Renaissance: rebirth. That is an audacious claim to make for any period of literary history; but it can be justified.1 The period covered by this anthology, from 1509 to 1659, was one of unprecedented poetic productivity. Poets thought through the meaning of their art systematically, from the writer’s social responsibility to the minutiae of rhythm and verse form. The contemporary who acclaimed John Donne as a ‘Copernicus in Poëtrie’ was responding to an originality that discovered new poetic worlds.2 Edmund Spenser created his own fictive world or ‘Faerie Land’: his disciple Michael Drayton could hail him as ‘our first late great Reformer’.3 Sir Philip Sidney argued that, far from simply imitating the external world, the poet could emulate God in creating a wholly new world:
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature… Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.4
The poet can effectively undo the Fall and put us in touch with a primal golden age.
Sidney sees nature as a ‘rich tapestry’: his language unembarrassedly celebrates his delight in richly ornate objects. To post-Romantic readers, for whom poets are expected to disguise their art, there may seem something shameless about the Elizabethan poets’ conspicuous consumption of artifice. But Renaissance writers could look to their God for a pattern. The French poet du Bartas, who was enormously popular in the period, and was translated by Sidney, imagines God admiring His creation like a ‘cunning Painter’ who
Forgets his paines; and inly fill’d with glee,
Still on his Picture gazeth greedilie.
(no. 343 ll.1, 7–8)
The artist’s aim was not simply to copy the surface of appearances but to re-enact the primal act of creation. Blurred and worn down with mutability, an everyday language could be transfigured into a vision of origins: ‘a New world leaps forth’, writes Cowley of the poet, ‘when Thou say’st, Let it Be’ (no. 373 1.35). Even when Alexander Hume describes meadows whose green spreads ‘naturallie but [without] artifice’ (no. 183 1.95), he sees the landscape essentially as a manifestation of God’s art: ideal landscapes were sown with flowers of rhetoric. The creation of such ‘golden worlds’ was not seen as mere escapism: on the contrary, by giving a sharp realization to the Utopian ideal, making their readers feel ‘more then humane’, ‘out of themselves remov’d’ (no. 353 ll. 75–6), poets could move them to action, to creating new worlds themselves. Armed with these defences, poets could celebrate their golden worlds with an undisguised sensuous relish (nos. 81, 88, 175, 190, 206, 214, 362). Spenser’s Calidore is so overcome by the vision of ‘An hundred naked maidens lilly white’ that he envies his own eyes; the vision has been created by Colin Clout – that is, Spenser himself (no. 348 ll.16–17). Even a spare description of the ‘dead sticks’ of a winter landscape will rest on a contrast with the rich dress of summer (no. 122). Sensuousness could easily verge on self-parody, as in Campion’s comparison of a woman’s face to a garden (no. 131), or the song of Herrick’s wassailers who compare cowslips to cream, then abandon their metaphors when they realize they are not going to be given beer (no. 208). And self-parody becomes high camp in Marlowe’s luxuriantly inventive portrayal of Hero’s costume, in which art outdoes nature so far that a handmaid follows Hero to put water in the artificial sparrows that chirrup as she walks (no. 99).
The word ‘Renaissance’ often conjures up poetry of this highly self-conscious kind, which may seem to owe more to ancient Arcadia and the courts of Italy than to southern England. But the British Renaissance transformed those southern landscapes as it transformed so many poetic conventions it had borrowed from other cultures. Samuel Daniel, whose discursive, meditative mode is very different from the familiar textbook notions of Renaissance verse, declared that
… all that ever hotter spirits exprest
Comes bettered by the patience of the North.
(no. 353 ll.53–4)
That ‘patience’ often expressed itself in a critical distance from the most flamboyantly artificial modes of poetry. In his unjustly neglected sequence Cœlica, Daniel’s friend Fulke Greville steadily undermined the conventions of courtly praise in mordant self-ironies (nos. 73–7, 262–4); in Sir Walter Ralegh’s ‘The 21th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’ (no. 21), the rhetorical polish and patterned artifice of the conventional sequence of love-poems start to collapse into poetry of an almost ‘confessional’ rawness. Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene is a critique as well as an imitation of Italian romance, and one of his most powerful images of evil is a parody of the kind of richly ornate landscape he himself loved to describe (no. 80). The point about Calidore’s vision is that it is fragile: it is in the end the product of a visionary way of seeing, not an object that can be kept on the connoisseur’s shelf. Poets were well aware that their age’s taste for conspicuous ornament might have a deadening effect on the landscape: a formal garden could be seen as enclosing ‘A dead and standing pool of Air’ (no. 216 1.6), and a stately home might be a blight on its surroundings,
The marble pavement hid with desart weede,
With house-leeke, thistle, docke, and hemlock-seed.
(no. 185 ll.29–30)
In Renaissance poetry, especially in the earlier seventeenth century (for example nos. 198, 220), we can find exaltations of nature above art that seem to anticipate poetry of a much later period. Henry Vaughan could see a book not as a triumph of artifice but as the tomb of a once vibrant natural life (no. 374).
Generalization about Renaissance poetry is always liable to be defeated by the period’s immense range: if in some respects it seems to anticipate the visionary, prophetic ambitions of the Romantic era, the Renaissance is also rich in a poetry of personal address and discussion more often associated with the eighteenth century. The verse epistle in a ‘low’ or ‘plain’ style becomes a favourite medium. Its plainness may be the vehicle for an austere critique of the artifice of the public world (cp. nos. 223, 228). The form is also open, however, to Jonson’s self-mocking hedonism in inviting a friend to supper and claiming that he will he about the goods in store to make sure he comes (no. 233). Such poetry often conjured up an all-male world, but women poets began to celebrate their own networks of friendship (nos. 189, 244–6). The period’s wit encompassed the self-deprecating, socially poised irony most prized by the eighteenth century, but ranged more widely across genres, bringing a sardonic cast to religious melancholy and amatory compliment. Alexander Pope acknowledged the wit of Donne’s satires, even though he found them unpolished, and despite the constraints of censorship there was an increasingly vigorous body of political satire. Denham’s Coopers Hill combined satire with the celebration of a classical balance in poetry as well as in politics:
O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.
(no. 42 ll.189–92)
The poets of the later seventeenth century looked back to writers like Denham and Edward Fairfax (no. 342) as pioneers of their favoured manner. Yet there was much in Renaissance verse that failed to match later standards of good taste and propriety, from the harsh, populist manner of the poetry of social and religious protest to the erotic extravagance of Crashaw’s lyrics (for example no. 293). Against the patterned rhetoric of the sonneteers can be set the vigorously colloquial voice of the balladeer’s Wife of Bath confronting St Peter:
Alas for you, good sir she said,
now gip you doting Knave.
(no. 127 ll.15–16)
The Renaissance was more at ease than the succeeding era with the fantastic and supernatural. Sir John Harington was well placed to catch the tone of Ariosto’s exuberantly self-mocking fantasy (no. 341). Spenser, who set himself to ‘overgo’ Ariosto, may have tried to strike a more sober note but matched the Italian poet in an almost surreal inventiveness.
Amid all this variety, one generalization that does have some plausibility is that Renaissance poets were distinguished from their predecessors by a heightened awareness of subjectivity and individuality. Poets had not always made such high claims for their work as Sidney does in A Defence of Poetry. In Chaucer’s The House of Fame, the poet’s role is to perpetuate others’ fame, not to glorify his own. The new self-assertiveness of poets corresponded to a new insistence in Renaissance culture on the significance of the individual voice. One reason Renaissance poetry often seems so immediate and ‘modern’ today is that our culture places so much value on the individual. It is easy for modern readers to sympathize with Wyatt’s refusal to play the games of court politics – ‘I cannot I, no no it will not be’ (no. 223 1.76) – and with Shakespeare’s challenge to social convention, ‘Noe, I am that I am’ (no. 114 1.9). Sidney’s Astrophil urges himself with deceptive simplicity to ‘looke in thy heart and write’ (no. 65 1.14). When Spenser declares:
So I unto my selfe alone will sing,
The woods shall to me answer and my Eccho ring
(no. 88 ll.17–18)
he is signalling his departure from convention, contrasting the poem he has written for his own marriage with the ceremonial verse which poets were normally expected to compose for patrons and a court audience; his poetry is moving towards a more modern idea of individual authenticity. The period’s religious poets approach God and eternity in an intimate, personal way, as in Vaughan’s celebrated opening: ‘I saw Eternity the other night’ (no. 3001.1). Milton rushes to ‘prevent’ the three Magi by having ‘the honour first, thy Lord to greet’ and joining his voice directly to ‘the Angel Quire’ (no. 270 ll.24–7). On occasion such individualism becomes conscious blasphemy, as in Laurence Clarkson’s declaration that God is within, in what he punningly calls ‘this Single Eye’ (no. 298 1.23). When Marvell claimed that
Two Paradises ’twere in one
To live in Paradise alone
(no. 217 ll.63–4)
he was jokingly pushing to its extreme a real current of thought in his age.
In its openness to individuality, Renaissance poetry may seem strikingly modern. Whether or not that is a good thing is another matter, and has repeatedly been debated. For T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the individualistic humanism of the Renaissance displaced God and tried to put man in His place, and the result was a disastrous arrogance. Socialists have criticized the Renaissance from a different angle, seeing competitive individualism as an evasion of responsibility to the community.5 When Daniel’s Philocosmus says that he lives in a ‘wiser profit-seeking age’ (no. 353 1.8), a degree of irony hovers around the world ‘profit’, which is becoming increasingly specialized from a general sense of benefit to a narrower sense of personal financial advantage. Another word whose modern sense had not yet become fully established, ‘purchase’, still retained older connotations, being linked with ‘chase’ in the sense of ‘hunt’ (see no. 10).
The period’s fascination with creating fictive worlds was in part a rehearsal of the process of conquering new worlds: the period marks a significant stage in the ideology of colonialism. The lover in Donne’s ‘To his Mistress going to bed’ (no. 96) wants to possess his mistress like a colonist plundering a new continent, and in a punning excess of acquisitiveness he calls her ‘My Myne’. This parallel between nature and woman as objects to be possessed can be found in much of the period’s writing.6 Enclosure and the clearing of forests aroused protest at the time as expressions of a new, more manipulative attitude to the land as private property by people whose ‘self will is theire law’ (no. 211 I. 16) at the expense of traditional communal rights (cp. nos. 177, 201). The poets’ almost physical pleasure in imaginative possession of their landscapes can be said to offer an encloser’s eye view: Sidney did much of his writing in a recently enclosed landscape. In a lyrical description of the light on a forest floor, Lord Herbert observes that its beauty can ‘cloath the poorest’ (no. 199 1.7); his brother George imagined his mind as a deer-park (no. 284 1.3). In Wyatt’s ‘Who so list to hount’ (no. 54), the King has shut up the woman the poet desires like a deer in his own private forest, and Wyatt’s frustration is tinged with envy. Renaissance man as free individual often depended on a considerably less free Renaissance woman. ‘Mee, brought to light, your tender arms sustaynd’, writes Nicholas Grimald in an elegy for his mother (no. 310 1.3), his syntax indicating how his grief is almost outweighed by concern about how far she acknowledged him.7 Women in the period often found their own individuality a burden rather than a liberation, a restriction to a domestic space in which they were not able to voice their feelings: ‘When others hunt, my thoughts I have in chase’, writes Lady Mary Wroth (no. 143 1.9). Katherine Philips had to rework Donne’s language to imagine a less limiting world of female friendship. Whereas for Donne
She’is all States, and all Princes, I,
Nothing else is
(no. 133 ll.21–2)
for Philips
We are our selves but by rebound,
And all our Titles shuffled so,
Both Princes, and both Subjects too.
(no. 24411.23–5)
Where Donne’s famous compass analogy makes the woman the static centre, the man the active wanderer (no. 137 ll.25–36), Philips imagines each friend in either position (no. 245 ll.27–8).
Even the period’s most extravagant assertions of selfhood, in fact, often prove to be significantly qualified: ‘not alone’, writes Donne, ‘My lonenesse is’ (no. 29 ll.7–8). The compass had often figured male self-sufficiency, and in insisting on the interdependence of the two legs Donne was shifting it in the direction of mutuality. The final stanzas of ‘A Valediction forbidding mourning’ (no. 137) gain some of their power from our awareness that when the compass is finally lifted to its greatest height it will be balanced at its most precarious on a tiny point.8 Shakespeare transmutes the possessiveness of the lovers’ ‘mine’ into a Utopian interchange: ‘Either was the others mine’, and their love appalled ‘Propertie’ – implying more mundane legal possessions as well as abstract metaphysical laws (no. 312 ll.36–7). Daniel argues that it is only by setting aside the pursuit of worldly goals that one can avoid becoming ‘a possession held for others use’ (no. 231 I.62); Shakespeare, however, finds something disturbing in the stoical self-withdrawal of those who desire to be ‘Lords and owners of their faces’ (no. 113 1.7).
Religious poets were both inward-looking and acutely uneasy about what Fulke Greville termed ‘selfe-nesse’ (Cœlica, Sonnet 18): ‘We seeme more inwardly to know the Sonne’, he wrote (no. 262 I.7), but this might be one more form of idolatry. The later Donne can affirm himself only in total subjugation:
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.
(no. 259 ll.12–14)
Donne’s ‘I’ dangles at the end of its line, precarious in its assertive humility.
Francis Quarles urges God to
… keepe me from my Selfe; ’Tis best for me,
Never to owne my Selfe, if not in Thee.
(no. 275 ll.19–20)
And even in answering such fears, Herbert makes God turn individualism back on the speaker: ‘Who made the eyes but I?’ (no. 285 1.12).
The status of the individual is in fact called in question by the very concept of the Renaissance: it affirms itself as doing something new and individual, but also as repeating something that has been done already – not a birth but a rebirth, not a discovery but a recovery. The art of ‘discovery’ or ‘invention’ in logic and rhetoric involved finding ideas and themes in an existing store rather than creating new ones. When Sidney’s Astrophil declares that invention is ‘Natures child’ and flees ‘step-dame Studie’ (no. 65), we can sense an ironic distance from his creator, for whom study and imitation were essential parts of the poetic process. Such imitation, however, was not so much a denial of selfhood as a way of finding it: ‘invention’ was in fact beginning to be opposed to mere ‘imitation’ (cp. no. 365 1.27), and we can sense something of that tension between innovation and respect for tradition in the by no means entirely stable gap between Sidney and Astrophil. Words like ‘reformation’, ‘restoration’ and ‘revolution’ in the period served to negotiate between tradition and change: going back to a remote past was a way of criticizing the present while accommodating traditional prejudices against innovation. Opposing political factions would vie with each other for the claim to be restoring the past correctly. Edmund Waller saw Charles’s repairing of St Paul’s Cathedral as a heroic bid to
… higher clime,
And things half swallow’d from the jaws of time
Reduce…
(no. 290 ll.33–5)
Charles’s adversaries, the architects of the English Revolution of 1649, spoke of themselves as restoring ancient liberties. The word ‘revolution’ itself was pivoting between old and new senses: it originally meant the return of a wheel to its original position (cp. no. 194 1.92), but it was coming to be applied to radical innovations, too.9
In the same way, Renaissance individualism began as a process of imitation, of recovering lost voices from the past. What was reborn in the Renaissance was in the first instance the culture of classical antiquity. That culture, of course, had never been entirely lost, and there had been many earlier periods of recovery. In the medieval academic curriculum, however, which came to centre on Aristotle, the Greek texts were studied in Latin translations and overlaid by elaborate commentaries which sought to systematize them into an all-embracing canon of knowledge. This ‘scholastic’ syllabus aroused opposition from a group who became known as ‘humanists’: it was too abstract and dogmatic, it lost sight of the concrete human complexities in the impossible attempt to find universal rules of behaviour. The humanists revived the ancient quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric which went back to Plato’s attacks on the sophists, and often enlisted poetry along with rhetoric in what Sir Philip Sidney termed a ‘civil war among the Muses’.10 Poetry and drama could be valuable sources of political wisdom precisely because they did not aim at a timeless and transcendent truth but examined generalities in the context of specific situations, offering dialogue rather than monologue.11 The humanists wanted to revive the priorities of the classical educational system, to privilege the studia humanitatis – disciplines like grammar, rhetoric, poetics, history and moral philosophy. In the texts of classical antiquity they found voices which seemed to them startlingly fresh and contemporary – the voices of a culture which was in certain respects more secular and individualistic than their own epoch.12 The fourteenth-century Italian humanist Petrarch felt acute shock and excitement when he discovered copies of Cicero’s letters and recognized an individual more problematic and deviously political than the traditional image of a pious dispenser of moral maxims.
