Mythologies of Internal Exile in Elizabethan Verse: Six Studies 9781138366503, 9780429401633

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Astrophil, Cupid, Petrarch, and Internal Exile in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella
2 Cupid, Venus, Ulysses, Petrarch, and Internal Exile in Spenser’s Amoretti
3 The Donna Angelica, Cupid, Petrarch, and Internal Exile in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
4 Displacing the Satyr: Urbanity, Exile, and Integration in Donne’s Satires
5 Roman Satire and Satyric Exile in Hall’s Virgidemiae
6 The Protean Mythology and Calvinist Theology of Exile in Marston’s Satires
Conclusions
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Mythologies of Internal Exile in Elizabethan Verse

Writers of the English Renaissance, like their European contemporaries, frequently reflect on the phenomenon of exile—an experience that forces the individual to establish a new personal identity in an alien environment. Although there has been much commentary on this phenomenon as represented in English Renaissance literature, there has been nothing written at length about its counterpart, namely, internal exile: marginalization, or estrangement, within the homeland. This volume considers internal exile as a simultaneously twofold experience. It studies estrangement from one’s society and, correlatively, from one’s normative sense of self. In doing so, it focuses initially on the sonnet sequences by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare (which is to say, the problematics of romance); then it examines the verse satires of Donne, Hall, and Marston (likewise, the problematics of anti-­romance). This book argues that the authors of these major texts create ­mythologies— via the myths of (and accumulated mythographies about) Cupid, satyrs, and Proteus—through which to reflect on the doubleness of exile within one’s own community. These mythologies, at times accompanied by theologies, of alienation suggest that internal exile is a fluid and complex experience demanding multifarious reinterpretation of the incongruously expatriate self. The monograph thus establishes a new framework for understanding texts at once diverse yet central to the Elizabethan literary achievement. A. D. Cousins, senior Professor in English at Macquarie University, is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Member of the Order of Australia. He has published a number of books in America and England, including monographs on Andrew Marvell, Thomas More, Shakespeare’s non-dramatic verse, as well as religious verse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture

Milton’s Italy Anglo-Italian Literature, Travel, and Connections in SeventeenthCentury England Catherine Martin Satire in the Elizabethian Era An Activistic Art William Jones Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama Enacting Family and Monarchy Chanita Goodblatt Donne’s God P. M. Oliver Eros and Music in Early Modern Culture and Literature Claire Bardelmann Jonson, the Poetomachia, and the Reformation of Renaissance Satire Purging Satire Jay Simons Fortification and Its Discontents from Shakespeare to Milton Trouble in the Walled City Adam F. McKeown Mythologies of Internal Exile in Elizabethan Verse Six Studies A. D. Cousins

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Mythologies of Internal Exile in Elizabethan Verse Six Studies

A. D. Cousins

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of A. D. Cousins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-36650-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-40163-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

In Memory of Arthur Brown, Earl Miner, and Boyd Vickery.

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction 1 1 Astrophil, Cupid, Petrarch, and Internal Exile in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 14 2 Cupid, Venus, Ulysses, Petrarch, and Internal Exile in Spenser’s Amoretti 33 3 The Donna Angelica, Cupid, Petrarch, and Internal Exile in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 59 4 Displacing the Satyr: Urbanity, Exile, and Integration in Donne’s Satires 87 5 Roman Satire and Satyric Exile in Hall’s Virgidemiae 111 6 The Protean Mythology and Calvinist Theology of Exile in Marston’s Satires 139 Conclusions 167 Bibliography Index

173 187

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for help of many kinds when I was writing this book, and would like especially to thank Michael Ackland, Helen and Neil Cadzow, Jim and Maureen Cahillane, Manfred and Janet Mackenzie, Dani and Juliette Napton, Teresa Petersen, Jane Ryan, Michelle Salyga, my wife Robin, my sons David and Matthew, and my grandson Daniel. Earlier and different versions of material in this volume have appeared in the following: Parergon (Chapter 1); English Studies (Chapters 2, 3, and 5); Writing and Religion in England, 1558–1689: Studies in Community-­ Making and Cultural Memory, eds Roger D. Sell and Anthony W. Johnson (Chapter 4).

Introduction

Although there has been recurrent interest in how writers of the English Renaissance depict exile from one’s homeland, there has been no sustained commentary on how they portray the phenomenon of internal exile: marginalization, or estrangement, within one’s community. The main aim of this volume is to provide the first account of internal exile as a preoccupation in Elizabethan literature and culture. It does so by examining the non-dramatic verse of six major writers: Sir Philip ­Sidney, ­Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, J­ oseph Hall, and John Marston. In particular, it considers three sonnet sequences (­A strophil and Stella, Amoretti, Shakespeare’s Sonnets) and four collections of satires (Donne’s Satyres, Hall’s Virgidemiae, as well as ­Marston’s Certaine Satyres along with his The Scourge of ­Villanie). To be more specific, the ensuing chapters explore mythologies (and sometimes theologies) of internal exile fashioned by quite different authors across two modes of writing—the erotic as opposed to the satiric; in other words, romance as opposed to anti-romance—and within seven different if nonetheless sometimes variously connected texts. The subsequent chapters focus chiefly, that is to say, on ways in which those authors use mythology and mythography concerned with the ­A lexandrian Cupid, satyrs, and Proteus so as to shape what become their own mythologies of the exilic. It also widely considers the chosen texts in relation to classical and then-contemporary European literatures. Two aspects of internal exile are primarily analysed across the seven texts: estrangement from one’s social environment and, cognately, from one’s normative sense of self. The phenomenon of exile within the homeland is therefore scrutinized especially in terms of what are, to diverse degrees, at once social isolation and alienation from the values that one’s community affirms (whether rightly or wrongly, whether actually or ­notionally) as essential to personal identity. The following chapters suggest that, perhaps even more than does its counterpart, internal exile necessitates radical reinterpretation of both who one is, or might be, and of what society is, or should be. That necessity involves, they also suggest, dealing with questions constellated round issues such as those of freedom and constraint, quests and compulsion, thresholds and impasses.

2  Introduction Moreover, they indicate that sometimes the answers to such questions can prove to be intransigently simple and seemingly all but impossible to act upon—or elusive, or impossibly intricate. They do not propose, however, that internal exile is the sole or even the predominant concern of those texts on which they severally focus. They argue rather that in each text it is an inescapable and significant consideration. It may be so, for example, because an indivisible link between desire and internal exile is implied throughout Petrarch’s Rime sparse; and, therefore, an attempt to overwrite the Rime demands further thought upon the nature of that link. Or it may be, too, because internal exile forms a topos in Roman verse satire and thus to emulate Roman satirists demands renewal of the topos rather than its repetition. The ensuing chapters argue, then, that internal exile is a concept, an experience, insistently explored by and always taking new forms within Elizabethan literary culture. As has been widely documented and discussed, exile from the homeland forms a powerful theme throughout literatures of the Renaissance.1 Early in his Epistolae Familiares, for example, Petrarch observes that he was ‘begotten in exile, born in exile’.2 Francesco Filelfo, near the start of his dialogue on expulsion from the patria, has Onofrio ask his father whether there is ‘anything more wretched or miserable than exile?’3 Joachim Du Bellay’s speaker, in ‘Desiderium Patriae’ (‘Longing for My Native Land’), concurs.4 Shakespeare’s Romeo exclaims, ‘Ha, banishment? Be merciful, say “death”, / For exile hath more terror in his look, / Much more than death. Do not say “banishment”’. And he adds, soon after, ‘There is no world without Verona walls’. 5 Mowbray, in Richard II, is hardly less passionate when responding to his sentence of banishment from England: ‘Then thus I turn me from my country’s light, / To dwell in solemn shades of endless night’ (1.3.170–1). It is, furthermore, of little surprise that again and again behind widely various representations of exile we hear the voices of Ovid or of Boethius. The first offered paradigms for lament at being excised from one’s people and culture; the second, stratagems for coming to terms with that very phenomenon.6 Nevertheless, banishment from one’s homeland is not the sole form of exile acknowledged in Renaissance texts. Throughout the Rime sparse, Petrarch repeatedly demonstrates desire’s subjection of his persona by emphasizing, among other things, that it compels the latter to inhabit a private world of obsession, to endure an almost total isolation. My point here, however, is not primarily that Petrarch’s erotic verse posits and explores the experience of internal exile and thus complements his striking identification of himself in his letters as an outsider. My point is that, in the process, it figures the multifacetedness as well as disjunctive force of desire by means of the mythology and mythography of the ­A lexandrian Cupid. Sonnet 35 of the Rime, for instance, begins with Petrarch’s speaker describing his existence as utterly divorced from the lives of ­everyone else (1–4). Yet the poem concludes with the speaker remarking

Introduction  3 wryly that he does in fact have a single companion throughout his exile, namely, the Alexandrian Cupid (12–14).7 Similarly, the speaker of sonnet 189 opens his complaint by telling of his isolation in a personal world of desire through which the Alexandrian Cupid directs, or misdirects, his way.8 This association of desire, dramatized in the guise of Cupido Victor, with alienation from both the community and one’s self—with banishment amidst society—is a manoeuvre that Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare will notably exploit in their reconfigurations of the Rime. Deploying that same tactic in order to create what are, in effect, their own mythologies of internal exile, the three English poets engage with Petrarchan precedent by displaying their insights into the diverse lore surrounding the Alexandrian Cupid. That is to say, just as Petrarch himself engages with that lore, so they engage with both him and it. Even a glance at that multifarious textual tradition will illustrate, moreover, a longstanding connection between Cupido Victor and notions of lost or confused or dispossessed selfhood. One could start with representations of Cupid in a work known directly or indirectly to each of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare: The Greek Anthology.9 Thus, Antipater of Thessalonica describes Cupid as the god who dominates those whom he possesses (9.420); Moschus too images him as the god who robs you of yourself (9.440). In keeping with those portrayals of Cupido Victor as the power who alienates his victims from themselves is Maecius’ characterization of him as ‘thief of the mind, robber of the reason’ (16.198.3–4). Secundus and Philippus write of Amoretti who have deprived even the Olympian gods of their identities (respectively, at 16.214 and 215). Analogous portrayals of the Alexandrian Cupid occur, of course, across a variety of Roman texts familiar to Elizabethan readers. One can readily cite instances from the verse of Propertius, Virgil, and Ovid, which differ—as might be anticipated—in their explicitness and scope. In Elegies 1.7, for example, Propertius’ speaker warns Ponticus: You, too, if the Boy stuns you with his unerring bow—with which I wish the gods I serve had not so outraged me!—, it will be away with your camps, poor wretch, away with your seven hosts, and you will weep that they lie unresponsive beneath dust ne’er to be disturbed; and in vain will you desire to put together tender couplets, for Love come late will not supply you with song. (15–20)10 Cupido Victor, according to the speaker, will end Ponticus’ existence as an epic poet and transform him into an incompetent author of erotic poems.11 A more succinctly inclusive view is attributed to Gallus in Virgil’s tenth eclogue: ‘Love conquers all; let us, too, yield to Love’ (‘omnia vincit Amor: et nos cedamus Amori’).12 Certainly, this maxim by implication subsumes the perspectives proffered by the poets of The Greek

4  Introduction Anthology and by Propertius on desire’s power to banish its victims from their habitually lived identities. Yet Virgil is far more explicit and specific in concurring with them when he proceeds, at Aeneid 1.717–22, to emphasize Cupid’s influence upon Dido: With her eyes, with all her heart she clings to [Cupid disguised as Ascanius, Aeneas’ son] and repeatedly fondles him in her lap, knowing not, poor Dido, how great a god settles there to her sorrow. But he, mindful of his Acidalian mother, little by little begins to efface Sychaeus [Dido’s deceased husband], and essays with a living passion to surprise her long-slumbering soul and her heart unused to love.13 Love has in fact comprehensively conquered Dido. The child god takes her from herself. ‘What say I? Where am I? What madness turns my brain?’, she later soliloquizes (4.595).14 He also takes her away from her responsibilities to the people she rules; further, he is instrumental in alienating her from the peoples surrounding her own.15 Overwhelmed by the Alexandrian Cupid, she has become, as she recognizes, ‘lost’ (‘perdita’, in 541). At the same time, however, Virgil carefully observes in this section of his epic that Aeneas himself is not dissimilarly overcome by a responsive desire (222–78, especially at 271–6). The Alexandrian Cupid almost deflects the destiny of Rome. I shall end discussion of Roman representations connecting the Alexandrian Cupid with loss of self and displacement amidst the community by briefly considering two episodes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text so often acknowledged in the writings of Petrarch, Spenser, and Shakespeare.16 At 1.452–67, Ovid relates the tale of Apollo and Daphne, the myth that Petrarch will make central to his Rime sparse. There Apollo cries out to the fleeing nymph: My arrow is sure of aim, but oh, one arrow, surer than my own [that of Cupid], has wounded my heart but now so fancy free. The art of medicine is my discovery. I am called Help-Bringer throughout the world, and all the potency of herbs is given unto me. Alas, that love is curable by no herbs, and the arts which heal all others cannot heal their lord! (519–24)17 His lament reveals that, conquered by the greater power of Cupid, he has lost at once lordship over his sphere of influence (‘nec prosunt domino, quae prosunt omnibus, artes’, 524) and governance of himself. He is dispossessed, displaced within his own domain—one of the great Olympians, yet overcome by the ‘wanton boy’ who is the

Introduction  5 Alexandrian Cupid (‘lascive puer’ being Apollo’s phrase at 456). Nevertheless, Daphne’s anguish and loss exceed those of Apollo. Having been struck by Cupid’s aversive, leaden arrow and thereafter pursued relentlessly by a divinity whose coercive force neither she nor her father can match outright, Daphne is rescued by her father, the river god Peneus, through a transformation that delivers her from Apollo but simultaneously separates her forever from her parent and deprives her forever of herself (548–52). Thanks ultimately to the Alexandrian Cupid, she continues to inhabit but lives in virtual banishment amid her environment. The second episode occurs at 10.1–85, where Ovid tells of Orpheus and Eurydice. When pleading with the infernal gods for the return of his wife, Orpheus sings, Love has overcome me, a god well-known in the upper world, but whether here or not I do not know; and yet I surmise that he is known here as well, and if the story of that old-time ravishment is not false, you, too, were joined by Love. (26–9)18 There Orpheus acknowledges his conquest by the Alexandrian Cupid in terms that chime with ‘omnia vincit Amor’, from Virgil’s Eclogues. At the same time, they emphasize that the god’s power has driven Orpheus into temporary but nonetheless still daunting exile from the upper world—the domain of the living and the light—into darkness among the dead. Further, his words emphasize also that the influence of Cupido Victor reaches down into the underworld and was at one time exerted upon its very ruler.19 These Greco-Roman configurations of the Alexandrian Cupid are affirmed throughout Renaissance mythography. Thus, for example, Giovanni Boccaccio writes when interpreting the iconography of the god: They [those who offer traditional portrayals of Cupid] cover his eyes with a blindfold so that we would understand that lovers do not know where they are going, have no judgment, and are led by no distinction between things but only by passion. 20 Vincenzo Cartari similarly describes how Cupido Victor deprives his victims of their self-possession: But even by himself Love is so powerful that he conquers the most stubborn wills, smashes open every hardened heart, and so humbles and subdues those who are most fierce and proud that they willingly place their hands in Love’s chains. 21

6  Introduction Thereafter, Natale Conti summarizes the god’s negative aspects as follows: ‘In a word, the ancient poets attributed so many of these emblems, powers, booty, savage companions, hideously blinded eyes, and immature age to Cupid to show the madness of human desire’. 22 Boccaccio, Cartari, and Conti variously emphasize the notion that, although the Alexandrian Cupid may be a god capable of benevolence, he can indeed render you alien to yourself. And, as we shall see, this is the role primarily assigned him in the sonnet sequences of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. While Cupido Victor features prominently in the erotic verse of those three poets, satyrs feature strikingly in Tudor theorizings of the satiric mode but unevenly across the actual verse satires of Donne and Hall. The satyrs’ pervasiveness in then-current accounts of where satire comes from and what it does seems to guarantee their exclusion from Donne’s collection of satiric verse. He ostentatiously if tacitly ignores them, refusing to draw on satyr myths or mythography, and chooses instead to fashion a mythos around himself. Just as he will not (unlike so many contemporary poets) write a sequence of erotic sonnets, so he declines to associate his verse satires with the lore of goat-men. 23 Hall, by contrast, makes the oft-repeated connection between satyrs and satire elemental to his Virgidemiae. Yet to focus on their choices is of course to consider an antecedent question: if the lore of the Alexandrian Cupid offers a means for love poets to represent how desire brings with it alienation, how does the lore of satyrs enable writers of verse satire to stage the experience of isolation in a contaminated world? Even a brief examination of satyr mythography and Tudor literary theory will indicate an answer to that question—and thence illuminate the satiric strategies of Donne and Hall. How the two bodies of knowledge interact can be described as follows. Mythographers stress that satyr myths serve to identify anarchic appetite and degraded intellect as hallmarks of subhuman behaviour—of a diminished humanity. The physical hybridity of satyrs, in other words, incarnates the notion that uncontrolled passions, unjudged engagement with the world, imbrute us. So, for example, we read in Fulgentius, Cartari, Conti, Abraham Fraunce and, sometime later, George Sandys. 24 But the satyrs’ habitual unruliness and indecorum, which mythographers interpret pejoratively, literary theorists choose on occasion to interpret as praiseworthy. Thus, to cite a famous instance, George Puttenham writes that early satirists fashioned satyr personae whose apparent lack of restraint, whose rustic outspokenness, had a decorum of their own outside the courtesy deemed in general as appropriate to civil society. According to Puttenham, ‘the first and most bitter inuectiue against vice and vicious men, was the Satyre’, in which poets ‘made wise as if the gods of the woods, whom they called Satyres or Siluanes, should appeare and recite those verses of rebuke, whereas in deede they were but

Introduction  7 disguised persons vnder the shape of Satyres’. 25 He adds that, thereafter, satiric drama ‘was somwhat sharpe and bitter after the nature of [verse] Satyre, openly & by expresse names taxing men more maliciously and impudently then became’ (32). Puttenham sees the putative connection between satyrs and satire as offering poets a distinctive opportunity. It allows them a form of what the Romans had called libertas: the right to speak out freely against what one takes to be corruption or folly. Yet it also does more than that, for it allows them to speak of individuals and about their society as if from an external perspective—as if outsiders freed from the constraints of seemliness. It hence affords them, that is to say, an opportunity for articulating alienation from alleged individual deviance and, by implication, from any perceived collective offence committed against what are or should be communal standards (Puttenham does not however pretend that satire knows no boundaries). To write in a mode linked with satyr myths and mythography therefore grants one a licensed albeit necessarily not unlimited wildness. One can play the outsider within; one can perform the role of resident alien. As we shall see below, this conventional association between satyrs and satire serves Hall well. Writing from an angle of vision encouraged within his college at Cambridge—but from the perspective of moral rather than physical marginalization—he unleashes sophisticated, elaborately faux-sauvages criticisms upon the metropolis. Writing from inside London, Marston alludes to the conventional connection of satire with satyrs yet creates an alternative to it when, across his Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie, he shapes what is effectively his own mythos of internal exile. Throughout his two collections of verse, he weaves variations on the fables and mythography of Proteus which together offer a lore much more prominent in humanist discourse than is that of satyrs. Marston’s speakers do not don the mask of a satyr. They are self-conscious shape-shifters who angrily scrutinize the transformations of those around them, and so are flawed amid the flawed whose aberrations alienate them. They seem to be, in fact, alienated from both themselves and the great majority of those around them. As a result, and with whatever degree of intent on their maker’s part, they indirectly subvert or at least stress negative aspects of two humanist dogmas most often expounded via myths of Proteus. These are: humankind’s capacity for infinite self-transformation; its potential to achieve self-perfection by way of that very ability. Having said as much, I shall nevertheless not proceed now to consider Protean mythology and mythography, for I do so at length in the relevant chapter below. I shall instead outline what the ensuing sections of this volume argue. Concern with different forms and experiences of internal exile was not first articulated, in the English Renaissance, by Elizabethan authors—so the verse of John Skelton, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, illustrates. Moreover, the latter two poets explored banishment

8  Introduction within or alienation from society via both erotic verse engaging with Petrarchan tradition and verse satire. Here, one could cite for instance Wyatt’s sonnet, ‘Whoso list to hunt’—where the Petrarchan original undergoes political transmutation—as well as other poems, some of which feature the Alexandrian Cupid. 26 One could cite too his first satire, ‘Mine own John Poyntz’, in which he politically metamorphoses a Juvenalian imitation by Luigi Alamanni. 27 Even so, it is the Elizabethan poets who fashion developed mythologies and thence critiques of internal exile, in the process comprehensively rewriting Petrarch or reinventing Roman verse satire. I begin, as chronology would suggest, with Sir Philip Sidney and the first English sonnet sequence, his Astrophil and Stella, to offer a sustained emulation of Petrarch’s paradigmatic Rime sparse. In particular, I pursue this argument. It is through linking the mythology and mythography of Cupid with the issue of choice that, for the most part, Sidney seeks at once to overwrite Petrarch and to stage a semi-autobiographical fiction. He fragmentarily relates how Astrophil’s subjugation by the Alexandrian Cupid has banished him from his true self: from his normative sense of personal identity and from his public role within the Elizabethan courtly sphere. Indeed, Sidney implies that Astrophil’s double exile can have no end. He denies his persona the remission seemingly granted to Petrarch’s. Sidney’s client, Edmund Spenser, creates in his Amoretti however a sonnet sequence that departs from the dramatization of endless, desire-driven exile presented both by the Rime sparse and by Astrophil and Stella. Spenser depicts throughout Amoretti a courtship that necessitates metamorphosis of both the beloved who represents Elizabeth Boyle, his intended, and the lover who represents himself. In keeping with his poem’s title, Spenser links transformation of the lady, whom he identifies at the outset as a donna angelica, with the mythology and mythography of Cupid. But inseparable from his doing so—and subtler—is his portraying her in association with the mythology as well as mythography of Venus. He connects transformation of his persona too with the figure of Cupid; likewise, however, with greater subtlety, he links his persona with the ­figure and lore of Ulysses. Informing their mutually interactive transformations, he indicates, is an experience of love where eros and agape meet in eventual and precarious harmony as caritas. A significant consequence is that Spenser liberates Petrarch’s characterization of the male lover, which Sidney had translated into the court of Elizabeth I. From Spenser’s pen, the Petrarchan lover acquires a selfhood resonant with the heroic and the exemplarily marital, a selfhood that allows him to look homewards rather than to see himself as trapped in exile. By way of contrast, Shakespeare does not envision in his Sonnets either harmony born of discords or an end to desire-driven alienation from the self and the world. His speaker diversely portrays, throughout some of

Introduction  9 the initial 126 sonnets, an aristocratic, transgendered male version of the donna angelica who ambiguously embodies grace. This is a figure whom we come to recognize as having an uncertain relationship with the concept, at once moral and aesthetic, of ‘grace’ that, for example, Castiglione deploys to characterize his ideal of the male courtier and Della Casa emphasizes as essential to civilized behaviour in society. Throughout some of the so-called Dark Lady sonnets thereafter, Shakespeare’s speaker more negatively refigures the donna angelica topos. Across a number of poems, he images a desacralized female object of desire in terms of grace profaned. He does not associate her with emanatio (emanation), raptio (ravishment), and remeatio (return)—as representations of the donna angelica deriving from fin’amor tradition would insistently suggest. He connects her with concupiscence and with akrasia (acting against one’s better judgement). He thus implies, more strongly than he does in poems to or about the young man, that the experience of love has exiled him from his normative understanding of who and what he should be, amplifying the power of sexual desire via allusion to the tyrannical sovereignty of the Alexandrian Cupid. In Elizabethan verse satire, as in the great sonnet sequences, one also sees desire linked with alienation. But the major collections of satires here considered link the latter with misdirected desire and, moreover, with mythologies other than the lore of Cupid in order to create their own myths of internal exile. So the earliest satires of the 1590s, those by Donne, clearly indicate. Donne’s satires portray an internal exile that appears to end with acceptance of and by the community. They trace the experiences of a persona who is, up to the point at which his disaffection and marginalization suddenly as well as finally seem to end, divided within himself no less than diversely from society at large. Repelling him (while radically excluding him because of his Catholic recusancy, although this is not made quite explicit), his society heightens his awareness of its self-alienation, the distance between its notional aspirations and what it actually often does—at the same time inviting his participation in its misdirected will to power. This is a temptation to which he now defiantly, now remorsefully and akratically succumbs. Moreover, amid negotiations with his disorientating environment, Donne’s persona does not represent himself through or associate himself with the mythology of satyrs, which a number of his fellows in Elizabethan verse satire certainly do; instead, he mythologizes himself. He writes himself large against, then for, the community within which he restlessly lives. At the heart of the five poems depicting his engagements with the later Elizabethan world lies Satire 3. There Donne’s persona offers the most profound critique of his isolation within that world, and hence the chapter discusses Satire 3 at some length. Unlike Donne’s persona, Hall’s speaker does allude to the mythology as well as mythography of satyrs in his satires and, furthermore, does so

10  Introduction throughout them. Early in Virgidemiae, he implicitly turns away from the Virgilian rota exemplified by the career of Spenser—to whom he specifically and explicitly signals deference—because a need to speak out against wrongdoing necessitates his departure from it. A compulsion to write satire excludes him, or so he fables, from genres directly associated with the Virgilian model for poetic achievement. Indeed, he announces that it impels him in a new direction for an English poet and, when making that declaration, he foregrounds the conventionally alleged etymological link between satire and satyrs. His satires become satyric embodiments of libertas (freedom of speech)—yet ambiguous personifications that, at some times, he may describe as unexpectedly refined but at others will not. He himself will emphasize that the later books of Virgidemiae are calculatedly harsher to the eye than their three predecessors (cf. 4,1 at 1–14, 29–34, 167–75). This summoning of satyr lore in order to personify satiric libertas contributes likewise, moreover, to the speaker’s representation of his internal exile. Marston’s verse satires, on the other hand, recurrently foreground myths of self-transformation. In particular, they highlight the myth of Proteus. Thereby however they do not establish a pattern of mythic allusion to self-transformation. Instead, they make re-fashioning of the self a motif through which Marston’s personae indirectly subvert (or at least stress the negative aspects of) mythographic fictions where humankind’s alleged power to reinvent personal identity is linked with its supposed potential to achieve self-perfection. To appreciate these mythological and mythographic implications of Marston’s verse satires proves illuminating for another reason. To do so helps us understand the theology highlighted within The Scourge of Villanie: the network of Calvinist concepts variously evoked throughout it. Moreover, we see in consequence that Marston creates verse satire articulating what might be called a mythology and theology of exile. Most of humankind is, as he variously represents his world, distanced from its own true humanity; and his personae recognize themselves to be in virtual exile although amidst society. They are separated from almost all those around them by their fury at the extravagant follies to which most of their fellows are notionally addicted. Further, the persona of Certaine Satyres complicates portrayal of his isolation by conceding himself to be grossly flawed. He is in exile, as it were, from the person he should be—and precisely because he is akin to those whom he excoriates. Such is similarly albeit not identically the case, we come to learn, with the persona of The Scourge. Marston’s satiric personae are exiles surrounded by exiles. Across the 1590s, then, a preoccupation with internal exile is embedded in both the great collections of sonnets seeking to rival Petrarch’s Rime sparse and the formal verse satires aspiring to overwrite Roman precedent. It is embedded in the literary culture of late Elizabethan

Introduction  11 England, in romance and anti-romance. So the affinities between, say, Sidney’s Astrophil and Spenser’s Timias (from The Faerie Queene), or between Marston’s Kinsayder and Jonson’s Asper (from Every Man Out of His Humour) further suggest. The question therefore remains as to how the authors considered in the ensuing chapters explore notions and experiences of internal exile. This they do with the acuity we would expect, but the diversity and scope of their explorations might well prove unexpected. Their fables, so to speak, have in fact an almost infinite variety.

Notes 1 Indicative of the commentary’s range are: Charles Edward Trinkaus, Jr., Adversity’s Noblemen: The Italian Humanists on Happiness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 126–35; Randolph Starn, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance ­Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); A. Bartlett Giamatti, “Hippolytus among the Exiles: The Romance of Early Humanism”, in his Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 12–32; Louis L. Martz, Milton: Poet of Exile, 2nd edn (1980; rpt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); Christine Shaw, The Politics of Exile in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); George Hugo Tucker, Homo Viator: Itineraries of Exile, Displacement and Writing in Renaissance Europe (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 1–52; Jane Kingsley-Smith, Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1–30; Charles A. Knight, The Literature of Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 81–115; Philip Major, ed. Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath, 1640–1690 (London: Routledge, 2010); Emma L. E. Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Philip Major, Writings of Exile in the English Revolution and Restoration (London: Routledge 2016). 2 ‘Ego, in exilio genitus, in exilio natus sum’. See Francesco Petrarca, Epistolae Familiares, in Opera Omnia, ed. Pasquale Stoppelli (Roma: Lexis ­Progetti Editoriali, 1997), at 1.1.22. My translation. 3 Francesco Filelfo, On Exile, ed. Jeroen De Keyser, trans. W. Scott Blanchard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 15. In the original, his words are: ‘An est quicquam exilio aut aerumnosius aut miserius?’ (ibid, 14). Cf. his later remark, ‘But if both infamy and poverty fall to his lot, there is nothing unhappier, nothing more miserable, nothing more unfortunate than an exile’ (49). The Latin, on the preceding page, runs: ‘Quod si utrunque malum, et infamia et paupertas, accesserit, nihil profecto exule miserius, nihil infelicius, nihil infortunatius’). 4 Reference is from Fred J. Nichols, ed. and trans., An Anthology of NeoLatin Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 524–8. My translation of the poem’s title. Cf. Clément Marot, “Au Roy, du Temps de Son Exil à Ferrare”, in idem, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. B. Saint-Marc, vol. 1 (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1879), 190–5. 5 Romeo and Juliet, 3.3.12–14 and 17. Reference is to The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997). Subsequent reference to Shakespeare’s plays is from this edition.

12  Introduction 6 Mowbray’s lament resonates with Ovid’s complaints against his exile. See Tristia and Ex Ponto, trans. Arthur Leslie Wheeler, Loeb Classical Library (1924; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), for instance at Tristia 1.1.126–7, Ex Ponto 1.3.49–50 and 4.16.47–9. Onofrio’s father, Palla, responds to his son in ways that resonate with the characterization of Philosophy by Boethius. Cf. The Consolation of Philosophy, 1.2. Passim with On Exile, 16–19. Reference to Boethius is from The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, the former trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, S. J. Tester and the latter, S. J. Tester (1978; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also two studies by Jo-Marie Classen: Displaced Persons: The Literature of Exile from Cicero to Boethius (London: Duckworth, 1999); Ovid Revisited: The Poet in Exile (London: Duckworth, 2008). 7 Reference here and hereafter is to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). The sonnet’s last lines are: ‘but still I cannot seek paths so harsh or so savage that Love does not always come along discoursing with me and I with him’ (‘ma pur sὶ aspre vie né sὶ selvage/cercar non so ch’ Amor non venga sempre/ragionando con meco, et io con lui’). 8 1–4 where, at the quatrain’s close, he says: ‘and at the tiller sits my lord, rather my enemy’ (‘et al governo/siede ‘l signore anzi ‘l nimico mio’). 9 Reference is to The Greek Anthology, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library, 5 vols (1916; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). 10 Propertius, Elegies, ed. and trans. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). In the original: ‘te quoque si certo puer hic concusserit arcu—/quo nollem nostros me violasse deos!—/longe castra tibi, longe miser agmina septem/flebis in aeterno surda iacere situ;/et frustra cupies mollem componere versum,/nec tibi subiciet carmina serus Amor’. 11 On Cupido Victor, cf. 1.1.1–8. The quoted lines evoke the recusatio topos with an evidently self-referential irony. 12 Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, trans. H. R. Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library (1999; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), at 10.69. Reference to Virgil here is from this edition. 13 ‘reginam petit. haec oculis, haec pectore toto/haeret et interdum gremio fovet, inscia Dido,/insidat quantus miserae deus. at memor ille/matris Acidaliae paulatim abolere Sychaeum/incipit et vivo temptat praevertere amore/ iam pridem resides animos desuetaque corda’. 14 ‘quid loquor? Aut ubi sum? Quae mentem insania mutat?’ It should be noted that ‘mens’ signifies not merely ‘mind’ but, too, ‘the intellectual faculties’ (Lewis and Short) as well as ‘will’ or ‘self-possession’ (Oxford Latin Dictionary). 15 Cf. 4.86–89 and 320–4. 16 Reference is to Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (1977; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 17 ‘certa quidem nostra est, nostra tamen una sagitta/certior, in vacuo quae vulnera pectore fecit!/inventum medicina meum est, opiferque per orbem/ dicor, et herbarum, subiecta potentia nobis./ei mihi, quod nullis amor est sanabilis herbis/nec prosunt domino, quae prosunt omnibus, artes’. 18 ‘vicit Amor. supera deus hic bene notus in ora est;/an sit et hic, dubito: sed et hic tamen auguror esse,/famaque si veteris non est mentita rapinae,/vos quoque iunxit Amor’. I have slightly amended the translation, by omitting an initial ‘But’ and by capitalizing ‘Love’ at its end, so as to register the Latin text’s continued reference to Cupid.

Introduction  13 19 Cf. Octavia 554–71, in Seneca, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hercules on Oeta, Octavia, ed. and trans. John G. Fitch, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 20 Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011 and 2017), vol. 2, 403. In the original: ‘Oculos vero illi fascia tegunt, ut advertamus amantes ingorare quo tendant, nulla eorum esse iudicia, nulla rerum distinctione, sed sola passione duci’ (402). 21 Vincenzo Cartari, Images of the Gods of the Ancients: The First Italian Mythography, trans. and annot. John Mulryan (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012), 399. See also, idem, Imagines Deorvm, Qvi ab Antiqvis Colebantur (Lvgdvni: Apvd Barptolemaevm Honoratvm, 1581): ‘[V]t intelligamus hanc in amatoriis rebus plurimum posse: licet & ille magnas vires habere, per nostrum socordiam, vulgo existimetur’ (336). 22 Natale Conti, Mythologiae, trans. and annot. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, 2 vols (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), vol.1, 334. See also, idem, Mythologiae, sive Explicationis Fabularvm Libri Decem (Patavii: Apud Petrumpaulum Tozzium, 1616): ‘Atque vt summatim dicam, tot insignia, tot vires, tot spolia, tam saeui comites, tam deformis occulorum caecitas, & aetas minime apta prudentiae, data sunt Cupidini ab antiquis poetis, ad exprimendam libidinis hominum insaniam’ (218). 23 Emile Legouis finely noted Donne’s ‘horror for the commonplace’. See his A History of English Literature: The Middle Ages and the Renascence (650–1660), trans. Helen Douglas Irvine (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 215. Moreover, Donne’s choosing to bypass the supposed affiliation between satire and satyrs aligns implicitly with some of Sir Philip Sidney’s remarks on the mode in his An Apology for Poetry. See An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy), ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. R. W. Maslen, 3rd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 101. 24 Fulgentius the Mythographer, trans. and introd. Leslie George Whitbread (­Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 83; Cartari, 109–111, 332; Conti, 380; Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch, Entitled Amintas Dale, ed. Gerald Snare (Northridge: ­California State University Press, 1975), 30; George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, eds. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 199. ­Sandys’ text was printed in 1632. 25 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 31. 26 ‘Sighs are my food’ is especially pertinent, an epigram that does not however feature the Alexandrian Cupid. 27 Reference to the poems is from H. A. Mason, Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Literary Portrait (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1986).

1 Astrophil, Cupid, Petrarch, and Internal Exile in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella

Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1581–2, although not printed until 1591) was neither the first sonnet sequence in English nor by itself the first Elizabethan attempt to imitate Petrarch’s Rime sparse.1 Anne Lock’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (printed in 1560) and Thomas Watson’s The Hekatompathia or Passionate Century of Love (printed in 1582) severally preceded and accompanied Astrophil and Stella in those respects. Lock’s sequence was, however, a very brief series of religious meditations. 2 Watson’s was a collection of poems that eclectically imitated the erotic verse of Petrarch, Serafino, and many others, but offered no continuous interaction with or developed appraisal of the Rime.3 In contrast to The Hekatompathia, Sidney’s series of sonnets and songs was the first English attempt to naturalize Petrarch’s paradigmatic text by means of a sustained engagement with it as well as a developed (if implicit) critique of it. Astrophil and Stella thus expresses not so much imitation of as rivalry with the Rime: aemulatio rather than imitatio.4 Here I shall argue that pervading Sidney’s rivalrous relationship with Petrarch is sensitivity to his own cultural immersion and belatedness as a love poet. Sidney makes clear to his readers, again and again, how well he knows the scope of other, contemporary poets’ writings and the extent of their dependence on writings by predecessors. He emphasizes his familiarity with the cosmopolitan breadth of modern poetic practice, how thoroughly he recognizes the debts of moderns to ancients, and how sharply aware he is of the distance in time between himself and Petrarch. Acknowledging all those things, he seeks by way of response to create a distinctive space for Astrophil and Stella within the heterogeneous canon of current verse, in particular, to signal the differences between his love poems and those of his contemporaries. He especially seeks to fashion poems that, at the same time as they acknowledge Petrarch and Petrarchan tradition, are meta-Petrarchan and hence not primarily replicative of the Rime.5 It is through linking the mythology and mythography of Cupid with the issue of choice that, in the main, he enacts his agonistic ambition. At the start of Astrophil and Stella, as he concludes the first and introductory sonnet itself, Sidney has the protagonist who re-presents or

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella  15 personates him indicate that to write authentically of love is to write with consciousness of Petrarch, in fact, that Petrarch’s Rime sparse all but offers the natural way to articulate a lover’s experience. That implicit affirmation of Petrarch foregrounds Astrophil’s choice to ­accept—if not to be bound by—the authority of his predecessor. Indeed, it serves to highlight choice and its consequences as a central concern for Astrophil and leads directly to an instance of choice crucial to his characterization. Sidney proceeds to distinguish the protagonist of his sequence from Petrarch’s speaker by having Astrophil relate that falling in love with Stella was a considered decision. Yet Sidney also has Astrophil concede that his free, deliberate commitment has now subjected him to desire. Astrophil thereafter recurrently portrays his condition as a troubled submission to the dominion of the Alexandrian Cupid, depicting what becomes in effect a microcosmic and personal counterpart to Etienne de La Boétie’s description of a people’s voluntary assent to tyrannic rule. A further and related consequence of Astrophil’s choice to love, and one likewise recurring throughout Sidney’s sequence as a whole, is that of exile. Astrophil’s submission to the Alexandrian Cupid has not driven him from his homeland but it has nonetheless, as he frequently laments, distanced him from his true self—from his normative sense of personal identity and from his public role within the Elizabethan courtly world. The motif of exile of course pervades the Rime sparse.6 When ­Sidney deploys it, however, he both affirms and re-fashions Petrarchan precedent. For Petrarch’s speaker, the motif crystallizes an emotional dislocation caused by love’s sudden seizure of his consciousness. For Sidney’s Astrophil, it becomes a way of imaging the psychological, social, as well as political alienation sequent upon his decision to love. Its point of entry into Astrophil and Stella occurs in the 13th poem and forms the climax to this crucial phase of Sidney’s sequence, which is to say, within the early sonnets where Sidney establishes the dynamic of Astrophil’s characterization. There Sidney has Astrophil retell the Judgement of Paris myth, focusing it now upon the Alexandrian Cupid and Stella. Yet although Astrophil shapes the myth anew in order to explicate the various disruption to his personal experience, he also does more than modernize and individuate it. In reinventing the ancient story about choice of life—choice of the direction for one’s life to follow—he narrates the myth setting all his ‘tale of me’ (45,14) in perspective. Thereby, he fulfils Sidney’s ambition to create a meta-Petrarchan sequence of love poems, and the means through which he has become instrumental to the success of Sidney’s rivalrous aspiration can therefore be summarized briefly in these terms. By way of the Alexandrian Cupid, Sidney re-imagines the persona of the Rime and, in addition, supplants the myth central to P ­ etrarch’s collection (the fable of Apollo and Daphne) with a myth also made his own but about choice.

16 Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella Nearly one-third of the way through Astrophil and Stella, in sonnet 34, Sidney’s protagonist declares his determination to write and then immediately asks himself whether it makes sense to write about love at all. Pondering that question, he stages an interior debate as to whether inscribing the woes of passion will merely iterate them or transmute them into aesthetic pleasure, whether his distress may become the occasion of fame rather than of shame, whether to write for his eyes only—to shield the tale of his pain from potential condemnation as folly—would be futile or therapeutic (1–11). This elaborately rendered moment of self-conscious and ironic hesitancy, in which Astrophil acknowledges the contrariness of writing about wariness of self-expression, he tentatively concludes with the hypothesis that from his perplexity notional readers may be able to infer the influence and mystique of his beloved. His final words are, ‘Thus write I while I doubt to write, and wreak / My harms on ink’s poor loss; perhaps some find / Stella’s great powers that so confuse my mind’ (12–14). The impulse to write and what he writes, even when ostensibly focused on himself, bespeak Stella. At once enlarging on that speculation, in the following sonnet he identifies the preliminary and more complex question therefore besetting him. If everything he writes tells of Stella, then the question is not about his writing’s purpose (as voiced in 34,1) but, rather, how to write at all about Stella—whose very name of course implies otherworldliness, an incommensurable difference and distance between herself and her suitor that are akin to those between star and star-lover. This he suggests throughout the subsequent poem’s octave: What may words say, or what may words not say, Where truth itself must speak like flattery? Within what bounds can one his liking stay, Where nature doth with infinite agree? What Nestor’s counsel can my flames allay, Since reason’s self doth blow the coal in me? And ah what hope, that hope should once see day, Where Cupid is sworn page to chastity? (1–8) We recognize that, so as to emphasize his bewilderment at the phenomenon who is Stella, Astrophil’s questions merge the inexpressibility topos and adynata. We recognize too that his sequence of questions proceeds from the problematics of decorous speech to the problematics of decorous desire, specifically, to his wavering between what Ficino, Pico, and Castiglione would designate as contradictory ways of loving, as loving either honourably (5–6) or dishonourably (7–8).7 We see at once, moreover, that Astrophil shapes each of the declarations forming the sonnet’s sestet through dementiens. Thereby he implies (particularly

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella  17 with reference to the last then first of the octave’s questions) that Stella enables the triumphant resolution of all hesitancy, all uncertainty, the transcendence of all questioning. Nevertheless, we notice two additional things here as well; and they do not merely further illumine this pair of poems but serve to elucidate Sidney’s sequence as a whole. The first of those returns us to Ficino and the second to Petrarch. In combination, they take us back to the sonnet opening Astrophil and Stella, that is to say, they help directly clarify how Sidney seeks both to naturalize the Rime sparse and to create meta-Petrarchan erotic verse in doing so. Ficino heads the third chapter of the third speech in his Commentary with the maxim that ‘Love is the master and governor of the arts’ (66).8 By way of explanation, in that chapter he writes, [W]hoever greatly loves both works of art themselves and the people for whom they are made executes works of art diligently and completes them exactly. In addition to these points there is the fact that artists in all of the arts seek and care for nothing else but love. (ibid)9 He later adds, [I]t is possible to infer the same thing, and to conclude summarily that Love is in all things, for all things. That he is the author and preserver of all things, and the lord and master of all the arts. (67)10 Astrophil affirms Ficino’s sententia, whether by design or otherwise, at the close of sonnet 35. He asserts, ‘Wit learns in thee [Stella] perfection to express; / Not thou by praise, but praise in thee is raised; / It is a praise to praise, when thou art praised’ (12–14). He endorses the dictum more famously of course in sonnet 74. The poem’s octave begins with his sardonic and disingenuous concession that he ‘never drank of Aganippe well’ (1). The poem’s sestet opens with Astrophil’s asking himself, ‘How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease / My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow / In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please?’ (9–11). The poem concludes with Astrophil’s proposing, in answer to that question: ‘Sure, thus it is: / My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella’s kiss’ (13–14). And sonnet 79, unfolding as expolitio on what it means to kiss Stella, illustrates his assertion (cf. 80,5 as well as 81,4). Yet Astrophil’s emphasis throughout sonnets 34–5 upon love alone as being ‘the lord and master of all the arts’ is indivisible from his simultaneous engagement with Petrarchan precedent and tradition. Reflection on the difficulty of writing about desire recurs across—in fact, becomes a topos within—the Rime sparse. Petrarch’s speaker iterates how hard it is to articulate the complexity as well as force of desire,

18 Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella or sometimes wonders what trying to express them might achieve.11 For example, in 73 the persona initially says, Since through my destiny that flaming desire forces me to speak which has forced me to sigh always, you, O Love, who arouse me to it, be my guide, and show me the way, and tune my rhymes to my desire. (1–6)12 He wishes indeed for love to be the master of his art. He adds, a little later, At the beginning I thought to find, through speech, for my burning desire some brief repose and some truce. This hope gave me the daring to speak of what I feel; now it abandons me in my need and dissolves. But still I must follow the high undertaking, continuing my amorous notes, so powerful is the will that carries me away [….] At least let Love show me what to say in such a way that if it ever strikes the ear of my sweet enemy it may make her the friend, not of me, but of pity. (16–24, 28–30)13 He continues, If only that knot which Love ties around my tongue when the excess of light overpowers my mortal sight were loosened, I would take boldness to speak words at that moment so strange that they would make all who heard them weep. (79–84)14 By way of contrast, in 247 Petrarch’s speaker insists, It will perhaps seem to someone that, in my praise of her whom I adore on earth, my style errs in making her noble beyond all others, holy, wise, charming, chaste, and beautiful. I believe the opposite, and I am afraid that she is offended by my too humble words, since she is worthy of much higher and finer ones. (1–7)15 These paradoxes of co-existent incapacity and empowerment, of artistic failure elaborately confessed and in the same breath therefore implicitly refuted, of lofty celebration unable nonetheless to match aspiration or desert, reveal that when Astrophil in effect indicates love to be ‘the lord and master of all the arts’, he appears to gesture as well towards a

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella  19 problem recurrent within the Rime and so towards Petrarch’s magisterial presence behind his verse. The authority of Amor, as it were, and that of Petrarch seem coterminous. Just what this means becomes clearer if we return to the first sonnet of Sidney’s sequence: Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain; Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know; Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain; I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain; Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain. But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay; Invention, nature’s child, fled step-dame study’s blows; And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, ‘Fool,’ said my muse to me; ‘look in thy heart, and write’. Astrophil begins with gradatio that develops a fin’amor counterpart to the scala perfectionis of religious contemplation (1–4), thereby imaging his quest for the erotic ‘grace’ of his beloved (4) rather than for adumbrations of beatitude. Gradatio is a rhetorical manoeuvre that Sidney will deploy again in Astrophil and Stella, although by no means as often as he will allegory; and, in fact, Astrophil goes on to unfold an allegory incorporating a further, briefer, but also affective instance of gradatio (5–14 at 9–10).16 The psychomachia of his creative processes then presented is a fable of ‘Invention’ (10)—or, inventio—that initially proffers a georgics of failed literary creation (7–8). Next, a series of complementary as well as aptly disjointed narratives fables the same phenomenon in terms of crippled movement, comic violence, unsettling intrusiveness, and anguished powerlessness (9–12 seriatim). The last, climactic narrative shows Astrophil picturing himself androgynously, his self-portrayal a conventional exercise in the grotesque, since to trope male authorship as child-bearing was a topos in Renaissance literature, but one that nonetheless encapsulates comic awkwardness as well as distress and evinces his fondness for calculated displays of melodrama. The elaborate and extended fable of Invention dominating the sonnet, therefore, makes two quite different emphases in communicating Astrophil’s struggle to articulate desire. Its virtuosic intricacy of course refutes the very failure it asserts (which coincides with what we have seen in sonnet 34). More important, despite Astrophil’s apparent railing against ‘artificial’ invention, his allegory in fact stresses the naturalness of invention whether

20 Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella ‘inartificial’ or ‘artificial’: so the georgic imagery and imagery of childbirth within his fable especially imply. Art, that is to say, all artifice, is natural to humankind.17 In the poem’s final line, Astrophil stages a dramatic conclusion to his fable, an end that seems to resolve its contraries yet nonetheless emphasizes the elegant duplicity and complexity of their interplay. He announces that his ‘muse’ suddenly manifested herself, as if a dea ex machina, and uttered this command: ‘“Fool,” [… ] “look in thy heart, and write”’ (14). The meaning of those words has been widely discussed and a number of commentators, myself included, have suggested that the muse’s instruction tells Astrophil to ‘look in [his] heart’ for inspiration and then ‘write’, because within his heart he will find the image of Stella, which will enable him to express what he truly feels (given his loving ‘in truth’ and being ‘fain in verse [his] love to show’, as he declares at the sonnet’s outset). Such an interpretation seems hard to deny. Astrophil explicitly tells us in sonnet 32 that he carries the likeness of Stella in his heart (13–14). However, as I have also noted, Petrarch’s speaker variously tells us across the Rime sparse that he carries Laura’s image in his heart (96,5–7), her image impresses itself on his heart (94,1–2), Amor has planted a perfect laurel—figuring Laura—within his heart (228,1–4), and on his heart has written her name (5,1–2).18 Astrophil’s conclusion to his monologue therefore reveals his muse instructing him at once to write spontaneously and to acknowledge Petrarchan precedent. Her imperative implies that to write with true feeling is to write with mindfulness of Petrarch: that Petrarch’s rhetoric of desire is virtually the natural language of love. Nevertheless, I would argue that this coup de théâtre, which spectacularly but nonetheless subtly closes the introduction to Astrophil and Stella, has a much larger significance for Sidney’s sequence as a whole. For a start, it qualifies Astrophil’s earlier, rueful declaration, ‘And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way’ (11). That remark has no chronological boundaries; it inherently includes authors past as well as present. Thus, in sonnet 3, we see Astrophil register his lack of sympathy with some aspects of how some contemporaries write—deriding, for instance, what he dislikes about Pléiade verse or the prose of John Lyly (3–4 and 7–8). In 15, he decries contemporary English poets who without discrimination imitate others’ works, or whose technique is naïve (1–6), climactically condemning poets who become mere English echoes of the long-dead Petrarch (7–8). The introductory sonnet of Sidney’s sequence unmistakably foreshadows, then, Astrophil’s subsequent revelation of a cosmopolitan artistic rivalry with his coevals; and, in doing so, it foreshadows his cognate revelation of sensitivity at being a very belated inheritor of Petrarchan tradition. Yet in the dramatic close of the introductory sonnet, Astrophil deliberately connects portrayal of himself as a lover with the Petrarchan speaker’s self-portrayal in that

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella  21 role throughout the Rime. Astrophil’s decision to establish a distinct connection between himself and Petrarch’s speaker—especially since he will soon suggest his awareness of Petrarchism’s long history—implies that Petrarch’s verse is not among the ‘strangers in [his] way’. Moreover, the calculated, theatrical conclusiveness of his decision, which mythologizes it as having the force of external compulsion, emphasizes choice itself to be an issue of moment in his self-representation. So it immediately becomes. We have just now seen that Sidney ends the first sonnet by showing Astrophil’s decision to create a parallel between himself and the speaker of the Rime. He begins the second, however, with suggestion of Astrophil’s having decided to distinguish himself from his archetype. There Sidney begins to differentiate portrayal of his protagonist from Petrarch’s characterization of his speaker, and so to initiate development of Astrophil and Stella as not merely replicative of the Rime but meta-Petrarchan. With self-­ conscious transgressiveness, Astrophil announces at the start of the second sonnet: Not at first sight, nor with a dribbed shot, Love gave the wound which while I breathe will bleed: But known worth did in mine of time proceed, Till by degrees it had full conquest got. I saw, and liked; I liked, but loved not; I loved, but straight did not what love decreed: At length to love’s decrees I, forced, agreed, Yet with repining at so partial lot. (2,1–8) Commentary on those lines often and rightly notes that, by insisting his love for Stella was neither love at first sight nor involuntary, Astrophil distinguishes himself from Petrarch’s speaker in the Rime. In Rime 2,5– 11 and 3,3–11, for example, Petrarch’s speaker confesses that Amor one day took him by surprise, unexpectedly assaulted him when he was defenceless, and overwhelmed him. Certainly, then, this familiar gloss on the sonnet’s octave is true. But it does not sufficiently identify the nature and importance of Astrophil’s decision, insight into which begins with remembrance of this simple fact: two decisions are set before us simultaneously. Astrophil announces that his love for Stella at first resulted from a process of judgement, from reason and passion functioning freely together. Stella’s ‘known worth’ (3) reasonably albeit gradually generated his love for her. Astrophil thus aligns his falling in love more closely with the workings of right reason than with those of unreason.19 Choosing to recount the origins of his love for Stella in such a way, Astrophil at the same time gives his ‘tale of me’ a point of departure divergent from Petrarch’s opening narrative in the Rime.

