1. Many points in the Introduction are argued more fully in David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1984. In a general survey of this kind it is impossible to make full acknowledgement of the many critical works that have been drawn on, but the notes refer readers to books which will provide fuller guidance, and further reading is also recommended in the editions referred to in the textual notes.
2. Thomas Pestell, quoted in A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: The Critical Heritage, 1975, p. 108.
3. Drayton, ‘To the Reader’, in The barons warres, Poems, 1619, sig. [2A2r]. On the creation of fictive worlds, see Harry Berger, Jr., ‘The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World’, in Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, selected and arranged, with an introduction, by John Patrick Lynch, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1988, pp. 3–40.
4. Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, Oxford 1973, p. 78.
5. See, for example, the critiques of ‘humanism’ in Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection, 1984, and Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama, 1985.
6. Cp. Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, Chicago and London 1986, pp. 123–42.
7. Cp. G. W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy, Cambridge 1985, pp. 47–52; Pigman offers a valuable survey of elegiac conventions.
8. Karl Josef Höltgen, Aspects of the Emblem: Studies in the English Emblem Tradition and the European Context, Kassel 1986, pp. 82–90, notes that Donne’s patron Lord Hay used the compass figure with the King at the centre and the courtier on the circumference.
9. Christopher Hill, ‘The Word “Revolution”’, in A Nation of Change and Novelty: Radical Politics, Religion and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England, London and New York 1990, pp. 82–101.
10. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, p. 74.
11. See Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1978.
12. See R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries, Cambridge 1954.
13. Thomas M. Greene, ‘Petrarch and the Humanist Hermcneutic’, in The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, New Haven and London 1982, pp. 81–103.
14. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, reissue, Cambridge 1987; James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in J. G. A. Pocock (ed.), The Political Works of James Harrington, Cambridge 1977, pp. 161ff. and passim. On criticism and critique, see Paul Connerton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School, Cambridge 1980, pp. 16ff.
15. G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 1–32.
16. On this sense of possession by the past, see D. J. Gordon, ‘Giannotti, Michelangelo and the Cult of Brutus’, in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D.J. Gordon, ed. Stephen Orgel, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1975, pp. 233–45.
17. S. K. Heninger, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics, San Marino 1974.
18. A. Kent Hieatt, Short Time’s Endless Monument, New York 1960.
19. In practice, humanist education often bred political conformity rather than opposition: see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, 1986.
20. On civic humanism, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton 1975.
21. See Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England, Cambridge 1966, and, for a useful anthology of humanist educational writings, Joanna Martindale, English Humanism: Wyatt to Cowley, 1985. On literacy, see Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, 1982, pp. 184–91.
22. See Pocock’s extremely rich and suggestive account in The Machiavellian Moment, ch. 10, and, on the full range of political discourses, J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640, 1986.
23. On Skelton’s politics, see Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s, Cambridge 1988, and Alistair Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, Oxford 1989, chs. 8–10.
24. Fox, Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII, p. 271.
25. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named The Governour, ed. H. S. Croft, 2 vols., 1880, i. 1–3.
26. S. P. Zitner, ‘Truth and Mourning in a Sonnet by Surrey’, Journal of English Literary History, 50 (1983), 509–29.
27. For a full discussion, see John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition, Princeton 1982.
28. On critical elements in the pastoral tradition, see Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry, Oxford 1988.
29. On humanist social policy in relation to literature, see Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context, Oxford 1989, ch. 1.
30. Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘“Eliza, Queene of shepheardes,” and the Pastoral of Power’, English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980), 153–82.
31. See Peter Stallybrass, ‘ “Drunk with the Cup of Liberty”: Robin Hood, the Carnivalesque, and the Rhetoric of Violence in Early Modern England’, in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds.), The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, London and New York 1989, pp. 45–76.
32. For discussion of differing interpretations, see John N. King, ‘Was Spenser a Puritan?’, in Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, Princeton 1990, pp. 233–8.
33. See Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, 1975.
34. For Calvin’s reading of this Psalm as warning against idolatry, see Arthur Golding’s translation, The psalmes of David, 1571, commentary on Psalm 89; on the politics of the Psalm translations generally, see Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, New York and Oxford 1990, ch. 4.
35. See Robin Headlam Wells, Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ and the Cult of Elizabeth, 1983.
36. For differing views, see Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1989, and Martin N. Raitiere, Faire Bitts: Sir Philip Sidney and Renaissance Political Theory, Pittsburgh 1984.
37. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the divell, in Works, ed. R. B. McKerrow, revised edn, ed. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols., Oxford 1958, i.193.
38. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
39. David Norbrook, ‘The Monarchy of Wit and the Republic of Letters: Donne’s Polities’, in Katharine Maus and Elizabeth Harvey (eds.), Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth–Century English Poetry, Chicago and London 1990, pp. 3–36.