Hunting through monasteries for such fragments as might have survived of ancient manuscripts, the humanists experienced the full pathos of what had been lost by time, and often also by conscious censorship exercised by the Christian Church, and they tried to recover as much as possible. Such texts as had survived had been copied and recopied until multiple errors had crept in. Petrarch compared such corrupt texts to the Roman ruins that still dominated many parts of the Italian landscape: if one were skilful enough, perhaps one could reconstruct them, but the danger of error was ever-present.13 On a larger scale, the Romance languages themselves were ruined Latin, a palimpsest beneath which the original words could be uncovered by the archaeological technique of the etymologist. The humanists’ sensitivity to language heightened their historical consciousness: their philological techniques exposed as a forgery the ‘Donation of Constantine’ by which the papacy had claimed special powers passed on to it from the Roman Emperors (no. 341 ll.95–6), thus highlighting the gulf between their own traditions and the quite different political structures of classical antiquity: textual criticism became a political critique. Scholars investigating the etymology of the word ‘feudum’ became aware that it was derived not from Roman but from Germanic laws of landholding, and thus began to formulate a historical model involving a sharp break between classical antiquity and feudalism. It became possible to call for a restoration of classical political forms and agrarian policies – what James Harrington termed ‘ancient prudence’ – to counter the corruptions of feudal social and political forms.14 Humanists experimented with what would today be called theories of ideology as they exposed the rhetorical strategies, the mystifying images and representations, with which corrupt institutions had justified their power.
The poets’ sense of their belatedness, of the need to repeat what had been said before, could of course become intimidating, with the dispiriting idea that, as Shakespeare put it, love ‘makes antiquitie for aye his page’, so that the lover’s ‘thou mine, I thine’ is no more than repetition (no. 351). In repudiating many of their own political and cultural traditions as a falling-off from classical purity, Renaissance humanists cast themselves as the heirs to barbarians. Renaissance classicism, however, was a great deal more confident than the more rigidly rule-bound neoclassicism of the succeeding era. Renaissance poets freely mingled traditional genres and invented new ones (cp. Appendix 1). The period was a great age of translation, but there was no clear dividing-line between translation and imitation. Rhetoricians described imitation as a process of struggle, of wrestling with the texts of the great antecedents, and the metaphor implied that the struggle was an even one.15 The ancient world had been neglected for so long that it was a new continent much like the new worlds being discovered by the navigators. Both forms of discovery, it was sometimes argued, were signs of a providential dispensation, of long-lost truths that were being at last yielded to a favoured age. Discovery could be hard to separate from plunder. Sir John Harington directly compared the processes:
You’le spoile the Spaniards, by your writ of Mart:
And I the Romanes rob, by wit, and Art.
(no. 349 ll.9–10)
In his dedicatory sonnet to The Faerie Queene, Ralegh presented Spenser’s recovery of the poetic creations of Petrarch and Homer as a kind of grave-robbing. Spenser himself had translated a poem in which the French humanist du Bellay compared the rediscovery of Rome to necromancy, raising the ‘Idole’ of the dead by ‘Magicke skill’ (no. 335).16 Renaissance humanists could thus be figured both as vindicators of the classical world against the barbarians and as barbarians sacking it anew. Predatory though their greedy acquisition of classical poetry might sometimes seem, however, it included a genuine respect for the otherness of the past, a scholarly interest in words and cultural forms whose very distance from the present provided a stimulus to the imagination: a process of dialogue rather than simple appropriation. Marlowe could find equal stimulus in the irreverent eroticism of Ovid (no. 339) and the acerbic anti-courtly rhetoric of Lucan (no. 340), and adopt very different voices in response. Chapman was fuelled in his project of translating Homer (no. 344) by the conviction that he had been possessed by the Greek poet’s spirit. Marvell probed his response to the revolutionary events of 1649–50 by going back as scrupulously as possible to the voice of Horace’s public odes (no. 45).
The excitement of recovery extended beyond particular literary genres to the timbre and rhythm of the verse line. Renaissance poets considered the accentual metre they had inherited from the Middle Ages to be too crude, too pedestrian, and sought a new metrical basis for English verse (cp. Appendix 2). For a time they experimented with restoring the metrical forms of classical poetry, which were based on syllable length rather than stress (cp. nos. 181, 333, 337). Pedantic as these largely unsuccessful projects may seem today, they had the visionary aim of making English words dance in a lost harmony. It was believed that Greek verse had been based on a principle of musical proportion, and that the ancients had been able to match the meanings of words with their sensuous properties in a particularly exquisite way.17 The philosopher Pythagoras was known to have believed that numerical proportions were the key to the cosmos: complex harmonies structured everything from the positions of the heavenly bodies to musical notes. The pioneers of Renaissance opera and song were trying to regain a pristine unity of words and music: it was appropriate that Monteverdi should have taken as the plot of one of the first great operas the myth of Orpheus, who tried by the beauty of his song to recover his loved one from the underworld. Spenser and other poets soon abandoned their quantitative experiments, but they tried to create, or recreate, an equivalent harmony in the ‘iambic pentameter’ line with its complex interplay of stress and syllable-counting. In Spenser’s Epithalamion, the elaborate vowel-patterns of the carefully structured stanzas culminate with an Orphean appeal for the landscape to answer and echo his song. The whole poem has an elaborate numerical structure, its patterns of long and short lines enacting the precise proportions between light and dark on the day of his wedding in Ireland, so that the text becomes part of the cosmic processes it celebrates.18
For the poets of the northern Renaissance, the process of imitation was a doubly complicated one: in one sense they were particularly belated, for Italian humanism had a massive lead over them; on the other hand, northern humanists drawing on new principles of textual criticism had helped to stimulate a process of religious reformation more thoroughgoing than anything undertaken in Italy. Humanist scholarship on the Donation of Con-stantine had undermined the authority of the Roman Church; and northern humanists were increasingly dissatisfied with the traditional Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate. Sidney was excited by the prospect that scholars were at last discovering the secret of the metrical basis of the Hebrew Psalms after centuries of neglect, and he and his sister could find a voice in David’s poems (nos. 31, 336–8). It was by checking the Vulgate against the original Hebrew and Greek forms that reformers fuelled their challenge to Catholic tradition and called for a renaissance of the simplicity of the early Church. Erasmus, the pioneer of humanism in the Netherlands and northern Europe in the early sixteenth century, campaigned for widely available vernacular translations of the Bible at a time when this was seen as a dangerous transfer of interpretative authority away from the priest toward the individual.
It was certainly true that new methods of interpretation could become increasingly challenging to the traditional order. A growing body of interpreters argued that the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of St John the Divine, concealed behind its cloudy allegories some very specific prophecies. Its references to the reign of Christ for a thousand years could be taken to refer to the era from Christ’s birth to the growing corruption of the medieval Church (cp. no. 261), but it could also be held to point forward to a future reign of Christ and his saints over a renewed earth: the years 1650 and 1666 were looked forward to as marking crucial transformations in mankind’s history. Thus advances in textual interpretation, the unveiling of hidden meanings, became for radical Protestants at once a herald to and a sign of the revelation or renaissance of true religion after epochs of corruption. While Protestantism did encourage greater attention to individual religious practice at the expense of the status of the Church, it also provided a strong imperative towards collective action in reforming abuses in Church and State. Milton’s first major poem, ‘On the morning of Christs Nativity’ (no. 270), reveals the growing apocalyptic fervour of many Protestants by the 1630s; its vision goes far beyond the individual’s destiny, yet it also displays a virtually unprecedented confidence in the poet’s prophetic status. Milton outdoes classical poetry with a poetic evocation of the music of divine creation which pagan myths only dimly recalled. The young Milton was already foreshadowing his epic project of lifting ‘Human imagination to such highth/Of Godlike Power’ that it could overcome the Fall, and re-enact the creation of Eden itself (Paradise lost, VI ll.300–1).
If the Renaissance nurtured individualism, then, it was as part of a process of imitation and recovery. Moreover, the dominance of individualism in the Renaissance has often been exaggerated by later epochs which have read back their own individualism into the period. Poetry anthologies have often heightened this distortion by concentrating narrowly on the lyric. The period is characterized as much by dialogue as by monologue, and its poets displayed a growing concern with their public responsibility. The idea of constructing a ‘golden world’ might seem escapist, anticipating later theories of the total independence of poetry from society, but for Sidney its aim was didactic, inspiring the translation of its ideal visions into everyday practice. This idea was certainly not without problems, and throughout the period there was a tension between the humanist insistence on the value of the active life and the attractions of the umbra, the shade, of contemplative life (cp. no. 31 ll.1–8, 43, no. 45 1.3, no. 353 1.48). For many poets of the period, however, the gap between poetry and the active life was in any case a narrow one. Shelley might speak of poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators’, but in the Renaissance they were acknowledged: More, Wyatt, Sidney, Greville, Ralegh, Davies, Donne, Herbert, Waller and Marvell were among the leading poets who sat in Parliament. For them, poetry was not necessarily a total escape; but its devices of formal distancing – parody, allusion, irony, genre, metre – helped to form an imaginative distance from the everyday discourses of public life which could facilitate political and intellectual independence. Constructing a golden world could be a means of criticizing the given world.
This emphasis on the practical social function of poetry meant that it was seldom sharply distinguished from rhetoric (cp. no. 265 ll.63–4): Daniel saw poetry as rhetoric’s ‘mother’ (no. 353 1.67), and many poetic genres were subsumed under classical oratorical categories (see Appendix 1). The recovery of classical rhetoric had important political implications. In the republican phases of Greek and Roman culture, rhetoric had been a central means of participation in public life: citizens were trained in rhetoric in order to claim their rightful place in the processes of decision-making. When power passed from republic to empire under Augustus’s dynasty, however, rhetoric had dwindled in its practical significance as public dialogue was reduced to an imperial monologue and citizens dwindled to subjects. The dominant rhetorical modes shifted from the ‘deliberative’, the art of political persuasion, to ‘demonstrative’ or ‘epideictic’ rhetoric, the ceremonial praise of rulers and patrons. The triumph of Christianity had resulted in a further undermining of classical political ideals. For St Augustine, the earthly city, the secular political order, was inherently inferior to the heavenly city, and the contemplative life took priority over the active life. The ‘civic humanists’ of the Renaissance challenged this devaluation of the active life and hence of political rhetoric; they tended to favour republican forms of government.19 Their cult of liberty distanced them from feudal and absolutist political orders, though it would be anachronistic to equate their views with modern liberalism. The values they derived from classical writers emphasized the priority of the common good over the individual, and their concept of liberty was a positive one, implying a duty to participate in public life, rather than a negative defence against State encroachment.20 The Roman ruling élite had been a small and selective one, and Renaissance republicanism often had an aristocratic rather than a democratic emphasis. None the less, it provided a discourse which challenged many traditional institutions.
For pioneering humanists in northern Europe, such as Sir Thomas More, the discourse of civic humanism was compelling but disturbingly powerless, so alien to their everyday world that it was most easily addressed not in their own language but in Latin, the language of the international humanist republic of letters. It was in Latin that More most directly confronted the tension between civic humanist ideals and his own political context, both in verse (no. 3) and in his sceptical fantasy of a rationally ordered republic, the Utopia (1516). Soon after publishing the Utopia, More entered the royal service: as so often in the sixteenth century, the humanist rhetorician turned courtier. This was partly a matter of bowing to the inevitable. More’s Utopia had been founded by an enlightened prince, reflecting the fact that the monarchy alone had the immediate power to institute humanist educational reforms. It needed articulate administrators, and joined with the humanists in distrusting the traditional aristocratic cult of military honour. The nobility must be civilized: in helping to transform them into polished courtiers, sublimating their pursuit of individual honour into a new cult of honour gained in the service of the State, humanists could feel that they were serving the cause of political rationality. Henry VIII did encourage classical studies in the universities, and there began what has been termed an ‘educational revolution’ which extended from the aristocracy, who developed a considerably higher level of education than their Continental counterparts, to local grammar schools. The overall literacy rate may have remained as low as 30 per cent by 1642, but in some areas it was very much higher and extended well beyond the ruling élite.21 This ‘revolution’ helped to lay the foundations for the cultural Renaissance. It also introduced generations of pupils to a world of republican values, to writers like Cicero for whom monarchy was a barbaric and archaic form of government: though civic humanist discourse remained marginal within the institutions of court, Church and common law, it became a significant element in the period’s complex medley of political discourses.22
The immediate prospect of an active life for an ambitious young writer lay not in dreaming of Roman antiquity but in serving the Crown. The prospect of an alliance with the Crown was an appealing one for many poets in the period. In adopting the demonstrative rhetoric of the court, writing panegyrics of the ruler and leading courtiers, they could think of themselves as in effect writing the script of the public world, fulfilling the humanist imperative of making their verbal skill serve the State. The resultant compromises with courtly discourse, however, were often uneasy. More himself went to the block in 1535 not only for his loyalty to the Roman Church but also for his resistance to Henry’s unconstitutional methods of rule. John Skelton, who had hailed Henry’s accession with enthusiasm, also had a turbulent career. Skelton was no radical humanist: he was hostile to the new Greek learning, and the Latin that sounds through ‘Phyllyp Sparowe’ (no. 307) is the medieval Latin of the liturgy rather than the humanists’ academic language. The characteristic Skeltonic metre, with its heaped, accumulated rhymes, strongly resists the humanists’ idea that rhyme was a clumsy, ‘barbaric’ cultural form which the classical age had wisely avoided (cp. no. 354). Yet Skelton did share with the humanists a heightened sense of the poet’s dignity and right to mould public events. His bids for advancement from the young Henry VIII on his accession to the throne in 1509 (no. 1) met limited encouragement, his way apparently being blocked by the King’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey. Skelton eventually fought back by adopting an increasingly oppositional rhetoric. Turning from a courtly to a city audience, in Collyn Clout (1522) he adopted the persona of a plain-speaking rustic denouncing abuses in the Church (no. 247). Although he covered himself by attacking the emergent underground groups of Protestants, his poem was probably sponsored by a Londoner with Protestant leanings and designed to gain favour with a wider public.23 Looking back from the 1570s, Spenser could see Skelton as a pioneer of Protestant humanism and take up his persona as Colin. There was, however, no security in writing satires, even if they did gain public fame, and within a year Skelton had sought Wolsey’s pardon and was back in favour. Before long he was calling for the burning of the heretics his satires had helped to inspire; and yet he was doing so in a poem which claimed for the poet precisely the kind of prophetic individuality to which Protestants laid claim (no. 346).
Skelton’s involvement with Protestantism and humanism was not deep-rooted; Sir Thomas Wyatt, by contrast, took a keen interest in contemporary Continental humanism on his travels in the royal service, and was a pioneer in translating Petrarch’s poetry. He is sometimes seen as quintessentially a court poet, but his poems take a sceptical view of the courtly rhetoric of praise and he did not write public poems for ceremonial occasions. His lyrics take us behind the public scenes, into a world where political and erotic life are both composed of ever-shifting tactical alliances, and even the occasional success is attributed to ‘fortune’ (no. 53 1.8). His intrigues became dangerous when his relationship with Anne Boleyn brought him into direct conflict with the King. Desperate to produce a male heir, Henry had determined to divorce Catherine of Aragon and had settled on Anne Boleyn as her successor. Wyatt seems to have voiced his frustration in some of his poems (cp. no. 54), and the King’s suspicions of his loyalty led to several periods of imprisonment.
It was probably soon after one imprisonment, in 1536, that Wyatt composed ‘Myn owne John poyntz’ (no. 223), which draws on contemporary republican discourse. The poem is generically innovative: Skelton’s satires followed a vernacular tradition of harsh denunciation, speaking with a collective voice, whereas Wyatt turns to the classical verse satire, whose voice was more personal and ironic, discussing his grievances with a specific individual. Wyatt is drawing not directly on Roman poetry but on a classicizing satire by the Florentine poet Luigi Alamanni. In the early sixteenth century, Florence had see-sawed between monarchical and republican forms of government, an oscillation reflected in the writings of her leading political theorist, Niccolò Machiavelli. Despite his notoriety as an apologist for ruthless authoritarian rule in The Prince (written around 1513), he later celebrated the cult of republican liberty in his Discourses on the Roman historian Livy. Machiavelli had made Alamanni one of the speakers in his dialogue The Art of War. It was as an exile after his involvement in a republican plot that Luigi Alamanni wrote the satire which Wyatt imitated. Wyatt declares, with Alamanni, that he cannot ‘alow the state’ of Julius Caesar with his monarchical aspirations. Though he removes a reference to Brutus, who had assassinated Julius Caesar in the name of republican liberty, it is only to substitute a glance at More’s fate, with an allusion to the innocent victim Cato.24 Wyatt refers his reader to Livy, who was not in fact an important source for the story of Cato; the reference evokes the world of Machiavelli’s Discourses. Wyatt uses the term ‘comonn wele’, whose democratic associations were to cause the more conservative humanist Sir Thomas Elyot to call for its replacement by ‘publike weal’.25 Wyatt’s reservations about monarchs who owe their authority not to God but to ‘fortune’ (1.8) certainly did not make him a radical democrat, however, and the whole poem may seem somewhat disingenuous: the real ‘cause’ he fled the court was not so much moral integrity as the fact that he had been banished, and before long he would be back in search of further advancement: despite the repeated cries of ‘I cannot’, he could. It is possible to be too cynical about such dilemmas, however: even if we see Wyatt as simply trying to rationalize his self-interests at any particular moment, he had to do so by means of discourses which demanded that he universalize his situation.
