classical Latin, such as ‘Stand whoso list’ (see Wyatt, Complete Poems, 94).²³ His Psalms infuse accentual-syllabic metre (the up-and-coming mode) with echoes of ‘an earlier metrical tradition’, as a line such as ‘Measureless mercies to measureless fault’ (Wyatt, Penitential Psalms, line 526, Complete Poems, 209) ‘conforms to a classical alliterative line’, where two stressed alliterating syllables fall in the first half of the line, a third in the second, in the pattern aa/ax.²⁴ This alliterative structure also appears, with slight modifications, in lines such as ‘In mortal maid, in mortal habit made’ (Wyatt, Penitential Psalms, line 701, Complete Poems, 214), which introduces an additional alliterating stress (in response to the demands of the decasyllabic line), or inverted—(xa/aa)—as in ‘Torn off with death (for death should have her doom)’ (Wyatt, Penitential Psalms, line 705, Complete Poems, 214), the sonic patterning working with semantic repetition to invoke David’s intense, and often recursive, self-examination. In the mid-twentieth century, H. A. Mason could claim that ‘the general opinion is that Wyatt’s Psalms in terza rima are inferior to the so-called satires’.²⁵ They have since undergone considerable critical rehabilitation, and are (as Hannibal Hamlin notes) ‘beginning to be recognized as a complex and powerful work’.²⁶ Poulter’s measure—another of Wyatt’s apparent inventions, excoriated by C. S. Lewis as a ‘terrible’ metre—has been less fortunate.²⁷ Here, Wyatt does not assimilate a non-Anglophone form (as with terza rima or
²¹ For the Coverdale Bible, see Biblia the Bible, that is, the holy Scripture of the Old and New Testament, faithfully and truly translated out of [German] and Latin into English ([Zurich/Cologne/Marburg?], 1535). ²² Sir Thomas Wyatt, in R. A. Rebholz (ed.), The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, 1978). ²³ See Cathy Shrank, ‘Finding a Vernacular Voice: The Classical Translations of Sir Thomas Wyatt’, in Rita Copeland (ed.), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 1, 800–1558 (Oxford, 2016), 583–600, 593. ‘Stand whoso list’ translates Seneca’s Thyestes, 391–403; see Seneca, in John G. Finch (ed. and trans.), Tragedies, Vol. 2, Oedipus. Agamemnon. Thyestes. Hercules on Oeta. Octavia (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 266–7. ²⁴ Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 329. ²⁵ H. A. Mason, Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London, 1959), 203. ²⁶ Hannibal Hamlin, ‘Piety and Poetry: English Psalms from Miles Coverdale to Mary Sidney’, in Pincombe and Shrank (eds), Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, 203–21, 212. ²⁷ C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), 225.
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409 the sonnet), but he nonetheless responds to one. The immediate prompt for this metrical innovation seems to have been Petrarch’s Rime Sparse 37 (‘Sì è debile il filo’), translated by Wyatt as ‘So feeble is the thread’, the alternating hexameters and heptameters of poulter’s measure serving to translate the fluid form of Petrarchan canzoni, with their lines of varied length.²⁸ Further to that, despite Lewis’s disdain, the protracted lines of poulter’s measure— often requiring additions to the source text, and, through their length, inviting a clear caesura—aptly reflect the ennui of the lover as he, in turn, reflects on his protracted absence from his beloved, even as the frequent enjambment, tipping one line into the next, captures the poetic speaker’s simultaneous sense of the rapid passage of time: ‘The time doth fleet and I perceive th’hours how they bend / So fast that I have scant the space to mark my coming end’ (Wyatt, ‘So feeble is the thread’, lines 15–16, Complete Poems, 109). Surrey’s smaller body of work (numbering fifty poems in Emrys Jones’s edition) enthusiastically adopts many of the metrical forms that Wyatt developed or Anglicised: notably the sonnet and poulter’s measure, both of which feature particularly prominently in Surrey’s canon. Surrey himself experimented with Italian versi sciolti, unrhymed hendecasyllabic lines, in his Aeneid translations, in pentameters (see Surrey, Poems, 35–88), and in his paraphrase of Psalm 55, ‘Give ear to my suit, Lord, fromward hide not thy face’, in hexameters (see Surrey, Poems, 101–2). James Simpson draws attention to the significance of contemporary Italian literary theory for Surrey’s choice of metre for poems featuring the impassioned orations of a suffering speaker (be it Aeneas, Dido, or David).²⁹ As Giovanni Giorgio Trissino argues in the preface to Sophonisba (1524), versi sciolti is ‘not only very useful in the narratives and speeches, but essential for moving to pity; for a speech which moves to pity is one born of suffering, and suffering seeks spontaneous expression, and therefore rhyme, which shows deliberation, is an obstacle to pity’.³⁰ Surrey’s blank verse is thus a hybrid: it adapts a vernacular, Italianate form in order to translate Classical and biblical Latin into English.³¹ In the process, it shucks off the catalectic ending of the Italian line (suited to syllabic patterning of that language, with its tendency to stress the penultimate syllable of a word) in favour of an end-stressed metre, suitable for sixteenth-century English, which no longer tended to sound the terminal -e.³² Further to that, it incorporates Scots idiom. Surrey’s debt to Gavin Douglas’s Scots translation of the Aeneid (composed 1513; printed in 1553) is widely acknowledged.³³ Surrey must have worked with both a Latin text and a manuscript of Douglas’s Eneados in front of him,³⁴ as can be seen from a comparison of lines near the opening of Book 2:
²⁸ The 150-poem ‘core’ of Wyatt’s canon contains two examples of poulter’s measure: ‘So feeble is the thread’ and ‘Iopas’ Song’ (see Wyatt, Complete Poems, 109–12, 217–20, respectively), both in Wyatt’s hand in the Egerton Manuscript. The belated position of the latter and its unfinished state possibly indicate that it postdates the former, which was probably composed during Wyatt’s embassy in Spain, 1537–40. For dating, see Jason Powell, ‘Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry in Embassy: Egerton 2711 and the Production of Literary Manuscripts Abroad’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67 (2004), 261–82. ²⁹ James Simpson ‘The Aeneid Translations of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: The Exiled Reader’s Presence’, in Copeland (ed.), Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 1, 601–24. ³⁰ Cited in Simpson ‘The Aeneid Translations’, 613. ³¹ ‘Versi sciolti’ literally means verses free from or not bound together by rhyme. ³² See Jeremy Smith, Sound Change and the History of English (Oxford, 2007), 131. ³³ See Simpson, ‘Aeneid Translations’, 610–12; and William McGaw (ed.), A Critical Edition of the Complete Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (Lewiston, 2012), 364ff. ³⁴ Sessions, Life, 282–3.
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410 - Troy discharged her long continued dole*. *grief The gates cast up, we issued out to play, The Greekish camp desirous to behold, The places void and the forsaken coasts. Here Pyrrhus’ band, there fierce Achilles’ pight*; *pitched Here rode their ships, there did their battles join. Astonished some the scatheful* gift beheld, *harmful Behight by vow unto the chaste Minerve*, *Minerva, goddess of wisdom and war All wondering at the hugeness of the horse. (Surrey, Aeneid 2, lines 36–44, Poems, 36)
Compare Douglas’s version: Quarfor all thaym of troy, blyth* as thay mocht Thare *langsum dule*, and murnyng dyd away Kest up the portis, and Ischit* out to play The Grekis tentis, desiris for to se And vode placis, quhare* thay war wont to be The coist and stryndis*, left desert at clene Here stude the army of dolypes*, sum wald mene
*cheerful *long-lasting sorrow *issued *where *streams *Dolopians (a people of Thessaly) *tent, pavilion
Cruell Achil here stentit his palyoun* Quhare stude the navy, lo the place younder doun Here the oistis* war wount, to jone in feild *host, armed company And sum woundering the skaithful* gift behelde *harmful Suld be offerit, to the unweddit Pallas* *Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom and war Thay mervellit first, the hors *sa mekle* was. *so large (Douglas, Eneados, sigs. E5v–E6)³⁵
Here is Virgil’s original: ergo omnis longo solvit se Teucria luctu. panduntur portae; iuvat ire et Dorica castra desertosque videre locos litusque relictum. hic Dolopum manus, hic saevus tendebat Achilles, classibus hic locus, hic acie certare solebant. pars stupet innuptae donum exitiale Minervae et molem mirantur equi. [So all the Teucrian land frees itself from its long sorrow. The gates are opened; it is a joy to go and see the Doric camp, the deserted stations and forsaken shore.
³⁵ Gavin Douglas, The xiii. bukes of Eneados of the famose poete Virgill translatet out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir, bi the Reuerend Father in God, Mayster Gawin Douglas Bishop of Dunkel [and] unkil to the Erle of Angus. Euery buke hauing hys perticular prologe (London, 1553).
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411 Here the Dolopian bands encamped, here cruel Achilles; here lay the fleet; here they used to meet us in battle. Some are amazed at maiden Minerva’s gift of death, and marvel at the massive horse.] (Virgil, Aeneid, 2.26–32, Aeneid: Books 1–6, 318–19)³⁶
Surrey is clearly influenced by Douglas, importing words and phrases almost wholesale: ‘dole’, ‘cast up’, ‘issued out to play’, ‘desirous’, ‘places void’, ‘the scatheful gift beheld’. Occasional changes to Douglas’s word order help to smooth his decasyllables into more regular iambic lines. Yet, freed from the need to make the rhyme—which often requires the insertion of ‘fillers’ such as Douglas’s ‘blyth as they mocht’ or ‘quahare they war wont to be’—Surrey’s version is both more efficient (taking sixty-five words to translate forty-three words of Latin compared with Douglas’s 104) and better able to replicate the rhetorical structure of the original, as in lines 40–1 (‘Here . . . join’), which picks up on Virgil’s use of anaphora, isocolon, phrases of similar length and structure, and zeugma, when one part of speech—usually the main verb—governs two or more parts of the sentence. ‘Astonied some’ (line 42), meanwhile, corresponds more closely to the force and sound of ‘pars stupet’ (2.31) than Douglas’s more prolix and mellifluous ‘And sum woundering’. Surrey is not bound to either source, however. The alliteration of the final line (‘hugeness. . . horse’) takes inspiration from either, or both, the Latin and Scots (‘molem mirantur’; ‘mervellit . . . mekle’) but finds a more natural English expression. Surrey also departs from both sources for emotive effect. The choice of the pronoun ‘we’ in line 37 reinserts Aeneas into his own narrative, from which he is distanced in both Virgil’s and Douglas’s accounts by the use of the third person (‘all thaym of troy’, ‘it is a joy’ [iuvat, 2.27]). Substituting ‘Dolopian’ [Dolopum, 2.29] with a direct reference to their leader, Pyrrhus, not only accentuates the link with Pyrrhus’s dead father, Achilles (with whom he now shares the poetic line), but also foreshadows the tragedy to come: it is Pyrrhus who will go on to slaughter Priam, the aged king of Troy, a scene related at length by Surrey at lines 644–730, and which Shakespeare may well restage in the player’s speech in Hamlet 2.2.390–440.³⁷ Surrey’s adaptation of versi sciolti left a lasting impact on English literature as the basis for blank verse. A metre described as ‘strange’ on the title page of his translation of Aeneid 4, printed by John Day for William Awen in 1554, was re-presented as ‘English metre’ on the title page of Richard Tottel’s 1557 edition, and was soon adopted as the most appropriate form for tragic verse drama (the first example being Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc, performed in 1561 and first published in 1565).³⁸ Equally influential was Surrey’s and Wyatt’s assimilation of the sonnet. Surrey’s modification of the sonnet responded to the ‘skarsete’ [scarcity] of ‘rym in Englissh’ lamented in Chaucer’s ‘Complaint of Venus’ (Chaucer, ‘Complaint of Venus’, line 80, Riverside Chaucer, 649). Easing the necessity of finding two sets of four rhyming words, as required by the Petrarchan octave
³⁶ Virgil, in H. Rushton Fairclough (trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1–6 (Cambridge, MA, 1999). ³⁷ See Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘What is My Nation? Language, Verse, and Politics in Tudor Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid’, in Pincombe and Shrank (eds), Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, 389–403, 401–2. For the player’s speech in Hamlet, see Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016), 1797–8. ³⁸ Compare The fourth book of Virgil intreating of the love between Aeneas and Dido, translated into English, and drawn into a stra[n]ge metre by Henry late Earl of Surrey, worthy to be embraced (London, 1554) with Certain books of Virgil’s Aeneis turned into English metre by the right honourable lord, Henry Earle of Surrey (London, 1557). See also the discussion of Douglas’ and Surrey’s translations of Virgil in Chapter 15 in this volume.
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412 - (abbaabba), Surrey created what would come to be known as the ‘English’ or (overwriting Surrey’s contribution) the ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet, which comprises three alternately rhymed quatrains (abab cdcd efef) and a final couplet (gg). In contrast—despite the exigencies of rhyme—Wyatt almost always keeps the Petrarchan octave. This seeming fondness for a repetitiveness of sound is also found in his longer lyrics, where entire stanzas frequently rely on just two rhymes.³⁹ The only exceptions to Wyatt’s propensity for retaining the Petrarchan octave are the double sonnet ‘The flaming sighs’, which introduces a second set of enclosed rhymes (cddc) for lines 5–8 (see Wyatt, ‘The flaming sighs’, Complete Poems, 88), and ‘Such is the course’, where Wyatt departs from Petrarch’s enclosed rhymes, but amplifies—rather than diminishes—the challenge of making rhymes by having three (not two) quatrains of the same alternate rhyme, abab (see Wyatt, ‘Such is the course’, Complete Poems, 90). Despite a tendency to adhere to the Petrarchan octave, Wyatt’s sonnets invariably end in a rhyming couplet, setting a pattern for other English sonneteers. The looser progression of rhymes found in the Petrarchan sestet often coincides with the point at which Petrarch strikes a more meditative note, or turns away from the intense focus on the feelings of his poetic speaker, as at the end of Rime Sparse 269, which closes with a universalising reflection in the final three lines of a sestet rhyming cdcdcd: ‘O nostra vita ch’ è sì bella in vista, / com’ perde agevolmente in un matino / quel che ‘n molti anni a gran pena s’acquista’ [Oh our life that is so beautiful to see, how easily it loses in one morning what has been acquired with great difficulty over many years!] (Rime Sparse 269, ‘Rotta è l’alta colonna’, lines 12–14, Lyric Poems, 442–3).⁴⁰ In English sonnets, following Wyatt, this is replaced by a drive towards the aural full stop of the rhyming couplet which frequently introduces an epigrammatic note and shifts the ‘turn’ of the sonnet from the beginning of the ninth line to the thirteenth. Wyatt’s development of the final couplet may have been inspired by Italian strambotti (rhyming abababcc): certainly, the pithy potential of the rhyming couplet is strongly present in ‘My heart I gave thee’, where Wyatt collapses two of Serafino’s eight-line strambotti into a fourteen-line sonnet, concluding, ‘For he that believeth bearing in hand, / Plougheth in water and soweth in the sand’ (Wyatt, ‘My heart I gave thee’, lines 13–14, Complete Poems, 78). Aside from the fact that Wyatt strengthens the equation between love of a woman and being deceived by making love synonymous with being borne ‘in hand’ (line 13), the form, tone, and content is a close rendition of Serafino’s original: ‘perche chi pone lo suo amor in femina / Zappa nel acqua, & ne l’harena semina’ [For who puts his love in a woman / Ploughs in water and sows in the sand] (Opere volgari, sig. P1).⁴¹ So far, then, Puttenham’s assessment of Wyatt and Surrey as ‘reformers of our English meter and style’, indebted to—or inspired by—Italian models, rings true. Nonetheless, neither poet follows these Italian metres slavishly. We repeatedly see Wyatt, for example, taking Italian forms and producing something different: compressing two strambotti into a sonnet (as above); stretching the varied lines of a Petrarchan canzone (between seven and eleven syllables long) into poulter’s measure (as with ‘So feeble is the thread’); or extending a sonnet into a rondeau (as with ‘Go, ³⁹ For example, see Wyatt’s ‘Though I cannot your cruelty constrain’ (aabba), ‘What death is worse than this’ (ababba), ‘Alas, the grief and deadly woeful smart’ (aababb), ‘Since ye delight to know’ (aabbaab), and ‘Lo, what it is to love’ (aabbabba), in Complete Poems, 141–2, 178, 263–4, 164–5, and 165–8, respectively. ⁴⁰ Francis Petrarch, in Robert M. Durling (ed. and trans.), Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA, 1976). ⁴¹ Serafino Aquilano, Opere volgari (Fano, 1516).
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413 burning sighs’, a version of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse 153, ‘Ite caldi sospiri’, Lyric Poems, 298–9).⁴² Both poets also fuse these non-Anglophone forms with older, vernacular idioms and poetic traditions, moulding them to fit English rhythms of speech. Feminine rhymes—which dominate in Italian—are characteristically reduced to accommodate the greater number of monosyllabic and end-stressed English words, while alliteration is recurrently used to provide the patterning of sound supplied, in the original, by the higher proportion of similar sounding word-endings in Italian. The next section tests Puttenham’s assertion that there is ‘little difference’ between the two poets, beginning with their responses to Petrarch’s Rime Sparse 189.
‘Imitating very naturally and studiously their master Francis Petrarch’⁴³ Passa la nave mia colmo d’oblio per aspro mare a mezza notte il verno enfra Scilla et Caribdi, et al governo siede ’l signore anzi ’l nimicio mio; à ciascun remo un penser pronto et rio che la tempesta e ’l fin par ch’ abbi a scherno; la vela rompe un vento umido eterno di sospir, di speranze et di desio; pioggia di lagrimar, nebbia di sdegni bagna et rallenta le già stancher sarte che son d’error con ignoranzia attorto. Celansi i duo mei dolci usati segni, morta fra l’onde è la ragion et l’arte tal ch’ i’ncomincio a desperar del porto. [My ship laden with forgetfulness passes through a harsh sea, at midnight, in winter, between Scylla and Charybdis, and at the tiller sits my lord, rather my enemy; each oar is manned by a ready, cruel thought that seems to scorn the tempest and the end; a wet, changeless wind of sighs, hopes, and desires breaks the sail; a rain of weeping, a mist of disdain wet and loosen the already weary ropes, made of error twisted up with ignorance. My two usual sweet stars are hidden; dead among the waves are reason and skill; so that I begin to despair of the port.] (Petrarch, Rime Sparse 189, ‘Passa la nave’, Lyric Poems, 334–5)
Wyatt’s translation of this Petrarch sonnet is, at first sight, fairly faithful, following his Petrarchan source pretty much line-for-line:
⁴² The latter poem can be found at Complete Poems, 72. Muir and Thomson (eds), Wyatt, Collected Poems (282), state that ‘Go, burning sighs’—like Petrarch’s Rime Sparse 121 (‘Or vedi, Amor’, Lyric Poems, 234–5), also rendered as a rondeau in Wyatt’s ‘Behold, Love’ (see Wyatt, Complete Poems, 71)—was ‘probably’ mediated via French sources, now lost or still unidentified. However, Wyatt was obviously willing to experiment with form and may be doing so here as well. ⁴³ Puttenham, Art, 150.
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414 - My galley charged with forgetfulness Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass ’Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas, That is my lord, steereth with cruelness; And every oar a thought in readiness As though that death were light in such a case. An endless wind doth tear the sail apace Of forced sighs and trusty fearfulness. A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain Hath done the wearied cords great hindrance, Wreathed with error and eke with ignorance. The stars be hid that led me to this pain. Drowned is reason that should me comfort And I remain despairing of the port. (Wyatt, ‘My galley charged with forgetfulness’, Complete Poems, 81)
Nevertheless, Wyatt’s deliberate departures from his source shift the tone of the poem in ways that epitomise his writing. Not least of these is a tendency to remove Petrarch’s mythological references—here substituting ‘rock and rock’ for ‘Scilla et Caribdi’ [Scylla and Charybdis] (line 3)—and to efface the more spiritual or ethereal aspects of his Petrarchan sources, as when Wyatt habitually translates the Italian ‘alma’ as ‘heart’ or ‘mind’, rather than ‘soul’.⁴⁴ Here, the heavenly associations of ‘eterno’ (line 7) are rendered, more mundanely, ‘endless’. Wyatt’s alterations also increase a sense of resentment, and of threat. ‘Reason’ is not just ‘morta’ [dead] as in Petrarch’s poem (line 13): it is ‘Drowned’, a choice of verb that holds a possibility of foul play, particularly in a poem where ‘mine enemy’ transpires to be ‘my lord’ (lines 3–4), Wyatt’s enjambment and the delay caused by the insertion of the sighing interjection ‘alas’ adding an extra element of suspense before the identity of the enemy is revealed. Wyatt injects his translation with a sense of persecuted victimhood. He amplifies the critique of the lord, who now ‘steereth with cruelness’ (line 4). This idea is implanted by the word ‘rio’ [cruel] that ends the following line in the Italian, but—in a move typical of Wyatt’s habits of translation—is now transferred to another part of the poem.⁴⁵ The ‘stars’—now ‘hid’—are also blamed, as they are not in the Italian, for leading him ‘to this pain’ (line 12), while his poetic speaker has been deprived of reason ‘that should me comfort’ (line 13), an addition to Petrarch which, with its modal verb ‘should’, inscribes a sense of obligation that is now unmet. The unreliability of those things on which one should be able to depend is further present in Wyatt’s rewriting of the final pair in Petrarch’s anaphoric triplet ‘of sighs, of hopes, and of desire’ as ‘trusty fearfulness’ (line 8), which demonstrates a Wyattian resistance to translating ‘speranza’ and related terms as ‘hope’.⁴⁶ Wyatt’s semantic preference for trust over hope dovetails with a concern that cuts across his ⁴⁴ See, e.g., ‘And after her mine heart [alma] would fain be gone’ (Wyatt, ‘Such vain thought as wonted to mislead me’, line 6, Complete Poems, 84; translating Petrarch, Rime Sparse 169, ‘Pien d’un vago penser’, line 6, Lyric Poems, 314–15; and ‘What can I more but have a woeful heart [alma]’ (Wyatt, ‘The pillar perished is whereto I leant’, line 10, Complete Poems, 86; translating Petrarch, Rime Sparse 269, ‘Rotta è l’alta colonna’, line 10, Lyric Poems, 442–3). ⁴⁵ See Shrank, ‘Finding a Vernacular Voice’, 589–90, 592–3. ⁴⁶ See Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London, 1998), 99.
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415 ‘original’ poetry as well as his translations.⁴⁷ His use of ‘trust’ customarily establishes expectations about standards of behaviour which are inevitably disappointed, as in ‘Love and Fortune and my mind’, which ends with ‘trust’ falling from the speaker’s hand: ‘I see that from mine hand falleth my trust [speranza]’ (Wyatt, ‘Love and Fortune and my mind’, line 13, Complete Poems, 82; translating Petrarch, Rime Sparse 124, ‘Amor, Fortuna’, Lyric Poems, 238–9). In the perilous world of ‘My galley charged with forgetfulness’, Wyatt’s decision to deploy oxymoron destabilises the concept of trust even further: all that is constant, all that can be relied on, it implies, is ‘fearfulness’. This sonnet also expresses the ‘paralysis’ that Simpson finds characteristic of what he calls ‘Wyatt’s elegiac poetry’⁴⁸: that is, poems whose speakers lament some kind of loss, usually of faith in, or possession of, a lover rather than the death of that lover.⁴⁹ This impasse is hinted at by the way in which Wyatt pluralises the nouns in line 2: for example, the nouns in Petrarch’s ‘aspro mare a mezza notte il inverno’ become ‘sharp seas in winter nights’, indicating an iterative situation, counter to his usual tendency—identified by Thomas M. Greene—to singularise and linearise Petrarch’s ‘circular plots’.⁵⁰ That sense of stalemate is reinforced by one small change to the final line: where Petrarch’s speaker ‘begins to despair’, Wyatt’s ‘remain[s] despairing’ (line 14, my italics). His emotional deadlock meshes perfectly with the aural stasis of the rhyming couplet. Such semantic details have the potential to alter meaning quite radically, as Wyatt himself was all too aware. As he wrote in the Tower of London, faced with a charge of high treason in 1541: it is a small thing in altering of one syllable either with pen or word that may make in the conceiving of truth much matter or error. For in this thing ‘I fear’, or ‘I trust’, seemeth but a small syllable changed, and yet it maketh a great difference. (Wyatt, Life and Letters, 197)⁵¹
‘I love another and thus I hate myself ’, writes Wyatt elsewhere (Wyatt, ‘I find no peace and all my war is done’, line 11, Complete Poems, 80; translating Petrarch, Rime Sparse 134, ‘Pace non trovo’, Lyric Poems, 272–3). The insertion of that ‘small’, monosyllabic word ‘thus’ transforms a line that otherwise reads almost identically: ‘et ò in odio me stesso, et amo altrui’ [and I hate myself and love another]. What in Petrarch are two contrary but simultaneously experienced emotions become, in Wyatt, cause and effect. As a translator, Wyatt recurrently reworks his source texts through these tiny semantic adjustments. Surrey’s rewritings generally take a different direction. The source of Surrey’s ‘O happy dames’ is usually traced to one of Serafino’s verse epistles, ‘Quella ingannata,
⁴⁷ ‘Trust’ and its derivatives appear twenty-five times across the ninety-seven poems in the Wyatt section of Songs and Sonnets, outdoing ‘truth’, another of Wyatt’s ‘key’ words (seventeen occurrences). ⁴⁸ Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 159. ⁴⁹ Only twice in his extant poems does Wyatt turn to the ‘in morte’ section of the Rime Sparse, where Petrarch imagines an ‘afterlife for love’, as his ‘sonnets transcend Laura’s death, depicting a love that will continue in its intensity and passion once her soul has ascended to heaven’: Ramie Targoff, ‘Passion’, in Cummings and Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations, 609–34, 614. The two poems that Wyatt takes from the ‘in morte’ section are ‘The pillar perished’—which removes all reference to a Laura-figure and is usually read as a lament on the fall of Wyatt’s patron, Thomas Cromwell—and the canzone ‘Mine old dear en’my’ (see Wyatt, Complete Poems, 103–7; translating Rime Sparse 360, ‘Quel antique mio dolce empio signore’, Lyric Poems, 560–9), in which the lover puts Love on trial, again without obvious reference to a dead beloved. ⁵⁰ Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982), 250–2. ⁵¹ Kenneth Muir, The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963).
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416 - afflitta & miseranda’ [That deceived, afflicted, and wretched woman], itself adapting Phyllis’s complaint from Ovid’s Heroides. Surrey—like Serafino and Ovid—ventriloquises a female voice (as such, pre-empting the 1590s vogue for female-voiced complaint), but he adopts the situation of Serafino’s poem only insofar as both feature a woman waiting for her loved one to return from the sea. Surrey’s protagonist is almost always read as his wife, Frances de Vere, left in England during Surrey’s military command in Boulogne, France, in 1544–6. She directs her—presumably oral—appeal to other women, asking for their empathy. It has none of the bitterness of Phyllis’s angry letter, addressed to her perfidious lover. Nor does Surrey adhere to either the verse form (terza rima) or the idiom of his supposed source: as McGaw notes, Surrey’s seven-line stanzas, combining four lines of common metre (alternating lines of eight and six syllables, rhyming abcb) with an octosyllabic tercet (ddd) is ‘unusual’, although it captures something of the syllabic and rhyming flexibility of a Petrarchan canzone.⁵² The only section that closely resembles Serafino’s verbally comes in lines 25–8: I stand the bitter night In my window, where I may see Before the winds how the clouds flee. Lo, what a mariner love has made me! (Surrey, ‘O happy dames’, lines 25–8, Poems, 21)
Serafino’s epistola reads: Ah quante volte quando il ciel simbruna a mezza notte uscio del freddo letto a sentir lhore, a remirar la luna. Fatta son marinar per questo effetto. [Ah, how many times when the sky darkens at midnight I have left my cold bed to hear the hours, to wonder again at the moon. I have been made a mariner because of this.] (Serafino Aquilano, Opere volgari, sig. F6v)
Arguably, Petrarch’s Rime Sparse 189 is as much, if not more, of a presence in Surrey’s lament, as can be seen if we turn to the second stanza: In ship, freight* with remembrance *freighted, laden Of words and pleasures past, He sails that hath in governance My life, while it may last; With scalding sighs, for want of gale, Furthering his hope, that is his sail Toward me, the sweet port of his avail. (Surrey, ‘O happy dames’, lines 8–14, Poems, 21)
⁵² McGaw (ed.), Critical Edition, 309.
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417 Surrey here transforms Petrarch’s metaphor: in Surrey’s poem, it manages to be both an actual ship, carrying the woman’s beloved, and a figurative one, laden—not, as in Petrarch, with ‘oblio’ (Rime Sparse 189, line 1) or Wyatt, following him, with ‘forgetfulness’ (Wyatt, ‘My galley charged’, line 1)—but rather with memories of former happiness: ‘remembrance / Of words and pleasures past’ (Surrey, ‘O happy dames’, lines 8–9). So too, when voiced by Frances de Vere, the statement that ‘he’ who sails the ship has ‘in governance / [Her] life’ (lines 10–11) takes on a literal, legal truth rather than a ‘poetic’ or metaphorical one, as it refers to her husband. Surrey also reverses the poem’s perspective, as well as its speaker’s gender: where Petrarch’s (and Wyatt’s) storm-battered speaker despairs of reaching harbour, Surrey’s protagonist becomes that ‘sweet port’ that awaits her absent lover (line 14). The voice of the poem is the fixed point, rather than the traveller; her ‘scalding sighs’ (line 12)—perhaps transferred from Petrarch’s ‘Ite, caldi sospiri’ (Rime Sparse 153, line 1, translated by Wyatt’s ‘Go, burning sighs’, Complete Poems, 72)—are not a threat (as in Petrarch’s and Wyatt’s second quatrains) but a welcome substitute for the wind that is failing to bring her beloved home. Pace Puttenham, Surrey’s engagement with his sources is here markedly different from Wyatt’s: where Wyatt tends to follow his sources, departing from them at select, strategic moments, Surrey is not averse to bricolage, melding together borrowings from different sources, as can be seen in ‘The sun hath twice brought forth the tender green’ (see Surrey, Poems, 6–7), assembled from identifiable snippets of the Rime Sparse and other Petrarchan commonplaces.⁵³ Despite penning some patently autobiographical poems—including ‘When Windsor walls’ and ‘London, hast thou accused me?’ (see Surrey, Poems, 24–5, 30–1)—Surrey seems to have been interested in impersonating other voices. The canon of Surrey’s poetry is smaller than Wyatt’s, but he uses personae which are obviously distinct from a lyric ‘I’ much more often: a shepherd in ‘In winter’s just return’, a woman in ‘O happy dames’, and ‘Good ladies, you that have your pleasure in exile’, another long lyric lamenting a husband’s absence (see Surrey, Poems, 12–14, 21–2, 22–3, respectively). This feature of his oeuvre is perhaps also reflected in the two books of the Aeneid (2 and 4) that he chose to translate: the former is almost entirely spoken by Aeneas; the latter, dominated by direct speech or thought, especially Dido’s. Where Surrey adopts different personae, Wyatt frequently intensifies the lyric ‘I’. This stems partly from structural differences between English and inflected languages like Italian and Latin, where an indication of person can be embedded within the verb forms. Translating from those languages into English inevitably increases the number of personal pronouns. Nevertheless, Wyatt maximises on the opportunities provided by this linguistic shift. His characteristic amplification of the first person reaches an apogee in ‘The pillar perished is’, his adaptation of Rime Sparse 269, where Petrarch’s five free-standing firstperson pronouns are almost tripled to thirteen across the fourteen lines of the sonnet and include the emphatically self-reflexive clause ‘And I myself myself always to hate’ (Wyatt, ‘The pillar perished is’, line 13, Complete Poems, 86). Wyatt also turns some of the sonnets that Petrarch addressed to others in the second person into poems exploring the experience of a lyric ‘I’. The contrast that Petrarch draws in Rime Sparse 98 (‘Orso, al vostro destrier’, Lyric Poems, 200–1) between Orso dell’Anguillara’s horse—which can be reined in—and his heart, which cannot, is transformed by Wyatt into an expression of self-censorship, bristling with first-person pronouns: ‘Though I myself be bridled of my mind’ (Wyatt, ‘Though
⁵³ See McGaw (ed.), Critical Edition, 245–50.
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418 - I myself be bridled’, line 1, Complete Poems, 80, my italics). The epigram ‘Of Carthage he’ reworks the opening lines of Rime Sparse 103 (‘Vinse Anibàl’, Lyric Poems, 206–7), addressed to Stefano Colonna the Younger, to similar effect: a poem written to advise another person becomes an examination of the poet-speaker’s own failure to ‘use his chance’ (Wyatt, ‘Of Carthage he’, line 2, Complete Poems, 93). Yet, for all Wyatt’s characteristic inwardness and emphasis on the self in his poems, they reveal little, despite critics’ recurrent attempts to read them biographically, particularly with regard to his relationship with Henry VIII’s doomed queen, Anne Boleyn. They maintain a circumspect opacity or ambiguity, as we can see if we return to ‘My galley charged with forgetfulness’. Extracted from its sequence—like all of Wyatt’s (and Surrey’s) Petrarchan translations—the sonnet floats free of the narrative into which Alessandro Vellutello’s influential edition (first printed 1525) had bound Petrarch’s poems, as Vellutello rearranged the order so that they mapped known events in the poet’s life, prefaced the work with a ‘Life of Petrarch’, and hedged each poem with extensive explanatory commentary.⁵⁴ Removed from this narrative, Wyatt’s poem lacks obvious references that might anchor its meaning, or even its genre as a ‘love’ lyric. The ‘stars’ are no longer an allusion to Laura’s eyes (‘my two usual sweet stars’, Rime Sparse 189, line 12), but could be read instead as indicating the twists and turns of a malevolent fortune. Like Wyatt’s lyric poetry, so too ‘the seemingly confessional character of his [Psalm] paraphrases has suggested to some readers a personal, obliquely autobiographical expression of . . . private experience’.⁵⁵ Surrey’s biblical paraphrases (from Ecclesiastes and the Psalms) are rendered in an unmediated first person, often evoked in their opening line. The shorter poems interleaved with Surrey’s Psalms further invite biographical readings by invoking known associates at court: ‘My Blage’ (Surrey, ‘The sudden storms’, line 11, Poems, 33); ‘My Denny’ (Surrey, ‘When reckless youth’, line 5, Poems, 32). In contrast, Stamatakis reminds us, in Wyatt’s sequence, such precise one-for-one correspondences are immediately frustrated by the presence of two distinct speakers—namely, a David persona who speaks from an intimate first-person perspective in the terza rima Psalms, and a narrator commenting more objectively from a third-person stance in the ottava rima prologues.⁵⁶
Wyatt’s version exhibits a complex and ambivalent relationship to his material: he both introduces a first-person voice not present in Aretino’s Sette Salmi (his source for the frame) and resists identification with the ‘I’ of both the frame and the Psalms themselves. Aretino’s frame is presented unproblematically in the author’s own voice, each narrative section headed with the words ‘Pietro Aretino’ in capital letters. Wyatt’s version eschews such marks of ownership. His revisions in the Egerton Manuscript, moreover, work to individuate David’s experience, rather than making him emblematic of penitent sinners more
⁵⁴ See William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 47–51. For Wyatt’s use of Vellutello’s edition, see also Patricia Thomson, ‘Wyatt and the Petrarchan Commentators’, Review of English Studies, 10 (1959), 225–33. ⁵⁵ Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting, 65. Stamatakis’s ‘some readers’ include H. A. Mason, ‘Wyatt and the Psalms. Part 1’, Times Literary Supplement (27 February 1953), 144; Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ, 1979), 237; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL, 1980), 114–23; and Greg Walker, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005), 354. ⁵⁶ Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting, 66.
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419 generally.⁵⁷ Thus David’s role as ‘comfort of us sinners’ is emended to ‘comfort of wretched sinners all’ (Wyatt, Penitential Psalms, line 78, Complete Poems, 197); ‘our David’ is recurrently revised to plain ‘David’ (Wyatt, Penitential Psalms, lines 293, 638, Complete Poems, 203, 212). The narrative frame also recedes as the work progresses: the sixth and final prologue departs from Aretino’s, its final two stanzas spoken almost entirely in David’s voice (see Wyatt, Penitential Psalms, lines 712–25, Complete Poems, 215). It is also David’s voice that is left resonating at the end of the poem as we have it: the closing pages of Aretino’s Sette Salmi are not translated, so that we end with Psalm 143, ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, hear my request’, rather than the author-narrator’s concluding words (see Wyatt, Penitential Psalms, lines 727–75, Complete Poems, 215–16). For Brian Cummings, ‘Wyatt’s Psalms . . . are as much self-concealing as selfrevealing’.⁵⁸ That same ‘characteristic’ guardedness permeates Wyatt’s secular poems, where it is often brought into sharp relief by the sociable settings they simultaneously evoke. Surrey’s poetry frequently lingers, appreciatively, on the natural world. He extends— and makes more species-specific—the description of spring in ‘The soote [sweet] season’ (see Surrey, Poems, 2), which uses Petrarch’s Rime Sparse 310 (‘Zefiro torna’, Lyric Poems, 488–9) as its launchpad; and he recurrently uses the natural world as a counterpoint to the suffering of the lyric ‘I’, as in ‘The sun hath twice brought forth the tender green’ (see Surrey, Poems, 6–7) or ‘Alas, so all things now do hold their peace’ (see Surrey, Poems, 4; translating Petrarch’s Rime Sparse 164, ‘Or che ’l ciel et la terra e ’l vento tace’, Lyric Poems, 310–11). His memories of happier times at Windsor make a kaleidoscope from images of its outside spaces: its ‘large green courts’, ‘meads’, and ‘secret groves’ (Surrey, ‘So cruel prison’, lines 6, 21, 25, Poems, 25, 26), or ‘blossomed boughs’ and ‘flowered meads’ (Surrey, ‘When Windsor Walls’, lines 4, 5, Poems, 24). When Wyatt’s poetry engages with nature, in contrast, it tends to be deployed as a simile—‘Like to these unmeasurable mountains / Is my painful life’ (Wyatt, ‘Like to these unmeasurable mountains’, lines 1–2, Complete Poems, 83), ‘Like as the swan towards her death . . . / Right so sing I with waste of breath’ (Wyatt, ‘Like as the swan’, lines 1, 3, Complete Poems, 134)—or an analogy: as with the bee and the spider, sucking honey or poison out of the same flower, in ‘Nature that gave the bee so feat a grace’ (see Wyatt, Complete Poems, 97). Wyatt’s poetic speaker is frequently found in internal spaces: ‘in my chamber’ where mysterious others once seemed to seek and stalk him (Wyatt, ‘They flee from me’, line 2, Complete Poems, 116), or performing songs in intimate, indoor spaces before a company that includes his faithless lover, in ‘Blame not my lute’, ‘My lute, awake’, and ‘She sat and sewed’ (see Wyatt, Complete Poems, 129–30, 144–5, 92, respectively). Nor, when he does venture outside, is he necessarily alone. ‘Whoso list to hunt’ takes Petrarch’s solitary meditation on the vision of a ‘white doe’ (Rime Sparse 190, ‘Una candida cerva’, line 1, Lyric Poems, 336–7)—where the only other human evoked is held within a simile, ‘like the miser’ (‘come l’avaro’, line 7)—and relocates it within the crowded and competitive environment of a deer hunt. Compare the note of anxious rivalry that Wyatt introduces into ‘Though I myself be bridled of my mind’ (discussed above) where the observation, addressed to his own heart, ‘Though other be present, thou art not all behind’ (Wyatt, ‘Though I myself be bridled’, line 8, Complete Poems, 80), has none of the complacent assurance that Petrarch gives dell’Anguillara at this point, stating ‘null’ altro il precorre’ [no other can precede him] (Rime Sparse 98, line 8, Lyric Poems, 200–1).
⁵⁷ See Stamatakis, Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Rhetoric of Rewriting, 67. ⁵⁸ Brain Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2002), 244.
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420 - Even as Wyatt’s poetry evokes this social milieu, his speakers frequently express distaste for the ‘press’ of the world they inhabit.⁵⁹ His poetic speakers yearn for rest and solitude: a ‘hidden place’ where they might be ‘use[d] . . . quiet’ (Wyatt, ‘Stand whoso list’, lines 5, 3, Complete Poems, 94). Movement becomes an expression of dissatisfaction, as when Wyatt rewrites Petrarch’s opposition between ‘pace’ and ‘guerra’ [peace and war] (Rime Sparse 360, ‘Quel antique mio dolce empio signore’, line 30, Lyric Poems, 560–1) as a difference between ‘rest’ and ‘error’ (Wyatt, ‘Mine old dear en’my’, line 28, Complete Poems, 104), drawing on the etymology of errare, to wander. Yet, we repeatedly witness his poetic speakers, unable to extract themselves from their social world and achieve that longed-for tranquillity. Paradoxically, the emotional paralysis of Wyatt’s poems (discussed earlier) is one that seems to condemn his poetic speakers to continued motion and/or prevents their withdrawal from public to private domains, as can be seen in ‘Whoso list to hunt’. ‘I may no more’, the speaker declares in line 2, but still he follows (Wyatt, ‘Whoso list to hunt’, Complete Poems, 77). ‘Yet may I by no means my wearied mind / Draw from the deer’, he confesses (lines 5–6), the enjambment dragging him onwards, over the line-endings: ‘as she fleeth afore / Fainting I follow’ (lines 6–7). The final part of line 7 insists that he ‘leave[s] off therefore’. Imaginatively, he cannot, however: where Petrarch’s poem concludes with the semi-comic shattering of his vision—‘io caddi ne l’acqua et ella sparve’ [I fell into the water, and she disappeared] (Rime Sparse 190, line 14, Lyric Poems, 336–7)—Wyatt’s ends still fixed on the deer, and the inscription round her neck, just as his rewriting of Aesop’s, or Horace’s, fable of the town mouse and the country mouse diverges from its sources and analogues by leaving the unwary mouse ‘caught . . . by the hip’, the cat’s murderous swipe forever suspended, as the mouse is ‘made there against her will [to] remain’ (Wyatt, ‘My mother’s maids’, lines 66–7, Complete Poems, 191). Wyatt and Surrey thus visit similar, or even the same, material—most particularly, the Rime Sparse and the Psalms—which they adapt to vernacular idioms and poetic traditions. Surrey follows, and builds on, the formal innovations and importations of the man he styles as his literary predecessor, and whom he even cites as an authority to correct a biblical one: ‘Yet Solomon said, the wronged shall recure / But Wyatt said true, the scar doth ay remain’ (Surrey, ‘My Ratcliff ’, lines 5–6, Poems, 32; paraphrasing Wyatt, ‘Sighs are my food’, line 8, Complete Poems, 99). Any definitive comparison between the two poets is, of course, hampered by the uncertain shape and size of their actual canon, and the likelihood that poems have been lost, or remain un- or misattributed. Nevertheless, despite the frequent similarities between their sources and methods, and despite these necessary caveats, their surviving work does reveal differences that Puttenham’s magisterial survey elides. Not the least of these dissimilarities is tone, particularly in their amorous verse. Surrey’s poems are certainly capable of displaying anger, notably, in the ‘tirade’ ‘London, hast thou accused me?’ (see Surrey, Poems, 30–1).⁶⁰ However, his love poetry does not, even when it features unrequited desire: ‘Therefore I never will repent, / But pains contented still endure’, vows the lover of Surrey’s ‘When raging love’ (Surrey, ‘When raging love’, lines 25–6, Poems, 2). Wyatt’s equivalent examination of that commonplace image of love as madness—‘What rage is this?’—also concludes imagining a constant love; the difference is that ‘So love thou still’ is a curse, not a promise, punishment for the ‘poison’ that the disappointed lover has ingested (Wyatt, ‘What rage is this?’, lines 18, 4, Complete Poems, 151, 150). ⁵⁹ See, e.g., ‘Amid the press of lordly looks to waste’ (Wyatt, ‘In court to serve’, line 4, Complete Poems, 102); ‘And flee the press of courts whereso they go’ (Wyatt, ‘My own John Poins’, line 3, Complete Poems, 186). ⁶⁰ See Heale, Wyatt, Surrey, 140.
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421 Reed Way Dasenbrock has aptly described Wyatt’s characteristic mode as ‘blame-style’, a rewriting of Petrarch’s ‘stile de la loda’ [praise-style].⁶¹ In Wyatt’s poetry, the woman is frequently made emblematic of a shifting, treacherous world; in Surrey’s, she can still resemble Ulysses’ loyal wife, Penelope, a fidelity we witness first-hand in his female-voiced complaints (see Surrey, ‘O happy dames’ and ‘Good ladies’, Poems, 21–2, 22–3), as well as hearing about in poems such as ‘Give place, ye lovers’ (see Surrey, Poems, 7–8). In contrast, the women in Wyatt’s poetry are shown as active agents in the pursuit—and abandonment—of sexual partners, as in ‘They flee from me’, where the woman ‘me caught in her arms long and small’, as ‘her loose gown from her shoulders did fall’ (Wyatt, ‘They flee from me’, lines 12, 11, Complete Poems, 117). In the process, Wyatt ‘Ovidianizes the Petrarchan mode’.⁶² Where—as Sergio Baldi notes—‘Petrarch’s lady is hard and immovable only because of her virtue, and in the cause of virtue . . . Wyatt’s is merely fickle, unfeeling, or ungrateful’.⁶³ ‘Was I never yet of your love grieved’ (see Wyatt, ‘Was I never yet’, line 1, Complete Poems, 77–8), writes Wyatt, translating the opening line of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse 82: ‘Io non fu’ d’amar voi lassato unquanco’ [I have never been weary of loving you] (Lyric Poems, 184–5). That monosyllable ‘yet’ transforms the poem, as the poetic speaker anticipates his inevitable betrayal. It also epitomises the way in which Wyatt’s poetic speakers are unable, or even unwilling, to extricate themselves from situations and milieux they apparently regret or abhor. The male lover of ‘They flee from me’ has all the benefit of hindsight, but he still treasures that brief erotic encounter: ‘Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise / Twenty times better, but once in special’ (Wyatt, ‘They flee from me’, lines 8–9, Complete Poems, 117). That second stanza, replaying the incident, revels in the moment, giving no hint of the ‘forsaking’ (line 17) to come. So, too, the seemingly guileless speaker of ‘Mine own John Poins’, who ‘cannot frame [his] tune to feign’ (Wyatt, ‘Mine own John Poins’, line 19, Complete Poems, 186), transpires to be more implicated in court life than his initial anatomisation of its vices would suggest. His departure from court is revealed to be enforced, not voluntary: the ‘liberty’ he boasts of is soon qualified by the information that ‘a clog doth hang yet at my heel’ (Wyatt, ‘Mine own John Poins’, lines 84, 86, Complete Poems, 188), a detail for which there is no equivalent in his source (Luigi Alamanni’s tenth satire, ‘A Thommaso Sertini’). Unlike Alamanni’s verse epistle, Wyatt’s also ends with an explicit plea for re-engagement with the world its speaker ostensibly rejects, as he invites Poins—a man whom Colin Burrow has shown to be embroiled in the ‘deadly’ ‘information game’ and ‘tangles of Henrician government’⁶⁴—to join, and ‘judge’ him in the Kentish idyll he has depicted (Wyatt, ‘Mine own John Poins’, line 103, Complete Poems, 189). And herein lie their distinctive legacies: Surrey bequeaths forms (the ‘English’ sonnet; blank verse) to his Elizabethan successors; Wyatt, a mode of poetry that self-consciously opens up a critical distance between poet and poetic voice, paving the way for the unreliable or self-deluded speakers of works like Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella or Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
⁶¹ Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘Wyatt’s Transformation of Petrarch’, Comparative Literature, 40 (1988), 122–33, 129. ⁶² Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), 59. ⁶³ Sergio Baldi, in F. T. Prince (trans.), Sir Thomas Wyatt (London, 1961), 31–2. ⁶⁴ Colin Burrow, ‘Horace at Home and Abroad: Wyatt and Sixteenth-Century Horatianism’, in Charles Martindale and David Hopkins (eds), Horace Made New: Horatian Influences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1993), 27–49, 38–9.
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24 Mid-Tudor Poetry Danielle Clarke
Despite radical changes in many aspects of poetic production between the mid-1550s and early 1570s, poets of the mid-Tudor period are self-deprecating about the qualities of their verse.¹ John Hall calls his verse ‘rough and ragged’ (Hall, Poesy, sig. B7); Thomas Brice mentions his ‘too homely and rude enterprise’ (Brice, Compendious Register, sig. A5); George Turberville notes the ‘baseness of my Book’ (Turberville, Epitaphs, sig. *4).² Thomas Howell alludes to his ‘rattling sentences thundering along’ and to ‘mine own weakness in words’ (Howell, Arbour, sigs. A2, A2v).³ Barnabe Googe, likewise, asserts ‘the grossness of my Style’ and refers to his poems as ‘these trifles of mine’ (Googe, Eclogues, sig. a5).⁴ The idea of a radical change of stylistic direction in English poetry across the last quarter of the sixteenth century persists, though many poets from the mid-Tudor period produced verse throughout Elizabeth’s reign, such as Nicholas Breton, Thomas Churchyard, Thomas Howell, and Hugh Plat. Many key figures of the later period started their writing careers contemporaneously with poets such as Googe, Turberville, George Gascoigne, and Isabella Whitney, and many of them continued to be printed into the later part of the century. Edmund Spenser’s first publication for the press was The Theatre for Worldlings in 1569. The sequestering of the period as marginal to the longer history of English poetry belies the lines of connection with both the preceding and the succeeding periods, and the ways in which these decades witness the confluence of the remnants of late medieval tradition and the (re)incorporation of Classical and Continental influences.⁵ Critical evaluations of the output of the 1560s and 1570s have confirmed these assessments, seeing the period as laying the foundations for the poetic achievements of the later Elizabethan period. Stylistically, the poetry has had a mixed reception, and is often seen as
¹ The term ‘mid-Tudor’ is applied variously in critical accounts, inflected partly by the type of literature being discussed. For Mike Rodman Jones, for example, ‘mid-Tudor’ refers, more or less strictly chronologically, to c 1542–50; see his ‘ “O London, London”: Mid-Tudor Literature and the City’, Review of English Studies, 68.287 (2017), 883–901, 886. Accounts of poetry, by contrast, tend to work on the basis of output and aesthetic formation, and see ‘mid-Tudor’ as running from the late 1550s to the early 1570s. I am grateful to Kaitlin Picard for her research and input into this project, her comprehensive listing of printed poetic outputs from 1530–80, in particular. See also Thomas Betteridge, ‘The Henrician Reformation and Mid-Tudor Culture’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35.1 (2005), 91–110. ² John Hall, A Poesy in Form of a Vision (London, 1563); Thomas Brice, A Compendious Register in Metre (London, 1559); and George Turberville, Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (London, 1567). The spelling of early modern texts is modernised throughout. ³ Thomas Howell, The Arbour of Amity, Wherein is Comprised Pleasant Poems and Pretty Posies (London, 1568). ⁴ Barnabe Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets (London, 1563). ⁵ For useful perspectives on Chaucer’s importance to sixteenth-century poets, see Theresa M. Krier (ed.), Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville, FL, 1998). On the debt to medieval writing more generally, see Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (eds), Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007). See also Chapter 2 in this volume. Danielle Clarke, Mid-Tudor Poetry In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Danielle Clarke 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0024
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- 423 deeply ‘drab’ (to use C. S. Lewis’s persistent epithet).⁶ New Historicist approaches tended to be more interested in poetry that had a clearer relationship to power, which mostly meant courtly power. Recent research, particularly work on the material circumstances of poetic production, views the output of these middle decades more kindly, even if this sometimes prioritises bibliographic and material questions rather than poetic, formal, and aesthetic ones.⁷ But interest in other forms—resulting in lively, innovative scholarship on ballads, on the city, and on women’s writing—has enabled a different critical lens to be turned on these poets. The socially mixed character of mid-Tudor poetry—its conception of poetry as a tool for social and cultural change and debate, and its largely commercial rather than courtly character—has frequently sidelined it in a trajectory of poetic history that moves from Sir Thomas Wyatt to John Milton, stopping along the way at Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and George Herbert. Didacticism and utilitarianism are qualities not much valued by later readers, and the writers of these decades have often been eclipsed by the inventive virtuosity of some later poets. Yet, these very qualities were in demand in a rapidly expanding London, where different social and geographical identities were in flux, and the twin impacts of humanism and Protestantism began to impact on non-elite culture through the medium of print.⁸ Mid-Tudor poetry represents a moment—or a series of moments—at which participation in poetic production moves down the social scale, engages playfully with questions of authorship, attempts to replicate the intimacy of manuscript circulation in print, and demonstrates poetic co-production, where poets work with printers and patrons. Notions of authorship are in development, catalysed by print and close contact between poets and printers. As Michelle O’Callaghan asserts, ‘publishers fashioned authors’.⁹ In the 1560s and 1570s, most poets look for material gain from their work, either through enhanced social/ patronage opportunities, or payment, or both. The question of self-image, the credit of the poet, is crucial to these endeavours and questions of ethos are very much part of the transactional economics shared by poets and reader. Gascoigne, for example, is at pains to point out that he received no money for his poems: ‘I never received of the Printer, or of any other, one groat or penny for the first Copy of these Posies’ (Gascoigne, ‘Epistle to the Reverend Divines’, Posies, sig. }3).¹⁰ The sometimes nakedly instrumental nature of midTudor verse is partly a consequence of disruption and instability in court culture and patronage systems—and there was no reason in the early 1560s to assume that Elizabeth’s reign would be any more stable than the years that preceded it—and partly a matter of evolving literary and publication systems. Provisionality, as O’Callaghan notes, ‘is both a socioeconomic fact . . . and a rhetorical device’.¹¹ Shifting priorities and allegiances are
⁶ See C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), 64. Jones, ‘ “O London” ’, gives a useful overview of critical accounts (883–5). See also Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford, 2009); and Mike Pincombe, ‘Introduction: New Lamps for Old?’, Yearbook of English Studies, 38 (2008), 1–16. ⁷ See Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘ “My Printer must, haue somewhat to his share”: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and Crafting Books’, Women’s Writing, 26.1 (2019), 15–34. ⁸ On Tudor London, see Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 1995); Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989); and Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford, 2007). ⁹ O’Callaghan, ‘ “My Printer” ’, 17. ¹⁰ George Gascoigne, The Posies of George Gascoigne, Esquire (London, 1575). ¹¹ O’Callaghan, ‘ “My Printer” ’, 20.
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424 - registered in form, format, and formation, as poets grapple with, and intervene in, changing social, economic, and cultural conditions. George Puttenham places in a single catalogue poets that modern criticism would assign to at least two discrete phases in the development of English: And in her Majesty’s time that now is are sprung up another crew of courtly makers, noblemen and gentlemen of her Majesty’s own servants, who have written excellently well, as it would appear if their doings would be found out and made public with the rest. Of which number is first that noble gentleman, Edward Earl of Oxford, Thomas Lord of Buckhurst, when he was young, Henry Lord Paget, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, Master Edward Dyer, Master Fulke Greville, Gascoigne, Breton, Turberville, and a great many other learned Gentlemen, whose names I do not omit for envy, but to avoid tediousness, and who have deserved no little commendation. (Puttenham, Art, 149)¹²
What unites Puttenham’s ‘crew’ is social position, not poetic value, despite his plea that their ‘doings’ (a phrase which symbolises Puttenham’s emphasis on poetic craft) be ‘made public’. Most poets of the mid-Tudor period are aware that they are building English poetics anew, expanding its formal and stylistic range, and looking for authority and inspiration. It is not accidental that so many earlier writers come to the press in the 1560s and 1570s: there is the question of a ready market, but also of a desire to create poetry with its own distinctively English genealogy. The semi-collapse of court culture during the short and turbulent reigns of Edward and Mary leaves a patronage vacuum, the contours of which only start to reform at the end of the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, and in terms that are quite different from those that pertained under male monarchy.¹³ This chapter aims to outline some key developments and changes in the conception and practice of poetry in the mid-Tudor period, arguing that, when freed from the occlusions of later evaluations, the output represents a vibrant, democratising, and politically engaged body of work.
Forms Puttenham’s history focuses on lyric poets, but he registers the importance of both print and translation in the mid-Tudor period. Output is diverse and is marked by a desire to bring earlier work into print, and by formal innovation. Influence is not linear or successive; the impact of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey’s poetry is largely felt after Richard Tottel brings his poems into print in 1557. These decades witness a number of firsts, in terms of texts and authors available to readers in English often for the first time (Virgil, Mantuan, Ovid, Petrarch), imitations, verse forms, and poetic genres.¹⁴ The poets Gascoigne, Howell, Whitney, and Turberville, discussed in more detail below, exemplify these trends in different ways, and demonstrate commitment to the didactic function of poetry, and to the development of metrical patterns which align with the patterns of speech, ‘plain-style ¹² George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ¹³ On the different phases of Elizabethan iconography, see Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke, 1995). ¹⁴ In A Sweet Nosegay (London, 1573), Isabella Whitney refers to ‘VIRGIL, OVID, MANTUAN’ as books she has read (two of them translated by her contemporary, George Turberville) and grown ‘weary’ of (sig. A5v).
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- 425 poets’ as Patrick Cheney terms them.¹⁵ This potentially conceals the degree to which these poets innovate, and integrate inherited traditions—both popular and elite, English and Continental—through a concerted effort to make poetry central to cultural life.¹⁶ Poetry proves to be a flexible and adaptable tool for addressing a range of pressing issues and concerns, from the wage crisis in mid-Tudor London (Whitney) to reflections on the relationships between poetry and satire (Gascoigne).¹⁷ Literacy rates rose rapidly in the mid-Tudor period, but oral cultures and traditions were still influential, and many of the texts discussed in this chapter show strong traces of what we might call ‘oral residue’: the use of tropes of repetition, a tendency towards restatement, and a willingness to sacrifice diction to prosody: all questions addressed in Gascoigne’s ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’ (1575). There is a large body of literature in rhyme from the mid-Tudor period that represents a different trajectory in terms of the purpose and function of verse in English. Much of this verse is polemical or moralistic in character, suggesting the proximity and cross-fertilisation of types of poetry that are later distinguished more clearly, even if readers were more promiscuous than accounts of poetics like to suggest.¹⁸ Such verse, usually printed in short pamphlets (one or two gatherings at most), served multiple purposes and was frequently reprinted, suggesting a close relationship between demand and supply in the mid-century book market. Hugh Rhodes’ The Book of Nurture for Men, Servants and Children (?1545) was reprinted several times (twice in 1560, 1568, 1570, 1577), with the intention of providing advice regarding conduct, focusing on speech in particular: ‘gaze ne scoff nor scold / with man ne child make no fray / Fair speech doth great pleasure / it seemeth of a gentle blood / Gentle is to use fair speech / it requireth nothing but good’ (Rhodes, Book of Nurture, sig. [A4v]).¹⁹ The text, printed in black letter, is in fourteeners (fourteen syllables to a line, usually iambic), the ballad measure used ubiquitously for Psalm singing and secular poetry alike, and against which later metrical innovations were measured. Many poems are versifications of Scripture,²⁰ such as John Marbeck’s The Holy History of King David . . . Drawn into English Metre for the Youth to Read (1579), also in fourteeners, aimed at utilising metre to counter the apparent charms of less edifying books: to impair hereby the credit as well of all lewd lying legends of unsound Saints consecrated and canonised in the high court of Rome . . . as also of all filthy, fond, and unsavoury songs, books, and fancies far unfit and ill beseeming the eyes of baptised Christians. (Marbeck, dedicatory letter to Mistress Elizabeth Barret, Holy History, sigs. A2–A2v)²¹
None of this material has pretensions to poetic ambition, yet it reveals a careful deployment of the key features of metre, imagery, and verbal patterning to achieve maximum impact, as well as clear indebtedness to the alliterative traditions of late-medieval poetry in English.
¹⁵ Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), 145. ¹⁶ Cheney’s Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry sets out the larger case very effectively and in far more detail than is possible here. ¹⁷ On the context for Whitney’s social and economic critique, see Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture; on Gascoigne, see Syrithe Pugh, ‘Ovidian Reflections in Gascoigne’s Steel Glass’, in Pincombe and Shrank (eds), Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, 571–86. ¹⁸ See Jenni Hyde, Singing the News: Ballads in Mid-Tudor England (New York, 2018). ¹⁹ Hugh Rhodes, The Book of Nurture, for Men, Servants and Children (London, ?1545). ²⁰ See Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013), chapters 11 and 12. ²¹ John Marbeck, The Holy History of King David . . . Drawn into English Metre for the Youth to Read (London, 1579).
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426 -
Form: Printed Anthologies A notable feature of the mid-Tudor period is the interplay between the printed miscellany— often a means to circulate earlier, courtly poetry, of which Tottel’s Miscellany is the best known—and the rise of the single-author collection, or ‘heterogeneous collections of occasional poetry’.²² Collections by Googe, Turberville, Howell, Gascoigne, and Breton, amongst others, replicate conceptually and materially the dynamics of the highly successful poetic miscellanies that continued to be strong sellers in the book market in the 1560s and 1570s and beyond. For writers on the margins of courtliness, this form of publication enabled the creation of a courtly effect, the illusion of closely networked poetic exchanges being put into the public domain. Formal variation is a way both of displaying poetic skill and of presenting a range of apparently loosely connected texts. Many collections reveal some internal logic, using titles and headers to track mini-narratives of love, loss, longing, and need (the latter often financial). The relationships between poems within the anthologies both model and anticipate a set of reciprocal and mutually satisfying social relationships which, it is suggested, will be homologous. Friends will provide support and assistance; lovers will reciprocate; morals will be upheld; the value of personal virtue will be recognised. Poetry here is a form of social enactment, modelling reciprocation and the consequences of its failure, and suggests the ways in which readers might themselves perform these social identities. As Roland Greene argues in relation to Petrarchan lyric, ‘its franchise is to represent unrequitedness in a European culture for which requital is an important but little theorized condition of public and private life’.²³ This point might be broadened to include all the poets discussed in this chapter. Questions of place, position, and their uncertainty are repeatedly addressed, in forms that suggest applying read experience to lived experience: the application of scenarios encountered in a programme of humanist reading are recast for a readership without ready access to such learning. Gary Waller notes ‘the seriousness with which [poetry] took its vocation to comment upon political, social and religious issues’, yet volumes such as Whitney’s The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573) also display a satirical edge as they innovate, hybridising inherited forms such as the complaint (filtered through both the Mirror for Magistrates political tradition and the Ovidian tradition), the mock-testament, and adages and aphorisms.²⁴
Printed Anthologies: Thomas Howell Howell’s Arbour of Amity (1568), subtitled ‘pleasant Poems and pretty Poesies’, deploys a wide range of verse forms and metres, including dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and ballad metre (the fourteener). He uses couplets, quatrains, sestets, octaves, and longer narrative forms, usually deploying rhyming couplets or alternate rhyme, irrespective of the
²² Jane Hedley, Power in Verse: Metaphor and Metonymy in the Renaissance Lyric (University Park, PA, 1988), 59. For more on miscellanies in the period, see also Chapter 10 in this volume. See further the section in this chapter on ‘Format’. ²³ Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, IL, 1999), 11. ²⁴ Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, second edition (London, 1993), 38.
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- 427 length or form of the poem.²⁵ The ‘poesies’ are short poems, which can be read horizontally and vertically, on sententious topics such as ‘Of Counsel’, ‘Of Knowledges’, ‘Of Degrees’, a model which hints at the origin of such versification in the commonplace books of aphorisms, adages, and sententious sayings that this group of poets would have kept as students at the Inns of Court.²⁶ For example, ‘Of Counsel’: Thou must do well, Seek rage to press, Faith true obtain: First try heart true: Wit none repel, Thy sins excess, Friend dear entrain. Lament and rue. (Howell, Arbour, sig. C3v)
The poems enact dialogic relationships, between poems in the form of question and answer, and beyond the boundaries of the book in the form of addresses to absent friends or lovers, ‘H. to K. his Friend’, ‘I. K. to his Friend H.’ (see Howell, Arbour, sig. E3). The titles of the poems indicate multiple loose lines of narrative and thematic connection, while enabling each poem to stand alone. Moral meaning is overt, and easily extractable, bolstered by selfglossing Classical references, for example: When that he saw of worthy fame, chaste spouse by tried trade: Who can depaint the passing game, that then Ulysses made? When Paris got the Gem of Greece, his sports surpassed then: Who brought her home a flower of price, unto his Country men. (Howell, Arbour, sigs. E8v–F1)
Howell’s collection in many ways typifies the authorial miscellany of the mid-Tudor period. There is a degree of conformity across these volumes, suggesting that they satisfied audience expectations, and that readers were well acquainted with the necessary interpretive codes.
Printed Anthologies: George Turberville Like Howell’s Arbour, Turberville’s Epigrams, Epitaphs, Songs and Sonnets (1567) features the emblem of his patron, Anne, Countess of Warwick, and his address to her suggests a close working relationship: ‘I have (Madam) by a little enlarging this Book, enlarged not a little my folly’ (Turberville, dedicatory epistle, Epitaphs, sig. *3). Turberville’s selfpresentation is often at odds with the seriousness of his poems, yet the downplaying of aspirations, particularly stylistic, is symptomatic of a period of development in English ²⁵ For a useful account of the deployment of the couplet in mid-Tudor poetry, see Jessica Rosenberg, ‘The Point of the Couplet: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie’, ELH, 83.1 (2016), 1–41. ²⁶ See Jessica Winston, Lawyers at Play: Literature, Law, and Politics at the Early Modern Inns of Court, 1558–1581 (Oxford, 2016). An engagement with aphorisms and adages is a feature of much of the output of this period, notably in Whitney’s versifications of Hugh Plat’s The Flowers of Philosophy (1572) in A Sweet Nosegay.
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428 - poetry, where new forms, discourses, and types of publication are being assimilated in an uneven way, and questions about the capacity of the English language for eloquence are still pressing.²⁷ His promise ‘To the Reader’ is of diversion and comfort, ‘to pleasure and recreate thy weary mind and troubled head’ (Turberville, ‘To the Reader’, Epitaphs, sig. *5), while simultaneously asserting the moral—and Protestant—purpose of his work: by mere fiction of these Fantasies, I would warn . . . all tender age to flee that fond and filthy affection of poisoned and unlawful love . . . Let this be a Glass and Mirror for them to gaze upon. (Turberville, ‘To the Reader’, Epitaphs, sigs. *6–6v)
Like Howell, and Gascoigne, Turberville’s volume comes with an extensive contents page which enables the reader to navigate the text. The volume starts and ends with poems to the volume’s dedicatee, the Countess of Warwick. Her alliances at court, her close connections to Elizabeth, and her reputation for brokering alliances and supporting petitions made her an appealing patron.²⁸ The narrative arc of the volume introduces a conceit that was to dominate later love poetry: Turberville addresses the Countess under the persona of Pyndara. The volume contains a range of poems encompassing complaints, elegies, an echo poem, and a variety of metrical and verse forms, and Turberville gives it narrative shape by framing the dispersed lyric voices of his poems through a fictive persona, Tymetes, who is betrayed in love by Pyndara: ‘He glad or grief-ful wax, and ever draws / His present state with Pen as here ensues’ (Turberville, Epitaphs, sig. B2v). Many of the poems do not fit this narrative of the beloved lady and her bereft lover; rather (like other similar anthologies), the titles point to generic applications for such texts, such as ‘The lover seeing himself abused, renounceth Love’, or ‘The Lover in utter despair of his lady’s return’ (Turberville, Epitaphs, sigs. N2v, T2). The speaker both is and is not Tymetes, or Turberville. The stages and states of love are carefully anatomised, matched by change and variety in verse forms, with the addresses to his lady carefully modulating both stock scenarios and metrical forms. For example, ‘To his Lady, that by hap when he kissed her and made her lip bleed, controlled him and took disdain’, is written in dimeter/trimeter (a₄a₄b₆c₄c₄b₆),²⁹ but recapitulates the alliterative mode of poetry from the late-medieval tradition: Discharge thy dole, Thou subtle soul, It stands in little steed* *stead To curse the kiss That causer is Thy cherry lip doth bleed. (Turberville, Epitaphs, sig. C1v; emphasis added)
Like Howell, Turberville uses a range of metres, from fourteeners (generally for longer narrative poems) to iambic pentameter and tetrameter.
²⁷ See Danielle Clarke, ‘Translation and the English Language’, in Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. 2, 1550–1660 (Oxford, 2010), 17–23. ²⁸ See Simon Adams, ‘Dudley [née Russell], Anne, countess of Warwick’, ODNB (2004). ²⁹ Dimeter is four syllables (the ‘4’ in the notation) and two stresses to a line; trimeter is six syllables and three stresses; each letter denotes the end-rhyme pattern for a given line.
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- 429 Turberville is also highly aware of other poets (perhaps an effect of his work as a translator), and self-consciously positions himself as the heir to Surrey in particular. His ‘Verse in praise of Lord Henry Howard Earl of Surrey’ strategically deploys the humility topos, using apophatic speech as a way of asserting his own poetic claims: ‘What should I speak in praise of Surrey’s skill / Unless I had a thousand tongues at will?’ (Turberville, Epitaphs, sig. B8v).³⁰ It is perhaps not accidental that the poem that follows the one addressed to Surrey is titled ‘Of Jealousy’, as Turberville enumerates the qualities of Surrey’s verse: ‘such a skill in making Sonnets . . . / Each word in place with such a sleight [craft, skill] is couched’ (Turberville, Epitaphs, sig. C1). In anticipation, perhaps, of E. K.’s Epistle prefacing Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) or Sidney’s assessment in The Defence of Poesy (1595) of the poetic resources of English in the generation preceding theirs, it is Surrey’s linguistic development that Turberville singles out for praise: ‘Our mother tongue by him hath got such light, / As ruder speech thereby is banished quite’ (Turberville, Epitaphs, sig. C1). The poem goes on to elevate the praise of the man above the commendation of his poems: ‘Reprove him not for fancies that he wrought, / . . . / What though his verse with pleasant toys are fright? / Yet was his honours life a Lamp of light’ (Turberville, Epitaphs, sig. C1). Throughout the volume there are a number of poems attributed or addressed to Googe, whose Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets had appeared in 1563, testament to the multiple lines of connection between this group of mid-Tudor poets, through patrons, printers, education (particularly the Inns of Court), or through textual encounter.
Format In The Imprint of Gender (1993), Wendy Wall designated print outputs as ‘literary pseudomorphs’, arguing that the format of verse anthologies such as Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay or Gascoigne’s Posies self-consciously aped earlier, elite forms of poetic circulation, specifically the manuscript miscellany; arguments that have subsequently been extended and consolidated by many scholars.³¹ By contrast with later, single-author productions, these mid-Tudor collections represent a particular material, spatial, and typographic negotiation of an evolving concept of authorship and authority. Miscellaneous poems of varying lengths, forms, and types are gathered together under a single authorial signature or name. Gascoigne’s audacious Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573), which purported to be a collection made using the poems of many (and translation is a key trope here), reveals the ways in which mid-Tudor poets play with questions of voice and persona, utilising multiple voices to mimic the polyvocality of the miscellany. These poets use the material shape of their volumes to enact and perform sociability, personal credit, and future reciprocation based on the fulfilment of obligations: and fulfilling obligations in the form of thanks, love, praise, and remembrance is critical to midTudor poets’ self-conceived role.
³⁰ On Surrey’s legacy, see Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London, 1998); on Surrey’s contribution to Petrarchanism, see Cathy Shrank, ‘ “Matters of Love as of Discourse”: The English Sonnet, 1560–1580’, Studies in Philology, 105.1 (2008), 30–49. ³¹ Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1993), chapter 4.
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430 - The majority of the volumes of poetry printed in the 1560s and early 1570s share some key characteristics. First, paratexts.³² These vary in type and number, but mostly aim to connect the volume with a larger social context, often directed to a specific dedicatee in the expectation of support, protection, or preferment. Many paratexts engage in elaborate games of obfuscation with the reader, and questions of attribution are often vexed, for example in the case of the Printer’s Preface to Gascoigne’s Hundreth Sundrie Flowers.³³ Sometimes, the connection with the dedicatee is more obscure, or its significance lost to us, as in the case of George Mainwaring, the dedicatee of Whitney’s Sweet Nosegay. Many dedications provide a platform for poets to defend their decision to publish, and to head off potential critics: Googe refers to ‘the disdainful minds of a number both scornful and carping Correctors, whose heads are ever busied in taunting Judgements’ (Googe, dedicatory epistle to William Lovelace, Eclogues, sig. a5v). The relationship between poet, printer, and the publication process can be fraught and fractured; and while there is an element of overkill in protestations about poems being published against the poet’s will, nonetheless, these complex relationships between authors and printers speak to a degree of instability, with poets—particularly figures like Gascoigne, Turberville, and Googe who had courtly aspirations—attempting to play off the need for commercial gain against putative reputational damage. Googe explains that his manuscript had been left in safe-keeping with his friend Lawrence Blundeston while he was in Spain, but that by the time he was able to intervene, the situation was unsalvageable: ‘Paper provided for the Impression . . . It could not without great hindrance of the poor Printer be now revoked’ (Googe, dedicatory epistle to William Lovelace, Eclogues, sigs. a6–a6v). This regard for the finances of the printer suggests that the future of the relationship required protection. Relationships with printers were crucial to this group of poets, none of them aristocratic, on the edges of courtly culture, and with limited opportunities to bring their abilities to the attention of potential patrons. This also explains the continual expression of anxiety about quality. Aspects of the patronage relationship are literally being contracted on the page, a process that Gascoigne takes much further in the motivated manufacture of his self-image through his printed volumes.³⁴ In The Posies (1575), he provides detailed explications of the social occasions giving rise to particular poems, and the contexts in which poetic exchanges were transacted. Here he describes the occasional nature of poetic production at Gray’s Inn, on his entry to the Inn: being required by five sundry Gentlemen to write in verse somewhat worthy to be remembered . . . he compiled these five sundry sorts of metre upon five sundry themes, which they delivered unto him. (Gascoigne, Posies, xxix)³⁵
Paratextual and dedicatory materials often consolidate and advertise the poet’s social networks, and these often overlapped. Alexander Neville, for example, is credited with providing a theme for one of Gascoigne’s poems: ‘Alexander Neville delivered him this ³² See Kirk Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing and the Making of Literary Culture (Toronto, 2018), chapter 1 for a comprehensive account of the making, printing, and presentation of sixteenth-century texts; also Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (eds), Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge, 2011). See further Chapter 4 in this volume. ³³ See Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing, 109–10. ³⁴ See Gillian Austen, ‘Self-portraits and Self-presentation in the Work of George Gascoigne’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 14.1 (2008), 34 paragraphs; and Felicity A. Hughes, ‘Gascoigne’s Poses’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 37.1 (1997), 1–19. ³⁵ For the background to this poem, see the ODNB entry by G. W. Pigman III, ‘George Gascoigne’, ODNB (2004).
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- 431 theme . . . whereupon he compiled these seven Sonnets in sequence’ (Gascoigne, Posies, xxxiii); Neville is also the addressee of a poem in Googe’s Eclogues and the author of a response to that poem (see Googe, Eclogues, sigs. F2v–F3, and for the reply, sigs. F3v–F4). Secondly, arrangement. As Kirk Melnikoff suggests, printed miscellanies fall into two broad types with regard to arrangement: those which promise a degree of coherence directed by authorial authority, and those which are more miscellaneous in character.³⁶ These apparently heterogeneous volumes of printed verse usually adhere to some degree of internal logic, pairing related poems (often question and answer, or pro et contra arguments on a particular point), or grouping poems loosely thematically. Sometimes related materials are dispersed throughout the volume in a non-linear way, replicating the apparent randomness of common-placing. Many texts provide varying levels of textual apparatus to enable the reader to negotiate the contents in a combinatorial way. These might take the form of titles, running heads, the use of a new page, or internal title pages. Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay, for example, materialises its logic in the spatial and sequential arrangement of the various poems—dedicatory epistle, letter to the reader, versifications from Plat (abstract ideas of virtue, credit, and community), sequence of letters (concrete application of broad principles from Plat), complaints bewailing the failure of this strategy, farewell and mock-testament addressed to London—dividing them off clearly from one another, using titles, or ‘Finis’. But each of these ‘sections’ might be read in its own right. Many printed miscellanies, even when gathered under an authorial signature, do not presuppose that reading will be linear: Gascoigne’s seven sonnets in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (under the running head ‘The devises of sundry Gentlemen’, also found in Posies under the running head ‘Flowers’) are numbered, predating this convention by some years.³⁷ Neither Googe’s nor Whitney’s collections have contents pages. In the case of Googe, the arrangement of the poems follows the order of his title. Whitney’s reworkings of Plat’s aphorisms are numbered sequentially, with a continuous running head, but significantly alter the order in Plat. A Copy of a Letter similarly lacks a dedication or contents pages, despite having its own title page.
Formulation: The Discourses of Poetry—Gascoigne It is Gascoigne who is singled out most frequently as breaking the mould of mid-Tudor poetry; he is an iconoclast and risk-taker who utilises the resources of his poetic inheritance while simultaneously subverting them. Of the poets discussed here, he is the most committed to developing an abstract language for poetics, and an important precedent for Spenser. The complexities surrounding the publication of his poetry provide fascinating evidence of a transition from what one might call the ‘authorial miscellany’ to printed books which fully realise the figure of the author and her/his functions. Gascoigne’s output deploys the idea of the gathering of flowers into posies (a homophone for ‘poesie’ and played on repeatedly through the mid-Tudor period) as a structuring metaphor for the compilation of textual materials.³⁸ It references several discourses and aligns closely with expectations about the morally improving and diverting nature of poetry, which provides the underlying
³⁶ Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing, 101. ³⁷ Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591), for example, was not numbered on its first publication. ³⁸ Deriving from Greek ἀνθολογία [flower-gathering], ‘anthology’ is rooted in the same metaphor; the concept of the anthology was current in the sixteenth century, even if the word itself was not. See OED anthology n.
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432 - justification for apparently frivolous poetic making. Selection and anthologisation was widely articulated through the metaphor of gathering flowers, or through the apian metaphor of bees gathering nectar: a metaphor that comes under some pressure in the paratexts to Gascoigne’s two volumes. For Whitney, in A Sweet Nosegay, the metaphor is more precisely horticultural, referring to the taking of ‘slips’ which are then grafted onto other plants. In ‘The Printer to the Reader’ of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, the volume’s printer, Richard Smith, argues that ‘the industrious Bee can gather honey out of the most stinking weed’ (Smith, ‘The Printer to the Reader’, Hundreth, sig. A2v), which is then countered in Gascoigne’s ‘Epistle to the Reverend Divines’ in The Posies, when he states, ‘indeed out of every flower the industrious Bee may gather honey, yet by proof the Spider thereout also sucks mischievous poison’ (Gascoigne, ‘Epistle to the Reverend Divines’, Posies, sig. }4v).³⁹ The metaphor of the posy (or, for Whitney, the nosegay) is both thematic and structural, drawing on ideas of the origin of art in nature, the notion of herbs as protection against disease and moral degeneration, as well as the idea of the poetic collection as gift, love token, or prophylactic. It asserts the moral purpose and value of poetry along with its capacity for diversion, and for inaugurating or cementing relationships through the idea of the gift. The idea of the posy as structural device in Gascoigne is deployed differently in each volume, the title page of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers drawing on the conventional use of the gathering metaphor to indicate translation and imitation: Gathered partly (by translation) in the fine outlandish Gardens of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, Ariosto, and others: and partly by invention, out of our own fruitful orchards in England. (Gascoigne, Hundreth, title page)
The structural potential of the figure of the posy is not expanded upon, which is consonant with the apparent ‘chaos’ of the volume as a whole, with its seemingly infinite combinatorial possibilities.⁴⁰ In The Posies, ‘corrected’ and under Gascoigne’s name, what in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers had been ‘the devices of sundry Gentlemen’ (the running head to this section of the volume) are ordered into a ‘division’ (a term drawn from rhetorical argument) under the rubric ‘Flowers’. ‘Sundrie’ [sundry] here captures both the sense of the word as separate, individual, not joined to one another, and as various or miscellaneous.⁴¹ In the later volume, Gascoigne (and/or his printer) develops a heterogeneous text into a plural expression of singular authorship, from the elaborate title page onwards. The Posies comes with voluminous paratexts: three addresses, multiple dedicatory poems, as well as a coherently conceived structural frame built around the idea of the posy. The texts are divided into ‘Flowers’ (‘more pleasant than profitable’), ‘Herbs’ (‘more profitable than pleasant’), and ‘Weeds’ (‘neither pleasant nor profitable’) (Gascoigne, Posies, sig. }}4).⁴² This is the beginning of a defence of poetry itself, where the responsibility for the creation of ethical meaning lies not with the author, but with the reader (a position that anticipates, and is developed further by Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesy):⁴³ ³⁹ For the larger context see George W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33.1 (1980), 1–32. ⁴⁰ Melnikoff, Elizabethan Publishing, 109. But see further below on the logic of arrangement in A Hundreth. ⁴¹ See OED, sundry, adj. A.I.1, 2, and 3; and A.II. ⁴² Gascoigne thereby anticipates the threefold division of The Shepheardes Calender (1579) into ‘Plaintiue’, ‘recreatiue’, and ‘Moral’ eclogues; see Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999), 32. ⁴³ See Catherine Bates, On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (Oxford, 2017).