22 Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella Yet how he positions himself there in relation to Petrarch also forms part of a diverse interaction—whatever his degree of intent—with various Renaissance fictions and philosophies of love. Astrophil does not significantly disagree with Petrarch alone, for instance. Ficino asserts in his Commentary, ‘[L]overs do not know what they desire or seek, for they do not know God Himself, whose secret flavour infuses a certain very sweet perfume of Himself into his works’ (52). 20 On the other hand, Astrophil agrees with Ficino’s proposition that ‘love is free, and arises of its own accord in free will’ (Commentary, 97). 21 Hence he concurs too with Pico on love as free choice (Commentary, 101–2). While contradicting Ficino on the ignorance of lovers, moreover, he agrees with Cardinal Bembo in The Courtier, who says, ‘[Since] our desire is only for things that are known, knowledge must always precede desire, which by its nature turns to the good but in itself is blind and does not know the good’ (243). 22 Astrophil’s conspicuous denial of Petrarch’s authority is therefore at the same time an interaction with later, influential theorists of love who were themselves interacting, at least in part, with the authority of Petrarch. He then ends his tacit dialogue with current (if not contemporaneous) thought on passion, knowledge, and freedom of choice by conceding that he has become a prisoner of the choice he freely made. As we have seen, although Astrophil declares near the start of sonnet 2 that he has become a victim to Cupido Victor, for ‘Love gave the wound’ (2), straight after his declaration he makes clear that his wound is actually self-inflicted. 23 Thus, if ‘[a]t length to love’s decrees [he], forced, agreed’ (7), it was in obedience to the desire generated by a personal decision—one made in light of Stella’s ‘known worth’ (3), her established and acknowledged merit. Thereupon, nonetheless, Astrophil laments not that his own decision wounded him but that it effected his irrevocable subjugation. He suggests, in the ensuing account of his decision’s consequences, that he has moved far past even lamenting loss of freedom, for ‘now like slave-born Muscovite / [he calls] it praise to suffer tyranny’ (10–11). This admission has several implications. Among them, first, we recognize Astrophil’s complaint at enslavement by the Alexandrian Cupid to be complaint at subjection to his own passion. Further, we recognize Astrophil to be describing private experience that has significant affinities with—and contrasts to—Etienne de La Boétie’s portrayal of what he called voluntary servitude, that is, a people’s willing assent to tyrannic government. Not long after the opening of his tract, La Boétie writes, It is the people who enslave themselves, who cut their own throats, who, when they have the choice of being either free men or slaves, give up their freedom and take up the yoke if they accept their ill, or rather pursue it. 24

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella  23 La Boétie there describes a nation’s entry upon subjection to tyrannic rule as political suicide; as he relates it, ‘the people’ mortally injure themselves when choosing to lose their freedom—for they do indeed voluntarily abandon it. Through the process of judgement from which has resulted his love for Stella, Astrophil tells us, he has at once irremediably injured himself and made a choice initiating loss of personal freedom. But his situation is clearly worse than that of ‘the people’ as described by the French writer. National self-enslavement, as La Boétie would picture acceptance of and obedience to rule by a single individual, can be repudiated. A nation can choose to recover its liberty. La Boétie sums up this notion with the words, ‘Resolve no longer to be slaves and you are free!’ (8). 25 For Astrophil, on the contrary, both freedom and the very wish for it are gone (10–11, quoted above). That is a phenomenon La Boétie understands: It is unbelievable how people, once they are subjected, fall so quickly into such a deep forgetfulness of freedom that it is impossible for them to reawaken and regain it; they serve so freely and so willingly that you would say to see them that they had not lost their liberty but won their servitude. It is true that in the beginning one serves, constrained and defeated by force; but those that come after serve without regret, and do willingly what those who came before did under constraint. (13)26 Nevertheless, Astrophil has made clear just how far his privately experienced servitude differs from its civic counterpart as theorized by his contemporary. Although concerned to advance the proposition that citizens voluntarily enter into collective political servitude and can likewise voluntarily repudiate it, La Boétie offers no very detailed rendition of the processes through which a nation might abandon or could regain liberty. We expect Astrophil, however, to be closely focused on the mechanisms of voluntary servitude because, after all, he writes about personal experience from within the Petrarchan tradition (which prioritizes obsessive self-analysis)—and so he is. Thus, whereas La Boétie broadly juxtaposes the concepts of national freedom as willingly lost and of national freedom as recoverable by an act of will, Astrophil attentively recreates the stages that marked his loss of personal liberty. Further, he reveals this loss to have been a paradoxical phenomenon, and one in which the voluntary merged with the involuntary. In sonnet 2, for example, as we have seen, Astrophil says, ‘I loved, but straight did not what love decreed: / At length to love’s decrees, I, forced, agreed, / Yet with repining at so partial lot. / Now even that footstep of lost liberty / Is gone’ (6–10). Astrophil’s irony becomes more insistent—the aristocratic sdegno directed against

24 Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella himself intensifies—as his narrative of diminishing control over his own life unfolds. Fully aware of the self-contradictoriness to which he admits, in other words, Astrophil reports that he fell voluntarily in love and at the same time declined to accept the subservience obviously as well as necessarily consequential upon his choice—thereupon unwillingly accepting it and at the last delighting in utter servitude. This has been, he thereby clearly implies, a trajectory towards self-created, self-enforced enslavement. If there were any doubt that Astrophil portrays his devotion to Stella as an enslavement begun in paradoxical interplay between the voluntary and the involuntary, or that he uses the Alexandrian Cupid to figure the force of love not as some terrible, external power suddenly imposing itself on his life but as an irruption within his life at once generated by him and understood yet also underestimated by him, sonnet 5 resolves it. There Astrophil implicitly affirms all those things by conceding, ‘It is most true, what we call Cupid’s dart, / An image is, which for ourselves we carve; / And, fools, adore in temple of our heart, / Till that good god make church and churchmen starve’ (5–8). Further, in affirming them, Astrophil’s words harmonize with this maxim by Calvin on idols and idolatry: ‘[M]an tries to express in his work the sort of God he has inwardly conceived. Therefore the mind begets an idol; the hand gives it birth’. 27 Astrophil’s demythologizing of the Alexandrian Cupid in this quatrain from the fifth sonnet, with its iconoclastically Protestant temper, thus does indeed emphasize his departure from Petrarch (as from La Boétie). One could add that it also ironically albeit obliquely supports Ficino’s notion that ‘love is the lord and master of all the arts’. Even though it denigrates what Ficino too condemns as a perversion of love—mere sensual desire—and calls amor ferinus, ‘love’ of that kind is what impels the poem and with what, for all his awareness of virtuous alternatives to amor ferinus, Astrophil finally associates himself. 28 Of more immediate pertinence here is, however, the fact that Astrophil’s iconoclastic desacralizing of Cupid indicates both critique of Petrarch’s authority and endorsement of it on his own terms. I have mentioned above that Petrarch’s speaker, when describing his innamoramento, insists on the involuntariness of his desire. He iterates a narrative of ambush, assault, and conquest by Amor, suggesting that he was unexpectedly stricken with love as if it had been visited upon him by some irresistible, external force. Here one could again cite Rime sparse 2 and 3, and add the striking 61st sonnet with its series of blasphemously parodic beatitudes (61,1,5,9,12; cf. 13,5–8). Astrophil’s counter-narrative, just now discussed, insists on his love for Stella as directly although not immediately the result of knowledge, judgement, and free choice, yet as nonetheless proceeding at once to entwine the voluntary with the involuntary. Whereas Petrarch’s speaker depicts himself, then, first in the role of victim to Amor and thereupon in that of love’s martyr (the latter

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella  25 exemplified by 133,1–4 and 9–11), Astrophil at first repudiates the passivity of Petrarch’s speaker only soon to re-enact it after his own fashion. To put this more comprehensively, his assertion of autonomy inasmuch as he chooses—at least, initially—to love, which is at the same time a statement of independence from the foundational portrayal of Petrarch’s speaker in the Rime and an implicit criticism of it, leads nonetheless to a self-depiction akin (if not identical) to that displayed by his predecessor. Like Petrarch’s speaker, he proceeds to reveal a pervasive consciousness of subjection, abjection, and conviction of sin. The last of those appears in the Rime as an intermittent mindfulness of cupiditas (so 62 makes clear, for instance, along climactically with 365–6), and in Astrophil and Stella as a recurrent awareness of concupiscentia—what might be called the Calvinist counterpart to cupiditas (so 5,5–8 make clear along with, for example, 71–2, passim). Elemental to Astrophil’s sense of himself as a lover, in fact, essential to Sidney’s characterization of him in the early sonnets of Astrophil and Stella, are choice and the contamination of choice, which is to say, exploration via the Alexandrian Cupid of freedom and constraint, of reason’s assertiveness and yet powerlessness, of aspiration intricately aware of its own delusive heroics and twinned with consciousness that multifaceted loss must be its price. The dynamic of Astrophil’s characterization thus established in the very early poems of Sidney’s sequence soon after receives its most elaborate formulation in sonnet 13. There, as was mentioned earlier, Sidney has Astrophil rewrite the Judgement of Paris myth so as to concentrate it upon the Alexandrian Cupid and Stella. Reinventing one of the bestknown ancient myths about choice of life, Astrophil shapes a miniature narrative that explicates what he will subsequently represent as love’s multifarious disruption of his personal experience. This is therefore a sonnet resonant throughout the rest of Astrophil and Stella, offering in effect the mythic narrative that informs Astrophil’s consequent accounts of himself. Thereby the poem fulfils Sidney’s ambition to create a meta-Petrarchan sequence of love poems, for in reinventing the ancient story about choice of life Astrophil discards the myth set at the heart of Petrarch’s Rime sparse, namely, the fable of Apollo and Daphne. According to Astrophil, Phoebus was judge between Jove, Mars, and Love, Of those three gods, whose arms the fairest were. Jove’s golden shield did eagle sables bear, Whose talents held young Ganymede above: But in vert field Mars bare a golden spear Which through a bleeding heart his point did shove. Each had his crest: Mars carried Venus’ glove, Jove on his helm the thunderbolt did rear. Cupid then smiles, for on his crest there lies

26 Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella Stella’s fair hair, her face he makes his shield, Where roses gules are borne in silver field. Phoebus drew wide the curtains of the skies To blaze these last, and sware devoutly then, The first, thus matched, were scarcely gentlemen. This is, I suggest, the poem in Sidney’s sequence that most distinctly illuminates Astrophil’s lament, ‘I am not I, pity the tale of me’ (45,14). Fulgentius had interpreted the Judgement of Paris as an allegory about choosing whether to pursue a life centred on political power, or on wisdom, or on sensual pleasure—the gifts offered to Paris, as we know, respectively, by Juno, Minerva, and Venus. Many later mythographers, including Sidney’s contemporary, Natale Conti, would concur. 29 Sidney has Astrophil alter the story’s cast and focus, fashioning a completely masculinized version of the myth in which the contest, although still connected with choice of life, is immediately over possession of the finest chivalric equipage rather than possession of pre-eminent female beauty. All the participants in his version are gods. Now, Jove replaces Juno (and again symbolizes political dominion), Mars replaces Minerva (symbolizing military prowess, an attribute shared with the goddess), and Cupid replaces Venus (while continuing to symbolize the power of love). Apollo now judges the contest since he has the capacity, being god of poetry, to confer eternal fame on whom he chooses as winner (13,12–13). By imagining the contest as among those male divinities and over pre-eminence of self-representation, Astrophil focuses the allegorical significance of the myth correlatively on masculine choice of life and public status: the public status attendant upon pursuing one masculine way of life rather than another. That focus allows Astrophil to devalue pursuit of political or military success—and to do so with divergent consequences. He has Jove represent himself in terms evoking the rape of Ganymede: heraldic imagery suggesting the god’s exercise of irresistible misrule in order to gratify illicit desire. Astrophil has Mars represent himself through reference to his adulterous affair with—in other words, his conquest by—Venus (Venus Victrix): a personal and dishonourable defeat. What the two gods publicly proclaim about themselves demeans them. Stella, whose presence makes Astrophil’s fable at once contemporaneous and personally relevant, therefore becomes the determinant of triumph within it. Like Cupid, she too displaces Venus; further, her unflawed beauty empowers the Alexandrian Cupid to supplant his rivals and gain victory. Stella confers honour on Cupid, then, which of course means that loving Stella confers honour on Astrophil. The latter, in fact, implicitly denies either political or military pursuits the ability to bestow transcendent prestige; that, he contradictorily implies, derives alone from love for Stella, who embodies perfection. One consequence of Astrophil’s metamorphosing

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella  27 the Judgement of Paris into the Judgement of Apollo, and thence devaluing pursuit of status via the political or the military, is thus hyperbolic praise of Stella, which is to say, the conferring of honour on her. Indeed, near his fable’s end, Astrophil tells of Apollo immortalizing, perhaps stellifying, the personal beauty of Stella and maybe the Devereux arms (12–13). Yet evidently there is an accompanying consequence. If a direct result of Astrophil’s refocusing the Judgement of Paris is that he simultaneously eulogizes Stella and legitimizes his complete devotion to her, an indirect result is that he indicates how his obsession with her has reduced as well as enhanced his life. It is through the figure of Apollo that Astrophil both concludes his praise of Stella and nevertheless suggests how his love for her has lessened his existence. True, Apollo adjudicates the fable’s contest among the gods in favour of Cupid because of Stella’s unique beauty; and, true again, the god of poetry honours Stella by glorifying her beauty among the stars. We see him provide justification for Astrophil’s being preoccupied with her alone. We recognize however that, in this fable, Apollo is not merely Astrophil’s re-creation; he is also a surrogate for Astrophil. Honouring Stella, setting her praise across the skies, he does either what Astrophil himself actually does or what Astrophil seeks metaphorically to do: he enacts what has now, in fact, become Astrophil’s vocation. Moreover, his disdain of the equipage borne by Jove and Mars (13–14) anticipates and justifies what Astrophil will proceed to reveal as his own apparent distraction from, if not disdain for, pursuits political or military. Those pursuits are, Astrophil emphasizes throughout subsequent poems, elemental to a contemporary male courtier’s public role and therefore expected to be priorities in his performance of that role although, as he makes clear, they are not. Through Apollo’s refusal to honour Jove and Mars, Astrophil indicates that his love for Stella now diminishes his successful participation, much less achievement of pre-eminence, in the actual business of courtiership. Now he courts her in what for him has almost become a self-imposed isolation from the wider concerns of courtly life. Astrophil’s depiction of himself as the courtier who has sacrificed nearly all for love—whose choice to love has set him apart to varying degrees from his fellows and their professional preoccupations—features prominently throughout the sonnets that follow his recounting the Judgement of Apollo. In sonnets 18, 21, 23, and 27, for example, he variously acknowledges alienation from his own intellectual talents, his political responsibilities as a member of an aristocratic family, and his social environment at court.30 Yet there is, as we might well foresee, an artful disingenuousness to his confessions of personal and public failure. Here one could cite sonnet 30 by way of illustration, a poem specifically political in its emphasis. Throughout the majority of the poem, Astrophil reveals his alertness to European matters of state before going on to suggest

28 Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella distracted indifference to them.31 He is careful to intimate, when registering near-obliviousness, that his views are sought out by those more ostensibly concerned with politics than is he. ‘These questions [on momentous current affairs] busy wits to me do frame’, he says (12). Thus his self-deprecatory last words, in which he declares he ‘know[s] not how’ he responds to queries about politics (14), imply not his ineptness as a courtier but the talent that his devotion to Stella has suppressed (‘for still I think of you’, he tells her at the end of the poem’s final line). One could add that, in sonnet 107, Astrophil deftly uses political terms when asking Stella to release him for a while from his duties to her, so that—it seems—he may pursue politics other than those of courtship.32 Similarly but not identically ambivalent is Astrophil’s portrayal of his chivalric military skills and prowess as exhibited at jousts. He depicts himself throughout sonnet 41 in the role of victorious knightly hero: to be a courtier embodying chivalric triumph. Like some hero of romance, according to his narrative, he has achieved a success attributable to the ‘heavenly’ influence of his beloved, who here is Stella, his own fortunate star (12–14). By contrast, in sonnet 53 Astrophil relates that on another occasion he was altogether disempowered by the distracting, overwhelming beauty of his beloved. Then, he says, the Alexandrian Cupid jealously asserted lordship over him when he was acting with success ‘[i]n Mars’s livery’ (6) and ordered him to look at Stella, whereupon Astrophil was instantly stupefied by her supranatural beauty (8–13), rendered hors de combat and therefore militarily humiliated in her sight. This mock-heroic tale of failure accords with his pervasive complaints in other sonnets that Stella has conquered him, that whether as a type of Venus Victrix or of Petrarch’s ‘sweet warrior’ (Rime sparse, 21,1–2) she has gained dominion over him. Sonnet 29, for example, shows Astrophil deploying an analogy at once political and military, whereby he can describe Stella’s heart as having allied itself with the Alexandrian Cupid in order to preserve its liberty, which has consequently effected his utter and hopeless overthrow (13–14). Astrophil may be now inspired to chivalric distinction, or now denied it, by his love for Stella, but he is always conquered by and subject to her. Astrophil’s Judgement of Apollo forms an explanatory preface to those accounts of statecraft foregone, of chivalric glory and humiliation interlinked because it allegorizes his freely chosen commitment—freely chosen at first—to a life focused on desire for Stella rather than on pursuits political or military: priorities metonymic of the courtier’s public role, his engagement with the business of courtiership. As we have seen, although Astrophil thus emphatically gives courtship precedence over courtiership in his fable, he carefully ensures thereafter that we understand his reflections on the consequences of his choice to unfold a ‘tale of me’ wherein failures follow from obsession, from distractedness, rather than from any want of gifts. Yet the shrewdness of Astrophil’s

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella  29 individuated myth about his choice of how to live, and the significance of its early placement within Sidney’s poetic sequence, lie perhaps most clearly in the fact that Astrophil’s service to the Alexandrian Cupid itself results not just in failure but failure without end. In sonnet 72, Astrophil soliloquizes on the inseparability of carnal and spiritual desire in his devotion to Stella—on that internecine struggle in a male lover’s consciousness identified by Petrarch’s speaker as conflict between caritas and cupiditas or, by Ficino, between amor honestus and amor ferinus. 33 When, straight afterwards in the Second Song, Astrophil dramatizes his seizing a chance to make physically sexual contact with Stella and steal a kiss from her while she is asleep, he concludes with self-condemnation for timorous restraint (21–8). No hope of future and further consummation will be realized from that moment onwards. If Astrophil’s spiritual love for Stella will find gratification in his adoring her as a donna angelica (indicated across the seventh and eighth songs), his physical desire for her will remain endless and unfulfilled (so the ninth song suggests, for instance, along with sonnet 108). His choice to serve the Alexandrian Cupid leads to self-division and, ultimately, incompletion. The Judgement of Apollo clarifies, then, Astrophil’s lament, ‘I am not I, pity the tale of me’ inasmuch as that metamorphosed myth of personal choice allows us to appreciate, when reading the interlaced reflections and narratives subsequent to it, how Astrophil becomes distanced him from his normative sense of individual identity and his public role within the Elizabethan courtly world. Petrarch’s speaker in the Rime had proposed that to love unrequitedly is to journey into exile. Ficino had later agreed, asserting that a lover’s soul, spirit, and even body all go into exile of a kind, since they are driven by desire from their customary courses: the lover’s personal experience of exile is, in other words, total. 34 Astrophil insistently if not invariably images himself as estranged from the Elizabethan court, where not the Queen but Stella is his prime object of desire (cf. 107,9–10). He tends to portray himself as displaced from the court even though within it—often, as if in a self-imposed internal exile. Further, because it is not the myth of Apollo and Daphne but another fable of Apollo that most comprehensively illuminates Sidney’s protagonist, we recognize the astuteness with which Sidney displaces Petrarch himself within Astrophil and Stella and thereby fulfils his aspiration to create a meta-Petrarchan sequence of sonnets. It is in the early sonnets of his sequence, one could not unreasonably suggest, that we come to understand Sidney’s predominant tactics for engaging with the Rime sparse by way of imitating, affirming, and yet supplanting Petrarch.

Notes 1 Reference to Astrophil and Stella is from Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed. Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works (1989; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University

30 Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella Press, 2002), 153–211. I have also consulted: William A. Ringler, Jr., ed. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Richard Dutton, ed. Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Writings (1987; rpt. New York: Routledge, 2002). Pertinent discussions of Sidney include Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), 230–47; Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 63–108; Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16–21; Tom W. N. Parker, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle: Loving in Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1998), 35–85; Edward Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 102–41; Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 72–100; Robert E. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 139–40; Jane Kingsley-Smith, Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 36–7, 153–6; Ulrich Langer, Lyric in the Renaissance from Petrarch to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 15–48; Richard McCabe, Ungainefull Arte: Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 23–4, 65–6. 2 See Anne Vaughan Lock, The Collected Works, ed. Susan M. Felch (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 1999), 62–71. 3 Thomas Watson, Hekatompathia, ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham: Arber, 1870). See, representatively, passions 5 and 75–9. 4 On imitation and rivalry in the theory and practice of Renaissance art, see: Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 3–66; Frederick Ilchman, ‘Venetian Painting in an Age of Rivals’, in idem, ed. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (Boston, MA: MFA Publications, 2009), 21–39; Alison Cole, Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure, Power (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2016), 140–4. See also: Philip Hardie, Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 439–84, 523–37; David Mayernik, The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2016), 15–48. 5 For accounts of Sidney’s dealings with Petrarch and Petrarchism, other than the account offered here, see especially in addition to Greene and Langer (cited above): Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 119–69, chiefly at 127–39; Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 99–107. See, further, Michael J. Giordano, The Art of Meditation and the French Renaissance Love Lyric: The Poetics of Introspection in Maurice Scève’s Délie, object de plus haulte vertu (1544) (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 4–5, 32–41, 289–94. 6 For example, Rime 17, 23, 35, 37, 45, 130. 7 Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, introd. and trans. Sears Jayne (Woodstock: Spring Publications, 1985), 54. Idem, Commentaire sur Le Banquet de Platon, de L’Amour / Commentarium in Convivium Platonis De Amore, ed. and trans. Pierre Laurens, 2nd edn (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2012), 41 and 43. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni, trans. Sears Jayne (New York: Peter

Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella  31 Lang, 1984), 128–9. Idem, Commento sopra una canzone d’amore, ed. Paolo de Angelis (Palermo: Novocento, 1994), 73–4. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Daniel Javitch, trans. Charles Singleton (New York: Norton, 2002), 251–2. Idem, Il Cortegiano, or The Courtier, ed. and trans. A. P. Castiglione, 2 vols (London: 1727), 435–7. Subsequent reference to Ficino, Pico, and (in this chapter) Castiglione is from these editions. 8 In the Commentarium, ‘Amor est magister artium et gubernator’ (57). 9 ‘Artis [ . . . ] opera diligenter exequitur atque exacte consumat, quicumque et artificia ipsa et personas quibus illa fiunt, maxime diligit. Accedit ad hec quod artifices in artibus singulis nihil aliud quam amorem inquirunt et curant’ (59). 10 ‘Idem in ceteris artibus coniectari licet, atque summatim concludere amorem in omnibus ad omnia esse, omnium auctorem seruatoremque existere et artium uniuersarum dominum et magistrum’ (61). 11 Rime 1, 5, 18, 20, for instance, establish and work early variations on those themes. See also, representatively: 125, 131, 252, 268, 354. 12 ‘Poi che per mio destino / a dir mi sforza quell’accesa voglia / che m’à sforzato a sospirar mai sempre, / Amor, ch’ a ciò m’invoglia, / sia la mia scorta e ‘nsnimi ‘l camino / et col desio le mie rime contempre’. 13 ‘Nel cominciar credia / trovar parlando al mio ardente desire / qualche breve riposo et qualche triegua; / questa speranza ardire / mi porse a ragionar quel ch’ i’ sentia, / or m’abbandona al tempo et si dilegua. / Ma pur conven che l’alta impresa segua / continuando l’amorose note, / sὶ possente è ‘l voler che mi trasporta, / [ . . . .] Mostrimi almen ch’ io dica / Amor in guisa che, se mai percote / gli orecchi de la dolce mia nemica, / non mia ma di pietà la faccia amica’. 14 ‘Solamente quel nodo / ch’ Amor cerconda a la mia lingua quando / l’umana vista il troppo lume Avanza / fosse disciolto, i’ prenderei baldanza / di dir parole in quel punto sὶ nove / che farian lagrimar chi le ‘ntendesse’. 15 ‘Parrà forse ad alcun che ‘n lodar quella / ch’ i’ adoro in terra, errante sia ‘l mio stile / faccendo lei sovr’ ogni altra gentile, / santa, saggia, leggiadra, onesta et bella. / A me par il contrario, et temo ch’ ella / non abbia a schifo il mio dir troppo umile, / degna d’assai più alto et più sottile’. 16 Other occurrences of gradatio notably include: 2,5–7; 44,1–4; 74,9–11. 17 After all, ‘artificial’ invention may have ‘study’ as its ‘step-dame’ but it is nevertheless, as we are told, the ‘child’ of nature (10). In other words, it is the offspring of human nature nurtured—or in this case notionally (yet ­actually not) impeded—by the educative processes themselves born of human culture. ‘Art is man’s nature’, as Edmund Burke remarks in his Letter from the New to the Old Whigs. 18 Cf. Ficino’s Commentary, 129 and Commentarium, 171. 19 On the concept of right reason, see especially Robert Hoopes’ classic, Right Reason in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1–33 and 123–45. 20 ‘[Q]uid cupiant aut querant amantes ignorant, deum namque ipsum ignorant, cuius sapor occultus odorem quemdam sui dulcissimum operibus suis inseruit’ (Commentarium, 37). 21 ‘Amor [ . . . ] liber est ac sua sponte in libera oritur uoluntate’ (Commentarium, 115). 22 ‘amòr non è altro, che un certo desidério di fruὶr la bellazza; & perchè il desidério non appetisce, se non le cose conosciύte, bisogna sempre che la cognition preceda il desidério, il quale per sua natura vuole il bene, mà da sè è cieco, & non lo conosce’ (Il Cortegiano, 421).

32 Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella 23 Stella is assigned the role of Venus Victrix in subsequent poems, such as 36 and 42 (where, as elsewhere, she also appears in the role of donna angelica). See also 85–6. 24 Reference is from Etienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, trans. James B. Atkinson and David Sices, introd. and annot. James B. Atkinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2012), 6. Subsequent reference is given in the text. Reference to the French original is from idem, De La Servitude Volontaire ou Le Contr’un, annot. M. Coste and introd. F. de La Mennais (Paris: Daubrée et Cailleux, 1835). In this case, ‘C’est le peuple qui s’asservit, qui se coupe la gorge: qui ayant le chois d’estre sujet, ou d’estre libre, quitte sa franchise, et prend le joug, qui consent à son mal, ou plustost le pourchasse’ (72). 25 ‘Soyez resolus de ne servir plus, et vous voila libres’ (77). 26 ‘Il n’est pas croyable, comme le peuple, deslors qu’il est assujetty, tombe soudain en un tel et si profond oubly de la franchise, qu’il n’est pas possible qu’il s’eveille pour la r’avoir, servant si franchement, et tant volontiers, qu’on diroit à le voir, qu’il a, non pas perdu sa liberté, mais sa servitude. Il est vray, qu’au commencement l’on sert contraint, et vaincu par la force: mais ceux qui viennent après, n’ayans jamais veu la liberté, et ne sachans que c’est, servent sans regret, et font volontiers ce que leurs devanciers avoyent fait par contrainte’ (89). 27 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.11.8. See also, idem, Institutio Christianae Religionis (Londini: Thomas Vautrollerius, 1576): ‘[Q] uod homo qualem intus concepit Deum, exprimere opere tentat. Mens igitur idolum gignit: manus parit’. In Institutes 2.3.5 Calvin reflects, by way of Bernard, on the notion of voluntary servitude (‘voluntariae cuiusdam servitutis’) but his psychology of choice differs markedly from that indicated by Sidney’s Astrophil and La Boétie, since he effectively denies that freedom of choice exists. 28 On amor ferinus see Commentarium, 7.3, passim. 29 Fulgentius the Mythographer, 64–7. Natale Conti, Mythologiae, vol. 2, 554–62. Here, and at some points in later paragraphs, I revise and develop earlier work of mine on Sidney. 30 Compare, especially: 18,5–11; 21,5–11; 23,5–11; 27,1–8. 31 In verses 9–10 he pointedly alludes to the term that Sidney’s father spent as Lord Deputy Governor of Ireland, referring to ‘my father’ (10) and so gesturing towards his role as a mask for, or re-presentation of, Sidney. 32 See, in particular, lines 1–8 and the reference to ‘this great cause’ (8). 33 Rime sparse at, for example, 365–6 with Commentarium, respectively, 2,7 and 7,3. With 72, compare 76,13–14. 34 Ficino: Commentary, 123 and Commentarium, 6.9 (‘Quisque istorum naturali amisso exulat domicilio’).

2 Cupid, Venus, Ulysses, Petrarch, and Internal Exile in Spenser’s Amoretti

We have been diversely shown how, throughout Amoretti, Spenser stages the courtship preceding his second marriage within the sanctified progress of time: secular time’s envelopment by the seasons and festivals of the liturgical year.1 There appears to be an immanent design to his text that is both numerological and ecclesiastical, although the latter’s relevance to individual poems seems at some points evident and illuminating while at others unclear, less than demonstrable, or non-existent. 2 Informative as such commentary often may be, we need also to recognize that Spenser portrays his courtship by means of an immanent mythological and mythographic patterning at once more elaborate and specific than has been acknowledged. This mythic patterning articulates Spenser’s suggestion that his courtship does not merely evoke but necessitates metamorphosis, in both the beloved who represents Elizabeth Boyle, his intended, and the lover who represents himself. In accord with his poem’s title, Spenser connects transformation of the lady, whom he identifies initially as a donna angelica, with the mythology and mythography of Cupid.3 Yet inseparable from his doing so—and of greater subtlety—is his depicting her in association with the mythology as well as mythography of Venus. He connects the transformation required of his persona too with the figure of Cupid; likewise, however, with greater subtlety, he links his persona with the figure and lore of Ulysses. Impelling their mutually interactive transformations, he intimates, is an experience of love where eros and agape meet in eventual and precarious harmony as caritas.4 A distinct theology of love informs the mythic design of Amoretti. Within Spenser’s fictional projection of his courtship, the lady becomes a donna angelica who reflects the multiplicity of Venus and, he especially implies, who should in due time affirm the bond between Venus Caelestis and Venus Vulgaris—the bond between love of the divine and honourably mutual human love. In courting this numinous object of desire, in questing for her and thence heaven, his persona becomes analogous to the hero of the Odyssey. His speaker engages upon an arduous quest for home, seen primarily not in terms of place (another Ithaca) but of someone who embodies home (as a counterpart to Penelope). Further, his speaker takes on, if not perhaps quite or always the role of trickster,

34 Spenser’s Amoretti at least the roles of the versatile and sometimes cunning man defined by—at the last, refined by—the unique worth of the woman he seeks so as to make her his wife (he anticipates marriage to her and lauds her anticipated fidelity in 6,13–14). Spenser mythologizes his courtship, then, not so much through overtly assigning mythic names or re-telling mythic narrative (although to an extent he does both) as through allusion to mythic attribute and theme. Deploying this confluence of myth across his fiction of courtship, he dramatizes what is itself a syncretic theology of love, a dynamic of sanctified if not unproblematic desire. Amoretti therefore reveals Spenser, like Sidney before him in Astrophil and Stella, ingeniously overwriting Petrarch. At the heart of Petrarch’s Rime sparse lies the myth of Apollo and Daphne. One of Sidney’s main tactics for naturalizing the Petrarchan sonnet sequence into England and creating meta-Petrarchan verse is to set a quite different myth at the heart of Astrophil and Stella: the Judgement of Paris rewritten as the Judgement of Apollo. Here I am arguing that Spenser similarly sets a personal mythic paradigm at the heart of Amoretti.5 But as we know there are correlatively other, powerful contrasts that distinguish Spenser’s sonnets from those of both Petrarch and Sidney. Unlike the speaker of Petrarch’s Rime, or Sidney’s Astrophil, the Spenserian persona is empowered by religious orthodoxy rather than anguished by it; and he can anticipate desire’s consummation in marriage. He is thus not predominantly a martyr to love.6 Spenser liberates Petrarch’s characterization of the male lover, which Sidney had translated into the court of Elizabeth I. From Spenser’s pen the Petrarchan lover acquires an identity resonant with the heroic and the ideally marital, an identity that allows him to look homewards rather than to see himself as trapped in exile. Not least important is this additional contrast. Petrarch implies that he first saw Laura on Good Friday; in other words, he implies that his courtship of Laura began in Lent. Spenser’s persona makes the Lenten season central to the chronology of his courtship. Thereby Spenser can forcefully contrast his pursuit of Elizabeth Boyle to Petrarch’s of Laura. The Italian poet, seeing his object of desire on Good Friday, fashions a persona possessed by love that generates the self-division, the fragmentation, of a consciousness at war with itself. Spenser recounts an experience of Love that traverses Lent and yet his speaker moves, albeit often with trouble, towards integrated selfhood and sacramental union with the beloved. *** Sonnets 1–21, which precede those concerned with Lent (22–68), present the fictionalized counterpart to Elizabeth Boyle as a donna angelica whose sdegno manifests the authority that she holds over her suitor, and thus initiate her concurrently implicit role throughout the poem as a type of Venus Caelestis et Victrix.7 In doing so, furthermore, they

Spenser’s Amoretti  35 associate her with the notion of seeking home and homeland. When Spenser images her as the numinous mediator between this world and the next, he figures her both as an embodiment of the earthly paradise and as enhancing her lover’s power to win heaven itself. Therefore, by implication, Spenser’s persona becomes a man who, courting his object of desire, quests for what is truly home in this world and, at the last, beyond it: Spenser begins to cast his fictional self in the role of a man who, embarking on pursuit of the beloved, undertakes a quest that after its fashion unites the Petrarchan with the Ulyssean. So we are unmistakably shown, for the Spenserian persona relates courtship of a woman whom he declares to be at once his muse, his prospective spouse, the completion of his personal identity, his journey’s end on this side of the afterlife, and his guide to beatitude in the afterlife itself. Amoretti begins with a ritual of submission. In the first amoretto among the little cupids with which he will hope thereafter to engage the attention of his lady, Spenser’s speaker addresses the collected sonnets themselves. Deferentially he gestures towards the constellation of attributes that he will acknowledge in his lady and celebrate across the first sonnet’s successors; and he adumbrates what his responses to those attributes will be. She is, he says in a sequence of tropes once focused upon Laura, the source of heavenly illumination, a celestial being beatific in countenance, and his muse. She is, he adds, the spiritual nourishment he needs and the heaven on earth for which he seeks. Hence his incantatory repetition of ‘happy’, indicating that to be in her presence—to experience life with her—is to be joyful, fortunate, blessed: Happy, ye leaves, whenas those lily hands (Which hold my life in their dead-doing might) Shall handle you and hold in love’s soft bands, Like captives trembling at the victor’s sight; And happy lines, on which with starry light Those lamping eyes will deign sometimes to look, And read the sorrows of my dying spright Written with tears in heart’s close bleeding book; And happy rhymes, bathed in the sacred brook Of Helicon (whence she derived is), When ye behold that angel’s blessed look, My soul’s long-lacked food, my heaven’s bliss: Leaves, lines and rhymes, seek her to please alone Whom, if ye please, I care for other none. Spenser’s persona creates a numinous introduction of his beloved into Amoretti, revealing her as Laura come again but also as more than another Laura. Certainly, like her Petrarchan antecedent she manifests the sacred in our world. The persona, addressing his collection of verse,

36 Spenser’s Amoretti declares to her and to us all that she exemplifies the angelic and confers grace, that she embodies beatitude and is thus his telos (11–12). He implies that because she instantiates beatitude on earth, incarnates an earthly paradise to be not merely desired but perhaps regained, she encapsulates the idea of home while indicating the blessed homeland that lies beyond her in eternity. She is indeed a donna angelica, evoked in visionary exstasis; and the intensity of that visionary moment intimates the force of the persona’s eros. Nonetheless, the lady’s advent discloses that she must be perceived as a subtly re-imagined type of Laura. The speaker’s epiphanic representation of his beloved associates her immediately and elementally with Laura. When he celebrates the ‘starry light’ of her ‘lamping eyes’ (5–6), his imagery recalls a motif often used by Petrarch to evoke Laura’s mystique.8 She is his muse, we are later told (9–10); and in that respect too she, of course, resembles Laura.9 Further, she is a muse who inspires him and will read what she has inspired: viewing his verse, his amoretti, she will see into his heart and soul (7–8). She will read him. So Petrarch’s persona, addressing Laura’s eyes, says (though with a different emphasis), ‘But you, blessed eyes, [ . .  .] you see me entirely, without and within, even though my sorrow does not pour forth in laments. [ . . .] [Y]our seeing shines in me as a sunbeam penetrates glass’.10 Yet the lady’s insight into his devotion, anxiety, and pain expresses a more comprehensive power over him, one that extends her role as donna angelica. The nature of this power centres upon notions of conquest, disdain, and condescension. In understanding it, we appreciate how Spenser’s speaker elaborates on Petrarch’s depiction of Laura and thereby portrays his beloved as a type of Venus Caelestis et Victrix, which is also to say, of Venus Caelestis (Urania) and cognately Venus Vulgaris. Conquest is almost the first motif used by Spenser’s speaker in order to depict his beloved. His reference to her ‘lily hands’ (1) concisely and gracefully locates her within fin’amor conventions for presenting the object of desire as ideally beautiful—conventions within which Petrarch of course also situates Laura.11 Then we see that, as in the traditions of fin’amor and as too in the Rime sparse, perfect beauty exercises total power over its devotee. Spenser’s speaker, like Petrarch’s, asserts that the beloved holds the power of life and death over him (2) and that the quivering pages of his verse, which in articulating his passion express his innermost self, will become ‘[l]ike captives trembling at the victor’s sight’ (4). He has been captured by her; and his book will be held in ‘love’s soft bands’ as her prisoner. At the sonnets’ beginning, Spenser’s speaker enacts a ritual of submission, of conquest and imprisonment, familiar across the literature of courtly love in general and Petrarch’s verse in particular.12 No less familiar in those contexts are the notions of disdain and condescension, often as linked to their companion in conjunction with concepts of worthiness and unworthiness.

Spenser’s Amoretti  37 As we have long known, in fin’amor tradition the beloved’s power, her authority, tends to derive from exceptional beauty informed by singular virtue. Hence her role as donna angelica, exemplified by Dante’s Beatrice, by Petrarch’s Laura, and celebrated by Castiglione in his The Courtier when Cardinal Bembo discourses on love.13 She often appears, then, to be uniquely worthy as an object of desire and may choose in consequence to treat her suitor with disdain (which he may acknowledge as decorous, given her status, but perhaps call cruelty) or with an apt condescension (which he registers perhaps as mercy, perhaps as pity). My point here is that the notions of disdain and condescension, the concepts of worth and its opposite associated with them, have a specialized lexicon of which Spenser makes use from his sonnets’ very start. Further, observing his use of it means gaining a clearer sense of the power his speaker attributes to the beloved in Amoretti and thereby how Spenser summons the mythology and mythography of Venus in his poems, which results in a representation of the beloved that distinguishes her from Laura as portrayed by Petrarch. The place to begin specifying all this lies in the concept of worth as fin’amor tradition would proffer it—the object of desire’s notionally unique worth, and the worthiness or otherwise of her suitor. In sonnet 5 of the Rime sparse, amid glorifying Laura’s name, Petrarch’s speaker praises Laura herself, turning to her with the words: ‘O Lady worthy of all reverence and honour’ (‘o d’ogni reverenza et d’onor degna’, line 11). It is therefore entirely understandable from his perspective, and as he remarks elsewhere, that she should hold in decorous disdain (‘sdegno’) whatever is unworthy of her—which at times may include himself. For example, he says in 71,24–6, ‘When in your burning rays I become snow, your noble disdain is perhaps offended by my unworthiness’ (‘quando agli ardenti rai neve divegno, / vostro gentile sdegno / forse ch’allor mia indignitate offende’). So Boccaccio’s Troilo describes to Criseida her ‘graceful ladylike disdain, whereby every lowborn desire and action seemeth base to thee’.14 In his Inferno, at 9.88, Dante pictures an actual angel manifesting sdegno when confronting unworthiness. Of this male and decidedly aristocratic figure his persona says, ‘Ah, how full of disdain he seemed to me’ (‘Ahi quanto mi parea pien de disdegno!’). By no means all accounts of or allusions to sdegno are positive, of course. Many complaints suggest that sdegno can diminish the person who exercises it no less than the recipient of it, and that it can have a disruptive impact on a community. Castiglione often presents it negatively, for instance, in different ways throughout The Courtier.15 Nevertheless, although both Dante and Petrarch acknowledge that sdegno may sometimes be perceived and experienced negatively by a lover when pursuing his beloved, they emphasize that its optimal function within a relationship is salvific. Dante makes this emphasis indirectly if clearly in La Vita Nuova, Petrarch more explicitly in his Rime sparse.16

38 Spenser’s Amoretti There Petrarch’s speaker does indeed register Laura’s disdegno as punitive (one could cite 171,12). On the other hand, early in the sequence, he announces that Laura facilitates his quest for salvation (13,5–14—cf. 4, 12–14) and indicates how her sdegno contributes to her doing so. Near the close of sonnet 21 he insists, ‘I disdain what does not please you’ (‘mio, . . . sdegno ciò ch’a voi dispiace’, line 8). To read the speaker’s statement in its larger sense is to recognize his self-identification by way of aspirational identification with his beloved. Sharing her disdain for unworthiness means attempting to approximate her perfection, which is to say, accepting metamorphosis by her and hence aspiring to beatitude. Her pity and condescension are likewise ultimately tied to her will that he seek transcendence of the merely mundane, the dishonourable, the vicious.17 This lexicon of worth, unworthiness, disdain, and condescension— inseparable from conceptualizing in fin’amor of irresistible female authority—illuminates the first sonnet in Amoretti and other of the poems antecedent to those associated with Lent. To observe Spenser’s use of it is to see how his speaker simultaneously affirms depiction of the lady as a donna angelica and intimates or adumbrates her correlative role as a refracted image of Venus: as reflecting at once the sacredness and multifacetedness of love. If we return to the initial sonnet, for example, we note mention of the beloved’s ‘deign[ing] sometimes to look’ (6) at the pages of her suitor’s book. Condescension allows for the possibility of its opposite; and soon after, in sonnet 5, Spenser’s speaker says of what he calls his lady’s ‘portly pride’ (2): For in [her] lofty looks is close implied Scorn of base things and sdeign of foul dishonour, Threatening rash eyes which gaze on her so wide That loosely they ne dare to look upon her. Such pride is praise . . . . (5–9) At the heart of her ‘pride’ is sdegno, as he makes quite clear by specifying her ‘[s]corn of base things and sdeign of foul dishonour’ (6). He then focuses his subsequent monologue on celebration of her disdain, although there he presents her sdegno as ‘rebellious pride’ (6,1) because of its delaying his lady from acceptance of a marital love that is both natural and sacred.18 In a similar vein, not long afterwards, the Spenserian persona requests of Cupid: ‘But her proud heart do thou a little shake. / And that high look (with which she doth control / All this world’s pride)’ (10,9–11). To those instances of concern with the lady’s disdain, one could add 2,9, 7,6–7, 13,1 and 9, 14,7–8, 17,11–12, 19,11–12, 20,7–14, 21,3–12. Each iterates and heightens her image as donna angelica, for Spenser’s speaker continues to insist that her ‘pride’ manifests sdegno of

Spenser’s Amoretti  39 worldliness and unworthiness—thus evincing his beloved’s commitment to the divine. That portrayal of her pervades Amoretti (27, 38, 49, 55, 58, 61 and 81 could be cited representatively); and it informs or encompasses all references to her cruelty, tyrannical behaviour, and remoteness. Yet from the very outset, it also associates her with the multiplicity of Venus. This formulation of the beloved’s dominance over her suitor, that is to say, allows us to perceive both how Spenser aligns Amoretti with Rime sparse and how he differentiates his sequence of sonnets from Petrarch’s. Here, we must return to the initial poem. In it, as we have seen, Spenser begins with notions of certain conquest and imagined condescension, depicting an ideally beautiful woman—indeed, a woman of otherworldly beauty—to whom he emphatically assigns the role of ‘victor’ over the totality of his persona’s existence.19 He offers oblique portrayal of her as a donna angelica and at the same time intimates that she has the conquering, irresistible authority of a Venus Victrix. By virtue of that simultaneity, she is necessarily a counterpart to or type of Venus Caelestis as well as Venus Victrix. The Spenserian speaker’s stress on her capacity to bestow condescension or impose disdain evidently affirms this but also more subtly conforms with it. Some versions of faculty psychology associated sdegno with the irascible element of the sensory appetite (its function being to reject the disagreeable and the harmful), which was held to exercise a coercive force itself associated symbolically with Mars. 20 The speaker’s recurrent allusion to his lady’s disdain thus penumbrally as well as directly affirms her role as conqueror; and he does not wait long before making that role all but explicit. In sonnet 11, he announces of his beloved, ‘Daily, when I do seek and sue for peace, / And hostages do offer for my truth, / She, cruel warrior, doth herself address / To battle and the weary war reneweth’ (1–4). We recognize this immediately as a conflation of the beloved, first, with Laura (via Petrarch’s ‘sweet warrior’ trope—as in ‘dolce mia guerrera’ from 21,1—widely echoed by his imitators) and, second, with Venus Victrix/Venus Armata (the victorious Venus who, having subjugated Mars, dons his armour and takes up his arms). 21 My argument here is not primarily that Spenser, in those lines, recalls Petrarch and the mythographers but, rather, the insistence, the obviousness, with which he draws our attention to them. His speaker’s distinct and emphatic mythologizing of the beloved throughout the 11th sonnet—particularly, his extended fabling of her as a Venerean conqueror—has several important functions. For a start, it comprehensively amplifies her power, her authority, as donna angelica by combining at length a classical with a Christian version of the divine. It elaborates upon the speaker’s brief and oblique correlation, in the first sonnet, of his beloved with not merely Venus herself but Venus in her role as Conqueror. In doing so, it therefore heightens representation of the lady’s presence as virtually theophanic and of experiencing her presence as numinous. Cognately, it implies that the lady, thus

40 Spenser’s Amoretti depicted as a manifestation of the otherworldly, enacts what neoplatonic theorizings of love call emanatio—thence in her suitor evoking what those theorizings identify as consequences of emanatio, namely, raptio and remeatio. 22 Emanatio, moreover, especially in conjunction with the lady’s condescension—her bestowal of favour or, as the conventions of fin’amor would suggest, ‘grace’—can itself, in turn be seen as manifesting what the reformed theology of Spenser’s time understood by the term agape, thence in the suitor evoking what the theology of Spenser’s time likewise understood by the term eros. From their interaction, Spenser’s speaker intimates, follows caritas. I shall presently discuss that theological dimension to the speaker’s portrayal of his beloved, when considering the Easter sonnets in Amoretti. For the moment, I shall mention one further function of the speaker’s imaging his lady as a type of Venus. It facilitates his depiction of her metamorphosis from singular woman, disdainful of love, into singular woman who accepts love into her life and becomes his betrothed. To explore and celebrate this process of transformation, he indicates her transition from being, predominantly, a type of Venus Victrix/Venus Armata into being, additionally as well as concordantly, a type Venus Vulgaris (the Celestial Venus as she appears generatively in the corporeal world, and whom Catullus mentions as Bona Venus). 23 The beloved is still far from affinity with the figure of Venus Vulgaris, as we cannot fail to have inferred; and so she remains throughout the initial suite of Spenser’s sonnets. There, nonetheless, she does not feature merely in the guises of Venus Caelestis and Venus Victrix/Armata. The speaker’s portrayal of her highlights at different moments the multiplicity of Venus and hence the diversity of love. Although he does associate her chiefly with Venus the Celestial and Conqueror, he links her too in passing with Venus Genetrix, Venus Machinatrix, and Venus Philommeides—connections that will recur across the Easter sonnets. 24 He suggests her association with the Celestial and Conquering Venus, beyond those instances of it mentioned above, diversely at 5,11–2, 7,3–4, 10,5–8, 12,1–4, 20, passim.25 He connects her with Venus Genetrix, on the other hand (and as we would anticipate), not by way of alignment but disjunction. This he does unmistakably if obliquely in the two reverdie sonnets (4 and 19), for example. Within the fourth sonnet, he shapes a gorgeous pageant. He fables Janus—the New Year—summoning Cupid so that the latter might prepare to manifest himself in a world where spring approaches: where Flora will soon appear (1–12). The implication here is that universal beauty and incipient fertility should incline the beautiful, chaste, and triumphant donna angelica towards acceptance of love. 26 As the speaker concludes, ‘Then you, fair flower, in whom fresh youth doth reign, / Prepare yourself new love to entertain’ (13–14). Inviting her to participate in the festal renewal of their world, he asks her in effect to become a type of Flora and, by way of corollary, submit herself

Spenser’s Amoretti  41 to Venus Genetrix. He asks her, that is, to participate in the economy of nature, from which she now stands aloof. The speaker thus fashions his beloved as someone who should assume her due and pre-eminent role in a cosmic pageant (which resembles how Shakespeare in his Sonnets, for instance 5–7, sometimes presents the Young Man). He similarly does so in sonnet 19, her indifference to honouring Cupid (9–12) indicating more broadly her repudiation of Alma Venus. Of the two other Venerean personae notably assigned to the lady in these early sonnets, the more interesting is that of Venus Machinatrix (the Venus skilled in love’s artifices). Sonnet 11 hints at the beloved’s appearance in this role although primarily it is concerned with imaging her as Venus Victrix/Armata. There the speaker says of the ‘cruel warrior’ (3): ‘But then she seeks with torment and turmoil / To force me live, and will not let me die’ (11–12). He attributes her with a cruelty inflected by cunning; he lightly, stylishly nuances her predominant characterization. The 18th sonnet, however, shows him casting her in greater detail as Venus the Trickster. Amidst complaints that will end with accusation of his lady’s being a domina petrosa (14), the speaker laments, But when I plead, she bids me play my part; And when I weep, she says tears are but water; And when I sigh, she says I know the art; And when I wail, she turns herself to laughter. (9–12) The beloved, already linked to several aspects of Venus, now also resembles the goddess by clearly displaying and asserting her mastery of cunning in love. ‘I know the art’, as we are told she says (11). That in itself is interesting because it highlights the ludic dimension of Spenser’s serio-ludic sequence—the mutual playfulness, so typical of Amoretti and so rare in other collections of erotic sonnets, that accompanies or underlies the speaker’s excursions into comic self-pity, extravagant denunciation, and grandiose gestures when he chooses to stage them. Nonetheless, it has greater interest for another reason. Insofar as the lady’s cunning in love makes her reminiscent of Venus Machinatrix, that very cunning likewise makes her resemble her suitor. If, as I have suggested previously, he presents himself as a man questing for the woman who will become in marriage his counterpart to Penelope, thus embodying home and, at the same time, helping him seek his eternal homeland, then he variously aligns himself with Ulysses. And not the least of his qualities as a Ulyssean figure is his cunning, as we would expect: his own skill—which he now exhibits, now disingenuously denies, now pretends to conceal—in the artifices of love. I shall examine those affinities between the speaker and Ulysses a little later. What I wish to emphasize here, first, about congruence between the beloved and Venus

42 Spenser’s Amoretti Machinatrix could be put this way. Thereby the speaker implies that part of what he and his lady share, part of their mutuality, is a characteristic quintessential to Ulysses but nevertheless shared between the Ithacan hero and his wife—that characteristic being metis.27 The speaker’s aligning his lady with Venus Machinatrix has further, significant dimensions. Evidently her role, so to speak, as Venus the Trickster merges with that of Venus Philommeides (the Laughing Venus). Sonnet 18 has already revealed this, when the speaker complains, ‘And when I wail, she [his lady] turns herself to laughter’ (12). One might additionally cite 10,14, which merges her evocation of the Laughing Venus with her eliciting Venus the Conqueror. Yet, in the last of the early sonnets, the lady’s resemblance to Venus Machinatrix becomes inseparable from the speaker’s insistence, evinced somewhat earlier (13,4), that her conduct displays a ‘[m]ost goodly temperature’. He begins the sonnet with celebration of her ‘tempered’ beauty (2), which harmonizes ‘pride’ (sdegno) with ‘meekness’ (3). He goes on to observe, With such strange terms her eyes she doth inure That with one look she doth my life dismay, And with another doth it straight recure: Her smile me draws, her frown me drives away. Thus doth she train and teach me with her looks: Such art of eyes I never read in books. (9–14) The lady’s ‘tempered beauty’ is in fact, according to the speaker, a concordia discors by means of which she controls him—through which she virtuously directs him, inculcating moderation (so 5–8 make clear). Her skill in love’s stratagems, her presence as Venus Machinatrix, therefore affirms her roles as donna angelica and Venus Caelestis/Victrix. Practising the temperantia she teaches, she stands displayed—just before the Easter sonnets commence—as an embodiment of constantia. Indeed, in sonnet 9 the Spenserian speaker has suggested that his beloved is a donna angelica, a Venus Caelestis, with three Graces of her own: castitas, constantia, and gentillesse (7, 9, 10 severally). This intricate mythologizing of the lady illuminates in turn, we can now appreciate, at once the role of Cupid and the Spenserian speaker’s role within the sonnet sequence. If Amoretti is a pageant of ‘little cupids’, or putti, offered to the speaker’s beloved, and if he depicts himself as overwhelmed by the impact of the Alexandrian Cupid—raw, subtle, multifarious desire—upon his life, then the speaker is both master of cupids and subject to Cupid. 28 His lady, on the other hand, is the focus and the judge of his amoretti. A donna angelica as well as Venus Caelestis, she simultaneously dominates the Alexandrian Cupid and her suitor. Desire rules him; he shapes his desire into self-expression. She rules her

Spenser’s Amoretti  43 desires, directs him, judges the desire he voices. In consequence it is decorous and almost inevitable that, at various moments, the speaker’s account of loving should seem to incorporate a neoplatonic pattern, namely, emanatio, raptio, and remeatio. For example, at the start of sonnet 8, he renders his beloved’s presence as theophanic and his response to her as numinous. ‘More than most fair, full of the living fire / Kindled above unto the Maker near’, he exclaims (1–2). She is emanative from the divine and he enraptured. Then he implies that after raptio follows remeatio. ‘Through’ the ‘bright beams’ of his lady’s eyes, he announces, ‘angels come to lead frail minds to rest / In chaste desires on heavenly Beauty bound’ (5,7–8). At the very beginning of Amoretti, he had already alluded to and modified the pattern throughout 1,9–12 (as I have indicated above in my discussion of the poem). Near the opening of sonnet 3 he had alluded to the lady’s presence as engendering raptio and remeatio (3–8). Later, in 17, the speaker initially celebrates his beloved in terms suggestive of emanatio and raptio (1–2), with remeatio remaining a corollary (3) because from that praise of his donna angelica he proceeds rather to virtuosic play with the inexpressibility topos (4–14). Nonetheless, useful as it is to recognize that, at times, Spenser fashions his speaker—and of course the lady—in accord with this neoplatonic pattern, one aspect of the latter particularly illuminates characterization of his speaker throughout Amoretti as a whole. This is the connection, enacted by the pattern’s dynamic of descent, conversio and thence ascent, between the beloved and homecoming. Like Petrarch (in some of the Rime sparse) but, less ambiguously, ­Ficino and Castiglione, Spenser’s speaker asserts that decorous pursuit of the beloved is at the same time progression towards our eternal homeland. The neoplatonic triad of emanatio, raptio, and remeatio extends as well as supports, in other words, the speaker’s assertion from very early in Amoretti that for him to court his lady successfully, gain her in marriage, will be to find and possess his true home (cf. 1,12 and 6,5–14). As I have proposed above, by implication Spenser’s persona becomes a man who, courting his object of desire, quests for what is truly home in this world and, at the last, beyond it. Spenser casts his fictional self in the role of a man who, embarking on pursuit of his beloved, commits to a quest that after its fashion unites the Petrarchan with the Ulyssean. I am not arguing, then, that from the outset of his sonnet sequence Spenser presents his speaker as a counterpart to Ulysses. I am arguing that initially Spenser fashions the speaker of Amoretti as a man who reveals affinities with Ulysses—who intimates possession of Ulyssean possibilities or potential. He fashions a speaker who in effect aspires to refigure Ulysses’ return to Penelope, hopes to become another Ulysses, and seeks to undergo a transformation indisseverable from the transformation of his beloved. After all, Ulysses was returning to wife and home; the speaker of Amoretti quests to

