Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England: Faith in the Language (Early Modern Literature in History) 9783030817947, 9783030817954, 3030817946

Citation preview

EARLY MODERN LITERATURE IN HISTORY

Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England Faith in the Language Jamie H. Ferguson

Early Modern Literature in History

Series Editors Cedric C. Brown, Department of English, University of Reading, Reading, UK Andrew Hadfield, School of English, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

Within the period 1520–1740, this large, very well-established series with notable international representation discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. This series is approaching a hundred titles on a variety of subjects including early modern women’s writing; domestic politics; drama, performance and playhouses; rhetoric; religious conversion; translation; travel and colonial writing; popular culture; the law; authorship; diplomacy; the court; material culture; childhood; piracy; and the environment.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14199

Jamie H. Ferguson

Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England Faith in the Language

Jamie H. Ferguson University of Houston Houston, TX, USA

ISSN 2634-5919 ISSN 2634-5927 (electronic) Early Modern Literature in History ISBN 978-3-030-81794-7 ISBN 978-3-030-81795-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81795-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: duncan1890 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

In the early stages of my formation, Herbert J. Marks, polymath, student of biblical literature and hermeneutics, and superb reader of poetry, taught me what I was able to learn. Judith H. Anderson showed me the complex riches of English Renaissance literature and culture (with much else) and kept pointing me towards the more interesting questions when I wanted to simplify. Eric MacPhail helped me to resist the gentle tug of parochialism in my understanding of the Renaissance and kept me honest in my use of French and Latin. Anne Lake Prescott, mirabile dictu, brought together knowledge of all these specializations into her own rich synthesis, reinforcing my sense of the continuity among the different disciplines I was trying to bring together. Later, I benefitted greatly from a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on Erasmus led by Kathy Eden. I am grateful to all of them for their instruction, guidance, and friendship. This book is much better for the comments of Beth Quitslund, Debora Shuger, David Mikics, the readers for the Early Modern Literature in History series, and, above all, Alan Stewart. My work has been informed and invigorated by exchanges over the years with Hannibal Hamlin, Robert Stillman, Susannah Monta, Gergaly Juhász, François Wim, Roger Kuin, Brian Cummings, Richard Strier, Irena Backus (deceased), Erika Gaffney, Tom Fulton, and many others. My colleagues at the University of Houston, especially Richard Armstrong, Ted Estess, Wyman Herendeen, Ann Christensen, and Bill Monroe, have contributed to a rich and v

vi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

supportive environment in which to teach and write; I thank my graduate students at the University of Houston for providing occasions to discuss and rethink many of the texts and approaches in this book. I am very grateful to the Francis Bacon Foundation, the Newberry Library, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University of Houston’s Martha Gano Houstoun Endowment for funding that made possible invaluable research and writing time at the Huntington, Newberry, Folger Shakespeare, University of Oxford, and University of Geneva Libraries respectively. An earlier draft of Chapter 2 was published as “Faith in the Language: Biblical Authority and the Meaning of English in the More-Tyndale Polemics,” Sixteenth Century Journal 43/4 (2012): 989–1011, and part of Chapter 3 appeared as “The Roman Inkhorn: Religious Resistance to Latinism in Early Modern England,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700, ed. Kevin Killeen et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 83–97. I am grateful to the editors and readers involved for their feedback and to the Sixteenth Century Journal and Oxford University Press for permission to reprint. Finally, my wife, Kinga, for whom no sentence expressing gratitude and affection seems complete. Our children, Kuba and Natalia, have shown my time away from them working on this book the bemused tolerance it deserves.

Contents

1

Introduction: Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England

Part I 2 3

1

Reformation Hermeneutics and the Meaning of English

Biblical Authority and the Meaning of English in the More-Tyndale Polemics

33

The Roman Inkhorn: Literary and Religious Resistance to Latinism in the English Renaissance

77

Part II Reformation Hermeneutics and Sidneian Poiesis 4

Biblical Hermeneutics and Poiesis in Philip Sidney’s Apology and the Sidney Psalter

125

Part III Reformation Hermeneutics and Post-Petrarchan Poetics 5

Tradition and Tautology in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

169

6

Tradition and Invention in the Songs and Sonets and Sermons of John Donne

207

Index

245 vii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England

The expressive and literary capacities of post-Reformation English were largely shaped in response to the Bible.1 The interpretation of English Renaissance literature has often been dominated by secularist readings, as if imaginative literature necessarily represented a displacement of scriptural revelation.2 This book, by contrast, examines the convergence of biblical interpretation and English literature, from William Tyndale to John Donne, and argues that the groundwork for a newly authoritative literary tradition in early modern England is laid in the discourse of biblical hermeneutics.3 The period 1525–1611 witnessed a proliferation of English biblical versions, provoking a century-long debate about how and whether the Bible should be rendered in English. These highly public, indeed institutional accounts of English as a biblical medium changed the language: the isolation of Scripture from exegetical tradition that motivated Protestant vernacular Bibles in the Reformation bore strange fruit in secular literature that defined itself by its autonomy and self-sufficiency vis-a-vis prior literary tradition.4 The distinction between Scripture and exegetical tradition is axiomatic in Protestant exegesis. Early Protestant texts argue that the only way to guarantee validity in biblical interpretation is to assume that Scripture expresses itself clearly and self-sufficiently. Roman Catholics, in response,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. H. Ferguson, Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81795-4_1

1

2

J. H. FERGUSON

argue that the meaning of the Bible is only discernable at the intersection of the biblical text and the interpretive tradition preserved by the Roman Church. This basic opposition between Scripture and exegetical tradition, between autonomy and contingency, defines opposing positions in a variety of Reformation and Renaissance debates concerning biblical authority and translation, secular imitation in Latin, translation from the learned languages into the vernaculars, and literary imitation in the vernacular traditions. The Reformation opposition between Scripture and exegetical tradition is thus integrated into the conceptualization of the English language from the initial polemics about biblical English between William Tyndale and Thomas More (Chapter 2).5 The same opposition is key to the understanding of the relationship between Renaissance English and foreign borrowings, particularly from Latin (Chapter 3), of Sidney’s definitions of poetry in his Apology for Poetry and the metrical Psalter he initiated (Chapter 4), and of the responses to Petrarchan tradition in the Sonnets of William Shakespeare (Chapter 5) and the Songs and Sonets of John Donne (Chapter 6). The Protestant notion of scriptural autonomy represents a pole toward which English literature tends over the course of the sixteenth century. The sense of literary autonomy, self-determination, and authority that characterizes the writings of Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne represents the literary fulfillment of an idea of textual autonomy formulated at the beginning of the century with the entrance of Reformation biblical polemics into England.6 The poetics of Sidney, Shakespeare, and Donne are “Protestant poetics” in the sense that they realize in literary terms, around the turn of the seventeenth century, assertions about the autonomy and self-sufficiency of biblical language formulated in Reformation controversies from the beginning of the sixteenth.7 Many critics have demonstrated that the English Bible provided themes, characters, dramatic situations, generic designations, etc. to early modern English literature. Faith in the Language argues that Reformation English biblical hermeneutics helped to legitimate the autonomy of English literary works vis-à-vis prior literary tradition. This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first section documents a convergence between Reformation hermeneutics and “the single most important literary debate of the Renaissance,”8 the so-called Ciceronian controversies. The second section offers a reading of John Donne’s “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister,” an exceptionally subtle poetic

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

3

treatment of the relationship between divinity and human expression, logos and language, theology and poetics.

I Nowhere was the conflict between prior literary tradition and literary autonomy contested more fiercely, complexly, or enduringly, in England as elsewhere in Renaissance Europe, than in the querelle cicéronienne, the arguments in Latin about the proper imitation of Cicero. Perhaps because entrants in the Ciceronian debate are building on an extensive literature in classical Latin on style and imitation,9 the Ciceronian debates tend to be more sophisticated and probing than vernacular writings on literary imitation: the Latin writers have a head start on their vernacular peers (even when, as in the case of Pietro Bembo, the same author writes about imitation in both Latin and the vernacular).10 Renaissance humanists’ recovery and editing of classical texts led to a newly comprehensive appreciation of classical usage, culminating in Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae linguae latinae (1441–48).11 Valla anatomized the Latin of classical Rome and prescribed it as the normative literary tradition for contemporary writing, as against the post-classical Latin in use in the schools; Valla represents a generation of humanists who idealized the “golden” Latin of classical authors as a timeless ideal. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle characterizes Valla’s central conception: “In the custody of barbarians and conquering hordes, Latin still conserved, holy and religious, its sacramental power to signify reality and effect the transformation of men.”12 According to this view, classical Latin was not to be accommodated to the situation of later writers; rather, the minds of later writers should be accommodated to Latin usage as defined in the classical period. Valla’s position anticipates the more exaggerated advocacy of the so-called Ciceronians—Paolo Cortesi, Ermolao Barbaro, Pietro Bembo, Etienne Dolet, et al.—on behalf of their eponym’s style as a permanent ideal of Latin usage.13 Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola, Gian Francesco Pico, and Desiderius Erasmus, among other opponents of the Ciceronians, argue that style and lexis must be accommodated to new writers and historical periods. “The [Ciceronian] controversy got right to the crux of the humanist dilemma,” writes Ann Moss, “setting the concept of language as an absolute and fixed norm of human communication against the concept of language as fluid, relative, and historically conditioned.”14

4

J. H. FERGUSON

Early in his career, Erasmus compiled an epitome of Valla’s most famous work, the Elegantiae. In response to perceived excesses in this classicist program, however, Erasmus went on to write the Dialogus Ciceronianus sive de optimo dicendi genere (1528), an influential attack on what “anti-Ciceronians” considered the anachronistic affectation of Ciceronian eloquence in contemporary Latin writing and speaking.15 The dialogue’s Ciceronian character, Nosoponus, has catalogued every word, phrase, and rhythm used by Cicero; on the basis of this compilation, he proceeds “to find meanings for these verbal embellishments” (sensus ad haec verborum ornamenta invenire).16 The Ciceronians’ enthusiasm for Cicero’s language thus precludes direct treatment of any subject matter postdating classical Rome, as Nosoponus admits: “those themes only will I handle which can be expressed in the words of Cicero” (ea duntaxat tractabo, quae possint verbis Tullianis explicari).17 Erasmus argues forcibly that the language of a writer of classical Rome, no matter how eloquent, will only inadequately render reality more than a millennium afterward. Erasmus’ mouthpiece, Bulephorus, asks: “do the present conditions agree with those of the time when Cicero lived and spoke, considering our absolutely different religion, government, laws, customs, occupations, the very face of the men?” To Nosoponus’ admission that they do not, Bulephorus goes on: “What effrontery then would he have who should insist that we speak, on all occasions, as Cicero did?” (61). Bulephorus points to the absurdity of attempting to describe Christian revelation without straying from the lexis of a pagan author: Nosoponus, for example, terms the Christian God “Jupiter maximus.”18 Erasmus objects to the writer’s search for topics to fit words: language, for Erasmus, should be accommodated to subject, not the other way around. Thomas Greene sums up the dispute: “The Ciceronian … will tend to deny any effective discontinuity between himself and his master. The anti-Ciceronian … will tend to found his case on some form of historicism.”19 Against the permanent Ciceronian model of usage, Erasmus and others advocate an eclectic, flexible Latin usage accommodated to the contemporary world. David Kalstone, referring to Sidney’s Astrophil and other Petrarchan protagonists, draws a connection between Ciceronianism and Petrarchism: “Petrarchan language comes to these young heroes as might the Ciceronian style, as part of an inherited way of dealing with or projecting experience. Their characters are created for us in terms of their reactions to the language of the conventional lover.”20 Ciceronianism and

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

5

Petrarchism are closely related, conceptually and historically: the tension between literary tradition and autonomy underlies both, and the earliest major champion of Petrarchism, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), also wrote on behalf of Ciceronianism. Bembo, in a well-known exchange with Gianfrancesco Pico (1470–1533), defends the adoption of Cicero’s writings as the singular model for Latin style: “[t]he imitation of Cicero will be perfectly suitable for all those who wish to write in prose, whatever the subject or material [quacumque … de re atque materia] they must address, for the same style [idem … stilus] can be adapted to countless subjects.”21 Soon after this exchange, Bembo published a vernacular work, the Prose della volgar lingua (1525), part of whose thrust was to “transfer Bembo’s Latin Ciceronianism to the volgare.”22 The programmatic imitation of Petrarch is part of a deliberate project to provide Italian with a vernacular equivalent of the writings of Cicero. Petrarchism at its origin represents a vernacular extension of Ciceronian classism.23 Cave identifies in the Ciceronianus “a formulation virtually absent from classical and medieval rhetoric,” namely, “self-expression” (specifically, the “reflexive use of exprimere”; 42). In fact, the passage that Cave cites (in translation), “[q]uod si totum vis exprimere Ciceronem, teipsum non potes exprimere,”24 is a very close adaptation of a sentence from the opening section of Angelo Poliziano’s letter to Paolo Cortesi, a letter that would come to be regarded as the opening salvo in the Ciceronian debates: Poliziano quips that, of his own writing, someone might say, “you do not convey Cicero” ([n]on exprimis … Ciceronem), to which Poliziano replies, “That is because I am not Cicero; and yet I suppose I do convey myself” (Non enim sum Cicero; me tamen, ut opinor, exprimo).25 Erasmus cites the exchange between Poliziano and Cortesi—and that between Pico and Bembo discussed above—in the Ciceronianus.26 Cave’s conclusions regarding this new form of selfexpression in Latin, even if its initial formulation should be attributed to Poliziano rather than Erasmus, are relevant to vernacular literature as well: “significant utterance is now said to arise from, and to be guaranteed by, a subjective ‘self,’” and “self-identity is … both the origin and the object of discourse” (43).27 This self is defined by its difference from Ciceronian tradition. This formulation of literary self-expression or autonomy in the context of Ciceronian imitation anticipates Sidney’s discussion of English erotic “Songs and Sonnets” in the Apologie for Poetrie: “many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistable love; if I were a mistress,

6

J. H. FERGUSON

would never persuade me they were in love; so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings … than that in truth they feel those passions.”28 Sidney’s juxtaposition of “coldly” and “fiery” suggestion a Petrarchan context for these remarks, as do echoes of this passage in Astrophil and Stella, e.g., “Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show, /…/Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Studie’s blowes/And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way.”29 Furthermore, Sidney’s critique of excessively imitative Petrarchan poetics leads immediately in the Apologie to a passage on affected diction and particularly to Ciceronian imitation: “I could wish … the diligent imitators of Tully and Demosthenes … did not so much keep Nizolian paper-books of their figures and phrases, as by attentive translation (as it were) devour them whole, and make them wholly theirs” (114). “Nizolian Paper-books” refers to Marius Nizolius’s Observationes M.T. Ciceronem (1535), “a lexicon of Latin based exclusively on the writings of Cicero.”30 Though published after Erasmus’s Ciceronianus , the Observationes is precisely the kind of work Erasmus has Nosoponus describe as an “alphabetical lexicon” of all the words used by Cicero31 ; Gabriel Harvey includes Nizolius among a dozen named (and “innumerable” unnamed) authors of “Ciceronianae obseruationes.”32 Sidney’s characterization of proper “translation” (or imitation) as digestion echoes Erasmus’s model in Ciceronianus.33 These alignments between Ciceronian and Petrarchan imitation help to fix, in English Renaissance responses to the Petrarchan tradition, an opposition between self-expression (creative autonomy) and what Kerrigan calls literary “tradition as such”34 : merely to rewrite literary tradition, what has already been written, is to deny the autonomy of one’s own text. This idea of literary autonomy issues from debates about literary imitation in quattrocento Italy and converges in sixteenth-century England with one of the principal cruxes of Reformation hermeneutics, the relation between the biblical text and interpretive tradition. Reformation hermeneutics subjects the concept of exegetical tradition (defined by opposition with the biblical text itself) to intense scrutiny; one historian has characterized the Reformation as itself a “crisis in the understanding of tradition.”35 Protestants tend to assign authority to Scripture alone and reject interpretive tradition; while in practice Protestant exegetes of course cultivated their own exegetical traditions, they maintained the theoretical distinction between such traditions and the bare text of Scripture.

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

7

Roman Catholics argued, by contrast, that the biblical text was unreliable, functionally incomplete, in the absence of interpretive tradition. From the initial exchange between Thomas More and William Tyndale in the 1520s through the early seventeenth century, the vernacular Bible was a site of extensive and closely reasoned argument about conditions of meaning in the English language.36 The crisis, provoked early in the sixteenth century by an increasing proliferation of English Bibles, subjected the English language to the kind of scrutiny previously reserved for the learned languages (as in the Ciceronian controversies), while the broad resonance of the Bible in English extended this linguistic scrutiny beyond scholarly circles and gave it significance beyond the purely religious arena out of which it came.37 These arguments tested the ways in which, and the extent to which, the English language could be said to signify Scripture adequately. Holy Writ became the principal touchstone against which to evaluate the expressive capacities of the English language, and as the Bible was made English, so the English language was implicated in Reformation debates about biblical interpretation. The writings of Erasmus anticipate this convergence of literary imitation and biblical interpretation.38 A few years prior to his attack on the anti-historicist position of the Ciceronians, Erasmus published De libero arbitrio διατ ριβ η´ sive collatio (1524), his first public repudiation of the teachings of Martin Luther. In this work, Erasmus’s “accommodation of Ciceronian rhetoric to Christian theology … is … an important historicist statement. Its true and eloquent apology is the dialogue Ciceronianus.”39 Luther answered with De servo arbitrio (1526), to which Erasmus responded in turn with his Hyperaspistes (1526/1527). The controversy is ostensibly about the theological problem of free will, but the prefatory remarks to both De libero arbitrio and De servo arbitrio identify a more fundamental division “about how words come to have meanings … at a moment of crisis not only in religious doctrine but also in the philosophy of language.”40 In response to Luther’s advocacy of an intrinsically meaningful biblical text (sola scriptura), Erasmus makes, in the De libero arbitrio, a crucial distinction: “the debate here is not about Scripture itself … the quarrel is over its meaning.”41 Erasmus makes much the same point about biblical exegesis as he makes about Ciceronian imitation: language cannot be abstracted from its historical context. Erasmus argues that biblical language is inherently obscure and that the only reliable guide to this obscure text is outside the text in the historical institution of the Roman Church, whose “inner concord … is a reflection

8

J. H. FERGUSON

and product of the presence of the Spirit.”42 While agreeing with Erasmus about the distinction between the biblical text and its meaning, Luther counters, in the De servo arbitrio, that Scripture’s self-evident meaning does not depend on extrinsic interpretation.43 Erasmus and the anti-Ciceronians historicize the imitation of Cicero: they advocate not writing Cicero’s language but writing as Cicero would have written were he a contemporary. Contra Luther, Erasmus takes a similarly historicist approach to the interpretation of Scripture. In a way that recalls the Ciceronians’ undigested regurgitation of the language of Cicero, Luther and later Protestants tend to portray the biblical text as utterly unmediated by historical circumstances. As Boyle writes about Luther, “Luther’s hermeneutics was anti-hermeneutical: not the private interpretation of Scripture, as Protestant belief is frequently misstated, but rather no interpretation of Scripture.”44 This “anti-hermeneutic” is based on the notion of a self-interpreting Bible, as formulated influentially by Luther: “If the words are obscure in one place, yet in another they are clear” (Si uno loco obscura sunt verba, at alio sunt clara).45 Gerhard Ebeling, a modern Lutheran theologian, summarizes the Lutheran position: “Luther illustrates the fact that with regard to Holy Scripture the real hermeneutic concern is not directed towards throwing light on the difficulty and obscurity of the text, but springs from the illuminating and dominating power of the contents of the Holy Scriptures, the Word of God.”46 In accord with the sola scriptura principle, Protestants, as a matter of principle, conceive scriptural language as self-interpreting and tend therefore to isolate Scripture from interpretive traditions. As a practical matter, Protestant theologians complicate the absolutist position of Luther and other early Reformers, through coordination of the sola scriptura principle with the tools of historical philology: as Bullinger writes in the Second Helvetic Confession (1562), “we acknowledge as orthodox and authentic the interpretation of the Scriptures insofar as it is drawn from the Scriptures themselves (according to the character of the language in which they were written, as well as the circumstances in which they were set down, and interpreted in the light of like and unlike passages, both many and plain)….”47 The difference between the earlier, absolutist position, and the more rational perspective of Bullinger anticipates the shift in Protestant biblical theology, from Tyndale to Donne, traced in the chapters that follow.48 Protestant exegetes increasingly frame biblical language as relatively rather than absolutely independent of interpretive traditions.49

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

9

Against the Protestant tendency to restrict authority to the text of Scripture, Roman Catholics assert that the Bible has been received by an historical church and is therefore only fully meaningful as part of a larger canon of ecclesiastical tradition.50 In response to the Protestant notion of a self-interpreting Bible, Roman Catholics emphasize the indeterminacy of biblical language. In his Hierarchiae ecclesiasticae assertio (1538), for example, Albertus Pighius draws an influential analogy: the Bible is “a nose of wax, which allows itself to be drawn first in one direction, then in another, then back again, and shaped with ease into whatever you like” (nasus cereus, qui se horsum illorsum et in quam volueris partem, trahi, retrahi, fingique facile permittit ).51 The formal obscurity and material insufficiency of the Bible are common topics of sixteenthcentury Roman Catholic polemic.52 For Roman Catholics, the Bible is, as Pontien Polman writes, “incapable de determiner ses propres frontiers,” so that the authority of Scripture depends on a source external to Scripture—a reference to Augustine’s influential assertion: “I would not have believed in the New Testament if the authority of the catholic church had not moved me [to it]” (Evangelio non crederem nisi me Ecclesiae catholicae commoveret auctoritas ).53 A modern Roman Catholic historian of these controversies, George M. Tavard, summarizes the position reached by Catholic polemicists in the first half of the sixteenth century this way: “Face to face with the ‘Scripture alone’ of Luther, we now have ‘the Church alone.’”54 Reformation hermeneutic controversy and English Petrarchan (or post-Petrarchan) poetics both emphasize the opposition between autonomy and contingency. While Petrarchism, “the distinctive genre of the English Renaissance,”55 gave English writers of the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries an opportunity to demonstrate that their national literature was on par with Continental traditions, the prominent conventionality of the Petrarchan mode also threatened to dissolve the poetic autonomy of these English works in a “circle of self-reference,”56 what Michel Jeanneret calls “le régime livresque.”57 William Kerrigan characterizes Renaissance Petrarchism as “probably the clearest instance in Western literary history of the binding power of tradition as such.”58 England’s century-long creation of, and debate about, a national church and a national Bible provide the groundwork for a poetic responses to the Petrarchan tradition in the English Renaissance—a “defense,” in Harold Bloom’s words, “against poetic tradition.”59 This convergence

10

J. H. FERGUSON

of literary imitation and biblical hermeneutics is a specific formulation of what Cummings describes as “the interrelationship between literary methods of reading and writing and turmoil in theology and religion,” and of “a larger cultural crisis in which both play a part and which makes them inseparable.”60 The opposition between adherence to tradition and creative autonomy represents this book’s main point of convergence between religious and literary texts.61

II The death in 1621 of Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, occasioned John Donne’s poetic meditation on the relation between divine logos and human language in the Sidney Psalter. In “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister” (first printed in 1635), Donne portrays this relation variously: at times as strictly dualistic, at times as a relation of contiguity and reciprocity. Most interestingly, Donne’s poem suggests that the relation between divine logos and human language does not exist in isolation but rather is conditioned by the tradition or historical circumstance to which texts like the Sidneian Psalter belong. The Sidneys’ ostentatiously artful translation of the Psalter thus elicits from Donne a suggestive treatment of Scripture as a measure of the expressiveness of English: Donne’s poem both asserts and doubts the adequacy of artful language as mediator of the Word of God; it also registers the impact of tradition or convention on this mediation. The Sidney Psalter as a merging of biblical and literary English represents an important text for the argument of the present book (see Chapter 4); the final chapter of the book discusses the secular poetry and theological prose of Donne. For both reasons, Donne’s response to this Psalter is an appropriate point of departure for the chapters that follow. Likely because of its inclusion at the beginning of J. C. A. Rathmell’s edition of the Sidney Psalter, Donne’s poem has served many critics as a point of entry to discussion of that Psalter62 ; a more comprehensive reading than the poem usually receives illustrates ways in which the expressive and literary capacities of English were shaped in response to the Bible and biblical tradition in Renaissance England. “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes” begins by asserting an absolute separation between the divine and the human: Eternall God, (for whom who ever dare)

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

11

Seeke new expressions, doe the Circle square, And thrust into strait corners of poore wit Thee, who art cornerless and infinite) I would but blesse thy Name, not name thee now; (And thy gifts are as infinite as thou:). (ll.1–6)63

These lines are not sanguine about human approximation to the divine. Initially, the timelessness of “Eternall” god is contrasted with the timeliness of “new expressions.” The distinction between (material, finite) square and (ideal, infinite) circle reinforces the point, as does the contrast between divine majesty, on the one hand, and the daring and thrusting effort of what is merely “poore [human] wit,” on the other. The “strait corners” into which this poor wit seeks to thrust the divine infinite allude to “new expressions” in general but more specifically to the rigors of poetic form, and perhaps to the unprecedented formal experimentation that is the most prominent feature of the Sidney Psalter. The import of the parenthetical statement that ends with line 4 is recapitulated by the antanaclasis in line five (Name, name).64 The speaker’s refusal to name the Name of God (with an allusion to the tetragrammaton) depends upon a strict distinction between human language and divine logos.65 The poem’s opening thus insists on the distinction between divine logos and human language. The passage following suggests a resolution of this opposition: Fixe we our prayses therefore on this one, That, as thy blessed Spirit fell upon These Psalmes first Author in a cloven tongue; (For ’twas a double power by which he sung The highest matter in the noblest forme;) So thou hast cleft that spirit, to performe That worke againe, and shed it, here, upon Two, by their bloods, and by thy Spirit one. (7–14)

The speaker shifts his attention from the strict dualism of the previous lines onto an image of unity, this one (English) Psalter. Two made one (14) provides the general pattern. The Hebrew original, written by “a cloven tongue” or a “double power,” reconciles the “strait corners” and the “cornerless and infinite” so emphatically separated in lines 3–4 above: the Psalter represents the adequation of human language to divine logos. The speaker extends this new unity to the Sidney Psalter, another doubling (“That worke againe”), and to the pair of sibling translators, made one by

12

J. H. FERGUSON

shared blood but more importantly by the divine inspiration behind their united work on this translation. This image of brother and sister united opens onto resonant praise and thanksgiving for the Sidney Psalms: A Brother and a Sister, made by thee The Organ, where thou art the Harmony. Two that make one John Baptists holy voice, And who that Psalme, Now let the Iles rejoice, Have both translated, and apply’d it too, Both told us what, and taught us how to doe. They shew us Ilanders our joy, our King, They tell us why, and teach us how to sing. (15–22)

The opposition in the early lines between the eternal and the worldly has been relaxed here into untroubled, even facile, complementarity: the Sidneys are the instrument (the organ), God is the form; the Sidneys have joined their voices to sing both John the Baptist and the Psalmist, aligning the two Testaments; the Sidneys translate the words and the teaching of Psalm 97—though Donne does not draw on Pembroke’s language (“You isles with waves enclosed,/Be all to joy disposed” [ll.3–4]66 ) in citing this text; and the Sidneys have expressed in their translation the content, the what and why, as well as the form, the how, of scriptural revelation. As if to toy verbally with doubling, both boths in lines 19–20 are both adjectival (both brother and sister) and adverbial (both “translated and apply’d,” both “told and taught”). Lines 21–22, lines often cited by critics in reference to the Sidney Psalter, conclude with epigrammatic finality; they seem to express the happy mediation of spirit by matter that worried the poem’s opening. Many commentators treat “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes” as if the poem ended on the lines just cited. In fact, the following passage introduces a new conceit and new complications: Make all this All, three Quires, heaven, earth, and sphears; The first, Heaven, hath a song, but no man heares, The Spheares have Musick, but they have no tongue, Their harmony is rather danc’d than sung; But our third Quire, to which the first gives eare, (For, Angels learne by what the Church does here) This Quire hath all. The Organist is hee Who hath tun’d God and Man, the Organ we. (23–30)

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

13

“Make all this All” recalls the speaker’s earlier declining to name thy Name, even as the phrase suggests a more positive adequation of the worldly all with the divine All. The binary, divine/human, operating to this point in the poem has been replaced here with a set of three, “heaven, earth, and sphears,” and the ordering of heavenly and earthly upset. In this concatenation of Ptolemaic cosmology and Christian Trinitarianism, the two upper tiers are those found lacking: the heavens’ music is entirely ineffable, the spheres’s tangible but inaudible. Only the earth’s music “hath all” (29). For Christ’s tuning divine and human, spirit and matter, the world has (spiritual) song, (tangible) music, and (human) tongue. According to this new Incarnational logic, the direction of influence between heaven and earth is reversed: earlier in the poem, matter seeks to adequate itself to spirit; here, the heavenly “gives ear” to the earthly (27). The image of Jesus the organist playing the instrument of humanity revises the earlier image of the Sidneys as an Organ for which God provides the “harmony” (16): the Incarnation represents the deeper involvement of God in humanity than under the previous dispensation, where the speaker insists upon the difference between abstract, spiritual “harmony” and human instruments. The binary, hierarchical distinction between the divine and the worldly has collapsed here into reciprocity, implying an increased confidence in the adequation of human language to divine logos. The passage following returns to the Sidneian Psalter: The songs are these, which heavens high holy Muse. Whisper’d to David, David to the Jewes: And Davids Successors, in holy zeale, In forms of joy and art doe re-reveale To us so sweetly and sincerely too, That I must not rejoyce as I would doe When I behold that these Psalmes are become So well attyr’d abroad, so ill at home, So well in Chambers, in thy Church so ill. (31–39)

These lines extend the confidence in the transmission from God to humanity from earlier in the poem: as David’s “cloven tongue” integrated divine “matter” with human “forme” (9–11), so here the Psalms are passed from “heavens high holy Muse” through David to “the Jewes,”

14

J. H. FERGUSON

and from the Jews are re-revealed “to us.” The neatness of this great chain of singing is expressed by the chiastic crossing of divine joy and human art with human sweetness and divine sincerity in lines 34–35. The trouble is, the Psalm translators, “Davids Successors,” evoked here are not the Sidneys: the speaker “must not rejoyce” as he would like, since the Psalm translations made so “sweetly” are “abroad,” not “at home,” isolated “in Chambers,” not publicized “in thy Church.” These two lines may describe two aspects of the same situation: the Psalter is well translated into foreign languages, such that these versions are read only in the chambers of the learned, and not in the English Church generally.67 On the other hand, the two distinctions might be separate, even contradictory, statements: the Psalms are well translated into foreign languages but not into English; the Psalms are well translated into English, but these English versions are restricted to private chambers. The latter reading of lines 38–39 is not strictly logical, but it seems to be the sense pursued in the lines following: As I can scarce call that reform’d, untill This be reform’d; Would a whole State present A lesser gift than some one man hath sent? And shall our Church, unto our Spouse and King More hoarse, more harsh than any other, sing? For that we pray, we praise thy name for this, Which, by this Moses and this Miriam, is Already done; and as those Psalmes we call (Though some have other Authors) Davids all: So though some have, some may some Psalmes translate, We thy Sidnean Psalmes shall celebrate. (40–50)

The speaker expresses thanks for and praises the Sidneys’ Psalms, “[a]lready done,” but still prays for something else. What is that which he finds lacking? It is the restriction of the Sidneys’ version to “Chambers,” leaving the English Church to sing “[m]ore hoarse, more harsh than any other.”68 The speaker prays, then, that the Sidney Psalter be sung in the English Church; the speaker’s celebration of the Sidney Psalter is qualified by that Psalter’s exclusion from the English liturgical tradition.69 Despite the triumphalism of the speaker’s equation of Philip and Mary Sidney with Moses and Miriam, his celebration of the Sidneys

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

15

as the quintessential English Psalm translators (as David is called the quintessential author of the variously authored Psalter70 ) is a hortative plea, or prayer, not recognition of a fait accompli. Most commentators on the poem see the lack of a “well attyr’d” English Psalter as a problem resolved by the Sidney Psalter,71 but this is not what the poem says. The speaker’s shall in “We…shall celebrate” suggests both future indicative and present imperative senses.72 Moreover, the speaker’s immediate replacement of an optative (“we pray”) with an alliterative and assonant indicative (“we praise”) suggests that the praise stands in for the unfulfilled prayer. As in lines 5–7 above, where the speaker substitutes blessing thy Name (associated with “our praises”) for naming thee, so here the speaker acknowledges the replacement of the ideal with the attainable. Like lines 21–22, discussed above, lines 49–50 seem to mark a definitive conclusion. The so at the head of line 48 completes the comparison begun with as at line 47; the closing couplet is given a sense of finish not only by rhyme but also by a shapely tricolon, “some…some…We.” As with lines 21–22, however, this ostensible conclusion is the occasion for a fresh departure. The final three couplets of the poem change the framework of the discussion to qualify the accomplishment of the Sidney Psalter in another sense: And, till we come th’Extemporall song to sing, (Learn’d the first hower, that we see the King, Who hath translated these translators) may These their sweet learned labours, all the way Be as our tuning, that, when hence we part We may fall in with them, and sing our part. (51–56)

“Extemporal” normally means spontaneous, unpremeditated—arising out of the moment, as the etymology (ex tempore) would indicate. In this sense the word is active in contemporary theological wrangling about sermons delivered extemporaneously rather than from a written text: in his sermons, Donne often complains of a “negligent, and extemporal manner of preaching” (5:43).73 The same sense may be relevant to Donne’s use of the word here, but only incidentally. This “Extemporall song” is rather learned than spontaneous (52), and if it is spontaneous in the sense that it is given to rather than excogitated by its singers, the more important meaning is of a song that belongs to the heavens rather than to the world, a song removed from time (ex tempore in another sense) or outside of history.74 “Extemporall song” thus turns the poem

16

J. H. FERGUSON

back—with perhaps a playful etymological link between extemporal and eternal —to its initial distinction between the “Eternall God,” “cornerless and infinite,” on the one hand, and the “strait corners of poore wit,” on the other. The conclusion of the poem suggests an anagogical— or merely typological—correspondence between human and divine song: what the “Extemporall song” is in heaven, the Sidney Psalter is to the world (compare the reciprocity evoked in ll. 27–30 above). The speaker’s disappointment that the Sidney Psalter is not part of the English liturgical tradition seems to provoke a return to the frankly dualistic view of worldly poetry and divine truth from the opening of the poem.75 “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes” describes the relation between divine logos and human language variously: as a measure of the inadequacy of human expression (1–6), as a divorce to be reconciled in the Psalter (7–22), as mutual exchange (23–30), and as anagogical or typological correspondence (51–56). The warmth of the speaker’s praise for the Sidney Psalter has distracted some critics from that for which the speaker prays. The twenty lines (31–50) left out of the above analysis register at once thanksgiving for the Sidneys’ translation and dismay at the English Church’s failure to incorporate their version into public worship, on which waits the perfected reform of that Church. The speaker’s celebration of the Sidney Psalter as a successful human mediation of the divine Word is significantly qualified by his recognition that their Psalter has not been incorporated into English ecclesiastical tradition. This qualification forms part of the speaker’s recognition of the complex and contingent relationship between divine logos and human language. “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes” suggests that the capacity of human language to adequate the divine logos depends not only upon abstract considerations but also upon the contingencies of human convention and tradition. Donne’s poetic treatment of the impact of historical contingency on the expressiveness of English vis-à-vis the biblical Word thus offers a precedent for the other texts discussed in Faith in the Language. ∗ ∗ ∗ The following chapters examine a number of different intersections of biblical and literary ideas across an historical arc that runs from the first major engagement of the English Reformation in the 1520s and ‘30s through the poetry and sermons of John Donne a century later. The book is divided into three parts.

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

17

Part I, Chapters 2 and 3, connects biblical polemics with debates about English semantics. Chapter 2 describes the translation of the Reformation dispute concerning Scripture and interpretive tradition onto the English scene and into the conceptualization of the English language through analysis of the first major dispute around the English Bible in the sixteenth century, between Thomas More and William Tyndale. Like their predecessors writing in Latin, More and Tyndale take usage as the focus of their arguments about doctrine and language. In the Dialogue concerning Heresies (1529), More emphasizes, to polemical advantage, the textual and interpretive complexities involved in reading the Bible. Such complexities underline the need for an extra-biblical authority, which More identifies with the consensus of the Roman Church. As More suggests in his Dialogue and goes on to argue at length in his Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532/1533), consensus also has a linguistic function: it underwrites usage, which controls the relation between words and meaning. By contrast, in his Answere to Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge (1531), Tyndale denies that Scripture is intrinsically problematic: the only real obstacle to reading Scripture is extraneous, the Roman Church’s human meddling with divine revelation. Tyndale aligns English semantics with his hermeneutics: for him, biblical English should be autonomous of usage (as defined by the Latin Church) and should take its meaning from its ostensibly intrinsic denotation rather than from conventional connotation. Although the positions staked out by More and Tyndale would be moderated in ensuing decades, these polemics are significant in that they represent the first translation of Reformation debates about Scripture and interpretive tradition into the conceptualization of the English language. Chapter 3 argues that disputes about biblical English impacted attitudes about the integrity of the English language from the 1530s through the Elizabethan period: the hermeneutic opposition between scriptural autonomy and interpretive tradition shaped sixteenth-century examinations of the sufficiency of the English language with regard to foreign borrowings. The inkhorn is a ready figure of comedy in Renaissance England, as elsewhere in Europe. Behind comical figures like Shakespeare’s Holofernes is a series of debates and pronouncements by Thomas Elyot, John Cheke, Stephen Gardiner, Thomas Wilson, Roger Ascham, George Puttenham, Richard Mulcaster, and others about the self-sufficiency of early modern English vis-à-vis other languages, and Latin in particular. At the same time, the inkhorn is associated with religious disputations from its coining and through the beginning of the

18

J. H. FERGUSON

seventeenth century: John Bale, the first cited source for the word, uses it to describe the Latin tags he associates with Papists (Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe, 1543); early in the seventeenth century, William L’isle uses the word to attack the “fustian” English of the RheimsDouai Bible (Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament, 1623). This chapter discusses the writings of, among others, Stephen Gardiner, Gregory Martin, William Rainolds, William Fulke, Thomas Cartwright, and William Lisle in order to assess the abiding themes and changing dynamics in debates about biblical English following the exchange between More and Tyndale. Resistance to literary inkhornism is part of a broader assertion of national autonomy—an autonomy not only linguistic and literary but also ecclesiastic, and thus tied up intimately with the language of the English Bible. Chapter 4 (encompassing the whole of Part II) makes two related arguments: (1) that Elizabethan biblical hermeneutics shaped Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry and (2) that Sidney fuses poetics and exegesis in his Psalm translations. Juxtaposition with another apology, John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesia Anglicanae (1562), helps to reveal correlations between Sidney’s heterogeneous definitions of poetry in his Apology, on the one hand, and orthodox Elizabethan ambivalence concerning Scripture, on the other. In one of the central accounts of poetry in his Apology, Sidney positions poetry between the “bare rule” of philosophy and the “bare was ” of history; Sidney expresses this Aristotelian formulation in terms that recall the Elizabethan middle way between the contending claims of Puritan absolutism and Roman historicism. Similarly, Sidney’s broader indecisiveness in the Apology about whether poetry is creatively autonomous or mimetic of prior knowledge echoes ambivalence in Elizabethan hermeneutics concerning Scripture and interpretive traditions. Finally, Sidney’s tenuous distinction between “right” and divine poetry reinforces these associations between poetry and the Elizabethan Bible. The latter conflation of biblical poetry and poetry proper anticipates the metrical Psalter begun by Philip and completed by his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert. These translators considered the Psalter a platform upon which to demonstrate the poetic resources of the English language: their paraphrase is perhaps the fullest compendium of English poetic capacities of the early modern period. It is also clear that the translators considered the poetic resources of the English language a platform upon which to represent the Psalter. The poetic effects of the Sidneys’ versions would seem to exceed the Psalter’s sacred character, as the Sidneys understood

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

19

that character, but then it would seem no less clear that, for the Sidneys, the sacred character of the Psalter exceeded any mere poetic effect. The distinction is a false one: the Sidneys understood enhancement of their vernacular as a function of biblical exegesis. Part III shows how Shakespeare in his Sonnets (Chapter 5) and Donne in Songs and Sonets (Chapter 6) situate their poems vis-à-vis Petrarchan tradition in accord with changing accounts of Scripture and exegetical tradition in post-Reformation hermeneutics. Chapter 5 offers a comprehensive reading of Shakespeare’s 1609 Sonnets as a sequence-long meditation on literary imitation in line with contemporary biblical hermeneutics. Vernacular Petrarchan poetics inherits tensions between creative autonomy and literary tradition from earlier writings about Ciceronian imitation. Shakespeare’s Sonnets draws on early Protestant hermeneutics in addressing these tensions. Over the course of the sequence, Shakespeare’s Sonnets constructs an association between the involvement of poetic language in historical tradition, on the one hand, and obstructed mimesis, on the other. In a series of so-called Rival Poet sonnets, Shakespeare’s speaker responds to this obstruction, “the barren tender of a poet’s debt” (83:4), with bare, tautological equivalence: “he that writes of you, if he can tell, / That you are you, so dignifies his story” (84:7–8). Shakespeare integrates this paradoxical notion of bare, tautological equivalence into the larger dramatic plot of his sequence and into a coherent response to poetic tradition. This response to tradition represents a literary correlate of the biblical absolutism of early English Protestants like Tyndale. If, like the tenuous, ahistorical exegesis of these early Protestants, the Sonnets’ response to the crisis of tradition is narrow and reactionary, a dead end of linguistic mediation, it is also testament to the pervasiveness of the opposition between autonomy and tradition at the intersection of biblical hermeneutics and imaginative literature. Chapter 6 describes the convergence of secular poetics and biblical hermeneutics in the writings of a single author, John Donne. An initial discussion of Thomas Carew’s elegy and of Donne’s first three “Satires” highlights the preoccupation in Songs and Sonnets with questions of language and imitation. One of the recurring motifs in Songs and Sonnets is the creative autonomy of erotic experience, the separate, self-sufficient realm it produces, separate both from the external world and from literary (Petrarchan) traditions. Formally, Songs invents alternatives to, rather than merely rejecting, conventional expectations. Donne’s Songs and Sonets

20

J. H. FERGUSON

thus suggests a discrete alternative to, rather than a repudiation of, Petrarchan tradition. These discursive and formal assertions of poetic-erotic invention in Songs and Sonnets suggest a more robust response than that offered by Shakespeare’s Sonnets to the problem of tradition. Donne’s biblical exegesis articulates a similarly constructive response to tradition: his sermons reinvent the role of interpretive tradition in biblical meaning. This correlation, between Donne’s secular lyrics and sermons regarding tradition and invention, epitomizes this book’s argument about the interaction of literary language and Reformation hermeneutics. Chapter 6 brings the argument of Faith in the Language full circle: having demonstrated the impact of ideas about biblical authority on secular literature, the book’s final chapter turns from secular poetry back to the theological prose (in Donne’s sermons) with which, in the exchange between More and Tyndale, the main argument of the book begins.

Notes 1. See Ann W. Astell and Susannah Brietz Monta’s similar formulation: “Ways of reading the Bible…affect not only how other texts were read, but also how they were composed” (“Genre and the Joining of Literature and Religion: A Question of Kinds,” Religion and Literature 46/2– 3 [2014]: 96). See too Nandra Perry’s general sense of a “growing consensus within the discipline that the literary innovations and anxieties of the period cannot be understood properly apart from the theological innovations and anxieties that preceded, accompanied, and sometimes grew out of them”; the “anxieties” Perry has in mind concern above all the “relationship of linguistic ‘surfaces’ to the poetic, philosophical, and theological ‘essences’ they were long believed to contain and convey”. (Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014], 2, 5). Anthony Yu generalizes more broadly: “The most apparent and apposite justification for including literary materials in the study of religion [and, presumably, vice versa] is the historical one. … In virtually every high-cultural system…the literary tradition has…developed in intimate – indeed, often intertwining – relation to religious thought, practice, institution, and symbolism. … To ignore this interrelatedness of holy and profane texts and the interdependence of their interpretive sciences is to distort large segments of the world’s literary and religious history” (Anthony Yu and Larry D. Bouchard, “Literature: Literature and Religion,” Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones [Detroit: Thompson Gale, 2005], 8: 5466).

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

21

2. In his most recent book, Common, Neil Rhodes argues that the Reformation delayed the Elizabethan renaissance by inducing, on the one hand, an “attack on bonae literae by Catholics” and, on the other, a “denigration of fiction and ‘fantasie’ by Protestants”; Rhodes explains the former as “a fierce hostility to the common, and to the process of making common, on the part of conservatives” and the latter as “resistance to the work of the imagination on the part of the more radical reformers” (Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018], 79). “With two opposed constituencies pulling in the same direction,” as Rhodes goes on to write, “it is hardly surprising that the Elizabethan literary renaissance came so late” (172). Rhodes elaborates on English Protestant resistance to imaginative literature, particularly under Edward VI: “[f]reedom of expression was circumscribed by the principle of sola scriptura, which functioned not only as a theological doctrine but also as a prescription for writers: it gave no license to the exercise of the imagination. … The achievement of a vernacular Bible for the common reader … is probably the defining characteristic of the English Reformation, but it comes at the expense of poetry” (111– 12). In Poetic Authority, John Guillory describes “the displacement of God’s word by the fallen word of man, and the substitution of a human authority and a human origin for that of the divine author” (Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], 14). For other major critical treatments of early modern English literary authority that treat imaginative literature in strictly secular terms, see Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Jacqueline Miller, Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Sean Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 3. Compare Deirdre Serjeantson’s assertion that “the drive to obliterate secular writing and to establish in its place a vernacular library of hymns, psalms, and biblical translations represents only one strand in sixteenth-century literature,” part of a masterful argument concerning the compatibility between the Petrarchan sonnet and “the experience of the amorous, prophetic, lyrical and personal voice of David the psalmist” (“The Book of Psalms and the Early Modern Sonnet,” Re-forming the Psalms in Tudor England, special issue of Renaissance Studies 29/4 [2015]: 632–49, at 633, 649). See too Hannah Crawforth’s analogous

22

J. H. FERGUSON

4.

5.

6.

7.

alignment of biblical and literary discourses: “The practices of Biblical Humanism and scriptural translation authorize the application of a new philological attention to the vernacular, which is subsequently adapted to poetic works …” (Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 18). Compare Timothy Rosendale’s discussion of the “English Reformation as an important religious and political component of this legitimation [i.e., of the English language], focusing on the state-sponsored shift from Latin to English in the language of divine access” (“‘Fiery toungues’: Language, Liturgy, and the Paradox of the English Reformation.” Renaissance Quarterly 54/4 [2001]: 1143). In this article and in his monograph, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Rosendale focuses on the impact of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, while my emphasis is on the English Bible. See Anthony Yu and Larry D. Bouchard’s similar attention to language as the convergence of literary and religious disciplines: both disciplines, they write, “entail the deepest and most wide-ranging engagement with the analysis of language, and this engagement implicates all the concerns of the human sciences” (“Literature: Literature and Religion,” 5472). Compare Neil Rhodes’s account of the process by which English assumes new “literary sufficiency” in the second half of the sixteenth century, an account that makes no mention of biblical interpretation: “The language itself was the raw material, and in the decades between Ascham’s bleak pronouncement on the poverty of English [in “Toxophilus” (1545)] and the explosion of self-confidence in the 1590s … that raw material was increasingly recognized as a suitable vehicle for eloquence” (The Origins of English [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 124, 129 and 118–34 passim). My thesis is in accord with Patrick Collinson’s general sense that “since for Protestants religion was not one compartment of a segmented life but all-enveloping, this [i.e., Henry Chillingworth’s notion that ‘the Bible only…is the religion of Protestants’] must also mean that the Bible only is the culture of Protestants.” Compare Collinson’s characterization of a “third phase [of] protestant biblicism” (which Collinson dates from about 1626), when “an authentically protestant literary culture emerged.” The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeen Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 95, 98. My project corresponds to what James D. Mardock describes as “the religious turn’s second wave,” insofar as I am “uninterested in recovering or reconstructing the specific belief systems” of the authors I discuss.

1

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

23

James D. Mardock and Kathryn R. MacPherson, eds., Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014), 9. JoAnn DellaNeva, ed. and Brian Duvick, trans., Ciceronian Controversies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 7. Cicero’s De Oratore, Orator, Brutus, the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, Seneca’s Epistola 84, Horace’s Ars poetica, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, among other works. “Since it was in Latin rather than the vernacular that the most elaborate theories of discourse were formulated in the sixteenth century,” writes Terence Cave, “it is hardly possible to speak about such topics without bringing examples of vernacular writing into contact with Latin humanist writing.” The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1979), 10. Subsequent page references given parenthetically in the text. Cf. Erasmus’ comment, in De copia, on Latin’s independence from usus: “the rules of speech are sought not from the multitude, but from the works of the learned.” Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24–2, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Betty I. Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 21. Original in De copia verborum ac rerum, ed. Betty I. Knott, in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami, vol. 1–6 (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1988), 42. At this point in the text, Erasmus has just cited Horace’s Ars Poetica, lines 70–71, on the rise and fall of words according to usage: “multa renascentur quae iam cecidere, cadentque/quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet usus” (many words will be reborn that now have fallen, and words now esteemed will fall, if usage so wills ). Another classical precedent for this argument is provided by Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae (1.10.4; 10.7.12). I owe the latter reference to a talk given by Eric MacPhail at Indiana University, February 2003, “Like a Rock at Sea: Language Change and Historical Thought in the Renaissance.” Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 54. Cf. Grafton, “Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts,” esp. 620, 631, 642–43; Cave, “Problems of Reading in the Essais ” in Michel de Montaigne, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 83; Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 48–53. Documents relevant to the Italian polemical writings preceding Erasmus’ Ciceronianus are edited (and translated into Italian) in Eugenio Garin, ed. and trans., Prosatori latini del quattrocentro (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1952); English translations are available in Izora Scott, trans., Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero as a Model for Style and Some Phases of their Influence on the Schools of the Renaissance, 2 vols. (New York: Teachers

24

J. H. FERGUSON

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

College, Columbia University, 1910), Quirinus Breen, trans., “The Correspondence of G. Pico della Mirandola and Ermolao Barbaro concerning the Relation of Philosophy and Rhetoric,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952): 384–412, and Ciceronian Controversies, op. cit. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) provides a critical overview. Etienne Dolet’s response to the Ciceronianus is published in facsimile: L’Erasmianus sive Ciceronianus d’Etienne Dolet (1535), ed. Emile V. Telle (Geneva: Droz, 1974). “Humanist Education” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 150. See Lawrence Manley’s parallel formulation: “On the one hand, efforts to restore ancient eloquence to the present perforce assumed timeless and abiding standards of fitness; on the other hand, the altered character of contemporary social and linguistic habits imposed a need for flexible adaptability.” Convention, 1500–1750 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 154. For a skeptical view on the influence of Erasmus’ historicism in the Ciceronianus, see G. W. Pigman, III, “Imitation and the Renaissance Sense of the Past: The Reception of Erasmus’ Ciceronianus,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9 (1979): 155–77. The Latin text is cited from Dialogus Ciceronianus, ed. Pierre Mesnard, in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami, vol. 1–2 (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1971), 614. Hereafter abbreviated ASD 1–2. The translation is cited from Ciceronianus or A Dialogue on the Best Manner of Speaking, trans. Izora Scott (New York: AMS, 1972), 31. ASD 1–2, 620; Ciceronianus or A Dialogue, 40. ASD 1–2, 641; Ciceronianus or A Dialogue, 67. As Nandra Perry remarks, Erasmus’ critique of the Ciceronians demonstrates that for him right “imitatio and imitatio Christi are one and the same” (Imitatio Christi, 7). The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, 175. Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 108. Ciceronian Controversies, 80–81. Martin L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance, 268. Thus Bembo in himself represents the generational shift described by Cathy Shrank with reference to England: “internationalists … for whom learning transcended territorial boundaries, were replaced by new generations of writers who used their humanist education to nurture national pride” (Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 13).

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

25

24. ASD 1–2, 649. 25. Ciceronian Controversies, 2. The English translation in this edition, “‘[y]ou do not write like Cicero’ … I am not Cicero. Yet I do express myself, I think” (3, my emphasis), obscures the direct opposition between expressing Cicero (exprimere Ciceronem) and expressing myself (me exprimere) that is explicit in the parallel Latin accusatives. 26. ASD 1–2, 664, 705–07; Ciceronianus or A Dialogue, 96, 124–26. 27. Compare the characterization of the Renaissance Petrarchan self as a response to the frustrated courtship on which the mode relies: “[a]ction hits a wall, and the rebound goes inward, into the resource of the poetic self. Petrarchism as it unfolds in the Renaissance dilates the individual in a condition of unwanted isolation” (William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989], 160). See too the authors’ subsequent characterization: “the old threat of idolatrous love gave way to a reflexive idolatry of the self in the newly expansive and resourceful ego of the suitor-poet” (212). 28. An Apologie for Poetrie, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. ed. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 113. Further references to Sidney’s Apologie are taken from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 29. Astrophil and Stella, 1.1, 10–11. William Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 165. On the opposition between truth and verse, heart and art, attribute and affect in Sidney’s sequence, see also sonnets 3, 6, 15, 28, 34–35, 44–45, 55–55, 57–58, 70, 74, 84, 90. 30. Quirinus Breen, “The Observationes in M. T. Ciceronem of Marius Nizolius,” Studies in the Renaissance 1 (1954): 49–58, here 49. 31. ASD 1–2, 609–11; Ciceronianus or A Dialogue, 24–26. 32. Gabriel Harvey, Ciceronianus, ed. Harold S. Wilson, trans. Clarence A. Forbes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1945), 90–91. 33. ASD 1–2, 652; Ciceronianus or A Dialogue, 81–82. 34. “What Was Donne Doing?” South Central Review 4 (1987), 10. 35. John M. Headley, “The Reformation as Crisis in the Understanding of Tradition.” Archive for Reformation History 78 (1987): 5–23. For English post-Reformation writings on convention and tradition as a “doctrinal debate about the nature and value of traditional or merely social norms themselves,” see Lawrence Manley, Convention, 1500–1750, 67–90. 36. I borrow the phrase “conditions of meaning” from Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Culture (Fordham University Press, 2005), esp. ch. 2. I understand it to mean the framework (semantic, grammatical, syntactical, etc.) within which English takes on meaning.

26

J. H. FERGUSON

37. See Hannah Crawforth’s similar point in a different context: “The practices of Biblical Humanism and scriptural translation authorize the application of a new philological attention to the vernacular, which is subsequently adapted to poetic works by those editors eager to add a polemical gloss to Medieval literary texts” (Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature, 18). 38. Neil Rhodes comments, in another context, on the “correspondence, in the person of Erasmus himself, between reformation and renaissance” (Common, 44). 39. Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus’ Civil Dispute with Luther (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 40. 40. Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 149. 41. A Discussion of Free Will /De libero arbitrio διατ ριβ η´ sive collatio, trans. Peter Macardle, Collected Works of Erasmus, 76 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 16. 42. See James K. McConica, “Erasmus and the Grammar of Consent,” Scrinium Erasmianum, ed. Joseph Coppens (Leiden: Brill, 1969), 2: 82–89, here 86. 43. The Bondage of the Will, trans. Philip S. Watson and Benjamin Drewery, in Luther’s Works, 33 vols (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 89–90. 44. “Evangelism and Erasmus,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 50. 45. De servo arbitrio, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Karl Drescher (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1908), 18: 606. Luther’s sentence is a less elegant restatement of Augustine’s exegetical rule in the De doctrina christiana: “Ubi autem apertius [sententiae] ponuntur, ibi discendum est quomodo in locis intellegantur obscuris” (Where, however, [these meanings] are expressed more clearly, it is there to be learned how the same are to be understood in obscure places ) (De doctrina christiana, 168). For a concise historical account of Luther’s development of the sola scriptura principle, see Roland Bainton, “The Bible in the Reformation,” The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. S. L. Greenslade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 1–37. 46. “‘Sola Scriptura’ and Tradition,” The Word of God and Tradition, trans. S. H. Hooke (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964), 131. 47. Latin text in Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes, 3 vols. (New York: Harper, 1877), 3: 256. Cited in translation by Edouard Reuss, History of the Canon of the Holy Scriptures in the Christian Church, trans. David Hunter (New York: Dutton, 1884), 299.

1

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

27

48. See too Alexandra Walsham’s view that “the anxieties attendant upon unclasping the Book and disseminating it by means of the mechanical press were shared by key figures on both sides of the ideological divide”: “[d]eeming direct engagement with Scripture too dangerous for the average layman,” following the Peasants’ War and the rise of sects such as the Anabaptists, “the reformers themselves increasingly sought to filter it through the sieve of marginal glosses and commentaries. Fresh emphasis was placed on approaching the Bible in its original languages, Hebrew and Greek, and on the need for scholarly training to avoid the treacherous pitfalls hidden in Holy Writ. Protestant ministers were effectively reinstated as gate-keepers” (“Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible,” Journal of British Studies 42/2 [2003]: 164, 166). 49. See Susan Elizabeth Schreinder, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 80–82, and, on the debate among early Protestants concerning the relation between Scriptural interpretation and the inner testimony of the Spirit, see ibid., 82–112. On anti-materialist approaches to the scriptural text among later seventeenth-century noncomformists, see Kevin Killeen, “Immethodical, Incoherent, Unadorned: Style and the Early Modern Bible,” The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 516–20. 50. On the status of oral tradition vis-à-vis the Bible, and on the relative claims of pope and council, among other sixteenth-century Roman Catholic polemicists, see Pontien Polman, L’Élément Historique dans la Controverse religieuse du XVI e Siècle (Gembloux: Duculot, 1932), 284, 300, 306–07. 51. Hierarchiae ecclesiasticae assertio, 80r, qtd. by Polman, L’Élément Historique, 287n4. For a broad view of the Early Modern reception of this metaphor, see Porter, “The Nose of Wax: Scripture and the Spirit from Erasmus to Miton,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 14 (1964): 155–74. Jewell cites this passage from Pighius, calling it a “similitude, not al together of the beste making.” An Apologie, or answer in defence of the Church of England (London, 1572), 37v. 52. See Polman, L’Élément Historique, 284–87, 303–04. For a review of the topics treated by these polemicists, including the normative consensus of the Church, the interior Word written in the hearts of believers, the respective and sometimes competing claims of the Fathers, Popes, councils, and Doctors, apostolic succession and oral traditions, see further ibid., 289–303, 304–09. 53. Polman, L’Élément Historique, 284, see also 289–90; the citation from Augustine is taken from Contra epistolam Manichaei, qtd. by Polman, 28–29.

28

J. H. FERGUSON

54. Holy Writ or Holy Church: The Crisis of the Protestant Reformation (London: Burns and Oates, 1959), 150. For a review of other sixteenthcentury Roman Catholic polemicists (Peresius, Schatzgeyer, Pighius, Hosius, Ravesteyn, and Fisher) who took the same position on sola scriptura, see Polman, L’Élément Historique, 287–89. 55. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance, 158. 56. Herbert Marks, “Echo and Narcissism,” University of Toronto Quarterly 61/3 (1992): 336. 57. Michel Jeanneret, Des mets et des mots: banquets et propos de table à la Renaissance (Paris: J. Corti, 1987), 250–51. 58. “What Was Donne Doing?” South Central Review 4 (1987), 10. 59. A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 125. Robert Weimann has outlined a related argument: “The European Reformation and the various Protestantisms emerging from it provided the most intense site on which early modern uses of authority were radically redefined. If this is so, cannot sixteenth-century prose narrative, even where its outlook is quite remote from Protestant doctrine, be read in conjunction with the new mode of authority and authorization?” (Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996], 3). Although Weimann looks to prose narrative for evidence of the ramifications of theological debates about authority, his general characterizations of a shift in literary authorization are illuminating with regard to English poetic responses to the Petrarchan tradition: “[m]odern authority, rather than preceding its inscription, rather than being given as a prescribed premise of utterances, became a product of writing, speaking, and reading, a result rather than primarily a constituent of representation”; “traditional relations between writing and its sources (and their authority) could readily be suspended within the very process of their adaptation and reception” (Authority and Representation, 5, 14). 60. Literary Culture of the Reformation, 94. Cummings’s earlier formulated aspiration, “to write the history of the Reformation back into the history of literature” outlines a basic goal of this book (“Reformed Literature and Literature Reformed,” The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 822). 61. Compare Astell and Brietz Monta’s identification of “the relationship between the individual writer’s creative expression and the literary tradition that first inspires it” as a topic through which “considerations of genre may gather together, into a single field of observation, texts, ‘religious’ and ‘literary,’” (“Genre and the Joining of Literature and Religion: A Question of Kinds,” 97). 62. J. C. A. Rathmell provides a text of the poem prior to his own introduction to the Psalter (The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess

1

63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

69.

70.

INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION HERMENEUTICS AND LITERARY …

29

of Pembroke [Garden City: Doubleday, 1963], ix–x). John R. Roberts’s bibliography of criticism for the years prior to and just following Rathmell’s edition (1912–1967) includes not a single entry for “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes” (John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1912–67 [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973]). The number of entries increases with each of Roberts’s three volumes following (encompassing 1968–1978, 1979–1995, and 1996–2005, respectively). The text of “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes” is taken from Shawcross’s edition, op. cit. “Eiusdem verbi contraria significatio” is Quintilian’s paraphrase of the Greek αντανακλασις: ´ “a single word with varied meaning” (Institutio Oratoria, trans. Donald A. Russell [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001], 140 [9.3.68]; translation modified). For Quintilian, the ambiguity of antanaclasis is heuristic: the initial confusion caused by homonyms provokes careful discrimination of the different meanings at play. On divine naming, see the divisio and the first Part of the undated sermon on Ps. 6:1 (The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953– 1962], 5: 319–27). All quotations from Donne’s sermons are taken from this edition. See too the similar passage quoted from Donne’s earlier Essays in Divinity by the editors (5: 26–29). Rathmell, ed., The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke. Gardner implausibly takes “abroad” and “in Chambers,” “at home” and “in thy Church,” as synonymous rather than merely juxtaposed terms (The Divine Poems, 2nd ed., [Oxford: Clarendon, 1982], 103). Donne likely has in mind here the Whole Booke of Psalmes as translated into English by Sternhold, Hopkins, et al. and “embraced by virtually all of the English Church” in the Elizabethan period (Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1549–1603 [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008], 239). See Beth Quitslund’s similar points, which lead to a conclusion different from mine, (“Teaching Us How to Sing?: The Peculiarity of the Sidney Psalter” Sidney Journal 23/1–2 [2005]: 98–100). The composite authorship of the Psalter was common knowledge in the period. Anthony Gilbie, in the Epistle Dedicatory to Katherine, Countess of Huntington, preceding his English translation of Beza’s Latin “arguments” and paraphrases of the Psalms, describes the Psalms as set forth by the Holy Ghost’s “secretaries, David and others” (The Psalmes of David, Truely Opened and Explaned by Paraphrasis, according to the Right Sense of Every Psalme [London, 1580], ¶iiv). Further in the same Epistle, Gilbie

30

J. H. FERGUSON

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

refers to “David and the other servants of God, that made these Psalmes” (¶iiiiv). Raymond-Jean Frontain notes that Donne calls for congregational singing of the Sidney Psalms and notes the failure of this project, but his emphasis is on what he describes as Donne’s gratitude for these Psalms’ “providing the final link in the chain of revelation from heaven to earth, from God to humanity” (“Translating Heavenwards: ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes’ and John Donne’s Poetics of Praise,” Essays in Renaissance Culture 22 [1996]: 110–12, 115). Brian Cummings quotes Charles Barber’s Early Modern English: “shall could be used all through our period to signal obligation or necessity” (260; qtd. in Literary Culture of the Reformation, 215). See Cummings on the theological inflections of Tyndale’s use of the word shall at the cusp of future and imperative meanings in his biblical translations (Literary Culture of the Reformation 213–17). See also, for example, the passage playing on the word extemporal in Donne’s Second Prebend sermon (7:61), an undated sermon on Ps. 32:5 (9:304), and the second sermon on Ezek. 34:19, preached at Whitehall (10:174). Frances M. Malpezzi glosses the phrase “that song that transcends the limits of time” (“Christian Poetics in Donne’s ‘Upon the Translation of the Psalmes’” Renascence 32/4 [1980]: 223); cf. Anne Lake Prescott, “‘Forms of Joy and Art’: Donne, David, and the Power of Music,” John Donne Journal 25 (2006): 6, and Hannibal Hamlin, “Upon Donne’s ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes,” John Donne Journal 27(2008): 183. If the OED is correct, Donne’s usage of the word here is unique (s.v. Extemporal ). Frontain suggests that in using the same word for the final two rhymes, Donne “is able to perform the action of unification poetically … reforming the binaries of the preceding twenty-seven couplets” (“Translating Heavenwards” 116).