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- 433 I have here presented you with three sundry sorts of Posies, Flowers, Herbs, and Weeds. In which division I have not meant that only the flowers are to be smelled unto, nor that only the Weeds are to be rejected . . . as many weeds are right medicinable, so may you find in this none so vile or stinking, but that it hath in it some virtue if it be rightly handled. (Gascoigne, ‘Epistle to the Young Gentlemen’, Posies, sig. }}4)
Gascoigne is both complicit in, and resistant to, the criticisms levelled at his poetry. He responds, deploying the discourse of prodigality, but in a way that subverts and disarms his detractors, deflecting the responsibility for interpretation onto the moral capacity of the reader. This ludic upending of the authority of the poet represents a significant departure from the assumptions of most of Gascoigne’s contemporaries. To give just one example of the ways in which poems are rearranged and re-ordered in The Posies, ‘In praise of a gentlewoman who though she were not very fair, yet was she as hard favoured as might be’, is a poem on a stock theme (the most famous example being Shakespeare’s sonnet 130), which extends into a defence of Cleopatra’s virtues, overturning the convention whereby she is condemned for luring Antony from his martial (and marital) destiny: But I that read her life, do find therein by fame, How clear her courtesy did shine, in honour of her name. ... And all the worthy gifts, that ever yet were found, Within this good Egyptian Queen, did seem for to abound. (Gascoigne, Hundreth, 303)
In A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers the poem is positioned in the middle of a series of poems on various aspects of women’s amatory conduct (a woman who refused him; a woman who passed him by; and so on), but in The Posies it is moved to the start of the ‘Weeds’ section (Gascoigne, Posies, 277–8) where it is followed by ‘The Praise of Philip Sparrow’. Thus, despite the later volume exhibiting more structural coherence from the point of view of an ordered whole, the local micro-contexts of individual poems are disrupted and are aligned with an arbitrary schema of moral (and possibly aesthetic) value. The expanded prefatory material of The Posies gives Gascoigne a platform from which to articulate his views on poetry; and, while in many ways conventional, these do represent a departure from his contemporaries in ways that anticipate, for example, the positions taken by Spenser/‘E. K.’ in 1579. There are close parallels between the prefatory materials and ‘Certain Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English’, the first essay to address English versification. Gascoigne addresses questions of English diction, positioning himself in opposition to the neologisers, and arguing for the sufficiency of English to poetic expression, asserting that one can write ‘both compendiously, and perfectly in our English tongue’: I have more faulted in keeping the old English words . . . than in borrowing of other languages, such Epithets and Adjectives as smell of the Inkhorn. (Gascoigne, ‘Epistle to the Reverend Divines’, Posies, sig. }3v)
In ‘Certain Notes’, this commonplace insight is given new momentum by fusing it with questions of versification, as Gascoigne advises poets to avoid the excessive use of polysyllables:
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434 - first the most ancient English words are of one syllable, so that the more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seem, and the less you shall smell of the Inkhorn. (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes’, Posies, sig. T4)
Like ‘E. K.’, Gascoigne commits to augmenting the resources and status of English internally: ‘for the cadence of rhymes . . . I have rather regard to make our native language commendable in itself, then gay with the feathers of strange birds’ (Gascoigne, ‘Epistle to the Reverend Divines’, Posies, sig. }4). The ideas set out in ‘Certain Notes’ seem uncontroversial in the light of the impassioned debates of the 1580s, but represent a significant innovation in the specific focus on poetry as opposed to rhetoric, in a language that largely eschews or revises the terms of rhetoric. ‘Invention’, in Gascoigne’s definition, while clearly derived from the canons of rhetoric, is both capacious and relatively unstructured: some good and fine device, showing the quick capacity of a writer . . . the occasions of Inventions are (as it were) infinite . . . if I should undertake to write in praise of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise her crystal eye, nor her cherry lip, etc. For these things are trita et obvia [trite and obvious]. But I would either find some supernatural cause whereby my pen might walk in the superlative degree, or else I would undertake to answer for any imperfection she hath, and thereupon raise the praise of her commendation. (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes’, Posies, sigs. T2–T2v)
Such invention remains within the dynamics of inherited poetic tropes, inverting them or working in response to them.⁴⁴ Finally, ‘Certain Notes’ provides important evidence of one very astute reader’s response to the poems of his own time. In the ‘Epistle to the Young Gentlemen’, Gascoigne is scornful of those who fail to register that poetic voice is to be understood figuratively: ‘the pleasant ditty of the noble Earl of Surrey (beginning thus, In winters just return) was also construed to be made indeed by a Shepherd’ (Gascoigne, ‘Epistle to the Young Gentlemen’, Posies, sig. }}3). He critiques the lack of metrical variety in English verse—‘there is none other foot used but one’, despite the fact that Chaucer ‘used the same liberty in feet and measures that the Latinists do use’ (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes’, Posies, sig. T3v)—although he seems unaware of the difference between accentual and quantitative verse. He advocates working within the accepted conventions, urging poets to use idiomatic word order, except where ‘rhyme enforceth’ (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes’, Posies, sig. U1); to avoid strange words, except where they promote ‘attentive reading’ (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes’, Posies, sig. T4v), and to avoid excessive use of alliteration: sundry words beginning all with one letter, the which (being modestly used) lendeth good grace to a verse: but they do hunt a letter to death, that they make it Crambé, and Crambe bis positum mors est [cabbage cooked twice is death]. (Gascoigne, ‘Certain Notes’, Posies, sig. T4v)
Formulation: Structuring Ideologies—Whitney and the City Isabella Whitney is the author/compiler of two printed miscellanies, The Copy of a Letter (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay (1573). Each shares conventions with the writings of her ⁴⁴ Compare Robert Henryson’s earlier use of ‘invention’ in a literary sense, as discussed in Chapter 22 in this volume.
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- 435 contemporaries, from the metaphor of the posy to the exploitation of the potential of the miscellany. The title itself hints at a manuscript exchange of letters from which the printed book is derived, and the verse letters contained in A Sweet Nosegay attempt to bind family members (siblings, cousins) into a network of reciprocal obligation. What is striking about Whitney’s output is its intriguing combination of typicality and innovation, and her deft hybridisation of inherited traditions in the service of a unique perspective on the social, economic, and sexual dynamics of Tudor London. Interestingly, she does not fall foul of Gascoigne’s critiques of his contemporaries—her diction is idiomatic and carefully calibrated metrically, and her use of alliteration judicious and astute—as in ‘The admonition by the Auctor, to all young Gentlewomen’, for example: Trust not a man at the first sight, but try him well before: ... For trial shall declare his truth, and show what he doth think. (Whitney, ‘The admonition’, Copy, sig. A6v; emphasis added)⁴⁵
Here the key stages in the argument are linked through alliteration, pointing to the implied gradation from trust, to try, to trial, and finally to truth. Each of the volumes printed by Richard Jones, arguably a co-producer of the text, demonstrates the tension between the emergent figure of the author and the inclusion of multiple voices within the volume. Throughout, the poems are introduced through the framing device of the ‘Auctor’, both grounding the poems in an individual voice and enabling that voice to be generalised and to assert its own authority at the same time. No apparent contradiction is registered between the ‘Auctor’ and her gender. ‘Auctor’ links through its Latinate root to the idea of authority—a particularly interesting alignment in the case of a writer overtly presented as female in the paratextual material.⁴⁶ In Whitney’s poetry, however, the plural voices are very deftly and strategically pressed into establishing the credit of her authorial persona, through ideas of ownership, obligation, and exchange. Authorship itself is couched in terms of domestic economy: The Copy is a ‘trifle’ but also self-evidently a commodity, as a domestic language of gathering is developed into a model for female authorship. As Whitney Trettien argues: Whitney’s innovation . . . is to draw attention to and exploit the prescriptivist gendering of ‘gathering’ as a form of authorship . . . she adopts the role of [the] idealized female reader whose reading (figured as arranging slips) spurs her writing.⁴⁷
The two volumes are quite different. The Copy uses the form of the complaint (itself here a hybrid of the Mirror for Magistrates tradition, and the Ovidian Heroides tradition) to ⁴⁵ Isabella Whitney, The Copy of a Letter, Lately Written in Metre, by a Young Gentlewoman (London, 1567). ⁴⁶ Auctor, the Classical Latin etymon of ‘author’, is described by the OED as a ‘person with authority to take action or make a decision, guarantor, surety, person who approves or authorizes, person who has weight or authority, spokesperson, representative, advocate, supporter, adviser, witness, expert, writer regarded as an authority, originator, source, mover or proposer, person or thing responsible, prime mover, initiator, cause, agent, creator, divine creator, builder, inventor, person who has written a book, founder, ancestor’. See OED, author, n. (etymology). ⁴⁷ Whitney Trettien, ‘Isabella Whitney’s Slips: Textile Labor, Gendered Authorship, and the Early Modern Miscellany’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 45.3 (2015), 505–21, 514, italics original.
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436 - address the sexual double standard, but in terms that point to women’s moral and economic vulnerability. Wittily and pithily summarising the long tradition of male infidelity as represented in Classical texts, Whitney provides a gender-subversive re-reading of the developing canon of literary texts: For they, for their unfaithfulness, did get perpetual fame: Fame? wherefore did I term it so? I should have called it shame. (Whitney, ‘I. W. to her Unconstant Lover’, Copy, sig. A3v)
Her writing is admonitory (‘The admonition by the Auctor’), but not didactic. As Susan Wiseman has argued, it represents a kind of ‘amorous pedagogy’ which ‘demonstrates the claiming and use of cultural capital’. Whitney positions herself as the transmitter of accumulated knowledge and wisdom, and mediates this for an emerging readership: urban, contingent, literate, mobile, and hovering (as many of the poets discussed here do) on what Wiseman terms ‘the border between gentility and service’.⁴⁸ These concerns are evident in the more structurally complex volume printed in 1573, A Sweet Nosegay. This uses the metaphor of the nosegay, symbolising protection against plague, to frame Whitney’s versification of Hugh Plat’s The Flowers of Philosophy (1572), figured as gift: ‘I was in mind to bestow the same on some dear friend’ as ‘labour’ (Whitney, dedicatory epistle to George Mainwaring, Nosegay, sig. A4),⁴⁹ as protection against harm, and as a means to health. Whitney’s Nosegay selects a small proportion of Plat’s prose aphorisms (110 versus 883), and her self-presentation in ‘The Auctor to the Reader’ is assertive about her role in choosing and gathering, strongly implying that this confers ownership: a fascinating take on the complexities of literary ownership which underlie sixteenth-century concepts of imitation. She writes, ‘though they be of another’s growing, yet considering they be of my own gathering and making up: respect my labour and regard my good will’ (Whitney, dedicatory epistle to George Mainwaring, Nosegay, sig. A4v). Whitney’s language about how she came by her material is evasive, and it implies a commitment to the common good that transcends questions of proprietary ownership. Her demand that her labour be rewarded suggests Whitney’s understanding of an emergent distinction between commodity or capital, and labour, and an ability to apply this to poetic labour: ‘It is the giver: not the gift, thou oughtest to respect’ (Whitney, ‘The Auctor to the Reader’, Nosegay, sig. A7). The nosegay is imagined as being exempt from ownership, as something that will be passed along to others who might need it: ‘if that thy complexion, with them do not agree: / Refer them to some friend of thine, till thou their virtue see’ (Whitney, ‘The Auctor to the Reader’, Nosegay, sig. A7v), an echo of Gascoigne’s insistence on the importance of the ethical formation of the reader, not the writer. Ideas about ownership, economy, and possession—tracking a transition from things held in common to individualised ownership—are central concerns in Whitney’s innovative and provocative mock-testament, ‘The manner of her Will, and what she left to London’ (Whitney, ‘The Auctor’s Testament before her departing’, Nosegay, sig. E3). As is clear from the poems that precede the ‘Will’, the conceit is that Whitney is dispossessed: ‘This ⁴⁸ Susan Wiseman, ‘Labour’s Loves? Isabella Whitney, Leonard Wheatcroft and the Love Miscellany’, Textual Practice, 33.8 (2019), 1363–87. ⁴⁹ Whitney, A Sweet Nosegay.
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- 437 Harvest time, I Harvestless, / and serviceless also’ (Whitney, ‘The Auctor to the Reader’, Nosegay, sig. A5v), ‘The loss I had of service hers, / I languish for it still’ (Whitney, ‘To her Brother, G. W.’, Nosegay, sig. C6v). Her departure from London is figured in terms of the loss of a lover, activating the language of complaint: But many Women foolishly, like me, and other more, Do such a fixed fancy set, on those which least deserve That long it is ere wit we get, away from them to swerve. (Whitney, ‘A communication which the Auctor had to London, before she made her will’, Nosegay, sig. E2v)
The poem inverts the model of the bequest, and plays on the ambiguity of ‘leave’: Whitney has nothing material to bequeath to London, but catalogues the material things she left behind, wishing London and its inhabitants prosperity and health. This is very pointed, precisely because of the contrast between the city’s copious abundance of goods and commodities, and the speaker’s own lack of access to these. The poem gives us an invaluable portrait of Tudor London, with the speaker as a kind of flâneur figure, imagining the city from the perspective of someone who is outside it, and no longer part of its complex and voracious dynamics of production and consumption. The ‘Will’ draws on a number of precedents, notably the mock-testament and the cornucopia, often used in the service of satire, and Whitney uses these to represent overlapping categories: social orders, the social geography of the city, and different types of merchant and trader. The effect is to articulate the proximity of these groups, the ways in which urban life is a fractured but collective experience, with multiple relationships of obligation and dependency. London is simultaneously a voracious consumer—‘Because their keeping craveth cost, / I yet will leave him more’; ‘In Cheap [trading, bartering] of them, they store shall fine / and likewise in that street [Cheapside]’—and a fantasy of plentitude: ‘At Mint, there is such store, it is / unpossible to tell it’ (Whitney, ‘The Auctor’s Testament before her departing’, Nosegay, sigs. E3v, E4, E5). Whitney’s legacy is prodigious, but also to be widely distributed. Making the city the executor of the ‘will’, she enjoins it ‘to give / the goods unto the rest’, guided by Fortune (Whitney, ‘The Auctor’s Testament before her departing’, Nosegay, sig. E7v). There is bitterness at the city’s failure of reciprocation, the models of exchange modelled in the rest of the miscellany: And unto all that wish me well, or rue that I am gone: Do me commend, and bid them cease my absence for to moan. And tell them further, if they would, my presence still have had: They should have sought to mend my luck; which ever was too bad. (Whitney, ‘The Auctor’s Testament before her departing’, Nosegay, sig. E8)
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438 -
Conclusions From the perspective of later developments in English poetry, it is clear that mid-Tudor poetry occupies a transitional position. Yet, this requires a partial and selective reading of the very diverse range of poetic output, and risks distorting the interpretation of a vibrant and dynamic body of material which has much to teach us about emergent literary culture in early modern England. Mid-Tudor poetry, in its range and diversity, offers an expansive and rapidly changing view of what poetry might be able to do, politically and socially, as well as aesthetically. Many ideas are mooted, and tested, and the unique circumstances of reception that structure and determine the specific complexions of poetic output in these years will dissipate with the dominance of the Petrarchan paradigm and the resurgence of courtly poetry in the 1580s and 1590s. It is important to recall the more wide-ranging vision of these earlier, and often overlooked, poets.
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25 Philip Sidney Catherine Bates
In the Defence of Poesy, Sidney is determined to define poetry as broadly as possible: ‘it is not rhyming and versing that maketh poesy’, he insists (Sidney, Defence, 100),¹ but the creation of imaginary worlds whose vividness and emotional power is capable of gripping the reader better than any philosophy or history. In its broadest definition, poetry extends to the entire domain of what we would now call fiction, and need not be in verse in order to qualify. Nevertheless, it is on Sidney’s verse that the present chapter will focus, for if he appears to denigrate ‘rhyming and versing’ here, he quickly comes to its defence. Poets have generally ‘chosen verse as their fittest raiment’, he writes, because it is more difficult and dignified than mere ‘table-talk’ (Defence, 82) and what distinguishes literature from ordinary speech. It is precisely because verse ‘doth most polish that blessing of speech’ (Defence, 100) that it shows language at its best. With its careful placement of words and syllables and considered use of rhyme, verse is easier to memorise than prose, making it a superior if not ‘the only handle of knowledge’ (Defence, 101). With its artful deployment of rhythm and harmony, verse ‘striketh a certain music to the ear’, lending language a special ‘sweetness’ and ‘majesty’ (Defence, 120) that delights all who read or hear it. If Sidney’s traditional characterisation of verse as mere ‘raiment’ appears to subordinate outer form to inner content, or verba to res, it belies the seriousness with which he took versification and the lengths to which he went in experimenting with different verse forms. And if focusing exclusively on the verse seems to risk narrowing Sidney’s wider understanding of what poetry means, the question of form is, as we shall see, central to his poetics. Winnowing the poetry from the prose and singling it out for discussion was once the characteristic of an older Sidney criticism.² In doing the same here, however, I am not regressing to the practices of the past. My aim, rather, is to show that, while a formalist approach is inseparable from a political or historicist one, it is also capable of telling us more about poetry—and the history of poetry—than either of those can. Far from taking a step backwards, this orientation resonates with more recent evaluations of Sidney’s aesthetic preoccupations, and promises a renewed appreciation of his sublime poetic art. Sidney’s poetry is best described as pastoral and lyric, the verses he composed for The Lady of May (c 1578) and the numerous poems and eclogues he incorporated into the Old Arcadia (c 1577–81) approximating to the former category, and the various songs and sonnets he wrote for Certain Sonnets (c 1577–82) and Astrophil and Stella (c 1582) falling
¹ Philip Sidney, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, 1973). ² See, e.g., Theodore Spencer, ‘The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney’, English Literary History, 12.4 (1945), 251–78; Robert L. Montgomery, Symmetry and Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney (Austin, TX, 1961); David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (New York, 1965); Neil L. Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development. (Cambridge, MA, 1967); and J. G. Nichols, The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney (Liverpool, 1974). Catherine Bates, Philip Sidney In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Catherine Bates 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0025
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440 - largely into the latter.³ In many ways this distinction is a false one, of course, since pastoral—and especially the Italianate pastoral that Sidney affected—was predominantly about love, while lyric readily lent itself to pastoral devices, as when Astrophil masquerades as a shepherd in the ninth song of Astrophil and Stella: ‘Go my flock, go get you hence, / Seek a better place of feeding’ (Sidney, AS ix, lines 1–2, Poems, 221).⁴ I keep the two categories momentarily in play, however, because they serve to point up two distinct kinds of relation that will be important for the discussion that follows. In the case of lyric, that relation concerns a difference of gender, and in the case of pastoral, a difference of class. In both cases, a situation is created in which what might otherwise pass as the normal or straightforward interaction between individuals is made unduly complicated by the necessity of their having to negotiate some kind of difference between them. In lyric, that difference is traditionally marked by the attempt to communicate with a member of the opposite sex; in pastoral, by the pretence that the socially high might communicate with/as the socially low. In both cases, these poetic forms require the individuals involved to communicate across some kind of divide, as if they were estranged or of unequal status. They must somehow overcome the fact that they do not speak the same language, and in that difficulty all the interest lies, for suddenly the ordinary business of getting someone else to understand what one is saying (and hopefully agreeing, cooperating, and acting accordingly) becomes fraught, uncertain, and problematic: the material, in short, for art. When mutual understanding can no longer be assumed, the other party must be wooed to be won—persuaded, induced to listen, made to pay attention, or at the very least to hear what the speaker has to say—and this newly required effort calls for a special kind of speech that is motivated, pressured, and end-driven: in a word, rhetoric. In their different ways, therefore, lyric and pastoral are both concerned with the same thing: namely, how to deal with discrepant class relations. Between them, these poetic forms engineer and simulate in art relations between beings of a different class—or between different classes of being—and in doing so they exemplify what, in describing the special effort required to transact these relations, Kenneth Burke calls the ‘rhetoric of courtship’: for the relations between classes are like the ways of courtship, rape, seduction, jilting, prostitution, promiscuity, with variants of sadistic torture or masochistic invitation to mistreatment.⁵
Like William Empson, on whose work he draws, Burke considers pastoral ‘profoundly concerned with the rhetoric of courtship between contrasted social classes’, and, as above,
³ None of Sidney’s works were published during his lifetime (1554–86). The full text of the Old Arcadia was not published until the twentieth century. The revised but unfinished version, the New Arcadia (composed c 1582–4), was published by Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville in 1590, while a composite version that used the end of the Old Arcadia to complete the New was published by his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, in 1593. Astrophil and Stella first appeared in print in two unauthorised editions in 1591. The Defence of Poesy (composed c 1579–81) was published in 1595 by two different publishers (one edition having the alternative title, An Apology for Poetry). The Lady of May and Certain Sonnets did not appear in print until Mary Sidney Herbert’s publication of all of Sidney’s literary works (except the Psalm paraphrases) in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, written by Sir Philip Sidney, Knight, now the third time published, with sundry new additions of the same Author (London, 1598). ⁴ Sidney, in William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962). Hereafter, Astrophil and Stella will be abbreviated to AS, sonnet numbers given in Arabic numerals, and song numbers in Roman numerals. In line with the conventions of the present volume, all spellings have been modernised throughout. For Sidney’s use of Italianate pastoral, see especially Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry. ⁵ Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, CA, 1950), 115.
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441 he finds in the multi-fold language of love an unparalleled resource for articulating the many different positions which these sexually and socially complex relations entail: from the opening gambit of a hopeful, humble approach, right through to the bitter end which acknowledges mutual incomprehension to be the rule.⁶ George Puttenham gives a good idea of how the language of love enabled poets of the period to negotiate the complex relations of a deeply hierarchical society when he writes, in The Art of English Poesy (1589), that love requires ‘a form of poesy variable, inconstant, affected, curious, and most witty of any others’, because lovers will inevitably be ‘sometimes praying, beseeching, sometime honoring, advancing, praising; another while railing, reviling, and cursing; then sorrowing, weeping, lamenting’ (Puttenham, Art, 134).⁷ By focusing his poetic energies almost exclusively on lyric and pastoral, Sidney indicates his clear interest in, if not obsession with, relations between beings who are by definition alien and strange to one another. Indeed, this might extend even to his translation of the Psalms since they, too, are a form of love poetry—their author, David, ‘shows himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith’, as Sidney writes (Sidney, Defence, 77)—and they detail relations between beings, human and divine, who could not be further apart. As Burke notes, the rhetoric of courtship naturally culminates in religion since ‘theology is the ultimate reach of communication between different classes of beings’, and, in attempting to speak across the ultimate divide, the Psalms stood, for many Renaissance poets, as the model for all amorous poetry, including secular verse.⁸ Sidney’s translation of Exaudi Domine—‘My suit is just, just lord to my suit hark’ (Sidney, Psalm 17, line 1, Poems, 289)—might stand for many as an example of how the rhetoric of courtship lends itself to religious articulation. To illustrate the way poetry comes to mediate between individuals who otherwise speak differently from one another, one might take as an example ‘Come Dorus, come, let songs thy sorrows signify’ (see Sidney, OA 7, Poems, 14–20): a poem from early in the First Eclogues of the Old Arcadia in which (in good pastoral fashion) a local shepherd, Lalus, proposes a singing contest with ‘Dorus’, apparently a visiting shepherd but actually Musidorus, duke of Thessalia, who is in disguise and has assumed this name as an alias (an identity his opponent takes in good faith).⁹ As the real and pseudo shepherds square off against one another—competing in verse by comparing their respective successes in love— the stage is set for a classic fusion of lyric and pastoral in which three sets of relations come to be negotiated at once: between two supposedly equal rivals, between the socially low and the socially high, and between men and the women they woo. Since ‘Lalus’ means ‘babbler’ and ‘Musidorus’ ‘gift of the Muses’, it is clear which of the two is destined to win, but the contest is not a walkover and every effort made to present it as a fair fight. Lalus is no yokel but ‘one of the best singers’ amongst the Arcadian shepherds (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 58),¹⁰ a group Sidney’s narrator has already praised as being favoured by the Muses and as having ‘so high conceits as the most learned of other nations have been long time since content both to borrow their names and imitate their cunning’ (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 4). Lalus sets ⁶ Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 123. ⁷ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ⁸ Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 178, italics original. ⁹ I follow Ringler’s sigla and numeration of the Arcadia poems throughout. Hereafter, OA will indicate poems from the Old Arcadia; CS will indicate Certain Sonnets; and OP, Other Poems. ¹⁰ Sir Philip Sidney, in Jean Robertson (ed.), The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (Oxford, 1973). All quotations from the prose narrative of the Old Arcadia (as opposed to the poetry) are taken from this edition.
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442 - the bar extremely high when he opens the challenge with alexandrines (hexameter lines) in fashionable terza rima (ababcbcbcdcd . . . ) and a demanding three-syllable rhyme (‘signify’/ ‘dignify’, lines 1, 3), all of which Dorus matches perfectly in his answering stanza. Lalus seems gradually to run out of steam, however, as, after four such stanza pairs, though still maintaining the terza rima format, he goes down to feminine rhyme with its two-syllable rhymes (‘treasure’/‘measure’, lines 73, 75), and from thence to single-syllable or masculine rhyme (‘sprite’/‘sight’, lines 101, 103), the last move also coinciding with a drop from hexameter to pentameter verse. In matching all these (again, perfectly), Dorus, by contrast, shows no sign of flagging. Lalus next replaces end rhyme with medial rhyme (‘Kala at length conclude my ling’ring lot: / Disdain me not, although I be not fair’, lines 115–16), necessarily losing his terza rima in the process, and from thence he introduces a new stanza form of alternating pentameter and trimeter lines: altogether, a way of indicating in verse that Lalus is slowing down. This is the point at which Dorus finally takes the lead, and, by repeating the last line of his challenger’s stanza as the first of his own, he effectively obliges Lalus to do the same, thereby forcing the latter to repeat after him ‘Oh he is marred that is for others made’ (lines 166, 167): in other words, to admit defeat. The whole poem is a classic example of the way poetic measures are used as a measure of social distinction, for here the contrasting status of the two singers is signalled not by anything as obvious or visible as their relative wealth or power but rather by the most minute of formal details: namely, their ability or otherwise to sustain a high syllable count.¹¹ Though a subtlety that might well be lost on the inattentive reader, it is this that decisively reveals the supposed equals to be socially poles apart and their relation to be, therefore, far from simple. The brute realities of class inequality find themselves transposed onto a quite separate register, an almost ethereal realm, but the purpose of the mystification is, of course, the ultimately conservative one—typical of romance fiction—of affirming the innate superiority of the ‘real’ prince as guaranteed to show through in the end. True quality cannot be veiled by ‘raiment’ any more than content can be subordinate to form, although it is by entirely formal means, ironically, that this message gets conveyed. Dorus shows his true colours when, despite winning the contest, he courteously insists that Lalus is the better singer: ‘I yield to thy ability’ (line 174). It is by means of such social reversals—entirely typical of pastoral—that the aristocrat is able to reassert his higher status, and the ‘special man’, as Empson calls him, to reveal himself as ‘more delicate and complex than others’.¹² So much for relations between supposedly equal rivals who turn out to be socially remote. It remains to consider the relations between the men and the women they woo, and here a surprise is in store. For although Lalus’s homely praise for Kala (comparing her with honeybees, rabbits, lambs, and the like) contrasts with Dorus’s elevated Petrarchanisms (his beloved is beyond compare) in ways that clearly reiterate the class differences just discussed, what is interesting is just how similar—in their sexual relations—these socially divergent men turn out to be, for they both woo women who are their social equals. In what follows, therefore, I will consider in turn social relations that might (however schematically) ¹¹ Musidorus/Dorus, together with Pyrocles/Cleophila and Philisides, are similarly distinguished socially by being the only characters in the romance to compose quantitative verse, which is organised around the use of long and short syllables in imitation of Latin poetry, rather than the number of stresses, as in vernacular, accentual poetry. For poems in quantitative verse by Musidorus/Dorus, see OA 11, Poems, 29–30, and OA 34, Poems, 68–9; by Pyrocles/Cleophila, see OA 12, Poems, 30–1; OA 32, Poems, 65–7; OA 33, Poems, 67–8; by the two of them together, see OA 13, Poems, 31–7; and by Philisides, see OA 31, Poems, 62–5, and OA 74, Poems, 122–4. The best studies of Sidney’s quantitative verse remain John Thompson, The Founding of English Metre (New York, 1961); and Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974). ¹² William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935), 20.
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443 be described as ‘low to low’ and ‘high to high’, before going on to consider relations that might be described as ‘low to high’, as this will go a long way towards clarifying Sidney’s use of the sexually differential relations between men and women as a means of negotiating class. First, then, to Lalus and Kala, for the most important thing about the relationship between the shepherd and his shepherdess is that it is not negotiated through poetry. Lalus might report to Dorus things he has previously said to Kala, but there are no poems in which he addresses her directly. Indeed, we are told at the beginning of the Third Eclogues—devoted to celebrating their wedding—that ‘Lalus, not with many painted words, nor false-hearted promises, had won the consent of his beloved Kala, but with a true and simple making her know he loved her’ (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 244). In the wedding poem that follows (see Sidney, OA 63, Poems, 91–4)—the first formal epithalamium in English—various bodies are called upon to bestow their blessing upon the couple, not least the Muses: Ye Muses all which chaste affects allow, And have to Lalus showed your secret skill, To this chaste love your sacred favours bow, And so to him and her your gifts distil. (Sidney, OA 63, lines 19–22, Poems, 91)
If Lalus was ever blessed with a special poetic ability, both he and Kala will henceforth be favoured by the Muses equally, so that any potential discrepancy in that regard will be evened out, and husband and wife will for ever after speak together (beautifully) as one. At the same time, various evils are seen off, including ‘foul Cupid, sire to lawless lust’ (line 55), for the couple’s ‘simple love . . . being pure and plain’ (lines 58, 62) has no need of his ‘hurtful art’ or ‘charming skill’ (lines 59, 60). Here, plainly, the rhetoric of courtship does not apply, and it can be summarily dispensed with because the parity of the parties renders it quite redundant. As a union between equals, this relationship is characterised as free from tension and capable of being publicly ratified and resolved. To some extent, the same could be said of the love-relations of the socially high— Musidorus/Dorus (who has fallen in love with the princess of Arcadia, Pamela) and his cousin Pyrocles, prince of Macedon (who has fallen in love with Pamela’s younger sister, Philoclea)—for, although there is plenty of tension in those relationships, that tension is entirely contrived and (this being romance fiction) both couples succeed in marrying at the end. The otherwise wholly desirable and appropriate dynastic matches between the marriageable Arcadian princesses and these very eligible bachelors are complicated by nothing more than a plot device: the foolish determination of the princesses’ father, Basilius, to take himself and his family into pastoral retirement in order to evade the ominous predictions of an oracle (thereby, of course, bringing it about). It is this action alone that requires the two princes to go into disguise—Musidorus as a shepherd, Pyrocles as an Amazon, ‘Cleophila’— in order to woo princesses they might otherwise have wed with no more fuss than Lalus and Kala, and although this complication makes for a much more interesting story—and the production of plenty of poetry—it is easily overcome precisely because it is so patently artificial. The two pairs of lovers have come to understand each other and agreed to marry before the end of Book 2, and they manage this because they soon recognise that they are speaking the same language. In neither case is the rhetoric of courtship, strictly speaking, required.
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444 - Musidorus/Dorus succeeds in communicating with Pamela by re-routing the words he intends for her via her lowlife servant, Mopsa. As the daughter of the herdsman Dametas, whose family has been allocated care of the princess, Mopsa comes pretty near the bottom of the pastoral pecking order (ranking considerably lower than the sheep-owning Lalus, for example), so when Dorus occupies himself by ‘making store of love songs unto her’, Pamela quickly suspects him of ‘a second meaning’ and falls to ‘scanning’ him more closely (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 99). In the poem that follows, ‘Since so mine eyes are subject to your sight’ (see Sidney, OA 16, Poems, 39), Dorus uses two five-line stanzas of iambic pentameter (this is the only poem in the Old Arcadia to take this form) to allude to the marriage number—five, in Renaissance numerology—and combines various rhetorical devices, including anaphora (the repetition of a word at the beginning of a line, sentence, or clause, as in ‘Since . . . Since’, lines 1, 3, 5, 7, etc.), anadiplosis (the repetition of a word at the end of one clause and near the beginning of the second, as in ‘sight . . . sight’, lines 1, 2; ‘light . . . light’, lines 3, 4, etc.), and wordplay (‘goods . . . good’, lines 5, 6), in order to communicate his verbal ability—and thus his secret message—to the princess: ‘How can you him unworthy then decree, / In whose chief part your worths implanted be?’ (lines 9–10). Being an attentive reader, Pamela duly notes ‘both the matter Dorus spake and the manner he used in uttering it’ and, seeing in both ‘a very unlikely proportion to mistress Mopsa’ (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 100), begins to comprehend his ruse. Being fully au fait with literary convention, Pamela rapidly comes to understand this as the textbook pastoral device that entails what one critic calls ‘the pretense of stooping, when the activity of the whole mind is bent upon rising to some higher value’.¹³ Once again, those with eyes to see are able to apprehend the real prince lurking beneath a pastoral disguise, and to penetrate the true meaning lying behind his deceptive words, even though it is those very masking words that are the means of that discovery. Communicating over the head of the witless Mopsa, the two aristocrats soon come to understand each other perfectly, and within six short pages they have agreed to run away together. As for Pyrocles, he assumes the identity of the Amazon, Cleophila, in order to have unimpeded access to and communication with Philoclea, but his disguise is more thoroughgoing than his cousin’s in that it involves a transformation not just of outward clothing but apparently of the body beneath as well. It is because Pyrocles has renounced both his princely status and his masculinity that, in the sonnet ‘Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind’ (see Sidney, OA 2, Poems, 11–12), he complains he has been ‘with double conquest foiled’ (line 2). Indeed, he has so identified with the object of his desire— ‘What marvel then I take a woman’s hue, / Since what I see, think, know is all but you?’ (lines 13–14)—that, as Cleophila, he is thereafter referred to by the female pronoun throughout. Where Pamela quickly comes to see through Musidorus’s disguise, Philoclea remains mystified by Pyrocles’ double bluff and takes longer to understand what is really going on. In the First Eclogues, Cleophila presents her with a heavily coded message—a song in sapphics (a quantitative metre in four-line stanzas associated with the Greek poet Sappho, many of whose poems were addressed to a female beloved) in which she speaks ‘as it were to her own hope’ (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 81)—and, gazing intently on Philoclea’s face, delivers a poem about the success or failure of meaningful looks to communicate what they want to say:
¹³ Robert E. Stillman, Sidney’s Poetic Justice: The Old Arcadia, Its Eclogues, and Renaissance Pastoral Traditions (Lewisburg, PA, 1986), 190.
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445 If mine eyes can speak to do hearty errand, Or mine eyes’ language she do hap to judge of, So that eyes’ message be of her received, Hope we do live yet. But if eyes fail then, when I most do need them, Or if eyes’ language be not unto her known, So that eyes’ message do return rejected, Hope we do both die. (Sidney, OA 12, lines 1–8, Poems, 30)
Although ‘sweetly ravished withal’ (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 82), Philoclea fails to get the hint on this occasion, and the poems Cleophila sings next are typical Petrarchan sonnets on the theme of unrequited love and the paradoxes of desire: ‘In vain, mine Eyes, you labour to amend’ (see Sidney, OA 14, Poems, 38) and ‘Loved I am, and yet complain of Love’ (see Sidney, OA 20, Poems, 41). These poems are not in fact heard by Philoclea at all but overheard by her parents (Gynecia and Basilius, respectively), who have by this stage developed amorous designs of their own on Cleophila, in another plot device aimed at thwarting the latter’s desires. Nevertheless, for all these complications, it is not long before those desires are fulfilled. For Philoclea soon comes upon Cleophila in the classic pose of the female complainant, weeping into a river and inscribing on its sandbanks her next poem, ‘Over these brooks trusting to ease mine eyes’ (see Sidney, OA 21, Poems, 41–2), which happens to be in the same form (three pentameter sixains, rhyming ababcc) as a poem that Philoclea herself had previously written on a white marble stone in the forest: ‘Ye living powers enclosed in stately shrine’ (see Sidney, OA 18, Poems, 40). With the lovers now metrically aligned, the moment has come for their recognition and mutual understanding at last: Cleophila reveals all—‘Behold here before your eyes Pyrocles, prince of Macedon’—and within two pages they have ‘passed the promise of marriage’ (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 120, 122). With her true identity known to Philoclea but still concealed from the rest of the Arcadian community, ‘Cleophila’ is thenceforth able to communicate expressions of erotic passion directly to her beloved, knowing they will be understood by her while the others remain none the wiser. In the Second Eclogues, for example, she sings two songs in quantitative metres associated with the Classical poets best known for their erotic lyrics. In the first of these poems, ‘My muse what ails this ardour’ (see Sidney, OA 32, Poems, 65–7)—which follows a metre used by Anacreon (born c 570 ) and meditates on the inability of words to express ‘So great a passion’ (line 16)—Cleophila finds her Muse unable to help in this matter because she, too, it turns out, is infatuated with Philoclea and thus equally tongue-tied: My muse what ails this ardour? ‘Alas’ she saith ‘I am thine, So are thy pains my pains, too. Thy heated heart my seat is Wherein I burn, thy breath is My voice, too hot to keep in. Besides, lo here the author Of all thy harms: Lo here she, That only can redress thee, Of her I will demand help’. (Sidney, OA 32, lines 40–9, Poems, 67)
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446 - And, in the second of these poems, ‘Reason, tell me thy mind, if here be reason’ (see Sidney, OA 33, Poems, 67–8), sung in a metre used by Catullus (c 84–c 54 ), Cleophila admits that her reason has been conquered by Philoclea’s beauty: in other words, that she has been overcome by passion. On a similar note, Book 3 ends with the two lovers in bed together, as Pyrocles—his Amazon identity put aside for the duration—runs over in his mind ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ (see Sidney, OA 62, Poems, 85–90), a lengthy erotic blazon in tetrameter couplets (a song metre) that lovingly itemises each part of his beloved’s naked body: The belly there glad sight doth fill, Justly entitled Cupid’s hill. A hill most fit for such a master, A spotless mine of Alabaster. Like Alabaster fair and sleek, But soft and supple satin like. In that sweet seat the Boy doth sport: Loath, I must leave his chief resort. (Sidney, OA 62, lines 77–84, Poems, 88)
This is not the rhetoric of courtship but an unabashed celebration of sexual love that looks ahead to the poetry of John Donne and the Cavalier poets of the seventeenth century.¹⁴ Like Pamela and Musidorus, Pyrocles and Philoclea still have some way to go before they are finally able to tie the knot—to maximise tension, the plot devices of the Old Arcadia orchestrate a near-tragic climax just to put the satisfaction off a little longer—but in the closing pages a comedic ending as contrived as the plot itself conclusively sweeps all obstacles away, allowing relationships that were intended all along to be (like Lalus and Kala’s) publicly ratified and resolved. These relationships all succeed because they are based on social parity. Once it is established that there is either no or no real class difference to overcome, individuals (whether shepherds or aristocrats) can straightforwardly communicate with their kind and it is only a matter of time before that simplicity—the needlessness of rhetoric—is symbolised by marriage. These happy endings thus provide the necessary backdrop against which to contrast those relationships where such parity does not exist and can, indeed, never be reached: relationships that might be characterised as ‘low to high’ in which the rhetoric of courtship is required to negotiate between different classes of being, and in which the most arduous efforts are made to persuade the other party to listen and to love, invariably without success. In such cases, the complexity invoked and experienced is not destined to melt away as it did for Pyrocles and Musidorus, but remains an absolute and permanent condition. These are relations (if, indeed, they can be called relations at all) that are founded and founder upon difference: wholly blocked, they are ruled by an impossibility there is no chance of overcoming. In the Old Arcadia, three figures in particular represent these unachieved and unhappy situations: Philisides (‘star lover’, with a clear play on Sidney’s name) and his companions, the pair of friends Strephon (‘twisted’, ‘tortured’, ‘tormented’) and Klaius (‘weeper’), all of them gentlemen, but outliers—strangers to
¹⁴ I analyse this poem at greater length in Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge, 2007), chapter 3.
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447 Arcadia—who associate only with the shepherds of that country. In all three cases, the hopelessness of their love-relations is signified by their repeated association with evening, night, and death. Strephon and Klaius, for example, do not appear until the Fourth Eclogues when the Arcadian shepherds, having retired to the western side of a hill to contemplate the setting sun, devote themselves to mourning the death (as they think) of their duke, Basilius. This lugubrious scene provides the setting for the two friends’ famous double sestina, ‘Ye Goatherd Gods, that love the grassy mountains’ (see Sidney, OA 71, Poems, 111–13), in which they mourn their separation from the woman they both love—‘one maid of that country named Urania, thought a shepherd’s daughter, but indeed of far greater birth’ (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 328), and whose name (that of the Muse of astronomy) is also suggestive of a cosmological unreachability—who has mysteriously departed and forbidden them to follow.¹⁵ Since Urania is not there to hear, the lovers’ song falls literally on deaf ears as they address themselves instead to the ‘silent ears’ (line 4) of equally unresponsive beings. Elusive spirits, features of the landscape, and planetary bodies are variously invoked to ‘Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music, / Which oft hath Echo tired in secret forests’ (lines 11–12). In the absence of their destined addressee, the lovers’ words inevitably bounce back echo-like from an empty world, and the sestina format—in which each stanza repeats the same six rhyme words, its first line repeating the same rhyme word as that of the preceding line—emphasises that, in their alternating stanzas, Strephon and Klaius speak to, hear, and echo no one but each other. As if in some Ovidian metamorphosis, they have effectively become the landscape themselves, turning (like Ovid’s Echo) into the valleys, mountains, rocks, and caves that resound with their own cries, their repetitions having, as Empson suggests, the aimless, impersonal feel of ‘the sea on a rock’.¹⁶ The whole poem is an epitome of failed communication—of a message not and never getting through—and much the same might be said of their following poem, ‘I Joy in grief, and do detest all joys’ (see Sidney, OA 72, Poems, 113–16). A dizain (ten decasyllabic ten-line stanzas) in corona format where each stanza begins by repeating the preceding line, and in which the final line of the poem repeats the first, this poem, too, is circular, centripetal, claustrophobic, and closed. As compatriots in sorrow, Strephon and Klaius at least have one another, their mutual inseparability mitigating, if not compensating for, their absolute separation from Urania. Philisides, by contrast, does not even have that and cuts perhaps the loneliest figure in the entire story. In the Fourth Eclogues, he follows the two laments of Strephon and Klaius with two of his own: first, ‘Now was our heav’nly vault deprived of the light’ (see Sidney, OA 73, Poems, 116–22), in which he details, in the form of a night terror, his hopeless love for one Mira, a classic Cruel Fair of Petrarchan convention who has the beauty of Venus but the chastity of Diana; and secondly, ‘Unto the caitiff wretch, whom long affliction holdeth’, in quantitative metre (see Sidney, OA 74, Poems, 122–4), in which he berates himself—‘fool, fool that I am’ (line 49, repeated at line 53)—for persisting so obsessively with a loverelation that is doomed to fail. Philisides has been in this blighted state from the beginning and is introduced in the First Eclogues as lying ‘at the foot of a cypress tree, leaning upon his elbow’ (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 71): in other words, as the very picture of melancholy. In ‘Up,
¹⁵ A sestina is a poem of six stanzas, each of six lines, followed by a final triplet; all stanzas have the same six rhyme words (in this case, ‘mountains’, ‘valleys’, ‘forests’, ‘music’, ‘morning’, and ‘evening’) in six different sequences. In this double sestina, Strephon’s stanzas alternate with Klaius’s, making twelve stanzas in all (the sequence of the first six stanzas being repeated exactly in the second six stanzas). ¹⁶ William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, second edition (London, 1947), 36.
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448 - up Philisides, let sorrows go’ (see Sidney, OA 9, Poems, 22–6), the aged shepherd Geron tries to raise the prostrate form, but when snubbed for his pains ‘he began to speak to his dogs as if in them a man should find more obedience than in unbridled young men’ (Sidney, Old Arcadia, 76), and his following poem, ‘Down, down Melampus; what? your fellow bite?’ (see Sidney, OA 10, Poems, 26–9), powerfully suggests that, in his rudeness, irrationality, and self-chosen abjection, Philisides is little better than a cur. Deaf to Geron’s warning that there is nothing more pointless ‘Than cries to senseless things, which neither knows / What aileth thee’ (Sidney, OA 9, lines 41–2, Poems, 23), Philisides persists in addressing himself to things that admit of no response. In ‘Fair Rocks, goodly rivers, sweet woods, when shall I see peace?’ (see Sidney, OA 31, Poems, 62–5), the lengthy echo poem in quantitative metre that he sings in the Second Eclogues, Philisides appeals (like Strephon and Klaius) to an empty landscape and hears only his own words in return, even though, in their depersonalised, alienated form, they bring home the same point that Geron had made about their own pointlessness: But when I first did fall, what brought most fall to my heart? Art. Art? what can be that art which thou dost mean by thy speech? Speech. What be the fruits of speaking art? what grows by the words? Words. Oh much more than words: those words served more me to bless. Less. Oh when shall I be known, where most to be known I do long? Long. Long be thy woes for such news, but how recks* she my thoughts? Oughts*. Then then what do I gain, since unto her will I do wind? Wind. *reckons, calculates *things of no consequence, noughts (Sidney, OA 31, lines 28–34, Poems, 64)
‘What be the fruits of speaking art?’, indeed. Condemning himself to the empty iteration of words that convey nothing but their own vacuity, Philisides stands as an indictment of the rhetoric of courtship: of the artful speech that would ideally bear fruit in the form of love returned but that in reality produces nothing but more words. If such speech typically has to pass from low to high—from the prostrate lover to a beloved as remote and distant as the stars—if it has to labour to transcend that difference and to make itself intelligible to a being of another class who might just as well be from another planet, then in Philisides’ case it fails conclusively to do so. Here, sexual and social difference—and the complexity they entail— prove quite insuperable. From the Old Arcadia, this gloomy legacy passes directly to Astrophil, like Philisides another star lover and fictionalisation of the Sidney persona. In typical Petrarchan fashion, the relative positioning of lover and beloved in Astrophil and Stella is pitched entirely in terms of height and depth: Alas, if from the height of Virtue’s throne, Thou canst vouchsafe the influence of a thought Upon a wretch, that long thy grace hath sought; Weigh then how I by thee am overthrown. (Sidney, AS 40, lines 5–8, Poems, 184–5)
Astrophil is the proverbial astronomer who fares ‘like him that both / Looks to the skies, and in a ditch doth fall’ (AS 19, lines 10–11, Poems, 174), while Stella sits ‘heav’nly high’ (AS 67, line 6, Poems, 199), in ‘highest place’ (AS 27, line 13, Poems, 178), with her ‘high heart’ (AS
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449 69, line 10, Poems, 200), like one of those heavenly ‘Bodies high [that] reign on the low’ (AS 26, line 11, Poems, 178), or a weather god who ‘throws only down on me / Thundered disdains and lightnings of disgrace’ (AS 60, lines 3–4, Poems, 195). She is, of course, ‘my Star’ (AS 73, line 5, Poems, 203), ‘Stella star of heavenly fire, / Stella loadstar of desire’ (AS viii, lines 31–2, Poems, 218), but she is also the sun, most often at its ‘Zenith’ (AS 42, line 8, Poems, 186)—at high noon when it tends to dazzle and burn rather than warm and light (AS 76, Poems, 204–5)—but also set and absent from the sky, plunging Astrophil into eternal darkness: with ‘that fair you my Sun, thus overspread / With Absence’ veil, I live in Sorrow’s night’ (AS 91, lines 3–4, Poems, 224). Other metaphors emphasise the same altitudinous distance between them: Stella is Astrophil’s ‘Queen’ (AS 107, line 9, Poems, 236) and ‘Princess’ (AS 28, line 6, Poems, 179; AS 107, line 1, Poems, 236), who has complete ‘Majesty’ (AS 42, line 12, Poems, 186; AS 48, line 4, Poems, 188), ‘authority’ (AS 62, line 9, Poems, 196), and ‘sovereignty’ over him (AS 71, line 6, Poems, 201). She is ‘Conqueror’ (AS 40, line 11, Poems, 185), ‘Tyrant’ (AS 42, line 6, Poems, 185) and ‘Killer’ (AS 48, line 13, Poems, 189), his ‘Captainness’ (AS 88, line 2, Poems, 223), ‘Master’ (AS 107, line 12, Poems, 236), and ‘school-mistress’ (AS 46, line 10, Poems, 188), in relation to whom Astrophil is a ‘slave’ (AS 29, line 14, Poems, 179; AS 47, line 3, Poems, 188; AS 86, line 9, Poems, 212), a prisoner of war (AS 36, Poems, 182–3; AS 104, Poems, 233), and a naughty schoolboy who ‘from book mich [plays truant] to desire’ (AS 46, line 13, Poems, 188). As if this were not abject enough, Astrophil wishes he were lower still, imagining himself (like Philisides, perhaps) as Stella’s pet dog (AS 59, Poems, 194) or bird (AS 83, Poems, 208), and even as his own horse (AS 49, Poems, 189).¹⁷ In his lengthy courtship of Stella, Astrophil is supposed to scale these self-made heights by means of his ‘speaking art’ in order to persuade her and win her round, but just as his words fail to reach their target or achieve their desired effect, so he, too, eschews upward mobility at every turn and takes every opportunity to go down rather than up. He wishes that Reason would ‘climb the Muses’ hill’ (AS 10, line 3, Poems, 169) because he refuses to do so himself. He is entirely lacking ‘ambition’s rage . . . still climbing slippery place’ (AS 23, lines 9–10, Poems, 176), although some judge him guilty of it. When a heavenly body does rise, like the moon, he sees it not as a glorious ascent but as an image of a failed love like his own: ‘With how sad steps, o Moon, thou climb’st the skies, / How silently, and with how wan a face’ (AS 31, lines 1–2, Poems, 180). He determines that his own steps will lead nowhere—‘Let me no steps but of lost labour trace’—since he does not ‘envy Aristotle’s wit, / Nor do aspire to Caesar’s bleeding fame, / Nor ought do care though some above me sit’ (AS 64, lines 6, 9–11, Poems, 198). He denies he seeks poetic fame as Petrarch did: ‘Nor so ambitious am I, as to frame / A nest for my young praise in Laurel tree’ (AS 90, lines 5–6, Poems, 224). When he makes one last attempt to raise himself to Stella’s level, the effort is so feeble it naturally fails: when ‘my young soul flutters to thee his nest, / Most rude despair my daily unbidden guest, / Clips straight my wings, straight wraps me in his night’ (AS 108, lines 6–8, Poems, 236). The rhetorical device Sidney uses most often to dramatise Astrophil’s fall from (rather than achievement of) grace is gradatio: the scheme that builds a series of steps intended to progress logically towards a desired conclusion. The sonnet sequence opens with just such a scheme when Astrophil hopes that Stella will ‘take some pleasure of my pain: / Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, / Knowledge might pity win, and pity ¹⁷ For the masochistic connotations of Astrophil’s abject self-positioning, see Bates, Masculinity, Gender and Identity, chapter 2.
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450 - grace obtain’ (AS 1, lines 2–4, Poems, 165).¹⁸ Here, as in the classic Neoplatonic scala d’amore (ladder of love), the lover’s ascent is supposed to lead to the beloved’s assent, as formerly estranged parties manage to communicate across the void, and mutual understanding—the marriage of true minds—is finally achieved. As Burke writes of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (the paradigm of such idealised courtship), it is by means of such ‘gradations [that] it builds a ladder of courtship dialectically, into a grand design that, in its ultimate stage, would transcend the social mystery, ending Platonically on a mystic, mythic vision of celestial mystery’; the ‘hierarchic principle of courtship sets a pattern of communication between “lower” and “higher” classes (or kinds) [which] can be universalized in terms of a climbing from body to soul, from senses through reason to understanding’.¹⁹ The point, of course, is that Astrophil fails to move upwards and remains mired in the senses to the end, his courtship of Stella being, in the event, so far from Castiglione’s ideal that it could be taken as a rejection of idealist poetics altogether.²⁰ For one critic, Sidney’s lover ‘steps down, not up’, and for another, ‘gradation might open out onto degradation’.²¹ In a hierarchical society, ‘degree’ can no more be scaled than love’s gradatio (both deriving from Latin gradus, step), as Queen Elizabeth reminded Sidney in no uncertain terms when, reprimanding him for his tennis court quarrel with the Earl of Oxford in 1579, she laid before him their insuperable ‘difference in degree’.²² If pastoral and lyric traditionally set about to poeticise ‘a beautiful relation between rich and poor’, then in his own contribution to these forms Sidney takes an altogether more sceptical look at such mystifications.²³ Sidney’s own class position was particularly ambiguous, deriving as it did from the feudal nobility on his mother’s side—as the sometime heir to his Dudley uncles, the Earls of Warwick and Leicester, Sidney enjoyed virtually princely status, on the Continent at least— and the aspirant gentry on his father’s: as the son of a bureaucratic functionary, albeit a loyal one, Sidney had no hereditary title and, in his daily life, interacted with worlds quite removed from the court, such as the mercantile family with whom he lodged while at Shrewsbury School.²⁴ Sidney claimed his ‘chiefest honour is to be a Dudley’ and boasted of ‘the nobility of that blood whereof I am descended’ (Sidney, ‘Defence of the Earl of Leicester’, Miscellaneous Prose, 134), but he was also the son of what he called ‘so youngly a fortuned family as the Sidneys’ (Sidney, letter to Sir Francis Walsingham, 17 December 1581, Correspondence, 1044),²⁵ and—perennially short of money, lacking the incomegenerating position the Queen was slow to grant him—he died leaving colossal debts. For many, the class differential with which Sidney’s poetry is so obsessed finds its origin here, in his unique need to negotiate between very different social strata. One critic, for example,
¹⁸ For other examples of gradatio in the sequence, see: AS 2, lines 5–7, Poems, 165; AS 44, lines 1–4, Poems, 186; AS 74, lines 9–11, Poems, 204; AS v, lines 1–2, Poems, 212; and AS vii, lines 7–10, Poems, 217. ¹⁹ Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 221, 231–2. ²⁰ See Catherine Bates, On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (Oxford, 2017); and Corey McEleney, Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility (New York, 2017). ²¹ Alan Hager, Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney (Newark, DE, 1991), 14; Alex Davis, ‘Revolution by Degrees: Philip Sidney and Gradatio’, Modern Philology, 108.4 (2011), 488–506, 505. ²² Fulke Greville, ‘A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney’, in John Gouws (ed.), The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (Oxford, 1986), 40. ²³ Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 11. ²⁴ See Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley, CA, 1976); Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford, 1992); and Alan Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London, 2000). ²⁵ Sir Philip Sidney, in Roger Kuin (ed.), The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 2012).
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451 identifies these ‘competing modes of social distinction’ as, on the one hand, status (the static, immutable, God-given entitlements of hereditary birthright) and, on the other hand, class (access to and control of the dynamic system of circulating goods and wealth, in a word, capital), and sees Astrophil as the product of an urgent though ultimately unsuccessful desire to reconcile the two.²⁶ The problem is that Astrophil’s aristocratic status is dependent upon, and yet undermined by, his possession or otherwise of material wealth, something the sonnet sequence articulates very precisely as his desire for something he lacks and can never possess: namely, Lady Rich. For Stella is identified on at least three occasions (see AS 24, Poems, 176–7; AS 35, Poems, 182; AS 37, Poems, 183) as Penelope Devereux, daughter of the first Earl of Essex, once considered a possible match for Sidney, but married in 1581 to Robert, Lord Rich. What presents itself as a personal story of disappointed love, therefore, can also be read as a meditation on how to achieve social status and what it costs. As Lady Rich, Stella could be seen as an allegorical figure who stands somewhere between Lady Meed in Piers Plowman—who represents everything from remuneration and payment to reward and the free gift of grace—and Lady Munera in The Faerie Queene, who represents nothing but bribery and corruption (fantasies about how to gain status and influence giving way to bitter realities as the period progressed).²⁷ And, in cursing Stella’s husband as ‘that rich fool’ (AS 24, line 9, Poems, 177)—the beloved’s husband being structural to the inception of desire from the troubadours on—the impoverished and importunate Astrophil is also identifying with the one figure he would like to be: Lord Rich/a rich lord.²⁸ Following Empson and Burke, critics increasingly came to see Sidney’s pastoral and lyric in such sociological terms, and for several decades this became the default reading of his poetry. The fantasies of sexual advancement dramatised in his works were historicised and viewed as ways of imagining, rehearsing, and testing out the vicissitudes of social advancement: its desirability, the ways and means of achieving it, the consequences of not being able to do so. Sidney’s poetry was seen to epitomise the rhetoric of courtship: Astrophil’s conceits and devices, for example, were judged ‘not poetic but rhetorical’, because, whether they succeeded or not, they clearly aimed at persuasion and made every effort to communicate with a remote and superior being.²⁹ Sidney’s pastorals were likewise understood as using the fiction of country courtships to court Queen Elizabeth and persuade her of his and his faction’s foreign policy objectives.³⁰ No small part of the justification for such views was, first, that in the Defence Sidney argued the whole purpose of poetry was to move its readers, ideally to action; and, secondly, that this was exactly how his poetry was read in the period, where it furnished rhetorical handbooks with numerous exempla.³¹ In such readings, what
²⁶ Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 2005), 74. ²⁷ On the allegorical figure of Lady Meed, see Danila Sokolov, Renaissance Texts, Medieval Subjectivities: Rethinking Petrarchan Desire from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Pittsburgh, PA, 2017), 25–81. ²⁸ In this respect, Astrophil is much like the Sidney who used his eloquence to persuade those who are ‘in hope to grow rich by that which they have not’ to adventure in the New World: see Greville, ‘A Dedication’, in Gouws (ed.), Prose Works, 70. ²⁹ Richard A. Lanham, ‘Astrophil and Stella: Pure and Impure Persuasion’, English Literary Renaissance, 2.1 (1972), 100–15, 102. ³⁰ See Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship’, Renaissance Drama, n.s. 8 (1977), 3–35, and ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’, ELH, 50.3 (1983), 415–59; Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge, 1992); and Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CT, 1996). ³¹ For example, Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (London, 1588); George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (London, 1589); and John Hoskins, ‘Directions for Speech and Style’ (1599).
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452 - looked like amorous courtship was really a vehicle or veil for political courtship: ‘love is not love’ (to quote the title of one particularly influential article) but a way of articulating ambitions for power, status, and social mobility that it would have been counterproductive to articulate openly.³² The ruse was a pervasive and long-lasting one because it allowed a writer like Sidney to substitute the technical mastery of his craft for the uncertainties of a world over which he otherwise had little control, a factor which might account for the defensiveness often detected in his work.³³ If the strategy did not always (or ever) succeed in realising its fantasies of success, it nevertheless served an important function: the language of love was endemic in the poetry of the period because, as one critic puts it, ‘in Western literature and especially after Petrarch, its franchise is to represent unrequitedness in a European culture for which requital is an important but little theorized condition of public and private life’.³⁴ There were good reasons, then, for reading Sidney’s poetry rhetorically in this way, and such interpretations had and continue to have a lot of mileage in them. It is worth remembering, however, that the rhetoric of courtship in his literary works is shown to be either quite unnecessary, in the case of relations that exist on a par (whether high or low), or quite impossible, in the case of those that do not. Sidney could, of course, have endlessly repeated such scenarios in his poetic fictions in order to convince himself and others of rhetoric’s redundancy and failure, but to make that the only thing his poetry is about is to do him a disservice. Poetry and oratory may share an ‘affinity’ in matters of diction and style, as he suggests in the Defence (119), but that does not mean the former is reducible to the latter. Poetry may or may not persuade but it does plenty of other things besides, many of which— especially the formal regimes of prosody and versification that lyric foregrounds above all— have nothing to do with signification and communicate, if anything, how much more there is to language than its referential function alone: how alien and strange the medium is to those who know.³⁵ Where the humanist poetics of the sixteenth century insisted on an instrumentalist model of art that inevitably reduced poetry to oratory, those poets who resisted such a diminution of their art found an alternative model in the sublime.³⁶ For, as theorised by Longinus (c 213–73 ), sublime art specifically aimed not to persuade but, rather, to shock, dumbfound, and bewilder its recipients—to transport them to a state of wonder—and poetry was especially able to do this because its formal features were precisely what differentiated it from ordinary speech (in the latter, of course, instrumentality is very useful). In making language do something different from usual—in making it sing and dance and sound, over and above anything it might mean—poetic language and poetic form halt the cogitating, calculating mind in its tracks and show how much more there is to human experience than understanding and knowledge alone: more things in heaven and earth, oratio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Poetry is the closest thing to ‘pure ³² Arthur F. Marotti, ‘ “Love Is Not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order’, ELH, 49.2 (1982), 396–428. ³³ On Sidney’s ‘mastery’, see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Politics of Astrophil and Stella’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 24.1 (1984), 53–68; and Maureen Quilligan, ‘Sidney and His Queen’, in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (eds), The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago, IL, 1988), 171–96. On Sidney’s defensiveness, see Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals; and Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1983). ³⁴ Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago, IL, 1999), 11. ³⁵ See Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton, NJ, 2007); and Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA, 2015). ³⁶ See Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 53–60; and Patrick Cheney, English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson (Cambridge, 2018). See also Chapter 5 in this volume.
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453 persuasion’, as Burke calls it—‘pure’ in the sense that it is not persuasion at all—because it is uniquely able to detach language from any ulterior motive and to say something ‘not for an extra-verbal advantage to be got by the saying, but because of a satisfaction intrinsic to the saying. It summons because it likes the feel of a summons. It would be nonplussed if the summons were answered.’³⁷ With his fascination for, and minute attention to, all aspects of poetic language and poetic form, Sidney was more aware of this than most, and I will conclude this chapter, therefore, by looking briefly at some aspects of his verse that prioritise outer form over inner content, verba over res, in ways that suggest that poetry might come into being not or not only for some additional purpose, effect, or yield, but indeed for the satisfaction of the saying alone. Sidney often describes his poetic works as nugatory—the Arcadia is a ‘toyful Book’ (letter to Robert Sidney, 18 October 1580, Correspondence, 1009) and ‘a trifle . . . triflingly handled’ (dedication to Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Old Arcadia, 3), the Defence an ‘ink-wasting toy’ (Defence, 121), and Astrophil ‘brings forth toys’ (AS 18, line 9, Poems, 174)—but these need not be dismissed as ritual expressions of the modesty topos, for he often seems to spin poetry out of very little indeed. His longest poem, for example, ‘A Shepherd’s tale no height of style desires’ (see Sidney, OP 4, Poems, 242–56), conjures 544 lines in ottava rima (eight-line stanzas, rhyming abababcc) out of a childish game of ‘barley-break’ (the pastoral equivalent of ‘catch’ or ‘tag’), and still is not finished after that. As one critic notes of this and Sidney’s other Arcadia poems, they ‘have outstanding technical merit, using and stretching the language with a complex fluency unsurpassed by any poet of the period. Yet all are, by his own most exacting standards, empty.’³⁸ The echoing hollowness of the highly wrought complaints sung by Strephon, Klaius, and Philisides has already been noted. Another critic sees ‘Sweet glove the witness of my secret bliss’ (see Sidney, OA 35, Poems, 70)—a poem addressed by Dorus to Pamela’s empty glove (also in ottava rima, as it happens)—as, like the glove itself, all surface and no content, such that it enacts the humanist fear that language might indeed be mere ‘raiment’ with nothing more substantive underneath. In a gradatio in the second stanza—where ‘hand’, ‘heart’, ‘band’, and ‘part’ build progressively to the ‘joys’ Dorus prays Pamela will impart (the five steps corresponding, of course, to the five empty fingers)—‘Sidney creates a formal emblem of style without matter’.³⁹ A third critic notes that, where theorists of the period generally liked rhyme words to agree in sense as well as sound on grounds that this reinforced the poet’s meaning, Sidney often prioritises sound over sense, rhyme over reason, choosing words not for their expressive point but for their phonetic likeness alone. In the final couplets of Astrophil and Stella, for example—where one might expect particularly resounding ‘clozes’, as Samuel Daniel would call them in his Defence of Rhyme (1603)— Sidney often chooses rhyme words that are ‘semantically empty or neutral’: ‘this / is’ (AS 21, Poems, 175), ‘do / you’ (AS 30, Poems, 180), ‘me / see’ (AS 39, Poems, 184; AS 53, Poems, 191), ‘thus / us’ (AS 52), ‘wit / it’ (AS 59, Poems, 194), ‘take / make’ (AS 69, Poems, 200), ‘all / shall’ (AS 72, Poems, 202), and so on.⁴⁰
³⁷ Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 269. ³⁸ Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Philip Sidney’s Toys’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 66 (1980), 161–78, 172, italics original. ³⁹ Colleen Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics (New York, 2018), 53. ⁴⁰ Anne Ferry, By Design: Intention in Poetry (Stanford, CA, 2008), 45; for the quotation from Daniel, see Samuel Daniel, in Arthur Colby Sprague (ed.), Poems and a Defence of Ryme (Chicago, IL, 1930), 138.
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454 - Indeed, Sidney is particularly drawn to empty sounds: the vocable ‘O’ appears more often in his poetry (385 times) than the word ‘love’ (337 times), for example, and in their moans, groans, sighs, and cries—‘Ah’, ‘Aha’, ‘Alas’, and ‘Io Paean sing’ (AS 63, line 9, Poems, 196)— his various speakers are forever emitting inarticulate sounds: the kind of thing Michael Drayton would later parody when he claimed (albeit disingenuously) that he had not in such ‘Ah-mees my whining Sonnets dressed’ (Drayton, Idea, prefatory sonnet, line 7, Works, 2.310).⁴¹ Sidney’s poetry even accommodates sounds that are not human. Appropriately enough, given his identification with animals, Philisides identifies with a lamb and its ‘beawaymenting cry’ (Sidney, OP 5, line 78, Poems, 258), and in ‘As I my little flock on Ister bank’ (see Sidney, OA 66, Poems, 98–103)—the satirical beast fable he recounts in the Third Eclogues—he imagines a scenario in which the entire animal kingdom expresses itself in a cacophonous ‘neighing, blaying, braying, and barking, / Roaring, and howling’ (Sidney, OA 66, lines 62–3, Poems, 100).⁴² Elsewhere, sound more harmoniously simulates music, as in one of the Certain Sonnets, written to be sung to the tune of a rustic song, which simulates pastoral pipe-music with the nonsense refrain ‘Fa la la leridan, dan dan dan deridan: / Dan dan dan deridan deridan dei’ (Sidney, CS 27, Poems, 156–7), or in ‘The lad Philisdes’ (see Sidney, OP 5, Poems, 256–9) where the latter does the same with his pipe’s ‘liribliring cries’ (line 62, Poems, 258).⁴³ And the non-verbal rhythms of prosody, of course, also strike a certain music to the ear, for music ‘mediates between soundscape and speech’, as one critic writes, moving ‘nonhuman sounds in the direction of speech, and speech in the direction of nonhuman sounds’.⁴⁴ By extending language beyond its purely referential function in such ways, poetry expands the medium into a synaesthetic experience that, at its best, is the more stunning—the more sublime—because it surpasses the merely ratiocinative mind. It demonstrates that there is more to language than getting your message across, and at least one area of human experience that is not governed by utility. To those who still insist that poetry must have some instrumental purpose and serve some profitable end—who are ‘so cloyed with wit’ (Sidney, AS vii, line 3) they judge the ‘ravishing delight’ (line 2) of such an experience foolish and vain—Sidney has only this to say: O let them hear these sacred tunes, and learn in wonder’s schools, To be (in things past bounds of wit) fools, if they be not fools. (Sidney, AS vii, lines 5–6, Poems, 217)
A poem is an opportunity to make beautiful sounds, to show language in all its glory. For Sidney, the subject matter provides an occasion for making verse, not the other way round, so it does not really matter what that verse is about. The Psalms or a game of tag serve ⁴¹ Michael Drayton, in J. William Hebel (ed.), Works, corrected edition, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1961). For Sidney’s use of ‘O’ and ‘Love’, see Herbert S. Donow (ed.), A Concordance to the Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Ithaca, NY, 1975), 617. By way of comparison, while Sidney uses ‘O’ (or ‘Oh’) some fifty-five times in the 108 sonnets of Astrophil and Stella, Spenser uses ‘O’ only four times in the eighty-nine sonnets of the Amoretti: at a ratio, that is to say, of 4.5 to 51, or over eleven times less often. ⁴² For other examples of shepherds sounding like sheep, see: ‘I pray thee learn to blea’ (Sidney, OA 29, line 136, Poems, 56); ‘He treble beas for help’ (Sidney, OP 4, line 492, Poems, 254); and ‘Tell her in your piteous blaying’ (Sidney, AS ix, line 49, Poems, 222). Bird sounds are also prevalent: see, e.g., the parliament of fowls in OA 10, lines 67–87, Poems, 28; and numerous references to the sound of parrots, magpies, owls, and swans throughout Sidney’s poetry. ⁴³ For other examples of onomatopoetic pipe-sounds in pastoral poetry, see also Chapter 14 in this volume. ⁴⁴ Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, IL, 1999), 51. For a futher discussion of Sidney’s delight in the signifier or pure sound, see my ‘Obtaining Grace: Poetic Language and the Language of Reform in Astrophil and Stella’, Reformation, 26.1 (2021): 23–41.
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455 equally well as the basis for making such music, and the language of love (infinitely ‘variable’ as Puttenham said) will do as well as any. ‘Love is not love’ when poetry is treated as rhetoric: it can only be courtship, a means to an end. But love is love when poetry is treated as poetry—not Astrophil’s love for Stella, or Sidney’s for Penelope Rich (subjects about which we have no right to speculate)—but a love about which no one can be in any doubt: Sidney’s love for poetry, the artist’s love for the thing he has made.
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26 Spenser Shorter Poetry Ayesha Ramachandran
Edmund Spenser concludes his Epithalamion (1595) with an envoi to his own poem: ‘Song’, he urges, ‘Be unto her a goodly ornament, / And for short time an endlesse moniment’ (Spenser, Epithalamion, lines 427, 432–3, Shorter Poems, 449).¹ This famous line captures a characteristic Spenserian paradox: the delicate play of scale that juxtaposes the small and large, the trivial and the weighty, ‘short time’ and ‘endlesse moniment’. The poem is an ‘ornament’—an embellishment or decoration, seemingly incidental and inconsequential— but it also manifests a sign or circumstance of honour (from the Latin ornamentum); its brevity, the ‘short time’ of its speaking, belies its symbolic invocation of cosmic temporalities that are fused, in turn, into the classic trope of poetry’s enduring power against the ravages of historical time. The Epithalamion’s envoi is thus a condensed reflection on the nature of Spenser’s ‘shorter poetry’ itself, which is paradoxical, scalar, playful, and always in juxtaposition with the vastness of his long poem, The Faerie Queene. It is not surprising, then, that critics have long struggled to describe in collective terms the Spenserian poetic oeuvre beyond the epic. As early as the 1611/17 folio Works, The Shepheardes Calender, and The Faerie Queene occupy a central place, while the rest of the poems are relegated to the category of ‘other works’.² While the Variorum simply lists the works, beginning with the Calender and The Faerie Queene, J. C. Smith and Ernest de Sélincourt’s important 1910 edition creates a dichotomy that persists through much of the subsequent century by dividing the epic from ‘the minor poems’.³ These other, minor poems were reclassified as the ‘shorter poems’ in the later twentieth century, first in the Yale Edition of William Oram, et al., and then followed by Douglas Brooks-Davies and Richard McCabe.⁴ But this editorial discomfort with the appropriate tag for these poems discloses some of the challenges confronting any reader or critic of these works: what is the relationship (if any) of these poems to The Faerie Queene? Is there a hierarchy of value and achievement (aesthetic, cultural, historical, or political) to be discerned amongst these poems? Is their interest merely in their status as remainders, the scraps on the floor of a great writer, or are they works worthy of attention in their own right, even today? We might also ask what implicit comparison or genre is signalled by the term ‘shorter poems’. After all, many of these ‘other’ poems are quite long: the Calender (1579), taken as a whole, consists of over 2,200 lines; Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595) clocks in at just
¹ Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). ² See Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene: The Shepheards Calendar: Together with the Other Works (London, 1611). ³ Edmund Spenser, in J. C. Smith and Ernest de Sélincourt (eds), Poetical Works (Oxford, 1910). ⁴ See William A. Oram, et al. (eds), The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven, CT, 1989); Douglas Brooks-Davies (ed.), Edmund Spenser: Selected Shorter Poems (London, 1995); and McCabe (ed.), Shorter Poems. Ayesha Ramachandran, Spenser: Shorter Poetry In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Ayesha Ramachandran 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0026
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457 under 1,000 lines, and Fowre Hymnes (1596), taken as a set, are almost 1,200 lines long. Compared to the output of other Renaissance poets, these are longish poems, and they signal their interest in matters of size and scale by their careful groupings into sequences, series, and collections. But within the Spenserian corpus, they shrink in comparison to the 36,000-line Faerie Queene. I linger on this question of brevity to note how the generic heterogeneity, relative length, and multilayered complexities of the ‘shorter poems’ have long been overshadowed by the sheer size of Spenser’s long poem. At the same time, however, the ‘shorter poems’ are not merely a catchall for a group of poems united by their relatively small size and shared authorship; for the label does reveal, almost unexpectedly, the ways in which these poems are locked in a continuous conversation with The Faerie Queene, particularly with regard to generic innovation, practices of imitation, multilingual intertextual allusion, translation, and a persistent interest in the appropriate place of poetry in the sociopolitical world. The relationship of the shorter poems to the epic remains a prime concern of Spenserian scholarship and is frequently used as a lens through which to understand Spenser’s poetic self-fashioning. The emphasis that Richard Helgerson and Patrick Cheney have placed on the national, laureate poet sets the poems within a specific career trajectory and a rota Virgilii (the ideal model of a poet’s career based on Virgil) that moves from pastoral to epic, while Anne Prescott and William Oram have suggested that the thematic foci of the shorter poems, read alongside the epic, call for understanding Spenser as a love poet, perhaps on the model of Pierre de Ronsard, who (also) abandoned his epic to continue writing lyric poems.⁵ More intriguingly, Roland Greene and Colin Burrow have invoked the ancient model of neoteric poetics to understand Spenser’s poetic corpus, since the counterpointing of epic and non-epic poems by Catullus and others offers useful analogies.⁶ Noting that, in its original usage, the term ‘neoteric’ ‘designates a school that uses the shorter, less weighty genres (elegy, lyric, epyllion) as a lever with which to renovate epic’, Greene usefully catalogues the similarities between the Roman poetae novi and Spenser’s own poetic practice: they both ‘[insist] on the mutual invigorations of poetry and doctrine or theory; [rethink] the relations between poetry and language, including the recuperative effects of archaism; and finally, [position their] poetry against a horizon of presentness—in history, in politics, in social thought—even as that poetry may reach back with discrimination into the past for models’.⁷ Many of Spenser’s shorter poems are in fact lyric poems set together in complex patterns that point to a sustained poetics of experimentation and innovation. This begins with the translations for Jan Van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings (1569), explodes into view in The Shepheardes Calender, and persists throughout the poet’s career, even in late works such as
⁵ See Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA, 1983); Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993); Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Laurel and the Myrtle: Spenser and Ronsard’, in Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (eds), Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age (Lexington, KY, 2000), 63–78; and William A. Oram, ‘Lyric Address and Spenser’s Reinvention of the Proem’, Studies in Philology, 116.2 (2019), 253–79. On the rota Virgilii and the literary career, see also Chapter 9 in this volume. ⁶ See Roland Greene, ‘Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry’, in Andrew Hadfield (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spenser (Cambridge, 2001), 237–51; and Colin Burrow, ‘Spenser and Classical Traditions’, in the same volume, 217–36. ⁷ Greene, ‘Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry’, 238. So named by Cicero, the poetae novi [new poets] included Catullus, Gallus, Propertius, Tibullus, Ovid, and Virgil, writers who consciously distanced themselves from the traditions of Homeric epic.
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458 - Fowre Hymnes, Prothalamion (1596), and the Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609).⁸ Alongside the writing of The Faerie Queene, Spenser continued to publish shorter poems which often offer an oblique commentary on the contexts and content of the epic: Complaints (1591), for instance, with its imitations of Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch, and Joachim Du Bellay, deconstructs at a smaller scale questions of transmission, translation, and the cultural politics of Elizabethan poetry; Colin Clouts, a kind of pastoral epyllion, reflects on the writing of epic and court poetry, while Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595) are in dialogue with the themes of love and marriage that animate the central books of The Faerie Queene. Most of all, the shorter poems are where Spenser gleefully flaunts his learning, his humanistic commitments, and the pleasure of poetic play, characteristics that locate him ‘among European poets of his generation’.⁹ This chapter will return the shorter poems to their dialogic relationship to The Faerie Queene and each other, highlighting their revolutionary treatment of genre and poetic selfpresentation. If, as Harry Berger famously argues, the poetics of The Faerie Queene can be described as ‘revisionary play’, this is also the literary mode of the shorter poems, which return over and over again to shared forms, tropes, themes, and dilemmas as the poet seeks to understand what poetry can and cannot do in the world.¹⁰
The New Poet: From the Theatre to the Calender Though The Shepheardes Calender is usually hailed as Spenser’s first appearance in print, that honour belongs to the Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings, a multinational literary franchise curated by Jan Van der Noot in 1569 which appeared in three languages (Dutch, French, and English) addressed to three national readerships within a single year.¹¹ It was, however, not until the early nineteenth century that Spenser’s hand was distinguished by H. J. Todd in his Variorum edition, and it is only with the forthcoming New Oxford edition that the Theatre will get a modern edition.¹² The Theatre places Spenser, the only English poet, in a well-established Petrarchan tradition amongst masters such as Du Bellay and Clément Marot, though the teenage poet-translator remains anonymous. Still, as Joseph Loewenstein argues, ‘That the twenty-two sonnets in The Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings are not identified as Spenser’s should not set them securely outside the circle that includes the poems made canonical by Virgilianist criticism, since The Shepheardes Calender is similarly anonymous’.¹³ Indeed, while critics who seek in Spenser’s oeuvre the ⁸ It remains unclear whether the Cantos of Mutabilitie should be read as a ‘shorter poem’ or an extension of The Faerie Queene: on this, see Andrew Zurcher, ‘The Printing of the Cantos of Mutabilitie in 1609’, in Jane Grogan (ed.), Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos (Manchester, 2010), 40–60. ⁹ Greene, ‘Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry’, 238. ¹⁰ Harry Berger Jr, Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley, CA, 1988). I invoke Berger’s resonant phrase to highlight Spenser’s habit of constant revision and re-enactment across his oeuvre, both at a formal and narrative level. ¹¹ Jan Van der Noot, A Theatre Wherein Be Represented as Well the Miseries and Calamities That Follow the Voluptuous Worldlings, as Also the Great Joys and Pleasures Which the Faithfull Do Enjoy. An Argument Both Profitable and Delectable, to All That Sincerely Love the Word of God (London, 1569). ¹² Edmund Spenser, in H. J. Todd (ed.), The Works of Edmund Spenser . . . with the Principal Illustrations of Various Commentators (London, 1805). On the textual history of Spenser’s work, see Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Spenser’s Textual History’, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 2010), 637–63. ¹³ Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Spenser’s Retrography: Two Episodes in Post-Petrarchan Bibliography’, in Judith H. Anderson, Donald Cheney, and David A. Richardson (eds), Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography (Amherst, MA, 1996), 99–130, 116.
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459 makings of a Virgilian career rightly emphasise the tour-de-force performance that is the Calender, his earlier foray into translation, European literary dissemination, and Protestant polemic affords an equally important lens on the making of Spenser’s deeply humanist, theologically inflected, philosophically engaged poetry.¹⁴ The Theatre marks the emergence of a visionary poet, a vates, who draws on Petrarch and apocalyptic biblical poetics on the one hand, and the new vernacular poetry of Marot and Du Bellay on the other. Du Bellay, in particular, will emerge as a kind of Spenserian alter ego: a nationalist poet of exile, an innovator who transformed the Petrarchan tradition in the sixteenth century by emphasising the political, polemical, proto-Protestant Petrarch rather than the lover of Laura alone.¹⁵ It is from translating Du Bellay’s sonnets and imitating them that Spenser may have acquired a model for the narrative poetics of his epic, wherein ‘a closely observed scene comes into view, described from a vantage that suggests both sensual attraction and moral revulsion, only to be superseded by a second scene that is somehow both a continuation of the first and entirely different’—a model which Greene describes as ‘narrative subduction’, a process ‘where a unitary world is continually coming into sight, multiplying into alternatives and being recovered again as unitary’.¹⁶ This mode of seeing and re-seeing also echoes the apocalyptic poetics of the Book of Revelation, central to Van der Noot’s commentary, and, later, to Spenser’s own epic poetics. Several passages in the Theatre in fact are reworked in The Faerie Queene.¹⁷ From a theological point of view, Van der Noot’s ‘forward Protestantism’, a political stance that favoured actively preserving the Protestant ascendancy in Europe, resonates with positions that Spenser would (perhaps) espouse in the Calender, Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, and the Complaints volume: several scholars note that the Theatre usefully provides a poetic and philosophical genealogy to Protestantism.¹⁸ With its reflections on time, mutability, and the deferred promise of eternity, the Theatre introduces some of the persistent themes of the Spenserian corpus, but also suggests how Spenser draws on a rich range of multimedia sources. Its evocation of the spatialised but ephemeral notion of human life as theatrical performance may also have spurred Spenser to think about literary form itself: the matter of time’s passage is knowingly recrafted into the meditations on poetic bildung [development], history (literary and political), and the natural cycles of seasonal change in The Shepheardes Calender that would announce the début of a ‘new Poete’ ten years later (Spenser, Calender, ‘Epistle’, line 10, Shorter Poems, 25). The Theatre showcases a progression of visions that telescope eschatological time; the Calender builds on this technique, juxtaposing in its progression of monthly eclogues both a linear, progressive movement as well as patterns of cyclical return (Januarye and December,
¹⁴ On the Virgilian shape of Spenser’s career, see Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight; and Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge, 1993). For a substantial recent consideration of Spenser’s contribution to the Theatre in the context of his own career, see Tom MacFaul, ‘A Theatre for Worldlings (1569)’, in McCabe (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, 149–59. ¹⁵ On Petrarch as a proto-Protestant figure, see Deirdre Serjeantson, ‘Milton and the Tradition of Protestant Petrarchism’, Review of English Studies, 65.272 (2014), 831–52; and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1984), 40. ¹⁶ Greene, ‘Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry’, 240. ¹⁷ See, for instance, Revelation 21.4; sonnet 15 from the Theatre; and The Faerie Queene 6.4.23. See MacFaul, ‘Theatre’, 156–7. ¹⁸ On ‘forward Protestantism’, see the classic essay by Patrick Collinson, ‘Puritans, Men of Business and Elizabethan Parliaments’, Parliamentary History, 7.2 (1988), 187–211. On the radical Protestantism of Van der Noot, see J. A. van Dorsten, The Radical Arts: First Decade of an Elizabethan Renaissance (Leiden, 1970); Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CT, 1996); and MacFaul, ‘Theatre’.
