Selected Essays on George Gascoigne (Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge) [1 ed.] 9780367630874, 9780367630904, 9781003112082, 0367630877

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Short Titles
Foreword
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
I: Influences on Gascoigne
Gascoigne, Piccolomini, and the demilitarisation of the Siege of Troy
‘Ficta sub imagine texta’: John Skelton and George Gascoigne
George Gascoigne and Female Complaint
II: Gascoigne’s Influence on Elizabethan Literature: Gascoigne and Drama
Gascoigne’s Poses and Supposes
‘Certain decayed men’: Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske
Gascoigne and Poetry
‘To leave remembrance of my name’: Gascoigne’s Problematical Legacy to Spenser
Gascoigne’s Lute, Gascoigne’s Sparrow, and Gascoigne’s Goodnight: imitatio and the ‘verie sweete notes adapted’
Gascoigne, Miscellaneity, and Aesthetic Satisfaction
Gascoigne the soldier-poet: Rhetoric, representation, and reality
Gascoigne and Prose Fiction
‘Pretty conceits as pleased her peevish fantasy’: The ‘Manling’ Secretary in The Adventures of Master F.J.
Not Forgetting Frances: ‘Adventures’ in Elizabethan Fiction
III: Gascoigne’s Critical Reputation
‘The very chefe of our late rymers’: George Gascoigne and Literary Fam
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Selected Essays on George Gascoigne

This collection of essays situates George Gascoigne in context as the preeminent writer of the early part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. His ceaseless experimentation was hugely influential on those later Elizabethans  – including Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare  – who represent the great flowering of the English literary renaissance. Gascoigne rarely returned to a genre, writing prose fiction, blank verse, plays, sonnets, narrative verse, courtly entertainments, satire, and many other literary forms, and the later Elizabethans were fully aware of his significance. These essays are organised into three main sections: influences upon Gascoigne, such as Skelton; Gascoigne’s influence on others, including Spenser; and finally a reassessment of his critical neglect and the story behind his marginalised status in the English literary canon. As only the second multiauthored essay collection on Gascoigne, this book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of this important, influential, and often misunderstood writer. Gillian Austen is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of English, University of Bristol, England, UK.

Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge Series Editors: Harald E. Braun (University of Liverpool, UK) and Emily Michelson (University of St Andrews, UK)

SRS Board Members: Erik DeBom (KU Leuven, Belgium), Mordechai Feingold (California Institute of Technology, USA), Andrew Hadfield (Sussex), Peter Mack (University of Warwick, UK), Jennifer Richards (University of Newcastle, UK), Stefania Tutino (UCLA, USA), Richard Wistreich (Royal College of Music, UK) This series explores Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge (c.1400– c.1700) in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. The volumes published in this series study the individuals, communities and networks involved in making and communicating knowledge during the first age of globalization. Authors investigate the perceptions, practices and modes of behaviour which shaped Renaissance and Early Modern intellectual endeavour and examine the ways in which they reverberated in the political, cultural, social and economic sphere. The series is interdisciplinary, comparative and global in its outlook. We welcome submissions from new as well as existing fields of Renaissance Studies, including the history of literature (including neo-Latin, European and non-European languages), science and medicine, religion, architecture, environmental and economic history, the history of the book, art history, intellectual history and the history of music. We are particularly interested in proposals that straddle disciplines and are innovative in terms of approach and methodology. The series includes monographs, shorter works and edited collections of essays. The Society for Renaissance Studies (http://www.rensoc.org.uk) provides an expert editorial board, mentoring, extensive editing and support for contributors to the series, ensuring high standards of peer-reviewed scholarship. We welcome proposals from early career researchers as well as more established colleagues.

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Renaissance-and-Early-Modern-Worlds-of­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​ ­Knowledge/book-series/ASHSER4043 ­­ ​­ ­

Selected Essays on George Gascoigne

Edited by Gillian Austen

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Gillian Austen; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Gillian Austen to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted 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. British Library ­Cataloguing-in-Publication ­​­­ ​­ Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress ­Cataloging-in-Publication ­​­­ ​­ Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-63087-4 ­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ (hbk) ­ ISBN: 978-0-367-63090-4 ­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ (pbk) ­ ISBN: ­978-1-003-11208-2 ­​­­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ (ebk) ­ DOI: 10.4324/9781003112082 ­ Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

For G.W. Pigman III

Contents

Acknowledgements Short Titles Foreword Notes on Contributors Introduction

ix xi xiii xvii 1

A RT H U R F. K I N N E Y

I

Influences on Gascoigne

11

Gascoigne, Piccolomini, and the demilitarisation of the Siege of Troy

13

R .W. M A SL E N

‘Ficta sub imagine texta’: John Skelton and George Gascoigne

34

JA N E G R I F F I T H S

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint

48

M I K E PI NC OM BE

II

Gascoigne’s Influence on Elizabethan Literature: Gascoigne and Drama

67

Gascoigne’s Poses and Supposes

69

R IC H A R D C . M c C OY

‘Certain decayed men’: Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske S T E PH E N H A M R IC K

79

viii

Contents

Gascoigne and Poetry ‘To leave remembrance of my name’: Gascoigne’s Problematical Legacy to Spenser

105 107

E L I Z A BE T H H E A L E

Gascoigne’s Lute, Gascoigne’s Sparrow, and Gascoigne’s Goodnight: imitatio and the ‘verie sweete notes adapted’

122

C H R I S T OPH E R G O ODW I N

Gascoigne, Miscellaneity, and Aesthetic Satisfaction

139

M IC H A E L H E T H E R I NGT ON

Gascoigne the soldier-poet: Rhetoric, representation, and reality

157

D. J. B . T R I M

Gascoigne and Prose Fiction ‘Pretty conceits as pleased her peevish fantasy’: The ‘Manling’ Secretary in The Adventures of Master F.J.

173 175

S USA N C . S TAU B

Not Forgetting Frances: ‘Adventures’ in Elizabethan Fiction

189

K AT H A R I N E W I L S ON

III

Gascoigne’s Critical Reputation

207

‘The very chefe of our late rymers’: George Gascoigne and Literary Fam

209

GI L L I A N AUS T E N

Select Bibliography Index

235 239

Acknowledgements

Particular thanks go to Mac Pigman, Arthur Kinney, Andrew Hadfield, Roger Pooley, Catherine Bates, Gavin Alexander, Alan Stewart, Jessica Winston, Eric Stanley, Elizabeth Goldring, and Cathy Shrank. Thanks, too, to all of the contributors for their patience and hard work, and especially to Mike Pincombe for his advice. Thanks also to the Society for Renaissance Studies for its unfailing support, to the Bodleian Library, and especially to Lincoln College, Oxford.

Copyright Notice A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres by Gascoigne, ed. G.W. Pigman III (2000). 5,032w from pp. lvi, 4, 7–8, ­ ​­ 15–16, ­ ​­ 18, 20, 23, 26, ­30–31, ​­ ­34–37, ​­ 43, 48, 54–56, ­ ​­ 58, 61, ­141–142, ​­ ­145–148, ​­ ­153–154, ​­ 157–159, ­ ​­ 165, 168, ­176–177, ​­ 179, 181, 198– ­ ​ ­199, 215, 217, 219, 226, ­234–235, ​­ ­238–239, ​­ 241, ­251–252, ​­ ­237–239, ​­ 251, ­269–270, ​­ 272, 287, 289, 301, 304–309, ­ ​­ 311–312, ­ ​­ 329, 341–342, ­ ​­ ­359–361, ​­ 363, ­365–367, ​­ ­370–371, ​­ 397–398, ­ ​­ 421, 447, ­453–455, ​­ ­457–459, ​­ 461, 552, 567, 732, 791. By permission of Oxford University Press.

Short Titles: Editions and Secondary Works

Austen

Gillian Austen, George Gascoigne (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer), 2008 Cunliffe J.W. Cunliffe, ed., The Complete Works of George Gascoigne. 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1907, 1910, repr. New York, 1969), volume 2 ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) OED Oxford English Dictionary (second and third editions) Pigman G.W. Pigman III, ed., George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) Prouty Charles T. Prouty, George Gascoigne. Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942) Robertson Jean Robertson, “George Gascoigne and The Noble Arte of Venerie and Hunting”, Modern Language Review 37 (1942), ­484–5​­ Salzman Paul Salzman, ed., “The Adventures of Master F.J.”, in An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, World’s Classics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Wallace William L. Wallace, ed., George Gascoigne’s The Steele Glas and The Complainte of Phylomene: A Critical Edition with an Introduction, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 24 (Salzburg, 1975) Weiss Adrian Weiss, “Shared Printing, Printer’s Copy, and the Text(s) of Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres”, Studies in Bibliography 45 (1992), ­ 71–104 ­ ​­

Short Titles: Gascoigne’s Works

Editions used are Pigman for A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres and the Posies; Pigman and Salzman for Master F.J.; and Cunliffe, volume 2, for Gascoigne’s other works. Abbreviated titles for the shorter poems use Pigman’s versions in his Table of Contents and are referenced by page numbering in Pigman. Where appropriate, stanza and line references in Pigman’s edition are provided. Spellings follow the Pigman and Cunliffe editions and modernise i/j and v/u. ­ A Hundreth

A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, bounde up in one small poesie. Gathered partely (by translation) in the fine outlandish Gardins of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarke and Ariosto, and other: and partly by invention, out of our owne fruitefull Orchardes in Englande: Yelding sundrie sweete savours of Tragical, Comical and Morall Discourses, bothe pleasaunt and profitable to the well smelling noses of learned Readers (1572/3) ­ ­

Master F.J.

A Discourse of the Adventures passed by Master F.J. (first ­ published in A Hundreth)

Posies

The Posies of George Gascoigne, Esquire. Corrected, perfected and augmented by the Aucthour (1575) ­

Certayne Notes

‘Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English, written at the request of Master Edouardo Donati’ (first published in the Posies)

Glasse of Government

The Glasse of Governement. A tragicall Comedie so entituled, bycause therein are handled aswell the rewardes for Vertues, as also the punishment for Vices. (1575) ­

Noble Arte

The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575) ­

Princely Pleasures

The Princeleye Pleasures, at Kenelwoorth Castle (1576) ­

Steele The Steele Glas. A satyre co[m]piled by George Glas/Complaynt ­ Gascoigne Esquire. Togither with The Complainte of of Phylomene Phylomene, An Elegie devised by the same Author. (1576) ­

Foreword

When I first started working on Gascoigne in 1991, there was only one modern annotated edition (Wallace’s The Steele Glas) and there were just three book-length studies: Prouty’s biography from 1942; and two monographs, one from 1893 and one from 1972.1 But there were dozens of interesting (and sometimes misleading) articles and chapters on Gascoigne, scattered across many journals and textbooks. My correspondence with Mac Pigman, who was at that time working through the notes to his authoritative edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, was uniquely inspiring. But even then, there were other scholars whose names cropped up repeatedly, who had written a chapter on Gascoigne in a hugely influential book (such as Arthur Kinney), or who kept returning to Gascoigne in successive influential articles (such as Susan Staub, Richard McCoy, and Robert Maslen). It is a privilege to have them represented in this book. This selection of essays makes a number of important contributions to the understanding of Gascoigne and his work. New approaches to his work are proposed, new sources and influences on his work are discovered, and new ways in which his work influenced Elizabethan literature are described. Hence, the volume is organised to show some of the influences upon him, and some of the authors and genres that he influenced. The hope is that the variety of critical approaches by these scholars, and the richness and diversity of Gascoigne’s work, will inspire future work which will give him his deserved place in the canon. The final paper is my own, and seeks to address the key issue of Gascoigne’s current literary status. From a personal point of view, as an undergraduate I had first noticed Gascoigne’s name cropping up repeatedly in the footnotes to editions of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser. So the most persistent question that lurked in the background to the years I later spent researching Gascoigne was why he was considered so marginal. When I was working on my monograph, I was able, by a simple exercise of gathering up all the known published references to Gascoigne by his contemporaries, to trace the development of his literary reputation immediately following his death. By presenting those contemporary references in chronological order, it was immediately obvious that Gascoigne’s reputation rose

xiv Foreword significantly in the years after his death. His reputation as an innovator was unsurpassed among the later Elizabethans, and clearly all those writers we recognise as representing the great flowering of the English literary renaissance were fully aware of how significant his work was.2 So why wasn’t Gascoigne central to our understanding of the glories of later Elizabethan literature? How had his reputation become so tarnished and his status so marginalised? Once the book was published, I was able to extend my investigations beyond 1603. That meant trying to trace Gascoigne’s literary reputation through not only the end of the Tudor dynasty and the sweeping away of virtually all of the Elizabethan court, but also across vast topics including the English Civil War, the Restoration, the rise of antiquarianism, the emergence of Shakespeare studies, the Enlightenment, Samuel Johnson, Romanticism, and many others. But I was committed to finding some answers to the problem of Gascoigne’s marginalisation, even if it meant skating over the surface of those topics to trace what remained of his reputation. If the Elizabethans valued him so highly, why didn’t we accord him the significance of a Chaucer or a Wyatt? And conversely, if he was a failure as some critics have argued, why was he remembered at all? What I discovered was a tale ranging between huge historical and cultural events and the smallest of literary details like missing title pages, sole surviving copies, lost attributions, ardent Gascoigne collectors and detractors, and fortuitous editions – even a fire in a Victorian library which destroyed the only extant copy of a Gascoigne book. It is a narrative which demonstrates the elements of chance that shape our understanding of what makes an author important. Gascoigne’s practice of publishing some of his work anonymously and some of it under his own name played into this, creating difficulties of attribution. Just ten years after his death, the bookseller Abel Jeffes published the first Whole Woorkes of George Gascoigne, but within months he had to reissue it under a new title (the Pleasauntest woorkes) when he realised how much he had missed out. Rarely returning to a genre, endlessly inventive, Gascoigne never fitted readily into a recognisable category. His attempts to fix an authorial identity as a moralist were always compromised by his parallel anonymous activities in more courtly genres. Furthermore, the most successful of Gascoigne’s works in contemporary terms would have been the manuscripts he presented to the Queen at New Year in 1576 and 1577, which were hidden away in the Royal Collection for centuries. It is little wonder that his success, and his significance, were so quickly obscured when the Tudor age ended. I hope that by tracing his posthumous fortunes I might contribute to his rehabilitation. For one thing is certain: Gascoigne’s work and influence deserve more attention, more detailed work, and more editions like Mac Pigman’s. This selection of essays is dedicated to him. Gillian Austen University of Bristol

Foreword

xv

Notes 1 The edition is William L. Wallace, ed., George Gascoigne’s The Steele Glas and The Complainte of Phylomene: A Critical Edition with an Introduction, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 24 (Salzburg, 1975); the biography is by Charles T. Prouty, George Gascoigne. Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942); the two monographs are F.E. Schelling, The Life and Works of George Gascoigne, University of Pennsylvania Series in Philology, Literature and Archaeology, Vol. II, no. 4 (Philadelphia, 1983) and Ronald C. Johnson, George Gascoigne (New York, 1972). 2 Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 6–14.

Notes on Contributors

Gillian Austen read English Literature as a mature student at Lincoln College, University of Oxford, spending the next two years working in publishing. She returned to Oxford to do her doctorate, focusing her research on George Gascoigne. Her monograph, George Gascoigne, was published by D.S. Brewer in 2008. She has published several journal articles on Gascoigne and his peers as well as chapters in books, including the entry on Francis Kinwelmershe for the ODNB and the entries for Gascoigne and Whetstone for the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Renaissance English Literature, edited by Alan Stewart and Jennifer Richards (2012). She wrote on Gascoigne as a prose writer, looking at the wide range of his prose work (and ­ Master F.J. in passing), for The Oxford Handbook to English Prose, ­1500–1640 ​­ (OUP, 2013). She wrote the Gascoigne entry for the online Oxford Bibliographies in “British and Irish Literature”, ed. Andrew Hadfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). She is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of English, University of Bristol. Christopher Goodwin  read History at Clare College, Cambridge. He has played the lute since the age of 19, and since 1997 has been Secretary of The Lute Society, and Editor of The Lute, Journal of The Lute Society, and Lute News magazine. From 2009, he has edited the Fellowship of Makers and Researchers of Historical Instruments Quarterly; he briefly edited Early Music Performer magazine. His independent researches, when time allows, have principally been in the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century songs, in particular attempting to re-unite the music of long-lost song tunes with their lyrics. His most significant findings to date have been the identification of the earliest extant English lute manuscript, and the tentative identification of the lost music for Feste’s “Come away death”, from Twelfth Night. He co-founded the European Lute Orchestra and helped to refound the defunct Italian Lute Society. He sings and plays the lute, and his recordings with the group English Ayres can be heard at http://magnatune.com. Jane Griffiths is Associate Professor in English at Oxford and Placito Fellow and Tutor in English at Wadham College, University of Oxford. She has

xviii  Notes on Contributors published widely on the poetry and drama of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and is also a poet: her sixth collection is Little Silver (Bloodaxe, 2022). Her first monograph was John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (OUP, 2006); her 2014 book, Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (OUP, ­ 2014), includes the chapter “‘Masking Naked in a Net’: Author and Text in the Works of Gascoigne and Harington”. Stephen Hamrick  is Professor of English at Bemidji State University. His article “‘Set in portraiture’: George Gascoigne, Queen Elizabeth, and Adapting the Royal Image”, Early Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (2005), analyses Gascoigne’s beautiful woodcut images in The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting within the nascent cult of Elizabeth. Hamrick edited the first collection of essays on Gascoigne, a Special Issue of Early Modern Literary Studies (2008), which included his essay “‘Thus Much I Adventure to Deliver to You’: the Fortunes of George Gascoigne”. Two chapters in his monograph, The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, ­1558–1582 ​­ (2009), read a range of Gascoigne’s work within the cults of Elizabeth. Hamrick also edited Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (2013), including his reception study, “‘Their Gods in Verses’: Songes and Sonettes, 1557–1674”. His most recent monograph is Shakespeare and Sexuality in the Comedy of Morecambe and Wise (2020). ­ Elizabeth Heale has written extensively on both Spenser and Gascoigne, in particular in her books: The Faerie Queene. A Readers’ Guide (revised ­ edition 1999) and Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse (2003). She is particularly interested in understanding the work of both poets in the context of other mid-sixteenth- c entury poets and has explored this topic in a number of publications, including essays in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (OUP, 2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (OUP, 2010). Her essay on Spenser’s religious context is included in the Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Lit­ erature and Religion (2017). Other publications include Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (1998) and an edition of The Devonshire Manuscript: A Women’s Book of Courtly Poetry (2013). Elizabeth Heale taught in the English Department of the University of Reading and was subsequently an honorary Research Fellow at the University’s Early Modern Research Centre. She is now retired and lives in Scotland. Michael Hetherington  completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge in 2013, and was, until 2020, a supernumerary fellow in English at St John’s College, Oxford. He is now an independent scholar and teacher. His research interests lie mainly in Elizabethan poetry and prose, with a special focus on early modern poetics and its wider philosophical and cultural contexts. He has published articles and book chapters on William Scott, Edmund Spenser, and George Gascoigne, and on broader topics in

Notes on Contributors  xix the history of literary criticism; recent work includes “Gascoigne’s Accidents: Contingency, Skill, and the Logic of Writing,” English Literary Renaissance, 46 (2016). He continues to work on a range of topics in early modern literature, including a large-scale study of sixteenth- c entury ideas about literary unity and textual coherence. R.W. Maslen is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of three books: Elizabethan Fictions (1997), ­ Shakespeare and Comedy (2005) and The Shakespeare Handbook (2008), and has edited Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (2002) and Mervyn Peake’s Collected Poems (2008), and co- edited Thomas Dekker/Thomas Middleton’s News from Gravesend for the Oxford Middleton (2007) and Mervyn Peake’s Complete Nonsense (2011). He has written many essays on Renaissance literature, with several influential contributions on Gascoigne, including two book chapters: “Myths Exploited: the metamorphoses of Ovid in Early Modern England”, in Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A.B. Taylor, 15–20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and “Sidney, Gascoigne, and the ‘Bastard Poets’”, in Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic, eds., Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640 (New York, 2003). Richard McCoy is Emeritus Professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University, New York (CUNY). He earned his BA at Stanford University and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written four books – Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (Rutgers, ­ 1979), The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (California, 1989), Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (Columbia, 2002), and Faith in Shakespeare (Oxford, ­ 2013; pbk. 2015). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Council for Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Folger Shakespeare Library and Huntington Library. He is currently working on a study of Shakespeare’s “clownish fools”. His first article on Gascoigne’s verse was published more than 30 years ago, and he returned in his most recent book to links between Gascoigne’s Supposes and Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Mike Pincombe  is Emeritus Professor of Tudor and Elizabethan Literature at Newcastle University and Visiting Professor at the Friedrich­­Alexander-Universität ​­ at ­Erlangen-Nürnberg. ​­ He founded and convened the Tudor Symposium from 1997 to 2009. He has written books on John Lyly and on Elizabethan humanism and also co- edited, with Cathy Shrank, The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature. He is the author of a quantity of essays and articles on m id-Tudor literature, most recently on William Baldwin, Thomas Wyatt and Barnaby Googe. An essay on “Gascoigne’s Phylomene: A late-mediaeval paraphrase of the Philomela story” appeared in Elizabethan Literature and Transformation (ed. ­

xx  Notes on Contributors ­ Susan C. Staub  is Professor of English at Appalachian State University, where she teaches Shakespeare and Early Modern Literary Studies. She has published several essays on Gascoigne including ‘“According to My Source”: Fictionality in The Adventures of Master F.J.’ Studies in Philology 87 (1990), pp. 101–35; “A Poet with a spear”: Writing and Sexual Power in the Elizabethan Period’, Renaissance Papers (1992), ­ pp. 1–15; ­ ­ ​­ a chapter in  Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose, ed. Constance Relihan (1996), ‘“T he Lady Frances did watch”: Gascoigne’s Voyeuristic Narrative’; and “Dissembling His Art: Gascoigne’s Gardnings,” Renaissance Studies 25.1 (2011), ­ pp.  ­95–110. ​­ Her publications include Nature’s Cruel Stepdames: Representations of Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England with Duquesque University Press and The Literary Mother (editor). Her current scholarship focuses on Shakespeare and botany, and she is editing the forthcoming collection Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination. D. J. B. Trim  is Director of the Archives of the General Conference of Seventh- day Adventists, and Professor of Church History at the Seventhday Adventist Theological Seminary, Andrews University (USA), having previously been Senior Lecturer in History at Newbold College (UK) and Walter C. Utt Professor of History at Pacific Union College (USA). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He has published widely on early modern and military history, including the edited collections The Huguenots: History and Memory in Transnational Context (Brill, 2011), Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge, 2011), and European Warfare ­1350–1750 ​­ (Cambridge, 2010). His publications on Renaissance literature include an analysis of Gascoigne’s writings in his essay “Martial Poetics from Henry Howard to Philip Sidney” in The Oxford Handbook ​­ of Tudor Literature, ­1485–1603 (OUP, 2009) and a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (OUP, 2016). Katharine Wilson has taught at Newcastle University and the University of Oxford. She is the author of Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia (Oxford, 2006) and contributed chapters to Writing Robert Greene, edited by Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes (Ashgate, ­ 2008), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (OUP, 2009) and The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640 (OUP, 2013). Her research interests include Elizabethan fiction, especially the works of John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge.

Introduction Arthur F. Kinney

“George Gascoigne was the most inventive and influential of the early Elizabethan poets,” Gillian Austen has written; “he found favour with Elizabeth I and his work was admired by Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare.”1 Modern neglect of his work, then, is both inexplicable and inexcusable. But Austen’s essay in this volume seeks to solve the mystery of Gascoigne’s poor treatment by posterity and explain why he has been so neglected. Austen traces Gascoigne’s posthumous reputation across four centuries, picking up the story where she concluded her earlier account of his Elizabethan reputation. For those who read the two accounts together, Austen has created a narrative which helps to explain both why Gascoigne is so important and why he has been so marginalised in the English literary canon. The reconsideration of Gascoigne, the pre- eminent writer of the early Elizabethan period, is long overdue. Among his contemporaries, Gascoigne had no rival in the exploration of genres. The closest was Sir Philip Sidney, like Gascoigne a courtier, a soldier, and a poet. Both died young, within a decade of each other, Sidney in 1587 at 30; Gascoigne in 1577 at 38. In their abbreviated lifetimes, both made translations (Sidney, Aristotle’s Poetics II; Gascoigne, Ariosto’s Supposes, Dolce’s Giocasta, and both moralistic tracts and the highly courtly The Noble Art of Venerie); critical treatises (Sidney’s A Defence of Poesie and ­ Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction); sonnet sequences (Astrophil and Stella; “Gascoigne’s Memories”); masques (The Lady of May; Gascoigne’s “Devise of a Maske” and The Princeleye Pleasures, at Kenelwoorth Castle); and of course fiction (The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; The Adventures of Master F.J.). Even then, Gascoigne’s searching experimentation seems ceaseless for we have yet to add drama (The Glasse of Government), dream vision (“The Complaynte of Philomene”), blank verse (The Steele Glas), reportage (The Spoyle of Antwerpe), and the many literary forms in his miscellany, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. Yet, all of this was recognised by the Elizabethans, as Austen has argued.2 Revising Gascoigne’s achievement by placing him among the great pioneering authors of the Tudor Renaissance, therefore, bears needed testimony here.

DOI: 10.4324/­9781003112082-​­1

2  Arthur F. Kinney Gascoigne is noted for his experimentation, and he realised from the start that all poetry – that is, all the work of the i magination – is conjecture, the works hypotheses. Neither observation nor experience, it is made up. As his Prologue put it in his Supposes, translated from Ariosto and performed at Gray’s Inn: I suppose you are assembled here, supposing to reape the fruite of my travayles: and to be playne, I meane presently to presente you with a Comedie called Supposes, the verye name whereof may peradventure drive into every of your heades a sundry Suppose, to suppose the meaning of our supposes … But understand, this our Suppose is nothing else but a mystaking or imagination of one thing for an other: … But what? I suppose that even already you suppose me very fonde [foolish], that have so simply disclosed unto you the subtilties of these our Supposes… (p. 7) ­­ Almost without exception, no Renaissance English poet has set out his lifelong poetics in such an early work as this, the Prologue or Argument of Gascoigne’s translation of Ariosto’s I Suppositi, written in 1566. In his essay in this volume, Richard McCoy discusses and even imitates Gascoigne’s wit and playfulness; Gascoigne’s “notion of poses, is capacious and paradoxical, encompassing not only disguise and play-acting, but also all supposition and even thought itself.” In this connection, McCoy recalls Touchstone’s belief that there is “much virtue in If” in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (V.iv.102). ­ Such a credo describes all of Gascoigne’s works; they put Ariosto into unending play. This helps to explain the unsettledness that we find in so much of his work. It helps, too, to explain why he was so willing to revise A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. But he also played on multiple perceptions of the imagination and this led to works of some complexity. One suppose led to another; one suppose, when examined, led to a complex of supposes. This also explains, at least in part, the unresolved ambiguities in his work, the shiftings and circlings and realignments. His work, more than that of any of his contemporaries, takes on different significances at different times, in various contexts. Think, for example, of The Adventures of Master F.J. It is kaleidoscopic. The relationships of the main characters are mercurial, always alive, always shifting. Reading about them, our responses follow in kind. Complexity leads to, resides in, ambiguity. What knowledge we gain is that we do not know, may never know, what is going on with these characters, what constitutes their thoughts, or what distinguishes their actions from one another. It is not the least bit puzzling that someone like Thomas Nashe found Gascoigne’s works so appealing, so important. It is all the more frustrating that Gascoigne has

Introduction  3 been so neglected when he helps to discover the appeal of a similar poetics in our own time.

I Releasing multiple meanings for a singular text may seem radical, yet it is what metaphor does even when it is limited to few possibilities. Gascoigne’s satire The Steele Glas is a case in point. The poem is built on a simple contrast between crystal glass mirrors, still being perfected in the sixteenth century, alongside the steel mirror, carried by the military, which gave a reflection free of distortion – the kind of distortion that personal conditions, habits, or perspectives might bring to any observation or understanding. Seeing was opposed to being, but here the understanding was fragmented by a long series of examples taken from the estates and activity of English life in the sixteenth century. Yet this is little more than an extension of the humanist practice of imitatio, when a model text was faithfully followed to a point where it diverged, formulating a new meaning. Cambridge trained Gascoigne in this way, following the ancients such as Aristotle, Quintilian and, especially, Cicero; the last two taught ways to formulate arguments from unexpected sources that would surprise or sidetrack prosecutors. Now two more sources for Gascoigne can be added to our understanding. Identifying a new source for Master F.J., Robert Maslen proposes Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II. His Historia de duobus amantibus (1444) was translated into English in 1515. As Maslen notes, the first formal link between Piccolomini’s and Gascoigne’s novella is that both are contained within the framework of a letter, and that “both are packed with epistolary exchanges between their central characters”, using prefatory letters as framing devices for the tales that follow. Maslen pinpoints Gascoigne’s awareness of his place in literary tradition, referring to the centrality of both his and Piccolomini’s “preoccupation with literary depictions of the Trojan War (Virgil’s, Ovid’s, Boccaccio’s, and in Gascoigne’s case Chaucer’s)”. Like Master F.J., Piccolomini’s narrative is “a playful one, which undercuts the pretensions of the courtly love tradition, laughs at Petrarchan idealism, and mocks the chivalric code as depicted in romance”. Such a comparison easily applies to the multiple narration in both the northern English household (1573) and the Italian great house (1575) in which the two versions of The Adventures of Master F. J. take place. Maslen may be gleeful or acerbic in noting how the narrator “tangles himself into fantastic knots of speculation” under the fragmentation of meaning, the accumulation of supposes. Jane Griffiths locates another source for Gascoigne in John Skelton, a fellow Catholic poet of the preceding generation. She takes as starting point Gascoigne’s poem on the topic of “Philip Sparrow”, the subject of one

4  Arthur F. Kinney of Skelton’s own poems. “Where Skelton’s poem [in the voice of one Jane Scrope] contains both Jane’s praise of the sparrow Philip and [Skelton’s] own praise of Jane” – the poem bifurcated near the start – Gascoigne’s speaker, a third view, “conflates the two, giving his human mistress the name ‘Philip Sparrow.’ This allows Gascoigne to create a long run of blatant doubleentendres, as in the following stanza: His fethers are so freshe of hew, And so well proyned everye daye: She lackes none oyle, I warrant you: To trimme hir tayle both tricke and gaye. And though her mouth be somewhat wide, Hir tonge is sweet and short beside. (p. 234) ­­ In Gascoigne, such supposes are sequential, haphazard, interruptive. Griffiths continues, The most interesting connections between Skelton and Gascoigne, however, are … in shared writing practices and habits of mind. This is strikingly exemplified by their respective uses of complex, heteroglossic structures that both reflect and encourage thought about the processes of writing and reading and the nature of the relationship between author and reader. Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe is far from being the only one of his poems composed of multiple voices, fragments, quotations, envoys, and additions. Griffiths goes on to invoke other works by Gascoigne: Master F. J., of course, but also The Posies, Dan Bartholmew of Bath, The Greene Knight, or The fruite of Fetters. Skelton’s influence on Gascoigne is surely deserving of further investigation. The third essay in the section on Gascoigne’s influences takes an entirely different approach. Both by its methodology and its approach, which is through the influence of genres and generic expectations, Mike Pincombe’s essay must seem an anomaly. In discovering a new genre in the same spirit of Gascoigne trying out all of them, his work is suitably pioneering. At once both professional and parodic, his search for a new genre is fully in the spirit of Gascoigne in the 1570s exploring one genre after another. Even so, that he fails to find it, secures Gascoigne’s reputation. There is another way this is a capstone effort. Gascoigne’s poetics of supposes multiplies concerns, splinters thoughts and attitudes and occurrences so that readers can rejoin them, that truth can be comprehended in patterns – the humanists would have said models – which contain their own revelations. Pincombe is doing that too, but in reverse: he is gathering up examples to compose a generalisation. His charts and scattergrams are informed midpoint. Pincombe tests Gascoigne’s methodology in his own.

Introduction  5

II In considering Gascoigne’s influence on his contemporaries and successors, this collection groups the essays into sections by genre or work. Richard McCoy’s essay on the playfulness of the translation of Supposes has already been mentioned. But Gascoigne’s influence on the drama is far-reaching, and evident in tragedy as well as comedy, courtly entertainments as well as moralistic prodigal son plays, and even on the development of masques. His direct influence is evident on Shakespeare and Marlowe, to name only the two most prominent of the period. Drama is the genre that by its very nature and convention is many-voiced, inviting a poetics of complexity by supposes radiating from a common centre or resting on the audience pulling actions and speeches together in a pattern of significance. Gascoigne’s earliest original work in drama is his Devise of a Maske for the right honorable Viscount Mountacute, which Stephen Hamrick explicates in all its religious and political significations – all its supposes. The occasion is a Catholic double marriage. Centring on the Catholic victory over the defiant infidel Turks in the decisive battle of Lepanto, the masque can use history and religion to political purpose and military battles to religious purpose. (These are two supposes.) As the device’s introduced in print has it, eight English men, members of the Montacute/Montague family, Catholics dressed as Venetians “entreated Master Gascoigne to devise some verses to be uttered by an Actor”, to justify their choice of costumes. Gascoigne wrote the verses to be spoken by an “imprisoned” boy, who narrates the recent victory by the Venetians (fully 376 lines of rhyming couplets). This transcultural mix with its consequently rapid union calls both identity and reliable alliances to account while paying tribute to the Catholic Viscount. There are multiple supposes here. In poetry, Gascoigne’s influence was unrivalled in the early 1570s and well into the 1580s. Elizabeth Heale’s essay on Gascoigne’s influence on Spenser shows how he shaped his models and ideas about verse and language: here, at last, we see Gascoigne recognised as an “influential model” on Spenser. It is possible that the two poets met, since both knew Gabriel Harvey. (Gascoigne gave Harvey his first opportunity in print, with a commendatory verse to the Posies in 1575.) Indeed, Harvey claimed to have discussed Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction with Spenser. Both wrote as a display of their skills; both desired to educate the reader to understand their new poetic ambitions. It can be safely averred that Spenser was more successful at this than Gascoigne. Perhaps learning from Gascoigne’s confusing self-presentation, Spenser realised he needed to offer himself explicitly as “the new poet”. One aspect of Gascoigne’s verse that has had little attention to date is the way he utilised music.3 As Christopher Goodwin of the Lute Society tells us, the structure of several of Gascoigne’s lyric poems suggests that

6  Arthur F. Kinney they overlay well-known songs, providing a pattern that lurks before – and beneath – the poems. Indeed, some of his poems were sung in his lifetime. According to Goodwin, The 1587 edition of The Whole Woorkes includes a verse ‘Come, ­ muses, come and help me to lament’ which according to its rubric was performed in the royal entertainment at Kenilworth in 1575 … A very small number of Gascoigne’s verses either have clear instructions as to the music to which they are to be sung, at least in imagination, and another small group have extant contemporary settings. Goodwin goes on to explore those of Gascoigne’s verses which are “very obviously modelled on” well-known songs of the day. Certain refrains of music, then, governed the form of some of his lyrics and, knowing that form alongside reading the poem, locates two somewhat different experiments and separates the vocal and the instrumental. The result is two separate supposes or, uniting them, three. Such an understanding varies Gascoigne’s applications of his poetics but it does not change them. His works separate in order to recombine and the possible recombinations establish the meaning. Gascoigne’s “A Lady being both wronged by false suspect” recalls a similarly patterned lyric by Wyatt and leads to songs by Sidney, Munday, Herrick, Quarles, and Carew. Miscellanies were, of course, the logical, the most suitable genre for someone devoted to the episodic, the contrary, the unfinished, the varied, the most ambiguous. Gascoigne’s first venture into print, A Hundreth sundrie Flowres (1573), revised two years later as The Posies, remains his best and most enduring work. It combines with ease classical and contemporary drama, song, lyric, autobiography, prose narrative, and satire. His writing could find a home in any genre because all writing he saw as speculative. In his wide-ranging chapter on Gascoigne’s miscellany, Michael Hetherington calls this “a process strategically fitted to its recipient.” A Hundreth, he argues, advertises its capaciousness and copiousness by assuring us (in Gascoigne’s own words) that it is “so universall, as either in one place or other, any mans mind may therewith be satisfied …” ( p. 4). Hetherington contrasts George Puttenham’s “monolithic” sense of the reader’s mind with what he sees in Gascoigne as a “radical subjectivity of aesthetic experience”. And he asks a fundamental question when we consider Gascoigne’s use of supposes: “How does one address an unknown reader successfully in print, when the occasion of a poem’s reception can no longer be controlled?” After 1575, Gascoigne adopted the motto “Tam Marti, quam Mercurio”, indicating his military skills as well as his facility with forms of cultural communication. In this volume, D. J. B. Trim’s essay details the military life of Gascoigne, who sought honour in the tiltyard and on the battlefield: “… participation in war was widely acknowledged among the sixteenth- c entury

Introduction  7 English gentry and nobility to be the chivalric, aristocratic, and masculine apogee”. In 1572, Gascoigne raised a small troop of horse to fight in France; there he joined the army of Louis of Nassau, the younger brother of William of Orange, and moved on to fight in Spain and the southern Netherlands. The result was “Dulce bellum inexpertis, The fruits of Warre”, an autobiographical account of Gascoigne’s observations and reflections on his experiences. Gascoigne’s later work The Spoyle of Antwerpe (1576) works much the same way in prose. One of the best pieces of reportage in the Renaissance, Gascoigne’s eyewitness account is visually powerful in the mind’s eye: I forbeare also to recount the huge nombers, drowned in ye new Towne: where a man might behold as many sundry shapes and formes of mans motion at time of death: as ever Mighel Angelo dyd portray in his tables of Doomes day. I list not to recken the infinite nombers of poore Almains, wholay burned in their armour, some th[e] entrails skorched out, & all the rest of the body free, some their head and shoulders burnt of so that you might looke down into the bulk & brest: and there take an Anatomy of the secrets of nature. (ed. ­ Cunliffe, p. 596) ­ Unlike the earlier work, Gascoigne adds to the observations concrete images that haunt the remainder of the text. He calls not only on the perception of his audience/readers but asks that they visualise the situation, thus actually joining in. The audience is again witness or participant, combining the supposes of Gascoigne’s account. Gascoigne’s influence on the development of English prose fiction is the focus of the final section. What we have observed about ambiguity and shape-shifting as characteristic of Gascoigne’s poetics of supposition is employed too in what is unanimously thought his best known and most enduring work and a significant part of his miscellany: The Adventures of Master F. J. Two quite different essays in this collection address this central text. In Master F. J., a love triangle – or a parody of one – is based on the supposes of the protagonist F. J., Elinor (sometimes replaced by her unnamed secretary) and Frances, in which as every thought is a suppose, so it is that they are exercised in every action. The narrative traces their conjectures, their hopes and disappointments, their activities and games and speculative banter until, in the end, everything is in disarray. Susan C. Staub, in her essay, attempts to unlock and order these shapeshifting ideas and actions, unpacking the rich texture of the account by focusing on the secretary and his position in the story. As secretaries were privy to household secrets to secure their management, he blurs boundaries through superior awareness and friendship; he is “a repository of secrets, a writer, and a confidant and friend” connecting him to both F.J. and G.W. As a go-between between F.J. and Elinor, he serves as pander. As the story

8  Arthur F. Kinney unfolds, the reader is asked to determine what each character knows and his or her motives, the apparently loyal yet relatively unknown Frances. We are asked to judge the characters’ motives and behaviour in a world of multiple deceptions and self-promotion. Why is the secretary a blocking figure? Is Elinor ever serious about anyone? Wordplay on “friend, “closet”, “secretary”, “further complicates the issues since words (like people) have multiple meanings”. And who is the most reliable narrator? Is the lord of the manor, or the secretary, or Frances ever in control? Is the story set in the present or is it recollection? Is G.T. the older F.J. reliving the past? Staub’s chapter is nicely complemented by the longer, more exterior view of Master F.J. in Katharine Wilson’s essay. Instead of approaching the story by way of an erotic Dame Elinor and a secretary, Wilson attempts to enter through Frances. She is presented as “a more obvious ethical touchstone, ‘Hope’ to F. J.’s ‘Trust.’” Word games of the first edition now become overtly moral: Frances can be seen as both a keeper and a revealer of secrets … By hiding F. J.’s sword and reminding him of Elinor’s promiscuity, she gives F. J. the chance to understand his own story in a different way. Yet, in reshaping triangular action and characterisation, Gascoigne managed to set a prototype that many of the later writers followed. His influence in the subsequent rise of prose fiction helped many of his contemporaries find inspiration and an independent voice. Wilson demonstrates with conviction how many of them were inspired in different directions: George Whetstone’s Discourse of Rinaldo and Giletta; John Grange’s The Golden Aphrodite; John Lyly’s Euphues and Euphues and his England; Sir Philip Sidney’s The Old Arcadia. In these works, the hero as loser became a literary type; his journey is the rite of passage. No Renaissance English writer inspired as much, except Sidney and Shakespeare and Marlowe. But it would be difficult, wouldn’t it, to match so inspiring a variety and subtlety. It is impossible to dismiss Gascoigne’s inventions, his discoveries, his supposes. In her essay, Gillian Austen explores his critical reception to show why his reputation declined. We can now set it right, taking up the invitation of his contemporaries from Puttenham to Sidney to Edmund Spenser, the prince of poets in Elizabeth’s time. E.K., in a gloss to Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, noted: Ma[ster] George Gaskin a wittie gentleman, and the very chefe of our late rymers, who and if some partes of learning wanted not (albee it is well knowen he altogyther wanted not learning) no doubt would have attayned to the excellence of those famous Poets. For gifts of wit and naturall promptnesse appeare in hym aboundantly. Spenser had it right, for his time and ours.

Introduction  9

Notes 1 Austen, George Gascoigne, p. xi. 2 Austen, p­p. ­6 –​­140. 3 A notable exception is Gavin Alexander’s, ‘­Gascoigne and Practical Music: Playing Loath to Depart’, in Review of English Studies, 67 (­2016), ­pp. 42–​­61.

Arthur F. Kinney, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English, served as a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for 50 years, retiring in 2016 as the Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History. Arthur published a remarkable number of books and articles on poetry, prose and drama, and included Gascoigne in his seminal analysis of intellectual culture in the Renaissance, Humanist Poetics (1986).

I

Influences on Gascoigne

Gascoigne, Piccolomini, and the demilitarisation of the Siege of Troy R.W. Maslen

A Lost Golden Age of Tudor Fiction Along with William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (c. 1553), Gascoigne’s A Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F.J. (1573) is the work of Tudor prose fiction whose reputation has undergone the most remarkable transformation in recent years, helping to elevate readers’ estimations of the literary quality of Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan ‘novelistic discourse’ (as Constance Relihan calls it) to an unprecedented level.1 Much effort has been expended in tracing Gascoigne’s influence on his successors – though more work remains to be done in this area; but the question of where his most sophisticated narrative came from remains something of a puzzle. Master F.J. is sometimes handled as if it had sprung fully formed from its author’s head, spontaneously generated by a combination of quick wit and good fortune (which is just the impression Gascoigne meant to give). The first purpose of this essay is to show that this is not the case; and the second is to argue for the complexity of the novelistic milieu of the 1560s and early 1570s from which it emerged. Gascoigne had many different models of prose fiction available to him before he started writing Master F.J., and one model in particular, I shall argue, will serve to illustrate the extraordinary sophistication of the humanist tradition of erotic novella-writing on which he drew. Of the possible influences on Gascoigne’s text, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has rightly been given pride of place. The 1573 version of Master F.J. opens with a homage to Chaucer, and the direct links between the climactic bedroom scenes in the poem and the novella have been noted.2 Gascoigne also acknowledged the impact of the Italian short story writer Matteo Bandello when he revised Master F.J. in 1575, disguising his rewrite as a translation from the salacious ‘r iding-tales’ of a non- existent author called ‘Bartello’ whose name echoes that of his real-life Piedmontese counterpart.3 It is becoming increasingly clear, too, that Gascoigne wrote his proto-novel in the wake of a series of sophisticated English fictions: a native pre-novelistic tradition whose practitioners show a keen awareness of their English precursors in the field. The belated publication of Beware the Cat in 1570 may well have inspired him.4 So might one or more of the many

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14  R.W. Maslen editions of the anonymous novella The Image of Idleness (c. 1556), whose epistolary form and wittily erotic content could have given him many hints.5 William Bullein’s celebrated ­novel-cum-textbook ­​­­ ​­ A Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence (1564), which influenced Nashe, might have suggested some of the ­pseudo-medical ​­ ­goings-on ​­ in Master F.J.; and Gascoigne’s interest in questioni d’amore could have been sharpened by Edmund Tilney’s attractive ­garden-set ​­ novella The Flower of Friendship (1568), as well as by Henry Grantham’s 1566 translation of Boccaccio’s Filocolo.6 Indeed, if one takes translations and reprints into account as well as original compositions, the 1560s could be seen as a golden age of prose fiction in English, making available to the aficionado a wider range of novelle, merry tales and imaginative dialogues than at any time in the country’s history before that decade.7 In this essay, however, I shall argue that one of Gascoigne’s main inspirations, both for his proto-novel and for the delight in quick-wittedness that drives it, was a little-k nown book by the fifteenth- c entury diplomat Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II: the Historia de duobus amantibus (1444), translated into English in about 1515 as The Goodli History of the Ladye Lucres of Scene and of her Lover Eurialus – ​­more simply, Eurialus and Lucrece.8 Piccolomini’s Latin narrative was much better known in sixteenthcentury Europe than Chaucer’s Troilus, and proved as popular in England as in Gascoigne’s other stamping-ground, the Netherlands, where the first translation into English was made. John Coyle has described it with disarming accuracy as the best pornographic novel ever written by a future pope.9 At the centre of Piccolomini’s narrative, I shall argue – as at the centre of Gascoigne’s – is a preoccupation with literary depictions of the Trojan War (Virgil’s, Ovid’s, Boccaccio’s, and in Gascoigne’s case Chaucer’s): and its playful toying with this theme helps to point up its preoccupation with the moral, political and social paradoxes beloved of the humanist movement. In Gascoigne’s and Piccolomini’s novelle, the Trojan War becomes internalised in a pair of adulterous early modern lovers at a time of relative peace, a process that highlights the religious and cultural fissures that threatened to tear Europe apart in both men’s lifetimes. As with Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s versions of the Troilus story, the war also comes to stand for the social and moral hypocrisies that underlie religious conflicts. It is this internalising of Troy that I shall explore in this essay, as indicative of the transference from Italy to England of an interest in the politics of the mind which found its best expression in prose fiction. It is impossible to guess which edition or manuscript of Piccolomini’s book Gascoigne might have read. For one thing, he was an accomplished linguist, which means he could have read any of the dozens of editions and manuscripts published on the continent in Latin, French, or Italian: over 73 editions of the story appeared in various languages before 1500 alone, and more than 100 manuscript copies of the Latin original survive to this day.10 But the existence of three English translations in the sixteenth century – the second of which went through three editions between 1553 and 1567, while

Gascoigne and Piccolomini’s De duobus amantibus  15 the second (verse) ­ translation appeared in ­1569–70 – ­​­­ ​­demonstrates conclusively how popular the narrative was in England during Gascoigne’s lifetime, and particularly in the two decades before the appearance of Master F.J. as the first part of his miscellany, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, in 1573. If ever there was a time in English literary history when Pius II’s most famous text could have made an impression, it was in these two decades. And it seems to me beyond the bounds of probability that Gascoigne did not know it, and know it well. I shall begin with a brief account of Piccolomini’s literary career and move on to a close comparison of his and Gascoigne’s masterpieces before returning to the Trojan theme of my title. In the process, I hope to show that De duobus amantibus deserves to be thought of, alongside Master F.J., as one of the seeds whose long germination culminated in the rise of the novel in late ­seventeenth-century ​­ England.

The Seductive Stranger The ­neo-Latin ​­ novella De duobus amantibus, written by a little man on the make, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (his surname means ‘wee man,’ as he often reminds us), is a minor work of genius, a breath of Tuscan fresh air from the middle of the fifteenth century.11 One of the most widely disseminated and often-translated narratives of the early modern period – a Europe-w ide bestseller for 250 years – it has nevertheless failed to get more than a passing mention in histories of English prose fiction. Yet the briefest glance makes it clear that here is a major point of origin for that remarkable series of Elizabethan proto-novels written in the 1570s and 80s, which began with Gascoigne’s own ­mini-masterpiece, ​­ Master F.J., and went on to include ­Pettie’s Petite Pallace of Pleasure, Lyly’s two Euphues books, Sidney’s Arcadia and the astonishing outpouring of fictions by Robert Greene. Not only may Piccolomini’s text have served as Gascoigne’s inspiration, but it may also have fed its influence directly into the work of his successors, as its fourth English translator William Braunche seems to have recognised in 1596 when he transformed the relatively plain style of the original into the highly patterned prose of Lyly and Greene.12 One of Piccolomini’s lifelong preoccupations, emerging in both his religious and literary writings throughout his career, was to expose a form of hypocrisy that lay at the heart of European civilisation: the refusal to acknowledge the role played by the body and its emotions in human affairs – the failure, that is, to accommodate humankind’s full humanity. In this, he is a true humanist, a rhetorician, and a poet rather than a logician or a philosopher. But he is an astonishingly daring and outspoken humanist, whose daring paid off to the extent that despite working through much of his career as a servant of the chief European enemies of the papacy, the Council of Basel, he successfully switched allegiance in m id- career and went on to become Pope Pius II. His switch of allegiance is seen by some as a career

16  R.W. Maslen move, one of the supreme examples in the fifteenth century of unprincipled self-advancement; but he insisted that his transformation from anti-papal agitator with a hyperactive sex drive to chaste clerical crusader for the papal supremacy was not so much a schizophrenic change of personality as a well-timed and appropriate shift in emphasis.13 His choice of the name ‘Pius’ as his papal sobriquet alludes to Virgil’s identification of the protagonist of the Aeneid as pious Aeneas; so that when Pope Pius II urges his flock in a celebrated proclamation to ‘reject Aeneas; accept Pius,’ he is asking them to recognise that he is the same man he was in his youth, but that his priorities have changed, as is expected of an intelligent man in the later stages of his life.14 This notion of humankind as an unruly composite, whose bodily needs must be met as well as its mental and spiritual requirements, can be found everywhere in his writings. His influential treatise on the education of boys stresses the training of the body as forcefully as the training of the mind, the value of poetry as well as the necessity to ingest philosophy, the crucial importance of using theory as a blueprint for practice.15 As one might expect, the treatise has nothing to say about sex, since it was composed as a letter to a ten-year-old princeling, and Aeneas was a priest by the time he wrote it. But an equally famous letter to a teenage prince, Sigismund of Tyrol  – w ritten before Aeneas found his vocation for the priesthood  – suggests that sex can form an integral part of a young man’s physical, intellectual, and moral development.16 When young Sigismund asked him to draft a love-letter to instruct him in the art of seduction, Piccolomini explained his motivation in acceding to the request in scrupulous detail. Given that desire is a ‘condition of human life,’ he argues, sexual exploits should be undertaken in youth rather than old age, ‘since… age is inept in love.’ Echoing Andreas Capellanus and the school of courtly love he helped to found, he claims that ‘the custom of love… excites the sluggish virtues of youth,’ encouraging young men to extraordinary feats of arms, letters and friendship, and enabling them to know ‘good and evil’ and ‘the stratagems of the world.’ And he closes the letter with an unusual twist on a familiar literary dictum. Writers of the Renaissance are forever urging their readers to treat their texts as bees treat gardens, shunning unwholesome weeds and drawing nectar only from the sweetest literary flowers – or else extracting goodness from weeds and flowers equally. But Piccolomini’s metaphorical gardens are not texts but the bodies of women: ‘as the bees sip honey from flowers, so you should learn virtue from the blandishments of Venus.’ This identifies the female body, and the sexual adventures boys might experience with women, as a kind of book or library from which virtue can be extracted as effectively as – more effectively than? – from the tomes of the philosophers. His own life, as unfolded in his collected epistles and his great autobiography, The Commentaries, gave a perfect practical demonstration of his conviction that sexual adventures have an integral role to play in the

Gascoigne and Piccolomini’s De duobus amantibus  17 development of a fully rounded human being. He fathered two illegitimate children that we know of: one in Scotland, where he was as impressed by the beauty of the Scottish women as by the barbarity of the Scottish men, and one in Strasbourg, with an English or Breton woman named Elizabeth. The Scottish child died in infancy, but Elizabeth’s son survived, and Aeneas wrote a letter to his father asking him to receive the boy into his household.17 What is striking about this letter is the extent to which he defends his behaviour in literary terms. He begins by describing himself as ‘Aeneas Sylvius, poet’ – a title he used throughout this phase of his career, after being crowned laureate by Frederick III in 1442 – and nearly all the examples it deploys are drawn from the works of poets. When he wants to point out that his father, too, slept around in his youth, he uses a quotation from the Decameron 4.1, the story of Tancred and Ghismonda: ‘you begot no son of stone or iron, being flesh yourself’ (and Eurialus would later use the same quotation to defend his adulterous desire for Lucrece).18 A few lines later, Aeneas uses a different tale from the Decameron, 3.5, to flesh out his rendezvous with Elizabeth. Having asked her to leave her bedroom door unlatched and been twice refused, he tells his father that ‘I remembered Zima the Florentine’: the Boccaccian dandy who contrives to arrange a tryst with a woman sworn by her husband to silence, by appointing himself her ventriloquist, speaking her words for her, and setting up a nocturnal meeting, an arrangement with which she silently acquiesces by following his instructions to the letter. Aeneas chooses to assume that despite Elizabeth’s show of reluctance she will follow his instructions, as Zima’s lover did; and when that night he makes his way to her room, sure enough, he finds the door unlatched, whereupon they proceed to conceive a son. Aeneas’s sexual adventure, in other words, was modelled on that of a Boccaccian hero, Zima the dandy, and he uses the words of a Boccaccian heroine, Ghismonda, to defend it. Poetry, then, in Sidney’s sense of ‘fiction,’ offers practical help to desperate lovers. And all men and women are to a greater or lesser extent lovers, and quite likely desperate ones. So those who disapprove of erotic fictions or the actions they encourage are no better, Aeneas claims, than the ‘hypocrite’ who ‘says that he knows no fault in himself,’ in defiance of Christian doctrine. Eloquence itself, in fact – the essential skill of a secretary, as he says in one of his letters, and an art whose supreme exponent is the poet19 – ​­is associated with illicit desire by Piccolomini. His attraction to Elizabeth begins with an admiration for her linguistic skills. For one thing, she speaks fluent Tuscan, and for another, he ‘delights in women’s jests,’ a field in which ‘she excelled,’ reminding him of Cleopatra’s seduction of Ceasar and Antony with her eloquence.20 Her eloquence breeds eloquence in him; he quickly persuades himself by comparisons with great men, sometimes Moses, sometimes Aristotle, sometimes notable Christians, to pursue his interest in her. For Aeneas, three major philosophical traditions of the world, the Jewish, the ancient Greek and the Christian, concur in recognising both

18  R.W. Maslen the power of the sexual urge and its significant place in the make-up of the great public speakers. And even as Pius II, Aeneas continued to think of rhetoric in sexual terms. In the famous ‘retraction bull’ he wrote to exonerate himself for defending the anti-papal Council of Basel21 – an official pronouncement composed to prevent any of his earlier writings from bringing ‘scandal’ to his pontificate – Pius speaks of his old letters and pamphlets as the product of a youthful passion for articulacy: a passion which produces illegitimate texts as readily as a young lover produces illegitimate offspring. ‘Our writings pleased us,’ he confesses, ‘in the manner of poets who love their poems like sons.’22 The sentence neatly identifies his proBasel polemics as works of fiction, while showing an amused tolerance for the ease with which a clever man may be seduced by the music of his own utterances. 1444 was an annus mirabilis for Aeneas the poet. Having been crowned laureate two years earlier by the Emperor Frederick, he confirmed the validity of the title by penning a trio of compositions: an epistolary satire on the misery of a courtier’s life (De curialium miseriis), a version of which George Gascoigne could have read in Alexander Barclay’s Eclogues23; a Plautine comedy called Chrysis, about love between priests and prostitutes in a brothel24; and his most celebrated work, De duobus amantibus. All three texts identify Aeneas as a detached, witty and sometimes acerbic commentator on contemporary European life, a position made easier for him by Frederick’s policy of maintaining a neutral stance in the conflict between the Anti-pope Felix V and Pope Eugenius. And the comedy and novella identify illicit sexual liaisons as the ultimate testing ground for the pervasive culture of hypocrisy that possessed fifteenth- century Europe. They identify, too, exuberant speech as the peculiar province of lovers, who wield it honestly in the service of dishonest love, and in the process show up the degree to which eloquence has been commandeered for vastly more destructive purposes elsewhere in the world they inhabit. Gascoigne could not have known Chrysis, since the play was lost from the time of its composition to the twentieth century; but it is interesting that Aeneas’s novella was penned by an aficionado of neo- classical comedy, just as Gascoigne’s Master F.J. sprang from the imagination of the translator of another Italian post-Terentian comedy, Ariosto’s I Suppositi, Englished by Gascoigne as Supposes. And Chrysis can help us to interpret De duobus amantibus. Emily O’Brien has recently shown how Aeneas’s comedy satirises the fifteenth- c entury fashion for Neo-Stoic philosophy: the intellectual tradition that rejects passion in favour of an idealised and unattainable rationalism.25 In addition, Aeneas transplants the Grecian setting of his comedy to the political hotbed of Basel in the 1440s, identifying its characters with real-life participants in the struggle between Pope Felix and Pope Eugenius, and having the young man Charinus allude to the conflict between the pontiffs only to dismiss it as irrelevant to the concerns of non-politicians. ‘There are some gentlemen of the toga,’ Charinus observes,

Gascoigne and Piccolomini’s De duobus amantibus  19 who say there is some kind of awful dissension between pontiffs. For my part, I keep in mind that saying of the wise: that useless worries are best put behind you. Just as chickens who are destined to be slaughtered tomorrow fight amongst themselves for feed in the henhouse, so men contend for empire when they have no idea how long they’ll be permitted to hold it. If I’m going to give up something, I’d sooner give up an empire than my dinner. (IV.164–74) ­ ­ ​­ Accordingly, the characters in Aeneas’s play have nothing to do with virtue, as either the popes or the Stoic philosophers defined it. His lecherous priests exploit their celibate status as a means of avoiding matrimony and indulging in a perpetual round of free love. They resolve to punish their prostitute lovers not for sinning but for sleeping with other men. And the prostitutes teach the priests a lesson not in celibacy but in affection, showing a warmth for their clerical lovers – despite their promiscuity – that scuppers the men’s plans to abuse the women for being unfaithful. Overhearing the prostitutes profess their love near the end, the priests concede that ‘it’s we who have been wicked and they good’ (XVIII.778); and the play closes with a reconciliation between whores and clerics which is celebrated with ‘three jugs of the best vintage wine’ (XVIII.802), as well as the applause of Aeneas’s audience. When another male character, then, tells us in the epilogue that the play’s moral is ‘you should work hard to be virtuous, stay away from courtesans, pimps, parasites, and wild parties,’ and that ‘Virtue excels all things, and the virtuous man lacks for nothing’ (XVIII.807–12), we could be forgiven for assuming that he has completely missed the point. Virtue is the language of popes and politicians, and like the squabbles of politicians has nothing to do with what makes relationships work between men and women of flesh and blood. It seems likely, too, that the moral is a joke at the expense of the moralised versions of Terence’s plays that formed a staple of the medieval school curriculum. Unlike the philosopher, the pedant or the power-hungry pontiff, the poet knows all about the emotional machinery that drives the houses and towns of the common people and can discover a complex web of virtues there which do not involve withdrawal from either hard work, hard play or a bit of hard core fornication. All of which brings us to Aeneas’s masterpiece De duobus amantibus, one of the models, I suggest, for Master F.J. A brief summary of what the two texts have in common can serve as a starting point for the comparison.

Divided Loyalties Aeneas’s novella, De duobus amantibus, was written not much more than a year before his famous act of apostasy, when he switched his professional role from apologist for the anti-papal Council of Basel to propagandist for the papacy. This impending change of allegiance is signalled by the fact that

20  R.W. Maslen it is a book about divided loyalties. It concerns a German man, who finds his career as an official in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor at odds with his love-life, and a faithfully married woman of Siena, who finds herself in love with a man who is not her husband, and who transfers her affections to him without compromising her wholehearted commitment to the principle of loyalty. It is hard to imagine anyone who was not in Aeneas’s awkward political position writing such a richly duplicitous text, which identifies certain intransigent problems at the heart of Christian morality and exposes them in painful detail through what is ostensibly the lightest kind of romance – the prose equivalent of a Plautine comedy. Gascoigne’s Master F.J., too, is a story of divided loyalties. A young man from the South of England, the titular F.J., comes to stay with a Northern friend in his castle and initiates an affair with his friend’s wife, Elinor. Another woman in the castle, Frances, detects the affair and signals her attraction and loyalty to F.J. by showing him that she knows what he is up to, yet refraining from exposing his adultery. Instead, she seeks to win him for herself with a mixture of witty banter, amorous fables, and hints about Elinor’s congenital promiscuity. F.J. finds himself attracted to both women, but cannot commit himself to Frances because (as in Capestranus’s treatise De amore) the allure of illicit, hard-won love proves far too intense to be surrendered for legitimate affection. Gascoigne, like Aeneas, stood accused in his lifetime of a taste for sexual and political adventure: he was indicted and acquitted as both a bigamist and traitor, and his verse outside Master F.J. celebrates and repents of adultery (real or imagined) with equal fervour. And if he did not switch his allegiance in mid- career as Aeneas did, his failure to find steady employment necessitated an equally developed capacity to change objectives and allegiances at a moment’s notice, a talent for spontaneous improvisation which is invoked by the word ‘adventures’ in the title of his novella.26 To live at adventure in the sixteenth century was to live from day to day, seizing whatever chances or adventures fell in your path and resisting all attempts to confine you within the bounds of duty, obligation, or (by extension) morality. Gascoigne’s well-attested delight in weaving his own reputation as an unruly adventurer into the plots of his various fictions could well have made Aeneas’s ingenious interweaving of biography and poetic invention singularly attractive to him. So too might Aeneas’s ambiguous recantation, when he transformed himself from Aeneas to Pius without ever quite rejecting the political and sexual exploits of his youth. Gillian Austen has in recent years made a thorough case for the ambiguity of Gascoigne’s many gestures of repentance in the last years of his life.27 Where Aeneas cut off the sins of his youth in one clean gesture when he took the cloth (though he remained willing to recall the sins of his youth in ample detail in his autobiographical writings), Gascoigne carefully tailored each of his later texts to its intended recipients, switching with disconcerting ease between stern abjurations of his youthful folly and continued dabblings in courtly erotic

Gascoigne and Piccolomini’s De duobus amantibus  21 poetry. He might well have seen Aeneas as something of a fellow spirit, with his pragmatic juggling of the claims of body and soul, the diversity of his literary output, and his reputation as a man of sexual, political, and even military action.28 The first formal link between Aeneas’s and Gascoigne’s novelle is that both are contained within the framework of a letter, and that both are packed with epistolary exchanges between their central characters. This formal choice is hardly surprising in Aeneas, since he was one of the most respected composers of letters of the early modern period; and Gascoigne’s extensive use of the form may owe as much to Aeneas as to the author of the English epistolary fiction The Image of Idleness.29 De duobus first appeared in a letter to the humanist Mariano Sozzini and was frequently printed with this and another letter as explanatory prefaces; and although the Tudor translations of Aeneas’s text omit these epistles, Gascoigne’s considerable skills as a linguist could have given him ready access to them in Latin, by way of the various Italian, French, and German editions circulating in his lifetime.30 Aeneas’s prefatory epistles foreshadow the celebrated letters from H.W. and G.T. that preface Gascoigne’s Master F.J. in the book where it first appears, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres. The first of Aeneas’s letters as they are printed, to a German friend named Caspar Schlick, lets slip the fact that De duobus is a roman à clef, and that Schlick has much in common with Eurialus. It thus anticipates the hints at a true-life scandal that run through Gascoigne’s Master F.J., and to which Gascoigne alludes in the revised 1575 version of his novella.31 But Aeneas’s first epistle also resembles the letter from Gascoigne’s H.W. in the challenge it presents to orthodox morality and in the way it sets the tone for the tale to come. The bulk of the epistle consists of an extravagant mock eulogy of that ‘very little Person’ Mariano Sozzini, who should have been surnamed ‘wee man,’ Aeneas tells us – like Aeneas h imself – on account of his diminutive size.32 He’s ‘as great a Philosopher as Plato; in Geometry equal to Boetius; in Arithmetic to Macrobius’; he ‘paints like another Apelles,’ carves like the legendary sculptor Praxiteles, and so on. Nobody, of course – let alone a little body like Sozzini – could possibly encompass all these qualities. And even if he did, the letter goes on, even the best of men has some blemish that lets him down. Plagarensis became enraged that his ass could not bear as many offspring at one birth as his sow; Gomicius thought he had fallen pregnant because he let his wife get on top when they were making love; and Sozzini, too, has his blemish. He is addicted to sex; and since Aeneas owes him a favour, the writer has duly obeyed the little man’s request to write him a pornographic novella to indulge his proclivities. But the letter ends by claiming, as Sidney did in the Apology, that a love of love is hardly a fault. ‘He ­ who never was in Love,’ Aeneas states, ‘is either a Stone or a Beast,’ and any attempt to deny this would be hypocrisy. Human frailty in matters of desire is an intransigent ‘Truth,’ and this frailty deserves due recognition from poets.

22  R.W. Maslen The second epistle, to Sozzini himself, is equally witty at the expense of po-faced moralists. It begins by pointing out that Sozzini is 50 and Aeneas nearly 40, and that it is therefore inappropriate for either of them to show much interest in pornography. But Aeneas adds that Sozzini’s continued ‘Proneness to Amour’ protects him from ageing, and therefore promises to ‘rouze all the amorous Spirits of this grey headed Lover.’ So when the letter closes by claiming that the ensuing story of Eurialus and Lucrece gives a ‘warning to Youth, to avoid such Criminal Amours’ as the lovers indulged in, the rest of the epistle forbids us to take this seriously. Aeneas undercuts the moral of his narrative by placing it in a context where its absurdity becomes palpable. And this process of setting up apparent moral judgements only to explode them in the next sentence – and perhaps reinstate them the sentence after – will become familiar as we read on. It is not a device that Gascoigne mimics directly; but he could have learned a lot, I think, from Aeneas’s willingness to play continually with set notions of right and wrong. The two epistles set up one strand of the ensuing narrative: a playful one, which undercuts the pretensions of the courtly love tradition, laughs at Petrarchan idealism, and mocks the chivalric code as depicted in romance. The Emperor’s court in the novella is a place where playfulness is endemic: the Emperor himself is both lover and joker, who delights in teasing Eurialus about his attraction to a married woman. But a strand of seriousness runs through the story, which comes to the fore in the final pages. Unlike the Emperor, Eurialus cannot afford to treat his affair with Lucretia as a joke; if he does, his career will suffer. The material conditions of fifteenth- c entury life dictate that a courtier cannot laugh freely at the things his master laughs at. And a married woman cannot laugh at the things a male courtier finds amusing. Aeneas keeps reminding us of these incompatibilities, as if to draw our attention to the real social issues that get obscured by talk of moral idealism and the apparatus of conventional romance. Again, it is the philosophy rather than the details of this constant play between light and darkness, the comic and the deeply serious that Gascoigne could have learned from. Gascoigne’s Master F.J. shares with De duobus an ability to veer between moods at a moment’s notice, and he makes the veering a defining feature of the relationship between his lovers. There is, however, one occasion when F.J., like Eurialus, learns the danger of telling jokes about infidelity in the context of the court. One of his poems celebrating his adulterous affair finds its way to the ears of courtiers, who take offence at his claim to have got a monopoly on beauty now that he has got Elinor as his mistress (Pigman, 176.22–31). Not much is made of the courtiers’ displeasure and its possible consequences. But the effect of its being mentioned is to stress the provincialism of F.J.’s affair, and to remind us that it would have had quite different personal and political repercussions if it had been prosecuted a little closer to the centre of power. Juxtaposed with the household of the Queen herself, F.J.’s hubristic comparisons of Elinor to a range of mythical deities and monarchs would have looked uncomfortably

Gascoigne and Piccolomini’s De duobus amantibus  23 like high treason. And the episode also demonstrates how easy it is for provincial doings to find their way to the centre, however secretly they seem to be conducted. Aeneas’s text could well have laid the foundation for this perception of Gascoigne’s, given the atmosphere of increasing paranoia about the possibility of detection that pervades his Sienese narrative.

Women Versus Men Like Master F.J., then, De duobus is a duplicitous or two-faced text, remarkable for its clear-eyed recognition of the torments as well as the delights of an illicit relationship. This tension is of course familiar from the literature of courtly love, but both Aeneas and Gascoigne are astonishingly skilful in sustaining it; and they manage this feat, I think, through the complexity of their female characters. Gascoigne supplies his readers with two clever heroines: an adulterous wife called Elinor and her free-spirited but faithful sister (or sister-in-law) Frances, who between them test F.J.’s intelligence in the context of a three-way attraction. Aeneas, by contrast, gives his readers a single heroine, Lucrece/Lucretia, who seems to have been designed specifically to confound anti-feminist preconceptions about desiring women. Neither Gascoigne’s Frances nor Aeneas’s Lucretia permits readers the satisfaction of passing easy judgement on her actions. And part of what forbids such a judgement is the link both stories forge between the dilemma these women find themselves in and the greatest of all stories about adultery, the myth of Troy. The first of the links with Troy, of course, is that both novelle describe an affair between a married woman and a foreigner. In this they run counter to their ­best-known ​­ sources, Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, in which Cressida is a widow and Troilus her fellow Trojan. Aeneas’s and Gascoigne’s lovers have more in common with Paris and Helen, whose affair sparked off the Trojan war. Gascoigne stresses the parallel by naming his heroine Elinor – which gets changed to ‘Helen’ in one of F.J.’s poems (Pigman 175.21–177.24) – while Aeneas gives his heroine a husband called Menelaus and a brother-in-law called Agamemnon, while repeatedly associating his hero with Trojans such as Memnus and Paris. Intriguingly, though, both writers mix up their lovers with Troilus and Cressida too. Aeneas’s hero Eurialus, for instance, has a go-between called Pandalus, while Master F.J. becomes a member of ‘Troylus sect’ (Pigman 189.5) when he gets jealous of Elinor. The double parallel with Helen/ Paris and Cressida/Troilus identifies both sets of lovers as simultaneously enemies and friends – a paradox Gascoigne recognises when he has F.J. refer to Elinor as his ‘friendly enemy.’33 It also marks them out as subject to a higher dispensation, the helpless playthings of politicians whose agendas run counter to their own. Eurialus’s imperial master governs his fate as Priam governs that of Troilus, while F.J.’s hidden rival for Elinor’s love, the so- called ‘secretary,’ turns out to be a far more potent ghost-writer of Elinor’s affairs than he is, a Homer or an Ovid where F.J. is just a clever schoolboy with too much

24  R.W. Maslen pride in his own compositions. And the presence of Troy in these two affairs dooms each set of lovers from the start. They are retreading old ground filled with the ruins of lost civilisations, and the location of this ground in Siena and England suggests that the tensions and contradictions that led to the fall of Troy are somehow replicated at the level of the town and even the household in early modern Europe. In the 1573 version of Master F.J., Gascoigne associates F.J. with another character from the Trojan war, a figure who makes explicit the link between ancient Troy and early modern England. At the point when F.J. finally meets up with Elinor in a corridor at night, the narrator invites his male readers to share his imaginative complicity with the adulterous act that follows: But why hold I so long discourse in discribing the joyes which (for lacke of like experience) I cannot set out to the ful? Were it not that I knowe to whom I write, I would the more beware what I write. F.J. was a man, and neither of us are sencelesse, and therfore I shold slaunder him, (over and besides a greater obloquie to the whole genealogie of Enaeas) if I should imagine that of tender hart he would forbeare to expresse hir more tender limbes against the hard floore. (Pigman ­ 168.11–18) ­ ​­ This passage is a wonderful example of the moral ambiguity of the 1573 Master F.J. (it was omitted from the cleaned-up 1575 version). It begins by implying the inexperience of the narrator, who has never undergone the pleasures that he wishes us to picture. His inexperience becomes gullibility in the second sentence, where he claims to know the identity of his reader (‘I knowe to whom I write’): a reference to the fact that the whole narrative is supposed to have been contained in a private letter from the narrator G.T. to his friend H.W.  – who promptly betrayed his friend by disobeying his instructions to keep it private and submitting it for publication (Pigman 141. 1–142.37). The reader is a beneficiary of this act of betrayal, and therefore complicit with it; in other words, betrayal is spread from person to person like an infection by the printed text we are reading. Yet, treason is already endemic in the English people, because they trace their ‘genealogie’ to the arch-traitor Aeneas, whose grandson Brutus founded the island nation. Gascoigne could have referred, if he wished, to ‘the genealogie of Brutus’ – and indeed this was the more usual formulation. But Aeneas’s treachery was proverbial, condemned in the Trojan histories of Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis as well as by the woman he abandoned, Dido Queen of Carthage, in Ovid’s Heroides.34 By tracing F.J. and the reader to a common ancestor – the legendary founder of Rome – Gascoigne makes them brothers in brutishness, capable of abandoning any pretence at a ‘tender hart’ and crushing the ‘more tender limbes’ of women without a moment’s reflection. And of course it is tempting to see the shadow of another womanising Aeneas behind the allusion to Virgil’s ambiguous hero.