PART I

Reformation Hermeneutics and the Meaning of English

CHAPTER 2

Biblical Authority and the Meaning of English in the More-Tyndale Polemics

A Reformation crux: Is Scripture alone sufficient for the determination of Christian doctrine? Is Scripture, in other words, self-explanatory? If the biblical text is not self-explanatory, then doctrine can be determined only by extending the authoritative canon beyond the Bible. The restriction of canonical status to sola scriptura, on the other hand, suggests that anything beyond Scripture will serve at best as confirmation, at worst as corruption, but that, in any case, such materials will be superfluous. In the Dialogue concerning Heresies (1529), written against the “pestylent secte of Luther & Tyndale,” Thomas More (1478–1535) is a motivated theorist of hermeneutics, of interpretation as a problem: he emphasizes, to polemical advantage, the textual and interpretive complexities involved in reading the Bible. Such complexities underline the need for an extrabiblical authority, which More identifies with the consensus of the Roman Church. By contrast, in his Answere to Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge (1531), William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) denies that Scripture is in itself problematic; the only real obstacle to reading Scripture is extraneous, the Roman Church’s human meddling with divine revelation. In their exchanges concerning Tyndale’s English New Testament, More and Tyndale turn this theological argument about the relation between Scripture and doctrine into an argument about semantics, the relation between words and meaning. The turn hinges on the notion © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. H. Ferguson, Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81795-4_2

33

34

J. H. FERGUSON

of consensus. Throughout the polemic, More argues that historical consensus acts as guarantor to the Roman Church’s authority. As More suggests in his Dialogue concerning Heresies and goes on to argue at length in his Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532/1533), consensus also has a linguistic function: it underwrites usage, which controls the relation between words and meaning. Tyndale, on the other hand, argues that just as revelation is intrinsic to Scripture and absolute, so the meaning of words persists independently of collective, historical usage.1 Both arguments move from canon definition to semantics. The immediate subject of this dispute is a mere handful of words in Tyndale’s New Testament. Nevertheless, More and Tyndale battle over roughly a dozen syllables as if the entire structure of English ecclesiastical usage were at stake.2 Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century debates about secular Latin imitation supply important points of reference for these polemics. Can language be meaningfully isolated from the historical context out of which it comes and in which it is used, or is the sense of words contingent on changing usage? In what has been called the “classic controversy of the English Reformation,”3 More and Tyndale draw together philological arguments regarding the consuetudo loquendi and ecclesiological arguments regarding the consensus fidelium—the role, in other words, played by historical consensus in the generation of linguistic meaning and of Christian doctrine respectively. Around the time of Erasmus’s entry into the Ciceronian controversy about Latin semantics, More and Tyndale apply a comparable degree of theoretical scrutiny to English, whose status as both a religious and a literary medium was still very much in historical flux. In line with their respective conceptions of ecclesiology, More and Tyndale set out opposing notions of English biblical semantics: More assigns meaning to biblical English in relation to the usages agreed upon by contemporary English speakers, while Tyndale isolates biblical English from consensual usage and argues for its semantic autonomy. Although the polemical context leads Tyndale in particular to assert an untenable position, the whole exchange is significant in that it applies learned discussion of semantics to the English Bible and thus initiates a century-long process of rewriting the expressive capacities of the English language in response to the Bible.4 ∗ ∗ ∗

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

35

The fictional frame of the Dialogue expresses neatly More’s sense of the Lutheran challenge to the Roman Church. The narrator, More himself,5 is portrayed as an older man, a counselor to the king who is also ensconced in the domestic routines of his Chelsea residence.6 The first sentence of the Dialogue strikes a homely note with an “olde sayd saw” (“one busynes begettyth and bryngeth forth a nother”7 ); the theological discussion begins with a Messenger’s arrival in More’s garden, is twice interrupted by meal-time (185/33–35, 344/34–35), and ends with More’s departure “to the courte” (435/30–31). Our narrator, we understand, is familiar with the ways of crown and commons alike; such a man is ideally situated to shoulder the burden of the Dialogue’s argument: a layman’s defense of the settled usages of English religious life. More’s interlocutor is a young student, sent by a friend to hear More’s opinions on certain men and books recently accused of Lutheranism by the English Church. This “Messenger” recounts for More what “the people say,” “some men saye,” “it is thought,” etc., about the matter (28/17, 30; 29/10, etc.), but the Messenger’s neutral report soon turns into a spirited defense.8 More gives the Messenger his head in the first chapters of the Dialogue: he seems ready to confront the worst the reformers have to say about the Church; the remainder of the book relates the ineluctable reeling in of the Messenger’s attraction to novel doctrines.9 This Messenger’s life and contacts begin and end in the university, where, as More comments (aside), “yonge scolers be sometyme prone to newe fantasyes” at odds with the grounded realities of English religious practice (34/29–30; cf. 379/15–17); the Messenger’s isolation from general English society figures the Dialogue’s two particular targets: the foreigner Luther and the exile Tyndale. At the same time, this universitystudent would represent a figure familiar to the “simple” folk Bishop of London Cuthbert Tunstall asked More to address in the Dialogue.10 The Dialogue is principally concerned with defending the authority of the established consensus of the Church against Scripture taken as its own interpreter. Already prior to the Dialogue, Luther’s polemics with the English establishment had taken on a special vehemence11 ; Luther’s radical use of the sola scriptura principle made the Bible’s sufficiency (sufficientia, perfectio), necessity (efficacia, necessitas ), intrinsic intelligibility (perspicuitas ), and authority (autopistia, auctoritas ) issues of fierce and general debate.12 More describes the belief “that a man is not bounden to byleue any thynge but yf it may be prouyd euydently by scrypture” as “the very fond foundacyon and grounde of all [Luther’s]

36

J. H. FERGUSON

greate heresyes” (148/35–149/1). The Dialogue attempts to undermine the claims made for both the intrinsic and exclusive authority of the Bible. A demoted Bible takes its place in a wider canon of orthodox texts, cumulatively authorized by the consensus of the Roman Church. More uses an analogous notion of consensus as a linguistic argument against Tyndale’s innovations in New Testament vocabulary. Despite the polemical context, More’s ruthless undermining of confidence in the Bible’s sufficiency is likely to appear shocking, if not counterproductive13 ; the tack also differs from More’s previous writings in defense of Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum (a new, annotated Latin translation of the New Testament, en face with a Greek text). In his letter “To a Monk” (1519), for example, More refers to the rich if complex textual history of the received biblical canon, citing Jerome’s recourse to Greek and Hebrew texts as a precedent for Erasmus’s work.14 In the Dialogue, More is ready to dismiss this canon’s integrity out of hand: “some partes be all redy lost / more peraduenture then we can tell of. And of that we haue the bokes in some parte corrupted with mysse wrytynge” (115/23–25).15 Here is despair for the solascripturalist: a Bible lacking books, miscopied; worst of all, the gaps and inaccuracies now beyond location, let alone repair.16 More uses the biblical canon’s insufficiency as evidence that the text of the Bible has to be subordinated to the Bible’s meaning—as recognized by the Church: “And yet the substaunce of those wordes that he [i.e., the Bible] mente ben knowen / where some parte of the wrytynge is vnknowen” (115/25–27). Indeed More is ready to state that a church with Scripture but without the traditional “ryght vnderstandyng” thereof “were as well without” the former (116/30–117/1). More also illustrates the potential dissonance between text and meaning with the perennial—and intensely topical—problem of translation: “it is daungerous to translate the texte of scrypture out of one tonge into another as holy saynt Hyerom testyfyeth / for as moche as in translacyon it is harde alwaye to kepe the same [w]hole” (315/23– 27).17 Does William Tyndale find straightforward what Saint Jerome found “dangerous”? If not, then Tyndale will have to concede that his New Testament may well render the original text while missing or marring its meaning. For More, the mere words of the Bible and the “substaunce” or meaning of those words are embodied by the Bible and wider Roman tradition respectively. Given this scheme, the Bible is, finally, unnecessary—an idea that More boldly brings into view: “the faythe sholde stande

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

37

thoughe the scryptures were all gone” (181/7–8).18 More makes this argument in putatively historical terms as well, pointing out that the Word of God was by definition initially unwritten: “The wordes that god spake to Moyses were they not goddes wordys all / tyll they were wryten? And the wordes of Cryst to his apostles were they not his wordys tyll they were wryten?” (155/4–7). Moses, the apostles, and sundry other “good faythfull folke,” More points out, “byleued well byfore the Scripture was wryten” (254/4–5). If the reasoning is circular—More’s source for prebiblical history is after all biblical19 —the implicit argument is cogent and consistent with his definition of the canon: those without learning in More’s England might very well represent a “good faythfull folke” in the absence of a Bible they could read. Even supposing that a complete and accurate text were available, what might the Bible, that “feste of so moche dyuers vyaunde [foods]” (343/14), mean? Or, better: What might it not mean? Albertus Pighius compares the Bible to a nose made of wax (nasus cereus ): it “allows itself to be drawn first in one direction, then in another, then back again, and shaped with ease into whatever you like.”20 According to Tyndale, on the other hand, it is Roman Catholic interpreters who, when “their Holy Ghost moveth them” to defy the explicit sense of Scripture, make it “a nose of wax, and wrest it this way and that way, till it agree”; the solascripturalist would have it that Christian doctrine inheres, fully and explicitly, in Scripture, that Christian doctrine and Scripture are coextensive.21 In order to drive a wedge between the Bible and doctrine, More shows that there is little or nothing that is fully explicit in the Bible: “Harde it were…to fynde any thynge so playne that it shold nede no glose at all” (168/19–20).22 A particularly pertinent argument against the perspicuity of the Bible comes from another controversy, the age-old dispute between Christian and Jew over the meaning of the Old Testament, in which the two sides “shold not vary for the text / but for the sentence & vnderstandyng” (102/26).23 This dissonance between text and meaning is only the more glaring in disputes among Christians, who agree in accepting the “hole corpus of scrypture / as well the new testament as the olde” (102/32–33). Since both sides accept the whole text of the Bible, Christian disputants can only “stycke” in one thing: the “interpretacion” (102/33–34), echoing Erasmus’s statement, in the De libero arbitrio, against Luther: “the debate here is not about Scripture itself … the quarrel is over its meaning.”24 The biblical text and its interpretation are two distinct matters: the Bible, in other words, does not interpret

38

J. H. FERGUSON

itself. While this does not guarantee the validity of the church’s interpretation, it denies a categorical distinction between the church’s interpretation and Scripture; rather, the distinction would be between the interpretation of the church and other, unorthodox interpretations. Isolated from its rightful place in the broader canon, an incomplete and ambiguous Bible is at best an indifferent authority.25 To illustrate, More invites the Messenger to imagine himself confronted with the Arian challenge to orthodoxy, in Arius’s own time. In a way that seems typical of humanist method, More dismisses the Messenger’s complacent appeal to “truthe” as it has been established in the mean time and confronts him with the situation as it would have seemed prior to the Church’s determination in the matter: yf ye had bene in that tyme (albe it ye be now fast and sure in the truthe) ye myght haue happed whyle the matter was in questyon / and many grete clerkes and well scryptured men / and some semyng ryght holy / set on the wronge syde / ye myght haue happed I say so to haue bene mouyd with the reasons on bothe the sydes / that ye sholde not haue wyste on whyche parte to determyne your byleue. And what wold ye than haue done? (156/26–33)

Characteristically at a loss (“ye put me now to a pynche” [34]),26 the Messenger distances himself from More’s embarrassing question. Rather than answering, he tells a witty anecdote: Henry VII once asked his almoner what he would have done in Joseph’s place, tempted by Potiphar’s wife; the almoner replied: “I can not tell you what I wold haue done / but I can tell you well what I sholde haue done” (157/9– 11). This bit of coyness does not get the Messenger off More’s hook: More asks him how precisely he, the Messenger, would have proceeded at the time. The Messenger can do no more than beg the question: Mary I wolde haue byleuyd the best quod he. The best quod I? That were beste in dede / yf ye wyst whiche it were. But the case is put / that the reasons grounded vpon scrypture semyd vnto you in such wyse / eche to impugne and answere other / that ye stode in suche a doute / that ye coulde in no wyse dyscerne whyther syde sayd best. By god quod he I had forgotten that. (157/18–25)

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

39

Highlighting the irrefutable “reasons grounded vpon scrypture” brought forward by the Arians in support of their position, More highlights the insufficiency of the Bible taken alone.27 At this point, the Messenger can think of nothing more he might have done than to pray to God for guidance in choosing the right side, and “then wolde I boldely byleue the one whiche god sholde haue put in my mynde (30–31).”28 More undercuts this feeble piety, mocking the Messenger with the proposition that “after [his] specyall prayours” he might set out the two positions on two pieces of paper and look for God’s answer in the direction his staff falls between them (158/7–11). The gullible Messenger accepts the premise: “Or ellys put it vppon two lottes / and than at aduenture drawe the one and take it” (158/12–13). The choice between two interpretations has come down to pure chance: scriptura sola puts the determination of Christian doctrine “at aduenture.”29 The solascripturalist restricts doctrinal authority to a text that, by itself, may or may not guide the reader to right doctrine. All More’s arguments with regard to the inadequacy of the Bible alone—the corruption of the text, the priority of oral teaching to written text, the distinction between text and interpretation, the special ambiguity of biblical revelation, and the unreliability of biblical evidence—are meant to drive home the need for an external authority: “they shall haue euyll prefe [i.e., they shall prove unsuccessful] therin / that wyll reken them selfe to vnderstande it [the Bible] without a reder [teacher]” (334/1315). Such authority resides in a canon that is partly “written in the bookes,” partly “without wrytynge reueled,” and partly delivered “by the secrete inspyracyon of god / without eyther wrytynge or any outwarde worde” (143/5, 12–13, 16–17)—the lot given unity by the consensus of the Roman Church.30 More defines the Church as “the hole congregacyon of true crysten people in this worlde,” whose tradition runs unbroken “euer synce his appostles dayes” (244/7, 31–32). The bond maintaining this historical integrity, as More remarks again and again in the Dialogue, is the “common consent” of the Church (62/18). Lest it be contended however that the Church’s consensus is mere historical circumstance, the Dialogue cites New Testament proof texts for the divine warrant underwriting the Church’s historical continuity: namely, Jesus’s words at Matt. 28:20 (“Ego vobiscum sum omnibus diebus vsque ad finem seculi. I am with you all the dayes tyll the ende of the worlde” [114/4–6]31 ) and John 16:13 (“he shall come that is the spyryte of trouthe / he shall lede you in to all trouthe” [178/22–23]).32 The Church’s traditional consensus and its divine justification are two aspects of a single phenomenon:

40

J. H. FERGUSON

“the hole general counsayle of crystendom / approued by the fayth & custome of all the people / besyde growyng in to such consent by goddes holy spyryte that gouerneth his chyrch” (210/12–15). In secular terms, the Church’s consensus represents a successive and pervasive agreement among men, and thus a visible guide to right doctrine; in sacred terms, the same consensus represents the Spirit’s continuous intervention in history as promised in the Gospels. The canon of authorities sheltered by the Church is broad and ever-expanding: it includes the Bible, oral traditions (Apostolic and otherwise), the words and deeds of the saints, the findings of the Fathers, councils, popes, doctors, as well as the “lawe wryten in mennys hartys” (142/19–20, citing Jer. 31:33)33 —the whole maintained by the continual guidance of the Spirit. More goes on to apply these familiar theological arguments to linguistic theory.34 Language, according to the Dialogue, functions in much the same way as the historical and commonly recognized fact of the Church’s continuity: both derive meaning through the “consent and agrement of men” (46/28). In support of this principle, More draws a particularly effective comparison between words, on the one hand, and the religious images so despised by the reformers, on the other: “yf they gyue honour to the name of our lorde / whiche name is but an ymage representynge his person to mannes mynde and ymagynacyon / why and with what reason can they dyspyse a fygure of hym carued or paynted / whiche representeth hym and his actes / farre more playne and more expressely” (39/35–40/5).35 Language, no less an “image” than the plastic arts, is in fact more problematic than painting or sculpture: the latter rather than the Word might be said to “declare themselfe” (34/12), to signify transparently: “ymages paynted / grauen / or carued / may be so well wrought and so nere to the quycke and to the trouth / that they shall naturally / and moche more effectually represent the thynge then shall the name eyther spoken or wrytten” (46/29–32).36 Language’s lack of a “naturall” connection to the “thynges” it represents is key to More’s argument against Tyndale’s translation of Scripture and parallels More’s notion of canon. More proposes to the Messenger a scenario in which a child is left alone with the Bible and poses the rhetorical question: “how olde…he shold be / or [ere] he lernyd the artycles of his byleue in the byble?” (133/22–23). More’s point, of course, is that the child will not arrive at the necessary articles of belief without aid from the visible consensus of the Church.

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

41

Language, argues More, consists of “sygnes,” “thynges,” and a tertium quid – the “ymagynacyon” of the thing “conceyued in the mynde”: all the wordes that be eyther wrytten or spoken / be but ymages representyng the thynges that the wryter or speker conceyueth in his mynde: lykewyse as the fygure of the thynge framed with ymagynacyon and so conceyued in the mynde / is but an ymage representyng the very thyng it selfe that a man thynketh on. (46/14–18)

Words are not images of things but images of images conceived in the mind of the speaker, which latter images in turn represent things.37 Human imagination necessarily stands in an intermediary position between words and things; no word is joined with meaning independently of such mediation: “As for ensample yf I tell you a tale of my good frende your mayster / the ymagynacyon that I haue of hym in my mynde / is not your mayster hym selfe but an ymage that representeth hym. And when I name you hym / his name is neyther hym selfe / nor yet the fygure of hym / whiche fygure is in myn ymagynacyon but onely an ymage representynge to you the ymagynacyon of my mynde” (46/19–24). Human mediation between word and meaning implies that signs function according to the shifting conventions of customary usage: “all these names spoken / and all these wordes wrytten / be no naturall sygnes or ymages but onely made by consent and agrement of men / to betoken and sygnyfye suche thynge” (46/26–29).38 Words, then, refer to things through linguistic consensus, as the Bible refers to doctrine within the framework of the broader canon defined by the Church’s consensus. More turns this notion of consensus to a philological critique of Tyndale’s translation—or, rather, to a philological critique of a handful of words in Tyndale’s rendering of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. More is an evidently captious reader of Tyndale’s New Testament. When the Messenger asks “what fautys were there in it,” More responds with a statement that is equal parts vague and ominous: “there were founden and noted wronge & falsly translated aboue a thousande textys by tale” (285/18, 20–21)—“founden” by whom? What are the thousand or more mistranslations? There follows a piece of genial sophistry: “I wyll shewe you for ensample two or thre [words] suche as euery one of the thre is more than thryes thre in one” (285/24– 25). Of over a thousand errors, then, More will show three—though three that together possess the force of more than twenty-seven. One

42

J. H. FERGUSON

might forget that a translation of the entire New Testament is being reduced, for the purpose of criticism, to three words. And indeed the Messenger—overlooking his earlier assertion that “men say” the translation was done “ryght well” (284/30)—takes the bait: “what wordes be they?” (285/35). This critique is focused on three Greek words: presbiteros , ecclesia, and agape, traditionally rendered as priest, church, and charity, but englished by Tyndale as senior (later elder 39 ), congregation, and love.40 Tyndale’s evident intention is to strip away the doctrinal resonance attached to the Greek words of the New Testament in their traditional Latin and English translations.41 In response, More denies that Tyndale’s new “names in our englysshe tonge…expresse the thynges that be ment by them [i.e., the things meant by the Greek words]” (286/4–6). More demonstrates these failings by distinguishing between denotations and connotations,42 inherent meanings and those assigned by consensual usage, only the latter of which represents actual meaning. The “thynge ment by” the Greek word “presbiteri,” for example, is the “offyce” of such men (286/21). Even if the literal sense of presbiteros is “elder men,” its connotation, its meaning in New Testament usage, has only incidentally to do with age: “neyther were all prestys chosen olde…nor euery elder man is not a prest” (286/11, 14). It is notable that More cites a New Testament proof text here (“nemo iuuentutem tuam contempnat. Let no man contempne thy youth” [286/12–14; 1 Tim. 4:12]) not to teach Christians what to believe but to illustrate how its authors used the Greek language.43 Both the Latin senior and the English elder, on the other hand, “rather sygnyfy theyr age than theyr offyce” (286/20–21). Elder has taken on an additional connotation, notes More, but it is not one that fits the Greek: “the name doth in englysshe playnly sygnyfy the aldermen of the cytees / and nothyng the prestys of the chyrche” (286/21–22). Commenting on Tyndale’s English word, senior, More again distinguishes between the word’s denotation or inherent sense and the very different connotation it has taken on in current English usage: “this worde senyor sygnyfyeth no thynge at all / but is a frenche worde vsed in englysshe more than halfe in mockage / whan one wyll call another my lorde in scorne” (286/15– 17).44 The word priest on the other hand “hath alwaye sygnyfyed an enoynted person and with holy orders consecrated vnto god” (290/3– 5). More’s complaints about congregation and love are identical: in both cases, the established terms—church and charity, respectively—signify “in englysh mennys erys” (288/4–5), according to current English usage,

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

43

the specifically Christian applications of Tyndale’s more general terms (286/26–288/8).45 More’s conventional model of signification implies that customary usage will be the ultimate arbiter of meaning in language; this notion of semantics corresponds to More’s definition of the religious canon as consensually determined.46 In fine, More’s canon is bigger than Tyndale’s canon. To what he perceived as the extravagant Lutheran claims for sola scriptura, More comes close to asserting sola ecclesia. An incomplete, ambiguous, and ultimately mysterious Bible only takes on doctrinal authority within the Spirit-anchored common consent of the Church; divorced from the Church’s broader traditional canon, the bare text of the Bible is an inadequate guide to doctrine, inviting misunderstanding and abuse.47 In More’s critique of Tyndale’s New Testament, authoritative consensus assumes a linguistic dimension: since the connection between word and meaning is not “natural” but mediated by human convention, meaning is not fixed in words inherently but is determined by consensus among the speakers of that language. The “consent and agrement of men” that is the doctrinal instrument of the Spirit is thus also the instrument of verbal meaning. More, it has to be said, has customary usage on his side in this controversy: he can well afford to uphold the meanings that usage has given the disputed words since that usage is controlled by the Church he has set himself to defend. Language and revelation alike are mixed into historical circumstance inextricably; neither meaning nor doctrine is available except as a product of this mediation. ∗ ∗ ∗ Having satisfied the Messenger in all points—the prologue tells us—More decides to transcribe the entire conversation rather than trust the Messenger’s memory to retain “so dyuerse & so long / and somtyme suche wyse intrycate” a treatise (21/24–25). In light of More’s pointed skepticism regarding written tradition, one imagines that Tyndale might have savored the irony—had he been particularly attentive to the Dialogue’s form. The Dialogue’s presentation of its own composition represents a sophisticated interplay of oral and written speech. The Messenger recites a memorized “letter of credence,” authenticating the written letter More’s friend has sent, which the Messenger reads aloud; the written letter provides that the Messenger shall give an extempore account of what English people are saying about the Church, and that More shall answer

44

J. H. FERGUSON

the Messenger’s report. The Messenger is then to repeat the entire discussion back to the friend from memory. More defies the plan in two ways: he defers discussion with the Messenger until the following day in order to gather his thoughts; following the conversation, he transcribes all that has been said in case the Messenger should forget anything. The first-person direct discourse of Tyndale’s Answere comes as a shock after the elaborate plotting of More’s Dialogue; anticipating later developments in English Puritanism, the Answere dismisses such artifice as “poetrie” (with a passing dig at More’s celebration of custom): “M. More hath so longe vsed hys figures of poetrie / that (I suppose) when he erreth most / he now by the reason of a longe custome / beleueth him selfe / that he saith most true” (14/6–8).48 The charge is specious: More is clear enough about his positions within the dialogue form, as witness the mere fact of Tyndale’s response. Tyndale, Morouer,49 has his own formal resources: the Answere begins with a salutation in the style of the New Testament epistles (5/1–6), countering More’s appeal to oral proverbial lore (one busynes begettyth and bryngeth forth a nother) with a direct translation of New Testament stylistic features into English.50 Tyndale’s Answere consists of several preliminary essays followed by four books purporting to respond “particularlye vn to everye chaptre” (3/7–8) of the Dialogue.51 For More, the Bible, with all its textual failings and interpretive puzzles, is a sufficient guide to doctrine only within the collective framework of the Church; outside of that framework, the Bible is susceptible of all manner of misinterpretation. More is fond of opposing individual heretics (Luther and Tyndale) to fifteen hundred years of ecclesiastic consensus. Tyndale reasserts the validity of scriptura sola by shifting the ground under these terms. More’s opposition between (willful, subjective) individuals and (consensual, reliable) collectivities becomes, in the Answere, an opposition between “feeling” and “historical” faith, what one knows for oneself versus what one has been told (a distinction later made as between “explicit” and “implicit” faith).52 In this new configuration, individual knowledge stands on the side of “sure felynge,” collective knowledge on the side of mere “opinion” (49/22). One hears More’s insistent question in the background: “To whom dothe that appere…so playnly / whan it appereth one to you / and to the hole chyrche another?” (Dialogue 169/10–11). Tyndale defends the “sure felynge” of the righteous with a flight of biblical lyricism: “who taught the egles to spie out their praye?” (47/11–12). In terms slightly

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

45

more concrete, Tyndale does in passing associate “feeling faith” with the “reason of scripture” (70/2), but he does not define in detail this exegesis of “sure felynge”—as if to suggest that to explicate the interpretive process would be to complicate it misleadingly.53 Tyndale at once reduces and refocuses the scope of the authoritative canon, though the emphasis is on the reduction: the Answere includes considerably more criticism than positive statement.54 Tyndale charges that “historical faith,” belief in the extra-biblical materials canonized by “the comen fame and consent of many” (48/29; cf. 69/30–70/4, 197/23–29), does not perfect scriptural revelation but corrodes it; this redefinition of the relation between Scripture and historical consensus also provides a theological frame for Tyndale’s defense of his unusual usages in New Testament vocabulary— and, by implication, a notion of semantics at odds with that of More. The Roman Church, insists More, constitutes ipso facto a recognizable guide to doctrine. God would not be just were He not to insure that such a visible sign pointed to the truth. Tyndale posits a more tenuous—not to say antagonistic—relation between history and providence: “we…beleue only by the auctoryte of our elders and…thynke that we can not erre / beynge soch a multitude. And yet we se how God in the olde testament did lett the greate multitude erre / reseruynge al waye a litle flocke to call the other backe agayne and to testifie vnto them the right waye” (52/12–17; cf. 121/14–122/10).55 This “litle flocke” is the anonymous company of predestined elect, whom More continually skewers as “a secrete vnknowen sorte of folke” (Dialogue 204/27) in contrast to “the comen knowen multitude” of the Roman Church (205/5). For Tyndale, however, the Roman Church is just that, “a greate multitude to gether” (122/18–19), one such “greate multitude” among others. Where More contrasts the relativism of biblical interpretation with the authority of an ecclesiastical tradition underwritten by God, Tyndale contrasts the reliability of Scripture as touchstone with an assortment of elders—“his elders,” “my elders,” “our elders,” “theyr elders,” the elders of the “turkes” and of the “Iewes” (52/3–11)—all of whom are credited with divine warrant. The only standard upon which any of these traditions might be brought to agree is the “autenticke scripture” (128/12–13). In the canonical dispute that frames the polemic, Tyndale denies that any traditional “consent and agrement of men” can assume to itself divine warrant; “autenticke scripture” not human consensus possesses the only authority that matters.56

46

J. H. FERGUSON

More, in the Dialogue, cites Christ’s promises at Matt. 28:20 and John 16:13 as proof that the Holy Spirit has provided the Church with instruction throughout history. Immediately following the Answere’s opening “salutation,” Tyndale’s cites another, more ominous pledge made by Christ: the holye gost shall come and rebuke the worlde of iudgement. That is / he shall rebuke the worlde for lacke of true iudgement and discrecyon to iudge / and shall proue…that they iudge to be the lawe of god which is but a false imaginacion of a corrupte iudgement. (5/9–11, 15–17, citing John 16:8; cf. 8/20–21)

This absolute separation between the spiritual and the temporal is central to Tyndale’s theology. The visible Church cannot be guaranteed guidance from the Spirit; rather, it invites rebuke for substituting its “false imaginacion” for the “lawe of god.” At this level of generalization, the ecclesiological disagreement between More and Tyndale solicits little more than dueling proof texts, an exegetical impasse: every heretic has his text—and so does every believer.57 Definition of the canon, the relation between Scripture and non-Scripture, constitutes a more ramified element of the debate. More sees revelation as an ongoing process and the canon as cumulative; he scoffs at the notion that Christ and the Holy Spirit would “leue the bokes behynde them and go theyr waye” (Dialogue 115/29–30). Tyndale, on the other hand, largely reduces the activity of Christ and the Spirit to Scripture and then pits Scripture against every other claimant to religious authority. The same “material” opposition between the Spirit’s true and the world’s false teachings thus operates in the “formal” opposition between scriptural and non-scriptural texts.58 One of Tyndale’s favorite metaphors in this regard is derived from a Johannine expression of dualism (“the light shineth in the darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not” [John 1:5]), which he applies to the relation between revelation and worldly tradition, “gods worde” and “wordes of mans wisdome” (44/15): as the darke ayre geveth the sonne no lighte / but contrary wise the light of the sonne in respecte of the ayre is of it selfe and lighteneth the ayre and purgeth it from darkenesse: even so the lienge herte of man can geue the word of god no trueth / but contrary wise the trueth of gods worde is of hir selfe and lyghteneth the hertes of the beleuers and maketh them true / and clenseth them from lies. (23/30–24/5, citing John 15:3)

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

47

For More, revelation consists of the continuous acting of the Spirit through its chosen vehicle, the Roman Church; this consensus expresses itself via a broad canon of texts—the Bible included—none of which is complete in itself and all of which are only fully meaningful in relation to the others. For Tyndale, on the other hand, Scripture is absolute, “of hir selfe,” intrinsically meaningful: it constitutes the entire canon. A self-evident Bible is its own meaning and does not—by definition, cannot—derive meaning from anything outside itself: it stands apart from history, rejecting any meaning attached to it by human custom.59 Following More’s lead, Tyndale assimilates the doctrinal matter to a theory of language. Tyndale contends that just as the biblical text must be liberated from the consensual tradition of the Church that has betrayed it, so English words must be disencumbered of certain meanings attached to them by usage. More states that, in English usage, congregation is a general term applying to any gathering, while church pertains specifically to Christians. Tyndale counters that even if More’s assertion were correct, “yt hurteth not,” since “the circumstance doeth ever tell what congregacyon ys ment” (13/23). Moreover, Tyndale does not concede the broader point about the prescriptive force of usage: “whersoeuer I maye saye a congregacyon / there maye I saye a church also as the church of the deuell / the church of sathan / the church of wretches / the church of wekedmen / the church of lyers and a church of turkes therto” (13/24– 28). There is more than gratuitous abuse in this sentence: Tyndale’s deliberately unusual collocations are meant to suggest that as a translator he may give his words significations “litle knowen amonge the comen people” (11/23–24) and still be understood.60 In the Prologue to his 1526 New Testament, for example, Tyndale promises that a future edition will provide “a table to expound the words which are not commonly used, and shew how the scripture useth many words which are otherwise understood of the common people, and to help with a declaration where one tongue taketh not another.”61 The word church “hath dyuerse significacions” (10/2), some of which are in common use and some not; one of the senses church “hath yet or shuld haue” is “congregacion” (11/25). These qualifications (“hath yet or shuld haue”) acknowledge Tyndale’s defiance of customary usage, but then, there’s a war on: the clergy—like magnets (“adamandstones”)— have “appropriat vn to them selues” the word church (13/6–7, 11–13), and Tyndale is determined to win the word back, even if it means giving words the meanings they have had or should have rather than those they

48

J. H. FERGUSON

actually do have.62 Tyndale’s theological project is to reform the Church into what it has been or should be, and his use of English follows suit.63 Tyndale’s refusal to accept human custom as a guide to biblical language brings him to simplify the matter of translation and to disregard the particularities of each language’s usage, which tend to complicate the transfer of meaning from one language into another. Erasmus, Tyndale points out, often renders ecclesia by congregatio in his new Latin translation of the New Testament.64 Tyndale sees no difference between Erasmus’s Latin word and his own English: “how happeth it that M. More hathe not contended in lyke wise agaynst hys derelynge Erasmus all this longe while? Doeth not he chaunge this worde ecclesia in to congregacyon and that not selden in the new testament?” (14/24–27). Defending his avoidance of priest, Tyndale translates, in the space of a few lines, from Greek into Latin, from Greek into English, and from Latin into English, while suggesting that none of these translations makes any difference whatsoever to meaning: In the. v. chaptre of the first of peter / thus standeth it in the laten texte. Seniores qui in vobis sunt / obsecro ego consenior / pascite qui in vobis est gregem christi. The elders that are amonge you I besech whych am an elder also that ye fede the flocke of christe / whych is among you. There ys presbyteros called an elder. (15/17–22)

This is a dizzying passage. Is the last sentence here a translation from Greek into English (i.e., presbyteros = elder) or is it an English translation of the Vulgate’s Latin in order to show how the Vulgate translates the Greek (presbyteros = senior, senior = elder, ergo presbyteros = elder)? The Vulgate calls presbyteri “seniores,” not “elders,” but for Tyndale it is all one: the Latin and English words point to exactly the same thing and are thus interchangeable. “There ys presbyteros called an elder”: “elder” in this sentence is not the English word elder but the word’s referent— or, rather, the sign points without complication to the thing it signifies. Nor is this merely hurried shorthand: Tyndale cites two further passages from the Vulgate that include “senior,” commenting that “presbiteros ys called an elder” in both (16/25–29). Finally, Tyndale provides a bilingual citation from Acts 20, further conflating Latin words, English words, and the things to which they point:

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

49

paule sent for maiores natu ecclesie / the elder in birth of the congregacion or church / and said vnto them / take hede vnto youre selves and vnto the hole flocke / ouer which the holy gost hath made you episcopos ad regendum ecclesiam dei / bisshops or ouersears to gouerne the church of god. There is presbiteros called an elder in birth which same is immediately called a bisshope or ouersear / to declare what persons are ment. (16/1– 7)65

Here maior natu is also identified with that word or thing elder. Latin senior, Latin maior natu, English elder: all are perfectly identical; nothing separates any of them from the referent all three denote. That referent is, of course, “nothinge saue an elder,” the persons so-called “because of their age / grauite and sadnesse” (16/10, 11)—a putatively nonhistorical, indeed archetypal, referent to which the words in all three languages point.66 In the preface to his 1534 New Testament, “W. T. to the Reader,” for example, Tyndale writes of the word “Elders”: “whether ye call them elders or prestes, it is to me all one: so that ye vnderstonde that they be offycers and seruauntes of the worde of God.”67 The specific usages belonging to different languages and different periods are, for Tyndale, immaterial; what these words mean derives not from their use in the language to which they belong but from their inherent denotation, in line with Tyndale’s notion of the canon: “the trueth of gods worde dependeth not of the trueth of the congregacion” (53/17–18). More attributes to the Church the warrants of historical consensus and divine guarantee, while Tyndale’s dualist theology not only denies any collaboration between Spirit and church but sees the relation between the two as antagonistic. Tyndale redeems the principle of sola scriptura by extending this antagonism to the relation between Scripture and human commentary. For Tyndale, the Roman Church’s suppression of Scripture, through its exegetical and sacramental practices, exemplifies the impossibility of mixing Scripture with human custom. Tyndale rejects the successive establishment of such usages, in favor of continuous return to an absolute, the text of Scripture; he aligns this program with the humanist return to ancient models, but with a difference: restricting canonical status to Scripture, Tyndale cuts Scripture off from every other kind of language, including especially texts that purport to interpret Scripture. Tyndale’s self-evident Bible functions independently of history and thus of the complication that history introduces between Scripture and doctrine and between words and meaning, i.e., shifting linguistic usage.

50

J. H. FERGUSON

Whereas every other use of language is subject to history, Scripture is transcendent. This is the doctrinal basis of Tyndale’s defense of his innovations in New Testament vocabulary: as ecclesiastic usage has degraded Scripture by immersing it in historical usage, so current English usage has assigned several keywords in the New Testament pernicious connotations. Tyndale’s rejection of Rome brings him to deny the claims of customary usage, the same claims that More puts to such good use in his defense of the status quo. ∗ ∗ ∗ In response to Tyndale’s taunts, More discards the “poetic” apparatus of the Dialogue and writes the Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer in his own voice, in the truculent style of previous exchanges in Latin between Luther and the English establishment.68 Perhaps More was taken aback by Tyndale’s directness in the vulgar tongue69 : the author of the Dialogue may have felt that this was not how one addressed oneself unto the babes. Thus More concludes a reprise of his Arian example with a new emphasis on the susceptibility of vulgar judgment: “now good readers…thynke ye by your trouth that the people vnlearned…shalbe mete to dyscerne and iudge whyther parte is bytwene them better proued by scrypture?” (269/9–13); More implies that Tyndale has taken advantage of a lack of learning among the vulgar to promote his heresies. More even acknowledges the dangers posed to a vernacular audience by his own and Erasmus’s earlier Latin works: “yf any man wolde now translate Moria [i.e., the Moriae Encomium] in to Englyshe, or some workes eyther that I haue my selfe wryten ere this, all be yt there be none harme therin / folke yet beynge (as they be) geuen to take harme of that that is good / I wolde not onely my derlynges [Erasmus’s] bokes but myne owne also, helpe to burne them both wyth myne owne handes, rather then folke sholde (though thorow theyr own faute) take any harme of them, seynge that I se them likely in these dayes so to do” (179/10–17).70 Whatever the cause, the Confutation is brimming over with exasperation. There can be few books as exhausting as the Confutation, few books so conspicuously impatient of formal economy. The Confutation is endless, and there is much repetition—in the first volume alone (books 1–3, published in 1532),71 there is much repetition. If these heretics would “wery all wryters at last wyth endlesse and importune babelynge, &…ouerwhelme the hole worlde wyth wordes” (27/12–14), More will

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

51

go them one better. Almost any point of doctrine from the Confutation can be cited passim—mainly as a result of the book’s peculiar formal conceit, as More describes it in his later Apology (1533): “the reder sholde in euery place where he fortuneth to fall in redynge, haue at hys hand wythout remyttynge ouer ellys where, or labour of ferther sekyng for it, as mych as shall seme requysyte for that mater that he there hath in hande” (8/29–33).72 So, for instance, More spends more than four hundred lines (61/12–72/20) refuting a pair of sentences from the Answere (6/15– 32 = Confutation 60/32–61/10) in which Tyndale asserts that the true cause behind the practice of fasting is “to tame the fleshe.” In illustration after illustration, with reference to proof text after proof text, More repeats no less than two dozen times, almost verbatim, that the cause of fasting is not to tame the flesh.73 Not only does More repeat the same points again and again, but at times he will cite a passage from the Answere, confute the passage at length—and then cite the passage again for further mauling. It is a characteristic gesture: More spends hundreds upon hundreds of pages in the Confutation pushing on the open door of his own presuppositions. Nevertheless, Book Two of the Confutation, against the “defence of Tyndale for his translacyon of the new testament” (143/2–4), stands out as a remarkably cogent discussion of the historicity of meaning; this book extends and deepens the critique of Tyndale’s unusual usages sketched in the Dialogue. Having rehearsed briefly the Dialogue’s main points, More turns to Tyndale’s responses. “But fyrst,” a rhetorical question: “to what purpose serueth all hys defence?” (144/32–33). More forestalls discussion of semantics with the broader charge of heretical intent: though a nother man translatynge the testament and beynge good & faythfull, myghte haue vsed happely [i.e., by chance] those chaunges [elder for priest, etc.] amonge, wythout euyll meanyng or any suspicyon therof: yet he [Tyndale] syth those chaunges so serued for hys heresyes, must nedys be, not suspected, but manyfestley detected and perceyued to haue vsed them beynge suche so many and so often, not of any chaunce or good intent, but of very playne purpose to gyue hys heresyes in the earys of vnlerned men, some coloure of profe in the texte of the new testament. (144/36–145/4; cf. 172/28–34, 183/33–184/4, 358/6–11)

This is not quite the ad hominem argument it might seem. Tyndale is an open heretic and it is only natural that his translation should

52

J. H. FERGUSON

be suspected on this basis alone, yet More concedes that Tyndale’s “chaunges” might be “vsed” with or without “euyll meanynge”: the verbal equivalences themselves are innocuous. It is the use (“suche so many and so often”) to which Tyndale puts these changes that is telltale.74 Even as he dismisses the translation out of hand, however, More cannot forbear (here or anywhere else in the Confutation) from rebutting Tyndale on every possible point: “I were lothe to leue vntouched any thyng that Tyndale any where sayeth agaynst my purpose” (331/27– 28). This touching attentiveness to Tyndale’s every word leads More to set aside both extrinsic and internal evidence of heresy,75 in order to consider the legitimacy of Tyndale’s innovations in the abstract, on the basis of “suche lytle knowledge as I haue of greke, latyn, and of our owne englysshe tonge” (219/19–20). Where the Dialogue asserts a theory of linguistic signification according to which connotation or usual meaning is the only legitimate semantic standard, Book Two of the Confutation provides a detailed, historical exposition of the principle of customary usage. Ever the lay humanist, More has the most interesting things to say about words themselves.76 For Tyndale, meaning cleaves to biblical words themselves: he refuses meanings attached to the controversial words by corrupt usage and reactivates the unusual sense that these words “should have or have had.” In response, More elaborates on the role of “connotacyon” or “vsuall sygnifycacyon” according to the “comen custume” of the language’s speakers (167/33, 20–21).77 More’s insistence on the social–historical basis of verbal meaning reduces Tyndale’s innovations to private language— unless, that is, Tyndale should personally provide England instruction in this new language: “yt is lawfull inough…to call any thynge in englyshe by what worde so euer englysh men by comen custume agre vppon. And therfore to make a chaung of the englyshe worde, as though that all Englande shold go to scole wyth Tyndale to lerne englyshe / is a very frantyque foly” (212/9–13).78 Tyndale’s meanings are no meanings at all; the senses these words “should” have, nothing but Tyndale’s preferences—which is to say, these new senses are nonsense, since no Englishman will understand them. To Tyndale’s assertion that he “maye saye” church to mean any of several things (13/23), More retorts: “Tyndale may thus saye for hys pleasure…yet can he not saye that thys is the proper sygnyfycacyon of the worde, whyche is the thynge that a translatour must regarde” (168/24–26; cf. 175/23–25). And in response to

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

53

Tyndale’s pert observation that sense is always clear in context, More carries the principle ad absurdum: If the settyng of the cyrcumstaunce make all well inough: he nedeth not mych care what worde he chaungeth nor how. For he maye set suche cyrcumstaunces of his owne deuyce / that he maye make men percyue what he meaneth. For so he maye translate the worlde in to a foteball yf he ioyne therwyth certeyne cyrcumstaunces, and saye this rownde rollynge foteball that menne walke vppon & shyppys sayle vppon, in the people whereof there is no reste nor stabylyte, and so forth a greate longe tale / wyth such cyrcunstaunces he myght as I say make any worde vnderstanden as yt lyke hym selfe, what so euer the worde byfore sygnyfyed of yt selfe. (165/35–166/7)

This is very able rhetoric. Tyndale distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic, inherent and usual, meanings; More reorients this opposition, equating the intrinsic sense, “what the worde byfore sygnyfyed of yt selfe,” with the usual signification, and the extrinsic sense with the bizarrely unusual. More thus at once emphasizes the ordinariness of customary usage and relegates Tyndale’s idiosyncratic senses to a realm of lands clad in stitched leather. Language takes on meaning among the users of that language; such meanings are unchallengeable within the linguistically and historically specific contexts to which they belong. Tyndale’s rejection of the usage obtaining among English speakers represents a private idiom posing as meaningful language. Needless to say, this opposition between private idiom and general consensus comes readily to the hand of More in his capacity as defender of the established Church. In his Dialogue More assigns consensus a mediating role both between the Bible and doctrine and between words and meanings. Tyndale rejects both kinds of mediation: Scripture interprets itself; words in different languages for the same things are interchangeable. Tyndale passes carelessly among Greek, Latin, and English words: “presbyteros,” we may recall, is for Tyndale “called an elder” in the Vulgate. Commenting on this reasoning, More writes: Is presbyteros here called an elder in the olde latine translacyon? I fynde there this word seniores, where the greke chyrch vsed in theyr langage presbyteros. But as for this word elder which Tindale sayth is the old latyne transclacyon: he were lyke to pore out his eyen vppon the latyne boke ere he fynde that englyshe word elder there, but yf he cause yt to be wryten

54

J. H. FERGUSON

in hym selfe.…he fyndeth in stede of presbyteros this word seniores or natu maiores / and alwaye he setteth thereto, lo here is presbyteros called an elder and an elder in byrth, as though this latine word seniores or natu maiores were this englysh word elder / where he sayth that presbyteros is called elder in the olde translacyon / whych as ye se muste nedes be false: but yf this englyshe worde be in that latine boke, and that he make englyshe latine and latine englyshe. (184/16–22, 24–31)

In this brilliant bit of badgering, More interrupts Tyndale’s slide from one language to another and brings Tyndale up at his words. To Tyndale’s charge in the Answere that “Paul neuer knew of this word Masse” (95/15–16), More responds: “I byleue that well inough / for I neuer herd that he spake any word of englyshe” (Confutation 316/34–35). Latin words are not English words: words in the two languages do not quite, for More, mean the same things—or, if they do mean the same things, they do not do so in quite the same ways. In either case, More’s position obviously makes translation problematic, and More imagines Tyndale coming to his own defense according to the common assumptions justifying translation in general: syth that latine worde is there that sygnyfyeth in laten the same thynge that this worde elder sygnyfyeth in englyshe: we can not blame hym for translatynge presbyteros in to thys worde elder / but yf we blame in lyke wyse the translatour, for translatynge presbyteros in to this worde seniores. (185/1–5)

The very possibility of translation would seem to require that “the same thynge” is called by different names in different languages. What else is translata or “carried across” from one language to another if not such “things”? More contends that the negotiation is more complex. More does not argue that language constitutes the content to which it refers: words, for More, point to things and do not create them.79 More does argue, however, that each language signifies such things in its own particular ways, according to the “maners and formes of spekyng in dyvers langages” (236/6–7). This renders one-to-one equivalence between words in different languages impossible. Languages are not comparable according to abstract equivalence: each language’s words have taken on particular (and changing) meanings from, on the one hand, the historical circumstances in which they are used, and, on the other, the other words in that language. Latin senior is different from English

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

55

elder not for an inherent difference of denotation between the words themselves but because the Latin word was and is used in historical and linguistic contexts different from those pertaining to the English word. Roughly synonymous words in different languages are just that; such equivalents never have quite the same meaning. More provides abundant evidence for such differentia, drawing careful, historical distinctions between Greek, Latin, and English usages.80 Continuing his discussion of presbyteros / senior / elder, More cites both Jerome and Erasmus, who recognized that presbyteros “sygnyfyeth authoryte wyth grekes / where seniores in latine sygnyfyeth but theyr age” (185/16–17 ). As a result, Erasmus at times elected to “kepe styll the greke worde presbyteros ” in his Latin version (185/11), while Jerome “was rather contente to ioyne the latine coniunccyon with the greke word, and call yt compresbyter” (22–23).81 The use of senior in the “olde translacyon” (the so-called Vetus latina version Jerome was assigned to correct) is for More an example of semantic approximation: “how sone after Crystes deth he translated it who can tell? And then when the latine chyrche had no laten worde for the crysten prestes all redy receyued & vsed / what blame was he worthy that toke that worde…whyche of all latine wordes semed to hym to go nexte the sygnifycacyon of presbyteros at that tyme” (185/29–34). With the advent of Christianity, a new thing had appeared, an elder with authority, and the poor translator could find nowhere else to put this new wine but into an old bottle. This approximation (i.e., senior) gave rise to the presumption that presbyteros signified nothing more than an elder. It remained for Jerome and then Erasmus to coin closer Latin equivalents, compresbyter and presbyteros respectively, taken more or less directly from the Greek. These partial translations—transliterations really—signal a skepticism concerning the mutual translatability of languages generally; they suggest that usage creates an irreducible element in words themselves: only this Greek word, and not its closest equivalent in another language, can express the thing meant. Similarly, in the case of ecclesia / congregatio / church, a new thing was given an old name: “Tyndale sayth therin trewth, that the worde ecclesia was vsed a thousande yere before crystendome beganne” (170/29–30).82 Again the situation called for approximation: the authors of the New Testament used ecclesia “after thexample of the tother [i.e., the nonChristian kind of] assembly” for want of a closer fit (172/4–5); but, asks More with a fine rhetorical thrust, “how wolde Tyndale haue had saynte

56

J. H. FERGUSON

Luke tell the tale but by suche wordes as then represented the mater?” (6–8). The Latin church, in this case, immediately opted to Latinize the Greek word ecclesia, which usage had since given a properly Christian meaning (171/16–22). More faults Tyndale for failing to distinguish the original meaning of ecclesia from its later, Christian sense: “Tyndale wyth all his greke tolde you but a lame tale. For he telleth you not what manner of congregacyon ecclesia dyd sygnyfye in the greke / but mysse taketh yt to sygnyfye euery manner of congregacyon at auenture” (171/30–33). More suggests that the obvious, properly Latin alternative would have been concio, which, like ecclesia, initially had a general, pagan meaning of “congregacyon or assembly” (171/28). According to More, the Latins preferred to adopt a Greek word with an established Christian usage rather than assign a Christian sense to one of their own words previously used with a pagan meaning. It is actually the upstart English tongue in this case that has the advantage, precisely because of its belatedness: the word church (unlike Greek ecclesia or the rejected Latin concio) came into use after the appearance of the thing it would properly signify and is thus completely unambiguous: “yt wyll be hard to proue & warraunt that this word chyrch was vsed for any congregacyon byfore cristendome began, or that euer it sygnifyed any congregacion other then crysten” (170/31– 33; cf. 172/15–17 and 201/20–23 on charity).83 Church, with no pagan history to forget, is firmly rooted in the only usual meaning it has ever had. Tyndale, in his Answere (14/24–27 – see above), defends his use of congregation by pointing out that More did not criticize Erasmus’s use of congregatio to render ecclesia: a clear indication of bias toward his “derelynge Erasmus” (14/25).84 More retorts that Tyndale again makes “englyshe latine and latine englyshe”: the laten tonge had no laten word byfore vsed for the chyrche, but the greke word ecclesia / therfore Erasmus in hys new translcyon gaue it a laten worde. But we had in englysshe a proper englysshe worde therfore [i.e., for ecclesia] / and therfore was no suche cause for Tyndale to chaugne it in to a worse.…And therfore was there in this mater no cause for me to contende wyth Erasmus, as there was to contende wyth Tyndale wyth whom I contende for puttynge in congregacyon in stede of chyrch / excepte that Tyndale peraduenture meaneth that I sholde haue ben angry wyth Erasmus bycause that in stede of congregacyon in hys laten translacyon, he hadde not put in our englysshe worde chyrche. (177/28–32, 177/35–178/2)

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

57

There is clearly some twisting of the evidence here: previously, More praised Erasmus and Jerome for their assimilation of the Greek word presbyteros into Latin; here More praises Erasmus for replacing the Latinized Greek word ecclesia with a properly Latin word congregatio. What makes the properly Latin word inadequate in one context and preferable in the other?85 More wants to distinguish between Latin congregatio and English congregation, not on the basis of their inherent denotations, but according to the Latin and English lexicons respectively. More faults Tyndale for using congregation instead of church; he cannot, as he says, very well fault Erasmus for using congregatio for the same reason: Erasmus uses congregatio instead of ecclesia, not instead of church. Each translator’s choice of words has to be evaluated according to his language as a whole: congregation is unacceptable while congregatio is appropriate, not because the words themselves are so very different, but because the “words themselves” have no meaning independently of the lexicons in which they participate.86 Congregation is much worse than congregatio because the supplanting of church is much worse than the supplanting of ecclesia—that is, because of the words’ places in their respective languages considered in their entirety. There is no exact adequation between words in different languages: Latin is not English and English is not Latin. Tyndale’s defense brings More to clarify his own position on the historical contingency of verbal meaning. If More’s exasperation in the Confutation has produced an impossible book, it also drives More beyond the prima facie evidence of Tyndale’s heresy to consider in detail the semantic issues raised by his New Testament innovations. More catches at the weak point in Tyndale’s defense: Tyndale admits that he bypasses normal usage. ∗ ∗ ∗ The dispute between Tyndale and More concerns above all definition of the authoritative canon.87 More’s fluid canon runs in banks fixed by the consensus of the Roman tradition; Tyndale, on the other hand, opposes a closed scriptural canon to all forms of extra-scriptural tradition.88 These canonical definitions become competing notions of semantics. Yet as More insists that it is historical, consensual usage that determines linguistic meaning, and Tyndale asserts that it is essential denotation, one senses that the real contest lies elsewhere. More puts so much stock

58

J. H. FERGUSON

by the usual connotations of the disputed words because these connotations reinforce the Church he defends. Tyndale in turn uses ideas about language in service to a larger aim: undermining the Roman Church.89 He seems to have believed that his most potent tool for doing so was to make his English Bible “vsuall in euery mannys handys.”90 More and Tyndale were battling for public opinion, not in the hope of establishing one or another tenet of linguistic science: the ye addressed by both polemicists is not the opponent but the English people; the prize not theoretical vindication but general assent. Consensus, in other words, is both what More and Tyndale are fighting about and what they are fighting for.91 More charges that no-one will understand the unusual senses Tyndale attaches to New Testament vocabulary, but the argument from usage exposes More’s own cause to the very historicity he deploys against Tyndale. Here perhaps is one reason for More’s increasing exasperation: for all of More’s charges of idiosyncrasy, Tyndale’s English would be all too understandable should people begin to use New Testament words as he does.92 It should come as no surprise that the dispute between Tyndale and More was not settled through superior argumentation. Rather many thousands of copies of Tyndale’s New Testament93 and the successive official establishment of the vernacular Scripture changed the terms of the argument.94 By the 1540s in England, Tyndale’s biblical translations had been published under royal imprimatur.95 Given the institutional and public status of vernacular biblical translation in this period, it is worth asking whether these competing semantic conceptions had an importance beyond their local polemical targets.96 The polemical circumstances brought both writers to overstate their linguistic arguments, but those circumstances also extended this linguistic scrutiny beyond scholastic circles and gave it a significance beyond the purely religious. The highly public, indeed institutional accounts of English as a biblical medium changed the language: both More and Tyndale incorporate the exegetical opposition between autonomous text and interpretive tradition into the conceptualization of biblical English and the English language generally. Although Tyndale’s absolutist claims for the autonomy of (biblical) English from history would be qualified with the new ecclesiology of the Elizabethan via media, these polemics are significant in that they represent the first translation of Reformation debates about biblical authority into discussions of English semantics, bringing to bear on English a theoretical sophistication and cogency normally restricted to the learned

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

59

languages. The exchange thus represents an initial stage in a century-long convergence of biblical hermeneutics and English literature.

Notes 1. See the analogous distinction, in Martin Elsky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 60 and chs. 1–2 passim, between “referential” and “conventionalist” approaches to language, which Elsky aligns with scholastic philosophy and humanist philology, respectively. See too the distinction at Brian Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 127, between the “semantic analysis of meaning practiced in the medieval schools” and the “descriptive account of usage championed by humanism.” 2. Lucy Munro’s neat formulation, which she applies to the rules provided to the translators of the King James Bible, applies as well to these disagreements between Tyndale and More: “[r]eligious ‘truth’ here appears to reside in form as much as content” (Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 109). 3. Edward I. Carlyle, “William Tyndale,” Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee (London: Oxford University Press, 1949–50), 1354. 4. James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) mounts a revisionist defense of More’s “consensual, historically grounded account of reading” against Tyndale’s “fundamentalism” (259). 5. Though properly speaking the narrator of the Dialogue is a character in a fictional scenario, I will refer to that narrator as More since the Dialogue itself makes this identification from the title page forward, and, more importantly, since More, speaking in his own voice in the Confutation, will acknowledge the narrator’s arguments in the Dialogue as his own. 6. See Thomas More, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963–97), 6:487. This edition of More’s works will be cited hereafter as More, Complete Works, followed by volume, page, and (where applicable) line numbers. 7. More, Complete Works, 6:21/2–4. Further references to the Dialogue are cited from this edition and are given in the text with page and line numbers. I have expanded the contractions “ye ” and “yt .” 8. It has been supposed that the Dialogue’s conversation might be modeled on More’s relationship with his son-in-law, Roper: see, e.g., More, The Complete Works, 8:1143–44; Rainer Pineas, “Thomas More’s Use of the

60

J. H. FERGUSON

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Dialogue Form as a Weapon of Religious Controversy” in Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1960): 199–200. For other popular and dramatic elements in the Dialogue, see ibid., 199–205. See Alistair Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 123. The sense of inevitability is relieved somewhat at the Dialogue’s midpoint, where the Messenger recounts his embarrassing failure to convince certain “very fresshe lerned men” of More’s arguments during a return-trip to the university (247/14–15), at which point the indoctrination must begin all over again. Tunstall’s letter is cited at length at More, The Complete Works, 8:1137– 39; alternatively, see J. F. Mozley, William Tyndale (London: SPCK, 1937), 212–13. For an substantive account of Henry’s (1521) and Fisher’s (1523) books against Luther’s Babylonian Captivity (1520), Luther’s response to Henry (1522), and the confutations of the latter by Fisher and More (both in 1523), see Headley’s account in More, The Complete Works, 5; on Henry’s and More’s books, see John M. Headley, “The Reformation as Crisis in the Understanding of Tradition” Archive for Reformation History 78 (1987): 8–16; George M. Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church: The Crisis of the Protestant Reformation (London: Burns and Oates, 1959), 131– 33. See William A. Clebsch, who discusses as well Fisher’s two English sermons against Luther (1521, 1526) and More’s exchange with Johann Bugenhagen (England’s Earliest Protestants, 1520–1535 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964], 11–41). See also Marc’hadour’s account in More, Complete Works, 6, which covers much of the same material and provides, in addition, a valuable comparative discussion of the responses of Erasmus and More to the Lutheran Reformation. I borrow use of the Latin terminology from Elisabeth Flesseman-van Leer, “The Controversy about Scripture and Tradition between Thomas More and William Tyndale,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeshiedenis 43 (1959): 145; Robert H. Pfeiffer, “Canon of the O[ld] T[estament],” The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. G. A. Buttrick et al. (Nashville, TN: Abington, 1962), 519 col. 1. On the role of the sufficiency and perspicuity of the Bible in the polemical writings of More and Tyndale, see Flesseman-van Leer, “Controversy about Scripture and Tradition,” 156–63. As I hope will become clear, Gogan’s statement that “More never undervalued the role of scripture in the formation of faith” is more partial than precise. Brian Gogan, The Common Corps of Christendom: Ecclesiological Themes in the Writings of Sir Thomas More (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 139. St. Thomas More: Selected Letters, trans. Elizabeth F. Rogers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 119.

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

61

15. More repeats these points in the Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer: The Complete Works, 8: 335/13–17, 28–34, etc. Further references to the Confutation are cited from this edition and are given in the text with page and line numbers. See Marc’hadour and Lawler at More, The Complete Works, 6: 508n2; William Rockett, “Words Written and Word Inspired: More and Sola Scriptura,” Moreana 36/137 (1999): 15–16. See also Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, 46–47, on a similar critique (a “magnificently deconstructive essay”) of the scriptural canon in the Responsio: “As an example of the baby leaving with the bathwater this could hardly be bettered. In one sentence [99/37–101/2] More does the work of a thousand years of religious skepticism, and tears down the fabric of the church he so earnestly seeks to protect.” This is neither More’s baby nor his church. Cummings assumes that the Church stands or falls with the intrinsic authority of the canonical scriptures—not an assumption that More shares. 16. Compare an early section of Erasmus’s Ciceronianus concerning the instability of the text of the Ciceronian corpus. Against Nosoponus’ assertion that the good Ciceronian should represent (exprimere) the “whole” of Cicero, “in his entirety,” Bulephorus notes several times that the Ciceronian canon has been substantially corrupted in transmission. Whole books are simply missing: “just consider…what a large proportion of the Ciceronian corpus has disappeared” (361). And even those books that are extent are marred by the degradations of time: “in the places where he did give us a chance to observe him, he’s fragmented and hardly half there” (mutilus…ac vix dimidiatus ) (363; ASD 621). A further complication involves miscopying: “the Cicero we have is not only defective and mutilated, but so distorted [truncum ac lacerum, verumentiam ita deprauatum] that if he were to come to life again, he wouldn’t, I think, recognize his own writings, nor would he be able to restore the text where it has been corrupted by the audacity, carelessness, and ignorance of scribes and persons with half-knowledge” (363; 622). Translations cited from The Ciceronian: A Dialogue on the Ideal Latin Style, trans. Betty I. Knott, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 28 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986); Latin original cited from Dialogus Ciceronianus, ed. Pierre Mesnard, Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami, vol. 1–2 (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1971). 17. On More’s word “sentence,” see Latin sententia (“thought” or “meaning”). “‘Difficult’ rather than ‘dangerous’ seems to be the word that best describes Jerome’s feelings about translation”—so the editors of the Dialogue acknowledge what can only be regarded as More’s intentional mistranslation of one of the more famous statements on the duties of a translator (More, Complete Works 6: 691).

62

J. H. FERGUSON

18. On the role of the necessity of the Bible in the polemical writings of More and Tyndale, see Flesseman-van Leer, “Controversy about Scripture and Tradition,” 150–52. See Gogan’s accurate summary—which however does not square with his earlier point concerning More’s unconditional reverence for scripture: “The word of scripture forms part of doctrine but in any particular instance a definition of the church is preferable to a problematic interpretation of a scriptural text” (Common Corps 145). 19. See Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, 45–46, for a similar point with regard to More’s Responsio: “The proof that some of the truths of Jesus are unwritten comes from the written text of scripture, from the same John as Luther’s.” 20. Albertus Pighius, Hierarchiae ecclesiasticae assertio, 80r, qtd. in Pontien Polman, L’Élément Historique dans la Controverse religieuse du XVI e Siècle (Gembloux: Duculot, 1932), 287n4. 21. Tyndale, An Exposition upon the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Chapters of Matthew, Expositions and Notes on Sundry Portions of the Holy Scriptures together with the Practice of Prelates, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), 103; I owe this reference to H. C. Porter, “The Nose of Wax: Scripture and the Spirit from Erasmus to Miton,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 14 (1964): 155–56, who cites Pighius’s sentence in Bishop Jewel’s translation, as well as a similar statement from the Encomium Morae, elaborated in Thomas Chaloner’s 1549 English version to read “they [modern theologians] take upon them to form and reform holy scriptures at their pleasure, as it were a nose of wax, or a Welshman’s hose.” On the solascripturalist position, see Tyndale’s assertion in The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London: Penguin, 2000), 171—a book More mentions in the Dialogue (303/19)—that “the scripture giveth record to himself and ever expoundeth itself by another open text [i.e., another passage in scripture whose sense is clear].” The Messenger repeats Tyndale’s point in his opening statement of the reformers’ cause: “as touchyng any dyffycultye he sayd that he founde by experyence that the best and surest interpretacyon was to lay and conferre one texte with another / which fayle not amonge them well and suffycyently to declare themselfe” (34/7–12; see 167/26). This passage receives the ironic marginal notation, “The surest interpretation of scripture.” As the editors of the Yale edition note, More might have had in mind Luther’s De servo arbitrio (1525). 22. See Marius’s comment on this passage, More, Complete Works, 8: 1287. See also Confutation, 337/12–17, 338/9–26. 23. See the classic proof texts at Lk. 24:27–46. In his Letter to Dorp, More applies the same formula to the Greeks, in order to defend Erasmus’s return to the Greek text of the New Testament. By way of contrast with the relatively conciliatory Greeks, More mentions the Jews—“avowedly

2

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

63

more bitter enemies to all Christians”—who might be suspected of altering the text (Selected Letters, 47–48). A Discussion of Free Will / De libero arbitrio διατ ριβ η´ sive collatio, trans. Peter Macardle, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 76 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 16. More refers to the passage in a 1526-letter to Erasmus (Selected Letters 163). Cf. More’s formulation in the Confutation: “the questyon lyeth bytwene vs, not vppon goddys worde but vppon the ryght vnderstandynge therof” (250/27–29). On authority in the polemics, see Flesseman-van Leer, “Controversy about Scripture and Tradition,” 152–56. See Tyndale’s comment on the transparency of the Dialogue’s fiction in An Answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, ed. Anne M. O’Donnell and Jared Wicks (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 194/14–18: “master More thorow out all his boke maketh / quod he [i.e., the Messenger] / to dispute and moue questions after soch a maner as he can soyle [refute] them or make them appere soyled / and maketh him graunte where he listeth and at the last to be concluded and led wother Master More wyll haue him.” Further references to the Answere are cited from this edition and are given in the text with page and line numbers. I have again expanded the contractions “ye ” and “yt .” Marc’hadour and Lawler find “semantic pluralism” (More, Complete Works 6: 498) in the exchange of proof texts More includes in his account of the trial of an English Lutheran (378/35–402/5): the interrogators answer a Lutheran reading of a verse from Isaiah (64:6) with four alternative interpretations (394/36–395/3, 395/16–32). All four orthodox interpretations reinforce Roman Catholic teaching as against the Lutheran reading, i.e., the interrogators assert the superiority of their interpretations over that of Luther’s, not the impossibility of settling doctrine with reference to scripture alone. The more radical “semantic pluralism” in the Dialogue is in More’s assertion that there is, finally, no certainty in interpretation of the Bible without external guidance. This chimes with More’s contention that even the Apostles, following the death of Jesus, did not settle for private inspiration: they “were not content onely to pray secretly by them selfe in theyr chambers / but also resortyd to the temple to make theyr prayers” (59/17–19). More connects the Arian and Lutheran challenges to the Church explicitly in the Confutation, 267/14–271/9. See More’s early assertion of the authority of consensus as regards Church doctrine in the Letter to Dorp (Selected Letters 36); see also later, more explicit statements of the multiple forms taken by revelation in the Confutation, 257/33–258/3, 351/21–29. The striking combination of sincere piety and intolerant dogmatism in More’s mature sense of the Church might be summed up in the following two statements: “yf god

64

J. H. FERGUSON

31.