Like More, Wyatt found it impossible to find a public discourse which would satisfactorily harmonize humanist suspicion of the court’s structural inequalities and the strong humanist imperative toward the active life. At this time of crisis, he turns to a more private discourse which none the less has political resonances: like-minded friends could address each other in their letters without the evasions of courtly rhetoric, helping to build up a republic of letters whose boundaries cut across the geographical limits of monarchies. ‘Myn owne John poyntz’ is not just a transparent expression of personality: in adapting a new kind of literary model, Wyatt was creating a new kind of space for discourse. The work involved in that activity included the arduous process of introducing into English the difficult metre of Alamanni’s terza rima, which was associated in Italian with popular, non-courtly poetry. Wyatt’s retreat from the court is acknowledged as less than perfect or complete – his local liberty is a house arrest, so that even while hunting he has points in common with the captured hind (no. 54), leaving tracks in the snow for his enemies to read. Writing to a friend made a more secure mark.
In his later years Wyatt seems to have turned increasingly toward Protestant ideas, which coloured his versions of the Penitential Psalms. The religious situation, however, was insecure and unpredictable. The King’s increasingly desperate desire for a male heir overruled his respect for traditional restrictions on divorce and pushed him into breaking with Rome and declaring himself head of the English Church. The new Church of England was thus established from above rather than from below; how far it would lead to a full establishment of Protestant ideas and religious practices remained unclear. The reformers received a sharp setback in 1540 when Thomas Cromwell, who had been sympathetic to their views, suddenly fell from power; Wyatt’s sonnet on his fall (no. 7) registers his intense disquiet.
Wyatt’s death the following year produced a tribute from Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, which revealed the common humanist bonds that could cut across differing political alignments (no. 309). Surrey’s pride in his Howard ancestry made him hostile to Cromwell and his allies. His poetry evokes the world of chivalry and tournaments more colourfully than Wyatt’s. The epitaph on Clere (no. 308) enacts the social bonds of aristocratic tradition by placing the deceased man’s name in a subordinate clause, giving pride of place to the Howards’ Norfolk estate. Clere was buried in the family vault, and Surrey makes even his death an obliging act of deference towards the family.26 The still-innovative form of the sonnet, however, establishes Surrey’s interest in new humanist ideas. His translation of Virgil (no. 332) pioneered blank verse, which reflected the humanists’ disparagement of rhyme and their quest for a metre which would capture in the vernacular something of the flavour of classical unrhymed verse. Stale as that metre may seem today, for the sixteenth century blank verse would have had a quality of risk as each line in turn launched out on its ten-syllable progress without the safety net of rhyme. The ‘lordly port’ (no. 332 1.31) of Surrey’s Virgil translation is more self-consciously stately than the immediately preceding version by Gavin Douglas or its successor by Stanyhurst (no. 333). Surrey’s humanism was courtly in emphasis, and he saw cultural innovativeness as a means of giving a new lustre to traditional social rank.
Surrey’s concern with decorous order and proportion has made his poetry less popular in the present century than Wyatt’s; closer reading, however, reveals the edge behind the apparent blandness. The artistic discipline he sought was in part a form of self-discipline against the periodic eruption of an unregenerate aristocratic violence and unruliness. Surrey’s pride in his birth made him extremely resistant to royal authority, and he was eventually executed for allegedly conspiring to take the throne himself on Henry’s death; his poetry can be as sharp as Wyatt’s in its critique of tyranny (no. 8).
In 1549 the stately mansion which Surrey had built outside Norwich was occupied by agrarian rebels led by Robert Kett. The political pendulum had swung rapidly: the Protestant faction at court had eventually prevailed, and their influence over the boy-king Edward VI when he came to the throne in 1547 led to a relaxation of censorship controls on Protestant writings and a substantial expansion of the public sphere.27 The Edwardian period saw the interpenetration of several different discourses of social protest. In a tradition going back to Langland’s Piers Plowman, which was edited in 1550 by the reforming poet Robert Crowley (cp. no. 10), religious reformers had adopted the persona and the rugged, uncourtly diction of the ploughman or shepherd. Luke Shepherd – the name may be an appropriate pseudonym – pushes the rhetoric of Skelton’s Collyn Clout in a more radical direction, parodying the authoritarian language of courtly Latin (no. 249). Such populist rhetoric drew on traditions of secular complaint and protest, which were articulating a new wave of resistance to the disruption of the traditional agrarian order by enclosures. Large areas of land which had formerly been in common ownership were being taken over for sheep farming, dispossessing the traditional occupants who were driven to work as hired wage labourers.
Encouraged by some humanist advisers, the government began to take measures against unduly disruptive enclosures. Humanist anti-aristocratic discourse could converge with protests based on an older ethic of rural solidarity: Machiavelli had blamed the decline of the Roman republic on the aristocracy’s selfish refusal to accept agrarian reform, and More had attacked enclosures in his Utopia, which was translated from its humanist Latin into English in the Edwardian period. For humanist writers, the figure of the protesting ploughman in popular culture could fuse with the shepherd of the classical eclogue. Virgil’s first eclogue, a key schoolroom text (no. 361 1.37), opened with a complaint by Meliboeus that was read as a protest against Augustus’s redistribution of land after the Roman civil wars.28 Some poems of the mid-century were ready to present the rebels’ viewpoint (cp. no. 177).
Such sympathy, however, was easily lost: it was one thing for social reforms to be proposed from above, another for the people to take matters into their own hands. Kett’s supporters were not the mindless anarchists of hostile propaganda: for example, their occupation of Surrey’s house seems to have been carefully targeted, reflecting their resentment at his family’s notorious resistance to freeing their feudally subordinated ‘bondmen’. The opponents of enclosure had set themselves to ‘restore’ a traditional order which they saw as threatened by selfish individualism (no. 177 1.71). Nevertheless, the spectacle of dispossessed labourers occupying a nobleman’s home starkly juxtaposed culture and anarchy. After 1549, humanists tended to become more and more assertive in distancing themselves from populist tendencies and, since Roman humanists like Cicero had been elitists with an acute anxiety about popular protest and demagoguery, they could find classical precedents for such an attitude. The masses, they assumed, would never be capable of the level of education necessary for full participation in the civic life.
The humanists’ economic programmes in any case tended to offer limited consolation to the rural poor, insisting on the need for a strict social discipline which hit both aristocratic conspicuous consumption and some of the traditional safety-valves of feasting and recreation.29 Humanists were anxious to encourage the wool trade, whose prosperity depended on further enclosures. In later Elizabethan pastoral, the shepherd often changes from a voice of protest to an emblem of the leisure secured for the gentry by agrarian change.30 May Day festivities had often been a rallying point for social protest, with Robin Hood and Maid Marion as festive agents of misrule. In many later versions of the legend, however, Robin becomes promoted to an earl and purged of his populist associations. The figure of the Pinder of Wakefield similarly oscillates between subversion and respectability; he often figures as a law-abiding opponent of Robin, yet within a single version of the ballad (no. 178) his status seems to shift from a yeoman who considers himself equal to any baron to a hireling eager to escape wage-slavery by joining the outlaws.31 In the later sixteenth century, Protestant radicals – who became widely known as ‘Puritans’ – grew more and more hostile to traditional rural rituals, which they saw as vestiges of superstition and idolatry, while traditionalists idealized these rituals as maintaining a deep-rooted harmony with the rhythms of nature. Representations of rural festivities had become loaded with contradictory meanings, making it possible for Spenser in his ‘Maye’ eclogue to pit different literal and allegorical representations of rural festivity against each other in a complex dialogue which still leaves critics in doubt as to which view prevails and how ‘Puritan’ he was (no. 182).32
Anxiety about social upheavals contributed to the limited support obtained by a Protestant faction which attempted to stave off a Catholic succession with the rival claim of Lady Jane Grey in 1553. Historians still debate whether Protestantism was so deeply rooted at this time that Mary’s attempts to bring the nation back to the Catholic fold were doomed to failure. Certainly, the ruthlessly pragmatic means by which Henry VIII had broken with Rome left a lasting residue of scepticism (nos. 251, 255), and there had been popular risings against religious reform in 1549. But that scepticism could also undermine any attempt to return to a purified Catholicism. Heywood’s poem on Mary’s marriage to Philip II of Spain (1554) indicates some of the ideological problems her regime encountered (no. 11). As a woman, she was expected to subordinate herself to a husband; but in choosing to marry the king of a powerful Catholic country she aroused nationalistic as well as religious fears. The persecutions and burnings that ensued reconciled many conservative waverers to the accession of Mary’s Protestant sister Elizabeth in 1558. A more pragmatic motivation was alarm at Mary’s attempts to reclaim the Church’s lands. Henry VIII’s Reformation had resulted in a massive transfer of lands into the secular domain, and much of this land had been sold off. In the short term these measures gave large sections of the gentry a vested interest in a Protestant monarchy. To the Crown, however, these sales also represented a hostage to fortune, an exchange of long-term power for short-term interest; lacking a standing army and a large professional bureaucracy, the monarchy needed the cooperation of the gentry, both inside and outside Parliament.
Elizabeth learned from the mistakes of her half-sister Mary. She and her supporters made a virtue of her sex, exploiting its complex symbolic resonances. Her refusal to marry became ultimately a symbol of national independence, and she became the centre of an enthusiastic literary cult of monarchy. Although she did not contribute very much directly to literary patronage, her court was a great deal less forbidding in atmosphere than Henry’s. While she was not puritanical, she insisted that the cult of royal virginity should be taken seriously, and her court did not attract the lurid denunciations of sexual immorality so often found in Renaissance anti-court satire. Her virgin status also acquired religious meanings. John Foxe, a friend of the prophetic poet Robert Crowley, gave definitive form to an enormously influential apocalyptic monarchism. On this view, the Roman Church, justifying its actions by the notorious Donation of Constantine, had usurped not only true religion but also the State, subordinating royal power to the Pope. The Reformation thus restored if not the primitive Church then at least the status quo of the reign of the Emperor Constantine. Queen Elizabeth, as a female ruler, fitted neatly into this symbolism, becoming likened to the Woman Clothed with the Sun, the antitype of the villainous Whore of Babylon of Revelation.33 Protestants’ belief that an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil was in progress was sharpened after the Council of Trent in 1562 called for militant doctrinal and political opposition to the heretics: in 1570 Elizabeth was excommunicated.
As head of the Church, Elizabeth presided over a complicated compromise. The thrust of reformed Protestantism was to diminish the mediating role of the priesthood and of ritual in the struggle for salvation. The spiritual forces at work in the relations between man and God were too immense to be represented in the ornamental, external forms of images. In one of her Psalm translations, the Countess of Pembroke elaborated on the original to express this Protestant vision of a transcendent cosmic order testifying to God’s unbreakable covenant with the elect: ‘who is above that may compare with mighty Jehova?’ (no. 3371.15).34 If faith alone gave salvation, if God’s election took precedence over man’s freedom, then the role of the Church’s rituals was sharply diminished. The Elizabethan settlement was not a radical one, however: many of the old rituals remained, and there was space in the Church for those who had doubts about Calvinist teaching on predestination.
This compromise reflected the fact that Elizabeth herself was no militant evangelical; but she had been imprisoned under Mary’s reign, and for many of her subjects she became a potent symbol of virtuous opposition finally gaining divine recognition (no. 12). A group of prominent aristocrats, led by the Earl of Leicester, urged her to greater activism in abolishing the remains of superstition at home and in rallying Protestant forces throughout Europe. They also sponsored cultural change, a ‘reformation’ of poetry along Protestant lines. God’s word was to be relished not just for its divine content but for its poetic power too: in their translations of the Psalms, Leicester’s nephew and niece, Philip and Mary Sidney, set themselves to match David’s divine eloquence with their own formal virtuosity. Mary Sidney praised the Queen as a new David, combining the roles of godly prince and champion of the Muses (no. 31). Elizabeth had after all received a humanist education, and she wrote a number of translations and original poems (cp. nos. 13, 20). It was thus appropriate that in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene she should have served at once as muse and as symbol of political and religious reformation.35 Sidney, Ralegh and many other poets joined in the chorus of praise.
The cult of Elizabeth was not without political tensions, however. She feared that the Leicester circle’s militancy risked kindling subversion at home, and that their keen support of the godly struggle against Catholic oppression on the Continent might threaten the prestige of monarchical rule. The circle’s social self-definition was complex: many of them had gained wealth and titles relatively recently, but they often identified themselves with the feudal aristocracy who recalled a time when monarchs had been no more than first among equals. They feared that the monarchy’s growing power might threaten their traditional liberties, that ‘Honor’ was becoming ‘the creature of Authoritie’ (no. 26 1.16).36 Their militancy reflected not only godly zeal but also a strong desire for the profits to be gained from imperial expansion. The Dudley–Sidney–Devereux dynasties were to play an important part in cultural and political life down to the Civil War, when they sided with Parliament against the monarchy. In The Faerie Queene, Elizabeth may serve as a static image of virtue, but the main agency in the poem is reserved for masculine knights or for Amazonian females like Britomart, who loves the militant Artegall (cp. no. 32). In a manner characteristic of the period, Spenser revises a backward-looking chivalric imagery in the name of a new Protestant–humanist discourse, an aristocratic populism.
Sir Philip Sidney followed a similar programme in his prose epic the Arcadia. Though he is today celebrated as a dashing courtier, his relations with the Queen were somewhat strained, and his ‘Ister Bank’ eclogue (no. 14) shows why. The poem alludes to his conversations with the French Protestant Hubert Languet, who kept Sidney in contact with Continental theorists of resistance to absolutism. The poem adopts the populist modes of the beast-fable, the vernacular pastoral and the golden-age myth, but it gives them an aristocratic twist, insisting that even in early times there was ‘order’, specifically the rule of the ‘beasts with courage clad’ who made up the ‘Senators’. The poem reveals the Sidney circle’s political ambivalence, with their call for liberty against royal encroachments being sharply qualified by the fear that the common people might threaten their own privileges. Monarchy and people are here presented as forming an unholy alliance: the multitude institute monarchy out of spite at the nobility’s privileges. The biblical story of God’s warning the Israelites against kingship is shifted into a sardonic mode, with the call for a king becoming a dissonant medley of animal cries. Although the poem’s final political sympathies remain open to debate, it is not surprising that the Queen found Sidney politically unreliable. When he was killed in a campaign in the Netherlands, intense popular mourning contrasted with the lack of an adequate official monument (no. 15).
Sidney’s literary output had been by no means uniformly pious, revealing a tension between Christian and secular discourses, but in his later years he had turned increasingly to religious poetry, including the ambitious translation of the Psalms, which his sister Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, continued. The Sidney Psalms drew heavily on the French versions by Clément Marot and Théodore de Bèze, whose militancy served to marshal resistance to the Catholic monarchy in France. Bèze invoked Psalm 52, in which David denounces a massacre of the godly, as a precedent for Protestant resistance after the massacre of ‘heretics’ on St Bartholomew’s Day 1572 (cp. Anne Dowriche’s treatment of this episode, no. 17). The Countess of Pembroke’s ringing address to the ‘Tyrant’ is secure in the confidence that God will ‘crush’ him (no. 336). Even the stars, in her version, become ‘armed squadrons’ (no. 337 1.4). Such vehemence was not altogether reassuring to monarchs, however godly they might consider themselves to be.
It was Sir Walter Ralegh who gave the negative subtext of the cult of Elizabeth its fullest expression. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser portrays Ralegh as the squire Timias, concerned exclusively with the Queen’s private person, Belphoebe, and indeed Ralegh’s relationship with Elizabeth was a fundamentally private one of personal dependence. His unorthodox religious views and political restlessness gave his court career a particular degree of insecurity. He risked Elizabeth’s disfavour by challenging the cult of the Virgin Queen: ladies of her bedchamber were meant to be virgins, and he married one without royal permission. For this offence he was consigned to the Tower. It may have been during this imprisonment that he began work on ‘The 21th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’ (no. 21), which is at once an ironically incomplete epic, a ruined sonnet sequence, a self-woven funeral shroud, a complaint, a pastoral, a satire, a recantation and, almost despite the author, a love-poem to a remarkable woman. The poem constantly undermines its panegyric by misogynistic outbursts against being governed by a mere woman whose castigations gave his ‘longe arections’ a ‘suddayne fall’ (no. 21 1.230); Ralegh revealingly presents the court poet’s art as one of ‘hydinge’ all ‘trespase, and mischance, for her own glorye’. And yet he cannot rest in satire: he is constantly tugged back to a real wonder. The Queen has come to signify not just a particular woman but the lost beauty of the deities of antiquity, ‘Th’Idea remayninge of thos golden ages’, which Ralegh’s poetic skill has been able to recapture. In the humanist tradition, however, Ralegh cannot remain content with contemplating an abstract symbol: he has willed himself to link this ideal with the real person of the Queen, to make abstract beauty and truth engage with the practical political world. And for all his frustration, Ralegh knew that she was in fact an exceptionally able ruler; that awareness had to some degree to trouble the sexual stereotypes. The poem is torn apart by its uncertainties, and its climactic line abandons any attempt to unify the opposing forces: ‘Shee is gonn, Shee is lost, shee is found, shee is ever faire’ (1. 493).
