Renaissance Transformations: The Making of English Writing 1500-1650 9780748642106

Citation preview

Renaissance Transformations

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Renaissance Transformations The Making of English Writing (1500–1650)

Edited by Margaret Healy and Thomas Healy

Edinburgh University Press

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© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2009 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Sabon and Futura by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3873 4 (hardback) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Introduction Margaret Healy and Thomas Healy Part I 1 2 3 4

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Making Writing: Form, Rhetoric and Print Culture

Playing Seriously in Renaissance Writing Thomas Healy Framing and Tuning in Renaissance English Verse Neil Rhodes Transforming A Mirror for Magistrates Jennifer Richards ‘Not without Mustard’: Self-publicity and Polemic in Early Modern Literary London Andrew Hadfield

Part II

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Shaping Communities: Textual Spaces, Mapping History

The Making of Writing in Renaissance England: Re-thinking Authorship Through Collaboration Alan Stewart The Duties of Societies: Literature, Friendship and Community Michelle O’Callaghan Gender, Material Culture and the Hybridity of Renaissance Writing Danielle Clarke The Overseas Voyage in Early Modern English Writing Bernhard Klein

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Contents

Part III 9

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Embodying Change: Psychic and Somatic Performances

Eloquent Blood and Deliberative Bodies: The Physiology of Metaphysical Poetry Michael Schoenfeldt Protean Bodies: Literature, Alchemy, Science and English Revolutions Margaret Healy Shakespearean Somniloquy: Sleep and Transformation in The Tempest William H. Sherman ‘A Cat On A Post’: Animal Events in Seventeenth-century Writing Susan Wiseman

Notes on Contributors Index

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Introduction Margaret Healy and Thomas Healy

The year 1608 witnessed the publication of M. William Shak-speare: HIS True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters. With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of TOM of Bedlam. The title-page continues to claim that its text represents the play: ‘As it was played before the King’s Maiestie at Whitehall vpon S.Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. By his Maiesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe on the Bancke-side.’ Though this quarto was republished in 1619, by the time the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays appeared in 1623, the work had been renamed The Tragedie of King Lear and placed in the book’s section labelled tragedies and not with Shakespeare’s other English history plays. Though revived when the theatres re-opened at the Restoration, King Lear’s bleak vision was unpalatable to audiences and Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation, in which Cordelia lives to marry Edgar, became the play’s performed version for the next 150 years. King Lear serves to illustrate some of the key issues addressed in this book. Renaissance Transformations commences from a critical perspective that views sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing as formed by complex processes beyond a solitary writer penning his or her craft. Preparing Lear for the press almost certainly did not involve Shakespeare directly and, despite the 1608 quarto’s claim, we have no way of knowing whether its text is exactly the play performed at Whitehall. Further, as current editors acknowledge, the differences between the play in the 1608 edition and the one printed in the 1623 Folio are so substantial that they may be apprehended as separate entities, with the later substantially revised and significantly re-imagined in a number of areas. Then there is the issue of genre. Was the True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three Daughters imagined by Shakespeare as a history play, with the 1623

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editors deciding that it should be distinctly presented as a tragedy? Or did this shift of genre function to suppress questions surrounding whether Lear’s history and Shakespeare’s representation of it were in any sense related to genuine events? Subsequently, did the Restoration’s dislike of what it viewed as the play’s failure to correspond to decorous dramatic proprieties act to enhance later centuries’ celebrations of it as the epitome of Shakespeare engagement with the tragic? Did the return to Renaissance versions result from nineteenth-century Romanticism’s dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment’s literary order rather than a craving for Shakespearean authenticity? At its origin and afterwards, King Lear alters in both its text and how that text is witnessed. Its protean qualities, far from being exceptional in Renaissance writing, are commonplace. With literature regularly circulating in differing versions in manuscripts (frequently without assignment to an author), in unauthorised printed editions, or even through being heard rather than read directly, the Renaissance experience of literature was markedly different to our own in which scholars, publishers and legal procedures collude to determine a fixed entity and origin. Working from the premise that Renaissance writing was made by its circulation as much as by how it was first penned, this volume foregrounds the crucial importance of attempting to recapture the wider cultural as well as literary environments in which it first operated, seeking to understand the social and imaginative conditions that act to shape meaning. King Lear’s transition from ‘true chronicle historie’ to tragedy also brings attention to another of this volume’s concerns: how do we portray the culture within which writing circulates? Throughout the sixteenth century, Lear and his family seem to have been perceived as genuine rulers from ancient British history. They appear in chronicles such as Holinshed’s (1587), in compendia of exemplary stories believed to be based on historical truth such as A Mirrour for Magistrates (1574) and in ballads, history plays and pamphlet lists of English kings. There is not the same imperative in the Renaissance to separate empirically verifiable history from legend as there is in later scholarship. In an environment where historical figures were witnessed as offering exemplary lives – representing increasingly complex illustrations of vices or virtues – legendary figures could appear with as much delineation as genuine personages, even those from the near past. As recent studies have shown, imagined links between ancient Britain and the Tudor and Stuart courts played a part in the quest to ‘remember’ a history of the British archipelago that showed its native purity and integrity.1 Though few attending current productions of King Lear ever pause to consider

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whether they are seeing an enactment of England’s history, the critical vision that underwrites this volume believes that understanding how the play might have been appreciated in the early seventeenth century is crucial to expanding our insights into its dramatic potentials. In contrast to critical trends that endeavour to represent past literature accommodated to current concerns, the following chapters are predicated on attempts to recapture Renaissance imaginative frameworks even where they resonate peculiarly (or seemingly not at all) with later ones. From Renaissance Transformation’s perspective, Lear’s tragic vision intensifies when we observe it engaging with England’s historical identity and the nation’s sense of destiny. Past literature becomes more vivid and challenging when we try to encounter it within the cultural conditions that first prompted it. The following chapters’ investigations into the literary, intellectual and social dynamics that made Renaissance writing happen heighten our awareness of its vitality, strengthening our sense of the Renaissance’s interplay with current cultural possibilities through its differences from rather than its similarities to the present. This is a curious but exciting moment in Renaissance literary studies, a juncture at which critical paradigms largely established in the 1980s (centred on issues of power, identity and the textuality of history) are being increasingly challenged, and yet in which there is considerable uncertainty about the direction and future shape of the field. Renaissance Transformations asserts the centrality of historical understanding in shaping critical vision. As the following chapters demonstrate, a nuanced and subtle historicism founded on employing cultural structures from within the period is a dynamic methodology to employ in our quest to comprehend how Renaissance writing was ‘made’. The book’s contributors share an appreciation that past categories for understanding writing – how its inextricably linked content and form were imagined, and how it was produced, disseminated and assimilated – were significantly different from those of the present. The contributors are sceptical about critical terminologies and teleologies that witness the Renaissance as the early modern becoming modern, even becoming postmodern in some seamless fashion. Just as Ovid’s Metamorphoses proposes that the changes that shape the world may result from caprice or irrationality rather than orderly destiny, this collection approaches the Renaissance as a period of difference in which cultural transformations did not inevitably lead towards the Enlightenment and in which phenomena and categories that we have long separated (for example, the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the secular, the imaginative and the factual, the scientific and the literary) were frequently experienced as closely intertwined or even

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indistinct. Each chapter here uses the period’s literature to explore how writing both presents and creates the world that it addresses and how it is itself part of a transforming process. The ‘making’ of the subtitle serves to amplify the book’s vision. In his Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney proposed that the serious writer is appropriately called a ‘maker’. The word captures something fundamental about the Renaissance apprehension of writing, conveying a sense of creativity, skill with handling form, and even the activity of copying out from earlier texts. Since God was a ‘maker’ too, it implies writers’ elite company, as well as their associations with craft – print workers, scriveners and other artisans. Donne wonderfully captures this mingling of spiritual ideas with material forms and practices when he declares that: ‘God can work in all metals and transmute all metals: he can make . . . a Superstitious Christian a sincere Christian; a Papist a Protestant.’ 2 ‘Maker’ captures the medieval sense of the writer as fabricator, suggests a link with classical antiquity (Sidney proposes the etymology is from the Greek poieten), and gestures towards more modern inferences surrounding an activity that comes to be perceived as central in forging a collective national consciousness. Most significantly, however, ‘maker’ conveys the idea of the writer as ‘wordsmith’, an employer of language who is also, literally, a manufacturer of language. Richard Stanyhurst captures this sense when he describes Owen Odewhee as ‘a preacher and a maker in Irishe’, and Donne embraces it when he declares of the Psalms, ‘all Metricall Compositions . . . the whole frame of the poem is a beating out of a piece of gold’.3 ‘Maker’ was a highly significant term in the Renaissance context. As Pico della Mirandola asserted, a human was a protean ‘molder and maker’, a self-constructor capable of degenerating into ‘a brute’ or aspiring to become ‘divine’.4 Yet the term sounds archaic and odd to modern ears. From Romanticism’s legacy in celebrating writers’ unfettered genius, to their subsequent critical relegation under Barthian and Foucaultian suppositions about agency, we are used to thinking about writers as authors, a term which denotes a less material, more transcendent quality to their activities than ‘maker’. It is clear, however, that attempts to pursue a more accurate and nuanced intellectual grasp of the activity of writing in the Renaissance must involve recovering these senses of its ‘making’, grappling with the past through its own intellectual categories and attempting to understand how they were imaginatively assimilated. Alongside this recognition of a different, even alien past, the relation between writing and history is increasingly being apprehended as subtler than previously assumed. The moment is over when a singular,

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overarching theoretical idea such as ‘power’ might be conveniently deployed to depict all relations among individuals, groups and the state. Nevertheless, one of the abiding dilemmas in Renaissance studies is the urge to be reductive about the period, for example alleging too much uniformity among a population’s preoccupations, or between cultural expressions that may occur a century or more apart. Perhaps more worryingly, there remains a tendency to posit overly rigid limitations about what could have been thought or enacted, whether this involves political systems, individual beliefs, or gender, race and class relations. Different types of investigations undertaken by scholars often working in less rigid disciplinary arrangements than have previously operated in the academy – allowing more multifaceted investigations of specific cultural occurrences, or enabling investigations of relations between cognitive and material phenomena – have tended to reveal less cohesive social dimensions than previously posited. Three important illustrations of this are, first, our growing recognition of the period’s diversity in religious affiliation in both denominational allegiance and devotional practice; secondly, the awareness that interactions between popular and elite or between public and private writings were intricate, involving a complex negotiation of social and political assumptions; and thirdly, the growing acceptance that Britain’s ‘Renaissance’ was expressed through hybrid artistic modes adapted from both continental and native forms and that it was not dependent on a slow but eventual absorption of Italianate classicism. In addition to this developing interest in the making of Renaissance writing, there are also burgeoning explorations into what might be described as Renaissance mentalities: the imaginative, cognitive and psychological outlooks of the period. Accepting that history plays a decisive role in conditioning how cultural forms are expressed increasingly extends to witnessing that the ‘self’ is also shaped and understood in history, prompting critical trends that recognise how a gamut of contemporary phenomena resulted from mental states that were culturally conditioned. The period’s writings can provide fruitful vehicles for negotiating such areas as the distinctions between the natural and the supernatural or between reality and fantasy, emotional sensation, the experience of subjectivity and of the external world. A further arena of current critical interest is a re-conceptualisation of Renaissance ideas about space and location. An acknowledgment of cultural heterogeneity within the British archipelago has reconfigured ideas about a court/London centre and the culturally less refined margins, prompting new attentiveness to diversity of customs, law, religion and even, crucially, language. Simultaneously, the traditional

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academic focus on the Atlantic world, the Low Countries and the northern Mediterranean as the key locations for British cultural interactions abroad has been extended to include areas previously viewed as exotic and remote to British interests: the Middle and Far East, North Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia. A significant aspect of this has been the growing attention to commercial trade and the interactions between cultural and commercial capital in developing consumer markets. Our understanding of how this collection of north Atlantic islands witnessed themselves in relation to one another and to the wider world is being fundamentally altered. In varying ways, the chapters of Renaissance Transformations contribute to a re-conceptualising of the Renaissance world and English writing’s place within it. The book is arranged in three parts: ‘Making Writing: Form, Rhetoric and Print Culture’; ‘Shaping Communities: Textual Spaces, Mapping History’; and ‘Embodying Change: Psychic and Somatic Performances’. The first is concerned with issues of form and language in comprehending the world: the decisive ways that what is understood is forged in relation to how it is understood. The second cluster addresses how texts mediate larger cultural registers, creating what O’Callaghan terms ‘the textuality of behaviour’. The third concerns the corporality of thought, how Renaissance writing pursues currently unfamiliar collocations to investigate the human – the chemical imagination, the animal with the spiritual, the blurred separation between sleep and wakefulness. Yet these parts should not be understood as discrete: they deliberately speak to one another, shift boundaries and shade into one another’s concerns. While each chapter addresses a particular collection of texts, or even one work, they do so with the intention of illustrating broader issues. The design of this volume has always been that the whole should be more than the sum of its parts, offering a coherent if multifaceted view of how texts function in history. Although this book does not claim to offer a complete overview of how the period’s literature operates (and no collection would pretend to address more than some representative aspects of the processes involved), we invite readers to explore this volume in its entirety, believing it raises important new challenges to critical practice. Thomas Healy’s opening chapter highlights the dilemmas produced by the Renaissance’s belief that eloquent language was the best vehicle to negotiate truth even while recognising that it could readily be misemployed to deceive. Arguing that the rhetorical strategy of serio ludere (‘playing seriously’) was a device that writers employed to navigate this dualistic perception of language – its capacities to improve social organisations and potentially re-instate humanity’s divinity and its

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potential to sow discord – he proposes that Renaissance writing was overwhelmingly involved in a continual unravelling of significance, eschewing conclusive articulation. Healy is interested in how texts operate to encourage readers to negotiate literature’s artfulness. In ‘Framing and Tuning in Renaissance English Verse’, Neil Rhodes highlights how special significance was attached to the formal issues of metre and rhyme in writers’ construction of a national poetic voice. Citing the civilising paradigm around Orpheus, whose tuneful song was able to charm nature, Rhodes draws attention to the importance of poetry’s sound for understanding cultural history. The ‘sweetness and strength’ that are increasingly sought from English Renaissance verse emerge from its association with music’s ability to charm: it is not simply how poetry expresses cultural value but how it helps make and transform such values. Rhodes’s emphasis on sound importantly points to an apprehension of language in which articulation is rooted in the body, a visceral encounter of ‘pulse, life, and energies’ in which rhyming cadences are, in Samuel Daniel’s view, virtual ‘incounters of touch’.5 Jennifer Richard’s ‘Transforming A Mirror for Magistrates’ is also centrally concerned with how rhetoric shapes emotional affect, but this chapter additionally asks us to consider how texts are transformed through their evolution in print. As she points out, this crucial book for England’s representation of its moral history was collaborative and protean, changing and expanding in its numerous editions throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather than a text that merely illustrates a distinct thesis, A Mirror needs to be witnessed as a project in which moral-political positions are worked out, providing a parallel to how a political commonwealth should pursue virtue in its attempts to reform itself. Richards demonstrates how A Mirror employs its rhetoric to shift political history into tragedy but also to raise a variety of voices, whose accuracy the reader is invited to judge. Instead of seeking to articulate an unambiguous lesson to passive recipients, Renaissance writing is shown to be fundamentally concerned with the processes through which readers form judgements. Richards shows that A Mirror operates as both effective and affective political writing precisely because it refuses straightforward didacticism. In ‘“Not without Mustard”: Self-Publicity and Polemic in Early Modern Literary London’, Andrew Hadfield examines how the growing rhetorical vehemence sparked by Reformation polemic transferred into the wider public sphere of print. The taste for ‘spicy’, aggressive styles of polemic became something that literary writers adopted to ensure public appetite for their work. Vociferous risk taking, even

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the creation and manipulation of scandal, became a key feature of an emerging popular print culture, one that had significant importance for literature’s engagement with Renaissance politics. Centred on how the Harvey–Nashe quarrel was played out in a series of printed exchanges that followed on from the controversial storm surrounding the Marprelate tracts, Hadfield’s chapter reveals how the disputational nature of religious argument was brought into the realm of literature with resulting church and state censure. As suggested above, by asking us to consider the writer as ‘maker’, Renaissance Transformations is proposing an alternative model of authorship to that posited by post-Romantic considerations. Alan Stewart’s chapter offers a fundamentally different view of how writing was made: that of the collaborative household in which a cadre of secretaries, clients, friends and scribes did not simply advise, research or copy out the work of leading politicians, courtiers and administrators but actually wrote it. Focusing on Francis Bacon’s household, and Bacon’s own drafting of Essex’s writing in his early years, Stewart suggests that Bacon employed the same process with his own work. The author, as head of the household, took responsibility for the work of his household that bore his name but which emerged from a collaborative process. While we are used to thinking of Renaissance dramatists collaborating, we tend to employ a model to understand this process that simply multiplies the number of authors, giving each a distinct part. Stewart offers a strikingly new view of how a writing community operated. Michelle O’Callaghan’s chapter addresses a different aspect of writing communities, one whose declarations of exclusivity were also a device to negotiate personal and political obligations. The exchange of verse epistles (her chapter notably focuses on Donne’s) in a culture of gift-giving created chains of obligations linked to the performance of friendship. Like Stewart’s, this chapter is concerned with the social mode of authorship, but here the focus is on how discourses of friendship were confirmed in processes of exchange and reproduction, creating an idea of authorship dependent on enabling interpretative communities. O’ Callaghan readily acknowledges that the community she explores is uncompromisingly masculine. By contrast, Danielle Clarke’s chapter addresses how female writing networks nurtured a mode of articulation that attempted to mesh ethics and style, deliberately disrupting dominant male-centred paradigms of writing. Women’s often tangential and ambiguous relationship to the language regime that developed out of humanist educational systems facilitates the emergence of a

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highly flexible and adaptable literary language, one based on ‘ordinary’ speech. Clarke shows how, by bringing private experience into the public sphere, women had a particular role to play in the emergence of models of writing that privileged interiority and subjectivity. While Stewart marks out a new model of how a household community collaborated to produce a text, Bernhard Klein addresses another form of collective ‘making’: the way in which logbooks, diaries, letters and journals were assembled as sea voyage narratives ‘to make the material of experience durable, accessible and useful’, as Mary Fuller puts it.6 The voyage account shaped the accidental and unpredictable nature of the route and the time spent on the water: it became ordered rhetoric that literally ‘made’ the shifting featureless ocean-scape. What engages Klein is the myriad of genres that went into this process and the resulting critical dispositions that were ready to accommodate the contradictions and incoherencies, as well as the unexpected alliances, forged by such writing. As he argues, this process has largely been ignored by postcolonial criticism which tries to reduce the variety of possibilities this writing offers by seeking out instances that appear to correspond to the present’s own master narrative. Michael Schoenfeldt’s chapter again points to the occlusions current organisations of knowledge create for Renaissance texts. In his study of the physiology of metaphysical poetry, he argues that the postCartesian segregation of cognition from corporeality prevents us from apprehending the surprising connection between physiological concept and aesthetic practice in the Renaissance: an environment in which the blood could literally be characterised as eloquent. Centring on the poetry of Donne, Schoenfeldt develops an issue raised by Rhodes: that passionate, argumentative poetic articulations bestow an exhilaration that is simultaneously intellectual and visceral, registering these complex continua between body and soul, mind and emotion. It is the Renaissance’s physiological understanding that helps make such arresting poetic utterances possible. Margaret Healy extends this examination of the embodied imagination by considering how the rise of the alchemical, Paracelsian medical model and cosmology in the Renaissance impacted significantly on social and scientific thinking. She explores how a preoccupation with chemistry’s powers of transmutation and regeneration, linked to millennial quests for renewed golden worlds, captivated the seventeenthcentury imagination including that of Francis Bacon, inspiring his utopian fable, New Atlantis – the blueprint for the Royal Society. Literary scholars generally apprehend alchemy as an arcane, inconsequential pursuit of the Renaissance, but Healy illuminates how the

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chemical philosopher’s imagined inner power to ‘digest’ and transform – and hence to replicate the creative ways of God the ‘Maker’ – inspired and helped to authorise England’s social and intellectual transformations, including its political and scientific revolutions. William H. Sherman addresses another somatic topic, that of sleep. As he demonstrates, this phenomenon, too, is subject to history, with pre-industrial societies experiencing much less sharply defined separations between sleep and wakefulness. Sleep was segmented, with an hour or more of drowsy wakefulness between what was called ‘first’ and ‘second’ sleep, during which people undertook a host of activities, including reflecting on the dreams that preceded awakening from their first sleep. This leads Sherman in a reconsideration of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play in which the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness, dream and reality, are constantly examined. Susan Wiseman’s concluding chapter is also concerned with the different Renaissance imaginative sense of embodiment – crucially in this case, of how the soul inhabits the body. Wiseman explores one of the era’s most fraught senses of transformation, that which occurs in the sacramental process, but her approach seeks to understand how this was frequently registered in the seventeenth-century’s popular imagination through animal stories. Attending to a feature which initially seems on this society’s fringe – that of animal baptism – she employs it to penetrate what a wide social range of people felt about the religious rites they engaged with during periods of social and political change. What she demonstrates is that far from being reflective of certain marginal, underclass beliefs and rituals, these strange beast-inflected episodes illuminate texts and vocabularies that resonate widely across the social stratum. Her chapter causes us to re-assess our understanding of the ‘popular’ in the Renaissance.

••

This volume emerges out of a distinct attempt by its editors to create a book that would demonstrate some important, new perspectives on how imaginative texts work in history. Its authors were specifically commissioned for this task but the choice of topics and texts was their own. In April 2008 a symposium of the contributors met at Birkbeck College, where they presented their work in progress. This was followed by lengthy debate, with chapter drafts being used as starting points for discussion about the wider conceptual as well as specific critical issues they raised. This enabled us collectively to address the volume’s central concern with how writing was ‘made’ and helped to mould the Renaissance world, but also to re-think the directions that

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historicist-based criticism might take. The revised pieces assembled here are the fruits of this process. We particularly wish to acknowledge the support and hospitality of the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck in the making of this volume.

Notes 1. See Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The British Problem, c.1534– 1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (London: Macmillan, 1996); David J. Baker and Willy Maley (eds), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 2. The Sermons of John Donne, eds George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–62), IV, p. 110. 3. Richard Stanyhurst, A treatise contayning a playne and perfect description of Irelande [1577] in Henry Ellis (ed.), The Description of Ireland, An Electronic Edition, ch. 7 (Perseus Digital Library), at http://www.perseus. tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0089%3Acha pter%3D7, accessed 19 March 2009; Sermons of John Donne, VI, p. 41. 4. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, in Elizabeth Forbes (trans. and ed.), Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 104–6. 5. Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Rhyme, in G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 2 vols, II, p. 362. 6. Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 6.

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Chapter 1

Playing Seriously in Renaissance Writing Thomas Healy

The medium is the massage.1

Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism articulated the mid-twentieth century’s recognition that dominant communication media shape the ways that we perceive the world around us. Yet, as befits a scholar whose doctoral thesis was entitled ‘The place of Thomas Nashe in the learning of his time’, McLuhan’s views were founded on the centrality of the idea to the Renaissance, as current interests in print and manuscript studies are decisively amplifying.2 Critical shifts in literary studies since the late 1970s have come to emphasise Renaissance texts as repositories of information about wider cultural practices and concerns. In focusing on the history of ideas, questions about form and language in history (as opposed to either theoretical or belletristic, ahistoricised ‘readings’) have frequently been bypassed. When scrutinising the period’s writing to uncover the era’s cultural attitudes, literary scholars like to remind historians about issues surrounding genre, imitation or even just irony, but literary scholars, too, often overlook more fundamental concerns about the centrality of language to the Renaissance. From the nineteenth century, empirically founded scientific investigation has been the West’s dominant paradigm for determining ‘truth’. As a result, the core of the Renaissance’s view of eloquentia – namely the ideal that to speak well is also to speak ‘good’, as it were, that is ethically, correctly and truthfully – has come to seem an alien, even bizarre, idea. In contrast to our current senses of rhetoric as language employed as misrepresentation, or as an empty vessel whose surface elaborations occlude absent content, Renaissance humanist education centred on rhetoric as a positive art of persuasion – a means to negotiate truth through language, and truths ultimately unavailable except in elegant language. As Sir Philip Sidney argued, the fallen world of nature could not readily produce the higher truths

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to which humanity should aspire. By employing language properly, however, decayed humanity: With the force of a divine breath . . . bringeth things foorth surpassing her [Nature’s] doings – with no small arguments to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam, since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it.3

Within the creative ‘making’ of poesy – that is, the formal deployment of the language arts – a textual space might be formed where the possibility of a re-pairing with the divine could be enacted, if not fully translated into quotidian life. In a cultural environment where supernatural beliefs were envisioned as possessing factuality, and where natural experience was envisioned as illusionary in some powerful respects, the language arts occupied the pinnacle of humanity’s endeavours to reach towards concepts that were understood as higher authentic realities. Yet it was also acknowledged that rhetoric could act as dissimulation, that it could forge theatres of illusion and fantasy that obscured or, worse, intentionally acted to destroy truth. With a virtually universal belief in Europe that the human will was ‘infected’ and that deception was a principal method through which a satanic reality actively lured humanity to destruction, there was an admission that it was almost impossible to distinguish confidently between truth and falsehood with the completeness that was sought, particularly when engaged with rhetorical systems that celebrated copia – stylistic abundance and variety – as eloquent language’s proper element. As Adam argues to Eve in book IX of Milton’s Paradise Lost, even in their perfect condition, humans are still vulnerable to mistaking truth because, while the will cannot be forced into error when it is led by reason (and Adam knows that God made reason right), reason, nevertheless, can be surprised ‘by some fair appearing good’, which acts to misinform the will and ‘dictate false’ so that the will undertakes to do ‘what God expressly hath forbid’.4 Adam warns Eve that only when reason is wary and ‘still erect’ can it resist falling into deception unaware. Yet even though Adam and Eve are armed with this counsel, Satan’s persuasive arts prevail in Eden. As with Sidney’s confident proclamation that ‘our erected wit’ knows what perfection is, such admonitions never clarify how this is validated other than by direct divine revelation or by customary adherence (that is, unwilled submission) to dictated law and convention. And even here dangers lurk: revelation may be falsely imagined, law may be misapplied. Thus, while celebrating eloquentia, Renaissance writers were also aware that the various educational models that humanism advocated

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to train students in the language arts might potentially become the very vehicles that prevented recognition of the higher reality that eloquence should nurture. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c.1592) contains a wonderfully ironic illustration of such misemployment. Faustus plays a logical and verbal game with the devil, Mephistopheles, about the existence of hell, claiming as a type of schoolroom proposition that ‘hell’s a fable’, to which Mephistopheles chillingly responds: ‘Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.’ 5 But Faustus is a trained disputer and is not going to accept Mephistopheles’s presence as empirical evidence about hell’s reality. Instead he quibbles about what hell signifies, claiming that his own ability to walk and dispute with a devil means that ‘hell’ (defined as a place of torment and punishment) cannot be hell because he is enjoying himself. The scene wonderfully demonstrates the Renaissance dilemma about the connection of language to truth. As the Devil is known to be a notorious liar, Mephistopheles’s assertions to Faustus about hell may be false. But Faustus’s own reasoning is exposed as naïve, founded on his linguistic cleverness in proposing a disparity between what a word – hell – is normally thought to denote and his manipulative glossing of it. Faustus may score highly in the debate but his ingenuity leads him to deny what the overwhelming majority of the play’s early witnesses (educated or not) accepted as indisputable fact. When Faustus declares, ‘Think’st thou that Faustus is so fond to imagine / That after this life there is any pain? Tush, these are trifles and mere old wives’ tales’ (II, i, 135–7), he is dismissing what was widely accepted as real by an audience that has already been informed that he is a character ‘swoll’n with cunning of self-conceit’, the result of which is that ‘melting heavens conspired his overthrow’ (Prologue, 20–2). Far from demonstrating Faustus’s rhetorical and logical deftness, the scene alarmingly confirms how the satanic teases humanity into imagining that devils can be outwitted. In this play, eloquent language serves to reveal characters as consummate actors, ones who employ such language to occupy various roles that lead them away from divine order rather then re-pairing them to it. Indeed, the play seems to question whether humanist learning and conventions necessarily seek to achieve this goal at all. Yet, as Sidney’s Defence advocated, the correct employment of elegant poesy was also envisioned as a prime vehicle through which humanity’s intelligence might genuinely advance towards higher truths. My concern in this chapter is to explore how the rhetorical strategy of serio ludere (‘playing seriously’) was one device that Renaissance writers used to cope with this dualistic, virtually Manichean, perception of language: its capacities to improve social organisations and

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potentially re-instate humanity’s divinity, and its potentials to sow discord and dissolve further the restoration of such a bond. While from antiquity there existed a long-standing tradition of considering serious philosophical issues through literary designs that could border on the frivolous, for Renaissance writers serio ludere became a means of registering the struggle for knowledge in an environment which they accepted was replete with paradox and contradiction. Deploying the ludic when investigating significant issues enabled a fine balance to be observed between maintaining a pursuit of serious inquiry into the human condition and acknowledging the inadequacy of the means to accomplish it, tangling and complicating attempts to resolve decisively a text’s argument, making it hard for readers to establish a transparent and intelligible meaning. This chapter investigates this in one of the most notable employments of serio ludere in Thomas More’s Utopia, and then addresses how the device underpinned the dilemma about how humanity might connect with the divine through examining examples from John Donne, George Herbert and Mary Sidney. Throughout, I wish to draw attention to how serio ludere engages with two of this book’s central preoccupations: making and transformation – concerns that might be construed as opposed. ‘Making’ appears to indicate a set of procedures that have a distinct goal in mind: the forging of a ‘thing’ (whether material entity or abstract idea) that is stable, enduring and knowable. On the other hand, transformation seems to subvert this design, suggesting that such phenomena are always subject to change, possessing shifting qualities both in their construction and in how they are apprehended – indeed, challenging whether writing possesses an integrity that can be distinguished from its interpretative environment. What the employment of rhetorical devices such as serio ludere indicates is that far from trying to reduce the risk of transformation, Renaissance writers embraced it, using strategies that draw attention to the impossibility of fixing either form or meaning in their work. Instead of aspiring to a conclusive state, their methods involve a continual negotiation of significance – it is the process of making that is highlighted.

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At the start of the sixteenth century, Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus were involved in translating texts by the first-century ad Greek rhetorician and satirist Lucian into Latin. As with Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1511) or More’s Utopia (1516), Lucian’s writings possess a serious dimension while employing exaggerated comedy, often drawing attention to a narrator whose discourse weaves the decorous and the

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impossible, mixing apparently sensible contentions with eccentric claims. In his A True Story (Άληθων διηγημάτων), for example, Lucian’s narrator dryly recounts the most inflated and absurd voyages through earth, heavens and the underworld in a parody of Homer’s Odysseus. In one episode, he finds himself in the Isle of the Blest, a version of the classical world’s Elysium containing all the great figures of antiquity. Presided over by the mythical wise king of Crete, Rhadamanthus, the place is a seeming paradise with every comfort available for the inhabitants, including notable feasts: But the greatest thing that they have for ensuring a good time is that two springs are by the table, one of laughter and the other of enjoyment. They all drink from each of these when the revels begin, and thenceforth enjoy themselves and laugh all the while.

But not all among the Blest are content: ‘Rhadamanthus was angry at Socrates and had often threatened to banish him from the island if he kept up his nonsense and would not quit his irony and be merry.’ Plato, too, is notably absent: ‘it was said that he was living in his imaginary city under the constitution and the laws that he himself wrote’.6 Lucian raises a question about the applicability of philosophic systems that promote ideals that, along with their proponents, are apparently out of step with an environment which is ostensibly the universe’s decreed place of reward for a virtuous or heroic life. While Lucian is, of course, not genuinely seeking to dismiss Socrates’s ideas as ‘nonsense’, and is drawing attention to conventions that present humanity’s highest goal as an intellectually obtuse, frivolous, pleasure-consuming environment, he is also broaching the problem of philosophy’s appropriateness and methods in the wider cultural sphere. In refusing to divorce the philosophers’ personalities from their principles, Lucian’s Plato can seem more a crank fantasist than a profound guide to political life. This brief example from A True Story illustrates a quandary that is constantly encountered in Renaissance writing: the difficult relation between writing’s ostensible pursuit of disciplined, idealised conditions and the flawed, confused, quotidian environment from which such quests emerge and in which they are inescapably enmeshed. In Thomas More’s Utopia, the raconteur of Utopian society, Raphael Hythloday, is described as a man ‘better versed in Greek than Latin’.7 Ostensibly praising Raphael’s cultural eminence (Greek was an unusual accomplishment in northern Europe in the early sixteenth century), More is teasing readers (and his own fictional identity in the Utopia), many of whom will fail to realise that ‘Hythloday’ is a Greek composite that suggests Raphael is a nonsense speaker or idle talker. Readers’

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assurance that Utopia’s vision is to be taken seriously is perplexed by Raphael’s presentation in Utopia, along with that of his interpreter ‘More’ (the Greek for foolish: moros) and the ‘good/no-place’ linguistic tease of the book’s title. Yet many modern critical accounts of the book tend to relegate such linguistic joking to the status of humanistic trivia – clever but unimportant scholarly jesting – and proceed to examine Utopia in a way that largely separates its tales from its tellers. In his prefacing letter to Peter Giles, the fictional More relates his intention to record Raphael’s discourse as accurately as possible. He will forgo an elevated Latin style to emulate his raconteur’s ‘casual simplicity’ (p. 3). Yet while proclaiming his desire to achieve a truthful account, he also shows his own inadequacies that prevent him from achieving this, revealing that the fictionalised figure of ‘More’ in the Utopia often accords with his foolish name. It doesn’t occur to him, for instance, to ask where Utopia’s precise location is. But this letter to Giles raises an interesting dilemma, one which on the surface seems based on More’s playfully forging an aura of authenticity to his fiction. He asks Giles to peruse the text: And let me know if you find anything that I’ve overlooked. Though I’m not really afraid of having forgotten anything important – I wish my judgement and learning were up to my memory, which isn’t too bad – still I don’t feel so sure of it that I would swear I’ve missed nothing. For my servant [Logan’s translation for the Latin puer meus, literally ‘my boy’, as opposed to ministris, which More uses when ‘servants’ are more unambiguously described] John Clement has raised a great doubt in my mind. As you know, he was there with us, for I always want him to be present at conversations where there’s profit to be gained. (And one of these days I expect we’ll get a fine crop of learning from this young sprout, who’s already made excellent progress in Greek as well as Latin.) Anyhow, as I recall matters, Hythloday said the bridge over the Anyder at Amaurot was five hundred paces long; but my John says that is two hundred paces too much – that in fact the river is barely three hundred paces wide there. (pp. 4–5)

Immediately preceding this exchange, More has been explaining to Giles how his domestic duties prevented him from writing up Raphael’s accounts quickly. He needed to attend to wife, children and servants (ministris) and behave agreeably towards them: ‘But, of course, he mustn’t spoil them with his familiarity, or by overindulgence turn the servants into his masters’ (p. 4). This appears a casual remark but it is indicative of a deliberate ambivalence that the work expresses about Raphael Hythloday, shaping him as a more dubious figure than he is often allowed to be. Raphael’s social status is uncertain. More describes his first encounter with him when he sees him talking to Giles: ‘A man of quite advanced

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years. The stranger had a sunburned face, a long beard and cloak hanging loosely from his shoulders; from his face and dress, I took him to be a ship’s captain’ (p. 9). Giles says More is mistaken, Hythloday is ostensibly a gentleman by birth, but one who has given up his lands and obligations to travel. This striking account, though, suggesting Raphael has a somewhat wild and socially unrefined appearance, complicates the frequent critical attempts to present him as a thinly veiled mouthpiece for More’s own views.8 The difficulty of locating Raphael socially reflects on his presentation and the character More’s apparent naiveté about him, but it also addresses issues that increasingly preoccupied More later in his life in his arguments with Tyndale about who should have access to scripture: does a widening of the intellectual franchise create new opportunities for truth or does it multiply error and lead all into confusion? In Utopia, More’s growing familiarity with Raphael, and Raphael’s own accounts of his mixing with the elite in England and the esteem accorded him in Utopia, repeatedly touch on the anxiety casually voiced by More in his letter to Giles about mixing with social inferiors and turning ‘the servants into masters’. The real Thomas More had gone to Bruges and Antwerp in 1515 as part of a Royal Commission engaged on a crucial diplomatic mission about trade rights.9 The English export wool trade, principally directed through these ports, had become the greatest generator of England’s prosperity. While More, like many others in England, experienced disquiet about some of the social consequences of the enclosure that helped to generate this wealth, he was also in a particularly privileged position to recognise its wider economic importance. Raphael’s condemnation of enclosure in book I of Utopia has a rhetorically powerful straightforwardness to it; but it is in precisely these terms that it is destabilising as well as ostensibly reformist. Raphael’s account appears to have a ‘truth’ about it that both the real Thomas More and Peter Giles – who, as secretary to the City of Antwerp, was also well aware of the economic significance of the wool trade – would probably seriously dispute; yet in Utopia their characters seem to acquiesce in Hythloday’s perspective. One of the ways serio ludere operates here is to present the characters of More and Giles (whose official position is not mentioned) as far less worldly than they were in reality. Raphael’s account of his hospitable entertainment and hearing by Cardinal Morton in book I can appear ardent, forthright reportage: a means to allow the author More a fictional mouthpiece through which to castigate England’s economic and social conditions. Raphael, though, arrogantly furnishes himself with a credibility to which it is not

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clear that the sociable Morton assents. In exposing the apparent illogicality of English practices, Raphael generates his own. For example, as an alternative to capital punishment for thieves, he suggests it would be better to adopt the methods of the Polylerites (literally ‘people of much nonsense’) that he came upon during his Persian travels. They put thieves to work on public projects where they labour constantly though in reasonable conditions. Further, ‘sometimes they do not do public work, but anyone in need of a workman can go to the market and hire a convict by the day at a set rate, a little less than that for free men’ (p. 24). In articulating what sounds like a humane alternative to capital punishment, Raphael presents a solution whose consequence would undermine the labour market, effectively ensuring that most free labourers would need to become prosecuted thieves to gain work. An English lawyer who has been Raphael’s main opponent in the debates in Morton’s household dismisses these suggestions, but Morton diffuses the tension by offering an ambivalent compromise that decorously neither approves nor rejects Raphael’s view. Raphael assumes the cardinal is backing him rather than indulging him. More carefully develops his story so that a reader can perceive other interpretations of Raphael’s account and its reception than that of the sober, social philosopher who is ridiculed and undermined by a collection of parasitic, self-interested courtiers, professionals and clerics at Morton’s table, the perspective Raphael wants to encourage. Throughout Utopia, Raphael repeatedly emerges as a humourless, self-important figure. As the character More mentions at the end of Raphael’s account of Utopia itself, while he has certain objections to raise, he is ‘not sure he could take contradiction in these matters, particularly when I recalled what he had said about certain counsellors who were afraid they might not appear knowing enough unless they found something to criticise in other men’s ideas’ (p. 110). For Raphael, as perhaps for Lucian’s Socrates and Plato, those who oppose his ideas are fools not to recognise truths. Yet while More is playing with his own character’s ‘foolishness’, he is drawing attention to the difficulties of imposing absolute systems within highly varied social environments. His character in Utopia responds to Raphael’s intransigence by taking him into supper with the promise of further talk; he maintains an environment, as in Morton’s household, where hospitable negotium(‘business’ or more precisely ‘ the conduct of one’s affairs’) is the means though which genuine exchange becomes possible. Part of humanist educational agendas was to nurture ideals of nobility that were not strictly tied to caste. Excellence in the language arts should allow those of even modest backgrounds to participate in the

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formation of the civitas, the social commonwealth: wise fools (moroi) might legitimately address kings. Yet, as we have seen, recognising excellence in the language arts was not as straightforward as the ideals suggested. The Latin fool, More, does not recognise the Greek idle talker, Hythloday. Raphael’s pursuit of Greek, ‘because his main interest is philosophy’ (p. 10), does not wholly accord with what we learn about him. But it notably draws attention to More, his ostensible social and educational superior, and his apparent inability to register Raphael’s inconsistencies. This is left to his pupil Clement, a puer meus who has ‘already made excellent progress in Greek as well as Latin’ (p. 5). In the humanist utopia of Peter Giles’s garden, serio ludere allows that learning is simultaneously both displayed and misconstrued, a place of erudition and a resort of fools. Emphasising More’s employment of serio ludere does not invite an understanding of the text that simply reverses common critical perceptions by proposing that Utopia’s ideas should now be revealed as dystopian. The rhetorical strategy allows the absurd to occupy the same space as the reasonable. Instead of seeking to articulate a precise political vision under the guise of fiction, More’s text acts to draw readers into further debate, maintaining an emphasis on the disparity between idealised vision and its quotidian realisation, provoking different interpretations that refuse a separation of substance from speakers. Like the character More at the conclusion who defers further discussion, Utopia can be witnessed as a paradigm for Renaissance writing’s refusal of closure.

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Nearly a hundred years after Thomas More sat in Peter Giles’s Antwerp garden, a fictionalised persona of John Donne is travelling westward. Donne’s problem, though, is that it is Good Friday and he is aware that, morally and religiously, he should be moving east, the direction in which Christ is being crucified. From a devotional perspective, riding westward on such a day carries sinister implications about the rider’s spiritual condition. In Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward Donne attempts to reconcile this disparity between his quotidian reality – his westward direction on business – and his spiritual ideal: his desire to demonstrate a devotion to Christ, whose crucifixion offers him the possibility of salvation. Donne’s poem is typically ingenious, passionate and apparently sincere. Yet, as is characteristic of Donne, the cleverness invested in the poetic argument also insinuates a contrivance that subverts the narrator’s attempt to reassure himself that his westward motion is other than what he fears: a movement towards death and damnation.

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Donne begins with a proposition – an assertion – that recalls the rhetorical disputation cherished by humanist educators: ‘Let man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this / The intelligence that moves, devotion is’ (ll. 1–2).10 The circle is traditionally the shape linked with the divine, and Christian Platonic cosmology portrayed spiritual ‘intelligences’ or angels as the drivers of celestial bodies: Donne is seeking to establish the harmony of his soul within a divinely ordered universe. Yet Renaissance cosmology also recognised that the planets ‘wander’; they do not keep regular orbits but are displaced by the influence exerted by other spheres on them. Thus, Donne proposes, his soul’s true direction towards the east is disrupted by it being ‘subject to foreign motions’ (l.4) that act on him. By utilising the analogy that pairs his soul with cosmic movement he can present his directional waywardness as a familiar and natural phenomenon. Already, however, cracks are appearing in Donne’s scheme. ‘Subject’ carries with it resonances not merely of a mechanical response but of allegiance; and Donne seems to concede this: ‘Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit / For their first mover, and are whirled by it’ (ll. 7–8). Seeking to assert his soul’s integrity, his language is leading him on a contrary track, acknowledging that his ‘motion’ confirms his loyalty to pleasure or business. This is reinforced as he tries to shape his case for his emotional commitment to Christ by claiming that the crucifixion’s tortures make him ‘almost be glad, I do not see’ (l. 15). Yet in developing his compassionate response to the enormity of the Good Friday events, he further conveys his being out of synchrony with them: What a death were it to see God die? It made his own lieutenant Nature shrink It made his footstool crack, and the sun wink. Could I behold those hands which span the poles And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes? (ll. 17–21)

According to scripture (Matthew 27:45–51; Mark 15:33; Luke 24:44– 45), at the time of Christ’s death, nature responded to the crucifixion’s affront to God by suspending its normal regulation so that even the sun underwent self-eclipse. Further, a number of the poem’s early manuscripts have ‘turn’ rather than ‘tune all spheres’, a reading which more emphatically indicates that God is the authentic Aristotelian ‘first mover’.11 Donne’s claim that he is travelling westward unwillingly appears suspicious when he concedes that the whole of the natural order responds to the pivotal moment of Christ’s death. Donne’s exposition continues by carefully shifting his position, arguing first that Christ’s crucifixion, though ‘from mine eye’ (l. 33), is

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present in his memory as he rides westward, and second that he is now willingly turning his back on Christ because he is seeking correction from him: O think me worth thine anger, punish me, Burn off my rusts, and my deformity, Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace That thou mayst know me, and I’ll turn my face. (ll. 39–42)

Donne’s contention that he is gazing on Christ in his memory so as to be able to assert the crucifixion’s immediacy before him, despite contrary appearances, draws attention to the narrator’s attempt to manipulate time. The poem opens by claiming continuity between the historical crucifixion and its recollection, employing this period’s common understanding of Christian history as omnitemporal – while each scriptural event occupies a distinct historical moment, the spiritual truth of these instances also infuses all moments past, present and future. In liturgical thinking, the spirituality manifest in these events possesses the same literal truth as their historical distinctiveness – that is, their factual enactment at a point of history did not confine them to only that era. Instead, the liturgical year not only figuratively but literally, if spiritually, repeats events that occurred centuries past. Hence, at the poem’s opening, Donne understands Christ’s crucifixion as genuinely occurring in 1613, not merely being recalled through a Good Friday ceremony. As the narrator shifts from evoking the immediacy of Christ’s crucifixion to employing memory to summon it up, Donne is indicating an absence of Christ in the narrator’s present. If he now looks on Christ it is through recollection of him in the past. This is confirmed by his own awareness of his present ‘deformity’, his need to have Christ’s image restored in him. The violence Donne proposes Christ should enact against him, while amplifying his longing to regain a healthy relation with his saviour, also has a quality of desperation in it. Yet this is a disquiet mixed with a curious sense of pride. Beginning with an apparent humbleness, hoping that he is ‘worth thine anger’, Donne shifts to confront Christ arrogantly, asserting that he will conform to his heavenly motions only if Christ acts to restore him. Far from encouraging a belief in Donne’s authentic humility, this rhetorical passion instead confirms the waywardness of his motion, one epitomised by his poem’s unsuccessful attempt to offer a credible explanation for his undertaking to travel west – unless he refutes his opening proposition and acknowledges that spiritual devotion to Christ is not the intelligence that moves his soul. The narrator’s poetic argument and employment of devotional rhetoric

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are revealed as a linguistic mask, yet, crucially, a mask the poem has carefully allowed the attentive reader to witness. Donne’s poem manifests a more severe, anxious reflection of serio ludere than Utopia’s playful preservation of significant social considerations within Raphael’s incongruous fictions. Yet many elements are similar. Donne, like More, is aware of how attempts to fashion a controlling narrative inevitably employ language which disrupts his narrator’s ability to manipulate his environment with the confidence his assertions purport. As Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward illustrates, Donne generally employs theatrically vivid figures in his poems, but ones who expose doubts about their declarations by using rhetoric that appears to be searching for truth yet is regularly revealed to be evading it. Superficially self-possessed, his poetic narrators divulge themselves as protean figures, prepared to adopt different guises and positions in their attempts to establish a secure, reassuring vision. Although, in Donne’s devotional poetry, they don’t immediately strike us as sharing the double-edged foolish qualities that More so neatly exploits, they are similarly shown as involved in linguistic games that ironically depict their limited capacity for understanding even as they frantically search for knowledge. Donne’s narrators want to accept eloquent poesy’s ability to re-pair them to the divine but, as in Utopia, his poems refuse to allow readers to separate his speakers’ clever articulations from their fragile, self-interested locations that compromise the ideals they seek. Importantly, though, Donne’s use of serio ludere acts to maintain some sense of language’s potentials for reaching higher understanding by displacing any definitive conclusions about poetic eloquence onto further negotiation. By bringing attention to the narrator as well as to what is narrated in Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward, as in most of his poetry, Donne indicates that the poet’s ability (as well as a reader’s) to witness the poem’s theatrical artfulness also preserves the promise of surmounting it. In becoming better readers – now discerning rhetorical deceit where we may have imagined truth – we undertake a process of textual negotiation that sustains the supposition that authentic eloquence is recognisable. In revealing the poetic narrator’s limitations, Donne’s poem retains the promise of eloquentia as tantalisingly achievable to less naïve, less disturbed inquirers after truth – language remains potentially a genuine means to look on Christ. Throughout the devotional writing generated by what may be termed England’s long Reformation (1530–1688), there is a continuous negotiation between the use of human reason and a reliance on direct godly revelation in trying to attain a genuine conception of God’s designs and in stimulating proper devotion to him. Some writers advocate the

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enthusiastic zeal commonly associated with revelation (God somehow directly illuminates an individual’s understanding); others emphasise the patient analysis of nature or scripture to comprehend the divine truths believed to reside in them. While writers are often suspicious about excessive claims around either revelation or reason, it is rare to encounter texts that do not recognise the need for the two to co-exist in some fashion. Yet, in many respects, there is an inherent contradiction produced from this duality because revelation fundamentally asserts the inability of reason to encompass the divine, while reason is acutely aware that revelation is insecure, resulting potentially from intoxicating fantasy or, worse, diabolic deception. Serio ludere offered the devotional writer the opportunity to sustain the quest for devotional understanding by suspending the need to reach a final conclusion. Even in instances where understanding appears to be achieved, this rhetorical device allowed a sense of human limitations to be registered, rendering knowledge’s completion uncertain. I want briefly to illustrate this in a well-known example, George Herbert’s ‘Love III’, the final lyric in The Church section of his collection The Temple, first published in 1633. This poem seems to gesture towards closure, its position in the collection intimating that it be witnessed as a conclusion. In his lyrics Herbert employs the idea of life as a spiritual quest, a pilgrimage. ‘Love III’ appears to indicate that the soul has finally passed to its final resting place, that while ‘Guiltie of dust and sinne’ (l. 2), it has now achieved the place where ‘Love bade me welcome’ (l. 1), a journey that completes Herbert’s lyric church.12 Love constantly refutes the soul’s unworthiness, concluding by offering the narrator sustenance to which he eventually acquiesces: ‘You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat’ (ll. 17–18). Yet the stark simplicity of ‘Love III’, with its detailed context pared down to a minimum, both rhetorically acts to insinuate its genuineness – it seems an instance of Herbert’s celebration of those ‘Who plainly say’ (‘Jordan I’, l. 15) in matters of devotion – and also functions to confound clarity, for example, by preventing attempts to resolve whether the soul’s location has transferred beyond the mortal or whether it remains encased in a body ‘Guiltie of dust and sinne’. In many respects, the poem seems potentially to embrace circularity as readily as it indicates an end point in the collection’s linear progress. Rather than presenting the soul transferring to a higher realm, ‘Love III’ might be describing the narrator entering a church in order to undertake communion, returning to ‘The Altar’ that begins The Church section of The Temple. As a clergyman in the Church of England, Herbert was deeply acquainted with the central if vexed issue about the nature of Christ’s

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presence in the Anglican service of Holy Communion. The ministration of this service, though, is carefully detailed in the Book of Common Prayer, whose ceremonial language the overwhelming majority of Herbert’s early readers would consistently have used. Placing the bread in the communicant’s hands the minister proclaims: ‘The bodie of our lord Jesu Christ, which was geven for the, preserve thy body and soule into everlastinge life: and take and eate this in remembraunce that Christ died for thee, feede on him in thine heart by faith, with thankesgevynge.’ 13 The communion service liturgy repeats acts of spiritual encounter that enable both a formal recollection of Christ’s sacrificial grace and a regeneration of the spiritual fruits of that sacrifice in the believer. Herbert’s ‘Love III’ concludes with the narrator declaring his eating of Love’s meat; but it is unclear whether we are to understand this as a literal representation of spiritual sustenance in the afterlife, a visceral replenishment of the body’s needs in order to continue on life’s pilgrimage, or an encounter that is both physical and spiritual as in the communion service. The uncompromising physicality of ‘eat’ actually channels readers to conceive a spiritual event that is the very opposite of a bodily process – an aspect heightened by realising that Love’s offer of ‘meat’ has a distinct sexual connotation if viewed in a purely corporeal way.14 Part of the poem’s ‘playfulness’ is its exploitation of its devotional indecorousness if it is witnessed simply in corporeal terms. Herbert’s lyric, though, assumes readers who will be versed in the liturgical resonances of its language; and, like liturgy, the poem is open to repetition, re-reading and re-imaging at each encounter. A large part of the Anglican communion service is centred on enjoining its prospective participants to ensure that they are in the right spiritual and moral disposition to engage with it. Chastising those who are invited to a rich feast but refuse to come, it also enjoins that the benefits of the Lord’s supper rest with the individual: For as the benefyte is greate, yf wyth a trulye penitente herte and lyvely faith we receive that holy sacrament (for then we spiritually eate the fleshe of Christ, and drincke his blonde, then we dwell in Christe and Christe in us, we be one wyth Christ, and Christe with us) so is the daunger great, if we receyve the same unworthely. For then we be gilty of the body and bloud of Christ our saviour. We eate and drincke our owne dampnation.15

In Herbert’s poem, Love is continually obliging. It is the narrator who believes himself unworthy. Emerging from an environment where the spiritual quality of love’s meat was understood as resting with the narrator’s devotional condition, the plainness of the assertion ‘So I did sit and eat’ occludes whether we are witnessing a quotidian encounter

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with divine promise within a church – one subject to change – or a final fulfilment of that promise in the afterlife. Yet, within a lyric that refuses to clarify its speaker’s condition, what is apparent is the unfaltering presence of Love. Herbert’s recognition that we remain uncertain about this eating reinforces the presence of divine bounty regardless of human action. The poem’s reassurance is this continuity regardless of the nature of the narrator’s verbal self-performance. Donne’s and Herbert’s poetry brings attention to the gap between their narrators’ desires for devotional completion with God and their apparent inability to negotiate this comfortably through language. In exposing this divide, the poets use serio ludere to manifest scepticism, but one that rests principally with their narrators’ potential misconstructions and what these reflect about their spiritual characters rather than with eloquentia’s ideals per se. For Renaissance devotional writers, language as potentially ‘true making’ was indisputably valid, for this is how God himself operated: ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light . . . And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night’ (Genesis 1:3, 5). Scripture – effectively, culturally unchallenged as an authentic, divinely authored account – not only showed God making through saying, it also recorded the importance he attached to naming. His creation of words was conceived of as inseparably part of the substance of his creation and what gave it identity. The dilemma for the user of language in a fallen world was deciphering how genuine the relation between naming and making remained when perceptions might mislead. In the fallen world, the secure relation between name and authentic meaning had been lost. Calling something ‘day’ might now be a false label, signifying the opposite of light. As Spenser claims of the decayed world: For that which all men then did vertue call, Is now cald vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight vertue, and so us’d of all.16

In English Renaissance devotional expression, the earthly self is largely a tormented self, whose own uncertain declarations are part of the distress it suffers. Even where scripture is, in essence, the poem itself, the quandary remains about whether the narrators voicing it are doing so with understanding, truly discovering God’s voice in theirs, as it were; or whether they are undertaking a strident piece of theatrical acting, whose rhetorical intensification masks its spiritual emptiness. In Mary Sidney’s version of Psalm 142, ‘Voce mea’, Sidney’s text is her expression of King David’s song, a work believed to be inspired and, therefore, authored by God. Yet as she addresses God, pleading for her

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case to be heard, Sidney registers that her language is also presenting her ‘in doubtfull waies a straunger’.17 Sidney’s anxiety is that she is not convinced that God will listen to her, imploring him to ‘yeeld me hearing’ (l. 17). Acknowledging that she is neglected and unknown by the world (and thus without identity), she also registers the fear that she is similarly invisible to God. Crucially, she conceives her self becoming known through her words. Language is the key to her being. Ultimately, though, the psalm confirms that her complete security is possible only when she changes her earthly state to a heavenly one: O chaunge my state, unthrall my Soule inthralled: Of my escape then will I tell the storie And with a crowne enwalled Of godlie men, will glorie in thy glorye. (ll. 21–4)

Her escape from the world will provide her with an assured narrative – ‘the storie’ that combines the uniqueness provided by the definitive article with a verbal play on ‘the’ as pronounced ‘thy’. The urgency of Sidney’s eloquence within a psalm that is also ‘timeless’, its attention to preserving voice and identity while expressing urges to dissolve them, and her desires for a God-directed ‘storie’, while also portraying herself as somehow presently excluded from its coherence, demonstrate the unresolved control of language that is the essence of serio ludere. Even when attempting to impersonate God through scriptural translation, Sidney is articulating her awareness that her rhetoric’s insistence involves an elaborate game, unavoidably ‘playing’ with issues which involve her eternal salvation. Her plea to ‘unthrall my Soule inthralled’ wonderfully captures the dilemma of devotional language: for being ‘inthralled’ is both enslaved and fascinated, and ‘unthrall’ is both to emancipate and to disillusion: the words resonate both positives and negatives simultaneously. As we have witnessed, medium is both massage and message; Renaissance writing is a continuous negotiation that remains necessarily unresolved.