Gascoigne and Piccolomini’s De duobus amantibus  25 F.J.’s treacherous nature is confirmed soon afterwards in Gascoigne’s second set of extended references to the Trojan war. F.J. composes several poems or songs to celebrate his betrayal of his friend, Elinor’s husband; and one or more of these songs exposes the young man’s adultery as well as his hubris to the world at large. But the verses also expose him to the suspicion of Elinor, who suspects they were written about somebody else, although F.J. later swears that he changed the name Elinor to Helen in the poem because ‘he toke it all for one name, or at least he never red of any Elinor such matter as might sound worthy like commendation for beautie’ (Pigman 177.13–15). The narrator tangles himself into fantastic knots of speculation at this point as to whether Elinor was right, and the Helen of the poem was someone different. Rumour has it, we learn, that F.J. did have an affair with someone called Helen; but she was not worth writing poems about, and the style of the poem suggests that it was written long before he met her, and besides it is clearly a sensible policy to adapt the same poem for use in more than one relationship. By the end of the passage, poetry has become the versatile tool or pimp of serial adulterers, a stalking horse (or Trojan horse) whose general purpose is always sexual and specific purpose always obscure. ‘Well by whom he wrote it I know not,’ the passage ends; but once I am sure that he wrote it, for he is no borrower of inventions, and this is al that I meane to prove, as one that sende you his verses by stealth, and do him double wrong, to disclose unto any man the secrete causes why they were devised, but this for your delight I do adventure. (Pigman 177.24–29) ­ ­ ​­ In other words, nothing about the poem is clear except that it can readily be adapted to treachery – such as the treachery we are condoning by reading F.J.’s poems, adventurously purloined from him for our voyeuristic pleasure. The one set of values the narrator seems to celebrate is the technical accomplishment of the poet: and he gives F.J. special praise for the originality of his compositions, ‘for he is no borrower of inventions.’ But even this seeming ‘fact’ about F.J.’s originality proves uncertain; the next poem we read is a translation from the Italian, and therefore a ‘borrowed invention.’ Lyrics are like so many Helens, available to be poached from one situation or language and deployed for erotic purposes in another; no wonder, then, that Elinor should regard their male composers with equal distrust, and subject the poet to the same cavalier treatment as his poems promise her. Like her namesake Helen, whose first experience of love was with the serial abandoner of women Theseus (as F.J.’s lyric about her reminds us (Pigman 176.9–10)), or like Criseyde in Chaucer’s poem, Elinor inhabits an environment where women are used by men as sexual playthings and political pawns, and under the circumstances, it is hard to blame her for acting at all times in her own best interests. F.J.’s Helen poem marks him out as a betrayer, although he continues to pose throughout the narrative as if he were the soul of integrity. Aeneas’s

26  R.W. Maslen male lover Eurialus is also a traitor, abandoning Lucretia so as not to compromise his political future. Here, then, is another way in which Gascoigne’s narrative has more in common with De duobus amantibus than with Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer’s innocent Troilus has had no experience of love before he falls for Criseyde, whose widowhood teaches her to be far more wary of the sudden twists and turns of fortune than her lover has yet learned to be. There is an element of innocence in both Eurialus and F.J., but it is the heartless, self-serving innocence of young men who think the pose of courtly lover is a game and have no idea how much they will damage themselves and others with their infidelities. And once one has recognised this first set of family resemblances between the texts, a number of others present themselves, binding the books together in intriguing ways. Both pairs of lovers are defined in their narratives as being at once foreign to each other and fellow citizens of the same emotional nation. The German Eurialus tells the Italian Lucretia: ‘call me no straunger, I pray the, for I am rathere of thys contrye, than he that is borne heare, sythens hee is but by chaunce, and I by myne own choyse’ (Morrall 16.27–29). Later, of course, his foreignness reasserts itself, as he decides to throw in his lot with Emperor Sigismund rather than his lover and abandons Lucrece as Aeneas abandoned Dido – or as that other Aeneas, Piccolomini, abandoned his women in Scotland and Strasbourg. F.J. and Elinor, too, begin by assuming that they share a common language: the discourse of continental courtship, whose French, Italian and Spanish lexicon litters their conversation, covertly signalling their willingness to subscribe to continental amorous practices, of which adultery was supposed to be one. In one sentence F.J. gives Elinor a French congé or greeting accompanied by the Spanish gesture of kissing the hand (Bezo las manos), and the cod-Spanish gesture of a kiss on the lips described in the cod-Spanish phrase zuccado dez labros, before reciting a poem in the ­ ​­ Italian form of a Terza sequenza (Pigman 149.31–34). The Babel of different languages anticipates the inevitable breakdown in communication, when the lovers’ foreignness to each other reasserts itself as it did in Aeneas’s novella. F.J. loses track of Elinor’s meaning and avenges himself by raping her; and Elinor at once avenges herself in turn by transferring her affections to another man. The frail city of their relationship, built on the slenderest of foundations, collapses and leaves no trace – like Babel or the City of Troy. In all versions of the Trojan legend, the city betrays itself. Without Paris’s ruinous affair with Helen, and Troy’s condoning of it, the war with Greece would never have started; without the city’s rash acceptance of the wooden horse, its towers would not have fallen; and in many versions, it is the Trojan Aeneas who is responsible for persuading his fellow countrymen to bring the horse inside the city walls. By their allusions to the Trojan war, both Piccolomini and Gascoigne put betrayal at the heart of their stories – and at the heart, I would suggest, of the cultures they inhabit. Both texts reinforce this theme of self-betrayal by replacing a war between two separate peoples, the Trojans and the Greeks, with what is effectively a

Gascoigne and Piccolomini’s De duobus amantibus  27 civil war. The countries where the action takes place are in each case enjoying a fragile peace between bouts of international conflict. Eurialus comes to Siena in the train of Emperor Sigismund, who is often at war (as Eurialus tells Lucretia) but pays his visit to the city en route to a diplomatic mission in Rome, while the Southerner F.J. arrives in the North parts of England not long after the Northern Rebellion of 1569, when the Catholic lords of the North of England rose against the Protestant settlement that had been imposed on them by the South, as part of the ongoing religious struggle 35 between Reformers and ­Counter-Reformers. ​­ But there is a conflict going on in these texts: between adulterers and husbands; between the lip-service paid to laws and customs in Renaissance Europe and the passionate, w itfuelled relationship pursued by the lovers in defiance of both; between the literary conventions of courtly love or chivalric romance invoked by the adulterers on the one hand, and their repeated violation of those conventions on the other. And the potential for violence in this conflict is signalled by the presence of swords at their sexual encounters. F.J. carries a sword to his first assignation with Elinor, on the bare floorboards of the gallery. Eurialus too carries his sword to his first assignation with Lucretia. Their love-making is interrupted by her husband, which condemns Eurialus to an hour or two of cowering in a closet; and when he later recalls the episode, swords figure prominently in his recollection: ‘though I hadde escaped [her husband’s] handes because hee hadde no weapon, and I hadde a sweard by my syde, yet hadde he a man wyth hym, and weapons honge at hande uppon the wall, and there was many servauntes in the house… and I shoulde have ben handled accordynge’ (Morrall 25.13–18). So, war in these narratives is no mere metaphor (although it is that too, especially in Master F.J.). There are physical dangers involved, and phallic weapons can end up damaging their owners, as well as the women they are intended to protect. Swords, like penises, have divided loyalties, and unsheathing them can lead to a host of unpredictable consequences. Eurialus’s inner torment, both while he is locked in the closet and afterwards when reflecting on his predicament, dramatises one of the central conflicts in both narratives: an internal war of attrition between the male lover’s contradictory attitudes to his mistress. Throughout the text, Eurialus careers between emotional extremes: delighted celebration of the wonderful sex he is enjoying and outbreaks of lacerating self- disgust in which he berates himself for falling prey to the wiles of women. Gascoigne’s hero too gets trapped in mental turmoil – the self-inflicted excruciation of jealousy – which leads him half way through the story to mistrust the elusive wordgames with Elinor he has so far relished, and re-read the letters she has sent him as products of duplicity rather than affection. This agonised reinvention of himself and her leads to his rape of Elinor, a rape that is linked with his earlier assignation by being described in terms of a sword attack (‘he drewe uppon his new professed enimie, and… thrust hir through both hands, and etc.’ (Pigman 198.19–21)). Violence in the civil war of these two

28  R.W. Maslen narratives springs from an interior split or fragmentation in men which inflicts appalling damage on women’s bodies. Both texts stress the inwardness of the affairs they describe – their origin and growth in the enclosed space of the lovers’ minds and bodies – by careful concentration on the physical details of the buildings where they take place. Gascoigne’s Elinor knows of secret passages between her bedchamber and his, and we quickly become familiar with the ambience of the bedchambers themselves, where F.J. languishes in a jealous fever and Elinor holds court. In the same way, we build up a vivid picture of the streets and buildings that surround Lucretia’s house in De duobus, and learn much about the marital bedroom where she and Eurialus make love. The effect of all this architectural and mental inwardness is a mounting sense of claustrophobia, which culminates in the failure of either affair to escape from the confines of the house where it got started. In each case, it is the woman who stays trapped in the building at the end of the story, unlike her Greek and Trojan counterparts, as if to confirm her continued subjection to the laws and customs she has dared to challenge. Both stories, then, imply that the conditions which gave rise to their own particular Trojan War remain in place after the affair has fizzled out, and that the conflict will carry on into successive generations. Notwithstanding the passions that have been aroused in Siena and Northern England, the European household and the rules that are presumed to govern it remain unchanged, and the emergence of further labyrinthine secret ­histories – ­​­­post-Trojan ​­ ­histories – ​­like the ones we have witnessed seems inevitable.

Names and Naming Lucretia’s name in De duobus amantibus promises exactly this. It is an inspired choice of name and a deeply unsettling one. It means that hovering over Aeneas’s heroine is the shadow of rape – the rape that is carried out in Gascoigne’s story  – and a corresponding problematisation of the early modern anti-feminist tradition of laying the blame for any act of fornication squarely on the woman, who must therefore pay the price for it. Lucretia shares her name with a founder of Rome as distinguished as Aeneas’s namesake: the woman whose rape set off a revolution, leading to the collapse of the Roman monarchy and the foundation of the republic. She is physically beautiful, described in loving detail by a besotted narrator; and like Elinor and her sister Frances, she is amusing and intelligent as well (‘Who would then leave to love,’ Eurialus cries, ‘when he seeth suche wit and learning in his maystres?,’ Morrall 15.35–36). But despite this perilous fusion of beauty and intelligence with powerful desire, Aeneas never once lets her integrity be questioned. Whenever Eurialus gets frightened or frustrated by his affair, he lapses into the commonplaces of fifteenth- century misogyny; but he always finds his anti-feminism demolished by the unarguable fact that Lucretia lends no fuel to it.

Gascoigne and Piccolomini’s De duobus amantibus  29 Her fusion of bodily and mental perfection remains as marked at the end of the tale as it was in this lyrical passage near the beginning: Her mouth small and comely, her lyppes of corall colour, handsom to byte on, her small tethe, wel set in order, semed Cristal through which the quivering tonge dyd send furth (not wordes) but moost pleasant armony. What shall I shewe the beautye of her chynne, or the whytenesse of her necke? Nothynge was in that bodye not too bee praysed[. A]s the outwarde aparaunces shewed token of that that was inwarde, no man beheld her that dyd not envy her husbande[. S]he was in speche as the fame is, the mother of Graccus was, or the doughter of Hortentius. Nothynge was more sweter, nor soberer than her talcke. She pretended not (as dothe many) honestye by hevy countenance: but with mery vysage, shewed her sobernes, not fearefull, nor over heardye: but under drede of shame, she caryed in a womans hart. (Morrall ­ 3.35–4.10) ­ ​­ It is only after agonised self-interrogation and a lengthy correspondence that this paragon of loyalty transfers her allegiance from her husband to a German stranger; and once the transference has been completed, her ‘honestye’ and ‘sobernes’ remain unshakeable. This deeply honest form of dishonesty – a carefully considered change of mind as complete as the change of the physical object of her desire – is a state few early modern English poets could allow their women to inhabit. Gascoigne had to split his heroine in two in order to present women from as complex a perspective as Aeneas, while Lyly and Greene never tried anything so controversial. I wonder whether, in creating such a heroine and calling her Lucretia, Aeneas aimed to stage a revolution in the attitudes of his contemporaries to desire itself? If so, the attempt was a failure of heroic proportions. But I suspect he knew his attempt would fail and was determined only that it should fail heroically. The most complex use of Lucretia’s name occurs in the last letter of the narrative, in which Eurialus explains why he has to leave her, and why he cannot take her with him. It is her name, he insists, that prompts this refusal. ‘Thou knowest thou art maryed into a noble familye,’ he says, ‘and haste the name of a ryght beautyful and chaste Lady’ (Morrall 38.2–3); and the English phrase used by the translator neatly collapses the distinction between two meanings of the word ‘name’: designation and reputation. The latter meaning is taken up when he suggests another name that might become linked with hers if she should elope with him: ‘Lo,’ the world would say, ‘Lucres that was called more chast then the wyfe of Brutus, and better than Penelope, foloweth an adulterer… it is not Lucres, but… Medea that folowed Jason’ (Morrall 38.8–12). He concludes by insisting that his abandonment of her will preserve her as the living image of the woman her name commemorates. ‘Another lover peraventure wolde otherwyse counsel the,’ he writes, ‘and desyre the to ronne thy way, that he myghte abuse the as long

30  R.W. Maslen as he myght, nothynge regardynge what shulde befall of it, whyle he myght satifye hys appetite[;] but he were no true lover that wolde regarde rather his own lust, than thy fame’ (Morrall 38.26–31). The image he presents of this alternative lover, dragging her like a camp-follower round the battlefields of Europe as he follows in the train of the Emperor, reminds us of what he claims not to be: Diomedes seducing Cressida, Tarquin raping Collatinus’s wife. By invoking these examples, however, he glosses over his own resemblance to the Jason who abandoned Medea. And he also inadvertently betrays his excessive respect for fame and fortune, which he demonstrates by pursuing his political ambitions at the expense of his devotion to Lucretia. Earlier, he persuaded a relative of her husband’s – Pandalus – to act as messenger between them by offering him an earldom. Here, Eurialus shows that he shares Pandalus’s preference for position over loyalty. The Emperor made Eurialus ‘ryche and of great power,’ he points out, ‘and I cannot departe from hym without the losse of my state, so that if I shulde leave hym, I coulde not convenientlye entertayne the’ (Morrall 38.17–19). The mixture here of genuine concern for Lucretia and deep self-interest, of the exalted vocabulary of courtly love and the double-speak of hypocrisy, renders it as complex a piece of prose as anything written in the following century. One of the things this letter and its aftermath show us is how far Aeneas’s text works to subvert its reader’s expectations. If Lucretia is never condemned by Piccolomini, neither is Eurialus. He leaves her, but is never the same again; he is grief-stricken ever after. Having refused to carry her off on this occasion, he tries and fails to find an opportunity to do so later. And their final meeting causes such physical torment to both lovers that all doubts of Eurialus’s commitment are banished: ‘one love and one mynde was in two devyded, and the harte suffred particion. Parte of the mynde wente and part remayned and all the sences were disperpled and playned too departe from theyr owne selfe’ (Morrall 39.33–36). Body and soul, reason and emotion are damaged by the lovers’ parting, and it is easy to see this as a comment on Aeneas’s culture, which can see no way to reconcile the needs of the flesh with those of the brain and spirit, the pursuit of a career with the satisfaction of desire. Aeneas and his protagonists inhabit a partitioned community, and reconcilement can only be effected by drastic collective action – an ethical revolution. The moral complexity of Aeneas’s narrative may well have been one of the things English readers prized about it. The 1553 English translator tones down or omits the rare moments of moral comment that occur in the Latin. Instead, he tacks on a few verses at the end which stress not the immorality of the affair but the agonies it inflicted: …love is no plesur, but a pain perdurable And the end is deth which is most lamentable Therfore ere thou be chayned with suche care By others peryls, take hede and beware. (Morrall ­ 41.5–8) ­ ​­

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One might be reminded of the apparently ‘moral’ conclusion of Gascoigne’s revised version of 1575, in which a woman dies as a result of the lovers’ affair  – though the woman who dies is Elinor’s blameless sister-in-law Frances, while Elinor goes on to live ‘long in the continuance of hir acustomed change’ (Pigman 215.29–216.16 note). The death of Frances is as bereft of moral purpose as her survival was in the first version, and serves, like Lucretia’s death, to satirise the early modern tendency to equate literary value with the delivery of simplistic moral lessons, without much concern for their relevance to the difficult world inhabited by the reader. Throughout both versions of Master F.J., in fact, Frances behaves like an Elizabethan successor to Lucretia, making plain her desire for F.J. at every opportunity while never eliciting a word of condemnation from the narrator for her witty acknowledgement of her own attraction to him. Indeed, Frances’s nickname for F.J.  – she dubs him her ‘Trust’  – echoes one of Lucretia’s letters, in which she identifies Eurialus (with equal irony) as ‘my onelye truste’ (Morrall 37.24). Perhaps Gascoigne’s killing off of Frances in his revised version was intended to strengthen her resemblance to Aeneas’s heroine. One might even consider Frances to have been as selfishly and casually abandoned as Lucretia was. After all, F.J. seems at one point to confirm his status as Frances’s lover and champion: when Frances dubs him her ‘Trust’, he names her his ‘Hope’ as if exchanging verbal favours with her, thus sealing his status as her chivalric champion, perhaps even her betrothed. But although F.J. and Frances continue to address each other by these affectionate nicknames, the relationship they imply never comes to fruition – F.J. and Frances never become a couple – and ironically, all because of F.J.’s utterly misplaced sense of loyalty to Elinor, whose loyalty to him was erased when he raped her. As in De duobus amantibus, in other words, notions of loyalty and betrayal, friendship and enmity, sexual promiscuity and fidelity, are challenged and problematised at every stage of Master F.J., as they are in the most interesting stories to have emerged from the myth of Troy. As I have said before, it is in the tone and moral complexity of his novella rather than its details that Gascoigne most clearly betrays his debt to the subtle mind of Piccolomini. Both men were citizens of a new Troy of intelligent, articulate desire: a lovely, doomed city that never was and for all they knew never could be, but which they dared to superimpose on the map of their own particular time and nation. And it would seem to me well worthwhile to go on tracing the contours of that shared imaginative cityscape in more detail than I can manage here.

Notes 1 For a convincing explanation and defence of the use of the phrase ‘novelistic discourse’ to describe early modern prose fiction, see Constance Relihan, Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994), introduction. Throughout this essay I use the

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2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18

R.W. Maslen term ‘novella’ to describe prose fiction by Piccolomini and Gascoigne, but I do so loosely, meaning both to distinguish the kinds of narrative they wrote from the modern novel and to acknowledge its place in the prehistory of that genre. For the homage to Chaucer, see Pigman, p. 143, lines 25–31. Pigman gives parallels between the Adventures and Troilus and Criseyde on p. 555. For the Bartello reference, see Pigman, p. 140, lines 1–2, note. For the publication history of Beware the Cat, see Beware the Cat: The First English Novel, ed. William Ringler and Michael Flachmann (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1988), introduction. For the publication history of The Image of Idleness, see ‘The First English Epistolary Novel: The Image of Idleness. Text, Introduction and Notes’, ed. Michael Flachmann, SP, 87 (1990), pp. 1–74, introduction. See R.W. Maslen, ‘The Healing Dialogues of Dr Bullein’, YES 38.1 and 38.2 (2008), pp.  119–35, and R.W. Maslen, ‘Edmund Tilney’, Dictionary of Literary Biography 136, Sixteenth-Century Nondramatic Writers (Detroit, Washington, DC and London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1994), pp.  326–29. For Grantham’s translation, see STC 3180–82. For translations of the 1560s, see the entries on prose fiction in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 2: 1550– 660, ed. Gordon Braden, R.M. Cummings and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See E.J. Morrall, ‘Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II), Historia de duobus amantibus: The early editions and the English translation printed by John Day’, The Library, 18.3 (1996), pp. 216–29, and Piccolomini (Pius II, The Goodli History of the Lady Lucres of Scene and of Her Lover Eurialus, EETS 308 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), introduction. All references are to this edition, henceforth cited as Morrall. John Coyle of the University of Glasgow, in conversation. Morrall, ‘Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II), Historia de duobus amantibus’, The Library, 18.3 (1996), p. 217. For Piccolomini’s jokey explanation of the meaning of his surname, see Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius: Selected Letters of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), introd. and trans. Thomas Izbicki, Gerald Christianson and Philip Krey ( Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), pp.  9–10. He repeats the joke about his surname in his letters to his father and to Mariano Sozzini discussed below. Braunche’s 1596 translation is The Most Excellent historie, of Euryalus and Lucresia, STC 19974. See Cecilia M. Ady, Pius II: The Humanist Pope (London: Methuen, 1913), and Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, introduction. For Piccolomini’s own retrospective account of his apostasy, see Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, letter 69. For the proclamation, see Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, entry 78 (pp. 392–406); the phrase occurs on p. 396. See Albert Baca, ‘The “Art of Rhetoric” of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’, Western Journal of Communication, 34.1 ( Winter 1970), pp.  9–16; and Piccolomini, De liberorum educatione (The Education of Boys) in Humanist Educational Treatises, eds. and trans. Craig W. Kallendorf, The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), introduction and pp. 126–259. Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, Letter 38, pp. 180–81. Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, Letter 30, pp. 159–62. The editors of Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius do not note the phrase ‘you begot no son of stone’ as a quotation from Boccaccio, but E.J. Morrall cites the source in his edition of Piccolomini’s novella: see Morrall, p. 30, lines 7– 8, note.

Gascoigne and Piccolomini’s De duobus amantibus

33

19 The letter is cited in Benedikt Konrad Vollmann, ‘ENKYKLIOS PAIDEIA in the work of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’, in Pius II: ‘El Piu Expeditivo Pontifice’, ed. Zweder von Martels and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), pp. 10–11. 20 Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, p. 161. 21 Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, pp. 392–406. 22 Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, p. 399. 23 See The Eclogues of Alexander Barclay from the Original Edition of John Cawood, ed. Beatrice White, EETS 175 (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), introduction. 24 Reprinted in Humanist Comedies, ed. and trans. Gary R. Grund, The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 284–347. All references are to this edition. 25 Emily O’Brien, ‘Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’s Chrysis: Prurient Pastime  – or Something More?’, MLN, 124.1 (January 2009), pp. 111–36. 26 For the most up-to- date account of Gascoigne’s life, see Austen, George Gascoigne, ‘The Literary Career of George Gascoigne: An Introduction’, pp.  1–21. For the term ‘adventures’ in Gascoigne’s novella, see R.W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), ch. 3, ‘George Gascoigne and the Fiction of Failure’. 27 Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 14–21. 28 The military aspect of Piccolomini’s career can be summarised by the fact that Pope Pius II died on an abortive crusade to liberate Jerusalem from the Turks. 29 For Piccolomini as letter-w riter, see Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius, introduction. For Gascoigne’s debt to The Image of Idleness, see R.W. Maslen, ‘The Image of Idleness in the Reign of Elizabeth I’, ELN, 41.3 (March 2004), pp. 11–23. 30 See E.J. Morrall’s article, ‘The Early Editions’, and the introduction to his edition of Eurialus and Lucrece. 31 The autobiographical elements of Master F.J. are discussed in Pigman, p. 550. For his possible allusions to a scandal involving the Earl of Leicester, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 5, pp. 103–22. 32 References to the prefatory epistles are taken from their first translation into English, The History of the Amours of Count Schlick, Chancellor to the Emperor Sigismund, and a Young Lady of Quality of Sienna (London, 1708). All references are to this edition, which is unpaginated in the relevant section. 33 See Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions, p. 134ff. 34 For Aeneas as traitor, see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 2: 1350–547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 3, especially pp. 79– 80 and 87– 88. 35 See Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions, p. 133.

‘Ficta sub imagine texta’: John Skelton and George Gascoigne Jane Griffiths

John Skelton (1463–1529) ­­ ​­ and George Gascoigne (1534/35–77) ­ ­­ ​­ both have something of a reputation as idiosyncratic and ‘difficult’ writers. Each has a strongly developed sense of his own importance and a pronounced interest in the forms in which his works were published; each, too, gained (and lost) a considerable literary reputation within his own life-time and suffered serious neglect for centuries following his death. This chapter will investigate whether these resemblances are mere coincidence or whether it is possible to trace more substantive likenesses, either due to Skelton’s influence on Gascoigne or because the two share techniques and habits of mind that reflect developing views of authorship, publishing, and self-publicising in the sixteenth century. The clearest evidence of a direct connection between Skelton and Gascoigne comes, of course, from Gascoigne’s Philip Sparrowe poem, ‘He wrote … in prayse of a Gentlewoman, whose name was Phillip’ ( p. 233), first published in his A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573) and then again in The 1 Posies (1575). ­ Yet, although Gascoigne’s poem clearly alludes to Skelton’s earlier poem Phyllyp Sparowe, his lyric seems based on only a very partial reading of Skelton’s work.2 Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe is a complex, elusive poem, famously described by C. S. Lewis as ‘the lightest, the most like a bubble, of all the poems I know’.3 Its first part is spoken in the person of Jane Scrope, a young girl whose family Skelton knew. Drawing on the Office for the Dead, Jane mourns for her pet sparrow (killed by Gyb the cat), digressing with increasing frequency into recollections of their intimacy.4 Some of these are suggestively physical, as when she remembers how Philip would take her by the lip or fly beneath her gown, yet Jane herself seems unaware of the implications of what she is saying. She is entirely focused on the loss of her sparrow and, increasingly, on her own ability to compose an epitaph for him; as well as desiring to memorialise Philip, she is concerned with her own development as a writer.5 Jane’s voice is abruptly interrupted, however, by Skelton’s own, declaring that it is he who has composed Jane’s lament, ‘ficta sub imagine texta’ (created under a feigned likeness): Per me laurigerum Britanum Skeltonida vatem

DOI: 10.4324/­9781003112082-​­4

John Skelton and George Gascoigne  35 Hec cecinisse licet Ficta sub imagine texta. Cuius eris volucris, Prestanti corpore virgo: Candida Nais erat, Formosior ista Joanna est: Docta Corinna fuit, Sed magis ista sapit.6 (ll. ­ ­834–43) ​­ He then goes on to praise Jane herself in extravagant and adult terms. Following to the letter Geoffrey de Vinsauf’s model for the praise of the ideal mistress, describing her beauties from top to toe, Skelton goes rather beyond the spirit of his model when he describes or rather refuses to describe: Her kyrtell so goodly lased, And under that is brased Such pleasures that I may Neyther wryte nor say. (ll. ­ ­1194–97) ​­ From being an aspiring writer herself, Jane becomes the subject of authorial fantasy. But despite this sudden change of perspective, Skelton does not give himself altogether the last word; the final lines of the poem and the ‘addicyon’ which follows record a number of objections to the terms in which he has praised Jane, and his attempt to answer them. It appears that Skelton’s critics included Jane herself; Skelton asks: Alas, that goodly mayd, Why shuld she be afrayde? Why shuld she take shame That her goodly name, Honorably reported, Sholde be set and sorted To be matriculate With ladyes of estate? (ll. ­ ­1283–89) ​­ In consequence, Jane remains a real presence, and the poem remains dialogic; it includes within it a record of its own making and reveals something of the difficulty of accommodating a living person to the poet’s ends. In Gascoigne’s lyric, there is no such interplay of voices; there is just one speaker, and he takes his cue exclusively from the innuendo in Skelton’s commendations. Where Skelton’s poem contains both Jane’s praise of the sparrow Philip and his own praise of Jane, Gascoigne’s speaker conflates the

36  Jane Griffiths two, giving his human mistress the name ‘Philip Sparrow’. This allows him to create a long run of blatant double-entendres, as in the following stanzas: Hir fethers are so freshe of hewe, And so well proyned everye daye: She lackes none oyle, I warrant you: To trimme hir tayle both tricke and gaye. And though hir mouth be somewhat wide, Hir tonge is sweet and short beside. And for the rest I dare compare, She is both tender, sweet and soft: She never lacketh dainty fare, But is well fed and feedeth oft: For if my phip have lust to eate, I warrant you phip lacks no meate. And then if that hir meat be good, And such as like do love alway: She will lay lips theron by the rood, And see that none be cast away: For when she once hath felt a fitte, Phillip will crie still, yit, yit, yit. (p. 234, ll. 31–42) ­­ ­ ​­ Such overt double- entendres stand in marked contrast to Skelton’s more subtle practice, through which the reader rather than the author is made responsible for supplying the double meaning. Although when Jane describes how her sparrow was allowed to lie between her breasts and go under her smock, the reader instantly assumes a double- entendre of precisely the kind Gascoigne deploys, she then remembers that this is a young girl speaking about a pet bird. And this technique allows the poet to claim a defence of ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’; in doubting Jane’s innocence, the reader only proves her own rather grubby sophistication. In Gascoigne’s poem, there is no such double perspective, and the reader is not discomforted by her own ability to read in a meaning of which the speaker is unaware. The author is clearly inviting her complicity, not wrong-footing her. From this comparison, then, it seems that Gascoigne takes little from Skelton’s poem other than the name. His rather one- dimensional reading of it has an analogy in the 1554 edition of Phyllyp Sparowe printed by Robert Toy. This includes a woodcut on the final verso which shows what might be either a large, rather bleak monument or a human-sized and empty open tomb on a hillside, with the heading ‘Phyllyp sparowes tombe’.7 It is almost hilariously inappropriate to a poem that ends with a lengthy invocation to Philip which seems to summon him back from the dead, and whose final lines record such lively disagreement. In Skelton’s work, Philip lives on in the written word, and his vivacity when alive is matched by the vigour of the

John Skelton and George Gascoigne  37 debate provoked by his literary memorial. By contrast, the heavy-handed literalism of woodcut reduces Skelton’s shape-shifting work to a single, static image of death and confinement. Gascoigne’s lyric initially appears equivalently reductive, ignoring all that is distinctive about Skelton’s poem. It would be unfair, however, to accuse Gascoigne of careless reading; there are indications, both in ‘He wrote … in prayse of a Gentlewoman’ and elsewhere in his writing, that Gascoigne was quite intimately familiar with Skelton’s work. Specifically, Gascoigne’s assertion that his Philip’s feathers are ‘so freshe of hewe’ may be a verbal echo of another of Skelton’s poems, Speke Parrot, whose protagonist has feathers that are ‘fresshe as ys the emerawde grene’ (l. 16), and it is possible that there is a further allusion to the same poem elsewhere in Gascoigne’s writing, in the name of his most famous (or notorious) persona: the Green Knight.8 Although the Green Knight explains that he is called ‘green’ because ‘my greeves are alway fresh and greene’ ( p. 447, l. 211), it seems that he may count Skelton’s parrot among his literary ancestors; there is a suggestive correlation between the quite literally green parrot, one of whose guises is as unsuccessful lover and who is himself based in part on Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Amant Vert (another parrot who presents himself as lover to his mistress), and the equally unsuccessful Green Knight, who also has to substitute words for deeds.9 The most interesting connections between Skelton and Gascoigne, however, are to be found not in echoes or allusions, but in shared writing practices and habits of mind. This is strikingly exemplified by their respective uses of complex, heteroglossic structures that both reflect and encourage thought about the processes of writing and reading and the nature of the relationship between author and reader. Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe is far from being the only one of his poems composed of multiple voices, fragments, quotations, envoys, and additions which make it difficult to distinguish text from paratext; as Seth Lerer has argued: Skelton is a poet of continuous rewriting. His many additions to his poems, the evidence that some of them were composed over many years, and his thematic concern with reading as a form of rewriting, all contribute to the sense of Skelton both enacting and inviting audience rescriptions of his text.10 As is apparent from his reworking of A Hundreth in the Posies, Gascoigne too is a compulsive reviser, and his work also habitually encompasses extensive layering of voices and (in consequence) numerous implicit shifts in perspective; to look at a single lyric in isolation, as we did with his, ‘He wrote  … in prayse of a Gentlewoman, whose name was Phillip’, gives an unfairly restricted view of his practice. The most notorious example of such experimentation is of course his attribution of the lyrics of A Hundreth to diverse entirely fictional gentlemen, but although Gascoigne’s fictions of authorship are most frequently discussed in relation to this invention of

38  Jane Griffiths multiple authors, a comparable experimentation with voice appears in the interplay of prose narrative and interpolated verses in Master F.J., in the interweaving of the voices of narrator, lover, and mistress in Dan Bartholomew of Bath, and (in the Posies) in the still more complex layering of narrator, ‘auctor’, and Green Knight in The Fruite of Fetters.11 In each of these, the effect of the interplay of voices  – in particular, Gascoigne’s blurring of distinctions between the author and the protagonists of his poems – is the constant wrong-footing of the reader in a way that strongly recalls that of Phyllyp Sparowe. Gascoigne, like Skelton, characteristically writes ‘ficta sub imagine texta’. This is true even of his seemingly transparent claim of authorship of The Posies. The naming of Gascoigne on the title page undoes the fiction of multiple authorship put forward in A Hundreth, but only in order to substitute a new puzzle, as readers are invited to consider at least some of the contents as autobiographical. The Green Knight’s history in The Fruite of Fetters, in particular, so closely resembles Gascoigne’s own that one early reader, Gabriel Harvey, finds no fiction in it at all; when he writes in the margin of his copy of the Posies that the Knight exhibits ‘Sum vanity, & more levity; his special faulte’ and judges this to be ‘the continual causer of his misfortunes. Many others have maintained themselves gallantly upon sum quarter of his qualities’ he clearly draws on his extra-textual knowledge of Gascoigne’s own character.12 The suggestion that author and character are one and the same is of course a titillating one: it teasingly holds out the possibility that the affair with Ferenda and even the more scandalous elements of the Green Knight’s history, such as the impotence or venereal disease which he seems to allude towards the end of The Fruite of Fetters, are also Gascoigne’s own, and that the poem is a private confession in a public place. But the Posies does not just invite us to read it as a roman à clef. It also contains hints that the Green Knight should be identified with the protagonist of an earlier work in the volume, Dan Bartholomew of Bathe, as well as with Gascoigne himself. Both Dan Bartholomew and the Green Knight suffer at the hands of the lady Ferenda Natura, and when the Reporter declares towards the end of the poem that the Green Knight is ‘Batts owne Fathers Sisters brothers Sonne’ ( p. 397, l. 399), one obvious interpretation of the riddle is that Batt and the Green Knight are one and the same. There is a further ambiguity here, however, since Gascoigne begins this stanza with a reference to his supposed source for this story, one Bartello, and ‘Batts’ might as readily be a contraction of ‘Bartello’ as of Bartholomew. Thus, the implication may be that Bartello and Bartholomew are identical with one another, identical with the Green Knight, and ultimately also identical with Gascoigne.13 This rather dizzy sequence of possible correspondences adds little or nothing to a reading of The Fruite of Fetters as a roman à clef, and suggests that Gascoigne is not (only) concerned to encourage his readers to seek links between his fictions and the outside world, but just as much concerned to inscribe himself,

John Skelton and George Gascoigne  39 however cryptically, at every level of the text, so that the volume as a whole becomes a re-presentation of his self, in multiple guises of both subject and creator. Each suggests that he seeks to encourage engaged, interpretative reading as an end in itself, not just as a means of reconciling the fictional and the real. Both aims give him something in common with Skelton. This is not to say that Skelton is the only possible influence on Gascoigne; in fact, it seems likely that clues as to the real-life identity of Dan Bartholomew and the Green Knight parody the provision of contextualising snippets of (mis)information in texts such as Tottel’s Miscellany, while Gascoigne may also have learned from Baldwin, whose skilful blurring of boundaries between fiction and reality appears not only in the Mirror for Magistrates but still more in his Beware the Cat.14 But his experimentation with fictional autobiography does have marked consonances with Skelton’s work as well. These are not, perhaps, immediately apparent; unlike Gascoigne, Skelton inscribes himself unambiguously within his work, regularly including reminders of his laureate status not only within the paratext, but also within the text of his poems.15 And in the poem in which he deploys an autobiographical persona, A Garlande of Laurell, he does so quite explicitly, naming him ‘Skelton poeta’ and providing him with a curriculum vitae and an extensive bibliography that map almost exactly onto those of the historical Skelton.16 Yet, despite such apparent straightforwardness, Skelton (like Gascoigne) also veers between inviting us to read his fiction as thinly veiled fact and implying that this is not the only (or even the most effective) way to read his poem. A Garlande includes a large number of Skelton’s contemporaries who are named outright, such as Elizabeth Countess of Surrey and her attendant ladies – and this clearly encourages the reader to attempt to unriddle the poem’s more opaque references; thus, when ‘Skelton poeta’ enquires after the identity of a ‘blunderar… that playth didil diddil [and] fyndith fals mesuris out of his fonde fiddill’ (ll. 740– 41), the official reply is ‘Envyous Rancour’ – but an interpolated Latin verse gives a rather different answer. Its heading, which declares it to be ‘Interpolata, que industriosum postulat interpretem, satira in vatis adversarium’ (an interpolated satire on the poet’s adversary, which demands an industrious interpreter), clearly challenges the reader to discover who this adversary is – and the verses are followed by a sequence of numbers which, when decoded, give the name ‘Rogerus Stathum’. It appears from one of the lyrics in A Garlande that Skelton had formerly had some kind of relationship with Roger Stathum’s wife Gertrude; as one of the other characters in the poem observes, ‘Writyng remaineth of recorde’, and it seems that Skelton may have taken the opportunity of printing his poem to settle some old scores.17 Yet, while this kind of reference implies that the poem is coded reality, a later cryptic passage suggests that Skelton – like Gascoigne – is equally interested in starting hares for their own sake, as a form of diversion. A

40  Jane Griffiths Garlande of Laurell incorporates a long list of ‘Skelton poeta’s’ previous writings. This, in turn, includes a notable digression: Of Manerly Margery Maystres Mylke and Ale; To her he wrote many maters of myrghe; Yet, thoughe I say it, therby lyith a tale. (ll. ­ ­1198–200) ​­ At least one of these lyrics still survives  – but the way in which the Margery poems are described in A Garlande constitutes life-writing rather than bibliography.18 The ‘tale’, the following lines suggest, is that of Margery’s protestations of purity and her actual unfaithfulness: For Margery wynshed, and breke her hinder girth; Lorde, how she made moche of her gentyll birth! With, ‘Gingirly, go gingerly!’ Her tayle was made of hay; Go she never so gingirly, her honesty is gone away. Hard to make ought of that is nakid nought; This fustiane maistres and this giggisse gase. Wonder is to wryte what wrenchis she wrowght, To face out her foly with a midsomer mase; With pitche she patchid her pitcher shuld not crase; It may wele ryme, but shroudly it doth accorde, To pyke out honesty of suche a potshorde. (ll. ­ ­1201–11) ​­ As with the reference to Roger Stathum, it seems that Skelton is using the printed, publicly available poem as a way of getting his own back for a private grievance. He goes so far as to suggest that Margery’s worthlessness has infected his own writing; the line ‘Hard to make ought of that is nakid nought’ can be read as meaning both that Margery was immoral (‘nought’) when naked, and that an unembellished or plain-speaking (‘naked’) text is resistant to being moralised and thus ineffective. The concluding couplet of the same stanza picks up on the latter sense; stating outright that nothing worthwhile can be made of such an unpromising subject, it suggests that the best that can be said of these lines of Skelton’s is that they rhyme. Yet, despite such assertions that he can make nothing of nothing, the Latin verses that follow suggest that something has already come of his relationship with Margery. They imply that she has given birth to a son, who is of the blood of Delos, and will prove to be another Apollo. These are terms which Skelton more commonly uses to describe himself, as inspired and prophetic poet, and which thus seem to imply that this child is Skelton’s, too.19 Since Skelton was an ordained priest, this secret is a particularly scandalous one. But even as he seems to be giving it away to all readers, he retracts it again:

John Skelton and George Gascoigne  41 Et relis, et ralis, et reliqualis. A good herynge of thes olde tales; Fynde no mo such fro Wanflete to Walis. (ll. ­ ­1216–18) ​­ That is to say ‘and so on and so on; these stories are just monstrous red herrings’. He explicitly invites the reader to become an ‘industrious interpreter’ and then denies that there is anything to interpret.20 Both Skelton’s practice in A Garlande and Gascoigne’s in the Posies thus suggest that they share a view of writing as a game of simultaneous revelation and concealment which is partly a collaboration with and partly a challenge to the reader. In formulating such views, they both may be reacting against some common contemporary assumptions, fostered by the development of new teaching methods over the course of the sixteenth century as to the innately ‘instructive’ value of literature and the use of texts as containers of readily extractable morals.21 In Skelton’s work, such a reaction is apparent not only in the shifting perspectives of Phyllyp Sparowe but also in Skelton’s repeated challenges to the reader to decode riddles (in Ware the Hauke and A Garlande of Laurell) or to treat Speke Parrot as a whole as an exercise in intelligent interpretation, claiming it as a ‘supposicyon that callyd is arte’ of which ‘Every man after his merit [should] take his parte’ (ll. 197; 199). In Gascoigne’s work, the habit of challenge is less ingrained, but in many of his works, the interplay of voices demonstrates that he shares Skelton’s cast of mind. Thus, in ‘Dan Bartholowmew of Bathe’ ( pp. 329ff), whose Reporter not only provides a frame for the story of Dan Bartholomew’s wooing, winning, and losing of the lady Ferenda Natura but also moralises his experience, the value of such moralising is called into question both by his own repeated confessions of literary incompetence and by his conclusive summing up of what we should take from Dan Bartholomew’s story long before its end. Thus, although the position of the poem in the ‘Hearbes’ section of the Posies implies that its moral is its most valuable aspect, the internal moralisation is so clearly unreliable that the onus is placed on the reader to discover for herself what that moral might be. In The Fruite of Fetters, the narrator’s naïvety and the consequences for the reader are still more pronounced. Although he is to some extent identified with the Green Knight, whose story he frames just as the Reporter does Dan Bartholomew’s, he spectacularly overlooks the doubleentendre in the Green Knight’s lengthy lament over the loss of his most prized firelock piece, instead speculating with insistent literal-mindedness as to what the exact specification of the firearm might be. Yet in the concluding ‘Epilogismus’, after the Green Knight has ritually taken his leave of all his past delusory pastimes and desires, it is the narrator who points out that the one thing he has not renounced is that very same firelock piece, and who comments:

42  Jane Griffiths See sweete deceipt, that can it self beguile, Behold selfe love, which walketh in a net: … When Foxes preach, good folke beware your geese. (p. 453, ­­ ll. 1–2; ­ ​­ p. 454, ­ l. 7) He then concludes: But holla here, my muse to farre doth mell: Who list to marke, what learned preacher sayeth, Must learne withall, for to beleeve his lore: But what he doth, that toucheth nomans fayth, Though words with workes, (agreed) persuade the more, The mounting kite, oft lights on homely pray And wisest wittes, may sometimes go astray. ­­ ­ ​­ (p. 453, ll. 8–14) This is very slippery indeed. It not only calls into question the sincerity of the Green Knight’s repentance, but by ending with two proverbial-sounding phrases that are only dubiously relevant to his situation, it ultimately casts doubts on the usefulness of any kind of literary instruction at all, including the narrator’s own. Uncertainty as to whether the mounting kite should be understood as the Green Knight, the narrator, or a predatory woman, and as to whether the wisest wits are the Green Knight’s, the narrator’s or the reader’s, means that the ‘Epilogismus’ shifts from moralising on behalf of the reader to challenging him to think for himself, in a way that strongly recalls Skelton’s technique. For both writers, too, such playfulness appears to be linked to a consciousness of the conditions of their works’ publication, and an interest in the way in which both presentation and medium of transmission alter the meaning of a text. Specifically, their blurring of the boundaries between public and private, and between fiction and reality, reflects a strong awareness of that a printed text will inevitably reach a number of very different readerships, and that they are therefore writing both for genuine intimates, and for a much wider public consisting of readers of differing abilities. For both writers, this awareness spurs an experimentation with printed paratexts which reveals an interest in bridging the gap between writer and wider readership  – or which at least performs an interest in bridging it. This is most obvious in some of their more wayward marginal glosses. Whether authorial or not, in their most common form, glosses serve almost literally as a bridge between text and reader – but in both Skelton’s and Gascoigne’s works they are at times converted into a conspicuous dead end. With Gascoigne, the most notorious instances of such glossing occur in Dan Bartholomew of Bathe, the first at the point where Dan Bartholomew recalls how his lover wore a certain (unspecified) colour in proof of her faithfulness

John Skelton and George Gascoigne  43 and how her ‘blood was sacrificed eke, / To manyfest [her] stedfast martyrd mynde’ (p. 342, ll. 166– 67). The lines are cryptic, but the gloss is more cryptic still; it comments that: ‘These thinges are mistical and not to bee understoode but by Thaucthour him selfe’ (p. 341, l. 161n.). Subsequent glosses, attached to references in the text to ‘a trustie token’ (l. 236), an unidentified ‘noble face’ (l. 272), and a certain ‘Ippocrace’ (l. 295), are equally elusive; each in turn draws attention to ‘Another misterie’ l. 271 n., l. 292 n.) and ostentatiously with-holds any further information. These glosses not only become a running joke, a sequence almost independent of the text, but also invite speculation that the text at these points refers to people or to things or incidents that might be recognised by readers in the know.22 As Austen has argued, they ‘seem gratuitously provocative… [intended] to provoke speculation about the relation of the narrative to external reality’.23 They also have a striking precedent in some of Skelton’s glossing. In A Garlande, where most of the glossing consists of complex but illuminating cross-references to other texts, a strange anomaly occurs alongside a set of Latin verses which no one has successfully managed to translate, but which convey just enough to suggest that they are political and satirical. The gloss here reads ‘Cacosyntheton ex industria’: that is, ‘something badly put together on purpose’. It draws attention to a difficult passage which readers might otherwise have been tempted to skip entirely but fails to offer any further elucidation. Similarly, Skelton’s last surviving poem, A Replycacion (1528), contains the gloss ‘obscuros sarcasmos’, or ‘obscure sarcasm’, with no further indication of what its subject is. Although William Nelson long since discovered that Skelton’s ‘sarcasm’ is a joke at Wolsey’s expense, whereas Gascoigne’s ‘misteries’ remain just that, these glosses function in almost identical ways, and this reveals some shared idiosyncracies of Skelton’s and Gascoigne’s. They do not only re- emphasise the extent to which Skelton and Gascoigne conceive their writing as somewhere between a game and a challenge, but – due to their positioning apart from the main body of the text – they also give the impression of being unpremeditated asides or afterthoughts. They thus create an impression of intimacy, as if the author were actually present at the time of reading, adding afterthoughts and asides in the reader’s ear. By intimating the impossible – that the author is present at the time of reading – the glosses stand in both a complementary and a contestatory relation to one of the other elements of paratext which Skelton and Gascoigne share: the author portrait. Although such portraits are one of the most obvious ways of signalling an author’s ownership of his text, neither Skelton nor Gascoigne uses his in an unthinking or conventional way.24 Gascoigne’s woodcut portrait in his Steele Glas and Complaynt of Phylomene (1576) is well known. Taking up an entire page, it has both a pictorial and a verbal element, showing the head and shoulders of the author, with the tools of war to one side of his head and a shelf of books to the other, and his motto ‘Tam Marti quam Mercurio’ beneath.25 The portrait’s combination of a verbal

44  Jane Griffiths and a visual element clearly places it in the emblem tradition – yet, its verbal element is not confined to the motto alone. Contemporary emblems such as those popularised by Francis Quarles and George Withers typically incorporated not only a woodcut and a motto but also a short verse; the full meaning of each emblem was revealed by a simultaneous ‘reading’ of all three elements.26 Gascoigne’s use of a combined portrait and motto at the beginning of The Steele Glas / Complaynt of Phylomene thus implies that the volume as a whole takes the place of the verse; that is, that the writings it contains should be interpreted as the third element in his self-portrait. Like his inscription of himself at all levels of the text, the portrait implies that the book is the man. Something similar applies to Skelton’s author portraits in A Garlande. Where Gascoigne’s appears to be an image from the life (and may, as Austen has argued, even be a self-portrait), Skelton’s earlier text makes use of two generic woodcuts. The first, which appears to have been used exclusively in this edition, is of an elderly man examining a book at a writing- desk. The second, adapted from a cut in the French Compost et Kalendrier des Bergeres printed in Paris in 1499, is of a young man holding a laurel branch, with the superscription “Skelton Poeta”.27 Yet, although neither is in any sense a portrait ‘from life’, and one – as was common – re-uses an existing cut, the pairing of youth and old age means that the cuts function quite uniquely in this particular context: the poet’s garland in the second woodcut is a sign of the promise which the first woodcut’s image of the finished book has already shown to have been fulfilled. It seems likely, therefore, that the book should be understood as A Garlande itself, and that the man examining it is Skelton, holding in his hand the record of his life up to the moment of its publication.28 The paired images imply something comparable to Gascoigne’s and give an early indication of what will be made explicit in the narrative of the poem: that A Garlande is a kind of apologia pro vita sua, and that it too contains the author’s entire self. But although Skelton’s and Gascoigne’s use of portraits is highly creative, a portrait is in itself is a static presence in the text. It says that here, on the one hand, is the author; and there, on the other hand, are his words. Even when portrait and text combine to make a composite representation of the author – as they do in A Garlande and the Steele Glas – words and pictures remain formally separate elements. Glosses (or at least wayward ones of the kind that Skelton and Gascoigne use) establish the author’s presence differently and more radically. They are analogous to the more extensive revisions and re-presentations of their works for which both Skelton and Gascoigne are notorious – but by standing so visibly apart from the text, as a kind of aside or afterthought, they imply not just that the text has been revisited but that the reader has caught the author in the very act of thinking. They thus imply that the text contains a kind of authorial presence that both complements and contrasts with what is implied by their portraits, suggesting that the text is not a stable record of ‘what the author says’ but a record

John Skelton and George Gascoigne

45

of the process of shaping it. Whereas the juxtaposition of portrait and text is part of the making of the finished book, the glosses seem rather to imply that the book, though printed, is not yet finished. Being so strikingly at odds with the condition of the printed page, they thus render the reading of the text a kind of game: an active engagement with the author in a mutual contest of wits. For both Skelton and Gascoigne, the form of their published text becomes a key part of its meaning. It appears, then, that Skelton and Gascoigne share a great deal more than appears from Gascoigne’s one direct (and fairly unsubtle) borrowing in ‘He wrote … in prayse of a Gentlewoman, whose name was Phillip’. They have in common a strong focus on writer-reader relations, and on their book as sites where a game between writer and reader is played out; they also share a sense of opportunities provided by print publication to make the blurring of boundaries between fiction and reality, and public and private a central part of that game. Finally, they have in common an interest in the way that the presentation of the printed text can enhance these kinds of play. Where the woodcut of Philip Sparrow’s tomb emblematically shuts down communication, both Skelton and Gascoigne seek to encourage engagement with their work by speaking directly to their readers. Even as their portraits suggest their printed books as monuments to the self – not unlike Philip’s tomb – the immediacy of their glossing suggests that a static monument is an inadequate one. For both writers, the printed book becomes a comprehensive ‘feigned likeness’ of the writer engaged in what Skelton calls ‘the ioyous besynes of wrytynge’.29

Notes 1 The relationship between A Hundreth and The Posies is notoriously complex. For discussion, see Pigman, pp. l–liv; and Austen, George Gascoigne, 84–103. 2 Phyllyp Sparowe was printed four times in the decades following Skelton’s death: three times on its own (STC 22594, STC 22595, and STC 22596) and once in the Pithy Pleasaunt and Profitable Workes of Maister Skelton, Poete Laureate edited by John Stow (STC 22608). It would thus easily have been available to Gascoigne. 3 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (New York: OUP, 1954), 138. 4 The following outline of Skelton’s poem is based on that in Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 172–74. For more detailed readings of ‘Phyllyp Sparowe’, and for the relationship between Jane and Skelton in particular, see Celia R. Daileader, ‘When a Sparrow Falls: Women Readers, Male Critics, and John Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe’, Philological Quarterly 75 (1996), 391– 409; Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) 113–26; and Susan Schibanoff, ‘Taking Jane’s Cue: Phyllyp Sparowe as a Primer for Women Readers’, PMLA 101 (1986), 832–47. 5 See further Schibanoff, ‘Taking Jane’s Cue’. 6 ‘Through me, Skelton the laureate poet of Britain, these compositions could be sung under a feigned likeness. She whose bird you were is a maiden of surpassing physical beauty: the naiad was fair, but Jane is more beautiful; Corinna was

46

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16

17

Jane Griffiths learned, but Jane knows more’. Text and translation from The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood rev edn (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). Unless otherwise specified, all quotations from Skelton’s works will be taken from this edition. Here after Foloweth a litle booke, of Phillyp Sparow, Compiled by Mayster Skelton poete laureate (London: Robert Toy, 1554), sig. Dviiiv. Speke Parrot was printed at least four times in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, in collections of Skelton’s works (STC 22598, STC 22599, STC 22600, and STC 22608). For L’Amant Vert, see William Nelson, John Skelton: Laureate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 182– 83; and Heiserman, Skelton and Satire, 174–77. Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in L ate-Medieval England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 194. See further Austen, George Gascoigne, 74–78 and 93–96 (on Master F. J.); 81–83 and 96–98 (on Dan Bartholomew); and 98–101 (on The Fruite of Fetters). Harvey’s copy of The Posies is now in the Bodleian Library, shelfmark Mal. 792 (1). This may be corroborated by the use of Gascoigne’s own motto, ‘Tam Marti quam Mercurio’, by way of cognisance at the end of Dan Bartholomew of Bathe (pp. 398, 449). For the importance of the fictional framework in The Mirror for Magistrates, see Sherri Geller, ‘What History Really Teaches: Historical Pyrrhonism in William Baldwin’s A Mirror for Magistrates’, in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies, ed. Peter C. Herman ( Newark: Associated University Presses, 1999), 150– 84; and Jessica Winston, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates and Public Political Discourse in Elizabethan England’, Studies in Philology 101 (2004), 381– 400. For Beware the Cat, see Edward T. Bonahue, ‘“I Know the Place and the Persons”: The Play of Textual Frames in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat’, Studies in Philology 91 (1994), 283–300; and Clare R. Kinney, ‘Clamorous Voices, Incontinent Fictions: Orality, Oratory, and Gender in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat’, in Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts, ed. Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 195–207. See further Jane Griffiths, ‘What’s in a Name? The Transmission of “John Skelton, Laureate” in Manuscript and Print’, Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (2004), 215–35; for illuminating readings of Skelton’s ‘laureateship’, see Dan Breen, ‘Laureation and Identity: Rewriting Literary History in John Skelton’s Garland of Laurel’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40 (2010), 347–71, and Mary C. Flannery, ‘The English Laureate in Time: John Skelton’s Garland of Laurel’, in Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper, ed. Andrew King and Matthew Woodcock (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 107–22. For a detailed autobiographical reading of A Garlande, though one that also insists on the poem’s status as art, rather than literal record, see F. W. Brownlow (ed.), The Book of the Laurel ( Newark, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1990), 47–70. Something comparable appears in Skelton’s skilful use of multiple dedications to make clear to the poem’s dedicatee, Skelton’s former enemy and now putative patron, Cardinal Wolsey, that he still has the ability to use the pen and the press to attack him. See further Jane Griffiths, ‘Text and Authority: John Stow’s 1568 Edition of Skelton’s Works’, in John Stow and the Making of the English Past: Studies in Early Modern Culture and the History of the Book, eds. Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie (London: British Library, 2004), 127–34.

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18 The surviving lyric is ‘Manerly Margery Milke and Ale’, which is printed in The Complete English Poems from the copy in BL MS Additional 5465. Until recently, this was the only known copy, but for the discovery of a variant version, see A. S. G. Edwards and Linne Mooney, ‘A New Version of a Skelton Lyric’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 10 (1994), 506–10. 19 Cf. Brownlow, Book of the Laurel, 195. 20 Cf. Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, 117–28. 21 For the new teaching methods and their implications, see Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). For Skelton’s opposition to the use of commonplaces in teaching, see Griffiths, Skelton and Poetic Authority, 79–96; for Gascoigne’s more farreaching challenge to the view of rhetoric as the basis of as moral instruction, see Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in SixteenthCentury England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 89–117. 22 For a more detailed discussion of Gascoigne’s glossing practices, see Jane Griffiths, Diverting Authorities: Experimental Glossing Practices in Manuscript and Print (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 149–61. 23 Austen, George Gascoigne, 96. 24 For the uses of author portraits, see further Cynthia Brown, Poets, Patrons and Printers: Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 101– 02. 25 See further Austen, George Gascoigne, 157–59. 26 See further Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 36–38. 27 See further Mary C. Erler, ‘Early Woodcuts of Skelton: The Uses of Convention’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 87 (1986–87), 17–28. 28 An alternative reading of the seated figure as a representation of Wolsey rather than Skelton is also possible (see Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Bibliography and Early Tudor Texts’, Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (2004), 166–68). 29 John Skelton, The Bibliotheca Historica of Diodorus Siculus, ed. F. M. Salter and H. L. R. Edwards, EETS os 233 (1956), 2.

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint Mike Pincombe

A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres contains several lyric poems which might be (and have been) called ‘female complaints’. But are they? It all depends what you mean by the term. There is always more than one way of assigning genre to a poem; and I shall use a selection of Gascoigne’s female complaints as a way of gesturing towards the richness of analytical possibilities.

I The problem with female complaint is the same as with any other genre. It is part of a non-systematic assemblage of items which has been patched together over the millennia in a prolonged and collective act of bricolage. It is hard to say when ‘female complaint’ came into existence as a genre. But to judge from entries listed in the MLA Bibliography, it would seem that the genre does not gain currency as a literary term until the last quarter of the twentieth century.1 Until that time, and certainly in the sixteenth century, there seem to have been only complaints. Some were ‘spoken’ (as it were) by men and some by women. But there was no need felt for a separate term for those spoken by women until the 1970s and afterwards. It is not hard to see why the need for the term arose when it did. Scholars concerned to rediscover and make public a tradition of female authorship were bound to find the complaint interesting and important. Female complaint  – complaints spoken by women – presented and still present a problem, however. Almost all of them were written by men. The ‘female voice’ was thus still rather ambivalently gendered. There is a further consequence of the discovery or invention of the new genre. If there is a ‘female complaint’, then what are we to call the complaints that are not included in this class? The obvious answer would be: ‘male complaint’. But this term seems not to exist; so, it is hard to claim that such a genre actually exists. Certainly, there is no set of texts identified as ‘male complaint’. Perhaps the day will come when this genre, too, will be invented, just as Men’s Studies followed in the wake of Women’s Studies. This will still not solve a more basic problem, however. There are

DOI: 10.4324/­­9781003112082-​­​­​­5

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint  49 some mid-Tudor complaints (and no doubt before and after) where the sex or gender of the speaker cannot be determined with certainty. Where will these poems find a sub-generic ­ ​­ resting-place? ­ ​­ For an example of such a poem, we need look no further than Gascoigne himself. Poem 26 in George Pigman’s edition of A Hundreth has the title: ‘The careful lover, cumbered with pleasure, thus complaineth’. Is this a male or a female lover? No clue is given in the text that follows. This is an inherent problem with poems written since the adjective lost its masculine and feminine endings in English (well before Gascoigne’s time). A first-person poem in French still betrays the gender of the speaker in this way. If I am a man, I say: Je suis malheureux; but if I am a woman, I say: Je suis malheureuse. In Polish, the past tense is marked for gender as well. A man who wept says: Płakałem; a woman says: Płakałam. But only the third-person singular pronoun bears the mark of grammatical gender in ­post-mediaeval ​­ English. The speaker of Gascoigne’s poem could be a man or a woman. Even the comparisons he or she makes with other animate creatures are no real help. There is a comparison with ‘the striken Deare, that seeth his fellowes feede’ (p. ­ 239, emphasis added); but there is also one with ‘the seely [harmless] byrd, that with the Bolte is brusd’, and lies helpless and vulnerable, ‘of al hir pheares [companions] refusd’ (emphasis ­ added). The bird has the edge on the deer, perhaps, because she hears her friends sing, ‘yet cannot she rejoyce, | Nor frame one warbling note to passe, out of hir mournfull voyce’. The song-bird is used often as a symbol of the poet. Indeed, the comparison is drawn explicitly in one of the three poems under discussion: ‘An absent Dame thus complayneth’ ( p. 241). It begins: Much like the seely Byrd, which close in Cage is pent, So sing I now, not notes of joye, but layes of deepe lament. Does this tiny detail tip the ‘speakership’ of the poem in favour of a female plaintive? It seems too weak to do so much work. The sex or gender of Gascoigne’s careful lover remains a mystery. And there is not much more to be said about the absent dame. There is the evidence of the title, and that is very good evidence, of course. But there is nothing in the text to support it. The speaker compares herself (as we must say) to a: hooded Hauke, which heares the Partich spring, Who though she feele hir self fast tyed, yet beats hir bating wing: So strive I now … ’ (p. 241, emphasis added). ­­ But she also compares herself to a male animal:

50  Mike Pincombe The Greyhound is agreev’d, although he see his game, If still in slip he must be stayed, when he would chase the same. So fares it now by me …’ (emphasis added) Again, the birds may just win out over the beast, this time thanks to a second comparison: ‘Swallow-like I sing, as one enforced so’. This leads to a further allusion to the unmelodious bird: Yet you that mark my song, excuse my Swallowe’s voyce, And bear with hir unpleasant tunes, which cannot well rejoice. ­ (emphasis added) Does the word ‘hir’ refer back to the swallow’s voice and thus her unpleasant tunes? Or does it refer forwards (as it were) to the subject of the relative pronoun ‘which’? That is: Bear with the unpleasant tunes of her which cannot well rejoice. The syntax is ambiguous; but we may incline towards the latter explanation and so add just a single in-text female marker to help us identify the speaker. A further question suggests itself: Is it possible for the speaker to exhibit signs both of maleness and femaleness? Gascoigne once more furnishes us with an example of the ‘hermaphrodite complaint’, though it is not as substantial as his ‘androgynous’ careful lover. This is the speaker of The Steele Glas (1576), who asks the nightingale, Philomel, to help him sing his song. This is a mystery which needs to be explained to the poet’s patron, Lord Grey. The speaker denies that he is the womaniser that he has been portrayed as by his critics. On the contrary: I n’am [am not] a man, as some do thinke I am, (Laugh not good lord) I am in dede a dame, Or at the least, a right Hermaphrodite …2 The speaker is in fact a woman (so it seems) called Satyra. The rest of the piece makes it clear that Satyra is modelled on Philomel, and The Steele Glas is printed with another earlier long poem by Gascoigne called The Complaynt of Phylomene. However, the hermaphrodite complaint is not (as far as I know) represented in mid-Tudor lyric poetry. Nor, in the authoritative judgement of the editor of this collection, is Gascoigne’s The Complaynt of Phylomene even ‘strictly a complaint’.3 We will leave it to one side. The invention of female complaint necessarily calls up the possibility of these three other ‘sexes’ or ‘genders’ of complaint: male; androgynous (gender-neutral); ­­ ​­ and hermaphrodite (gender-complex). ­­ ​­ Indeed, it calls for a rethinking of the way we assign gender to the speaker of a text and thus to a genre. What we have called the ‘speaker’ of a lyric poem is really a courtesy title for a thematic unity which cannot really be male or

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint  51 female. Only things which can be sexed can be male or female; but a thematic unity cannot be sexed in the way we sex a hawk or a greyhound. The words feminine and masculine work much better here because they operate at the same fuzzy level of reference to sex as they do in everyday speech. One critic might feel that a bird is somehow more ‘feminine’ than a greyhound. Another might think that a hawk is hardly feminine, though he (let us say) might concede that a swallow was more so, and perhaps even a partridge. Some dimly perceived cultural logic is at work here. In the end, however, we might be best to say that the speaker of the text is ‘feminised’ by certain verbal markers, or ‘masculinised’. Contradictory gender markers ‘hermaphroditises’ the speaker; and the absence of gender markers ‘androgynises’ the speaker. Better still, perhaps, the absence of gender markers sets up a challenge to the relentless gendering of each and every lyric voice that we hear in a poem.

II The invention of female complaint has naturally had an effect on the assemblage of genres that haunt the collective literary-historical imagination. So, for example, in the appendix on genres at the end of the Penguin edition of Tottel’s Miscellany (2011), we find that there are ‘female complaints’, but also ‘love complaints’ and also ‘complaints (on subjects other than love)’.4 To the structuralist (c’est ­ moi), a typological grid immediately presents itself. In the first place, there is an opposition /± love/. There are ‘complaints on love’ and ‘complaints on subjects other than love’. The former is the ‘marked case’: It secedes from the universality of the potential subjects of complaint and establishes itself as a domain distinct from all the other subjects, which remain in an undifferentiated mass. The less salient opposition is /± female/. Holton and Macfaul do not list a genre called ‘complaints (by speakers other than female)’. Nor is this very surprising. The grid is easy to construct. Here it is: +love

love complaint with non­female speaker

love complaint with female speaker

−love

­non-love ​­ complaint with ­non-​ ­female speaker −fem

­non-love ​­ complaint with female speaker +fem

We will not pursue the opposition /± love/; it is clearly important, but it is just as clearly not essential to complaint. Instead, we will build on the insights of Holton and Macfaul in other items in their list of genres. For example: ‘celebrations of success in love’. Is this really a genre? Not in the way that ‘elegies’ and ‘epigrams’ are genres, but it actually has more promise for a systematic approach to genre than these ancient survivors. Holton and Macfaul wanted to assign every poem in Tottel to a genre. If there was

52  Mike Pincombe no genre conveniently to hand, then they seem to have made one up. The ‘celebration of success in love’ (five specimens) looks very similar to the sort of genre analysed by Francis Cairns in his study of Generic composition in Greek and Roman poetry.5 For example, we have genres called ‘gloating over fulfilment’ and ‘public advertisement’ rubbing shoulders with propemptikon and vocatio ad cenam. If Cairns found that a genre he had spotted did not have a Greek or Latin label, he invented one in English  – and rightly so. Scholars should not be shackled to the assemblages of their ancestors. But Cairns proceeded methodically from a theory of lyric poetry: ‘The method adopted […] has been to suggest principles of analysis rather than attempt to produce complete lists of genres, or generic examples, or topoi – an impossible task until much more work has been done in the field’ ( p. 1). The theory is that: ‘All the genres originate in important, recurrent, real-life situations’ ( p. 70). This theory is pursued both methodically and with great brio. It is a book anyone interested in genre theory should read. Given his priorities, and also the limits of knowledge at the time, it is unsurprising that Cairns did not attempt to construct a system of genres in which their interrelations might be demonstrated. Perhaps some other classicist has done it in the meantime, for it would be a valuable inquiry to undertake. One of Cairns’s analytical principles is that the genre is defined by its ‘primary elements’. He says: ‘For the purpose of analysis every genre can be thought of as having a set of primary or logically necessary elements which in combination distinguish this genre from every other genre’ ( p. 6). This is a useful principle and we may apply it to the complaint. We need not proceed inductively, that is, by comparing all the poems called complaints and then trying to work out the elements they have in common with each other but do not share with other poems. Henry Ansgar Kelly tried to do this in his study of Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (1993): ­ For the purposes of this study […] the name of tragedy is both a necessary and sufficient condition for tragedy. That is, every work considered by its author to be a tragedy is a tragedy; and only those works considered by their authors to be tragedies are tragedies6 Kelly’s extreme nominalism and prodigious erudition in several languages led him to produce a valuable encyclopaedia. But all we learn of the word tragedy is that it meant different things to different people at different times; and, naturally, all his myriad examples defy systematic classification. By the time he came to write his study of Chaucerian Tragedy (1997), Kelly’s nominalist bravado had been slightly shaken by his having read Tzvetan Todorov’s dismissal of the inductive method in Le fantastique.7 Todorov argues that we do not have to read every single example of a genre (as Kelly had) in order to discuss it intelligently: ‘Let us leave exhaustiveness, then, to those who have not other recourse’.8 Todorov is right, of course. He also makes a useful distinction between two types of genre in the same study:

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint  53 There are ‘historical genres’ and ‘theoretical genres’.9 The same distinction is rewritten as one between ‘genres’ and ‘types’ in Todorov’s article on ‘Literary genres’ for the Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences du Langage.10 There are two approaches to genre, he says: ‘The first is inductive: it notes the existence of genres on the basis of the observation of a given period. The second is deductive: it postulates the existence of genres on the basis of a theory of literary discourse’.11 Todorov thus goes a step further than Cairns in the direction of a deductive method; and we will go with him in this essay. The primary element of complaint is derived from an ‘important, recurrent, real-life situation’. This situation may be summarised as a schema: /I complain/. All complaints must have a first-p erson speaker who complains. But we may deduce a typology of complaint by means of a simple combinatoire. (Cairns does the same when he enumerates and illustrates the various operations to which the primary element may be subjected: inversion, reaction, inclusion, speaker-variation, and addressee-variation.) All that is required is to analyse what we do when we complain and make this the basis of our typology. Anciently, we used to beat our chests. The word complaint derives from plangere, ‘to beat (the head, the chest)’. The planctus was a song that accompanied this ritual act of auto-percussion. Acts of physical violence towards one’s own body are still secondary elements of the Tudor complaint. But the primary element of the song itself must be sought elsewhere. When we complain, we ‘give expression to sorrow or suffering’ (OED, ­ complain, v., I). This is the sense which was originally associated with the literary genre. There is a logically later sense, with the expression of suffering ‘passing into that of grievance and blame’ (OED, complain, v., II). We might say that ‘a sense ­ of grief’ becomes ‘a sense of grievance’. Thus, we can identify not one but two closely related types of complaint: the ‘plangent’ and the ‘querulous’. The primary element in type I (the plangent) is a verbal elaboration of the sentence: /I suffer/. In type II (the querulous) this sentence is: /I blame X/. A third type immediately suggests itself: /I suffer and I blame X/. And here we may draw up another little grid ( p means plangency and q means querulousness): +q

I blame (but I do not suffer)

I suffer and I blame

−q

I do not suffer and I do not blame −p

I suffer (but I do not blame) +p

The fourth box raises an interesting question. The juxtaposition of the two basic types of complaint /I suffer/ (I) and /I blame/ (II) means that they both imply each other in a virtual but unrealised state. Hence, /I suffer/ implies /I blame/ but in a negative form: /I do not blame/. But can we say that

54  Mike Pincombe the complex type /I suffer and I blame/ (III) likewise implies a virtual type IV: /I do not suffer and I do not blame/? We intuitively reject such a statement; but Cairns has argued that a poem can still belong to a genre even if its primary element is missing, so long as the absence of that element is made clear in the text.12 It is an intriguing possibility. Let us return to the two poems by Gascoigne we have already discussed. The careful lover certainly says /I suffer/: Now have I found the way to weep and wail my fill, | Now can I end my doleful days and so content my will’. (p. 238, ll.1–2) He or she will suffer so much that he or she will die and end his or her suffering that way. But he or she does not blame anyone for his or her suffering. Nor does he or she even declare its cause.13 Here is an example of the type I complaint. The absent dame suffers also, and we may add that she suffers for love. She has selected her mate and has carefully managed his affections until he is ready to return her sexual interest in him. (The beloved’s gender is actually not stated. We rely on heteronormativity to avoid the stylistic embarrassment of ‘he or she’.) But they have been separated, and the dame knows  – or thinks  – that the person she has groomed is now distributing his favours elsewhere, despite all the hard work she has put into him. This is what makes her suffer. Yet, it is hard to say that she lays any real blame on her favourite; and we never learn why they have had to separate in the first place. Fortune might have been a useful whipping-post here, but she is ignored, and we assume that the dame is simply not interested in developing the querulous potential of complaint. On the other hand, there is just enough sense of grievance to make us consider this poem as a weak example of the type III complaint. Here, we have reached one of the great impasses of genre studies, one which is particularly prevalent in essays where a degree of systematicity is attempted. Even where there is a minimal level of definition, as here, it can still be difficult to assign individual poems to one type or another, simply because it can be hard to interpret the text as exactly as seems to be required. The point has been often made, but we might here gesture towards to Alastair Fowler’s energetically sceptical remarks on the value of more ambitious attempts to ‘map’ literary genres as a system in his well-known study of the theory of genres and modes, Kinds of literature.14 He says: ‘It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole enterprise of constructing genre maps is theoretically unsound. In mimicry of scientific procedure, it invents a spurious objectivity and permanence for entities that in reality are institutional and mutable’.15 Structuralism (the enemy here) has always been liable to such accusations of ‘scientism’. Fowler is persistently dismissive of ‘maps’ because there are so many dimensions which could be taken into account that he cannot see how they might be represented spatially: ‘Topologically?