44 Spenser’s Amoretti realize both in the person of his lady. Spenser’s projecting his fictional self as an analogue to Ulysses therefore involves at once affirmation and denial. How Spenser establishes and unfolds this Ulyssean (although also Petrarchan) characterization of his speaker starts to become clear if we briefly reconsider an image in 1,12, ‘my heaven’s bliss’. I have mentioned above that this catachrestic trope heightens portrayal of the lady, just before in 1,11, as a donna angelica and at the same time insistently identifies her with the notions of home and homecoming. Here, I would suggest further that it thus penumbrally associates the concept of nostos—‘return home’—with Spenser’s depiction of himself as suitor: nostos being one of the main concepts clustered around Odysseus in Homer’s epic.29 Other of those concepts used to define Odysseus have counterparts in Spenser’s delineation of his speaker. For example, Homer emphasizes that Odysseus exercises metis, ‘cunning’, and indicates that Penelope does too. As we have seen, when connecting the lady with Venus Machinatrix Spenser’s speaker draws attention to her astuteness, ludically acknowledging his own lack of guile, or failed guile, while covertly exercising just that quality through praise of his beloved’s superior wit and power (one could again cite 18,9–12 and, additionally, 54,9–12 along especially with 23, passim—which I shall discuss in a moment, or 29, passim). Then, as well, there is Homer’s introductory description of Odysseus as ‘polutropos’ (‘versatile’ or ‘self-transformative’). 30 The speaker of Amoretti virtuosically displays how he transforms himself in courting his lady, as well as how she transforms him and he responds. 31 He in turn, of course, casts and recasts her in a multiplicity of forms.32 What Spenser thereby establishes and develops could be called a Ulyssean subtext to his speaker’s characterization. It is also a subtext that he brings to the surface of his sonnets, but he exhibits it there in sophisticated self-contradiction. At first he makes it explicit by way of layered denial that, nevertheless, offers implicit affirmation. In sonnet 23 he retells part of the Penelope-­ Ulysses story in order to celebrate his lady as another Penelope and apparently distance himself from the role of latter-day Ulysses. The octave runs, Penelope, for her Ulysses’ sake, Devised a web her wooers to deceive, In which the work that she all day did make The same at night she did again unreave. Such subtle craft my damsel doth conceive The importune suit of my desire to shun: For all that I in many days do weave, In one short hour I find by her undone. (1–8)

Spenser’s Amoretti  45 Having named Penelope, the speaker almost immediately names her husband, the two forming an exemplum of marital fidelity. He then directs the exemplum towards the lady but away from himself. He proceeds to assert the lady’s resemblance to Penelope but not his to Ulysses; on the contrary, he claims rather to resemble one of Penelope’s importunate suitors (‘importune suit of my desire’, 6). In the process, he not only indicates his unlikeness to Ulysses; he suggests that he is Penelope’s parodic counterpart. She was both the weaver and unraveller of her own work. He too, undesired suitor though he may notionally be, is a weaver (7): of words—’text’ deriving from the Latin texere, ‘to weave’. Yet, his beloved, like another Penelope, knows how to unravel those woven words, his text, which he importunately proffers her. Indeed, she dismantles his web of words as if they were merely a ‘spider’s web’ (13; cf. 2), an analogue that demeans him further by evidently summoning the myth of Arachne, a tale of creative skill, overreaching pride, and that pride’s punishment. We are confronted by an obvious, albeit intricate, contrariety. Casting the lady as Penelope, Spenser’s speaker declines to cast himself as Ulysses. He becomes instead an unwelcome suitor, a maker of the unsubstantial, an overreacher whose ambition is easily punished. No less obviously, however, the speaker does at the same time imply his kinship to Ulysses. When he wryly says, upon beginning to specify his lady’s resemblance to Penelope, ‘Such subtle craft my damsel doth conceive’ (5), he puns elegantly on subtilis (‘finely woven’ as well as ‘discriminating’ are two of that Latin word’s meanings). The casually sophisticated pun celebrates his beloved’s metis while lightly displaying his own astuteness. Moreover, inaugurating praise of her artifice, it also introduces his manoeuvres of self-deprecation: the finely spun fictions of self-transformation that we recognize as revealing a disingenuous humility and submission. This is not duplicity that by implication devalues his praise of the lady for her ‘subtle craft’—the attributed guile aligning her with a mythic antecedent—but artifice that encompasses hers, metis that gracefully subsumes hers, in lauding it. At the start of the sonnet’s sestet we are told, ‘So, when I think to end that I begun, / I must begin and never bring to end’ (9–10). Spenser’s speaker describes himself as a man engaged on a quest. By the sonnet’s end, we perceive that he has likewise presented himself as a man at once cunning and versatile. By the sonnet’s end, in other words, we recognize how significantly he is akin to Ulysses. Later in the sequence, we see their affinity amplified. ‘Penelope, for her Ulysses’ sake’, just now considered, epitomizes a number of the early and Lenten sonnets in Amoretti where the speaker portrays himself as a man on a quest but far from achieving his goal. Sonnets 63–4 imply, by contrast, that his quest eventually draws near to successful completion. The first of those poems begins, After long storms’ and tempests’ sad assay (Which hardly I endured heretofore

46 Spenser’s Amoretti In dread of death and dangerous dismay) With which my silly bark was tossed sore I do at length descry the happy shore In which I hope ere long for to arrive: Fair soil it seems from far, and fraught with store Of all that dear and dainty is alive. (1–8) There the quest motif is rendered explicitly as a sea voyage, and the speaker fashions his suit into an allegory of homecoming. His courtship becomes an arduous journey, seemingly on the verge of triumphant completion, towards the woman who embodies home, fulfilment, and quies (the latter signified by ‘so sweet a rest’, in 10). She embodies, in fact, an earthly paradise—at once a locus amoenus and a type of the enclosed garden in the Song of Solomon (the last is adumbrated by 5–10 and subsequently elaborated upon throughout 64). The speaker’s allegory figures him, amidst this narrative, in several interesting ways. First, it emphasizes his affinity with Ulysses: to be more precise, it implies that he has advanced beyond similarity and approaches virtual iteration. Second, it implies that he is in effect a Ulysses baptized and therefore like Spenser’s own Guyon in Faerie Queene 2.12—except that the Knight of Temperance voyages towards a false earthly paradise of luxuria, centred upon Acrasia, whereas the speaker journeys towards an object of desire who incarnates temperantia, constantia, paradise regained (cf. 76,3). ­Finally, it illustrates how Spenser simultaneously deploys and overwrites Petrarch’s rhetoric of love. Behind sonnet 63 lies Petrarch’s ‘Passa la nava mia colma d’oblio’ (189), where the lover’s suit is also allegorized in terms of an arduous, storm-beset sea voyage. Yet, in that sonnet, the Petrarchan speaker concludes, ‘I begin to despair of the port’ (i’ncomincio a desperar del porto’, 14). Spenser’s sonnet crystallizes how, across Amoretti, he confers a new identity on the paradigmatic persona of Rime sparse. Petrarch’s persona gains an identity resonant with the heroic and the ideally marital, an identity that allows him to experience desire as homecoming rather than as perpetual exile. This transformation in the speaker of Amoretti is correlative with, and necessarily inseparable from, an equivalent in the lady whom he courts. Spenser sets before us a suitor in the roles of Petrarchan voyager but also Ulyssean traveller, a man who certainly enacts the role of love’s martyr but comes to transcend it. This gradual and comprehensive metamorphosis, he intimates, at once effects and essentially follows from no less significant a change in the speaker’s beloved. According to Spenser’s representation of her, she evolves from being a distant donna angelica into becoming a donna angelica who responds to desire and accepts the prospect of marriage. It is implicit that from being a type of Venus Caelestis et Victrix she moves towards becoming a type of Venus

Spenser’s Amoretti  47 Vulgaris. If Spenser’s speaker transforms into a wise (albeit not flawless) lover, whose emergent success derives from insight into the playfulness and gravitas of desire, the speaker gains that insight because his object of desire incarnates the decorum of love.33 That is to say, as she guides him in his experience of love, decorously tempering his desire, so he counsels and encourages her towards acknowledgement of desire and willingness for its marital completion. The question thus arises as to how in Amoretti Spenser portrays the couple’s mutual metamorphoses. *** To have looked closely at Spenser’s patterning of myth and mythography as he establishes, then develops, his characterization of the lovers in Amoretti brings the course of their mutual transformations sharply into perspective. I am by no means suggesting that the liturgical affiliations of his sonnets are therefore invariably unimportant for or irrelevant to understanding portrayal of how the lovers change. Sometimes those connections do tell us little if anything. For example, sonnet 22 alludes to Ash Wednesday and so to the onset of Easter, but the poem is far from Christocentric. On the contrary, it centres upon worship of the beloved, whom her suitor calls his ‘sweet saint’ (4) and adds, ‘Her temple fair is built within my mind, / In which her glorious image placed is / On which my thoughts do day and night attend / Like sacred priests’ (5–8). She is, he says, ‘the author of [his] bliss’ and a ‘goddess’ (severally 9 and 13). Whatever the day’s readings, Spenser’s poem replicates blasphemy of a kind familiar from the Rime sparse.34 One could cite, too, 50,13–14 and more extensively the very secular 75—where the speaker stages an agon between nature and art, asserting the power of his art against that of natural process and also in flattering defiance of his lady’s mature reasonableness. Elsewhere, the liturgical readings are demonstrably both relevant and important. In the later sonnets of the Lenten suite, for instance, they heighten the speaker’s representation of his courtship’s success as a triumphant convergence of the erotic and the sacred (57–68). Nevertheless, after the first of the Lenten sonnets, we see not merely the ongoing pervasiveness of myth, but its crucial function in suggesting the theology of love that informs the lovers’ shared experience of change and concord. The continued recurrence of myth, and some fin’amor motifs that accompany it, can be readily illustrated and I shall spend little time in doing so. Having established his lady’s roles as Venus, the speaker iterates them to amplify the topos of her otherworldliness, and hence the concept of her numinous elevation beyond him, yet also to sustain portrayal of the sophistication with which he and she negotiate the social protocols, the notionally constitutive lore of love. Thus, across the Lenten and subsequent poems, we variously see her associated with Venus Victrix/Armata,

48 Spenser’s Amoretti Venus Machinatrix—and, at times, Venus Apaturia—Venus Docta, Venus Philommeides. 35 The lady is linked too with mythical figures such as Penelope, Pandora, and Daphne.36 (She appears all but omnipresently in her role as donna angelica.) Just so, the lover continues to hint at or foreground his role of Ulyssean as well as Petrarchan suitor. 37 Within the Lenten and later sonnets, moreover, Spenser’s speaker continues to stress the difficulty of his quest by casting the lady as a domina petrosa and emphasizing her sdegno.38 There are, of course, many aspects to this interplay of myth and motif; three seem nonetheless most pertinent here. First is the speaker’s rewriting, rather than replicating, myth in order to suggest the mutuality between him and his beloved. His many indications of their shared and playful regard for one another, as has been mentioned above, significantly distinguish Amoretti from Rime sparse or Astrophil and Stella. For example, sonnet 28 shows the speaker focusing on a ‘laurel leaf’ (1) worn by his lady and thence inviting her to appreciate a transformed version of the Daphne and Apollo myth (9– 12)—to acknowledge his play with that ancient story of metamorphosis, itself rewritten within as well as central to Rime sparse, and entertain the notion of transforming their relationship. This personal and unconventional narrative, he says in the next sonnet, she repudiates; instead, she amusedly proffers her own historicized attribution of meaning to the laurel leaf she wears, her more conventional and authoritative narrative then contradicting his (29,5–8). Yet his immediate and smoothly disingenuous capitulation to her riposte asserts his power, as a maker of narratives, to confer universal fame on her (9–14) and flatteringly as well as self-flatteringly implies that his metis at the last overreaches hers. A variant manoeuvre occurs in sonnet 37 where, by way of expolitio concentrated upon his lady’s hair, the Spenserian speaker evidently rewrites Petrarch’s mythologizing of Laura (see sonnets 12, 90, 157, and 181, for instance, from Rime sparse). In doing so, he intimately celebrates his lady by re-imagining as it were his own surrogate Circe, Acrasia, who lies at the heart of Faerie Queene 2.12. Here, the beloved figures as an innocent counterpart to Acrasia (2–8). What her suitor claims, in an elaborate staging of wonder (stupore), to be ‘guile’ (1) is succeeded by a no less theatrical and consciously futile warning to himself against the sensuous seductiveness of that cunning (9–14)—for he figures de facto as a Guyon who has always already succumbed to entrapment. The sonnet rewrites myth in creating a very private comedy of love. Second, and associated with that reworking of myth to communicate intimacy, is its deployment to suggest a theology of love. The sonnets just now considered hint at the mutuality, the good will, the affection between suitor and beloved. The poems thus gesture, through their sophisticated play, towards a bond of caritas between lover and lady: in fact, as we come to discover, the sonnets anticipate the fulfilment of that bond,

Spenser’s Amoretti  49 which is manifested across 57–68. Spenser’s speaker foreshadows the union between himself and his beloved in caritas elsewhere, of course, and by other means. For example, he sometimes suggests that his lady’s sdegno preludes her response to him in caritas. Sonnet 6, where she appears as a donna angelica rather than as Venus Victrix (although that role has previously been assigned her), shows the speaker interpreting her ‘pride’ (2) via the Book of Nature (5–14). There he asserts that the lady’s sdegno, when read aright, augurs her union with him in reciprocal and enduring love (9–12). The speaker additionally uses myth, however, to imply the beloved’s agape and his own eros, which will achieve reconciliation in that caritas informing their betrothal. Two sonnets exemplify the speaker’s connecting his lady with agape. One, as we might expect, presents her in the role of donna angelica (8); the other, by contrast, depicts her in the guise of Venus Philommeides (39). The earlier poem insists that her presence is theophanic. ‘More than most fair, full of the living fire / Kindled above unto the Maker near’, it begins (1–2). It then proceeds to announce her conquest of the Alexandrian Cupid, that is, over her own sexual desire (5–6) and to tell of her eyes as imparting grace. Through their ‘bright beams’, the speaker says (5), ‘angels come to lead frail mind to rest / In chaste desires on heavenly Beauty bound’ (7–8). He then concludes, ‘You frame my thoughts and fashion me within; / You stop my tongue, and teach my heart to speak; / You calm the storm that passion did begin, / Strong through your cause, but by your virtue weak’ (9–12). His portrayal of the lady as donna angelica is therefore framed by myth and has myth at its heart. The poem itself forms one amoretto within a pageant of amoretti. Further, the speaker makes the Alexandrian Cupid himself central to demonstration and celebration of the lady’s spiritual power. In her capacity as mediatrix she enacts agape through the dynamic of emanatio, raptio (conversio), and remeatio: manifesting herself to the speaker she guides him, who has not merited such grace, in the direction of the divine; by means of that grace he becomes, in effect, born again (cf. 14). Sonnet 39 also insists that the lady’s presence is theophanic. It too evokes the concepts of emanatio, raptio, and remeatio in associating the beloved with agape but offers a wholly mythic characterization of her. Appearing as Venus Philommeides (1–5 clearly indicate this), she bestows an unexpected, unmerited joy on the discountenanced speaker that effects the renewal, the ecstatic restoration of his spirit (6–14). In the guise of Venus Philommeides, that is to say, she bestows a counterpart to agape upon her suitor.39 Just as both those sonnets use myth to identify the lady with a divine and descending love, so others use it to identify the speaker with ascending love: with eros. In him, we are shown an unstable eros at once urgent and in need of transformation. It needs to become an eros in which the physical and the spiritual will converge harmoniously, achieving a

50 Spenser’s Amoretti ‘goodly temperature’—that quality which, elsewhere (13,4), he associates with his beloved. Sonnet 8 unmistakably evinces these ideas. There, the speaker describes the lady’s theophanic presence as generating in him a merely profane eros that she has power to transform into its sacralized counterpart (8,11–12). His mythic portrayal of her introduces portrayal of himself. Elsewhere, we see Spenser’s speaker under domination by the Alexandrian Cupid, which is to say, his own concupiscentia. From the force of merely profane desire, figured as subjection to the Alexandrian Cupid, he needs deliverance by the lady who is both a donna angelica and a type of Venus Caelestis et Victrix. A broadly comic version of the speaker’s subjection to Cupid appears at the start of 10 (1–4) and a more ceremonious representation throughout the sestet of 19. Spenser’s speaker also rewrites the myth of Narcissus when, in sonnet 35, he self-consciously reveals the ambiguity of his desire. At the poem’s start, he tells of his ‘hungry eyes’ and their ‘greedy covetise’ (1)—an implicit reference to gluttony (gula) and to lust of the eyes. But this evidently concupiscent eros, expressed through a selfishly possessive gaze compared in its intensity to that of Narcissus (7–8), focuses entirely and paradoxically on the lady’s beauty, which does not derive from this world (9–14, especially the final verse, and cf. 8,1–2). The 35th sonnet reappears, moreover, almost word for word as sonnet 83, thus showing that the instability of the speaker’s desire remains even after the success (and, concomitantly, theological resolution) of his suit. By far, the most frequent mythic representations of his uncertain eros occur, however, amid his self-portrayals as a lover dominated by Venus Victrix/Armata. Sonnet 15, for example, plays detailed and commodified enjoyment of the lady’s physical attractions abruptly if climactically against celebration of her ethos, her spirituality (5–12, then 13–14).40 Finally, here, one could cite sonnet 53. As the sophisticated comedy of that poem unfolds, the speaker wavers between appreciation of his beloved’s sexual allure and apprehension of her more than sexual mystique (see, in particular, 5–12).41 The third aspect to the interplay of myth and motif in the later sonnets is its role in illuminating the lovers’ experience of mutual transformation— the lovers’ shared experience of change and concord, wherein agape and eros find accord as caritas. Spenser’s speaker portrays this achievement of harmonia across sonnets 57–68, a suite of poems that forms the triumphant apex of Amoretti and that could not be fully appreciated without insight into the relationship between myth and theology throughout it. So we see at once. Sonnet 57 initiates the suite of poems with evocation of Venus Victrix/Armata. Yet thereby Spenser’s speaker makes us aware from the very outset that the dynamic of his courtship has altered. He begins, ‘Sweet warrior, when shall I have peace with you? / High time it is this war now ended were, / Which I no longer can endure to sue, / Ne your incessant battery more to bear’ (1–4). He suggests not merely that

Spenser’s Amoretti  51 he is under his beloved’s dominion but, more important, that he is overwhelmed by the desire she now expresses for him. He implies too how that desire should be viewed and therefore just what ‘peace’ (1) between them might mean. The most significant element of this transitional moment is, in fact, not primarily the speaker’s reiteration of his lady’s supranatural power, nor even his indication that now she openly returns his love, but what his mythic imaging of her implies about the nature of both of her love and its consequences. Portraying her as a divinity who has chosen to bestow love freely upon someone below her and thence unworthy, the speaker implies that his lady’s love for him equates with agape. This parallels, as has been mentioned above, earlier accounts of her interaction with the speaker. In the context of those poems under consideration here, it concurs with his question from sonnet 61 (where he presents her again as donna angelica), ‘What reason is it, then, but she should scorn / Base things that to her love too bold aspire?’ (11–12). It likewise and especially concurs with his remarks in the octave of 66, which conclude, ‘Ye—whose high worths, surpassing paragon, / Could not on earth have found one fit for mate, / Ne but in heaven matchable to none / Why did ye stoop unto so lowly state?’ (5–8). Yet when subsequently depicting himself as in excess a martyr to love, he tells of his ‘heart’ being ‘through-launched everywhere / With thousand arrows which [her] eyes have shot’ (7–8). The speaker has already disassociated his beloved from Blind Cupid, saying, ‘Through [her] bright beams doth not the blinded guest / Shoot out his darts to base affection’s wound [;] / But angels come to lead frail minds to rest / In chaste desires on heavenly Beauty bound’ (8,5–8). His ‘incessant battery’ trope (4) thus connects her love for him also with sanctified eros, which sonnet 64 confirms through its allusions to the Song of Solomon and to the hortus conclusus topos (1–4 and 10–11).42 Emphasizing the intensity of his lady’s desire, Spenser’s speaker indicates that she has indeed undergone a transformation. If the speaker images his beloved, in her roles as Venus (Caelestis et) Victrix/Armata as now responding to him with love, then clearly he implies that she has entered upon a yet further Venerean role and has become as well a type of Venus Vulgaris. He has set his courtship in the context of marriage from very early on, albeit obliquely, in sonnet 6 (at 13–14) and goes on to do so explicitly here in sonnet 64 (via his allusions to the Song of Solomon), thereby likewise indicating that in her love for him she has affiliations with Venus Vulgaris (and cognately Bona Venus). Spenser’s speaker takes care to intimate that the beloved’s metamorphosis, although decisive, is at the same time not without a certain hesitancy (65,1–2). As has been discussed above, moreover, he reveals to us his own transformations: not merely into love’s excessive martyr (66,7–8) but into a triumphantly Petrarchan/Ulyssean voyager who has arrived at the verge of his quest’s fulfilment (63–4). In this

52 Spenser’s Amoretti suite of poems, therefore, Spenser’s speaker evinces the lovers’ shared experience of change and concord; and he amplifies suggestion of their mutuality by two means. One is theological and the other involves a motif from fin’amor. First, he signals their union in caritas. The agape and sanctified eros correlative with the lady’s mythic and Petrarchan roles—what one might call her neo-Petrarchan identity—converge with her suitor’s now sanctified if still unstable eros in reciprocal and sacralized love. So, sonnet 64 intimates through its biblical resonances. Then, too, in the final couplet of 66, the speaker asserts, ‘Yet, since your light hath once enlumined me, / With my reflex yours shall increased be’. Similarly, 67 ends with this depiction of mutual human love sanctified in betrothal: There she, beholding me with milder look, Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide, Till I in hand her yet half-trembling took, And with her own goodwill her firmly tied. Strange thing, me seemed, to see a beast so wild So goodly won, with her own will beguiled. (9–14) Sonnet 67 distinctly rewrites Rime sparse 190 and, in doing that, epitomizes the scope of Spenser’s departure from Petrarch.43 Even more explicit is the sestet of 68, the Easter Sunday sonnet that brings this suite to its conclusion. The poem begins as a prayer, and in its sestet the speaker asks Christ to grant that ‘Thy love, we weighing worthily, / May likewise love Thee for the same again, / And for Thy sake, that all like-dear didst buy, / With love may one another entertain’ (9–12). Thereafter, he closes in monitory invitation to the lady: ‘So let us love, dear love, like as we ought: / Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught’ (13–14). Beneath that invitation, we hear John 15:12 (‘This is my commandement, that ye loue one another, as I haue loued you’).44 We also hear Augustine’s dictum that ‘Love of God, love of neighbor, is called caritas’.45 Affirming these theological indications of the lovers’ newly achieved accord is the speaker’s redirection of the sdegno motif. This occurs in sonnets 58–9, which are paired. The former bears the epigraph, ‘By her that is most assured to herself’, and there has been disagreement as to whether ‘By’ indicates that we shall subsequently read a monologue attributed to the beloved or that it tells us we shall go on to read a reflection ‘concerning’ her.46 Although my argument does not ultimately depend on it, I take sonnet 58 to be a monologue by the lady, followed by her suitor’s response in the next poem. The two poems, in other words, can reasonably be seen as anticipating sonnet 75, in which a speech attributed to the lady initiates a reply from her suitor (5–8, then 9–14, respectively). 58 opens with ‘Weak is the assurance that weak

Spenser’s Amoretti  53 flesh reposeth / In her own power, and scorneth others’ aid: / That soonest fails whenas she most supposeth / Herself assured and is of nought afraid’ (1–4). In those lines, sdegno (2) is turned against the presumption of one’s self-sufficiency, against disdain of what Augustine would have understood as caritas and Calvin as mutua communicatio. Sdegno is directed against its own potential to be merely pride (superbia). Thus, the poem aptly ends: ‘Ne none so rich or wise, so strong or fair, / But faileth trusting on his own assurance’ (13–14). Sonnet 59, however, shows the speaker deflecting this redirection of sdegno by celebrating the lady’s ‘assurance’ as constantia, which he does almost in Petrarchan/Ulyssean terms through his sequent simile of the ‘steady ship’ (9–12). Indeed, at the poem’s conclusion, he identifies her constantia—her (heroic) virtue—as making fortunate him who is committed to her: ‘Most happy she that most assured doth rest; / But he most happy who such one loves best’ (13–14). He proposes that what she questions about herself in fact helps to bond them. The climactic suite of poems in Amoretti starts, then, with evocation of Venus (Caelestis et) Victrix/Armata and closes with invocation of Christus Victor. Yet immediately afterwards Spenser’s speaker presents himself as victorious and triumphant. His doing so seems not unproblematic. True, he has already if implicitly fashioned a heroic self-image via the mythos of Ulysses; and it is true that here the glorification of his courtship’s success lauds his beloved—whose worth, he joyfully declares, has made that success glorious (69,7–12). His reference to the lady as having become his ‘glorious spoil’ (13) nonetheless unflatteringly overturns the previous portrayals of her as Venus Victrix/Armata. She may be ‘glorious spoil’ but she is still spolia: the booty won from love’s warfare. The beloved’s yielding of herself, her graciousness acceptance of betrothal (emphasized in 64 and 66–7, for example), are suddenly obscured. Further, after the ensuing reverdie sonnet (70) where the speaker warns his lady to seize the prime moment for love (8,13–14), he proceeds to allegorize her as having been ‘caught in cunning snare / Of a dear foe, and thralled to his love / In whose strait bands ye now captived are / So firmly that ye never may remove (71,5–8). She has initiated that allegory, the speaker says (1–4, which gesture towards the story of Penelope), and its playfulness attests to the lovers’ mutuality; his imagery, moreover, alludes to the bonds of marriage. But those lines unmistakably echo the tone of 69, celebrating his own metis and insisting that she has become his conquest. We are made aware that the climactic suite of poems has suggested the lovers’ mutual experience of transformation and their achievement of accord—but not necessarily the resolution of all difficulties between them. Three of those difficulties have particular relevance to the mythology and theology of Amoretti. First is the unstable eros still and consciously manifested by Spenser’s speaker. He wavers between the sanctified eros

54 Spenser’s Amoretti that, for example, he praises in 8, ecstatically expresses in 64, affirms in 77 as well as 84, and the physically obsessed eros to which he gives voice, likewise, in 35 but also in 72, 76, and 83. He especially draws attention to the ambivalence of his desire, as we thus see, through juxtaposed and fluidly antithetic poems: 76–7; (35) 83–4. Second is the separation of the lovers. The climactic suite of poems leads not to anticipation of their courtship’s fulfilment but to anxiety at that fulfilment’s deferral. The speaker complains of missing his beloved in 73; sonnet 78, on the other hand, and the final sonnet in Amoretti (89) lament her absence at length. In the latter, Spenser’s speaker says, ‘So I, alone now left disconsolate, / Mourn to myself the absence of my love’ (5–6). His anxiety at separation from his betrothed has been often noted in commentary, of course; nonetheless, in the context of his Petrarchan/Ulyssean self-characterization it implies fear of not reaching journey’s end, of not finding home (nostos). We recognize it as a form of nostalgia. We recognize too that it preludes the joy displayed in that great, festal poem honouring the advent his marriage—Epithalamion, which almost immediately follows—and his journey’s completion. To study the mythology and theology of love in Amoretti is to perceive that the former has a cohesive diversity, and the latter a dominant strategy, not hitherto remarked. It is also to perceive that Spenser chooses not to make mythology the mere vehicle of theology, as has been sometimes supposed. On the contrary (and so the discussion above has indicated), mythic lore and theological doctrine sometimes function harmoniously within or across poems in his collection of sonnets—here one could cite sonnets 64 and 67, for instance; at times, too, they diverge or work against each other—and here one could cite, for example, sonnets 22 and 69. Yet, I should like to conclude with two observations about what might be called the tendency of mythology and theology in Spenser’s sonnets: where they ultimately direct the reader. The first concerns a sententia delivered in Edmund Tilney’s The Flower of Friendship (1568), a dialogue on the subject of marriage. There we read, ‘[E]qualnesse herein, maketh friendlynesse’.47 That axiom refers, as voiced, specifically to social class; and, indeed, Spenser’s sonnets identify Elizabeth Boyle with the middling classes, to which he belonged, at the same time as they assign her heroic or supranatural attributes—in effect, aristocratic status. Nevertheless, elsewhere Tilney’s text offers an assertion of women’s equality with men in intellect and essential humanity, which is an emphasis recurring throughout Amoretti and underlying portrayal of the beloved whether as donna angelica or type of Venus.48 The second concerns an account of marriage in Calvin’s sermon on 2 Samuel 1, where he interprets verses 21–7: [I]t would be a brutal and cruel nation that did not know the love of women or the duty of marriage. For our Lord has willed that our

Spenser’s Amoretti  55 humanity show itself chiefly in this domain, that is to say, in the kindness due between husband and wife. For, certainly, the source of marriage is that we must love one another. For just as God has loved his own from the greatest to the least, he wills that we be members of one body. It is a privilege that God has given humankind a common nature, but if we consider how this nature is maintained, it is through marriage.49 Calvin’s words suggest the distance that, when portraying the lovers’ mutuality, Spenser’s text travels from Petrarch’s while retaining contact with it.

Notes 1 Reference is to Edmund Spenser, Selected Shorter Poems, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies (London: Longman, 1995), 201–90. I have additionally consulted: The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, eds. William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 583–658; Amoretti and Epithalamion: A Critical Edition, ed. Kenneth J. Larsen (Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 1997), cited hereafter as Larsen; Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London: Penguin, 1999), 385–432, 670–96. 2 On numerological and liturgical patterning, see: Alexander Dunlop, ‘The Unity of Spenser’s Amoretti’, in Silent Poetry, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Routledge, 1970), 153–69; James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 68–71; Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life: Some Contexts for Amoretti 67–70’, Spenser Studies, 6 (1985), 33–76; William C. Johnson, Spenser’s Amoretti: Analogies of Love (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 25–64; John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 163–5; Larsen, 3–66 and 121–225; Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 303. Other commentary includes Louis L. Martz, ‘Spenser’s Amoretti: “Most Goodly Temperature”’ (1961), reprinted in idem, From Renaissance to Baroque: Essays on Literature and Art (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 100–14; G. K. Hunter, ‘Spenser’s Amoretti and the English Sonnet Tradition’, in A Theatre for Spenserians, eds. Judith M. Kennedy and James A. Reither (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 124–44; Thomas Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love: Cupid in Renaissance Literature (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 127–30; Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the ­Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 152–84; Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 101–22; Roland Greene, ‘Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595)’, in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 256–70; Jane Kingsley-Smith, Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture, 50; Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 147–51.

56 Spenser’s Amoretti 3 O. B. Hardison Jr. links Amoretti with the related donna angelicata motif, and glances at the poem’s liturgical references, in his ‘Spenser’s Amoretti and the Dolce Stil Novo’, English Literary Renaissance, 2 (1972), 208–16. On Laura as donna angelica, see, for example, Petrarch’s sonnet 90,9–14. 4 On those different concepts of love, see: Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson, rev. edn (1932–39; Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1953); Gene Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Simon May, Love: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 14–142. 5 Spenser does cite the Apollo and Daphne story, in 28. He rewrites it at 9–12, as is discussed below. 6 For example, Rime sparse 39, 55, 86, 87, 122, 133. 7 On Venus Caelestis and Venus Vulgaris, see: Marsilio Ficino, Commentary, 53–4 and Commentaire / Commentarium, 39, 41, 43 along with Conti, vol. 1, 316. On Venus Victrix and Venus Armata, see: Cartari, 417–18, 426; Conti, 319. 8 On Laura’s eyes, see, for instance, sonnets 3, 17, 75, 189, 220, 233 and songs 71–3. Spenser’s imagery also incidentally links the lady of Amoretti with Sidney’s Stella, suggesting the latter’s very name—that is, her essential characterization in Sidney’s sonnet sequence. 9 On Laura as at the same time an inspiration and an impediment to writing, see representatively songs 23 and 73. 10 ‘Ma voi, occhi beati, [… ] / di for et dentro mi vedete ignudo / ben che ‘n lamenti il duol non si riversi. / [… ] [V]ostro veder in me risplende / come raggio di sol traluce in vetro’ (5,7–10). 11 On the whiteness of Laura’s skin, see, for example, sonnets 199, 219 and 246. 12 See variously sonnets 3, 197, 209, 221, 266. 13 Reference to Dante is subsequently from The New Life: La Vita Nuova, ed. and trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 2006) and The ­Divine Comedy, 6 vols, trans. and annot. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). 14 The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio, eds and trans. Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Arthur Beckwith Myrick (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929), 4.165. ‘Ed il vezzoso tuo sdegno donnesco, / Per lo quale apparien d’esserti vili / Ogni appetito ed oprar popolesco, / Qual tu mi se’. Cf. 3.77. 15 See Il Cortegiano at pages 20, 178, 275, 313, 326, 376, 379 for diverse and mainly negative aspects of (di)sdegno. 16 See La Vita Nuova, 19, at page 38: ‘Madonna è disiata in sommo cielo… e sì l’umilia, ch’ogni offesa oblia’. 17 Cf. 23, 127–35. 18 So his exemplum of ‘[t]he dureful oak’ (5), metonymic reference to ‘chaste affects’ (12) and allusion to ‘knit[ting] the knot that ever shall remain’ (14) imply. 19 As has been discussed earlier, Spenser’s persona declares in sonnet 1 that his beloved holds his life and his art – which expresses his innermost selfhood – in her hands. He uses the ‘victor’ simile (4) to crystallize the completeness of her power. 20 For instance, Edward Fairfax, Godfrey of Bulloigne, eds. Kathleen M. Lea and T. M. Gang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 16.34 passim. From his original, most importantly: Ma poi che diè vergogna a sdegno loco, / sdegno guerrier de la ragion feroce, / e ch’al rossor del volto un novo foco / successe, che piú avampa e

Spenser’s Amoretti  57 che piú coce, / squarciossi i vani fregi e quelle indegne / pompe, di servitú misera insigne…. See Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Anna Maria Carini (Milano: Feltrinelli Editore, 1961), 16.24.3–8. Cf. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 2.9.33–5 in The Faerie Queene, Book Two, ed. Erik Gray (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006). 21 Brooks-Davies, for example, also mentions these allusions in his notes to the sonnet (225). 22 On emanatio, raptio, and remeatio as a sequence in the experience of love see: Ficino, Commentary, 38–9, 46, 64–5; Commentarium, 11 and 13, 23 and 25, 53, 55, and 57. In addition: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Commentary, 138–41; Commento, 97–101. Also: The Courtier, 244, 255–7; Il Cortegiano, 412–13, 442–5. 23 As Erwin Panofsky observes of Venus Vulgaris with customary deftness. See his Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 142. Also: Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, new and enlarged edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 138–40. On Catullus and Bona Venus, see: 61,44–5 in Catullus, Tibullus, Pervigilium Veneris, ed. and trans. F. W. Cornish, Loeb Classical Library, rev. edn (1962; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Cf. Cartari, 420–1. 24 On these three Venuses, see: Cartari, 405, 413, 417; Conti, 317, 320, 325, 327–8. 25 Continued portrayal of the beloved as donna angelica is so foregrounded throughout sonnets 1–21 as not to need illustration. 26 Wind, in Pagan Mysteries (cited above), remarks on the symbolism of the Graces: ‘Beauty inclines Chastity towards Love’ (84). 27 On metis (‘cunning’) in Ulysses, see Homer, The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), and compare 13.299–304 with 311: oude su g’ egnōs / Pallad’ Athēnaiēn, kourēn Dios, hē te toi aiei / pantessi ponoisi paristamai ēde phulassō, / kai de se Phaiēkessi philon pantessin ethēka, / nun au deur’ hikomēn, hina toi sun mētin huphēnō / khrēmata te krupsō ‘polumētis Odusseus’. On Penelope and metis, see 19.157–8. Reference is hereafter from this edition. 28 10,1–2 unmistakably acknowledges the Alexandrian heritage of Cupid in Amoretti. 29 And from early on, as at Odyssey 1.5. 30 Odyssey, 1.1. 31 Thus, he is variously a Petrarchan worshipper of the lady (as in 3, for instance, and 7, or 30), the failed warrior of love (11 and 14), Cupid’s subject (as in 10 and elsewhere), a second Narcissus, and so on. 32 Complementing and elaborating on those images of the lady considered closely above are the luxuriantly diverse images pervading 15 and 64, sonnets which in effect epitomize the speaker’s way of celebrating his beloved’s rich multiplicity. 33 Ulysses is, of course, a wisdom figure, linked to the concept of noos. For example, see Odyssey 1.3–5. 34 See, especially here, sonnets 3, 4, and 90. 35 Venus Victrix/Armata at, for example: 36,5–14; 37,13–14; 41,1–4; 42,7–14; 49, passim; 52,1–8; 57, passim. Venus Machinatrix and Apaturia, similarly at: 23,5–8 (in conjunction with the Penelope analogy); 29,5–8 (that duality

58 Spenser’s Amoretti

36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

repeated); 37, passim; 41,9–10; 47,1–8; 73,1–3 (glancing back to 37); Venus Docta: 54, passim and 75,5–8. Venus Philommeides: 39, passim; 40, passim. Respectively at 23,1–8; 24,8–12; 28,9–14. Notably at: 23, passim; 26,8; 63, passim; 34, passim; ironically and problematically, 69, passim; 76–8, less directly. But there are also the repeated allusions to nostos and metis throughout the Lenten suite and thereafter. Following from 6,4, 9,10, and 18, passim, see 25,9 (contrast 28,2), 51, passim, 54,12 – which align with the cumulative references to her sdegno (as at 31,9, 38,9–12, 55,9–12, 56,5, 61,11–12, 81,7–8). For further instances linking the lady, as donna angelica, with emanatio (sometimes, sdegno) and agape see especially: 7,9–12; 61, passim (her presence in the world is itself an expression of the divine agape); 82, passim. For another example of the lady, as donna angelica and Venus Philommeides, being associated with agape, see 17, passim. The immediately preceding poem laments the lady’s power as Venus Victrix/ Armata – thus introducing this glorification of what gives her that power. Sonnet 47, where the lady resembles Venus Victrix (as well as Philommeides and Apaturia), shows the speaker all but losing his sense of the otherworldly mystique that he nonetheless attributes implicitly to her. Castiglione, by contrast, has Bembo speak of ‘those spiritual odours that quicken the powers of the intellect’ (258). Anne Lake Prescott offers the best account of this poem’s scriptural and liturgical significances. See her article cited in n. 2, above. The Geneva Bible (1560), introd. Lloyd E. Berry (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Bibles, 2007). ‘Amor Dei, amor proximi, charitas dicitur’ (my translation, above). See Enarrationes in Psalmos, 31.2.5, from S. Aurelii Augustini, Opera Omnia, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, vol. 36, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris: Bibliothecae Cleri Universae, 1865), col. 260. On this topic, see Martz, cited in n. 2, at 111–2. Reference is from Edmund Tilney, The Flower of Friendship: A Renaissance Dialogue Contesting Marriage, ed. and introd. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), at 108. At 133. Jean Calvin, Predigten uber das 2 Buch Samuelis, ed. Hans von Ruckert (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1961), 26. My translation from this original: [C]e sera une nation brutale et cruelle qui ne scauront que c’est de l’amour des femmes, ou du debuoir du marriage. Car nostre Seigneur a voulu que l’humanité se monstrast principalement en cest endroit, c’est ascauoir en la beniuolance que se doiuent le mary et la femme. Car c’est aussi la source du marriage qu’il nous faut aymer les uns les autres. Car comme Dieu a aymé les siens depuis le plus grand jusques au plus petit, il veut que nous soyons membres d’ung corps. Il y a ung priuilege que Dieu fait aux hommes en ce qu’il y a une nature commune, mais si nous regardons, comment la nature s’entretient, c’est par le mariage’.

3 The Donna Angelica, Cupid, Petrarch, and Internal Exile in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Shakespeare’s Sonnets radically depart from and nonetheless closely adhere to Petrarchan precedent. Some points of their departure from Petrarch’s Rime sparse are well known. For a start, as readers soon discover, unlike their predecessor the Sonnets focus on at least two objects of desire, of whom certainly one is male and another - female. It used to be undisputed that sonnets 1–126 are concerned with a young man, and sonnets 127–52 with the so-called Dark Lady. However, the sonnets between 1 and 126 that are explicitly to or about a young man do not always indicate whether they are to or about the same male figure— many sonnets between 1 and 126 do not suggest explicitly whether their subjects are male or female. Those between 127 and 152, moreover, may perhaps not always be to or about the same woman. It is possible to infer that the Sonnets are directed to personages beyond the young man who appears at the very beginning of the sequence or the Dark Lady who appears much later: that there are several objects of desires.1 Thus it is not impossible too that some of the sonnets usually thought to be concerned with the young man are concerned instead with the Dark Lady, or vice-versa. The Sonnets do not, then, centre on a single, female beloved and express the contraries of desire for her, as do the poems of the Rime (its persona, in loving Laura, torn between sacred and profane eros or between caritas and concupiscentia, between hope and despair or delight and misery). They communicate longing that is directed towards different beloveds and multifarious. In fact, they articulate fractured desire—being fragmented like the Rime itself and yet, unlike Petrarch’s ‘scattered rhymes’, without even nominal resolution. The male-focused desire within some of sonnets 1–126 seems, to offer a familiar though useful illustration, ambiguously multifaceted. There Shakespeare’s speaker often indeterminately implicates the homosocial with the homoerotic, and each intermittently with what seems an aspiration to patronage. 2 No less evidently diverse are the perspectives on and responses to the female presence (or, just maybe, presences) identifiable in the sonnets, where disingenuous reverence plays against carnal adulation or disgust, and problematic intimacy against misogyny. The speaker’s voice

60  Shakespeare’s Sonnets wavers furthermore across the sonnets as a whole between extremes of self-abandoning devotion and disenchantment, between almost stratospheric ecstasy and self-contempt. It is of course that last aspect of the Sonnets which particularly emphasizes their affinity with the Rime: how Petrarchan they are despite the un-Petrarchan multiplicity of desire that they dramatize (and the intense sexual enactment of desire recurrently as well as contradictorily evoked in the Dark Lady poems). Yet correspondences between the Sonnets and the Rime have attracted less scrutiny than have differences between them. Like Petrarch’s speaker, Shakespeare’s obsessively fictionalizes and scrutinizes the experience of wanting, seeking, attempting to comprehend, misunderstanding, becoming close to, failing to achieve or sustain intimacy with a beloved. Like Petrarch’s speaker, Shakespeare’s self-riven, compulsive persona deploys the myth of Narcissus when acknowledging the force of a desire constantly attentive to its own fluctuations and nuances, its impulses and evasions, its complex ironies and violent paradoxes—as 62 notably illustrates. That is to say, divided in his responses to multiple objects of desire, and divided between—or, not impossibly at least, among—those disparate beloveds, he is an intensified embodiment of the self-division typifying Petrarch’s speaker in the Rime. Nevertheless, the speaker of the Sonnets distinctly presents himself as a meta-Petrarchan poet of love, for in exploring its protean manifestations he neither merely repudiates nor replicates the Petrarchan inheritance but, rather, rewrites it. How he does so, and in the process re-imagines Petrarch’s connecting desire with internal exile, is my concern here. I shall argue that especially in one respect Shakespeare’s speaker imagines the Petrarchan discourse of love anew and overturns it: by refiguring, both in the sonnets to a male and those to a female addressee (or focus of consideration), the topos of the donna angelica. In outline, my argument will be as follows. Shakespeare’s speaker diversely portrays, throughout some of the initial 126 sonnets, an aristocratic, transgendered male version of the donna angelica who precariously embodies grace. This is a figure whom we come to discern as having an ambiguous relationship with the concept, both moral and aesthetic, of ‘grace’ that, for example, Castiglione deploys to characterize his paradigm of the male courtier and Della Casa emphasizes as elemental to civilized behaviour in society. Throughout some of the so-called Dark Lady sonnets, thereafter, Shakespeare’s speaker more negatively reconstitutes the donna angelica topos. Across a number of poems, he images a desacralized female object of desire in terms of grace profaned. He does not associate her with emanatio, raptio, and remeatio—as representations of the donna angelica deriving from fin’amor tradition would insistently suggest. He connects her with concupiscence and with akrasia. 3 He thus implies, more strongly than he does in poems to or about the young man, that the experience of love

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  61 has exiled him from his normative understanding of who and what he should be, amplifying the power of sexual desire via allusion to the tyrannical dominion of the Alexandrian Cupid. *** In order to specify and clarify what has been proposed above, I shall first consider Petrarch’s images of Laura as donna angelica within the context of some earlier as well as subsequent instances of that topos, focusing particularly on ways in which they deploy concepts of grace. Thereafter, I shall consider notions of grace that occur chiefly but not exclusively in Castiglione’s The Courtier and Della Casa’s Galateo, examining ways in which they are used to postulate ideal male behaviour: according to Castiglione, within the world of a court; according to Della Casa, amid the world at large. Initially, I want to glance at a configuration of the donna angelica topos in Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti, which was printed not long after Shakespeare began composing what would become his sonnets. The persona of Amoretti addresses his beloved with these words in the octave of the eighth poem: More than most fair, full of the living fire Kindled above unto the Maker near: No eyes, but joys in which all powers conspire, That to the world nought else be counted dear. Through your bright beams doth not the blinded guest Shoot out his darts to base affection’s wound, But angels come to lead frail minds to rest In chaste desires on heavenly Beauty bound.4 Those lines crystallize three aspects of the donna angelica motif that have direct relevance to Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The Spenserian persona blazons his beloved as an otherworldly inhabitant of this world: as incarnating a transcendent spirituality because connected in essence proximally to God himself. Thus, his perception of her is, here at least, epiphanic and he suggest that she evokes a numinous desire; in fact, he implies that she manifests emanatio, thence inspiring raptio or conversio and ultimately remeatio. He therefore presents her as a being who confers grace upon those who behold her (and who can overrule the power of the Alexandrian Cupid). Similar if less resplendent or developed images of the beloved as an angelic figure had been proffered by Sir Philip Sidney in Astrophil and Stella (1591) and in Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592). 5 Kindred if lesser images occur too across the different versions of Drayton’s Idea.6 But a closer similarity appears much further back in Dante’s La Vita Nuova. There his persona fables, ‘He sees all salvation perfectly / Who

62  Shakespeare’s Sonnets sees my lady, amidst other ladies’ (26, sonnet 2,1–2), which affirms his earlier declaration: And when she may find anyone worthy / to behold her, that man will experience her salvific power when she greets him, / and he becomes so humble that he forgets all wrongdoing. / Through a yet greater grace God has granted her, / he who speaks to her cannot end in evil. (the canzone of Chapter 19,37–42)7 Perhaps closer again is Petrarch’s imaging of Laura in the Rime. His speaker depicts her as a donna angelica who embodies, mediates, implicitly imparts, and directly confers grace. He represents her as embodying grace—that is, in part, as an embodiment of gracefulness—in 213. Its celebration of her begins, ‘Graces that generous Heaven allots to few’ (‘Grazie ch’ a pochi il Ciel largo destina’). More important, at the outset of 72 he says to Laura: My noble Lady, I see in the moving of your eyes a sweet light that shows me the way that leads to Heaven [….] This is the sight that induces me to do well and guides me toward the glorious goal [,…] Lovely angelic sparks that make blessed my life. (1–3, 5–6, 37–8)8 Even more explicitly than the representative passages just now quoted from the Vita, and thus more immediately in concord with the quatrains from Amoretti 8, those lines depict a donna angelica who implicitly imparts grace, manifests emanatio, and inspires conversio then remeatio. By way of corroboration, one could cite 13,9–14 and their continuity with images of Laura in her guise as donna angelicata (implicit throughout the initial quatrain of 306 and likewise the sestet of 351, along with the final couplet of 348—where she is cast as mediatrix). One could however particularly cite 154,5–14, where Petrarch’s speaker says of Laura that ‘Love in her beautiful eyes […] seems to rain down sweetness and grace without measure’ and tells of her eyes drawing men not to ‘low desire’ but rather to ‘desire of honor, of virtue’.9 Laura’s ennoblement of others, he says, follows from her power to confer grace directly upon them. (It is of course true that elsewhere he describes the nature and effect of her grace upon him as ambiguous.10) This emphatic as well as diverse association between the donna angelica topos and notions of grace in the portrayal of Laura would come to permeate erotic verse modelled on the Rime. Its pre-eminence in the Rime and its pervasiveness across the verse by Petrarch’s imitators help us to appreciate how, when Shakespeare in effect subverts the motif of the beloved as angelic lady and disrupts that motif’s connection with ideas of grace, he thereby distinctively overwrites Petrarch.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  63 Even a brief look at love verse by some other, European poets of the sixteenth century will elucidate what I mean. Evocations of the donna angelica topos, and of the grace afforded by the angelic lady, vary across that verse from succinct allusion to substantial iteration—and so we would anticipate. For example, in his Délie (1544) Maurice Scève writes at one point, ‘When (O how little) I see her nearby / Who is Virtue and Grace themselves: / I, who was once so greatly aflame, / Now feel that I am wholly straitened to ice’ (354,1–4).11 At different moments in the Sonnets pour Hélène (1578) Pierre de Ronsard’s speaker lauds the ‘bonne grace’ of his beloved (28,1), calls her ‘angelique’ (39,9), and tells of the angelic light of her eyes.12 Lorenzo De’ Medici, before commenting upon his first sonnet, alludes to the angelic lady motif; then, within his commentary as well as the poem itself, he celebrates a donna angelica become a donna angelicata from whom one should seek grace.13 Torquato Tasso, in his poems for Lucrezia Bendidio (begun c.1561 but variously printed till 1593), casts her in the guise of a donna angelica who implicitly imparts grace (she confers it explicitly when in another Petrarchan role, namely, that of sweet warrior), and who, an incarnation of the transcendent, inspires raptio then remeatio. His persona says, for instance, that even nature acknowledges her otherworldliness, recognizes that ‘she now  / has come from heaven; her celestial worth / is only fitly prized where she was born’.14 In another sonnet, he depicts her more elaborately and comprehensively as a donna angelica, associating her implicitly with grace as well as with emanatio, conversio, and remeatio.15 He does so perhaps more emphatically still in a further poem, which begins, ‘The beauty of your eyes, where Phoebus’ rays / and Love’s flames burn, while both inspire / the enraptured soul to seek the heavenly choir, / enthralled my heart’.16 Each of those instances is, as we see, consonant with Petrarchan precedent (allowing of course for the differences of scope among them). Shakespeare’s Sonnets therefore diverge no less strikingly from such formulations of the angelic lady motif, and their engagements with concepts of grace, than from Petrarch’s own. But his -Sonnets depart significantly too from other poets’ radical revisions of the donna angelica topos and rethinking of how the angelic lady and grace are connected. Directly relevant here are the sonnets by Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna. I shall consider those of the latter first since they form what might be called a continuation and heightening of the angelic lady motif as shaped by Petrarch.17 Colonna represents herself not in the role of but, rather, questing to become a truly donna angelica. Thus, she begins her ninth sonnet with this prayer: Let my heart be reborn in you [Jesus] on this glorious day / on which she who bore you was herself born, / and may your divine being lend my heart wings / to fly up to its true lofty resting place. (1–4)18

64  Shakespeare’s Sonnets Moreover, she seeks grace to fulfil her aspiration from that supremely donna angelica who is the Theotokos (5–11). The same desire opens Colonna’s 19th sonnet, now focused on the Theanthropos, but is qualified by fear of spiritual overreaching (1–8). Hence, the decorous submissiveness that closes sonnet 21. There, Colonna expresses hope to reach a state of grace wherein, she writes, ‘my deeds and my desires will no longer be my own, / but lightly I will move upon celestial wings / wherever the force of [Jesus’] holy love might fling me’ (12–14).19 Her sonnets begin, so to speak, where Petrarch’s Rime ends. Michelangelo’s depart from Petrarchan precedent, however, by re-imagining the angelic lady motif in a way that brings him nearer to Shakespeare than to his friend Colonna. 20 For a start, he transforms the donna angelica motif by transgendering it. This he does in poems for Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and for Vittoria Colonna. The 80th poem, a sonnet where his persona commemorates first sight of the former, begins, ‘I thought, on the first day that I gazed upon / so many charms, unique and singular, / that I’d fix my eyes, as the eagle on the sun, / on the smallest of the many that I desire’’ (1–4). But, he thereupon writes, ‘Then I recognized my mistake and error: / for one who, lacking wings, would pursue an angel / flings seed on stones, and words into the wind, / And the intellect at God, all in vain’ (5–8). 21 De’ Cavalieri becomes in those lines a masculine counterpart to the donna angelica, a signore angelico, who enacts emanatio, inspires raptio, but whose otherworldly beauty seems to baffle any impulse towards remeatio (9–14). The 83rd sonnet, by contrast, not only again images de’ Cavalieri as a signore angelico but also implies the fulfilment of emanatio and raptio—or, here, conversio—in remeatio: ‘[H]e who loves you in faith / rises up to God and holds death sweet’ (13–14). 22 Concordantly, Michelangelo elsewhere associates de’ Cavalieri with that neoplatonic triad and with the conferring of divine grace: ‘[N]or does God, in his grace, show himself to me / anywhere more than in some fair mortal veil; / and that alone I love, since he’s mirrored in it’ (106,12–14).23 So too he connects Vittoria Colonna with both—and her he portrays androgynously. In a madrigal composed about and addressed to her, his persona announces: ‘A man within a woman, or rather a god / speaks through her mouth’ (235,1–2). He continues, [H]er beautiful face spurs me / so far above vain desire / that I see death in every other beauty. / O lady who pass souls / through fire and water on to days of joy: / Pray, make me never turn back to myself again. (8–13)24 There, she becomes a hybridized donna angelica, thus to a degree resembling the young man depicted in Sonnets. It is worth noting that, also like the young man (and de’ Cavalieri), she is explicitly associated with

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  65 conferring grace. In another madrigal, Michelangelo’s persona lauds the ‘grace and mercy’ (111,6) that accompany her ‘divine beauty’ (2). 25 The sonnets of Vittoria Colonna, along with Michelangelo’s sonnets and songs, therefore emphasize the extent to which Shakespeare’s sonnets differ not merely from other sequences that replicate the donna angelica topos as deployed by Petrarch, but even from sequences or collections of poems that iterate and yet markedly depart from Petrarchan precedent. I have proposed above that an important element of Shakespeare’s refiguring the angelic lady motif and thence rewriting Petrarch is his attentiveness to connections within it between the lady herself and grace. No less important, I have suggested, is the way in which, amidst this process of reinvention, Shakespeare’s representations of grace as embodied by the young man and the Dark Lady in effect distort what are at once aesthetic and moral formulations of the concept by Castiglione and by Della Casa. In order, then, to illuminate Shakespeare’s play with concepts of grace throughout his Sonnets, I shall now briefly consider the importance and function of that category in the widely influential Book of the Courtier (1528) and Galateo (1558). 26 Across the debate, in Castiglione’s text, about what attributes an ideal courtier should possess, participants repeatedly nominate ‘grace’. The prominence accorded to grace is hence unquestionable. For example, Count Ludovico asserts that the ideal courtier should express ‘grace in all that he does or says’ (1.22). 27 Messer Cesare emphatically concurs and so too does the Magnifico Giuliano (severally at 1.24 passim and 1.28). The function of grace is no less clear. If informing all the courtier’s actions and words, it allows him to achieve a personal style of behaviour simultaneously agreeable to others in his sphere and setting him apart from them (1.37). 28 Further, it facilitates his gaining favour with and achieving a benign influence over his lord, whom he encourages to embody ‘the [ . . . ] virtues that befit a good prince’ (4.5). 29 As manifested in the ideal courtier, grace unites the aesthetic and the moral; it entwines personal advantage with the public good. Castiglione is chiefly concerned of course with how grace should reveal itself as an aesthetic and a moral phenomenon shaping the courtier’s individuated presence among his fellows. The term that he introduces via the Count to crystallize discussion around that topic, sprezzatura (1.26), signifies ‘nonchalance’ but suggests, in fact, the successful performance of nonchalance: the courtier’s successfully staging an illusion of spontaneity and of effortless ease (after all, we are told at 1.33–4 and 2.8 that the courtier must have the skills of both an actor and an orator). 30 Success in enacting sprezzatura, moreover—which means avoidance of its caricature, affectation (affettazione)—depends upon the courtier’s conduct being guided by moderation (1.27—mediocrità). That virtue necessarily implies its companions, namely, good judgement and mindfulness of decorum, which is to say that it necessarily indicates possession of prudence.