Notes 1. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). 2. Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 3. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Gavin Alexander (ed.), Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 9–10.

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4. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), IX, ll. 354–6, p. 457. All citations are of this edition. 5. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (1604 text), in Mark Thornton Burnett (ed.), Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays (London: Everyman, 1999), II, i, 129–30 p. 360. All citations are of this edition. 6. Lucian, A True Story, book II, in A. M Harmon (trans. and ed.), Lucian Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), pp. 320–31. 7. Thomas More, Utopia, trans. and eds George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 3. All citations are of this edition. 8. The range of critical commentary on Utopia is immense. Representative studies that tend to emphasise the book’s content as opposed to its style include: J. H. Hexter, introduction to Utopia, in Edward Surtz, SJ, and J. H. Hexter (eds), The Complete Works of St Thomas More (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), IV, pp. xv–cxxiv; George M Logan, The Meaning of More’s Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Quentin Skinner, ‘Thomas More’s Utopia and the virtue of true nobility’, in Visions of Politics, vol. II: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 213–44. Two studies that cogently reflect on style with content are Elizabeth McCutcheon, My Dear Peter: The Ars Poetica and Hermeneutics for More’s Utopia (Angers: Editions Moreana, 1983); and Arthur F. Kinney, ‘Rhetoric as poetic: Humanist fiction in the Renaissance’, English Literary History, 43 (1976), pp. 413–43. 9. The fullest account of this embassy is Edward Surtz, ‘St Thomas More and his Utopian embassy’, Catholic Historical Review, 39:3 (1953), pp. 272–97. 10. John Carey (ed.), John Donne, Oxford Authors (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 241–2. All citations are of this edition. 11. See the commentary in Herbert J. C. Grierson (ed.), The Poems of John Donne (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), II, p. 358. 12. F. E. Hutchinson (ed.), The Works of George Herbert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 188. All citations are of this edition. 13. ‘The Ordre for the Administration of the Lordes Supper or Holy Communion’, Book of Common Prayer 1559, http://justus.anglican.org/ resources/bcp/1559/Communion 1559.htm, accessed 4 December 2008. All citations are of this edition. The 1559 Prayer Book was the version current during Herbert’s ministry. 14. See Thomas Healy, Richard Crashaw (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), pp. 138–40. 15. ‘The Ordre for the Administration of the Lordes Supper’. 16. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), Book V, Proem, 4, ll. 1–3, p. 724. 17. Mary Sidney, ‘Psalm 142’, in Danielle Clarke (ed.), Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 181. All citations are of this edition.

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Chapter 2

Framing and Tuning in Renaissance English Verse Neil Rhodes

When literary studies rejected formalism for historicism in the 1980s it marginalised a vital element in our understanding not just of aesthetic structure but also of cultural history. This is something that we should now try to retrieve. Early modern English writers attached special significance to formal issues; they were important because they were held to be markers of cultural value. In particular, cultural status was defined to a significant degree through the medium of sound. The paradigm of civility is provided by the myth of Orpheus, who represents the voiced power of speech and song as the principal agent in the civilising process. Echoing Horace in Ars poetica, the Orpheus topos is invoked by Thomas Wilson in the first comprehensive English rhetoric, and by most of the authors of poetic treatises arguing for the literary capabilities of English, including Puttenham and Sidney.1 Puttenham goes on to remind readers that ‘[t]here is no greater difference betwixt a ciuill and brutish vtteraunce then cleare distinction of voices’ before explaining the function of the pause or ‘cesure’ in the verse line.2 Conversely, the term ‘barbarism’ derives from the Greek word that represented the supposedly brutish noises uttered by non-Hellenic peoples. These points are well known, and Bruce Smith’s superb Acoustic World of Early Modern England has also done much to reinstate sound in our map of English Renaissance culture,3 but we still greatly underestimate the importance of sound in the making of English poetry. We need also to remember that we are dealing with a culture that was still highly oral in character, where reading aloud was common, and where sound effects were as important in the reception of poetry as they would have been in the more obviously spoken forms of drama, sermon and oratory. In such an environment the achievement of a national poetic voice depended upon the proper management of the acoustic qualities of the language. It is surely no coincidence that the dates given by Richard Foster Jones, in his classic study The Triumph of the English Language,

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for the point at which writers became confident in English as a vehicle for literary expression (1575–80) are exactly the same as those given by George T. Wright for the point at which English metre becomes fully crafted.4 Jones, in fact, is explicit in stating that the change in the view of English comes about through achievements in poetry.5 We do, of course, always need to remember when we are talking about the making of English poetry in the late sixteenth century just how marginal England was, culturally and politically – nobody would have thought it worthwhile publishing a Teach Yourself English book before 1580, for example6 – but we need also to understand the extent to which debates about cultural value were conducted in terms of form. For the Elizabethans, metre, along with the other formal properties of verse, such as rhyme, represented the Orphic civilising paradigm through its process of framing and tuning. The aim of the present chapter is to explain the significance of those terms, and the relationship between them, in the construction of a national poetic voice, but in view of their associations with music I want also to underline the centrality of speech. Elizabethan poetry finds its voice in the late Elizabethan period through the confluence of verse and speech, but it does so by recognising that in certain crucial aspects poetry is not like music.7 I would like initially to refer these points back to the concept of ‘articulation’, the term that perfectly expresses the process of framing and tuning through its double meaning both of distinct utterance and of a system of connectivity, seen most obviously in the joints of the body.8 Both these meanings were available in the Renaissance, but the term itself was a recent, Latinate addition to English vocabulary, and the English word that corresponds most directly to the double sense of articulation is in fact ‘frame’.9 For although ‘frame’ might be most readily understood to refer to a kind of construct, as in modern ‘framework’, and would thus correspond with the secondary meaning of articulation, it was also used to refer to speech. Thomas Wilson, for example, notes that ‘[u]tteraunce therefore is a framyng of the voyce’, and he is echoed by Abraham Fraunce in his later rhetoric based on Sidney’s Arcadia, which focuses on elocutio in Ramist fashion.10 Implicit in both is Puttenham’s point that civil utterance depends upon ‘clear distinction of voices’ (p. 73). The term ‘frame’ covers quite a wide semantic field, including some of the space occupied by ‘tuning’, and it also has a particular application to verse composition. Much of this field has been surveyed in an excellent recent study by Rayna Kalas, who sets out to show how poetic innovation in the period can be understood as a craft or technology in its own right by relating it to developments in the material forms of frame, mirror and window. An

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important theme of the earlier part of her book, dealing with ‘frame’, is that the poet does not impose form from without but instead realises the inherent properties of the material that he or she is dealing with.11 Kalas’s principal concern, however, is with spatial form and the visual arts, so I hope that by concentrating on sound in the present chapter it will dovetail (to use a suitably crafty metaphor) with her more visually orientated discussion. There is no doubt that speech was imagined as material capable of being crafted. In the English translation of La Primaudaye, for example, the reader is told that ‘philosophers . . . saie that speech is made by aire, beaten and framed with articulate and distinct sound’, conjuring up an image of the metal worker and suggesting that eloquence is golden- or silver-tongued.12 But speech, or framed discourse, was also conceived physically in terms of the articulated body. At the most elementary level, the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster explains that ‘letters can expresse sounds withall their ioynts & properties . . . letters resemble the ioynts in sound’.13 Moving from the basic unit of sound to the basic unit of sense, many writers of the period talk about the ‘knitting together’ and ‘framing’ of sentences. This idea is especially relevant to poetic metre, which does of course consist of ‘feet’, but where those feet may also be thought of as the joints or sinews that hold the verse line together, as the translator of Virgil, Richard Stanyhurst, does when he writes of ‘many good verses . . . hauing their ioynctes knit with theese copulatiue sinnewes’.14 Other writers extend the physical dimension of poetry from the verse line to the stanza, which was sometimes referred to as a ‘staff’, so called, Puttenham speculates, because it acts as ‘a bearer or supporter of a song or ballad, not vnlike the old weake bodie, that is stayed vp by his staffe’ (p. 65). Through its conscious representation in physical and anatomical terms in the sixteenth century, verse form probably offers the best illustration of the associated meanings of both ‘articulation’ and ‘frame’. In the most idealised accounts of poetry, sound and structure are the twin properties through which individual poetic makers echo the ‘goodly frame’ constructed by the divine craftsman. Reason itself, the image of divinity in the human being, is certainly conceived as an operation of framing both in general terms (‘an absolute Patern, framing the matter’) and in the specific terms of logic (‘[a] certaine frame of prouing, called a Sillogisme’).15 And reason is also frequently seen to have an affinity with music; hence the alliance between framing and tuning. The rational mind is a well-tuned instrument, expressed in the harmonies of ordered discourse, just as its opposite reveals itself in verbal confusion and discordance. Commenting on disordered speech as a reflection of the ‘incoherence of things in general’, Ben Jonson adds

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that ‘[n]either can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose wordes doe jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous’.16 Jonson’s strictures are as much to do with the role of eloquence in civil society as with the making of a well-balanced individual, and the cultural value that he attached to issues of form can hardly be overestimated, but the metaphoric associations of framing and tuning are of considerable significance in a good deal of English Renaissance literature, not least in Shakespeare. They appear in the language of reason and unreason in Hamlet, but perhaps have an even more central role in Othello, where Iago sets about to unframe and untune the harmonies of what Wilson Knight famously called ‘the Othello music’.17 Iago is an anti-poet, literally a maker of discord, as he watches Othello and Desdemona embrace and vows to ‘set down the pegs that make that music’ (II, i, 201).18 The accomplishment of this satanic project is eventually signalled by the collapse of Othello’s confident verse lines into unjointed and incoherent prose in IV, i. What seems mere hyperbole in Othello’s premonition, ‘And when I love thee not / Chaos is come again’ (III, iii, 93), is enacted in formal and poetic terms as a process of comprehensive disintegration. Poets are makers but they are also made, as Jonson pointed out in his poem to Shakespeare. Jonson himself was certainly well aware of his debt to Camden, but schoolmasters have probably not been given sufficient credit for their part in the making of English verse in the late sixteenth century. Thomas Lodge thought that his contemporaries had ‘brought the Chaos of our tongue in frame’,19 in imitation of the divine craftsman, but three of them – Spenser, Kyd and Lancelot Andrewes – had themselves been framed by the same schoolmaster as Lodge himself, the remarkable Richard Mulcaster at Merchant Taylors. All educational regimes aim to mould their pupils, and are therefore in the business of framing in a general sense, but Mulcaster’s was specifically adapted to some of the more bodily aspects of both framing and tuning through the emphasis he placed on physical exercise and voice training. This was why drama played such an important part in his curriculum.20 Mulcaster’s pupils did of course learn composition, but they also learned performance, so they would have developed a concept of poetry as an art that embraced delivery as well as writing. In his two books on education, Positions (1581), which is particularly concerned with physical exercise, and The Elementarie (1582), which deals with the writing of English, Mulcaster addresses the ‘naturall principles, wherevnto the younglings may best be framed’, and also gives some idea of just how far he may have shaped the future literary careers of the boys in his charge:

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If natur do offer a towardnesse to write, and no impediment let, but it maie be well applied, is not consideration vntoward, if that abilitie want forwarding? If with som small help a childes voice maie be made swete, tunable and cunning, is not education lame, if it continew harsh, vnpleasant and rude?21

While Mulcaster’s point here is to underline the schoolmaster’s duty to indulge and develop natural talent, his linking of writing to the tuneable voice is a good indication of how his pupils would have been sensitised to the aural dimension of poetry, a lesson undoubtedly learned by Edmund Spenser. Other teachers with a less stellar record of pupil achievement published books that stress the importance of both composition and performance, framing and tuning. Edmund Coote’s The English Scholemaister, which went through an extraordinary fifty-four editions between 1596 and 1737, outlines a programme for ‘the framing and sweet tuning of the voyce’ and claims that through practice ‘all learners shall so frame and tune their voyces, as that they shall truely and naturaly pronounce any kind of stile, eyther in prose or verse’.22 Although Coote’s book, like Mulcaster’s Elementarie, was devoted to English, and early modern pedagogy was directed mainly towards the learning of Latin, there was considerable crossover between the languages. John Brinsley, a Leicestershire schoolmaster who employed a system of ‘grammatical translation’ to develop facility in both Latin and English, entitled one of the chapters of his book, Ludus Literarius, ‘Of pronouncing naturally and sweetly, without vain affectation’.23 But perhaps the best illustration of this double agenda for framing and tuning in any early modern educational work comes fairly late, in 1634, in John Barton’s Art of Rhetorick. This was an English rhetoric, with a shorter Latin version attached, and in the first part Barton writes that ‘Utterance is the sweet framing of the voice’, but also that ‘this composure of words is like some frame of joyned ware, the joynts and parts whereof are so truely proportioned and fitted, that the whole coupleth rightly together’.24 Barton’s observations nicely convey the two senses of framing that we have been exploring, and he also presents composition very much in terms of material craft, but what emerges most strikingly, perhaps, from these schoolmasterly reflections is the reiteration of the term ‘sweet’. The word appears again and again in these treatises, as it does in Elizabethan poetry. In one sense frame provides strength, and in its other sense, when allied to tuning, it produces sweet and melodious sound. Strength and sweetness are the twin goals of the new English verse that starts to emerge in the late 1570s. Mulcaster himself was certainly an ardent advocate of the vernacular,

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and his books appear immediately after the point which Jones and Wright identify as the coming of age for English. In the second of these, The Elementarie, he reiterates the standard view that eloquence is a marker of cultural value, saying that he hopes to make Englishmen ‘seme not to be barbarous’, seeing that ‘fair speech . . . is a great argument of a well-ciuilled peple’. What we need to do is to ‘pease the force of speche, according to that grace which euerie tung hath’ (p. 56). He then goes on to claim that, just as the age of Demosthenes was the finest for Greek and the age of Cicero for Latin, ‘[s]uch a period in the English tung I take this to be in our daies, for both the pen and the speche’ (p. 83). And while Mulcaster’s classical parallels are with orators rather than poets, what he has to say about the part of education in the making of eloquence is of particular relevance to literature, not least because of the role he assigns to nature: ‘the end of education, and train is to help natur vnto hir perfection’, he writes, noting the ‘great concordance . . . betwene natur in framing, and art in training’ (pp. 31–2). Mulcaster’s comments are significant for literature because making the most of the natural qualities of one’s own tongue is the principle that lies at the heart of the Elizabethan debate about verse form. This debate provides an essential further context for our understanding of framing and tuning. It is also directly relevant to Rayna Kalas’s discussion of the need for poets to respond to and shape the natural properties of their language rather than conform to an external pattern imposed from without.25 For the Elizabethans, that pattern – ideal or alien, depending on your point of view – was provided by the quantitative metrical system of classical poetry, based upon the length of syllables in a verse line. This contrasted with native English verse metre, which was much simpler and relied upon accentual stress, either iambic or trochaic. Changes in pronunciation had made it impossible to hear the quantities of classical verse long before the sixteenth century, so its relationship with the spoken voice was extremely tenuous, either for English schoolboys trying to declaim Latin poetry or for poets trying to write English verse in classical metres.26 But this did not prevent some critics from arguing that without the frame provided by classical quantitative metres, English verse would lack structure and strength. This was what Stanyhurst meant when he referred to the ‘ioynctes’ and ‘sinnewes’ of the verse line. And this is also what Roger Ascham meant when he dismissed the first attempt at accentually stressed, unrhymed iambic pentameter (i.e. blank verse) in English, by the Earl of Surrey in his translation of books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid, as ‘feete without ioyntes . . . numme feete’; adding for good measure that ‘feete in our English versifiing without quantitie and ioyntes, be sure signes, that

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the verse is either, borne deformed, vnnaturall and lame’.27 These comments appeared in The Scholemaster (1570), written a little earlier than Mulcaster’s pedagogy, and the difference in emphasis between them offers a good illustration of the changing relationship between education and poetry in the period. One crucial difference between the two metrical systems lies in their relationship to music. I suggested earlier that English verse finds its voice when writers begin to understand the ways in which poetry is not like music, a development that also entails a reversal of the precedence of art over nature. The analogy between poetry and music is based on the idea that the divine craftsman who first framed the world is also the originator of cosmic harmony, order and proportion through the creation of an immutable world of number. So in one, highly idealised view of poetry, the poet tries to emulate ‘an absolute Patern, framing the matter’ through number, something that is only possible with the fixed, quantitative metres of classical verse. Such a view, which also presents art as superior to nature, was advocated in the Renaissance by Scaliger in his massive Poetices libri septem (1561).28 By arguing that the poet uses a predetermined prosodic system to replicate the numerosa concordia (melodious harmony) of the divine creator, Scaliger offered a theory of poetry quite opposite to the one in which the poet tries to shape his or her material in ways that respond to its own inherent qualities. This is reflected in Gabriel Harvey’s observation that ‘Nature ingendreth, Art frameth’, which precisely reverses the role that Mulcaster gives to nature in framing.29 Scaliger’s views also percolate down to Sidney, not just in his claim that poets create a ‘golden’ world, but also in his preliminary designation of verses as ‘charms’, deriving from Latin carmina (songs), characterised by their ‘observing of number and measure in words’. That Sidney is thinking of ‘number’ and ‘measure’ in the context of classical metre is made clear a little later when he praises the art that ‘considers each word, not only (as a man may say) by his forcible quality, but by his best measured quantity, carrying even in themselves a harmony – without, perchance, number, measure, order, proportion be in our time grown odious’. Sidney has plenty of positive things to say about native English verse, and he does, incidentally, attribute ‘sweetness’ to both kinds of poetry, but the Apology shows strong residual elements of classicism even as it presents itself as a manifesto for a new English poetry that would abandon the rules of classical metre premised on a pattern of cosmic musical harmony.30 Sidney is astonishingly versatile, and his blending of classical tradition and vernacular potential is obviously not a fault, but there is also a good deal of confusion in the way Elizabethan writers describe the

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two prosodic systems, partly because they use the terms ‘numbers’ and ‘measure’ to refer to accentual-stress metre as well as to quantitative metre, even though accentual stress cannot really fulfil the function that the terms imply. There is also some ambivalence in the way they refer to ‘rhyme’, and this is of particular interest in the context of framing and tuning. In this period, ‘rhyme’ is the generic term for native English verse and is used to refer to accentual-stress metres as well as to homophonic line endings, since the one was thought to imply the other. This comes about through the derivation of the term ‘rhyme’ from rythmus (rhythm), and sometimes, more fancifully, from ‘romance’, which lent it a rustic, medieval air. Puttenham, for example, writes that classical metres ‘haue a maruelous good grace, which was in Greek called rithmos: whence we haue deriued this word ryme’, though he adds that because English poetry isn’t quantitative, it doesn’t achieve the ‘musicall numerositie in vtterance’ that theirs does (p. 69). Naturalised in English, ‘rhyme’ and ‘rhythm’ became synonymous and were pronounced in the same way, as when Gascoigne refers to ‘Rithme royall’.31 This led many Elizabethans to make a distinction between ‘verse’ and mere ‘rhyme’ (or ‘rhythm’) in the same way that later writers have distinguished between ‘poetry’ and mere ‘verse’. Gascoigne says that ‘wee are fallen into suche a playne and simple manner of writing, that there is none other foote used but one [iambic]; wherby our Poemes may justly be called Rithmes, and cannot by any right challenge the name of a Verse’ (p. 468).32 But not everyone took such a hierarchical view, even in the case of the most spiritually elevated poetry, as Matthew Parker makes very clear in his verses on ‘The Vertue of the Psalms’, which preface his own metrical English versions of them: The Psalter booke: of Psalterie an instrument so namde: For that the Psalmes: most commonly, to it were tuned and framde. And who that noth: and hath it waighde, how Psalmes by Metre go: Can blame no art: by rythme so layde, nor musike squard therto. Thus Bernard sweete: in holy rede, Christes death reuolued in rythme: So Ambrose sage: and worthy Bede, thought this no shame or cryme. And what is verse: but rythme to name, in Lattine, Frenche, or Greeke:

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Neil Rhodes Our Englishe verse: I count the same, though all men hit not leke.33

Parker is writing before either Puttenham or Gascoigne or Sidney, probably about 1556, and was soon to reach the very summit of the ecclesiastical ranks as Elizabeth’s first archbishop of Canterbury, yet he speaks up for lowly English in a way that offers a virtual summary of the terms we have been discussing. The literal meaning of Parker’s lines, it has to be admitted, is not entirely clear, since his syntax is rather elliptical. Although this is certainly a defence of ‘rythme’, it seems also to be a defence of art and music as appropriate supplements to sacred poetry. Parker defends rhyme by citing the Venerable Bede, who had sanctioned accentual-syllabic verse in his De arte metrica as far back as the early seventh century. Moreover, the poems Bede had in mind, such as the fourth-century Ambrosian hymns, were written in Latin, which allows Parker to argue that rhyme has the status of ‘verse’ and that this is something common to both English and the classical languages. Since in this case quantitative metre is not an issue, there is no discrepancy between art and music on the one hand and accentual-syllabic metre on the other. However, as Rivkah Zim has pointed out, Parker also gives careful instructions on how his verse should be read aloud, which would suggest that he has an idea of poetry based on the rhythms of speech.34 While it may come as a surprise to find these views on ‘rythme’ being expressed as early as the 1550s, they make sense as a Reformation view of poetry, honouring native English tradition in both Latin and the vernacular. Before long, writers more interested in the virtues of secular verse would also start to take a less censorious attitude towards rhyme. One reason for this is that it moves into the space traditionally occupied by poetry in classical metres once it is recognised as a vehicle for both framing and tuning, strength along with sweetness. There is obviously no difficulty in recognising the element of tuning in rhyme, or its capacity for sweetness. Puttenham says that English poets use ‘concords or tuneable conceits in the latter end of [their] verses’ in place of the ‘currantnesse [fluency] of the Greeke and Latine feete’ (p. 76). But he is quite apologetic about this, pointing out that since Elizabethan poetry lacks the ‘numerous’ quality of classical verse, which would make it truly musical, this ‘certain tunable sound’ in the cadences is ‘in effect all the sweetnesse and cunning in our vulgar Poesie’ (p. 80). It is not until Samuel Daniel’s passionate advocacy of English verse form in his Defence of Ryme (1603) that ‘rhyme’ finds a truly committed and eloquent spokesman. Arguing that ‘single numbers’ (unrhymed

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quantitative verse) are unlikely to show any ‘worke of wonder’ in English, he counters that the world will feele where the pulse, life, and energie lies; which now we are sure where to haue in our Rymes, whose knowne frame hath those due staies for the minde, those incounters of touch, as makes the motion certaine, though the varietie be infinite . . . For be the verse neuer so good, neuer so full, it seemes not to satisfie nor breede that delight, as when it is met and combined with a like sounding accent: which seemes as the iointure without which it hangs loose. (pp. 362–3 )

For Daniel, the tuneable sounds of rhyme are also capable of framing, supplying those joints and sinews which earlier writers had thought were the peculiar characteristics of classical verse. And in making his case, Daniel not only seems to echo Mulcaster’s ‘joints of sound’, but also returns us to our starting point in ‘articulation’ and to an idea of language rooted in the body, which has ‘pulse, life, and energie’ and where the rhyming cadences themselves are ‘incounters of touch’. We do not know where Daniel went to school, but he ended up at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, in the early 1580s, where he is unlikely to have found much support for his partisan view of the merits of the vernacular. By the 1590s (probably between 1592 and 1595) he had become part of the literary circle based at Wilton under the patronage of Sidney’s sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke. It was this that he described in the Defence as his ‘best Schoole’, where he had ‘beene first incourag’d and fram’d’ to write in rhyme by Mary Sidney. But the Defence appears nearly a decade after his Wilton days and it was prompted by the last concerted attempt to argue for the merits of English quantitative metre, Thomas Campion’s Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602). Campion was a composer as well as a lyric poet, and he had recently published A Book of Ayres (1601) with the lutenist Philip Rosseter, so it is not surprising that he opens his treatise on versification with an appeal to the analogy between poetry and music: ‘The world is made by Simmetry and proportion, and is in that respect compared to Musick, and Musick to Poetry.’ The basis of the analogy is, of course, ‘number’, which is also what determines ‘proportion’, and only classical metres respect this. When we talk of a poem being written ‘in number’, he explains, we are not just counting the number of syllables but evaluating the sound of each individual syllable in terms of its length, as quantitative metres demand. The ear, then, is to assume an active role as ‘a rationall sence and a chiefe iudge of proportion’, something that it won’t find in ‘our kind of riming’ because there is such a ‘confused inequalitie of sillables’. As for the sounds of rhyme itself, so far from having any capacity for framing, as Daniel was to claim, they are dismissed as ‘childish

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titillation’.35 Campion’s treatise offers a succinct restatement of the view of poetry that Daniel believed would prevent English from finding its own poetic voice, and one that he was determined to discredit. What Daniel focuses on, in retaliation, is the precedence of nature and custom over the predetermined rules of art. For Daniel, Campion’s concept of a metrical frame based on number and proportion is nothing but a Procrustean bed, a rigid system that can’t accommodate the natural properties of English. Instead, Daniel points out that any aspiring poet ‘findes in our language, without all these unnecessary precepts, what numbers best fitte the Nature of her Idiome’ (p. 378). And what comes naturally to English is the accentually stressed iambic line. There is no need for all these ‘strange precepts of Arte about the framing of an Iambique verse in our language, which hath euer beene vsed amongest vs time out of minde’ (pp. 376–7). Particularly absurd is the violation of the natural stresses and rhythms of speech (‘true English reading and pronouncing’) in order to satisfy the requirements of an alien, quantitative metrical scheme. Daniel’s defence of English ‘rhyme’ is impassioned, patriotic and highly eloquent. At its heart lies an awareness that for English verse forms to flourish, the classical analogy between poetry and music needs to be severed so that the verse line can adapt itself more closely to ‘the best power of our speach’ (p. 381). This involves making a distinction between metre and rhythm – something that Sidney had intuitively recognised a quarter of a century earlier – as well as a distinction between rhythm and rhyme. Poetry by numbers has to be replaced by what Daniel calls, earlier in the essay, ‘pulse, life, and energie’. In what is clearly a direct contradiction of Campion’s claim that the ear is a rational sense he writes: When we heare Musicke we must be in our eare, in the vtter-roome of sense, but when we intertaine iudgement, we retire into the cabinet and innermost withdrawing chamber of the soule; And it is but as Musicke for the eare, words that will fit the music of the Latin lyre, but it is a worke of power for the soule, to master the rhythms and measures of life. (p. 381)36

Daniel’s rejection of the musical analogy ultimately led him to a more general mistrust of the siren-like qualities of sound in poetry and to a desire for a poetry that subjugated sound to sense. This is evident here in his contrast between the superficiality of musical effect and the inward chamber of the soul. But this is, after all, a treatise in defence of sound, and his other contrast, between musical effect and ‘the rhythms and measures of life’, has to be understood in those terms. What Daniel means, I would suggest, is that literature works most powerfully when it is framed and tuned in concert with the rhythms of live speech.

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By the time Daniel wrote his Defence of Rhyme all this had been accomplished in the great verse drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which had naturalised the iambic pentameter in English. Iambics had been recognised by the Greeks as the metre with the closest affinity to speech rhythms, but, as we have just seen, Daniel is scornfully dismissive of attempts to find a classical ancestry for something that he clearly regards as a native English verse form. What Daniel largely ignores is the fact that the confluence of verse and speech in dramatic poetry has already resulted in the virtual disappearance of rhyme in the conventional sense of the term, though he does concede that ‘a Tragedie would indeede best comporte with a blank Verse and dispence with Ryme’ (p. 382). But then by 1603 drama had also had an impact on non-dramatic poetry, most strikingly in Donne’s satires, elegies and ‘songs and sonets’, all of which use rhyme in conjunction with metres driven by the rhythms of the spoken word. Within the broader context of the relationship between literary form and cultural status it is also important to remember that from an Elizabethan point of view it was not Shakespeare – or Donne for that matter – who represented the literary pinnacle to which all discussions of that nature might be referred, but Homer. And it is the case of Homer that provides us with the other most vigorous defence of English as a poetic language in the period, as well as with a final example of the process of framing and tuning. George Chapman published his first translations of Homer, Seaven Bookes of the Iliades (in rhymed fourteeners) and Achilles Shield (in rhymed decasyllabics), in 1598. In the preface to the latter, Chapman heaps abuse on Scaliger for preferring Virgil to Homer before declaring that Homer ‘hath appeared like an Angel from a cloud, or the world out of Chaos, when no language can make comparison of him with ours if he is worthily converted’. So he assigns to Homer the role of originary framing, something that he sees mirrored in the image of Achilles’ shield itself as ‘one circlet’ that figures ‘a universall world’ where all things are described ‘as if they consisted not of hard and solid metals, but of a truly living and moving soule’. And this, like Daniel’s ‘work of power for the soul’, he argues, is what English is uniquely able to convey.37 Chapman thinks that one of the strengths of the language is its store of monosyllables, because it facilitates what Puttenham had called the ‘tuneable conceits’ of rhyme. This was a subject on which earlier opinion differed, with Ascham deploring them, citing the authority of Quintilian, and Mulcaster claiming that they represent ‘the chiefe ground and ordinarie pitch of both our pen and tung’ (Elementarie, p. 286). Chapman himself was in no doubt of their virtue in poetry. In his prefatory verses to the later Iliads (1611), he argues that the

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profusion of monosyllables in English makes it far more melodious than clumsy polysyllabic languages like French and Italian, which ‘in harsh collision / Fall as they brake their necks’. He then adds: I can prove it cleare That no tongue hath the Muses’ utterance hey’rd For verse, and that sweet Musique to the eare Strooke out of rime, so naturally as this. Our Monosyllables so kindly fall And meete, opposde in rime, as they did kisse.38

Chapman’s kissing monosyllables anticipate Daniel’s figuring of rhymes as ‘incounters of touch’, both writers resorting to the kind of bodily metaphor that informs so much of the discourse on verse form of the period, most fundamentally in the concept of articulation itself. At the same time, his lines boldly claim that monosyllabic English is the most tuneful of languages for poetry and that speech is music. The question of translation returns us to our starting point in verse form as a marker of cultural status, and it is not difficult to see what is at stake when Matthew Parker or George Chapman argue for the adequacy of English verse forms for the Psalms or for Homer. If English can capture the spirit of these most elevated expressions of the secular and spiritual imagination, then it can do anything, and Parker’s agenda is also linked to the momentous project of the secure foundation of the Church of England. Chapman, it is true, lowers the tone somewhat, as he turns the formalist debate into a slice of romance fiction where the other European vernaculars dash headlong to a noisy and violent end, while sturdy, monosyllabic English gets to kiss the girl. However, the wider cultural importance of verse form is indicated not just by this rather crude kind of triumphalism, or even by the eminently serious matter of state-sponsored religion, but also, in the case of Daniel, by an understanding of its political significance. Arguing that English expression has no need to conform to ‘the square of Greece and Italie’, and that states must lay their own foundations, he points out that Rome’s imperial success was based on ‘the first frame of that commonwealth; which was so strongly ioynted, and with such infinite combinations interlinckt as one naile or other euer held vp the Maiestie thereof’ (pp. 366, 372). He then goes to claim that the ‘wonderfull Architecture of this state of England’ has similarly secure foundations, not in imitation of Rome, but ‘laide by the Rule and Square of Nature’ (pp. 372–3). It might seem extraordinary that this should appear in a defence of rhyme, of all things, but it is precisely Daniel’s purpose to argue that framing and tuning, sound structure and the structure of sound, are an integral part of national culture in its broadest sense. We should listen to him.

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Notes 1. See Brian Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 73–5, 194, 338; and Gavin Alexander (ed.), Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004). 2. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 73. All citations are of this edition. 3. Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 4. See Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), p. 211; George T. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), p. 38. 5. Jones, Triumph, p. 178. 6. The first is Jacques Bellot, Le Maistre d’Escole Anglois (London, 1580). 7. Some aspects of this development were discussed by John Hollander in The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970). 8. See Neil Rhodes, ‘Articulate networks: The self, the book and the world’, in Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (eds), The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 189–91, and Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 16–20. 9. Rhodes, Origins, p. 34. 10. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. Thomas J. Derrick (New York: Garland, 1982), p. 33; see also Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike, 2nd edn (London, 1588). 11. See Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 1, 57–60. 12. Pierre de La Primaudaye, The French Academie, trans. Thomas Bowes, 2nd edn (London, 1589), p. 120. 13. Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie, ed. E. T. Campagnac (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), pp. 110, 115. All citations are of this edition. 14. Richard Stanyhurst, ‘From the Dedication and Preface to the Translation of the Aeneid’, in G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), I, p. 143. 15. William Painter, The Second Tome of the Palace of Pleasure (London, 1567), *2v; Dudley Fenner, The Artes of Logike and Rhetorike (London, 1584), C2v. 16. Ben Jonson, Discoveries, in C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (eds), Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), VIII, p. 628. 17. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy, rev. edn. (London: Methuen, 1949), pp. 97–119. 18. William Shakespeare, Othello, in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds),

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

Neil Rhodes The Complete Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 829. All citations are of this edition. Thomas Lodge, ‘Phillis’, in E. W. Gosse (ed.), The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge (Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1883), II, p. 6. See John Wesley, ‘Mulcaster’s boys: Spenser, Andrewes, Kyd’, unpublished PhD Diss., University of St Andrews, 2008. Richard Mulcaster, Positions . . . for the training vp of children (London, 1581), p. 26. Edmund Coote, The English Scholemaister (London, 1596), sigs. A1r, A4r. John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, or The Grammar Schoole (1612), ed. E. T. Campagnac (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1917), p. 211; on the crossover between the two languages, see pp. 106–8, 115–17. John Barton, The Art of Rhetorick Concisely Handled (London, 1634), pp. 35, 29. See Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse, p. 57. On the Elizabethan pronunciation of Latin verse see Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: English Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 21–40. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, in William Aldis Wright (ed.), The English Works of Roger Ascham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), p. 291. On Scaliger I follow Fernand Hallyn, ‘Cosmography and poetics’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 442–8. Gabriel Harvey, A New Letter of Notable Contents (London, 1593), A3v. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. R. W. Maslen, 3rd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 84, 101, 115. George Gascoigne, ‘Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse’, in John W. Cunliffe (ed.), The Posies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), p. 471. On rhyme and romance see Samuel Daniel, A Defence of Ryme, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, p. 360; all citations are of this edition. Gascoigne’s essay is none the less pioneering in other ways, especially in his instruction to ‘place everie worde in his natural Emphasis or sound’; see Suzanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1984), pp. 110–24. Matthew Parker, The Whole Psalter (London, 1567), B1v. Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535– 1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 135. On Bede see O. B. Hardison, Jr, Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 39–42. Thomas Campion, Observations in the Art of English Poesy, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, pp. 328–31. The italicised part of the passage is given by Daniel in Latin from Horace, Epistles 2.2, pp. 143 and 144; the English translation is from Alexander, Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy, p. 230.

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37. George Chapman, ‘A defence of Homer’, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, pp. 300–1, 297. 38. George Chapman, Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 11.

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Chapter 3

Transforming A Mirror for Magistrates Jennifer Richards

A virtue of the ‘old historicism’, for my purposes at least, was its receptiveness towards a work long regarded as the ‘greatest composite monument of the Drab Age’, A Mirror for Magistrates.1 Admittedly, critics of this school interpreted it as unambiguously didactic. Lily B. Campbell regarded its argument as pleasingly self-evident: that a subject may ‘under no circumstances rebel against the ruler’.2 This perception has been hard to shake off. It persists even within the ‘new historicism’, only this time the approval is lacking. In Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, this best-seller of the Elizabethan period is relegated to a footnote and dismissed as propaganda with ‘its tireless repetition of the same paradigm of retributive justice’.3 One purpose of this chapter is to argue that the Mirror is far from relentlessly didactic. To do so, I aim to grasp more fully the argument of a work that is not only about transformation but which was also itself in transformation in the sense that it was repeatedly adapted and extended over a period of more than fifty years. The Mirror constitutes a series of tragic narratives in which corrupt officers and their rulers step forward to lament and explain their ‘falls’. Not surprisingly, in the face of such mutability, scholars have perceived this work as a defence of political stability. However, as I will argue, the Mirror is a varied and shifting work, not least because it is collaborative. From the beginning its authors were concerned with the way in which rhetorical affect influences the interpretation of moral examples, and this informs the development of its argument. Like many Tudor miscellanies, the Mirror is a project in which its authors are working out moral-political positions, not simply illustrating a thesis: this remaking of its argument is perhaps best understood as a political virtue in a reforming commonwealth. Importantly, the Mirror foregrounds not only its moral agenda but also the ‘sociability’ of its making; this should have a bearing on how we engage with the former. The first edition to be successfully printed

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was overseen by William Baldwin in 1559. It consisted of nineteen tragedies, purportedly by several authors, many of whom are unnamed, along with a prose frame in which the moral import of the narratives is discussed. In 1563 Baldwin printed a new edition, and this includes eight new tragedies, again by different authors, under the title The seconde parte of the Mirrour for Magistrates. In both of these editions Baldwin takes the moral lead; however, his precepts are not always easily applied. In subsequent years the Mirror accumulated yet more contributors, changed compilers and printers, expanded in length, and changed its form and, to an extent, its moral-political focus. Significantly expanded editions appeared in 1574, 1578, 1587 and 1610.4 To date, this expansion has attracted little modern scholarly interest, and, when acknowledged, has been represented as the ‘disintegration’ of Baldwin’s original purpose.5 This ostensible breakdown is presented as stemming from the fact that later contributors were more interested in sentimental tragedy than morally edifying history. But this is to miss the emotiveness of the early tragedies, as well as its authors’ collective concern with the process of interpretation and the role this plays in the remaking of its argument. This chapter traces this process; it explores the changing uses of sympathy as part of a developing argument. I will begin, though, by considering why the Mirror has been regarded as didactic and why critical approaches to it have changed so little since the 1930s. What is it that we are missing? One reason why the Mirror has been read as a stable and didactic work is that William Baldwin, its original compiler, encourages us to read it in this way. In his dedication ‘To the nobilitye and all other in office’, which appeared in the first successful printing of this work in 1559, Baldwin outlines its political argument with particular clarity, noting that the poems follow the pattern of de casibus tragedy established by Boccaccio, whereby bad governors get their come-uppance. Baldwin begins the dedication by identifying ambition as the principal cause of bad governance. It is ‘prollers for power or gayne’ who destroy the commonwealth because they ‘seeke not for offices to helpe other, for whiche cause offices are ordayned but with the vndoing of other, to pranke vp them selves’.6 The rest of the preface is concerned with how such prowlers are dealt with. ‘Iustice is the chief vertue,’ he declares, ‘so is the ministracion therof, the chiefest office: & therfore hath God established it with the chiefest name, honoring & calling Kinges, & all officers vnder them by his owne name, Gods.’ Thus, when a governor fails in his office, ‘God can not of Iustice, but plage [his or her] shameles presumption and hipocrisy, and that with shamefull death, diseases, or infamy’ (*3r). Baldwin assures the reader that this argument is illustrated in the tragedies.

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In her influential discussion of this preface, Lily B. Campbell focuses on Baldwin’s definition of magistrates as ‘Gods’. She reads this as a restatement of the doctrine of Calvin’s Institutes, that the ‘King is vicegerent to God’, concluding that ‘Subjects may, therefore, under no circumstances rebel against the ruler.’ This lesson in ‘political truth’ is demonstrated in the tragedies of the 1559 Mirror, which teach ‘not only the duties of subjects to their king, but also the accountability of kings to the King of Kings’.7 It is not hard to see why Campbell takes Baldwin at his word. The text’s first protagonist to complain, the lawyer Robert Tresilian, suggests that he is an example to all corrupt ‘Judges and Justicers’ (A3r), and he relates the horrible punishment he meets. The justice of this fall is confirmed by Tresilian, who reminds us to ‘Take god before your eyes’ and to ‘Remember well your reckening at the daye extreme’ (B1r), and also by the author of this complaint, George Ferrers. In introductory remarks, Ferrers describes Tresilian’s tragedy as a warning to those who misconstrue the law ‘to serue the princes turnes’ (A2r). ‘There is very little chance of drawing the wrong conclusion from this story’, Lawrence Green observes, ‘since its conclusion precedes, recurs throughout, and ends it.’ 8 This does not mean that there is no debate about the political thesis of the Mirror. Scholars sensitive to Baldwin’s confessional identity, and aware that his intended first edition (1554) was suppressed by Mary I’s lord chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, identify a different argument for this work: that magistrates should ‘disobey all unjust royal commands, no matter what the personal consequences of such disobedience might be’.9 This is based on a contrary interpretation of Calvin’s argument in his Institutes. Calvin did not forbid resistance to tyrants; rather, he allowed that ‘It is the duty of the magistrates to oppose tyranny as the guardians of civil society.’ 10 Scott Lucas cites the tragedy of Lord John Tiptoft, the Earl of Worcester, as an illustration of this. Worcester is nicknamed the ‘Butcher’ (b3r) because he did Edward IV’s gruesome bidding, overseeing the execution of unwelcome nobles. Worcester acknowledges his crime but also shifts blame onto the king who issued the orders: ‘What would mine enemies do in such a case,’ he plaintively asks, ‘Obey the king, or proper death procure?’ (b3v). However, in the rest of poem, Lucas explains, he attempts ‘to dissuade officers from ever adopting’ the ‘course’ he has taken, arguing that ‘God’s law holds a higher claim upon an officer’s obedience’: But who for loue or dread of any man, Consentes to accomplish any wicked thing,

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Although chiefe fault therof from other spring, Shall not eskape Gods vengeance for his dede. (b3v)11

This certainly challenges conventional readings of the Mirror. Lucas pays more attention than did Campbell to the context of this work’s making, the aftermath of the failed reformation, and he is sensitive to the rhetorical affect of the work: he is moved by Worcester. Nonetheless, the tragedies are still interpreted as ‘exempla’ that illustrate the precepts outlined in Baldwin’s dedication, and this is grounded on a conception of divine retribution. However, what if we choose not to make the dedication the starting point of a reading of the Mirror? The dedication shapes the expectation that this work offers a lesson in ‘political righteousness’. However, the precepts Baldwin outlines are not so easily applied to the tragic examples that follow; this is partly owing, I suggest, to a decision the authors elect to make at the start of the project, to represent the fallen protagonists in the first person. That is, the authors choose to use the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia (where a narrator speaks in the guise of another person), whereby orators and poets ‘maketh the common wealth to speake’ and sometimes ‘rayse . . . the dead agayne, and cause them to complayne or to witnesse that they knew’.12 In so doing, they transform moral history into tragedy. This decision turns Baldwin and his co-authors into moralists in a complex way not recognised in the dedication. They are moral commentators on the complaints, but they are also absorbed by the compromised ‘ghosts’ who moralise their own falls; this inevitably affects the judgements made. The dedication is not the best place to begin for another reason: it gives the impression that this is a coherent work managed by its compiler, William Baldwin. In fact, the Mirror is better understood as a work in progress involving many contributors over several decades. The Mirror’s shifting, expanding qualities over its different editions are only grudgingly noted by Campbell, who proposes the later editions represent the ‘disintegration’ of Baldwin’s original project. Of the later contributors, John Higgins (1544–c.1602), the author and compiler of The first parte of the Mirour for magistrates containing the falles of the first infortunate princes of this lande (1574), is singled out for criticism. Campbell describes him as a bad poet, or rather, a poet only ‘by self-determination’, and one of Baldwin’s ‘worst readers’. In his hands, the Mirror becomes ‘a strictly literary adventure’.13 Even among those who disagree with the detail of Campbell’s account of ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’ there is still a tendency to focus almost exclusively on it. The view that Baldwin’s work ‘metamorphosed from

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an ideologically aware poetic history into a sentimental historical poem’ is largely approved.14 Yet, as I have already noted, the tragedies in the earliest edition are already affecting. Later compilers extend the preoccupation in ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’ with rhetorical affect, but this does not mean that this project degenerates into banality and sentiment. On the contrary, Higgins extends and deepens Baldwin’s purpose by replacing the latter’s emphasis on divine retribution in his dedication with a new focus on temperance as a way of managing unruly aspirations, and of reading tragic lament. Arguably, Higgins’s dedication is more in keeping with the aspiration of the Mirror’s authors to explore the tricky relationship between affect and judgement.15 This approach inevitably affects our appreciation of the Mirror as a form of political writing. As I have already noted, Lucas is unusually sensitive to the emotive appeal of the tragedies in ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’, interpreting this, in some tragedies, as an attempt to accommodate the failure of reformation once deemed a ‘providentially bestowed triumph’.16 Yet, these affecting tragedies may do more than this. Our understanding of the ‘political’ sphere is changing, thanks to the work of scholars recovering the contribution of groups traditionally ‘imagined as excluded’ from it, especially women.17 The association of the ‘political’ with the ‘public’, and the de-politicisation of the ‘private’ that follows from this, is well established in ancient Greek and modern political theory. Yet, as Susan Wiseman notes, these assumptions do ‘not readily map’ on to Renaissance England, where public office ‘was intimately tied to familial and social bonds’. Rather, upholding this division between the public (political) and the private ‘disrupts’ the ‘potential to describe or analyse’ the way in which these spheres overlapped, and so occludes a variety of contributions to political debate.18 For several decades scholarly work has been committed to recovering these voices, real and represented. Most recently, critics have turned to genres that focus on personal crises and give expression to heightened emotion, like complaint. They explore these genres, moreover, as political writing as well as domestic tragedy, noting how these bring into focus the devastating, far-reaching effects of events that may begin in the ‘public’ sphere, and so prompt a ‘revisionist reading’ of ‘political ethics’.19 This critical work has a resonance for earlier complaints like the Mirror which are concerned primarily with male virtues and vices. In this chapter, I propose to explore the use of prosopopoeia in the Mirror as a rhetorical choice, noting both how this complicates the judgements we might make of the protagonists represented in ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’, and how it shapes this work’s transformation.