Ralegh was able to regain favour, and even in its despair his poem draws resonance from the dominant traditions of public poetry. For a younger generation, however, the cult of Elizabeth was becoming less and less meaningful. Donne’s early satires powerfully evoke the emergence of London as a centre of political debate – what Nashe termed an ‘open Theater of opinions’.37 Jürgen Habermas has analysed the development of what he termed a ‘bourgeois public sphere’, a realm of debate in which citizens could participate as equals, independently of pressure from monopolies of power.38 Though he dates the full emergence of the public sphere to 1695, its development in England, while uneven, was also remarkably precocious, and precipitated countermeasures by the authorities, who were anxious to limit public discussion of ‘mysteries of state’.39 Young men about town gathered outside and inside St Paul’s Cathedral, where all three forces Foxe had singled out as great vehicles of the reforming spirit – preachers, players and printers – were offering their wares.
The literary market-place had reached a point that was making a career as a professional writer just barely viable, permitting greater independence from court patronage. The remarkable institution of the public theatre became a highly significant forum for dialogue on ideas that would be considered unorthodox at court or in the universities, and many of the period’s leading poets wrote partly or primarily for the stage.40 We may owe Shakespeare’s narrative poems (nos. 100–1) to a temporary closure of the theatres because of the plague. The theatres might still notionally be under the patronage of the monarch or leading noblemen, but their financial basis was increasingly independent of the Crown. The space of the stage could serve as an imaginary ‘world’ permitting a significant distance from received ideas. For an audience aware that the actors might be wearing cast-off clothes from the court, the rituals of power became demystified, a commodity like the tourist-guide’s endlessly repeated patter (no. 29 ll.14, 122). Theatres also quickly became familiar enough to serve as an allegory for mental processes (no. 184), and poets would spend an evening reciting to each other their favourite passages from plays (no. 361 I.9). Critics have often ascribed the increasingly dramatic quality of lyric poetry in the 1590s and 1600s to the theatre’s influence – Donne, though not a playwright, was a great playgoer (no. 28 1.33, no. 29 1.33). It can also be said that a tendency to drama and dialogue was itself intrinsic to humanism, and that the astonishingly rapid development of the public stage owed something to humanist educational practice. Even poets like Greville who suspected the public stage as breeding immorality could explore sensitive political issues in dialogue form in their closet dramas.
A theatrical career was financially precarious, however. Nor was the market for printed books secure, especially in the absence of authorial copyright. In any case, the major public demand was for the kind of moral didacticism that the young intellectuals of the 1590s were starting to view sceptically. While bad harvests in the 1590s provoked an economic crisis for the rural poor, the very success of humanist policies for limiting domestic consumption was starting to pay off for many members of the gentry, who found themselves with new possibilities as consumers.41 Protests against enclosures are to be found in writers like the balladeer Deloney and the satirist Joseph Hall (no. 185), but many young wits were ready to turn their satire against the moralizing stance of the satirist. They might attack the luxury of the court, and yet they were themselves indulging in the intoxications of new modes of conspicuous consumption, from plays to tobacco, and mocking puritanical moralists. The naïve celebration of consumer power in ‘Greensleeves’ (no. 62) would have been too blatant for them, but neither could they go along with the moralizing replies which the ballad had provoked. Furthermore, social criticism was inhibited by the savage crackdown by the authorities on the irreverent ‘Martin Marprelate’ tracts which had called for systematic reforms in the Church. Donne’s satires of the 1590s represent the young poet about town as finding it very difficult to position himself, alike rejecting retirement in his study, the noise and dirt of the streets, and a court which he compares to Dante’s Inferno (nos. 28, 29, 256). Donne’s verse of this period was circulated only in manuscript, and its sceptical view of all forms of public morality and political authority certainly ventured on dangerous ground: the State is ‘rotten’ and all branches of Christianity are equally suspect. Donne’s Catholic origins made him especially vulnerable to official displeasure, and his involuted poetry communicates the vertiginous sense of being a ‘spyed Spie’ (no. 29 1.136). The authorities were indeed keeping an eye on the wits, and in June 1599 further satires were banned and books by several satirists were ordered to be burned.42
By the late 1590s the regime was facing a crisis of legitimacy. The second Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, the political heir of the Leicester circle, became the focus for discontent with what was felt to be the regime’s dilatoriness on religious reform and on the international Protestant struggle. The Queen’s sex came to count against her as courtiers lamented the realm’s lack of manly resolution (cp. no. 30). Sir John Harington dared to hint that it would be better if there were no more female rulers (nos. 24–5). There were fears that corrupt courtiers would monopolize the most likely successor, James VI of Scotland, or even that there might be a Spanish succession. Sir Philip Sidney’s brother Robert was denied court advancement, and his discontent at his semi-exile in the Netherlands perhaps coloured his melancholic love-lyrics (nos. 120–3). In the later books of The Faerie Queene, the cult of Elizabeth plays a less prominent part: Book 6, the Legend of Courtesy, pointedly does not contain a court (no. 348). In 1601 Essex and his followers risked staging a coup d’état to force the Queen’s hand. The plot was an ignominious failure, but even figures like Greville and Donne who had had their reservations about the Earl’s erratic temperament were shaken by his fall.
For Spenser, one of the central causes for complaint had been the government’s Irish policy. In A view of the present state of Ireland, completed around 1596, Spenser had drawn on Machiavelli’s authority in calling for Essex to be given special powers to achieve a decisive victory in Ireland. Partly because of its championship of Essex, the treatise failed to be printed until 1633. It was a manifesto of humanist modernity, calling for a radical remodelling of the island’s social structure, decisively ending the power of the Irish aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Colonists were to be brought in to dispossess the unproductive natives and transform the basis of Irish agriculture. Such a programme was popular with the ‘new English’ settlers led by men like the first Earl of Essex and Sir Philip’s father Sir Henry Sidney, but it overrode the complexities of Irish society, most notably the divisions between the original Irish-speaking inhabitants and the descendants of earlier English settlers, the ‘old English’.43 Many of the ‘old English’ had begun to adapt to Irish traditions, and sometimes to the Irish language, though others insisted strongly on the English element in the Anglo-Irish compound. Something of the resultant cultural tension can perhaps be seen in Richard Stanyhurst’s almost Joycean metrical and linguistic experiments (no. 333). Especially after the establishment in 1541 of Ireland as a separate kingdom, it seemed possible that these processes of cultural coexistence might persist. In Wales, the power-base of the Tudor dynasty, directly comparable cultural forms were allowed to survive and were invested with a patriotic lustre (cp. nos. 180, 192). While Spenser had drawn on Welsh legends for the dynastic framework of The Faerie Queene, however, he extended no such tolerance to Irish traditions. Uneasy about the 1541 Act, he insisted that by its medieval right of conquest England had no need to concede to Ireland the political rights enjoyed by the English. Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, written at about the same time as A view, celebrates his patron Lord Grey’s past achievements against the rebels and calls for resolution in future campaigns. Like many committed English Protestants down to Cromwell and Algernon Sidney and well beyond, he saw Ireland as a kind of laboratory for advanced social engineering, with the Gaelic inhabitants as awkward encumbrances.44
The inevitable result of such policies was a hardening of religious and political sentiments on the other side: Protestantism imposed from above, with sword and halter, was not calculated to win a people’s devotion. The ancestors of today’s Ulster Protestants ironically helped to create Catholic nationalism. There is a certain mirroring effect in juxtaposing Spenser’s celebration of Grey’s role in defeating the Irish rebels with Eochaidh Ó Heóghusa’s praise of Hugh Maguire’s valour against the English (nos. 32–3). Maguire was serving with the forces of Hugh O’Neill, whose campaign in Munster in 1598 had led to the destruction of Spenser’s estate at Kilcolman. Both poems celebrate violence, though James Mangan’s famous translation of Ó Heóghusa, obeying the romanticizing imperatives of a later nationalism, plays down the poem’s militancy in favour of its pathos.45 The poets’ discourses, however, remain radically distinct, reflecting different social as well as national positions. Ó Heóghusa is a bard in an oral tradition, celebrating his personal bonds to his patron and lamenting the decline of the old aristocratic order. In a later poem he complained that he now had to compose poems for the common people in rough accentual measures, there being no more audience for the traditional, intricate syllabic metre.46 Spenser’s mode is more impersonal and less aristocratic. It is true that his poem retains a courtly framework, drawing on medieval and Renaissance romance. Artegall/Grey, the focus of personal allegiance, is represented as a chivalric knight obeying the rules of single combat. He is reinforced, however, by the impersonal killing-machine Talus, and the campaign is given an elaborate ideological defence as a manifestation of cosmic justice. Spenser’s poem as a whole, notionally addressed to a patron who is herself the representative of an entire State, in fact aims through the printed medium at a wide readership going far beyond the aristocracy.
In the short term Spenser’s views did not prevail: his house was burned down by rebels, and Essex, who had paid for his funeral, disastrously failed in his Irish campaign and was then discredited by his failed coup. Before long, however, a more effective military campaign had cleared the way for the colonization of Ulster, and the traditional basis of bardic culture had been destroyed. Some English voices were raised against the harsh treatment of Irish Catholics, notably that of the genial and witty Sir John Harington. But the remarkable episode when he read to the ‘barbaric’ O’Neill from his translation of Ariosto (no. 341) had few parallels, and men like Wither and Milton were to show no regrets about Cromwell’s ruthless campaign of reconquest in 1649–50.47
The Ulster plantations were the work of King James VI and I, the first ruler with the opportunity of unifying all the different cultures of England, Scotland and Ireland: he tried to fuse England and Scotland into the entity of ‘Great Britain’. Scotland itself was of course no homogeneous cultural entity: the Gaelic culture of the north and west was viewed with suspicion from the Lowlands. In the sixteenth century, however, a Scottish national identity was in the process of formation, with its political balance significantly different from England’s.48 There was an important tradition of court poetry, which continued despite political vicissitudes through to the court’s departure to England in 1603. The monarchy was weaker than in England, however, and the discourses of law, politics, education and religion were more open to anti-monarchical currents. Whereas the English reformation was presented as the achievement of a godly monarch handed down to the people, in Scotland religious reform had come more obviously from pressure from below. There was a strong vein of vernacular literature of social protest which was reinforced by the reception of radical currents in humanism and by the Reformers’ campaign for widely available public education. Sir David Lindsay’s poetry could span idioms from the courtly to the popular (cp. no. 4) and his Satire of the thrie estaitis was to be found in many country people’s cottages. While writers could thus address a growing popular audience, the reading public was still very small in comparison with that in England, and the very isolation of the Scots in European terms encouraged many of their writers to address an international humanist audience in Latin. The most celebrated neo-Latin poet, George Buchanan, was in some senses less circumscribed by local political traditions than his English counterparts. His lyrics could fuse traditional seasonal celebrations with classical golden-age myths and the prophetic discourse of the apocalypse (no. 175). As an historian and a political theorist, he criticized absolutism and championed the austerity of the Roman republic. With such a man as tutor to the young King James VI, many writers in England looked forward to James’s probable accession to the English throne as marking a great opportunity. Was not James a patron of court poets and a poet himself?49
The exaggerated expectations which some writers entertained of the new reign were quickly dashed. James was keen to push through a political and cultural union between the two nations (no. 34), but the terms on which this union was to be effected seemed to many both in England and in Scotland to involve an aggrandisement of royal powers: James had reacted strongly and publicly against Buchanan’s democratic tendencies. The advent of large numbers of Scottish courtiers put great strains on the patronage system. The most celebrated and notorious court occasion of the reign saw Frances Howard, a member of an old dynasty with absolutist leanings, marrying the Earl of Somerset, the King’s Scottish favourite, after divorcing her first husband, the third Earl of Essex. The marriage was a slight to the old Sidney and Essex groups; and when it emerged that Frances Howard had arranged the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, an opponent of the match, those like Ben Jonson who had written in praise of the wedding were left in an embarrassing position.
Jonson was the only major poet to enjoy large-scale patronage from James, and his court masques were a long way from the austere humanism he had espoused in the 1590s, when he had been as alienated and sceptical politically as his friend John Donne, verging on republican discourse in his Roman play Sejanus (1603). Jonson always tried to establish for himself a broader public role than that of court poet, however, being ready to risk ridicule by publishing plays as well as poems in his collected works. His poetry of praise celebrated a network of friendships that cut across political factions and public honours, and he was patronized by men like the Earl of Pembroke and Sir Robert Sidney who maintained a stance of independence from the court (no. 190). Yet one thing that saves his more ‘plain’ poetic modes from the risk of blandness is the very difficulty Jonson had in maintaining a position of serene detachment. In his last years, increasingly sick, he turned savagely from the public which had failed to appreciate his late plays and vowed to sing of King Charles instead, but the most powerful work of this late period is not his last masque but the Cary–Morison ode (no. 315). In this poem, the cult of friendship and of the good life has to be fought for in the face of the dark opening, which imitates the baffling obliqueness of Pindar and presents a powerful vision of human futility.
Jonson was not merely a court poet; but he did manage to achieve a public eminence which no other contemporary quite matched, and less favoured poets developed a more directly oppositional style of writing. Fulke Greville, ousted from office, presented an alternative programme for English Protestantism in his idealizing life of Sidney. Greville’s friend Samuel Daniel, who had been widely viewed as the pre-eminent English poet on Spenser’s death, was outflanked by Jonson in the quest for court favour and became critical of the new regime. Like many poets, he found more sympathetic patronage from James’s son Prince Henry, though Daniel had his reservations about the militant colonialism popular in Henry’s circle (no. 194). Henry’s early death in 1612 came as a devastating blow to many, notably to Sir Walter Ralegh, who had hoped that Henry might obtain his release from the Tower where James had had him thrown early in his reign. Ralegh warmly welcomed his friend Sir Arthur Gorges’s project of translating the anti-courtly epic of Lucan (no. 357; cp. no. 35).
Henry’s death marked a stage in the growing alienation from the monarchy of the Jacobean ‘Spenserian’ poets – Michael Drayton, William Browne and George Wither – who began to abandon dynastic compliment as a centre for their major poems, and turned from the court and literary coteries to a wider reading public (cp. no. 361 ll.183–9). They celebrated the countryside rather than the court and the Union. Despite its title, Browne’s Britannia’s pastorals did not venture beyond England and Wales, and Drayton did not take his description of the counties of England in Poly-Olbion north of the border. This failure was not necessarily due to chauvinism – Drayton was an admirer of the Scottish poet William Drummond, who had not joined the southward rush of so many Scottish court poets and who was developing a British rather than a Scots literary language which was to win Milton’s admiration (nos. 267–8). A celebration of English national identity, however, was gradually becoming a means for writers to distance themselves from the court.50 Parts of Drayton’s ninth eclogue (no. 191) were recast in Poly-Olbion, where there is a sense of decline as the muse passes from the Cotswolds to London and the court. The Spenserians’ pastorals are generically eclectic, drawing on the discourses of Spenserian political pastoral and on Virgil’s Georgics, which emphasized the role of labour in the countryside, as well as the Eclogues. Browne uses the ‘glasse prospective’ of his poetic vision to correct the gaze of a monarch used only to the flattering perspectives of court masque, and to draw attention to the economic pressures on the traditional rural order (no. 37 1.35).51
For all their poetic self-consciousness, Browne and his friends were genuinely seeking a more open and spontaneous poetic, one characterized by generic ‘mixtures’ and resembling the subtle gradations of the rainbow’s colours rather than the strict patternings of courtly ceremonial genres; the weaving and flower-arranging of country women can thus serve as its paradigm (no. 358 ll.49–70) .52 Browne’s description of a rural dawn exemplifies this ‘loose’ poetic, with the sharp itemization of particulars playing against the structure of the pentameter couplets (no. 198). This ‘natural’ poetic was to be rediscovered by Keats and his generation of Romantic writers as a political as well as a poetic alternative to neoclassicism.