32.

33.

34.

wolde…suffre his chyrche to be deceyued…then sholde hym selfe…not onely suffre his honour and ryght fayth and relygyon to be perpetually lost / but helpe also hymselfe to destroy it” (245/6–7, 9–11); “byleue you the chyrche / not bycause it is trouth that the chyrche telleth you / but ye beleue the trouth of the thynge bycause the chyrche telleth it” (251/11–13). For an excellent discussion of More’s understanding of ecclesiastic authority in general, including its relations to pope and council, see Richard Marius, “Thomas More’s View of the Church” (More, Complete Works 8: 1294–1315); see also his earlier sketch of the issues in “Thomas More and the Early Church Fathers,” Traditio 24 (1968): 400–03, 404–07. Marius’s eloquent summation of More’s defense of the Church is worth citing: “He held to the church because the church embraced a history directed by the providence of God. If the church were wrong, then history was meaningless, and life for any individual within history had no glimmer of hope beyond death” (More, Complete Works 8: 1363). See also the biographical perspective on More’s attachment to this concept in John Guy, Thomas More (London: Arnold, 2000), 118: “the notion of ‘consensus’ or the ‘common faith’ of Christendom became More’s most important ideological concept, culminating in his refusal to accept the Act of Supremacy on the grounds that the explicit and implicit ‘consensus’ of General Councils of the Catholic Church and of the faithful was the infallible sign of the authenticity of a dogmatic position.” On More’s deviations from the text of the Vulgate in citations from scripture, especially on his mixing of the Vulgate and Erasmus’s translation in the Dialogue and his closer fidelity to the Vulgate in the Confutation, see More, Complete Works, 6: 503, 504–08. Anne M. O’Donnell, “Scripture Versus Church in Tyndale’s Answere Unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue,” Moreana 28/106–07 (1991): 121–22, notes that these two verses, the “most frequently quoted biblical texts” in all of More’s works, are cited thirteen and seven times respectively in the Dialogue. See also Marius’s comment at More, Complete Works, 8: 1279. “And so was it conuenyent for the lawe of lyfe / rather to be written in the lyuely myndes of men / than in the dede skynnes of bestes” (143/35– 144/2). On More’s use of the classic antithesis between “old” (written) and “new” (spiritual) covenants against the sola scriptura principle, see William Rockett, “Words Written and Word Inspired,” 7–10, 12–13. See Germain Marc’hadour, Thomas More et la Bible: La place des livres saints dans son apologétique et sa spiritualité (Paris: Vrin, 1969), 267: “More se réclame de l’usage, seul arbitre du langage. C’est l’usage qui nous renseigne sur le sens propre des mots.” For a suggestion of More’s indebtedness to Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace in adopting such an approach, see Brenda M. Hosington, “Thomas More’s Views on Language and Translation and Their Place in the Classical and

2

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

65

Humanist Tradition,” Moreana 40/153–54 (2003): 72–74, 89–91. For a shrewd account of how More’s approach to language anticipates some of postmodernism’s most cherished insights, see Anne Lake Prescott, “Postmodern More,” Moreana 40/153–54 (2003): 228–29. More uses “name of the Lord” as synecdoche for the language of the Gospel in general; see a restatement of More’s comparison in the Dialogue between writing and images: “yf yt be as yt is in dede well and vertuousely done deuotely to kysse a boke in whych Crystes lyfe / and hys deth is expressed by wrytyng / why shold it be euyll done reuerently to kysse the ymagys by whych Crystys lyfe & his passyon be represented by scrypture or payntyng?” (359/18–22). More offers the following illustration of interdisciplinary comparison: “these two wordes Christus crucifixus / do not so lyuely represent vs the remembraunce of his bytter passyon / as doth a blessyd ymage of the crucyfyx / neyther to lay man / nor vnto a lerned” (47/15–18). See More’s contention, in his Responsio, that Luther “tries to force us to believe that the foundation referred to [1 Cor. 3:10–11] is scripture, not Christ; or that scripture is the same thing as Christ, as if a book written about Caesar is the same thing as Caesar” (235/30–32, qtd. by Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation 44). See the opening section of Aristotle’s On Interpretation, trans. Harold P. Cooke, The Organon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 115: “As writing, so also is speech not the same for all races of men. But the mental affections themselves, of which these words are primarily signs, are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects of which those affections are representations or likenesses, images, copies.” For an account of the abiding influence of On Interpretation through and beyond the Renaissance, see Brian Vickers, “‘Words and Things’ – or ‘Words, Concepts, and Things’? Rhetorical and Linguistic Categories in the Renaissance,” Res et Verba in der Renaissance, ed. Eckhard Kessler and Ian Maclean (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 2002), 287–335. For a more focused account of the influence of Aristotle on debates between scholastics and humanists, see Elsky, Authorizing Words, 8–16. See the view of Hermogenes in Plato’s Cratylus , trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1987: “there is no name given to anything by nature; all is convention and habit of the users” (422 [384d]). Tyndale’s 1526 New Testament uses senior for presbyteros; in response to More’s Dialogue, Tyndale writes in the Answere: “Of a truth senior is no veri good English…but there came no better in my mynde at the tyme. How be it I spyed my faute sens / longe yer M. More told it me / and haue mended it in all the workes which I sens made and call it

66

J. H. FERGUSON

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

an elder” (15/9–13 [=Confutation 182/9–14]). More’s caricature of the translator’s painstaking search for the right word is irresistible: “Here hath he done a grete acte, now that he hath at laste founde out elder. He hath of lykelyhed ryden many myle to fynde out that. For that worde elder is ye wote well so straunge and so lytell knowen, that it is more than meruayle how that euer he coude fynde it out” (182/27–30). More notes as well, but only in passing, Tyndale’s substitution of “fauour” for “grace,” of “knowledgygne” for “confessyon,” of “repentaunce” for “penaunce,” and of “troubled harte” for “contryte harte” (290/17–21). See Germain Marc’hadour, “William Tyndale entre Erasme et Luther,” Actes du Colloque International Erasme (Tours, 1986) (Geneva: Droz, 1990), 187: Tyndale’s substitution of “termes sans contenu doctrinal…qu’on pouvait investir d’un message hétérodoxe” makes of his New Testament “une sorte de cheval de Troie dans la citadelle de la vielle foi.” There is no sense in trying to defend Tyndale against the charge of tendentious translation, nor in accusing Tyndale of deviating deliberately (in bad faith, as it were) from the sense of the Greek. More and Tyndale understand the New Testament differently and translate accordingly. Though More repeatedly charges that Tyndale “had a myscheuous mynde in the chaunge” (Dialogue 286/7), and Tyndale denies it (Answere 13/13–16), one suspects that both More and Tyndale took the polemics for what they were: a struggle for ascendancy by means of an argument about semantics. John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe: A New and Complete Edition, ed. S. R. Cattley (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1837), 5: 129, 130, 134, cites three times Tyndale’s claim that “I never altered one syllable of God’s word against my conscience.” See Marc’hadour and Lawler: “More’s position, in agreement with that of the church, is that translation and interpretation are too essentially interconnected to be considered separable” (More, Complete Works 6:508); see also Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 95. I borrow use of this distinction from O’Donnel, “Scripture Versus Church,” 122. More uses the word connotation in his Confutation (167/33); neither polemicist writes denotation. See Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, 192, on this section of the Dialogue: “he [More] grounds his objection not on dogma but linguistic usage.” More later cites an example of such mocking: “die vous garde senior” (290/7–8). For the controversy between More and Tyndale concerning charity and love, see Evan A. Gurney, Love’s Quarrels: Reading Charity in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018), 23–43.

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

67

46. In Literary Culture of the Reformation, Cummings describes Tyndale’s controversial words as “new-fangled,” “coinages,” and “neologisms” (192, 193, 214); Cummings also argues, with regard to More, that, “while he can easily support his doctrinal arguments by reference to the Vulgate, in English he is groundless” (193). These statements belong to a compelling argument according to which Reformation theology heralds the emergence of English as a theological medium in the sixteenth century: “the battle between prominent catholic humanists and Luther’s English supporters was as much about the English language as it was about the new theology” (188). The argument fails to account for More’s central complaint that Tyndale has supplanted the usual word with innovations: Tyndale’s version, More writes in the Dialogue, implies that preachers have “englyshed the scrypture wronge to lede the people purposely out of the right way” (290/35–36—a passage that Cummings himself cites, just prior to stating that More is “groundless” in English [193]; see also Confutation 177/28ff., cited below). Cummings states that, at the time of the More-Tyndale polemic, orthodox doctrine was “inscribed exclusively in Latin” and “as yet unwritten” in English (189), that “Lollards, not bishops, spoke religion in English” (188). Cummings cites the precipitous translation of Fisher’s 1521 English sermon into Latin as evidence for what he calls the “oddity of writing theology in the vernacular” (188), but no such qualms seemed to have attached to Fisher’s translations and expositions of the seven Penitential Psalms published as The fruytfull saynges of Davyd the kynge & prophete in the seven penytencyall psalms, of which Cotton cites six editions printed (all but one by Wynken de Worde) between 1505 and 1529 (Henry Cotton, Editions of the Bible and Parts Thereof in English, from the Year MDV. to MDCCCL [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1852], 133–34). The urge to put Fisher’s 1521 sermon into Latin might rather, like Henry’s attack on Luther published in Latin in the same year, demonstrate the English religious establishment’s desire to publish its orthodox credentials for an international audience. The immediate translation of Henry’s book into English further troubles the claim that theology in the vernacular was an “oddity,” suggesting rather that the English establishment, already in the early 1520s, wanted to carry out the battle with heresy on both native and international fronts. One of the controlling ideas of Literary Culture of the Reformation would seem to have obscured evidence of which Cummings is well aware: see his earlier article, “Justifying God in Tyndale’s English,” Reformation 2 (1997), where a different thesis about a different word (justify) brings contrary evidence to light: “The English which Tyndale used was not his to own or to coin except in limited circumstances. It was a language already invested with Christian connotations and with

68

J. H. FERGUSON

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

a ready-made biblical vocabulary. Although the Bible itself was officially disseminated in Latin – along with the liturgy and the technical language of theology – vernacular sermons, prayers, and devotions were naturally common currency” (147; cf. 152, 165). On More’s conception of the various “modes and avenues by which God makes himself present in the world,” see Rockett, “Words Written and Word Inspired.” Later in the Answere, Tyndale terms one of More’s chapters “as true as his storie of vtopia” (194/6; see also 158/24). One of the two elements in Neil Rhodes’s argument in Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) is that “Protestant emphasis on the literal truth of Scripture forces the Bible and secular literature into mutually exclusive positions, as the latter is deemed to be the product of the same misleading power of the human imagination that juggles with the word of God” (92). On Tyndale’s response to More’s “poetry,” see G. D. Bone, “Tindale and the English Language,” The Work of William Tyndale, ed. S. L. Greenslade (London: Blackie & Son, 1938), 63, 67–68; C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 185–86; Marc’hadour, Thomas More et la Bible, 239. For modern, partisan responses to the matter, see David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 272; Gogan, Common Corps, 146. Answere, 92/22. Tyndale—or a wry typesetter—capitalizes the /m/ in Morover enough times in the Answere for the pun to seem intentional (69/6, 93/31, 130/21). Tyndale begins his Parable of the Wicked Mammon and Obedience of a Christian Man in the same style. More comments that Tyndale and others of Luther’s sect “begynne theyr pystles in suche apostolycall fashion / that a man wold wene yt were wryten from saynt Paule hym self” (Confutation 41/14–16). Anne Richardson, “Scripture as Evidence in Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man.” Moreana 28/106–07 (1991): 83, points out that Tyndale may have relied on his readers’ recognition of this form on the basis of his own New Testament translations. In fact, Tyndale answers More’s points very selectively. Tyndale’s authorship of the second section of the Answere has been questioned on the basis of a letter from Joye attributing these sections to John Frith. See, e.g., William A. Clebsch, England’s Earliest Protestants, 1520–1535 (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1964), 95–97, and the review of scholarship in the introduction to Tyndale’s Answere, xxv–xxvii. See Answere, 49/4–12. The editors of the modern edition of the Answere note More’s tracing of Tyndale’s terms to Melanchthon (Confutation 741/35) and cite relevant passages from Melanchthon’s works (284–85:

2

53.

54.

55.

56.

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

69

48/27–28). On “implicit” and “explicit” faith, see, e.g., John Milton, Areopagitica, The Prose of John Milton, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), 310, 310n287. Tyndale does attribute “felynge faith” to the action of the Spirit generally (Answere 49/19–20, 23–24) but does not directly address the role of inspiration in exegesis. Compare Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 33, The Bondage of the Will, trans. Philip S. Watson and Benjamin Drewery (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), 28: “no man perceives one iota of what is in Scriptures unless he has the Spirit of God,” and Werner Schwarz, Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation: Some Reformation Controversies and their Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 169–72. See Flesseman-van Leer, “The Controversy about Ecclesiology between Thomas More and William Tyndale,” Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeshiedenis 44 (1960): 66: Tyndale’s “ecclesiology has a strongly negative accent, i.e., it is determined by its attack on the doctrine of More.” Flesseman-van Leer explains Tyndale’s lack of constructive detail on the grounds that “one should not expect a well-formulated ecclesiology at a time when all interest was directed still to attacking the accepted hierarchical church” (74). Compare John Donne’s comment in an undated sermon on Psalm 32:10–11: “[o]ur Adversaries of Rome charge us, that we have but a negative Religion; If that were true, it were a heavy charge, if we did onely deny, and establish nothing; But we deny all their new additions, so as that we affirme all the old foundations” (The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962], 9: 405). See too Patrick Collinson, “William Tyndale and the Course of the English Reformation,” Reformation 1 (1996): 184–85: “Tyndale’s ecclesiology was so evangelically pragmatic, so inchoate…that it is impossible to predict what kind of Church of England he would have constructed or legislated.” See Tyndale’s image of selectively mediated antagonism between spirit and world, with reference to Jn. 1: “his [God’s] electe know him / the world knoweth him not” (47/16). The Apocryphal or “deuterocanonical” books were included in the Septuagint and in Latin Bibles based thereon but were not part of the Hebrew canon; Jerome included them in the Vulgate but relegated them to noncanonical status. To my knowledge, neither More nor Tyndale addresses these books, though their debate about the canon bears clearly on the divide regarding these books between Roman Catholics, who have tended to treat them as authoritative, and Protestants, who have marginalized or omitted them. See C. T. Fritsch, “Apocrypha,” The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, op. cit.

70

J. H. FERGUSON

57. “Every heretic has his text” translates a Dutch proverb current in the sixteenth century: “iedere ketter heeft zijn letter” (qtd. by Polman, Élément Historique, 287). 58. For use of the terms “material” and “formal” in this context, see Polman, Élément Historique, 284, 303; Heiko Oberman, Forerunners of the Reformation: The Shape of Late Medieval Thought Illustrated by Key Documents, translations by Paul L. Nyhus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 57. 59. See Patrick Collinson, “The Coherence of the Text: How it Hangeth Together: The Bible in Reformation England,” The Bible, the Reformation and the Church, ed. W. P. Stevens (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995), 96, 102–03. 60. Tyndale’s unusual English—and, for that matter, the Latinate English of Roman Catholic biblical translators discussed in Chapter 3 below— is an example of the “affective and conceptual potential of the disabled utterance” that forms the subject of Carla Mazzio’s The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 2. 61. William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, 390. On Tyndale’s innovations in vocabulary in the context of his connection to the Lollard movement, see Henry Wansbrough, “Tyndale,” The Bible in the Renaissance: Essays on Biblical Commentary and Translation in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Richard Griffiths (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 125, 128–29. For different views of this connection, see Clebsch, England’s Earliest Protestants, 4; More, The Complete Works, 8: 1222; and the review of the scholarship on this question at Collinson, “William Tyndale,” 79–80. 62. Tyndale practices the kind of etymology that Hannah Crawford describes as typical of Early Modern writers: “uncovering the history of a word and, at the same time, remaking that word for present use by reconnecting it to this past.” Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3. 63. Gurney terms Tyndale’s use of English in his biblical translations “lexical iconoclasm” (Love’s Quarrels, 41). 64. The editor of Desiderius Erasmus, Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 6/2, Novum Testamentum ab Erasmo Recognitum, II, ed. Andrew J. Brown (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001) lists the following places where Erasmus renders ecclesia by congregatio: in the 1516 ed., Acts 2:47, 5:11; Rom. 16:5; Col. 4:15; 3 Jn. 10; in the 1519 ed., Acts 7:38; 11:26; 1 Cor. 14:4, 33; 2 Cor. 1:1 (255; Acts 5:11). 65. The editors of the Answere note that the Latin Tyndale cites in this passage is a mixture of the Vulgate and Erasmus’s editions: “maiores natu,” for example is from the Vulgate; Erasmus gave “seniores” in 1516

2

66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

71

and “presbyteros” in 1522; “ad regendum” is from Erasmus 1522, the Vulgate gives “regere” (249). Tyndale remarks that the apostles’ and Latin translators’ use of “presbyteros” and “senior,” respectively, derive from the “custome of the hebrues” but goes on to assign this custom to the requirement of nature, not to historical circumstance (19/15–20). Tyndale’s substitution of “elder” for “priest” is clearly influenced by Luther’s blurring of the line between the temporal and spiritual orders. The New Testament Translated by William Tyndale 1534, ed. N. Hardy Wallis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 12/2–3. See Fox, Thomas More, 123–25. On the “affective emphasis” of Tyndale’s polemical style, see Peter Auksi, “‘So rude and simple style’: William Tyndale’s Polemical Prose,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8/2 (1978): 241–49. According to Neil Rhodes, “what drove More into a position of hardened reaction was the realization that the free play of ideas which he had celebrated in the Lucian translations and in Utopia might result in real change, and that the principle of the common ownership of property which had been advanced as an ideal in Utopia might actually extend to the word of God. This is why he changes his mind about translation” (Common 90). The second volume—books 4–9, the last unfinished—was published in 1533. More, Complete Works, 9: 8/29–33. More writes in the Confutation something over nine words for every one in Tyndale’s Answere (Daniell, William Tyndale 277). Marc’hadour, “William Tyndale,” 191, notes that Tyndale, though famous for translating the same words variously into English, never uses either church or charity. More asserts that Tyndale has so travestied the New Testament as to turn it into a book no less heretical than the “Alchorane” (4/36–37). See the Dialogue: “who so callyth [Tyndale’s version] the newe testament calleth it by a wronge name / excepte they wyll call it Tyndals testament or Luthers testament. For so had Tyndall after Luthers counsayle corrupted and chaunged it frome the good and holsom doctryne of Cryste to the deuylysh heresyes of theyr owne / that it was clene a contrary thyng” (285/4–8). For More’s “proof” of Luther’s influence on Tyndale’s translation, see Dialogue, 288/12–14 (and 270/7–11) and Tyndale’s response (Answere 148/22). There is evidence to suggest that Tyndale did matriculate at the University of Wittenberg in 1524 (Mozley, William Tyndale 53; M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965], 4n2).

72

J. H. FERGUSON

76. Though Tyndale did not respond in print to More’s Confutation, the dismissive tone at Anne M. O’Donnell, “Scripture Versus Church in Tyndale’s Answere Unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue,” 119, is misleading in tone: “Tyndale wisely refrained from answering this exhausting polemic.” Tyndale clearly took More’s criticisms seriously, adopting several of More’s corrections in his 1534 revision, though not with regard to the handful of controversial words: see More on “this worde, the” in Tyndale’s rendering of Jn. 5:34 (Confutation 229/34–35 [=Answere 24/14]; 230/15–16, 26, 29–30; 231/1–4; 233/35–39; 234/10–12, 15, 21, 30–32) and Tyndale’s 1534-revision of the verse (The New Testament Translated by William Tyndale 1534 197; cf. KJV); see also More on word-order with reference to Tyndale’s translations of Jn. 1:1 and 5:34 (235/24–25; 236/5–10; 235/31–32; 237/5, 14–15, 17), and Tyndale’s revision of the former (New Testament 187; cf. KJV). See also More’s distinction between nay and no, ye and yes, in reference to Tyndale’s translation of Jn. 1:20 (231/18–232/7). See Bone, “Tindale and the English Language,” 58; Marc’hadour, Thomas More et la Bible, 247, 254, 267 and “William Tyndale,” 188–89; Mozley, William Tyndale, 288; David Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1: 100. 77. Marc’hadour and Lawler comment that the pages in the Confutation devoted to Tyndale’s word love “reiterate with energy” More’s discussion in the Dialogue, viz. “that usage alone is the ground of More’s rebuke, while the unavowed ground of Tyndale’s preference is theological” (More, Complete Works 6: 513). This is at once right and subtly misleading: usage, in More’s justification of the Roman Church, is a thoroughly theological concept, and so the suggestion that More is somehow more unbiased than Tyndale seems unfair. It seems doubtful that More would have rebuked Tyndale on the ground of usage had it not served his polemical purposes; certainly, Roman Catholic defenders of the Rheims New Testament at the end of the century abandoned the principle of customary usage, once the Roman Church had lost control of that usage in England. 78. See Marius’s fine gloss on More’s use of the word frantic at More, Complete Works, 8: 1341. 79. Cf. Richard Waswo’s Wittgensteinian reading of Renaissance treatments of language: “[w]hen language is talked about, it is consciously regarded as the clothing of preexistent meanings; but when language is employed to reflect on its various functions – to recommend a style, to praise a vernacular, to teach the figures of speech, to urge a method interpreting Scripture, or to compose literature – it is often implicitly regarded as constitutive of meaning” (Language and Meaning in the Renaissance [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987], 80). By contrast,

2

80.

81.

82.

83. 84.

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

73

see More’s contention that it is proper that the Greek exomologesis be rendered by the Latin-derived confession (and not knowledge) since “the goodnesse of god brought in that thynge wyth hys holy sacrament of penaunce, whyche was brought in by the latynes” (208/33–35, my emphasis). See Socrates’s slighting reference to the notion that, in speaking of the variety of languages, “the things differ as the names differ” (Plato, Cratylus , trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the Letters, 424). See Ann Moss, “Humanist Education,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3, The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 147. The editors of the Confutation cite the relevant passages from Erasmus’s Annotationes (1533: 185/9–18, 185/18–25). Though More celebrates Jerome’s and Erasmus’s assimilations of Greek words into Latin, elsewhere he castigates Tyndale for doing the same in English: “Tyndale muste in hys englysshe translacyon take hys englysshe wordes as they sygnyfye in englyshe, rather then as the wordes sygnyfe in the tonge, out of whyche they were taken in to the englysshe” (201/26–29; see More on the terminological choices involved in the translation of Latin chronicles into English, 187/1–12). Tyndale argues that ecclesia is a word with both general and specifically Christian applications, in order to justify his ambiguous English word congregation (Answere 13/31–14/5). Cf. More’s discussion of the nonChristian etymological senses of ecclesia and baptisma (189/29–37). See Tyndale’s statement in the Answere, 13/24–28, cited above. This is also the passage in which Tyndale gave birth to the contentious theory of the “two Mores”: the liberal humanist of Utopia, the Letter to Dorp, etc., and the intolerant defender of Roman orthodoxy. Erasmus, writes Tyndale, “made Moria [i.e., the Moriae encomium] in his [More’s] housse. Which boke if were in englishe / then shulde euery man se / how that he then was ferre other wise minded than he nowe writeth” (14/28–30; see 140/24–26). According to Tyndale, More knows that Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament is accurate: More understood the Greek “long yer” Tyndale did himself (22/13–14). Scholars less sympathetic to More tend to support Tyndale’s accusation; More’s partisans, on the other hand, tend to connect the two phases of More’s career. For an admirably balanced view, with particular examples, see Kinney’s account at More, Complete Works, 15: xci–xcii; see also Fox’s psychological discussion, emphasizing More’s preoccupation with Original Sin (Thomas More 1–5, 111–27). More responds that his own “Messenger” in the Dialogue is much more critical of ecclesiastic abuses “after the manner of the dysours [fool]” than Erasmus’s Moria (178/17–22). See Luther’s charge that Erasmus had betrayed his own calls for evangelical

74

J. H. FERGUSON

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

90.

reform in the “Paraclesis” in order to pander to the established Church (Bondage of the Will 57). Mozley objects: “if twelve hundred years of church use had not made ecclesia a Latin word, then neither are honour or confession English words” (William Tyndale 91–92). See Cummings, “Justifying God,” 150. In Judith H. Anderson’s terms, Tyndale represents the more traditional view in the period that “differences among languages are merely superficial and do not affect meaning in any real way,” while More represents the greater sophistication that flows from, for example, “the many controversies about meaning attendant on translation of the Bible into the vernacular” (Words that Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996], 40). Pace Marius, who writes that “[w]hen Thomas More went to war against the Protestant Reformation, he instantly divined that the field of battle was the definition of the word ‘church’” (More, Complete Works 8: 1271, citing Confutation 480/24–27). It is true that More locates the “very brest of all this batayle” in “the questyon whyche is the chyrche” (Confutation 34/30–31); it is also true that More, fighting on behalf of the ecclesiastic establishment, derives considerable strategic advantage from defining the controversy in this way. See Alistair Fox, “Thomas More’s Controversial Writings and His View of the Renaissance,” Parergon 11 (1975): 41, 43, on More’s opposition to a “simplified view of the Renaissance,” i.e. a “return ad fontes without recognizing that the fountains had continued to flow throughout history”; according to Fox, More is motivated in the polemical writings by the desire to “persuade the English people against repudiating their history” (42)—an English history that would exclude, incidentally, the Lollard movement. For Fox, More’s noble reconciliation with the complex and messy processes of history does not come of his allegiance to the Roman Church but of his profound recognition of the “implications of Man’s Fall” (43). As Munro puts it with reference to a recurrence of these debates later in the century: “when the translators alter words they signal their intention to do away with the things themselves” (Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674, 112). See too Gurney, Love’s Quarrels, 60. The phrase is More’s (Dialogue 342/34). See “W.T. to the Reader” prefacing Tyndale’s Pentateuch (1530): “I had perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue” (Tyndale’s Old Testament: Being the Pentateuch of 1530, Joshua to 2 Chronicles of 1537, and Jonah, ed. David Daniell [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992], 4).

2

BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE MEANING OF ENGLISH …

75

91. See Richard Duerden, “Equivalence or Power? Authority and Reformation Bible Translation,” The Bible as Book: The Reformation, ed. Orlaith O’Sullivan, (London: British Library, 2000) for an application of recent hermeneutic models and Foucauldian discourse-analysis to early modern debates around Bible-translation. 92. See Fox, Thomas More, 199–205. 93. B. F. Westcott, A General View of the History of the English Bible, 3rd ed., rev. W. A. Wright (New York: Macmillan, 1905), 37, estimates that the six editions of Tyndale’s New Testament printed during his lifetime (1526–1530) came to 15,000 copies. 94. For modern, partisan responses to the legacy of the More-Tyndale polemics, see Mozley, William Tyndale, 236, 238; William E. Campbell, Erasmus, Tyndale and More (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1949), 138, 154. 95. In 1537 the pseudonymous editor of the Matthew Bible gathered together William Tyndale’s New Testament and those books of the Old Testament that Tyndale had completed before his capture and execution in 1536 (including Joshua through 2 Chronicles, left in manuscript), filled out with versions from Coverdale’s 1535 translation. Commissioned by the king to prepare the text of the Great Bible (1539) on the basis of the Matthew Bible, Coverdale used Tyndale’s versions of Genesis through 2 Chronicles and the New Testament. 96. A second edition of the Dialogue was issued in 1531, with minor revisions (More, Complete Works 6: 556–75). Neither volume of the Confutation was reprinted during More’s lifetime (More, Complete Works 8: 1421). The Dialogue and the Confutation (both volumes, with the addition of the unfinished ninth book [ibid.]) were included in the 1557 English Works of More. On More’s posthumous reputation in sixteenthcentury England, emphasizing his reception among recusants, see James K. McConica, “The Recusant Reputation of Thomas More,” Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Thomas More, ed. R. S. Sylvester and G. P. Marc’hadour (Hamdon, CT: Archon, 1977), 136–49. The Answere was reprinted by Foxe in the 1573 Whole Works of W. Tyndale, John Frith, and Doct. Barnes, (Tyndale, Answere xlvii–xlviii). On “Tyndale’s ongoing role in the developing course of the English Reformation,” including an excellent review of the secondary literature, see Patrick Collinson, “William Tyndale and the Course of the English Reformation” Reformation 1 (1996): 72–97.

CHAPTER 3

The Roman Inkhorn: Literary and Religious Resistance to Latinism in the English Renaissance

Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English is notable for the volume of borrowings from other languages.1 These borrowings served a dual purpose. On the one hand, they added to the supply of concepts (or “matter”) expressible in English. Richard Sherry’s preface to his Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550) asks rhetorically: “who hath not in hys mouthe nowe thys worde Paraphrasis, homelies, usurped, abolished, with manye other lyke? And what marvail is it if these words have not bene used here tofore, seynge there was no suche thynge in oure Englishe tongue where unto they shuld be applied?”2 The word paraphrase is borrowed from the Latin (paraphrasis ) in the early sixteenth century to describe a genre of biblical interpretation new to English.3 In the same passage from The Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, Sherry describes the other rationale for borrowings: namely, to increase the supply of synonyms in the target language. Sherry praises “certayne godlye and well learned men, which by their greate studye enrychynge our tongue both wyth matter and words, have endevoured to make it so copyous and plentyfull that therein it maye compare wyth anye other whiche so ever is the best” (sig. Aiir−v ). As in Erasmus’ De duplici copia rerum ac verborum, so here the ideal of copia includes not only referential breadth but also verbal amplitude for its own sake.4

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. H. Ferguson, Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81795-4_3

77

78

J. H. FERGUSON

The inkhorn represents superfluous—and therefore affected—foreign borrowings (especially from Latin). The inkhorn is a ready figure of comedy in Renaissance England, as elsewhere in Europe: one thinks not only of Shakespeare’s Armado and Holofernes, for example, but also of Rabelais’ écolier limousin. In Love’s Labor’s Lost (1594–95), the “peregrinate” Armado, hoping both to demonstrate that he is one of those who has eat paper and drunk ink and to show off his relationship with the King, brags that “it will please His Grace…sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder and with his royal finger thus dally with my excrement, with my mustachio.”5 The trouble with the concept of the inkhorn is that the object of the complaint, verbal superfluity, is one of the two basic raisons d’être for borrowing. What renders Armado’s excrement a crass joke rather than the healthy outgrowth (Latin excrementum) of the language? What separates the ridiculous Armado from the Erasmus who comes up with more than one hundred ways to thank someone for a letter in his De copia? What is the difference between admirable and risible verbal superfluity? One obvious difference between Erasmus’ kind of verbal excess and Armado’s is that Erasmus is writing in Latin, while Armado is speaking Latinate English. Erasmus’ superfluity represents the harnessing of the full resources of an authoritative language, while Armado’s demonstrates a subordination of a less established language to Latin. Armado is laughable because he prefers, or feels he must pretend to prefer, Latin to English: the comedy derives from his use of Latinate words with utter disregard for the meanings these words have taken on in English usage.6 The trouble with the inkhorn, then, is not the borrowing of unneeded synonyms but the subordination of English to other tongues. It is a matter of the status relationships between languages.7 The relationship between early modern English and Latin is a particular case, largely because of the strong association between the Latin language and the Roman Church. Charles Barber makes the general point that, “because of the Catholic use of the Vulgate, and insistence on Latin as the liturgical language, there was a tendency to associate Latin with Catholicism, which worked to the disadvantage of Latin in strongly Protestant circles.”8 Indeed, Protestant resistance to Latinism is easy to document in early modern England: John Rainolds’ characterization of Latin as the “Romish tongue (so to call it) and language of Poperie” is among the most explicit of many such statements.9 Other English Protestant writers in the period seek out terms at the Saxon fontes of the language as an alternative to

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

79

Latinate English. William Fulke, in his Defense of the Sincere and True Translations of the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue (1583), for example, draws a connection between the original Greek of the New Testament and older forms of English: “the etymology [of the word church] is from the Greek word κυριακη, which was used of Christians for the place of their holy meetings, signifying ‘the Lord’s house’; therefore in the northern, which is the more ancient English speech, is called by contraction kyrke, more near to the sound of the Greek word.”10 However fancifully, Fulke seeks forms of English prior to the influence of Latin usage. The most consistent application of this principle is likely Sir John Cheke’s unpublished version of the Gospel of Matthew and a fragment of Mark (c.1550), where Christ speaks in biwordes (parables) and is crossed (crucified) prior to his gainrising (resurrection).11 At the same time, any number of “strongly Protestant” English writers wrote extensively in Latin: William Whitaker, for example, replied to Nicholas Sander’s De visibili monarchia ecclesiae (1571) with his own Latin polemic, Ad Nicolai Sanderi demonstrationes quadraginta (1583). In the preface “to the Christian reader” of this work, Whitaker includes criticism of the “unusual and unnatural novelty of words” (verborum inusitatem & prodigiosam nouitatem) of the Rheims English New Testament (1582).12 It was only when he was answered in turn, this time in English, by William Rainolds’ Refutation of sundry reprehensions, cauils, and false sleightes (1583), that Whitaker turned to English, in his Answere to a certeine booke, written by M. William Rainolds (1585). The fact that a staunch Protestant like Whitaker could write in Latin against the Latinism of the Rheims New Testament suggests that he was not opposed to Latin but to Latinate English. Whitaker was opposed to writing English as if it were Latin, to subordinating English usage and vocabulary to Latin. Barber’s observation needs to be refined: early modern English Protestants such as Whitaker associated Latinate English, rather than Latin itself, with Roman Catholicism. As in the example of Armado, though in a very different context, Latinate English threatens the integrity of English. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of inkhorn as a description of bookish diction was in an anti-Catholic tract, John Bale’s Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe (1543), where Bale describes the Latin tags secundum esse and exercitium used by proponents of papal supremacy as “Ynkehorne termes.”13 Bale opposes the subordination of English royal power to the papacy; he extends his defense of English ecclesiastical autonomy to apply as well to the integrity of the English language.

80

J. H. FERGUSON

In 1542, Bishop Stephen Gardiner proposed a list of corrections to the Great Bible: the list included Latinate terms “that [Gardiner] desired, as far as possible, either retained in their natural state or turned into English speech as closely as possible [vel in sua natura retineri, vel quam accommodatissime fieri possit in Anglicum sermonem verti], both for their inherent and native sense and for the majesty of the thing represented [pro eorum germano et nativo intellectu et rei majestate].”14 Gardiner’s list of one hundred words and phrases includes the three terms—ecclesia, presbyter, and charitas —about which Thomas More and William Tyndale argue at length; Gardiner moves beyond the debate about English equivalents (whether to render ecclesia as church or congregation, for example) to suggest that Latin words such as ancilla, baptizare, complacui, opera, pontifex, tyrannus, and zizania be transcribed rather than translated. Gardiner’s list provides a precedent for the more radical embrace of the Vulgate as a model for biblical English in the Rheims-Douai versions four decades later, when it is the turn of Roman Catholic biblical translators to defend an unusual English idiom against customary usage. Gardiner’s preference for Latinate neologisms has nothing to do with increasing the store of English vocabulary; his aim, rather, is to make English pay homage to the special religious significance of the Latin Vulgate. The English language here acts as a proxy for the English Church: as Gardiner subordinates the English Church to Catholic tradition, so he subordinates the English language to Latin. Like the Latin tags about which Bale complains, Gardiner’s brand of Latinism affronts the autonomy of both the English language and the English Church. Bishop Gardiner’s proposed revisions to the Great Bible were not adopted, but his approach to Latinate English in the translation of the Bible did come to fruition decades later, in the Rheims New Testament of 1582. In the same year, the Roman Catholic exile Gregory Martin justified the Rheims version via an attack on the whole line of Protestant English Bibles in the Discoverie of the Manifold Corruptions of the Holy Scriptures by the Heretikes of Our Daies . Martin’s Discoverie was answered, paragraph by paragraph, in William Fulke’s Defense of the Sincere and True Translations of the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue in 1583. Also in 1583, William Whitaker included his attack on “verborum inusitatem & prodigiosam nouitatem” in the Rheims New Testament in his Ad Nicolai Sanderi demonstrationes quadraginta, which William Rainolds quickly answered with his Refutation. In 1588 Edward Bulkeley and George Wither published brief attacks on the Rheims New Testament’s

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

81

prefatory remarks and annotations respectively,15 just prior to William Fulke’s comparative volume, The text of the Nevv Testament of Iesus Christ, translated out of the vulgar Latine by the papists of the traiterous seminarie at Rhemes . … VVhereunto is added the translation out of the original Greeke, commonly vsed in the Church of England (1589), with detailed answers to the Rheims New Testament’s entire apparatus. Fulke describes his work as a stopgap in anticipation of yet another, even fuller response to the Roman Catholic Bible: he was likely thinking of Thomas Cartwright, who published his Ansvvere to the preface of the Rhemish Testament in 1602, later incorporated into a posthumous volume answering the annotations as well and reprinting the translation: A confutation of the Rhemists translation, glosses and annotations on the Nevv Testament (1618).16 The 1582 publication of the Rheims New Testament and Martin’s accompanying Discoverie thus instigated a flurry of polemics concerning the English Bible.17 According to Martin’s Discoverie, the root of the dispute between the Protestants and Roman Catholics is “the double signification of words.”18 The Protestants tend to take words in their “original property,” or etymological sense, the Roman Catholics favoring the “usual taking thereof in all vulgar speech and writing,” or derivative sense. Like other Roman Catholic polemicists, Martin emphasizes that the Bible is subject to “the approved sense of the holy fathers and catholic church,” the Church being the one historical institution able to claim divine warrant (Defense 9). For Martin, the “common use and signification of the word in vulgar speech, and in the holy scriptures” (i.e., in English and in the Vulgate) alters the “original property” of biblical words according to “ecclesiastic use and appropriation” (Defense 200). For example, he writes, “episcopus , a Greek word, in the original sense is ‘every overseer,’ as Tully useth it, and other profane writers; but among Christians, in ecclesiastical speech, it is ‘a bishop’; and no man will say, ‘My lord overseer of London,’ for ‘my lord bishop’” (Defense 217). Rainolds, in a concurrent exchange with Whitaker, describes the Protestants’ “common and vulgar kind of disputing, that is, upon the first and original derivation and signification of Ecclesiastic words.”19 Rainolds illustrates with a parody of a Protestant “superintendent” speaking to his “synagoge”: I that am your elder or surveyer and superintendent, placed in this synagoge by the holy wynd, for the feeding of your carcasses, do denounce unto you

82

J. H. FERGUSON

in the name of the Anointed our Baal, that except yow with more devotion come to receave the thankesgeving, and performe better your promise made to God in washing, you shal be condemned bodie and carcas to the grave, with the slaunderers, I say with the Lord of a flye and his messengers. (269; emphasis in the original)

Few of the terms here mocked ever made their way into an English Bible, but several were defended by English Protestant translators as legitimate alternatives to the more usual English biblical terms. The substitution of elder for priest is a central point of contention between More and Tyndale; it forms the subject of Chapter 6 in the exchange between Martin and Fulke, but there is little there not already discussed in the earlier polemics. The substitution of carcass and grave for soul and hell does not come up between More and Tyndale, whereas it is a topic of running debate between Martin and Fulke: as Martin points out, Beza’s New Testament (1576) renders Acts 2:27, “Non derelinques cadaver meum in sepulchro”20 (in Martin’s English, “Thou shalt not leave my carcase in the grave” [Defense 280]). Both the Geneva Bible (1560) and Laurence Tomson’s English rendering (1576) of Beza’s Latin translation render this line “thou wilt not leaue my soule in graue [sic],” Geneva annotating soule, “Or, life, or, persone.”21 Beza’s version was obnoxious to the orthodox Roman Catholic belief in the passage of Christ’s soul through Hell following the crucifixion, during which time Christ redeemed the “godly of the Old Testament,” as Fulke calls them, from the limbus patrum (Defense 280); on this basis, moreover, was built the doctrines of purgatory and of Christ’s bodily ascension to heaven. Martin notes Beza’s stated intention to undermine these teachings through his translation (Defense 280).22 As in the polemics between More and Tyndale, semantics has direct implications for doctrine: the “original” and “usual” senses of key theological terms provide justifications of Protestant and Roman Catholic positions respectively. In line with his Protestant predecessors, Fulke persists in fixing the meaning of Scripture at a particular point in textual history: the “first fountains and springs,” the biblical texts in the original languages; he rejects any further historical change, “any streams that are derived from” these sources (Defense 47). As Thomas Cartwright, the last of the Elizabethan polemicists to attack the Rheims New Testament, puts it: “The true religion being like the heavenly bodies which never change: the Popish religion resembleth the earth, which as the potters clay is readie to

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

83

receave any forme, according as the wind and weather, times and seasons of the yeare, winter and sommer, spring or fall will set upon it” (Confuation Bv). Cartwright’s allusion to Isaiah (“Wo be unto him that striveth with his maker … shal the claie saie to him that facioneth it, What makest you?” [45:9, Geneva version; cf. Isa. 29:16]) suggests that the subjection of doctrine to historical reception is mere idolatry: the subordination of the divine to the secular. The Roman Catholic entry into the field of English Bible-translation in 1582 thus reactivated the fundamental exegetical divide of the Reformation, even as “the battle for the vernacular Bible [contested by, among others, More and Tyndale] had been displaced by a debate about the politics of translation.”23 More and Tyndale advocated respectively historicist and essentialist notions of biblical semantics, based in Roman Catholic and Protestant definitions of biblical authority. Elizabethan polemics rehearse but also revise these positions. Over the course of the sixteenth century, control of the language of English religion effectively passed from Roman Catholic to Protestant hands, out of the hands of a king (at that time) still loyal to Rome and into those of a queen who—however her more precise critics might accuse her of diffidence—definitely aligned herself with Protestantism. Following Henry’s vacillations and the violent reversals under Edward and Mary, the Elizabethan establishment consolidated and then extended the Protestant biblical tradition in English. The first decade of Elizabeth’s reign is characterized by the dominance of Genevan versions: an English New Testament was published towards the end of Mary’s reign in 1557,24 a Psalter in 1559, a year after Elizabeth took the throne, and a complete Bible in the following year. The Geneva Bible touted itself as the most philologically advanced version available: “albeit that diuers heretofore haue indeuored to atchieue [the Englishing of Scripture]: yet considering the infancie of those tymes and imperfect knollage of the tongues, in respect of this ripe age and cleare light which God hath now reueiled, the translations required greatly to be perused and reformed” (sig. * * * iiiir ). Genevan rigor notwithstanding, English printers continued to issue Coverdale’s Great Bible (originally published in 1539), until, at the end of the 1560s, Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker published a new version, the Bishops’ Bible, which superseded the Great Bible as representative of an official orthodoxy, more moderate than that coming out of Geneva. Through the better part of Elizabeth’s reign, the Bishops’ and Geneva Bibles were both printed

84

J. H. FERGUSON

in many editions, the former typically in massive folio, intended for placement in churches, and the latter in less expensive and more portable formats.25 From the mid-1530s, then, English Roman Catholics could no longer appeal to established English biblical usage against Tyndale’s translations: Tyndale’s English, incorporated into the Matthew and Great Bibles, was becoming institutional. The rise of a Protestant biblical tradition, and the reversal of political fortunes that it represented, confronted English Roman Catholics with a situation radically different from that of the first three decades of the sixteenth century. As control of biblical English shifted from the English Roman Catholic Church of the first few decades of the sixteenth century to a new Protestant establishment, so control of English usage shifted from Roman Catholic to Protestant hands. The sword More used against Tyndale (customary English ecclesiastic usage) now increasingly cut in the other direction, and English Roman Catholics were forced to refine and retrench their arguments about the vernacular Bible. Having lost control of biblical English, Roman Catholic partisans returned to a more basic fixture of Roman tradition: the “true and authentical scripture … the vulgar Latin bible, which so many years hath been of so great authority in the church of God” (Defense 69). The force of this historical precedent is so powerful, Roman Catholics argue, that the Vulgate should be considered “not onely better than al other Latin translations, but then the Greeke text itselfe, in those places where they disagree” (268). Where More defends the usual Latin version as ipso facto authoritative, however, Elizabethan Roman Catholic polemicists justify the Vulgate on historical grounds: they assert that the Latin texts were translated from the Hebrew and Greek prior to the latter texts’ corruption by Jewish and Greek heretics.26 Roman Catholics extend this charge of corruption to Elizabethan English. More contrasts the novel usages in Tyndale’s New Testament with the customary speech of Englishmen, but Elizabethan Roman Catholics were faced with an established English biblical idiom created by Protestants: an idiom that, as Thomas Cartwright can justifiably claim in the late 1580s, had “confirmation, by the common use and practice of our nation for so many yeares together.”27 Roman Catholics reject the established biblical usages of Elizabethan England and translate the Bible into an ostentatiously unusual English idiom that, like Gardiner’s translations, is explicitly subordinated to the Latin of the Vulgate. For Elizabethan Roman Catholic translators, the Roman consensus represented by the

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

85

Vulgate necessarily trumps the (Protestant) Elizabethan consensus around biblical English, meaning that Latinate English trumps the more native idiom of the Protestant English Bibles. As a result of this flood of Protestant biblical English, the principle according to which words take on meaning through “ecclesiastic use and appropriation” is applied differently in the Rheims New Testament from the way it is used by More. Publishing an English Bible, in a “massive … initial print run of around five thousand copies,”28 the Rheims translators condescended to what they called an “erroneous opinion of necessitie”—namely, that Scripture should be available in the vernacular— while maintaining their adherence to the Vulgate.29 Jerome famously insisted that Cicero’s dictum on translation, “non verbum pro verbo,” did not apply to the translation of Scripture, where even “the order of words is a mystery” (verborum ordo mysterium est ).30 The author of the Rheims Preface uses this distinction to justify a new kind of English, which would conform to the Vulgate’s Latin “not only in sense … but sometimes in the very wordes also and phrases” (Cotton 279; cf. 263). As Lucy Munro writes about this passage, “authenticity here lies in the translator’s stylistic imitation of his source text.”31 This practice, the translators admitted, resulted in words and constructions that might “seeme to the vulgar Reader & to common English eares not yet acquainted therewith, rudenesse or ignorance” (279)—words, that is, alien to ordinary English usage. It is “better,” the preface continues, “that the reader[,] staying at the difficultie of [such words], should take an occasion to looke in the table following, or otherwise to aske the ful meaning of them, then by putting some usual English wordes that expresse them not, so to deceive the reader” (281). In his comparative volume, Fulke gives this glossary of “explication of certaine wordes … not familiar to the vulgar reader” more prominence than it has in the Rheims New Testament: Fulke places the table, printed as an appendix to the Rheims New Testament, at the very head of his volume (Cartwright does the same [sig. A**v ]). The table is the only part of the Rheims New Testament that neither Fulke nor Cartwright answers, as if to suggest that examples of “new fanglednesse of forraine speech” (Confuation F2) such as contristate, euro-aquilo, prefinition, and superedified spoke for themselves.32 A modern reader’s sympathy with the Protestant position is blunted by the list’s inclusion of other words, however, words that have since “grow[n] to be currant and familiar” (281): prescience, for example, assist, cooperate, issue, and victims.33

86

J. H. FERGUSON

Elizabethan Protestants also calibrated their positions. In the earlier phase, Tyndale attacked the traditions of the Roman Church as demonstrably corrupt and self-serving and staked the Reformers’ exegesis to the supposedly unmediated text of Scripture; Tyndale argued for a correspondence between the original Greek text of the New Testament—as against the received Vulgate—and the etymological (unusual) senses of English words he claimed to have restored: instead, for example, of the received English term church, Tyndale gave congregation, whose basic, etymological sense corresponded, according to Tyndale, to the original meaning of the Greek term ecclesia prior to the intervention of Roman Catholic tradition. Because he rejected the traditional Roman Church, Tyndale refused to recognize that biblical language might take on meaning historically within a community of its users, thus exposing himself to More’s attacks regarding private language. Elizabethan Protestants, representatives of the dominant religious culture, embraced current biblical English, since this usage was a Protestant creation. Protestants like Fulke also break with Tyndale in restoring biblical language to its original historical contexts. Whereas resistance to the Roman church led early Protestants like Tyndale to distrust the cultural conventions obtaining in their own day, humanist emphasis on historical philology inculcated, in later Protestants like Fulke, respect for the cultural conventions obtaining at the time and place of the biblical texts’ composition. Unlike Tyndale, for example, who claimed (illogically) that biblical language is free of historical conditioning, Fulke concedes that the “first fountains and springs” themselves are to be interpreted in accord with historical conventions; he argues, however, that the convention to be consulted is that of Greek as it stood prior to the writing of the New Testament, rather than the Roman, ecclesiastical conventions of later ages: “there is no better way to know the proper or diverse signification of words, than out of ancient writers, though they be never so profane, who used the words most indifferently in respect of our controversies, of which they were altogether ignorant” (Defense 161).34 Martin calls this kind of philology a “miserable match”: the “unworthy names of Xenophon and Plato, in trial of St Paul’s words, against all the glorious doctors” (233). In defense of the unusual English in the Rheims New Testament, the Preface to the volume contends that Protestant Bibles include many words more or less transliterated from the Greek and Hebrew: “if Hosanna, Raca, Belial, and such like be yet untranslated in the English

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

87

Bibles, why may not we say Corbana [transliterated Hebrew for “offering”], and Parasceue [“day before Sabbath”]”; “if Pentecost, Act. 2, be yet untranslated in their bibles, and seemeth not strange: why should not Pasche and Azymes so remaine also…specially whereas Passeover at the first was as strange, as Pasche may seeme now” (280).35 Martin is likely referring to the Geneva Bible, whose translators testify to their effort, in rendering the New Testament, to hold close to the “proprietie of the [Hebrew] wordes,” “considering that the Apostles who spake and wrote to the Gentiles in the Greke tongue, rather constrayned them to the liuely phrase of the Ebrewe, then entreprised farre by mollyfying their langage to speake as the Gentils did” (*** iiii). In 1585, within a few years of the publication of the Rheims New Testament, a new Protestant Latin version of the Bible was issued; the translators of the Old Testament for this volume (Immanuel Tremelius and Franciscus Junius) extend this principle: they claim in their preface to have “used Hebraic expressions where it was possible to render them word-for-word without harm to Latin speech” (Hebraismos…sine damno latinitatis de verbo ad verbum reddere licuit, expressimus ); more specifically, these translators “wrote proper names in Hebraic form, to the extent that this could be done” (Nomina propria…ex Hebraeorum formâ, ut maxime fieri potuit, scripsimus ).36 William Rainolds calls this tendency a “most childish affectation to seeme somwhat skilful in the hebrew, reduce al sacred names to the old Judaical sound” (Refutation 455) and goes on to critique the principle according to which such practices were justified: as though Petrus, Joannes, Jacobus, Stephanus, howsoever they be uttered in any other tonge, Hebrew, Greeke, Latin, Spanish, French, or Italian were not truly & exactly expressed in English by Peter, John, James, Stevin, but must needes be pronounced, as they are in the first language from which originally they are derived. as though a man translating some storie out of French or Spanish into English, translated not wel if he said, Frauncis the French King in his warres against the Spaniards, but must needes say, Fransois King of the Fransois in his warres aginst the Espanioulx: or, los Espanoles in such a victorie against los Franceses, in steede of, the Spaniards in such a victorie against the Frenchmen. And why then do they not in the new testament use like noveltie? why for Christ use they not, Jeschua, for our Lady, Miriam, for S. Peter, Cepha, for S. John, Jochannan, and so in the rest of the Apostles, whereas they know that thus were they called in their proper language. (456–57)

88

J. H. FERGUSON

While this is an effective attack on what the Rheims preface calls the “ostentation” (261) of the Protestant translators’ “new names,” it would seem no less effective as a critique of the Roman Catholic translation, of which Cartwright complains that “being translated, it remaineth … as it were un-translated” (Confuation F2). What else is the Roman Catholic English Bible but a deliberate attempt to make English words sound “as they are in the first language from which originally they are derived”— i.e., in the case of the Rheims New Testament, Latin? Translators on both sides are ready to adapt their target languages to the lexis of their sources.37 Protestant English translators are not consistent in defending the “purity” of their language against the influence of other tongues: they incorporate vocabulary strange to English usage so long as these words are derived from the Hebrew “first fountains and springs,” as against Roman Catholic translators’ allegiance to the “old vulgar Latin text” (266).38 The core of the problem was the old argument about source-texts. The rise of the English biblical tradition translates this older exegetical question about sources into a question about the relationship between Latin and English, since the subordination of English to Latin norms betokened the subordination of the English Church to Rome. Each camp is ready to stretch the lexis of English in allegiance to its authoritative text; these translators’ different allegiances to English norms are more clearly evident in their approaches to English syntax. The Rheims translation often yields constructions that function much more effectively in Latin than in English. In his Answere to William Rainolds, Whitaker cites among the “goodlie flowers” of the Roman Catholic translation the tendency to follow Latin grammar at the expense of intelligibility in English: “the obscuritie and ambiguitie of sentences, by reason of leaving out the verbs and other words in the English translation, which may in latine more easilie be understood” (185). The Rheims Preface derives this practice from the translators’ proper respect for the text: “we presume not in hard places to mollifie the speaches or phrases, but religiously keepe them word for word, and point for point, for feare of missing, or restraining the sense of the holy Ghost to our phantasie” (282). The Preface cites several examples from the translation where their following of the “Scriptures phrase” preserves meaningful ambiguities present in the Latin. More often, however, this literal translation has the more straightforward effect of generating English syntax that is (and, according to Whitaker, was at the time) difficult to follow:

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

89

He therefore that giveth you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you: by the workes of the Law, or by the hearing of the faith doeth he it? [Vulgate: qui ergo tribuit vobis Spiritum et operitur virtutes in vobis ex operibus legis an ex auditu fidei] (Gal. 3:5) But he that of the bond-woman, was borned according to the flesh: and he that of the free-woman, by the promisse. [Vulgate: sed qui de ancilla secundum carnem natus est qui autem de libera per repromissionem] (Gal. 4:23)39

In each of these passages, Rheims relies on grammatically parallel clauses (“by the workes” coordinated with “by the hearing”; “of the bondwoman…according to the flesh” with “of the free-woman, by the promisse”) to suggest an omitted verb (“doeth” omitted from the first clause, and “was borned,” from the second). These sentences strain the resources of English grammar, less forgiving than Latin of attenuated syntax. Rheims does “mollify” the English by interpolating a main clause (“doeth he it”) where the Latin assumes that the verbs in the first part of the line (“tribuit,” “operitur”) will be inferred in the second; generally, however, Rheims treats the English language as if its grammar mirrored that of Latin. The Bishops’ version of the lines cited above shows immediately the greater transparency of less Latinate syntax: He therefore that ministreth to you the spirite, and worketh myracles among you, doeth hee it through the deedes of the Lawe, or by hearing of the faith? (Gal. 3:5) But he which was of the bonde woman, was borne after the flesh: but he which was of the free woman was borne by promise. (Gal. 4:23; italics in the original)

In the first of these lines, two individual words seem significant, neither of which has anything to do with syntax: “ministreth” (for tribuit ) suggests a more ancillary role for the official than does “giveth”; “deedes” for “workes” (operibus ) alludes to what William Rainolds dismisses as “this new solifidian gospel” (Refutation 424). The syntactical differences between the two versions are more subtle: the Bishops’ version provides the main clause (“doeth he it”) with the first of the two coordinated prepositional phrases rather than with the second and so clarifies the link

90

J. H. FERGUSON

between them. In the second example, the Bishops’ Bible repeats the verb “was borne” in the second of the two clauses, marking the insertion with roman type in an otherwise italic text. This recalls Coverdale’s comment, in the preface to his diglot New Testament, concerning “the figure called Eclipsis [sic], diverse tymes used in the scriptures, the which though she do garnysh the sentence in latyn, yet wyll not so be admitted in other tunges.”40 The insertion in Bishops’ is clearly intended to compensate for the syntactical difference between Latin and English, differences that the Rheims New Testament ignores. Contemporary writers were acutely aware of such semantic differences and of the stakes involved. Fulke’s 1589 tome, setting out the entirety of both the Bishops’ and the Rheims New Testaments in parallel columns, elaborates massively a critical awareness of biblical semantics that is already evident in the polemical writings of Martin, Fulke, and others.41 As for the stakes involved, biblical English was subject to what Martin calls “Machiavel’s politic rules” (Defense 254): the political effectiveness rather than adherence to principle of those with the power to determine biblical usage. With regard to the words priest and elder, for example, Martin contends that the Protestants deliberately manipulated the language of the New Testament: “Because yourselves have them whom you call bishops, the name ‘bishops’ is in your English bibles; which otherwise by your own rule of translation should be called an ‘overseer’ or ‘superintendent’. … Only ‘priests’ must be turned contemptuously out of the text of the holy scriptures, and ‘elders’ put in their place, because you have no priests, nor will none of them, and because that is in controversy between us” (Defense 254). As Lucy Munro puts it, about a similar passage written by William Rainolds, “when the [Protestant] translators alter words they signal their intention to do away with the things themselves.”42 Fulke in turn accuses the Roman Catholics of “abusive acception [sic] and sounding of the English word ‘priest’ and ‘priesthood’” (253): “That ‘our christian forefathers’ ears were not acquainted with the name of “elders,”’ it was because the name of priest in their time sounded according to the etymology, and not according to the corruption of the papists” (244). Fulke and Martin agree that the forging of biblical English has political motivations and political consequences. Fulke’s publication of juxtaposed New Testament translations provided readers with a systematic comparison of Protestant and Roman Catholic versions of biblical English. The enormous stakes involved in these textual comparisons induce a correspondingly acute awareness of the capacity of

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

91

biblical translations to shape the language.43 As happens in the earlier polemics between More and Tyndale, Elizabethan polemics concerning the Latinate English of the Rheims New Testament turn ideas about religion into ideas about language. From Bishop Gardiner’s proposed revisions of the Bishops’ Bible forward, English Roman Catholic translators of the Bible and their defenders pose a challenge to the semantic and grammatical integrity of the Elizabethan vernacular: as they subordinate English to Latin, so they would subordinate the English church to the Roman papacy. The Protestants’ consistent rejection of Latinate English, on the other hand, betokens the autonomy or independence of the English Church from Rome, even as these Protestants qualify this autonomy through a greater openness to the historicity of language in general. English borrowings were thus subject to strenuous interrogation in the realm of biblical translation, where the integrity of English vis-à-vis Latin acts as a proxy for the ecclesiastical autonomy of the English Church from Rome. What do treatments of secular borrowings have in common with these religious discussions? Traditional critical accounts of the “inkhorn controversy” describe an impoverished English increased by a stream of borrowings through the early and middle part of the sixteenth century until the English language reached a kind of fullness or self-sufficiency, at which point the flow of borrowings slowed down.44 Such accounts imply that the volume of borrowings reflects the practical needs of vernacular expressiveness and copiousness; they leave out the challenge posed by the inkhorn to the linguistic and ecclesiastical integrity of English—the convergence of language and church out of which the very term emerges in Bale’s Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe. Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson, John Cheke, Ralph Lever, George Puttenham, and Richard Mulcaster associate foreign borrowings in general, and Latinate English in particular, with the subordination of English to foreign languages so controversial in the context of biblical translation. Resistance to the inkhorn, to the subordination of English to other languages, and to Latin in particular, flows in part from debates about biblical English.45 These biblical debates thus contribute to defining the expressive capacities of early modern English. Sir Thomas Elyot is an early promoter of the sixteenth-century English vernacular, which he aims to enhance through foreign borrowings. In much the same terms as Richard Sherry uses in his Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, Elyot, in the Boke Named the Governour (1531), describes his contributions both to English “plentie of … mater” and to English

92

J. H. FERGUSON

“plentie of words.”46 A characteristic feature of the prose of the Governor is Elyot’s pairing of borrowed and more familiar terms, “neologistic couplets.”47 Many of these pairings imply that the borrowing conveys more “mater” than any single English term: e.g., “leuigate and made more tolerable” (16), “gestes and actis martial” (30). Often Elyot’s Greek and Latin borrowings require lengthy English paraphrase: “cosmographie, called in englisshe the discription of the worlde” (30); “Paedia Cyri, whiche may be interpreted the Childehode or discipline of Cyrus” (45); “De officiis, whereunto yet is no proper englisshe worde to be gyven; but to provide for it some maner of exposition, it may be sayde in this fourme: ‘Of the dueties and maners appertaynynge to men’” (47). Such pairings imply the greater expressiveness of the foreign tongues. Elyot looks to bring in foreign words that are more expressive than their English equivalents, but he also admits borrowings merely to increase the store of English synonyms (“plentie of wordes”). Many of Elyot’s pairings gloss a single borrowed with a single familiar word: “office or duetie” (14), “enseignment or teaching” (15), “preeminence and estimation” (16), “adminiculation or aide” (17), “comodiouse or pleasant” (18), “lacivious and unclene” (20), “facile and easy” (22), “resemblance or similitude” (23), “inclined or disposed,” “delectation or appetite” (24), “entrelased and mixte” (25), “wrathe or furie” (26), “anguisshe and dolour” (27), “ouerthrewe and vainquisshed” (30), “simulachre or image,” “stained or embrued” (31), “argument or matter” (33), “desire and coveite” (36), “enserche and perceive” (37), “apte and propise” (38), “easy and covenable” (43), “hostes or armyes” (45), among many others.48 This latter category raises a question: if the borrowed term can be matched with an existing English synonym, what gains the English lexicon by the borrowing?49 Elyot’s aim here is amplify the sheer verbal copia of English. Elyot’s efforts to champion the English vernacular emphasize “the insufficincie of our owne language” (2), an insufficiency that leads Elyot to supply his native tongue with new words, as we have seen, but also leads him to subordinate English semantics to Latin. The first matter discussed in the Governour, the definitions of two terms, “publike” and “weale,” is representative of Eliot’s linguistic concerns throughout the book. The former word, “publike,” Elyot calls “borrowed of the latin tonge” (2); the latter term, “weale,” Elyot associates with one of the senses he gives the Latin term res, namely “profite” (1). Of the two terms that define one of the basic themes of the book, then, one is borrowed

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

93

from the Latin lexicon and the other defined as if it belonged to that lexicon. Elyot also takes pains in this first chapter to distinguish between “publike weale” and “commune weale,” which opposition he identifies with that between the Latin terms “res publica” and “res plebia,” using an opposition between Latin terms to define his pair of English terms. Here and throughout the Governour, Elyot defines English terms as if they belonged to the Latin lexicon. Elyot does evoke English usage (“our dayly communication” or “sayenge”) but only to confirm his grounding of English words in Latin semantics: in the countrey, at a cessions or other assembly, if no gentyl men be there at, the sayenge is that there was none but the communaltie, whiche proveth in myn oppinion that Plebs in latin is in englisshe communaltie. (2)

Elyot does not acknowledge the possibility that usage might legitimately carry an English term away from Latin semantics, that English usage might possess autonomy vis-à-vis Latin. He does elsewhere in the treatise recognize the power of usage: looking for a term to describe subordinate authorities, Elyot settles on governours, “apropriatynge, to the soveraignes, names of kynges and princes, sens of a longe custome these names in commune fourme of speakynge be in a higher preeminence and estimation than governours” (16). Nevertheless, Elyot does not allow English “custome” or “commune fourme of speakyng” to override Latin precedent. Elyot is determined to supply English in both “mater” and “words,” but his enthusiasm for his foreign verbal donors brings him to subordinate English to Greek and, especially, Latin precedents. Elyot expands the English lexis at the expense of English integrity. Writing concurrently with the polemics between More and Tyndale, Elyot does not associate his linguistic ideas with matters of religion, and Elyot seems throughout his career to have maintained a relatively nondoctrinal humanism in public life. He would seem to belong to the period in England, as Cathy Shrank writes, “when national identity was only just beginning to be drawn along confessional lines.”50 Nevertheless, his implicit undermining of the autonomy of the English language, especially vis-à-vis Latin, recalls the linguistic-ecclesiastic questions at stake in the More-Tyndale polemics and, more pointedly, in the arguments about Latinate English in the translation of Scripture of the decades following.