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint  55 16

Hologrammatically?’. We might need ‘anything from twenty to two hundred dimensions’.17 Computer-assisted analytical techniques have developed greatly since the 1980s. In fact, 200 dimensions may be easily represented by various methods of visualisation. Studies in authorship ascription regularly deploy this number of variables. As it happens, 200 is exactly the number of function words used by Hugh Craig, Arthur F. Kinney, and their team to produce very convincing results in their study Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship.18 Computers can also help us with the assignment of individual poems to types and genres. Indeed, they can help us re-imagine what these entities mean ‘in reality’. In the following table, values for p and q have been inserted. They cannot be exact. I have used my own intuitions in deciding whether a particular expression might be ‘translated’ into one of our basic schemas: /I suffer/ and /I blame/. Another person might come up with slightly different results; but not, I think, much different. I have simply divided the number of expressions by the number of syllables in each poem, as a measure of its size. This gives us a frequency (expressed as a percentage). Figures prefixed by G are other complaints by Gascoigne (in the numerical order given by Pigman). G26 is Gascoigne’s ‘Careful lover’, G28 his ‘Absent dame’. Figures prefixed by T refer to poems from Tottell (in the numerical order given by Holton and MacFaul). A simple statistical measure (the z-score) indicates which of these p- and q-values are significantly higher or lower than average.19 These values are included in columns pZ and qZ. Finally, shading indicates values which are neither high not low. poem

gender

P

Q

pZ

qZ

G26 G28 G31 G36 G37 G38 T138 T159 T164 T167 T17 T19 T192 T225 T237

M F M M M F M F M M F F F F M

5.4 2.7 1.3 0.3 2.1 3 1.5 1.4 1.4 1.8 4.1 3.1 4 3 2.7

0 0.2 1.9 3.4 2.7 0.9 0.2 0.3 0.7 2.6 0 0 3.5 1.8 0.8

2.2 0.2 −0.9 −1.7 −0.3 0.4 −0.8 −0.8 −0.8 −0.5 1.2 0.5 1.2 0.4 0.2

−0.9 −0.8 0.5 1.7 1.2 −0.2 −0.8 −0.7 −0.4 1.1 −0.9 −0.9 1.8 0.5 −0.3

These figures offer material for a typology of these particular complaints. They are arranged in the diagram below. Note that the symbols + and – mean ‘high’ and ‘low’ intensity’ (more than one standard deviation above or below the mean) and that the symbol ~ means ‘average’ (everything in between).

56  Mike Pincombe +q

G36

~q −q −p

G37, T167

T192

G28, G38, G31, T19, T138, T159 T164, T225, T237

G26, T17

~p

+p

As we might expect, the middle box is crowded with complaints which are ‘averagely plangent, averagely querulous’ (~p~q). Nine of the fifteen poems are here, with the others scattered about in the more extreme positions. None of them lack an element of querulousness, and only one, G36, lacks plangency (but makes up for it by being extra- querulous). This suggests, surprisingly perhaps, that /I blame/ might be more central to the complaint than /I suffer/. If the z-scores for p and q are presented as a scattergram, the proximity between poems and groups of poems can also be visualised: The circled dots are Gascoigne’s ‘An absent Dame thus complayneth’ (28; p.  241; left) and ‘An absent lover  … thus complayneth’ (37; p.  249; right). More data might change this picture; and scores of other poems might eventually be added to the analysis. But all I have tried to do here is to demonstrate a method, not to change the course of literary history. Most readers of this essay will have found these arguments tedious, maybe even uncomfortable. Having dismissed genre systems to his satisfaction, Fowler comments: ‘This conclusion brings a certain relief, for if literature could be mapped it would be a good deal less personal and interesting’.20 The critic’s personal interests (institutional as well as psychological) are somehow obscurely threatened by structuralist analysis; and hence the otherwise unaccountable animosity that it provokes amongst otherwise intelligent people. It is not hard to see why. One look at the cover of Matthew Jockers’s Macroanalysis (2013) is enough to alarm almost anyone. It shows a cluster diagram of 3,000 nineteenth- century novels plotted against 500 variables. It looks like a giant hair-ball. If this is what the future of literary studies looks like, it is no wonder that most people want to stay firmly set in the past. The ‘human clutter (or creative disorder)’21 of the assemblages produced by bricolage  – the harmlessly higgledy-piggledy disorder of the genres drawn up by Holton and Macfaul – is far more manageable. But we will say no more.

III ‘A Lady being both wronged by false suspect’ (38; p.  251) is the second female lament by Gascoigne under discussion. It sits comfortably within the ‘normal zone’ of averagely plangent and averagely querulous complaints. The full title reads: ‘A Lady being both wronged by false suspect, and also wounded by the durance of hir husband, doth thus bewray hir grief ’ (p. 251). ­­ The first stanza opens up a ­mise-en-scène. ­​­­ ​­ The lady calls for someone to give

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint  57 her her lute as she lies in bed, and to lock the door of her chamber. She is preparing to complain of her ‘secrete smart’ in ‘mournefull verse’ (ll. 3– 4). She asks the walls to respond with an echo, and her bed to bear witness to her restlessness. The next five stanzas form the song she actually sings. She tells the story of her love: how her friends selected a mate for her when they saw she was ripe for love; how she followed her parent’s will; how she was happy with her husband until Slander and Suspect stirred up trouble between them; and how she and her husband have been separated by what seems to be some sort of military service on his part. In the seventh stanza the lady, having ended her song, turns to certain ladies who have been there all the time ( presumably it is they who gave her the lute and locked the door). She asks them to join in her lament. In the final stanza, however, she lays her lute in her bed and announces her intention to make her moan in the open air: Untill I may entreate some curteous wynd: To blow these wordes unto my noble make [mate], That he may see I sorowe for his sake. (p. 252, ll. 62–64) ­­ ­ ​­ The poem presents an interesting problem. The actual complaint seems to be the song that occupies stanzas 2– 6. This is when she has the lute in her hands and accompanies herself as she sings. The lady specifically states that is over at the beginning of stanza seven: ‘Now have you heard the summe of all my grief’ (l. 49). Before and after the song, we have a sort of one-sided dialogue. The lady talks to the other ladies and also to her lute, her bed, and the walls of her room. They do not reply, of course. In any case, there seems to be a ‘complaint proper’, the actual song sung by the lady to her lute, and another sort of poem into which it is inserted. The song could quite easily be extracted from the poem and be anthologised as a perfectly well-rounded poem beginning with the words: ‘In prime of youth when Cupid kindled fire’ ( p. 251, l. 9); and ending: Such is my hap to shake my blooming time, With wynters blastes before it passe the prime’ ­­ ­ ​­ emphasis added) (p. 252, ll. 47–48; But as things are, it is a ‘complaint within a complaint’. The same is true of the third poem under discussion: ‘A loving Lady being wounded in the spring time, and now galded eftsones [galled once more] with the remembrance of the spring, doth therfore thus bewayle’ (25; p. 237). The poem has nine stanzas, of which stanzas 6 –7 are taken up with the actual song sung by the lady. This time, however, the song could not be extracted quite so easily, because there are two instances of the unsung phrase ‘quod she’ (ll. 19, 39). With minimal adjustment, the song could still be lifted from

58  Mike Pincombe the poem where it now nestles and be anthologised as a separate poem beginning: ‘Alas, [alas], behold each pleasant green’ (the second ‘alas’ has been substituted for the first ‘quod she’); and ending: Needs must I fall, I fade both roote and rynde, My braunches bowe, at blast of ev’ry wynde. (p. 238, ­­ ll. 41–42) ­ ​­ It is not quite as neat as the excerpt from ‘A Lady wronged’; but in compensation, the text is marked more strongly for excerption. It is preceded by the phrase: ‘and thus this Lady sayed’ (l. 18); and followed by the phrase: ‘This sayed’ (l. 43). Both poems have a female complaint ‘framed’ by other material to form a larger poetic unit. In ‘A Lady wronged’, the frame is a ­mise-en-scène: ­​­­ ​­ The speaker sets her song in a particular physical, social, and imaginative ‘scene’. In ‘A loving Lady’, the frame is narrative – and the narrator is another person. There are thus two first-person speakers in the second poem, and only one in the first. In ‘A loving Lady’, the narrator goes out one fine spring morning and rows across the Thames to take a walk on the other side. He (let us say for now) hears a voice raised in lament; he investigates and finds a lady weeping in a garden. The lady sings her song, and as she finishes, she sees the narrator, and both are seized by confusion. The narrator runs away and goes home, where he writes down her song ‘in this waymenting [lamenting] verse’ ( p. 238, l. 48). The final stanza, however, is a closing ­mise-­​ The narrator turns to certain ladies, all of whom know the lady in ­­en-scène: ​­ the garden, and asks them to help her. ‘A loving Lady’ has the best credentials of all Gascoigne’s poems as a female complaint, since John Kerrigan selected it for his anthology Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’ in 1991.22 The inverted commas suggest that he was not quite sure whether female complaint was a genre or not. The first sentence of his introduction shows where the problem lay: ‘Set before a cave mouth, or in the hollow of a vale, a “female” figure laments’.23 So, it is not the word complaint that needs the inverted commas, but the word female. This is because most of the complaints gathered in his anthology were actually written by men. The complaint might be spoken by an imaginary female figure, but the words were put into her mouth by a man. For Kerrigan, there is thus something inherently problematic about the ‘female complaint’. The same would be true of ‘female tragedy’ or ‘female epic’. It is the ‘femaleness’ that gives pause for thought. In ‘A loving Lady’, the maleness of the narrator is also worth pondering. Actually, there is no lexico-grammatical indication of the narrator’s gender in the text itself. We suppose the speaker is male because he rows a boat on the Thames. This is not something we would expect a woman to do in the 1570s (though it is perfectly possible that this woman did, of course.) Really,

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint  59 though, we assume the speaker is male because he is not specifically marked as female. He is male by default. The narrator is thus only very weakly masculinised; but we will assume he is male, as have done others before us. Kerrigan is particularly insistent on the maleness of the narrator in this poem. He is clearly uncomfortable with the kind of female complaint in which a male narrator overhears a woman who complains that some other man has done her wrong. Kerrigan asks anxiously: ‘Can the narrator’s overhearing and subsequently circulating the maid’s song be disentangled from the (equally masculine, invasive) wrong which she reports?’.24 The thought preys on him, especially when he considers that male readers actually enjoy reading poems where wronged women complain of what men have done to them: When the faithless youth of The Diseased Maiden Lover tells the narrator, ‘I was not made for one alone, | I take delight to heare them moane’, he anticipates and seems to share in the pleasure of a misogynistic reader, leafing promiscuously through ballads, perusing Ovid’s gallery of heroines, or turning the pages of this anthology.25 Hypocrite lecteur! Suddenly, the male reader of Motives of Woe sees his own respectably academic features reflected in the grin of the callow youth of an ancient ballad. There is worse to come. Kerrigan cites a definition of the genre which Germaine Greer sent him in a letter: ‘an essentially masculine mode, predicated on a sado-masochistic sexual dynamic’.26 The male reader is a misogynist and a sadist. The stakes are high, then. And, of course, Kerrigan was his reader’s own semblable. Amongst his acknowledgements, we read: ‘Alison Hennegan interrupted her work for The Women’s Press Bookclub to scrutinize the introduction’ ( p. vii). So, he was granted a feminist imprimatur. I am teasing Kerrigan here. But I also want to make the point that genres do not come into existence by themselves. They are the result of scholars and critics working in the usual conditions and under the usual pressures. When Jean-Marie Schaeffer came to re-write Todorov’s article on genres for the Nouveau dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage in 1995, he concluded with a discussion of the difference between la généricité auctoriale and la généricité lectoriale. The first deals with genre as it is perceived and deployed by the author, and the second by the reader, including the critic and the scholar. This distinction, he says, ‘refers at one and the same time to the regulated character of literary communication and to the differentiation of literature as an historical corpus of works which are read’.27 In other words, Todorov’s ‘historical genres’ are revived as ‘readerly genres’. The female complaint was invented by readers centuries after it ceased to be reproduced by writers. And it is as much the child of late twentieth- c entury feminism as of literary scholarship.

60  Mike Pincombe This is not to deny that there is something unedifying about the voyeurism of the narrator in ‘A loving Lady’. Here is where it happens: This sayed, she cast a glance and spied my face, By sight wherof, Lord how she chaunged her hue? So that for shame, I turned back a pace, And to my home, my selfe in haste I drew: And as I could hir woofull wordes reherse, I set them downe in this waymenting verse. ­ 43–48) ­ ​­ (ll. The dramatic moment where the lady and the narrator catch each other’s eye, and each is pained and confused, though for different reasons, is Gascoigne at his best. It works so well because he chooses not to amplify any of its details. The final couplet lacks this terse urgency. The ‘house style’ of complaint reasserts itself in the familiar locution ‘woeful words’. This expression is found in many mediaeval works which Gascoigne probably knew. He certainly knew Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, so he must have read the scene where Pandarus says he cannot tell his niece of all of Troilus’s ‘complaining’, lest he himself should faint in sympathy: ‘But now to you rehearsen all his speech | Or all his woeful words for to soun [utter], | Ne bid me nought, but ye woll [unless you want to] see me swoon’ (Chaucer 1542: 188 [2.572–74]). Gascoigne’s narrator shows less sympathy for the lady in the garden; and his readiness to set down her words, though he must know that she will be embarrassed to have them circulated still further, is not kind. Here, he is more like the paparazzo-like narrator of Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight (also a poem well known in Gascoigne’s day). Lydgate’s narrator hides himself in some bushes so he can hear what the (male) plaintive has to reveal. Then, when the plaintive leaves the scene, the narrator whips out pen and paper and writes it all down while there is still light in the sky: A pen I took and gan me fast speed The woeful plaint of this man to write, Word by word as he did endite. Like as I heard and could him tho [then] report I have here set, your hearts to disport. (Lydgate 1531: 15/19) ­ ­ So male grief can also be presented as a source of pleasure for the reader, who may here be male or female. In the middle of the poem, the poet says that it will bring consolation to ‘any now […] in this place | That feel in love brenning [burning] or fervence, | Or hindered were to his lady’s grace | With false tongues’ (Lydgate 1531: 7; emphasis added). But the envoy is addressed to a mysterious princess whose refusal is the source of the male plaintive’s grief (Lydgate 1531: 18). Is it possible that the roles of sadist and masochist could be reversed? That the female reader might take pleasure

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint  61 in the complaints of men who had been wronged by women? Is this not the myth of Petrarchism? We will not pursue the matter beyond drawing attention to Marcy North’s shrewd observation that the narrator in Gascoigne’s poem ‘finds the alarm, embarrassment, and possible recognition by himself reflected in his own shame’.28 The key word here again is reflection. The narrator and the lady are at this moment mirror-i mages of each other. Each has been caught out by the other and shocked into a moment of self-recrimination: The narrator is ashamed to have been caught spying on the lady; and the lady is ashamed to have been caught giving such full expression to a grief where there is actually so little cause for blame. For what is complaint but an exercise in egotism? Mon semblable, ma sœur!

IV There is no reason why we should not call ‘A loving Lady’ a female complaint. It fits the bill well enough. But what is the reason why we do? On the one hand, there is an element of ‘feminist complaint’. The poem may be inserted within the great modern project of the re-invention of early modern literature along the axes of sex and gender. On the other, there are good formal reasons, too. As we have seen, single poems of any length tend to combine different kinds of proto-generic material. By that, I mean that, for example, a female complaint might consist of the single primary element Cf, but that, more often, that element is combined with other elements – here N or M – which are not strictly necessary but are there anyway. In some cases, these other elements might be conceived as the primary elements of other genres (in the Cairnsian sense). Narrative might be such a case, though the ­mise-en-scène ­​­­ ​­ requires another element to ‘surround’, as it were. The poems we have examined might all be called female complaints not only because they all have the element Cf, but because it is syntactically central, and this formal centrality might give the element superiority in a hierarchy of elements. Even in the case of ‘An absent Dame’, where the formula reads CM, and where neither element can be strictly said to be central, we might say that the formula is a partially realised variant of a more canonical form MCM. The formula might in this case read ^CM, where the caret symbol ^ means that he first M is ‘lacking’ (Latin: caret). A tacit assumption of the formal appeal of symmetry is at work here. By the same argument, we might say that ‘A loving Lady’ could be written as ^NCNM, where there is a ‘missing’ ­mise-en-scène ­​­­ ​­ element at the start. When we add the gender marks, we get: ^mNmCf NmMm. Now, the central element of female complaint looks even more central, not only because of the pattern of elements, but the pattern of genders: MMFMM. On the other hand, however, we might select M as the primary gender here simply because it is applied to three (or four) elements as opposed to the single, though central, element which carries the feminine marker. We might argue that ‘A loving Lady’ is a poem which is as much and maybe more concerned with male than female experience.

62  Mike Pincombe Here, we might turn to another modern genre of early English poetry: the chanson d’aventure (a genre mentioned by Kerrigan several times in his introduction by the way). According to Helen Sandison, who wrote the first (and only) detailed study of its English form, the chanson d’aventure is a poem in which a first-person narrator typically goes out one day (usually it is a fair spring morning) and comes across a person singing par aventure: ‘by ­ chance’.29 The ‘love-lament of a young girl’30 is particularly favoured as the centre-piece. Ideally, the poem ends with the resumption and conclusion of the narrative; although many poems, especially English ones, lack this element. The opening segment of the narrative is always present. In effect, there is a canonical format NSN, which can also be partially realised as NS^ (here ‘S’ means ‘song’). Finally, the poem is also a chanson within a chanson. There are two persons who sing ‘I’. The first is the singer-narrator, who is always male, it seems. The second is the fictive singer he sings about in his song, who may be male or female, but especially the latter. The formal similarity between ‘A loving Lady’ and the chanson d’aventure is evident: It lies in the core sequence N*N. If we wish to concentrate on the favoured type where the song is the lament of a young maid, then we can say that the core sequence is identical: NmCf Nm. The difference is that Gascoigne’s poem has a final segment of ­mise-en-scène ­​­­ ​­ in which the poet steps out of the role of narrator and talks directly to his audience. There is no evidence to suggest that Gascoigne actually did sing this poem to a group of ladies who were acquainted with the mysterious lady in the garden. It would have to have been a very small audience, though that it in itself is no bar, especially if we give ear to the possibility that Gascoigne may have been commissioned to write the poem on behalf of a lady abandoned by Edward de Vere, the young Earl of Oxford.31 However, it seems more likely that he just wrote the poem and handed it over. The final segment is just as fictive as the rest of the poem. But in any case, the chanson d’aventure suits the form of ‘A loving lady’ just as well as the complaint, female or otherwise. But when we consider the second part of the label chanson d’aventure more closely, we may have to grant that it points towards the male narrator more than the person (or sometimes persons) he meets. Aventure comes from the Latin advenire, or ‘to come to’. It is, of course, the same root that gives us adventure. An adventure is something that happens to you when you are not expecting it. Even if you seek adventure, as the knights of old did according to romance, you are not seeking any particular dragon or giant, but you take whatever challenge you happen to meet on the road. The adventure ‘comes to you’ (advenit). ­ At some level, then, we might analyse the chanson d’aventure as containing a variant of the ancient narrative motif of ‘the trial’. Here we might return to the two mediaeval poems already mentioned. In both cases, a male narrator comes across a male plaintive in a state of distress. Chaucer’s narrator goes to the aid of the plaintive, whereas Lydgate’s greedily consumes the other man’s grief and then exploits it in order to promote his own interests as a poet. Chaucer’s narrator has been rewarded with

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint  63 critical approval: He is evidently humane even if he is a little slow on the uptake. Lydgate’s has not received as much attention, but his role as ‘narratoras-spy’ is inevitably less savoury than Chaucer’s helper, and Dana Symons is right to point to the poem’s anxious allusions to the fate of Actaeon (Symons 2004, pp. 74 & 78). Actaeon, hunting, accidentally  – par aventure  – ​­came across Diana whilst she was bathing, and was turned by her into a stag and killed by his own hounds. The Actaeon myth fits Gascoigne’s ‘A loving Lady’ even better.32 The male narrator comes across the lady in the garden par aventure. His intention in rowing across the Thames was merely ‘to take the cherefull ayre, / In open feeldes’ (ll. 5 – 6). True, his curiosity is piqued when he hears ‘a voice, which seemed to lament’; and here we may be quite generous to him. Although the gender of the plaintive is not specified until a few lines later, we may presume that the narrator could hear that it was a woman who lamented, and that he wished to seek her out and help her as a ‘damsel in distress’. There is no indication that he is a Peeping Tom. He says ‘I saw a dame’ and then disappears from the text until the narrative resumes and he comes back on stage, as it were. This does not mean that the individual reader might prefer to imagine the narrator ‘on-stage’, or ‘in the frame’, watching the lady as she sings her song. That is the sort of readerly preference which shapes the actively gendered genre of female complaint offered by Kerrigan, for example. But the only sign that the narrator feels he has done something wrong occurs after the lady ceases and then  – also par aventure – sees that she has been observed: ‘she cast a glance and spied my face’ (l. 43). On the whole, Gascoigne’s narrator is much more like Actaeon than Fellini’s Paparazzo. We may still feel, however, that the narrator fails the test and is found wanting. Did not Chaucer’s narrator overcome his embarrassment and offer sympathy? But The Boke of the Duchess is a dream vision, and there is thus no need for the usual reticence which holds back the ordinary person from speaking to a person of much higher rank without invitation. Lydgate’s poem, on the other hand, is an extended chanson d’aventure and has a realworld setting. True, there are exceptions to the social rule. A shepherd shows sympathy to a grieving gentleman in Surrey’s ‘In winter’s just return’,33 which has been described as ‘A Chaucerian “Courtly Love Aunter”’.34 Here aunter is yet another derivation from the Latin advenire. But this is a very strange poem, in which the plaintive breaks all the rules by actually killing himself rather than just hoping to die as soon as he can. Perhaps Gascoigne’s narrator may be forgiven for not speaking to the lady whose high rank seems assured by the nature of the ‘stately dore’ which separates her world from his own (l. 9). If we follow the argument that the Earl of Oxford was somehow involved in all this, then the narrator’s awkwardness is even more understandable. It also helps explain why he writes the song down and then shares it with the lady’s friends, who really are in a position to help her in a way that he is not.

64

Mike Pincombe

And if we return to Actaeon for a moment, we may see another reason to approach Gascoigne’s narrator more sympathetically. He survives his encounter with the forbidden sight, but he suffers: I left my Boate, and up on land I went. Till at the last by lasting payne I found, The wofull wight, which made this dolefull sound’. (ll. 10–12; emphasis added) Possibly, the phrase ‘by lasting pain’ means ‘by a long and diligent search’; but the preposition by means so many different things in Gascoigne’s idiolect that I am tempted to read the phrase to mean ‘to my lasting pain’. Perhaps this is going too far in my attempt to redeem Gascoigne’s male narrator from the charge of voyeurism; though I would gesture for support here to Theresa Krier’s delicately nuanced study of what others might call voyeurism in Spenser: Gazing on secret sights (1990). But I hope at least to have shown that the chanson d’aventure offers a different way of reading the poem, in which Nm is the primary element rather than Cf. * Genres, genres, genres. They are both fascinating and infuriating. Every time you think you have pinned a text down as genre X, it slips away from your grasp and pops up somewhere else as genre Y. Fowler added modes. Now there are types, too. But as Schaeffer says in the last lines of Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire?: ‘on est bien obligé de s’en accommoder’.35 We have to make the best of the sheer productivity of la généricité lectoriale. Better still: we have to make the most of it. The concept of female complaint has opened up a new line of enquiry in the study of Tudor poetry; but in applying gender to the complaint, it has given us more than just the female variant, but also male, androgynous, and hermaphrodite variants. Indeed, the female complaint cannot be properly understood until the differentia are fully explored. Likewise, the typological variety produced by shifting attention from Cf to Nm. This essay is a step in that direction.

Notes 1 I note with pleasure that the title Female Complaints was chosen by Sarah Stage for her 1979 study of the pioneer of women’s medicine and my distant American kinswoman: Lydia E. Pinkham (‘Lily the Pink’). 2 Cunliffe, p. 144. 3 Austen, George Gascoigne, p. 156. 4 Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul, eds., Tottel’s Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Others (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 536–37. 5 Francis Cairns, Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 1972.

George Gascoigne and Female Complaint

65

6 Henry Ansgar Kelly, Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. xv. 7 Henry Ansgar Kelly, Chaucerian Tragedy (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997); Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. from Introduction à la littérature fantastique by R. Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). 8 Todorov, 1975, p. 5; cit. Kelly, 1997, p. 2. 9 Todorov, 1975, p. 13. 10 Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Literary genres’, in Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, ed. Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris, 1983); trans. by Catherine Porter (1979; Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 149–55. 11 Ducrot and Todorov, 1979, p. 149. 12 Cairns, 1972, pp. 128–29. 13 This is where the English scholar looks enviously towards his friends in Hungary, whose mother tongue is mercifully gender-free. 14 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 15 Fowler, 1982, p. 249. 16 Fowler, 1982, p. 248. 17 Fowler, 1982, p. 247. 18 Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney, eds., Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 221–22. 19 To produce a z-score for a series of values, you calculate the average value and the standard deviation for the series. Then, you subtract the average from each individual value and divide the remainder by the standard deviation. Values of +1 and above are said to be significantly higher than the norm, and those of −1 and below significantly lower. 20 Fowler, 1982, pp. 249–50. 21 Fowler, 1982, p. 250. 22 John Kerrigan, ed., Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1991). 23 Kerrigan, 1991, p. 1. 24 Kerrigan, 1991, p. 16. 25 Kerrigan, 1991, p. 17. 26 Kerrigan, 1991, p. 75. 27 Jean-Marie Schaeffer, ‘Genres Litteraires’, in Nouveau Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences du Langage, ed. Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1995), pp. 626–37, (trans. M.P.) 28 Marcy North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in TudorStuart England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 229. 29 Helen Estabrook Sandison, The “Chanson d’Aventure” in Middle English (Bryn Mawr, PA: Bryn Mawr College, 1913). 30 Sandison, 1913, p. 4. 31 Pigman, p. 611. 32 Michael Delahoyde, “Lyric Poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare”, in Soul of the Age: Edward de Vere as Shakespeare Stimulates a Golden Era of English Literature, ed. Paul Hemenway Altrocchi (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 9, 2014), 379. 33 Tottel, 2011, pp. 23–26. 34 Martine Braekman, ‘A Chaucerian “Courtly Love Aunter” by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’, Neophilologus 79, pp. 675–87. 35 Schaeffer, 1989, p. 185.

II

Gascoigne’s Influence on Elizabethan Literature Gascoigne and Drama

Gascoigne’s Poses and Supposes Richard C. McCoy

George Gascoigne’s title for A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres Bounde up in One Small Poesie is a pun, equating poesy and posies and highlighting the etymology of anthology as a bouquet of poetic flowers. His pun is even more concise in the Posies, the second edition published in 1575. But, here and elsewhere, the word is a multiple pun. Posies are also “short epigrams” as George Puttenham tells us in The Art of English Poesy, and these are often succinct and explicit statements of a poem’s theme.1 Gascoigne’s verse abounds in such devices, such as “Ever or never” or “Fato non fortuna,” but his are usually more obscure than transparent. Indeed, as Mary Thomas Crane points out, Gascoigne “does not use the posy, as some poets do, to sum up the moral of a poem.” Instead, his posies “express something about the poet’s attitude” which constantly changes because “he sees sayings not as a stable frame, but as a reflection of ungroundedness.”2 Gascoigne himself acknowledges this instability with apparent regret in the Posies where he says, in his “generall advertisement of the Author” that, in the Flowres, he “often changed my Posie or worde” and “no meruaile: For he that wandereth much in those wildernesses, shall seldome continue long in one minde” (p. 371). In his prefatory letters to the second, supposedly reformed and “gelded” ( p. 361) edition of his verses, Gascoigne presents himself as a now repentant prodigal who has renounced his wandering, errant, and inconstant ways.3 These slippery shifts in stance and attitude indicate another meaning of the pun, hinting at the artful and ambiguous poses and pretenses pervading both the Flowres and the Posies. Gascoigne’s poesy entails extensive posing and equivocation, and he would agree with Touchstone that “the truest poetry is the most feigning.” In his role as “The Reporter” in Dan Bartholmew of Bathe, he admits to this paradox while coyly insisting on his own innocence: And if I were a poet as some be, You might perhappes heare some such tale of me. But for I fynde my feeble skyll to faynte, To faine in figures as the learned can,

DOI: 10.4324/­­9781003112082-​­​­​­7

70  Richard C. McCoy And yet my tongue is tyed by due constrainte, To tell nothing but truth of every man. (p. 329) ­­ This is a typical pose for Gascoigne. While hiding behind the generic persona of a mere “Reporter,” he pretends to be someone incapable of poetic license who can only speak plain truth. “If I were a poet” indeed! Gascoigne is increasingly recognised as one of the most talented, ambitious, and versatile poets of Elizabeth’s early reign. C. S. Lewis credits him with helping to launch its Golden Age, and his verses are witty and ambiguous, far removed from the dull truisms promised by the Reporter.4 For Gascoigne, as for Touchstone, there’s as “much virtue in if” as in poetry itself, for both open up the possibilities of the conditional and hypothetical – or supposes – as well as the fictive and the devious – or poses. In A Hundreth, poses and supposes are combined, and that, perhaps, is why Gascoigne’s translation of the Supposes comes first in the collection. The “position of the plays in the volume is very odd indeed,” as G. W. Pigman notes, but I think the placement is intentional and significant rather than an oversight.5 The conception of supposes Gascoigne sets forth in the prologue to the play, like his notion of poses, is capacious and paradoxical, encompassing not only disguise and play-acting but also all supposition and even thought itself. As Robert Maslen says in Elizabethan Fictions, the connection makes Gascoigne “a cunning dissembler who can adopt whatever ‘pose’ he likes and who can play at will on the ‘supposes’ – the expectations, fantasies, and assumptions of his simple readers.”6 Supposes propose and impose perspectives on the world, but in Gascoigne’s account, they prove both unreliable and inescapable since they are inextricably entangled in poses. The first pose Gascoigne strikes in A Hundreth is certainly equivocal in its misleading self- effacement for he completely disappears, hiding behind an address by “The Printer to the Reader” and claiming that this publication was unauthorised. It is a familiar dodge aimed at avoiding the so- called stigma of print, and many early Tudor writers employed it; the prefatory letters to Master F. J. continue that fiction.7 But he follows that feint with a move that allows Gascoigne a more dramatic, direct, and domineering confrontation with his audience. In the “Prologue or Argument” before the Supposes, Gascoigne himself addresses the bright, ambitious young men of Gray’s Inn, gathered for the Christmas revels of 1566. He repeatedly challenges their expectations and derides their “supposes”: “I suppose you are assembled here, supposing to reape the fruite of my travayles” (7). Such exchanges are more ingratiatingly offered elsewhere in A Hundreth. In the address of “The Printer to the Reader,” he encourages us to pluck the honey from the volume’s poesies. Similarly, in the letter from “H. W. to the Reader” preceding Master F.J., he invites us to make a “common commoditie” of “other mens travailes ( p. 142).” By contrast, in his prologue to the Supposes, Gascoigne complicates this exchange, warning us not to misread

Gascoigne’s Poses and Supposes  71 his intentions and “suppose the meaning of our supposes.” But we cannot help doing it anyway because suppositions are inevitable. After he gives away the basic details of the plot – “the master supposed for the servant, the servant for the master … the stranger for a well knowen friend, and the familiar for a stranger” – he warns us against supposing him “very fonde, that have so simply disclosed unto you the subtilties of these our Supposes.” He then jeers at our need to “heare almoste the laste of our Supposes, before you could have supposed anye of them arighte” ( p. 7). His prologue thus asserts what Jane Hedley calls the “poet’s prerogative,” claiming the right to “control both what occurs and what is signified” within his own poetry.8 Gascoigne’s tone here is markedly different from his source. Ariosto in his prologue flatters the knowledge and erudition of his “good audience” (benigni ­ Auditori) and defers to their judgements: “As you know, children have been substituted for one another in the past, and sometimes are today. You have seen this in plays, and you have also read about it in history books.” The substitutions of young men for old may “seem new and strange to you,” but “Whether or not the author should be condemned for this he leaves to your discretion” (al discretissimo giudicio vostro) asking only that they give his play, whose story unfolds part by part, a kind and patient hearing (benigna ­ udienza).9 Gascoigne, by contrast, describes his play as a guided missile aimed at our helpless brains because its “verye name whereof may peradventure drive into every of your heades a sundry Suppose” (p. 7). He then doubles the number of our sundry suppositions and tells us they’re all mistaken. These include philosophical or sophistical hypotheses, esthetic “quaint conceiptes,” and sexual or pornographic fantasies. Unlike Ariosto, Gascoigne insists on his own alternative definition and commands his audience to “understand, this our Suppose is nothing else but a mistaking or imagination of one thing for an other.” His definition proves hard to grasp because his “or” doesn’t indicate whether these are alternatives or equivalents, but the imperative makes our position if not our understanding clear. “Understand” aims to reverse the presumptions of supposing as well as its etymology. We must stand under and yield to the play rather than imposing our own subjective suppositions. Gascoigne thus anticipates the ambition of England’s most imperious neoclassical playwright. Ben Jonson was also determined to make his spectators understanders and put himself on top. But what Gascoigne tells us we must understand is both vast and unsettling, since a suppose is either a mistake or the imagination of one thing for another and we have no way of distinguishing between them. Gascoigne’s notion of “supposes” thus goes beyond Ariosto’s idea of substitution and disguise, plumbing greater epistemological depths. This links the play, as Alan Stewart notes, to the “overarching conceit of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres” which equates “supposes” with “doubts” 10 and “conjectures.” ­ He aims to bring our “braynes in a busie conjecture” which, like Master F. J., we may find endless (p. 158). After this dramatic prologue, the tricks and mistakes that actually follow may seem disappointing because the characters are almost as clueless as

72  Richard C. McCoy we are at guessing the outcome and “meaning of our supposes” ( p. 7). The heroes are inept and half-hearted in their attempts at dissimulation. Having fallen in love with the otherwise inaccessible Polynesta, the young master, Erostrato, admits that he “supposed the readiest medicine to my miserable affects had bene to change name, clothes, and credite with my servant, and to place my selfe in Damons service” and thus gain entry to her father’s household ( p. 15), while his servant, Dulippo, poses as Polynesta’s rich suitor. Their story provides the prototype for the Bianca-Lucio subplot of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, and their identity swap reaps even greater rewards for the master. Erostrato says that, for two years, “I have free libertie at al times to behold my desired, to talke with hir, to embrace hir, yea (be it spoken in secrete) to lye with hir” ( p. 15). Yet, even though he gets the girl, he regrets “this unfortunate enterprise” and finds that “as my joyes abounde, even so my paines encrease,” because an even richer suitor courts Polynesta while winning favour with her greedy father ( p. 15); “Alas, what wretched estate have I brought my selfe unto, if in the ende of all my farre fetches, she be given by hir father to this olde doting doctor” ( pp. 15– 16). The wily servant has a plan: the feigned Erostrato will promise an even larger dowry and produce a fake father to back him up, and the master is briefly reassured by this scheme. “I believe you,” he tells his servant, “for I know you can counterfeit well” ( p. 20). As the plot unfolds, the master can only “stand aside here and laugh a little,” and even then he concedes that “I jest and have no joye” ( p. 23). This is the trademark complaint of Master F. J. who is also somewhat sadly fatalistic. The feigned Dulippo sees himself as fortune’s pawn, and, of this practice that nowe my servaunte hath devised, although hitherto it hath not succeded amisse, yet can I not count my selfe assured of it, for I feare still that one mischance or other wyll come and turne it topsie turvie ­­ (p. 30) The wily servant’s confidence in his own schemes is not much stronger. After his master’s affair with Polynesta is discovered and the feigned Dulippo is arrested, his ingenuity is apparently exhausted. The feigned Erostrato haplessly asks, “What escape or what excuse may I now deuise to shifte ouer our subtile supposes?” ( p. 34). He seems completely overwhelmed by the arrival of “the right Philogano the right father of the right Erostrato.” The prodigals’ defiance of patriarchy has always been pretty feeble, and the feigned Erostrato thinks that the real father and master is “the man that wil not be abused” ( p. 35). And his feeble schemes are no match for fortune which he curses for entangling him in “thy ruinous ropes” by keeping “secret our subtil Supposes” only discipher them with a sorrowful successe” ( p. 48). The right Erostrato believes that his father will never consent to his marriage when he discovers that “to follow this amorous enterprise, I have set aside

Gascoigne’s Poses and Supposes  73 all studie, all remembraunce of my duetie, and all dread of shame. Alas, alas, I may go hang my selfe” (p. 18). Nevertheless, while patriarchy terrifies these two creatures, all the fathers are fairly ridiculous. The feigned Dulippo tells Cleander that he is maligned by his parasite as a miser with body odor and bad breath as well as an impotent homosexual, “bursten in the cods,” who plans to use his young bride to “entice many yong men to your howse” ( p. 26). The customs officers’ search of Philogano sounds like a sexual assault: how often they untrussed my male and ransacked a litle capcase that I had, tossed and turned all that was within it, serched my bosome, yea my breeches, that I assure you I thought they would have flayed me to searche between the fell and the fleshe for fardings (pp. 36–37) ­ ­­ ­ ​­ The hero’s father submits to this “tedious toyle and travaile … only to see my sonne, and to have him home with me,” and he proclaims “there is no love to be compared like the love of the parents towards their children” (p. 36). Though he has not forgotten the “many mad prankes … that liked me not very well,” Philogano yearns for a reunion, and his love for his son seems to weaken and emasculate him. One onlooker rebukes him accordingly, saying “It is commendable in a man to love his children, but to be so tender over them is more womanlike” ( p. 37). Moreover, the fathers in this play seem just as clueless as their sons in the face of their own reversals of fortune. After Damon learns that “My daughter is defloured, and I utterly dishonested,” he cannot imagine “howe can I then wype that blot off my browe?” ( p. 31). His long lament is Gascoigne’s addition, and it reinforces a sense of paternal pathos and helplessness.11 “Alas, who shall relieve my miserable estate?” Philogano complains, and, again in Gascoigne’s addition, he can only appeal to “God the supreme judge (whiche knoweth the secrets of all harts)” ( p. 43). He submits to the plot’s bizarre twists and rationalises each as providential, “for I thinke that not so much as a leafe falleth from the tree, withoute the ordynance of god” ( p. 56). Damon clutches even more desperately at the prospect of a providential happy ending: would god it were true that Polinesta, tolde me ere while: that he who hathe deflowred hir, is of no servile estate, as hitherto he hath bene supposed in my service: but that he is a gentleman borne of a good parentage in Sicilia (p. 54) ­­ But finally and quite fortuitously, that faint hope which he thought “but a tale” turns out to be “a true tale” (p. 55). Similarly, when Cleander learns that the servant supposed for the master is really his long-lost son, their

74  Richard C. McCoy happy reunion is proclaimed “the strangest case that ever you heard: a man might make a Comedie of it” ( p. 55). The man who actually does “make a Comedie of it” is, of course, the playwright. That arch remark reminds us of his supreme control over all these supposedly fortuitous events; fato non fortuna indeed. I don’t think, as Robert Maslen does, that Gascoigne feels his “subtilties” can only be sorted out “by divine intervention.”12 His trust in providence seems no more convincing to me than his moralising. The characters achieve very little by their own exertions, but their happy ending depends on the ingenuity of their author. Like Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, they can only plead, “O time, thou must untangle this, not I./It is too hard a knot for me t’untie” (ll.ii.38-39). Shakespeare here evokes the metaphor of the favola intreccia, a favoured plot device in Italian romance, where complications increase, intensify, and almost explode until revelations of concealed identities resolve them all at the last minute. Ariosto’s adaptation of a classic comedy of errors from Terence’s Eunuchus and Plautus’s Captivi presents a standard dramatic variation on intrigues and disguises that get chaotically out of hand. The Italian play follows the well-known formula laid out by Aurelius Donatus in which events move from an “increase and progression of the agitation” which tightens “the whole knot of errors” to a sudden reversal, recognition, and resolution.13 Gascoigne’s adaptation of Ariosto’s I Suppositi asserts the playwright’s control even more aggressively in the beginning and the end, and its outcome is complicated from the start by his expansion of the title’s significance. As Donald Beecher explains in his edition of the play, by keeping Ariosto’s word, he changes the meaning entirely, for ‘to suppose’ in English does not mean to impersonate, but to hypothesize in relation to the evidence available. This notion is extended even further by the marginalia, which call attention to the various moments of supposing on the part of several characters throughout the play; Beecher adds that, for Ariosto, the word ‘supponere’ ­ meant substitution” and notes that Gascoigne moves beyond substitution, impersonation, and disguise to more fundamental “comic misapprehensions of reality, false postulations, and dramatic irony.”14 As Joel Altman explains, Gascoigne’s version of the play sees “comedies of error as man’s usual mode of existence.”15 Moreover, errors get harder to sort out and recognise even when painstakingly indicated, because there is no end or escape from supposes. The marginalia in the second edition of The Supposes ponderously point out various mistaken supposes, beginning with the master and servant’s exchange of identity, “The first supose and grownd of all the suposes” ( p. 8). In Thomas Nashe in Context, Lorna Hutson contrasts the creative freedom of A Hundreth with the constricted moralising of the Posies, arguing that while the

Gascoigne’s Poses and Supposes  75 original text invited the reader to identify the discursive virtuosity of the playwright with the plot’s capacity to create and exploit opportunities for error (supposes), the addition of marginalia directs the reader towards a moral analysis of the perils of acting upon conjectures which are deceptive supposes.16 Later, in The Usurer’s Daughter, she treats this “moral signposting” more sceptically, concluding that it is just another cover that allows Gascoigne to “have it both ways.”17 More recently, in The Invention of Suspicion, she argues against Gabriel Harvey’s notion that Gascoigne’s aim was “To coosen the Expectation” since one’s “expectation can hardly be ‘coosened’ or temporarily fooled when the legend ‘you are no being fooled’ is written all over the dialogue’s plausible misleading indirections and deliberate false turns.”18 I agree with Harvey rather than Hutson in this instance. I think that Gascoigne’s marginalia are intended to indicate that there is no end to error on the part of the audience. The last marginal annotation is attached to Damon’s plaintive wish for his daughter that “he who hathe deflowred hir, is of no servile estate, as hitherto he hath bene supposed in my service: but that he is a gentleman borne of a good parentage in Sicilia” ( p. 54). Thus is “The first suppose brought to conclusion.” But not completely since we still “see the master supposed for the servant” ( p. 7) by a hostile fellow servant who suspects him of being a common thief. When Nevola returns with fetters and bolts to bind Polynesta’s lover, Damon says “I will tell thee Nevola, to make a righte ende of our supposes, lay one of the bolts in the fire, and make thee a suppositorie as long as mine arme.” The “right end” to that suppose is a suppository up the ass.19 Then, he turns to the “Nobles and gentlemen” in the audience and demands, “if you suppose that our supposes have given you sufficient cause of delighte, shew some token, whereby we may suppose you are content” ( p. 58); evidently, the members of Gray’s Inn did what they ­ plauserunt” (p. 58). ­­ were told, for the text records, “Et By giving him the play’s last word and letting him address the audience directly, Gascoigne makes Damon his spokesman. The bullying tone of his epilogue echoes the belligerence of the prologue. In the beginning, he tells us the play’s title “may peradventure drive into every [one] of your heades a sundry Suppose,” each one wrong, and he suspects that, despite all the clues the prologue provides, “in deede I suppose you shoulde have heard almost the laste of our Supposes, before you could have supposed any of them aright” ( p. 7). The marginalia may helpfully tell us when “The first suppose [is] brought to conclusion” ( p. 54) but it never tells us which one is the last or where it ends. The only “right end” just might be a suppository up the ass. But, though we are spared that assault, the supposes and the ramifying confusion they cause don’t stop. As that final request for applause indicates – “if you suppose that our supposes” delight you, clap so that “we may suppose you are content” – there is no “right ende” of circular supposes.

76  Richard C. McCoy I want to conclude by suggesting that Gascoigne’s audacious adaptation of Ariosto broadened the imaginative possibilities of Tudor-Stuart drama.20 Evidence for this is perhaps clearest in those early Shakespeare comedies most closely influenced by Gascoigne’s play. Here too, errors prove more unsettling and supposes more fecund than they do in traditional Plautine comedy. As Lorna Hutson suggests, The Supposes helped both The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew to move beyond the “tedious (old) new comedy plot” whose “objective … is the revelation of eye-blinding ‘supposes’” to more mysterious and intractable complications.21 The Comedy of Errors expands on The Supposes’ brief glimpse of uncanny duplications where the “world is large and long, and there may be more Philoganos and more Erostratos than one” (p. 39), and wandering and error are both scary and liberating. In The Taming of the Shrew, Kate ultimately submits to Petruchio’s wilful distortions after realising how such “mad mistaking” (IV.v.49) is stronger than more conventional suppositions. As Cecil Seronsy points out, Petruchio’s bold “supposes” represent “a deeper, more conscious effort, the will to believe and make real and establish beyond cavil what everyone else fails to see.”22 Shakespeare’s plays work our will to believe hard requiring us in the words of The Winter’s Tale, to awake our faith. His early comedies follow Gascoigne’s lead in their sly manipulation of our supposes and beliefs. The Taming of the Shrew’s induction subjects its onstage audience member to a set of outrageous suppositions in order to make the drunken Christopher Sly imagine himself a lord. So powerful are their effects that he “cannot choose” but to “forget himself,” yet when they’re over they will feel like nothing more than “a flatt’ring dream or worthless fancy” (Induction 1.42). By contrast, the “real” lord in A Midsummer Night’s Dream resists all assaults on his credulity, Theseus declaring “I never may believe/ These antique fables, nor these fairy toys” (5.1.2–3). He dismisses the players and their play even while condescending to hear them: “The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing. / Our sport shall be to take what they mistake” (5.1.89–90). Theseus thus regards “the mistaking or imagination of one thing for an other” as the same thing and reduces the ambiguous alternative posed by Gascoigne’s prologue to a simplistic equation. In his view, perceiving a Gypsy as beautiful is just as mistaken as thinking a bush a bear. He cannot see how “Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity” (1.1. 232–33). Moreover, he and the other “gentles” deride Pyramus and Thisbe and refuse to see any connection between its follies and their own. After the play is over, Theseus expressly orders “no epilogue,” but his authority is usurped by Puck who gets the last word and the epilogue. Puck exercises his authority gently, asking us “Gentles” to pardon the players and play. We can even dismiss it as an “idle … dream” (5.1.413–16). But, having seen the intense effect of “shaping fantasies,” our confidence in “cool reason” may not be as strong as the player king’s. Gascoigne’s Supposes boldly dramatises the power of theatre and the supposes that it generates. In addressing the “Nobles and gentlemen” in his

Gascoigne’s Poses and Supposes 77 original audience, he challenged those who assume that, on the one hand, “a mistaking or imagination of one thing for an other” are equivalents or, on the other, that they can be easily distinguished. He apparently enjoyed reminding these “Gentles” that they cannot simply take what the players mistake because they make their own mistakes. Gascoigne boldly amplified the intellectual challenges posed by the English theatre and poetry, but his imaginative audacity caused him problems. In his prefatory letters to The Posies, he concedes that many of his earlier “conceytes … have beene doubtfully construed, and (therefore) [found] scandalous” (p.  359). The “busie conjecture” his work stimulated prompted censorious suppositions more powerful than his playful supposes. In The Posies, he refers explicitly to those oppressive reader responses and complains that “I had an intent farre contrarie unto all these supposes, when I first permitted the publication hereof,” but, his intentions having backfired, he finds he must “addresse my tale, for the better satisfying of common judgements” (p. 365). His abjection may be suppositious but the pose took hold in his later writing. It would take another generation before the conflict between a playwright’s and poet’s poses and the audience’s supposes could attain a more even balance.

Notes 1 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, eds. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 1.30.146. 2 Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in SixteenthCentury England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 177. 3 See my “Gascoigne’s Poëmata Castrata”: The Wages of Courtly Success,” Criticism, 27 (1985): 42– 43. I remain as skeptical about these professions of reform as I was 30 years ago. 4 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), p. 269. 5 Pigman, Introduction, p. lvi. 6 Robert W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 127. 7 See J. W. Saunders, “The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,” Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139–64. 8 Jane Hedley, “Allegoria: Gascoigne’s Master Trope,” English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981): 154–55. 9 Comedies of Ariosto, Edward M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, ed. and trans. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 53. 10 Alan Stewart, “Gelding Gascoigne,” Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England 1570–1640. Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 153–54. 11 Lodovico Ariosto, Supposes (I Suppositi). George Gascoigne, trans. Donald Beecher and John Butler. Donald Beecher and John Butler, ed. (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1999), p. 170. 12 Maslen, p. 127. 13 Cited in Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 146. 14 Beecher, Introduction, Supposes, p. 67.

78

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15 Altman, p. 157. 16 Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 61–62. 17 Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 121. 18 Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 205– 06. 19 Hutson discusses threats of sodomy in both Ariosto and Gascoigne, suggesting that audiences need to watch their back in both plays in ibid., p. 193. 20 For a more extended discussion of the broad impact of Gascoigne’s play on English Renaissance drama, especially on its “forensic or litigious plot structure,” see ibid., p. 131. See also 146– 47. 21 Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, p. 222. 22 Cecil Seronsy, “‘Supposes’ as the Unifying Theme in The Taming of the Shrew,” SQ 14 (1963): 23. Seronsy argues that the main plot thus opens up the “full significance of idea behind ‘supposes,’ with its possibility for dramatic enlargement” (15).

‘Certain Decayed Men’ Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske Stephen Hamrick

Charles Prouty persuasively suggests that Gascoigne published A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), in part, because of the success of his Devise of a Maske written for the double wedding of the heirs of Catholics Anthony Browne, the first Viscount Montague, and Sir William Dormer in the fall of 1572.1 Discussing Gascoigne’s whereabouts in that period, Prouty also wonders if the poet involved himself in the political activities surrounding his Catholic patron, Montague. More recently, G. W. Pigman notes that the 11-month siege and fall of Famagusta and the subsequent Catholic Holy League’s victory over the Ottoman Turks at Lepanto on 7 October 1571 served as apt subjects for a marriage mask celebrating the union of two influential Catholic families.2 Despite these historical and political observations and despite its contemporary success, Gascoigne’s Devise of a Maske, published under his own name in his ostensibly anonymous A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), continues to be misread from within the Stuart masque tradition and therefore judged negatively. Prouty, for example, concludes that as a “masque,” Devise of a Maske represents “a puny attempt indeed,” citing the ostensible fact that the central “story of Famagusta and Lepanto is told for its own sake,” rather than being an integrated part of the text.3 Marie Axton and, more recently, Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, however, warn against reading Elizabethan masks within the Burgundian or Stuart masque traditions as Prouty and others have done with Gascoigne’s text.4 Rather than serving as expansive royalist spectacles and neoplatonic vehicles of cultural order, Tudor courtly masks embody political critique and negotiation. Written primarily to influence Montague, Gascoigne’s Devise of a Maske, his first known patronage poem, offers political advice in the tradition of the Tudor disguisings.5 Gascoigne clearly knew and worked within the Tudor mask traditions, which remained syncretic throughout the period. Gascoigne’s awareness of the multiple traditions that make up Tudor masking or disguising includes, from the epilogue of The Steele Glas (1576), the tradition of dressing in foreign garb: “like women” “masking in mens weedes  … with dutchkin

DOI: 10.4324/­­9781003112082-​­​­​­8

80  Stephen Hamrick dublets, and with Jerkins jaggde” or “with Spanish spangs, and ruffes fet out of France.”6 Gascoigne also notes the Tudor mask’s inclusion of dancing and music, writing in The Glass of Government (1575) that “it is not meete that every dancer heare our musike before the maskers be ready.”7 Gascoigne combines multiple components of Tudor disguisings, relying most heavily upon the tradition of the courtly or ceremonial mumming to accentuate the Catholic identity of the masking members of the Montague affinity. To generate critical discussion of the Devise of a Maske, this chapter begins by reestablishing both Montague and Gascoigne’s participation in the courtly mask tradition and then sets Gascoigne’s text within the politicocultural contexts relevant to Montague, the viscount’s activist Catholic affinity, and Gascoigne. Domesticating the victory over the Turk at Lepanto through his courtly mumming mask, Gascoigne’s Devise of a Maske suggests that the viscount embrace an aggressively oppositional form of Catholicism.8

All Against Me Anthony Browne (1528–92), the first Viscount Montague, knew the function of courtly entertainments well, including the mask tradition, readily understanding the political function of masks like Gascoigne’s Devise of a Maske. In addition to being familiar with the work of his father, Sir Anthony Browne, sometime Master of the Revels for Henry VIII, Montague attended the masking entertainments provided by Robert Dudley, newly Earl of Leicester, on 5 March 1565 at Whitehall.9 Spanish Ambassador, Diego Guzman de Silva, comments upon the performance of a mask of satyrs or wild gods that followed a comedy in which “the plot was founded on the question of marriage, discussed between Juno and Diana,” a common political component of courtly entertainments in the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign.10 According to Guzman Viscount Montague and her Vice-Chamberlain [waited] with me until the Earl of Leicester disarmed, when the rest of the guests and I went to his apartments to supper. When this was ended we went to the Queen’s rooms and descended to where all was prepared for the representation of a comedy in English, of which I understood just so much as the Queen told me.11 In patriarchal fashion, “Jupiter gave a verdict in favour of matrimony,” and, publically recognising the political intent of the masking comedy, the Queen indicated that “this is all against me.”12 Fashioning a disempowering (married) identity for the Queen, the comedy engages the contemporary marriage debate for an international audience consisting of both Protestants and Catholics, including Montague.

Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske  81

Diana We Adore In addition to witnessing such courtly political entertainments, Montague actively participated in the mask celebrating the marriage of his daughter, Mary Browne, to Henry Wriothesley, the second Earl of Southampton, 19 February 1566. In his edition of Hundreth, Pigman suggests that Gascoigne may have attended the 1566 wedding in London, more of which to follow. Written and explicated by Thomas Pounde, the 1566 wedding entertainment also embodies the political functions of the early Elizabethan masking tradition adapted by Gascoigne. A successful courtier, Pounde would later become a lay Jesuit and, as Mike Pincombe writes, he remains notable “as an unyielding recusant who spent more than half his long life in various gaols up and own England for his adherence to the Roman Catholic faith.”13 Pounde’s mask oration engages directly with contemporary courtly and social traditions, yet has been largely derided and ignored by modern readers. Consistently rejected by critics as poorly written, the oration Made and pronunced by Master pownde of lyncolnes Inne with A brave Maske owt of the same howse all one greatte horses Att the marriage off the yonge erle of South hampton to the lord Mountagues dawghter Abowt shrovetyde (ll. ­­ 1–5) ​­ nevertheless engages the immediately topical issue of Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to the Habsburg royal, Archduke Charles of Austria.14 Pounde’s title stresses the processional nature of the Tudor mask, identifying “the brave maske out of the same house all and greatte horses.” Engaging the traditional disguising fiction of the surprise visit by “foreign” maskers, Pounde adroitly positions himself as a potential future client to Montague and others, hoping for their immediate and long-term “favoures” (ll. 16–17) Announcing the masking entry, Pounde states, And as for that which you do seme thus longinge for to knowe what these strange things shuld meane which I have browght here to bestowe. (ll. ­­ 18–21) ​­ Fashioning his audience’s “longinge” and the mask as a “strange things,” Pounde here evokes the mask’s function of constructing social identity, namely, “what we are” (i. 22) and what the mask “shuld meane.” Immediately, Pounde reveals that the maskers hail from Lincoln’s Inn and, moreover, enact identities seemingly at odds with the celebration of the Wriothesley-Browne wedding. Rather than avoiding such an incongruity,

82  Stephen Hamrick Pounde stresses the ostensibly inappropriate nature of the maskers’ appearance at the wedding: That whyle we leade this single lyffe diana we adore As goddes of our chastities to worshipe here therefore. (ll. ­­ 46–49) ​­ Beyond such adoration, the men of Lincoln’s also indicate, So make we her our patrones Eche man to be here knyght And therefore thus we cladde our selves lyke vyrgins all in white. (ll. ­­ 50–53) ​­ Devotees of the chaste Diana and, for the moment, dedicated to “this single lyffe,” the Lincoln maskers suitably “cladde” themselves “Lyke vyrgins all in white.” Initially creating dissonance, the Lincoln men also worship Hymen, the god of marriage, in hopes of a good match for themselves. Continuing to foreground identity through the miraculous voice of a heavenly bird, Pounde’s “himeneus” or Hymen informs the Lincoln gentlemen that they must serve as attendants to the Wriothesley-Browne wedding, bearing gifts from the gods. Rather than a “fallen” nymph, such as Calisto, Sylvia, or Maia, Montague’s daughter Mary Browne, one of “dyanaes nymphes” ( p. 68), receives the chaste goddess’ blessings. Hymen informs the maskers that One of the noblest nymphes she hathe is married nowe Awaye A proper and A vertuous mayde but well bestowed they saye. (ll. ­­ 102–05) ​­ The text immediately confirms the maid’s virtue, indicating: which els wold greve diana more to lose here Jewell so but that an earle is to be liked All thowghe she had no mo. (ll. ­­ 106–09) ​­ Pound’s panegyric fashions Mary Browne as both “proper” and “vertuous” but also reveals the political import of such marriages between powerful

Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske  83 Catholic families and peers, such as Viscount Montague and the “earle,” who must “be liked” more than remaining single. Rather than being grieved, Diana blesses the union, joining Minerva in sending her benison: So that those same two goddesses do favoure so those twane that as it is a noble matche as most have benne agayne. (ll. ­­ 118–21) ​­ Multiplying blessings, further divine approval emerges from the male divinities: So to the god of Marriage they both have made request That they might honour so this feast as they have thowght hit best. (ll. ­­ 122–25) ​­ For Pounde, Diana blesses the wedding because the couple, due to the bride’s age, swear that “Yet vyrgins styll theye wyll remaine / and keppe true chastytye” ( pp. 184– 85) for a year. Pounde’s wedding oration ends without describing the mask dance or the traditional recall procession, yet the valorisation of virginity aptly responds to the personal needs of the bride and groom. Pounde, like Gascoigne later, also addresses the contemporary religiopolitical issues relevant to Montague and Southampton. Susan Doran and others have established that a series of entertainments celebrating marriage over chastity, including Leicester’s masked entertainments of March 1565, were directed to Elizabeth. As Doran writes and Elizabeth’s 1565 comments support, these works convey a “political point” through the “repetition of the theme that marriage was preferable to chastity at a time when many subjects were pressing Elizabeth to wed the Archduke Charles.”15 Within this context, the February 1566 marriage mask celebrating the union of Mary Browne and Henry Wriothesley, as well as excessively valorising married life, serves as one of the “many masques and plays in the 1560s,” which, according to Doran, “should be viewed as part of the general pressure on the queen to marry.”16 A former servant with personal connections to the Habsburgs and an unapologetic Catholic, Montague acted as a diplomat negotiating the possibility of the Queen’s marriage to Charles.17 Pounde’s topical valorisation of marriage over single life, as well as Gascoigne’s choice of the fall of Famagusta and the Catholic, Habsburg victory at Lepanto as the theme of Devise of a Maske, thus correspond to Montague’s personal experience and political service. In light of his contemporary residence and function at Gray’s Inn and his interest in crown patronage, Gascoigne may also have been present at

84  Stephen Hamrick Pounde’s 1566 wedding mask, as Pigman suggests.18 In residence at Gray’s Inn during 1566, Gascoigne had been made an ancient in 1565 and his responsibilities included participation in the Inn’s vacation revels. In addition to helping elect the King of the Revels each holiday season, according to statutes of the Inn, every Fellow elected to be one of the Ancients should thenceforth, for the whole time of every the nine Vacations next ensuing their said election, be attendant as well upon the Marshall chosen at the Feast our Lord, upon the penalty of forty shillings for every one making default throughout Christmas until the beginning of Lent.19 As part of the mock government, ancients like Gascoigne advised the King of the Revels on both the practical and political components of the entertainments, as well as helping fund the festivities.20 Pounde’s 1566 marriage mask took place just before Lent when Gascoigne was required to be in residence at Gray’s Inn, suggesting Gascoigne’s probable attendance; the two inns, moreover, sit in close proximity or, as he writes, “portpulia” or Gray’s Inn, “northeward liethe next / whose bounds and ours do mete” (pp.  34– 35).21 Gascoigne’s own participation in Gray’s entertainments that season also make the Lincoln’s wedding mask of interest. As such, Gascoigne possessed relevant experience of politically coded entertainments and a working knowledge of specific entertainments familiar to Montague. Moreover, Gascoigne’s 1566 contributions to the tragedy Jocasta, first performed during the Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn that year, offer entertainment with a clearly political message.22

My Glittering Golden Gite Gascoigne knew and expertly used the Tudor tradition of the courtly mumming mask to address Sir Anthony Browne, the first Viscount Montague, in political and artistic registers that the peer would understand. Gascoigne’s Device of a Maske, in fact, effectively integrates such traditional masking elements as foreign disguise, a drum,23 torchbearers, processional “dance,” a surprise visit by strangers,24 and a narrator or “truchman” explicating the mask via a scripted monologue.25 Gascoigne, moreover, includes each of the distinct phases common to the Tudor mask, including the entry, the revels, and the recall.26 In the tradition of Elizabethan courtly masks, Gascoigne’s Devise of a Maske incorporates multiple voices, fashioning distinct and sometimes conflicting identities for participants, audience members, his patrons, and (later) readers.27 Not unlike Pounde, Gascoigne begins his mask focusing on identity and maintains that focus throughout the text. In his prefatorial introduction, he describes

Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske  85 a devise of a maske for the right honorable Viscount Mountacute, written  … upon this occasion, when the sayde Lord had prepared to solemnise two mariages betwene his sonne and heire and the daughter of sir William Dormer knighte, and betwene the sonne and heire of sir William Dormer, and the daughter of the saide Lord Mountacute (71.0.1–7) ­ ­ ​­ With the terms “right honorable,” “Viscount,” “knight,” and the repeated “heire,” Gascoigne aptly (re)situates his text as part of an elite performance central to the reputation of an important Catholic peer. The heir of a knight himself, Gascoigne accentuates the central role of kin and political alliance in (re)fashioning personal reputations in Elizabethan honour cultures, underscoring the fact that “there were eighte gentlemen (all of bloud or alliance to the saide Lord Mountacute) which had determined to present a maske at the day appoynted for the sayd mariages” (71.0.7–9). The terms “gentlemen,” “bloud,” and “alliance” recall that, instead of focusing solely upon individual identity, early modern individuals defined themselves in relation to larger groups or communities, including such social alliances as family; religious affiliation; the great household; the Court; London or other urban communities; trade guilds; the parish; the universities; Inns-ofCourt; intellectual, artistic, and educational coteries; and others. As scholars increasingly recognise, patronage affinities, religious groupings, family alliances, and social networks played a distinct role in the cultural work of ­self-fashioning. ​­ Consistently attuned to such affinities, Gascoigne focuses attention on alien or foreign identity and affinity. Gascoigne’s introduction informs readers that the eight Montague kin had alredy bought furniture of silks. etc and had caused their garments to be cut of the Venetian fashion. Nowe then they began to imagine that (without some speciall demonstracion) it would seeme somewhat obscure to have Venetians presented rather than other countrey men ­ ­ ​­ (71.0.10–15) In light of the fact that Tudor courtly masks regularly presented relatively “obscure” costumes or “furniture,” as well as foreign characters, Gascoigne’s introduction egregiously calls attention to the fact that his “countrey men” “presented” themselves as “Venetians.” By thus estranging readers from the Venetian costumes and by stressing the active performance of identity through the term “presented,” Gascoigne leads his original readers to focus specifically on their Venetian identities. Anne Geoffroy, in fact, establishes that Gascoigne first invented the mythical, symbolic and/or fictional Venice for English and, specifically Catholic, readers.28 Although Geoffroy suggests that Gascoigne’s audience remained loyal both to the English Crown

86  Stephen Hamrick and to Catholicism, analysis suggests a more radical understanding of Gascoigne’s text and some members of his audience. Inexplicably forgetting Gascoigne’s penchant for misdirection, some readers take his introductory description of the mask as a simple record of events.29 Rather than serving as a factual etiology, Gascoigne’s introductory headnote invokes the traditional scenario of the courtly feast interrupted by “beings from another world” and transfers that ephemeral and recognizable dramatic component to the more permanent context of his published text where it serves as a metatextual marker of alien, i.e., Catholic, affinity.30 Even as the text foregrounds the “foreign” nature of the maskers, Gascoigne adapts the tradition of the mask narrator in order to connect the English spectators to the eight Venetian Montague veterans. Dressed in what the mask text labels as “strange ­ attire” (71.11), Gascoigne’s narrating “Actor” poses as an English Montague boy reporting his experience of the siege of Famagusta, the battle of Lepanto, and his rescue from the Turks. Fashioning the fictive surprise of the courtly mumming, which we noted in Pounde’s wedding mask, the boy indicates that the wedding guests “wonder” and “marvaile” at the “strange” or “rare” (71.1–3ff.) sight of him and the four torchbearers.31 Carefully explaining the “outlandishlike” (71.16) attire worn by himself and his attendant torchbearers, Gascoigne’s Actor draws further attention to courtly mumming as a means of constructing a transcultural affinity with “so many nooble peeres.” Such an identity takes on further importance as the rescued boy suggests that Percase my strange attire my glittering golden gite, Doth either make you marvell thus, or move you with delite. Yet wonder not my Lords for if your honors please, But even to give me eare awhile, I will your doubts apease. And you shall know the cause, wherefore these robes are worne, And why I go outlandishlike, yet being english borne. (71.11–16) ­ ­ ​­ Gascoigne’s “glittering golden gite” corresponds to “the coper cloth of golde gownes,” which, according to courtly haberdasher Thomas Giles, participants used in “the maryage of the dowter of my lorde montague” (p. 410).32 Through the Italian masking attire of the distinctly labelled “Englishe” Actor or narrator, Gascoigne constructs a hybrid identity for the Montague affinity. Devise of a Maske accentuates such an ostensibly unstable dual identity (English and Venetian) within the context of repeated requests that Montague welcome these fictionally unexpected maskers and “be to them right good” (p. 71.342). The victorious Montacutes enter the seat of Montague influence, Buck Hall at Cowdray, yet the Actor’s almost incessant requests strike a discordant or anxious note, requiring Gascoigne’s speaker to not only “recommaunde” the Venetians but also, as the speaker indicates,

Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske  87 And then this boone to crave, that under your protection They might be bolde to enter here, devoyde of all suspection, And so in friendly wyse for to concelebrate, This happie matche solemnized, according to your state. (71.331–34) ­ ­ ​­ The ritual function of solemnising and “concelebrating” the “happie match” seems oddly inflected by Gascoigne’s craving a “boone” or favour and “protection” for these Venetians who remain under some cloud of “suspection.” Although the fictional suspicion and otherness generated here evokes the masking tradition of the unknown and unexpected visitors, that tradition also accentuates Gascoigne’s metatheatrical fashioning of identity. Directing aural and visual attention to the “visitors,” the Actor states, They will not tarrie long, lo nowe I heare their drumme, Beholde, lo nowe I see them here in order howe they come, Receyve them well my lorde … (71.343–45) ­ ­ ​­ Repeatedly identified as Venetians or Italianated Englishmen in need of “protection” and as “Christian” victors over God’s scourge the Turk, these masked Montacute/Montague householders boldly project a Catholic identity of active political and religious engagement that, in Protestant England, would require, and did receive, the protection of Viscount Montague. Until about 1572 and, to a lesser extent, until his death in October 1592, in fact, Montague remained an “insider” serviceable to the Crown and, at the very least, remained able to protect an entourage of activist Catholic associates and family members hostile to the Crown.33 In addition to deploying silken Venetian costumes, Gascoigne uses the traditional “drumme” and choreographed entry procession to further underscore the “strangers’” Catholic pedigree. Announcing the maskers’ entry, the Actor indicates: They are Venetians, and though from Venice reft, They come in suche Venetian roabes as they on seas had left: And since they be your frends, and kinsmen too by blood, I trust your entertainment will be to them right good. They will not tarrie long, lo nowe I heare their drumme, Beholde, lo nowe I see them here in order howe they come… (71.339–44) ­ ­ ​­ Through the terms “maske” and “in order how they come,” as well as through the drum, torchbearers, and the formal introduction, these men engage the central masking practice of the processional entry dance.34 Recalling that, as Anne Daye indicates, “Tudor masques were processional in

88  Stephen Hamrick concept, with the marching entry as the defining feature,” readers recognise that Gascoigne refers to the processional entry when he writes “after the maske was done” (p. 346.1).35 Critics who fault the mask as incomplete, citing a lack of dancing, then, commit an error of category confusion, judging Devise of a Maske within the context of the Stuart masque and its extended choreography rather than recognising that the Tudor mask centralised the processional entry as dance, which we noted in Pounde’s oration for the Wriothesley-Browne ­ ​­ wedding. Significantly, by stressing that the visitors remain attired in “suche Venetian roabes as they on seas had left,” Gascoigne centralises and lauds their roles as victorious combatants from Lepanto and thus as members of the victorious but uneasy Catholic alliance or Holy League, which did not collapse until April 1573.36 Rather than remaining an anomaly in need of justification, the costumes serve as the primary conduit of Devise of a Maske’s political support for the Catholic victory.