66  Shakespeare’s Sonnets So, directly or otherwise, Castiglione often insists. In 1.22, for example, he has the Count remark that ideally a courtier will act ‘with that good judgment which will not allow him to engage in any folly’. 31 The courtier’s ‘good judgment’, in other words, will reveal sensitivity to what is fitting and wise in any given circumstances.32 The Count makes a similar observation at 1.26 and again at 1.44, with the Magnifico Giuliano soon thereafter (throughout 1.48) seeking more detailed information on good judgement’s connection with decorum. The Count later mandates that ‘our Courtier must be cautious in his every action and see to it that prudence attends whatever he says or does’ (2.7). In fact, he continues, the ideal courtier must seek to behave in such a way that ‘his every act may stem from and be composed of all the virtues’ (ibid).33 Sprezzatura, therefore—indeed, each of the courtier’s displays of grace—will be founded upon and directed by the virtues, Castiglione emphasizing those particular virtues foregrounded in the Count’s expositions and in his exchanges with the dialogue’s other characters. This is what underlies the aesthetic impact of the courtier’s graceful conduct, which can be epitomized as follows. The Count says, when introducing the term sprezzatura into his discourse on grace: ‘[E]veryone knows the difficulty of things that are rare and well done; wherefore facility in such things causes the greatest wonder’ (1.26). He sets before us categories from then-contemporary art theory that are used to identify achievement of artistic excellence, namely, difficultà, facilità, and maraviglia.34 The ideal courtier is also a true artist. At the same time, he would be, from the perspective of Della Casa in Galateo, a prime contributor to a truly civil society. Della Casa has his persona conclude the initial chapter of Galateo by postulating that to be a participant in communal life demands courtesy and tact.35 There, he implies, however, not just that we cannot function amongst others unless we behave courteously, but that civil society itself cannot function without courtesy. This he proceeds variously to affirm. He suggests, for example, that courtesy mediates justice (by demanding we give everyone his or her due) and caritas (by dictating we give people the best due them, whether they actually deserve it or not).36 Acting with courtesy thence requires discernment, which is to say, it must be governed by moderation and thus prudence.37 In light of such views, similarities between Della Casa’s thought on courtesy and Castiglione’s on the grace embodied by the ideal courtier are apparent. Yet, they become even more evident when, near the end of Galateo, Della Casa’s persona urges the necessity of grace, decorum, and harmony in one’s behaviour, stressing that precisely because the courteous individual observes those criteria of conduct he or she will also be virtuous—repudiating at once the discord of offensive speech or action and that of immorality (28,88–9). As Della Casa writes, Therefore, a man must not be content with doing what is good, but he must also seek to do it gracefully. Grace is nothing else but

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  67 something akin to a light which shines from the appropriateness of things that are suitably ordered and arranged one with the other, and in relation to the whole. Without this measure, even that which is good will not be beautiful, and beauty will not be pleasing. (28,88)38 For an instance of someone held to incarnate, in effect, many of the moral as well as aesthetic values articulated by Castiglione and by Della Casa—and, furthermore, akin to the figure of the donna angelica—we need merely consider Raphael of Urbino as portrayed by Vasari. Introducing his biography of Raphael, Vasari begins, With wonderful indulgence and generosity heaven sometime showers upon a single person from its rich and inexhaustible treasures all the favours and precious gifts that are usually shared, over the years, among a great many people. This was clearly the case with Raphael Sanzio of Urbino, an artist as talented as he was gracious, who was endowed by nature with the goodness and modesty to be found in all those exceptional men whose gentle humanity is enhanced by an affable and pleasing manner, expressing itself in courteous behaviour at all times and towards all persons.39 Vasari adds that nature exhibited in Raphael ‘the finest qualities of mind accompanied by such grace, industry, looks, modesty, and excellence of character as would offset every defect’ (ibid).40 He concludes his introduction, moreover, by declaring ‘One can claim without fear of contradiction that artists as outstandingly gifted as Raphael are not simply men but, if it be allowed to say so, mortal gods’ (ibid).41 And, according later to Vasari, Raphael is, of course, not so much a true artist as ‘the master’ of all other painters (301—‘il maestro’, at 633). Although further such instances could be cited, especially with respect to Raphael’s adroitness as a courtier, one can see that values foregrounded by Castiglione and Della Casa are literally at the forefront of Vasari’s biography. One can see, too, that Vasari presents Raphael in a way that resonates with the donna angelica topos—and hence with Michelangelo’s imaging of Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. The terms ‘grazie’, ‘grazioso’, ‘modestia’, ‘graziata’, ‘virtύ’, ‘bellezza’, ‘dèi mortali’, and so on, leap from the page. To note this is by no means to claim identity among those writers, but rather to highlight significant points of congruence among them. It is also to highlight how alike—and yet how different—the depictions of Tommaso de’ ­Cavalieri and of Raphael are both to and from Shakespeare’s depiction in his S­ onnets of that persona dramatis who might still with reason be called ‘the young man’. ***

68  Shakespeare’s Sonnets I shall confine my discussion of how that persona is portrayed in the Sonnets to those poems where Shakespeare’s speaker seems definitely (or, at the least, quite probably) to be focusing on not just a young man but the same young man.42 To study Shakespeare’s fashioning of his presence throughout the Sonnets—given the order of the 1609 Quarto, which I take to be Shakespeare’s—is to examine a collocation of episodes, much as when one studies Petrarch’s imaging of Laura across the Rime (the difference lies in our knowledge that most of its poems are undoubtedly about Laura). Yet, if the Sonnets do not fashion a narrative around the youth, indeed do not set out an elliptical yet unifying story, we cannot deny that among very many of the first 126 poems there are compelling continuities of concern, tone, and register—of conceptual as well as emotional preoccupation and of rhetorical practice. That having been said, the place to start is where we see Shakespeare’s speaker not merely engage with the donna angelica topos but spectacularly refigure it by way of depicting the young man, in other words, with consideration of sonnets 20 and 53. From the start of sonnet 20, Shakespeare’s speaker celebrates the androgyny of his male addressee, imposing on him a mythos of union— integration might be a better term—and transcendence. He begins, A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted, Has thou, the master mistress of my passion; A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change as is false women’s fashion; An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth. (1–8) The fable offered to the young man (and I will presently give my reasons for so calling him) implies that he brings the feminine and the masculine into an irresistible unity, although he is biologically male (11), and therefore that he is desired by everyone. Since in him the genders coalesce, upon him the sexual fascination of both women and men converges. His allure, his mystique he is told, dominates the speaker just as it compulsively draws others to him (2 and 8). Moreover, Shakespeare’s speaker indicates that the young man recalls Laura while at the same time evidently displacing the paradigm of the beloved bequeathed by her, as it were, to Petrarchan tradition. A dominant motif used throughout the Rime to emphasize Laura’s singularity among women is praise of her eyes for their unequalled brilliance; in addition, she is recurrently praised for the singular constancy of her virtue; she is likewise praised

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  69 for her unique capacity to bestow grace upon and thus ennoble those whom she favours. All those interconnected elements of her characterization by Petrarch recur in the speaker’s blazon of the young man. The latter, too, is notionally unequalled in brilliance of eye and pre-eminent in virtue; he too supposedly enhances or ennobles everything subjected to his gaze (3–6). He seems, then, in displacing the influential representation of the female beloved established by the Rime, rather to transcend than to rival it, for if he allegedly replicates some of Laura’s essential attributes, he nevertheless exceeds her possession of them inasmuch as he is said to integrate femaleness with masculinity.43 Seeming and achieving are by no means identical here, however; and equivocations or instabilities embedded in the speaker’s epideictic rhetoric blur his portrayal of the young man. First, ‘less’ (5) appears to exclude inconstancy or falsehood from the young man’s behaviour but nevertheless intimates their presence or its possibility. Similarly, ‘Gilding’ (6) indicates enhancement yet also connotes deception or self-deception. More important, the ‘master mistress’ trope (2), which is so prominently positioned near the poem’s beginning, implies not a seamless fusion of contraries but their indeterminate integration as discordia concors.44 Shakespeare’s speaker presents a problematic image of his addressee as iterating while transcending Petrarch’s characterization of Laura. The main consequence of this dissonant portrayal is not, for all that, simply its equivocal relations with the picturing of Laura throughout the Rime, and therefore with traditional depictions of her successors as objects of desire. The most significant consequence is that, through the ambivalence of those affiliations, it both evokes and disrupts the donna angelica topos, delineating a beloved who precariously embodies grace, and whom we therefore perceive to have an ambiguous relationship with the concept of grace as influentially promulgated by Castiglione and Della Casa. I am not suggesting that in sonnet 20 Shakespeare presents a fully reconfigured version of the angelic lady motif; but I am proposing that in the poem he gestures distinctly towards its reconfiguration and thereby his radical divergence from Petrarch. The portrait that his speaker unfolds is of someone who verges on embodying and yet also on caricaturing the donna angelica topos as enacted throughout Petrarch’s Rime by his characterization of Laura. Thus, the young man’s supranatural beauty aligns him with the latter although, because his beauty is androgynous, it simultaneously distinguishes him from her. Further, her unmatchable beauty emanates from the divine—his, uniquely from Nature herself but not the divine (1,9–10). Again, Laura embodies a virtuous constancy; he does too, yet possibly not. Finally, she imparts grace on those favoured by her gaze; his gaze enhances, or ennobles, albeit perhaps seeming to do so while actually creating the illusion of enrichment. Shakespeare’s speaker implies that he responds to this uncanny presence with raptio, a

70  Shakespeare’s Sonnets reaction to the angelic lady dictated by literary convention. He does not however imply that his response initiates remeatio, which is what Laura evokes when in the role of donna angelica. For him, raptio ultimately takes the form of at once asserting devotion to the young man and disclaiming sexual interest in him via a series of genital puns (12–14). To remark those differences between the addressee of sonnet 20 and Laura in her guise as angelic lady is necessarily to note differences also between him and Laura’s many successors in erotic verse—yet not only between him and them. It is likewise to note how far the Shakespearean speaker’s portrait of the young man diverges from, say, Michelangelo’s representations of de’ Cavalieri or Colonna, for in Michelangelo’s poems the former becomes a resplendent signore angelico, inspiring raptio then (on occasion) remeatio, and the latter, a donna angelica serenely untroubled in her fusing of genders and bestowing of grace. Moreover, if in The Courtier grace is an aesthetic and a moral phenomenon that shapes the courtier’s individuated presence among his fellows, in sonnet 20, it is a morally uncertain aspect of the young man’s characterization. Nor can a reader clearly discern that grace, decorum, and harmony (which Della Casa prioritizes in personal behaviour, near the end of his Galateo) are unconditionally associated with the young man who, one could add, resembles and at the same time has unmistakable dissimilarities from Vasari’s Raphael. To recognize that broad pattern of likenesses and radical departures is to acknowledge Shakespeare’s proximity, in sonnet 20, to reconfiguration of the donna angelica topos and thence to rewriting of Petrarch. Why I have been identifying the addressee of sonnet 20 as ‘the young man’ will now become apparent if we turn to sonnet 53, which complements the numerically earlier poem but is its more complex and more ambitious companion. Unless Shakespeare wrote to and about a number of (supposed) androgynes, then sonnets 20 and 53 are addressed to the same real or imagined person. If, furthermore, we read the two poems against each other, we thereupon see that their mutual addressee is biologically male and young.45 Shakespeare’s speaker begins sonnet 53 by seeking to convey the mystique emergent from what, here, he suggests to be the young man’s fusion of genders—that is to say, from the marvels he incarnates and the sense of wonder those marvels inspire: What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend? Since every one hath, every one, one shade, And you, but one, can every shadow lend. Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit Is poorly imitated after you. On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set, And you in Grecian tires are painted new. (1–8)

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  71 According to Shakespeare’s speaker, the young man is not a second Adonis, another Helen. He is rather the archetype that any attempt to image Adonis will imperfectly reflect, the realization of a natural loveliness that Helen herself could prefigure only if her appearance had been cosmetically augmented. But this celebration of the young man’s flawless, androgynous beauty is not an end itself, although the speaker presents it as a marvel, a cause for wonder (which is to say, in effect through the frequently combined categories maraviglia and stupore). Fabling the young man’s absolute transcendence of gender serves to exemplify a more ambitious apprehension of him. Near the sonnet’s end, Shakespeare’s speaker reveals what that is. ‘And you in every blessed shape we know’, he says (12), immediately affirming his assertion when he adds, ‘In all external grace you have some part’ (13). His words clearly go beyond the rapturous praise, in Amoretti  8, of the beloved as expressing an otherworldly splendour within the mundane world—as being connected in essence closely to God, inspiring numinous desire, and conferring grace on those who witness her. They exceed too the template for Spenser’s evocation there of the donna angelica topos, namely, Petrarch’s imaging of Laura as an angelic lady, which at one moment even blasphemously represents her entry to the world as paralleling the Incarnation itself (4,9–14). In fact, they clarify the question and answer with which the sonnet begins. At almost the poem’s conclusion, the Shakespearean speaker declares that the supranatural diversity in unity attributed to the young man at the poem’s start characterizes him in terms of relations between the One and the Many. It implies that he is as a god to whose presence this world bears witness, associating him manifestly with the neoplatonic counterpart to God. It suggests that he is apprehensible by means of an equivalent to the Via Illuminativa—and broadly congruent with, for instance, Plotinus’ account of how the One, through the Divine Mind, impacts on the world of matter.46 Indeed, just before voicing those claims, and by way of enlarging upon the mythic exempla within the preceding lines, Shakespeare’s speaker has told the youth that the loveliness of the natural world, in perfection, is merely an image of his own beauty, that nature’s beneficent plenty is an image of his generosity (9–11.) We recognize in consequence that the speaker’s idolatrous hyperbole does far more than laud the youth as a transgendered donna angelica—far more, that is to say, than the speaker attempts in sonnet 20. On the contrary, in sonnet 53, Shakespeare’s speaker fashions a vertiginously ambitious version of the angelic lady motif. His elaborate rendering of the young man as an androgyne and beautiful beyond directly mythic comparison initiates a portrayal of the youth that becomes so comprehensive in its inclusiveness as virtually to apotheosize him, and to image a secularized dynamic of emanatio, raptio, and remeatio. Shakespeare’s version of the donna angelica topos thus overreaches, say,

72  Shakespeare’s Sonnets Spenser’s use of it to honour Elizabeth Boyle, Michelangelo’s to reverence Tommaso de’ Cavalieri or Vittoria Colonna. Yet, most important, Shakespeare’s deployment of the topos in connection with the young man ultimately refigures its paradigmatic fashioning at the hands of Petrarch. Refiguring the topos, in other words, he rewrites Petrarchan tradition and finally Petrarch himself. The sonnet’s conclusion obliquely confirms, moreover, that he does so. I have quoted half of it above, however in full it runs: ‘In all external grace you have some part, / But you like none, none you, for constant heart’ (13–14). Throughout the preceding quatrains, Shakespeare’s speaker has declared that everything gracious in our world either reflects the graces of the youth or in some way derives from them. The world often less than perfectly replicates his graces; and he confers grace upon it. But when the speaker moves beyond the surface of things, and their mutual interaction with the youth, to consider what lies within the graces of the young man, the ambivalence of his final assertion simultaneously sustains and demythologizes the fable of divinization. This is because the sonnet’s concluding couplet both asserts the unchangeableness of the youth and queries it: lauds and brings into question his supposedly quintessential constantia. According to orthodox thought, neither in God nor in the One is there change.47 The speaker can be seen, in harmony with that notion, as extolling the young man for his unique constancy. If, however, we read ‘But’ in conjunction with ‘like’ viewed as a verb—thereby acknowledging the grammatical fluidity of the last verse—we then see the speaker’s penumbral indication, too, that nobody ascribes constancy to the youth, nor does he to others. The young man’s all-encompassing possession of grace, and his ability to confer it, are hence themselves thrown into question (which, as in sonnet 20, gestures towards his ambiguous relationship with the thinking on grace so influentially articulated by Castiglione and Della Casa). A subtle dissonance informs and disturbs the extravagance of his characterization through the donna angelica topos. Shakespeare’s simultaneous refiguring of the angelic lady motif and rewriting of Petrarch occurs proximally then spectacularly in the correspondent sonnets just now discussed and, as would hardly seem unexpected, also resonates beyond them across the initial 126 poems of his sequence (as set out, of course, by the 1609 Quarto). Although to demonstrate that in detail would require more space than is available for the purposes of this discussion, some affinities between sonnets 20, 53 and other of poems 1–126 can be usefully if economically identified. For example, the young man addressed and meditated upon in the procreation sonnets (1–17) appears to be similarly conceptualized, at important points of that monitory as well as epideictic suite, to the young man delineated in sonnets 20 and 53. Shakespeare’s speaker there counsels an aristocratic youth to marry and beget an heir, insisting that refusal by the young man to fulfil his duty to his family and the world makes him

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  73 an exile from the economy of nature: that his narcissistic self-possession puts him outside the natural cycle of birth, maturation, procreation, age, death, supersession by one’s offspring. Thus, at the very start to this process of counsel, Shakespeare’s speaker urges his addressee to marry because ‘[f]rom fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty’s rose might never die, / But as the riper should by time decease, / His tender heir might bear his memory’ (1,1–4). My concern here is with two instances where he subsequently elaborates upon that idea in ways congruent with use of the angelic lady motif throughout sonnets 20 and 53. Those are both instances of amplification representing the young man’s loveliness as otherworldly. Neither describes him as androgynous. But elsewhere there is a clear indication of his being so, Shakespeare’s speaker declaring to the youth: ‘Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime’ (3,9–10; cf. 4,1). That having been noted, we can turn now to the first of the two amplificatory episodes, which appears in sonnet 7. Shakespeare fashions his sonnet as an extended analogy between the youth and the sun. His comparison ends with the young man being warned this: just as the sun at last declines into obscurity, so too will he unless he ‘get[s] a son’—another ‘sun’ like himself (14). In the comparison’s earlier phases, however, Shakespeare’s speaker lauds the youth for his implicitly supranatural beauty and its overwhelming effect on all beholders. He begins by describing the young sun’s brilliant manifestation of itself to the world, when ‘the gracious light / Lifts up his burning head’ and ‘each under-eye / Doth homage…’, ‘[serving] with looks his sacred majesty’ (1–4). Next, he tells of the mature sun being observed with ‘ador[ation]’ as it progresses along its ‘golden pilgrimage’ (7–8). No less ethereal or extravagant is the second episode, which occurs in sonnet 17. There the speaker says to his addressee, ‘If I could write the beauty of your eyes, / And in fresh numbers number all your graces, / The age to come would say “This poet lies: / Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces”’ (5–8). There one sees, in 17,5 and thence the hyperbole of 7–8, an unmistakable reference to Petrarchan tradition and, finally, to portrayal of Laura herself. More important is, nevertheless, the way that both excerpts image the young man in terms of the epiphanic, the numinous, maraviglia: manifesting the divine within the mundane world, he evokes raptio and stupore—but not remeatio. He embodies and imparts grace. He reminds us of Laura in the Rime, and he supplants her inasmuch as he is a masculine (and yet, as we have seen, nonetheless feminine) counterpart to her when she appears in the guise of donna angelica. In their depiction of the young man, that is to say, the procreation sonnets accord closely with the refiguring of the angelic lady motif, thereby rewriting of Petrarch across sonnets 20 and 53. Briefly one could point to similar connections among sonnets 20, 53,1–17 and others either definitely or at least probably focused on a

74  Shakespeare’s Sonnets male object of devotion, most of those variously associating him with the sun and (or) grace. Sonnet 33 forms a striking example. It begins with description of the sun’s ‘glorious’ presence ‘[g]ilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy’ (1 and 4)—the trope of golden enhancement precisely evoking 20,6. Shakespeare’s speaker proceeds to tell of the sun as allowing its ‘celestial face’ to be unworthily obscured, and thereafter applies that narrative analogically to a male presence in his life who was his ‘sun’, who ‘did shine / With all triumphant splendour’ upon him, but who does so no longer (9–11). ‘Suns of the world may stain, when heaven’s sun staineth’, the speaker concludes (14), punning on suns/sons much as in 7,14. One could correspondingly cite 33–4 and 37,5–12.48 Likewise, in sonnets 40–2, one especially notes the ‘Lascivious grace’ (40,13) attributed to the male addressee—his contaminated grazia (cf. 67,2 and 96,2–3). But instead of offering further illustrations, I should like to end for now with two remarks. The more important of these is that sonnets 20 and 53, in refiguring the angelic lady motif, present a heightened formulation of how Shakespeare’s speaker often portrays a male object of desire throughout sonnets 1–126 (whatever that desire might be in any given context). They are thus pre-eminent rather than divergent. The other is that, whereas in the procreation sonnets Shakespeare’s speaker seeks, as it were, to counsel a narcissistic youth out of his self-imposed exile from the economy of nature, in numerically subsequent poems the speaker sometimes gestures towards different notions of exile. On the one hand, he may suggest his rescue from virtual exile within society by a male friend (30,13–14 and very probably 29,10–14, for illustration). On the other, he may suggest that preoccupation with a male friend exiles him from his normative sense of who he is (thus, 57 and very probably 34–6). *** It is upon interaction between the donna angelica topos and the last of those concepts of exile that I now wish to focus in considering the Dark Lady sonnets. I shall be examining poems that seem addressed to or concerned with the same female persona dramatis. My argument assumes neither that sonnets 137–52 all spiral around the one real or imagined woman, nor that they are all in fact to or about a woman. Moreover, my argument is not simply that, in what we might still call the Dark Lady sonnets, one finds negation or parodic iteration of the angelic lady motif. There is denial, of course, just as there is parody: ostentatious denial as well as parody at once ingenious and brutal. The sonnets give voice to more than rejection and caricature, however, which I take to be this. Although Shakespeare’s speaker does indeed at one point emphatically wave aside the donna angelica topos—and elsewhere inverts some of its main elements—he does so because preoccupied with a beloved whom he

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  75 portrays as, in effect, emblematizing its deformation, its violation. The speaker fashions an elaborately desacralized image of his mistress. He does not associate her with emanatio, raptio, and remeatio but, rather, with grace profaned. In particular, he connects her with akrasia. She therefore implicitly becomes an antithesis to that androgynous signore angelico who is the young man. Further, she therefore becomes Laura’s distorted shadow and, in addition, an oblique counterpart to Spenser’s Acrasia. Shakespeare’s speaker thereby suggests that the experience of loving her has exiled him from his sense of who and what he should be, amplifying as he does so the power of sexual desire via allusion to the tyrannical authority of the Alexandrian Cupid. It is sonnet 130 that leads to the heart of the matter or, more properly, the heart of the problem. There, the speaker concedes assertively at the outset, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’ (1). He concludes the sonnet even more emphatically, ‘I grant I never saw a goddess go: / My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. / And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare’ (11–14). This celebration of his beloved’s everyday attractiveness obviously repudiates fin’amor and Petrarchan conventions of female beauty while, no less obviously, affirming them. It exists only because of their familiarity and power, which denial of them acknowledges. Further, the lines quoted above evidently privilege the natural over the supranatural. The beloved is no donna angelica. Behind the sonnet’s defiant close one can hear overtones of poems such as Rime 90, with its allusions to Venus in the Aeneid (9–12). What seems most suggestive in those lines is, nonetheless, not the speaker’s confident rejection of the angelic lady motif but his concluding remark about false comparison, which comes immediately after the speaker’s disavowal of the motif and is introduced by a neatly ironic appeal to ‘heaven’ (13). Following on as it does after rejection of the donna angelica topos, his remark insists we see that topos as the falsehood crowning an inheritance of misrepresentation—as the culminating fiction in a legacy of falsehoods. Decrying it as completely false—indeed, as a lie capping cognate untruths—he implicitly repudiates the philosophies of love from which it derives and towards which it directly or indirectly gestures. One consequence is that he obliquely brings into question his virtual apotheosizing of the young man throughout sonnets 20, 53, and the poems concordant with them. Deployment and negation of the donna angelica topos thus cohabit in the Sonnets, cross the divide of gender, and allow readers to suspend disbelief or not (to whatever extent), as they choose. Yet there is as well an additional, more pressing, and related consequence of the speaker’s remark about false comparisons. It tacitly condemns how he represents his mistress in other poems: for a start, in sonnet 127. That poem (which begins the Dark Lady series as the Quarto’s numeration sets it before us) reveals Shakespeare’s speaker

76  Shakespeare’s Sonnets imposing—from a reader’s point of view, having already imposed—an elaborate fiction on what seems quite clearly to be the same female object of desire. Evidence of identity between the two is not hard to find. The speaker tells us in sonnet 130 that his mistress’s hair is ‘black’ and that her skin is by no means ideally pale (3–4). Throughout sonnet 127 he also praises the dark hair and eyes of his beloved, lauding ‘black’ as ‘beauty’s successive heir’ (3). There, we recognize at once, the speaker bases his eulogy of her colouring on a mock-aetiological myth, a satiric mythos of origins. According to this fable, the Golden Age—namely, the Fair Age, the Age of True and Golden Beauty—is gone forever because cosmetic artifice has now made falsified beauty indistinguishable from the real thing (5–6). In unfolding his burlesque of a Golden Age narrative, Shakespeare’s speaker plays with the issue of how to determine a standard for the beauty of women when the traditional aesthetic, founded on genuineness of appearance, has been betrayed (7–8). He locates a ludic authenticity by fabling his mistress’s dark colouration as incarnated grief at the pervasiveness of forged beauty (9–12)—at debasement, as it were, of the gold standard (the latent contradiction being, within this mythos of mass betrayal and emergent individual triumph, that the old paradigm of what constitutes true beauty nevertheless retains its primacy). The speaker therefore links his darkly coloured mistress with decorum; and her singular, distinctive observance of decorum supposedly, if not actually, establishes a new aesthetic (13–14). Decorum becomes by implication the new truth in a world of confusions. Three significances of the speaker’s intricate and duplicitous mythmaking in sonnet 127 are especially pertinent to my argument. First, it shows him fashioning around his mistress a myth just as unstable and problematic as are the myths of androgyny centred upon the young man. Thus, he refuses to impose a distortive fiction on his mistress and denounces the misrepresentation of a beloved; he also luxuriates in imposing an extravagant fable upon his mistress; that fiction has affinities with overreaching fables imposed on the young man. Second, it indicates his unreliability as the narrator of his own desires—an intimation that will become explicit in other poems associated with his mistress and that he will there intensify (and that therefore links him to Petrarch’s speaker in the Rime).49 Finally, and correlatively, it suggests that he can exert only an imperfect or indecisive judgement upon his desire (which likewise links him to Petrarch’s speaker in the Rime).50 Each of those significances is inseparable from the notions in play throughout sonnet 127 of decorum, abrogation of decorum, and disgrace—which is to say, each is inseparable too from the Shakespearean speaker’s defacing of the donna angelica topos. This he variously reveals in sonnets 131–2 and 144. The most intriguing aspect of sonnet 131 is, for example, neither his initial recourse to a familiar Petrarchan trope—the beloved’s tyrannical dominion over her

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  77 lover (1–2)—nor merely his use of it so as to emphasize his beloved’s divergence from conventional expectations about an object of desire, and thence his own divergence from them in his role as a lover. The poem’s fascination lies, rather, in his defiantly if not altogether incautiously idiosyncratic renegotiation of what ‘fair’ can mean: his assertion, in short, of what it means for him if not for anyone else. Thereby creating an alternate language of desire, he creates in effect a heterocosm of love for himself and his mistress. Yet, the hesitations and self-contradictions with which he does so are never denied or concealed. They are calculatedly foregrounded. ‘[T]o my dear doting heart / Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel’, the speaker tells his beloved near the poem’s start (3–4), appropriating and personalizing the lexicon of beauty (cf. 130,13). Near its close he adds, ‘Thy black is fairest in my judgement’s place’ but continues, ‘In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds’ (12–13). He overturns, then incongruously and wilfully confirms, social convention. The speaker’s private language of desire expresses his consciously incoherent independence; and that deliberate singularity of vision, aware of its disjunctures, shapes the speaker’s address to his mistress in the ensuing poem. There he praises her eyes, a motif pervading the Rime and subsequent verse in the Petrarchan tradition, deploying that praise to create a shadow version of the donna angelica topos. Fabling that his mistress’ eyes reciprocate his love for them and that their ‘black’ hue indicates compassion for the ‘disdain’ inflicted upon him by her heart (1–4), he presents as the poem’s centrepiece a declaration that they transcend both ‘the morning sun of heaven’ and the evening star (5–9), manifesting her ‘grace’ (11).51 His beloved becomes by implication a darkly angelic lady, a donna angelica unique in her archly legitimized and precariously extolled blackness. The conventional symbolic value of ‘black’ is however iterated and wholly affirmed throughout sonnet 144. In parodic evocation of the morality play, or perhaps in parodic allusion to scenes from Doctor Faustus redolent of that medieval dramatic form, Shakespeare’s speaker soliloquizes at the sonnet’s start: Two loves I have, of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still. The better angel is a man right fair; The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. To win me soon to hell my female evil Tempteth my better angel from my side . . . (1–6) He begins the poem by unfolding an embittered drama of betrayal, in which a signore angelico is contrasted with the dark-hued mistress, now cast in the guise of a donna diabolica. He presents her, then, not as a darkly angelic lady but as a demon. The donna angelica topos is thus not

78  Shakespeare’s Sonnets so much re-imagined as inverted; and that inversion is telling. It forms part of an elaborate conflict staged between caricatures, wherein the Shakespearean speaker idealizes a young man (quite possibly the same young man whom he celebrates in sonnets 20 and 53) yet extravagantly transforms his mistress into a grotesque. At the sonnet’s uncertain conclusion, he reveals that if he resembles Doctor Faustus, he is a Faustus likely to be deceived by those dearest to him and also misled by his determination to caricature them along with their relationships to him. Nonetheless, what matters here is how this inversion of the donna angelica topos functions. In suggesting that his mistress emblematizes deformation and violation of the angelic lady motif, in shaping a violently desacralized portrayal of her where she is associated with profanation instead of grace, with raptio and concupiscentia rather than raptio and remeatio, the speaker simultaneously images himself as someone whose sense of self has become lost amid desire—whether the latter be obsessively concupiscent or devotedly homosocial. Loss of selfhood because overcome by desire—losing one’s established (but not therefore static) sense of personal identity because seized by desire as if by possession—is a concept essential to the characterization of Petrarch’s speaker in the Rime. He too is a helpless observer of his quotidian self’s erasure by passion. He too reflects on his loss of agency, compulsively analysing his life and aware of his powerlessness to change it after its metamorphosis by desire. He too wavers between alternatives and extremes; and, at different times, he intimates his entrapment in akrasia. These are all points of likeness between Shakespeare’s speaker as characterized across the Sonnets, especially in poems to or about the dark-hued mistress, and his Petrarchan predecessor. Yet the differences between them—as regard the Dark Lady sonnets—are no less evident and important. First, Laura is a radiant donna angelica: Petrarch’s speaker asserts that decorous desire for her ennobles him. The Alexandrian Cupid, insofar as he may personify the Petrarchan speaker’s own concupiscent desire, is the shadowy presence informing the Rime and diminishing the speaker’s sense of who he is (contrast 4 and 13 with 1 and 62). In Shakespeare’s sonnets concerned with ‘the woman coloured ill’, it is the now darkly angelic, now demonic, lady who imposes on his speaker a new and disempowered selfhood. It is she, he insists, who generates solely and obsessively concupiscent desire within him—she, then, who subjects him to domination by the Alexandrian Cupid. By way of illustration, one could juxtapose the vaginally punning references to ‘hell’ in 144,5 and 12 with the same pun in 129,14, and relate them, in turn, to 147,14, 148,1–4, 153,11–14, and 154,7 (147,9–11 parallel 129,6–9). This selfhood is, moreover, continually and not intermittently akratic; further, it is knowingly akratic; and, finally, it is beyond resolution, beyond reach of salvation. Petrarch’s speaker can turn from his difficulties in appropriately loving his donna angelica and, at the last, seek

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  79 salvific grace via that lady clothed with the sun who is the Virgin Mary (366), renouncing his cupiditas. For Shakespeare’s speaker, there can be no deliverance from enthrallment by a mistress who seems to embody distortion or disfigurement of the donna angelica topos and who can engender concupiscence but not confer grace. The imposition of an akratic selfhood on Shakespeare’s speaker by his mistress, whether he image her as darkly angelic or as demonic, appears with varying emphases throughout sonnets 137, 147–50, and 152. 52 Each of the poems implies that a knowingly akratic consciousness is also a consciousness knowingly in exile, bespeaking estrangement from what one would otherwise be, alienation from what one might aspire to be. Shakespeare’s speaker strongly suggests that he regards his akratic experience of desire as taking him away from what he would otherwise be and prefer to be—a perception, he indicates, shared by those around him (150,11–14; cf. 148,5–8). Much of this is crystallized in sonnet 137, which begins with the speaker addressing his desire in terms that evoke the Alexandrian Cupid: Thou blind fool love, what dost thou to mine eyes / That they behold and see not what they see? / They know what beauty is, see where it lies, / Yet what the best is, take the worst to be’, he says (1–4). His words allude unmistakably to Blind Eros—the Alexandrian Cupid—and then the dark-hued mistress, implying that his desire blinds him inasmuch as it gives him an idiosyncratic, aberrant perspective on his beloved. It makes him see, drives him to act within, what is in effect a private world of obsession, thereby compelling him to deviate from the quotidian world’s standards of value and right reason although he is only too mindful of them and their claims upon him. This entrapment in knowing akrasia, and correlative exclusion from the normative, the speaker attributes initially to his own concupiscent gaze but subsequently to the contaminated allure of its object: ‘If eyes corrupt by over-partial looks / Be anchored in the bay where all men ride, / Why of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forged hooks, / Whereto the judgement of my heart is tied?’ (5–8). His exasperated interrogation of his consciously and unalterably misdirected desire presents a remythologized equivalent to Spenser’s episode, in Faerie Queene 2.12. stanzas 72–82, where Acrasia preys on Verdant (namely, where inexperienced youth is shown as having succumbed to akrasia). Shakespeare’s speaker is neither young nor green, as he makes plain in sonnets 73 and 138 respectively; nor is he is caught unawares in experiencing weakness of will. He inhabits a heterocosm of desire that he has fashioned for himself—and that he knows to be self-fashioned. Knowingly akratic, he implies that he is therefore at the same time doubly exiled—from social norms and expectations, and also from what he wants to be and thinks he should be. The Acrasia to whom he succumbs—she who functions as the incarnation of his own akrasia—is ‘the worst’ wilfully construed as ‘the best’ (4)

80  Shakespeare’s Sonnets and, at the last, ‘this false plague’ (14). Here, no less than in sonnet 144 if less explicitly, Shakespeare’s speaker demonizes his mistress, who becomes Laura’s distorted shadow, a grotesque complement to the young man (in his role as signore angelico). So we see likewise in sonnet 147, with its similarities as well to sonnets 129 and 144. The speaker there maps out an elaborate allegory of akrasia, which he designs as a psychomachia. He starts by declaring, ‘My love is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease, / Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill’ (1–3). In words that increasingly resemble those used to condemn ‘lust in action’ throughout sonnet 129, he goes on to tell of ‘reason, the physician to [his] love’ (5) abandoning him because of his failure to follow its dictates, and of ‘Desire’ as being ‘death’ (8). ‘Past cure I am, now Reason is past care, / And, frantic-mad with evermore unrest’, he adds (9–10). His concluding and summative remark identifies the cause of his akratic state. To his mistress, he says, ‘For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night’ (13–14). His images penumbrally summon the donna angelica topos in denouncing the object of his desire as a donna diabolica, who diseases him with amor ferinus and renders him an incapacitated but acutely self-conscious observer of his devalued life. 53 Moreover, his allusion to the angelic lady motif (via ‘fair’ and ‘bright’ in line 13) gestures towards it as a desideratum, as a signifier of something at once intensely desired and altogether impossible. One can perhaps detect, then, in that allusion not just the speaker’s anger at his flawed judgement and consequent envelopment by misdirected desire, but nostalgia for the positive possibilities integral to Petrarch’s troubled portrayal of Laura. The sonnet rewrites Petrarch, imagines the Petrarchan discourse of love afresh, yet ultimately stays within the parameters of the Rime. Other sonnets that distinctly associate the ‘woman coloured ill’ with the donna angelica topos similarly characterize Shakespeare’s speaker, his mistress, and their relationship—similarly remain within the expansive, fluid boundaries of Petrarchan discourse while implicitly rewriting Petrarch. Continuities between them and the poems so far considered in this segment of the discussion can be readily and economically illustrated. For example, in sonnet 150 the speaker complains that his mistress subjugates his judgement, overturns his exercise of right reason, and (as he obliquely if unmistakably indicates) compels him to renounce the ideal of the angelic lady, accepting the violation of it that she incarnates. In his words, O, from what power hast thou this powerful might With insufficiency my heart to sway, To make me give the lie to my true sight,

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  81 And swear that brightness doth not grace the day? Whence hast thou this becoming of things ill, That in the very refuse of thy deeds There is such strength and warrantize of skill That in my mind thy worst all best exceeds? Who taught thee how to make me love thee more, The more I hear and see just cause of hate? (1–10) His linking ‘brightness’ to ‘grace’ in affirmation of normative aesthetics, his intimation that his mistress lacks the former and inclusively the latter, his suggestion—in consequence—that he inhabits a private world of misapprehension and akrasia, all point to the object of his desire as a darkly angelic lady, a donna diabolica. He concludes, however, by conceding that love of so darkly angelic a mistress reveals his own darkness, his own grotesqueness (13–14). He ends, that is to say, not in mere parody of the triad emanatio, raptio, remeatio but by confirming his virtual exile from the shared values, attitudes, and experiences of the social world environing him. One could additionally and concordantly examine 148,1–8, 149,9– 14, 152,8–14, yet it would be more useful to consider instead how those sonnets where Shakespeare refigures the donna angelica, and hence rewrites Petrarch, relate to those where he diverges from Petrarch by different means. Several factors are especially pertinent here. For a start (and as I have indicated above), since the angelic lady motif is recurrent throughout the Rime, in deploying that motif Shakespeare observes Petrarchan precedent while deviating from and rewriting it. Second, the topos of the donna angelica is essentially Christian—although the lady’s epiphanic presence may be depicted very diversely or irreligiously, as we know. Shakespeare certainly secularizes it in the case of sonnets portraying the young man as a signore angelico. In the case of the ‘woman coloured ill’, he draws on its religious affiliations so as to suggest indirectly how far his speaker’s mistress distorts the likeness of Laura, the extent to which she violates the ideals of fin’amor and Petrarchan discourse. 54 When imaging her too, then, Shakespeare’s speaker rewrites and secularizes Petrarchan precedent. This desacralizing of the angelic lady motif—which nonetheless proffers extremes of the numinous—stands in contrast to the religious self-scrutiny unfolded throughout sonnet 146, which is positioned amidst the socalled Dark Lady sonnets and seeks from a conventionally Christian perspective to counter akrasia with contemptus mundi (as at 146,5–8; cf. Rime 62). Yet it accords distinctly with Shakespeare’s secular view on the economy of nature expressed across sonnets 1–19, most of those between 55 and 65, and elsewhere. In those poems (60,1–8 form a representative illustration), Shakespeare’s speaker evokes the temper if

82  Shakespeare’s Sonnets not the strictly Epicurean letter of Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15, where human experience is delineated as occurring within a universe wholly material, unstable, protean. 55 Shakespeare’s refiguring of the donna angelica topos, and thence implicit rewriting of Petrarch, thus contributes to a dialogue that pervades his Sonnets, namely, a debate amongst divergent concepts and representations of the spiritual that co-exist in sceptical irresolution.

Notes 1 See especially: Heather Dubrow, ‘“Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d”: The Politics of Plotting in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 47 (1996), 291–305; Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (1997; rpt. London: Thomson Learning, 2010), 46–9; Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 14–21; William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 118–23; Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Original-Spelling Text, ed. Paul Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4–5; Stanley Wells, ‘“My Name is Will”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Autobiography’, in his Shakespeare on Page and Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 192–204. On compositional dates of the sonnets within Shakespeare’s sequence, see: Duncan-Jones, 11–30; Burrow, 103–7; Hammond, 8–9; and William J. Kennedy, Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 219–312. As to whether publication of the Sonnets was authorized by Shakespeare, compare: Duncan-Jones, 33; Burrow, 107; Hammond, 9: Wells, 193–4. Reference to the Sonnets in what follows will be from Burrow’s edition. 2 For recent comment on the issue of patronage in the Sonnets, see Richard ­McCabe, Ungainefull Arte: Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 21–2. For other recent discussion of the Sonnets, see in particular: John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 104, 304, 473–5; John D. Cox, ‘Shakespeare’s Prayers’, and Peter Holbrook, ‘Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Classical Reason’, both in Patrick Gray and John D. Cox, eds, Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), respectively, at 123–38 and 261–83; Colin Burrow, ‘Classical Influences’, Anthony Mortimer, ‘Shakespeare and Italian Poetry’, and Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Du Bellay and Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, all in Jonathan F. S. Post, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), severally at 97–115, 116–33, 134–50; ­Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 198–225. 3 For general discussions of akrasia, see: Risto Saarinen, Weakness of Will in Renaissance and Reformation Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially at 43–95 and 164–74; Tobias Hoffmann, ed., Weakness of Will from Plato to the Present (Washington, WA: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), especially at 58–114. 4 Registered in 1594, the sequence was published during the next year.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  83 5 Sir Philip Sidney, Seventh song, 11–18 and Eighth song, 29–44; Samuel Daniel, Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme, eds Geoffrey G. Hiller and Peter L. Groves (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998), 6,7–10 and 12,3–10. 6 See, representatively: Ideas Mirrour (1594), amour 5; Idea (1599), sonnet 30; Idea (1605), sonnet 57. Reference is to Minor Poems of Michael Drayton, ed. Cyril Brett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907). 7 My translations. Reference in this case is from Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, ed. M. Barbi (Firenze: Bemporad, 1932). Respectively: ‘Vede perfettamente onne salute / chi la mia donna tra le donne vede’ and ‘E quando trova alcun che degno sia / di veder lei, quei prova sua vertute, / ché li avvien, ciò che li dona, in salute, / e sὶ l’umilia, ch’ ogni offesa oblia. / Ancor l’ ha Dio per maggior grazia dato / che no pò mal finir chi l’ ha parlato’. 8 ‘Gentil mia Donna, i’ veggio / nel mover de’ vostr’ occhi un dolce lume / che mi mostra la via ch’ al ciel conduce’; ‘Questa è la vista ch’ a ben far m’induce / et che mi scorge al glorioso fine’; ‘Vaghe faville angeliche, beatrici / de la mia vita’. 9 ‘tanta negli occhi bei for di misura / par ch’ Amore et dolcezza et grazia piova’ (7–8) and ‘basso desir non è ch’ ivi si senta / ma d’onor, di vertute’ (12–13). 10 57,13–14, for instance. 11 My translation. Reference is to Délie: object de plus haulte vertu, ed. Eugene Parturier (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1916). In the original: ‘Quand (o bien peu) je voy auprès de moy / Celle qui es la Vertu, & la Grâce : / Qui paravant ardois en grand esmoy, / Je me sens tout reduict en dure glace’. 12 32 begins, ‘De vostre belle vive angelique lumière’ (cf. 29,1–4). Reference is to the edition by Roger Sorg (Paris: Editions Bossard, 1921). 13 Lorenzo De’ Medici, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Jon Thiem, transs Jon Thiem et al. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 105–7,114–16. See also Idem, Comento de’ miei sonetti, ed. Tiziano Zanato (Torino: Einaudi, 1992), 4–5 and 16–19 (especially,’chiamata essaudi, o nume, i voti nostri’—the 11th line of the sonnet, on 18). 14 Torquato Tasso, Love Poems for Lucrezia Bendidio, ed. and trans. Max Wickert (New York: Italica Press, 2011). Here, from ‘Mentre adorna costei di fiori e d’erba’: ‘scesa è dal cielo in terra, e dove nacque / di sua bellazza onor celeste è degno—‘(13–14). 15 ‘Del puro lume, onde i celesti giri’, passim. 16 ‘Al bel de’ bei vostri occhi, ond’arde Amore / e Febo splende, e l’uno e l’altro spira / spirto che l’alme al ciel rapisce e tira [. . . ] fiso ‘l core’. Cf. ‘Bella guerriera mia’, 7. 17 Reference is to Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Abigail Brundin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 18 ‘Rinasca in te il mio cor quest’almo giorno / Che nacque a noi colei di cui nascesti, / L’animo excelso tuo l’ale ne presti / Per gir volando al vero alto soggiorno’. 19 ‘Non saranno [ . . . ] mie l’opre e ‘l desire, / Ma lieve andrò con le celesti piume / Ove mi spinge e tira il santo ardore’. 20 Reference is to The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation, ed. James M. Saslow (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 21 ‘I’ mi credetti, il promo giorno ch’io / mirá tante bellezze uniche e sole, / fermar gli occhi com’ aquila nel sole / nella minor di tante ch’i’ desio. / Po’ conosciut’ho il fallo e l’erro mio: / ché chi senz’ale un angel sequir

84  Shakespeare’s Sonnets vole, / il seme a’ sassi, al vento le parole / indarno isparge, e l’intelletto a Dio’. 22 ‘e chi v’ ama con fede / trascende a Dio e fa dolce la morte’. On De’ Cavalieri as signore angelico, see also 61 and 89. 23 ‘né Dio, suo grazia, mi si mostra altrove / più che ‘n alcun leggiadro e mortal velo; / e quel so amo perch’in lui si specchia’. 24 Respectively: ‘Un uomo in una donna, anzi uno dio / per la sua bocca parla’; ‘mi sprona il suo bel volto, / ch’i’ veggio morte in ogni altra beltate. / O donna che passate / per acqua e foco l’alme a’ lieti giorni, / deh, fate c’a me stesso più non torni’. 25 ‘tuo grazia e mercede’ and ‘benché sia diva / di beltà’. 26 Reference to The Courtier is from the edition by Daniel Javitch and, in this case, to its Italian original from Il Cortegiano, ed. Carlo Cordié (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1991). Reference to Galateo is from the translation by Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett, 3rd edn rev. (Toronto, ON: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009) and to its original from Il Galateo overo De’ costumi, ed. Emanuela Scarpa (Modena: Panini, 1990). The first English translation of The Courtier was of course Thomas Hoby’s, in 1561, and that of Galateo likewise Robert Peterson’s in 1576. 27 ‘in ogni cosa che facia o dica sia aggraziato’. 28 In that section, with respect to the diversely pleasing styles of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and other artists, the Count notably says ‘di modo che ad alcun di loro non par che manchi cosa alcuna in quella maniera, perché si conosce ciascun nel suo stilo essere perfettissimo’. 29 ‘[le] virtù che si convengono a bon principe’. 30 The Count says that sprezzatura is ‘the real source from which grace springs’ (‘il vero fonte donde deriva la grazia’). 31 ‘con quel bon giudicio che no lo lassi incorrere in alcuna schiocchezza’. 32 On decorum and its connection with wisdom, see Cicero’s Orator 21.70. Cicero defines prudentia as ‘the practical knowledge of things to be sought for and of things to be avoided’. See De Officiis, ed. and trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (1913; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 1.43.153 (‘quae est rerum expetendarum fugiendarumque scientia’). 33 ‘[Il] nostro cortegiano in ogni sua operazion sia cauto, e ciò che dice o fa sempre accompagni con prudenzia’ and ‘che ogni suo atto risulti e sia composto di tutte le virtù’. 34 ‘perché delle cose rare e ben fatte ognun sa la difficultà, onde in esse la facilità genera grandissima maraviglia’. Cf. David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 177–85. 35 1, at page 33 (so in format for subsequent references to the English translation). Especially: ‘[N]o one will deny that knowing how to be gracious and pleasant in one’s habits and manners is a very useful thing to whoever decides to live in cities and among men, rather than in desert wastes or hermit’s cells’. The key phrase in the Italian original runs: ‘il sapere essere ne’ suoi costumi e nelle sue maniere gratioso e piacevole’ (1, at page 2, and likewise). 36 Della Casa’s persona initially makes that point by demonstrating how discourtesy inflicts injustice and how a prudent courtesy will generate charitable action (8, 43). See also 9, 45. 37 4, 36. In the original, amid an exemplum of courteous and liberal hospitality: ‘cortese e liberale assai [ . . . ] con magnificenza non soprabondante, ma mezzana’. Cf. 16, 56.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets  85 38 ‘Non si dèe adunque l’uomo contentare di fare le cose buone, ma dèe studiare di farle anco leggiadre: e non è alto leggiadria che una cotale quasi luce che risplende dalla convenevolezza delle cose che sono ben composte e ben divisate l’una con l’altra e tutte insieme, sanza la qual misura etiandio il bene non è bello e la bellezza non è piacevole’ (28, 58). 39 Reference is from Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, 2 vols (1965; rpt. London: Penguin, 1987), vol. 1, 284. Reference to the Italian original is from idem, Le vite de piú eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architetti, ed. Luciano Bellosi e Aldo Rossi (Turino: Einaudi, 1986), here at 617 as follows. ‘Quanto largo e benigno si dimostri talora il cielo collocando, anzi per meglio dire, riponendo et accumulando in una persona sola le infinite ricchezze delle ampie grazie o tesori suoi, e tutti que’ rari doni che fra lungo spazio di tempo suol compartire a molti individui, chiaramente poté vedersi nel non meno eccellente che grazioso Rafael Sanzio da Urbino; il quale con tutta quella modestia e bontà, che sogliono usar coloro che hanno una certa umanità di natura gentile, piena d’ornamento e di graziata affabilità, la quale in tutte le cose sempre si mostra, onoratamente spiegando i predetti doni con qualunche condizione di persone et in qualsivoglia maniera di cose, per unico od almeno molto raro universalmente si fé conoscere’. 40 ‘chiarissimamente risplendevano tutte le egregie virtú dello animo, accompagnate da tanta grazia, studio, bellezza, modestia e costumi buoni, che arebbono ricoperto e nascoso ogni vizio’ (ibid). 41 ‘Per il che sicurissimamente può dirsi che i possessori delle dote di Rafaello, non sono uomini semplicemente, ma dèi mortali’ (ibid). 42 I would not be surprised if sonnets 1–126 were mostly, or even all, to or about the same young man; but that possibility lacks proof, at present. In his refreshing Ideas of Order: A Close Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), Neil L. Rudenstine works on the assumption ‘that there is one male friend in the first 126 sonnets, and one mistress in 127–54’ (8). 43 Penumbral to portrayal of the young man in the sonnet are hence the mythology and mythography of the hermaphrodite. 4 4 In fact, contrapositum is the Latin title of the trope used in line 2. 45 The androgynous addressee of 20 is ultimately male; the also androgynous addressee of 53 is an Adonis before he is a Helen, and Adonis died young (very young, in Shakespeare’s own Venus and Adonis). 46 On the Via Illuminativa, see for instance Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism—1200–1350 (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1998), 102–12. See also Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (New York: Larson Publications, 1992), 5.1.5–9. 47 Respectively: James 1:17 and Plotinus, Enneads, 5.1.11. 48 ‘Do deeds of youth’ (37,2) suggests the gender of the child in question. 49 One could cite Rime 70 by way of example. 50 Cf. 32, 36, 99. 51 On Hesperus as the star of Venus, see Boccaccio, vol. 1, 394–7. The mistress is therefore distantly associated with Venus Victrix. 52 Those are not the only poems where the speaker focuses on the ‘woman coloured ill’, nor are they the only poems preoccupied with a female beloved and akrasia—but they are sonnets in which the ‘Dark Lady’ and akrasia are distinctly associated. 53 On amor ferinus (‘bestial love’), see Ficino, Commentarium, 7.3, passim.