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Prosopopoeia was one of the ‘school exercises’ that taught boys ‘essential skills’,20 notably rhetorical versatility: the ability to express a range of emotions persuasively in persona. This skill is useful not only to the would-be poet or dramatist, but also for those destined for careers as secretaries in noble households, who were expected to write ‘in whatever persona was required’.21 Evidence of some remarkable impersonators survives,22 but one is especially noteworthy for my purpose: William Watkinson, secretary to Lady Anne Clifford, and one of the three hands that appear in the margins of her copy of the Mirror (1610). Watkinson writes as Clifford’s secretary in the margins of this book, recording, among other things, the dates that particular passages were read to her, but occasionally he also writes as if he were Clifford (‘This was read over to mee . . . on The 14th May 1670’).23 As Stephen Orgel notes, we see the different ‘personae throughout the book shade into each other as Clifford’s sense of herself incorporates her servants, and as they ventriloquize her voice’.24 In effect, impersonation, the merging of one voice into another, binds this household together. This example reminds us that the Mirror authors chose their genre wisely, for it displays their talents and employability. But it also reminds us what else can be achieved by impersonation. As we shall see, the emotive appeal of the ghosts can interfere with our moral judgement of them, making it hard to lay blame, but, more importantly, it can also embody the social bonds that ambitious magistrates destroy. For Higgins in particular, the value of the sympathy that prosopopoeia evokes is that it extends our understanding of political office; it makes proportionate judgement a private as well as a public obligation, and this affects how we read and judge political failure. This is underscored by his re-writing of Baldwin’s dedication. Rather than simply dismissing Baldwin’s ‘dedication’ as misleading, it might be better to propose that there are other available starting points. The ‘dedication’ was probably written after Baldwin was ordained in 1559/60, some four years following the completion of the tragedies.25 We know this because Baldwin explains that the 1559 edition is the second attempt at print publication. The first attempt, A Memorial of suche Princes, as since the tyme of kyng Richard the seconde, haue been unfortunate in the Realme of Englande, was suppressed by Stephen Gardiner in 1554 for reasons that are still unclear, though which are usually assumed to be religio-political. The 1559 A myrroure for magistrates is a ‘lightly revised’ version of this, with the dedication as one obvious innovation.26 Surviving from the suppressed edition, however, is a quite different preface, ‘A Briefe Memorial of

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sundrye Unfortunate Englishe men. William Baldwin to the Reader’, which is linked to the work’s prose frame. This offers no elaboration of the work’s general moral argument; rather, attention is given to the collaborative making of this work, a consequence of which is the displacing of Baldwin as author. In this preface Baldwin represents himself as the reluctant compiler of the Mirror project. He claims no credit for its inception, relating that the idea originated with the printer John Wayland. Wayland was planning a new edition of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, Baldwin explains, and he was counselled by ‘dyuers’ honourable men to commission a continuation of this, extending it ‘vnto this presente time’. Initially, Baldwin ‘refused vtterly to vndertake it’ without any ‘helpe’, and confesses to hoping ‘euen so to shift my handes’ (A1r). However, Wayland was not deterred; he found Baldwin seven collaborators who ‘throughe a generall assent at an apoynted time and place gathered together to deuyse’ this continuation (A1v). More than half of ‘Baldwin to the Reader’ is reported speech. One of the named co-authors, George Ferrers, is quoted at length, explaining that they should begin ‘where Bochas [Lydgate] left, whiche was about the ende of king Edwarde the thirdes raigne’ (A1v). Ferrers comes to this conclusion reluctantly; he would have liked to have begun with the first Britons, but he recognises the need to ‘leaue that great laboure to other’ (A2r). This preface has been commented upon as a means of drawing attention to the use of the frame in the Mirror to stage ‘a conversation about power’.27 In the prose inserts that follow the tragedies, Jessica Winston notes, the collaborators worry about the diversity of their sources, and offer different emotional responses to the tragedies they have heard. Following the Earl of Salisbury’s complaint, for example, Baldwin reports that ‘This straunge aduenture . . . drave us al into a dumpne’ (K1v). In some commentaries the authors meander and digress (‘we had long talke concerning the natures of dreames’ (a4r)); in others, they struggle to identify the moral example. It is never clear, for instance, whether ‘Jack Cade’ is guilty of ambition, as his ghost confesses (M2v), or whether he is the scourge of an unjust king, Henry VI, as one of the commentators suggests (N1r). Even among themselves, the commentators cannot agree on what kind of man Cade really was. According to one he is a man ‘base borne, of no abilitye’ (M1v), but for another more sympathetic reader he is undoubtedly ‘a gentylman by his learnyng’ (N1r). Winston’s attention to the Mirror’s frame is useful because it reminds us that there are other ways of understanding its politics. It ‘presents and fosters a public conversation about governance’; its co-authors take up different positions on key political issues, including ‘rebellion, obedience,

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and individual and collective action in creating a stable state’.28 None the less, this ‘conversation’ is not concerned only with governance at the highest level; nor is it always well reasoned. As Baldwin reminds us, the authors agree that ‘euery man for his parte’ will assume ‘sundrye personages, and in theyr behalfes . . . bewayle vnto [him] theyr greuous chaunces, heuy destinies, & wofull misfortunes’ (A1v). This sounds promising. Many of the ghosts admonish and advise, just as we might expect in a didactic work, while their misery serves as a stark warning to corruptible magistrates.29 But they also do more than that: they complain, wheedle, and duck responsibility, making it hard for the reader to lay blame. This aspect is forgotten in readings of the Mirror that prioritise the dedication. Scott Lucas’s argument for proto-republican sympathies in the Mirror, for example, only makes sense because he is taken in by the manipulative Worcester. ‘Worcester’ may promise to tell the ‘truth’, and he may speak feelingly of the impossibility of his situation, making us see that the cause of his fall is complicated. A direct cause, he offers, is the ‘cancard grudge’ of the Earl of Warwick (b4r); but the original cause is the king himself, whose interests Worcester served. The latter is, as Lucas describes him, an ‘anguished ghost’ who faces a ‘terrible ethical dilemma’.30 Baldwin, or whoever wrote this tragedy, likely did mean to advise magistrates to resist tyrants regardless of the personal consequences. Yet this conclusion can only be arrived at by listening to and sympathising with a fallen, compromised and eloquent protagonist who shifts blame repeatedly: Now tel me Baldwin, what fault doest thou find, In me, that iustly should such death deserue? None sure, except desire of honour blind, Which made me seke in offices to serve. What minde so good, that honors make not swerve? So mayst thou see, it only was my state That caused my death, and brought me so in hate. (b4v)

To be sure, the key argument, that officers should disobey corrupt kings whatever the consequences, is unaffected by any sympathy we may feel for Worcester. We understand Worcester’s ‘ethical dilemma’ even when we know what is the right thing to do. Yet the Mirror authors also draw our attention discreetly to the problems such sympathy poses to the reading of these complaints as moral literature. In the next complaint, the Earl of Warwick, Worcester’s enemy, emphasises that he died serving the commonwealth. Unsurprisingly, the authors express sympathy for this ghost. He must have been a ‘glorious man’, says one commentator admiringly, and what he says ‘of him selfe’ must

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be ‘true’, else ‘the people woulde never have loved him as they did’ (d1r–v). However, to arrive at this conclusion this commentator must accept Warwick’s account of why he swapped sides in the War of the Roses, and his claim ‘I was no hippocrite’ (c4v). In fact, we have already been given a different view of Warwick’s service to the commonwealth by Worcester, who describes his motive as self-interest. Even Warwick anticipates Baldwin’s suspicion: ‘Perchaunce thou thinkest my doinges were not such / As I and other do affirme they were’ (c4v). This is a more complicated view of the Mirror than has previously been suggested: the experience of reading the tragedies in 1559 raises more problems than a moral frame can resolve because the tales are affecting. A crucial question that arises from this observation is how it influences our understanding of the Mirror as political writing. Indeed, is it still a political work? The Mirror, as we have seen, has long been defended as such: its tragedies dramatise a political thesis; or, as has been recently argued, they reflect topical concerns, even offering consolation to the losing side.31 Always it is assumed that there is a position to be advanced or defended. However, I am suggesting that the process of composing and reflecting on these tragedies is also part of its moralpolitical argument. It is concerned with how judgements are formed, and not simply with making them. The possibility that the tension I am registering, between rhetorical affect and moral argument, is very much in the minds of the Mirror’s readers and authors is suggested by contributions to the second edition printed in 1563. In several of these, prosopopoeia makes sympathy the routine response to the tragic tales related, but it also makes this an uncomfortable experience. One of these tales is Thomas Sackville’s ‘The complaynt of Henrye duke of Buckingham’. Like many of the tragic protagonists in the Mirror, Sackville’s Buckingham is a deeply ambivalent character. At the start of his complaint he represents himself conventionally enough as a warning to ambitious princes.32 Buckingham is quick to remind Sackville of his high estate: he is of royal blood, a peerless prince who made the mistake of befriending a ‘wretched wyght’ (S2r), Richard, the Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III. By his own admission he was Richard’s ‘chief complyce’ in his rise to power (S2v), and he freely admits the terror they unleashed on their contemporaries to achieve this: ‘We spared none whose life could ought forlet / Our wycked purpose to his pas to cum’ (S4r). He even implicates himself in the murder of the two ‘gylteles’ princes, the heirs to the throne imprisoned in the tower by Richard (S4v). This confession leads Buckingham to accept his fall, at least initially. He compares himself to other fallen ‘princes’ who have committed

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violence and been punished accordingly – Cyrus, Cambises, Brutus – concluding piously ‘So iust is God in al his dreadfull doomes’ (S2v). However, this is only half the story he has to tell. The rest of his complaint describes vividly the awakening of his conscience, the first stirrings of his rebellious thoughts as his disgust at Richard’s ruthlessness increases, and his unwise confession of these thoughts to a servant who betrays him. Much of this complaint is concerned with the passions of Buckingham: his remorse, his desire for revenge, his physical suffering on his imprisonment. As a result, this ghost does not sustain the self-criticism of the opening pages, but rather casts himself as a victim of circumstance and the ingratitude of the ‘commontie’ (T4v). Indeed, Buckingham unexpectedly likens himself to ancient, virtuous Roman statesmen, like Scipio, who were let down by the people they spent their political lives advancing (U1r). The difficulty of this complaint rests not on this about-turn but on the lack of commentary. There is no prose frame prefacing this tragedy. This is replaced by a poetic ‘Induction’ in which Sackville descends to hell in imitation of Virgil, accompanied by ‘Sorrow’. Repeatedly, Sackville shares the emotions of the passionate figures he meets, so that by the time he encounters grieving Buckingham his heart is softened: ‘My harte so molte to see his griefe so great, / As felingly me thought it dropt awaye’ (R4v). Curiously, this complaint passes without comment by the other authors, who acknowledge Sackville’s innovation but worry only about what he means by representing ‘hell’. The auditors are equally uninterested in the argument of Churchyard’s tragedy of ‘Shore’s wife’. Churchyard uses the gender of this ‘faulter’ to reflect differently on the same problem highlighted by the Worcester poet and by Sackville: who is to blame? Shore’s wife, mistress to Edward IV, and later his queen, is a victim several times over, or so she tells us. On the one hand, this is a story of the entrapment and subjection of an ordinary woman by a powerful man: ‘Who can withstand a puissaunt kynges desyre?’ (Z3r). If nature had made her less lovely, she complains, ‘Then had I kept my name and good renowne’, while her friends and family are also not ‘cleare from blame’, since she was bound in marriage (to Shore) before she was ready (Z3r–v). ‘The lesse defame redoundes to my disprayse,’ she explains, ‘I was entyste by traynes, and trapt by trust’ (Z4r). But, on the other hand, this tragedy is a lament for the loss of power: I gouerned him that ruled all this land: I bare the sword though he did weare the crowne, I strake the stroke that threwe the mightye downe. (Z4v)

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Again no guidance is given; the commentators simply urge Churchyard to write another complaint. In fact, Churchyard did do this, contributing the complaint of Cardinal Wolsey to a later edition (1587), which is prefaced by the most daring adaptation of the prose frame yet. It is ‘Wolsey’, not Churchyard, who speaks this, and he promises a tale ‘sadly and sorrowfully tolde’. Moreover, Wolsey also describes his speaking out as an act of patronage, a gesture of ‘beneuolence and curtesy of minde’ and a bestowal of ‘credit’ on his noter, Churchyard, who ‘not only hath preferred my tragedy to the Printer’, but has made public a matter ‘secret and helde priuate among a fewe’. In addition, Wolsey boasts of his ability to sway the king at will and gives us a compelling account of the persuasiveness of prosopopoeia: ‘A tale by signes, with sighes and sobs set out, / Moues peoples mindes, to pity plagued men.’ 33 The complication for the reader is the suspicion that the sympathy we feel for this complex figure is a consequence of ‘his’ eloquence and the bias of Churchyard. Complaints such as these make sympathy an uncomfortable part of our reading experience. They foreground the tension between judgement and rhetorical affect that was already an issue in the 1559 Mirror by leaving us without a moral guide (if indeed, the prose frame ever provided that). In contrast, we could say that John Higgins’s The first parte of the Mirour for magistrates (1574) makes sympathy a comfortable part of our reading experience. This Mirror is a study of the fates of the first Britons, inspired by Ferrers’s throwaway comment in the preface (A2r); it begins with the story of the Trojan Brutus, the mythical founder of Britain, and ends with the repelling of Julius Caesar, and throughout, pity and compassion are foregrounded as proper responses to the complaints. In this, Higgins leads the way. In his ‘Authours induction’, a form he adapts from Sackville, Higgins makes clear that he values the complaints as affective tragedies. His first reading of ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’ ‘set [his] heart on fire’; on a second reading, he ‘marked playne eache party tell his fall’ and adds ‘Mee thought in mynde, I sawe those men in deede.’ 34 This emphasis on affect is reinforced in the tragedies he composes. This does not mean that he abandons the moral complications of earlier authors. One of his complainants, Elstride, has clearly led an immoral life. She was concubine to Humber, king of the Huns, then to Locrinus, king of the Britons, before she was drowned by the latter’s wife, Gwendoline. Like Shore’s wife, she is both victim and agent. Her father’s decision to gift her to Humber meets with her approval: ‘I rather was content: / In hope of crowne with Humber to consent’

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(C5v). However, no other Mirror author dramatises so fully the sighs and tears of characters like Elstride, whose unsuccessful pleading for her life makes her a pitiable figure. Even more pitiable is the innocent Sabrine, Elstride’s illegitimate daughter, who is murdered despite her eloquence. It is perhaps not surprising that this Mirror should have been dismissed as ‘sentimental’, especially given other changes that Higgins introduces. For instance, he completely abandons the prose frame, replacing this with ‘poetical lenvoys’ which, according to Campbell, are ‘devoted to purely narrative and descriptive detail’.35 Yet, as we have seen, ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’ already uses rhetorical affect to complicate moral judgement. Prosopopoeia is the figure that inspires the Mirror’s authors, and it underpins the transformation of this work. Higgins’s contribution made this affective appeal integral to the Mirror’s argument, enabling him not only to recognise the complexity of many of the tragedies but also to value the humanitas destroyed by tyranny. We can discover this intent in some of the other changes that Higgins makes. He shares Baldwin’s concern to restrain ambitious governors. His Mirror includes a motley collection of tyrannical and generally useless male rulers, who cannot restrain their wills. However, Higgins also dramatises the effects of their wilfulness on those who do not possess power; this is why female complaint is so powerful. Through figures like Elstride and Sabrine, Higgins portrays a merciless society in the grip of personal and public tyranny. In this work the commonplaces and proverbs that remind people of their obligations to one another are inverted. Gwendoline is stony-hearted at the sight of Elstride’s suffering: ‘No teares, nor sobbes, nor sighes might ought aswage / The gelous queene, or molifie hir mynde’ (D1v). Elstride’s distress only leads her to conclude ruthlessly that ‘the proverbe sayes that pitie, / Hath leudly loste full many a noble citie’ (D2v). Meanwhile, though Sabrine’s ‘lamenting made the souldiers sad’, no one intervenes, and this leads her to reflect, paradoxically, on the cruelty of such expressions of compassion: ‘You wot the Commons vse such prouerbs still: / And yet the captiues poore no better are, / It rather helpes their pained hartes to kill’ (D5v). This is not the conclusion we are meant to draw from this Mirror. The importance of compassion as a virtue of the temperate leader is emphasised in the first complaint spoken by Albernact, one of the three sons of Brutus, and it is his father’s conduct that matters in his complaint. Brutus is not infallible; his decision on his deathbed to divide his kingdom is hardly wise (this Mirror also tells the story of King Lear). But Brutus is an exemplary figure in many respects; for example, he is not an invader, since Britain is inhabited only by giants when he and

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his displaced people arrive. Indeed, most of this narrative about the search for a new land represents Brutus’s repeated refusal to conquer other peoples, including the Greeks who have enslaved many of his fellow Trojans: ‘Wee rather ought by clemency to rayse / Our fame to sky, then by a sauage guyse, / Sithe Gods and men, both cruelty despise’ (A6r). Moreover, the Trojans also represent a functioning community. Brutus listens to and is guided by his counsellors. This is recalled in the final complaint of the heroic Nennius, who won Julius Caesar’s sword in battle. In this complaint, it is the council who, recalling their Trojan forebears, advise Cassibellane’s ironical response to this imperial Roman aggressor: ‘Wee are to fight, and rather then to frendship prest, / To saue our country’ (I7v). How should we understand Higgins’s transformation of Baldwin’s Mirror? I would suggest not as a ‘disintegration’ of Baldwin’s original moral-political purpose. Rather, it might be more accurate to describe the 1574 edition as clarifying and extending an ongoing dialogue among several collaborators about the nature of political virtue in a reforming commonwealth. Higgins is not the outsider that scholars would have us believe; he is a friend of Churchyard, whose complaint of Wolsey is included in the 1587 edition of the Mirror that Higgins compiled.36 However, there is one way in which the 1574 Mirror does represent a deliberate transformation of Baldwin’s Mirror. Baldwin’s emphasis on retributive justice in his preface does not always fit well with tragedies that call upon our sympathies in such varied and complex ways. For Higgins, compiling his Mirror some twenty years later, when the language of reformation in government was more conciliatory, this called for a different way of reflecting on the experience of political failure. Thus, he re-writes Baldwin’s dedication, re-interpreting his emphasis on ‘justice’ to accommodate the moral compromises we have noted. In this he is following a well-respected source, Cicero’s De officiis (‘On social duties’). It was another political failure, the collapse of the Roman republic, that led Cicero to clarify anew the obligations of citizens. He made private conduct or ‘social duties’ a political matter; the virtue of temperance, which involves the skill of working out what is the right thing to do in a whole range of different social situations, is intertwined with the political virtues of fortitude, prudence and justice.37 The opening of Higgins’s dedication echoes Baldwin’s almost word for word: Amongst the wise (right Honorable) whose sentences (for the moste parte) tende either to teache the attaining of vertue or eschuing of vice, Plotinus that wonderfull and excellent Phylosopher hath these wordes: The propertie

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of Temperaunce is to couet nothing which may be repented: not to excead the bandes of measure, and to keepe desire vnder the yooke of Reason. (*3r)

The one change he immediately makes seems insignificant: Plotinus is substituted for Plato as the source for Higgins’s opening ‘notable sentence’, which remains much the same: in Baldwin, that the ambitious should not seek office; in Higgins, that officers should ‘couet nothing’. However, in his naming the virtue of office as ‘Temperance’, not ‘Justice’, Higgins is making a significant change. In contrast to Baldwin, Higgins has nothing to say about divine retribution but a great deal to say about worldly ‘justice’ and its relationship to the other virtues. There are four cardinal virtues, he notes, echoing Cicero’s De officiis, and each has a relationship to the others; this changes how we understand ‘Justice’: Iustice that incomparable vertue . . . [is] a perpetual and constant will which geueth to euery man his right. Yet if she be not constant, which is the gift of fortitude; nor equal in discerning right from wrong, wherin is prudence; nor vse proportion in iudgement and sentence, which pertaineth to temperance: shee can neuer be called equitie or iustice, but fraud, deceit, iniustice and iniurie. (*4r–v)

This helps us to see why the problems posed by its eloquent protagonists from 1559 onwards matter, and how its tragedies might be read, by using ‘proportion in judgement and sentence’. Higgins understands that the reader is central to this work’s moral-political purpose. We are fully implicated in its practice rather than being enlisted only as a passive recipient of its lessons. This makes the Mirror effective and affective political writing not least because it refuses to teach a lesson.

Notes 1. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 240. 2. L. B. Campbell (ed.), The Mirror for Magistrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 53. 3. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), p. 292, n. 18. 4. John Higgins (1574 and 1587); Thomas Blenerhasset (1578), Richard Niccols (1610). For a survey of this work’s print history see Campbell, Mirror for Magistrates, pp. 3–20, and Elizabeth M. A. Human’s ‘House of Mirrors: Textual Variation and the Mirror for Magistrates’, Literary Compass (2008), pp. 772–90.

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5. L. B. Campbell (ed.), Parts Added to The Mirror for Magistrates by John Higgins and Thomas Blenerhasset (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946), p. 17. 6. William Baldwin, A myrroure for magistrates. Wherein may be seen by example of other, with howe greuous plages vices are punished: and howe frayle and vnstable worldly prosperitie is founde, euen of those whom Fortune seemeth most highly to fauour (London, 1559), sig. *2v. 7. Campbell, Mirror for Magistrates, pp. 52–4. 8. Lawrence D. Green, ‘Modes of perception in the Mirror for Magistrates’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 44 (1980–1), pp. 117–33, p. 118. 9. Scott Lucas, ‘“Let none such office take, save he that can for right his prince forsake”: A Mirror for Magistrates, resistance theory and the Elizabethan monarchical republic’, in John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 91–107, p. 96. 10. Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 99. Noted in Lucas, ‘“Let none such office take”’, p. 100. 11. Lucas, ‘“Let none such office take”’, p. 97. 12. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence Conteyning the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorick (London, 1577), sig. O3r. 13. Campbell, Parts Added, pp. 17, 14. 14. Paul Budra, A Mirror for Magistrates and the De Casibus Tradition (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000), p. 35. See also Tom Betteridge, Literature and Politics in the English Reformation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 182; Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity, pp. 99–100; Philip Schwyzer, ‘John Higgins’, Dictionary of National Biography. For a summary of different views see Meredith Skura, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and the beginnings of English autobiography’, English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006), pp. 26–59, pp. 37–8. 15. For a defence ‘of the value of reading the successive Mirrors’ see also Human, ‘House of Mirrors’, p. 784. 16. See Scott Lucas’s discussion of Ferrers’ ‘The Tragedy of Edmund Duke of Somerset’ in ‘Coping with providentialism: Trauma, identity, and the failure of the English Reformation’, in Yvonne Bruce (ed.), Images of Matter: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), pp. 255–73, pp. 257, 266–7. See also Lucas, ‘The consolation of tragedy: A Mirror for Magistrates and the fall of the “Good Old Duke of Somerset”’, Studies in Philology, 100 (2003), pp. 44–70. 17. Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 5. 18. Ibid., p. 15. See also Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 7, esp. pp. 199–200. 19. Alison Thorne, ‘“Large complaints in little papers”: Negotiating Ovidian genealogies of complaint in Drayton’s England’s Heroicall Epistles’, Renaissance Studies, 22 (2008), pp. 368–84, p. 382. See also Danielle

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

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Clarke, ‘Ovid’s Heroides, Drayton and the articulation of the feminine in the English Renaissance’, Renaissance Studies, 22 (2008), pp. 385–400. On the importance of mourning to historical writing in the period see Dermot Cavanagh, ‘History, mourning and memory in Henry V’, in Dermot Cavanagh, Stuart Hampton-Reeves and Stephen Longstaff (eds), Shakespeare’s Histories and Counter-Histories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 32–48. Gavin Alexander, ‘Prosopopoiea: The speaking figure’, in Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Karrin Ettenhuber (eds), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 97–112, p. 98. Stephen Orgel, ‘Marginal maternity: Reading Lady Anne Clifford’s A Mirror for Magistrates’, in Douglas A. Brooks (ed.), Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 267–89, p. 275. See Alan Stewart’s Chapter 5 in this volume. Orgel, ‘Marginal maternity’, p. 275–7. Ibid., pp. 275–7. John King, ‘William Baldwin’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lucas, ‘“Let none such office take”’, p. 95. Jessica Winston, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and public political discourse in Elizabethan England’, Studies in Philology, 101 (2004), pp. 381–400, pp. 387–90, 382. On the link between the preface and the prose frame see also Sherri Geller, ‘Editing under the influence of the standard textual hierarchy: Misrepresenting A Mirror for Magistrates in the nineteenth- and twentieth –century editions’, Textual Cultures, 2 (2007), pp. 43–77. Winston, ‘Mirror for Magistrates and public political discourse’, pp. 397, 395. Budra, Mirror for Magistrates, p. 10. Lucas, ‘“Let none such office take”’, p. 97. Scott Lucas, ‘The suppressed edition and the creation of the “orthodox” Mirror for Magistrates’, Renaissance Papers, (1994), pp. 31–54, pp. 34–5. William Baldwin, A Myrrour for Magistrates etc. (London 1563), sig. S1r. John Higgins, The Mirour for Magistrates . . . with the addition of divers tragedies enlarged (London, 1587), sigs. 2M1r–v, 2M5v. John Higgins, The first parte of the Mirour for magistrates, containing the falles of the first infortunate Princes of this lande: From the comming of Brute to the incarnation of our sauiour and redemer Iesu Christe (London, 1574), sig. A1r–v. Campbell, Parts Added, pp. 14, 16. See Churchyard’s dedicatory poem advertising Higgins’s employability in Higgins, Huloet’s Dictionaries, newelye corrected, amended, set in order and enlarged (London, 1572), *3r. On temperance see Cicero, Marcus Tullius Ciceroes three bookes of dueties, trans. Nicholas Grimald (London, 1574), sigs. F1r–I3r.

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Chapter 4

‘Not without Mustard’: Self-publicity and Polemic in Early Modern Literary London Andrew Hadfield

In Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), there are a number of sharp and sardonic references to other writers. When the absurd Sogliardo is designing his own coat of arms, Puntarvolo suggests that he adopt the motto ‘Not without Mustard’, an apparent parody of William Shakespeare’s acquisition of a coat of arms and the assumption of his family’s motto ‘Non Sanz Droict’, ‘not without right’.1 As Katherine Duncan-Jones has pointed out, it is hard not to make this connection, ‘in a play conspicuously peppered with allusions to Shakespeare’s recent work, especially Henry IV and Julius Caesar’, particularly if we also bear in mind that ‘the bright yellow colour of mustard surely alludes to the lavish gold/yellow of Shakespeare’s coat’. Jonson ‘continued to mock Shakespeare for his “gentle” status even after his own social advancement’.2 Duncan-Jones also notes that the quotation actually comes from Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell (1592). Nashe, like Jonson, is mocking a young social climber, a common enough target in satirical writing, especially in the aggressive, confrontational and litigious 1590s. Indeed, the problem of the poor young man’s lack of mustard is mentioned four times within the space of a page, three times in one paragraph: A yoong Heyre or Cockney, that is his Mothers Darling, if hee haue playde the waste-good at the Innes of the Court or about London, and that neither his Students pension, nor his vnthrifts credite, will serue to maintaine his Collidge of whores any longer, falles in a quarrelling humor with his fortune, because she made him not King of the Indies, and sweares and stares, after ten in the hundreth, that nere a such Pesant as his Father or brother shall keepe him vnder: he will to the sea, and teare the gold out of the Spaniards throats, but he will haue it, byrlady: And when he comes there, poore soule, hee lyes in brine, in Balist, and is lamentable sicke of the scuruies: his dainty fare is turned to a hungry feast of Dogs & Cats, or Haberdine [dried or salt cod] and poore Iohn [salt hake] at the most, and which is lamentablest of all, that without Mustard.

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As a mad Ruffion, on a time, being in daunger of shipwrack by a tempest, and seeing all other at their vowes and praiers . . . began thus to reconcile his soule to heauen. O Lord, if it may seeme good to thee to deliuer me from this feare of vntimely death, I vowe before thy Throne and all thy starry Host, neuer to eate Haberdine more whilest I liue. Well, so it fell out, that the Sky cleared and the tempest ceased, and this careless wretch, that made such a mockery of praier, readie to set foot a Land, cryed out: not without Mustard, good Lord, not without Mustard: as though it had been the greatest torment in the world, to haue eaten Haberdine without Mustard.3

Nor is this all: in Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599), a work published just before Every Man Out was first performed, Nashe makes further allusions to the need for mustard to add proper taste and spice to food, and his prominent literary allies, Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, made a similar reference in their play A Looking Glass for London and England, first performed in 1589 or 1590, and published in 1594 (Nashe, Works, IV, p. 101). Why should Jonson refer back to Nashe? And what is Nashe actually writing about? In answering the second question first, I think we can safely conclude that Nashe is not simply referring to food. Rather, he is using taste and consumption as a symbolic reference to wider issues of writing and culture. As was well known, Nashe’s friend Robert Greene had perished – or was at least said to have perished, by friends and enemies alike – after a ‘fatall banquet of Rhenish wine and pickled herring’, as Nashe recorded in Strange Newes (1592) (Works, I, pp. 287–8). In Nashe’s writings spicy food was associated with risk taking, something that was desired and valuable, but which could destroy as well as elevate and ennoble: earlier in Strange News Nashe had produced a typical pun on herring/hearing in joking that Greene had ‘surfieted not of Pickled hearing, but of an exceeding feare of his [Harvey’s] Familiar Epistles’ (Works, I, p. 279). Later, Nashe wrote a whole treatise in praise of the herring, Lenten Stuff, playing extensively on the relationship between the fish as the staple commodity of the town that supported him in hiding, Great Yarmouth, and the red herring as a misleading story. Such evidence would suggest that Nashe’s young man at the Inns of Court is not wrong to want mustard; rather, his error has been to fritter away his money so that his life has become dull and restricted. Such matters and such a tangled history should force us to rethink Jonson’s reference to Shakespeare. The general assumption is that Jonson is simply being a snob and is looking down on Shakespeare, a man without his own classical learning, strangely blind to his own

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aspirations and obvious social climbing, given that he was the son of a bricklayer. But if we bear in mind Nashe’s comments, as well as the fact that Nashe was also of humble origins, being the third child of a Suffolk clergyman who had died in 1587, it seems more likely that Jonson is referring to the common dangers that defined any writing career. How can you thrive without mustard – or herrings, especially the red ones that populate the pages of Lenten Stuffe – all good, cheap, native fare? Why, though, does Jonson allude to Nashe in a play in 1599? The answer is that Nashe’s writings are crucial for understanding the literary map of the 1590s. Nashe was especially important in 1599, as his quarrel with Gabriel Harvey had led to their works against each other being banned, along with a host of other satirical, political and pornographic material. On 1 June, the archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, and the bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, took the extraordinary step of calling in Nashe and Harvey’s works, and prohibiting them from writing anything else. Harvey retreated to Saffron Walden and wrote nothing more, although he lived on until 1630. Nashe was dead by 1601. The ban also prohibited publishing works of history without the permission of the Privy Council, and plays that were not licensed for performance. It was followed by the public burning (4 June) of a number of books at the Stationers’ Hall, Nashe’s works probably among them, along with John Marston’s satires Pygmalion and The Scourge of Vilanie (both 1598), and works by Edward Guilpin, Thomas Middleton, John Davies and others. The Harvey–Nashe quarrel, hard on the heels of the Marprelate controversy, spectacularly transformed the range and scope of Elizabethan letters, bringing the disputational nature of religious controversy into the realm of literature. The Martin Marprelate tracts were seven Presbyterian works produced in 1588–9 on a movable printing press by an author or authors hostile to the emerging episcopal culture of the Church of England: hence the pseudonym Martin Marprelate.4 The tracts were scandalous, acerbic and vociferous, demanding that the church return to its true vocation, making use of a long tradition of Reformation satire, and owing much to such figures as John Bale, John Skelton, Thomas Becon, Luke Shepherd and Simon Fish.5 They were alive to the culture of print, skilfully parodying recently established conventions and paving the way for the polemical literary culture that dominated the 1590s. From now on theological dispute, issues of church government and questions of style were inextricably linked: precisely what the ‘hotter’ sort of Protestants had argued, and exactly what their opponents had hoped to refute. In a sense this battle was an extension of the conflict over adiaphora,

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the concept of ‘things indifferent’, which, as Patrick Collinson has argued, ‘formed the corner-stone of Anglicanism’.6 The vestarian controversy, ‘the major ecclesiastical crisis of the 1560s’, saw Archbishop Parker attempt to impose the square cap and surplice on a largely reluctant clergy, many of whom, like the influential and widely respected president of Magdalen College, Oxford, Laurence Humphrey, saw the garments as ‘bitter reminders of popery’.7 The crisis had passed, but had been one of the festering resentments within the church which had helped fuel the Marprelate controversy. One of the demands of the Marprelate tracts was that the authorities suspend their campaign against ministers who refused to wear the cap and surplice.8 The problem for the authorities was such that even loyal mainstream Calvinists, like Edmund Grindal, voiced their opposition, illustrating that many within the newly established state church were wary of official policy and saw the style of worship as an intrinsic element of its matter.9 It was a short step from modes of church ceremony and styles of ecclesiastical dress to styles of literary and intellectual debate. The ‘hotter’ Protestants wanted spicier rhetorical food and, through a series of manoeuvres, they had won. What seemed like aggressive ‘puritan’ polemic had become one of the defining modes of literary production, if not its most important element. Writers connected with Grindal, such as Edmund Spenser, found themselves drawn into this style of writing. Spenser defended Grindal in his first major work, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), casting Algrind as the victim of harsh royal punishment in alluding to Grindal’s rustication as archbishop of Canterbury for not acting strongly enough against the Puritans.10 But Spenser’s allusions are mild and nuanced, and bear little comparison to the vitriolic debates ranging around him. Later, however, his satirical attacks brought an unusual public rebuke from his mentor, Gabriel Harvey, who argued that the aggressive Mother Hubberds Tale (1591) had been an error as it did not conform to the urbane ideal of literature and letters. Complaining of the plethora of aggressive and misconceived work that dominated the literary marketplace, written by those who ‘professe the Arte of railing’, Harvey lumps together ‘Cormorants, and Drones, Dunces, and Hypocritical hoat spurres, Earthwormes, and Pinchefart Penny-fathers’, and then includes Spenser as one of the offenders against decorum and taste: ‘they can lash poore slaues, and spurgall asses mightily, they can tell parlous Tales of Beares and Foxes, as shrewdlye as Mother Hubbard’.11 The point is that if even so learned and urbane a writer as Spenser can stoop so low, the decline of letters is a serious matter. It is hard not to see Harvey lamenting the ways in which literary culture had developed

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in the late 1580s and early 1590s, one that had infected both himself and his protégé. If we know what went before, it is hard to overestimate the importance of this 1599 act of censorship, one that, as Cyndia Clegg has pointed out, ‘was extraordinary because it affected both the London Stationers and literary works, and was apparently unmotivated by concerns about conformity or treason’.12 The other key moments of censorship in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England – or non-censorship, as they usually happened after a work was published, or a play was performed, and then had to be called in – occurred because a particular work had offended someone, crossed a line and/or led to a diplomatic incident. John Stubbes’s Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf (1580) caused serious difficulties for Elizabeth and her government; Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale gravely offended Lord Burghley; John Hayward’s The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII (1599) looked as if it was trying to argue the case for Essex as king. Even so, all these writers enjoyed successful careers once their crimes had been investigated and punishments administered (in Stubbes’s case, the loss of his right, writing, hand). The Bishops’ Ban of 1599 was a more widespread assault on literary culture. Nashe and Harvey, unlike other victims of censorship, were silenced. Even though satires were published once the crisis generated by Essex – which was undoubtedly a major factor behind the ban – had ended with his execution (25 February 1601), literary culture was clearly changed by the intervention of the authorities. As Anthony Dawson and Gretchen Minton have pointed out, after the Bishops’ Ban, ‘satire found a home in drama, with Marston [whose satires had been banned] and Ben Jonson as two of its chief practitioners’.13 Although Cyndia Clegg argues that the whole episode can be explained as a specific reaction to this crisis, it is odd that Nashe and Harvey should bear such a heavy punishment.14 Nashe’s writing defined the literary scene in London in the 1590s. It is clear that Jonson, like every other writer working in the city, had an eye on what Nashe was doing.15 Nashe was more than keen to be involved, to co-operate and collaborate with other writers, creating a group of his own friends and allies, and to alienate those who quarrelled with him, creating the alliances and divisions that constituted the map of literary London. His first publication was the preface to Robert Greene’s romance Menaphon, published in 1589, a work that looked back to John Lyly’s Euphues, as well as across to Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; he collaborated with Christopher Marlowe in writing The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage (published in 1594); he wrote

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the preface to the pirated edition of Astrophil and Stella (1591), and his prose fiction The Unfortunate Traveller, as Gavin Alexander has recently pointed out, ‘reacts ironically to Sidney’s romance’; and it is likely that he played some role in the massive project of Henry VI plays written in the late 1580s or early 1590s.16 Most significantly, he collaborated with Jonson on the lost play The Isle of Dogs in the summer of 1597, a work which everyone agrees must have been ‘an exceedingly subversive play’.17 The Isle of Dogs, the small peninsula across from Greenwich, was where Elizabeth kennelled her hounds – hence its name – and the play undoubtedly lampooned a series of servile and fawning courtiers who were surely not best pleased at how they were represented. Nashe fled to Great Yarmouth, and Jonson went to prison, but the real significance was that plays were banned in the short term. The lord mayor and aldermen of the City of London asked for the Privy Council to suppress all stage plays throughout the city, and they did, on 28 July 1597. Within the space of two years Nashe had managed on two separate occasions to have whole areas of literary production shut down: the play houses, and then published works – a significant achievement, and a testament to his extraordinary power and influence in the decade in which he was active. How had this state of affairs developed? Why had Nashe become so powerful? Lorna Hutson has suggested that, while triggered by a specific series of events, the ban was part of a wider unease resulting from the Marprelate controversy and ‘from a post-Marprelate sensitivity to the subversive potential’ of printed works.18 The Marprelate tracts produced a series of responses from writers employed by the archbishops of Canterbury and London, including Anthony Munday, John Lyly, Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe, who probably wrote An Almond for a Parratt (1590), and may also have written all or part of The Returne of the Renowned Cavaliero Pasquill of England (1589) and The First Part of Pasquils Apologie (1590). Joseph Black is especially acute in observing the connections between the two sides of the conflict, one that produces collaborative discourses: Martinist and anti-Martinist works participated in a complex dialogue . . . In a real sense they are also products of one another. What came out of this paper skirmish were not new ideas about the ideal organization of the church but new ways of presenting those ideas to a public increasingly recognized as an entity that could be addressed in print.19

Both sides developed a shared style of polemical exchange, one that ultimately placed greater emphasis on the mode of address than the actual substance of the argument. In The Just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior (1589) (a Martinist tract), there is a description of the

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archbishop of Canterbury, leading to a damning account of the Church of England, its government and role in English society: For indeed thy uncle Canter. Is no less than a most vile and cursed tyrant in the church. And a plain Antichrist he is even by the doctrine of the Church of England, and so by the doctrine of our church are the rest of our cursed bishops, in the proof of which point by and by I will a little insist. And because many take snuff that my father [i.e., Martin] should account them, yea, and prove them petty antichrists, I will manifestly prove them to be so, even by the doctrine of the church of England, maintained by statute and her Majesty’s royal privilege. For my father now hath taught us such a way to reason against these Caiaphases, in the Theses set down by thee, as will anger all the veins in John Canterbury’s heart.20

Such invective, with its repetitions and patterning, and the heavy stress on colloquial diction, also characterises the anti-Martinist treatises. The description of a Puritan in the dialogue The Returne of the Renowned Cavaliero Pasquill of England illustrates this point nicely: They have an itch in their eares, that would be clawed with new points of doctrine never dreamed of; and an itch in their fingers, that would be nointed with the golden Aenulatum of the Church. I knowe they are commonly called Puritans, and not amisse, that title is one of the marks they beare about them. They have a marke in the heade, they are selfe conceited. They take themselves to be pure, when they are filthy in Gods sight: They haue a mark in the eye, theyr lookes are haughtie; They have a marke in the mouth, a verie blacke tooth, they are A generation that cursse theyr father. (Nashe, Works, I, p. 73)

Again, there is the same insistent repetition of words and phrases (‘itch’, ‘marke’), a rhetorical trick to make opponents seem limited and stupid. While the Martinists represent the establishment as complacent and dull, the anti-Martinists represent the Martinists as self-obsessed and inward looking, each vice mirroring the other and revealing opponents to be arrogant hypocrites. The style and nature of the Marprelate controversy lived on, as is clear from the frequent references to the names and texts, when it produced a further, this time more protracted, dispute in print: the Harvey–Nashe quarrel.21 As has often been pointed out, the two disputes are indelibly and intricately linked.22 Nashe’s great editor R. B. McKerrow argues that before the quarrel started there appears to have been bad blood between the three Harvey brothers – Gabriel, John and Richard – and Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford, so that a reference to Harvey’s Three Letters, his correspondence with Edmund Spenser, in Oxford’s client John Lyly’s anti-Martinist tract Pappe with a Hatchet (1589) produced a furious response in Piers Perceval (1590) by Richard Harvey, who took the opportunity to excoriate all the anti-Martinist

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authors. Harvey was not eager to defend the Martinists: rather, his aim was to attack the anti-Martinists, but this opened up the possibility of a serious dispute. Nashe attacked Richard Harvey in his preface to Robert Greene’s prose romance Menaphon, and also dismissed the value of Ramist logic, which Gabriel Harvey was trying to introduce into the English university system and which had been the subject of his treatise on rhetoric, Ciceronianus (1577). Even at this early stage Nashe was able to boast that he ‘arme[d] [his] stile against all’ (Nashe, Works, III, p. 322). The gamekeeper who had been employed to defend the Church of England was about to become the poacher who eventually closed the theatres down and stopped the printing presses. The quarrel quickly accelerated. Richard Harvey returned to the fray with Lamb of God (1590), attacking Nashe. Robert Greene responded with some aggressive comments about all three Harvey brothers in Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592), although it is possible that these passages, deleted in later editions, were by Nashe.23 Nashe weighed in with Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell, the work that Jonson recalled so aptly in Every Man Out. At this point Gabriel Harvey assumed responsibility for the assaults on his family honour. He published Fowre Letters and Certaine Sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene and other parties abused by him (1592), which excoriated Greene in no uncertain terms, but rather patronised Nashe as a young writer not really in control of his ideas. Nashe responded with Strange Newes, Of the intercepting certaine Letters, and a Convoy of Verses, as they were going privilie to victual the Low Countries , and Harvey responded in kind with Pierces Supererogation, or a new prayse of the old ass (1593), undoubtedly his finest polemical moment, as Harvey trawls through Nashe’s works making a number of spiteful observations, mocking his opponent’s wit and style, and returning the taunts that had been directed at him earlier. Nashe then proffered what appears to have been a sincere apology to Harvey in the preface to Christ’s Teares Over Jerusalem (1593). Unfortunately Harvey seems either to have missed this, or thought the apology inadequate, and his New Letter of Notable Contents (1593) continued the quarrel with some more insults. Nashe consequently withdrew his apology in the second edition of Christ’s Tears (1594). He waited before launching what turned out to be his last attack, Have With You to Saffron-Walden (1596), perhaps because he was expecting his fellow anti-Martinists, especially John Lyly, to pour scorn on the Harveys. A final work, The Trimming of Thomas Nashe (1597), once attributed to Harvey, berates Nashe for many more literary crimes, including his co-authorship of The Isle of Dogs. It also contains a woodcut of Nashe in irons, perhaps

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based on fact, perhaps a wish-fulfilment of the author. Nashe claims that he is about to reply in Lenten Stuff, but he never does, and the quarrel effectively ended in 1597. Of course, it was not forgotten, as the edict of June 1599 testifies. Both authors are acutely aware of the origins of their quarrel in the Marprelate controversy and refer to it at key points. In Pierces Supererogation Harvey boasts, extremely unwisely, that he was suspected by some readers of actually being Martin Marprelate: Had I bene Martin (as for a time I was vainely suspected by such madd Copesmates, that can surmise any thing for their purpose, howsoever unlikely, or monstrous;) I would have beene so farre from being moved by such a fantasticall Confuter, that it should have beene one of My May-games, or August triumphes, to have driven Officials, Commissaries, Archdeacons, Deanes, Chauncellors, Suffraganes, Bishops, and Archbishops . . . to entertaine such an odd, light-hedded fellow for their defence.24

Nashe treats Harvey’s gauche mock-modesty with predictable satirical ferocity in Have With You to Saffron-Walden: ‘I have a laughing hickocke [hiccup] to heare him saye, hee was once suspected for Martin, when there is nere a Pursuiant in England, in the pulling on his boots, ever thought of him or imputed to him so much wit’ (Nashe, Works, III, p. 138). The put-down is clear enough. Nashe may have written against the Martinists, but at least they were worthy opponents: witty, dangerous and hard to combat. Harvey is not in their league and is much easier to defeat. The implication is also that Nashe has learned – or, rather, honed – his literary style in the battle with the Martinists, a dangerous open acknowledgement that perhaps goes some way towards explaining the Bishops’ Ban. Religious controversy and literary style have become inextricably linked. It is especially important to look at what the quarrel did to Harvey and the ways in which he was represented by his opponent. In the final contribution to the quarrel, The Trimming of Thomas Nashe, which is almost certainly not Harvey’s work, someone else has intervened and shown that the two figures, Nashe and Harvey, have merged as one, exactly what happened in the earlier Marprelate quarrel. The work is probably that of its purported author, Richard Lichfield, as there was a Richard Lichfield, barber-humorist of Cambridge, addressed by Nashe in the prefatory letter to Have With You To Saffron-Walden.25 The pamphlet opens with Lichfield in his shop getting ready to cut Nashe’s hair: Sir, here is a gentleman at the doore would speake with you. Let him come in. M. Nashe! Welcome. What, you would be trimd? & I cannot denie you that favour. Come, sit downe, Ile trim you my selfe. How now? What makes

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you sit downe so tenderly? You crinch in your buttocks like old father Pater patriae, he that was father to a whole countrey of bastards.26

The tract is indeed much wittier and more colloquial than many of Harvey’s earlier assaults on Nashe (notably, the rather leaden and pompous Fowre Letters and Certaine Sonnets), and Lichfield makes a serious effort to run with jokes much as Nashe does. There are long passages which expand a single idea, such as the insulting description of Nashe’s breath and mouth (pp. 21–4); an extended comment on Nashe’s beard (pp. 38–41); and, following a barbed reference to the Isle of Dogs, a passage on dogs (‘Since that thy Isle of Dogs hath made thee thus miserable, I cannot but account thee a Dog’ (p. 54)). There are also some good one- and two-liners, attacking Nashe’s corrosive and destructive wit. The best joke is what seems to be a reference to the description of the torture and execution of Zadoch in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), who is scourged and burned before his nails are prised from his fingers, ‘and then under-propt them with sharpe prickes, like a Tailers shop window halfe open on a holy daie’ (Nashe, Works, II, p. 316). Lichfield claims that he will torment Nashe in a similar fashion: I . . . am my selfe become a spirit, and goe about with howling cries with my launce in my hand to tortour thee, and must not returne home, till Ignatiuslike thou shalt be carbonadoed, and I shall carrie on my launce-point thy bones to hang at my shop-windowe, in steed of a coronet of rotten teeth, as the trophies of my victorie. (p. 42)

Nashe and his detractors have indeed begun to sound the same. The problem is that no one is as good as Nashe at this sort of polemic, and no one can sustain ideas in the same way or connect different strands of narrative to produce what we might think of as polyphonic insults. There is nothing in Lichfield (or Harvey) to resemble the sort of sustained and brilliant insult that Nashe can produce, taking on all three Harvey brothers: The Spanyards cald their invasive fleete against England the Navie invincible, yet it was overcome. Lowe shrubbes have outliv’d high Cedars: one true man is stronger than two theeves: Gabriell & Richard, I proclaime open warre with you: March on, Iocus, Ludus, Lepos, my valiaunt men at armes, and forage the frontiers of his Fauntasticallitie as you have begun. Tubalcan, alias Tuball, first founder of Farriers Hall, here is a great complaint made, that vtriusque Academiae Robertus Greene hath mockt thee, because hee saide, that as thou wert the first inventer of Musicke, so Gabriell Howliglasse was the first inventer of English Hexameter verses. Quid respondes? Canst thou brooke it, yea or no? Is it any treason to thy well tuned hammers to say they begat so renowmed a childe as Musicke? Neither thy hammers nor thou, I know, if they were to put to their booke oaths, will ever say it. (Nashe, Works, I, p. 298)

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Nashe skilfully weaves together a series of attacks, suggesting that the Harvey brothers are really traitors as they are like the Armada (treason is mentioned in terms of Gabriel’s ideas about metre, but Nashe is deliberately placing such comments next to rather more dangerous contexts); that they are fantasists who cannot tell the truth; that they are like dubious biblical figures such as Jubal, the descendant of Cain who played the lyre, or Tubal, the ancestor of the Iberians; that Gabriel is like the grotesque trickster figure Howelglas (a common refrain throughout the quarrel, as both Harvey and Nashe sought to indicate the true nature of their opponent); and that Gabriel has a tin ear, having been responsible for the unsuccessful experiment of writing English verse in quantitative metre.27 Harvey has been cleverly manoeuvred into fighting a war in unfamiliar territory, one that suits Nashe. Moreover, Nashe clearly knows that he has a significant advantage over his opponent and appears to do all he can to prolong the quarrel. But it would be a mistake to think that the dispute was simply about self-promotion and publicity, as is sometimes alleged.28 Alexandra Halasz has pointed out that much more was involved than each writer’s career (which is just as well, given how the affair ended): ‘the quarrel functions as an index of humanist response to the development of print culture . . . At stake for both Harvey and Nashe is the position of the orator, of oratory, in a discursive field no longer delimited by institutional sites of high literacy and audiences whose rank and status could be predicted.’ 29 Where Halasz distorts her otherwise impressive argument is in trying to tie the dispute between the two rather too closely to the emergence of print as a medium and a commodity, because in their differing ways both writers were adept at producing work for an audience eager to read printed books. Harvey’s enthusiasm for Ramist rhetoric certainly did not mark him out as a backwardlooking scholar, and his relationship with Spenser suggests that he was alive to the possibilities of what could be done with printed texts. Moreover, Harvey looked back throughout his writings to the dominant humanist figure of Erasmus, ‘master of print, masterly product of himself as European man of letters, [who] has come to stand, for all posterity, as the archetype and exemplar of the European scholar’.30 Harvey’s eagerness to publish his letters mirrors one of the principal ways in which Erasmus fashioned himself, a point that Harvey surely understood.31 Harvey not only published collections of letters – his correspondence with Spenser, to various writers against Greene, and to his publisher, John Wolfe – making him the most obvious figure who produced work in this manner in late Elizabethan England. He also wrote with great enthusiasm about letters as a tool of learning and an exchange of ideas between equals, looking back to the circle of Erasmus, Thomas More,

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Peter Gilles, Cuthbert Tunstall et al.32 Harvey valued polite conversation between lofty intellects from which others could learn, and deliberately contrasts the ‘builded towers of Superarrogation’ that Nashe has constructed ‘in his owne head’ with the ‘kind of smooth, and clenly, and neate, and fine elegancy before’.33 For Harvey, ‘malice is the Divell’.34 The work of both Nashe and Harvey developed out of a culture of rhetorical training, but their chosen paths pointed in opposite directions.35 Harvey, the Ciceronian, reluctantly entered into a dispute which was unlikely to help his writing career; his sense of himself as an Erasmian could not save him from an intellectual mauling. As Richard Lichfield recognised, Harvey was in fact facing Erasmus’s nemisis, Martin Luther, whose energetic rhetoric destroyed the unity of the church that Erasmus tried so hard to preserve – and Nashe had satirised More and Erasmus in The Unfortunate Traveller (Nashe, Works, II, pp. 245, 252). According to Trimming, Nashe and Luther are bed-fellows: You remember the time when your fellowe Luther and you lay in cole-harbour together, when you had but one payre of breeches betweene you both, but not one penie to blesse you both, and howe by course hee woore the breeches one day, and went cunny-catching about for victuals, whilest you lay in bedde, and the next day you wore the breeches to goe begge whilest he lay in bed.36

Harvey has lost the quarrel, because Trimming reads very much like Nashe in its polemical style. The reference to Luther would appear to suggest that Nashe’s triumph began with the Marprelate dispute and that what Nashe had learned from it was to write like Luther. Just as Nashe ended up absorbing and adopting the style of his opponents in the Marprelate controversy, so has he transformed Harvey and his defenders in the later quarrel. What was the impact on English literature of this major quarrel? Returning to Jonson, we can now see that Every Man Out was first performed in testing times, especially for authors and dramatists. This was a crucial play for Jonson, one that defined his artistic vision and changed the nature of his career, altering Jonson’s sense of himself as a writer. He replaced his habit of writing ‘superior plays of a popular nature’ and wrote a work that had serious designs on its audience, attempting to ‘transform . . . its spectators by calling on them to enact their own best selves’, a ‘vision of theatre as a real social force’.37 Jonson not only articulated a clear understanding of what his plays could do and how they could change the lives of those who saw them, but also tried to denigrate other writers, leaving himself centre-stage as the ideal poet, a habit and style that were to characterise the rest of his career. The wars of the theatres were just beginning, as rival companies competed for audiences through staging very

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different plays, articulating competing visions of what they had to offer. As Jonson developed the savage comedy of humours, with contemporary London settings, Shakespeare responded with romantic marriage comedies based on mistaken identities, usually set in exotic, pastoral locations. The Harvey–Nashe quarrel helped fuel the wars of the theatres and provided Jonson with an understanding of what he was doing and how he might consider his role and tactics as a writer. The dispute undoubtedly had effects on other writers. A decade before the quarrel began, Gabriel Harvey had been represented in bed with Edmund Spenser in their Three Proper and Wittie, Familiar Letters (1579). Spenser then emigrated to Ireland in 1580 while Nashe and Harvey fought tooth and nail. Significantly enough, each referred to Spenser with the greatest respect as the dominant English poet, one of the few opinions they shared. Although he had been rebuked by Harvey for satirising Lord Burghley, Spenser repeated the attack later. The final verse of his magnum opus The Faerie Queene, published in 1596 at the height of the Nashe–Harvey quarrel, ends with a further assault on Burghley: Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest, Hope to escape his [The Blatant Beast’s] venomous despite, More then my former writs, all were they clearest From blamefull blot, and free from all that wite, With which some wicked tongues did it backbite, And bring into a mighty Peres displeasure, That neuer so deserued to endite. Therefore do you my rimes keep better measure, And seeke to please, that now is counted wisemens threasure.38

Why does Spenser end his poem like this? His most obvious poetic models – the Aeniad, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberata – do not conclude by advertising the hostility of ‘a mighty Peres’. Spenser alerts the reader to the possibility of a dispute, advertising his work as controversial and confrontational – spicy literary fare with lashings of mustard. He was no longer isolating his polemical and controversial material in separate works but allowing it into his epic. The implication must surely be that he was aware of how the literary scene had changed since he had left England and was showing that he could play the same games as everyone else when he needed to.

Notes 1. Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour, ed. Helen Ostovich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), III, i, 244.

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2. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London: Thomson [now Cengage], 2001), p. 96. 3. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, supp. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), I, pp. 170–1. All citations are of this edition. 4. Joseph L. Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. lv. All citations are of this edition. 5. Marprelate Tracts, p. xxx. 6. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, rpt. of 1967), p. 27. 7. Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 375–6. 8. Marprelate Tracts, p. 34. 9. Patrick Collinson, Edmund Grindal, 1519–83: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London: Cape, 1979), pp. 167–76. 10. Collinson, Grindal, pp. 275–8. 11. Gabriel Harvey, Fowre Letters and Certaine Sonnets, especially touching Robert Greene and other parties abused by him (1592), ed. G. B. Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), pp. 54–5. 12. Cyndia Susan Clegg, Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 198. 13. Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, eds Dawson and Minton (London: Cengage, 2008), p. 35. 14. Clegg, Censorship in Elizabethan England, p. 201. 15. For Nashe’s influence on Shakespeare in particular, see Neil Rhodes, Shakespeare and the Origins of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 70–5. 16. See Nashe, Works; Edward Burns, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, part one, ed. Burns (London: Thomson, 2000), pp. 82–3; Gavin Alexander, Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 263. 17. David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 32. 18. Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 66. 19. Marprelate Tracts, p. lxxiii. 20. Marprelate Tracts, p. 177. 21. My account relies principally on McKerrow’s description in Nashe, Works, V, pp. 34–110. 22. W. Schrick, Shakespeare’s Early Contemporaries: The Background of the Harvey–Nashe Polemic and Love’s Labour’s Lost (Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1956), chs. 5–7; Hutson, Nashe in Context, pp. 198–201; Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 84–6. 23. Donald J. McGinn, John Penry and the Marprelate Controversy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1966), p. 111. 24. Gabriel Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, or a new prayse of the old ass

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Andrew Hadfield (London, 1593), sigs. J4r–K1v. On Harvey as Marprelate, see John Lyly, Pappe with an Hatchet (1589), sig. B3v; Virginia F Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 85–9. Benjamin Griffin, ‘Nashe’s dedicatees: William Beeston and Richard Lichfield’, Notes & Queries, 44 (March 1997), pp. 47–9. Alexander B. Grosart (ed.), The Works of Gabriel Harvey (New York: AMS, 1966, rpt. of 1885), III, p. 9. On Howelglas, see P. M. Zall (ed.), A Hundred Merry Tales and Other Jestbooks of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963); on the experiments with quantitative metre and Harvey’s role, see Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 188–91. Donald J. McGinn,Thomas Nashe (Boston: Twayne, 1981), p. 104. Halasz, Marketplace of Print, p. 87. Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 189. Jardine, Erasmus, ch. 6. See Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, sig. F1v; Harvey, Works, III, p. 12. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, sigs. B4r, C1r. Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, prefatory letter, ‘To My Very Gentle, and Liberall Friendes, M. Barnabe Barnes, M. John Thorius, M. Antony Chewt, and every favourable Reader.’ See Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. ch. 5. Harvey, Works, III, p. 26. W. David Kay, cited in James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poet’s War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 56. See also Riggs, Jonson, pp. 55–62; Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, pp. 118–22. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Harlow: Longman, 2001), VI, xii, 41.

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Chapter 5

The Making of Writing in Renaissance England: Re-thinking Authorship Through Collaboration Alan Stewart

Recent years have seen an outpouring of scholarship on collaborative authorship in English Renaissance literary studies.1 Critics have focused on known collaborative teams such as Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and have been increasingly willing to accept that even William Shakespeare may have been a ‘co-author’, writing several of his plays in tandem with other playwrights, including Fletcher (The Two Noble Kinsmen), George Wilkins (Pericles), and Thomas Middleton (Macbeth, Measure for Measure). It’s now possible for Brian Vickers to state, without causing offence, that ‘every major playwright in this period worked collaboratively at some point in his career’.2 But whereas scholars such as Jeffrey Masten hoped that the collaborative play might move us beyond ‘categories of singular authorship, intellectual property, and the individual that are central to later Anglo-American cultural, literary, and legal history’,3 in fact much of the recent work on collaboration has left intact the notion of the playwright as author. Most often, analysis of collaborative plays attempts to assign individual acts, scenes or speeches to individual authors. In Grace Ioppolo’s reconstruction of collaborative play-writing, ‘collaborators appear to have portioned off sections of the play by acts or scenes to complete alone and then found a way together or separately to join the scenes (with marginal additions of cue lines, for example) rather than sitting in the same room and composing the entire play together’.4 So acceptance of the fact of collaborative writing has done little to change the model of the author, simply multiplying the number of authors. This model has depended upon a very particular type of collaboration, what Philip McGuire has described as ‘the collaborative compositional practices of professional dramatists writing together and concurrently (synchronously) for the commercial theater industry’.5 And yet, as Ioppolo points out, these collaborations may not all have been a meeting of equals. She quotes the boast by Ben Jonson that he

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had finished Volpone alone: ‘’Tis knowne, fiue weekes fully penn’d it: / From his owne hand, without a Co-adiutor, / Nouice, Iorney-man, or Tutor.’ 6 As Ioppolo notes, this suggests that at least one playwright, and perhaps his contractors, placed collaborators into hierarchical categories. For Jonson, the main author reigned above co-adjutors (helpers or assistant writers), novices (inexperienced or probationary writers) and journeymen (writers who were newly qualified, having finished their apprenticeships). The definitions of all three positions . . . imply that each served in subservient positions to more experienced masters, such as Jonson.7

In this chapter I want to follow through the implications of Ben Jonson’s suggestive description of the dynamics of collaborative writing. Moving beyond the specific world of commercial drama, this chapter takes as its case study a prolific writer who was not – despite the rumours – a professional playwright: Francis Bacon. To all appearances, Bacon is the author par excellence: a writer who thinks of himself as an author, speaks of himself in terms of Demosthenes, Cicero and Ovid, executes the print publication of his books, and plans for their translation into Latin and European vernaculars. But while Bacon undoubtedly appropriates for himself what Michel Foucault would call the ‘authorfunction’,8 the making of his writing is anything but a solitary exercise. In what follows, I suggest that an examination of collaborative writing forces us to re-think our notion of authorship: to accept that the author may not be the person who writes (either mentally composes or physically pens) a text.