40. On political debate in the theatre, see Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge 1980.
41. Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context, pp. 82ff.
42. Richard A. McCabe, ‘Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599’, Yearbook of English Studies, 11 (1981), 188–93.
43. For an excellent introduction, see Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972, 1988, chs. 1–3.
44. See Ciarán Brady, ‘Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s’, Past and Present, 111 (1986), 17–49, and Patricia Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Cork 1989.
45. Mangan’s translation can be found in Thomas Kinsella’s The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, Oxford 1986, pp. 277–8, and can be instructively compared with Kinsella’s own translation, pp. 159–61.
46. ‘On a Change in Literary Fashions’, in Osborn Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry, Dublin 1970, p. 127.
47. Thomas Park (ed.), Nugae Antiquae, 2 vols., 1804, i.249.
48. See Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: The Apocalypse, the Union, and the Shaping of Scotland’s Public Culture, Edinburgh 1979.
49. Helena Mennie Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland under King James VI, Cambridge 1969.
50. Richard Helgerson, ‘The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England’, Representations, 16 (1986), 51–85.
51. On the mingling of pastoral and georgic in Browne and other Jacobean poets, see Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, pp. 142ff. Patterson argues that Browne’s denunciation of abuses (no. 37) inverts the georgic praise of the ‘happy man’.
52. The weaving thus has elements both of Minerva’s and of Arachne’s tapestries in the Metamorphoses: cp. no. 334 and the discussion in Section 3.
53. It has been possible to claim Donne and Herbert both for Anglo-Catholicism and for orthodox Calvinism. For influential analyses, see Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, New Haven 1954, and Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, Princeton 1979.
54. Amy M. Charles, A Life of George Herbert, Ithaca and London 1977, pp. 80ff., 138, emphasizes early dates for many of the poems, though the evidence is inconclusive.
55. Thomas Cogswell, ‘England and the Spanish Match’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642, 1989, pp. 107–33. The ensuing analysis of this very controversial period draws heavily on this volume; for alternative ‘revisionist’ perspectives, questioning the degree of long-term political and social polarization, see Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War, 1973, and Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War, Oxford 1990.
56. See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640, Oxford 1987.
57. Cp. Thomas F. Healy, Richard Crashaw, Leiden 1986, p. 3 and passim.
58. Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments, Cambridge 1989.
59. See Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Cust and Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England, pp. 72–106.
60. See Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800, London and Boston 1979, pp. 71 ff.
61. For this reading, see David Norbrook, ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” and the Politics of Genre’, in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English Civil War, Cambridge 1990, pp. 147–69, and cp. John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell, Cambridge 1968; on apocalyptic themes, see Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth Century Poetry, Brighton 1986.
62. James Harrington, An essay upon two of Virgil’s Eclogues, 1658, sig. A8r–v. I am indebted to David Armitage for discussion of Harrington.
63. Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature, Cambridge 1992.
64. Richard C. McCoy, ‘Gascoigne’s “Poëmata Castrata”: The Wages of Courtly Success’, Criticism, 27 (1985–6), 29–55. It was probably the prose work The adventures of Master F.J. that gave most offence.
65. Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry, Cambridge 1970, pp. 175–6.
66. See, for example, Thomas P. Roche, Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences, New York 1989.
67. One of the leading ‘confessionals’, John Berryman, had a scholarly interest in Elizabethan poetry, and his first venture into confessional poetry was a sonnet sequence. Berryman’s protestations that the escapades of his fictional ‘Henry’ had nothing to do with him can be compared with the attempt to make a radical separation between Sidney and Astrophil: in each case there is room for argument.
68. See Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 1982.
69. Erasmus, De ratione studii, in Literary and Educational Writings 2, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24), Toronto, Buffalo and London 1978, pp. 683ff.
70. Stevie Davies, The Idea of Woman in Renaissance Literature: The Feminine Reclaimed, Brighton 1986.
71. On the sonnets as a revision of the conventions of epideictic complimentary poetry, see Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1986; on the sonnets’ triangle as figuring general ‘homosocial’ bonds between males, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York and London 1985; for a homosexual reading, see Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Chicago and London 1985.
72. On the gender politics of the blazon, see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property, London and New York 1987, pp. 126–54.
73. On rhetoric and representation in the poem, see Nancy Vickers, ‘ “The blazon of sweet beauty’s best”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds.), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, London and New York 1985, pp. 95–115.
74. William and Malleville Haller, ‘The Puritan Art of Love’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 5 (1941–2), 235–72; more recent authorities have played down the ‘Puritan’ element and emphasized the degree of traditional consensus on marriage, for example Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, ch.4.
75. For differing views of Spenser on marriage, cp. Davies, The Idea of Woman in Renaissance Literature, and Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen, London and New York 1989, pp. 153–65.