Most Constantly and Christianly Avaunced the Catholyke Fayth Gascoigne’s celebration of the Catholic victory, in fact, further draws upon the Viscount Montague’s family honour and personal engagement with members of the Holy League, including the Papacy, the Venetians, and, most significantly, the Habsburgs under King Philip II. In addition to helping reconcile England to the papal See and serving as envoy to Venice in 1555, Montague received a seat on Catholic Queen Mary’s Privy Council as reward for organising county defenses during Philip’s war in France, serving also as lieutenant-general of English forces at St. Quentin, Picardy.37 Active in suppressing Protestantism during Mary’s reign, contemporaries praised the fact that Montague, “at all tymes, and against all the rablement of heretykes, sustained, and most constantly and Christianly avaunced the Catholyke fayth.” Elevated to the peerage in light of his staunch devotion to Catholicism, he served briefly as Philip’s master of the horse and as Elizabeth’s ambassador to Spain in 1560.38 Although Montague carried secret correspondence to Philip on that embassy, he also served as Elizabeth’s ambassador in 1560, he said, only because “he is accredited to” the King. The Spanish ambassador, Guzman de Silva, however, praised Montague as “a man who has acted  … the most honourably of any man of his quality in our time” and believed he would endeavour to restore Catholicism in England. Much as the mask Actor addressed Viscount Montague, the ambassador assured Phillip, “I know your Majesty will for this reason extend all considerations to him,” i.e., Montague.39 Montague’s favour with the Pope and King Philip, along with his fame as a defender of the Catholic faith, remained a part of family honour and thus family identity for generations.40 Gascoigne’s Devise of a Maske distinctly relies upon Montague’s Catholicism and Catholic identity to convey a message of political activism.

Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske  89 Gascoigne’s masking theme, the defeat of the Turk, in fact, echoes the Viscount’s stated politico-religious concerns. Much as Gascoigne dehumanises the Ottomans at Lepanto as antichrist, as the “Christian enmie,” surviving letters to his relative, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and Sir William More indicate that Montague happily reported on the (albeit temporary) Spanish victory over antichristian Ottoman forces prior to 1572.41 Casting the 1565 Ottoman attack on Fort St. Elmo in the providentialist discourse of the demonic “Turke,” Montague wrote to his Protestant neighbour, More, on 19 July, decrying “the fyve cruell assaultes sustayned by the Christians,” which he suggests, would have succeeded “if god had nott givin the victrye to the comf[o]rt of his  & the contrarary to his enemyes” (fol. 1).42 Extending this portrait, Montague carefully specifies that the “fierce Turk” attacked Fort St. Elmo “violently” and with “great slaughter” (ibid.) ­ However, as soon as the Ottoman forces took the fort “in the very instante the king of spayne his armye landid & without intermishun of tymes assaulted agayne  & recovered itt nott leavinge a Turke within itt alive” (ibid., ­ fol. 2). Perhaps hoping to garner his correspondent’s approval of such a draconian (or Catholic) victory, the viscount also assures the Protestant More that “the Regent & all the state came on thursday to the churche at Brussells” and, moreover, he “thanke[d] god” before sending the news to his neighbour (ibid.). ­ Providing further evidence of his guarded approval of Catholic victories over the “enemies of God,” less than a week later, on 29 July 1565, Montague also wrote Leicester about the victory. In this letter, the Viscount again communicates the positive response to the Catholic victory but elides his own feelings writing that “there was great joy at Brussels at the arrival of the news” and that “I write what I hear. The truth will appear afterwards.”43 Perhaps further distancing himself publically from such “great joy,” Montague strategically enclosed substantiating evidence in the form of a news sheet reporting the victory. Gascoigne’s thematic choice of the victory over the violent “Turk,” then, celebrates a form of international Catholic imperialism approved by and guardedly enunciated by Montague and, to some extent, embraced by the Crown.44

To See That Cruell Turke Gascoigne’s Devise carefully deploys the same discourse of the demonic “Turke” to characterise the Venetian Montagues and, by transitive implication, Gascoigne’s patron. Even as he recognises the moral ambiguity of war, Gascoigne dehumanises the Ottomans at Lepanto as antichrist.45 The text magnifies this characterisation by casting the Turk as a “tirant” (71.82) who “trusted power to[o] much” (71.185) and, after death, joined the “hellishe trayne” (71.144) “registered in Beelzebub his rolles” (71.230) because “it pleazed God to helpe his flocke” (71.210). Rehearsing his imprisonment by the Turks, the Actor trembled

90  Stephen Hamrick To heare those hellish fends in raging blasphemie Defye our only savioure, were this no miserie? To see the fowle abuse of boyes in tender yeares, The which I knowe must needes abhor all honest christians eares. (71.107–13) ­ ­ ​­ As the enemy of specifically “honest” Christians, Gascoigne’s 1572–73 Turk embodies each of the qualities of the antichrist represented in the discourse of the demonic “Turke” deployed by Montague in 1565. Through this trope, writers interchangeably fashion the Muslim as a “hellish fiend,” as a rebel to the “true faith,” and/or as a sodomite. Gascoigne deploys other common rhetoric to camouflage his activist message. Much as Montague stated that “if god had nott givin the victrye to the comf[o]rt of his,” Gascoigne also asserts that “Christe ­ gave his flocke the victorie” (p. 226). Writing to the Protestant More, Montague carefully used the term “Christians” and not “Catholics” and also used the binary term “enemyes” to describe the Ottomans. Gascoigne also deploys the term “enmie” and deploys the terms “Christian” or “Christians” 12 times in Devise of a Maske. Gascoigne also evokes a providentialist framework for the Catholic victory at Lepanto by referencing God’s essential aid at least 11 times. By contrast, in the 1576 Spoyle of Antwerpe, Gascoigne uses the term “Catholique” (2: 596) sarcastically to denigrate Spanish soldiers and, in the 1576 Steele Glas, he humanises the Turks by asserting that they “live in better wise / Than we” (2: 153); more of which to follow. Matthew Dimmock has established that, in the late 1560s and early 1570s, the rhetoric referencing religionists as “Christian,” rather than as “Catholique” or “Reformed,” fashioned a discourse of united Christendom crusading against “the Turk.” After 1566, however, Protestants would increasingly reject such a unifying conception of Christianity in order to define the Papacy and/or Catholicism, and not “the Turk,” as antichrist.46 Framed by consistent references to “Christian” identity and set within a providentialist context, Gascoigne’s portrait of foreign “Christians” and demonic Turks voices the same inclusive Catholic worldview publically evinced by Montague and largely rejected by the Elizabethan government. Such a coded separation from the Crown would, as scholars have demonstrated, be repeated within the entertainments provided to Elizabeth when she visited Montague at Cowdray in 1591.47 Although Gascoigne deploys inclusive rhetoric, the mask transcends such discursive camouflage to assert a more radical Catholic activism. Further participating in the expansive discourse that mythologised the battle of Lepanto as a victory of true, i.e., Catholic, Christendom, Gascoigne celebrates the “generall of Spayne,” half-brother to King Philip, and overall commander of the Holy League’s fleet, Don John of Austria, as well as “the good Venetian Generall,” Sebastiano Venier.48 The Actor / Montacute boy

Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske  91 gushes as, in Gascoigne’s version, the Christian leaders simultaneously rescue the boy and defeat the Ottomans: Oh howe I feele the bloud now tickle in my brest, To think what joy then pierst my heart, and how I thought me blest To see that cruell Turke whiche helde me as his slave By happie hande of Christians his payment thus to have: His head from shoulders cut, upon a pyke did stande, The which Don John of Austrye helde in his triumphant hand. (71.217–22) ­ ­ ​­ Very much as Viscount Montague fashioned news of the earlier 1565 Spanish victory over the Turks in excited terms, here the Montague boy thrills in recalling the decapitation of the Ottoman captain, which brings the ostensibly apocalyptic battle to a glorious conclusion and frees him from slavery.49 As political and dramatic synecdoche, the momentous defeat of the Turkish heretic and rescue of the English boy implies that the victory at Lepanto should symbolically liberate the whole of the English Montague family. Referencing an emblematic hat pin worn by the Montacutes, Gascoigne further signals the boy’s representativeness in the narrator’s claim that “this ­ Token they me gave, / And bad me lyke a Montacute my selfe alway behave” (71. 281– 82). In the world fashioned by the 1572 mask, to behave like “a Montacute” would mean to follow the successful example of the Holy League and attack the enemies of Catholicism. In returning the boy to England as an Italianated Montague sporting Venetian clothing and the emblematic “Token,” Gascoigne physically and symbolically connects the foreign and domestic kin, indicating earlier that “there is a noble house of the Montacutes in Italie” and that Montague “hath the inheritance of the sayde house” (71.0.18–21). Since those Italian kin defeated the Ottoman enemies of the Church, and, as Gascoigne writes, “since they be your frends, and kinsmen too by blood” (71.341), he should, in the logic of the text, defeat the enemies of the Church as well, making his blood “tickle” in his breast as the Montague boy’s had.

Let Him Play All for Me Gascoigne further fashions an alternative or activist Catholic identity for the Viscount by connecting the English Montagues to domestic Catholic activism. Devise of a Maske indicates that “after the maske was done, the Actor tooke master Tho. Bro. by the hand and brought him to the Venetians” (71.311). Although Gascoigne’s imprecise “after the maske” fails to convey the duration of the processional entry dance, and thus might include maskers dancing with the audience as Glynne Wickham concludes, here the poet limits the audience participation to Thomas.50 Nevertheless, by literally taking Thomas Browne from the audience and incorporating him into

92  Stephen Hamrick the Venetian group as the new truchman or mask narrator, the mask adapts the Tudor tradition of audience participation but, more significantly, materially enacts the symbolic union of domestic and international Catholicism represented thematically in the drama. Thomas Browne, Montague’s fifth son, performs a distinct but counterintuitive role in the mask.51 Explaining his choice of Thomas as unmasked participant, the boy states The viscount Mountacute, Hath many comely sequences, well sorted all in sute. But as I spied him first I could not let him passe, I tooke the card that likt me best, in order as it was. And here to you my lords, I do present the same, Make much of him, I pray you then, for he is of your name. For whome I dare advance, he may your tronchman be, Your herald and ambassadour, let him play all for me. ­ ­ ​­ (71.349–56) With the seemingly unnecessary statement that Thomas “is of your name,” Gascoigne’s narrator rhetorically defamiliarises the young Browne. In also indicating metaphorically that “I spied him first,” the text evokes the popular rhetoric of surveillance, which, as Robert Maslen has examined, Gascoigne and others used in the 1570s to fashion themselves as mysterious operatives and to advertise their potentially traitorous abilities within the world of international espionage.52 Gascoigne extends this rhetoric by informing readers that “then ­ the Venetians embraced and received the same master / Tho. Browne, and after they had a while whispered with him” (71. ­ ­ 357–58), he complimented the wedding party. When Vassiliki Markidou claims that the text “underlines the viscount’s triple role as ‘tronchman,’ ‘herald,’ and ‘ambassador’ and requests that Venetian Montagues ‘let [the Viscount] play all for me,’ ” he ignores the multiple references to “Tho.” or Thomas Browne as the metaphorical ambassador to the Venetian visitors.53 Nevertheless, other than the private “whispered” conference “with him,” Thomas and the “foreign visitors” largely maintain the silence common to Tudor courtly disguisings, adopting the traditional fiction, for the visitors, that “their englishe is but weake” (71.363).54 This whispered communication, moreover, recalls the furtive actions of Catholics involved in plotting the 1569 Northern Rebellion and the 1570 Ridolfi plot, which, as Michael Questier has demonstrated, included Montague’s son-in-law, the Earl of Southampton, and his second son, George Browne.55 When we recall that Tudor masking entertainments offer models for political behaviour, Gascoigne’s inclusion of Thomas Browne seems a counterintuitive choice. As the Viscount’s fifth son, Thomas would probably not have acted as the chief representative of the Montague household, explaining the family to outsiders as the analogical terms “ambassadour,” “herald,” and

Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske  93 “tronchman” indicate. Scanty records, however, provide some indication of Thomas’ political and/or thematic role in Devise of a Maske. Although Viscount Montague included his other sons and, significantly, his daughters in a property settlement of 1569 (before the Northern rebellion), he did not include Thomas. Such a decision might suggest some distance between Montague and his fifth son, which the mask seeks to bridge. If such a settlement was designed to protect the viscount’s property from Protestant reprisals after the (Catholic) Northern rebellion, the exclusion of Thomas might suggest the son’s complicity in the rebellion itself.56 Perhaps friendly with Thomas himself, Gascoigne entered into a bond in 1568 to pay one “Thomas Browne, citizen & writer of London” 100 marks, but this might not refer to Thomas Browne, son of the first Viscount Montague.57 Regardless of family politics or his own relationship with members of the Browne family, Gascoigne provides textual indications of what Thomas represents.58 Replicating the English boy’s impassioned reception by the Venetians (71.276–77), the victorious soldiers embrace Thomas and therein the mask suggests that, much as the son exchanges secret communications with victorious imperial Catholics, Montague should also engage in such conversations, as he had in the past. Thomas, however, delays such a ( potentially traitorous) discussion, proclaiming: “Lo now they take their leaves of you and of your dames, / Hereafter shal you see their face and know them by their names” (71.373–74). Here, Thomas sounds the formal recall and directs attention to the final processional dance common to Tudor masks. Thomas wishes the wedding couples a prosperous future, yet the courtly drama does not end with the communal dance as had the Montague-Southampton wedding mask of 1566. Rather, in postponing the revelation of the Venetians’ identity and the union of maskers with the wedding party, Gascoigne structurally maintains the license accorded maskers who, in being masked, are technically not themselves and thus not bound by conventional roles and social expectations. Moreover, Thomas Browne remains the only domestic member of the family to speak, suggesting his central importance to the event. Thomas, furthermore, evokes a tone that recalls Montague’s own international Catholic espionage when he conveys that the Venetians again “crave a boone, / That you will give them licence yet, to come and see you soone” (pp. 369–70). Coded dramatically as a craving, which would require both another “boone” and “licence,” such a request smacks of illicit activities best discussed in private. By delaying the unmasking, Gascoigne also deploys the “divided self” that Marie Axton identifies as constitutive of Elizabethan masks written in the first 20 years of the reign. Viscount Montague’s identity as a committed Catholic and accomplished ambassador and ally to Spain, Venice, and Rome finds expression in the masking celebration of the Holy League’s victory. Gascoigne also, to some degree, represents the publically conformist side of Browne’s complex identity by, at least in the published version of the mask, eliding the Viscount’s response to the victorious Venetian Catholics,

94  Stephen Hamrick as well as retaining their anonymity within the written text. The manipulation of common masking practices (the unmasking inverted here), then, serves both as a form of protective anonymity for activist members of the Montague affinity and as a model of covert Catholic activism increasingly engaged in Elizabethan England.59

King of England Within a Year Although the Elizabethan regime ostensibly celebrated the Catholic victory at Lepanto, it was widely believed that the victory would result in an invasion of Spanish forces released from the crusade against “the Turk.” In a letter to King Philip of 20 November 1571, for example, Guerau De Spes reports from London that “all people, and particularly the Catholics, show great delight at the signal victory which God has given to your Majesty.”60 Like Gascoigne, De Spes places the battle of Lepanto within a providential frame, marking a discernable difference between Catholic and Protestant celebrations of the victory. In a letter to Cecil of 7 December 1571, two months after the battle of Lepanto, the resourceful agent John Lee, perhaps more accurately, represents the Crown’s complex position ­vis-à-vis ­​­­ ​­ Lepanto and domestic Catholicism, reporting that Mr Harvey has brought news from Spain that greatly pleases our contraries, that they shall have sufficient aid ere long which may be better granted from the overthrow given the Turk by Don John of Austria, who they trust will be King of England within a year; and that his next enterprise will be to subdue the English Turks, which they say will be easy, understanding the great force he will bring with him, the great aid he will have with us, and the Scots ready to join him.61 In this report, the victorious Don John threatens to seize the English throne by force, notably aided by both Scottish Catholics and “the great aid he will have with us,” i.e., domestic Catholics like Montague, and, perhaps, serving as a kind of “forward unit,” the Venetian Montacutes secreted under the Viscount’s protection at Cowdray. Although Montague seems to have rejected Mary, Queen of Scotts, and her claim to the English throne, as well as the plots consistently surrounding her, his name appeared in at least two different lists of her supporters, suggesting, in part, the nature of the Catholic peer’s reputation as someone willing to fight the “English Turks” analogised in Lee’s letter. Montague’s recusant nephew, Nicholas Browne, and Sir William Dormer’s names also appear in one of the lists with the Viscount.62 With the defeat of the Turks at Lepanto, Lee informs, Catholic activist and English exile Sir Francis Englefield began to work publically for the restoration of English Catholicism, yet he had already worked in 1569–70 covertly to ensure that the Montague-Dormer wedding would come to fruition and thereby strengthen Catholic power in England. Englefield wrote

Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske  95 to Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria and half-sister of the Robert and Mary Dormer celebrated in Devise. Englefield asked the Duchess to convince her father Sir William Dormer that the marriage of his daughter, Mary, to Anthony Browne, Montague’s heir, would strengthen both the families and the Catholic cause, writing that “the marriage with Lord Montague would be the safety of both, and a pillar to the family that shall succeed in that realm.”63 Englefield also wished to ensure that the Dormer men remained Catholic.64 As Englefield’s letter to Jane Dormer also indicates, one Mr. Kinwelmarshe played a role in the marriage negotiations. If this named individual is one of the Kinwelmarshe brothers’ resident at Gray’s Inn with Gascoigne as Prouty suggests ( p. 33), then he potentially provides Gascoigne with an information source within the Montague-Dormer affinity aware of and/or involved in the plots surrounding Montague.65 Working to prevent such an insurrection, agent provocateur William Herle wrote to Cecil on 16 March 1573 of a report that one of Montague’s younger brothers would join in an expedition with the Spanish to topple the Protestant government.66 Three days before travelling to the Netherlands with Gascoigne, who describes the agent Herle as one of “my chiefe companions whome I held most deare” (1:359), Herle wrote of A new Conspiracye, that is intended by certain decayed men to go over into Spaigne,  & to joyne with Stukely in his practises for the invading of Ireland, & the subversion of this State, as far as in them lyes … They allso mene to bring in som more decayed gentilmen, & some other suche as they note ether discontented or addicted this waye, & among these they wold have yong Brown with them a base brother to the L. Montacute.67 Herle’s communiqué reiterates the threat created by the Catholic victory at Lepanto but, more significantly, identifies a group of “decayed men” who wish to join in an attack on the Elizabethan state, including one of the Viscount’s blood relations. Sir Anthony Browne, father of Viscount Montague, provided a life-time annuity of £10 “To base son Charles” in his will.68 As an illegitimate son of a great Catholic household with six other legitimate older brothers, Charles Browne could easily be identified as “yong ­ Brown.”69 In a 1594 Spanish analysis of the English exile community, moreover, an observer described Charles Browne and one Gabriel Denis “as Gentlemen very Catholic and affected to the service of his Majesty,” King Philip; Philip provided Charles and other exiles with small but infrequent pensions. Serving in exile as adviser to one of the Northern rebels, Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland, and hopeful of active service with the Spanish monarch, the reportedly pious Charles Browne also aptly fits the profile of a “decayed” man desirous of political and religious change in England. Browne was also connected to Charles Paget, a Catholic spy involved in the Babington plot to kill Queen Elizabeth.70

96  Stephen Hamrick

The Nobility of the Land is Kept Back Thomas Browne’s metaphoric call to action in Devise of a Maske should not surprise us for Viscount Montague also expressed the same attitudes as his illegitimate brother Charles reportedly held. According to Herle again, dissidents hoped “to se the Q. majestie he sayth destroyed with all the pack of suche villaynows Cowncelllors, as now governe” and, moreover, that they no longer wish to “serve in suche a state, where upstarts do command, & that the nobility of the land is kept back and contempned.” Montague had deployed the same rhetoric multiple times at the beginning of the reign, claiming in Parliament in 1563, for example, that good men should not suffer themselves to be led by such men that are full of affection and passions, and that look to wax so mighty, and of power, by the confiscation, spoil and ruin of the houses of noble and ancient men.71 Although Montague recognises the attack on entrenched Catholic political power in 1563, he nevertheless continued to enjoy some political agency in this period. In 1572, Montague’s potential political influence had declined, making it perhaps more likely that he would respond to Gascoigne’s metaphoric call to arms in Devise of a Maske. Anti-Catholic legislation in 1571 and his absence from the 1572 Parliament both testify to increased political tensions for the unapologetic Browne.72 Though it remains true that the intermarriage of influential Catholic families like the Dormers and Brownes “could be read by contemporaries as an aggressive assertion of their political and religious identity,” Gascoigne’s Devise of a Maske asserts a highly aggressive identity more akin to the Viscount’s activist entourage than his public conformity might suggest.73 Set within its immediate political context in this fashion, Gascoigne’s Devise of a Maske offers distinct support for an international activist Catholicism, rather than a pedantic and self-indulgent explanation of why the mask includes Venetian costumes or the more safe accommodation of remaining both Catholic and true to the Crown. Such sentiments would not fall on deaf ears, as, for example, Mary Dormer, one of the brides celebrated in Gascoigne’s mask, would remain a Catholic activist into old age.74

How Live the Mores Finally, in writing and publishing a distinctly pro-activist Catholic mask, as well as other texts markedly inflected by Catholicism, Gascoigne appears to ally himself with Catholic magnate Montague or activist Catholicism at a time of heightened anti- Catholic feeling throughout England. The early 1570s, in fact, represents a period in which many Elizabethans perceived Catholicism as an increasing threat. The Catholic Northern Rebellion of

Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske  97 1569, the papal excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570, and the 1571 Catholic Ridolfi plot engendered an environment in which “papist” Catholicism was viewed as a threat to Protestant England. The resulting anti- Catholic statutes passed by the 1571 parliament, the publication of the decidedly anti- Catholic Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571, and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Protestants in August 1572 contributed to the growing sense that Catholicism represented an immediate threat. In May 1572, immediately prior to the performance of the mask, reports circulated that the Spanish threatened to invade Ireland, creating a beachhead for the invasion of England. Elizabethans expected an imminent attack from domestic Catholics in the event of such a Spanish, and thus Habsburg, attack.75 It is in this decidedly anti- Catholic moment that Gascoigne chooses to publish the ­pro-Catholic ​­ Devise of a Maske and name himself the author in his ostensibly anonymous A Hundreth. Such an action seems to have achieved the desired patronage for Gascoigne received (but did not take) a seat controlled by Montague in the 1573 parliament.76 Devise of a Maske, however, is not the only of Gascoigne’s works to address domestic Catholicism. As Maslen has demonstrated, in fact, Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F. J. valorises the Catholic infiltration of Northern country houses and the practice of traditional religion, seemingly rewriting and rejecting the Elizabethan reformation. As I have suggested elsewhere, moreover, Petrarchan poetry in general and Dan Bartholmew of Bathe in particular, discursively circulate traditional Catholic practices without offering the Protestant criticism of a Barnabe Googe, a Roger Ascham, or a Philip Sidney.77 From this vantage point, a number of Gascoigne’s published texts included alongside Devise of a Maske in A Hundreth (a text connected to Viscount Montague, among others) maintain a Catholic valence and a Catholic worldview in the increasingly iconoclastic and anti-Catholic 1570s, which may serve as another one of his many personae. By 1576, Gascoigne had worked for Protestant patrons Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Crown spymaster Francis Walsingham, and Queen Elizabeth, and his use of “the Turke” in his patronage-seeking publications presage the Crown’s interest (starting in the late 1570s) in extending trade relations with the still-powerful Ottoman empire.78 Ever observant of his cultural moment, in 1576, Gascoigne fashions “the Turke” in light of his then current patrons’ relatively more positive assessment of Muslims. In the Steele Glas (1576), Gascoigne asks, How live the Mores, which spurne at glistering perle And score the costs, which we do hold so deare? How? how but wel? and weare the precious pearle Of peerlesse truth, amongst them published, (Which we enjoy, and never wey the worth.) They would not then, the same (like us) despise,

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Stephen Hamrick Which (though they lacke) they live in better wise Then we, which holde, the worthles pearle so deare.

(stanza 8)79

Gascoigne’s comparative rejection of English, Christian materialism (and its attendant “costs”) uses Islamic culture as a positive foil. For Gascoigne, the Moors reject Gospel “truth” only because they have not been exposed to the Christian texts. Nevertheless, he claims that “they live in better wise / Then” Christians live. This judgement of Islamic moral superiority in regard to “Avarice” (stanza 8; 153) brackets absolute religious differences to recognise a human and ethical strength within a culture normally objectified and thus dehumanised.80 Gascoigne’s parenthetical “like us” suspends judgement to position Islamic culture as an exemplum for his readers. Further distancing himself from the celebration of victorious Catholic imperialists, within the Spoyle of Antwerpe (1576) Gascoigne reverses and thereby undermines essentialist concepts of race or racial binaries, contrasting Spanish Catholics and, for Gascoigne, their “hipocriticall boasting of the catholique religion” with his English reader who possesses “a true Christian hearte” (2: 596). As these starkly different representations of Catholics and “Turkes” suggest, Gascoigne refines his portrait according to the needs of his patrons, yet here fashions a continuity between races, refusing to reaffirm racial binaries. Gascoigne’s later valorisation of “the Turke” allows us to better understand his Devise of a Maske within its specific cultural moment, outlining the pro-Catholic attitudes decidedly congruent with his patron Montague and the activist entourage surrounding the viscount. Such an initially successful strategy seems quite remarkable in the face of official and popular antagonism towards Catholicism, underlining not only Gascoigne’s adaptive facility but also, perhaps, his willingness to position himself as a sometime religious outsider in print. Although Gascoigne removed anti-Catholic sentiments from his work when he republished A Hundreth as The Posies (1575), he nevertheless thereafter pursued Protestant patrons. As with many other elements in Gascoigne’s life, his death in 1577 prevents us from assessing whether he would have pursued Catholic patronage again.

Notes 1 Prouty, pp. 57–58. 2 Pigman, p.  656. The battle of Lepanto occurred exactly six years before Gascoigne’s death on 7 October 1577. References to the Devise of a Maske, numbered 71 by Pigman, give his line. 3 Prouty, p.  176. See also, David Bergeron, “‘Are We Turned Turks?’: English Pageants and the Stuart Court,” Comparative Drama 44.3 (2010), p. 257. 4 Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Aldershot: Ashgate; 2002), pp. 158–68. 5 Gillian Austen, George Gascoigne, pp.  63– 65, provides the clearest overview of this masque. Michael Pincombe, “Two Elizabethan Masque- Orations by

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Thomas Pound,” Bodleian Library Record 12 (1987), p. 351, n. 1, indicates that Gascoigne’s Devise belongs “to a ‘recitative form of masque, in which a single lengthy speech is made by the ‘trucheman,’ or spokesman, on behalf of the disguised masquers, whose main function is to provide a gorgeous and exotic spectacle and to ‘masque,’ or dance, with the ladies after the speech is over” and also refers to this as a “‘processional’ masque.” Cunliffe, p. 173. Cunliffe, p. 25. Vassilki Markidou, “‘I goe outlandishe lyke, yet being English borne’: Catholic England, the Ottoman Empire, Venice and Fragile Identities in George Gascoigne’s A Devise of a Maske for the Right Honorable Viscount Montacute,” EIRC 37.2 (2011), pp.  86  & 91, unpersuasively asserts that the mask worked “to transform Montague’s Catholicism from a drawback into an asset and, thus, promote  … his patron to Elizabeth” and that the mask serves as “an attempt to include loyal Catholics ( like the Montagues)” in Elizabeth’s foreign policy initiatives. He does so because he wrongly identifies the politically more acceptable Viscount as the mask’s celebrated “ambassador” rather than the mask’s actual centerpiece, Thomas Brown, whose more radical associations make an assimilationist, a conformist, or a loyalist, reading of the text unconvincing. See, Alfred Kempe, The Loseley Manuscripts (London: John Murray, 1836), pp.  69–70, and Frank Fowell and Frank Palmer, Censorship in England (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972), p. 6. Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs: Preserved Principally in the Archives of Simancas, ed. Martin Hume (4 vols, London: HMSO, 1892–99), vol. 1, p. 404. CSP Simancas, ibid. CSP Simancas, ibid. On the 1565 celebrations, see Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 49. On Pounde, see Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 64. Pincombe, “Two Elizabethan,” p. 350. MS. Rawlinson Poet, 108, Oxford, Bodleian Library, f. 23v. The text has been transcribed in Pincombe, “Two Elizabethan,” pp. 355–65. “Juno Versus Diana: The Treatment of Elizabeth I’s Marriage in Plays and Entertainments, 1561–1581,” The Historical Journal 38.2 (1995): p. 265. On Elizabeth and marriage in the first part of the reign, see also Judith Richards, Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 58–65. Doran, “Juno Versus Diana,” pp. 264– 65; Doran does not address the MontagueSouthampton maske. On his diplomatic service, see Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 129ff. Pigman, p.  657. For analysis of Gascoigne’s pursuit of patronage, see Gabriel Heaton, Writing and Reading Royal Entertainments: From George Gascoigne to Ben Jonson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp.  17– 48; Stephen Hamrick, The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, 1558–1582 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp.  71–149; and Hamrick, “‘Set in Portraiture’: George Gascoigne, Queen Elizabeth, and Adapting the Royal Image,” Early Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (2005): pp. 1–30. For this statute, see William Douthwaite, Gray’s Inn: Its History and Associations (London: Reeves and Turner, 1886), p. 34. On Gascoigne’s residence at Gray’s, see Prouty, Elizabethan Courtier, p.  32, n. 26; Prouty refers to BL MS 1912, f. 238v, which also has the 1563 order that ancients serve at vacations. Basil Brown, Law Sports at Gray’s Inn with a Reprint

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of the Gesta Grayorum ( New York: privately printed, 1921), pp. xxiii–xxiv, 93, provides an overview of the duties of the ancient. On “portpulia” as Gray’s Inn, see Pincombe, “Two Elizabethan,” p. 352. See Allyna E. Ward, “‘If the Head Be Evil the Body Cannot Be Good’: Legitimate Rebellion in Gascoigne and Kinwelmershe’s Jocasta,” Early Modern Literary Studies 14.1/Sp ecial Issue 18 (May, 2008): pp.  31–33 and Ward, Women in Tudor Tragedy: Feminizing Counsel and Representing Gender (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), pp. 51–74. On the single drum as sufficient in period masks, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, pp. 92 and 95. Scholars have simply assumed that Gascoigne’s paratext should be read prima facia; I suggest this represents one more example of his misdirection. For this assumption, see Prouty, p. 124, and Marion Trousdale, “Shakespeare’s Oral Text,” Renaissance Drama 12 (1981): p. 96. For an accurate reconstruction, see Pigman, p. 657. On the script, the popularity of foreign disguises, and the focus on identity, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, pp. 159, 138, and 168, respectively. See also, John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), pp. 246– 47. Otto Gombosi provides an overview of the phases in “Some Musical Aspects of the English Court Masque,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 1.3 (1948): p. 7. On the overlap in courtly forms and the contemporary disregard for clear boundaries between forms, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 102. Marie Axton, “The Tudor Mask and Elizabethan Court Drama,” English Drama: Forms and Development, eds. Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 24– 47. On the courtly mask in the Tudor period, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, chapter seven. On the Burgundian tradition of the masque, see Gordon Kipling, The Triumph of Honor: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1977). Anne Geoffroy, “L’invention de Venise: A Devise of a Maske for the right Honourable Viscount Montacute (1572) de George Gascoigne,” Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 28 (2011): pp.  118–19, seems to suggest that, at the time of the mask, the audience wished to maintain loyalty both to Catholicism and the English Crown, which they would later reject. La double allégeance des destinataires (à la couronne et à la religion catholique). Il convient toutefois de souligner la nature éphémère de la rhétorique élogieuse déployée à l’endroit de Venise par Gascoigne. Le désir d’incorporation qui se manifeste avec force dans le masque cèdera à la logique de l’aliénation dans la prose fictionnelle anglaise de la décennie suivante.

29 Austen, George Gascoigne, pp.  85– 89, reviews scholarship on Gascoigne’s duplicitous, strategic poses. 30 Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, pp. 158–59, write that the fictional scenario implicit in the courtly mumming – the household feast interrupted by a formal visitation from beings from another world  – was adopted as a matrix for a range of entertainments. Some of the other elements may disappear: the game of chance may vanish, the masking may be replaced by more general disguising, even the silence may be broken by song. Most curiously, it can even acquire a script. 31 On the unexpected stranger in masking traditions, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, pp. 153, 157, and 166.

Gascoigne’s Catholic Maske 101 32 Albert Feuillerat, ed., Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (London: David Nutt, 1908), p. 410, provides this quote from the “Complaint of Thomas gylles gainst the Yeoman of the Revels.” On Giles, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 321. Prouty, Elizabethan Courtier, p. 173, argues that these gold gowns were used for a different entertainment. 33 On Montague’s “insider” status, see Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 124–29; the quote is from page 129. Markidou, “‘I goe outlandishe,’” pp. 82– 84, reviews Montague’s conformist Catholicism. 34 On dancing as central to the mask, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, pp. 133–43. 35 Daye, “Torchbearers in the English Masque,” Early Music 26.2 (1998): p. 246. See also, Enid Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship Between Poetry & the Revels ( New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), pp. 3 and 166. 36 On the importance of procession, order, and hierarchy in Elizabethan society, see Mary Hazard, Elizabethan Silent Language (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 144, 163, and 208. On the unmasked participants, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 13. On the troubled and eventual collapse of the Holy League, see Niccolo Capponi, Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2008), pp. 153–78 and Angus Konstam, Lepanto 1571: The Greatest Naval Battle of the Renaissance (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003), p.  90. For a sober analysis of the “inconsequential” nature of the Battle of Lepanto, see Molly Greene, “The Ottomans in the Mediterranean,” The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, eds. Virginian Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 110–11 and 104–16. 37 Glyn Redworth, “‘Matters Impertinent to Women’: Male and Female Monarchy Under Philip and Mary,” The English Historical Review 112.447 (1997): p. 612. On Montague, see also Loseley 6729/8/1. 38 Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 131, Surrey People: Sir Anthony Browne and Sir Anthony Browne, First Viscount Montague ( Woking: Send & Ripley History Society, 1982); Sibbald Scott, “Cowdray House, and Its Possessors,” Sussex Archaeological Collections 12 (1851): pp. 176–89; Roger Manning, Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), and The Complete Peerage, or, A History of the House of Lords and All Its Members from the Earliest Times, eds. H. Doubleday and Howard De Walden (14 vols; London: St. Catherine Press, 1936), vol. 9, pp. 97–100. 39 Calendar of State Papers, Simancas, vol. 1, pp. 121 & 124. 40 See Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 113–15. 41 Loseley Manuscripts, Surrey History Centre, 6729/8/26, 6729/8/16. On Montague’s glee at Spanish defeat of Turks in 1562, see, Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 141. 42 Loseley MS, 6729/8/26. On the dominant trope of the “demonic and alien ‘turke,’” see Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 149. 43 E. Purnell, ed., Report on the Pepys Manuscripts Preserved at Magdalene College, Cambridge (London: HMC, 1911), p. 64. 44 Markidou, “‘I goe outlandishe,’” pp. 86–87 & 89–90, examines Elizabeth’s attitude towards the victory and Venice. 45 On such ambivalence in Gascoigne’s work, see Elizabeth Heale, “The Fruits of War: The Voice of the Soldier in Gascoigne, Rich, and Churchyard,” Early Modern Literary Studies 14.1/Special Issue 18 (2008). On Gascoigne’s ability to both embody “the stock opposition between demonic infidels and true Christians” and his ability to “challenge this binary oposition,” see Markidou, “‘I goe outlandishe,’” pp. 84–85.

102 Stephen Hamrick 46 Dimmock, New Turkes, pp. 72–77. 47 On such distance in the 1591 entertainments, see Questier, Catholicism and Community, p.  174, and Elizabeth Heale, “Contesting Terms: Loyal Catholicism and Lord Montague’s Entertainment at Cowdray, 1591,” The Progresses, Pageants, & Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I,” eds. Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 189–206. 48 For a brief review of the scholarship on the Battle of Lepanto, see Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects Between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), p.  20. On this discourse and the makeup of forces, see Hugh Bicheno, Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto 1571 (London: Cassell, 2003), pp. 139–54. See also, Andrew Hess, “The Battle of Lepanto and Its Place in Mediterranean History,” Past and Present 57. 1, (1972), 53–73. On the battle, see also Konstam, Lepanto 1571. 49 Although the text misidentifies the beheaded captain, I agree with Pigman, p. 660, that Gascoigne refers to the Turkish admiral in these lines. 50 Gombosi, “Some Musical Aspects,” pp.  7–8. Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300–1660 (4 vols, London: Routledge  & Kegan Paul, 1981), Vol. 3, p. 279, also assumes that Gascoigne’s introduction serves as a factual record. 51 Thomas Browne could not have been born before 1555. Montague’s first wife, Jane, died 1552 and his second wife, Magdalene, had two boys, George and Henry, before Thomas. 52 Robert Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 53 Markidou, “‘I goe outlandishe,’” p.  91. In fact, the text reads “Tho. Browne, after they had a while whispered with him,/ he tourned to the Bridegrooms and Brides, saying thus,/Brother, these noble men to you now have me sent,/As for their tronchman to expound the effect of their intent” (71.358– 61). 54 On the silence and the need for the presenter or interpreter, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 161. 55 Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 88, 146, & 181ff. At page 190, he writes “though he may not actively have endorsed and encouraged his more daring and radical relatives … [he] was, even if indirectly, affording them a measure of protection.” In Devise, Gascoigne also uses whisper at 1:79, see also 2:157, 2:239, 2:427–28. 56 The settlement, Loseley Manuscripts, Surrey History Centre, SAS BA/67, in part, reads in consideration of love and affection to the said Anthony Browne and Henry Browne, esq. another of the Viscount’s sons, and to William Browne, esq., brother of the said Viscount, and to Henry Browne senr., brother of the said Viscount, and to Francis Browne, another brother of the said Viscount, and to Mary, Countess of Southampton, Elizabeth Browne, Mabell Browne, and Jane Browne, daughters of the said Viscount. See also, Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 145, n. 141. 57 On the 1568 payment, see Prouty, p.  313. In 1558, Viscount Montague appointed one Thomas Browne as rector at St James the Great, Ewhurst Green, East Sussex; however, Browne died in 1559. On Browne’s death, see Calendar of Institutions by the Chapter of Canterbury sede vacante, eds. C. Woodruff and I. Churchill (Canterbury: Cathedral Records Branch, 1924), p. 45. For a brief discussion of Thomas Browne, rector of Ewhurst, see Alan Bowden, “Two Patrons and the Living of Ewhurst,” Parish News (Parish of Ewhurst, Sussex: August

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63 64 65 66 67

68 69

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2006), p. 22. I want to thank Karen Wake, Ewhurst Parish Clerk, for providing me with the article. I also wish to thank former Parish Clerk Alan Bowden for his suggestions concerning rector Thomas Browne and Michael Questier for his assistance in attempting to track Thomas Browne. For analysis of Gascoigne’s skill with reshaping conventions to his needs, see Megan Heffernan, “Gathered by Invention: Additive Forms and Inference in Gascoigne’s Poesy,” Modern Language Quarterly 76.4 (2015), 413–45. On license and protective anonymity of masking, see Twycross and Carpenter, Masks and Masking, p. 10. Calendar of State Papers, Simancas, vol. 2, p. 350. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, and James I, 1547–1625 (12 vols, London: HMSO, 1856–72), vol. 7, pp. 372–73. For a brief discussion of this letter and some of its implications, see Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes, pp. 83–84. On Montague and Mary, see Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 145. For the 1571 list, see Alexander Labanoff, ed., Letteres, Instructions, et Memoires de Marie Stuart (7 vols, London: Charles Dolman, 1844), vol. 2, p. 252. For the 1574 list, see John Wainewright, “Two Lists of Supposed Adherents to Mary, Queen of Scots,” Miscellanea 8 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1913), pp. 89, 95, and 133. State Papers, Domestic, vol. 7, p. 285. Prouty, Elizabethan Courtier, p. 57, briefly notes the interactions amongst Englefield, the Dormers, and the Montagues, without coming to a conclusion. See also, Pigman, p. 657. On Herle, see P. Hasler, The House of Commons, 1558–1603 (3 vols, London: HMSO, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 302–04. BL MS Lansdowne 16 f. 102r–103v, transcribed in Letters of William Herle Project (Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, 2006), www.livesandletters.ac.uk. Herle’s letter can also be found in Thomas Wright, ed., Queen Elizabeth and Her Times: A Series of Original Letters (2 vols, London: Henry Colburn, 1838), pp.  472–73. Juan Tazon, The Life and Times of Thomas Stukeley (c.1525–78) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 167, suggests that this invasion rumour might simply be a legend, but does not mention Browne. On rumours of Stukeley’s invasion of Ireland, see Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honorable Marquis of Salisbury (24 vols, London: HMSO, 1883–1976), 9.1, p. 539. West Sussex Record Office, SAS/BA 19. Neither Charles’ nor Thomas’ name appears in a counterpart settlement, SASBA/41, enacted by Montague in Nov. 1569. For a list of Sir Anthony Montague’s legitimate children, see Julia Roundell, Cowdray: The History of a Great English House (London: Bickers and Son, 1884), p. 21. Thomas Knox, The First and Second Diaries of the English College Douay (London: David Nutt, 1878), p.  403, reads “Hay tambien Ricardo Hopequins, hombre de grande fidelidad y zelo en las cosas del servicio de Dios y del rey. Hay Gabriel Denis y Carlos Broune, caballeros muy catolycos y afectos al servico de su Magestad.” I want to thank my daughter, Elisabet Samonides-Hamrick, for her help with translating this passage. On Neville and Browne, see Anthony Petti, The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegen (London: R.H. Johns, 1959), pp.  220–21. On Paget, see John Pollen, Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1922). Questier, Catholicism and Community, pp. 122 and 139. Gerald Bowler, “‘An Axe or an Act’: The Parliament of 1572 and Resistance Theory in Early Elizabethan England,” Canadian Journal of History 19 (1984): pp. 349– 60. On Montague’s increasing marginalisation after 1570, see Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 149ff., and Curtis Breight, “Caressing the Great:

104 Stephen Hamrick

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

Viscount Montague’s Entertainment of Elizabeth at Cowdray, 1591,” Sussex Archaeological Collections 127 (1989), pp.  149–50, who also establishes that the entertainment failed to offer complete subjection but, rather, an assertion of honor and the “right to bear arms.” Questier, Catholicism and Community, p. 92. Ibid., p. 75. Hans Hamilton, ed., Calendar of the State Papers relating to Ireland, of the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth (11 vols, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1860–1912), vol. 1, p. 472. Austen, George Gascoigne, 65, reviews the purported contretemps surrounding Gascoigne’s seat in Parliament. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions, chapter three. On Gascoigne, Googe, and Ascham, see Hamrick, The Catholic Imaginary. On these changing attitudes towards “the Turke,” see Markidou, “‘I goe outlandishe,’” Dimmock, New Turkes, p. 88 and Daniel Vitkus, English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave, 2003), p. 26. Cunliffe, p. 153. On this discourse, see Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 12–16, and Brandon Beck, From the Rising of the Sun: English Images of the Ottoman Empire to 1715 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 36–46.

Gascoigne and Poetry

‘To leave remembrance of my name’: Gascoigne’s problematical legacy to Spenser1 Elizabeth Heale What, if anything, was Gascoigne’s poetic legacy to the aspiring young poet of The Shepheardes Calendar? In considering this question I shall not primarily be concerned with identifying possible sources or borrowings, though I will suggest some in passing. Rather, I shall suggest that some of Gascoigne’s printed volumes, especially A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), ­ Posies (1575), ­ The Princely Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle (1576) ­ and The Steele Glas (1576) not only provided Spenser with models and ideas about verse which he found sympathetic but that they may also have served as warnings about the dangers of writing and printing verse in the 1570s and of an inauspicious poetic career. Hints of Spenser’s close engagement with Gascoigne’s work and self-presentation are particularly evident in the fanfare work of the ‘new poet’ in The Shepheardes Calender, printed just three years after The Steele Glas and two years after Gascoigne’s death, but a rueful echo of that work and its themes may also find expression at the very end of that new poet’s most ambitious poem. There is only one explicit reference to Gascoigne in Spenser’s work, in a gloss by E.K. on Philomele, the nightingale, in the November eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender: Philomele) the Nightingale. […] whose complaintes be very well set forth of Ma. George Gaskin a wittie gentleman, and the very chefe of our late rymers, who and if some partes of learning wanted not (albee it is well knowen he altogyther wanted not learning) no doubt would haue attayned to the excellencye of those famous Poets. For gifts of wit and naturall promptnesse appeare in hym aboundantly.2 One commentator notes rather condescendingly: ‘Even Gascoigne, a journeyman of the past decade who might be expected to provoke his disdain, is treated with deference’.3 The comment reflects Spenser’s own selfpresentation as a ‘new’ sort of poet, aspiring to Classical and European levels of learning and ambition, as well as twentieth- c entury critical categorisation of The Shepheardes Calender as a work that marks a clear division between the ‘drab’ early-Elizabethan poets and the ‘golden’ poetry of the

DOI: 10.4324/­­­9781003112082-​­​­10

108  Elizabeth Heale late Elizabethans.4 I believe that The Shepheardes Calender is much better understood in the context of earlier Elizabethan poets than in that of the ‘golden’ and courtly poetry of a Sidney, a Dyer, a Daniel, or a Ralegh. Far from registering surprise at Spenser’s ‘deference’ to ‘a journeyman of the past decade’, we may find in Spenser’s acknowledgement of his predecessor, evidence of the later poet’s need to acknowledge his debts to an influential model, as well as his need to signal difference. It is no coincidence that this acknowledgement comes in a gloss on Philomele, a familiar figure for the poet in Renaissance literature.5

‘Concerning the making of verse or rhyme in English’ Spenser certainly knew Gascoigne’s printed work and may conceivably have met him. Spenser’s friend, Gabriel Harvey, whose crucial role in the production of The Shepheardes Calender has been elaborated by Richard McCabe, does seem to have known Gascoigne personally.6 Harvey contributed a prefatory poem to Posies, wrote some elegiac poems on Gascoigne’s death, and annotated his own personal copies of Posies and The Steele Glas.7 In particular, Harvey added copious marginal notes to Gascoigne’s treatise ‘Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English’, printed in Posies. Many of the notes seem to have been added much later, after the publication of The Faerie Queene, but his annotated copy of Posies (bound with The Steele Glas) is dated by him 1577, at a time when he and Spenser must have been discussing ideas about English verse and its composition.8 At least one of the notes, albeit written later, claims Harvey discussed some points from Gascoigne’s treatise with Spenser.9 There are a number of suggestive parallels between The Shepheardes Calender and some of Gascoigne’s work. Gillian Austen has plausibly suggested that the very form of Spenser’s first publication may owe a debt to Gascoigne’s A Hundreth.10 Spenser’s volume, published anonymously, is accompanied by an extensive commentary and annotations by someone identified only by the initials E.K. E.K. provides a lengthy prefatory epistle that sets out a kind of poetic manifesto for the ‘new poet’ and he also provides notes to each of the eclogues. It is not known who, if anyone other than Spenser, E.K. may be, although it seems probable that Gabriel Harvey had some hand in the editorial material.11 Spenser and Harvey may well have been influenced by Gascoigne’s packaging of A Hundreth with its prefatory epistle by H.W. and its notes, some of them commenting, albeit tongue-in- cheek, on poetic genres and styles and sources, by G.T. Not only does The Shepheardes Calender, like A Hundreth, come with the paraphernalia of an introduction and glosses, it also uses masks to mediate its authorial voice and hints at events and identities, some of them perhaps dangerously political, hidden within its fictions.12 Like A Hundreth, it exploits, in Austen’s words, a ‘wilful blending of fiction and reality’.13

Gascoigne and Spenser  109 The Shepheardes Calender also follows A Hundreth in being designed to showcase the poetic skill and range of its author. Gascoigne’s A Hundreth and Posies display a wide variety of forms and metres. In the epistle to ‘the reverende Divines’ prefaced to Posies, Gascoigne says the volume was compiled to publish some pledge or token of those giftes wherwith it hath pleased the Almightie to endue me: To the ende that thereby the vertuous might bee incouraged to employ my penne in some exercise which might tende both to my preferment, and to the profite of my Countrey (p. 361) ­­ The Shepheardes Calender, with its 12 eclogues, is similarly designed, at least in part, to display the skills of its author through a dazzling variety of, often innovative, verse forms and genres. Spenser’s volume, like Gascoigne’s, functions to advertise its author’s abilities to the world, with a particular eye to such patrons as the Earl of Leicester, with whom Spenser had gained employment by the time the volume was published, and Philip Sidney, to whom the work is dedicated. Spenser may also have found aspects of Gascoigne’s reflections on poetry and the craft of verse sympathetic. Certayne Notes of Instruction, printed in Posies, is in fact the first treatise on vernacular English verse before The Shepheardes Calender. Even in the prefatory epistles to Posies, taken up as they are largely with attempts to defend or excuse Gascoigne in response to censure of A Hundreth, there is some defence of poetry, some discussion of style, and an ironic passage on how to read poetry (that is, with an awareness of its fictive and metaphorical nature). E.K.’s prefatory Epistle to The Shepheardes Calender is a much more ambitious discussion of verse, a manifesto for the ‘new poet’. Two of its views about the writing of English verse particularly echo those of Gascoigne. The first is Gascoigne’s emphasis in Certayne Notes on the use of ‘auncient English wordes’ ( p. 457). There he urges poets to use single-syllable words because they are usually old English words and by using them ‘the truer Englishman you shall seeme, and the lesse you shall smell of the Inkehorne’ ( p. 458). Austen considers Gascoigne’s advice here to be playfully ironic, but I am not so sure.14 Gascoigne expands on the use of old English words in his epistle ‘to the reverende Divines’ prefacing Posies: ‘I have more faulted in keeping the olde English wordes (quamvis iam obsoleta) than in borowing of other languages, such Epithetes and Adjectives as smell of the Inkhorne’ ( pp. 360– 61). Even while advocating the use of plain English, Gascoigne demonstrates with his Latin tag that for him this is a learned choice. Nevertheless, Gabriel Harvey, in his manuscript annotations to Certayne Notes, dismisses this idea: ‘non placet. A greater grace, and Majesty in longer wordes, so they be current Inglish. Monsyllables ar good to make upp a hobling and hudling verse. Sir Philip Sidney and M. Spenser of mie opinion’.15 This note must have been written

110  Elizabeth Heale after 1583 when Sidney was knighted, but it does suggest that at some stage, possibly before The Shepheardes Calendar was written, Harvey and Spenser discussed Gascoigne’s ideas about English verse. Perhaps just such a discussion as those evoked in the Harvey/Spenser exchange of letters, dated to 1579 before the publication of The Shepheardes Calender.16 While Harvey in the marginalia to Certayne Notes records that Spenser agreed with him in disapproving of single-syllable words, he notes elsewhere in his annotations that Spenser had revived just such old English words as Gascoigne recommends should be used for effect.17 The use of old and obsolete English words is one of the defining characteristics of The Shepheardes Calender, and E.K., unsurprisingly, spends a lot of time justifying the practice in terms that are very close to Gascoigne’s: It is one special prayse, of many whych are dew to this Poete, that he hath laboured to restore, as to theyr rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as haue ben long time out of vse and almost cleare disherited. Which is the onely cause, that our Mother tonge, which truely of it self is both ful enough for prose and stately enough for verse, hath long time ben counted most bare and barrein of both. which default when as some endeuoured to salue and recure, they patched vp the holes with peces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the french, there of the Italian, euery where of the Latine […] So now they haue made our English tongue, a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speches’. (p. 27; Epistle ll. 77–91) ­­ ­ ​­ John King has suggested a reverence for Chaucer and middle English was characteristic of a number of scholars at Cambridge in the middle years of the sixteenth century, both as a language for poetry and for its associations with a supposed anti-Catholic reformist poetics.18 Gascoigne claimed to have studied at Cambridge, and Spenser had studied at Pembroke where Harvey was still a Fellow. The Cambridge connection may well have encouraged in both Gascoigne and Spenser a particular interest in the poetry of Chaucer and in the use of middle-English words in their own verse. Interestingly, The Steele Glas and The Complaynt of Phylomene, alluded to by E.K. in his praise of Gascoigne, both use distinctively medieval genres (the dream vision and estates satire). A second parallel between Gascoigne’s and E.K.’s writings about verse is their shared dislike of superficial rhetorical decoration, epitomised for both of them by what they both call ‘hunting the letter’. Both adversely compare such superficial decorative effects to what Gascoigne terms the ‘grounde’ of ‘good and fine invention’ ( p. 454). Gascoigne advises the aspiring poet not to ‘thunder ­ in Rym, Ram, Ruff, by letter’, but to ‘stand most upon the excellencie of your Invention […] that beyng founde, pleasant woordes will follow well inough and fast inough’ ( pp.  454–55). E.K./Spenser’s irritation with poetry

Gascoigne and Spenser  111 written for superficial effect rather than that which the Epistle describes as ‘well grounded, finely framed, and strongly trussed vp together’ is similarly expressed in terms of a comic attack on excessive alliteration: ‘I scorne and spue out the rakehellye route of our ragged rymers (for so themselues vse to hunt the letter) which without learning boste, without iudgement iangle, without reason rage and fome’ ( p. 28). For both Gascoigne and Spenser, it is what Sidney calls the ‘fore- conceit’, the idea that gives coherence and distinctiveness to the composition, that is the mark of the good poem, not the decorative effects of new-fangled words or excessive alliteration. Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes and E.K./Spenser’s prefatory Epistle are designed to educate their readers to understand and appreciate new poetic ambitions. The Shepheardes Calender, according to E.K., uses a language that is designed to be ‘round without roughnesse, and learned wythout hardnes, such indeede as may be perceiued of the leaste, vnderstoode of the moste, but iudged onely of the learned’ ( p. 28). Gascoigne’s advice is remarkably similar: frame your stile to perspicuity and to be sensible: for the haughty obscure verse doth not much delight, and the verse that is to easie is like a tale of a rosted horse; but let your Poeme be such as may both delight and draw attentive readyng, and therewithal may deliver such matter as be worth the marking. (p. 459) ­­ Earlier, in the Epistle ‘To al yong Gentlemen’ prefacing Posies, Gascoigne had expressed his exasperation with ignorant readers ‘who (having no skill at all) […] understande neyther the meaning of the Authour, nor the sense of figurative speeches’ and thus judge the poetry falsely ( p. 365). Spenser would thus have found a number of Gascoigne’s ideas thoroughly sympathetic and would at least have found encouragement in the older poet’s views about the writing of vernacular verse. Nevertheless, E.K. criticises Gascoigne for lack of learning and seriousness: ‘Ma. George Gaskin [is] a wittie gentleman’ but lacks ‘some partes of learning’ ( p. 146). Gascoigne in ­ Certayne Notes recommended that invention be grounded in ‘aliquid salis’ ( p.  454), but Spenser may well have considered, like the reverend divines, that Gascoigne’s salt in A Hundreth and Posies was too salty. More to his taste would have been The Steele Glas, with its creative use of medieval genres, its innovative use of blank verse, and its ambitious claim, in a prefatory poem, to ‘seeke, by science to assault’ the ‘fort of fame’ and ‘so to leave, remembrance of my name’.19

Philomene I want to suggest, however, that Gascoigne’s significance for Spenser is more than a matter of shared poetic ideas and some specific borrowings.20 Rather,

112  Elizabeth Heale that Gascoigne’s career, or at least Gascoigne’s own representation of his career, may have served as a disturbing warning to Spenser about the dangers of writing verse in the last few decades of the sixteenth century. Where Syrithe Pugh finds in the Spenser of The Shepheardes Calender ‘a supreme confidence in the invulnerability of his own immortal fame’, I detect in ‘the new poet’, seen through the lens of Gascoigne’s Philomene with her tongue cut out, a more anxious and troubled figure.21 In The Steele Glas, Gascoigne allegorises the fable of Philomene as a cautionary tale about the writing of verse in the 1570s. Philomene, in her new ­ guise as Satyra, tells how her sister, ‘pleasant Poesys’, is seduced and carried to court by ‘vayne Delight’.22 The aristocratic ‘vayne Delight’ then turns his attention to Philomene (Satyra) who, unwilling to give in to his seductions, has her tongue cut out ‘with Raysor of Restraynte’. Spenser would certainly have found much to interest him in this tale. It is worth remembering that during the printing of The Shepheardes Calender, its printer Hugh Singleton was tried, with Philip Stubbes, for publishing the latter’s The Gaping Gulfe. Both were condemned to have their right hands cut off, although it is thought Singleton escaped the penalty. The Gaping Gulfe was condemned for openly attacking the proposed marriage between the Queen and the French Catholic Duc d’Anjou, a position which Spenser also seems to have supported, although far more obliquely, in The Shepheardes Calender, as will be discussed below. Political censorship and condemnation may, however, have been only one of the anxieties besetting the strategically anonymous poet of The Shepheardes Calender. Gascoigne’s career suggested that publishing amorous poetry might also be a problematical undertaking for an ambitious Protestant poet in the 1570s. As is well known, A Hundreth, once printed, attracted criticism of some kind; precisely what is unclear as the Stationers’ Company records are lost for the relevant period. Susan Clegg in her study of press censorship in the period suggests that A Hundreth was probably censured rather than censored and Austen is inclined to agree with this view.23 We know that some sort of fuss was made because Gascoigne refers to it in 1575, when he reissued a ‘gelded’ version of A Hundreth as The Posies. In the first of the prefatory letters to Posies, Gascoigne addresses the ‘reverende Divines’, members of the Court of High Commission, responsible for press censorship. In that letter, he acknowledges that A Hundreth had attracted disapproval ‘for sundrie wanton speeches and lascivious phrases’ and ‘that the same have beene doubtfully construed, and (therefore) scandalous’ ( p. 359). Gascoigne claims that he is concerned that Posies, in spite of changes and rearrangements, would suffer the same official disapproval as A Hundreth since ‘youre gravitie [reverende divines] hathe thought requysite that all ydle Bookes or wanton Pamphlettes shoulde bee forbidden’ ( p. 360). He seems to have been right. In August 1576, 50 copies of Posies were returned to Stationers’ Hall ‘by appointment of the Q.M. commissioners’.24 Clearly, the Posies, at least, was censored.

Gascoigne and Spenser  113 Gascoigne’s experience with A Hundreth and Posies is a striking, if less physically violent instance than Stubbes’, of a writer falling foul of censure and censors. While hints of court scandal may contribute to the offence caused, there is abundant evidence in the 1560s and 1570s of a chorus of official hostility to the degenerate effects of vernacular verse, especially that dealing at all sympathetically with themes of love. Such verse was repeatedly considered to be immoral, lascivious and both the product of, and conducive to, idleness. Gascoigne identifies ‘my doings at the common infection of love’ as the reason for the reverend divines’ disapproval of his verse ( p. 366). Richard Tottel’s Songs and Sonettes, that popular printed anthology of early Tudor verse, often seen as providing a significant example for later Elizabethan courtly poets, was a particular focus for disapproval. John Hall rewrote some of the Tottel poems, particularly Wyatt’s, in The Court of Virtue (1565). In a poem prefacing Hall’s rewritings, the lady Virtue warns him: Suche as in carnall loue reioyce, Trim songes of loue they wyll compile, And synfully with tune and voyce They syng their songes in pleasant stile, To Venus that same strumpet vyle: And make of hir a goddess dere, In lecherie that had no pere.25 Barnabe Googe, a ward of Burghley, tried to negotiate the prejudice against poetry in his Eclogues, Songs and Sonets (1563), by repeatedly versifying his disdain of love and seductive women, and concluding his collection with a long dream allegory ‘Cupido Conquered’ in which the forces of Cupid are defeated by Diana.26 Roger Ascham attacked vernacular rhyming verses in The Scholemaster in 1570, calling them ‘lewd and rude rymes’ that ‘make great shew of blossomes and buddes, [but] in whom is neither, roote of learning, nor frute of wisedome at all’.27 Peter Herman in his study of anti-poetic sentiment in the period, ­Squitter-Wits ​­ and ­Muse-haters, ​­ cites a number of attacks in the 1570s, not least one printed in 1572 (with 15 editions before 1606) by the reforming preacher Edward Dering, that fulminated against Tottel and similar texts: ‘nothing so vaine, nothing so wanton, nothing so ydle, which is not both boldly printed and plausibly taken’.28 This genre of attacks on verse culminated in Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse, printed, William Ringler has argued, at the instigation of the London authorities earlier in the same year as The Shepheardes Calender, and dedicated, like the Calender, to Sidney.29 It is perhaps an indication of official attitudes to verse at the time that Thomas Lodge’s answer to Gosson, written in 1579, was suppressed.30 It is in this climate, then, that The Shepheardes Calender was published. The dilemma of printing verse, some of it dealing with the experience of love, in the face of reformist suspicion and disapproval of such verse, may

114  Elizabeth Heale have been particularly acute for Spenser because in many respects, he seems to have shared the values and attitudes of the moralistic reformers rather than those of the courtly Petrarchists. A number of the earlier eclogues in The Shepheardes Calender moralise about the dangers of love in the manner of Googe.31 Old Thenot in Spenser’s February eclogue warns the young shepherd, Cuddie: For Youngth is a bubble blown up with breath, Whose witt is weakenesse, whose wage is death, Whose way is wildernesse, whose ynne Penaunce. ­ 43; Februarie ll. 87–89) ­ ​­ (p. The two mottos of the March eclogue echo the same theme: Willyes Emblemze. To be wise and eke to loue, Is graunted scarce to God aboue. Thomalins Embleme. Of Hony and of Gaule in loue there is store: The Honye is much, but the Gaule is more. (p. 56) ­­ Spenser, like Googe, moralises the theme of love, setting young men’s appetites in the context of Christian teaching on virtue. However, his characteristic technique of juxtaposing viewpoints throughout the Shepheardes Calender complicates the moral teaching and signals the possibility of a new more sophisticated, serious and ambitious Protestant poetics of love, what Pugh calls ‘a reformed eros’.32 The most conspicuous lover in the Shepheardes Calender is Colin Clout who, E.K. tells us, is a figure for the author ( p. 38). The name derives from Skelton’s Collyn Clout, a poem of ecclesiastical satire that had been appropriated by the Protestant tradition. It is thus strongly suggestive of reformist themes. Curiously, however, Spenser does not use him for this purpose although the Shepheardes Calender contains three eclogues of ecclesiastical criticism. Instead, Colin is a poet of love whose past verses of praise and lament evoke the admiration of all who hear him, but whose unrequited passion paradoxically silences him. At the end of the December eclogue, Colin hangs up his pipe on a tree, to play no more: My boughes with bloosmes that crowned were at firste, And promised of timely fruite such store, Are left both bare and barrein now at erst: The flattring fruite is fallen to grownd before, And rotted, ere they were halfe mellow ripe. (pp. 151–52; ­ ­­ ­ ​­ ll.­ 103–07) ​­

Gascoigne and Spenser  115 In so far as Colin is a figure for the aspiring Virgilian poet that the new poet of the Shepheardes Calendar might become, it is love that seems to frustrate his career. From one point of view, then, the passion of love seems in the Shepheardes Calender to confirm the moralists’ worst fears, transforming the eloquent Colin into a figure of idleness and waste. However, the poet Colin’s passion is treated with sympathy and does not clearly confirm the reformist disapproval of amorous themes. Colin’s susceptibility to love seems inseparable from his capacity to write wonderful poems in praise of faire Elisa in April and Dido in November. In the October eclogue, Cuddye blames love for Colin’s lack of poetic aspiration: ‘He, were he not with loue so ill bedight, / Would mount as high, and sing as soote as Swanne’ ( p. 131; ll. 89–90). Cuddye, whose characterisation may, I suggest, owe something to Spenser’s perception of Gascoigne’s prodigal career: he has wasted his youth singing ‘dapper ditties […]/ To feede youthes fancie’ ( p.  129; ll. 13–14), but it has done him no good and now he repents, despising such ‘rymes of rybaudrye’ ( p. 131; l.76).33 Piers, in dialogue with Cuddye, gives a very different view of love and its power as a source of poetic inspiration: Ah fon, for loue does teach him [Colin] climbe so hie, And lyftes him vp out of the loathsome myre: Such immortall mirrhor, as he doth admire, Would rayse ones mynd aboue the starry skie. And cause a caytiue corage to aspire, For lofty loue doth loath a lowly eye. (p. ­ 131; ll.­ 91–96) ​­ Piers’s conception of a serious and aspiring poetry of love as a fit subject for the ‘famous flight’ (l. 88) of ambitious verse is not only differentiated from the ‘ribaudrye’ of which Cuddye and perhaps Gascoigne were guilty, but it also competes with the traditional epic and imperial themes that Cuddye says find no audience in an unheroic age (see ll. 61–78). Pugh has persuasively argued that in Spenser’s later work, Spenser achieves a synthesis of the Ovidian and the Virgilian traditions which ‘will ultimately place a reformed eros at the centre of Spenser’s moral, political and religious teachings’.34 In Piers’s speech, I suggest, we see an early expression of this view of love as potentially the subject for the most ambitious poetry. My argument is that Spenser’s ambivalence about love as a theme in the Shepheardes Calender, presenting it in a conventionally reformist manner as seductive and destructive, and on the other hand, as an emotion that can inspire and lift the mind, however painfully, is a response to the dilemma posed by the climate of reformist hostility to love poetry within which he wrote. His attitude is both conditioned by and a reaction to Gascoigne’s verse in A Hundreth and Posies. It is not that I think Spenser feared being censored, or even censured, for writing about love in the Shepheardes

116  Elizabeth Heale Calender; none of his poetry comes near to the salacious eroticism of Gascoigne’s Master F.J. It is more that the climate of disapproval, encouraged by religious authorities, troubled Spenser and faced him with the problem of how to write about sexual desire as a positive force, not least because he himself shared a reformist dislike of Petrarchanising love poetry as part of a courtly art of seduction. It is not until Book 3 of The Faerie Queene (1590), ­ Amoretti and Epithalamion in 1594, and Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe in 1595 that he solved this dilemma.35

Elisa and Zabeta In The Steele Glas, Gascoigne claims the identity of the female Philomene who, raped and with her tongue cut out, nevertheless attempts to hold a steel mirror of truth up to society by means of her sharp but tuneful song. Philomene is allegorised as Satyra, a figure of plain speaking and her tongue is cut out by the ‘Raysor of Restraynte’.36 If Philomene/Satyra’s sister ‘Pleasant ­ Poesys’ is vulnerable to the exploitation of courtly ‘vayne Delight’, Satyra is vulnerable to the Court’s violence. It is surely no coincidence that E.K.’s allusion to Gascoigne’s use of Philomene comes in the notes to the November eclogue which, modern scholars have argued, covertly alludes to Elizabeth I’s proposed marriage to Anjou. In the November eclogue, in Richard McCabe’s words, the name Dido recalls ‘the Virgilian queen who destroyed herself through infatuation with a foreign prince’, thus inviting a reading of the poem as an elegy for another, English, queen who will be lost if she marries a foreign Catholic prince.37 The Shepheardes Calender actively if covertly participates in Leicester and Sidney’s campaign of opposition to the Anjou marriage. Spenser was working for Leicester when it was published and it is dedicated to Sidney.38 In alluding to Gascoigne’s Philomene, E.K./Spenser may have been thinking not only of the problem of writing about love in the 1570s but also of the possible dangers of speaking plainly about matters of state. The ghastly example of Stubbes may have focussed Spenser’s mind during the actual printing of The Shepheardes Calender, but during its writing, Gascoigne’s image of a censored Philomene and his own repeated self-representation as punished and marginalised for speaking the truth,39 may have served as a warning about the writing of politically dangerous poetry, and its possible repercussions. Queen Elizabeth is figured most explicitly in the Shepheardes Calender as Elisa in the April eclogue and this also has been read as covert criticism of the Anjou marriage. The poem insistently praises the Queen for her virginity at a point when she is proposing to lose it. Spenser’s rapturous praise of Elisa in April sets her in a mythological landscape in which she appears both as a nymph and a royal Queen:

Gascoigne and Spenser  117 See, where she sits vpon the grassie greene, (O seemely sight) Ycald in Scarlot like a mayden Queene, And Ermines white. Vpon her head a Cremosin coronet, With Damaske roses and Daffadillies set. (p. ­ 62; ll. 55–60) ­ ​­ This figuring of the virginal and queenly Elisa, attended as she is by ‘Ladyes of the lake’ (l. 120), can scarcely avoid recalling the iconic representation by Gascoigne of Elizabeth as a virgin and a queen in The Princely Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle ( published anonymously in 1576), similarly written to support Leicester’s agenda and similarly engaging with the dangerous political issue of Elizabeth’s marriage. In the Princely Pleasures, Gascoigne set Elizabeth in an Arthurian and mythological landscape in the grounds of Kenilworth Castle. Elizabeth was attended by a ‘lady of the lake’, and celebrated by Gascoigne as Diana’s nymph, Zabeta, who reigns as both an idealised virgin and as a royal queen. Diana celebrates Zabeta who is revealed sitting in the woodlands: Behold where here she sits, whom thou so long hast sought: Embrace her since she is to thee, a Jewel deerely bought.40 Spenser’s celebration of the virginal monarch, interlacing her royalty and the natural landscape, may partly have been designed to recall Gascoigne’s earlier entertainment in order to demonstrate the effortless superiority of the new poet’s intricate and varied verse form over his predecessor’s poulter’s measure. There may also be, in the implicit allusion, both an acknowledgement of his debt to his predecessor, and an elegant  – or uneasy  – signal of his awareness of the potential dangers of being seen to deal with the politics of Elizabeth’s virginity in celebratory verse.41 Elizabeth is thought to have censored Gascoigne’s part of the entertainment, including the scenes with Zabeta, none of which were actually performed. Austen very plausibly argues that Gascoigne went on to redeem himself from this debacle, by composing at short notice a narrative of the entertainment that the Queen had missed introducing a comic and, to Elizabeth more palatable, ending that transformed Leicester, figuratively, into a holly bush.42 This was performed by Gascoigne, running in the rain alongside Elizabeth’s horse as she left Kenilworth, having cut short her stay. Spenser almost certainly knew (from Harvey, Leicester, or perhaps Sidney) the story of Elizabeth’s reception of Gascoigne’s politically dangerous entertainment and may well have pondered it as he composed the April eclogue with its oblique echoes of the offending device.

118  Elizabeth Heale Although there is no evidence that Gascoigne suffered for his part in Leicester’s unwelcome entertainment, Gascoigne/ Philomene/Satyra presents himself/ herself in The Steele Glas (also printed in 1576), as marginalised and alienated: And thus I sing, in corner closely cowcht Like Philomene, since that the stately cowrts, Are now no place, for such poore byrds as I.43 Whether or not this describes Gascoigne’s actual position vis-à-vis the Court in the final two years of his life, Spenser, I suggest, may have found in Gascoigne’s work, and in particular in the figure of Philomene, powerful warning fictions of the dangers of writing poetry in the late 1570s: vulnerable to accusations of seduction, to the censuring of the reformers, and to political censorship.

The Blatant Beast Concern with censorship and the censuring of verse continued to trouble Spenser’s poetry throughout his career. At the end of The Faerie Queene, in Book 6, the Book of Courtesy, the Blatant Beast (that antithesis of courtesy) attacks in particular ‘the gentle Poets rime’ (6.12.40): Ne may this homely verse, of many meanest, Hope to escape his venemous despite, More then my former writs, all were they clearest From blamefull blot, and free from all that wite, With which some wicked tongues did it backebite.