94

J. H. FERGUSON

The most common alternative to foreign borrowings in the expansion of the early modern English lexis is the recourse to archaism.51 In the Proheme to the Governour, Elyot refers obliquely to this pair of options: “I knowe well ynowghe dyuers do delyte to haue theyr garmentes of the facion of other countreyes, and that whiche is mooste playne is unplesant: but yet it doth happen sometyme that one man beynge in auctorytie or fauour of his prince, beinge sene to weare somme thing of the old facion: for the stangenes therof it is taken up ageine with many good felowes. What I doo meane euery wyse man perceyueth” (9–10). Sir John Cheke, in his dedicatory letter to Thomas Hoby’s Book of the Courtier (1561), refers to the same pair of alternatives, antiquated and foreign English, with a clear preference for the former: after announcing that “our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges,” Cheke writes that “if either the mould of our own tung could serve us to fascion a woord of our own, or if the old denisoned wordes could content and ease this neede, we wold not boldly venture of unknownen wordes.”52 The desire to maintain the “unmixt and unmangeled” integrity of our own English helps to explain Cheke’s and others’ recourse to archaism. Roughly the first half of the Forespeache to Ralph Lever’s Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft (1576) sets out to “proue that the arte of Reasoning may be taught in englishe.”53 In line with this pedagogical idea, Lever emphasizes the dependence of new matter on new words: one cannot, for Lever, introduce novel philosophical content without introducing new English vocabulary. About both such new concepts and words, Lever writes, “though these rules and termes seme harde at the first: (as all strange and unacquainted things doe) yet use shall make them easye” (sig. **ir ). Lever imagines that his readers will accommodate themselves in the same way and at the same pace to both the philosophical content and his neologisms. Instead of borrowing words from other languages, as does Elyot, Lever draws on the native resources of the language through a combination of compounding and archaism. Unlike Elyot’s neologisms, Lever’s reinforce rather than undermine the integrity of his native tongue. When, two years after the publication of the Governour, Elyot reflects on the reception of that book in the proheme to Of the Knowledge Which Maketh a Wise Man (1533), he emphasizes the scornful reaction of those “offended (as they say) with my strange termes,” with which Elyot “intended to augment our Englyshe tongue, whereby men shulde

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

95

as well expresse more abundantly the thynge that they conceyued in theyr hartis (wherefore language was ordeyned) hauynge wordes apte for the purpose.”54 Ralph Lever, by contrast, very deliberately avoids “inkhorne termes deriued of straunge and forain languages” in favor of “new termes compounded of true english words” (sig. **vir ). Lever describes the choice of vocabulary this way: An arte is to be taughte in that toung, in whiche it was neuer written afore. Nowe the question lyeth, whether it were better to borrowe termes of some other toung, in whiche this sayde Arte hath bene written: and by a litle chaunge of pronouncing, to seeke to make them Englishe wordes, whiche are none in deede: or else simple usual wordes, to make compounded termes, whose seuerall partes considered alone, are familiar and knowne to all english men? For trial hereof, I wish you to aske of an english man, who understandeth neither Greek nor Latin, what he conceiueth in his mind, when he heareth this word a backset, and what he doth conceiue when he heareth this terme a Predicate. (sig. **vv –vir )

Beginning from the assumption that “that our languge hath no words fitte to expresse the rules of this Arte” (sig. *iiiir .), Lever has to decide between two kinds of neologisms, neither of which will be immediately comprehensible to his readers. Lever takes for granted the inadequacy of existing English vocabulary. His question, or dilemma, concerns not adequacy but integrity: should the neologisms required in a translation like his be devised from domestic materials or foreign? Lever assumes that his readership consists primarily of the unlearned: his learned readers could be expected to recognize a term like predicate, while neither the learned nor the unlearned would immediately comprehend backset. The choice is between neologisms entirely unfamiliar to English readers and those whose constituent parts at least are “familiar and knowne to all english men.”55 These neologisms notwithstanding, Lever remains as close to familiar English usage as possible: “men by consent of speache, frame and deuise new names, fit to make knowen their strange devises” (sig. *iiiiv ). He acknowledges the force of usage and then, as few others in the period do, describes the means by which usage is altered: “no man is of power to change or to make a language when he will: but when fit names are deuised and spoken, they force the hearers to like of them and to use them: and so do they by consent of manye, growe to a speache” (sig. *viv -viir ). This notion, that the “fit name” forces its way into usage, of

96

J. H. FERGUSON

course begs the question: what is fit? Lever associates verbal fitness with propriety and truth in such a way as to give his neologizing a nationalist thrust: We therefore, that deuise understandable termes, compounded of true & auncient english wordes, do rather maintain and continue the antiquitie of our mother tongue: then they, that with inkhorne termes do chaunge and corrupt the same, making a mingle mangle of their native speache, and not observing the propertie thereof. (sig. *viv )

That which needs protecting from corruption in this passage is the integrity of “true English,” which Lever identifies with “antiquitie.” As in so many sixteenth-century comments on neologisms, the basic contrast is between ancient English and the foreign. Lever is optimistic about the progress of English learning: “learning did neuer so flourishe in England in our forefathers dayes, as it doth now, and hathe done of late, euen since men haue begon to write of Artes in our englishe tongue” (sig. *viiv ). On the assumption that new ideas require new words, Lever uses the occasion of introducing his Arte to emphasize the resources available to the English language for native neologisms. In addition to the antiquity of the language, Lever also emphasizes the particular appropriateness of the basic elements of English for use in constructing new words: As for deuising of newe termes, and compounding of wordes, our tongue hath a speciall grace, wherein it excelleth many other, & is comparable with the best. The cause is, for that the moste parte of Englyshe wordes, are shorte, and stande on one sillable a piece. So that two or three of them are ofte times fitly ioyned in one. (sig. *vr−v )

Lever’s underlying assumption is that “straunge and inckhorne termes…proue not directly, that there is anye lacke in oure language” (sig. *iiiiv ), since English vocabulary contains within itself the constituent parts for the neologisms needed to advance learning in English. Lever and Elyot are similarly committed to advancing the semantic reach of the English vernacular; they differ on the question that divided More and Tyndale: namely, the question of the autonomy or integrity of English vis-à-vis foreign, especially Roman, influence. Lever, a Marian exile with puritan inclinations, sides with Tyndale.

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

97

Nearly a half-century prior to Shakespeare’s parody of inkhorn language in the character of the “fantastical Spaniard,” Armado, Thomas Wilson published, in his Art of Rhetoric (1553/1560), a similar satirical portrait under the title, “A Letter Devised by a Lincolnshire Man for a Paid Benefice to a Gentleman That Then Waited upon the Lord Chancellor for the Time Being.” The letter, labeled “An ynkehorne letter” in the margins of the 1553 edition, comes in the middle of the first section of Book Three, the section on “plainness.” In context, the letter marks the culmination of an attack on “strange inkhorn terms,” “outlandish English,” and other means of “counterfeiting the king’s English”: “French English,” and “English Italianated”; the language of the “fine courtier,” who “will talk nothing but Chaucer”; the “mystical wise men,” who “will speak nothing but quaint proverbs and blind allegories”; the pretenders to learning who “Latin their tongues.”56 Wilson is not against borrowing per se: “whereas words be received, as well Greek as Latin, to set forth our meaning in the English language, either for lack of store or else because we would enrich the language, it is well done to use them.” Only, borrowings and neologisms in general are subject to the dictates of customary English usage: “no man therein can be charged for any affectation when all others are agreed to follow the same way.” Insisting that “words be accommodated to the place in which they are written or spoken and that they do not displace more familiar and proper terms,” Wilson, as Catherine Nicholson writes, “establishes England as the necessary measure of eloquence in the vernacular.”57 One of the terms used in the letter, prerogative (“such illustrate prerogative and dominical superiority” [189]), is the heading of an important chapter in Mulcaster’s Elementarie, discussed below; the same word is used a bare two pages further in Wilson’s own text: “the ‘king’s prerogative’ declareth his power royal above all others” (191). Prerogative is amusingly inappropriate in the letter and appropriate in Wilson’s phrase “king’s prerogative” not for the word itself but because in the context of the letter the term belongs to a pattern of using “such words as few men do use, or us[ing] them out of place, when another might serve much better.” The strangeness and outlandishness of language about which Wilson complains are relative to the standard of customary usage—in accord with Wilson’s models, particularly Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace. This point echoes a passage from the opening pages of the Rhetoric, in a section called “The End of Rhetoric,” where Wilson cites Gellius (Noctes atticae 1.10.4) on “overold” words (46). Unlike Elyot and Lever,

98

J. H. FERGUSON

Wilson does not choose between the archaic and the foreign but measures both by a single standard: customary English usage—the same principle of the “commune fourme of speakyng” that Elyot discounts in favor of the dictates of Latin semantics. In confirmation of Cathy Shrank’s association of the Rhetoric with an “overtly antipapist mood,”58 Wilson’s treatment of borrowings does not concern the adequacy or inadequacy of the English language but its autonomy. Discussing English borrowings in the chapter “Of Language” in his Art of English Poesy (1589), George Puttenham begins to adjudicate between appropriate and inappropriate borrowings in his own text: “peradventure the writer hereof be in that behalf no less faulty then any other, using many strange and unaccustomed words and borrowed from other languages.”59 Words about words quickly turn to Puttenham’s words about Puttenham’s words: “Ye find also this word idiom, taken from the Greeks yet serving aptly when a man wanteth to express so much unless it be in two words, which surplusage to avoid, we are allowed to draw in other words single and as much significative. This word significative is borrowed of the Latin and French, but to us brought in first by some nobleman’s secretary, as I think, yet doth so well serve the turn, as it could not now be spared” (231). Puttenham’s commentary on language seems on the point of quite catching up with the words he is using. Such reflexivity is characteristic of the sophistication reached by English writers in the 1580s, in the wake of several decades of religious and secular attention to the medium. The editors of the 1936-edition of Puttenham’s Art suggest that Wilson’s book “may well have inspired Puttenham to do for the poet what Wilson had done for the prose writer.”60 Puttenham writes that the ability to speak is natural, while the form taken by speech is purely conventional: “Speech is not natural to man saving for his only ability to speak” (228). Speech therefore is defined by convention, “fully fashioned to the common understanding and accepted by consent of a whole country and nation” (228). Puttenham lists “usurped Latin and French” words, some appropriate, because “well expressing the matter, and more than our English word,” and some inappropriate, with no reason given (231–32). He refers the question about appropriate and inappropriate borrowings to the passage from Horace’s Ars poetica concerning the power and mutability of custom in determining verbal usage. Instead of choosing between foreign borrowings and archaisms, Puttenham, like Wilson, submits both to the dictates of common usage: “Our maker [poet] therefore at these

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

99

days shall not follow Piers Plowman nor Gower nor Lydgate nor yet Chaucer, for their language is now out of use with us”; nor should the writer employ “inkhorn terms so ill affected, brought in by men of learning, as preachers and schoolmasters, and many strange terms of other languages by secretaries and merchants and travelers, and many dark words and not usual nor well sounding” (229–330; my emphasis). By assigning control over foreign borrowings to English customary usage, Puttenham and Wilson emphasize the autonomy of English semantics. Like Elyot in the Governour, Puttenham borrows both to verbalize new things in English and to say more efficiently with “words single” what can be said only with “surplasage” in English (231). Unlike Elyot, however, who defines English terms as if they belonged to the Latin lexicon, Puttenham refers English terms to the particularities of English semantics. For example, Puttenham uses the borrowed terms scientific “with some reason, for it answereth the word mechanical, which no other word could have done so properly, for when he [Puttenham himself] spake of all artificers which rest either in science or in handicraft, it followed necessarily that scientific should be coupled with mechanical, or else neither of both to have been allowed but in their places: a man of science liberal and a handicraftsman, which had not been so cleanly a speech as the other” (230). For Puttenham, then, the word scientific belongs to a relational pair with mechanical: each is defined by opposition with the other. This relational pairing allows both borrowed terms to communicate their meanings more effectively (in a more “cleanly” fashion) than their bulkier native equivalents in the phrase: “a man of science liberal and a handicraftsman.” As in Thomas More’s critique of William Tyndale’s conflation of Latin and English usage, so here, in service of a very different argument, verbal meaning depends not on abstract equivalence between words and things but on the places words occupy relative to each other in their respective lexicons. Puttenham’s appeal to the English lexicon as the locus in which English meanings are formed has the effect of validating the semantic autonomy of English. Although Richard Mulcaster’s immediate topic in his First Part of the Elementarie (1582) is English orthography, this topic leads to a much broader discussion of the English language.61 Published in the same year as the Rheims New Testament and Gregory Martin’s accompanying attack on Protestant English Bibles, the Elementarie has in common with these and other Elizabethan biblical polemics a preoccupation with the rivalry between English and Latin: in the passage most often cited from the

100

J. H. FERGUSON

Elementarie, Mulcaster writes: “I love Rome, but London better, I favor Italie, but England more, I honor the Latin, but worship the English.”62 Mulcaster treats the question of English borrowings much more comprehensively and with more nuance than the other secular writers discussed in this chapter. Mulcaster is the first Elizabethan writer on the English language to give serious consideration to both customary usage and innovation.63 Broadly reflective of Elizabethan consensus in both secular and religious matters, Mulcaster’s balanced account undergirds his larger argument about the status relationship between English and Latin.64 Mulcaster’s treatment of what he calls “enfranchisement,” the naturalization of foreign words, begins pragmatically. The English must spend an inordinate amount of time “lingring about language,” i.e., learning the grammar of foreign languages, since, as Mulcaster writes, “our own tung remaineth but poor, and is kept verie low, thorough some reasonable superstition, not to haue learning in it” (52).65 Mulcaster here announces the need to translate learning into English, so as to save the time of young scholars who at present spend too much time on grammar; he also acknowledges that doubts about such translations are reasonable, presumably because the language does indeed lack words for many of the ideas that such translators would need to express. This is the context for Mulcaster’s call to “fine” (i.e., refine) the English language: “doth it not I praie you, shew us Englishmen a verie great pleasur, if it help to the fining of our own English tung, & thereby to make it to be of such account, as other tungs be, which be therefor of best account, bycause theie be so fined?” (50). In accord with this argument, Mulcaster makes the oft repeated point about the relativity of linguistic stature: “our naturall tung being as beneficiall unto us for our nedefull deliverie, as anie other is to the peple which use it: & having as pretie, and as fair observations in it, as anie other hath: and being as readie to yeild to anie rule of Art, as anie other is: why should I not take som pains, to find out the right writing of ours, as other cuntrimen have done, to find the like in theirs?” (53). Mulcaster makes clear in his Peroration that this point about the basic equality of all languages applies beyond orthography: “No one tung is more fine then other naturallie, but by industrie of the speaker, which upon occasion offered by the kinde of government wherein he liveth, endevoreth himself to garnish it with eloquence, & to enrich it with learning” (25366 ). All tongues being equal at the level of expressive potential, all are equally susceptible to refinement and equally receptive to learning. Indeed, part of Mulcaster’s

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

101

rationale for discussions in the Elementarie “that be not for children,” for discussions that exceed points of elementary education, is to “se how our English tung will plaie with these arguments, which ar thought so uncouth [unfamiliar], and not expressible in our tung” (61). Mulcaster begins his account of “enfranchisement” with a striking, if mixed, metaphor: “our tung semeth to have two heds, the one homeborn, the other a stranger” (153). These two heads correspond to two kinds of “occasions” for speech, “home occasions” and “new occasions” (154). In Mulcaster’s homespun, as long as the English restricted themselves to domestic occasions, they “desired no help of foren tungs.” Mulcaster assumes, however, that “all our learning [is] fet from the foren” (51), and that foreign knowledge needs foreign words: “when the mind is fraught with matter to deliver … it seketh both home helps, where theie be sufficient, and significant, and where the own home yeildeth nothing at all, or not pithie enough, it craveth help of that tung, from whence it received the matter of deliverie” (154). In this narrative, foreign borrowings are no source of shame but are “common to all those [languages], which use anie speche in matters more than ordinarie, naie in matters above the brutish.” Mulcaster estimates that such borrowings constitute “one third part of our hole speche” (226), and he identifies the borrowings among the more than 7,500 words in the word-list at the end of the Elementarie (170–225).67 Mulcaster accepts such borrowings positively: “The necessitie of these foren words must nedes be verie great bycause the number of them is so verie manie” (226). He is even grateful toward foreign lenders and humble about the capacity of English to reciprocate: “we are much beholden [to borrowings], for that theie vouchsafe to be com English to serve our nede, as their peple ar to thank our tung, for returning the like help, in cases of like nedes, tho their occasions to use ours be nothing so often, as ours to use theirs.” This is a far cry from the linguistic nationalism of Lever and Cheke. Echoing Puttenham, Mulcaster turns his discussion of borrowing back on itself, as a way of illustrating the compromise between foreign and domestic norms in his own language: “In this verie chapter of enfranchisment, tho I do not affect anie extraordinarie forenism, yet how manie foreners am I constaned to use? Verie, chapter, enfranchisement, affect, extraordinarie, foren, forenism, constrained, use, in this last sentence do easilie prove, that it were to[o] foren from the matter, to seke examples of foren words” (156). Mulcaster’s taste for heavy-handed word play aside, he points to the inevitability of borrowings: if the word foreign itself is

102

J. H. FERGUSON

foreign, the English will require recourse to borrowings to write about borrowings.68 Mulcaster provides practical and flexible terms for the naturalization of foreign words, “rules … how to square [foreign words] to the use of those which will borrow them” (259). Mulcaster portrays borrowing as a negotiation between the “substance of [foreign] words” and the “frame of our speche”; when this negotiation is successful, writes Mulcaster, “it maie appear both whence theie [foreign words] com, and to whom theie com.” Mulcaster views this negotiation in political terms: “the words that ar so enfranchised, becom bond to the rules of our writing … as the stranger denisons be to the lawes of our cuntrie” (154–55).69 “Enfranchise” here bears both the sense naturalize and its other contemporary meaning, liberate: words are enfranchised from one language and bound to another70 : thus, as Mulcaster writes, while “the learned enfranchiser maie somtime yeild to[o] much to the foren … the verie natur of enfranchisement doth enforce obedience to the enfranchisers lawes, not to be measured by his bare person [the ‘substance’ of the foreign word], but by the custom, reason, & sound, of his cuntries speche” (155). Mulcaster thus requires that foreign borrowings “wear our colors” (226), though this requirement depends on the length of the foreign words’ stay in English: “If we mean to use them but for a time, or to som end the premunition [forewarning] will be our warrant. If we mean to make them ours, then let them take an othe to be trew to our tung, and the ordinances thereof” (156). Mulcaster treats borrowing as a negotiation between two tongues and insists that this negotiation varies according to context. While Mulcaster finds “shew of learning,” learned affectation, behind yielding too much to foreign forms, still he argues that “the common men ought to yeild therein to the use of those that be learned,” for fear that the unlearned will “misse as foulie in the writing of them, as theie use them madlie, in mistaking their meaning” (155–56). Mulcaster here echoes his earlier discussion about the entrance of foreign subject matter with foreign languages: only the learned will be in a position appropriately to naturalize these new words. He cites the word philosophie, which spelling he calls “to much upon the foren,” preferring the more native filoso[p]hie. In his General Table, he brackets ten words beginning with /ph/ with the marginal question, “why not all these with f?” (three of which are repeated in the same Table spelled with /f/ [189, 190, 206]). About this kind of orthographic decision, Mulcaster writes that the learned must not “think it strange to write foren Englished terms after an

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

103

English ear, tho it be contrarie to his acquaintance, seing it is not contrarie to the cusom of his cuntrie” (157). In his capacity as a learned adjudicator, Mulcaster opposes accepted spelling in defense of native English phonetic custom. Among the more conservative orthographers, Mulcaster objects to the addition to, or modification of, the existing English alphabet: “if the other so estemed tungs…did deliver them selves by other means, then either by altering, or by innovating, or by encreasing their characts, and made the stuf of their own custom, to be stear [steered?] of their direction, as this method will shew, why should we desire to seke foren means, and impertinent to our tung, by devise of new forge, having such a pattern to perfit our writing, by a so well warrented president?” (62). Mulcaster here relies on the notion, discussed earlier in his text, that all tongues are created equal, in proposing that orthographic custom, or “president,” should have the same binding force in English as it has had in the more celebrated languages: “we ar as well … bound to our generall custom, for the artificiall notes of our naturall tung, as anie other peple is, to anie other language, whether auncient in books, or modern in speche” (100). Like Wilson and Puttenham, Mulcaster argues that “the English tung hath in it self sufficient matter to work her own artificiall direction” (77). Mulcaster here links explicitly a language’s self-sufficiency with that the authority of that language’s customary usage, a connection implied but not stated outright by the other writers discussed in this chapter.71 In order to argue that that which is customary is not therefore alien to reason, Mulcaster distinguishes between custom and “corruption in use” (73).72 Against radical orthographic reform, Mulcaster sets out a considered and resonant defense of custom. Mulcaster’s radical opponents, who “seme to seke the reforming” of English orthography, call custom “a vile corrupter” and call for a return to bare sound, “as the onelie soverain, and surest leader in the government of writing: & [they] fly to innovation, as the onelie mean, to reform all errors, that be in our writing” (83–84). This reforming innovation, in favor of what Mulcaster elsewhere calls the “primitive letter” (94) purportedly lying beneath accumulated custom, recalls Protestant, perhaps particularly Puritan, priorities—an association reinforced, in Mulcaster’s account, by the breadth of these reformers’ assault on custom: “In their quarell to custom theie seke to bring in into generall hatred, as a common corrupter of all good things, and that naturallie, without anie exception” (84).

104

J. H. FERGUSON

In explaining why no previous effort at orthographic reform has succeeded, Mulcaster makes one of his most important contributions on custom, a topic with valence in both language theory and religion. Mulcaster defends custom against those who attack it “as a most pernicious enemie to truth and right, even in that thing [i.e., writing], where custom hath most right” (79),73 whereas, for example, “Quintilians custom is no corrupter” (95). Mulcaster cites Quintilian’s description of custom not as “the frute of a multitude” but as that “wherein the skilfull and best learned do agre” (85). Custom, according to Mulcaster, has suffered from a conflation, has taken on a “duble name” encompassing two very different phenomena: “theie, which accuse custom do mean false error, which counterfeateth custom, and is a great captain among the impudent for naughtinesse, and the ignorant for rashnesse, and yet directeth all the most. And theie that praise custom do mean plain truth, which cannot dissemble, which is companion with the honest in vertew, and with the learned in cunning, and directeth all the best” (86).74 Quintilian understood custom positively in associating it with the “learned” and the “best,” while those who misunderstand it associate it exclusively with the “ignorant,” the “most.”75 Mulcaster seems to include a concession about the limited purview of custom in his defense: “custom certainlie in a matter of speche, is a great and a naturall governour, tho in other things it maie sometimes seme to be a sore usurper” (86). This apparent concession only leads, however, to recapitulation of Mulcaster’s point: “yet good autors will hardlie graunt that, which still fre custom from all offensive note, both in words and dedes, bycause theie ground custom not upon error in depravation at the last: but upon iudgement, in direction from the first” (86). In language, as in other matters, for Mulcaster the “natural” or true custom is that custom which is “right and reasonable”; custom as the “common confusion in practis of the most, and least iudiciall people” belongs to a different category (87). Mulcaster portrays an antipathy toward custom that exceeds the bounds of orthography: opponents of custom claim that “there is nothing in custom, but an hell of most vile, and filthie corruptions: that it alone infecteth all good things: that it alone corrupteth right writing” (85). Mulcaster could be a critic of radical Protestantism when he describes these critics’ proposed “act of reformation” as “a strange point of physik, when the remedie it self is more dangerous then the disease” (97). Like conservative critics of Protestantism, Mulcaster charges these orthographic reformers with setting “privat mens conceits” over the “so long,

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

105

and so lawfull” determinations of custom” (98), “privat fantsie before generall use” (101). This attack on custom would seem to go far beyond the scope and terms of the argument about spelling reform that is the ostensible subject.76 As if to substantiate the sense that this argument about orthographic usages extends beyond spelling reform, Mulcaster asks rhetorically about the ramifications of the radicals’ proposals: “were it not a wonderfull wish, even but to wish that all our English scriptur & divinitie, all our lawes and pollicie, all our evidence & writings were pend anew” (98). Without quite saying that the orthographic argument functions as a proxy for larger disputes, Mulcaster does suggest that the very conditions of writing are at stake in arguments concerning the authority of custom.77 Mulcaster here strikes a compromise that echoes the political and religious terms of the Elizabethan Settlement: “when the custom of your cuntrie alloweth this as best, and therefor fittest for hir perpetuall service, doth she not then tell you, by severing hir own general [rule], that she saw your speciall? For how could choice have taken place, if both the extremities had not bene in sight?” (101). Mulcaster is intent on rejecting proponents of pure principle against historical precedent: “I know som men which have contraried all our latin grammer rules, as not so generallie trew that waie, which theie are used, but even as trew of the contrarie side, bycause theie have som examples in the tung, repugnant as theie think to the rules, which be given. Whose error is in that theie do not consider, that our commonlie so, and not their allwaie so, is right in such cases” (101–02). These “som men” favor the purity of principle over the flexibility of actual practice, despite the fact that the learned understand that “this commonlie so, is the onelie right in writing and speaking,” and “the unlearned also in their dailie experience, maie well perceive, that the thing is so by the liking and misliking, by the rising and decaing of sundrie words, and phrases of speche, in their ordinarie dealings” (102). Mulcaster balances this defense of linguistic custom through acknowledgment of what he calls the “prerogative” of language: “a quiksilver in custom, ever stirring, and never staied” (159). Paradoxically, Mulcaster begins his discussion of the quickening spirit of linguistic change by celebrating linguistic stasis. He defines, with great specificity, what moderns would come to call the “classic” period in the development of a language: “those men, which will give anie certain direction for the writing of anie tung … must take some period in the tung, or else their rules will prove unrulie. For everie tung hath a certain ascent from the meanest to

106

J. H. FERGUSON

the height, and a discent again from the height to the meanest” (157). Mulcaster associates this period, when a language has “com to the assurance of note,” with Demosthenes’ Greece and Cicero’s Rome, a position very familiar from the so-called Ciceronian debates. Neither of these classic periods would have survived without writing, according to Mulcaster, since spoken languages are ever changing: “if learned writing had not commended [the Greek of Demosthenes and the Latin of Cicero] to the tuition of books, theie had ben of smal worth, naie of no remembrance, long before this daie: as the spoken tungs of the same soils beginning in their daies to change, be now quite altered” (157). Mulcaster summarizes this point by means of a familiar contrast between bookish and spoken language: “[b]ooks give life where bodies bring but death.” For Mulcaster, however, this “death,” the perishability of non-written language, turns out to mean the possession of the “soulish substance in everie spoken tung, which fedeth … change” (158). The “life” or imperishability granted by writing comes at the expense of this quickening spirit: “if anie tung be absolute, and fre from motion, it is shrined up in books, and not ordinarie in use, but made immortall by the register of memorie” (158). “To be immortal,” as Judith H. Anderson writes of this passage, “is also in human terms to be dead.”78 Having defended the force of custom extensively in previous chapters, Mulcaster here marks the limits of its authority: “som not verie well advised peple, esteme as an error, and a privat misuse contrarie to custom, bycause it semes to be a verie imperious controller, but theie ar deceived. For in dede this prerogative, tho it chek generall conclusions, thorough privat oppositions, yet that opposition came not of privat men, but it is a privat thing it self, and the verie life blood.” Whatever value for the purpose of imitation Mulcaster assigns to the classic state toward which languages ascend, living languages are dynamic: Mulcaster’s prerogative “preserveth tungs in their naturall best from the first time that theie grew to account, till theie com to decaie, & a new period growen, different from the old, tho excellent in the altered kinde, and yet it self to depart, and make roum for another, when the circular turn shall have ripened alteration.” For the anti-Ciceronian Mulcaster, the cost of being a living language is mutability: “Bycause no banks can kepe it in so strait, bycause no strength can withstand such a stream, bycause no vessell can hold such a liquor, but onelie those banks which in flowing ar content to be somtimes overrun, onelie those staies which in furie of water will bend like a bulrush, onelie that vessell which in holding of the humor, will receive som it self, as allowing of the relice [release]” (161).

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

107

Mulcaster’s balance between custom and mutability (prerogative) informs his portrayal of the relationship between English and Latin in the Peroration to the Elementarie. The section of the Peroration “of the English tung & the penning in English” (253,79 side note) begins by responding to an imagined attack on his decision to write in English: “we should neither write of anie philosophicall argument, nor philosophicallie or anie slight argument in our English tung, bycause the unlearned understand it not, the learned esteme it not, as a thing of difficultie to the one, and no delite to the other” (253). This objection brings Mulcaster to recapitulate his general ideas on language, with several new points made along the way. “No one tung is more fine then other naturallie” (253*)—this point, made earlier in the text, supports Mulcaster’s assertion that learning can be translated from any one language into any other without modification. Thus “the learned tungs [are] so termd for their store” and not for any intrinsic quality, and Roman writers translated “these same arguments which theie had from the foren … whereat we wonder so.” These are commonplaces in the period, but Mulcaster goes on to propose an original comparison between the Latin of ancient Rome and the Latin of his own day: “there was nothing somuch learning in the latin tung, while the Romane florished, as at this daie is in it by the industrie of students, thoroughout all Europe, who use the latin tung, as a common mean, of their generall deliverie.” The choice between Latin and English is thus a choice between two modern languages, one foreign and one domestic: “the question is not to disgrace the Latin, but to grace our own. And why more a stranger in honour with us, then our own peple…?” (257–58). The English “students” to whom Mulcaster refers are enriching the Latin language at the expense of their own. In Mulcaster’s formulation, the choice between Latin and English involves a fierce competition between languages equal in their natures. The “learned tungs, tho chieflie the Latin” have two advantages: “the knowledge, which is registered in them [and] the conference, which the learned of Europe, do commonli use by them, both in speaking and writing” (253*-54). As for “the knowledge, which is registered in them,” Mulcaster describes the transmission of knowledge from one language to another as fluid; he refuses to allow any permanent association between any particular language and the knowledge that has been accumulated in it: “I confesse their [learned languages’] furnitur and wish it were in ours, which was taken from other, to furnish out them. For the tungs which we studie, were not the first getters, tho by leerned travell the[y] prove

108

J. H. FERGUSON

good kepers, and yet readie to return and discharge their trust, when it shalbe demanded in such a sort, as it was committed for term of years, and not for inheritance.” With no necessary link between the established learned languages and the knowledge they contain, Mulcaster proposes, “for the gain of most time” (254), that English take the place of Latin, even though “in the end it displaced the Latin, as the Latin, did others, & furnished it self by the Latin learning.” As Mulcaster has earlier argued, transferring learning into English would save English students considerable time learning foreign languages. If this causes English to supplant Latin, then English writers would only be doing to Latin what Latin writers did to other languages: “I wish all were in ours, which theie had from others, neither offer I them wrong, which did the like to others, and by their own president do let us understand, how boldlie we maie ventur.” This is very much the argument concerning the imitation of Cicero in Erasmus’ Ciceronianus : “[l]et us,” writes Erasmus, “imitate him [Cicero] as he imitated others” (sic illum imitemur, quemadmodum ipse est alios imitatus ).80 Let us, writes Mulcaster, translate from the Latin as Roman writers translated from other tongues. This competition between Latin and English provides the organizing idea for the last two paragraphs of the Peroration that concern the English language. The first of these asks, “Will ye deface the Latin tung?” (258). Mulcaster answers that he will, in return for the Romans’ pillaging of England: “spoiling our cuntrie, as all histories witnesse, or defacing our learning.” The second asks, “Why not all in English?” Though this latter section ends on an ambiguous note: “I am verie well content to deal in English, not renouncing either Latin or other learned tung, when my ascent in writing shall require their use” (260). Nevertheless, Mulcaster’s main emphasis is that “an English profit must not be measured by a Latinists pleasur” (259). Mulcaster’s focus throughout the Peroration and the Elementarie as a whole is on the competing claims for status of Latin and English. Mulcaster’s exceptionally nuanced portrayal of English as subject to the authority of its own custom and to “prerogative,” the mutability inherent in all languages, supports his broader argument against subordinating English to Latin, in line with both the Elizabethan ecclesiastical establishment and the other discussions of English borrowings discussed here that seem “poised between religious and secular demands.”81 ∗ ∗ ∗

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

109

In 1623, William Lisle published “an ancient monument of the Church of England,” under the title A Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament , the purpose of which was to establish the integrity of the Christian Church in England prior to the arrival, under the Norman banner, of the Roman Church.82 As Munro argues regarding various Anglican establishment and anti-establishment writers in the period, “archaism identifies the texts with earlier, ‘purer’ or plainer forms of the language, thus playing a central role in the religio-political project of naturalising a particular version of Christianity as domestic and familiar.”83 Lisle’s pseudo-historical account of the Roman Church in England joins a tradition of such attacks; Lisle is indebted in particular to John Foxe’s preface to The Gospels of the Fower Euangelistes (1571).84 Among Lisle’s evidence, in his Prologue “To the Readers,” for the prior integrity of the Saxon church is the expressiveness of the Saxon language, even with regard to highly technical theological vocabulary: the Saxon tongue, Lisle claims, includes equivalents for such terms as “Trinity, Unity, Deity and Persons thereof; for Coaequal, Coaeternall, Invisible, Incomprehensible; Yea for Incarnation, for Ascension, Descension, Resurrection, for Catholike and all such forraine words as we are now faine to use, because we have forgot better of our owne” (e3v). The “forraine” words about which Lisle complains were matched, he insists, by Saxon equivalents prior to their being imported into the language: the new, Latinate terms did not fill semantic gaps but added to the stock of synonyms. While such borrowings should in principle add to the copiousness of English, Lisle finds them offensive for their affront to the integrity of the language (and, by extension, of the English church).85 Although Lisle laments the unnecessary supplanting of native words for such key theological terms as he lists here, he is no idealist to dismiss the dictates of current usage: “I speake not to have them [the Saxon theological terms] recalled into use, now these [the Latinate borrowings] are well knowne; sith I use them and the like my selfe.” As the Prologue continues, a more specific target becomes clear: “the wilfull and purposed obscurity of those other translators,” namely, the translators of the Rheims-Douai Bible: “the Saxon Bibles…will in many places convince of affected obscuritie some late translators; who to provide for their owne opinions, not otherwise found in the word of God, are faine to stuffe the text with such fustian, such inkehorne termes, as may seeme to favour their parts; or darken at least the true meaning of holy Scripture, and discourage weake readers with doubtfull sense and harshnesse”

110

J. H. FERGUSON

(e3).86 Where for example the Rheims translators use the Latinate term “Supersubstantiall bread,” which, Lisle suggests, “no man hauing but the English tongue onely is able to understand,” the Saxon Bible translates the same Greek terms by “dayly bread”—“plaine…pure English” (e3). The difference between “supersubstantiall” and “dayly” bread is not merely a matter of linguistic transparency, of course: under the guise of attacking Latinate English, Lisle is attacking the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. As in his historical account, so here Lisle combines religious and linguistic concerns. The general purpose of Lisle’s retrospective is “to stop the base and beggerly course of borrowing when we need not” (e3v). Strikingly, Lisle incorporates literary writers into his defense of an English free of undue Latin influence: “what tongue is able more shortly and with lesse doubtfulnesse, to give utterance and make way for the cumbersome conceits of our minde, than ours? What more plentifull, than ours might be, if we did use well but our owne garbes, and the words and speeches of our sundry shires and countries in this Iland? Neither is it the least glory of a Nation to have such a language. … Yet our Poetes, I must needs say, have done their part” (e3v-e4). Lisle’s attack on the Roman Catholic versions of the Bible sums up more than a half-century of Protestant English negotiation with and resistance to the inkhorn. His inclusion of the “poets” suggests that such religious resistance to Latinism belongs to a broader assertion of the integrity of English, a project that, dissenting from the Latinizing habits of Elyot and others, includes the secular treatments of Wilson, Cheke, Lever, Puttenham, and Mulcaster—as well as even so light-hearted an example as Shakespeare’s lampooning of Armado’s peregrinate excrement.87

Notes 1. Terttu Nevalinen, “Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics,” The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume III: 1476–1776, ed. Roger Lass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 336. 2. A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes —And His Translation of The Education of Children by Desiderius Erasmus, ed. Herbert W. Hilderbrandt (Gainesville, FL: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1961), sig. A.iir –iiv . 3. The earliest usage of paraphrase recorded in the OED is from Nicholas Udall’s English edition of The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the Newe Testamente (1548), but the word is used already in 1532 in the prologue to Miles Coverdale’s version of the Latin paraphrase

3

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

111

of the Psalter by Jan Campensis. A paraphrasis upon all the Psalmes of David, made by Iohannes Campensis, reader of the Hebrue lecture in the universite of Louvane, and translated out of Latine into Englisshe (London, 1539). Charles Barber, “Inkhorn Terms,” The English Language: A Historical Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 189. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 5th ed. (New York: Pearson, 2004), 5.1.98–101. On Armado’s affectation, compare one of Carla Mazzio’s characterizations of the “inarticulate” (“linguistic forms coded as unintelligible or ineffectual”) in Renaissance England: “scholars alienated by the inability of their language to be used or comprehended by others” (The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008], 2, 3). Compare Catherine Nicholson’s argument about John Lyly’s Euphues vis-à-vis Erasmus’s De copia: “Lyly does not succumb to Erasmian excess so much as he deliberately subjects English to its hidden costs” (Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014], 16, 72–99). See Neil Rhodes’s discussion of the “cultural contest between English and Latin […] first given theatrical expression on the London stages of the 1580s and 1590s” and of the ways in which “Shakespeare’s plays are part of that contest.” The Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119 and the chapter “Vernacular Values” passim. Early Modern English, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 48. John Rainolds, The summe of the conference betwene Iohn Rainoldes and Iohn Hart: touching the head and the faith of the Church… (London, 1584), 20. See Carla Mazzio’s point about Reformers’ association of Latin with inarticulate speech: “Reformation idealization of vernacular plainness as a vehicle of scriptural and liturgical translation found its diabolical antitype in ecclesiastical Latin mumbling” (The Inarticulate Renaissance, 22). A Defence of the Sincere and True Translations of the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue, against the manifolde cauils, friuolous quarels, and impudent slaunders of Gregorie Martin, one of the readers of Popish diuinitie in the trayterous Seminarie of Rhemes, ed. Charles H. Hartshorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1843, rpt. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 231. Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. For the association between the Northern English dialect and English archaism and the literary uses to which this dialect was put in Renaissance England, see Chapter 4 of Paula Blank, Broken English:

112

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

J. H. FERGUSON

Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996). The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, and part of the first chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Mark, translated into English from the Greek, with original notes by Sir John Cheke, ed. James Goodwin (London: Pickering, 1843). According to Neil Rhodes, Cheke’s translation was an attempt “to outflank Tyndale in producing a sturdy, honest, unadulterated New Testament English, and to do so he draws upon a well of English undefiled by any terms originating from south of Dover” (Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018], 41). Rhodes comments further that “Cheke and Smith saw their agenda for pure and common Greek as a model for pure and common English,” and that, in Cheke and Smith’s generation, “the purist mindset which sets the authority of the Word restored to its true and original form against ‘custom’ is applied to the related matters of pronunciation of Greek, the writing of English, and the question of metre, as Protestant scholars edge towards the idea of a reformed literary culture” (Common 189). See the related formulation, with a connection drawn between debates about pronunciation and debates about borrowing, by M. C. Bradbrook, “St. George for Spelling Reform!” Shakespeare Quarterly 15/3 (1964): 130. John F. McDiarmid has demonstrated that the dispute between Cheke and Thomas Smith, on the one hand, and Stephen Gardiner, on the other, concerning the pronunciation of Greek should be read as a proxy for their dispute concerning Latinate English. “Sir John Cheke’s Protestant Ciceronianism and Its Background,” Proceedings of the PMR Conference: Annual Publication of the International Patristic, Mediaeval, and Renaissance Conference 10 (1985): 119–20. Ad Nicolai Sanderi demonstrationes quadraginta… (London, 1583), sig. **viir . Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe (Zurich, 1543), sig. Hiiiv . A. W. Pollard, ed., Records of the English Bible: The Documents Relating to the Translation and Publication of the Bible in English, 1525–1611, rpt. (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino, 1974), 273, 274–75n. David Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1: 115, cites Gardiner’s list as evidence for the degree to which “the question of English vocabulary was tied up with larger issues.”. Edward Bulkeley, An answere to ten friuolous and foolish reasons, set downe by the Rhemish Iesuits and papists in their preface before the new Testament by them lately translated into English… (London, 1588); George Wither, A view of the marginal notes of the popish Testament, translated into English by the English fugitiue papists resiant [sic] at Rhemes in France (London, 1588).

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

113

16. This volume seems to have gone unfinished by Cartwright: Fulke’s answers to the Rheims annotations replace Cartwright at Rev. 16:6. A preface to the posthumous volume notes also that Fulke has supplied certain “small defects by Mice” (A2v). The Roman Catholic translators published their version of the Old Testament in 1609–1610; one of their defenders, John Heigham, published The gagge of the reformed gospell in 1623, answered by Richard Barnard in the same year (Rhemes against Rome) and by Richard Mountagu in 1624 (A gagg for the new Gospell? No: a nevv gagg for an old goose). 17. Cf. Rhodes’s discussion of the controversy between Martin and Fulke (Common 148–52). 18. Fulke, Defense (which reprints Martin’s Discovery in full), 217. Further references to Martin’s Discovery are taken from Fulke’s Defense and cited parenthetically in the text. 19. A refutation of sundry reprehensions, cauils, and false sleightes, by which M. Whitaker laboureth to deface the late English translation, and Catholike annotations of the new Testament, and the booke of Discouery of heretical corruptions … (Paris, 1583), 264. Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. 20. The same language is used at Acts 2:31. 21. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. Laurence Tomson, trans., The Nevv Testament of our Lord Iesus Christ, translated out of Greeke by Theod. Beza… (London, 1576). 22. Fulke’s imperfect defense of Beza and the corresponding English versions refers to the Hebrew words sheol and nephesh behind the Greek αδης and ψυχ η: “That Beza translated the Greek of the New Testament after the signification of the Hebrew words, although it was true in sense, yet in mine opinion it was not proper in words” (Defense 82). For Fulke the relevant Hebrew words do have the basic sense represented by Beza’s translation: it is only by extension that they come to take on the more abstract senses of Christian exegetical tradition. Thus the meaning of the Greek words is essentially the Hebrew words behind them, though Fulke concedes that, as he puts it elsewhere, “[w]ords in derivation and composition do not always signify according to their primitive” (Defense 174). Fulke’s diffidence on this point notwithstanding, the distinction between usual and etymological meaning generally frames the conflict between Roman Catholic and Protestant translators of Scripture. 23. Alexandra M. Walsham, “Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible,” Journal of British Studies 42/2 (2003): 143.

114

J. H. FERGUSON

24. According to Darlow, this New Testament translation is ascribed to William Whittingham and “forms the groundwork of the New Testament in the Geneva Bible of 1560” (T. H. Darlow and H. F. Moule, Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525–1961, rev. and expanded by A. S. Herbert [London: British and Foreign Bible Soc., 1968], 60–61). 25. See Norton, History of the Bible as Literature, 1: 117, 120–21. These two Bibles seem to have divided between them public and private functions; they might be taken to represent respectively what Beza calls (in Tomson’s English) the “reformed” and “transformed” (i.e., proto-Anglican and Puritan) parties within the English church. Laurence Tomson, trans., The Nevv Testament of our Lord Iesus Christ, translated out of Greeke by Theod. Beza, sig. Biiiir . 26. The revisionist charge of Hebrew textual meddling had been used much earlier in attacks on Jerome’s circumvention of the Greek Septuagint in his new translation of the Old Testament; the analogous charge of Greek meddling was employed in turn by opponents of Erasmus’ supplanting of the Vulgate in his retranslation of the New Testament. 27. A confutation of the Rhemists translation, glosses and annotations on the Nevv Testament (Leiden, 1618), F2. Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. 28. Alexandra Walsham, “Unclasping the Book?” 154. Walsham gives the standard print run of editions prior to 1635 as around fifteen hundred copies. 29. The Preface to the Rheims New Testament, reprinted in Henry Cotton, Rhemes and Doway: An Attempt to Shew What Has Been Done by Roman Catholics for the Diffusion of the Holy Scriptures in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1855), app. 1 (249). Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. 30. The citation comes from Letter 57 (c.396), Jerome’s so-called De optimo genere interpretandi (Saint Jérôme, Lettres, ed. and trans. Jérôme Labourt, 8 vols. [Paris: Société d’Edition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1958], 5: 59). 31. Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 111. 32. William Whitaker, writing against Rainolds, makes the caustic comment that this glossary would have been a reasonable addition “if it had been somewhat larger” (An answere to a certeine booke, written by M. William Rainolds student of diuinitie in the English Colledge at Rhemes, and entituled, A refutation of sundrie reprehensions, cauils, &c… [London, 1585], 185). Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. 33. Writing about Martin’s defense of the neologisms in the Rheims New Testament, Norton calls Martin “sensitive and informative, even as a man before his time in matters of language” (History of the Bible as Literature

3

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

115

1: 127–28). Though he does cite a new quality in Martin’s arguments, a “desire to create language of the appropriate religious quality” (128), Norton seems to ignore the theoretical contributions of More at the beginning of the century. On the impact of Rheims vocabulary on the King James Bible and the language in general, see James G. Carleton, The Part of Rheims in the Making of the English Bible (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902) and Norton’s History of the Bible as Literature, 1: 127. Cartwright takes advantage of the same distinction: “ευαγ γ ελια was a Greeke word before the Gospell came into the world” (Confuation F2v). On these Protestant neologisms, see too Munro, Archaic Style in English Literature, 111–12. Testamenti veteris Biblia sacra sive libri canonici, priscae Iudaeorum Ecclesiae a Deo traditi, / Latini recens ex Hebraeo facti, brevibusq[ue] scholiis illustrati ab Immanuele Tremellio & Francisco Junio (London, 1585), n.p. (preface “Christiano Lectori S.”). For an excellent survey of this and several other Latin Bible translations of the sixteenth century, see Joseph Eskhult, “Latin Bible Translations in the Protestant Reformation: Historical Contexts, Philological Justification, and the Impact of Classical Rhetoric on the Conception of Translation Methods,” Shaping the Bible in the Reformation: Books, Scholars, and Their Readers in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bruce Gordon and Matthew McLean (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 167–85 (181–83 on the Tremellius/Junius version). Eskhult suggests that versions like the Tremellius/Junius, in attempting “to bring the Bible into closer formal conformity with the Hebrew or Greek original” (171), served a “scientific exegetical” purpose, while versions with “humanist rhetorical” goals by Erasmus, Leo Jud, and Theodore Bibliander, and, above all, Sebastian Castellio, emphasize these translators’ adherence to latinitas rather than literalism (175–76, 178–81). Catherine Nicholson’s characterization of Ascham’s method for teaching Latin as a “detour” that “returned a generation of English writers to their mother tongue as, in effect, a second language” (Uncommon Tongues, 13) applies to the neologisms on both sides of these debates: the biblical languages translated into English neologisms that required in turn translation into more familiar English. Norton notes Fulke’s objections to Martin’s unusual English but does not acknowledge that this was precisely the charge that More leveled against Tyndale (History of the Bible as Literature 1: 133); instead Norton calls the potential for biblical translation to reshape English, as illustrated by the language of the Rheims New Testament, “a real change from More and Tyndale” (1: 133). Vulgate cited from Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatem versionem, ed. Robert Weber (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).

116

J. H. FERGUSON

40. The newe testament both in Latine and Englyshe eche correspondente to the other after the vulgare texte, communely called S. Ieromes. Faythfullye translated by Iohan Hollybushe [sic] (Southwarke, 1538), sig. *iiiv . Ironically, in this English sentence about differences between Latin and English, Coverdale uses a feminine pronoun relative to a noun that, in English, is neuter. 41. The revision of the Wycliffite Bible illustrates the same consciousness of the differences between Latinate and “natural” English, though in a very different ideological context. 42. Archaic Style in English Literature, 112. 43. Cf. Norton on Martin’s Prologue to the Rheims New Testament and analogous issues in the More-Tyndale polemics: “English words and phrases were being formed by the language of the [biblical] translators” (History of the Bible as Literature 1: 126). 44. R. F. Jones, The Triumph of English: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), 68–141; Charles Barber, “Inkhorn Terms,” 189–90; Veré L. Rubel, Poetic Diction in the English Renaissance from Skelton through Spenser (New York: Modern Language Association, 1941), 1–13, 102–18; Alvin Vos, “Humanistic Standards of Diction in the Inkhorn Controversy,” Studies in Philology 73/4 (1976): 376–96; Ian A. Gordon, The Movement of English Prose (London: Longman, 1966), 73–101; Matti Rissanen, “‘Strange and inkhorne termes’, Loan-Words as Style Markers in the Prose of Edward Hall, Thomas Elyot, Thomas More and Roger Ascham,” Style and Text: Studies Presented to Nils Erik Enkvist, ed. Håkan Ringbom (Stockholm: Skriptor, 1975), 250–62; James Sledd, “A Footnote on the Inkhorn Controversy,” University of Texas Studies in English 28 (1949): 49–56; Neil Rhodes, The Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 125–29. Concerning Continental writers, Eric Macphail concludes that “during the course of the Renaissance, the ideal of latinization fell into decline as the vernacular conquered its autonomy. By the 1530s, in Italy if not elsewhere, the latinizer is regarded as a relic of the past and his ideal is felt to be an obsolete obsession.” “The Elegance of the Ecolier Limousin: The European Context of Rabelais’ Linguistic Parody,” Modern Language Notes 123 (2008): 880. For Catherine Nicholson, the classical notion of “strangeness as both the antithesis and the epitome of style” meant that even as English writers’ “study of ancient rhetoric and poetry taught them to recognize their estrangement from antiquity, it also taught them to perceive in that estrangement – or any estrangement of language – the essence of literary value.” Uncommon Tongues, 4, 11.

3

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

117

45. As Cathy Shrank writes in another context, English Protestants treat Latinate English in accord with “a rhetoric of English nationhood that celebrates England’s self-sufficiency,” a self-sufficiency “buttressed by a transfigured history authorizing English autonomy from the Roman Church.” Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 20. 46. The Boke named the Governour, ed. F. Watson (London: Dent, 1937), 42. Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. 47. Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues, 28. 48. The above lists exclude near-synonyms, of which “astate or condition” (2, 14) is an interesting example. These two words might seem perfect synonyms in Elyot’s usage, until one recalls that Elyot lists both words among the various senses attaching to the Latin res: “the worde Res hath diuers significations, and dothe nat only betwoken that, that is called a thynge, which is distincte from a persone, but also signifieth astate, condition, substance, and profite” (1). As usual in the Governour, Elyot here uses distinctions from Latin semantics to characterize English. 49. See Nicholson’s parallel formulation: “if the familiar term is adequate to express the meaning of the borrowed or invented term, why borrow or invent? If it is not, how useful is it as a guide to the unfamiliar word? What is forestalled (but also registered) by such a compound is the vexed question of linguistic and cultural parity” (Uncommon Tongues 29). 50. Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 62. Shrank follows this observation with the comment that, during this period, “the equation between early modern Englishness and Protestantism was neither clear-cut nor inevitable.” 51. “As English grows in self-confidence as a result of its enrichment from other sources, some writers nevertheless hanker for the one true source and the prestige of tradition.” Neil Rhodes, The Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 125. For other examples of the opposition between archaism and borrowings, see Jones, Triumph of English, 116–41. See too Lucy Munro’s brief discussion of the use of archaism in the md-sixteenth century with regard to the “relationship between language and national identity,” as an alternative to foreign borrowings (Archaic Style in English Literature 22–23). 52. Sir Thomas Hoby, tr., The Book of the Courtier, ed. Virginia Cox (London: Everyman, 1994), 10. 53. The Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft, teaching a perfect way to argue and dispute (London, 1573), sig. *iiiir . Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. 54. Of the Knowledge Which Maketh a Wise Man, ed. E. J. Howard (Oxford, OH: Anchor, 1946), 4–5.

118

J. H. FERGUSON

55. Having chosen to address an unlearned readership, Lever nonetheless offers “that helpe, whyche the Latine terme dothe yelde” in his table of “new devised terms” at the rear of the volume: each English definition also includes a Latin equivalent, with reference to the page and section in the text where the term is used: e.g., “Saywhat. 73.1.definitio. corruptly called a definition: but for yt it is a saying which telleth what a thing is, it may more aptly be called a saywhat” (sig. Pvr−v ). 56. The Art of Rhetoric, ed. P. E. Medine (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 188–89. Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. Cathy Shrank cites the recycling of Wilson’s attack on the inkhorn as late as 1619 in Alexander Gil’s Logonomia Anglica (Writing the Nation in Reformation England 184). Some of Wilson’s targets here are helpfully glossed with reference to one of the “strategies of humanist imitation” that Thomas Greene applies to Renaissance vernacular literature: namely, the “reproductive or sacramental,” which “celebrates an enshrined primary text by rehearsing it liturgically, as though no other form of celebration could be worthy of its dignity” (The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982], 38). 57. Uncommon Tongues, 56, 49. For Nicholson, Wilson’s domestication of foreign rhetorical ideas posed a conundrum: “[i]s rhetoric a native discourse, after all, or a place where Englishmen must agree to follow a foreign way?” (ibid., 56). Her larger argument is that, since writers like Wilson, Gascoigne, and Puttenham found “alienation as the signal feature of style” in the classical rhetorical models they were imitating, these writers were free to “imagine an English language enriched and enlarged by its estrangement from both the classical past and itself” (ibid., 70). 58. Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 185. Shrank notes that Wilson was detained in Rome in 1558 and charged with heresy on the basis of his Rhetoric and Rule of Reason. Having refused to amend the Rhetoric in response to these charges, his republication of the book ostensibly unaltered in 1560 represented, according to Shrank, “his triumph, and that of his country, over popery” (ibid., 186–87). 59. The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 230. Further quotations from Puttenham’s Art are taken from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 60. The Arte of English Poetrie, ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936, rpt. 1970), li. 61. M. C. Bradbrook, “St. George for Spelling Reform!” 135: “Mulcaster is the first writer on English who fully understands the functions of language.” Bradbrook’s assertion needs to be qualified by the example of More’s treatment of semantics in his Confutation. For a discussion of

3

62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

69.

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

119

Mulcaster’s promotion of “an orthography, grammar, rhetoric, and poetics fashioned specifically for English, according to English models and English habits,” see Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues, 40–44. The First Part of the Elementary, facs. ed. (Menston: Scolar, 1970), 254. Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. In transcribing, I have omitted the acute accents that Mulcaster uses to mark long vowels. See the similarly balanced statement from William Camden’s Remains (1605): English “hath beene beauified and enriched out of other good tongues, partly by enfranchising and endenizing strange words, partly by refining and mollifying olde words, partly by implanting new wordes with artificiale composition” (qtd. in Rhodes, The Origins of English [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 127). See too Rhodes’s discussion of Mulcaster in Common, 190–92, 199. Mulcaster’s Elementarie was published seven years earlier than Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, but much of Puttenham’s book seems to have been composed earlier, around the year of Elizabeth’s ascension. Willcock and Walker assign most of the work, with particular reference to the passage on “inkhorne termes,” to the mid-Tudor period, c. 1569 [The Arte of English Poetrie, xliv–liii].) Chronologically and in spirit, Mulcaster’s text is the more characteristically Elizabethan of the two. Mulcaster returns to this theme, of time wasted in language-study, a number of times in the Elementarie: 254, 258, etc. There is a pagination error in the 1582 printing of the Elementarie, reproduced in the facsimile ed. from Scolar Press: the page after 235 is numbered 246, and the jump of ten numbers is followed through to the end of the volume. The page number cited here then should properly be 243. The General Table includes something more than 7,500 words: thirty-six words to a full column, four columns to a page, fifty-three pages—noting the error in pagination, namely, the omission of pages 216–18. Some columns are truncated by head-letters, others are interrupted by notes. None of the words in Mulcaster’s list here is marked as a borrowing in the General Table; two of them are omitted from the Table altogether. Catherine Nicholson observes the same phenomenon and cites Wayne Rebhorn’s comparison of English rhetorician with their Roman predecessors, “who depended on a theoretical lexicon borrowed from Greece” (Uncommon Tongues, 10). Mulcaster’s statement elaborates on a passage from Joachim du Bellay’s Deffense et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549): foreign borrowings “seront en notre Langue comme etrangers en une cité.” La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1997), 59–60. Mulcaster’s reliance on

120

70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

J. H. FERGUSON

Du Bellay’s Deffence has been well documented (and has spurred in turn research into Spenser’s poetic imitations of Du Bellay): in particular, Mulcaster’s emphasis on the basic equality among languages and his decrying of the amount of time students must devote to language study seem both to come from Du Bellay’s text. See W. L. Renwick, “Mulcaster and Du Bellay,” Modern Language Review 17 (1922): 282–87. Mulcaster himself acknowledges the international dimension of his writing: “I will pen the same things in the latin tung also, to satisfie some peple, which wil be best pleased so, as in verie dede saving for the ortographie, which is proper to our tung, there is nothing in the Elementarie, but it maie well be communicated with anie foren nation” (56). “Enfranchise, v.” OED. “By 1582,” as Bradbrook writes, “‘custom’ no longer suggested Popish darkness” (“St. George for Spelling Reform!” 135). Mulcaster is with those, in Bradbrook’s account, who “place Reason, not where Hart did, on the side of Innovation, but on the side of Custom” (“St. George for Spelling Reform!” 131–33, here 133). Mulcaster here suspends his discussion of custom to address the main subject of the chapter, the defense of English. This defense, broken up into four topics (the antiquity of English, the people’s wit, learning, and experience [79]) includes several points concerning borrowings: most notably, Mulcaster takes both the antiquity of German, “the ground of our speche,” and the antiquity of the languages from which English borrows its “verie newest words” as indications of the antiquity of English (80). Mulcaster concludes the chapter by counting “use and custom” among the factors in support of the appropriateness of existing English orthography (82). On Mulcaster’s “duble name” of custom, see too Lawrence Manley, Convention, 1500–1750 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 67–70. See, for example, Francis Bacon’s characterization of Idols of the Marketplace in his Novum Organum (1620): “…words, being commonly framed and applied according to the capacity of the vulgar, follow those lines of division which are most obvious to the vulgar understanding” (Francis Bacon, A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft [New York: Odyssey, 1965], 341). In Bradbrook’s account, this is precisely the scope of Hart’s attack on orthographic custom in his Orthographie: “[h]e equated arguments for customary spelling with arguments for Popery; ‘custom’ meant inertia” (“St. George for Spelling Reform!” 131). Bradbrook is referring to John Hart, whose Orthographie was written under Edward VI, revised and published in 1569. See Vivian Salmon, “Hart, John (c.1501–1574),”

3

77.

78. 79.

80.

81.

82.

83. 84.

85.

THE ROMAN INKHORN: LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS RESISTANCE …

121

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). An elaborate analogy reinforces this point: “a new writing cumming in under hand, & the old charact growing out of knowledge, all that evidence in whatsoever English kind, must nedes either com over to the new fashion, or be subiect to the frump [i.e., to scorn], & remain wormeaten like an old relik, & so to be red, as the Romain religion, writen under Numa Pomplius was by them of Tullies time, when everie word was so uncouth & strange, as if it had come from some other world, then where it was penned” (98–99). The “Romain religion” in this analogy represents any texts left behind by the proposed typographic reform, but it seems quite plausible that the reference might also include Roman Catholic materials rejected by Protestant reform in England: Mulcaster aligns orthographic radicals with the radical Protestants, or Puritans, of his time. Words that Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 48. This is the first of two consecutive pages numbered 253 in the 1582 Vautroullier edition. References to the second page numbered 253 in this text will be indicated by an asterisk. Dialogus Ciceronianus, ed. Pierre Mesnard, in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami, vols. 1–2 (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1971), 651; Ciceronianus or A Dialogue on the Best Manner of Speaking, trans. Izora Scott (New York: AMS, 1972), 81. Shrank suggests that “historical, literary, or linguistic issues are often consequent to, or intertwined with, religious turmoil” and that the discussion of Latinate English in the period is “poised between religious and secular demands” (Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 15, 17). See too Carla Mazzio’s more recent formulation with regard to Thomas Harding’s critique of John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562) in Anne Bacon’s English translation: “debates over theology were equally cast in terms of debates about philology and rhetoric” (The Inarticulate Renaissance, 24). Jewel’s Apologia is discussed in Chapter 4. A Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament (London, 1623). Further references to this work are cited parenthetically in the text. Archaic Style in English Literature, 105. Phillip Pulsiano, “William L’Isle and the Editing of Old English,” The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Timothy Graham (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Inst., 2000), 181–82. Lisle’s case illustrates well Alexandra Walsham’s general sense that, in the early seventeenth century, “[l]earned exaltation of Latin, Hebrew, and

122

J. H. FERGUSON

Greek slowly gave way to a new pride in English that was intimately linked with the growth of national identity and historical consciousness” (“Unclasping the Book?” 144). 86. Just prior to this passage, Lisle criticizes both Roman Catholics and Puritans (e2v), but the reference to “fustian, … inkehorne termes” makes it clear that Lisle refers to the Rheims New Testament and Douai Old Testament. Pulsiano cites most of this passage but provides no specific context for Lisle’s criticism (205). 87. For a related discussion of the integrity of the English language and English eloquence, of “[h]ow to craft an English language that is eloquent without ceasing, in the process, to be English,” see Catherine Nicholson’s “Englishing Eloquence: Sixteenth-Century Arts of Rhetoric and Poetics,” The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 9–26, at 10. Nicholson discusses many of the same humanist authors and texts discussed in this chapter, but she treats the religious dimension of the question only tangentially (ibid., 14–15).