For poets who continued to seek advancement at court, a humiliatingly high price in flattery had often to be paid. Donne’s tortuous poetry of courtly compliment in the Jacobean period contrasts strongly with his bold irreverence in the 1590s. His struggles to win the favour of an arbitrary, capricious God in the ‘Holy Sonnets’ (for example no. 259) are coloured by the passive aggression of the courtly dependent. It was in the Church rather than the State that Donne eventually found advancement. The Jacobean Church was of course itself a political institution, and as Dean of St Paul’s Donne found himself preaching sermons in defence of unpopular royal policies. The Jacobean Church was something more than a puppet of the State, however. The Elizabethan compromise had seemed botched and makeshift to many of its critics, but by James’s reign the Church was starting to attract gifted intellectuals like Donne and Herbert. Despite the best efforts of scholars of rival denominations to categorize them, Donne’s religious lyrics cut across the conventional modes of Calvinist and Counter-Reformation devotion.53 He came from a Catholic background and he was sympathetic to rituals that many Puritans attacked as ungodly, but his religious poetry is not ritualistic in any simple way: it often plays on his unwillingness to represent God directly (cp. no. 257). Carew’s elegy sees Donne’s role at St Paul’s as that of an inspiring preacher rather than a ritualist (no. 365).
The same emphasis on the Word, on God’s eloquence, characterizes the poetry of Donne’s friend George Herbert. Izaak Walton’s lives of Donne and Herbert have fixed an image of both men as ritualists associated with a High Church faction under Charles I. It is true that both Donne and Herbert attacked Puritans who called for further assaults on ecclesiastical ritual. Herbert took an interest in the semi-monastic religious community at Little Gidding which T. S. Eliot’s poem made famous again in the twentieth century, and which was attacked by Puritans as crypto-Catholic. Herbert’s verse, however, is close in spirit to the more open atmosphere of the Jacobean Church, and much of it was probably composed at that time.54 While his poetry constantly invokes the physical rituals and buildings of the Church, these function more on an allegorical than a literal level. One poem (no. 286), probably composed in the 1620s, reflects Puritan fears that the invisible Church of the elect might have to leave England and move to America, and the passage ran into trouble with the censors in 1633.
In Herbert’s verbal temple, words themselves are always in danger of becoming ‘too rich’ (no. 281 I.11). Herbert’s poetry could speak to readers right across the religious spectrum, from Charles I to Ranters. His ‘plainness’ gives him something in common with the immensely popular didactic poet Francis Quarles (nos. 271–5), and yet few poets have written so powerfully of the pleasures of composing (no. 283 ll.36–9). Like Donne, Herbert looked back to the Sidneys’ Psalm translations as reminders that there was scriptural authority for the poetic vocation, and his formal virtuosity owes much to their example. In ‘The Forerunners’ (no. 284), religious asceticism becomes a means of stifling regret at an anticipated loss of poetic power. There is a characteristically tough wit in the idea of his white hair as the chalk-mark anticipating death’s occupation; but at the conclusion this white writing gains a vividness that suddenly outdoes the fading colours:
Let a bleak palenesse chalk the doore,
So all within be livelier then before.
By the time of Herbert’s death, it was becoming increasingly difficult to establish a devotional voice with such a broad appeal. Already in James’s last years the always precarious factional balance within the Church had been shattered. There was an explosion of public controversy on political and religious matters, a notable expansion of the public sphere. The debates were intensified by the international situation. In 1619 James’s son-in-law, Frederick V of the Palatinate, was elected King of Bohemia, upsetting the balance of power between Protestant and Catholic states and escalating the European conflict that became the Thirty Years War. In England, militant Protestants saw this conflict as an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil and urged the government to support the international Protestant cause. An immense appetite for news of current events was fed by the first regular newspapers and by manuscript newsletters. Parliamentary elections became increasingly contentious, and increases in the size of the electorate meant that more members of the general public were becoming involved in political life. Parliamentarians increasingly spoke out on matters that James considered inviolable mysteries of State. The mystique of monarchy was being undermined by irreverent satires against the King and his favourite the Duke of Buckingham, who was hated for his alleged homosexual relationship with the King and his monopolizing of the patronage system on behalf of his friends and relatives (see no. 39).55 Large tracts of land were awarded to his relatives, and his sister-in-law was kidnapped by agrarian rebels who were less swayed than Sir William Davenant by her divine voice (no. 201). Buckingham’s political influence continued on the accession of Charles I in 1625. A measure of the crisis of confidence in traditional power structures can be found in the chorus of praise directed at John Felton when he assassinated Buckingham in 1628 (no. 38): he was celebrated as belonging to the tradition of classical tyrannicides.
Such exaltation of spiritual freedom over external forms caused widespread alarm, and James and Charles set themselves to limit the damage. Increasingly vigorous attempts by the monarchs to control Parliaments culminated in 1629 when Charles dissolved Parliament; he was to rule without it until 1640. James and Charles also decided that the traditional Church settlement had been too unstable, too open to potentially subversive forces. In cooperation with conservative clergymen led by William Laud, Charles used the Church to help to contain the emergence of a public sphere of criticism and dissension. The Laudians called for greater reverence to be given to the Church visible and its external forms. With the predominance of Calvinists in the Church, preaching from the pulpit had taken precedence over the altar, whose adoration was regarded as superstitious, and there was a gradual dilapidation of church buildings and ornaments (no. 289). This lack of reverence for external forms was felt to parallel a general breakdown in respect for social discipline. The Laudians’ opponents dubbed them ‘Arminians’, after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius who criticized the orthodox Calvinist position on predestination.56 The impulse behind the movement, however, involved Church discipline as much as doctrine – the more vigorously the Calvinists challenged free will, the more they undermined the authority of priests and rituals in affecting salvation. The Laudians’ triumph was marked in church architecture by returning the altar to its supremacy over the pulpit (cp. no. 294), a measure which had a clear political significance. Outdoor sermons in St Paul’s, that symbolic centre of the public sphere, were stopped and the news-gatherers were displaced from the aisles to the shelter of Inigo Jones’s massive new portico, where royal statues emphasized the unity of Church and State (no. 290).
The poet whose work most clearly bears the trace of the new religious movement is Richard Crashaw. The Laudians reacted against what was seen as the excessively cerebral nature of Calvinist piety: in the traditional association of the rational with the masculine, a return to the emotive involved a revaluation of female imagery, including the cult of the Virgin Mary. Crashaw aroused much controversy for the devotion he showed to the Virgin in his preaching, and his poetry concentrates again and again on the fertilizing fluidity of the female saints. He is often seen as a distinctively Catholic poet, yet his conversion came only after his ousting from his living in 1644, by which time he had composed many of his best-known poems. In the 1630s it seemed possible that his religious temper could be accommodated within the Church of England.57 Pastor-poets like Robert Herrick and the celebrated wit Richard Corbett, who were in a very different mould from Donne and Herbert, can also be seen as reinforcing the Laudian programme, celebrating the old ritual calendar which Protestant rationalism had been trying to eradicate (nos. 200, 206). (Since Herrick lived in an area with a strong Puritan presence, however, his view of the country people was somewhat ambivalent: cp. no. 205.) Laud himself was anxious to maintain a certain distance from Rome, but more and more poets became involved in a cult of Queen Henrietta Maria which effectively repudiated the traditional cult of Elizabeth the Virgin Queen and brought back the worship of the Virgin Mary.58
For its supporters, the Laudian Church represented a return to the central traditions of the English Church. For its opponents, however, it was effectively a return to Catholicism, with Laud as ‘our English Pope’ (no. 295 1.32). Many Protestant humanists were uneasy with strict Calvinist pre-destinarianism; it was challenged by Wither, and Milton was himself to become a staunch believer in free will. But the political context of the Laudian reformers aroused both men’s suspicions. Milton denounced the Laudians not only as enemies of reformed religion but also as antagonistic to humanist principles: in satirizing the bishops’ ‘lean and flashy songs’ (no. 325 1.123) he links their authoritarianism with their insensitivity to language. The Laudians wanted to restrict debate about the interpretation of Scripture, closing dialogue in a dismal monologue, and Milton saw them as the heirs to the humanists’ old enemies, the scholastic philosophers, who substituted arid abstractions and empty rituals for a response to the full richness of the Word. Milton does not repudiate verbal beauty, on the contrary he self-consciously relishes it (cp. no. 363) and offers it as a pattern of heavenly harmony; but he also insists that it is only a pattern, and his poems thus have a dual movement of both offering and subverting a sensuous fulfilment. Thus the Nativity ode (no. 270) looks forward to the apocalypse before coming to rest in the very last stanza on the conventional image of the child in the manger, the serenely incarnate Word; and in ‘Lycidas’ (no. 325) restless questionings, and disruptions of anticipated regularity in the rhyme scheme, clash with the ritual of elegy. The Jacobean Spenserians who most influenced Milton’s early poetry, figures like Giles and Phineas Fletcher, placed great emphasis on the extreme difficulty of bringing the infinite within the limitations of human descriptions (nos. 265, 269): the problem with the Laudians was that they seemed too confident of their ability to do so. Music is Milton’s favourite symbol of divine discourse precisely because it seems less corporeal, more transcendent, than visual images: other poets contrasted Laud’s idolatrous church bells with the deeper harmony of the ‘constant Sermon-Bell’ (no. 294). For Milton, there was no incompatibility between vehement Puritanism and a commitment to the art of poetry: it was the Laudians who were betraying humanist positions.
The motives behind Charles’s support of the Laudians had been partly political, an attempt to contain emergent democratic and individualistic tendencies in the polity. The attempt failed. Whether it could in the long term have succeeded has been much debated: there is evidence of popular support for Laudianism, and also of fierce resistance. One crucial factor was the difficulty of uniting not just one but three kingdoms in a single religious order. The Scots saw his attempt to impose the new English liturgy and prayer-book as a blow to national pride. When a Scots army invaded England in 1639 it received a sympathetic greeting from many citizens, and before long Puritans in England were to form an alliance with the Scots to force the King’s hand in religious and political reforms. For a time it seemed as if a compromise could be patched up, with the King accepting far-reaching constitutional and religious reforms; many of his most hated ministers fled (no. 295). Religious radicalism in England, however, provoked panic in Ireland, where there was a Catholic rising in 1641; and the massacres there provoked further reaction in England. A rumoured alliance between the King and the forces of Counter-Reformation Catholicism conjured up deep-rooted anxieties.59 Such an alliance, it was believed, would help to swing the European balance of power and consolidate absolute monarchy throughout Europe. Gentlemen like Sir Thomas Fairfax feared for lands their ancestors had gained from the Church (cp. no. 218); the Inquisition would undo centuries of struggle for free access to the Gospel. Neither side trusted the other to control the armed forces, and the crisis escalated throughout the spring and summer of 1642.
Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill (no. 42), written as the conflict moved towards civil war, registers the ideological crisis in part by what it cannot represent. In the manner of Caroline pastoral, the poet still celebrates a harmonious and peaceful rural landscape, and he salutes Waller’s tribute to the rebuilding of St Paul’s (no. 290). Below the cathedral, however, there hangs a pall of smoke which for Denham symbolizes the restless activism of a city that has abandoned order for anarchy. And the rural landscape is itself darkened: the stag hunt at the end allegorizes the fall of Strafford, the King’s favourite minister, to whose death he had consented in a vain attempt to propitiate the opposition (cp. no. 41). For Denham, the subject’s liberties are gifts from above, not rights, and if subjects press monarchs too hard for concessions they will provoke a deluge of tyranny. A few weeks after Coopers Hill was published, the King raised his standard against Parliament. He took his court to Oxford, where he was joined in time by Denham and by many other poets, including Cowley, Davenant and Fanshawe, who were alarmed by the breakdown of the traditional political order and by the parliamentarian leaders’ appeal beyond the traditional political élite to the London crowds. Thomas Hobbes claimed that humanist studies had been a main factor in provoking the Civil War by intoxicating the literati with the ideal of liberty; his friend Davenant insisted that monarchs should clothe their minds in mystery (no. 370 1.22).
The royalist poets tended to brand their enemies as base-born philistines, and saw the monarchy as the natural guardian of the arts. It was certainly true that the demise of court patronage was a devastating blow for many poets, artists and musicians. But humanism had always had an ambivalent attitude to the court, and other poets sided enthusiastically with the parliamentarian cause. George Wither, who found himself directly opposed to forces led by Denham when war broke out in 1642, campaigned against the royalists by poetic as well as military means. Where Denham attacked prophetic individualism and exemplified civil order in his disciplined couplets, Wither’s poems became ever more rambling and open to prophetic spontaneity (no. 369): his goal was to make both poetry and Parliament more representative of the popular voice. In Wither and in other poets of the mid-century (cp. no. 373), the breakdown of traditional political controls was paralleled by a breakdown of traditional poetic forms.
The public appetite for news and the collapse of traditional restrictions led to the precocious emergence of a lively press. The immensely popular medium of the almanac was also used to prophesy doom to the enemy.60 In these unprecedented circumstances, even political conservatives engaged with new forms of communication. The balladeers Martin Parker (no. 43) and John Taylor sided with the royalists but showed considerable flair in turning from the ballad to the newspaper. Their long-term aim, however, was to limit the damage, to restore as much as possible of the old political and religious order; and by the mid-1640s the parliamentary group which became known as the ‘Presbyterians’, alarmed by tendencies to democracy, was seeking a compromise settlement with a strong, though reformed, State Church. The ‘Independents’ pressed instead for a more vigorous pursuit of the war with the aid of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Wither and Milton both became aligned with this group.
Milton attacked any attempt to produce a new Presbyterian State Church (no. 296), and his Areopagitica (1644) celebrated division and dissension in a society as a sign not of weakness but of commitment to the ideals of radical Protestantism and civic humanism. Sidney’s ‘civil war among the Muses’ had become a real conflict. The royalists, in Milton’s view, were aligned with authoritarian dogmatism, the domination of social and intellectual life by the private interests of courtiers and churchmen, and the parliamentarians with the spirit of inquiry and the revival of public rhetoric. Milton’s pamphlets of the 1640s mingle rhetoric and poetry, fierce invective and visionary prophecies, and offer the poet a new form of engagement in a society no longer offering the traditional lures of courtly advancement.
Andrew Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ suggests that it took the exceptional force of Oliver Cromwell to translate republicanism into practice, to
… ruine the great Work of Time,
And cast the Kingdome old
Into another Mold.
(no. 45 ll.34–6)
Certainly the trial and execution of Charles I in January 1649 would not have been possible without the overwhelming military successes of Cromwell’s New Model Army, which brought Charles’s forces to surrender in 1646 and again after a second civil war in 1648. Cromwell was in fact more vacillating on political matters than Marvell’s poem suggests; caught between the fierce hostility of his more radical soldiers and the King’s refusal to compromise what he saw as the divine dignity of his office, Cromwell eventually allowed his forces to be used to put pressure on Parliament for the King’s trial. Marvell lays so much emphasis on Cromwell’s devious role in events that many critics have read his poem as a satire; but the poem’s terse, demystifying idiom can also be seen as an attempt to cut through courtly mystification and recover the tougher discourse of classical republicanism. In the process it overgoes its Horatian model and has more in common with Machiavelli, for whom the hero who decisively seizes the occasion for a political transformation is to be applauded despite a lack of moral purity. Unlike Waller’s Charles I, who ornaments an old building (no. 290), Marvell’s Cromwell lays the foundations for a wholly new structure, recovering and potentially surpassing the strengths of the Roman republic. Revolutions in political and artistic forms are seen as running parallel.
The new republic did for a time succeed where Charles had failed in bringing England, Scotland and Ireland under a uniform system of government. Marvell’s poem registers the exultation felt by many English Protestants in the decisive crushing of Catholic resistance, which at last made possible the kind of Protestant cultural revolution long ago urged by Spenser – whose grandson received a pension from Cromwell. And the concluding prophecy of victory against the Scots was to be justified by events. Marvell’s darkly violent language, however, registers some of the cost of those victories.61 The Scots, critical though they might have been of Charles’s absolutist pretensions, disliked the English presumption that their king could be disposed of without consulting them (no. 46). In Wales, attempts to graft radical Puritan ideology on to traditional bardic measures (cp. no. 297) met with limited success. The greatest Welsh poet of the period, Henry Vaughan, strongly opposed the new regime, although his poetry perhaps reflects the breakdown of traditional religious forms: in comparison with his chief poetic model, George Herbert, Vaughan’s own lyrics are looser in form and more personal and visionary in discourse (nos. 299–302, 328, 374). The republican government strongly repressed internal dissent not only from the right but also from the left; its republicanism was more oligarchic than democratic, and it cracked down on the democratic ‘Leveller’ movement and the agrarian reformers known as the ‘Diggers’ (no. 211). The new republic brought freedom on the point of a sword.
Throughout the 1650s, political life was dominated by the implications of Marvell’s terse maxim:
The same Arts that did gain
A Pow’r must it maintain.