(stz. ­ 41)­44

Spenser may be alluding to the censorship of his 1591 satire ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale’, or he may be alluding to the criticism of the first three books of The Faerie Queene that he describes at the beginning of Book 4: The rugged forhead that with graue foresight Welds kingdomes causes, and affaires of state, My looser rimes (I wote) doth sharply wite, For praising loue […] By which fraile youth is oft to follie led, Through false allurement of that pleasing baite, That better were in vertues discipled, Then with vaine poemes weeds to haue their fancies fed. (4.Proem ­ 1) The terms (surely highly ironic) with which he describes his earlier poetry are strikingly like those used by Gascoigne who categorised his own vain

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poems as ‘Weedes’ in Posies. Unlike Gascoigne, however, Spenser does not accept such criticism of his amorous poetry: ‘Such ones ill jiudge of love, that cannot love, / Ne in their frosen hearts feele kindly flame’(stz. 2). Spenser’s description of the ravenous Blatant Beast, attacking poetry that is vulnerable to ‘wicked tongues’, may itself recall an image used by Gascoigne in The Steele Glas. There, he warned that ‘the line, of that false caytife king/ (Which ravished fayre Phylomene …) /And then cut out her trustie tong for hate […] /Lives yet’: Whose greedy lust, unbridled from their brest, Hath raunged long about the world so wyde, To finde a pray for their wide open mouthes.45 It is not only the image of the gaping mouth marauding through the world that is so suggestive but also the way in which Gascoigne, like Spenser, blames the creature’s power on its transgressive appetites (Spenser’s monster is driven by its ‘vile tongue and venomous intent’ (VI.i.8), and identifies the Court as the creature’s source (cf. The Faerie Queene VI.ix.3). Perhaps Spenser was confident ‘in the invulnerability of his own immortal fame’,46 but the haunting presence of Gascoigne’s Philomene in his earliest and one of his last works suggests that for Spenser, Gascoigne, or at least Gascoigne’s version of his career in his printed work, remained a disturbing and cautionary model.

Notes 1 Quotation from Gascoigne’s The Steele Glas, ‘The Author to the Reader’ (Cunliffe, p. 140, l. 4). 2 Richard A. McCabe, ed, Edmund Spenser. The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 146. All quotations from The Shepheardes Calender in my text will be from this edition with page and, where relevant, line numbers given in parentheses after the quotation. 3 Roland Greene, ‘Spenser and Contemporary Vernacular Poetry’ in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 237–57 (p. 243). 4 The terms are of course those of C.S. Lewis in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 64. For a fuller discussion of Spenser’s engagement with mid- century poets and some implications throughout his career as a poet, see my essay ‘Spenser and SixteenthCentury Poetics’ in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 586– 601. 5 See McCabe’s note on August line 183 in Edmund Spenser, p. 552, and Spenser’s comparison of Philomele’s song to that of the Muses in The Teares of the Muses (ll. 235–46) in op.cit. p.  198. See also Aemylia Lanyer’s use of Philomela as a figure for herself as a poet in ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ in Salve Deus Rex Judeorum (1611), ll. 31–32 and 189–90. Syrithe Pugh cites the identification of Philomele with Poetry in Sabinus’s commentary on Ovid in ‘Ovidian Reflections and The Steel Glass’ in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485– 1603, eds. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 575–80 (p. 579).

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6 Richard A. McCabe, ‘“Thine owne nations frend/And Patrone”: The Rhetoric of Petition in Harvey and Spenser’, Spenser Studies XXII (2007), pp. 47–72. 7 See Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey. A Study of His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 31n, 33–34, 215–16. 8 Stern p.15; McCabe, ‘“Thine owne nations frend”’, pp. 56–58. 9 Harvey’s marginalia are incorporated by Pigman into his notes on ‘Certayne Notes’, in Pigman, A Hundreth ( p. 454ff.). For the note implying discussion of Gascoigne’s ideas with Spenser, see p. 736 note to p. 457.35. Harvey’s marginalia are also transcribed in G. Gregory Smith’s notes to Gascoigne’s treatise in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), I pp. 359– 62. 10 Austen, George Gascoigne, p. 70. 11 One candidate is Edmund Kirke, a friend of Spenser’s and Harvey’s at Cambridge. If there was an E.K., his role seems to be that of a mouthpiece for Spenser and perhaps Harvey. 12 For the argument that it was Master F.J., suggestive of events at Court, that caused trouble for A Hundreth, see Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.  110– 11. For dangerously political implications in some of Spenser’s eclogues, see my discussion below. 13 Austen, George Gascoigne, p. 73. See also McCabe, ‘“Thine owne nations frend’”, p. 55. 14 Austen, George Gascoigne, p. 102. 15 Pigman, p. 736n (on p. 457. 35). 16 The Three Proper, and wittie, familiar Letters, dated 1580 were printed together with Two Other very commendable Letters, dated October 1579. 17 Quoted in Pigman, p. 736 commenting on pp. 458.39– 45. 18 Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 30–31. 19 Cunliffe, p. 140. Cunliffe misreads ‘fort of fame’ as ‘sort of fame’. 20 For suggestions that the oak and the briar fable in the February eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender is derived from Sylvanus’s speech in Gascoigne’s The Princely Pleasures, and that the figure of Malbecco in The Faerie Queene III is derived from the figure of Suspicion in a retelling of an Ariostan tale in ‘The adventures of Master F.J.’, see Roy Eriksen’s entry under ‘Gascoigne’ in The Spenser Encyclopaedia, eds. A.C. Hamilton et  al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 325. 21 Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 38. In ‘Gascoigne’s Ovidian Masks’, an unpublished paper delivered to the Gascoigne Seminar 2009, Pugh argued that the Complaint of Philomene and The Steele Glas, radically use Ovid to criticise the tyranny of state censorship in ways that were profoundly influential on the Spenser of The Shepheardes Calendar. 22 Cunliffe, pp. 144–46. 23 Clegg, Press Censorship, pp. 103–19; Austen, p. 85. 24 Quoted by Pigman, p. liii. 25 Russell A. Fraser, ed, John Hall, The Court of Virtue (1565) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 15. 26 Judith M. Kennedy ed., Barnabe Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphs and Sonnets (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), no. 48. Jessica Winston discusses Googe and a number of other mid- c entury poets in the context of a humanist opposition to romantic verse schooled into children through the education system, see ‘Lyric Poetry at the early Elizabethan Inns of Court: forming a professional community’ in The Intellectual and Cultural Worlds of the Early Modern Inns

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27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

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of Court, eds. Jayne Elizabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring and Sarah Knight (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 223–44. Roger Ascham, English Works (Cambridge: The University Press, 1904), p. 290. Quoted in Peter C. Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters. Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), p. 48. Stephen Gosson. A Biographical and Critical Study (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942), pp. 26–28. Ringler, p. 27, citing Lodge’s own evidence in An Alarum against Usurers (1584). Richard Helgerson argued that a climate of moral disapproval by the establishment of the literary expression of romance and erotic desire shaped a pattern of prodigality and repentance in the work of a number of Elizabethan writers; see The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), see especially chapter 3 for a discussion of Gascoigne. Compare especially Googe’s eclogue 4 in Kennedy, ed, Googe, no.8. Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, p. 36. McCabe is more inclined to interpret Cuddye as a figure for Spenser himself, ‘“Thine owne nations frend’”, p. 62. Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, p. 36. Ibid., especially chap. 5. See also Heale, ‘Spenser and Sixteenth- Century Poetics’, pp. 592–600. Cunliffe, pp. 143–46. McCabe, ‘“Little booke: thy selfe present”: the poetics of presentation in The Shepheardes Calender’ in Presenting Poetry. Composition, Publication, Reception. Essays in Honour of Ian Jack, eds. Howard Erskine-Hill and Richard A. McCabe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 15–40 (p. 33). For discussions of the pro- Leicester politics of The Shepheardes Calender, see Paul E. McLane, Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. A Study in Elizabethan Allegory (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), esp. chaps II and IV; Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity. Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 177– 86; McCabe ‘“Little booke: thy selfe present”’. For example, in The Steele Glas, Cunliffe, p. 146. Cunliffe, p. 116. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 84–89. Austen, pp.131–32, but see Norbrook, op. cit., and Susan Frye, Elizabeth I. The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 63. Cunliffe, p. 146. Quotations from The Faerie Queene are from A.C. Hamilton ed., The Faerie Queene (London: Longman, 1977) with book, canto and stanza numbers given in parentheses after quotations. In The Teares of the Muses ll. 235–82, Euterpe, using the image of Philomele, seems to describe poetry as blighted not only by ignorance, but also by oppression. Cunliffe, p. 144. Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, p. 38.

Gascoigne’s Lute, Gascoigne’s Sparrow, and Gascoigne’s Goodnight Imitatio and the ‘verie sweete notes adapted’ Christopher Goodwin George Gascoigne’s writings repeatedly attest the author’s keen interest in music, and moreover, a fair working knowledge of the musical theory and practice of his day. In a recent article, Gavin Alexander has shown how Gascoigne’s references to music serve not merely to display erudition, to supply local colour, or to furnish material for extended metaphors; rather music serves as an expression, symbol, and medium for socially constrained and patterned human interactions. Music in the form of song and dance  – musical forms that bring together voice and instrument, words and music, or partners in a dance – becomes a way of exploring the nature of other human exchanges, and especially amorous and sexual ones … Music is the sign as well as the vehicle of this idea of Gascoigne’s about codified and performed human interactions.1 Alexander is surely right to state that some Gascoigne’s imagined musical performances, notably in The Griefe of Joy (1577) occupy a purely ‘fictive performance space’, to use Gillian Austen’s phrase, yet at least some of his poems really were sung in his lifetime.2 The 1587 edition of The Whole Woorkes includes a verse ‘Come, muses, come and help me to lament’ which according to its rubric was performed in the royal entertainment at Kenilworth in 1575: ‘Herewith the consort of musicke sounded and Deepe desire sang this song’. A very small number of Gascoigne’s verses either have clear instructions as to the music to which they are to be sung, at least in imagination, and another small group have extant contemporary settings. The argument of this paper is that a third category of songs can be discerned and reconstructed. Given than Gascoigne explicitly tells us that many of his poems had music ‘adapted unto them’,3 where his verse is very obviously modelled on (and in the same metre as) well-known songs of the day, it is reasonable to suppose either that Gascoigne intended his songs to be sung

DOI: 10.4324/­­­­9781003112082-11

Imitatio and the ‘verie sweete notes adapted’  123 to this same music, or at the very least that music-loving Elizabethans would have assumed that certain pieces of music were intended for them. That Gascoigne might implicitly be suggesting that we sing his verses to the public domain music then used for the performance of his poetic exemplars is the more plausible because his work is so shot through with instances of imitatio. An author responsible for so many literary innovations should not have to struggle too hard to establish a claim to originality, yet Gascoigne’s work is full of instances of the conscious reworking of preexisting models, going well beyond mere influence or allusion, which was practised in all the arts in the renaissance.4 Imitatio may offend against our post-romantic notions of the artist as an inspired and original creative individual (an idea which has developed at the expense of older ideas of the artist as experienced craftsman) or indeed against our concepts of plagiarism. What writer today would give pride of place in his own collected works to his translations, or would think that it added lustre to his largest and most important work to pretend that it was not his at all, but a translation from a (non-existent) ­­ ​­ foreign writer? Evidently, imitatio gave great pleasure. For the artist, it could represent an hommage to the dead and friendly emulation of the living, and showed him at work in the laboratory of cultural research and development. Meanwhile, if the reader, listener or viewer was not familiar with the artist’s exemplar, they would have the pleasure of experiencing a classic trope for the first time; and if on the other hand they were familiar with that exemplar they could admire the artist’s polished handling of it and any new touches he had brought to it while feeling perhaps a little frisson of satisfaction that they themselves were culturally ‘in the know’.5 A good instance of Gascoigne’s relationship with both his exemplars and those writers later influenced by him in their turn, is one of a significant number of poems which reflect his interest in music, ‘A Lady being both wronged by false suspect’ (p. 38) from A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, which begins: Give me my Lute in bed now as I lye, And lock the doores of mine unluckie bower: So shall my voice in mournefull verse descrie, The secrete smart which causeth me to lower. Resound you walles an Ecchos to my mone, And thou cold bed wherin I lye alone: Beare witnesse yet what rest thy Lady takes, When other sleepe which may enjoy their makes. (p. 251, ­­ ll. 1–8) ­ ​­ While this looks back to Wyatt’s lute poems, ‘At most mischief I suffer grief’, ‘All heavy minds’, and ‘My lute awake’ (l. 5 probably also alludes to Wyatt’s ‘Resound my voice, ye woods that hear me plain’), and ultimately back to Sappho’s address to her lyre, it does seem to be the first depiction in English literature of a woman, specifically, lamenting to her lute. As such, it

124  Christopher Goodwin looks forward to poems by Sidney, Munday, Herrick, Quarles, and Carew, and even an anonymous early seventeenth- century ballad, ‘Complain my lute, complain on him that stays so long away’, and more generally, to countless depictions in both portraiture and verse of nice young ladies (Corinna, Lucia, Isabella, Clarastella, Phillis, and many more) with their lutes.6 Now let us consider in turn the imagined music in Gascoigne’s writings, extant contemporary musical settings of his verses, and the ‘sweet notes adapted’ to his poetry.

Gascoigne’s imagined music Gascoigne’s musical references are not always precise. In the main dance scene in Master F.J., he tells us that ‘The violands at ende of the pavion staied a whyle’ ( p. 157, ll. 15–16) but a few lines later relates that ‘Againe the vyols called them forthwardes’ ( p. 157, l. 37–p. 158, l. 1) – exactly the sort of imprecision that exasperates music historians – does he mean violins or viols? The two are not the same. However, at least two of his musical descriptions in Master F.J. are as precise as we could reasonably ask for. Later in the same scene, F.J.: … calling the musitions, caused them softly to sound the Tyntarnell, when he clearing his voyce did Alla Napolitana applie these verses following, unto the measure. In prime of lustie yeares, when Cupid caught me in, And nature taught the way to love, how I might best begin: To please my wandring eye, in beauties tickle trade, To gaze on eche that passed by, a carelesse sporte I made…. (p. 159, ­­ ll. 19–27) ­ ​­ As the reader may guess, the word ‘Tynternall’, usually now spelt Tinternel, has an onomatapoeic quality and origin which make its precise meaning hard to pin down. Continental cognates, some musically related, others not, include ‘tinton’, ‘tantayne’, ‘tintorello’, and ‘tintalore’ and ‘tiente alora’. The best attempt to date to disentangle the different word forms and their meanings in their historical context is probably that of Dr Ian Payne in his book on the almain in Britain.7 Suffice it to say here that in English literary circles in Gascoigne’s day, the term ‘alla napolitana’ alluded to the supposed Italian practice of singing and dancing at the same time, and indeed that a choreography for a sedate and charming dance called Tinternell is found among the Inns of Court measures, described in a series of dance manuscripts, the earliest from c. 1563– 66, the last from the 1670s or later. Gascoigne is thus giving us a picture of Italian court life, within the constraints of what the educated Elizabethan knew of it. Two pieces of music labelled ‘Tinternel’ have come down to us, both in the same metre and fitting Gascoigne’s words perfectly, one a rather

Imitatio and the ‘verie sweete notes adapted’  125 ­

The other ‘imagined’ song in Master F.J. occurs a little later in the action: at last F.J. taking into his hand a Lute that lay on his Mistres bed, did unto the note of the Venetian galliard applie the Italian dittie written by the woorthy Bradamant unto the noble Rugier, as Ariosto hath it. Rugier qual semper fui, etc. but his Mistres could not be quite until shee heard him repeat the Tyntarnell which he used over night, the which F.J. refused not … . ­ ­­ ­ ​­ (pp. 165, l. 32–166, l. 1) There is a caveat for the would-be song reconstructor here, for the Venetian galliard is not the music to which Ariosto’s famous verses, from stanza 61, canto 44 of Orlando Furioso were usually sung. The text was associated with its own music, an eight-bar harmonic ground with a simple melody, called ‘Ruggiero’ or ‘Rogero’ and popular in Italy, England, and elsewhere in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though in England a version of the melody acquired its own variant harmonies.9 Gascoigne’s would be one of the earlier English references, though lost editions of Clement Robinson’s A Handefull of Pleasant Delites from as early as 1566 may have contained ‘A faithefull vow of two constant Lovers to the new Rogero’ found in the extant 1584 edition, and John Ward has drawn attention to a crude setting of ‘Ruger, by me Richard Pyttyns’ found in BL Royal Appendix 74, f. 46v, supposedly from as early as 1547– 48.10 The ‘normal’ music for ‘Ruggiero’ is found in many English sources: seven lute settings, three for cittern and one each for keyboard and for bandora, the earliest datable source being once again the Dallis Lute Book.11 As for the ‘Venetian galliard’, continental sources include two unrelated pieces under this name, one in Julio Abondante’s Intabolatura (1546) for lute, and one in Antonio Gardane’s keyboard print of 1551,12 but Gascoigne is far more likely to be thinking of a piece, popular in England, found intabulated for cittern in the Mulliner book, a manuscript collection made by Thomas Mulliner, under the tutelage of John Heywood in the early 1560s13. With the elision customary in Italian song, Ariosto’s verses can indeed be sung to this piece, and the lower parts of the harmony realised on the lute, as Gascoigne describes. Professor John Ward notes Montaigne’s surprise on visiting Empoli in Tuscany, at hearing the very peasants singing Ariosto to the lute,14 so in depicting F.J.’s nonchalant performance Gascoigne is once again giving his story some local colour, albeit through the lens of what educated Elizabethans thought of as typically Italian – the ‘Venetian’ galliard seems in fact to be known only in English and north European sources.15 Why Gascoigne should have chosen the ‘Venetian’ galliard rather than the familiar

126  Christopher Goodwin ‘Rogero’ ground for F.J. to sing one can only guess; perhaps ‘Rogero’ was already too much of an English balladeer’s commonplace by the time Gascoigne wrote to seem attractively exotic in a culturally somewhat pretentious work – spaghetti bolognese, rather than penne all’arrabiata, so to speak. By way of digression, another little puzzle concerns the title of the piece, which in Thomas Mulliner’s manuscript has a double ascription: at the beginning, on f. 126v ‘Venetian galliarde’ and at the end, on f. 127, ‘finis galliarde Churchyarde’ to which a later hand has added ‘a Poet’. A slightly later source, Francis Willoughby’s lute book, in use in the 1570s, seemingly corrupts this to ‘Church’s galliard’ but later sources give it generic names, such as the ‘sinkapace’ [recte: cinquepace, a synonym for the galliard], but in a source of the 1630s, Robert Creighton’s keyboard MS (now Paris MS Res. 1186), the title ‘Churchyards galliard’ returns once again. Personal names attached to instrumental compositions at this period are usually names either of composers or of aristocratic dedicatees. Can Churchyard really have written this piece, or else have been considered important enough to have it named after him? Perhaps, rather, it was associated with performance of one or other of his poems.

Extant Elizabethan settings Three early musical settings of Gascoigne’s poetry have come down to us; two of them intact and performable, though a little after Gascoigne’s time; and the third, which he must have known, surviving only in fragmentary form. A setting of ‘Amid my Bale I bath in blisse’16 for voice and viols is found in BL Add. MSS 18936-9, a set of partbooks almost certainly from the library one of the great Elizabethan musical households, that of Sir Edward Paston, an East Anglian Catholic recusant. The music is attributed to the Norwich composer William Cobbold who lived from 1560 to 1639, so Gascoigne, who died in 1577, cannot have heard it.17 John Barlett composed a lively setting of Gascoigne’s ‘Of all the byrds that I do know, Phillip my sparrow hath no peare’18 which can be performed by one voice and lute or four voices with or without lute, printed in his A Booke of Ayres (London, 1606).19 To trace the history of the sparrow as a symbol of lasciviousness, from Catullus, via Chaucer and Skelton, to Gascoigne and Sidney would be beyond the scope of both this essay and this author; suffice it to say that to hammer home the double entendres, as if such a thing were really necessary, Bartlett, who sets verses 1– 4 and 8 of Gascoigne’s poem, takes the final couplet from verse 7, and makes this the refrain at the end of each verse: For when she once hath felt a fitte, Phillip will crie still, yit, yit, yit. (p. 234, ­­ ll. 41–42) ­ ​­

Imitatio and the ‘verie sweete notes adapted’  127 Sadly, the one extant musical setting, which the poet must presumably have known, of a short poem attributed to Gascoigne (but not included in A Hundreth or the Posies) has not come down to us fully intact. A bass line only survives, labelled simply ‘I sigh’ in a slight musical manuscript of just nine leaves, which has received virtually no scholarly attention; BL Add. MS 36526A. Metrically, this fragment is a perfect fit for Gascoigne’s ‘I sigh, Why so? For sorowe of her smart’, printed in The Paradyse of Dayntye Devises (1576) as no. 39. The setting was evidently in the very simple, sober, almost psalm-like style of much ‘drab age’ song, characterised by rhythmically regular, one-note-per-syllable ­ ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ word setting, and lack of any discernable polyphonic imitation, melisma, adventurous harmonies, vocal leaps or natural speech rhythms. The music consists of only two phrases, and the rubric ‘4ter’ (quater, ­ four times) over a repeat mark in the middle of the piece explains how to set the words to the music, with the first four lines sung to the first phrase in the music, and the last three to the second, longer phrase, with the last line of the verse repeated at the close, as was absolutely normal in song at this period. The music manuscript in fact bears the name of its presumable owner, ‘Joseph Palmer of Cropredy’, a miller’s son from the Oxfordshire village who matriculated as a sizar, the poorest class of student, at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1597–98, took his B.A. in 1600– 01 and his M.A. in 1604, before returning to his home village as a clergyman. He or his friends (there seems to be more than one hand in the source) copied out parts from the newest and most fashionable music of the day, John Dowland’s First Booke of Songs (1597) and Thomas Morley’s Consort Lessons (1599), but also, as it would appear, music from some earlier manuscript collection dating from the early 1560s; it includes parts for ‘In going to my naked bed’ by Richard Edwards (d.1566) and a setting by Robert Parsons from Day’s Whole Psalms in foure partes (1563); this earlier manuscript, no doubt, was the source for the setting of Gascoigne’s ‘I sigh’. The text for ‘I sigh’ is found in The Paradyse of Dayntye Devises (1576), ­ which the publisher Henry Disle tells us were ‘devised and written for the most part, by M. Edwards, sometimes of her Maiesties Chappel’. He goes on to say that: the ditties  … wyll yeelde a farre greater delight, being as they are so aptly made to be set to any song in.5. partes, or song to instrument. This may well be an incomplete or even misleading statement of purpose on the part of the publisher. Settings of around 24 Paradyse poems are known (and in some cases multiple settings) and in fact so many of the texts had already been set to music by the date of the first edition of 1576, not least by Richard Edwards himself and Robert Parsons (d.1572), both deceased well before publication, that the book may well have served rather as a source of additional verses for the songs its users and purchasers already had in their manuscript music books – songs surviving in score from the period, in

128  Christopher Goodwin manuscript sources such as York Minster M 91 (S), the Dallis Lute Book, or BL Add. MS 4900 (which contains songs from the 1560s) tend to have only one verse, or sometimes no verses at all, underlaid to the music. Gascoigne’s ‘I sigh’ then, while found in a post-1599 source, is very likely to have been in circulation in the early 1560s, and the appearance of its lyrics in Paradyse argues for its general currency as a song.20

In search of Gascoigne’s ‘verie sweete notes’ In A Hundreth, Gascoigne states that: These good Morowe and good nyght, together with his Passion, his Libell of divorce, his Lullabye, his Recantation, his De profundis, and his farewell, have verie sweete notes adapted unto them: the which I would you should also enjoy as well as my selfe. For I knowe you will delight to heare them. As also other verie good notes whyche I have for dyvers other Ditties of other mens devyse which I have before rehersed. (p. 289) ­­ Is it possible that Gascoigne actually wrote music for his own poems? In the absence of his explicitly saying so, or of any biographical evidence that he had any received formal musical training, this seems unlikely. Numerous Elizabethan title pages betray fear of censure from what the poet and musician Thomas Whytehorn called ‘the fault-fi nding, carping crew’,21 and while there were instances of poet- c omposers, such as Whytehorn or, later and more famously, Thomas Campion, it seems unlikely that a gentleman with no musical training would simply have ‘had a go’ at setting his poems to music and then stuck his head above the parapet by making his efforts public. Jane Flynn has shown in her doctoral dissertation on the Mulliner Book that musical education in Gascoigne’s heyday, such as that given to choirboys in the colleges and cathedrals, was a matter of formal contract and indenture.22 Not surprisingly, many professional musicians were from musical families, or had come up through the choir schools. In fact, Gavin Alexander has noted a passage in Gascoigne’s ‘Devises’ where the poet’s use of musical metaphor is strained, not to say confused, to a degree which would not lend much credit to a working composer.23 A relationship between poet and music probably similar to Gascoigne’s is spelt out in the address to the reader from Anthony Munday’s Banquet of Dainty Conceits (1588), a collection consisting of poems written to be sung to the fashionable consort repertoire of the day. Munday explains that his ditties … will seem very bad stuffe in reading, but (I perswade me) wyl delight thee, when thou singest any of them to thine Instrument … if any Dittie

Imitatio and the ‘verie sweete notes adapted’  129 shall chaunce to lympe a little in the Note (as I doo not know that any one of them dooth, because they have been tryed by them of judgement, and those that have not a little esteemed of them) yet I pray thee condemne mee not, in that I have no jote of knowledge of Musique, but what I have doone and doo, is onely by the eare…. Munday was a competent poet and music lover, confident of his sense of what makes for good lyric verse, but not claiming to be a practising musician. In writing his verse, he seems to be doing exactly what Gascoigne does in the case of the two songs from Master F.J. which both fit sensibly to the tunes Gascoigne refers to. In fact, Gascoigne’s choice of words is revealing; he says that the notes are ‘adapted unto’ the words; he does not say that his verses have been ‘set by learned musicians’ – the sort of phrase that might have been used had the music been specially composed at his request. So the music already existed before his poems were sung to it. Do we have any hope then of identifying and recovering Gascoigne’s ‘verie sweete notes?’ The caveat that Gascoigne imagines ‘Ruggier, qual sempre fui’ sung to music other than the music we would expect has already been noted. Yet, in the cases of poetic imitatio considered below, he really must have known that the verses he was reworking were song lyrics with their own music, and that by keeping the metre and argument of his originals, he was inviting the musically informed reader to perform the poems as songs, either in reality or in i magination – just as a modern poet who rewrote the words of ‘Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away’ or ‘How much is that doggie in the window?’ would be inviting real or imaginary performance. If at a distance of 450 years, the Elizabethan music aficionado can easily spot musical allusions alongside poetical ones, then how many more would have been immediately recognisable at the time? So while we cannot be entirely sure of what ‘verie sweet notes’ Gascoigne had in mind, we can with some certainty identify music that some of his readers would have assumed was intended. Paradoxically, the argument for identifying music via imitatio is perhaps strengthened by counter- example, for it is clear enough when Gascoigne is not following the musical and poetic herd. His ‘De ­ profundis’ (p. 290–93) ­­ ­ ​­ is unusual in being written in iambic pentameters (Wyatt’s De Profundis being another rare instance); it therefore cannot be sung to the music for any of the other numerous Elizabethan glosses on Psalm 130. The standard ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’ translation (beginning ‘Lord to thee I make my mone When daungers me oppresse’) and the ‘church tune’ supplied for it in English psalters from 1558 onwards (based on a Calvinist tune of 1539) is in heptameters, as is Miles Coverdale’s translation, and William Seager’s (1553), and William Byrd’s, printed in his Songs of sundrie natures (1589), which begins ‘From depth of sin, O Lord, to thee I have made humble cry’. John Hall, meanwhile, in his Court of Vertue (1565) has a De profundis paraphrase in

130  Christopher Goodwin octameters, while William Hunnis in his Seven Sobs of a Sorrowfull Soule for Sinne (1585) uses poulters measure for his gloss on the psalm. Nor will Gascoigne’s verse fit the anonymous lute song ‘From depth of griefe’ found in the early seventeenth- century Swarland lute book, BL Add. MS 15117, f.  5v.24 In fact, Gascoigne’s pentameter verses have unusual half lines as the eighth and ninth lines of each stanza, suggesting that he had a melody in mind when he wrote his verses, but none of the obvious suspects will do. But let us now turn to those Gascoigne texts for which music suggests itself very readily. “A translation of Ariosto allegorized” (1) The wide currency of the ground and melody ‘Rogero’ or ‘Ruggiero’ has been noted above; it is interesting that while Gascoigne describes Master F.J. singing Ariosto’s verse to the Venetian galliard, and not to ‘Rogero’, the very first verses following Master F.J. in the A Hundreth are ‘A translation of Ariosto allegorized’, beginning: When worthy Bradamant, had looked long in vain, To see hir absent love and Lord, Ruggier returne againe …. (p. 217, ­­ ll. 1–2) ­ ​­ This verse is in the correct metre to be sung to ‘Rogero’, an obvious hint to the Elizabethan musician, to pick up his or lute, or sit at the harpsichord, and sing.25 “The Partridge in the pretie Merlines foote” (23) It is perhaps with this poem more than any other that we are on firm ground in suggesting that Gascoigne must have known that he was following a musical as well as a poetic exemplar. The poem is preceded with the lines: Now to begin with another man, take these verses written to be sent with a ryng, wherein were engraved a Patrich in a Merlines foote. ­­ (p. 235) This, however, would appear to be a piece of amusing Gascoignian bunkum: in fact, the poem is obviously an expanded version of Surrey’s 14-line sonnet ‘Lyke as the lark within the marlians foote’ printed by Tottel in Songes and Sonnettes (1557), which begins: Lyke as the lark with the marlians foote With piteous tunes doth chirp her yelden lay: So syng I now, seyng none other boote, My rendering song, and to your wyll obey….

Imitatio and the ‘verie sweete notes adapted’  131 Gascoigne expands this to six stanzas of six lines each, beginning: The Partridge in the pretie Merlines foote, Who feeles hir force supprest with fearefulnesse, And findes that strength nor strife can do hir boote, To scape the danger of hir deepe distresse: These wofull wordes may seeme for to reherse Which I must write in this waymenting verse. (p. 235, ­­ ll. 1–6) ­ ​­ Note the recurrence even of the foot/ boot rhyme. Gascoigne has the worst of it in substituting a lark for a partridge, for as everybody knows, larks sing beautifully, but partridges do not, and his partridge simply has to speak rather than sing his lament! Music for Surrey’s verse is found in the Dublin Virginal Manuscript, an anonymous source in use around 1570. The music is found as an untitled keyboard score but the part-writing in four strict parts is clear, and it can be identified as the music for Surrey’s verse via several Scottish seventeenth- century sources, including the first secular songbook printed in Scotland, Forbes’s Songs and Fancies (Aberdeen, 1682).26 (A number of mid-Tudor English songs remained popular in Scotland well into the seventeenth century.)­27 A backhanded compliment and indication of the currency of the music is that fact that John Hall chose to ‘moralise’ this (along with other songs such as Wyatt’s ‘Blame not my lute’) in his Court of Vertue ­28 (1565) ­  – the very title a moralisation of an earlier poetry collection, The Court of Venus (c. ­ 1538). It is of no matter for musical performance that Surrey’s verse falls into quatrains while Gascoigne’s is in sestets; one has only to repeat one of the phrases of the music. In this case, grammatically and semantically, the verse seems to ‘hinge’ at the end of the fourth line, so it is best to repeat the first strain of the music and sing the second strain only once. “Gascoigne’s libell of Divorce” (54) ‘Gascoigne’s libell of Divorce’ is not so mechanical a piece of imitation as ‘The Partridge in the pretie Merlines foote’, yet it too clearly has an exemplar which was popular also as a song: Vaux’s ‘The aged lover renounceth love’ beginning ‘I lothe that I did love’, which once again was printed in Tottel’s Songs and Sonnettes. Here, Gascoigne is on good form, for he wittily reframes a poetic commonplace, the ageing man complaining of aching limbs, declining libido and fading good looks, into an imaginary divorce petition.29 Nonetheless, Gascoigne is heavily influenced by Vaux’s imagery. Vaux’s poem has a ‘she’: his muse, who ‘dothe not delight me as she did before’; and Gascoigne’s has two: ‘love and lingring life, That one hath been my concubine, that other was my wife’. Vaux’s opening line is:

132  Christopher Goodwin I lothe that I did love In youth that I thought sweet…. Gascoigne’s third line reads: In youth I lived with love, she had my lusty dayes. (p. 269, ­­ l. 3) Later, Vaux has: And lusty life away she leaps as there had been none such and Gascoigne gives us: That lusty love leapes quite away, and liketh me no more. (p. 270, ­­ l. 20) Vaux sees death approaching: The harbinger of death, To me I see him ride: The cough, the cold, the gasping breath, Doth bid me to provide A pikeax and a spade… Gascoigne is tormented by the ‘crooked croane’ of life: She cloyes me with the cough, hir comforte is but colde She bids me give mine age for almes, where first my youth was solde. (p. 270, ­­ ll. 23–24) ­ ​­ It is reflection on the Elizabethans’ love of a gloomy and lugubrious dirge that this text attracted not one but two extant settings (likewise there are two settings of Vaux’s ‘When I behold the bier’, not to mention all the De Profundis texts already mentioned, or the innumerable ‘Fortune my foe’ ballads). One is found among the lute songs, dating from the 1560s, in BL Add. MS 4900, seemingly an intabulation of a vocal original in four parts, and the other is a single line of music among the ‘Wynne Marginalia’ a set of melody, harmony and bass parts transcribed from a lost copy of Tottel, preserved in a nineteenth- c entury print; see illustration (over).30 The words of Gascoigne’s poem fit the music exactly as Vaux’s does.31 Once again, there is circumstantial evidence of the wide currency of one or more of these tunes, in ballad tune directions, and the fact that the gravedigger sings a snatch of the song in Hamlet. So, once again, we can say with confidence that Gascoigne would have known his exemplar as a song with music.

Imitatio and the ‘verie sweete notes adapted’  133

A setting of Vaux’s ‘I lothe that I did love’, from the Wynne Marginalia, a printed transcription c. 1814, from a lost sixteenth- century original, by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Norfolk.

“Gascoignes Lullabie” (56) The practice of writing words for a particular tune, and not only in the same metre but also on the same or similar subjects, which of course was the bread-and-butter practice of the ballad maker, gave rise to some identifiable ‘families’ of lyrics. There are for instance no fewer than five extant ‘willow song’ texts, besides Desdemona’s song in Othello ( plus a Restoration spoof, ‘O gingerbread, gingerbread O!’), all in the same metre and with a similar refrain;32 Elizabethan readers would not have need to be told that these went ‘to the tune of Willow, willow, willow’. Another possible instance of such a family of texts is a small group of lullabies, which would all fit to the same tune (allowing for arbitrary repetition of last lines, as required) and of which Gascoigne’s “Lullabie” ( p. 272) would be one of the earliest: Sing lullabie, as women do, Wherewith they bring their babes to rest, And lullabie can I sing to As womanly as can the best. With lullabie they still the childe, And if I be not much beguiled, Full many wanton babes have I Which must be stilld with lullabie. (p. 272, ­­ ll. 1–8) ­ ​­ Gascoigne’s text seems self- consciously allusive; he is reframing a lullaby to his own moral and spiritual uses. Breton’s ‘Come little babe, come silly soule’ is in the same metre, as is George Wither’s ‘Sweet baby sleep, what ails my dear?’ from his Hallelujah (1641). Gascoigne’s and Breton’s verses both appeared as broadside ballads, while Gascoigne’s was reprinted by John Rhodes in his Countrie Man’s Comfort (1588). ­ Gascoigne tells us that there was music for his lullaby, and an interesting candidate would be a lullaby piece, found once again in Joseph Palmer’s manuscript, entitled ‘My little lamb’. Only bass and treble parts are given, and infuriatingly, someone has carefully crossed out all the lyrics, but the words ‘sing lullaby baby sing …’ can just be discerned in the final refrain.

134  Christopher Goodwin In form, the melody is strongly reminiscent of a piece in the Mulliner book called ‘I smile to see how you devise’ which adds further weight to a date in the early 1560s for the song. Gascoigne’s lullaby, and the later texts, fit the music perfectly, though one can say no more than this.33 “Gascoignes good nyghte” (65) It seems fitting to close with ‘Gascoignes good nyghte’ ( p. 288). There is no suggestion that the music Gascoigne had in mind can specifically be identified, but there are settings of cognates and his probable exemplar. The conceit of the poem goes back to the Golden Verses of Pythagoras: ‘Let not sleep e’er close thy tired eyes, without thy ask thyself: what have I omitted and what done?’34 An English text on this theme appears in BL Add. MS 15233, an oblong quarto manuscript containing organ music, Redford’s ‘Play of Wit and Science’, and lyric verse; which seems to have been in use at St Paul’s school in the 1550s. A few years ago, the present author in collaboration with Byrd’s biographer John Harley, concocted the suggestion that the ‘SB’ monogram on the cover of the manuscript might be Symond Byrd, a choirboy at St Pauls, and brother of the famous composer.35 This would explain perfectly a number of concordances and coincidences, not least that Byrd, in his 1611 setting of ‘Let not the sluggish sleep’ preserves the eccentric scansion of the manuscript text, wherein the opening verse is in a different metre from the subsequent ones: Let not the sluggish sleape Close up thy waking eye, Until with judgment deepe Thy daylie deedes thou trie. He which one sinne in conscience kepes, When hee to quite goes, More venterous is then that sleeps With twentie mortall fooes. A more rational scansion is found in a Scottish source,36 though with a melody, which seeming to quote the opening of a song by Dowland’s ‘If floods of tears’ (published in 1600) cannot be from Gascoigne’s time: Let not, I say, the sluggish sleep Close up thy waking eye Untill that thou with judgement deep Thy dayly deeds do try. The opening of Gascoigne’s text is a free meditation on this theme; his debt to his exemplar becomes clear later in the poem from around line 27.

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The text in Add MS 15233 has verses 5 and 6 as follows: My bedd is like the grave so coulde, And sleape which shuts mine eye Resemble death: clothes which me folde, Declare the moulde so drie. The friskinge fleas resemble well The wringlinge worme to me, Which with me in the grave shall dwell, Wheare I no light shall see. The cognate passage in Gascoigne’s text reads: My bed it self is lyke the grave, my sheetes the winding sheete, My clothes the moulde which I must have to cover me most meet: The hungrie fleas which friske so fresh, to worms I can compare, Which greedily shall gnaw my flesh, and leave the bones ful bare. (p. 289, ll. 27–30) Were it not for the metrical irregularity in Byrd’s text, we might sing Gascoigne’s verse to his music and perhaps even be tempted to speculate that it was the music Gascoigne intended. But could Gascoigne at least have heard Byrd’s song? John Harley suggests that it is a late work, because it appears for the first time only in Byrd’s Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets (1611). If BL Add. MS 15233 was indeed the very source of Byrd’s text, this might have passed to William on Symond’s death in 1579. On the other hand, pen trials in the MS include the names Ferdinando Heybourne, a fellow musician, and Anne Chandler, whom Heybourne married in 1592, suggesting that it had passed into their ownership long before 1611, and that Byrd had copied out the text of ‘Let not sluggish sleep’ and written his music for it at a rather earlier date. Perhaps if Symond actually shared his library with his brother, the music may even have been composed in Gascoigne’s lifetime. In conclusion, we will never be sure which ‘verie sweets notes adapted’ Gascoigne was referring to in A Hundreth, but we can state with certainty that in case of at least some of his verses, such as the ‘The Partridge in the pretie Merlines foote’ or the ‘Libell of Divorce’, that musically educated Elizabethans will have spotted Gascoigne’s literary and musical allusions and have been aware that they could sing his verses to the music that they knew, should they so wish. The author, who is Secretary of the Lute Society, and can be contacted via www.lutesociety.org, is happy to supply copies of the music for Gascoigne’s songs.

Notes 1 Gavin Alexander, ‘Gascoigne and Practical Music: Playing Loath to Depart’, Review of English Studies, 67 (2016), 42–61, pp. 44, 51. 2 Alexander, p. 49; Austen, George Gascoigne (esp. pp. 203–12), at p. 208.

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3 Pigman, A Hundreth, p. 289, l. 38.4. 4 For Gascoigne’s literary “firsts”, see Prouty, Gascoigne, p.  284; for his importance as an innovator, see Austen, pp. 6ff. 5 For a discussion of imitatio, analysing its theory and practice in the Renaissance, see G.W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33, no. 1 (Spring 1980), pp. 1–32. 6 See Christopher Goodwin, ed. The Lute Society Booklets no. 11, The Lute in English Renaissance Verse 1500– 1700, An Anthology (Albury: The Lute Society, 2007), pp. 24–45, 48–53. 7 Ian Payne, The Almain in Britain c. 1549–c. 1675, A Dance Manual from Manuscript Sources (Farnham: Ashgate Press, 2003) especially pp. 147–56. 8 Both pieces of music are presented in short score in Payne, op. cit. English cittern music is catalogued in The Lute Society Journal xxi (1979–1981): John Ward ‘Sprightly and Cheerful Music, Notes on the cittern, gittern and guitar in 16th and 17th- c entury England’, while English renaissance lute music is catalogued in the doctoral thesis of Julia Craig-McFeely, ‘English Lute Manuscripts and Scribes 1530– 630. 3 vols. (St Hugh’s College, Oxford, May 1994, unpublished but now available online). Bandora music is catalogued in Lyle Nordstrom, The Bandora: Its Music and Sources (Detroit: Harmonie Park Press, 1992). The Dallis Lute Book, dated 1583, belonged to a student of Trinity College, Cambridge: ‘Tint[er]nel’ is found on p. 223. The latter Tinternel is found in CUL MS Dd. 4.23, ff. 20v–21 and 24, dating from c. 1595, one of the manuscripts associated with Mathew Holmes, praecentor of Christ Church Oxford, from 1588, and for lute, under the name ‘Il nodo di gordio by Mr Holborne’ in CUL MS Dd.2.11, Mathew Holmes’s lute book, at ff. 21v–22 (facsimile edition, ed. Ian Harwood et al., Albury: The Lute Society, 2010) and under the title ‘Flow forth abundant teares’, in Margaret Board’s lute book, formerly in the collection of Robert Spencer, now in the Royal Academy of Music, and in use c. 1620–30 (facsimile: ed. Robert Spencer, Leeds: Boethius 1976), at f. 14. Queen Elizabeth’s lutenist John Johnson (d.1594) made a duet on the piece, known as ‘The Short Almain’ found in another Mathew Holmes lute book, CUL Dd.3.18, at ff. 9v– 10 and in Jane Pickeringe’s lute book, BL MS Egerton 2046, in use c. 1616–50 (facsimile: ed. Robert Spencer, Clarbricken: Boethius, 1985) at ff. 13v–14; see ed. Jan Burgers, John Johnson, Collected Lute Music 2 vols. (Luebeck: Tree Edition 2001). 9 See the entry for ‘Rogero’ in Claude Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1966). 10 See John M. Ward, ‘Music for a Handefull of Pleasant Delites’, Journal of the American Musicological Society (1957), 10.3, pp. 151–80. 11 For lists of settings, see Craig McFeely, op. cit., John Ward, ‘Sprightly and Cheerful’, Simpson, op. cit., and John Ward, Music for Elizabethan Lutes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) esp. p. 100. 12 See Howard Mayer Brown, Instrumental Music Printed before 1600, A Bibliography (Harvard University Press, 1965), listed under ‘Galliard’. 13 See the magnificent new edition Musica Britannica i, The Mulliner Book, ed. John Caldwell (Stainer & Bell, 2011) replacing John Stevens’s 1951 edition, with extensive bibliographies and summary of previous research, which includes reconstructions for four voices of many of the songs found in keyboard score in this source. 14 Ward, ‘Music for a Handefull’, pp. 170–72. 15 Sources of the ‘Venetian’ galliard and its cognates in roughly chronological order are: ‘Venetian galliarde  … finis galliarde Churchyarde’ in the Mulliner Book, ff. 126v–27, from the early 1560s; an untitled textless fragment a3 added

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20 21 22 23 24

25 26

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in MS to the Folger Library’s copy of Fulwel’s Like wil to like (London, c. 1570, printed by Andrew Sabol in ‘A three man song  …’ RN 10 (1957)), ‘Churches galliard’ in the Willoughby lute book, Nottingham University Library Mi LM 16, f. 90v, of c. 1575 (facsimile edition ed. Jeffrey Alexander and Robert Spencer, Clarabricken: Boethius, 1978); ‘Galliarda’ in Emmanuel Adriaensen Pratum Musicum (Antwerp, 1584, and reprinted in 1600) f. 81v (facsimile edition ed. Kwee Him Yong, Buren: Frits Knuf, 1977); [untitled] in the Marsh lute book, Archbishop Marsh’s library MS, Z3.2.13, p.  126, of c. 1595 (facsimile edition ed. Robert Spencer, Clararbicken: Boethius, 1981); ‘the sinckapace galliard’ in TCD MS 408/2, p.  95, of c. 1605 (bound in with William Ballet’s lute book); ‘Galliarde’ in the Vilnius lute book, Vilnius MS 285 MF LXXIX, f. 25, and f. 58, of c. 1600–20; ‘Galiarda’ in the Fabritius lute book, Copenhagen Kongelige Bibliotek MS Thott 841.4, ff. 107–107v, ‘Gaillarde’ in the Thysius lute book, Leiden MS 133.1.63, ff. 31–31v and 35–35v, of c. 1620; ‘Zinkpass’ in the Stobaeus lute book, BL Sloane MS 1021, f. 44, of c. 1635; ‘Churchyards galliard’ in Robert Creighton the elder’s(?) keyboard MS, Paris Res. 1186, f. 100 from the 1630s (modern edition ed. Martha Haas, English Pastime Music 1630–1660, Madison, 1974; with a cognate also found in NY Drexel MS 5609, Sir John Hawkins’s keyboard MS, p. 70); ‘Sinkpays’ in the Wemyss lute book, National Library of Scotland, dep. 314, no. 23. ff. 22v–23, of 1643–44. Gascoigne’s poem, “A straunge passion of another Author”, which begins ‘Amid my Bale I bath in blisse’ (30, p. 243). The music is printed in Musica Britannica, vol. xxii, Consort Songs, ed. Philip Brett (Stainer & Bell, 1967), no. 28. Gascoigne’s poem “He wrote … in prayse of a Gentlewoman” (22, p. 233). John Bartlett’s setting of Gascoigne’s ‘Of all the byrds that I do know’, A Booke of Ayres (London, 1606). https://imslp.org/wiki/Of_All_the_Birds_ (Bartlet%2C_John). Facsimile edition: London: Brian Jordan/Scolar Press, 1980; modern editions from Stainer & Bell in their English Lute-Song series. The author is preparing papers on both BL Add. MS 36526A, with a hypothetical reconstruction of Gascoigne’s ‘I sigh’, and on musical settings of the Paradyse poems, to appear in forthcoming issues of The Lute. Thomas Whytehorn, Songes for three, four and five voyces (London, 1571) modern edition, 3 vols. ed. Robert McQuillan (Moretonhampstead: Antico, n.d) no. 1. Jane Flynn, ‘A Reconsideration of the Mulliner Book (British Library Add. MS 30513): Music Education in Sixteenth- Century England, PhD dissertation, 1993, passim, especially pp. 159–66. Gavin Alexander, op. cit., p. 45. The claim that Gascoigne wrote his own settings is made by Austen in George Gascoigne, pp. 25–26. See Maurice Frost, English& Scottish Psalm  & Hymn Tunes c.1543– 1677 (London, 1953); all the texts from printed sources can be found on the ChadwickHealey Literature Online database; BL Add. MS 15117 has been published in facsimile, ed. E, Bickford Jorgan, English Song 1600– 1675, British Library Manuscripts Part 1 ( New York/London, 1986) Cf. ‘Out of the doungeone deape’ in a fragmentary source, the endpapers to Sidney Sussex, Cambridge MS 118, perhaps connected to a Paradyse-related collection of texts in BL Add. MS 26737; see Lute News 79 (October 2006), pp. 19–24. See notes 4 and 5 above regarding lists of musical sources and other texts set to Rogero: a clear statement of the ground is printed in Ward, Music for Elizabethan Lutes, vol. 1, p. 103. Anonymous mid sixteenth- century setting of Surrey’s ‘Like as the lark’, preserved in John Forbes, Songs and Fancies (Aberdeen, 1682 National

138

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Christopher Goodwin

Library of Scotland website at https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-ofprinted-music/archive/87698765 [Accessed 6th June 2022]. The music is printed, with Surrey’s text, in The Dublin Virginal Manuscript, ed. John Ward (Schott, 1983) and a full list of sources is printed in idem, Music for Elizabethan Lutes, p. 82. At ff. 108v–109v. Cf. Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ or the anonymous and heavily suggestive Henrician song ‘I have been a foster’. Setting of Vaux’s ‘I lothe that I did love’. https://digital.nls.uk/specialcollections-of-printed-music/archive/91370459 [Accessed 6th June 2022]. Ward, Music for Elizabethan Lutes, presents the music and a discussion of it, pp.  114–15, 34, 35, 80, 83. See also Claude Simpson, op. cit., entry for ‘I loathe that I did love’. See Lute News 64 (December 2002), pp. 15–17 and Lute News 73 (April 2005), pp. 27–33 for partial transcriptions, discussion and bibliography. The author’s forthcoming papers, see note 13 above, will include a transcription of the song. Translation of Fabre d’Olivet [1917]. See John Harley, The World of William Byrd, Musicians, Merchants and Magnates (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp.  227–33, and Christopher Goodwin, ‘A few more discoveries in Elizabethan song’, The Lute 44 (2004), pp. 58–59. John Forbes, Cantus, Songs and Fancies (Aberdeen 1662) printed in Musica Britannica, xv, eds. Kenneth Elliott and Helena Mennie Shire, Music of Scotland 1500–1700 (Stainer & Bell, 1957), no. 63.

Gascoigne, Miscellaneity, and Aesthetic Satisfaction Michael Hetherington

When George Gascoigne made his decisive authorial move into the medium of print in 1572, he settled on the bibliographical form of the miscellany as the vehicle for his literary ambitions. Adrian Weiss has speculated that an early version of Gascoigne’s publication project, hatched in collaboration with the publisher, Richard Smith, and Smith’s printer, Henry Bynneman, envisioned a printed edition of his two collaborative dramatic works, Supposes and Jocasta, dating from his time at Gray’s Inn in the m id-1560s.1 Soon, however, this volume evolved into a complex miscellany, presented as the work of multiple authors in the mould of Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes (1557), but marked by greater generic heterogeneity than the popular lyric miscellanies of the time. This chapter will suggest that Gascoigne was a writer particularly attuned to the virtues of miscellaneity; in particular, it will argue that Gascoigne subtly articulated a sophisticated, though implicit, aesthetics, which made the miscellany into an especially compelling and intellectually serious form of the book, a space within which the array of unknown readers which constituted the print-buying public might encounter texts, read them, and judge them.2 The organising conceit of Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, the book as bouquet, was of course nothing new to early modern literature; it playfully extends the implications of the Greek word anthologia, or ‘flower­­ ​ gathering’. Gascoigne’s intense and ludic reliance on this metaphor rests on its capacity to suggest the similarity, commensurability or even near-identity of the intellect and the senses. On the title page, these two apparently distinct categories are collapsed together when the miscellany is described as ‘Yelding sundrie sweete savours […] bothe pleasaunt and profitable to the well smellyng noses of learned Readers’. The intellect implied by the word ‘learned’ is described as acting as if it were a sensing organ; perceiving and understanding are not disjunctive alternatives or sequential stages in a process but parts of one larger cognitive act. The opening letter from the printer to the reader – probably, in fact, written by Gascoigne himself – also

DOI: 10.4324/­­­­­9781003112082-12

140  Michael Hetherington constructs the book as, in part, a site for aesthetic rather than intellectual experience: Now it hath […] a greater commoditie than common poesies have ben accustomed to present, and that is this, you shall not be constreined to smell of the floures therein conteined all at once, neither yet to take them up in such order as they are sorted: But you may take any one flowre by itselfe, and if that smell not so pleasantly as you wold wish, I doubt not yet but you may find some other which may supplie the defects thereof. […] To conclude, the worke is so universall, as either in one place or other, any mans mind may therewith be satisfied. ­­ ­ ​­ 23–24) ­ ​­ ­3 (p. 4, ll. 4–11, This chapter will argue that the concepts of ‘satisfaction’ and ‘commodity’ are both important to and revealing about Gascoigne’s poetic theory and practice. The virtue of ‘commodity’ is one frequently attributed to books in ­sixteenth-century ​­ paratextual matter.4 In Gascoigne’s book, the form of the miscellany or ‘posy’ is held to possess this virtue in abundance because of the aesthetic freedom it permits the tasting, judging reader. That reader is presented as, first and foremost, the owner of an appetite in need of satisfaction. The Latin etymology of ‘satisfaction’ – from satis, ‘enough’, ­ and facere, ‘to do/make’ – is registered in Gascoigne’s emphatically quantitative aesthetic lexis (‘so pleasantly as you wold wish’), and in the related notion that defective aesthetic experience may be perfected by the almost creative agency of the reader in selecting and fashioning his own experience of the physical book in his hands. ‘Commodity’ (that is, ‘the quality of being ‘commodious’; convenience, suitability, fitting utility; commodiousness’, or possibly even a ‘convenient juncture of events; opportunity, occasion’) is therefore as much potential as actual, a quality which comes fully into being only when a particular reader, on the occasion of a particular reading, happens to realise and to take advantage of it.5 The event of ‘satisfaction’ proves the existence of the otherwise latent quality of ‘commodity’. This prefatory letter appears to constitute a remarkable surrender of literary agency from writer to reader, but stresses that that surrender is only made possible by the book’s singular richness – singular in the sense both of its exceptional variety and of its all- encompassing ‘universality’. The intimate relationship between ‘commodity’ and ‘satisfaction’ is not, of course, historically limited to Gascoigne’s Elizabethan cultural moment. The most famous account of the nature of the commodity, articulated by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, closely associates these two concepts: ‘A commodity [Ware] is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies [befriedigt] human wants of some sort or another’.6 Marx describes the nature of the commodity as inherently bound up with the ‘satisfaction’ it yields. The articulation of a theory of satisfaction is not something for which either of these strange bedfellows, Gascoigne or Marx, is primarily known; but both writers recognise something similar in the

Gascoigne and Miscellaneity  141 concept. Gascoigne’s use of the term is a window into his aesthetics; specifically, it can inform our sense of the way in which the presentation of his lyric, dramatic and prose writings in the form of a miscellany affects those aesthetics. This chapter explores the ways in which Gascoigne’s creative interaction with the terminology and imaginative affordances of the miscellany helped him towards a sophisticated understanding of the process of literary cognition, of how the poetic work of art is received by a reader and how different readers might react differently to it. The word ‘satisfaction’ plays a role in other works by Gascoigne, particularly when he reflects on the dynamics of the act of communication. It finds a place, for instance, in Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes of Instruction on the Making of Verse, a text which is presented as fulfilling a debt to its recipient, Eduardo Donati (who may be a fictional figure). In writing Certayne Notes of Instruction, Gascoigne tells Donati, ‘I covet […] to satisfie you particularly’, meaning that he will not attempt to produce a comprehensive and methodical poetics but a series of notes tailored to Donati’s particular needs (p. 455). This conveys one important nuance in Gascoigne’s use of ‘satisfaction’: it is something experienced by an individual, something most easily achieved when writing to and for a particular person. This is also seen in the dedication of Gascoigne’s Droomme of Doomes Day (1576) to the Earl of Bedford: if I shuld presume (in this epistle dedicatorie) to blasonne and set forth eyther your just desertes in generalitie, or your exceeding favour and bountie towardes me in perticularitie, I might […] offend your honorable eares (which are seldome seene willing to harken unto your owne prayses) […]. Let it then please your honor to rest throughly satisfied with this my simple acknowledging of your great goodnes.7 Once again, communication is understood as a process strategically fitted to its recipient, with ‘satisfaction’ as its ultimate aim. Similarly, in the letter of uncertain provenance which ends The Droomme, from ‘I.B.’ to ‘G.P.’, I.B. writes that ‘although I have not satisfied my self in the argument, yet have I gone about to satisfie your affection’.8 In both the Certayne Notes and The Droomme, there is a hint of worry or defensiveness: Gascoigne ‘covets’ Donati’s satisfaction, implying that this is not something that will simply follow from the mere attempt to communicate but must be actively achieved, and he highlights the work that goes into it. In the second of the manuscript elegies of The Grief of Joye, presented to the Queen in 1576, Gascoigne proudly notes that ‘my Muse, hathe quite her selfe so well, / And satisfied (w ­ th Reason) everie Dame’.9 As in the previous instances, ‘satisfaction’ occurs when an attempt to communicate works, a linguistic encounter leaves both parties happy, but Gascoigne leaves open a certain ambiguity about the actual source of that satisfaction, again allowing a note of hesitancy or defensiveness: it is not clear whether Gascoigne means that it is reasonable that every dame should have been satisfied, or that reason itself was the means of that satisfaction.

142  Michael Hetherington In contrast to these examples, the satisfaction described by the opening letter to A Hundreth is largely a matter of aesthetic pleasure, based on the analogy of the flowers’ scent; it has been observed before by critics of Gascoigne’s work that he is intensely concerned, particularly in A Hundreth, with poetic pleasure or ‘delight’.10 Indeed, both the 1573 A Hundreth and the 1575 Posies helped establish an important literary tradition in which later Elizabethan printed miscellanies were framed by paratexts stressing their aesthetic appeal: The Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576), ­ A Handful of ­ Pleasant Delights (1584), Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591), and The Arbor of Amorous Delights (1597) are just a few examples of this. The apparent consistency in these miscellanies’ paratextual strategies masks a wide variety of literary styles and genres: while the Handful is certainly ‘delightful’ in its emphasis on providing modish and above all singable lyrics, The Paradise’s daintiness turns out to consist not in light or amatory verse but in its poems’ strong moral tone and frequent pessimism about worldly things and human relationships. The Paradise took Gascoigne’s and others’ application of a lexis of delight to poetry, and fused it with a slightly earlier English tradition which similarly employed the rich metaphors of miscellaneity, visible in texts like those produced by the Protestant populariser Thomas Becon: A Christmas Bankette Garnyshed With Many Pleasaunt and Deynty Disshes ­ ­ (1542), Dauids Harpe Ful of Mooste Delectable Armony (1542), A Pleasaunt ­ Newe Nosegaye Full of Many Godly and Swete Floures (1542), The Flower of 11 ­ Godly Prayers (1551) and The Pomaunder of Prayer (1561). The pleasure or satisfaction in these, predictably enough, is of the spiritual kind; indeed, they collapse the Horatian dichotomy of pleasure and profit by metaphorically figuring profit as pleasure.12 Becon was instrumental in fashioning for an English readership the kind of metaphors for the book which Gascoigne and his contemporaries would later use. He was, for instance, the first to figure a printed book as a ‘nosegay’; the image would later be used by Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye (1573), published in the same year as Gascoigne’s A Hundreth. It was Gascoigne and his printer-publishers, however, who were the first in English fully to exploit the complex potential of these metaphors of miscellaneity for thinking about pleasurable aesthetic experience. The particular sophistication of Gascoigne’s allusions to poetic pleasure can be made clearer by comparing them with the appeals to the concept of ‘satisfaction’ in other writers on poetics in the period. George Puttenham writes in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) that ‘poesy is a pleasant manner of utterance varying from the ordinary purpose to refresh the mind by the ear’s delight’.13 This focus on sonority places somatic or aesthetic experience at the heart of poetic pleasure (in contradistinction, perhaps, to the stress on the primacy of ‘invention’ in Gascoigne’s Certayne Notes). At various points in The Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham resorts to the terminology of ‘satisfaction’ to describe either mental or aural experience. He claims, for example, that ‘no kind of argument in all the oratory craft doth better

Gascoigne and Miscellaneity  143 persuade and more universally satisfy than example’; that metrical sophistication is to be preferred ‘for the ear’s better satisfaction’; or that ornament […] is of two sorts: one to satisfy and delight the ear only by a goodly outward show set upon the matter with words and speeches smoothly and tunably running; another by certain intendments or sense of such words and speeches inwardly working a stir to the mind.14 Throughout The Arte of English Poesie, Puttenham reiterates this appeal to ‘the ear’ or ‘the mind’ as the twin loci of aesthetic reception, reasoning that ‘the ear is properly but an instrument of conveyance for the mind’, and that well-tuned verse ‘breed[s] no little alteration in man. For to say truly, what else is man but his mind?’15 Puttenham’s tendency to talk in terms ‘the mind’ and ‘the ear’, with a somewhat generalising definite article, always risks a somewhat crude universalising of literary experience. Witness his description of the cognitive effect of the rhetorical trope synecdoche on a reader: if we use such a word (as many times we do) by which we drive the hearer to conceive more, or less, or beyond, or otherwise than the letter expresseth, and it be not by virtue of the former figures metaphor and Abaser, and the rest, the Greeks then call it synecdoche […]. For by a part we are forced to understand the whole16 Puttenham says that this trope demands a certain quick-w ittedness in response; but his lexis of ‘driving’ and ‘forcing’ implies that rhetorical figures have necessary and determinate effects on their recipients. As Raphael Lyne has suggested, there was a strong tendency in early modern rhetorical textbooks to explain tropes by describing the way they arise from and then work on the mind.17 Rhetoricians, in attempting to describe the link between language, affect, and persuasion, depended on a pragmatic sense of normative cognitive response – a need shared by theorists of poetry. Puttenham was not alone in this: William Scott’s newly rediscovered Model of Poesy (1599), for example, uses similarly normative and generalising language in connection with aesthetic satisfaction. Scott argues that even unpleasant ‘affects and passions’ can give rise to a ‘delightful satisfaction’ when they are represented artistically, which reason the philosopher [i.e. Aristotle] inclineth unto when he saith we joy in the works of imitation because we delight to have some express and sensible demonstration or resemblance of what we otherwise know, as in contemplation whereof our understanding is afresh informed and our minds more sufficiently fed with a thorough- digested knowledge. Scott also writes that the purpose of the various kinds of ‘plaintive’ literature, designed to bemoan painful situations, ‘is a satisfaction of ourselves by

144  Michael Hetherington a delight which naturally everyone hath even in the representing and limning these affections to behold them in the image and reflection, though the passions themselves be grievous and dreadful within us’.18 Scott’s observations about naturalness, normativity, and what ‘we’ experience are typical of the philosophical claim to speak for and define common human experience. The modern philosopher Stanley Cavell writes of such claims, and their coercive use of the word ‘we’, that: the philosophical appeal to what we say, and the search for our criteria on the basis of which we say what we say, are claims to community. And the claim to community is always a search for the basis upon which it can or has been established.19 Modern philosophy, in the wake of Kant, has recognised that such claims are particularly fraught in matters of aesthetic response: this lies at the heart of Kant’s important argument that judgements of taste are subjective but are expressed as if they are logically and universally valid.20 Rhetoric and poetics may, in contrast to the modern discipline of philosophical aesthetics, rely on a pragmatic sense of normal cognitive response; but from another angle this normativity looks like a conceptual limitation, a failure to account for human difference, which precludes the possibility of a radically individual aesthetic response.21 This is not, I believe, a limitation which Gascoigne accepts. A Hundreth, as we have seen, advertises its capaciousness and copiousness by assuring us that it is ‘so universall, as either in one place or other, any mans mind may therewith be satisfied’ ( p. 4, l. 24). The phrase ‘any mans mind’ points towards the necessary plurality of readers, a phenomenon which a rhetorical theorist of literature like Puttenham can only intermittently acknowledge. John Kerrigan has highlighted Gascoigne’s awareness of ‘the mixed nature of his audience’, and the acknowledgement by Gascoigne and other early modern authors ‘that readers’ responses could be as various as the readers themselves’.22 To this we might add that such mixture and variety is particularly important in the context of a literary miscellany, in which readerly heterogeneity is mirrored or matched by the heterogeneity of the text. In his prose miscellany of 1579, one H.C. hopes that his ‘diuerse deuises’ will be ‘fitte for this present time, and agreeable with the mindes of moste men’, calling his book The Forrest of Fancy precisely because its multiplicity responds to humankind’s essential variety: So variable are the minds of men (gentle Reader) and so diuerse their opinions, that amongste twenty, it is hard to fynd twaine that agree all in one thing. For commonly that which one man lyketh, another loatheth, that which one man praiseth, another reproueth, that which one desyreth, another disdayneth, and whatsoeuer pleaseth one, doth as much displease another.23

Gascoigne and Miscellaneity  145 The slight trepidation felt by H.C. in publishing his occasional devises is rather more potently felt in a prose anthology by Pedro Mexia translated into English by Thomas Fortescue in 1571, in which we read of the ‘daungers’ to which a writer in print ‘willyngly exposeth hymself, […] so daintie, and so diuers are the iudgementes of menne, so prone to depraue, and contemne the sweate of others’. As it would be for Gascoigne, miscellaneity is a strategy designed to mitigate this danger: bee thankefull to the aucthour, enter into his Foreste, disportyng thee therein, some laune, some range, perchaunce maie please thy indifferent mynde, some walke, or some thyng els, maie lende thee contentation, nothyng I trust shall greue, or annoye thee hedgde therein.24 In another contemporary compilation, by John Grange, a writer influenced by Gascoigne, we find this: I haue brought vnto your Lordshippe a handfull of fragrant floures (though not gathered in Adonis garden) the chiefe whereof are Primeroses and Violettes. Your choyce is not great, yet chuse what likes you best, the worst turne backe againe. For if some may please, and none displease, I shall not onely thinke my time wel spent, and my diligence better imployed, but also my labour and trauell best of al bestowed.25 Grange’s exhortation to a particular reader to ignore material which he finds disagreeable is similar to that found in Gascoigne’s A Hundreth; and of course this paratextual commonplace was, far from being new to the 1570s, a strategy deployed in exemplary fashion by Chaucer in ‘The Miller’s Prologue’: ‘And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere, / Turne over the leef and chese another tale; / […] Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys’.26 At least one of Gascoigne’s near- contemporaries, Abraham Fleming, explicitly described textual variety in terms of satisfaction, creating what he called a plant of pleasure, bearing fourteene seuerall flowers, called by the name of holie Hymnes and spirituall Songs, to reade at thy leasure for thy recreation, and not so much for thy recreation, as for thy profit: which I haue put partlie in rythme, and partlie in prose, for the satisfaction of sundrie Readers desires, some beeing addicted to this, and some delighted in that kind of writing.27 It is therefore clear that the paratextual strategies of Gascoigne’s compilation are part of a much larger phenomenon. However, rather than seeing Gascoigne simply as part of this wider trend, I wish to suggest the innovativeness of his approach to the question of readerly variety, and the relative subtlety of his aesthetic thought.