86  Shakespeare’s Sonnets 54 She is antithetically portrayed, moreover, to Castiglione’s description of the Duchess in The Courtier at 1,4. For example: ‘[I]t seemed that she tempered us all to her own quality and fashion, wherefore each one strove to imitate her style, deriving, as it were, a rule of fine manners from the presence of so great and virtuous a lady’. 55 See further my ‘Sonnet 60’, in Michael Hanke and Michael R. G. Spiller, eds, Ten Shakespeare Sonnets: Critical Essays (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2006), 46–54.

4 Displacing the Satyr Urbanity, Exile, and Integration in Donne’s Satires

Donne’s satires portray an internal exile—a mutual, mutable estrangement— that appears to end with acceptance of and by the community. They trace the experiences of a persona who is, up to the point at which his disaffection and marginalization suddenly as well as finally seem to end, divided within himself no less than diversely from society at large. Appalling him (while radically excluding him because of his Catholic recusancy, although this is never made quite explicit), his society sharpens his awareness of its selfalienation, the distance between its notional aspirations and what it actually so often does, at the same time inviting his participation in its misdirected will to power. This is a temptation to which he now defiantly, now guiltily and akratically succumbs. Moreover, amid negotiations with his disorientating environment, Donne’s persona does not represent himself through or associate himself with the mythology of satyrs, which a number of his fellows in Elizabethan verse satire certainly do; rather, he mythologizes himself. He writes himself large against, then for, the community within which he restlessly lives. At the heart of the five poems that depict his engagements with the later Elizabethan world lies Satire 3. There Donne’s persona offers the most profound critique of his isolation within that world, and hence in what follows I shall focus on it at greatest length. Attempts to interpret Satire 3 and to position it within the Satires as a whole seem to downplay the evasions or inconsistencies that, in the third satire, are consequent upon the imperative, ‘Seek true religion’ (43), and that in the other Satires are likewise associated with the deployment of religious reference.1 As a result they often give the impression that Satire 3, while urging a quest at once laborious and labyrinthine, does so in terms that are themselves quite direct if not, of course, transparent. Moreover, they seem sometimes to miss, sometimes to underestimate, the extent to which religion is played with or even disingenuously evoked in the satires surrounding the third satire. 2 Here I want to argue, in the first instance, that an awareness of Satire 3’s lack of straightforwardness in advocating the quest for ‘true religion’—whether the lack be thought caution or perhaps duplicity—begins as soon as a reader tries to establish the kind of satire it is. The poem has been described as at once a satire and a deliberative oration, as a fusion of satire with meditation, as an exercise

88  Donne’s Satires in casuistry, as a Christian diatribe, and so on. I do not want to deny that meditative or casuistical practices, for example, may be discernible in Satire 3, or that the poem can be viewed as deliberative in its unfolding. Satire is after all a hybrid, a mingling of the apparently miscellaneous. I do want to suggest, however, that the poem may be better seen as akin to the suasoria than as a satire which is a deliberative oration: that its deliberative design connects in significant ways with Quintilian’s description of the suasoria, and therefore that the third satire should likely be regarded less as a statement about Donne himself than as an exercise setting out a case for, or entertaining, a complex possibility. When he wrote the poem, Donne may well have been enacting and not just entertaining the notion of what his speaker urges upon the reader; his poem may therefore be, in part, an elaborately stylized autobiographical moment.3 Yet to whatever degree it may be that, Satire 3 presents a case, a proposal to be evaluated. Its status as a proposal, the articulation and exploration of a possibility no less intriguing than laborious, would seem consonant with the poem’s avoidance of sectarian affiliation and thus with the often divergent or contradictory uses of religious reference in the other satires. Suggesting connections between the third satire and the suasoria, I want especially to argue that, in presenting his case, Donne’s speaker advocates a religious quest which is outlined in terms carefully unmindful of relevant, major, and contemporary theological conflicts.4 For instance, Donne’s speaker evades the Reformation debate over what principle (or principles) of authority should ultimately determine scriptural interpretation (that is to say, should it be personal response directed by Church tradition and dictate or a matter of tradition and dictate only?). Given that he exhorts the reader to personal discovery of religious truth—in relation to choosing among the then mainstream Christian creeds—his evasion can be seen as both reasonable and decorous. On the other hand, he counsels reliance chiefly upon tradition when the quest for ‘true religion’ is undertaken but does so in such a way as to make that reliance ambiguous. He evades the debate as to whether scripture or continuity of apostolic tradition identifies the true Church (as he occludes the debate over interpretation of scripture); moreover, he implies the actual indefeasibility of reliance upon religious tradition. Thus Donne’s speaker advocates, regarding the pursuit of religious truth, inquiry into the authority of Church and State, namely, into the authorities of churches and of states to define and to command religious belief, yet in doing so he at once affirms and denies the power of cultural memory, through which such an investigation would (he suggests) need chiefly to be conducted. It seems that in Donne’s third satire his speaker sets out a problematic case for the Church Militant’s atomistic re-formation. ***

Donne’s Satires  89 The evasions and inconsistencies of the third satire, as well as those linked throughout the other satires with the use of religious reference, necessarily involve issues of authority—as I have indicated above in relation to Satire 3 itself.5 Often they are, of course, linked to the ambiguous and (or) deliberately devious assumption of authority, not least by Donne’s speaker. Therefore, as a first step towards contextualizing and clarifying the elusiveness of Satire 3, I want to consider how Donne’s speaker engages with religion and with modes of authority in the accompanying poems. The Satires in fact begin by playing with religion and authority. I therefore want to focus for a while on the first satire, which introduces much that will be reworked in the second, fourth and fifth. At the start of Satire 1, Donne’s speaker assumes authority with an overt, calculated duplicity that reveals his taking on a magisterial role to be parodic and yet not mere parody. His assumption of authority is, in short, unstable. It is moreover an ambiguous performance marked by a toying with the sacred, a manoeuvre that will at times take the form of ruthless trifling with or allusion to religion in Satire 1 and in the subsequent poems framing Satire 3. The third satire, the poem both on seeking ‘true religion’ and numerically central to the Satires as a whole, thus has clear differences from as well as connections with the poems that environ it. Turning, then, to the start of Satire 1 means witnessing by way of introduction to the collected Satires a deliberately and amusingly precarious arrogation of power by Donne’s speaker: Away thou fondling motley humorist, Leave me, and in this standing wooden chest, Consorted with these few books, let me lie In prison, ‘and here be coffined when I die; Here are God’s conduits, grave divines; and here Nature’s secretary, the Philosopher; And jolly statesmen, which teach how to tie The sinews of a city’s mystic body; Here gathering chroniclers, and by them stand Giddy fantastic poets of each land. Shall I leave all this constant company, And follow headlong, wild uncertain thee? (1–12) In apparently rejecting the adversarius, Donne’s speaker claims to be rejecting folly, the changeable, the corporeal in favour of wisdom, constancy, the mind. His assumption of authority over the ‘wild uncertain’ intruder into his life is in no small part based on the books he lists as his ‘constant company’: divinity, philosophy (represented by Aristotle), politics, history—and poetry. The speaker’s wry but obvious delight—as a poet—in evoking the unpredictable, imaginative energy of the poetic

90  Donne’s Satires consciousness suggests, especially after his serio-ludic or mocking allusions to different ways of thought, that the writings of ‘[g]iddy fantastic poets of each land’ have the last yet also climactic place in his list.6 So if the books in his study are constantly his companions, those by poets are certainly in no further sense ‘constant’; on the contrary, in their caprice, they obliquely associate him with the ‘wild uncertain’ adversarius (whose ‘sins’ the speaker calls ‘giddinesses’ in lines 50–1). The speaker’s role as an austere scholar, a magisterial figure virtually buried alive with his library, has no sooner been assumed than it is revealed by him to be a calculated joke, at once stylishly deceitful and parodic without being only the latter. Donne’s speaker, which is to say, his self-projection to his Inns of Court and university readership, is at pains to identify himself as scholarly; but throughout Satire 1, he does not locate his authority in his scholarship. Rather, and with an ostentatiously ingenious inconsistency, he locates it in his wit. Now, the first of the books that he lists are works of divinity and it is clear that through them he initially lays claim to authority as a scholar. But again, even though he lists the writings of poets last it is as a poet he speaks and a poet’s perspective on the books of divinity that he offers: ‘God’s conduits, grave divines’. The catachrestic image of the divines offers, none too indirectly, an implicit metonym of his ‘fantastic’ mind. Hence the speaker appeals to his scholarship for authority yet does so by asserting the authority of his wit. He foregrounds his scholarly concern with the divines but presents himself as at one with the ‘[g] iddy fantastic poets’. Beginning with the ‘grave divines’ and ending with the poets, joining them momentarily through his wit then moving immediately beyond ‘God’s conduits’, he displays a fusion of gravitas with levitas, after which a stylish levity becomes almost all in all. It is certainly through his wit that Donne’s speaker exercises authority over the adversarius in the remainder of the poem, once even providing a reaction-shot in order to demonstrate the effect of his epigrammatic cleverness, which is to say, his sdegno: Now leaps he upright, jogs me, and cries, Do ‘you see Yonder well-favoured youth? Which? O, ‘tis he That dances so divinely; O, said I, Stand still, must you dance here for company? He drooped, we went . . . . (83–7) In opposition to his companion’s love of fashion, he sets his personal and cerebral stylishness, his maniera. Crucial to the speaker’s personal style and hence his assumption of authority over the intruder into his study is his curious play with the sacred, which is by turns obtrusive and indirect, blasphemous and (or) manipulative. If the adversarius is a would-be

Donne’s Satires  91 penetrator of the fashionable world, as the speaker seems to imply by similarly describing the former’s sexual desire and his desire to court the fashionable (37–41 and 73–6, with their respective uses of ‘itchy’ and of ‘itch’), then Donne’s speaker is self-evidently his notional antithesis. The man of style, supposedly a young master of contemptus mundi who is detached alike from City and Court, defines himself against the man eagerly gazing at the fashionable world and desperate to get inside it.7 As the beginning of the Satire has nonetheless indicated, the two are linked (lines 83–7 reveal that the speaker is to a degree dependent upon the adversarius since he facilitates the speaker’s self-display). Acknowledging this means recognizing how, in his first satire, Donne chooses to rewrite Horace’s Satire 1.9.8 It also means recognizing how Donne’s speaker uses religious reference in the rest of the poem: his cunning evasions and inconsistencies, his flamboyant blasphemy. A striking religious reference occurs briefly, just after the reaction-shot, when Donne’s speaker describes his companion’s crossing the street: [O]ne (which did excel Th’Indians in drinking his tobacco well) Met us; they talked; I whispered, Let us go, ‘T may be you smell him not, truly I do. He hears not me, but, on the other side A many-coloured peacock having spied, Leaves him and me; I for my lost sheep stay; He follows, overtakes, goes on the way . . . . (87–94) The reaction-shot is followed by a non-reaction that the speaker makes just as telling; and then follows his allusion to scripture, ‘I for my lost sheep stay’ (93). That evocation of the Good Shepherd offers a casually ruthless parody of the divine agape, underlining the irony of the speaker’s remark delivered just before he leaves his study—his site of faux-exile— for the street: Man’s first blest state was naked, when by sin He lost that, yet he was clothed but in beast’s skin, And in this coarse attire, which I now wear, With God, and with the Muses I confer.

(45–8)9

The claim to an all but prelapsarian simplicity by someone who, from the poem’s start, parades the opposite emphasizes that in this poem the speaker’s authority over the adversarius has much more to do with the Muses than with God. In this poem, Donne’s speaker puts God in the Muses’ service, that is, in his own.

92  Donne’s Satires Revealing though the speaker’s parody of the divine agape (93–4) may be, a further religious reference seems to be even more so. In fact, I want to suggest that while much of what has been discussed thus far in ­Satire 1 will be reworked in Satires 2, 4, and 5, it is this further religious reference, deliberately facile yet also evocative, which has special relevance to the fourth satire—and especially regarding issues of authority. An obvious, important and pertinent question is, why in Satire 1 does the speaker go from his study into the street? Horatian precedent does not provide an answer since, in 1.9, Horace’s speaker is already in the street when he encounters the bore; one needs to consider how Donne’s speaker explains his change of mind, for he does do that. Ostensibly, the speaker explains his departure for the street in terms of the intruder’s importunity and repentance. Of that repentance, he says, But since thou like a contrite penitent, Charitably warned of thy sins, dost repent These vanities, and giddinesses, lo I shut my chamber door, and come; let’s go. (49–52) So the change of heart by the adversarius is supposed to explain the speaker’s change of mind. Yet the change of heart, described with such elaborate mock-religiosity, is of course a joke; further, ‘giddinesses’ overtly links the ‘wild uncertain’ adversarius with ‘[g]iddy fantastic ­poets’ and hence with the speaker, as has been suggested above. Right from the start of the satire, then, as Donne has made plain, speaker and bore are connected (and not, I think, because the second is simply the alter ego of the first), which has told the reader, all along, that the speaker was always going to go with the intruder into the street.10 The religious reference therefore comically effects an inevitable change of scene; on the other hand, in its self-conscious facileness it does something more. What that is can be seen when Donne’s speaker asks, ‘But how shall I be pardoned my offence / That thus have sinned against my conscience?’ (65–6). Now like the speaker’s allusion to the adversarius as repentant, his allusion to himself as a sinner (because he has chosen to enter the street) is a facile joke. But each allusion indicates that the speaker cannot or will not offer a convincing reason for his choice. One implicit reason is, as I have been suggesting, that he and the bore are obliquely connected. That connection tacitly subverts the speaker’s claim to authority over the bore. Yes, the speaker is more ingenious than, more truly stylish than, but is not in fact ultimately different from the adversarius. The superiority of one over the other seems ambiguous: both true and illusory. Yet beyond their connectedness (which is to say, underlying it), and through the speaker’s joking admission of sin, in 65–6, can be glimpsed another reason, namely, the motiveless human impulse to waywardness, to transgression.

Donne’s Satires  93 In the first satire that impulse is only hinted at and really is little other than a joke since it leads to the speaker’s triumphant self-display. However, its greater significance comes into focus when in the fourth satire the speaker reflects on his going to the Court. He says, My mind neither with pride’s itch nor yet hath been Poisoned with love to see or to be seen; I had no suit there, nor new suit to show, Yet went to Court. (5–8) The speaker has no convincing reason for what he has done. He had none, in the first satire, for entering the street.11 Given that similarity and given, too, the insistence of religious reference throughout Satires I and IV, it seems reasonable to read those moments of unexplained or inexplicable aberration—contrasts in seriousness though they evidently are—as gesturing towards an archetypal predicament of the Christian consciousness, akrasia. Here, Donne’s speaker seeks again to exert authority over an adversarius cast in the role of bore, one who is however also a courtier. The speaker seeks domination of this more powerful figure through a wit based on pretended incomprehension of what the courtier says—but concedes that he truly cannot understand his own akratic self-division.12 The religious allusion effecting a transition into the street, and the religious resonance of the admission prefacing entry into the Court, playfully yet radically undermine the speaker’s unruly will to power.13 If play with or evocation of the sacred there sets radical subversion of against aspiration to authority, in the second as well as in the fourth satires it more usually implies the attempt to arrogate authority; doing so, it reworks much that can be seen throughout Satire 1. I shall illustrate this only briefly, since my aim is of course not to focus on those poems for their own sakes but rather to suggest how Satires 1, 2, 4, and 5, through their uses of the religious, provide a local context for Satire 3. And although I am chiefly concerned with the speaker in Satires 2 and 4, it is nevertheless with the adversarii and not the speaker that I want to begin. Like the initial satire, the second and fourth satires severally portray the speaker engaging with a bore. The fashion bore of Satire 1 is succeeded by the more formidable legal bore, Coscus, of Satire 2. He is followed by the likewise formidable courtier-bore of the fourth satire (I leave aside what might be called the religious bores of Satire 3, who are observed rather than encountered and who are, perhaps, in effect a single and religious bore-figure aptly refracted). To varying degrees, the speaker’s play with or devious evocation of the sacred seems associated with his unstable attempts to claim authority over and beyond

94  Donne’s Satires them. Coscus, bad poet and worse lawyer, lives in and through a controlled disordering of language. Whereas the bore of Satire 1 wants to penetrate the fashionable world, simple in his desperation to possess it, Coscus displaces the language of law in his attempts to possess bodies of women, bodies of land. The speaker portrays him first as a mere caricature: a comically grotesque rewriter of Petrarch into legalese, who thereby displaces both the Petrarchan language of desire and the language of law. Then, the speaker depicts him as grotesquely insatiable in his desire to possess Britain piecemeal by means of diversely corrupt legal texts. Attempting to exercise authority over a bore ultimately more formidable in his ambitions and sinister in his methods than the bore of Satire 1, Donne’s speaker begins with a flippant allusion to the divine. ‘Sir’ he says, ‘though (I thank God for it) I do hate / Perfectly all this town […]’. His subsequent religious references seem not so much disingenuous as ambiguous. Some appear sympathetically Catholic whereas others do not (while yet others appear directed against English clerics and Protestantism, or just exploit the sacred). Many suggest his attempt to assert moral authority over Coscus. Thus, the state of men obsessed with writing verse is said to be ‘poor, disarmed, like papists, not worth hate’ (10). But the speaker says of Coscus’ perversions of the law that ‘Bastardy’ abounds not in kings’ titles, nor / Simony’ and sodomy in churchmen’s lives, / As these things do in him; by these he thrives’ (74–6). Then again, when Coscus has made it to the bar he is described as being ‘jollier of this state / Than are new beneficed ministers’ (44–5). And thereafter comes the comparison between Coscus and Luther as writers, unflattering to each (93–6). The point to be emphasized here is however that, in Satire 2 as in its predecessor, Donne’s speaker subordinates the sacred to his will to power. It becomes a component of his attempt at self-authorization, which is, in the main (and as in Satire 1), claimed through his wit. Donne’s speaker implicitly puts himself forward as at once true poet and judge. He sits in both aesthetic and moral judgement on Coscus who enables him, like the bore in the preceding poem, to display himself to advantage. The speaker sets his wit’s copia against the grotesque copia he attributes to his adversarius; so likewise he wittily plays his notional respect for the social and not the monetary value of law, for valuable social precedent, against ­Coscus’ anti-social greed.14 That bravura process of counterbalancing ends, and the poem concludes, with Donne’s speaker celebrating the mean in terms glancingly anti-Catholic and then emphatically anti-Protestant. His doing so is important, I think, chiefly for two reasons. First, the multiplicity of religious perspectives anticipates the evasive fluidity of religious perspective in Satire 3, although that anticipation need not be seen as purposeful. More important, the expression of a formally unaligned moral stance—one technically unaligned as regards religion—seems an attempt by the speaker to exhibit an independent moral authority, even

Donne’s Satires  95 though in Satire 1 he has quite elaborately undermined his claim to possess moral authority, not least by his indicated connection with and his easy concession to the bore.15 In Satire 4 he undermines it again, as we have seen, by drawing attention to his associated, self-contradictory visiting of the Court. In fact, immediately after doing that he further lessens his claim to moral authority, by means of the religious reference through which he denies any responsibility for having made the visit: . . . [B]ut as Glaze, which did go To mass in jest, catched, was fain to disburse The hundred marks, which is the statute’s curse, Before he ‘scaped, so ‘it pleased my destiny (Guilty’ of my sin of going), to think me As prone to’ all ill, and of good as forget ful, as proud, as lustful, and as much in debt, As vain, as witless, and as false as they Which dwell at court, for once going that way. Therefore I suffered this. (8–17) Having expressed a Catholic resentment against ‘the statute’s curse’ Donne’s speaker proceeds to parody the doctrine of predestination, a core tenet of English Protestantism.16 His ‘destiny’, he says, made him go to Court and nevertheless held him guilty for going. Yet in holding him guilty, he adds in allusion to lines 3–4, it incongruously inflicted upon him what was de facto a Purgatorial (and in that sense Catholic) punishment, namely, experience of the Court itself and in particular an encounter with a boring and dangerous courtier. Problematically playing the Catholic against the Protestant, Donne’s speaker portrays himself as victim not agent: almost, as it were, doubly a victim of a Protestant universe—first in terms of quasi-predestination and next at the hands of the bore. The fourth satire subsequently shows the speaker denying his claim to moral authority still further, yet denying it implicitly having loudly asserted it. Both the denial and the assertion are expressed through a curious interplay of religious references. After paying off the courtier, whom he could not dominate through his wit, Donne’s speaker proceeds to compare himself to Dante: At home in wholesome solitariness My precious soul began the wretchedness Of suitors at court to mourn, and a trance Like his who dreamed he saw hell did advance Itself on me. Such men as he saw there,

96  Donne’s Satires I saw at court, and worse, and more. Low fear Becomes the guilty, not the’ accuser; then Shall I, none’s slave, of high-born or raised men Fear frowns? And my mistress Truth, betray thee, To th’ huffing braggart, puffed nobility? No, no. (155–65) The speaker’s heroic self-presentation as religious visionary, man of no mean descent, and militant servant of Truth has a broad affinity with the heroic stances of the speakers in Hall’s and even in Marston’s verse satires, which is to say, with their performances of Juvenalian indignatio. Moreover, the irony of that self-presentation seems hard to interpret as other than deliberate since it forms part of an ironic sequence. Recounting his visit to the Court, Donne’s speaker initially describes himself as a predestined sinner who transgressed without knowing why and underwent Purgatorial suffering. Subsequently, he relates that, upon his coming home from Court, he had a Dantesque vision of the Court’s infernal horrors— against which he now sets himself in heroic defiance. Then he abruptly announces that he returned to the Court, in an unexplained repetition of his original and to him inexplicable sin: Tis ten o’clock and past; all whom the mews, Balloon, tennis, diet, or the stews, Had all the morning held, now the second Time made ready that day in flocks are found In the presence, and I (God pardon me) . . . . (175–9) Dante’s persona left Hell and Purgatory behind him, ascending to Paradise. Donne’s speaker descended, as he would have it, to Court again.17 Nevertheless, the speaker’s attempt to assert authority continues to the poem’s end, for just as he tried to assert power through his wit after his first fall into the Court, so he does after his second. The first time he failed, being outmanoeuvred by the courtier-bore. Following the second, he aspires to being accorded ‘canonical’ authority as a true (and ingeniously condemnatory) recorder of the Court’s hypocrisy. However his closing allusion to Maccabees, which English Protestantism held to be apocryphal books of scripture—and this particularly after his problematic identification with Dante—indicates that his satire on the Court is in one basic respect less than authoritative, for he himself lacks public auctoritas. To be more specific, the mock-humility of the speaker’s allusion to Maccabees emphasizes his presenting himself as an outsider but understander (his implicit role in Satire 1): a man lacking authority but the authority of whose writing, of whose wit, should be acknowledged.

Donne’s Satires  97 Though I, yet With Maccabees’ modesty, the known merit Of my work lessen, yet some wise man shall, I hope, esteem my writs canonical.

(241–4)18

Presumably that ‘wise man’ is someone not unlike Sir Thomas Egerton, the addressee of Satire 5. It is in his service that Donne’s self-projection—his official persona, one might now say—unambiguously identifies himself (and thus of course Donne the secretary) as having gained authority, as having had authority conferred on him. Far more secular than its predecessors, with little by way of religious reference, the fifth satire is dominated by a narrative of political authority descending hierarchically from the Queen, through Egerton, to the speaker/Donne: Greatest and fairest Empress, know you this? Alas, no more than Thames’ calm head doth know Whose meads her arms drown, or whose corn o’erflow; You, Sir, whose righteousness she loves, whom I By having leave to serve, am most richly For service paid, authorized, now begin To know and weed out this enormous sin. (28–34) The ‘sin’ in question seems to have concerned ‘the fees charged by the Clerk of the Star Chamber’.19 However, the important point here is that the speaker/Donne presents himself as gaining authority twofold: directly from the courtier who, evidently transcending the courtiers of Satire 4, ‘now begin[s]’ by his imperial mistress’ command to cleanse the operations of the law from what Coscus emblematizes; ultimately from the ‘Empress’, who necessarily cannot know the sometimes damaging effects of her distantly transmitted power. 20 Elizabeth is made part of the economy of nature—a naturalizing of her power that, relieving her of responsibility for injustices committed far from her, thereby shrewdly introduces the account of her ordering Egerton to correct injustices close to her person. Donne’s speaker, and Egerton’s secretary, receives authority at the last from the Head of both State and Church. The poem’s wit is subordinate to her and authorized by her. 21 The speaker’s self-portrayal as an exile ends. If the speaker of the Satires—variously asserting and (or) subverting his authority either in or between individual poems—ends triumphantly albeit tamely with authority conferred upon him, what does that process tell us of Satire 3? First, it tells us that authority itself is an important issue not only in Satire 3 but also throughout the Satires as a

98  Donne’s Satires collection. Yet it tells us rather more. We are shown for example that, although the speaker of Satire 3 urges his readers to authorize themselves in their search for true religion, and to reject merely institutional authority (about which, after all, he offers many negative views throughout the Satires as a whole), he himself ends with grateful acceptance of it. We are shown further things, too. I have been suggesting that the speaker of the Satires, of the satires framing Satire 3, uses the sacred primarily to arrogate power: to claim or to attempt the exercise of authority but also to condemn the authority of others. To have said as much is to suggest that he uses it ambiguously in the exercise of his wit, subordinating it to display of the acuity, of the maniera through which he seeks a dominance otherwise unavailable to him. That being allowed, then—especially in the context of the environing poems—the copia focused on ‘our mistress fair religion’ at the start of Satire 3, the poem’s acerbic caricaturing of sectarians and some non-sectarians, its long lines of admonition dominated by the hill of truth icon, all seem to imply an arrogation of power through wit. The sacred is both the subject of wit and its means, used stylishly by a speaker who seems to urge acceptance of almost no authority beyond that of one’s own inquiring mind. Perhaps, above all, the speaker’s manoeuvres in Satire 3 characterize him as a wary, ludic advocate of the search for truth. *** Having considered, in relation to the use of religious reference and issues of authority, how the poems surrounding Satire 3 contextualize and therefore clarify its advocacy of the quest for true religion, I want now to focus on this satire’s mode and its relation to some theological debates and conflicts of the Reformation. In doing so, I shall necessarily return to the poem’s connections with its companion pieces; initially, however, I want to revisit my proposal that the third satire has points of contact with the suasoria. As Thomas O. Sloan was the first to demonstrate, ­Satire 3 is deliberatively patterned; and it seems to me that whatever affiliation might be posited between the poem and any genre or mode beyond that of satire, primarily the poem has a deliberative form and momentum. 22 I would propose, however, that viewing the poem’s deliberative design in relation to the suasoria significantly influences perception of the argument unfolded. By way of beginning, I want to consider some correspondences (one, at least, ironic) between Satire 3 and the suasoria as described by Quintilian. In his The Orator’s Education, Quintilian writes of the suasoria as a deliberative exercise necessarily congruent with and differing from the deliberative oration as practised in political engagement. His remarks on ‘Definite Questions’ in deliberative oratory are relevant to an important moment in Satire 3. He observes,

Donne’s Satires  99 Definite Questions arise from a combination of facts, persons, times, and so on. [… ] In these, the entire Question seems to be based on the facts and the persons. An Indefinite Question is always wider, for the Definite Question derives from it. Let me illustrate this by an example. ‘Should one take a wife?’ is indefinite: ‘Should Cato take a wife?’ is definite, and so can form a suasoria. 23 The moment in Satire 3 to which those words have relevance is this: ‘Seek true religion. O where?’ (43). By implication, the speaker seems to be saying that if ‘our mistress fair religion’ (5) is ‘worthy of all our soul’s devotion’ (6), she must of course be ‘true religion’—and, he asks, exactly ‘where’ is she? His advice appears nevertheless to be difficult in more than one sense. For example, is the speaker talking solely to the addressee and (or) implied reader or to himself as well? Is he soliloquizing: reflectively voicing a maxim which, as he proceeds to indicate, tells what to do but not how? Thus, that moment in the poem—the calculated juxtaposition of imperative and question—is at once crucial and ambiguous. It is also, I would suggest, when the speaker asks a question akin to a Definite Question. If the speaker were asking ‘Where is true religion to be sought [in post-reformation Europe]?’, then in effect he would be asking what Quintilian calls an Indefinite Question of knowledge (3.5.5–6). But he appears, in fact, to be inquiring ‘Where will you [the addressee and (or) implied reader in then-contemporary, Elizabethan London—and he himself] look for true religion?’ The question is specifically addressed and pertains to the specific environment in which it is asked. It was a question of special interest to Donne himself (as we know) and would have been so to his recusant contemporaries; but, it would also have been of at least theoretical interest to Donne’s friends and acquaintances who were adherents to the Established Church. 24 In any event, the correspondence between the speaker’s question and Quintilian’s Definite Question influences how one sees what the speaker immediately proposes by way of an answer. The proposed answer at first leads, by mockery then advocacy, outside the religious allegiances identified by the speaker and hence outside the established, national Church (Phrygius and Gracchus of course exemplify non-allegiance): it leads to an unorthodox independence of thought, which could potentially result in a commitment at odds with adherence to membership of that Church. The answer therefore sets out a problematic course of action—and I would suggest that the question ‘O where?’ enables the unfolding of the answer to be seen either as a deliberative exercise (part of what is then perceived to be a suasoria) or as actual counsel (part of a deliberative oration). The form of the question, within the poem’s deliberative design, allows the speaker to give an answer which is, in form, equivocal. As I shall presently argue, the answer seems equivocal in substance no less than in form, for all its insistence.

100  Donne’s Satires Before I do that, however, I should like briefly to identify a concern crucial to both Satire 3 and the suasoria. According to Quintilian, the effectiveness of the suasoria depends especially on one thing: [T]he most important aspect of giving advice is the speaker’s own authority. Anyone who wants everybody to trust his judgement on what is expedient and honourable must be, and be thought to be, both very wise and very good. In the courts, it is commonly thought proper to indulge one’s prejudices to some extent; but advice, as no one can deny, reflects the speaker’s moral principles. (3.8.12–3)25 Throughout the satires, as I have sought to demonstrate in relation to the poems accompanying Satire 3 and as I shall proceed to argue in connection with the latter poem itself, authority is often implied to be unstably and (or) speciously assumed both by Donne’s speaker and by others. As I shall now argue, his speaker in the third satire, answering the equivalent to a Definite Question (‘O where?’) that he himself has posed, magisterially offers ‘advice’ but seems evasive and inconsistent in doing so, not least when he considers the authority of religious tradition. Hence, his arrogated authority cannot there be trusted any more than it can be elsewhere in Satires 1–4. Moreover, he holds suspect all institutional authority. The issue of what authority may reasonably be trusted lies at the heart of Satire 3, which lies (as it seems) at the heart of the Satires. *** The third satire opens with Donne’s speaker disingenuously assuming authority and then proceeding to assert it. He begins, Kind pity chokes my spleen; brave scorn forbids Those tears to issue which swell my eyelids, I must not laugh, nor weep sins, and be wise; Can railing then cure these worn maladies? (1–4) The speaker lays claim to moral authority by implicitly linking castigation of sin (upon which he is of course about to embark) with adherence to the mean (3–4). 26 In fact, it could be said that he makes a double claim to moral authority, for he associates that of observing the mean with that of acting as satirist-physician to a sick society. Connecting the two is evidently problematic but indirectly assuming the role of satirist-physician seems in particular to be so. The answer to the question, ‘Can railing then cure these worn maladies?’ (4), is very obviously

Donne’s Satires  101 a negative—as Donne’s speaker cannot fail to know although he feigns otherwise. He tacitly yet distinctly undermines his role as satirist even before he has taken it upon himself; and thereupon he performs it (5–42). Yet the speaker’s disingenuous arrogation and subsequent assertion of authority seem designed clearly enough as a gesture against helplessness, not to say hopelessness. If Satire 1 presents a speaker whose magisterial role is a stylish joke in a poem where his personal maniera matters more than anything else, here, in Satire 3, the speaker’s performance of authority delivers a stylish condemnation of what could never be ‘cure[d]’ by mere satire. That gesture, with its energetic reconfigurations of the commonplace (denunciation of commitment to the world, the flesh, and the devil rather than to ‘fair religion’), can be seen as an exercise in exuscitatio—as, in effect, an assertion of power through wit when power cannot be otherwise exerted—but it is also the prelude to a more intricate dealing with authority. 27 Following the imperative and question of line 43, ‘Seek true religion. O where?’, the speaker ambiguously and (or) inconsistently engages with the authority of religious tradition (and, as I have suggested earlier, he evades then-contemporary debate over what principle or principles of authority should determine interpretation of scripture). But first, via the caricatures of sectarians and of some non-sectarians, he engages primarily albeit not solely with institutional authority. The initial caricatures, those of Mirreus and of Crants, clearly figure the extremes of Catholicism and of Genevan Calvinism. Then follows the image of Graius, likewise figuring the Church of England, which Donne’s speaker declines to identify as medially between Rome and Geneva. 28 Beginning to answer his own question and surveying the main ways through which his contemporaries think ‘true religion’ may be sought, the speaker links the choices of religion by Mirreus, Crants, and Graius (and the ecclesiology each thereupon accepts) with individual, even idiosyncratic, sexual preference, a connection that his troping of religion as ‘our mistress fair religion’ in line 5, implicitly continued in line 43, has neatly made possible. For example, Crants to such brave loves will not be enthralled, But loves her only, who’ at Geneva ‘is called Religion, plain, simple, sullen, young, Contemptuous, yet unhandsome; as among Lecherous humours, there is one that judges No wenches wholesome, but coarse country drudges. (49–54) The speaker portrays Crants’ lack of response to the sensuous allure of Catholicism and his commitment to the most austere embodiment of Calvinism as, respectively, a disdain of glamour and an idiosyncratic

102  Donne’s Satires preference for the perceived eroticism of charmlessness. But the speaker’s point is evidently that Crants, in making his choice of religion, accepts an ecclesiology susceptible of rational description while being nonetheless deeply and obviously unreasonable, a point also made in relation to Mirreus and to Graius. So the speaker suggests when, in effect, he implies the ecclesiology of Catholicism to be fetishistic (47) and that of the English Church to be a spiel for pimps (56). Those criticisms are themselves stylish rather than reasonable, wittily asserted rather than argued. Argument is not however their concern. They vividly stage the speaker’s independence, his authority, in repudiating the ecclesiological authorities of the chief competitors for English religious allegiance. By contrast, the ensuing caricatures of Phrygius and of Gracchus are simple because they represent marginal modes of belief: modes of non-allegiance. The caricature of Gracchus seems most interesting in its use as a transition to the poem’s next and more serious phase of dealing with authority. On the other hand, ­M irreus, Crants, and Graius can be seen as, among other things, having already formed an introduction to it. One of the most important tactics through which Donne’s speaker rejects the institutional, that is to say, the ecclesiological authorities of the Roman, Genevan, and English Churches seems to be by rejecting the concept and practice of tradition informing (or not informing) each. He identifies Catholicism, predictably enough, with the preservation of Christian tradition; but what he sees at Rome is the preservation of outworn religious trappings, the ‘rags’ of ‘true religion’ (severally, 47 and 43). To Crants, those ‘rags’ ­constitute ‘brave[ry]’ (49, ‘brave[ry]’ indicating superfluously ‘showy apparel’) and thus he espouses a Genevan ecclesiology because seeking to achieve renovatio: the renewal of pure tradition. The speaker implies, however, that ­Genevan ­renovatio produces very mixed results, namely a religion that, while ‘plain’ and ‘young’ and ‘simple’, is at the same time ‘sullen’, ‘[c]­ontemptuous’, and ‘unhandsome’ (51–2). The first three terms, although suggestive of r­ enovatio, are none the less potentially negative; the last three are overtly pejorative. More pejorative still is the speaker’s view on how tradition relates to the ecclesiology of the English Church. It could almost be said that he dissociates the two, for he links the ecclesiology of the Church of England with a body of law—recent law—rather than with tradition. Presumably, the preachers who are ‘vile ambitious bawds’ battening onto Graius (56) should be imagined as having discussed religious tradition with him; be that as it may, Donne’s speaker emphasizes not the link between tradition and ecclesiology in the Church of England but the force of ‘laws’ / Still new like fashions’ (56–7). In that context, the ‘bid[ding]’ of priests is one thing, that of the laws another. Donne’s speaker thus connects Catholicism with the attempt to conserve religious tradition, Genevan Calvinism with the attempt to renovate it, and the English

Donne’s Satires  103 Church rather with legal innovation. 29 Further, his allusions to novelty and fashion obliquely connect the Church of England with his disdain for merely superficial fashion as expressed in Satire 1 and his condemnation in Satire 2 of the law’s misuse. The caricature of Graius disconcertingly evokes the third satire’s predecessors. Each of the caricatures drawn by way of the speaker’s starting to answer his own question—’O where?’—signifies a choice of religion made for a wrong reason. (Selection of no single religion, as by Phrygius, or of all, as by Gracchus, is nevertheless a choice.) What has been chosen, especially in the cases of Mirreus, Crants, and Graius, is not flatteringly portrayed. The speaker does not suggest that all choosing of religion will be made unwisely. Nor does he suggest that all the mainstream objects of choice are just wrong. But he implies the necessity of making a reasoned selection and of knowing that any institutional religion selected will be problematic, since institutional religious authority is, as individual religious choices are (although of course to different degrees, and so he proceeds to demonstrate), less than perfect. Only a Mirreus, a Crants, or a Graius will think what he has chosen to be unflawed. This part of the poem, then, at once identifying where ‘true religion’ cannot simply be found and implicitly confuting the idea that it can be simply found, images a fractured Church Militant and stages the speaker’s wittily independent, outsider’s view of the division. Having considered the rupture of the Church Militant into rival centres of authority, into warring interpretative communities, Donne’s speaker thereupon sets out a case for its atomistic re-formation. That turn from mockery to advocacy in answering his question is a move from considering religious tradition’s role in the ecclesiologies of the mainstream churches to proposing individual encounters with it. There, as I have suggested earlier, Donne’s speaker reveals his arrogation of authority to be more unreliable than it is anywhere else in Satire 3—and his case for the re-formation of the Church Militant to be both equivocal and inconsistent. The issue of authority is raised immediately after the suite of caricatures, which is to say, straight after the portrayal of Gracchus who ‘loves all [religions] as one’ (l.65): [B]ut unmoved thou Of force must one, and forced but one allow; And the right; ask thy father which is she, Let him ask his; though truth and falsehood be Near twins, yet truth a little elder is; Be busy to seek her; believe me this, He’s not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best. (69–75) As has been often remarked, the admonition ‘ask thy father’ (71) alludes to Deuteronomy 32:7 which runs, ‘Remember the dayes of olde: consider

104  Donne’s Satires the yeres of so manie generacions: aske thy father, and he wil shewe thee: thine Elders, and they wil tel thee’. 30 Donne’s speaker does not replicate the assertive assuredness of the scriptural passage. The verse from Deuteronomy predicates the smooth, certain descent of truth through tradition. Donne’s speaker, alluding to that verse, affirms the necessity of tradition but in effect urges religious tradition’s disruptive purification through a return ad fontes. In so doing, he displaces its authority, implicitly and simultaneously (and not undevoutly) undermining that of the scriptural verse he invokes. Now, the speaker indicates, religious tradition is not an easy and intact inheritance. To find out what that tradition should be, and thus to which church one should adhere despite its imperfections, means initiating a long series of questionings: questionings an individual inquirer cannot simply perform. The processes of tradition have to be investigated, requiring disjunction (‘Let him ask his …’) and the expectation of discovery gained in part or deferred. The speaker’s displacement of religious tradition’s authority is of course more complicated than that. For a start, his trope of regression implies the actual impossibility of returning ad fontes. In proposing, ‘ask thy father which is she, / Let him ask his …’, Donne’s speaker images the obviously unfulfillable. He creates an image implying bafflement, one not altogether denying truth’s discovery but suggesting an investigative sequence that can only be imaged. Then, too, there is the problem of beginnings and endings. Tradition being inverted, the questioner becomes an originator searching for the origin. Fulfilment of the quest, that being possible, clarifies the descent of tradition—reveals its inheritance—for the questioner and for others. Yet, what will the originator find in this case? The answer is, according to Donne’s speaker, bits of religious truth as he pursues his quest; and what lies waiting to be found is ‘true religion’ itself, as we know, which the speaker implies must be found but tropes as seemingly impossible to find. In this case, however, the questioning of tradition will inevitably lead through the Fathers to engagement with apostolic tradition and ultimately to Christ: to the Logos himself, for at the last he himself is the origin of ‘true religion’. The speaker of Satire 3 thus both evokes and evades major theological conflicts of his time, for how will the questioner interrelate patristic texts, apostolic tradition, and the words of the Word? Will scripture declare itself (Luther thought it mostly did, enablement by the Holy Spirit being taken into account) or will commentary from the Church make it accessible (which, in the main, was Erasmus’ view)?31 That dilemma, as I have said above, can reasonably be occluded by Donne’s speaker but another connected with it cannot, namely, whether scripture per se or continuity of apostolic tradition identifies the true Church (Luther and Calvin supporting the former view, for example, and More the latter).32 The speaker of Satire 3 affirms the absolute importance of tradition in the quest for true religion, displaces its authority, does not suggest

Donne’s Satires  105 how tradition relates to scripture—though he necessarily indicates that it derives from scripture—and implies the impracticability of restoring tradition although its reconstruction is imperative. 33 The speaker’s counsels and maxims texturing this penultimate section of the poem (69–89), in which lies embedded the hill of Truth icon (79– 82), therefore express a personal authority at once asserted yet evasive and inconsistent. His injunction, ‘believe me this’ (74), draws attention to a credibility less commanding than the display of gnomic wit manifesting it. Nevertheless, having displaced tradition’s authority and his own, Donne’s speaker then concludes Satire 3 by advocating cautious independence (in seeking true religion) from political as well as from ecclesiastical authority: Keep the’ truth which thou hast found; men do not stand In so ill case, that God hath with His hand Signed kings’ blank-charters to kill whom they hate, Nor are they vicars, but hangmen to fate. Fool and wretch, wilt thou let thy soul be tied To man’s laws, by which she shall not be tried At the last day? Will it then boot thee To say a Philip, or a Gregory, A Harry or a Martin taught thee this? (89–97) In those lines, that is to say, the main elements of the speaker’s proposal, of the case that he so elaborately sets out, seem to be brought together. What he appears to be proposing at the conclusion to Satire 3 can be briefly described as follows. Given that no institutional church’s dealing with religious tradition can be taken at face value, for each of those dealings is flawed, then the individual inquirer must seek to reconstruct it for himself, recognizing that the attempt signifies a desire for what must by implication be finally unachievable. Inquiry, that is to say, will involve refusal of unguarded obedience to merely human authority: in effect, to traditions, or impositions, deriving not from the Word himself but from those who would, in later times, talk both on his behalf and on their own. ‘That thou mayest rightly’ obey power, her bounds know’, observes Donne’s speaker (100), adding that undue submission to power ‘is idolatry’ (102). He does not indicate what the ‘bounds’ proper to political and ecclesiastical powers in their different guises may be, or how they may be discerned, or how far the identification of them might be left to individual judgement (namely, the limits of religious libertinism). His implication seems to be that the post-Reformation Church Militant must be atomistically and circumspectly re-formed (the Church Militant in England, in the London of the mid-1590s as broadly characterised by Donne’s speaker). To his Inns of Court and (or) Universities readership

106  Donne’s Satires Donne posits the need for a community that may best be described as an aggregation of cautiously undogmatic inquirers. How one interprets that variously difficult proposal, where authority of nearly all kinds seems destabilized, depends in part of course on how one interprets the deliberative rhetoric of the third satire. 34 *** I have argued above that, in the satires framing Satire 3, Donne’s speaker primarily uses the sacred to arrogate power and, in doing so, often uses it ambiguously in the exercise of his wit: to display the maniera through which he seeks a dominance otherwise unavailable to him. There, moreover, now asserting and now subverting his authority he ends with authority conferred upon him and gladly, even triumphantly, accepted. Yet, in the poem at the heart of the Satires, Donne’s speaker makes the sacred both the subject of wit and its means, proposing (through an equivocally deliberative rhetoric) the re-examination of almost all then-contemporary authority connected with the sacred. From that scrutiny, which would involve among other things the individual reconstruction of religious tradition, he suggests will follow informed choice of ‘true religion’: in effect, a microcosmic re-formation of the Church Militant. To read Satire 3 in relation to how its companion pieces use the sacred is, then, to appreciate that the equivocations and inconsistencies of Donne’s speaker throughout the Satires reflect Donne’s tendency, no matter what the genre, to test boundaries or to transgress them. It is also to acknowledge his tendency sometimes to avoid boundaries altogether.35 It is, further, to observe Donne’s fascination with re-modelling the actual or modelling the possible in terms of figura, that is, in terms of multum in parvo—his version of the topos often being non multum sed omnia in parvo.36 Finally, it is to see Donne’s speaker, throughout the Satires (and in the context of religion), perhaps as a Janus rather than a Proteus, for amidst his outsider’s elusiveness he looks back not always without nostalgia and forwards not invariably without misgivings.37

Notes 1 I am not impugning scholarship on the third satire, merely pointing out what I take to be one of its recurrent problems. Accounts of Satire 3 include Sister M. Geraldine, ‘John Donne and the Mindes Indeavours’, Studies in English Literature, 5 (1965), 115–31; Thomas O. Sloan, ‘The Persona as Rhetor: An Interpretation of Donne’s Satyre III’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 51 (1965), 14–27; Thomas V. Moore, ‘Donne’s Use of Uncertainty as a Vital Force in “Satyre III”’, Modern Philology, 67 (1969), 41–9; Camille Slights, ‘“To Stand Inquiring Right”: The Casuistry of Donne’s “Satyre III”’, Studies in English Literature, 12 (1972), 85–101; Dominic Baker-Smith, ‘John Donne’s Critique of True Religion’, in John Donne: Essays in Celebration, ed. A. J. Smith. (London: Methuen, 1972), 404–32; Heather Dubrow, ‘“No

Donne’s Satires  107 Man Is an Island”’: Donne’s Satires and Satiric Traditions’, Studies in English Literature, 19 (1979), 71–83; James S. Baumlin, ‘Donne’s Christian Diatribes: Persius and the Rhetorical Persona of “Satyre III” and “Satyre V”’, in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne, eds. Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, SC: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 92–105; Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 41–3; Richard Strier, ‘Radical Donne: “Satire III”’, Journal of English Literary History, 60 (1993), 283–322; M. Thomas Hester, ‘“Ask thy father”: Re-Reading Donne’s “Satyre III”’, The Ben Jonson Journal, 1 (1994), 201–18; Peter Desa Wiggins, Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of Courtliness (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000), 21–59; Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 21–47; John Stubbs, John Donne, The Reformed Soul: A Biography (New York: Norton, 2007), 94 and 233; Gregory Kneidel, ‘The Formal Verse Satire’, in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, eds. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 122–33, especially at 132. As far as I am aware, the sole monograph on the Satires is M. Thomas Hester’s Kinde Pitty and Brave Scorn: John Donne’s Satyres (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982), where Satire 3 is discussed at 54–72. 2 Surrounding the third satire, that is to say, in terms of the order now conventionally assigned the Satires. On the dating of Satire 3 and its placement in relation to the other satires, see Wesley Milgate, ed., The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 139–40. See also John T. Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of John Donne (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 412; Paul R. Sellin, ‘Satyre III No Satire: Postulates for a Group Discussion’, John Donne Journal, 10 (1991): 85–9. I have additionally consulted: Herbert J. C. Grierson, ed., The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols (1912: rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Robin Robbins, ed., The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2008); Janel Mueller, ed., John Donne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Reference is to John Donne: Collected Poetry, ed. Ilona Bell (London: Penguin, 2012). 3 I am by no means suggesting that texts (much less Donne’s) offer unstylized autobiographical moments; rather, I am saying that Satire 3 perhaps to some extent offers what would be indeed an elaborately stylized moment of autobiography. 4 Reference here and throughout to ‘Donne’s speaker’ is not intended to imply that a uniform or homogeneous voice speaks to the reader from the Satires. Donne’s Satires seem to me to be spoken by voices which—very similarly inflected, often similarly preoccupied, recurrently and similarly unstable—in effect form one voice. 5 I am not denying Donne’s Catholic sympathies in the Satires, not least, his fellow-feeling with his deprived and persecuted co-religionists. But I am suggesting that his Catholic affiliations do not preclude querying or condemnation of Catholic practices and belief—and certainly do not preclude exploitation of things religious for rhetorical purposes. 6 My discussion of Satire 1 (and, to a much lesser extent, of the other poems) develops from my ‘The Coming of Mannerism: the Later Ralegh and the Early Donne’, English Literary Renaissance, 9 (1979): 86–107, 102–4. 7 Near the poem’s end, the adversarius abandons the speaker, who relates: ‘At last his love he in a window spies, / And like light dew exhaled, he flings from me / Violently ravished to his lechery’ (106–8). But he is unable to make a

108  Donne’s Satires sexual conquest of her just as he is unable to be a successful lover of fashion. He is, on the contrary, ‘[v]iolently ravished’ then wounded—and returns to the speaker’s disdainful companionship (110–2). 8 For discussion of how Donne’s Satires relate to the writings of Roman satirists other than Horace, see the essays by Dubrow and by Baumlin, and Hester’s monograph (all cited in note 1 above). In the present chapter, as far as Donne’s use of Horace is concerned, I have space to focus solely on Donne’s recreating of the Horatian bore figure, which I take to be one of his main tactics. Reference to Horace is from Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (1926; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). 9 The landmark discussion of the divine agape is Anders Nygren’s in his Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1953). See especially 61–165. 10 About which he evidently knows less but understands more than does the intruder. Donne’s speaker presents himself as an ‘understander’. 11 The repetition of ‘itch’ in those lines distinguishes the speaker from both the bore in Satire 1 and from his cunning counterpart in this satire. 12 See 83–4, 86–7, 93, 143. In 81–2 the courtier arguably gives as good as he gets; and he can manoeuvre round the speaker, as in 91–2. Aptly, then, at one point the speaker acknowledges that his attempt to exercise authority over the courtier makes him look like a ‘fool’ (90; cf. 228). The bore in Satire 1 is a mere victim of the speaker’s wit; his counterpart in Satire 4 is, appropriately, not. 13 In Satire 1 the speaker’s claim to authority has already been at once asserted and undermined near the poem’s start. In Satire 4, the speaker’s claim to authority is subverted before his (unsuccessful, as I see it) contesting of power with the courtier and so before his attempt to arrogate power over the Court itself by satirically laying bare its corruption. 14 Respectively: compare 49–57, then 57–62, in relation to 17–20; see in particular 62–4 and 103–12. 15 See 106–12, with their dismissive reference to ‘Carthusian fasts’ (106) and mocking allusion to Protestant devaluing of ‘[g]ood works’ at the expense of faith (110–12). The poem’s underlying sympathy and affiliation are arguably more Catholic than otherwise, as the heavy emphasis on Protestant devaluing of ‘[g]ood works’ would seem to affirm. Regarding the latter point, see M. Thomas Hester’s ‘“Ask thy Father …”’, 209–10. 16 In Nicholas Tyacke’s words, ‘The characteristic theology of English Protestant sainthood was Calvinism, centring on a belief in divine predestination [. . .]’. See his Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (1987; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1. 17 ‘Facilis descensus Averno …’ seems the subtext here. 18 Prior to his interplaying references to Inferno and to Maccabees, Donne’s speaker carefully balances Protestant against Catholic religious references, as he does in Satire 2. See ll. 208–17. 19 I quote Milgate, from his edition of the Satires, at 165. 20 On Egerton’s transcending the courtiers of Satire 4, see 5,2–4 and 31. It is a mark of the fifth satire’s secularity that, after alluding to his ‘Muse’ at the beginning of the poem, Donne’s speaker next appeals to the authority of Castiglione. 21 The copia so ostentatiously displayed in the poem—especially in connection with expolitio and commoratio—indicates the stylistic continuity between Satire 5 and its predecessors. 22 See Sloan, ‘The Persona as Rhetor’.

Donne’s Satires  109 23 Reference here and subsequently is to Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library, 5 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3.5.7–8. In the original: Finitae autem sunt ex complexu rerum personarum temperorum ceterorumque. [ . . . ] In his omnis quaestio videtur circa res personasque consistere. Amplior est semper infinita, inde enim finita descendit. Quod ut exemplo pateat, infinita est ‘an uxor decenda finita ‘an Catoni ducenda’, ideoque esse suasoria potest’. 24 M. Thomas Hester suggests Donne may have had a particularly Catholic readership in mind. See his ‘“Ask thy Father …”’, 212. See however R.C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford, 1970), 62–79. (At 70–2, Bald considers criticisms directed at both Protestantism and Catholicism in the Satires.) See also Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet, 41–3. Both Hester and Marotti quote from the well-known letter [To Sir Henry Wotton?] written perhaps in 1600. The relevant passage, implying the close circulation of Donne’s Satires, is ‘[T]o my satyrs there belongs some feare …’. See Evelyn­ Simpson, John Donne: Selected Prose, eds. Helen Gardner and Timothy Healy (­Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 111. 5 Quintilian’s use of sententia is forceful: ‘Valet autem in consiliis auctoritas 2 plurimum.’ The whole passage runs: Valet autem in consiliis auctoritas plurimum. Nam et prudentissimus esse haberique et optimus debet qui sententiae suae de utilibus atque honestis credere omnes velit. In iudiciis enim vulgo fas habetur indulgere qliquid studio suo: consilia nemo est qui neget secundum mores dari. Other passages in The Orator’s Education that are relevant to Satire 3 include 3.8.4–6 and 3.8.30–2. 26 Scodel has a pertinent though different discussion of the poem’s opening lines. See his Excess and the Mean, 22–3. 27 On exuscitatio see Ad Herennium 4, 43, 55: ‘[W]hen not only we ourselves seem to speak under emotion, but we also stir the hearer’. The phrase ‘dicere videamur’ has special relevance here. Reference is to [Cicero], Ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (1954; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). See also Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence ([1577]; rpt. Menston: Scolar Press, 1971), Uir: ‘[W]hen the Oratoure sheweth him selfe much moued by the vtteraunce of hys speeche’. 28 As Scodel also notes, remarking: ‘Donne pointedly refuses to treat the third [the Church of England, represented by Graius] as the mean’ (Excess and the Mean, 26). 29 Scodel offers another (and more limited) view of this, contextualising it in terms of the Book of Common Prayer and the idea of ‘custom’ (ibid, 26). See also Hester’s Kinde Pitty, 62–4. 30 Geneva Version. The Vulgate version is ‘Memento dierum antiquorum, cogita generationes singulas: / Interroga patrem tuum, / Et annuntiabit tibi: / Maiores tuos, et dicent tibi.’ 31 Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, trans. and ed. E. Gordon Rupp et al. (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1969). Respectively: Luther, De Servo Arbitrio, trans. and ed. Philip S. Watson, with D. Drewery, at 162, 168– 9; Erasmus, De Libero Arbitrio, trans. and ed. E. Gordon Rupp, with A.N. Marlow, at 38–42. Cf. Donne’s comment on Erasmus (and counterbalancing contraries) in The Courtier’s Library, ed. Evelyn Mary Simpson (­London: Nonesuch Press, 1930), 49–50. See also, Lawrence Manley, Convention 1500–1700 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 67–90.