(no. 45 ll.119–20)
The politicians needed the army but also suspected it; military rule without constitutional forms lacked long-term legitimacy. In April 1653 Cromwell dissolved the Long Parliament by military force; in December he took on semi-regal power as Protector. The pragmatic Marvell praised Cromwell as enhancing England’s newly expansionist imperial role (no. 50, cp. no. 214). But was the new order concerned primarily with commercial prosperity or republican virtue? Royalists like Waller and Denham could reconcile themselves to Cromwell’s regime in part because it did seem to offer social stability and economic growth: if in the pre-revolutionary version of Coopers Hill the River Thames mainly signified royal power, in successive revisions it became increasingly the medium of a less and less ‘guilty’ (I. 167) process of commercial exchange. James Harrington, the decade’s leading republican theorist, could reject the traditional moralizing that denounced women’s ornamentation: the claims of commerce had to be heard (no. 172). His admired Machiavelli had celebrated the expansion of the Roman republic as a sign of its constitutional strength. Harrington insisted, however, that commercial prosperity depended on far-reaching agrarian and institutional reforms; he and an emergent republican opposition feared that England under Cromwell was sacrificing liberty for the sake of material wealth. A society’s poetry, Harrington believed, might be an index of social change: so Virgil’s eclogues registered the decay of agrarian relations under the Empire.62 Harrington’s friend Marvell’s portraits of rural landscapes, while containing the expected compliments to his patron and disparagements of rural disorder, register some unease about how ‘natural’ the established agrarian order might be (nos. 215–18, cp. no. 220): in a post-revolutionary order, the landscape has to be painted anew (no. 218 ll.40–63), and Marvell’s mower has a far more ambiguous relationship to his environment than the traditional shepherd. Milton’s sonnet to Vane, Cromwell’s most influential opponent, articulates the acute tensions between the demands of military security and the claims of religious liberty (no. 49).
By Cromwell’s death, the divisions between Cromwellians and republicans were so deep that no stable consensus could be established, resulting in the giddy political instability captured by one of Brome’s ballads (no. 51). When the merry-go-round stopped in 1660, England was left with the restoration not of the golden age but of Charles ll. This event, which was celebrated by scores of panegyrists, has often been seen as manifesting a deep-rooted affinity between poetry and the English monarchy. One aim of the foregoing survey has been to suggest that their interrelations were in fact always problematic. Before long, Marvell and other poets were putting pressure on Charles to try to prevent his regime from putting the clock back too far, and in the deposition of James II in 1688 absolutism was to be given a sharp check. Many of the institutional changes of the previous decades had been undone, however, and remain so to this day. Britain was to move into its maturity as a commercial society and a world power in a heavily archaic monarchical costume; some of the constitutional projects of the revolutionary period remain unfinished business.
Despite their reputation for individualism, Renaissance poets did consistently show a sense of public responsibility. It is in the realm of love, marriage and desire that we might expect to find the poets at their most individualistic. The Renaissance did indeed make a distinction between the ‘political’ and the ‘economical’, by the latter category meaning the realm of the household (from the Greek oikos, cp. no. 213 1.38). But in the early modern period that distinction was not yet a sharp one. Under a personal monarchy, there was no clear-cut dividing-line between the administration of the State and the household of the ruler. Conversely, many political theorists saw the household as a little State, with the father as the natural ruler. It was in the early sixteenth century that the English word ‘courtship’ became extended from political relationships to the rituals preceding marriage; in such central texts as The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s sonnets, the discourses of patronage and of love are inextricably intermingled.63 To explore the world of sexual relations, then, is by no means to lose sight of political issues altogether.
It is true that the libertine poets of the Renaissance did sometimes turn to sexuality as a force that unsettled the conventional hierarchies of State and household, upholding a hedonistic anarchism. As in the political sphere, however, their rebellion against convention was often expressed by recovering voices from the past. While Donne characteristically insisted on seeking out a wholly new world of love (no. 96), such quests were often encouraged by the recovery of an ancient world with very different views of sexuality from Christian orthodoxy. Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On the Nature of the Universe), which had been effectively lost until 1417, offered a materialist account of knowledge and sexuality. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with its sympathetic exploration of the unpredictable extremes of sexuality, had been saved for medieval orthodoxy by allegorical interpretations, but humanist methods of textual interpretation tended to undermine such moralism and concentrate instead on the poem’s sceptical rhetoric. From the Renaissance through to the Enlightenment, libertine poetry inspired by the erotic elegies of Ovid, Catullus and other Roman poets became one rallying-point for those who challenged religious and political orthodoxy. Nashe proclaimed himself as restoring a lost classical eloquence in his erotic poem ‘The choise of valentines’ (no. 95): ‘Complaints and praises everie one can write’ (a fact which can be verified at length from Section II of this anthology), but modern poets have neglected ‘loves pleasure’s’. The idealizing poetry of Petrarch, who had sublimated troubadour eroticism into a highly rarefied idiom, had its admirers, but English imitators from Wyatt onward (no. 54) revised his conventions in a more critical – or, some would say, misogynistic – direction.
New currents of love-poetry were more uncompromising in their physicality. In Italy, Pietro Aretino (cp. no. 291.10) acquired a European reputation as the ‘scourge of princes’ and also as an accomplished pornographer, benefiting from the relatively free press of the Venetian republic. In England, however, such libertine writing faced opposition from the ethos of humanist and Protestant moralism. Many young Elizabethan poets followed what became a familiar path of beginning in defiant eroticism and ending in pious recantation. The love-poems of George Gascoigne’s A hundreth sundrie flowres (no. 61) hardly strike modern readers as inflammatory, yet they were much criticized and a second edition of them was banned; Gascoigne turned increasingly to didactic and panegyrical verse.64 He could point to the model of grave divines who had written love-poetry in their youth, and one strategy for poets who ventured on dangerous ground was indeed to establish an ironic distance between the personae of the individual poems and the authoritative position of the moralist. Thus Sir Philip Sidney could detach himself from the ‘trewand pen’ of Astrophil (no. 65) by various formal distancing devices, notably the pattern of numerical symbolism in which the 108 sonnets of the complete sequence paralleled Astrophil with the ultimately unsuccessful suitors of Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey.65 Critics rightly warn against the dangers of naïve autobiographical readings of such texts.66 All the same, the sonnet was a particularly sensitive instrument for exploring personal experience in a society which still disapproved of too much individualism, and sonnets must have seemed at times as raw and personal as the work of modern ‘confessional’ poets.67 It is unlikely that the poets chose this form simply in order to record moralistic disapproval: rather, the moralizing structures of sonnet sequences were to some degree retrospective, an attempt to impose an external moral order. In some cases, as in Chapman’s continuation of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, fellow poets cooperated in the work of moralization (nos. 99, 124). Much less plausibly, another of Marlowe’s friends, Thomas Nashe, claimed that ‘The choise of valentines’ (no. 95) was merely written to put him in training for singing the praises of his patron, Lord Strange – who doubtless agreed that the poem presented ‘strange moralitie’ (no. 95 1.11).
Humanist scholarship often had difficulties with a particularly vexed difference between Christian and pagan mores, the attitude to homosexuality. Current scholarship warns against anachronism in projecting the twentieth-century concept of homosexuality into a period whose assumptions were different and in which friendship between those of the same sex could assume great intensity.68 The fact remains that sodomy had been made a capital offence in 1533 and the Protestant reformers had campaigned vigorously for closer regulation of sexual conduct. The humanist interest in antiquity, however, drew attention to very different attitudes. Reading the classics from the perspective of compulsory heterosexuality was always an act of bowdlerization. Erasmus advised teachers of Virgil’s second eclogue, in which Corydon declares his love for Alexis, to distract students from its subject-matter by directing their attention to the grammar.69 Clearly such strategies did not always succeed. Plato, the humanists’ favourite amongst classical philosophers, had declared love between men to be more noble and elevated than other kinds. The familiar textbook phrases ‘Renaissance Platonism’ and ‘Neoplatonism’ often gloss over this fact, which certainly raised complex questions for commentators like the Florentine Marsilio Ficino. The myth recorded by Plato of a primal androgyne from whom both men and women descended caught the imagination of many poets, including Spenser.70 Marlowe is alleged to have provocatively compared Christ’s relationship with John the Baptist to that of Virgil’s Corydon with Alexis. In Hero and Leander he presents a pagan world in which orthodox sexual boundaries are constantly undermined. Hero is compared to the androgynous nymph Salmacis, while Leander resembles Jove’s favourite Ganymede; when Leander professes to misunderstand Neptune’s advances, the god simply smiles (no. 99 1.677). The eroticism of Neptune’s wooing quickly found an imitator in Richard Barnfield, author of the first known English sequence of love-poems to employ a homosexual persona or speaker (nos. 102–3).
In this period of erotic experimentation, Shakespeare began his own sequence of sonnets, most of which are addressed to the man he called ‘the Master Mistris of my passion’, regrettably ‘prickt… out for womens pleasure’ (no. 105). The theme of androgyny is highlighted by the sequence of ‘feminine’ rhymes ending on unstressed syllables, and by a series of bawdy puns. The description of his friend’s penis as ‘one thing to my purpose nothing’ is probably reinforced by a play on ‘nothing’ as ‘female genitals’, and there may be similar bawdy undertones in ‘acquainted’ and ‘controwling’. The poem’s verbal restlessness belies its attempts to establish a conventional distinction between heterosexual love and masculine friendship, and later poems to the young man have sexual undertones (for example, no. 110). His affair with the poet’s mistress provokes an outpouring of sexual puns (no. 117).
Some of these poems embarrassed the editor of the 1640 text so much that he tampered with the language: thus in Sonnet 108 (no. 351 1.5) ‘boy’ became ‘love’, and some words were converted to feminine forms. The response of later critics has sometimes recalled Erasmus’s advice to teachers: they steer discussion away from problematic areas of sexuality in order to get on to the safer ground of rhetorical convention. The compulsion to rearrange the sonnets in a more ‘natural’ order seems to be a defence against the scandal of finding the national bard tainted by sexual irregularity. Some critics deny the existence of any erotic charge in the poems to the young man, though the 1640 edition suggests that some at least among Shakespeare’s early readers were disturbed by this feature. Others argue that Shakespeare invented the bisexual persona as a rhetorical exercise, or as a means of ingratiating himself in an aristocratic circle where homosexuality was fashionable.71 It would indeed be insensitive to reduce the sonnets to autobiographical outpourings, and to deny their philosophical expansiveness. The relationship with the young man is a complex one, blending the discourses of erotic desire, platonic admiration, male bonding and literary patronage. The ‘dark lady’ is a systematic inversion of the Petrarchans’ blonde paragon. But critics are sometimes over-eager to monumentalize the sonnets as transcendental statements on Love, Beauty and Friendship – or, more recently, Language: such readings gloss over their raw edges, the uneasiness of the transition to the universal from a situation painfully perceived as highly particular. The poet’s defiance of conventional opinion pushes him into an ‘I am that I am’ which blasphemously echoes God’s words to Moses (no. 114; Exodus 3:14).
Shakespeare was tired of ‘arte made tung-tide by authoritie’ (no. 111); and the bishops’ ban on dangerous texts in June 1599 included erotic works by Marlowe, Davies and Marston. Even a playful ballad like ‘The wanton Wife of Bath’ (no. 127) came under suspicion. As has been seen, the authorities’ main worry may have been about political rather than sexual matters; but there does also seem to have been public concern from moralists about the wave of libertinism. The debate still continues: with the emergence of feminism, these erotic texts have become liable to censure on somewhat different grounds, as reinforcing an acquisitive, domineering male ego. The vogue in the sixteenth century for the blazon, the detailed enumeration of the parts of a woman’s body, can be seen as reflecting the new scientific mentality with its mastering gaze, its passion for mapping the world in order to gain power over it: Donne makes the connection in ‘To his Mistress going to bed’ (no. 96).72 Women had to be far more careful about where they directed their gaze (no. 144). There is certainly something proprietary about the way in which Spenser displays his wife’s body to the admiring gaze of the ‘merchants daughters’ (no. 88 1.167); and the blazon often served as a form of soft – sometimes not so soft – pornography. The strategy was indeed so blatant that it quickly lent itself to self-parody (no. 67) or to milder variations, such as Spenser’s transmutation of the anticipated visual pleasure to pastoral scents (no. 84); and the genre could assume spiritual resonances from the blazons in the Song of Solomon, which were frequently allegorized in a religious sense (cp. no. 265). There was an intrinsic gender inequality in the genre, in that praise of the gifts of nature, of external beauty, rather than public virtue was assumed to be especially suited to the confined state of women. Marlowe, however, characteristically broke the boundaries in his comically erotic blazon of Leander (no. 99 ll.61–89). And on the Continent, where women poets could sometimes be more outspoken, some female blazons of men were written; but Lady Mary Wroth was considerably more restrained than Gaspara Stampa or Louise Labé.
The idea of women as subjects as opposed to objects of poetic praise caused male poets many problems. Donne’s mistress seems to be holding out against his rhetoric so effectively that he has to remove his clothes himself, resorting to what the rhetoricians termed ‘inartificial proof’ – displaying physical evidence to supplement verbal arguments. On the other hand, Leander’s barrage of rhetorical arguments is comically disproportionate, for Hero is won already; but to acknowledge this openly would be to expose herself as wanton. In the event, ‘her toong tript’ in saying ‘Come thither’ (no. 99 1.357), and we are left in doubt as to how voluntary the ‘trip’ may be. Eloquence was much admired in men, but too much eloquence in a woman was traditionally suspect: Venus’s impassioned wooing of Adonis (no. 100) has its pathos but also a comic edge, and her moist hand is a sign of unruly desire. However much civic humanists might idealize rhetorical debate among equal citizens, they were rarely prepared to admit women to the public sphere.
The crucial question was not just how the image of women was represented in poetry but how much chance women had of representing themselves. As will be shown, they were starting to do so; but male writers took an ambivalent view of the process. Some of them, it is true, were ready to turn aside from their own amatory monologues and try to represent the voice of women’s wrongs; the vogue for the amatory sonnet was accompanied by a great interest in the complaint, the lament of the seduced woman. Shakespeare showed his interest in the genre not only in A lover’s complaint, which was printed at the end of his sonnet sequence, but also in Lucrece (no. 101). Here the wronged woman is conscious of the imbalance in the resources available to men and to women for representing their views. Tarquin is presented in civic humanist terms as epitomizing tyrants’ hostility to rhetoric, to open debate, and Lucrece is made to defend such debate, but Tarquin turns from rhetoric to violence. After the rape, seeking a means of articulating her grief, Lucrece looks for a woman whose situation mirrors her own in a painting of the fall of Troy. She is so angry that the painter cannot give the widowed Hecuba ‘a tong’ that she threatens to scratch out the eyes of Hecuba’s tormentors, intervening in the canvas to redress the injustice it depicts. The remainder of the poem explores Lucrece’s own search for a tongue; in the climax she gains her voice only at a tragically self-destructive cost. She comes close to naming her assailant as the royal Tarquin only in her final sentence, and in a sudden syntactic twist she evades the name to the end and kills herself, leaving the men to draw the inference and execute their revenge.73
Lucrece’s self-annihilating agency may be presented as tragic, but male writers were frequently unsympathetic to more direct forms of female self-assertion. In one of his sonnets (no. 87), Spenser has his bride-to-be take control of the images of love; she weaves an image of the poet as a spider and herself as a bee about to be entangled in his ‘cunning snare’. The poet’s reply is not exactly reassuring: no doubt with an intended playful tone, he compares the pleasures of marriage to flowers adorning a prison cell – an analysis not so far removed from that of radical feminism. The woman is wittily inverting conventional images, for the bee was a traditional figure of the poet, while the spider was said to have originated as a female weaver. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Arachne is a weaver who claims to be as skilful at her craft as the goddess Minerva and challenges her to a competition. Minerva’s tapestry portrays the gods as wise, controlling deities; Arachne’s tapestry presents them as treacherous and sexually rapacious, but it is every bit as good as Minerva’s. Exasperated, Minerva is about to strike her when Arachne puts her head in a noose to hang herself; Minerva spares her life and allows her to continue weaving – but only as a spider. Ovid tells the story with some sympathy for Arachne, and indeed his own endlessly fluid poem in some sense resembles her web, a challenge to the will to finality and dynastic triumph embodied in the epic genre; but Renaissance moralists like the Calvinist translator Arthur Golding moralized the story from the gods’ point of view (no. 334). The myth provides a link between verbal representation and gender. Conventional moralists insisted that too much learning was not for women, that they should turn from the pen to the spinning-wheel. In the Arachne myth, a woman takes control of a medium of representation and uses it to criticize authority; Minerva, by contrast, had been born directly from her father Jupiter’s head, and represented a form of creativity which was directly under masculine control. Spenser was fascinated by the story, narrating it directly in Muiopotmos and alluding to it again in the Bower of Blisse episode of The Faerie Queene, where the enchantress Acrasia with her ‘subtile web’ is compared to Arachne (no. 80 1.70). The tapestries in the wicked enchanter Busirane’s house echo Arachne’s (no. 82 ll.19–144, no. 334 ll.117–51). (In another sonnet (no. 83) it is Spenser whose web of courtship is compared to a spider’s.)