146  Michael Hetherington Gascoigne’s thought about the issue of aesthetic response and readerly variety was certainly more subtle than that of his two main literary exemplars for the publication of collections of work in various genres by living writers: Barnabe Googe’s Eclogues, Epitaphes, and Sonnets (1563) and George Turberville’s Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (1567). In Turberville’s prefatory matter, we see some of the sensitivity to aesthetic judgement we find in Gascoigne: But if there be any thing herein that maye offend thee, refuse it, reade and pervse the reast with pacience. Let not the misliking of one member procure thee rashlye to condemne the whole. I stand to thy iudgement, I expect thy æquitie. Reade the good, and reiect the euill.28 Whereas Gascoigne in A Hundreth explicitly imagines the different responses of several readers, Turberville addresses one reader as if he were everyman. Turberville’s reader is simultaneously constructed as, on the one hand, rational and objective, and, on the other, a creature of tastes, likes, and dislikes. The bold phrase, ‘I expect thy æquitie’, almost aggressively challenges the reader to be a fair judge, not one prone to the whimsical indulgence of his own predilections. By invoking the legal concept of equity, Turberville alludes to a powerful but deeply contested principle of early modern hermeneutics: for some thinkers, ‘equity’ was a principle of natural justice which could correct the rigidity of the common law; for others, the reliance in the equity-based Court of Chancery on the ‘conscience’ of the Chancellor in deciding cases introduced a radically variable and unstable element which threatened to undermine the doing of justice.29 Turberville appeals to it as if it were a reliable and wholly rational practice, glossing over the complexity and debate which surrounded the term. This complex idea is one which Gascoigne, too, explored in his writing, as we shall see. In Barnabe Googe’s prefatory matter, there is a stronger precedent for Gascoigne’s sense of readerly plurality. Alexander Neville’s prefatory poem says that, now that they have been printed, Googe’s works are open ‘to momish mouths, / reproachful tongues, and vile / Defaming minds’ – a plurality of readers, to be sure, but all hostile. Suggesting that Googe ignore these readers, Neville writes: Submit thyself to persons grave, whose judgement right always By reason ruled doth rightly judge, whom fancies none can charm, Which in the most inconstant brains are chiefly wont to swarm, Whom no desire of filthy gain, whom lucre none can move. From truth to stray. Such men esteem, such, such, embrace and love.30

Gascoigne and Miscellaneity  147 Neville’s emphatic ‘such’ points to a varied readership composed of qualitatively different human minds, understanding reason not as a hermeneutic universal on which the author can rely but as something unevenly distributed. Googe’s letter to William Lovelace conveys his anxieties about publication in similar terms: he writes of his fear of ‘the disdainful minds of a number both scornful and carping correctors’ and ‘the disdainful doom of any offended mind’.31 In contrast, Googe writes amicably of Lovelace’s own ‘friendly ­ mind’.32 These reiterations of the word ‘mind’ emphasise human difference and particularity. Such references chime with those we have seen in H.C. and Mexia, and with Gascoigne’s reference to the satisfaction of ‘any mans mind’; and they contrast strongly with Puttenham’s monolithic common ‘mind’. Googe’s book, like Gascoigne’s, portrays its contents as providing mental satisfaction: the prefatory poem by Laurence Blundeston describes the poems as things to turn to when ‘The mind desires to break from thoughtful den’.33 Googe’s fondness for the word ‘mind’ is shared by Gascoigne, in whose works the words ‘satisfaction’ and ‘mind’ are closely and habitually linked. In The Glasse of Government, Phylopaes tells himself: ‘thy minde is not satisfied, unlesse all thinges might fall out unto thine owne desire’.34 In Gascoigne’s masque of Diana, written for the entertainments at Kenilworth but never performed, the nymph Nichalis wishes that she could, by helping Diana, ‘satisfie an uncontented mind’.35 In Jocasta, Antigone’s request for information on the evolving political situation is answered by Bailo with the words, ‘So noble a desire (O worthy dame) / I muche commende: and briefly as I can, / Will satisfie thy hungry minde herein’ (1.3.136–38) (p. 72). Later in Jocasta, when Creon presses Tyresias for information, the seer replies ‘Then will I satisfie / Thy greedie minde in this’ (3.1.162– 63) (p. 103). Elsewhere in Gascoigne’s work, he frequently remarks on the radical individuality of the ‘minds’ he describes. One of Gascoigne’s favourite proverbs seems to have been ‘quot homines, tot sententiae’: in the Certayne Notes he writes, ‘I pray you consider that Quot homines, tot Sententiae, especially in Poetrie’ (p. 454), and in Master F.J., he deploys the English translation, ‘So many men, so many minds’ (p. 165), when seeking explanations for why F.J. falls for Elinor rather than the apparently more desirable Fraunces. The same English wording is used in The Glasse of Government.36 ‘Mind’ was not, for Gascoigne, as it would be for Puttenham, something we can talk about in general terms, but something necessarily individual and particular. The semantic range of the term sententia, which Gascoigne translates as ‘mind’, is perhaps important here: rooted in the Latin verb sentio, ‘to feel’, the word heavily implies a sensing, perceiving, tasting mind rather than a more purely rational one. It is partly in such lexical choices that Gascoigne’s emphasis on the subjectivity of human experience in general, and aesthetic experience in particular, moves towards something which we might anachronistically call ‘taste’. George Puttenham’s emphasis on a normative human ‘mind’, for all his awareness of aesthetic pleasure, ultimately places faith in reason, in

148  Michael Hetherington a common way of thinking shared by all, which rhetoricians and literary theorists can analyse and describe. Gascoigne is aware of the possibility of such a rational understanding of mind and of reading, but toys with it. The limitations of rationality are displayed in exemplary fashion in a passage which makes yet another use of the ‘quot homines’ proverb: the agon between Polynices and Eteocles in Jocasta (2.1.350–57). ­ ­ ​­ If what to some seemes honest, good and just, Could seeme even so in every doubtfull mind, No darke debate nor quarell could arise: But looke, how many men so many minds, And that, that one man judgeth good and just, Some other deemes as deeply to be wrong. To say the truth (mother) this minde of mine Doth fleete full farre from that farfetch of his. ­­ (p. 38) This speech emphasises the ‘quot homines’ proverb through a repetitive focus on the word ‘mind’, and Eteocles’s strong statement of the idiosyncrasy of his own understanding of the situation. The original Euripidean text which stands behind this passage is not, directly, the source of the ‘quot homines’ proverb, although it does express a similar sentiment: If everyone defined justice and wisdom the same way, there would be no quarrelling or strife among men. As things stand, the only similarity or equality mortals show is in their use of words: the reality to which these refer is not the same.37 Euripides seems, then, to make the even more radical assertion that language provides a specious medium for intersubjective communication that belies the utter idiosyncrasy of human perception. It is unlikely that Gascoigne read Euripides directly, but he would undoubtedly have found this sentiment intriguing if he did. Gascoigne’s source, Lodovico Dolce’s Giocasta, does include the words, ‘Ma quanti huomini son, tante ueggiamo / Esser l’openioni’ (‘but we see that there are as many opinions as there are men’), a version of the ‘quot homines’ proverb.38 It is possible that Dolce may have seen the connection between the Latin proverb (which is taken from Terence’s Phormio) and this passage from Euripides in Erasmus’s Adagia, where the two extracts are said to express the same fundamental idea.39 As I have argued at greater length elsewhere, Act Two, Scene One of Jocasta is intensely concerned with the status of equitable judgement: Eteocles’s deployment of the ‘quot homines’ proverb even deploys a line of argument made against the equity court of Chancery in the 1530s, in a manuscript treatise entitled Replication of a Serjeant at the Laws of England.40 The serjeant, defending the common law courts of King’s Bench and Common

Gascoigne and Miscellaneity  149 Pleas against the creeping jurisdiction of Chancery, finds that equity, with its reliance on the conscience of the judge, is a worryingly unstable and unpredictable principle: ‘divers men, divers conscience’.41 This concern with equity is touched on slightly in Dolce’s Giocasta, but strongly emphasised in Gascoigne’s translation; in making this change of emphasis, Gascoigne can be seen to be thinking about, and profoundly uncertain of, the kinds of rational judgement which men might find in common.42 The debate about equity is closely identified with a potentially even wider inquiry into human normativity and the very possibility of successful communication: if judgement is as personal and perspectival as Eteocles says that it is, it becomes difficult to imagine how an act of communication like writing might ever be truly successful. Herein, I believe, lies an important reason behind the sustained meditation on individual aesthetic experience found in the A Hundreth, its paratexts, and in Gascoigne’s other works. Reflection on what men have in common, and on how they might communicate with each other, is perhaps especially important for a writer moving into print for the first time, as Gascoigne was in 1572/3. As we have seen, Gascoigne often uses the word ‘satisfaction’ to refer to successful communication between individuals, when it is possible to tailor a text to its recipient. If Eduardo Donati, the purported recipient of the Certayne Notes, was in fact a fictional creation, as G. W. Pigman and others have argued, it is notable that Gascoigne should have chosen to present his text in this way: Certayne Notes becomes a specific and occasional act of writing, on which subsequent readers of the printed text merely eavesdrop.43 Similarly, the attempts in A Hundreth to contextualise its texts, describing the occasions on which its poems were composed, imply that literary composition should be thought of as a fundamentally occasional and personal activity. Even Puttenham, for all his totalising reference to ‘the ­ mind’, says in his chapter on decorum that ‘every speech should be to the appetite and delight, or dignity of the hearer, and not for any respect arrogant or undutiful’.44 Puttenham follows the rhetorical tradition in making this statement, just as he does in relying on the normative cognitive effects of literary tropes, two positions which might be seen as being in tension. That rhetorical tradition, however, presents a fundamentally oral sense of what a speech or a poem might be: they are to be delivered to a particular audience on a particular occasion. Gascoigne shares this sense of poetic performance and occasion, but asks a further question which Puttenham does not address: how does one address an unknown reader successfully in print, when the occasion of a poem’s reception can no longer be controlled? The letter from H.W. ( probably another mask for Gascoigne himself) which precedes Master F.J. has something to say about this problem: my […] friend [i.e. G.T.] charged me, that I should use them [i.e. the manuscript poems which became the printed A Hundreth] onely for my owne particular commoditie, and eftsones safely deliver the original copie to

150  Michael Hetherington him againe […]. But the worke (for I thought it worthy to be published) I have entreated my friend A.B. to emprint: as one that thought better to please a number by common commoditie then to feede the humor of any private parson by nedelesse singularitie. (p. 142) ­­ H.W.’s argument for the publication of these works for the common benefit of all playfully appropriates the strong current of sixteenth- century legal, ethical, and political thought which argued for the primacy of the ‘common weal’ over private profit. Indeed, H.W. parrots a line of reasoning strongly identified with the so- called ‘commonwealth men’ or ‘gospellers’ of the 1540s, a group of radical moralists including Bishop Hugh Latimer, John Hales, and Robert Crowley.45 One aspect of their fusion of Erasmian humanism, Protestantism, and social polemic was a critique of what H.W. calls ‘particular commoditie’ and ‘nedelesse singularitie’: if the ploughmen of the country were as negligent in their offices as prelates be, we should not long live, for lack of sustenance. And as it is necessary for to have this ploughing for the sustentation of the body, so must we have also the other for the satisfaction of the soul, or else we cannot live long ghostly. […] [T]here be two kinds of inclosing, to let or hinder both these kinds of ploughing; the one is an inclosing to let or hinder the bodily ploughing, and the other to let or hinder the holidayploughing, the church-ploughing. The bodily ploughing is taken in and inclosed through singular commodity. For what man will let go, or diminish his private commodity for a commonwealth? And who will sustain any damage for the respect of a public commodity? The other plough also no man is diligent to set forward, nor no man will hearken to it.46 This polemical terminology of the 1540s was available to Gascoigne in the 1570s to plunder for literary effect. H.W.’s letter modifies this lexis, shifting the focus from the necessity of bodily and spiritual sustenance towards a sense of ‘commodity’ as something ‘pleasing’. ‘Commodity’ is a complex word with a variable and uncertain ethical weight, caught somewhere in the lexical range between ‘need’ and ‘pleasure’. H.W. exploits this range, slyly inverting what one might assume to be the normative ethical hierarchy of unnecessary ‘pleasing’ and necessary ‘feeding’: here the ‘pleasing’ of many through ‘common commoditie’ is marked as morally preferable to the mere ‘feeding’ of the human appetite, conceived of as being located in the individual human being. The tone here is difficult to judge, appropriating moral discourses in a diffuse and general way which admits of no firm reading. When the printer’s letter says that ‘the well minded man may reape some commoditie out of the most frivolous works’ ( pp.  3– 4), commodity seems like moral edification; when he boasts of the book’s ‘greater commoditie than common poesies have ben accustomed to’ ( p. 142), commodity seems

Gascoigne and Miscellaneity  151 like a marketing strategy; when H.W. speaks out against ‘particular commodity’ and ‘needless singularity’, commodity seems like selfish personal gratification. Gascoigne’s reliance on such terms, as he theorises his own poetics and the reception his works may encounter, is alive to their richness and ambiguity; indeed, I suggest that this complexity is the very reason that he chose them. Satisfaction is something less (and more) than pleasure; it differs, at least, from the disinterested pleasure which Kant would, in the eighteenth century, locate in the free play of the mind in response to aesthetic stimulation.47 Satisfaction is not disinterested: it fulfils a desire and thus depends on an imagined state of dissatisfaction, of deferral, of craving. This echoes the idea found often in Gascoigne’s writing that there is something adversarial, impassioned, and pugnacious about the relationship between reader and author: writing is there to be judged, perhaps by grave and g rey-haired judgers, perhaps by reverend divines; writing is there to be apologised for, to be defended; and to publish it at all, whether in manuscript or in print, is an act of some bravado, most vividly represented in the drawing of a martial Gascoigne kneeling (but hardly in submission) before Elizabeth in the manuscript containing Gascoigne’s French, Italian, and Latin translations of Hemetes the Heremyte.48 Publication is often described, in Gascoigne’s period, as a perilous business; assertions of satisfaction are often anxious, precisely because they raise the possibility of the dissatisfaction of a discerning reader.49 The seriousness of ‘satisfaction’, even literary satisfaction, is underlined by the fact that the word also had grave religious and legal senses, as a term used for the payment of debts or reparations, the doing of penance, and the process of atonement: this is an ethically loaded and potentially emotive term. This lexis was not always used by sixteenth- c entury writers in a sophisticated way. Gascoigne’s near- contemporary and probable imitator Humphrey Gifford is a case in point. His Posie of Gilloflowers (1580) is, like Gascoigne’s A Hundreth, a single-author miscellany of verse and prose; it begins with a selection of translated letters, which is followed by Gifford’s own verse. The poems are dedicated to John Stafford of Bletherwick in Northamptonshire; designed to repay a debt of friendship, they are described as a ‘meanes […] to make manifest my thankfull minde’. As a posy of flowers, the poems are said to possess the qualities of ‘shew’, ‘colour’, ‘sent and odour’. Gifford goes on: Though al the flowers herein contained, carie one name, yet eche of them differs from other, both in colour and sauour, the better to satisfie the diuersitie of eyes that shall view them, and variety of noses that shall smell them.50 This passage, like some of the miscellanies we encountered earlier, suggests some of the influence which we might tentatively ascribe to Gascoigne’s A Hundreth, not just in further popularising the already extant ‘posy’ metaphor,

152  Michael Hetherington but in the emphasis on satisfaction, on the diversity of men’s minds and on the irreducibly personal nature of aesthetic appreciation which this entails. But Gifford is no Gascoigne. Gifford has picked up, from Gascoigne or elsewhere, the link between satisfaction and individual taste; but in Gifford’s hands, this is merely the reiteration of a commonplace. My contention has been that Gascoigne was doing something more than this – that he was engaging in what we might now call aesthetic speculations. As I have said, Gascoigne’s language of ‘satisfaction’ is distinct from a post- eighteenth- c entury language of aesthetic pleasure; it need hardly be pointed out that Gascoigne cannot be described as having thought philosophically about aesthetics because he had no ‘philosophical aesthetics’ – no one did until, in 1735, Alexander Baumgarten inaugurated (and named) the discipline to which Kant, Hegel, and later thinkers lent real philosophical weight. Gascoigne did not even have access to the science of ‘taste’ sought after by British thinkers of the eighteenth century, like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Burke. The absence, in the sixteenth century, of a defined field in which people talked and thought about the nature of the beautiful and aesthetic experience can cause problems for modern scholars who would like to analyse sixteenth- century culture in so- called ‘actors’ terms’.51 The proto-aesthetic terminology, normally derived from the art of rhetoric, visible in sixteenth- c entury texts  – the lexis of delight, pleasure, wonder, satisfaction  – seems to denote emotional responses to art which are only historically recoverable in the crudest and most limited of ways. These are terms for which it can be difficult to identify distinct periodic identities, unlike, perhaps, the complex political concepts recovered by intellectual historians like Quentin Skinner and John Pocock; these are phenomena at once so complex and so simple as to challenge us to believe in their straightforward historical immutability.52 Surely, we might ask, sixteenth- c entury delight was not qualitatively different from twenty-first- c entury delight? What nuances does the survival over centuries of a capacious word like ‘delight’ or ‘satisfaction’ obscure? Kantian aesthetics, in the eighteenth century, would distinguish between judgements about the beautiful and judgements about the agreeable or pleasant. In judgements of taste about things we find merely agreeable (for which Kant uses the example of Canary wine), we are happy to acknowledge that tastes vary: It would be folly to dispute the judgment of another that is different from our own in such a matter, with the aim of condemning it as incorrect, as if it were logically opposed to our own; thus with regard to the agreeable, the principle [that] Everyone has his own taste (of the senses) is valid.53 It will be immediately apparent that this is the very argument made in the preface to A Hundreth: to each his own. Gascoigne did not have access to

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a philosophy which made such a precise distinction between judgements of beauty and judgements of agreeableness; in the absence of such a philosophy, Gascoigne deployed a rich and complex vocabulary which went some way towards describing the nature of the satisfaction a text can give to a variety of readers, and the curious relationship between reader and writer which this entails. In attributing to Gascoigne a sophisticated awareness of the aesthetic issues raised by print publication, I am slightly modifying earlier understandings of Gascoigne’s attitude towards print. Gillian Austen has written, for instance, that ‘for all his enthusiasm for print, Gascoigne was not particularly interested in a mass readership: print was simply another means (like works in manuscript or performance) to attract the attention of those in positions of influence’.54 This is, I think, largely true; but I hope to have shown that Gascoigne’s references to the possibility of ‘mass readership’ in A Hundreth’s paratexts fit into a wider and rather philosophical preoccupation with the nature and variability of human judgement. In so doing, I hope to have contributed further to the rehabilitation of Gascoigne’s reputation which has gathered pace in recent years, by suggesting that he should be taken more seriously as a reflective, thinking writer. For in comparison with contemporaries like Googe and Gifford, Gascoigne had a more particular, more situated, and more material sense of what it is to read and be satisfied. Gascoigne locates literary experience both in individual minds and in the situations in which those minds find themselves. The printer’s letter is keen to defend A Hundreth from ‘any such misliking, as the graver sort of greyheared judgers might (perhaps) conceive’ of it; it comments, further, that ‘nothing is so well handled now adayes, but that some malicious minds may  […] take occasion to mislike it’, but also that ‘the well minded man may reap some commodity out of the most frivolous works’; and the letter defends its own argument by saying, ‘thus much I have thought good to say in excuse of some savours, which may perchance smell unpleasantly to some noses, in some part of this poeticall poesie’ (pp.  3– 4 (emphasis mine). Gascoigne had a highly sophisticated awareness of the contingencies which beset the reading of literature – especially, perhaps, the reading of a miscellany. As he moved into print in 1572/73, the form of the miscellany, its generic variety, the sheer plurality of possibilities it offers for reading, and the hap and occasion which beset a reader while leafing through it, were foremost in his mind as he pondered how ‘to please a number by common commoditie’. Gascoigne’s nuanced answer to this question did not attempt to totalise his print readership, but remained instead boldly committed to the radical subjectivity of aesthetic experience.

Notes 1 Adrian Weiss, ‘Shared Printing, Printer’s Copy, and the Text(s) of Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres’, Studies in Bibliography, 45 (1992), 72–105.

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2 For other views on A Hundreth’s relationship with the tradition of manuscript and printed miscellanies, and of Gascoigne’s intentions in publishing the volume, see Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 68–74; Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 11–13, 65–66; Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 243–50. 3 On Gascoigne’s authorship of the printer’s letter, see Pigman, p. lvi. 4 See, for example, the letter ‘To the Curteous Reader’, in Aelian, A Registre Of Hystories, tr. Abraham Fleming (London: Henry Middleton for Thomas Woodcock, 1576), sig. ¶3v: Open this base boxe, and lifte vp the lydd of this course casket, wherin so riche and costly a Iuell is inclosed, wey yt, and weare it, the commodity issuing from the same is singular, so is the delight redundant and plentifull.

5 6

7 8

9 10

11

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13 14

For further examples from contemporary writers and texts with similarities or links to Gascoigne, see Thomas Blundeville, The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories (London: William Seres, 1574), sig. A1r; Nicholas Breton, A Floorish upon Fancie (London: William How for Richard Jones, 1577), sig. A3r; Thomas Churchyard, The Firste Parte of Churchyardes Chippes (London: Thomas Marsh, 1575), sig. *3r; Abraham Fleming (ed.), A Panoplie of Epistles (London: Henry Middleton for Ralph Newberry, 1576), sig. ¶5r; George Whetstone, The Rocke of Regard (London: Henry Middleton for Robert Waley, 1576), sig. ¶2r. OED s.v. ‘commodity, n.’, 1, 4. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol.1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, tr. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling ( New York, NY: International Publishers, 1967), p. 43; for the German text, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, 43 vols (Berlin: Dietz, 1956–90), XXIII, p. 49. Cunliffe, p. 211. Droomme of Doomesday, in Cunliffe, p. 449. The moral texts of the Droomme make occasional use of the term ‘satisfaction’ in various moral senses, e.g. in referring to the insatiability of the covetous man, or to the true satisfaction that comes from leading a godly life: ‘For it is unpossible that a man doe both injoy the present delights and the joyes to come. It is unpossible both heere to fyll the paunche, and there to satisfie the mynde’ ( p. 406). The Grief of Joye, in Cunliffe, p. 539. On ‘delight’ in Gascoigne, see Matthew Zarnowiecki, ‘“Nedelesse Singularitie”: George Gascoigne’s Strategies for Preserving Lyric Delight’, in his Fair Copies: Reproducing the English Lyric from Tottel to Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 47–70. Even in works that do not adopt this miscellany terminology, Becon favours metaphorical titles that figure the book as an object: e.g. The Castell of Comforte (London: John Day and William Seres, 1549) and The Iewel of Ioye (London: John Day and William Seres, 1550). His titles became more matter- of-fact and polemical during the reign of Queen Mary, when Becon published abroad. See Horace, Ars poetica, ll. 333–34, in Satires. Epistles. Ars poetica, ed. and tr. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 478. It is often forgotten that Horace describes delight and edification as two alternative functions of poetry rather than as necessarily coordinated goals. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 113. Puttenham, ed. cit., pp. 128, 203, 227.

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15 Puttenham, ed. cit., p. 281. 16 Puttenham, ed. cit., p. 270. 17 Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 68–99. 18 William Scott, The Model of Poesy, ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 13, 28. 19 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 20. 20 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, tr. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 96–101. 21 I am of course simplifying the arguments of both Puttenham and Kant here for reasons of space, but I hope that the comparison will have some heuristic value. 22 John Kerrigan, ‘The Editor as Reader: Constructing Renaissance Texts’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 112, 114. 23 H.C., The Forrest of Fancy (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1579), sig. A4r. 24 Pedro Mexia, The Foreste or Collection of Histories, tr. Thomas Fortescue (London: John Kingston for William Jones, 1571), sigs. a4v–b1r. 25 John Grange, The Golden Aphroditis (London: Henry Bynneman, 1577), sig. A3r. See also sig. S4v: ‘as I haue brought you into my rude Garden, so (turnyng the key) here will I leaue you, to choose what flowers shall like you beste’. On Grange’s debts to Gascoigne, see Katharine Wilson, Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 37– 43. 26 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, 1.3176–81, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), p. 67. 27 Abraham Fleming, The Diamond of Deuotion (London: Henry Denham, 1581), sigs. L11r–v. 28 George Turberville, ‘To the Reader’, in Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (London: Henry Denham, 1567), sig. *5v. 29 For a summary of these debates, see Sir John Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, Volume VI: 1483– 1558 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 40–49; and Dennis Klinck, Conscience, Equity and the Court of Chancery in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 30 Barnabe Googe, Eclogues, Epitaphes, and Sonnets, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. 35. 31 Googe, p. 38. 32 Googe, p. 39. 33 Googe, p. 40. 34 The Glasse of Government, in Cunliffe, p. 83. 35 The Princely Pleasures, in Cunliffe, p. 113. 36 The Glasse of Government, in Cunliffe, p. 34. 37 Euripides, Phoenissae, ll.  499–502, in Helen. Phoenician Women. Orestes, tr. David Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 261– 63. 38 Lodovico Dolce, Giocasta (Venice: Sons of Aldus Manutius, 1549), sig. C2v. 39 Desiderius Erasmus, Adages I.i.1 to I.v.100, tr. Margaret Mann Phillips, ed. R.A.B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), pp. 240– 41. 40 See my ‘Gascoigne’s Accidents: Contingency, Skill, and the Logic of Writing’, English Literary Renaissance 46 (2016), 1–31 (pp. 19–21). 41 The Replication of a Serjeant at the Laws of England, in Christopher St. German on Chancery and Statute, ed. John Guy (London: Selden Society, 1985), p. 101. 42 Gascoigne would have been exposed to such debates during his time at Gray’s Inn, the institution for which Jocasta and Supposes were originally produced

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in 1566. For an analysis of the plays which emphasises their Inns context, see Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 189–202. On Donati, see Pigman, p. 731. Puttenham, p. 351. On the dubious validity of the term ‘commonwealth men’ as a representing a real historical party with a coherent set of ideas, see Geoffrey Elton, ‘Reform and the “commonwealth-men” of Edward VI’s Reign’, in The English Commonwealth 1547– 1640: Essays in Politics and Society, ed. Peter Clark, Alan G.R. Smith, and Nicholas Tyacke (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979), pp. 23–38. See also Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 140–76. Hugh Latimer, Sermons, ed. George Elwes Corrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), pp. 65–66 (my emphasis). Kant, pp. 90–91. Cunliffe, p. 472. Witness, for instance, this nuanced and careful passage from the pen of Abraham Fleming, the editor of the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles in 1587: Howbeit perfected as it is, though not with exquisit curiousnes to please euerie fickle fansie, yet according to the proportion of skill vouchsafed of God to the dealers therein (men of commendable diligence though not of deepest iudgement) somewhat to satisfie the well affected and indifferent mind, the same is now come abrode, yeelding matter no lesse manifold than the spring dooth floures, and the same maruellous frutefull, if they haue their right vse and due application.

50 51

52

53 54

Raphael Holinshed et al., The Chronicles of England […] Newlie Amended and Inlarged (London: John Harrison, George Bishop, Rafe Newberry, Henry Denham and Thomas Woodcock, 1587), sig. 7O3v. Humphrey Gifford, A Posie of Gilloflowers (London: Thomas Dawson for John Perin, 1580), sig. I1r. In referring to ‘actors’ terms’, I am of course gesturing towards historiographical arguments made most prominently by the so- called ‘Cambridge School’ (whose main members are Quentin Skinner, John Pocock and John Dunn), and in particular to their argument that historians should not attribute to historical figures concepts which were not available in the language and thought of their own time. Part of the task of the scholar, in their view, is to write the history of ideas in terms which previous historical agents would have recognised. See, inter alia, Quentin Skinner’s seminal article, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8.1 (1969), 3–53. However, for an attempt to describe a conceptual framework for aesthetic pleasure using sixteenth- century ‘actors’ terms’, see David Cast, The Delight of Art: Giorgio Vasari and the Traditions of Humanist Discourse (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). Cast argues that Vasari appropriated a language of delight derived from rhetoric and elsewhere to describe what we would now call ‘aesthetic experience’, in full recognition of the historical difficulties this entails, ‘For even if we admit the possibility of any such engagement with the arts […] we may feel that it is so private and subjective a response as to be beyond the public narratives of history’ ( p. xi). Kant, p. 97. Austen, George Gascoigne, p. 5.

Gascoigne the ­soldier-poet ​­ Rhetoric, representation, and reality D. J. B. Trim

George Gascoigne is known for more than his writings on war, but they comprise some of his longest, most moving, most challenging, and most analysed works. His martial poetry is difficult to read – but then that is true of all his writings. However, scholars have, I suggest, been more inclined to take his martial poetics at face value than they have other types of Gascoigne’s writing. To be sure, they are well aware of and sensitive to Gascoigne’s fascination with ‘poses’, which is both literally and conceptually present at least from his translation of Supposes in 1566 and may well be a third punning element in his love of titles that pun ‘poesy’ and ‘posy’.1 His almost compulsive adoption of multiple ‘masks and personae’ is present in his pictorial, as well as literary, self- depictions.2 Many critics bear these complexities in mind when reading Gascoigne’s martial poetics, recognising that, as with most of his verse, there is more going on than initially meets the eye. Nevertheless, there is and always has been something of a critical consensus about Gascoigne’s writing on war – that he was embittered by his experience of it and by the fact that its reality was so sharply at odds with his idealised picture of warfare, gained from traditional, chivalric literature; and that his writing on war is therefore hostile to the chivalric ethos and opposed to the martial poetics of most late-medieval and early modern writers. This essay argues a different position, based on biography. It is worth reminding ourselves how little we actually know for certain about George Gascoigne’s early life and how much of the evidence comes from his own selfpresentation(s). It is widely agreed, for example, that he was an avid jouster and tourneyer. Yet, almost all the evidence for Gascoigne’s participation in tournaments is from his own writings. There are some other sources that verify his self-presentation as an experienced and expert jouster – but there is not the wealth of evidence that exists for, say, Sidney’s jousting. Furthermore, surprisingly little has been published on Gascoigne’s service in the Netherlands. This has perhaps been masked by the rich narratives of 1572 and 1573 that are found in Prouty’s biography,3 yet while these were constructed entirely from other contemporary sources, especially the Calendar of State Papers Foreign and Roger Williams’s autobiographical narrative,

DOI: 10.4324/­­­­­9781003112082-​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­​­13

158  D. J. B. Trim Actions of the Lowe Countries,4 none of them mention Gascoigne by name; apparently apposite quotations from Gascoigne’s poems are plugged in as Prouty thinks appropriate – but appropriateness is in the eye of the beholder. Indeed, given that Gascoigne’s self-presentations are multiple, multilayered, and sometimes misleading (and even apparently sometimes deliberately so), how much do we really know about his martial exploits, whether on the tiltyard or the battlefield? Even though we know we cannot take him at his word, very often we do so – and necessarily so, for want of evidence. Yet, it is very desirable to be able to shine some light from external sources onto Gascoigne’s career. This is particularly true of his military career, because the picture that he paints for us is actually more conflicted than the existing scholarly consensus recognises.5 And as it happens, external sources for Gascoigne’s military career do exist. Thus, while we are normally obliged to use Gascoigne’s writing to obtain knowledge of his life, his martial service provides an instance where his life potentially affords some insights into his writing. This essay seeks to integrate literary and documentary evidence; it uses Gascoigne’s own published texts, but also draws on archival material, to help produce a better sense of his actual military career, then uses this to cast light on his martial poetry. The essay draws on research on the English involvement in the early Dutch Revolt.6 While much about Gascoigne’s military career remains unknown or uncertain, his repeated service with the Prince of Orange and the Dutch rebels (as a gentleman volunteer in Zeeland in 1572 and as a captain in Holland in 1573 and 1574), and his probable service with Henry of Condé in the fifth war of religion in France (1576), all suggest, not a man whose illusions were shattered, but rather a man committed, and not just before he encountered the reality of warfare, to the martial ethos – and to the Protestant Cause. Gascoigne grew up with a martial ethos. During the sixteenth century, some of the Tudor gentry gradually turned away from the traditional martial ethos of their caste, focusing on ‘the robe’ rather than ‘the sword’, but the degree to which this was true has been overstated by scholars, and it evidently was not the case with Sir John Gascoigne, George’s father, even though Sir John’s own father had been Cardinal Wolsey’s Comptroller of the Household. Armed affinities remained reasonably common among the Tudor gentry, as well as nobility, despite strict Tudor laws on retaining: that is, the common late-medieval practice in which nobles and wealthy gentlemen maintained as part their wider household a body of armed men (a ‘retinue’), paying its members (‘retainers’) in cash or kind, and often providing them with a common livery. The prevalence of such small private armies had been a factor in the chronic civil wars of the late fifteenth century and the Tudors regulated the practice of retaining, stringently limiting both its incidence and the numbers of retainers in any retinue.7 However, there was no attempt to restrict access to arms and many martially minded gentlemen, as well as nobles, could easily assemble sizeable forces of armed

Gascoigne the soldier-poet  159 men. Indeed, the Tudor government, far from objecting to this, relied on it for assembling armies. Only in the second half of the century were armies raised largely by conscription; and even under Elizabeth, English forces were raised for service in the Netherlands and France, and for self- defence against the Armada, by mobilising the households, servants, tenants, clients, and ‘well-willers’ of members of the nobility and gentry.8 Sir John Gascoigne was one whose (admittedly small) affinity had a military capability. He had mustered a contingent that served under Henry VIII in France in 1544 and this was not a one-off, for we know that in 1557, angered at an incursion into his lands by a hunting party from a neighbouring gentleman’s estate, Sir John gathered some twenty of his servants and yeomen tenants, armed with swords, shields, and halberds, and led them in an attack on the offending hunting party. George took part in this skirmish.9 In November 1561, he wed Elizabeth Breton (née ­ Bacon), but another gentleman, Edward Boyes, disputed the marriage, claiming to already be Elizabeth’s husband, leading to a protracted series of lawsuits.10 Almost a year after the wedding, figurative hostility boiled over into actual violence: in September 1562, George led his father’s armed men against Boyes’s followers in a ‘grett fray’ on the streets of London in which ‘dyvers wher hurtt’.11 George and the Gascoigne affinity were in action again in an affray with members of Lord Latimer’s affinity in 1564.12 In addition to this is the fascination with the tilt that clearly emerges from a range of his writings and indicates that Gascoigne was a regular participant in tourneys. Furthermore, at some point before 1572, Gascoigne probably killed a man. The evidence for this is the notorious anonymous accusation to the Privy Council ‘Against Georg Gascoyne’, which characterised him as ‘a notorious Ruffiane’ and ‘noted as well for Manslaughter as for other greate crymes’.13 While one must be cautious in accepting anything in this hostile and unsigned indictment, the claim that he was well known for his ruffianly qualities and for ‘manslaughter’ suggests that he did have something of a reputation for violent conduct. Thus, from at least the age of 20, George Gascoigne was no stranger to the use of arms, whether in sport or in earnest. All this suggests that, in 1572, Gascoigne, by then in his early 30s, fully bought into the chivalric ethos that motivated many other sixteenth- century 14 ­soldier-poets. ​­ There is further indirect evidence for this, in his circle of friends. His poetic ‘councell’ to Bartholomew Withypoll, a poem written (I suggest) in the late spring of 1572 before the second Dutch revolt broke out, reveals that one of his close friends was William Morgan of Pencoed.15 The significance of this seems to have been missed. William Morgan was a veteran of the second and third French wars of religion. In the spring of 1572, he raised a small troop of horse that he led to France to join the army Louis of Nassau (younger brother of William of Orange, leader of the Dutch revolt against Spain) led in an invasion of the southern Netherlands from northern France in May, after uprisings in the North Sea ports of Brielle and Flushing.16

160  D. J. B. Trim Some of Gascoigne’s soldier friendships, such as that with Rowland Yorke, were probably made during his service in the Netherlands in 1572–73, rather than before, but his friendships with John Zouche and Ned Denny (who, like Yorke, are mentioned at the end of the verse-narrative ‘Gascoignes voyage into Hollande’), probably pre- date Gascoigne’s Dutch experience.17 Zouche, who Gascoigne thought a model lieutenant colonel,18 had been a captain in campaigns in Scotland (1560), France (1562– 63) and against the northern rebels (1569) (and later served in the army in Ireland into the 1580s).19 He was related to Richard, 9th Baron Zouche, father-in-law of Arthur, 14th Baron Grey of Wilton, Gascoigne’s ‘first … patron’.20 Edward Denny served as a captain in Ireland, was a friend of other men of letters, including Sidney, and his brother, Sir Henry Denny, married Honora Grey, Lord Grey of Wilton’s sister.21 Grey and Gascoigne knew each other before Gascoigne went to Holland in 1572; as Austen points out, the two were at Gray’s Inn together in 1555, while the poem, ‘Gascoignes wodmanship’, composed in 1572–73 in a bid for Grey’s patronage, implies a pre- existing connection.22 If Gascoigne was indeed part of Grey’s circle, even if on its outer rim, then he may well have known Thomas Churchyard, veteran soldier and prolific author, who had long-standing patronage connections to the 13th and 14th barons.23 All this is significant because it suggests that Gascoigne went to Holland in 1572 not because he was financially embarrassed, but because he wanted to be a soldier – a desire produced equally by his upbringing, his temperament, and his circle of friends. Like other Tudor soldier-poets, he emphasised that there was a critical difference between actual warfare, on the one hand, and, on the other, the use of arms to maintain a man’s honour or that of his family, whether in a tournament, a duel, or an affray with neighbours. In perhaps his best-known martial poem, ‘The fruites of Warre’, Gascoigne stresses that he knows the ‘difference twixt broyles and bloudie warres’ (stz. 94).24 Elsewhere in his poetry he mocked the ‘vayne avayle’ of men whose triumphs were won only in the tiltyard, contemptuously warning that it Should not allure thy flytting mind to feeld Where sturdie Steedes in depth of daungers roon, With guts wel gnawen by clappes that Cannons yeeld.25 While this attitude to men who had not been in battle was probably one of ‘the fruites of Warre’ for Gascoigne, participation in war was widely acknowledged among the sixteenth- century English gentry and nobility to be the chivalric, aristocratic, and masculine apogee. Jousting and hunting, while sports, were both seen as martial sports. However, in the words of a manual on honour, jousting was ‘stouter and manlier’ and more ‘stately and warlike’ than hunting – the joust was thus a better source of an honourable reputation.26 The use of arms in potentially deadly combat, whether in the newly imported Continental fashion of the

Gascoigne the soldier-poet  161 duel, or in the more traditional English brawl and affray (memorably captured by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet), rivalled jousting (which could result in mortal injuries, but rarely did) as a source of honour. All of these activities were part and parcel of the gentleman’s vocation, but were ideally seen as preparations for that vocation’s ultimate expression, on the field of battle or in a siege. Active participation in warfare was the ultimate source of aristocratic and masculine honour. It is possible that such attitudes were changing in the sixteenth century, but they still widely obtained in Tudor England.27 A man of Gascoigne’s experiences and the temperament revealed by his apparent fascination with jousting and his evident reputation (even if it was exaggerated) for violence, and surrounded by men who had been to war, would very probably have keenly felt the desirability, even necessity, of experience as a soldier, not just a jouster. Thus, when English volunteers were raised with the connivance of the Privy Council and sent to Flushing, in the Dutch province of Zeeland, to aid the Dutch uprising of 1572, it is not surprising that Gascoigne was among them. Traditionally, the explanations given have revolved around financial embarrassment or crisis, and money may well have played a part in the decision since Gascoigne’s lifestyle in the 1560s had apparently been extravagant. However, it must be recalled, firstly, that his father, Sir John, had died in April 1568; from the summer of 1569, George had estates, with a yearly value totalling £195 – not a vast sum, but not inconsiderable. The same year he obtained the wardship of his wife’s son by an earlier marriage, with an annuity from the property held in his stepson’s name.28 It is true that George had been forced to fight legal battles over his father’s property, both with Sir John, before the latter’s death, and with his younger brother, also John.29 But it is likely that Gascoigne was not as badly off as has sometimes been thought. In any event, personal enrichment is a more credible motivation for him in 1573 and 1574, when he had command of a company, than in 1572, when he served as a gentleman volunteer and would have received negligible pay. This does not mean that money was no part of his motivation, for it was widely expected that soldiers would make money from plunder, rather than from wages – this was sanctioned by the chivalric ethos, so long as certain lines were not crossed (such as the plundering of gentlewomen or of churches, though Protestant Englishmen often did not accept Catholic churches as sacrosanct). It is likely that Gascoigne’s decision to join the English regiment was taken at a late date; as we have seen, to judge from his poem to Withypoll, earlier in the year he expected to be on the Continent, but as a tourist rather than a soldier.30 Gascoigne was distantly related to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, commander of the English regiment in Zeeland that summer, and his later introductory epistle to Gilbert’s A Discourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia may be indicative of a previous patronage connection, in 1572.31 Thus, when Gilbert was secretly commissioned in May by the Privy Council to raise a regiment for service in Zeeland, Gascoigne

162  D. J. B. Trim was unexpectedly afforded the perfect opportunity to obtain a gentleman volunteer’s place in a combat force. If he did not obtain it directly from Gilbert, he could have got it through Grey of Wilton’s patronage, for there is evidence of leading military patrons placing their clients with Gilbert in the late spring of 1572.32 Either way, Gascoigne had the chance to prove himself in the ultimate aristocratic and masculine theatre, that of war. His service in and around Flushing in 1572 has never been in doubt. There is a reference to what ‘flussing fraies’ have ‘taught him’ about ‘the warres’, in the poem ‘Gascoignes Wodmanship’ (72, lines 67– 68), which as noted above is thought to have been written in the winter of 1572–73; there are a few specific details in ‘The fruites of Warre’, which, though written after his final return from the Netherlands in late 1574, includes brief recollections of events in 1572 (P28, stzs. 95–97) and, in addition, his epitaph for a fellow soldier, Captain Bourchier, betrays personal feeling and thus seems to have been written from first-hand knowledge, and Bourchier’s death in 1572 is well attested in historical sources.33 What have been unknown, though, are Gascoigne’s rank and any firm details of his personal service. He is, however, mentioned by name in a newsletter written from Flushing in m idAugust 1572 that survives among the Devereux Papers, in the Marquess of Bath’s manuscripts at Longleat.34 In light of the detail given and the use of the first person in describing command decisions, its author probably was on the staff of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and it is likely that the newsletter was written for and circulated to those noblemen who had helped Gilbert raise his regiment. Four folios long, it includes several evocative accounts of combat, including one that took place near the town of Ter Goes.35 Probably on the 9th of August 1572 the English advance guard, ‘under the leadinge of Captayn Thomas Morgan’, was ‘ambushed’ by a Spanish force, which, ‘setting upon our men at unawares they inforced them somwhat to retyer’. Seeing this, and to turn the tide, Gilbert ‘caused divers gents to the number of 12 with sordes and targettes, accompanyed with some halbartes, to charge them afresh, who executed the same so valiantly that they drove the Spanyardes’ back into Ter Goes, ‘a longe Englyshe myle distant from … where the skirmysh first begane’.36 This action, with a key role played by a small group of English gentlemen volunteers, each armed with sword and ‘target’ (i.e., a small shield – ‘buckler’ was an alternative contemporary English term), makes good sense in the context of sixteenth- century warfare. The burden of fighting was borne by large numbers of pikemen (whose weapons were sixteen feet long, or longer), formed in close order; in combat, the blocks of pikes could easily become intertwined in what contemporaries called a ‘push of pike’. At such moments, swordsmen and halberdiers could get in among the entangled and encumbered pikemen, and cut them up, giving their own pikemen a potentially decisive advantage. The Spanish had evolved tactical ploys using such troops during the Italian Wars in the first half of the sixteenth century; in the 1570s, Spanish, Dutch, and German infantry units not infrequently

Gascoigne the soldier-poet  163 included small, elite groups of ­sword-and-shield-armed ­​­­ ­​­­ ​­ soldiers,37 to attack pike formations. It was in such a charge by a group of swordsmen and halberdiers that Gascoigne participated. The newsletter records: ‘The gents that charged them in the face with sordes and targetes were theise: Mr Cotton Lyueftenaunt generall, Mr Lyster, Mr Edward Jobson, Mr George Gaskoyne, Mr Keymishe, Mr Waye, Mr Selynger, with others’.38 Elsewhere, the narrative is consistently clear in distinguishing captains, gentlemen, and field officers.39 Thus, we can be sure that Gascoigne was one of the gentlemen volunteers who made up the core of most English forces serving abroad in the late sixteenth century.40 What is striking in this is Gascoigne’s behaviour. He took part in a very risky charge, made by a small number of men, armed with neither pike nor musket, the key weapons of the early-modern military revolution, but instead with sword and shield, fighting essentially as individuals, relying on their skill with the blade. This deed of courage and personal prowess at arms won him acclaim, both among his fellow soldiers (for otherwise he would not have been singled out), and back in England, where the report circulated. In this moment, Gascoigne literally embodied the chivalric literary tradition.41 Two months into his first campaign, he was hardly a cynic. What is also striking is that Gascoigne returned to the Netherlands. Having finally gone on campaign and thus proven himself a soldier, as well as a tourneyer and duellist, he could have decided that this would suffice as a rite de passage and personal vindication. Very few English troops remained in the Netherlands in the winter of 1572–73, although his friend William Morgan was one of them.42 Gascoigne was at home, engaged in poetic solicitation of Grey of Wilton’s patronage.43 However, it was not uncommon for English captains to spend time at home over the winter, both attending to personal affairs and (frequently) recruiting.44 The following spring, Thomas Morgan, who had commanded the vanguard at Ter Goes, raised a new English regiment and took it to Den Brielle, in Holland. One of his company commanders was Gascoigne. The first troops began to arrive in mid to late March 1573.45 On March 19, Gascoigne took ship from Gravesend for Den Brielle along with William Herle, an agent of the English government, and Rowland Yorke, another of Morgan’s captains. Gascoigne and his travelling companions barely survived his ‘voyage into Hollande. An[no] 1572’, endangered by bad weather and the drunkenness of the Dutch pilot – or so Gascoigne tells us in a verse narrative that was clearly written soon after his arrival in Holland.46 The confidence of Gascoigne’s modern editor, Pigman, that there is ‘no reason’ to regard the March 19 date as a fiction is reinforced by the fact that Morgan’s regiment, including Yorke, who was Morgan’s lieutenant colonel, shipped to Den Brielle in March and April (as documents in the Dutch archives, unknown to Pigman, reveal). Gascoigne may have considerably embroidered the episode but its underlying reality is that he did sail to Holland in the spring of 1573.47

164  D. J. B. Trim That apart, though, modern scholars have found his whereabouts and activities in the first six months of 1573 ‘difficult to trace’.48 In fact, however, his movements can be ascertained to some extent. Thomas Churchyard lists ‘Capitaine George Gascoyne’ as one of the captains who commanded English troops in the failed campaign to relieve Haarlem in April (as Gascoigne may have foreshadowed in ‘Gascoignes voyage’); this makes it highly unlikely that he attended the Earl of Kent’s funeral as Pigman suggests.49 In June, an anonymous report to England from Delft mentions Captain ‘Gascon’ and his men as part of a force that had retired into The Hague.50 The same month, Captain ‘Gascons’ appears in the financial records of the States of Holland, as captain of a company of foot in Morgan’s regiment. At a muster in the first week of July, it was 169 strong, and it remained in the field until at least 15 October.51 Gascoigne would not have taken service in the Netherlands in 1573 if his experiences there in 1572 had been utterly disillusioning. Prouty argued that the charges made against Gascoigne in the anonymous accusation to the Privy Council (referred to earlier) had made England too hot to hold him and that this was why he returned to Holland in 1573. However, as Gillian Austen observes, ‘there is no evidence that Gascoigne was at any point threatened with such an investigation’.52 In addition, it ought to be noted that Prouty’s reasoning is partly based on ‘the career of Robert Poole, one of the assistants at Marlowe’s murder’, although this was more than twenty years in the future.53 There may well have been financial reasons for Gascoigne’s return: a captain stood, at least in theory, to make considerable sums, if he effectively managed his company and it was part of a successful campaign. Unlike many English captains in Dutch service, Gascoigne seems to have been paid reasonably on time, although the surviving documentary evidence does not permit firm conclusions.54 However, his career in Dutch service was still not over. And this suggests that the real reason was a commitment to the Protestant Cause and a desire to prove himself still further in the crucible of war. On the 15th of October, Gascoigne’s company was paid off. A bitter dispute between Thomas Morgan and the Prince of Orange had led to a complete breakdown of relations between the Welsh colonel and his Dutch employer; Gascoigne’s paying-off clearly was part of the disbanding of Morgan’s regiment. However, Prouty is incorrect in arguing that Gascoigne then stayed in the Netherlands as part of a collective bargaining action. Morgan returned home to England with many, but not all of his men, who were taken into royal employment, serving in Ireland. Another English colonel, Edward Chester, far from engaging in collective bargaining with Morgan, as Prouty avers, actually ‘took advantage of the situation to resolve his own differences [over pay] with William [of Orange] and to obtain from him a commission as colonel-in- chief of all English troops in Dutch employ’.55 One of the captains from Morgan’s regiment who chose to remain, serving under Chester’s command, was George Gascoigne.

Gascoigne the soldier-poet  165 It is highly unlikely that he had financial reasons for remaining this time. He had almost certainly not been paid all the sums due him, but because his company had been formally disbanded, he had no hope of receiving his back pay by staying, for he would be in command of a newly commissioned company. He had seen the chaotic state of William of Orange’s fiscal affairs and must have expected the continued non-payment of wages and expenses. Finally, after experiencing the desperate defensive campaign of 1573, he can have had no illusions that there would be opportunities for plunder – the precarious defensive war being fought in Holland and Zeeland meant opportunities for pillage were few or none. Yet the following year, Gascoigne duly reappeared in the Netherlands as captain of a company in Edward Chester’s regiment. The most likely explanations for his return to the Netherlands are honour, religion, and personal loyalty. War was still the ultimate source of manly and gentlemanly honour. As to Gascoigne’s religious views, the evidence, as so often, is mostly implicit, but is noteworthy. He had fought a legal battle with Sir John Gascoigne, when the latter had sought, if not to disinherit his elder son, then at least to limit how much he inherited. Prouty attributed this partly to ‘the fact that Sir John was a strong Catholic, whereas his son made slighting references to the faith of his father’. Certainly, in 1564, Sir John had been labelled by the Bishop of Lincoln as a ‘hinderer’ of Reformation.56 What, though, of George’s own confessional allegiance? While Prouty’s view of him as a ‘reformed prodigal’ has been very influential, it has also been critiqued by Gascoigne’s latest biographer and her arguments are well taken. But the possibility of Reformed influences on Gascoigne ought not to be rejected too easily. Roger Pooley argues that, for all the sexual referencing that led to the suppression of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, it also includes many examples of Calvinist attitudes that Pooley sees as examples of Dutch influence.57 Certainly, Gascoigne’s verse of the 1570s includes notably religious and anti-Catholic sentiments.58 Finally, Gascoigne seems to have had a high opinion of William of Orange. In his supposedly ultra- cynical reflection on the ‘Theame, Dulce Bellum Inexpertis’ (p. 28), he observes of ‘Guyllam of Nassau’ that the author ‘needed none other guyde but he’ (stz. 99). William is praised as ‘that Prince, whose passing vertues shine’ (stz. 114) and Gascoigne rhapsodises: O noble Prince, there are too fewe like thee If Vertue wake, she watcheth in they will, If Justice live, then sure thou art hee, If Grace do growe, it groweth with thee still. (stz. ­ 118) Personal and confessional loyalties are more likely explanations than financial exigency for Gascoigne’s return to the Netherlands. Whatever his reasons for making a third ‘tour of duty’, however, it was to be his last, and third time was not a charm. Chester’s regiment was assigned

166  D. J. B. Trim to the defence of the key city of Leiden, but the men were barely supplied with food or gunpowder and were completely unpaid. The result was that, when attacked by the Spanish, almost all of Chester’s men, including most of their officers fled in disarray.59 Some thirty of Gascoigne’s men evaded the Spanish and made it into the inner defences of Leiden; they were almost the only foreigners who took part in the celebrated siege, whose relief was one of the turning points of the Revolt. Yet, they were led not by their captain, but rather by his lieutenant, Ralph Cromwell (who went on to serve the Dutch with distinction for another decade).60 Gascoigne was captured by the Spanish, along with a number of other English officers and soldiers. He was well treated and eventually ransomed; but thereafter, his services were no longer wanted in the Netherlands.61 Most critics seem to agree that disenchantment and cynicism are rampant in ‘The fruites of Warre’, including its sub-title: ‘written upon this Theame, Dulce Bellum Inexpertis’. If so, however, it is the product of this final campaign, rather than something present throughout the author’s time in the Netherlands. Gascoigne undoubtedly felt personally ashamed by the outcome in 1574, and this comes through in his poem. He bitterly (and not without cause) contrasts Dutch failures to feed and equip their English troops with the good treatment he received at Spanish hands, though there is more than a trace of self-justification, and indeed of self- c entredness in his verse narrative – he seems not to have realised that, while he was treated well, many of the rank-and-file English prisoners had been put to hard labour, and the Spanish may well have hanged others.62 Although no record survives of his finances in 1574, the general experience of English captains leaves no doubt that he had incurred considerable debts in his two years’ service. All in all, his hopes had been dashed and his personal campaign had ended in embarrassing, even humiliating failure. Yet, to apply the bitterness of Dulce bellum inexpertis to Gascoigne’s whole military career, rather than to one disastrous campaign, flies in the face of his own prolonged service in the Netherlands and his willingness to return not once, but twice. Nor was this necessarily his last military service in the ‘Protestant Cause’. Gascoigne was in Paris in September 1576, whence he wrote to the lord treasurer, Lord Burghley, of his plans to travel to Antwerp. He arrived to the great entrepôt in time to be an eyewitness of its capture and sack by mutinous soldiers in November – the infamous ‘Spanish Fury’, about which he published the first report in English.63 What he witnessed seems to have brought back memories of two years before, for his admiration of the discipline and fighting quality of Spanish soldiers is evident in his narrative, despite his horror at the excesses the victorious troops committed. He affirms: that both their order & vallure in charging and entring was famous: And had they … shewed the tenth part of such manly corage, in using theyr victory, and parting of their spoyle: I must then needes have sayde that Cæsar him selfe had never any suche souldiours.64

Gascoigne the soldier-poet  167 However, it is apparent from his letter to Burghley of September that he had already been involved in travel or some campaign in the summer of 1576. The coincidence of location and date and his evident status as an agent of Burghley, and of the principal secretary of state, Sir Francis Walsingham, to whom he delivered ‘lettres’ on his return to England in November,65 all suggest he probably was one of the several captains (all either agents or clients of Walsingham) who carried messages and money to Henry of Condé and John Casimir of the Palatinate and then served with them in the conclusive campaign of the fifth civil war in France. This is partly conjectural, but the timing and circumstances would fit.66 It would also fit, as we have seen, with what can be guessed about Gascoigne’s religious views. There are unquestionably many points in Gascoigne’s verse at which a clear sense of cynicism, even bitterness, about the traditional aristocratic attitudes to war and soldiering, seems to be apparent. At other points, however, he endorses the values common to chivalric literature.67 The problem with Gascoigne is that his style is richly layered; indeed, at times he seems to be not so much fascinated with ‘poses’, guises, and disguises, as obsessed by them; and he feels no obligation to be consistent. It is often far from clear whether we are supposed to agree with views expressed at any given point; the author’s own views remain elusive and the authorial voice far from authoritative; amid all the rhetoric and representations, the ‘real’ Gascoigne is hard to identify. When views critical of war, and of the aristocratic concept of it as the ultimate theatre for honourable actions and demonstrating virtue, are presented, is the reader meant to learn from and identify with them? Or, are they there to demonstrate the unreliability of the current narrative persona? The author’s purpose is so often unclear because Gascoigne deliberately avoids a clear purpose.68 Perhaps seeking to know what Gascoigne was trying to tell his readers is a question that only an historian would ask. However, having asked it, two possible answers emerge from this account of Gascoigne’s life and extraordinary personal history as the epitome of a chivalric warrior, fighting for the ‘Protestant Cause’. The first is that, in Elizabeth Heale’s words, ‘Gascoigne the soldier’, as he presents himself in his verse on his own experience of war, ‘is a … complex figure’, embodying a range of different (and contradictory) attitudes ‘in one persona’. Gascoigne was caught between a desire to portray the soldier’s life as one of travail and bitterness, unrewarded by a thankless nation, and a desire to represent himself as a man of courage and enterprise, ready and eager to follow when the drum beats.69 Alternatively (or additionally), having written realistically, perhaps cathartically, about the ‘brutal reality of war’ and its ‘desperate [and] terrible impact’, Gascoigne may, as Andrew Hadfield argues, also have deployed his martial poetry ‘to fashion himself as … . one who understood the ancient

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art of war, realising its powers and dangers’ – and who could therefore be trusted as a counsellor by statesmen such as Lord Grey of Wilton (who served as lord lieutenant of Ireland), Burghley, and Walsingham.70 It may be that Gascoigne himself did not always know exactly how he felt about the ‘fruites of Warre’ – that he would have found as much difficulty in identifying the ‘real’ Gascoigne as do readers, and that his verse accurately reflects his ambivalence. By this reading, then, Gascoigne was not overtly hostile to the chivalric ethos and concept of war as the ultimate source of aristocratic and masculine honour, yet neither could he wholeheartedly endorse them, at least not after he had experienced war. There is a second possibility, however: namely that Gascoigne, like many other English soldiers who served the Dutch, was an adherent of a confessionalised chivalric ethos, and that the more ambivalent or outright critical statements in his verse present a persona that Gascoigne expected his readers to reject, and to whose values he himself did not subscribe, rather than presenting his own views. Even Dulce bellum inexpertis, by this reading, might not be a statement of Gascoigne’s particular unhappiness at the disastrous denouement of the 1574 campaign; when one bears in mind that it, too, was written for Lord Grey of Wilton, the possibility opens up that it is yet another pose, one Gascoigne did not expect the reader to sympathise with, even if some of his undoubted chagrin unconsciously works its way into the text. By this reading, too, the reaction of the celebrated Cambridge humanist, Gabriel Harvey, to ‘The fruites of Warre’, namely that it was ‘A good pragmatique Discourse; but unseasonable, & most unfitt for a Captain, or professed Martiallist’ and reflected ‘A sory resolution for owre Netherland Soldiours’, was in fact exactly the sort of response Gascoigne hoped to stimulate.71 Modern scholars have tended to identify Gascoigne with, or as precursor to, the soldier-poets of the First World War: both consciously,72 and, I suspect, unconsciously. But are they seeing, in Gascoigne’s martial poetry, twentieth- and twenty-first-century, rather than sixteenth-century, society’s preoccupations – and their own, rather than the author’s, presumptions about war?73 Regardless of the answer to this question, the reality of Gascoigne’s military career requires critical re- evaluation of his rhetoric about war and the chivalric ethos, and the way he represents them. His martial poems have too often been taken for unusually candid moments of selfrevelation by this most enigmatic of poets, but it is all too likely that in fact, they are just another series of poses.

Notes 1 First performed at Gray’s Inn at Christmas 1566, Supposes is a translation of Ariosto’s Suppositi, but Gascoigne adapts the original considerably: see Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 190–91; Gillian Austen,

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2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20

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George Gascoigne (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 48–51 (and pace 52). It first appeared in print in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, Bounde Up in One Small Poesie (London: [1573], STC 11635), which was the basis for the later Posies of George Gascoigne (London: 1575, STC 11637). The modern edn of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G. W. Pigman III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) [hereafter cited as Pigman] prints Supposes pp.  5–58. A contemporary meaning of ‘pose’, no longer current but one Gascoigne surely had in mind, was to put someone ‘at a loss’ or ‘to confuse, perplex [or] puzzle’: OED (2nd edn), ‘pose’ v.2. Felicity A. Hughes, ‘Gascoigne’s Poses’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 37 ( Winter 1997), 3; see also Gillian Austen, ‘Self-portraits and Self-presentation in the Work of George Gascoigne’, Early Modern Literary Studies 14.1/Special Issue 18 (May 2008) 2.1–34 http://purl.oclc.org/emls/14-1/article1.htm; cf. Hughes, ‘Gascoigne’s Poses’, 17; and Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 139–41. Prouty, Gascoigne, pp. 50–56 (1572) and 66–71 (1573). Roger Williams, The Actions of The Lowe Countries, ed. John Hayward (London: 1618, STC 25731), available in a modern edition, John X. Evans (ed.), The Works of Sir Roger Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). I made this point briefly in D. J. B. Trim, ‘The Art of War: Martial Poetics from Henry Howard to Philip Sidney’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 600–02. D. J. B. Trim, ‘Fighting “Jacob’s wars’. The Employment of English and Welsh Mercenaries in the European Wars of Religion: France and the Netherlands, 1562–1610 (unpubl. PhD thesis, London, 2002) [hereafter Trim, ‘Mercenaries’]. Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, pp. 249–50, 357–58. See ibid., chap. 8. N. M. Fuidge, ‘Gascoigne, Sir John (by 1510– 68) of Cardington, Beds’, in The House of Commons 1558–1603, ed. P. W. Hasler. 3 vols. (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1981), I, 193; Prouty, Gascoigne, 7–8. See Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 24–25. Henry Machyn, Diary, 30 Sept. 1562, in John Gough Nicholls (ed.), The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant-Taylor of London, from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, Camden Soc., [1st series], 42 (1848), p. 293. Prouty, Gascoigne, p. 36. P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice], SP 12/86, no. 59, printed in Prouty, Gascoigne, p. 61. Trim, ‘Art of war’, pp. 591–96. ‘Gascoignes councell given to … Bartholmew Withipoll’ (Pigman, 69; pp.  295– 99 at 299). Prouty, Gascoigne, 60, dates it to the spring of 1573 (i.e., 1572 in the Julian calendar), but as I show below, in the spring of 1573 Gascoigne was recruiting a company to serve in the Netherlands that summer, so a composition date of April 1572 makes more sense. Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, pp. 112, 453. ‘Gascoignes voyage into Hollande. An. 1572’, Pigman 77, ll. 339, 344, 345. Pigman, 77, ll. 342–44. Thomas Churchyard, Churchyards Challenge (London: 1593, STC 5220), 104; PRO, SP 70/48, fo. 215r; E. M. Tenison, Elizabethan England: Being the History of This Country ‘In Relation to All Foreign Princes’, 12 vols. in 13 (Royal Leamington Spa: privately printed, 1933– 60), pp. I, i, 42. Austen, George Gascoigne, 67. For the relationship between Zouche and Grey, see G. E. C[okayne], The Complete Peerage, 2nd edn, rev. Lord Howard de Walden et  al., 13 vols. in 14 (London: St Catherine’s Press, 1910–59), pp. XII, ii, 949; British Library, Harleian MS 6992, fo. 110r; Julian Lock, ‘Grey, Arthur, fourteenth Baron Grey of Wilton (1536–1593)’, ODNB.

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21 See Calendar of State Papers, Irish, 1574– 85, 343; Narasingha P. Sil, ‘Denny, Sir Anthony (1501–1549)’, ODNB; Nicholas Doggett, ‘Denny, Sir Edward (1547– 1600)’, ODNB. 22 Austen, George Gascoigne, 23, 66; Pigman, ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. xxxi; and ‘Gascoignes wodmanship’, Pigman 72, pp. 312–16. 23 Raphael Lyne, ‘Churchyard, Thomas (1523?–1604)’, ODNB. 24 ‘The fruites of Warre’, Pigman 28, p. 398. 25 ‘Two gentlemen did roon three courses at the rynge’, Pigman 3, p. 219. 26 Lawrence Humfrey. The Nobles or of Nobilitye. Fyrste writte[n] in Latine by L. Humfry … Late Englished. Whereto Is Coupled the Small treatyse of Philo a Jewel by [Humphrey] Out of the Greeke Latined, Now Also Englished (London: 1563, STC 13964), sig. V4r–v. 27 Trim, ‘Art of war’. 28 Fuidge, ‘Gascoigne’, I, 193–94; Stephen Hamrick, The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, 1558– 1582 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 82; Prouty, Gascoigne, 37; Calendar of Patent Rolls, Elizabeth I, IV, 377, 428, nos. 2223, 2580. 29 Prouty, Gascoigne, pp. 38–39, 40. 30 ‘Gascoignes councell given to … Bartholmew Withipoll’, Pigman 69, p. 295. 31 Prouty, Gascoigne, p. 13. 32 Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, pp. 261– 62, 264. 33 ‘Gascoignes Epitaph upon capitaine Bourcher’, Pigman 70, p.  300. See Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, p. 409 and sources in fn. 39. 34 The Devereux Papers are cited and quoted by permission of the Marquess of Bath, Longleat House, Warminster, Wiltshire. 35 Devereux Papers, MS 2, fo. 7r: ‘at a lytle villadge called Nisckirk’ [Nissekerke] one Englishe myle distaunt from Tregose’. Modern maps show the hamlet of Nisse, 2 miles southwest of Goes; presumably Nissekerke lay between the two in the 16th century. While Gascoigne, in ‘The fruites of Warre’, recalls being actually in a ‘trench before Tergoes’ (stz. 97, Pigman, p. 417), this was in a later attack on the town. 36 Ibid. This is almost certainly the action described by Gilbert to Burghley, 13 August 1572, in [J. M. B. C.] Kervyn de Lettenhove (e d.), Relations politiques des Pays-B as et de l’Angleterre sous le règne de Philippe II, 11 vols. (Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 1882–1900), VI, 489, no. 2450, which tells how his force ‘dyd serve very valiently on the 9th of this mondth and dyd kyll divers Spanerdes and maed them rune awaye 3 myeles’. 37 They were known as ‘rondassiers’ in the Low Countries; there are a number of depictions of them in prints and paintings in the (Dutch) Nationaal Militair Museum, Soest, Netherlands. 38 Devereux Papers, MS 2, fo. 7v. 39 Ibid. fos. 7v-9r. 40 See Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, pp. 279– 84. 41 Trim, ‘Art of war’. 42 Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, p. 453. 43 The poem in question, as noted above, was ‘Gascoignes Wodmanship’. 44 Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, p. 241. 45 Ibid. 126; ‘Stukken betreffende de Engelsche regimenten van de kolonels Edward Chester en Thomas Morgan’, 1573, Het Nationaal Archief, Den Haag, Collectie Ortel, lias 29 (unfoliated). 46 ‘Gascoignes voyage into Hollande, An. 1572’ (Pigman 77, pp.  319–28) (March 1573 was March 1572 in the Julian calendar, which England still followed); Yorke at ll. 203, 339; for date of composition, see Pigman, ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. lvii.

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47 Pigman, ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. lvii fn.29 (and cf. pp. xxi, lix). See Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, 393; ‘Stukken betreffende de Engelsche regimenten’, Collectie Ortel  29. Gascoigne does not mention his company in his ‘Voyage’, but he and Yorke may have sailed in advance of their men, which would not have been unusual. 48 Pigman, ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. lvii. Cf. Prouty, Gascoigne, 65; also Hamrick, Catholic Imaginary, 83, who confuses Gascoigne’s service in the Netherlands in 1572, when he was a gentleman volunteer, part of a force reviewed by Elizabeth I at Greenwich (see Williams, Actions, 101) with his service there in 1573 (and misses his service in 1574). 49 T[homas] C[hurchyard] and R[ichard] Ro[binson], A True Discourse Historicall of the Succeeding Governours in the Netherlands (London: 1602, STC 17486), p. 19; ‘Gascoignes voyage’, ll. 301– 03 (Pigman 77) and ‘Biographical Introduction’, pp. xxxi, lvii. Pace G. W. Pigman III, ‘Gascoigne, George (1534/35?–1577)’, ODNB. 50 Lettenhove, Relations Politiques, VI, 791, no. 2609. 51 ‘Stukken betreffende de Engelsche regimenten’, Collectie Ortel 29. 52 Austen, George Gascoigne, p. 65. 53 Prouty, Gascoigne, pp. 61– 65, at 65. 54 ‘Stukken betreffende de Engelsche regimenten’, Collectie Ortel 29. 55 Ibid.; Prouty, Gascoigne, 72–73; Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, pp. 127–28. 56 Prouty, Gascoigne, pp. 12, 38–40. 57 Austen, George Gascoigne, 16–17; Roger Pooley, (ed.), ‘Introduction’, to George Gascoigne, The Green Knight: Selected Poetry and Prose (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1982), pp. 9–10, 21. 58 For example, ‘Gascoignes good morow’ (Pigman 64), is in praise of Christ’s nativity, and inter alia urges the need to ‘overthrowe’ the ‘Devill …With goonshot of beliefe’ (p. 287); ‘Gascoignes De profundis’ (Pigman 66) is at least apparently, a poem of repentance and trust in God’s mercy ( pp. 290–93); in The Steele Glas (1576), Gascoigne wrote of how ‘errors grow where  … false prophets preach’ (Cunliffe, p. 145). 59 See Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, pp. 128–29. 60 Anon. report, 23 August 1574, Lettenhove, Relations Politiques, VII, 317, no. 2815; pay warrant, Leiden garrison, 1574, Regionaal Archief Leiden, Archief der Secretarie 1334; Emmanuel van Meteren, Historica Belgica (N.p.: [1598]), p. 139; [Adam Henricpetri and Gilbert Roy], Histoire des troubles et guerres civiles du Pays-Bas, autrement dict la Flandre (N.p.: 1582), p. 277; Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, pp. 380–81. 61 See Gascoigne, ‘Fruites of Warre’, passim. Prouty, Gascoigne, 74–77; Pooley, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. 62 Henricpetri and Roy, Histoire des troubles et guerres civiles, 277; Jean–François Le Petit, La grande chronique ancienne et moderne, de Hollande, Zelande, West– Frise, Utrecht, Frise, Overyssel et Groeningen, jusques à la fin de l’an 1600, 2 vols. (Dordrecht: 1601), II, 284. Cf. Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, 64; Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567– 1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars, 2nd edn (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 143. 63 Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, Queen Elizabeth, XI (1575–77), pp. 376, 392–93, nos. 915, 951; Gascoigne, The Spoyle of Antwerpe, in Cunliffe, II, 590–99. On this episode see Austen, George Gascoigne, 179–86. 64 Spoyle of Antwerp, Cunliffe, 599. 65 Charles Trice Martin (ed.), Journal of Sir Francis Walsingham, From December 1570 to April 1583, in Camden Miscellany, VI, Camden Soc., [1st series], 104 (1871), 29.

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66 Trim, ‘Mercenaries’, p. 132: the other known captains included several who were, like Gascoigne, veterans of the Netherlands in 1572–74. 67 See Trim ‘Art of war’, pp. 601– 02. 68 See esp. Elizabeth Heale, ‘The Fruits of War: The Voice of the Soldier in Gascoigne, Rich, and Churchyard’, Early Modern Literary Studies 14.1/Special Issue 18 (May, 2008) 5.1–39 http://purl.oclc.org/emls/14-1/article4.htm; ead., Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 73–75. 69 Heale, ‘Fruits of War’, para. 39, and Autobiography and Authorship, pp. 75–76. 70 Andrew Hadfield, ‘War Poetry and Counsel in Early Modern Ireland’, in Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle (eds.), Elizabeth I and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 255–56. 71 Quoted in Prouty, Gascoigne, p. 66, from Harvey’s marginal annotations in his copy of the Posies. 72 For example, Richard Hoffpauir, The Art of Restraint: English Poetry from Hardy to Larkin (Cranbury, N.J. and London: Associated University Presses, 1991), pp. 93–94; Pooley, ‘Introduction’, 14; Lorrie Goldensohn, Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-century Soldier Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 14–15. 73 See for example Stephen Hamrick, ‘Introduction: “Thus much I adventure to deliver to you”: The Fortunes of George Gascoigne’, Early Modern Literary Studies 14.1/Special Issue 18 (May, 2008) 1.1–22. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/14-1/anintr2. htm, para. 11.

Gascoigne and Prose Fiction

‘Pretty conceits as pleased her peevish fantasy’: The ‘Manling’ Secretary in The Adventures of Master F.J. Susan C. Staub Shee had in the same house a friend, a servaunt, a Secretary: what should I name him? …] Hee was in height, the proportion of twoo Pigmeys, in bredth the thicknesse of two bacon hogges, of presumption a Gyant, of power a Gnat, Apishly wytted, Knavishly mannerd, and crabbedly favord… (Pigman, p. 153; Salzman, 15)1­ This is, of course, G.T.’s over the top description of Elinor’s lover and F.J.’s rival in Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J. “What was there in him then to drawe a fayre Ladies liking? […] This manling, this minion, this slave, this secretary,” G.T. asks incredulously ( p. 153, ll. 30–31, 35–36; emphasis added. Salzman, 15). I would like to shift G.T.’s question a bit to ask instead, what is there in him to provoke such derision? G.T.’s use of the diminutive “manling” plays on the slang meaning of “man” as penis and thus immediately calls into question the secretary’s sexual potency, while “minion” – an underling, a servile hanger on, but also someone, male or female, kept for sexual favors – effeminises and further diminishes him, “a degradation from non-man, to sexual object of man, to physical possession – and only then to secretary,”2 a word which G.T. practically snarls. G.T.’s detailed and highly partisan description of him is humorous, and it is the only specific description of a character that we get in the narrative. The secretary never speaks; there are no reported conversations between him and Elinor or F.J. Yet, he is given inordinate importance in G.T.’s commentary as F.J.’s most hated rival, taking priority over F.J.’s other rivals in the story, the store of ready clerks who also service Elinor, and her husband, who hardly appears in the narrative at all except as the occasion for a bawdy joke by F.J. It is precisely his role as secretary that most problematises him and that affords him power. According to the OED, a secretary is “one whose office it is to write for another; specifically, one who is employed to conduct or assist with correspondence, to keep records, and (usually) to transact various other business.” Although much has been written on the ambiguous role played by the early modern secretary, particularly concerning the homosocially charged

DOI: 10.4324/­­­­­9781003112082-15

176  Susan C. Staub intimacy that results between the male secretary and his male employer,3 it would not have been unusual for a gentlewoman such as Elinor to employ a servant or clerk specifically to handle her correspondence. Scholars suspect, for instance, that Barbara Gamage Sidney used a secretary, as did Lady Anne Clifford and Lady Margaret Hoby.4 As such, he would seem to be a relatively ordinary fellow, although admittedly one who occupies a position of privilege given his access to the lady and to the intimate details of her life. As an anonymous and servile figure, one not even significant enough to warrant the subterfuge of initials accorded the two main male characters in the narrative, he would seem to pose no real threat to the courtly, presumably socially superior, Master F.J.5 And yet, the narrative turns on his presence or absence. As the OED further defines him, the secretary is “one who is entrusted with private or secret matters; a confidant; one privy to a secret.” “One privy to a secret….” But what secret? In a text that makes an elaborate and constant show of containing many secrets, what is it that the secretary knows? The simple answer is the Lady Elinor. As Alan Stewart sums it up, he is “at once a non-man and a potent competitor in the sexual use of women, a ‘minion’ and one who enjoys unequalled access to the most secret part of the household, figured in Gascoigne as the lady’s chastity.”6 Not only is he privy to the secrets of the lady but also to the secret that is the lady herself.7 As a woman, Elinor is a sieve, a “leaky vessel,” unable to control her body and “its production of fluids” – parodied by Gascoigne with her nosebleed8  – or her verbal expression. The inclusion of the secretary thus plays into a traditional discourse about female bodies, one that isolates the “female body’s material expressiveness  – its production of fluids  – as excessive” and “shameful” and that links such “liquid expressiveness to excessive verbal fluency.”9 As a woman, Elinor is unable to keep either verbal or bodily secret, a fact that reduces F.J. and his bumbling courtship of her to a caricature by the end of the narrative. Most fundamentally, by including the secretary, Gascoigne sets up the traditional triangle of heterosexual desire that René Girard has traced in European fiction (though G.T.’s presence complicates the triangle somewhat, as does the duo of male readers surrounding the text). But further, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, what is most interesting in this kind of erotic rivalry is that the “bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved.”10 With the inclusion of the secretary, Gascoigne creates an alternate triangle – G.T., F.J., and the secretary – that in some ways seems more powerful than that between F.J., Elinor, and the secretary. Although G.W. Pigman posits that Gascoigne uses the term “secretary” metaphorically – the character is “her secretary because he uses his pen to write for her and to write in her” ( p. 567) – I argue instead that the word “secretary” in its various Renaissance connotations is of crucial importance to the text and that an awareness of those meanings adds interesting resonances to the tale. Whether literal or metaphoric, Gascoigne’s use of the

The ‘Manling’ Secretary in Master F.J.  177 term warrants examination. A consideration of the secretary’s position in the narrative allows us to interrogate the connections between secrets, eroticism, and writing that are a central concern of the text and of much of early modern poetry. In this essay, I seek to point out some of the social and cultural meanings of the secretary, some of which are quite contradictory, and to illustrate how what Richard Rambuss calls “secretarial poetics” plays a significant part in Gascoigne’s narrative.11 The position of secretary was becoming increasingly important during this period, and it is at this time that we witness the rise of the permanent personal secretary as well as of the political secretary, as is evident in the creation of the post of “secretary of state” or “principal secretary,” “the right hand man to the sovereign, and the nominal head of the privy council.”12 Several texts written shortly after Gascoigne was writing, Angel Day’s The English Secretary, as well as those by Robert Cecil and other lesser members of Elizabeth’s secretariat, Robert Beale and Nicholas Faunt, define and lay out the skills necessary for advancement in such an office.13 In both governmental and household incarnations, the secretary was a figure within whom great trust and power were placed. As Angel Day notes, the job had evolved from one whose foremost qualification was “to write well, and in neate and fine forme to set forth his Letters” to a role of considerable importance, a position of “Trust, Regard and Fidelity.” Central to his power is his management of secrets; etymologically, the secretary is the “keeper and conserver of the secret unto him committed,” in Day’s words.14 But the connection between secrets and secretaries is only one of a series of complex associations and meanings that the term evokes. Because he is privy to the most intimate and private details of his master, he serves as a natural intermediary, but also as a substitute for his master. As both friend and servant, he inhabits an ambivalent place in the social structure, a conundrum which Day takes great pains to explain: “hee is in one degree in place of a servant, so he is in another degree in place of a friend” (Pt. 2, p. 106). Describing a kind of mutually dependent relationship with his master, Day suggests that the secretary is indentured to his employer as slave to master, but Day also finds in this bond what he calls a “friendlie knot of love” (Pt. 2, p. 113). The secretary thus straddles the space between public and private, employee and intimate. He blurs boundaries. He is at once a repository of secrets, a writer, and a confidant and friend, roles that connect him with both F.J. and G.T. And while he is sometimes associated with illicit sexuality, the secretary is also frequently depicted as the protector of his lady’s chastity, a role that Gascoigne’s narrative flouts. Further, in The English Secretary, he becomes the architectural embodiment of his role, the “closet” or “secret Cabinet” of his master: as the closet, he must be “as a thicke plated doore, where through, without extraordinarie violence no man may enter” (Pt. 2, p. 124). His placement – and displacement – in the text mimics the structure and concerns of the narrative – and of the whole of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres.