110  Donne’s Satires 32 For Luther, see the previously cited volume, 158–62. For Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.7–8 passim, 4.1.5, 4.1.9, 4.10.18, 4.10. 23–5 passim. For More, see Responsio ad Lutherum, ed. John M. Headley, The Yale Edition of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 1.8–10 passim. 33 For Donne’s subsequent views on hermeneutics and tradition, with special relevance to Satire 3, see Pseudo-Martyr, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal, QC and Kingston, VIC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 12–14, 19–21, 36, 38, 45, 75–80, 89–93 among many instances. See also John Donne and the Theology of Language, eds. P.G. Stanwood and Heather Ross Asals (Columbia, SC: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 49, 56, 77, 79, 100, 102, 265, 287. 34 Just as, of course, it originally depended in part on how Donne’s contemporaries viewed his poem’s deliberative rhetoric. 35 A similar point is made nicely in another context, that of Donne’s ‘O my black soul!’, by Brian Cummings. See his The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 388–9. See also F.W. Brownlow, ‘The Holy Sonnets’, in Donne and the Resources of Kind, eds. A. D. Cousins and Damian Grace (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 87–105. 36 Scaliger describes figura as, ‘[A] configuration or formula which is like an architect’s model of the structure of the whole’. See Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 1968), 100. 37 On Donne as a Janus in another and very pertinent sense, with which I do not have space to engage here, see Thomas O. Sloane, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 57–63.

5 Roman Satire and Satyric Exile in Hall’s Virgidemiae

At the conclusion to a poem prefacing his Virgidemiae, verse satires collected into six books (1597–8), Joseph Hall has his persona declare: ‘In scornfull rage I vow this silent rest, / That neuer field nor groue shall here my song. / Onely these refuse rimes I here mispend, / To chide the world, that did my thoughts offend’ (‘His Defiance to Enuie’, 111–14).1 Hall’s decision to foreground anger as a motive for writing gestures distinctly (along with some lesser if cognate choices) towards imitation of Juvenal. Arnold Davenport was therefore probably right when he suggested that Hall’s speaker claims not to be the first actual satirist in English but rather the first English poet who voices satire modelled on Juvenal’s in some particular respects.2 Even so, Hall’s poems are eclectic in their imitation of Roman verse satire, and since Roman satiric poets allude repeatedly to their predecessors—engaging in continuous dialogue with their forebears at the same time as they focus on contemporary circumstance—Hall’s evocations of Juvenal thus more broadly evoke the Roman practice of satirical verse. His gestures towards Juvenal, that is to say, seem to form part of a larger, if implicit, self-representation as a poet who attempts fashioning of the first authentically Roman verse satire in English culture. This more comprehensive sense in which Virgidemiae indicates Hall’s attentiveness to Roman satiric tradition appears, as I shall now argue, in his deployment of especially three concepts that form topoi across the poems of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. These are libertas, recusatio, and the idea of a state or condition that the Roman satirists do not describe by a single, encompassing term but that we might call exile. To consider elements of each is a necessary prelude to discussing their individual as well as collective significances for Virgidemiae, and a point of departure would be the observation that, in Latin, libertas identifies not just the idea of freedom but notions of civil freedom, ­political liberty, political independence, freedom or boldness of thought and speech. 3 It can also denote the freedom to do as one pleases and likewise an unrestrained, excessive freedom of behaviour: licence.4 Recusatio, on the other hand, refers to refusal, to declining—to an expression of unwillingness. 5 Finally, one should add here that in the satires of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal the idea of exile is formulated not as banishment from

112 Hall’s Virgidemiae the homeland (the patria) but as marginalization of some kind within it. This appears, in the satires by Persius and by Juvenal, as estrangement from the homeland because it has become estranged from itself. Yet the idea does not lay stress on solitude. The three Roman satirists associate the idea chiefly with their personae, and the latter are often characterized as members of a microcosmic, truly Roman community residual within or in fact essential to a Rome that has abandoned, or forgotten, or been deprived of—or, as Horace intimates, is in the process of recovering—its Romanitas. Hall re-fashions those concepts, I shall argue more specifically, as follows. When introducing the satires themselves, Hall’s persona anticipates the hostility his outspokenness (libertas of that kind) will incite. In ‘His Defiance to Enuie’ he suggests that ‘enuie’ (where ‘envy’ means not ‘jealousy’ but ‘ill-will’ or ‘resentment’) will be a probable consequence of the ‘scornfull rage’ with which his satires ‘chide the world’ (111 and 114, respectively). He goes on to assert in his ‘Prologue’ that ‘Enuie waits on [his] backe’, (5; cf. 6–7). But the function Hall primarily assigns to libertas, rather than mere allusion to the idea, indicates his insight into Roman verse satire and his intent to shape an English counterpart to it. Like Horace and thereafter Persius along with Juvenal, Hall has the speaker of his satires recurrently focus on and decry cupido falsus in its different manifestations throughout the culture environing him.6 Horace treats the notion syncretically in his satires, locating it within different philosophical or experiential contexts; and so too does Juvenal, Persius’ perspective on it being in the main Stoic. Hall amplifies the notion by speaking out against cupido falsus as a phenomenon that aligns no less with Augustinian and Calvinist categories of thought than it does with those from ancient philosophies. That is to say, he obliquely if unmistakably renders the concept (and hence cupido falsus as a topos in Roman verse satire) yet more elaborately syncretic at the same time as he makes it of immediate topical relevance to his readers. He similarly recreates what are the concepts as well as topoi of recusatio and of exile. In Roman verse satire, as often in the lyric, recusatio takes the guise of a refusal to attempt the writing of epic. The satires of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal play with that performance of denial, but Juvenal’s express refusal and nonetheless implicitly emphasize their congruence with epic, inasmuch as they suggest that heroic denunciation of social decline has a grandeur of its own and thus they figure the satirist as an ironic culture hero. Hall prefaces his Virgidemiae by acknowledging the lowliness of satire, its place amid low-style genres and therefore its distance from epic, yet also has his persona cast himself as a successor to the hero of romance epic—a successor because the times are unheroic, the ideals of romance epic have become almost lost to the world, and heroism now lies in daring to unmask the world’s moral failure.7 Hall

Hall’s Virgidemiae  113 points towards recusatio and proceeds nevertheless to repudiate it: he rewrites the topos of refusal by acknowledging and thereupon declining it via an embrace of the heroic. Less dramatic, if not less interesting, is Hall’s representation of exile. His speaker identifies himself as belonging to an intellectual and moral enclave within a greater society impelled by overreaching, misdirected desire: a microcosmic community humble in its aspirations to gain knowledge and moderate in its material needs (4.6.82–9). This is, in fact, the community of Hall’s college at Cambridge when he was writing his satires, namely, Emmanuel College, a centre of Puritan learning; and, from that coign of vantage, the persona of Virgidemiae surveys society at large.8 *** In order to clarify Hall’s re-imagining of libertas, recusatio, and exile in his satires, I want first to examine more closely some ways in which those motifs function across satires by Horace, Persius, and ­Juvenal. Doing so will sharpen understanding both of how he re-fashions them and of their importance to Virgidemiae as a whole. I shall start with the motif of libertas because that is where Hall begins. Next will follow consideration of recusatio, for that at once follows and merges with its predecessor in Hall’s poems. Finally, I shall look at versions of the concept and topos of exile. As we have come to learn, the various idea of libertas in Roman culture signified, most broadly, either freedom to do something or to have freedom from something. If, for instance, the former were abused it would cease to be libertas and become licentia (license), which one might seek to counter or from which one might seek deliverance.9 It is against libertas become licentia that Horace directs the nuanced geniality of his free speech in his satires: his civic liberty to speak out, despite potentially adverse consequences, against freedom in others (and on occasion himself) gone wrong. So, for example, when meditating in Satires 1.1 about everybody’s apparent dissatisfaction with his lot in life (‘sortem’, at 1.1.1), Horace’s persona asks, ‘Furthermore, not to skim over the subject with a laugh like a writer of witticisms—[…] what is to prevent one from telling truth as he laughs [?]’.10 He is emphasizing— amid exercising—his right to speak out in public and affably to lay bare an uncomfortable truth. Moreover, he posits, as a maxim essential here to consideration of everyone’s unhappiness with his individual lot, the proposition that ‘a good many people [are] misled by blind desire’, where the phrase ‘blind desire’ (‘cupidine falso’ being its form within the poem) indicates a will to pleasure or to power that aims awry, overreaches, is delusional.11 This assertion harmonizes with Cicero’s statement early in De Inventione that ‘caeca ac temeraria dominatrix animi cupiditas’ (‘immoderate desire—the mind’s blind and unheeding mistress’) is the

114 Hall’s Virgidemiae hallmark of post-Golden Age humankind.12 Horace begins his Satires, then, by connecting freedom of speech, a free man’s right to speak out, with condemnation of misdirected desire’s pervasiveness in society.13 That is a connection to which he returns throughout his Satires, one recurrent likewise in the satires by Persius and by Juvenal. True, associating outspokenness and repudiation of misdirected desire might hardly seem unexpected as a manoeuvre in verse satire; in any case, furthermore, Horace and his successors ultimately had Lucilius for their precedent. In making that connection, nonetheless, Horace stresses his alertness to the varieties of outspokenness, shows his fascination with the diversity of misdirected desire’s manifestations, and takes pains to acknowledge as well as to distinguish himself from Lucilius.14 Thus, for instance, at 1.3.51–2 he has his persona express a clear understanding that outspokenness can merely reveal a speaker’s failures of judgement. This the Horatian persona does again at 1.4.88–103 but proceeds immediately to suggest the moral training and insight that have shaped and still continue to shape his own freedom of speech; and he insists that his outspokenness is directed against himself no less than it is towards others (103–43). In addition, he glances at the fear that free speech can arouse even prospectively in those to whom it may be addressed (2.8.35– 8). Horace’s multifaceted and self-reflexive representation of outspokenness, which contributes so much to the fashioning of his persona throughout the Satires, is therefore distinctly individuated. As we might anticipate, it plays no small role in his positioning of himself against Lucilius—to his fashioning a voice, an ethos that recall but distinguish themselves from those of his predecessor.15 Equally diverse and self-implicating is his scrutiny of cupido falsus. One could demonstrate with little enough effort that the Horatian persona’s various rhetoric of free speech targets a diversity of aberrant desires, citing by way of illustration his accounts of expensive gluttony, the illicit will to power, avarice, or the hunt for legacies.16 All will be revisited by Hall as they are by both Persius and Juvenal. Noteworthy in passing is Horace’s amusement at literary manifestations of cupido falsus, for that re-appears initially and at length—as will be discussed below—in Hall’s Virgidemiae (see, for example, 1.9.21–4 and 1.10.36–9). It would be easy likewise to demonstrate the diversity of perspectives opened onto concepts of prudence and moderation that are proffered remedially against excesses generated by cupido falsus. Yet, finally at this point, and with respect to self-implication in Horace’s critiques of misdirected desire, one could cite his often-quoted, ‘[W]hy laugh? Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’ (1.1.69–70—‘quid rides? mutato nomine de te / fabula narratur’). We are to understand that everyone’s face is mirrored somewhere in the Satires. Within that context, namely, Horace’s staging libertas as mockery of the different forms assumed by cupido falsus across everyday Roman

Hall’s Virgidemiae  115 society, his persona’s allusions to the recusatio topos suggest, of course, not Horace’s inability to produce epic but rather his judged moderation— his prudence—in knowing when not to attempt it: in knowing how to avoid at once misplaced aspiration and dullness. Yet they also suggest more than quite that. Within the programmatic 1.10, to cite a key instance, we see Horace’s persona tracing literary genealogies, or dispensing compliments along with ridicule so that he can represent writing satire as an observation of the golden mean, and hence a display of prudentia­because a literary enactment of self-knowledge. Let some, he says, presume in ignorance of self to attempt epic—and not recognize the bathos that results; let others who are wiser aim high and succeed in their heroic designs. He positions himself between them with a cunning humility, its elaborate self-deprecation nominally asserting while evidently denying his satires’ insignificance (1.10.36–44).17 Persius and Juvenal will work variations on Horace’s manoeuvre. Hall will elaborate their reworkings of it into a strikingly new and topical configuration. With their own emphases, too, all three will affirm Horace’s formulation of what I am calling the idea and topos of exile. I suggested above that in the satires of Horace, Persius, and Juvenal the idea of exile is articulated not as banishment from the patria but as marginalization of some kind within it—Horace’s Satires presenting this as his persona’s membership of a microcosmic, genuinely Roman community essential to a Rome that, he intimates, is in the process of recovering its Romanitas under the rule of Octavian. In 2.1.21–3, by way of illustration, the Horatian persona’s interlocutor assures him that to write satire is to become almost universally hated. To exercise libertas in decrying the misdirected desires of others is to become an outsider. The persona responds ultimately, however, by letting his counsellor know that he himself is part of a patronage coterie centred on Caesar, whose quintessentially Roman virtues are beyond dispute (for Caesar is iustus et fortis, as the interlocutor readily acknowledges at 16) and whose judgement alone matters (83–6). Horace’s membership of this community within the larger community, an inner circle securely linked to traditional values, has already been hinted at by the boorish interlocutor of 1.9 at 43–4. ‘“How is Maecenas towards you”, he [the Bore] starts up again—“a person of few friends and very sound discernment?”’18 The topos of exile appears in Horace’s Satires, therefore, through the persona’s portraying himself as simultaneously marginalized and yet at the heart of what really matters in Roman society: as the outsider who is at the same time part of a small group that reverences, adheres to—and, by implication, at the last through Octavian inculcates—mos maiorum (ancestral values). Casting the satiric persona as both outsider and insider offered dramatic potential of which Persius, Juvenal, and Hall would take shrewd advantage. Nevertheless, anterior to consideration of how they do so is necessarily some reflection on how Persius and Juvenal engage with notions, first, of

116 Hall’s Virgidemiae libertas then of recusatio. Only thereafter can one appreciate what exile in that guise means for each and thence, in turn, what Hall chose to foreground as his inheritance from their satires and from those of Horace. Libertas seems a much more problematic category for Persius than it had been for Horace—and not simply because the former writes under the reign of Nero whereas the latter had written under that of Augustus. What needs emphasis here is not merely that notions of libertas as civil freedom, political liberty, and political independence are more constrained in Persius’ time, but that—in a time when the meanings of libertas have become yet more restricted—Persius depicts his persona as someone who dares to speak out freely, and from the very start, in identification of a cultural crisis.19 The initial satire is a dialogue and, throughout it, Persius’ speaker excoriates contemporary Roman poets for diminishing (as he claims) their literary inheritance, for in fact caricaturing the literary heritage they presume themselves to be enhancing. Persius has his persona survey contemporary literature and highlight, among other things, either failed aspiration to epic, exemplified notably by a recent attempt at translation of Homeric narrative, or misunderstanding of it, instanced likewise by his interlocutor’s view that modern epic makes the Aeneid seem a monument from an age less sophisticated, less judicious than the present (4,69–75, 50–1, 92–7). Doing so, the persona implies that to juxtapose Homer and Virgil with their would-be modernizers or supposed successors reveals all too clearly the hubris of Rome’s current poets and, thence no less clearly, the decadence of its current literary elite. It is apparent at once, in other words, that Persius’ attack on contemporary poets differs in scope and virulence from Horace’s mockery of failed writers inasmuch as he pays attention to them across his Satires. Certainly, Horace indicates that failed literary aspiration is a not unfamiliar phenomenon in Octavian’s Rome; nevertheless, he also emphasizes that signal literary achievements have appeared—have been fostered—within it (compare 1.10.36–49 and 78–91). Persius suggests not just that Rome has people who try to be celebrity poets and then fail, but that Neronian literary culture is dominated by failure: by poets who disfigure rather than reconfigure the writings of their predecessors, and by audiences who collude with them. Hence the virulence as well as comprehensiveness of Persius’ first satire, in which his persona tropes literary dysfunction by picturing a poetics of sodomy and a reader-reception of pathic submission (13–21). For all that, Persius’ subsequent satires proceed, like Horace’s, principally to stage libertas as the censure of misdirected desire and to associate literary dysfunction with a more broadly societal moral dysfunction. Again, however, Persius’ condemnation of Rome as he characterizes it differs in scale and tone from Horace’s characterization of Augustan Rome. Just as Persius has his persona, throughout the opening satire, metonymically itemize the total collapse of literature under the reign

Hall’s Virgidemiae  117 of Nero, so he has his speaker in the subsequent poems tell of a virtually total breakdown of moral values under Nero—of a moral failure that is predominant rather than pervasive, seemingly (if not in fact quite) continual rather than recurrent. A moment in the second satire pellucidly crystallizes this performance of outspoken, almost all-encompassing, moral denunciation. Towards the close of that poem, Persius’ speaker exclaims in synoptic and dismissive overview of his fellow Romans: ‘O souls bent earthwards and void of celestial thoughts, what help is it to unleash our ways upon the temples and to infer the gods’ values from this wicked flesh of ours?’ (‘O curvae in terris animae et caelestium inanis, / quid iuvat hoc, templis nostros inmittere mores / et bona dis ex hac scelerata ducere pulpa?’, 61–3). A concordant moment occurs in the fourth satire. There, with relevance to his own world, Persius imagines Socrates asking Alcibiades, ‘What’s your idea of the highest good? To live off rich dishes all the time [?]’ (17–18), then to assert, ‘No one attempts the descent into [himself], no one!’ (23). 20 If questing for the good life necessitates that we look both upwards and inwards—seek the divine, seek to know the self—who in Rome actually does, Persius challenges us to reflect. A final citation here will affirm his emphasis on this angry enactment of libertas across his satires. In the fifth satire, his speaker condemns as follows a life of capitulation to false desires: ‘With alternating enslavement, you must by turns submit to your masters’ (155–6). 21 The Stoic tenor of that remark and of the dialogue scripted for Socrates, quoted beforehand, unmistakably distinguishes Persius’ perspective on cupido falsus from the more eclectic viewpoint of Horace. It also illuminates how Persius frames the topoi of recusatio and exile. Given the Stoic colouring that comes to permeate the six satires, a reader soon understands what the derision of Neronian epic signals in Persius’ first poem: his turn from contemporary aspirations to reanimate Augustan genres and towards those forms of writing—diatribe, dialogue, expository monologue, for example—that allow his speaker (or, as one might prefer to say with his Socrates and Cornutus in mind, his various personae) to play out a familiar Stoic trope, namely, the Stoic counsellor as physician to moral illness in the society surrounding him (as at 5,52ff.). Just so, a reader therefore quickly understands how Persius has his speaker, across the poems, appear in the guise of an outsider, a marginal presence in the Neronian world—according, of course, to Persius’ portrayals of it. If, according to those portrayals, fools are many but aspirants to wisdom few, then representation of the speaker as separated from the multitude because adherent to Stoic priorities casts him in the role of resident alien within his immediate world. He is an outsider privileged by his membership of a microcosmic, albeit cosmopolitan, community amidst Neronian society. A mark of both that estrangement from his world and his belonging to a community within as

118 Hall’s Virgidemiae well as transcending it, can be seen in this remark from 5,14–16, assigned to Cornutus and addressed to Persius’ speaker: ‘You pursued the language of the toga, skilled at the pointed combination, rounded with moderate utterance, clever at scraping sick morals and at nailing fault with well-bred wit’ (‘verba togae sequeris iunctura callidus acri, / ore teres modico, pallentis radere mores / doctus et ingenuo culpam defigere ludo’). The much-quoted phrase ‘iunctura callidus acri’ (14) might also be rendered as ‘expert in the shrewd [or, astute] juxtaposition’ and, in rewriting Horace’s Ars Poetica 46–8, it emphasizes the satirist-physician’s singularity of vision—his Stoic outsider’s insight into the misdirected desire disordering society at large. Persius’ characterization of his speaker as a marginalized figure with a privileged and disruptive perspective on society is replicated in the very first of Juvenal’s satires, yet with striking differences. Juvenal has the persona of that opening and programmatic poem appears distanced from the society he describes, which is to say, apart from it yet not emotionally disengaged from what he sees. Thus, at 63–6 he asks, Surely I’m allowed to fill a roomy notebook while standing at the crossroads, when an accessory to fraud is carried past on as many as six necks already, exposed to view on this side and that, in his almost naked litter, strongly recalling the languid Maecenas [?]. 22 His brief self-portrayal suggests a man far from the contaminated spheres of wealth and power, an affronted observer indistinguishable amongst but separate from those around him. It also deftly suggests, through the even more brief allusion to Maecenas, someone who is very aware of Horace’s eminence in satiric tradition. The second satire begins with a similar self-portrayal. Juvenal’s speaker opens the poem with a declaration of mental estrangement from Rome—an internal exile of the angered spirit. ‘I feel like running away from here beyond the Sarmatians and the icy Ocean whenever those people who imitate the Curii but live like Bacchanals have the gall to talk about morality’, he announces (1–3). 23 That in turn anticipates the third satire’s depiction of Rome as a city estranged from its core values. Fortuna has played with Roman society, we are told, on one hand by variously filling it with foreigners and, on the other, by making it unmindful of mos maiorum (severally, 40–1 and 10–16 along with 60–119). The physical departure of the Juvenalian speaker’s friend from Rome signals the departure of Romanitas from the city and highlights the mental exile of the speaker himself within the city inasmuch as he residually embodies those values that the city itself has abandoned (1–3, 90–125, 203–11, 312–22). One could also cite, by way of contrast, the 13th satire’s conclusion, in which Juvenal’s speaker considers physical exile as punishment for betrayal of the homeland’s laws (243–49). But what matters more, here, is the exilic persona’s response

Hall’s Virgidemiae  119 to the familiarity yet otherness of his surroundings: the libertas of his speech in engaging hostilely with them and his reinterpretation of recusatio when he does so. The concept and topos of libertas, in Juvenal’s Satires, famously albeit partly involves their persona’s belief that he has a right to express anger, to direct outraged satire against a hybridized Rome now insistently caricaturing its ancient self. 24 Like Persius’ speaker, he associates Rome’s loss of its traditional identity with its inhabitants’ willing submission to insatiable and misdirected desire. He inveighs, then, not merely against what he thinks aberrant behaviour but against the cultural crisis consequent upon deviation from Romanitas—from ancient values such as virilitas, temperantia, and iustitia. Thus, for example, he remarks in the opening satire—with an allusion at the outset to Lucilius as a heroic embodiment of Romanitas: ‘Yet why I choose to charge across the same plain where the great protégé of Aurunca steered his chariot, I’ll explain, if you have the time and can listen quietly to my reasoning. When a womanly eunuch takes a wife!—when Mevia shoots a Tuscan boar, holding the hunting spears with one breast bared!—when the man who made my stiff beard rasp while he shaved me in my youth can single-handedly challenge all the aristocrats with his wealth!—when that remnant of the Nile’s trash, that native slave of Canopus, that Crispinus, wafts a gold ring in summer on sweaty fingers while his shoulder hitches up a Tyrian cloak!—then it is hard not to write satire.’ (19–30)25 Similarly, at 1,45–8 he says, Why should I describe the immense rage burning in my fevered guts, when the people are intimidated by the herds that follow someone who’s defrauded his ward and reduced him to prostitution, and someone else who’s been found guilty in a meaningless verdict?’ And he continues, in allusion to Horace, ‘These outrages—can’t I think they merit the Venusian lamp? These outrages—can’t I have a go at them?’ (51–2). 26 Many instances akin to those could be put forward from the ensuing poems. 27 Yet this performance of libertas as an exilic speaker’s impulse to voice fury at Rome’s self-deformation generates, and so we see immediately but likewise come later to recognize, two important issues. The first is his emphasis on anger as a response to his environment; the second, his dealings with the notion and topos of recusatio. Both necessarily have a number of aspects. For a start, from the very outset but also throughout the Satires, rage unmistakably betokens powerlessness (compare for example 1,45–8 with 3,126–34): rage seems to be what

120 Hall’s Virgidemiae remains when one is confronted by the incoherence of contemporary civic life and has no power to amend it. Further, that emotion is itself critically and variously scrutinized in the Satires. A very notable example occurs in Satire 15. The speaker of the 15th satire condemns anger— especially, humankind’s failure to limit its extreme manifestations—as a grossly dehumanizing instance of what Horace would call cupido falsus (129–33 and 159–60). In so doing he reveals an indignation perhaps not entirely separable from anger; at the same time, however, he also implicitly condemns rage of the kinds expressed earlier across the Satires and that flashes out in the remnants of the final poem. Contradiction equally characterizes the Juvenalian persona’s dealings with recusatio. Juvenal begins his Satires, like Persius, with denunciation of what he chooses to perceive as a contemporary cultural crisis; and, again like Persius, initially he has his persona repudiate current attempts to reanimate epic. ‘Shall I always be stuck in the audience? Never retaliate for being tortured so often by hoarse Cordus’ Song of Theseus? Let them get away with it, then?—this one reciting to me his Roman comedies and that one his love elegies?’ (1,1–4). 28 To his initial mockery of modern mythological epic (no doubt positioned there because epic was thought to be highest among the literary genres) he soon returns (1,7–11). Nevertheless, as we have seen above, Juvenal’s speaker intimates that satire now has an element of the heroic because daring to confront what he insists is latter-day cultural decline (1,19–30—cf. 81–4). In fact, Juvenal often implicitly presents satire as the only verse form that now can be truly epic in manner and scope: only the heroic daring it enacts, the lofty perspective it brings incongruously to bear on what it excoriates, can encompass the decadence of Rome. 29 From even so brief a consideration of libertas, recusatio, and exile in the poems of those Roman satirists most widely imitated throughout the English Renaissance, one can begin to appreciate how Hall attempted the fashioning of formal verse satire that would be elementally and innovatively Roman yet at the same time immediately relevant to his readers. To have said as much is therefore not to suggest that Hall’s satires offer mere selective re-enactment of Roman precedents. It is rather to suggest that Virgidemiae attempts a naturalization of Roman satire, which goes beyond translation and seeks to be emulative. Hall’s persona is thus decorously assertive when he declares in the prologue introducing Book One: ‘I First aduenture, with fool-hardie might / To tread the steps of perilous despight: / I first aduenture: follow me who list, / And be the second English Satyrist’ (1–4). In seeking to clarify where those defiant verses lead, one must begin with Hall’s individualizing the motifs of libertas and recusatio—for that is his own point of departure. ***

Hall’s Virgidemiae  121 Even before Hall presents the first satire of Virgidemiae he emphasizes anger. His speaker tells us that anger is elemental to the ensuing satires and that, in fact, it is intrinsic to all satire. Thus, and as we have seen, he highlights in ‘His Defiance to Enuie’ the ‘scornfull rage’ motivating his satires (111), then proceeds to assert in ‘De suis Satyris’ that ‘anger makes satire’ (3:’Ira facit Satyram’), adding that real satire must be delineated in—coloured with—blood (4: ‘Pinge tuo Satyram sanguine, tum Satyra est’). He affirms this emphasis, as we have likewise seen, in the preface to his three last books of satires, namely, ‘The Authors charge to his Satyres’. There he relates that ‘holy Rage’ was in large part a determinant of the subsequent poems (2). Yet if his recurrent stress on the connection between satire and anger is evidently Juvenalian, no less so is his linking anger with libertas. Juvenal’s connection of the two at 1,45–52 and thereafter has been discussed above. Hall does not seek, however, just to replicate Juvenal’s manoeuvre, just to duplicate that gambit through which the Roman poet begins suggesting the ethos of his satiric persona. Certainly, by means of that tactic Hall begins to establish the characterization of his own speaker; but, at the same time, he repositions the idea and topos of libertas itself. How he does so is innovative in its comprehensiveness. At the outset of Virgidemiae, ‘His Defiance to Enuie’ shows Hall’s speaker elaborately presenting his mindfulness of the uncertainties that await someone who would dare to satirize humankind’s misconduct. These pre-eminently include the possibility of receiving honour and, by contrast, the possibility of attracting resentment: honour for daring to attack folly; resentment from the victims of that attack. As he announces, Needs me then hope, or doth me need mis-dread: Hope for than honor, dread that wrongfull spight: Spight of the partie, honor of the deed, Which wont alone on loftie obiectes light. That Enuy should accost my Muse and mee, For this so rude, and recklesse Poesie. (25–30) He acknowledges the precariousness of the satirist’s role—arguably a phenomenon of no less relevance to Hall than it was to Persius and Juvenal.30 Further, he implicitly introduces a connection between libertas (towards which he gestures in the last line just now quoted) and ira, that is, between outspokenness and the ‘scornfull rage’ he will stress near the poem’s end (111). But, in Hall’s prefatory poem, libertas has a significance beyond that of outspokenness: a free member of the community’s free (and angry) speech against the community’s wrongdoing. It has three further significances. After the stanza quoted above, Hall’s speaker goes on to say that, congenial as he finds other poetic genres, he

122 Hall’s Virgidemiae must now turn away from them; in particular, he highlights pastoral and romance epic (see 31–42, 49–64, 79–108). He thus turns away from the Virgilian rota instantiated in the career of Spenser—to whom he specifically defers when discussing pastoral (107–8)—because the need to speak out against wrongdoing necessitates his departure from it. The compulsion to write satire excludes him, or so he fables, from genres directly associated with the Virgilian model for poetic achievement. He will soon declare that it urges him in a new direction for an English poet. Prior to voicing this claim, however, he evokes the conventionally alleged etymological link between satire and satyrs. In his words, ‘The ruder Satyre should goe rag’d and bare: / And show his rougher and his hairy hide: / Tho mine be smooth, and deckt in careless pride’ (76–8). His satires become satyric embodiments of libertas—yet ambiguous personifications that, here, he may describe as unexpectedly sleek but elsewhere he will not.31 He himself will emphasize that the later books of Virgidemiae are calculatedly harsher to the eye than their three predecessors (cf. 4,1 at 1–14, 29–34, 167–75). This summoning of satyr lore in order to personify satiric libertas contributes, as we shall see, to Hall’s reworking the idea and topos of exile. The final significance that he gives to libertas is nonetheless more important still for Virgidemiae as a whole. In his ‘Prologue’ to Book One, Hall’s speaker begins with what is in effect libertas triumphantly reshaping the Virgilian rota and dismissing recusatio. His opening words indicate the scope of his ambitiousness: I First aduenture, with fool-hardie might To tread the steps of perilous despight: I first aduenture: follow me who list, And be the second English Satyrist. Enuie waits on my backe, Truth on my side: Enuie will be my Page, and Truth my Guide. Enuie the margent holds, and Truth the line. (1–7) He concludes, Goe daring Muse on with thy thanklesse taske, And do the vgly face of vice vnmaske: And if thou canst not thine high flight remit, So as it mought a lowly Satyre fit, Let lowly Satyres rise aloft to thee: Truth be thy speed, and Truth thy Patron bee. (19–24) Two aspects of the prologue’s start and end are evident but thus far have received very little or no attention. First, Hall’s satiric persona

Hall’s Virgidemiae  123 simultaneously represents his satires as a material book and casts himself, in voicing them, as an equivalent to a chivalric hero from romance narrative. There are, for example, with respect to the former, his pun on ‘Page’ along with his references to ‘margent’ and ‘line’ (severally at 6–7). There is, with regard to the latter, his self-portrayal as a knight errant for his times: he urges his ‘daring Muse’ to pursue the ‘thanklesse taske’ of unmasking vice—and hence indicates that he has a quest before him (19–20); he is accompanied by page and guide—the resentment that will follow his endeavour and the truth he must follow in turn, which should be the ‘Patron’ of his Muse (severally at 6–7, then 24). He heightens the power and extends the scope of libertas. The daring and ambition of his outspokenness, he suggests, elevate satire to the level of romance epic: raise it from the low style, its conventional placement in the hierarchy of genres, to the high. Therefore, second, if by writing satire aligned with Roman tradition Hall takes English poetry in a new direction, in doing so he likewise transforms the Virgilian rota and departs from that tradition. The truly heroic poetry for these times is satire, he implies, and hence he displaces epic in its conventional forms from sole domination of the generic hierarchy. His deployment of the concept and topos of libertas thus at the same time indicates dismissal of recusatio. Thereby he effects a clear albeit silent departure from Roman satiric precedent. Like Juvenal, Hall associates satire with epic; unlike Juvenal however he none too obliquely proffers satire as a replacement for more traditionally heroic verse—and not just as a substitute for heroic verse but as heroic in its own right.32 One could add correspondingly moreover that his ‘Prologue’ aligns with yet diverges from Spenserian precedent. The poem’s opening appropriates the rhetoric of romance epic and romance allegory. As recently and notably in that fusion of romance epic with allegory which is the Faerie Queene, a knight sets out on a symbolic quest (cf. Faerie Queene 1.1 stanzas 1–4).33 Nonetheless, the opening and conclusion to Hall’s ‘Prologue’ also by implication contradict the first stanza of Spenser’s Proem, where the latter locates at once his Faerie Queene and his career distinctly within the Virgilian rota (cf. Proem, 1–9). Although Roman satiric precedent is elemental to Virgidemiae, acknowledgement of Spenser’s oeuvre substantively informs it as well. 34 The programmatic ‘His Defiance to Enuie’ and ‘Prologue’ suggest Hall’s comprehensive repositioning of libertas and, inseparable from that, his rethinking of recusatio. The aptness, the decorum, of this emulously innovative rather than merely replicative engagement with Roman satiric precedent becomes apparent in the three sequent Books of Virgidemiae, and yet more distinct throughout the three Books that follow them. We see at once from the ensuing satires that Hall has heightened the power and extended the scope of libertas so that his persona may the more credibly stage his attacks as not just the excoriation of particular

124 Hall’s Virgidemiae vices but as an encompassing intervention in a cultural crisis. He puts forward his persona, that is to say, as someone who dares to assault the dysfunction that virtually pervades an entire society; and thereby Hall’s persona resembles while differing from his Roman predecessors. Horace’s speaker, for example, does not represent Rome as experiencing cultural crisis. Rather, he implicitly depicts it as pervaded by follies that the new regime of Octavian is attempting, chiefly through the values and attitudes of an elite centred on Octavian himself, to rectify or ameliorate. Persius’ speaker, on the other hand, portrays his society as experiencing a crisis reflective of failed personal morality, failed governance—a crisis deplored and confronted by the marginalized few. His Juvenalian successor similarly dramatizes denunciation of a Rome in almost total decline—a decline observed and denounced by the few residual heirs of Romanitas. Like Horace’s persona, Hall’s attacks contemporary follies without suggesting that they characterize his entire society. 35 Nevertheless, like the personae of Persius and thereafter Juvenal he identifies his society as deeply and variously disrupted. In Virgidemiae he traces England’s dysfunctionality across its arts, its personal modes of behaviour, its public practices of civility and community, and some of its lawmaking. His sense of his country’s predicament, one might fairly claim, verges on the dystopian. Hall begins as do Juvenal and Persius, with a critique of contemporary verse and its patronage. His predecessors put forward their initial views on Rome—on current performances of Romanitas—by dissecting its literary milieu. Hall has his persona initially examine later Elizabethan England by focusing on the literary modes that articulate its preoccupations. His speaker indicates that current writing, Spenser’s already having been made a notable exception (‘His Defiance to Enuie’, 107–8), deforms the genres now most fashionable. Aptly enough, given the re-presentation of libertas and recusatio in those programmatic poems that preface Virgidemiae, Hall’s speaker opens with repudiation of romance epic, which he obliquely criticizes for wantonness, perhaps errancy, and luxuriance. ‘Nor Ladies wanton loue, nor wandring knight, / Legend I out in rymes all richly dight’, he says (1–2); and what is hinted at there finds more overt expression in the lines that ensue. He continues soon after: ‘Nor list I sonnet of my Mistresse face, / To paint some Blowesse with a borrowed grace’ (5–6). Then, a little later, ‘Nor can I crouch, and writhe my fauning tayle / To some great Patron, for my best auaile’ (11–12). Hall’s persona suggests that contemporary and fashionable writing distorts the genres it employs because it is pervasively informed by misdirected and distorted desire. Horace at times connects overreaching and unsuccessful attempts at writing with cupido falsus; but Persius and Juvenal do that repeatedly and so too does Hall’s persona—here and hereafter throughout Book 1. Further, he insists at the close to Satire 1 that he voices his poems in isolation from both the world of letters and

Hall’s Virgidemiae  125 the world in general (19–28). They derive, as he indicates at the poem’s end, from within the environs of Cambridge; and he reminds us, via a respectful allusion to the Faerie Queene, that also from Cambridge has come one romance epic from which he will decidedly not disassociate himself, and which was written by a fellow Cambridge poet (28–32). Pursuing that connection between misdirected desire and the distortion of genre in contemporary literature, Hall makes clear what form cupido falsus now ultimately takes in his world and what deformation of the genres ultimately signifies. This he begins to do in the second satire. The Muses were once ‘nine Vestall maides’ (1), his persona fables, but unaccountably were subjected to violation (14). Whoever might have borne original culpability for the sexual assault to which they were subjected, he adds (10–12), the Muses themselves were transformed by their experience: And [they,] euer since disdaining sacred shame, Done ought that might their heauenly stock defame. Now is Pernassus turned to the stewes: And on Bay-stockes the wanton Myrtle growes. Cythêron hill’s become a Brothel-bed[.] (17–19) Hall’s speaker concludes his mock-aetiological fable by declaring to those contemporary poets who are participants in literature’s deformation: ‘Ye bastard Poets see your Pedegree, / From common Trulls, and loathsome Brothelry’ (37–8). His mythmaking elaborates in effect on the allusions to wantonness and luxuriance at the first satire’s start. It emphasizes that concupiscence shapes modern writing—and concupiscence becomes an inclusive as well as dominant category throughout Hall’s remaining satires. To begin illustrating this, one could representatively cite 1,7,1–15 but more interesting examples occur in Book 1’s eighth and third satires. Attacking the religious verse of Robert Southwell, probably Thomas Lodge, and Gervase Markham, Hall’s persona says in the former poem: Now good Saint Peter weeps pure Helicon, And both the Maries make a Musick mone: Yea and the Prophet of heauenly Lyre, Great Salomon, sings in the English Quire, And is become a newfound Sonetist, Singing his loue, the holy spouse of Christ: Like as she were some light-skirts of the rest[.] (5–11) The personal religious beliefs of those Catholic writers are not his concern; their affectively devotional aesthetics are. Hall’s persona condemns,

126 Hall’s Virgidemiae as we might anticipate given Hall’s Puritan background and presently Emmanuel College environment, what is to all intents and purposes their importing the affective aesthetics of Counter-Reformation baroque literature from Europe into English religious verse. This he makes especially clear in lines 5–6, where he alludes to the literature of tears (a sub-genre popular in Counter-Reformation poetry) and then to the heightened sensuousness, erotically nuanced, which was of course a tactic deployed across differing Counter-Reformation arts—not across the literary kinds alone. And he proceeds to elaborate on that tactic throughout the passage’s remaining lines. He thus principally deprecates the verse of those Catholic poets for its merging the erotic with the sacred and hence its transformation of the sacred into a sexual phenomenon: for its deforming devotion by way of a concupiscent aesthetics. If, according to Hall’s speaker, cupido falsus in the guise of concupiscence pervasively distorts genre in contemporary literature, it therefore also warps representation of and response to the sacred. Likewise, he asserts in Satire 3, it at once destabilizes the equanimity of private life and prompts aspirations threatening civil stability. When proposing that some contemporary writers experience only alcoholic inspiration (1–8), Hall’s persona illustratively accuses Christopher Marlowe (among anonymous others, quite possibly including Shakespeare) of a drunken hubris that deforms tragic drama: One higher pitch’d doth set his soaring thought On crowned kings that Fortune hath low brought: Or some vpreared, high-aspiring swaine As it might be the Turkish Tamberlaine. Then weeneth he his base drink-drowned spright, Rapt to the threefold loft of heauens hight, When he conceiues vpon his fained stage The stalking steps of his great personage, Graced with huf-cap termes and thundering threats That his poore hearers hayre quite vpright sets. Such soone, as some braue-minded hungry youth, Sees fitly frame to his wide-strained mouth[.] (9–20) There Hall’s speaker considers the literary transmission not of eroticized religious desire but of a misdirected desire for power. His mock-heroic narrative focuses on what he projects as Marlowe’s authorial hubris, and on how that generates a moving icon of the will to illicit sovereignty, ‘Tamberlaine’, whose hubris in turn motivates a latter-day ‘high-aspiring swaine’—captivated by the icon before him—to iterate and so to embody its cupido falsus. Hall’s persona, considering the Elizabethan theatrical interest in depicting political dominance lost or

Hall’s Virgidemiae  127 (especially) seized, fashions Marlowe into an exemplum of immoderate authorial ambition who, overwhelmed by his own aspirations to power, creates a dramatic image of the will to illimitable dominance—which itself has power, in turn, to beget that very desire within the susceptible (as indicated chiefly at 9,11–12 and 19–20). In that passage, Hall’s persona explores what can follow from a mimesis contaminated by overreaching, self-centred acquisitiveness. As the prefatory poems and those representative episodes from the early satires suggest, then, Hall reshapes libertas and dismisses recusatio in order to trace throughout later Elizabethan society the pervasiveness of cupido falsus that he has also reinterpreted. He at once extends what the category of misdirected desire can mean in satiric verse modelled on Roman precedent, and gives it an immediate relevance to his contemporaries. Hall’s images of misdirected desire indicate that he sees it as variously involving displacement and dispossession: in the first place, of course, rightly ordered desire’s displacement by its counterfeit; second, the desirer’s consequent failure to possess what would be indeed a worthy object of desire.36 They correlatively imply, therefore, a displacement of right reason in the desirer and hence loss of what he or she could be and should be. Inasmuch as they suggest such things, they accord to an extent with Horace’s critiques of cupido falsus from Epicurean and Stoic perspectives; they have some congruence too with Persius’ attacks, from an insistently Stoic angle of vision, on misdirected desire. Yet they are much more closely akin to Augustine’s view of postlapsarian humankind as marked by cupiditas—which has some commonality with Cicero’s understanding of cupiditas, cited above—and to Calvin’s notion, itself an elaboration on and departure from Augustine’s thought, that after the Fall humankind carries the infection of concupiscentia (concupiscence). According to Augustine, our fallen human consciousness has always to choose between egocentric or theocentric desire, namely, between cupiditas or caritas—the former inclining us to enjoy (frui) the world and merely use (uti) God, but the latter to enjoy God and merely use the world.37 Similarly, Calvin writes in his Institutes of concupiscentia that even the regenerate are not free from contamination by ‘illo concupiscendi morbo’ (‘that disease, concupiscence’), which functions as ‘kindling to [the flame of] evil’ (‘mali fomitem’) within the consciousnesses of all fallen humankind. It both incites sinful desire and is, he goes on to assert by way of correcting Augustine, sinful in its own right. 38 Mindful of those Christian insights into what constitutes misdirected desire and how it inhabits human consciousness, we can see that whereas notions of cupido falsus familiar to, say, Horace or Persius would be adequate enough for evaluating Hall’s allegory of the Muses in 2,1–19, they would be less than adequate for appreciation of his attack on the appearance of Counter-Reformation aesthetics in contemporary devotional verse (8,5–11). Augustine’s thinking on cupiditas and Calvin’s on

128 Hall’s Virgidemiae concupiscentia evidently provide more apt theoretical contexts for Hall’s depiction of authorial failures to distinguish between sacred and profane desires. The same could be said of Hall’s attack on some modern tragedians, most notably Marlowe. There his satire on overreaching authorial ambition critiques an immoderate desire that manifests itself as hubris dramatizing hubris, which certainly recalls Persius and Juvenal’s ridicule of bathetic attempts by contemporaries at fashioning high tragedy. Yet Hall’s disdain for what he presents as, in effect, a latter-day reprise of such precedents has an element that of necessity they could not possess. His ironic picture of Marlowe being ecstatically borne heavenwards by joy at the creation of his Tamburlaine, whom he has graced with extravagant dialogue, has a theatrical dimension (through allusion to a playhouse’s ‘loft’, at 14) but a more emphatically religious one. Hall’s portrayal of Marlowe thus traces a process of self-centred, delusionary aspiration that we can recognize as having affinities with classical thought and nonetheless clearly as well with Augustine’s cupiditas or Calvin’s concupiscentia. Just as Hall by implication broadens and modernizes the category of cupido falsus across his satires, so he seems in effect to expand and renew the motif of anger. That is to say, one cannot determine whether he works with current thinking about anger in his poems or, contrariwise, fashions poems that may harmonize with but do not deliberately engage with aspects of it. Yet what matters, either way, is that if Juvenal emphasizes and problematizes anger throughout his satires, Hall characterizes his persona, whom he designs partly after Juvenal’s, in terms of an anger both prominent and diverse. The primary representation of anger in Virgidemiae is performance of outrage: anger that notionally distances the speaker from what he deprecates and hence, by extension, sets him apart from a culture almost pervasively experiencing crisis. This recalls ira or indignatio as manifested from the outset by Juvenal’s speaker and, thereafter, also queried by him; indeed, it is an emotional state about which Hall’s persona reveals differing attitudes. Sometimes he announces his commitment to viewing the world with righteous indignation. Occasionally, however, he appears ambivalent about committing himself to violent reproachfulness. 39 Further, sometimes in Virgidemiae Hall’s persona seems not so much to voice rage as disdain—to articulate disdegno rather than ira, as he indicates when beginning the ‘Prologue’ to Book 1 (1–2).40 Throughout all Virgidemiae Hall emphasizes that he sees staging anger as foremost among the things a satirist does (whatever form he might assign to anger in any given poem). But his foregrounding anger nevertheless has—aside from its function of associating Hall with Juvenal—another role, and one that Hall might or might not have intended. Then-current psychological theorizing linked anger with what was called the irascible appetite: the aspect of

Hall’s Virgidemiae  129 our consciousness inclining us away from the harmful, the inconvenient, the unattractive.41 Hall’s stress upon anger in Virgidemiae may perhaps signal his concurrence with psychological thought of his time inasmuch as exhibiting anger could notionally serve to stimulate the irascible appetites of his readers and encourage them to avoid the follies that he castigates. His recurrent interest in anger therefore links his satires with both authority from the past and speculative inquiry from the present. There is nonetheless a topicality to Virgidemiae beyond its concern with the failures of modern literature and, inseparable from that concern, its points of connection with Elizabethan psychological speculation or an Augustinian-Calvinist theology. One can see this, for example, in the modernizing of estates satire that occurs within Book 2, from poems 3 to 6. The third poem denigrates corrupt lawyers, the fourth mocks grasping physicians, the fifth derides corrupters of the clergy, and the sixth continues that theme by offering a brilliant ‘character’ of an impoverished chaplain (5–16).42 After the transition that opens Book 2—the poem addressed to a failed writer identified as Labeo, a name taken from Persius’ first satire—Hall proceeds to enlarge our perspective on a culture that he represents as brought to crisis because informed and contaminated by varieties of aberrant desire. This he continues to do, and with similar immediacy, throughout the subsequent couple of Books. He begins Book 3 by revisiting the Golden Age mythos, which he Christianises in terms that echo those used earlier to condemn Marlowe. Narrating the fall of humankind from its original and paradisal condition, Hall’s persona attributes our loss of innocence to the emergence of cultural practices that engendered ‘Pride’ and ‘Couetise’—these joined concepts together evoking Augustine’s cupiditas and Calvin’s concupiscentia: Then crept in Pride, and peeuish Couetise: And men grew greedy, discordous and nice. Now man, that earst Haile-fellow was with beast, Woxe on to weene himselfe a God at least. No aery foule can take so high a flight, Tho she her daring wings in clouds haue dight: Nor fish can diue so deepe in yeelding Sea, Tho Thetis-selfe should sweare her safetie: Nor fearefull beast can dig his caue so lowe, All could he further then Earths center goe: As that the ayre, the earth, or Ocean, Should shield them from the gorge of greedy man. ***

130 Hall’s Virgidemiae O Nature: was the world ordain’d for nought, But fill mans maw, and feede mans idle thought[?] (3,1,42–53 and 56–7) Soon after, by way of ending the poem, he shows how cupido falsus in that guise—now definitively established within Virgidemiae—­manifests itself throughout present-day England. It turns the English world upside down, he implies; and his emblem for this national instantiation of the mundus inversus topos is what might be called a binary ‘character’. He depicts someone who has abandoned his traditional national identity (and conventionally male selfhood) through seeking to become, in pursuit of luxuria, a microcosm of Europe (64–71). This representative individual may well be moreover a member of the underclass and hence not notionally entitled to the aspirations his luxuriousness reveals (72–5—again, a point of contact with the earlier critique of Marlowe). As the persona goes on to declare, ‘Lo the long date of those expired daies,  / Which the inspired Merlins word foresaies: / When dunghill Pesants shall be dight as kings, / Then one confusion another brings’ (76–9). Hall’s metonymic image of a multifarious displacement and dispossession, these being consequent upon misdirected desire as delineated earlier in the satire, serves to advance (as we recognize at once) his explorations in outspoken estates satire: his libertas finding expression via ‘character’ and epigram. So he continues throughout the remainder of Book 3 with, however, a change of satiric manner and thematic emphasis (but not focus) in Book 4. After 3,1 for example, the immediately sequent ‘character’ of ‘Greet Osmond’ (3,2,1–24) elaborates on the overreaching concupiscence studied in that previous poem, and it too glances back towards the critique of Marlowe at 1,3,9–20 (see 1–10). Thereupon follow the similarly conceived ‘characters’ of Polemon and Myson (respectively, 4,1–24 then 25–30), of ‘[a] lustie Courtier’ (5,5–28), of Gullion (6,1–24) and of Ruffio (7,5–66)—the last of which returns us to the representative figure depicted in the Book’s initial satire. Book 4 opens with a change from what might be called an Horatian register to one that Hall himself thought of as Juvenalian.43 Further, although the satires of Book 4 iterate concerns and tactics pre-eminent across those of the preceding Books, they also suggest more emphatically that the misdirected, overreaching desire on which their predecessors focus has brought about a social mobility threatening to effect social incoherence. That dynamic of iteration and intensification can be readily demonstrated. In 4,4, to offer one illustration of the former, Hall’s persona at first briefly sketches Lolio’s son, Pontice, Sigalion, and then refers again to Labeo (1–15). This small rogues’ gallery preludes his delineation of Gallio, whose ‘character’ he renders in detail and who appears as a precursor to Jonson’s Epicure Mammon, yet a Mammon feminized

Hall’s Virgidemiae  131 by luxurious extravagance and here contrasted with the aggressively if crudely masculine Vorano, Martius and Make-fray (severally at 36–41, 42–5, 52–9), their ‘characters’ being embedded in his own. Just so, in Satire 6, Hall fashions his vivid ‘character’ of ‘[t]he sturdie Plough-man’ whose naive ambition for military splendour and gain compels him to become a soldier—and then makes him an exemplar of the maxim dulce belllum inexpertis (4,6,36–49).44 But early among these various representations of how cupido falsus destabilizes individual lives and impacts on those of others, Hall stresses—via the extended narrative centred on the figures of Lolio and his son (both of whom are mentioned, as we have seen, in 4,4)—that it can have still more widely disruptive social outcomes. Hall’s ironic fable, unfolded in Satire 2, tells of Lolio, a rustic who leads a miser’s life because obsessed with desire for his son to become a gentleman, and hence acquire status that will reflect on Lolio himself (1–60 and 109–16). Having deprived himself of all comforts so that his son can acquire a legal education and social polish, he luxuriates in the status of his heir (109–16)—whereas the son is embarrassed by the father’s humble circumstances and desperately seeks to obscure them (71–84). The point of Hall’s fable is nonetheless not so much that one day Lolio’s son may very well become a person of influence, in which case he will no doubt pay for a false genealogy so as to obscure his real origins (117–32). True, Hall’s persona does suggest that Lolio’s misdirected and immoderate desire, which results in his self-dispossession throughout his life, will probably result in his displacement after his death (the very erasure of his name, as 119–20 indicate). More important, Hall has his persona think ahead to a communal future that could be significantly shaped by Lolio and his successive offspring: How I fore-see in many ages past, When Lolioes caytiue name is quite defa’st, Thine heire, thine heyres heyre, & his heyre againe From out the loynes of carefull Lolian, Shall climbe vp to the Chancell pewes on hie, And rule and raigne in their rich Tenancie; When pearch’t aloft to perfect their estate They racke their rents vnto a treble rate; And hedge in all the neighbour common-lands, And clodge their slauish tenant with commaunds, Whiles they, poore soules, with feeling sighs complain And wish old Lolio were aliue again, And praise his gentle soule and wish it well[.] (119–31) The persona prophesies that Lolio’s son and successors may well fulfil Lolio’s ambition, his will to vicarious power, beyond Lolio’s own

132 Hall’s Virgidemiae aspirations—and that they may well, in addition, do their best to eradicate their connection to him. Yet should they rise to high office, he proffers, they will necessarily transmit Lolio’s cupido falsus—the self-centred greed for money and thence power, which generated their ascent—more widely than could he into the community: they will inflict its effects disastrously on those below them, making Lolio to be remembered, and to be recollected (ironically enough) as humane. Hall proceeds to explore repeatedly across Books 5 and 6 the wider societal impact that cupido falsus can have when empowered by the authority of the state. These concluding Books of Virgidemiae put forward, in consequence, what are perhaps the collection’s most controversially topical representations of misdirected desire. Throughout them, Hall exercises libertas in denouncing a concupiscence that has been sanctioned as well as emboldened by current law, and that, having been so, seeks to negate the virtues contrary to it. His immediate point of focus, as has been amply documented, is the enclosure movement and the statutes that have made the movement possible, allowing landowners to inflict deprivation and hence worse poverty or destitution on their dependants.45 His persona’s condemnations of the grasping greed manifested by enclosures of common land recall the contempt displayed for Lolio’s avarice in 4,2 (see, for example, 5,2,65–96 along with 5,3,24–87). Yet although Hall’s attack on the enclosure movement has been illuminated in some detail, and the indignatio of his persona has likewise received comment, the larger moral implications of his attack have been given less attention. What it means in moral terms if cupido falsus—for Hall, as we have seen, a concupiscence identifiable with Augustine’s cupiditas and Calvin’s concupiscentia—is to some degree authorized by the mechanisms of government, remains to be clarified. Hall indicates the moral concerns that frame his attacks upon the enclosure movement and its facilitation by the state when he has his persona lament how those phenomena in particular have brought about a decline of communal benevolence in rural life: indifference to the collapse of domestic economies; denial of hospitality by great households; caricature of the communal ideal itself. One sees this for example in the portrayal of an impoverished tenant (5,1,51–80), in the description of country house life that denies welcome to guests and relief to the poor (5,2 passim), in the description of an individual covetousness that refuses to acknowledge the rights and needs of others (5,3,35–87)—depictions of provincial tyranny and oppression.46 Hall’s persona decries the passing of charitableness, of mutually supportive social interaction across life in the country. In doing so, moreover, he does not merely emphasize that the enclosure movement has brought widespread social injustice and its evils into agrarian life. He intimates that cupido falsus thus expressed, and quite identifiable in Augustinian-Calvinist terms familiar to contemporary readers, actually negates concepts asserted by Augustine and

Hall’s Virgidemiae  133 Calvin to be essential for rightly ordered human existence—both personal and communal. These are, specifically, Augustine’s idea of caritas (theocentric love for others) and Calvin’s of mutua communicatio (his notion, resembling Augustine’s, that we owe a duty of love and care to others because all humankind is made in God’s image).47 By virtually negating those concepts, Hall’s persona angrily implies, the enclosure movement has transformed the rural world into a near-dystopian society amid a wider England in cultural crisis. Similar displays of outspoken and various anger by Hall’s persona recur across Virgidemiae, as we have seen, and they characterize him as distanced from the follies he berates, a stance foreshadowed by the prefatory His Defiance to Enuie when it evokes thenconventional linking of satire with satyrs (76–8, discussed above). The persona’s satiric/satyric wildness presents him in the role of outsider: as in exile amidst his society. Nevertheless, through this staging of a voluntary marginalization, Hall gestures directly towards his personal and actual remoteness—his fortunate self-marginalization—from the moral and social turmoil, as he perceives it, of his times. One could cite in that respect the affectionate reference to Spenser and Cambridge at 1,1,27–32—where he alludes to himself as a Cambridge poet. More distinct and emphatic is however this association of himself with his university and its detachment from the public sphere: Oh let me lead an Academicke life, To know much, and to thinke we nothing know; Nothing to haue, yet thinke we haue enough, In skill to want, and wanting seeke for more, In weale nor want, nor wish for greater store; Enuye ye Monarchs with your proud excesse At our low Sayle, and our hye Happinesse. (4,6, 83–9) There Hall’s persona represents the microcosmic community to which Hall himself belongs at Cambridge as free from the concupiscence otherwise pervading English society. Appropriately, then, those lines communicate a happy self-sufficiency and self-containment; they are untouched by the anger that accompanies, elsewhere in Virgidemiae, indictments of cupido falsus. It is a picture of civil society in miniature, which recalls passages in both Horace and Persius.48 If staged anger can thus suggest distancing from what it repudiates, so too—albeit momentarily—can calm. *** To recognize that the concepts and topoi of libertas, recusatio, and exile are elemental to Virgidemiae as they are likewise to the satires of Horace,

134 Hall’s Virgidemiae Persius, and Juvenal is to appreciate that although in his controversial collection of poems Hall certainly did aim at imitation of Juvenal—a longstanding and well-founded scholarly judgement—he had still greater ambitions. One can consequently appreciate that throughout Virgidemiae Hall sought a more inclusive imitation and in fact emulation of Roman satiric tradition: that by reinventing some of its primary constituents he sought to pioneer its naturalization into England. His ambition was, in short, to recreate Roman satiric practice, to rival it, and thereby to fashion the first truly formal verse satire in his homeland that could manifest continuity with as well as independence from Roman precedent. This he did by focusing his persona’s outspokenness, or libertas, on misdirected desire (the cupido falsus recurrently critiqued in Roman satire) that could be interpreted in terms of Roman thought about aberrant aspiration yet could also be understood in Augustinian and Calvinist terms. Moreover, he had his persona suggest, even before commencing attack on contemporary follies, that true heroism could now take its exemplar not so much from the chivalry central to romance epic but from the daring free speech of satire. Finally, he portrayed his persona as necessarily marginalized from a culture in crisis while nonetheless belonging to a microcosmic community emblematic of personal and civil virtues. Looking out from his personal environment at Cambridge, Hall appears to have observed several aspects of English society at large that he found disturbing. He seems, for example, to have seen much contemporary literature as offering a distorted representation of at once English social life and, more broadly, human consciousness itself. He undoubtedly saw, furthermore, the enclosure movement along with its legal substructure as enacting and further enabling a distortion of traditional, Christian social relations. To his Puritan cast of thought, it may well have seemed that what Horace called cupido falsus—which he and his coevals knew as cupiditas or concupiscentia—was permeating his world. Virgidemiae was his substantial response.