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460 - for instance, share the same verse form, enfolding a dizzying range of poetic and metrical experiments between them). To enter Spenser’s poetry through the Theatre, as a prelude to the Calender, is thus to place a comparative frame around his career and to observe that from his very first published poems, the poet thought of himself as part of an international, multilingual literary world engaged in cross-cultural dialogue, and not merely in national terms. The later reworking of poems from the Theatre for the Complaints volume suggests how even the making of a distinctly English poetry (as in the lament of Verlame in The Ruines of Time) drew on international literary engagements. And the intentional use of blank verse for the Theatre sonnets, for instance, suggests early vernacular experimentation that seeks to differentiate the English poems from their Continental counterparts, even as Spenser clearly used Italian and French forms as models. When Spenser publishes The Shepheardes Calender in 1579, all these trends come to the fore. Deriving from the Greek root kalein, to ‘announce’, the Calender has been hailed as ‘one of the most ambitious poetic debuts of any poet in any language’, and it certainly rivals other flashy debuts of the sixteenth century, such as those of Garcilaso de la Vega and Juan Boscán (1542), Du Bellay (1549), and Pierre de Ronsard (1550), thereby thoroughly assimilating the internationalist experience of the Theatre.¹⁹ Greene notes that Spenser self-consciously joins others who ‘measure the distance from their forerunners while they renovate their national poetries’.²⁰ At the same time, Spenser absorbs an impressive array of Classical and vernacular sources, distilling them into an ‘original’ English voice and making a strong claim for the capabilities of English language verse through the sheer variety of poetic experiments on display. Unlike his predecessors, however, Spenser’s début is playfully anonymous and engages in an elaborate game of literary masking. The Calender is a series of twelve pastoral eclogues, each named after a month of the year and ensconced within a complex editorial apparatus by one ‘E. K.’, but its author is identified only in the prefatory lyric, ‘To His Booke’, as ‘Immeritô’ [unworthy one]. It is E. K. who introduces Immeritô and aims to amplify his accomplishments: he praises the efforts of the ‘new Poete’, associates his project with a range of Classical, Continental, and English precursors, and adds copious notes and glosses which occupy half the work.²¹ Though E. K. effectively produces a pre-edited text, nudging the reader towards particular interpretations, he is also, obviously, an unreliable editorial voice—both a parody and a celebration of the humanist-commentator. His notes range from simplistic glossing (as with his painstaking explanation of the well-known iconography of Cupid in March) to technical observations full of rhetorical jargon—such as ‘a prety Epanorthosis . . . and withall a Paronomasia’ (Spenser, Januarye, gloss to line 61, Shorter Poems, 39)—and they often offer reductive, confusing, or moralistic accounts of
¹⁹ Clare R. Kinney, ‘The Shepheardes Calender (1579)’, in McCabe (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, 160–77, 162. ²⁰ Greene, ‘Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry’, 245. ²¹ E. K. famously observes: ‘So finally flyeth this our new Poete’ (Spenser, Calender, ‘Epistle’, lines 155–6, Shorter Poems, 29). On the significance of this claim, see Richard Helgerson, ‘The New Poet Presents Himself: Spenser and the Idea of a Literary Career’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 93.5 (1978), 893–911. For an important reflection on Spenser’s linguistic range and sources, see Richard A. McCabe, ‘Translated States: Spenser and Linguistic Colonialism’, in Jennifer Klein Morrison and Matthew Greenfield (eds), Edmund Spenser: Essays on Culture and Allegory (Aldershot, 2000), 67–88.
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461 the poems.²² E. K.’s identity has provoked much critical detective work, but Louise Schleiner makes a persuasive case that ‘Spenser primarily wrote the apparatus, with the initial help and general inspiration of [Gabriel] Harvey’, a suggestion that gives the Calender an aura of doublespeak.²³ Within the work is a further poetic mise-en-abîme. Many of the eclogues record the efforts of a young, accomplished pastoral poet, Colin Clout—whose name (E. K. notes), meaning ‘country lout’, derives from John Skelton and Marot (see Januarye, first gloss, Shorter Poems, 38)—to understand the place of poetry in a complex sociopolitical world. Though Colin appears at the opening, middle, and close of the work (in Januarye, June, and December), has his songs sung in Aprill and August, and is discussed in September and October, the Calender is also about a diverse community of speakers, some of whom comment on Colin’s plight and others of whom engage in debates quite distinct from concerns over eros and poetry: notably, generational conflict, political hierarchy, and ecclesiastical satire. Colin will come to stand in more clearly for Spenser himself in later works—such as Colin Clouts and the sixth, pastoral book of The Faerie Queene (‘Colin Clout (who knowes not Colin Clout?) / He pypt apace, whilest they him daunst about’ (Faerie Queene, 6.10.16))²⁴—but, in this early volume, he is a complex refraction of both Immeritô and E. K. He is both the young, anxious poet making his literary début with uncertain success (Colin breaks his pipe in the final December eclogue) and the learned humanist-commentator who seeks to make visible his achievement in print. David Miller thus separates the ‘negative bildungsroman’ of Colin from the poetic trajectory of his creator, Immeritô/Spenser.²⁵ The form of the volume itself signals this multilayered interpretive framework and echoes the mixed media presentation of the Theatre. E. K.’s dedicatory epistle identifies Immeritô as the ‘new Poete’, heir to Chaucer and Virgil, and highlights his national-literary project to ‘restore . . . our Mother tonge’ (Spenser, Calender, ‘Epistle’, lines 79–82, Shorter Poems, 27). Each eclogue that follows begins with an original, anonymous woodcut and an ‘Argument’ by E. K., while the poem is then followed by Immeritô’s emblem, an aphoristic signature given to each speaker through fragments of Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, and E. K.’s glosses. The work as a whole concludes with Immeritô’s twelve-line poetic envoi in epic hexameters (twelve-syllable couplets). Even the typography of The Shepheardes Calender registers this doubleness: as McCabe notes, the black letter Gothic typeface of its poems suggests an ancient text, while the modern Roman typeface of the commentary suggests topicality and contemporary relevance.²⁶ A cursory glance thus reveals a dialogic, polyvalent work, filled with multiple voices and literary games, impossible to summarise in any satisfactory manner: a work that flaunts both its humanistic learning and vernacular pride, and that anticipates in nuce the literary entanglements of The Faerie Queene.²⁷ As
²² More than one critic has observed that E. K.’s question-begging remarks—his glosses that need glossing— provoke the reader to additional interpretation: see, for instance, Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 68; and Annabel M. Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley, CA, 1987), 127. ²³ Louise Schleiner, ‘Spenser’s “E. K.” as Edmund Kent (Kenned / of Kent): Kyth (Couth), Kissed, and Kunning-Conning’, English Literary Renaissance, 20.3 (1990), 374–407, 380. The identity of E. K. has always provoked much critical commentary: Schleiner offers a clear overview of the debates. ²⁴ Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.). The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ²⁵ David Lee Miller, ‘Authorship, Anonymity, and The Shepheardes Calender’, Modern Language Quarterly, 40.3 (1979), 219–36, 233. ²⁶ McCabe, ‘Translated States’, 37. ²⁷ I am drawing strongly on Kinney, ‘The Shepheardes Calender’, who provides a detailed discussion of the multivalence of this work. Isabel G. MacCaffrey, ‘Allegory and Pastoral in The Shepheardes Calender’, English Literary History, 36.1 (1969), 88–109, 89, already notes that the multiplicity of the Calender previews The Faerie Queene.
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462 - Clare Kinney observes, the key question facing readers of the Calender is this: ‘How can readers keep in focus the shape-shifting Shepheardes Calender, deal at a glance with its bravura display of poetic technique, its vigorous engagement with literary history, its passionate reflections on the poetic vocation, and its devious topicality?’²⁸ Critics have typically focused on three aspects of the Calender: its careful self-fashioning as the commencement of a significant poetic career; its exploration of genre through dense intertextuality and variety of poetic innovation; and its topical allusions which mark distinct religious and sociopolitical agendas. While it is beyond the scope of the present chapter to offer a detailed discussion of each eclogue in these terms, it is worth observing the ways in which the Calender as a whole emblematises these features, which are characteristic of Spenser’s shorter poems. E. K.’s emphasis on the rhetoric of newness and his allusions to Virgil in the opening letter frames the Calender as the first stage in a prestigious poetic career: ‘So flew Virgile, as not yet well feeling his winges. So flew Mantuane, as being not full somd [summed, grown, fully fledged]. So Petrarque. So Boccace; So Marot, Sanazarus, and also diuers other excellent both Italian and French Poetes’ (Spenser, Calender, ‘Epistle’, lines 150–3, Shorter Poems, 29). From the beginning, then, Spenser seems to have understood and presented his ‘shorter poetry’ within the paradigm of pastoral as a developmental stage in the quest for epic greatness. Pastoral here subsumes a variety of lyric kinds, and the Calender is a veritable compendium of short verse forms in English. But pastoral—and short poems in general— also serve as a crucial counterpoint for national, epic ambitions and Spenser will return to this genre as poetic touchstone throughout his career. While Cheney accents the Virgilian trajectory as well as the Orphic power manifested in the eclogues, Helgerson, who sees the makings of a laureate poet in the Calender, usefully reminds us that the work is a record of frustration as well as ambition, in which Colin’s failures haunt the aspiring epic poet (a dynamic replayed dramatically in Book 6 of The Faerie Queene where Calidore, the epic’s Knight of Courtesy, intrudes on Colin Clout’s pastoral vision of the dancing Graces, only to make the scene vanish).²⁹ As ‘England’s first great pastoral poet’, Spenser combines the two main versions of pastoral: idealistic and ideological, idyllic and satirical, Arcadian and Mantuanesque.³⁰ Exploiting the pastor/priest pun already used by Petrarch, Mantuan, and Marot (as in May, where Piers’ critique of Palinode’s celebration of actual shepherds at play slides into theological territory with the use of ‘pastor’ in a metaphorical sense), Spenser overgoes the pastoral experiments of Alexander Barclay and Barnabe Googe to explore a wide variety of themes, from erotic disappointment to ecclesiastical malfeasance. E. K. provides a tripartite division of the Calender’s eclogues into ‘Plaintiue’, ‘recreatiue’, and ‘Moral’ (Spenser, Calender, ‘General Argument’, lines 27, 28, 30, Shorter Poems, 32), but while some critics have stayed close to this categorisation, the poems themselves strain against these criteria, often mixing multiple characteristics (as, for instance, August where the ‘recreatiue’ singing match is followed by Colin’s ‘plaintiue’ sestina). The Calender’s structure can also be understood as a loose alternation between erotic–aesthetic eclogues and satirical–topical eclogues that converge in the complex pastoral elegy of November. These distinct strands of
²⁸ Kinney, ‘The Shepheardes Calender’, 169. ²⁹ Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight, 23; Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 69. ³⁰ The phrase is Cheney’s: see Patrick Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Pastorals: The Shepheardes Calender and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe’, in Hadfield (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Spenser, 79–105, 79.
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463 the work, which highlight Spenser’s lifelong struggle to relate poetry and politics, offer interconnections to other poems: for instance, as Rachel Hile has shown, the links between the Calender and Complaints develop a distinctly Spenserian poetics of satire; the variations on Petrarchan love lyric continue through The Faerie Queene, Amoretti, and Fowre Hymnes; while the persistent dialectic of nature and art finds further theoretical development in The Faerie Queene and the Cantos of Mutabilitie.³¹ Similarly, the Calender’s full title—The Shepheardes Calender Conteyning twelve Aeglogues proportionable to the twelve monethes—balances two different literary origins for Spenser’s poetry that will recur across all his work: a mix of high and low genres, Classical and vernacular sources. It invokes a popular and didactic miscellany, The Kalender of Shepherds (Paris, 1503, and reprinted many times), an English edition of a French almanac structured according to the Christian calendar with practical advice for herdsmen and husbandmen and long passages of moral and spiritual instruction. Sukanta Chaudhuri points out that such works are related to ‘a major line of realistic, satiric and politically oriented portrayals of rural life channeled in England through the Plowman literature’, thereby creating an alternate, indigenised genealogy for Spenser’s shepherds via Langland and Chaucer alongside the Classical eclogues of Theocritus, Virgil, and their early modern imitators, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Mantuan, Marot, and Sannazaro.³² This dense intertextuality is evident in the patterns of allusion: for instance, Bion’s Lament for Adonis is glanced at in March, Virgil’s fourth ‘Messianic’ eclogue is invoked in Aprill, Mantuan is the subtext for Julye and October, while Marot’s Eglogue sur le Trespas de ma Dame Loyse de Savoye is explicitly the basis of November. As the strategically non-idealised English settings of Spenser’s shepherds collide with the literary inheritance of Virgil’s idealised Greek pastoralists, both traditions converge in the figure of ‘Tityrus’, who appears to evoke both Chaucer and Virgil. The multiple authorial personae, the colourful cast of characters, the allusive shadow voices, and E. K.’s ‘exfoliating commentaries’, all contribute to make the Calender a multilayered, polyglossic work.³³ Within eclogues, different poetic structures compete for attention: what, for instance, is the relationship between Willye and Perigot’s playful singing contest and Cuddie’s recollection of Colin’s sestina in August? Is Cuddie a stand-in for Colin or does his mediation and retelling itself transform Colin’s original, which we never hear directly? August is also the most varied of the eclogues, including a ballade, broken ballade, roundelay, and sestina, thus offering a glimpse of the astonishing poetic range in the Calender. A store of often difficult-to-catalogue metrical and stanzaic innovations, it showcases the vernacular poet’s newfound freedom from the Classical pentameter of pastoral and introduces lyric forms that Spenser will develop more extensively in later poems. Thus, Januarye and December use an abbreviated rhyme royal stanza (ababcc) that will shape Fowre Hymnes; June features a complex variation on ottava rima that may be a harbinger of the Spenserian stanza of The Faerie Queene; and versions of the Petrarchan canzone appear in Aprill and November that anticipate the stanza of the Epithalamion.³⁴
³¹ Rachel E. Hile, Spenserian Satire: A Tradition of Indirection (Manchester, 2017). ³² Sukanta Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments (Oxford, 1989), 21. See also Chapter 14 in this volume. ³³ The phrase is Kinney’s: see ‘The Shepheardes Calender’, 165. ³⁴ For a detailed discussion of the metrical and formal work of the Calender, see Jeff Dolven, ‘Spenser’s Metrics’, in McCabe (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, 385–402; and Susanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino, 1984), 139–44. On the Epithalamion stanza specifically, see further, note 72 in this chapter.
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464 -
Styles of Complaint: Spenser’s Poetic Bildung If the Theatre for Worldlings and The Shepheardes Calender stage forms of poetic initiation, the ‘middle’ volumes of Spenser’s shorter poetry—Complaints and Daphnaïda (1591), Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595), and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595)—present a portrait of the artist as a middle-aged man shaping a parallel poetic legacy and voice distinct from the claims of national-imperial epic. To be sure, The Faerie Queene haunts these volumes, appearing as shared tropes and allusions, reworked episodes and figures, and even explicitly invoked (as in Amoretti 33 and 80). But in poems from The Ruines of Time and Epithalamion to the river marriage and cosmogony of Colin Clouts, Spenser explores an alternative poetic position through the affordances of a personal, lyric voice—often wry, ironic, witty, and poignant by turns, oscillating between self-reflexivity and self-delusion; knowing, but also anxious and angry at the ways of the world. In each of these three volumes from the early to mid-1590s, Spenser reworks and develops earlier experiments and themes, often explicitly providing a second take or a revision on an earlier work that invites renewed comparison. While this is evident in the material composition of Complaints, which brings together reworked pieces of Spenser’s own verse, in both Amoretti and Epithalamion and Colin Clouts Spenser offers a first-person version of themes first unfolded in the Calender and The Faerie Queene. The Complaints volume contains revised versions of the poems from the Theatre, now appearing as Visions of the World’s Vanitie, as well as a full suite of translations (Ruines of Rome: By Bellay, The Visions of Bellay, The Visions of Petrarch); its two poems on mutability, The Ruines of Time and Teares of the Muses, are also elaborate variations on the dream vision. In contrast, the controversial Mother Hubberds Tale expands the satirical potentials of the ecclesiastical eclogues of the Calender, and the two epyllia revisit epic topoi obliquely and with gentle irony—Virgils Gnat retells the pseudo-Virgilian Culex, while Muiopotmos relocates the trials of the Bower of Bliss into an insect romance. Burrow has emphasised the importance of the Pseudo-Virgilian poems for Spenser, noting their neoteric origin and associating them with moments of personal and generic transition, and, in this sense, Complaints is a deeply humanist miscellany, deploying a variety of shorter poetic forms to think intensively about the shaping of a poetic voice and its cultural role outside the mainstream of history and politics.³⁵ There remain many questions about the Complaints volume, published by William Ponsonby in 1591, and it is unclear whether Spenser oversaw the printing.³⁶ In the preface, Ponsonby reports that he has collected the contents, which represent only a portion of Spenser’s work, but the ordering of the volume itself suggests signs of authorial intention. The volume has a distinct architecture: it is both bookended by, and centred upon, visionary poems that commemorate lost greatness, of which Rome is the prime example, and within this frame it explores images of the world’s seeming triviality through satire and mock-epic. Thus the paired Ruines of Time and Teares of the Muses, which open the volume, are answered by the similarly paired Visions of Bellay and Visions of Petrarch at the end, while at the very centre we find Ruines of Rome: By Bellay. On either side of the Ruines of Rome are
³⁵ Burrow, ‘Spenser and Classical Traditions’, 220–1. ³⁶ On the textual and publication history of Complaints, see Richard Danson Brown, ‘The New Poet’: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints (Liverpool, 1999); and Mark David Rasmussen, ‘Complaints and Daphnaïda (1591)’, in McCabe (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, 218–36. See, further, Chapter 19 in this volume.
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465 paired poems as well: Virgils Gnat and Mother Hubberds Tale arranged in parallel formation to Muiopotmos and Visions of the World’s Vanitie. The poetics of the volume as a whole and its possible relationship to other lyric collections and sequences have received little attention because of the apparently heterogeneous subject matter of individual poems, but the structural logic of Complaints deserves to be taken seriously as a set of generic experiments in ‘complaint’.³⁷ Here, I will limit myself to some remarks on genre, poetic technique, and key themes, and then focus on the two noteworthy poetic signatures of the volume: Mother Hubberds Tale and Muiopotmos. The term ‘complaint’ itself evokes a rhetoric of inconsolable grief and includes exhortations to contemptus mundi, images of mutability, and estates satire; as a genre it has medieval precedents, but reaches back even further to draw on the poetics of lamentation in both Classical (Ovid’s exilic Tristia is a key text) and biblical texts (such as the Book of Lamentations).³⁸ Complaint may be usefully distinguished from elegy, notes Mark Rasmussen, because where elegy ‘works upon loss, works upon death, to create something new’, complaint refuses this transmutation; its strength comes from a refusal to overcome trauma through mourning and from its melancholic, paradoxical desire for mutable, mortal (often beautiful) things that must inevitably pass away.³⁹ In a Christian context, of course, such a wilful, iterative insistence on loss is theologically problematic. Spenser may be reflecting on these philosophical challenges of the form by strategically invoking as a key subtext Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Fragments IN THE VERNACULAR), also known as the Rime Sparse, the Renaissance ur-text of lament for the mutability of the mortal world alongside a struggle for spiritual respite: ‘Che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno’ [whatever pleases in the world is a brief dream] (Petrarch, Rime Sparse 1, line 14, Lyric Poems, 36–7).⁴⁰ A translation of Rime Sparse 323, The Visions of Petrarch, concludes the Complaints volume (they also rework the early translations of the Theatre), and in translating Du Bellay’s Les Regrets and Songe, as two separate sequences, Spenser is also acknowledging the French poet’s own Petrarchan inheritance and its further transformations into increasingly nationalist and political concerns. Given the close significance of Spenser’s choices as a translator, as Anne Coldiron has demonstrated, and the dense intertextual links that permeate the volume, the poetics of reiteration and repetition in Complaints recalls the similar technique of the Calender and connects Spenser back to a European poetic network.⁴¹ After the publication of the nationally focused first part of The Faerie Queene (1590), Complaints draws on a diverse set of models and forms to announce the development of a second, alternative poetic trajectory alongside stated epic ambitions: one which, significantly, also undercuts epic’s claims to immortal fame via predecessors
³⁷ There are few studies of the structure of Complaints as a whole: see William A. Oram, Edmund Spenser (New York, 1997); Rasmussen, ‘Complaints and Daphnaïda’; and Brown, ‘The New Poet’. The trajectory of the volume is from traditional complaint to what Brown terms ‘innovative complaint’, which ‘articulates the complexities of the mortal condition, and constructs a mimesis no longer tied to moralistic imperatives’ (254). ³⁸ On the logic of complaint, see John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (Oxford, 1991). Rasmussen emphasises the nature of complaint as articulations of ‘unconsoled grief ’, ‘Complaints and Daphnaïda’, 223. ³⁹ Rasmussen, ‘Complaints and Daphnaïda’, 223. ⁴⁰ Francis Petrarch, in Robert M. Durling (ed. and trans.), Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA, 1976). On the philosophical dimensions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, see Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Petrarch as Metaphysical Poet Who Is Not Dante: Metaphysical Markers at the Beginning of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Rvf 1–21)’, in Zygmunt G. Baranski and Theodore J. Cachey, Jr (eds), Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (Notre Dame, IL, 2009), 195–225. ⁴¹ A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘How Spenser Excavates Du Bellay’s “Antiquitez”; Or, The Role of the Poet, Lyric Historiography, and the English Sonnet’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 101.1 (2002), 41–67.
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466 - who firmly rejected epic poetics, the Virgilian model, and Roman centrality (Ovid, Petrarch, Du Bellay). Rome, in fact, looms large over these imitations as a humanist touchstone for ancient grandeur as well as its decline and fall; but Rome is also a cultural ideal. To piece together fragments (of texts, monuments, ideas, affects) is to reconstruct and—perhaps—reanimate an exemplar of past imperial and intellectual might. But as both Petrarch and Du Bellay recognise and chronicle in their poems, such a vision of Rome is also irretrievably gone. For Spenser, Rome is thus both a model and a cautionary tale for potential English cultural and imperial glory—he is, after all, writing from Ireland as a colonial official and is witness to the savagery of empire-building—and the city-as-emblem embodies the tension between mutability and endurance that runs across his entire oeuvre. The Ruines of Time, the first poem of the volume, manifests these themes. Dedicated to Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, it presents a narrator walking by the Thames when he meets Verlame, a personification of the now vanished Roman-British city Verulamium, whose lament for her own fall, the fall of Rome (see Spenser, Ruines of Time, lines 22–175, Shorter Poems, 167–72), and the recent deaths of great Elizabethans, beginning with Spenser’s former employer, the Earl of Leicester, and concluding with Sir Philip Sidney (see Spenser, Ruines of Time, lines 176–343, Shorter Poems, 172–6), occupies most of the poem. Verlame herself emerges from a fusion of Classical, biblical, and contemporary traditions, including Ariadne (in Catullus and Ovid), the Babylonian exiles of Psalm 137, and Du Bellay’s weeping Rome in the tenth poem of Songe; and her use of rhyme royal stanzas (ababbcc) recalls laments by fallen women such as Jane Shore in The Mirror of Magistrates. But the poem also stages a kind of critical self-reflection: as Margaret Ferguson observes, Verlame’s emblematically broken sceptre, like the broken instruments of the Muses in the following poem, recalls the breaking of Colin’s pipes in the Januarye eclogue, and, as others have noted, her complaint itself is built from fragments of Spenser’s earlier poems: a technique that mirrors the humanist reconstruction of the Classical past, especially of Rome.⁴² But The Ruines of Time frames and sets off Verlame’s lament within the narrator’s visionary experience, and in turn distances both from the author, who voices the poem’s ‘Envoy’: her excessive grief conceals excessive attachment, a theological problem that must be repudiated.⁴³ This nested structure recalls the authorial play of the Calender, and provides a point of meta-reflection on Spenser and Complaints as a volume: Rasmussen thus argues that The Ruines of Time, taken as a whole, offers an ‘an exorcism of complaint, a purging of the self-assertive energies of the plaintive will’, as Spenser both elaborates the form of lament but also separates himself from it by providing a range of interpretative possibilities via the narrator’s Theatre-style visions and the Envoy’s direct address to Mary Sidney Herbert.⁴⁴ Like the subsequent poem (The Teares of the Muses), The Ruines of Time is also an anguished howl against perceived political injustices and poetry’s impotence in influencing the course of contemporary history. Verlame indicts a courtier, ‘broad spreading like an aged tree’, who ‘Lets none shoot vp, that nigh him planted bee’ (Spenser, Ruines of Time, ⁴² See Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘ “The Afflatus of Ruin”: Meditations on Rome by Du Bellay, Spenser, and Stevens’, in Annabel Patterson (ed.), Roman Images: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982 (Baltimore, MD, 1984), 23–50, 34. ⁴³ Carl J. Rasmussen, ‘ “How Weak Be the Passions of Woefulness”: Spenser’s Ruines of Time’, Spenser Studies, 2 (1981), 159–81, 170. ⁴⁴ Rasmussen, ‘Complaints and Daphnaïda’, 225.
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467 lines 452–3, Shorter Poems, 180)—a veiled reference to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who is also attacked in Mother Hubberds Tale—and sees in the deaths of Leicester and Sidney the end of a glorious, idealised age when politics and poetry may have been mutually reinforcing. The presence of Sidney (there are multilingual puns on his name) ties the poem and volume to Daphnaïda, printed virtually simultaneously in 1591, and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, which is followed by seven elegies to Sidney.⁴⁵ If The Ruines of Time concludes with poetry’s helplessness in the face of historical decline, The Teares of the Muses offers an extended treatment of the ambivalent relation between poetry and courtly life: the nine Muses lament the circumstances that thwart poetic glory in Elizabethan England in what may be a version of Spenser’s own sense of being blocked in his aspirations.⁴⁶ Prescott highlights the unstable dynamic involving gender and class, but the poem also implicates aristocratic and court culture at large in terms that look ahead to Colin Clouts.⁴⁷ Indeed, The Teares of the Muses, along with Virgils Gnat, Mother Hubberds Tale, and Muiopotmos situate Complaints as a career move away from court and an appeal to different audiences.⁴⁸ Oram suggests that the failure of Spenser’s visit to Elizabeth’s court in 1589–91 had a lasting impact on his self-conception as a national poet, for he ‘came face to face not with the court’s enmity, but with its indifference’.⁴⁹ This evolving opposition between poet and court is neatly framed in Virgils Gnat, which is anchored on the opposition between a ‘carelesse’ shepherd (Spenser, Virgils Gnat, line 153, Shorter Poems, 215), asleep in a pleasant bower, and a care-filled gnat whose sting warns him of a serpent’s hidden attack. The gnat is swatted for his pains but appears to the shepherd in a dream to complain of his mistreatment. Surprisingly, for Complaints, the gnat is heard and finds satisfaction as the shepherd builds a funerary mound, complete with flowers and an epitaph. The mock-epic tone of the poem is, however, undercut by a pointed sonnet addressed to the Earl of Leicester which associates the ‘Gnatts complaint’ (Spenser, Virgils Gnat, dedicatory sonnet, line 14, Shorter Poems, 210) with Spenser’s own grievances and—perhaps—gently mocks the poet’s own exalted self-regard; the final fantasy of epic remembrance is firmly tongue-in-cheek but also poignant in its recognition of both the poet’s aspirations and their delusion.⁵⁰ We note the shift, too, in the stature of the volume’s lamenter-poets—from Verlame and the Muses to insects and animals—marking a strategically staged devaluing of poetry in the world. Both Mother Hubberds Tale and Muiopotmos explore these movements in different generic registers: satire and epyllion. The former was also the cause of the volume’s being called in—all unsold copies were impounded—for its clear attack on Lord Burghley, who is distinctly portrayed as the corrupt Fox and was referred to by his enemies as such. Mother Hubberd was finally only included in the folio edition of Spenser’s Works after the death of Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son and successor, in 1612. The poem—a beast fable that draws on Aesop’s tales and the late medieval trickster-story cycles of Reynard the Fox—tells of the duplicitous Fox and Ape who seek their fortunes by adopting the roles of shepherd, priest, ⁴⁵ On the dating of these volumes, see Adrian Weiss, ‘Watermark Evidence and Inference: New Style Dates of Edmund Spenser’s Complaints and Daphnaïda’, Studies in Bibliography, 52 (1999), 129–54. ⁴⁶ See William A. Oram, ‘Spenser’s Audiences, 1589–91’, Studies in Philology, 100.4 (2003), 514–33. ⁴⁷ See Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Spenser’s Shorter Poems’, in Hadfield (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Spenser, 143–61, esp. 146–7. ⁴⁸ See Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career; Oram, ‘Spenser’s Audiences’; and William A. Oram ‘Spenser in Search of an Audience: The Kathleen Williams Lecture for 2004’, Spenser Studies, 20 (2005), 23–47. ⁴⁹ Oram, ‘Spenser’s Audiences’, 516. ⁵⁰ I am drawing on Rasmussen, ‘Complaints and Daphnaïda’, here, but Prescott suggests that Spenser may be generating ‘an inky cloud of seeming secrecy so as to appear well connected’, ‘Spenser’s Shorter Poems’, 147.
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468 - courtier, and, finally, monarch and chief minister. Going beyond a general satire of the court, Spenser presents a series of analogies by means of what Hile has called ‘indirect satire’ between the Fox’s behaviour and Burghley’s alleged conduct to suggest how unscrupulous courtiers can usurp a kingdom.⁵¹ This ‘imprudently courageous tale’, as Prescott deems it, notices a range of social types and recalls Spenser’s debt to Chaucer; but it also makes a powerful argument for poetry’s impact in the circumstances of its world—here it effectively speaks truth to power and calls out political abuses.⁵² The abject, unresolved complaints of prior poems now give way to an equivocal success—the poem’s subject was legible and potent enough to provoke governmental suppression of Complaints—but the whistleblowing narrator-poet continues to suffer and can only bemoan his conflict with the court. Muiopotmos further reduces courtly conflicts to insect romance, but in doing so it also replays and rewrites key episodes in The Faerie Queene: the butterfly Clarion’s entrapment and demise in the spider Aragnoll’s web echoes several aspects of the Bower of Bliss in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, including its meditation on art and nature, Elizabethan gender politics, the arbitrary workings of power, and the troubled fate of the heroes of chivalric romances.⁵³ Its two inset Ovidian tales—the weaving contest between Arachne and Minerva, based on Metamorphoses 6, and the tale of the nymph Astery (Spenser’s invention)—mark the poem as an epyllion, though its affiliations to the beast fable draw on Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale.⁵⁴ It also recalls the rhetoric of the paradoxical encomium—the celebration of insignificant or unpraiseworthy topics—such as Lucian’s Muscae encomium [praise of a fly] or Erasmus’s imitation of it in the famous Moriae Encomium [The Praise of Folly]; generically, however, it may be modelled on the Pseudo-Homeric Batrochomyomachia [Battle of Frogs and Mice], a comic parody of the Iliad, and thus, an oblique critique of epic itself. The poem’s interest in styles of aesthetic engagement and political action, its finely wrought miniature portraits, and its effective use of metaphor and simile make it stand apart in Complaints as a small-scale literary accomplishment, closer to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander or Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis than to the unceasing mourners of the rest of the volume. In its lingering insistence on beautiful things—Clarion’s wings, the flowers in the garden, the tapestries of Minerva and Arachne, even Aragnoll’s web—Muiopotmos makes a claim for the value of aesthetic experience, often through the use of ekphrasis. While it is ostensibly a lament for the death of Clarion, it lacks the reiterative heaviness of the other poems, maintaining a light touch and delicate, ironic self-reflexivity: after all, this is a poem about the death of a butterfly, a seemingly short-lived and trivial phenomenon, perhaps like poetry itself. And yet, the poem’s evocation of epic tropes confers dignity and pathos on the miniscule, and its surprising power has led readers to search for allegorical correspondences between the poem’s narrative and actual topical intrigues and personalities at court.⁵⁵ Whether or not there is a specific allegory, the poem offers a ‘delicate comment
⁵¹ Hile, Spenserian Satire, 11–37. ⁵² Prescott, ‘Spenser’s Shorter Poems’, 147. ⁵³ For an extended consideration of these themes, see Ayesha Ramachandran, ‘Clarion in the Bower of Bliss: Poetry and Politics in Spenser’s “Muiopotmos” ’, Spenser Studies, 20 (2005), 77–106. ⁵⁴ See Judith H. Anderson, ‘ “Nat Worth a Boterflye”: Muiopotmos and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1971), 89–106; Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, NJ, 1981); and Daniel D. Moss, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England (Toronto, 2014). For a further discussion of the epyllion genre, see also Chapter 16 in this volume. ⁵⁵ The poem has invited (sometimes questionable) speculations about possible topical allegories: see, e.g., Thomas Herron, ‘Plucking the Perrot: Muiopotmos and Irish Politics’, in J. B. Lethbridge (ed.), Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions (Madison, WI, 2006), 80–118.
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469 on mutability, mortality, and the constrictions put on innocently self-pleasing if imprudent desire by envy, slander, fate and chance’, thereby rendering the anti-court satire of Mother Hubberd in a more mythic and allegorical register reminiscent of pastoral.⁵⁶ And it is to pastoral that Spenser returns, in keeping with his now-characteristic poetic practice of revision, to extend and amplify his critique of court politics in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. A seeming sequel to The Shepheardes Calender, which sees Colin Clout—now a clear figure for Spenser himself—coming ‘home’ to Ireland after his unhappy visit to the English court, the poem is a generic hybrid, ‘an extended and eccentric eclogue’ that enfolds courtly satire, pastoral dialogue, a mini-epyllion (the tale of Mulla and Bregog), and cosmogonic mythmaking.⁵⁷ It amplifies themes found in both the Calender and Complaints, offering, in Kinney’s words, ‘a new version of Cuddie’s October lament about incompetent readers who cannot prize the poet (not to mention the dearth of noble patrons for the aspiring maker) rehearsed in the more urgent tones of the artist in exile’.⁵⁸ But this career movement away from the exalted status of the Virgilian laureate poet has challenged the conventional narrative of Spenser’s epic ambitions, and, as Cheney acknowledges, appears to ‘confound his self-presentation as ‘the Virgil of England’ and specifically his selfannounced move from pastoral to epic’ in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene.⁵⁹ But despite arguments to read Colin Clouts as ‘minor epic’, its decasyllabic cross-rhymed quatrains signal its proximity to the long lyric forms of the period, as do its allusions to Ralegh’s Ocean to Cynthia and Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond.⁶⁰ As in the epic, here, too, the poet negotiates his relation to his sovereign, but in Colin Clouts, the poet locates himself far away at the margins, on the shores of Ireland, rather than close at hand in London. The traditional pastoral opposition between court and country is here mapped onto a crucial, vexed Spenserian opposition between England and Ireland. As many scholars have noted, it was his Irish service that had given Spenser significant social mobility, and though he remained deeply conflicted about Irish politics, the presence of the landscape, its myths, and its bardic culture seeps into his poetry. As Oram notes, it is ‘his sense of having a world elsewhere that distinguishes him from others of his generation to whom he is often compared: Sidney, Ralegh, Gabriel Harvey . . . for Spenser [his estates] were home—a center that he built into his poetry’.⁶¹ Colin Clouts confronts this distinction by posing it as a question: where is Colin’s home? Is it in the uncultured ‘waste’ (Spenser, Colin Clouts, line 183, Shorter Poems, 350) of the Irish countryside or at Cynthia’s court? The dialogue between Colin and the Shepherd of the Ocean (a figure for Ralegh) provides classic pastoral contrasts reminiscent of Virgil’s first eclogue that are, however, charged by the colonial politics of the 1590s.⁶² Ironically—and with no little ambivalence—despite the largely negative treatment of Ireland with its ‘wayling’, ‘wretchednesse’, ‘bloodie issues’, ‘leprosies’, ‘griesly famine’, ‘raging sweard’ [sword], and ‘nightly bodrags’ [raids, incursions] (Spenser, Colin Clouts, lines 312–15, ⁵⁶ Prescott, ‘Spenser’s Shorter Poems’, 148. ⁵⁷ Kinney, ‘The Shepheardes Calender’, 174. ⁵⁸ Kinney, ‘The Shepheardes Calender’, 174. ⁵⁹ Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Pastorals’, 82. ⁶⁰ Cheney, ‘Spenser’s Pastorals’, locates Colin Clouts ‘amid epic’ situations between two instalments of The Faerie Queene, connects it to the vogue for so-called ‘minor epic’, and argues that its length (similar to long lyrics such as Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis), as well as its use of dialogue, allegory, and digression, ‘recalls standard features of the minor epic’, (97–8). ⁶¹ Oram, ‘Spenser’s Audiences’, 528. ⁶² Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral, suggests that Colin Clouts can be seen to deploy the twin topoi of the ‘admiring shepherd’ and the ‘critical shepherd’ traditionally used to view court life through a pastoral lens (37).
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470 - Shorter Poems, 353), Colin is clear that this is where he belongs, defiantly turning away from Cynthia and towards his beloved Rosalind.
Beyond Epic: Spenser as Love Poet Spenser’s Rosalind, who appears first in The Shepheardes Calender and then in Clouts Clouts Come Home Againe and eventually, in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene, has been the subject of much biographical speculation: perhaps by 1595, she may be identified with Elizabeth Boyle, the much younger, well-born Anglo-Irish woman whom he would marry on St Barnaby’s Day, June 11, 1594. It is to this other Elizabeth that Spenser writes the Amoretti and Epithalamion, perhaps his best known ‘shorter’ work after the Calender, also published, like Colin Clouts, in 1595. Spenser’s sonnet sequence has often been placed in the context of the sonnet vogue of the sixteenth century, an oddly belated example that stands out for its defiance of the Petrarchan norm of unrequited love. Here, the poet is requited, his lady accepts his advances, and they are married: an event celebrated in Epithalamion, a wedding poem (again, non-traditionally) voiced by the poet-groom himself. But the Amoretti volume also marks a culmination and perhaps a turning point within Spenser’s own poetic corpus: he breaks free from the long imitative shadow of Petrarch and Du Bellay in previous volumes to produce his own lyric sequence; builds on themes explored in The Faerie Queene’s books of love and friendship (Books 3–4), often echoing specific topoi and allusions; and pointedly places his personal lyric voice in counterpoint with his public one in poems such as Amoretti 80: After so long a race as I haue run Through Faery land, which those six books compile giue me leave to rest . . . ... Till then giue leaue to me in pleasant mew, to sport my muse and sing my loues sweet praise. (Spenser, Amoretti 80, lines 1–3, 9–10, Shorter Poems, 427)
It is not coincidental that the turn to Rosalind/Ireland in Colin Clouts is paralleled by the embrace of private desires and personal, affective fulfilment in Amoretti and Epithalamion: a shift that is discernible across the 1596 Faerie Queene, as well as in the late lyrics, Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion. In keeping with the complex, multilayered structures that we have seen in prior volumes, Amoretti and Epithalamion is a tightly integrated tripartite work: it comprises a sonnet sequence of eighty-nine poems, followed by four ‘Anacreontics’ (poems after the style of the Greek Anthology), and finally the twenty-four stanza wedding song or epithalamium—a structure similar to Daniel’s Delia (1592), Fletcher’s Licia (1593), Lodge’s Phillis (1593), and (if we count the Cupid sonnets as Anacreontics), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609). But, characteristically, Spenser takes a contemporary form and explores its possibilities for complex effects. Thus, not only does Amoretti and Epithalamion reverse the trajectory of previous sequences (towards marital and sexual fulfilment rather than isolation and abjection), the volume also presents a distinctive mise-en-page that connects each of these parts. Ponsonby prints one sonnet per page, followed by one stanza per page: a choice that allows the narrative development of the sonnet sequence into marriage to be reflected in poetic
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471 terms by the explosion of the fourteen-line lyric into the eighteen-line canzone-like stanza form. Roland Greene has rightly emphasised how the work highlights Spenser’s ‘concern for the materiality of the poetic object’, by emphasising its artefactuality and its self-reflexive attention to its own patterning: the opening sonnet, for instance, apostrophises ‘leaues’, ‘lines’, and ‘rymes’ rather than Love or the lady (Spenser, Amoretti 1, lines 1, 5, 9, Shorter Poems, 388).⁶³ Amoretti (literally ‘little loves’ in Italian) tells of a courtship, even though some poems (such as Amoretti 8) may have been composed prior to Spenser’s encounter with Boyle. Like Petrarch’s Rime Sparse, the sequence invokes a substructure of liturgical and calendrical anniversaries: New Year’s Day (see Amoretti 4), Spring (see Amoretti 19), Lent (see Amoretti 22), Easter (see Amoretti 68), Lady Day (see Amoretti 62) and the second Spring (see Amoretti 80). It also makes a triptych: after twenty-one sonnets comes a sonnet on Ash Wednesday, then there are forty sonnets for Lent (counting Sundays), and finally another twenty-one sonnets to close out the sequence: a structure reminiscent of Du Bellay’s L’Olive (1549). To this, Spenser adds a cross-cutting two-part division as well—in keeping with the in vita and in morte divisions common to editions of Petrarch’s Rime—except that the shift to the second section of the sequence, marked by Amoretti 63, announces the promise of fulfilment: ‘I doe at length descry the happy shore, / in which I hope ere long for to arryue’ (Spenser, Amoretti 63, lines 5–6, Shorter Poems, 419).⁶⁴ These patterns have suggested that Spenser deliberately crafts a love lyric sequence to harmonise and reconcile the conflict between erotic and spiritual desires that mark the Petrarchan tradition in a distinctly Protestant vein—perhaps most obviously in Amoretti 68, where the lovers seem to embody the love of Christ for the Church—but a closer reading of the Amoretti’s subtle tonal effects, and repeating images of prisons, bonds, captives, and cruel animals, suggests greater ambivalences.⁶⁵ What is clear, however, is that placing reciprocal love at the centre of the sonnet sequence, Spenser renews the possibilities of the genre while at the same time critiquing its intellectual posturing. The greatest difficulty in reading the Amoretti—and perhaps the reason why the poems may ‘not [have] received their due from readers and critics’—has to do with interpreting their tone.⁶⁶ On the surface, the sequence is a pastiche of familiar Petrarchan tropes; indeed, they are a ‘set of homages drawn from the previous fifty years of sonnets in the European vernaculars, and from the sources of those sonnets in scriptural, Classical and late medieval amatory writing’.⁶⁷ But frequently, the invocation of past models only serves as an occasion for ironic self-mockery, humour, or an in-joke between the lovers. Writing in his forties, already a widower, to a much younger second wife-to-be, Spenser cannot but be aware of the potential absurdity of his poetic stance as a Petrarchan lover—or, by the mid-1590s, of his beloved’s and readers’ own awareness of the genre’s excesses. The opportunities for humour and self-reflexive irony generated by this poetic situation—to which Spenser explicitly calls attention—permeates the poems. Take, for instance, Amoretti 16, the crucial poem of innamoramento, in which the lady ‘suddenly with twincle of her eye’ breaks the
⁶³ Roland Greene, ‘Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595)’, in McCabe (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, 256–70, 257. ⁶⁴ See Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life: Some Contexts for Amoretti 67–70’, Spenser Studies, 6 (1985), 33–76. ⁶⁵ See Prescott, ‘The Thirsty Deer’, and ‘Spenser’s Shorter Poems’; and, more recently, Catherine Nicholson, ‘ “Against the Brydale Day”: Envy and the Meanings of Spenserian Marriage’, ELH, 83.1 (2016), 43–70. ⁶⁶ Greene, ‘Amoretti and Epithalamion’, 256. ⁶⁷ Greene, ‘Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry’, 246.
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472 - ‘misintended dart’ of a little putto, deftly defanging the deadly assault of Cupid by stripping it of metaphoric power with witty amusement (Spenser, Amoretti 16, lines 11, 12, Shorter Poems, 395). Or Amoretti 18, in which the lover replays tired Petrarchan clichés: Yet cannot I with many a dropping teare, and long intreaty soften her hard heart: that she will once vouchsafe my plaint to heare, or looke with pitty on my payneful smart. (Spenser, Amoretti 18, lines 5–8, Shorter Poems, 396)
But, in a striking shift, the sestet presents a feisty beloved who shrugs off these postures: But when I pleade, she bids me play my part, and when I weep, she sayes teares are but water: ... and when I waile she turns hir selfe to laughter. (Spenser, Amoretti 18, lines 9–10, 12, Shorter Poems, 396)
Beyond its surface, the sonnet chronicles a shared complicity between the lovers who understand themselves to be re-enacting a set of postures, almost in a synergy of calland-response. Conventions are repeatedly asserted in the Amoretti, only to be undercut gently and redirected to the lovers’ ends. This recognition of the uses and limits of conventionality, as well as its consistently teasing dismissal in the lady’s responses, render the poems dialogic and slippery. At times the lady is a partner in the making and speaking of the poem; at times she is portrayed as caged bird or trembling deer, objectified into familiar gendered tropes that are discomfiting, especially for modern readers. But it is important to note that nowhere in the extensive European sonnet literature can one find a sequence in which the beloved speaks back to the Petrarchan lover with such consistency, wit, irony, and vulnerability. It is no accident that Spenser uses the same Petrarchan tropes for both Amoretti 34 and Britomart’s signature lament in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene, playing in both cases with gendered types. The sequence is thus ‘profoundly revisionary’, in Prescott’s words, even as it lacks the flashy, radical virtuosity of Sidney or Shakespeare, and relishes in a kind of quiet expertise and control of form.⁶⁸ It is in the Amoretti that Spenser develops the definitive English answer to the economical rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet, which is built on only five rhymes, explores its wide range of effects—an accomplishment that may derive from an expansion of the octave-length stanza of The Faerie Queene—and further seeks to overgo Petrarch by reimagining his canzoni in the Epithalamion’s stanzaic experiments.⁶⁹ In grafting a sonnet sequence onto an epithalamium, Spenser fuses ancient and modern traditions: where the Amoretti builds on an Italianate, distinctly Renaissance form, the wedding poem is a distinctly Classical tradition—most familiar from Catullus’s Carmen 61, 62, and 64—that was revived by sixteenth-century humanists such as Jean Salmon Macrin
⁶⁸ Prescott, ‘Spenser’s Shorter Poems’, 153. ⁶⁹ For the poetic contexts for the Spenserian stanza, see Richard Danson Brown, The Art of The Faerie Queene (Manchester, 2019). The nine-line Spenserian stanza of The Faerie Queene also has affinities with the sonnet’s octave, adding an additional alexandrine for closure.
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473 and Du Bellay.⁷⁰ To the shape of the Classical genre, Spenser adds the poetic language of the Song of Songs as well as the Book of Common Prayer, to produce what is ‘one of the most successful wedding songs in any European vernacular’.⁷¹ It enshrines the poet’s wedding day in verse by following its ceremonial unfolding with an almost beat-by-beat precision— each stanza marks a specific event from morning preparations to the wedding service and party, to consummation and post-coital reflections—but in so doing, also aims to capture not only the personal but the social, mythological, and cosmic significance of this act of union. As the personal and public intersect in complex ways, Spenser explores a favourite theme about the significance of a mutable human life: the marriage and procession become a consolation for grief and loss, and the poem itself is transformed into a bulwark against mortality. This is achieved in no small measure by the poem’s famed numerological effects. Even more than the Amoretti, the patterning of the Epithalamion is striking, for it instantiates at the level of verse and line philosophical claims for the links between poetry and cosmic order. As A. Kent Hieatt has shown, the poem’s twenty-four stanzas parallel the hours of the day, its 365 long lines figure the days of the year; stanza 17 marks the shift from day to night, marking sixteen hours of daylight, following the almanac for Ireland on 11 June, the longest day of the year. The emphasis on circularity and cosmic recurrence—a macrocosmic (divine) pattern reproduced in the microcosmic (human) poem—surfaces in emblems of time, echoes, and rings, via the unfolding of the quotidian processes of the wedding day, the many references to garlands, and finally, the refrain’s repeated ‘echo rings’. All this is sustained by the Epithalamion’s extraordinary stanza. Built of approximately eighteen lines—stanzas 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 16, 21, and 23 include eighteen lines, while the rest consist of nineteen except for 15 (seventeen lines) and the envoy (seven lines)—it moves between largely iambic pentameter lines punctuated by two trimeters (at lines 6 and 11), a tetrameter (at line 16/17), and a final alexandrine.⁷² The tonal range, as well as the possibility for modulation, shifts in intensity and attitude, ‘comments or adjustments’ within the stanza, which then concludes—as does the Spenserian stanza—on the longer, foundational hexameter, offers a rich interplay between lyric nuance and epic amplitude, suggesting at the level of metrics the engagements between miniature, private affects and large-scale, public effects. Recent criticism of the poem has consequently focused either on its aesthetic ingenuity or its thematic and affective dissonances—Prescott elegantly notes that the Epithalamion ‘allows and encourages unease’ as it confronts the loss of self in marriage (particularly for the bride), fears of sexual violence and violation, and anxieties over bondage and possession.⁷³ The ambivalent allusions to Medusa, Orpheus, and Jove’s many love affairs are never entirely benign, and the speaker’s energetic ritual expulsions of threat almost heighten
⁷⁰ Jean Salmon Macrin’s Livre des epithalames (1528–31) had offered his wife love poems, a wedding hymn, and a celebration of the couple’s baby; see also Joachim Du Bellay’s Epithalame sur le mariage de . . . Philibert Emanuel, duc de Savoie, et . . . Marguerite de France (1561). See Virginia Tufte, The Poetry of Marriage: The Epithalamium in Europe and Its Development in England (Los Angeles, CA, 1970); and Heather Dubrow, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca, NY, 1990). For Catullus’s poems, see F. W. Cornish, J. P. Postgate, and J. W. Mackail (trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Catullus. Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris (Cambridge, MA, 1913), 68–85, 85–91, 98–127. ⁷¹ Greene, ‘Amoretti and Epithalamion’, 265. ⁷² See the detailed discussion of the Epithalamion’s stanza in Germaine Warkentin, ‘Spenser at the Still Point: A Schematic Device in “Epithalamion” ’, in H. B. de Groot and Alexander Leggatt (eds), Craft and Tradition: Essays in Honour of William Blissett (Calgary, 1990), 47–57. ⁷³ Prescott, ‘Spenser’s Shorter Poems’, 156. See also Nicholson, ‘ “Against the Brydale Day” ’.
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474 - worries rather than ward them off. In this, the Epithalamion channels concerns treated at some length in the middle books of The Faerie Queene, where mutually fulfilling marriage is always longed for but never actually achieved. Thus, despite long-held commonplaces about the significance of marriage for Spenser as the concordance of opposites, particularly in the epic, the ‘shorter poem’ once again offers a useful, discordant note that opens alternative considerations. Beyond the institutional conventions of (Petrarchan) courtship and Protestant marriage, Amoretti and Epithalamion is also fundamentally about love, eroticism, intimacy, and pleasure manifested in a specific couple, but these are also themes difficult to speak of with precision without sentimentality or psycho-philosophical obfuscation. As though to highlight this problem and seek a vocabulary and philosophical framework within which to examine them, Spenser turns in his late works to more abstract considerations of love in Fowre Hymnes. These four long lyrics, written in a seven-line rhyme royal stanza, are amongst the most aesthetically contested in his corpus—they are either reviled for their static iteration and murky, mystical fog or are celebrated for their integration of poetic and philosophic concerns.⁷⁴ In both cases, the key challenge has been to confront their weighty, Neoplatonic apparatus, which can often distract from their poetic innovations, and to reconcile the paradoxes of ascent and descent, assertion and recantation, that frame the poems from the dedication onward. Like Amoretti and Epithalamion, the Hymnes also look back to Petrarch: they draw on the metaphysical progressions of the Trionfi but fuse their concerns to the emerging genre of the Christian hymn, itself a syncretic form that sought to conjoin Classical hymns with the Psalms.⁷⁵ But the work also develops themes and tropes from Colin Clouts and The Faerie Queene, most notably, the interest in cosmogonic mythmaking. Within the arc of Spenser’s poetic career, Fowre Hymnes thus poses interpretative challenges: they are published in 1596, following the second instalment of The Faerie Queene, printed along with a reissue of Daphnaïda, and followed by the publication of Prothalamion: the last work printed before Spenser’s death in 1599. Do the Hymnes mark a new direction, a turning away from worldly, epic matters to heavenly contemplation, as the Shepheardes Calender had seemingly forecast? From this perspective, Prothalamion and the posthumously published Cantos of Mutabilitie also seem to contribute to a narrative of political disaffection and a desire to break free of the limits of human, courtly patronage and reach instead for the greater mysteries of cosmic order, divinity, and the fundamental nature of things [rerum naturae] as the true subjects of poetry. Alternative readings see Fowre Hymnes as an anomalous experiment, as Spenser returns to political, occasional poetry and topical allusion in both Prothalamion and the Cantos. Moving away from an insistence on career trajectory, we might note that all the late works offer distilled, generically diverse meditations on a problem that Spenser wrestles with repeatedly: the place and use of poetry in the world, and, as a corollary, the poet’s vocation to discern and disclose the truth in a world of appearances: a challenge that animates his allegorical poetics across all forms. In Fowre Hymnes, Spenser’s combination
⁷⁴ See, for instance, Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford, 2012), who is sceptical of the high seriousness of the Hymnes, versus David Lee Miller, ‘Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion (1596)’, in McCabe (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, 293–310; Matthew Zarnowiecki, ‘Spenser’s Angels: Salvation, Retractation, and Superhuman Poiesis in Fowre Hymnes’, Spenser Studies, 30 (2015), 75–103; and Ayesha Ramachandran, ‘Edmund Spenser, Lucretian Neoplatonist: Cosmology in the Fowre Hymnes’, Spenser Studies, 24 (2009), 373–411. ⁷⁵ See Miller, ‘Fowre Hymnes and Prothalamion’, on the Petrarchan sources for the Hymnes.
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475 of love poetry and philosophical speculation in the hymns to earthly and divine love and beauty offers a dialectical meditation on the relations between matter and form, human and divine, mutability and eternity as they dramatise a desire to uncover the underlying order of the universe. Much scholarship on the Hymnes has been concerned with the structural problem of how the first, ‘earthly’ pair of hymns relates to the second, ‘heavenly’ pair: is there a progression of Neoplatonic ascent at work, a repudiation of mortal, worldly concerns for spiritual ones, or a narrative of retraction and conversion at play? It is, however, perhaps more fruitful to consider how the repetition and counterpointing of themes across the four hymns create a complex set of interactions: the two hymns on love are arrayed against the two hymns on beauty, matching meditations on the material, desiring body with images of intangible, desired form; but the paired earthly and heavenly hymns also function as units in a dialogue, exploring a different, but related, dualism. At the same time, all the hymns share formal features, most notably distinct creation accounts and ‘progresses’ of the desiring subject towards a paradisal destination, which shifts its particular contours across each hymn, but may ultimately point towards the same goal. Internally, the hymns juxtapose repeated narratives of ascent and descent, fall and redemption, performing in language the very effort of thought as it struggles to comprehend the mysteries of cosmic order. Drawing together aesthetics and cosmology, they suggest that the individual mind makes sense of the world by seeking its ‘Paterne’ (Spenser, Hymne in Honour of Beautie, lines 32, 36, Shorter Poems, 464), and that poetic symmetries can recreate intellectual coherence amidst competing philosophic paradigms. Love and Beauty thus become metaleptic keywords that mediate a series of interlinked reflections on the nature of creation, the form of the physical universe, the relationship between the visible, phenomenological world and the invisible heavens, the continuum of human desire and divine compassion, the interpenetration of body and soul, and the promise of the afterlife. While these keywords remain seemingly unchanging through incantatory sequences of repetition within and across the hymns, they take on a range of shifting meanings, containing within themselves entire philosophic histories that the speaker reconciles through poetic conjunction. ‘Love’ for example, is a term that variously signifies a cosmogonic force, a cosmic principle, a physical need, a metaphysical foundation, a spiritual comfort, and an ethical principle. It is a term that encompasses all aspects of the world, from the emotions and psychology of the individual to the very substance of the universe, from a basic reproductive impulse to a principle of compassion and the basis of a community, from the desire that brings the deity itself into existence (see Spenser, Hymne of Heavenly Love, lines 116–19, Shorter Poems, 475) to the ultimate sacrifice of the Son to redeem fallen humanity. The readerly trajectory of the Hymnes consequently traces an arc from materiality to abstraction: thus, the ‘carefull wretches’ of An Hymne in Honour of Love (Spenser, An Hymne in Honour of Love, line 126, Shorter Poems, 456), tormented by their unfulfilled sexual desires, culminate in the final hymn’s sublime Sapience, ‘the soueraine dearling of the Deity’ (Spenser, Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, line 184, Shorter Poems, 486), who holds the key to cosmic form. Spenser’s presentation of contradictory cosmologies in the Hymnes (Empedoclean, Lucretian, Platonic, Aristotelian) is thus not so much a mimetic representation of the cosmos as it is a means of thinking through competing philosophical paradigms via a series of thought experiments.⁷⁶ From such a perspective, Fowre Hymnes is a logical development of other ⁷⁶ For an extended discussion of the philosophic sources for the Hymnes as well as a synthesis of the scholarship, see Ramachandran, ‘Edmund Spenser, Lucretian Neoplatonist’.
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476 - Spenserian topoi, such as the Gardens of Adonis or the vision at Mount Acidale, and it looks ahead to the meta-critical dismantling of allegory itself in the Cantos of Mutabilitie. For this reader, Fowre Hymnes is a high-water mark for the shorter poems. It builds on sources and questions that Spenser had explored before and combines them into a searching, often poignant meditation not only on love and beauty, individual and cosmos, but on poiesis itself—what Greene has identified as the core of Spenser’s ‘unwritten poetics’—an investment in the power of the pattern.⁷⁷ The insistence on ‘abstract patterns [which] realize poiesis’ across Spenser’s work exists in a ‘productive tension with mimesis’, celebrating poetry’s ability to create a world of its own, one that often exists in counterpoint with a historical reality.⁷⁸ In Prothalamion, a commissioned piece celebrating an aristocratic double marriage, Spenser exploits this tension one final time in print, deploying mythic, Ovidian figures to enact and transcend the specific historical circumstances that call the poem into being. The work’s title, which unmistakably recalls Spenser’s own Epithalamion, is a premarriage song, a celebration of the betrothal of Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset, the daughters of the (Catholic) Earl of Worcester, to Henry Guildford and William Petre. Its verse form—ten eighteen-line stanzas and echoing refrain—and its stately progression up the Thames to Essex House also recalls the metrical and temporal process of the Epithalamion, now distanced from the narrator, who reflects on the emblematic significance of this marriage-to-be. An Ovidian poem, in which forms, personae, and figures transform and metamorphose into one another, Prothalamion follows its speaker, who sees a vision on the Thames as he walks away from the court: first, he sees nymphs gathering flowers, followed by two shining swans (the brides) who are travelling upstream with the tide. This basic structure of the dream vision returns to the work of early poems such as The Ruines of Time and its affinities to complaint. Though the poem is ostensibly a celebration, it carries an undercurrent of sadness: a perception amplified by the organising and ambivalent use of the myth of Jove and Leda, which suggests (as does the use of similar rape imagery in Epithalamion) the losses that accompany marital union, and the eruption of the poet’s own complaints about his condition for two stanzas in a bald attempt to seek patronage from the Earl of Essex. Unlike other similar poetic commissions, which tend to focus on the occasion and subjects, Spenser emphasises his own lyric subject-position as an observer, commentator, and poet. Prothalamion is finally concerned with temporality and flow, of historical time, of memory and anticipation, and of the poet’s verse to reflect upon and mediate them. Within the Spenserian poetic imagination, the patterning of Prothalamion, which emphasises the ache of brevity and endings in its refrain—‘Against their Brydale day, which is not long: / Sweet Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song’ (Spenser, Prothalamion, lines 17–18, repeated at the end of each stanza, Shorter Poems, 492–7)— bookends the Epithalamion’s insistence on cosmic duration, cyclical return, and the celebration of poetry’s power to memorialise: ‘for short time an endlesse moniment’ (Spenser, Epithalamion, line 433, Shorter Poems, 449). In this, it is also a fitting, intentionally crafted end to Spenser’s poetic career.
⁷⁷ Roland Greene, ‘Spenser’s Unwritten Poetics’, Spenser Review, 46.1 (2016), non-paginated. ⁷⁸ Greene, ‘Spenser’s Unwritten Poetics’.
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27 Spenser The Faerie Queene Richard McCabe
Form, Mode, and Content Lo I the man, whose Muse whylome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shephards weeds, Am now enforst a farre vnfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds: And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds. (FQ, 1.Proem.1, lines 1–5)¹ The opening lines of The Faerie Queene are designed to occasion generic shock. Effortlessly segueing from Virgilian epic (‘Lo I the man’) into Ariostan romance (‘And sing of knights and ladies’), they suggest a fusion of elements generally regarded as incompatible.² Critical debate raged throughout the sixteenth century about the legitimacy of Italian romance and its questionable relationship to Classical epic, but Spenser’s narrator establishes generic fusion as central to the work’s aesthetic; and does so in a unique stanza designed to demonstrate the principle involved.³ Epics were traditionally written in hexameters, romances in ottava rima, but The Faerie Queene encompasses both, adopting a complex nineline variation on the ottava rima that ends in a hexameter or alexandrine. And what is true of the poem’s medium is also true of its overall design. Epics were traditionally structured in ‘books’, romances in ‘cantos’, but The Faerie Queene places cantos within books.⁴ The effect is to generate a radical uncertainty of literary expectation. Conforming neither to the patterns of ancient epic nor early modern romance but eclectically echoing, blending, or abandoning both, The Faerie Queene’s complex storylines, and its Ovidian poetics of transformation and exile, afford their readers an experience equivalent to that of their questing knights as they traverse unpredictable terrain and suffer the continual ‘deferrals of
¹ Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007), hereafter abbreviated to FQ throughout, with numerals referring to Book, Proem or canto, and stanza, respectively, followed by line number/s, except in those cases where a stanza is quoted in its entirety. Where parts of the volume other than the poem are cited (e.g., the title page, the ‘Letter to Ralegh’, commendatory verses, etc.), numerals refer to page numbers. ² Echoing the probably spurious opening line traditionally attributed to the Aeneid, ‘Ille ego, qui quondam’, and the first line of the Orlando Furioso, ‘Le donne, i cavallier, l’arme, gli amori’, respectively. See Virgil, in H. Rushton Fairclough (trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1–6 (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 261; and Ludovico Ariosto, in Marcello Turchi (ed.), Orlando Furioso, 2 vols. (Milan, 1974), 1.11. ³ On this critical debate, see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL, 1961), 2.954–1073. ⁴ Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1495) was organised into books and cantos, but the book divisions do not thematise individual quests. Richard McCabe, Spenser: The Faerie Queene In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Richard McCabe 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0027
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478 - closure’ that frustrate resolution and proleptically anticipate the poem’s incompletion.⁵ The relatively linear structures of Books 1 and 2 give way to the sprawling, interlaced narratives of Books 3, 4, and 5, and they in turn to the hybrid heroic pastoral of Book 6. The poem’s ultimate ‘deferral’, in other words, is that of generic identity. The peculiar form that Spenser chose for the poem—twelve separate adventures united through the interventions of Prince Arthur—was never calculated to promote easy thematic or narrative resolution. Emphasising the paramount importance of unity in epic verse, Tasso cautioned that ‘if the fable is one, the goal will be one . . . multiplicity produces indeterminacy’ (Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, 67).⁶ In structuring his Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), he therefore rejected the influence of Boiardo and Ariosto to construct a linear narrative more reminiscent of Homer’s Iliad or Virgil’s Aeneid. The alternative practice, however, was ably defended by Giraldi Cinthio, who asserted that romance narratives imitate the actions ‘not of one man only but of many, since they build the whole fabric of their work upon eight or ten persons, but they give to the work the name of that person or that action which is dominant in the whole work and on which all the others depend’ (Giraldi, On Romances, 11–12).⁷ This provides, perhaps, the closest template in sixteenth-century criticism for Spenser’s structure, but does not even begin to encompass its complexity. Tasso and Giraldi are describing what they regard as mutually exclusive alternatives; Spenser attempts to make them coalesce. The intricate storylines that characterise the Orlando Furioso are not formally demarcated into separate structural or thematic units, but the plan for The Faerie Queene envisages twelve lesser epics through which Arthur moves like a latter-day Hercules completing the dozen labours that will display his moral ‘magnificence’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, FQ, 714) and prove him worthy of Gloriana, and his creator of the ‘magnificent Empresse Elizabeth’ to whom the work is dedicated (Spenser, Dedication to the 1590 edition, FQ, 26). In view of the poem’s formal hybridity, it is notable that its title page carefully eschews all generic affiliation to announce a primarily didactic poem ‘disposed into twelve books, fashioning XII Morall vertues’ (title page, FQ, 26, 27). In the accompanying ‘Letter to Ralegh’, professedly intended to ‘expound’ the work’s ‘general intention and meaning’, Spenser describes it as ‘a continued Allegory, or darke conceit’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, FQ, 714).⁸ Ancient epics were regularly ‘allegorised’ by later commentators, and allegorical components feature to varying degrees in Italian romance, but Spenser regards his project as distinct because the element of ‘continued allegory’ sets it apart from the general run of ‘historicall fiction’ which ‘the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, then for profite of the ensample’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, FQ, 715).⁹ Yet, knowing ‘how doubtfully all Allegories may be construed’, Spenser offers Ralegh his advice ‘for your better light in reading thereof ’, the first of many attempts to ‘fashion’ his readers’ response to the poem intended to fashion them (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, FQ, 714). Here, as so often throughout the text, ‘read’ is used in the sense of ‘consider, interpret, [and] discern’, the primary senses recorded in the OED. It is with just such an act of ‘reading’ that Sir Guyon in Book 2 dismisses Mammon’s praise of wealth: ‘all otherwise . . . I riches read, / And deeme them roote of all disquietnesse’ (FQ, 2.7.12, lines 1–2). The same level of engagement is ⁵ For the Ovidian influence, see Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot, 2005). ⁶ Torquato Tasso, in Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (trans.), Discourses on the Heroic Poem (Oxford, 1973). ⁷ Cinthio Giraldi, in H. L. Snuggs (trans.), On Romances (Lexington, KY, 1968). ⁸ For the ‘Letter’, see Wayne Erickson, ‘Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh and the Literary Politics of The Faerie Queene’, Spenser Studies, 10 (1989), 139–74. ⁹ See Michael Murrin, The Allegorical Epic: Essays in its Rise and Decline (Chicago, IL, 1980).
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479 required of knights and readers but is less straightforwardly ‘moral’ than the somewhat disingenuous title page might suggest. Spenser writes with an eye to applied rather than abstract ethics. He tells Ralegh that his poem is ‘coloured with an historicall fiction’, and that fiction is insidiously operative on the ‘ensample’ it offers (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, FQ, 715). ‘In that Faery Queene’, Spenser explains, ‘I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceiue the most excellent and glorious person of our soueraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, FQ, 716). The degree to which the poem’s ‘general’ and ‘particular’ intentions resist such easy correlation constitutes the primary hermeneutic problem. By the time we reach Book 5, with its attempt to represent Elizabeth I’s pragmatic and expedient foreign policy under the rubric of ‘Justice’, the issue is acute. The poem sets out to educate the reader, ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, FQ, 714), but its moral criteria are politically determined. Its ‘Arthurian’ virtues are Tudor values. Spenser claims to have chosen Arthur as ‘furthest from the daunger of envy, and suspicion of present time’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, FQ, 715), but the Arthurian legend, part of the nation’s myth of origin, had been appropriated by the Tudor dynasty. Rather than distancing the poem from ‘present time’, it serves as its primary vehicle of engagement. In theory, all twelve of the poem’s projected adventures arise from, and culminate in, the ‘fairy’ court, but the allegorical identification of that court with its Tudor equivalent threatens to degrade cyclicity into solipsism: ‘Then pardon me, most dreaded Soueraine, / That from your selfe I doe this virtue bring, / And to your selfe doe it returne againe’ (FQ, 6.Proem.7, lines 1–3). The resulting multiplicity of images, filtered through a myriad interlocking narratives, frustrates all possibility of simple eulogy. Multiplicity does indeed cause indeterminacy, as Tasso claimed, but in Spenser’s hands indeterminacy is aesthetically functional. A major instrument of that functionality is the intrusive presence of the poem’s narrator. It is one thing for a narrator to be omniscient, another to be omnipresent, an insistent ‘I’ perpetually engaging the reader in the business of narration.¹⁰ The six ‘proems’ that preface The Faerie Queene’s various books, amounting to a staggering 37 stanzas or 333 lines, have no precedent in heroic verse. It is not just that the story the narrator tells diverges substantially from the plot described in the ‘Letter to Ralegh’, but that the epistolary and narrative voices are so out of tune. The two perspectives are distinct: the author is outside the work, the narrator within it. The ‘Ed. Spenser’ who addresses Ralegh seems wholly in control of the poem’s ‘conceit’, projects confidence in the coherence of its various parts, and anticipates and parries objections. The narrator, on the other hand, is by turns assertive, apologetic, hopeful, or despondent. His interventions are by no means confined to the proems, extensive as they are, and he becomes increasingly embroiled in the narrative until he is attacked by one of the poem’s monsters at the close of Book 6. In effect, the narrative persona becomes the principal instrument through which the glaring discrepancy between the Fairy and Tudor courts is revealed. Through his good offices the poem becomes as much a critique as a celebration of ‘present time’. By infusing a lyric voice into heroic narrative Spenser exposes the difficulties inherent in writing ‘modern’ epic, particularly for someone who was not a ‘court’ poet but an outsider writing from the margins of empire to the centre, as the dedicatory sonnets to Lord Grey and Lord Ormond indicate (see FQ, 731, 730). This is not to say that the poem is in any simple sense ‘about’ the Ireland in which Spenser lived, ¹⁰ For the narrator, see Richard A. McCabe, ‘Authorial Self-Presentation’, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 2010), 462–82.
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480 - but that the experience of the colonial enterprise colours its attitudes to identity, nationality, and ‘civility’.¹¹ Through the voice of the narrator, The Faerie Queene is made to reflect on its own values, structures, and aims.
The Faerie Queene (1590) The first instalment of The Faerie Queene, comprising the Legends of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity, is largely concerned with questions of selfhood and identity, and the complex interaction of their personal, national, and spiritual components.¹² The verse is pervaded by images of self-loss and self-finding, of degradation, transformation, and recovery. As Spenser presents them, St George and Prince Arthur enter the poem as foundlings ignorant of their own antecedents; Sir Guyon professes a temperance that has scarcely been tested; and Britomart a chastity untried by desire. The challenge facing protagonist and reader alike is to distinguish between virtues and vices that are remarkably similar. In the world of The Faerie Queene, heroic narrative proceeds on the knife-edge of parody. Prince Arthur’s vision of Gloriana, for example, is modelled on its mock-heroic equivalent in Chaucer’s Sir Thopas: Me seemed, by my side a royall Mayd Her daintie limbes full softly down did lay: So faire a creature yet saw never sunny day. (FQ, 1.9.13, lines 7–9)¹³
This passage is disconcerting not just because of the flagrant echoes of Chaucerian mockepic but because of its highly questionable sexual nature. The ‘goodly glee and lovely blandishment’ (FQ, 1.9.14, line 1) the recumbent lady makes to Arthur is more reminiscent of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ than the chaste paragon that is Gloriana. It is a dream vision, of course, and may say more about the dreamer’s desire than the object’s character, except that when Arthur awakes he finds physical evidence of the lady’s presence, ‘pressed gras where she had lyen’ (FQ, 1.9.15, line 2). This is the only time the Fairy Queen appears in the poem that bears her name, and the appearance leaves both Arthur and the reader confused. An equivalent moment in ancient epic is Aeneas’s return from the underworld bearing the vision of Augustan Rome through the Gate of Ivory, identified by Virgil’s narrator as the gate of false dreams (see Aeneid, 6.893–8). If Gloriana represents ‘the glorious person of our soueraine the Queene’, what is this episode telling us? Over the course of the years Elizabeth had encouraged countless suitors without satisfying any, and in Book 4 of the poem, in his account of ‘Timias’ and ‘Belphoebe’, Spenser would handle her tortuous relationship with Ralegh, drawing upon his ‘Book of the Ocean to Cynthia’, a protracted cry of personal pain.¹⁴ Such episodes infuse into the overt language of praise a destabilising subtext of discontent.
¹¹ For the Irish context, see Andrew Hadfield, Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Savage Soyl (Oxford, 1997); and Richard McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford, 2002). ¹² See David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ, 1988). ¹³ For the Tale of Sir Thopas, see Canterbury Tales, Fragment 7, lines 787–96, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edition (Boston, MA, 1987), 214. ¹⁴ See William A. Oram, ‘Spenser’s Raleghs’, Studies in Philology, 87.3 (1990), 341–62.
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481 The first stanza of The Legend of Holiness encapsulates the hermeneutic problems facing both knight and reader: A gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, Ycladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde, Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine, The cruell markes of many’ a bloody fielde; Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield: His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, As much disdayning to the curbe to yield: Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt. (FQ, 1.1.1)
A ‘gentle knight’ but as to who, or where, or when, we remain as ignorant as he does. The first four lines suggest an experienced campaigner but the fifth flatly contradicts that impression. Our hero rides in borrowed armour and, according to lines 6 and 7, is not even in control of his horse. No epic or romance had ever begun with such a conundrum. ‘Full iolly knight he seemd’: what was the reader to make of this? Later on, when the evil Archimago disguises himself as George, the lexis repeats, ‘Full iolly knight he seemde, and wel addrest, / And when he sate vppon his courser free, / Saint George himselfe ye would have deemed him to be’ (FQ, 1.2.11, lines 7–9). The challenge here is directly to the reader’s perception: unaided by him, ‘ye would have deemed’ wrong, as indeed does Una, who both personifies truth and reveals its vulnerability (see FQ, 1.3.26). The problem, as she later discovers, is that even the ‘real’ George is essentially false. The armour he wears without entitlement is identified in the ‘Letter to Ralegh’ as the whole armour of God described by St Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians 6:11–17, and he will later discard it with disastrous effect (see FQ, 1.7.2). His imperfect control of his horse suggests an imperfect control of his passions, particularly the irascible ones. When he misguidedly abandons Una, for example, we learn that ‘the eie of reason was with rage yblent’ (FQ, 1.2.5, line 7), and the ‘rage’ in question is aroused by Archimago’s introduction of a phantom at once antithetical to the real Una yet indistinguishable from her. In this manner, the opening cantos of The Faerie Queene signal an underlying quest for meaning in a world of contradictory signs, with the added complication that the signalling itself is subject to internal contradiction. The fluidity of the poem’s medium enhances the subtlety of its message. By comparison with the ottava rima (abababcc) its specially designed nine-line stanza (rhyming ababbcbcc) allows for immense syntactical, aural, and metrical flexibility. Echoing the poem’s overall structure, its defining characteristic is variation within replication. Its closeness to the stanza of The Monk’s Tale (ababbcbc) enhances Spenser’s claim to Chaucerian inheritance, while the addition of a hexameter considerably alters the effect, incorporating the traditional into the radically new. Potentially, the stanza allows for two couplets (at lines 4–5 and 8–9), as is apparent from the opening verse of Book 1 quoted above, but the syntax often resists the rhyme scheme, as, for example, in the very next verse where the major break occurs at line 4, and the following line opens into a new sentence, and sentiment: ‘And dead as liuing euer him ador’d: / Vpon his shield the like was also scor’d, / For soueraine hope . . . ’ (FQ, 1.1.2, lines 4–6). The caesura in the concluding hexameters of both these verses falls after the sixth syllable, apparently establishing a pattern, but the next deploys a dramatic variation calculated to capture the naïve eagerness of an immature young knight whose big break
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482 - cannot come too soon: ‘Vpon his foe, and his new force to learne; / Vpon his foe, | a Dragon horrible and stearne’ (FQ, 1.1.3, lines 8–9). Bare rhythm is here made to convey brash character. Collectively, the first three verses of the narrative give notice that it is a poem that not only demands close reading but invites carefully nuanced vocalisation. Because the Fairy Queen is never located in the narrative, we never know whether we are moving towards her or away from her. Thanks to the repeated deferrals of narrative closure, no destination proves to be anything more than a temporary staging post along a greater journey to which the narrator supplies no map. Sir Calepine’s experience is characteristic: Much was he then encombred, ne could tell Which way to take: now West he went a while, Then North; then neither, but as fortune fell. So vp and downe he wandred many a mile, With wearie trauell and vncertaine toile, Yet nought the nearer to his journeys end. (FQ, 6.4.25, lines 1–6)
Because of the poem’s heavily allegorical dimension, the nature of travelling in The Faerie Queene is qualitatively different from that of its predecessors. It has a topography rather than a landscape in the sense that each ‘place’ is also a representative state, simultaneously a geographical and rhetorical ‘topos’: the Wood of Error, the Dungeon of Ignorance, the Cave of Despair. And place reacts on person. So George escapes the Wood of Error only to be deceived by Archimago; he flies the House of Pride only to fall prey to Orgoglio (pride, arrogance); he enters the Cave of Despair only for despair to enter him. In the House of Holiness, by contrast, despair—conceived as a sense of abjection in the face of failure—is transformed into a humble acceptance of the need for grace. The epiphany credited to George at this point is of great significance to the national dimension of the legend. The entire episode is modelled upon Revelation 21:1–3 with George enacting the part of St John and Contemplation the angel that guides him. It is only at this point that the former Redcross Knight discovers he is ‘Saint George of mery England’, not just a wayfaring Christian, but the standard-bearer, or ‘signe’, for a wayfaring Protestant nation: ‘Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree’ (FQ, 1.10.61, line 9). The evil witch Duessa is stripped to reveal her true nature as Revelation’s Whole of Babylon, a figure commonly applied by the Reformers to the Roman Catholic Church, while Una lifts her veil in the final canto to reveal herself as the Whore’s antithesis, the Woman Clothed with the Sun (see FQ, 1.12.23).¹⁵ George’s journey from spiritual ignorance to a sense of election is hereby projected unto the history of the nation, and it is Arthur—the Tudors’ great progenitor—who makes both journeys possible by freeing George from the Dungeon of Ignorance in canto 8. According to this version of the legend, unique to Spenser, the famous defeat of the Dragon is empowered by personal and national ‘reformation’. But that process is understood as ongoing. Hence the first of the poem’s quite unexpected deferrals of closure. To the reader’s surprise, George is required to leave Una and ride back into the poem. We meet him again as an active participant in Books 2 and 3, and he is referenced in Book 5. But never again is he referred to as ‘George’. Despite the epiphany on the Mount of Contemplation, to re-enter the narrative is to resume membership of the Church Militant.
¹⁵ See John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1990).
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483 Redcross is the man; St George is the legend: ‘thou Saint George shalt called bee’, in the future tense (FQ, 1.10.61, line 8). Ongoing narrative, we are given to understand, allows no finality of action or agency because the spiritual may be adumbrated but never fulfilled in the material. Deferral of closure not only mimics the relentless continuities of history but problematises the very notion of an ‘ending’ capable of resolving the poem’s narrative and allegorical components simultaneously. The central image of Books 2 and 3 is that of the human body, virginal in the Legend of Temperance, connubial in the Legend of Chastity. Once again the arrangement is calculated to surprise. In this period, virginity, as embodied in the queen, was more often associated with females than males, but it is Sir Guyon who is a knight ‘of Maydenhead’ (FQ, 2.2.42, line 4), and Britomart who will sacrifice maidenhead for marriage. For Guyon, surrender to any form of concupiscence is tantamount to loss of identity. As he demonstrates in the Cave of Mammon, all worldly temptation must be resisted even if the price of resistance is physical collapse (see FQ, 2.7.66). He is saved only by divine intervention. By contrast, Britomart discovers her true identity through the sexuality Guyon represses. He needs grace to reject temptation, she to entertain it. The tense relationship between their two attitudes is brought into sharp focus at the outset of Book 3 when Britomart unseats Guyon from his horse. The virtues they espouse are supposed to be complementary, but such is the unavoidable component of desire, or even lust, in love, that virtue and vice become harder to distinguish because the body is their common vehicle, as it is of all human endeavour. It is, therefore, in Book 2’s Castle of Alma, structured like a human body, that Arthur and Guyon read the histories of Britain and Fairyland respectively (see FQ, 2.10). Their simultaneous reading of such contrasting materials suggests that only the virtue of Temperance, operating as personal and political restraint, can translate the recurrent disasters of the ‘Briton Moniments’ into the cumulative progress of the fairy chronicles. When he takes up the story of Britain in Book 3, however, Merlin identifies sexual passion as the driving force of history, and the sexual ‘glance’, that most apparently intemperate thing, as an instrument of providence:¹⁶ It was not, Britomart, thy wandring eye, Glauncing vnwares in charmed looking glas, But the streight course of heuenly destiny, Led with eternall prouidence, that has Guyded thy glaunce, to bring his will to pas ... Therefore submit thy wayes vnto his will, And doe by all dew meanes thy destiny fulfill. (FQ, 3.3.24, lines 1–5, 8–9)
By contrast, in Book 2’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ episode, the Palmer rebukes Guyon’s ‘wandring eyes’ for ‘gazing’ (FQ, 2.12.69, lines 2, 1) so intently on a pair of bathing beauties that ‘in his sparkling face / The secret signes of kindled lust appeare’ (FQ, 2.12.68, lines 5–6). Guyon proceeds to destroy the bower ‘with rigour pittilesse’ (FQ, 2.12.83, line 2), yet never seems so fully alive as when his face sparkles with desire. In that superb moment, the would-be personification fleetingly becomes a person. And the moment is resonant for the poem at
¹⁶ See Richard A. McCabe, The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Dublin, 1989).
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484 - large. In creating the Bower of Bliss, Spenser drew heavily on Tasso’s account of Armida’s gardens in the Gerusalemme Liberata (16, 14–15),¹⁷ translating its famous ‘Song of the Rose’ almost verbatim, yet with significant alterations:¹⁸ Gather therefore the Rose, whilest yet is prime, For soone comes age, that will her pride deflowre: Gather the Rose of loue, whilest yet is time, Whilest louing thou mayst loued be with equall crime. (FQ, 2.12.75, lines 6–9)
The reference to ‘crime’ is original to Spenser, but that is the point. The bower is beautiful not despite but because of its illicit nature. Its physical description evoked Spenser’s most sensuous verse. But Guyon’s attitudes are informed not just by a rejection of illicit sex but of sex itself. The original song of the rose speaks not of ‘equall crime’ but of emotional reciprocity—‘Let us pluck the rose today to love and burn / while we can love, and be loved in return’—but Guyon cannot reciprocate in any circumstance.¹⁹ Unlike Acrasia, a Circean figure arbitrarily turning men to beasts, Armida is genuinely in love with Rinaldo. Her gardens are as much an expression of affection as seduction and she destroys them herself once he leaves. Guyon ‘reads’ only half of Spenser’s debt to Tasso, but Spenser challenges us to read the other: ‘Right hard it was, for wight, which did it heare, / To read, what manner musicke that mote bee’ (FQ, 2.12.70, lines 5–6). In style and structure the Bower of Bliss is made to anticipate Book 3’s Gardens of Adonis (see FQ, 3.6.29–54), the poem’s most positive and dynamic depiction of sexuality.²⁰ In each case we encounter a portal, a garden, and an arbour harbouring a couple engaged in love, in the one case Acrasia and Verdant, in the other Venus and Adonis. There are obvious points of contrast, but it is less a matter of rejection and substitution than what Spenser, in the dedication to his Fowre Hymnes (1596), terms ‘retractation’, a rehandling of similar materials to different effect (Spenser, Fowre Hymnes, dedicatory letter, line 9, Shorter Poems, 452).²¹ The subtext of the bower is Armida’s genuine if excessive love for Rinaldo, but the Gardens of Adonis, while emphasising generative sex, make ample provision for personal desire, and female desire in particular. Within its arbour, Venus ‘reape[s] sweet pleasure of the wanton boy’ (FQ, 3.6.46, line 3). The porter to the bower is the false ‘Genius’, who promises self-fulfilment but delivers self-loss, and as Verdant makes love to Acrasia, the heraldic ‘signes’ on his shield are progressively erased (FQ, 2.12.80, line 4). The porter to the Gardens is the true Genius ‘That is our Selfe, whom though we doe not see, / Yet each doth in him selfe it well perceiue to bee’ (FQ, 2.12.47, lines 8–9), and as he makes love to Venus, Adonis combats mortality through generation: All be he subject to mortalitie, Yet is eterne in mutabilitie, And by succession made perpetuall,
¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹
See Torquato Tasso, in Max Wickert (trans.), The Liberation of Jerusalem (Oxford, 2009). See D. S. Wilson-Okamura, ‘When Did Spenser Read Tasso?’, Spenser Studies, 23 (2008), 277–82. Tasso, The Liberation of Jerusalem, 289. See J. Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ, 1976), 490–598. Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999).