178  Susan C. Staub As a rival to the poet F.J., the secretary seems at first to provide an alternative version of authorship; in earlier incarnations, he is merely a copyist, a kind of clerk or scribe who transcribes his master’s or mistress’s wishes and thoughts. In this role, he would seem to exist in counter distinction to the literary writer. Employing his pen in the interests of another, he possesses no independent existence apart from his service to someone else; having no real name of his own, he is “emblematic of the perfect subordinate and submissive functionary, not an advisor but a copyist, not a thinker and inventor but a mere executor of fine form, a ‘pigmy’ working and running amid ‘giants,’” as Capaccio describes him in a curious echo of G.T. in his treatise on secretaryship.15 Even in Angel Day’s construction, “His pen in this action is not his owne.” Furthermore, according to Day, he is “utterlie to relinquish anie affectation to his own doings or admixture of his own will” ( p. 130). As Goldberg sums it up, he “is notable for his invisibility.”16 As a writer for hire who composes mechanically and unoriginally, he thus encapsulates the very aspects of textual production coterie writers sought to distance themselves from but that writing in hopes of patronage might be held to represent. On the surface, it seems that the kind of secretarial work he performs thus provides F.J.’s imaginative writing with “an analogue and an antithesis.”17 As Jonathan Crewe explains, “This official is no person of name but a scribal functionary in and of the system. As such, he emerges as the figure of the writer as opposed to that of the poet.” Yet, as Crewe further points out, the contrast is not so simple in Gascoigne’s tale: “he also demystifies the poet inasmuch as he occupies the servant position repeatedly idealised in courtlylove poems. The real servant is not a courtly wooer but one who knows his place and function, performing anonymously in both.”18 Paradoxically, it is his anonymity, his lack of individuality, that empowers him. Introduced almost immediately after F.J.’s first plaintive letter but before F.J. can fair copy his first overwrought poem to Elinor, the secretary proves to be more than mere functionary. Noticing that the letter Elinor claims to return to him was not in his own hand, F.J. soon surmises it is not written in her hand either  – “When sodenly at a glaunce he perceaved it was not of his owne hande writing, and therewithall abashed, uppon better regard he perceyved in one peece thereof written (in Romaine) these letters: SHE” (Pigman, pp. 146– 47; Salzman, 8). According to Day, the secretary should be a “zealous imitator” of his master, down to the “forme and manner”’ of his penmanship (Pt. 2, p. 130). Women employed secretaries to deal with the paperwork and business matters of the estate or household, according to James Daybell, and although secretaries might sometimes write personal letters, their use for personal correspondence was often considered suspect.19 Secretarial letters were judged less personal than holograph correspondence, thus having secretaries write was sometimes considered inappropriate in personal relationships, as becomes apparent in the number of apologies women append to their correspondence when they have relied on secretaries to write for them. Despite the other kinds of business the secretary might

The ‘Manling’ Secretary in Master F.J.  179 do for Elinor, sexual or otherwise, one would not expect him to write her love letters. The fact that the letter is signed in Roman hand suggests either that Elinor signed the letter herself but did not write it or that the secretary “counterfeited” a feminine hand. Although there was no clearly identifiable woman’s hand, the “Roman hand,” a predecessor of our modern italic or cursive hand, would likely not have been used by a professional secretary, who would have used either court or secretary hand. Men – K ing James I, for example  – occasionally used the Roman hand as well; nonetheless, it was used almost exclusively by women, particularly among ladies at court.20 The worry that the secretary might have counterfeited the letter suggests the indeterminacy of secretarial power; while subject to his employer, ostensibly with no voice of his own, there is always the chance that he might become an agent in his own right. But more than the handwriting, G.T. and F.J. are struck by the letter’s devises, by its appropriation of the language of Petrarchan courtship: My friend F.J. hath tolde me divers times, that imediatly uppon receit hereof, he grew in jelosy, that the same was not her owne devise. And ther in I have no lesse allowed his judgment, then commended his invention of the verses … For as by the stile this letter of hirs bewrayeth that it was not penned by a womans capacitie … ( p. 147, ll. 22–27; Salzman, 9) As Katharine Wilson points out, The overarching joke is that F.J. and G.T. decide that the letter was written by a man precisely because he was able to compose an appropriately literary response to F.J.’s conceit. The language of Petrarchan courtship, Gascoigne implies, is invented for and by men. The fact that Elinor’s lover responded in kind to his conceit only revealed that its author must have been male.21 The secretary thus provides not so much a contrast to F.J. as poet but a formidable opponent and potent rival, literary and otherwise. This aspect of him is consistent with evolving ideas of secretaryship; according to Guarini, a secretary “must be clever and have a very versatile and mannered style with a rich vocabulary and an abundant command of forms.” Guarini continues somewhat suggestively, “He must know how to do with his pen and his person what Proteus did with his body, transmuting it into all possible forms and varying it to his need.”22 (No wonder the secretary proves to be the preferred lover in the end!) Day, too, emphasises that the work of the secretary is more than slavish imitation, and in the revised edition of his secretarial manual published in 1592, he expands his text to address another sense of letters, that of literary composition.23 Clearly, then, Elinor’s secretary can play the rhetorical game just as handily as F.J.

180  Susan C. Staub As mediator between F.J. and Elinor, he plays the role of pander or pimp, but he is also a producer of texts in his own right. Like Day’s paradoxical nameless secretary, his secret knowledge, here of the lady, grants him authority; his letter writing defines him as author. No mere servant, the secretary participates in a subtle power dynamic. This power dynamic sets up potential ironies in Gascoigne’s text. As G.T. and F.J. get increasingly worked up over the secretary’s privileged place in the household, we quickly discover that “love is not love,” as Marotti has taught us, but rather a cloak for social ambition – and frequently disappointment. “Love lyrics,” Marotti explains, “could express figuratively the realities of suit, service and recompense with which ambitious men were insistently concerned as well as the frustrations and disappointments experienced in socially competitive environments.”24 The focus on the letter and its author shifts our attention instead to the competition between men and to writing rather than to the courtship of the lady. After the secretary’s written pandering is suspected, G.T. explains that this competition fuels F.J.’s ardor. When he responds to the letter in question, it doesn’t even seem to matter if he writes to Elinor or to the secretary: “And after on the next day [F.J] thought better to replie, either upon hir, or uppon hir Secretary in this wyse as here followeth” (p. 148, ll. 1–2; Salzman, 9). F.J.’s nonchalance about his audience points out the peculiar relationship of the secretary to his employer, a relationship so intimate that the secretary is frequently figured as his master: he is his master’s “owne penne, his mouth, his eye, his eare, and keeper of his most secrett Cabinett,” in Faunt’s estimation.25 According to Day, the two fuse completely; Rambuss describes this connection as a “symbiosis of master and secretary so complete it becomes difficult to determine where the thoughts of one let off and the other began.”26 The secretary literally becomes a substitute for his master. But this construction is made all the more peculiar when the master is a woman being wooed by a male suitor. Although F.J. writes ostensibly to gain access to the lady, his sense that he may indeed write for the secretary suggests that he is as much concerned with performing for a male audience, most immediately the secretary, but beyond him G.T. and the circle of men surrounding the text. The suggestion that F.J. knowingly may be writing to the secretary displaces Elinor in this exchange and eroticises the relationship between F.J. and the secretary. As Stewart characterises it, “Read by, and written to, her Secretary, the letter suddenly comes alive.”27 But it also foregrounds writing as a competition between men and as a test of manhood, as Richard McCoy, Wendy Wall, and others have argued about the narrative.28 Once the secretary leaves, F.J. is able to penetrate into the secret spaces of the household, moving from the garden to the gallery to the lady’s chamber, a movement from outer to inner that parallels the reader’s experience in moving through the various prefatory letters and inter-nesting narratives of the text, itself a kind of secret cabinet or secretary. And, he is able to penetrate another secret space, the lady’s body, the word “secret” being a

The ‘Manling’ Secretary in Master F.J.  181 common term for female genitalia in the period. Day’s figuration of the secretary as a closet or secret cabinet, “whereof another hath … the key,” “a thick plated doore,” that no man may enter without violence “of such efficacy, as whereof no counterfeit key should be able to make a breach” is blatantly sexual with its language of opening and entry, of keys, doors, and breaching. In “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” Alan Stewart explains that the complex relationship of the secretary to a male or female master creates sexual anxieties largely because of the secretary’s access to this study or “closet,” a room, as we have seen, that is suggestively configured in the discourse on secretaryship. Stewart posits that this place actually influences the writing the secretary performs.29 But further, the items associated with the secretary and that are prevalent in Gascoigne’s text – chambers, doors, and keyholes – are also traditionally associated with female sexuality.30 Within this tradition, female virginity is perceived as a closed chamber. The keeping of secrets and secret places can therefore be read as the protection of female secrets, that is, of female genitalia, and by implication, sexuality, a tradition that Gascoigne parodies in the narrative. When F.J. notices a “disfurnishing of eloquence” in the lady, G.T. explains that he decides to “smyte while the yron was hotte, and to lend his Mistresse such a penne in hir Secretaries absence, as he should never be able at his returne to amende the well-writing thereof” ( p. 154, ll. 4–7; Salzman, 15–16). F.J.’s linking of pen with penis develops the narrative’s equation of writing and sexual prowess, but it shows too that F.J.’s performance depends on the judgement of a male audience. Again, this sexualised construction of authorship imagines literary ability as sexual potency, and F.J.’s capacity for virility and manliness is measured by the success of his writing in seducing the lady. G.T.’s presence further constructs F.J.’s position as public, part of the competitive world of the literary marketplace. In sharing his literary/ sexual bravado with G.T. (and G.T. in turn sharing it with H.W.), he appeals to a community of male readers for inclusion, approval, and authentication. He shares a joke with other men at the expense of his rival and of his lady, Elinor. F.J.’s triumphant bawdy joke seeks to reduce the secretary to a mere sexual tool of the lady, but it reduces F.J. as well. The pen-penis analogy here suggests another perhaps less common use of the word “secretary.” In slang terms, “a secretary,” particularly a “woman’s secretary,” was a dildo. The most famous instance of this usage is Thomas Nashe’s “Choice of Valentines, or the Merry Ballad of Nashe His Dildo.” In a possible parody of Gascoigne, Nashe elaborates on F.J.’s innuendo and with “pornographic excess” exaggerates Gascoigne’s suggestion that writing is sexual activity.31 It is perhaps worth turning for a moment to Nashe’s poem for a gloss on Gascoigne’s narrative. The “Choice of Valentines” describes a sexual encounter between a gentleman and his mistress, a prostitute, tellingly named Frances. Despite much effort on his part, the narrator is at first too eager and then too tired to satisfy the lady: “What shall I do to show myself a man?” he asks in frustration (l. 127).32 The connection between writing and

182  Susan C. Staub manhood is equally evident in this text, where “masculinity must [show] itself by marking a feminine text.”33 (Nashe seems directly influenced by Gascoigne here, who constructs the female body as a text to be written on by the man throughout the narrative; not only does F.J. measure his prowess by the length of his pen, but G.T. also notes that once the secretary returns after his absence from Elinor, he is likely to make a heartier lover – “his quils and pennes not worn so neer as they were wont to be,” p. 199, ll. 16–17; Salzman, 62). Finally, in exasperation, Frances replaces the narrator with her dildo, her secretary: “My little dildo shall supply their kind, /A knave that moves as light as leaves by wind, / That bendeth not, nor foldest any deal, / But stands as stiff as he were made of steel” (ll. 239– 42). The narrator’s misogynist railing against the dildo in Nashe’s text betrays the humiliation of being replaced by a mechanical substitute, a counterfeit, the same humiliation that F.J. will suffer at the end of his adventure when he is replaced by the secretary: Curse eunuck dildo, senseless, counterfeit, Who sooth may fill, but never can beget. But if revenge enraged with despair That such a dwarf his welfare should impair, Would fain this woman’s secretary know, Let him attend the marks that I shall show. ­ ­263–68) ​­ (ll. Although the narrative seems to set F.J. in opposition to the secretary, the number of times F.J. characterises his pen as a penis marks him as dildo as well, an instrument in the service of the lady. The revenge that Nashe’s narrator is unable to enact for this degradation is accomplished by F.J. when he rapes Elinor. The slang use of the word “secretary” is actually consistent with the idea of the secretary set forth in many treatises from the period: in Day, as we have seen, the secretary becomes the literal embodiment of the closet, but specifically, he is the closet “whereof another hath both the key, use and commandment.” In another, he is imagined as a “puppet,” a “man of wood,” charged with acting mechanically according to his master’s will.34 Gascoigne merely sexualises this aspect of secretaryship, an eroticism that is present elsewhere in secretarial discourse from the period. In addition, Since the secretary was a physical part of the mind of his patron, who was the inspiration of all things, and since he had the function of putting his patron’s thoughts into execution, the secretary frequently was not represented as a whole body. He was, for instance, ‘a hand of the will of the prince.’35 In Gascoigne’s rendering, that part is a penis, “a virtual ambulatory phallus,” according to Crewe.36 But as a dildo, he is a counterfeit penis, not a

The ‘Manling’ Secretary in Master F.J.  183 symbol of masculine prowess but rather of effeminacy. By offering himself as a substitute “pen,” F.J. reduces himself to the role of secretary- dildo as well. But F.J. fails in this role, precisely because he can never fully erase his desires. As I have argued elsewhere, by constantly equating F.J.’s sexual prowess with literary creativity, Gascoigne perhaps reveals his own ambivalence about writing with an eye toward courtly service.37 In A Hundreth Gascoigne at once shows that he has the skills necessary for secretaryship but perhaps also mocks the self- effacing posturing of such a role. Curiously, in the period after F.J. consummates his relationship with Elinor, his relationship with G.T. changes. After his success with Elinor, F. J.’s now turns inward and begins writing another kind of poetry, poetry that he hopes to keep private. Whereas before he seemed eager to confide in G.T., now he refuses to allow G.T. to see what he writes. G.T. explains, F.J. swymming now in delightes did nothing but write such verse as might accumilate his joyes, to the extremitie of pleasure, the which for that purpose he kept from mee, as one more desirous to seeme obscure and defective, than overmuch to glory in his adventures. (p. 179, ­­ ll. 22–26; ­ ​­ Salzman, 41) The pen is still equated with the penis, but F.J.’s verse is now self- expressive, contained “within the erotic circuit of his sexual pleasures, stimulating and relieving his masculine body,” the only way, as Elizabeth Heale puts it, that “the identification of pen and penis can be sustained.”38 As he no longer writes in the service of the lady, his writing becomes masturbatory. The other participant in this homosocial triangle is, of course, G.T., F.J.’s scribe  – and interpreter, apologist, and confidant. G.T. inhabits a quasi-secretarial role in the narrative, but rather than hiding secrets, he frequently exposes them. Like any good secretary, he transcribes F.J.’s writings and acts as an intermediary in their transmission. He places much stock in his capacity for secrecy and discretion, constantly calling attention to himself as the protector of F.J.’s confidences. In many ways, he claims the role Rambuss assigns to E.K.: “The repository for the secrets of another; employing his pen in the interests of another; possessing no independent existence apart from his relation of service to another.”39 G.T. extends this role beyond F.J., claiming to possess no independent existence apart from his relationship and service to the other poets in A Hundreth as well, and adventuring his pen only on their behalf. Like Day’s secretary, he remains largely unnamed and unidentified, presenting himself only as a “verie special and singular good friend.” But this is actually a ruse. Although G.T. makes much of his friendship with F.J., he also reveals his knowing betrayal of him. And he betrays not just F.J. but the supposed other writers in the volume, who, he claims, “them selves did alwayes with the verse reherse unto [him] the cause that then moved them to write” ( p. 145, ll. 3– 4; Salzman, 6). By themselves, he suggests, the poems lack full meaning. It is only with his

184  Susan C. Staub interpretation and voice that their meaning is fully realised. He authorises them. It is here that he moves beyond secretarial service. Imploring H. W. not to make the poems “common,” and insisting that he return the originals, G.T. clearly intends H.W. to copy F.J.’s writings and thereby proliferate the texts. Later, cautioning that he must expose the verses by “stealth,” he admits that he does F.J. a “double wrong” in disclosing the occasions why they were devised ( p. 177, l. 27; Salzman, 40). Yet, he is willing to do so for H.W.’s delight, thereby pimping F.J.’s poems. G.T. is thus a voyeur and an exploiter of the clandestine and covert. He is, in fact, an entrepreneur of the erotic, seemingly spying on F.J. and Elinor’s sexual activities and transmitting their private poems and letters to others in a blatant betrayal of F.J.’s trust. He misinterprets their desires and misrepresents his own motivations. Despite all the masking and coded language where he pretends to withhold information, he actually reveals in several places in the text that he has disclosed F.J.’s poems to readers other than his friend H.W. For instance, after describing the extreme jealousy F.J. suffers after the secretary returns and its resulting physical effects, he comments: hereat (some unto whom I have imparted this tale) have taken occasion to discommend his faynting hart, yit surely the cause inwardly and depely considered, I cannot so lightly condempne him, for an old saying is, that every man can give councell better than follow it (p. 181, ll. 17–21; ­­ ­ ​­ Salzman, 43) When he critiques the “Helen” poem, he suggests that the poem has been discussed among “diverse and sundry” acquaintances, “for this and divers other of his most notable Poems, have come to view of the world” ( p. 176, ll. 35–36; Salzman, 39). The power of the secret depends upon its display, as G.T. himself argues when he speaks of the increased joy of “secret intercommoning,” of sharing secrets with others.40 G.T. undermines the “secretarial poetics” of the text, then, and in so doing, he confounds the boundaries between public and private, between manuscript and publication, titillating the reader in the process. As Wendy Wall has noted, sixteenth- century texts often constructed publication literally – as the act of making something private public – and thus reading became an intrusion into a private space, “a prurient activity,” “a titillating and transgressive act.” Publication, she explains, “participated broadly in constructing a concept of privacy.”41 By revealing the occasions of the poems and providing critical analysis of their figures, G.T. indicates that he has in mind a reader other than H.W. He expands the coterie circle and makes public what should be private. He transforms the reader from outsider to “actively engaged” and informed insider.42 While the narrative makes a prodigious display of hiding many secrets, much in the text is not secret at all. The text is ostentatiously secret, covertly exhibitionist. The feigned discretion here, as in the whole of A Hundreth, is a form of self-promotion. As Rambuss

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explains in his analysis of The Shepheardes Calendar, “The ostentatious staging of secrets” functions as “a tactic of self-promotion.”43 Unlike the secretary who “was rewarded not for his speech and thoughts, his rhetorical expertise and insight into human affairs, but for his silence as a mark of absolute personal effacement,”44 G.T. overtakes the text and comes to represent what was most feared in the secretary, the man who becomes an independent penman while hiding behind his position of trustworthiness and friendship. As such, his role mimics the balancing act that Gascoigne engages in himself when he presents the poems of A Hundreth as those of various writers.45 Nonetheless, his true authorial identity is actually advertised in his secret sharing. The success of the secretary, F.J.’s degrading failure to compete with him, and G.T.’s undermining of the secretarial role suggest the competing literary and social systems at work in the text. The secretary, much like the courtierpoet, is a paradox. He is in service, ostensibly with no will of his own. In some constructions, he is valued precisely for his ability to cancel out his own identity as he carries out his master’s wishes: “He must conform to the will of the master, and to satisfy his every whim.” The perfect secretary is like the octopus, according to one treatise, “which is namely, to take on the color of the thing to which one is near. So the secretary should liken himself in all things to the master whom he serves.”46 Gascoigne’s text reveals the early modern fascination with the ambiguities of service, but more importantly, it teases out a new concept of the author. The secretary, F.J., and G.T. exist on a continuum, forming an interdependent trio that together reveal a changing notion of authorship, one based more on the publishing of secrets than the keeping of them.

Notes 1 Both the Pigman edition and Paul Salzman’s are cited for ease of reference. 2 Alan Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered,” Representations 50 (1995), p. 88. 3 See for instance, Richard Rambuss’s influential study of Spenser’s secretarial career, Spenser’s Secret Career (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 4 On Sidney, see Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, eds., Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005), pp.  12–14. For Clifford, see Aaron Kunin, “From the Desk of Anne Clifford,” English Literary History 71.3 (2004), p. 604. And on Hoby, see Joanna Moody, ed., The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (Stroud: Sutton Publishers, 2001). John Donne served as secretary to both Sir Robert and Lady Anne Drury. 5 Regarding social class, in Spenser’s Secret Career Rambuss argues that most secretaries were self-made men. As Robert Cecil phrases it, even the highest ranking secretary is “created by himself, and of his own raising,” (Quoted in Rambuss,

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p. 37). Jonathan Goldberg, on the other hand, connects the secretary with courtliness, noting in particular, the secretary’s resemblance to Castiglione’s Courtier: “The ‘being’ of the secretary is fetched from all the requirements of humanistic, courtly gentleness and civilisation; it extends from proper birth through high rhetorical education to include even a well-formed body and face.” Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 266. Angel Day is somewhat more ambivalent, granting the secretary social status by reputation at least: the secretary is “‘himself in reputation a Gentleman’ if the man he serves is one” (Rambuss, p. 43). Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet,” pp. 88–89. Noting the secretary’s privileged access to private information – both textual and physical – Julie Crawford broadens the definition of secretary to include gentlewomen attendants and chambermaids. Arguing that these women shared a similar intimacy with their mistresses as that shared by gentlemen and their secretaries, Crawford’s analysis encourages an examination of the “knowledge transmission” and power relations that existed among women (p. 112). The parallel between friendship and service that existed in these relationships illustrates “the extent to which female homoeroticism was an integral and deeply significant part of early modern social, cultural and political life,” Crawford contends, “Women’s Secretaries,” in Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze, ed. Vin Nardizzi and Will Stockton (Franham, GB: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), p. 131. A nosebleed was frequently considered evidence of sexual desire in the Renaissance. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 25. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 21. Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career. Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe, Letterwriting in Renaissance England ( Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004), pp. 55–56. James Knowles, “‘Infinite Riches in a Little Room’: Marlowe and the Aesthetics of the Closet,” in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/ Spaces, 1580–1690, ed. Gordon McMullan ( New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998),p. 13. Angel Day, The English Secretary (London, 1599), Pt. 2, pp. 102– 03. All further references are to this edition and will be supplied in the text. Quoted in Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 175. Goldberg, p. 267. As Goldberg further explains, the secretary is structured by, and as, a replacement for his lord. The secretary is the space of the lord’s secret where interiority and exteriority are intertwined. As a result, he must relinquish any individualising marks in his own writing. Gascoigne’s secretary is, of course, not invisible but ever present, at least towards the end of the narrative when he is depicted several times with Elinor in her chamber. This is the term used by Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell (eds.) to describe the one who literally writes – the scribe, the clerk, the copyist, the typist, the secretary, the word processor – as opposed to the author in Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), p. 2. Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 124. “Female Literacy and the Social Conventions of Women’s Letter-Writing in England, 1540–1603,” in James Daybell, Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing,

The ‘Manling’ Secretary in Master F.J.

20

21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31 32

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1450–1700 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p.  67. See also, Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). James Daybell, “Women’s Letters and Letter Writing in England: 1540–1603: An Introduction to the Issues of Authorship and Construction,” Shakespeare Studies 27(1999), p. 163 and Carolyn Sale, “The Roman Hand: Women, Writing and the Law in the Att.-Gen. v. Chatterton and the Letters of the Lady Arbella Stuart,” ELH 70.4 (2003), p. 940. Katharine Wilson, Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 25. Elizabeth Mazzola argues that a woman choosing to use a secretary for her correspondence does not indicate illiteracy, but rather might prove her wealth and power: “The absence of her own hand may illustrate, in other words, an early modern woman’s command over another’s,” Learning and Literacy in Female Hands, 1520– 1698 (Farnham, GB: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013), p. 64. In Gascoigne’s narrative, however, the male readers assert a superior and masculine kind of poetic language beyond female capacity. Quoted in Salvatore S. Nigro, “The Secretary,” in Baroque Personae, ed. Rosario Villari, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p.  96. Yet, other writers on secretaries seek to contain his protean aspect: as Gramigna explains, “even if he is Proteus, I will bind him so tightly, that after he has changed into all the shapes that he can, he will in the end be forced to take on his original shape and form, and still, not wishing to, be forced to satisfy our common desire” (Quoted in Biow, p. 176). Rambuss, p. 33. Arthur F. Marotti, “Love Is not Love: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” English Literary History 49 (1982), p. 398. Charles Huges, ed., “Nicholas Faunt’s Discourse Touching the Office of the Principal Secretary of Estate, &c. 1592,” English Historical Review 20.79 (1905), p. 501. Rambuss, p. 43. Alan Stewart, “Gelding Gascoigne,” in Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640, eds. Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), p. 158. Richard C. McCoy, “Gascoigne’s ‘Poemata castrata’: The Wages of Courtly Success,” Criticism 27.1 (1985), pp.  29–55 and Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Stewart, pp. 82–84. In some ways, Lena Cowen Orlin complicates the closet as a metaphor for secretarial power, finding at least nine possible uses for spaces dubbed “closets” in the early modern period, and argues that access to the closet was likely not as exclusive as scholars have contended. Nonetheless, the one consistent characteristic Orlin discovers in her study is that the closet could be secured: “At base, the closet was that which could be closed; it could be locked,” “Gertrude’s Closet,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 134 (1998), p. 64. Orlin’s argument about the closet as protected space supports my contention that the closet is also conflated with the female body in Gascoigne’s narrative. Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 74. Thomas Nashe, “The Choice of Valentines,” in Renaissance Literature: An Anthology, eds. Michael Payne and John Hunter (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 817–24.

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33 Steve Mentz, “Day Labor: Thomas Nashe and the Practice of Prose in Early Modern England,” in Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading, ed. Naomi Liebler (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 24. 34 Biow, p. 177. 35 Nigro, p. 87. 36 Jonathan Crewe, p. 124. 37 Susan C. Staub, “‘A Poet with a Spear’: Writing and Sexual Power in the Elizabethan Period,” Renaissance Papers (1992), pp. 1–15. 38 Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 139. 39 Rambuss, p. 56. 40 John Kerrigan makes a similar argument about secrets in “Secrecy and Gossip in Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Studies 50 (1997), pp. 65–80. 41 Wall, The Imprint of Gender, pp. 172–73, 177. 42 Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 60. 43 Rambuss, p. 54. 44 Douglas Biow, p. 177. 45 Even after he revises the text as The Posies, Gascoigne sets himself up as a secretary when he tells his readers that “the most part [of the love poems] were written for other men.” “If ever I wrote lynes for myself in causes of love, I have written tenne for other men in layes of lust…For in wanton delights I helped all men, though in sad earnest I never furthered myself in any kind of way,” he claims. The Posies, ed. John W. Cunliffe ( New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), pp. 16–17. 46 Gramigna, quoted in Biow, p. 176.

Not forgetting Frances: ‘Adventures’ in Elizabethan Fiction Katharine Wilson

This volume attests to a growing enthusiasm for the works of George Gascoigne. Admitting to enjoying Gascoigne’s writing brings critics closer to many of the author’s earliest readers, whose phenomenal response to his prose fiction is the subject of this chapter. The most proscriptive aspect of this response is a familiar though still murky story. The prose fiction which appeared under the name “A discourse of the adventures passed by Master F.J.” was first printed in Gascoigne’s anthology A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres in 1573. Gascoigne dropped heavy hints that his tale of aristocratic adultery at a country house was a roman à clef, then appears to have taken offence as soon as readers began to guess at the likely identities of his protagonists. In the preface to the revised edition of his anthology, The Posies, published in 1575, Gascoigne complained bitterly to the “reverend Divines” that his narrative had been entirely misinterpreted: “if I had bene so foolishe as to have passed in recitall a thing so done in deede, yet all the world might thinke me verie simple if I would call John, John, or Mary, Mary” ( p. 363). Accordingly, in the revised version, Gascoigne set the story in a fictional Italian castle rather than, as previously, in a northern country house, and gave his protagonists Italianate names. The prosy persona who oversees the 1573 version, “G. T.”, was replaced by an omniscient narrator who claimed to be retelling a tale by “Bartello”, a fictional writer whose name bears a striking resemblance to the bestselling author of Italian fictional shockers, Matteo Bandello. And for much of the twentieth century, the situation surrounding the text seemed clear enough: the first version was the story of a prodigal young man, and the second his printed repentance and attempt to appease the authorities.1 But Gascoigne’s endeavours to escape censure appear to have failed, and at least one later version of the text was banned.2 More recent critics have uncovered more complex narratives.3 Gascoigne’s protestations of repentance often seem more posed than penitential, and the letter he wrote to the reverend divines is more irritable than sorrowful. Most of the changes he made to the text were cosmetic. Gascoigne’s partial revision of the story’s ending seems intended to add a moralistic gloss, but it is a very equivocal one. The first version of the story has F.J., the young lover, discovering his adulterous mistress Elinor with one of her other lovers, and

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190  Katharine Wilson leaving in disgust. In the revised text, the story ends with Elinor, here called Leonora, continuing a promiscuous existence, and F.J. (now Ferdinando) also leading a life of dissolution. The only edifying protagonist in the text, Frances, or as she is here called Francischina, dies of consumption. Gascoigne probably intended to make a point about the continuance of evil in the world and the extinction of good; the wicked flourish like the green bay tree. But in the process, he also managed to convey how very repeatable his story was. Gascoigne had already composed two versions of the story, implicitly inviting readers to compare and contrast them. In addition to the prose fiction, he placed within the anthology a number of interweaving poetic narratives which appear designed to reflect on the story of F.J. and Elinor, and to keep it uppermost in readers’ minds. Long autobiographical sequences of poems which were expanded in the Posies relate the adventures of personae called Dan Bartholomew and the Green Knight, who go on to have disastrous love affairs, yet cannot help looking forward to being “amorous” again. The relentless perkiness of some of his personae suggests that their author was far from repentant and may indeed have helped to generate the notoriety which clung to his publications. Gascoigne presents his readers with a seemingly endless sequence of loving losers, whose failure to win their women only generates further erotic chases and poetic sequences. The story of F.J. and Elinor can be seen as one which keeps forcing itself on the public’s attention, keeps being rewritten – and which in turn encouraged other writers to rewrite it. This chapter is about how F.J.’s adventures helped to shape Elizabethan fiction, and the metamorphoses of the male poet surrogate whom Gascoigne created. Whatever degree of historical fact may lie behind it, Gascoigne’s narrative of a highly mediated love affair serves in one respect as an homage to the negotiations between Chaucer’s Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus, and as a statement of Gascoigne’s poetic credentials.4 But, as Gascoigne’s reference to Bartello suggests, part of the fascination of the tale for his many readers and imitators lay in the varied but violent plot and not simply because it appeared to reflect contemporary scandal. What arises from the diverse imitative fictions of George Whetstone, John Grange, Gabriel Harvey, John Lyly, and Philip Sidney is a desire to combine the beguiling multiplicity of Gascoigne’s fiction with a morally satisfying conclusion, and in particular to redress the uncomfortable fate of Frances. And as the female personae in the imitations become literate and articulate agents in their romances, the male protagonists find their status as men of letters is frequently compromised. To his successors, Gascoigne’s narrative presented as many challenges as it did attractions. Not only had Gascoigne hinted that he was exposing a real life scandal, the “wanton places” in the fiction also were shocking enough in themselves. Of these, the turning point in the story is the rape which F.J. commits, and which leads Elinor to abandon him in favour of his nameless rival, always referred to as the “Secretary”. (Although he makes mysterious visits to London, readers never discover whether this is an official title or

‘Adventures’ in Elizabethan Fiction  191 not. For the purposes of the fiction, the rival acts as Elinor’s secretary inasmuch as he composes love letters to F.J. on Elinor’s behalf.)­5 Gascoigne’s description of the rape is graphic and to the point. F.J. is suffering from lovesickness, and when Elinor turns up in his bedroom in her nightgown, he faints. Elinor revives him, and F.J. confesses his suspicions that Elinor has changed her mind about him. They quarrel and, pushing her up against the bolster of the bed, ‘he thrust hir through both hands and etc. wher by the Dame swoning for feare, was constreyned (for a time) to abandon hir body to the enemies curtesie’ ( p. 198). But according to G. T., Elinor does not suffer from the rape, ‘(bicause shee founde hir hurt to be nothing daungerous) I doubt not, but shee slept quietly the rest of the night’ ( p. 198). From the start of the narrative, Gascoigne had been making puns about pens and penises, but only now do they start to reveal their significance.6 Writing and sex are inextricably intertwined. F.J.’s attempts to court Elinor had begun with poetry, elaborately dissected by the long-w inded commentator G. T. But all F.J.’s poetry could not hide the fact that, thanks to his rape, his sexual style or “playne song” did not compare with his rival the secretary’s “quils and pennes” which Elinor now prefers ( p.  199). And as the plot thickens but F.J.’s courtship languishes, his poetry ceases to be at the heart of the text. While F.J.’s sexual and literary powers are eclipsed, the narrative encompasses a variety of literary modes, most notably educative storytelling sessions pioneered by the women staying in the house. Elinor however takes little part in these sessions. From the beginning, she has appeared as a semi- comic foil to F.J., her modes of communication at odds with his convoluted courtship. Elinor’s style varies between the apparently mysterious and the bathetically simple. In her initial encounter with F.J., she claims to be baffled by his Petrarchan metaphors, although whether her mystification is genuine or not we never know. What F.J. later suspects is that her more complex literary productions are the work of the secretary. Left to herself, Elinor conveys her meaning more concisely. After she first ­ sleeps with F.J., she appears with a paper marked “Contented” stuck to her forehead ( p. 172). Her rape raises more contentious issues. Gascoigne implicitly challenges his readers to differentiate themselves from G. T.’s breezy interpretation of the incident as trivial – no harm done. Elinor’s view of the matter remains oblique – all we know is that she turns to another lover for consolation. This was not the only time Gascoigne wrote about a woman’s response to rape, although the result was very different. In 1576, he composed his own version of the Ovidian legend of Philomela, The Complaynt of Phylomene. In Ovid’s tale, Philomela weaves the story of her abuse into a tapestry even though her own tongue has been cut out, the ultimate example of determined eloquence.7 Elinor is far less forthcoming. Her characteristic silence is in marked contrast to the behaviour of Frances, the highly articulate unmarried daughter of the house who befriends F.J. and puns with him as an equal. Frances is a facilitator who repeatedly if indirectly offers F.J. moral choice. At the

192  Katharine Wilson same time as making sure he is fully informed about Elinor’s other lovers, she steals the “naked sword” which F.J. has been using for foreplay. She also appears as a more obvious ethical touchstone, giving herself and F.J. the new allegorical identities of “Hope” and “Trust”. And while she never gets to take part in any of the writing games in the book, she becomes a linchpin of the storytelling sessions. Unlike the exchange of letters and poems between Elinor and F.J., the stories demand moral responses from their readers. When Frances tells a story about adultery, F.J. is able to pronounce judgement, despite his apparent inability to recognise that his opinions are compromised by his own sexual behaviour. Frances is in many ways an ambiguous exempla, and her determined interference in F.J.’s affair can be read as the fruit of jealousy or voyeurism.8 But she is also one of the many intermediary or perhaps ‘secretary’ figures in the text. Following Richard Rambuss’s redefinition of the role of the early modern secretary, Frances can be seen as both a keeper and a revealer of secrets.9 Like G. T., she intervenes in the affair between F J. and Elinor in order to shape it into a narrative arc. By hiding F.J.’s sword and reminding him of Elinor’s promiscuity, she gives F.J. the chance to understand his own story in a different way. Gascoigne is nudging his readers towards drawing a logical narrative inference: F.J. really should have fallen in love with Frances. That possibility is left as a tantalising hypothesis – but his successors could give free rein to their imagination. The idea of an F.J. – Frances relationship is part of what motivates Gascoigne’s reformist imitators, keen to exploit their predecessor’s success but avoid his notoriety. Two of Gascoigne’s earliest imitators tried to combine the elements of textual exchange which characterise Master F.J. with the depiction of a poetic courtship between two chaste lovers which ends in marriage. Thus, Master F.J. is effectively rewritten starring a reformed F.  J., and Frances instead of Elinor. The forces of evil could be safely externalised in the figure of a rival to the hero (the equivalent of the secretary) who is enraged by the heroine’s determined fidelity or defeated by the hero himself. The authors could thus avoid the sexual violence portrayed by Gascoigne – but they do not forget it either. The threat of rape lies at the heart of these texts – as does the heroine’s response. In place of the silent, faithless Elinor who turned to another lover after being abused, Gascoigne’s imitators experimented with the idea of a heroine who could repulse the assaults on her virtue by using the sort of eloquence exercised by Frances. But more thoughtprovoking issues are also raised – what would happen in an affair between an F.J. and a woman who might combine the wit of a Frances and the morals of an Elinor? Or what if a distinctly unreformed F.J. lusted after a Frances? The creation of a literate and resourceful heroine is more than a crowdpleasing device or a way of avoiding censure. Through the network within A Hundreth which linked F.J., Dan Bartholomew and the Green Knight, Gascoigne had established a strong identification between his own authorial persona and that of the prodigal young man who loses out to his more competent rivals in love (while seemingly inadvertently establishing his canon

‘Adventures’ in Elizabethan Fiction  193 of poetry in print). Gascoigne’s successors began to experiment with other modes of identification. In the earliest printed imitations, the emphasis in the narrative becomes more diffuse, with the nominal hero almost eclipsed by the witty woman whom he courts, or by the rival and his doomed and increasingly ridiculous attempts at rape. But Gascoigne’s story also provoked more complex negotiations, especially in the manuscript imitations which it engendered. As the heroine is redrawn, so the authors sought to find a place for the hero who can preserve a claim to virtue, both have his cake and eat it.

Just say “NO”: Whetstone’s Discourse of Rinaldo and Giletta and Grange’s The Golden Aphroditis Gascoigne’s earliest imitators in print share a house style. George Whetstone and John Grange both produced anthologies in 1576 and 1577, respectively, which include a story about chaste lovers who meet and enjoy a poetic courtship in a long gallery, just like F.J. and Elinor, and are temporarily separated by a malevolent rival (the equivalent of the secretary) before being triumphantly reunited in marriage. Both authors steer clear of the complications of a narrator like G. T.10 The settings are unquestionably fictional. Echoing the second version of Gascoigne’s text, Whetstone chose an Italian castle as the backdrop for his story. This is itself enclosed in ‘The Castle of Delight’, the first section of his anthology The Rocke of Regard (1576). ­ Grange ventures into the supernatural world, but keeps a richly adorned house with a long gallery as the place of courtship. Yet, the tone of the texts is wildly different, especially in relation to what we might think of as one of the most attractive features of Gascoigne’s narrative, the delight in textuality which underpins the exchanges between F.J. and Elinor. For while Whetstone was determined to save his protagonists from impropriety and ambiguity, Grange marooned his chaste lovers in a deeply erotic universe consisting seemingly entirely of coded references and bawdy jokes. Whetstone is the apostle of plain speaking, in contrast to F.J.’s debased “playne style”, and his heroine never misses an opportunity to simplify matters. Rinaldo meets Giletta at a masque, falls in love with her, and embarks on a similar type of poetic exchange to that practised by F.J. But while she receives his advances, Giletta tempers her participation in both speech and writing games. No metaphor is indulged for too long: Giletta sensibly cuts off one of Rinaldo’s more tortuous flights of fancy with “since your wit serves you to flourish on every worde figuratively spoken, I will deliver my minde in more plaine speaches”.11 While Elinor was always wrapped in an aura of mystery, Giletta provides a handy guide to her attractions for Rinaldo’s benefit; as she says, it is “my milde disposition… makes you so earnest a suter” (56). Whetstone also implicitly distinguishes her from the simplistic eloquence displayed in Elinor’s modes of communication. When Giletta does write a letter to Rinaldo, it serves to reinforce her virtue and her confident expectation that Rinaldo will not try to take advantage of her.

194  Katharine Wilson Giletta belongs in the world of speech and communicative action. Her conversation with Rinaldo echoes the exchanges between Frances and F. J., as she explains that she lives in hope of his love. His reply is prescient: “But in hope, sweete mystresse? (quoth Rinaldo) there is no hope withoute mistruste, and causelesse mistrust woorketh two injuries; the one in distempering the mistrusters minde, the other in suspecting the well meaninge friend” (p. 60). Unfortunately, Rinaldo’s poverty forces the couple to keep their love secret. Consequently, they get caught up in the sort of suspicion and mistrust which F.J. fell prey to when they become enmeshed in the ambiguous signs of courtly exchange – or what Giletta calls “teltale paper” (p. 52). This leads them to a different sort of romance landscape – for the latter part of the plot Whetstone relies on Ariosto rather than Gascoigne. The transition is signalled when Giletta attempts to send Rinaldo a letter enclosed in an apple – a mode of textual exchange which is promptly intercepted by Giletta’s jealous ex-suitor Frizaldo. But while the despairing Rinaldo tries to commit suicide, Giletta is forced to take to plotting in order to defeat the machinations of Frizaldo and marry Rinaldo. Whetstone even adds a marginal note: “the womans wit in matters of love, quicker then the mans” (p. 80). Giletta is a Frances released into the world of action, winning her husband by force of wit. In so doing, she encounters far more dangerous situations than Gascoigne’s protagonists do, thanks to the murderous intrigues of Frizaldo. The final resolution is accomplished by a duel; whereas in Gascoigne’s text naked swords had been chiefly useful for their bawdy metaphorical potential, here they allow virtue to triumph. But Whetstone is careful to avoid the sense of claustrophobic intimacy which in Gascoigne’s text led to Elinor’s rape. His underlying nervousness about Gascoigne’s plot is suggested by his need to stress his protagonists’ chastity and openness, as opposed to the deceptive power of courtly exchange. John Grange was equally determined to stress his protagonists’ chastity – combined with the orgasmic pleasure of textual exchange. In many ways, Grange is Whetstone’s polar opposite. Where Whetstone was devoted to plainness, in Grange’s book everyone is obsessed by mysterious talking, mainly about sex, although according to Grange, it is all done in the best possible taste. He claims his narrative is a Platonic allegory in which the nymph A. O. (Alpha Omega) and her lover N. O. (who says ‘no’ to temptation) are overcoming obstacles in their quest for a higher form of love. But it is really founded on a deeply bawdy poetics, full of in (or Inns) jokes for Grange’s fellow lawyers, in which A. O. and N. O. are the only pure ones left in a sex crazed universe. Like Whetstone, Grange imbues his text with a sense of its belatedness; his protagonists meet because they have to atone for the sexual sins of their ancestors, just as Grange has to atone for Gascoigne’s shortcomings. It is those modes of textual exchange which so threaten Whetstone’s Rinaldo and Giletta which enable A. O. to defeat her jealous ex, punningly called I. I., i.e., the author. (This by the way is not Giletta’s secretary, who appears to exist in a purely scribal capacity and writes secret letters in lemon

‘Adventures’ in Elizabethan Fiction  195 juice). Initially, I. I. tries to convince N. O. that he has slept with A. O. by carving “veni, vidi” (I came, I saw) on a doorpost. But as A. O. points out he cannot complete the quotation with “vici” (I conquered) precisely because he has not ‘conquered’ her. When he later tries to rape her, A. O. successfully fends off his advances by amassing examples of literary good women. As she points out, “you had need to rise very early if that flattering face of yours coulde goe beyonde me herein”.12 I. I. ends up wishing his words unspoken. Grange’s text reads at times like a parody of “Rinaldo and Giletta”. While Whetstone had hastily disposed of the lecherous villain, Grange turned Gascoigne’s puns about pens into an exuberant emasculation. The scandal at the heart of Gascoigne’s text becomes a joke, starring the author as incompetent rapist at the mercy of female eloquence. Unlike Whetstone’s Giletta, A. O. not only participates enthusiastically in literary contests but she also uses them as a defence. Grange thus makes sure the proprieties are satisfied. The foolish sexual predator finds himself tried and found wanting, and the hero marries the heroine. By suggesting a self-mocking identification between himself and the inadequate eloquence of I. I., Grange’s book constitutes a witty revision of Gascoigne’s narrative. F.J.’s rape had revealed his lack of sexual style in comparison to his literary accomplishments. I. I.’s incontinent sexual desire also appears to rob him of the power of argument in comparison to the chaste fluency of A. O. Throughout the text, Grange has been slyly implying that writing about sex is as much fun as having it. The final sentence of the anthology, “My penne is stubbed, my paper spente, my Inke wasted, my wittes grauelled”, suggests a post coital exhaustion (sig. S4v). Grange’s virtuously creative protagonists only talk and write until they get married – but they seem to take so much pleasure in it that it is hard to believe gratification is really deferred.

Aristocrats and academics: Euphues, Euphues and his England and “A noble mans sute to a cuntrie maide” Not all of Gascoigne’s imitators were so happy to let the woman get the upper hand – or to identify with the would-be rapist. Like Grange, Gabriel Harvey composed an imitation of Gascoigne’s Master F.J. in which a literate woman vanquishes the foolish assailant by the power of her intelligence. Harvey also made sure that his readers could easily identify Harvey himself – but not as the villain. For Harvey, Gascoigne’s tale was an object lesson in manliness, as he explains in the marginal notes he made to his copy of the Posies: The discouerie of his mistres, a false Diamant. His sicknes, & Jealosie, did not help the matter, but did marre all. Woomen looue men, & care not for pore harts, that cannot bestead them. Especially at the returne of his riual, her Secretarie, it imported him to emprooue himself, more, then, before, & not to languish like a milksop, or to play the pore snake vpon himself. Ladie Elinor would have liked the man that would haue

196  Katharine Wilson maintained his possession by force of arms, & with braue encounters beat his enemies owt of the field. Ladie Fraunces, a fine & politique gentlewooman; a sure friend at a pinch, & a helping hand at euerie turne: a good wench, & worthie to be better requited for her kind hart, & effectual loouing dealing.13 Harvey’s interpretation suggests that he would have preferred the story to end in a duel between hero and villain – just as Whetstone’s imitation had done. But when Harvey tried his hand at imitating Master F.J., it is perhaps not surprising that it is Harvey himself who emerges as the hero who beats his enemies out of the field, while a degenerate milksop lord is punished for his lechery by a sturdy village community. His unpublished letter book (BL, Sloane MS 93), composed in the late 1570s, shows Harvey’s deep debt to Gascoigne (for whom he composed two memorial poems) and a campaign to replace the persona of the dissolute Master F.J. with the worthy Master G. H. Harvey’s motivation can be traced at least partially to his own problems with being accepted by his peers at Cambridge while he was taking his MA. Accordingly, the letter book gives the impression of a private manifesto, featuring the scholarly but affable Harvey winning friends and influencing people. One of the most explicitly biographical items in the book is also one of the most enigmatic. With comparatively few of his customary revisions, Harvey created a comic fabliau depicting the attempted seduction of his sister Mercy at the family home in Saffron Walden by a figure known only as Milord, abetted by his servant P. Whether Harvey was recording fact remains uncertain. But even if the story were based in truth, he shaped the events into a narrative which plainly recalls F.J.’s affair with Elinor. Like Whetstone and Grange, Harvey produced a reformist imitation, inasmuch as attempted rape is avoided. Harvey also had a social and perhaps even geographical point to make. The lecherous lord and his sidekick are repeatedly thwarted by the seemingly humble maid Mercy, her neighbours and the vagaries of the Cambridgeshire weather. Accordingly, they often find themselves having to return to London soaked through. And ultimately, it is not the aristocrat who triumphs, but the academic. What is perhaps most provocative about the narrative is the presentation of Harvey’s sister Mercy, who remains far more difficult to read than either of Whetstone or Grange’s heroines. As Milord begins to court her by letter, Mercy’s understandable scepticism about her suitor’s intentions is reflected in the proverbs which she blandly quotes in her answers: “Chastitie they say is like unto time, which, being ons lost, can no more be recoverid”.14 Mercy turns out to be both remarkably literate and an expert in delaying tactics. She finally reaches the happy compromise of accepting Milord’s presents but avoiding his visits while composing taunting poetic responses. As she observes, “tis not inke and paper… that can content Milord”, before expatiating on the theme in rhyming couplets ( p. 151).

‘Adventures’ in Elizabethan Fiction  197 But Mercy does not have to rely on words alone, as becomes clear when she finally agrees to a meeting at a neighbour’s house during Christmas 1574. Milord is waiting in a parlour, points untrussed, and “woulde needs have laid ye maide on ye bed” ( p. 152). Mercy puts her cunning plan into action and gets a neighbour to knock on the door with a message from Mercy’s mother. So, the ‘politique’ Mercy – unlike Elinor – escapes unscathed, and the scene dissolves into comic humiliation for Milord. Mercy only oversteps the mark when she starts conjuring with Harvey’s name. She arranges for Milord to write to her under cover of writing to her brother “Master G. H.” himself, in a “small counterfet secretary” hand, which Harvey imitates on the page ( p. 156). Harvey however intercepts the letter (after joshing wittily with the postman) and writes a faux naïf response to Milord, claiming to suspect that Milord has been a victim of identity fraud. That is the end of the story in the letter book. Readers never know whether any of it is true or what happened next. But during the course of events, Mercy usurps the stereotypically male functions of reading and writing. While Harvey probably intended to portray her as a flirt, she emerges from the fiction as a plotter similar to Gascoigne’s Frances. Her final plot, starring Harvey as dupe, suggests that she is as cunning at using intermediaries as anyone in Master F.J. Mercy sets up a situation in which Milord finds himself courting the surrogate lover “Master G. H.”, a love triangle which recalls the negotiations between F.J., Elinor and her secretary in Master F.J. Harvey responds by seizing back his own identity as a letter writer, which he is establishing throughout the letter book, even as he pretends that it is Milord’s identity which has been abused. At one level, it is Harvey who is his sister’s counterfeit secretary, transcribing the letters which she may or may not have written, and which Harvey has shaped into his own text, perhaps partly to provide himself with a flattering filial role. Harvey recounts a battle for dominance, not just between Milord and Mercy but also between himself and his sister. Harvey wins, inasmuch as he rewrites the role of secretary in order to manage his sister’s secrets. Yet, the text leaves readers with a much more vivid impression of Mercy, who steals her brother’s identity while also robbing Milord of his role as lecherous rapist. For whatever reasons, Mercy never emerged beyond the confines of her manuscript, and by 1578, there was a whole new phenomenon designed to expunge the memory of masters F.J. and G. H. An even more graphic example of what happens when a woman threatens to take over the text is given by Lyly. There are neither millhouses nor long galleries in Lyly’s urban imitation, and emphatically no faithful lovers. Lyly’s Euphues. The Anatomy of Wyt is a narrative in which a potential F.J. is overwhelmed by a succession of plots, and finally by another plotter. But he is also the victim of Lyly’s timidity. Lyly portrays his hero the young Euphues as a prodigal son who quarrels with his father, steals his friend Philautus’s fiancée Lucilla and carries on a secret affair with her while initially pretending to Philautus that he is courting the lady Livia.

198  Katharine Wilson Lyly thus sets up a situation which could be said to parallel that between Elinor, Elinor’s husband and F.J. But Lyly hastily counteracts any suggestion of the lubriciousness of F.J. and Elinor’s coupling, let alone rape, noting that they just talk, “alwayes keepinge the body undefiled”.15 Like Elinor, Lucilla eventually rejects her admirer in favour of another suitor, the unattractive Curio, who is the equivalent of Elinor’s secretary. And she does really rather well out of it, as even Lyly is obliged to admit. When Lucilla has confessed her infidelity, her father dies of grief, she inherits his lands, and Euphues is left to his private study and furious recriminations. Even Lyly seems a bit taken aback, refusing to explain what happened to her, because, he says, “it is nothing incident to the history of Euphues” (i. 245). The Anatomy of Wyt is one of the most concerted attempts to capitalise on Gascoigne’s legacy while avoiding the consequences suffered by Gascoigne. Lyly accordingly tried to create a rebellious surrogate who would not upset the authorities and who never got to make love or poems. Like everyone else in the book, all he can do is talk. Euphuism as an art form is about doubling, reduplication, filling up the printed page, and it is Lucilla who proves herself at least as capable as Euphues. Unlike Elinor, Lucilla has no problem competing with a male style of argument, even when it is couched in the weird comparisons which became Lyly’s stock in trade. And she turns out to be far more skilled at making euphuism work for her than Euphues himself. Euphues tends to use comparisons to point up his own situation. When reflecting on his love for Lucilla, Euphues can amass examples: Ah well I perceiue that loue is not vnlyke the Figge tree, whose fruite is sweete, whose roote is more bitter then the claw of a Bitter, or lyke the Apple in Persia, whose blossome sauoreth lyke Honny, whose budde is more sower then gall (i. ­ 208) Lucilla however deftly mobilises examples to her own advantage, and the ones she picks are telling: “Is not the Dyamonde of more valewe then the Rubie, bicause he is of more vertue? Is not the Emeraulde preferred before the Saphyre for his wonderfull propertie? Is not Euphues more prayse worthy then Philautus being more wittie?” (i. 206). Precious stones provide Lucilla with an index with which she can comfortably equate moral worth. Ultimately, her value system turns out to be entirely arbitrary; she eventually picks Curio despite his lack of wit or wealth. But she is good at adapting her similes to her desires at the time. Since she ends up with her father’s inheritance as well as Curio, this would appear to be an economically successful strategy.16 The Anatomy of Wyt invented a deliberately catchy language system designed to be used and abused by all readers – anybody can remember the obscure toads and crocodiles, or at least write them down and learn them for future occasions. Euphues himself only regains his distinctiveness – and

‘Adventures’ in Elizabethan Fiction  199 the equivalent of F.J.’s canon of courtship poetry  – when he turns into a bitter moralist. It is possible that Lyly originally intended to make Livia into a counterpart of Gascoigne’s Frances. Her virtuous credentials are established at the end of the text when she explains to Euphues in a letter about the immoral behaviour of ladies at the court of an unnamed Empress. However, Lyly allowed her to fade from the main plot, concentrating instead on the all- consuming Lucilla. Unlike F.J., Rinaldo or N. O., Euphues only gains his identity as a writer after the love affair is over. Gascoigne had created a network of losers in love (F.J., Dan Bartholomew, the Green Knight) whose poetic identity depended on their repeated amatory failures. Lyly created an author who had emerged from love and claimed literary authority from his permanently disillusioned status. As an academic alone in his study, Euphues was free to moralise at will, with the death of Lucilla providing him with an opportunity for especially pompous reflections. If Lyly was satisfied with that, however, his real readers were not. They wanted books about love, not moral tracts, as is made clear in Lyly’s dedicatory epistle to his sequel Euphues and his England in 1580. The resultant text shows just how determined Lyly was to resolve the troublesome legacy left by F.J. Euphues the moralist was no longer suited to the role of lover, and it is left to Philautus to sort out Gascoigne’s plot. This time Lyly eliminates any possibility of controversy by presenting a comprehensively reformed version of Gascoigne’s house party. In place of the secrets, crowded bedrooms and galleries of Elinor’s house, Lyly placed Euphues and Philautus at the open English court. In place of the adulterous Lucilla, Lyly introduced an ideal of fidelity. Philautus falls in love with one of the ladies of the court, the English ‘rose’ Camilla, who rejects his advances out of a desire to stay faithful to her old lover. But in Lyly’s revised version, Philautus does not have to end up alone. Instead, Lyly gives one of the other ladies, Frances, nicknamed the “violet”, the chance to exercise her skills. Lyly gives his readers every opportunity to recognise his Frances’s ancestry in Gascoigne’s bunches of literary flowers. Not only has he “not forgotten” her (ii. 156), as he reminds his readers, he also converts her role in Master F.J. to the attainment of a worthier object. When the company are engaged in questioni d’amore, Philautus and Frances discuss whether constancy or secrecy is more important in love. Philautus opts for constancy, but Frances gives both qualities equal weight. The metaphor with which she begins her argument is revealing: “Gentleman if I shoulde aske you whether in the making of a good sworde, yron were more to bee required, or steele: sure I am you woulde aunswere that both were necessarie” (ii. 176). Just so, Frances argues, both constancy and secrecy are necessary in love. Whereas Gascoigne’s Frances helped F.J. to play with naked swords in his pursuit of Elinor, Lyly’s Frances uses them as representations of the moral virtues so lacking in F.J. and Elinor’s affair. With almost all the company earnestly matchmaking, Philautus soon realises, as Lyly tellingly puts it, on which side his bread is buttered, and switches his affections from

200  Katharine Wilson Camilla to Frances. Lyly thus ensures that his bold but modest Frances is a plotter who gains Philautus’s love by virtuous conversation, in contrast to the self-interested monologue employed by Lucilla. While Frances is placed firmly within the confines of the love plot, Euphues emerges from the fiction to undertake his role as chief flatterer to the queen. The encomium to England with which the text ends was designed to win Lyly a job, and by 1583, he was composing plays for the Blackfriars theatre. For Harvey and Lyly, then, the presence of an articulate female plotter provided a way of closing off the loose ends of Gascoigne’s plot in order to establish another masculine p ersona – not the loser poet, nor the chaste hero, but the exemplary secretary. Harvey’s intrusion into his sister’s affair helped him to construct an identity as a manager of secrets and letters. Lyly delegated the role of romance hero to Philautus, leaving Lyly’s surrogate Euphues to create a more commercially profitable literary identity.

Fighting against a weak resistance: Sidney’s Old Arcadia In the atmosphere at Lyly’s English court, there is no thought of anything more daring than conversation. Lyly had his career prospects in mind. Sidney had different agendas. As Robert Maslen has shown, The Old Arcadia can be added to the canon of reformist imitations of Gascoigne’s Master F.J., in which coded poetic courtships reach ultimately happy ends.17 The Old Arcadia can be seen as the partial fulfilment of Sidney’s call for the reinvigoration of English poetry in the Apology. Unlike F.J., Sidney’s hero prince Pyrocles has a higher purpose when engaging in sexual games and poetic exchanges. By so doing, he sorts out the disordered love lives of the ruling elders Basilius and his wife Gynecia, both of whom imagine themselves to be in love with Pyrocles. By means of a bed trick, he brings husband and wife together again and can only accomplish this end by employing the seemingly unheroic methods of subterfuge and female disguise. Yet, the Old Arcadia is not only a paean to masculine heroics. Like Lyly, Sidney had not forgotten Gascoigne’s Frances. By interweaving the love affairs of Pyrocles and his friend Musidorus, Sidney sets up a situation in which two possible outcomes to a coded poetic courtship are shown. Both involve rape – but both also involve chaste and intelligent women and the heroes of the text. Sidney – twice – imagines what would happen if an unreformed F.J. had fallen in love with a counterpart of Frances. For even though the princes may display more heroism overall than F.J., their sexual motivations are no different. Sidney however brings them to harsher judgement than that suffered by F.J. by making Arcadia into a state which punishes pre-marital sex with execution. In both cases, the princes are saved in part by the resourcefulness of the women they court, although also ultimately by chance. And in a book which comprehensively problematises human judgement, it remains debatable whether the two princes emerge as heroic, or just lucky.

‘Adventures’ in Elizabethan Fiction  201 As in Gascoigne’s narrative, the crux of the situation is the moment of sexual consummation. Or in Musidorus’s case, the moment of attempted consummation. The scene is associated with the revelation of true identity. Disguised as the shepherd Dorus, Musidorus has just rescued Pamela from the foolish rustics who have been guarding her. She reveals that she knows who he is, and declares her love, although also her chastity: “I have yielded to be your wife; stay then till the time that I may rightly be so”.18 From then on, Sidney seems at pains to remind his readers that he is writing a romance. The couple reach a locus amoenus, engrave love poems to each other on trees, and pass the time “in this virtuous wantonness” until Pamela eventually falls asleep ( p. 176). Musidorus contemplates her at leisure, and his thoughts form a prose blazon: “He thought her fair forehead was a field where all his fancies fought…her fair lids (then hiding her fairer eyes) seemed unto him sweet boxes of mother of pearl, rich in themselves, but containing in them far richer jewels” ( p. 176). But then the romance takes a different turn. Musidorus swiftly abandons ideas of chastity: overmastered with the fury of delight, having all his senses partial against himself and inclined to his well beloved adversary, he was bent to take advantage of the weakness of the watch, and see whether at that season he could win the bulwark before timely help might come ­ 177) (p. The martial metaphors recall F.J.’s assault on Elinor, but in this text, they also presage future events. Before he can rape her, Musidorus and Pamela are set upon by a vengeful mob of Arcadians. Musidorus, torn between lust and repentance, is able to sublimate his emotions by fighting off the attackers. He is outnumbered and only saved from execution by the pleas of Pamela. Instead, the Arcadians take them prisoner. While the couple continue to pledge their love, Sidney stresses the sexual danger Pamela was in: “she was in a shrewd likelihood to have had great part of her trust in Musidorus deceived, and found herself robbed of that she had laid in store as her dearest jewel” ( p. 265). What starts as Musidorus’s rape of Pamela ends with Musidorus at least partially dependent on Pamela for his life. The attempted rape then triggers the chance for Musidorus to display manly deeds – but also to show his own weakness to readers. Pyrocles is perhaps even more reliant on the woman he courts. The account of the consummation of his love in Philoclea’s bedroom is woven into the story of Musidorus’s attempted rape and the assault of the mob and parallels and reflects on both that narrative and that of F.J. and Elinor. Like F.J., Pyrocles faints after a quarrel with his lover over the question of fidelity and has to be revived by her. But Sidney equally stresses Pyrocles’s predatory intent. Philoclea is described as a nightingale singing alone, an obvious reference to the Ovidian myth of Philomela. When they are reconciled, Pyrocles lifts Philoclea back onto her bed, after which “there came a song

202  Katharine Wilson the shepherd Philisides had in his hearing sung of the beauties of his unkind mistress, which in Pyrocles’ judgement was fully accomplished in Philoclea”. Sidney records the long poetic blazon, “What tongue can her perfections tell” (p. 207), before revealing that Pyrocles himself was too busy to remember more than the “general fancy” of it. Like F.J. and Musidorus, Pyrocles is beginning an assault on Philoclea which is described in martial terms: fighting against a weak resistance, which did strive to be overcome, he gives me occasion to leave him in so happy a plight, lest my pen might seem to grudge at the due bliss of these lovers whose loyalty had but small respite of their fiery agonies ­ 211) (p. Sidney overlays the moment of consummation with contradictory narrative strands that seem designed to tease and confuse. The poetic blazon is placed at the heart of the experience for the reader, who is bound to associate it with Philoclea – even though Pyrocles himself does not really remember the poem, which was written by another poet (Sidney’s authorial persona) for his mistress, and thus assumes a more generic than personal quality.19 Readers are offered the poem as a consolation prize while Pyrocles has sex with Philoclea, while Philisides, the poet who is always unlucky in love, ironically has his poem appropriated to describe Pyrocles’s sexual experience. That sexual experience remains equally hard for readers to judge. Sidney tells us that Pyrocles rapes Philoclea – he fights, she resists. But in a tone strongly reminiscent of Gascoigne’s prurient G. T., the narrator also judges that when Philoclea says no, she really means yes. G. T. was left assuming that Elinor slept soundly after her rape. Sidney’s narrator confirms that Philoclea did so. Sidney rewrites the rape scene in Master F.J. a second time, so that Pyrocles, unlike F.J., finds his assault is apparently welcomed. Yet, the many framing devices Sidney places around this moment suggest that he gives his readers the chance to dissent from the controlling voice of the narrator in assuming Philoclea’s complicity. Sidney later picks up the story when (like Musidorus and Pamela) the couple are discovered and captured by locals, in this case the princesses’ guardian Dametas and his cronies. Now, like Musidorus, Pyrocles gets the chance to use weapons, since in his despair at their imprisonment, he attempts to commit suicide by falling on an iron bar. But he botches his attempts and (like Musidorus) finds himself dependent on female logic instead. While Pyrocles shows no remorse for the rape itself, he is convinced by Philoclea’s cogent and impassioned arguments against suicide as a contravention of divine law. Sidney’s presentation of his heroes is shot through with paradox. On the one hand, their sexual exploits could be interpreted as being matched by martial heroics. On the other hand, they are shown to be emasculated by their attempts to pursue their love affairs. Musidorus fails to rape Pamela,

‘Adventures’ in Elizabethan Fiction  203 and his use of a ‘naked sword’ to defend himself against the rebels does not prevent his capture. The complex framing devices with which Sidney surrounds Pyrocles’s rape seem initially to confirm his supremely masculine status. His vague remembrance of the poem by Sidney’s authorial persona serves to reinforce an ideal of masculine community reminiscent of many of the negotiations between men and their poems in the “Adventures”. In Master F.J., for example, F.J. sings the poem “Beautie shut up thy shop” to Elinor, who takes offence because she claims to believe it was originally addressed to one of F.J.’s previous lovers. Pyrocles however remembers a poem used about another mistress by another poet; he uses Philisides’s poem but distances himself from the stereotype of the loser in love which Philisides represents. But Pyrocles’s moment of triumph with Philoclea is followed by his clumsy attempts at suicide and Philoclea’s arguments to dissuade him. Like F.J., he finds his sexual exploits are closely linked to his humiliation. Both princes are left dependent on their articulate lovers to survive their imprisonment, and Pamela and Philoclea both make eloquent intercessions when they are later tried – Musidorus for stealing Pamela away and Pyrocles for rape. The latter conviction is particularly telling. Pyrocles decides to confess to rape as a cover story in order to save Philoclea, and Sidney’s narrator allows readers to forget that his consummation was described as rape in the first place. Finally, both princes are saved by good luck – Basilius is ‘resurrected’ from his drugged sleep, and all are reconciled. Sidney ends the story by pointing up the impossibility of unequivocal moral judgement in the case of Basilius’s wife Gynecia, who retains the reputation of a good wife as her lusting after Pyrocles remains largely unknown. But the princes are equally fraudulent. Musidorus attempted rape and Pyrocles committed it  – however, both have found women who respond to the situations they find themselves in and succeed in taking the initiative. Sidney imagines two possible replays of F.J.’s rape of Elinor, but by substituting an articulate ‘Frances’ type, ensures that both princes escape repentance and retribution. What Sidney has created is in many ways a w ish-fulfilling fantasy on the theme of Master F.J., in which the princes pick the right women and therefore get away with everything. Sidney makes sure that they are tried for their crimes, but finally releases them from the consequences – yet another example of the difficulty of making moral judgements. It is hard to exaggerate the influence of Master F.J. on Elizabethan fiction, and echoes of the text continue to surface amongst very different plots. Take for example Greene’s Philomela ( published 1592), in which a jealous husband tests his wife Philomela by persuading his best friend to court her as a chastity test. The best friend duly writes Philomela love poetry, but she writes moralising sonnets straight back at him, prompting him to exclaim in amazement that “mens poems follow their passions”, while women by implication can separate the two.20 Later, Philomela starts to behave in the manner of a recipient of poetry in Master F.J. Like F.J., she tears up a courtship poem, then later has to piece it together to read it. However, she retains

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her virtue and her poetry throughout, and it is her poetry which helps her save herself from rape later in the text. One way of looking at the increasing popularity of the Frances-type heroine is in relation to the growth of fiction itself. As writers sought to appeal to women readers more, their agency in the romances becomes paramount.21 But the F.J. story in particular enabled writers to find a different mode of authorial identification to set against that of the conventional prodigal poet. The legacy extends far beyond fiction. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (c . 1600) contains a coded courtship, duped suitor and aloof mistress. Anthony Brian Taylor has pointed to the parallels between Master F.J. and Orsino’s pursuit of Olivia, prosecuted by the intermediary Viola.22 The gulling of Malvolio with a mixture of letters, puzzles, and proxy authors bears comparison with F.J.’s humiliation when he discovers he has been writing to Elinor’s secretary. The portrayal of both Viola and Maria suggests that Shakespeare had also not forgotten Gascoigne’s Frances. What was it about Gascoigne’s short story which made it into a rite of passage for his successors? F.J.’s adventures are full of puzzles, but for his imitators, the plot itself needed to be solved, and its solution could launch a new author. The dominant but paradoxical persona in Gascoigne’s narrative is that of F.J., the loser in love who becomes a successful poet in print. For Whetstone, Grange, and Sidney, the persona of Frances provided them with ways of combining successful courtships with the creation of poetic canons. For Harvey and Lyly, the witty woman became a threat to be dismissed or domesticated so that a male authorial personality could emerge. But the problems of poetic identity which these texts raise all need further investigation. Perhaps the real conclusion is that we need to keep looking for Elinor, F.J. and Frances.

Notes 1 See Prouty’s biography. 2 See Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 103–22. 3 See especially Gillian Austen, ‘Gascoigne’s Master F.J. and its Revision, or “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”’, in W. Görtschacher and H. Klein eds., Narrative Strategies in Early English Fiction (Salzburg: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), pp. 67–85; Austen, George Gascoigne, 84–103; Felicity A. Hughes, ‘Gascoigne’s Poses’, SEL 37 (1997), 1–19. Meredith Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 168–96. 4 See M. R. Rohr, ‘Gascoigne and “My Master Chaucer”, JEGP 67 (1978), pp. 20–31. 5 See Susan C. Staub’s essay in this volume. 6 See the essay by Susan C. Staub in this volume for a discussion of Gascoigne’s use of sexual metaphors. 7 See Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Madeleine Forey (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 190–99. 8 See Susan C. Staub, ‘The Lady Frances Did Watch: Gascoigne’s Voyeuristic Narrative’, in Constance C. Relihan ed., Framing Elizabethan Fictions:

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1996), pp. 41–54. See Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 29– 48. For further detail on the links between these fictions, see P. W. Long, ‘From Troilus to Euphues’ in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kitteredge (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1913), pp. 367–76; Katharine Wilson, Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives: Euphues in Arcadia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 19–74. George Whetstone, The Rocke of Regard (1576). Repr. J. P. Collier, n. d., p. 52. John Grange, The Golden Aphroditis (London: H. Bynneman, 1577), sig. K2r. G. C. Moore Smith ed., Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia (Stratford upon Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), p. 166. The Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A. D. 1573– 1580 (London: Camden Society, 1884), p. 149. The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), i. 220. For Lucilla’s economic metaphors, see Joan Pong Linton, ‘The Humanist in the Market: Gendering Exchange and Authorship in Lyly’s “Euphues romances”’, in Relihan ed., Framing Elizabethan Fictions, pp. 73–97. R. W. Maslen, ‘Sidney, Gascoigne, and the “Bastard Poets”’, in Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic eds., Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in Britain, 1570–1640 ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 215–33. Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 173. See Catherine Bates’s discussion of the poem in Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 89–135. The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene M. A. in Prose and Verse, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 15 vols (London: Huth Library, 1881– 86), xi. 125. See Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Anthony Brian Taylor, ‘“The Adventures of Master F.J.” and Twelfth Night’, N&Q n.s. 45 (1998), pp. 331–33.