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From around 1588, Francis Bacon, then an up-and-coming Gray’s Inn lawyer and junior parliamentarian, became associated with Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex. While his elder brother Anthony Bacon was clearly a follower of the earl, for some years living in Essex’s own house, Francis Bacon was something between a client and a friend: the earl acted as a patron for Bacon, attempting to secure him the posts of Attorney General and Solicitor General, while Bacon undertook a variety of duties for the earl, most notably offering him counsel in the latter part of the 1590s through a series of widely circulated letters. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, Bacon’s involvement in the earl’s life came to be regarded as more thoroughgoing: two important editors of Bacon’s work, Thomas Birch in the 1760s and James Spedding in the 1860s, identified various writings previously attributed to the Earl of Essex as being the work of Francis Bacon.9 These included a device written for the 1595 Accession Day celebrations; and letters

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of advice sent from Essex to Fulke Greville and to Roger Manners, the young Earl of Rutland. Since the 1860s, scholars have been generally happy to write about these works as Bacon’s, identifying continuities in theme, content and style between these late Elizabethan writings and Bacon’s later, more significant publications such as the Advancement of Learning, the Essays and the New Atlantis. In a series of articles published from 1994, Paul Hammer, a leading expert on Essex, took issue with this attribution of authorship to Bacon.10 Hammer showed that Essex was building a team of secretaries to compete with the secretariat of the father-and-son team of the Cecils in order to ‘establish himself as the natural successor to Burghley as Elizabeth’s leading councillor’. Unlike Burghley, however, Hammer argues, Essex ‘had great faith in the practical value of academic learning’, and his impressive secretarial pool included the scholars Thomas Smith, Edward Reynolds, Henry Wotton, Edward Jones and even the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Henry Cuffe, who was lured away from the university for a salary of twenty pounds per annum.11 In addition to these paid secretaries, Essex had an array of scholarly friends on whom he called for some quasi-secretarial duties, including Anthony and Francis Bacon. Hammer writes of ‘the product of a cooperative effort between Essex, his secretaries and, perhaps, Francis Bacon’, with Essex at the helm: ‘Essex himself had a major part in composing these productions but he also used the assistance of his secretariat and possibly also of Francis Bacon.’ In Hammer’s account, these men worked in a scholarly collaboration in which Essex remained the dominant factor. Although he allows that Bacon may have ‘had a hand’ in some of the works emanating from the Essex circle, to Hammer these works remain Essex’s – commissioned by him, and bearing his name and his imprimatur.12 Hammer’s assertions provoked a spirited response from Bacon specialist Brian Vickers, who argues that the various devices and letters of advice were ‘interlinked in many ways, mirroring the development of Bacon’s thought in the 1590s, and reflecting characteristic methods of composition’.13 In Vickers’s model, ‘Essex seems to have called on his [Francis Bacon’s] help when he needed some particularly delicate piece of writing, such as an eloquent or tactful composition involving the queen.’ He points out that there is plenty of evidence that Bacon acted ‘as go-between and ghost-writer for Essex’,14 citing Bacon’s own words,15 early drafts of letters that Bacon ‘framd for my Lord Essex to the Queen’,16 and a letter ‘Written by Mr. Bacon for my Lord of Essex’, printed in an early collection by Bacon’s chaplain and editor William Rawley.17 Vickers retorts:

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Instead of Paul Hammer’s image of Bacon as a subsidiary helper in Essex’s campaign of reinstatement, grudgingly admitted to the same level as the men in Essex’s employ, I should like to propose a different scenario: Bacon, already an experienced lawyer and politician, expending much energy between 1595 and 1600 as a private counselor.18

What is important to note here is that Hammer and Vickers share an understanding of a working relationship between Essex and Bacon whereby Bacon would draft written materials for Essex’s use. The difference between them lies in attribution: the relative credit for authorship that each should receive. My contention in this chapter is that both Hammer and Vickers are right in their assertions: what we need to address is how they can both be right at the same time, and what this means for our understanding of authorship. In order to answer this, I propose we have to reassemble the mechanics of what happened when Bacon ‘wrote’ a piece. Beyond the recent work on commercial play-writing, there is a distinct dearth of scholarship on the writing process in the early modern period. Thanks to the labours of Harold Love, Peter Beal and Henry Woudhuysen we know a good deal about scribal culture and scribal publication, but their interest is in the copying and dissemination of works that have already been composed, rather than composition per se.19 Work on secretaries, men known to have written for their masters, has tended to focus on the notional relationship of secretary and master rather than to the detail of how the secretary worked with his master.20 This lack of scholarship is quite understandable: there are precious few traces in the archive to suggest how even a figure as prominent as Essex might have worked with his team of secretaries. There are, however, a few. I turn first to an undated letter (probably 1593) from Essex to Bacon, now at Lambeth Palace Library.21 Essex explains that he is under pressure from the queen to produce, at short notice, ‘a draft of an Instruction’ on intelligence concerning Rheims and Rome, home to two English seminaries. Although the premise of this demand is that Elizabeth intends to send one of her Privy Council on a mission, Essex doubts this is the case: instead, the queen ‘doth it rather to try my judgement in it’. In other words, the writing produced is a test of the capabilities of the earl. Faced with this challenge, however, Essex does not sit down and pen a tract himself. Instead, he seeks out the expertise of two men: Thomas Phelippes, a noted cryptographer who worked closely with the late secretary of state Francis Walsingham, and Francis Bacon: Master Phellipes hath known Master Secretary’s courses in such matters; so as I may have counsel from you [Bacon] and precedents from him [Phelippes]. I pray you, as your leisure will serve, send me your conceipt as

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soon as you can; for I know not how soon I shall be called on. I will draw some notes of mine own which I will reform and enlarge by yours.

Phelippes will provide ‘precedents’; Bacon will supply ‘counsel’ in the form of written ‘notes’; Essex will then ‘reform and enlarge’ his own draft incorporating anything useful from Bacon’s. The work will clearly stand as Essex’s: the earl here commissions the piece, suggests the mechanism for its composition, perhaps – although this is not clear – polishes the final product himself, presents it to the queen himself, and takes credit for it. Here we see the kind of process that Hammer envisions, with Bacon providing only part of the process, and Essex in control. The collaborative process produces Essex as author, the hierarchy of master and scribal servants playing itself out. But there are other circumstances where the same collaborative process emphatically does not produce the same author. Among Essex’s sorry succession of military exploits of the 1590s, perhaps the most successful was his sacking of Cadiz in June 1596. Needing to publicise his success back in England, Essex despatched his secretary Henry Cuffe, armed with Essex-eulogising accounts of the victory, to oversee their publication in print.22 Falling ill en route, Cuffe was obliged to send the materials on to another Essex secretary, Edward Reynolds, with a covering letter which provides a rare and detailed glimpse into the mechanics of manuscript production.23 The letter’s second half is familiar enough to readers of early modern printed books, with their conventional apologetics for reaching print. Cuffe asks Reynolds to replace his preface, if he considers it necessary, write a better one, and prefix it so that the tract would appear to be a letter sent from Cadiz to a ‘gentleman in Court’ back in England. The publication should then take place under someone’s initials, with that person claiming that they had received the discourse from Cadiz from, say, D.T., but they don’t know who D.T. is: Cuffe suggests that they use the initials of either Essex’s friend at court Fulke Greville, or Privy Council clerk Robert Beale (with whom the Essex circle had quarrelled). These are all ploys familiar from print culture, but Cuffe’s letter also tells us much of the often hidden processes by which a commissioned discourse, speech or letter came to be written. The discourse, he writes, was Penned very truly according to his Lordships Large enstructions, by which besides my owne knowledge he enformed me of sundry particulers of moment in the processe therof. And after I had penned it as plainely as I might alteringe little or nothinge of his owne drawght, I caused his Lordship to peruse it on[c]e againe and to adde extremam manum, which he hathe donne, as you may perceve by the enterlyneinge. his Lordship[es] purpose is that it should with the soonest be sett in print, both to stopp all vagrant

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Rumors, and to enforce those that are well affected of the truth of the whole, yet so that in any case nether his Lordships name nor myne nor any other my Lord be ether openly named used or soe insinuated that any slender guesse may be drawen who was the penneman / My opinion is that the best course is presently to cause a fair transcript to be made and so ether by Mr Temple or some other Lesse to be supported [suspected?] (in which point I knowe Sir Anthony Asheley will most willinging Lend you his helping hand) to cause it to be deliuered to some good printer in good Characters and with diligence to publish it.

The account was physically written (‘penned’) by Cuffe following general (‘Large’) instructions from Essex, also drawing on Cuffe’s ‘owne knowledge’, while Essex added in ‘sundry particulers of moment in the processe therof’. Cuffe continues: after he had penned with as little elaboration as possible of Essex’s draft, he ‘caus[es]’ his master ‘to peruse it once againe and to adde extremam manum’, the finishing touch, visible in ‘the enterlyneinge [interlining]’. Essex adds to Cuffe’s writing, by interlining Cuffe’s text, his own finishing touches, the final hand. The next part of this operation requires that these hands, so evident to Reynolds, be obscured, so that neither Essex, Cuffe nor any of the earl’s followers is ‘ether openly named used or soe insinuated’ as ‘the penneman’. Cuffe suggests that ‘a fair transcript’ should be made by someone unlikely to be suspected, proposing William Temple, another of Essex’s secretariat, or Sir Anthony Ashley, a Privy Council clerk serving as secretary of war for the Cadiz mission, recently knighted by Essex and Lord Admiral Howard, who, Cuffe says, ‘most willinging Lend you his helping hand’ – literally. They should then ‘cause it to be deliuered’ to a printer. So who writes this letter? Is the letter Essex’s, or Cuffe’s, or Reynoldes’s, or the man’s who will provide the fair transcript, perhaps Temple or Ashley? Here we have five possible candidates, and none of them will have his name associated with the product – a further two possibilities, Fulke Greville and Robert Beale, are suggested for that honour. So in all we have seven men associated with this writing – a necessity, because the aim is to distract attention from the author, to produce an effect of anonymity. Bacon knew this culture well. He is now believed to be the author of several anonymous or pseudonymous pieces that were published, either in manuscript or in print, in the 1590s. One of them is very similar to the Cadiz letter concocted by Essex and Cuffe: the 1598 A Letter written out of England to an English Gentleman remaining at Padua, containing a true Report of a strange Conspiracie, contriued betweene Edward Squire, lately executed for the same treason as Actor, and Richard Wallpoole a Iesuite, as Deuiser and Suborner against the person of the Queenes Maiestie, an account of the last of the alleged Catholic plots against Elizabeth (this one focused on a poisoned

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pummel).24 Its anonymity or pseudonymity did not stop people wondering who wrote it: the following year a Catholic pamphleteer attributed this ‘smooth penned pamphlet’ to ‘M. Smokey-swynes flesh, at the instance of Sir R.C.’.25 Once again, we have two names: Bacon as smooth penman, secretary of state Sir Robert Cecil as commissioner. Both names are needed to identify what we might call the authorship of the Letter written out of England. The Cadiz letter and the Letter written out of England hint at something vital to our understanding of the politics of authorship in the 1590s. Essex, Cuffe, Bacon and Cecil do not want their involvement to be traced; while the trickeries of print paratext facilitate this for a reading public, Cuffe is equally concerned that the text going to press does not bear his or Essex’s own handwriting. This is quite clearly because they recognise that handwriting has value as evidence: that one is held responsible for what one physically writes. This understanding underpins most of the criminal investigations of the 1590s. Documents in an identifiable hand are used to support arrests and arraignments; those being interrogated are required either to write confessions in their own hand or – in those cases when they are no longer able to write – to make an effort to sign the confession in their own hand, with witnesses observing the fact. Fully cognizant of these facts, conspirators would go out of their way not to pen letters or memoranda. All of these manoeuvres come to a head in the final trial of the Earl of Essex, following his abortive uprising in February 1601. Although there is little debate about what happened during the uprising, and Essex never seeks to defend his actions, a surprising amount of court time is given over to establishing what was planned about taking the court. And it’s not about whose idea this was, but quite literally, who held the pen. Prosecuting Essex in court was none other than Francis Bacon. Bacon was keen to establish that the conspirators were ‘not met together by constellation’, but purposely ‘assembled upon summons and letters sent’ – he wanted material, written evidence. Turning to Sir John Davis, he said: ‘in this consultation . . . you were clerk of that council-table and wrote all’.26 Sir John objected. If with good manners I might, I would long since have interrupted you, and saved you a great part of labour: for my intent is not to deny anything I have said or excuse that I have done, but to confess myself guilty of all, and submit myself wholly to the Queen’s mercy. But in that you call me clerk of the council, let me tell you that Sir Charles Davers was writing, but his hand being bad, I was desired to take the pen and write. But by-and-by the Earl said he would speed it himself; therefore we being together so long and doing so little, the Earl went to his house and set down all with his own

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hand, which was formerly set forth, touching the taking and possessing of the Court.27

The pen should have been in Sir Charles Davers’s hand, but since his hand was ‘bad’, it passes to Davies, but Davies writes too slowly and so Essex takes the pen and ‘set[s] down all with his own hand’. So the culmination of this remarkable scribal incompetence is that the plan is penned by the earl himself, and what’s more at his house, and by himself – this is a way of making the written evidentiary responsibility cohere with the actual responsibility. The only reason this debate takes place, of course, is that Essex took pains to burn the paperwork as soon as he realised that the uprising was doomed. But perhaps the oddest moment in the trial is the showdown between Essex and his erstwhile client Francis Bacon. The earl suddenly interrupted Bacon, ‘sayinge that the speache of Master Bacon gaue him occasion to plead himself against himself’. He recounted how Master Bacon beinge a dailye Courtier, and havinge Accesse to her Maiestie vndertooke to goe to the Queene in my behalfe, he drewe a Letter verie artificiallye, which was subscribed with my name: And another Letter was drawen to occasion the former, which other Letter should come from his Brother Master Anthonie Bacon, both which he shoulde haue showen vnto the Queene; Gosnold brought them both to me, and in my Letter he did plead for me as feelinglie, and pointed out my greevances as plainelie as was possible.

Far from being embarrassed by this revelation, Bacon claimed that ‘he had spente more houres to make him [Essex] a meete servante to her Maiestie, then euer he deserued’ and that ‘as for any thinge contayned in those lettres, yt would not blushe in the Clearest light’.28 These letters would make him appear a good friend to Essex, an interpretation he maintained in his 1604 Apologie.29 What should emerge from these incidents is an appreciation that our current notions of authorship are ill equipped to deal with the complexities of writing in the world occupied by Essex and Francis Bacon in the 1590s. This was, admittedly, a heightened political milieu in which it was not always advisable to be seen to be the penman of a particular letter or tract. The moments I’ve just discussed are all about wishing to avoid attribution, to evade responsibility, to escape blame. They testify to a sophisticated knowledge of the role of the writer, the penman, and how to manipulate documentary evidence. But beyond the more sensational cases I’ve been outlining, I want to suggest that these cases employ a mechanism of collaborative writing that in fact is common to a great many textual productions.

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All of these situations rely on Essex having access to a team of advisers, writers and researchers. While we might expect senior politicians like Essex and Burghley to have their secretariats, it seems that even men without such status worked in a comparable manner. To give one example, probably in 1588, Essex wrote to his ‘Cosin Foulke’, the poet Fulke Greville, giving him advice on how to recruit men to write for him. This letter was identified as largely Bacon’s by James Spedding; Paul Hammer has claimed that it is Essex’s; and Brian Vickers has reclaimed it as Bacon’s.30 But interestingly, the letter provides an account of a model of collaboration that might resolve the gridlock they’re stuck in. The letter opens: ‘You tell me you are goinge to Cambridge, and that the endes of your goinge are to get a scholler to your likeinge, to liue with you, and some 2. or 3. others to remayne in the Vniuersitye, and gather for you; And you require my opinion what instruction you shall geve these gatherers.’ 31 In 1589, Fulke Greville did indeed go to Cambridge and hired a scholar, John Coke, who became his secretary, and eventually his executor and editor, as well as having an elevated political career of his own.32 It would seem that Essex used Bacon to draft this letter, which was then sent to his kinsman Greville, to tell him how to find his own ‘Bacon’ figure. But this is not to suggest that the person in the supposedly ‘subordinate’ position did not have subordinates of his own. Bacon also had gatherers, both at the university and to live with him. In his 1608 notebook, the Comentarius solutus, Bacon not only lists figures he’d like to contact, men known to be practical experimenters, but also reminds himself to seek out ‘young scholars in the Universities’ and suggests ‘Gyving pensions to 4 for search to compile the 2 Histories ut suprà [as outlined above]’ 33 – the same notion on which he (as Essex) advised Greville. Even before he started his advancement to high office, Bacon clearly had a group of men writing for him. On 25 January 1595, he wrote from ‘my lodge at Twickenham Park’ to his brother Anthony in London, informing him, I have here an idle pen or two, specially one that was cozened, thinking to have gotten some money this term; I pray send me somewhat else for them to write out besides your Irish collection, which is almost done. There is a collection of Dr. James of foreign states, largeliest of Flanders, which, though it be no great matter, yet I would be glad to have it.34

Physician to Queen Elizabeth’s household, Dr John James was equally known as an expert in governmental paperwork who since the late 1570s had been recovering government documents from private hands, and ordering them into a working record office. James was a client of Essex, and it is presumably through the Essex links that Bacon assumes

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that his brother Anthony can obtain James’s ‘collection . . . of foreign states’ for copying.35 What is significant about this letter is that it reminds us that in 1595, Bacon was not only part of Essex’s extended household, he also headed his own household. The work being done at Twickenham Park is for him: ‘I would be glad to have it.’ This kind of household academy was explored by Bacon imaginatively, and most famously, in New Atlantis, a text that he is thought to have written around 1623, after his fall from grace, and that was not published until 1627, the year after his death, when it was printed in a volume after his Sylva sylvarum.36 New Atlantis describes a fictional land, Bensalem, on which a European ship is washed ashore. The narrator’s description of this realm culminates in the institution known as Salomon’s House, which was understood to forward Bacon’s notion of a collaborative academic institution: his amanuensis and editor William Rawley wrote that Salomon’s House should be seen as ‘a Modell or Description of a Colledge, instituted for the Interpreting of Nature, and the Producing of Great and Marueilous Works for the Benefit of Men’.37 Salomon’s House famously contains a division of intellectual labour. Twelve fellows known as the ‘Merchants of Light’ ‘Sayle into Forraine Countries’ to bring back ‘the Bookes, and Abstracts, and Patternes of Experiments of all other Parts’ (f4r–v). Three ‘Mystery-Men’ ‘Collect the Experiments of all Mechanicall Arts; And also of Liberall Sciences; And also of Practises which are not Brought into Arts’. Three fellows called ‘Pioners or Miners’ ‘try New Experiments, such as themselues thinke good’. But there’s also three Depredatours who ‘Collect the Experiments which are in all Bookes’. With these four groups doing the groundwork, three more fellows, known as ‘Compilers’, ‘Drawe [their] Experiments . . . into Titles, and Tables, to giue the better light, for the drawing of Obseruations and Axiomes out of them’. There is a then a further set of three men, known as ‘Dowry-men or Benefactours’, who look for practical applications for the experiments: they ‘bend themselues, Looking into the Experiments of their Fellowes, and cast about how to draw out of them Things of Vse, and Practise for Mans life, and Knowledge as well for Workes, as for Plaine Demonstration of Causes, Meanes of Naturall Diuinations, and the easie and cleare Discouery, of the Vertues and Parts of Bodies’ (f4v). Following meetings of all the fellows, three, known as ‘Lamps’, take responsibility ‘to Direct New Experiments, of a Higher Light, more Penetrating into Nature then the Former’ (f4v–g1r); three ‘Inoculatours’ ‘Execute the Experiments so Directed, and Report them’; and three ‘Interpreters of Nature’ ‘raise the former Discoueries by Experiments, into Greater Obseruations,

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Axiomes, and Aphorismes’ (g1r). This is precisely the kind of research institution that could produce the collections of knowledge called for in Bacon’s grand project, the Instauratio magna. But where is the author in this institution? A ‘Father’ of the house enters in great opulence, but he is not identified as any of the thirtythree ‘Merchants of Light’, ‘Depredatours’, ‘Mystery-Men’, ‘Pioners, or Miners’, ‘Compilers’, ‘Dowry-men or Benefactours’, ‘Lamps’, ‘Inoculators’ and ‘Interpreters of Nature’. In Bacon’s fantasy academic world, all the work is delegated, including the writing.38 And this should not be surprising. The world in which he moves is a culture in which leading politicians, courtiers and administrators routinely use a cadre of secretaries, clients, friends and scribes not simply to advise them on their writings, or research their writings, or copy out their writings, but also to draft their writings. This is a form of collaborative writing in which the head of the household takes responsibility, credit or blame for the work of his household – Bacon’s New Atlantis image is of perfect control by the father, but in reality, subordinate household members might have a real involvement in moulding the writing of the father. Finally, and leading on directly from this, I’d like to propose something that might be a little controversial. As I said at the outset, scholars are generally happy to recognise that Essex’s writings in the 1590s owe a great deal to Francis Bacon. But what might it mean to apply our understanding of Bacon’s methods of writing in the 1590s to a period later in his career, when he occupies the position Essex had occupied earlier? In the final decade of his life, Bacon authored the great natural philosophical works for which he’s remembered, starting with 1620’s Novum Organum, and continuing through the various parts of the unfinished Instauratio magna, the 1625 revision of the Essayes, and the posthumously published New Atlantis. At his height, Bacon’s household numbered over one hundred male servants; among the men who worked with him in his latter years were the mineralogist Thomas Bushell, the chaplain William Rawley, the diplomat-to-be William Boswell, and a young Thomas Hobbes. John Aubrey wrote of Hobbes’s working relationship with Bacon: The Lord Chancellour Bacon loved to converse with him. He assisted his lordship in translating severall of his Essayes into Latin, one, I well remember, is that Of the Greatnes of Cities: the rest I have forgott. His Lordship was a very Contemplative person, and was wont to contemplate in his delicious walks at Gorambery, and dictate to Mr. Thomas Bushell, or some other of his Gentlemen, that attended him with inke and paper ready to sett downe presently his Thoughts. His Lordship would often say that he better

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liked Mr Hobbes’s taking his thoughts, then any of the other, because he understood what he wrote, which the others not understanding, my Lord would many times have a harde taske to make sense of what they writt.39

Aubrey’s anecdotes, of course, are best taken with a ton of salt, but there may be something useful here: that Hobbes is the man best charged with ‘taking his [Bacon’s] thoughts’ because ‘he [Hobbes] understood what he [Hobbes] wrote’, whereas Bacon would ‘have a hard taske to make sense of what they [other scribes] writt’. None of the writing here is Bacon’s. The surviving autograph drafts by Bacon – that is, tracts written in his own handwriting – are scant indeed, and most of them are notes, occurring in commonplace books and notebooks.40 So his 1594 collection of proverbs, the Promus, also contains notes headed ‘Semblances or popularities of good and evill, with their redargutions; for Deliberacions’, which are a draft of the Colours of Good and Evill and notes on what becomes De spe terrestri.41 The 1608 notebook Comentarius solutus (1608/9) contains a sketch, Inquisitio legitima de motu.42 A legal commonplace book in Law French contains an unpublished piece On the King’s Prerogative.43 Otherwise, all we have is two fragments of rough drafts for A Discourse touching Intelligence and the Safety of the Queen’s Person,44 a single leaf containing drafts of parts 4 and 12 of ‘Natura durabilis’, part of the Historia vitae et mortis,45 and a rough (and superseded) draft for a speech for the 1595 Accession Day device.46 But these appear to be exceptions. The norm lies elsewhere: the norm is a draft in the hand of one of Bacon’s secretaries or amanuenses, with Bacon’s autograph comments, often quite extensive emendations. This is the case with a whole range of Bacon’s tracts, both political and scientific: A Brief Discourse touching the Happy Union of the Kingdom of England and Scotland (1603); A Preparation for the Union of Laws (1603); Certain Considerations touching the Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England (1603); Valerius terminus (1603–8); Temporis partus masculus (1608); Cogitata et visa de interpretatione naturae (1607); Redargutio philosophiarum (1608); Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain (1608); Argument in the Case of the Post-Nati of Scotland (1608); Certain Considerations touching the Plantation in Ireland (1608/9); In felicem memoriam Elizabethae, Anglicae Reginae (1608/9); Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1607–12); De vijs mortis; Aphorismi de dissulutione rerum; Filum labyrinthi, sive formula inquisitionis; and The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1621).47 That these writings range in date from 1603 to 1621 suggests that Bacon’s preferred form of writing may always have been collaborative, along the lines I’ve suggested above.

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The process of their composition prompts a further question. If we are happy to see the Baconian elements of works attributed to Essex in the 1590s, should we also be looking for, say, the Hobbesian elements of Bacon’s Latin Essays? To what extent did men like Hobbes or Rawley or Bushell attempt to impose or import their own views, obsessions or vocabulary? This is especially the case with William Rawley, who edited many of Bacon’s works posthumously – and was quite content to introduce minor changes into every other line of Bacon’s texts. So if Bacon wrote Essex, who wrote Bacon? My question here deliberately plays devil’s advocate. As I stressed above, there is no doubt that Bacon had the extremam manum on these texts, and that we should see them as produced under his authorship. But similarly, we should see Essex’s 1590s texts as produced under his authorship, while admitting that Bacon uses his position vis-à-vis Essex to promulgate his own, characteristically Baconian ideas. The Hammer– Vickers debate is a symptom of the circumstances under which Essex’s and Bacon’s writings were produced – a thoroughly collaborative process in which piecemeal divisions of labour were impossible, and in which the author might well not be the man who writes the text.

Notes 1. See, for example, Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Heather Hirschfeld, ‘Early modern collaboration and theories of authorship’, PMLA, 116 (2001), pp. 609–22; Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Hirschfeld, Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: a Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 2. Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author, p. 25. 3. Jeffrey Masten, ‘Playwrighting: Authorship and collaboration’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 357–82, pp. 361–2. 4. Grace Ioppolo, Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 32. 5. Philip McGuire, ‘Collaboration’, in Arthur Kinney (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 540–52, p. 550 n. 1. 6. Ben Ionson his Volpone or The foxe ([London]: [by George Eld] for Thomas Thorpe, 1607), sig. A4v. 7. Ioppolo, Dramatists and their Manuscripts, p. 33.

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8. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (eds), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 124–7. 9. Thomas Birch (ed.), Letters, speeches, charges, advices, &c. of Francis Bacon (London: Andrew Millar, 1763); James Spedding (ed.), The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon (London, 1861–74), I and II. 10. Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘The uses of scholarship: The secretariat of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, c.1585–1601’, English Historical Review, 104 (1994), pp. 26–51;Hammer, ‘The Earl of Essex, Fulke Greville and the employment of scholars’, Studies in Philology, 91 (1994), pp. 167–80. 11. Hammer, ‘Essex, Fulke Greville’, p. 175 n.40. 12. Hammer, ‘Essex, Fulke Greville’, p. 172. 13. Brian Vickers, ‘The authenticity of Bacon’s earliest writings’, Studies in Philology, 94 (1997), pp. 248–96. 14. Vickers, ‘Authenticity’, pp. 257–8. 15. In Sir Francis Bacon, his Apologie, in certaine imputations concerning the late Earle of Essex, etc. (London: Felix Norton, 1604): ‘And I drew for him by his appointment some letters to her Maiestie’ (D3v). 16. ‘The Substance of a Letter I now wish your Lordship should write to her Majesty’. Lambeth Palace Library [hereafter LPL] MS 941 art. 139. 17. Resuscitatio, ed. William Rawley (London: Sarah Griffin for William Lee, 1657), 3Nlv–3N2r. 18. Vickers, ‘Authenticity’, p. 263. 19. Harold Love, Scribal Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 20. Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), ch. 5. 21. Essex to Francis Bacon, [after 25 February 1593]. LPL MS 653 art. 2, holograph. Modernised transcription by Spedding, Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, I, p. 251. 22. See Hammer, ‘Myth-making: Politics, propaganda and the capture of Cadiz in 1596’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 621–42. 23. Henry Cuffe to Edward Reynoldes, [1] July 1596. LPL MS 658, fo. 88 (art. 61). I am grateful to Andrew Gordon for this transcription. 24. Anon., A Letter written out of England (London: deputies of C. Barber, 1599). 25. Anon, ‘An Addition to the Reader’, appendix to M[artin] A[day], The Discoverie and Confvtation of a Tragical Fiction, devysed and played by Edward Squyer (1599). 26. William Cobbett and T. B. Howell (eds), Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials . . . (London: T. C. Hansard, 1809–1823), I, col. 1438. 27. Cobbett and Howell, State Trials, I, col. 1438. 28. British Library, London [hereafter BL] Harley MS 4289, fo. 28v.

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29. ‘I did draw with my Lords priuitie, and by his appointment, two letters, the one written as from my brother, the other as an answer returned from my Lord, both to be by me in secret maner shewed to the Queene, which it pleased my Lord very strangely to mention at the barre.’ Bacon, Apologie, D5v–D6v. 30. See the discussion in Alan Stewart (ed.), Oxford Francis Bacon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), I. 31. Essex to Greville, n.d. The National Archives, Kew [TNA], State Papers [SP] 14/59, art. 4, fos. 4r–5v 32. Hammer, ‘Essex, Fulke Greville’, pp. 175, 176–80. On Coke see Michael B. Young, Servility and Service: The Life and Work of Sir John Coke (Woodbridge: Boydell for the Royal Historical Society, 1986). See also Hammer, ‘Uses of scholarship’, pp. 47–8. 33. BL Additional MS 27278, fo 16r. 34. Francis Bacon to Anthony Bacon, 25 January 1595, Twickenham Park. LPL MS 650 art. 28, holograph. Modernised transcription by Spedding, Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, I, pp. 347–9, p. 349. 35. On James, see R. Julian Roberts, ‘James, Thomas (1572/3–1629)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/14619, accessed 26 December 2008. 36. In seeing New Atlantis as an imaginative engagement with his real household, I follow John Guillory’s recent work: see ‘The bachelor state: Philosophy and sovereignty in Bacon’s New Atlantis’, in Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano and Daniela Coli (eds), Politics and the Passions, 1500– 1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 49–74. 37. William Rawley, ‘To the Reader’, in Francis Bacon, Sylua Syluarum: or A Naturall Historie In Ten Centuries, ed. William Rawley (London: William Lee, 1626 [i.e. 1627]), a2r. 38. For a possible model of Salomon’s House, with the same set-up, see Anthony Grafton’s discussion of Matthias Flacius Illyricus, who created a large-scale Institum Historicum in Magdeburg to prepare materials for a new history of the church. What is significantly missing from Flacius’ model is any specified place for Flacius himself. One might assume that he sees himself as one of the ‘five governors and inspectors’ but he doesn’t make this explicit: instead, all the components of work on the project – research, the compiling of notes, copying and drafting – appear to be delegated. Grafton, ‘Where was Salomon’s House? Ecclesiastical history and the intellectual origins of Bacon’s New Atlantis’, in Herbert Jaumann (ed.), Die europäische Gelehrtenrepublik im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus/The European Republic of Letters in the Age of Confessionalism (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), pp. 21–38. 39. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (1949; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 149–50. 40. I draw on Peter Beal’s pioneering work, cataloguing extant manuscripts of Bacon’s work in Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. I: 1450–1625 (London, Mansell, 1980), pp. 17–52. Each witness is designated by a ‘BcF’ code. 41. BL Harley MS 7017, fos. 83r–129v (BcF 269); ibid., fos. 128r–129v (BcF230); ibid., fo. 118 (BcF305).

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96 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Alan Stewart BL Additional MS 27278, fos. 17v–22v (BcF303). BL Harley MS 7017 fos. 179r–206v. LPL MS 936 arts. 1 and 2 (BcF 199). BL Additional MS 38693, fo. 49. LPL MS 936 art. 274 (BcF309). BL Harley MS 532, fos. 61r–4v (BcF 107); BL Harley MS 6797, fos. 20r–46v (BcF 261); TNA SP 14/5, no. 51 (BcF121); BL Harley MS 6463, pp. 1–70 (Bc 285); BL Harley MS 6463, pp. 70–3 (BcF307); Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 280, fos. 205r–33r (BcF 289); BL Harley 6855, vol. 1, fos. 4r–31v (BcF 306); BL Harley MS 7021, fos. 25r–42v (BcF232); BL Royal MS 17 A. LVI, fos. 1r–16v (BcF 99); BL Harley MS 6797, fos. 122r– 127v (BcF 132); BL Harley MS 6797, fos. 79r–83v (BcF 298); BL Harley 5106 (BcF203); BL Harley 6797 fos. 139r–46v (BcF 214); BL Additional MS 7084 (BcF 215); Chatsworth House, Hardwick MS 72A, fos. 1v–8r, 8v–30v (BcF 294 and 287).

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Chapter 6

The Duties of Societies: Literature, Friendship and Community Michelle O’Callaghan

Over the past decade, critical attention has turned to the study of ‘the collaborative construction of meaning’ in Renaissance texts, from poetry circulating in manuscript to plays performed on the public stage.1 Such attention to the communal contexts of literary creativity, particularly in recent work on collaboration in the theatre, has resulted in a useful corrective to the earlier critical fixation on the emergence of the author. The shift from the study of authorship to collaboration in theatre studies has led to the renewed attention to textuality and the dispersal of the authorial voice, if there can be said to be one, in collaborative play-texts.2 However, just as collaborative writing practices in the theatre were not uniform, but varied according to the specificities of writing partnerships, so too distinctions can be drawn within the paradigm of ‘the collaborative construction of meaning’. There are distinct differences, for example, between the collaborative writing of play-texts and the fashioning of textual friendships and communities. One of the founding texts in establishing a literary community in print, Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579), was specifically designed to introduce the ‘new Poete’ to his public. That said, this ‘new Poete’ is not the post-Enlightenment individual Author, but can only be known through the agency of his ‘familiar freendes and best acquayntance’; an interpretative situation that is complicated by the self-conscious dispersal of the identity of the ‘new Poete’ amongst a series of pseudonyms and initials (Immerito, Colin, E. K., Hobbinol), said to denote the poet and his friends.3 In The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser fashions an author function that is critically, and playfully, dependent on enabling interpretative communities. Attention to the communal contexts of literary creativity allows us to focus on the material and imagined environments in which texts were made and the series of creative contracts that writers entered into, from those with friends and acquaintances who read and commented on

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their work, to those with patrons who offered economic support and cultural capital, and those with publishers and printers who put the text through the press. These material conditions of the text’s production frequently appear in literary texts in metaphoric guise or as metonyms designed to draw attention to the processes of poetic making. The making of the text, from composition to publication, as Roger Chartier points out, ‘is always a collective process involving numerous actors in which there is no sharp distinction between the materiality of the text and the textuality of the book’. The way that writers ‘transformed the material realities of writing and publication into an aesthetic resource’, which then could ‘be used to achieve poetic, dramatic, or narrative effects’, signals the emergence of the new relationship that the writer has with his or her literary works. Chartier argues that such literary representations should ‘be understood as one of the ways in which societies attempted to control the irresistible proliferation of the written, to reduce the worrisome dispersion of texts’.4 Writers transformed the material conditions of writing and publishing into a metaphoric resource. We can understand this process not only as a creative act but as an attempt to impose order on a medium, whether written or printed, that was out of their hands as soon as it entered the channels of publication. The desire for control therefore goes hand in hand with the production of fictions of authorship. Writers began fictionalising their own creative practices and environments in order to understand and to define their relationship with the texts that they made. This chapter will examine modes of textual sociability in the epistolary sonnets of Donne and in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender and its companion texts, Three Proper and wittie familiar Letters and Two other very commendable Letters of the same mens writing (1580). Across these texts, familiar friendships are figured as distinctly male modes of sociability. The river Trent in Donne’s epistolary sonnet to ‘I. L.’ is part of a gendered topography in which it is the boundary between the male society of friendship, in London and at the Inns of Court, and ‘the embrace of a loved wife’, at home on the country estate: ‘Your Trent is Lethe; that past, us you forget. / You do not duties of societies.’5 The ‘duties of societies’ invoked are exclusively those of elite male friendship. Donne’s impassioned epistolary sonnets invest this language of male friendship with an emotional intensity. Male intimacy is posited as the prerequisite for the creative contract between fellow writers, as the basis for the trust that allows men to share verses and exchange ideas. The literary communities Spenser fashions in The Shepheardes Calender and his epistolary exchanges with Gabriel Harvey similarly draw on this notion of the creative nearness of familiar friends. The

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volume was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. While Sidney may have been a fellow poet, he was ultimately Spenser’s patron, and Spenser’s communities are fashioned within this underlying tension between the dependency of patronage and the intellectual autonomy promised by literary friendships. In his later Colin Clout Come Home Againe, and the subsequent print communities it fostered, these tensions are politicised. A humanist language of friendship came to prominence in the sixteenth century in part because the values it encoded helped to define and stabilise the class identity of gentlemen.6 The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed the publication of a number of books on the subject of gentility: the anonymous Institucion of a Gentleman (1555), Gerard Legh’s The Accedence of Armorie (1586) and John Ferne’s The Blazon of Gentry (1586). These books were responding to uncertainty over what constituted gentle status, brought about, in part, by the Tudor civic renaissance, the expansion of governing classes as men from merchant or yeoman stock, who had risen through the law, trade or the guilds, acquired land, held public office, and frequently served in parliament.7 These men, who were not gentlemen of three descents, none the less wanted access to tangible signs of gentility, including sending their sons to the universities and Inns of Court. When, in his Accedence of Armorie, Legh set out a utopian vision of the Inns of Court as a type of Aristotelian city-state, he built its foundations out of the gentlemanly ideal of friendship: ‘amitie is obtained and continued’, since ‘Gentlemen of all Countries in their young yeares, nourished together in one place, with such comely order, and daily conference are knit by continuall acquaintance in such unity of minds and manners, as lightly never after is severed: then which is nothing more profitable to the common weale’.8 Neither Donne, nor many of his close friends at Lincoln’s Inn to whom he addressed epistles, were the sons of landed gentry. Donne’s father was an ironmonger and citizen of London, while Rowland and Thomas Woodward were the sons of a London vintner.9 Friendship, with its basis in ideals of affinity, offered a vocabulary for elegantly asserting shared gentlemanly status, particularly when such a claim was uncertain. Donne’s epistolary sonnet to ‘I.L.’ belongs to this environment, in which the ‘duties of society’ are the ties that bind men who have studied together at the Inns of Court and hoped to enter the law or the service of a noble or government household, or take their place at court. The sonnet intensifies the claims of friendship by pointing to the fragility of these bonds. The speaker complains that such ‘duties’ have not been maintained by ‘I.L.’ so that the social contract they describe is in

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danger of being broken. Much depends on this investment in friends and friendship. Other friends, the speaker reminds ‘I.L.’, have maintained these bonds through the exchange of letters – there is a reference here to Henry Wotton, who was travelling in Padua, Paris, Vienna and Prague (‘Po, Sequan [Seine], or Danuby’). ‘I.L.’s’ silence has turned the Trent into the Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Social memory was central to the performance of early modern friendship. The idea that friendship can only be known through the test of time goes back to antiquity. Aristotle wrote ‘For a friend is not to be had without trial nor in a single day, but there is need of time.’ Friendship is tested and performed through acts of gift-giving that bind chains of obligation.10 It is not simply friendship, but its promises, pledges and bonds, that are given such weight in Donne’s epistolary sonnets. Many of Donne’s early verse epistles to his male friends are sonnets; in fact, he seems to have reserved the form for either his male friends, or a male deity. He is not unusual in using the sonnet to figure the intimacy of male friendship – William Shakespeare and Richard Barnfield also wrote sonnets in the 1590s that were explicitly homoerotic. Donne’s epistolary sonnets to ‘T.W.’, in particular, are highly erotically charged. The speaker of these sonnets is the importuning Petrarchan lover, frustrated and anxious that his love and his letters have not been reciprocated. The jealous desire of the male speaker attributes ‘an impassioned intensity and sincerity to the affective realm of male friendship’. As George Klawitter has noted, ‘what is most striking about the[se] verse letters . . . is their intense familiarity’.11 In Donne’s epistolary sonnets the often overwhelming desire for nearness is engendered by the absence of the friend, hence the need for epistolary exchange. The energies of his epistolary sonnets arguably are directed towards exploring and imagining forms of communal male creativity, the much-desired yet conflicted and intense creative contracts between men within the literary environment fostered by the Inns of Court. Donne’s epistolary sonnets are highly self-conscious studies of friendship as a mode of textual sociability. Written to his friends at the Inns of Court in the 1590s, these verses were read and circulated amongst these men and other close acquaintances. There is a remarkable continuity between the material status of the verses and the ‘textuality of behaviour’ they describe.12 The gift-giving at the heart of the performance of friendship, which provoke chains of obligation, is transacted through the exchange of letters and verses among the scribal community. The speaker gently chides his friend, ‘I.L.’, that if he does not repay the speaker’s verses in kind, the speaker will regret the investment that he has made in their friendship. As he reminds ’I.L.’, ‘Some hours on us

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your friends, and some bestow / Upon your Muse, else both we shall repent, / I that my love, she that her gifts on you are spent’ (ll. 13–14). Donne’s epistolary sonnets use the vocabulary of male friendship in innovative ways, both to set out the terms for how his verses should circulate privately within relatively restricted and known social circles and, just as importantly, to conceptualise the processes of communal literary creativity amongst a close-knit group. Arthur Marotti’s account of the ‘theory of epistolary communication’ that Donne develops in his prose letters could equally be applied to his epistolary sonnets, in that he similarly ‘allowed himself to reflect metacommunicatively on the [literary] medium in order to define the artefact he was creating and his desired relationship with his addressees’.13 The textual image of the ‘short roll of friends writ in my heart’ (l. 1) tropes a particular mode of scribal publication: that of the private circulation of verse epistles amongst an exclusive community of friends. The classicised language of male friendship, with its basis in an idealised intimacy of ‘one soul in bodies twain’, is a language of exclusivity and restricted circulation. Cicero drew a distinction between ‘the ordinary and commonplace friendship’ of the people and the ‘pure and faultless kind, such as was that of the few whose friendships are known to fame’.14 Such friendship was defined by its rarity; hence the speaker has only ‘a short roll of friends writ in my heart’. The language of rarity is highly appropriate for figuring the restricted circulation of texts within a scribal community. Just as Donne’s epistolary sonnets present the speaker as jealous of his male friends, insisting that they recognise his ‘rarity’, and place him at the centre of their affections and verse exchanges, so in his prose letters, he presents himself as equally jealous of his verses. In a letter, probably addressed to Sir Henry Wotton, sent together with a copy of his Paradoxes, with the promise also to send his ‘Satires’ and ‘Elegies’, Donne seeks to extract his own promise from the addressee, that: Except I receive by your next letter an assurance upon the religion of your friendship that no copy shall be taken for any respect of these or any other my compositions, I shall sin against my conscience if I send you any more. I speak that in plainness which becomes (methinks) our honesties and, therefore, call not this a distrustful but a free spirit.15

The bonds and obligations of friendship are wittily turned into those of sacred trust. Arguments from conscience frequently arose when there was a conflict of allegiance – the letter prompts the question of whether trust is held in the verses, in Donne’s own compositions, or in the friendship between the two men, ‘our honesties’. Rowland Woodward, one of Donne’s fellow students at Lincoln’s

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Inn in the 1590s, and his younger brother, Thomas Woodward, were the addressees of a number of Donne’s epistolary sonnets on the theme of friendship that are simultaneously highly self-reflective studies in the composition and circulation of Donne’s verses. Donne’s verse epistles to Thomas survive in a comparatively large number of copies, suggesting that they circulated quite widely amongst a group of friends and acquaintances. By contrast, three of the extant verse epistles addressed to ‘R.W.’ (‘Kindly I envy thy song’s perfection’, ‘Muse not that by thy mind the body is led’ and ‘Zealously my Muse doth salute all thee’) appear to have had a very limited circulation, perhaps only given to Rowland by Donne, and then kept close, since they survive only in the Conway Papers (a collection of papers belonging to Sir Edward Conway and his son, Edward, second Viscount Conway, both close friends of Donne and his son, John) and in the Westmoreland MS (compiled by Rowland, probably from his own manuscript book, for his employer, Francis Fane, Earl of Westmoreland) – in fact, ‘Kindly I envy’ exists only in this latter collection.16 ‘Kindly I envy’ is a sonnet written in critical appreciation of a verse by Rowland. Donne draws on the classical idea that the goal of friendship is emulation. Just as Rowland is figured as the idealised friend, his verse has stimulated a productive ‘envy’ through its author’s and its own exemplarity; the ‘perfection’ of ‘R.W.’’s song has ‘half quenched’ the ‘satiric fires which urged me to have writ / In scorn of all: for now I admire thee’ (ll. 6–8). The friend and his verse become Donne’s other, better self, capable of recreating the speaker through imitation: ‘Oh, I was dead: but since thy song new life did give, / I recreated even by thy creature live’ (ll. 13–14). The language of friendship coalesces with a language of literary imitation and emulation to imagine, in ideal terms, the creative environment that can exist among fellow poets – although, it is notable that the jealous ‘satiric fires’ can only be ‘half quenched’, turning the friend into a potential rival. Donne’s experiments with the idiom of friendship in his verses addressed to friends suggests the ways in which this language both arises out of and imagines quite specific writing practices and environments: those of the literary life of groups of people involved in manuscript exchange and circulation. In the case of Donne and Rowland Woodward, the implied reader was also the recipient of the verse, and both an intimate acquaintance and a fellow author, and this situation gives a particular inflection to the way that a language of friendship is put to work in the verses. The reader is thus imagined as having an active role in the creation of the text, in this case, acting as its muse and its exemplar. Donne’s poem addressed to ‘R.W.’, like his other epistolary sonnets addressed to friends, assumes the

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existence of a ‘short roll of friends’ who regularly exchange verses with each other; a material condition of creativity that, in turn, becomes the subject of the verse epistle. There is thus a remarkable circularity to the creative process: Donne and his sonnet have their point of origin and return in the friend, ‘R.W.’, and his song. The epistolary verse is personalised to such a degree that it gives the impression that it was intended only for the eyes of its addressee.17 The intimacy of this closed circle arguably describes a mode of textual sociability that emerges out a manuscript rather than print culture. Margaret Ezell has argued that the ‘practice of circulating scribal texts’ gave rise to a ‘different self-definition of authorship’, ‘characteristic of very different physical conditions of writing and reading’.18 Harold Love similarly posits a clear distinction between print and scribal communities: ‘Print-based communities were characterised by an openness and flexibility that contrasted with the coherence and inward-turned autonomy of the scribal reading circle.’ The transmission and exchange of verses in scribal communities not only coincided with pre-existing communities, but were a mode of social bonding that was both exclusive and designed to reinforce and perpetuate a communal, coterie identity. Communities of the book, by contrast, ‘implied the opposed view of a community . . . formed by public sharing of knowledge’.19 Exceptions can be found to every generalisation. None the less, too rigid a dichotomy between print and manuscript cultures can obscure more than it reveals. There are instructive affinities between print and scribal communities that point to shared textual and social practices between cultures of manuscript and the book. One of the definitive Renaissance print-based communities is Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, which, like Donne’s epistolary sonnets, uses the language of friendship to negotiate issues of obligation and dependency and to imagine a utopian space of creative autonomy and exchange. The paratext to The Shepheardes Calender is sophisticated and playful in the manner of Thomas More’s Utopia. The scholarly epistles, which set out to introduce the ‘new Poete’, advocate the reform of vernacular poetry and provide a history of the eclogue, are lightened by playful ‘faining’, from the identity of the new poet to those of his familiar friends ‘hidden’ under ‘fained’ names – the only friend named is Gabriel Harvey. The book sets up a complex interplay between the imagined community, largely figured through pastoral fictions, and an actual community of friends and patrons said to exist just outside its pages. There is a degree of openness to this print community since its purpose is to introduce the new poet to his public. Yet the refusal to disclose the actual identity of the author and his ‘circle’ insists on

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exclusivity and gives the impression of the ‘inward-turned autonomy’ typically ascribed to manuscript publication. Such ‘secrecy’, as Richard Rambuss points out, is premised on ‘intellectual and social exclusiveness (and exclusion)’: ‘The social enfoldedness of this kind of coterie secrecy introduces the Calender as a book intended only for “friends”.’ 20 The following year, two volumes of letters appeared in a London bookshop: Three Proper and wittie familiar Letters: lately passed betweene two Vniversitie men: touching the Earth-quake in Aprill last, and our English refourmed Versifying. With a Preface of a well willer to them both, and Two other very commendable Letters of the same mens writing: both touching the foresaid Artificiall Versifying, and certain other Particulars More lately deliuered vnto the Printer, both published in 1580. One of the university men identified in the volumes was ‘Maister G. H., Fellow of Trinitie Hall in Cambridge’ and the other signed himself and was addressed as ‘Immerito’, of ‘Leycester House’, the name taken by the new poet of Shepheardes Calender. These volumes of letters make numerous references to Shepheardes Calender, ‘a certaine famous Booke’, and Harvey, in particular, plays around with the anonymity of its authors and the shepherd poets that populate its pages: ‘For, I pray now, what saith M. CUDDIE, alias you know who, in the tenth GLOGUE of the foresaid famous new Calender’. If a diligent reader turned to this eclogue, they would find the gloss, ‘I doubte whether by Cuddie be specified the authour selfe, or some other.’ 21 Anonymity is a function of the singularity of authorship; it is the property, Jeffrey Masten argues, of ‘an author or his writings’. The Shepheardes Calender and the published Spenser–Harvey letters are not only aware of the authorial properties of anonymity, but play with it. ‘Immerito’ makes anonymity and the paternity of his book interdependent in his verse before The Shepheardes Calender, thereby attesting to the ‘inextricability of the question of authorship from patriarchy’s interest in paternity’.22 And yet the verse disrupts any straightforward equation between the father and his book. Shepheardes Calender is a bastard book; since its parent is ‘unkent’ (l. 2) (meaning both ‘unknown’ and ‘untaught’), ‘Immerito’ looks to Sir Philip Sidney to be its guardian, to give it ‘succoure’ (l. 6). So, when Spenser, along with his ‘friends’, introduced himself to the public as the ‘new Poete’, he disavowed the paternity of his own offspring in deference to another – the patron – thereby investing the community rather than the individual with responsibility for the book. This is a witty and audacious take on the patronage poem. The book is not simply a gift, but a child given over to the care of another, which intensifies the obligations imposed on its patron-guardian. The poem is a mix of self-abasement – his ‘little

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booke’ must ‘Craue pardon for my hardyhedde’ and ‘Say thou wert base begot with blame’ (ll. 12, 14) – and social and authorial presumption. The relationship between Sidney and Spenser is often held up as an ideal union in which enlightened patronage coalesced with intellectual creativity and poetic exchange. The ‘Life of Mr. Edmond Spenser’, which accompanied the 1679 folio of his collected works, concluded that ‘Mr. Spenser, by degrees, so far gain’d upon him [Sidney], that he became not only his Patron, but his Friend too.’ 23 Although this story of friendship has long been discredited, more attention has been paid to the affinities between the two poets than to the social tensions between the structures of patronage and the intellectual familiarity of scholarpoets that run throughout Spenser’s description of his relationship with Sidney in the letters to Harvey. Spenser tells of his acquaintance with ‘the twoo worthy Gentlemen, Master SIDNEY and Master DYER’, who ‘haue me, I thanke them, in some vse of familiarity’: And nowe they haue proclaimed in their άρειω πάγω [areopagus] a generall surceasing and silence of balde Rymers, and also of the verie beste to: in steade whereof, they haue by autho[ri]tie of their whole Senate, prescribed certaine Lawes and rules of Quantities of English sillables for English Verse, hauing had thereof already great practise, and drawen me to their faction. Newe Bookes I heare of none, but only of one, that writing a certaine Booke, called THE SCHOOLE OF ABUSE, and dedicating it to Maister SIDNEY, was for hys labor scorned, if at leaste it be in the goodnesse of that nature to scorne. Suche follie is it not to regarde aforehande the inclination and qualitie of him to whome wee dedicate oure Bookes.24

The areopagus Spenser cites is a rhetorical space; it is unclear whether it was Spenser in this letter, or Sidney and Dyer, who drew on the ancient Athenian Areopagus as a model for the scholarly conversations at Leicester House.25 The Athenian Areopagus, David Norbrook notes, ‘was a vestigial element of an older, aristocratic constitution, a body which censored morals and served as a counterweight to the democratic Assembly’.26 Interestingly, the Areopagus does not signify the utopian ideals of intellectual openness and toleration in this passage; rather the emphasis is on its social and intellectual elitism. This ‘Senate’ has ‘prescribed certaine Lawes and rules of Quantities of English sillables for English Verse’, and censured Stephen Gosson’s comparatively populist The School of Abuse. Jennifer Richards rightly points to the potential irony behind the ‘phrase “authority of their whole Senate” (which rests on a membership of two or three)’ and ‘is meant to sound absurd’.27 Yet this irony is accompanied by an underlying anxiety regarding the power of aristocratic censure and the dependency of the patron–client relationship

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that returns us to Spenser’s earlier concerns, expressed in the letter over the dedication of The Shepheardes Calender to Sidney. He solicited Harvey’s advice on these questions ‘of Estimation and Preferment’: My principal doubts are these. First, I was minded for a while to haue intermitted the vttering of my writings, leaste, by ouermuch cloying their noble eares, I should gather contempt of my self, or else seeme rather for gaine and commoditie to doe it, for some sweetnesse that I haue already tasted.28

Rather than credit his intellectual affinities with Sidney, Spenser has doubts which arise out of status anxieties – differences of taste and potential breaches of decorum and social distance: what if, like Gosson’s, his labour is scorned and censured? Spenser claimed a very uneasy familiarity with Sidney and Sir Edward Dyer that was caught between that of the subordinate dependency of the patron–client relationship and the intellectual equality of the Areopagus. Whereas after Sidney’s death, Spenser was able to posit an idealised poetic affinity in Astrophel (1595) through the tropes of pastoral friendship, in his letters to Harvey, as befits his lower social status, Spenser avoids any use of the idiom of friendship when giving an account of his relationship to these men. The familiarity between ‘Immerito’ and ‘G H.’ in the letters is of a very different order. Like Donne’s epistolary sonnets, friendship in these letters is eroticised to produce the affect of personal affinity and emotional intimacy. Yet unlike Donne’s epistolary exchanges, the Spenser–Harvey letters were intended for publication.29 These ‘familiar letters’, like The Shepheardes Calender, play around with public exposure, and self-consciously use the tropes of friendship to create the textual affects of personal intimacy, as well as intimate knowledge, for a public readership. Spenser writes of his desire for the physical presence of the absent friend, which lingers on a word, or is it a kiss: ‘I woulde rather I might yet see youre owne good selfe, and receiue a Reciprocall farewell from your owne sweete mouth’ (pp. 91–2). The speaker defers parting, writing several farewells before ending the letter. Both Spenser and Harvey write freely of their jealousies and rivalries. Spenser relates how he eagerly received Harvey’s letter, because of the verses inside, which he likes ‘passing well, and enuye your hidden paines in this kinde, or rather maligne and grudge at your selfe that would not once imparte so muche to me’. Jealousy stimulates competition: ‘You shall see when we meete in London . . . howe fast I haue followed after you in that Course: beware leaste in time I ouertake you’ (p. 90). What is being advocated and put into practice is a form of critical friendship: as Jennifer Richards argues, the letters ‘dramatise a style of rivalrous and conflictual amicitia that nurtures the talents of friends’.30 After giving

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appreciative commentary on his ‘Dreams’, Harvey turns to Spenser’s other work: ‘In good faith I had once again nigh forgotten your FAERIE QUEENE: howbeit, by good chaunce, I haue nowe sent hir home at the laste, neither in better nor worse case than I founde hir.’ Harvey is highly critical of Spenser’s poem, although he eventually defers to Spenser’s judgement: ‘If so be the FAERYE QUEENE be fairer in your eie than the NINE MUSES, and HOBGOBLIN runne away with the garland from APOLLO’ (pp. 115–16). By freely giving his advice, particularly critical advice, Harvey fashions himself as the trusted friend, a type of parrhesiastes (person who speaks his mind frankly) who is compelled to tell the truth, and refuses to flatter even a friend. The intimacy necessary for creative dialogue must be accompanied by honesty, which, in turn, provides the basis for productive intellectual and textual exchanges between fellow writers. There is a playfulness to the expression of friendship in these letters that mitigates rivalry. By way of diversion from serious literary counsel, Harvey relates an anecdote about ‘a young Brother of myne’ and the ‘hollydayes exercise’ he set him to translate and paraphrase passages from the Latin and Italian into English hexameter, in line with the reforms of English versification debated by Harvey and Spenser (‘Of Reformed Versifying’, p. 110). It is a reminder that these letters were exchanged between two university men who understood such literary games in institutional terms. The game that he plays with his pupil becomes a game that he plays with Spenser and draws his Shepheardes Calender into the processes of textual exchange and imitation. Harvey instructs his pupil: Let me see now, I pray, what you can doo in your owne TONGUE. And with that, reaching a certaine famous Booke, called the new SHEPHARDES CALENDER, I turned to WILLYES and THOMALINS EMBLEMES, in MARCHE, and bad him make them eyther better or worse in English verse. (‘Of Reformed Versifying’, p. 112)

There is a little, friendly dig here, but the effect is to establish The Shepheardes Calender as the English standard for vernacular poetry. Its author is presented as the father of English poetry, even if he has not yet acknowledged his own paternity. The success of The Shepheardes Calender, Three Proper and wittie familiar Letters and its sequel in introducing the new poet to the public can be judged by William Webbe’s A Discourse of English Poetrie, published six years later in 1586. Webbe claims not to know the identity of ‘the Author of the Sheepeheardes Kalender, . . . because himself and his freendes, for what respect I knowe not, would not reueale it’, but none the less has reserved for him ‘the tytle of the rightest English Poet’.