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485 Transformed oft, and chaunged diuerslie: For him the Father of all formes they call; Therefore needs mote he liue, that liuing gives to all. (FQ, 3.6.47, lines 4–9)
The Gardens do not reject so much as redirect the sexual energies of the Bower of Bliss. The ideal, seen from this perspective, is the union of desire and generation in marriage, the goal of Britomart’s quest. In the Amoretti, the only sonnet sequence of the period to end with an Epithalamion, or wedding hymn, the speaker refers to his lady’s bosom as ‘the bowre of bliss, the paradise of pleasure, / the sacred harbour of that heuenly spright’ (Spenser, Amoretti 76, lines 3–4, Shorter Poems, 425). The Gardens of Adonis suggest a similar complementarity of sensuality and spirituality. The energies Guyon attempts to suppress in Book 2 are socialised in Book 3. The teenage Britomart’s response to the first stirrings of desire is ignorant and agonised (see FQ, 3.2.26–32), but her nurse, Glauce’s, response supplies the perspective of common sense: Daughter (said she) what need ye be dismayd, Or why make ye such Monster of your minde? Of much more vncouth thing I was affrayd; Of filthy lust, contrary vnto kinde: But this affection nothing straunge I find. (FQ, 3.2.40, lines 1–5)
Guyon is a knight ‘of Maydenhead’ and a sense of guilt informs his attitude towards desire, but in Book 3 we repeatedly encounter figures who reject love for the wrong reasons. Marinell, for example, equates sex with death and remains virginal through fear not virtue (see FQ, 3.4.25–6). Traditionally, too, as in Ovid’s and Shakespeare’s versions of the myth, Adonis is either a passive or unwilling lover whose true passion is for the hunt. By contrast, the figure we encounter in the Gardens of Adonis, a figure in perpetual sexual engagement and renewal, represents the most radical reimagining of the myth in the early modern period. Here, as elsewhere, Spenser’s emphasis on the value of sexual love is insistent.²² At the outset of the episode Chrysogone gives birth to twins, Belphoebe and Amoret. Diana, goddess of virginity, takes the former away to be ‘vpbrought in perfect Maydenhed’, while Venus, goddess of love, takes the latter to the Gardens of Adonis ‘to be vpbrought in goodly womanhed’ (FQ, 3.6.28, lines 4, 7). The two adjectives are worth pausing over: ‘perfect’ and ‘goodly’. In a poem dedicated to a virgin queen, ‘maydenhed’ ideally represents the perfect mode of life, but perfect things cannot develop or, to use Spenser’s term, ‘dilate’.²³ The problem with identifying Gloriana/Elizabeth as the telos of the quests was that she constituted a genealogical dead-end and brought the Tudor dynasty to its close. While Amoret develops towards womanhood in the Gardens of Adonis, Belphoebe, whose ‘perfection’ begins and ends in herself, is necessarily excluded from the poetic heart of Book 3 and the generative energies it represents. It is, therefore, with Amoret’s history that Britomart’s is entwined.
²² See Thomas P. Roche, Jr, The Kindly Flame; A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ, 1964). ²³ For ‘dilation’, see Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, NJ, 1979), 54–64.
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486 - When Britomart encounters Amoret in the nightmarish House of Busyrane in the final cantos of Book 3, the latter is paralysed by sexual fear. Every aspect of the sinister building, with its darkly erotic images and statuary, instils terror into the very desire it elicits: ‘Be bolde, be bolde, and euer where Be bold’, but then, ‘Be not too bold’ (FQ, 3.11.54, lines 3, 8). Like a figure from Dante’s Inferno, Amoret endures repetitive nightly torments as she is paraded in the Masque of Cupid by a blind, sadistic god who leads her in triumph with her bloodied heart borne before her in a ‘siluer basin’ (FQ, 3.12.21, line 2). In order to rescue Amoret, Britomart must overcome her own sexual fears. ‘Why make ye such Monster of your mind?’, Glauce had asked her, and it is monsters of the mind that terrify Amoret, ‘so many . . . as there be phantasies / In wavering wemens witt, that none can tell’ (FQ, 3.12.26, lines 3–4). By withstanding such ‘phantasies’, Britomart simultaneously frees them both, as Spenser’s use of ambiguous personal pronouns suggests: Anon she gan perceiue the house to quake, And all the dores to rattle round about; Yet all that did not her dismaied make, Nor slack her threatfull hand for daungers dout, But still with stedfast eye and courage stout, Abode to weet, what end would come of all. At last that mightie chaine, which round about Her tender waste was wound, adowne gan fall, And that great brasen pillour broke in peeces small. (FQ, 3.12.37)
Glauce had advised Britomart not to be ‘dismayd’ by fear, and at this crucial moment she is not. But in committing herself to a chastity that is not synonymous with virginity she anticipates the moment she will consent to being ‘dis-maid’. In the final episode of the 1590 Faerie Queene she looks on enviously as Amoret and Scudamore embrace so closely as to resemble an hermaphrodite, an image here representing the complementarity of male and female. But, as the subsequent narrative reveals, neither category is secure, let alone absolute: Britomart rides through the poem dressed as a man until she eventually finds her future husband dressed as a woman. In the problematical nature of sexuality Spenser found the perfect lens though which to explore the various contested moral and social issues that preoccupy the poem while simultaneously lending them a compelling and universal applicability. Spenser’s poem is revolutionary, not just in the centrality it attributes to sexuality in matters of religion, politics, and history, but in the sheer poetic energy it draws from its bewildering diversity.
The Faerie Queene (1596) It was precisely that energy that caused problems of reception. When the second instalment of the poem appeared in 1596, adding three further books, the Legends of Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy, the Proem to Book 4 signalled a significant change in narratorial tone. In 1590, the defining feature of the narrator was engagement; in 1596, it is isolation: The rugged forhead that with graue foresight Welds kingdomes causes, and affaires of state,
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487 My looser rimes (I wote) doth sharply wite, For praising loue, as I haue done of late, And magnifying louers deare debate; By which fraile youth is oft to follie led, Through false allurement of that pleasing baite, That better were in vertues discipled, Then with vaine poemes weeds to haue their fancies fed. (FQ, 4.Proem.1)
The poem has been read as an erotic romance rather than an heroic allegory, and stands accused of corrupting its younger readers in what amounts to a flat rejection of its claim to fashion gentleman or noble persons ‘in vertuous and gentle discipline’. Much has changed since 1590. Spenser had received a royal pension in 1591 after presenting his poem to the queen, but a few months later his Complaints were called in, owing to perceived attacks on her Treasurer, Lord Burghley, the ‘rugged forhead’ of whom the narrator now dares to complain again.²⁴ Arguing for the relationship of heros and eros, heroism and love, he seeks to restore his work’s reputation, yet despairs of convincing his critics: ‘To such therefore I do not sing at all, / But to that sacred Saint my soueraigne Queene’ (FQ, 4.Proem.4, lines 1–2). The altered paratexts to the 1596 edition reflect the same exclusivity: now the poem is dedicated solely to Elizabeth. Gone are the seventeen subsidiary dedications that sought to unite all factions of the court, including Burghley, behind the enterprise. Gone, too, are all the commendatory verses, except for those by Sir Walter Ralegh and Gabriel Harvey, recommending the poet to the queen and urging him to seek her support in the face of ‘envy’ and ‘disdaine’ (Harvey, commendatory verse, FQ, 722).²⁵ In Book 4, Spenser adds weight to their recommendations by virtually identifying himself with his great predecessor, Chaucer, that ‘well of English vndefyled’ (FQ, 4.2.32, line 8), and by completing the unfinished Squire’s Tale, despite his personal preference for deferrals of closure. At the court of Mercilla in Book 5, however, we learn that being a pure ‘well of English’ is no guarantee of safety. There, for allegedly slandering the queen, the poet formerly known as ‘Bonfont’ has his tongue ‘nayld to a post’ (FQ, 5.9.25, line 3) and is re-named ‘Malfont’. The process, chillingly, is one of erasure and superscription. The prince can overwrite the poet: ‘bon that once had written bin, / Was raced out, and Mal was now put it’. Branded as ‘a welhed / Of euill words’ he becomes the antithesis of the Chaucerian ideal (FQ, 5.9.26, lines 4–5, 8–9). Just as Acrasia ‘razes’ Verdant’s arms, Mercilla can erase a poet’s ‘good’ name. It is all the more suggestive, therefore, that the ‘soueraigne Queene’, in whom the narrator places his hopes is even more conspicuously absent from the poem’s second instalment than from the first. Most notably, her place at the centre of the dancing Graces in Book 6—the place she had occupied as the fourth Grace in The Shepheardes Calender (see Aprill, lines 113–17, Shorter Poems, 64)—is usurped by Colin Clout’s own lady (see FQ, 6.10.16). In what is perhaps the poem’s most daring political gesture, the poet overwrites the prince. The second instalment of The Faerie Queene is often deemed to be a comparative failure, but it is more productive to approach it as an intensely wrought exploration of failed idealism, a reflection upon the optimism of the first three books, conducted through a new, more urgent, poetic. The first instalment is expository, the second exploratory. As Helen ²⁴ See Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford, 2012), 266–8. ²⁵ For the dedicatory sonnets, see Andrew Zurcher, ‘Getting it Back to Front in 1590: Spenser’s Dedications, Nashe’s Insinuations, and Ralegh’s Equivocations’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 38 (2005), 173–99.
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488 - Cooper has reminded us, it was common ‘to use the second half of the structure of romance to comment on the first’, and Spenser takes full advantage of the opportunity.²⁶ So the rapturous ending to Book 3 was duly discarded. Amoret and Scudamore are not reunited in 1596 and the latter’s ‘expectation to despaire did turne’ (1596 FQ, 3.12.45, line 4). The change signals a more violent, fragmented, and pessimistic worldview. The ‘friendship’ presented in Book 4 emerges fitfully through bloody conflicts; the ‘justice’ espoused in Book 5 operates violently in an ‘iron’ world; and the ‘court-esy’ examined in Book 6 seems alien if not antipathetic to the court. That is not to say that positive imagery is lacking: the union of Thames and Medway at the close of Book 4; Britomart’s mystical vision in the Temple of Isis in Book 5; and Colin’s vision of the Graces in Book 6. Yet, none stands unqualified: some of the rivers are stained with blood; Britomart’s experience is half dream and half nightmare; and Colin’s vision evaporates into thin air. More disturbingly, the positive symbolism of these episodes seems inoperative in the wider world of the poem. In the Proem to Book 5, the narrator identifies a perfect analogy for this situation in the relationship between the orderly, idealised image of the Ptolemaic heavens and the observable universe: For who so list into the heauens looke, And search the courses of the rowling spheares, Shall find that from the point, where they first tooke Their setting forth, in these few thousand yeares They all are wandred much; that plaine appeares. (FQ, 5.Proem.5, lines 1–5)
Far from providing normative images of order, the planets ‘wander’, in keeping with the etymology of the word. In this and every other way the ‘state of present time’ is at odds with ‘the image of the antique world’ (FQ, 5.Proem.1, lines 1, 2). Artegall, for example, must enforce ‘law’ in a world from which Astraea, the Goddess of Justice, has fled. Hence his oxymoronic function as the poem’s ‘salvage knight’, engaging in acts of acute brutality to impose order. His make-up is complex. The virtues were commonly gendered male or female but, according to the Italian Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino, Justice was properly bisexual, needing the strength of the male to enforce right, and the compassion of the female to deliver equity (Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, 140).²⁷ This idealised union of male and female elements is allegorised in the Temple of Isis when Britomart dreams she is the goddess and joins with Osiris.²⁸ The situation obtaining outside the temple is far more troubling. At this point in the narrative, Artegall is ‘bisexual’ only parodically in his bondage to Radigund, a cross-dressed Hercules to her Omphale. The sight of him leaves Britomart so ‘abasht with secrete shame’ that ‘she turnd her head aside’ (FQ, 5.7.38, lines 3, 4). Several themes are operative here: female regiment, at its most extreme, has emasculated Artegall, and in order to restore him Britomart must defeat Radigund, simultaneously overcoming her own desire for mastery, the Radigund within. Only by clothing Artegall in armour ‘anew’ can she herself ‘reuiu[e]’ (FQ, 5.7.41, lines 8, 9). Her destiny, according to Merlin, is to resume female dress, as he resumes male, and produce the
²⁶ Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), 364. ²⁷ Marsilio Ficino, in S. R. Jayne (trans.), Commentary on Plato’s Symposium (Columbia, MO, 1944). ²⁸ See D. V. Stump, ‘Isis Versus Mercilla: The Allegorical Shrines in Spenser’s Legend of Justice’, Spenser Studies, 3 (1982), 87–98.
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489 child fated to be the ancestor of the Tudor dynasty. But no such union is effected. Instead Artegall rides forth accompanied not by Britomart but the iron man, Talus, and the emphasis in subsequent cantos falls not on ameliorating justice with equity but on imposing punishment. To Artegall’s delight, for example, the ironically named ‘Mercilla’ shows no mercy to Duessa (see FQ, 5.10.4). In his Defence of Poesy (1595) Philip Sidney had argued that whereas law compelled goodness through fear of punishment, poetry inspired it through love of virtue.²⁹ But Spenser seeks to make poetic capital from fear itself, confronting the reader with increasingly violent and disturbing imagery to explore a darker aesthetic. Its nature is signalled at the outset of Book 4 when the narrator characterises his tale as so pervaded by ‘sad calamities’ that ‘oftentimes [I] doe wish it neuer had bene writ’ (FQ, 4.1.1, lines 1, 9), a very different outlook from the infectious sense of adventure shared by knight and narrator at the beginning of Book 1. Everywhere outside the Temple of Isis the accord of Britomart’s dream falls into the discord of the narrative. Such discordance is all the more remarkable in that, as Laurence Coupe observes, historical romance generally tends to ‘resolve the real contradictions of history in imaginative form’.³⁰ This is something Spenser conspicuously fails to do, and the failure is most striking in his treatment of Lord Grey’s Irish campaign in canto 12 of Book 5. The events referenced here occurred in the early 1580s, when Spenser was Grey’s secretary, but the situation in Ireland was deteriorating even as Spenser wrote. What concerned him in 1596 was not past history but present policy, and the greater transparency of his allegory reflects the urgency of the moment. In A View of the Present State of Ireland (c 1596), written around the same time, Spenser justified Grey’s violent methods while acknowledging how ‘the necessitye of that presente state of thinges forced him to that violence and allmoste Changed his verye naturall disposicion’ (Spenser, View, Variorum, 9.160).³¹ It is one of the earliest admissions of the psychological damage colonialism can do to the coloniser as well as the colonised and supplies a perfect genesis for the poem’s ‘salvage knight’, a figure who embodies the very forces he professes to oppose. The problem, however, is that this threatens to turn the perpetrator into the victim. Sympathy for the savage knight has an alarming tendency to generate sympathy for savagery, and dehumanise its victims. No-one reading canto 12 is likely to shed tears for Artegall’s opponent, the ‘monstrous’ Grantorto, ‘of stature huge and hideous’ (FQ, 5.12.15, line 1), whose fall, like that of George’s dragon, is greeted with shouts of joy (see FQ, 5.12.24). Artegall’s methods, however violent, are allegedly justified by ‘the necessitye of that presente state of thinges’ and would, we are assured, have reduced Ireland to ‘civility’, But ere he could reforme it thoroughly, He through occasion called was away, To Faerie Court, that of necessity His course of Iustice he was forst to stay, And Talus to reuoke from the right way, In which he was that Realme for to redresse. (FQ, 5.12.27, lines 1–6)
²⁹ See Gavin Alexander (ed.), Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth, 2004), 15. ³⁰ Laurence Coupe, Myth (London, 1997), 175. ³¹ Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, in Edwin Greenlaw, et al. (eds), The Works of Edmund Spenser, Vol. 9, A Variorum Edition, 11 vols. (Baltimore, MD, 1932–58).
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490 - One ‘necessity’ countervails another. The story should have ended in canto 12, but in this instance, where the poet for once preferred closure, the ‘Faerie court’ deferred it. The historical Grey was indeed recalled from Ireland under a cloud in 1582, as Artegall leaves Irena’s land pursued by ‘Envy’, ‘Detraction’ (FQ, 5.12.35, lines 6, 5), and the Blatant Beast (see FQ, 5.12.37–42). By ventriloquising the contemporary critique of Grey through those figures, Spenser attempts to invalidate it, but the effect is to inscribe into the poem the very counter discourse it is intended to suppress: Then [Detraction] comming neare, gan him reuile, And fouly rayle, with all she could inuent; Saying, that he had with vnmanly guile, And foule abusion both his honour blent, And that bright sword, the sword of Iustice lent, Had stayned with reprochfull crueltie, In guiltlesse blood of many an innocent. (FQ, 5.12.40, lines 1–7)
Despite attempts to the contrary, it is hard to trace any appreciable development in Artegall (equivalent to that seen in George or Britomart) over the course of Book 5. In this case it is not only narrative closure that is deferred, but also moral development.³² At the close of Book 5 Artegall rides ‘to Faery Court’ (FQ, 5.12.43, line 9). What this entails within the spatial parameters of the poem’s imaginary is riding headlong into the Legend of Courtesy where Spenser brutally exposes the court’s failings. ‘Of court it seemes, men Courtesie doe call’, we are told, ‘For that it there most vseth to abound’ (FQ, 6.1.1, lines 1, 2), but everything is not as it ‘seemes’: But in the triall of true curtesie, Its now so farre from that, which then it was, That it indeed is nought but forgerie, Fashion’d to please the eies of them, that pas, Which see not perfect things but in a glas ... But vertues seat is deepe within the mynd, And not in outward shows, but inward thoughts defynd. (FQ, 6.Proem.5, lines 1–5, 8–9)
The key term here is ‘fashion’d’. The poem, as we have seen, is designed ‘to fashion’ moral beings, but the court undoes the poet’s reformative work as it had undone Lord Grey’s. The poem is a ‘mirror’ reflecting reality, the court a ‘glas’ obscuring perception. It is the court that frustrates Artegall’s attempts to reduce Ireland to civility, and it is Sir Calidore, the most courtly of all the knights, who dispels Colin’s vision of the Graces, who cultivate ‘Ciuility’ (FQ, 6.10.23, line 9). True courtesy is a moral virtue located ‘deepe within the minde’ but, as practised at court, it has degenerated into a superficial manner. The narrator’s definition of the virtue is wholly at odds with its supposed etymology and origin.
³² For a different view see Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago, IL, 1971).
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491 The terrible possibility therefore arises that the attainment of courtesy necessitates abandonment of the court even though, according to the ‘Letter to Ralegh’, that is where everyone in the poem is heading. Is it worth reaching? In Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595) Colin had concluded not. His reappearance, against all generic expectations, in Book 6—as though the Tityrus of Virgil’s Eclogues were to reappear in the Aeneid—is signalled by Calidore’s arrival in a landscape familiar from Spenser’s pastoral verse (see FQ, 6.9.4). Its rustic philosopher, Meliboe, is a refugee from court where he was ‘long deluded / With idle hopes’ (FQ, 6.9.25, lines 1–2) and ‘beheld such vainenesse, as I never thought’ (FQ, 6.9.24, line 9), remarkably like the speaker of Spenser’s Prothalamion published that same year (1596). From this point on, the storyline is carefully constructed to elicit the inherent contradictions of courtly ‘courtesy’. Thus, believing he can attain courtesy without slaying the Blatant Beast, Calidore seeks every means ‘to worke delay’ although ‘his quest were farre afore him gon’ (FQ, 6.9.12, lines 7, 3). Falling in love with the aptly named Pastorella, ‘he lost himselfe and like one halfe entraunced grew’ (FQ, 6.9.26, line 9). As in the previous instances of George, Verdant, and Artegall, ‘loss’ of self is evidenced by the semiotics of dress: ‘doffing his bright armes, [Calidore] himselfe addrest / In shepheards weed’ (FQ, 6.12.36, lines 3–4). This development poses quite a challenge for Spenser’s readers as it is made to seem that not just the knight but the poet is reverting from epic to pastoral, reversing the so-called ‘Virgilian rota’, the Classical career structure that led in the opposite direction.³³ But generic fusion proves once again to be aesthetically functional, serving to reveal the symbiotic nature of the two modes Calidore sees as alternatives. In the event, the pastoral landscape he falsely idealises proves to be as perilous as that to which ‘Colin’ returns in disgust with the court, yet, ironically, only the power of the court can ever make it safe. The Meliboeus of Virgil’s first eclogue is the victim of Augustus’s land expropriations and his fate is left uncertain, but Meliboe, his Spenserian instantiation, is murdered by brigands while Calidore is absent (see FQ, 6.11.18). Spenser thus draws Virgil’s open-ended tale to a vicious conclusion. In order to rescue Pastorella, and all she symbolises, Calidore must re-arm himself ‘priuily’ beneath his ‘shepheards weeds’ (FQ, 6.11.36, line 4), resuming the quest he had abandoned. The ultimate, but logical, irony of the episode is that Pastoralla proves to be no more of a shepherd than he is, but a noble foundling ‘fostred under straunge attyre’ (FQ, 6.12.6, line 9). In what seemed like a diversion from the heroic quest and a derogation from the epic genre, Calidore rediscovers the virtue for which he is fighting, and his inspiration comes not from the court or its queen but from Colin (see FQ, 6.10.30). In this respect, Book 6 may be read as drawing Colin Clouts’ bitter dialogue to a point of impasse. The shepherd-poet may be the custodian of authentic ‘courtly’ values, but he needs the protection of a court that does not appreciate them. The otherwise surprising escape of the Blatant Beast from the poem ‘into the world’ (FQ, 6.12.38, line 9) is to this extent inevitable: Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest, Hope to escape his venemous despite, More then my former writs, all were they clearest From blamefull blot, and free from all that wite, With which some wicked tongues did it backebite,
³³ See Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993); and Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA, 1983). See also Chapter 9 in this volume.
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492 - And bring into a mighty Peres displeasure, That neuer so deserued to endite. Therfore do you my rimes keep better measure, And seeke to please, that now is counted wisemens threasure. (FQ, 6.12.41)
Apart from anything else, the shock of the poet’s fate validates the allegory by providing actual referents for its monsters in the real world. Artegall ends Book 5 hounded by the slanders of Blatant Beast (see FQ, 5.12.41) and the poet ends Book 6 the same way. Master and secretary are thus presented as equal victims of courtly intrigue and ‘backbiting’. The allusion to ‘a mighty Pere’ at the conclusion of Book 6 harks back to the opening of Book 4, thereby setting all the intervening narratives within the narrator’s discourse of discontent. To ‘seeke to please’ is to learn to flatter, and flattery is antipathetic to the project of ‘fashioning’ moral beings. Spenser becomes the first poet in the ‘imperial’ tradition to examine the implications of courtly corruption for the writing of heroic verse, thereby turning Arthurian heroism into an acute satire on the Neo-Arthurians of ‘present time’.
Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609) When the first folio of The Faerie Queene appeared in 1609, the publisher announced the addition of two previously unknown cantos ‘which, both for Forme and Matter, appeare to be parcell of some following Booke of the Faerie Queene, under the Legend of Constancie’.³⁴ He numbered these cantos ‘6’, ‘7’, and ‘the 8. Canto, unperfite’, the latter consisting of just two stanzas. Their exact relationship to the poem remains problematic, but in their present state they constitute an extended meditation not just on their own and The Faerie Queene’s incompletion, but on the concept of completion itself. Spenser first raised the issue in the Amoretti when he admitted to doing ‘Great wrong . . . / to that most sacred Empresse my dear dred’ by ‘not finishing her Queene of faëry’, while suggesting that the ‘accomplishment’ might prove impossible (Spenser, Amoretti 33, lines 1, 3, 6, Shorter Poems, 404). The Mutabilitie Cantos raise the problem from an artistic to an existential level, while carefully relating the two. In tone and tenor they resemble Ovid’s poetry of exile, the Epistolae ex Ponto and Tristia, where the poet reflects on his alienation from Rome and the fate of his Fasti, a work doomed to remain incomplete in six out of a projected twelve books, just like The Faerie Queene. The location of the debate between Mutabilitie and the gods is consequently as significant as its content. Ireland heavily informs the landscaping of The Faerie Queene but more often than not in a rather generalised way. The Mutabilitie Cantos, however, are set not just in Ireland but in and around Spenser’s plantation at Kilcolman Castle, and the narrator, never long absent, is more personally involved than at any other stage. The inset epyllion of Faunus and Molanna, for example, ‘dilates’ upon local aetiological legends previously ‘sung’ by Colin in Colin Clouts (see Spenser, Colin Clouts, lines 104–55, Shorter Poems, 348–9), and terminates in the cursing of Ireland by the goddess, variously named Cynthia (see FQ, 7.6.51) or Diana (see FQ, 7.6.54). Both names are flatteringly applied to Elizabeth in previous books of the poem but, in a notable difference from Ovid, the Mutabilitie Cantos ³⁴ See Gordon Teskey, ‘The Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609)’, in McCabe (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, 333–48.
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493 mark the point at which Spenserian flattery ends. Cynthia is Mutabilitie’s first victim, proving to be all too mortal (see FQ, 7.6.12–14), and Diana curses Ireland without any thought for its inhabitants, ‘which too-too true that lands in-dwellers since have found’ (FQ, 7.6.55, line 9). It is as though the historical referents of the allegory have proven to be unworthy of it. Within The Faerie Queene, as we have seen, the end is not only perpetually deferred but perpetually undefined. The implication of Mutabilitie’s argument for the universality of contingency is that such definition may be impossible in any case because change has no telos. The evidence she presents is formidable: the four elements that constitute the world’s substance are mutable (see FQ, 7.7.17–26), as is the temporal dimension in which substance exists (see FQ, 7.7.28–47), and the planets that determine that dimension (see FQ, 7.7.48–56). Translated into literary terms, what she envisages is narrative without meaning, and the consequent impossibility of allegory. Because nothing is fixed, nothing can function as a point of reference. Though herself conjured from the poetic imagination, Mutabilitie challenges the validity of poetry and thereby facilitates the Spenser canon’s most profound moment of self-reflexivity. By way of response, Nature, a figure drawn from the counterpoetic of Neoplatonism, claims that all things eventually ‘dilate’ into ‘themselves’ through a series of changes, presumably in the same way that the questing knights are imagined as discovering their true natures through trial and combat.³⁵ It is an ingenious response that satisfies, or at least silences, everyone, except the narrator. While he concedes that Mutabilitie is ‘vnworthy’ of ‘the Heav’ns Rule’ (FQ, 7.8.1, lines 3, 4), the debate merely strengthens his initial pessimism: In all things else she beares the greatest sway. Which makes me loath this state of life so tickle, And loue of things so vaine to cast away; Whose flowring pride, so fading and so fickle, Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle. (FQ, 7.8.1, lines 5–9)
The last line recalls its counterpart in the Epithalamion (1595), a poem that, in a stunningly effective play on words, proffers its incomplete state as an ‘endlesse moniment’ for ‘short time’ (Spenser, Epithalamion, line 433, Shorter Poems, 449). We are reaching the point at which the ‘unperfite’ is, paradoxically, the ‘perfite’ state for poetry. And if the best an imperfect poetic can do is identify a truly ‘perfite’ referent, the quest must be directed away from Elizabeth—interpreted by William Camden as Eli-Zabeth, or ‘The Peace of the Lord’, ‘the which England hath found verified in . . . our late Soveraigne’ (Camden, Remains, 96)— to the Lord of Sabbath himself.³⁶ Yet, the figure the narrator invokes is not the God of ‘Sabbath’ but ‘Sabaoth’, St Paul’s militant Lord of Hosts (Romans 9:29). The ‘rest’ that would ideally constitute the poem’s telos is not just placed outside it, and the world it represents, but is deferred even on the spiritual plane: Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd, Of that same time when no more Change shall be, ³⁵ For Nature, see H. L. Weatherby, ‘The Old Theology: Spenser’s Dame Nature and the Transfiguration’, Spenser Studies, 5 (1985), 113–42. ³⁶ William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain (1614).
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494 - But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd Vpon the pillours of Eternity, That is contrayr to Mutabilitie: For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight: But thence-forth all shall rest eternally With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: O thou great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight. (FQ, 7.8.2)
Ultimately it is the lyric voice that prevails, reasserting the narrator’s sense of his own imperfect agency in a greater narrative written by a truly omniscient author. The poem ‘ends’ very appropriately in the genre of prayer, a plea eternally awaiting a response.
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28 Daniel, Drayton, Chapman Katharine Cleland
Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and George Chapman have the distinction of being the most important minor poets of the late sixteenth century. During their own day, however, these poets were anything but ‘minor’, sharing the literary spotlight alongside their more famous contemporaries. They each also played a crucial role in the development of the English poetic tradition. Moreover, they openly expressed a desire to be key players in this development and worked hard to gain recognition for their efforts. Richard Helgerson has argued that each belongs to the unique early modern category of ‘self-crowned laureates’, or poets who viewed their writing as a professional career in the service of the nation, rather than as a bid for personal patronage.¹ He elaborates: ‘For the laureate, poetry was itself a means of making a contribution to the order and improvements of the state. This difference resulted naturally in differing attitudes towards the circulation of their work and in literary careers of markedly different shape. The amateurs avoided print; the laureates sought it out. The amateurs wrote only in youth, or more rarely, in the interstices between business; the laureates wrote all their lives.’² Helgerson does not devote much time to the three minor poets before turning to his book’s true stars: Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and John Milton. The goal of this chapter is to give Daniel, Drayton, and Chapman their chance to shine. In particular, Daniel, Drayton, and Chapman each cultivate a professional literary career in print at a time when some poets only circulated work in manuscript. The authors vie for the status of England’s poet laureate, both with each other and with the reigning ‘selfcrowned laureate’, Spenser. As we shall see, each dedicates himself not just to writing poetry, but specifically to the formation of a uniquely English literary tradition that builds upon and revises its Classical and Continental predecessors. They do not write for coteries but for the public. They hope to gain national recognition for their work, of course, but they also insist that poetry should be written in English for a general readership rather than just for a select few. Furthermore, Drayton and Chapman both wrote for the page and stage, suggesting that these seemingly divergent career paths are not antithetical to one another. It would be impossible to cover the entirety of any of the three poets’ rich and complex careers. This chapter thus aims to be cohesive rather than fully comprehensive. It will trace the way the authors’ poetic careers each deliberately unfold in their quest for the laureate crown. Each, for instance, begins his career experimenting with such diverse genres as pastoral, lyric, and epyllion, before turning to the ultimate laureate genre of epic.³
¹ See Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA, 1983), 21–54. ² Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 29. ³ On the poetic career, see also Chapter 9 in this volume. On different poetic genres as representing stages in the development of such a career, see also Chapter 14 (on pastoral), Chapters 11 and 12 (on lyric), Chapter 16 (on epyllion), and Chapter 15 (on epic) in this volume. Katharine Cleland, Daniel, Drayton, Chapman In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Katharine Cleland 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0028
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496 -
Daniel Samuel Daniel expresses his commitment to print when publishing his sonnet sequence Delia in 1592. The authorised publication of this typically private genre is unprecedented in the history of English poetry. A pirated version of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella had appeared in print the year before, but Sidney, who died in 1586, never intended his sequence to leave the security of manuscript. In his prefatory material to Delia, Daniel complains that he did not want to print his sequence either. He only does so, he explains in his dedicatory letter to Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, because twenty-eight of his sonnets had mistakenly appeared as part of Sidney’s own sequence: ‘I was betrayed by the indiscretion of a greedy Printer, and had some of my secrets bewrayed [divulged, revealed] to the world, uncorrected: doubting the like of the rest, I am forced to publish that which I never meant’ (Daniel, Delia, dedicatory letter, Complete Works, 1.33).⁴ These gentlemanly protestations, however, seem more conventional than sincere.⁵ While he admits some embarrassment at publicly airing the ‘private passions of . . . youth’ (Daniel, Delia, dedicatory letter, Complete Works, 1.33), Daniel could not have hoped for a more prestigious platform from which to launch his poetic ambitions. His sequence gained positive publicity for being initially associated with the illustrious Sidney and his family, and he further capitalises on the association by dedicating the volume to Sidney’s sister.⁶ Quite unlike Sidney, whose public literary legacy is largely crafted for him posthumously, Daniel carefully uses his poetic debut to forge a public authorial persona. Even the edition’s title page reflects forethought and attention to detail. For example, Daniel personalises the endeavour by including a motto adapted from the Roman elegist Propertius that appears on most of his subsequent works: Aetas prima canat Veneres, postrema tumultus [Let a poet’s first years sing of love, his last of conflicts].⁷ This motto confirms that Delia is not a begrudging one-off to set the record straight, as the dedicatory epistle seems to indicate. Instead, the motto promises that the sonnet sequence is only the first of more publications to come. Daniel’s love poetry is the initial stop on his authorial cursus that ultimately has epic ambitions. The title page of the second authorised edition, which also came out in 1592, features the façade of an impressive Classical building, suggesting the kind of edification and erudition the reader will find therein. With Delia, Daniel launches his authorial career, giving it the Classical sheen of laureate status. Daniel encodes his investment in publication within the language of the sonnets themselves. The sequence’s first iteration consists of fifty sonnets, which Daniel augments and revises several times before publishing a final version in 1601. In the sequence, Daniel differentiates himself from Sidney by adopting the Surreian sonnet form (three quatrains and a couplet rhyming ababcdcdefefgg), whereas Sidney uses a more Petrarchan sonnet
⁴ Samuel Daniel, in Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works in Verse and Prose, 5 vols. (London, 1885–96). ⁵ On the convention of seeming reluctant to print, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 175. ⁶ On Daniel’s own potential role in the publication, see Lisa M. Klein, The Exemplary Sidney and The Elizabethan Sonneteer (Newark, DE, 1998), 137–42. ⁷ From Propertius, Elegies, 2.10.7, in G. P. Goold (ed. and trans.), Elegies (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 132–3. On Daniel’s use of this motto, see Cecil Seronsy, Samuel Daniel (New York, 1967), 33–4.
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, , 497 form in Astrophil and Stella.⁸ In this way, Daniel privileges the English sonnet form and metre over the Continental. Daniel’s sequence also differs from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in that it is devoid of narrative event. The poet never approaches his beloved or achieves any kind of closure (either personal or poetic); instead, the beloved remains aloof and disdainful for the sequence’s entirety. The sequence’s mistress does not appear to have a real-life counterpart. The lack of an identifiable beloved suggests that Daniel wrote Delia to display his poetic skill rather than to attain the love of an actual woman through private courtship. Despite his seeming reluctance to embrace print, Daniel uses the language of publication in the very first sonnet. Identifying his sequence with the books of print rather than with the pages of manuscript, he proclaims: ‘Here I unclasp the Book of my charg’d soul’ (Daniel, Delia 1, line 5, Complete Works, 1.37). While Daniel does not seem to have an actual woman in mind, his commitment to print allows him to introduce ‘English readers to the idea that poetry might immortalize a beloved lady’.⁹ In the third quatrain of sonnet 44, the poet informs Delia that Thou mayest in after ages live esteemed, Unburied in these lines reserved in pureness; These shall entomb those eyes, that have redeemed Me from the vulgar, thee from all obscureness. (Daniel, Delia 44, lines 9–12, Complete Works, 1.66)
Daniel’s sonnets will thus preserve both his beloved’s beauty and his poetic skill for posterity. In contrast, Sidney, who never intended his sequence to be public, never refers to his sequence as a ‘book’. He also never claims that his sonnets will serve as eternal monuments, as though private expressions of love and desire were unable to immortalise the beloved. At the beginning of sonnet 2, Daniel uses specifically laureate language: ‘Go wailing Verse, the Infants of my love’ (Daniel, Delia 2, line 1, Complete Works, 1.38). This clearly echoes the dedicatory poem to The Shepheardes Calender (1579), with which Spenser launched his own poetic career, albeit anonymously: ‘Goe, little booke: thy selfe present, / As child whose parent is vnkent [unknown]’ (Spenser, Calender, ‘To his booke’, lines 1–2, Shorter Poems, 24).¹⁰ Of course, Spenser’s language, in turn, echoes Chaucer’s command to his work in Troilus and Criseyde, ‘Go, litel bok, go litel myn tragedye’ (Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, line 1786, Riverside Chaucer, 584).¹¹ Daniel thus expresses his intent to follow in the laureate footsteps of Spenser and Chaucer, sending his book of poetry out into the world for public readership. Daniel does not just imitate Spenser but overgoes his predecessor when beginning his authorial cursus with a sequence of love sonnets. Spenser did not publish his own amatory sequence, Amoretti, until 1595.¹² In this sense, Daniel is the first to demonstrate ⁸ Most of the 108 sonnets in Astrophil and Stella consist of an octave with only two rhymes (usually abbaabba) followed by a sestet with two or, more commonly, three rhymes (usually cdcee); while most are in iambic pentameter, six are in alexandrines (iambic hexameter). On the form and evolution of the sonnet, see also Chapters 12 and 23 in this volume. ⁹ John Pitcher, ‘Samuel Daniel: New and Future Research’, Oxford Handbooks Online (2017). ¹⁰ Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999). ¹¹ Geoffrey Chaucer, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, third edition (Boston, MA, 1987). ¹² On Spenser’s inclusion of the sonnet sequence into a Christianised Virgilian career path, see Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993), esp. 149–94. Spenser also translated sonnets by Petrarch (via Marot) and Du Bellay in A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), later revising them in Complaints (1591).
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498 - how a sonnet sequence can be incorporated into a laureate career despite the genre’s association with manuscript. In sonnet 55, he famously alludes to Spenser and the 1590 Faerie Queene: Let others sing of Knights and Paladins; In aged accents, and untimely words: Paint shadows in imaginary lines, Which well the reach of their high wits records; But I must sing of thee, and those fair eyes, Authentic shall my verse in time to come, When yet th’unborn shall say, ‘Lo where she lies, Whose beauty made him speak that else was dumb’. (Daniel, Delia 55, lines 1–8, Complete Works, 1.73)
Daniel does not so much present himself as a successor to Spenser—as he is often portrayed—than as a competitor, even if a good-natured one. He scoffs at Spenser’s epic material (‘Knights and Paladins’), medieval affectation (‘aged accents and untimely words’), and allegory (‘shadows in imaginary lines’). Daniel thus makes a startling claim: the poet laureate does not write old-fashioned epic but contemporary love sonnets. To be thorough, however, Daniel also associates his sequence with epic in sonnet 47. ‘Read in my face, a volume of despairs’, he urges, ‘The wailing Iliads of my tragic woe’ (Daniel, Delia 47, lines 1–2, Complete Works, 1.68). Daniel lends more weight to the sonnet as a poetic genre, claiming it has the same significance as epic even while using his motto to presage the epic he will write later in his career. With Delia, Daniel also works to solidify the place of English poetry in the Continental Petrarchan tradition. In sonnet 43, he expresses his intent to anglicise the tradition: Thou canst not die whilst any zeal abound In feeling hearts that can conceive these lines; Though thou a Laura hast no Petrarch found, In base attire, yet clearly Beauty shines. And I (though born within a colder clime,) Do feel my inward heat as great (I know it:) He never had more faith, although more rhyme; I love as well, though he could better show it. But I may add one feather to thy fame, To help her flight throughout the fairest Isle; And if my pen could more enlarge thy name, Then should’st thou live in an immortal style. For though that Laura better limned* be, *depicted, portrayed Suffice, thou shalt be loved as well as she. (Daniel, Delia 43, Complete Works, 1.65–6)
While humbly admitting that his poetic skill is not as great as Petrarch’s, Daniel claims that the Petrarchan sonnet can be repurposed for England’s ‘colder clime’. English poets can feel an ‘inward heat’ that allows them to create an English poetic tradition for their ‘fairest Isle’. Later, in sonnet 53, he further associates his sequence with England:
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, , 499 Flourish fair Albion, glory of the north, Neptune’s best darling, held between his arms: Divided from the world, as better worth, Kept for himself, defended from all harms. Still let disarmed peace deck her and thee: And Muse-foe Mars, abroad far fostered be. (Daniel, Delia 53, lines 9–14, Complete Works, 1.72)
By praising England as the ‘glory of the North’, Daniel transforms the genre of private love poetry into a vehicle for the nationalism associated with the laureate poet. In another first in English poetic history, Daniel pairs his sonnet sequence with a longer narrative poem, The Complaint of Rosamond. The pairing becomes so popular that several early modern English poets follow suit by appending a complaint to their own sonnet sequences.¹³ While the impetus behind the pairing has puzzled modern readers and critics, it allows Daniel to demonstrate his poetic virtuosity by writing from a female perspective.¹⁴ In contrast to the tortured subjectivity of the male poet-lover in the sonnets, the complaint features the tortured subjectivity of a wronged woman. The genre of female complaint has its roots in Ovid’s Heroides, which gives ill-treated women from Classical history and mythology an opportunity to excoriate the men who have treated them badly.¹⁵ Revealing the interest in English history that defines much of his later work, Daniel chooses Rosamond Clifford, the tragic mistress of King Henry II, as the protagonist of his complaint. This focus on an English historical figure further associates the poem with the popular Mirror for Magistrates (first published in 1559), a multi-authored collection of complaints in which the ghosts of prominent political figures recount their tragic downfalls. Daniel’s complaint consists of 130 rhyme royal stanzas (seven-line stanzas in iambic pentameter rhyming ababbcc). The speaker of the preceding sonnets encounters Rosamond’s ghost, who asks him to tell her story. Rosamond states that, as a result of her sins, her ‘soul is now denied, / Her transport to the sweet Elysian rest’ (Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, lines 8–9, Complete Works, 1.81). ‘Charon denies me waftage’ across the River Styx, she laments, ‘Till Lovers’ sighs on earth shall it deliver’ (lines 12, 14). In particular, Rosamond hopes to receive the sympathy of the poet’s own beloved, Delia. The complaint thus cleverly comments upon the sonnet sequence: Delia’s virtue shines more brightly when contrasted with the sinful Rosamond. According to Rosamond, Delia’s ‘merit would suffice for both our glory . . . / Such power she hath by whom thy youth is led, / To joy the living, and to bless the dead’ (Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, lines 45, 48–9, Complete Works, 1.82), emphasising the importance of Delia’s virtue to both Rosamond and the author. Daniel confirms that the purpose of his sonnet sequence is not the fruition of courtship but poetic glory: glory that is dependent upon Delia’s chastity. The complaint thus ironically speaks to the potential dangers of women giving in to the seduction that the sonnets seem to perform. The poet-narrator might lament that Delia
¹³ Most notably, Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint follows his Sonnets in 1609, although Shakespeare’s agency in this publication (even his authorship) of the complaint has been up for debate. See John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (Oxford, 1991); and Macdonald P. Jackson, Determining the Shakespeare Canon: ‘Arden of Faversham’ and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ (Oxford, 2014). For an alternative view, see Catherine Bates, ‘The Enigma of A Lover’s Complaint’, in Michael Schoenfeldt (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford, 2007), 426–40. ¹⁴ On Daniel’s impersonation of a female voice, see Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 250–60. ¹⁵ On the complaint genre, see also Chapter 19 in this volume.
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500 - never requites his love, but this is with the understanding that she would not be as desirable if she did. Rosamond explains how she came to be seduced: But what? he is my King, and may constrain me, Whether I yield or not, I live defamed. The World will think Authority did gain me, I shall be judged his Love, and so be shamed: We see the fair condemned, that never gamed. And if I yield, ’tis honourable shame, If not, I live disgraced, yet thought the same. (Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, lines 344–50, Complete Works, 1.93)
On the one hand, Rosamond reasonably suggests that, when propositioned by the most powerful man in the realm, she had little choice in the matter. On the other, her defensive attempts to excuse her behaviour, suggesting she gives in to temptation because she would be considered guilty even if innocent, complicates her victimhood. According to Heather Dubrow, Rosamond’s psychological complexity makes The Complaint of Rosamond ‘the most sophisticated poem of the [complaint] subgenre, save for The Rape of Lucrece’.¹⁶ This complexity also makes the male poet’s task to garner sympathy for her the more impressive. As the poet-narrator claims, ‘A worthy author doth redeem th’offence, / And makes the scarlet sin as white as snow’ (Daniel, Complaint of Rosamond, lines 297–8, Complete Works, 1.91). In his gripping exploration of Rosamond’s psychology, Daniel proves his worthiness as an author. He then harnesses the complaint genre to make a bridge to the next step on his authorial cursus. Indeed, the complaint is closely related to the minor epic. With The Complaint of Rosamond, Daniel thus prepares himself for his epic task, turning the genre of the minor epic into a training ground for the laureate poet. In 1595, Daniel publishes the first four books of his epic project, The Civil Wars: a project that he revises and augments in subsequent editions in 1599, 1601, and 1609 to a total of eight books. He chooses the Wars of the Roses for the content of his epic, relying primarily upon Edward Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1550) as his source. For his epic stanzas, he deploys ottava rima (eight-line stanzas rhyming abababcc), best known for its use in Italian heroic poetry, including Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. In this way, Daniel further demonstrates the ability of English poetry to appropriate Continental forms. Like Spenser, Daniel uses his epic to praise Queen Elizabeth: Yet now what reason have we to complain? Since hereby came the calm we did enjoy; The bliss of thee Eliza; happy gain For all our loss: when-as no other way The heavens could find, but to unite again The fatal severed families, that they Might bring forth thee: that in thy peace might grow That glory, which few times could ever show. (Daniel, Civil Wars, Book 1, stanza 3, Complete Works, 2.10) ¹⁶ Heather Dubrow, ‘A Mirror for Complaints: Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Generic Tradition’, in Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 399–417, 412.
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, , 501 He thus expresses his epic’s investment in the Tudor myth, revealing that the loss of life in the Wars of the Roses served to bring about an Elizabethan Golden Age. In his epic, however, Daniel also works to differentiate himself from Spenser. First, he looks to Lucan’s Pharsalia as his model, rather than Virgil’s Aeneid. Secondly, with his focus on concrete history, he notably eschews the mythological origins that occupy Spenser in The Faerie Queene. In The Civil Wars, Henry V delivers a patriotic speech: ‘Why do you seek for feigned Paladins (Out of smoke of idle vanity,) Who may give glory to the true designs, Of Bourchier, Talbot, Neville, Willoughby? Why should not you strive to fill up your lines, With wonders of your own, with verity? T’inflame their offspring with the love of good, And glorious true examples of their Blood.’ (Daniel, Civil Wars, Book 5, stanza 4, Complete Works, 2.175)
Daniel insists that poetry should not just be written in English but should contain distinctly English content. The worthiest subject of epic is not Spenser’s ‘dark conceit’ (Spenser, ‘Letter to Ralegh’, Faerie Queene, 714),¹⁷ but ‘verity’, or the straightforward narration of history: what Sidney had referred to in the Defence of Poesy as the historian’s ‘bare Was’ (Sidney, Defence, 89).¹⁸ Daniel pointedly undermines Spenser’s use of ‘feigned Paladins’ when claiming that real English heroes like the successful soldier, John Talbot, first earl of Shrewsbury (c 1387–1453) who fought for Henry V, should be the central figures of nationalistic epic. While admirable, Daniel’s insistence on ‘verity’ does not always make for exciting poetry. In his ‘Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden’, Ben Jonson famously derides Daniel for writing an epic about civil wars that ‘hath not one battle in all his Book’ (Jonson, ‘Conversations with Drummond’, Ben Jonson, 1.138).¹⁹ Daniel, however, clarifies the purpose of his poetic project which is to ‘versify the truth: not Poetize’ (Daniel, Civil Wars, Book 1, stanza 6, line 8, Complete Works, 2.12). With this statement, Daniel enters into the early modern debate about the relationship between poetry and history. In the Defence, Sidney had insisted (following the lead of Aristotle) that history, ‘being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness’ (Sidney, Defence, 90). This makes history inferior to poetry, which, by contrast, is able to inspire readers with idealised examples. Uncharacteristically, given his reverence for the elder poet, Daniel disagrees. While he indicates that verse is a suitable genre for history, he further insists that ‘poetizing’—adding ‘fictions’ or ‘fantasies’ as he calls them (Daniel, Civil Wars, Book 1, stanza 6, line 7, Complete Works, 2.12)—actually undermines the genre of epic rather than bolstering it.²⁰ Although not widely read or
¹⁷ Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ¹⁸ Sir Philip Sidney, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973). ¹⁹ Ben Jonson, ‘Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden’, in C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, Vol. 1, The Man and his Work, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52). In fact, battles are described in Books 3, 4, 6, and 8 of Daniel’s Civil Wars. ²⁰ The Oxford English Dictionary cites Daniel’s phrase as the first use of the word ‘poetize’ in this sense: ‘to exercise poetic license; to fabulate’ (see OED, poetize, v. 3). In the Defence, by contrast, Sidney originally coined the
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502 - studied today, Daniel’s epic merits greater attention. Taking Lucan’s association with Classical republicanism into account, for instance, might problematise Daniel’s seemingly uncritical glorification of Queen Elizabeth.²¹ At the end of the sixteenth century, Daniel pauses from his epic project to write a verse dialogue in terza rima (an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme, ababcbcdc . . . ) entitled Musophilus (1599). The dialogue puts the practical Philocosmus [lover of the world] in conversation with the philosophical Musophilus [lover of the Muses]. The speakers argue over the social and individual benefits of learning. Philocosmus contends that learning overall is superfluous. He particularly attacks writing poetry. The ‘idle smoke of Praise’ is not worth it, he contends, since ‘many thousands [have] never heard the name / Of Sidney, or of Spenser, or their Books’ (Daniel, Musophilus, lines 9, 440–1, Complete Works, 1.225, 239). If no one has even heard of England’s most celebrated poets, why bother? Indeed, Philocosmus undermines Daniel’s own attempts to secure an English literary tradition by pointing out that—since England is a ‘scarce discerned Isle, / Thrust from the world’, and has a ‘barbarous language’—it is best to leave poetry to those with ‘happier tongues’ (Daniel, Musophilus, lines 427–8, 433, 432, Complete Works, 1.239). Musophilus, however, more than rises to Philocosmus’s challenge. He eloquently proclaims: ‘weakness speaks in Prose, but power in Verse’ (Daniel, Musophilus, line 980, Complete Works, 1.256). In particular, Musophilus argues for the public utility of poetry, claiming that it allows readers to commune with, and even take counsel from, the dead: O blessed Letters, that combine in one, All ages past, and make one live with all: By you, we do confer with who are gone, And the dead-living unto Counsel call. (Daniel, Musophilus, lines 189–92, Complete Works, 1.231)
He praises Eloquence because it ‘canst do much more with one poor pen / Then all the powers of Princes can effect’ (Daniel, Musophilus, lines 945–6, Complete Works, 1.255). In Musophilus, Daniel thus concretely defines the laureate’s role, specifically anointing him with political influence. In the back and forth of the verse dialogue, we can see Daniel struggling with the purpose and worthiness of the poet’s epic task. In the poetic manifestation of this internal conflict, however, Musophilus is the clear winner—he speaks far more often and has the last word. In this way, at the very end of the sixteenth century, Daniel not only justifies his pursuit of the laurel crown, but also suggests that the pursuit is a worthy one for others to follow.
Drayton Michael Drayton inaugurates his own laureate career with the publication of Idea: The Shepherd’s Garland in 1593. Pastoral is the traditional generic starting point for the poet term as simply meaning ‘to compose poetry’ (see Defence, 110; and OED, poetize, v. 1). By introducing a new sense here, Daniel distinguishes himself from his predecessor, thereby making his own contribution to the sixteenthcentury debate on the relationship between history and poetry. ²¹ On the relationship between Lucan and republicanism, see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (Basingstoke, 2009); and Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, 2005).
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, , 503 who hopes to follow in the footsteps of the Classical laureate, Virgil, who wrote his Eclogues before composing the Aeneid. With The Shepherd’s Garland, Drayton thus self-consciously announces his debut as an aspiring laureate embarking upon the specifically Virgilian authorial cursus. The term ‘Idea’—the Neoplatonic concept of perfection—also appears in the titles of his subsequent sonnet sequence and epyllion, suggesting a thematic cohesion to his early works. He probably derives his concept of ‘Idea’ at least in part from Sidney’s Defence, which states that ‘the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself ’ (Sidney, Defence, 79). The title page of The Shepherd’s Garland also includes a motto that gestures towards the Ovidian—effugiunt avidos carmina sola rogos [only songs escape the greedy funeral pyre]—that will play a large role in his later works.²² In this way, Drayton establishes himself within both the Classical and contemporary literary traditions. By beginning his professional career with the pastoral, Drayton also follows in Spenser’s footsteps. The Shepherd’s Garland constitutes the first conspicuous imitation of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. Rather than an eclogue for each month, Drayton’s pastoral includes an eclogue for each of the nine Muses (his pastoral ‘garland’ an explicit reference, therefore, to the poet’s laurel crown). He emulates Spenser, however, by including mottos and beginning each eclogue with a brief argument. He even imitates Spenser’s purposely archaic diction. William Wells observes that ‘The First and Ninth Eglogs follow Jan[uary] and Dec [ember] so closely in verse form, tone, subject, and turns of speech that Drayton would seem to be inviting the reader’s comparison of the love-stricken shepherds Rowland and Colin’.²³ By coupling poetic aspirations with an acute sense of melancholia, Drayton’s own fictional persona, Rowland of the Rocks, closely resembles Spenser’s Colin Clout. Indeed, if anything, Rowland overgoes Colin by being even more melancholy. While The Shepheardes Calender begins with Colin contemplating the barren January landscape that his own mood ‘myrrhour[s]’ (Spenser, Januarye, line 20, Shorter Poems, 38), the first eclogue of The Shepherd’s Garland begins with Rowland bewailing the ‘winter of his grief ’ despite a springtime setting (Drayton, Shepherd’s Garland, eclogue 1, argument, line 4, Works, 1.47).²⁴ His artistic temperament is out of sync with the seasons. Drayton specifically acknowledges his indebtedness to Spenser when the shepherd Perkin calls upon Rowland to sing a song in Colin’s absence: In thy sweet song so blessed may’st thou be, For learned Colin lays his pipes to gage*, *pledge And is to faerie gone a pilgrimage: the more our moan. (Drayton, Shepherd’s Garland, eclogue 3, lines 13–16, Works, 1.55)
Perkin reveals that Spenser has moved to the next step on his Virgilian career path by writing his epic, The Faerie Queene. Later, Gorbo refers to Pandora as the ‘The lowly handmaid of the Faerie Queen’ (Drayton, Shepherd’s Garland, eclogue 6, line 162, Works,
²² A modification of Ovid, Amores 3.9.28 (the poem is Ovid’s elegy on the poet, Tibullus); the original line reads ‘defugiunt avidos carmina sola rogos’ [’Tis song alone escapes the greedy pyre]. See Ovid, in Grant Showerman (ed. and trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Heroides. Amores (Cambridge, MA, 1914), 488–9. ²³ William Wells, ‘Spenser Allusions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Studies in Philology, 68.5 (1971), 1–172, 31. ²⁴ Michael Drayton, in J. William Hebel (ed.), Works, corrected edition, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1961).
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504 - 1.76). Looking to these references, Andrew Hadfield confirms that Drayton hopes to ‘join the ranks of the major English poets in the public realm’.²⁵ Further, Drayton indicates that he is filling a void left by Spenser as England’s pastoral laureate poet. According to Drayton, laureate authorship occurs on a rolling basis: as one author takes the next step on the Virgilian career path, another takes his place. Like Daniel, Drayton also openly acknowledges Sidney as one of the founding figures of the English poetic tradition. In the fourth eclogue, Winken bewails the death of Elphin, Drayton’s name for Sidney: ‘Elphin is dead, and in his grave is laid, / Our lives’ delight whilst lovely Elphin lived’ (Drayton, Shepherd’s Garland, eclogue 4, lines 45–6, Works, 1.61). He extols Sidney further: A heavenly clouded in a human shape, Rare substance, in so rough a bark yclad, Of pastoral, the lively springing sap, Though mortal thou, thy fame immortal made. Spell-charming prophet, sooth-divining seer, ô heavenly music of the highest sphere, Sweet sounding trump*, soul-ravishing desire, *trumpet Thou stealer of man’s heart, enchanter of the ear. God of invention, Jove’s dear Mercury, Joy of our Laurel, pride of all our joy: The essence of all Poets’ divinity, Spirit of Orpheus: Pallas’s lovely boy. (Drayton, Shepherd’s Garland, eclogue 4, lines 58–69, Works, 1.62)
While Drayton owes his career model to England’s Virgil, Spenser, he elevates Sidney by name as the chief of the English poets, anointing the ‘amateur’ poet with laureate status. Drayton follows Sidney’s (and Daniel’s) example by publishing his own sonnet sequence—entitled Idea’s Mirror—in 1594. In this, its first iteration, the sequence contains fifty-one sonnets in the loose Surreian form, which on the title page he calls ‘amours in quatorzains’. The sequence is also more akin to Daniel’s than Sidney’s in that it does not have a clear overarching narrative, although some scholars speculate that his sequence’s ambiguous subject may refer to his patron’s daughter, Anne Goodere. While the sonnet sequence’s first published draft was not well received, Drayton revised it extensively throughout his career. Revising, adding, and removing sonnets, as well as reorganising them (suggesting an importance to the sequence’s order even in the absence of explicit narrative). A longer (and improved) version with fifty-nine sonnets came out under the title Idea in 1599; a final version with sixty-three sonnets came out in 1619. Drayton uses his sonnet sequence to grapple, not just with love, but with questions of authorship and poetry more generally. Perhaps acknowledging the derivative nature of his pastoral work, Drayton champions his sequence’s originality in a dedicatory sonnet: Yet these mine own, I wrong not other men, Nor traffic further than this happy Clime, Nor filch from Portes’ nor from Petrarch’s pen, ²⁵ Andrew Hadfield, ‘Michael Drayton’s Brilliant Career’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 125 (2005), 119–47, 136.
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, , 505 A fault too common in this latter time. Divine Sir Philip, I avouch thy writ, I am no Pickpurse of another’s wit. (Drayton, Idea’s Mirror, ‘To the dear Child of the Muses’, lines 9–14, Works, 1.96)
Drayton proudly asserts that his sequence is not purely imitative since he does not ‘filch’ from Portes (the French poet, Phillipe Desportes) nor from Petrarch. However, Drayton rejects filching from the Continental poets because he does not need to ‘traffic further than this happy clime’. In the final couplet, Drayton confirms that he will happily ‘avouch [the] writ’ of the ‘Divine Sir Philip’. A sonnet’s final couplet typically makes some kind of pronouncement—even if ironically—on the themes of the preceding quatrains. Making good on his pronouncement, Drayton quotes directly from sonnet 74 of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in his final line.²⁶ Drayton thus uses the couplet to acknowledge that even statements of literary originality have a source. Through his privileging of the ‘Divine Sir Philip’, Drayton makes a case for a distinctly English sonnet tradition that need not rely on Continental predecessors. Another dedicatory poem affirms the sequence’s role as the next step in his career path following the pastoral. Drayton refers to the river Ankor, setting for The Shepherd’s Garland, as the place where he first ‘gan rehearse’ his poetic career (Drayton, Idea’s Mirror, ‘Ankor triumph, upon whose blessed shore’, line 5, Works, 1.97). Still under the guise of Rowland, he will now turn from pastoral to amorous poetry. Drayton thus joins Daniel in incorporating the published, amatory sonnet sequence into the early modern laureate’s career path, particularly demonstrating how love sonnets can be incorporated into the Virgilian model before Spenser makes a similar move with the Amoretti in 1595. In Idea, Drayton further emphasises his sequence’s placement within the print tradition. One of his most famous sonnets, which first appears as sonnet 2 in the 1599 edition and later as the dedicatory sonnet to the 1619 edition, reads: Into these Loves, who but for Passion looks, At this first sight, here let him lay them by, And seek elsewhere, in turning other Books, Which better may his labour satisfy. No far-fetched Sigh shall ever wound my Breast, Love from mine Eye, a Tear shall never wring, Nor in Ah-mees my whining Sonnets dressed, (A libertine) fantastickly I sing: My Verse is the true image of my Mind, Ever in motion, still desiring change; And as thus to Variety inclined, So in all humours sportively I range: My Muse is rightly of the English strain, That cannot long one Fashion entertain. (Drayton, Idea, ‘To the reader of these sonnets’, Works, 2. 310)
²⁶ See ‘I am no pick-purse of another’s wit’, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 74, line 8, in William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), 204.
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506 - Here he follows Daniel’s rather than Sidney’s lead by referring to his sequence alongside other ‘Books’. In doing so, he again stakes a claim for his sequence’s originality, claiming that the reader will not find the hyperbolic ‘Ah-mees’ that permeate other sequences.²⁷ His sequence, Drayton promises, has more ‘Variety’, and is more active, even ‘sportive’. In sonnet 3 of the 1599 Idea, however (a poem subsequently dropped from later editions), Drayton also addresses his literary predecessors: Many there be excelling in this kind, Whose well tricked rhymes with all invention swell, Let each commend as best shall like his mind, Some Sidney, Constable, some Daniel. That thus their names familiarly I sing, Let none think them disparaged to be, Poor men with reverence may speak of a King, And so may these be spoken of by me. (Drayton, 1599 Idea, sonnet 3, lines 1–8, Works, 1.485)
Drayton gestures towards the sonnet sequence’s popularity in the 1590s; his sequence might be highly original, but it is not, he admits, the only one. Tellingly, he further reveals that the English poetic tradition has expanded: he mentions both Constable and Daniel alongside the beloved Sidney as the authors of sonnet sequences that readers might prefer. Although he does not attach a complaint to his sonnet sequence as Daniel does, Drayton does experiment with the genre. He publishes Piers Gaveston in 1593 and Matilda in 1594. Like Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond, Drayton’s choice of English historical figures for his protagonists places his complaint within the Mirror for Magistrates tradition. Clark Hulse observes that Drayton’s Piers Gaveston is an ‘attempt to “overdo” Daniel’s Rosamond at the new game of humanist historical verse’.²⁸ Drayton, for instance, pens longer speeches for his historical characters, and his writing is even more florid. Where ‘Daniel uses an Ovidian image or two’, Hulse observes, ‘Drayton uses five or six’.²⁹ Drayton thus overtly responds to—and competes with—Daniel’s own laureate aspirations. In Piers Gaveston, the ghost of Gaveston, Edward II’s loathed favourite, returns from hell and asks the poet to tell his story so that his tragedy can be appreciated. Drayton does not condemn Piers Gaveston outright as does his source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, demonstrating his authorial ability to gain sympathy for the morally suspect. Like other complaints, the poem also bears resemblance to the Ovidian erotic narrative.³⁰ Drayton, for instance, describes Gaveston in highly erotic terms. Gaveston boasts of how he ‘fished for Edward’s love’ using his body as ‘fair bait’ (Drayton, Piers Gaveston, line 163, Works, 1.163). He proclaims: If cunningest pencil-man* that ever wrought, By skillful art of secret symmetry, Or the divine Idea of the thought, With rare descriptions of high poesy,
*painter, artist
²⁷ Including Sidney’s: see Chapter 25, note 41, in this volume. ²⁸ Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, NJ, 1981), 222. On the genre of historical poetry, see also Chapter 17 in this volume. ²⁹ Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, 222. ³⁰ On the Ovidian erotic narrative, see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, NJ, 1977).
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, , 507 Should all compose a body and a mind, Such a one seemed I, the wonder of my kind. (Drayton, Piers Gaveston, lines 159–62, Works, 1.163)
Georgia Brown explains that by ‘defining a space for erotic desire and private experience, Drayton is simultaneously defining a space for a new kind of poetry . . . [H]e draws a connection between the defence of his scandalous, degenerate subject Piers . . . and the defence of poetry. Both need defence from the sober control of the stoic temperament’.³¹ Gaveston’s mentioning of Idea here might feel out of place, but it underscores Drayton’s attempt to draw connections between his works for his readers. In 1595, Drayton publishes the final instalment in his Idea trilogy, Endymion and Phoebe: Idea’s Latmus. As Brown notes, the minor epic gives Drayton the chance to ‘rework . . . his own images and lexicon to create the impression of a coherent personal career. The epyllion gives shape retrospectively to what has come before and brings about the public debut of the poet’, after his more youthful excursions into pastoral and sonneteering.³² The first commendatory sonnet refers to Drayton as ‘Rowland’, confirming the public absorption of his poetic persona. Written in 516 heroic couplets (rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter), the epyllion relays the Classical myth of how Phoebe, the moon goddess, falls in love with the mortal shepherd, Endymion. In Drayton’s version, Endymion takes a vow of chastity in service of Phoebe, but does not recognise her when she initially comes to court him in an earthly guise. After finally revealing her identity, Phoebe treats Endymion to a celestial revelation: And now to show her powerful deity, Her sweet Endymion more to beautify Into his soul the goddess doth infuse, The fiery nature of a heavenly Muse, Which in the spirit labouring by the mind Partaketh of celestial things by kind. (Drayton, Endymion and Phoebe, lines 505–10, Works, 1.142)
Endymion does not achieve ecstasy through a sexual union with his beloved Phoebe as one would expect, but rather through a Neoplatonic union that allows a celestial vision. As Barbara Ewell observes, ‘[c]learly, at the heart of the allegory lies the Neoplatonic enticement of the poet-lover from an appreciation of the earthly to the recognition of the Ideal itself ’.³³ As we shall see in the following section, Drayton takes his cue from Chapman here, revising the epyllion’s typically racy content through the lens of Neoplatonism. In doing so, he further transforms the Ovidian erotic narrative into a serious genre worthy of epic aspirations. He solidifies the genre’s inclusion in the laureate career path, particularly as one of the final steps before the writing of epic. His serious revision of the genre also includes a Spenserian focus on marriage when Endymion and Phoebe enter into marital union. Towards the end of poem, he explicitly refers to Spenser’s poetic persona when stating:
³¹ Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge, 2004), 203. ³² Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature, 125. ³³ Barbara C. Ewell, ‘Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe: An Allegory of Aesthetics’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 7 (1981), 15–26, 16.
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508 - Dear Colin, let my Muse excused be, Which rudely thus presumes to sing by thee, Although her strains be harsh, untuned, and ill, Nor can attain to thy divinest skill. (Drayton, Endymion and Phoebe, lines 993–6, Works, 1.155)
Drayton acknowledges that Spenser remains the public poet that he most admires and emulates, since his ‘strains’ remain ‘harsh’ and ‘untuned’ in comparison. However, Spenser is not the only poet on the national stage. Drayton also singles out Daniel when claiming his ‘scarce invention is too mean and base, / When Delia’s glorious Muse doth come in place’ (Drayton, Endymion and Phoebe, lines 999–1000, Works, 1.155). In this way, it is possible to see how Daniel had a poetic reputation that rivalled that of Spenser in the late sixteenth century. First published in 1597, England’s Heroical Epistles further privilege the Ovidian over the Virgilian. As we have seen, combining the Classical and contemporary literary traditions is the trademark of the English laureate poet. At this point in his career, Drayton works to distinguish himself from Spenser by looking to Ovid as a Classical precursor (rather than Virgil, as he does earlier in his career). Modelled after Ovid’s Heroides, the Epistles consist of fictional letters in heroic couplets. Unlike his Ovidian precursor, the verse epistles are not from abandoned women from Classical mythology to their lovers, but, like the Mirror for Magistrates, from major figures in English history. Like Daniel, Drayton rejects Spenser’s mythologising, insisting that actual English history is worthy content for poetry. In this instance, Drayton’s contemporaries agreed. England’s Heroical Epistles constitute Drayton’s most popular poetry, going through at least thirteen editions before his death and earning him the title, the ‘English Ovid’. The twelve historical couples who write the letters are either English or ‘else, . . . their Loves were obtained in England’ (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, ‘To the reader’, Works, 2.130). Drayton includes such couples as Rosamond and King Henry II, King John and Matilda, Queen Isabel of France and Roger Mortimer, and Guildford Dudley and Lady Jane Grey. Drayton explains that these figures are heroic in a Classical sense, likening them to the demi-gods Hercules and Aeneas, in that their ‘greatness of Mind come near to Gods’ (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, ‘To the reader’, Works, 2.130). The Epistles are thus a nationalistic endeavour that celebrates English heroes and history. Notably, the Ovidian genre allows Drayton to portray women as heroic figures alongside men, a move that the militaristic epic does not always easily accommodate. Lady Jane Grey’s epistle focuses on her heroic identity as a Protestant martyr. She writes to Dudley: When Persecution vehemently shall rage; When Tyranny new Tortures shall invent, To inflict Vengeance on the Innocent. Yet Heaven forbid, that Mary’s* Womb should bring, *Mary Tudor’s England’s faire Sceptre to a foreign King; But she to fair Elizabeth shall leave it, Which broken, hurt, and wounded, shall receive it: And on her Temples having placed the Crown, Root out the dregs Idolatry hath sown. (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, ‘The Lady Jane Gray to Guildford Dudley’, lines 168–76, Works, 2.299–300)
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, , 509 In this way, her epistle serves as a nationalistic prophecy, foreshadowing Queen Elizabeth as the sovereign who heals a nation wounded by her older sister, Mary’s, Catholic policies. The Epistles also celebrate the English language alongside its history. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, writes to the Lady Geraldine: From learned Florence (long time rich in fame) From whence thy Race, thy noble grandsires came, To famous England, that kind Nurse of mine, Thy Surrey sends to heavenly Geraldine: Yet let not Tuscan think I do it wrong, That I from thence write in my Native Tongue, That in these harsh-tuned Cadences I sing, Sitting so near the Muses’ sacred Spring; But rather think it self adorned thereby, That England reads the praise of Italy. Though to the Tuscans I the smoothness grant, Our Dialect no Majesty doth want, To set thy praises in as high a Key, As France, or Spain, or Germany, or they. (Drayton, England’s Heroical Epistles, ‘Henry Howard to the Lady Geraldine’, lines 1–14, Works, 2.277)
While he grants that Italian has more ‘smoothness’, English, he observes, still has a sense of ‘Majesty’. The need to admit English’s flaws shows how the privileging of the language remained controversial. Drayton insists, however, that poetry should be written in his own ‘Native Tongue’. Drayton’s poetic career culminates in the publication of his epic, Poly-Olbion. While the epic does not appear in print until the early seventeenth century, it is crucial for understanding the laureate career path that Drayton establishes at the end of the sixteenth century. He publishes the epic in two parts: the first in 1612 and the second in 1622. The epic’s subtitle is long, yet explanatory: ‘Chorographical Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests, and other Parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britain, with intermixture of the most Remarkable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarities, Pleasures, and Commodities of the Same’ (Drayton, Poly-Olbion, title page, Works, 5.280). In this 15,000-line epic of hexameter couplets, Drayton takes the reader on a poetic journey through Great Britain’s history and landscape, moving through the nation county by county. In doing so, as Jean Brink comments, he ‘sets out to show that there is an English equivalent for everything classical . . . heroes, events, and geographical wonders of the classical world are used as touchstones to demonstrate the importance of Great Britain’.³⁴ With the epic, Drayton brings his career full circle, demonstrating how the pastoral is not just a step on the path to epic but becomes epic through his celebration of his nation’s own pastoral landscape.
³⁴ Jean Brink, Michael Drayton Revisited (Boston, MA, 1990), 84.
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510 -
Chapman George Chapman begins his poetic career in 1594 in an unconventional manner with The Shadow of Night: Containing Two Poetical Hymns. The two poems in heroic couplets— ‘Hymnus in Noctem’ [Praise of Night] and ‘Hymnus in Cynthiam’ [Praise of Cynthia]— imitate the form of Classical Greek hymns. Chapman thus eschews both the traditional pastoral and the fashionable sonnet sequence for his public debut. He does, however, have his eye on Spenser. His dedicatory epistle to his ‘dear and most worthy friend Master Matthew Roydon’, and his learned scholarly commentary on the poems themselves imitate the apparatus of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. Chapman uses the dedicatory letter to justify the poems’ complexity: It is an exceeding rapture of delight in the deep search of knowledge . . . that maketh men manfully endure th’extremes incident to that Herculean labour: from flints must the Gorgonean fount be smitten. Men must be shod by Mercury, girt with Saturn’s adamantine sword . . . before they can cut off the viperous head of benumbing ignorance, or subdue their monstrous affections to most beautiful judgement. How then may a man stay his marvelling to see passion-driven men, reading but to curtail a tedious hour, and altogether hidebound with affection to great men’s fancies, take upon them as killing censures as if they were judgement’s Butchers, or as if the life of truth lay tottering in their verdicts. (Chapman, Shadow of Night, ‘To Master Matthew Roydon’, Works, 2.3)³⁵
On the one hand, Chapman’s diatribe suggests that his poetry is for an elite few: those who do not read to fill a ‘tedious hour’ but those who wish to ‘cut off the viperous head of benumbing ignorance’. According to Roy Battenhouse, ‘Chapman may have intended the poem as a challenge to the easy optimism of Petrarchist pastoral poets and courtly love sonneteers’.³⁶ Unlike Daniel and Drayton, Chapman does not put the courtly Sidney on a pedestal. On the other hand, the mere fact that Chapman publishes his work suggests that this kind of poetic edification is available to all readers. Anyone is capable of achieving the ‘rapture of delight in the deep search of knowledge’ if he or she is only willing to put in the work. Moreover, contrary to Spenser who hides behind ‘E. K.’, Chapman openly writes his own glosses, citing his work’s Classical precedents. Notably, he does not mention Virgil or Ovid, suggesting his desire to establish what Daniel Moss calls ‘an alternative set of allusive credentials’.³⁷ Chapman does not want to compete with Spenser for the Virgilian laurel crown. His neglect of Ovid, coupled with the poems’ moralistic undertones, also constitutes a public repudiation of what another critic calls the current ‘vogue for the erotic Ovidian poem’.³⁸ Indeed, denouncing and challenging the popularity of late sixteenth-century Ovidianism defines much of Chapman’s early career.
³⁵ George Chapman, in R. H. Shepherd and Algernon Charles Swinburne (eds), The Works of George Chapman, 3 vols. (London, 1904–24). ³⁶ Roy Battenhouse, ‘Chapman’s “The Shadow of Night”: An Interpretation’, Studies in Philology, 38.4 (1941), 585–608, 598. ³⁷ Daniel D. Moss, The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan England (Toronto, 2014), 61. ³⁸ Raymond Waddington, The Mind’s Empire: Myth and Form in George Chapman’s Narrative Poems (Baltimore, MD, 1974), 113.
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, , 511 As part of this denunciation, Chapman transforms the poet into a priest, a transformation that precedes Spenser’s similar move in Fowre Hymnes (1596). The ‘Hymnus in Noctem’ constitutes a lament about mankind’s corruption, while the ‘Hymnus in Cynthiam’ is a hymn of praise. In the first hymn, Night is not a force of evil and destruction as sometimes depicted in literature, but rather a sacred primordial force devoid of sin. Chapman recalls a time when she alone reigned over the world’s ‘formless’ matter’, filling ‘every place with [her] divinity’ (Chapman, Shadow of Night, ‘Hymnus in Noctem’, lines 31, 32, Works, 2.4). During this time, he observes, divine Chaos ‘had soul without a body’ (line 47). Now, however, ‘bodies live without the souls of men’—they are merely ‘Lumps being digested’ (lines 48, 49). Poetry, however, has the ability to reform the reader’s soul with ‘threats of virtue’ (line 28). The ‘Hymnus in Cynthiam’ then turns the religious service of The Shadow of Night into a nationalistic exercise. Like Daniel and Drayton, Chapman explicitly privileges the writing of poetry in English: Time’s motion, being like the reeling sun’s, Or as the sea reciprocally runs, Hath brought us now to their opinions; As in our garments, ancient fashions Are newly worn; and as sweet poesy Will not be clad in her supremacy With those strange garments (Rome’s Hexameters) As she is English; but in right prefers Our native robes, (put on with skillful hands English heroics) to those antic garlands. (Chapman, Shadow of Night, ‘Hymnus in Cynthiam’, lines 82–91, Works, 2.11)
Chapman blends the Classical and contemporary traditions that characterise the laureate poet. He acknowledges that his hymns appropriate the Classical tradition and its ‘ancient fashions’. He also asserts, however, that he ‘clad[s]’ his verse in the ‘native robes’ of ‘English heroics’ (iambic pentameter couplets) rather than in the ‘strange garments’ of ‘Rome’s hexameters’ (the lines of six metrical feet common in Latin poetry, especially epic). To emphasise the versatility of English poetics, the final line quoted above adds an extra syllable to the iambic pentameter to create a feminine ending, demonstrating Chapman’s own ‘skillful hands’ at manipulating verse. Cynthia, the moon goddess, also has a double allegory. She is ‘her sovereign kind’—Queen Elizabeth—and, more ambiguously, ‘the forces of mind’ (Chapman, Shadow of Night, ‘Hymnus in Cynthiam’, lines 152, 153, Works, 2.12). Chapman urges English ladies and gentlemen to worship Cynthia (and thus Queen Elizabeth). In doing so, he overgoes Daniel and Drayton by portraying the English literary tradition not just as a source of nationalistic pride but as a vehicle for salvation. With Ovid’s Banquet of Sense in 1595, Chapman acknowledges that the aspiring laureate must tackle the Ovidian erotic narrative head-on rather than simply denouncing it. In Chapman’s take on the genre, Ovid hides himself in Augustus Caesar’s private garden where the emperor’s daughter, Julia (whom Chapman names Corinna, after Ovid’s poetic mistress), is bathing. The poem consists of 117 nine-line stanzas (apart from the inset ‘Song of Corinna’ which follows the brief twelfth stanza). During the encounter, the Classical author ‘feasts’ each of his five senses. Like Drayton in Endymion and Phoebe, Chapman rejects hyperbolic eroticism by infusing his poem with Neoplatonism: in the poem’s climax,
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512 - Ovid achieves literary inspiration rather than sexual consummation. This philosophical emphasis partly inspires Frank Kermode to call Ovid’s Banquet of Sense ‘one of the most difficult poems in the [English] language’.³⁹ In the dedicatory letter (again, addressed to Matthew Roydon), Chapman anticipates Kermode’s observation. He proclaims: Obscurity in affection of words, and indigested conceits, is pedantical and childish; but where it shroudeth itself in the heart of his subject, uttered with fitness of figure, and expressive Epithets; with that darkness will I still labour to be shadowed. (Chapman, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, ‘To Master Matthew Roydon’, Works, 2.21–2)
While Chapman agrees that poetry should not be difficult for the sake of being difficult, he again rejects the coterie poets’ sprezzatura. The true poet, according to Chapman, does not disguise his labour. Chapman then encodes his privileging of poetic complexity within the poem itself. A statue of Niobe—a figure from Greek mythology who turns to stone while grieving the death of her children—famously (or perhaps infamously) resides in the garden’s centre. Chapman describes the statue in the third stanza: Stone Niobe, whose statue to this Fountain, In great Augustus Caesar’s grace was brought From Sypilus, the steep Mygdonian Mountain: That statue ’tis, still weeps for former thought, Into this spring Corinna’s bathing place; So cunningly to optic reason wrought That afar off it showed a woman’s face, Heavy, and weeping; but more nearly viewed Nor weeping, heavy, nor a woman showed. (Chapman, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, stanza 3, Works, 2.22–3)
Chapman warns his reader against superficial interpretation: poetic truth, he reveals, can never be found on the surface. What seems to be the statue of a weeping woman from ‘far off ’ may not be so upon closer investigation. In a similar fashion, what looks like an Ovidian erotic narrative upon initial reading may actually be a satire or even condemnation of the genre. Indeed, Ovid’s ‘feasting’ of his senses purposely inverts the typical hierarchy of a Platonic banquet. First, Ovid hears Corinna singing and playing upon her lute before he smells her sweet odours. Seeing her naked body emboldens him to ask Corinna for a taste through a kiss. Ultimately, touching Corinna’s body inspires Ovid to write one of his most famous works, the Ars Amatoria: Sweet touch, the engine that love’s bow doth bend, The sense wherewith he feels him deified, The object whereto all his actions tend, In all his blindness his most pleasing guide,
³⁹ Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (London, 1971), 84.
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, , 513 For thy sake will I write the Art of Love. (Chapman, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, stanza 105, lines 1–5, Works, 2.37)
According to Kermode, the ideal ‘Platonic Banquet represents love, the ascent from sense to the higher powers of the soul, and ultimately the apprehension of the divine beauty. The Banquet of Sense represents a descent from sight to the senses capable of only material gratification.’⁴⁰ In this reading, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense actually constitutes an anti-Platonic Banquet since the baser sense of touch sparks Ovid’s poetic imagination. William Weaver has usefully coined the term ‘anti-epyllion’ to describe the poem. ‘In this enigmatic flirt with degradation’, he observes, Chapman ‘inverts the typical economy of manner and theme found in earlier epyllia. Instead of treating a tragic theme in a comic manner, he treats an entirely trivial theme with a seriousness that would be more appropriate for a doctoral dissertation’.⁴¹ In his satiric treatment of the genre, Chapman thus insists that the popular Ovidian mode actually perverts poetry and its true purpose, making his poem a warning against the very genre in which it operates. In a different but related vein, Daniel Moss finds a profound ambivalence towards the Ovidianism that captivates so many of Chapman’s fellow authors: ‘Chapman’s early poems reflect the complexity of imitative fashion itself.’⁴² Chapman builds upon his professional engagement with Ovidianism and imitative complexity in 1598 when he publishes his continuation of Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished epyllion, Hero and Leander. In doing so, he publicly confronts the deceased Marlowe as one of the main proponents of the Ovidian career path.⁴³ In the original Classical myth, Hero is a priestess of Venus who lives in a tower in Sestos. She falls in love with Leander, who lives on the other side of the Hellespont in Abydos. After Leander drowns one night while swimming to visit her, Hero kills herself for grief. Marlowe’s description of the lovers and their encounters is highly sexually charged, featuring a homoerotic description of Leander’s naked body and a quasi-violent sex scene between the eponymous couple. The poem does not end with their untimely deaths but the morning after their consummation— condoning rather than condemning their illicit sexual activity. In response, Chapman first imposes order on the original poem by dividing it into two ‘sestiads’ before adding a further four of his own (retaining Marlowe’s use of heroic couplets). These divisions transform the genre of the minor epic into epic, further demonstrating how experimentation with the lesser genre prepares the laureate poet for the latter. In this case, however, Chapman reveals his poetic skill by taking a fellow author’s Ovidian erotic narrative and transforming it into something new. In doing so, Chapman not only changes the format of Marlowe’s poem. He also changes its tone and content by including a Spenserian focus on marriage (just as Drayton incorporates marriage into his own epyllion, Endymion and Phoebe). In doing so, Chapman reveals that it is not pre-marital sex that is the moral dilemma at the heart of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander so much as the lack of a public ritual formalising a marriage pact.⁴⁴ At the beginning of Chapman’s continuation, Leander admits that, in accordance with early ⁴⁰ Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, 99. ⁴¹ William P. Weaver, ‘The Banquet of the Common Sense: George Chapman’s Anti-Epyllion’, Studies in Philology, 111.4 (2014), 757–85, 758. ⁴² Moss, The Ovidian Vogue, 73. ⁴³ On Chapman’s epic alterations in terms of Marlowe’s Ovidian cursus, see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto, 1997), 238–58. ⁴⁴ For an expanded discussion on the role of clandestine marriage in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Chapman’s continuation, see Katharine Cleland, Irregular Unions: Clandestine Marriage in Early Modern English Literature (Ithaca, NY, 2021), 40–62.