Spenser’s presentation of the relations between the sexes is complex, however. In libertine poetry, love becomes so much a projection of anarchic individual desires that it turns to idolatry (cp. the claim of Marston’s narrator to prefer an image to a real woman, no. 125). The Faerie Queene abounds in male figures whose fetishistic relationship with their loved ones, their desire to map the mistress’s body precisely, becomes a cruel idolatry. The enchanter Busirane is defeated by the active woman Britomart (no. 82). By giving her many associations with Minerva, however, Spenser emphasizes her fidelity to an ultimately masculine order. His response to the libertines is to champion the ‘companionate’ marriage. In the Renaissance there was increasing idealization of marriages in which husband and wife were brought together by spiritual affinity rather than merely by dynastic property relations: thus Henry King could make a point of mourning his wife as his ‘Freind’ (no. 318). The Protestant emphasis on spiritual equality, though certainly not its sole cause, was one motivation behind this change.74 Spenser’s Amoretti sequence ends, unconventionally, with an epithalamium, and one written not for a great patron but for the poet himself; similarly, the climax of his legend of Courtesy celebrates his own wife rather than the Queen (no. 348). The poem to some degree questions conventional double standards of sexuality, representing chastity as an ideal which is relevant for both sexes. Generative power is celebrated above chastity, and Spenser places a discreetly veiled celebration of the female genitals at the mid-point of the first part of his epic (no. 81 ll.127–35). In thus exalting affective relations above the public sphere – and implicitly suggesting that the unmarried state of the Virgin Queen was perhaps not so ideal – he was also insisting on his wife’s confinement to a private realm.75 Katherine Philips wrote of an unmarried friend:
She is a publick Deity,
And were’t not very odd
She should depose her self to be
A petty Houshold God?
(no. 173 ll.5–8)
Many historians have debated the question of how far women’s lives were enriched or confined by the new marital ideals; inevitably there are many different answers.76 Spenser’s poetry does seem to have been popular with female readers: he gained the patronage of some leading women aristocrats.
Donne’s poetry of the 1590s, by contrast, often seems designed to shock ladylike sensibilities. In ‘His Picture’ (no. 132), the speaker presents a kind of counter-blazon of his own body, imagining himself on his return from the wars as a grotesque ‘sack of bones’. This self-image is presented as ultimately truer than the idealizing portrait he will soon outgrow, so that the poem is designed to wean the woman toward a more ‘tough’ aesthetic (cp. Jonson’s portrayal of his grotesque body, no. 142). If that toughness often seems aggressive, reducing the woman’s body to a terrain to be colonized, his cartographical conceits can also indicate the delicacy and vulnerability of a mutual relationship, the mapped globe quivering with the surface tension of a tear (no. 136; see further Section 4). The greater complexity of some of the lyrics in comparison with the ‘Elegies’ is often ascribed to Donne’s marriage to Ann More, which lost him his employer’s favour, so that the marriage relationship had to bear much of the weight of his earlier aspirations to the public world. Donne’s marriage, at least in its early years, may indeed have had a crucial effect; Ann was descended from Sir Thomas More, and repeated puns on ‘More’ in his lyrics (no. 135) connect his love with Utopian exploration. There is no hard and fast evidence, however, to make a complete chronological divide between the poet of 1590s libertinism and the poet of companionate marriage, and the narrative thus constructed by critics may seem too much like Chapman’s capping Marlowe’s libertine narrative with a ceremonious marriage. What Donne’s verse does suggest is that the dialogue between assertive masculine libertinism and a more mutual ideal of love, whether or not tied down to marriage, was taking place within individuals and not just between opposing schools of writers.
The censorship restrictions of 1599 seem to have had an effect in quelling the popularity of libertine verse. Donne himself had none of his love-poetry printed in his lifetime. When his collected poems eventually appeared in 1633, they had an immense impact. Thomas Carew’s famous tribute (no. 365) presents all subsequent love-poetry as weak and derivative. It is certainly true that no later love-poet of the period commanded the same range; Carew’s own erotic verse is strongly indebted to Donne (cp. nos. 96 and 156). The ‘school of Donne’, of whom the most significant was Abraham Cowley, were able to reproduce his witty analogies but not his subtlety and range.
In the growing political polarization of the 1620s and 1630s, opponents of royal policies tended to associate sexual libertinism with the court and to affirm a strict morality. The libertine poems of Carew, who had held a minor court post, were listed as a grievance of the realm in a petition to the Long Parliament in 1640. While censured by Puritans, however, courtiers like Carew, Suckling and Davenant, with their erratic private lives and unstable religious views, were not popular with the severe Archbishop Laud. There was always a potential tension between their sceptical tempers and their role as court poets celebrating the marital purity of the King and Queen.77 Richard Lovelace, best known today for lyrics which associate royalist honour with gallant love, could also allude knowingly to female masturbation (nos. 164, 166, 167). Beneath the idealizing façade of Caroline courtly discourse, the concerns of Restoration verse were emerging.
Such differences of emphasis were of little significance to Puritans like Milton, however. Rejecting courtly poetic fashions, he turned back to Spenser, though he eventually pushed the Spenserian championship of companionate marriage in a more radical direction. The celebration of the element of individual choice and ideological commitment in marriage, as opposed to simply accepting the marital bond out of reverence for custom, carried with it the implication that divorce might be the best solution for a marriage that proved unsuitable. Milton saw the tracts he published in defence of divorce in the 1640s as directly parallel to his defences of freedom of the press and of a republican constitution: all these changes offered a greater dignity to individual choices over prearranged conventions.
But choice for whom? Women were not granted the same degree of autonomy as men in their society. They were endlessly addressed in Renaissance poetry; they were hymned, abused, exhorted, enticed, cajoled; but their chances for answering back in verse were limited. Feminists have asked whether women had a Renaissance, and some have answered in the negative.78 Though some early humanists championed education for women, the humanist programme was designed above all as a qualification for entry into the public world: since women were denied a public political identity, their education was sharply circumscribed. The growing emphasis on marriage as woman’s central role heightened the split between public and private spheres, relegating many characteristic female activities to a private margin. Despite such restrictions, many women did embrace learning as the ‘key’ to escape ‘that prison’ of their ‘Sex’ (no. 231 ll.37–8); just how many has only become fully apparent with the recent revival of feminist scholarship.79
Male prejudices against female intellectuals remained strong, however, as Rachel Speght recorded (no. 359), and those who made their mark normally had the additional support of high social rank or an exceptionally strong religious conviction. Even those of noble birth tended to shy away from writing love-poetry, a kind of assertion of sexual agency, a control of the images, which society still frowned on. If even Sir Philip Sidney was defensive about writing love-sonnets rather than some more serious kind of verse, his sister Mary confined herself mainly to translations. The very uncertainty of how to name her reflects the tensions inherent in her public role. With her marriage, her identity was officially subsumed in her husband’s: she became Countess of Pembroke. Some contemporaries, however, continued to describe her as Mary Sidney, but this name itself subsumed her under another identity, authorizing her writings as a continuation of her brother’s projects. In her dedication of the Psalm translations to Elizabeth (no. 31), she defers to superior authority: she has merely completed a task begun by her brother, the translation is itself far inferior to the original and, as a woman addressing a monarch, she concedes that her poetic lines break through the lines conventionally constricting female conduct. She authorizes this activity by comparing poetry to the appropriately female activity of weaving, though this move in turn is carefully qualified by making Sidney responsible for the warp while she contributed the woof. But she has a further authorization for her utterance in the Queen’s own transcendence of traditional social roles by her personal merit as ruler and as writer – ‘Men drawne by worth a woman to obay’ (no. 31 I.83; emphasis added).80 She is able to make her own the denunciatory, prophetic power of David’s voice.
Dynastic legitimation certainly helped female poets, especially those who tackled secular themes. The first major sonnet sequence by a woman appeared in a romance by Lady Mary Wroth, the niece of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke and daughter of Sir Robert Sidney. Wroth signalled her Sidney connections by using the Sidney coat of arms, her father’s rank as Earl being considered to overrule her marital status. She closed the circle of her Sidney connections even more defiantly after her husband’s death by having two children by the Countess of Pembroke’s son, the third Earl of Pembroke. Her boldness in committing her writings to print provoked a bitter attack from Lord Denny, who contrasted her ‘lascivious tales and amorous toyes’ with her aunt who had ‘translated so many godly books and especially the holly psalmes of David’.81 Wroth’s sonnets are hardly ‘lascivious’. Her poetic persona was the constant but unrequited lover, and in her reshaping of the stock conventions of love-poetry we can see the pressures of the emergent social roles prescribed for women. Where Sir Philip Sidney often sees love, however mockingly, as a distraction from affairs of State, Wroth’s poems centre on the situation of retreating into a shaded, private world and waiting for some sign of affection. Although her Pamphilia adopts the role of the patient, constant platonic lover rejecting male fickleness, Wroth herself seems to have acknowledged that that role could be a trap. The darkening tone of the Urania accords with the disillusion reigning among many Jacobean courtiers by the second decade of the reign, and manifested more directly by other members of the Sidney connection such as William Browne. The woman’s role of retreat could acquire a further public resonance. The shifts in tone and diction in Wroth’s poetry work through these complex intertwinings of the public and the private: her verse was her Ariadne’s thread (no. 145).
Wroth belonged to a circle of prominent Jacobean women patrons who maintained the poetic and political interests of the old Leicester–Sidney and Essex circles and helped to maintain a community of female authorship. Though the old Essex faction had been disgraced by the 1601 rebellion, many of them found a favourable reception at the court of Queen Anne, who maintained considerable independence from her husband. The Countess of Bedford, whose husband had been involved in the rebellion, was an important patron for Donne (no. 188 and its note), Daniel (no. 231), Jonson (no. 232) and Gorges, and herself wrote poetry. When Æmilya Lanyer published her collection Salve deus rex Judœorum in 1611, she addressed poems to this charmed circle, led by the Countess of Pembroke, whose Psalm translations she praised. Lanyer’s bids for patronage seem to have been unsuccessful, however, and the collection betrays her anxieties.
There is an instructive difference between Lanyer’s ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ (no. 189) and Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ (no. 190). Though the credit for inventing the genre of the country-house poem has traditionally gone to Jonson, Lanyer’s poem may well precede his. But where Jonson celebrates a confident and easy relationship with his patron Sir Robert Sidney, Lanyer’s poem reflects the less stable relations involved in a woman’s seeking patronage from a female patron. She appeals for a renewal of former patronage to the Countess of Cumberland, who, despite her elevated rank, herself held a somewhat precarious status. Her estranged husband had cut off her daughter from succession to the earldom’s estates, and the Countess was under great pressure to abandon her attempts to gain her daughter what she considered her rights.82 When Lanyer looks back to the time of their association, it is to recall a shared activity of reading and study. Her invocation of the harmony between patron and nature conventionally assimilates the discourses of love and of patronage, but her gender complicates the relationship. She invokes a Utopian solidarity in which the client shared a common cause with her female patrons in the process of studying the Bible. She laments that social distance has now reasserted itself: ‘rich’ though they may be, the ties of obligation between patron and client are still ‘chaines’ (1.210). She makes a bold opposition between ‘degree’ and ‘love’, in which ‘the lowest alwayes are above’, and her immediate apology for her boldness only prepares the way for a further challenge (11.106–10, 111–13):
But whither am I carried in conceit?
My Wit too weake to conster of the great.
Why not?
The same questioning note informs Pilate’s wife’s apology for Eve:
… why should you disdaine
Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?
(no. 266 ll.67–8)
Such questions were posed more urgently during the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s. Women engaged in political activity as petitioners and protesters, and increasing numbers demanded a greater role in religious life. The Protestant belief that the divine voice, like Christ’s, could emanate from any social station, however lowly, could give authority to the voice of women prophets. John Foxe had celebrated courageous women like Anne Askew (no. 248) in his catalogue of Protestant martyrs. Even here, an elevated social background certainly helped: the most prominent female prophet and poet of the pre-revolutionary period, Lady Eleanor Douglas, invoked her noble birth as well as divine inspiration as a sanction for provocative denunciations of King Charles and his allies. In the 1640s and 1650s, however, many women began taking a more active role in their sects.83 Anna Trapnel aroused great wonder and admiration for her ability to improvise lengthy verse commentaries on the prophetic books of Scripture; these were transcribed and widely circulated (no. 304).
The fact that the number of publications by women rose sharply during the turbulent decades from 1640 to 1660 does not necessarily mean that the women in question welcomed the revolution. The Caroline court had provided a space for female literary activity and patronage which was now lost; and An Collins, Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, were all in differing degrees critical of the new republic. And yet their boldness of thinking went beyond the pre-war era. Cavendish’s verse was the most aristocratic in tone, insisting through her own self-assertion as a woman on her wealthy husband’s noble status. Even while rejecting traditional forms and vindicating female self-expression, she appealed to an aristocratic magnanimity:
… that seemes Noble, which is Easie, Free,
Not to be bound with ore-nice Pedantry.
(no. 371 ll.7–8)
But Cavendish was willing to challenge many orthodoxies. Unable to empathize with the expansive imaginations of many male contemporaries, she turned her quest for new worlds inward (no. 219); her concern about the despoliation of nature by an aggressive modernizing consciousness anticipates the themes of feminist ecology (no. 220).84 Philips came from a Puritan background and her husband was a parliamentarian, but she moved in royalist literary circles. Her portrayal of the monarchy’s apparently terminal crisis, however, was ambivalent rather than purely elegiac (no. 47). She responded to Donne’s imagery of finding new social worlds, and her lyrics explore a new kind of female utopia, a space free of patriarchal influences (nos. 173, 244–6). Like Cavendish, she responded to the age’s political turbulence with a heightened sensitivity to the natural world; there are similarities between their works and Marvell’s, and the traditional assumption that Marvell must have been the originator has been strongly questioned.85 Philips was to become the first Englishwoman to have a dramatic work publicly performed (1663). Aphra Behn was about to begin her career as a dramatist. Though their gains were by no means secure, women writers had shown that they could make their mark in the public sphere.
Spenser’s Bower of Blisse (no. 80) is a place of female temptation and also of rhetoric. Acrasia’s Arachne-like weaving severs the power of representation from its divine function of mirroring eternal truths. She is in league with Archimago, a villainous fabricator of deceitful images. Her veil serves to entice rather than enlighten, and she leaves the ‘signes’ of identity on the knights’ shields ‘fowly ra’st’ and turns them into debasedly sensuous ‘figures’, surrendering themselves to the pleasures of the body in a world of ‘vile difference’. Guyon and the Palmer destroy the Bower in the name of economy: Verdant is ‘wastfull’ in spending his days, goods and body in dalliance, abandoning his chances of ‘advauncement’. In disfiguring the Bower, Guyon moves from sign to thing signified, from concrete to abstract, and this is also presented as a move from feminine to masculine. The very violence of the move, registered in the hissing sibilants of ll.118–26, seems to betray a certain unease. Spenser himself proceeds by transforming abstract concepts into concrete ‘figures’, and his own style could well be regarded as wasteful in its rhetorical profusion: this is in fact the longest canto in the poem. Spenser was an enormously ‘uneconomical’ poet in linguistic terms: this particular passage contains seven words not previously recorded by The Oxford English Dictionary, and, despite his reputation for ‘archaisms’, the majority of his usages were innovative.86 It could be argued that Spenser is projecting on to the female figure of Acrasia his own anxiety about his role as a poet, which itself involves a retreat from direct public actions. The anxiety was widespread: poetry, declares Daniel’s Philocosmus, ‘unmans you quite’ (no. 353 1.22). Acrasia’s gaze has a castrating effect, parting Verdant from his ‘warlike armes’ which become ‘idle instruments’ hanging on a tree; it takes the combined efforts of Guyon and the Palmer with his ‘vertuous staffe’ to restore him.87
Much Renaissance poetry does indeed betray a certain unease about its own status, and a concomitant will to master the enticing differences of language and flatten them into a clear-cut meaning. Carew praised Donne for a ‘masculine expression’ which could make ‘Our stubborne language’ bend to his ‘imperious wit’ (no. 365 ll.39–50). Such will to mastery has been seen by feminist critics as characteristic of an increasingly assertive patriarchal attitude, which accompanied the rapacious individualism and the calculating rationalism of the Renaissance. There is some force in this analysis; but, like other generalizations about Renaissance individualism, it needs qualification. It can be argued that the Renaissance was characterized by a heightened sensitivity to the texture of language, by a challenge to the arrogance of those who would struggle to master it too easily. In fact, ‘conceited’ poetry of the kind represented in England by Donne and his school came in for just such criticism from the poet William Drummond, who complained that they had carried their ‘reformation’ of poetry too far, and had ‘endevured to abstracte her [poetry: note the female personification] to Metaphysicall Ideas, and Scholasticall Quiddityes’.88
The terms of Drummond’s argument here are very significant. The ‘metaphysical’ label is now so familiar that we are in danger of missing its original point. It emerged not as a complimentary but as a derogatory label, and it evoked a whole discourse of hostility to metaphysics. Humanism, as has been seen, originated in a defence of rhetoric against scholastic philosophy. Abstract metaphysics was attacked because it was too generalized and detached from the practical concerns of the active life, and one aspect of this abstraction was its insensitivity to language. The scholastics – rather like some twentieth-century linguistic philosophers–had tried to purify everyday language of its imperfections and invent a new set of technical terms which would permit the precise delimitation of concepts without the intervention of irrelevant connotations. The humanists insisted that at least in the areas of practical reasoning, of ethical and political questions, it was futile to try to ‘purify’ language in this way, because the crucial answers had to be related to particular human contexts, and language was the most subtle and precise instrument for engaging the practical choices.89 Poetry and rhetoric were not just inferior supplements to philosophy or theology but were media on the very cutting edge of intellectual inquiry, capable of taking on and even surpassing abstract discursive thought. The poet, wrote Sidney, ‘yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description’.90 And he went on the counter-offensive, enlisting the philosopher Plato on behalf of the poets: ‘in the body of his work, though the inside and strength were philosophy, the skin, as it were, and beauty depended most of poetry: for all standeth upon dialogues’.91 (Plato’s uneasiness with rhetoric perhaps leaves a trace, however, in the suggestion that poetry’s beauty is but skin-deep.) The poet, wrote Sidney, was a ‘right popular philosopher’.92
Such glorification of dramatic dialogue over philosophical monologue was a powerful intellectual incentive for Elizabethan poets to write for the public stage, and much of the period’s non-dramatic poetry works as a dialogue. Milton continued this humanist tradition in proposing an ideal syllabus which would turn from the ‘most intellective abstractions of Logick & metaphysicks’ to a greater concern with language, which was ‘obvious to the sence’. Pride of place must go to rhetoric and to poetry, which was ‘more simple, sensuous and passionate’ than prose – note the emphasis on the sensuous, bodily character of poetry.93 When Milton wrote that Spenser was ‘a better teacher then Scotus or Aquinas’,94 he was making the same kind of opposition between poetry and metaphysics as Drummond.