PART II

Reformation Hermeneutics and Sidneian Poiesis

CHAPTER 4

Biblical Hermeneutics and Poiesis in Philip Sidney’s Apology and the Sidney Psalter

A Tale of Two Apologies: Jewel and Sidney John Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562) is a central document of emergent Elizabethan ecclesiology and exegesis.1 While it attempts to paper over the disagreements among Protestants that would motivate much later English religious controversy,2 Jewel’s Apologia provides a nuanced and influential justification of the separation of the English Church from Rome. The Apologia describes itself as a response to the absence of Protestant voices at the Council of Trent: “a conspiracy and not a council,” according to Jewel (111), where “none of our sort” was allowed to speak (16). More broadly, the Apologia justifies the English separation from Rome by appealing to, on the one hand, the suprahistorical authority of Scripture and, on the other, ecclesiastical usages and traditions predating the putative corruption of the Roman Church. The Apologia frequently asserts the authority of Scripture as an “infallible rule,” against which “neither law, nor ordinance, nor any custom ought to be heard” (30). Part of Jewel’s formal defense of the English Church’s separation from Rome is the complaint that the latter asserts that the “word of God was written but for a time only” (69). Jewel cites with disdain the anti-Protestant Hierarchiae ecclesiasticae assertio (1538), by the Dutch Roman Catholic theologian Albertus Pighius (c.1490–1542), on Scripture’s dangerous susceptibility to unorthodox © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. H. Ferguson, Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81795-4_4

125

126

J. H. FERGUSON

interpretation: “they add also a similitude not very agreeable, how the Scriptures be like to a nose of wax or a shipman’s hose; how they may be fashioned and plied all manner of ways and serve all men’s turns” (77); he also cites Stanislaus Hosius’ characterization of Scripture as “naked elements or bare words” (78). These notions of scriptural pliancy and indeterminacy, Jewel writes, cause the Roman Church to rely on the “continual consent of all ages” (83). Such consent is historically contingent: “sundry and divers decrees serve for sundry and divers times of the church” (93). Jewel and his Church, by contrast, “have searched out of the Holy Bible, which we are sure cannot deceive, one sure form of religion” (135). Scripture for Jewel provides in itself “the most perfect prints of Christ’s own steps” (78); it contains “abundantly and fully comprehended all things, whatsoever be needful for our salvation” (30). Scripture needs no historical warrant: “the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ dependeth not upon councils nor, as St. Paul saith, upon mortal creatures’ judgments” (125). Jewel goes so far in defending the authority of Scripture itself as to assert, citing the second-century Apologist Justin Martyr, that “we would give no credence to God himself if he should teach us any other Gospel” (82).3 This kind of scriptural absolutism is a mainstay of Protestant polemics against the Roman Church; the appeal to the absolute rule of Scripture, however, is only one facet of Jewel’s Apologia. Earlier in the century, Tyndale asserted in English the principle that provided the foundational exegetical principle of Continental Protestantism: Tyndale denies that any traditional “consent and agrement of men” can assume to itself divine warrant; “autenticke scripture” not human consensus possesses the only authority that matters.4 Such scriptural absolutism is an element of Jewel’s Apologia, but Jewel marries this principle to historical traditions, the “homemade laws” of England (125). Tyndale often suggests that Scripture and human traditions are at least potentially inimical by nature.5 Jewel, on the other hand, suggests that the permanent principle of scriptural rule and practices warranted by historical practice are complementary: “the same thing that both might rightly be done and hath also many a time been done” (123). Where Tyndale is motivated above all by opposition to the accretions of traditional usage, Jewel is buttressing a new church—a new church that is, however, also a traditional church. W. M. Southgate compares the Continental Protestant churches’ replacement of “institutional authority with a sanction at once independent of

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

127

tradition and highly individualistic” with the English Church’s construction of “a theory of doctrinal authority independent of the institutional control of the Roman Church and yet at the same time both traditional and Catholic.”6 However accurate this general assessment of the variety of ecclesiastical approaches on the Continent, the contrast captures well the differences between Tyndale and Jewel: Tyndale is predominantly oppositional and negative7 ; Jewel is more constructive. While Jewel at times opposes the true authority of Scripture to the false authority of councils, a key section of the Apologia rather replaces one council, Trent (1545–1547, 1551–1552, and re-opened in 1562, the year of the Apologia’s publication), with the Elizabethan “synod and convocation,” or parliament, of 1559 (104). Jewel offers this “provincial synod” as an historically validated alternative to the “universal council” (124) that the Council of Trent purported to represent. When, in the Recapitulation of the Apologia, Jewel returns to the 1559 synod, he makes no appeal to scriptural precedent: rather he dismisses the legitimacy of Trent and then defends the English “provincial convocation” for its doing “as the holy fathers in former time, and as our predecessors have commonly done” (135). The authority to which Jewel appeals here is not scriptural but traditional and consensual. Jewel does not explain why the English Church would require recourse to historical tradition when it is grounded on the timeless rule of Scripture; he seems divided between assertions of the independent authority of Scripture and the mediation of scriptural authority via historical tradition. Jewel’s ambivalence is foundational for the Elizabethan Settlement between absolutist adherence to scriptural rule, on the one hand, and ecclesiastical tradition, on the other. The King James Bible translators extend the logic of the Elizabethan Settlement into the Jacobean period and into language theory: “wee have on the one side avoided the scrupolositie of the Puritanes, who leave the old Ecclessiasticall words, and betake them to other, as when they put washing for Baptisme, and Congregation in stead of Church: as also on the other side, we have shunned the obscuritie of the Papists, in their Azimes, Tunike, Rational, Holocausts, Praepuce, Pasche, and a number of such like.”8 These terminological extremes—“Puritan” rejection of traditional (“old”) ecclesiastic usage, on the one hand, and “Papist” adherence to the Latinate forms of the Vulgate, on the other—represent exegetical positions: scriptural absolutism and the appeal to ecclesiastical tradition, respectively. Such terminological negotiations are continuous with the

128

J. H. FERGUSON

debates about biblical English that begin with the exchange between More and Tyndale and run through the Tudor period. This chapter will suggest that the Elizabethan Settlement also has implications for ideas about secular literature. There is an inconsistency in Jewel’s Apologia, and in Elizabethan biblical exegesis generally, regarding the relationship between the biblical text and historical traditions; there are analogous inconsistencies in Philip Sidney’s various classifications of poetry in his Apology for Poetry (publ. 1595). As Nandra Perry and Robert E. Stillman suggest, “Sidney did not have a ‘secular’ literary career followed by a ‘sacred’ one: the truth is that the humane and the sacred intermingle at every point – among the works and within them – because for Philip as for Mary the human and the divine engage intimately at every turn.”9 In the Apology’s central section, the confirmatio, for example, Sidney compares poetry favorably with philosophy and history. The confirmatio occupies a privileged place within the oratorical structure of the Apology: it provides the main proof on behalf of Sidney’s thesis.10 He begins this section by describing the “ending end” of all learning: “to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying his own divine essence.”11 He goes on to connect this “knowledge of a man’s self” with “ethic and politic consideration” (88) and then identifies poetry as the best guide to practical ethics: poetry combines the advantages of historical writing and moral philosophy, its “principal challengers,” and betters both: “The philosopher…and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example. But both, not having both, do both halt” (90). For Sidney, the realism required of historical texts leaves rudderless the reader looking for moral guidance. History, “captived to the truth of a foolish world,” records what has been done, not what should have been—and should now be—done (93–94).12 In line with Protestant opponents of Roman Catholic tradition, he rejects the moral authority of mere history in favor of Reformation along idealized and ahistorical lines. Poetry is not “captived to the truth of a foolish world”; rather it is bound to represent “the most excellent determination of goodness,” arrived at philosophically (91). Sidney’s critique of philosophy is entirely different: the philosopher possesses the truth but lacks effective expression. Echoing longstanding humanist attacks on the abstruse language and methodology of the schoolmen, Sidney dismisses the means of expression rather than the

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

129

insight of the philosophers: “his knowledge standeth so upon the abstract and general, that happy is the man who may understand him, and more happy that can apply what he doth understand” (90).13 In Kathy Eden’s formulation, philosophy “fails to move the soul to action”; its “inadequacies prove to be psychological rather than logical.”14 To the charge of obscurity Sidney adds, later in the section, the philosopher’s failure to “delight” (95)—including his refusal of “delightful proportion” in words and the accompanying “enchanting skill of music” (95). Sidney’s poet mediates between the philosopher and the historian: the poet “coupleth the general notion [of the one] with the particular example [of the other]” (90); in Eden’s words, he “accommodates at once the nature of knowledge and the nature of the human soul.”15 Poetry takes the universal principles of philosophy and combines them with the effective exemplification of history; it thus avoids the obscurity of expression (the “bare rule”) of philosophy, on the one hand, and the amorality (the “bare was ”) of history, on the other (90, 93). The poet, in other words, has something to say and the means to say it. As the effective exemplification of history without philosophical content (the “fore-conceit”) is fruitless, so philosophical content cannot be made manifest without historical exemplification.16 The poet’s synthesis is “sweetly uttered knowledge” (86).17 Sidney acknowledges that “Aristotle himself, in his discourse of poetry, plainly determineth this question” (92): the conception, that is, whereby poetry combines the “precept” of philosophy with the “example” of history (89).18 Critics such as Eden and Wesley Trimpi have also established Sidney’s reliance on Ciceronian and Augustinian sources in this and other portions of the Apology; from these critics’ diachronic perspective, Sidney’s argument about philosophy, history, and poetry is significant as an innovative synthesis of his sources and as a marriage of rhetorical and poetic theory.19 Poetry’s middle way between philosophy and history also resonates synchronically. Sidney borrows his opposition between philosophy and history from Aristotle, but he expresses this opposition in terms that evoke the Elizabethan Settlement between the contending claims of Puritan and Papist. The Elizabethan Settlement synthesized extremes: the appeal to unalloyed principle, sola scriptura, on the part of the Puritans and the appeal to historical usage, ecclesiastic tradition, on the part of the Romanists. The “abstract considerations,” “precepts,” and “bare rule” that characterize Sidney’s philosopher (89) recall the “infallible rule” and

130

J. H. FERGUSON

the “one sure form of religion” that John Jewel, among others, associates with Protestant scripturalism (Apologia 30, 135). As Sidney’s historian has recourse to “them that have gone before,” “examples,” and the “bare was ” (89, 93), so Jewel’s Roman Catholic relies on the authority of the “continual consent of all ages” (Apologia 83). There is another sense in which Sidney’s Apology should be read as “an argument about the status of writing conducted along theological lines.”20 The confirmatio asserts that poetry defies historical accuracy in order to express philosophical insight: poetry ignores one kind of truth in order to assert another. The poet of the confirmatio is “the right popular philosopher” (92), synthesizing fiction and truth: “the application most divinely true, but the discourse itself feigned,” as Sidney writes of the “poetic invention” Nathan tells King David (96). Elsewhere in the Apology, he is ambiguous about what A. C. Hamilton calls poetry’s “correspondence to known truth.”21 The narratio and divisio, the two sections preceding the confirmatio, oscillate between describing poetry as a mediator of prior knowledge, on the one hand, and asserting the creative autonomy of poetry vis-à-vis not only history but also philosophy and theology, on the other.22 Sidney begins the narratio section of the Apology, an historical account of the facts and words associated with poetry, arguing for poetry’s historical subordination to other areas of knowledge. He introduces poetry as a “passport” to history and philosophy: poetry “hath been the first lightgiver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them [noble nations] to feed afterward of tougher knowledge” (82–83). Poetry is merely a means by which philosophers and historians “entered into the gates of popular judgments” (83). Greek philosophers “durst not a long time appear to the world but under the masks of poets,” namely, the verse in which some Presocratic philosophers wrote their treatises (82). The limited, propaedeutic role that Sidney here assigns to poetry corresponds to the identification of poetry with its verse-form. Later in the Apology he will contradict this flatly, calling verse “but an ornament and no cause to Poetry” (87). Already in the narratio, in fact, discussing Plato and the Greek historians, he characterizes poetry not by its verseform but by its “feigning.” He no longer refers to the “mask of poets” but to “the skin as it were and beauty,” the “fashion and…weight,” of poetry (82–83). He uses these more integral characterizations of poetry to describe the dramatic art, including invented characters, details, and speeches, in Plato’s dialogues and the Greek historians (82–83).

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

131

Following this historical sketch of poetry as a practice, Sidney concludes the narratio with a brief history of the terms used to name the poet. He begins with the Latin term vates (“diviner, forseer, or prophet” [83]), provoking the first mention in the Apology of David’s Psalms as a “divine poem” (84). In good humanist fashion and anticipating his later distinction between divine poets and “right poets” (86), however, Sidney prefers the underlying, secular Greek term poiein (“to make” [84]). This Greek term provides, “by luck or wisdom,” a key English term for the poet, maker (84), reinforcing for Sidney the sense that the poet is radically creative—the poet brings something into being—by contrast with other artists who are mere “actors and players…of what Nature will have set forth” (84–85). Sidney distinguishes between language arts that represent Nature, on the one hand, and Poetry that evokes “another nature,” on the other (85).23 In the divisio section, Sidney moves to the more technical, Aristotelian notion of poetic mimesis. Here, he considers poetry as an “art” (86), whereas in the earlier, etymological discussion, he characterizes poetry as different from every “art delivered to mankind” (84). The two sections contain contradictory accounts: of poetry as a medium of prior knowledge, on the one hand, and poetry as independent of other forms of knowledge, on the other.24 In the “more palpable…very description” of poetry in the divisio, he begins by calling poetry “an art of imitation”25 and goes on to distinguish three kinds of poets: the sacred poet, who “imitate[s] the inconceivable excellencies of God” (86); the philosophical poet, who conveys either moral or historical matter; and the “right” poet, who relies on his own “wit” (86–87). Or, rather, Sidney distinguishes here between versifiers and poets. Divine and philosophical reflections may be written in verse but are not poetry properly understood (i.e., “right” poetry), “verse being but an ornament and no cause to Poetry” (87); the right poet is the only one who “takes…the course of his own invention,” who “borrow[s] nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but range[s], only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be” (86–87).26 This contradicts the definition of the poet in the confirmatio as “the right popular philosopher” as well as statements elsewhere in the Apology to the effect that, like the kind of writing in the divisio that handles “matter philosophical,” poetry is a kind of “sweetly uttered knowledge” (86). While Sidney seems at pains, in the divisio, to distinguish between “right” poetry and the “the poetical part of the Scripture” (86), the

132

J. H. FERGUSON

distinction does not quite hold up under scrutiny. Divine verse is “chief, both in antiquity and excellency” and the “most noble” (86) and yet not “right,” proper poetry. Right poetry is not more excellent than divine verse; rather, the right poet supplants divinely warranted vision with his own invention, the “fictive products of human imagination.”27 David, Solomon, Moses, and Deborah were all “wrapped within the folds of the proposed subject”—in their cases, “the inconceivable excellencies of God”; none took the course of his or her “own invention” (86). Sidney defines right poetry as “borrow[ing] nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be; but rang[ing], only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be” (87). Such “divine consideration,” however, would seem to infringe on theological territory; Sidney’s language recalls Tyndale’s polemical Protestantism, which asserts the meaning the biblical word church “shuld haue” over the meaning it does have.28 Anne Prescott has highlighted other ways in which Sidney, in the Apology, conflates ideas of the poetic and the biblical, even as he at other points strives to keep the two traditions separate. Prescott has also documented persuasively a patristic tradition, widely known in the period, “in which the psalmist, besides his other advantages, was also in a fashion a right poet.”29 With reference to these and other inconsistencies, Prescott has praised the “openness” of Sidney’s Apology, championing its status as a “really lively text”30 : the Apology contains arguments about poetry that are compelling and traditionally resonant in themselves but also seemingly contradictory. In one of the key sections of the Apology, Sidney borrows from Aristotle the classification of poetry as straddling history and philosophy; he articulates this classification in language that recalls Jewel’s analogous description of biblical authority as alternately absolute and conventional, transcendent, and traditional. In the Apology more broadly, Sidney oscillates between assertions that poetry conveys (or “borrows”) knowledge and assertions of poetry’s creative autonomy, according to which poetry borrows nothing. This ambiguous description of poetry again recalls Elizabethan biblical hermeneutics, in which biblical language is alternately subordinate to recognized knowledge (in the determinations of counsels, etc.), on the one hand, and independent of all knowledge, on the other. Thirdly, Sidney’s ostensible distinction between biblical poetry and “right” poetry collapses, both in the Apology itself and in the traditions on which he draws. As this last point gestures to the discussion of the Sidney Psalter to follow, it also reinforces the sense

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

133

that throughout a lively array of overlapping and contradictory descriptions, Sidney’s Apology consistently turns Elizabethan ideas about biblical authority into measures of the expressiveness of English poetry.

Poetics as Exegesis in the Sidney Psalter Sidney’s complex treatment of imitatio in the Apology offers an informative perspective on his metrical translations of the Psalms.31 For the humanist tradition within which Sidney writes in the Apology, imitatio is of two kinds: imitation of external reality and imitation of other texts. Roger Ascham distinguishes explicitly between these two kinds of imitation in The Scholemaster: “The whole doctrine of Comedies and Tragedies, is a perfite imitation, or faire lively paynted picture of the life of every degree of man. … The second kinde of Imitation, is to follow for learning of tonges and sciences, the best authors.”32 The central sections of the Apology (the narratio and divisio) are inconsistent with regard to the first of Ascham’s objects of imitation: at times, Sidney’s poet imitates “life”—in the sense that the poet portrays the world naturalistically or in the sense that the poet conveys philosophical or theological truths; at other times, Sidney’s poet follows “the course of his own invention” away from naturalism and away from both the “excellencies of God” and “matters philosophical” (86).33 Near the close of the Apology, a digressio on English poetry addresses the other aspect of imitation, the relation between new and prior texts. In the digressio, this other kind of autonomy, not vis-à-vis reality but vis-à-vis other authors, becomes the distinctive criterion for judging the success of English poetry. Sidney’s criticism of English poets here concerns their excessively formal literary imitation: “so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings…than that in truth they feel those passions” (113), recalling the first line of the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella: “Loving in truth, and feign in verse my love to tell.”34 This point also recalls Erasmus’ Ciceronianus (1528), whose main target is the learning of words followed by the search for subject matter that will suit those words.35 Indeed, Sidney cites the Ciceronian debates shortly afterward: “I could wish…the diligent imitators of Tully and Demosthenes…did not so much keep Nizolian paper-books of their figures and phrases, as by attentive translation (as it were) devour them whole, and make them wholly theirs” (114). The definition of properly digestive imitation or translation is precisely the thrust

134

J. H. FERGUSON

of Erasmus’ Ciceronianus; this definition also helps to resolve one of the persistent critical difficulties regarding Sidney’s translations of the Psalms: how is the ostentatiously literary character of the translation to be reconciled with the Psalter’s devotional character? Sidney has not conducted experiments in versification and then gone in search of subject matter to suit those forms. Rather, Sidney’s Psalter represents an attempt to digest the individual character of each Psalm into its own expressive English form. William Webbe, in his Discourse of Englishe Poetrie (1586), records a contemporary sense of the seemingly infinite variety of metrical and rhyme schemes available to the English poet writing in accentual-syllabic verse: “There are nowe wythin this compasse as many sortes of verses as may be deuised differences of numbers: wherof some consist of equall proportions, some of long and short together, some of many rymes in one staffe (as they call it), some of cross ryme, some of counter ryme, some ryming wyth one worde farre distant from another, some ryming euery third or fourth word, and so likewise all manner of dytties applyable to euery tune that may be sung or sayd, distinct from prose or continued speeche.”36 Webbe cites Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579), a tour de force demonstration of English poetic resourcefulness, as an “authoritie in thys matter,”37 but the Shepheardes Calender is much narrower in scope than the metrical Psalter initiated by Philip Sidney and completed by Mary Sidney Herbert: their Psalter is perhaps the fullest compendium of English poetic formal capacities produced during the English Renaissance. Readers of Philip Sidney’s forty-three paraphrased Psalms have often asked: does their consummate variety of forms (rhyme schemes, meters, alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes) correspond to the subject matter of the Psalms in which these forms are used? Is the formal variety of Sidneys’ paraphrases excessive vis-à-vis the Psalms themselves?38 Sidney varies line length (from monometer to hexameter39 ), stanza length (from mono-rhyme [15] through a ten-line stanza [40], with every count in between represented), rhyme scheme, and masculine and feminine rhyme. He uses several well-established rhyme schemes: couplets (2, 39, 41), rhyme royal (18),40 ballad measure (19), terza rima (7, 30); he also uses several never before used in English (and some perhaps never since): Psalm 20, for example, is rhymed aabcb ccded, with a carried rhyme that recalls terza rima.41 Ten rhyme schemes are used only once among Sidney’s forty-three Psalms (in 11, 12, 15, 20, 23, 28, 29, 35, 36, 40), and none of these schemes is repeated among

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

135

Sidney Herbert’s versions. Sidney writes stanzas with simple metrical arrangements and simple rhyme schemes, stanzas with complex metrical arrangements and complex rhyme schemes, stanzas with complex rhyme schemes and simple metrical arrangements, and stanzas with simple rhyme schemes and complex metrical arrangements. For example, Psalm 12 uses three rhymes (abcabcabc) but only one meter (pentameter), 41 uses two meters (pentameter and trimeter) in each of its couplets, 15 is composed of thirteen lines all rhymed and in hexameter, and 11 is rhymed aaabcccb, its a- and c-rhymes in tetrameter, its b-rhymes trimeter. Psalm 42 uses an eight-line stanza rhymed ababccdd, the a- and d-rhymes feminine, the band c-rhymes masculine: an exceptionally varied alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, in tetrameter throughout. Sidney also varies the ways in which these formal elements are related to each other. Psalm 32 (Beati, quorum) uses a two-one pattern for its rhyme scheme (aabccb), the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes (two masculine followed by a feminine), and meter (two tetrameters followed by a trimeter); Psalm 26 uses the same rhyme scheme (aabccb) and the same two-one pattern of meters (in this case, two trimeters followed by a pentameter), all rhymes masculine. Psalm 23, by contrast, uses the rhyme scheme abbacc (one of the schemes unique among Sidney’s Psalms) but arranges its meters on an unrelated pattern, tetrameter-trimeter-dimeter twice, with masculine rhymes throughout; Psalm 40, rhymed abbaccdeed, aligns rhyme scheme with meter in the opening, envelope-rhymed quatrain (pentameter for the a-rhymes, tetrameter for the b-rhymes) but then uses a single meter, trimeter, for the remaining six lines of the stanza, lines which include a couplet followed by another envelope-rhymed quatrain—all rhymes masculine. Psalms 26 and 32 align rhyme and metrical schemes (32 also aligning its alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes); Psalms 23 and 40 dissociate rhyme and metrical schemes. Sidney does have a favored rhyme scheme, aabccb, which he uses nine times among his forty-three Psalms (3, 14, 16, 26, 31–33, 38, and 43),42 but he varies either the metrical scheme or the patterning of masculine and feminine rhymes in all nine instances, and 31 varies the rhyme scheme by carrying over the b-rhyme as the initial arhyme of each successive stanza (highlighting this carry-over by repeating the word forteresse in the transition between the first two stanzas, lines 6 and 7).43 Sidney in fact nowhere repeats the same conjunction of rhyme scheme, metrical scheme, and patterning of masculine and feminine rhymes.44

136

J. H. FERGUSON

Sidney and Sidney Herbert considered the Psalter a platform upon which to demonstrate the poetic resources of the English language. It is also clear that the translators considered the poetic resources of the English language a platform upon which to represent the Psalter: Sidney’s description of the Psalms as a “divine poem” in the narratio section of the Apology provides a general rationale for such a metrical paraphrase: even if verse is “but an ornament and no cause to Poetry,” verse has been judged the “fittest raiment” of Poetry: a translator of the Psalms, then, would be justified in “peizing each syllable of each word by just proportion according to the dignity of the subject” (87). Where is the Sidneys’ emphasis? Do they use English to illustrate the Psalter or use the Psalter to illustrate English? The poetic effects of their metrical paraphrase would seem to exceed the Psalter’s sacred character, as the Sidneys understood that character, but then it would seem no less clear that, for the Sidneys, the sacred character of the Psalter exceeded any merely poetic effect. The answer must be that the distinction is a false one: the use of English for the expression of faith and faith in the expressiveness of English are to a significant degree coextensive and mutually reinforcing. The Sidneys understood poetic virtuosity as an aspect of exegesis of the Psalter. From as early as John Donne’s celebratory poem, “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister,” in the early seventeenth century, the Sidney Psalter has been read against the Whole Booke of Psalmes , translated by, among others, Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, and first published in 1562 for liturgical use.45 Donne does not refer to the Whole Booke of Psalmes by name, but it is presumably this work (perhaps among others) that he has in mind when he laments the state of English Psalmody prior to the Sidneys: “these Psalmes are become / So well attyr’d abroad, so ill at home, / So well in Chambers, in thy Church so ill.”46 For Donne, the comparison with the Whole Booke of Psalmes suggests two antitheses: domestic vs. international versions of the Psalter, and English versions for congregational and private use. For modern critics, the comparison between the Whole Booke of Psalmes and the Sidney Psalter suggests several related antitheses: the sung vs. the read, popular vs. elite, devotional vs. literary, among others.47 In comparison with the Whole Booke of Psalmes or with a Psalter like Matthew Parker’s (drafted in 1557, first published, with music, in 1567), written in different versions of ballad meter throughout, the Sidneys’ varied meters accomplish something else: this consummate variation draws attention to the particularity of each

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

137

individual Psalm. In this, the Sidney Psalter effects a different exegesis of the Psalms: each Sidneian Psalm, almost uniformly unique in its formal features, bears the stamp of a particularized experience. Clément Marot (c.1496–1544) and Philip Sidney both completed metrical paraphrases of just under a third of the Psalms: Marot published versions of forty-nine Psalms (his Song of Simeon was counted as one of the “Vingt autres pseaumes,” following the initial “Trente”); Sidney finished forty-three. Each translator’s work was completed by another hand, Marot’s by Theodore Beza. (The complete Marot-Beza Psalter was first published in Geneva in 1562.) The most significant difference between the Psalm translations of Marot and Sidney is in the choice of Psalms to be translated: Marot rendered 1–15, 19, 22, 24, 32, 37, 38, 51, 103, 104, 113–15, 130, 137, and 143 in his first collection, 18, 23, 25, 33, 36, 43, 45, 46, 50, 72, 79, 86, 91, 101, 107, 110, 118, 128, and 138 in his second48 ; Sidney rendered Psalms 1–43. The obvious conclusion is that Marot sets out to paraphrase particular Psalms, Sidney the Psalter. Like the great majority of Psalm-paraphrasts, Marot (though he might have worked under a different conception through the first fifteen) chose Psalms of particular interest to him: his choices for the first collection range over the whole book, and his second collection does not systematically fill in gaps in the first (though it is also true that he did not provide new versions of Psalms previously published); it can be no accident that such favorites for poetic paraphrase as 23, 137, and six of the seven Penitential Psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 130, 143, omitting 102) were among Marot’s choices, all but one of these (23) included in his first twenty.49 Sidney, on the other hand, clearly intended to provide or at least begin a version of the whole, and this suggests a project that is not only more ambitious but also more exegetical. To render certain of the Psalms emphasizes the role of the poet-translator and so prioritizes his or her poetic project over the biblical text as such. (Versions of the Penitential Psalms represent an exception, since these Psalms were regularly set apart as a coherent sub-sequence of the Psalter; however, Marot’s interspersing of these Psalms among a large number of others, as well as his failure to paraphrase all seven, greatly reduces the sub-sequence’s independent standing among his selections.) To render the whole Psalter emphasizes, on the other hand, the integrity of the original collection and suggests that the translator has something to say about the biblical book itself. This may not prove that Sidney’s project was not a “fundamentally literary [as opposed to devotional] work,”50 but it does suggest that his

138

J. H. FERGUSON

project was literary in a sense different from that exemplified by Marot and so many other poet-paraphrasts. It suggests that Sidney’s paraphrase was exegetical.51 That Sidney’s Psalms were also conspicuously literary suggests a form of literary exegesis that might resolve the tension customarily observed in metrical paraphrases of the Psalter between fidelity to the biblical text and poetic ingenuity, between the special status of the biblical logos and secular literary form. This tension between biblical Word and secular literary form is best understood in the context of biblical paraphrase. The normal polarity applied to versions like Sidney’s and Marot’s is between the constraint to render the text as literally as possible, on the one hand, and the interpreter’s freedom to adapt the text to his or her poetic project, on the other; customarily, one weighs the interpreter’s fidelity against his or her license and renders judgment on the balance achieved. An early critic of Marot’s Psalter, Florimond de Raemond, charged in 1611 that the French poet “strayed from the straight path of the sense in order to reach a rhyme.”52 Another, English critic of Marot’s Psalter, Thomas Harrab, mixes ad hominem argument with precise terminology: “These Rithmes or Rimes in the vulgar, are rather Bezaes ballads, and Marots muses, then psalmes of David; for they vagary and goe out at their pleasure, from faithful translation, and from the sence of the holy Ghost, to make up their Rime:… Their Rimes indeed, are rather Paraphrases of their owne braine, then the text of Scripture, and so are nothing else but the ballads of Beza, and of Marot.”53 The charge of “Paraphrase,” or irresponsible translation, could come from either Roman Catholic or Protestant: each camp frequently accused the other of distorting Scripture for partisan ends. Harrab’s essential complaint concerns the vulgarization of the biblical text, as his evocation of a Calvinist service illustrates: the Minister “preacheth a sermon of some psalme in the vulgar tongue, with a lowed voice, al the people follow, men, women, children, and servants, some high, some lowe, some in tune, some out of tune, with great confusion, without order of harmony.”54 To the extent that Harrab’s diatribe can be applied to English religious practice, it would seem to fit the use of the Whole Booke of Psalmes much more readily than that envisioned by Sidney; indeed, Sidney’s Psalms seem a reaction against the same kind of populism that disturbed Harrab. The metrical sophistication as well as the circulation of the Sidney-Psalms in manuscript both suggest a preference for private devotion and study rather than popular liturgical usage,55 in the same way that different

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

139

translations of the Bible were published in the Elizabethan period for public and private functions. Hugues Vaganay’s valuable bibliographic essay demonstrates the vast number of metrical Psalms published in Latin in the sixteenth century; many of these Psalters employ a variety of meters, in accord with the suggestion of the Parisian theologian Joannes Ganeius (d.1549) that the Psalms include many poetic genres, that different boots fit different feet, and that various meters should be used to render the various genres.56 George Buchanan’s metrical Psalter, first published in 1556 and reissued more than twenty times before the end of the century, included twenty-nine different meters, many of them derived directly from Horace.57 The printer of the 1592 London edition of this Psalter, Richard Field, provides page numbers of the corresponding Latin versions of Beza for convenient comparison of the two.58 Beza, in turn, included in his Latin volume the “argumentum & usus,” a “paraphrasis,” an “interpretatio,” and a metrical version (with analysis of the meter used) for each of the Psalms. There was a thriving and sophisticated tradition of learned metrical paraphrase in Latin when Sidney sets himself to the Psalms. The object of translation, as generally understood, is verbal: the original words circumscribe bounds within which the translator must remain. Understood as an independent genre rather than as a reproach, paraphrase describes fidelity to the original, the relation between original and version, differently: paraphrase presents its difference from the original text as a reconstruction of what is thought to be implicit in the original but obscured by the distance between author and new audience. Paraphrase aims not to transfer the original text’s words into another language but to recreate contextual meanings that have been lost: such paraphrase renders the original in “more and other words,”59 because the original’s words, translated into the target language, would not convey the right meanings.60 Sidney’s metrical paraphrase goes further in the same direction: it should be considered an attempt to reconstitute poetic effects that time has effaced, rather than a compromise between fidelity and poetic license. Paraphrase represents itself as a radical revision of the original’s verbal form, a recovery of meanings that have been lost; metrical paraphrase of the Psalter focuses this recovery on the (lost) metrical features of the Psalms. Sidney acknowledges that the Psalter’s poetic properties were “not yet fully found,” but he believed that the Psalms were no less “fully written in meter” for that ignorance (Apology 84). The task that Sidney sets himself was to restore a sense of the Psalter that the passing of time had effaced.

140

J. H. FERGUSON

Modern critics often read metrical paraphrase with reference to an opposition between poetic invention and the scriptural text. Thus, for example, Michel Jeanneret concludes his discussion of the formal properties of Marot’s Psalms with an affirmation of the fine compromise achieved: Marot “liberates himself [s’affranchit ] from the lexical and syntactical properties [données lexicologiques et syntaxiques ] of the original, he amplifies his material and enriches its evocative power without however going beyond [sans dépasser] the limits of a very specific semantic field [champ sémantique] traced out by the source.”61 Jeanneret’s pair of verbs, s’affranchir and dépasser, smuggles in a distinction between concepts that are, in this sentence, practically interchangeable; likewise, the difference between “données lexicologiques et syntaxiques,” on the one hand, and “champ sémantique,” on the other, seems—again, in this sentence—more verbal than substantive. The essential point here, somewhat obscured by the indecisive wording, is that Marot has gone beyond the original without going beyond the original by too much, and that he has done so for good reasons. The measure that Jeanneret applies to these paraphrases derives from the traditional opposition between fidelity and poetic license. Hannibal Hamlin’s conclusion about the Sidney Psalter is similarly ambiguous: “whatever else it may be, it is an essentially literary work. It was as a book of poems, rather than as a psalter with any sort of liturgical or devotional purpose…that the Sidney Psalter had its greatest impact.”62 These two sentences shift from discussing the essence of the Psalter to discussing its impact; it is not clear which of the two Hamlin intends to describe, though one might suspect that he wants to address the first but falls back on the second for its being more readily subject to empirical demonstration. Furthermore, in the first of these sentences, Hamlin seems to want to exclude or at least to reduce the importance of other aspects of the Psalter (to describe its essence) without quite owning up to his exclusion of these other possibilities (“whatever else it may be”). Robert Montgomery argues a similar non-sequitur: “Sidney used the task [of translating Psalms] to try his hand at a variety of verse forms, though no doubt his devotional interests were equally engaged.”63 I would suggest that this critical embarrassment results from the dismissal of the devotional element of the Sidney Psalter in favor of a literary one, even as these critics feel that Sidney would have rejected this dichotomy. With reference to Marot’s description of David as the Apollo and the Holy Spirit as his Calliope, Prescott suggests a possible synthesis of sacred and

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

141

secular modes: “we tend to forget that such efforts [metrical versions of Scripture] were often seen not as rejections of secular abilities but rather as their spiritual fulfillment.”64 The binary oppositions of Jeanneret and Hamlin demonstrate that we still find it challenging to describe just how secular poetics might achieve this kind of spiritual fulfillment. The pressure of form intrudes itself so thoroughly in Sidney’s Psalms as to suggest that poetic form is inseparable from the content of the Psalter. The pressure of form suggests that we take more seriously Sidney’s description of “holy David’s Psalms [as] a divine Poem” (Apology 84): for Sidney, perhaps, a proper metrical Psalter was not—as Marot’s selection of Psalms would suggest—the mere addition of poetic ingenuity to paraphrasable content. Rather, the formal organization of these paraphrases is key to Sidney’s understanding of the Psalter, and, indeed, of form itself. Sidney certainly shows himself alert to the inseparability of form and content in his secular work: the most prominent theme of Astrophil and Stella is the form in which the speaker has undertaken to write.65 As noted above, Prescott has argued convincingly that Sidney’s definition of the secular (“right”) poet in the Apology has much in common with the psalmist’s art as described by a range of prominent theologians: for Sidney, “the psalmist, besides his other advantages, was also in his fashion a right poet.”66 This, again, is not to deny that Sidney’s Psalms represented a “right” poetic project; it is to suggest a more comprehensive resonance for his poetics (with regard, at least, to the Psalter). The formal variety of Sidney’s Psalms is an attempt to restore, using the resources of sixteenthcentury English poetics, the formal integrity of the Hebrew Psalter. That the restoration of the Psalms’ formal dimension should also represent a demonstrable advance in the literary sophistication of English suggests again Sidney’s sense of the Bible as a touchstone for the expressiveness of the English language. The same metrical variety has often, however, seemed to readers’ literary indulgence. The complete Sidney Psalter’s first modern editor, J. C. A. Rathmell, insists that, from among this “extraordinary variety of forms, each [is] conformable to the emotional tenor of the individual psalm” (xiv). Later in his Introduction, however, Rathmell makes a concession to the skeptical view: “Admittedly there may be an element here of virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, but the wide variety of form is intended also to reflect the diversity of the Psalms themselves” (xvii). Instead of insisting that each Psalm’s Sidneian form matches that Psalm’s content, Rathmell argues that the collective formal variation of the

142

J. H. FERGUSON

Sidneys’ Psalter corresponds with the general diversity of the Psalter’s contents. This suggests a plausible thesis: the traditional reception of the Psalter as an all-encompassing guide to Christian experience, expressed in a correspondingly diverse (if ill understood) array of Hebrew poetic forms, provided Sidney and Sidney Herbert with a pretext for developing a consummate exhibition of English poetic resources. This position is expressed nicely, if a little dismissively, by Coburn Freer: “the ‘lost’ metrical rules of the Hebrew psalms might have given a poet like Sidney a blank check in his…translations”67 ; it would seem to represent a consensus among published criticism on Sidney’s Psalms.68 This argument leaves open the question of the appropriateness of any particular Psalm’s form to its matter; it leaves Sidney’s Psalms individually vulnerable to the charge of mere craftsmanship. Philip Sidney’s secular sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, plays harmlessly on the potential conflict between artfulness and heartfeltness; the stakes involved in distinguishing between sincerity (the correspondence of manner and meaning) and mere artfulness would be considerably higher in a rendering of the Psalms. Sidney’s Psalms thus raise a potentially perilous opposition between formal ingenuity and scriptural truth, secular form, and divine logos. Versions of David’s imitations of “the inconceivable excellencies of God” (Apology 86) that are, individually or collectively, mere “exercises in technique,”69 would constitute inadequate expressions of devotion and would be, moreover, susceptible to the quintessential Reformation criticism against substituting human inventions for Scripture. It seems implausible that Sidney would have exposed himself to such a charge. Just this opposition is reflected in what the most recent editor of Marot’s Psalter, Gérard Defaux, describes as the simultaneous collaboration and tension between Marot and Jean Calvin in the 1543 Geneva edition of the Cinquante pseaumes.70 Calvin’s Epistle “A tous Chrestiens, et amateurs de la parole de Dieu, Salut,” published in its final form for the first time at the head of this Psalter, distinguishes between the Psalms’ “deux parties”: the subject matter (“la lettre, ou subject & matiere”) and the form (which Calvin identifies with music: “le chant, ou la melodie”). About the former, Calvin is certain: he cites Augustine on singing “choses dignes de Dieu…receu d’iceluy” and approves the Psalms as texts directly inspired by God: “quand nous les chantons, nous sommes certains que Dieu nous met en la bouche les paroles” (319). About the Psalms’ musical form, Calvin is considerably more ambivalent: a long paragraph on singing

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

143

in his Epistle shunts back and forth between, on the one hand, commonplace scriptural and patristic celebrations of the power of music to move the heart toward God and, on the other, music’s dangerous voluptuousness. Calvin distinguishes between profane (“dinner-table”) music and Psalms according to formal criteria: the former is “leger” and “volage” (“light” and “inconstant”), the latter have “poids & majesté” (“weight and majesty”). Despite this “grande difference,” however, it is a fact that Marot rendered the Psalms in metrical forms not unlike those he used in secular works—as did Sidney. The distinction between subject matter and artful verbal dress is conventional. In her dedicatory poem to the Tixall manuscript of the Psalmes, Sidney Herbert writes of her brother that “hee did warpe,” while she “weav’d this webb to end; / the stuffe not ours, our worke no curious thing.”71 In another dedicatory poem to the same manuscript, this one addressed to her deceased brother, Sidney Herbert draws the same distinction in commenting on how the Psalter has been transformed by the sibling paraphrasts: “in substance no, but superficiall tire.”72 In line with this distinction, Sidney Herbert’s claim that their Psalter is “no curious thing” seems a fitting gesture of modesty, a predictable celebration of the sacred stuff of the Psalter and de-emphasis of the craftsmanship of the paraphrasts; the latter dedication describes an analogous relation between Sidney Herbert’s Muse, of “mortall stuffe,” and her dead brother’s “divine” inspiration (lines 4–6). Donne recalls this image of divinely inspired sibling-unity in his “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes.” And yet, there is a gap here, similar to that between Calvin’s Epistle and Marot’s paraphrases: what could be more curious (i.e., done with care) than the relentless formal variation of the Sidneian Psalter? About the form of Marot’s Psalms, Calvin’s Epistle is guarded: “one hopes that it will be found holy and pure” (nous esperons qu’on la trouvera saincte & pure). This hope is grounded on the characterization of Marot’s translation as “simply ordered toward edification” (simplement reiglee à l’edification). Calvin’s words seem indeed hopeful rather than confident, as suggested by his ambiguity here: the phrase might mean that the Psalms are formally uncomplicated, in order to provide edification; the phrase might also mean that the form of these Psalms is edifying. Formal sophistication might hinder or it might effect edification. At the conclusion of the Epistle, Calvin writes that it seemed best that the Psalms’ melody be “moderée” in order to lend them the “weight and majesty appropriate to the subject” (poids & majesté convenable au subjet; 320). Later, in the

144

J. H. FERGUSON

Institutes , Calvin defines more specifically the “moderation” that must be preserved if Psalmody is going to be a “holy and salutary practice”: “we should be very careful that our ears be not more attentive to the melody than our minds to the spiritual meaning of the words.”73 Profane craft is to be subordinated to the sacred matter of the Psalms; meanwhile, the gap between Calvin’s principle and Marot’s practice seems the more troublesome for its going unacknowledged.74 Several modern critics have stated bluntly Sidney’s failure to match his complex patterns to the biblical content: Theodore Spencer, for example, calls Sidney’s formal variation, invention, and experimentation “mechanical”: Sidney has sacrificed “directness of expression” to “a preconceived pattern.”75 After noting a few exceptions (all drawn from Sidney Herbert’s versions), Hamlin doubts that the Sidneys’ formal choices are generally meaningful: “[d]espite all these psalms in which there is some significant relationship between form and content, however, there are many more in which there seems to be none. … The choice of most of the formal and metrical patterns is inexplicable, as one largely expects, since most meters, rhyme schemes, and stanza forms do not have a specific meaning or traditional associations.”76 The assumption that forms can take on meaning only through preconceived or traditional associations is problematic, as Hamlin’s own discussions elsewhere in his book would suggest. Another skeptic, Robert Montgomery, cites Sidney’s versions of Psalms 16 (Conserva me) and 17 (Exaudi Domine iustitiam): “On grounds of their content alone there seems to be little excuse for the switch from a six-line stanza with a seven-syllable line in Psalm XVI to a four-line stanza with couplets of ten and eight syllables in Psalm XVII. Both poems, pleas for security and justice, are very much alike.”77 It is notable that, by Montgomery’s lights, one must excuse stanzaic variety. Nevertheless, Montgomery’s critique has the virtue of citing specific examples; a brief analysis of these examples will illustrate the different approach to be pursued here. Psalm 16 evokes a sense of self-doubt and fear that is lacking in Psalm 17: in 16, the speaker pleads for and anticipates God’s support but acknowledges that his own “workes reach not to” God (line 6), feels his “faultes and chastening” (24), and dwells on death (31–36). Psalm 17, on the other hand, shows the speaker confident that (in the words of lines 17–18) “I have cal’d on thee, / And boldly saie thou wilt give eare to me”; this confidence suits the traditional attribution of Psalm 17

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

145

to an innocent David in flight from Saul’s jealous rage (cf. 1 Sam. 18– 24).78 The relatively complex scheme of Psalm16 (a sexain of two rhymed couplets divided and then joined together by rhymes at lines 3 and 6: aabccb) offers a metrical figure of the attenuated relationship between supplicant and God in this Psalm; by contrast, the unvaried march of couplets in Psalm 17 suggests the uncomplicated confidence of its speaker. The forms Sidney has chosen for these Psalms would seem expressive of these Psalms’ meanings. As mentioned above, the sexain rhymed aabccb is the only scheme, excluding the couplet, that is repeated more than once in Sidney’s Psalms: Sidney uses this scheme for nine of his forty-three Psalms (3, 14, 16, 26, 31–33, 38, and 43). Six of these nine Psalms were translated by Marot (3, 14, 32, 33, 38, 4379 ), the other three by Beza (16, 26, 31): of these nine French versions, 3, 26, 33, and 38 use sexains rhymed aabccb, although 33 alternates between this form and cross-rhymed quatrains. There was, then, precedent for Sidney’s use of this scheme, though he clearly did not feel bound to follow his French models consistently. In one of these, Psalm 38 (Domine, ne in furore), Sidney follows Marot’s metrics with remarkable subtlety. Both Marot’s and Sidney’s versions use the sexain rhymed aabccb. Marot varies the lengths of his lines: the second a- and c-rhymes of each stanza are trisyllabic, the remaining lines are of seven syllables: La, en ta fureur aigue Ne m’argue: De mon fait, Dieu tout puissant, Ton ardeur un peu retire, N’en ton ire Ne me punis languissant. Car tes flesches descochées, Son fichées Bien fort en moy sans mentir: Et as voulu, dont j’endure, Ta main dure Dessus moy appensantir. (38.1–12)

This is precisely the kind of metrical variation that enlivens Marot’s Psalms and distinguishes them from most of Beza’s versions. Sidney adopts the principle of variation throughout his Psalms; in his version of 38,

146

J. H. FERGUSON

however, he follows Marot’s meter even more closely than usual—syllable for syllable, in fact (but not word for word): Lord, while that thy rage doth bide, Do not chide Nor in anger chastise me, For thy shafts have peirc’d me sore; And yet more Still thy hands upon me be. (1–6)

These are either headless iambs or tailless trochees—the pause after “Lord” in the first line and the general currency of iambics in English verse might suggest the former, while the editor of Sidney’s poetry, William Ringler Jr., categorizes them as trochaic.80 However they are labeled, these lines represent ingeniously precise English adaptations of French tri- and hepta-syllabic lines. This careful shadowing of Marot’s metrics does not represent a consistent principle of Sidney’s treatment of his French predecessor, but it does emphasize his meticulous attention to the adaptation of formal characteristics from one language into another. In light of this close metrical imitation, Sidney’s other formal choices in these Psalms are strikingly original: Marot rendered Psalm 38 in twentytwo stanzas (132 lines), one stanza for every line of the original (whether that “original” be the Vulgate or the version iuxta Hebraicum 81 ). Sidney, as illustrated by the citations above, turns every two lines of the original into a single stanza, for a total of eleven stanzas (66 lines). As a rule, Sidney’s Psalms are shorter than Marot’s, though not usually by so much as in 38, and occasionally Sidney’s version will come very close to (as in Psalm 1), equal (Psalm 11), or even exceed Marot’s (Psalm 10). In all three of the latter, Marot alters his normal practice of providing an identical stanza for each line in the original82 : Psalm 1, in couplets, uses three French lines (effectively, a couplet and a half) for each one in the original; in Psalms 10 and 11, Marot alternates between three- and four-line units for each line in the original—these units are arranged into rhyme royal stanzas in 10 and rhymed ababcbc in 11. Sidney follows no consistent pattern in his adaptation of the original lines to his stanzas: usually his stanzas begin on new lines, but this is not always the case (e.g., 5.8–10, which includes parts of stanzas 1 and 2, renders line 4 in the original); within a single Psalm, stanzas might include part of a line, a single line, or two lines (e.g., 3.22–30, which encompasses part of stanzas 4 and

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

147

all of 5, renders line 7 in the original; 3.1–6, which encompasses stanza 1, renders line 1 in the original; 3.7–12, which encompasses stanza 2, renders lines 2–3 in the original).83 Unlike Marot, Sidney is not interested in preserving the structural integrity of the original’s lineation: he sacrifices it to his own stanzaic inventions. Psalms 29 (Afferte Domino) and 30 (Exaltabo te, Domine) offer another illustration of the correspondence between form and substance in Sidney’s versions and of Sidney’s relation to the Marot-Beza Psalter. Both versions in the French Psalter are attributed to Beza, where they are organized into eight- and six-line strophes, respectively (the former concluding with a quatrain), and both are composed entirely of endstopped, rhymed couplets. Vous tous Princes & Seigneurs, Remplis de gloire & d’honneurs, Rendez, rendez au Seigneur Toute force & tout honneur. Faites luy recognoissance, Qui responde à sa puissance: En sa demeure tressaincte, Ployez les genoux en crainte. La voix du Seigneur tonnant Va sur les eaux resonant: Parmi les nues des cieux S’entend le Dieu glorieux. La voix du Seigneur tesmongne De quell force il besongne : La voix du Seigneur hautaine, De hautesse est toute pleine. (29.1–16) Lors que j’avois tout à souhait, J’allois disant, Voila, c’est fait, Je suis pour jamais asseuré Ta bonté m’avoit remparé, Seigneur ma forteresse haute, Si que de rien je n’avois faute. Mais ton visage estant tourné, Soudain mon Coeur s’est estonné:

148

J. H. FERGUSON

Alors au Seigneur j’ai crié, Alors j’ay le Seigneur prié, Disant, Si je suis mis en terre, Qu’y peux-tu gagner ni acquerre? Estant mis en poudre, Seigneur, Pourray-je avancer ton honneur, Ou tes veritez annoncer? Plaise-toy ma voix exaucer, Seigneur, ta pitié me regarde: Seigneur Dieu, sois ma sauvegarde. (30.25–42)84

Beza abandons Marot’s practice of matching fixed groups of lines to single lines in the original: the eighteen lines excerpted here from Psalm 30 render an uneven five lines in the sources. Unlike Sidney, however, Beza does not forgo this kind of correspondence in service to his own stanzaic inventions. Sidney’s (and Marot’s) stanzas are given shape by rhyme and metrical schemes, while the integrity of Beza’s stanzas depends on the attached melodies. Sans music, Beza’s stanzas are merely sets of couplets. The formal characteristics of Sidney’s versions of Psalms 29 and 30, by contrast, echo clearly the two Psalms’ respective subjects. Psalm 29 is an exhortation to men of power and wealth to join the speaker in praise of God: Ascribe unto the Lord of light, Yee men of pow’r (ev’n by birth-right) Ascribe all glory and all might. Ascribe due glory to his name; And in his ever-glorious frame Of Sanctuary doe the same. Hys voice is on the waters found, His voice doth threatning thunders sound, Yea, through the waters doth resound. The voice of that Lord ruling us Is strong, though hee be gratious, And ever, ever glorioues. (1–12)

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

149

All nine of 29’s tercets and its concluding couplet are mono-rhymed (aaa bbb…jj ), and all are end-stopped. This consistent formal closure suggests a sense of stasis, which reinforces the thematic immobility of this Psalm: lines 7–23 are composed entirely of grammatically and thematically parallel statements describing God’s voice, its alternatively destructive and creative powers; line 24, somewhat incongruously, situates God’s fame “in his Church”; the final tercet (lines 25–27) switches from God’s voice to his justice but carries on the parallelistic form; the closing couplet sums up this series of illustrations with a guarantee of the strength and peace that God grants His followers. Some of the rhyme-words seem reflexively to reinforce the Psalm’s sense of circularity: name…same (4, 7), sound…resound (9–10). This monotonous run of praise seems perfectly suited to the heavy-handedly rhymed, static stanzas in which it is expressed. Psalm 30 begins and ends with the speaker’s vows of continual praise for God (lines 3 and 37–38); the middle of the Psalm, however, has the speaker recalling a time of profound doubt in God: For proof, while I my race did runne Full of successe, fond I did say, That I should never be undonne, For then my hill good God did stay: But ah, he straight his face did hide, And what was I but wretched clay? Then thus to thee I prayeng cride, What serves alas, the blood of me When I with in the pitt doe bide; Shall ever earth give thancks to thee? Or shall thy truth on mannkind laId In deadly dust, declared be? (19–30)

Psalm 30 is rendered in terza rima (aba bcb cdc etc., concluding—in Sidney’s version of the form—with an intruded couplet: lml mnn), a form first used for English Psalms in Thomas Wyatt’s version of the Penitential Psalms. Sidney and Wyatt paraphrased three Psalms in common (6, 32, 38), but Sidney followed Wyatt’s rhyme scheme in none of these.85 Wyatt’s use of terza rima suits the larger narrative framework within which Wyatt’s Psalms are set. Taken individually, none of the three Penitential Psalms that both Wyatt and Sidney paraphrased has as much narrative drive as 30: the lines cited above portray the speaker falling

150

J. H. FERGUSON

from complacency to despair (from which he rises again at the Psalm’s conclusion); the colloquial passages (“But ah,” “What serves alas”) and the general tone of recrimination toward God give the speaker’s despair particular poignancy. The speaker’s appeal in line 25 takes on additional immediacy for his shift from describing God in the third person (22–23) to a direct cry to “thee” (25, 28–29). The formal stasis of Psalm 29 would seem entirely out of place in this Psalm; the combination of retrospection and anticipation and the strong sense of narrative movement are answered by the simultaneously forward and backward motion of terza rima. This alignment of formal and thematic stasis is illustrated even more dramatically by another Psalm, 15: In tabernacle thine, O Lord, who shall remaine? Lord, of thy holy hill, who shall the rest, obtaine? Ev’n he that leades of life an uncorrupted traine, Whose deedes of righteous hart, whose harty wordes be plain: Who with deceitfull tongue, hath never us’d to faine; Nor neighboure hurtes by deede, nor doth with slander stain. (1–6)

This Psalm’s remaining seven lines are, like the first six, mono-rhymed hexameter; every one of these nine lines, like 3–6 above, rephrases what the righteous will and will not do–nine grammatically coordinated answers to the question, “who shall remaine?” Like Psalm 29, 15 casts a series of thematically repetitive, parallel statements in a simple, static form. Psalm 11 (In Domino Confido) offers another counter-example to this thematic and formal stasis: Since I do trust Jehova still, Your fearfull wordes why do you spill? That like a bird to some strong hill I now should fall a flyeng. Behould the evill have bent their bow, And sett their arrowes in a row, To give unwares a mortall blow To hartes that hate all lyeng. (1–8)

The versions of Psalm 11 by Sidney and Marot are composed of the same number of lines, twenty-four, but are set in very different rhyme schemes. Marot’s scheme is slightly irregular: as mentioned earlier, he

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

151

writes alternately three- and four-line units for each line in the sources and arranges these units into seven-line stanzas rhymed ababcbc (with a concluding tercet rhymed dbd). Sidney’s scheme in Psalm 11 (aaabcccb) might be considered a permutation of his favorite sexain, aabccb: Psalm 11 lengthens the a- and c- couplets into tercets, thus providing at once a greater sense of consistency and a greater sense of attenuation in the delayed b-rhymes—which are distinguished from the a- and c-lines by their being trimeter rather than tetrameter and by their feminine rhymes (with the possible exception of the b-rhymes in the last stanza, “assigned” and “enclined” [lines 20, 24]). Psalm 11 might also be compared with the mono-rhymed tercets of Psalm 29: the added fourth line in Psalm 11 binds pairs of 29’s tercets together into larger units even as it breaks up the monotony of those tercets. Thematically, Psalm 11 resembles Psalm 30 in terza rima discussed above: both look forward hopefully to God’s redemption of the just, but both also contemplate their speakers’ vulnerability to the searching judgment of God and to external threats. Like Psalm 30, then, Psalm 11 sets an expression of ambivalent moral feeling into a rhyme scheme that seems to make a point of its greater complexity relative to other Psalms in the collection. Psalm 40 (Expectans expectavi) is perhaps the most metrically and structurally complex of Sidney’s Psalms: the poem contains seven stanzas of ten lines each, each stanza composed of two envelope-rhymed quatrains separated by a couplet (abbaccdeed), the a-rhymes in pentameter, the b-rhymes in tetrameter, the remaining six lines in trimeter, all rhymes masculine. Psalm 40 is a song of glorification and a plea for aid immersed in a first-person narrative. The first stanza provides circumstances that tend to equate God’s provision of the song that follows with the divine help the speaker needs: While, long, I did with patient constancy The pleasure of my God attend, He did, him self, to me-ward bend And harkned how and why that I did cry. And me from pitt, bemired, From dungeon he retired, Where I, in horrors lay: Setting my feete upon A steedfast rocky stone; And my weake stepps did stay. (1–10)

152

J. H. FERGUSON

Throughout Psalm 40, Sidney makes a hard break in the sense between the initial quatrain and the remaining six lines: as far as sense-divisions go, the important boundary is that separating the longer lines of the initial quatrain (pentameter and tetrameter) from the shorter, trimeter lines of the couplet and closing quatrain. Nowhere in the Psalm is there an enjambment from the fourth onto the fifth lines; by contrast, Sidney often runs the sense from the sixth into the seventh line—and, in fact, the final six lines, divided by rhymes into a couplet and a quatrain, are divided by sense rather into two tercets.86 Beginning in the first stanza, Psalm 40 articulates a nuanced call-and-response structure. The speaker cries out from a bleak situation, God hearkens to and rescues him, and the rescue turns out to take the form of singing matter. The second stanza therefore takes a self-reflexive turn: Soe in my mouth he did a song affoord, New song unto our God of praise: Which many seeing hartes shall raise To feare with trust, and trust with feare the Lord. Oh, he indeede is blessed Whose trust is so addressed; Who bendes not wandring eyes To greate mens pecock pride, Nor ever turnes a side To follow after lies. (11–20)

The initial stanza of Psalm 40 provides a narrative context within which God “affoords” the speaker the song of praise that will follow this, the second stanza. That the song is “new” suggests a divine source for poetic inspiration. Line 4 includes a chiastic structure (“feare with trust, and trust with feare”) that, in this context, may suggest the way in which the speaker sees his identity as a singer reflected in the divine, his words as the reflection of divine words. The remaining six lines—united by uniform line-lengths, continuous and parallel syntax—describe a commonplace distinction between divine righteousness and human pride that takes on, in the present context, significance for the proper orientation of song or poetry. The latter six lines (15–20) might seem at first the “new song” announced earlier, except that the passage “he indeede is blessed / Whose trust is so addressed” refers back to the trustful fear or fearful trust

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

153

described chiastically in line 14, meaning that these latter lines are part of the longer passage describing the “new song” rather than the singing of that song. The “new song” would seem to begin rather with the third stanza: My God, thy wondrous workes how manyfold! What manne thy thoughts can count to thee? I faine of them would speaking be But they are more than can by me be told. Thou, sacrifice nor offring, Burnt offring, nor sinne offring Didst like, much lesse did’st crave; But thou didst peirce my eare, Which should thie leassons beare, And witnesse me thy slave. (21–30)

This stanza begins the glorification theme in Psalm 40 and represents a break from the narrative framework set out in the previous stanza: the circumstances within which the speaker is inspired by God to sing and the qualities associated with such song are here succeeded by a new theme, suggesting that this is the song evoked previously; moreover, the thirdperson address of God in the previous stanzas is here replaced with a direct, second-person address. It never becomes entirely clear in the Psalm where the “new song” begins or ends—it is a plausible reading that the Psalm as a whole represents the inspired song—but if the third stanza is this song, it introduces another, and stranger, self-reflexive turn into the text. The commonplace trope of inadequacy is here framed in a peculiar way: the words that God gives the speaker to sing are about the inability of the speaker to sing about God. Such a song would be reflexive but also inversely reflexive, insofar as the song does the opposite of what it says. Furthermore, this song is addressed directly to God, meaning that God is using the speaker as a medium through which to sing to Himself. There is no further break in the fabric of the Psalm: the second-person address is maintained through the end, and each new stanza picks up directly where the previous left off. Thus the last line of the third stanza, quoted above, reads “witnesse me thy slave”; the next stanza begins “Thus bound…” (31). The remaining stanzas do likewise: My hart shall not conceale Thy truth, health, gratiousness.

154

J. H. FERGUSON

Then, Lord, from me, draw not thy tender grace. (39–41) … …my surest part, My life-maintaining hart, Failes me, with ougly feares. Vouchsafe me helpe, O Lord, and helpe with haste. (48–51) … Yea lett them be destroied, For guerdon of their shame, Who-so unpittious be As now to say to me: A ha! this is good game. But fill their hartes with joy who bend their waies To seeke thy bewty past conceite. (56–62)

The sequence of stanzas 3 to 7, then, forms an unbroken direct address to God. They pass through a number of modes common in the Psalter as a whole: glorification of God (21–24), assertion of faith (31–40), complaint (41–50), plea for help (51–60), blessing of the righteous (61–64). The repetition of heart, in the lines quoted above and throughout the Psalm, gestures toward an idea of inner, essential truth commonplace in the Psalms and generally in the Hebrew Bible, even as the conceit of this Psalm’s divine inspiration (in part or in whole) turns inside out the speaker’s supposed interiority. The final line, “My God, O make noe stay” (70), repeats the final word of the first stanza, “And my weake stepps did stay” (10). Curiously, the word stay is given rather opposed senses in the two instances—“maintaining” in the former, “termination” in the latter—as if to refer back to the conflicted reflexivity informing the larger structure of the Psalm. This complex reflexivity is expressed as well by the magnificent stanzaic complexity of Psalm 40: the longer lines of the initial quatrain, marked off from the final six lines by sense and meter, would seem to record this Psalm’s complex treatment of identity and difference in the relations between believer and God, singer and sung. The Sidney Psalter makes Scripture a touchstone for the expressiveness of the English language. For Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, the culmination of English as a poetic medium took place in response to the Psalter, not merely in the sense that Psalms provided the Sidney

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

155

with prestigious pretexts for a demonstration of English poetic virtuosity, but in the sense that English poetic potential was fully realized in a work properly speaking of biblical exegesis. By using formal complexity to give each Psalm its own character, the Sidney’s immerse biblical language, the divine logos, into the secular history of literary form. Sidney describes an analogous qualification of poetic autonomy in the Apology, a qualified autonomy that corresponds in turn to the ecclesiastical-exegetical via media asserted by Jewel’s Apologia. As in the exchanges between More and Tyndale and in the discourse around Latinate English, so here, with regard specifically to literary writings, the Renaissance English mediation of Scripture played a decisive role in shaping the expressive capacities of the language.

Notes 1. According to Mandell Creighton, the Apologia is “the first methodical statement of the position of the Church of England against the Church of Rome and…the groundwork of all subsequent controversy.” An Apology of the Church of England, ed. J. E. Booty (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), xliii. Further references to Jewel’s Apologia are taken from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. Booty’s edition is based on the English translation by Lady Anne Bacon. The first English translation of the Apologia was published in 1562, Bacon’s version in 1564. 2. Such disagreements, for example, as that between followers of Luther and Zwingli on the nature of the Eucharist (44–45). 3. The statement may derive from Gal. 1:8: “though that we, or an Angel from heaven preache unto you other wise, then that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Booty’s claim (82n108) that this radical assertion was “added in the Bacon translation” is incorrect: the statement is present in the original Latin edition of 1562 (Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae [London, 1562], Eiiir) and in the English translation of the same year (An Apologie or aunswer in defence of the Church of England, concerninge the state of Religion used in the same [London, 1562], 40r), prior to Bacon’s version in 1564. The sentence was included in Thomas Harding’s Confutation of a Booke intituled An Apologie of the Church of England (1565), but without comment (LLL1v– LLL2v). From its first publication in 1567, Jewel’s Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande, as Booty notes correctly, omits the sentence (485 [misnumbered 487]–86). Booty, uncharacteristically, fails to provide

156

J. H. FERGUSON

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

a bibliographic reference for the citation, and I have been unable to locate the sentence in Justin’s works. An Answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, ed. Anne M. O’Donnel and Jared Wicks (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 133/21–29, discussed in Chapter 2, above. See, for example, Tyndale, An Answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, 23/30–24/5, discussed in Chapter 2, above. John Jewel and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), vii. See again Donne’s comment, referenced above, in an undated sermon on Psalm 32:10–11: “[o]ur Adversaries of Rome charge us, that we have but a negative Religion; If that were true, it were a heavy charge, if we did onely deny, and establish nothing; But we deny all their new additions, so as that we affirme all the old foundations” (The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962], 9: 405). The English Bible Translated out of the Original Tongues by the Commandment of King James the First, vol. 1: Genesis to Joshua (New York: AMS, 1967), 30. “Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert: Piety and Poetry,” The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion, ed. Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 330. Kenneth Myrick initially identified an oratorical structure underlying the Apology; Geoffrey Shepherd and others have refined Myrick’s reading. Kenneth Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 46–83. An Apologie for Poetrie, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson, 1965), 11–17. An Apologie for Poetrie, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. ed. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 88. Further references to Sidney’s Apology are taken from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. F. J. Levy argues that Sidney’s distinction between moral philosophy and history represents a significant intervention in turning history to its proper subject, politics. “Sir Philip Sidney and the Idea of History,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et de la Renaissance 26 (1964): 608–17. See Wesley Trimpi, “Sir Philip Sidney’s An apology for poetry,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 195. Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 167. Poetic and Legal Fiction, 169.