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514 - modern ecclesiastical law, he is in a ‘married state’ after becoming ‘affied’ with Hero and consummating the match in Marlowe’s original (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 3, line 160; sestiad 2, line 26, Works, 2.66, 73). Chapman further emphasises the importance of the public marriage ceremony when Hero invites two other betrothed lovers to be married in her temple. The argument of the fifth sestiad reveals that Hero performs this service so that ‘She covertly might celebrate / With secret joy her own estate’ (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 5, lines 9–10, Works, 2.81). Like Virgil’s Dido (ominously), Hero firmly believes that she is married, even though she has not gone through the public ritual. In Chapman’s version of the Hero and Leander myth, therefore, Leander does not drown while swimming across the Hellespont to have sex with Hero, but rather to rectify his ‘neglect of nuptial rites’ (Chapman, Hero and Leander, sestiad 3, line 157, Works, 2.73). In this way, Chapman’s continuation becomes about the importance of public ritual. The poet’s sacred duty, according to Chapman, is to elucidate this importance to his readers. After penning an anti-epyllion and transforming a fellow poet’s epyllion into epic, Chapman comes to his own interpretation of the laureate poet’s epic task: translating Homer. Homer tells the story of the Trojan War in the Iliad, and Odysseus’s return home in the Odyssey. While modern readers might not privilege an act of translation in the way they do original work, both Chapman and his contemporaries considered his translation to have the same weight and significance as inventing his own epic narrative. In the ‘Letter to the Reader’ of his Seven Books of the Iliads of Homer (1598), Chapman describes the translator’s role: The worth of a skillful and worthy translator, is to observe the sentences, figures, and forms of speech, proposed in his author: his true sense and height, and to adorn them with figures and forms of oration fitted to the original, in the same tongue to which they are translated. (Chapman, Seven Books of the Iliads, ‘Letter to the Reader’, Works, 3.10)
Chapman further views his translation as proof of the worthiness of the English language, claiming that the translation represents ‘due praise of your mother tongue above all others’ (Chapman, Seven Books of the Iliads, ‘Letter to the Reader’, Works, 3.10). Indeed, according to Chapman, nothing brings more glory to the English language than its ability to render Homer, although in the prefatory letter of Achilles’ Shield (1598), addressed ‘To the understander’, he does admit that English requires ‘good neighbourly borrowing’ from other languages (Chapman, Achilles’ Shield, ‘To the understander’, Works, 3.14). Chapman begins his work of translating Homer with these two initial instalments, the Seven Books (which includes Books 1, 2, and 7–11) and Achilles’ Shield (an excerpt from Book 18), both published in 1598. He translates the Homeric verse in ‘fourteeners’ (rhyming heptameter couplets), although the standalone version of Achilles’ Shield is in heroic couplets. He publishes a complete version of the Iliad in 1611 and the first twelve books of the Odyssey in 1615. The two Homeric epics, extensively revised, come out together under the title The Whole Works of Homer, Prince of Poets in 1616. In an astonishing first in English poetic history, Chapman translates the entirety of the Homeric epics into English, thus solidifying his status as the ‘English Homer’. Homer was not an obvious choice for Chapman’s epic translation: Homer’s rendition of the Trojan Wars did not have the same reputation as Virgil’s during the sixteenth century. As we have seen, however, aspiring sixteenth-century laureates differentiated themselves from Spenser by choosing different Classical authors to emulate. Chapman therefore charts his own course by elevating Homer as the Classical epicist to admire. In
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, , 515 the dedicatory epistle to Achilles’ Shield, addressed to the Earl of Essex, Chapman declares that since my publication of the other seven books, comparison hath been made between Virgil and Homer . . . and whosoever shall read Homer thoroughly and worthily, will know the question comes from a superficial and too unripe a reader; for Homer’s poems were writ from a free fury, an absolute and full soul: Virgil’s out of a courtly, laborious, and altogether imitatory spirit: not a simile he hath but is Homer’s . . . All Homer’s books are such as have been precedents ever since all sorts of Poems: imitating none, nor ever worthily imitated of any. (Chapman, Achilles’ Shield, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, Works, 3.11)
Chapman lingers on Homer’s originality as a poet who writes ‘from a free fury’ and ‘full soul’. Referring to Virgil’s own poetry as ‘courtly’, he places Virgil into what he considers to be the undesirable category of the coterie poet. Moreover, in the dedicatory epistle of Seven Books of the Iliads (again, addressed to Essex), Chapman elevates the Greek hero, Achilles, in ‘whose unmatched virtues shine the dignities of the soul, and the whole excellence of royal humanity’ over that of the Trojan hero, Aeneas (Chapman, Seven Books of the Iliads, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, Works, 3.8). This elevation partially explains Chapman’s publication of Achilles’ Shield in a separate volume. In the excerpt, Achilles’ mother, Thetis, asks the Greek god Vulcan to make a shield for her son (Chapman uses the god’s more familiar Roman name, rather than Homer’s ‘Hephaistos’). After readying his tools and workspace, Vulcan ‘forged a huge and solid Shield’ of ‘five-fold proof ’ (Chapman, Achilles’ Shield, lines 151, 155, Works, 3.555, 556). He assures Thetis that the shield will not only protect Achilles but serve as a work of art that ‘all the worlds shall . . . admire’ (Chapman, Achilles’ Shield, line 137, Works, 3.555). The rest of the excerpt consists of a famous ekphrasis—a detailed verbal account of a visual work of art—describing the shield’s five scenes surrounded by the ocean: the heavens, a peaceful city, a besieged city, agricultural work, and, finally, a youthful dance. In his descriptions, Chapman displays his skill as a playwright when dramatising their action. The description of the peaceful city, for instance, begins with a wedding scene: . . . the one was fill’d With sacred nuptials and with solemn feasts, And through the streets the fair officious guests, Lead from their bridal chambers their fair brides, With golden torches burning by their sides. Hymen’s sweet triumphs were abundant there, Of youths and damsels dancing in a sphere. (Chapman, Achilles’ Shield, lines 160–6, Works, 3.556)
By privileging the ekphrasis, Chapman not only draws more attention to Achilles. He also showcases the very nature of poetics: ekphrasis traditionally stands in as a metaphor for the ‘speaking picture’ of poetry. By singling out Achilles’ shield in its own instalment, therefore, Chapman demonstrates his poetic skill in its highest form. The poetic tour de force of the ekphrasis, moreover, underscores the excellence of the English language. Chapman’s poetic feat in translating Homer has thereby been recognised and lauded within the very lines of English poetic history. The Romantic poet John Keats famously proclaimed that he had never fully appreciated the ancient epic until ‘I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold’
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516 - (Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, line 8, Complete Poems, 72).⁴⁵ Chapman’s Homer thus remains one of English poetry’s most celebrated achievements. At the end of the sixteenth century, Daniel, Drayton, and Chapman openly compete with each other—and with Spenser—for the position of English poet laureate. This act of mutual competition creates and defines the laureate career path. Each poet works to forge his own distinct poetic identity, even while carefully crafting that identity both within and against the Classical and contemporary traditions. Although they work to differentiate themselves from each other, they agree that the laureate poet is a public figure who uses the burgeoning medium of print to speak to a general readership. They use this platform to weigh in on issues of political and national importance. Furthermore, their poetic voice speaks in and celebrates the vernacular, raising English to the status of the Classical languages revered during the Renaissance. Their wide-ranging experimentation with poetic form and genre influences their contemporaries and successors, forever changing the trajectory of English poetry. Indeed, through their individual and interlocking efforts, Daniel, Drayton, and Chapman deserve recognition for their role in the birth of the English literary tradition.
⁴⁵ John Keats, in John Barnard (ed.), Complete Poems, second edition (Harmondsworth, 1977).
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29 Marlowe Rachel Eisendrath
In histories of English sixteenth-century poetry, Christopher Marlowe is praised for introducing dramatic blank verse, that is, lines of five feet of alternating light and heavy stress (iambic pentameter) that, like Classical verse in Latin or Ancient Greek, do not rhyme. He was not the first—that credit goes to Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc (1561)—but he developed the power and subtlety of this verse form and brought it into high renown. Released from what John Milton would call the ‘modern bondage of rhyming’ (Milton, Paradise Lost, ‘The Verse’, Poems, 457),¹ Marlowe’s lines seem to rush forward, generating a powerful momentum that sweeps along in their current a vast medley of peoples (Turks, Jews, Catholics), places (most famously, ones with foreign-sounding names such as Persepolis), and things (baubles, buskins, buckles, toys). Marlowe’s is the ‘mighty line’ to which Ben Jonson refers at the beginning of the 1623 Folio of William Shakespeare (Jonson, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved’, line 30, Norton Shakespeare, A28).² Jonson’s reference to Marlowe sounds complimentary, but it is part of his claim that what Shakespeare did was ‘out-shine’ Marlowe’s achievement (line 29, my italics). Such comparisons will become typical in the ensuing scholarly treatment of Marlowe.³ A commonly told story is that Shakespeare brought blank verse to a higher stage of development by finding ways of more naturalistically enjambing the lines, so that Shakespeare’s lines roll out beyond their endings, as though privileging the flow of content over the artificial constraints of verse.⁴ Marlowe, born the same year as Shakespeare (1564), is called into the story of English literary history to help prove Shakespeare’s greater greatness.⁵ It is difficult to see past this view, in which, as one critic quips, Shakespeare plays a role in literary history not unlike that which homo sapiens plays in evolutionary biology: the final form at which everything is always already heading.⁶ Seen through this lens, Marlowe can seem an
¹ John Milton, in John Carey and Alastair Fowler (eds), The Poems of John Milton (Harlow, 1968). ² Ben Jonson, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved’, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016), A28–30. ³ In the seventeenth century, Edward Phillips refers to Marlowe as ‘a kind of second Shakespeare’ who was ‘inferior [to Shakespeare] both in fame, and merit’. Quoted in Millar MacLure, Christopher Marlowe: The Critical Heritage, 1588–1896 (Boston, MA, 1979), 51 (spelling modernised). In the twentieth century, Harold Bloom rejects the possibility of any significant rivalry between Marlowe and Shakespeare because the former was so ‘very much smaller than his inheritor’. See his The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford, 1973), 11. He amends this position in the extended preface of the 1997 revised edition by acknowledging the rivalry, although not by challenging the ‘triumph’ of Shakespeare, who ‘began to make Marlowe seem rudimentary’ (xxi). ⁴ George Saintsbury, for example, describes the ‘distressing stiffness’ of English blank verse that Marlowe ameliorated but that only Shakespeare could fully cure. See his A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, 2 vols. (London, 1923), 1.316. Russ McDonald discusses Saintsbury’s account of blank verse in ‘Marlowe and Style’, in Patrick Cheney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, 2004), 55–69, 62. ⁵ See Paul Menzer, ‘c.f. Marlowe’, in Jeremy Lopez (ed.), Richard II: New Critical Essays (New York, 2012), 117–34, 119. ⁶ O. B. Hardison, Jr, in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), Poetics and Praxis, Understanding and Imagination: The Collected Essays of O. B. Hardison Jr (Athens, GA, 1997), xv. Rachel Eisendrath, Marlowe In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Rachel Eisendrath 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0029
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518 - awkward, transitional evolutionary fossil, not unlike that of the forgotten Pakicetus, which, with nostrils at the top of its skull, rightfully gives place to the whale.⁷ What is ironic about this teleological view of Marlowe is how deeply Marlowe’s poetry strains against such teleological understandings of history—even as his poetry also recognises such understandings as inevitable—thereby anticipating, on some level, his poetry’s own customary role as the superseded in literary history. By a teleological understanding of history, I mean one that focuses on ends (the establishment of the Roman Empire, for example, or the triumph of Christianity, or the rise of the secular individual), as a kind of unifying purpose towards which history seems to be moving or, retrospectively, to have moved. If epics that celebrate the histories of nations or the foundations of empire are the literary version of this teleological view of history, Marlowe’s poetry is anti-epic at its innermost core. To register the unique power of Marlowe’s verse is to start to enter into a critical relationship with epic’s stated ends of glory, nationhood, empire, seemingly unlimited acquisition, and individualistic heroism.⁸ His work resists even end-driven logic itself. Take as a starting point these brief lines, which describe the death of Hecuba, from Dido, Queen of Carthage, a collaboration between Marlowe and Thomas Nashe published in 1594:⁹ At last the soldiers pulled her by the heels, And swung her howling in the empty air. (Marlowe, Dido, 2.1.247–8, Complete Works, 1.140)¹⁰
In Virgil’s Aeneid, there is nothing like this description of Hecuba’s death.¹¹ The last we see of Hecuba in that epic is when she is begging Priam to put down his arms. At that point, Aeneas remembers his own father, and the preservation of his male line becomes Aeneas’s focus. In the iconic moment of his escape from the falling Troy, he holds the generations of men in his arms: his son in one hand and the statues of his male ancestors in the other and his father on his shoulders—losing his wife, who disappears into the crowd as she trails behind.¹² When Marlowe imagines Hecuba grabbed by the heels and flung into ‘the empty air’, and when he lingers at that precise moment when she disappears into the void, known
⁷ George Bernard Shaw refers to Marlowe as a kind of primitive, the ‘true Elizabethan blank-verse beast’ in ‘The Spacious Times’, The Saturday Review (11 July 1896), 36. For Marlowe’s place in the history of blank verse and English poetics, see McDonald, ‘Marlowe and Style’. ⁸ For Marlowe’s ‘counter-nationalism’, see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto, 1997). ⁹ Although Nashe’s name appears alongside Marlowe’s on the first edition of the play’s title page, scholars contest the terms of their collaboration. For a brief summary of the current range of positions, see Ruth Lunney, ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’, in Sarah Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (eds), Christopher Marlowe at 450 (New York, 2015), 13–49, 16. Dating Marlowe’s work is a notoriously fraught business. Here and throughout this chapter, I have provided the dates of publication because the dates of composition are highly contested. However, publication dates are hardly better help in charting his career trajectory since only Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2 were published during his lifetime, in 1590. ¹⁰ All citations of Marlowe are from Roma Gill, et al. (eds), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 volumes (Oxford, 1987–98), spelling modernised. ¹¹ Nor is there anything like this in Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s c 1540 English translation of the Aeneid Books 2 and 4 (the first nondramatic blank verse in English). ¹² Virgil himself repeatedly suggests the cost for women of his epic’s patriarchal story: e.g., when Creusa laments her fate or Dido kills herself. Although an anti-epic understanding of the Aeneid is often considered a post-Renaissance phenomenon, there were Renaissance readers who were sensitive to these ‘pessimistic’ strains in Virgil: see Craig Kallendorf, The Other Virgil: ‘Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (Oxford, 2007). It is notable that, by focusing on the Dido story, Marlowe has zoomed in on the part of the epic that most powerfully challenges its own imperial story.
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519 now only by her howl, he is reflecting on this fraught gap in the patriarchal story that Virgil tells, and discovering in that exclusion a critique of how Hecuba is lost into irrelevance, into an abyss of silence. The horrible power of these lines of Marlowe’s is inseparable from their being endstopped. This technique of using syntax or punctuation to create a pause at the end of each line of verse helps manifest on the formal level the sense of an ending that lies at the heart of this scene. The first line begins with a concluding phrase, ‘at last’, and the end-stopped structure of each line emphasises that it is a terminus, a point beyond which there is, for an instant, nothing, empty air. This is the silence—whether of history or death—that swallows up the horror of her howl and renders it null. The nameless soldiers who dispassionately swing her body into the empty air are faceless figures who enact the cruelty of history. Heaving her beyond the ramparts, they reduce Hecuba to being a mere body, a weight. Her howl seems to come from beyond the space of epic, from beyond even the lines’ own endings, from a kind of negative space (to use the painter’s term) that the lines construct around themselves on the page. If Marlowe’s poetry shows that history sweeps human beings and human bodies towards the epic ends of nationalist triumph, force, power, individualism, and greed for unlimited wealth, and recognises that these ends will in fact ultimately win, his poetry also strains against these same ends, and does so in ways that defy even our own reductive teleologies of literary history. One of the reasons for the relative neglect of Marlowe in past scholarship may be precisely the same reason for the rising interest in him now: the renegade, disruptive power of his example. Literary scholars today (myself included) often favour nonconformity, and Marlowe has proven far less susceptible than Shakespeare to appropriation for nationalist and institutionalised ends. For example, as Paul Menzer points out, there is little objection (yet) to programmes designed to bring Shakespeare productions into the schools in the United States, but it is hard to imagine a comparable ‘Marlowe for Kids’, ‘Marlowe Made Easy’, or ‘Marlowe Camp’.¹³ Marlowe is too edgy, defiant, and recalcitrant a figure. While past scholars more often grounded Marlowe’s radicality in his reputedly bad-boy life and early, violent death—finding in his ‘hunger and thirst after unrighteousness’ (William Hazlitt) the type of a ‘hot and fevered youth unrestrained by law’ (Henry J. Nicholl)¹⁴— recent scholars more often focus on the radicality of his literary transgressions: on his subversive way of using Classical sources,¹⁵ on his narrative disruption of pre-given arcs of normative sexuality,¹⁶ on his challenges to humanist rhetoric,¹⁷ or on his use of the sublime to evoke an experience of personal liberty associated with the breakdown of monarchical structures and with the advent of republicanism.¹⁸ The result of such Marlowe scholarship, as well as of the more widespread interest today in the constructedness of literature
¹³ Paul Menzer, ‘Marlowe Now’, in Emily C. Bartels and Emma Smith (eds), Christopher Marlowe in Context (Cambridge, 2013), 357–65, 359. See also Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Afterword: Shakespace on Marloan’, in Donald Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds (eds), Shakespeare without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (New York, 2000), 277–85. ¹⁴ Quoted in MacLure, Critical Heritage, 18. ¹⁵ See Georgia E. Brown, ‘Marlowe’s Poems and Classicism’, in Cheney (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, 106–26. ¹⁶ See Judith Haber, ‘ “True-loves blood”: Narrative and Desire in Hero and Leander’, English Literary Renaissance, 28.3 (1998), 372–86. ¹⁷ See Catherine Nicholson, ‘Marlowe and the Limits of Rhetoric’, in Bartels and Smith (eds), Christopher Marlowe in Context, 27–38. ¹⁸ See Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (Basingstoke, 2009).
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520 - (suggested, for example, by the increased attention to the emphatically artificial form of the epyllia), is that Marlowe’s over-the-top bombast, his ‘huff-cap [blustering, swaggering] terms and thundering threats’,¹⁹ his ‘spuming rhetorics of foam and eddy’,²⁰ have started to seem less like a callow failure to achieve mature naturalism and more like daring literary experimentation with far-reaching social and political implications. Following the lead of these scholars, this chapter will focus on how Marlowe uses verse to oppose, shirk, delay, deflect, and endlessly complicate the end-directed stories of literary history, both then and now.²¹
Translation 1, Anti-Epic Model 1: Power That Crushes, Lucan’s First Book Marlowe was the first to translate into English two key ancient works: Lucan’s Pharsalia, Book 1 (published in 1600 as Lucan’s First Book) and Ovid’s Amores (published c 1599 as All Ovid’s Elegies). These translations of Marlowe’s marked ‘watershed’ moments, according to Jenny Mann:²² his Lucan because it was the first sustained use of blank verse in an epic poem since Surrey’s translations of the Aeneid, Books 2 and 4 (a feat that would not be achieved again until Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost);²³ his Ovid because it was the first translation of the Amores into any European vernacular language and helped establish the heroic couplet (rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines) as a major poetic form in the English Renaissance. These translations both resist the epic model although in very different ways, exemplifying the two extremes of Marlovian style: on one side, the high and sublime (Lucan);²⁴ on the other, the sexual and playful (Ovid).²⁵ Lucan uses an epic mode to reveal the brutality of epic’s glorification of power, taking an anti-epic stance from within epic. Ovid entirely evades the end-directed logic of epic, opening an alternative space—as though within the parentheses of epic’s end-driven story—for nonpurposive sensuality, dallying, and play.
¹⁹ Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum (1598–9), quoted in MacLure, Critical Heritage, 41. ²⁰ Harry Morris, ‘Marlowe’s Poetry’, The Tulane Drama Review, 8.4 (1964), 134–54, 139. ²¹ A foundational study of how literature (particularly romances) can defer epic ends through seemingly endless ‘error’, delay, and dilation is Patricia A. Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, NJ, 1979). On epic teleology, see David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ, 1993). ²² Jenny Mann, ‘Marlowe’s Translations’, in Bartels and Smith (eds), Christopher Marlowe in Context, 110–21, 111. ²³ See Hardison, Poetics and Praxis, 47. ²⁴ On Marlovian sublimity, understood in its relations to political thought, see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship; and Graham Hammill, ‘The Marlovian Sublime: Imagination and the Problem of Political Theology’, in Paul Cefalu and Bryan Reynolds (eds), The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive (New York, 2011), 143–66. On the sublime more generally in the early modern period, see Cheney, English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson (Cambridge, 2018); and David L. Sedley, Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005). See further, Chapter 5 in this volume. ²⁵ On Ovid as a model for a counter-cultural literary tradition in the Renaissance, see W. R. Johnson, ‘The Problem of the Counter-classical Sensibility and Its Critics’, California Studies in Classical Antiquity, 3 (1970), 123–51; Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT, 1986); Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession; Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2000); Heather James, ‘Ovid and the Question of Politics in Early Modern England’, ELH, 70.2 (2003), 343–73, and ‘Time, Verisimilitude, and the Counter-Classical Ovid’, in Dympna Callaghan and Suzanne Gossett (eds), Shakespeare in Our Time: A Shakespeare Association of America Collection (London, 2016), 272–6.
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521 The end will bring no good in the world of Lucan’s Pharsalia, which tells the story of how Julius Caesar overcame Pompey the Great and toppled the Roman Republic, initiating the period of empire. Marlowe’s choice of Lucan’s epic is telling: Lucan was writing under Nero, who would command the poet to commit suicide at the age of twenty-five. This poet of the first century produced a poem that claims to be a tribute to Nero but is really a criticism of this tyrannical emperor, as though the young poet wanted, to borrow the words of Elvis Costello, ‘to bite the hand that feeds me . . . to bite it so badly’.²⁶ In his dark epic, it is not hard to predict how history will go: ‘Force mastered right, the strongest govern’d all’ (Marlowe, Lucan’s First Book, line 177, Complete Works, 1.98). The end, both in the sense of termination (‘Time ends’) and also in the sense of goal (‘such end the gods, / Allot’), is that point beyond which all will become (again) brutality, darkness, and chaos: Time ends, and to old Chaos all things turn; Confused stars shall meet, celestial fire Fleet on the floods, the earth shoulder the sea, Affording it no shore, and Phoebe’s wain Chase Phoebus and enraged affect his place, And strive to shine by day, and full of strife Dissolve the engines of the broken world. All great things crush themselves; such end the gods, Allot the height of honour. (Marlowe, Lucan’s First Book, lines 74–82, Complete Works, 1.96)
Too bad this poem has often been dismissed as the ‘bottom of the Marlowe barrel’, because these lines exemplify the wild power and dark vision that underlies much of Marlowe’s work.²⁷ The passage starts with the double stresses of the terrible idea that ‘Time ends’, a phrase which falls in the two solid thuds of a spondee, and the caesura that follows might almost seem to figure that point, or terminus ad quem, beyond which lies a gaping universal void. But from the devastating silence of that pause soon rise forces that start the universe up again. A swirling appears in the void: a swirling that, unlike when the world began, is apocalyptically violent because it has now come to wreck an existing order. We are made to witness the falling into formlessness as opposites collide: heavenly fire rushes over the waters, the waters swirl over the land (all four classical elements coming together), as the universe is thrown wildly off-kilter. Amidst this chaos, it is hard to tell exactly who or what is responsible, who or what (even on the grammatical level) is the subject that ‘dissolve[s] the engines of the broken world’. There seems to be something already vulnerable about this world, something that is already broken. When this passage comes to a head, it does so with the astonishing line that channels the universal disorder into words of appalling force: ‘All great things crush themselves’. The line begins with a series of four strong stresses (two spondees), wherein each monosyllabic word is a strike, and these strikes continue as the voice searches for a place to land, until finally arriving at the gnashing, consonantal mosh-pit ²⁶ Elvis Costello and the Attractions, ‘Radio Radio’, This Year’s Model (Radar, 1978). ²⁷ Stephen Orgel (ed.), Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations (New York, 2007), xx. Charles Martindale offers the opposite perspective, calling Marlowe’s translation of Lucan ‘arguably one of the underrated masterpieces of Elizabethan literature’, in Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge, 1993), 71; and C. S. Lewis deems the translation ‘of very great merit’, although—no unambivalent admirer of Marlowe—he questions whether it is actually by Marlowe: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), 486.
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522 - of crush. Here is a universe that is not benign, not reliable, not stable. Look elsewhere for the reassurances of the neatly hierarchical Elizabethan world picture.²⁸ A nightmare vision of the world arises, and the poem explores how this nightmare vision is then mistaken for reality, and, in being so mistaken, finally becomes reality. Waiting for Caesar’s approach, the terrified citizens of Rome conjure for themselves visions of horror, and then, faced with these visions, flee the city, thereby bringing on the horrors that, just a moment before, were merely imagined. ‘Thus in his fright did each man strengthen Fame, / And, without ground, feared, what themselves had feigned’ (Marlowe, Lucan’s First Book, lines 481–2, Complete Works, 1.106). What each man had ‘feigned’—that is, made (‘feigned’ shares with ‘fiction’ the same Latin root, fingere, to form, shape, make)—points to a problem for poetry that we will see Marlowe exploring throughout his corpus: how, and to what extent, we first make the world in words or in images and how this imaginary world is then converted into a reality which we then have to inhabit in fact. The epic story is what we write, not just what happens to us.
Translation 2, Anti-Epic Model 2: A Poetry of Wanton Toys, All Ovid’s Elegies Marlowe’s other major Classical translation, All Ovid’s Elegies, evokes what can seem like the very opposite side of his poetic register, and an opposite mode of resisting epic teleology. Eschewing the grandeur and sublimity of epic, Marlowe takes on the voice of the ancient poet who seems to delight in triviality, participating in a 1590s style of Ovidian poetry that Georgia Brown characterises as flaunting its slightness, indecency, and excessive ornamentalism.²⁹ Ovid’s Amores had, at that point, no history in English. These risqué poems— which tell of sex with his mistress, Corinna, of a bawd’s instructions about gaining money from sex, and of his own impotence—arrived in readers’ hands without mediating commentary, helping to create a new Ovidian tradition that was playful, irreverent, effete, obscene. Generations of readers have admired and reviled these poems. Thomas Warton’s assessment in the eighteenth century is typical: Marlowe’s translations of these poems of Ovid’s, he says, ‘convey the obscenities of the brothel in elegant language’.³⁰ Before that, Ovid had largely come into the Renaissance ‘moralised’.³¹ In many early Renaissance editions of the Metamorphoses, each single small passage of Ovid appears surrounded by an edifice of commentary, building a kind of scaffolding of secondary meanings that seek to control a reader’s entrance into Ovid’s text, lest—as the sixteenth-century translator Arthur Golding emphasised—even in omitting that commentary, the reader mistake the text for being ‘light and vain’ (Golding, ‘To the Reader’, line 214, Metamorphoses, 29).³² In contrast, Marlowe’s translations of Ovid’s poems not only fail to guard against that risk, but actively promote it by seeming to court lightness or triviality: With Muse upreared I meant to sing of Arms, Choosing a subject fit for fierce alarms. ²⁸ See E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943). ²⁹ Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge, 2004). See also Chapter 18 in this volume. ³⁰ Excerpted in MacLure, Critical Heritage, 57. ³¹ I am referring to the anonymous fourteenth-century Ovide Moralisé. ³² Arthur Golding, in John Frederick Nims (ed.), Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1567 (New York, 1965).
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523 Both verses were alike till love (men say) Began to smile and took one foot away. Rash boy, who gave thee power to change a line? (Marlowe, All Ovid’s Elegies, 1.1.5–9, Complete Works, 1.13)
The poet presents his verse in direct contrast to that of Virgil, who famously begins the Aeneid, ‘Arms and a man I sing’ [arma virumque cano]. But rather than defy the values of epic outright, the narrator adopts a self-deprecating pose, suggesting that he is incapable of meeting the demands of an epic-worthy story: ‘Love slacked my Muse, and made my numbers soft’ (Marlowe, All Ovid’s Elegies, 1.1.22, Complete Works, 1.13). The narrator claims that he is not sufficiently martial or manly. In contrast with the grand landscapes of epic, with its triumphal story of war, its glorification of honour won on gore-splattered fields, here we find a poetry of the small. The plot focuses on trivial events associated with the emphatically anti-martial: on sexual acts and gestures of flirtation that are sometimes so small they can escape detection. For example, the speaker narrates how he instructs his mistress, who will bring her husband to a banquet, to sip from part of the same wineglass that he sipped from (see Marlowe, All Ovid’s Elegies, 1.4.31–2, Complete Works, 1.17), producing a fantasy of contact via a tiny gesture mediated through an object. These poems are ‘wanton toys’ (Marlowe, All Ovid’s Elegies, 3.14.4, Complete Works, 1.84), that is, childish trifles. But the content here, too, is serious. Ovid, like Lucan, was defined by his conflict with autocratic power, this time with Emperor Augustus, who exiled Ovid to distant Tomis on the Black Sea. As Heather James explains, Ovid resisted the inscription of poetry into the ideologies of Augustus by playfully subverting the emperor’s imperialist expectations. Ovid’s stance of wantonness and seeming amorality in fact had a moral agenda. To use James’s words, Ovid’s poetry was, for Marlowe, ‘wanton yet moral’.³³ Ovid’s sexual licentiousness offered a claim of freedom from the state project, a stance of personal liberty and of self-sovereignty. Marlowe’s Ovidianism is rightfully associated with his moments of lyrical sensuality and delight in seeming triviality. But these moments can also point towards surprising critiques of imperialism by suggesting the peculiar banality and foolishness that may lie at the heart of fantasies of world domination, of endless acquisition, of unending violence. When Tamburlaine in the play that bears his name (first performed in 1587–8; first published in 1590) slaughters the virgins of Damascus, for example, he launches into an Ovidian ode to the beauty of Zenocrate, whose tear-stained face he likens to that of ‘Flora in her morning’s pride / Shaking her silver tresses in the air’ (Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part 1, 5.1.140–1, Complete Works, 5.66). Here as elsewhere, Marlowe strikes some of his most disturbing chords by showing the lack of differentiation between the violent and the erotic, the tragic and the comic, the sublime and the farcical, leading T. S. Eliot to describe Marlowe’s work as ‘always hesitating on the edge of caricature’.³⁴ This quality, which Anthony Trollope calls Marlovian ‘burlesque’, can make even the goals of empire seem petty.³⁵ For example, in Doctor Faustus (published in two versions, the so-called 1604 A-text and 1616 B-text), Faustus orders Mephistopheles to fetch for a
³³ Heather James, Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, 2021). See also Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession. ³⁴ T. S. Eliot, Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1956), 63. ³⁵ Quoted in Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession, 100.
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524 - duchess grapes from ‘India, Saba [Sheba], and farther countries in the East’ (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 11.24, Complete Works, 2.38). Marlowe thereby evokes the wonders of international trade that were emerging into public awareness at this time when England was moving in on monopolies that had started to slip out of Venetian hands after that city-state had taken up its war with the Turks in the 1570s.³⁶ What charges the scene is the banality that lies at the heart of fantasies associated with this dream of the mercantile empire, for which England was arguably selling its soul.³⁷ Marlowe savours the absurdity of the loss of a soul measured against the pleasures of impressing a duchess with a bunch of grapes, albeit grapes that are, admittedly, ‘the best grapes that e’er I tasted in my life before’ (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 11.27–8, Complete Works, 2.39).
A Poetry That Invites: ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’ Come live with me, and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That valleys, groves, hills and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields. (Marlowe, ‘The Passionate Shepherd’, lines 1–4, Complete Works, 1.215)
This six-stanza poem, one of the most anthologised in English, takes this criticism of the epic tradition further. The poem was published posthumously in two versions: one in a 1599 collection, The Passionate Pilgrim, which includes an abbreviated text of the poem, incorrectly attributing it to Shakespeare; the other in a 1600 collection of pastoral poems, England’s Helicon, that includes the more authoritative version, correctly attributing it to ‘Chr. Marlow’. The pastoral, which builds on the ancient pastoral tradition established by Theocritus’s Idylls in Ancient Greek and continued by Virgil’s Eclogues in Latin, is often conceived of as opening an alternative rustic scene, a scene of leisure and shade away from epic’s glitter and clash of arms.³⁸ For Marlowe, the pastoral offers a place to craft a kind of poetics that will characterise the literary experimentation of much of his work. Marlowe’s poem invites the beloved (and the reader) into an ahistorical space, characterised at first by a lost simplicity and naturalness, a space that seems at first possible and then, increasingly, impossible. The narrator begins by asking the beloved to imagine pleasures that initially seem to belong to the landscape, to what the valleys, groves, and hills will yield. But these pleasures soon take on a new inflection and become aestheticised when, in the stanza that follows the one quoted above, the narrator imagines sitting on rocks with his beloved watching shepherds feeding their flocks. It almost seems, suddenly, as if he and his beloved are not really shepherds themselves but spectators of a pretty picture that has started to come into being. The poem continues to mark its artificiality, next, through a
³⁶ Stephen Greenblatt considers Marlowe in the context of the ‘acquisitive energies of English merchants’ and the ‘glorified gangsterism’ of Renaissance foreign relations: Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL, 1980), 194, 206. ³⁷ See Irving Ribner, ‘Marlowe’s “Tragicke Glasse” ’, in Richard Hosley (ed.), Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig (Columbia, MO, 1962), 91–114, which makes a related point in describing Barabas in The Jew of Malta as heady with a new kind of global domination and with ‘the intoxication of expanding empire which Elizabethans could experience in the exploits of Hawkins or Drake’ (102). ³⁸ See also Chapter 14 in this volume.
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525 shift in the kinds of gifts the shepherd promises his beloved, gifts that become increasingly far-fetched in this rural setting. The narrator begins by listing beds of roses, posies (which might mean flowers or poems), a cap of flowers, a myrtle-embroidered kirtle, and a woollen gown, but then we find that the shepherd has apparently done a different kind of shopping: he will also give his beloved slippers that sport pure gold buckles and a straw belt studded with coral clasps and amber ornaments. These items are far-fetched in two senses: they evoke a proto-imperialism (the fancy things are, like Faustus’s grapes, fetched from afar) and a kind of literary exoticism (the fancy words seem out of place in the pastoral genre). George Puttenham makes the link between these two kinds of out-landishness—geographic and verbal—in The Art of English Poesy (1589), where he describes a literary trope that he calls ‘the Far-fetched’: an elaborate verbal conceit that, he misogynistically says, ‘please[s] women rather than men’ because, like luxury goods, ‘things far fetched and dear bought are good for ladies’ (Puttenham, Art, 267).³⁹ The exotic pleasures that Marlowe’s poem offers are, we soon see, unreal, imaginary, poetic. When Sir Walter Ralegh wanted to mock this poem, he did so by writing ‘The Nymph’s Reply’ (published alongside Marlowe’s poem in the 1600 England’s Helicon), a poem that looks at these conceits from what we would call a realistic frame of mind: in time, Ralegh’s narrator says, everything must age and wither and yield to winter’s reckoning.⁴⁰ But Marlowe’s poem is all about opening a shared fantasy space in the interstices of that known actual reality. The last two stanzas of ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ end with couplets that the poem invites us to test against each other: And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. ... If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me, and be my love. (Marlowe, ‘The Passionate Shepherd’, lines 19–20, 23–4, Complete Works, 1.215)
In the first of these two couplets, the pleasures may move the beloved (‘these pleasures may thee move’), whereas in the second it is specifically the mind that may be moved (‘these delights thy mind may move’). We seem to have progressed from the realm of the sensual into the realm of the intellectual. Closer study brings out further nuances. The second version of the couplet has a complication that arises when considered more closely: ‘If these delights thy mind may move, / Then live with me, and be my love’ means first, as just noted, that the delights are moving the mind, suggesting the way the poem leads us into the intellect, into the realm of poetry. But this final couplet can also be read so that ‘thy mind’ is moving these delights. What that would mean is that the beloved is participating in the creation of poetic delight. Part of the reason this kind of poetry of conjuration works as a seduction ploy is that it depends on the participation of the wooed. Poetry may be the realm of making (poiesis), but it is more precisely the realm of mutual making. The beloved—and, by implication, the reader—have to imagine the world the lover depicts in order for that world to exist at all. To ³⁹ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ⁴⁰ For a discussion of Ralegh’s ‘reply’, see further Chapter 31 in this volume.
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526 - understand this poem as a poetics is to see that poetry works by invitation and not by a raw force that can compel without consent or mutuality. ‘Come’ is a special kind of imperative with an if-only, optative effect: a verb that is not a demand, really, but an invitation: an attempt to excite, to seduce, to elicit the involvement of beloved and reader alike in the construction of a fantasy. In Dido, Queen of Carthage, Dido analyses the hypothetical status of this imagined future by breaking it down and, like a literary critic setting to work on ‘The Passionate Shepherd’, explains the poem’s opening this way: ‘Conditionally that thou wilt stay with me . . . ’ (Marlowe, Dido, 3.1.114, Complete Works, 1.146, my italics). This is a poetics of the optative that invites the beloved into the mutual construction in the imagination of a hypothetical future. What is striking about the legacy of ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ is not only how many poems it influenced,⁴¹ but the extent to which it served as a poetics for Marlowe, reappearing in various guises throughout his plays, where it gains new inflections. That there is this crossover between his poetry and plays is significant. In his Defence of Poesy (published in 1595), Philip Sidney links verse and drama. For him, the distinction is not between poetry and other literary genres, but between poetry and fact. C. S Lewis explains, ‘What is in question is not man’s right to sing but his right to “make things up”’.⁴² Indeed, Marlowe routinely translates ideas from one literary form to another, and becomes the first major English author to be at least as famous for his poetry as for his plays, setting the path for poet-playwrights like Shakespeare and Jonson.⁴³ Less than sixty lines after Tamburlaine has offered to Zenocrate a speech of love that plays on ‘The Passionate Shepherd’—by evoking a shared future of luxurious material exotica and pleasure (see Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part 1, 1.2.93–105, Complete Works, 5.15)—Tamburlaine uses similar language to win over a general. In this political seduction scene, he convinces Theridamas to betray Mycetes and join his small band of rogues: Forsake thy king and do but join with me, And we will triumph over all the world. (Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part 1, 1.2.172–3, Complete Works, 5.17)
Erotic seduction thereby enters the realm of politics, where rulers master the future by conjuring pictures of it that, if vivid enough, seem to wait for their subjects just around the corner. Politics is like erotic seduction in that they both depend on the realm of wish, on the imagination, on the co-construction of a shared future. The actor John Douglas Thompson, who played Tamburlaine in Michael Boyd’s astonishingly vital production at the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn (Winter 2014–15), perceived the ability to conjure a world into being at the heart of his character: ‘He’s in a constant mode of conjuring people, the audience, those around him, even himself and the gods that he talks to, into willing what he wants to have happen.’⁴⁴
⁴¹ For an extensive although inevitably incomplete list, see R. S. Forsythe, ‘The Passionate Shepherd; and English Poetry’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 40.3 (1925), 692–742. See also Chapters 3, 10, 14, 31, and 33 in this volume. ⁴² Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 318. ⁴³ Patrick Cheney emphasises this point in several works; see especially his entry on Marlowe in David Scott Kastan (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Vol. 3 (Oxford, 2006), 393–7, 393. ⁴⁴ Theatre for a New Audience, ‘Trailer: Tamburlaine, Parts I and II at Theatre for a New Audience’, YouTube, 12 November 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObwbOCElrpY.
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527 Yet, that superman power of self-authorship and world-authorship only goes so far. The drive of history is so overwhelming that even the agents of that history can start to seem as if they do not have power over their own actions, as though they were characters within their own fictions. When Tamburlaine orders the virgins of Damascus to be slaughtered because he has proceeded by his custom from the white to red to black garb that indicates his progressive will towards destruction, he acts as if there is nothing he can any longer do to countermand his own tradition: They have refused the offer of their lives, And know my customs are as peremptory As wrathful Planets, death, or destiny. (Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part 1, 5.1.126–8, Complete Works, 5.65)
It is as though Tamburlaine himself has forgotten that he is the one who invented this tradition. It is not, of course, the planets that are ‘wrathful’, but himself. The peculiar timing of this passage is key to the impression of destiny it evokes. After Tamburlaine has regretfully ordered his henchmen to slaughter the virgins, only nine lines later one of his men arrives to report that their corpses have been hoisted up onto the walls of the defeated city. The impossible collapse of time colludes with Tamburlaine by almost making it seem that this brutal deed has somehow already happened, as if there really were no choice. Shakespeare will experiment with similar effects in his treatment of brutality when he has Macbeth say, contemplating the murder of Duncan, ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’ (Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.7.1–2, Norton Shakespeare, 2731). These lines, like Marlowe’s, work to conceal the process by which deliberation and choice happen. The illusion is that human fictions—in this case, Tamburlaine’s custom of slaughter— occur by their own agency. Marlowe thus analyses our power to construct a world which we soon forget we have made, a world in which we entrap others and in which we then also find ourselves entrapped, sometimes in horrifying ways. When the Christians open the trap door at the end of The Jew of Malta (published in 1633) so that Barabas falls into the cauldron, that punishment may seem fitting for the evil Jewish character. But although this cauldron which waits below may remind us of a hell’s mouth, Marlowe also does not let us forget that it is a human-made thing, a stage property, part of a contraption that we have just watched being constructed. The play’s final scene begins with the stage direction: ‘Enter [Barabas] with a hammer above, very busy [, and Carpenters]’ (Marlowe, Jew of Malta, 5.5, stage direction, Complete Works, 4.82). If we feel swept up in and tossed around by the forces of the universe, Marlowe’s poetry reminds us that the weight that ultimately crushes us may be our own.
A Poetry of Dallying: Hero and Leander This poem, published in two different editions in 1598, participated in a vogue of epyllia (i.e., mini-epics) in the 1590s.⁴⁵ The story unfolds in the narrow strait of the Hellespont, which divides Greece from Troy, Europe from Asia. The setting could not be more
⁴⁵ See also Chapter 16 in this volume.
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528 - emphatically the site of epic history. It is the very landscape of the Iliad and of Greek tragedy, and the poem indeed begins in the high, sublime register that is associated with these genres: ‘On Hellespont guilty of True love’s blood, / In view and opposite two cities stood’ (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 1–2, Complete Works, 1.189). But the poem soon drives a wedge into that grand epic reality, prying open a space for dallying, for play, for a kind of sensuality that is not necessarily end-directed.⁴⁶ This poem is queer not just in its overt homoeroticism but in its relation to linear time, which, as suggested by the German root quer, is ‘transverse, oblique, crosswise, at right angles, obstructive’.⁴⁷ Marlowe transfers his resistance to the end-directed story of epic into the erotic realm. End-directed heterosexuality (the poem has been called the first great tale of the consensual loss of virginity)⁴⁸ is both determinative of the poem’s narrative drive and also that against which the poem endlessly plays. The Hero and Leander story, which originated with the Hellenistic poet Musaeus in the fifth or sixth centuries and also figured in Ovid’s Heroides, was well known in the late sixteenth century: it was, according to Abraham Fraunce in 1592, in ‘every man’s mouth’.⁴⁹ Because the story had been translated into a number of languages including Spanish, French, Latin, and Italian, many of Marlowe’s readers would have already known how the narrative was going to end: that Hero and Leander would become lovers and that Leander would drown, swimming across the Hellespont during a stormy night-time attempt to reach Hero, after which she would kill herself. Marlowe’s poem never reaches that final terminus: his poem ends the morning after the couple have had sex. George Chapman, assuming that Marlowe died before reaching the story’s expected conclusion, produced what he called a ‘continuation’ (published in the same volume with Marlowe’s poem in one of the 1598 editions), although some recent scholars now consider that Chapman may not have ‘finish[ed]’ Marlowe’s poem, which already has its own peculiar coherence, so much as ‘responded to it’.⁵⁰ One of the ways in which Marlowe’s poem plays with and subverts the end-driven logic it sets up is by confusing the reader about when the sex actually happens. When Leander finally arrives at Hero’s tower, the narrator tells us: At last he came, O who can tell the greeting These greedy lovers had at their first meeting? He asked, she gave, and nothing was denied; Both to each other quickly were affied*. *affianced (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 507–10, Complete Works, 1.201)
We soon see Hero repenting her rashness, and the reader is made to believe that the lovers have slept together. But then, only twenty-five lines later, the narrator tells us that Leander was enjoying her ‘as a brother with his sister toyed, / Supposing nothing else was to be done, ⁴⁶ See Georgia E. Brown, ‘Gender and Voice in Hero and Leander’, in J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (eds), Constructing Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, 2000), 148–63; and Haber, ‘ “True-loves blood” ’, which links the disruption of end-directed narrative and end-directed sexuality. ⁴⁷ See OED, queer, adj. 1, etymology. ⁴⁸ See Patrick Cheney and Brian J. Striar (eds), The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe (Oxford, 2006), 17. ⁴⁹ Cited in Warren Boutcher, ‘ “Who Taught Thee Rhetoricke to Deceive a Maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature, 52.1 (2000), 11–52, 36. ⁵⁰ Katharine Cleland, ‘ “Wanton loves, and yong desires”: Clandestine Marriage in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Chapman’s Continuation’, Studies in Philology, 108.2 (2011), 215–37, 216. See also Chapter 28 in this volume.
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529 / Now he her favour and good will had won’ (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 536–8, Complete Works, 1.202). It seems that the reader has misunderstood, that in fact the lovers have not yet had sex. ‘Leander rude in love, and raw, / Long dallying with Hero, nothing saw / That might delight him more, yet he suspected / Some amorous rites or other were neglected’ (lines 545–8). Marlowe playfully subverts the end towards which his narrative is, at the same time, driving. The editorial history of the poem becomes important here because, as Judith Haber has powerfully explored, editors since C. F. Tucker Brooke’s 1910 edition have consistently changed the order of a key passage so that, as the poem progresses, sexual consummation maps more neatly onto narrative climax.⁵¹ The confident near-unanimity of modern editions is perplexing once it is seen that Marlowe’s is a poem that is largely about obstructing and delaying its own expected end. This is a poem where the pull of end-directed stories—especially in the heteronormative erotic sphere—is repeatedly tested against the desire for dallying and play. The poem’s resistance to end-driven logic becomes explicitly meta-literary when the poem turns to parody end-directed language, that is, Leander’s rhetoric, which obviously intends to produce a desired result, that of convincing Hero to give up her virginity.⁵² The halting commonplaces he deploys in end-stopped rhyming heroic couplets that seem to go nowhere produce a uniquely comic effect that Nicholson describes as ‘the rhetorical equivalent of hopping up and down in one place’.⁵³ Demonstrating and parodying the rhetorical training that was central to Elizabethan pedagogy,⁵⁴ Marlowe has Leander make one speech after another, like a naïve schoolboy who has been assigned his lessons and then runs through arguments that he does not fully understand. Leander has read about love (he gives bookish arguments against virginity), but he has taken too literally what he has read. Perhaps he has read Musaeus, who describes the sexual moment in the language of total euphemism: ‘forthwith he loosed her girdle, / And they entered into the rites of most wise Cythereia’ (Musaeus, Hero and Leander, lines 272–3; Hero and Leander, 379).⁵⁵ Because the text is silent about the heterosexual act itself, Marlowe playfully renders this act absent from Leander’s consciousness.⁵⁶ Schoolboys were not supposed to know about such things. Of Ovid’s sexually explicit Ars Amatoria, ‘perhaps it would not be safe to exercise callow youth’, pedagogues had warned.⁵⁷ Marlowe’s resistance to end-directed speech is expressed through the poem’s most lyrically beautiful passages, which seem to linger effusively through an apparently endless series of elaborate descriptions. These ekphrases—of, for example, Hero’s elaborate clothing (including her knee-high buskins that chirp on account of the water-filled jewelled sparrows perched on them), of Leander’s body, and of Venus’s temple—have the effect of distracting the reader from the poem’s own forward-going narrative drive.⁵⁸ ⁵¹ What are now lines 763–4 appeared in both 1598 editions just after line 784. See Haber, ‘ “True-loves blood” ’, 382–6, which powerfully describes this poem’s ‘aesthetic of pointlessness’ and defiance of ‘end-directed meaning’. ⁵² Aristotle describes rhetoric as attempting to produce a desired result (Rhetoric, 1357a). See J. H. Freese (trans.), revised Gisela Striker, Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge, MA, 2020), 22–5. ⁵³ Nicholson, ‘Marlowe and the Limits’, 32. ⁵⁴ See Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia, PA, 2012). ⁵⁵ Musaeus, in Cedric Whitman (trans.), Callimachus and Musaeus, Aetia. Iambi. Hecale. and Other Fragments; Hero and Leander (Cambridge, MA, 1975). ⁵⁶ A precedent for this conceit can be found in Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe; see Rachel Eisendrath, Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (Chicago, IL, 2018), 104. ⁵⁷ Modus Conscribendi Epistolas, probably by Erasmus. See Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 172, note 42. ⁵⁸ For ekphrases as a method of narrative delay and aestheticisation, see Brown, ‘Marlowe’s Poems and Classicism’, 117; see also Haber, ‘ “True-loves blood” ’. For a discussion of how these ekphrases reflect on reification of literary tradition, see Eisendrath, Poetry in a World of Things, 82–117.
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530 - One of the most beautiful of Marlowe’s narrative-impeding descriptions is that of the waves. As Leander is straining to swim across the Hellespont and Neptune is attempting to keep him in the sea, Marlowe describes how the waves ‘mounted up, intending to have kissed him, / And fell in drops like tears because they missed him’ (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 657–8, Complete Works, 1.205). The yearning of the water for the young man’s body, animated by the narrator’s homoeroticism, is what energises the description, what endows the mighty ocean with wistfulness, self-irony, a sense of play. Part of the pleasure of this passage lies in how well it describes the movement of water, which seems to be the very way longing moves as it reaches for what it desires (Leander’s body), and then falls from that body in tears. These tears, as water, only add more to the water that was doing the desiring in the first place, so that, on a material level, desire makes desire desire more. This Ovidian account of desire—‘inopem me copia fecit’ [the very abundance of my riches beggars me]⁵⁹—charges with lyricism the slight gap between desire’s rising in the form of aspiration for its object and its falling in the form of lament. Marlowe is able to make our attention pause in this gap, in this moment of potential precariousness so that signification undergoes a slight hiatus, a hovering. Even then, however, the poem does not move on—does not ‘get on with it’⁶⁰—but, against the demands of the forward drive of its own plot, returns to explore extravagantly this motion of the water even further: He* clapped his* plump cheeks, with his tresses played, *Neptune *Leander’s And smiling wantonly, his love bewrayed*. *revealed He watched his arms, and as they opened wide, At every stroke, betwixt them would he slide, And steal a kiss, and then run out and dance, And as he turned, cast many a lustful glance, And threw him gaudy toys to please his eye, And dive into the water, and there pry Upon his breast, his thighs, and every limb, And up again, and close beside him swim, And talk of love. (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 665–75, Complete Works, 1.205–6)
Marlowe produces here a blazon of nouns that linger over the various parts of the eroticised male body: ‘cheeks’, ‘tresses’, ‘arms’, ‘breast’, ‘thighs’, ‘every limb’. He produces, at the same time, a blazon of prepositions that evoke all the different possible relations to these parts of this beautiful male body: ‘with’, ‘betwixt’, ‘out’, ‘into’, ‘upon’, ‘up again’, ‘close beside’, and ‘of ’. As though Leander now represents the force of the drive to the end, and Neptune the desire to tarry and to delay the inevitable arrival at the far shore towards which this young man is furiously lapping, the god of the sea must ‘steal’ his kisses. And, as if trying to think of ways to linger here, the narrator offers one digressive addition after the next, figured by the sequence of ‘and’s with which seven of the above lines begin. The delight in this process of delay is further suggested by the poem’s exuberant rhymes; see especially the wonderfully ridiculous feminine rhymes like “I could tell ye / How smooth his breast was, and how white ⁵⁹ Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.466, in Frank Justus Miller (trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Metamorphoses, Vol. 1, Books 1–8 (Cambridge, MA, 1916), 156–7. ⁶⁰ Brown, ‘Marlowe’s Poems and Classicism’, 117.
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531 his belly” (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 65–6, Complete Works, 1.190, my italics). The narrator tarries over Leander’s beautiful back, imagining fingers that run over its many ‘curious dint’ (line 68) but eventually must pull himself up short, recognising the limits to such homoerotic verse: ‘but my rude pen / Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men’ (lines 69–70). The delay, thus, only works for a time. The naked Leander, protesting that he is ‘no woman’ (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, line 676, Complete Works, 1.206), eventually reaches the shore and, in so doing, reaches Hero. The sex that follows reintroduces the brutality that the rest of the poem has kept at bay. Bodies take on their own force, discover the power of their own drives, which take no heed of the other but, caught up in the momentum now of their own wanting, only pursue that wanting. Other bodies, things, are drawn into the current: So that the truce was broke, and she alas, (Poor silly maiden) at his mercy was. Love is not full of pity (as men say), But deaf and cruel where he means to prey. Even as a bird, which in our hand we wring, Forth plungeth, and oft flutters with her wing, She trembling strove; this strife of hers (like that Which made the world) another world begat Of unknown joy. (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 769–77, Complete Works, 1.208)
Lucan-like planetary strife returns in the friction between bodies, which seem to have their own agency. Hero finds herself at Leander’s mercy, and love in the end appears ‘deaf and cruel’; she is compared at this point to a bird who, as its neck is wrung, struggles to escape. But then this strife is rediscovered, too, as containing within itself something unexpected that contradicts that lamentable end—an originary creative energy, a new kind of pleasure, that arises from that friction—so that from this cruelty and strife is born a world, which contains for Hero a potential for unknown joy. The poem ends by suddenly pivoting to a new register. As the sun rises, the narrator imagines a kind of victory over ‘ugly night’, who ‘o’ercome with anguish, shame, and rage, / Danged down to hell her loathsome carriage’ (Marlowe, Hero and Leander, lines 816, 817–18, Complete Works, 1.209). The tone thus switches from the frothily hyperbolic and campy mode of Ovid to a howl of pain in the high serious tragic-epic register of Lucan. With its collision of harsh consonants, the word ‘dang’, not unlike the word ‘crush’ in the passage of Lucan earlier analysed, expresses night’s embittering experience.⁶¹ The effect is ominous. The poem may end with a victory over darkness, but it is a victory over the darkness of night and therefore a temporary victory. Cast for now into hell by the triumph of the sun and perhaps also by the power of the poem’s own glittering beauties, night will inevitably return. In a sense, Marlowe’s own poem is a kind of ‘gaudy toy’, like that which Neptune throws to Leander to distract him in his race towards his target and to seduce him into lingering, frolicking, dallying with him. The phrase ‘gaudy toy’ recalls Marlowe’s description of Ovid’s poems as ‘wanton toys’ cited above (Ovid’s Latin deliciae would be more literally translated
⁶¹ See OED, ding v.¹ 4, ‘To knock, dash, or violently drive (a thing) in some direction’. ‘Dang’d’ is what Marlowe’s editor, Roma Gill, describes as ‘[a]n acceptable form of the past tense’, in her note to line 818.
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532 - as merely ‘delights’).⁶² Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, like such a toy, is a gaudy, wanton, ekphrasis-encrusted, tawdry bauble of a thing, a bit of costume jewellery, an overembroidered sleeve, a gauche purple patch, a poetic charm bracelet jingling with gilt trinkets that—look at this! and this! and this!—is meant to delay the forward-directed rushing towards the finish line: it is a come-live-with-me of its own, an invitation to dawdle and, before the end, to prove together some pleasures.
A Poetry of Sociability: Plays That Play With Me In his highly influential book, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (1952), Harry Levin makes the rise of individualism paramount to his interpretation of this Elizabethan poet and playwright, whose characteristic protagonist is ‘always l’uomo singolare, the exceptional man who becomes king because he is a hero’.⁶³ The Italian phrase is a nod to Jacob Burckhardt, who in his landmark Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) described this individualism as a key characteristic of the Renaissance: a kind of goal towards which history seemed to have been moving. ‘Observe the expressions “uomo singolare” and “uomo unico”’, Burckhardt wrote, ‘for the higher and highest stages of individual development’.⁶⁴ It is telling that the title page of Levin’s book is decorated with an emblem showing the fall of Icarus. The young man is shown naked, upside down, falling alone into the sea: l’uomo singolare. The idea of the overreacher plays into our most established teleologies of history, such as the triumphal rise of the heroic individual, who is imagined as autonomous, clench-jawed, self-controlled, isolated, able to dictate his own and others’ realities. Such an interpretation seems to find numerous examples in Marlowe’s plays: Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas all strive to create themselves and to dominate futurity through their own sheer willpower, knowledge, or cunning. Yet, Marlowe at the same time complicates this lonely understanding of power.⁶⁵ What is overlooked in the account of Marlowe as the exalter of the individual is his emphasis on the intense sociality of human life—on the ways in which texts and visions and worlds are collaborative, relationships entangled and complex, fantasies of autonomy sad. Examining the biographical documents alluding to Marlowe, Jeffrey Masten finds, in contrast to the solitary overreacher, ‘another Marlowe: a Marlowe conversing with his culture, with other playwrights; a Marlowe who sometimes speaks with, rather than alone in alienation from’.⁶⁶ This emphasis on sociability is another way in which Marlowe’s work can be considered anti-epic, in that his characters depart from the model of individualistic heroism exemplified by the much-lauded Aeneas, who tends towards either ‘anxious solitude’ or a peculiarly
⁶² See Heather James, ‘The Poet’s Toys: Christopher Marlowe and the Liberties of Erotic Elegy’, Modern Language Quarterly, 67.1 (2006), 103–27. ⁶³ Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, MA, 1952), 24. For a more recent account of Marlowe’s interest in the ‘secular goal of emancipatory self-recreation’, see Lars Engel, ‘Marlowe and the Self ’, in Bartels and Smith (eds), Christopher Marlowe in Context, 202–11. ⁶⁴ Jacob Burckhardt, in S. G. C. Middlemore (trans.), The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London, 1945, 1995), 367. ⁶⁵ For an alternative account of the limitations of individualist history, see Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning, 193–221. ⁶⁶ Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia, PA, 2016), 95, italics original.
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533 taciturn kind of conversation that is ‘stifled, unconsummated’.⁶⁷ Marlowe’s heroes, in contrast, make their grasp at greatness or wealth or power while also often asserting their passionate feelings for others, and doing so voluminously. Recall the final act of Marlowe’s Edward II (published in 1594), a tragedy which helped bring into new prominence in the late sixteenth century the genre of English historical drama. Critics often focus on the physical brutality of the king’s murder (in Raphael Holinshed, he is killed by a burning spit thrust into his ‘fundament’, a method of death which can seem like a sadistic re-enactment of the king’s social and/or sexual intercourse with other men).⁶⁸ Much less attention has been paid to the torture that precedes this grotesque means of execution. Not only is the king made to remain half-submerged in sewage water—thereby punishing him for taking to the gutter, or slumming with his minions—but, as Marlowe emphasises, he is also punished by being isolated from others and by being denied words of fellow human kindness and comfort. Drawing on John Stow’s account of how Edward II’s torturers tormented him by contradicting every word he spoke, and Holinshed’s account of how Edward was kept from all friends, Marlowe’s Mortimer Junior asks the torturers to express no fellowship with the king: Seek all the means thou canst to make him droop, And neither give him kind word, nor good look. ... Let no man comfort him, if he chance to weep, But amplify his grief with bitter words. (Marlowe, Edward II, 19.54–5, 64–5, Complete Works, 3.73, 74)
The torturers break down the king not only by denying him food, water, and hygiene, but also by withholding from him any sympathetic word or look, thereby thrusting him outside the world of talk and interchange that are key to Marlowe’s conception of human life. Marlowe’s emphasis on fellow feeling does not fit neatly into our accepted teleology of the triumphal rise of the self-secure individual. For example, in Doctor Faustus, Marlowe depicts a character who may seem to represent the very figure of the aspiring man. Yet, having sold his soul to the devil, Faustus confronts his death by making a peculiar gesture of fellow feeling just before his soul is dragged off to hell: ‘Gentlemen away’, he urges his fellow scholars, ‘lest you perish with me’ (Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 13.49, Complete Works, 2.44). In that extreme situation, he retains a social instinct to preserve others. Even Tamburlaine, who can seem the ultimate overreacher, exulting in a relentless mode of chest-thumping, expresses a consistent passion for others. Rejecting any suggestion of payment or ransom for his prisoners, Tamburlaine declares, ‘Think you I weigh this treasure more than you? / Not all the gold in India’s wealthy arms / Shall buy the meanest soldier in my train’ (Marlowe, Tamburaline Part I, 1.2.84–6, Complete Works, 5.14–15). Tamburlaine wins men over at least partly through intense homosocial bonding. To return to the emblem on the title page of Levin’s book, it is unclear whether Icarus, shown falling alone into the sea, is meant to represent one of Marlowe’s characters or ⁶⁷ D. Feeney, ‘The Taciturnity of Aeneas’, The Classical Quarterly, 33.1 (1983), 204–19, 214, 215. ⁶⁸ This description appears in both the 1577 and 1587 editions of Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. See Raphael Holinshed, in Paulina Kewes, et al. (eds), Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. 1577, 1587. The Holinshed Project. http://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/texts.php?text1=1587_3941& text2=1577_5319#p11933. Stephen Orgel argues that Edward II’s means of death is ambiguous in Marlowe’s play; see his Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, 1996), 47–8.
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534 - Marlowe himself, who, dead at twenty-nine, was a reputed homosexual (avant la lettre), atheist, gambler, counterfeiter, spy, and smoker. If it is only the last of these that would now provoke our condemnation, as David Clark wryly points out, this was not always, and is not everywhere, so.⁶⁹ The tendency to conflate Marlowe with his characters has a long history. In his own era, Thomas Beard called him an atheistic ‘barking dog’ in whose nostrils God had put his hook (which makes Marlowe sound like Faustus); Richard Baines said Marlowe claimed that anyone who does not love boys and tobacco is a fool and that Jesus found a bedfellow in John the Evangelist, who ‘leaned always in his bosom’ and who ‘used him as the sinners of Sodoma’ (which makes Marlowe sound like Neptune and Edward II); and Robert Greene accused dramatists who dared ‘God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlaine’.⁷⁰ However inflammatory, these accusations at least have the advantage in retrospect of evoking a kind of messy sociability, conveying a life lived in a raucous tangle of attachments, resentments, and conversations sustained over years.⁷¹ Levin’s image of the ‘overreacher’ also conflates Marlowe with his characters, but departs from this tradition by presenting him as a man totally alone, plunging naked into the sea. This picture may have served as a way of managing the radicality of Marlowe’s work by casting this young man into total loneliness and making his early death seem almost like the inevitable punishment for his work having been so boldly innovative and uncompromising.⁷²
⁶⁹ See David Clark, ‘Marlowe and Queer Theory’, in Bartels and Smith (eds), Christopher Marlowe in Context, 232–41, 232. ⁷⁰ Citations from MacLure, Critical Heritage, 42, 37, 29, respectively. ⁷¹ See Masten, Queer Philologies, 83–105. ⁷² Thanks to Catherine Bates, Patrick Cheney, Heather James, and Betsy Kalish for invaluable comments on drafts of this chapter.
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30 Shakespeare Dympna Callaghan
Writing in The New Statesman in 1962, the British poet Philip Larkin wondered what a recording of Shakespeare reading the Sonnets might sound like: Had the history of technology meshed a little differently with the history of literature I might now be able to lay reverently on my turntable a thick black 78 rpm with a Globe label reading Will Shaxper: Sundrie Sonnets (recording supervised by my Lord Veralum), and, after a vertiginous crackling pause, hear, in almost incomprehensible Elizabethan, ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty’s rose might never die . . . ’¹
Larkin goes on to weigh the merits of listening to verse spoken aloud versus hearing its sonorous qualities in one’s mind. He wonders whether poems are like musical scores that must be brought to life by performance, in which case the ideal way to encounter a poem would be to hear it read aloud by its author. In the end, Larkin determines that silent reading is superior to oral rendition because when we listen to it we cannot see a poem’s punctuation, length, or stanza-shape. Larkin, whose own restrictive metres and constrictive rhymes nonetheless adeptly rendered the rhythms of ordinary speech, thus draws our attention to the difference between the poet’s voice in the literal sense and the voice we sound out in our heads when we read a poem. This distinction is especially important in relation to early modern culture where, as Patrick Cheney has pointed out, distinctive voice, in the figurative sense, became one of the key characteristics of post-Reformation poetry.² Reading became just as much about close listening to the sound communicated by the poem, with its stress on the faculty of internal hearing, as about visual apprehension. Attuned to the poet’s voice, the reader, like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, might aver: ‘I see a voice’ (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.190, Norton Shakespeare, 1090).³ This chapter will argue that ‘voice’, both the voice of the poet—Shakespeare’s distinctively Ovidian poetic persona—and that of the other speakers and characters who populate his verse, is central to all of Shakespeare’s poetry. Because they are Shakespeare’s most wellknown poems, we will begin with the Sonnets (1609), which were published in their entirety rather late in Shakespeare’s career, although some were also in manuscript circulation in the early 1590s. We will then address the questions of voice in relation to Shakespeare’s first major poem in print, Venus and Adonis (1593), followed a year later by The Rape of Lucrece (1594), and the enigmatic lyric ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ (1600). Finally, we will briefly
¹ Philip Larkin, ‘The Voices of Poets’, The New Statesman (2 February 1962). ² See Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011), 141–62. ³ William Shakespeare, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare, third edition (New York, 2016). Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Dympna Callaghan 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0030
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536 - address the poem that was printed at the end of the 1609 Quarto of the Sonnets, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’.
The Sonnets For centuries, most people heard poetry. It was orally disseminated by being recited or sung and listeners memorised the verse and conveyed it to others, again in speech or song. The proliferation of the relatively new medium of print had begun to supplant both the oral tradition of verse recitation and manuscript publication, as part of what Carla Mazzio has called ‘[t]he increasing textualization of early modern culture’, and facilitated the inaudible engagement with poetry.⁴ Silent reading required, then, that the reader become, like Bottom, someone who sees voices and thus attends to the poet’s voice in a completely new way. The chaotic presentation of the poems on the page in the 1609 Quarto of the Sonnets seems to have anticipated, more than most, a reader focused entirely on content rather than on presentation. The reader must concentrate on the mental impression of the poet’s voice conveyed by the verse, without any recourse to visual stimulation such as that offered by more aesthetically conscious printing: for instance, the miniature edition of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595), which neatly presents a single poem per page complete with a decorative border, or printer’s flower, atop and below each one. By contrast, Shakespeare’s Sonnets are presented in disarray. Frequently, the fourteen lines of verse are split over two pages. Sonnet 2, for example, ‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow’, leaves the reader hanging for the final couplet with the single word, ‘This’, straggling inelegantly at the bottom of the page as an indication to the reader that there is more to come (see Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets, sig. B1).⁵ In sonnet 12, ‘When I do count the clock that tells the time’, ‘number’ is supremely important because it is about counting the hours and minutes on the clock. Yet, six lines of the poem appear on one page and the remaining eight spill over the next, again with an untidy cue to the reader to turn the page (see Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets, sigs. B3–B3v). In this poem, the reader hears not so much the voice of the poet as the ticking of the clock in the metronomic beat of the iambs. In order not to disrupt this rhythm, the reader needs to override the visual break at line six by listening very attentively. Thus, if it is not to prove a distraction, the infelicity of the sonnet’s disorderly textual appearance must be subsumed by the sound of the verse. Crucially, early moderns did not expect to hear a direct rendition of Shakespeare’s authentic thoughts and feelings—how he really felt—but, certainly in the Sonnets, and indeed, in all of Shakespeare’s poetry, they understood that the poet’s voice was heavily shaped and mediated by poetic convention and was an integral component of lyrical artifice. Especially in the Sonnets, it is difficult to claim that we can entirely disentangle the voice of Shakespeare ‘the poet’ and ‘the speaker’ from Shakespeare the person, but it is equally impossible to claim that they are one and the same. What, then, did the reader hear? We are given a clue about what Shakespeare’s poetic voice sounded like to his contemporaries by Francis Meres’ remarks in Palladis Tamia (1598). This is not only the earliest reference to the Sonnets (long before they were printed ⁴ Carla Mazzio, ‘Sins of the Tongue’, in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1997), 53–80, 70. ⁵ William Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets Never before Imprinted (London, 1609).
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537 in 1609), but also to Shakespeare’s renown for poetic eloquence in his own lifetime: ‘As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras: so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends’ (Meres, Palladis Tamia, fols. 281v–282).⁶ These, then, were the qualities exemplified by the long poems and whatever sonnets were in manuscript circulation in the 1590s: they sounded like Ovid because they were witty, eloquent, and mellifluous. The adjectives Meres uses to describe Shakespeare’s poetry merit close attention.⁷ The word ‘mellifluous’ is derived from the Latin word meaning flowing with honey. When applied to poetry, ‘mellifluous’ means not just sweet-sounding, but more specifically— because honey doesn’t pour out fast from the jar—endowed with a smooth, viscous fluidity and pace of expression. In other words, ‘mellifluous’ describes the aesthetic qualities, the expressive metrical fluency of Shakespeare’s verse. This is important because Shakespeare’s Sonnets, whose shifting emotional terrain includes not only the more conventional demonstrations of love poetry—most of which are to be found in the first 126 sonnets that are mainly addressed to a ‘man right fair’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 144, line 3, Norton Shakespeare, 2299) or a ‘lovely boy’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 126, line 1, Norton Shakespeare, 2293), a male of unspecified age—but also melancholy reflections on mortality, bitter recriminations, sexual disgust, and even, in the final two sonnets, venereal disease. These negative sentiments are especially concentrated in sonnets 127 to 154, whose principal addressee is a ‘woman colored ill’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 144, line 4, Norton Shakespeare, 2299). Although we do not know exactly which manuscript sonnets Meres had read when he penned his remarks for publication in 1598, it seems likely that he was referring to some of those addressed to the boy. If the 1609 Quarto in its entirety could be described as ‘sugared’ in any sense, it would not be because the sonnets are all sweetness and light—for they are absolutely not— but rather because all of the poems, even the ones describing uncomfortable and disturbing emotions, deploy aesthetically adroit rhetorical forms and pleasing lyrical expressions. Even as early as 1598, Meres is probably not just talking about the thematic content of the sonnets he had read, but is just as likely to be describing the quality of the poet’s voice; and honey and sugar are his metaphors for its texture, for how that voice sounds. Meres’ key adjective, ‘mellifluous’, also connotes a poetic voice possessed of a certain unimpeded fluency of expression. For Meres, this is a quality Shakespeare shares with the Roman poet Ovid (43–17), whose Amores and Ars Amatoria are closely related to Shakespeare’s Sonnets. All Ovid’s Elegies, Christopher Marlowe’s translation of the Amores, was banned and burned on Episcopal order in 1599.⁸ Via the process of transmigration or metempsychosis expounded by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, Ovid’s ‘sweet and witty’ soul, Meres attests, now inhabits Shakespeare’s body. Ovid’s erotic lyrics include poems about abortion, adultery, and betrayal, and no more often ‘sweet’, in that sense, than Shakespeare’s. They are, however, aesthetically smooth even as they traverse the gamut of emotions about love and sex. Ovid’s verse was famous for its fluency, a quality English poetry had struggled to achieve through the course of the sixteenth century. Crucially, what Meres recognises is that, although Shakespeare has not attempted to emulate the technical structures of Latin metres (e.g., the Amores was composed in elegiac distiches: a dactylic
⁶ Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598). ⁷ See Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet Playwright (Cambridge, 2004), 49, 57. ⁸ Marlowe’s translations of Ovid were published as follows: All Ovid’s Elegies: 3. Books, by C. M. Epigrams by J. D. (‘Middleborough’, n.d.); and Epigrams and elegies. By J. D. and C. M. (‘Middleborough’, n.d.).
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538 - hexameter followed by a pentameter line), he has succeeded nonetheless in catching its Ovidian pace and cadence. Sweetness, therefore, is not only a taste but also a sound. Early moderns typically referred to this easy facility of verse expression as ‘flowing verse’. Flowing is etymologically related to ‘fluency’, from the Latin fluens [flowing/fluent]. Indeed, Shakespeare himself uses this term to describe the smooth texture of poetry: ‘your verse / Flowed with her beauty once’ (Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale, 5.1.102–3, Norton Shakespeare, 3193, my italics). In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio declares that, inevitably, love-sick Romeo will be adept in the art of poetry: ‘Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in’ (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.36–7, Norton Shakespeare, 993–4, my italics). ‘Numbers’ refers to the metrical count of poetry, while the Italian poet Petrarch’s name was synonymous with a seemingly limitless capacity for amorous lamentation, which was the substance of the most famous sonnet sequence in Europe, his vernacular masterpiece, the Canzoniere, also known as the Rime Sparse. Shakespeare remained indebted to Petrarch even though his sonnets more fully resemble Ovid’s lyrics, in part because they do not definitively constitute a sequence. Rather, the Sonnets are unevenly divided into 126 poems addressed primarily to the fair boy/man while the remaining twenty-eight are primarily addressed to a (probably married, and definitely non-aristocratic) woman of dark complexion: ‘Two loves I have, of comfort and despair’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 144, line 1, Norton Shakespeare, 2299). The man is his ‘comfort’, and the woman his ‘despair’. Unlike the orthodox sonnet narrative in which the poet exhibits his unrequited love for a beautiful, but unfeeling noblewoman, the poet in Shakespeare’s sonnets has clearly had sex with the woman, while she and the young man have also been lovers. The sonnets addressed to the woman do not seek to idealise her but to convey an emotionally tumultuous erotic relationship. Consummation, then, is not thwarted here, as it is in Petrarch. Rather, although fully indulged, sex merely inaugurates a different order of the poet’s inner turmoil. Petrarchan orthodoxies are frequently reversed in this group of poems, a reversal which had itself become another form of poetic convention by the time Shakespeare was writing. The woman is not conventionally beautiful but ‘black’: ‘Thy black is fairest in my judgment’s place’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 131, line 12, Norton Shakespeare, 2295). The woman’s desirability in Shakespeare’s sonnets neither depends upon, nor correlates with, well-worn metaphors, and her beauty, or lack thereof, confounds aesthetic standards and Petrarchan tropes: ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 130, line 1, Norton Shakespeare, 2294). However, this matter-of-fact pronouncement is more than just a clever play on Petrarchan chromatics. Rather, it constitutes a direct challenge not just to Petrarchan ideals of female beauty but to Petrarchan language itself because this is the kind of forthright declaration that sounds much more like Ovid than Petrarch. Indeed, it is as if in sonnet 130 Ovid confronts Petrarch and lays down the gauntlet. While the Sonnets deploy Petrarchan tropes, we don’t hear Petrarch through them nearly as often as we hear Ovid, who is frank and free about sexual intimacy, even when writing about ostensibly scandalous sexual topics (such as impotence) that might seem beyond the remit of poetry. Further, the energised dramatic pronouncements of the Sonnets, which we hear very clearly in sonnet 129, again suggest a connection with the performative poetics of Ovid, who is always in character, playing a role, perhaps most famously as the praeceptor [teacher] who offers a guide to love and sex in the city of Rome in the Ars Amatoria. The Sonnets echo this distinctively performative texture of Ovid’s own poetic voice.⁹ ⁹ David Schalkwyk has argued that ‘[p]erformance is central to Shakespeare’s poems, not merely because the world’s most famous man of the theatre was a major poet, but also because, by illuminating the vexed but
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539 Shakespeare’s performative voice is especially evident when the speaker (the poet’s persona) loses power over language altogether, becoming incoherent with lust and sexual disgust. In sonnet 129—whose astonishing first line connotes ejaculation: ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 129, line 1, Norton Shakespeare, 2294)—the poet is reduced to a torrent of adjectives that speed up the line to the point of frenzy: ‘perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame’ (line 3). Again, this urgent, physical, almost gynophobic language is very far from Petrarchan lament, which is always structured by the chasm between the poet and Laura, his beloved, because the two are never in close physical proximity. In sonnet 129, even the disjointed inarticulate thought achieves a bitter eloquence and becomes the substance of astonishingly original lyrical accomplishment. The tone of the poet’s voice in the first 126 sonnets addressed to the boy is completely different from that of the later sonnets. The goal of the former is to preserve, represent, and reproduce beauty, starting from the very first line of the opening sonnet: ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 1, line 1, Norton Shakespeare, 2250). The first seventeen sonnets are a rhetorical exercise in persuasion, but more accurately, they constitute a threat: reproduce, or else ‘eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 1, line 14, Norton Shakespeare, 2250). These poems set the stage for a kind of paragone or comparison—here, an artistic competition between biological reproduction as a means of preserving beauty, on the one hand, and the art of poetry, on the other—which recurs through the entire first section of the Sonnets. In sonnet 18, the literary mechanisms of hyperbole and metaphor are shown to constitute an aesthetic limitation because the young man’s beauty has no appropriate comparison. The poem opens with a ruminative interrogative: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 18, line 1, Norton Shakespeare, 2256). The question is immediately answered in the second line when the standard lyrical trope of the glory of a perfect summer’s day is found to be deficient: ‘Thou art more lovely and more temperate’ (line 2). Yet, by the final couplet, the speaker is able to boast that the poem itself is the only sure way of fending off mortal decay: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ (lines 13–14). The poet’s voice here is assured, fully confident, infused with Ovidian bravura (though Ovid also has his moments of insecurity): he can confer immortality upon the youth. Ovidian wit is on display in sonnet 20, which offers a creation myth about the youth as a work of art. He was ‘hand painted’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 20, line 1, Norton Shakespeare, 2257) by the feminine personification of Nature, who intended to make him female but so fell in love with her handiwork that she added ‘one thing to my purpose nothing’ (line 12). ‘Thing’ and ‘nothing’ are early modern colloquialisms for the male and female genitals, respectively, making the youth’s masculinity highly ambiguous. Further, the poet has literally added ‘one [male] thing’ to every line of the poem, namely a hyper-metrical syllable. To add to the joke, the poem is composed entirely in (unstressed) feminine rhymes so that the reader can actually hear the poem’s equivocation about the youth’s gender identity. Depending on one’s point of view (or sexual preference), Nature’s addition has either botched or perfected her creation, so as to either thwart or enhance the poet’s erotic designs upon his ‘mastermistress’ (line 2). The clever sexual play of the much-debated final couplet does not resolve the matter for us. The youth’s anatomy may allow women pleasure, ‘use’ (potentially, reproduction), and ‘treasure’ (progeny), but this does not preclude him from having erotic neglected questions of agency, it elucidates the ethical as well as the political dimensions of these poems’. See David Schalkwyk, ‘Poetry and Performance’, in Patrick Cheney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry (Cambridge, 2007), 241–59, 241.
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540 - desire (‘thy love’) for the poet: ‘But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love, and they love’s use their treasure’ (lines 13–14).¹⁰ In sonnet 37, the poet worries that his poetry sounds lame, a word he uses twice in the poem: ‘So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite’, ‘So then am I not lame, poor, nor despised’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 37, lines 3, 9, Norton Shakespeare, 2263). Again, in sonnet 89 the speaker declares: ‘Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 89, line 3, Norton Shakespeare, 2280). Awkward metrical feet are referred to as ‘lame’ or halting, a witticism Ovid also makes in the Amores, where the personification of Elegy strolls by with ‘pes illi longior alter’ [one foot longer than its mate] (Ovid, Amores 3.1.8; Amores, 444–5).¹¹ Shakespeare’s line jokes that, if the beloved says he is lame, he will begin to limp (‘halt’), implying more seriously that he will desist from (or be incapable of) composing mellifluous verse. Once thus incapacitated, the poet will no longer speak the beloved boy’s name: ‘in my tongue, / Thy sweet belovèd name no more shall dwell’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 89, lines 9–10, Norton Shakespeare, 2280). This is ironic, since the poet does not tell us the youth’s name in this poem, or in sonnet 81, despite confidently promising that: ‘Your name from hence immortal life shall have’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 81, line 5, Norton Shakespeare, 2277). Here, then, the assurance of the poet’s voice carries intonation without information. The unspoken names of the addressees of the Sonnets, the youth and the so-called ‘dark lady’, are potentially crucial pieces of information that the poet withholds from the reader. Despite the fact that in the sonnet tradition real-life identities correlate problematically with their fictional counterparts, sonnet addressees are virtually always female and named. Petrarch’s addressee is named ‘Laura’ and Philip Sidney’s beloved is named ‘Stella’, for example, so we have a much clearer idea, or rather image, of who is speaking to whom.¹² In contrast, Shakespeare’s sonnets are blank in onomastic terms, a fact which has invited numerous implausible suggestions as to their ‘real’ identities. Chief amongst these is Shakespeare’s patron, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, on the improbable grounds that the cryptic dedication of the Quarto by ‘T. T.’ (the printer, Thomas Thorpe) is addressed to ‘Mr. W. H.’, the reverse of the earl’s initials. A close second in the annals of critical speculation about the identity of the youth is William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. This is equally unlikely, not least because no one in early modern England would ever refer to an earl as ‘Mr.’. As for the female addressee of the Sonnets, there is no clear favourite amongst the identities proposed. These have ranged from a prostitute called Lucy Negro to the poet of Italian-Jewish heritage, Amelia Lanyer. The un-naming of the Sonnets is much less likely to be the result of deliberate concealment on account of personal discretion or political suppression than of the sheer complexity of the way that art is entangled with life and that actual desire and emotion are enmeshed with their fictional poetic renditions. The poet shows no reticence about his own name, though, again, we should bear in mind that his
¹⁰ In one of the foremost critical commentaries on the Sonnets, Stephen Booth (ed.) claims that ‘this sonnet has been carelessly cited as evidence of its author’s homosexuality’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, CT, 1977), 163. John Kerrigan (ed.) agrees that the poem is ‘free from the imputation of sexual interest in the young man’: The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (Harmondsworth, 1986), 201. In contrast, Katherine Duncan-Jones (ed.), the most recent editor of the Arden Shakespeare, argues that this is ‘a famously puzzling sonnet, which has often been taken to exonerate Shakespeare from any imputation of homoerotic passion. However, it can be read as suggesting the exact opposite’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London, 1997), 150. ¹¹ Ovid, in Grant Showerman (ed. and trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Heroides. Amores (Cambridge, MA, 1914). ¹² See Lynne Magnusson, ‘Thomas Thorpe’s Shakespeare: “The Only Begetter” ’, in Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, and Clare Whitehead (eds), The Sonnets: The State of Play (London, 2017), 33–54.