III

Gascoigne’s Critical Reputation

‘The very chefe of our late Rymers’: George Gascoigne and Literary Fame Gillian Austen For Edmund Spenser, writing in 1579, George Gascoigne was “the very chefe of our late Rymers”, even though his own work made Gascoigne’s seem instantly outmoded, only two years after his death.1 Spenser’s tribute appears in the November Eclogues of The Shepheardes Calender, an innovative work which marked a new era in English literary composition. Gascoigne was enormously influential on the writers who followed him  – even Spenser’s self- conscious announcement of a new literary style can be traced to him. And Spenser is not alone: his contemporaries published dozens of tributes to Gascoigne in print, showing that they recognised him as the most exciting and important of the early Elizabethan writers. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, Gascoigne’s literary reputation was very high at the time of his death in 1577 and his reputation actually rose through the 1580s and 1590s, during the most significant years of the English literary renaissance.2 For example, in 1589, Thomas Nashe echoed Spenser’s tribute: … Master Gascoigne is not to be abridged of his deserved esteeme, who first beate the path to that perfection which our best poets have aspired too since his departure …3 Although Gascoigne’s modern literary reputation is rising once again, it does not yet fully reflect his Elizabethan status; neither the literary fame he achieved in his lifetime nor the unequalled reputation his work experienced in the decades following his death. This essay seeks to trace the evidence of his critical reputation and discover why he is not yet more central to the early modern literary canon. It follows a trail of scattered references and comments to uncover the variable fortunes of Gascoigne’s literary reputation since the end of Elizabeth’s reign until the last part of the twentieth century.4 What emerges is a narrative thread connecting considerable elements of chance, both in the detail – such as the survival of single copies of key works – and in the much bigger historical picture but also the sustained efforts of individual scholars who have championed Gascoigne’s significance. For example, in the late Victorian period, Felix Schelling repeatedly invoked Gascoigne in his many books, to support his estimation of Gascoigne as

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210  Gillian Austen “the foremost author of his day”.5 But this high reputation did not survive in the twentieth century and I argue that this is in large part due to the impact of another Gascoigne champion, Charles T. Prouty. The biography Prouty published in 1942 focused on Gascoigne as the Reformed Prodigal and had the unintentional effect of making him seem dull and moralistic, rather than an innovator. For Prouty, “In comparison with the innovators, Wyatt and Surrey, or the great figures, Lyly, Marlowe, Spenser and Shakespeare, Gascoigne and his contemporaries are likely to be dull” ( p. 4).6 For most of the second half of the twentieth century, Gascoigne’s work remained problematic, largely because there were no authoritative editions. As late as 1990, Jonathan Crewe characterised Gascoigne as “an appreciable poet of the English sixteenth century with whom, since Yvor Winters, no one has known quite what to do … Where he fits in remains a problem”.7 This is a long way from Schelling’s assessment of almost exactly a century earlier. It is only relatively recently, since the publication of the authoritative edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, edited by G.W. Pigman III, that Gascoigne has begun to be recognised as the single most important and exciting writer of the early Elizabethan period.8 It is to be hoped that Elizabeth Goldring’s edition of The Princely Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle and Gabriel Heaton’s edition of Hemetes the Heremyte will prompt further research and scholarly editions.9 Gascoigne left a substantial body of work, which was both important and innovative, and influenced all of the much better known Elizabethan writers who came after him. His experimental work in comedy, tragedy, essays, prose fiction, blank verse, translation, and a wide range of poetic forms and metres, including sonnet sequences, had a significant impact on the great flowering of English literature from the 1570s to the 1590s. His direct influence is traceable in the work of Sidney (the Old Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella, Defence of Poesie), as well as Spenser, whose medievalising in the Faerie Queene was influenced by Gascoigne’s Steele Glas and Complaynte of Phylomene. Gascoigne’s prose fiction, Master F.J., influenced George Pettie and Barnabe Riche as well as the next generation of “Reformed Prodigals” (Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney, John Lodge, John Lyly, John Grange, George Whetstone et al.).10 Poets as diverse as Thomas Watson, Timothy Kendall, Whetstone, and Grange again, and Gascoigne’s stepson, Nicholas Breton, borrowed ideas, phrases, and sometimes whole lines from Gascoigne’s work. His direct influence is traceable in the drama, too: in Shakespeare and Marlowe, at the very least.11 It is significant that, even when he pays tribute to Gascoigne’s work, Spenser praises him not as a moralist or satirist but as a “wittie gentleman”: For giftes of wit and natural promptnesse appeare in hym aboundantly.12 If Gascoigne was in person as penitent and moralistic as the predominance of his moralistic personae in print might suggest, the literary historian could

George Gascoigne and Literary Fame  211 expect this to be the dominant trait his contemporaries remarked upon. But we find the same distinction in Gabriel Harvey’s extant comments. Harvey almost certainly knew Gascoigne personally, and despite publicly acknowledging Gascoigne’s literary gifts, and having his own first publication in the form of a dedicatory verse in the Posies, Harvey noted personally critical comments on his own copy, such as: Sum Vanity: and more levity: his special faultes, & the continuall causes of his misfortunes. Many other have maintained themselves gallantly upon sum one of his qualities: nothing fadgeth with him, for want of Resolution, & Constancy, in any one kind.13 A “faultie” or poor personal reputation would be a major impediment in a system still dominated by patronage, where so much rested on personal connections and general likeability. But from the legal records, as well as from the contemporary references, it is clear that Gascoigne’s personal reputation was never good, and with good reason. From the biographical evidence – the many legal suits against him, the simple facts of his life  – Gascoigne emerges as a rather arrogant, impulsive man, sometimes aggressive or paranoid, who was always in debt and (through the 1560s) frequently in trouble. He had various legal disputes with his father, mother, and brother, and with erstwhile patrons such as the Earl of Bedford; he exploited his wealthy wife and tried to cheat his stepchildren of their inheritance; and he took advantage of a rather simple-minded gentleman, John Gostwick, over the living arrangements at a house he rented with him.14 He was the subject of a defamatory note in the early 1570s accusing him of several serious offences.15 Nonetheless, the way his contemporaries praised his talents after his death shows that they could see how important his work was, despite him being personally disreputable. As I have argued elsewhere, it was this poor personal reputation that prompted Gascoigne’s use of the persona of the Reformed Prodigal, since it offered an available cultural model which he could appropriate to try to rehabilitate himself in the light of his actual and potential patrons. But it was only one of the authorial personae which Gascoigne adopted quite pragmatically throughout his work. So why did Gascoigne come to be seen as so relatively marginal a figure in the modern literary canon? The answer is of course complex. Gascoigne’s uneasy modern reputation stems partly from his own experimental and sometimes misleading approach to the idea of authorial identity. His creation of multiple versions of the authorial “George Gascoigne” would have been genuinely confusing to his contemporaries, as well as to subsequent generations of critics, although it is a strategy which is far easier to grasp since literary commentators learned to separate the author from the text in the twentieth century. It is also partly to do with the body of work Gascoigne created: the mix of genres he worked in, the sheer range of his experimentation and the juxtaposition of attributed and anonymous work.

212  Gillian Austen His work falls into so many categories that it fits readily into none. As Crewe puts it, “Where he fits in remains a problem”.16 Above all, perhaps, Gascoigne’s problematic status is linked with modern literary taste, since he is one of the chief victims of C.S. Lewis’s “Drab” label (despite being categorised as “transitional” by Lewis himself).17 The Drab ghetto has been hard to get out of, despite its egregious mislabelling of many fine writers, as Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank have argued.18 All this has created a difficult identity for Gascoigne, a highly successful and important innovator, who does not fit into any of the prevailing categories of the English literary canon.

The Idea of Literary Fame Gascoigne was writing in the 1560s and 1570s, just at the point of the transition of literary culture from patronage to print, when it was possible to write both for individual patrons in manuscript and for a general audience in print. This created distinct literary cultures: the highly elitist courtly one, largely restricted to primarily manuscript circulation, and the more general readership of printed volumes. The dedication of printed books to individual patrons, as well as the anonymous publication of courtly works, shows the continuity of the older literary culture into the newer world of printed publication. Print was still a relatively experimental medium for contemporary, vernacular, literary work: there were few available single-author models for A Hundreth in 1573: Barnabe Googe’s Eclogues, Epitaphes, and Sonnets (1563) and George Turberville’s Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (1567); although Gascoigne may also have been aware of Hugh Plat’s The Floures of Philosophie (1572) and Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye (1573). Above all, perhaps, because it was so commercially successful, Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) provided a model which took poems by Wyatt and Surrey, from courtly manuscript culture, and published them alongside poems written anonymously within the Inns of Court.19 These distinct literary cultures created different types of literary fame. It was possible to publish something anonymously and yet still, because of the small numbers of people active in literary culture, have it linked to its author by word of mouth. The literary reputation Gascoigne would have acquired because of the anonymous A Hundredth, the Noble Arte of Venerie (1575) and the Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth Castle (1576) would be limited to some of the other writers and booksellers in the London book trade. Even more exclusively, knowledge of his performances in front of the Queen and the court at Kenilworth and Woodstock would be restricted to a small number of courtiers. But this elite (crucially) included the most important, influential and wealthy people at the top of the system of patronage: the Earl of Leicester, the Earl of Bedford, Lord Bacon, and the Queen. Similarly, the presentation manuscripts of Hemetes and Griefe of Joye which Gascoigne was invited to prepare for the Queen in 1576 and 1577 demonstrate a quite extraordinary

George Gascoigne and Literary Fame  213 level of literary success, but only the most exclusive inner circle of courtiers would have been aware of them because once they were presented to the Queen they would have been hidden away in the Royal collection. Gascoigne’s most successful work engaged with this courtly aspect of the literary culture, but the fame he gained from it would have been by word of mouth, dependent on living memory, which is necessarily short. This type of fame – ­ Fama – ​­ rested on ephemeral performances, exclusive manuscripts and anonymous publications, most of which were later either misattributed or their connection with Gascoigne lost. The exception to this is The Spoyle of Antwerpe (1576). Its anonymous publication would have been politically motivated  – it is, after all, an account of a secret mission into hostile territory – but the fact that Gascoigne was assigned this mission represents very significant courtly favour. Gascoigne was answerable directly to Lord Burghley, and two of his letters to Burghley (written secretly from Paris) are preserved in the Public Records Office.20 Nonetheless, the basis of Gascoigne’s reputation in terms of his courtly success lay on the anonymous, exclusive, private works and these proved a fragile basis for long-term literary fame. With the exception of A Hundreth, the only work which could reliably be known as Gascoigne’s after his death in 1577 was the printed work published under his own name. But it is these works, all ostensibly moralistic, and presented under the Reformed Prodigal persona – the Steele Glas and Complaynte of Phylomene, the Glasse of Government, the Delicate Diet and the Droomme of Doomesday  – which formed the basis of his literary reputation outside the court, the Inns of Court, and the London book trade. Although A Hundreth was itself anonymous, it was known as Gascoigne’s because its revised edition, the Posies, was published under his own name and his newly adopted Reformed Prodigal persona.21 These two volumes have always formed the basis for his wider reputation since they include the Gray’s Inn plays Supposes and Jocasta, a substantial collection of very fine, innovative poetry, his prose fiction Master F.J. and (in the Posies) his essay on versification, Certayne Notes of Instruction. As a body of work, this is substantial enough, but because Gascoigne’s reputation rested on the titles in print and neglected his most successful courtly work, the manuscripts and performances, it gives a distorted picture. Nonetheless, it is what most of his contemporaries would have known. George Whetstone, for example – often misrepresented as a friend of Gascoigne’s – reflects this view in the list of works he preserves in his elegy, A Remembraunce of the wel imployed life, and godly ende, of George Gaskoigne Esquire. The works he knew were the ones in print, which had been published under Gascoigne’s own name. Although he knew Gascoigne had written about hunting, he did not know the book’s title, referring to the Noble Arte of Venerie as simply “a book of hunting”.22 Whetstone was unaware of the anonymous Princely Pleasures and Spoyle of Antwerpe, as well as of the manuscript works presented to the Queen, Hemetes the Heremyte

214  Gillian Austen and The Griefe of Joy. He was certainly an admirer and imitator of Gascoigne, but it is unlikely that if he knew Gascoigne personally he would not know about those courtly works. The explanation seems to be that Whetstone knew Gascoigne’s work by reputation, hence his focus on the named, published volumes. The survival of only a single copy of Whetstone’s elegy into the nineteenth century illustrates another important element in Gascoigne’s modern literary reputation, since it throws into dramatic relief the arbitrary nature of historical fame. So much of what is left to posterity is a matter of chance. For as much as Gascoigne’s reputation was affected by the great flowering of English literature at the end of the sixteenth century, which made his innovations so outmoded so quickly, it also sometimes turned on the survival of a single book – even, as with Whetstone’s elegy, a single copy of a book by someone else. For it was Whetstone’s reference to a book of hunting that enabled Jean Robertson to attribute the Noble Arte of Venerie to Gascoigne in 1942.23 Without Whetstone’s Remembraunce, that attribution would be far more tenuous. Another elegy to Gascoigne, by Gabriel Harvey, is lost, but it would undoubtedly have provided an intriguingly different view, for as we have seen Harvey was highly critical of Gascoigne the man, though appreciative of his gifts and his achievement.24 Like Whetstone’s, Harvey’s elegy was done “as it were under the gentlemans owne person”, not an uncommon conceit at the time.25 Nonetheless, that Harvey felt it appropriate to memorialise Gascoigne is itself significant. Chance also played a significant part in what survived of Gascoigne’s own works, two of which survived in only one copy each. One is the sole extant copy of the Delicate Diet, for Daintiemouthde Droonkardes, which the actor George Steevens lent to Waldron to reprint in 1789.26 Even more important, since it was not recorded at all by Whetstone, was the sole extant copy of the 1576 edition of the Princely Pleasures, at Kenilworth Castle, which was burnt in a fire at the Birmingham Free Library in 1879. Even that copy lacked its title pages, which may have included a dedication, presumably to the Earl of Leicester, if anyone. That alone would have a significant impact on what we understand of Gascoigne’s patrons and therefore his literary stature in his own lifetime.27 However, in 1587, the bookseller Abel Jeffes had, in response to the growing appreciation of Gascoigne’s achievement and increasing demand for his books, published the first Whole Woorkes of George Gascoigne. This was very badly printed, but included the Posies, Steele Glas / Complaynte of Phylomene, and the Princely Pleasures (also without its title pages). The same year, a variant title page was issued, The Pleasauntest woorkes, suggesting that Jeffes had realised he could not claim it as complete, since it excluded the moralistic Droomme, Diet, and Glass of Government. For all that Gascoigne’s daily struggle to make ends meet might suggest that he was more focused on today’s patronage than tomorrow’s literary fame, there is ample evidence that he was ambitious for the possibility of

George Gascoigne and Literary Fame  215 ­

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The taint of failure which was until very recently associated with Gascoigne’s name is attributable in part to another historical accident, which means that his most frequently anthologised poem is “Gascoignes ­ Wodmanship”. The main virtues of this poem to the modern editor are its agreeable length, and its light and easily accessible premise: Yvor Winters called it “a poem unsurpassed in the century except by a few of the sonnets of Shakespeare”.31 Gascoigne presents himself as a poor huntsman on a day out hunting with his patron, Lord Grey, and uses the conceit to generate a tragicomical picture of himself as a failure in several key aspects of his life.32 However, it is easy to show that the idea of Gascoigne as a poor huntsman in the “Wodmanship” seems to have been a shared joke between two men who shared a love of hunting. (Gascoigne and Grey were of similar age and both at Gray’s Inn at the same time, although the differences in their social status cast one as patron and the other as client.) Both Grey and Gascoigne are known to have gone to considerable lengths to protect their hunting rights on their land.33 That Gascoigne was an expert huntsman is also evidenced by the original additions he made to his translation of the Noble Arte of Venerie in 1575.34 Much of the additional material in the Noble Arte is drawn from his own experience and describes hunting exploits of considerable daring and skill. For example, in describing how to swim out to a hart which has run into water, he says: It hath beene my happe oftentimes to kyll in this sorte verie great Hartes, and that in sight and presence of divers witnesses, and afterwards I have guided their deade bodyes to the banke swimming. (sig. ­ G3v) The Noble Arte was one half of a project by the bookseller, Christopher Barker, to produce two lavishly illustrated, up-to- date hunting manuals, the

216  Gillian Austen Noble Arte of Venerie and George Turberville’s Booke of Faulconrie, specifically for the aristocratic readers who considered hunting and hawking their own “noble” sports. It would make little sense for Barker to commission someone who was genuinely a poor huntsman to undertake the translation of this new French hunting manual, especially as he made a considerable investment in the volume, with its numerous illustrations. Gascoigne not only had the French to manage the translation, he also had the hunting expertise to offer a kind of cultural translation, describing the differences in practice in France and in England. This extended to original additions by Gascoigne on how to breed and train hunting dogs and the types of calls used in English hunting. Appealing though it may be to modern taste, Gascoigne’s self-presentation as a poor “wodman” in the poem is not supported by the evidence in the Noble Arte. Gascoigne himself drew or commissioned four new illustrations to augment Barker’s project, three of which showed Elizabeth enjoying the hunt in the Noble Arte and one (which was in Turberville’s companion volume) which showed her hawking for heron.35 It was the publication of the Noble Arte in June 1575 that drew Gascoigne to the attention of the Earl of Leicester and so led to his last-m inute involvement in Leicester’s lavish entertainments at Kenilworth Castle that summer. But the Noble Arte – being ​­ specifically addressed to a courtly audience – was one of Gascoigne’s anonymous publications and, because it was a companion volume to Turberville’s Booke of Faulconrie, it soon came to be attributed to Turberville by association.36 Even Whetstone, writing in 1577, did not know it, despite knowing that Gascoigne had written a book of hunting. With his name disassociated from the Noble Arte and its clear evidence of Gascoigne’s hunting expertise, the “Wodmanship” lost its jokey context, and (in the twentieth century) became evidence to support the notion of his repeated failures. In this way, a series of historical accidents after Gascoigne’s death helped to create a distorted view of his body of work and his success, miscasting him as a moralist and a failure. As Laurie Shannon puts it, he was “the most successful alleged failure in Elizabethan letters”.37

A Place in Literary History The Noble Arte of Venerie was to play a pivotal role in the way Gascoigne’s literary fame fared through the centuries. It was the only one of Gascoigne’s works to survive the transition from the Tudor monarchy to the Stuarts. In 1603, when King James arrived in London with his train of Scottish courtiers, Elizabeth’s court and its culture were almost entirely swept aside. There could be little hope at this point of prolonged literary fame for an outmoded, early Elizabethan writer who had been dead for 26 years and who had left such a mixed body of work, much of it published anonymously. But in 1611, the Noble Arte was reissued (again anonymously), alongside Turberville’s Booke of Faulconrie. In the new edition

George Gascoigne and Literary Fame  217 of the Noble Arte, Gascoigne’s woodcuts for both books were adapted to show King James rather than Queen Elizabeth. Who was responsible is unknown, but the technique was fairly crude: the Queen’s face was literally cut out of the blocks and James’s face was inserted, with minor adjustments being made to the figure’s clothing.38 What may be most significant here is that someone had clearly valued the illustrations enough to keep the woodcut blocks, as well as the formes of the set type, but there is no evidence in the reissue that either the illustrations or the translation were known to be Gascoigne’s work. By this time, especially following the influx of James’s Scottish nobles, there would have been very few – if any – courtiers left at court who would remember to attribute the anonymous Noble Arte to Gascoigne. So, as early as 1611, the Noble Arte began to be attributed to George Turberville by its association with his Booke of Faulconrie, and Gascoigne’s name was only associated with the volume because of his commendatory verses. Within three decades of his death, only A Hundreth and the Posies, and perhaps the Whole woorkes, kept alive the knowledge of Gascoigne’s literary experimentation. In 1615, Robert Tofte defended Gascoigne’s position as an important experimenter, despite the assumed superiority of verse in his own age: yet must not old George Gascoigne, and Turbervill, with such others, be altogether rejected, since they first brake the Ice for our quainter Poets, that now write, that they might the more safer swimme in the maine Ocean of sweet Poesie …39 In the Stuart court, with Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones dominating courtly entertainments, Gascoigne’s courtly successes were forgotten, with his performances at Kenilworth and Woodstock little known and his manuscript works hidden away in the Royal Collection. His anonymous publications were either misattributed, like the Noble Arte, or unknown (the Spoyle of Antwerpe). Only the named, published volumes were known as Gascoigne’s, with the exception of A Hundreth (because of the Posies), and the Princely Pleasures because of the Whole Woorkes. These works were enough, however, to preserve Gascoigne’s literary reputation as a courtly poet – albeit one who had also translated several moralistic works. Nonetheless, Gascoigne was now classed with George Turberville and Thomas Churchyard, a world away from his status as the Petrarchan who could claim Elizabeth as his Laura, or even his posthumous status in the 1580s as an English Tully. Edmund Bolton observed grudgingly in his Hypercritica (1620) that: “Among the lesser late poets George Gascoigne’s works may be endured”. By the third decade of the new century, and with a new Stuart king, Charles I, on the throne, interest in Gascoigne was entirely historical. Michael Drayton – an elderly Elizabethan – writing more than a generation after Gascoigne’s death, saw Gascoigne even more acutely as

218  Gillian Austen a transitional figure, but still gave him a place in a sequence from Chaucer and Gower through Surrey, Wyatt, and Brian, saying: Gascoine and Churchyard after them againe In the beginning of Eliza’s raine, Accoumpted were great Meterers many a day, But not inspired with brave fier, had they Liv’d but a little longer, they had seene, Their workes before them to have buried beene …40 As the seventeenth century progressed, with the tumultuous events of m idcentury and the cultural convulsions of the Civil War, Gascoigne’s name drops temporarily out of sight. But his work was preserved in some of the earliest literary collections after the Restoration of the monarchy, including those by Edward Phillips (1675), Thomas Rymer (1693) and Charles Gildon 41 (1693). ­ In the eighteenth century, Gascoigne’s reputation revived somewhat, as his works gained value to the new breed of antiquarians as a guide to interpreting obscure or obsolete vocabulary in Shakespeare and Jonson. His books maintained a significantly higher market value than many other black letter volumes (which were often sold at scrap value at the time), which may even suggest an appreciation of their intrinsic merit.42 There is plenty of scope here for further research, which would undoubtedly reveal a more nuanced picture, but it is possible to offer some preliminary findings. In the great succession of histories of English poetry published in the second half of the eighteenth century, Gascoigne’s work is represented only patchily. Johnson did not include him in his Lives of the English Poets, and Gascoigne only found a place there in Alexander Chalmers’s extended edition of 1810. But his books were preserved in some of the great private collections of the time, including those of Anthony Wood, Thomas Tanner, Francis Douce, and especially Edmund Malone. Malone was Gascoigne’s first real champion and a great collector of Elizabethan books. His collection of early editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems “represented in his time the most complete collection ever made”.43 It could just as well be said that Malone also owned what was, in his time, the most complete collection ever made of Gascoigne’s work, since it includes two copies of the first issue of Gascoigne’s The Posies; as well as Gabriel Harvey’s heavily annotated copy of the second issue of the Posies, which is bound with a copy of the Steele Glas/Complaynte of Phylomene; plus the Droomme of Doomesday; the Glasse of Government; separate copies of Jocasta and Supposes; and a copy of the posthumous Pleasantest works 44 (1587). ­ Malone’s interest in Gascoigne extended to paying the inordinate sum of £42-10/6 for the only extant copy of George Whetstone’s Remembraunce. Malone’s preservation of this volume is, as has been noted, of great importance to Gascoigne studies since it preserves a list of his work,

George Gascoigne and Literary Fame  219 including the definitive clue as to Gascoigne’s responsibility for the Noble Arte, that “I have for you, a Book of Hunting writ”.45 As the eighteenth century progressed, Gascoigne gained another influential champion in Thomas Warton, who admired both his poetry and his translations. Warton notes the smoothness of Gascoigne’s writing, but he was also aware of the esteem in which Gascoigne was held by his contemporaries: This author was well esteemed by his contemporary writers, as appears by their testimonies of him; and it must be confessed, that he has much exceeded all the poets of his age, in smoothness and harmony of versification.46 Warton did even more to popularise Gascoigne by passing to Thomas Percy a transcription of Gascoigne’s “In Praise of Lady Bridges” for inclusion in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a collection of ballads, sonnets, historical songs, and metrical romances published partly at the urging of Samuel Johnson.47 Percy’s Reliques was massively popular and went through numerous editions. There, Percy presents Gascoigne as: “a celebrated poet in the early part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign…”.48 Warton’s next project was his three-volume ­ ​­ History of English Poetry (1774– 81), the first literary history of real significance. Warton included Master F.J. and Supposes, saying of the latter that “The dialogue is supported with much spirit and ease, and has often the air of a modern conversation  …”.49 Warton also noted Shakespeare’s use of the Supposes in the Taming of the Shrew, which appears to be the earliest notice in print of Shakespeare’s direct indebtedness to Gascoigne. During the eighteenth century, as with so many Elizabethan writers, most of Gascoigne’s work was in process of being rediscovered – even the anonymous and courtly work – and he was gaining recognition as a dramatist and courtly poet, as well as a writer of courtly entertainments. In 1788, John Nichols published his seminal The Progresses, and Public Processions, of Queen Elizabeth, giving Gascoigne his rightful place as a key player in the great Progress of 1575.50 Its first volume includes The Princely Pleasures, at Kenelworth, together with Robert Langham’s Letter, and The Hermit’s Tale (a transcription of Gascoigne’s manuscript of Hemetes) and a selection of Whetstone’s verses “addressed to George Gascoigne”.51 It was at about this time that the moralistic tracts began to be uncovered, too: in 1789, F.G. Waldron reprinted The Delicate Diet, for Daintiemouthde Droonkardes, from Steevens’s only known extant copy, and the new edition enabled wider dissemination of that work.52 By the close of the eighteenth century, then, Gascoigne’s works were virtually all known, with the notable exception of the Noble Arte of Venerie, which was being misattributed again to Turberville. Although a book of hunting was listed in Whetstone’s Remembraunce, the only extant copy of the elegy was still hidden away in Malone’s private collection.

220  Gillian Austen In 1810, Alexander Chalmers published The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, a continuation of Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets. Unlike Johnson, Chalmers included Gascoigne, observing the “obscurity” of biographical details and scarcity of copies of his works.53 Chalmers notes the many posthumous references to Gascoigne’s literary reputation, and that: … In smoothness and harmony of versification he yields to no poet of his own time, when these qualities were very common …54 Chalmers also includes the text of Whetstone’s Remembraunce, “which has lately been brought to light, after a concealment of nearly a century”. Like his predecessors, Chalmers was misled by the Noble Arte: he notes that Whetstone attributes “a Book of Hunting”, but says, “This is not known. He has some commendatory verses before Turberville’s Art of Venerie”.55 However, he also notes in Turberville’s section, that “Mr Park thinks [Gascoigne’s book of hunting] is the one printed with the above Booke of Falconrye, and usually attributed to Turberville”.56 Thomas Park was another antiquary and bibliographer, and is apparently the first modern individual to recognise the Noble Arte as Gascoigne’s, although he did not develop his argument or publish his opinion. Were it not for Chalmers’s glancing reference, Park’s insight would be unrecorded.

The “Earl of Leicester’s Poet” As we have seen, until the early nineteenth century, interest in Gascoigne had been restricted to antiquarians and book collectors, historians of literature, and those scholars establishing the distinct area of Shakespeare studies. However, Gascoigne was rediscovered by a much wider readership in the nineteenth century as a direct result of the publication in 1821 of Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth. This historical novel was loosely based on Gascoigne’s Princely Pleasures and Robert Langham’s Letter, and became an instant best-seller. Visitors began to visit Kenilworth to see the ivied ruins of the castle, which accorded well with the emerging taste for the “sublime” in landscape and architecture, and a tourist industry was born. As a result, the Princely Pleasures was printed three times in 1821 and a total of six times in the nineteenth century, each edition including some kind of profile of “Gascoigne, the Earl of Leicester’s poet”, another of Gascoigne’s own creations.57 Gascoigne’s literary reputation at this time changed again, as it seems largely unconnected with his moralistic works: he was known (from A Hundreth/Posies) ­ principally as a courtly poet and a translator of Ariosto, and from Nichols’s edition of the Princely Pleasures as a writer of courtly entertainments. There was – significantly – nothing of the taint of failure which so dogged his reputation in the twentieth century.

George Gascoigne and Literary Fame  221 It is true, though, that Robert Southey was more susceptible to Gascoigne’s self-presentation as a Reformed Prodigal. In 1831, Southey published a Select Works of Gascoigne.58 Southey’s biographical note focuses on Gascoigne’s military career and on how he “lived to amend the errors of his youth, and became a wise and good man”. The poems Southey selects for his edition illustrate rather well his account of Gascoigne as a youthful prodigal who became a soldier and reformed his ways.59 The volume shows how easily Gascoigne’s work can, when approached selectively, support a preconceived idea of the man and his career. This is not to denigrate Southey’s work, only to point out how adaptable the range of Gascoigne’s poetic personae is, and how well it lends itself to supporting the Reformed Prodigal model he proposed for himself in some of his prefaces. At the very end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the early twentieth century, Gascoigne found a new champion in the German scholar Felix Schelling, who compiled his own Life and Writings of George Gascoigne (1893), the first Gascoigne monograph. Schelling, who published prolifically, also cited Gascoigne in his more general works. For example, he discusses Certayne Notes in his Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth (1891). In volume II of his Elizabethan Drama ­1558–1642 ​­ (1908), Schelling mentions the Princely Pleasures in his chapters on the English Masque and the Pastoral Drama. In his Foreign Influences in Elizabethan Plays (1923), ­ Schelling writes enthusiastically of Gascoigne’s little-understood play The Glasse of Government, saying, “This comedy is excellently planned and written”.60 Schelling’s work was invaluable in helping to keep Gascoigne in the bigger picture of Elizabethan courtly culture. Gascoigne’s reputation was once again rising in the first decades of the twentieth century.

The “Complete” Poems The publication of modern editions was crucial in disseminating Gascoigne’s work, but no one had attempted a complete works since the bookseller, Abel Jeffes, in 1587. In 1868, Edward Arber published a slender, very selective Gascoigne volume as part of his 30-volume English Reprints series, describing him as “One of the principal poets in the first half of Elizabeth’s reign”.61 Only a year later, W.C. Hazlitt published the first modern Complete Poems of George Gascoigne. Hazlitt recognised the quality of Gascoigne’s courtly poems, in their way as ranking among the best remains of English amatory verse, during the interval between Surrey on the one hand, and such polished writers as Daniel and Drayton (not to mention Shakespeare, Sidney and the rest) on the other.62 Hazlitt’s edition acknowledges the prominence of the Posies in Gascoigne’s reputation at the time:

222  Gillian Austen At the present time, the original productions of Gascoigne, of which, of course, the much- c ensured “Posies” constitute the chief and most important portion, are those on which his fame is considered to rest …63 Although he does not include it, Hazlitt knows the Noble Arte as a compilation by Gascoigne, which does at least suggest that the “Book of Hunting” mentioned by Whetstone was being tentatively linked with its translator once again in the high Victorian period. At the start of the twentieth century, a trickle of new Gascoigne editions appeared. In 1904, Certayne Notes was included in G. Gregory Smith’s Elizabethan Critical Essays. In 1906, J.W. Cunliffe published an edition of the Supposes and Jocasta,64 following this in 1907 and 1910 with the two volumes of his Complete Works of George Gascoigne. Cunliffe had aimed to publish all of “Gascoigne’s known writings”, to the extent of including two of Gascoigne’s dedicatory sonnets to other men’s books and the Prefatory Epistle to Sir Humfrey Gilbert’s Discourse of a Discovery … to Cataia. Cunliffe’s edition has minimal annotation, and its first volume takes the Posies as its copy text, but it was not superseded until the publication of the Pigman edition by the Clarendon Press in 2000. Cunliffe’s second volume remains, more than a century later, the only modern edition of much of Gascoigne’s other work.65 Cunliffe’s edition is not actually complete, since it excludes the manuscript letter to Sir Nicholas Bacon ­and – most ​­ ­significantly – ​­the Noble Arte of Venerie. Despite the hints by Hazlitt in 1869 that Gascoigne had compiled the Noble Arte, awareness of Gascoigne’s role in the volume had once again been lost, so that in 1908, the Clarendon Press edition was published as Turbervile’s Booke of Hunting. At about this time, A.W. Pollard published his edition of The Queen’s Majesty’s entertainment at Woodstock, 1575, with its thoughtful and carefully considered introduction to the tale of Hemetes the Heremyte.66 Woodstock was significant in Gascoigne’s career as it was part of Elizabeth’s great Progress of 1575, after Kenilworth, and he appears to have been connected in some way. It is possible that he performed as “Hemetes the Heremyte” as he had performed at Kenilworth; it is certain that somehow he acquired a copy of the tale and used it for his New Year’s gift to the Queen, translating it into Latin, French, and Italian and illustrating it with original emblems.67 In 1913, the Malone Society reprinted the Spoyle of Antwerpe, and in 1914, the Glasse of Government was issued in the Tudor facsimiles series. Almost all of Gascoigne’s work was finally available in modern editions. It might have looked as though Gascoigne was beginning to receive the critical recognition he deserved.

The Prouty Effect: Drabness and the Plain Style What could have been a decisive period for rediscovery of Gascoigne’s work was complicated in the 1920s by B.M. Ward in two articles in the Review of

George Gascoigne and Literary Fame  223 English Studies, which seem to have created some temporary uncertainty about the identity of the historical Gascoigne.68 Ward was convinced that Gascoigne provided an authorial identity as a cipher to conceal a group of aristocratic writers, an idea which originates with Gascoigne’s own authorial self-presentation ­ ​­ in A Hundreth, where he offers the text as a collection of work by several anonymous “sundrie gentlemen”.69 Ward went on to pub70 lish an edition of A Hundreth (1926), ­ in which he proposes the volume to be principally the work of the Earl of Oxford and Christopher Hatton. Ward’s deeply flawed edition is especially notable for its extraordinary excision of the prose passages of Master F.J. Ward’s efforts served only to problematise the study of Gascoigne’s work by complicating the question of his identity, although any mystery is easily explained away. Indeed, W.W. Greg discredited the Oxford hypothesis almost immediately, in his review of Ward’s edition.71 Despite this, and subsequent articles which successively disproved every piece of Ward’s supposed “evidence”, the notion was again proposed in all seriousness in 1930 by William Kittle, working independently.72 In 1942, Charles T. Prouty published his full-length biography, George Gascoigne, Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (Columbia University Press, 1942), which was generally well-received.73 The biography is the result of several years’ painstaking research in the archives identifying, locating, and translating the legal and other documentary evidence of Gascoigne’s life. (This research was a scholarly corrective to Ward’s speculations.) It was followed later in the year by Prouty’s edition of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (University of Missouri Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2), a volume specifically designed to supersede Ward’s edition. Prouty’s edition was welcomed “with reservations” by more than one commentator.74 It relies too heavily on the biography which it complements, and – like Ward’s – suffers from the absence of the plays. But the significance of Prouty’s dual project for Gascoigne’s twentieth- c entury reputation would be hard to overstate: Prouty was determined to supersede Ward’s edition and its notional, pluralistic biography. As we have seen, throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, until 1942 and the publication of Prouty’s full-length biography, Gascoigne’s reputation was almost entirely courtly, to the extent that he was seen as the “Earl of Leicester’s poet”, or even mistaken for the Earl of Oxford.75 But Prouty had been entirely persuaded by Gascoigne’s protestations of personal reformation from 1575 onwards, when the Reformed Prodigal became the “George Gascoigne” he most frequently proposed in print under his own name. While Prouty occasionally allows for “the possibility that he wrote [as a reformed prodigal] for reasons of expediency” ( p. 277), he repeatedly asserts his view that in 1575 Gascoigne became “a repentant sinner rejecting the world” ( p. 84). For example: That Gascoigne was sincere I do not doubt; that his reformation was in tune with his times seems clear, and his writings after his final

224  Gillian Austen return from the Dutch wars seem to me to testify to the sincerity of his transformation … (p. 239) ­­ … If literature were didactic and if Gascoigne turned with bitterness upon those aspects of life of which he had reason to repent, then it is understandable that he should become a Puritan Cato, crying out upon the wickedness of the world. ­­ (p. 277) The most unfortunate aspect of Prouty’s determination to press Gascoigne’s career into the mould of the Reformed Prodigal is the way it impacted upon his assessment of Gascoigne’s literary achievement. Although he was aware of many of the contemporary tributes to Gascoigne in print, Prouty – taking a dim view of his profligacy – judged him a failure in life and continually foregrounded his moral reformation rather than his literary influence on the later Elizabethans. For example, instead of seeing him as an exciting and innovative forerunner, Prouty agrees largely with Harvey’s negative assessment of his character and finds Gascoigne wanting: Had he not repented of his sins, Gascoigne might perhaps have challenged Lyly’s position as the first important Elizabethan dramatist. (p. 188) ­­ In the next generation, his abilities could probably have achieved more … (p. 285) ­­ Examples of Prouty’s bias are plentiful, but perhaps his judgement on the Devise of a Maske, as a masque, is enough: he judges is “a puny attempt 76 indeed” (p. 176). ­­ Prouty’s authoritative tone, backed by his years of meticulous research in the archives establishing the detail of Gascoigne’s biography, meant that his largely unfavourable judgement on Gascoigne’s literary achievements carried significant weight. When later scholars – most notably C.S. Lewis and Yvor Winters – came to look at Gascoigne after 1942, it was Prouty’s Gascoigne they saw. Prouty’s biography was therefore a major revisionist thesis, specifically addressing the speculative pseudo-biographical theories propounded by Ward et al. But by focusing on the Reformed Prodigal, Prouty tried to fix Gascoigne in one of his authorial identities and did not see that Gascoigne assumed – and functioned effectively under – a full range of poetic identities and personae. Prouty’s biography unwittingly did Gascoigne a terrible disservice, inasmuch as although it settled conclusively the question of Gascoigne’s identity, it made him seem dull and moralistic and consigned him, for most of the rest of the twentieth century, to the margins of the canon and of English literary history.

George Gascoigne and Literary Fame  225 This distortion of Gascoigne’s profile was made easier because Gascoigne’s authorship of The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting had been forgotten. As we have seen, Hazlitt had apparently believed that Gascoigne was responsible for more than the dedicatory poems which he included in his Complete Poems (1870), but the attribution was somehow lost, until the work was reclaimed for Gascoigne by Jean Robertson in the same year that Prouty’s biography was published.77 Robertson’s authoritative attribution makes it one of the most important short articles on Gascoigne, as Prouty quickly realised. Following Robertson’s article, Charles and Ruth Prouty developed Gascoigne’s claim to the Noble Arte in an article which tried to identify part of the original additions as a masque or device which was written for, but not performed at, Kenilworth.78 The Proutys argued that the Noble Arte was published anonymously because: whereas [Gascoigne] could and would acknowledge the highly moral Glasse of Government, he evidently did not think it well to put his name to so light and trivial a work as The Noble Arte… When we think of his other writings from this time on, all highly moral or designed to please Queen Elizabeth, we may conclude that such a secular work as The Noble Arte should not have occupied as serious a reformer as George Gascoigne!79 But they did not concede that this new attribution actually severely compromises the model of the Reformed Prodigal. Prouty’s biography remains seminal, but it was deeply flawed by its insistence on compressing Gascoigne’s varied opus into the restrictive mould of the Reformed Prodigal. Furthermore, the significance of losing the attribution of the Noble Arte is very evident. Gascoigne’s “boke of hunting” was fundamental to his successes in 1575, preparing the way for his employment by the Earl of Leicester when his agents were looking for contributors to the entertainments at Kenilworth.80 (The translator of a recent French book of hunting would be an especially valuable contributor, given the Queen’s love of hunting and Leicester’s very substantial investment in extending the castle’s Chase and populating it with deer.) Gascoigne’s successes at the greatest entertainments of Elizabeth’s reign paved the way for his performance at Woodstock, which in turn led to the manuscript of Hemetes, presented to the Queen as a New Year gift in 1576, and in the following year his employment by Burghley and the triumphantly courtly Griefe of Joye manuscript, presented to the Queen the following New Year. Without the Noble Arte, Gascoigne’s career does not cohere as that of a successful courtly poet, but is far more susceptible to the model of the Reformed Prodigal who didn’t quite succeed at anything. Prouty gave Gascoigne a place in modern literary history, but his focus on the notional “moral reformation” of 1575 paved the way for Gascoigne to be thoroughly miscast as a plain-speaking moralist. But Gascoigne’s

226  Gillian Austen “plainness” of style was a function of his sense of “Invention”: he chose a plain style when it suited his subject.81 For Gascoigne was continually metamorphosing his literary personae and manipulating his own literary profile. As the Reformed Prodigal, he was simply appropriating, in a quite pragmatic way, an available model which could serve to rehabilitate him in the system of patronage by generating a plausible and acceptable public persona. His moralistic voice was persuasive, but it was a convincing performance, just as much as the more courtly personae. Prouty’s original achievement must not be underestimated: his combined project, the edition and biography, was undoubtedly of great importance. But Prouty’s impact was almost immediate: after 1942, the slow trickle of new editions of Gascoigne’s work dried up altogether. A reconsideration of Gascoigne’s literary career must challenge his inclusion in the so- called “Drab” school of poetry, which set the terms for discussion of his work at mid- century. This line of discussion was unwittingly opened by Yvor Winters in an article in Poetry (1939), a reading which probably influenced Prouty, and which Prouty’s biography complements absolutely.82 Winters celebrates the apparent earnestness and directness of Gascoigne’s moral assertions, and groups him with Wyatt, Googe, Ralegh, and others as “practitioners of the plain style”, which in subsequent articles and books Winters links with the native English tradition of poetry.83 But C.S. Lewis developed this idea of contrasting plain and Petrarchan styles to distinguish between “Drab” moralistic writers (Churchyard, Ralegh, even Wyatt) and “Golden” courtly poets (Sidney, Spenser).84 Although Lewis expressly set Gascoigne apart from the “Drab Age”, calling him a “transitional poet”, this notion of “drabness” became the definitive classification of Gascoigne’s work: the term denotes a plain-speaking moralist, as found in the Steele Glas, for example, or the Glasse of Government. Both Winters and Lewis, influenced by Prouty’s biography, had thoroughly accepted the model of moral reformer, founded on the sequence of moralistic titles Gascoigne produced during 1575 and 1576. In the m id-t wentieth century, Gascoigne continued to be celebrated, if at all, as an exemplar of the Plain Style. Throughout the latter part of the 1960s, Gascoigne continued to feature in histories of English versification as one of the chief exemplars of a native school of alliterative, plain- style, moralising poetry. John Buxton commended his “directness of expression” and “preference for simplicity and brevity”, views which were echoed influentially the same year by Douglas L. Peterson.85 In 1969, Fred Inglis grouped Gascoigne with the Lord Vaux, Nashe, and Ralegh, as the “Plain Blunt Men”, misreading (for example) the jokey, flippant “Lullaby of a Lover” as Christian Stoicism and praising it for its “sternness of feature”.86 Quoting part of the “Lullaby”, Inglis notes that Gascoigne is “not always as sombre as these two stanzas… though he mostly offers cold comfort”.87 Hunter followed this with a paper at the English

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Institute. Observations like these surely attest to the success of Gascoigne’s adopted personae: his moralistic voices are plausible, so that his “directness” of expression is ultimately as persuasive as his indirection.89 Certainly, from the facts of his biography, Gascoigne’s twentieth- c entury reputation as a moralist would have surprised – a nd possibly startled – h is contemporaries. The success of Gascoigne’s moralistic personae, and the authority with which Prouty stated his case, consigned Gascoigne and his work to relative marginality among the moralistic Elizabethan writers for the middle, and much of the second part, of the twentieth century. The finest exposition of the Prouty tradition was Richard Helgerson’s highly influential chapter on Gascoigne in The Elizabethan Prodigals, which contains many invaluable insights, but proposes Gascoigne as chief exemplar of the model.90 There were of course exceptions. Roger Pooley followed Prouty for the biography and accepted Gascoigne’s repentance as sincere, but he argued that “Gascoigne’s most enduring character is “Gascoigne”, not to be confused with the historical figure who may often be observed sending him up from an ironic distance”, and so drew attention to the way he “tries out different roles”.91 Dozens of fine articles and chapters on Gascoigne have been published subsequently, some of them by authors represented in this volume.92 But in focusing on Gascoigne, each has been pushing against the “damagingly mischievous” labelling of his work. From Prouty’s biography in 1942, to C.S. Lewis’s egregious labelling of the Tudors as “Golden” or “Drab Age” in 1954, this short period drastically altered Gascoigne’s literary reputation. It has taken decades for our critical thinking about Gascoigne to break free of the taint of the “Drab Age” and the whiff of failure it carries with it. The cultural predominance of the novel has perhaps been the most instrumental influence on shedding the “Drab” or “transitional” image of Gascoigne, as scholars look at Master F.J. and understand its wit, its innovation and the ways it plays with the framing of the text, the use of an unreliable narrator, and the creation of the “author”. Since the end of the 1960s Master F.J. has been the one Gascoigne work which draws critics back time and again. Its ambiguity – existing in two forms – and its many perspectives and registers give ample scope for a wide range of critical approaches. Behind the playfulness of Master F.J. is a clever and courtly writer, with a substantial body of experimental, innovative work, produced at a key moment in our cultural history. This is the Gascoigne celebrated in this essay collection. It is to be hoped that it prompts further research and new editions, as Arthur Kinney proposes in his introduction. For if Gascoigne’s literary reputation was highest among the very Elizabethans we rate most highly in the modern literary canon, he is far more important than even his current, revived status acknowledges.

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Notes 1 Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, ed. W.L. Renwick (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1930), p. 149. 2 See Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 6–14. 3 Thomas Nashe, writing “To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities” in Greene’s Menaphon, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, Works of Thomas Nashe, rev. F.P. Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), iii. p. 319. 4 This essay continues the account begun in the Introduction to my monograph, which traces Gascoigne’s reputation from 1577 to 1603 and shows how high his literary reputation was among the later Elizabethans, and how influential he was. Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 6–14. 5 Felix Schelling, The Life and Writings of George Gascoigne (Boston: Ginn, 1893), p. 100. 6 Prouty also, on the same page, suggests Gascoigne was “the chief poet of the young Elizabeth’s court”, although there is no evidence that Gascoigne was ever at court. 7 Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 118–39 at p. 118. 8 Pigman, passim. 9 Elizabeth Goldring, ed., The Princely Pleasures, at Kenilworth Castle, and Gabriel Heaton, ed., The Tale of Hemetes the Heremyte, both in John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, vol. 2, edited by Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Clark, and Elizabeth Goldring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 231–332 and 359–401 respectively. 10 In the influential A petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure (1576), in which Pettie builds on William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566), he borrows from Dan Bartholmew, Jocasta and Master F.J. For the links between Nashe, Greene, Whetstone, Grange and Gascoigne see Katharine Wilson, Fictions of Authorship in Late Elizabethan Narratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 1–51 et passim. 11 For Shakespeare, see Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp.  207– 08; Margaret Lael Mikesell, ‘“Love Wrought these Miracles”: Marriage and Genre in The Taming of the Shrew’, Renaissance Drama 20 (1989), pp. 141–67; Dennis Kay, Shakespeare: His Life, Works and Era (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1992), p. 160; Carol Replogle, ‘Not Parody, not Burlesque: The Play within a Play in Hamlet’, Mod. Phil. 1969, pp. 150–59; Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Yet Another Source for Othello’s “Base Indian”’, N&Q 217 (1972), pp. 128–29; Roger Prior, ‘Gascoigne’s Posies as a Shakespearean Source’, N&Q 245 (2000), pp. 444–50; Richard Hillman, “Measure for Measure and the (A nti-) Theatricality of Gascoigne’s The Glasse of Government”, Comparative Drama 42.4 (2008), pp. 391–408. For Marlowe, see Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp.  105– 06; and Leonard Nathanson, ‘Tamburlaine’s “Pampered Jades” and Gascoigne’, N&Q 203 (1958), pp. 53–54. 12 Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, ed. cit., p. 149. 13 Malone 792, p. 192 (sig. M4v) and quoted in Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey. His Life, Marginalia, and Library ( New York and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 216. 14 C. T. Prouty, George Gascoigne, Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier and Poet (New York: Columbia University Press), 1942, pp. 40– 43. 15 Austen, pp. 8, 65. 16 Crewe, ibid., p. 118.

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17 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: OUP/Clarendon Press, 1954, reprinted 1973), p. 270. 18 It was “a damagingly ‘mischievous’ tag for the m id-Tudor decades – ‘the Drab Age’  – which has dogged them ever since he came up with the term in 1954”, Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., “The Travails of Tudor Literature”, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 2. 19 See J. Christopher Warner, The Making and Marketing of Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557: Songs and Sonnets in the Summer of the Martyrs’ Fires (Burlington, VT: Ashgate), 2013. 20 SP For. 70/139, fol. 169, letter from Gascoigne to Lord Burghley from Paris, 7th October 1576; and SP For. 70/140, fol. 23, letter from Gascoigne to Lord Burghley from Paris, 7th October 1576. 21 Gascoigne had used the language and imagery of the Reformed Prodigal in earlier works but here he used the persona to present the entire work, see Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 29–35. 22 George Whetstone, in George Gascoigne. The Steele Glas, &c. 1576, ed. Edward Arber, English Reprints, London: Alex Murray, 1868, p. 20. 23 Jean Robertson, “George Gascoigne and The Noble Arte of Venerie and [sic] Hunting”, MLR 37 (1942), 484– 85, published in October the same year as Prouty’s biography (see note 77). 24 Stern, Gabriel Harvey, ed. cit., p. 33. 25 British Library MS Sloane 93; published as The Letter Book of Gabriel Harvey, AD1573–80, ed. E.J.L. Scott, Camden Society n.s. 33 ( Westminster, 1884), pp. 55–58, 68–70. 26 F.G. Waldron, ed., in The Literary Museum (London, 1789). 27 Gascoigne’s known dedicatees are the Earl of Bedford, Lord Grey of Wilton, and Lord Bacon, although it is unlikely he received any reward from the latter. 28 Hemetes the Heremyte, Cunliffe, p. 510. 29 Griefe of Joye, Cunliffe, p. 517. 30 J. P. Mahaffy, Euripides, \/ (1879), 134–35. 31 Winters, “The 16th century Lyric in England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation” (1939), reprinted in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul J. Alpers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 100; cited Pigman, p. 663. 32 For example, Catherine Bates says Gascoigne’s poem “catalogues a lifetime of failures, a sorry career of missed targets and botched attempts”, although she goes on to acknowledge that the strategy has considerably more complexity than is often recognised, in Masculinity and the Hunt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 111ff. 33 Julian Lock reports Lord Grey spending five months in the Fleet prison after a major disagreement over his hunting rights, in ODNB, entry on Arthur Grey, Fourteenth Baron Grey of Wilton; Prouty reports an incident in which Gascoigne and his father were summoned to the Star Chamber to answer for a violent attack by them and their men on one Edmund Conquest, following a trespass on their hunting territory in Cardington Wood, pp. 7– 8. 34 Discussed in detail in Austen, pp. 105–15. He may have commissioned the woodcuts rather than executing them himself, but he would probably have specified their subjects and composition. 35 Austen, pp. 108–11. 36 As late as 1908, the work was reissued as Turberville’s Booke of Hunting, 1576, Tudor and Stuart Library, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908. No one seems to have questioned why Turberville might have put his name to one volume and not the other.

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37 Laurie Shannon, “Poetic Companies: Musters of Agency in George Gascoigne’s “Friendly Verse””, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10.3 (2004), 453–83, at 453. 38 See, for example: “Of the place where and how an assembly should be made, in the presence of a Prince, or some honourable person” (image p. 90, F8), where the Queen has been excised and replaced with King James. It is possible to see the outline of the section of the block that has been replaced. https://archive.org/details/ nobleartofveneri00gasc/page/90/mode/2up?ref=ol&q=f6r&view=theater, [Accessed 5th December 2021]. 39 Robert Tofte’s translation of Benedetto Varchi’s The Blazon of Jealousie includes this comment on Gascoigne ( p. 64). 40 Michael Drayton, in the elegy “To … HENERY REYNOLDS Esquire, of Poets and Poesie” (c.1621), in The Battaile of Agincourt (1627?), (Menston, Yorkshire: The Scolar Press, 1972). 41 Edward Philips, Theatrum Poetarum (1675); Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693); Charles Gildon, completing Langbain’s work, of which he is scathing, in The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (1698). 42 W.C. Hazlitt notes that, The bookseller, who was in the habit of supplying Major Pearson with the rarest articles in poetry, folklore and romance at a figure not greatly above waste paper value, never let the old quartoes of Gascoigne go under five shillings – the price at which many a Caxton was bought in 1788.

43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57

Hazlitt, Works of George Gascoigne, London: The Roxburghe Library, 1869, 2 vols, vol. 1, p. xii. W.D. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2nd ed., 1890, pp. 306–08. The title is a variant of the Whoole Workes of that year. Robertson, see note 76. Warton, History of English Poetry: From the Twelfth to the Close of the Sixteenth Century (London: Printed for, and sold by, J. Dodsley, Pall Mall, J. Walter, Charing Cross; T. Becket, Strand; J. Robson, New Bond-Street; G. Robinson, and J. Bew, Pater-noster-Row; and Messrs. Fletcher, at Oxford., 1774– 81), 4 vols, ii. 168. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London: printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1765), ii. pp. 152–54. See Pigman, p. 629, n. 51.0.1. Percy, Reliques, ii. p. 150. Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry, i. p. 474. John Nichols, The Progresses, and Public Processions, of Queen Elizabeth, &c. 2 vols, (London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1788). The modern edition of Nichols includes helpful, up to date commentary. See John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I, v.II 1572–1578, ed. Elizabeth Goldring, Faith Eales, Elizabeth Clarke, and Jayne Elisabeth Archer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. pp. 287–332. 1789, reprint of Delicate Diet, ed. F.G. Waldron (London: privately printed). It was republished in 1792 as a whole. Alexander Chalmers, ed., Poems of George Gascoigne, in The Works of the English Poets, (London: privately printed,1810), vol. ii, p. 447. Ibid., p. 455. Ibid., p. 450. Ibid., p. 578. These were in: The British Stage, or Literary Cabinet, 6 (1821); Gascoigne’s Princely Pleasures (London: Burn and Co., 1821); Kenilworth Illustrated; or, the History of the Castle, Priory, and Church of Kenilworth with a description of their

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58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68

69 70 71

72

73

231

present state (Chiswick: C. Whittingham, 1821), pp. 51–80; Kenilworth Festivities: Comprising Langham’s Description of the Pageantry, and Gascoigne’s Masques ( Warwick: Merridew, 1825); George Adlard, Amye Robsart and the Earl of Leycester (London: John Russell Smith, 1870); and E.H. Knowles, The Castle of Kenilworth, A Handbook for Visitors ( Warwick: Henry T. Cooke and Son, 1872). See Austen, George Gascoigne, pp. 115–33. Robert Southey, ed., Select Works of the British Poets (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1831). They are Gascoigne’s “Arraignment”, “Lullabie”, “Good Morrow” and “Good Night”, “De Profundis”, “Gascoignes Memories”, “Capitaine Bourcher”, “Fruites of Warre”, “Gascoignes Gardenings”, “Voyage to Holland” and the Steele Glas. F. E. Schelling, Foreign Influences in Elizabethan Plays (London: Harper and Brothers, 1923), pp. 8–9. Edward Arber, ed., Certayne Notes of Instruction, The Steele Glas/Complaynt of Phylomene, and Whetstone’s Remembraunce (p. 11). W.C. Hazlitt, ed. cit., (cf note 42). See also his entry on Gascoigne in Hazlitt’s Handbook of Early English Literature, (London: J.R.Smith,1867), p. xiii. Hazlitt, p. xiii. Supposes and Jocasta, ed. by J.W. Cunliffe (Boston: Belles-lettres ser., 1906). The exceptions are the annotated edition of The Steele Glas/Complaynte of Phylomene, ed. William L. Wallace, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 24 (Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1975); and Elizabeth Goldring’s edition of The Princely Pleasures and Gabriel Heaton’s edition of The Tale of Hemetes the Heremyte, both in John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the early Modern Sources, op. cit., note 4. The Queen’s Majesty’s entertainment at Woodstock, 1575, with an introduction by A. W. Pollard. (Oxford: H. Daniel and H. Hart, 1910). Limited print run of 115 copies. Austen, pp. 134–50; the illustrations are included. See B.M. Ward, “George Gascoigne and his Circle”, RES 2 (1926), 32–41 and “The Death of George Gascoigne”, RES 2:6 (1926), pp. 169–72; Genevieve Ambrose was working independently on related documents to try to establish Gascoigne’s biography, see “George Gascoigne”, RES 2:6 (1926), pp. 163–68. Austen, pp. 69–71. B.M. Ward, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, from the Original Edition (London: Frederick Etchells and Hugh Macdonald, 1926), repr. 1975 by Kennikat Press. W.W. Greg, “A Hundreth Sundry Flowers”, in The Library 7 (1926), pp. 269–82; Ward attempted to rebuff Greg, but was himself rebuffed, in the following issue (T he Library 8 (1927), pp. 123–30). It is perhaps worth noting that Greg was not a particular champion of Gascoigne, whom he considered “was well regarded as a poet in his day … but … he was more than démodé by the end of the century”, in English Literary Autographs, 1550–1650 Part 2 (1925), Headnote to Plate XXXVII. Articles following Greg’s, thoroughly disproving the Oxfordian hypothesis, include those by John Hankins, “A Note on Gascoigne’s Biography”, MP 30 (1932), pp. 96–97; and Fredson Thayer Bowers, “Gascoigne and the Oxford Cipher”, MLN (1937), pp. 183– 86. For the revival of the Oxford cipher, see William Kittle, G. Gascoigne, April 1562 to January 1, 1578; or, Edward De Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, 1550–1604 ( Washington, DC: W.F. Roberts Company, c. 1930). Prouty’s biography was reviewed by Jean Robertson, MLR 38 (1943), pp. 139– 40; H.E. Rollins, MLN, 58 (1943), pp. 317–19; Virgil B. Heltzel, MLQ 3 (1942), pp.  480–82; Leicester Bradner, JEGP, 42 (1943), pp. 120–21; E.K. Chambers, English 4 (1943), pp. 125–26.

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74 John Leon Lievsay, MLQ 5 (1944), pp. 369–71; D.C. Allen, MLN 58 (1943), pp. 634–65; Leicester Bradner, JEGP 42 (1943), pp. 586–87; TLS, 19 September 1942, pp. 462–64. 75 In 1940, Fitzgerald Flournoy, “William Breton, Nicholas Breton, and George Gascoigne”, RES 16 (1940), pp. 262–73. 76 See Stephen Hamrick’s essay in the present volume for a more detailed assessment. 77 Jean Robertson, “George Gascoigne and The Noble Arte of Venerie and [sic] Hunting”, MLR 37 (1942), pp. 484– 85, published in October. In her review of Prouty’s biography, Robertson suggests that “Gascoigne’s interest in hunting seems to have escaped Mr Prouty’s notice”, MLR 38 (1943), p. 139. 78 Charles and Ruth Prouty, “George Gascoigne, The Noble Arte of Venerie and Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth”, in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James G. McManaway, et al. ( Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), pp. 639–64. 79 Charles and Ruth Prouty, ibid., p. 652. 80 Austen 2008, pp.  105–15; also Stephen Hamrick, ‘“Set in Portraiture”: George Gascoigne, Queen Elizabeth, and Adapting the Royal Image’, EMLS 11.1 (May 2005), pp. 1–30. 81 See Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976). 82 Yvor Winters, “The Sixteenth- Century Lyric in England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation”, Poetry 53 (1939), pp. 258–72, 320–35, and Poetry, 54 (1940), 350–51; reprinted in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul Alpers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp.  93–125; and reprinted with additions in Yvor Winters, Forms of Discovery (Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1967), pp. 1–52. 83 Winters, Forms of Discovery, p. 27. 84 C.S. Lewis, ibid., p. 270. 85 John Buxton, A Tradition of Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 47, 48, 50; Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne (Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 120–63. 86 Fred Inglis, The Elizabethan Poets: The Making of English Poetry from Wyatt to Ben Jonson (London: Evans, 1969), p. 50. 87 Inglis, ibid., p. 51. 88 G.K. Hunter, “Drab and Golden Lyrics of the Renaissance”, in Forms of Lyric: Selected Papers of the English Institute, ed. Reuben A. Brewer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 1–18. 89 For example, Roger Pooley says: “Gascoigne’s poetry can be said to have an honest plainness, not only because he makes us aware that he is choosing it out of the gamut of styles, and playing it off against them, but also because he brings out the relationship between author and audience which is one of the main components of rhetorical awareness”, in “George Gascoigne: An Advocacy”, Poetry Nation Review, 10 (1983), pp. 57–58. 90 Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 57. 91 Roger Pooley, ed., George Gascoigne, The Green Knight. Selected Poetry and Prose (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1982), p. 22. 92 For example, see especially Richard McCoy, ‘Gascoigne’s Poëmata Castrata: The Wages of Courtly Success’, Criticism 27 (1985), pp. 29–55; Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric and Fiction in Sixteenth- Century England (Amherst, 1986); Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 118–39; Robert Maslen, Elizabethan

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Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Alan Stewart, ‘Gelding Gascoigne’, in Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic, eds., Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570– 1640 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 147– 69; Stephen Hamrick, “‘Thus much I Adventure to Deliver to You’: the Fortunes of George Gascoigne”, Early Modern Literary Studies, 14.1/ Special Issue 18 (2008), 1.1–22; Laurie Shannon, “Poetic Companies: Musters of Agency in George Gascoigne’s “Friendly Verse”, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.3 (2004), 453– 83, and ““Minerva’s Men: Horizontal Nationhood and the Literary Production of Googe, Turberville, and Gascoigne”, in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485– 1603 (Oxford, 2009), ed. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, pp.  437–54; and Gillian Austen, esp. George Gascoigne (2008), and “The Adventures Passed by Master George Gascoigne: Experiments in Prose”, in The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500–1640, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Oxford, 2013), pp. 156–71.

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Index

Ariosto, Lodovico 1, 2, 125, 194; I suppositi 18, 71, 74, 76, 215 Ascham, Roger 97, 113 Baldwin, William, Beware the Cat 13, 39; Mirror for Magistrates 39 Bandello, Matteo 13, 189, 190 Barclay, Alexander 18 Becon, Thomas 142 Bedford, Earl of 141, 211, 212 Blundeston, Laurence 147 Boccaccio 2, 17, 23 Breton, Nicholas 133, 210 Burghley, William Cecil, Lord 166–67, 168, 177, 213, 225 Byrd, William 134, 135; Psalmes, Songs and Sonnets (1611) 135; Songes of sundrie natures (1589) 129 censorship 112, 115–16 Chaucer, Geoffrey 3, 110, 215, 218; Boke of the Duchess 63; The Miller’s Prologue 145; Troilus and Criseyde 13, 14, 23, 26, 60, 62, 63, 190 Churchyard, Thomas 126, 160, 217, 218, 226 Coverdale, Miles, De profundis 129 Daniel, Samuel 108, 221 Day, Angel, The English Secretary (1599) 177–85 Day, John, Whole Psalms in foure partes (1563) 127 Dolce, Lodovico, Giocasta 148–49, 215 Dowland, John, First Booke of Songs (1597) 127; ‘If floodes of tears’ 134 Drayton, Michael 217, 221 Edwards, Richard, The Paradyse of Daintye Devises (1576) 127, 142 Erasmus, Adagia 148

Fleming, Abraham, The Diamond of Devotion (1581) 145 Gascoigne, George, self-presentation and poetic personae 5, 44, 167, 190, 199, 211, 213, 223, 224; attitude to reader 41–42, 43, 45, 167; “the Earl of Leicester’s poet” 223; female complaint 48–65; lyric poems 5, 48, 50; mottoes: “Ever or Never” 69; “Fato non fortuna” 69; “Tam Marti quam Mercurio” 6, 43; performance at Woodstock (1575) 212, 217, 222, 225 Gascoigne, George, works (titles and numbers of poems are from the Pigman edition of A Hundreth and the Posies): ‘An absent Dame thus complayneth’ (28) 55–56, 61; ‘An absent lover … thus complayneth’ (37) 56; Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English (first published in the Posies, P34) 1, 5, 109, 110, 111, 141, 142, 147, 149, 213, 221, 222; Complaynte of Phylomene, The (1576) 1, 43, 110, 191, 210; ‘Dan Bartholmew of Bathe’ (first published in A Hundreth and with additions in the Posies) 4, 38, 42–43, 69, 97, 190, 192; Delicate Diet, for daintiemouthde Droonkardes, A (1576) 214, 219; Droomme of doomes day, The (1576) 141, 214, 218; ‘The Fruite of Fetters’ (first published in the Posies, P29–33) 4, 37, 41–42, 190, 192; ‘The fruites of warre’ [Dulce bellum inexpertis] (first published in the Posies, P28) 7, 160, 162, 165–66; ‘Gascoignes councell given to Bartholmew Withipoll’ (69) 159, 161; ‘Gascoignes De profundis’ (66–67) 129; ‘Gascoignes Devise of a Maske’ (71)

240 Index 1, 5, 79–104, 224; ‘Gascoignes Epitaph uppon capitaine Bourcher’ (70) 162; ‘Gascoignes good nyghte’ (65) 134; ‘Gascoignes libell of Divorce’ (54) 131–33; ‘Gascoignes Lullabie’ (56) 133–34, 226–27; ‘Gascoignes prayse of Bridges, nowe Lady Sandes’ (51) 219; ‘Gascoignes wodmanship’ (72) 162, 215; Glasse of Governement, The (1575) 1, 80, 147, 214, 218, 221, 222, 225; Griefe of Joy, The (1577) 123, 141, 212, 214, 225; Hemetes the Heremyte (1576) 151, 210, 212, 213, 219, 225; ‘He wrote (at his friends request) in prayse of a Gentlewoman, whose name was Phillip, as followeth’ (22) 3–4, 34–47, 126; A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1572/3), passim.; ‘I sigh, Why so? For sorowe of her smart’ (in Edwards’ Paradyse of Daintie Devises) 127; Jocasta (first published in A Hundreth) 84, 139, 147, 148, 213, 214, 218, 222; ‘A Lady being both wronged by false suspect’ (38) 6, 56–58, 123; ‘A Loving Lady being wounded in the spring time’ (25) 57–58, 61, 62; Master F.J. (first published in A Hundreth) 1, 2, 7, 13–33, 38, 70, 71, 97, 124, 125, 129, 147, 175–88, 189–205, 210, 213, 223, 227; Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting, The (1575) 1, 212, 214, 215–17, 219, 222, 225; ‘The Partridge in the pretie Merlines foot’ (23) 130–31; Posies of George Gascoigne, Esquire, The (1575) 6, 38, 69, 77, 98, 108, 111–12, 115, 127, 142, 189, 211, 213, 217, 218; Princeleye Pleasures, at Kenelwoorth Castle, The (1576) 1, 107, 117, 147, 210, 212, 213, 214, 217, 219, 221, 222; Spoyle of Antwerpe, The (1576) 1, 7, 98, 213, 217, 222; Steele Glas, The (1576) 1, 2, 43, 50, 79, 97, 107, 108, 110, 111, 118–19, 210, 213, 218, 226; ‘A straunge passion of another Author’ (30) 126; Supposes (first published in A Hundreth) 5, 69–78, 139, 157, 213, 218, 222; ‘A translation of Ariosto allegorized’ (1) 130; Whole Woorkes of George Gascoigne, The (alternative title The Pleasauntest woorkes of George Gascoigne) (1587) 6, 123, 214, 217, 218

Gascoigne, Sir John 158–61, 165 Gifford, Humphrey, Posies of Gilloflowers (1580) 151, 153 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 161 Googe, Barnabe 97, 113, 114, 153, 226; Eclogues, Epitaphes and Sonnets (1563) 146, 212 Gosson, Stephen, The School of Abuse 113 Grange, John 8, 145, 190, 193, 194–95, 196, 204, 210 Gray’s Inn 2, 70, 75, 83, 84, 95, 139, 215 Greene, Robert 15, 29, 139, 215; Philomela (1592) 203 Hall, John, The Court of Virtue 113, 129, 131 Harvey, Gabriel 5, 38, 75, 108, 109, 110, 117, 168, 190, 195–97, 200, 204, 211, 214 H.C., The Forrest of Fancy (1579) 144, 147 humanism 3, 15–22, 150, 168; see also imitatio Image of Idlenesse (anon., c. 1556) 14 imitatio 3, 122–38 Jonson, Ben 71, 217, 218 Langham, Robert 219; Letter 220 Leicester, Robert Dudley, Earl of 80, 83, 89, 97, 109, 116, 117, 212, 214, 216, 220, 223, 225 Lewis, C.S. 212, 224, 226, 227 Lincoln’s Inn 81–83, 84 Lodge, Thomas 113, 210 Lydgate, John 60, 62, 63 Lyly, John 15, 29, 190, 200, 204, 210, 224; Euphues, The Anatomy of Wyt (1578) 8, 197–99; Euphues and his England (1580) 199–200 Malone, Edmund 218–19 Marlowe, Christopher 5, 8, 210 Montague, Viscount 79–80, 85, 86, 87, 91, 94, 97 Morley, Thomas, Consort Lessons (1599) 127 Mulliner, Thomas 125–6 Munday, Anthony 6, 124, 128

Index  241 Nashe, Thomas 2, 14, 209, 210, 226; Choise of Valentines 181–82 Neville, Alexander 146–47 Ovid 2, 23, 24, 191 Orange, William, Prince of 158, 165 Oxford, Earl of 62, 63, 223 Paradyse of Daintye Devises, The (1576) see Richard Edwards Petrarch 215; Petrarchism 3, 61, 97, 114, 179, 191, 217, 226 Pettie, George 15, 210 Philomela/Philomene 50, 108, 111–16, 210; and Satyra (Steele Glas) 112, 116–18; see also Gascoigne, Complaynt of Phylomene; Greene’s Philomela Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius, later Pope Pius II 13–33 Pounde, Thomas 81, 88 Prouty, Charles T. 79, 95, 157–58, 164–5, 209, 222–27 Puttenham, George 6, 8, 144, 147; The Arte of English Poesie (1589) 142–43, 149

210, 221, 226; Astrophil and Stella 210; Defense of Poesie 1, 21, 210; Old Arcadia 1, 15, 190, 200–03, 204, 210 Skelton, John 3–4, 34–47, 114–16, 126; A Garland of Laurell 39–41, 44–45; Phyllip Sparowe 34–38 Southampton, Earl of 81, 83, 92 Southey, Robert 221 Spenser, Edmund 1, 5, 8, 107–21, 210, 226; Amoretti and Epithalamion 116; Colin Clouts Come Home Again 116; The Fairie Queene 116, 118–19; The Shepheardes Calender 8, 107–21, 185, 209 Stubbes, Philip, The Gaping Gulf 112, 116 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of 63, 210, 212, 218, 221; ‘Lyke as the lark within the marlians foote’ 130, 131 Tottel, Richard, Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) 51, 113, 130–31, 132, 139, 212 Turberville, George; Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets (1567) 146, 212; Booke of Faulconrie (1575) 216–17, 220

Ralegh, Sir Walter 108, 226 Reformed Prodigal 16, 69, 165, 210, 211, 213, 221, 223, 224, 226

Vaux, Thomas 226; ‘The aged lover renounceth love’ 131; ‘When I behold the bier’ 132

Schelling, Felix 209, 221 Scott, Sir Walter, Kenilworth (1821) 220 Seager, William, De profundis (1553) 129 Shakespeare, William 5, 8, 14, 210, 215, 218, 220, 221; Comedy of Errors, The 76; Hamlet 132; Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 76; Othello 133; Romeo and Juliet 161; Taming of the Shrew, The 76, 219; Twelfth Night 204; Winter’s Tale, The 76 Sidney, Sir Philip 1, 6, 8, 17, 97, 108, 109, 111, 113, 116, 117, 124, 126, 157,

Walsingham, Sir Francis 97, 167, 168 Warton, Thomas 219 Whetstone, George 8, 190; The Rocke of Regarde (1576) 193–94, 195, 196, 204; A Remembraunce of the wel imployed life, and godly ende, of George Gaskoigne Esquire (1577) 213–214, 216, 218, 219, 220, 222 Wilton, Lord Grey of 50, 160, 162, 163, 168, 215 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 6; lute poems 123, 131; 210, 212, 218, 226; De Profundis 129