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

157

16. See Timothy Rosendale’s parallel discussion of this passage in Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 138–39. 17. Plato, that “most poetical” of philosophers (128), is the “patron” and not the “adversary” of poetry rightly construed (129–30): “the inside and strength were Philosophy, the skin as it were and beauty depended most of Poetry” (97). Plato’s criticism of poetry, as the Apology correctly records, is not categorical but is based on poets’ propagating “wrong opinions of the gods” (129). See the similar conclusion reached by F. Michael Krouse: “Sidney argues that Plato really condemned, not poetry itself, but only the abuse of poetry” (“Plato and Sidney’s Defense of Poesie,” Comparative Literature 6 [1954]: 143). 18. The best account of this portion of the Apology is the one closest to its Aristotelian sources and tradition: namely, Kathy Eden’s Poetic and Legal Fiction, esp. Ch. 4, pt. 4, “The Logic and Psychology of Renaissance Fiction: Sidney’s Apology for Poetry,” pp. 157–75. 19. Eden demonstrates that Sidney’s argument in this portion of the Apology “marks the culmination of a very gradual process of conflation between two distinct Aristotelian traditions [stemming from the Poetics, the Rhetoric, and the Nicomachean Ethics, on the one hand, the De Anima, on the other], each with its own foundations in the methods and procedures of the law” (Poetic and Legal Fiction 6). Trimpi points to both Aristotelian and Ciceronian sources: “Sidney drew on Aristotle’s comments on ‘pure rhetoric’ to emphasize poetry’s unique freedom from Nature”; “As Cicero insists that the ideal orator negotiate between generic and specific issues…so Sidney insists that the poet combine in his imago the philosopher’s abstract proposition [thesis ] and the historian’s particular case [hypothesis ]” (“Sir Philip Sidney’s An apology for poetry” 192). 20. Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 264. By way of defining the theological lines underlying the Apology, which are different from those described here, Cummings identifies the tension between, on the one hand, Sidney’s claim for the “highest point of man’s wit” (86), uncorrupted by the Fall, and, on the other, “pressures puritanism place[d] on literary culture” to limit human reason in light of the Fall (267–70). 21. “Sidney’s Humanism,” Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements, ed M. J. B Allen et al. (New York: AMS, 1990), 111. 22. John Ulreich’s essay, “‘The Poets Only Deliver’: Sidney’s Conception of Mimesis,” has made perhaps the most substantive effort to reconcile this ambiguity. Ulreich’s essay in fact attempts to reconcile two sources of ostensible incoherence in the Apology: he argues that Apology reconciles Platonic and Aristotelian mimesis, and that the latter reconciliation provides Sidney with a means of reconciling the apparent contradiction

158

J. H. FERGUSON

between creative autonomy and mimetic representation. My argument that Sidney’s Apology fails to unify the latter tension thus challenges Ulreich’s claim that Sidney’s “apparent self-contradictions are grounded in a deeper coherence” (68). One of the strengths of Ulreich’s argument lies in the cogency with which he demonstrates the “potential coherence of Aristotelian and Platonic definitions of form” (71): Ulreich argues that “Aristotelian mimesis is essentially a process forming a product, rather than the product formed” (71) and that Platonic “ideas themselves are actively working to produce the material universe…as the outward manifestation of their internal energy” (72), so that what appear to be “logically contradictory” emphases on outward form and inner essence are in fact two perceptions of “the same process at work, but from opposite points of view” (72). In responding to this complementarity, the Apology is “not a mere syncretism, but an active synthesis” (74): Sidney, for Ulreich, “unites the mutually interdependent processes of Platonic conception and Aristotelian embodiment” (74). Ulreich goes on to point to a “crucial distinction that Sidney implicitly draws between the works of Nature and her working, and thus between duplicating a visible product and reproducing the invisible process itself by which apparent Nature has been produced” (77). Sidney’s poet, that is, imitates not the products of Creation (what Ulreich calls Natura naturata) but the creative impulse from which nature results (Natura naturans ). (Michael Mack cites Coleridge using these terms with the same sense in the Biographia Literaria [Sidney’s Poetics: Imitating Creation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 32–33].) As Ulreich has pointed to the inner dimension of both Aristotelian form and Platonic conception, whereby they come to seem two sides of the same process, so he attributes to Sidney’s poet the imitation of the dynamic, inward process of “nature’s working” rather than static “works of nature” (77). In short, Ulreich’s Sidneian poet imitates the Creator rather than Creation—an argument that glosses neatly the otherwise puzzling intransitive use of the verb grow in the Apology where, Sidney explains, the poet “doth grow in effect into another nature” (85). As Erasmus argues, in the Ciceronianus : “[l]et us,” writes Erasmus, “imitate him [Cicero] as he imitated others” (sic illum imitemur, quemadmodum ipse est alios imitatus ) (Dialogus Ciceronianus, ed. Pierre Mesnard, Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterdami, vol. 1–2 [Amsterdam: North Holland, 1971], 651 [hereafter, ASD 1–2]; Ciceronianus or A Dialogue on the Best Manner of Speaking, trans. Izora Scott [New York: AMS, 1972)] 81.), so Sidney, according to Ulreich, argues that poetry “is an activity of poetic imagination, imitating the creative efficacy of God” (79). Sidney’s poet imitates the producer rather than the product and is therefore “productive,” creative, rather than reproductive

4

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

159

or referential (79). The proper understanding of poetic mimesis, which Ulreich initially described as a “subsidiary problem” (75), becomes the central argument of the essay for the “renewed life which [Sidney] has infused into the idea of mimesis itself … not as mere representation of natural forms, but as a reproduction of the Logos, a lively image of the Divine Word itself” (83–84). From this point of view, there is no distinction within poetry between creative autonomy and mimetic referentiality. “‘The Poets Only Deliver’: Sidney’s Conception of Mimesis.” Studies in Literary Imagination 15 (1982): 67–84. Further references to this essay are cited parenthetically in the text. Poetry’s other nature provides for the poet to redeem the “first accursed fall of Adam” (101). The “erected wit” shows the poet “what perfection is”: it points back to humanity’s “likeness” with God, humanity’s created position “beyond and over all the works of that second nature,” prior to humanity’s fall into “infected will.” The difference between Nature and the poet’s “golden” world is the difference between preand the post-lapsarian reality. Sidney syncretizes the Christian Fall with Platonic dualism: the Fall triggered the disappearance of divine Ideas from nature, and it belongs to the Poet to resuscitate these Ideas in his new golden world. Thus, what seems like creativity vis-à-vis the world of fallen humanity is in fact recreation of an unfallen ideal. Mack notes and corroborates the view of critics as early as C. S. Lewis that these two, initial comparisons belong to a single line of argument (Sidney’s Poetics 45–47). Cf. Cummings’ citation of William Temple’s summation of the “tota controversia” of the Apology in its theory of imitation (Literary Culture of the Reformation 264). Sidney’s distinction in the divisio between divine and “right” poetry, while implicitly complicated elsewhere in the Apology, troubles Nandra Perry’s assertion of a “shared (linguistic) means of poetic and Protestant imitatio” in this text (Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014], 51). Perry’s chapter-length juxtaposition of Sidney’s Apology and Thomas Rogers’s adapted translation of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, in seeking to identify the “overlap between literary discourses of imitatio and Rogers’s reformed vision of the imitatio Christi,” offers an instructive comparison with the juxtaposition of Sidney’s Apology and Jewel’s Apologia in the first section of the present chapter (see ibid., 17–63, 26). Robert E. Stillman, “The Scope of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy: The New Hermeneutic and Early Modern Poetics,” English Literary Renaissance 32/3 (2002): 383. Tyndale, An Answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, 11/25, discussed in Chapter 2 above. Michael Mack: “Sidney distinguishes the right poets

160

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

J. H. FERGUSON

from the theological poets in order ultimately to bestow on the right poets all the powers of the theological poets” (Sidney’s Poetics, 47). “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 131–51. “King David as a ‘Right Poet,’” 151. The editors of the most recent edition of the Sidney Psalter suggestively call it, “a practical accompaniment to [Sidney’s] Defense of Poetry.” Hannibal Hamlin, Michael G. Brennan, Margaret Hannay, and Noel Kinnamon, eds, The Sidney Psalter: The Psalms of Sir Philip and Mary Sidney [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], xiv. According to the editors, the Psalter “accompanies” Sidney’s Apology insofar as it provides a “demonstration not only of the mastery of Philip as a poet, but of the lyric possibilities of English poetry.” Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London: John Day, 1570), 47r. Michael Mack is incorrect to limit Ascham’s approach to imitation in the Scholemaster to the “imitation of language and style” (9). “[T]he work of the right poet may not properly be regarded as an imitation ‘of’ anything” (A. C. Hamilton, “Sidney’s Idea of the ‘Right Poet,’” Comparative Literature 9 [1957]: 54). As in Astrophil and Stella, so in this digressio, these threats to the autonomy of English writings extend to “far-fet” borrowings from other languages: “so far-fetched words, they may seem monsters, but must seem strangers, to any poor Englishman” (Astrophil 15:9; Apology 113). ASD 1–2, 614; Ciceronianus or A Dialogue on the Best Manner of Speaking, 31. Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 1: 269. Webbe will go on to call for a “reformed kind of English verse,” written in quantitative meter (1: 278). Ibid., 270. The following discussion includes some generalizations about the collaborative Sidney Psalter but restricts its close analysis to selections from the forty-three Psalms translated by Philip Sidney. Although the Psalter can be meaningfully read as a whole, founded on the conception and example of Philip Sidney, the sheer bulk of the work produced by Sidney Herbert would need more space than can be given here. Also, the formal allusiveness of Sidney Herbert’s versions deserves attention outside of the interpretive framework provided by Sidney’s Apology for Poetry: e.g., Sidney Herbert’s use of the Monk’s Tale rhyme scheme in her first three Psalms (with the shift in subject matter and manner of address that her new beginning represents; the scheme [ababbcbc] is Sidney Herbert’s favorite at eleven examples), her use of Spenserian and Petrarchan sonnet-form (100 and 150, respectively, the latter employing the rhyme scheme [abbaabbacdcdee] most typical of Astrophil and Stella),

4

39.

40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

161

her reversal of Sidney’s metrical scheme and of Sidney’s patterning of masculine and feminine rhymes within identical rhyme schemes: 130 (four dimeter followed by two tetrameter lines) reverses the metrical scheme of 27 (four tetrameter followed by two dimeter lines), 71 reverses the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes in 32 (using different metrical schemes), and 138 reverses the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes in 1 (using identical metrical schemes), not to mention Sidney Herbert’s use of quantitative measures in 120–127. The editors of the recent edition of the Sidney Psalter limit the whole Psalter’s variation of meters from dimeter to hexameter (The Sidney Psalter xxiii). This is clearly incorrect with reference to Sidney Herbert’s 119D, in which the fourth and ninth lines of each stanza are in monometer, and to 134, in which the ninth line of each stanza is so. Sidney’s Psalm 13 (rhymed abab) is more difficult to characterize: the b-rhyme usually seems a dimeter line, except in the fourth stanza (ll. 13–16), where the b-rhyme would seem to be in monometer. 18 is not listed among the instances of rhyme royal in the Introduction to the recent edition of the Sidney Psalter; 135 and 145 are also left out (The Sidney Psalter xxiii). All references to the Sidney Psalter are taken from The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, ed. J. C. A. Rathmell (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963). By comparison, Sidney Herbert uses the scheme only four times (71, 74, 75, and 141) among her one hundred twenty versions (counting the twenty-two sections of 119 individually and excluding the quantitative versions, 120–127). It should also be noted that the last word of 31, “supply,” is the only off-rhyme in the entire Sidney Psalter. Pace Theodore Spencer, who claims that, of Philip Sidney’s forty-three Psalms, two, 7 and 12, share the same stanzaic form (“The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney,” English Literary History 12/4 (1945): 254). This is false: 7 is in terza rima, while 12 is composed of nine-lined stanzas rhymed abcabcabc. Two pairs of Sidney Herbert’s Psalms, 45/98 and 60/119S, use identical rhyme scheme, metrical scheme, and patterning of masculine and feminine rhyme (all four using masculine rhymes exclusively). Rathmell (Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke xvii), attending to rhyme and metrical scheme but not to patterning of masculine and feminine rhymes, identifies the second of these but not the first, identifies three other pairs (8/118, 32/71, 70/144) identical in his terms—incorrectly in the case of 70/144, and leaves out several other twins and triplets (1/138, 8/99/118, 21/112, 42/69/86, 51/63, 78/105) identical in rhyme and metrical scheme but not in patterning of masculine and feminine rhymes.

162

J. H. FERGUSON

45. See Beth Quitslund’s explanation and evidence for this comparison among contemporary responses to the Sidney Psalter (“Teaching Us How to Sing?: The Peculiarity of the Sidney Psalter,” Sidney Journal 23/1–2 [2005]: 97–98). See too Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 259. 46. The text of “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes” is taken from John T. Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of John Donne (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967). 47. Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme, 239–42. 48. The Marot-Beza Psalter gives the translator’s initials with each Psalm’s number (e.g., “PSEAUME I. CL. MA.”). 49. In addition to perennial favorites such as Psalms 23 and 137 (not to mention the Penitential sequence), many of Marot’s choices were also taken up by poets, both French and English, who paraphrased selected Psalms. On English versions of 23 and 137, see Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature, chs. 5 and 7. 50. The Sidney Psalter, xiv. 51. See Quitslund’s related distinction between Psalters intended for congregational and private uses: “Potential church psalters at the very least declare themselves to be foretastes of a future whole, while those without ambitions for the public use of the church have no inherent need to include the entire Biblical Book of Psalms” (Teaching Us How to Sing? 92). 52. Qtd. in Cinquante pseaumes de David mis en françoys selon la vérité hébraïque: Edition critique sur le texte de l’édition publiée en 1543 à Genève par Jean Gérard, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Champion, 1995), 15: “égaré de la droite voye du sens, pour arriver à la Rhime.” Further references to Marot’s versions and to Calvin’s Epistle, “A tous Chrestiens, et amateurs de la parole de Dieu, Salut,” are taken from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 53. Tessaradelphus, Or The foure Brothers (n.p., 1616), Diiv–Diii (qtd. by Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978], 34). 54. Tessaradelphus, Dii. 55. Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme, 254. 56. Ganeius’ Psalmi Davidici septuaginta quinque in lyricos versus was published in Paris in 1547. Vaganay provides a French translation of parts of Ganeius’ Latin preface (Les traductions du psautier en vers latins au seizième siècle [Fribourg: Saint-Paul, 1898], 5). Rivkah Zim cites the same passage (English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 165). On this tradition, see also William A. Ringler, ed., Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford:

4

57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

163

Clarendon, 1962), 507. J. M. Lenhart counts sixty Latin metrical Psalters between 1521 and 1570 (“Protestant Latin Bibles of the Reformation from 1520–1570: A Bibliographical Account,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 8/4 [1946]: 431). Paraphrasis psalmorum Davidis poetica (London, 1592). See in particular Buchanan’s “Carminum genera quibus in hoc opera poeta usus est” (360–67). On Buchanan’s Psalter, see Richard Todd, “Humanist Prosodic Theory, Dutch Synods, and the Poetics of the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter,” Huntington Library Quarterly 52/2 (1989): 276–81, which article also discusses contemporary Dutch versions. Paraphrasis psalmorum Davidis poetica, Aii. Erasmus, The first tome or volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the Newe Testamente, trans. Nicholas Udall et al. (Delmar, NY: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), Biiii***. These ideas about biblical paraphrase in the period are described in more detail in my article, “Miles Coverdale and the Claims of Paraphrase,” Psalms in the Early Modern World, ed. Kari Boyd McBride, Linda Phyllis Austern, and David Orvis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 137–54. Poésie et tradition biblique au XVIe siècle: Recherches stylistiques sur les paraphrases des psaumes de Marot à Malherbe (Paris: Corti, 1969), 61. Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 131. Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature, 20. French Poets and the English Renaissance, 16. Preoccupation with the poetic medium was of course part of the Petrarchan tradition that Sidney inherited, but Astrophil and Stella express this preoccupation with particular consistency and urgency. “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” passim, here 12. Music for a King: George Herbert’s Style and the Metrical Psalms (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 30. See, for example, Neil Rhodes, Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 181, and Zim, English Metrical Psalms, 164. Robert Montgomery, Symmetry and Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 21. Clément Marot, Cinquante pseaumes de David mis en françoys selon la vérité hébraïque, 318n. Mary Sidney Herbert, The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 1: 102 (“Even now that Care,” lines 27–28). Sidney Herbert uses the terms warp and weave only semi-precisely: she revised and completed the project that her brother

164

72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

J. H. FERGUSON

began—she followed him as the (crosswise) weave follows the (lengthwise) warp. Collected Works, 1. 110 (“Angell Spirit,” lines 8–9). John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeill, trans. F. L. Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 895–96. This passage is cited by Freer (Music for a King 27). Part of this passage is also cited by Hamlin, who refers the cited comments of Augustine to Epistola 55.18.34, though the more prominent source for these comments is Confessions, Book 10, Chapter 33, whence, for example, Matthew Parker excerpted the passage in the prefatory materials to his metrical Psalter (The Whole Psalter Translated into English Meter … The First Quinquagene [London, 1567], Fiiv–Fiii). In one of the odder corners of modern biblical scholarship, the History of the Geneva Bible (in twenty-five slender, garishly bound volumes full of valuable information, whimsical asides and chapter headings (e.g., “Genevan Hell!”), several period initials and illustrations per page, passages printed in a modern manuscript hand, etc.), Lewis Lupton notes that the completed 1562-Psalter includes 110 meters and 125 different melodies, many of the latter quite long in order to accommodate the metrical variety of individual stanzas. The History of the Geneva Bible, 25 vols. (London: Fauconberg/Olive Tree, 1966–94), 5: 76. “The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney,” 254–55. Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature, 123. Symmetry and Sense, 21. The headnote in the Marot-Beza Psalter generalizes this situation to “David delivré de quelque grand danger.” The Latin incipit (Deus, Deus meus, ad te) printed with Psalm 43 in the 1543-edition of Marot’s Pseaums is incorrect: the first words of Psalm 43 in the Vulgate’s rendering (where it is numbered 42) are “Iudica me Deus”; “Deus, Deus meus, ad te” is the incipit to Psalm 63 (the Vulgate’s 62). The mistake seems likely to have resulted from a transposition of X and L in the Roman numerals XLIII and LXIII. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Ringler, 571. My references to the Vulgate and the version iuxta Hebraicum are to the texts in Lefèvre’s Quincuplex Psalterium (Guy Bedouelle, ed. [Geneva: Droz, 1979]); the modern edition of these texts delineates the Psalms differently. Cf. Jeanneret on the “correspondance…entre le verset biblique et l’unité strophique” (Poésie et tradition biblique au XVIe siècle 56–57). On the line numbers that appear in some of the early mss. of the Psalms, see Ringler, Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, 508. Psaumes mis en vers français (1551–1562), accompagnés de la version en prose de Loïs Budé, ed. Pierre Bidoux (Geneva: Droz, 1984).

4

BIBLICAL HERMENEUTICS AND POIESIS …

165

85. Sidney rendered Psalm 6 in cross-rhymed English (iambic) saphics, with a feminine rhyme in the b-rhyme, the first three lines in pentameter, the last in dimeter. Psalms 32 and 38 are both in Sidney’s favorite sexain (aabccb): 32 uses trimeter and feminine rhymes for the b-rhymes, tetrameter and masculine rhymes for the others—in slightly irregular iambic; 38 uses dimeter for the second and fifth lines, tetrameter for the rest—all in headless iambics. 86. The final six lines of the sonnets in Astrophil and Stellla often follow a similar pattern, divided by rhyme into a quatrain followed by a couplet, by sense into two tercets.

PART III

Reformation Hermeneutics and Post-Petrarchan Poetics

CHAPTER 5

Tradition and Tautology in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

The Petrarchan tradition extends principles of Ciceronian classicism into vernacular literature. Petrarchism also inherits from these earlier debates a basic opposition between self-expression and literary convention. To the Ciceronians’ imputation, “you do not convey Cicero” ([n]on exprimis…Ciceronem), Angelo Poliziano responds, “That is because I am not Cicero; and yet I suppose I do convey myself” (Non enim sum Cicero; me tamen, ut opinor, exprimo).1 The Petrarchan poetic sequence is predisposed to reflections on belatedness, textual redundancy: the sense that new writing might only repeat what has already been written, might only re-write Cicero, Petrarch, or another literary model.2 In a genre of such rehearsed conventionality as the Petrarchan sonnet sequence, the notion that a new work might be nothing more than a derivative echo of tradition or “second burthen of a former child” (59.4) is itself conventional.3 As John Hoskins writes of the conventional literary-rhetorical devices that he describes in his Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599): “if the times gives itself too much to any one flourish, it makes it a toy and bars a learned man’s writings from it, lest it seem to come more of the general humor than the private judgment.”4 Late-sixteenth-century English literature has a strong sense of belatedness, of being chronologically and geographically peripheral.5 Like Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Shakespeare’s Sonnets are concerned © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. H. Ferguson, Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81795-4_5

169

170

J. H. FERGUSON

throughout with literary mimesis: both sequences announce in their very first lines a preoccupation with faithful mimesis—and a sense that this mimesis might be obstructed.6 Rosalie Colie, Murray Krieger, John Kerrigan, Anne Ferry, and Joel Fineman, among other critics, have paid particular attention to what Colie calls the Sonnets ’ “literary self-reference and self-commentary.”7 These issues of mimesis and mere convention, which John Kerrigan associates with the Sonnets ’ “imitative complexity,”8 are germane to Shakespeare’s sequence in a peculiarly radical way. It is characteristic of the Sonnets consistently to involve this motif in the dramatic situation portrayed; in comparison with other sonnet sequences, as Kerrigan puts it, Shakespeare’s “renders uniquely integral the theme of imitation.”9 One of the most important ways in which Shakespeare’s speaker in the Sonnets addresses the Petrarchan dilemma is to pit bare statements of equivalence (“you alone are you,” 84.2) against poetic convention. The speaker fashions an aesthetic mode on the basis of such tautologies in the middle section of the sequence (“he that writes of you, if he can tell / That you are you, so dignifies his story,” 84.7– 8), particularly in the so-called Rival Poet sonnets. This tautological mode both reprises the confidence in biological reproduction of beauty in the opening sub-sequence (Sonnets 1–17) and provides a foil for the unfaithful reproduction decried in the Dark Lady sonnets at the sequence’s conclusion (Sonnets 127–152).10 In the Introduction to his edition of the Sonnets, Kerrigan discusses the speaker’s recurrent recourse to tautology in praise of the Friend; Kerrigan derives this mode of praise from Shakespeare’s reflection on the “ethical implications of his art”: for Kerrigan, the poet’s celebration of “particularity and being” represents a “moral” rejection of the “invidious roots of similitude.”11 Helen Vendler comments on the same statements, which she associates with a “poetics of identity” in the Sonnets; she suggests that this novel poetics is meant to recall “sacred texts, the word of God, faithfully recopied in scriptoria before the advent of printing.”12 Vendler restricts the relevance of this poetic mode to “pre-Gutenberg scribal process,” because, for her, this new poetics is soon shown to “collapse” in the Sonnets. This chapter will suggest, on the contrary, that bare statements of tautological equivalence represent a pivotal element of the Sonnets. Sixteenth-century biblical polemics are more germane to this tautological motif than the general ethical categories described by Kerrigan or the

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

171

outdated practices of scriptoria described by Vendler. Shakespeare’s treatment of poetic belatedness and bare equivalence is shaped by the same logic that controls the exegetical distinction between interpretive tradition and scriptural autonomy in Protestant biblical interpretation, especially in exegesis (such as Tyndale’s) of the early Reformation. Shakespeare’s tautology in the Sonnets reprises the absolute lack of mediation associated with Scripture by Tyndale. In the Sonnets discussed in this chapter, Shakespeare first elaborates the perpetuation of beauty through procreation (1–17), translates this process of immortalization from biology to poetry (15–68), and then pits his tautological statements (you are you) against poetic rivals (59–108) and, by implication, against praise for the Dark Lady’s beauty (127–152). Along this trajectory, Shakespeare replaces the conventional opposition between words and things, art and nature, with an opposition between his tautological statements and the poetry of his rivals: it is not that the Beloved is superior to any written account but that tautological statements that the Beloved is at one with himself are superior to other modes of praise poetry. In context, Shakespeare’s speaker’s tautological statements suggest a poetic equivalent to the Protestant paradox of biblical language as identical with its own unmediated meaning. The English Petrarchan tradition thus lends itself to a reading within the century-long exegetical debates about biblical autonomy and interpretive tradition that previous chapters have documented. That exegetical history evidences a shift from the earlier biblical absolutism of William Tyndale to a greater openness to history under the Elizabethan Settlement, in line with the latter’s via media between Roman Catholic and radical Protestant (or, “Puritan”). In the previous chapter, I argue that Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry, describes English poetic expressiveness by means of the qualified autonomy granted biblical language in Elizabethan hermeneutics and that the metrical Psalter initiated by Sidney exemplifies this convergence of biblical and poetic ideas with particular concreteness and power. The final two chapters of this book read Shakespeare’s Sonnets and John Donne’s Songs and Sonets as representative of the convergence of biblical exegetics and literary imitation at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare’s Sonnets reflects the predominantly oppositional exegesis of earlier Protestants such as William Tyndale, while Donne’s Songs and Sonets recalls the more constructive, and thus more nuanced, exegesis of later generations of Protestant exegetes such as John Jewel and John Donne himself in his sermons.

172

J. H. FERGUSON

The theme of the opening sub-sequence of Shakespeare’s Sonnets is conspicuously conventional: the susceptibility of Beauty to Time.13 The Sonnets do complicate this theme, though here too there are literary precedents. On the one hand, the persistence of the beautiful is associated with biological procreation: “as the riper should by time decease, / His tender heire might beare his memory” (1.3–4).14 On the other hand, threatening Time is associated with the Friend’s self-consumptive narcissism: “thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes, / Feed’st thy lights flame with selfe substantiall fewell, / Making a famine where aboundance lies” (1.5–7)—and perhaps onanism: “having traffike with thy selfe alone, / Thou of thy selfe thy sweet selfe dost deceave” (4.9–10). More specifically stated, then, the sub-sequence’s theme is the conflict between biological succession and psychological narcissism.15 This conflict occupies different levels of generality: at times it is the situation of a particularized beloved (whether historical or invented)—a young man who is younger (presumably considerably younger) than forty (2.1ff.), who is attractive to the women around him (3.5–6; 16.6–7), and who has a mother whom the poet can invoke (3.9–10); at other times this conflict is portrayed in universal dimensions, where all the world, Nature itself, is concerned with the Friend’s parenting decisions: Thou that art now the worlds fresh ornament … Pity the world, or else this glutton be, To eate the worlds due, by the grave and thee. (1.9,13–14). She [Nature] carv’d thee for her seale, and ment therby, Thou shouldst print more, not let that coppy die. (11.13–14)

The Friend as Beauty incarnate is one among a varied array of literary conceits introduced in this sub-sequence: Nature not as giver but as lender (4.3–4)16 ; procreation compared to seasonal change (5.5–8; 12), compared to the revolution of the sun (Sonnet 7), compared to flower-distillation (5.9–14), compared to (commendable) usury (6.5– 10), compared to musical harmonics (Sonnet 8), compared to husbandry (13.9–12); the refusal to parent as self-hatred (Sonnet 10) and as chokehold on the future of humanity (11); the Friend’s eyes as the objects of the poet’s astrology (14); and the Friend as draftsman of his own “line of life” (16.9–14). The suggestion that the perpetuation of Nature itself

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

173

depends on the Friend’s biological succession is the most sweeping of these conceits. Indeed, the opening lines of the Sonnets immediately set the theme of the procreation sub-sequence in universal, collective terms: “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauties Rose might never die” (1.1–2). This opening exceeds prima facie the particulars of the Friend’s situation; it suggests that the sub-sequence’s topic resonates beyond the parenting decisions of a stubbornly self-centered Friend. So consequential (or: so poetically magnified) is the Friend’s beauty that his squandering of that beauty would be Nature’s loss as well as his own. As this universalizing vehicle exceeds the sequence’s dramatic tenor and gives the theme of Beauty’s succession resonance beyond the Friend’s situation, it also draws attention to itself as hyperbole. This universal application is so clearly a function of the speaker’s flattery of the Friend as to seem mere hyperbole, what a later sonnet describes as “a Poets rage, / And stretched miter of an Antique song” (17.11–12), scarcely to be believed by readers (17.1–2). The movement beyond the specific dramatic situation of the Friend is thus accompanied by initial notice of worries about the adequacy of poetic language, worries that are engaged more fully in later sonnets. Toward the end of the procreation sub-sequence, Sonnet 15 sums up and makes explicit the poetry’s use of universal figures in the attempt to persuade the Friend to beget children: When I consider every thing that growes Holds in perfection but a little moment. That this huge stage presenteth nought but showes Whereon the Stars in secret influence comment. When I perceive that men as plants increase, Cheared and checkt even by the self-same skie: Vaunt in their youthfull sap, at height decrease, And were their brave state out of memory. Then the conceit of this inconstant stay, Sets you most rich in youth before my sight, Where wastfull time debateth with decay To change your day of youth to sullied night. (1–12)

The first and second quatrains present universal contemplations that bring the Friend’s situation to the poet’s mind. Both the figure of speech or “logical pattern”17 (When…When…Then…) and the figures of thought

174

J. H. FERGUSON

(or “conceit” [line 9], i.e., the elaborate analogies) are made prominent in this sonnet, as if the speaker wanted to draw attention to his own poetic/rhetorical devices. As the poet acknowledges his universalizing suggestions as poetic tropes, he also extends, for the first time in the sequence, the topic of Time and Succession to the subject of poetry18 : And all in war with Time for love of you As he takes from you, I ingraft you new. (13–14)

Poetry takes the place here that procreation has occupied in the previous sonnets. This closing couplet echoes words and themes from the first twelve lines of Sonnet 15 (“ingraft” recalling images of growth, plants, and sap; “war with Time,” Time’s wasteful effects) and invokes, through these immediate echoes, the preceding fourteen sonnets more generally. As the poet emphasizes his own poetry’s tendency to assimilate the Friend’s situation to other imaginative spheres, he also takes the first definitive step toward assigning the husbandry of the Friend’s Beauty to his own poetry. In one of the sequence’s rare explicit transitions between sonnets, Sonnet 16 both reinforces and complicates the analogy between biological procreation and literary imitation as means of making war with time: But wherefore do not you a mightier waie Make warre uppon this bloudie tirant time? And fortifie your selfe in your decay With meanes more blessed then my barren rime? (1–4)

Weighing procreation against the making of, in Philip Sidney’s phrase, “another [poetic] nature” aligns the two more closely.19 By binding them together, this sonnet and the one following imply that literary mimesis assumes something of the energia belonging to physical procreation. Now stand you on the top of happie houres, And many maiden gardens yet unset, With vertuous wish would beare your living flowers, Much liker then your painted counterfeit: So should the lines of life that life repaire Which this (Times pensel or my pupill pen) Neither in inward worth nor outward faire Can make you live your selfe in eies of men,

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

175

To give away your selfe, keeps your selfe still, And you must live drawne by your owne sweet skill. (5–14)

Lines 5–8 here recast a procreation-conceit already used in the subsequence (“where is she so faire whose un-eard wombe / Disdaines the tillage of thy husbandry?” [3.5–6]) as a foil for poetry, whose powers to confer immortality are comparatively inadequate. The following quatrain asserts that the Friend’s (anticipated) extension of his genealogical “line” outdoes any mimesis, interior or exterior, of which poetry is capable, and the final couplet summarizes the point. Sonnet 17 offers a comprehensive treatment of the comparison between poetic and biological creation: Who will beleeve my verse in time to come If it were fild with your most high deserts? Though yet heaven knowes it is but as a tombe Which hides your life, and shewes not halfe your parts. (1–4)

The counterfactual statement in lines 1–2 (that the poet’s work might adequately represent the Friend), which is exposed as false in lines 3–4, recalls previous acknowledgments of poetry’s limitations. Gainsaid expressly by 17.1–4 and by earlier sonnets, the conditional if is nevertheless indulged further in the following quatrains: If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say this Poet lies, Such heavenly touches nere toucht earthly faces. So should my papers (yellowed with their age) Be scorn’d, like old men of lesse truth then tongue, And your true rights be termd a Poets rage, And stretched miter of an Antique song. (5–12)

These lines pass from flat assertion of the impossibility of adequate literary mimesis to consideration of the problems that such mimesis would occasion. Each of these quatrains reflects on the sixteen preceding sonnets. The first quatrain uses ostentatiously a verbal figure nowhere used before in the Sonnets: namely, antanaclasis, homonyms whose proximity to one another (“numbers number,” “touches…toucht”) tends to destabilize meaning.20 The second quatrain compares the poet’s “papers” to the

176

J. H. FERGUSON

image of age so frequently evoked in the procreation sub-sequence; where the previous “deep trenches in…beauties field” were intended as straightforward goads to parenthood, here the effects of age are associated with poetic exaggeration and duplicity. Together, these two quatrains offer a comment about ways in which poetic language fails to achieve faithful mimesis: the “rage,” “stretched miter,” and “Antique song” of poetry are associated with the indeterminacy of meaning evoked by the figure antanaclasis. The figure antanaclasis recalls the solipsism so frequently attached to the Friend in previous sonnets: the self-reflexivity that threatened biological propagation in the previous sonnets here threatens poetic mimesis. This turn in the Sonnets reacts tacitly on the premise with which Sonnet 17 begins: the sustained treatment of the complexities involved in the ostensibly successful writing of the Friend’s beauty seems to realize what began as a counterfactual. The final couplet (“But were some childe of yours alive that time, / You should live twise in it, and in my rhyme” [13–14]) reinforces this new sense that the Friend shall indeed “live” in the poet’s rhymes, even if the Friend’s presence there is complicated. Following this sonnet, the sequence treats poetic re-creation often but never returns to biological procreation. Assertions of the permanence of the sequence’s poetic immortalization suggest, despite worries about the adequacy of poetic language, that the faithful mimesis previously associated with fatherhood has been transferred to poetry.21 In the procreation sub-sequence, the speaker expresses perfect confidence about the successful mediation of the Friend’s beauty to his son: “you were / You selfe again after your selfe’s decease” (13.6–7).22 The language used to praise the Friend in the early sonnets initiates both the transfer of this mediation from biology to poetry and the questioning of the efficacy of this new kind of mediation. This extension of the procreation theme to poetic immortalization is reinforced by a shifting relation in the early sonnets between parenting and poetic mimesis, a relation that is described initially as an opposition: “fortifie your selfe in your decay / With meanes more blessed then my barren rime” (16.3–4), then as a collaboration: “were some childe of yours alive that time, / You should live twise in it, and in my rhyme” (17.13–14), until procreation disappears before the power of poetry: “So long as men can breath or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (18.13–14).23 The latter sonnet, 18, signals the final turn from biological to literary creation. Over and over in the first seventeen sonnets, the poet reminds

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

177

the Friend of the normal course of natural degradation: the Friend, like “Sommers greene” (12.7), will soon know the effect of Time. In Sonnet 18, the poet reintroduces the image of summer as part of an elaborate proof that the Friend’s beauty exceeds the stock images of poetic convention: “Shall I compare thee to a Summers day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate” (1–2). The Friend’s exceeding beauty in Sonnet 18 is translated from biology to poetry: the Friend’s summer in line 9, unlike the natural summer of “too short a date” in line 4, is eternal, because committed to “eternall lines” (12). Biological propagation is no longer the means. Sonnet 18 is the first in the sequence exclusively concerned with poetic mimesis; curiously, this sonnet begins by questioning the adequacy of such mimesis: Shall I compare thee to a Summers day? (1)

The simile here proposed leads to a weighing of poetic vehicle against poetic tenor: Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough windes do shake the darling buds of Maie, And Sommers lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d, And every faire from faire some-time declines, By chance, or natures changing course untrim’d. (2–8)

Concealed behind this elaborate (and rather predictable) poetic hyperbole is an odd conceptual shift. The Friend’s superiority to the proposed poetic vehicle—the constancy and permanence of his beauty—would seem itself to be the product of the poet’s medium: But thy eternall Sommer shall not fade, … When in eternall lines to time thou grow’st. (9, 12)

The repetition of the keywords summer and eternal suggests that the essence of the Friend’s beauty is the product of poetic portrayal (cf. the less reflexive use of the word at 5.5, 9), as does the word-play

178

J. H. FERGUSON

in “to time,” which suggests both chronological expanse and metrical patterning. The disarmingly felicitous epigram in the sonnet’s closing couplet reinforces the point: So long as men can breath or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. (13–14)

As in this sonnet’s first two quatrains, an immaculate poetic surface distracts attention from an odd conceptual adjustment. The preceding sonnets have consistently emphasized the Friend’s responsibility actively to transmit his beauty, to give life, to a child; the final couplet of Sonnet 18, by contrast, reverses the transaction: the poetry now “gives life” to the Friend. This reversal recalls the turn in Sonnet 15 whereby the Friend’s situation begins to reflect the conditions of poetry. Both sonnets associate a critical view on poetic similitude with a redirection of mimesis: poetry is no longer only a mimetic means but is also reflexively itself the object of mimesis. The Sonnets ’ reflections on poetic mimesis—in combination with questioning of poetic analogy specifically—are recalled and emphasized by the sequence’s first mention of a rival poet/poetic, “that Muse” (my emphasis). The description of this rivalry in Sonnet 21 echoes the question that opens 18: So is it not with me as with that Muse, Stird by a painted beauty to his verse, Who heaven it selfe for ornament doth use, And every faire with his faire doth reherse, Making a coopelment of proud compare With Sunne and Moone, with earth and seas rich gems: With Aprills first borne flowers and all things rare, That heavens ayre in this huge rondure hems. (1–8)

The analogy between the Friend and a “Summers day,” rejected in 18, would seem to belong to the rival poet’s brand of “proud compare”— as would the array of conceits in the procreation sub-sequence, conceits which unabashedly couple the Friend with heaven itself (line 14), the sun (7), flowers (5), etc. Moreover, one of the keywords of the procreation sub-sequence, fair, is deeply woven into the texture of Sonnet 21: it occurs twice in line 4 (echoing repetitions of this word at 5.4 and 18.7),

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

179

provides the rhyme-sound for lines 5 and 7, and is itself one of the rhymewords in the third quatrain. These echoes suggest a systematic effort to align the poetic mode of the rival muse with the hyperbolic praise poetry of the procreation sonnets and to distinguish both from a new mode the speaker evokes only negatively.24 The turn from poetic mimesis to reflection on poetry, suggested in Sonnet 18, takes on an additional aspect here: the sequence’s narrative turn from procreative to poetic immortalization is associated with a new reflexivity about poetic mimesis and a rejection of the traditional modes of praise-poetry prominent in Sonnets 1–17 and now associated with a rival muse. Several sonnets that fall between the procreation and so-called Dark Lady sub-sequences (i.e., in the long middle section, 18–126) translate images and conceits from the topic of procreation to that of poetry. Sonnet 54, for example, has poetry distilling the Friend’s “truth,” recalling the “substance” distilled from flowers in Sonnet 5.25 Sonnet 67 reuses beauty’s Rose (1.2) with which the collection begins as a foil for the “roses of shaddow” produced by “false painting” (5–8). Sonnet 68 charges “faulse Art” with making “summer of an others greene” (11, 14), echoing Nature’s “Sommers greene” to which the poet compares the Friend’s beauty earlier in the sequence (12.7). Three sonnets (22, 37, 62) in this section of the sequence recall another conceit, relevant to the meditation on the powers of poetry. Sonnet 3 imagines the Friend looking into a mirror and taking the beauty he sees there and that beauty’s perishability as goads to have a son: Looke in thy glasse and tell the face thou vewest, Now is the time that face should forme an other. (1–2)

Sonnets 22, 37, and 62 all variously transfer this conceit from a scene in which the Friend sees his reflection in a mirror to a scene in which the poet sees his reflection in the Friend.26 Sonnet 22 supplies the basic pattern: My glasse shall not perswade me I am ould, So long as youth and thou are of one date, But when in thee times forrwes I behould, Then look I death my daies should expiate. (1–4)

The poet becomes the father, the Friend the son; the poet assumes the parental role occupied by the Friend in 1–17, observing the same logic of

180

J. H. FERGUSON

succession. Sonnet 37, which also recycles this reflection-conceit, includes echoes of key terms from 1–17: the poet ingrafts (line 8) his love to the Friend’s virtues, in compensation for his own failings (cf. 15.14, where the poet ingrafts the Friend into verse in order to immortalize him); the poet is himself ten times (14) happy for the Friend’s flourishing (cf. 6.8–10, where the Friend is imagined ten times happier for the ten children the poet encourages him to have). Likewise, 62 imagines the poet’s face “beated and chopt with tand antiquitie” (10), recalling the “deep trenches” (2.2) that threaten the Friend’s face, trenches cut by Time’s “antique pen” (19.10) and “winters wragged hand” (6.1). As the aging Friend was to look to his child for renewal, so now the poet contemplates the beloved to compensate for his own succumbing to Time’s decay. The second quatrain of Sonnet 22 goes on to associate this transference with an extremely complex reciprocity between poet and Friend: For all that beauty that doth cover thee, Is but the seemely rayment of my heart, Which in thy brest doth live, as thine in me. (lines 5–7)

The beloved’s beauty is contained within the poet’s heart—an utterly conventional figure in Petrarchan poetry.27 The lovely beauty clothing the Friend is the poet’s own reflection: looking on the Friend as on a glass, the poet gazes lovingly on the projection of his own heart.28 Lines 5–7 give this reciprocal exchange a further twist: the poet’s heart, the source of the Friend’s beauty, lives in the Friend. The Friend’s beauty, then, is the projection of the poet’s heart, which in turn has been projected into the Friend’s breast. In a general way, this strangely intertwined pair might represent the “mutual render” celebrated elsewhere (125.12); on the other hand, by intertwining two conventional tropes (the beloved’s beauty as the gift of the lover, the lovers’ exchange of hearts), 22 evokes an image not of “mutual render” but of a doubled Narcissus: a Friend whose beauty proceeds from the heart in his own chest and a poet infatuated by his own reflection. This peculiar intertwining of conceits suggests a solipsism on the part of the poet resembling that assigned to the Friend in the procreation sonnets: But thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes, Feed’st thy lights flame with selfe substantiall fewell. (1.5–6)

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

181

For having traffike with thy selfe alone, Thou of thy selfe thy sweet selfe dost deceave. (4.9–10)

These images of self-reflection, self-deception, and self-consumption, now associated with the poet, anticipate the verbal doubling and poetic duplicity in 17.5–12, discussed above. Sonnet 39 confronts this complex of ideas directly: it addresses both the self-reflexivity of the poet’s love for the Friend and the implications of this self-reflexivity for the poet’s singing: Oh how thy worth with manners may I singe, When thou art all the better part of me? What can mine owne praise to mine owne selfe bring; And what is’t but mine owne when I praise thee. (1–4)

This quatrain seems, initially, concerned with a psychological bind: the poet cannot decently (“with manners”) praise the Friend because such praise would be mere self-flattery. This is the “sinne of selfe-love” with which Sonnet 62 commences a meditation on poetic self-reflexivity that concludes: “T’is thee (my selfe) that for my selfe I praise, / Painting my age with beauty of thy daies” (13–14). Line 3 of Sonnet 39 turns from worries about decorum to a broader problematic: the emphatic repetitiousness of the phrase “mine owne praise to mine owne selfe”—whose rhythm disrupts entirely the line’s meter—offers a strong statement about solipsistic futility (compare Sonnet 62: “for my selfe mine owne worth do define” [7]). Vendler calls this evocation of poetic solipsism a “constructed pseudo-question,”29 but the prominence of the solipsism-theme in the procreation sonnets and in the sequence going forward suggests something more substantive: poetic solipsism, as evoked in Sonnet 62 and elsewhere might be as barren as the Friend’s narcissism in 1–17. Joel Fineman characterizes this kind of idealizing poetic metaphor as “taking itself as its own subject” and therefore bound within the self-referential circle of the attention it calls to itself as a motivated showing; such metaphor “present[s] itself as truth despite the fact that what it represents is false.”30 The remainder of the sonnet portrays another psychological feint, which, like the concern with self-flattery, conceals a larger point relevant to the Sonnets ’ meditations on their own mimetic mode:

182

J. H. FERGUSON

Even for this, let us devided live, And our deare love loose name of single one, That by this seperation I may give: That due to thee which thou deserv’st alone: Oh absence what a torment wouldst thou prove, Were it not thy soure leisure gave sweet leave, To entertaine the time with thoughts of love, Which time and thoughts so sweetly dost deceive. And that thou teachest how to make one twaine, By praising him here who doth hence remaine. (5–14)

This is clearly rationalization of a separation the poet neither wants nor can help (compare the patently disingenuous justification in Sonnet 42 of the Friend’s affair with a woman whom the poet says he loved dearly). The association of poetic creation with absence is too resonant in the Petrarchan tradition for the sense of these two quatrains to exhaust itself in mere playful rationalization. In the Petrarchan tradition and its afterlife, absence (while systemically abhorred) is one of the données of erotic poetry31 ; furthermore, the poetic narrator’s failure to join with the desired object tends to act as a figure for the potential failure of language to achieve faithful mimesis. The psychological and linguistic ramifications of absence become acceptable, even requisite, features of Petrarchan poetry. Sonnet 39 dramatizes the introduction of absence as a precondition for poetry, and yet, in embracing absence in order to avoid solipsism, the poet wills separation, which in turn threatens the connection between poet and beloved, between word and (fleshly) referent. This dilemma is broadly suggestive of what the Sonnets call its policies in love (118.9): after Sonnet 126, the poet leaves homo- for hetero-sexual love, but this turn from a reproductive dead-end to an affair that is at least potentially procreative also represents the rejection of writing truly. The poet’s choice is between solipsism, a seemingly redundant statement of identity, and a proper copulative joining subjects that are not identical—a copulative, that is, whose predicate is patently false.32 The apparent barrenness of mere repetition in the poet’s praising of the Friend is perhaps most vividly imagined in Sonnet 59, which evokes the tenuousness of authentic originality in the poetry of praise (compare Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 1). In treating poetic repetition generally, 59 also recycles some of the sequence’s own imagery:

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

183

If their bee nothing new, but that which is, Hath beene before, how are our braines beguild, Which laboring for invention beare amisse The second burthen of a former child? (1–4)

The eternal sameness of invention (in rhetorical discourse, the finding out of subject matter) is associated with sterility through reference to procreation-imagery (labor, bear, child) from the opening sub-sequence. In the earlier section of the Sonnets, childlessness was a direct threat to the Friend’s biological imitatio. Relatedly, Sonnet 59 assumes that brains, minds, and wits would “beare amisse” were it to turn out that poetic invention is mere recycling of subject matter from ancient books.33 The second and third quatrains of 59 turn from inventio to elocutio: Oh that record could with a back-ward looke, Even of five hundreth courses of the Sunne, Show me your image in some antique booke, Since minde at first in carrecter was done. That I might see what the old world could say, To this composed wonder of your frame, Whether we are mended, or where better they, Or whether revolution be the same. (5–12)

These lines imagine that the Friend has existed before and wish that the poet could see what the “old world could say”—what words the ancient poets could find—about him; the poet wonders whether the poetic/rhetorical apparatus of praise has deteriorated, improved, or remained the same. Instead of answering this involved and fraught question, the final couplet recurs to the question of the first quatrain34 : Oh sure I am the wits of former daies, To subjects worse have given admiring praise. (13–14)

With a limp flourish (“Oh sure I am…”), the poet evades this difficult topic (what Vendler calls “the intellectual juggernaut of recurring sameness”35 ); he offers instead an assertion that the Friend is more wonderful than any described by old books. This is a disarming way of switching attention from the medium of praise to its object, from the finding of words to the finding of matter and suggests a curiously willful disregard for the questions posed in the second and third quatrains. These

184

J. H. FERGUSON

latter quatrains assume that the Friend (“this composed wonder”) is a permanent presence and pose a question about changing words used to describe him; the couplet, by contrast, assumes the immutability of mimesis (“admiring praise”) and asserts that it is the Friend who is impermanent—that, in the past, the Friend’s place was taken by “subjects worse.” Sonnet 59 thus describes a serious threat to poetic creativity—the possibility that new poetic invention might be no more than repetition of prior works—and then shifts focus to the mutability of the poetic object, thus defusing the previous questions about the status of the poetic medium (the fixing of mind in character). Sonnet 68 looks back to the Sonnets ’ transmutation of procreation into literary imitation and looks forward to the Dark Lady sub-sequence (and to Sonnet 127, the first of that series, in particular). It puts a gruesome cast on the contrast between unmediated, natural beauty, and artificial ornament: Thus is his cheeke the map of daies out-worne, When beauty liv’d and dy’ed as flowers do now, Before these bastard signes of faire were borne, Or durst inhabit on a living brow: Before the goulden tresses of the dead, The right of sepulchers, were shorne away, To live a scond life on second head, Ere beauties dead fleece made another gay: In him those holy antique howers are seene, Without all ornament, it selfe and true, Making no summer of an others greene, Robbing no ould to dresse his beauty new, And him as for a map doth Nature store, To shew faulse Art what beauty was of yore.

As noted above, this sonnet recalls the frequent associations of the Friend with summer in Sonnets 1–17 (5.5, 6.2, etc.) and, more particularly, with summer’s green at 12.7 (cf. the closing couplet of Sonnet 63: “His beautie shall in these blacke lines be seene, / And they shall live, and he in them still greene”). Sonnet 68 also recasts the opposition between old and new, used in Sonnets 1–17 to imagine the beloved looking on his young child as he himself ages (“This were to be new made when thou art ould” [2.13]). Sonnet 68 would seem, then, to restate the contrast, asserted most insistently by Sonnet 16, between “living flowers” (natural,

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

185

true reproduction; cf. beauty’s flowers in 68) and “barren rime” (artificial, literary imitation), but 68 seems caught between its replacement of procreation with poetry, on the one hand, and distrust of the poetic medium, on the other: it portrays poetry (“bastard signes of faire”) both as an inverted image of the legitimate biological succession in Sonnet 1–17, where the fair Friend’s “tender heir might beare his memory” (1.4), and as an accurate anticipation of the poetry of Sonnets 127– 52, where “Beautie [is] slanderd with a bastard shame” (127.4). Having committed himself to poetry as the means to immortalization, the speaker contemplates the medium’s descent from amusing banter in early Sonnets (“like old men of lesse truth than tongue” [17.10]) to conscious lying in later ones (“Slandring Creation with a false esteeme” [127.12]). The remainder of the Friend sequence, insofar as it is concerned with poetic mimesis, addresses itself to resolving this dilemma. Several of the images in Sonnet 68 seem intended to revise the ambiguous statements in Sonnet 17 about poetic immortalization: a notion associated in 17 with a negative image of poetry, antiquity (“stretched miter of an Antique song”), is here valorized in a notion of pristine origins, “holy antique howers”; the general association of poetry with tombs in 17 is here limited to (poetry as) “faulse Art.” The latter’s tokens, “goulden tresses of the dead,” are so grotesque as to leave room—in the wide space between the harvesting of corpse-hair and perfect naturalness—for an alternative kind of imitation.36 Sonnet 68’s review of images and words from 17 suggests less a general decrying of poetry in favor of Nature than an attack on one literary mode in favor of another. Several of the Sonnets, and particularly those that treat a rival muse, elaborate on the speaker’s alternative to false art. Sonnet 76—which falls very near the midpoint of the sequence— addresses this topic by constructing an opposition between faithful mimesis and the poetic idiom’s involvement in time: Why is my verse so barren of new pride? So far from variation or quicke change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new found methods, and to compounds strange? (1–4)

Poetic innovation is associated here with style’s involvement in time (“with the time,” “new found methods”), and, until this quatrain’s last two words, this series of images of novelty seems uniformly positive, in

186

J. H. FERGUSON

accord with the self-recriminatory tone of the questions posed (barren is, of course, an especially resonant word in the sequence). Sonnet 32 reinforces the point: poetry is subject to “bett’ring of the time” (line 5, cf. 13); old poetry is exceeded by new (7–8); in short, poetry grows (10). The last two words of 76.4, compounds strange,37 however, recall the criticism of a rival poet’s (and the poet’s own earlier) brand of “coopelment of proud compare” at 21.5 (see above). Here, overelaboration of conceits is associated with changing poetic fashions, as in the point from John Hoskins’s Directions for Speech and Style, cited above: “if the times gives itself too much to any one flourish, it makes it a toy and bars a learned man’s writings from it, lest it seem to come more of the general humor than the private judgement.”38 The poet uses this association between excessive elaboration and poetic modishness to justify his single-mindedness further in 76: Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keepe invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost fel [tell] my name, Shewing their birth, and where they did proceed? O know sweet love I alwaies write of you, And you and love are still my argument: So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending againe what is already spent: For as the Sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told. (5–14)

In Sonnet 59, the idea that new poetry might be the “second burthen of a former child” is, until the surprising turn in the couplet, a source of anxiety; here, in 76, the poet owns to his “spending again what is already spent” as a badge of merit. Sonnet 59 articulates a historical comparison of old and new poetic styles, only to dodge the issue in a couplet that addresses itself to an entirely different matter. Even if the couplet’s point seems conclusive, a residue of anxiety remains about that sonnet’s unanswered question. Sonnet 76 resolves this anxiety much more thoroughly: only the initial quatrain expresses clear doubt about the poet’s stylistic immobility; the second quatrain, though it seems to continue the first quatrain’s line of questioning, defuses the tone of self-remonstration, turning from the first quatrain’s uniformly negative characterizations to characterizations that are consistently positive; the sonnet’s sestet provides

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

187

a full-fledged justification for this repetitious mode, which turns out, by the poet’s lights, to be a sign of fidelity rather than barrenness.39 The monomania defended in Sonnet 76 does, however, differ subtly from that evoked in 59: in the earlier sonnet, the poet worries about the consistency or lack thereof between “antique” poetry and that of moderns (including his own); by contrast, 76 describes self-consistency, the poet writing “all one, ever the same” with regard to his own “old words,” not those of ancient poets. Repetitiveness in Sonnet 76 reveals the poet’s “name,” the origin of the verse; the same quality in 59 reveals a potential lack of variation between older and contemporary poetry. The frame of reference for these reflections on poetic variation has shifted from poetry generally to the Sonnets in particular. This shift helps to prepare for the increasingly coherent statement that the Sonnets make about their own mode of poetic mimesis in the latter part of the sequence, prior to the Dark Lady section. Traditionally, Sonnets 78–86 have been taken as a sub-sequence on the Rival Poet; like most received wisdom about the Sonnets, this notion is helpful as long as it is not applied inflexibly: the rival is evoked elsewhere in the sequence (in Sonnets 21, 38, and indirectly in Sonnets 67–68) and seems irrelevant to Sonnet 81. Nevertheless, Sonnets 78–80 and 82–86, like Sonnets 1–17 and 127–152, do form a distinct sub-sequence within the Sonnets. Sonnet 80 treats the sexual rather than the literary dimension of the rivalry—evoking eroticism between the poet and the Friend that would seem perfectly frank40 ; Sonnets 82 and 83 introduce something new and characteristic into the sequence: they integrate the poet’s reflections, from elsewhere in the Sonnets, on the untimely lack of variation in his verse into the context of poetic rivalry. Sonnet 82 has the poet imagining the Friend—conscious of his superiority to the poet’s portrayals—“inforc’d to seeke anew, / Some fresher stampe of the time bettering dayes” (lines 7–8); this description of the rival’s poetry echoes ironically the “bett’ring of the time” invoked at 32.5. A later phrase in Sonnet 82, “strained touches [of] Rhethorick” (line 10), recalls in turn the “stretched miter” associated self-critically with the poet’s own poetry in Sonnet 17 (note also the use of the word touch in both sonnets). Similarly, the term for poetic praise in Sonnet 83, “barren tender of a Poets debt” (line 4), recalls the poet’s slighting of his own verse, at precisely the same position in Sonnet 16 (“fortifie your selfe in your decay / With meanes more blessed then my barren rime” [lines 3–4]). Furthermore, the full clause that includes barren tender in

188

J. H. FERGUSON

Sonnet 83—“you did exceed / The barren tender of a Poets debt” (lines 3–4)—restates the structuring idea of Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a Summers day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate /…/… thy eternall Sommer shall not fade” (lines 1–2, 9; my emphasis). The prominence of poetic rivalry in Sonnets 82 and 83 focuses the poet’s frustrations with the medium of poetry—with his own poetry and with the poetry of his rivals bearing a “fresher stampe” (82.8—recalling the Friend’s “seale” at 11.13 with which the Friend was urged to “print more” of himself through offspring41 ). Having trusted to good verses, the poet rejects the medium as he has received it and as it is used by others; the question remains: What kind of poetry will replace it? Sonnet 84 offers the first of two alternatives, both negative and austere, to the poetic excesses criticized in 82–83. Who is it that sayes most, which can say more, Then this rich praise, that you alone, are you, In whose confine immured is the store, Which should example where your equall grew. (lines 1–4)

In response to the competitive clamor of more and most associated with rival poets, the poet offers bare tautology: “you alone [you and none other, but also with the suggestion of ‘all one,’ i.e., you undividedly], are you.”42 This other who could equal the Friend is none other than the Friend himself: “within you is contained that which can be illustrated only by your equal – that is, yourself” (you alone are you). Leane penurie within that Pen doth dwell, That to his subject lends not some small glory, But he that writes of you, if he can tell, That you are you, so dignifies his story. (5–8)

The facile pun, penury…pen, makes a pitiful rival for the tautology evoked in the previous quatrain and yet further reduced here: you are you.43 Let him but coppy what in you is writ, Not making worse what nature made so cleere, And such a counter-part shall fame his wit, Making his stile admired every where. (9–12)

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

189

This quatrain recalls a passage from Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. Line 9 echoes Sidney’s “all my deed / But Copying is what in her Nature writes” (3.13–14). Like Shakespeare, Sidney uses, here and elsewhere in his sequence, the image of unmediated mimesis as a counter to excessive poetic ornamentation. Whereas the relevance of this image is limited to the contexts of particular sonnets in Astrophil and Stella, Shakespeare integrates this topic into the larger dramatic plot of his sequence; moreover, Shakespeare shapes this notion of tautology into a coherent statement about the writing of poetry.44 Literary reflexivity consistently motivates and lends meaning to the narrative texture and movement of Shakespeare’s sequence: the function of tautology in the metapoiesis of the Sonnets can be separated only reductively from its function in the sequence’s dramatic narrative. The issue of this concentrated reflexivity is the bare statement of equivalence, unmediated mimesis. Sonnet 84’s couplet offers an explanation for the failure of the rivals’ poetry to reproduce the Friend, and this explanation recalls the early sonnets on the Friend’s failure to propagate his image through fatherhood: You to your beautious blessings adde a curse, Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse. (13–14)

Heavy-handed alliteration (“beautious blessings”) and repetition of the word “praise” figure the redundancy of the Rival Poet’s ornamental poetry.45 The source of this poetic superfluity, as the couplet explains, is the self-satisfaction or narcissism of the Friend, the same trait that obstructed the Friend’s procreation in Sonnets 1–17: “thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes, / Feed’st thy lights flame with selfe substantiall fewell, / Making a famine where aboundance lies” (1.5–7; cf. 4.9–10). This parallel brings the Friend sequence full circle: both biological and literary imitatio are blocked by forms of solipsism. The Friend’s selfregard prevents him from seeing his own beauty beyond himself in a successor; the same self-regard perpetuates the kind of poetry, “of lesse truth then tongue” (17.10), that is too involved in the richness of its own medium to realize the object of its mimesis. The alternative? “Let him but coppy what in you is writ” (line 9). Sonnet 85 offers another alternative to the excesses described in 82–83:

190

J. H. FERGUSON

My toung-tide Muse in manners holds her still, While comments of your praise richly compil’d, Reserve their Character with goulden quill, And precious phrase by all the Muses fil’d. I thinke good thoughts, whilst other write good wordes, And like unlettered clarke still crie Amen, To every Himne that able spirit affords, In polisht forme of well refined pen. Hearing you praisd, I say ‘tis so, ‘tis true, And to the most of praise adde some-thing more, But that is in my thought, whose love to you (Though words come hind-most) holds his ranke before, Then others, for the breath of words respect, Me for my dombe thoughts, speaking in effect.46

As in Sonnet 76, the poet here compares others’ praise poetry of the Friend with his own, finds himself lacking (at least according to conventional standards), and ends up characterizing what seems like ineptitude in his own poetry as a mark of deeper fidelity. The couplet of Sonnet 32 ventriloquizes the Friend: “But since he [the poet] died and Poets better prove, / Theirs for their stile ile [i.e., the Friend will] read, his for his love.” This couplet closely resembles that of 85, except that the latter represents a further withdrawal from outward form: in 32 the poet excuses his lack of style, or arrangement of words; in 85, he excuses his lack of words altogether. In Sonnets 32, 76, and elsewhere, the poet’s apparent fault is his tedious conservatism; in Sonnet 85, it is his silence. The point is anticipated in Sonnet 83: “For I impaire not beautie being mute, / When others would give life, and bring a tombe” (11–12). This retreat from words to their silent counterparts, thoughts, seems a capitulation to the problem of verbal mimesis: the only way to preserve identity (to make a perfect copy) in verbal mimesis is tautology, a strippeddown statement of basic equivalence, on the verge of abdicating verbal predication altogether; the only legitimate alternative is silence. Sonnets 78–103 as a group constitute an exceptionally extended and coherent narrative sequence. Following the challenge of a Rival Poet and the resulting retreat from language (Sonnets 78–80, 82–85), the series describes a period of separation (Sonnets 87–99) and the poet’s own truant muse (Sonnets 100–3; the phrase comes from 101.1). Sonnet 101 explains the reluctance of his muse by celebrating “beauties truth…never intermixt” with extrinsic colors leant by poetry (101.6–8)47 ; tautology

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

191

(“best is best” [line 8]) underlies the muse’s imagined silent rejection of poetic praise for the Friend as redundant, unnecessary, since “he needs no praise” (line 9). In the latter section, the poet is ambivalent about the kind of transparent mimesis of the Friend that he celebrates elsewhere: Oh blame me not if I no more can write! Looke in your glasse and there appeares a face, That over-goes my blunt invention quite, Dulling my lines, and doing me disgrace. Were it not sinfull then striving to mend, To marre the subject that before was well, … And more, much more, then in my verse can sit. Your owne glasse showes you, when you looke in it. (103.5–10, 13–14)

These frustrations with the mimetic resources available to the poet culminate in a general review of the poet’s efforts to insure that the Friend’s beauty be preserved: To me faire friend you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I eyde, Such seemes your beautie still: Three Winters colde, Have from the forrests shooke three summers pride, Three beautious springs to yellow Autumne turn’d, In processe of the seasons have I seene, Three Aprill perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d, Since first I saw you fresh which yet are greene. Ah yet doth beauty like a Dyall hand, Steale from his figure, and no pace perceiv’d, So your sweete hew, which me thinkes still doth stand Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceaved. (104.1–12)

This sonnet is exceptional in the sequence for offering a specific indication of the duration of the affair (or, of one of the affairs) portrayed in the Sonnets; these three years, for obvious reasons, have fed considerable speculation about the dating of the Sonnets. Beyond its possible hints about dating, this explicitly retrospective statement is married to a condensed juxtaposition of many of the sequence’s keywords (fair, old, eye, beauty, winter, summer, spring, autumn, April, perfume, green, hue, etc.; less inclusively, the dial ’s unperceived stealing [lines 9–10] recalls the Friend’s

192

J. H. FERGUSON

“dyals shady stealth” and “Times thievish progresse” at 77.7–8).48 Both the general and the specific recollections give the negative statement in the couplet a resonance in the sequence as a whole: For feare of which, heare this thou age unbred, Ere you were borne was beauties summer dead. (13–14)

This sonnet’s retrospection concludes with what seems a defeat for the Friend’s literary succession. Unbred in line 13 recalls the time-defying breeding of the early sonnets (e.g., 12.13–14: “And nothing gainst Times sithe can make defence / Save breed to brave him, when he takes thee hence”). The last line denies that the Friend’s beauty will survive, in words that directly contradict the poet’s argument against his truant muse in Sonnet 101: Excuse not silence so, for’t lies in thee, To make him much out-live a gilded tombe: And to be praisd of ages yet to be. Then do thy office Muse, I teach thee how, To make him seeme long hence, as he showes now. (101.10–14)

Despite some slippage in the last line’s seem and show,49 this plea seconds the confidence expressed elsewhere in the sequence about the power of the poet’s verse to immortalize the Friend; the couplet in Sonnet 104 casts a similar look into the future and finds no hope that anything of the Friend will survive. This crisis arises out of the poet’s fundamental dilemma: the only adequate mimesis of the Friend is the bare statement of identity, and yet such tautology effectively undoes the basic predicative function on which the poet’s language—indeed, any language—depends. Cleansed of its tendency to false compare, language loses its basic copulative capacity. The poet acknowledges, on the one hand, the way in which language falsifies and, on the other, the fact that this falsification is essential to linguistic predication. It is this double bind, this apparent vanishing point of poetic perpetuation, which condemns the poet’s verse to silence and the Friend to oblivion. Following these renunciations of the value of verse about the Friend, Sonnets 105 and 108 offer a resolution for the poet’s conundrum regarding the language of praise. Sonnet 105 makes, however, an inauspicious start: this sonnet is often read as an elaborate joke, a fatuous

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

193

justification of the poet’s idolatrous love for the Friend.50 The poet distinguishes between polytheism and his monotheistic devotion for the Friend; he ignores completely the patent worldliness of the object of his worship: Let not my love be cal’d Idolatrie, Nor my beloved as an Idoll show, Since all alike my songs and praises be To one, of one, still such, and ever so. (1–4)

There is much disagreement about the function of “since” in line 3: Does this word introduce the cause of the accusation or the poet’s defense? If it is the former, then the poet has indeed acknowledged the idolatry of devotion to the Friend; if the latter, then he has ignored the question of the object of his worship and gone straight to a (specious?) defense against idolatry as the worship of multiple gods. The confusion can be resolved most simply by noting that the rest of the sonnet continues the train of thought begun in lines 3–4, suggesting that since introduces the justification that is the sonnet’s general burden: Kinde is my love to day, to morrow kinde, Still constant in a wondrous excellence, Therefore my verse to constancie confin’de, One thing expressing, leaves out difference. Faire, kinde, and true, is all my argument, Faire, kinde and true, varrying to other words, And in this change is my invention spent, Three theams in one, which wondrous scope affords. Faire, kinde, and true, have often liv’d alone. Which three till now, never kept seate in one. (5–14)

These lines use the constancy of the Friend as a hinge on which to shift from talk about theology to talk about poetry. The sonnet makes an inconspicuous but meaningful turn from the poet’s “love” (line 1) to his “verse” (line 7). The couplet’s allusion to the Trinity (“three…in one”), a playful defense against idolatry, for example, uses the same three words (fair, kind, true) that measure the poet’s unchanging attention to the Friend. These three words are often placed between quotation marks in editions of the Sonnets; in the poem’s terms, however, these are not words at all but an argument, a theme, the matter of invention,51 in short, things, thoughts, or matter—res. According to Sonnet 105, fair,

194

J. H. FERGUSON

kind, and true are not themselves words but are the “argument” that is varied to other words. Thus as the poet associates his purity of doctrine with his constancy of poetic mimesis, he also dissolves the distinction between words and referents. This intermingling of word and thought, verbum and res, into a single unit gestures toward a solution of the crisis in the sequence regarding verbal mimesis. The fusing of words and referents suggests a resolution of language’s problematic addition of a false proxy for what is only available in its utter particularity. Sonnet 108 associates the blurring of word and referent with successful poetic mimesis. The opening two lines resemble closely the correspondingly placed lines of a sonnet from Astrophil and Stella: What’s in the braine that Inck may character, Which hath not figur’d to thee my true spirit. (108.1–2) What may words say, or what may words not say, Where truth it selfe must speake like flatterie? (Astrophil and Stella 35.1–2)

What seems, in Sidney’s first line, a general question about the adequacy of verbal mimesis is, in the following line, restricted to the specific situation of poetic praise. Similarly, Shakespeare’s second line limits a general question about language’s expressive capacity to the specific situation of the poet’s communication of his “true spirit” to the Friend. The following lines of Shakespeare’s quatrain, however, take a direction quite different from Sidney’s: What’s new to speake, what now to register, That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit? (3–4)

As lines 1–2 do, these lines begin with a general question (about the perpetual circularity of language), which is then limited to the specific circumstances of the praise-poem. Departing from Astrophil and Stella, lines 3–4 join a question about the inherent repetitiousness of language to the initial question about the relation between words and referents, an alignment of ideas that recalls Sonnet 59: “Whether we are mended, or where better they, / Or whether revolution be the same” (lines 11– 12). The second quatrain of Sonnet 108 offers a familiar answer to the Sonnets ’ linguistic quandaries: Nothing sweet boy, but yet like prayers divine,

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

195

I must each day say ore the very same, Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine, Even as when first I hallowed thy faire name. (5–8)

With Sonnet 76, this quatrain disclaims “new found methods” (76.4) and puts in their place words repeated to the Friend from the beginning (cf. “dressing old words new” at 76.11). The phrase “thou mine, I thine” embraces a grammatical equivalence pared down to an utter simplicity that approximates the tautology of you are you (84.2, 8). Positions regarding poetic language taken earlier in the sequence are here grasped more firmly and more firmly associated with the language of religion: the second half of line 8 recalls a very specific prayer divine, the Lord’s “hallowed be thy name.”52 The remainder of the sonnet anticipates the Quietus with which the Friend sequence formally concludes (126.12): So that eternall love in loves fresh case, Waighes not the dust and injury of age, Nor gives to necessary wrinckles place, But makes antiquitie for aye his page, Finding the first conceit of love there bred, Where time and outward forme would shew it dead. (9–14)

Is love in line 9 to be understood as poetic content or poetic form? The confusion blurs the antithetical adjectives (eternal, fresh) associated with the two instances of the word and seems key to the transcendence of “time and outward forme” that is described in the rest of the sonnet. The fusion of word and sense suggests a resolution of the troubled involvement of language in time (“the dust and injury of age”) that has been a major preoccupation of the Sonnets. This kind of fusion has deep conceptual roots in the period’s notions about language and interpretation. While translation, for example, would seem to describe attempts to make one language reflect another, this assumption only occludes another, more philosophical conception, current in the period, whereby the real function of translation is to replace the verbal dress of a referent in one language with the verbal dress of another language; there is, in other words, no change of referent. The traditional hostility against translation “verbum pro verbo” is directed, on the face of it, against the slavish imitator’s substitution of a single

196

J. H. FERGUSON

word in translation for each word in the original; but, more profoundly, this dictum is directed against making words refer to other words instead of to things (res ). George Chapman, in his “Preface to Homer,” cites these “lawgivers to translators” in their instructions “not to follow the number and order of words,” the verbal features of the text, but to consider rather “the materiall things themselues, and sentences [from Lat. sententia, “thought” or “meaning”],” the text’s non-verbal referents, which are to be “cloth[ed] and adorn[ed]…with words.”53 The tradition bears with it, then, a clear insistence that the translator must render not words but referents.54 The exception that proves this rule is provided by St. Jerome’s insistence that Cicero’s dictum “non verbum pro verbo” does not apply to the translation of Scripture, where even “the order of words is a mystery” (verborum ordo mysterium est ).55 According to this conception, there is no functional difference between sign and referent in the translation of Scripture from one language into another: both the verbal features and the meaning of Scripture must be rendered. Jerome’s plenary notion of inspiration, according to which God supplied both the meaning and the very words of Scripture, is echoed in Sonnet 105 by the liturgical repetition of fair, kind, and true and the treatment of this phrase as if it represented a fusion of words and meaning; it is also echoed by the fusing of “eternall love” and “loves fresh case” in Sonnet 108. Asserted most influentially by Jerome, this conception of biblical language was adopted and further elaborated by Protestant defenders of sola scriptura. The fusing of word and referent, another form of tautological equivalence, suggests a poetic analogue in the Sonnets of this model of plenary scriptural inspiration. The tautological praise-poetry described above is framed in the Sonnets positively by the images of unmediated biological reproduction in the procreation sub-sequence and negatively by images of patently unfaithful reproduction in the Dark Lady sonnets (127–52). The first of these latter sonnets, 127, suggests immediately an antithetical relation to the earlier equivalence: In the ould age blacke was not counted faire, Or if it weare it bore not beauties name: But now is black beauties successive heire, And Beautie slanderd with a bastard shame. (1–4)

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

197

Lines 3-4 of Sonnet 1 – “as the riper should by time decease, / His tender heire might beare his memory” – provide the lines above with their point of departure: where the procreation sub-sequence is concerned with the imperative of perpetuating the Friend’s beauty, the opening of Sonnet 127 signals a perverse fulfillment of the earlier project of succession in an “heire” who has nothing in common with the beauty that should be its parent. The procreation sub-sequence is occupied with the conflict between biological succession and psychological narcissism; here succession is challenged by the disagreement between parent and child. The circularity or solipsism that the speaker associates first with his own poetry and, later in the sequence, with the poetry of rivals is here replaced with slanderous non-agreement between language and referent. The reference to “bastard shame” in line 4 recalls the “bastard signes of faire” of Sonnet 68 (l. 3), a sonnet particularly relevant to the quatrains following in 127: For since each hand hath put on Natures power, Fairing the foule with Arts faulse borrow’d face, Sweet beauty hath no name no holy boure, But is prophan’d, if not lives in disgrace. Therefore my Mistersse eyes are Raven blacke, Here eyes so suted, and they mourners seeme, At such who not borne faire no beauty lack, Slandring Creation with a false esteeme. (5–12)

The usurpation of Nature by “Arts faulse borrow’d face” is the explicit theme of Sonnet 68, where the speaker is skeptical concerning the project of replacing biological with poetic succession. The distrust of artful language acknowledged in 68 leads to the evocation, in later sonnets, of the poetics of bare equivalence that the speaker pits against the poetry of his rivals. Sonnet 127 recalls both the perfect confidence in biological succession from the procreation sub-sequence and the doubts about poetic succession in later sonnets. The acknowledged falsity of “accounts” of beauty in 127 and the remainder of the Dark Lady sonnets (with their flattery by lies [138.14], false swearing [147.9–14], and perjured truth [152.13–14]) poses a foil to the tenuous poetic equivalence evoked toward the end of the sonnets to the Friend. By providing an explicit antithesis to the imperative of Beauty’s succession with which the Sonnets begin, Sonnet 127 helps to frame the successful, if tenuous, poetics of bare equivalence achieved earlier in the sequence. The poet’s choice is between tautology, a seemingly redundant statement of identity, and a

198

J. H. FERGUSON

proper copulative joining subjects that are not identical – a copulative, however, whose predicate is patently false. In many of the Sonnets, Shakespeare’s speaker describes the involvement of poetic language in historical tradition as an obstruction to faithful mimesis: to write within poetic tradition is merely to say again what has already been said, a circularity or solipsism that echoes the narcissism inhibiting the Friend’s procreation. Shakespeare’s evocation of this obstruction bears detailed comparison with Protestant objections to the mediation of Scripture through the historical reception of the Roman Church. In repudiating this poetic recurrence, Shakespeare offers tautological statements identifying the beloved with himself. If Shakespeare’s speaker’s recourse to bare, tautological equivalence in the sequence seems narrow and tenuous, this negative, oppositional thrust recalls the exegetical emphasis of early English Protestants like Tyndale. Donne’s Songs and Sonets asserts a more robust version of poetic autonomy vis-à-vis Petrarchan tradition—in accord with the more constructive biblical exegesis of later stages of English Protestantism.