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541 is also a poetic persona, a literary rather than an autobiographical transcription of identity.¹³ He reveals in sonnet 136 that ‘my name is Will’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 136, line 14, Norton Shakespeare, 2297), perhaps because this information cannot be hidden since the Sonnets are not anonymous; and, as he tells us in sonnet 76, ‘every word doth almost tell my name’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 76, line 7, Norton Shakespeare, 2276, my italics). To ‘tell’ is both to divulge and to count, as in the metrical count of the lines, and suggests a disclosure that is beyond the poet’s control or desire. Every word almost speaks the poet’s authentic voice, but not quite. Perhaps surprisingly, the sense that the poet’s voice is constricted occurs repeatedly in the Sonnets. In sonnet 80, the poet had protested that he was ‘tongue-tied speaking of your fame’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 80, line 4, Norton Shakespeare, 2277) because a rival poet was also writing in praise of the boy. The rival’s poetry, unlike the poet’s own terrestrial efforts, is ‘above a mortal pitch’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 86, line 6, Norton Shakespeare, 2279). ‘Mortal pitch’ suggests height, as in the biblical notion that God’s love is, as the Geneva Bible (1560) has it, ‘as high as the heaven is above the earth’ (Psalm 103, verse 11, Geneva Bible, 257).¹⁴ More importantly from the point of view of the poet’s voice, it suggests ‘pitch’ in the musical sense of a higher note and a celestial sound associated with the music of the spheres. In sonnet 85, the poet’s ‘tongue-tied muse’ again reveals the poet’s struggle to articulate his ‘dumb thoughts’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 85, lines 1, 14, Norton Shakespeare, 2279). In sonnet 106, the poet generalises this deficit not as something peculiar to himself, but as an insufficiency of his age: ‘For we which now behold these present days, / Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 106, lines 13–14, Norton Shakespeare, 2286). Those absent tongues are organs that are perhaps congenitally incapable of giving sounded-out expression to the visual experience of the youth’s beauty. The sonnets addressed to the young man end suddenly with a poem that is two lines short of the fourteen required for a sonnet. The poet has been saying since sonnet 1 that death was menacing the youth, and ‘never-resting time’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 5, line 5, Norton Shakespeare, 2252) has exerted relentlessly constrictive pressure on his vitae summa brevis [brief life span] throughout.¹⁵ By sonnet 126, his time has run out. In a poetic rendering of the idea that we must all pay our debts to nature by our mortality, Nature, who created the youth, must now pay him back in the final line of the poem: ‘her quietus is to render thee’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 126, line 12, Norton Shakespeare, 2293). ‘Quietus est’— literally, ‘he is quit’—was the phrase written on bills to indicate that a debt had been fully discharged. Like many endings in the course of human life and relationships, this one is very sudden, and the final poem is a violently broken utterance, a moment when the poet’s voice abruptly breaks off. Shakespeare seems to suggest in sonnet 126 that the speaker’s powers of expression have failed him and that the fears of disfluency expressed in the preceding poems have now been realised. In addition to creative inadequacy, there is another form of restriction on the poet’s voice that concerns the speaker of the Sonnets, which is implicit in Meres’ comparison of Shakespeare with Ovid, namely the political pressures of censorship. Meres yoked Shakespeare with the writer who, in the annals of poetic history, had most spectacularly run afoul
¹³ See Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Introduction (Oxford, 2007), 13–34. ¹⁴ For the Geneva Bible, see The Bible and Holy Scriptures contained in the Old and New Testament. Translated according to the Hebrew and Greek, and conferred with the best translations in divers languages (Geneva, 1560). ¹⁵ See Dympna Callaghan, ‘Confounded by Winter: Speeding Time in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Michael Schoenfeldt (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford, 2010), 104–18.
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542 - of the political regime of his day. Everyone in early modern England who had heard of Ovid knew that he had been exiled from Rome and that he had provoked imperial opprobrium ostensibly because his Ars Amatoria (about how to find sex in the city of Rome) was deemed indecent, and because he had committed some sexual indiscretion with one of Augustus’s relatives. His actual transgression was much more likely to have been his sly parody of Caesar in the final book of his most famous poem, the Metamorphoses. So, even though Meres focuses on distinctly aesthetic matters, when he aligns Shakespeare with his Classical forebear, Ovid’s notoriety makes the political intimations about the dangers of poetic fluency inescapable. In light of this, every apparently anodyne reference, to flowing verse and to its impediments, inevitably takes on a political charge. In sonnet 66, Shakespeare comes perilously close to a direct, and overtly political complaint about the suppression and silencing of the poet’s voice: Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimmed in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honor shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, And strength by limping sway disablèd, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill, And simple truth miscalled simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill. Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone. (Shakespeare, sonnet 66, Norton Shakespeare, 2272)
This is an extraordinarily melancholy poem, beginning with the conventional idea that death offers respite from the exhausting trials and tribulations of life. However, the poet’s death wish has not been caused by the inevitable turbulence of life in general but by particular social and political circumstances. Sonnet 66 is characterised by epimone [emphasising or repeating a focal point], since the final couplet begins with a repetition of line 1. The poem conveys the oppressive burden of the social maladies it enumerates by use of the rhetorical figure of anaphora [the repetition of a word at the beginning of successive lines or clauses]. With each of the ten successive iterations of the word ‘And’, that weight gets heavier. This feeling of crushing encumbrance is intensified by the fact that Shakespeare departs from his usual sonnet structure of three quatrains, each with its own rhyme, and a final couplet. In the 1609 Quarto, every line of this poem up to line 12 ends with a comma (see Shakespeare, Shake-speares Sonnets, sig. E2v), giving a sense of the unrelenting nature of social ills, which are being itemised like a bill, the awful cost of which is being paid by the poet. The repetition from line 1 of ‘Tired with all these’ in line 13 drains the energy of the verse, so that the reader, by this point, is as emotionally spent as the speaker, and thus participates in the poet’s utter fatigue. In the catalogue of social injustices that take up eleven of the sonnet’s fourteen lines, the most obtrusive complaint is in line 9: ‘And art made tongue-tied by authority’. This is not only because it speaks to the political forces that constrict the poet’s voice, but also because
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543 ‘tongue-tied’ is a spondee, a metrical foot of two stressed syllables rather than the typical unstressed/stress pattern. ‘Art’ in this period could refer to any form of skilled labour, but ‘art’ in combination with the suppression of speech points dangerously towards the stifled expressions of the muzzled poet himself. Although we have only intimations about how the pressure of authority on writers might have been applied, the racking of Thomas Kyd, the murder of Marlowe, the imprisonment of Ben Jonson, and the arrest of Shakespeare’s actor Augustine Phillips could be adduced as evidence that the pressure could be enormous. That the complaint about creative restriction occurs in line 9 is significant because in Petrarch’s Italian sonnets this is where there was a volta or ‘turn’ in the poem’s argument, when, following the opening octave, a new rhyme was introduced to the poem. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the poem shifts gears, not at line 9 but at line 13, and the final couplet variously summarises, consolidates, or ambiguates (and, sometimes, all three) the previous twelve lines. Line 9, however, is still important for Shakespeare: it is the shadow of the Petrarchan turn, the vestigial pivot inherited from the Continental sonnet. In sonnet 66, however, although there is, unusually for Shakespeare, no change in rhyme, the line still constitutes a turn, a ‘revolutionary’ moment where the poem literally turns on itself, self-reflexively referring to the impediments placed upon artistic expression. It is, after all, one thing to opine in general about the ‘siege of batt’ring days’ (Shakespeare, sonnet 65, line 6, Norton Shakespeare, 2272), as poets have done since time immemorial, and as the speaker of sonnet 66 does with the deictic expression [one where the meaning is dependent on the context] ‘all these’ of line 1 (that was a red herring, a feint). It is quite another matter to court danger by being all-too specific about the ills as they imperil the poet’s own life and creativity. This is a society in which the poet does not have a voice in the sense of access to political power. (Interestingly, voting in parliamentary elections in the period occurred by the vocal assent of the severely restricted class of electors ‘giving their voices’ to candidates and not by paper ballot). It is a world in which the speaker cannot fully or plainly speak up. There is a paradox in this, since the speaker describes the restrictions on what he can say, while all the while saying it with exquisite precision. Helen Vendler has argued that ‘[i]f indeed art has been rendered tongue-tied, the poem cannot afford to appear “eloquent”’.¹⁶ More importantly, the poet cannot overtly challenge the social order. Perhaps this is why, for all that it is a cri de coeur, the sonnet does not end with a rallying cry for resistance. Instead, it ends as a love poem arguing that death would leave his lover alone and with the implication that, in such a corrupt world as the one he has described, love is the only thing worth living for.
Venus and Adonis If art was indeed ‘made tongue-tied by authority’, Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare’s first major foray into non-dramatic poetry, escaped that fate. Venus and Adonis was entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1593 with notices that it had been authorised by the Archbishop of Canterbury on April 18 of that year.¹⁷ Given the profoundly erotic nature of the poem, as well as Queen Elizabeth’s proclamation of the same year ordering a crackdown on the publication of material deemed ‘unseemly for Christian ears’ (and note the emphasis on sound rather than sight), it is hard to believe that the poem got through what was, albeit ¹⁶ Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 310. ¹⁷ See Cyndia Susan Clegg, ‘Liberty, License, and Authority: Press Censorship and Shakespeare’, in David Scott Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford, 1999), 464–85, 468–9.
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544 - sporadically, the very tight apparatus of the censoring ecclesiastical authority.¹⁸ One might wonder, indeed, if Archbishop Whitgift had actually read it.¹⁹ One can only assume that he, or more likely his clerical underlings, were more focused on stalling the publication of heretical tracts that posed an explicit threat to the established religion than in censuring salacious verse. That the poem was dedicated to an illustrious patron, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, probably also helped its passage. Indeed, the tone of the dedication is especially interesting, first, because it is where the author speaks in his own voice, ostensibly dropping the mask of the poetic persona he assumes in the poem: ‘I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, Dedication, Norton Shakespeare, 666). Secondly, in the dedication, Shakespeare treads the line carefully (and creatively) between fawning on an aristocratic patron and bruiting his worth as a poet. He achieves the latter not in his own voice but by an Ovidian motto printed in Latin at the head of the dedication: ‘Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi favus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministrit aqua’ [Let what is cheap excite the marvel of the crowd; for me may golden Apollo minister full cups from the Castalian fount].²⁰ The reference is to the Castalian fountain on Mount Parnassus, sacred to the god of poetry, Apollo, and to the Muses. To imbibe these waters, let alone to be served them by a god, was to be filled to the utmost with divine poetic inspiration. The quotation is not inappropriate since Shakespeare’s rendition of the story the poem tells is based upon Book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.²¹ As in the Ovidian source, Adonis is killed in a boar hunt and transformed into a purple flower. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, however, are only lovers manqué, cast in a Petrarchan framework where the goddess’s love remains unrequited. The pair occupy the pagan landscape of untrammelled sexual licence where the frank expression of desire evades Christian stricture and is unbound from the mores of Elizabethan England. In the political climate of the 1590s, myth was a place of greater safety where, as Heather James points out, Shakespeare’s poetic voice could cover a greater range because he could skirt the boundary between the permissible and the licentious.²² Fundamentally, what structured and enabled the poem to escape censure was its genre, the epyllion. The word comes from the Greek, meaning ‘little epic’ or ‘scrap of poetry’.²³ The subjects of this genre were typically mythological, and, in the Hellenistic tradition, took an
¹⁸ On attempts to restrict Ovidian poetry, see Dympna Callaghan, ‘The Book of Changes in a Time of Change: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Post-Reformation England and Venus and Adonis’, in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 4, The Poems, Problem Comedies, and Late Plays (Oxford, 2003), 27–45, and Dympna Callaghan, ‘Comedy and Epyllion in Post-Reformation England’, Shakespeare Survey, 56 (2003), 27–38. ¹⁹ Venus and Adonis is more than merely erotic. The poem also entails perverse sexual practices such as pederasty and bestiality. See Dympna Callaghan, ‘(Un)natural Loving: Swine, Pets and Flowers in Venus and Adonis’, in Philippa Berry and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (eds), Textures of Renaissance Knowledge (Manchester, 2003), 58–78. ²⁰ See Ovid’s Amores, 1.15.35–6; Amores, 378–9. See also Marlowe’s translation: ‘Let base conceited wits admire vile things, / Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ springs’ (All Ovid’s Elegies, sig. B7). ²¹ See John Frederick Nims (ed.), Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567 (New York, 1965). Shakespeare’s is a much-expanded version of Ovid’s account: see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993), 50–66. ²² Heather James argues that ‘The Amores and the Metamorphoses . . . share an artistic vision when it comes to the question of subordinating one’s ingenuity and expressive liberty to the decrees of the state’; see Heather James, ‘The Poet’s Toys: Christopher Marlowe and the Liberties of Erotic Elegy’, Modern Language Quarterly, 67.1 (2006), 103–27, 108. On the political dimension of Ovidianism, see Heather James, ‘Ovid and the Question of Politics in Early Modern England’, ELH, 70.2 (2003), 343–73; and on the moral dilemma Ovid posed for his early modern admirers, see Heather James, ‘Ovid in English Renaissance Literature’, in Peter E. Knox (ed.), A Companion to Ovid (Oxford, 2008), 433–41, 423. ²³ For more on the genre of the epyllion, see also Chapter 16 in this volume.
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545 episode from the life of an epic figure and placed that character in fully human situations. The genre was characterised by vivid and detailed descriptions of natural beauty, and conventionally there was a digression in the middle. Shakespeare creates the lush, sensual world appropriate to this genre within the very tightly organised verse framework of a sixain in iambic pentameter, which is to say six lines rhyming ababcc: thus, a heroic quatrain (four lines of alternately rhymed iambic pentameter) and a rhymed couplet, which has a definitively closural function in the stanza. As with the sonnet form that Shakespeare uses, this structure was not original to him. This is significant because it demonstrates once again that Shakespeare was not bridling against the constraints of received poetic frameworks. Rather, within the constrictions of this verse structure, Shakespeare composed a tragicomic poem that is about sexual constraint and the failures of ‘voice’. It is not the poet-narrator whose vocal capacities are impaired here but those of Venus herself. When her rhetorically perfect overtures to Adonis nonetheless fail to seduce him, ‘impatience chokes her pleading tongue’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 217, Norton Shakespeare, 671). Venus chokes on her words, and yet her ineffective eloquence, which is tantamount to verbosity, is nonetheless the voice that dominates this poem, the bulk of which largely consists of her rhetorical attempts to persuade Adonis, a mere mortal, to succumb to her desires, and when that fails, she resorts to violence. The poem understands the coercive element in both sexual seduction and rhetorical persuasion (the ‘pleading tongue’), and, crucially, the potential violence of erotic language—and even of poetry— recognising that words are always embedded in power relations. Indeed, the poem’s opening mirrors and anticipates the inversions of gender and power explored in the body of the poem, and, despite Adonis’s rebuke to Eros, suggests the ligatures of amatory attachment that are already all tied up in the rhetorical scheme called chiasmus [a repetition of words or concepts in reverse order]: ‘Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 4, Norton Shakespeare, 666). Indeed, Venus and Adonis is ostentatious in its exhibition of the poet’s capacity to deploy rhetorical tropes and figures. But Shakespeare also wittily demonstrates that, even when perfectly executed, such strategies can fail; that the auditor has the freedom to resist and refuse the proffered arguments. The seductive wiles with which Venus brought Mars, the hyper-masculine god of war, into ‘servile’ subjection (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 112, Norton Shakespeare, 669), simply will not work on obdurate young Adonis. Such rejection makes Venus almost human. In fact, the goddess of love is transformed by Shakespeare from an ethereal being into a figure with a recognisably human physique and is equipped with sufficient solidity and strength to abduct and restrain Adonis. She plucks him from his horse and tucks him under her arm (see Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, lines 30–2, Norton Shakespeare, 667). Venus is the actor here: she is all verbs: ‘she seizeth on his sweating palm’, ‘she murders with a kiss’, ‘backward she pushed him’ (lines 25, 54, 41, my italics). Importantly, the voice that describes all of this is that of the extremely effective poetnarrator. Adonis is also described by him as a child, ‘the tender boy’ (line 32).²⁴ Immobilised by Venus’s strong grip, ‘Rose-cheeked Adonis’ (Shakespeare, line 3, Norton Shakespeare, 666) is described as a captured enemy combatant: ‘A lily prisoned in a jail of snow, / Or ivory in an alabaster band / So white a friend engirts [encircles] so white a foe’ (Shakespeare,
²⁴ William Weaver argues that Shakespeare explores what Erasmus termed ‘the mystery of boyhood’, which is profoundly connected with the pedagogical programme of the Elizabethan grammar school. See William P. Weaver, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh, 2012), 72.
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546 - lines 362–4, Norton Shakespeare, 674). The narrator here manipulates the Petrarchan dynamic and colour scheme (red and white) whereby the beloved alabaster Petrarchan lady who refuses the poet-lover becomes his ‘foe’. Thus, Adonis acquires all the qualities of the cold, fickle Petrarchan love object, while Venus is the ‘bold-faced suitor’ (Shakespeare, line 6, Norton Shakespeare, 666). However, Venus and Adonis share the ultra-white flesh characteristic of Petrarchan beauty, which in the Canzoniere is never ascribed to the lover, but only to the female beloved. The narrator’s voice comes to the fore again in the major digression of the poem, which is one of the conventional characteristics of the epyllion. Adonis’s horse has no voice and is thus the perfect vehicle for the poet’s demonstration of rhetorical sprezzatura or the appearance of effortless fluency.²⁵ Shakespeare demonstrates that he can compose a virtuoso set piece following the model of the period’s rhetorical handbooks. This is not then a matter of voicing something completely new, or at least not entirely, but a case of exemplifying the qualities prescribed by the rhetorical model. The narrative voice describes Adonis’s horse breaking his tethers in sexual pursuit of a nearby jennet: Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds, And now his woven girths he breaks asunder. The bearing Earth with his hard hoof he wounds, Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven’s thunder. The iron bit he crusheth ’tween his teeth, Controlling what he was controllèd with. (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, lines 265–70, Norton Shakespeare, 672)
In sharp contrast to his master, the horse is the embodiment of spirited, libidinal male energy that ‘leaps’ and ‘bounds’ in imagery that intimates vigorous coitus, as the beast pounds and ‘wounds’ the feminised ‘womb’ of the earth in an act of self-emancipation. This wounding anticipates the boar’s sexual ferocity and the ‘vaginal’ death wound that will be inflicted by it later in the poem.²⁶ Readers today may have serious qualms about the idea that sexual violence can ever be funny, and that remains an open question. However, that Adonis is ‘Forced to content, but never to obey’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 61, Norton Shakespeare, 668) describes his imposed acquiescence, but also suggests that he is able to preserve his autonomy as well as the integrity of his body and of his masculine identity. Notwithstanding Venus’s molestations, he has succeeded in ‘mast’ring her’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 114, Norton Shakespeare, 669, my italics). If we put pressure on how this came about, we arrive at the fact that, no matter how proficient, the voice of a woman and female rhetoric is destined to fail. Further, there is a sense in which—even while Adonis is on the bottom of the binaries divine/human, strong/weak, adult/child—his trump card is that he maintains his position in the gender hierarchy: male/female. Thus, despite rhetorical and physical
²⁵ Loraine Fletcher claims that the equine species in the poem succeeds in communicating despite the absence of human language, whereas Venus and Adonis talk a lot without communicating. See Loraine Fletcher, ‘Animal Rites: A Reading of “Venus and Adonis” ’, Critical Survey, 17 (2005), 1–14. ²⁶ Lisa Starks-Estes claims that Shakespeare ‘aligns himself with the dark side of the Latin legacy of Renaissance literature—Ovid’. See Lisa Starks-Estes, ‘Virtus’ in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid (London, 2014), 3.
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547 coercion, his will is never broken, and thus he is never emasculated by Venus, even though he is literally emasculated by the boar: ‘And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine / Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, lines 1115–16, Norton Shakespeare, 691). The difference between being penetrated by the boar and Venus’s sexual abuse is that Adonis gave his consent in the former instance and withheld it in the latter: ‘ “I know not love,” quoth he, “nor will not know it, / Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it”’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, lines 409–10, Norton Shakespeare, 675). We may hear his voice much less frequently than that of Venus in this poem, but when Adonis does speak, he is decidedly emphatic. The emphatic double negative ‘nor will not’ encapsulates his ‘will’, his unshakably autonomous volition. Paradoxically also, these lines are composed with feminine rhymes (rhymes wherein a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one) to express a masculine preference for sporting activities over amorous pursuits. Supreme amongst these is the hunt, which serves in art as a cultural metaphor for other power relations, fundamentally the dominion of human beings (‘man’) over nature, and especially, of men over women. Despite the regal exception of Elizabeth I, who hunted and was frequently figured as the virgin huntress-goddess Diana, ‘venery’, as it was known, is historically an intensively masculine venture understood as the ritual rehearsal of warfare.²⁷ Hunting was also a definitively aristocratic recreation because forests belonged to the crown and game enclosures assured a kill. There are echoes of this social arrangement in Shakespeare’s poem when the goddess offers to be the enclosure for Adonis: ‘I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 231, Norton Shakespeare, 671). Venus imagines shielding her beloved from the violence of the hunt: ‘No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 240, Norton Shakespeare, 672). This bespeaks one of the key characteristics of the goddess, namely the maternal, blindly procreative impulse of Venus genitrix [the mother goddess]. However, the other aspect of her identity is never far away, namely the rapacity of Venus vulgaris [the sex goddess]. Indeed, while the boar has an inescapably phallic dimension, voracious Venus also identifies with it: ‘Had I been toothed like him, I must confess, / With kissing him I should have killed him first’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, lines 1117–18, Norton Shakespeare, 691). Despite this, the tone of voice Venus adopts after Adonis’s death is that of the mater dolorosa, the sorrowful mother of the crucified Christ depicted in medieval poetry but also the grief-stricken women of the Metamorphoses. That Shakespeare adopts Ovid’s tone and modulations of voice, and deploys the bounce and brio of Ovidian language, allows him to make the mythic love affair of Venus and Adonis into a tragi-comedy of frustrated desire. However, it is Adonis’s transformation into what is traditionally believed to be a ‘wind flower’, an anemone, ‘A purple flower . . . checkered with white’ (Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, line 1168, Norton Shakespeare, 692), that seals the poem’s status as a story of metamorphosis, which was synonymous with Ovid. There are intimations in this image of the wind flower that Adonis has at last evaded the predatory grasp of Venus. However, in metamorphosis, the only form of escape, if it can be called that, is a change of state, a transmutation into a less than human identity, whose defining characteristic is not freedom but voicelessness.
²⁷ See Catherine Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt: Wyatt to Spenser (Oxford, 2013), 16, 61.
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548 -
The Rape of Lucrece Voice is central to the literary diptych of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.²⁸ The Ovidian idea of raptus—the violent intrusion of the divine upon the human (usually rape)— explored to comic effect in Venus and Adonis, is muted though still present in Lucrece, where Lucrece’s purity is explicitly described as ‘divine’ (Shakespeare, Lucrece, line 193, Norton Shakespeare, 707) and her rape as an act of desecration. Nonetheless, the poem is set in the entirely human and political realm where the problem of attaining political liberty becomes analogous to the problem of how to give voice to the horror of sexual violation. In general, cultural terms, early modern women were enjoined to be chaste, silent, and obedient. There was enormous pressure to silence women’s voices. As a consequence of the injunction against female speech, persuasion, speaking up and speaking out, which constitute the cultural functions of rhetoric, were not fully available to women. A voiceless woman, after all, can neither give nor withhold ‘consent’. ‘Consent’ appears twice—in the poem’s preface (see Shakespeare, Lucrece, ‘The Argument’, Norton Shakespeare, 703) and again at its conclusion (see Shakespeare, Lucrece, line 1854, Norton Shakespeare, 744)—and signals the political ramifications of rape as an instance of the tyrannical imposition of the will of the powerful upon the powerless. The poem’s argument specifically draws on the analogy between rape and tyranny, and while its implications are intimated within the poem itself, the overwhelming emphasis is rather on the private thoughts and motivations of its central figures. These are not, however, given equal space: the majority of the poem gives voice to Lucrece’s experience of the aftermath of the rape. Shakespeare thus considers not only how rape silences a woman’s voice but also how, paradoxically, it compels her to speak. The tragedy of Shakespeare’s second epyllion is instigated by the loose and ‘shallow tongue’ of Lucrece’s husband, Collatine (Shakespeare, Lucrece, line 78, Norton Shakespeare, 705): . . . Collatine unwisely did not let To praise the clear unmatchèd red and white, Which triumphed in that sky of his delight. (Shakespeare, Lucrece, lines 10–12, Norton Shakespeare, 703)
This circumstance is nonetheless delivered to the reader within a controlled seven-line stanza of rhyme royal (ababbcc), used also by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde. In conversation with his fellow Romans during the siege of Ardea, Collatine does not ‘let’ or desist from his exorbitant praise of ‘his beauteous mate’ (line 18), who is reduced to a silent, abstract red and white colour scheme akin to that used in heraldry, as well as in the ‘lilies’ and ‘roses’ of Petrarchan poetry: ‘This silent war of lilies and of roses’ (Shakespeare, Lucrece, line 71, Norton Shakespeare, 705, my italics). Collatine thereby incites rapacious covetousness in Tarquin, son of the tyrannical king, who then insinuates himself into Lucrece’s household as a guest, and, impervious to her pleas, ravishes her. This event brings about the demise of the Tarquin monarchy and the rise of the Roman Republic. In positioning male (rather than female) loquacity and the brutal abrogation of sexual consent as the root of political upheaval, Lucrece subversively suggests, to paraphrase Hamlet, that the lady should ²⁸ Ted Hughes argues that the mythological foundation to everything that Shakespeare ever wrote consists in the myth of ‘the Great Goddess and of the Goddess-destroying god’. See Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London, 1992), 2.
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549 speak her mind freely (see Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.282, Norton Shakespeare, 1794), that is, that female expression is an ingredient of, as well as a figure for, political liberty. In the suspenseful early part of the poem, Tarquin ‘doth premeditate / The dangers of this loathsome enterprise’ (Shakespeare, Lucrece, lines 183–4, Norton Shakespeare, 707). Lucrece’s eloquent rhetoric fails to stop what, in Macbeth, Shakespeare terms ‘Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design’ (Shakespeare, Macbeth, 2.1.55, Norton Shakespeare, 2734). Caught not only by surprise but also by the cultural conundrum about vocal women, Lucrece struggles to find her voice: Her modest eloquence with sighs is mixed, Which to her oratory adds more grace. She puts the period often from his place, And midst the sentence so her accent breaks That twice she doth begin ere once she speaks. (Shakespeare, Lucrece, lines 563–7, Norton Shakespeare, 716)
Her speech is ‘modest’, its fluency impeded by sighs, which only enhance its effect as a rhetorical performance. The rape itself is described as a violent silencing, when Tarquin smothers Lucrece’s screams with her nightdress: The wolf hath seized his prey, the poor lamb cries, Till with her own white fleece her voice controlled, Entombs her outcry in her lips’ sweet fold. For with the nightly linen that she wears He pens her piteous clamors in her head. (Shakespeare, Lucrece, lines 677–81, Norton Shakespeare, 718)
Paradoxically, Lucrece’s vocal power intensifies exponentially immediately after she is raped, although at that point we the readers are her only auditors. The second and longest part of the poem is devoted to her complaint against the abstract forces that conspired with Tarquin to violate her—Night, Opportunity, and Time: Sometime her grief is dumb and hath no words; Sometime ’tis mad and too much talk affords. (Shakespeare, Lucrece, lines 1105–6, Norton Shakespeare, 728) Like Venus, Lucrece is capable of advanced rhetorical exercises, especially evident in the poem’s ekphrasis, when she gazes upon a painting of the fall of Troy and claims the right to vocalise the mute figure of Hecuba, and specifically claims for her the genre of female complaint: ‘And therefore Lucrece swears he [the artist] did her wrong / To give her so much grief, and not a tongue’ (Shakespeare, Lucrece, lines 1462–3, Norton Shakespeare, 735).²⁹ After a night of agitated rumination, she decides to commit suicide as the only possible way of salvaging her reputation, now that her body is irremediably polluted. However, she also resolves to speak out before killing herself, and having determined this course of action, she writes to summon Collatine home. Shakespeare thus shows a
²⁹ For more on the genre of the female-voiced complaint, see also Chapter 19 in this volume.
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550 - privileged form of female enunciation, women’s writing, as well as the tormented process of composition. After much second guessing, Lucrece composes a succinct and eloquent missive of a mere seven lines (a single stanza), which concludes: ‘My woes are tedious, though my words are brief ’ (Shakespeare, Lucrece, line 1309, Norton Shakespeare, 732).³⁰ There is a certain irony here because, from the reader’s point of view, Lucrece has been anything but brief in her disquisition on the circumstances that overpowered her chastity. Notably, she engages here neither in full disclosure of the crime nor in rhetorical display. Rather, we see her ‘fold . . . up’ the letter in an act that is simultaneously one of communication and concealment. The line ‘Here folds she up the tenor of her woe’ (line 1310) brings us back to the ‘outcry in her lips’ sweet fold’ (line 679) that Tarquin stifled during the rape. The poem’s folding and unfolding, concealment and revelation, silencing and speech, serve to animate the paradoxical reversal of consequences whereby it is her assailant who becomes ‘the captive victor’ (Shakespeare, Lucrece, line 730, Norton Shakespeare, 719) because he has ravished his own soul.³¹ Although the poet does not report it as direct speech, Lucrece does succeed in vocalising ‘Tarquin’s name’ (Shakespeare, Lucrece, line 1717, Norton Shakespeare, 741). She thus makes good on her determined commitment to ‘name him’ (Shakespeare, Lucrece, line 1688, Norton Shakespeare, 740) four stanzas prior: ‘She throws forth Tarquin’s name’ (line 1717, my italics). Crucially, she does not pronounce the name as an inaudible whisper but rather projects this vital utterance with force sufficient to leave her breathless from the emotional, psychological, and vocal exertion of doing so. ‘Tarquin’s name’ then becomes the referent for the repeated pronoun, ‘He, he’ (line 1717), at the beginning of the following sentence, which, in an instance of what is known as aposiopesis, she is unable to complete: She throws forth Tarquin’s name. ‘He, he’, she says But more than ‘he’ her poor tongue could not speak; Till, after many accents and delays, Untimely breathings, sick and short assays, She utters this, ‘He, he, fair lords, ’tis he That guides this hand to give this wound to me’. (Shakespeare, Lucrece, lines 1717–22, Norton Shakespeare, 741)
This stanza affords the only remaining opportunity to reveal the identity of her rapist since her suicide occurs in its last line. Despite the intense emotional distress that prevents her from pronouncing further details of her ordeal, the fact that she names her assailant is of the utmost significance because without this information, the assembled men would remain ignorant of his identity and thus have no cause to ouster the Tarquins from Rome. Lucrece cannot be a rape survivor. The constraints of history and Shakespeare’s source material largely determine her ending. Reduced to an emblem, a bleeding body paraded through Rome, her suicide bespeaks not the subversion of patriarchy but rather its seemingly endless capacity to appropriate women’s bodies. Notoriously, St Augustine found the
³⁰ See Huw Griffiths, ‘Letter-writing Lucrece: Shakespeare in the 1590s’, in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (eds), Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (London, 2007), 89–110. ³¹ Heather Dubrow explores the complexities of victimhood and the paradox of the ‘captive victor’ as phenomena that permeate all Shakespeare’s poems (though she excludes A Lover’s Complaint). For example, she argues that both ‘Tarquin and Lucrece at times imply that Collatine, not his wife, is the primary victim of the rape’, in Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, NY, 1987), 89.
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551 historical Lucretia culpable in the rape because she committed suicide, a mortal sin according to Christian doctrine.³² Lucrece was thus not only the victim of Tarquin and Roman sexual mores but also of the interpretative tradition up until Shakespeare’s time, the overwhelmingly male voices that drowned out Lucrece’s long-lost own. By imagining her voice, Shakespeare’s poem does for Lucrece what she wished the painter did for mute Hecuba: he endows her with the voice of poetry.
‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ In contrast to the narrative poems, with ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ Shakespeare shifts into the lyric voice. Indeed, the poem is self-reflexively, about (bird)song. That is, its subject is lyric vocality itself. The poem concerns the funeral rite performed for the mythological (here, female) phoenix and the (male) turtle dove. Now confined to a funeral urn, the couple remain ‘Co-supremes and stars of love’ (Shakespeare, ‘Phoenix’, line 51, Norton Shakespeare, 1978) whose defunct conjugality was characterised by an extraordinary feature: ‘married chastity’ (Shakespeare, ‘Phoenix’, line 61, Norton Shakespeare, 1979). Whether this perfect union was achieved despite or because of this circumstance, the poem does not tell us. However, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ suggests a radical form of mutuality, a ‘mutual flame’ (Shakespeare, ‘Phoenix’, line 24, Norton Shakespeare, 1977), which is undergirded by a liberation from the wayward pull of Eros altogether.³³ ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ was printed as an untitled poem in 1601 in a book of verse compiled by Robert Chester in honour of Sir John Salisbury: Loves Martyr: or, Rosalind’s Complaint Allegorically Shadowing the Truth of Love, in the Constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle. Shakespeare, then, was not given carte blanche about his contribution to the volume, but rather, composed the poem in response to a decidedly idiosyncratic commission. This also explains why the phoenix is female and the turtledove (traditionally the female emblem of constancy) is male, because this is how Robert Chester represents them in the poem which comprises the bulk of Love’s Martyr. The defining mythological feature of the phoenix is that it regenerates by consuming itself in flames and rising from its own ashes. What sets Shakespeare’s poem thematically apart from the rest of the volume is that his phoenix simply dies without any intimation of resurrection. Shakespeare thus takes the liberty to depart from mythological convention as well as from history and real events, the latter being one of the freedoms of the poet championed by Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesy (1595). Such freedom belongs especially to lyric poetry, where the poem’s vocal register ascends far above the instrumental uses of language found in everyday speech.³⁴ Nor is ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ in the business of actuality or facticity. For example, the emotional tenor of the poem is one of sombre gravity and formality appropriate to rites for the dead, but it is not concerned with why or how the birds died. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ thus exemplifies many of the qualities that are characteristic of the lyric voice. As the
³² See Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford, 1982), 21–39. ³³ Michael Schoenfeldt argues that ‘this poem aspires to articulate a remarkable degree of sexual equality, whereby each party is imagined as the mutual possession of the other’. See Michael Schoenfeldt, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (Cambridge, 2011), 127. ³⁴ See also Chapter 25 in this volume.
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552 - twentieth-century critic Cleanth Brooks argued: ‘The urn to which we are summoned, the urn which holds the ashes of the phoenix . . . is the poem itself.’³⁵ The events of the poem comport with the matter of lyric. The bird with the loudest song—‘the bird of loudest lay’ (Shakespeare, ‘Phoenix’, line 1, Norton Shakespeare, 1977)— is instructed to invite other birds to flock to a requiem for the dead pair. The invitation is to exclude all raptors except the majestic eagle. The white swan is to act as the priest and the black crow, in sartorially appropriate fashion, is to mingle with the mourners. An anthem, a funeral elegy, is sung about the death of love and constancy that the dead birds exemplified. Their married love unified them in a way that defied reason. The personification of Reason (who may or may not also be a bird) then enunciates the poem’s concluding Threnos, or funeral lament, the final eulogy for the birds. While iambic pentameter is what we might call the poetry of speech, the metre used in this poem is what we might term the poetry of song, or, at the very least, incantation. Shakespeare’s usual firm and flat iambic feet are here replaced by a stressed foot followed by an unstressed one. This is trochaic tetrameter with a dropped final syllable: dum da dum da dum da dum—thus ending on a single stressed syllable, appropriate to the grave and sombre tone required of ‘obsequy’ and ‘requiem’ (Shakespeare, ‘Phoenix’, lines 12, 16, Norton Shakespeare, 1977), the Catholic Mass for the dead. The word ‘obsequy’ here is a particularly interesting one since, etymologically, it refers not just to the funeral service but to rites of burial as well, particularly the funeral procession of mourners who follow the dead to the gravesite.³⁶ Seque is the Latin word for ‘follow’, so the trailing stress at the end of each line linguistically reiterates the movement of those who have gathered to commemorate these dead lovers: ‘Here the anthem doth commence’ (line 21). ‘Here’ is a stressed syllable, followed by an unstressed ‘the’ and by the two further iambs, ‘the anthem doth co-’ so that the ‘-mence’, the second syllable of ‘commence’, constitutes the trailing syllable. In effect, this verbal patterning of trailing syllables makes its own procession. The stressed first word ‘Here’ gives a clear head to the procession, while ‘And love and constancy is dead’ (line 22) signals its end. The very regular rhyme scheme, abba, contributes to the stateliness of the poem. When the poem arrives at Reason’s funeral oration, the rhyme shifts to aaa: Leaving no posterity: ’Twas not their infirmity, It was married chastity. (Shakespeare, ‘Phoenix’, lines 59–61, Norton Shakespeare, 1979)
The couple may not have consummated their union, but the stanza’s triplets suggest generative possibilities beyond those of biological reproduction (the two still succeed in becoming three), and cast the relationship in the framework of both the Platonic transcendence of carnal desire, as well the profoundly theological form of the Christian Trinity with its three persons in one God. The form of the poem, then, is the key to understanding it, but it is not a puzzle to be solved and must be taken on its own lyric terms. Despite this, the history of criticism has
³⁵ Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), 20–1. See also Lynn Enterline, ‘ “The Phoenix and the Turtle”: Renaissance Elegies and the Language of Grief ’, in Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr (eds), Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion (Oxford, 2007), 147–59, 156–7. ³⁶ Colin Burrow (ed.), William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford, 2002), 373.
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553 overwhelmingly approached the poem as an allegory, often reading the phoenix as Queen Elizabeth I and the turtle as the Earl of Essex. Over the years, commentators have put forward many variations on this theme, and what they all have in common is the belief that, far from exercising the poetic licence and imaginative latitude afforded by lyric, Shakespeare deliberately occluded his meaning for political or religious reasons.³⁷ While historical context is always significant, and while there are many things about the publication circumstances of Love’s Martyr that remain unknown, the idea that understanding the poem depends on missing historical information diminishes the importance of this poem’s central idea that married love is a consecrated mystical union: ‘Two distincts, division none’ (Shakespeare, ‘Phoenix’, line 27, Norton Shakespeare, 1978).³⁸ Love, like lyric, always transcends logic, and this poem, which voices an elegiac love song, leaves us with that mystery.
A Lover’s Complaint A Lover’s Complaint appears at the end of the First Quarto of the Sonnets, and, like Lucrece, it too is composed in rhyme royal. The poem follows the Ovidian model of exploring love in the female voice, rather than only from the male perspective. Book 3 of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria instructs women in the art of love, while his Heroides is a series of epistolary verse complaints in which bereft women address the men who have wronged or abandoned them.³⁹ A Lover’s Complaint falls into the genre of amatory complaint, and while it is also indebted to plaintive Petrarchan poetry where the emphasis is on the male poet-speaker’s feelings, the voice which dominates here is that of the woman who has been seduced and betrayed. Such female-voiced complaints are to be found at the end of a number of sonnet sequences, such as Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592), Thomas Lodge’s Phillis (1593), and Richard Barnfield’s Cynthia (1595). A complaint constitutes a very specific type of poetic utterance: it is the articulation of a grievance which is protested and bemoaned by the speaker. The amatory complaint does not so much seek redress as simply the opportunity to voice a tragic injustice done specifically to a woman. Crucially, the woman also seeks to be heard. Complaint is also, of course, like women characters on the early modern stage, an instance of female impersonation, whose appropriative mechanisms are emphasised in this poem by having the entire complaint overheard by a male courtier. The woman in A Lover’s Complaint shares with an empathetic ‘reverend man’ ‘the motives of her woe’ (Shakespeare, Lover’s Complaint, lines 56, 63, Norton Shakespeare, 2308). While male presentations of women’s voices, then, are necessarily ventriloquised, some, like that of Lucrece, seem aimed to ³⁷ Claire Asquith, for example, has argued that Shakespeare was writing in code because he was a cryptoCatholic, and that this poem is about his proscribed religious identity: ‘The poem’s haunting tone takes us beyond the death of two remarkable individuals. Shakespeare is here confronting for the first time the possibility that the spirit of the Catholic resistance would be extinguished in England.’ See Claire Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York, 2005), 182. The fullest treatment of the poem to date is the book-length study by James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Truth of Love: The Mystery of ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ (London, 2012), which offers an accurate, historically grounded, literary treatment of the poem. ³⁸ While John Donne is conventionally thought to inaugurate English metaphysical poetry, Bednarz makes the compelling case that ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ is ‘the first published great metaphysical poem’. See James P. Bednarz, ‘ “The Passionate Pilgrim” and “The Phoenix and Turtle” ’, in Cheney (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, 108–24, 117. ³⁹ See Catherine Bates, Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge, 2007), 177–8.
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554 - represent women, while others, as Elizabeth Harvey has argued, appropriate women’s experience and silence women’s voices.⁴⁰ The woman in A Lover’s Complaint is left bereft of her chastity and with only the detritus of her former beauty: ‘the carcass of beauty spent and done’ (Shakespeare, ‘Lover’s Complaint’, line 11, Norton Shakespeare, 2307). Her ruin has been wrought by the young man’s seductive eloquence, both in writing—he gifts her ‘deep brained sonnets’ (line 209, Norton Shakespeare, 2312)—and in speech: ‘For maiden-tongued he was’ (Shakespeare, Lover’s Complaint, line 100, Norton Shakespeare, 2309). In other words, for his own sexual gratification, he used his linguistic prowess to approximate, or perhaps even impersonate, a female voice. This is a power possessed not only by the faithless lover, of course, but also by the poet. At the end of the poem, the woman still cannot cure herself of love and suspects that the young man could again ‘pervert a reconcilèd maid’ (Shakespeare, Lover’s Complaint, line 329, Norton Shakespeare, 2315). One of the fascinating things about A Lover’s Complaint is that it may not represent Shakespeare’s poetic voice at all. Down the years, there have been numerous debates about its authorship, though more recently the balance of critical opinion maintains that the poem was written by Shakespeare.⁴¹ Because a complaint is such a popular poetic form, the debate about attribution serves as a reminder that poetic vocality is not invariably about Shakespeare’s distinctive, individual voice, but also about the shape of poetic expression that he shared with his culture.
⁴⁰ See Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London, 1992), 12. ⁴¹ For arguments against Shakespeare’s authorship, see Ward Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, ‘Did Shakespeare Write A Lover’s Complaint? The Jackson Ascription Revisited’; and Marina Tarlinskaja, ‘The Verse of “A Lover’s Complaint”: Not Shakespeare’, both in Brian Boyd (ed.), Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson (Newark, DE, 2004), 117–40, and 141–58, respectively. Most recent critics, however, take the poem to be authentically Shakespearean, and major editions of Shakespeare’s poetry and collected works include it, with the exception of the Folger Library Shakespeare Editions. Catherine Bates makes a convincing case for the similarities between Venus’s moans in Venus and Adonis and A Lover’s Complaint in Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge, 1992), 116.
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31 Ralegh Andrew Hiscock
He was sometimes a Poet, not often. (Aubrey, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, 260)¹ Such was John Aubrey’s considered opinion in the closing decades of the seventeenth century and, indeed, it was one which might have been easy to reach, as will swiftly become apparent. The discussion which follows focuses on Ralegh the poet and early modern poetic practice. This is necessarily the case because one of the thorniest conundrums of any account of early modern English literature continues to be how to establish a Raleghan poetic canon: a canon which might include, for example, a number of texts published at the time with the signature ‘Ignoto’ [Unknown]. Any reading of the poetic output is fraught with questions of provenance and attribution, and this debate is as lively in the twenty-first century as it has been in previous ages.² In the post-war period, Agnes Latham lamented that ‘[i]t is typical of the man that he should have been known among his contemporaries as one of the notable poets of the day, but has left posterity little to supplement their assurances’, and in these years her voice was joined by that of Philip Edwards: ‘Much that he wrote has been lost, and no one can say how much, or whether what we have represents his best work. At every turn there is the problem of authorship’.³ For more recent generations, Steven W. May underlines once again that ‘Ralegh’s poetry presents one of the most difficult editorial problems of the English Renaissance’.⁴ Some of the poetic texts considered in this discussion enjoy a critical consensus that they originate from Ralegh’s pen; others, which have been attributed to the court favourite down the ages, less so. However, in engaging with these texts we gain not only an experience of early modern poetics more generally, but also of the ways in which Ralegh was perceived by his readers, who may well have been quite convinced of the authenticity of certain attributions, whatever the doubts voiced in some cases in current critical debate. The accounts of Ralegh in his many and various identities as poet, chronicler, pamphleteer, essayist, correspondent, explorer, politician, court favourite, and prisoner in the Tower have been far from uniform over the centuries. Strikingly, in the decades following his execution in 1618, his cultural capital as a long-standing victim of Stuart enmity marked him out for particular distinction: even Prince Henry was reported famously to have
¹ John Aubrey, in Oliver Lawson Dick (ed.), Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Edited from the Original Manuscripts (London, 1949). ² In this context, see also the editorial discussion of Michael Rudick (ed.) in The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition (Tempe, AZ, 1999), xiv–xv. ³ See Agnes M. C. Latham (ed.), The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh (London, 1951), xxiii; and Philip Edwards, Sir Walter Ralegh (London, 1953), 53. Latham would add in a later publication: ‘Too little of his poetry has survived for it to be easy to make any general assessment of it, to trace influences or suggest sources’: see Agnes M. C. Latham, Sir Walter Ralegh (London, 1964), 16. ⁴ Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets. The Poems and their Contexts (Columbia, MO, 1991), 362. Andrew Hiscock, Ralegh In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Andrew Hiscock 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0031
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556 - remarked that ‘only my father would keep such a bird in a cage’.⁵ The publication of The Prerogative of Parliaments in England in 1628 hailed the author on its title page as ‘the worthy (much lacked and lamented) Sir Walter Raleigh Knight’ (Ralegh, Prerogative of Parliments, title page), and when the Judicious and Select Essays and Observations By that Renowned Knight Sir Walter Raleigh rolled from the presses in 1650, the printer alerted his reader to the fact that ‘Raleigh’s very Name is Proclamation enough for the Stationer’s advantage’ (Ralegh, Judicious and Select Essays, sig. A4).⁶ Nonetheless, if Ralegh’s political significance, both during and after his life, has always been recognised in narratives of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, critical voices have often been in greater discomfort when attempting to evaluate the very disparate legacies of his poetry. Michael L. Johnson, for example, argued that ‘[m]uch of Ralegh’s poetry reveals the extent of his involvement in courtly society and political intrigue’,⁷ Steven May that ‘[m]ost of Ralegh’s poetry is occasional’,⁸ and Robert Nye that ‘Sir Walter Ralegh excelled at other things besides the writing of poems, and it is for the other things that he is best known’.⁹ Whatever the case in terms of his broader career, we certainly have a range of evidence to suggest that Ralegh’s verse (and sometimes the verse attributed to him) was widely admired. In The Art of English Poesy (1589), George Puttenham drew attention to a new generation of ‘courtly makers’ during Elizabeth’s reign, and placed ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’ in their number. This was a ‘crew’, he continued, which ‘have written excellently well, as it would appear if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest’ (Puttenham, Art, 149).¹⁰ Thus, it seems, problems of identification and attribution were clearly being negotiated by critics and readers alike, even in the Elizabethan period. If Puttenham contended that ‘very many notable gentlemen in the court . . . have written commendably and suppressed it again, or else suffered it to be published without their own names to it’ (Puttenham, Art, 112), he was nonetheless at pains to excerpt some of what he found to be the poet’s work— ‘written by Sir Walter Ralegh of his greatest mistress, in most excellent verses’ (Puttenham, Art, 282)—and, indeed, was given to high praise on occasions: ‘For ditty and amorous ode I find Sir Walter Ralegh’s vein most lofty, insolent, and passionate’ (Puttenham, Art, 151). Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia (1598) is regularly cited in critical studies as evidence of contemporaneous praise of Shakespeare, but ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’ also appears in the list of those who ‘are the most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of Love’ (Meres, Palladis Tamia, fol. 284).¹¹ Elsewhere, if in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), Spenser celebrated one whose ‘song was all a lamentable lay, / Of great vnkindnesse, and of vsage hard, / Of Cynthia the Ladie of the sea, / Which from her presence faultlesse him debard’ (Spenser, Colin Clouts, lines 164–7, Shorter Poems, 349)¹², in Book 4 canto 7 of The ⁵ Cited in Latham (ed.), The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, xxi. ⁶ See Sir Walter Ralegh, The Prerogative of Parliaments in England proved in a dialogue (pro & contra) between a counsellor of state and a justice of peace (‘Middleborough’, 1628); and Sir Walter Ralegh, Judicious and Select Essays and Observations By that Renowned Knight Sir Walter Raleigh (London, 1650). ⁷ Michael L. Johnson, ‘Some Problems of Unity in Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 14.1 (1974), 17–30, 17. ⁸ Steven W. May, Sir Walter Ralegh (Boston, MA, 1989), 42. ⁹ Robert Nye (ed.), A Choice of Sir Walter Ralegh’s Verse (London, 1972), 11. Conversely, in later years, Sir Robert Naunton submitted in his Fragmenta Regalia (1641) that ‘the truth is [Elizabeth] took [Ralegh] for a kind of Oracle, which nettled them all, yea those he relied on, began to take this his sudden favour for an Alarm, and to be sensible of their own supplantation’: see Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta regalia, or, Observations on the late Queen Elizabeth, her times and favourites (London, 1641), 31. ¹⁰ George Puttenham, in Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (eds), The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition (Ithaca, NY, 2007). ¹¹ Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598). ¹² Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999).
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557 Faerie Queene (1596) his reader was presented with the Raleghan figure of the squire Timias, who is locked in an amor da lonh¹³ for the chaste Belphoebe, but who finds himself banished from her presence when his attentions falter in the encounter with her twin sister, Amoret. Lyrics in one way or another associated with, or attributed to, Ralegh appeared in anthologies during his lifetime: Britton’s Bower of Delights (1591), The Phoenix Nest (1593), The Arbour of Amorous Devices (1597), England’s Helicon (1600), and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602). Moreover, in keeping with the growing interest in the man himself with the passage of time, the number of such anthologies which included texts accompanied by his name increased after his execution in 1618: Remains after Death (1618), The Golden Fleece (1626), The Garland of Goodwill (1631), Posthumi (1633), Wit’s Interpreter (1655), Le Prince d’Amour (1660), England’s Worthies (1660), and Westminster Drollery (1672). William Byrd set ‘Farewell false love’ to music in his Psalms, Sonnets and Songs (1588), Robert Jones’s Second Book of Ayres (1601) did the same for ‘Now what is love’, and, for The First Set of Madrigals and Motets (1612), Orlando Gibbons included a setting of ‘What is our life? A play of passion’. By way of conclusion to these introductory thoughts, it might be added that Ralegh’s lyrics were attended to even by those whose responses might not always be characterised by admiration: I return you two papers in exchange, the one a letter from Sir Walter Ralegh to the King before he came to Salisbury, and withal half a dozen verses he made the night before his death, to take his farewell of Poetry wherein he had been a piddler even from his youth. (Chamberlain, letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, 7 November 1618, Letters, 2.179)¹⁴
Poetics and Reading Strategies Taking all the above considerations into account, some poems may be much more securely inscribed within the Raleghan canon than others, and this is the case for a lyric dating from the very beginning of his career as a poet. In his dedicatory verse for George Gascoigne’s The Steel Glass (1562), Ralegh rehearsed a mode that was to remain dear to him for years to come, drawing on a format whereby the evocation of a common experience led to the exposition in unadorned diction of a more proverbial truth: Sweet were the sauce, would please each kind of taste, The life likewise, were pure that never swerved, For spiteful tongues, in cankered stomachs placed, Deem worst of things, which best (percase) deserved. (Ralegh, ‘Sweet were the sauce’, lines 1–4, Poems, 1)¹⁵
¹³ This term originates from medieval troubadour literature of southern France (le pays d’Oc) concerning accounts of the delicacy of erotic devotion (‘fin’amors’) and how it imposes a relationship of vassalage upon the suitor. The service, or submission, of supreme attachment on the part of the man is typically dedicated to a married woman of a higher social status, and, if this devotion is acknowledged (for it is expressed at a distance, ‘de loin’), by the mistress, it is not reciprocated. In the literature of the amor da lonh, it is the suitor’s emotional turmoil and unceasing experience of frustration which is privileged in narrative terms. ¹⁴ John Chamberlain, in Norman Egbert McClure (ed.), The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA, 1939). ¹⁵ Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Ralegh’s poetry are taken from Michael Rudick (ed.), The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition, spelling modernised.
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558 - Such an authoritative poetic voice, which does not appear to admit of dissent, may represent a particular challenge for the more contemporary, perhaps post-Romantic, reader attuned to verse wedded closely to the relation of vividly realised, individuated experiences and scenes. However, as Yvor Winters argued robustly in the inter-war period, ‘the great aphoristic lyrics of Gascoigne and of Raleigh probably represent the highest level to which the mode has ever been brought . . . a poetry which permits itself originality, that is the breath of life, only in the most restrained and refined subtleties in diction and in cadence, but which by virtue of those subtleties inspires its universals with their full value as experience’.¹⁶ Furthermore, Ralegh was investing in a poetic mode which had enjoyed great longevity looking back to antiquity, and one which would endure long after the Tudor century had lapsed. Indeed, his textual voices often strenuously sought to promote their auctoritas precisely in relation to generalised evocations of human conduct and endurance. Strikingly, such a strategy can be exploited even when amorous subject matter is addressed: Her Face, her Tongue, her Wit So fair, so sweet, so sharp, First bent, then drew, then hit, Mine Eye, mine Ear, my Heart. ... Her face, her Tongue, her Wit, With Beams, with Sound, with Art Doth bind, doth Charm, doth Rule, mine eye, mine ear, my heart. ... This Eye, this Ear, this Heart, Shall joy, shall bind, shall swear, Your Face, your Tongue, your Wit To Serve, to Love, to Fear. (Ralegh, ‘Her Face, her Tongue, her Wit’, lines 1–4, 9–12, 21–4, Poems, 14–15)
Here, in keeping with contemporaneous poetic practice across early modern Europe, the lyric voice emblazons the mistress through a systematic enumeratio of her charms—or an anatomy of her constituent parts, for the suitor—and, in this way, tests the possibility that the purchase of the senses upon our everyday lives might enrich our powers of apprehension. Indeed, in this instance, Ralegh offers the reader an example of correlative verse (which, as a poetic mode, dates back to Ancient Greece) whereby given features or items are matched or ranged in comparison with other groupings so that the poem may be read ‘vertically’ as well as ‘horizontally’. Thus, exploiting the repeating rhythms of listing and anaphora as structuring principles for a verse narrative, the lyric urges us to see and to hear as we attend to the convergences of lover and loved one in the former’s account of amorous service. However, it should be underlined that it is the motions, the sense responses, of the partners which are summoned forth onto the page, rather than any detailed evocations of
¹⁶ Yvor Winters, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Lyric in England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation: Part I’, Poetry A Magazine of Verse, 53.5 (1939), 258–72, 263.
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559 the figures themselves, and this generalising emphasis is widely in evidence throughout the poems often associated with Ralegh.¹⁷ We re-encounter a tenacious resistance to delineate the agents in such a relationship with any specificity in a text attributed to him from the 1580s, ‘Calling to mind, mine eye went long about’ (sometimes entitled ‘The Excuse’). Here, the suitor is evoked in terms of his senseate faculties: ‘Another time I called unto mind, / It was my Heart, which all this woe had wrought’ (Ralegh, ‘Calling to mind’, lines 7–8, Poems, 9). In due course, the agonies endured by the unfulfilled lover briefly trigger the extravagant possibility of a death wish— ‘And told myself, myself slay I will’ (line 16)—a trope which had been in evidence in Surrey’s poetic narratives a generation earlier, for example; and yet, in this instance, trauma is resolved through a consolatio of faithfulness: ‘Yet when I saw myself to you was true, / I loved myself, because myself loved you’ (lines 17–18). Similarly, in a ballad which may be Raleghan in origin, ‘As you came from the holy land’, the donna angelicata in question ‘is neither white nor brown, / But as the heavens fair’, and yet the suitor cherishes the vision of her ‘angel-like face, / Who like a queen like a nymph, did appear / By her gait by her grace’ (Ralegh, ‘As you came from the holy land’, lines 9–10, 14–16, Poems, 16–17). During the early modern period, the faculties of sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing were widely thought to complement and educate each other. In The Garden of Eloquence, for example (first published in 1577), Henry Peacham acknowledged Aristotelian constructions of mind–body coordinations in sensory knowledge acquisition and might be seen as reaching forward for the kinds of perceptual distinctions which the natural philosopher Francis Bacon would seek in the next century: ‘we translate a word from the senses of the body, to the things of the mind’ (Peacham, 1577 Garden of Eloquence, sig. B2v).¹⁸ However, such lyrics as those excerpted above pursue their enquiries into human attachment under the broadest terms, investing in pared-down diction and typically accompanied by the strategies of masculine terminal rhyme schemes, anaphora, parallelism, and carefully positioned caesurae: caesurae which are themselves tactically made part of the textual music. Another example of a poetic text claimed for Ralegh’s pen is the poem entitled ‘Epitaph upon the right honourable Sir Philip Sidney’ (see Ralegh, Poems, 24–6). If the date of composition is open to speculation—and it appeared without attribution in The Phoenix Nest collection (1593)—it had already been identified before publication as belonging to the poet by Sir John Harington in a manuscript copy (see Ralegh, Poems, xli): To praise thy life, or wail thy worthy death, And want thy wit, thy wit high, pure, divine, Is far beyond the power of mortal line, Nor any one hath worth that draws breath. ... And I, that in thy time and living state, Did only praise thy virtues in my thought, As one that sealed the rising sun hath sought, With words and tears now wail thy timeless fate. ... (Ralegh, ‘To praise thy life’, lines 1–4, 9–12, Poems, 24)
¹⁷ In this context, see C. Q. Drummond, ‘Style in Ralegh’s Short Poems’, South Central Review, 3.1 (1986), 23–36. ¹⁸ Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577). For further discussion, see Andrew Hiscock, ‘ “Yet not past sense”: Walter Ralegh, Mary Wroth and the pleasure principles of the body’, Études Épistémè, 34 (2018), 42 paragraphs.
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560 - These extracts from a poem which extends over sixty lines of verse amply convey many of the defining characteristics of poetry frequently linked with the compositions of the court favourite. If Gary Waller argues that ‘[t]ypically, Ralegh’s poetry has superb control of mood, movement, voice modulation and an appropriately direct rhetoric’, this particular lyric surely endorses that contention.¹⁹ Here, we find finely balanced, end-stopped poetic measures (proportio) chiming together, supported by the resources of alliteration and enumeration, leading more generally to a mood of gravitas framed assuredly by masculine terminal rhymes. Moreover, we encounter again a solemn voice which unfalteringly communicates axiomatic, or what at least appears to be universally acknowledged, wisdom. In keeping with so much early modern verse, the thrust of this narrative concentrates on the artistic undertaking of praise, in this instance, an epideictic rhetorical discourse commemorating the dead. Indeed, amongst rhetorical practices inherited from the Greco-Roman world, the trope of apodixis, for example—in which an argument was consolidated through recourse to general experience or accepted principles—was thought worthy of imitation. In the later edition of The Garden of Eloquence (1593), Peacham defined apodixis as ‘a form of speech by which the Orator grounds his saying upon general and common experience’ (Peacham, 1593 Garden of Eloquence, 86).²⁰ Underlining the admiration which the trope continued to enjoy, Peacham insisted that ‘[o]f all the forms of speech there is not one more apt, or more mighty to confirm or confute then this, which is grounded upon the strong foundation of experience, confirmed by all times, allowed of in all places, and subscribed to by all men’ (Peacham, 1593 Garden of Eloquence, 87). The poetic voices we discover in such lyrics attributed to Ralegh most often treat wellestablished lines of perspective in debates upon the nature of time, society, and the transit of human life, echoing a discursive mode which, for the age, might claim revered origins in biblical homiletics and Senecan sententiae. In addition, reviewing the length of Ralegh’s career as a poet, this abiding concern to communicate poetically more generalised evocations of human experience is everywhere apparent in the selection and translation of poetic texts from antiquity in The History of the World (1614). In this magnum opus, the accounts of antique peoples are regularly punctuated by portentous narratorial pronouncements— ‘there are none in the World . . . so well disposed, whom (the reins being let loose) the continual fellowship and familiarity, and the examples of dissolute men may not corrupt and deform’ (Ralegh, History of the World, 1.1.11.14)—and short translations of poetic extracts taken from the ancients.²¹ Thus, in the account ‘Of our base and frail bodies’, Ralegh brings his meditations to a close with a translation of a verse from Marius Victor (a fifth-century rhetor from Marseilles), affirming that ‘Diseases, famine, enemies, in us no change have wrought, / What erst we were, we are; still in the same snare caught’ (Ralegh, History of the World, 1.2.3.24). In this instance, the chronicler is drawing upon the GrecoRoman (most notably Stoic) belief in a circuitus temporum, or the cyclical nature of human experience. From this perspective, the future, like the past, was repetitive and predictable; and, in future ages, conditions of existence would re-present themselves and demand strategic human intervention as they had in antiquity. Exposure to such thinking might be gained from readings of Cicero’s De Re Publica, De Divinatione, and letters to Atticus, for
¹⁹ Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1986), 117. ²⁰ Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, revised edition (London, 1593). ²¹ Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World (London, 1634). All references to the History are to Book, chapter, section, and page, respectively.
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561 example, Virgil’s fourth eclogue, Ovid’s Fasti, or Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae.²² Amongst Ralegh’s contemporaries, it is clear that Francis Bacon also pondered ‘these turning wheels of vicissitude’ in his essay ‘Of Vicissitude of Things’ (Bacon, Major Works, 454),²³ and later in the Religio Medici Sir Thomas Browne argued that ‘commonweals and the whole world, run not upon an helix that still enlarges, but on a circle’ (Browne, Religio Medici, 19).²⁴ More generally, we see in this and other lyrics discussed thus far that Ralegh does not indulge in a highly decorative style, but exploits a poetic logic by which narrative progression is constructed sequentially with recourse to general human experience and typically underpinned with tropes such as analogy, personification, and enumeration. Such a mode of proceeding is in evidence in the dedicatory sonnet for The Faerie Queene, ‘Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay’ (see Ralegh, Poems, 2), where his reader encounters transcendent forces (Love, Virtue, Oblivion) whose agency is enlisted for an allegorical pageant, in this instance, eulogising the mistress. Elsewhere, in ‘My body in the walls captived’ (which forms part of the ‘Cynthia’ collection in Ralegh’s own script held at Hatfield House in the Cecil papers, of which more below), the initial referencing of ‘My body’ is quickly translated to a more abstract, carceral poetic environment of one resisting ‘the wounds of spiteful envy’ and submitting to the fetters of ‘her ancient memory’: ‘Despair bolts up my doors, and I alone / speak to dead walls, but those hear not my moan’ (Ralegh, ‘My body in the walls captived’, lines 2, 4, 13–14, Poems, 25). In a rather different key, symbolic discourse is also certainly apparent in the poem entitled ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, a text repeatedly attributed to Ralegh, but only in the period after his death. Here, echoing the Pauline evocation of the Christian follower donning the armour of God (Ephesians 6:10–18), the pilgrim makes request for . . . my scallop shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon, My scrip* of joy, immortal diet, *small bag, pouch My bottle of salvation: My gown of glory, hope’s true gage*, *pledge, pawn, security And thus I’ll make my pilgrimage. (Ralegh, ‘Give me my scallop shell of quiet’, lines 1–6, Poems, 126)
In such texts, poetic voices are seen to invest energetically in the devices of allegory which look back to poetic practice in the late medieval and early Tudor periods, rather than the precise particularity of experience which is so often conventionally associated and admired in more recent times as forming a crucial element in early modern artistic creativity.
²² For further discussion here, see Hiscock, ‘ “Most fond and fruitlesse warre”: Ralegh and the Call to Arms’, in Christopher M. Armitage (ed.), Literary and Visual Ralegh (Manchester, 2013), 257–83. ²³ Sir Francis Bacon, in Brain Vickers (ed.), The Major Works (Oxford, 1996). ²⁴ Sir Thomas Browne, in Robin Robbins (ed.), Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus (Oxford, 1982). In The Discourses (which Ralegh knew), Machiavelli also draws famously upon Cicero’s ideas in De Re Publica, stressing ‘the cycle through which all commonwealths pass, whether they govern themselves or are governed’. See Niccolò Machiavelli, in Bernard Crick (ed.), Leslie J. Walker and Brian Richardson (trans.), The Discourses (Harmondsworth, 1978), 109. For further discussion, see also Hiscock, ‘ “Provide for the Future, and Times Succeeding”: Walter Ralegh and the Progress of Time’, in Andrea Brady and Emily Butterworth (eds), The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2010), 90–109.
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562 - Indeed, rather than pursuing an extended commitment to densely pictorial language or enargeia²⁵ associated with some of his contemporaries, Ralegh’s verse is often much more likely to give substance and status to symbolic, psychomachic narratives depicting struggle or conflict. Typically in such instances, his verse draws upon accounts of the cut-andthrust of social exchange or, more generally, the shaping forces of human existence with the assistance of didactic interventions: a modus operandi which he could easily have identified amongst contributions from the previous generation of ‘makers’ anthologised in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). Equally importantly, a number of critical studies have drawn attention to the probable influence of Ralegh’s nearer contemporaries upon his poetic decision-making. Douglas L. Peterson and Steven May, for example, look to the models established by Elizabethan poets such as Gascoigne, George Turberville, or Ralegh’s kinsman Arthur Gorges in their exploitation of spare diction, even rhythms, anaphora, and apothegmatic phrasing.²⁶ Certainly, Ralegh’s poetic determination to privilege narrative development over decorative art would have found support in Gascoigne’s promotion of the plain style [aphelia] which is addressed in his ‘Certain notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or rhyme in English’, published in his Posies (1575). Here, his reader is reminded that [y]our Invention being once devised, take heed that neither pleasure of rhyme, nor variety of device, do carry you from it: for as to use obscure and dark phrases in a pleasant Sonnet, is nothing delectable . . . I think it not amiss to forewarn you that you thrust as few words of many syllables into your verse as may be . . . [F]irst the most ancient English words are of one syllable, so that the more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seem. (Gascoigne, Posies, sigs. T2v, T4)²⁷
Indeed, both Gascoigne and Ralegh may be seen to forswear the pleasures of poetic ornament for a more vigorous concern to impart knowledge in their compositions. In direct comparison with a number of texts alluded to above, the lyric ‘Now we have present made’—deemed a ‘probable’ output by Ralegh by one of his most recent editors, Michael Rudick (see Ralegh, Poems, xlvii)—constructs poetic narrative with the mechanism of alternation: in this instance, moving selectively between expectations associated with the discourses of pastoralism and the Petrarchismo. This text was entered by Ralegh into one of his own manuscript books and clearly shares emphases of diction and narrative sequencing with the ‘Cynthia’ poems discussed below. Here, we enter a carefully orchestrated scene of praise of ‘Beauty that cannot fade’ (Ralegh, ‘Now we have present made’, line 4, Poems, 46). The panegyric adopts once again a mode of generalised diction—‘She as the valley of Peru / whose summer ever lasteth’ (lines 9–10)—deploys abstract nouns and allegorical evocations—‘Love, nature, and perfection / Princes of world’s affection’ (Ralegh, ‘Now we have present made’, lines 22–3, Poems, 47)—and brings the whole to a close with a Petrarchan evocation of unceasing devotion to the cruel fair with its attendant conventions of paradox ²⁵ This rhetorical trope is described by the Tudor rhetorician Richard Sherry as ‘when a thing is so described that it seemeth to the reader or hearer that he beholdeth it as it were in doing’. See Richard Sherry, A treatise of schemes [and] tropes very profitable for the better understanding of good authors (London, 1550), sig. E1v. This is differentiated in many rhetorical handbooks from energeia: the effective and persuasive presentation of an argument. On this distinction, see also Chapter 8, note 7; Chapter 11, note 38; and Chapter 21, note 29, in this volume. ²⁶ See Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles (Princeton, NJ, 1967), 162; and May, Sir Walter Ralegh, 25. ²⁷ George Gascoigne, The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (London, 1575).
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563 and antithesis: ‘But love’s and woe’s expense / Sorrow can only write’ (lines 31–2). Once again, we witness that if Ralegh typically refrains from densely metaphorical language, like many of his contemporaries, he invests deeply in the trope of personification, and, on occasions, to such an extent that the poetic environment draws closely within the ambit of emblem literature. Accounts from Classical mythology can, on occasions, be specifically exploited in Ralegh’s writing to undergird a poetic narrative. An early verse attribution, ‘Would I were changed, into that golden Shower’, for example, is organised wholly around references to Danaë, Leda, and Narcissus (see Ralegh, Poems, 8), but such strategies are not usual in those lyrics associated with him, where the undertaking is more typically focused upon familiar evocations of pastoral landscape, rather than mythical intrigue. In this context, perhaps the most famous lyric associated with Ralegh’s pen is what has been sometimes styled as ‘The Nymph’s Reply’ (see Ralegh, Poems, 119), a response to Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Come live with me and by my love’.²⁸ If, in subsequent centuries, this lyrical dialogue has continued to attract marked attention from readers and poets alike with contributions such as Emily Dickinson’s ‘I cannot live with you’, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ‘Come lie with me and by my love’, John Updike’s ‘To an Usherette’, C. Day Lewis’s ‘Song’, and William Carlos Williams’ ‘Raleigh was right’, it is evident with such productions as Donne’s ‘The Bait’ that this poetic encounter excited attention equally amongst Elizabethan contemporaries. In the ‘reply’ the Nymph proposes the possibility of stiff resistance to the shepherd’s wiles with the exercise of reason, reflection, and negotiation: ‘If all the world and love were young, / And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue: / Those pretty things my mind might move’ (Ralegh, ‘If all the world and love were young’, lines 25–7, Poems, 119). While maintaining the beguiling harmonies of rhyming tetrameters, the Nymph consigns the potential of seduction resolutely to a past, lost world of experience: the present is firmly inscribed within a mutable, sublunary reality where the pastoral world is given over to forbidding myth—‘And Philomel becometh dumb’ (line 31)—and waning energies: ‘To wayward Winter reckoning yields’ (line 34). The body may be a site of sensate faculties—‘A honey tongue, a heart of gall’ (line 35)—and the world one of material promises—‘Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses’ (line 37)—but there can be no yielding to their promise of fulfilment: ‘Thy Coral clasps and Amber Studs, / All these in me no means can move’ (lines 41–2). If the poem begins with the tense potentiality of hypothesis, it is resolved thus with stern scepticism, leaving the reader with a radically transformed sense of expectation as we move from one very different poetic environment to another within a short space of time. This Nymph remains mindful, like the scientists of Bacon’s New Atlantis, of ‘all Delusions and Deceits of the Sight’ (Bacon, New Atlantis, 33),²⁹ of the constant potential for sensory misapprehension and material distraction, and we are thus returned to a world of human conduct governed by dispassionate analysis and resolute judgement. Ralegh would refer with admiration to Bacon’s Advancement of Learning in his History of the World (see Ralegh, History of the World, 4.2.22), but at such moments we may also be reminded of a contention in the Essays of their contemporary, Sir William Cornwallis, who exclaimed, ‘Fie upon these engrossing senses of ours, that make all fare the worse for the satisfaction of one, and yet limit their objects, and carry level but certain distances. The mind, the mind is the Magazine [storehouse] of contentment’ (Cornwallis, Essays, sig. C4v).³⁰ ²⁸ For a discussion of Marlowe’s poem, see also Chapters 3, 10, 14, 29, and 33 in this volume. ²⁹ Sir Francis Bacon, New Atlantis. A Work Unfinished (London, 1659). ³⁰ Sir William Cornwallis, Essays (London, 1600–1).
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564 -
‘The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia’ If Robert Nye found that ‘it is indeed the levelness of his tone, the deliberation of his thought, and the quality and consistency of his feeling—in a word, the integrity of his utterance—which gives [Ralegh’s] verse its particular character’, such estimations are radically challenged by the ‘Cynthia’ poems.³¹ These four poetic texts surviving in Ralegh’s own script were identified for the first time in the Cecil papers in the nineteenth century. They are ‘If Cynthia be a queen’, ‘My body in the walls captived’, ‘Sufficeth it to you, my joys interred’ (entitled ‘The 21th and the last book of the Ocean to Cynthia’), and ‘My days delights, my springtime joys fordone’ (entitled ‘The end of the books of the Ocean’s love to Cynthia and the beginning of the 22nd book, entreating of sorrow’) (see Ralegh, Poems, 47–66). Together with the lyric ‘Now we have present made’ (see Ralegh, Poems, 46–7), this grouping shares stylistic and thematic emphases, despite having significant variations in poetic form and length: ‘My body in the walls captived’ is a sonnet, for example, whereas ‘the 21th and the last book’ extends over 522 verse lines. There is no secure manner in which to date their composition or to estimate their state of completion. In their different ways, they share a sustained investment in the angst-ridden suitor voice of the Petrarchismo, that Europe-wide poetic movement which became so pervasive that it was soon impossible in the early modern period to envisage the erotic lyric without exploiting the tropes associated with the Italian poet in his accounts of the melancholic lover painfully teasing out the details of his unanswered, unruly desires. This was a movement, for example, in which the French poet Pierre de Ronsard might iterate, ‘Je ne veus plus que chanter de tristesse, / Car autrement chanter je ne pourrois, / Veu que je suis absent de ma maitresse: / Si je chantois autrement, je mourrois’ [I only wish to sing of sadness, for I could not sing of other matters, given that I am away from my mistress, I would die if I sang otherwise] (Ronsard, chanson 37, lines 1–4, Les Amours, 423).³² The Canzoniere of Petrarch remained the focal point of veneration and imitation for such writing, but this particular poetic strain might look much earlier to find its origins in antiquity, such as in the verse of Ovid, for example: ‘flendus amor meus est—elegiae flebile carmen; / non facit ad lacrimas barbitos ulla meas’ [I must weep, for my love—and elegy is the weeping strain; no lyre is suited to my tears] (Ovid, ‘Sappho to Phaon’, lines 7–8, Heroides, 180–1).³³ If the ‘Cynthia’ poems cannot be dated securely, some critical discussions have located the spur for their composition to the early 1590s when Ralegh was exiled from court on account of his illicit marriage to the lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton.³⁴ Thus, if in the ‘21th book’ the lover is discovered ‘Alone, forsaken, friendless on the shore / with many wounds, with death’s cold pangs embraced / writes in the dust as one that could no more / whom love, and time, and fortune had defaced’ (Ralegh, ‘Sufficeth it to you, my joys interred’, lines 89–92, Poems, 51–2), a very similar voice appears in the correspondence of these years of banishment from the royal presence. In July 1592, for example, Ralegh wrote to Robert Cecil that
³¹ Nye (ed.), A Choice, 16. ³² Pierre de Ronsard, in André Gendre (ed.), Les Amours et Les Folastries (1552–1560) (Paris, 1993). ³³ Ovid, in Grant Showerman (ed. and trans.), revised G. P. Goold, Heroides. Amores (Cambridge, MA, 1914). ³⁴ Waller proposes, more generally, that ‘[i]t appears to be the barely revised draft of an appeal, if not to the Queen herself, at least to that part of Ralegh’s mind he knew to be occupied by her power’: English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, 119.
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565 the Queen goes away so far off,—whom I have followed so many years with so great love and desire, in so many journeys, and am now left behind her, in a dark prison all alone . . . even now my heart is cast into the depth of all misery. I that was want to behold her riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus, the gentle wind blowing her fair hair about her pure cheeks, like a nymph . . . Behold the sorrow of this world!³⁵
This experience (authentic or histrionised) or the memory of it may or may not lie at the heart of the ‘Cynthia’ collection of poems. Certainly, Spenser appeared appreciative enough of this profile of the variously distraught, contrite court favourite for him to assert in The Faerie Queene that ‘Ne other drinke there did [Timias] euer tast, / Then running water, tempred with his teares’ (Faerie Queene, 4.7.41, lines 6–7).³⁶ More generally, the insistences on the mythic status of the sovereign, the speaker’s social marginality, and this anguished sense of his impermanent status in the affections of his mistress are strikingly counterpointed in the lyrics of this grouping. To seek new worlds, for gold, for praise, for glory, to try desire, to try love severed far, when I was gone she sent her memory more strong than were ten thousand ships of war ... Such heat in Ice, such fire in frost remained such trust in doubt, such comforts in despair much like the gentle Lamb, though lately weaned plays with the dug though finds no comfort there, But as a body violently slain, retaineth warmth although the spirit be gone, and by a power in nature moves again till it be laid below the fatal stone. (Ralegh, ‘Sufficeth it to you, my joys interred’, lines 61–4, 69–76, Poems, 50–1)
If, in such verse, Ralegh showcases many of the tropes associated with the Petrarchismo, they are not integrated into a securely developing narrative in the manner that has been witnessed earlier in this discussion. Indeed, Robert Nye found that ‘the poem is more obsessive than understandable’, while Philip Edwards argued that ‘[t]he poem is a fevered elegy, obscure, turbulent and erratic, with the incoherence almost of delirium in the flow of its thought’.³⁷ Clearly, in reading the ‘21th book’, many of Ralegh’s readers have found themselves transported into a poetic environment of affective disorder bereft of any hope of salvation: the emphases upon dispossession and irrevocable loss remain unattenuated by any prospect of reciprocated emotion. Instead, condemned to repeating cycles of tormented endurance, the speaker remains inert, bound fast by the aporia of human experience and the
³⁵ Cited in Edwards, Sir Walter Ralegh, 131–2. ³⁶ Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ³⁷ Nye (ed.), A Choice, 19; Edwards, Sir Walter Ralegh, 102.
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566 - insecurity of human knowledge. The latter speaks most directly to an attitude that was often claimed for Ralegh in his own lifetime, that of scepticism.³⁸ Amongst the most important intellectual legacies from antiquity cherished in early modern Europe, scepticism continued to enjoy broad influence across the Continent. Indeed, the ideas of the philosophical school of the ancients had been renewed for attention in the sixteenth century by the highly influential scholarship of Justus Lipsius and the compilation of the works of Sextus Empiricus by Henri Estienne, for example, and it had been communicated even more widely to European audiences through the popularity of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne. In the ‘21th book’, Ralegh offers his readers the most sustained evocations in verse not only of affective upheaval, but of epistemological flux: we appear to enter a cognitive inertia where thoughts revert compulsively to assertions of diminution and the incoherence of a personal and a seemingly inevitably degenerative cosmic order in the absence of the loved one. Interestingly, in the fragments that comprise ‘The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia’ there is little close association between the title and the tenor of the poetic cogitations. Nonetheless, in its very thwarting of poetic expectations (in terms of narrative development and resolution), this text has continued to excite critical attention and admiration. Michael L. Johnson found that ‘the work’s power is derived from images of the disrupted pastoral landscape’, while Steven May has identified it as Ralegh’s ‘finest poetic achievement’.³⁹ Even earlier in the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis had drawn attention to the ‘sombre passion’ of the poetic narrative: ‘The monotony, the insanity, and the rich, dark colours of an obsessive despair are powerfully expressed’.⁴⁰ In this extended aria of erotic anguish, we find no trace of the controlled assurance or vatic pronouncements detected in some lyrics analysed earlier in this chapter. In this context, it is perhaps significant that in the ‘21th book’ Ralegh explores more frequently the supple energies of enjambment than is in evidence elsewhere in his oeuvre. Instead of a poetic world of didactic or sage-like reflections, this particular poetic narrative searches out the heroic potential, the exquisitely painful self-drama, of victimisation exemplified in the plight of the rejected lover. We are not greeted with a more conventional Petrarchan, Neoplatonic environment in which earthly beauty may be seen to draw the suitor upward onto a spiritually enriching plane of understanding,⁴¹ but with an extravagant scene of unremitting torment accompanied by the labours of (self-) mourning: She is gone, She is lost, she is found, she is ever fair, Sorrow draws weakly, where love draws not to Woe’s cries sound nothing, but only in love’s ear. Do then by dying, what life cannot do. Unfold thy flocks, and leave them to the fields
³⁸ For further discussion of early modern scepticism, see, e.g., William Hamlin, Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke, 2005); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 2011); and Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles (eds), Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy (Cham, Switzerland, 2016). ³⁹ Johnson, ‘Some Problems of Unity’, 30; May, Sir Walter Ralegh, 52. ⁴⁰ C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), 520. Nye also concurs with this critical response, declaring that the ‘Cynthia’ poems constitute ‘Ralegh’s finest achievement’: see Nye (ed.), A Choice, 18. ⁴¹ For further discussion here, see A. D. Cousins ‘The Coming of Mannerism: The Later Ralegh and the Early Donne’, English Literary Renaissance, 9.1 (1979), 86–107.
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567 to feed on hills, or dales, where likes them best of what the summer, or the spring-time yields for love, and time, hath given thee leave to rest. (Ralegh, ‘Sufficeth it to you, my joys interred’, lines 493–500, Poems, 65)
Katherine Duncan-Jones contends persuasively that ‘the poem we have could not have been shown to the Queen’, but that its value lies in the fact that it unveils early modern verse in ‘process rather than a completed state: thoughts in the thinking, conflicting emotions struggling in vain for resolution, series of images which the poet has not forced into a pattern’.⁴² Similarly minded, Marion Campbell has also underlined that the longer texts in this grouping are ‘radically incomplete, addressed to an absent Queen whose presence alone would complete it’.⁴³ It might be added that the seemingly unfinished nature of this text mirrors precisely the unending nature of the mortification being related: where joyful birds sing neither lovely lays nor Philomen recounts her direful moan, No feeding flocks, no shepherd’s company that might renew my dolorous conceit. (Ralegh, ‘Sufficeth it to you, my joys interred’, lines 27–30, Poems, 24).⁴⁴
In the remorseless account of personal defeat and cultural disintegration, which survives in the ‘21th book’, we inevitably search in vain for strains of reintegration, of restitution, as Ralegh has bequeathed a demonstration in adynaton [hyperbole taken to the point of impossibility], in this instance, a peculiarly compelling enquiry into impossible conditions of existence communicated through an unremitting discourse of hyperbolic excess.
Concluding Thoughts This discussion began with an investigation into the critical querying of Ralegh’s poetic corpus and it is perhaps fitting that we should return to these initial reflections. In the 1950s, the eminent Ralegh critic and editor Agnes Latham pointed out dolefully the precarious nature of Ralegh’s textual legacies to later centuries: Although he distinguished himself in so many ways of life, everything he did seems to have been tainted by a curious impermanence; to have had something sketchy and amateurish about it. Not one of his Virginian expeditions succeeded, and his schemes for Guiana came to nothing. His history was never finished and his poetry is lost.⁴⁵ ⁴² Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘The Date of Raleigh’s “21th: and Last Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia” ’, Review of English Studies, 21.82 (1970), 143–58, 147, 158. In this context, see also Robert E. Stillman, ‘ “Words Cannot Knytt”: Language and Desire in Ralegh’s The Ocean to Cynthia’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 27.1 (1987), 35–51; and Cousins, ‘The Coming of Mannerism’. ⁴³ Marion Campbell, ‘Inscribing Imperfection: Sir Walter Ralegh and the Elizabethan Court’, English Literary Renaissance, 20.2 (1990), 233–53, 241. ⁴⁴ C. F. Tucker Brooke went perhaps furthest in the critical assertion of the poem’s incompleteness, stating that ‘Ralegh’s Cynthia, his one long poem, we do not really possess . . . All that we do possess is an addendum of five hundred and fifty lines’. See C. F. Tucker Brooke, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh as Poet and Philosopher’, English Literary History, 5.2 (1938), 93–112, 99. ⁴⁵ Latham (ed.), The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, xiv.