In response to this philosophical turn to language, Renaissance rhetoricians scrutinized the details of verbal texture and figuration with a minuteness that makes even twentieth-century techniques of ‘close reading’ look vague and impressionistic.95 In modern criticism, metaphor has become the dominant figure to the extent of eclipsing virtually all others with the possible exception of metonymy; Renaissance criticism listed hundreds of figures.96 Editors of poetic and dramatic texts were not content simply to gloss unfamiliar words: they would also note significant figures and rhetorical strategies. Absurdly elaborate as the received rhetorical terminology may seem today, Renaissance readers would perhaps react to the dominant modern critical vocabulary rather as some inhabitants of the Arctic Circle might do on discovering that English has only one word for ‘snow’. These terms may seem abstract rather than ‘sensuous’ to us; but in the translations offered by George Puttenham – significantly, to a female audience, for whom too much erudition was considered unbecoming – we can see the exuberant physicality that underlay these apparently very abstract terms in their original languages. He rendered metaphor as the ‘figure of transport’, and other figures included the ‘changeling’, the ‘middlemarcher’, the ‘fleering frumpe’, the ‘privie nippe’, the ‘dismembrer’, the ‘rebound’, the ‘crossecoople’, the ‘underlay’.97 The word ‘figure’ evoked a physical form or shape; a ‘trope’ was a ‘turning’. The word ‘scheme’ was said by one rhetorician to be derived from the movement made by a victorious dancer,98 and schemes were the figures that made language dance; metre was included among the schemes.
In this insistence on the bodily characteristics of language, in fact, Renaissance humanists can be said to have something in common with post-modern and feminist writers who have tried to reaffirm rhetorical play against philosophical asceticism. Rather like the humanists, they have attacked the aridities of metaphysics and have tried to break down the clear-cut distinctions between philosophy, rhetoric and poetry.99 And some Renaissance poets seem to verge on the post-modern outlook. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (no. 99) presents a world where there is no absolute truth, only a series of different rhetorics. The hero is like ‘a bold sharpe Sophister’; the barrage of arguments he uses against virginity parodies the certainties of scholastic logic. Like Arachne’s web, the pictures in the temple represent the gods in an extremely unfavourable light. And the inset fable presents Mercury, the god of rhetoric, as a figure of political and moral subversion, overthrowing the king of the gods. Mercury was the god of the market-place, the place where ideas are exchanged by the medium of words and goods by the medium of money, and where in each case the values involved seem totally arbitrary. We know that Marlowe was arrested for coining – usurping the authority of the monarch to stamp coins with the signs of legitimacy – and there is a similar impulse in his poem’s sceptical scrutiny of traditional signs and representations. The fragmentary status of Marlowe’s poem may well be deliberate: he refuses to carry the story to a tragic conclusion that would permit a traditional moral. The poem dissolves the normal categories of linear narrative, social order and personal identity.
It is not surprising that Marlowe scandalized his contemporaries. In general, rhetoric played a more conservative social role, with the emphasis on maintaining rather than subverting social order. This could be done by emphasizing the principle of decorum: language could be integrated with the rules of social honour and dishonour in a hierarchical society.100 In his completion of Marlowe’s poem, Chapman brought in ‘Comelinesse’, decorum, along with Morality, as attendants on Ceremony, the goddess who ‘all estates of men distinguisheth’ (no. 124 ll.134–5): these figures turn arbitrary currency into ‘civill forms’ in tune with the order of nature. The rules of decorum in Renaissance England prescribed that princes were to be described in a ‘high’ style, country people in a ‘low’ or plain style. Poems were to observe principles of precedence in their structure: thus a description of a ruler might often be positioned at the middle line of a poem, and the moral disorder of Busirane’s house is revealed by the way aristocrats are ‘heap’d together with the vulgar sort’ on its tapestries (no. 82 1.164). In practice, however, such neat distinctions were hard to maintain: arguments about just what counted as decorum were ultimately circular, implying a previous ideological agreement. Classical writers of the republican era might insist on a sharp dividing-line between the élite and the plebeians, but they would have regarded the more extravagant encomia which Renaissance poets showered on their princes as somewhat indecorous. Christian ideology cut across classical divisions between high and low: Christ provided a pattern for authentic popular speech which could be imitated by the poetry of pastoral complaint and by prophets like Anna Trapnel (no. 304). Women poets challenged some standards of decorum by their very existence. It is hard to know exactly how to interpret the decorum of Marvell’s placing Charles I at the centre of a poem praising a regicide (no. 45). Like so many concepts in the period, the principle of decorum was open to debate.
Reason was at least as important in constraining rhetorical invention as social custom. In recent literary theory, the opposition between rhetoric and philosophy has been pushed so far that rhetoric comes to be seen as the subversion of any process of rational communication.101 Few Renaissance poets were prepared to go so far; they were concerned with the pragmatic, communicative aspects of language and, while they wanted logic to be more relevant to practical argumentation, they certainly did not advocate its overthrow.102 Renaissance rhetoricians brought together the logical and verbal sides of their art. In the Middle Ages, ‘elocution’, the art of verbal ornamentation, had tended to develop in separation from logical argument; ‘rhetoric’ in popular parlance today often refers simply to figures of speech. It had a much wider meaning for the Renaissance, which restored the classical integrity of the art, with ‘invention’ – finding arguments – and ‘disposition’ – structuring arguments – preceding ‘elocution’ and the other two parts of rhetoric, ‘memory’ and ‘action’ or gesture.103 Renaissance editions of literary texts would regularly provide breakdowns of their arguments as well as analyses of their elocution or figures of speech. Some logicians in the sixteenth century began to argue that invention and disposition actually belonged with logic rather than rhetoric, that there was no such thing as a separate rhetorical mode of argumentation; Abraham Fraunce used Spenser’s eclogues as central examples of logical debate.104 Whatever the demarcation disputes between the different arts, an interest in strategies of reasoning was central to the period. The more writers learned about the power of rhetoric to deceive and dazzle, the more of an interest they would find in being able to disentangle an opponent’s fallacious arguments and deceitful images: in modern terms, to criticize ideology.
That tension between rhetoric and logic helps to explain the dualism, the split between the intellectual and the sensuous, which has been noted in the Bower of Blisse episode. Spenser’s reader is expected to be able to demystify, to be alert to deceptive images and arguments. Yet the poem’s movement is dialectical rather than merely schematic. Guyon is not necessarily the ideal reader, for his responses are somewhat rigid, and the force of his resistance to Acrasia’s bodily allurements may reflect his limitations: alone of the protagonists, he is not in love. Reading the poem becomes a long-term process rather than a communion with static types of beauty; readers are both invited to lose themselves in this ‘golden world’, to respond to the sensuous properties of the language, and jerked back into contact with their own world, encouraged to paraphrase what they have been reading. The value of the experience lies in the process rather than in the paraphrasable content. Spenser would not have subscribed to the claim of some twentieth-century writers and critics that ‘A poem should not mean/But be’;105 it must both mean and be, and must resist too simple a movement from the one to the other.
The apparent dualism of such an attitude to poetry, the split between form and content, led critics like F. R. Leavis to disparage Spenser and Milton at the expense of Donne and the metaphysicals; but it was precisely on the grounds of dualism that poets in the Spenserian tradition criticized the metaphysicals. Drummond complained that they made poetry a mere vehicle for ‘Scholasticall Quiddityes’; Milton attacked the ‘late fantasticks’ who failed to give their ideas the ‘gay’st attire’ of language (no. 363 ll.20–1). This was in turn a misunderstanding, of Donne if not of some of his lesser followers: Donne was too recent and too powerful a precursor for Milton to be able to engage with him properly. But it is true that Donne repeatedly dismisses conventional poetic taste as effeminate, as too much bound up with the body, and presents himself as the poet of pure mind. In ‘To his Mistress going to bed’ (no. 96), the stripping away of the woman’s clothes matches the poet’s quest for a less ornate style of love-poetry – though it is noteworthy that he sees men rather than women as liable to be deceived by mere externality. Donne is fond of figures drawn from the prelinguistic, deductive science of geometry. But he is more an ‘anti-metaphysical’ than a ‘metaphysical’ poet. His poems constantly explore the difficulties of relationship by means of the difficulties of representation. The cartographer’s geometry has a totally different logic in two and in three dimensions (no. 136 ll.10–16), the lovers’ convex tears try to mirror each other but must acknowledge failure.106
Donne may draw attention to the argumentative structures of his poems, as in ‘Loves growth’ (no. 135): ‘I scarce beleeve’, ‘But if, ‘And yet’, ‘If’. The case the poem makes is not a rigorously logical one, however: the speaker is working with enthymemes, the merely approximate arguments of rhetorical proof, rather than the logician’s syllogisms. He begins, after all, by blithely assuring us that he has ‘lyed all winter’, so we are hardly prepared to take his words at face value. The poem works by assertion and counter-assertion: he insists that his love has changed but is also keen to deny that change may entail decay and death, so that by line 15 he is protesting that it only seems subjectively to have changed, and his final declaration that the winter will not change his love takes us back to the previous winter’s lies. The argument is clinched by a series of analogies, which were considered by Renaissance logicians to represent a low level of proof. Critics have made much of Renaissance beliefs in natural analogies between the human body and the world at large, which meant that metaphor and simile might have a literal truth; but it should also be remembered that rhetorical training encouraged a profound scepticism about the literal truth of any analogy. In any case, literal truth, for the rhetorician, is not the point: analogies are significant because they involve the emotional nuances which are more significant for exploring concrete human relations than metaphysical categories. It is in the way he uses his far-fetched analogies or ‘conceits’, rather than the conceits themselves, that Donne stands out so sharply from his lesser imitators.
The poem firmly challenges scholastic aspirations to other-worldly transcendence. The speaker’s love is not a ‘quintessence’, a fifth element that could transcend the material mutability of the other four: rather than ‘pure, and abstract’, it is material, ‘mixt of all stuffes, paining soule, or sense’. Donne deploys the language of the humanist exaltation of the active life: ‘Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.’ In a bawdy pun, ‘doing’ or making love becomes an exemplum of the active life in the world. But the element of phallic boasting so often found in Donne’s poetry is tempered by the ensuing ‘And yet’: what is at issue is not the physical ‘growth’ of, among other things, the poet’s erection, but the revelation of ever-new facets of the original relationship, and these are now figured by the stars around the sun, the budding blossoms, and the ever-increasing circles spreading from the loved one. A buried sexual pun in ‘concentrique’ counters Donne’s phallicism by placing the woman’s body at the centre. In the traditional cosmology the spheres are fixed and perfect, the earth mutable and imperfect; Donne makes the expanding ripples of love part of a process rather than a static perfection. Yet such an acknowledgement readmits the possibility of decay, and in a final bid to dispel such doubts Donne resorts to one of his dazzling switches of discourse:
As princes doe in times of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate the springs encrease.
Not being timeless, Donne’s love cannot be shut up in the closed economy of the household, the oikos, for the ‘economy’ is increasingly being perceived as an impersonal mechanism that mediates between individual and State. And we realize that on one level this is a poem about inflation: the inflation of language in the lover’s hyperboles as well as the inflation caused by the internecine competition of nation-states. In such a world there is no stable currency, words cannot become the reliable counters for timeless concepts towards which the scholastics aspired. Yet the poem’s rueful wit at the end does not imply disillusion: the lovers can still make their own commitment, can dedicate their love to embracing and outdoing the world’s changes rather than flying from them. Donne’s love is made more by spring, it ‘cures all sorrow/With more’: it may be that his poem’s language finds its own precarious moment of stability in addressing his wife, Ann More.
The humanist commitment to rhetoric, then, cuts across conventional oppositions between literary schools. It remains true that the later part of the period sees an increasingly sharp reaction against the deceitful properties of language, a movement towards ideals of plainness in style. This movement reflects in part a loss of confidence in the public ceremonious language of the court and, more generally, the emergence of rationalist currents of thought. In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes took geometry rather than rhetoric as his model for political science, and scathingly anatomized the errors caused by the misuse of language. In the best poetry of the period, however, there is always a tension between the desire to subordinate language to an unambiguous meaning and an awareness of the medium’s productive resistances.
In Fulke Greville and his friend Samuel Daniel we can trace a persistent wrestling with the question of poetic truth and poetic artifice. Daniel wrote an interesting defence of rhymed verse, and yet his own poetic practice reveals a certain scepticism about the validity of imposing external rhyme structures on rational argument (cp. nos. 194, 353). Ben Jonson, who railed only half-ironically against over-ornate verse forms (no. 354), tended to compose his poems in prose before casting them into verse. Verse was no mere external ornament for him, however. In the Cary–Morison ode (no. 315) the ‘lines of life’ become the cosmic dance and the workings of his own adaptation of the Pindaric form, and at the poem’s most audacious moment (11.84–5) the enjambment from stanza to stanza, pivoting on an ambiguously placed period, suspends his massive bulk between heaven and earth.107
Jonson’s ‘plainness’ is very different from that of the Puritan George Wither with his sharply antagonistic attitudes to religious and poetic forms. Wither aimed at plainness of a rather different kind, presenting his poetry as the spontaneous overflowing of a spiritual essence, a ‘VOICE’, which transcended the material ‘Forme’ of language (no. 369 ll.19–21). Wither’s ‘loose’, spontaneous style, repudiating conventional formal structures, has led to his being compared to modern confessional writers, even to William Burroughs.108 Yet Wither was careful to insist that his inspiration was not ‘immediate’ and that care was needed to articulate his visions in poetic language (in fact the poem’s stanzas are formally structured as sonnets). The poet’s particular gift, he said, was to move the emotions through language, by catching
At all advantages of Place and Time,
Of Actions, or Expressions;…
(no. 369 ll.62–3)
These are the skills of the orator, mediating between universal truths and particular human contexts.
Wither may not have been quite as spontaneously disorderly as he sometimes liked to claim, but his poetry did represent an extreme face of individualism. It enacted on a formal level that process of breaking free from traditional rituals which the Puritan revolutionaries were putting into practice. Conservatives responded by insisting on more decorous modes of poetic and religious formality. Waller praised the remodelling of St Paul’s Cathedral under King Charles in revealing terms: the building
… Spouse-like may with comly grace command
More then by force of argument or hand.
For doubtfull reason few can apprehend,
And war brings ruine, where it should amend.
But beauty with a bloodlesse conquest findes
A welcome sovereignty in rudest mindes.
(no. 290 ll.37–42)
In such self-consciously temperate verse, the unsettling conflicts between rhetoric and logic, beauty and deceit, that motivated so much Renaissance poetry are subsiding. It would not become a gentleman to be too logical in matters of religion, and the beauty of rhetoric has lost its associations with visionary harmony or with energetic argumentation and has become the domestic composure of a good wife, reassuringly subordinated to her husband’s authority. The closed couplets and the antithetical patterning admit a degree of obtrusive artifice but keep it under firm control. To the later seventeenth century, such poetry seemed to look forward from the immediate turmoil of the Civil War to a new era of refinement and social concord. In surveying the huge, and often disorderly, variety of Renaissance verse, it may also be thought that much was lost in that process of refinement.