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The reason why he needs to know this poet’s name is that he wants to place him among, and so assemble, a distinctly English fellowship of poets – the new poet, Gabriel Harvey, and his two brothers – who will dedicate themselves to ‘that reformed kinde of Poetry’.31 However fanciful Webbe’s imagined literary school may be, it is instructive. If the formation of literary traditions and canons depends on the figure of the Author, then this figure did not emerge in isolation, but was understood in terms of literary affinities and consanguinities as much as singularity and rarity. Harvey offers Spenser a vision of the future in which his status as a ‘gentle’ author will be secured through the printing of his books, when he will ‘purchase great landes and Lordshippes with the money which his CALENDAR and DREAMES haue, and will, affourde him’. The print marketplace represents an alternative to the vagaries of patronage, governed, in Spenser’s words, by the ‘mindes of Nobles [which] varie as their Estates’ (‘Of Reformed Versifying’, pp. 114, 88). Richard McCabe has recently drawn attention to the ways in which Spenser’s poetry continually returns to ‘the conflicting demands of personal obligation and artistic integrity that [literary patronage] invariably entails’. Spenser struggled with the demands of patronage throughout the 1590s.32 Astrophel and Colin Clout Comes Home Againe, published together in 1595, return to the tropes of pastoral friendship to imagine an alternative world, unconstrained by patronage, a ‘shepheards nation’ (l. 17), and conferred a new cultural authority on the poet. It is important that it was Spenser in Astrophel who fashioned a cultural role for Sidney as the idealised shepherd-poet, in effect, turning his former patron into a fellow poet. The next year, William Smith dedicated his Chloris to Spenser, asking the poet ‘Colin’ to act as the literary guardian or patron to his book. The poet is now patron: ‘Smith’s dedication’, McCabe explains, is ‘an empowerment of poetical “gifts” by the poetically gifted’ and ‘marks a crucial stage in the emergence of a “Spenserian” school of verse’.33 Writers turned to the language of friendship to transform themselves into authors. Its tropes provided a means of representing and negotiating conflicting personal and political obligations to fellow writers and patrons, on the one hand, and conceptualising the material and ideological conditions that enable creative exchange and define writers’ relationships to the texts they have made, on the other. This chapter has concentrated on the homosociality of such literary production. It is, of course, only one side of the story. Women writers, such as Aemilia Lanyer and Katherine Philips, as has long been recognised, imagined female communities, negotiated the demands of patronage, and

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mobilised the trope of friendship, to fashion an author-function and to locate themselves within the processes of textual exchange and reproduction. Key to understanding these processes is the analysis of social modes of authorship, which draws critical attention to the practices of textual sociability and how ‘writing was “made”‘ within communities and among friends and rivals. Notes 1. The phrase is Jeffrey Masten’s, in Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 4; Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994); Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000); Rebecca D’Monté and Nicole Pohl (eds), Female Communities 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Julie Campbell, Literary Circles and Gender in Early Modern Europe: A Cross-Cultural Approach (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 2. Masten, Textual Intercourse, p. 13; Richard L. Nochimson, ‘“Sharing” The Changeling by playwrights and professors: The certainty of uncertain knowledge about collaborations’, Early Theatre, 5 (2001), pp. 37–55. 3. The Shepheardes Calender (1579), in Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 25, 127. All citations are of this edition. 4. Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. ix–xi. 5. John Donne, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 5–6. All citations are of this edition. 6. Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 136–9; Masten, Textual Intercourse, pp. 28–30. 7. Phil Withington, ‘Two Renaissances: Urban political culture in PostReformation England reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), pp. 239–67. 8. Gerard Legh, The Accedence of Armorie. Newly corrected and augmented (London, 1612), pp. 216–17. 9. R. C. Bald, Donne, A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 20–3, 74. 10. Cited in Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins

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11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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(1997; London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 20. Friendship, Derrida writes, is ‘held in a pledge, a promise, an alliance (performative chain)’ (p. 9). O’Callaghan, The English Wits, pp. 19–21; Arthur Marotti, ‘The social context and nature of Donne’s writing: Occasional verse and letters’, in Achsah Guibbory (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 37; George Klawitter, The Enigmatic Narrator: The Voicing of Same-Sex Love in the Poetry of John Donne (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 3. See Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), p. 31. Marotti, ‘Social context and nature of Donne’s writing’, p. 40. Cicero, De Amicitia, ed. W. A. Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), p. 133, vi.22. John Donne: Selected Letters, ed. P. M. Oliver (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2002), p. 5. Alan MacColl, ‘The circulation of Donne’s Poems in manuscript’, in A. J. Smith, ed., John Donne: Essays in Celebration (London: Methuen, 1972), pp. 32–3; Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. 1: 1450–1625 (London: Mansell; New York: R. R. Bowker, 1980), part 1, pp. 247, 252; Westmoreland MS, New York Public Library. See also Klawitter on the verse epistles to ‘R.W.’, Enigmatic Narrator, p. 7. Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 12, 39–40. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 183–4. Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 29, 50. Gabriel Harvey, ‘Of Reformed Versifying’, in G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), I, p. 114 Masten, Textual Intercourse, p. 12. The Works of that Famous English Poet, Mr. Edmond Spenser (London, 1679), sig. A1. Edmund Spenser, ‘Of Reformed Versifying’, in Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, I, p. 89. The existence of a ‘formally convened coterie’ at Leicester House, presided over by Sidney and Dyer, has been rejected by a number of critics, including S. K. Heninger, who states that ‘There was no poetical academy dubbed the Areopagus with fixed rules and regular meetings’: Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), pp. 9–10. That said, given that Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, presided over a literary circle at Wilton, it is credible that conversations of the type described by Spenser were held at Leicester House, and may have playfully used the premise of the Areopagus, even if these gatherings were informal and short-lived. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 130.

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27. Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 125. 28. Spenser, ‘Of Reformed Versifying’, p. 88. 29. See Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career, p. 18. 30. Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, p. 138. 31. William Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie. Together, with the Authors iudgment, touching the reformation of our English Verse (1586), ed. Edward Arber (London: Alexander Murray & Son, 1868), VIII, p. 35. 32. Richard A. McCabe, ‘Rhyme and reason: Poetics, patronage, and secrecy in Elizabethan and Jacobean Ireland’, in David Womersley and Richard McCabe (eds), Literary Milieux: Essays in Text and Context, Presented to Howard Erskine-Hill (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 30, 35–6. 33. McCabe, ‘Rhyme and reason’, p. 47.

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Chapter 7

Gender, Material Culture and the Hybridity of Renaissance Writing Danielle Clarke

My purpose is this chapter is twofold: first, to reposition the ‘making’ of English Renaissance writing – that by women in particular – in terms of developments in language and rhetoric in the period; and secondly, to suggest that women’s writing has a particular role to play in the gradual evolution of a model of writing that privileges interiority and subjectivity over other kinds of experience, because of women writers’ habit of bringing private experience into the public domain.1 They disrupt the dominant paradigms of Renaissance writing, where experience is articulated through formal, inherited and programmatic structures, by turning directly to experience as a source of invention, but framing this in the terms prevalent in Renaissance culture as a whole – authority, analogy and precedent. Crucial questions of ethos in relation to women’s speech still require serious investigation, as interpretation of women’s writing moves beyond accepting prescriptive writings at face value, and counterpoints these with detailed evidence of the ways in which women attempt to mesh ethics and style in order to develop an art of speaking (or writing) well. I am not proposing a return to an unreconstructed experiential reading, but a reconsideration of the evidence in the light of what we increasingly understand about Renaissance textual practice, which indicates that women were sophisticated participants on a wider scale than the previous tendency to isolate exceptional figures suggests. I want to argue that privacy, intimacy and emotion in the Renaissance are figured textually, in the first instance, by the act of shaping words into sentences, and sentences into texts – by the physical encounter between self and script – and, in the second, by the incorporation of other texts, frequently but by no means exclusively the Bible. As Ashley Tauchert argues, ‘[w]riting can also be understood as the unique imprint of a moment at which subjectivity gains voice in a social exchange of meaning’.2 This kind of exploration inevitably means reaching into the

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critical toolbox and picking out some old-fashioned-looking tools – dictionaries, the analysis of tropes and figures with due attention to their expressive and emotional functions and to their methodological underpinnings. It means thinking more about how textual practices might be learned and transmitted outside grammar schools and household tutors for boys. It also means thinking about relationships between extant documents in terms of practice rather than final intentions. These issues will be explored by case studies of two Renaissance women writers: Lady Anne Southwell and Lady Margaret Hoby. Some of the prevalent paradigms that structure our understanding of Renaissance women’s writing need to be turned on their heads. The foremost of these relates to the issue of imitation; in particular, the notion that most literary productions by women in the period are derivative, pale imitations of classical or popular models that male authors, by virtue of their education and opportunity, can replicate more productively. Rather, women writers turn the most immediately proximate forms and models to account, resulting in the transformation and pluralisation of inherited textual forebears. Informal acquaintance with both rhetorical tropes and figures, through individual reading and via printed handbooks, and with the habits of humanist pedagogy, through fathers, brothers, sons and husbands, permits the adaptation of such methods to new forms and different texts, resulting in some unorthodox, but significant hybrids. In other words, the household can be seen as a significant locus for literary production, with writing as a conduit that negotiates and reconfigures its boundaries.3 The second key issue to be countered concerns women’s formal mastery of language and literary form, in particular the idea that it is amateurish, and that women’s command of language lacks virtuosity: it is not copious, varied or correct. In fact, women’s tangential and ambiguous relationship to an emergent language regime based on a metropolitan, masculine standard actually facilitates verbal fluidity and invention, and permits a highly flexible and adaptable literary language to emerge, one based much more closely on ‘ordinary’ speech. Although scholarship is catching up, texts by women, especially manuscript ones, are often not recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, and in many cases, women’s usage predates the earliest citations there. Like their male counterparts, women who write are enthusiastic coiners of words, often using similar methods (zero derivation, suffixing, compounding). Women, too, exploit the unstable resources of an as yet unfixed language ‘standard’ that is characterised by the lability of boundaries between speech and writing, and between oral, aural and scripted realisation. Recent linguistic work by Terttu Nevalainen strongly suggests

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that Renaissance women were often drivers of linguistic change, enthusiastically adopting emerging prestige forms – those forms and styles that symbolise upward social mobility and mark social stratification.4 One could argue that the relative lack of stability in the written language until at least the Restoration (I stress written language, not print) renders female literary production less marginal than a focus on printed texts would suggest, taking its place amongst a range of nonmetropolitan, non-hegemonic forms of writing. One of the key struggles over the course of the English Renaissance is to do with attempts to contain the potential unleashed by women’s (and non-elite classes’) access to literacy, and about how to realign the disruptions to the social and linguistic hierarchy set in train by the fact that the prestige dialect was no longer the exclusive preserve of one social group. Women’s exclusion from institutional sites of textual production, especially the schools’ systems for teaching rhetoric, means that women who write are often powerfully transformative in relation to the models that they adopt, producing generically hybrid texts that frequently eschew formal ornament in favour of styles that privilege plainness and sincerity, even where they are linguistically innovative or unorthodox. Literate women occupy a paradoxical place within a hierarchy based upon access to the written word – neither fully literate in the ‘lettered’ sense, nor entirely excluded from the world of writing by virtue of status or poverty. These women have access to books and written materials, as well as spoken texts (prayers, sermons, books of household management and advice), but, with rare exceptions, lack formal programmatic training. The remainder of this chapter will examine these issues in relation to two women writers: one a poet, the other a diarist. Both Lady Anne Southwell (1574–1636) and Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633) were gentry figures who used literate practice in the context of the household; yet in so doing they require us to rethink the parameters of the household and the ways in which both its physical and ideological boundaries were subject to continual re-negotiation.

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Lady Anne Southwell’s letter to Cicely McWilliams, Lady Ridgeway (at this point probably resident in Clogher, County Tyrone – like Southwell’s husband, Lord Ridgeway was a planter), attempts to persuade her of the merits of poetry, disputing her adherence to prose: ‘[y]ou say, you affect proze, as your auncestors did; Error is not to bee affected for antiquitye.’5 Southwell’s ‘letter’ cannot be dated with any certainty, but the terminus ad quem is Lady Ridgeway’s death, in 1627. It is immediately obvious

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that the text uses one form (the letter) to introduce another (the defence of poetry); it is a ‘letter’ only in the sense that it carries an address and a signature; in all other respects it is a free-standing piece of carefully crafted continuous prose. It is not uncommon to find quite involved discussions of complex and abstract matters in Renaissance letters, but the debate here is self-contained and is not accompanied by speculations or news of any kind.6 Its transmission is testament to Southwell’s habit – common in business transactions in the period – of keeping copies of letters sent in a letter-book or, as in this case, a book used more promiscuously for keeping records.7 It is usually called a commonplace book, although it is closer to being what might be termed a ‘table book’, as it contains drafts and copies of poems, alongside ‘letters’ (verse and prose) on various topics and themes, and notes on her reading, as well as more quotidian items like bills of receipt and inventories. Although it includes poems that Southwell clearly thought important (Ralegh’s ‘The Lie’ and Henry King’s ‘Exequy’), the book is not a commonplace book in the conventional sense, and is not organised as such.8 This ‘letter’ has a playful air, and it clearly reflects a tradition of dialectic often informally rehearsed as jests and dialogues.9 Here the topic is whether poetry is superior to prose. It is impossible to know whether this is a response to an actual conversation, or is simply framed as such. Many of the key ideas about poetry are familiar Renaissance notions, underlining the point that women often encountered cultural and aesthetic norms in non-institutional ways: ‘Poesye seemes to doe more for nature, then shee is able to doe for her selfe, wherein, it doth but lay downe a patterne what man should bee; & shewes, that Imagination goes before Realitye’ (ll. 20–3). Equally, the idea that poetry encapsulates and surpasses the other arts is a Renaissance commonplace, ‘how shee is envelloped upp wth the rest of the artes’ (5:52), but Southwell’s knowledge and use of commonplaces is something that should be viewed constructively, as she uses this argument as the inventio upon which the rest of her attempt to persuade her friend is based. The brio of the piece lies in its use of figures and tropes, and in her ability (attested to in the widespread use of complex conceits in her poems) to exploit the materiality and plasticity of early modern English. Her tactic is to link poetry with a series of other powerful discourses by analogy and metaphor in a phrase structured by zeugma (two parts of a sentence joined with a common noun or verb). The other arts ‘are but Bases & Pedestalles, unto the wch this is the Capitall; the mere [in the sense of pure, unmixed] Herald of all Ideas; The worldes true vocall Harmonye of wch all other artes are but partes’ (ll. 2–5). The ‘true vocall Harmonye’ draws upon poetry’s ancient relationship to music, and the homoioteleuton of ‘artes’ and ‘partes’ points

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to the musical meaning of ‘partes’. These concrete analogies demonstrate the power of figuration that the ‘abstruse’ art of poetry embodies. Southwell’s interest in figuration as a tool of argumentation is quite striking; besides the analogies with architecture and music, she compares poetry favourably to the body, the elements and the four humours. Poetry is a moral salve, applied by a ‘phisitian’. The idea of poetry as a form of physic for the soul is the deft ligature that leads to the substance of the argument: that poetry is divine, and whilst corrupted, can always be returned to its rightful and natural usage, and in this potential act of re-creation, it approximates the divine. Southwell’s interest in a doubleness of poetic ‘making’ is clearly indebted both to Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and to Puttenham’s more earthy formulation of the twin imperatives of poetic creativity. The universality of poetry and the idea that it is integral to existence are explored through a series of complex metaphors, where creation itself is a poetic text (pace Augustine, whose Confessions Southwell owned; she also wrote notes on the City of God): God; whose never enough to bee admired creation, was poetically confined to 4. generall genusses . . . The effectes wch give life unto his verse, were, Hott, Cold, Moist & Drye . . . Now being thus poetically composed; How can you bee at unitye wth your self, & at oddes wth your owne composition. (ll. 12–18)

This tendency to shift register and to perceive relationships between things (‘poetically confined . . . poetically composed . . . composition’) is a feature of Southwell’s writing style, but it has its origin not in the formal habit of gathering together examples of particular topoi (mostly fixed in advance), but in Southwell’s own reading habits. This short text reveals Southwell’s facility with allusions; in the space of just over fifty lines, she refers to the Old Testament figures of Rahab and Doeg, Venus and Adonis, Hero and Leander, and David. These are conventional enough, but it is Southwell’s capacity to apply these precedents aptly and with authority that is significant. She argues that it is the misuse of poetry (put to ends other than virtue) that has turned Lady Ridgeway against the form: ‘Some wanton Venus or Adonis hath bene cast before your chast eares, whose evill affyre; disgracing this beautifull Nimph, hath unworthyed her in your opinion’ (ll. 30–3). Reason is the arbiter, which should return poetry to its proper sphere from the erotic and ‘wanton’; these abuses are merely a ‘cloud’. Southwell, like many of her contemporaries (and again, taking her lead from Sidney’s Defence, printed 1595), argues that the Psalms represent the apotheosis of poetic achievement:

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see the kingly Prophett, that sweete singer of Israell, explicating the glorye of our god, his power in creating, his mercye in redeeming, his wisedome in preserving; making these three, as it were the Comma, Colon, & Period to every stanzae. Who would not say, the musicall spheare did yeeld a cadencye to his songe, & in admiration crye out; O never enough to bee admired, devine Poesye. It is the subject, that commends or condemnes the art. (ll. 43–9)

The sentiment here is conventional enough, but what is significant is Southwell’s mode of expression; her use of isocolon (two or more clauses of a sentence of similar length and structure used to pinpoint parallels) and paronomasia (punning, word play, based on formal, aural or semantic similarities between words), and the witty textual self-consciousness of ‘Comma, Colon, & Period’, where punctuation is metaphorically associated with the underlying invention of the Psalms, the substructure to their poetic articulation. Unlike many of the texts preserved in the Southwell-Sibthorpe commonplace book, this letter has no revisions, suggesting that this was one of several fair copies. Southwell’s poems, in particular, show evidence of repeated reworking, postdating the effort to collect the works together that is represented by the book itself. It includes drafts in various states of what we might call ‘completion’. Space does not permit a detailed consideration of the highly complex processes by which the commonplace book was put together, but I would like to make a point about the type of textuality that is represented here.10 The commonplace book is entitled ‘the workes of Lady Ann southwell’ and is clearly an attempt to pull scattered materials together into some kind of coherence; it thus represents a gathering, an anthology, but more germanely, an attempt to create a specific textual locus for a series of writings identified purposely as those of Lady Anne Southwell. The term ‘workes’ is worth dwelling on; not only does it ally Southwell’s textual productions with the aspirational publications of authors such as Jonson and Daniel, it also hints at the idea of textual production as a form of domestic productivity, the manifestation of the work of virtue expected of the archetypal household. The production of this book suggests a working familiarity with process, with writing as making (poesis, if you will), invention, style, composition, drafting and revision. It could thus be said to ape a fair copy (and may well have started out that way, given that the book appears to have been a wedding gift from Henry Sibthorpe, Southwell’s second husband), an idea of textual coherence that might parallel that of a printed text; it is a book to be kept in a particular place, not a set of scattered papers bound arbitrarily together. Southwell’s library contained several books that might well have

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served as a model for the creation of ‘workes’ – for instance, Sir John Davies’s Nosce Teipsum or Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals – and this gives rise to my argument about the way in which women absorb and utilise the patterns and textual models that they have to hand and, as autodidacts, thus receive and re-work the prevalent rhetorical habits of their period.11 The assertion I wish to make about this text (and the same point could be made in relation to the Countess of Pembroke’s Psalter) is that it is the process of textual creation that is the point, not solely or exclusively the production of a finished text.12 Different versions and different states of the ‘same’ text (and this approach poses challenges both to traditional textual theory and to new bibliography) do not necessarily have to exist in a hierarchical or temporal relationship to one another. This kind of open-ended fluidity is obviously a feature of manuscript culture more generally, but figures like Southwell and Pembroke also quite consciously view their poetic activity as a meditative process, a logical extension of the minute engagement with the word that their faith prescribed and encouraged. These and other writers tap the potential that exegetical methods, intended to inculcate passive virtue, have for the ‘making’ of texts. This is supported by the widespread practice of reading the Bible rhetorically, and by the evidence of the practice of meditation on the word, discussed below. As Southwell’s letter suggests, the model of the Psalms was hugely important in this regard, because this was one area where the rhetorical analysis of poetic style was actively developed by sixteenth-century commentators; it thus became a source from which women readers could learn how tropes and figures could be identified and applied. The books in Southwell’s library provide a clue both to a habit of reading the Bible rhetorically, and to the process of writing as a meditative one; her books included works by Calvin, Hooker, Montaigne, de Mornay and Owen Feltham, Augustine’s Confessions, Cosin’s private devotions and Featley’s Ancilla pietatis, as well as various books of Roman history. Southwell reveals a notable degree of poetic self-consciousness about the writing process, in particular the materiality of writing. A sense of this can be gained from Southwell’s letter to Ridgeway, where her analysis of the Psalms’ enargeia as physical punctuation marks (as well as the pauses in delivery, the division of the text into its logical parts) recalls Donne’s sermons. Southwell writes in her passage on the importance of the law of the gospel: As there is but o’nely god, one onely Christ, one onely faith, one onely church, and one onely gospell: so likewise unto the world is but one onely

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divine lawe, imprinted alreadye by god in the minde of man, darkened by sinne. (p. 108, my emphasis)

The attempt to lighten this ‘darkness’, at the heart of both Southwell’s work and her repeated defence of poetry as a medium for divinity, reveals a preoccupation with the need for words not to drift or betray, and thus explains her ludic attempts to incorporate instability of meaning into the substance of her texts: Mans mind a mirror is of heavenly formes & though created, yett hee can create his polish’d thoughts the quill & booke adorne wch cloude of ignorance doth captivate (Precept 4, #26. ll. 151–4)

Thus, what Southwell terms ‘this banquett of soules, devine Poesye’ (Letter to Lady Ridgway, l.30), the text of her writing, is the extension, the outcrop, of the encounter between self and God, and its expression is seen to be sanctified by Him: ‘And being dipt in heavens Selestiall Springes / My penn shall portrait Supernaturall thinges’ (1st commandment, 5–6).13 Such a degree of self-consciousness is a common element in much Renaissance writing. In many instances it is no doubt little more than an adopted convention, a semantic reflex, but its prevalence does suggest a particularly concrete sense of engagement with something that is not merely abstract but also material. Southwell had something before her, an object in relation to which she formulated her own forms of expression in yet another material medium. Paper, print, books, the materials ranged on the table in front of her, are recycled and turned into paper, pen, ink, marks on a page – a process that requires not only intellectual action, but physical and material activity. She demonstrates a preoccupation with words and their dangers, and a striving for language and thought to cohere – for it not to mislead – an attempt to resist its fallen nature: ‘othes are to the soule as dartes & swordes, / the voyce of truth sayth, they come from the divell / then never sweare to make men trust your wordes’ (pp. 134, 319–21).14 Throughout the commonplace book and the Lansdowne manuscript, Southwell’s scepticism regarding words and truth is manifest (‘the tongu’s a world of wickednes we see’, l. 499), a concern that is indebted both to her biblical sources and to Renaissance anxiety about the capacity of words to signify, and to relate to the truth. If the task of the poet is to represent the truth of the text before her in language which will not betray that truth, then it is quite logical that this connection will be foregrounded in the poetic process itself: the act of devotion equates with linguistic fidelity to the originating Word, or to the stamp of God’s grace or law

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‘imprinted in the hearts of the regenerate’ (Southwell, p. 108). This is neither slavish, nor unthinking; rather it is ludic, self-reflexive and transformative. The use of the word ‘imprint’ is one of Southwell’s lexical quirks, and it refers primarily to the way in which God’s grace is fundamental to human beings, but also to a range of other things – mankind being made in God’s image, God’s law ‘imprinted’ in the mind and so on. Southwell’s poetic task is presented as the writing out of what God has imprinted in her soul, without corruption or deviation, although the poetry itself reveals that it is the model that is important. The divine, twinned with a witty and quirky reworking of a conventional construction of female creativity – women as vessel or conduit – thus authorises her poetic creativity. In Sonnett 2 the soul is figured as a book (not in itself an uncommon trope), ‘that secret booke / Wherein I sigh to Looke’. Southwell figures this book-as-soul/soul-as-book as the physical product of writing, as her revision suggests ‘How many blotts there be, I wish I could not see’ (p. 1). Sonnett 5 is quite different in character, but nevertheless makes it clear that the writing agent, the source of text, is indeed the soul: ‘Shall I sublyme my Soule to frame a letter / And to the Sisters prove a nedy Debter’ (p. 2, ll. 1–2). The attempt at fidelity to what God has imprinted on the soul neatly authorises Southwell’s writing, even if it is flawed, a justification that she compounds by distancing herself from financial need: To lay fayre colours on a wrinckled hide or smooth up vice wth eloquent discource Who writes for pence, be he soe turpified & lett those nine Chima’raes bee his nurse. to teach him crawle the Heliconian hill & in Pernassus dipp his ivorye quill. (Lansdowne, Precept 4, #47)

However it is conceived, Southwell places a breach between her self and her text, to the extent that she seems to suggest that it is her text which constitutes authorship, rather than its relationship to her self: ‘Darest thou my muse present thy Battlike winge, / before the eyes of Brittanes mighty kinge. / . . .You lines excuse my boldnes in this matter / & tell the truth, my hart’s to bigg to flatter’ (1–2, 11.12). That text is both what God has imprinted and Southwell’s mode of expression (in the largest sense): for mee, I write to my self & mee what gods good grace doth in my soule imprint I bought it not for pelf, none buyes of thee nor will I lett it at soe base a rent

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as wealth or fame, wch is but drosse & vapor & scarce deserves the blotting of a paper. (#48)

This is a complex statement on the nature of writing and circulation, but the key point is that Southwell writes ‘to my self & mee’ of what God’s grace bequeaths her: her role as author is predicated upon her relationship with God, and specifically with grace. Yet in her insistence that she will not sell God’s grace cheap she effectively elevates her work above earthly preoccupations with ‘wealth or fame’. She insists throughout her work that poetry should be a pure, uplifting medium – not least because of its link to God’s imprint – and that it shouldn’t be pulled down by ‘amorous Idiotts’ (l. 310) by sloppy or hypocritical phrasing (again, perhaps one explanation for her revisions upon revisions). The poetic process is central.

••

The final part of this chapter will briefly consider the other aspect of the ‘making’ of English writing in the Renaissance – not so much the processes of poetic invention and lexical innovation that I have attempted to demonstrate are evident in Lady Anne Southwell’s work, her poesis, but the more quotidian acts of creating writing that ultimately feed into the development of a vernacular idiom for the personal, and the private, positioned in relation to (and arguably articulated through) the kinds of texts and models that might be found in literate households in the early modern period. What this amounts to is the adaptation of a shared, public language to individual private concerns and vice versa. The examples I want to explore here reveal the ways in which women in local, domestic and community settings find and adapt textual practices that have their origins in the schoolroom or the university, or were devised for the annotation of classical texts, or the compilation of books of topoi. That records of these practices survive not only in the form of material evidence, but in encomiastic texts about individual women that were intended for the emulation of other women, suggests that we need to re-think some of our assumptions about the status of female literacy.15 Philip Horneck’s funeral sermon on Lady Guilford, for example, describes how she spent her period of Morning Prayer: Part of which time was spent in Reading the New-Testament, with Annotations upon it; and wherever she lighted on a passage applicable to her self, or fell in with relations of Great and Exemplary Men, she would pitch on them for Subjects of her ensuing Meditation.16

Lady Guilford is engaged in a form of active, productive reading where annotation provides topics for meditation – many women produce

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meditations in written form, such as those of Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, some of which were reproduced in her funeral sermon, Eureka, Eureka. The Virtuous Woman found (Anthony Walker, 1678). These writings are the result of sustained textual engagement: In the evening went out into the willderness to meditate but founde the heart dull and untorde, then went to family prayer and there the heart breathed after god, after supor prayed in my closet . . . [after] . . . duties . . . went to my clossett, and read in the word, then went to prayer.17

Edward Reynolds’ account of Lady Mary Langham traverses similar territory: She was a woman mighty in the Scriptures, read them over once a year, and searched after the sense of difficult places out of the several Annotations before her. She was as it were a Concordance directing usually to the Book and Chapter where any place mentioned in discourse, was to be found.18

Like many other women, her reading led to text production, specifically for household consumption: She left behind her in her closet a paper book, wherein with her own hand she had collected divers general Directions for an holy spending of the day, with several particular meanes for the faithful observance of those General Rules. (pp. 33–4)

John Collinges’s funeral sermon for Lady Frances Hobart includes a ‘short Account of the Holy Life and Death’, which is devoted to a detailed description of the spiritual activities of the household, and Lady Hobart’s role in directing these and in exemplifying its key tenets and principles, which, as Collinges suggests (like other encomiasts of pious women), is an argument of force in itself. These activities typically revolve around prayer, meditation and the reading of scripture: a Course of Prayer (in conformity to Davids Copy, Morning and Evening and at Noontime; Reading some portion of Scripture, twice each day, and expounding it, as my leisure would allow me) Catechizing once every week, or stricter observation of the Lords dayes, and Repetitions of Sermons both on that, and other dayes, when we had attended upon the publick Ordinances. 19

These sermons offer fascinating glimpses of women’s literate activities within the household, but it is important to note that these cannot always be strictly classified as ‘private’; in many cases, these women undertake to direct the spiritual direction of their households, which often (as with Lady Hobart) extends to the local community. There is clear evidence of textual activities being associated with particular household spaces (often, but not always, a closet), with a range of key texts, and with systematic reading practices:

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she was rarely to be found alone with her Bible before her, she had drawn up for her self a method for reading the Scripture . . . that she might want no satisfaction to any doubt arising upon her reading the Scripture, she had furnished her self with a large library of English Divines, which cost her not much less than 100 l. of which she made a daily use: (ibid., p. 26)

The evidence of Lady Margaret Hoby’s diary corroborates these accounts of women’s literate activities. Whilst many commentators have been frustrated by its lack of disclosure of private and intimate detail, what is interesting about the diary as a document is the degree to which Hoby puts her collective life on display; the diary explicitly traverses the frangible boundary between private and public. Lady Margaret Hoby’s diary represents only one element of her textual engagement over one quite specific period of her life from 1599 to 1605. However, in the form that the diary has come down to us, it is far from being a unified document, as she herself acknowledged in April 1605: At Night I thought to writt my daies Journee as before, because, in the readinge over of some of my former spent time, I funde some profitt might be made of that Course from which, thorow too much neccligence, I had a longe time disissted: but they are unworthye of godes benefittes and especiall favours that Can finde no time to make a thankfull recorde of them.20

This entry is uncharacteristically lengthy for this portion of the diary (or ‘Journee’ as she terms it, bringing together the function of the diary as a daily account of her actions, and as part of her spiritual development), coming at the point where her entries have become relatively infrequent, as well as exceedingly brief and factual. As Marie-Louise Coolahan has argued, ‘the value of meditative writing is often associated with re-reading one’s journal and spiritual accounting’.21Lady Margaret Hoby’s resolve on this occasion bears little fruit, and the diary peters out three months later. Although Hoby’s diary records and constantly reiterates the same kinds of activities, the range of these is quite broad and they are carefully distinguished according to subject matter, occasion and social context. Hoby frequently refers to the writing of notes – which do not appear in the diary – but rarely to the writing of the journal itself. One of her most frequently recorded acts is the writing of notes into her Bible, and also into her ‘testamente’ (p. 28). The testament may well be the same thing as her Bible (‘reed of the bible and testament’, p. 69), although they are occasionally mentioned in the same entry as if they are distinct entities: ‘I wrett out notes in my testement’ (p. 8) and ‘then I wret notes out into my bible’ (p. 8). However, when she talks of reading, it is clearly the New Testament that Hoby means: ‘reed a Chapter of the testament’ (p. 53). These notes are frequently garnered from texts read aloud in the

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household: ‘I wrett my notes in my testament, which I geathered out of the Lector the night before’ (p. 15). Sometimes these notes clearly arise from what we might call ‘directed reading’: ‘I reed of the testement, and wrett notes in itt and upon Perknes’ (p. 59), namely William Perkins, the highly popular Puritan polemicist and writer. 22 It seems likely, but by no means certain, that these notes were summaries or paraphrases (as the reading notes in the Southwell-Sibthorpe commonplace book are), or adversaria ‘under Heads and Common Places’.23 Hoby not only reads and interprets scripture and commentaries, but occasionally reports the recording of freer kinds of spiritual engagement: ‘to my Closit, wher I praied and Writt some thinge for mine owne privat Conscience’ (p. 59). Some of these are clearly directed by her household chaplain, Richard Rhodes: ‘wret a medetation made by Mr Rhodes’ (p. 35) and ‘againe wrett some medetation in to my book framed by Mr Rhodes’ (p. 51). In addition to the writing of ‘notes’, presumably derived from the many conversations with Mr Rhodes and other clergymen, or from any one of the commentaries mentioned in the diary (for example, George Gifford on the Song of Solomon), one central textual activity that is recorded is the copying of sermons, or the recording of sermons heard in church. Again, this is common currency for exemplary women too, for instance Lady Guilford: Her attention at Church, was always fix’d; and having the advantage of a Tenacious Memory, she could easily Command, not only the general Heads, but likewise all the material Passages in a Sermon, which she committed to Short-Hand before Dinner, and afterwards digested more Regularly, in order to ruminate on them the succeeding Week.24

Lady Margaret Hoby refers frequently to ‘my sermon’, as in ‘after I Cam hom I wrett my sermon that was preached the saboth day before’ (p. 15). The use of the possessive pronoun suggests something of the process of textual incorporation – the closing of the gap between self and text – that was the intended end of such activities, and was often specifically prescribed for women. The sermon that Hoby is writing out or recording here is being recalled at a distance of almost a week, suggesting that memory of texts delivered orally was also a key component of literacy. These sermons were, however, written into a book clearly kept for that specific purpose – distinct from the diary that records the process. A few examples will make the point: ‘then I wrett out the sarmon into my book preached the day before’ (p. 4), followed a couple of entries later by ‘and wrett out the rest of those possitions which I left uncopied the day before’ (p. 6), suggesting an intertext where the chief heads were set out from memory, later to be written up more fully.

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One household activity commonly recorded on Sundays is the discussion of the sermon, or the repetition of the sermon: ‘I hard the sermone repeated’ (25). This is then written into Hoby’s ‘sarmon book’, presumably to be used for perusal on future occasions, or to be submitted to the scrutiny of Mr Rhodes. When Hoby writes that ‘I meditated of the sarmons’ (p. 32) it is not clear whether this arises immediately from that week’s sermon, or from reading over the texts copied into the sermon book. I would venture that these are two different activities. The recording of sermons in the sermon book is the end product of a series of textual engagements: Hoby heard the sermon, heard the ‘repetition’ and ‘examenation of the sarmons’ (p. 46), and sometimes ‘medetated of the sarmons’ (p. 68) or ‘went to the sarmon and then walked abroad and talked of itt’ (p. 80). On occasion, she records correcting what she has written previously, again, perhaps after discussion or conference with others: ‘after I returned into my Clossitt and altered that a little which before I had wretten’ (p. 100). When Hoby travels to London, her point of spiritual contact remains Mr Rhodes, to whom she sends notes for scrutiny: ‘busied my selfe in my chamber, writinge some notes of sermons which I purposse to send to Mr. Rhodes’ (p. 121). The textual exchange is two-way, as Hoby receives guidance and instruction from him: ‘[a]fter praier I reed over certaine papers of instruction wch I had received from Mr Rhodes’ (p. 132). Neither the diary nor the sermon book marks the limit to Hoby’s literate activity. There is a clear problem of nomenclature in relation to the ways in which she describes her various writing and reading activities. For example, it is not obvious or apparent when she writes ‘Came home and wrett of my Common place book’ (p. 12) that this is distinct from the other places where she gathers fruitful sayings, notes or meditations; however, the description ‘commonplace book’ is quite specific in terms of early modern textual culture, although it does not exclude spiritual musings of the kind that Hoby’s other activities suggest. In the absence of corroborating evidence, it is hard to know whether she is doing something identifiably different when she turns to what she terms her commonplace book as opposed to the other kinds of ‘book’ she describes – clearly at this point in time, a ‘book’ does not necessarily mean print, or even a text written by someone else. In most entries where the term is used, the context is unaltered: ‘after, I wrett in my Comun place book . . . and then returned to medetation and privat praier: then I studied a while for my Lector . . . and then I read of the book of marters’ (p. 31). As well as the commonplace book, Hoby mentions her ‘table book’, writing that ‘after, I made an end of my table’ (p. 43) – this presumably consists of household lists or inventories of some

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kind; but it is frequently mentioned in the context of more obviously spiritual activities ‘then reed of the bible: after, wrett in my table book’ (p. 52).

••

These very brief case studies of the textual and material complexities of the work of two women writers have attempted to demonstrate that the kind of writing that takes place from within the household, in private places, shares a great deal with what we have come to know of literate practice more generally. This suggests that, rather than being sequestered and removed from the effects and assumptions of rhetorical culture, women are active participants in it. These interventions are achieved by means of the imitation and absorption of literate habits in the immediate environment, transforming the materials immediately to hand to the end of articulating a form of selfhood that confers a type of cultural capital; not so much ostentatious display of learning, but the demonstration through textual means of appropriate virtues – virtues that often extend well beyond the household in their effects.

Notes 1. See Sasha Roberts, ‘Women’s literary capital and early modern England: Formal composition and rhetorical display in manuscript and print’, Women’s Writing, 14:2 (2007), pp. 246–69. 2. Ashley Tauchert , ‘Writing like a girl: Revisiting women’s literary history’, Critical Quarterly, 44 (2002), pp. 49–76, p. 51. 3. For an illuminating account in the late medieval period, see Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 4. See Terttu Nevalainen, ‘Women’s writings as evidence for linguistic continuity and change in Early Modern English’ in Richard Watts and Peter Trudgill (eds), Alternative Histories of English (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 191–209. 5. All quotations from Southwell are from Jean Klene (ed.), The SouthwellSibthorpe Commonplace Book (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997). Reference is by page and line number. 6. See James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 7. For example, the letters of the Fairfax family, Bodleian Ms. Add. A.119. I owe this reference to Dr Gillian Wright. 8. See Erica Longfellow, Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 3. 9. On Southwell’s connection with courtly news games, see Elizabeth Clarke, ‘Anne Southwell and the pamphlet debate: The politics of gender, class and

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11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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manuscript’, in Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki (eds), Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 37–53. See Jean Klene, ‘Working with a complex document: The SouthwellSibthorpe Commonplace Book’, in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts III (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 2004), pp. 169–75. See Jean Cavanaugh, ‘The library of Lady Southwell and Captain Sibthorpe’, Studies in Bibliography, 20 (1967), pp. 243–54; the inventory is in Klene, Southwell-Sibthorpe Commonplace Book, pp. 99–101. See my ‘The Countess of Pembroke and the practice of piety’, in Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott Baumann (eds), The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women (Palgrave, forthcoming). Echoing Psalm 44; in the Countess of Pembroke’s rendering, ‘My tongue the pen to paint his praises forth’, in Danielle Clarke (ed.), Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), l. 3. Sentiments about the unreliability of words are a Renaissance commonplace, no doubt reflecting the importance of language in the formation of contracts and obligations in a culture that is largely not literate. See Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a detailed account of funeral sermons on women, see Eric J. Carlson, ‘English funeral sermons as sources: The example of female piety in pre1640 sermons’, Albion, 32 (2000), pp. 567–97. Philip Horneck, A Sermon on the Death of the Right Honorable The Lady Guilford (London, 1699), p. 8. BL. Add. 27352, f. 10r (July 1666). See Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Redeeming parcels of time: Aesthetics and the practice of occasional meditation’, Seventeenth Century, 22 (2007), pp. 124–43. The Churches Triumph over Death (London, 1662), p. 33. John Collinges, The Excellent Woman: Discoursed more privately from Proverbs 31, 29, 20, 31 (London, 1669), p. 18. The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, ed. Joanna Moody (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1998), pp. 210–11. Coolahan, ‘Redeeming parcels of time’, p. 131. See Ann Blair, ‘Note taking as an art of transmission’, Critical Quarterly, 31 (2004), pp. 85–197. Sir Francis Bacon to Fulke Greville, c.1599, quoted in Blair, ‘Note taking’, p. 8. Horneck, Sermo, pp. 19–20.

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Chapter 8

The Overseas Voyage in Early Modern English Writing Bernhard Klein

I want to start with an example drawn not from English but from Portuguese writing. In 1552, the historian João de Barros – eulogised by subsequent generations as the ‘Portuguese Livy’ – published the first ‘decade’ of his multi-volume history of the Portuguese empire in the Indian Ocean in the firm belief that Portugal had a superior claim on the lands and riches of the East. His reasons were simple and straightforward, offered without any sense of irony or self-doubt, and aimed to sideline both Asian and European competitors: since the ‘Moors and Gentiles’ in the Indian Ocean were, he wrote, ‘outside the law of Christ Jesus’ and thus had no right to protection under the laws that govern Christians, their lands and seas were freely available for conquest.1 And since no other European nation at the time of the original ‘conquest’ (presumably in 1498, when Vasco da Gama first sighted the west Indian shoreline) could match the superior navigational skills of the Portuguese, no one could possibly have a rival claim on India, ‘because before our [the Portuguese] entrance into India, by which we took possession of it [com a qual tomámos posse della], there was no one there who had any property inherited or conquered’.2 The audacity of this reasoning still boggles the mind; it also clearly affirms the continuing critical relevance of colonial discourse analysis. Central to this striking display of early imperial ambition are certain key rhetorical strategies designed to naturalise colonial power relations: the implicit assumption of Western cultural supremacy, the curious denial of any local prerogative or even presence, the imposition of Western concepts of ownership on non-Western cultures, and the seamless textual conflation of religious intolerance, military prowess and navigational expertise that together made Western maritime imperialism the powerful force it was. Undoubtedly, colonial presumption of this kind remains a worthy target even in the twenty-first century, when the critical paradigms ‘centred on issues of power, identity and

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the textuality of history’ that have been so dominant in anglophone Renaissance studies since the 1980s are being increasingly contested, not least by this volume.3 Contesting the approach does not mean denying its value altogether, of course. It signals an awareness, though, that figuring history principally as a series of discursive speech acts risks falling for a rhetorical façade that, while undeniably present, may not have had anywhere near the significance it assumes in the process of critical deconstruction. As old historicists have shown, the process of research and reflection that enabled Barros’s writing was a lot more complex than some of the critical tools now used for its decoding are able to suggest. Barros has long been the most admired and trusted of contemporary Portuguese historians mainly on the grounds of his impressive study skills and his archival discipline. As the official historian of Portugal, appointed by the king, he had access to all the state papers, letters, and proceedings of judicial inquiries, but he was not satisfied with such ‘one-dimensional’ sources. He was an avid collector of books, maps and manuscripts (some written on palm leaves) from all over Asia;4 he consulted several Hindu and Muslim chronicles, including a Persian Tarigh, a ‘Way’ or ‘History’, described by Barros as ‘a summary chronicle of all the kings of Persia until its subjugation by the Muslim Arabs’;5 he relied equally on Malay oral sources and on Chinese geographical compendia and atlases; and he used genealogies and chronicles of the royal lines in Kilwa, Gujarat, Vijayanagar and elsewhere. Having never travelled to Asia personally, he drew most of his knowledge of Indian Ocean geography from Arab maps and navigational handbooks, which he valued very highly for their quality and accuracy. He knew no Asian languages but relied on slaves for translations from Arabic, Persian and other languages, and he expressly bought an educated, Portuguese-speaking Chinese slave who would read to him from several Ming Dynasty geographical works.6 Barros was also known to question returning pilots, soldiers and merchants rigorously about their personal experiences of the lands he knew only through his research.7 In Charles Boxer’s view, ‘[t]his systematic and discriminating use of primary Oriental sources was something quite unprecedented’,8 even though these sources finally served only to bolster a patriotic crusade. In other words, while Barros denied Asian peoples all claims to territorial ownership, spiritual autonomy and political self-rule, he did not question their often impressive cultural and scientific achievements, or the depth of their own history, and he never seriously doubted that historical scholarship had any other choice than to be rigorously inclusive in its use of all available evidence.

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The example of Barros shows with striking clarity how an imperial mindset could easily develop a genuine intellectual interest in the ‘other’, and how the European respect – sometimes even admiration – for non-European cultures did not dispel the conviction that Europe’s imperial mission, including the greed and violence it licensed, was justified and deemed entirely legal in an intellectual tradition in which Christian ‘truths’ took automatic precedence over any other spiritually sanctioned certainties. At the same time, the example also makes it obvious that a good deal of cross-cultural exchange and scholarly curiosity shaped both the history of early contact between East and West, and the subsequent textual processing of that history. It makes writing such as Barros’s Decades of Asia multi-layered in ways that are all but drowned out by the imperial bravado that dominates its surface. What tends to command attention, and control the critical reception of such texts, is not their reliance on non-European sources, ideas and attitudes, but their unambiguously colonial rhetoric. Two unwanted side effects of this critical bias are the inability to see motivations other than colonial or imperial desire in European activities overseas, and the denial of agency on the part of the colonised or misrepresented ‘other’. Of course Barros encourages just these readings: he first recovers ancient learning before he proceeds to suppress it, and he listens intently to what others have to say before denying them a voice. But if his own writing thus occurs quite consciously on the back of many other, earlier and culturally diverse forms and modes of writing, the absorption of these oriental sources into an occidental text suggests that this text is only seemingly ‘closed’ on the surface or resistant to outside influences, and that prior realities are not simply erased or cancelled in order to create some kind of cultural tabula rasa ready for European inscription. I am not convinced it is helpful to assume that the voices Barros carefully records are fully silenced in his writing, and that the ancient cultural forms that energised these voices are no longer – if only at some deeper textual level – alive and present. The issue presents itself in a slightly different light for the English material that I will be concerned with in the rest of this chapter. In England, too, much more of a genuine (and, quite evidently, often reciprocal) interest in the lore and wisdom of different cultures went into the construction of the early images of foreign lands and people than the frequent literary demonising of the Eastern ‘other’ – in the form, say, of the sabre-rattling Turk, the sexually lascivious Moor or the morally corrupt oriental – would seem to suggest.9 Yet no sixteenth-century English writer (with the possible exception of John Dee) quite compares to Barros in method, scope and global ambition, an intellectual gap

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mirrored by the political gap that still separated England and Portugal on the international stage: in 1608, the Portuguese sense of their own superiority was still healthy enough to deride the English monarch as a ‘King of Fishermen, and of an iland of no import’.10 While the relative belatedness of England’s imperial ambitions certainly means that English writing is often positioned at a greater distance to foreign cultures, and to the whole nature of overseas travel, than many comparable Spanish or Portuguese examples, English texts concerned with overseas voyaging equally absorb material from a range of sources without making these influences immediately recognisable. The critical disposition necessary to stay sufficiently attuned to the divergent, often contradictory, semantic layers of texts that appear so culturally exclusive, even at times monologic, on their surface thus remains a key challenge for the historicist agenda to which the present collection is committed. Since few Renaissance activities have caused more incisive transformations on a global scale than the European overseas voyages that led to the dubious ‘conquests’ Barros describes, the way we choose to read these early travels is crucial to both early modern and more recent modes of historicising. If voyage writing was powered by colonialist fantasies then such dreamwork was hardly irresistible or without alternative, yet the problem of retrospective imposition – the use, in the words of the editors of this volume, of ‘terminologies and teleologies’ alien to the historical context they are enlisted to explain – often obscures that basic insight:11 one casualty of the ‘postcolonial turn’ has been its conceptual opposite, the ‘precolonial moment’ that was a reality before it was ‘turned’ or changed and became its own colonised future.12 In this chapter I want to pursue the implications of such multi-layered textualities by looking at generically diverse yet thematically related forms of early modern English writing – texts focused on overseas voyaging, the transformative maritime practice that enabled Barros’s own historicising – and explore connections that do not make the historical outcome of these early modern ventures, the triumph of European colonialism, the inevitable telos of any such textual engagement.

••

English writing that deals with the overseas voyage in the broadest sense cuts widely across standard generic divisions while converging in a shared thematic focus. I want to suggest three loose categories: first, writing that precedes the voyage in the sense that it makes it materially possible, for instance, by issuing instructions on how to navigate a ship, or how to make a map that will enable spatial (often also moral)

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orientation for the traveller in distant lands; secondly, writing that occurs either during the voyage itself or in a relatively unbroken continuum with the actual travelling, often in the form of logbooks, diaries or voyage reports; thirdly, writing that epistemologically postdates the voyage (whether that voyage was factual or fictional) and that suggests, often in literary form, some kind of independent rationale or imaginative purchase on its meaning. As is obvious from this, I see the literary/ non-literary divide between these forms of writing as much less relevant than their shared interest in the ways of negotiating the contingencies of travel. Since my main concern in what follows will be with the different categories of writing implied by this triad of practical manuals, actual voyage reports and imaginative investments in the idea of travel, it is important to state at the outset that the typology is not meant to suggest conceptual division but rather generic interrelation. Separating these textual modes into largely unconnected layers of material base, practical application and discursive meaning imposes on them certain forms of hierarchy and disjunction which I do not think adequately explain the way in which each element of the triad implies the other two. The point is implicitly made in much current critical work on imaginative texts – such as travel drama, for instance – in which related writings and images about voyaging (say, logbooks, diaries, navigation manuals, travelogues, geographical prints and treatises, and so on) are routinely consulted to elucidate the dramatic fiction, with a view to providing a missing or insufficiently visible perspective. Though less frequently practised, the model is equally hospitable to ways of thinking forward into fiction when starting not with a play but with the ‘facts’ about a specific voyage in Eden, Hakluyt or Purchas. In current literary analysis, the existence of close interrelations between generically diverse writings is so widely accepted that critics rarely reflect any more on the nature of the connection. The implicit theoretical models used to rationalise the links between different textual modes tend to take three main forms: first, the traditional notion of the ‘source text’, in which a clear hierarchy accords the work of literature a much higher reflective capacity than its background ‘source’; secondly, the concept of the ‘discursive field’, which postulates that a great variety of different texts, images or statements are related through the performance of shared meanings – an approach that eliminates the textual hierarchies of the source text model but allows no significant ideological difference or disharmony between discursively related texts; and thirdly, the ‘circulation of social energy’ model – the migration of ideas and concepts around vastly different texts – which in its application by

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new historicist scholars has moved a long way, from the conceptual affinities Greenblatt discovered deep in the textual matrix of different kinds of writing, to a mere surface similarity of more or less accidental cultural phenomena.13 Some elements of all three of these established analytic practices have, for good reasons, proved resistant to polemics. One is the importance of historical sources, which are taken seriously by historians in a way they are often not by new historicists. Another is the central tenet that all forms of writing are linked to each other in ways that categorial divisions into separate textual genres are liable to obscure. Yet another is the deliberate emphasis on the equality of various textual forms or formats in their relation to the world by which they are ‘made’, even when one specific text happens to be at the centre of critical attention. What needs to be added to those models is the awareness that different texts and images can, and perhaps should, be seen as part of a larger cultural register that may or may not be ideologically coherent and structurally unified, and that reflects and mediates a non-textual, social and cultural landscape, in which meanings are connected in largely provisional, unpredictable, unfinalised, sometimes even contradictory forms. By the same token, this approach would suggest that sometimes there simply is no meaningful conceptual relation between certain texts and images, even if a temporal, spatial, institutional or other kind of alliance or proximity can be historically established, and even if the whole of a culture is seen as one complete text. I am in part reacting here against what I see as the insistence, in some critical work, on connections so far-fetched they cease to be plausible. Gallagher and Greenblatt praise ‘the discovery of unexpected discursive contexts for literary works by pursuing their “supplements” rather than their overt thematics’ as a major transformation new historicism has helped bring about in literary analysis.14 The importance of placing high value on ‘supplementary’ meanings is beyond doubt or critique, but the dismissal of thematic links is surely no necessary consequence of such shifting critical emphases: ‘unexpected’ borders dangerously on ‘unconvincing’. I would want to argue instead for the preservation of some kind of thematic connection, provided the link is understood as more than a mere citational reference, and does not aim to re-import traditional text/context hierarchies. The model suggests, to take a particular instance, that while it is certainly still useful to ask whether Maria, in Twelfth Night, had a specific example in mind when she casually described Malvolio as smiling ‘his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’,15 the identification of

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the probable source of that reference as Edward Wright’s famous world map of 1599, though important, is still insufficient as an explanation of the verbal image. Map and play speak to each other here in more profound ways than the mere identification of a source (speculative as it must, of course, remain) can indicate. What are brought into imaginative constellation at this specific juncture are different visual fields in which an understanding of the world is played out (both map and play are versions of ‘theatre’);16 new forms of cultural reference emphasising the ‘exotic’ (‘Indies’), which both text and image make equally available; new conceptions of global space and how humans (human faces) relate to it; and so on. Another, more indirect source in this scene is the kind of practical manual that explained both the making and reading of maps, one of which was written by Edward Wright himself in 1599,17 against which his map of the same year appears primarily as a didactic exercise in a specific form of geometric projection (Mercator’s cylindrical map projection, to be precise). In this example, then, we have a ‘scientific’ or didactic treatise, a map and a line in a stage play all connected through a shared investment in overseas travel. What do these interconnections imply? A number of things, surely, and chief among them, I would suggest, the competing but interlocked registers of the serious and the comic, the affirmative and the sceptical. Wright’s treatise and his map were presented to the public in 1599 with the utmost seriousness as a corrective to existing practices of map use and navigation,18 only to be lightly mocked by their association with a duped Malvolio. But no one in the play’s original audience could have even begun to make sense of the joke unless the seriousness of Wright’s navigational and cartographic reasoning had been at least provisionally accepted in the first place. And how such early modern ‘science writing’ anticipated the mockery of its own ambitions is evidenced, for instance, by the recourse to the contemptus mundi trope on early modern world maps,19 or by such seeming geographical flippancies as the various printings of the Fool’s Cap Map, in which the face of a jester is replaced by a map – which of course on one level simply visualises Maria’s laughter about Malvolio’s grin. Clearly, each of these artefacts – the manual, the map, the stage play – takes on different meanings when looked at as conceptually interrelated instead of when studied in isolation. In addition, these meanings are never fixed but constantly in play; they are not offered by any of the writers or makers of these artefacts as exclusive, singular or finalised but rather as self-consciously experimental and hypothetical, as transitional statements of the moment. Wright describes the mathematical projection he carefully explains to the reader as ultimately no more

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than a clever ‘conceit . . . [which] may satisfie the curious exactnesse of the Geometrician’,20 not as a natural or final answer to the question of global visual representation. The map he produces alongside his manual is full of pictorial and conceptual lacunae: interrupted shorelines, doubtful interiors and geographical speculations – all offered in the spirit of an ongoing investigation that needs a collective effort to complete it; and Maria’s parallel between rhumb lines and wrinkles on a smiling face is a somewhat forced joke, a comic moment that may actually not have been all that successful on the Elizabethan stage, but that relies both on advanced geographical knowledge and on what cartographic historians call ‘mapmindedness’, the ability to think of space in abstract terms within the conventions of cartographic projection – precisely the technique Wright aimed to teach his audience. All three documents also draw on meanings that point beyond an insular national culture to some form of interaction with the wider world. This interaction is made possible by a two-way exchange, not just by one culture gazing at another – or, in the case of Wright’s global image, at the rest of the world. Maps always rely on data obtained from all kinds of sources, local and foreign, and at one level in the collaborative and international exchange of ideas and information that led to the production of Wright’s map, it must have absorbed knowledge from just the kind of documents on which Barros based his chronicles. The mathematical reasoning in Wright’s treatise is, in addition, the product of centuries of intense speculation about the nature and form of numbers, much of it happening in the Asian and Arabian world. Both these knowledge formations come together in the words ‘lines’ and ‘Indies’ in Twelfth Night, which as terms and ideas are casually exhibited here on the stage at the same time as they enter the Elizabethan mindset through a range of thematically related but generically distinct forms of writing. What this suggests is that thinking about the ways local writing draws on global sources might be a fruitful way forward.