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568 - The present discussion has sought to depart from this critical mode of grieving when engaging with the textual output of the Elizabethan court favourite and Jacobean prisoner in the Tower, and, indeed, it is this critical response which has increasingly characterised Raleghan studies in more recent decades. Gary Waller, for example, has insisted that ‘Ralegh’s importance . . . belies the slimness of his poetic output . . . [He must be considered] one of the most important of the Elizabethan courtly “makers” ’. He adds equally strategically that with regard to the thorny issues of attribution in the case of Ralegh, ‘[i]n one important sense, however, it does not matter: Elizabethan court poetry often speaks with the voice of a collectivity and its authors are scriptors or spokesmen for the values of a dominant class and its ideology’.⁴⁶ As we have seen, Ralegh was perceived as the exponent of an important poetic for his own generation of early modern ‘makers’, producing texts of extravagant amorous turmoil, and, elsewhere, of sobering, sometimes gnomic reflection. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Ralegh never argued for the eternising powers of verse, being much more exercised by the human potential for endurance. In antiquity, Aristotle (or the Pseudo-Aristotle) enquired notably in the Problems, ‘Why is it that all those men who have become extraordinary in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are obviously melancholic?’ (Aristotle, Problems, 2.276–7).⁴⁷ It is indeed through the many and various accounts of grim cogitation, affective distress, and biting social critique in his verse that Ralegh nonetheless compels us to bear witness to the abiding sense of a melancholic sensibility at work, but a sensibility which is equally capable of intriguing hypersensitivity, subtly nuanced creativity, and some exceptional poetic achievement.
⁴⁶ Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, 122, 117. ⁴⁷ Aristotle, in Robert Mayhew and David C. Mirhady (eds and trans.), Problems, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 2011).
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32 Mary Sidney Herbert Gillian Wright
Amongst the great poets of the late sixteenth century, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, is the least known and was, until recently, the least appreciated. This lack of reputation is not due to any dearth of appreciation for her poetic skill; on the contrary, Sidney Herbert’s creative brilliance has been widely recognised from her own time until the present day. John Donne, writing shortly after her death, identified her with the biblical prophet and songstress Miriam, and praised the Sidney-Pembroke psalter (which she cotranslated with her brother, Philip) as superior to all previous English versions of the Psalms.¹ In the mid-twentieth century, her virtuosity as both poet and translator was championed by scholars such as J. C. A. Rathmell, who approvingly quoted Alexander Grosart’s description of her Psalm paraphrases as ‘infinitely in advance of her brother’s in thought, epithet and melody’, and Robert Coogan, who described her rendering of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte [Triumph of Death] as ‘the finest translation of this triumph in the English language’.² That her works remained, nonetheless, relatively little-read can be attributed to several factors. Sidney Herbert’s preference for manuscript rather than print circulation of her poetry initially restricted its readership and later smacked of amateurism to nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics unfamiliar with early modern publishing conventions. Translation, her favoured poetic mode, has often been undervalued by postRomantic aesthetics that valorise originality and authenticity, especially when, as with the Psalms, the translated source-text cannot be linked with a prestigious literary author. The fact that her most important and substantial work, her 107 Psalm paraphrases, represents the culmination of a project initiated by her brother Philip (to whom she represents declared herself inferior) may also have served to undermine her achievements in the eyes of earlier generations of readers, some of whom may have been all too likely to dismiss or disparage the achievements of women writers. Attitudes, however, have changed, and scholarship on Sidney Herbert’s poetry has benefited greatly from the revaluation of early modern manuscript circulation, translation, and literary collaboration, as well as women’s writing, over recent decades. Margaret P. Hannay’s exemplary biography, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, followed by the Oxford Collected Works co-edited by Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, has helped to lay the foundations for a new generation of Sidney Herbert scholarship by critics such as Gavin Alexander, Danielle Clarke, and Femke
¹ See John Donne, ‘Upon the translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke his Sister’, in Sir Herbert Grierson (ed.), Poetical Works (London, 1933), 318–19. ² J. C. A. Rathmell (ed.), ‘Introduction’, The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke (New York, 1963), xi; Robert Coogan, ‘Petrarch’s “Trionfi” and the English Renaissance’, Studies in Philology, 67.3 (1970), 306–27, 324.
Gillian Wright, Mary Sidney Herbert In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Gillian Wright 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0032
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570 - Molekamp.³ Sidney Herbert’s achievements as a translator, poetic experimenter, and literary reader are, in consequence, better appreciated in the twenty-first century than ever before. It remains likely, however, that the true scale of Sidney Herbert’s poetic endeavours is now both unknown and unknowable. Both the homes where she lived for much of her adult life—Wilton House in Wiltshire, and Baynard’s Castle in London—burnt down in the mid-seventeenth century, and it is possible that some, perhaps many, unique literary manuscripts were lost in these conflagrations.⁴ Given the poetic skill apparent in even her earliest extant verse, it is difficult to believe that Sidney Herbert did not write more poetry than has survived to the present day. By definition, what does survive is that which was circulated beyond Wilton and Baynard’s before their destruction, and which may therefore represent other readers’ interests as much as hers. Any attempt to account for the shape and extent of Sidney Herbert’s poetic creativity needs to be mindful of these possible gaps in our knowledge and their potential implications for mapping her work. Acclaimed both in her own time and now, Sidney Herbert is nonetheless often treated, even in twenty-first-century scholarship, as a case apart, her virtuosity, apparently, serving to separate her from, rather than connect her to, the literature of her own time. The brilliance of her Psalm translations, moreover, has sometimes tended to obscure some of her other, less well-known but no less intriguing poetic works. The present chapter engages with the full range of both her printed and manuscript poetry, exploring the often underestimated generic and tonal variety of her verse and locating it more firmly amidst the literary culture of the 1590s and early 1600s. It also considers why, given the high esteem in which Sidney Herbert’s poetry is held, she remains such an elusive figure within early modern literary scholarship. Why is such dazzling poetry so difficult to write about?
Sidney Herbert In Print A well-informed literary reader in the late Elizabethan era would have had numerous reasons to be aware of Mary Sidney Herbert. Two of her translations, the religious treatise A Discourse of Life and Death (from Philippe Duplessis-Mornay) and the closet drama Antonius (from Robert Garnier), were published in 1592, while her editions of her brother’s works were issued under the title The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia in 1593 and 1598. Sidney Herbert was also the subject of numerous dedications in the early 1590s, in such works as Abraham Fraunce’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch (1591), Edmund Spenser’s The Ruines of Time (1591), Nicholas Breton’s The Pilgrimage to Paradise (1592), and Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592) and Cleopatra (1594). Some of these dedications, furthermore, identify Sidney Herbert as herself a poet. Spenser’s depiction of her, in The Ruines of Time, as singing ‘with deep harts sorrowing’ (Spenser, Ruines of Time, line 318, Shorter Poems, 176)⁵ in memory of her brother seems likely to allude to an elegy for Philip Sidney, while Daniel’s praise of ‘Those Hymns which thou dost consecrate to heaven, /
³ See Margaret Patterson Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford, 1990); Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (eds), The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998); Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford, 2006); Danielle Clarke, ‘The Countess of Pembroke and the Practice of Piety’, Literature Compass, 9.3 (2012), 252–61; and Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford, 2013). ⁴ See Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 177. ⁵ Edmund Spenser, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, 1999).
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571 Which Israel’s Singer to his God did frame’ (Daniel, Tragedy of Cleopatra, dedication to Mary Sidney Herbert, lines 57–8, Complete Works, 3.25)⁶ is an unmistakable reference to her Psalm translations. Sidney Herbert’s authorship of both original and translated verse would thus have been at least potentially knowable to a wider reading public outside the literary elite. For such non-elite readers, a first encounter with Sidney Herbert’s own poetry may have come through Astrophel, a pastoral collection in memory of Philip Sidney published with Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Againe in 1595. The seven elegies within Astrophel include one by Spenser himself, two by Lodowick Bryskett, and one by Sir Walter Ralegh. They also include an untitled work described within Spenser’s elegy (which it immediately follows) as a ‘dolefull lay’, sung by ‘his sister that Clorinda hight’ (Spenser, Astrophel, lines 214, 211, Shorter Poems, 380). Whether ‘The Doleful Lay of Clorinda’, as it has become known, is really by Sidney Herbert, or whether the true author was Spenser himself, writing in her persona, remains the subject of critical disagreement.⁷ The ambiguity of the attribution within Astrophel is compounded by the general critical assessment of the Lay as a relatively weak piece of work, untypical of either Sidney Herbert or Spenser at their best. Hannay and her co-editors classify the poem as a disputed work, though the structure of their arguments tends towards endorsing Sidney Herbert’s authorship: they suggest, for instance, that ‘Spenser would be most unlikely to insult a patron by writing an inferior piece in his own style and attributing it to her’, and speculate that, by comparison with the stylistic polish of her Psalms, the ‘Doleful Lay’ may have been ‘an early effort’.⁸ It may, conceivably, have been the elegy apparently alluded to in The Ruines of Time. Failing any compelling new evidence, the authorship of ‘The Doleful Lay of Clorinda’ is likely to remain subject to critical dispute. What can be said for sure, however, is that Astrophel associates the ‘Lay’, albeit ambiguously, with the Countess of Pembroke, and that it may have been taken as hers by some contemporary readers. The hypothesis that ‘The Doleful Lay’ is an early work by Sidney Herbert also opens up the possibility that the poem—positioned within Astrophel as secondary to Spenser’s—was instead the originating and foundational element within this important collection. On this reading, Sidney Herbert’s commemoration of her brother may have given rise not only to the remaining elegies on her brother but also to some of their governing conceits, including the generic choice of the pastoral mode and the image of Philip Sidney as a flower. If (as in the Collected Works) ‘The Doleful Lay’ is read as a free-standing poem, without its traditional Spenserian frame, some of its most distinctive properties can be more readily perceived. Its speaking voice, for instance, is not only unnamed but is not explicitly gendered, and does not assert a familial connection with its subject. The speaker is rather identified only as the most bereft of all those who now mourn Astrophel: ‘Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘Doleful Lay’, line 36, Collected Works, 1.134).⁹ It is also curiously reticent as to Philip’s own familial and political status. The dead Astrophel is nowhere identified as a member of the Sidney family, but is described as ‘lineally deriv’d from Angels’ race’ (line 64). No reference is made, moreover, to either Philip’s public life or ⁶ Samuel Daniel, in Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Complete Works in Verse and Prose, 5 vols. (London, 1885–96). ⁷ For a summary of differing views, see Patrick Cheney, ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, Astrophel, and The Doleful Lay of Clorinda (1595)’, in Richard A. McCabe (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 2010), 237–55, 250. ⁸ Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan (eds), Collected Works, 1.128, 132. ⁹ Mary Sidney Herbert, in Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan (eds), Collected Works, spelling modernised.
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572 - the circumstances of his death (serving with the English army against the Spanish in the Netherlands), though dark hints are dropped as to the ‘jealous rancour’ and fears of ‘harm’ to which he was subject during his lifetime (Sidney Herbert, ‘Doleful Lay’, lines 84, 87, Collected Works, 1.135). Instead, Astrophel is characterised as a poet, and, still more specifically, as a love poet, a ‘merry maker’ of ‘love-lays’ and ‘riddles’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘Doleful Lay’, lines 48, 43, 45, Collected Works, 1.134). Philip Sidney’s Psalm translations are not mentioned, even after the poem’s turn towards spiritual consolation in its last five stanzas. While Astrophel, translated to Paradise, is said to have ‘well understood’ the ‘strange notes’ that now lull him to sleep (Sidney Herbert, ‘Doleful Lay’, line 75, Collected Works, 1.135), there is no suggestion that his own poetry might have included similar ‘notes’. The poem closes, rather, with a reiterated contrast between the ‘happy’ Astrophel, now safe in the ‘everlasting bliss’ of heaven (lines 91, 85), and the sorrow of the pastoral community that now mourns his loss. That so much of the secondary literature on ‘The Doleful Lay of Clorinda’ has focused on authorship has perhaps distracted from the poem’s subtle but strategic use of elegiac convention. The Astrophel of the ‘Lay’ is carefully positioned in a coterie space between public and private. While stressing his centrality to his own immediate community, the poem makes no comment on his public activities and gives nothing away about his private life. It also resists any sense of consolation for those who survive him, who now seem suspended in perpetual and mutually reinforcing grief.¹⁰ The redemptive powers so often claimed by elegy are explicitly denied by a speaker who can see no prospect of comfort from either men or heaven and who constructs the poem as addressed only ‘to my self ’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘Doleful Lay’, line 19, Collected Works, 1.133) and the bereaved landscape (see lines 23–4). Whether ‘The Doleful Lay’ was genuinely by Sidney Herbert or not, its inclusion in Astrophel publicly associated her with both her late brother and a certain style of mourning for him. If the poem is indeed hers, its publication within Astrophel may have appealed to her as a discreet means of publicising grief for Philip Sidney and shaping the terms in which he would be remembered, complementing her editorship of his literary works. Perhaps not coincidentally, the one other poem ascribed to Sidney Herbert in print in her own lifetime also connected her with a culturally powerful individual with whom she seems to have wanted to be publicly associated. ‘A Dialogue between Two Shepherds, Thenot and Piers, in praise of Astrea’, published in 1602 in Francis Davison’s A Poetical Rhapsody, alludes to Queen Elizabeth both through the use of the sobriquet ‘Astrea’ (the goddess of Justice, to whom Elizabeth was often compared) and in its subtitle, ‘made by the excellent Lady, the Lady Mary Countess of Pembroke, at the Queen’s Majesty’s being at her house at—Anno 15—’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘A Dialogue’, subtitle, Collected Works, 1.89). Though it is not clear how Davison gained access to this text, he can scarcely have hoped to please his dedicatee, Sidney Herbert’s elder son, William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke, if he had obtained the Countess’s poem without permission. Though the dating of the poem within A Poetical Rhapsody is unclear, Mary Erler has convincingly linked its composition with Elizabeth’s planned visit to Wilton in summer 1599.¹¹ The poem thus represents a public complement ¹⁰ On the elegiac motif of resisting consolation, see also Chapters 18 and 19 in this volume. Contrast the discussion of Sidney Herbert’s Triumph of Death—and the way it offers both personal consolation and spiritual reassurance—below. ¹¹ See Mary C. Erler, ‘Davies’s Astraea and Other Contexts of the Countess of Pembroke’s “A Dialogue” ’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 30.1 (1990), 41–61. The visit was cancelled due to fears of a Spanish invasion.
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573 to Sidney Herbert’s ‘Even now that care’, a commendatory poem addressed to Elizabeth which is also thought to have been written in honour of the royal visit to Wilton, but which remained unpublished in the period. Sidney Herbert’s ‘Dialogue’, as its title suggests, is a praise poem, intended both to compliment the queen and to bring credit on her hosts at Wilton. Deceptively simple in appearance, the ‘Dialogue’ in fact exemplifies Sidney Herbert’s particular skills as a poet: the ability to select thoughtfully from a wide range of cultural materials, to inhabit diverse voices, to put traditional forms to innovative purposes, and to take the reader by surprise. As Erler points out, Sidney Herbert’s construction of the queen as Astrea, while consonant with the laudatory conventions of the 1590s, is selective in its reworking of the Astrea myth, largely eschewing religious imagery while emphasising the goddess’s association with the return of spring.¹² The poem’s strongly pastoral tone is achieved not through its main text, which includes no explicitly pastoral language or allusions, but rather through its paratextual apparatus and form. Glossed as ‘shepherds’ in the subtitle, the names ‘Thenot’ and ‘Piers’ would have been best known to a 1590s reader through their use in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) (respectively, in the Februarie, Aprill, and November, and the Maye and October eclogues). The dialogue’s metrical form, tail rhyme—which juxtaposes iambic tetrameters with snappy shorter lines ending in an unstressed syllable—had been used for Psalm translation by Clément Marot and Theodore Beza as well as Philip Sidney, but was probably best known in the 1590s through its use in the Calender (in the March eclogue).¹³ The form’s jaunty connotations (ultimately deriving from its use in Chaucer’s comic Tale of Sir Thopas) might have seemed incongruous given both the frequently serious applications of Spenserian pastoral and the cultural and political responsibilities inherent in praising the queen. They were not to be the only unexpected aspect of this inventive poem. For writers of the late 1590s, praising Queen Elizabeth must have represented a formidable challenge. Both the length of the queen’s reign and her own increasing age would have exacerbated the difficulty of finding original yet plausible ways of complimenting her. Though Sidney Herbert’s first speaker, Thenot, does hail Astrea as ‘so fair’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘A Dialogue’, line 13, Collected Works, 1.89), the overall emphasis of the poem is less on the queen’s beauty than on her wisdom and virtue (see lines 19–20), as well as on her worldaltering qualities: she dispels evil and generates good (see lines 25–30); she is her people’s only true source of joy (see lines 31–6); she radiates more light than the day (see lines 43–8). The poem even risks a hint at the queen’s advancing age, through Piers’ rejection of Thenot’s characterisation of Astrea as ‘A field in flow’ry Robe arrayed, / In Season freshly springing’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘A Dialogue’, lines 38–9, Collected Works, 1.90). While Piers’ rejoinder—‘That Spring endures but shortest time, / This never leaves Astrea’s clime’ (lines 40–1)—is mainly concerned to stress the durability of Astrea’s life-giving powers, it also, by necessity, gestures towards the length of her reign, and thus her age. Behind the generic superlatives is a touch of realism. ‘A Dialogue between Two Shepherds’ testifies not only to Sidney Herbert’s well-known skill in manipulating poetic form but also to a characteristic less commonly associated with her: irony and humour. The structural joke on which the ‘Dialogue’ turns is that Piers— whose name and rhetoric associate him with plainness (via The Shepherdes Calender and, ultimately, the Piers Plowman tradition)—in fact flatters Astrea more comprehensively than
¹² See Erler, ‘Davies’s Astraea’, 48.
¹³ See Erler, ‘Davies’s Astraea’, 47.
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574 - Thenot, through his repeated rejection of the latter’s metaphors as inadequate to the queen’s supreme greatness. The poem, moreover, ends when Piers argues that words themselves are insufficient to honour Astrea as she deserves; his aphoristic declaration, ‘But silence, nought can praise her’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘A Dialogue’, line 60, Collected Works, 1.91), brings the dialogue to an immediate and logically unavoidable conclusion. The poem’s greatest compliment to Elizabeth is thus its confidence in her to appreciate—and be unoffended by—its own witty and self-cancelling use of encomiastic convention. In addition to its obvious Spenserianisms, ‘A Dialogue between Two Shepherds’ also displays close affinities with Philip Sidney’s poetry: through its wit, its use of the singing match form (reminiscent of Philip’s Lady of May and Old Arcadia), and its sometimes unexpected allusions to Philip’s own texts. Thenot’s plea that Piers ‘of friendship’ resolve the paradoxes inherent in praising Elizabeth (Sidney Herbert, ‘A Dialogue’, line 55, Collected Works, 1.90) recalls Astrophil’s appeal that the moon ‘of fellowship’ explain the contradictions of Petrarchan love (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 31, line 9, Poems, 180);¹⁴ the difference is that Piers, unlike the moon, replies. Such intertextual connections, however, remain at the level of allusion, demonstrating, indeed, that even when Sidney Herbert’s poetry seems furthest from her brother’s, his formative influence can still be discerned in her work. That influence was to be at its most powerful—though also its most complex—in Sidney Herbert’s magnum opus, her poetic paraphrases for the Sidney–Pembroke psalter.
Sidney Herbert’s Psalms In recent years, scholarship on Sidney Herbert’s Psalm paraphrases has proliferated.¹⁵ Much of this scholarship, as already noted, has built on the Collected Works, in which both her sophisticated use of sources and the complicated early textual history of her work are meticulously documented. Subsequent research has continued to explore the textual complexities of Sidney Herbert’s Psalms, while also reading her work through such frameworks as collaborative authorship, the politics of sixteenth-century Psalm translation, and early modern devotional practice, especially by women. The challenge, for Sidney Herbert scholars, of keeping so many critical contexts in play is further exacerbated by the sheer number and diversity of her Psalm paraphrases; while such plurality is at the heart of Sidney Herbert’s appeal to the literary reader, it also, necessarily, resists any attempt to create a straightforward critical account of her poetic methods or theological priorities. A further challenge, for scholars keen to appreciate Sidney Herbert’s distinctive contribution to English poetic Psalmody, is that of placing her work on the Psalms in relation to Philip Sidney’s. To do justice to the complexities of the siblings’ literary relationship, scholars need to account for Philip’s formative role in his sister’s poetry without either eliminating Sidney Herbert’s creative agency or emphasising her virtuosity at her brother’s expense. This is a finely calibrated critical task. The distinctive qualities of Sidney Herbert’s Psalm translation, particularly in relation to Philip Sidney, can best be appreciated through comparison of Psalm 14 (as translated by
¹⁴ Sir Philip Sidney, in William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), spelling modernised. ¹⁵ For a useful summary of, and contribution to, recent scholarship on the Psalms, see Danielle Clarke, ‘Memory and Memorialization in the Psalmes of Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’, Memory Studies, 11.1 (2018), 85–99.
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575 Philip) and Psalm 53 (as translated by Sidney Herbert). The two Psalms are almost identical in the Geneva Bible (likely to have been the chief biblical source for the Sidney–Pembroke Psalter), differing substantially only in a few clauses towards the end of the Psalm.¹⁶ The survival of two different versions of Psalm 53—an early rendering, extant in Samuel Woodforde’s seventeenth-century transcription of Sidney Herbert’s working papers; and a later version, extant in John Davies’ scribal presentation copy—also enables developments in her approach to translation to be traced with some precision.¹⁷ Psalm 14/53 is one of the most familiar of the Psalms. In the Geneva text, it begins with the arresting declaration: The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God: they have corrupted, and done an abominable work: there is none that doeth good. (Psalm 14:1, Geneva Bible, fol. 237)¹⁸
Philip Sidney’s version of Psalm 14 converts the seven-verse biblical text into four six-line stanzas. The regular rhyming pattern aabccb comprises two pairs of iambic pentameters (the a and c lines), each alternating with a shorter line of seven syllables (the b lines). The use of the shorter line (with unstressed ending) to terminate each stanza accentuates Philip’s division of the Psalm into four sense-units, in turn describing the fool, God’s observation of his folly, the madness of those who devour God’s people, and the hoped-for salvation of Israel. The first stanza, equating to verse 1 in Geneva, exemplifies Philip’s approach to his biblical original: The foolish man by flesh and fancy led His guilty heart with this fond thought hath fed, There is no God that reigneth. And so thereafter He, and all his Mates Do works which earth corrupt and Heaven hates, Not One that good remaineth. (Sidney, Psalm 14, lines 1–6, Poems, 286)
As comparison with Geneva shows, Philip’s version is largely a close rendering of his biblical original, albeit with a few extra glosses and differences of emphasis. The notion of folly—central to the Psalm but signalled by only one word (‘fool’) in Geneva—is here expanded (‘foolish man . . . this fond thought’) and rationalised (‘by flesh and fancy led’), Philip’s use of ‘f ’ alliteration further enhancing this shift in narrative stress. The desire to explain, first evident in ‘by flesh and fancy led’, reappears in the gloss on ‘works’ as ‘which earth corrupt and Heaven hates’, while the apparently tautologous addition of ‘that reigneth’ in line 3 in fact initiates a recurring preoccupation with leadership and its responsibilities, with subsequent allusions to the people as ‘loosely led’ and the poor as ‘oppressed by you’ (Sidney, Psalm 14, lines 13, 19, Poems, 287), both also without equivalent in Geneva. As these last examples show, furthermore, although Philip’s rendering of the Psalm is largely
¹⁶ On Geneva as the principal source for Sidney Herbert’s Psalms, see Molekamp, Women and the Bible, 152; for Sidney’s use of this version, see Ringler (ed.), Poems, 505. ¹⁷ On the manuscripts of the Sidney psalter, see Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan (eds), Collected Works, 2.308–57, esp. 308–14. On the relationship between all three versions of the Psalm, see also Collected Works, 1.70–1. ¹⁸ For the Geneva Bible, see The Bible and Holy Scriptures contained in the Old and New Testament. Translated according to the Hebrew and Greek, and conferred with the best translations in divers languages (Geneva, 1560).
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576 - faithful to the original, he is also on occasion prepared to diverge quite significantly from the Bible. Such differences include some that reinterpret the original text: thus the Psalmist’s sorrowful reflection ‘there is none that doeth good, no not one’ (Psalm 14:3, Geneva Bible, fol. 237) becomes the rather differently weighted ‘Not One that God discerneth’ (Sidney, Psalm 14, line 12, Poems, 286); while the conclusion to the Psalm—in Geneva a prayer, ‘Oh give salvation unto Israel out of Zion’ (Psalm 14:7, Geneva Bible, fol. 237)—becomes a question: ‘Ah, when from syon shall the saver come . . . ?’ (Sidney, Psalm 14, line 22, Poems, 287). Other alterations, such as Philip’s exclamation ‘O madness of these folks’ (Sidney, Psalm 14, line 13, Poems, 286), and his subsequent claim that the folks will come to ‘quake / More than they now do brag’ (lines 16–17), are outright additions to the biblical text. The former, occurring immediately after the mid-point of the Psalm and at the beginning of a stanza, is an especially conspicuous difference. Philip Sidney’s poetic paraphrase of Psalm 14 demonstrates both the opportunities and the challenges inherent in the genre. While the change from ‘there is none that doeth good’ to ‘Not One that God discerneth’ may represent a typically Protestant emphasis on faith and inner perception rather than outward action, his apparent attempt to map theological argument on to poetic form, though successful in the first two stanzas, becomes less exact in the latter two, and in the third stanza seems contingent on the embellishments to lines 13 and 16–17. Reconciling poetic and theological imperatives would have remained as much a challenge for Sidney Herbert as for her brother, and indeed, given that the foundational principles of the siblings’ project evidently precluded the duplication of poetic forms, would have required her to devise increasingly inventive solutions as her work on the psalter continued. This structural requirement for ever-greater originality, compounded by the sheer number of Psalms translated by Sidney Herbert—107, as compared with the fortythree translated by Philip—may explain in part why critics such as Rathmell and Grosart have seen her contributions to the psalter as superior to her brother’s, though practice alone could not have ensured her success if she had lacked the skill to develop and refine her poetic technique. Sidney Herbert’s first version of Psalm 53 (hereafter differentiated as Psalm 53a) shows her influenced by, but already starting to move away from, Philip’s rendering of Psalm 14. The two siblings’ work is at its most similar in their treatment of Geneva verse 1, which in Sidney Herbert’s rendering reads: The fool in foolish Fancy says There is no God that marks men’s ways So he and all the Witless train Such deeds both do, and done maintain Whose hateful touch the earth doth stain, Who good among them? None. (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 53a, lines 1–6, Collected Works, 2.260)
Sidney Herbert retains Philip’s alliterative emphasis on folly—‘The fool in foolish Fancy’— as well as his direct quotation of the provocative biblical assertion ‘There is no God’ (similarly placed at the start of a line). She also follows him in representing the fools’ actions as damaging to the planet, her claim that their misdeeds ‘stain’ the earth a nearequivalent to Philip’s insistence that they ‘earth corrupt’. Later echoes of Philip’s text include her use of the contrastive ‘Even God’ (line 7) to mark the shift from condemning the fool to describing the Lord, her descriptions of the people as ‘a-straying’ and the workers
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577 of iniquity as ‘Cannibals’ (lines 10, 15), and her construction of the end of the Psalm as a question, not a prayer: ‘Ah! when shall time away be worn’ (line 22).¹⁹ Yet there are also, of course, differences, many of which show Sidney Herbert remaining closer than her brother to the biblical text. Sidney Herbert’s ‘Not one doth good, not one’ (line 12) is a nearverbatim quotation from Geneva, while her description of the Almighty as ‘Searching if any God would know’ (line 9) more closely resembles the biblical ‘to see if there were any that would understand, and seek God’ than does Philip’s ‘If of this Clayey race he could espy / One, that his Wisdom learneth’ (Sidney, Psalm 14, lines 8–9, Poems, 286). Structurally, too, the verse form devised by Sidney Herbert for this early version of Psalm 53 shows both similarities to and differences from her brother’s poem. In terms of lines— twenty-four in each case—the two paraphrases are exactly the same length, though Sidney Herbert’s use of shorter metres (iambic tetrameters and trimeters) obliges her to express the biblical text in significantly fewer syllables. Her verse form, aabbbcddeeec, differs from Philip’s in dividing the Psalm into two structural units rather than four: the first stanza describing the fool’s misdeeds and God’s scrutiny; the second addressing the wider implications of such folly. Each stanza, however, is structurally subdivided into two by the use of c-rhyming trimeters at its mid- and endpoint. The resulting six-line sections equate directly to Sidney’s four stanzas, an effect frequently reinforced by verbal echoes, such key words and phrases as ‘fool’, ‘earth’, ‘Even God’, and ‘a-straying’ occurring on the same lines in each poem. Given these strong similarities, coupled with the technical challenges of working with a more complex verse form (and fewer syllables), Sidney Herbert’s Psalm 53a reads at once like a homage to, and an attempt to overgo, her brother’s Psalm 14. Sidney Herbert’s later version of Psalm 53 (hereafter differentiated as Psalm 53b) shows her moving still further away from, while remaining mindful of, her brother’s poetic example. The clearest single difference is at the level of structure, with the Psalm now recast into three eight-line stanzas, each rhyming ababbcac. Though this interlaced verse form, mildly reminiscent of the interwoven Spenserian sonnet, differs further from her brother’s Psalm 14 than the twelve-line stanzas of her earlier version, the total number of lines in the paraphrase—twenty-four—remains the same. Sidney Herbert’s tripartite structure in this new rendering is quasi-syllogistic, her three stanzas focusing successively on the fool, the immediate implications of his folly for the people at large, and the divine retribution—and possible mercy—set to follow. Further changes include the opening and closing sections of the Psalm, which each diverge significantly from both her own earlier version and Sidney’s Psalm 14 in theological emphasis and syntactic form. Most obviously, Sidney Herbert now inverts the opening line of the Psalm, beginning with the stark ‘There is no god’, before continuing ‘the fool doth say’ (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 53b, line 1, Collected Works, 2.53). While this foregrounding of the fool’s words, rather than their speaker, differs from the Bible itself as well as her immediate poetic models, Sidney Herbert moves closer to the spirit of the biblical original in her conclusion to the Psalm, still framing ‘ah! why delays that happy while / when Sion shall our saver bring?’ (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 53b, lines 21–2, Collected Works, 2.54) as a question, but ending with the assertion, ‘The lord his folk will one day free: / then Jacob’s house shall dance and sing’ (lines 23–4). Though the detail of ‘dance and sing’ is not present in her original—which, in Geneva, ends ‘then Jacob shall
¹⁹ See, by comparison, Sidney, Psalm 14, lines 7, 10, 14, 22, Poems, 286–7. The editors of the Collected Works— questionably, in my view—read the terminal period in Sidney Herbert’s line 24 as suggesting that ‘the last three lines are exclamatory, not interrogatory’: Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan (eds), Collected Works, 2.448; they are in any case not supplicatory.
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578 - rejoice, and Israel shall be glad’ (Psalm 14:7, Geneva Bible, fol. 237)—both the idiom and the confidence in God’s mercy to his people are authentically biblical. As such comparisons show, Sidney Herbert’s later version of Psalm 53 demonstrates a still greater degree of assurance and independence in rendering the biblical text than had her earlier rendering. This independence is often most visible at the level of structure, Sidney Herbert now, apparently, less concerned to mirror her brother’s length and weighting of lines and ideas than to explore the Psalmic resonances on her own account. It applies also, however, at the level of language: witness her altered description of the fool, which by clarifying that his denial of God is not necessarily explicit—‘if not in word, in thought and will’ (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 53b, line 2, Collected Works, 2.53)—opens up a potentially narrow category to much wider application. Perhaps the most striking change in her revised version, indeed, involves mutually reinforcing alterations to both structure and language. Sidney Herbert’s new three-part division of the Psalm not only corresponds more nearly to the argument of her original than had either its two- or four-part predecessor, but also enables a remarkably bold approach to her central stanza: They all have stray’d are cankered all: not one I say, not one doth good. But senselessnes, what should I call such carriage²⁰ of this cursed brood? My people are their bread, their food, upon my name they scorn to cry: whom vain affright doth yet appall, where no just ground of fear doth lie. (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 53b, lines 9–16, Collected Works, 2.53)
Starting with a phrase familiar from The Book of Common Prayer, ‘They all have stray’d’— where the admission ‘we have erred and strayed’ figures prominently in the daily ‘Order for Morning Prayer’ (Book of Common Prayer, 103)²¹—this stanza gradually reveals itself to be framed in the voice of God. The ‘I say’ of line 10—which might look on a first-time reading to be mere syllabic padding—is instead compounded by further instances of first-person singular pronouns in lines 11, 13, and 14. This emphasis on the divine voice represents a shift both from Geneva, whose equivalent stanzas include only one first-person pronoun— ‘they eat up my people, as they eat bread’ (Psalm 14:4, Geneva Bible, fol. 237)—and from the earlier versions by Philip Sidney and Sidney Herbert herself, which each elide even this single incidence of the first person. While the ‘I’ of lines 10 and 11 could, at first glance, signify the Psalmist, the identification of this stanza’s speaker as God himself becomes fully clear in line 13, the simple but eloquent ‘My people are their bread, their food’. Much expanded from Philip’s brief allusion to the devourers of God’s people as ‘Cannibals’ (or her own scarcely less succinct earlier reference to ‘Wolvish Cannibals’), Sidney Herbert’s new emphasis on, and willingness to ventriloquise, the divine perspective ironically also recalls Philip’s adverting in the Defence of Poesy (1595) to ‘the often and free changing
²⁰ The spelling in the original manuscript—‘careage’—incorporates an ironic pun on ‘care’, a quality that the ‘brood’ damagingly lacks. ²¹ The Book of Common Prayer, in Brian Cummings (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford, 2011).
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579 of persons’ as evidence for the Hebrew Psalms’ status as poetry (Sidney, Defence, 77).²² Her skill in manipulating poetic convention is fully aligned with her theological confidence in speaking for God. Sidney Herbert’s poetic practice, across her many Psalm translations, is so varied that even the simplest generalisations about her methods can often be readily disproven. Evidence of her varying approach to her materials can be found even within a single Psalm, the emphasis on divine mercy evident in Psalm 53b, lines 15–16 (where, with just a few extra syllables at her disposal, she glosses Geneva’s two bare references to fear as ‘vain affright’ and ‘no just ground of fear’) contrasting with the next two lines—‘But on their bones shall wreaked be / all thy Invader’s force and guile’ (Sidney Herbert, Psalm 53b, lines 17–18, Collected Works, 2.53)—where she shows no sign of shrinking from the violence of the biblical original. What does emerge consistently from her numerous and much reworked Psalms is a remarkable degree of literary and theological self-confidence, an ever-greater willingness to experiment, and a dedication to fulfilling the spirit of her Sidneian project, even if, on occasion, at the expense of the Sidneian letter.²³
Sidney Herbert Beyond the Psalms: The Commendatory Poems and The Triumph of Death Sidney Herbert’s work on the Psalms was clearly a lengthy undertaking, lasting many years and involving many stages of revision, few of which can now be confidently dated.²⁴ Her other surviving poems, however, bear witness to at least two occasions when she looked back on the Psalms as a completed project. ‘Even now that Care’, addressed to Queen Elizabeth and once probably included in the (now imperfect) presentation copy of the Psalms prepared by John Davies, seems likely to date from the same planned royal visit to Wilton that gave rise to ‘A Dialogue between Two Shepherds’ in 1599.²⁵ The poem entitled ‘To the Angel Spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney’ has a more complicated early history, surviving in two variant textual states, neither of which is precisely datable.²⁶ Both versions, however, allude to the Sidney–Pembroke Psalms as ‘finished’, although, given the psalter’s extended history of revision, quite what this may have meant is open to question. While ‘Even now that Care’ and ‘To the Angel Spirit’ are both commendations for the Psalms, they fulfil very different poetic functions. ‘To the Angel Spirit’, for instance, links the psalter so exclusively to Philip Sidney that it seems unlikely ever to have been included in the queen’s presentation copy, at least in its current form; the queen herself is not mentioned, and the ‘coupled work’ of the psalter is described as ‘to thee [Sidney] alone . . . addressed’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘To the Angel Spirit’, lines 2, 1, Collected Works, 1.110).²⁷ Sidney Herbert’s praise of her brother and the outstanding qualities of his contributions to the psalter is also premised on disparaging her own part in the project; had Philip lived, she ²² Sir Philip Sidney, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973). ²³ For further discussions of Sidney Herbert’s Psalm paraphrases, see also Chapter 3 (on Psalms 52 and 139), Chapter 6 (on Psalm 120), Chapter 12 (on Psalm 100), Chapter 18 (on Psalm 82), and Chapter 20 (on Psalm 130) in this volume. ²⁴ See Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan (eds), Collected Works, 2.337–40. ²⁵ See Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 85; and Ringler (ed.), Poems, 547. ²⁶ See Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan (eds), Collected Works, 1.303–4. ²⁷ See also the brief discussion of this poem, and its description of the psalter as a ‘coupled work’, in Chapter 11 in this volume.
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580 - asserts, what now becomes merely a ‘half maim’d piece’ could have ‘sorted with the best’ (line 18). Yet, as her Oxford editors perceptively note, Sidney Herbert’s use of the modesty topos in ‘To the Angel Spirit’, though emphatic, is neither gendered nor particular to herself.²⁸ Her inability to equal her brother’s Psalm translations, that is, is ascribed to neither her sex nor her own personal inadequacies but rather to the necessary inability of any other poet to match his ‘Phoenix’-like greatness (Sidney Herbert, ‘To the Angel Spirit’, line 38, Collected Works, 1.111). Her justification of her own ‘presumption’ in finishing the psalter— claiming that, following Philip’s death, her love for him ‘hath no further scope to go, / nor other purpose but to honour thee’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘To the Angel Spirit’, lines 25, 29–30, Collected Works, 1.110–11)—also underplays her own creative agency through its use of strategic omission. Sidney Herbert could have honoured Sidney without attempting to complete his psalter, just as she did not, herself, complete either his New Arcadia or his translation of Duplessis-Mornay’s De la verité de la religion Chrestienne. Her Psalm translations, though undoubtedly motivated by sisterly love, were also a literary choice. Sidney Herbert’s commendatory and other occasional poems are often so individually focused as to seem almost mutually exclusive. ‘To the Angel Spirit’ contrasts with the (admittedly dubious) ‘Doleful Lay of Clorinda’ in stressing the speaker’s familial relationship with her subject—she refers to, while denying, the notion that shared ‘blood’ might ‘partialize’ her towards him (Sidney Herbert, ‘To the Angel Spirit’, line 51, Collected Works, 1.111), and in signing off identifies herself as ‘the Sister of that Incomparable Sidney’—and also in emphasising his religious to the exclusion of his secular poetry. The two poems do, however, have intriguing common features: most notably, their eschewal of any reference to Sidney’s public life, coupled with dark allusions to the unfair hostility his achievements had incurred: ‘jealous rancour’, according to the ‘Lay’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘Doleful Lay’, line 84, Collected Works, 1.135), ‘Envy’ in ‘To the Angel Spirit’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘To the Angel Spirit’, line 63, Collected Works, 1.111). Similarly, ‘Even now that Care’ contrasts with ‘A Dialogue between Two Shepherds’: the former at once more sombre and more attentive to the queen’s responsibilities, while partially echoing the latter’s representation of her. As the editors of the Collected Works observe, ‘Even now that Care’ ‘makes no reference . . . to the queen’s beauty, her eternal youth, or even her chastity’, omissions also characteristic of the ‘Dialogue’.²⁹ Crucially, as already noted, the poem differs from ‘To the Angel Spirit’ in its orientation of the psalter towards its intended reader, Elizabeth, rather than its originating author, Philip Sidney. Though Philip’s role in initiating the translation project is still acknowledged and his untimely death still lamented, these are no longer the principal focus of the poem, and the notion of Philip himself as the psalter’s sole addressee is tactfully omitted. While insisting, as ever, on her own inferiority to her brother—‘the poorer left, the richer reft away’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘Even now’, line 22, Collected Works, 1.102)—Sidney Herbert now hints that she did not merely inherit the psalter project from her brother, but had some involvement with it from the start; she alludes to its authorship, albeit gnomically, as ‘once in two, now in one Subject’ (line 21). Less equivocally, she takes full responsibility for both completing the psalter—‘he did warp, I weav’d this web to end’ (line 27)—and dedicating it to Elizabeth: ‘I the Cloth in both our names present’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘Even now’, line 33, Collected Works, 1.103). Her own agency, though modestly asserted, is unambiguous.
²⁸ See Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan (eds), Collected Works, 1.109. ²⁹ Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan (eds), Collected Works, 1.101.
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581 ‘Even now that Care’ is a quietly extraordinary poem. Unlike Sidney Herbert’s overtly virtuosic Psalm translations—though like ‘To the Angel Spirit’—it is formally understated, its eight-line stanzas following the relatively simple rhyme pattern ababbcbc. Lacking any (obvious) preoccupation with its own form, the poem is the more able to focus on its message to, and engagement with, its royal addressee. Strikingly, its status as a manuscript text, destined for private reading by the queen alone, seems to license Sidney Herbert to address the queen more intimately, though always respectfully, than in the more public ‘Dialogue between Two Shepherds’. This is particularly apparent in the poem’s opening stanzas, which first invoke the queen’s many responsibilities—all too likely, Sidney Herbert concedes, to preclude the reading of poetry—before pointing to the necessary if occasional ‘ebb[ing]’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘Even now’, line 18, Collected Works, 1.102) of the queen’s duties, which may, together with her ‘goodness’ and ‘strength’ (lines 14, 15), justify the psalter’s translators in sending her their work: Cares though still great, cannot be greatest still, Business must ebb, though Leisure never flow: Then these the Posts of Duty and Goodwill shall press to offer what their Senders owe. (Sidney Herbert, ‘Even now’, lines 17–20, Collected Works, 1.102)
Sidney Herbert’s deferential but empathetic reconstruction of how the queen might experience her own responsibilities is just one of several elements in ‘Even now that Care’ that seem to have been facilitated by the poem’s confinement to manuscript. Another is its extended engagement with politics. As Hannay, most notably, has argued, ‘Even now that Care’ takes a strong, consistent, and potentially controversial position on contemporary national and international affairs.³⁰ Its reference, in the opening stanza, to ‘these most active times’ (line 8), characterises the present day in terms favoured by Protestant interventionists for whom ‘active’ connoted opposition to the Catholic powers of Continental Europe, while a later stanza recalls and celebrates the defeat of the Spanish Armada (see lines 77–8). Subtly daring in her approach to international politics—advocating a more robust stance than that typically favoured by the cautious Elizabeth—Sidney Herbert is also adroit in her engagement with religious politics, devising in ‘Even now that Care’ an ingenious means for defusing another potentially controversial aspect of the psalter project. Although, as Hannay notes, Elizabeth had herself translated a Psalm in earlier life, by the late sixteenth century the psalter had gained strong associations with the more Reformed strains in contemporary Protestantism through its use by French Huguenots and in its Geneva translation.³¹ The queen was also known to be unsympathetic to individual interpretation of the Bible, a hostility most evident in her ‘negative attitude towards preaching’ and her suppression of prophesyings.³² Sidney Herbert’s consistent portrayal in ‘Even now that Care’ of the psalter as the work of David, rather than the word of God, forms another contrast with ‘To the Angel Spirit’, where the Psalms are described as ‘heaven’s King . . . his own’ and as merely ‘form’d’—mediated—by God’s ‘Kingly Prophet’ (Sidney Herbert, ‘To the Angel Spirit’, lines 8, 14, Collected Works, 1.110). Framing King David, rather than God, as the ultimate author of the Psalms thus not only represents a compliment to Queen Elizabeth, the psalter’s dedicatee, but is also a canny act of misdirection. The restriction of ³⁰ See Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 90, see further 91–6. ³¹ See Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 92–5. ³² Patrick Collinson, ‘Elizabeth I (1533–1603), Queen of England and Ireland’, ODNB (2004).
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582 - both ‘Even now that Care’ and the Sidney–Pembroke psalter to elite manuscript would have secured Sidney Herbert against the risks her psalter might have incurred had it been issued publicly in print. What is possibly Sidney Herbert’s last poetic work, her translation of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte, survives in a single manuscript, a transcription sent by Sir John Harington to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, in December 1600.³³ Given these circumstances of transmission, it is impossible to tell whether Sidney Herbert translated only one of Petrarch’s six Trionfi or others as well. Her apparent privileging of The Triumph of Death (over, for instance, the Triumphs of Fame or Eternity) may thus represent, as it seems, further confirmation of the preoccupation with death otherwise evident in A Discourse of Life and Death, her work on the psalter, and ‘To the Angel Spirit’. It may, alternatively, signify Harington’s own selection from a wider body of now-lost translations, reflecting his own—or Lucy’s—preferences amongst her poetry. Sidney Herbert’s translation of the Trionfo is one of the most skilled and beautiful of all her works. Her technical proficiency is most apparent in her treatment of Petrarch’s terza rima: with very few exceptions—and unusually amongst English-language translations before or since—her own tercets exactly correspond to his terzine.³⁴ The narrative of the triumph—which sees Laura succumb to death before later returning in a vision to teach and comfort the grieving speaker—has almost inescapable biographical application for a translator who, it seems, never stopped mourning her much-loved brother. Perhaps not coincidentally, some of her translation’s most exquisite lines are those of personal consolation and spiritual reassurance. Responding to Petrarch’s anguished appeal ‘Is it such pain to die? That, make me know’ (Sidney Herbert, Triumph, chapter 2, line 30, Collected Works, 1.278), Sidney Herbert’s Laura replies: I not deny (quoth she) but that the cross Preceding death, extremely martyreth, And more the fear of that eternal loss. But when the panting soul in God takes breath; And weary heart affecteth heavenly rest, An unrepented sigh, not else, is death. (Sidney Herbert, Triumph, chapter 2, lines 46–51, Collected Works, 1.279)
Sidney Herbert’s translation is still more explicitly Christian than Petrarch’s (already very Christian) original; her reference to the ‘cross’ (line 46) preceding death, for instance, equates to ‘l’afanno’—sorrow—in the Italian. While formally disciplined, her translation is linguistically innovative: her coinage ‘squadronet’ (Sidney Herbert, Triumph, chapter 1, line 15, Collected Works, 1.273) adapts a word that had entered the English language only a few decades earlier.³⁵ It is also—to an arguably greater extent than much of Sidney Herbert’s other poetry—in dialogue with its own period. The predominance of the voice of Laura within The Triumph of Death can be read as a riposte to the late Elizabethan fashion for reworking Petrarch’s Canzoniere—a body of work which included Sidney’s Astrophil and
³³ See Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan (eds), Collected Works, 1.315–16. ³⁴ See Coogan, ‘Petrarch’s “Trionfi” ’, 324. ³⁵ The first citation of ‘squadron’ in OED and EEBO dates from 1562.
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583 Stella—in which the voice of the frustrated male lover loomed large.³⁶ The poem is also frequently reminiscent of Spenser: Death’s argument, as she prepares to kill Laura, that ‘better is by far / From age and age’s loathsomeness to fly’ (Sidney Herbert, Triumph, chapter 1, lines 65–6, Collected Works, 1.274), closely resembles Despair’s speech to Redcrosse in The Faerie Queene (see Faerie Queene, 1.9.38–40),³⁷ while Laura herself, as Petrarch’s spiritual teacher, often recalls Una, The Faerie Queene’s personification of Christian truth. The Triumph’s cultural significance, contributing at once to Petrarch’s English afterlife and to late sixteenth-century debates on death and constructions of female spiritual authority, is profound, and deserves further exploration.
Sidney Herbert the Poet Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, is a poet of many masks and many voices. It is characteristic of her poetry—her elegies, her commendatory verses, and especially her translations—to inhabit its genre(s) so completely that her own authorial personality is elided, subsumed into, or displaced by the literary exigencies of the text itself. This, in addition to the factors alluded to elsewhere in this chapter—her predilection for translation, the collaborative status of the psalter, the dominance of source study in research on her works (which can often make them seem inaccessible to more generalist readers)—may help to explain why, even in the twenty-first century, scholarship on her poetry has remained something of a niche area within early modern literary studies. Current trends in literary scholarship—in particular, the re-evaluation of translation and a more pluralistic approach to early modern women’s writing—seem likely to redress this historical imbalance in forthcoming decades. Sidney Herbert’s poetry is not only an immensely productive focus for close reading, but is also more varied and surprising than is often supposed. Her well-known preoccupation with death sits alongside a less often appreciated literary wit, while her poetry also speaks to strong interests in cultural, religious, and national politics, the scope and potential of English versification, and the agency of women. Future scholarship on her work is likely to engage still further with her multilingualism, while also taking a more nuanced approach to her intertextual links with other texts of the period. Mary Sidney Herbert’s poetry represents a powerful challenge to a critical aesthetic that privileges a strong authorial personality at the expense of such other factors as genre, intertextuality, and literary collaboration. Her work, as this chapter has shown, does not lack for personal engagement, particularly as regards her commemoration of her brother and her commitment to poetic experimentation. It is, nonetheless, distinctive for a textual modesty that consistently prioritises its sources and subjects rather than its own authorial origins, and that thus requires especially patient critical reading. Ironically, its very modesty is what makes it so demanding.³⁸
³⁶ See Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan (eds), Collected Works, 1.265–6. ³⁷ See Edmund Spenser, in A. C. Hamilton (ed.), The Faerie Queene, revised second edition (Harlow, 2007). ³⁸ I am grateful to Hugh Adlington and Kathleen Taylor, as well as Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter.
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PART V
TRANSITIONS
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33 The Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Century Michael Schoenfeldt
Changes of literary style rarely mesh with the deaths of monarchs, and even less with the turn of centuries. Yet, we tend to frame our analyses, and even to formulate our pedagogy, around those ostensibly arbitrary moments when monarchs die and centuries end. Most frequently, nothing really changes but a calendrical number, or a political allegiance. ‘The Queen is dead’, we might shout; ‘Long live the King!’ Changes in literary style, moreover, are more frequently glacial than seismic, and rarely occur in a vacuum. It is unusual, if not unprecedented, when a genre or style spreads like wildfire across a desiccated literary landscape. And it is even rarer when such moments of rapid change are synchronised with an arbitrary change in the calendar or the political situation of a country. With the turn of the seventeenth century, however, we have a relatively unique situation: the death of a long-serving female monarch is synchronised, almost precisely, with a profound change in literary style. Sometime around the end of the sixteenth century, that is, something really does seem to alter—albeit slowly and unsystematically—in literary style and subject. Elizabeth was sixty-seven years old in 1600, unmarried, and unlikely without divine intervention to produce an heir. She had been on the throne for forty-two years. The heir presumptive, King James VI of Scotland, was her cousin. He was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, whom Elizabeth had ordered to be executed in 1587, because rebellious plots against Elizabeth continued to cluster around the idea of putting Mary on the throne of England. And in 1601, the earl of Essex, former favourite of Elizabeth, led a rebellion against her. She also had him put to death. And James had only been on the throne for two years when a group of Catholic recusants planned to blow up Parliament and the king. The failure of this act of terrorism, which came to be known as the Gunpowder Plot, only licensed further suppression of Catholics. As this thumbnail description of events suggests, it was a turbulent and unsettling time in English history, and many of the cultural and political fault lines revealed would run throughout the seventeenth century, resulting ultimately in the horrible violence of a Civil War and the execution of Charles I by Parliament in 1649. This volatile religious and political world would also have an impact on the preferred modes, styles, and genres of literary production.¹ The 1590s were marked in large part by ¹ The classic statements of the disparate accomplishments of these two centuries are C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954); Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600–1660 (Oxford, 1962); and Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago, IL, 1947). More recent works in this area include Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1986); Jonathan F. S. Post, English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (London, 1999); Thomas N. Corns, A History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Malden, MA, 2007); Marshall Grossman, The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook (Chichester, 2011); Patrick Cheney, Reading Sixteenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, 2011); and my Reading Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Malden, MA, forthcoming). The larger stakes of literary periodisation are discussed intelligently by Ted Underwood, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford, CA, 2013). Michael Schoenfeldt, The Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Century In: The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Volume 4. Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. Edited by: Catherine Bates and Patrick Cheney, Oxford University Press. © Michael Schoenfeldt 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830696.003.0033
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588 - the preponderance of two very different poetic genres: the sonnet sequence and satire. Whereas the former devotes the majority of its energies to erotic idealisation, the latter turns its attention to sardonic moral denigration. In the process, both genres managed to do a lot of distinctive kinds of cultural work, with little overlap.² Petrarchan poetry imagined a cruel, distant lady, and articulated the tempests of thwarted desire in the sea of life. Petrarch made his own internal emotional suffering the febrile centre of his lyrics. In the hands of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the sonnet was an effective vehicle for depicting the emotional extremes of life at the court of Henry VIII. Returning from an embassage to Italy, Wyatt imports the form into England, and writes some brilliant, cynical, tough-minded poems that do not so much translate Petrarch as transplant his works on English soil.³ The sonnet goes relatively quiet, at least in England, until Thomas Watson, who brings the idea of the sonnet sequence to full fruition in English with his Hecatompathia (1582), which included one hundred eighteen-line sonnets. This was followed by Sir Philip Sidney’s groundbreaking Astrophil and Stella, written during the 1580s but not published until 1591. The work’s great wit and brilliance caused the genre of the sonnet sequence to spread like a virus; for the next decade, it seemed that almost any Elizabethan courtier worth his salt would have to write a sonnet sequence, however uninspired. Rejecting ‘poor Petrarch’s long deceased woes’ (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 15, line 7, Poems, 172)⁴ while boasting that he is ‘no pick-purse of another’s wit’ (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 74, line 8, Poems, 204), Sidney develops a unique voice and wit through his ingenious and supple use of the potentially constraining form of the sonnet. Sidney, of course, is soon imitated, with greater or lesser success, by a surge of aspiring writers. Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) was probably the most aesthetically successful of the myriad sequences published in the 1590s. Spenser achieves a sonorous music in his sonnets, employing Petrarchan conventions in inventive ways that significantly expand the palette of erotic sentiment. What is more, Spenser concludes his remarkable sequence with an Epithalamion, in which he celebrates the fruits of his poetic labours with a joyous hymn to his beloved on their wedding day. Spenser thus decouples the traditions of Petrarchan poetry from the conventional scenario of adulterous love and attaches them to the spiritual aspirations of heterosexual marriage. It is one of the many innovations of Spenser that John Milton will cultivate in his great epic of the first marriage—that between Adam and Eve—in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). It is always a challenge to account for the efflorescence and the fading of literary taste and genres, and the fashion of the sonnet sequence in the 1590s is no exception. It is possible, however, that this poetry, dedicated for the most part to the articulation of devotion to a distant mistress, mapped well onto the concerns and anxieties of courtiers dealing with a brilliant but ageing queen. It is also possible that the discrete units of individuated experience presented by the sonnet sequence provided an apt vehicle for expressing the disorientation and frustration of courtly experience in the 1590s. Roland Greene astutely suggests that the sonnet was ‘practically a technology for representing voltas or turns of all
² For more on these two forms, see also Chapters 12 and 13 in this volume. ³ For more on Wyatt’s poetry, see also Chapter 23 in this volume. ⁴ Sir Philip Sidney, in William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), spelling modernised.
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589 psychic sorts’.⁵ The sonnet sequence would in turn became a vehicle in which a courtier’s wish to serve his queen could be translated seamlessly into a series of poetic conventions premised on the promise of faithful if physically unrequited service to a distant mistress. The English sonnet sequence, however, dies out in the seventeenth century almost as quickly as it had blossomed in the sixteenth. The emergence of a male monarch in 1603 perhaps rendered the Petrarchan project of proto-erotic courtship an unsuitable model of courtly aspiration. In addition, James’s fondness for theology and political theory likely had an influence on the kinds of discourse and genres that aspiring courtiers would practise. Where the sonnet dies, the religious lyric will blossom. The sonnet sequence, though, does go through a few mutations before it fades from the literary landscape for almost a hundred and fifty years. While Shakespeare’s brilliant, troubling sonnets are not printed until 1609, in a volume that may or may not have been authorised, many of them are likely written in the 1590s. The volume seems to know it comes at the end of a thriving genre, playing aggressively with its enervated conventions. The beloved is now a beautiful young male, who is urged to have sex with a woman in order to reproduce and so preserve an image of his beauty, just as the poet seeks to capture that beauty in verse. Similarly, Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), transforms the genre by emphasising the female subject-position of the speaker. The second sonnet sequence to be written by a woman (the first is by Anne Vaughan Lock, whose devout ‘Meditation of a Penitent Sinner’ was published in 1560), Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is the first to be written from the perspective of a female lover of an unfaithful male. Just as Shakespeare’s changing of the gender of the beloved to a beautiful young man drives various radical adjustments to the inherited Petrarchan machinery, so does Wroth’s alteration of the sex of the speaker invigorate the tired conventions of Petrarchan lyric. The sonnet, then, does not vanish completely in the seventeenth century, but it does undergo a sea change in subject and style. John Donne’s posthumously published collection of erotic lyrics, the Songs and Sonnets (1633), contains no actual sonnets, but the poems had circulated widely in manuscript before print publication. Yet, Donne does write several Holy Sonnets of erotic longing and emotional intensity. In Donne’s deft hands, God becomes a distant if punishing lover whose favour and attention the speaker courts. George Herbert, in turn, composes a volume of devotional poetry, The Temple (also published posthumously in 1633), that absorbs from the sonnet sequence the narrative ebb and flow of intense but disparate emotion over time in the portrait of his devotional struggles. Herbert’s volume of devotional verse, moreover, includes fifteen highly innovative sonnets. And around the middle of the seventeenth century, John Milton will write a series of aesthetically accomplished and emotionally electrifying sonnets on love, devotion, and politics. After Milton, it would be almost a century and a half before someone would again write a sonnet worth reading. If the genre of the sonnet satisfies the impulse of late sixteenth-century culture to idealise, then satire appealed to its longing for a discourse of caustic censure. Deploying in different degrees the models of the Latin satirists Horace, Juvenal, and Persius, the greatest satirists at the end of the century were Donne, Joseph Hall, and John Marston. The genre revelled in caustic criticism, veering into utter disgust at various societal practices. In one of the most famous and atypical satires, Donne interrogates the utilitarian function of the genre: ⁵ Roland Greene, ‘Anne Lock’s Meditation: Invention versus Dilation and the Founding of Puritan Poetics’, in Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (eds), Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Newark, DE, 2000), 153–70, 166.
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590 - ‘Can railing then cure these worn maladies?’ he asks (Donne, Satire 3, line 4, Collected Poetry, 115).⁶ Most satirists, on the other hand, seemed less interested in finding a cure for societal maladies than in lancing without anaesthetic the infected wounds of society. Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum (1597, 1598) is suffused with moral indignation. It is fascinating that both Donne and Hall begin as satirists and conclude their careers in the Church of England; Hall, in fact, lives long enough to engage in theological controversy with John Milton, amongst many others. Marston’s overtly scurrilous Scourge of Villainy (1598) relishes the very sins he vehemently condemns, and exudes a disquieting self-disgust: ‘He that thinks worse of my rhymes than myself ’, he admonishes the reader, ‘I scorn him, for he cannot; he that thinks better is a fool’ (Marston, Scourge of Villainy, ‘To those that seem judicial Perusers’, Works, 3.305–6).⁷ The genre was producing such social unrest that on 1 June 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, disturbed by the increasingly subversive energies released by these poems, ordered various satires to be burned. The so-called ‘Bishops’ Ban’ would succeed in eradicating the genre; satire would subsequently go underground, as genres tend to do when they are suppressed from above. Certainly, Ben Jonson’s satiric comedies absorb much of their moral indignation. Satire will, moreover, reemerge with a vengeance at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Particularly when wedded to acerbic wit and political jaundice, satire will become the preferred vehicle for discussing the scandalous politics of the Restoration. The turn of the seventeenth century, then, is a period of whiplash transitions as well as glacial change. Several genres blossom and then fade out as the century turns. The Ovidian epyllion, or erotic narrative poem, is another genre that bursts forth with great vigour in the late sixteenth century, and then seems to diminish rapidly in the seventeenth.⁸ The genre was probably inaugurated in English by Thomas Lodge’s Scyllas Metamorphosis (1589). This was followed in short order by Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593); this lubricious poem about an older goddess attempting to seduce a reluctant younger male was the most popular thing Shakespeare wrote in his lifetime, if the number of printings are any indication (there were sixteen editions before 1640). The poem describes male and female bodies as objects of immense beauty and as occasions of intense erotic attention. At almost the same time, Marlowe was working on his unfinished Hero and Leander (written 1593, the year of Marlowe’s death, and published posthumously in 1598). Two of the more popular Ovidian narratives from the period are Michael Drayton’s Endymion and Phoebe (1595) and John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598). Marston thus shows himself to be a master of both satire and of the erotic works that satire frequently attacked. Worlds away from the Ovide moralisé tradition that attempted to translate Ovid’s amoral tales into moral fables, these poems are suffused with erotic energy in their presentation of lustful gods and eager or reluctant mortals. This genre specialises in a kind of prurience that flew uneasily under the tattered flag of a moral lesson from the Classical past. Throughout much of late sixteenth-century literature, there is a growing edginess, a burgeoning anxiety, which seems to blossom in the seventeenth into what has been called ‘Jacobean melancholy’. There is, I would argue, a general darkening of the literature produced at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, which is only intensified under King James. Shakespeare’s Hamlet (probably written in 1600) is perhaps the most famous example of literary brooding, but there is in general a turn to morbid subjects, melancholy moods, and ⁶ John Donne, in Ilona Bell (ed.), Collected Poetry (Harmondsworth, 2012). ⁷ John Marston, in A. H. Bullen (ed.) The Works of John Marston, 3 vols. (London, 1887). ⁸ For more on the genre of the epyllion or minor epic, see also Chapter 16 in this volume.
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591 macabre ambience. This may well be a product of what the historian Patrick Collinson has referred to as the ‘nasty nineties’: a period of immense anxiety about the succession and a fear that the comparatively recent Wars of the Roses (1455–87) could erupt again.⁹ In the various works of Donne, we can see how heavily these stresses weigh on a particularly articulate and sensitive figure. Donne is such a profoundly transitional writer, moving from Catholicism to a prominent position in the Anglican Church, and engaging with testy ingenuity the various poetic conventions he inherits. He is only eight years younger than Shakespeare, but by the end of his life he is preaching to the court of Charles I. Sometime in the 1590s, Donne movingly records the myriad ways in which this legion of pressures could impinge on the conscience, and the literary production, of a particular individual. In his Satire 3, he depicts the immense difficulty of navigating this treacherously charged religious landscape, trying to steer clear of the Scylla of Catholicism as well as the Charybdis of Protestantism. Navigating such churning seas is a great challenge, particularly when each credo stakes a chilling claim to exclusive truth and damns the other side, ignoring just how much they share. Donne was descended from a distinguished Catholic family, related to Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor who would not agree to Henry VIII’s claim of supremacy over the English church, and paid the price with his head. Donne had also lost a brother who was arrested for harbouring a priest, and died in prison. The opening lines of Satire 3 brilliantly characterise the emotional turmoil elicited by this spiritually complex situation: Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids: I must not laugh, nor weep. (Donne, Satire 3, lines 1–3, Collected Poetry, 115)
The desperate speaker of this satire asks where true religion lies, and cynically categorises the available choices of religious practice as different forms of erotic preference. But the subject of the poem is deadly serious, and asks a question which would continue to haunt seventeenth-century England: ‘ask thy father which is [true religion], / Let him ask his’ (Donne, Satire 3, lines 71–2, Collected Poetry, 117). Only recusant Catholics might answer this question without sentencing to eternal damnation either a parent, a grandparent, or themselves; and they would be accused by the establishment of disobedience and seditious non-compliance. We can feel in this poem a sense of the spiritual whiplash, and its lingering paroxysms, experienced between the generations in sixteenth-century England. Donne finally settles on a remarkable commitment not to a single religious doctrine but, rather, to a kind of philosophical spiritual scepticism that disputes the capacity of any terrestrial institution to maintain an exclusive claim on the truth. His audacious response to the violently absolute claims made by the various religious dispensations is to ‘doubt wisely’ (line 77). He advises: . . . in strange way, To stand enquiring right is not to stray; To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill,
⁹ Patrick Collinson, ‘Playboy’s Paperwork’, London Review of Books, 21.22 (11 November 1999).
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592 - Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go. (Donne, Satire 3, lines 77–81, Collected Poetry, 117)
This sense of truth as achieved only after an arduous non-linear climb (replicated beautifully in the repetition of ‘about must’) by a sceptical individual, is a radical departure from the idea of truth as transcendent and handed down by an institution demanding absolute conformity. Donne brilliantly uses the popular genre of satire to navigate the myriad fault lines that open up amidst the various claims of absolute and exclusive religious truth at the turn of the century. At the end of this poem, we are indeed not far from Donne’s famous lines in his ‘First Anniversary’ (1611) about the ways in which the world he inhabits seems emptied of traditional structures and meanings: ‘And new philosophy calls all in doubt . . . / ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’ (Donne, ‘First Anniversary’, lines 205, 213, Collected Poetry, 206). It would of course be less than thirty years before England would experience the political version of this total dissolution of order, when Parliament and monarch would go to war in 1642. Interestingly, alongside this turn to a darker, more anxious and sinister atmosphere, runs an expansion of the metaphorical resources available to the lyric poet. In the deft hands of Donne in particular, as well as his many poetic followers, the dimensions of poetic imagery expand astronomically. This was inspired in part by Donne’s voracious curiosity, which imported scientific concepts into erotic lyrics with remarkable ingenuity. And at the same time, the possibilities of poetic form expand as well. From the comparatively taut forms of the Elizabethan landscape, the early seventeenth century sees an efflorescence of novel literary forms. As the century turns, we can watch the straightjacket of the sonnet surrender to the formal experimentation of Donne, Herbert, and others. Donne bestows on the English lyric a vigorous colloquial language that probably owes as much to the stage as it does to preceding poetry. He was once described by a contemporary, Sir Richard Baker, as ‘a great visitor of Ladies, a great frequenter of Plays, a great writer of conceited Verses’.¹⁰ The three activities cited were brilliantly intertwined in his literary works. His poetry has a dramatic spontaneity that is wedded to some deliberately roughhewn speech. It feels, as one reads, that one is watching the thought process of a brilliant mind at work on a problem or situation. His poetry sounds remarkably different from the acquired smoothness of Sidney of Spenser, even though little more than a decade may separate their composition. Indeed, he probably shares more with the rough-hewn cynicism of Wyatt at the beginning of the sixteenth century than he does with those more polished poets at the end of the century. Donne was known by his contemporaries for bringing something fresh and new to English verse. Thomas Carew’s incisive ‘Elegy on the Death of Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne’ credits Donne with the development of a robust mode of poetic utterance that repudiates much of the stilted artificiality that preceded him: The Muses’ garden, with pedantic weeds O’erspread, was purged by thee, the lazy seeds
¹⁰ Sir Richard Baker, A chronicle of the kings of England from the time of the Romans’ government, unto the reign of our sovereign Lord King Charles (London, 1643), ‘The Reign of King James’, 156, spelling modernised.
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593 Of servile imitation thrown away, And fresh invention planted. (Carew, ‘Elegy’, lines 25–8, in Donne, Collected Poetry, 334)
Donne, Carew argues, manages to create something fresh and vigorous in what he apprehends as the unweeded garden of English poetry. Donne’s fresh invention, moreover, entailed the effort to seek out images from a disparate range of sources and experiences. Indeed, Donne made a virtue—and sometimes a vice—of developing metaphors that compare disparate realms of existence in unexpected ways. In one of his most justly famous poems, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, Donne compares the parting of lovers to ‘gold to airy thinness beat’ (Donne, ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, line 24, Collected Poetry, 37), and imagines their reunion as the re-joining of the legs of a compass. While the poets of the early seventeenth century would not have recognised the term ‘metaphysical’— which is first bestowed by John Dryden as a term of opprobrium, and later developed by Samuel Johnson in his ‘Life of Cowley’—there is a conscious expansion of the possibilities of poetic imagery into science, physiology, alchemy, and astronomy.¹¹ The capacity to deploy images from metallurgy and geometry to describe the tender parting of lovers is the kind of bold innovation that Donne brings to English verse. Erotic verse, then, changes ever so slightly, but meaningfully, from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Instead of just playfully adapting Petrarchan convention, the poets of the seventeenth century issue a more overt challenge to Petrarchism. One way they do this is to allow the consummation devoutly wished by sixteenth-century writers. Like Shakespeare in the Sonnets, Donne’s erotic verse explores just what happens when an idealised love issues in actual physical intimacy. Donne, for example, wakes with his lover after a night of ardent pleasure with a joy that verges on the spiritual in ‘The Good Morrow’. And in ‘The Canonisation’, he allows erotic love to exemplify the spiritual courage and emotional commitment required to achieve full sanctity. In Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, love is either an occasion of anxiety and disgust or a reverie of full intimacy. And Donne injects a kind of tough-minded argumentation into his erotic lyrics; he will argue with himself as well as his erotic partner with rigour and intensity. He will also use erotic poetry to explore philosophical ideas, including the crucial question of the relationship between body and soul. As Donne suggests in ‘The Ecstasy’, one of his richest and most philosophically complex poems, ‘Love’s mysteries in souls do grow / But yet the body is his book’ (Donne, ‘The Ecstasy’, lines 71–2, Collected Poetry, 40). It is a book that Donne read closely, with precision and attention. Donne’s corkscrews of meaning and syntax work their way into myriad realms of human experience. In addition, Donne’s poetry displays a remarkable metrical and stanzaic variety; his prosody allows the patterns of thought to chafe against or merge with the expectations of metre as the sense and the emotion demand. Where Shakespeare’s Sonnets would make the most complex ideas available in the smoothest, most regular verse, Donne’s metrics will force a reader to slow down, and even to pause. This is why Jonson said that Donne ‘for not keeping of accent deserved hanging’ (Jonson, ‘Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden’, Jonson, 1.133).¹² But thankfully, convulsive metre is not a felony, or none shall escape.
¹¹ See my ‘Metaphysical Poetry’, in Roland Greene (gen. ed.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, fourth edition (Princeton, NJ, 2012), 870–2; and Earl Miner, The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley (Princeton, NJ, 1969). ¹² Ben Jonson, in C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52).
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594 - Jonson’s formal classicism injects a new dimension to the Renaissance idea of the rebirth of Classical learning. Jonson carefully translates the Classical values of balance and order; his measured couplets offer an incorrigibly English version of the good life. He suggests that this good life is in some sense sponsored by an intrinsically good society, whose parameters must be respected. There is something of a paradox in Jonson’s project here, since Jonson wrote for the most part in support of the very aristocratic ideals that would exclude his full participation. The son of a bricklayer, Jonson nonetheless asserts with vigour and panache his own accomplishments as a producer of classically informed, elite culture. He even took the unprecedented step in 1616 of supervising the publication of his poetry and publishing his collected writings as his Works (a translation of the Latin word ‘Opera’, used for collected editions of the Greco-Roman classics). Jonson, furthermore, insisted on the moral and social importance of the poet. Far less metrically experimental than Donne or Herbert, Jonson created supple couplets that fit his Classical ideal of balance. At its best, his work is like polished wood that brings out the grain. Jonson’s brilliant use of the couplet establishes it as a vehicle that would later be utilised with great subtlety by Dryden, Sir John Denham, and Edmund Waller in the second half of the seventeenth century. Pastoral is a genre, as Helen Cooper has shown above, that is both passionately idealistic and profoundly ideological.¹³ Deeply self-reflexive, the genre abides throughout the seventeenth century, but not without undergoing some dramatic changes. Elizabethan pastoral is highly artificial in its conventions and has little to do with real shepherds or sheep. Typically sounding like courtiers pretending to be shepherds, its cultural meanings move in two opposite directions: on the one hand, its portrait of simple shepherds invokes a nostalgia for a kind of uncomplicated rural life that, of course, never really existed; on the other, it uses the alternative space of the country to offer an intensification and critique of the courtly world to which it is ostensibly opposed. Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) is probably the finest Elizabethan pastoral. It is made up of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year. The poems cover various subjects, but are united by the hopeless love of Colin Clout for the haughty shepherdess Rosalind. Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ is perhaps the supreme statement of the elegant use of pastoral conventions for erotic ends: Come live with me, and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That Valleys, groves, hills and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields. (Marlowe, ‘The Passionate Shepherd’, lines 1–4, Complete Works, 1.215)¹⁴
But Marlowe’s poem is answered with a dose of cynical realism by Sir Walter Ralegh, in ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’. Ralegh’s poem strips away the pastoral idealism of Marlowe without remorse, and allows time and decay to threaten all the pastoral pleasures offered by Marlowe’s shepherd. Ralegh’s nymph concludes:
¹³ See Chapter 14 in this volume. ¹⁴ Christopher Marlowe, in Roma Gill, et al. (eds), The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1987–98), spelling modernised.
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595 But could youth last, and love still breed, Had joys no date, nor age no need, Then these delights my mind might move To live with thee, and be thy love. (Ralegh, ‘The Nymph’s Reply’, lines 21–4, Poems, 119)¹⁵
Pastoral continues, but its energies migrate into different forms, perhaps in response to the changing social and political circumstances. Either Jonson or Amelia Lanyer inaugurates the country house poem, a genre that would continue to evolve throughout the seventeenth century and beyond. Where Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ celebrates an ideal society of generous, responsible aristocrats, Lanyer’s ‘The Description of Cookham’ is a lament for a lost community of women. Both poems mystify the arduous labour on which their precarious fictions of social harmony depend. Jonson announces that Penshurst was reared with ‘no man’s groan’ (Jonson, ‘To Penshurst’, line 46, Jonson, 8.94), but Robert Herrick’s pastoral poem, ‘The Hock-cart or Harvest Home’, manages to record the hidden pain of hard physical labour in the poem’s celebration of the harvest. Herrick’s poem tells the labourers ambiguously that ‘this pleasure is like rain, / Not sent ye for to drown your pain, / But for to make it spring again’ (Herrick, ‘The Hock-cart’, lines 53–5, Complete Poetry, 1.96).¹⁶ The poem brilliantly allows the implicit ambiguities of ‘it’ to indicate that the pain, like spring, will always return for the labouring class. Pastoral, then, keeps flirting with a kind of social realism that its early manifestations in English disguised. Throughout the seventeenth century, various pastoral motifs and conventions are dismantled and rearranged, so that they can be reinvigorated with topographical detail. One outcome of this project is Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1622), an overly elaborate description in poetry of the landscape of each county in England. The genre probably reaches its apotheosis in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’, an almostepic effort to place that particular estate in English history. The conventions of pastoral would ultimately be dismantled and rearranged in Marvell’s mobile lyrics about nature and the mind. In ‘The Garden’, he suggests, one might engage in the total immersion of consciousness into nature, ‘annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade’ (Marvell, ‘The Garden’, lines 47–8, Poems, 158).¹⁷ If the sonnet dies a slow death in the seventeenth century, devotional verse flourishes on the comparatively barren ground of sixteenth-century religious lyric.¹⁸ The unpublished Sidney Psalter, begun by Sir Philip and finished by his sister Mary Sidney Herbert, is certainly a product of the late sixteenth century, and its metrical range and yearning voice paves the way for George Herbert’s brilliant formal experimentation in the religious lyric.¹⁹ I would argue, furthermore, that Herbert’s remarkable formal variety, along with the impression of spiritual immediacy, absorbs from sonnet sequences some of the capacity for recording the emotional ebb and flow of a relationship. ¹⁵ Sir Walter Ralegh, in Michael Rudick (ed.), The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition (Tempe, AZ, 1999), spelling modernised. Marlowe’s poem and Ralegh’s reply are also discussed in Chapters 3, 10, 14, 29, and 31 in this volume. ¹⁶ Robert Herrick, in Thomas Cain and Ruth Connolly (eds), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2013), spelling modernised. ¹⁷ Andrew Marvell, in Nigel Smith (ed.), The Poems of Andrew Marvell, revised edition (Harlow, 2007). ¹⁸ For more on devotional poetry, see also Chapter 20 in this volume. ¹⁹ See Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney [Herbert], in Hannibal Hamlin, Michael G. Brennan, Margaret P. Hannay, and Noel J. Kinnamon (eds), The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney (Oxford, 2009).
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596 - Donne’s own religious poetry possesses a colloquial power and vigour that resembles the great strengths of his secular poems. Donne struggles to find comfort and union with God, and frequently feels most at home when suffering, which he sees as the correction of a fierce but ultimately benevolent deity. Donne writes several Holy Sonnets, poems which employ the taut form of the sonnet to depict the explosive complexities of the human devotional relationship with God. His sonnets specialise in recoil; he frequently uses the form to state an audacious idea: If poisonous minerals, and if that tree, Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us ... Cannot be damned, alas, why should I be? (Donne, ‘Holy Sonnet’ 5, lines 1–2, 4, Collected Poetry, 258)
The poems then back-pedal from the bold challenge to God’s justice, and the speaker repents: ‘But who am I, that dare dispute with thee’ (line 9), is the prototypical line of the volta of a Holy Sonnet. Donne also writes a range of powerful hymns that depict the inner turmoil of the devotional subject. Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Hymns constitute one of the finest bodies of religious utterance in English from any period. If Donne has an equal in religious poetry, though, it is his younger acquaintance, Herbert. Herbert’s verse forms are wonderfully creative, exhibiting an unmatched technical virtuosity. Herbert makes poetry out of questioning the very project of writing devotional poetry. His two ‘Jordan’ poems, for example, ask what kinds of images might be appropriate for his divine subject: ‘Nothing could be too rich to clothe the sun’, Herbert argues in ‘Jordan’ (II), before interrogating the aesthetic pride inherent in such a claim (Herbert, ‘Jordan’ (II), line 11, English Poems, 367).²⁰ His poem ‘The Collar’ enacts a formal virtuosity that is almost unimaginable in the sixteenth century (or in any century). Apparently unshaped, the poem exhibits irregularly alternating lines of different length in order to represent the disorder of a true temper tantrum: I struck the board, and cried, No more; I will abroad. What? shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free; free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store. Shall I be still in suit? (Herbert, ‘The Collar’, lines 1–6, English Poems, 526)
Yet, the poem concludes with a sense that order is being restored as the speaker returns to a relationship of service to his lord: But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild At every word, Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child: And I replied, My Lord. (Herbert, ‘The Collar’, lines 33–6, English Poems, 526) ²⁰ George Herbert, in Helen Wilcox (ed.), The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge, 2007), spelling modernised.
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597 Herbert’s remarkable ability to find the perfect form for expressing his spiritual state— whether the studied chaos of ‘The Collar’ or the carefully patterned rhymes of ‘Paradise’— would remain unparalleled in English devotional verse, although he does attract a lot of followers and imitators over the course of the century. Richard Crashaw, Christopher Harvey, and Henry Vaughan all write devotional verse deeply influenced by Herbert. In 1611—the same year that the King James Version of the English Bible was published— Lanyer would publish her brilliant Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a proto-feminist revision of the Bible, emphasising the substantial roles played by women throughout, and the ways in which Jesus’ own submission to male authorities parallels the lamentable experience of women in the patriarchy of early seventeenth-century England. The volume also includes a fascinating defence of Eve, spoken by Pilate’s wife. Not until Milton’s Paradise Lost would Eve have such a powerful advocate. As the sixteenth turns to the seventeenth century, then, various stylistic handoffs occur, some of which are fumbled, and some of which occur with mixed success at best. The sixteenth century ends with a brilliant if inimitable English epic, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590 in three books; 1596 in six). Written in a self-consciously archaic style, The Faerie Queene can seem like the product of a much earlier time. Unfortunately, several poets in early seventeenth-century England decide to try to imitate it, with comparatively unpalatable results. Not until John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667 in ten Books; 1674 in twelve) would the English epic assume the same august presence, lyrical music, and intellectual heft that Spenser had bestowed upon it. Shakespeare’s brilliant, enigmatic lyric ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ is published in 1601, in one of the strangest collections of poetry published in the period, Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr; Or, Rosalind’s Complaint. A mystical allegory cast in trochaic tetrameter, Shakespeare’s poem laments the deaths of a phoenix and turtledove while celebrating the survival of the ‘mutual flame’ of their love (Shakespeare, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, line 24, Complete Sonnets and Poems, 374).²¹ It is perhaps the first ‘metaphysical’ lyric to be published. The poem evokes the esoteric mysteries of passionate love in a series of staggering paradoxes: So they loved as love in twain, Had the essence but in one, Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain. (Shakespeare, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, lines 25–8, Complete Sonnets and Poems, 374)
In its effort to describe the mystical phenomenon of ‘Hearts remote, yet not asunder’ (line 29), the poem shares much with Donne’s secular erotic poems, which attempt through striking imagery to define the parts of a love that can survive physical separation. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ either paves the way for the lyric meditation on relations between the soul and the body, exemplified by Donne’s ‘The Ecstasy’, or follows closely in its path. When, as Donne suggests, ‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’, one can look to any realm of experience for analogy and meaning. Wilfully surrendering the fictions of utter unintelligibility, Donne explores a poetry in which anything can be likened to anything. There was, at the turn of the century, a sense that the growing body of scientific knowledge ²¹ William Shakespeare, in Colin Burrow (ed.), The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford, 2002). See also the discussion of this poem in Chapter 30 in this volume.