Notes 1. JoAnn DellaNeva, ed. and Brian Duvick, trans., Ciceronian Controversies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2. 2. Harold Bloom has in mind the dramatic works rather than the Sonnets when he writes that “Shakespeare belongs to the giant age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic consciousness” (The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 11). 3. I cite Shakespeare’s Sonnets from Rollins’s conservative transcription of the 1609 Quarto in the New Variorum Edition: The Sonnets, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944), which makes no changes to Q’s orthography or punctuation; I have substituted modern s and w for their equivalents in the 1609 edition and distinguished between u and v and between i and j. 4. Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935), 17. Cf. Hoskins’s remark on “Sentencia,” which, like other rhetorical and poetic devices, “if it be well used, is a figure—if ill or too much, it is a style” (ibid., 38). See too Murray Krieger, regarding Shakespeare’s Sonnets: “[t]he problems are almost insurmountable for the Petrarchan sonneteer who comes along as late as Shakespeare and who wants to be more than conventional. From verse form to conceits and

5

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

199

even attitudes and judgments, there seems to be almost too much that is dictated by convention for the uniqueness of individual talent and individual intention to be given free enough play to create really new poems.” A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Modern Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 75. For elaboration and substantiation of this point, see the chapter, “The Uneloquent Language,” R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), 3–31. See Hannah Crawforth’s treatment of poetic imitation and creativity in light of the ambiguity of the word invention: “Astrophil cannot quite decide what ‘Invention’ properly means: is it found in books or in ‘Nature’? Does it derive from study or from a more organic moment of insight? Is it found in (or at) ‘others’ feete’ or within oneself”? (Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 2). Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974], 55. Cf. Colie’s characterization of the Sonnets as “a drama of verse and about verse” (66). See too Murray Krieger, A Window to Criticism: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Modern Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964); John Kerrigan, “Between Michelangelo and Petrarch: Shakespeare’s Sonnets of Art,” Surprised by Scenes: Essays in Honour of Professor Yasunari Takahashi, ed. Yasumari Takada (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1994), 142–63; Anne Ferry, The "Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983); and Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). “Between Michelangelo and Petrarch,” 154. “Between Michelangelo and Petrarch,” 154. I use but do not consistently rely on the ordering of the 1609-edition: I am with those, as Rollins puts it, who “follow Thorpe, not because they think his sequence correct, but because they despair of producing any that will be better” (A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets, 2. 112). I do not, for example, include the final two sonnets, 153–54, within the Dark Lady sub-sequence, which would otherwise seem to form a closing movement to the collection. The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 24–30. See also Kerrigan, “Between Michelangelo and Petrarch,” 155. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 371–72. Classical, medieval, and renaissance treatments of this theme are legion, both prior to and following the Sonnets. One particularly immediate source for Shakespeare might have been a group of sonnets (33–40 in

200

14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

J. H. FERGUSON

the 1594 edition) in Samuel Daniel’s Delia (F. T. Prince, “The Sonnet from Wyatt to Shakespeare,” Elizabethan Poetry. Shakespeare, the Sonnets: A Casebook, ed. Peter Jones [London: Macmillan, 1977], 180, where the numbers given are 30–36); another source might have been the speech of Pythagoras in Book 15 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as translated by Arthur Golding (published 1567); echoes of this translation have been identified throughout Shakespeare’s other writings. Particularly pertinent passages from Book 15 are reprinted in an appendix to Booth’s edition of the Sonnets (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000], 551–54). Kerrigan cites relevant passages from Seneca’s Letter 84 and Petrarch’s (indebted) Familiar Letter 23.19 to Boccaccio, on the “model of father-son resemblance…as an image of successful imitatio” (“Between Michelangelo and Petrarch,” 150–54). I do not follow, however, Kerrigan’s finding a resulting “relative coolness of [the poet’s] urgings [the Friend] to breed” (155). An even more immediate source is probably the “Encomium Matrimonii” of Erasmus, as translated by Thomas Wilson in the Art of Rhetoric (ed. P. E. Medine [University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994], 79–100). Cf. Krieger, A Window to Criticism, 87. Cf. the Duke’s disingenuous use of this figure in persuading Angelo to assume power in Measure for Measure, 1.1.30–41 (The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 5th ed. [New York: Pearson, 2004]). Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 175. In his Commentary, Booth points out that the literary reference for these lines does not become clear (reading with Q) until the beginning of the following sonnet (Shakespeare’s Sonnets 158). Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. ed. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 85. Cf. Puttenham’s definition of what he calls “the Rebounde” (The Arte of English Poetrie, ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970], 207). Among much learned and useful comparison of Shakespeare’s themes in the Sonnets with both Classical and Renaissance antecedents, J. B. Leishman also offers several plain misconstructions of the Sonnets: apropos the lines discussed above in Sonnets 15–17, for example, Leishman asserts that the Sonnets provide “nothing like a real dialectic…between parenting and poetry as means of perpetuation” (Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 2nd ed. [London: Hutchinson University Library, 1963], 101n).

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

201

22. Most editors correct You self to yourself , missing the statement of bare equivalence in you were you, to which later sonnets return with reference to poetic rather than paternal mimesis. 23. Cf. Kerrigan: Shakespeare “advances verse as a means of survival first parallel to, then a substitute for, drawing stemmata” (“Between Michelangelo and Petrarch” 155). 24. Anne Ferry provides less specific evidence of this kind for her contention that “Shakespeare’s speaker…implicates himself in the styles he also mocks by making connections, both inclusive and specific, with his own poems” (The “Inward” Language 176–77). The conclusion she draws from this self-mockery—namely “that his verse can therefore nowhere be simply identified as a true voice of passion” (ibid., and 177–78)—is extreme. 25. The distillation-conceit is never explicitly applied to procreation in Sonnet 5; the application depends on the setting of 5 among other sonnets on the topic. 26. Joseph Pequigney notes the thematic link between these three sonnets (Such is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985], 86–89). He takes them as illustrations of a psychological complex, as described by Freud, combining narcissism and homosexual desire; he ignores the parallel between the mirrorings, poet/Friend and Friend/imagined son. Pequigney treats the Sonnets ’ narrator as an analysand subject to Freudian psychoanalysis (see esp. 96– 97), going so far as to infer from the text formative childhood experiences on the part of that narrator. 27. Cf., among many other examples, Sonnet 24 and Astrophil and Stella, 5.5–6: “what we call Cupid’s dart, / An image is, which for our selves we carve,” where Astrophil accepts this proposition as an irrefutable—if futile—dissuasion from his love for Stella. All quotations from Sidney’s sequence are taken from William Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Cf. also the idealized portrayal of this motif in Spenser, Amoretti 45. 28. Joan Grundy makes the general point about Elizabethan sonnets: “If the poem is a mirror, it is one which [the sonneteer] likes to look both at and into, and before which he never tires of parading” (“Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Elizabethan Sonneteers,” Shakespeare Survey 15 [1962]: 42). 29. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 203. 30. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, 5–6, 60. 31. Cf. L. C. John’s rather mechanical rehearsal of the use of this topic by several Elizabethan sonneteers (The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence: Studies in Conventional Conceits [New York: Russell & Russell, 1964], 110–14). For John, the immediacy with which this theme is treated demonstrates

202

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

J. H. FERGUSON

that his examples are not “solely a product of literary convention” but offer “autobiographical reality” (111). See Kerrigan’s Introduction: “Similarity depends on difference; for without difference there is identity, not similitude. ‘Identity,’ writes Wallace Stevens, ‘is the vanishing point of resemblance’” (The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint 23, 18–30 passim). On the basis of criteria that are logical in themselves but extrinsic to Sonnet 59, Margreta de Grazia sees the second burthen of a former child as a kind of “freak of nature” and, in literary terms, an example of catechresis; as she herself implies, however, this former child belongs to a context of recurrence, not novelty: “The freakish metaphor notwithstanding, the poet [in Sonnet 59] seems convinced that what he has written has already been written before” (“Revolution in Shake-speares Sonnets,” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007], 61–62). Barber cautions that “in most of the sonnets the couplet is not the emotional climax, or indeed even the musical climax; where it is made so, either by Shakespeare’s leaning on it too heavily, or by our giving it unnecessary importance, one feels that two lines are asked to do too much” (“An Essay on the Sonnets,” Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul J. Alpers [New York: Oxford University Press, 1967], 305). A reading of Sonnet 59 that assigns considerable significance to the couplet should justify that significance by reference to the Sonnet as a whole, to other sonnets in the sequence, or both. It is worth pointing out that Barber’s explanation of his sense of the couplets’ general function is circular: he offers no specific readings in support of his view. For a comprehensive rebuttal, see Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art, 68–79. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 282. Commentators on 68.5–8 explain that the use of corpses’ hair in wigs was customary in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England; nevertheless, Sonnet 68 effectively defamiliarizes this practice. Kerrigan glosses compounds strange “exotic compound words” and notes a fashion for such words among some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries (The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, 269–70). The sense I give the phrase—“far-fetched comparisons”—relies on at least two Shakespearean analogues, 21.5 (discussed above) and 130.14, and at least one nonShakespearean: “Ennobling new found Tropes with problems old: / Or with strange similes enrich each line” (Astrophil and Stella 3.6–7; words that appear in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76 italicized). For my purposes here, these two meanings need not be mutually exclusive, as they are not in W. G. Ingram’s and Theodore Redpath’s editorial gloss: “recherché combinations of images and words” (Shakespeare’s Sonnets [London: University of London Press, 1964], 176).

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

203

38. John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, 17. 39. In light of the poet’s celebration of writing all one, it is very odd that Patrick Cruttwell would characterize the Sonnets as a “sort of embryo” in which Shakespeare made an historical leap from “smoothness and standardization” to “maturity and complexity” (The Shakespearean Moment and Its Place in the Poetry of the 17 th Century [New York: Random House, 1960], 38, 18, 32). Surely this is to tilt the Sonnets in the direction of the poetry of John Donne. 40. Pequigney’s instinct to sexualize all of the Sonnets ’ language certainly leads to extremes but seems entirely appropriate in the case of Sonnet 80 (Such Is My Love 119–21). Still, his characterization of Sonnets 78–86 is precisely the reverse of mine: “the rivalry that is superficially a literary one is at bottom a sexual one” (118); “the farthest thing from [the poet’s] thoughts is to render an account of his own verse. He assumes a variety of stances, often at odds with one another, and all of them for the purpose of dealing with a love rival who happens to be a poet” (122). Pequigney’s “variety of stances” is comprised of two pairs of seemingly contradictory positions: the poet emphasizes the humble achievement of his verse while also recurring to his verse’s power to immortalize; the poet stakes his poetry to direct, unornamented presentation in contrast to his rival’s (or rivals’) paint and then castigates the latter for the very same kind of poetic immediacy (79.7–8—but see also 86.13). The poet does indeed acknowledge his inadequacy in terms of the art and scope of his “well-refined” peers, and he does indeed disavow the poetic mediation of the Friend, but it is precisely through the rejection of these conventional poetic values that the poet expects his verse to survive the “time bettering dayes.”. 41. Cf. also the “beauties Rose” subject to biological “increase” at 1.1–2 and false painting ’s “poore beautie,” “Roses of shaddow,” imitated from the Friend’s true Rose at 67.5, 7–8. 42. Cf. de Grazia’s helpful statement: “In a number of sonnets, the sublimation [of the Friend’s beauty in verse] is best achieved by verbatim repetition; the pure tautology of ‘you alone, are you’…constitutes highest praise” (“Revolution in Shake-speares Sonnets ” 65). Cf. also Colie’s remarks on the poet’s Yahweh-esque “I am that I am” at 121.9 (Shakespeare’s Living Art 62–63) and Vendler’s remarks cited below. 43. I am not sure, as is Vendler, that the conditional if in line 7 suggests the poet’s acknowledgment of what she calls the “difficulty of the poetics of pure description” (The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 371). I would paraphrase “if he can tell, / That you are you” this way: all he has to do is say that you are you. 44. Cf. the images of unmediated transcription in Sonnet 37: the Friend pours into the poet’s verse his “owne sweet argument” (2–3) and so ensures that the poet should never “want subject to invent” (1). Cf. also the

204

45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

J. H. FERGUSON

poet’s complaint about a rival poet—against what seems the latter’s “worthier pen”—that “what of thee thy Poet doth invent, / He robs thee of, and payes it thee againe” (79.6, 7–8). (The last item contradicts the poet’s assertions elsewhere that the rival poets’ treatments of the Friend are flawed in their emphasis on extrinsic poetic affect, e.g., “In others workes thou doost but mend the stile, / And Arts with thy sweete graces graced be. / But thou art all my art” [78.11–13].) See also the parallels in Du Bellay’s Regrets (nos. 1–4) and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (3, 6, 15, 74) noted by Leishman (Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 116–17). The alliteration and verbal repetition are further linked by the phonetic closeness of /b/ in “beautious blessings” to /p/ in “praise.” Cf. Astrophil and Stella 54 (qtd. by Ferry, “Inward” Language 196). Cf. Kerrigan’s suggestively cryptic comment: “It is because the excuse is routine, not because it is necessarily false, that Sonnet 101 is apologetic about its apology” (“Between Michelangelo and Petrarch” 156). Sonnet 102 offers a similar retrospection: “Our love was new, and then but in the spring, / When I was wont to greet it with my laies, / As Philomell in summers front doth singe, / And stops her pipe in growth of riper daies” (5–8); unlike Sonnets 101 and 103, Sonnet 102 offers nothing more sophisticated by way of explanation for this stoppage than the glut of imitators: “wild musick burthens every bow, / And sweets growne common loose their deare delight” (11–12). This slippage is especially clear if one reads 101.14 against the first two lines of the following sonnet—another of the poet’s excuses for his truant muse: “My love is strengthned though more weake in seeming / I love not lesse, thogh lesse the show appeare” (102.1–2; my emphasis). Colin Burrow glosses seem/show at both 101.14 and 102.1–2 but does not record the parallel between them (The Complete Sonnets and Poems [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 582). Paul Ramsey observes that, after Sonnet 100, “statements of [the Friend’s] divine identity are made, at times assertively, at times desperately, at times merely plainly” (The Fickle Glass: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets [New York: AMS, 1979], 150). He cites a manuscript annotation, attributed to an eighteenth-century hand, at the end of the sequence in the Rosenbach copy of Q that reads “What a heap of wretched Infidel stuff” (156). Burrow glosses over this anomalous treatment of words as argument by redefining the term invention as the “ability to…find out words to suit his subject” (Complete Sonnets and Poems 590); the correct meaning, of course, is the one he gives the term at 38.8: “the faculty for finding out matter” (456; my emphasis). The Geneva Bible gloss to Mt. 6.9 (“After this maner therefore pray ye,” etc.) hints at paradox: “Christ bindeth them not to the wordes, but to

5

TRADITION AND TAUTOLOGY IN SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

205

the sense, and forme of prayer.” Not the mere repetition of words, in the Roman way, but the sense is the fundamental thing—and yet the form (cf. manner in Mt.) too is somehow of the essence. Booth notes the echo of Mt. 6.9 and the prohibition against “vaine repetitions as the heathen” two verses previous; he sees the thrust of both echoes in the poet’s ongoing “comic self-mockery” (Shakespeare’s Sonnets 349). 53. “The Preface to the Reader” (Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, 3 vols. [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957], 1. 72). 54. The source of the “non verbum pro verbo” formula is to be found in Cicero’s own practice as translator from the (more learned) Greek into a relatively primitive Latin. In a quite straightforward way, historically analogous situations take up analogous theorizations of language. 55. Jerome, Lettres, ed. and trans Jérôme Labourt (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1949– 63), 5: 59.

CHAPTER 6

Tradition and Invention in the Songs and Sonets and Sermons of John Donne

A century-long debate about the translation of Scripture into English defined the expressiveness of biblical English, and of English in general, according to an opposition between textual autonomy and historical contingency, Scripture and exegetical tradition. Both William Shakespeare and John Donne, in their secular lyric sequences, situate their poems vis-à-vis Petrarchan tradition according to versions of this Reformation opposition. Chapter 5 argues that Shakespeare’s speaker in the Sonnets rejects poetic tradition with recourse to a negative, paradoxical notion of bare, tautological equivalence. The present chapter argues that Donne’s Songs and Sonets are more positive, less concerned with opposing poetic tradition than with constructing their own autonomous poetics. One of the preoccupations, or recurring motifs, in Songs and Sonets is the autonomy of erotic experience, the separate, self-sufficient realm it produces, separate both from the external world and from literary (Petrarchan) traditions of erotic verse.1 Formally, too, the poems of Songs and Sonets are idiosyncratic vis-à-vis conventional expectations. These discursive and formal assertions of poetic independence in Songs and Sonets suggest a more robust response than that offered by Shakespeare’s Sonnets to the threat posed by Petrarchan tradition. In the early decades of the seventeenth century, John Donne can celebrate at St. Paul’s, in an undated sermon on Psalm 90:14, an English © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. H. Ferguson, Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81795-4_6

207

208

J. H. FERGUSON

Church that has given boys psalms to sing at their plows; Donne’s Church has replaced the “Traditions of men” with Scripture that is “plaine enough” in itself.2 This consensus around Scripture in the vernacular marks the English Church’s realization of the evangelical project announced in Erasmus’ “Paraclesis” just over a century before and promulgated in large part by the English Lutherans of William Tyndale’s generation: “Erasmus laid the eggs and Luther hat[c]hed them,” as Stephen Gardiner complained in 1547, from the Fleet.3 Donne’s sermons perpetuate this quintessentially Protestant distinction between divine Scripture and human tradition; at the same time, and in accord with the model of poetic autonomy achieved in Songs and Sonets , the sermons by Donne discussed below suggest a balanced view of Scripture and exegetical tradition, closer to the Elizabethan exegesis articulated by John Jewel than to the oppositional, absolutist biblical theology of Tyndale. William Lisle includes literary writers among the defenders of an English free of excessive Latin influence4 : what tongue is able more shortly and with lesse doubtfulnesse, to give utterance and make way for the cumbersome conceits of our minde, than ours? What more plentifull, than ours might be, if we did use well but our owne garbes, and the words and speeches of our sundry shires and countries in this Iland? Neither is it the least glory of a Nation to have such a language. … Yet our Poetes, I must needs say, have done their part. (e3v-e4)

Discussion of English borrowings from other languages, from Latin in particular, took place at the convergence of literature and religion. Lisle’s text was published in 1623, eight years prior to the death of John Donne. Among the surviving elegies for Donne, that by Thomas Carew goes beyond generalized praise for the poet and preacher to argue that Donne has, in Lisle’s phrase, done his part to change the English language. Like Lisle, Carew describes that impact on the language in both literary and religious terms: Donne is both Apollo’s and “the true Gods” priest (98).5 Carew’s emphasis in the elegy, however, is on Donne’s secular poetry: he decries the “blinde fate of language” that can be expected initially to favor the “tun’d chime” that “charmes the outward sense” over the “masculine expression” of Donne (39, 46–47). Donne can nevertheless “claime / From so great disadvantage greater fame,” since “to the awe of thy imperious wit / Our stubborn language bends” (47–50).6

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

209

Carew does not emphasize linguistic borrowing, as does Lisle, though he does cite among Donne’s corrective influences on English poetry the discarding of “whatsoever wrong / By ours [poetry] was done the Greeke, or Latine tongue” (35–36). Carew rather emphasizes Donne’s recasting of poetic mimesis: by Donne were “The lazie seeds / of servile imitation throwne away; / And fresh invention planted” (26–28). Carew writes that Donne paid the poetic “debts of our penurious bankrupt age,” overcame the “Licentious thefts, that make poëtique rage / A Mimique fury” and “open’d Us a Mine / Of rich and pregnant phansie” (28–31, 37–38). According to Carew, Donne made a harvest from a landscape previously “bare” of poetic invention, even if, with Donne’s demise, Carew expects poets to “repeale the goodly exil’d traine / Of gods and goddesses, which in thy just raigne / Were banish’d nobler Poems,” so that “Verse refin’d by thee, in this last Age, / Turne ballad rime, Or those old Idolls bee / Ador’d againe, with new apostosie” (57, 63–65, 68–70).7 Carew’s pessimism about English poetry in the wake of Donne notwithstanding, he understands Donne to have renewed the expressive capacity of English through his purging of slavish imitation. Carew does not associate the “Mimique fury” to which Donne offered an antidote with sonnets in the Petrarchan tradition. Carew elaborates on such mimicry with reference, however, to the same traditional “traine / Of gods and goddesses” of Ovidian mythology attributed by Sidney’s persona in Astrophil and Stella to merely imitative poets, who dress their poems “in Jove, and Jove’s strange tales…/ Broadred with buls and swans, powdred with golden raine” (6.5–6)8 and who “search for everie purling spring, / Which from the ribs of old Parnassus flowes” (15.1–2).9 Sidney’s speaker associates this brand of poetic borrowing with Petrarchism. Each of the passages cited above is juxtaposed with language parodying the Petrarchan mode: in Astrophil and Stella 6, the speaker mocks the “hopes begot by feare,” the “heav’nly beames, infusing hellish paine,” and the “living deaths, deare wounds, faire stormes and freesing fires” of Petrarchan paradox (2–4); in 15, the speaker explicitly invokes “poore Petrarch’s long deceased woes” (7). Carew’s critique of the poetic pillaging of classical mythology is closely associated with Sidney’s and others’ critiques of Petrarchan imitators. Donne himself, in his “Satire II,” combines a critique of excessively imitative poetry with a broader approach to language theory and religious-exegetical controversy.10 The poem begins with a rhetorically effective concession to the speaker’s general contempt: “though…I do

210

J. H. FERGUSON

hate / Perfectly all this towne, yet there’s one state / In all ill things so excellently best, / That hate, toward them, breeds pitty towards the rest” (1–4). The scornful treatment of poets that follows this opening accentuates the speaker’s overriding contempt for that which of “all ill things [is] so excellently best.”11 The speaker initially associates “Poëtry,” though it is “not worth hate,” with ruinous excess, Spaniards, and Papists (6– 10). After describing poets who write for the theater (11–16), who write amorous verse (17–20), who write for the sake of patronage (21–22) and mere fashion (23–24), the speaker comes to the “worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw / Others wits fruits, and his ravenous maw / Rankly digested, doth those things out-spue, / As his own things” (25–28). These lines anticipate Carew’s “Mimique fury,” though the latter lacks the harshness and edge of Donne’s succeeding lines: and they’are his owne,’tis true For if one eate my meate, though it be knowne The meate was mine, th’excrement is his owne: But these do mee no harme, nor they which use To out-doe Dildoes, and out-usure Jewes To’out-drinke the sea, to’out-sweare the Letanie. (28–34)

The speaker’s inclusion of his own poetry (“my meate”) in the portrait of these worst of poets implies, of course, that the speaker is implicated in the general decline of the medium: it also implies that, from the speaker’s point of view, poetry’s decline is something to be resisted rather than merely deplored. In any case, the speaker seems ready to leave such poets to their own devices, since they “punish themselves” (39). At the same time, the way that this diatribe against Poëtry culminates in gross artificiality leads directly to the real object of this satire, the one ill thing that provokes the speaker’s “just offence”: namely, the figure Crocus (40). This figure likely takes his name from the anonymous sonnet sequence, Zepheria (1594), parodied in John Davies’s Gulling Sonnets (c.1594).12 Crocus, though set apart structurally from the preceding tribes of poets, was himself a “scarse Poët” (44) and represents a continuation of their worst faults: before he turns lawyer, Crocus was among those who “would move Love by rithmes” (17), and his wooing in “language of the Pleas, and Bench” (48)—the very affectation parodied by Davies in the Gulling Sonnets —resembles the grossly artificial language previously associated with the worst kind of Poëtry.13 Furthermore, if Crocus

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

211

courts women like a lawyer, he practices law like the writers already maligned. Crocus’s motive for turning to law, “meere gaine” (63), recalls one of the motives assigned writers previously: “rewards to get” (21). Crocus’s profession also recalls the legal metaphor used earlier in the poem for the theatrical writer, who “like a wretch, which at Barre judg’d as dead, / Yet prompts him which stands next, and cannot reade, / And saves his life” (11–13). Like the imitative writers who “with sinnes all kindes as familiar bee / As confessors” (34–35), Crocus the lawyer displays more “Symonie’and Sodomy” than is found “in Churchmens lives” (75). The long passage describing Crocus’s legal practice (62– 102) recurs throughout to the “words, words” (57) this poet-lawyer consistently perverts. The topic leads the speaker to theology: modern theologians “[a]re Fathers of the Church for writing lesse” (90) than has Crocus in his legal “parchments” (87); Crocus’s legal prolixity resembles Luther’s addition of the “Power and glory clause” to the mere text of the Pater noster with his abandonment of the Roman Church (92–96)14 ; and, by contrast, Crocus’s selective omission of deleterious words from his contracts, “[a]s slily’as any Commenter goes by, / Hard words, or sense; or in Divinity / As controverters, in vouch’d Texts, leave out / Shrewd words, which might against them cleare the doubt” (99–102). The latter charge is common enough in contemporary polemics: Donne himself in his Pseudo-Martyr (1610) writes that the Roman Catholic polemicist, Cardinal Bellarmine “deceives us, by mutilating the sentence.”15 “Satyre II” runs its critique of linguistic falsification from poetry through law and into theology. Crocus’s legal falsifications through the addition (87–92) and subtraction (97–99) of language echo the textual misappropriation of the imitative poets described earlier in the poem (25–28); each of these passages marks the culmination of its respective section. In short, there is almost nothing in the preliminary section on poets that does not anticipate the portrait of poet-turned-lawyer Crocus. The connections established among poetry, law, and theology, and centrally between poets and lawyers, suggest that the faults of poets, translated into legislation, result in general degradation. Toward the end of the satire, the speaker contrasts the excessive avarice of Crocus and his ilk with an image of personal moderation: “in rich mens homes / I bid kill some beasts, but no Hecatombs, / None starve, none surfet so” (107–09). These lines provide an epigrammatic conclusion to the portrait of Crocus in the preceding section, but they also refer back to the beginning of the satire, to the subject of poetry

212

J. H. FERGUSON

and more specifically to that brand of poetry the speaker describes as “worst”: the satire’s attack on excessively imitative and affected poetry evokes in the term “Hecatombs” an allusion to one of the most flagrantly imitative and affected poetic sequences of the sixteenth century, Thomas ´ oμπ αθ ι´α [Hecatompathia], or Passionate Century of Love Watson’s Eκατ (1582). Watson’s sequence, like the anonymous Zepheria, would have been an obvious target for satire: in the headnotes and annotations to these poems, Watson makes abundantly clear that his “passions” are little more than the recycling of already-recycled poetic matter. The headnote to Passion 66 is representative: “This Latine passion is borrowed from Petrarch Sonetto 133… Wherein he imitateth Virgill, speaking of Dido… And this Author [Watson] presumeth, upon the paines he hath taken, in faithfully translating it, to place it amongst these his owne passions, for a sign of his greate sufferance in love.”16 Watson, in such notes, categorically refuses to distinguish between his own supposed “greate sufferance in love” and the sentiments expressed by his sources: among the moderns, he cites Chaucer, Petrarch, Ronsard, Serafino, Poliziano, Parabosco, Forcadel, Firenzuola; among the ancients, Ovid, Cicero, Tibellus, Virgil, Sophocles, Pliny, and Jerome. Watson’s literary precedents, pedantically cited in poem after poem, are the signs of the feeling he wants to express: he has nothing at all new to say; he is “enslaved to poetic tradition,”17 like those poets of Donne’s generation who, according to Carew’s Elegy, “each in others dust, had rak’d for Ore” (44). The Hecatompathia effects a reductio ad absurdum of literary imitation. Watson is one who, albeit openly, complacently, “doth chaw / Others wits fruits, and his ravenous maw / Rankly digested, doth those things out-spue, / As his own things” (25–28). This allusive return to the matter of poetry near the end of “Satyre II” is further illustrated by the speaker’s self-reflexive final lines: my words none drawes Within the vast reach of th’huge statute laws. (111–12)

In contrast to the “words, words” of the poet-lawyer Crocus, the speaker’s (poetic) writing has not been given the “vast reach” of legislative status. The speaker continues, then, to imagine the extension of poetic language into the public sphere, even as his final lines lament (defiantly) the triumph of such as Crocus over himself. The speaker here anticipates

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

213

Carew’s pessimism about the influence of a kind of poetry like Donne’s, marked by its rejection of “servile imitation” (27). As N. H. Keeble has emphasized, the formal diversity of the Songs and Sonets is an important aspect of Donne’s defiance of current poetic practices: “For the received lyrical genres Donne substituted a metrical and stanzaic variety unprecedented in any collection of English love poetry.”18 The only poem labeled a sonnet in the Songs and Sonets, “The Token,” in fact adds a quatrain to the standard form (ababcdcdefefghghii). Donne repeats the same rhyme scheme seven times in the collection: ababccc in “Witchcraft By a Picture,” “Confined Love,” and “Loves Deitie”; aabb in “The Bait” and “A Jeat Ring Sent”; ababccdd in “The Broken Heart” and “The Blossome”; abab in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” “A Feaver,” “The Extasie,” “The Undertaking,” and “Selfe Love”; abbacccdd in “The Indifferent,” “Valediction of the Booke,” and “A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day”; ababcc in “A Valediction of My Name, in the Window,” “Loves Diet,” and “The Expiration”; and aabbccddd in “The Flea” and “The Will.” Of these, only one set of three and one pair of poems follow the same pattern of line lengths: “Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” “Feaver,” and “Extasie” are rhymed abab in tetrameter throughout; “Undertaking” and “Selfe Love” follow the same scheme, alternating between tetrameter and trimeter.19 Each of the remaining thirty-eight poems in Songs and Sonets has its own rhyme scheme, and no two poems in the collection have the same rhyme and metrical schemes and number of lines.20 Donne varies stanza length in the Songs and Sonets considerably: “The Paradox” is written in couplets, nine poems are written in quatrains, and there are six-, seven-, eight-, nine-, ten- eleven-, twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-line stanzas.21 Such formal variety is surmounted by the massive, twenty-four-line stanza of “The Dissolution” (rhymed abcdbacdeeffegghhiijkkjj ). This poem distinguishes itself from every other poem in the collection immediately: no other poem concludes its first four lines without a single rhyme: Shee’is dead; And all which die To their first Elements resolve; And wee were mutuall Elements to us, And made of one another. (ll. 1–4)

214

J. H. FERGUSON

The form of this initial quatrain mirrors the sense: the patterning of rhyme seems to have resolved into the atomized elements of blank verse. Pattern emerges in the second quatrain (like the first, a single sentence/unit of sense): My body then doth hers involve, And those things whereof I consist, hereby In me abundant grow, and burdenous, And nourish not, but smother. (5–8)

As if to toy with the reader’s expectation of pattern, the initial two rhymes here (the a- and b-rhymes from the first and second lines of the poem) are given in reverse order. The following two (the c- and d-rhymes) follow the order of the first quatrain, as if to contain the formal disorder of the poem’s first six lines, even as the negative connotations of these rhyme words (“burdenous” and “smother”) introduce a note of anxiety into the consolidation of pattern, and as the feminine d-rhyme undermines the completeness of what has emerged as an octave. The following four lines, two couplets, seem to rein in further the sense of formlessness: My fire of Passion, sighes of ayre, Water of teares, and earthly sad despaire, Which my materials bee, But ne’r worne out by loves securitie. (9–12)

The regularity of these two couplets is worried by the lack of a complete sense unit in either of these couplets, or in the two together. The subject and main verb of the sentence come only in the line following: Shee, to my losse, doth by her death repaire, And I might live long wretched so But that my fire doth with my fuell grow. (13–15)

As the speaker’s attributes (fire, sighs, etc.) are relegated from nominatives to the grammatical objects of the dead beloved’s repair, so what seemed a pair of couplets (lines 9–12) is changed by the repetition of the e-rhyme (“repaire”) into the first four lines of a five-line stanza rhymed eeffe. The sentence begun in line 9 is completed only in line 15, which, like lines 7–8 above, introduces a sense of formal closure with a neat couplet. The

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

215

following six lines complicate this poem’s successive provision, refusal, and modification of pattern further: Now as those Active Kings Whose foraine conquest treasure brings, Receive more, and spend more, and soonest breake: This (which I am amaz’d that I can speake) This death, hath with my store My use encreas’d. (16–21)

These lines are marked as a sestet by their completed sense/sentence and by an inexactly but clearly chiastic patterning of line lengths (trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, pentameter, trimeter, dimeter). The rhyme scheme is less discernible: the two initial couplets seem again, like lines 9–12 above, to restore a sense of regularity, but lines 20–21—despite the neatly paradoxical sense of completion in the sense, this death hath me increased—provide two rhymes answered only in the following, final lines of the poem: And so my soule more earnestly releas’d, Will outstrip hers; As bullets flowen before A latter bullet may o’rtake, the pouder being more. (22–24)

The j- and k-rhymes from the previous two lines (“store,” “encreas’d”) are resolved here, but the punning redoubling of the k-rhyme with “more” in the last line again suggests a more comprehensive patterning of lines in retrospect than seemed the case previously: the envelope-rhymed quatrain (jkkj ) is changed with the final line into a five-line stanza (jkkjj ). This concluding gesture of retroactive patterning, of which the initial octet offers the strongest illustration, emphasizes the poem’s elusive but consistent stanzaic coherence. The poem demands to be read as an organized stanza rather than the verse paragraph including “impromptu,” inconsistent rhyme schemes into which it often seems on the point of dissolving.22 By flirting with formal dissolution, the poem insists all the more strongly on its idiosyncratic integrity.23 This idiosyncratic integrity suggests that Donne’s formal variety in the Songs and Sonets represents strategic management, rather than mere neglect, of formal conventions. The second-longest stanza in the collection comes in the “sonnet” (“The Token”) already mentioned, where

216

J. H. FERGUSON

Donne, by intruding a fourth quatrain prior to the concluding couplet, sharply defies while still clearly evoking the standard fourteen-line structure. This larger program with regard to Petrarchan convention is epitomized in the most explicitly parodic of the poems, “The Baite,” where the only substantive alteration in the opening couplet taken from Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” also breaks the formal (iambic) patterning of the verse: Come live with me and be my love And we will some new pleasures prove. (1–2; my emphasis)

This intrusion into the steadily evoked model anticipates, of course, the poem’s later introduction of realistic diction and outright menace alien to Marlowe’s poem and, finally, to the breathtaking reversal of the entire sexual dynamic of the original, when the real “bait” in the poem turns out to be not the speaker’s luring words but the predatory mistress, and Donne’s seducer-speaker turns out to be the seduced. Where Walter Ralegh’s “Nymph’s Reply” critiques the idealizing assumptions of Marlowe’s poem, Donne turns his model inside out, reverses the wooerwooed relation, to create an entirely new conception of the relationship between poet-speaker and beloved. Ralegh’s poem begins and ends in dialogue with Marlowe; “The Baite” begins as response but becomes a text autonomous of its predecessor, a self-sufficient document of erotic experience, all the while evoking that precedent closely. Donne’s Satires and Elegies elsewhere offer further interpretive purchase on the poetics of Songs and Sonets, a collection within which, as William Kerrigan puts it, “[o]nce one moves away from the unit of the particular lyric, Donne becomes notoriously difficult to talk about.”24 The Elegy “Variety” offers in its opening lines a neat gloss to the formal inventiveness of Songs and Sonets: The heavens rejoyce in motion, why should I Abjure my so much lov’d variety, And not with many youth and love divide? Pleasure is none, if not diversifi’d The sun that sitting in the chaire of light Sheds flame into what else so ever doth seem bright, Is not contented at one Signe to Inne, But ends his year and with a new beginnes. (1–8)

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

217

This evocation of natural mutability, serving the speaker as precedent for his own sexual adventurousness, suggests as well the variety of personas, poses, lovers, situations, and metrical forms in Songs and Sonets. A later line, “Another’s brown, I like her not the worse” (29) anticipates that paean to multiple partners, “Indifferent,” in Songs and Sonets. “Variety” goes on to paraphrase Ovid closely (“All things doe willingly in change delight” [9]), to justify explicitly the speaker’s refusal to stake himself to one lover and his attack on the tyranny of the latecomer “this title honour” (45). The sun’s circuitous course, from lines 5–8 above, suggests a connection with pivotal lines from another poem, “Satyre III”: on a huge hill, Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will Reach her, about must, and about must goe. (79–81)

Theresa DiPasquale has described neatly the association in this satire between “men’s denominational preferences” and their “tastes in women.”25 As she notes, the last persona described, Graccus, who “loves all as one” (65), resembles the lover of “Indifferent” closely. It is Graccus’s example that brings the speaker of the third Satire to acknowledge that he “Of force must one, and forc’d but one allow; / And the right” (70–71), setting the stage for the serious-minded, if circuitous, search for true divinity described in the lines above. In both “Variety” and this satire, two ideas of variety are juxtaposed: variety as abandon (related in both poems to the speaker’s stance in “Indifferent”), and variety as the proper vehicle of inquiry, natural or divine. In light of the association in “Satyre III” between religious adherence and “heterosexual object choice,”26 the dramatic and formal variety of Songs and Sonets looks less a matter of indifference than a focused mode of erotic inquiry.27 Are there poems or passages in Songs and Sonets that take an overview of the various stances28 struck in the collection, as the speaker of the third Satire takes an overview of the five figures described? Can we attribute parts of Songs and Sonets to such an overarching poetic persona (without necessarily identifying this persona as the biographical John Donne), a presence for whom the speakers of other poems in the collection serve as phases through which he “about must, and about must goe” in a larger erotic inquiry? Certain poems in the collection, often associated in a biographical scheme with what J. B. Leishman calls “a fundamental

218

J. H. FERGUSON

seriousness,”29 do take a view on erotic experience that encompasses the limited perspective of other poems in the collection, as the speaker of “Satyre III” comprehends the positions of the five figures described. Most prominent among such poems is “Valediction of the Booke,” at whose conclusion the speaker “remov[es] far off” (l. 56), quite literally to take an overview of his poem’s contents.30 The rhyme scheme (abbacccdd), which “Valediction of the Booke” shares with “Indifferent” and “Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day,” suggests a compressed image of formal variety: it joins units of four, three, and two rhymes into a single stanza. The variegated rhyme scheme is paired with considerable metrical variety. Following the consistent pentameters of the initial quatrain (abba), the shift to trimeter in the fifth line surprises. The movement from quatrain to tercet seems to account for the metrical shift, though the tercet (ccc) includes a trimeter and then two tetrameter lines, and the closing couplet (dd) a pentameter and then a hexameter. The expectation generated in the initial quatrain that meter will follow rhyme is thus defied in the following tercet and couplet, though the latter five lines turn out to follow their own pattern: a steady increase from trimeter to hexameter. Like “Dissolution,” this poem defies initial formal expectations only to substitute new patterns. The division into quatrain, tercet, couplet is used flexibly with regard to sense divisions in the poem. Units of sense are usually but not everywhere contained within these divisions: there is unobtrusive enjambment of sense in the second stanza from the initial quatrain into the tercet: “write our Annals, and in them will bee / To all whom loves subliming fire invades, / Rule and example found” (12–14); the last stanza includes a strong enjambment from the tercet into the closing couplet: “but to conclude / Of longitudes” (61–62). Similarly, the poem’s iambic base is interrupted by frequent trochaic and spondaic substitutions, at the beginnings, middles, and ends of lines: the poem juxtaposes lines of perfect regularity—e.g., “But absence tryes how long this love will bee” (58)—with lines that seem consistently trochaic: e.g., “When this booke is made thus” (23)—while using masculine rhymes throughout. This fluent use of sophisticated stanzaic and metrical form, running to seven stanzas to form one of the longest poems in the collection at sixtythree lines (only “Extasie” and “Valediction of My Name” are longer),31 instantiates the transcendent erotic record that is the poem’s main subject. Other poems in Songs and Sonets also treat the perpetuation of erotic experience (one of Shakespeare’s main themes in the Sonnets ): indirectly

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

219

in “Extasie”; ironically in “Triple Foole,” “Undertaking,” “Will,” and “Funerall”; and concretely in “Canonization.” None of these, however, achieves the discursive and formal eloquence of “Valediction of the Booke.” The poem begins with a dual insistence on the significance of the love between speaker and beloved and on the textual perpetuation of that love: I’ll tell thee now (deare Love) what thou shalt doe To anger destiny, as she doth us, How I shall stay, though she Esloygne me thus And how posterity shall know it too. (1–4)

The “booke” that the speaker is instructing his beloved to write is in itself both an act of defiance against their fated parting and a record of that defiance. The remainder of the first stanza pursues the latter thread: How thine may out-endure Sybills glory, and obscure Her who from Pindar could allure, And her, through whose helpe Lucan is not lame, And her, whose booke (they say) Homer did finde, and name. (5–9)

The poet frames his beloved’s perpetuation of their love in terms of competitive emulation with major figures from literary tradition; he also, perhaps slyly, insinuates that the speaker will join this line of male poets who have derived (or stolen) their work from women. Out of the larger sense here of poetic competition proceeds, in the two stanzas following, an emphasis on the textual autonomy of the beloved’s composition: Study our manuscripts, those Myriades Of letters, which have past twixt thee and mee, Thence write our Annals, and in them will bee To all whom loves subliming fire invades, Rule and example found; There, the faith of any ground No schismatique will dare to wound, That sees, how Love this grace to us affords, To make, to keep, to use, to be these his Records. (10–18)

As the conception of the beloved’s book emerges out of textual competition with prior poets, so that same book emerges materially from collation

220

J. H. FERGUSON

of the handwritten manuscripts of the lovers’ letters. Leishman suggests that the title, “Valediction of the Booke,” implies that this poem “accompanied a manuscript volume of love-poems” addressed to the beloved, and that these poems are the “Myriades / Of letters” the beloved, whom Leishman thinks must be Ann More, is to transcribe.32 While this poem does suggest a comprehensive view of the poems that came to be collected in Songs and Sonets, evidence for this connection emerges from the poems themselves. There is no need to identify the letters with poems written by Donne, nor to assign these letters any status beyond the symbolic role they play (i.e., as the private documents on which a public record is built) in the poem’s imaginative construction. From these love letters emerges a book as all-encompassing and authoritative as it will be “long-liv’d” (19). The following stanza describes this book as an “all-graved tome / In cypher writ, or new made Idiome” (20–12). All-graved tome is an odd term: it may suggest that the book contains within itself all writing, or that it is the quintessence of writing; it may suggest, alternatively, the most funereal of tombs.33 Another poem, “Canonization,” distinguishes between tome and tomb, “if unfit for tombes and hearse / Our legend bee, it will be fit for verse” (29–30), only to suggest that the distinction is relatively meaningless, that tomes and tombs are interchangeably effective as perpetuators of the erotic sublime: “As well a well wrought urne becomes / The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes” (33–34). The terms used to describe this tome’s language, in cypher write and new made idiom, reflect the language of Songs and Sonets generally. As many critics have emphasized, the collection often uses what seems like private coding, whether between speaker and beloved or poet and coterie: “T’were prophanation of our joyes, / To tell the layetie our love” (“Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” ll. 7–8); likewise, the collection’s frequent recourse to earthy and irreverent diction appears deliberate and self-conscious, recalling Carew’s eulogistic praise, discussed above. At the middle of this third stanza (the third of six that describe the beloved’s book), the speaker begins to catalog the various branches of learning whose encapsulation in the beloved’s book marks it as an instrument or “encyclopedia”34 of universal knowledge: When this book is made thus, Should againe the ravenous Vandals and Goth inundate us, Learning were safe; in this our Universe Schooles might learne Science, Spheares Musick, Angels Verse. (23–27)

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

221

The Renaissance of classical learning following the sack of Rome provides a strong but inadequate analogy for this book’s perpetuation of knowledge, since the latter’s reach extends beyond the worldly to the cosmic and angelic realms. The following three stanzas (lines 28–54) set out a more pedestrian catalogue of learning: Divines, Lawyers, and Statesmen, respectively, can all find in this book “their occupation the grounds” (47). As so often is asserted about Scripture, so the speaker asserts about the beloved’s book that it contains the totality of various branches of knowledge. As a mark of this completeness, her book, again in this like the Bible, will be misread to find any number of doctrines: “In this thy booke, such [deluded Statesmen] will their nothing see, / As in the Bible some can find out Alchimy” (53–54). James Baumlin reads these lines as undermining the capacity of the beloved’s book to perpetuate the love evoked: “What is this final knowledge, then, this ‘nothing’?”35 Citing Donne’s references to biblical misreading in this poem and elsewhere, Baumlin claims that the beloved’s book is “put under erasure (sous rature, in Derrida’s formula) even before it is written.” Baumlin points to the puns in “all-graved tome” as evidence that the beloved’s book “becomes grave and tomb for the lovers, their faith, their private experience and knowledge.” Baumlin concludes that, in this poem, “writing provides but a weak compensation and surely no antidote for absence, becoming a pharmakon or drug – or, more precisely, a compulsive action that seeks to allay (though it can never cure) the anxiety of separation.”36 This is a strong reading of the poem, but its point of departure is misleading: Donne’s comment on the Statesmen—as is suggested immediately in the stanza by the limiting clause, “or of them, they which can reade” (l. 46)—is rather social satire than hermeneutic program. He emphasizes that such people are so corrupt as to read anything incorrectly, even a text as authoritative as the beloved’s book: “As in the Bible some can finde out Alchimy” (l. 54).37 Donne does not, I believe, share Baumlin’s view concerning the utter instability of scriptural meaning or of writing generally. While it is true that “Reformation controversy … remains a subject of Donne’s love poetry,”38 the pharmakon Baumlin associates with Donne’s general theory of language is Derridean rather than Donnean. Within this global catalogue are also contained, in miniature, some of the more prominent themes and stances treated in the Songs and Sonets. The dualism of erotic experience, for example, which exercises the dialectical wit of many of the speakers in the collection, is here handled with

222

J. H. FERGUSON

a sense of measured certainty, even complacency, that seems to contain the strenuous back-and-forth in other poems: “though minde be the heaven, where love doth sit, / Beauty’a convenient type may be to figure it” (35–36; compare, especially, “Extasie”). Somewhat incongruously in this poem celebrating transcendent love, the stanza on lawyers reprises the blank cynicism about women that many poems in the collection take up (see, for example, “Indifferent” and “Womans Constancy”): mistresses “forsake him who on them relies / And for the cause, honour, or conscience give, / Chimeraes, vaine as they, or their prerogative” (43– 45).39 The third of these stanzas echoes another strand from the Songs and Sonets, namely social satire, parenthetically limiting the statesmen evoked to those “of them, they which can reade” (46; compare, among other poems, “The Will”). As these stanzas suggest that the beloved’s book contains within itself the quintessence of all knowledge, so the stanzas themselves seem to epitomize some of the major topics of the Songs and Sonets, and perhaps of Donne’s secular poetry more broadly. If Shawcross’s dating is correct, “Valediction of the Booke” is significantly later than most of the collection, making it a good occasion for such a retrospective view.40 The final stanza of “Valediction of the Booke” turns from the beloved’s composition to the speaker’s own measure of and perspective on their love: Thus vent thy thoughts; abroad I’ll studie thee, As he removes farre off, that great heights takes; How great love is, presence best tryall makes, But absence tryes how long this love will bee; To take a latitude Sun, or starres, are fitliest view’d At their brightest, but to conclude Of longitudes, what other way have wee, But to marke when, and where the darke eclipses bee? (55–63)

Characteristically for Songs and Sonets, this “Valediction” concludes not with a summary but with a new conceit, whose particular elaboration would seem to substitute for a broader resolution of the poem’s theme (compare “Message,” “Song: Goe, and catche a falling starre,” “Flea,” “Curse,” “Relique,” and, especially, “Womans Constancy”). It is also true, however, that the technical matter of latitudes and longitudes treated at the end of the poem reprises the poem’s point of departure: namely, the

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

223

rationalization of separation. More particularly, the speaker here recalls his own status as author of the poem, his own implied relation to the poets mentioned in the first stanza (which anticipates Carew’s reference to Donne’s purging of poets possessed by Pindar’s “Extasie…not their owne” [32–33]), his shared authorship of those “Myriades / Of letters” that formed the beloved’s copy text, and (potentially) the self-reflexive language of “[i]n cypher writ, or new made Idiome” (21). In short, the speaker’s initiative described in the last stanza suggests that this very poem is a model or realization of the project assigned to the beloved in the body of the poem. The comprehensive structural and metrical elaboration of “Valediction of the Booke” looks, in this light, like the formal expression of the transcendent and totalizing text the poet has been describing. It is above all this poem, Donne’s poem, that responds to poetic tradition with an image and formal realization of autonomy.41 Like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Donne’s Songs and Sonets practice what Heather Dubrow describes as Petrarchan counterdiscourses: “strategies to distance [their poems] from Petrarchan conventions in the very process of invoking them.”42 Shakespeare and Donne understand poetry that conforms to Petrarchan conventions as in danger of being merely contingent, mere repetition of what has already been said. Poems like “Dissolution” emphasize their structural autonomy by defying formal expectations only to supply their own, idiosyncratic formal parameters. “Valediction of the Booke” capitalizes on this strategy by extending this stanzaic autonomy out to multiple units, in a poem whose explicit, self-reflexive subject is its own autonomy as an erotic text. ∗ ∗ ∗ In a sermon preached to Queen Anne, 14 December 1617, on Proverbs 8:17 (vol. 1, no. 5), Donne writes of “amorous” Solomon that, “when he turn’d to God, he departed not utterly from his old phrase and language,” as an example of the general principle that “[a]ll affections… shall not only be justly employed upon God, but also securely employed” (1: 237).43 Donne’s treatment of Scripture and exegetical tradition in his sermons corresponds to his treatment of poetic autonomy and Petrarchan tradition in his secular poetry. The poetic autonomy to which many of the poems in Songs and Sonets appeal and which “Valediction of the Booke” seems to consummate is reflected in Donne’s biblical hermeneutics. From the Protestant point of view, Roman exegesis reduces Scripture to text

224

J. H. FERGUSON

that is contingent on merely human traditions or conventions. Donne’s poems reflect “Protestant poetics” by defining their relation to Petrarchan tradition according to logic that also obtains in his and other Reformation biblical exegesis. Criticism of Donne’s sermons has often treated the ten volumes of Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter’s edition as if they comprised a single work of some three-to-four thousand pages, within which any passage can be used to illuminate any other part of Donne’s work.44 Against this tendency, Jeanne Shami has written helpfully: with regard, for example, to the use of Troy D. Reeve’s three-volume index as a kind of subway-map to the sermons,45 and with regard more generally to the use of “fragmented ‘sound bytes’ culled indiscriminately from the sermons” in lieu of “focusing in more detail…on sermons in their particular historical and cultural contexts.”46 Donne’s sermons before the more popular auditories of, for example, St. Paul’s tend, for pastoral reasons, to present the results of exegesis rather than reflections on exegetical method. Of more interest for the current discussion are Donne’s sermons before the learned audiences of the royal court (at Whitehall, for example): these sermons often include sustained discussions of hermeneutics, the methodology of Donne’s biblical exegesis. For example, in a sermon preached at Whitehall, 20 February 1617, on Luke 23:40 (vol. 1, no. 6), Donne uses the pretext of describing the workmanship of the tabernacles from Exodus to use a word, Mosaick, that turns out to describe punningly the complexities of what moderns have come to call Mosaic Authorship: “[a]s the Tabernacle of God was, so the Scriptures of God are of this Mosaick work: The body of Scriptures hath in it limbs taken from other bodies; and in the word of God, are the words of other men, other authors, inlaid and inserted. But, this work is onely where the Holy Ghost is the Workman: It is not for man to insert, to inlay other words into the word of God” (1: 252).47 Donne has a definitive standard concerning the difference between Scripture and exegetical tradition but a nuanced view of how this impacts the question of biblical authorship.48 The distinction here is between the genuine Scripture within the canon, on the one hand, and, on the other, “counterfeit…Mosaick work,” extra-biblical material, inserted into Scripture, where “it is made equal to the word of God” (253). One of the obviously extra-biblical texts to which Donne refers here is “the Revelations of Brigid,” whose author Donne mocks as one of the

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

225

“She-fathers” (253). The same text reappears in what is likely a much later sermon (it is undated, but Simpson suggests that it was written during the reign of King Charles49 ) preached again at Whitehall, on Ezekiel 34:19 (vol. 10, no. 6). In this latter sermon, Donne reprises his chauvinist taunt of the Roman Church for seeking to include “Mothers of the Church” among its authorities, though he explains that his criticism of Brigid is not for her sex (“[t]he great mystery of the Resurrection of Christ was revealed to women before men”), but for the book’s “blasphemy, and impertinency, and incredibility,” less conducive to religion than Ovid’s Metamorphoses (146). This attack on misplaced textual authority in the Roman Church is part of a larger polemic in the sermon.50 The Whitehall sermon on Ezekiel 34:19 is among the most sophisticated treatments of biblical authority in all of Donne’s sermons. It is also one of the less clearly structured: it lacks Donne’s usual divisio, though it does follow introductory remarks with several separate (though unlabeled) Parts. This sermon begins with a distinction between the Great and Minor Prophets on the basis of the formers’ speaking “more of the comming of Christ, and the establishing of the Christian Church, then the lesser Prophets doe” (10: 140). Donne passes on to a defense of Ezekiel as the “greatest” of the four Great Prophets for his “extraordinary depth, and mysteriousnesse” (141). Jerome’s assertion (unattributed here) that what was prophecy for the writers of the Old Testament is history for Christians means that the mysteries for which Ezekiel is counted the greatest of the prophets are “more open to us, then they were to the ancients, because many of those prophecies are now fulfilled.”51 As a result of this shift in status, the verse that provides this sermon’s starting point, Ezekiel 34:19, has never contained for Christians “darknesse, nor difficulty, neither in the first emanation of the light thereof, nor in the reflection; neither in the Literall, nor in the Figurative sense thereof.” Donne joins together Jerome’s conclusion about prophecy and history with the standard exegetical distinction between the literal and figurative meanings of Old Testament prophesy. The literal sense of the passage from Ezekiel (“and as for my flock, they eate that, which yee have trodden with your feet, and they drink that which yee have fouled with your feet”) refers to the situation of Israel under Babylonian domination and God’s eventual restoration of the people, while “the figurative and Mysticall sense is of the same oppressions, and the same deliverance over againe in the times of Christ, and of the Christian Church” (141). However, just

226

J. H. FERGUSON

as this prophecy concerning Christ and his Church ceased to be prophecy once it took place in history, so what Donne describes as “the figurative and Mysticall sense” becomes “more then figurative, fully literall, soon after the Text.” As prophecy becomes history, the figural becomes literal. This literalization of the figure and historicization of prophecy further “comprehends the whole kingdome of Christ,” not merely Christ and the Primitive Church: it also “touches us more nearly, the oppressions and deliverance of our Fathers, in the Reformation of Religion, and the shaking off of the yoak of Rome, that Italian Babylon” (142). Having established this typically Protestant “conformity between the two Babylons, the Chaldean and the Italian” (143), Donne has reached the polemical target of this sermon. The remainder of the sermon addresses “the severall metaphors of the Text, as the holy Ghost continues [extends ] them to the whole reign of Christ, and so to the Reformation” (142). Donne uses the implied image of the corrupt shepherds at Ezekiel 34:19 to complain of the conjoined abuses by Church and State in Rome (143–44); he uses the implied responsibility of the shepherds to care for their sheep to complain of the Roman Church’s use of Latin, “a language, not onely not understood by him that heard it, but for the most part, not by him that spoke it,” thus preventing any pastoral instruction (144). Relatedly, Donne criticizes the Roman Church for responding to the need for vernacular instruction with “Legends…in vulgar tongues,” which “did not onely faine actions, which those persons never did, but they fained persons which never were” (145). In Rome, “the sheep lacked due food in the due place,” because in place of revelation, they were fed fiction. The Roman substitution of chaff for wheat in the vernacular context provides the basic logic for the broader treatment of Scripture and exegetical tradition in the long section following. Donne introduces this discussion with the figure of the grass that should sustain the sheep in the passage from Ezekiel: “the sheep eat their grasse, whilest the Dew was upon it, which is found by experience to be unwholesome. The word of God is our grasse, which should be delivered purely, simply, sincerely, and in the naturall verdure thereof. The Dews which we intend, are Revelations, Apparitions, Inspirations, Motions, and Interpretations of the private spirit ” (145). These dews “seem to fall upon us from heaven [but] arise from the earth, from our selves”: they are the human traditions with which “the Romane Church [did] make our fathers drunk and giddy.” As the Roman Church substituted vernacular fictions for the Scriptures, so here, for example, “a great Author of theirs…when he pretends to prove

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

227

all controversies by the Fathers of the Church…every where intermingles that reverend Book, of Brigids Revelations ” (146). “But press we a little closer to the very steps, and metaphor of the holy Ghost, who here lays the corrupting of the sheeps grasse” (146). What follows recalls but also greatly exceeds in sophistication the discussion of Scripture and traditions in the sermon of 1617 where Donne cites “the Revelations of Brigid.” Donne divides his investigation into two parts, touching preaching and exegesis, respectively: the first concerns the “mingling of too much humane ornament, and secular learning in preaching, in presenting the word of God” (147); the second concerns the “mingling humane Traditions, as of things of equall value, and obligation, with the Commandments of God.” On the first topic, Donne rejects secular ornament in preaching only when it comes to “more then may serve ad vehiculum, for a chariot for the word of God.” He worries that the secular vehicle may overwhelm the religious tenor: “if your curiosity extort more then convenient ornament, in delivery of the word of God, you may have a good Oration, a good Panegyrique, a good Encomiastique, but not so good a Sermon”; he continues, “we may transfer flowers of secular learning, into these exercises; but if they consist of those, they are but Themes, and Essays ” (148).52 Donne makes the interesting historical point that St. Paul had more need than modern preachers to apply “sentences of secular Authors,” since Paul’s audiences were not “conversant, not acquainted at all, with the phrase and language of Scripture” (148). Donne can celebrate his own time by contrast: “amongst us now, almost every man…is so accustomed to the text of Scripture, as that he is more affected with the name of David, or Saint Paul, then with any Seneca or Plutarch.” In this learned sermon for a learned audience, Donne pushes beyond the conventional picture of St. Paul as the Christian preacher par excellence to propose a suggestive historical distinction between Paul’s situation and Donne’s own. Reflecting on the relevance of this discussion to the Roman Church, Donne makes a surprising turn: is it so “that the Italian Babylon can be said to have trodden down the grasse in that kinde, with overcharging their Sermons with too much learning ” (148–49)? Not at all, writes Donne, “very very far from it” (149): “for when they had prevailed in that Axiome, and Aphorisme of theirs, that it was best to keep the people in ignorance, they might justly keep the Priests in ignorance too.” It is the second part of the present section, on the “mingling of the humane additions, and traditions, upon equall necessity, and equall obligation as