••

In the triad suggested above, the kind of writing that conceptually precedes the voyage is perhaps the least studied by literary critics. I am thinking here principally of writings on mathematics, map projection, navigation and various related aspects of seafaring, such as the variation of the compass, the art of chart-making, or theories on the sufficiency of the ship. English writers on these topics include Thomas Blundeville, William Bourne, John Dee, Leonard Digges, Edward Wright (already mentioned), Thomas Hood and a host of others. Much of this writing is technical in a way that hardly lends itself to much culturally inspired

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analysis. Its relevance to the topic of overseas voyaging is self-evident, though, since all successful seafaring relied on navigators bringing the ship safely to port. Navigation, by its very nature, aims to provide protection to the voyager at sea, against the elements and hazards of the ocean. This ‘art’ is at root a highly abstract attempt to take systematic possession of space, to exercise a conceptual command over the natural world that makes the dimensions of time and space appear as purely theoretical, and hence manageable, constructs. That this was a mental exercise more than a physical possibility is an insight implicit in much navigational writing. The most popular and influential of the navigation manuals circulating in Elizabethan England, The Art of Navigation by the Spaniard Martin Cortes, which was available from 1561 in a translation by Richard Eden, makes this point quite directly in its discussion of the nature of maritime space. Sea voyages, Cortes writes, differ from viages by lande, in thre thynges. For the lande is fyrme and stedfast. But this is fluxible, wauering, and moueable. That of the lande, is knowen and termined by markes, signes, and limittes. But this of the Sea, is uncerten and unknowen. And if in viages by lande, there are hylles, mountaynes, rockes and craggie places, the Sea payeth the same seuen fold with tormentes and tempestes. Therefore these viages beyng so difficulte, it shalbe hard to make the same be vnderstode by wordes or wrytynge.21

Since the sea cannot be easily written, Cortes goes on to explain, it should be ‘painted’ – in maps and charts, that is to say, in images that will serve as graphic substitutes for writing. He proceeds in his manual to teach his readers exactly how to make such images for themselves, suited to their own needs. So ‘writing’ here is inferior to ‘painting’ because it is less successful as a form of understanding, but each is seen to serve the same goal: to grasp an idea of the world through a representational practice. The sea charts whose construction Cortes then explains, however, and that several other writers – notably Thomas Hood – describe in similar ways to their readers,22 are not figurative ‘paintings’ or mimetic topographies: they are abstract accumulations of data on local aspects such as currents, winds, tides, weather conditions, time of year, appearance of shorelines and so on – all temporary rather than permanent features. Sea charts are the products of a specific experience, not the signs of a readily available spatial knowledge; they require an actual voyage for their conceptual completion.23 Such geographic visualisations are experimental in an epistemological sense: they imply possibilities, suggest hypotheses, but make no claims to certainties or even final truths. Fictions are thus built-in elements of the construction of space in ‘scientific’ documents such as sea charts or the forms of maritime

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writing that promoted their use. And importantly, as Wright’s description of the Mercator projection as a clever ‘conceit’ implies, this instability is understood as such by the makers of the technology that enabled the overseas voyage in the first place, whether that technology came in textual form – as a map, a rutter, a practical manual, a mathematical explanation – or in material shape as a quadrant, astrolabe, cross-staff or other instrument used to establish position at sea. The world that is encompassed or ‘made’ by this writing is a world transformed and constantly transforming, which has that transformative element built both into its very make-up and into the textual and visual forms accounting for its shape. Arts such as geometry or mathematics, often thought of as totalising in their conceptual hold over the natural world, are thus self-consciously speculative systems – experiments on the world rather than impositions of absolute knowledge. At some level, these are of course simply maritime technologies designed to anticipate and master the contingencies of the voyage. The written record of the journey initially had a similar purpose: to control chance, accident, risk, through careful and methodical inscription. Travel at sea and on the page should happen in tandem, in ideal correspondence, as various official instructions stipulated: ‘the marchants, and other skilful persons in writing, shal daily write, describe, and put in memorie the Navigation of every day and night, with the points, and observation of the lands, tides, elements, altitude of the sunne, course of the moon and starres’, Sebastian Cabot instructed the 1553 expedition to Cathay. These individual records were to be compared once a week, debated and corrected, edited down to a single comprehensive version, and then put ‘into a common leger to remain of record to the company’.24 The East India Company continued essentially the same practice fifty years later, when they instructed the third voyage in 1606 that Continuall & true Iornalls be kept of eury daies course & Navigacion during the wholle voyadge wth a true relacion of eury thinge that passeth, & this not onelie to be done by the seurall Captaines, mrs Pylottes & mrs mates, but alsoe by the mrchauntes & Pursars: and that some of the Principalls in each shipp, may conferre together att convenient tymes, when the Generall shall call them theare vnto, to thend that yf any haue forgotten, what an other obserued the same may be added, soe as a perfect discourse may be sett downe to be presented to the Gournor & Companie, when god shall graunte them a saffe retourne, to be kept the better direccion for posteritie.25

The duty of memory and the assistance of posterity are named as the main reasons for this practice; the purpose of such writing, Mary Fuller

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concludes, was ‘to make the material of experience durable, accessible, useful’.26 The ‘discourse’ of the voyage is ‘perfect’ in spite of the obviously accidental and unpredictable nature of the route followed and the time spent at sea; it is ordered prose, rhetoric, that quite literally ‘makes’ this world. One of the trademarks of early modern travel writing is its generic multiplicity – it comes in the form of logbooks, diaries, letters, journals and a myriad of other genres – and the typology of travel writers, as William Sherman has recently pointed out, is equally diverse.27 The writing most faithful to the kind of formal instruction quoted above is quite possibly the dullest; there is little imaginative spark in the dutiful attention to the daily changes of wind, weather and tide. But the conditions of travel are recorded mainly in the captain’s log; other accounts, such as journals by merchants, are concerned more with what interrupted the daily routine. Merchants’ writing was subject to the same requirements of precise reporting, but it tends to describe experiences on land rather than long passages at sea, and often has as its main focus the terms of trading with the local population. In many such accounts, moments of real contact alternate with rhetorically patterned descriptions that seem to record expectation rather than experience, relying on received wisdom and accepted prejudice. Similar fare is often seen as the staple of contemporary travel plays, such as, for instance, Fletcher and Massinger’s 1622 collaboration The Sea Voyage, which I want to use here as a final example of typically multi-layered, early modern English voyage writing. Until recently the play has been discussed mainly as an early response to The Tempest. In the past decade or so the terms of discussion have notably shifted to address a variety of topical concerns in the play, such as its use of voyage myths (ancient and modern),28 the political context to which its vague geography might allude (Virginian or East Indian),29 the complexities of its gender roles,30 and most recently its identity politics.31 Clearly, the play has by now been brought into dialogue with a great number of contemporary discourses and contexts. Most critics would probably agree with Michael Hattaway’s impression that The Sea Voyage is one of a number of plays that, while nominally set in faraway places, are not really ‘reflections of other cultures, but reflections upon the culture inhabited by their audiences’.32 The observation is important but detaches the play perhaps too quickly from the promise of cross-cultural traffic implicit in its title. Like The Tempest, the setting of the play is elusive – two islands, one barren, one fertile, in an unspecified ocean – but despite this schematic locale, the play rehearses some of the meanings central to contemporary travel.

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For instance, in showing French mariners enslaved and close to being executed by wild Amazons – who at that point in the play are still assumed to constitute the indigenous population – The Sea Voyage does acknowledge, in contrast to The Tempest’s proleptic use of the Crusoe myth, that shipwrecked Europeans on foreign islands will be subjects, not masters, and forced to accept local conditions rather than given free rein to impose their will on others. The play turns this fate into farce by making the fierce Amazon warriors obedient Portuguese ladies in the end, but the insight still remains. Fantasies of imperial or colonial rule, based on ‘superior’ European seafaring technology, collapse as quickly as the patriarchal order in this play; like the navigational discourse discussed above, these systems are deeply unstable, and its proponents are keenly aware of that very instability. The conversion of the Amazons into Europeans, happening only in the very last scene of the play, also offers perhaps more subtle insights into the nature of voyaging than has been fully recognised. This final revelation, I want to suggest, can be seen both as a way of diminishing the threat of the foreign by restoring customary gender hierarchies, and as an ironic acknowledgment that rationalising the unfamiliar exclusively in terms of the familiar leads to no clearer understanding of cultural difference than could have been reached by staying at home. While the immediate and initially unquestioned acceptance of the Amazonian myth by the European voyagers suggests the continuing authority of the ancients, the eventual white Mediterranean explanation of the exotic phenomena encountered on the islands erases any need for a serious confrontation with foreign realities. The conscious dramatic play with these mechanisms of cognition and (mis)understanding suggests a more intimate knowledge of the dynamics of travel than the farcical and partly non-sensical plot appears capable of commanding. Most characters in this play refuse to learn anything from the foreign location, choosing instead to spend their time defending their honour or saving their skin. The navigation manuals and forms of travel writing discussed above all suggest the need, when travelling, to take a keen interest in local conditions, whether through the collection of geographical data or through the systematic written testimony of one’s own or the ship’s physical progress. What the play may well be arguing, in the fun it pokes at duped European males, is that the values of European civilisation count for nothing in foreign parts unless the desire for some kind of genuine understanding is one of the reasons for setting out. Local culture is always provincial, never universal, and one of the key virtues of voyaging is a genuine intellectual interest in the foreign and unfamiliar. Seen thus, the distance to any serious cultural

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difference in the play – made perfectly obvious by the lack of a single indigenous character – indicates less the ignorance of the authors than the inaccessibility of the foreign, given the dominant, Europe-focused mindset of the cast. In its playful evasion of a ‘real’ world beyond the British Isles, this local and (in setting and origin) doubly insular drama may seem far removed from the imperial fantasies of Barros’s global historicising. Yet both works are structured around a similar faultline: while each shows Europeans making a new world their own, whether by advancing a spurious legal argument or by writing the indigenous population out of the text, each engages more deeply with foreign realities than its surface plotlines initially reveal. Their respective attitudes to cultural difference are certainly not the same, but measured against their own ambitions they are also more complex, diversified and receptive to the challenges of alternative worlds than we have been fully prepared to see. Voyage writing rarely trades in epistemological absolutes: across a diversity of genres, travel texts construct provisional worlds, possible causalities and hypothetical constellations, while always remaining aware of their own experimental character. One key analogy recognises the convergence between this textual address and the perspective of the traveller: the view from the deck of a ship (whether real or imagined) was always a gaze into the unknown, extending along a horizon of uncertainty, misperception and, often, incomprehension. The writing that was ‘made’ in such highly volatile conditions requires a critical disposition ready to discover the contradictions and incoherencies, as well as the unexpected alliances, buried deep in its intricate semantics.

Notes 1. Quoted from Henry E. Stanley, ‘Introduction’, in The Three Voyages of Vasco da Gama, and his Viceroyalty. From the Lendas da India of Gaspar Correa. Accompanied by original documents, trans. Stanley (London: Hakluyt Society, 1869), p. xxx. For the original passage, see João de Barros, Da Asia. Dos feitos, que os Portuguezes fizeram no descrubrimento, e conquista dos mares, e terras do Oriente. Decada primeira, parte segunda (Lisboa: Na Regia Officina Typografica, 1777), p. 16. 2. Stanley, ‘Introduction’, p. 31; Barros, Da Asia, p. 17. 3. Margaret Healy and Thomas Healy, introduction to this volume, p. 3. 4. For a list of ‘oriental’ sources mentioned by Barros in his Decadas, see C. R. Boxer, João de Barros: Portuguese Humanist and Historian of Asia (New Delhi: Concept, 1981), p. 119. 5. Barros, Decade II, quoted after Boxer, João de Barros, p. 103.

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6. See Boxer, João de Barros, pp. 104, 106–7. 7. On Barros as a historian, see Boxer, João de Barros, pp. 97–129; and J. B. Harrison, ‘Five Portuguese historians’, in C. H. Philips (ed.), Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 155–69. 8. Boxer, João de Barros, p. 119. 9. For some recent critical studies that bear out this point, see Gerald MacLean on English relations with the Ottomans: The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Nabil Matar on Britain and the Moors: Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), and Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Daniel Vitkus on the multicultural Mediterranean: Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and Richmond Barbour on England’s theatrical engagement with the East: Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 10. An insult reported by William Hawkins. See William Foster (ed.), Early Travels in India, 1583–1619 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 74. 11. See Healy and Healy, introduction to this volume, p. 3. 12. On the critical fallacy of mistaking sixteenth-century England for an imperial or colonial power see Daniel Vitkus, ‘Before empire: England, alterity, and the Mediterranean context’, in Turning Turk, pp. 1–24. 13. On the discursive field see Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish: The discursive con-texts of The Tempest’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 191–205, pp. 196–7. On the circulation of social energy see Stephen Greenblatt’s introduction to his Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 14. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 17. My italics. 15. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, in The Oxford Shakespeare, eds Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), III, ii, 73–4; p. 166. 16. See John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 70–98. 17. Edward Wright, Certaine Errors in Navigation (London: Valentine Sims, 1599). 18. See my ‘Mapping the waters: Sea charts, navigation, and Camões’s Os Lusíadas’, forthcoming). 19. See Richard Helgerson, ‘The folly of maps and modernity’, in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (eds), Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 241–62.

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20. Wright, Certaine Errors, sig. D2r. 21. Martin Cortes, The Arte of Nauigation (1537), trans. Richard Eden (London: Richard Jugge, 1561), fol. 56r. 22. See Thomas Hood, The Marriner’s Guide (London: Thomas Est, 1592). 23. Klein, ‘Mapping the waters’. 24. David W. Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times (London: National Maritime Museum, sec. ed. 1978), III, appendix 4, p. 509. 25. Sir George Birdwood (ed.), The Register of Letters &c of the Governour and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies, 1600–1619 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893), pp. 116–17. 26. Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 6. 27. See William Sherman, ‘Stirrings and searchings (1500–1720)’, in Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 17–36. Despite its inclusive title, this collection is concerned only with travel writing in English. 28. See Antony Parr, ‘Introduction’, in Parr (ed.), Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 1–54; and Michael Hattaway, ‘“Seeing things”: Amazons and cannibals’, in JeanPierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (eds), Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 179–92. 29. See Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 235–54, for the Virginian reading; and Michael Neill, ‘“Material flames”: Romance, empire, and mercantile fantasy in John Fletcher’s Island Princess’, in Neill, Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 312–15, for the East Indian reading. 30. See Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics 1589–1642 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 196–206. 31. Jean Feerick, ‘“Divided in soyle”: Plantation and degeneracy in The Tempest and The Sea Voyage’, Renaissance Drama, 35 (2006), pp. 27–54. 32. Hattaway, ‘“Seeing things”’, p. 183.

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Chapter 9

Eloquent Blood and Deliberative Bodies: The Physiology of Metaphysical Poetry Michael Schoenfeldt

Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or who hath given understanding to the heart? (Job 38:36) It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions. Who, for decorum’s sake, has ever slowed his heart, or muted a blush? (Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach)

In the second Anniversary, ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’, John Donne famously celebrates the spiritual purity of Elizabeth Drury, the deceased daughter of his patron Sir Robert Drury, in decidedly corporeal terms. Endowing her living flesh with the improbable characteristics of sentience and percipience, Donne observes that her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say, her body thought.1

Donne is talking here about the quotidian act of blushing, but does so in an anomalous way that invests obdurate flesh with cognitive power and moral agency. Blushing, as Donne imagines it suffusing the complexion of Elizabeth Drury, is a deliberate effort of the blood to announce the young woman’s inner moral fibre.2 In this chapter, I want to suggest that the complex imbrication of soul and body articulated at length in early modern physiology is at least a co-conspirator in the wondrous processes that make such arresting utterances possible. This physiology underpins a world where bodies could be imagined to speak and think, where blood could be characterised as eloquent. I want to show that this metaphoric stance, which seems like the epitome of poetic fancy, derives at least in part from a particular set of physiological assumptions that Donne inherits, and invests with breathtaking vitality. Throughout his career, Donne was fascinated and troubled by the relationship between bodies and souls. As Ramie Targoff has recently written, this relationship is ‘the

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great subject of Donne’s writing’.3 Donne sometimes used aspects of contemporary soul–body theory with irreverent precision, turning their philosophical perplexities into a dialectical pretext for erotic seduction in ‘The Ecstasy’ and Elegy 11 ‘On His Mistress’. But he also used the anxious installation of a core self within the gregarious and vulnerable material of sentient, passionate flesh to produce poetry endowed with unique dramatic immediacy and carnal urgency. Inevitably, then, understanding the remarkable transformation that Donne wrought on English lyric poetry entails an investigation with both physiological and aesthetic dimensions. T. S. Eliot’s famous description of Donne as a metaphysical poet whose sensibility had not yet suffered the aesthetic devastation of dissociation relies of course on the terms of Donne’s own praise of Elizabeth Drury’s eloquent corporeality: ‘a thought to Donne was an experience’, Eliot writes; ‘it modified his sensibility’.4 But this description is also a re-statement of exactly how thoughts and emotions were understood to function in the early modern period. In The Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, Robert Burton argues that as the Body workes upon the minde, by his bad humours, troubling the Spirits, sending grosse fumes into the Braine; and so per consequens disturbing the Soule, and all the faculties of it . . . so on the other side, the minde most effectually workes upon the Body, producing by his passions and perturbations, miraculous alterations; as Melancholy, despaire, cruell diseases, and sometimes death it selfe.5

In such a physiological world, a thought or feeling is indeed a corporeal experience, capable of modifying one’s sensibility and physiology. As I have argued elsewhere, Galenic humoralism provided early modern writers with an integrated vision of bodily, emotional and intellectual activity.6 Our own post-Cartesian segregation of cognition from corporeality can occlude our understanding of early modern texts, which are written within a physiology that imagined souls and bodies to be the extreme ends of a single ontological continuum. It also prevents us from apprehending the deep if surprising connection between physiological concept and aesthetic practice. We can glimpse some of Donne’s evolving attitude to this physiology in the anomalous book that he composed, probably early in his career, called the Paradoxes and Problems. In this book, Donne explores the milieu of ‘playing seriously’ analysed by Thomas Healy in Chapter 1 of this volume. Rehearsing the brittle bravado Donne would exhibit intermittently in the Songs and Sonnets, problem 8 of the Paradoxes and Problems is devoted to the deliberately perverse question of why the most beautiful women are always the falsest. ‘Doth the mind so follow the temper of the body’, Donne asks,

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that because those complections are aptest to change, the mind is therefore so too? Or as Bells of the purest metall retayne the tinkling and sound longest: so the memory of the last pleasure lasts longer in these, and disposeth them to the next.7

The term ‘complection’ here does not specifically designate skin colour, as it does for us, but rather the complex balance of humoral fluids, of which skin tone served as a primary indication (the melancholic was dark, the sanguine red, the phlegmatic pale and the choleric yellow). The intentionally fallacious reasoning attempts to explain hedonistic conduct by reference to humoral composition, finding in the eroticised capacity to blush a register of affective mutability and eloquent corporeality. Donne uses exactly the same phenomenon that provided the occasion of Elizabeth Drury’s unequivocal praise in the second Anniversary – blushing – and asks it to signal here a kind of endemic female infidelity. Donne’s paradox 4 argues somewhat less disingenuously that ‘our complexions and whole bodyes we inherit from parents, [and] our inclinations, our minds follow that. For our mind is heavy in our bodyes afflictions, and rejoyceth in the bodyes pleasures’ (p. 7). Donne here ponders, as have so many philosophers and scientists from Plato to the present, the material bases of character. Asserting that the ‘Gifts of the body are better than those of the Minde’, paradox 6 argues similarly that the body makes the mind . . . And if this mind may be confounded with Soule, without any violence or injustice to Reason or philosophy, then our Soule (me seemes) is enabled by our body, not this by it . . . Are Chastity, Temperance, or Fortitude guifts of the mind? I appeale to phisicians whether the cause of these be not in the body. (pp. 11–12)

Donne suggests outrageously that the performance of virtue is merely an effect of the body’s humoral complexion rather than the result of strenuous ethical effort or divine guidance. Something of a recurring scandal in the period’s moral philosophy, this concept was identified with an infamous tract by the classical Roman physician Galen entitled Quod Animi Mores (‘That the manners of the soul follow the temperature of the body’). There Galen argues, in the words of a popular sixteenth-century humoral theorist named Juan Huarte, That the maners of the soule, follow the temperature of the body, in which it keepes residence, and by reason of the heat, the coldnesse, the moisture, and the drouth, of the territorie where men inhabit, of the meates which they feed on, of the waters which they drinke, and of the aire which they breathe: some are blockish, and some wise: some of worth, and some base; some cruel, and some merciful.8

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As Donne relentlessly explores the cultural anxieties that emerged from this troubling physiological doctrine, he also develops a rich sense of the labyrinthine entanglements of matter and spirit. The Paradoxes and Problems are playfully, even wilfully perverse, but the playfulness is precisely what allows Donne to ponder issues of urgent solemnity. In a letter of 1608, probably to Sir Henry Goodyer, Donne ruminates on the complex interdependence of matter, mind and spirit that constitutes living human flesh: We consist of three parts, a soul, and body, and mind: which I call those thoughts and affections, and passions, which neither soul nor body hath alone, but have been begotten by their communication, as music results out of our breath and a cornet.9

Thought and emotion are here the ethereal music produced by the ineffable but indispensable communication of body and soul. Indeed, in the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, written while Donne was dangerously ill with a relapsing fever, the gravity of the occasion forces him to ask the same question in a different key. ‘If I ask mere philosophers what the soul is’, writes Donne, they will tell me, it is nothing but the temperament and harmony, and just and equal composition of the elements of the body, which produces all those faculties which we ascribe to the soul; and so itself is nothing, no separable substance that outlives the body.10

In the face of death, Donne anxiously confronts the materialist explanations of ‘mere philosophers’ that he had played with in the Paradoxes. He remarks in a sermon, ‘In the constitution and make of a natural man, the body is not the man, nor the soul is not the man, but the union of these two makes up the man.’ 11 In Donne’s imagination, then, it is the pregnant conjunction of the apparently disparate phenomena of body and soul that produces human life. This notion of a core self inexorably if anxiously transfixed in corporeality has vast implications for poetic practice. It bolsters Donne’s particular approach to metaphor, and continually reinforces the materialist components of his intensely metaphorical language. The vividly dramatic beginning of Satire 3 – ‘Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids / Those tears to issue which swell my eye-lids’ – invokes a powerful admixture of psychological condition and bodily fluid (ll. 1–2). Articulating a state of profoundly mixed emotions in deeply physical terms, Donne bestows actual agency on his contrary passions and the organs that produce them, describing how scorn oppresses the tears of grief while the emotion of pity suffocates the spleen, the organ thought to cause anger. Donne does not just look into his heart and

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write; rather, as Eliot remarks, he ‘look[s] into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts’.12 The various internal organs and the emotions they produce become for Donne the medium and the message of the subject moved by passion. For Donne, then, even the most ineffable subjects must be grounded in obdurate materiality. Rumination on the relationship between body and soul trained him in a way of thinking about spiritual subjects in deeply material terms. I would like to suggest that some of the remarkable aesthetic transformations Donne inaugurates in English love poetry emerge from his creative exploration of the myriad permutations of conceivable soul–body dispositions. To attend to the physiological orientation of Donne’s language is not to deny attention to the aesthetic fibres of his poetry; it is rather to begin to comprehend the very phenomena – cultural, biological, biographical – that engender, and distinguish, those fibres. Other writers of the time were of course exposed to the same physiological embodiment of intellect and emotion, but with far less spectacular aesthetic results, so it cannot be the physiology alone that produces Donne’s remarkable regeneration of English verse. I would argue none the less that his particular metaphoric practice – the attribute for which he most frequently receives praise and blame in literary history – is in part a function of this physiological orientation, which predisposed him to ferret out tacit connections among apparently disparate materials. This orientation, in other words, may have something to do not just with Donne’s deep investment in the embodied elements of his thought and emotion but also with his development of characteristically stunning metaphors, such as his likening parting lovers to stiff twin compasses (‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’) or his transformation of a pesky insect into ‘our marriage bed, and marriage temple’ (l. 12, ‘The Flea’). At the very least, this orientation provided a wonderful training ground for exploring the convulsive congress between spirit and matter. Not all readers, of course, have been impressed by Donne’s extraordinary use of such improbable images. Revisiting the early plaudits and complaints about what came to be called metaphysical poetry – a term, of course, that would have baffled Donne – can tell us much about his particular aesthetic practices, and the invigorating power they exercised over English verse. One of the first significant appraisals of Donne’s lyric innovations occurs in a commendatory poem to the first edition of his poetry (1633), written by his friend and fellow poet Sir Thomas Carew. Both a devout funeral elegy and an astute act of literary criticism, ‘An Elegie on the Death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. John Donne’ claims Donne as the author of a major transformation of English verse:

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Michael Schoenfeldt The Muses garden with Pedantique weedes O’rspred, was purg’d by thee; The lazie seeds Of servile imitation throwne away; And fresh invention planted.13

Carew praises Donne for violently ejecting pedantic imitation, and admires his aggressive refusal of affected ornamentation and obsequious convention. Donne, Carew argues, produces a whole new kind of poetry, emerging from the robust seeds of ‘fresh invention’.14 Carew also declares that ‘Thou has . . . open’d us a Mine / Of rich and pregnant Phansie, drawn a line / Of masculine expression.’ 15 He finds in Donne’s aesthetics a fascinating androgyny, coupling fertile imagination with virile rhetoric. Carew asserts that Donne brings to poetry something new and fresh and vigorous, something designed to have a dramatic affect on both the visceral emotions and the embodied intellect of the reader. Donne’s reputation in the subsequent decades, though, plummets, until, in the Life of Cowley (1779), Dr Johnson famously complains about the recondite philosophy and strained metaphors of this group he terms ‘the metaphysical poets’. What Johnson laments, though, a young T. S. Eliot, disappointed at the stale and arid poetry that surrounds him, lauds. Eliot praises Donne’s calculated admixture of philosophical and quotidian concerns, and admires his sudden discovery of occult resemblance between divergent phenomena, arguing that You only have metaphysical poetry, as I understand it, when you have a philosophy exerting its influence, not directly through belief, but indirectly through feeling and behavior, upon the minute particulars of a poet’s daily life, his quotidian mind, primarily perhaps his way of love-making, but also any activity.16

Eliot finds the studied conjunction of thought and feeling in Donne’s poetry to be the object of immense aesthetic admiration. John Dryden had misogynistically censured Donne for perplexing ‘the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy when he shou’d engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of Love’.17 Eliot, though, praises in particular Donne’s deliberate agglomeration of philosophy and love-making, his ability to engage simultaneously the mind and the heart. In one of the finest recent accounts of Donne’s poetry, the novelist A. S. Byatt remarks that Donne’s ‘great love poems stir both body and mind in an electric way that resembles nothing else’.18 Endorsing Eliot’s reading of Donne, she argues that Donne ‘does feel his thought. But what he feels – and what he makes us, his readers, feel – is the peculiar

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excitement and pleasure of mental activity itself.’ 19 I find particularly insightful Byatt’s account of the delight, at once cerebral and corporeal, of reading Donne; ‘The pleasure Donne offers our bodies’, she argues, ‘is the pleasure of extreme activity of the brain.’ 20 Not only does Donne register psychological and spiritual matters in deeply embodied terms, but also his work offers to the reader the intellectual, even neurological, thrill of comprehending the tacit meanings embedded in a complex, even difficult, metaphor. The embodied thought experienced by Donne’s speakers incites the same range of sensual media in his readers. I would like to turn briefly to ‘Aire and Angells’, a poem that bestows this thrill by demanding of its readers extreme intellectual activity in its aggressive exploration of two interrelated concatenations: that between material and immaterial existence, and that between men and women. ‘Aire and Angells’ is just the kind of poem that Dryden censures – it is a syntactically intricate and intellectually complex poem addressed to a female lover. The complexity, though, seems designed to engage rather than to perplex the mind of the ‘fair sex’. Actually composed of a pair of sonnets, ‘Aire and Angells’ uses this conventional framework to interrogate the form’s stereotypical idealisation of the beloved. The poem opens with a cunningly diplomatic account of the speaker’s ardent erotic activity before meeting the current beloved: ‘Twice or thrice had I loved thee, / Before I knew thy face or name’ (ll. 1–2). With this clever beginning, Donne challenges the standard tropes of idealisation and disembodiment imbuing conventional love poetry, particularly love poetry that deploys the stale if rhapsodic comparison of women to angels. This subtle attack on the tradition of distant mistresses is continued in Donne’s claim that his soul, the source of his love, must ‘take limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do’ (l. 8). The contemporaneous physiological link between emotions and bodies here underpins Donne’s suggestion that he and his beloved must celebrate their ethereal love in a decidedly embodied medium. Donne then develops a deliberate confusion between male desire and its feminine object in the line: ‘So thy love may be my love’s sphere’ (l. 25). The phrase brilliantly invokes the vertiginous perplexity that the opening lines infer, fusing the term for emotion and for the object of that emotion – ‘thy love’ and ‘my love’. This confusion, moreover, is cultivated rather than abated by the rest of the poem, and in the process destabilises the various hierarchies – between men and women, between matter and spirit, between air and angels – on which the poem is structured. Even the word ‘pinnace’ carries immense if diffuse intellectual freight; it is at once a slang term for a prostitute, a clinical term for male genitalia, and a technical term for a small ship (l. 18):

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Michael Schoenfeldt Whilst thus to ballast love, I thought, And so more steadily to have gone, With wares which would sink admiration, I saw, I had love’s pinnace overfraught. (ll. 15–18)

Here Donne may be punning on the etymology of metaphor itself, which means ‘a bearing or transporting across a boundary’; George Puttenham terms metaphor the ‘Figure of Transport’.21 Brilliantly fusing the naughty and the nautical, Donne displaces recurring male anxieties about genital size, erotic performance and female fidelity onto the charged imagery of an overburdened ship. Although the poem’s consummate difficulty has provoked decidedly differing readings, it is typically seen to argue that men’s love is purer than women’s love.22 Attention to its studied opacity, though, reveals a far more complex and interesting utterance. The poem rather seems to suggest that the disparity between male and female love may be fundamental, but it is at the same time ethereal, perhaps as unavailable to mortal perception as are the differences between air and angels: ‘Then as an angel, face and wings / Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear, / So thy love may be my love’s sphere’ (ll. 23–5). The syntactical difficulty of the utterance brilliantly mirrors the perceptual difficulty apprehending the ontological difference between the substance of angels, and the atmospheric medium through which they are perceived. Under pressure, the distinctions between men and women, and between air and angels, become distinctions without a difference, critical organising principles that are impossible to sustain. The poem’s syntactical difficulty and epistemological perplexity impel the reader to accomplish the ‘brave’ task described in ‘The Undertaking’: to ‘forget the He and She’ (l. 20). This is a poetry whose scrupulous obscurity is organic to its intricate and ineffable subject. Indeed, the sensual pleasures that the poem describes are related to the intellectual pleasures the poem bestows; negotiating Donne’s labyrinthine syntax becomes a version of the arduous project of discovering the ontological location of love ‘nor in nothing, nor in things / Extreme’ (ll. 21–2). Donne understood well the abiding pleasure, and the intellectual exhilaration, issuing from the sudden comprehension of something difficult. In a sermon he articulates beautifully the aesthetic power of opacity, praising the pedagogical technique of those teachers who ‘taught the People by parables and darke sayings . . . They had a power and dominion over the affections of their Disciples, because teaching them by an obscure way, they created an admiration, and a reverence in their hearers’ (Sermons, VII, p. 315). Donne shows here a preacher’s

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attention to the rhetorical power of deliberate obscurity, outlining the admiration and reverence it can stir in the auditor. He proceeds to articulate at length his admiration for Jesus’ particularly strategic use of such obscurity: when it is said, They were astonished at his Doctrine, for his word was with Power [Luke 4:32], they refer that to this manner of teaching, that hee astonished them with these reserved and darke sayings, and by the subsequent interpretation thereof, gained a reverend estimation amongst them . . . For those Parables, and comparisons of a remote signification, were calld by the Jews, Potestates, Powers, Powerfull insinuations. (VII, pp. 315–16)

Donne here imagines Jesus as perhaps the first practitioner of what would come to be called metaphysical poetry; Jesus astonishes his auditors by ‘comparisons of a remote signification’, methodically using obscurity as a powerful homiletic tactic. It is fascinating to think of Donne discovering a model for his own revolutionary poetic in the parabolic utterances of a prophet 1,600 years earlier. Donne understands acutely both the unsettling awe that can imbue dark parables, and the tumultuous pleasure that can emerge from apprehending their covert meanings. Donne was frequently castigated for obscurity; Ben Jonson famously complained that ‘Done himself for not being understood would perish.’ Donne was also frequently criticised for the related phenomena of metrical roughness. His irregular metrics particularly exasperated Jonson, whose own lyrics aspire to the measured smoothness of rational thought. Jonson insisted that Donne, ‘for not keeping of accent deserved hanging’.23 Dr Johnson likewise scolds the metrics of ‘the metaphysical poets’: ‘instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables’.24 Yet this deliberate metrical irregularity is exactly what Carew was talking about when he praised Donne’s ‘line / Of masculine expression’.25 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, moreover, realised that Donne’s rough metrics do not necessarily entail aesthetic failure, but rather an effort to find the form and rhythm that would suit the situation and emotion: ‘To read Dryden Pope, &c., you need only count syllables; but to read Donne you must measure time, and discover the time of each word by the sense of passion.’ 26 Coleridge suggests that whereas Dryden and Pope achieve regular scansion in response to the rationality they intend to exhibit, Donne’s metrical irregularity deliberately reflects the frequently turbulent emotion of the lines. The occasionally clogged syntax of ‘Aire and Angells’ represents the cognitive dissonance of the invariably fitful processes of thought and passion.

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Attentive to poetry as a medium for rendering tensions between reason and passion, between restraint and expression, between calm and commotion, Donne meticulously cultivates in his verse the salutary antagonism between formal and emotional elements. The experience of arresting vitality that suffuses Donne’s verse emerges in part from his brilliant exploration of the isometric tension between the patterns of a rhythmically ordered will and awkwardly exuberant outbursts of passion. The discipline of poetry in this regard takes on particular urgency as a vehicle for comprehending powerful, insurgent passions. In the poem ‘The Triple Foole’, Donne broods with mischievous tenacity about poetry and its complex relation to emotion and sensation. Poetic form, he suggests, is cathartic, even curative, of the torment of strong emotion. He brilliantly but irreverently characterises previous love poetry, dedicated for the most part to the laborious articulation of unrequited desire, as ‘whining poetry’ (l. 3). He argues that by participating in this conventional celebration of erotic frustration, he is ‘two fools . . . for loving, and for saying so’, and suggests sardonically that he would be the envy of all wise men if he only were the recipient of the carnal consummation that love poetry devoutly purports to desire (ll. 1–2). Despite his comic disparagement of ‘whining poetry’, he proceeds to suggest that the studied patterns of literary form might provide a kind of emotional catharsis for the inevitable experiences of grief. Literary forms and metrical numbers, he insists, are structures for mastering affect: ‘he tames [grief], that fetters it in verse’ (l. 11).27 In the effort to represent the way that painful emotion is beneficially discharged in verse, Donne employs a mistaken notion of the processes by which seawater is purified of salt: Then as th’earth’s inward narrow crooked lanes Do purge sea water’s fretful salt away, I thought, if I could draw my pains Through rhyme’s vexation, I should them allay. (ll. 6–9)

Donne argues that the strenuous discipline required to transmute emotional loss into orderly verse becomes a way of managing bereavement. The rest of the poem, though, humorously laments the fact that expressing grief in verse also becomes a vehicle for proliferating that grief, since there are always those ‘fools’ who are ready and willing to ‘set and sing my pain,’ and so ‘free again / Grief, which verse did restrain’ (ll. 14, 16). Although the formal restraints of poetry might allay and circumscribe the poet’s agony, the very pleasures poetry offers to readers make it a disturbingly effective vehicle for the contagious spread of emotion.

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In ‘The Triple Foole’, then, Donne displays his fascination with the fact that most prior love poetry was dedicated largely to the perverse pleasures involved in the metrical articulation of pain. He also wonders about the reasons for the popularity of such verses, locating it in the sadistic amusement achieved by reading verse articulating another’s incessant pain. Sir Philip Sidney had signalled something of the macabre aspects of this enjoyment in the first poem of Astrophil and Stella, where the speaker hopes that his beloved ‘might take some pleasure of my pain’.28 Shakespeare too, identified the sadistic aspects of this process in his sonnets, describing how his ‘words express / The manner of my pity-wanting pain’.29 In his ‘Gulling Sonnets’, Sir John Davies suggests irreverently that the prototypical suffering lover is a ‘patiente burden-bearinge Asse’.30 Donne indeed might turn the process back on us, arguing that our abiding obsession with poetry dedicated to the lyric articulation of unfulfilled desire identifies us as today’s version of his triple fools. At the very least, ‘The Triple Foole’ invites us not only to contemplate the cathartic power of verse devoted to erotic suffering but also to explore our own cathexes about such poetry in our critical and pedagogical performances. The New Criticism cut its wisdom teeth on the lyrics of Donne, in large part because the ways in which his difficult poetry gradually opens up to deep, ingenious, repeated readings were perfect for ‘close reading’, a practice dedicated to the rigorous discovery of the formal containment of intellectual tension. Donne has not fared as well with the new historicism, in part because its tendency to treat literature as history and as politics ignores most of what makes him wonderful and distinctive. At the same time, by focusing on the startling discovery of unexpected connections among apparently disparate discursive contexts via the anecdote, the new historicism tacitly co-opted one of the signal strategies of metaphysical poetry.31 The new historicism at least got us back to history, producing carefully contextualised readings of the politically subversive tendencies of literary texts. In the process, though, it left out pleasure, the hard-won pleasures of literary form, as well as the erotic pleasure of love consummated and sustained. In our struggles to uncover the politically subversive and historically meaningful dimensions of literature, we for the most part forgot to note those rare moments of transubstantiation – the only kind I have ever known – when the metre, and the sound and the rhyme, and the form, and the emotion, and the occasion, all come together to produce real magic. Earlier cultures called this inspiration, and thought it so special that it had to be explained by divine intervention. It is in essence the miraculous transformation celebrated in Shakespeare’s sonnet 65:

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‘That in black ink my love may still shine bright’ (l. 14). The ultimate Renaissance transformation, then, might be the wondrous process by which ink on paper is transformed into material which conveys over great chunks of time the processes and enterprises of passion and intellect in deeply gratifying and eminently pleasurable forms. I would like to think that those of us who focus on early modern poetry could at least become, in Donne’s phrase, ‘a little wise’, and begin to develop a kind of criticism which remains attentive to history, to gender, to race, and at the same time accounts for the complex forms of pleasure that literature inculcates and celebrates. We may remain fools, in Donne’s sense, but perhaps we can none the less locate in our engagements with texts from the past a lexicon and syntax worthy of the devout commitments and sublime experiences these texts provide. Donne’s love poetry records with unprecedented detail the remarkable emotional exhilaration of physical and spiritual intimacy with another human being. Most previous love poetry was about the unrequited courtship that he in ‘The Triple Foole’ dismisses as ‘whining poetry’. He writes love poetry, by contrast, that celebrates and enacts what Helen Gardner terms the ‘bliss of union in love’.32 Donne writes love poetry about getting, and keeping, and valuing, a beloved. His lovers want a room, if not a world, of their own, where their love can be practised and nourished. As Ilona Bell astutely remarks, these may well be the first Renaissance love poems written for adults.33 One of the many hallmarks of Donne’s striking originality, then, is the care with which he attends to the precious but vulnerable world of erotic intimacy. The decidedly carnal celebrations of his love poetry are wedded to its considered materialism. His love poetry celebrates with colloquial vigour and dramatic immediacy the good morrow of souls and bodies waking up to each other; thus Coleridge writes of ‘The Good Morrow’s ‘Fine vigorous exultation, both soul and body in full puissance’.34 Donne’s amorous verse aggressively resists a Neo-Platonic separation of body and soul, emphasising instead the full participation of body, mind and soul in the flush experience of erotic intimacy. As he declares in ‘Aire and Angells’, ‘Love must not be, but take a body too’ (l. 10). The ineffable phenomenon of copious affection demands a material medium for consummate realisation. As Donne writes in a letter to his friend Sir Henry Wotton, ‘love, though it be directed upon the minde, doth inhere in the body’.35 The speaker of ‘Love’s Growth’ similarly argues that Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their Muse,

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But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do. (ll. 11–14)

Donne’s speakers, moreover, repeatedly endow their capacity to love with heroic and saintly qualities. ‘The Canonization’ imagines that love is worthy of sainthood, while ‘The Undertaking’ describes the profound courage required to see ‘Virtue attired in woman . . . And forget the He and She’ (ll. 18–20). Donne’s speakers continually resist what ‘The Blossom’ terms a love ‘forbidden or forbidding’, insisting instead upon the magnanimous rectitude of their fully embodied erotic pursuits (l. 12). ‘Let us love nobly, and live’, declares the speaker of ‘The Anniversary’ (l. 28). I would like here to take issue with Christopher Ricks’s provocative but ultimately tendentious account of Donne’s post-coital disgust, because it ignores what is most revolutionary and transformative in Donne. ‘Donne’s poems’, Ricks writes in an essay entitled ‘Donne after love’, ‘record a dislike of having come.’ 36 Poems such as ‘Farewell to Love’ do describe how love, ‘Being had, enjoying it decays’, leaving ‘a kind of sorrowing dullness to the mind’. But that is far from the predominant mood of poems such as ‘The Good Morrow’, ‘The Sun Rising’ or even ‘Break of Day’. While we do get moments of physical revulsion at carnality in Donne’s poetry, there is nothing in him like the moralised nausea expressed in Shakespeare’s sonnet 129, ‘The expense of spirit’. Donne’s misogynist poems and the anxious sentiments they utter are far less remarkable in literary history than the rare and ennobling exhilaration he is capable of describing in the morning after love. For him, there may be no completely safe sex – the world of course continually challenges his right to love, and the sexual act itself threatens, since all orgasms were thought to shorten one’s life – but the rewards are more than worth the risk. I have tried in this chapter to push us to think beyond our own inherited post-Cartesian dualisms in order to comprehend the pre-Cartesian materialist physiology that Donne inherited, and the aesthetic practices that this physiology might have enabled. Donne’s particularly aggressive and ingenious take on this physiology betrays the decidedly physical underpinnings of an aesthetic that would come to be called metaphysical poetry. I would also argue that it is one of the central sources of the deep and abiding if edgy and exhausting pleasure of reading Donne. Our protracted delight as readers in working through the difficult conjunction of disparate materials, and in negotiating the aptly clotted syntax through which the striking conjunction is frequently conveyed, emerges from the excitement, at once spiritual and visceral, intellectual

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and corporeal, of apprehending language as sound and sense, as reason and emotion, simultaneously. In fact, in a sermon on the Annunciation, that moment when the word truly was made flesh, Donne describes the visceral thrill of being inwardly moved by another’s speech in terms that evoke as well as anything I have ever read the scintillating pleasures of reading his poetry: a man may upon the hearing of something that strikes him, that affects him, feel this springing, this exultation, this melting, and colliquation of the inwardest bowels of his soule; a new affection, a new passion, beyond the joy ordinarily conceived upon earthly happinesses; which, though no naturall Philosopher can call it by a name, no Anatomist assigne the place where it lyes, yet I doubt not, through Christ Jesus, but that many of you who are here now, feele it, and understand it this minute. (Sermons, IV, p. 159)

Donne’s poetry possesses the remarkable capacity to inculcate the rare and ineffable pleasure that he portrays here with materialist precision. The reader of Donne’s love poetry is bequeathed that precious moment of sublime joy in the inwardest bowels of the soul (a phrase that beautifully fuses the spiritual and the carnal). Donne continually extols the decidedly corporeal yet eminently spiritual experience of what ‘A Valediction of the Book’ aptly calls ‘love’s subliming fire’ (l.13). Part of the reason that he is so successful at producing this effect in the reader, I would argue, is his rigorous exploration of the complex continua between body and soul, between mind and emotion. He bestows on his readers the exhilaration, at once visceral and intellectual, of being moved by passionate, argumentative speech. Even his notoriously rough metrics emerge from a palpable tension among the bodily gratifications of metrical regularity, the hesitant rush of unpremeditated thought, and the staccato rhythms of passionate, extemporaneous speech. Those rare moments when impetuous flesh experiences a sublime pleasure that is simultaneously corporeal, emotional and logical are his special milieu. Deeply interested in the galvanic euphoria of physical conjunction, and fascinated by the ecstatic joys of emotional bonding, Donne distils the essence of an inherited physiology into a new aesthetics of vigorous, difficult, passionate poetry.

Notes 1. John Donne, ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’, in A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: The Complete English Poems (New York: Penguin, 1971), ll. 244–6. All citations are of this edition. 2. Mary Ann O’Farrell, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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English Novel and the Blush (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Ramie Targoff, John Donne: Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 2. Thomas Stearns Eliot, ‘The metaphysical poets’, in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), p. 247. Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, eds Thomas Faulkner, Nicholas Kiessling, and J. B. Bamborough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), part 1, sect. 2, memb. 3, subs. 1, p. 247. See Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Helen Peters (ed.), John Donne: Paradoxes and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 30. Juan Huarte, The Examination of Men’s Wits, ed. Carmen Rogers (Gainesville: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1959), pp. 21–3. Edmond Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne (London: William Heinemann, 1899), I, p. 184. John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Together with Death’s Duel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 114. John Donne, Sermons, eds. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), II, p. 261. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 250. Cited in A. J. Smith, John Donne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 94. Ibid, p. 94. Ibid, p. 94. Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 294. Cited in Smith, John Donne: The Critical Heritage, p. 151. A. S. Byatt, ‘Feeling thought: Donne and the embodied mind’, in A. Guibbory (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Donne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 247. Ibid, p. 248. Ibid., p. 248. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, eds Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 262–3. See John R. Roberts, ‘“Just such disparitie”: The critical debate about “Aire and Angels”’, John Donne Journal, 9:1 (1990), pp. 43–64. Cited in Smith, John Donne: The Critical Heritage, pp. 70, 69. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 265. On the therapeutic articulation of grief, see my ‘“Give sorrow words”: Emotional loss and the articulation of temperament in early modern England’, in Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken (eds), Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 143–64; and ‘Aesthetics and anesthetics: The art of pain management in early modern England’,” in Jan Frans van

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28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

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Dijkhuizen and Karl Enenkel (eds), The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture in a special issue of Transactions (Leiden: Brill, 2009): pp. 19–38. Sir Philip Sidney, ‘Astrophil and Stella: Sonnet 1’, in K. Duncan-Jones (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), intro. 2. William Shakespeare, sonnet 140, in Colin Burrow (ed.), The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). John Davies, ‘The Gulling Sonnets’’, in Clare Howard (ed.), The Poems of John Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), p. 224. See the fascinating essay by Joel Fineman, ‘The history of the anecdote: Fiction and friction’, in H. A. Vesser (ed.), The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 49–76. Helen Gardner, ‘General introduction’, in Gardner (ed.), The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. xvii. Ilona Bell, ‘The role of the lady in Donne’s Songs and Sonets’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 23: 1 (Winter 1983), pp. 113–29. In Smith, John Donne: The Critical Heritage, p. 267. John Donne, Letters to severall persons of honour: written by John Donne Sometime Deane of St Pauls London (London: 1651), p. 121. Christopher Ricks, ‘Donne after love’, in E. Scarry (ed.), Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 33.

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Chapter 10

Protean Bodies: Literature, Alchemy, Science and English Revolutions Margaret Healy

The men of experiment are like an ant; they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. (Bacon, New Organon)1

Francis Bacon’s reputation as an important early exponent of experimental science might lead us to assume that he was an inveterate objectivist and rationalist. His writings, however, disclose a considerable indebtedness to more mystical systems of thought, notably hermetic philosophy and its close associates in this period, Neo-Platonism, cabalism and alchemy.2 Ironically, Bacon’s scientific ‘middle way’ of the bee – the way of moderation – included an engagement with currents of thought that are often dismissed today as vestiges of benighted medievalism or the arcane preoccupations of the Renaissance lunatic fringe. Thus in the Advancement of Learning Bacon saw fit to commend James I as ‘invested of that triplicity which in great veneration was ascribed to the ancient Hermes; the power and fortune of a King, the knowledge and illumination of a Priest, and the learning and universality of a Philosopher’, and proceeded to list alchemy, along with astrology and natural magic, as sciences with ‘noble’ ends. He singled alchemy out as having ‘brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions and experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature as for the use of man’s life’.3 Indeed, ‘chymistry’, with its limbecks and furnaces, its quest for a universal cure-all medicine, its investment of nature with signatures of God, and its lexicon of wondrous transmutation of base substances into gold, exercised a considerable hold on the early modern psyche. This, married to the hermetic philosopher’s imagined inner ‘power’ to ‘digest’ and ‘transform’ – and hence to replicate the creative ways of God the ‘Maker’ – constituted, I wish to argue, a seminal ‘fable’ which – far from being marginal in

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the Renaissance – inspired and helped to authorise its social and intellectual transformations, including its seventeenth-century political and scientific ‘revolutions’.4 I use the word ‘fable’ purposefully because Bacon himself recognised the crucial importance of fables in initiating change. As the first editor of New Atlantis, W. Rawley, explained in 1627: This fable my Lord devised, to the end that he might exhibit therin a model or description of a college instituted for the interpreting of nature and the producing of great and marvellous works for the benefit of men . . . Most things therein are within men’s power to effect . . . This work of New Atlantis . . . his Lordship designed for this place [the end of the volume containing Sylva Sylvarum or The Natural History]; in regard it hath so near affinity . . . with the preceding Natural History. (‘To the Reader’)5

Natural history and imaginative fable were designed to conjoin in this volume because, as Bacon’s De Augmentis explains, ‘An object of sense always strikes the memory more forcibly and is more easily impressed upon it than an object of intellect.’ 6 ‘Poesy’ and imagination ‘raise’ the mind in a way that ‘reason’, which can only ‘buckle and bow the mind’, simply cannot (Advancement of Learning, book 2, p. 344);7 thus parables and myths were in former times a route to enlightenment and truth: Behind that curtain [the gallery of the ancients] lie the secrets of that antiquity which preceded the learning of the Greeks . . . They are not offered to us as new inventions for the first time brought forward, but as things formerly believed and known. This circumstance increases their value in my eyes, since it suggests that they are sacred survivals of better times.8

If, in his own corrupted times, truth had to be recaptured ‘by the light of nature’ – through the intensive study of the natural world – Bacon nevertheless conceded in De sapientia veterum (Wisdom of the Ancients, 1609) that a ‘veil of fables’ provided a link between ancient wisdom and the later centuries: Greek myths and Platonic dialogues, for example, encoded elements of the prisca theologia (the one true, trans-cultural theology).9 Fables and myths have the power to move men to action, but the tantalising ‘sacred survivals of better times’ alluded to here require further consideration; Bacon’s ‘fable’ of New Atlantis seems an appropriate place to start. In New Atlantis a sea voyage from Peru to China and Japan provides the context for a ‘discovery’ of a new world of an entirely different and momentous kind. Driven off course by great winds into a ‘wilderness of waters’, the unfortunate travellers lift up their ‘hearts and voices to God’ and – presumably through divine intervention – soon find themselves in sight of ‘a good haven’ (pp. 129, 130). Far from

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encountering the usual (imagined) blank religious and intellectual space inhabited by savages and thus ripe for Christian appropriation and plunder, the protagonist of this fable finds himself amidst a secluded community of scientific geniuses whose civility and sincere religiosity and charity make the old world seem shameful and barbarous. The inhabitants of Bensalem are, we learn, the epitome of temperance, and they understand a range of languages including ancient Hebrew and Greek, ‘school’ Latin and Spanish. Further, they possess such advanced medical knowledge that the sick seafarers think themselves immersed in a ‘divine pool of healing’ (p. 135). ‘A Christian people full of piety and humanity’ (p. 134), the Bensalemites appear as a model chosen race engaged in building the equivalent of a New Jerusalem through the activities of the college of Salomon’s House, having been blessed with divine revelation, miraculously, about twenty years after the ascension of Christ.10 At that time ‘a great pillar of light’ in the form of a column topped by a cross rose from the sea, and when this dispersed a chest of cedar – an ‘ark’ – was discovered which contained the Old and New Testament, the Apocalypse and various other crucial texts that saved the island from ‘infidelity’(p. 138). This, it seems, was the islanders’ reward for their industriousness in natural philosophy undertaken in Salomon’s House – the ‘lanthorn of this kingdom’ (p. 145) – and demonstratively approved of by God. Their research had enabled the ‘good brethren’ ‘to know [the] works of creation, and the secrets of them; and to discern . . . between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts’ even before the miraculous light arrived (p. 137). Bacon always cautioned against activities that he perceived as foolish extremes and, while he favoured natural magic, he inveighed against Faustian excesses: demonic magic – ‘impostures and illusions’ – had to be ruled out. Notably, however, this did not include cabalism, which was closely associated with magic in this period; indeed, the laws of Bensalem had been ordained by none other than Moses through a ‘secret cabala’ (p. 151). The activities of Salomon’s House are truly impressive and visionary. Through a range of specific laboratory and experimental environments the Salomon’s House scientists devote themselves to: ‘The knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’ (p. 156). Such ambitious, open-ended plundering of nature’s secrets required divine approval, and in Bacon’s fable there is no mistaking that the Bensalemites have God’s full support. All the Salomon’s House projects are for the benefit of mankind (rather than personal greed); thus when

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inventions and discoveries are made they are patented and put to practical use. This avid research includes such audacious goals as ‘the prolongation of life’, the ‘restitution of youth’, ‘the curing of diseases counted incurable’, ‘the altering of . . . fatness and leanness’, the ‘making of new species’, ‘versions of bodies into other bodies’ and ‘the increasing and exalting of the intellectual parts’ (pp. 167–8). Bacon’s New Atlantis seems to have anticipated even relatively recent scientific and technological developments, including animal cloning (pp. 156–64). However, before getting swept up in a wave of positivistic euphoria about the ‘Enlightenment’ and the origins of modern science and secularism emerging in this amazing text, it is important to stress what a deeply mystical vision New Atlantis is: science, religion and the supernatural cannot readily be teased apart in the Renaissance. Indeed, the magus-like ‘reverend’ men of the island who function as authoritative guides in this fable (see pp. 131 and 154, for example), with their wide-sleeved gowns, capes, dainty turban-hats and locks of hair that come down below the brim are remarkably reminiscent of Hermes Trismegistus as figured on the title-page of Oswald Croll’s Basilica chymica (Frankfurt, 1609), or in the grand black-and-white mosaic pavement of Siena cathedral (c.1480), which proclaims that Hermes Trismegistus was Moses’ contemporary. What is the significance of ancient Hermes to Bacon’s futuristic vision and to the birth of science? The influential Protestant writer Philippe Du Plessis Mornay declared of Hermes: Mercurius Trismegistus, who (if the bookes which are fathered upon him bee his in deede, as in trueth they bee very auncient) is the founder of them all, teacheth everywhere, That there is but one God . . . which hath universall power of creating all things . . . That unto him alone belongeth the name of Father, and of Good.11

The supposed (‘if the bookes . . . bee his in deede’) writings of Hermes Trismegistus are much neglected by literary historians today (in spite of the impressive scholarship of Frances Yates in the mid-twentieth century),12 yet their re-emergence in the fifteenth century had a profound impact on Renaissance culture. Indeed, the Hermetica’s footprints can be traced in a wide range of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and thinkers, among them Marlowe, Spenser, Chapman, Sidney, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Vaughan, Milton, Marvell and the heroes of science, Newton, Boyle and Kepler. What exactly was hermeticism’s appeal? When a collection of short Greek texts – part of the hermetic corpus – came to light c.1460, Cosimo de’ Medici ordered Marsilio Ficino to interrupt his studies of Plato and set to work translating these.