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598 - had emptied the universe of its magic, and of a consistent meaning. Religious strife challenged the exclusive claims of Catholic Christianity. What has sometimes been called, for better and worse, ‘The Elizabethan World Picture’ was disintegrating, if indeed it had ever existed.²² I would argue, in fact, that the ability to link through myriad unexpected metaphors expands as the intrinsic coherence of the world is challenged, rendering all of creation available for the discovery of tacit relationship and the imposition of hidden meaning. What has come to be called the metaphysical conceit emerged in large part from a willingness to generate connections amongst heterogeneous realms of existence. If all coherence is gone, one must generate whatever fragile coherence one can through all possible resources, including metaphor. And part of the pleasure of the poetry is the illusion of watching thought and emotion in the process of being formed. Donne achieved an astonishing particularity and a dramatic immediacy designed to engage, if not to startle, a reader. Deploying imagery from science, medicine, astronomy, and travel to enrich the comparatively limited resources of Petrarchan lyric, Donne generates sparks of connection in a world that seemed to be disintegrating. One can see, then, that the cracks in what came to be called the Elizabethan compromise became spaces of great poetic creativity as well as places of immense political contention. Poems in the early seventeenth century become somewhat less artificial, as the language becomes more colloquial and the rhythms become rougher, more like those of everyday speech. As the centuries turn, we move from a poetry that adapts convention with striking ingenuity to a poetry that makes a point of chafing against convention. This may, in part, be due to the erosion of certainty that Donne articulated so well, and a corollary instalment of irony and paradox as intellectual responses to doubt. Paradox addresses well the phenomenon of intellectual bewilderment, but is ultimately less satisfying as a response to the implicit emotional anxiety aroused by this erosion. We see in the early seventeenth-century poets a concerted effort to create new lyric forms as well as to do unusual and creative things with inherited forms. As we move from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, we slowly leave behind the measured fluidity and rhythmic grandiloquence of Elizabethan poetry for the practical, plain, sceptical, hesitant, ambiguous, paradoxical poetry of the Jacobean age. I would argue, then, that the turn of the seventeenth century is not an arbitrary demarcation but rather something of a watershed moment in the literary and political landscape of England. Looking closely at the poetry of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, one discovers not a story of sustained aesthetic progress but rather one of fits and starts, of the deaths and births of genres. It is in some ways too bad that we tend to break up our pedagogy, and even our scholarly expertise, with the gratuitous turn of the calendar. The stories we tell would certainly look somewhat different if we emphasised other modes of demarcation other than the turn of centuries. Yet, the arbitrary chronological structures we use reveal at least as much as they conceal, and are shadowed by what comes after. The move from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century turns out to be as good a time as any, and better than most, to take stock of the remarkable work that emerged in the previous century, and to think about the hidden conduits of influence that enrich and delimit the work of the next.
²² See E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943). The New Historicism, particularly in its early phases, engaged in an explicit challenge to this model; see, e.g., Stephen Greenblatt, The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, a special issue of Genre, 15 (1982).
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Index Aesop 29, 234, 420, 467 A., H. 289; The Scourge of Venus 289 Alabaster, William 219, 352, 369–70; Divine Meditations 352 Alamanni, Luigi 234, 421 Alençon, Duc de: see Francis, Duke of Anjou and Alençon Alexander, Sir William 227, 394, 403; Aurora 227, 403 alexandrine 135, 227, 295n, 361, 442, 472n, 473, 477, 497n allegory 4, 22, 26, 55, 56, 60, 117, 145, 155, 173, 189, 245, 276, 296, 297, 298, 385, 398, 403, 468, 469n, 476, 478, 487, 489, 492, 493, 498, 507, 511, 553, 561, 597 alliteration 7, 20, 31, 32, 36, 167, 184–5, 202, 221, 265–6, 293n, 335, 364, 373, 376, 381, 390, 402, 408, 411, 413, 425, 428, 434, 435, 560, 575, 576 Anacreon 196, 445 anacreontics 220, 346, 362, 470 Andrewes, Lancelot (Bishop) 223 Anguillara, Orso dell’ 417, 419 Aphthonius 291 Aquilano, Serafino 200n, 215, 407, 412, 415–16 The Arbour of Amorous Devices 557 Aretino, Pietro 353, 408, 418–19; Sette Salmi 408, 418, 419 Ariosto, Ludovico 11, 60, 91n, 122, 125, 129, 132, 135, 142, 198, 215, 264, 276, 278, 398, 405, 432, 477, 478, 500; Orlando Furioso 11, 60, 91n, 122, 264, 276, 278, 398, 477n, 478, 500 Aristotle 83, 84n, 96, 144, 145, 162, 194, 198n, 262, 264, 278, 383n, 449, 501, 529n, 568; Poetics 83, 96, 194, 262, 264; Problems 568; Rhetoric 83, 144, 198n, 383n, 529n Arundel-Harington Manuscript 68, 164, 320 Arundel, Thomas (Archbishop) 407 Ascham, Roger 86, 89, 93, 97, 123–4, 272; The Schoolmaster 86, 123, 272 Askew, Anne 48, 69–70, 353 Athanasius 356 Aubrey, John 555 Auden, W. H. 350 Auerbach, Erich 150 Augustine, St 160, 550–1 Augustus, Caesar 96, 106, 159, 171, 246, 325, 491, 511, 512, 523, 542 authorship 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 58, 64, 84, 132, 141–2, 177, 178n, 182, 209, 336, 392, 423, 429, 432, 435, 457, 504, 527, 554, 555, 571, 572, 574, 580 Awen, William 411 Ayton, Sir Robert 404
Bacon, Sir Francis 95, 208, 222, 269, 559, 561, 563; The Advancement of Learning 563; New Atlantis 563 Bacon, Sir Nicholas 269 Baines, Richard 534 Baker, Sir Richard 592 Bakhtin, Mikhail 263 Baldwin, William 50, 51, 54, 86, 183n, 184, 186, 338 Bale, John 69–70 ballad 4, 47, 58, 60, 67, 68–70, 73, 76, 107, 110, 115, 116, 126, 134, 137, 166, 183n, 195–6, 202, 206, 208, 245, 252, 269, 302, 358, 361, 392–3, 423, 425, 426, 463, 559 Bannatyne Manuscript 392, 399–400 Barclay, Alexander 246, 247, 251–2, 462 Barksted, William 289; Hiren, or the Fair Greek 289; Myrrha 289 Barnes, Barnabe 212, 220, 354, 369, 370; A Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets 212, 354, 369; Parthenophil and Parthenophe 212, 220 Barnfield, Richard 2n, 30, 37–42, 48, 189, 220, 248, 289, 342, 347, 553; The Affectionate Shepherd 38–40, 248, 342; Cassandra 289; The Combat Between Conscience and Covetousness 37–8; The Complaint of Chastity 347; Cynthia 220, 553; Orpheus his Journey to Hell 289 Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste du 275, 365–6, 368, 404; Divine Weeks and Works 365–6; Urania 365 Basil, St 357 Beard, Thomas 30n, 38n, 534 beast fable 20, 25, 54, 340, 454, 467, 468 Beaumont, Francis 288, 289, 292, 293; Salmacis and Hermaphroditus 288, 289, 292 Beaumont, John 289; The Metamorphosis of Tobacco 289 Bellay, Joachim du 13n, 227, 339, 341, 458, 459, 460, 464, 465–6, 470, 471, 473, 497n Bembo, Pietro 85n, 214 Bentley, Thomas 70n, 361; The Monument of Matrons 70n, 361 Beza, Theodore 319, 361, 573 Bible 122, 173, 209, 261, 334, 348, 355, 356, 357, 358, 365, 366, 407, 581, 597 New Testament 356, 366 Acts of the Apostles 210, 357; James 366; John 402; Luke 238, 402; Matthew 210, 365; Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 481, 561; Paul’s Letter to the Romans 493; Revelation 233, 402, 459, 482
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644 Bible (cont.) Old Testament 50, 52, 357 Ecclesiastes 355, 357; Ezekiel 233; Genesis 357; Job 355; Lamentations 337, 348, 465; Proverbs 355, 357; Song of Songs 352, 355, 356, 357, 473; see also Jeremiah; see also Psalms Bibles Coverdale Bible 356, 358, 363, 408; Douai–Rheims Bible 368; Great Bible 407; Hebrew Bible 355; Geneva Bible 10, 47, 355, 356, 363, 403n, 541, 575–6, 577–8, 581; King James Bible 46, 353, 366, 597; Matthew Bible 356; Vulgate 408 Bion of Smyrna 255, 323, 463 Bishops’ Ban 73, 243, 327, 537, 590 blank verse 2, 102, 104, 109, 111, 135, 164, 227, 236, 261, 266, 267, 282, 284, 362, 409, 411, 460, 517, 518, 520 blazon 193, 221, 294, 446, 530–1, 558 Blount, Charles, 8th Baron Mountjoy 38 Blount, Edward 59 Blundeston, Lawrence 77, 430 Boccaccio, Giovanni 78, 170, 198, 231, 251, 312n, 334, 403, 462, 463; Of the Falls of Illustrious Men (De Casibus Virorum Illustrium) 312n, 334 Boiardo, Matteo Maria 198, 477n, 478 Boleyn, Anne 62, 64–5, 68, 130, 418 Bolton, Edmund (aka ‘E. B.’) 188, 259–60, 261 The Book of Common Prayer 473, 578 Boscán, Juan 460 Bourdieu, Pierre 161, 170n Boyd, Michael 526 Boyle, Elizabeth 220, 470, 471 Breton, Nicholas 116, 247, 254, 257, 258, 260, 422, 424, 426, 570; Britton’s Bower of Delights 557; ‘In the merry month of May’ 254, 257, 258; The Pilgrimage to Paradise 570 Brice, Thomas 422 Bright Manuscript 62, 64 Britton’s Bower of Delights, see Breton, Nicholas Browne, Sir Thomas 561; Religio Medici 561 Browne, William 301–2; Britannia’s Pastorals 301–2 Bryan, Sir Francis 132, 200, 235, 316 Bryskett, Lodowick 324, 571 Buchanan, George 353, 361, 402 Bullein, William 231 Bunyan, John 208 Buonarotti, Michelangelo 27 Burckhardt, Jacob 532 Burghley, Lord, see Cecil, William, Lord Burghley Burke, Kenneth 4, 5, 8, 143, 145–6, 147, 148, 150–1, 152–8, 263, 440–1, 450, 451, 452–3 Burns, Robert 401 Butler, Thomas, 10th Earl of Ormond and Ossory 479 Byrd, William 557 Cabot, John 281 Cabot, Sebastian 281
Callimachus 196 Calvin, John 45, 219, 242, 352, 359, 365, 369, 398–9 Camden, William 493 Camel, Thomas 29 Camões, Luís Vaz de 282; Os Lucíadas 282 Campensis, Joannis 408 Campion, Edmund 320 Campion, Thomas 30, 85, 110–11, 115, 118, 201, 211, 319; Observations in the Art of English Poesy 85, 110, 118, 211 canon 9, 12, 21, 29, 71, 127, 136, 138, 161n, 173n, 213, 261, 286, 287–9, 407n, 409, 417, 420, 436, 493, 555, 557 canzone 64, 115, 116, 119, 120, 214, 217, 220, 409, 412, 415n, 416, 463, 471, 472 career 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 43, 44, 46, 59n, 107, 112, 114, 116, 136–7, 159–74, 183n, 240, 246, 269, 277, 280, 286–7, 290, 292, 293n, 294–300, 311, 321, 331, 340, 366, 422, 457, 459, 460, 462, 467, 469, 474, 476, 491, 495, 496, 497, 498, 502–5, 507–10, 513, 516, 518n, 535, 556, 557, 560, 590 Carew, Richard 86, 91, 276; Epistle on the Excellency of the English Tongue 86, 91; Godfrey of Bulloigne 276 Carew, Thomas 592–3; ‘Elegy on . . . John Donne’ 592–3 Carey, Elizabeth 58, 215 Caro, Annibale 27 Carr, Frances (neé Howard), Countess of Somerset 68–9 Carr, John 348; A Larum Bell for London 348 Carr, Robert, Earl of Somerset 69 Castiglione, Baldassare 29, 92, 101n, 450; The Book of the Courtier 29, 92, 101n, 450 Catholicism 23, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 55, 62, 120, 179, 219, 232, 269, 271, 319, 320, 349, 352, 354, 360n, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 404, 476, 482, 509, 517, 552, 553n, 581, 587, 591, 598 Catullus, Gaius Valerius 73, 196, 317, 320, 446, 457, 466, 472 Caxton, William 20, 29, 57, 59, 265, 273, 382n, 397 Cecil, Robert, 1st Earl of Salisbury 467, 564, 566 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 340, 467, 468, 486–7, 492 censorship 3, 34, 54–5, 56, 73, 236, 327, 541, 544; see also Bishops’ Ban Chaloner, Sir Thomas, the Elder 405–6 Chamberlain, John 557 Chapman, George 9, 86, 97, 257, 274–6, 282n, 286–7, 288, 289, 291, 295n, 296–300, 495, 507, 510–16, 528; Achilles Shield 97, 275–6, 514–15; ‘De Guiana’ 276; The Divine Poem of Musaeus 288, 289, 299–300; continuation of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander 287, 288, 296–9, 513–14; Odyssey 97n, 276, 514; Ovid’s Banquet of Sense 86, 288, 289, 291n, 295n, 296, 511–13; Seven Books of the Iliads 274–5, 282n, 514–15; The Shadow of Night 510–11 Charles I 587, 591
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645 Charles II 590 Charlewood, John 76 Charron, Pierre 324 Chaucer, Geoffrey 2, 11, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 36, 38, 66, 67–8, 75, 79, 89, 104, 105, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118, 122, 127–9, 130, 131, 133–4, 135, 136, 159, 170, 171, 173, 179, 183, 184, 185, 231, 233, 246, 248n, 251, 256, 266, 302, 310, 318, 322, 334, 335, 362, 377, 378, 379, 380n, 386, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 407, 411, 434, 461, 463, 468, 480, 481, 487, 497, 548, 573; Anelida and Arcite 129; The Book of the Duchess 25n, 26; The Canterbury Tales 36, 67, 184n, 251, 337, 387, 480n; The Clerk’s Tale 24; The Knight’s Tale 21, 28, 128; The Monk’s Tale 481; The Nun’s Priest’s Tale 25, 27, 468; The Squire’s Tale 127–9, 134, 487; The Tale of Sir Thopas 28, 128, 256, 480, 573; The Wife of Bath’s Tale 21, 32, 207 ‘A Complaint to his Lady’ 407; ‘The Complaint of Venus’ 411; The House of Fame 318; The Legend of Good Women 22, 67, 266; The Parliament of Fowls 11, 377; Troilus and Criseyde 22, 66, 67, 79, 111, 127, 130, 131, 134, 136, 248n, 334, 335, 377, 380n, 395, 497, 548 Cheke, Sir John 133 Chepman and Myllar prints 391, 392 Chester, Robert 551, 597; Love’s Martyr 551, 553, 597 Churchyard, Thomas 29, 115–16, 183n, 186, 235–6, 309, 323, 345–7, 422; Churchyard’s Challenge 345, 346–7 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 34, 50, 83n, 96, 97, 101, 123, 194, 321, 457n, 560, 561n Cinthio, see Giraldi, Giovanni Battista Clapham, Henoch 357 Clapham, John 289; Narcissus 289 Clifford, Rosamond 346, 499 Colonna, Stefano, the Younger 418 Collingbourne, William 54–5, 86, 186–7, 338–9 Colse, Peter 342, 347; Penelope’s Complaint 342, 347 commonplace book 4, 57, 59, 62, 68, 124, 125, 130, 141, 142, 177, 321, 427 commonplacing 4, 57, 124, 125, 431 complaint 7, 8, 9, 22, 38, 43, 79n, 134, 185, 189, 204, 214, 220, 232, 235, 236, 238, 241, 242, 251, 256, 258, 259n, 274, 279, 281, 287–8, 289, 293n, 296, 304, 309–10, 312–13, 316, 320, 321, 322, 324, 334–50, 365, 366, 367, 385, 397, 402, 407, 411, 416, 421, 426, 428, 431, 435–6, 437, 453, 458, 459, 460, 463, 464–9, 476, 487, 497n, 499–500, 506, 536, 542, 543, 549, 551, 553–4, 597 Complaint of the Ploughman 337 La connaissance d’amours (La conusaunce d’amours) 22–4, 25, 27, 28 Constable, Henry 223–4, 258n, 368–9, 506; Diana 223–4, 368; ‘Spiritual sonnets’ 368–9 copia 5, 40, 148, 216, 217–25, 231 Copley, Anthony 366; A Fig for Fortune 366
Cornish, William 201, 204 Cornwallis, Sir William 563 corona 213, 220, 447 coterie 31, 77, 120, 140, 204, 332, 398, 495, 512, 515, 572 Counter Reformation 179, 368 The Court of Venus 354 Courtop, Richard 72 Coverdale, Miles 356, 357, 358, 363, 408; Ghostly psalms 356–7, 358; see also Bibles, Coverdale Bible Cowley, Abraham 192 Crashaw, Richard 208, 351, 597 Cromwell, Thomas 349, 415n Crowley, Robert 354, 357, 358, 360n, 365, 407n; Pleasure and Pain 354, 365; Psalter of David 354n, 357, 358, 407n cultural capital 5, 7, 161, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173, 174, 377, 436, 555 Curione, Celio Secondo 73 cursus Virgilii 240, 269, 277, 503; see also rota Virgilli Cutwode, Thomas (pseudonym of Dymoke Tailboys) 289; Caltha Poetarum 289; Philos and Licia 289 dactylic hexameter 263, 267, 272; see also hexameter Daniel, Samuel 9, 59, 62, 85, 90, 91, 94n, 98, 118, 120, 139, 198–9, 212, 220, 225–6, 228, 281, 285, 289, 301, 304–5, 309–10, 312, 313, 316, 335, 346, 347, 453, 469, 470, 495–502, 504, 505, 506, 508, 510, 511, 516, 553, 570–1; The Civil Wars 118, 281, 304, 309, 500–1; Cleopatra 62, 570–1; The Complaint of Rosamond 62, 226, 289, 309, 312, 313, 335, 346–7, 469, 499–500, 506; A Defence of Rhyme 85, 91, 98, 118, 198–9, 212, 453; Delia 62, 118, 139, 212, 220, 225, 226, 228, 346, 470, 496–9, 508, 553, 570; Musophilus 90, 94n, 502 Dante Alighieri 2, 6, 90, 127, 159, 170, 185, 317, 405, 486; Inferno 127, 486; Purgatorio 127; La Vita Nuova 317 Danter, John 76 Dares Phrygius 303 Darnley, Sir Edmund 354 David (King) 60, 195, 207, 209, 210, 219, 345, 348, 349, 353, 354, 355, 357, 358, 359, 360n, 361, 366, 367, 393, 407n, 408, 409, 418–19, 425, 441, 581; see also Psalms Davies, John, of Hereford 212–13, 221, 227, 575, 579; Wit’s Pilgrimage 213, 221 Davies, Sir John 72–3, 221, 227, 239, 243, 289; Epigrams 73, 227, 243, 327, 537n; ‘Gulling Sonnets’ 221; Nosce teipsum 73; Orchestra 289 Davison, Francis 572; A Poetical Rhapsody 557, 572 Day, Angel 323 Day, John 266, 267, 411 de casibus tradition 312, 334, 338, 342, 345, 365; see also Boccaccio; see also Lydgate
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646 decorum 88, 183, 185, 196, 230, 246, 253, 254, 255, 256, 260, 261, 334, 338, 341 Dekker, Thomas 42, 74–5 Demosthenes 96, 97 Denham, Sir John 594 Descartes, René 2 Desportes, Philippe 215, 505 Dethick, Henry 86 Devereux, Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex 69, 255–6, 274, 275, 282n, 369, 476, 515, 553, 587 Devonshire Manuscript 62–4, 66–7, 68, 71, 79, 130, 164, 202 Dickenson, John 342; The Shepherd’s Complaint 342 Dickinson, Emily 563 dimeter 116, 207, 363, 426 Dio of Prusa 96 Diogenes Laertius 141 Donne, John 4, 6, 10, 11, 41, 42, 43–5, 58, 59n, 70–1, 74, 119–21, 139–40, 157, 169, 174, 190, 206–7, 208, 209–10, 211, 220, 231, 235, 237–40, 241, 247, 295n, 330–3, 351–2, 354, 364, 368n, 369, 370, 423, 446, 553n 563, 569, 589–93, 594, 596, 598; ‘The Bait’ 563; ‘The Canonisation’ 593; ‘Devotions upon Emergent Occasions’ 351–2; The First Anniversary 592; ‘The Ecstasy’ 593, 597; Elegies 330–3; ‘Eternal God’ 209–10, 364; ‘Go and catch a falling star’ 206–7; ‘The Good Morrow’ 593; Holy Sonnets 44, 211, 354, 589, 596; ‘A Lecture Upon the Shadow’ 119–20; Satires 139–40, 237–8, 239–40, 241, 589–90, 591–2; ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ 593 Douglas, Gavin 265–6, 268, 270, 396–7, 403n, 404, 409–11; Eneados 265, 396–7, 404, 409, 410; Palyce of Honour 396, 397 Douglas, Lady Margaret 64, 66, 68, 130 Dowland, John 30, 201 Drake, Sir Francis 6, 280–2, 524n Drant, Thomas 229, 230, 235–6 Drayton, Michael 9, 58–9, 117–19, 120, 212, 215, 217, 221, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 246, 247, 256–7, 281, 285, 286n, 288, 289, 296n, 301–2, 304–5, 306, 309–15, 316, 335, 342, 347, 361, 362, 365, 366, 454, 495, 502–9, 510, 511, 513, 516, 590, 595; The Barons’ Wars 281, 309; Endymion and Phoebe 285, 288, 289, 507–8, 511, 513, 590; England’s Heroical Epistles 301, 305, 310, 311, 312, 313–15, 508–9; Harmony of the Church 361, 362; Idea 117, 212, 217, 223, 225, 227, 228, 256, 454, 504, 505–6, 507; Idea: The Shepherd’s Garland 117, 256–7, 502–4, revised as Pastorals 246, 256; Idea’s Mirror 117, 215, 221, 223, 225, 228, 504–5; Legend of Matilda 289, 309, 310, 312, 335, 347, 506; Legend of Piers Gaveston 289, 309, 310, 312, 342, 506–7; Mortimeriados 281, 309–10, 311, 312; Poly-Olbion 117, 302, 310, 509, 595; Robert Duke of Normandy 289, 301, 310–11, 312, 365
dream vision 24, 25, 378, 397, 464, 476, 480 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden 226, 501, 593 Dryden, John 593, 594 Dudley, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick 450 Dudley, Anne (neé Russell), Countess of Warwick 427, 428 Dudley, Guildford 312, 508 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester 74, 167, 340, 450, 466, 467 Dunbar, William 389–91, 394, 399, 401, 404; Ane Ballat of Our Lady 390; Flytyng 391, 394; The Goldyn Targe 390–1; ‘The Lament for the Makaris’ 391; ‘Of Ane Blak–Moir’ 391; ‘Quhy will ye’ 389–90; Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen 391, 394 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe 570, 580 Dyer, Sir Edward 109, 316, 424 echo poem 428, 448 Edward II 342, 506, 533 Edward IV 302, 312, 313, 345 Edward VI 2, 50, 55, 232, 352, 354, 355, 358, 365, 424 Edwards, Thomas 289, 292, 295; Cephalus and Procris 289; Narcissus 289, 292 Egerton Manuscript 103, 200n, 202, 214, 407, 409n, 418 Egerton, Sir Thomas 239 E. K. 115, 171–2, 244, 246, 248, 250, 251, 325, 429, 433, 434, 460–1, 462, 463, 510 ekphrasis 193, 275, 297, 468, 515, 529, 532, 549 elegiac distich 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 327, 328, 332, 537 elegy 6, 7, 88, 111, 115, 132–3, 180, 182, 227, 240, 245, 246, 255, 256, 280, 316–33, 336, 340, 349, 350, 457, 462, 465, 503n, 540, 552, 564, 565, 570, 571, 572, 592–3 Eliot, T. S. 523 Elizabeth I 2, 9, 10, 15, 43, 50, 55, 57, 83, 89, 91, 106, 112, 115, 116, 130, 137, 172, 182, 189, 197, 215, 246, 249, 254, 256, 257, 274, 275, 276, 279, 304, 308, 322, 325, 340, 360, 369, 404, 422, 423, 424, 428, 450, 451, 467, 478, 479, 480, 483, 485, 487, 492, 493, 500, 502, 508–9, 511, 543, 547, 553, 556, 567, 572–3, 574, 579, 580, 581, 587, 588, 590 Elviden, Edmund 29 Elyot, Sir Thomas 83n, 86, 91, 93, 94, 97; The Book Named the Governor 86, 94 Elysium 256, 270, 312, 346, 499 Empedocles 475 Empiricus, Sextus 566 Empson, William 4, 126, 245, 440, 442, 447, 451 enargeia 144, 198n, 562 energeia 84n, 99, 144, 198n, 383n, 562n England’s Helicon, see Ling, Nicholas England’s Parnassus 130, 141–2 England’s Worthies 557 enjambment 113, 114, 184, 200, 266, 275, 359, 362, 375, 380, 409, 414, 420, 517, 566 envoy/envoi 2n, 136, 339, 341, 386, 456, 461, 466, 473 epic 2, 6, 8–9, 11, 13–14, 15, 35, 36–7, 58, 60, 83, 88, 91, 116, 117, 122, 134, 136–7, 154, 159–60, 171,
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647 172, 173, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 205, 217, 240, 248, 262–84, 285n, 286, 287, 288n, 296, 298, 306, 317, 318, 327, 341, 351, 365–6, 377, 404, 456, 457, 458, 459, 461, 462, 464, 465–6, 467, 468, 469, 473, 474, 477–8, 479, 480, 481, 491, 495, 496, 498, 500–2, 503, 507, 508, 509, 511, 513, 514–15, 518, 519, 520–3, 524, 528, 531, 545, 588, 597 epigram 5, 6, 73–4, 105, 116, 195, 196–7, 198, 199–201, 220, 222, 227, 243, 332, 336, 338, 346, 412, 418 epithalamium 443, 470, 472 epyllion 6, 9, 10, 114, 201, 285–300, 324, 336, 347, 349, 367, 457, 458, 464, 467, 468, 469, 492, 495, 503, 507, 513–14, 520, 527, 544–5, 546, 548, 590; see also mock-epic Erasmus, Desiderius 40, 131, 148, 218, 236, 337, 355, 468, 529n, 545n; Adages (Adagia) 131, 236–7; The Complaint of Peace (Querela Pacis) 337; De Copia 148, 218; Paraphrase on John 355; Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae) 468 Essex, see Devereux, Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex Estienne, Henri 566 Étienne, Robert 356 Euripides 84, 89, 432 Fairfax, Edward 276 Fairfax, Robert 201 Fane, Lady Elizabeth 354, 360n The Fantasy of the Passion of the Fox 25–8, 32 Farnese, Allesandro (Cardinal) 27 feminine rhyme 380, 413, 442, 530, 539, 547 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 563 Ferrars, George 50 Fethy, John 399, 400 Ficino, Marsilio 488 Field, Richard 60 Fisher, John (Bishop) 408 Fitzgeoffrey, Charles 6, 280–2; Sir Francis Drake 280–2 Fitzroy, Henry, Duke of Richmond and Somerset 180 Fitzroy, Mary (neé Howard) 64 Fleming, Abraham 74, 246, 253 Fletcher, Giles 220, 228, 470; Licia 220, 228, 470 Fletcher, John 246–7, 257; The Faithful Shepherdess 247, 257 Fletcher, Phineas 208, 287, 288, 289, 291, 294–7, 298, 300; The Purple Island 296; Venus and Anchises 287, 288, 289, 294–6, 300 Flower, Francis 76 flyting 7, 231, 391, 394, 397, 402 Forrest, William 365 Foucault, Michel 125 fourteener 107, 115, 166, 252, 253, 257, 267, 269, 275, 425, 426, 428, 514 Fowler, William 394, 403, 404 Francis, Duke of Anjou and Alençon 115, 325 Fraunce, Abraham 86, 253–4, 366, 451n, 528, 570; The Arcadian Rhetoric 86; The Countess of Pembroke’s Emanuel 253–4, 366; The Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch 570
Freeman, Thomas 240 Frobisher, Martin 281 Frye, Northrop 93n, 146n, 191, 193, 197, 198n, 199, 207, 263, 264, 282 Gama, Vasco da 282 The Garland of Goodwill 557 Garnesche, Sir Christopher 142 Garnier, Robert 570 Gascoigne, George 2, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 85, 86, 97, 101, 102, 105–8, 109, 110–11, 113, 178, 183n, 206, 214, 218, 219, 220, 223, 236, 334, 335, 360, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426, 428, 429, 430–4, 435, 436, 557, 558, 562; ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’ 85, 97, 105, 107, 108, 183n, 206n, 214, 218, 223, 334–5, 425, 433–4, 562; A Hundreth Sundry Flowers 72, 76, 77, 105–8, 178, 220, 360n, 429, 430, 431, 432–3; Posies 74, 77, 85, 105–7, 178n, 360n, 423, 429, 430–1, 432–4, 562; ‘Psalm 130’, 360; The Steel Glass 236, 557 Gibbons, Orlando 557 Gilbert, Humphrey 281 Giraldi, Giovanni Battista (aka Cinthio) 478 Godfray, Thomas 67 Golden Age 245, 249, 276 The Golden Fleece 557 Golding, Arthur 20, 107, 208, 223, 270, 522 Goodere, Anne 504 Goodere, Sir Henry 70, 74 Googe, Barnabe 29, 77, 133, 206, 214, 247, 252–3, 422, 426, 429, 430–1, 462; Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets 77, 133, 206, 252, 422, 429 A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions 178 Gorges, Sir Arthur 228, 324, 350, 562 Gosson, Stephen 94 Gower, John 21, 22n, 89, 127, 170, 171, 231, 248, 379, 386; Confessio amantis 22n, 248 gradatio 221, 449–50, 453 Grafton, Richard 302–3 grammar school 34, 229, 285, 287, 291, 300, 341, 386, 545n Grange, John 30; The Golden Aphroditis 30 Greene, Robert 97, 188, 189, 247, 322–3, 324, 333, 534; A Maiden’s Dream 322–3; Menaphon 97, 188 Greville, Sir Fulke, 1st Baron Brooke 5, 108, 143–58, 369, 424, 440n, 450n, 451n; Alaham 144; Caelica 5, 146n, 147, 148, 149–50, 151–2, 153–4, 156–7, 369; Mustapha 144; Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (aka ‘A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney’) 144, 145–6, 450n, 451n; Treatise of Human Learning 152 Grey, Arthur, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton 479, 489, 490, 492 Grey, Lady Jane 312, 508 Griffin, Bartholomew 220, 223; Fidessa 220, 223 Grimald, Nicholas 20, 30–1, 32, 179, 182, 406 Guarini, Giovanni Battista 248
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648 Gude and Godlie Ballatis 401 Guilpin, Everard 140, 238, 239, 243 Gunn, Thom 102, 143, 147, 150, 151–2, 156–8 Hake, Edward 236, 238 Hall, Arthur 273–4, 275; Ten Books of Homer’s Iliades 273–4 Hall, Edward 500 Hall, John 29, 354, 407n, 422; The Court of Virtue 354 Hall, Joseph 6, 11, 139, 140–1, 142, 230n, 240–3, 520, 589, 590; Virgidemiarum 139, 240, 241, 243, 520n, 590 A Handful of Pleasant Delights 178 Hardyng, John 302–3, 307–8, 310, 313 Harington, John 182 Harington, Sir John 60, 86, 91, 97, 122, 125, 129, 132, 141–2, 264, 278, 320, 398, 559, 582; ‘A Brief Apology for Poetry’ 86, 91, 97, 264, 278; translation of Orlando Furioso 122, 125, 129, 132, 142 Harvey, Christopher 597 Harvey, Gabriel 35, 42, 70, 83n, 89n, 94n, 95n, 109–10, 172, 212, 241, 272, 461, 469, 487 Hatton, Sir Christopher 68, 69, 322 Hawes, Stephen 19, 22n, 26, 93 Hazlitt, William 519 Hedley, Thomas 29–30, 32; ‘The Judgement of Midas’ 29–30 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 101 Henry I 311 Henry II 312, 313, 346, 499, 508 Henry V 501 Henry VI 183, 302 Henry VII 20, 183 Henry VIII 2, 20, 43, 55, 58, 67, 103, 130, 131, 161, 162, 180, 201, 204, 231, 337, 343, 352, 385, 405, 418, 588, 591 Henry (Prince) 275, 555–6 Henryson, Robert 235, 395–6, 397, 398, 434n; Orpheus and Eurydice 396; The Tale of the Uponlandis Mouse 235; Testament of Cresseid 395–6, 398 Heraclitus 336 Herbert, George 7, 147, 148, 208, 218, 351, 352, 354, 369, 423, 589, 592, 594, 595, 596–7; ‘The Collar’ 596–7; ‘Jordan (I)’ 354, 596; ‘Jordan (II)’ 596; ‘Paradise’ 597; ‘Prayer (I)’ 147, 148, 218; The Temple 589 Herbert, Mary (neé Sidney), Countess of Pembroke 2, 7, 9–10, 46–9, 77, 86n, 110, 115, 118, 160, 167, 168–9, 209, 219, 324, 339, 340, 341, 348–9, 361, 362–3, 440n, 453, 466, 496, 569–83, 595; Antonius 570; A Dialogue between Two Shepherds 572–4, 579, 580, 581; A Discourse of Life and Death 570; ‘The Doleful Lay of Clorinda’ 571–2, 580; ‘Even now that care’ 86, 573, 579, 580, 581–2; Psalms 10, 46–9, 110, 168–9, 209–10, 219, 348–9, 361, 362–3, 569, 571, 572, 574–9, 580, 581, 595; ‘To the Angel Spirit’ 209, 324, 579–80, 581, 582; The Triumph of Death 582–3 Herbert, William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke 540, 572 Here Beginneth a Complaint 342
Herodotus 122 Herrick, Robert 595 Hesiod 299 hexameter 35, 107, 109, 117–18, 136, 217, 251, 253, 254, 263, 265, 267, 269, 271, 272, 317–18, 323, 357, 362, 366, 407, 409, 442, 461, 473, 477, 481, 497n, 509, 511, 538; see also alexandrine Heywood, Thomas 287, 288, 289, 291, 292–3, 295; Oenone and Paris 287, 288, 289, 292–3 Higgins, John 303–4 Hoby, Sir Edward 57 Hoby, Sir Thomas 29 Hoccleve, Thomas 377; Regiment of Princes 377 Holinshed, Raphael 533; Chronicles 111, 506 Homer 6, 7, 84, 97n, 99n, 123, 125, 135, 262, 264, 273–6, 278, 280, 287, 296, 297, 299, 306, 340, 457n, 478, 514–16 Hopkins, John 46–8, 107, 110, 201, 359n, 407n Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 2, 6, 83, 84n, 87, 96, 97, 105, 107, 108, 139, 140, 169, 182n, 187, 196, 229, 230, 231, 233, 234–5, 236–7, 238, 240, 241, 242, 243, 246, 254, 318, 339, 589; Art of Poetry (Ars poetica) 83, 87, 96, 97, 246, 318; Odes 107, 140, 182, 234, 236, 243, 254; Satires 140, 229, 235, 237, 238, 241 Hoskins, John 86, 90, 92, 102, 222, 224, 451n; ‘Directions for Speech and Style’ 86, 90, 102, 222, 451n Howard, Douglas 324, 325n, 350 Howard, Frances, see Carr, Frances (neé Howard), Countess of Somerset Howard, Frances (neé de Vere), Countess of Surrey 416, 417 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 2, 8, 19, 20, 30, 72, 86, 89, 93, 102, 104–5, 106, 109, 111, 130, 132–3, 135, 161–2, 164–5, 167, 168, 173, 178–81, 182, 184, 189, 200–1, 206, 208, 214, 218, 220, 228, 233, 239, 247, 266–8, 269n, 284, 312, 316, 317, 320, 321–2, 323, 324, 333, 335, 343, 344, 345n, 348, 352–3, 357, 358, 360n, 361, 362, 392, 399, 405–21, 424, 429, 434, 509, 518n, 520, 559; ‘Alas, so all things’ 419; translation of Aeneid Books 2 and 4 104, 109, 133, 135, 164, 208, 266–8, 405, 406, 409–11, 417, 518n, 520; ‘Divers thy death’ 322, 323, 406; Ecclesiastes 357, 405, 418; ‘Give place, ye lovers’ 421; ‘Good ladies’ 344n, 417, 421; ‘In winter’s just return’ 417, 434; ‘London, hast thou accused me’ 233, 417, 420; ‘My Ratcliff ’ 201n, 420; ‘O happy dames’ 344, 415–17, 421; Psalms 348, 352, 353, 357–8, 405, 409, 418, 420; ‘So cruel prison’ 180, 182, 320, 345n, 419; ‘The soote season’ 184n, 218, 419; ‘The sudden storms’ 418; ‘The sun has twice brought forth’ 180, 417, 419; ‘When raging love’ 420; ‘When reckless youth’ 418; ‘When summer took in hand’ 179; ‘When Windsor walls’ 417, 419; ‘W[yatt] resteth here’ 72n, 104, 132–3, 180–1, 321–2, 406 Howard, Lord Thomas 66–7, 130
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649 Howell, Thomas 77, 78, 214, 422, 424, 426–7, 428; The Arbour of Amity 77, 78, 422, 426–7; New Sonnets, and Pretty Pamphlets 77 Hudson, Thomas 365; The History of Judith 365, 404 humanism 2, 3, 4, 5, 26, 28, 29, 34, 37, 83, 85–95, 103, 106, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 161, 172, 190, 192, 222, 229, 233, 235, 251, 254, 262, 292, 355, 361, 384, 385, 392, 394, 396, 397, 398, 402, 423, 426, 452, 453, 458, 459, 460, 461, 464, 466, 472, 506, 519 Hume, Alexander 403–4; ‘Of the Day Estivall’ 403–4; ‘Epistle to Gilbert Moncrief ’ 404 iambic pentameter 2, 19, 104, 164, 198, 359, 360, 380n, 428, 444, 473, 499, 507, 511, 517, 520, 545, 552, 575; see also pentameter ille ego (thus I the man) 269, 271, 277, 477n imitation/imitatio 6, 11, 86–7, 91, 93, 96, 98, 110, 117, 119, 120, 122, 123–6, 127–8, 131, 138, 139–40, 142, 159, 192, 194, 217, 231, 233, 234, 236–7, 238, 241, 243, 245, 251, 257, 262, 263, 272, 277, 287, 288, 290, 291, 292, 293, 295, 296, 297, 298, 304, 319, 320, 342, 355, 362, 384, 395, 424, 432, 436, 442n, 457, 458, 466, 468, 503, 560, 564, 593 Inglis, Esther 399 Inns of Court 32, 62, 72, 74, 106, 119, 120, 224, 239, 241, 285, 286, 288, 290, 291, 330, 427, 429, 430 invention/inventio 6, 87, 98, 99, 148, 169, 211–17, 219, 221–3, 224–5, 228, 266, 267, 286, 292, 299, 304, 362, 367, 383, 395–7, 432, 434, 504, 506, 508, 562, 593 Jaggard, William 217; The Passionate Pilgrim 30, 178, 189, 217, 524 James IV of Scotland 394, 397 James V of Scotland 393, 397, 399 James VI of Scotland and I of England 50, 54, 55, 60, 86, 88, 212, 227, 256, 323, 365, 393, 397, 398, 402, 403, 404, 587, 589, 590; Ane Schort Treatise (aka ‘Reulis and Cautelis’) 60, 86, 88, 212, 365, 402, 403; Lepanto 404 Jeremiah 229, 231, 233, 239, 339, 348 Jerome, St 229, 231, 232, 239 John (King) 301, 312, 313, 314, 347, 508 John of Garland 316–17 Johnson, Samuel 593 Jones, Inigo 299 Jones, Richard 75, 435 Jones, Robert 557 Jonson, Ben 3, 11, 42, 108, 112, 120, 138–9, 142, 174, 190, 208, 211, 242, 244, 247, 318, 423, 495, 501, 517, 526, 543, 590, 593, 594, 595; Conversations with Drummond 212n, 501, 593; Every Man In His Humour 11, 138–9; The Poetaster 139, 242; The Sad Shepherd 247; ‘To Penshurst’ 595 Julius Caesar 246, 282, 521, 522 Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) 6, 229–33, 236–43, 337, 339, 386, 589
The Kalender of Shepherds 250, 463 Keats, John 515–16 Kemys, Lawrence 275 Kendall, Timothy 74, 116; Flowers of Epigrams 74, 116 Kennedy, Walter 391 Kingston, Sir William 68 Kinwelmarshe, Francis 72 Kristeva, Julia 125, 126, 138 Kyd, Alexander 399 Kyd, Thomas 543 labour 5–6, 98, 118, 121, 124, 135, 204, 210–28, 264, 265, 268, 271, 272–3, 275, 279, 280–1, 284, 286, 287, 297, 306, 365, 436, 445, 448, 449, 505, 507, 510, 512, 543, 566, 588, 595 Lane, John 79 Langland, William 36, 229, 231, 337, 365, 463; Piers Plowman 36, 229, 232, 337, 451, 573 Lant, Richard 78 Lant, Thomas 323, 324 Lanyer, Amelia 160, 174, 540, 595, 597; ‘The Description of Cookham’ 595; Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 597 Larkin, Philip 535 Latimer, Hugh (Bishop) 252 Latymer, William 65 laureate 2, 9, 101, 159–60, 161, 162, 164, 205, 230, 295, 298, 373, 374, 377–8, 386–7, 388, 457, 462, 469, 495, 496, 497–8, 499, 500, 502–4, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 511, 513, 514, 516 Leicester, see Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester Leland, John 405–6 Lemaire de Belges, Jean 252 Lentini, Giacomo da 211 Lewis, C. Day 563 Lewis, C. S. 11, 12, 19, 34, 107, 183n, 189, 408, 409, 423, 521n, 526, 566, 587n libel 58, 72, 73, 238–9, 336 Lily, William 291 Linche, Richard 220; Diella 220 Ling, Nicholas (probably ‘L. N.’) 177–8, 188, 257; England’s Helicon 5, 137, 177–8, 187–90, 247, 256, 257–60, 524, 525, 557 Lipsius, Justus 566 L’Isle, William 275 Livy (Titus Livius) 115, 307 L. N. see Ling, Nicholas Lock, Anne Vaughan 168n, 219, 348, 353, 359–61, 368n, 369n, 589; A Mediation of a Penitent Sinner 219, 348, 359–60 Lock (or Lok), Henry 219–20, 223, 360, 363, 370; Ecclesiastes 219–20, 223, 370; Sundry Christian Passions 219–20, 360, 370 Lodge, Giles 59 Lodge, Thomas 86, 91, 94, 220, 228, 237, 241, 247, 258, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 300, 310, 312, 470, 553, 590; The Complaint of Elstred 310; A Defence of Poetry 86, 91; A Fig for Momus 237; Phillis 220, 228, 470, 553; Rosalynde 258; Scylla’s Metamorphosis 285, 289, 291, 294, 295, 590
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650 Longinus 84–5, 95, 96–7, 98–9, 192, 452 Lovelace, William 430 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus) 127, 265, 271, 282, 304, 501, 502, 520–2, 523, 531; Pharsalia 265, 282, 501, 520, 521, 531 Lucian 231, 468 Lucilius, Gaius 229, 236, 240 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) 11, 263, 475 Luther, Martin 45, 49, 352, 357, 407 Lydgate, John 19, 22n, 27, 29, 38, 50, 51, 62, 63, 103, 127, 135, 136, 183, 302, 334, 377–9, 387; The Fall of Princes 50, 51, 135, 136, 183, 334, 377; Testament 27 Lyly, John 29, 42, 79–80, 226 Lyndsay, Sir David 390, 397, 401; Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis 390, 397, 401; Squyer Meldrum 397 lyric 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14n, 21, 29, 30, 41, 42, 58, 64, 66, 68n, 71, 74, 75n, 76, 88, 105, 110, 112, 120, 149, 189, 191–210, 218, 220, 222, 227, 245, 247, 248, 250, 254, 257, 258, 259, 260, 296, 316, 327, 341, 343, 351, 352, 353n, 354, 362, 364, 367, 368, 370, 373, 375, 378, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 390, 391, 392, 393, 398, 399–402, 407, 412, 417, 418, 419, 424, 426, 428, 439–40, 441, 445, 450, 451, 452, 457, 460, 462, 463, 464, 465, 469, 470, 471, 473, 474, 476, 479, 494, 495, 523, 529, 530, 535, 536, 537, 538, 539, 551–3, 557, 558, 559, 560, 561, 562, 563, 564, 565, 566, 588, 589, 592, 593, 595, 597, 598 Machiavelli, Niccolò 404, 561n Macrin, Jean Salmon 472–3 madrigal 190, 214 Maecenas, Gaius 236, 237, 239 The Maid’s Metamorphosis 249 Mainwaring, George 430, 436 Maitland, Marie 399 maker (Scots, makar) 7–8, 57, 89, 92, 106, 162, 164, 165, 169, 173, 210, 276, 311, 353, 387, 388, 391, 395, 397, 398, 402, 403, 405, 424, 469, 556, 562, 568, 572 Mantuan (Baptista Spagnuoli Mantuanus) 246n, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 424, 462, 463 manuscript 3, 4, 9, 19–20, 26, 31, 41, 57–9, 60, 62–71, 73, 74, 75–80, 103, 105, 109, 112, 113, 124, 130, 132, 137, 139, 140, 142, 164–5, 167, 169, 170, 177, 192, 200n, 202, 204, 214, 218, 219, 226–7, 228, 266, 287n, 291, 295, 296n, 305, 313, 317, 320, 332, 348, 360n, 361, 362, 377, 390, 392, 397, 398, 399, 406, 407, 409, 418, 423, 429, 430, 435, 495, 496, 497, 498, 535, 536, 537, 559, 562, 569, 570, 575n, 578n, 581, 582, 589; see also ArundelHarington Manuscript; Bannatyne Manuscript; Bright Manuscript; Devonshire Manuscript; Egerton Manuscript Marbeck, John 425; The Holy History of King David 425 Marlowe, Christopher 2, 3, 9, 29, 38, 41–2, 44–5, 89n, 90, 99–100, 102, 111–14, 120, 124, 129, 189–90, 247, 259, 268, 282, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 291–2, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299,
300, 312, 317, 318, 324, 327–30, 332, 367, 468, 469n, 513–14, 517–34, 537, 543, 544n, 563, 590, 594; All Ovid’s Elegies 90, 113, 317, 324, 327–30, 520, 522–3, 537, 544n; Edward II 114, 312, 533; Dido, Queen of Carthage 38, 268, 518, 526; Doctor Faustus 44–5, 99–100, 523–4, 525, 532, 533, 534; Hero and Leander 114, 124, 129, 282, 285, 287, 288, 289, 291, 295, 296, 297–9, 367, 468, 469n, 513–14, 527–32, 590; The Jew of Malta 524n, 527, 532; ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ (‘Come live with me and be my love’) 41, 189–90, 259, 524–6, 594; Lucan’s First Book (translation of Pharsalia) 282, 520–2; Tamburlaine 114, 518n, 520, 523, 526–7, 532, 533, 534 Marot, Clément 248, 251, 361, 362, 400, 458, 459, 461, 462, 463, 497n, 573 Marprelate tracts 42 Marston, John 4, 6, 11, 129–30, 140–1, 142, 230, 237n, 239, 241–3, 287, 288, 289, 290, 293–4, 589, 590; Certain Satires 140, 230, 241, 242, 293; Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image 230n, 287, 288, 289, 293–4, 590; Parasitaster 141; The Scourge of Villainy 141, 230, 239, 241–2, 293n, 590; What You Will 141 Martin, Richard 72 Marvell, Andrew 595; ‘The Garden’ 595; ‘Upon Appleton House’ 595 Mary I 2, 50, 54, 55, 182, 184, 218, 252, 269, 352, 365, 424, 508, 509 Mary Queen of Scots 55–6, 397, 399, 401, 587 Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) 73, 136n, 139, 201, 231, 241, 339 Melanchthon, Philip 45 Meldrum, William 397 Melville, Elizabeth, Lady Culross 398–9, 403; Ane Godlie Dreame 398–9 Menippean satire 231, 236 Meres, Francis 75–6, 89n, 124–5, 129, 230, 276, 316, 536–8, 541–2, 556; Palladis Tamia 38n, 76, 89n, 129, 230, 276, 316, 536–7, 556 Metham, John 214 Meun, Jean de 11 Michelangelo, see Buonarotti, Michelangelo Middleton, Thomas 243, 296n, 335, 347–8; The Ghost of Lucrece 335, 348 Mill, John Stuart 192 Milton, John 155, 208, 250, 284, 366, 423, 495, 517, 520, 588, 589, 590, 597; Lycidas 250, 349; Paradise Lost 155, 284, 351, 366, 517, 520, 588, 597 Minturno, Antonio 194 The Mirror for Magistrates 5, 50–5, 111, 134–5, 178, 182–7, 303–4, 312, 334–5, 338–9, 345, 365, 426, 435, 466, 499, 506, 508 miscellany 5, 8, 62, 68, 70–1, 79, 106, 115, 139, 165–6, 177–90, 192, 194, 322, 354, 392, 426–7, 429, 431–2, 434–7, 463, 464; see also Tottel’s Miscellany mock-epic 6, 284, 295n, 464, 467, 480; see also epyllion Montaigne, Michel de 118, 566 Montemayor, Jorge de 252, 258n; Diana 252, 258n
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651 Montgomerie, Alexander 393–4, 402, 403; ‘To his Majestie’ 393; ‘Of M. J. Sharpe’ 402; ‘The Poets Legacie’ 394 More, Henry 122 More, Sir Thomas 45–6, 116, 591; Utopia 53–4 Morrice, Sir William 69 Moschus 255, 323 Munday, Anthony 365; The Mirror of Mutability 365 Musaeus 124, 288, 289, 290, 291, 297, 298, 299, 528, 529 Nashe, Thomas 35, 36, 38, 42, 58, 62, 70, 77, 86, 89n, 91–2, 93n, 167n, 241, 267, 272, 319, 321, 327, 518; Anatomy of Absurdity 91, 93n; ‘The Choice of Valentines’ 319, 327; Dido, Queen of Carthage 38, 268, 518, 526; Have With You to Saffron Walden 70; Preface to Astrophil and Stella 36n, 77, 86; Preface to Greene’s Menaphon 36n, 86, 91–2, 267; Strange News 35, 62, 272; Summer’s Last Will and Testament 167n, 321; The Terrors of the Night 58 nationalism 8, 89, 90, 110, 115, 172–3, 214, 215, 337, 459, 460, 461, 462, 464, 465, 480, 482, 499, 501, 508–9, 511, 519 Negro, Lucy 540 Neoplatonism 216, 260, 261, 278, 298, 368, 394, 450, 474, 475, 488, 493, 503, 507, 511, 566 Nero 521 Neville, Alexander 72, 77, 430–1 Newman, Thomas 76–7 Noot, Jan Van der 457, 458, 459 Norton, Thomas 89, 411, 517; Gorboduc 89, 411, 517 ode 5, 182, 192, 197, 523, 556; see also Horace, Odes; see also Pindar, Odes O’Hara, Frank 102 oral culture 58, 68, 69, 70, 163, 165, 166, 392, 425, 535 Ormond, see Butler, Thomas, 10th Earl of Ormond and Ossory Orpheus 14, 20, 88, 205n, 207, 289, 292, 396, 397, 473, 504 ottava rima 11, 105, 115, 135, 198, 199n, 200, 267, 282, 362, 407, 418, 453, 463, 477, 481, 500 Overbury, Sir Thomas 69 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 2, 3, 6, 9, 14, 20, 21, 22, 24–9, 33, 76, 90, 111–12, 113, 122, 123, 124, 127, 129, 135, 136, 140, 160, 166, 186, 205n, 208, 215, 223, 253, 270, 282, 285, 287, 288, 290, 291, 293, 294, 296, 297, 298, 311, 316, 317, 318–20, 322, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 340, 341, 342, 400, 416, 424n, 426, 432, 435, 447, 457n, 458, 466, 468, 476, 477, 478n, 485, 492, 499, 503, 506, 507, 508, 510, 511, 512, 513, 520, 522–4, 528, 530, 531, 535, 537, 538, 539, 540, 541, 542, 544, 547, 553, 561, 564, 590; Amores 90, 111, 113, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 324, 326, 327, 328, 329, 331, 332, 503n, 520, 522, 537, 540, 544n; Ars Amatoria 318, 330, 512, 529, 537, 538, 542, 553; Epistolae ex Ponto 136n, 492; Fasti 492,
561; Heroides 311, 318–19, 320, 322, 324, 340, 341–2, 344, 416, 435, 499, 508, 528, 553, 564; Metamorphoses 3, 14, 20, 26, 28, 33, 107, 123, 124, 140, 186, 205n, 208, 223, 270, 285, 288, 298, 319, 324n, 468, 522, 530, 542, 544, 546; Tristia 136n, 319, 324, 465, 492 Oxford, see Vere, Edward de, 17th Earl of Oxford Page, William 73 Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors 249 Paget, Henry, 2nd Baron Paget of Beaudesert 424 A Paradise of Dainty Devices 178, 368n Parker, Henry, Lord Morley 218–19 Parker, Matthew (Archbishop) 97, 356, 357; Whole Psalter 356, 357 parody 4, 9, 32, 69, 138–9, 167n, 221, 235, 256, 288, 296n, 298, 401, 403, 454, 460, 468, 480, 529, 542 Parr, Katherine (Queen) 360 The Passionate Pilgrim, see Jaggard, William pastoral 2, 6, 8, 9, 10, 36, 38, 41, 42, 88, 109, 112, 114, 116, 140, 159–60, 168, 171, 187–90, 195, 230, 240, 244–61, 269, 278, 287n, 295, 296n, 298, 301, 316, 323, 324, 330, 336, 342, 350, 439–44, 450, 451, 453, 454, 457, 458, 460, 461, 462–3, 469, 478, 491, 495, 502, 503–5, 507, 509, 510, 524–5, 562, 563, 566, 571, 572, 573, 594–5 patronage 3, 20, 40, 64, 70, 71, 74, 75, 78, 108, 119, 182, 189, 208, 237, 239, 249, 251, 252, 285, 286, 291, 293, 349, 392, 415n, 423–4, 427, 428, 429, 430, 469, 474, 476, 496, 504, 540, 544, 571 Peacham, Henry 86, 224, 336n, 559, 560; The Garden of Eloquence 86, 224, 336n, 559, 560 Peele, George 255–6, 259n; Eglogue Gratulatory 255–6; Oenone’s Complaint 259n Peend, Thomas 289; Hemaphroditus and Salmacis 289 pentameter 102, 104, 105, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 252, 317, 318, 328, 409, 426, 442, 445, 463, 538; see also iambic pentameter Percy, Henry, 4th Earl of Northumberland 377 Persius (Aulus Persius Flaccus) 6, 229–31, 236–42, 589 Pessoa, Fernando 178 Petowe, Henry 289; The Second Part of Hero and Leander 289 Petrarch, Francis 2, 6, 20, 24, 91, 103, 107, 112, 115, 118, 120, 125, 135, 139, 151, 157, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167–8, 170, 173, 191, 197, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211, 212, 214–16, 218, 220, 221, 225, 233, 243, 251, 285, 291, 296, 312, 317, 327, 330, 335, 339, 343, 344, 346, 355, 369, 394, 402, 403, 406, 407, 409, 411, 412–21, 424, 426, 432, 438, 445, 447, 448, 449, 452, 458, 459, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 470, 471, 472, 474, 496, 497n, 498, 504–5, 510, 538, 539, 540, 543, 544, 546, 548, 553, 562, 564, 566, 569, 574, 582–3, 588, 589, 593, 598; Africa 160; Rime Sparse
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652 Petrarch, Francis (cont.) (aka Canzoniere/Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta) 163, 212, 215, 216, 218, 220, 225, 317, 335, 343, 344, 370n, 409, 412, 413, 415, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 465, 466, 471, 538, 546, 564, 582; Triumphs (Trionfi) 317, 474, 569, 582 Petrarchism 20, 111, 197, 215, 317, 330, 442, 562, 564, 565, 593 Phaer, Thomas 36–7, 107, 109, 133, 183n, 269–71, 273, 275; translation of the Aeneid 36–7, 107, 109, 269–71, 273, 275 Phillip, John 323 Phillips, Augustine 543 The Phoenix Nest 115, 178, 557, 559 Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius 251 Pindar 195; Odes 192, 196 Pius V (Pope) 43, 55 plain style 6, 9, 104, 106, 107, 108, 230, 234, 235, 249, 250, 253, 386, 393, 400, 424–5, 562 Plat, Sir Hugh 166, 422, 427n, 431, 436; Flowers of Philosophy 166, 427n, 436 Plato 87, 96, 248, 331, 395, 475, 488; Ion 96; Republic 96, 331; Sophist 87; Symposium 395, 488 Plautus 89 Plutarch 96 A Poetical Rhapsody, see Davison, Francis Pompey the Great 282, 521 Ponsonby, William 59, 339, 464, 470 Posthumi 557 poulter’s measure 102, 105, 106–7, 115, 179, 267, 269n, 357, 407, 408–9, 412 Pound, Ezra 193 A Pretty Complaint of Peace 337 Le Prince d’Amour, see Rudyerd, Sir Benjamin print 2, 3, 4, 9, 19–20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 42, 43, 50, 57–62, 66–80, 86, 102, 106, 109, 112, 113, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124, 125, 129, 132, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177, 178, 180–1, 182, 184, 189, 201, 204, 208, 213, 225–8, 236, 237, 239, 241, 243, 250, 251, 262, 265, 269, 273, 274, 275, 282, 301, 302, 304, 305, 313, 327, 332, 339, 344, 348, 356, 357, 358, 361, 365, 366, 370, 387n, 391–2, 396, 397, 401, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407n, 409, 411, 418, 422–3, 424, 425, 426–31, 432, 434–5, 436, 440n, 458, 461, 463, 464, 467, 470, 474, 476, 495–7, 505, 509, 516, 535–6, 540, 551, 556, 569, 570–4, 582, 589, 590 Proba, Faltonia 125 Propertius, Sextus 316, 317, 319, 320, 326–7, 457n, 496 prosopopeia 12, 195, 337, 339, 348 Protestantism 2, 15, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 49, 55, 62, 86, 108, 115, 123, 134, 151, 179, 182, 220, 229, 232, 233, 239, 269, 351, 352, 353, 360n, 361, 365, 368, 369, 370, 401, 403, 404, 423, 428, 459, 471, 474, 482, 508, 576, 581, 591 proverb 9, 104, 129, 131–2, 141, 197, 200, 233, 357, 360n, 367, 382, 383, 384, 390, 393, 402, 448, 557
Psalms 5, 7, 10, 46–9, 60, 107, 110, 168–9, 195, 196, 197, 201, 207–10, 218, 219–20, 345, 348, 352–68, 384, 385, 405, 407–8, 409, 418–19, 420, 425, 440n, 441, 454, 466, 474, 541, 557, 569, 570, 571, 572, 573, 574–82, 583, 595 Purfoot, Thomas 78 Puttenham, George 12–13, 66, 73, 77, 86, 87–93, 99, 101–2, 139, 143–4, 148, 149, 152–3, 155, 161–2, 163, 165, 195–6, 197, 198, 199, 222, 229–30, 231, 234, 244, 247, 263, 264, 318, 320–1, 336, 337, 344, 353, 405, 412, 413, 417, 420, 424, 441, 451n, 455, 525, 556; The Art of English Poesy 85, 86, 87, 88, 101, 110, 143, 195, 222, 244, 318, 336, 441, 525, 556 Pynson, Richard 22 Pythagoras 129, 537 quantitative verse 35, 37, 46, 102, 109–11, 112, 117, 169, 240, 245, 253, 254, 267, 272, 361, 434, 442n, 444, 445, 447, 448 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) 34, 39, 97, 123, 143, 145, 148, 150–1, 152–3, 158, 198n, 217, 321; The Orator’s Education (Institutio Oratoria) 39, 79, 97, 123n, 145, 150–1, 152, 153, 198n, 217 Rainolds, John 86, 97n Ralegh, Sir Walter 2, 9, 41, 42, 137–8, 173, 190n, 193n, 247, 259, 276, 316, 331, 424, 469, 478, 479, 480, 487, 525, 555–68, 571, 594–5; ‘As you came from the holy land’ 559; ‘Calling to mind’ 559; Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney 559–60; ‘Give me my scallop shell’ 561; ‘Her face, her tongue’ 558–9; The History of the World 560, 563; Judicious Select Essays 556; ‘Methought I saw the grave’ 561; ‘Now we have present made’ 562–3; ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ (‘If all the world and love were young’) 42, 189–90, 259, 563, 594–5; ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’ 9, 137, 138, 469, 480, 561, 562, 564–7; The Prerogative of Parliaments 556; ‘Sweet were the sauce’ 557–8; ‘What is our life?’ 557; ‘Would I were changed’ 563 Ramus, Petrus 222, 253 Ravenscroft, Thomas 249–50 Reformation 2, 3, 7, 23, 34, 36, 43, 45, 49, 58, 162, 172n, 208, 229, 233, 271, 309, 331, 352, 354, 368, 397, 398, 403, 482, 535 Remains After Death 557 republicanism 2, 3, 50, 51, 96, 234, 238, 271, 282, 502, 519 The Return from Parnassus 138 Reynolds, Henry 289, 301; Mythomystes 289 Rhodes, Hugh 425; The Book of Nurture 425 rhyme royal 22, 105, 111, 117, 134–5, 183, 184, 202, 302, 307, 309, 334–5, 337, 347, 362, 373, 376–83, 385, 386, 387, 402, 407, 463, 466, 474, 499, 548, 553 Rich, Lady Penelope (neé Devereux) 38–9, 40, 168, 354, 451, 455 Rich, Robert, 3rd Baron Rich 168, 451 Richard II 51, 183, 312
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653 Richard III 54, 183, 312, 338, 339, 345 Richmond, see Fitzroy, Henry, Duke of Richmond and Somerset riddle 5, 64n, 181n, 193, 197, 199, 200, 201, 367, 572 Ridley, Nicholas (Bishop) 252 Robert of Gloucester 301–2, 313 Robert the Bruce 404 Robinson, Thomas 365; Life and Death of Mary Magdalen 365 rondeaux 76, 181, 227, 407, 412–13 Ronsard, Pierre de 215, 323, 457, 460, 564 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 220 rota Virgiliana/Virgilii 116, 296, 457n, 491; see also cursus Virgilii roundelay 115, 188, 223, 244, 257, 258n, 463 Rouse, Francis 29 Roydon, Matthew 86, 510, 512 Rudyerd, Sir Benjamin 72n, 239; Le Prince d’Amour 72n, 557 Russell, Lucy (neé Harington), Countess of Bedford 71, 74, 582 Sabie, Francis 254, 366–7; Pan’s Pipe 254; ‘David and Beersheba’ 366–7 Sackville, Thomas, 1st Earl of Dorset and Baron Buckhurst 89, 183–5, 186, 334–5, 411, 424, 517; Gorboduc 89, 411, 517; see also The Mirror for Magistrates Salel, Hugues 273 Salisbury, Sir John 551 Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus) 115 Samuel, William 357 Sandys, George 32, 208 Sannazaro, Jacopo 248, 251, 462, 463 Sappho 340, 444, 564 satire 2, 6, 7, 10, 11, 21, 25, 28–9, 32, 42, 73, 88, 108, 116, 119, 129–30, 131, 134, 138, 139–41, 142, 155, 229–43, 245, 248, 250, 251, 256, 257, 288n, 293–4, 296, 332, 336, 337, 379, 385, 386, 397, 399, 400, 407, 408, 421, 425, 437, 461, 463, 464, 465, 467, 468, 469, 492, 512, 588, 589–90, 591–2 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 85n, 90n, 196, 227, 229, 230, 262, 317, 320 scepticism 155, 309, 351, 450, 563, 566, 591, 592, 598 Scott, Alexander 399, 400–1 Scott, William 86, 87, 91, 92, 99, 195, 196–7, 227; The Model of Poesy 87, 91, 92, 99, 195, 196–7, 227 Segar, Francis 338 Selden, John 302 Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Younger) 107, 123, 129, 139, 144, 194, 368n, 408n, 560, 561 Serafino, see Aquilano, Serafino Serres, Michel 102, 120 sestina 2, 115, 220, 245, 255, 259, 447, 462, 463 Seymour, Jane (Queen) 360 Shakespeare, William 2, 3, 9, 11, 20, 21, 29, 30, 31–3, 42, 76, 78, 86, 102, 106, 108, 115, 118, 119, 123, 126, 129, 135, 138, 141, 157, 163n, 164, 178, 183, 185, 186, 189, 192, 201, 204, 208, 214, 217, 220, 221, 224, 225, 227, 247, 260–1, 268, 282–4,
285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291–2, 292–4, 295, 296, 297, 300, 312, 316, 324, 335, 344, 347, 367, 384, 411, 412, 421, 433, 468, 469n, 470, 472, 485, 499n, 517, 519, 524, 526, 527, 535–54, 556, 589, 590, 591, 593, 597; As You Like It 129, 247, 261; Edward III 86, 312; Hamlet 11, 32, 126, 204n, 268, 411, 548–9, 590; Henry V 282–4; Henry VI 312; King Lear 11, 108; A Lover’s Complaint 9, 499n, 536, 550n, 553–4; Love’s Labour’s Lost 189, 217, 260; Macbeth 11, 527, 549; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3, 21, 31–3, 535; ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ 535, 551–3, 597; The Rape of Lucrece 9, 76, 78, 135, 286, 289, 290, 291, 296n, 335, 347–8, 500, 535, 537, 548–51, 553; Richard II 312; Richard III 141; Romeo and Juliet 538; Sonnets 76, 119, 192, 214, 217, 220, 221, 224, 225, 227, 344, 421, 433, 470, 535, 536–43, 589, 593; The Tempest 30; Twelfth Night 204; Venus and Adonis 9, 115, 123, 135, 138, 201, 285–7, 289, 290n, 291–3, 296n, 324, 468, 469n, 535, 537, 543–7, 548, 554n, 590; The Winter’s Tale 208, 247, 261, 538 Shelton, Mary 64 Shepherd, Luke 134, 232–3 Sherry, Richard 86, 147, 148, 149, 155, 562n; A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes 86, 147 Shirley, James 288, 289; Narcissus, or the Self– Lover 288, 289 Shore, Jane 186, 309, 312, 313, 345–7, 466 Sidney, Mary, see Herbert, Mary (neé Sidney), Countess of Pembroke Sidney, Sir Philip 2, 7, 8, 10, 12, 20, 29, 36, 38, 46, 57, 59, 62, 75, 76, 77, 83n, 85, 86–7, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97–9, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112–14, 115, 118, 119, 143, 144, 145–6, 148, 149, 150, 151, 157, 159, 163n, 167–8, 169–71, 172, 173, 174, 187, 195, 198n, 201, 207, 208, 209, 210, 215, 216, 221, 222, 225, 228, 236, 244, 246, 247, 250, 254, 255, 256, 257, 262–3, 274, 303–5, 309, 316, 319, 323–4, 336, 339, 340, 341, 348, 353n, 354, 355, 358n, 360, 361, 362, 363–4, 365, 392, 393, 394, 396, 403, 421, 423, 424, 429, 431n, 432, 439–55, 466, 467, 469, 472, 489, 496, 497, 501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 510, 526, 540, 551, 559, 570, 571, 572, 573, 574, 575–6, 577, 578–9, 580, 582–3, 588, 592, 595; Astrophil and Stella 36, 76, 86, 108, 112–13, 118, 167–8, 187–8, 215, 216, 221, 225, 257, 354, 361, 396, 403, 421, 431n, 439, 440, 448–50, 453, 496, 497, 505n, 574, 583, 588; Certain Sonnets 439, 440n, 454; ‘Defence of the Earl of Leicester’ 450; Defence of Poesy 57, 75, 83n, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 97–8, 114, 150, 151, 167, 169–70, 171, 195, 198n, 207, 210, 222, 228, 244, 262–3, 303–4, 316, 336, 355, 358n, 429, 432, 439, 440n, 441, 451, 452, 453, 489, 501, 502n, 503, 526, 551, 578–9; ‘The lad Philisides’ 454; The Lady of May 114, 439, 440n, 574;
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654 Sidney, Sir Philip (cont.) New Arcadia 112, 113, 168, 174, 187, 250, 255, 361, 440n, 570, 580; Old Arcadia 107, 109, 112, 113, 255, 319, 361, 439, 440n, 441, 443, 444–8, 453, 454, 574; Psalms 10, 46, 168, 201, 207, 208, 209, 210, 348, 361–2, 363–4, 440n, 441, 454, 569, 572, 573, 574, 575–9, 580, 595; ‘A shepherd’s tale’ 453 Sidney, Robert 453 sixain 115, 193n, 201, 218, 293n, 367, 402, 445, 545 Skelton, John 2, 4, 7, 20, 24, 25, 27, 32, 78, 86, 93, 101, 103, 108, 127, 128, 134, 136, 137, 138, 142, 160, 163–4, 198n, 202, 204, 206, 207, 230, 231–3, 240, 320, 337–8, 373–88, 461; Agaynst a Comely Coystrowne 380, 382–3; Agenst Garnesche 142, 376; The Bowge of Court 25, 134, 373, 379, 386; Collyn Clout 103, 134, 231, 232, 337, 386; Dyvers Balletys and Dyties Solacyous 202, 378, 380, 381; A Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell 127, 136, 137, 373, 375, 377, 378–9, 386; ‘Knolege, acquayntance’ 381–2; Magnyfycence 376, 378; Manerly Margery 382, 383; Phyllyp Sparowe 25, 137, 386–7; A Replycacion 86, 373, 374–5, 376, 378, 383, 385; Speke Parott 231, 337–8, 373, 376–7, 378, 383–6; The Tunnyng of Eleanor Rummyng 163, 386, 387; Upon a Deedmans Hed 375, 380; Upon the Dolorous Dethe 377, 378, 379, 386; Ware the Hauke 375–6; Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? 231, 232, 386 Skeltonics 7, 27, 163, 202, 232, 337, 373–6, 387 Skene, Lilias 399 Smith, Richard 76, 432 Smith, Sir Thomas 15, 353 Smith, William 220, 223, 227, 228, 342; Chloris 220, 223, 227, 228, 342 song 5, 20, 30, 39, 47, 60, 64, 68, 69, 70, 76, 77, 90, 104, 109, 110, 113, 115, 116, 126, 167–8, 182, 185, 187, 192, 194, 195–6, 197–8, 201–9, 222, 232, 245, 247, 249, 253, 254, 255, 257, 260, 264, 269n, 282, 284, 295, 301, 317, 324, 325, 328, 335, 343, 351, 354, 355, 356–8, 361, 362, 364, 365, 380, 382, 383, 392, 393, 399–400, 401, 419, 425, 439, 440, 444, 445, 446, 447, 454, 456, 461, 470, 473, 476, 484, 503, 511, 536, 551, 552, 553, 556, 557, 563, 569 sonnet 2, 5–6, 9, 10, 13, 30, 35, 38, 44, 45, 62, 64, 71, 75, 76, 77, 98, 102–3, 105, 106, 108, 112, 113, 117–18, 119, 135, 139, 147, 162–3, 164, 167–8, 173, 179, 181, 182, 184n, 189n, 194n, 196, 197, 201, 204, 206, 207, 208, 211–28, 240, 241 243, 259, 271, 285n, 319, 322, 323, 335, 339, 342, 343–4, 346, 347, 348, 349, 351, 354, 355, 359–60, 361, 362, 363, 364, 368–70, 393–4, 396, 399, 402–3, 404, 406, 407, 409, 411, 412, 413–15, 417, 418, 421, 429, 431, 433, 439, 444, 445, 449, 451, 454, 458, 459, 460, 467, 470–2, 479, 485, 487n, 496–9, 503, 504–6, 507, 510, 536–43, 545, 553, 554, 561, 562, 564, 574, 577, 588–9, 592, 593, 595, 596 sonnet sequence 5, 13, 38, 62, 71, 112, 117–18, 119, 139, 149, 167, 168n, 214, 219, 220, 221, 224,
225, 226, 241, 335, 342, 346, 348, 351, 354, 359, 360, 368n, 370n, 403, 449, 451, 470, 471, 472, 485, 496, 497n, 498, 499, 503, 504, 505, 506, 510, 538, 553, 588–9, 595 Southampton, see Wriothesley, Henry, 3rd Earl of Southampton Southwell, Anne 59 Southwell, Robert 42, 43, 319, 349, 354, 366–8; Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears 368; Moeoniae 367; St Peter’s Complaint 43, 349, 366–7 Spenser, Edmund 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10–15, 20, 36, 41, 42, 55–6, 58, 59, 60, 83, 86, 90, 91, 97, 102, 107, 109–10, 112, 114–17, 118, 122, 127–8, 134–6, 136–7, 138, 140–1, 157, 159–61, 164, 166, 167, 171–4, 184, 185, 194n, 208, 219, 220, 223, 226, 227, 232, 236, 240, 244, 245, 246, 247–8, 250, 251, 252, 255, 256, 257, 258, 264, 267, 270, 273, 276–82, 284, 285, 288, 289, 293n, 294–8, 299, 300, 301, 305–9, 310, 311, 312, 316, 323–6, 328, 333, 335, 336, 339–41, 343, 350, 354, 366, 403, 422, 423, 429, 431, 433, 454n, 456–94, 495, 497–8, 500, 501, 502, 503–4, 505, 507–8, 510, 511, 513, 514, 516, 536, 556–7, 565, 570–1, 573, 574, 577, 583, 588, 592, 594, 597; Amoretti 13, 118, 194n, 220–1, 223, 403, 454n, 458, 463, 464, 470–4, 485, 492, 497, 505, 536, 588; ‘Astrophel’ 323–5, 328, 571–2; Colin Clouts Come Home Againe 138, 258, 323, 456–7, 458, 461, 464, 467, 469, 470, 474, 491, 492, 556, 571; Complaints 336, 339–41, 458, 459, 460, 463, 464–9, 487, 497n; Daphnaïda 324–5, 326, 350, 464, 467, 474; The English Poet 86, 244; Epithalamion 13, 220–1, 456, 458, 463, 464, 470, 472, 473–4, 476, 485, 493, 536, 588; The Faerie Queene 3, 6, 8, 10–15, 55–6, 83, 90, 91–110, 114, 116–17, 127–8, 134, 135, 136–7, 138, 141, 160, 172–4, 250, 270, 276, 277–9, 281, 282, 290n, 295, 298, 300, 301, 305–9, 310, 315, 339, 340, 341, 347n, 351, 366, 404, 451, 456–8, 459, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 468, 469, 470, 472, 474, 477–94, 498, 501, 503, 557, 561, 565, 583, 597; Fowre Hymnes 354, 457, 458, 463, 470, 474–6, 484, 511; ‘Letter to Ralegh’ 83, 172, 270, 306, 307, 341, 478–9, 481, 491, 501; Mother Hubberds Tale 339, 340, 464, 465, 467, 469; Muiopotmos 289, 290n, 339, 341, 464–5, 467–8; Mutabilitie Cantos 458, 463, 474, 476, 492–4; Prothalamion 458, 470, 474, 476, 491; The Ruines of Rome 13n, 335, 339, 464; The Ruines of Time 310, 339–41, 464, 466–7, 476, 570, 571; The Shepheardes Calender 36, 41, 60, 61, 86, 90, 114–16, 117, 136, 137, 159, 160, 171–2, 173, 232, 240, 244, 245, 246, 250, 251, 255, 256, 258, 278, 306, 323, 325, 340, 343, 429, 432n, 456, 457, 458–63, 464, 465, 466, 469, 470, 474, 487, 497, 503, 510, 573, 594; The Teares of the Muses 279–80, 339, 340, 464, 466, 467; A Theatre for Worldlings 227, 422, 457, 458–60, 464, 465, 497n; Virgils Gnat 339, 340, 464, 465, 467; Visions of Bellay 227, 339, 464; Visions of Petrarch 339, 464
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655 Stanyhurst, Richard 35–7, 86, 87, 89, 91, 97, 102, 108–9, 111, 208, 270–3; First Four Books of Virgil his Aeneis 35, 87, 89, 108–9, 270–3 Statius (Publius Papinius Statius) 122, 127, 265; Achilleid 127n, 265 Sternhold, Thomas 46–7, 48, 107, 110, 201, 352, 354, 355, 358–9, 361, 362, 407n Stewart, John, of Baldynneis 398; Roland Furious 398 Stoicism 8, 106, 182, 187, 201, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 242, 322, 507, 560 Stow, John 62, 301, 533 St Leger, Sir Anthony 406 strambotto 64, 200n, 214, 412 Sturm, Johannes 123–4 sublime 4, 7, 13, 15, 84–5, 91, 92, 94, 95–100, 192, 390, 394, 401, 439, 452, 454, 475, 519, 520, 523, 528; see also Longinus Surrey, see Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey Sylvester, Joshua 275, 366 Vaughan, Henry 208, 351, 597 Vega, Garcilaso de la 460 Vegio, Maffeo 218, 265, 269 Vellutello, Alessandro 418 Vere, Edward de, 17th Earl of Oxford 189, 424, 450 Vere, Frances de, see Howard, Frances (neé de Vere), Countess of Surrey versi sciolti 267, 409, 411 Victor, Marius 560 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 2, 6, 9, 35, 36, 86, 87, 89, 96, 104, 108, 109, 116, 123, 125, 127, 133, 134, 135, 136–7, 159–60, 164, 166, 167n, 171, 172, 208, 240, 245–8, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 262, 263, 264, 265–71, 272, 273, 276, 278, 283, 284, 286n, 293n, 296, 298, 303, 306, 323, 327, 342, 396, 397, 403n, 410–11, 424, 457, 458, 459, 461, 462, 463, 464, 466, 469, 477, 478, 480, 491, 497n, 501, 503, 504, 505, 508, 510, 514, 515, 518, 519, 523, 524, 561; Aeneid 35, 36, 86, 87, 89, 91, 97, 102, 104, 107, 109, 127, 134, 136, 159, 160, 164, 171, 172, 208, 262, 265–71, 277, 278, 280, 283, 327, 396, 397, 404, 405, 406, 409–11, 417, 477n, 478, 480, 491, 501, 503, 518, 520 523; Eclogues (aka Bucolics) 136, 159, 245, 246, 250, 251, 253, 256, 257, 323, 342n, 463, 491, 503, 524; Georgics 136, 159, 171 voice 2, 4, 6, 8, 9–10, 10–11, 14, 15, 27, 46, 48, 69, 95, 96, 101–2, 105, 146, 156, 157, 181, 184, 191, 195–6, 204n, 205, 210, 229, 230, 231–3, 236, 254, 259, 263, 264, 267, 279, 282, 285, 298, 312, 313, 317, 321, 323, 324, 326, 334, 336, 341, 343, 344, 348–9, 353, 356, 360, 361, 365, 367, 382, 383, 386–7, 399, 401, 408, 416, 417, 418–19, 421, 428, 429, 434, 435, 460, 461, 463, 464, 466, 470, 477, 479–80, 494, 499n, 516, 521, 522, 535–54, 555, 556, 558, 560, 561, 564, 568, 571, 573, 578, 582–3, 588, 595 The Wakefield Master 249 Waller, Edmund 594 Walsingham, Sir Francis 340, 450 Warner, William 6, 264, 276–7
Warton, Thomas 522 Watson, Thomas 215, 226, 228, 253, 259n, 340, 588; Hekatompathia 215, 226, 228; Lamentations of Amyntas 253 Watson, Thomas (later Bishop) 272; translation of the Odyssey 272 Wayland, John 50 Webbe, William 89, 217, 245n, 253, 262, 264, 269, 274; A Discourse of English Poetry 86, 217, 253, 262, 269 Webster, John 74–5 Weever, John 241, 242, 288, 289, 293, 294; Faunus and Melliflora 241, 242, 288, 289, 294 Westminster Drollery 557 Whetstone, George 74, 77, 90–1, 323; Promos and Cassandra 90–1; The Rock of Regard 77 Whitgift, John (Archbishop) 327, 543–4 Whitney, Geoffrey 29 Whitney, Isabella 2, 75, 77, 160, 165–7, 236, 342–3, 422, 424, 425, 426, 427n, 429, 430, 431, 432, 434–7; The Copy of a Letter 75, 77, 165–6, 342–3, 426, 431, 434; A Sweet Nosegay 77, 165, 166, 167n, 236, 424n, 426, 427n, 429, 430, 431, 432, 434–7 Whittaker, George 29 Williams, William Carlos 563 Wilson, Sir Thomas 86, 93, 108, 321; The Art of Rhetoric 108, 321 Winters, Yvor 106, 107, 145, 157, 558 Wit’s Interpreter 557 Wolsey, Thomas (Cardinal) 134, 138, 231, 232, 383, 384–5, 386 Woodforde, Samuel 575 Woolf, Virginia 218 Wootton, John 260 Wotton, Sir Henry 71, 239 Wriothesley, Henry, 3rd Earl of Southampton 285, 286, 291n, 292, 293, 540, 544 Wroth, Lady Mary 160, 174, 213, 226, 589; Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 213, 226, 589; Urania 174, 226 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 2, 6, 8, 19–20, 28, 68, 71–2, 86, 89, 93, 94n, 102–5, 108, 120, 122, 131–4, 135, 161–5, 167, 168, 173, 178, 179, 180–2, 198, 199–201, 202–6, 207, 208, 209, 214, 216, 220, 224, 227, 228, 229, 231, 233–5, 237, 238, 269n, 316, 317, 320, 321–2, 323, 329, 333, 335, 343–5, 348, 349–50, 352–3, 354, 358–9, 361, 392, 393, 399, 405–21, 423, 588, 592; ‘Accused though I be’ 181; ‘Ah, Robin, / Jolly Robin’ 202–4, 206; ‘Behold, love, thy power’ 181, 413n; ‘Blame not my lute’ 205n, 419; ‘The flaming sighs’ 412; ‘The furious gun’ 199; ‘Go, burning sighs’ 412–13, 417; ‘I find no peace’ 335, 415; ‘It burneth yet’ 344–5; ‘Like as the swan’ 419; ‘Like to these unmeasurable mountains’ 419; ‘The long love’ 162–3; ‘Love and Fortune’ 415; ‘Mine old dear en’my’ 420; ‘Mine own John Poins’ 28, 94n, 181, 233–5, 420n, 421; ‘My galley charged with forgetfulness’ 335, 413–15, 417, 418; ‘My heart I gave thee’ 412; ‘My lute, awake!’ 204–6, 419; ‘My mother’s maids’ 233, 234–5, 420;
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656 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (cont.) ‘Nature that gave the bee’ 419; ‘Of Carthage he’ 418; Penitential Psalms 209, 348, 352–3, 358, 359, 405, 407–8, 418–19, 420; ‘The pillar perished is’ 349–50, 414n, 415n, 417; ‘She sat and sewed’ 200n, 419; ‘Sighs are my food’ 200, 420; ‘So feeble is the thread’ 409, 412; ‘Some fowls there be’ 343–4; ‘A spending hand’ 131–2, 233, 235; ‘Stand whoso list’ 408, 420; ‘Such is the course’ 412; ‘Such vain thought’ 216, 414n; ‘They flee from me’ 20,
133–4, 181, 329, 419, 421; ‘Though I myself be bridled’ 417–18, 419; ‘Vulcan begat me’ 199; ‘Was I never yet’ 421; ‘What rage is this?’ 420; ‘Whoso list to hunt’ 216, 419, 420 Wynkyn de Worde 20, 25 Yong, Bartholomew 257–8 Zepheria 224–5, 228 Zwingli, Ulrich 45, 408