Notes 1 Reference here and throughout is to Joseph Hall, The Poems, ed. Arnold Davenport (1949: rpt. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969), cited consequently as Davenport. Virgidemia means ‘a harvest of rods’, the trope signifying ‘a severe beating’ (Oxford Latin Dictionary). Hall’s title to his collection, Virgidemiarum, Sixe Bookes, thus suggests ‘six books of harvests of rods’ and hence ‘six books of severe beatings’. 2 Davenport, The Poems, xxiv–xxv. On Hall’s identifying anger as a motive for writing satire, see the prefatory ‘His Defiance to Enuie’ 109–14 and the prefatory epigram, 1–4 (echoing, as Davenport also notes, Juvenal 1.79–80). See too Hall’s prefatory poem to his last three books of satires, ‘The Authors charge to his Satyres’, 1–2. Reference to Juvenal, and subsequently to Persius, is from Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Hall’s Virgidemiae  135 3 Those possible meanings of the term are cited by Lewis and Short in their A Latin Dictionary. 4 Those potential meanings are cited in The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 5 The first two meanings are cited in A Latin Dictionary and the third in The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 6 I write cupido falsus and not falsa because Horace routinely masculinizes that noun. The phrase signifies intense but erroneous, misdirected, spurious, illusory desire (as discussion of Horace’s satires, below, will demonstrate; see also the entries for both words in The Oxford Classical Dictionary and A Latin Dictionary). 7 Contrast ‘His Defiance to Enuie’, 65–6 and 76–9 with ‘Prologue’, 1–8 and 19–24, which evidently allude to Faerie Queene 1; see additionally the ‘Prologue’ to Book Two, 9–10. 8 On Hall while at Emmanuel College, see Davenport xv-xviii. See also Frank Livingstone Huntley, Bishop Joseph Hall, 1574–1656: A Biographical and Critical Study (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), 4–9 and Richard A. McCabe, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 7, 11, 30, 77. Hereafter, the latter studies will be cited severally as Huntley and McCabe. 9 See Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretative Introduction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 54–7, here chiefly at 54. See also: Donald Earl, The Moral and Political Tradition of Rome (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 54–5 and 59–60; Florence Dupont, ‘Recitatio and the Reorganization of the Space of Public Discourse’, in The Roman Cultural Revolution, eds. Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 44–59, especially at 52–6; Kirk Freudenberg, Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3–4, 48–51; Myles McDonnell, Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic (2006; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 173–80. 10 ‘Praeterea, ne sic, ut qui iocularia, ridens / percurram: quamquam ridentem dicere verum / quid vetat?’ 11 In the original, which immediately illustrates and thereby, in part, explicates the idea of ‘blind desire’: ‘At bona pars hominum decepta cupidine falso / “nil satis est” inquit, “quia tanti quantum habeas sis”’ (61–2). ‘But a good many people, misled by blind desire, say, “You cannot have enough: for you get your rating from what you have”’. 12 1.1.2, from Rhetorici libri duo qui vocantur de inventione. M. Tullius Cicero, ed. Eduard Stroebel (Lipsiae: Aedes B.G. Teubneri, 1915). My translation. 13 On Horace as satirist, see representatively: George Converse Fiske, Lucilius and Horace: A Study in the Classical Theory of Imitation (1920; rpt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966); Niall Rudd, The Satires of Horace (1966; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 86–131 and 243–57; Kirk Freudenberg, The Walking Muse: Horace on the Theory of Satire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 52–108; R. O. A. M. Lyne, Horace: Behind the Public Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), especially at 34–9, 75–7, 103–6; Kirk Freudenberg, Satires of Rome (cited above), 15–124; Catherine Keane, Figuring Genre in Roman Satire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), particularly at 76–87 and 108–12; Michael C. J. Putnam, Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 48–71; Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 72, 81, 153, 204.

136 Hall’s Virgidemiae 14 Just so, Persius and Juvenal would carefully acknowledge and distinguish themselves from Horace—with Juvenal also iterating, while altering, aspects of Persius’ satires. 15 See: 1.4.1–13 and 56–62; 1.10.53–65; and 2.1.17, 29, 62, 75. 16 Severally: 1.2.111–116; 1.8.23–45; 2.3.158–9; 2.5.10–69 and 84–110. 17 Especially 1.10.37: ‘haec ego ludo’ (‘I amuse myself with these things [his satires]—my translation). Cf. 2.1.12–20. 18 ‘“Maecenas quomodo tecum?” / hinc repetit: “paucorum hominum et mentis bene sanae”’ (my translation). 19 On Persius’ satires, see representatively: Freudenberg, Satires of Rome, 125–208; Catherine Keane, Figuring Genre (cited above), especially at 25– 6, 82–94; Maria Plaza, ed., Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Persius and Juvenal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 17–254 (and hereafter cited as Plaza); Kenneth J. Reckford, Recognizing Persius (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), particularly at 16–51; Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome (cited above), 72. See also Peter E. Medine, ‘Isaac Casaubon’s Prolegomena to the Satires of Persius: An Introduction, Text, and Translation’, English Literary Renaissance, 6 (1976), 271–98. 20 ‘quae tibi summa boni est? uncta vixisse patella / semper [?]’ and ‘Vt nemo in sese temptat descendere, nemo’. 21 ‘subeas alternus oportet / anticipiti obsequio dominos’. 22 ‘nonne licet medio ceras implere capaces / quadrivio, cum iam sexta cervice feratur / hinc atque inde patens ac nuda paene cathedra / et multum referens de Maecenate supino [?]’ 23 ‘Vltra Sauromatas fugere hinc libet et glacialem / Oceanum, quotiens aliquid de moribus audent / qui Curios simulant et Bacchanalia vivunt’. 24 Scholarly accounts of Juvenal include Gilbert Highet, Juvenal the Satirist: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954); Edward Courtney, A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal (1980; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Freudenberg, 209–77; Frederick Jones, Juvenal and the Satiric Genre (London: Duckworth, 2007), especially at 95–132; Keane, 13–72; Plaza, 257–532—especially at 361–449 (W. S Anderson’s landmark essay on Juvenal and anger); Catherine Keane, Juvenal and the Satiric Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chiefly at 26–86; James Uden, The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3–23 and 206–18. See also Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 35–6. 25 Cur tamen hoc potius libeat decurrere campo, / per quem magnus equos Auruncae flexit alumnus, / si vacat ac placidi rationem admittitis, edam. / cum tener uxorem ducat spado, Mevia Tuscum / figat aprum et nuda teneat venabula mamma, / patricios omnis opibus cum provocet unus / quo tondente gravis iuveni mihi barba sonabat, / cum pars Niliacae plebis, cum verna Canopi / Crispinus Tyrias umero revocante lacernas / ventilet aestivum digitis sudantibus aurum, [nec sufferre queat maioris pondera gemmae] / difficile est saturam non scribere. 26 ‘haec ego non credam Venusina digna lucerna? / haec ego no agitem?’ 27 One need hardly offer a list, but among many instances cf.: 2,110–116; 3, 90–125; 4,37–149; 5,156–173. 28 ‘Semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam / vexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi? / inpune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas, / hic elegos?’ 29 See, for example: 1,58–62; 3,195–200 and 278–85; 6,82–91; 10,256–64. 30 On the social circumstances within which Hall was writing, see: Huntley, 10–45; McCabe, 53–72. See also: Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England

Hall’s Virgidemiae  137

31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42 43

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 3–23 and 44–119; Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 75–6, 106–7, 119–20, 149–50, 177–89; David Scott Kastan, ‘Naughty Printed Books’, in Brian Cummings and James Simpson, eds, Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (2010; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 287–302; Richard McCabe, Ungainefull Arte: Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 221–3. On his arguments with Marston and others, see: Davenport, xxviii–lx; Huntley, 22 and 29–45; McCabe, 70–1. For general surveys of Hall in relation to other satirists of the English Renaissance, see: Colin Burrow, ‘Roman Satire in the Sixteenth Century’, in Kirk Freudenberg, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 243–60; Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Evolution of Tudor Satire’, in Arthur F. Kinney, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 220–40; James S. Baumlin, ‘Generic Contexts of Elizabethan Satire: Rhetoric, Poetic Theory, and Imitation’, in Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ed., Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 444–67. Cf. ‘Or whether list me sing so personate, / My striuing selfe to conquer with my verse’ (103–4). Hall will stress later in Virgidemiae that his satires are by no means mindful of Juvenal alone (4,1 at 1–4, for instance). Reference here and subsequently is from The Faerie Queene, Book One, ed. Carol V. Kaske (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006). Hall repeatedly alludes to Spenserian texts in Virgidemiae. Early instances occur at: ‘His Defiance to Enuie’, 49, 51, 85–94; then 1,1,19–22; 1,2,15–32. Davenport too notes these—and further examples. Donne, at the end of his Satires, ostentatiously excludes Elizabeth I from any responsibility for her nation’s ills; Hall is in effect silent about the monarchy. Hall makes these points throughout Mundus Alter et Idem, as for instance when his narrator describes the customs of the Moronians. See Another World and Yet the Same: Bishop Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem, trans. and ed. John Millar Wands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 94–105. See De Doctrina Christiana Libri Quatuor, 3.10–11. Cf. 1.3–4 and 22–9 in De Doctrina Christiana Libri Quatuor et Enchiridion ad Laurentium, ed. C. H. Bruder (Lipsiae: Caroli Tauchnitii, 1838). John Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis, 3.3.10 (my translation). Contrast, for example, De suis Satyris, 3–4 (then 4,1,174–5 and 4,7,73–4 as well as 5,3,1–2 or 6,1,21–2) with The Authors charge to his Satyres, 1–2. Cf. 1,3,57–8 along with 6,1,304–5. See representatively: Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall, introd. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 15–26; Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1656; rpt. London: EEBO Editions, 2016), 313–24. Hall is, we perceive at once, modernizing as well as naturalizing Horace’s and Juvenal’s deployment of ‘characters’: it is another of his tactics for making Roman satiric tradition topically relevant to his readers. In ‘A Post-script to the Reader’, which comes after the last three Books of Virgidemiae (the ‘byting Satyres’, as he called them), Hall writes: ‘I thinke my first Satyre [that is, 4,1] doth somewhat resemble the soure and crabbed face of Iuuenals, which I indeauouring in that, did determinately omit in the rest’ (Davenport, 99, at 90–3).

138 Hall’s Virgidemiae 44 Erasmus famously writes on that topic, but so too of course does Gascoigne— in a poem bearing that name and ending with discussion of the maxim itself. 45 See McCabe, 54–72. See also Huntley, 21. 46 Cf. 5,4, 18–22. 47 De Doctrina Christiana, 3.10–11 (cited above, n. 37). See also Calvin’s commentary on Matthew 5:43, in Commentarius in Harmoniam Evangelicam, Joannis Calvini Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia, eds. Edouard Cunitz, Johann-Wilhelm Baum, Eduard Wilhelm Eugen Reuss, vol. 45 (Brunsvigae: C. A. Schwetschke, 1863), col. 187. 48 See, for example: Horace, 2.2.1–7 and 63–93, along with 112–36; Persius, 5.109–12 and 6.18–41.

6 The Protean Mythology and Calvinist Theology of Exile in Marston’s Satires

John Marston’s verse satires have disconcerted many of his modern commentators. To some extent, as one soon recognizes, this has been for the same reason that they startled contemporary readers. Throughout his Certaine Satyres (printed in 1598 along with an epyllion, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image) and the larger collection that followed it later the same year, namely, The Scourge of Villanie (to which a single poem was added in 1599), he dramatizes often virulently confrontational personae—in particular, the persona who voices The Scourge and whom he identifies as W. Kinsayder.1 There is nevertheless another and arguably more important reason. Although Marston’s verse satires allude again and again to their Roman predecessors, they evaluate the society of Elizabethan England from what scholars have considered a problematic, even incoherent (rather than eclectic), point of view largely alien to the philosophic outlooks discernible in, say, the satires of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius. For example, some scholars have argued that the unmistakably Calvinist elements of The Scourge of Villanie render its persona’s satiric denunciations meaningless: according to Calvin, after all, reform itself depends on the allocation of God’s grace, not on human effort; and, in addition, the actually reprobate can’t reform. Moreover, Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie also pervasively assess the Elizabethan world in terms of mythology as well as of mythographic lore; and both collections of satires are glancingly associated with—but thereafter depart from—neostoic criteria. Myths can be made to illustrate Calvinist attitudes or values, of course. So too can mythography of some kinds. Yet the tenets of neostoicism essentially cannot, Calvin himself being hostile to neostoic thought. 2 Here, advancing from my earlier work on the mythology and mythography of Marston’s verse satires, I offer a new account of the latter’s conceptual inclusiveness. Beginning with discussion of Certaine Satyres, I suggest that its poems recurrently foreground, as will those in The Scourge, myths of self-transformation (for instance, the myth of Proteus). Thereby, I argue, they do not establish a pattern of mythic allusion to self-transformation but, rather, make re-fashioning of the self a motif. Through this motif, Marston’s personae indirectly subvert, or

140  Marston’s Satires at least emphasize the negative aspects of, mythographic fictions where humankind’s supposed power to reinvent personal identity is linked with its alleged potential to achieve self-perfection. Fictions of that kind can notably be found in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration Concerning the Dignity of Man as well as in Juan Luis Vives’ A Fable on Man. Further, I also argue, at the same time as Marston’s poems in Certaine Satyres and The Scourge unfold that motif, they turn away from the neostoic values with which they are at first obliquely connected. To appreciate these mythological and mythographic implications of Marston’s verse satires proves helpful, I then propose, for another reason: doing so enables us to understand with some exactness the theology highlighted within The Scourge of Villanie, that is to say, the network of Calvinist concepts variously elicited throughout it. We see, in particular, Marston’s concern that his contemporaries’ distortive or reductive metamorphosing of the self indicates their compulsion to disfigure what Calvin identifies as the imago dei still faintly residual within humankind. Marston’s persona pervasively equates the reinventing of selfhood in his world, then, not just with redefinition of the limits to one’s personal identity but with yet profounder corrosion of one’s quintessential humanity, already marred (almost erased) by the Fall. In consequence, the poems from his second suite of satires offer their readers not so much images intimating where and how aberrant behaviour could be amended by way of voluntaristic reform, but theological insight into behaviour (personal and communal) that could be interpreted as unselfconsciously concupiscent, or knowingly akratic, or at worst as reprobate. Marston thus creates verse satire that is conceptually inclusive while being nevertheless cohesive, that is diverse of thought without becoming intellectually incoherent. He also creates, given especially his persona’s theological preoccupations in The Scourge, verse satire that is not so much neoclassical—for all its allusions to Roman satire—as at the last meta-classical. He writes satire that gestures towards its Roman antecedents and ultimately works within a worldview nullifying many of their basic assumptions; he acknowledges and at the same time finally moves beyond the classical inheritance. In the process, he creates verse satire that articulates what might be called a mythology and theology of exile. Most of humankind is, as he variously represents his world, distanced from its own true humanity; and his personae recognize themselves to be in virtual exile although amidst society. They are separated from almost all those around them by their fury at the extravagant follies to which most of their fellows are notionally addicted (this according with a motif in the satires of Persius and Juvenal). Further, the persona of Certaine Satyres complicates portrayal of his isolation by conceding himself to be grossly flawed: in exile, as it were, from the person he should be—and precisely because he is akin to those whom he excoriates. Such is similarly albeit not identically the case, we come to learn, with Kinsayder in

Marston’s Satires  141 The Scourge. Denouncing his contemporaries’ concupiscentia from the distance of moral outrage, he recurrently if tacitly reveals his own. An intriguing aspect of his characterization is that the extent to which he recognizes his fallibility remains unclear. *** In order to specify what has been argued above, I shall begin with consideration of The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres. At the start of his volume, Marston dedicates his epyllion to ‘Good Opinion’, which he calls in an initial prose apostrophe: ‘Sole Regent of Affection, perpetuall / Ruler of Iudgement, most famous Iustice of / Censures’ (1–3). Although ‘opinion’ evidently had a range of meanings in Marston’s day—and although, no less evidently, those meanings are not always clearly separable from one another—one of its significances among the educated derived from neostoic philosophy. According to Justus Lipsius, for example, opinion is the antithesis of right reason. The latter, he writes, ‘fighteth for the soule, being in the soule’, whereas the former, ‘for, and in the body’. 3 He continues, ‘Reason hath her offspring from heauen, yea from God’ (ibid); thereafter he adds, ‘[b]ut the other part (I mean OPINION) hath his offspring of the bodie, that is of the earth’ (82). In sum, ‘Therefore we define RIGHT REASON to be, A true sense and iudgement of thinges humane and diuine. (So farre as the same appertaineth to vs.) But OPINION (being the contrairie to it) is defined to be, A false and friuolous coniecture of those thinges’ (79–80).4 Lipsius’ definition of right reason draws on Cicero’s account of wisdom in De Officiis, where the Roman author refers to prudentia as ‘the practical knowledge of things to be sought for and of things to be avoided’ while describing wisdom in general as ‘the knowledge of things human and divine’.5 In approximate agreement with Lipsius (and perhaps closer alignment with Cicero), Guillaume Du Vair asserts the following: first, that ‘the good and happines of man consisteth in the right vse of reason’; second, that ‘Wisedome’ [ . . . ] ‘teacheth and telleth vs [ . . . ] what is to be desired and followed, or shunned and auoyded. She remoues al false opinions out of our heads which trouble our braines’.6 Marston’s dedicatory prose and thereupon verse addressing ‘Good Opinion’ seem to set neostoic meanings of ‘opinion’ and ‘right reason’ in ironic interplay. The ostentatiously feigned self-deprecation with which Marston ends his prose address—‘I humbly offer thys my Poem’ (6)—is at once complemented at the start of his poem by the elaborate mock-homage to now ‘Great OPINION’, which he apostrophizes as the ‘soule of Pleasure, Honors only substance, / Great Arbitrator, Vmpire of the Earth, / Whom fleshly Epicures call Vertues essence’ (1–3). He proceeds no less tellingly to represent it as a ‘moouing Orator, whose powrefull breath / Swaies all mens iudgements’ (4–5). We discern at once that Marston

142  Marston’s Satires places opinion and right reason in a strategically unspoken opposition. His prose address calls ‘Good Opinion’ the determinant of both judgement and censure; his apostrophe in verse calls ‘Great OPINION’ the world’s supreme arbitrator [of value or status] and amplifies his antecedent claim that opinion has an irresistible power over how people make sense of things. It has subsumed, he implies, all authority over the ways in which humankind assesses, discriminates, decides. It has left no room for right reason, which might be expected to exercise some role in those processes. Yet at the same time as Marston stages this opposition we discern too its corollaries. We recognize of course that he presents himself as a voice challenging the authority of opinion by allowing right reason, so pervasively occluded and silenced, to be heard. After all, the hyperboles of his mock-panegyrics invite the reader to question, deride, and reject opinion’s hegemonic influence—invite, in other words, its interrogation by recta ratio. This forms the prelude to his ultimately threatening Good—or Great—Opinion, at his poem’s end, with exposure of its authority as an illusion and hence de facto affirmation of right reason’s as genuine (16–18). Indeed, from the very outset Marston’s personifying and individuating opinion indicates his attempt to impose a rational albeit fictional control over it, to superimpose his role as auctor over its sovereignty, which recalls a tactic basic to medieval and Renaissance mock-encomia of Fortune. Thomas More’s poems intended for a Boke of Fortune could be cited in illustration. Yet we also recognize something else. Marston associates opinion with the flesh (consider his reference to ‘fleshly Epicures’ in line 3 of his poem), as does Lipsius. In his second collection of satires, Marston will have Kinsayder repeatedly associate folly with carnality, and evil with the flesh (sarx), when attacking concupiscentia. Desire, the flesh and unreason are obvious preoccupations of Marston’s epyllion, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image. There, Marston’s persona seeks to display coolly effortless, virtuosic control over his mythic materials, that is, to exhibit a contemporaneously Ovidian maniera when reworking a tale from the Metamorphoses. He transforms Ovid’s story into that of himself, as poet, relating mistreatment by a domina petrosa (his mistress, fashioned as a ‘stony lady’ from fin’amor and thence Petrarchan convention), in conjunction with re-presenting the Roman poet’s story about an artist who fashions a literally domina petrosa, is overwhelmed by desire for her, then joys to find her metamorphosed into responsive flesh through the intervention of Venus Vulgaris. As he says, in the 32nd stanza: O wonder not to heare me thus relate, And say to flesh transformed was a stone. Had I my Loue in such a wished state As was afforded to Pigmalion,

Marston’s Satires  143 Though flinty hard, of her you soone should see As strange a transformation wrought by mee. He would be both Pygmalion and the medium of love’s transcendently metamorphic impact; he has already become a transformer of Ovidian myth. Yet what matters most here is that his tale sets out a narrative mingling self-implication with self-distancing. His explicitly and flamboyantly self-reflexive story reveals him as, like Pygmalion, the captive of concupiscence. Obsessive concupiscence means for Pygmalion, however, complete enthrallment with his own artifice, whereas for Marston’s persona it does not. He delights in his tale, but he is nevertheless simultaneously and carefully distanced from it (contrast stanzas 28 and 38, which situate pride in artistic virtuosity against a nominal observing of ethical decorum). This interplay between involvement and disengagement allows us to appreciate how Marston characterizes the persona who voices Certaine Satyres—who acknowledges, and nonetheless turns away from, neostoic values. In between his epyllion and the first of his satires, Marston presents another mock-encomium. The first was, as we have seen, his (dis)praise of Good Opinion; this is its counterpart, directed against Pigmalion. The latter was designed, Marston’s speaker tells us, to display the faults marring contemporary erotic verse—and hence to be a satire in the guise of an erotic poem (‘The Author in prayse of his precedent Poem’, 35–42). Whatever Marston’s motives when making that claim, one consequence is that it allows him to suggest a continuity between poems otherwise different in genre: we are to see that the persona relating Pigmalion now manifests his true identity when delivering Certaine Satyres. The plausibility of his claim need not, then, be an issue even though it could be debated. Moreover, as I have just now suggested, there is in any case a clear likeness between the personae of the two poems, for an intermingling of involvement and disengagement hallmarks their characterizations. The way that it does so starts to become apparent at the close of Marston’s transitional poem. At the very end of his second mock-encomium, Marston’s speaker announces, ‘Thus hauing rail’d against my selfe a while, / Ile snarle at those, which doe the world beguile / With masked shows. Ye changing Proteans list, / And tremble at a barking Satyrist’ (43–6). His declaration, in looking both backwards and forwards, tells us at least three things; each is important and a couple are problematic. First and most directly, it acknowledges Marston’s persona as quite able to make himself the target of satiric attack. It does not exclude self-reflexivity from his satiric gaze—and this becomes, as I shall explain presently, a problem of which he is well aware. Second, and more simply, it indicates that to a degree the following satires will have a cynic temper. Marston’s persona warns that he will snarl and bark, dog-like, at people who deceive

144  Marston’s Satires ‘the world’ by imposing illusions upon it (akin to imposing opinion upon others, thereby disempowering their use of right reason).7 Third, the persona calls those prime targets of his hostility ‘Proteans’. He assigns people who deceive others via self-transformation a specific, mythic identity—which is problematic because in myth and in mythography Proteus most often features as a wisdom figure. Humanist discourses on the distinctive excellence of humankind, ‘the dignity of man’, sometimes notably cast Proteus in that role when they seek to link the human capacity for self-transformation with a supposed human potential to achieve self-perfection. Problems connected with self-reflexivity and self-transformation—that is to say, with involvement and disengagement—arise in the immediately sequent poems. Marston’s initial satire opens with his persona asserting: ‘I cannot show in strange proportion, / Changing my hew like a Camelion. / But you all-canning wits, hold water out, / Yee vizarded-bifronted-Ianian rout’ (1,1–4). It is clear that ‘vizarded’ iterates ‘masked’ from the transitional poem (45); and it is equally apparent that ‘Ianian’ offers a variant of ‘Proteans’ (ibid) as, from the lore of beasts and emblem books, does ‘Camelion’.8 We perceive at once, then, that if Marston’s persona has created a mythic identity for the targets of his satire, he has not done so by way of initiating pervasive allusions to the sea god. Reference to the Proteus myth will certainly follow, passing from Certaine Satyres into The Scourge of Villanie and fading out, to be succeeded by the emblem of the ape.9 He has instead inaugurated a motif for portraying and analysing how his contemporaries, rather than transform themselves in search of self-perfection, metamorphose, and achieve a contented (even delighted) self-distortion: diminution and disfiguration of the self as it seeks to prey on others. I shall elaborate below on his shaping and use of that motif. What needs to be mentioned here is that, when he inaugurates it, he glances again at neostoic values and then goes on to signal his departure from them. When Marston’s persona declares, ‘I cannot show in strange proportion, / Changing my hew like a Camelion’, he implicitly suggests his possession of constantia. That is, he implies his possession of a core neostoic virtue. ‘CONSTANCIE is a right and immoueable strength of the minde [ . . . . ] By STRENGTH, I vnderstande a stedfastnesse not from opinion, but from iudgement and sound reason’, writes Lipsius.10 Nevertheless, Marston’s speaker opens the second satire by glorying in a transformation he has already undergone: ‘I that euen now lisp’d like an Amorist, / Am turn’d into a snaphaunce Satyrist. / O tytle, which my iudgement doth adore!’ (2,1–3). Further, he goes on to distinguish himself from Joseph Hall’s satiric persona in these terms: But if I could in milk-white robes intreate Plebeians fauour, I would shew to be

Marston’s Satires  145 Tribunus plebis, gainst the villany Of these same Proteans, whose hipocrisie, Doth still abuse our fond credulity. But since my selfe am not imaculate, But many spots my minde doth vitiate, I’le leaue the white roabe, and the biting rimes Vnto our moderne Satyres sharpest lines; Whose hungry fangs snarle at some secret sinne. (6–15) In the first of those quotations, Marston’s persona intimates that, despite his previous declaration of immutability, he is nonetheless inconstant and (given what he claims to be his now overtly satirical role) happily so. This he emphasizes at the exclamatory close to his opening remark, where the philosophic weightiness of ‘iudgement’ is countered by the emotional buoyancy of ‘adore!’. In the second quotation, he confesses that although he may denounce the illusions imposed by ‘Proteans’ on a society they exploit, he cannot claim clear moral superiority over them since he is himself contaminated by vice (‘not imaculate’ / ‘vitiate’). Disengagement and involvement merge as the passage unfolds; self-distancing and self-implication meet amid its contradictions. Marston’s persona indicates in the second satire that he is at once virtuously and unvirtuously a ‘protean’: transformed in a good cause, but thence not constant; honest in confessing flaws, yet linked because of them to those whose exploitative viciousness he condemns. By the end of the second satire, he has separated himself from the neostoic values variously evoked and affirmed across a number of his earlier monologues. If his consciously damaging admission reveals both the kind of satirist he cannot be and the kind he does not want to be—inasmuch as he is flawed, on the one hand, and on the other won’t pretend to righteousness he lacks—Marston’s persona nevertheless proceeds at once to demonstrate the kind he is: someone who attacks unrepentant, determined ‘Protean shadowes [who] delude our sights’ (126).11 Marston characterizes his speaker, that is to say, as fascinated and repelled by the interplay amongst metamorphosis, self-distortion, and predation within the objects of his antagonism. A striking illustration of this insistent concern can be seen in the ‘character’ of ‘Bruto the trauailer’ (127–56). The portrayal of Bruto begins, Looke, looke, with what a discontented grace Bruto the trauailer doth sadly pace Long Westminster, ȏ ciuill seeming shade, Marke his sad colours, how demurely clad, Staidnes it selfe, and Nestors grauity Are but the shade of his ciuility. (2,127–32)

146  Marston’s Satires Marston’s persona introduces Bruto as an elegant malcontent, as someone whose stylish display of disappointment is calculated, adroit, and has little to do with spontaneity (‘discontented grace’ suggests the care actually informing what seems to be Bruto’s unstudied behaviour). Through a sequence of telling repetitions, the persona then proceeds to anatomize Bruto’s performance. Bruto’s gait and his manner of dress are tacit declarations of dignity and sobriety (so ‘sadly pace’ as well as ‘sad colours’ indicate—moreover, he appears to surpass ‘Staidnes it selfe’). He appears truly courteous in manner, a courtly presence for all his want of advancement in public life (thus, ‘ciuill’ and ‘ciuility’). Yet the repetition of ‘shade’ has most to tell us. Bruto is merely, the persona asserts, the shadow of a civil selfhood; ‘seeming’ to embody civility, he is in fact its mere umbra or imago. For all that, the illusory self he projects onto the world, the self-transformation that is his disguise (as we shall see), does exert a certain social influence. He successfully creates the illusion of himself as a man of transcendent gravitas, to the point where it is almost as if he were Nestor’s latter-day successor and supplanter—as if Nestor’s symbolic moral weight were just an imperfect foreshadowing of Bruto’s immediate, unsurpassable reality. Nestor was famed for his longevity but no less for his wisdom and ­eloquence.12 By allowing us to hear Bruto in soliloquy, Marston’s persona intimates why Bruto could indeed seem the perfect incarnation of that Homeric hero’s attributes: O thou corrupted age, Which slight regard’st men of sound carriage, Vertue, knowledge, flie to heauen againe Daine not mong these vngratefull sots remain. Well, some tongs I know, some Countries I haue seene And yet these oily Snailes respectles beene Of my good parts. (133–9) Perhaps this is not a soliloquy. Perhaps we are hearing what Bruto says when pretending to think aloud, thereby intending to cozen his auditors. Yet if we do assume his speech to be a soliloquy (as I do), then it shows Bruto being absorbed by his own fiction, being caught up in the transformation through which he feigns an ideal ‘civility’ and hence a gravitas that he does not possess. His speech further attracts our interest because, while it portrays him as a man who appears to embody the very essence of Nestor’s particular excellences, it also brings together complaint and satire. Directly after Bruto’s monologue, however, Marston’s persona emphasizes that Bruto is nonetheless a ‘shade’ and therefore entitled not to satirize others but instead to be satire’s object.

Marston’s Satires  147 Completing the line that contains Bruto’s self-congratulatory close to his monologue, the persona counters with, ‘O worthles puffie slaue!’ (139). This sudden, derisive outburst is in effect explicated throughout the mockery of Bruto that ensues. Marston’s persona proceeds to suggest Bruto’s ‘worthles[sness]’ by revealing Bruto as a very elaborate instance of hypocritical pretence. He asserts, first, that when Bruto visited Venice (fabled at the time for its luxury) he did so chiefly to gain physical pleasure, not at all to practise ‘[v]ertue’ or acquire ‘knowledge’ (135). ‘Did’st thou to Venis goe ought els to haue? / But buy a Lute and vse a Curtezan? / And there to liue like a Cyllenian?’, he asks (140–2), thereupon intensifying his attack via allusion to cosmetics, poison, and pornography (143–6). Nevertheless, he then goes on to disclose the main and much more important focus of his satiric hostility. He demands, ‘What art thou but black clothes? Say Bruto say / Art any thing but onely sad array?’ (147–8). His questions imply that Bruto’s having transformed himself into a simulacrum of grave, civic virtue conceals his actually having metamorphosed into a void: his illusory self covers a distorted and, at the last, erased selfhood. We have been shown that beneath his carefully fashioned façade lies restless, demeaning, futile desire of various kinds, which is to say, what Marston and his contemporaries might possibly have called cupiditas but, far more likely, would have called concupiscentia (142–6). We are now shown that, beneath his façade, Bruto is nothing save a microcosm of European vices (149–56), a mosaic of other people’s follies. He is also Marston’s climactic example in Satire 2 of ‘these same Proteans, whose hipocrisie, / Doth still abuse our fond credulity’ (9–10). The other protean figures in his poem likewise manifest compulsive or misdirected desire that underlies their several versions of shape-shifting.13 But Bruto, with whom the satire ends, most comprehensively indicates where being one of the ‘Proteans’ must at last lead. His characterization implies that the self-transformations observed across society by ­Marston’s persona signify the will to power—or the will to pleasure as concomitant with it—leading towards utter self-negation. In the ‘characters’ who precede Bruto, we discern moral deformation that anticipates not so much a total loss as a total abandonment of a cohesive self. In the portrayal of Bruto, we recognize the continuous, habitual performance of self-­erasure. Yet we therefore recognize too that the characterizations culminating in the depiction of Bruto obliquely subvert or, at least stress negative elements within, the mythography of Proteus as used across humanist deliberations upon ‘the dignity of man’. To consider the ways in which they do so will help clarify the ways in which Marston’s satires present a mythology (and thereafter a theology) of exile. Pico della Mirandola’s Oration Concerning the Dignity of Man and Juan Luis Vives’ A Fable on Man notably illustrate humanist deployments of

148  Marston’s Satires the Proteus myth to represent humankind’s capacity for self-transformation and potential for self-perfection. Pico has God tell Adam, We have made thee [ . . . ] so that with freedom choice [ . . . ] thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgment, to reborn into the higher forms, which are divine. (1.3)14 Soon after, Pico alludes to Proteus—an allusion that allows him to crystallize his view of what distinguishes people from animals or angels. ‘It is man who Asclepius of Athens, arguing from his mutability of character and from his self-transforming nature, on just grounds says was symbolized by Proteus in the mysteries’, he writes (1.4).15 Vives offers a broadly similar argument by portraying humankind in terms of mimesis. At one point, when imagining man-as-actor in performance before the classical divinities, he relates: ‘Then, as he [Jupiter] of gods the greatest, embracing all things in his might, is all things, they [the watching gods] saw man, Jupiter’s mime, be all things also’.16 He continues, The gods were not expecting to see him in more shapes when, behold, he was remade into one of their own race, surpassing the nature of man and relying entirely upon a very wise mind. [ . . . ] At first they were astonished that they, too, should be brought to the stage and impersonated by such a convincing mime, whom they said to be that multiform Proteus, the son of the Ocean. (ibid)17 Vives, like Pico, makes Proteus symbolic of humankind’s ability to metamorphose and through metamorphosis to achieve self-perfection. Kindred deployments of the sea god also appear in texts more contemporaneous with Marston’s satires, namely, Vincenzo Cartari’s Le Imagini de gli dei degli antichi and Natale Conti’s Mythologiae.18 Both those texts were of course themselves influential, and Marston’s persona mentions them together, giving them some prominence, in his second satire (26–9). Quoting Diodorus Siculus, Cartari suggests in Le Imagini that Proteus was actually a ‘king of Egypt’, a man raised to the throne because of his singular wisdom. His reputation for shape-shifting perhaps derived, Cartari reflects, from a prudence so great that he could therefore ‘adapt himself to any situation’ (203).19 Proteus remains, although now in mortal guise, symbolic of humankind’s power to self-transform and to self-perfect through wisdom. Conti agrees. For him, Proteus was a man exemplifying how advantageously adaptable and self-advancing

Marston’s Satires  149 people can become by means of wisdom—which is more precisely to say, prudence. ‘Others’, he writes, ‘claim that Proteus was an exceptionally wise man’. He continues, ‘As far as I’m concerned, if a prudent man ever lived, it was Proteus. He was very good at winning and maintaining friendships, in keeping his emotions in check, and in making sure that character had an effect on how things turned out’. Conti thus explains Proteus’ mutability of form. He then sums up by asserting: ‘But the application of this myth goes far beyond friendship and public administration; it strikes at the core of how we live our lives’ (vol. 2, 729). 20 So Marston’s second satire, the remainder of Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie suggest as well. They imply what is in effect Marston’s emphatic concurrence with Conti. Yet they signal that accord via the inversion or the harsh restriction of what Renaissance mythographic tradition (including Conti’s contribution to it) had repeatedly proposed as the Proteus myth’s central significance. As the second satire and the satires following it indicate, Marston writes against that mythographic tradition. The degree of intent with which he does so cannot be ascertained; to do so may not be his intent. 21 Nevertheless, he fashions a negative or reductive counterpart to it—its shadow, one might say—through which his personae explore moral deformation and self-erasure: self-transformation that approaches or actually effects self-negation amidst a mutable, predatory social environment. In his epyllion, Marston offers a benignly comic, flamboyantly self-reflexive portrayal of desire impelling metamorphosis; in his satires, he offers a tragicomedy of recognition, much as in The Malcontent, where he has metamorphosis manifest the grotesqueness of misdirected and egocentric desire among his contemporaries, of the will to power and to pleasure that urges them towards nothingness. His persona delineates this vision of humankind’s darkly protean capacities and potential diversely across the ensuing poems of Certaine Satyres, sometimes in ways that wittily take us by surprise. Striking instances occur across all three of the remaining poems in the collection. The third satire’s title, Quedam et sunt, et videntur (‘some things are what they seem’), implies that Marston’s persona will now go on to berate folly and vice existing openly, operating without concealment behind an illusion—without concealment behind a transformation that emphasizes, because in stark antithesis to what it notionally masks, how the foolish and vicious have deformed themselves through pursuit of their desires. Certainly, the ‘fantasticke’ (26) whose portrait occupies the first part of the satire (3–42) is described by the persona as ‘[a]n open Asse’ (37): he is just the vicious fool he appears to be (reference to his ‘Ganimede’, at 31–3, being metonymic of his vices). But the persona asserts that openly corrupt behaviour such as this expresses a profound transmutation of values within current society. He exclaims, ‘O age! In which our gallants boast to be / Slaues vnto riot, and lewd luxury! / Nay,

150  Marston’s Satires when they blush, and thinke an honest act / Dooth their supposed vertues maculate!’ (47–50). That alleged inversion and hence transformation of traditional moral standards is, according to Marston’s speaker, precisely why excessive or aberrant behaviour can often avoid seeking a disguise. He elaborates throughout the two subsequent poems on metamorphosis as both a systemic and a personal phenomenon within society. In ‘Reactio’, Marston specifically and unmistakably attacks Joseph Hall once more. His persona suggests that Hall’s Virgidemiae manifests an author who has transformed and deformed himself unawares upon assuming the role of satirist. Adopting that persona, he has simultaneously and insensibly turned himself into a caricature. The persona’s accusation is not merely, then, that Hall has been a ridiculous overreacher when writing satires (see 5–8 as well as 131–54, for example). It is rather that, having chosen his targets indiscriminately and at times altogether inappropriately, Hall has offended against the decorum of satire by ridiculing what should be ignored or is indeed worthy. He has inquired too closely into squalor. He has profaned the sacred and therefore has revealed himself as an irrational enemy to his society’s legitimate, especially spiritual aspirations and achievements. Upon becoming a satirist, in short, Hall has also turned himself into another Gryll: Cannot some lewd, immodest beastlines Lurke, and lie hid in iust forgetfulnes, But Grillus subtile-smelling swinish snout Must sent, and grunt, and needs will finde it out? Come daunce yee stumbling Satyres by his side If he list once the Syon Muse deride. Ye Granta’s white Nymphs, come & with you bring, Some sillabub, whilst he doth sweetly sing Gainst Peters teares, and Maries mouing moane, And like a fierce enraged Boare doth foame At sacred Sonnets. (29–39) Two things are of particular interest in those lines. First, Marston is of course identifying Hall—as ‘Grillus’—with Spenser’s Gryll who, at the end of Faerie Queene 2 (canto 12, sts 86–7), symbolizes humankind’s capacity to make those appetites shared between people and beasts the determinants of existence. 22 The irony of Marston’s allusion lies both in its linking Hall with Spenser’s characterization of Gryll and in the fact that Hall’s own satires ostentatiously pay homage to Spenser. 23 Second, if Hall/Grillus is not like the ‘fantasticke’ of satire three (who lacks a disguise), nor is he like other of the proteans (inasmuch as he does not outwardly transform himself to conceal what he has inwardly become— his inner metamorphosis). As Marston’s persona would have it, Hall

Marston’s Satires  151 has turned himself knowingly into a satirist and unknowingly into a caricature of the human. Hall’s portrayal thus emphasizes how aptly multiform as well as negative the Proteus motif is throughout Marston’s satires. In the final poem of this collection, Marston’s persona deploys the motif in order to attack both individual deviance and the social environment generating it. That is to say, he examines deformation as at once a systemic and a personal phenomenon within the disrupted world around him. So, at the poem’s beginning, he asks, ‘Ambitious Gorgons, widemouth’d Lamians, / Shape-changing Proteans, damn’d Briareans, / Is Minos dead?’ (1–3). Later, describing the environment that produces such monsters as a world upside down, he declares, Fie, fie, I am deceiued all thys while, A mist of errors doth my sence beguile; I haue beene long of all my wits bereauen, Heauen for hell taking, taking hell for heauen; Vertue for vice, and vice for vertue still, Sower for sweet, and good for passing ill. (139–44) *** Tis so, tis so; Riot, and Luxurie Are vertuous, meritorious chastitie: That which I thought to be damn’d hel-borne pride Is humble modestie [ . . . . ] (149–52) According to the persona, his world’s values are inverted; all human perception, action, and interaction have metamorphosed; misapprehension and distortion are now normative. Throughout the poem he maps the enormities that he sees around him in terms of myth and mythography— Conti’s mythography, as Davenport has demonstrated (248–56), which enables him to render extravagance and excess via a canon of moralized archetypes. Therefore, although he does not attribute every instance of folly or vice to one of the ‘Proteans’, self-transformed lives are said to surround him amid a community that has transmuted its inherited orthodoxies of right and wrong, of absolute bliss and misery, even of commonplace pleasure and distaste. Myth and mythography provide Marston’s persona, in that extended mapping of his society, with a language well-suited to the representation of extreme phenomena: a language that facilitates his staging frenetic repulsion when he brings Certaine Satyres to its climactic end (here one could cite the satire’s opening lines, quote above). Nevertheless, at the

152  Marston’s Satires same time, his mythological idiom creates the effect of distance. On theone hand, it safely conceals immediate events and circumstances behind those of a remote and imaginary past. The emotions provoked by what surrounds the persona can be voiced publicly but without incurring danger. On the other hand, however, it emphasizes his disassociation from the present. Looking angrily at who and what surround him, he seems to view a world at once familiar and alien. The pervasive idiom of the persona’s final satire therefore amplifies his expressions of estrangement from society that recur insistently throughout the preceding satires—and that are articulated primarily, as we have seen, through ancient fable. It crowns his various formulations of the Proteus motif by positioning them within a wholly mythologized depiction of his social environment. In doing so, it suggests that across Certaine Satyres, he has been cumulatively unfolding what could be called a personal mythos of internal exile—a mythic narrative of personal separateness, and yet one that concedes from early on his own flaws and will not indicate his absolute moral transcendence of his coevals. And hence we see the ambiguity of his naming Epictetus below the fifth satire’s last line. That stoic philosopher may for Marston’s persona embody an ideal, a calm’, and clarity of mind, to which he aspires; but we have not seen the persona draw near to that ideal. 24 *** Certaine Satyres implies that while its speaker is consciously less than what he should be as an individual, and hence an incomplete version of himself, his contemporaries are in the main more comprehensively divorced from their truly human selves and live existences of utter self-­ estrangement. The phenomenon of what I am calling internal exile has, then, two basic aspects throughout that volume. The persona’s private mythos of internal exile certainly involves his life apart from, although within, society but it also involves his inner life (an aspect of the exilic that he shares with those around him): it identifies him as at once isolated within his community and distanced from his own higher selfhood. To this developed mythology, The Scourge of Villanie unites a theology of exile that elaborates upon the former via categories from the thought of Calvin. Prominent among those is Calvin’s concept of humankind as quintessentially defined by its having been made in the image of God. In the poems that offer the most intellectually ambitious and problematic critiques of his society, Marston has his persona, Kinsayder, closely interweave the Proteus motif with Calvin’s doctrine of the imago dei. But this is not how The Scourge begins. It opens with the first prefatory poem, ‘To Detraction I present my Poesie’, voicing sdegno for adverse criticism and cognately glancing at neostoic criteria likewise elicited in the mock-encomium on Good Opinion (which precedes Pigmalion and

Marston’s Satires  153 Certaine Satyres). Kinsayder insists, ‘My minde disdaines the dungie muddy scum / Of abiect thoughts, and Enuies raging hate. / True iudgement, slight regards Opinion, / A sprightly wit, disdaines Detraction’ (15–18). He adds, affirming his neostoic indifference to the force of mere Opinion: A partiall praise shall neuer eleuate My setled censure, of mine owne esteeme. A cankered verdit of malignant Hate Shall nere prouoke me, worse my selfe to deeme. Spight of despight, and rancors villanie, I am my selfe, so is my poesie. (19–24) Kinsayder there asserts his constantia, much as did his predecessor at the start of Certaine Satyres (1,1–4). Yet if his predecessor quickly conceded failure to observe that neostoic ideal (2,1–3, and 11–12), Kinsayder immediately although unconsciously reveals his own powerlessness to maintain it. This revelation of failure is obvious but nonetheless interesting because in the process of his insensible admission Kinsayder alludes to the motley crew ridiculed by the persona of Certaine Satyres. His inability to possess constantia, to place his mind under the habitual rule of ‘[t]rue iudgement’, is all but made explicit at the outset of ‘In lectores prorsus indignos’ (‘to readers [who are] utterly unworthy’), which is the second prefatory poem. There, he angrily asks, Fy Satyre fie, shall each mechanick slaue, Each dunghill pesant, free perusall haue Of thy well labor’d lines? Each sattin sute, Each quaint fashion-monger, whose sole repute Rests in his trim gay clothes, lye slauering Taynting thy lines with his lewd censuring? (1–6) Those lines do not affirm Kinsayder’s declared espousal, in the previous poem, of a neostoic indifference to unreasonable and extreme praise or blame by his readers. On the contrary, their angry disdain implies the absence of equanimity (aequus animus), moderation (moderatio), the golden mean (aurea mediocritas)—of neostoic values essential to the preservation of constantia. This is not the voice of someone on the road to a version of apatheia (freedom from negative emotions); it is, rather, the voice of someone delighting in the extravagant display of contempt. Furthermore, while continuing his indulgence in an excess of ridicule Kinsayder evokes the objects of attack in Certaine Satyres. He names Castilio, gestures towards Bruto as well as towards Ganimedes for hire,

154  Marston’s Satires and names Tubrio.25 Thus, for instance, he sneers at ‘Castilios, Cyprians, court-boyes, Spanish blocks’ (31). He demands, ‘Must naught but clothes, and images of men / But sprightles truncks, be Iudges of my pen?’ (59–60). And in conjunction with ‘quaint Castilio’ (75) he mentions ‘lewd Tubrio’ (76). Summoning them into The Scourge, he thereby also translates into it the critique focused upon them, namely, that constellated around the Proteus motif. Nonetheless, as I have adumbrated above, he will proceed to elaborate in Calvinist terms upon the mythology of exile developed across Certaine Satyres. He does not immediately introduce elements of Calvinist thought into The Scourge, however. Before their appearance in the collection, and straight after his attack on putatively worthless readers, he interposes neoplatonic praise of those whom he considers worthy readers. Thereupon, moreover, he presents a neoplatonic condemnation of the deviance he perceives surrounding him, a dispraise that he merges with deployment of the Proteus motif. Amplification of the motif via neoplatonic categories thus precedes development of it via categories derived from Calvinism. That philosophic emphasis, so to speak, is clear in both the encomium and the first two satires, which all but directly follow it (for a brief essay, ‘To those that seeme iudiciall perusers’, and a brief poem, ‘Proemivm in librum primum’ directly succeed ‘In lectores prorsus indignos’). The neoplatonic terms through which Kinsayder shapes his encomium appear from its outset. He begins by addressing ‘diuiner wits, celestiall soules’ (81) and adds, for example: ‘Yee substance of the shadowes of our age, / In whom all graces linke in marriage, / To you how cheerfully my poeme runnes’ (84–6). His antithesis between ‘substance’ and ‘shadowes’ iterates a distinction made often in Certaine Satyres, and frequently in connection with the Proteus motif. Then, amid the Juvenalian imitation that textures his first satire with abruptness, obliquity, and continuous anger, Kinsayder proffers this: Thou sweet Arabian Panchaia, Perfume this nastie age, smugge Lesbia Hath stinking lunges, although a simpring grace, A muddy inside, though a surphul’d face. O for some deepe-searching Corycean, To ferret out yon lewd Cynedian. How now Brutus, what shape best pleaseth thee? All Protean formes, thy wife in venery At thy inforcement takes; well goe thy way, Shee may transforme thee ere thy dying day. (54–63) His words form a summative statement of the poem’s Juvenalian motto, ‘Fronti nulla fides’ (‘There can be no trusting appearances’, from Satire 2,8). 26 Decrying the times as noisesome, Kinsayder focuses illustratively