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Ficino readily complied and in 1471 published them together with his commentary as the Pimander. The latter proved immensely popular, undergoing sixteen editions prior to 1500. References to hermeticism do occur in medieval scholastic writings and in several church fathers, including St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, who accorded Hermes the status of an historic personage of great antiquity: an Egyptian sage acquainted with the secrets of the world of nature.13 Throughout the Middle Ages, hermeticism was closely associated with the alchemical tradition – effectively, alchemy was the science of hermetic philosophy. Ficino speculated that Hermes had been born a little after Moses and that his religious and esoteric knowledge had been passed to Orpheus and then on to Pythagoras and Plato. Egyptian hieroglyphs, Greek myths and Platonic dialogues might therefore encode pristine religious wisdom. Ficino was unaware that the pronounced Platonic influences he found in the hermetic writings derived from their having actually been penned in the third or fourth century ad rather than in ancient times. Although this was established by Isaac Casaubon in 1614, hermetic philosophers ‘ignored the evidence’, and the Hermetica continued to be influential throughout the seventeenth century.14 The hermetic writings could not have emerged at a more apposite moment: they caught the fifteenth-century renewed tide of enthusiasm for Platonism, and the mystical-spiritual religion encountered in them not only chimed sufficiently well with orthodoxy (having been written, in actuality, by Christian Neo-Platonists) but seemed to many to be relatively free from the corruptions and antagonisms of latter-day Christianity – here was a new route to truth. To intellectuals like the Protestant Philippe Du Plessis Mornay, hermeticism’s stress on one religion and on inner spirituality provided a peaceful-seeming contrast to the strife and factionalism they were witnessing around them.15 To many, then, Hermes Trismegistus with his Egyptian religion appeared a credible exponent of the true religion before Christ. Against this backdrop we can begin to make sense of Bacon’s enigmatic allusion to ‘the secret survivals of better times’. But hermeticism could have captured Bacon’s imagination for another crucial reason: its immense concern with the secrets and powers of nature. This passage, spoken by Hermes in the text Asclepius, might have been particularly inspiring: Pure philosophy that depends only on reverence for god should . . . wonder at the recurrence of the stars, how their measure stays constant in prescribed stations and in the orbit of their turning; it should learn the dimensions, qualities and quantities of the land, the depths of the sea, the power of fire and the nature and effects of all such things in order to commend, worship and wonder at the skill and mind of god. (p. 74)

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According to the Hermetica the book of nature was, in effect, a second work of divine revelation (after holy scripture), and the devout Renaissance philosopher was thus duty bound to study the works of nature and seek out the treasures which became hidden after man’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In hermeticism, the celestial bodies are a link between God and mankind: they are capable of infusing their powers into terrestrial matter, and thus natural entities like flowers and stones can acquire the same occult virtues – they possess divine efficacy which the skilled natural philosopher might access. Processes such as alchemical distillation could eventually lead to the recovery of the divine ‘signature’ (the transcendent essence). Bacon described natural magic in the following terms: ‘I . . . understand it as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations; and by uniting (as they say) actives with passives displays the wonderful works of nature’.16 In this scheme of things, the scientist assisted the work of nature, encouraging her to yield her secrets, which gave him enhanced ‘powers’ that could be deployed to ‘the effecting of all things possible’ (New Atlantis, p. 156). Such immense optimism was underpinned by an enhanced confidence in human potential that was also supplied in swathes by the Hermetica: A human being is a great wonder, a living thing to be worshipped and honored: for he changes his nature into a god’s, as if he were a god . . . He cultivates the earth; he swiftly mixes into the elements; he plumbs the depths of the sea in the keenness of his mind. Everything is permitted him. (Asclepius, p. 69)

Such an heroic conception of man certainly captured the Renaissance imagination; indeed, we might think of Marlowe’s Icarus-winged notorious ‘overreacher’, Faustus; Hamlet’s famous words seem to resonate, too, with those of Hermes in Asclepius: ‘What a piece of work is man! . . . in apprehension how like a god’ (Hamlet, II, ii, 305–9).17 Asclepius’s vision was inspiring and motivating because it seemed to offer a way back into Eden – a divinely sanctioned method of recapturing golden worlds. In hermeticism, man’s immortal component is highly creative and he can regenerate his soul, letting in more divine light and thereby enhancing his ability to control the powers of nature (Asclepius, p. 87). In such a world view, the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the heavens are tightly interlinked – hermeticism was a highly integrated vision of ‘oneness’. Some Renaissance thinkers, however, notably Pico della Mirandola, stretched this liberating and shape-shifting thinking to extremes that a figure of moderation like Bacon might not have been happy to endorse.18 For Pico, man was a protean ‘molder and maker’

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of himself; he could degenerate into a ‘brute’ or become ‘divine’ according to his will and actions (‘Oration’, pp. 104–6).19 In the nineteenth century Jacob Burckhardt notably highlighted Pico’s ‘lofty’, optimistic ‘conception’ as ‘one of the noblest bequests of that great age’.20 This immensely liberating and motivating vision of protean man had been given a seal of divine approval by the Hermetica – man as maker in God’s likeness was capable of accessing special powers and transforming himself and his environment (‘God is maker of the world and all it contains, governing all things along with mankind, who governs what is composite’; Asclepius, p. 72). It must be conceded, however, that this wisdom, this ‘sacred survival of better times’, remained suspect from the perspective of many. Original sin and Calvinistic predestination did not sit easily with notions of man’s divinity and perfectibility. At the very least the upsurge in science was deeply unsettling – ‘And new Philosophy calls all in doubt’, proclaimed John Donne (‘First Anniversary’, l. 205).21 Shakespeare’s Prospero is an Asclepian-type magus with powers to manipulate his world, producing harmony out of discord, but he notably ends his magic and begs for mercy when this is achieved – he knows when to stop. Like Prospero, real hermetic philosophers recognised that they were treading a very narrow path of respectability, and even committed ones like the Anglican clergyman Henry Vaughan registered unease about the extensive ‘rifling’ of nature’s ‘secrets’ that natural magic involved: I summon’d nature: peirc’d through all her store, Broke up some seales, which none had touch’d before, Her wombe, her bosome, and her head Where all her secrets lay a bed I rifled quite . . . (‘Vanity of Spirit’, ll. 9–13)22

Anxieties aside, the rape of nature had begun in earnest, and while Bacon took care to dissociate himself in print from extremists who saw nature as a ‘courtesan for pleasure’, other contemporaries, like Hugh Plat – a much more hands-on scientist – appeared to revel in the plunder: ‘I may happily be encouraged to pry a little further into Nature’s cabinet, and so to disperse some of her most secret jewels.’23 By 1600, as Deborah Harkness has described, London was bristling with natural philosophers labouring in backstreet as well as more elaborate workshops. Furthermore, alchemical medicine had become so established in England that it was competing with Galenism. Indeed, one of alchemical medicine’s major exponents, Robert Fludd, far from being considered an irrational medical maverick, was deemed sufficiently mainstream in the first decade of the seventeenth century to

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be admitted into the prestigious College of Physicians. Hermeticism’s chemical dream of protean change, refinement and golden worlds was, it seems, firmly embedded in the English psyche and it was to have far-reaching effects on the material world – effects that its first peaceseeking Florentine exponents could never have anticipated. Indeed, the story of the English Revolution is closely intertwined with elements of this burgeoning fable.

••

During a revolution, with the collapse of the old order and its laws, language itself falls into disarray and the body comes to the fore as the ultimate point of reference. As Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin have argued, Any perceived pattern or organized system in nature is liable to be employed to express and comment upon social order and social experience . . . Of all the models of coherent organization recognized in nature, none is more readily available than the human body, and none is more frequently turned to as a tool for explaining or justifying social order.24

Certainly, an aesthetics of embodiment in which important meanings are inscribed on and through the soma emerges prominently in the midseventeenth century, and prime among these revolutionary bodies is the alchemical model. In the early sixteenth century, the Swiss physician commonly known as Paracelsus (1493–1541) presented traditional humoral medicine with the most serious challenge to its authority that it had experienced in the West since its inception.25 Paracelsus sought deliberately to overturn the learning of the ‘high colleges’ (universities), instituting a new system of physic that required divinely inspired physicians and knowledge based on ‘shoebuckle’ experience and arcane wisdom.26 His pamphlets became an important vehicle for anticlericalism, and for obvious reasons he was sarcastically dubbed the Luther of medicine.27 His view of the world was deeply mystical and he considered himself a prophet sent by God to recover the ‘pristine’,28 uncorrupted knowledge possessed by Adam before the Fall. Arcane wisdom could not be ‘copied from books’ (p. 56). Access to divine secrets had to be earned first through consulting the cabala (p. 133) and subsequently through the intensive study of nature, which involved travelling (hence the ‘shoebuckle’), alchemy (‘the art which makes the impure into the pure through fire’, p. 143) and natural magic (‘Magic has power to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason’, p. 137). As in hermeticism, the mysteries of the firmament were revealed through an intuitive interaction between the ‘light’ of nature and the ‘light of man’ (pp. 43–4), and all this was

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dependent on the Holy Ghost: ‘the Holy Ghost and nature are one . . . each day nature shines as a light from the Holy Ghost and learns from him, and thus this light reaches man, as in a dream’ (p. 181). The cosmos articulated in the writings of Paracelsus and his followers was intensely integrated and activated through spirit. The heavens, earth and man were all composed of three things – mercury, sulphur and salt – and were only distinguished by the form in which they manifested themselves, ‘for they are only ONE thing, ONE being’ (pp. 18–19). Extreme unity and spirituality were the hallmarks of the Paracelsian scheme. This rather beautiful vision of oneness was considered unsettling, even dangerous by some of the king’s persuasion in the late 1640s, and it is not difficult to discern why. Inner ‘light’ was what Paracelsians prized most highly – it was the godhead in themselves – and for committed royalists this was a delusion that constituted a potential challenge to the authority of a divine-right monarch. Significantly, among the images of dismembered, diseased and lewd bodies that inhabit the uncanny landscape of the late 1640s satirical playlets, there sometimes lurks the spectre of Paracelsianism as if it and its practitioners and adherents were somehow peculiarly responsible, along of course with Cromwell and his ‘Levelling Crew’,29 for the mid-century turmoil. Thus Mercurius Melancholius’s Craftie Cromwell: or, Oliver Ordering our New State (1648) rails at ‘the Inslaved Commons of England’, the ‘Deluded Vulgar’ (the target audience of this playlet) who ‘in lieu of light’ have been ‘Involoped with fumes of cloudie night’ (p. 1). ‘Let the world know’ it threatens, ‘Kings when once instated / Are Gods on Earth, by Heaven Consecrated’, and it insists that in order to bring ‘your Wholesome Lawes’ ‘Back to their pristine use’ ‘your’ king must ‘re-inthrone[d]’ (p. 2). As we have seen, utopian dreams (registered here as delusions), ‘light’ and desire for the ‘pristine’ have significant Paracelsian meanings (pp. 1, 2), and the implication is that frenzied rebels have appropriated its discourse. Craftie Cromwell’s ludicrous farce is not completely without substance; it is certainly true that the bodily-social visions of England’s revolutionaries often appear very hermetic-Paracelsian.30 James Harrington’s fragmentary treatise of natural philosophy, The Mechanics of Nature (c.1660), is particularly revealing in this respect.31 Its stress is not (as its title might be taken to suggest) on mechanistic, dualistic philosophy but rather on the unity and co-operation afforded by the spiritual cosmos: ‘BETWEEN the animal Spirits of the whole or Universe, and of the parts, as of man’s Body, there is an intercourse or cooperation which preserves the common order of Nature unseen’ (p. xliii).

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Harrington’s spiritually integrated understanding of man, nature and the cosmos certainly underpins his prescription for a utopian commonwealth as expressed in his most famous work, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656). ‘The idea of the whole’ – of society working interdependently and harmoniously – which is seminally important to Harrington’s utopian vision, also drives the Digger Gerrard Winstanley’s frequent ‘dreams’: ‘all as one man working together and feeding together as sons of one father, members of one family’ (The True Leveller, 1649).32 As ‘one house of Israel’, he asserts, people should be ‘united in brotherly love into one spirit . . . in the community of one earth, their mother’ (p. 87). In his utopian commonwealth, as in the hermetic-Paracelsian cosmos, knowledge of God is gleaned via ‘the light in man’ through the intensive search for nature’s ‘secrets’ (Law of Freedom, p. 346). With his maker ruling within him, man needs no external teachers and rulers (The True Leveller, p. 77). The ‘light’ or godhead in man, then, justifies his rejection of external authority, and in 1649 such logic encouraged Winstanley and his followers ‘to dig up, manure and sow corn upon George Hill in Surrey’ (p. 77). No wonder the royalist Thomas Hobbes expended so much energy in Leviathan (1651) denying any spiritual, immaterial component to the cosmos, railing: If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civill Obedience.33

The spirit–matter controversy was not simply a natural philosophy issue; it was densely political. It would be a mistake to conclude from my discussion so far that all mid- seventeenth-century alchemist-hermeticists were political zealots. The appeal of transmuting, fiery images from ‘chymistry’ to those writers – medical and political – with apocalyptic mindsets, eager for radical change, is obvious, but there is no evidence of an isomorphic relation between alchemical medicine and republicanism. In fact, translations of hermetic and alchemical texts poured off the presses in the 1650s, 1660s and 1670s in greater numbers than ever before; and ‘chymical’ medicine actually reached the height of its appeal after the Restoration. The king’s physician, Walter Charlton, went through an alchemical phase in 1650 during which he translated and published several treatises, and George Thomson, who did so much to promote alchemical medicine in England, was a committed monarchist, as were the hermetic philosopher Thomas Vaughan and his poet brother Henry.34 Rather, I would suggest, political commentators used medical

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vocabulary and ideas selectively and often inconsistently to imagine and shape their visions and to lend authoritative weight to their arguments: bodily analogies have a tendency to seem ‘natural’ and therefore more convincing. Whatever individuals’ political affiliations, the cultural imaginary we have been exploring supported and encouraged visions of intellectual renewal and scientific and technological progress. Through its synthesising and harmonising of science and religion, the hermetic text Asclepius, for example, provided the blueprint for the predicted ultimate transformation – the intensive study of nature would prepare the way for perfection after the final apocalyptic destruction of ‘vices and perversion’ and ‘repression’ in religion (Asclepius, pp. 81–3). In a way that meshed with biblical prophecy, the Asclepius seemed to encode a millennial scenario, and many in England were anticipating and working towards a reign of the saints, either before or after the Judgement, when perfection and peace on earth would be achieved, ‘so that the world itself will again seem deserving of worship and wonder’ (Asclepius, p. 83). Charles Webster has demonstrated how natural philosophers as politically diverse as Paracelsus, Dee, Bacon, Hartlib, More, Napier, Goodwin and Newton ‘firmly believed that the ordained 6000-year span of life of the cosmos was ending’, and that the way was being prepared for momentous changes.35 While Joseph Glanvill was frightening his associates with prophecies of the world ‘enveloped in a ball of fire’, the diarist John Evelyn (not a noted fanatic) provided a more comforting account of the distillation of the saints into clouds before the ‘dreadfull Conflagration of this present Earth, which shall now be burnt up, and so refin’d as to be made a New Earth’ – he was fascinated by chemical explosions. Newton too – an enthusiastic alchemist as well as brilliant mathematician – believed that his labours were paving the way for the universal restoration of the world.36 The motivation for the establishing of a Royal Society for the advancement of science in 1660 clearly owes much to the hermetic ‘fables’. In 1651 Elias Ashmole, one of its founding members, saw fit to publish an extensive collection of alchemical writings which he described as ‘the most Divine Mysteries’ – ‘Severall Poetical Pieces of our Famous English Philosophers, who have written the Hermetique Mysteries’.37 When Thomas Sprat wrote The History of the Royal Society in 1667, he lavished praise on Bacon’s wit and imagination, which in his estimation had given rise to this whole great enterprise. The ‘unresolved tension’ between science and poetry, reason and imagination, truth and fable that critics are apt to discover in Bacon’s texts tells us, I suggest, more about the post-Cartesian desire to drive

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wedges between these purported binaries than it does about Bacon and the seventeenth century.38 Bacon’s New Atlantis, which provided the model for the Royal Society, spoils the uncomplicated triumphal story we moderns might prefer to tell about a decline of mysticism with the rise of mechanism and advancing secularism giving birth to science in this period. The truth is that Bacon, like many of his contemporaries, was a deeply religious, eclectic thinker who drew selectively from the scientific traditions available to him. Thus organic (Aristotelian), mechanistic and mystical systems of thought tend to mingle promiscuously in his writings, and from time to time he is an impatient critic of elements of all these paradigms. This was not unusual in the seventeenth century and religion, science, fable and poetry were frequent companions rather than rivals. We do well to remember that all our studies are only ever partial. I have emphasised the mystical-fabulous, bodily components of seventeenth-century intellectual and social transformations because these are the ones, ironically, that literary critics tend most to neglect. It is as if we have been co-opted into a positivistic belief system that validates the heroic labours of science by downplaying the significance and relevance of the imagination and metaphorical thinking to reasoning processes, innovation and progress. While cognitive philosophy, the social sciences and a growing body of scientists themselves are currently stressing the importance of metaphors – particularly bodily analogies – and the imagination to reasoning processes, literary criticism is mostly still languishing under the assumption that the tropes it prizes so highly are simply decorative devices, strategically placed to produce aesthetic pleasure.39 Disciplinary boundary-crossing remains relatively rare, and consequently, and rather ironically, literary criticism tends to remain blinkered, underplaying or even ignoring the importance of the imagination and its fables (story-telling) in understanding, ordering and acting upon the world. This chapter has explored how a captivating aesthetics of ‘chymical’ medicine drew together religion, politics and science around a central metaphor of the body, firing apocalyptic and radical thought but also enabling people to envision alternative golden worlds beyond the cataclysmic events of the mid-century. Far from being distinct sensibilities in the seventeenth century, scientific, religious, philosophical and artistic mentalities were intimately intertwined. Paolo Rossi was among the first to foreground the substantial mystical component of Baconian seventeenth-century science, declaring in 1975: As years go by, I am more and more convinced that to explain the genesis – which is not only complicated but often confused – of some modern ideas is

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quite different from believing that one can offer a complete explanation of these ideas by describing their genesis.40

History is full of unwanted residues – like hermeticism and alchemy – that do not seem to contribute meaningfully to modern ideas; there are obstacles, fractures and fissures that get in the way of linear trajectories and compelling accounts of ‘genesis’. Frequently, the past simply does not lead straightforwardly to ‘us’.

Notes 1. Francis Bacon, New Organon (1620), part II, XCV; cited in Hugh Kearney, Science and Change 1500–1700 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), p. 91. 2. Because he berates frivolous ‘degenerate’ (as opposed to ‘regenerating’) natural magic Bacon is often apprehended as opposed to alchemy and mystical science; see, however, J. C. Gregory, ‘Chemistry and alchemy in the natural philosophy of Sir Francis Bacon’, Ambix, II (1946), p. 93; Graham Rees, ‘Francis Bacon’s semi-Paracelsian cosmology’, Ambix, XXII (1975), p. 81. 3. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), book 1, in James Spedding, Robert Ellis and Douglas Heath (eds), Collected Works of Francis Bacon (1876; London: Routledge, 1996), III, part 1, pp. 263, 289, 289. All citations are of this edition. 4. ‘Digestion’ is a specific alchemical term for a stage in the process of purification of a basic metal (inner alchemy assumes a metallic consciousness); see Paulo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 13–14. Some historians have long been foregrounding the importance of mystical traditions to seventeenth-century science and challenging positivistic, ‘Whiggish’ interpretations of history which stress mid-seventeenth-century paradigmatic shifts and an inverse relationship between the rise of science and the decline of magic with the triumph of mechanism and secularism. See, for example, Rossi, Bacon; Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Dream of the Renaissance (Cambridge: Heffer, 1968); Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Walter Pagel, From Paracelsus to van Helmont: Studies in Renaissance Medicine and Science (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986). 5. W. Rawley, ‘To the Reader’, New Atlantis (1627), in Spedding et al., Collected Works of Francis Bacon, III, part 1, p. 127. All citations are of this edition. 6. Cited in Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton, Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), p. 139. 7. See Sarah Hutton, ‘Persuasions to science: Baconian rhetoric in the New Atlantis’, in Bronwin Price (ed.), Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis:

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8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 48–60. Bacon, Redargutio philosophiarum (1608), sp III, 574, cited in Rosso, Bacon, pp. 91–2. Bacon, Redargutio, cited in Rosso, Bacon, p. 92; Bacon, De sapientia veterum (1609), discussed in Rosso, Bacon, p. 95. As Stephen A. McKnight points out, Bensalem is a neologism suggesting New Jerusalem (‘Hebrew ben means son or heir, and salem (shalom) is the stem of Jerusalem’): ‘Wisdom of the ancients and Bacon’s New Atlantis’, in Allen G. Debus and Michael T. Walton (eds), Reading the Book of Nature: The Other Side of the Scientific Revolution (Missouri: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1998), p. 104. Philippe Du Plessis Mornay, A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion, trans. Sir Philip Sidney and George Chapman (London, 1587), p. 27. The writings of the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus actually date from the early Christian era, not the time of Moses, but this does not mean that Hermes’ teachings did not ‘originate from a long oral tradition’ – his status as an historical figure or a pagan god remains unclear today. See Brian P. Copenhaver (ed.), Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), especially the introduction, p. xlv; and Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 101. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972; St Albans: Paladin, 1975), are but two of her books on this topic. I would, however, agree with William Sherman that Yates over-represented the occult aspects of hermeticism, see John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 12–19. On the rediscovery of the hermetic writings see John G. Burke, ‘Hermetism as a Renaissance world view’, in Robert S. Kinsman (ed.), The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 95–117; Allen G. Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate: Van Helmont to Boerhaave (Nantucket: Science History Publications, 2001); Stephen A. McKnight, The Modern Age and the Recovery of Ancient Wisdom (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), esp. pp. 27–59; Copenhaver, Hermetica, esp. the introduction. All citations from the Hermetica are of Copenhaver’s edition. Copenhaver, Hermetica, p. xlx. See Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, esp. pp. 71–125. Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientarum, sp. I, 573 cited in Rossi, Bacon, p. 21. William Shakespeare, Complete Works, compact edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 666. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’, in Elizabeth Forbes (trans.and ed.), Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). See discussion of Pico in John S. Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

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Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 36–52, esp. pp. 40–1. The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives wrote a tract, A Fable About Man (Louvain, 1518), that reveals he was very familiar with Pico’s Oratio, and Erasmus’s Praise of Folly is informed by it too. It is interesting that an early work of Thomas More was The Life of Picus, Earl of Mirandula. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Mentor, 1960), p. 257. See Burke, ‘Hermetism’, p. 95. John Donne, ‘An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary’, in Herbert Grierson (ed.), The Poems of John Donne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), pp. 229–45. Henry Vaughan, ‘Vanity of Spirit’, in L. C. Martin (ed.), Vaughan’s Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 418–19. Cited in Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 233. Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (eds), Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (Beverley Hills and London: Sage, 1979), p. 15. On the significance of Paracelsus see Walter Pagel, From Paracelsus to van Helmont: Studies in Renaissance Medicine and Science (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986); Hill, Intellectual Origins, pp. 72, 75; Charles Webster, Paracelsus: medicine as popular protest’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds), Medicine and the Reformation (London: Routledge, 1993). Jolande Jacobi (ed.), Paracelsus Selected Writings, Bollingen Series XXVIII (1951; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), trans. Norbert Guterman, pp. 5–6. All citations are of this edition. See Webster, ‘Paracelsus: medicine as popular protest’. Note the satire on the ‘pristine’ in Craftie Cromwell, p. 2, discussed below in my text. On Helmontian chemical medicine in the mid seventeenthcentury see Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Mercurius Melancholius, Craftie Cromwell: or, Oliver Ordering our New State. ‘A Tragi-Comedie. Wherein is discovered the Trayterous undertakings and proceedings of the said NOL, and his Levelling Crew’ (London, 1648), title-page. All citations are of this edition. See also Anon., The Disease of the House: Or, The State Mountebanck: Administring Physick To a Sick Parliament (Printed for the Health, Of the Common-wealth, London, 1649), p. 12. On Paracelsianism and politics see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975); J. Andrew Mendelsohn, ‘Alchemy and politics in England 1649–1665’, Past and Present, (1992), pp. 30–78; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,1996), p. 10. James Harrington, The Mechanics of Nature, dating from the early 1660s, is published in John Toland (ed.), The OCEANA of James Harrington, and HIS OTHER WORKS, Som whereof are now first publish’d from his

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32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

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own MANUSCRIPTS (London: 1670). All citations are of this edition. See Craig Diamond, ‘Natural philosophy in Harrington’s political thought’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 16 (1978), pp. 387–98. Gerrard Winstanley, The True Leveller’s Standard Advanced (1649), in Christopher Hill (ed.), The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 87, 89. All citations of Winstanley’s texts are of this edition. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 114. All citations are of this edition. Mendelsohn, ‘Alchemy and politics’, makes this point. Webster, Paracelsus to Newton, p. 36. Glanvill, Lux orientalis (London, 1682), pp. 137–41; Evelyn, ‘Concerning the millennium’ (1688), Christ Church Oxford, Evelyn Manuscripts 35, 2r–v; cited in Webster, Paracelsus to Newton, p. 40. On the alchemy of Newton and Boyle, see M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea (eds), Reason, Experiment and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975); Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Betty Jo Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Elias Ashmole, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (London, 1651), sig. A2r, title-page. See, for example, Robert M. Schuler and John Channing Briggs, discussed in Totaro, Suffering in Paradise, p. 160. On embodiment and cognition, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945; London: Routledge, 2002), p. 146; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). On anthropomorphism and the world’s body, see John O’Neill, Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 116. Paolo Rossi, ‘Hermeticism, rationality and the scientific revolution’, in M. L. Righini Bonelli and William R. Shea (eds), Reason, Experiment, and Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), p. 257.

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Chapter 11

Shakespearean Somniloquy: Sleep and Transformation in The Tempest William H. Sherman

In 1989, the Guardian’s tireless theatre critic Michael Billington chaired a roundtable discussion with a group of famous actors and directors. The event was part of a series of public conversations on Shakespeare’s place in contemporary culture, and the question posed to the panel (and their audience) on this particular day was ‘Does Shakespeare’s Verse Send You To Sleep?’ 1 After each of the speakers confessed that they had once or twice found their heads nodding at a play, they took turns blaming other people for their lapses in concentration. Most of them charged bad actors or tone-deaf directors with failing to convey the dynamic energies of Shakespeare’s texts. As Tony Church put it, If you just blandly trot through and hope, as Peter Brook once said, that the verse will go on by itself, like a railway train on tracks, then it can become boring . . . It’s possible to get away with Shakespeare by just letting the train run on its tracks, because the rhythm will go on, the shapes, the melodies will go on; and for years, from when I [first] started going to the theatre, that’s how people spoke Shakespeare – and I did go to sleep for parts of it. (p. 101)

In his introduction to the published discussion, the editor John Elsom offered the intriguing theory that the soporific effects of Shakespeare’s verse might not be the result of performers on auto-pilot but rather the inevitable side effect of changes in pronunciation since Shakespeare’s day: Modern pronunciation flattens and lightens the vowel sounds, leaving a blander sound to the verse and quickening the speed of delivery. Under those circumstances, the metrical stress become[s] a barely conscious hidden beat, blurring verse and prose, and sometimes sounding like a hypnotic throb. (p. 99)

Billington, for his part, blamed the tourism industry: ‘My belief is [that] it’s not Shakespeare’s verse that sends you to sleep, but those horrendous package tours where you do Oxford in the afternoon and Stratford in the evening’ (p. 113).

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But everyone was in complete agreement about two points: first, that when Shakespeare’s verse sends us to sleep it is a bad thing, and, secondly, that Shakespeare himself has no share in the blame. Everyone, that is, but an anonymous member of the audience who, in the brief question-and-answer session, wondered if it might be possible to ‘construe [the question posed by the title] as a compliment’ (p. 112), reminding the panellists that we sometimes find ourselves lulled by the beauty of speeches or scenes that we may not be properly taking in. What makes us so sure, then, that Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have seen sleepiness as an inappropriate response to the patterns of sound and imagery they presented to viewers and readers? Do we know enough about the place of sleep in Elizabethan somatics and aesthetics to assume that early modern playgoers (like modern ones) would consider vigilant wakefulness the hallmark of successful appreciation of great art? We do know, after all, that sleep was the subject of a wide range of artistic representation in classical, medieval and Renaissance Europe. Andy Warhol may have broken new ground with his infamous film Sleep (which hovers for more than five hours over the sleeping figure of John Giorno), but he was hardly the first artist to exploit the surprising potential of slumbering lovers or gods: the ‘sleeping cupid’ was a favourite theme of ancient sculptors, revived by Michelangelo and made most famous, perhaps, by the painter Caravaggio.2 We know that Elizabethan writers of and on music praised that art for having the power to transport, instruct and heal its hearers by bringing on an actual or metaphorical slumber – a state explicitly invoked in a conspicuously high proportion of the period’s songs. In 1609, Robert Jones gave his entire ‘Fourth Booke of Ayres’ the title A Musicall Dreame, explaining his conceit in the dedicatory epistle: I betooke me to the ease of my Pillow, where Somnus hauing taken possession of my eyes, and Morpheus the charge of my senses; it happened mee to fall into a Musical dreame, wherein I chanced to haue many opinions and extrauagant humors of diuers Natures and Conditions, some of modest mirth, some of amorous Loue, and some of most diuine contemplation; all these I hope, shall not giue any distaste to the eares, or dislike to the mind, eyther in their words, or in their seuerall sounds, although it is not necessarie to relate or diuulge all Dreames or Phantasies that Opinion begets in sleepe.3

Such visions – at once playful and profound, and under the aegis of both classical and biblical models – also provided the framing device for the ‘medieval dream poem’, one of the period’s most popular genres (featuring some of the best-known work by Chaucer, Langland and Gower).4

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And we know, above all, that Shakespeare’s entire corpus testifies to a deep and enduring preoccupation with sleep and dreams. In his suggestive essay ‘Sleeping through Shakespeare’, Ronald Hall reports that Shakespeare’s works contain about a thousand references to sleep. If you put together all the passages where a character is asleep onstage, you get a total performance time equal to one-and-a-half plays. This excludes all of the offstage sleepers that we only hear of . . . Even in plays with no onstage sleep at all, images of sleep can exercise and accumulate considerable force. Sleep on- or offstage, speeches on sleep or [the] lack of it, incidental images of sleep [and] dreams: these are not confined to one period of the works or to one type of play.5

In a comprehensive survey of onstage sleepers in medieval and Renaissance plays, David Bevington reminds us that even in the first half of Shakespeare’s career he was already using sleep ‘as a metaphor for the fluid boundaries between reality and illusion, life and art, theater and dream’.6 As Shakespeare’s life and art were coming to an end, this metaphor became more rather than less potent, culminating in a speech, towards the end of The Tempest, that is often read as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.7

D. G. James observed that ‘the words “sleep” . . . and “dream” recur again and again’ in The Tempest – though, in fact, ‘dream’ appears only four times in the play, twelve fewer than A Midsummer Night’s Dream and thirteen fewer than Richard III, and The Tempest’s twelve uses of ‘sleep’ are matched by four other plays and surpassed by Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard III and Macbeth (with twenty-six).8 What James described as the play’s ‘pervasive dreamlike quality’ emerges from other features – from the story’s strange and shifting setting, its conspicuous use of music, its frequent jumps in logic, and above all from the fact that (as Hall put it) ‘virtually every character in the play apart from the spirits is at some point associated literally or figuratively with sleep’.9 To be more precise, if we include the Master, the Boatswain and

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a mariner or two (all of whom fall asleep after the opening storm and are not roused until the closing moments of the play), well over half of the play’s characters spend part of the play in an actual – and often visible – state of slumber. The only major characters whose sleep is not depicted or described are Antonio, Sebastian, Trinculo and Stephano, all of whom are involved in conspiracies enabled by the sleep of others. This must be the highest tally of sleepers in any single play (and this in the second shortest text in the canon), and it is all the more remarkable since the action explicitly takes place not at night but, more or less in real time for the standard theatrical performance in the period, between two and five or six in the afternoon. If Shakespeare can be said to have written a dream poem, it may be The Tempest rather than A Midsummer Night’s Dream: indeed, some modern productions have gone so far as to set the play as an elaborate psychodrama taking place within the mind of Prospero. And if Hamlet marks Shakespeare’s most potent experiments with the soliloquy, The Tempest offers his final and most profound exploration of somniloquy, plumbing the power of what one of the play’s own characters calls ‘sleepy language’ – language about sleep, language in sleep, and even language that brings on sleep.10 In this chapter I will argue, first, that the play has much to teach us about the place of sleep in the artistic and ethical designs of Renaissance texts, and, secondly, that sleep can paradoxically help us to account for the peculiar restlessness of The Tempest’s critical and creative afterlife.

••

Sleep may strike us as the action farthest removed from thinking, speaking, writing or indeed acting – as such, perhaps the most unpromising state of all for dramatic representation. Most Renaissance medical theory considered sleep to be the categorical opposite of waking, with which it formed one of the so-called ‘non-naturals’ necessary for maintaining the balance of humours within the body. It was typically defined as a lack of everything associated with being awake. ‘Sleepe,’ explained Thomas Cogan in his Haven of Health (1584) is defined to be an impotencie of the senses. Because in sleepe the senses be unable to execute their office, as the eye to see, the eare to heare, the nose to smell, the mouth to tast, and all sinowy parts to feele. So that the senses for a time may seeme to be tyed or bound, and therefore sleepe is called of some the bond of the senses.11

Levinus Lemnius’s The Touchstone of Complexions (1581) described sleep as

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nothing els but a resting of the Animal faculty, and a pawsing from the actions and busines of the day, whereby the vertues of the bodies being faynt . . . are reuiued and made fresh againe, and all the weary members & Senses recomforted. (sig.G8v)

As this passage suggests, sleep was generally praised (when part of a properly regulated regime) for its restorative or recuperative powers: in other words, it was not just part of what makes us human but played an important role in keeping us so. According to Cogan, in fact, sleep is the perfect natural therapy for the various conditions from which the characters in The Tempest suffer: ‘it refresheth the body, it reviveth the minde, it pacifieth anger, it driveth away sorowe’.12 It is this approach to sleep that Renaissance poets most often turned to in voicing the complaints of their unhappy courtiers and lovers. For instance, sonnet 45 in Daniel’s 1592 sequence, Delia, begins, Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born, Relieve my languish, and restore the light; With dark forgetting of my care return, And let the day be time enough to mourn The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth.

It ends, in the final couplet, with ‘Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain, / And never wake to feel the day’s disdain.’ One of Drummond of Hawthornden’s sonnets from his 1616 Poems imagines sleep as an even safer haven: Sleep, Silence’ child, sweet father of soft rest, Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings, Indifferent host to shepherds and to kings, Sole comforter of minds with grief opprest; Lo, by thy charming-rod all breathing things Lie slumbering, with forgetfulness possest.13

In other contexts, too, sleep offered its miraculous powers of restoration in the face of traumatic experiences – including tempests. John Cook’s pamphlet describing his voyage to Ireland during the ‘great storm’ of 5 January 1650 described the deepest of dreams in the unlikeliest of circumstances: The storm still increased, and I grew exceeding heavy and sleepy . . . so it pleased God, that sitting as upright as I could, I fell into as fast a sleep as ever I was in all my life. And in my sleep I dreamed. That I was in an upper chamber with my sweet Redeemer Christ Jesus, and that there were many suiters attended to speak with him; to beseech him to save their Ships and Barks that they might not perish by the storme.14

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The storm that occupies the opening scene of The Tempest has similar effects on those who experience and witness it – including Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, who sinks into a deep sleep some 200 lines after watching the wreck of what must be the first ship she has ever seen, with the apparent loss of the first human visitors to the island in her lifetime. During those lines, in which Prospero recounts the actions that led to their exile from Milan and identifies the noblemen who have just been washed up on their shore, Miranda finds it surprisingly difficult to stay awake: three times Prospero breaks off to ask her if she is paying attention before acknowledging (or is it commanding?), ‘Thou art inclined to sleep. ’Tis a good dullness, / And give it way. I know thou canst not choose’ (I, ii, 185–6).15 Miranda’s fit of narcolepsy, like Cook’s dream, suggests that Renaissance sleep could be strikingly different from our own, testifying to causes and effects that are richer and stranger than anything the medical texts would lead us to expect. And when we turn to Shakespeare’s plays, we find that sleep is almost never simply or straightforwardly therapeutic: indeed, it is very rarely a positive force of any kind in his plays, or (for that matter) in the romance texts with which The Tempest is closely affiliated. As in Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, sleep is associated with the loss of control over one’s passions and with vulnerability to a wide range of physical and moral dangers. Far from being a simple state of passive repose, sleep was often a charged site of potentially radical transformation. From the Middle Ages onwards, romance fictions are concerned above all with altered states, in the various senses of that phrase, disorientations and reorientations that are at once physical, geographical and political. These altered states are brought about, in Cymbeline, Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, through disguises, drugs, prophecies, marriages and travel. But in The Tempest Shakespeare turned (or returned) to sleep as his agent of transport.16

••

When we first meet Ferdinand in act I scene ii, after he has been led around the island by Ariel’s disembodied music and has succumbed to the respective charms of Miranda and Prospero, he has been possessed by a kind of waking sleep: ‘My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up’ by ‘My father’s loss, the weakness which I feel, / The wrack of all my friends, [and] this man’s threats / To whom I am subdued’ (I, ii, 484–7). Similarly, sleep comes to the seamen after their extraordinary exertions and to the Neapolitan courtiers after trauma and grief – combined, once again, with the musical enchantments of Ariel.17 These are the same sounds, perhaps, that inspire Caliban’s dreams of clouds opening to pour riches on him:

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Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, I cried to dream again. (III, ii, 133–41)

This may be the most moving – and certainly the most memorable – description of sleep in the play; but for Prospero’s purposes, the most significant scene occurs in act II, scene i. In that scene Prospero makes Ariel send the Neapolitan king Alonso and his courtly entourage selectively to sleep. In order of their innocence, they give into what they describe as a ‘wondrous heaviness’ (193) and a ‘strange drowsiness’ (194) – the loyal old councillor Gonzalo first, then the passive noblemen Adrian and Francisco, and finally Alonso himself. Again, the slumber is sudden: as the others fall dead asleep around him, the king muses, ‘What, all so soon asleep? I wish mine eyes would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts. I find they are inclined to do so’ (186–8). Alonso’s brother Sebastian and Prospero’s brother Antonio remain awake and assure the king that they will stand guard over him. Looking at the sleeping figure of the king, Antonio urges Sebastian to follow his lead and usurp his brother’s position: ANTONIO Th’occasion speaks thee, and My strong imagination sees a crown Dropping upon thy head. SEBASTIAN What? Art thou waking? ANTONIO Do you not hear me speak? SEBASTIAN I do; and surely It is a sleepy language, and thou speak’st Out of thy sleep. What is it thou didst say? This is a strange repose, to be asleep With eyes wide open; standing, speaking, moving, And yet so fast asleep. ANTONIO Noble Sebastian, Thou let’st thy fortune sleep – die, rather; wink’st Whiles thou art waking. SEBASTIAN Thou dost snore distinctly; There’s meaning in thy snores. (II, i, 203–14)

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In this case, onstage sleep is both a sign of the sleepers’ virtue and a lesson about their vulnerability to the political machinations of those who are not virtuous. Similarly, Prospero’s customary afternoon naps give Caliban and his co-conspirators the opportunity for political machinations of their own. Caliban punctuates the drunken banter of Stephano and Trinculo with desperate urgings to take advantage of his master’s apparent vulnerability: I’ll yield him thee asleep, Where thou mayst knock a nail into his head. (III, ii, 67–8) as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him I’ th’ afternoon to sleep. There thou mayst brain him (III, ii, 96–7) Within this half hour will he be asleep. Wilt thou destroy him then? (III, ii, 124–5) speak softly. All’s hushed as midnight yet. (IV, i, 230–1) If he awake, From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches, Make us strange stuff. (IV, i, 259–61)

Once again, Prospero is using sleep to stage-manage a lesson in virtue. But his sleep may have been bound up in another lesson in virtue, one in which he himself served as the negative exemplar. Renaissance writers unanimously warned against sleeping during the day – on both medical and moral grounds. Cogan’s Haven of Health was unequivocal on this matter: after[-]noone sleepe maketh undigested and rawe humours, whereof groweth oppilations, which oppilations engender fevers. Also it maketh a man slouthfull . . . Again, it causeth head ache, because grosse and undigested meate, remaining yet in the stomacke, sendeth up grosse vapours to the braine. And last of all, it breedeth rheumes. (sig.Gg4r)

So it is possible that Prospero’s own afternoon sleep may well have struck The Tempest’s early audiences as an emblem for the abdication of princely duty, and therefore as a sign that he has not yet learned the lesson that landed him on the island in the first place. Traditional approaches to The Tempest have tended to find not just in its closing speeches of forgiveness and release but in its very sleepiness

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a comforting note of resolution. While The Tempest has probably been subjected to more political readings than any other Shakespeare play, those critics who have considered the play’s use of sleep and dreams have tended to take a different tack from the political readers, generally reinforcing the traditional interpretations that see Prospero as ultimately benign and his plot as moving towards contrition and reconciliation. Even Marjorie Garber, who is as sensitive to the play’s unsettling qualities as anyone, describes Prospero’s closing speeches as a ‘calm resolution’, concluding that ‘imagination and the dream world give way in the half-light of morning to “clearer reason”’ and that in act V of the play we are presented with a ‘series of awakenings which will culminate in reconciliation’.18 But in his essay on The Tempest, ‘Miraculous harp’, Harry Berger, Jr, challenged just this sort of reading of the play: ‘The renunciation pattern is there’, he concedes, but only as a general tendency against which the play strains. Too many cues and clues, too many quirky details, point in other directions, and critics have been able to make renunciation in this simple form the central action only by ignoring those details.19

To Berger’s list of quirky details we can add one that has taken on new importance in the light of recent work on the history of sleep: in the closing scenes of the play, many characters express confusion about whether or not they are awake. The courtiers are finally released from the agonising spell that has them wandering around the island in a waking nightmare for the second half of the play, but we are given repeated indications throughout act V that they never return to their senses. As Ariel delivers the dazed Neapolitans into the magic circle, Prospero observes that The charm dissolves apace, And as the morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness, so their rising senses Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle Their clear reason. (V, i, 64–8)

And several lines later he promises that Their understanding Begins to swell, and the approaching tide Will shortly fill the reasonable shore That now lies foul and muddy. (V, i, 79–82)

But we never see it happen. He spends most of his remaining words trying to convince the courtiers that he is flesh and blood and not

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another product of the ‘subtleties o’ th’ isle, that will not let you believe things certain’ (V, i, 124–5). Postcolonial critics have pointed out that Prospero never really relinquishes the control he uses to keep the other characters under his tyrannical spell (except, perhaps, in the epilogue where he turns that power over to the members of the audience).20 Prospero promises Ariel, ‘My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore, / And they shall be themselves’ (V, i, 31–2) – but we never see it happen. We are told that he will break his staff and drown his book, but we never witness it. We are told that Ariel will be freed after performing one final task – but we can only assume it happens. We are told that there will be forgiveness all around, but there are some significant exceptions when the time comes to deliver. When the Boatswain is summoned to court in the play’s closing moments, and asked by Alonso what miracle has delivered him and their ship, he responds, ‘If I did think, sir, that I were well awake, / I’d strive to tell you’ (V, i, 229–30). He explains how they were roused from their sleep by ‘strange and several noises / Of roaring, shrieking, howling, jingling chains’, and ‘Even in a dream . . . brought moping hither’ (232–9). So perhaps, in the end, it is not the language and logic of the dream that pervade this play but rather that ‘strange repose’ between waking and sleep. If the historian A. Roger Ekirch is right in his extraordinary work on ‘Pre-industrial slumber in the British Isles’, this hypnagogic state was, in fact, much less strange in Shakespeare’s day. Reminding us that early modern sleepers tended to have an hour or more of drowsy wakefulness between what was explicitly called ‘first sleep’ and ‘second sleep’, Ekirch argues that ‘segmented sleep’ was the norm before the advent of electricity and the dawning of artificial lighting, and suggests that it played an important role in both domestic and imaginative life: Until the modern era, up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness midway through the night interrupted the rest of most Western Europeans, not just napping shepherds and slumbering woodsmen. Families rose from their beds to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors. Remaining abed, many persons also made love, prayed, and, most importantly, reflected on the dreams that typically preceded waking from their ‘first sleep’. Not only were these visions unusually vivid, but their images would have intruded far less on conscious thought had sleepers not stirred until dawn . . . In addition to suggesting that consolidated sleep, such as we today experience, is unnatural, segmented slumber afforded the unconscious an expanded avenue to the waking world that has remained closed for most of the Industrial Age.21

The relative tranquillity and continuity of modern slumber have allowed us to forget, in other words, that the border between wakefulness and

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sleep was a less stable and more active zone in the pre-modern imagination. And this in turn suggests that it may be the shifting, ‘tricksy’ charms of Ariel as much as Prospero’s rough magic or Caliban’s dreams of revenge that accounts for the play’s uncanny ability to transport and be transported.

••

If we survey The Tempest’s later adaptations and appropriations, from the seventeenth century onwards, it quickly becomes clear that they have continued to explore the play’s somniloquent power – even when the focus is far from sleepy. Fred McLeod Wilcox’s pioneering film Forbidden Planet (1956) may be best remembered for taking The Tempest into the future and into outer space, where Ariel is transformed into the multilingual robot Robby. But it also takes us into the past and into the inner space of the dreaming mind. Prospero appears as Dr Morbius; he and his daughter are the only surviving members of an expedition for the exploration and colonisation of other planets. The name ‘Morbius’ combines Morpheus (the god of dreams) and morbus (Latin for ‘illness’), and he accidentally unleashes the monstrously destructive psychic force that stands in for Caliban in the film.22 In what may be the most explicit Freudian parable in popular cinematic history, he realises too late that the sleep-learning exercises he has been using to absorb the superior intelligence of the original inhabitants of Altair-4 have given deadly, physical form to the fears and desires of his own unconscious mind. And where Prospero renounces his ‘rough magic’, Morbius abjures his ‘id’ – saving his daughter and her new love by sacrificing his uncontrollable passions. In 1996, when the time came for the popular fantasy writer Neil Gaiman to conclude his long-running Sandman comic-book series, he turned to the text that has traditionally been read as Shakespeare’s farewell to his art. The seventy-fifth and final issue of The Sandman is an almost word-for-word adaptation of The Tempest – but with a long epilogue in which Shakespeare meets none other than Morpheus himself (the story-giving Sandman of the series title). As they talk, and visit the otherwise uninhabited island that Morpheus lives on in a state of permanent exile, we discover that, at the beginning of his career, Shakespeare had signed a Faustian pact, receiving from the Sandman a pool of stories ‘to give men dreams that would live on long after I was dead’.23 Perhaps the most interesting example of all is Derek Jarman’s 1979 film of The Tempest. In Jubilee, Jarman had transported Queen Elizabeth I to the punk London of the 1970s, with the help of the

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magician John Dee and the spirit Ariel, and he later offered a queer take on the Renaissance with his Caravaggio and Edward II. But none of these projects prepares us for the sophistication with which Jarman approaches Shakespeare’s play on sleep. Jarman had originally designed a stage production of the play, where Prospero turned out to be insane, imagining all of the parts from the asylum his brother had placed him in.24 But the film production translates Prospero’s seething imagination to the equally disturbing world of the dream: in the original press-kit Jarman described the setting as ‘A film of the night –or one night, any night . . . a twilight never-never land.’ 25 The film opens with the deep and rhythmic breathing of the sleeping Prospero, face covered by a gauzy scarf, thrashing and murmuring as he dreams up a cinematic flashback of a storm at sea. As with Forbidden Planet’s Morbius, Jarman’s storm is a projection of Prospero’s sleeping fantasies that casts a shadow over the entire film. The characters are both figments of a dream and projected images who vanish into thin air. Like Prospero’s metatheatrical play-within-a-play in act IV, this opening film-within-a-film calls attention to Prospero’s own insubstantial status. And the use of candlelight for the Gothic interior scenes and of dusky blue filters outdoors keeps the viewers (literally and figuratively) in the dark, making us wonder if Prospero has ever woken up from his cinematic dream and who, for that matter, is calling the shots. With these techniques Jarman comes very close to what David Bevington sees as Shakespeare’s most mature use of sleep: Sleep becomes a more ambiguous state . . . it grows more difficult to ‘read’ as a theatrical signifier, and more consciously connected . . . with the very business of writing and acting plays. As sleep becomes more metatheatrical, it serves as an apt vehicle for explorations of carnival inversion, indeterminacy of meaning, uncertainty as to the will of Providence, and the ironies of human lack of self-awareness.26

And finally, in the most audacious of the film’s many textual rearrangements, Jarman forgives the courtiers and frees Ariel before falling asleep again. ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep’ is heard over the deep and rhythmic breathing that began the film, which then closes with a blackout and a dedication to the memory of Jarman’s recently deceased mother. Jarman is being true to the play’s dramatic effect and intellectual background. Almost everyone remembers these lines as coming at the end of the play rather than (as they actually do) in the middle of a speech from the middle of act IV. And he is effectively reviving the Renaissance association between sleep and death – and between voyages (especially by sea) and mortality. But the scenario gives Prospero’s dreams of death

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the kind of last word that they never quite achieve, and puts him in absolute control of his sleepy magic – however rough it turns out to be. Despite Prospero’s – and Jarman’s – desire to round things off with the ultimate slumber, The Tempest keeps talking in its sleep.

Notes 1. The conversations were later published in John Elsom (ed.), Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary? (London: Routledge, 1989), ch. 5. Billington’s panelists included Sheila Allen, Alexander Anikst, Tony Church and David Thacker. 2. David Roberts makes a similar observation at the beginning of his essay, ‘Sleeping beauties: Shakespeare, sleep and the stage’, comparing Shakespeare’s interest in sleeping women to the British artist Cornelia Parker’s 1995 exhibition, The Maybe. Parker filled the Serpentine Gallery with glass cases full of ‘relics of the famous and the dead’, and in the largest case of all she installed the actress Tilda Swinton, sound asleep (Cambridge Quarterly, 35:3 (2003), pp. 231–54). On images of sleep in Renaissance art, see Maria Ruvolt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 3. Edward Doughtie (ed.), Lyrics from English Airs, 1596–1622 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 316–17. On music, magic and sleep in the Renaissance see Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and for sensitive readings of The Tempest’s soundscape, see Michael Neill, ‘“Noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs”: The burden of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 59:1 (Spring 2008), pp. 36–59, and Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 4. Useful overviews include A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Peter Brown (ed.), Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Helen Phillips, ‘Medieval dream poems’, in Peter Brown (ed.), A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c.1350–1500 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 374–86. 5. Ronald Hall, ‘Sleeping through Shakespeare’, Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 12 (1999/2000), pp. 24–32, p. 24. 6. David Bevington, ‘Asleep onstage’, in John A. Alford (ed.), From Page to Performance: Essays in Early English Drama (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), pp. 51–83, p. 68. 7. Shakespeare, The Tempest, in Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds), The Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), IV, i, 148–58. All citations are of this edition. 8. D. G. James, The Dream of Prospero (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 148.