228

J. H. FERGUSON

the word of God it selfe,” that pertains to Rome. On this topic, Donne distinguishes two ways in which traditions intrude on the prerogative of Scripture: one of these he characterizes as the Hog, the other as the Mole (150). The first is the more pernicious of the two: as the Hog “doth root up the grass…so some traditions doe utterly oppose the word of God, without having under them, any mysterious signification, or any occasion or provocation of our devotion, which is the ordinary pretext of traditions, and Ceremonial additions in their Church.” Donne associates such utterly destructive traditions with Jewish officials reproached by Jesus and with the worst practices of the Roman Church. The other form of tradition receives fuller treatment, in part because this form of tradition is more germane to the church Donne represents. The Mole does not uproot but “cast[s] a slack, and thin earth upon the face of the grass,” such that “if the shepheard, or husbandman be present to scatter this earth againe, the sheep receive no great harme, but may safely feed upon the wholesome grass, that is under” (150). Such Moletraditions, “particular things, and words, and actions…transacted in the Church,” “are not the institutions of God immediately, but they are a kind of light earth, that hath under it good and usefull significations” (150–51). Such traditions do not extirpate the word of God but might veil it: if someone does not “shew [the flock] the grass that lies under” this traditional cover, the flock may “inhere, and arrest their thoughts, upon the ceremony it selfe” (151) and so miss that which lies beneath. Thus, Donne can write on behalf of his church that “[w]e deny not that there are Traditions, nor that there must be ceremonies, but that matters of faith should depend of these, or be made of these, that we deny; and that they should be made equall to Scriptures.” This is far from Tyndale’s sense that such ceremonies are intrinsically inimical to a properly biblical theology. Such traditions and ceremonies belong to that class of things, adiaphora, that have been “superstitiously abused” but are “in their own nature indifferent” (8:331), as Donne puts it in a late sermon preached at St. Paul’s in 1628/29 on Acts 28:6 (vol. 8, no. 14). The rejection of such “abuse” with the acceptance of ceremonies properly observed represents the middle way of Donne’s English Church between Rome and the Separatist “Puritans,” as he describes it in a much earlier sermon, preached to Queen Anne on 14 December 1617 (vol. 1, no. 5): “Thou must not so think [Jesus]…beyond Sea, as to seek him in a forrein Church, either where the Church is but an Antiquaries Cabinet, full of rags and

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

229

fragments of antiquity, but nothing fit for that use for which it was first made, or where it is so new a built house with bare walls, that it is yet unfurnished of such Ceremonies as should make it comly and reverend” (1: 246; cf. 9: 363). In the sermon preached at St. Paul’s on the “Anniversary celebration of our Deliverance from the Powder Treason” (vol. 4, no. 9), Donne frames the same contrast differently with reference to the religious inclination of King James, “the Josiah of our times,” who turned “neither to the fugitive, that leaves our Church, and goes to the Roman, nor to the Separatist, that leaves our Church, and goes to none” (4: 247).53 Finally, in the 1628/29 sermon on Acts 28:6 (vol. 8, no. 14), Donne offers a different but related frame of reference for the practices of his Church: “[t]hat Church, which they call Lutheran, hath retained more of those Ceremonies, then ours hath done; And ours more then that which they call Calvinist; But both the Lutheran, and ours, without danger, because, in both places, we are diligent to preach to the people the right use of these indifferent things” (8: 331). These shared ceremonial usages link the Roman, Lutheran, and English Churches: “They…that aske now, Where was your Church before Luther? would then have asked of the Jews in Babylon, Where was your Church before Esdras ? that was in Babylon, ours was in Rome” (10: 170).54 Donne’s focus in the sermon on Ezekiel 34:19, however, is on exegesis rather than liturgy: he cites Tertullian’s reproach against the heretics of his time that, “pressed with Scriptures, they fled to Traditions, as things equall or superiour to the word of God” (10: 151). Adapting in this context a Latin sentence from St. Hilary, Donne deplores the linguistic and exegetical consequences “[s ]i aliquis aliis verbis, quam quibus a Deo dictum est, demonstrare velit, if any man will speake a new language, otherwise then God hath spoken, and present new Scriptures, (as he does that makes traditions equall to them)” (152). Donne’s creative translation of alia verba as “new language” and “new Scriptures” (rather than simply “other words”) is meant to emphasize the misplaced authority granted such traditions in the Roman Church.55 Donne concludes this section by turning the common Roman Catholic claim about “insufficiency in the Scriptures” back on the claimants, who base this assertion on their perpetual mistaking of exegetical tradition for Scripture: “[t]he Fathers abound in the opposing of Traditions, when out of those traditions, our adversaries argue an insufficiency in the Scriptures.” As Donne writes in another sermon, “[t]he Word of God is Biblia, it is not Biblioteca.”56 “The excellency of the Christian Religion is,” writes Donne in an undated

230

J. H. FERGUSON

sermon on Psalm 32:6 (vol. 9, no. 14), “that it is Verbum abbreviatum, A contracted Religion,” while “those waters of Traditionall Doctrines in the Romane Church…are so many, as that they overflow even the water of the life, The Scriptures themselves” (9: 329–30). Such disdain for the biblical text is, for Donne, characteristic of Roman Catholicism: “I should not easily feare his being a Papist, that is a good Text-man.”57 In criticizing other aspects of Roman Catholic practice, the remaining sections of the sermon on Ezekiel 34:19 leave aside reflections on hermeneutics to offer further figurative readings of the verse from Ezekiel: these readings complete Donne’s “accommodation of the words of our text, literally intended of the conditions of Gods Children in Babylon, but pregnantly appliable to the condition of our Fathers in the Italian Babylon, Rome” (158). In an earlier, Lincoln’s Inn sermon from Ascension Day, 1622 (vol. 4, no. 4), preached during a period when King James had liberalized policy vis-à-vis Roman Catholics in England,58 Donne is similarly critical of “collateral and subdivided Tradition” in the Roman Church (4: 141). As in the sermon just discussed, Donne combines the question concerning Scripture and exegetical tradition with the introduction of secular material into sermons: Donne describes as offending “in curiosity” a preacher who is “over-vehemently affected or transported with Poetry, or other secular Learning” (143). He comes here to the same conclusion reached in the later sermon: “[w]e in our profession may embrace secular Learning, so far as it may conduce to the better discharge of our duties, in making the easier entrance, and deeper impression of Divine things in you.” In this sermon, however, Donne connects secular learning with his listeners’ curiosity about Roman Catholic doctrine: as excessively secularized sermons are “curiosity in us…it is so in you, if when you have sufficient means of salvation Preached to you in that Religion wherein you were Baptized, you enquire too much, too much trouble your self with the Religion of those, from whose superstitions you are already by Gods goodness rescued” (143). Donne builds this association between the Roman Church and the secular on the basis of a general assertion, in the same sermon, of the worldliness of that Church, whose followers “make their Divinity, and the Tenets of their Church, to wait upon temporal affairs, and emergent occasions” (142). While sermons, or for that matter “Devotions,” might respond to “emergent occasions,” “[s]ubstantial and fundamental points of Religion…do not ebb and flow; they binde

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

231

all men, and at all times, and in all cases.” In the undated sermon on Acts 10:44 cited above, Donne distinguishes between devotional texts and Scripture: “[i]t is not Many words, long Sermons, nor good words, witty and eloquent Sermons that induce the holy Ghost, for all these are words of men; and howsoever the whole Sermon is the Ordinance of God, the whole Sermon is not the word of God: But when all the good gifts of men are modestly employ’d, and humbly received, as vehicula Spiritus …The chariots of the Holy Ghost” (5: 37).59 Roman Catholics do not distinguish between such fundamental (i.e., Scriptural) points and human devotional aids, resulting in “this planetary…this transitory…this occasional Religion” (4: 142)—or, as Donne puts it in his 1625 sermon on Psalm 11:3 (vol. 6, no. 12): this “Arbitrarie…Occasionall Religion” (6: 250). Donne’s conclusion to the 1622 Lincoln’s Inn sermon expresses the matter bluntly: “Belief in God, and not in man, nor traditions of men” (4:144). Such worldliness, on Donne’s account, is related to the Roman Catholic faith in the precedential force of human history: “[i]t is a great, and a dangerous wickednesse, which is done upon pretext of Antiquity; the Religion of our Fathers, the Church of our Fathers, the Worship of our Fathers, is a pretext that colours a great deale of Superstition” (4: 249).60 Scripture alone, not the traditions of men, offers a coherent account of truth. Donne begins a rather less sophisticated sermon on Psalm 90:14, preached at St. Paul’s sometime after 1621 (vol. 5, no. 14), for example, with an attack on one of the cornerstones of Roman Catholic exegesis: the purported “unanime consent” of the Church Fathers, against which he cites the incompatible positions on Psalmic authorship of Augustine and Jerome (5: 268). Donne balances this diversity of Patristic opinion against the surprising coherence of the referents indicated by two central English biblical terms, prayer and praise, and the Hebrew words they translate: “The name changes not the nature; Prayer and Praise is but the same thing; The name scarce changes the name; Prayer and Praise is almost the same word; As the duties agree in the heart and mouth of a man, so the names agree in our eares; and not onely in the language of our Translation, but in the language of the holy Ghost himselfe, for that which with us differs but so, Prayer and Praise, in the Originall differs no more then so, Tehillim, and Tephilloth” (5: 270). Donne concludes this sermon with a contrast between his own and “another Church,” where the “Additionall things exceed the Fundamental; the Occasionall, the Originall; the Collaterall, the Direct; And the Traditions of men, the Commandments of God” (5: 295). In his rather simplistic appeal to sound-alike words61

232

J. H. FERGUSON

and in his less nuanced denunciation of the Roman Church, Donne in this sermon appeals to a more popular auditory. By contrast, Donne’s sermon preached to King Charles at Whitehall on John 14:2 on 18 April 1626 (vol. 7, no. 4) includes a quite nuanced discussion of biblical authority vis-à-vis the authority of traditions, especially in its first Part, on “[t]he rule of all Doctrines; which in this place is, The word of God in the mouth of Christ, digested into the Scriptures” (7: 119). The sermon’s introductory remarks begin on a question of punctuation: as Donne notes, “as there are Doctrinall Controversies, out of the sense and interpretation of the words, so are there Grammaticall differences about the Distinction, and Interpunction of them” (118). Donne cites conflicting authorities on the punctuation linking the two clauses of his chosen verse (and linking the latter clause and that following in the next verse); the punctuation, as Donne shows, determines the sense of the verse. Such careful philology is distant from the overstated alliterative resemblances between “Prayer and Praise,” “Tehillim, and Tephilloth.” Furthermore, Donne settles the complicated question of biblical punctuation not by absolutist appeal to sola scriptura but to “the Interpunction of these words, which our own Church exhibits to us” (119). On this point, Donne indicates the more nuanced appreciation for the collaboration of Scripture and exegetical tradition to be pursued through the remainder of this section of the sermon. In the division, Donne identifies two exegetical extremes between which he places the position of his Church: “That there are other things to be beleeved, then are in the Scriptures, and…That there are some things in the Scriptures, which are not to be beleeved” (7: 119). Donne describes the position of his Church, between the “insufficiency of the Scriptures” and a notion of biblical superfluity, in the first Part of the sermon, on “[t]he rule of all Doctrines.”62 Donne begins this section or “branch” with a taunt against the Roman Church: why, Donne asks, does Rome want the Apocrypha granted the “ranke, and nature, and dignity of being Scriptures,” when, by their own reckoning, “the Scripture be not full enough, or not plain enough, to bring me to salvation” (120)? Donne’s familiar answer is that the Roman Church intends “to under-value the Scriptures, that thereby they may over-value their own Traditions…to put the name of Scriptures upon books of a lower value, that so the unworthinesse of those additionall books, may cast a diminution upon the Canonicall books themselves, when they are made all one.”63 While Donne concedes that the Roman Church “ascribe[s] to

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

233

all the books of Scripture this dignity, That all that is in them is true” (121), he goes on to point out, with reference to pagan texts of which the same might be said, that “it is but a faint, but an illusory evidence or witnesse, that pretends to cleare a point, if, though it speake nothing but truth, yet it does not speake all the truth.” The Roman Church diminishes the Scripture not by calling it untrue but by denying that all necessary truth is to be found there. Thence, Donne continues, comes the necessity for extrinsic traditions: “[a]ll this is not because they absolutely oppose the Scriptures, or stiffly deny them to be the most certain and constant rule that can be presented…But because the Scriptures are constant, and limited, and determined, there can be no more Scriptures” (124). Donne’s target in the second branch of this Part of the sermon, on the belief that “That there are some things in the Scriptures, which are not to be beleeved,” is less overtly stated. The refrain of those implicated here is “Dolos bonos, and fraudes pias …That God should use holy Illusions, holy deceits, holy frauds, and circumventions in his Scriptures, and not intend in them, that which he pretends by them” (119). These ostensibly false statements in Scripture Donne identifies in, for example, 1 John 2:2: “That Christ is the propitiation for the sinnes of all the world” (126). The target then of this second branch includes those who would respond to Christ’s promise of the possibility of salvation to all, “you pretend to offer salvation, where you mean it not” (127), since according to them, in fact the beneficiaries of Christ’s propitiation are limited to the predestined elect. Donne’s response to this brand of predestinarianism is to cite the view of the English divines attending “the last forraine Synod” (i.e., the Synod at Dort [1618–19]): “all men are truly, and in earnest called to eternall life” (127).64 It is significant that Donne cites such a synod as a resolution of a fundamental matter of doctrine (i.e., the “hypothetical universalism”65 of the biblical promises concerning Christ’s redemption). Donne’s recourse to the authority of a synod recalls John Jewel’s citation of the Elizabethan synod in his Apologia Ecclesia Anglicanae: both authors assert the special authority of Scripture while also allowing for the authority of ecclesiastical tradition. In another, undated sermon on Psalm 32:7 (vol. 9, no. 15), Donne, like Jewel, accepts the authority of councils, so long as they are not on the model of Trent: “[i]f they thinke to perplex us with Councels, we will goe as farre as they in the old ones, and as farre as they for meeting in new Councels, if they may be fully, that is, Royally, Imperially called, and equally proceeded in, and the Resolutions grow and gathered there upon debatements, upon the place, and not brought

234

J. H. FERGUSON

thither upon commandment from Rome” (9: 344). Indeed, Donne’s suggestion in the 1626 Whitehall sermon that his Church occupies a position between those who overvalue exegetical tradition at the expense of Scripture and this other, Gomarist Calvinist66 group suggests that the latter would logically overvalue Scripture at the expense of exegetical tradition, thus associating the via media of Donne’s Church with a balanced position between the claims of the two authorities.67 Donne’s defense of “indifferent” traditions properly used reflects of course the institutional self-definition of his English Church as a “middle way” between Puritan and Papist. It also accords with Donne’s engagement in Songs and Sonets with Petrarchan tradition. Shakespeare’s poet in the Sonnets responds to rival poets by refusing the very possibility of poetic mimesis (you alone are you); Donne’s poet responds rather by building his own idiosyncratic pretty rooms: as Keeble writes about Songs and Sonets, “[e]ach successive poem finds yet another way to declare itself not a sonnet.”68 In both his religious and his poetic writings, Donne offers constructive alternatives to tradition, rather than mere rejections (as in Tyndale’s early Protestantism and Shakespeare’s Sonnets ). In an undated sermon on Psalm 32:10–11 (vol. 9, no. 18), the last in a series of eight sermons on this Psalm, and the third that Donne preached on the Penitential Psalms, Donne writes, “[o]ur Adversaries of Rome charge us, that we have but a negative Religion; If that were true, it were a heavy charge, if we did onely deny, and establish nothing; But we deny all their new additions, so as that we affirme all the old foundations” (9: 405). There is some truth to this charge with regard to the polemical stance Tyndale takes in his exchange with Thomas More. In reckoning with More’s powerful attacks on Tyndale’s lack of historicism, writers such as John Jewel, Richard Mulcaster, and John Donne are able more effectively to create images of English ecclesiastical, linguistic, and poetic autonomy. It is no accident, for example, that Donne’s poetry became a touchstone for New Critics’ assertions concerning the autonomy of literary writing. The religiously informed legitimization of an autonomous, self-sufficient English literary tradition culminated in works that, three centuries later, provided such critics with evidence for their general definitions of literary art.69 These literary writings are among the children of a marriage, between Tyndale and More, that began in divorce.

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

235

Notes 1. For a reading of such autonomy within the history of sexuality, see Richard Halpern, “Lyric in the Field of Information: Autopoesis and History in Donne’s ‘Songs and Sonnets,’” Yale Journal of Criticism 6 (1993): 185–215. 2. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962), 5: 288, 295, 270. 3. Gardiner, The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, ed. James Arthur Muller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 403 (addressed to Somerset); I owe notice of this letter to Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 23n29. Cf. Germain Marc’hadour’s characteristically pithy description of the White Horse Inn at Cambridge, “où l’on s’encourage à lire le Nouveau Testament d’Erasme avec les lunettes de Martin Luther” (“William Tyndale entre Erasme et Luther,” Actes du Colloque International Erasme (Tours, 1986), ed. Jacques Chomarat, André Godin, and Jean-Claude Margolin [Geneva: Droz, 1990], 186), and Werner Schwarz: “Luther’s notes begin at the point where Erasmus’s end” (Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation: Some Reformation Controversies and their Background [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955], 190, see also 190–92, 196–98). 4. See the conclusion of Chapter Three above. 5. The text of Carew’s elegy and all quotations of Donne’s poetry are taken from John T. Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of John Donne (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967). 6. John Lyon argues for a reconciliation of Ben Jonson’s and Carew’s assessments of Donne’s poetic legacy: “For Jonson, Donne will not survive, and that is an indictment of Donne. For Carew, Donne will not survive, and that is an indictment of time and of language. For Jonson, Donne should not be imitated. For Carew, Donne cannot be imitated” (“Jonson and Carew on Donne: Censure into Praise,” Studies in English Literature 37/1 [1997]: 108). 7. Lyon points out that “the muses, the ‘Delphique quire,’ the Metamorphoses, Orpheus, and Apollo have already begun to encroach on this very elegy: Carew’s poem enacts its own prediction” (“Jonson and Carew on Donne” 109). 8. This and the following quotations from Astrophil and Stella are taken from William Ringler, ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

236

J. H. FERGUSON

9. William Kerrigan notes, with reference to Carew’s elegy, that “Donne gave up, with myth, a certain ready expansiveness” (“What Was Donne Doing?” South Central Review 4 [1987]: 9). 10. Cf. John R. Lauritsen’s characterization of this Satire’s subject as the “perversion of the word, whether this be in law, theology, or poetry” (“Donne’s Satyres: The Drama of Self-Discovery,” Studies in English Literature 16/1 (1976): 123). 11. Clayton D. Lein clarifies the classical precedents for this structure: Donne “imitates the formal design of many Latin satires: a prologue introducing speaker, secondary target, and environment, followed by the primary satiric portrait” (“Theme and Structure in Donne’s Satyre II,” Comparative Literature 32/2 [1980]: 132). While agreeing with Lein about the structural integrity of the second Satire, I do not follow his argument that this structure is provided by Donne’s “vision of universal decay” (134). Nor do I agree that the religious allusions in the poem “disclose a Catholic temperament” (145), despite the slighting comment on Luther at lines 92–96 (see below); Lein is presumably drawing on Herbert Grierson’s early (1921) suggestion of “a veiled Roman tone” in Donne’s Satires (—Grierson’s reference to Donne’s conversion to Anglicanism in the previous sentence makes it clear that he does not mean [as he might have said less controversially] the Rome of Persius; Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, rpt. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1960], xxvi). Lein’s claim that contemporary Protestants appealed to the motto veritas filia temporis in defense of their supposedly late appearance on the historical scene (146) is deeply misleading. 12. J. B. Leishman, The Monarch of Wit: An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1955), 111; Shawcross, Complete Poetry of John Donne, 19n40. See Margaret Christian, “Zepheria (1594; STC 26,124): A Critical Edition,” Studies in Philology 100/2 (2003): 177–243, here 179. Gulling Sonnets and selections from Zepheria are reprinted in Maurice Evans, ed., Elizabethan Sonnets (London: Dent, 1977). The former is available in a critical edition in The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). 13. R. W. Hamilton helpfully compares the mockery of Crocus’s lawyerly wooing with the legalistic language of “Love’s Exchange” (“John Donne’s Petrarchist Poems,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 23 [1979]: 52). 14. This portrait of Luther adding his own language to the Pater noster comments ironically on Protestants’ ostensible adherence to the bare text of Scripture. 15. Pseudo-Martyr, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 71–72.

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

237

´ 16. Thomas Watson, Eκατ oμπ αθ ι´α, or Passionate Century of Love (London, 1582), I1v. 17. N. H. Keeble, “To ‘Build in Sonets Pretty Roomes’? Donne and Renaissance Love Lyric,” Donne and the Resources of Kind, ed. A. D. Cousins and Damian Grace (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), 73. 18. “To ‘Build in Sonets Pretty Roomes’?” 77. 19. Shawcross notes the matched set, “Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” “Feaver,” and “Extasie,” but not the identical forms in “Undertaking” and “Selfe Love” (Complete Poetry of John Donne xx). 20. While emphasizing the fragmentary publication history of Songs and Sonets, Dayton Haskin cites this diversity as “reason to think that Donne thought of these poems as a group” (“The Love Lyric,” The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011], 203–04). 21. Compare the table of metrical forms in Pierre Legouis, Donne the Craftsman (Paris: Didier, 1928), 14–16. Legouis’s analysis is useful but not without errors: he describes, for example, “Computation” as written in couplets, when in fact the stanza is rhymed aabbccccdd. Legouis calls all the stanzas that run beyond fourteen lines “non-stanzaic,” “nondescripts,” despite his own recognition that the eighteen-line “Token,” for example, is clearly discernable as a sonnet to which an extra quatrain has been added (16, 27). 22. Arnold Stein, John Donne’s Lyrics: The Eloquence of Action (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 141. I disagree with Legouis’s sense that in this poem, “Womans Constancy,” and “Apparition,” “[a]ny rule or order as regards metre or rhyme is disregarded; verse could not be freer, it seems, without losing the name of verse” (Donne the Craftsman 27). 23. Such counterintuitive wholeness may help to explain the popularity of the Songs and Sonets for New Critical analysis. For a programmatic defense of such analysis, with an application to Donne’s “Canonization,” see Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox,” The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1947), 3–21. 24. “What Was Donne Doing?” 3. 25. Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 153. 26. Richard Strier, “Radical Donne: ‘Satire III.’” English Literary History 60/2 (1993): 293. 27. Cf. Strier’s characterization of “Satyre III” as a defense of “Donne’s suspension of [religious] commitment” (“Radical Donne” 285). Strier associates this position in the satire with “a temperamental unwillingness to ‘betroth or enthrall my selfe, to any one science, which should possesse or denominate me” (284, citing Pseudo-martyr [B2r-v]). Strier

238

28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

J. H. FERGUSON

goes on to associate the position with Songs and Sonets: “The identification of commitment with enthrallment is a familiar feature of the erotic life Donne represents in the lyrics” (ibid.). I speak of “stances” rather than “personae” to avoid the overly rigid categorization of Songs and Sonets that characterizes, for example, Patricia Garland Pinka’s This Dialogue of One: The Songs and Sonnets of John Donne (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982). The Monarch of Wit, 190. Theodore Redpath calls this poem “[p]erhaps the most elaborate…in the collection” (The Songs and Sonets of John Donne, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009], 60n). Legouis notes “Valediction of the Booke” among poems in Songs and Sonet that contradict the claim that “the number of stanzas in each piece is in the inverse ratio to the length and complexity of the stanza-form…the more intricate the pattern, the fewer the copies” (Donne the Craftsman 26). Only one other poem in Songs and Sonets repeats a stanza longer than a quatrain more than six times: namely, “Valediction of My Name, in the Window,” which runs to eleven sixains (rhymed ababcc). “Extasie,” by comparison, includes nineteen quatrains (rhymed abab). The Monarch of Wit, 191. Helen Gardner notes that the “figurative use of ‘graved,’ commonly used for what is permanently impressed on the mind or heart, seems to have puzzled scribes since the reading ‘Tombe’ for ‘Tome’ occurs sporadically in the manuscripts” (The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets [Oxford: Clarendon, 1965], 194). Redpath, The Songs and Sonets of John Donne, 251n. “Donne’s Poetics of Absence,” John Donne Journal 7 (1988): 178. “Donne’s Poetics of Absence,” 180. Cf. Grierson’s note on these lines (The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. [London: Oxford University Press, 1912], 2:29), Gardner’s (The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets 195–96) and Redpath’s (The Songs and Sonets of John Donne 251): all read these lines in accord with Michel de Montaigne’s sentence, “tout est en toutes choses, et par consequent rien en aucune, car rien n’est où tout est”: the generalization illustrated by Montaigne’s anecdote, cited by Grierson, about the ecclesiast who justifies his interest in alchemy through tendentious interpretation of Scripture (Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. Pierre Villey, 3 vols. [Paris: Félix Alcan, 1930–31], 2: 585). “Donne’s Poetics of Absence,” 164. Strier argues that the speaker of the third Satire is more sympathetic with the skeptical perspective of Phrygius (and even more so with the ecumenical perspective of Graccus) than might seem to be the case (“Radical Donne” 295–99). Such sympathy for positions ostensibly rejected

6

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

239

might suggest a precedent for the persistence of cynicism toward women, à la “Indifferent,” in “Valediction of the Booke.”. Shawcross conjectures that the poem’s occasion may be Donne’s trip abroad with the Drurys and so offers July 1611 as the date of composition (The Complete Poetry of John Donne 415). Shawcross dates most of Song and Sonets between 1593 and 1601 (416n). Cf. Pinka, who calls the beloved’s book “appropriate” as a “description of the Songs and Sonnets ” but discounts the comparison as the “fanciful” product of the speaker’s “flattery” (This Dialogue of One 167–68). Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 231. Cf. the less sophisticated readings of Hamilton on a similar critical platform: Donne’s “poems assume the [Petrarchist] convention in that they depend on a recognition of the conventions governing the behaviour and response of Petrarchist lovers, but they are not…about the poet’s feelings. … What is interesting in the poems is…the sometimes oblique and sometimes overt comments which he makes on the convention” (“John Donne’s Petrarchist Poems” 53). All quotations from Donne’s sermons are taken from The Sermons of John Donne, op. cit. Auditory, date, biblical text (where available), and volume and sermon number in the Simpson and Potter edition are provided for each cited sermon; subsequent references to previously cited sermons are provided with dates and biblical texts; quotations are followed by volume and page numbers. See, for example, Dennis Quinn’s learned and lucid early essay on “John Donne’s Principles of Biblical Exegesis,” where the lack of discrimination between the different auditories before which Donne preached leads the author to propose contradictory generalizations about Donne’s exegesis in the sermons: Quinn asserts successively that “Donne consistently maintained that a strict literal sense is always preferable to a figurative interpretation” and that Donne’s exegesis is “predominantly tropological.” Quinn concludes that we should not view the sermons “as either medieval and ‘allegorical’ or as modern and ‘literal,’” as a result of “Donne’s astonishing power to unite perennially wedded yet warring forces” in biblical exegetics. What Quinn takes as a grand synthesis is rather the result of Donne’s adopting different modes of exegesis before different audiences. “John Donne’s Principle of Biblical Exegesis,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 61/2 (1962): 320, 327, 339. “Approaching the Sermons through the Index is analogous to exploring London by tube.” Jeanne Shami, “Donne’s Sermons and the Absolutist Politics of Quotation,” John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995), 405n7. Cf. Shami’s distinction, within the “wide variety of audiences” to which Donne preached,

240

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

J. H. FERGUSON

among sermons delivered “‘in the Mountaine’ (to the courtly and learned) and ‘in the plaine’ (to the simple country parishes)” (“The Sermon,” The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, 327, citing The Sermons of John Donne, 7: 330–31). “Anti-Catholicism in the Sermons of John Donne,” The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature, and History 1600–1750, ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 140; see also “Donne’s Sermons and the Absolutist Politics of Quotation,” 382–91. The new edition of Donne’s sermons being in publication by Oxford University Press, in which sermons are collected according to auditory, will no doubt move scholarship in the direction of attending to sermons in their particular contexts. Compare Donne’s statement, in another sermon preached at Whitehall (19 April 1618; vol. 1, no. 8): “as Christ is God too, so as that he is Man too; so the Scriptures are from God so, as that they are from Man too” (1: 298). See, for example, Donne’s account of the authorship of the Psalter in his “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister” (especially lines 7–11), discussed in the introduction above. The Sermons of John Donne, 10: 15. See, for example, the sermon preached at Whitehall on 19 April 1618, cited above, and “A Lent-Sermon Preached before the King, at Whitehall, February 16, 1620” (vol. 2, no. 9) which cover much of the same conceptual ground as the Whitehall sermon on Ezekiel 34:19. In his prologue to the Pentateuch, Jerome writes that the translators of the Septuagint, “translated before the advent of Christ and what they did not know they expressed in doubtful terms. What we write after His Passion and Resurrection is not so much prophecy as it is history” (interpretati sunt ante adventum Christi et quod nesciebant dubiis protulere sententiis, nos post passionem et resurrectionem eius non tam prophetiam quam historiam scribimus ). Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatem versionem, ed. Robert Weber (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), 4. Compare Donne’s statement, in a second sermon preached at Whitehall on 19 April 1618 (vol. 1, no. 9): “we that come after [the life of Jesus], have more then they which were before them, we have more in the history then they had in the Prophets” (1: 305). See too Donne’s description of Lamentations as “a Propheticall history, and a Historicall prophecy,” in the sermon preached at St. Paul’s on the “Anniversary celebration of our Deliverance from the Powder Treason,” November 1622, on Lamentations 4:20 (vol. 4, no. 9), 4: 238. Cf. Shami, “The Sermon,” 324–25, with reference as well to Erasmus’s Ecclesiastes, sive de ratione concionandi.

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

241

53. Compare Donne’s characterizations of Puritans, in the second sermon on Ezekiel 34:19 at Whitehall (vol. 10, no. 7): “such persons as undervalue, not onely all rituall, and ceremoniall assistances of devotion, which the wisdom, and the piety of the Church hath induced, but even the Sacraments themselves, of Christs owne immediate institution, and are always open to solicitations to passe to another Church, upon their own surmises of errours in their own” (10: 162). See too the sermon preached at Lincoln’s Inn on Ascension Day, 1622 on Deuteronomy 12:30 (vol. 4, no. 4), where Donne addresses the parents in the audience on a related theme: “[t]here is a snare laid for thy son, a perswasion to send him to foreign Universities; they will say, Not to change his Religion: For Religion, let him do as he shall see cause; but there he shall be better taught” (4: 138). 54. From the second sermon on Ezekiel 34:19 at Whitehall, cited above. 55. On the adoption of new theological “languages,” see Donne’s comment on certain Scholastic vocabulary in “A Lent-Sermon Preached at WhiteHall, February 20, 1617” (vol. 1, no. 6): “Resistibility, and Irresistibility of grace, which is every Artificers wearing now, was a stuff that our Fathers wore not, a language that pure antiquity spake not” (1: 255). 56. “A Lent-Sermon Preached before the King, at White-hall, February 16, 1620,” op. cit., 2: 208. It seems unlikely that Donne did not know the etymology of “biblia” as a plural neuter Greek noun, but I do not recall that Donne refers to this etymology anywhere in the sermons. 57. From the sermon preached at St. Paul’s on the “Anniversary celebration of our Deliverance from the Powder Treason” (op. cit.), 4: 255. 58. The Sermons of John Donne, 4: 31. 59. The language of this passage and Donne’s emphasis on the subordinate role of human words vis-à-vis Scripture in the other sermons cited here contradict flatly Thomas F. Merrill’s argument that, for Donne, “preaching operates on an ex opere basis, the preached Word being in fact the Word of God” (“John Donne and the Word of God,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 69 [1968]: 610). Merrill supports this claim with an array of excerpts gathered indiscriminately from the sermons with no sense of their original contexts. 60. From the sermon preached at St. Paul’s on the “Anniversary celebration of our Deliverance from the Powder Treason” (op. cit.). 61. Compare the much more rigorous discrimination between phrases much closer than those cited above in an undated sermon on Psalm 6:1 (vol. 5, no. 16): “these two phrases, Argui in furore, and Corripi in ira, which we translate, To rebuke in anger, and to chasten in hot displeasure, are by some thought, to signifie one and the same thing, that David intends the same thing, and though in divers words, yet words of one and the same signification. But with reverence to those men…they doe not well agree

242

62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

67.

J. H. FERGUSON

with one another, nor very constantly with themselves” (5: 331), and the ensuing discussion of different shades of meaning in different languages that constitutes the remainder of the sermon (331–37). Jeanne Shami, “‘Speaking Openly and Speaking First’: John Donne, the Synod of Dort, and the Early Stuart Church,” John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives, ed. Mary Arshagouni Papazian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 49. Cf. the first sermon before King Charles, at Saint James on 3 April 1625, on Psalm 11:3 (vol. 6, no. 12), where Donne characterizes the conflation of Scripture and exegetical tradition as the “diminution” of the former, “as that the writings of men shall bee equall to them” (6: 253; cf. 9: 375). On this aspect of this sermon, see Shami, “‘Speaking Openly and Speaking First,’” 43, 53–55. Peter Lake, “Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635,” Past and Present 114 (1987): 57. That is, Calvinist followers of Franciscus Gomarus (1536–1641), a leader of the Contra-Remonstrant party against the Arminian opponents of strict (“double”) predestinarianism, the latter associated by their enemies with the Pelagian heresy (The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], 2: 181–82). Cf. Tyndale’s uncompromising position on the liturgy, according to which the sacraments are “holy signs” pointing directly to the Scriptural lessons (The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell [London: Penguin, 2000], 108). The Roman Church’s betrayal of these ideals is thus a semiotic failure, a failure to properly signify—both in its sacrament usage and in its dissemination of Scripture: “where no significacion is / there ys no sacrament. A signe ys no sygne vn to him that vnderstondeth nought therby: as a speche is no speche vn to hym that vnderstondeth it not” (An Answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, ed. Anne M. O’Donnel and Jared Wicks [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000], 176/26–29). Tyndale returns again and again in the Answere to the Church’s “domme ceremonies and sacramentes” (9/2), its “straunge holy gestures” (178/17), and its “darkenesse of sacramentes with out significacion” (150/3–4). As More himself notices, Tyndale’s charge derives from Luther’s definition of sacrament in the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520): “in every promise of God two things are presented to us, the word and the sign, so that we are to understand the word to be the testament, but the sign to be the sacrament” (The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, trans. A. T. W. Steinhäuser, rev. Frederick C. Ahrens and Abdel Ross Wentz, Three Treatises [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978], 162). The meaning of the sacramental signs, in Tyndale’s words, is “what I shuld doo or beleue or both” (Answere 172/22–23)—the very information provided by Scripture: “what soeuer we ought to beleue or doo / that

6

TRADITION AND INVENTION IN THE SONGS AND SONETS …

243

same is written expresly or drawen out of that which is written” (24/29– 30). Thus, the sacraments’ purpose is to convey to the congregation the meaning expressed by Scripture. Tyndale draws a direct connection between the historical evolution of Roman sacramental practices and the displacement of the biblical text from the liturgy: assone as the prelates had sett vpp soch a rable of ceremonies / they thought it superfluous to preach the playne texte any longer and the law of god / feith of Christ / loue toward oure neyboure and the ordir of oure iustifienge & saluation / for as moch as all soch thynges were playd before the peoples faces dayly in the ceremonies and euery child wist the meanynge: but gott them vn to allegories / faynynge them euery man aftire his awne brayne / with out rule / all most on euery silable / and from thence vnto disputynge and wastinge their braynes aboute wordes / not attendynge the significacions vntyll at the last the laye people had lost the meaninge of the ceremonies and the prelates the vnderstondynge of the playne texte and of the Greke Latine and specially of the Hebrue which is most of nede to be knowen / and of all phrases / the propir maner of speakynge and borowed speech of the Hebrues. (Answere 74/25–75/7) The striking thing about this genealogy is its relative impersonality. The otherwise detested prelates did not necessarily banish the plain text of Scripture with malicious intent but because it was strictly speaking superfluous in a liturgy that, at its inception, conveyed intelligibly the meaning of Scripture. These sacramental practices supplanted the biblical text according to a kind of structural logic, implying that human usage and scriptural revelation are by their nature mutually exclusive. If it has come to pass that the people are read the biblical text “in latine ouer theyr heeds” (Answere 60/5) as they are ministered sacraments that they do not comprehend, this is because human usage does not lend significance to “holy signs” but drives that significance out, so that during Mass, according to Tyndale, “we heare but voyces with out significacion and buzsinges / howlinges and crienges / as it were the halowenges of foxes or baytinges of beres / and wonder at disguisinges and toyes wheroff we know no meaninge” (10/12–15). 68. “To ‘Build in Sonets Pretty Roomes’?” 77. 69. Cf. David Hesla’s suggestion, in his historical account of religion and literature as a field of study, that, by the 1970s, the “‘context’ of poetry which [New Critical] theory had ‘sealed’ had been cracked open by dialogical theology” (“Religion and Literature: The Second Stage,” Journal of the

244

J. H. FERGUSON

American Academy of Religion 46/2 [1978]: 187). I would argue instead that the literary autonomy asserted by New Critics was in part a function of Reformation religious and theological history.

Index

A Ad Nicolai Sanderi demonstrationes quadraginta (Whitaker), 79, 80 Anderson, Judith H., 25, 74, 106 Ansvvere to the preface of the Rhemish Testament (Cartwright), 81 Answere to a certeinebooke, written by M. William Rainolds (Whitaker), 79, 88, 114 Answere to Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge (Tyndale), 33, 44–46, 51, 54, 56, 242 Antanaclasis, 175–176 Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (Jewel), 121, 125–127, 128, 130, 233 Apologie for Poetrie (Sidney), 5–6, 128–133, 136, 141, 142, 174 Archaism, 94, 96, 98, 109–110 Arianism, 38, 39, 50 Aristotle, 65, 129, 131, 132, 157 Armado (Love’s Labor’s Lost), 78 Ars poetica (Horace), 98

Arte of Reason, rightly termed, Witcraft (Lever), 94 Art of English Poesy (Puttenham), 98–99 Art of Rhetoric (Wilson), 97–98 Ascham, Rober, 133 Astell, Ann W., 20, 28 Astrophil and Stella (Sidney) form and content, 141, 142, 165 imitation/Petrarchan tradition, 6, 133, 209 and Shakespeare’s Sonnets , 189, 194, 201 “A tous Chrestiens...” (Calvin’s Epistle), 142–144 Augustine, 9, 129, 142, 164, 231 Auksi, Peter, 71

B “Baite, The” (Donne), 216 Bale, John, 79, 91 Barber, Charles, 30, 78, 111

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. H. Ferguson, Reformation Hermeneutics and Literary Language in Early Modern England, Early Modern Literature in History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81795-4

245

246

INDEX

Barber, C. L., 202 Baumlin, James, 221 Bembo, Pietro, 3, 5 Beza, Theodore Marot-Beza Psalter, 137, 139, 145, 147–148 New Testament translation, 82 Bible authority (Donne), 231–233, 225–226 authority (Jewel), 125–127, 130, 233 English expressiveness, 7, 16, 34 literal and figurative meanings, 225–226, 230, 233 in original language, 82, 84 source of literary elements, 2 suitability of English, 1, 7, 21, 48, 50, 58, 208 see also Extra-biblical authority (interpretative tradition); Sola Scriptura (biblical self-sufficiency) Bishops’ Bible, 83–84, 89–90, 91 Bloom, Harold, 9, 198 Boke Named the Governour (Elyot), 91–94 Booth, Stephen, 200, 205 Borrowings alternatives to, 94–98, 109–110 appropriateness, 98 biblical and secular, 91, 208 from Greek, 92, 93, 98 from Latin, 77–78, 92–93, 98, 109–110, 208 poetry, 131, 132, 209 purpose of, 77–78, 80, 92, 99–102 Bouchard, Larry D., 22 Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, 3, 8 Bradbrook, M. C., 118, 120 Buchanan, George, 139 Bulephorus (Ciceronianus ), 4, 61

Bulkeley, Edward, 80 Bullinger, Heinrich, 8 Burrow, Colin, 204

C Calvinism, 229, 234 Calvin, John, 142–144 Camden, William, 119 Canon broader than the Bible (More), 38, 39, 57 Donne, 224, 230, 232 insufficiency (More), 36–37 Jerome, 69 reduction (Tyndale), 45 role of the Spirit, 43, 46, 47 see also Sola Scriptura (biblical self-sufficiency) “Canonization” (Donne), 220 Carew, Thomas, 208–209, 223 Cartwright, Thomas, 81, 82–83, 84, 85, 88, 115 Cave, Terence, 5, 23 Chapman, George, 196 Cheke, Sir John, 79, 94 Chillingworth, Henry, 22 Ciceronian debates, 3–10 Erasmus, 3–8, 61, 133–134, 158 Mulcaster, 106, 108 Petrarchism, 5–6, 9, 169 Valla, 3, 4 Ciceronianus (Erasmus), 4–6, 61, 108, 133, 158 Colie, Rosalie, 170, 203 Collinson, Patrick, 22, 69 Confutation of the Rhemists translation, glosses and annotations on the Nevv Testament, A (Cartwright), 81, 82–83 Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (More), 34, 50–55, 57

INDEX

Consensus and linguistic meaning, 34, 42–43, 47–48, 57–58, 86, 93 Continental Protestantism, 126 Council of Trent, 125, 127 Coverdale, Miles, 83–84, 90. See also Great Bible (Coverdale) Cratylus (Plato), 65, 73 Crawforth, Hannah, 21, 26, 70, 199 Creighton, Mandell, 155 Crocus (Satire II), 210–211, 212 Cruttwell, Patrick, 203 Cummings, Brian literature and religion/theology, 10 Sidney, 157, 159 Tyndale and More, 30, 59, 61, 62, 66, 67 Customary word usage, 34, 97–100, 102–103, 106–107, 108–109 D Daniel, Samuel, 200 Dark Lady sequence, 170, 171, 196–198, 199 Darlow, T. H., 114 Davies, John, 210 De copia (Erasmus), 78 Defaux, Gérard, 142 Defense of the Sincere and True Translations of the Holy Scriptures into the English Tongue (Fulke), 79, 80 De Grazia, Margreta, 202, 203 De libero arbitrio (Erasmus), 7–8 De servo arbitrio (Luther), 7–8 De visibilimonarchia ecclesiae (Sander), 79 Dialogue concerning Heresies (More), 33–46, 52, 53 Dialogus Ciceronianus sive de optimo dicendi genere. See Ciceronianus (Erasmus) DiPasquale, Theresa, 217

247

Directions for Speech and Style (Hoskins), 169, 186 Discourse of Englishe Poetrie (Webbe), 134 Discoverie (Martin), 80, 81 “Dissolution, The” (Donne), 213, 218, 223 Donne, John Bible authority, 225–226, 231–233 Carew’s elegy, 208–209, 223 imitatio/mimesis, 209, 211–213, 234 Pseudo-Martyr, 211 on Roman Catholic Church, 225–233 “Satire II”, 209–213 “Satire III”, 217–218 sermon, Acts 10:44, 231 sermons vol. 1, no. 5 (Proverbs 8:17), 223, 228 sermons vol. 1, no. 6 (Luke 23:40), 224 sermons vol. 4, no. 4, 230, 231 sermons vol. 5, no. 14 (Psalm 90:14), 207, 231 sermons vol. 7, no. 4 (John 14:2), 232–233 sermons vol. 8, no. 14 (Acts 28:6), 228, 229 sermons vol. 9, no. 14 (Psalm 32:6), 230 sermons vol. 9, no. 15 (Psalm 32:7), 233 sermons vol. 9, no. 18 (Psalm 32:10–11), 69, 234 sermons vol. 10, no. 6 (Ezekiel 34:19), 225–230 “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes...”, 10–16, 136–137, 143 “Variety”, 216–217 see also Songs and Sonets (Donne)

248

INDEX

Dubrow, Heather, 223 Duerden, Richard, 75

E Ebeling, Gerhard, 8 Eden, Kathy, 129 Elegantiae linguae latinae (Valla), 3, 4 Elementarie (Mulcaster), 97, 99, 101, 102, 107, 108 Elizabeth I, Queen, 83 Elizabethan Settlement, 105, 127–130, 171 Elsky, Martin, 59 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 91–95 Enfranchisement (naturalization of foreign words), 100–102 English Church between Rome and Puritans (Donne), 208, 228–229, 232, 234 from Roman Catholic to Protestant, 91, 83–84, 125–127, 208 liturgy for all people, 35, 37, 43, 50, 58, 208 subordination of, 79, 80, 88, 91 synod and convocation 1559, 127 English expressiveness Bible, 7, 16, 34 borrowings and neologisms, 91–95, 98–101 Donne, 209 poetry, 133, 141–142, 154 Saxon, 109 Sidney Psalter, 10, 77, 134, 136, 141–142, 154 English language autonomy, 98, 99, 234 institutional/Protestant control, 84, 86 integrity, 95–97, 109–110

preferred to Latin, 99–100, 103, 107–108, 208, 209 Psalms/Psalter, 14–16, 136 subordinate to foreign languages, 91, 93 subordinate to Latin, 78–80, 84, 88, 91–93, 208 suitability for Bible, 1, 7, 21, 48, 50, 58, 90, 208 see also Borrowings; Translation English literature, autonomy vs. tradition biblical English, 2, 9–10 Donne, 212, 223, 234 Shakespeare, 169, 171, 198, 207–208 Equivalence (tautologies), 170–171, 188–192, 196–198 Erasmus, Desiderius Bible translation, 36, 48, 50, 55–57, 62, 64 Ciceronian debates, 3–8, 61, 133–134, 158 De copia, 78 De libero arbitrio, 7–8 Novum Instrumentum, 36 “Paraclesis”, 208 Erotic poetry, 182, 187, 207, 216–218 Extra-biblical authority (interpretative tradition) Jewel, 125–127, 130, 233 and literature, 171, 198 More, 33–39, 43–45, 57–58, 83, 84 Roman Catholic Church, 1–2, 6, 8–9 F Ferry, Anne, 201 Field, Richard, 139 Fineman, Joel, 181

INDEX

Fisher, John, 60, 67 Fox, Alistair, 60, 74 Foxe, John, 66, 109 Francis Bacon, 120 Freer, Coburn, 142 French language, 98. See also Marot-Beza Psalter Frontain, Raymond-Jean, 30 Fulke, William, 79, 80–82, 85, 86, 90–91

G Ganeius, Joannes, 139 Gardiner, Stephen, Bishop, 80, 91, 208 Gardner, Helen, 29, 238 Geneva Bible, 82, 83, 87, 204 Gilbie, Anthony, 29 Gladys D. Willcock, 119 Gogan, Brian, 60, 62 Gomarus, Franciscus, 234 Gospels of the Fower Euangelistes, The (Foxe), 109 Grammar, 88–91, 100 Great Bible (Coverdale), 75, 80, 83–84, 90 Greek language borrowing words from, 92, 93, 98 Erasmus’ use of Greek sources, 36, 57, 62 idealized/classical version, 81, 106 influence on poetry (Donne), 209 and Jerome/Vulgate, 36, 84–86 link to old English, 79 Rheims translation, 86–87 term for poet (poiein), 131 Tyndale’s use of Greek sources, 42–43, 48, 53, 55–56 Greene, Thomas, 4, 118 Grierson, Herbert, 236, 238 Grundy, Joan, 201

249

Guillory, John, 21 Gulling Sonnets (Davies), 210 Gurney, Evan A., 66, 70 Guy, John, 64 H Hamilton, R. W., 236, 239 Hamlin, Hannibal, 140, 141, 144, 162, 164 Harrab, Thomas, 138 Harvey, Gabriel, 6 Haskin, Dayton, 237 Headley, John M., 25 Hebrew language, 36, 84, 86–87, 141, 142, 231 Henry VIII, King, 60, 83 Hesla, David, 243 Hierarchiaeecclesiasticaeassertio (Pighius), 9, 37, 125 Holy Spirit, 7, 40, 43, 46–47, 49 Hopkins, John, 136 Horace, 98, 139 Hosington, Brenda M., 64 Hosius, Stanislaus, 126 Hoskins, John, 169, 186 I Identity, 170, 182, 190, 192, 197. See also National identity Images and words, 40, 41 Imitatio/mimesis Carew, 209 Donne, 209, 211–213, 234 Shakespeare’s Sonnets , 170, 174–179, 181–187, 189, 198 Sidney Apology, 131, 132, 157 Imitation Astrophil and Stella (Sidney), 6, 133, 209 Latin, 2, 3, 5, 6, 34 vernacular, 2, 3, 5

250

INDEX

Immortalization, 171, 175, 176, 179, 180, 185, 192 “Indifferent” (Donne), 217, 218, 222 Inkhorn definition, 78, 91 first use, 79 resistance to, 91, 95–97, 99, 102, 109, 110 Institutes (Calvin), 144 Interpretative tradition. See Extrabiblical authority (interpretative tradition) Invention, 183, 193, 209 Italian language, 5, 23

J James, King, 229, 230 Jeanneret, Michel, 9, 140, 141, 164 Jerome canon, 69 influence on Donne, 225, 231 translation of Scripture, 36, 55, 57, 85, 196 Jewel, John, 121, 125–128, 130, 233 John, L. C., 201 Jonson, Ben, 235 Junius, Franciscus, 87 Justin, Martyr, 126

K Kalstone, David, 4 Keeble, N. H., 213, 234 Kerrigan, John, 170, 200–202, 204 Kerrigan, William, 6, 9, 216, 236 King James Bible, 127–128

L Languages, equality of, 100, 103, 107–108 Latin

borrowing words from, 77–78, 92–93, 98, 109–110, 208 contemporary/fluid/flexible, 4, 107 English preferred, 99–100, 103, 107–108, 208, 209 Erasmus’ Bible translation, 36, 48, 50 idealized/classical version, 3, 5, 106, 107 imitation, 2, 3, 5, 6, 34 metrical psalms, 139 Protestant Bible 1585, 87–88 Protestant resistance to and use of, 79 Roman Catholicism, 78–80, 226 superior to English, 78–80, 84–85, 88, 91–93, 208 Tyndale and More, 48, 53–57 see also Vulgate Latinate English, 78–81, 85, 91, 109–110 Lawler, T. M. C., 63, 66, 72 Learning, 96, 97, 100–101, 107–108, 220, 230, 227 secular learning, 227, 230 Leer, Elisabeth Flesseman-van, 60, 62, 63, 69 Legouis, Pierre, 237, 238 Lein, Clayton D., 236 Leishman, J. B., 200, 217, 220 Letter to Dorp (More), 62, 63, 73 Lever, Ralph, 94–96 Levy, F. J., 156 Lisle, William, 109–110, 208 Love’s Labor’s Lost (Shakespeare), 78 Lupton, Lewis, 164 Lutheranism, 229 Luther, Martin, 7–8, 35–36, 211, 242 Lyon, John, 235 M Mack, Michael, 159

INDEX

Malpezzi, Frances M., 30 Manley, Lawrence, 24 Marc’hadour, Germain, 60, 63, 64, 66, 71, 72, 235 Mardock, James D., 22 Marius, Richard, 64, 72, 74 Marlowe, Christopher, 216 Marot-Beza Psalter Beza’s psalms, 137, 139, 145, 147–148 Calvin, 142–144 Marot’s psalms, 137–138, 140–142, 145–147, 146, 150–151 rhyme schemes, 138, 146–148, 150–151 Martin, Gregory, 80–82, 86, 87, 90 Matthew Bible, 75, 84 Mazzio, Carla, 70, 111, 121 Melanchthon, Philip, 68 Merrill, Thomas F., 241 Mimesis. See Imitatio/mimesis Montaigne, Michel de, 238 Monta, Susannah Brietz, 20, 28 Montgomery, Robert, 140, 144 More, Thomas Answere to Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge (Tyndale), 33, 44–49, 51, 54, 56, 242 Biblical insufficiency, 35–40, 43 Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, 34, 50–55, 57 Dialogue concerning Heresies , 33–46, 52, 53 extra-biblical authority, 33–40, 43–45, 83, 84, 57–58 Letter to Dorp, 62, 63, 73 philological critique of Tyndale’s translations, 42–43, 47–49, 53–57, 82, 86 Roman Catholic Church and the Spirit, 47, 49 “To a Monk”, 36

251

Moss, Ann, 3 Mozley, J. F., 74 Mulcaster, Richard, 97, 99–108 Munro, Lucy, 59, 74, 85, 90, 109, 115, 117 Myrick, Kenneth, 156

N Narcissism, 172, 176, 180–181, 189, 197, 198 National identity, 93, 96, 101 Naturalization of foreign words (enfranchisement), 100–102 Neologisms, 80, 92, 94–97, 102 New Testament (Tyndale), 33–34, 41–43, 45, 47–50, 58, 84 Nicholson, Catherine, 97, 111, 115, 117, 119, 122 Nizolius, Marius, 6 “Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day”, 218 Norton, David, 114–116 Nosoponus (Ciceronianus ), 4, 6, 61 Novum Instrumentum (Erasmus), 36 “Nymph’s Reply” (Marlowe), 216

O Observationes M.T. Ciceronem (Nizolius), 6 O’Donnell, Anne M., 64, 66, 72 Of the Knowledge Which Maketh a Wise Man (Elyot), 94 Ovid, 200, 209, 217

P “Paraclesis” (Erasmus), 208 Paraphrase definition, 77 Marot-Beza Psalter, 137–142

252

INDEX

Sidney Psalter, 134, 136, 139, 143, 154–155 see also Marot-Beza Psalter; Sidney Psalter Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of Canterbury, 83–84, 136, 164 Passionate Century of Love (Watson), 212 “Passionate Shepherd to His Love, The” (Marlowe), 216 Pembroke, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of. See Sidney Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke Pequigney, Joseph, 201, 203 Perry, Nandra, 20, 24, 128, 159 Petrarchan sonnet form Donne’s Songs and Sonets , 215–216, 223, 234 Herbert Sidney, 160 Shakespeare’s Sonnets , 170, 180, 182 Petrarchism Astrophil and Stella (Sidney), 6, 133, 209 Ciceronian debates, 5–9, 169 Watson, 212 Pighius, Albertus, 9, 37, 125 Pinka, Patricia Garland, 239 Plato, 65, 73, 130, 157 Poetry decline (Donne), 210, 211 English expressiveness, 133, 141, 154 erotic poetry, 182, 187, 207, 216–218 “right” poetry (Sidney), 131–133, 141 sacred poetry, definition (Sidney), 131 Poliziano, Angelo, 5, 169 Polman, Pontien, 9, 70 Praise poetry

excesses, 181, 188, 189 mediation, 176 repetition, 178, 182–183, 194 tautologies, 170, 171, 190–191, 196 “Preface to Homer” (Chapman), 196 Prerogative of language, 97, 105–108 Prescott, Anne Lake, 65, 132, 140, 141 Procreation/opening sub-sequence (1–17), 170–179, 181, 184–185, 189 Prose dellavolgar lingua (Bembo), 5 Protestantism Continental, 126 gains control of English Church, 83–84, 91, 125–127, 208 institutional influence on English, 83–84, 86 Latin Bible 1585, 87–88 resistance to Latinism, 78–79 see also Sola Scriptura (biblical self-sufficiency) Pseudo-Martyr (Donne), 211 Puttenham, George, 98–99, 200 Q Quinn, Dennis, 239 Quintilian, 104 Quitslund, Beth, 29, 162 R Raemond, Florimond de, 138 Rainolds, John, 78 Rainolds, William, 79, 80, 81–82, 87, 89, 90, 114 Ralegh, Walter, 216 Ramsey, Paul, 204 Rathmell, J. C. A., 10, 141, 161 Redpath, Theodore, 238 Reeve, Troy D., 224

INDEX

Refutation of sundry reprehensions, cauils, and false sleightes (Rainolds), 79, 80 Repetition, 177, 181, 187, 196 praise poetry, 178–179, 182–183, 183–184, 189 “Revelations of Brigid”, 224, 226 Rheims-Douai Bible, 80, 109–110 Rheims English New Testament, 79, 80–81, 82–83, 85, 86, 88–89, 90 Rhodes, Neil, 21, 22, 68, 71, 111, 112, 117 Rhyme schemes Donne’s Songs and Sonets , 213–215, 218 Marot-Beza Psalter, 138, 146–148, 150–151 Sidney Psalter, 134–136, 144–145, 148–149, 150–151, 152, 160 Richardson, Anne, 68 “right” poetry (Sidney), 131–133, 141 Ringler, William, Jr., 146, 164 Rival poet, 178–179, 185, 186, 197 Rival Poet sequence, 170, 171, 187–190 Roberts, John R., 29 Roman Catholic Church Donne’s critique, 225, 233 as extra-biblical authority, 1–2, 7, 8–10 Latin, 78–80, 226 loses control of English Church, 83–84, 91, 125–127, 208 power, 79, 80, 83, 88, 90, 109 and Spirit, 7, 47, 49 see also Extra-biblical authority (interpretative tradition) Rosendale, Timothy, 22 S sacred poetry, definition (Sidney), 131

253

Sander, Nicholas, 79 “Satire II” (Donne), 209–213 “Satire III” (Donne), 217–218 Saxon language, 109–110 Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament, A (Lisle), 109 Scholemaster, The (Ascham), 133 Scripture. See Bible Second Helvetic Confession, 8 Self-reference, 170, 212, 223. See also Narcissism; Solipsism Semantics consensus and linguistic meaning, 34, 42–43, 47–48, 57–58, 86, 93 customary word usage, 34, 97–99, 100, 102–103, 106–107, 108–109 definition, 7 particularities of English (Puttenham), 99 semantic autonomy (Fulke), 86 semantic autonomy (Tyndale), 34, 45, 47–50, 52–53, 57, 83, 86 see also Sola Scriptura (biblical self-sufficiency) Serjeantson, Deirdre, 21 Shakespeare, William Love’s Labor’s Lost , 78 see also Sonnets (Shakespeare) Shami, Jeanne, 224 Shawcross, John T., 222, 237, 239 Shepheardes Calender (Spenser), 134 Sherry, Richard, 77 Shrank, Cathy, 24, 93, 98, 117, 118, 121 Sidney Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 10, 135, 143, 144, 160, 161 Sidney, Philip. See Apologie for Poetrie (Sidney); Astrophil and Stella (Sidney)

254

INDEX

Sidney Psalter Donne, 10–16, 136–137, 143 English expressiveness, 10, 77, 134, 136, 141–142, 154 paraphrase, 134, 136, 137–139, 143, 154–155 Psalm 11, 135, 150–151 Psalm 12, 135 Psalm 15, 134, 135, 150 Psalm 16, 144–145 Psalm 17, 144–145 Psalm 23, 135 Psalm 26, 135 Psalm 29, 147, 148–149, 151 Psalm 30, 147, 149, 151 Psalm 31, 135 Psalm 32, 135 Psalm 38, 145–146 Psalm 40, 134, 135, 151–154 Psalm 41, 135 Psalm 42, 135 Psalm 97, 12 rhyme schemes, 134–136, 144–145, 148–149, 150–151, 152, 160 Simpson, James, 59 Sola ecclesia, 43 Sola scriptura (biblical self-sufficiency) Donne, 231 early Protestants, 1, 6 and literature, 21, 171, 196, 198 Luther, 7–8, 35 More, 35, 36–40, 43 Second Helvetic Confession, 8 Tyndale, 34, 37, 44, 46, 47, 49, 53, 126 Solipsism, 176, 180–182, 189, 197, 198 Songs and Sonets (Donne), 208 “Baite, The”, 216 “Canonization”, 220 “Dissolution, The”, 213–215, 218, 223

“Indifferent”, 217, 218, 222 “Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day”, 218 rhyme schemes, 213–215, 218 “Token, The”, 213, 216 “Valediction of the Booke”, 218–223 Sonnets (Shakespeare) procreation/opening sequence, 170, 171, 172–179, 181, 184–185, 189 Rival Poet sequence, 170, 171, 187–190 Dark Lady sequence, 170, 171, 196–198, 199 and Astrophil and Stella (Sidney), 189, 194, 201 imitatio/mimesis, 170, 174–179, 181–187, 189, 198 Sonnet 1, 173, 197 Sonnet 3, 179 Sonnet 15, 173–174, 178, 180 Sonnet 16, 172, 174–175, 176, 184, 187 Sonnet 17, 173, 175–176, 181, 185, 187 Sonnet 18, 176–178, 178–179, 188 Sonnet 21, 178–179, 186, 187 Sonnet 22, 179–180 Sonnet 32, 186 Sonnet 37, 179, 180, 203 Sonnet 39, 181–182 Sonnet 42, 182 Sonnet 54, 179 Sonnet 59, 182–184, 186–187 Sonnet 62, 179, 180, 181 Sonnet 67, 179 Sonnet 68, 179, 184–185, 197 Sonnet 76, 185–187, 195 Sonnet 82-83, 187–188 Sonnet 84, 170, 188–189, 195 Sonnet 85, 189–190

INDEX

Sonnet 101, 190–192 Sonnet 102, 204 Sonnet 103, 191 Sonnet 104, 191, 192 Sonnet 105, 192–194, 196 Sonnet 108, 192, 194–195, 196 Sonnet 127, 196–198 Southgate, W. M., 126 Spencer, Theodore, 144, 161 Spenser, Edmund, 134, 160 Spirit, 7, 40, 43, 46–47, 49 Stein, Arnold, 237 Sternhold, Thomas, 136 Stillman, Robert E., 128 Strier, Richard, 237, 238 Synod at Dort, 233 Synonyms, 77, 78, 92, 109 Syntax, 88–90, 91, 100

T Tautologies (equivalence), 170–171, 188–189, 190–191, 192, 196–198 Tavard, George M., 9 Tertullian, 229 Text of the Nevv Testament of Iesus Christ, The (Fulke), 81, 90 Tixall manuscript, 143 “To a Monk” (More), 36 “Token, The” (Donne), 213, 215 Tomson, Laurence, 82 Translation, 36, 83, 85, 87–90, 100, 109, 195–196 agape/charity/love, 42–43 ecclesia/church/congregation, 42–43, 47–49, 55–57, 80, 86 episcopus /overseer/bishop, 81, 90 κυριακη/Lord’s house/church/kyrke, 79 presbiteros /priest/senior/elder, 42, 53–55, 82, 90

255

see also Paraphrase Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (Sherry), 77 Tremelius, Immanuel, 87 Tunstall, Cuthbert, Bishop of London, 35 Tyndale, William Answere to Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, 33, 44–46, 51, 54, 56, 242 Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (More), 34, 50–55, 57 More’s philological critique of translations, 42–43, 47–49, 55–57, 82, 86 New Testament, 33–34, 41–43, 45, 47–50, 58, 84 semantic autonomy, 34, 45, 47–50, 52–53, 57, 83, 86 sola scriptura, 34, 37, 44, 46, 47, 49, 53, 126 U Udall, Nicholas, 110 Ulreich, John, 157 “Upon the Translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister” (Donne), 10–16, 136–137, 143 V Vaganay, Hugues, 139 “Valediction of the Booke” (Donne), 218–223 Valla, Lorenzo, 3, 4 “Variety” (Donne), 216–217 Vendler, Helen, 170, 181, 183, 203 verbal mimesis, 190, 194 verse, definition (Sidney), 131 Vulgate

256

INDEX

Elizabethan Roman Catholics, 84 Jerome’s canon choices, 69 More and Tyndale, 48, 53, 64, 67, 86 Rheims translation, 80, 81, 89 vs. Greek translations, 84–85, 86 W Walker, Alice, 119 Walsham, Alexandra, 27, 121 Wansbrough, Henry, 70 Waswo, Richard, 72 Watson, Thomas, 212 Webbe, William, 134 Weimann, Robert, 28 Wesley Trimpi, 129 Westcott, B. F., 75 Whitaker, William, 79, 80, 88, 114 Whittingham, William, 114

Whole Booke of Psalmes (Sternhold, Hopkins et al), 136, 138 Wilson, Thomas, 97–98 Wither, George, 80 Words customary usage, 34, 97–98, 100, 102–103, 106–107, 108–109 images, 40, 41 Wyatt, Thomas, 149 Wycliffite Bible, 116 Y Yet a course at the Romyshefoxe (Bale), 79, 91 Yu, Anthony, 20, 22 Z Zepheria, 210