Marston’s Satires  155 on Lesbia. He characterizes her as the fetid caricature of a Petrarchan lady and, thence by implication, of a donna angelica. Gross in her materiality, she is no luminous incarnation of spiritual beauty. 27 She is in fact a protean figure, transforming her outward appearance so as to disguise what her inner self has become. Thereby Lesbia proves akin to Brutus, presumably a near relation of Bruto in Certaine Satyres, who suppresses and transforms his wife’s sexuality into the shapes necessary for gratification of his own desire. Yet perhaps Brutus’ wife may metamorphose his sexuality in turn, Kinsayder speculates. Perhaps she may transform her husband’s will to power and pleasure, humanizing his sensuality. Amid the Juvenalian imitation likewise directing the second satire, which itself has a motto taken from that poet, we see a much more diffuse version of the preceding poem’s engagement with neoplatonic values and the Proteus motif. An approximate counterpart to the passage cited above occurs when Kinsayder laments: [ . . . ] Athens antient large immunities, Are eye sores to the fates; Poore cells forlorne! Ist not enough you are made an abiect scorne To iering Apes, but must the shadow too Of auncient substance, be thus wrung from you? O split my hart [!] (99–104) There he criticizes attacks on Cambridge and Oxford (‘Athens’) by way of neoplatonic categories, those also used at the end of ‘In lectores prorsus indignos’, and the ape emblem as a variant representation of humankind’s capacity to metamorphose. The passage’s critique of folly may be simpler than that in its broad equivalent from the previous satire, but it does usefully point to continuities: first, Marston’s recurrent concern with demeaning self-transformation; second, his no less recurrent concern with the disjunction between spirit and matter. Indeed, throughout the poem as a whole he displays his tendency, manifested across both collections of his satires, to link aberrant behaviour with desire misdirected towards the solely material, entrapped in the flesh (sarx). 28 The following satires show Marston most astutely and powerfully developing each preoccupation—and hence his notion of the exilic— through an implicit network of Calvinist concepts, chief among which is Calvin’s notion of humankind as bearers of imago dei. So we see decisively in the fourth satire, which is a comprehensive recontextualizing of Persius’ fifth. In that poem, Marston has Kinsayder clearly identify most of his satiric targets as contemporaries who, through obsessive desire for the material at the expense of the ethical or sacred, have transformed themselves into grotesques. They are not just people who fail to

156  Marston’s Satires be their better selves. They are, with different degrees of self-awareness and regret, people who have become and remain caricatures of what they should be. Thus, they are all what Kinsayder might elsewhere call ‘Proteans’ yet here, as in the second satire, he categorizes via the ape emblem. He interprets their being ‘Apes’ moreover not within a neoplatonic framework but in relation to elements of Calvinist thought. Calvin is never explicitly mentioned unlike, say, Aristotle (99); nonetheless, Kinsayder unmistakably gestures towards him. The real issue lies much less then in recognizing Kinsayder’s allusion than in understanding its specific focus and scope. The fourth satire studies deferral, which is to say, from an evidently religious perspective it portrays people who acknowledge the need for reformation of their lives but delay attempting to change how they currently behave. It presents, for example, Stadius, who is on the threshold of soullessness (9–20); it pictures Gallus, who routinely voices ‘lothsome blasphemies’ (21–32, here at 24); then, it proceeds to sketch the lecherous Sylenus (34–8), the money-scrounging cleric, Flaccus (39–52), along with a suite of the similarly disreputable and for the most part likeminded, namely, Ruscus (53–69), Drusus (69–72), Mecho (73–82), Aulus (83–6), and Luxurio (87–92). Kinsayder connects almost all of them with obsessive albeit various desire for the material at the expense of the spiritual. He suggests that all deviate from the imperatives of what would be truly religious conduct. Further, he tells us that all promise they will reform their lives ‘tomorrow’—which is what the poem’s title, taken from Persius’ fifth satire (see 66–69), signifies. Studying the delay that is common to them all amid their diverse pursuits of folly, Kinsayder reflects on the causes of and remedies for vicious human behaviour; doing so, he repudiates the (un)wisdom of classical authority and distinctly affirms the authority of Calvin. The origin of an individual’s vicious behaviour and the reason for his or her deferral of its abandonment do not lie in the power of habit, Kinsayder asserts against the authorities of both Ovid and Aristotle (respectively at 93–8 and 99–103). 29 He concedes that virtue may perhaps be encouraged by habit (103), as Aristotle argues, but declares that habit does not beget vice. In rebuttal of the Greek philosopher, he insists that ‘vice [ . . . ] comes by inspiration’ (103–4) and as evidence cites ‘[y] oung Furius’ who, although ‘scarce fifteene yeres of age’, is nevertheless ‘straight-wayes, right fit for marriage / Vnto the deuill, for sure they would agree, / Betwixt their soules there is such sympathie’ (105–8). The instance of Furius specifies what Kinsayder means by ‘inspiration’, through which he offers what is in fact nuanced denial of the idea that repeated misbehaviour trains and traps us in vice. The word does not indicate, we recognize at once, that Kinsayder envisions vice as breathed into an individual from without (the word’s Latin original, inspirare, literally means ‘to breathe into’). Rather, it implies that he sees vice as

Marston’s Satires  157 ‘breathed into’ a person from somewhere or something within. Via ‘inspiration’, then, he does not propose that vice results from a simple parody of divine inspiration: from an external force—namely, a pattern of activity affirmative of our worse inclinations—stamping evil upon the individual consciousness. He proposes instead that vice lies within each of us and breathes its influence throughout our inmost selves. His use of ‘inspiration’ is thus much more grimly ironic than might at first be thought.30 It is also resonant both with scripture and with reformed, especially Calvinist, theology. For example, it accords of course with James 1:13–14, which in the Geneva Bible run as follows: ‘Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God can not be tempted with euil, nether tempteth he any man. But euerie man is tempted, when he is drawne away by his owne concupiscence and is entised’.31 ‘[C]oncupiscence’ there equates with ‘concupiscentia’ (intense desire) in Latin versions of the bible—such as the Vulgate. The Geneva Bible’s annotation observes, however: ‘He [James] meaneth now of the inwarde tentations as of our disordered appetites, which cause vs to sinne’. This gloss tacitly aligns ‘concupiscence’ in the scriptural text with Calvin’s formulation of the term. Calvin’s direct comment on James 1:13 is, ‘[James . . . ] treats here of inward temptations, which are nothing else than the inordinate desires which entice to sin’ (‘inordinati appetitus’, rendered soon after as ‘perversa hominis concupiscentia’).32 By ‘concupiscentia’ or ‘concupiscence’ Calvin means, as we know, not merely illicit and intense desire; he means the incessantly active impulse to sin that characterizes fallen human nature. Thus, in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, he writes that even ‘in the saints, until they are divested of mortal bodies, there is always sin; for in their flesh there resides that depravity of inordinate desiring which contends against righteousness’ (3.3.10).33 Kinsayder’s identification of an ‘inspiration’ that generates vice from within us therefore both aligns with scripture and corresponds closely to Calvin’s identification of concupiscentia as the instigator of evil within the postlapsarian consciousness. It corresponds closely as well with Calvin’s thinking about the impact of concupiscentia on our humanity. According to Calvin, concupiscence distorts what essentially makes us human. Our humanity is ultimately defined, he writes, by our having been created after the likeness of God. Concupiscentia impelled the Fall and thereby almost erased that similitude. We know that still today, moreover, concupiscence pervades our lives and continues to disfigure our lingering resemblance to the Creator. A summary of Calvin’s view might be put this way. Three things constitute the imago dei: immortality, conferred upon us by God (and which he sustains, for we are not in or of ourselves immortal); our intellectual faculties, granted by God and imperfect now in consequence of the Fall; the pure integrity of being that we shall finally regain (presently, we are

158  Marston’s Satires fractured creatures) when grace renews us—a future that we are allowed to see in Christ as revealed through scripture.34 Inasmuch as we are beings contaminated by concupiscentia, we are all therefore deformed likenesses of God. We are warped images of him. Yet that is truer of some people than of others; our deformity is not in fact uniform.35 Preciselytherein lies the most important point of contact between Calvin’s doctrine of how humankind resembles God and Marston’s shaping of the Proteus motif in his fourth satire. Once Marston has had Kinsayder insist that vice derives from interior ‘inspiration’, and cite Furius as proof, he then has his persona portray in this manner those who have metamorphosed themselves, and continue to do so, through vicious behaviour: O where’s your sweatie habite, when each Ape, That can but spy the shadow of his shape, That can no sooner ken what’s vertuous, But will auoyde it, and be vicious, Without much doe, or farre fetch’d habiture. (109–113) There Kinsayder distinctly if implicitly associates the Proteus motif with Calvin’s notion that humankind is pervasively infected by concupiscentia. Nevertheless, while affirming that innate corruption and not ‘habit’ generates the deviance through which people can further dehumanizingly transform themselves—for we are all, in any case, already dehumanized by concupiscence—his attack has a quite specific pertinence. As the title of the fourth satire and the latter’s troupe of ‘characters’ indicate (2–92), his invective bears in particular on people who knowingly adhere to their folly, which is to say, people who live in a state of clear-eyed akrasia—a condition of course granted significant discussion by Calvin.36 The point of his attack is that, driven by concupiscentia (as Calvin argues), too many people wilfully make our likeness to God become mere caricature: they distort even more the imago dei defining our true humanity but, inasmuch as it has survived the Fall, defaced and vestigial. Their iterated deviance attests to lives hallmarked by irrationality, misdirection, incoherence—to sinfulness that Calvin describes as pursued of necessity and not because of compulsion. 37 Kinsayder’s words thus offer in effect both a mythology and a theology that counter long established, widely known, mythographic fictions of humankind’s capacity for self-metamorphosis and self-perfectibility. In the process, they crystallize a mythology and theology of internal exile: Marston’s most developed formulation of that theme in his satires. We come to recognize this when, thereafter, Kinsayder considers what can as well as what cannot remedy fallen humankind’s propensity for

Marston’s Satires  159 vice and, hence, the self-disfiguring existence of the consciously akratic. He goes on to declare, Omnipotent That Nature [God] is, that cures the impotent, Euen in a moment; Sure Grace is infus’d By diuine fauour, not by actions vs’d. Which is as permanent as heauens blisse To them that haue it, then no habite is. Tomorrow, nay to day, it may be got: So please that gracious Power clense thy spot. (115–22) Contrasting all-powerful God to powerless humankind, Kinsayder i­terates Calvin’s view that ‘Sure Grace’—God’s salvific, irresistible, and unlosable grace—‘cures’ humankind of its otherwise irremediable weakness. He also echoes Calvin’s view that redemptive grace comes ‘[b]y diuine fauour’ and cannot be earned—won from God in some way, as though we might impose our wills on his or contribute to our own salvations.38 Consequently, in light of those assertions, two things become apparent. First, we recognize that his declaration of God alone having power to heal moral illness (which centres on the ‘cures’ trope of 116) foreshadows his later, explicit denial of some medieval and ancient philosophers’ competences to diagnose or to restore moral health. He will there especially reject Stoicism (145–6, 149–52). This is interesting because the Stoics often conferred on their ideal type of the sage an ability to physic the world’s ills, but it is especially interesting because of the antithetic responses to neostoicism within preceding satires. Second, his affirmation of Calvin’s perspective on grace sharpens his portrayal of himself and all humankind as variously living in a condition of internal exile. Kinsayder’s implicit representation of life as exile amidst community is indeed diverse. He presents a mosaic of alienation, a multifaceted image expressing the profound dichotomy between concupiscentia and grace. But insofar as the worldview that he articulates throughout the fourth satire derives from Calvin, then an assumption underlying the poem is inescapably that to be human means, among other things, to be born an exile—and, moreover, an exile in related if different ways. According to Calvin, concupiscentia alienates us from God, for a start, yet at the same time from what we were prior to the Fall, as well as from our fellows—since concupiscence disrupts natural (prelapsarian) social relations—and from the physical environment, which the Fall cast into disorder. We are thus born into exile from our God, ourselves, one another, and our world.39 According to Kinsayder, not only are we all creatures intrinsically injured (by concupiscence) and in need of healing

160  Marston’s Satires grace (114–16), namely, of the remedy that God alone can grant and does grant as his wisdom dictates (117–22). We are creatures whose innate corruption has the ability to intensify our experience of exile: in particular, to distance us even further from God and from ourselves by warping still more grotesquely, via akrasia, the imago dei that defines our essential humanity. So he shows us in his rogues’ gallery of disparate ‘characters’ (2–92, not least at 9). There he exhibits people who have distorted themselves into extreme caricatures of humankind—and who, in the process, have increased the distance between themselves and God, widened the gulf between themselves and their innermost humanity, often become alienated from one another, and are all alien to the eyes of Marston’s persona. Hence, at the last, Kinsayder’s picturing them collectively by way of the ape emblem (109–113). It can be seen, then, that Marston explores rather than merely replicates Calvin’s thought. He develops his own variations on Calvin’s idea that human existence involves experience of a multifarious alienation. Two aspects of those variations hold special importance for The Scourge of Villanie as a whole. The first pertains to Kinsayder’s performing contemptus mundi. Kinsayder’s own argument tacitly identifies him as different in degree, not kind, from the grotesques he condemns, because concupiscentia is universal. It is embedded in everyone’s life. Yet the mere fact that a common, ineradicable guilt connects him to those whose behaviour has alienated him is not problematic. The difficulty lies rather in the fact that, deliberately or otherwise, Marston instils into Kinsayder’s ethos an outrage so intense as not infrequently to appear an extravagant manifestation of concupiscence: a self-indulgent, excessive delight in denunciation; an immoderate, disordered desire. That can be seen when, for example, Kinsayder turns the cynic diatribe against its practitioners and censures them in an exclamatio ending with what may be elaborate condescension or unintentionally comic petulance (153–60, the final couplet running, ‘Confounded Natures brats, can will and Fate, / Haue both theyr seate, & office in your pate?’).40 Misdirected and obsessive passion characterizes Kinsayder just as it does the exemplars of akrasia from whom he distances himself. The second pertains to Kinsayder’s apparent goal in Satire 4. As has been noted above, through the imagery of healing in 115–17 (centred upon the ‘cures’ trope of 116), Kinsayder asserts that God alone by means of his grace can restore humankind’s moral ills—and, later, he denies that ancient philosophies of voluntarism can teach people how to remedy their spiritual illnesses (145–60). But his denial is unavoidably self-reflexive, for while voicing it he also in effect devalues a traditional satiric role, namely, that of the satirist as physician to a diseased society: the outsider within who, showing his community its sicknesses, seeks to instigate its recovery by way of aversion therapy and good counsel.

Marston’s Satires  161 Kinsayder forcefully makes this explicit in the fourth satire’s conclusion. Addressing chronic procrastinators, he says, To day, to day, implore obsequiously, Trust not to morrowes will, least vtterly Yee be attach’d with sad confusion, In your Grace-tempting lewd presumption. But I forget; why sweat I out my braine, In deepe designes, to gay boyes lewd, and vaine? These notes were better sung, mong better sort, But to my pamphlet, few saue fooles resort. (163–70) With those words, Kinsayder turns from denunciation to exhortation. Seize the day through repentant prayer, he urges the akratic in echo of Isaiah 55:6 (‘Seke ye the Lord while he maie be founde: call ye vpon him while he is nere’).41 He claims no power to reform those who have transformed and iteratively deform themselves. He even indicates that he admonishes an actually reprobate readership—one beyond admonition— and that his warnings would be more helpful if set before others.42 The fourth satire, it could fairly be said, presents Marston’s most explicit and comprehensive incorporation of Calvinist theology into Certaine Satyres or The Scourge of Villanie. There he has Kinsayder variously explore Calvin’s links between concupiscentia and alienation, a process from which emerges his most intricate, his most ambitious deployment of the Proteus motif. But to have said as much is not at all to suggest that, thereafter in The Scourge, Marston makes Kinsdayer a dedicated spokesperson for Calvinist thought. His persona neither constantly nor systematically restates the theological insights offered throughout Satire 4. Kinsayder does nonetheless repeat or allude to them. So, for instance, across the fifth satire he denounces concupiscence, fraud, and violence (as in 6–47 along with 115–16, which glance at the ape emblem); then, too, in the sixth, he emphasizes the connection between concupiscence and self-metamorphosis that deforms the imago dei (65–7).43 Correlatively one could cite the more spectacular introduction to Satire 7 (1–16) where, deploying the Proteus motif, Kinsayder announces that no Circean bewitchment has now mysteriously turned men into swine (4); rather ‘the soules of swine / Doe liue in men’ and ‘Our intellectuall part, that glosse is soyled / With stayning spots of vile impietie, / And muddy durt of sensualitie’ (severally 7–8, 10–12). Many further moments throughout The Scourge likewise imply its author’s fascination with the insights of Calvin into what renders human life exilic.44 ***

162  Marston’s Satires Insofar as both Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie are conceptually inclusive, exhibit ‘characters’ of many kinds, and are stylistically diverse, it is not unreasonable to view them in light of the ancient commonplace that collections of satiric poems are miscellanies. Each does set before us, as it were, a lanx satura (a dish holding different morsels); we can align each to some extent with Juvenal’s well-known remark about his own satires, namely, ‘the mishmash of my little book’ (‘nostri ­farrago libelli’, in 1,86). Nevertheless, their inclusiveness does not exclude continuity and hence cohesion, whether within or between them. The most important continuity would seem to be Marston’s preoccupation across his two collections with the idea of self-­transformation, which he expresses through what I have called the Proteus motif. V ­ ariously shaping that motif, he writes against the grain of inherited and still current humanist discourse alleging humankind’s power at once to reinvent personal identity and to achieve self-perfection. He develops the motif, moreover, so that it comes to articulate not a merely broad engagement with Calvin’s thought but rather a specific concern with Calvin’s insights into the precariousness of our essential humanity—our flawed and unstable existences as, at the last, creatures made in the image of God (imago dei). What results is verse satire incorporating Roman literary and philosophical precedents yet necessarily moving beyond their scopes. In doing so, it simultaneously moves away from, without explicitly abandoning, some notional objectives of Roman verse satire—not least, the aim to effect aversion therapy by way of ridicule. Marston’s poems are therefore in that sense meta-satiric, for he does not just seek to reanimate, say, Persius or Juvenal in the contemporary world but, at his most ambitious, to bring Roman satiric practice into confrontation with Calvin’s vision of what it is to be human. That confrontation forms the apex of his verse satires’ development. Before then, he has his poems unfold a mythology of exile: trace the ways in which misdirected desire transmutes and dehumanizes personal identity. Thereupon he has them stage a more encompassing and problematic critique of how concupiscentia metamorphoses and defaces the imago dei. His verse satires thus offer a deepening and expanding vision of human experience as marked by alienation, marginalization, displacement. They extend, that is to say, a mythology into a theology of exile.

Notes 1 Reference is to The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961), hereafter cited as Davenport. On the dates of Marston’s satires, see Davenport, 1–2. On contemporary reactions to Marston’s satires, and his quarrelling in some of them with coevals such as Joseph Hall, see idem, especially at 18, 28–30, 220–30, 244–5, 354–5. See also Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An

Marston’s Satires  163 Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 83–119 (cited below as Finkelpearl). 2 See, for a spectrum of scholarly assessments stressing issues of heterogeneity or self-contrariety in Marston’s verse satires: Alison V. Scott, Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 104–8; Ejner J. Jensen, ‘Verse Satire in the English Renaissance’, in A Companion to Satire Ancient and Modern, ed. Ruben Quintero (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 101–17; John N. King, ‘Traditions of Complaint and Satire’, in A New Companion To English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway, 2 vols (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), vol. 1, 326–40; Colin Burrow, ‘Roman Satire in the Sixteenth Century’; Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Evolution of Tudor Satire’; Angela J. Wheeler, English Verse Satire from Donne to Dryden (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1992), 138–44; James S. Baumlin, ‘Generic Contexts of Elizabethan Satire: Rhetoric, Poetic Theory, and Imitation’; Gilles D. Monsarrat, Light From the Porch: Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature (Paris: Didier-Erudition, 1984), 51–80, 151–87; Raman Selden, English Verse Satire 1590–1765 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976), 45–72; Bridget G. Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1971), 58–77; Finkelpearl, 107–13; Anthony Caputi, John Marston: Satirist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 23–79; Davenport, 11–30; Alvin B. Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (1959; rpt. Hamden: Archon Books, 1976), 81–140; Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580–1640 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951), 145–8; W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry, 6 vols (London: Macmillan, 1895–1910), vol. 3, 70–3. 3 Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. Sir John Stradling, ed. Rudolf Kirk (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1939), 80. Lipsius’ text appeared in 1584, Stradling’s translation in 1595. 4 In the original, respectively: ‘Est autem recta Ratio non aliud, quam DE REBVS HVMANIS DIVINISQVE (quatenus tamen eae ad nos spectant) VERVM IVDICVM AC SENSVS. Opinio huic contraria, DE IISDEM FVTILE IVDICIVM AC FALLAX’. See Justus Lipsius, Concerning Constancy, ed. and trans. R. V. Young (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 28. See also: Peter Ure, ‘A Note on “Opinion” in Daniel, Greville and Chapman’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: Critical Essays, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1974), 209–20. 5 Cicero, De Officiis, ed. and trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (1913; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), 1.43.153. In the original: ‘quae est rerum expetendarum fugiendarumque scientia’; ‘rerum est divinarum et humanarum scientia’. 6 Guillaume Du Vair, The Moral Philosophie of the Stoickes, trans. Thomas James, ed. and introd. Rudolf Kirk (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1951), severally at 55 and 61. Du Vair’s text appeared in 1585, James’ translation in 1598. For the original see, Guillaume Du Vair, La Saincte Philosophie: Auec plusieurs traitez de pieté, Derniere Edition (Rouen: Adam Mallassis, 1603), at 5v and 10r. Thus: ‘Le bien donc de l’homme consistera en l’vsage de la droite raison’; ‘La Prudence [… ] nous apprend [… ] ce que nous deuons suyure ou fuyr. Elle nous oste les fausses opinions qui nous troublent’. James seems to ignore Du Vair’s apparent identification of wisdom with prudence (that is, with prudentia rather than with sapientia)—or he could be taking their sameness as a given.

164  Marston’s Satires 7 The word ‘cynic’ derives from the Greek terms ‘kynikos’ (‘dog-like’) and ‘kyôn’ (‘dog’). Hence, someone who chooses to ‘snarle’ and be ‘a barking Satyrist’ would seem to be associating himself or herself with a cynic outlook and the cynic diatribe. 8 See, for example: Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols (1940; rpt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), vol. 3, at 8.51.120–2; Andrea Alciati, The Emblematum Liber in English and Latin, trans. and ed. John F. Moffitt (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2004), 72. Alciati uses the chameleon to warn against flatterers. Cf. his depiction of Proteus at 211. But see especially Henry VI, 3.2.191–2, where Richard says, ‘I can add colours to the chameleon, / Change shapes with Proteus for advantages’. The poem’s final line refers to ‘This Ianian-bifront hypocrisie’ (136). Alciati, it should be mentioned, takes Janus as signifying prudentia (35). As will be noted below, Pico della Mirandola also juxtaposes the chameleon with Proteus. 9 By way of illustration: Certaine Satyres at 2,126 as well as 5,2; The Scourge of Villanie at 1,61 along with the ape emblem in 9, passim but chiefly 11–43, and 11,156–8. On the ape in emblem literature, see for instance Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden: Plantyn, 1586), 58 and 188. 10 Stradling, cited above, 79. In the original: ‘CONSTANTIAM hic appello, RECTVM ET IMMOTVM ANIMI ROBVR [….] Robur dixi, et intellego firmitudinem insitam animo, non ab Opinione, sed a iudicio et recta Ratione’ (in Young, cited above, 28). 11 Marston frequently has his persona, when articulating the motif of destructive self-transformation, use words such as ‘shadowes’, ‘shade’, or ‘shows’. For another example of ‘shadowes’, see 1,124. Likewise, for ‘shade’ see the mock-encomium on Opinion, at 14 and 18—where two meanings of the word are played against one another. And similarly, for ‘showes’ see the mock-­ encomium on Pigmalion, 45. 12 For an example of the former, see Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 2.736: ‘pectore Nestor erat’ (‘he was a Nestor in understanding’, my translation). Reference is to P. Ovidius Naso, Amores, Epistulae, Medicamina faciei femineae, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris, ed. R. Ehwald (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1907). For an instance of the latter, see Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Iuychurch. Entitled Amintas Dale, ed. Gerald Snare (Northridge: California State University Press, 1975), 119, where Fraunce refers to Nestor’s ‘aged eloquence’. 13 These are Muto, who creates the illusion of himself as an heir to Petrarch but is at once a merely carnal and inarticulate lover whose eloquence has been purchased (41–54); the usurious Puritan who devours his victims’ lives and would subject social order to his anarchic ambitions—yet has transmuted himself into an appearance of precise godliness (55–86); a seemingly courteous client who is in reality an arrogant machiavel (87–106); two instances of gender-transformation in which transformation may cover what the persona takes to be disruptive sexuality (107–26). 14 Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pompanazzi, Vives, eds Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, John Herman Randall, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 223–54. 15 In the original: ‘Quem non immerito Asclepius Atheniensis versipellis huius et se ipsam transformantis naturae argumento per Protheum in mysteriis significari dixit’. See De hominis dignitate, ed. Giovan Francesco Pico

Marston’s Satires  165 (Bologna: Benedetto Faelli, 1496), 1.34. Cf. with reference to Marston’s use of the chameleon image in the first satire, at line 2: ‘Quis hunc nostrum chamaeleonta non admiretur?’ (1.32). 16 Juan Luis Vives, A Fable about Man, trans. Nancy Lenkeith, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (cited in note 14), at 389. 17 In the original: ‘Non expectabant dii eum pluribus visum iri formis, cum ecce adest repente in eorum speciem reformatus, supra hominis ingenium, totus innixus sapientissimae menti. [… ] [P]rimum, stupescere se in scenam etiam introductos, expressosque ab hoc tam Ethico mimo, quem plerique multiformem illum Protheum Oceani filium esse affirmabant’. Reference is from Fabula de homine, in Opera Omnia, ed. G. Majansius (Valentiae: Benedicti Monfort, 1783), vol. 4, 5. 18 The first edition of Cartari’s text was in 1556 that of Conti’s in 1567. 19 In the Latin version (to which Marston specifically alludes): ‘[E]um in regnum ab Aegyptiis adscitum, tamquam qui omnibus sapientia antecelleret, per quam erat ita dexter in consiliis pro tempore capiendis vt ea alia ex aliis prout res requirebat, commodissime mutaret, atque hinc factum esse, vt se in diuersas figuras conuertere diceretur: quod idem erat, ac si dixissent, eum foro vti sciuisse’. Reference is to Imagines Deorum, Qvi ab Antiqvis Colebantvr (Lvgdvni: Barptolemaevm Honoratvm, 1581), 174. 20 ‘Alii [… ] Proteum virum sapientissimum fuisse tradiderunt. [… ] Ego Proteum virum fuisse prudentem putauerim [… ] et in conciliandis conseruandisque; amicitiis callidissimum, et in termperandis motibus animorum, et in moribus ad omnes euentus rerum caute formandos. [… ] [V]eruntamen non solum ad amicitias, et ad ciuitatum administrationes haec fabula pertinet, sud multo magis ad vniuersam humanae vitae rationem’. Reference is to: Mythologiae, siue Explicationum Fabularum, Libri Decem, The ­Renaissance and the Gods, ed. and introd. Stephen Orgel (1567; rpt. New York: Garland, 1976), 248–9 (numbered in that edition as 246–7). ­Boccaccio too connects Proteus with prudence. See Genealogiae Ioanis ­Boccatii, The Renaissance and the Gods, ed. Stephen Orgel (1494; rpt. New York: ­Garland, 1976), 55. 21 It is worth mentioning here, however, that Davenport’s commentary on Marston’s satires points again and again to their influence by Conti. Further, 5,2 seems an allusion to Conti’s account of Proteus (as Davenport notes at 248). 22 The Circe-like Acrasia had metamorphosed him from man to pig. Upon restoration to his human shape, Gryll ‘[r]epyned greatly, and did him [the Palmer] miscall, / That had from hoggish forme him brought to naturall’ (2.12.86,8–9). Guyon’s response is ‘See the mind of beastly man, / That hath so soone forgot the excellence / Of his creation, when he life began, / That now he chooseth, with vile difference, / To be a beast, and lacke intelligence’ (2.12.87,1–5). 23 See for instance ‘His Defiance to Enuie’, 106–8 and Virgidemiae 1,1,29–32 in Joseph Hall, The Collected Poems, ed. Arnold Davenport (1949; rpt. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969). In addition, Hall himself refers disparagingly to ‘Grill’ (Virgidemiae 2,2,66—as Davenport also notes at 244). 24 Failure to realize that ideal has been acknowledged by the persona not simply inasmuch as, early on, he has conceded his possession of mental flaws. Certaine Satyres shows us those flaws in operation. Epictetus writes, for example, ‘Signs of someone’s making progress: he censures no one; he praises no one; he blames no one; he never talks about himself as a person who

166  Marston’s Satires

25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 4 4

amounts to something or knows something’. The persona has violated each of those precepts. Thus, just as the volume opens with his allusion to and implicit departure from neostoicism, it ends by his implicitly evoking stoic doctrine—to which he has evidently not adhered. Reference is to Epictetus, The Handbook, trans., introd., and annot. Nicholas White (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983), 48. On Castilio, see Certaine Satyres 1,27–50. For Bruto, ibid, 2,127–156. For Ganimede and his companions, ibid, 3,31–3 and 5,60. For Tubrio, ibid, 1,89–122 and 2,118. Reference is to Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), my translation. Reference to Juvenal and Persius is from this edition. Marston has Kinsayder neatly capture this in the metonymic rhymes ‘simpring grace’ / ‘surphul’d face’ (56–7). See especially 2,38–43—but cf. ibid, 1–3 and 70–1. Davenport notes, at 309, the likely reference by Marston to Nichomachean Ethics 2.1 passim. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, transs Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). On the same page, he also cites Ovid’s Remedia Amoris, 83–106; but Marston seems rather to be mindful of 79–134, with particular reference to 90–96 (which advise against putting off enactment of prudent decisions till ‘tomorrow’). See P. Ovidius Naso, Amores, Epistulae, Medicamina faciei femineae, Ars amatoria, Remedia amoris, ed. R. Ehwald (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1907). Cf. 2 Peter 1:21 (‘sed Spiritu sancto inspirati, locuti sunt sancti Dei homines’), in Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam. Reference is to The Geneva Bible. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, trans. and ed. Rev. John Owen (1855: rpt. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), 288. Idem, Commentarius in Iacobi Apostoli Epistolam, in Joannis Calvini, Opera quae supersunt omnia, eds Edouard Cunitz, Johann-Wilhelm Baum, Eduard Wilhelm Eugen Reuss (Brunsvigae: C. A. Schwetschke, 1863), vol. 55, 390. In the Latin, ‘that depravity of inordinate desiring’ is, ‘concupiscendi prauitas’. On imago dei, see especially Institutes 1.15.2–5. See Institutes 2.2.27–2.3.4. For Calvin’s view on akrasia, see chiefly Institutes 2.2.23–7. See Institutes 2.2.7–8 and 2.3.5. Institutes 2.2.26–7 and 2.3.2–4 along with 2.3.6–14. Institutes 2.1.4–5 and 2.8.35–41, with 3.9.4. It could of course be intentionally comic petulance, but that would nonetheless affirm my point here. Geneva version. The accompanying note reads, ‘When he [the Lord] offreth him self by the preaching of his worde’—the ‘worde’ being here evoked via Kinsayder’s exhortation. Cf. Hebrews 3:13–16 and their accompanying notes. Kinsayder’s conclusion to the fourth satire resembles Calvin’s engagement, in Institutes 2.5.4–5, with issues of admonition and exhortation. There, the ape emblem again occurs, but those lines are relevant to 1–4 along with 21–2, the latter bitterly condemning ‘the bodyes scumme’, which is to say, sarx. Thus, one could additionally cite: 8, at 110–17 (with their focus on the power of concupiscence) and then, on self-deforming transformation of the imago dei, 163–200; 9, 11–43 (the ape emblem); 11, at 23–4, 92–3, 152–6, 205–38 on deformation of the imago dei.

Conclusions

To have studied how internal exile is represented within major Elizabethan sonnet sequences and verse satires is by no means, of course, to have offered a complete account of the concept’s formulations across texts from the 1590s. Yet to have done so nonetheless indicates that internal exile is a preoccupation intrinsic to later Elizabethan verse, variously interpreted in it, and diversely exhibited by it. My concern at this point is not however to suggest where else, at the close of the sixteenth century, one might discern significant instances of English verse mythologizing alienation, marginalization, or isolation amidst society. I shall instead briefly consider how concepts and experiences of internal exile are given shape in some early Stuart verse. As a consequence, my focus will be on continuities and departures. First, I shall examine ways that Donne, not now a young man writing satires for an Inns of Court and university readership, unfolds myths of internal exile when he writes amatory lyrics and devotional sonnets. I shall examine thereafter the ­political fables of internal exile fashioned respectively by Richard Lovelace and Henry King. *** ‘The Sun Rising’ is usually if not unhesitantly assigned to 1603–4 when, after his elopement with Ann More, Donne was no longer in the service of Sir Thomas Egerton and had no career prospects immediately before him.1 Excluded from success amid the great world, he writes a love lyric in which his persona shapes a myth of voluntary internal exile. His speaker claims to have turned away from not merely England but the entire world and, with his lover, to have made an erotic cosmos of their own in the space of a single room—a personal cosmos given order and substance by their mutual desire. So, for example, at the close to the first stanza Donne’s speaker asserts: ‘Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time’ (9–10). And at the start of the poem’s third as well as final stanza, he announces, ‘She’s all states, and all princes I, / Nothing else is. / Princes do but play us; compared to this, / All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy’ (21–4).

168  Conclusions ‘[T]he world’s contracted thus’, he succinctly adds (26). Yet in epitomizing the world he and his lover make it anew. Their private world of desire resplendently embodies not multum in parvo from the bereft environment beyond their bedroom but omnia in parvo: they possess a New World, generated by their desire, within and supplanting the Old. ‘The Sun Rising’ therefore simultaneously takes the form of an anti-aubade and a eutopian fiction. 2 Nevertheless, Donne has his speaker both quite precisely recreate the dawn song and equivocally set out a eutopian-utopian mythos of internal exile. His persona demythologizes Helios Hyperion, ostentatiously turning the sun god into a comic geriatric and social inferior at the poem’s start (1–5) then into an enfeebled geriatric at its close (27–30). ­Virtually at the poem’s centre he places evocation of his ­lady’s sun-­ dazzling gaze—a motif familiar from the Rime sparse—and ­insistence on his own power to blink the sun’s brilliance into darkness (11–15). The frame to his poem and its centrepiece mock-heroically overturn the power of natural process, the aubade’s conventions. His speaker not dissimilarly exercises control over utopian narrative. He presents a fable through hyperboles that at once project it and emphasize its fictionality, revealing the speaker’s declarations to be at once cosmopoiesis and mythopoiesis—an elegant mock-aetiology. Donne is in fact playing with a paradox invented by his ancestor, Thomas More. This is, as we know, that no place (utopia) may currently be the good place (eutopia), but no place will become the good place unless someone r­ einvents how people live. Here, in ‘The Sun Rising’, Donne’s persona offers a uniquely personal, serio-ludic version of just that. As in the Satires, Donne mythologizes himself. Although one could likewise examine in this context ‘The Anniversary’, also from Songs and Sonnets, it will be more illuminating to consider how some poems from Holy Sonnets articulate Donne’s dystopian mythologizing of internal exile. The collection begins, as printed in 1633 (but written c.1609–10), with its persona anguishing at his self-inflicted alienation from God and thus his true self. 3 At the poem’s heart, he laments (with an allusion to the doctrine of imago dei): I am Thy son, made with Thyself to shine, Thy servant, whose pains Thou hast still repaid, Thy sheep, Thine image, and, till I betrayed Myself, a temple of Thy Spirit divine; Why doth the Devil then usurp on me? (5–9) Consciousness of exile from God and from his own fully human nature impels doubt over his election. This we see too in ‘Batter my heart’, for example, or a poem added to the collection in 1635, ‘I am a little world’.

Conclusions  169 Moreover, each stages the alienated self as dystopic. In ‘Batter my heart’, the persona likens his debilitation by concupiscence to the powerlessness of a ‘usurped town’ (5–8). Throughout ‘I am a little world’, on the other hand, he pictures himself as a dystopic microcosm that God alone can regenerate by way of purgation—a glance towards the ordo salutis (cf. 3–4 with 10–14). By contrast to the persona of ‘The Sun Rising’, he has undone a world. Yet in another poem, from the Westmoreland manuscript, we see Donne presenting a different mythology of internal exile. The speaker of ‘O, to vex me’ laments what we would call his clear-eyed akrasia. The sonnet begins, ‘O, to vex me, contraries meet in one; / Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot / A constant habit, that when I would not / I change in vows and in devotion’ (1–4). It ends, ‘So my devout fits come and go away / Like a fantastic ague, save that here / Those are my best days when I shake with fear’ (12–14). Behind the speaker’s description of his exile from a truly theocentric and therefore integral selfhood lie myths and mythographies of transformation such as those informing or penumbral to Marston’s satires. In particular, however, his complaint echoes the archetypal voicing of divided consciousness by Ovid’s Medea, St Paul, and St Augustine. The first declares, ‘Ah, if I could, I should be more myself. But some strange power draws me on against my will. Desire persuades me one way, reason another. I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse’ (Metamorphoses 7.18–21).4 The second, ‘For I do not the good thing, which I wolde, but the euil, which I wolde not, that do I’ (Romans 7:19, Geneva Version). 5 And Augustine writes, ‘[The mind] commands [I say] that itself would will a thing; which never would give the command, unless it willed it: yet it does not that, which is commanded’ (Confessions 8.9).6 Donne’s speaker mythologizes his self-alienation by performing, as it were, the typology of akrasia. *** In Donne’s Jacobean verse, then, we see not merely his continuing concern with the concept of internal exile but his exploring it via eutopian, dystopian, and typological narratives. He is interested chiefly in the private politics of internal exile. Other early Stuart poets will focus on exile within society from a more comprehensively political perspective, not least when writing of the English Revolution. As was mentioned above, I shall here consider two royalist poets, Richard Lovelace and Henry King. In ‘The Grasse-hopper. To my Noble Friend, Mr. Charles Cotton’, Lovelace writes of isolation within a homeland now dominated by his and his fellow monarchists’ political enemies. But in ‘An Elegy upon the most Incomparable King Charls the First’, King writes of the monarch himself as having experienced exile within his own nation—an exile ending in betrayal and death.

170  Conclusions Having pictured the grasshopper as an example from nature of improvident happiness—of joy in bright days, without heed to colder and darker days lying ahead—Lovelace’s persona thereafter counsels his addressee as to what will be, for them in their wintry political environment, a way to achieve a prudent happiness. He says, Thou best of Men and Friends! we will create A Genuine Summer in each others breast; And spite of this cold Time and frozen Fate Thaw us a warme seate to our rest. Our sacred harthes shall burne eternally As Vestall Flames, the North-wind, he Shall strike his frost-stretch’d Winges, dissolve and flye This Aetna in Epitome. (21–8) Amid that defiantly luxuriant imagining of a royalist eutopia, two tropes predominate. They are the trope of ‘A Genuine Summer in each others breast’ (22) and that of the ‘sacred harthes’ (25), which is clarified in the ensuing reference to ‘Vestall Flames’. The first argues, in agreement particularly with Stoic thought, the power of the friendship shared between speaker and addressee. Stoic doctrine asserts that a bonding of the virtuous will create a spiritual and therefore authentic community within society at large. It will create a stable, microcosmic community that transcends the vicissitudes of the environing world.7 Here, it is foreseen as providing comfort for the politically marginalized friends who now live surrounded by desolation. It will humanize the brutalities of what is in effect their internal exile; and this suggestion is elaborated upon in the second trope. Lovelace’s persona implies that, with the overthrow of the monarchist order, the sacred flame of the state presently burns not in any one, central location but rather in the domestic hearths of loyalists. The traditional political order may have been fractured but its spirit survives. There is still a royalist community with unextinguished political fidelity. Lovelace thus appropriates a Roman myth of the state so as to mythologize his and his fellow’s exile within their own nation. Home is, according to Lovelace’s speaker, where the true homeland lives on. A more ambitiously political variant of the internal exile motif informs King’s Elegy (c.1659). At the poem’s heart lies depiction of Charles I in terms of the Royal Martyr topos (355–476). That is to say, King’s persona climactically characterizes Charles via the mythos first developed in Eikon Basilike (1649), where the monarch is portrayed as a Christ-like

Conclusions  171 figure who, removed from power over his country and isolated by its new rulers, dies on behalf of his nation’s established religion and traditional political order.8 The poem’s speaker says this, for example, of the Scots who handed Charles over to his enemies: What though hereafter it may prove their Lot To be compared with Iscariot? Yet will the World perceive which was most wise, And who the Nobler Traitor by the Price; For though ‘tis true Both did Themselves undo, They made the better Bargain of the Two, Which all may reckon who can difference Two hundred thousand Pounds from Thirty Pence. (367–74) That mythologizing of internal exile both takes the motif in a new direction and creates an instance of it that will survive well into the nineteenth century. So one sees (to cite just a few illustrations) in the writings of Austen, Scott, and the Disraelis. But, later in the seventeenth century, Milton will fashion his own alternative mythos of political estrangement within the homeland.

Notes 1 See R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 128– 200, and John Stubbs, John Donne: The Reformed Soul (New York: Norton, 2006), 154–204. See also Dennis Flynn, ‘Donne’s Wedding and the Pyrford Years’, in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, 471–82. 2 Here I revise and expand upon earlier work of mine from Donne and the Resources of Kind, eds. A. D. Cousins and Damian Grace (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 12–15. 3 On bibliographical and chronological problems raised by Donne’s Holy Sonnets, see R. V. Young, ‘The Religious Sonnet’, in The Oxford Handbook, 218–32, and John Donne, ed. Janel Mueller, 21st-Century Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 469–70. 4 ‘si possem, sanior essem! / sed trahit invitam nova vis, aliudque cupido, / mens aliud suadet: video Meliora proboque, / deteriora sequor’. 5 The Genevan Version’s annotation reads: ‘The flesh stayeth euen the moste perfect to run forwarde as the spirit wisheth’. 6 ‘[Animus] imperat, inquam, ut velit, qui non imperaret, nisi vellet, et non facit quod imperat’. Reference is from Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts, Loeb Classical Library (1912; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 7 See, for example, Seneca, Epistulae Morales, trans. R. M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols (1917; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. 1, letters 9 and 19. 8 Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings, ed. Philip A. Knachel (New York: Cornell University Press,

172  Conclusions 1966), as representatively at 177–78. One could add that the portrayal of Charles as the object of a hunt (349–52) resonates with the passage in Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill—according to the text of 1642—where description of a hunt allegorizes the fall of Strafford (263–304). See Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill, ed. Brendan O Hehir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).

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Index

adversarius 89, 90, 107n7 adynata 16 Aeneid 116 agape 49 Alamanni, Luigi 8 Alexandrian Cupid 1, 3–6, 9, 15, 22, 24–6, 28, 29, 42, 49, 50, 61, 75, 78, 79; Astrophil’s demythologizing 24; Greco-Roman configurations 5; mythology and mythography 8 A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (Lock) 14 Amoretti (Spenser) 8, 71; courtship 33–4; Lenten sonnets in 34; lovers, characterization of 47; ritual of submission 35, 36; Spenser’s persona 34–5; theology of 53, 54 amor ferinus 80 ‘The Anniversary’ 168 Apollo and Daphne 4, 5, 25 Apostolic tradition 88 Aristotle 156 Ars Poetica (Horace) 118 Astrophil and Stella (Sidney) 8, 14, 19, 25, 29, 34 Augustine 127, 128, 132 Augustinian-Calvinist theology 129, 132 Bembo, Cardinal 22 Bendidio, Lucrezia 63 Blind Eros 79 Boccaccio, Giovanni 5, 6, 13n20 Book of the Courtier 65 Boyle, Elizabeth 8, 33, 34 Bruto, Marston’s portrayal of 145–7, 155 Calvin, John 32n27, 58n49, 127–9, 133, 162; concupiscentia 157–9,

161–2; on humankind 152, 155, 158; Institutes of the Christian Religion 157; perspective on grace 159–60 caritas 52 Cartari, Vincenzo 5, 6, 13n21, 148 Casa, Della 9 Castiglione 37 Catholicism 101, 102, 107n5 Catholic recusancy 9 Certaine Satyres 7, 10, 139–40, 143, 144, 149, 151–5, 161–2 Cesare, Messer 65 Christian diatribe 88 Christus Victor 53 Church Militant 88, 103, 106 Church of England 101–3 Cicero, M. Tullius 113, 127, 141 Colonna, Vittoria 63, 64, 72 concupiscentia (Calvin) 50, 78, 127, 128, 129, 132, 141, 147, 157–9, 161–2 constantia 46, 153 contemptus mundi 81, 91 Conti, Natale 6, 13n22, 26, 148–9, 151 Cotton, Charles 169 The Courtier (Bembo) 22 The Courtier (Castiglione) 37 cupiditas (Augustine) 129, 132, 147 cupido falsus 112, 114, 117, 120, 124, 126, 128, 130–2 Cupido Victor 3, 5, 6, 22 Daniel, Samuel 61 Dante: donna angelica 37; La Vita Nuova 37, 61 Daphne and Apollo myth 48 Dark Lady 9, 59, 60, 65 Davenport, Arnold 111, 134n2, 151

188 Index de’ Cavalieri, Tommaso 64, 72 ‘Definite Questions’ 98–100 De Inventione (Cicero) 113 Delia (Daniel) 61 deliberative oration 88, 98, 99 Délie (Scève) 63 Della Casa 60, 61, 65, 66 De’ Medici, Lorenzo 63 De Officiis (Cicero) 141 de Ronsard, Pierre 63 De suis Satyris 121 Divine agape 92, 108n9 Divine Mind 71 Divinity 90 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 77 domina petrosa 48 donna angelica 8, 9, 29, 33, 34, 36–40, 42–4, 46, 49, 50, 155; angelic lady 63; Dark Lady 74; as Petrarch’s images of Laura 61; radical revisions of 63 Donne, John 1, 6, 9; epigrammatic cleverness 90; flamboyant blasphemy 91; power, arrogation of 89 Du Bellay, Joachim 2 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 29n1 Durling, Robert M. 12n7 Du Vair, Guillaume 141 Eclogues (Virgil) 5 Egerton, Thomas 97, 108n20, 167 Eikon Basilike 170 Elizabeth Boyle 8, 33, 34, 54, 72 emanatio 9, 40, 43, 49 Epistolae Familiares (Petrarch) 2 Epithalamion 54 Erasmus 109n31 A Fable on Man (Vives) 140, 147 Faerie Queene 46, 79, 125 Ficino, Marsilio 17, 22, 24, 29, 30n7 Filelfo, Francesco 2, 11n3 fin’amor tradition 19, 36, 37, 38, 47 The Flower of Friendship (Tilney) 54 Galateo 65, 66 Ganymede 26 Genevan Calvinism 101, 102 Genevan ecclesiology 102 georgic imagery 20 Giuliano, Magnifico 65 Goffen, Rona 30n4 Golden Age 76, 129

Golden Beauty 76 The Grasse-hopper 169 Gryll, Spenser’s characterization of 150 Hall, Joseph 1, 6, 136n30, 137n32, 137n36, 137n42, 144, 150–1 Hardison, O. B. 56n3 The Hekatompathia or Passionate Century of Love (Watson) 14 Hester, M. Thomas 109n24 Highet, Gilbert 136n24 His Defiance to Enuie (Hall) 112, 121, 133 Homer 44 Horace’s Satire 1. 9 91, 108n8 hortus conclusus topos 51 Howard, Henry 7 Hyperion, Helios 168 imago dei 140, 155, 157, 160–2 Indefinite Question 99 Inns of Court 90, 105 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin) 157 Janus 106 Jove/Juno 26, 27 Judgement of Apollo 27–9 Judgement of Paris 25–7 Juvenalian imitation 154–5 Juvenalian indignatio 96 King, Henry 167 Kinsayder, W. 139, 140, 142, 153–62 La Boétie, Etienne de 15, 23, 32n24 lanx satura 162 Laura 62; Petrarch’s depiction of 34–9 Legouis, Emile 13n23 Le Imagini de gli dei degli antichi (Cartari) 148 libertas 7, 10, 112–13, 116, 117, 119–21, 120, 123, 124, 127 Lipsius, Justus 141 Lock, Anne 14 locus amoenus 46 Lodge, Thomas 125 love 4, 5, 14, 17, 18, 46, 48, 49, 51, 63, 167; concepts of 56n4; rhetoric of 46 Lovelace, Richard 167 Ludovico, Count 65 Lyly, John 20

Index  189 Maccabees 96 The Malcontent 146 Mammon, Epicure 130 maraviglia 73 Markham, Gervase 125 Marlowe, Christopher 126–8 Mars/Minerva 26, 27 Marston, John 1, 7, 10; The Malcontent 149; opinion 141–2; persona 140, 142–51; portrayal of Bruto 145–7, 155; Reactio 150; verse satire 139–40 The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres (Marston) 141 Michelangelo 63, 70 mock-aetiological myth 76 More, Ann 167 More, Thomas 142 mos maiorum 118 multum in parvo 168 mundus inversus 130 mutua communicatio 53, 133 Narcissus 50 Neronian literary culture 116 Nichols, Fred J. 11n4 nostos 44 Odysseus 44 omnia in parvo 168 omnia vincit Amor 5 Oration Concerning the Dignity of Man (Pico Della Mirandola) 140, 147 The Orator’s Education 98, 109n23 Ovid 142, 156 Panofsky, Erwin 57n23 Penelope 44–5 Petrarch, Francesco 2, 14, 15, 24 Pico Della Mirandola, Giovanni 140, 147–8 Pigmalion 143 Poyntz, John 8 Proteans 144, 145, 147, 151, 156 Proteus 144, 147–9, 152 Puttenham, George 6, 7 Quedam et sunt, et videntur 149 Quintilian 98–100, 109n25 Raphael of Urbino 67 raptio 9, 43, 49

reactio 150 recusatio 111, 112–13, 116, 117, 119–21, 120 remeatio 9, 43, 49 Rime sparse (Petrarch) 2, 8, 10, 15, 20, 29, 34, 36, 37 Ringler, William A. 30n1 Romanitas 119, 124 Sandys, George 6 Satires (Juvenal) 113–15, 119, 120 satirist-physician 100 Satyres/Siluanes 6, 7 scala perfectionis 19 Scève, Maurice 63 Scodel, Joshua 109n26–109n29 The Scourge of Villanie (Marston) 10, 139–41, 144, 149, 152, 154, 160–2 sdegno 34, 37, 38, 48, 53 Shakespeare, William 1; sonnet 2 22, 23; sonnet 3 20, 43; sonnet 5 24, 37, 38; sonnet 6 49, 51; sonnet 7 73; sonnet 8 43, 50; sonnet 9 42; sonnet 11 39, 41; sonnet 13 25; sonnet 15 50; sonnet 17 73; sonnet 18 41, 42; sonnet 19 41; sonnet 20 68–72; sonnet 21 38, 64; sonnet 22 47; sonnet 23 44; sonnet 28 48; sonnet 29 28; sonnet 30 27; sonnet 32 20; sonnet 33 74; sonnet 34 16; sonnet 35 2, 17, 50; sonnet 37 48; sonnet 39 49; sonnet 41 28; sonnet 53 28, 50, 71; sonnet 57 50; sonnet 58 52; sonnet 59 53; sonnet 60 86n55; sonnet 61 51; sonnet 63 46; sonnet 64 51, 52; sonnet 67 52; sonnet 70 53; sonnet 72 29; sonnet 74 17; sonnet 75 52; sonnet 78 54; sonnet 79 17; sonnet 83 50, 64; sonnet 107 28; sonnet 127 75, 76; sonnet 129 80; sonnet 130 75, 76; sonnet 131 76; sonnet 137 79; sonnet 144 77; sonnet 146 81; sonnet 147 80; sonnet 150 80; sonnets 1–21 34–5; sonnets 18 27; sonnets 21 27; sonnets 22 54; sonnets 23 27; sonnets 27 27; sonnets 34–5 17; sonnets 40–42 74; sonnets 58–9 52; sonnets 64 54; sonnets 67 54; sonnets 69 54; sonnets 73 79 Siculus, Diodorus 148 Sidney, Philip 1, 8, 14, 15, 25–6, 61 signore angelico 64, 70, 77

190 Index

Ulysses 41–6

Venus Caelestis 33, 39, 42 Venus Caelestis et Victrix 34, 36, 46, 50 Venus Genetrix 40, 41 Venus Machinatrix 41–2, 44, 48 Venus Philommeides 42, 48, 49 Venus Victrix 28, 32n23 Venus Victrix/Armata 40, 41, 47, 50 Venus Vulgaris 33, 40, 46–7, 51 Via Illuminativa 71 Virgidemiae (Hall) 134n1, 150; cupido falsus 112, 114, 117, 124, 126, 128, 130–2, 135n6; iteration and intensification 130; libertas and recusatio 112–13, 116, 119, 120, 123, 124, 127; outspokenness 123; psychological thought 129; Roman satiric tradition 111–12, 115, 117, 120; scope of ambitiousness 122; Stoic colouring 117; Virgilian rota 122, 123 Virgilian model 10, 122 Virgin Mary 79 Vives, Juan Luis 140, 147–8

Venus: multiplicity of 33, 39, 40; mythology and mythography of 37

Watson, Thomas 14, 30n3 Wyatt, Thomas 7, 8

Skelton, John 7 Sloan, Thomas O. 98 Song of Solomon 46 Songs and Sonnets 168 Sonnets pour Hélène (de Ronsard) 63 Southwell, Robert 125 Spenser, Edmund 1, 8, 55n1 see Amoretti (Spenser) sprezzatura 65, 66 Stoicism 159 Suasoria 88, 98, 100 Tamberlaine 126 Tasso, Torquato 63 temperantia 46 Theanthropos 64 The Greek Anthology 3, 4 Theotokos 64 The Scourge of Villanie 7, 10 ‘The Sun Rising’ 167 Tilney, Edmund 54 Trinkaus, Charles Edward 11n1 Tyacke, Nicholas 108n16