76. On the ways in which the universalizing language of citizenship could marginalize women, see Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists, Urbana, Ill., Chicago and London 1982, pp. 58–9.
77. Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I, Cambridge 1987, and cp. John Kerrigan, ‘Thomas Carew’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 74 (1988), 311–50.
78. See Joan Kelly-Gadol, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History, Boston 1977, pp. 137–64; on the limitations of Renaissance education of women, see Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, ch. 2, and Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, Brighton 1983, pp. 38ff.
79. ‘Revival’ because there was a substantial wave of interest in women’s history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a movement that subsequently became eclipsed for a long time.
80. See Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, pp. 84–105.
81. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, Baton Rouge and London 1983, p. 239. On her romance The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, [1621], see Carolyn Ruth Swift, ‘Feminine Identity in Lady Mary Wroth’s Romance Urania’, English Literary Renaissance, 14 (1984), 328–46.
82. On the context of the Cookham poem, see Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Of God and Good Women: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer’, in Margaret Patterson Hannay (ed.), Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, Kent, Ohio, 1985, pp. 203–24.
83. See Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–1688, 1988, chs. 2–3.
84. Sara Heller Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies, Brighton 1987, pp. 38–9.
85. Allan Pritchard, ‘Marvell’s “The Garden”: A Restoration Poem?’, Studies in English Literature, 23 (1983), 371–88. This anthology’s chronological limits may have been broken to illustrate this interaction (cp. nos. 217, 222).
86. I am indebted to Patricia Ingham for discussion of this point.
87. Cp. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, pp. 126ff.
88. William Drummond of Hawthornden, ‘A Letter on the True Nature of Poetry, addressed to Dr. Arthur Johnston’, in Poems and Prose, ed. Robert H. MacDonald, Edinburgh and London 1976, p. 191.
89. There is thus a confusing disparity between the phenomenon labelled by Heidegger as ‘humanism’, an exaltation of metaphysics at the expense of sensitivity to language, and the Renaissance conception of humanism: cp. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco and London 1977, pp. 189–242.
90. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, p. 85.
91. Ibid., p. 75.
92. Ibid., p. 87.
93. Of Education, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols., New Haven 1953–82, ii.374, 403.
94. Ibid., ii.516.
95. For an excellent introduction, see Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1968.
96. On the gradual reduction of rhetorical figures to the master-trope of metaphor, or the structuralist binary opposition between metaphor and metonymy, see Gérard Genette, ‘Rhetoric Restrained’, in Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan, introduction by Marie-Rose Logan, Oxford 1982, pp. 103–24.
97. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker, Cambridge 1936, pp. 311–13. Puttenham lists ‘figurative’ itself as a recent term which the language cannot do without (p. 147).
98. Richard Sherry, A treatise of schemes and tropes, [1550], sig. b5v.
99. For parallels between humanist rhetorical theory and contemporary ‘deconstruction’, see Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance, Oxford 1979. Jacques Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ derives from and moves beyond Martin Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics; a somewhat parallel response to Heidegger can be found in the return to medieval and Renaissance rhetoric by North American scholars like Walter J. Ong, SJ (Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, Cambridge, Mass., 1958) and Marshall McLuhan (cp. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man, London and Toronto 1962, p. 248). McLuhan’s doctoral thesis discussed rhetoric in Nashe.
100. On decorum, see Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery:Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics, Chicago 1947, ch. 9, and Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England, Princeton 1978. For particularly precise analyses of structural decorum, see Alastair Fowler, Conceitful Thought: The Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems, Edinburgh 1975.
101. Cp. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Manchester 1986, p. 17: ‘Rhetoric, by its actively negative relationship to grammar and to logic, certainly undoes the claims of the trivium (and, by extension, of language) to be an epistemologically stable construct.’
102. Cp. Victoria Kahn, ‘Humanism and the Resistance to Theory’, in Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds.), Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, Baltimore and London 1986, pp. 373–96.
103. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, Oxford 1988, ch. 5.
104. Lisa Jardine, ‘Humanistic Logic’, in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge 1988, pp. 173–98. On the possible influence on poetry of Petrus Ramus’s transferral of ‘invention’ and ‘disposition’ from rhetoric to logic, see Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, pp. 331ff., and cp. Abraham Fraunce, The lawiers logike, 1588.
105. Archibald MacLeish, ‘Ars poetica’, Poems, 1935, p. 123.
106. Cp. Jean-Marie Benoist, ‘La géométrie des poètes métaphysiques’, Critique, 27 (1971), 730–69.
107. For a subtle and illuminating analysis of this poem, see Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson, New Haven and London 1981, ch. 5.
108. Thomas O. Calhoun, ‘George Wither: Origins and Consequences of a Loose Poetics’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 16 (1974), 263–79.