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9. Hall, ‘Sleeping through Shakespeare’, p. 30. 10. ‘Somniloquy’, or ‘somniloquism’, is in fact the technical term psychologists use for sleep-talking (as a companion to the better-known term used for sleep-walking, ‘somnambulism’). Arthur M. Arkin, Sleep-Talking: Psychology and Psychophysiology (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1981), p. 10. 11. Cited in Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 33. 12. Cited in Marcus Noll, An Anatomy of Sleep: Die Schlafbildlichkeit in den Dramen William Shakespeares (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1994), p. 24; compare Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘Sleep: Theory and practice in the late Renaissance’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 41 (October 1986), pp. 415–41. 13. I cite the Daniel and Drummond poems from Peter Washington (ed.), Poems of Sleep and Dreams, Everyman Library (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 48 (Daniel) and p. 49 (Drummond). On the connections between sleep and forgetting, see Sullivan, Memory and Forgetting, and Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams (eds), Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Legacies (London: Routledge, 2004). 14. John Cook, A True Relation of Mr. Iohn Cook’s Passage by Sea from Wexford to Kinsale in that great Storm Ianuary 5. Wherein is Related the Strangeness of the Storm, and the Frame of his Spirit in it. ALSO, The Vision that he saw in his sleep, and how it was Revealed that he should be preserved, which came to pass very miraculously. All written by himself (Cork and London: for T. Brewster and G. Moule, 1650), pp. 8–9. 15. It is not clear from the text that Prospero puts Miranda to sleep – though virtually all productions play it that way and most editors add a stage direction to that effect. But even if Miranda’s sleep is caused by Prospero, its timing and purpose are open to many different interpretations: see Jennifer Lewin, ‘“Your actions are my dreams”: Sleepy minds in Shakespeare’s last plays’, Shakespeare Studies, 31 (2003), pp. 180–200, p. 187. 16. Both Mary Baine Campbell and Garrett Sullivan see sleep and dreams as doing similar work to metaphor (defined by George Puttenham, in 1589, as ‘an inversion of sense by transport’): see Campbell, ‘Dreaming, motion, meaning: Oneiric transport in seventeenth-century Europe’, in Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan and S. J. Wiseman (eds), Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night (London: Routledge, 2008) pp. 15–30, and Sullivan, ‘Romance, sleep, and the passions in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Old Arcadia’, ELH, 74 (2007), pp. 735–57, pp. 752–3. 17. Sarah F. Williams considers the relationship between music and enchanted sleep in a number of Elizabethan plays, but does not discuss the example of The Tempest, in ‘“Singe the enchantment for sleepe”: Music and bewitched sleep in early modern English drama’, in Christine Göttler and Wolfgang Neuber (eds), Spirits Unseen: The Representation of Subtle Bodies in Early Modern European Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 179–94. Our best guide to Ariel’s music is David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 2006).

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18. Marjorie B. Garber, Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 209–12. 19. Harry Berger, Jr, ‘Miraculous harp: A reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 147–85, p. 150. 20. See, for instance, Peter Hulme, ‘Prospero and Caliban’, in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986). 21. A. Roger Ekirch, ‘Sleep we have lost: Pre-industrial slumber in the British Isles’, American Historical Review, 106:2 (April 2001), pp. 342–85. 22. Tim Youngs, ‘Cruising against the id: The transformation of Caliban in Forbidden Planet’, in Nadia Lie and Theo D’haen (eds), Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 211–29. 23. Sandman 75 (DC Comics, March 1996), p. 32. 24. Michael O’Pray, Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (London: BFI, 1996), p. 110. 25. The Tempest. Dir. Derek Jarman. 1979. DVD. Kino, 2000. 26. Bevington, ‘Asleep onstage’, p. 53.

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Chapter 12

‘A Cat On A Post’: Animal Events in Seventeenth-century Writing Susan Wiseman

Renaissance Transformations investigates the nature of ‘writing’ in the Renaissance: what forms did its ‘making’ take and what cultural work did ‘writing’ do? Focusing on the first half of the seventeenth century, this concluding chapter approaches these issues by asking two very specific questions. First, what was the significance of transformation itself in postReformation writing – in what kinds of texts do we find it discussed, and why might that be? Secondly, what does this suggest about the cultural, social and political significance of writing but also about other forms of symbolic representation at that time? What, for example, was the significance of the frequently reported animal ceremonies – which may or may not have happened – and the ways in which they, and the controversial ideas that they imply, were written about in England between 1600 and 1650? Discussing controversies over baptism and how the soul inhabited the body, this chapter explores relationships among forms of representation that are frequently understood as distinct and analysed using different disciplinary methods by modern critics and historians. Crossing the boundaries of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ that are often imposed on them, this chapter explores representations of animal rituals in a range of sources and asks what insights they provide into the society that produced them. Let us start with two very different kinds of writing. In ‘Resurrection and Immortality’ Henry Vaughan makes the ‘Body’ say: Oft have I seen, when that renewing breath That binds, and loosens death Inspir’d a quickning power through the dead Creatures a bed, Some drowsie silk-worme creepe From that long sleepe And in weake, infant hummings chime, and knell About her silent Cell Untill at last full with the vitall Ray She wing’d away. (ll. 1–10)1

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The body concludes, ‘Shall I then thinke such providence will be / Lesse friend to me?’ – God ‘keeps his Covenant even with our dust’ (ll. 15–18). Vaughan powerfully puts the claim to resurrection through faith; yet we also find the creature’s metamorphosis described with forensic as much as allegorical attention. Strikingly for a body–soul dialogue, the body does not seem to be entirely wrong: the ‘silk-worm’ is an acceptable allegory for the salvation by faith or for the arrival of grace – ‘the laver of regeneration’, as the Anglican baptismal service put it.2 At the same time we know (as would Vaughan’s readers) that even as the body uses the image of the silkworm’s emergence – a familiar image for the liberation of the soul – the conventions surrounding dialogues between the soul and the body insist that the body must learn from the soul. The debate about the soul’s place found a particular focus in discussion of Protestantism’s remaining sacraments after the Reformation – holy communion and, especially, baptism. Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena (1646) pursued his self-allotted task of listing the errors promulgated in the absence of what he felt was a true national church in the uproar of the 1640s. He found many, but in the context of this chapter his error no. 104 is particularly significant: ‘That Paedobaptisme is unlawfull and antichristian, and that it is as lawfull to baptize a cat or a Dog or a Chicken, as to baptize the infants of believers.’ 3 We can see that both Vaughan’s poem and Edwards’s condemnation of ‘error’ address the question of the place and nature of the creature in the story of Christian regeneration. The powerful potential of the natural world to symbolise – as allegory, but also more informally – marks the writing of Vaughan (Anglican, poet, alchemist, physician) and Edwards (Presbyterian, hereisographer). But it also inhabits the words and minds of those in the reformed church who sometimes address contested questions through a language of animal ceremony. These protests, though not from a shared viewpoint, share a symbolic lexicon. By 1646, when Edwards had worked his way to error 104 and beyond, the vexed question of how, why and whether baptism effected spiritual transformation was deeply embedded in post-Reformation culture, and by that point animal ceremonies circulated in a fairly wide range of printed writings. Earlier examples can be found in manuscripts, for example that registered by William Cotton, bishop of Exeter, who in 1600 wrote to complain about his diocese: A dangerous increase of Papists about the coasts and country. Profane Atheists: A matter very common to dispute whether there be a God or not. A slender and loose observation of the Sabbath and holy days. Many hundred stand wilfully excommunicate, not caring for their absolution or for coming to church. There was ridiculous and profane marriage of a goose and a

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gander. A cat having an apron, and a partlet, brought to the church to be baptised. A horse head at Launceston lately lapped in a mantle and brought to the church for baptism, and afterwards the bell told and rung out for the death of this head. A dead horse brought to the communion table with its feet spread upon it, as being prepared to receive the Sacrament. A young youth of 16 years baptised by the name of Gurlypott, at which time the font was overthrown. Libels made upon every sermon almost in every town.

Following more examples Cotton ends with the plea that ‘These and many such abuses cannot be redressed by a due course of law’ and begs to be sent ‘an Ecclesiastical Commission’.4 Also in the south-west, in 1617, Francis Ashley records an animal outrage. A lifelong practitioner in the Middle Temple with some literary aspirations, Ashley also laboured as a JP in Dorset, with responsibility for making initial investigations by interviewing suspects and witnesses, and then, if appropriate, sending them forward either to the Assizes or the Quarter Sessions. Ashley’s path was crossed by one ‘Richard Chrismas of Sidling, gentleman’ whom he fines twenty pounds, noting: Also he prophaned Religion by setting a catt on a post in Siding, saying he would make her preache as good a sermon as some of them; took a text out of the Corinth., pincht the catt by the ear and made her crye, saying that was a sermon, and that if 500 were at a sermon 480 of them were whores and knaves.5

The event was sufficiently serious, or ambiguous, for Ashley to follow it up, recording the examination upon oath of Catherin Savage the fifteen-year-old daughter of Richard Savage ‘of Sydling gentleman’ on 25 April. She attests that he ‘pincht’ the cat ‘by the eares’ and ‘when the cat cryed he said it was as good a sermon as etc., but named nobody’.6 All this was witnessed by Chrismas’s wife and one Jasper Devenish, the latter of whom corroborates Savage’s account. While the exact target of the parody disappears, perhaps because Chrismas or, more likely poor Catherin, or even Ashley himself, has a strategic lapse of memory, it seems likely that the evidence presented here refers to an actual incident. The two accounts are slightly, but significantly, different: the first suggests the inefficacy of preaching; the second fits closely to the expressed concerns of reformers and Puritans about the need for an appropriately trained preaching ministry. However, while it is not at all clear that Bishop Cotton has substantiating evidence of the plague of cat-baptism spreading through his parishes, it seems clear that Francis Ashley was at pains to make himself certain that something had happened. These texts are helpfully understood as part of the texture of parish and local life, such as recently discussed by Christopher Haigh. As he

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notes, while some incidents suggest moments of intensity and rage in the ongoing struggle over what it was to be a Christian, others were clearly japes. In yet other cases the point was the victim – the human mocked – and the church ceremony was the means, not the target, of mockery.7 However, in January 1632 Charles I’s Commissioners for Causes Ecclesiastical to the Council condemned Earl Rivers, Harbottle Grimstone and others for various misgovernments including ‘a judgement pronounced by the writers upon Sarah Peck for profane christening of a dog’.8 This incident shows that these events articulate conflicts over the interpretation of reformed religion – and these involve personnel from the unidentified actors of Cotton’s accusations, to the justices and, ultimately, up the hierarchy to Charles I’s commissioners. Animal ceremony, and particularly animal baptism, comes up at moments when the nature and personnel of church administration are being challenged and when the meaning of church ceremonies are woven into wider issues of religious, political and social authority. Cotton was a specific case; he may well have been an unwelcome innovator in his diocese and his career seems to have foundered on his excessive interest in making money. He may also have had reason to insist on his Protestant credentials as at least some members of his family seem to have been Catholic.9 However, whether they happened or he invented them, the incidents Cotton conjures up share with Ashley’s parody of inadequate preaching the characteristic that the recorded animal ritual emerged at a point of conflict over local circumstances and wider church priorities. In 1632 we can imagine that the beliefs, behaviours and punishments of church offenders were intensely disputed aspects of Laudian versus Puritan ideology. What frames of reference help us to fathom these kinds of writing? Thus far two main commentators have addressed the question of animal ceremonies. The first is Keith Thomas, in his compendious, sociologically informed study of the transformation of ‘magic’ into ‘religion’. Thomas notes that baptism like other sacraments ‘generated a corpus of parasitic beliefs’ unclaimed by the Roman church, and concludes: Some of the numerous cases recorded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of attempts to baptise dogs, cats, sheep and horses may . . . have reflected the old superstition that the ritual had about it a physical efficacy which could be directed to any living creature.10

David Cressy, the most recent historian to engage with this material, disagrees with Thomas, arguing that Thomas’s arguments are ‘more ingenious than persuasive; none of the evidence points in that direction’. Rather, he contends, ‘There is simply no trace of the supernatural

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in any of the mock baptisms we have covered, but abundant evidence that they had their origin in horseplay’. Further, Cressy asserts: Nor can it be argued that travesties of the sacrament were signs of a disorderly society, ready to break out in revolt . . . They were provocations to outrage and affronts to religious decorum, but hardly acts of resistance or incitements to riot.

Thus, although he agrees that they profane the sacraments, these events are best understood as ‘festive misrule – skylarking’ with a ‘fundamental innocency’.11 Cressy’s account has an intuitive rightness for some incidents, but for others it is problematic: first, because it does not clarify why the supposed authors of these dramas were reported to the authorities; and secondly, because it leaves unexamined what the symbolism suggests about that which might be being represented. Skylarking perhaps suggests, too, that popular misrule be separated from more profound social concerns and, additionally, it seems to construe such misrule as the preserve of a particular stratum of society. While Thomas’s thesis concerning religion and magic means that he follows this thread to all parts of culture, Cressy’s use of the idea of popular culture tends to see the popular as a sphere in itself, distant from elite concerns. Given that people took time to write down these incidents, they are likely to contain some clues as to ways to read them, both individually and as a group. While such events may seem eccentric to us, the fact that – whether they happened or not – they were recognised, reiterated, and at times prosecuted and punished indicates clearly that contemporaries had frameworks within which to interpret them. The same is suggested by the location and form of the stories – reports, trials and, later, printed news. Given this, it is possible to read these texts not as ‘isolated and unusual’ but, for those who performed, witnessed or imagined and wrote them, as related to the dominant culture or perhaps to points of pressure in that culture. Let us go back to the evidence and to a more obscure, perhaps darker, version of animal ceremony. In May 1618 the Calendar of State Papers records: Petition of Leonard Trevellyan to the Council. Has long awaited the trial of John Prowse, committed at his complaint for riding on horseback into church, offering to have his horse christened, hanging up his dead grandmother’s hair in the market place, as that of an old witch, &c.12

On 14 May one ‘Jo. Treneale’ was examined and said he ‘Knew that divers warrants from the Commission of ecclesiastical Causes were issued against John Prowse, of Brixham, Devonshire, for profaning the

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church.’ 13 Obviously, Prowse could be characterised as eccentric, but he does not seem to be joking. Whether he is or not, why is Trevellyan so keen to bring him to court? This short text suggests some lines of inquiry. Like Cotton’s complaints, it directs us to the testing of official powers – if Cotton appeals to the powers of the church, this is clearly a state prosecution. How does such counter-ceremony attempt to set limits to or challenge official power, and is this confined to a parodic moment or does it have a greater reach? Are the energies exposed here linked to wider social and political movements? What is the status of accusation and action? The legal response suggests that something happened, but was that the event or the accusation? Similarly to the others examined so far, this text indicates that, while granting Cressy’s implicit emphasis on a local and momentary context for interpretation, it is also necessary to locate these incidents in relation to wider questions. If Prowse riding into the church is clearly a challenge to authority, then the attack on his grandmother as a witch, particularly given the way in which witch prosecutions tended to take in families, often recusant families, suggests a strange undertow of self-accusation.14 First, though, any reader must wonder who it is who thinks the grandmother is an old witch – the accused is reported as thinking that, but what we actually have is the report of the accuser. The two threats (to baptise the horse and to hang up his grandmother’s hair) seem here to be connected by their suggestion of supernatural powers: the powers documented as historically associated with baptism and with the conjuring of familiars and spirits by witchcraft. At this point, although it is unclear who, exactly, is recalling the past (accused or accuser?), the evidence invites us to investigate more deeply some of the past contexts invoked by the scenes described. In 1618 the grandmother in question might have lived through the Reformation. In the witch-hunt of the 1640s Roman Catholics, or those associated with Romish church practices, including ministers, were repeatedly the targets of witchcraft accusations and prosecutions. At the same time, personal effects, like hair, were regarded as key constituents in witchcraft. In the light of the hair, we can return to the horse. Among the sacraments, baptism seems to have drawn to itself a substantial number of extra beliefs and social functions, including that a child needed to be baptised to survive physically and that baptism might restore sight. More significantly, perhaps, under the Roman church the ceremony of baptism itself tended to slide into adjacent contexts. The caul with which the infant was born was baptised; animals were regarded as benefiting from baptism; and women in labour were sometimes exorcised.15 The caul, like hair, was strongly associated with magic – could

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baptism have been seen as preventing witchcraft on the baby? If objects might benefit from baptism, how much more might an animal? But it is the transfer of baptism to the exorcising of the woman during childbirth that is our best clue, because it reminds us to consider the status of the sacraments in 1618 and recall that political attack can both reinvigorate and change the power of that which is attacked. As recent historians of the Reformation remind us, the attacks on the ‘old’ religion – the smashing of image-bearing church furniture, the removing of roadside crosses – did not simply erase traces of the objects they attacked.16 Such scholarship convincingly suggests, therefore, that the long-running Reformation attack on the paraphernalia of Catholicism did not result in erasure. Church ornamentation is often only partially smashed; the same goes for pew ornamentation, stained glass windows and other memorials in churches. The old religion, then, was recalled not only in the repeated attempts to revive it, but in the visibility and memory of markers of its destruction. Though how these problematic markers memorialised past and present is disputed, our examples above share in becoming curious specimens, eccentric thought and occulted knowledge that possess a partly acknowledged, partly disavowed power.17 The ceremonies for baptism were lodged in the Book of Common Prayer, which was in repeated revision and subject to the partial erasure of its meanings. The results were a re-dedication and re-making of meanings marked also by what had gone. The re-working of the Roman sacraments into vernacular, carefully scripted rituals for the new English church took place in 1549, 1552, 1559 and 1662, with an additional Scottish prayer book in 1637 – to say nothing of the Directory of Worship. What follows appears only in the 1549 version of the ceremony of baptism; it is gone just three years later and never appears again: Then let the Priest, looking upon the children, say ‘I command thee, unclean spirit, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, that thou come out, and depart from these infants, whom our Lord Jesus Christ hath vouchsafed to call to his holy baptism, to be made members of his body, and of his holy congregation. Therefore, thou cursed spirit, remember thy sentence, remember thy judgement, remember the day to be at hand when thou shalt burn in fire everlasting, prepared for thee and thy angels. And presume not hereafter to exercise any tyranny toward these infants, whom Christ hath bought with his precious blood, and by this his holy baptism calleth to be of his flock’18

As Frederick Bulley notes, ‘This form is nearly the same as the first of the two forms used in the Roman ritual.’ 19 It seems likely that the

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confused evidence concerning Prowse at least hints at this dimension of baptism, which, albeit briefly, did find its way into the Protestant vernacular sacrament. The exorcism of the evil spirit from the child was, indeed, a key point about the change in the baptismal service. It was not the only point contested; as much discussed were the blessing of the salt and oil (animism) and rituals with the caul.20 It seems possible that the key change, the removal of the exorcising of the evil spirit, is best understood as an attempt to cleanse the rite of the meaning and memory of the old rite. This issue also permeates objections to baptism. At the same time, the fact that the prayer book provided for the private as well as public baptism of infants raised the question of what might really have passed at those private ceremonies. Part of what left the question of the rite of baptism open was that the church kept two ceremonies – ‘public’ baptism, in which the infant was brought to the church and baptised for all to see, and ‘private’ baptism. If the church was not to allow infants to die unbaptised, private baptism, in which the child was hurriedly administered the ritual, was a necessary provision. The latter not only generated suspicion and excitement that the old rite persisted but, for the hot Protestant at least, undoubtedly conjured up a troubling scene – the female birthing room – in which the unchurched mother, the midwife and the gossips had control over the administration of the sacraments. In sum, the changes to the ceremony of baptism left it in a state of dispute in three regards: first, a perception that the old ritual was close to or was sorcery (exorcism, animism); second, the question over the nature of private baptism (secrecy and heresy); third, the question of the appropriate subject for baptism (the issues of the nature of development, and the soul’s relationship to the body, as well as the question of the transformative power of the sacrament). The old religion, animal elements and sorcery jostle for our attention in these ceremonies. The erasure of exorcism from the Protestant ceremony of baptism seems to have been an incomplete purge. Indeed, it may have contributed to the bringing of disavowed animal rituals to roost in the church itself. Clearly enough, though, the eccentric paw prints of animal, particularly cat, baptism take us rapidly to a politics of memory and forgetting central to Reformation cultural debates. The Reformation debates over baptism are self-consciously addressed by some of the ceremonies discussed. However, as we see, these events as they are reported can also be linked to other issues fiercely debated in England from the Reformation on into the mid-seventeenth century, particularly the need for a preaching ministry and for Laudian ceremonial reforms. Overall, we can see such animal events as addressing

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Reformation changes; though they do not necessarily do so from a single perspective, they do share a vocabulary and an iconography that allowed contemporaries to interpret them. Baptism offered a helpful point of focus because it was a sacrament and as such was the focus of attention in the sequence of new books of common prayer that appeared. It therefore gave rise to specific questions, some of which concerned baptism, some of which had to do with human versus animal status, and some of which concerned the relationships among the institutions of church and state versus local protest. Baptism continued to be controversial. If the project of reformation was regarded as incomplete when Bishop Cotton wrote begging for an Ecclesiastical Commission in 1600, as Thomas Edwards’s list of errors makes evident, many felt that it was no closer to completion in the 1640s. However, the volatile circumstances of the Civil War, which brought into being a substantial weekly news media, also changed and expanded the circulation of animal events. Besides an extended legal case, at least five printed texts from the Civil War period (from 1644 to 1646) canvass animal baptism, and, as Ann Hughes notes, Edwards’s accounts seem to draw on both oral and printed sources.21 At the end of October in 1644 the royalist newsbook Mercurius Aulicus followed up the new ordinance for the ordination of ministers by accusing the troops. Aulicus reports that: When the Earle of Essex was at Lostithiell in Cornwall, one of his Rebells brought a horse into that Church, led him up to the Font; made another hold him while himself took water and sprinkled it on the Horses head, and said Charles I Baptize thee in the name of the Father, &c. then Crossed his fore-head and said I signe thee with the signe of the Crosse, in token thou shalt not be ashamed to fight against the Round-heads at London; with a deale more such horrid blasphemy as no modest Christian is willing to repeat.22

If this account harks back to the contestation of baptism under the Laudian church, it is also adapted to its moment in its weaving together of treason and blasphemy. This outrage offends against king and church together. The accused is a parliamentary commander and a member of a famous and troubled dynasty. Aulicus takes analysis of the meanings of animal baptism to a limit in reminding readers that a challenge to the church’s authority on the meaning of baptism is inseparable from a challenge to the state: one who substitutes an animal for an infant deliberately misconstrues and challenges true relationships of hierarchy, order and truth. Aulicus, as always, generated a response from his pro-parliamentarian rival Marchmont Nedham in Mercurius Britanicus:

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I mislike it in nothing but in the circumstances of the manner of the action (in sprinkling water) and of the place (that it should be done at the Font) but as for the signing with the sign of the Crosse, I like the mark better upon a horse then a Christian, it being the mark of the Beast: This it is whereby the sottish, brutish Malignants desire to be distinguished from others in the use of Baptisme; and why do they not stickle for the other Ceremonies also, the superstitious salt and Spittle of their Forefathers? Why not for the other reliques of Popery, as well as this one? I think I must get some of our Saviours miraculous eye salve of clay and spittle, before I shall be able to cure these wretches of their blindnesse.23

Britanicus gives a marginal gloss: ‘Why the Crosse is fitter for a Beast then a Christian.’ Although they could be argued to be theologically inconsistent –participating in the ‘both and’ logic we find in the way this nexus of ideas seems to operate – it is worth listing Britanicus’s points: the sprinkling of water and the font are associated with popery in and of themselves; the Catholic signing is sorcery; building analogically, the sign of the cross is a sign of sorcery and so the mark of the beast (satanic), with the additional lurking implication that in some way, therefore, it is fitting for beasts; and finally, the royalists themselves have abandoned human status in sinking back into irrational superstition and so have become ‘brutish’. The whole event is a sign of the incredible ignorance of the royalists in holding out for baptism, which is itself popish (and so more fittingly done as a parody using an animal). Britanicus finds a way to be happy to sponsor the position of a cat baptiser and condemn the others as popish. We seem to have in Nedham a willing sponsor of animal baptism as preferable to human. Not that Nedham, possible republican and agent of Cromwell’s regime, did anything of the sort. In fact Nedham, like Edwards, spent time spying on the congregational churches, though in Nedham’s case he did it as a paid government agent. His complex relationship to authority notwithstanding, if the alternative is infant baptism he is prepared to sponsor animal baptism. If Aulicus makes clear the challenge to the king implied in the challenge to the church, Nedham responds by attacking the mystifying properties of baptism used as an agent rather than a sign. Significantly, he does so in what is essentially a recuperative move. He responds to Aulicus’s attack by saying: no such event; Aulicus is a libeller; even if the event had happened then it was better than an infant being baptised. The first two of these moves seek to relocate the debate on print-culture terrain – who is libelling whom. The last – the sponsoring of an animal baptism – can, I think, best be read as an attempt to scoop up animal ceremony and house it firmly within the confines of an extreme but discursively bounded debate on baptismal theology. Nedham, possibly like Harbottle Grimstone, tries

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to take the scandal out of the incident by framing it as a comment on the nature of the soul and of baptism. As Ann Hughes points out, the emergence of animal events in print does not help to quantify them or locate them with certainty in the real world.24 It does not take an acute observer to see that the story serves both sides and that, as newspaper proprietors, Britanicus and Aulicus are living off the same story. Animal baptism here takes on life as a ‘print event’, part of a populist debate on the nature and power of baptism circulated, and re-circulated, as ‘news’. One general effect of the shaping of the world as news might be the re-presentation to itself of a society’s concerns heightened as sensation and melodrama; another is an emerging assumption that there is a social world, or at least a world of conversation and debate, into which this news can insert itself. A specific condition of the re-circulation of cat baptism in print is that a representational vocabulary previously located in parish life is recycled and used as a vivid marker of controversy in national debates – as print events the animal transformations, as it were, refer back to and use the animal lexicon of local conflict. Baptism was certainly controversial in seventeenth-century England, and the re-shaping by print of questions surrounding the nature of animals and humans was central in baptism debates. Taking the subject as it starting place, the debate on baptism canvassed the humanity of the infant in terms of discretion and rationality. The question of the role of baptism in shaping human ‘regeneration’ had two significant aspects. First, there was the question of faith alone determining salvation: baptism is a sign, not an agent, of regeneration. At the same time, and to an extent because baptism is a sign, the sacrament was deeply bound to social roles and could be so in potentially troubling ways. Nedham’s assertion that ‘the Crosse is fitter for a Beast then a Christian’ has implications related to both aspects of this debate. As a rhetorical flourish it seems, almost, to win the argument by asserting the popish nature of the cross in the ceremony of baptism. Nedham’s ‘position’ on the transformational power of baptism is clear: it is transforming only as an effect of faith. This apparent clarity nevertheless left the reformed sacrament of baptism itself in a complex and arguably ambiguous position. The growing debate on infant baptism led to fierce questioning of who, or what, was an appropriate object for baptism. Those who rejected infant baptism did so because if grace was determined by faith alone then baptism was an outward sign rather than an agent of change. Although Luther retained infant baptism, it would be superstition indeed to see the infant as having faith. In this way, as Erica Fudge argues, ideas about regeneration come

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up alongside the question of education and, above all, ‘the status and capacity of the human’.25 Perhaps the very fact that Nedham addresses the scandal in detail and with such strong accusations of popery suggests something else: the enigmatic power and importance of the sacraments that drew the debate towards them. While Nedham is happy to extrapolate a logic which tells us why it is better to baptise an animal than a human, he is unmistakably keen to remind us that no such event actually happened. But what if we imagine it had happened? This is the scene all the accounts discussed invite their readers or imagined witnesses to conjure. Imagining the scene – in whatever terms that is understood – makes its scandal immediately vivid; for all the demystifying logic of Nedham’s answer, a cat being baptised suggests the power of baptism as a mystery and a sacrament and puts in play a vocabulary and iconography associated with magic and with the old religion, of which the punning of ‘cat’ and ‘catholic’ are merely the most obvious associations. Working allusively in this way, animal baptism stories harness considerable affective potential.

••

What, then, do animal events of this kind suggest about the place of transformation as imagined in the changing kinds of writing of seventeenth-century England? First, they indicate to us that transformation was imagined and written in many different ways and social locations; when animals are substituted for humans in sacraments, attention is called to the nature and transformational power of the sacrament in a dialogic movement between the abstract – the question of the sacrament’s nature and power – and the concrete animal parody. If the events alert us to the ready symbolic availability of the animal to offer a widely shared representational language, they also suggest that language is not isolated but shared and readily interpreted both at the margins and in the central institutions of that society. The nature of the transformational power of the reformed sacraments, and the question of what, if anything, should be considered as transformed by them, were at issue. This is not the whole story. The evidence which suggests a drive to demystification – such as Nedham’s insistence on justification through faith – must also be understood as, simultaneously, acknowledging, reenacting and perhaps inevitably amplifying the partially effaced power of baptism and the very sacramentality the evidence questions. These events suggest that in baptism there resided a question about what might constitute ‘orthodox’ thinking. Thus, in the animal events explored we

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can see that church ceremonies and their meaning for participants were one of the places where the demystificatory tendencies of Protestantism snagged on some of its own fundamental tenets and problems, a crucial one among them being: how does baptism produce the regenerate and redeemable Christian? What part works? Why? How? If Keith Thomas sensed in these parodies something lingering from the old practices, we can add an element of self-consciousness and say that, in imagining the events, seventeenth-century people played out again both the purging and the power of the old sacraments. While what they thought about such events depended on their points of view – on their theology, local and national circumstances, beliefs and social and political investments – they were aware of the questions as recalled and replayed. Though each instance is slightly different, these are ceremonies of inflected, usually critical, representation that play on past and present in the minds of the beholders or readers. Is attention called to the animal? To an extent it is, primarily within the frame of an anthropocentric comparison with the human. If this is often a comparison in which the beast is used to indicate human failings, nevertheless the presence of the beast also perhaps stabilises the ideal gap between human and animal. Yet, at the same time, the very symbolic presence of the animal suggests the crucial integration of specific animal species into patterns of thought, touch and listening which are only partially recoverable in text, particularly text read in a sensory universe so distant from the early modern world. Importantly, the use and choice of animals change the nature of the critique contained in the parody; but how? Particular events draw on the animals in different ways: cocks, for example, lend themselves to being baptised as Peter, while the cry of a pinched cat sharply, savagely, reiterates poor preaching, and there is too the association between cats and Catholics, and between cats and devils.26 It is also the case, though, that the use of the animal, the change of human to animal ceremony, joltingly repositions the human. If it can be done with an animal, what does that suggest about the human role in the ceremony? Whether it is a case of imagining or actually watching and hearing an animal participating in baptism, attention is called to the awkwardness of the ceremony itself: all the strange and illogical aspects are suddenly and visibly accentuated. Significantly, too, as the print media change to include a vernacular press, these events hit the news, recycled using the vocabulary and iconography of parish protest in a way that seems partly self-consciously referential, knowing. With its pronounced gender implications outlined earlier, private baptism was an important factor in the preservation of the unease about the nature of the rite of baptism. Moreover, the Catholic way of

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birth, recently discussed by Mary Fissell, was replaced not only by the medical emphasis during childbirth but also by an emphasis on Eve’s sin rather than Mary’s saving grace, which made the birthing room an even more comfortless place. Women, pushed to pray like Lady Frances Aburgauennie, ‘I feele thy promised punishment . . . iustlie pronounced against me, and the whole generation of Adam’, had some clear incentives to turn again to the old ways.27 Finally, what are the relationships between such events and other writers concerned with representation? Let us return to the Vaughan poem with which we began: For no thing can to Nothing fall, but still Incorporates by skill, And then returns, and from the wombe of things Such treasure brings As Phenix-like renew’th Both life and youth; For a preserving spirit doth still passe Untainted through this Masse, Which doth resolve, produce, and ripen all That to it fall. (‘Resurrection and Immortality’, ll. 25–34)

At the same time as evoking the question of what the Reformation has done to the eucharist, Vaughan puts in place, through a pun on mass as body, weight and sacrament, a mystery for the present where proper interpretation of the animal world is not derived, as the body thinks, from an understanding of that world that leads to a leap of faith – if God does so much for the silkworm he will do more for me. Rather, the soul admonishes the body to recognise the world in terms of a more mysterious breath. Responding to the problem of how to see the Christian as regenerate Vaughan posits a phoenix-like mystery in life breathing through the ‘Masse’ – both physical things and the eucharist (expressed, of course, in a way that emphasises the evocation of the Roman rite). Vaughan’s answer to the problem of where the Christian is in the reformed church, and how the relationship between the body and the soul can be properly understood, is to characterise the experience of regeneration as an acknowledgement of a mysterious relationship between the Christian and the ‘Phoenix-like’ renewal. Although he is theologically and conceptually distant from our recorders of animal ceremonies, Vaughan is helpful in that he is thinking about many of the issues that explicitly concerned them: the nature of the relationship of body and soul and how, under the Reformation, to find a language to express the work of the sacraments on the soul. We witness, in the way the body in Vaughan’s poem expresses not mere sense but basic

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Christian faith, the retreat of the mysterious part of religion to the ‘preserving spirit’. Importantly, while these texts have been previously analysed as part of a particular sphere of culture, it should now be apparent that not only were they ‘understood’ by potential participants (if they happened) and by writers and readers as part of quite a rich symbolic vocabulary, but also they addressed crucial issues at the heart of the Jacobean and Laudian churches. As social historians neither Thomas nor Cressy sought to situate these events in relation to literate culture. Indeed, the way the texts of transformation have hitherto been analysed suggests some significant methodological issues. As social historians have been the main group commenting on this material, they have tended to see these texts as ‘popular beliefs’ while understanding the popular as expressing a particular stratum of society. As I have argued, these textual representations suggest that events which happened in the parish context addressed key theological questions and were perceived as doing so. These events mark challenges to the wider cultural problem of the sacraments in the reformed church, and they do so using a relatively complex lexicon of words and images that call upon, and mix and match, known animal symbolism and qualities and memories, cherished or abhorred, of the old way. All this suggests that, far from a static model of culture, we need to embrace a more complex understanding of what some historians have characterised as the popular. Natalie Zemon Davis’s shrewd theorisation of the central and dynamic place of the ‘popular’ is helpful in this regard. As she has argued, such a study must involve the ‘beliefs, literary and visual works, practices and festivities widely dispersed in society and in their appeal often . . . jumping barriers of birth etc.’.28 This approach helps us to see how transformation is taken up and put to work. From the specifics of such usages we can begin to know what people thought and felt – the languages which they used to express their experiences of social and political change. These performances of animal transformation suggest that we need to think of the ‘popular’ not as a place or stratum of society but as characterising texts and vocabularies that play and are understood (albeit differently) in many cultural locations.

Notes 1. Henry Vaughan, ‘Resurrection and Immortality’, in Silex Scintillans, in L. C. Martin (ed.), The Works of Henry Vaughan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 400.

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2. See ‘Public baptism’ (1549) in Frederic Bulley, A Tabular View of the Variations in the Communion and Baptismal Offices of the Church of England 1549–1662 (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1842), p. 94. 3. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1646), I, pp. 28, 67. 4. Historical Manuscripts Commission (9) (1904), pp. 450–1. 5. Francis Ashley, Casebook, in J. H. Bettey (ed.), The Casebook of Sir Francis Ashley J.P. Recorder of Dorchester 1614–35 (Dorset: Dorset Record Society, 1981), p. 29. 6. Ashley, Casebook, p. 30. 7. Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 172–4. 8. Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 20 January 1632, p. 357; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission (London: Camden Society, 1886). 9. On Cotton’s Catholic relatives see the letter from Henry Lord Cobham to Robert Cecil (October 1599) in Historical Manuscripts Commission Salisbury (9) 1902, p. 383. See also HMC (10), 1904, pp. 9, 17, 378, 450–1; HMC Exeter (18) 1940, pp. 297–8, 448–9. 10. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Allen Lane, 1971), pp. 37–41. 11. David Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 184, 183. 12. CSPD, 10 May 1618, p. 538. 13. CSPD, 14 May 1618, p. 540. 14. See Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (London: John Murray, 2005), e.g. pp. 93–4. 15. Thomas, Religion, p. 41. 16. Dairmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005), pp. 3–16. 17. Compare discussions in MacCulloch, Reformation, and Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 1–3, 478–503. 18. Bulley, Tabular View, pp. 97–8. 19. See Bulley, Tabular View, appendix VII. 20. See Thomas, Religion, pp. 36–7. 21. Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 51, 118–29, 301–4. 22. Mercurius Aulicus, Monday 21 October, p. 1219. 23. Mercurius Britanicus, 11–18 November 1644, p. 457. 24. Hughes, Gangraena, pp. 176–82. 25. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 41–3. 26. Anon., A Whip for the Devil; or, the Roman Conjuror (London, 1683), p. 96. 27. Thomas Bentley, The Monument of Matrons (London, 1582), p. 106; Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 14–52. 28. Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Towards mixtures and margins’, American Historical Review, 97:5 (1992), pp. 1409–16.

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Notes on Contributors

Danielle Clarke is Professor of Renaissance English Language and Literature at University College Dublin Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. Margaret Healy is a Reader in English and Co-Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex. Thomas Healy is Professor of Renaissance Studies and Head of the School of English at the University of Sussex. Bernhard Klein is Professor of English at the University of Kent. Michelle O’Callaghan is a Reader in English at the University of Reading. Neil Rhodes is Professor of English Literature and Cultural History at the University of St Andrews. Jennifer Richards is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Newcastle. Michael Schoenfeldt is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. William H. Sherman is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York. Alan Stewart is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

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Susan Wiseman is Professor of Seventeenth-Century Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London.

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Index

adiaphora, 66–7 alchemy, 161, 173 Alexander, Gavin, 69 Aquinas, Thomas, 165 Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 76 Aristotle, 100 ‘articulation’, 33, 41 Ascham, Roger, 37, 43 Asclepius (Hermetica), 165, 166, 167, 171 Ashley, Sir Anthony, 86 Ashley, Francis, 194 Ashmole, Elias, 171 Aubrey, John, 91 Augustine, 165 Confessions, 116, 118 baptism (human and animal), Reformation debates, 10, 192–206 Bacon, Anthony, 82, 89, 90 Bacon, Francis, 8, 82–93, 161–4, 171, 172 Advancement of Learning, 83, 161, 162 De Augmentis, 162 De sapienta veterum, 162 Essayes, 83, 91 Instauratio magna, 91 New Atlantis, 9, 83, 90, 162–4, 172 Novum Organum, 91, 161 Sylva Sylvarum, 162

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Baldwin, William, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 61 Barnes, Barry, 168 Barnfield, Richard, 100 Barros, Joao De, 128, 129, 130, 131 Decades of Asia, 130 Barton, John, 36 Beal, Peter, 84 Beale, Robert, 85, 86 Beaumont, Francis, 81 Bede, ‘De arte metrica’, 40 Bell, Ilona, 156 Berger, Harry, 185 Bevington, David, 179 Billington, Michael, 177 Birch, Thomas, 82 Bishops’ Ban, 72 Black, Joseph, 69 Blundeville, Thomas, 135 Boccaccio, 49 Book of Common Prayer, 28, 198 Boswell, William, 91 Bourne, William, 135 Boxer, Charles, 129 Boyle, 164 Brinsley, John, 36 Browne, William, Britannia’s Pastorals, 118 Bulley, Frederick, 198 Burckhardt, Jacob, 167 Burghley, Lord, 76, 83, 89

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Index

Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 146 Bushell, Thomas, 91 Byatt, A. S., 150, 151 Cabalism, 161, 163 Cabot, Sebastian, 137 Cadiz letter, 85, 86, 87 Calendar of State Papers (1618), 196 Calvin, John, 118 Institutes, 50 Campbell, Lily B., 48, 50 Campion, Thomas, 42 A Book of Ayres, 41 Observations in the Art of English Poesie, 41–2 Caravaggio, 178 Carew, Sir Thomas, 149–50 ‘An Elegie on the Death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. John Donne’, 149 cartography, 134–5 Cathay, 137 Chapman, George, 43 Iliades, 43–4 Charles I’s Commissioners, 195 Charlton, Walter, 170 Chartier, Roger, 98 Chaucer, 178 Chrismas, Richard, 194 Church, Tony, 177 Churchyard, 57–8 Cicero, 82, 101 De officiis, 60 Civil War (English), 200 Clegg, Cyndia, 68 Clifford, Lady Anne, 53 Cogan, Thomas, Haven of Health, 180, 181, 184 Coke, John, 89 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 153, 156 collaboration, textual, 9, 81–96, 97 College of Physicians, 168 Collinges, John, 122 Coolahan, Marie-Louise, 123

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communion service, 28 contemptus mundi, 134 Cook, John, 181 Coote, Edmund, 36 copia, 16 Cortes, Martin, The Art of Navigation, 136 Cosin, John, Private Devotions, 118 Cotton, William, 193, 194, 195, 200 Cressy, David, 195, 196, 197, 206 Croll, Oswald, Basilica chymica, 164 Cromwell, Oliver, 169 Cuffe, Henry, 83, 85, 86, 87 Daniel, Samuel, 7, 117 Defence of Ryme, 40–43, 44 Delia, 181 Davers, Sir Charles, 88 Davies, John, 66 Davies, Sir John, 87, ‘Gulling Sonnets’, 155 Nosce Teipsum, 118 Dawson, Anthony, 68 De Barros, Joao, 128, 129, 130, 131 Decades of Asia, 130 De Medici, Cosimo, 164 Dee, John, 130, 135, 171, 188 Demosthenes, 82 Descartes, Rene, 146, 157 De Vere, Edward, Earl of Oxford, 70 ‘digest’ (in alchemy), 161 Digges, Leonard, 135 Donne, John, 9, 23, 43 ‘Aire and Angells’, 151–2, 153, 156 ‘The Anniversary’, 157 ‘The Blossom’, 157 ‘Break of Day,’ 157 ‘The Canonization’, 157 Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 148 ‘The Ecstasy’, 146 epistolary sonnets, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106 ‘Farewell to Love’, 157

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Index ‘First Anniversary’, 167 ‘The Flea’, 149 ‘Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward’, 23–6 ‘The Good Morrow’, 156, 157 ‘Love’s Growth’, 156 ‘On His Mistress’, 146 Paradoxes and Problems, 101, 146, 147, 148 ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’, 145 Sermons, 4, 118, 152, 153, 158 ‘The Sun Rising’, 157 ‘The Triple Foole’, 154, 155, 156 ‘The Undertaking’, 152, 157 ‘A Valediction of the Book’, 158 ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’, 149 verse epistles, 7 Drury, Elizabeth, 145, 146, 147 Dryden, John, 153 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 64 Du Plessis Mornay, Philippe, 118, 165 A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion, 164 Dyer, Sir Edward, 105, 106 East India Company, 137 Eden, Richard, 136 Education (Renaissance), 8, 15, 22, 37, 113, 114 Edwards, Thomas, 200 Gangraena, 193 Ekirch, A. Roger, 186 Eliot, T. S., 146, 150 Elizabeth I, 84, 89, 187 eloquentia, 15, 16, 29 Elsom, John, 177 enargeia, 118 English Revolution, 168 Erasmus, Desiderius, 74 Praise of Folly, 18 Essex, Second Earl of , 68, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 89, 91

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213

Evelyn, John, 171 Ezell, Margaret, 103 fable, 161–2 Featley, Daniel, Ancilla Pietatis, 118 Feltham, Owen, 118 female writing networks, 8 Ferne, John, The Blazon of Gentry, 99 Ferrers, George, 50 Ficino, Marsilio, 164 Pimander, 165 Fissell, Mary, 205 Fletcher, John, 81 The Sea Voyage (with Massinger), 138, 139 Fludd, Robert, 167 Foster Jones, Richard, 32 Foucault, Michel, 82 Fraunce, Abraham, 33 Fudge, Erica, 202 Fuller, Mary, 9, 137 Gaiman, Neil, Sandman, 187 Galen, 147, 167 Gallagher, Catherine, 133 Garber, Marjorie, 185 Gardiner, Stephen, 50, 53 Gardner, Helen, 156 Gascoigne, George, 39 Gifford, George, 124 Giles, Peter, 21–1, 23 Giorno, John, 178 Glanville, Joseph, 171 Goodyer, Sir Henry, 148 Gosson, Stephen, The School of Abuse, 105 Gower, John, 178 Green, Lawrence, 50 Greene, Robert A Looking Glass for London and England, 65 Menaphon, 71 Quip for an Upstart Courtier, 71 Greenblatt, Stephen, 48, 133

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214

Index

Greville, Fulke, 83, 85, 86, 89 Grimstone, Harbottle, 195, 201 Grindal, Edmund, 67 Guildford, Lady, 124 Guilpin, Edward, 66 Haigh, Christopher, 194 Hakluyt, Richard, 132 Halasz, Alexandra, 74 Hall, Ronald, 179 Hammer, Paul, 83, 84, 89, 93 Harkness, Deborah, 167 Harrington, James The Commonwealth of Oceana, 170 The Mechanics of Nature, 169 Hartlib, Samuel, 171 Harvey, Gabriel, 38, 68, 98, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108 Ciceronianus, 71 Fowre Letters and Certaine Sonnets, 71 New Letter of Notable Contents, 71 Pierces Supererogation, 71 Harvey, John, 70 Harvey-Nashe quarrel, 70–6 Harvey, Richard, 70 Lamb of God, 71 Piers Perceval, 70 Hattaway, Michael, 138 Hawthornden, Drummond of, 181 Hayward, John, The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII, 68 Herbert, George ‘The Alter’, 27 ‘Love III’, 27–9 Hermes Trismegistus, 161, 164, 165 Asclepius, 165, 166, 167, 171 Hermeticism, 161, 164–8, 167, 168, 173 Higgins, John, 51, 52, 58, 59, 60, 61 Hobart, Lady Frances, 122

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Hobbes, Thomas, 91, 92 Leviathan, 170 Hoby, Lady Margaret, 113, 114, 123, 124, 125 Homer, 43 Hood, Thomas, 135, 136 Hooker, Richard, 118 Horace, Ars poetica, 32 Horneck, Philip, 121 Huarte, Juan, 147 Hughes, Ann, 200, 202 Humphrey, Laurence, 67 Hutson, Lorna, 69 Inns of Court, 99, 100 Institution of a Gentleman (anon.), 99 inventio, 115 Ioppolo, Grace, 81, 82 isocolon, 117 James I, 161 James, D. G., 179 James, Dr John, 89 Jarman, Derek, 189 Caravaggio, 188 Edward II, 188 Jubilee, 187 The Tempest, 187 Johnson, Dr Samuel, 150, 153 Life of Cowley, 150 Jones, Edward, 83 Jones, Robert, ‘Fourth Booke of Ayres’(A Musicall Dreame), 178 Jonson, Ben, 35, 68, 81–2, 117, 153, 164 Every Man Out of His Humour, 64, 65, 66, 75 The Isle of Dogs, 69 Volpone, 82 Kalas, Rayna, 33–4, 37 Kepler, Johannes, 164 King, Henry, ‘Exequy’, 115 Klawitter, George, 100

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Index Langham, Lady Mary, 122 Langland, William, 178 Lanyer, Aemilia, 108 La Primaudaye, Pierre de, 34 Legh, Gerard, The Accedance of Armorie, 99 Lemnius, Levinus, The Touchstone of Complexions, 180 Lichfield, Richard, 72–3, 75 Lodge, Thomas, 35 A Looking Glass for London and England, 65 Love, Harold, 84, 103 Lucas, Scott, 50–1, 52, 55 Lucian, 18 A True Story, 19 Luther, Martin, 75, 202 Lydgate, John, 54 Lyly, John, 69 Euphues, 68 Pappe with a Hatchet, 70 McCabe, Richard, 108 McEwan, Ian, 145 McGuire, Philip, 81 McKerrow, R.B., 70 McLeod Wilcox, Fred, Forbidden Planet, 187, 188 McLuhan, Marshall, 15 McWilliams, Cicely, 114 Manners, Roger, 83 Marlowe, Christopher, 164 The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, 68 Doctor Faustus, 17, 166 Marotti, Arthur, 101 Marston, John, 68 Pygmalion, 66 The Scourge of Vilanie, 66 Marprelate controversy, 8, 66, 69–76 Marvell, Andrew, 164 Mary I, 50 Massinger, The Sea Voyage (with Fletcher), 138, 139 Masten, Jeffrey, 81, 104

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215

Medici, Cosimo de, 164 Melancholius, Mercurius, Craftie Cromwell: or, Oliver Ordering our New State, 169 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 3 metre, 7, 37, 41, 74 Michelangelo, 178 Middleton, Thomas, 66, 81 Milton, John, 164 Paradise Lost, 16 Minton, Gretchen, 68 Mirandola, Pico della, ‘Oration’, 4, 166–7 A Mirrour for Magistrates, 2, 7, 48–63 miscellanies, 48 Montaigne, Michel de, 118 More, Thomas, 20–3 Utopia, 18–23, 26, 103 moroi (wise fools), 23 Morpheus, 187 Moses, 163 Mulcaster, Richard, 34, 35–7, 38, 40, 43 Munday, Anthony, 69 music, 33, 182 Napier, Richard, 171 Nashe, Thomas, 15, 68, 69, 71 Christ’s Teares Over Jerusalem, 71 Harvey–Nashe quarrel, 70–6 Have with You to Saffron–Walden, 71, 72 Isle of Dogs, 69, 71 Nashe’s Lenten Stuff, 65, 72 Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell, 64, 71 Returne of the Renowned Cavaliero Pasquill of England, 70 Strange Newes, 65, 71 The Unfortunate Traveller, 69, 75 Nedham, Marchmont, 202, 203 Mercurius Britanicus, 200, 201 Neo-Platonism, 156, 161, 165 Nevalainen, Terttu, 113

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216

Index

New Criticism, 155 New Jerusalem, 163 Newton, Isaac, 164, 171 Norbrook, David, 105 Odewhee, Owen, 4 Orgel, Stephen, 53 Orpheus, 7, 32, 165 Ovid, 82 Metamorphoses, 3 Paracelsus, 9, 168, 169, 171 Parker, Mathew, 39–40 ‘The Vertue of the Psalms’, 39–40 paronomasia, 117 Peck, Sarah, 195 Perkins, William, 124 Phelippes, Thomas, 84, 85 Philips, Katherine, 108 physiology (Renaissance), 9 Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration’, 4, 166–7 Plat, Hugh, 167 Plato, 164 Platonism, 24 Pope, Alexander, 153 popular culture, 206 ‘power’ (in natural magic), 161 prisca theologia, 162 Privy Council, 84, 85 prosopopoeia, 52–3, 59 Prowse, John, 196, 197, 199 Psalms, 116, 117 Purchas, Samuel, 132 Puttenham, George, 32 Arte of English Poesie, 33, 40, 43, 116, 152 Ralegh, Walter, ‘The Lie’, 115 Rambuss, Richard, 104 Rawley, William, 83, 90, 162 Reformation (Church), 26 Reynolds, Edward, 83, 85, 86, 122 Rhodes, Richard, 124, 125 rhyme, 7, 39–44

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Rich, Mary Countess of Warwick, 122 Ricks, Christopher, 157 Ridgeway, Lady, 114, 116 Rivers, Earl, 195, 195 Rossi, Paolo, 172 Royal Society, 9, 171, 172 Sackville, Thomas, 56–7 Salomon’s House, 90, 163 Savage, Catherin, 194 Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, 38 serio ludere (‘playing seriously’), 6, 17–18, 21, 23, 26, 27, 146 sleep (Renaissance), 10, 177–89 Shakespeare, William, 65, 81, 164, 177–189 Cymbeline, 182 Hamlet, 35, 166, 180 King Lear, 1–3 Macbeth, 81, 179 Measure for Measure, 81 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 179, 180 Othello, 35 Pericles, 81, 182 Richard III, 179 Sonnets, 100, 155, 157 The Tempest, 10, 138, 139, 167, 177–189 Twelfth Night, 133 The Two Noble Kinsmen, 81 The Winter’s Tale, 182 Shapin, Steven, 168 Sherman, William, 138 Sibthorpe, Henry, 117 Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 29–30, 118 Psalm 142 (translation of), 29 Sidney, Sir Philip, 99, 104, 105 Arcadia, 33, 68, 182 Astrophil and Stella, 69, 106, 155 Defence of Poesy, 4, 16, 32, 38, 116 Siena Cathedral, 164

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Index ‘signature’ (in nature), 166 sleep, 177–89 Socrates, 19 Smith, Bruce, 32 Smith, Thomas, 83 Smith, William, Chloris, 108 Song of Solomon, 124 Southwell, Lady Anne, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121 Spedding, James, 82, 89 Spenser, Edmund, 29, 105, 106 Astrophel, 108 Colin Clout Come Home Againe, 99, 108 The Faerie Queene, 29, 76, 107, 182 Mother Hubberd’s Tale, 67–8 The Shepheardes Calender, 67, 97, 98, 103, 104, 106 Sprat, Thomas, History of the Royal Society, 171 Stanyhurst, Richard, 4, 34, 37 Stubbes, John Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf, 68 Tarigh, 129 Targoff, Ramie, 145 Tasso, Jerusalem Liberata, 76 Tauchert, Ashley, 112 Temple, William, 86 Thomas, Keith, 195, 196, 204, 206 Thomson, George, 170 Three Proper and wittie familiar Letters, 98, 104, 107

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217

Vaughan, Henry, 164 ‘Vanity of Spirit’, 167 ‘Resurrection and Immortality’, 192–3, 205 Vaughan, Thomas, 170 vestarian controversy, 67 Vickers, Brian, 81, 83, 84, 89, 93 Walker, Anthony, 122 Wallpoole, Richard, 86 Walsingham, Francis, 84 Warhol, Andy, 178 Watkinson, William, 53 Wayland, John, 54 Webbe, William, 107, 108 Webster, Charles, 171 Whitgift, John, 66 Wilkins, George, 81 Wilson, Thomas, 32, 33 Wilson Knight, G., 35 Winstanley, Gerrard Law of Freedom, 170 The True Leveller, 170 Winston, Jessica, 54 Wiseman, Susan, 52 Woodward, Rowland, 99, 101, 102 Woodward, Thomas, 99 Wotton, Henry, 83, 100, 101, 156 Woudhuysen, Henry, 84 Wright, Edward, 134, 135, 137 Wright, George T., 33 Zemon Davies, Natalie, 206 zeugma, 115 Zim, Rivkah, 40

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